A review of John Crowley's Ka

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, by John Crowley

a review by Rich Horton

Christie Yant opens her review of Ka in the April Lightspeed by noting, with some wonder, that the Nebula shortlist does not include this novel. That is certainly a thought that occurred to me. In the long run, or even mostly the short run, awards don't matter that much. But there are some books which confer more honor on the awards for which they are nominated than the awards confer on them. An award like the Nebula is diminished when it fails to notice a book as good, as important, as well-written, and as wise as Ka. This is not to say that any of the novels on the shortlist are bad -- in fact, it's my impression that that the list (fully seven novels deep!) is fairly strong overall. Three of its members joined Ka and John Kessel's The Moon and the Other on my Hugo nomination list. (Those were Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory; The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, by Theodora Goss; and Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz. And one that I haven't yet read, The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin, would very likely have had a chance to supplant one of those three.)

Doubtless there are reasons -- the most likely is that Ka, a long novel released late in the year, was not read by enough Nebula nominators. Be that as it may -- it is a remarkable work, and the notion that it was regarded as not one of the seven best SF/Fantasy novels of 2017 by the members of SFWA is, at least, curious. I don't want to sound so grumpy -- indeed, as I said, the novels chosen for the shortlist are pretty fine. (And, indeed, it's hard for anyone to read everything good published in a given year.) But there is pretty fine and there is remarkable.

So, what of the novel itself? Ka is told, in essence, in two voices. (And Crowley, like most great writers, is exquisitely in control of narrative voice.) The true narrator is an elderly man, some time in the fairly near future, in an environmentally collapsing world, somewhere in the Northeast of the US. His wife died some years before, and he is acutely aware that he is dying. (Perhaps the central concern of this novel is death -- the death of people, the death of crows, the death of civilizations, perhaps the death of the human world. The other central concern is story -- probably the most central concern of Crowley's entire oeuvre.)

The narrator finds a very sick crow in his yard, and nurses him back to health, and somehow learns to speak with the crow. He learns his name -- Dar Oakley -- and then learns his very long story. Dar Oakley is an unusual crow, obviously. He is the first crow to take a name, the first to learn to communicate with humans. The first human he has a relationship with is a girl named Fox Cap, in what seems a Neolithic culture somewhere in Europe. Fox Cap is close to the tribe's shaman, and indeed become shaman eventually. As a result of his association with her, and other humans, he learns of the human tendency to war, and of the benefit thereby accruing to crows -- carrion, dead humans. So indeed the novel is throughout involved with death, and more intimately as well, as Fox Cap and Dar Oakley journey to the land of the dead (or something like that) to steal "the most precious thing", the secret of immortality. Only Dar Oakley keeps it for himself.

And so he is reborn again and again, and we hear his story as he leaps forward in time -- to a monk in the middle ages; then across the ocean to the New World, and to a Native American tribe, and one man in particular, taken captive by one tribe (war again) and adopted into them. Then forward to the Civil War, and its aftermath, and a Spiritualist woman, and then her son, who learns to hate crows, and then finally to the time of the narrator, in our near future. Throughout we learn of war, and death, and what may come after death. Dar Oakley makes several journeys to various versions of the land of the dead. He also has numerous crow families, and we meet some of his fellow crows and his mates, particuarly one called Kits, who it turns out is a special crow as well.

All this is fascinating, always interesting, though the book lacks a conventional plot. The characters are involving, however: Each of these People characters is strange, obsessed, interesting; and the Crows are true Characters as well. The themes, of story and of death, grow and grow in layers as the book continues. By the end it Ka extraordinarily moving, mysterious and wise. And truly lovely. And witty and snarky (in a corvine sort of way) when needed. Crowley is one of the best writers of prose we have. One example from right at the end:

"Only the living can travel there from here, cross the river, see and speak to those they know or know of, take away its treasures. The living create the Land of Death and its inhabitants by going there, and returning with a tale. But dead People can't be there, can't go there or anywhere: they're dead."

A Perhaps Forgotten Collection: The Moon Maid, by R. Garcia y Robertson

The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures, by R. Garcia y Robertson
Golden Gryphon Press, 1998, $22.95
ISBN: 0965590186

A review by Rich Horton

Here's something I wrote a long time ago about one of my favorite writers of sheer fun colorful adventure SF and fantasy. This was his first story collection, and is still his only collection, but he kept publishing cool stories for the following decade or so, the last of which for a while, "Wife Stealing Time" (from 2009) appeared in my Best of the Year collection. He also published a few novels, the last the fixup Firebird in 2006. Three of his novels were what I call Gabaldonades -- time travel romances, about a 20th Century woman from Montana who travels back to the time of the Wars of the Roses, and falls in love with Edward, Earl of March (who later became King Edward IV, and was in fact the father of the famous Princes in the Tower, said to have been murdered by Edward's younger brother, Richard III.) I thought those novels far from Garcia y Robertson at his best, and the series was never finished. At any rate, Garcia y Robertson published nothing (that I am aware of) from 2009 until last year, when I was thrilled to see two more very enjoyable SF novellas in Asimov's.

At any rate, this hiatus led me to worry that Garcia y Robertson's career was in danger, and that his books, thus, in danger of being forgotten. So I think it makes sense to repost this review, as I wrote it back in 1998.

Sometimes I toy with the question "What academic discipline provides the best grounding for an SF writer?". The conventional answers might be Physics, or Astronomy, or even English Literature or Computer Science. But I've come to believe that History is the most valuable such discipline. A knowledge of History provides insight into other societies, into different technologies and different ways of thought, into the effect of geography on culture (very useful for "world-building"), all insights which illuminate the core of much of the best SF. And of course, History is itself a story, a grand sweeping story with a scope greater even than almost any SF story.

R. Garcia y Robertson is an historian, and the benefits of his particular training shine through in his stories. Most obviously, he loves to write historical fantasies, as with his novel The Spiral Dance (set on the Scottish-English border in the 15th Century), or with several stories in the collection at hand, set in a wide range of historical milieus. He also likes time-travel stories, most famously in The Virgin and the Dinosaur, but also in "Gypsy Trade" included here.

The title story is one of the most "Fantastic" of the historical stories included. "The Moon Maid" is an Amazon, one of an historical group of women warriors, located near the Don (or Amazon) River in what is now Russia. Her "tribe" honors lions, and when a nomad Hetman's son is killed by a lion, she must capture and destroy the animal, or risk having her whole tribe exterminated by the nomads. Her tracking of the lion is a mixture of realistic animal tracking, and rather wildly fantastic events, such as a meeting with Hercules, described in hilarious detail.

The place of women in historical societies is a recurring theme in these stories (and strong women characters occur in almost all the stories, including the futuristic ones). "The Other Magpie" features real historical figures at the Battle of Little Big Horn. The title character is a very independent Crow woman, mourning her brother's death at the hands of the Sioux. Partly as a result, she and her transvestite friend end up joining Custer's army. The Magpie and her friend are historical characters, though the specifics of the Magpie's dealings with her dead brother, and of her attempts to save Captain Reno from the coming disaster, are a bit more speculative. "Four Kings and an Ace", perhaps the best story here, features Boy Toy, a young Chinese girl, a Christian and the adopted daughter of missionaries, abandoned on the docks in San Francisco after her parents' deaths. She falls into the hands of a gang which tries to sell her into slavery as a whore, but is fortunate to encounter a clever lawyer, who sees a way to use her beauty in a battle against a crooked railroad man. The story climaxes with a suspenseful poker game, and a predictable ending which still surprises, in the best way.

The fourth "historical fantasy" is "The Wagon God's Wife", set in medieval Sweden, featuring a Norwegian Christian convert who has been banished to pagan Sweden. Saved from freezing by the title character, he finds himself in a battle with a pagan God. Colorful, sexy, and a fascinating look at a culture quite different from ours.

Robertson is also a first-rate writer of science fiction adventure. "Cast on a Distant Shore", one of his earliest stories, is set on an ocean world, where economically marginalized humans live on floating islands and earn subsistence money by diving for seastones. This setup is rather old hat, and the plot is a bit familiar as well, involving a diver in desperate straits who agrees to help an alien scientist fish for a particularly dangerous sea animal, but the story is very engagingly told, with a nice twist or two, and the main characters are interesting people.

"Gone to Glory" is also set on an alien planet, this one in the middle of terraformation. The dirty work of preparing the new planet for human colonization is being done by "retrobred" Neanderthals, and the daughter of a highly-placed human has been lost, apparently captured or killed by a tribe of escaped Neanderthals. Defoe, a skilled pilot with experience dealing with the wild Neanderthals, is called away from a cushy vacation to look for the missing woman. The setting is somewhat unconvincing (the economics of the colonization efforts, including the "retrobreeding" as well as the use of "Super-Chimps", don't seem to add up), but the story itself is very exciting, with a colorful balloon flight across the half-terraformed planet, and a serious, believable, ecological motivation behind things.

Another straight SF story in the collection (all three future-set stories seem to be fit vaguely into the same loose "Future History") is "Werewolves of Luna", a pure romp, and great fun. A Scottish tourist runs into spacesuit trouble, and is on the point of suffocating on the Moon. His rescuers cheerfully abstract his credit, and shanghai him into joining (and financing) their team for an upcoming Virtual Reality adventure game. (Fortunately, one of the rescuers is a beautiful woman.) The first part of the story is nice straight SF, and the finish, set inside the adventure environment, is more like fantasy, involving a quest for a jewel in Dracula's castle. As with some of the other stories, pulling too strongly on the plot threads might cause the whole thing to unravel, but, if you just go along for the ride, it's a wonderful ride.

Robertson writes that "Gypsy Trade" has been optioned for a movie. It's a strong story, with a plot element that movie makers understand (Nazis), and I think it could be a good movie. The story opens with Dieter, dressed in the uniform of a Waffen SS officer, entering a gypsy camp in 1591 with a plan to rescue three gypsy women from the local witch-hunting priest. The story is an interestingly different take on time travel, with a nice plot involving rescuing art treasures from the ravages of war, and incidentally rescuing some humans as well. The background gives us a look at the horrible treatment of gypsies in the 16th century, and again under the Nazis.

A very fine collection. The most compelling feature of these stories is that they are just that: stories. Indeed, as the title of this collection reads, "Fantastic Adventures". Rife with color, full of action and romance, every story included is pure fun to read. (And Robertson has a real knack of knowing when a story ends.) Indeed, if I had a gripe, it might be that serious thematic concerns are left in the dust as the action races by. (Though it should be noted, even as his protagonists strive and (usually) succeed, the background details are often darker: slavery in late-19th Century San Francisco, ecological disaster on an alien planet, the sometimes bloody history of Christianity, are all displayed here.)

Old Bestseller: The Masquerader, by Katherine Cecil Thurston

Old Bestseller: The Masquerader, by Katherine Cecil Thurston

a review by Rich Horton

Finally back to a sure thing Old Bestseller, from a writer with an appropriately dramatic personal life. Katherine Cecil Madden was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1875. Her father was a banker who later became Mayor of Cork. She married an English writer, Ernest Temple Thurston, who was four years younger than her, in 1901. Katherine had already been publishing short fiction, and her first novel, The Circle, appeared in 1903. Her second novel was John Chilcote, M. P., in 1904. This was retitled The Masquerader for American publication (a much better title, I think). It was a huge success -- the third bestselling novel of 1904 and the seventh bestselling novel of 1905, according to Publishers' Weekly. Her next novel, The Gambler, was the sixth bestselling novel of 1905, and her last novel, Max, was the fourth bestselling novel of 1910. While her husband was at first supportive, and turned some of her stories into plays, he apparently became resentful of her success relative to his. (He eventually did become a fairly popular writer.) They separated in 1907. After their eventual divorce, Katherine became engaged to a physician, A. T. Bulkeley-Green, but shortly before their planned marriage, in 1911, she died of an epileptic seizure. Her death was immediately the subject of rumors, however -- some though it might have been a suicide, some thought murder. Poisoning would have been the cause, which of course in the public mind suggested her physician fiancé as a suspect. My personal suspicion, based on very limited knowledge, is that she actually did die as a result of a siezure (she had a history of such attacks), and that the speculation of a more lurid cause was just sensationalism (perhaps abetted by the sensational plots of her novels).

So, to John Chilcote, M.P. aka The Masquerader. My edition seems possibly the American First, published by Harper and Brothers in October 1904. The flyleaf is signed "To Father from Lulu, Nov. 19, 1904". There are illustrations by Clarence F. Underwood. Though Harper's had a London office, the U. K. edition appears to have been from Blackwood (Edinburgh and London). (For some unexplained reason, the Publishers' Weekly page on 1904 bestsellers claims the book was anonymous, but my copy, and copies I've seen of the Blackwood UK first, are clearly attributed to Katherine Cecil Thurston.)

I'll start by saying that I really enjoyed this novel. And I'll immediately qualify that -- the story is pretty preposterous. And there's a lot of guff about masculine character vs. feminine character, and how a wife's greatest duty and joy is to get out of the way when her husband needs to be doing man stuff. It's interesting to think about this in light of the apparent problems in her marriage, and the way her husband resented the fact that she was more successful than he. But: it's a bestseller of a certain distinct type (there is, for one thing, some definite resemblance to The Prisoner of Zenda, though it's not a Ruritanian-style novel at all), and it executes its plot well, makes the central love story fairly convincing, and is an engaging book to read.

The story opens with John Chilcote, M. P., leaving the House of Commons one night and getting lost in the fog. By happenstance he bumps into another man -- and is shocked to see that this man, John Loder, is his exact double. They talk briefly, and we gather that Loder is somewhat down on his luck -- his father blew the family fortune, and Loder himself was unlucky in a love affair and has sworn off women; while Chilcote is outwardly very successful, but inwardly tormented by his addiction to morphia (morphine).

We follow Chilcote some more, see him neglecting his duties, learn that his marriage is loveless, see him interacting with his mistress, an empty-headed and manipulative woman. And then, in something like despair, and prompted by his mistress' mention of a current bestselling book in which two men who look alike change positions, Chilcote hatches a crazy idea -- he will go to John Loder and offer him money to take his place for a week or so at a time, while Chilcote indulges in his morphia cravings.

After some resistance, Loder agrees. And what he had intended to be just a rote fill-in job becomes something different when Chilcote's wife Eve somewhat contemptuously relays a message from Chilcote's mentor, the Tory leader Fraide, asking him to get a grip and fulfill his potential. As it happens, a crisis is on hand -- Russia is making trouble in Pakistan, and the Whig government, now in power, is vacillating. Loder plunges right in and starts making headway. Both Eve and Fraide notice the change in him ... and then Chilcote is ready to change places again.

This seesaws back and forth a couple of times -- Chilcote relapses and Loder takes over, then Chilcote comes back. Eve can tell the difference, though she doesn't know the reason, and she begins to see some hope that her marriage can be rekindled. Fraide too is excited, and he assigns Chilcote/Loder a key speech asking for more action against Russia. But by happenstance, Loder as Chilcote encounters Chilcote's mistress -- and, shockingly, she is the same woman who had disappointed him in his previous life. (I told you this was pretty preposterous.) Loder is torn between fear of being exposed, and his pride in his new accomplishments -- but especially torn between his growing feelings for Eve and his moral beliefs that as she is another man's wife he must renounce her, must come to a decision.

Spoilers follow ...

(illustration by Charles F. Underwood)

Loder decides to tell Chilcote they must stop this masquerade. He needs to leave the country and build himself a new life. But Chilcote is in terrible straits -- he begs Loder for one more night to lose himself in his addiction. Loder agrees -- and is indeed somewhat complicit in allowing Chilcote to take an unusually large dose. Loder goes home to Eve, and reveals all to her, telling her that he must leave. They both go to Chilcote, meaning to try to straighten him out -- but, no surprise, they find him dead. Loder still believes his duty is to leave, so as not to compromise Eve. But Eve has other ideas -- she insists that Loder as Chilcote has become too important to his country, in his role as Fraide's right hand man (Fraide has been asked to form a government): so, leaving aside her obvious desire to become fully his "wife", he has a duty to England to stay and take over Chilcote's identity.

(We note, of course, that that's exactly what Rudolf Rassendyll does NOT do in The Prisoner of Zenda!)

So -- yes it's preposterous. But I really did enjoy it. Besides the substitution plot, and the love story, there is a fair amount of political neep: I'm not sure that it's really that accurate, but it's fairly interest
ing anyway. A perfect example of the sort of novel that one understands both why it was a bestseller and why it's not a lasting classic. And of that set of novels, one of the more enjoyable reads.