Birthday Review: Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton

A review by Rich Horton

My friend Jo Walton turns 54 today. We've known each other online since the halcyon days of the Usenet newsgroups rec.art.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.composition back in the late '90s, and in person since Chicon in 2012. Recently I was fortunate to visit her in her town, Montreal, when she hosted a wonderful convention, Scintillation. I was thrilled to able to follow her evolution from an aspiring writer to a published writer to a winner of multiple awards, and I've reprinted some of her short fiction in my Best of the Year volumes.

Besides her best known novels -- the Hugo winner Among Others, the scary alternate history Small Change trilogy, beginning with Farthing, about a fascist England at the time of the Second World War, and her philosophical Thessaly trilogy about a project to create a city based on Plato's Republic -- I really like two of her lesser known novels: the World Fantasy Award winner Tooth and Claw; and the Mythopoeic Award winner Lifelode. I haven't written about Lifelode, but here's what I wrote about Tooth and Claw some time ago.

Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton's latest novel, is something quite different than her first three -- it is a fantasy set in a world in which dragons are real. And its plot is based on Anthony Trollope -- specifically Framley Parsonage. With the details of dragon physiology and culture cleverly molded to fit the Trollopian view of Victorian England.

One lack in Walton's first novels is wit, and any sense of lightness. To be sure the novels are all to an extent tragic in outlook. At the same time, though, Walton seems so immersed in her imagined world that she doesn't want to play with it at all -- the books are quite earnest in tone, often a bit too earnest, or even ponderous. But those who are familiar with Jo's Usenet postings (though alas of late she has abandoned Usenet for the Livejournal world) know that she can be very witty. (See her "Calamity Jane Austin" page for example.) Tooth and Claw, happily, is abundantly witty.

The novel opens as the old dragon Bon Agornin is dying. His son Penn, a clergydragon, hears his confession -- which is controversial according to Penn's religion. (It harks of the Old Religion -- setting up a conflict analogous to Victorian Era attitudes of Anglicanism towards Catholicism (and possibly a bit towards Methodism and other dissenting sects).) Bon's confession includes a shameful secret about his rise from a poor dragon to wealth and relative social standing. Then Bon dies, and his body is divided according to tradition, with his heirs each eating a portion. It seems that dragon meat is magically useful to dragons, allowing them to grow and thrive. However, against Bon's apparent wishes, his son-in-law, the Illustrious Daverak (equivalent to perhaps an Earl?), takes a large portion for himself and for his dragonets. This enrages Penn and his younger sisters and brother, and sets in play the main motivating force of the plot -- a lawsuit that Penn's brother will bring against Daverak.

Bon Agornin's children are the already mentioned Penn, Daverak's wife Berend, another son, Avan, who is establishing himself a position in the Civil Service, and two maiden daughters, Selendra and Haner. Penn has a living with a very high ranking dragon family, the Benandis. He is able to take in one sister, Selendra; but Haner must go live with the unpleasant Daverak. Daverak's bad nature consists of such things as abusing his traditional right to cull weaker dragons (for their meat), forcing his wife to get pregnant too often -- which can fatally weaken a female dragon, and mistreating his servants. This then is Haner's problem. Selendra's conflict is that her virtue is compromised by an oily clergydragon -- leaving it possible that she will not be able to get pregnant. Then it seems that the young Exalted Benandi (a Marquis?) is falling for her -- very much against the wishes of his stuck-up dowager mother. And Avan, back in the capitol city, has a live-in lover who has a couple of important and dangerous secrets of her own.

It all works out with the precision unwinding of the plot of a Victorian novel -- and in quite satisfying fashion. The real delights of the novel are the affectionately portrayed characters, the great fun Walton has mapping dragon physiology to her plot needs, and the wit. And small things like the offhand revelation of the origin of the name Yarge, which applies to the soft-skinned bipeds with whom the dragons have historically warred. I enjoyed Tooth and Claw as much as any novel I've read recently. It won the World Fantasy Award -- an award I am happy to endorse.

Birthday Review: Novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery

Birthday Review: Novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery

a review by Rich Horton

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born November 30, 1874, on Prince Edward Island, and died in 1942. She is of course best known for her series of novels about Anne Shirley, an orphan girl living on Prince Edward Island, which follow her through her life. (Montgomery herself was almost an orphan.) I read those aloud to my daughter starting in 1998, and in memory of Montgomery's birth date I have posted the very brief capsule reviews I did of most of the Anne of Green Gables stories back then, as well as of one other short novel, Kilmeny of the Orchard.

Via Wikipedia, I just learned something interesting about the genesis of Anne in Lucy Montgomery's mind. She saw a particular photograph of the model/actress Evelyn Nesbit, and used that photograph for her conception of Anne Shirley's looks, and of her "youthful idealism and spirituality". Let's just say that, if you look up Evelyn Nesbit's rather sad (and shocking) personal life (which has come up before on this blog), I think you'll be surprised at her association with a character like Anne Shirly.

As a teen I never read the Green Gables stories of Lucy Montgomery.  The reason is obvious enough: they are "girl" stories.  But I did feel, somehow, that I ought to be familiar with them.  Lately [in 1998] I've been reading long books aloud to my 9-year old daughter, Melissa.  This month I decided to try Anne of Green Gables.  As many of you no doubt know, it's about Anne Shirley, an 11-year old orphan, who is adopted by the sixtyish brother and sister pair of Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who wanted a boy to help on the farm but got a girl by mistake.  They live at the farm of Green Gables, in Avonlea on the North Coast of Canada's tiny province Prince Edward Island.  Anne is extremely talkative, extremely imaginative, extremely smart, and somewhat prone to getting in trouble.  (But not too much trouble.)  The story follows about 5 years of her life, from arrival at Green Gables to graduation from an Academy which certifies one as ready for college (if you can afford it), or teaching.  Teaching at the age of 16!  Plotwise the book is a bit episodic, and a bit manipulative, as Anne basically goes from scrape to remarkable triumph, again and again, until just at the end a couple of terrible blows are guaranteed to bring the reader to tears.  And Anne is in some ways just too much of a paragon.  But it's still a very enjoyable book, and even if I felt manipulated at times, it was very moving.  In addition, I thought the character and voices of Anne and her stepmother Marilla were extremely well done.  I felt particular empathy with Marilla, and by the end, when her love for Anne became clear even to her gruff self, I could hardly read any of Marilla's lines aloud for the lump in my throat.  A good book, and it's easy to see why it's an enduring classic.

The second Anne of Green Gables book is Anne of Avonlea.  This covers Anne's life from 16 to 18, as she is the schoolteacher at Avonlea.  She meets a young, rather cloying, American-born boy, who takes a fancy to her, and gets involved in the boy's widowed father's love life.  She tries to push the good folk of Avonlea into improving the village, along with her friends, especially, of course, Gilbert Blythe.  (It's been obvious to everybody: the readers, the other folks in Avonlea, Anne's friends, maybe even Gilbert, that Anne and he will marry, but Anne seems oblivious.  I'm not sure to what degree I buy this.)  She and her stepmother Marilla adopt orphaned twins, Davy and Dora, and the wild Davy becomes very attached to Anne as well.  And Anne befriends the mysterious, cranky, newcomer, Mr. Harrison. At the end, Anne is suddenly presented with an unexpected opportunity she had not thought to have.

These are enjoyable books.  I'm reading them aloud to my daughter.  (And I will say that Montgomery's prose holds up well to the stress of reading aloud.)  There is a certain lack of suspense, though Montgomery does spring a few surprises.  And to some considerable extent this book reveals its genesis as a serial.  (It is very episodic.)  The biggest weakness, I think, is that Montgomery doesn't seem to get men, at all.  I believed in Matthew Cuthbert, Anne's adoptive father, and Gilbert Blythe comes through OK, mostly because he is kept somewhat at a distance.  But characters like cloying young Paul Irving ("You know, Teacher."), his father Stephen, even the enjoyable Mr. Harrison, even minor characters like Thomas Lynde, don't convince at all.  Some of this may be cultural differences, some may be literary conventions, but I do think that Montgomery falls short in this area.  I still find the books worthwhile, though.

This month I finished reading L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Windy Poplars to my daughter.  This is the 4th in the series in internal chronology, but it's very late in order of writing.  (It was published in 1936, while the fourth book actually written comes from 1919 or so.)  The book shows the strain of being interpolated into the series: it's very episodic (I believe much of it was published as short stories), and there is no real tension in the plot, nor much development in Anne.  It tells of the three years after Anne and Gilbert became engaged, in which Gilbert was in medical school, and Anne was principal of the high school in Summerside, PEI.  There is a potted crisis for Anne to resolve in each year: in the first year she must win over the unfriendly Pringles, who dominated the town socially; in the second year she must win over the talented but bitter and unfriendly Katherine Brooke, one of her teachers at the high school; and in the third year she must save her little neighbor Elizabeth from the overly strict women who are raising her, and restore her to her father.  Still and all, the book remains enjoyable and worth reading.  Interestingly, this book was published in a longer version in England as Anne of Windy Willows.  Apparently, some of the incidents of which Anne hears (town history concerning some gruesome ancestors) were considered too intense for American kids. (The Willows/Poplars change was for another reason, I can't recall what.  I confess I think Windy Poplars (the name of the home in which Anne lives in Summerside) a much better name than Windy Willows.)

I've also finished reading the fifth novel in the Anne of Green Gables series to my daughter.  (Fifth in internal chronology, fourth in publication order.)  Anne's House of Dreams concerns the first few years of Anne and Gilbert's life in Glen St. Marys.  Gilbert sets up his practice, and Anne settles in as a housewife and has her first children.  The main conflicts concern a mysterious tragic young woman living close by.  The key new characters are this woman, Leslie Moore, and an old sailor named Captain Jim.  This book is still enjoyable, but Anne is in many ways less central, and a bit less interesting, than in earlier books, now that she's settled into her role as Gilbert's wife.   It's also extremely annoying in that LMM developed a late tic in her writing ... the constant ... unending ... use of ellipses.)

And, finally, I finished reading L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Ingleside to Melissa.  This is the last Anne novel LMM wrote, perhaps her last novel, period, written in 1939.  It's set at the turn of the century, pretty much, thus it's sixth of the eight Anne books in internal chronology.  It's also a good example of why internal chronology isn't always best.  For instance, there is one direct, and rather horrible, spoiler for a bad event from, I'm guessing, Rilla of Ingleside.  In addition, the story shows a lot of signs of struggling to squeeze in incidents without distorting the existing books.  For example, there are a couple of chapters about Jem's unsuccessful attempts to get a dog.  It's obvious that in an upcoming book, he will get a dog, and that in this book LMM needs to work around that.  It's very episodic, but then so are most of the Anne books.  Still, though, it's a fairly enjoyable read, with some nice touches. (It's also often annoying in that LMM developed a late tic in her writing ... the constant ... unending ... use of ellipses.)

Rainbow Valley is #7 in L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series.  This book is set in, I suppose, 1905 or so.  Anne Blythe, Gilbert, and their children are really only side characters.  The book is mostly about the new minister of Anne's church, and his four children.  The minister, John Meredith, is a widower, and he is a very unworldly man.  As a result, though he loves his children dearly, he is not raising them very well.  Clearly, he must marry.  But complications ensue, of course, as we follow the escapades of the children, and the bumpy course of John Meredith's romance.  All works out in the end, naturally.  I liked this installment quite a lot, really.  I was convinced and moved by the central romance, and I liked the new kids.  Pretty good.

The other Montgomery book I read was Kilmeny of the Orchard, a very short novel, not one of her Anne of Green Gables books.  This story concerns a young man, heir to a well-off shopkeeper, who decides to spend a year after college in a remote Prince Edward Island town.  While there, he meets a beautiful young woman, who cannot speak.  In all ways she appears perfectly healthy, she can hear just fine, plays an excellent violin, but can't speak.  The story is quite melodramatic, as first we are told the story of her mother, who got married to a man who turned out, through no fault of his own (!), to already be married.  Then the young woman, Kilmeny, and the young man fall in love, but Kilmeny feels herself unworthy of marriage, because of her "defect".  The resolution involves Kilmeny's step-brother, an Italian orphan, who had also been in love with Kilmeny.  This feature reveals one of the more distasteful features of Montgomery's books: her racism (and classism). In the Anne books the racist bits are very minor, involving occasional remarks about the "French".  Apparently the French community of New Brunswick (the original Acadians -- many of whom moved to Louisiana and became the Cajuns (Acadian = 'cadian = Cajun)) were not highly regarded by the Scots and English inhabitants of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.  They seem to have been mostly employed as farmhands.  In Kilmeny of the Orchard it is made clear from the beginning that Neil, of Southern European birth, somewhat dark-skinned, and an orphan, is a lesser being, prone to emotional outbursts despite having been brought up from birth by Kilmeny's dour Scots Aunt and Uncle. Anyway, though Kilmeny of the Orchard has significant flaws, it is still an involving and enjoyable read.

Old Bestseller: The Cobbler of Nîmes, by M. Imlay Taylor

Old Bestsellers: The Cobbler of Nîmes, by M. Imlay Taylor

a review by Rich Horton

Back to a true Old Bestseller type book. That said, I don't think this book was a bestseller, and indeed I'm not sure Taylor ever had a big bestseller. But she was an at least mildly popular writer. Her full name was Mary Imlay Taylor, and that seems to be her maiden name (in that one contemporary notice I found refers to her as "Miss Mary Imlay Taylor"). She was known as something of an expert on Russian history, and several of her books were set in historical Russia, including one of her best known, On the Red Staircase. Another popular book was The Impersonator. Her dates were 1878 1938.

The Cobbler of Nîmes was published in 1901, when Mary Imlay Taylor was only 23. It is copyright 1900, suggesting perhaps an earlier serialization? The publisher is the Chicago firm A. C. McClurg. My edition has a note on the flyleaf: "12/25/06 Merry Christmas to Marmee [?] from Willie".

I've previously written about several historical novels set in 16th and 17th Century France, all by English or American writers. Some of these concerned the conflict between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots), which was theoretically resolved in 1598, when Henry IV promulgated the Edict of Nantes, granting significant civil rights to the Huguenots. (Henry IV himself was raised Protestant, but famously converted to Catholicism, saying "The Crown is worth a Mass".) These books are listed below, with links to my reviews:

1515: When Knighthood Was In Flower, Louis XII

1530: Under the Rose, Francis I

1593: The Helmet of Navarre, Henry IV

1608: The Bright Face of Danger, Henry IV

1630: Under the Red Robe, Louis XIII

The Edict of Nantes, however, was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685 via the Edict of Fontaineblue. This led to decades of persecution of the Huguenots, and violent resistant from them. This is the backdrop against which The Cobbler of Nîmes is set. Its action occurs in 1703. The Huguenot, or Camisard, stronghold is in the Cévennes region of Southeast France. The King's soldiers, led by Marechal Montrevel, have a policy of burning Huguenot villages, and either executing the men or sending them to be galley slaves, and sending the women to supposed nunneries, in which they are mistreated and often die. (The Camisards, it should be said, also committed atrocities against some Catholic villages.)

The title cobbler, M. Charlot, is a hunchback (called le Bossu), and a good Catholic. He sees the exhibition at a fair of a "damned person" -- a young woman who died of her mistreatment at the Tour de Constance. He notices a young man at the exhibition, who seems distressed, and offers him a place. He is François d'Aguesseu, a Huguenot and the brother of the dead woman. Charlot urges him to hide, and arranges for him to have a place at the chalet of Mme. de Saint Cyr, who lives alone except for a serving woman, Babet, and her granddaughter Rosaline. They are secretly Protestants, and all the rest of the family has died in the religious unrest.

The reader will not be surprised that François and Rosaline are soon in love. But there are problems. A local commander in the French Army, M. de Baudri, fancies himself in love with Rosaline, though his love seems sadistic and rather vile. He is ready to pressure her to marry him in exchange for protection for her family from persecution. Another vile individual, Mère Tigraine, a local fishwife and fanatic Catholic, has discovered François's hiding place at the chalet. Meanwhile, François has a chance to flee to England (where his family has some money), but he refuses to either leave the Saint Cyrs in danger, and also he wishes to join the Camisards and fight for Huguenot rights.

In the end it is up to Charlot, at great risk to himself, to arrange for the escape of François and Rosaline, despite the interference of Mère Tigraine. There are battles to come, and a desperate capture of Rosaline, and a magnificient sacrifice by Charlot, who of course is in love with Rosaline himself, hopelessly, though she has always, unlike almost everyone else, treatedhim kindly. The ending is pretty predictable, and to some extent it comes off a bit flat, though Charlot's actions are pretty affecting.

This is a pretty minor effort among the great rush of historical novels that appeared around the turn of the 20th Century. But it's not bad either -- Taylor was a writer with real ability, though not a great writer. She does seem to have been quite scrupulous in her attention to historical accuracy.

Birthday Review: Five Capsules on C. S. Lewis

Five Capsule Reviews of C. S. Lewis.

Today is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Clive Staples Lewis (who, famously, died on the same day in 1963 as another British writer known for SF/F work -- Aldous Huxley -- and, of course, as an American President.) In Lewis' memory I'm posting this set of five rather informal (and somewhat short) "reviews" (blog posts, really) from some time ago. The four Narnia posts are all from a reread I did back in 2001 or so. (I couldn't find the others.) I purposely chose art from a variety of different editions of the Narnia books. As a kid when I first read them, from the library, several times over, the editions were the mass market paperbacks much like image shown for Prince Caspian below.

C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce is a "novel" which serves really as a piece of Christian apologia.  It's very well done, fascinating reading, well-argued though I think attacking straw men in many cases. I don't see that it can persuade an atheist, but the advice herein seems very good for a Christian. In it Lewis has a dream in which he is waiting for a bus in a grey, rainy, city.  The bus takes him and a number of other passengers into the sky, then up a cliff onto a beautiful plateau, leading to a range of mountains.  He and the passengers seem insubstantial, but a number of beautiful, substantial, people come to try to help the passengers make their way to the mountains. This is Heaven, you see, and they have come from Hell. Lewis overhears a number of conversations between the souls in Heaven and the unsaved souls: in every case, the unsaved souls find excuses for not accepting joy and staying in heaven. Eventually Lewis meets George MacDonald, Lewis' great predecessor as a combination Christian apologist/writer of children's fantasies, and MacDonald becomes the mouthpiece for much Lewis' burden of teaching. For instance, the famous quote from this book, "there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done'" is attributed to the MacDonald character, though as far as I know it's not really a quote from MacDonald.

One of my rereading projects for this year is the Chronicles of Narnia. The second book (by order of publication, which is obviously the right order in which to read the books -- hmmmph!) is Prince Caspian.  The four Pevensie children return to Narnia a year after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Soon they realize that hundreds of years have passed in Narnia while only a year has passed on Earth.  The reign of the four children is legendary.  Narnia has been ruled for some time by humans called Telmarines, who came from another country.  They have oppressed the talking animals and dwarfs and so on, especially recently, under the rule of the evil King Miraz.

Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy manage to save a dwarf from execution, and he tells the story of King Miraz' nephew Caspian (who is actually not a prince but the rightful King of Narnia).  Caspian was raised by a kindly nurse and a half-dwarf/half-human tutor, who told him stories of the glorious time of the High King Peter and the other Pevensie children, when the animals could talk, etc.  Caspian becomes a partisan for returning Narnia to a juster rule, and he also learns that he is the true King: that his uncle killed his father and exiled any loyal knights while Caspian was an infant.  When Miraz' wife finally gives him an heir, Caspian escapes and begins a resistance effort, with the help of a number of dwarfs and talking animals.  It is he who has called the four children back to Narnia (by blowing the magic horn introduced in the first book), and so the children make a journey to the site of the desperate battle Caspian is fighting with the much superior forces of the usurper.  And, of course, Peter and the others, particularly Lucy who seems closest to Aslan, help vanquish Miraz (who is doomed also by his natural suspicion and the dissension in his ranks).

This is an enjoyable book to read, but I didn't like it as much now as I liked it when a teen.  Not because of the Christian symbolism, which I didn't notice back then but which is clear as a bell now: I actually think that stuff is well done.  The main reservations I have are, first, the worldbuilding: which is really quite thin.  For example, as far as I can tell from travel times, Narnia must be no more than say 50 miles on a side.  By the same token the plot is simple, with a somewhat contrived ending.  And finally, Lewis is very anti-industry, anti-modernism of any sort, and at times that is expressed in a grating fashion, such as when he intimates that bridges are bad things.

I jumped right back into my reread of the Narnia books.  I'd say that rereading the first two books they seemed diminished by time, but The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, not a favorite of mine when I was a teen, seemed better on rereading.  Edmund and Lucy, the younger Pevensie children, are staying with their nasty cousin Eustace.  Eustace has made fun of them for their belief in Narnia, but one day as the three children are looking at a picture of a ship, they find themselves once again in Narnia ... indeed, in the water next to the ship. They are rescued, and the ship turns out to be the Dawn Treader, on which King Caspian is sailing to the Eastern Ocean, trying to retrace the steps of the seven nobleman who had been loyal to his father, and who were exiled by the usurper King Miraz.  Also, Reepicheep the Talking Mouse wishes to travel all the way to the very end of the world (Narnia being flat), and to see what lies beyond.  The neat part of this book is the imaginative details of the various islands the travelers visit on the way.  In addition, the ending is beautifully handled, though it's got some of the same sadness as some of the other Narnia books, as Edmund and Lucy are told that this is their last visit.  Eustace has undergone some salutary learning experiences on the trip, but there are hints that he may return.  Caspian is paired off with a wife, and as a result I now see that Neil Gaiman's Stardust has a slight echo of Narnia in it.  (Though as I've said before, Stardust reminds me much more of Lud-in-the-Mist.)  The only drawback is Lewis' usual anti-modernity, but that rather comes with the territory.

Continued galomping through Narnia with The Silver Chair.  Eustace, from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and his schoolmate Jill Pole, fleeing bullies at their school, escape through a gate into Narnia.  Aslan sends them to Caer Paravel, telling Jill a series of things she must do to help find the Prince, Rilian, the son of Caspian.  Rilian was searching for the serpent who killed his mother, and for ten years has been lost.  Eustace and Jill, with the help of a marsh-wiggle, Puddleglum, set out to the North to find clues about Rilian.  Braving some evil Giants, they learn that  he is underground, and they end up in a realm of "Earthmen", or gnomes, ruled by a beautiful Queen, and her Prince.  They learn, as you have guessed, that the Prince is Rilian and the Queen an evil sorceress, and through cleverness and bravery they fight free and back to the surface.  This book holds up pretty well.  The underground kingdom is pretty cool, and well described, as is the city of the Giants.  And Puddleglum is a delightful character, one of Lewis' best.

I continued my Narnia rereading project with The Horse and His Boy.  This is sort of a pendant to the rest of the books, being set during the reign of the four children from the first book.  It is set in Calormene, a corruptly ruled country, of an Arabian flavor, someways south of Narnia.  A young boy, Shasta, cruelly treated by his adoptive father, escapes with a horse who turns out to be a talking horse (Bree) from Narnia.  The two soon fall in with a noble girl (Aravis), running from a forced marriage to the evil Grand Vizier, who also is accompanied by a talking horse (Hwin).  When trying to sneak through the capitol city of Calormene, Shasta is mistaken by King Edmund of Narnia (who is visiting with Susan, as the Crown Prince of Calormene wishes to marry her) for the prince of Archenland, a country on the border of Narnia and Calormene.  Taken to the palace, Shasta escapes after finding the real prince, while Aravis meets one of her friends by luck overhears a plot by the Crown Prince to invade Archenland and Narnia to attempt to force Susan to marry him.  Follows a desperate ride across the desert to try to warn the Archenlanders, complete with encounter with Aslan, and revealment of Shasta's true identity (not much of a surprise).

This was my favorite Narnia book when I was a kid, but in some ways it doesn't hold up as well as some others.  For one thing, the meme "White men good, Arabs bad" seems to be tacitly understood.  Granted that in Narnian terms this can be explained by the degree of worship of Aslan -- it still comes off as frankly racist.  Also, I think the plot is easier to see coming at this age -- I think I was more surprised when a kid by the twists.  But there is much that is good, as well, perhaps especially the characters of the talking horses.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Sarah Monette

Today is Sarah Monette's birthday, and in her honor here is a compilation of my Locus reviews of her short fiction (with a blog extract included).

Locus, January 2004

The longest story in Alchemy #1, Sarah Monette's "The Wall of Clouds", is also fine, about a strange set of patients at a convalescent home, perhaps sometime in the late nineteenth century, some unexpected deaths, and a perhaps haunted elevator.

Locus, September 2004

In Sarah Monette's "The Venebretti Necklace", Mr. Booth discovers a walled-in skeleton in one of the Museum's mysterious basements. He and archaeologist Miss Coburn learn that the skeleton is of Mrs. Stanhope, who disappeared at the same time as the cursed Venebretti Necklace more than a half-century before. The question is "Who buried her and why?". In a way this is a somewhat ordinary ghost story, but the characters, especially the pathologically shy Mr. Booth, and Monette's voice, make for a very entertaining read. I look forward to more stories of Mr. Booth.

Blog Post, early 2005

My favorite story in All Hallows #35 was "Bringing Helena Back", by Sarah Monette, one of her Kyle Murchison Booth stories. This time Booth agrees to help an old college friend bring his wife back from the dead (despite the fact that she died of a cocaine overdose in the company of another man).


Locus, August 2006

Lone Star Stories has three good stories: “A Night in Electric Squidland” by Sarah Monette may be the best, about a psychic investigator looking at disappearances from a shady nightclub.

Locus, February 2007

Sarah Monette is one of the most consistently enjoyable newer writers we have. “Amante Dorée”, at the Winter Paradox, is another delightful piece. Annabel St. Clair is a prostitute in New Orleans in an alternate history in which the French rule North America. She is also a spy for the French emperor, investigating people such as young Louis Vazquez, who claims to be a descendant of the last Bourbon king. Yet she is vulnerable – when she lets real emotion affect her, as with her flirtation with a British spy. And she, of course, has secrets … This short story has intrigue, romance, sexual ambiguity, death … lovely work.

Review of Fast Ships, Black Sails (Locus, December 2008)

The other highlight, for me, is Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s “Boojum”, which is SF – speculative pirate collections seem usually to manage to sneak in a couple of SF stories. And I admit I am a sucker for them. Here, a boojum is a living spaceship, bred in the atmosphere of a gas giant, and Black Alice Bradley is a crewmember forced to make a dangerous choice when aliens attack. The ending reaches for good old SFnal wonder, and makes it.

Locus, August 2008

There is also, in the Spring Postscripts, a decidedly weird story of wandering in dream world from Sarah Monette, “The World Without Sleep”, which struck me oddly only in that it seemed not quite right for a Kyle Murchison Booth story – other than that it’s quite good.

Locus, October 2009

And there’s more horror – of a sort, again, that appeals to me – at Clarkesworld. “White Charlie” is another of Sarah Monette’s Kyle Murchison Booth stories (though Booth’s name is not given here). In this one Booth must deal with the unwanted gift to his museum of some mostly worthless old books from a dotty benefactor. Unfortunately, the previous owner had tried to use the books to gain power – and in so doing had summoned a rather scary creature, that comes along with the gift. What I really liked here – besides the secondary characters – was the way Booth is forced to think twice about his response to the dangerous creature unwittingly loosed on the museum.

Locus, December 2009

One story in particular in Lovecraft Unbound is outstanding: “Mongoose”, by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. This is set in the same future as their 2008 story “Boojum”. So we already know there’s Lewis Carroll lurking in the background, and the title of the new story points at Kipling. But Lovecraft is here too, as one Israel Irizzary is summoned to Kadath Station (other stations also have Lovecraftian names: Providence, Leng, Dunwich, etc.), to deal with an infestation of toves and raths. Carroll again – but if the creatures are named out of Carroll, they come from a Lovecraftian source – they are horrors out of space and time, that is. Monette and Bear nicely suggest that horror, and also suggest that bureaucratic screwups are a horror too, as they let Irizzary, with an unexpected ally, and with his partner Mongoose, deal with the infestation while learning some surprising facts about their universe.

Locus, May 2011

In May at Fantasy Magazine, Sarah Monette’s “The Devil in Gaylord’s Creek” is an involving story about a dead girl who has a job killing devils. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but Morgan, the narrator, is dead, and about 16, and with her rather prissy boss, or minder, or mentor, a man named Francis, she uses a magical sword to kill the Devil when he shows up. We learn something about these Devils – the one in Gaylord’s Creek was conjured from tragedy, and perhaps that’s always true – and we learn something about Morgan, and her life and death and afterlife, and her oddly affecting relationship with Francis. Good and original work.

Locus, March 2012

Sarah Monette's “Blue Lace Agate” (Lightspeed, January) is a buddy cop story – with the “cops” in question being instead members of the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation – worried about things like shoggoth larva smugglers. There's a decent murder mystery here, but as expected for this subgenre, the heart of the story is the developing relationship between two mismatched partners – and that is well-executed as well. I don't know if Monette plans more stories involving Jamie Keller and Mick Sharpton, but they would be welcome.

Birthday Review: Metaplanetary, by Tony Daniel

Metaplanetary, by Tony Daniel

a review by Rich Horton

Tony Daniel turns 55 today. He received a lot of well-deserved notice in the 1990s for his first couple of novels, and for stories like "Life on the Moon" and "The Robot's Twilight Companion". The novel in question, Metaplanetary, the first of a planned trilogy, appeared in 2001, and its successor, Superluminal, in 2004, but he couldn't sell the third book, and nothing else came out until an enjoyable novel from Baen in 2012, Guardians of Night. He has continued to write and edit for Baen since them. For his birthday, I am posting a review I wrote first for my blog back in 2001, of Metaplanetary.

The best reading I have done recently, however, was of Tony Daniel's new novel Metaplanetary. So far, this is the best SF book I've read from 2001. Metaplanetary is a grand, involving, novel set in 3013 C. E., in a fully colonized solar system which is about to burst into a vicious civil war. It is chock full of neat, if perhaps not always fully plausible, SFnal ideas. It managed to excite my somewhat jaded sense of wonder, and it made me care deeply about quite a few characters, and it advances some interesting and worthwhile moral themes. Its main flaw is that it doesn't end so much as stop -- it's part of a trilogy (the sequel was called Superluminal, and the third book never appeared), and it really does not stand alone. Another, lesser, flaw, perhaps, is that the villain is really evil -- no moral ambiguity there. But that said he is well-portrayed and interesting.

The solar system in 3000 or so is divided into basically two sections. The inner system, called the Met, consists of the inner four planets, and a gloriously weird system of tubes connecting them, which makes the whole thing look like a spider web, sort of. Many people seem to live in the tubes, or in nodes of the system, called bolsas. Mercury, with all that energy available, is the dominant planet. Earth has been largely returned to nature.

The outer planetary systems have all been colonized, with varying degrees of success. Triton, Neptune's big moon, is one of the most successful colonies. In addition, a number of artificially intelligent ships live permanently in space, particularly the Oort clouds, and they have traveled as far as Alpha Centauri. (These are called cloudships.) The Met doesn't reach to the outer system because the asteroid belt is impractical to cross with the tubes.

Besides the Met, the other key SFnal notion of the book is "grist". Basically, grist is very "smart" nanotech. Most if not all humans have an integrated bunch of grist attached, called a pellicle, which hosts a version of the their personality in AI form, called a convert. There are also "free converts", AI's based on scans of human brains but which don't have a biological body.Humans can interact with both free converts and with the "attached" converts of other humans in Virtual space, and all of the system, pretty much, is instantaneously connected by a grist network called the merci. And some humans are what are called LAP's -- LAP stands for Large Array of Personas: they are in essence a network of clones and converts that can be physically and virtually in many places at once.

For the most part, the solar system is in something of a Golden Age. The physical needs of people seem to be well supplied. A critical political issue is the rights of "free converts". Some do not consider them "Human" -- they are just computer programs, in this view, without real free will, without, if you will, "souls". But others, especially in the outer system, regard them as clearly human.

The novel is told from a variety of points of view: a couple of cloudships; a free convert named Danis Graytor; Danis' human husband Kelly; their daughter Aubry (who has a human body but is considered a "half free convert"); an artificial woman named Jill with a body made of grist and a braine based on a ferret's; Colonel Roger Sherman, the military leader of Triton's forces; Sherman's son Lee; Director Ames, the leader of the Met government; General San Filieu, an aging Catalan woman under Ames influence who leads the Met attack on Triton; and more. This gives us a good look at the variety of ways people live in this future, and at what it is like to be a free convert, or a cloudship, or a human with a pellicle and convert attachment, or a LAP. This also helps keep the action moving, important in a fairly long book.

The action of the novel is exciting and fascinating. We see atrocities, such as some clever means of torturing AIs, and a brutal attack on Triton with some scary uses of space tech; and we see heroism in the resistance to these atrocities. We see convincing depictions of sex between humans and AIs, and of alternate means of travel in a physically linked solar system, and of AI entertainment. We get useful glimpses of the history of this future: the young life of Director Ames, the development of the cloudships, the invention of grist and the merci. It's a fairly long book, but never boring.

The characters are fully rounded, even the villains. (If they are evil, and many are, they are evil in interesting ways.) Daniel gives his different characters and narrators different voices. His prose is generally sound, occasionally lapsing into cliche, but at other times very nice. His scope is vast, and his theme is one of the great SF themes: "What is a human?" He illustrates this nicely with his array of characters of vastly different "shape" or composition; and he metaphorically illustrates even more nicely the associated conflict of viewpoints between individualists and collectivists: hinting by the end at a truly scary collectivist vision. The scary parts of the book are convincing and often quite original, and very scary: and the heroism is moving and believable. I really liked this book.

Ace Double Reviews, 75: The Planet Killers, by Robert Silverberg/We Claim These Stars!, by Poul Anderson

Ace Double Reviews, 75: The Planet Killers, by Robert Silverberg/We Claim These Stars!, by Poul Anderson (#D-407, 1959, $0.35)

A review by Rich Horton

On the occasion of the 92nd anniversary of Poul Anderson's birth, here's a repost of a briefish review I did of one of his Ace Doubles, backed with one by Robert Silverberg.

Silverberg again! And Poul Anderson. Two of the most prolific writers in SF history, and also two of the more regular Ace Double contributors. And also two SFWA Grand Masters: two of the best SF writers ever. As of 1959, though, I doubt anyone was predicting future Grand Master status for Silverberg: certainly this novel provides no support for such speculation! Anderson, to be sure, is another matter.

Add caption

The Planet Killers is about 43,000 words long. It is an expansion of "This World Must Die!", published under the name Ivar Jorgenson in the August 1957 Science Fiction Adventures. It's a very simple story -- too simple, really. I expected -- hoped -- to see a twist along the way but none really happened. The story opens with Roy Gardner, an agent of Earth, being ordered to the planet Lurion. It seems that a computer has decided that Lurion will turn warlike in 67 years, make a sneak attack on Earth, and completely destroy it. The only alternative for Earth is to destroy Lurion now, by sending 5 agents to Lurion to set off sonic generators to, I guess, shake the planet apart.

The objections to this are obvious. Most clearly, in 67 years there is no way to divert Lurion from this path? More simply, how can there be a "sneak" attack if Earth has predicted it? And how contrived is this idea of sending 5 and only 5 agents to plant the sonic generators?

At any rate, Gardner goes to Lurion. He finds the one remaining agent of the 5 previously sent, who is near collapse. Gardner soon learns that Lurion is indeed an awful place, evidenced by such  things as entertainments in which two people (one usually, it seems, a woman) fight with knives until one is killed. But Gardner also meets a Lurionese group which hopes to reform the planet from within. And he meets an Earth woman, an anthropologist, with whom he falls in love. She too will be doomed if Lurion is destroyed, for any attempt to evacuate Earth people from the planet would give away the game.

Can Gardner's resolve hold? Or will he make the obvious morally correct decision? And how will his agency treat his defection, if he defects? All the most obvious and straightforward answers occur. It's really a paint-by-numbers book -- Silverberg at this stage of his career was not terribly good, but he was often at least decent -- competent and entertaining, and occasionally attacking interesting themes. But not here -- this is Silverberg at close to his worst.

(Cover by Ed Valigursky)

Poul Anderson's We Claim These Stars! is a fairly early Flandry story. It was originally published as "A Handful of Stars", in the June 1959 Amazing, then expanded and reprinted in this Ace Double as We Claim These Stars! The Ace Double version is about 41,000 words long. Ace later reprinted it as a single book. It was also reprinted, under the superior title "Hunters of the Sky Cave", in Anderson's collection Agent of the Terran Empire (1965). Alone among the stories in that book, it was not revised for the 1979 Gregg Press edition.

As with all Flandry, the story is good fun. And this is one of the earliest Flandry stories to show hints of the darkness that pervaded the later full-length Flandry novels. Right from the beginning, to be sure, Flandry was lamenting the coming "Long Night" -- that was the central them of the series from the get go. But by We Claim These Stars! little hints of Flandry's personal emptiness begin to show up. Briefly, in this novel he accompanies a young woman who has escaped from a planet overrun by Merseian supported invaders back to her planet, where he sets up a resistance operation. There is plenty of derring-do, and of course some romance (resolved as ever in a bittersweet way), and even a direct physical encounter with Flandry's rival Aycharaych. The Terrans win this round, but we already know, of course, that they won't win them all -- that the Long Night will claim the Terran Empire.

This is certainly one of the best early Flandry stories, probably the best.