Review: Winterlong, by Elizabeth Hand

Review: Winterlong, by Elizabeth Hand

by Rich Horton

Winterlong, from 1990, was Elizabeth Hand's first novel. (Her first story appeared in 1988, but I didn't really become aware of her until "Snow on Sugar Mountain" (1991), and it was really "Last Summer at Mars Hill" (1994) and "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol" (2000) that clinched the deal. Since then, she's become a favorite, with stories like "Cleopatra Brimstone", "Illyria", "Near Zennor", "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerephon", and novels like Wylding Hall, Curious Toys, and Waking the Moon. But I still hadn't read her first three novels, a trilogy, Winterlong, Æstival Tide, and Icarus Descending. So when Readercon decided to have a panel on those novels this year, it was time to read them.

My copy of Winterlong is a 1997 reprint, from Harper Collins, with an afterword by Hand, which tells quite interestingly of the germination of the book. It is as I said a first novel -- with both the energy you expect, and some of the faults. But on balance it's a fabulous first novel. It's set in a post-apocalyptic future, in which there have been two previous "Ascensions" -- the nature of them unclear. The world as we see it is a mess.

It's one of those novels that drops you into its setting without telling you anything. This makes it hard going at the first, but before long it speeds up, and by the end the mysteries and ambiguities are a feature. We open with Wendy Wanders, an autistic girl (it is said) aged 17, who has been raised from a young age at the Human Engineering Laboratory (HEL), where she has been subjected to invasive brain surgery, and many experiments (and drugs.) This has made her an empath -- she can absorb emotions and memories from other people, either with an electical connection, or by tasting their blood. She believes she has no emotions of her own. She is also haunted by dreams or visions of a boy in a tree -- a hanged boy, perhaps, and has some intimation of a twin brother of her own. And, worse, her empathic connections seem to cause some people to commit suicide. As the facility in which she lives is taken over by a new staff loyal to the the mad Aviator Tast'Annin, who is the new Governor of the City, the doctor who has treated her most of her life has also committed suicide, and there are threats that Wendy's powers will be weaponized for a coming war..

The focus shifts to Raphael Miramar, a Paphian in the City, a City that is increasingly a dangerous place, with its new Governor and impending war, with the periodic viral strikes ("rains of roses"), with lazars and aardmen roaming the environs and kidnapping or killing anyone they can get to. The Paphians are prostitutes, members of several Houses. Raphael is, for now, the most prized catamite of House Miramar, having been adopted when young, though his twin sister, who never spoke, was sent away and is presumed dead. He is 17, and it's made clear that Paphians age out quickly. And he has decided to leave the House, for the patronage of a Curator, Roland. He hopes, while at the Curator's place -- a museum, of course -- he can actually gain some learning. And indeed he meets a woman who lets him help with her duties, and they begin to become close -- but that relationship comes to a shocking end. And we realize that Raphael too is plagued with dreams of a boy in a tree, and a sense that he is somehow an agent of Death. 

Readers will gather quickly that Raphael's missing twin is Wendy. And soon Wendy has escaped HEL in the company of an Aide, Justice, a member of a Paphian family, who is in love with her. Likewise Raphael is soon cast aside by his patron, and he finds himself at loose in the City, captured by lazars, and ready to confront Roland at the next chance he gets. Wendy and Justice find their way to a company of players (including an uplifted chimpanzee, Miss Scarlet Pan, who is the leading lady.) They put on old dramas (mostly Shakespeare.) Wendy is being searched for by the mad Aviator Tast'annin, and so disguises herself as a boy -- and is quickly confused for Raphael. Inevitably the fates of the two are entwined, and will converge eventually, and resolve the mystery of the Boy in the Tree while bringing Tast'annin's plans either to fruition or frustration.

The story is beautiful and horrifying. Death stalks the narrative, and death is easy and common in the City (which is readily recognizable as Washington, D. C.) I should say both sex and death are common, and often linked -- the prostitutes are abused as part of their expected roles, and are used sexually from very young ages, with the sex often violent. But there are many other ways to die in the City, and it's clear that life is similarly parlous throughout the rest of the geography of this future age. The prose is very lush, mostly to very good effect, especially in the final scenes, in which some passages are gorgeous and powerful. The novel is suffused with tragedy, and this never fails to wrench the reader. Important characters die in the first few pages, and at the end -- sometimes at the hands of our heroes, sometimes cruelly at the hands of villains, sometimes randomly. 

I'll quote one beautiful passage: "And there came to me then a great sound, the sound of singing. And I saw all of them, Emma and Aidan, Gligor and Merle and Anna, Dr. Silverthorn and Toby Rhymer, a white dog with eyes like burning ice and a girl who wanted to fly like finches, all of them like lights dancing in the air. With them shrilled the voices of the lazars, like wounds bleeding song, all of them crying out to me. Loudest of all was the piercing cry of a boy with fair tangled hair and green eyes, his hands streaming through the darkness like the purest moonlight and his eyes like burning stars." ("Wounds bleeding song" -- what a glorious image.)

It's not a perfect book. There are passages that drag a bit, and the strategy of telling the reader nothing, though appropriate, does make it hard to follow at times. That said, solving the mysteries, figuring out what the Ascensions were, and what the lazars are, and the aardmen, and the geneslaves, and so on, is enjoyable. The overall conflict is difficult to rationalize -- and perhaps that's only to be expected, but it does sometimes try the reader's patience. But all that is minor, and in the end this is a lovely and moving book, and the harbinger of a brilliant career -- which was indeed realized. 

Resurrected Review: Kiln People, by David Brin

As I continue working my way through novels by Elizabeth Hand and Christopher Priest in preparation for Readercon, I figured I'd resurrect a review to post here. This is David Brin's 2002 Hugo, Clarke, and Campbell shortlisted novel Kiln People.

(I actually wanted to post something I wrote about C. C. Finlay's alternate history fantastical Revolutionary War series, but I seem to have lost that somehow. But it's Charlie's birthday, so, Happy Birthday Charlie!)

Kiln People, by David Brin

a review by Rich Horton

Kiln People (2002) is set several decades in the future. The key technological innovation presented in the book is "golemtech" -- it has become possible to imprint a person's "soul", or "Standing Wave", into a clay model, a golem or ditto, which will then have all one's memories, and which can do errands for their "archtype".  These models last only a day, after which they return to the archtype, and the memories can be inloaded if the archtype so chooses.

This has resulted in an economic revolution.  Most of the grunt work is now done by low-quality golems, most of which don't even inload their (presumably boring) memories to their archtype.  As a result many people have no job, and live on the "purple wage".  Recreations include, predictably, unusual sex using special golems optimized for heightened sensation; as well as "clay operas" -- realistic dramas enacted with golems; and dangerous sports in which the loss of a golem is regretted only if it results in complete enough destruction that the memories cannot be inloaded.  A key change, too, is that wars are now fought as a form of "sport", with skilled soldiers sending fighting golems to such places as the Jesse Helms Memorial Battle Range to resolve international disputes.  These various tasks are done by golems of different sorts, by law all different colors: grey ones for relatively normal tasks, green ones for fairly menial work, white ones for extra sensation, ebony ones for intellectual focus, etc.

All this background detail is very well done.  Brin has done a neat job of pretty pure SFnal extrapolation -- taking a quasi-plausible and interesting bit of future tech, and trying to work out its effects on an entire society.

The story itself is basically a thriller.  Albert Morris is a private detective.  He ends up with several different "selves" investigating (in parallel, it turns out) the death of Yosil Maharal, one of the inventors of golem technology.  If it is murder (it might be accident or suicide) the suspects include Maharal's partner, Aenaeas Kaolin; a crime lord called Beta who has had many past encounters with Albert; Gineen Wammaker, a purveyor of sex dittos; and various fanatics, both anti-golem agitators, and those who want golems to have full civil rights.  This story is for the most part pretty exciting, and confusing is a good way that eventually gets resolved.  Albert's journeys, and those of his dittos (including a "frankie" -- a ditto who didn't copy true and wants to be independent of Albert), allow exploration of much of this future society.  The search for motives for the murder leads us to investigate some research, hence further extraploation: what would be the effect of dittos that could last longer than a day?  Of dittos that could be copied over long distances?  Of the possibility of loading somebody else's memories into your head?  All this is pretty interesting stuff.

Then, the book pretty much runs off the rails.  Why?  I think the answer is -- too much ambition.  Brin begins to explore even more metaphysical issues -- "souls" independent of the body, in another dimension -- life after death -- that sort of thing.  And in so doing he stretches his extrapolation to the point where my belief in it snapped completely.  The "mad scientist" finale really just about lost me.  I think the book would have been better if Brin had turned off his imagination at a certain point -- if he had been more conservative.

That said, though I think the silliness of some of the last 100 or so pages of the book is a severe flaw, it's still a pretty strong piece of SFnal extrapolation up that point, with some pretty decent action to the plotline.  Overall, I recommend the book -- worth reading, just not a great book.

Old Bestseller Review: The Hundredth Chance, by Ethel M. Dell

Old Bestseller Review: The Hundredth Chance, by Ethel M. Dell

by Rich Horton

Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939) was a writer of romance novels published between 1911 and her death. She was popular enough -- she made up to £30,000 per year -- that she was routinely disparaged in serious books at the time, and even nonserious books like those of P. G. Wodehouse. Her married name was Savage -- curiously appropriate given some of her sexual themes. She is largely forgotten these days, as with many very popular authors of that era who were considered lowbrow. As I am fascinated by popular fiction of the early 20th Century (and for that matter before and after!) I figured I needed to try her. I had bought a book of hers at an antique store some time ago, but it got buried in a box somewhere when we did some remodeling a couple of years ago, so instead I went to Project Gutenberg and downloaded a copy of The Hundredth Chance, from 1917.

I have to say, upon reading The Hundredth Chance, that I kind of get why she was popular. She wasn't a good writer -- but she was better (at the prose level, and even the character level) than many writers of her era. Certainly she was better than her contemporary E. M. Hull, another romance writer, best known for The Sheik. The Hundredth Chance is involving -- it keeps your attention, makes you care about the characters, even though every reader can guess the shape of the plot from the getgo. I note, too, that it was the 10th best-selling novel of 1917, according to Publishers' Weekly. 

That said, there are huge caveats to offer. For one thing, there are lots of unpleasant -- often unnecessarily unpleasant -- aspects to the book. There is plenty of casual racism -- several uses of the N-word, for one thing. There are no POC characters, so no outright offensive characterization, but there are attitudes. And there is violence against women -- one beating for example, and an attempted kidnap and rape using drugs. And -- perhaps most troublingly -- there is marital rape, over some time period. None of this is justifiable, but there it is. (I will add that his novel is rapey enough, but The Sheik is far more, and more offensively, rapey.)

And on the literary side, there are faults as well. I've already hinted at the predictability. There is also a heck of a lot of convenient coincidence, and some dei ex machinae. (A miracle cure, for one thing, and some sheer luck rescuing the heroine at the end. And more.) And while the characters are consistently and recognizably portrayed and differentiated -- they are still pretty two-dimensional. But for all that, the book does keep you reading -- and I enjoyed it.

The main character is Maud, a 25 year old woman who has spent much of her life caring for her 10 years younger brother Bernard, who is crippled. Maud's father, a baronet, is long dead. Her mother is a useless whiner. Maud herself had been close to marrying Lord Saltash, an engaging man who seemed to love her, and who is wealthy and of good birth. But Maud rejected him when she discovered his affair with a married woman. Her mother, rather mad at her for turning down such a good match, is, at the start of the book, ready to marry the vulgar local bar owner, to save the family, as she has run out of money. The bar owner turns out to be an abusive slob, and a bad businessman, and when he thrashes Maud she leaves, with Bernard (called Bunny.) 

She and Bunny have already met Jake Bolton, the groom who runs Lord Saltash's stables. Bunny and Jake have struck up a friendship. And Jake has clearly fallen for Maud, and has gone so far ask her to marry him -- an offer she refused, to some extent on the grounds that Jake is not of her social class. But now, with nowhere to go, Maud agrees to marry Jake, for protection. But she makes it clear that while she and Bunny will live with him, they will not sleep together. He makes one condition -- if they ever are living together alone -- that is, if Bunny is ever cured and can live on his own -- they must live "as man and wife". Maud agrees.

Jake and Bunny continue to be friends, and Jake is very good for him. And Jake is friends with an American doctor who just may be able to cure Bunny. At least, there is a chance in a hundred, and Jake is always ready to bet on  the "hundredth chance". But  Lord Saltash has returned. And he begins to attempt to seduce Maud. He urges her to divorce Jake, and come away with him. Maud is too moral to accept, but she still seems to warm to him, despite clear evidence of his immorality, in manners aside from his previous betrayal of her.

Things keep developing -- the American doctor comes, and is able to cure Bunny. This is great for Bunny, but Maud is torn in a way -- she has given over much of her identity to being his caretaker, and Jake has already taken some of that, with his male friendship. And now Jake -- already angry over Maud's apparent dallying with Saltash -- claims his right to live with her as "man and wife". Which leads to carefully offstage incidents of marital rape. Maud grows more and more miserable -- and a form of salvation arises when her wealthy uncle, who had cut his feckless sister (Maud's mother) off, agrees to have Maud and Bunny visit.

There's a lot more going on, and I've already said too much I think. There are horse races involving Jake's favorite horse, and some bad dealing from Lord Saltash, who is always ready to arrange to throw a race for money. There is a religious awakening of sorts in Maud. There is a scene where she is a convinced that Jake (who doesn't drink) is drunk -- due to Lord Saltash's lies. There is a fire, and heroism by both Jake and Maud. It seems that Maud might be pregnant, then she isn't -- and I'm honestly not quite sure if we are subtly shown that she lost the baby or if she really wasn't pregnant. And Saltash makes his final play for Maud -- and goes too far.

The thing is -- a lot of this is absurd. Hyson Concepcion, who mentioned reading Ethel M. Dell with (sometimes horrified, I imagine) enjoyment, upon someone telling her that it's meretricious trash, responded, "Of course it's meretricious trash. That's why I read it." I feel the same way -- there are certain writers who are just trashy enough (and slyly skilled enough) that they are simply fun to read in the right mood. Dell was one of those, it seems. I rolled my eyes at much of this book, but I kept reading, and I enjoyed it (with huge reservations, but hey!) 

I will note that I ordered a couple of used Ethel M. Dell books, and when they came I realized they were abridged, as part of something called the Barbara Cartland Library. Which reminds me that, if you want meretricious trash that ISN'T worth reading, Barbara Cartland's your woman. This is, I note, based on decades old memories of trying a Cartland novel or two after I ran out of Georgette Heyer, and realizing they were dreadful and boring. Anyway, I don't like to read abridged books, so I went to Project Gutenberg as noted above.

Review: The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

Review: The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

by Rich Horton

This may be the most anticipated first novel in the SF/Fantasy field of at least the past decade. Kelly Link has been publishing short fiction since 1995, and she attracted immediate attention. Indeed, in the first year end recommendations piece I did, at SFF Net in 1997, I listed "Flying Lessons", her third story, among my Best Novelettes, and wrote "Of those listed, I'd point special attention to the Kelly Link story, mainly because I think she is a new writer of considerable interest, based on the grand total of two stories of her's that I've read." That's one thing I think I got right!

Since then she has published close to 50 short stories, most included in her six collections (and one slim chapbook.) She has also edited several anthologies and co-edits the magnificent small 'zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet with her husband Gavin Grant. Kelly and Gavin also have a bookstore, Book Moon, in Easthampton, MA (very close to my Dad's hometown of Hadley, close enough that last year before Readercon I drove out to west central Massachusetts to see my Dad's old house (and the school my grandmother taught at) and then visited Book Moon.) She has won the Tiptree/Otherwise Award, three Nebulas, a Hugo, a couple of World Fantasy Awards, a Sturgeon, a Stoker. And she has gained plenty of respect outside the genre as well, with numerous placements on "Book of the Year" lists, a Shirley Jackson Award, and being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

As for myself, I have a long list of Kelly Link stories I adore. I reprinted "The Summer People", "Secret Identity", "The Game of Smash and Recovery" and "The Girl Who did not Know Fear" in my Best of the Year volumes. Other favorites include "Magic for Beginners", "Lull", "Light", "The White Road", "The Faery Handbag", "The Specialist's Hat", and "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose". So I was certainly anticipating The Book of Love.

So what is it like? It's a big novel that takes place over a period of less than a week, in December of 2014 in the town of Lovesend, MA. There are four central characters, about as many nearly central characters, and many more who get brief POV sections. It's a fantasy, involving a Moon goddess, some nearly immortal characters, people coming back from the dead, and lots and lots of magic. It's also a pretty naturalistic story, about life in a semi-gentrified, semi-tourist town, with a noticeable focus on race, as one of the main characters is the grandson of a bestselling romance novelist who happens to be Black (but who only wrote one novel with a Black heroine.) Aspects of the novel reminded me of Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon, and as one of the main families in this novel is named Hand, I wondered if that might be a little nod to Hand's book. I should add that while there are some points of resemblance, the two novels are on the whole very different. 

The novel opens with Susannah Hand still mourning the death of her sister Laura, who had disappeared about a year before along with their neighbor Daniel Knowe (who was also Susannah's off-and-on boyfriend) and Mohammed Gortch, another friend of Susannah's. Susannah has graduated from high school but is kind of drifting. Laura and Mohammed were a year younger than Susannah and Daniel. Susannah, Daniel, and Laura were in a band called Our Two Hands Knowe You, while Mohammed was obsessed with music but very private about it.

Then, mysteriously, Laura, Daniel, and Mohammed escape whatever realm they went to when they died. And their music teacher, Mr. Anabin, makes bodies for them and sends them home, having altered the memories of everyone in Lovesend so that they are thought to have returned from a semester studying in Ireland. But there is a catch -- Mr. Anabin and a sinister shapeshifting creature named Bogomil are rivals of some sort, and they agree that the three returnees, plus a strange fourth, a boy named Bowie, must complete some magical tasks, after which, "Two stay, two return".

There follows a sort of whirlwind series of days -- just days -- in which the four returnees variously struggle with their increasing magical abilities (or resist them, in Daniel's case), and reintegrate themselves with their families: Laura with her sister and their mother and an unexpected visit from their father who left long ago; Daniel with his horde of step-siblings plus his mother and stepfather; Mohammed with -- well, the shocking realization that his grandmother (the romance writer) died in his absence (his mother was long dead) and all he has is his grandmother's assistant, Jenny Ping; and Bowie -- well, Bowie, who had died centuries before, has mainly to realize his own identity. Daniel and Susannah reignite their relationship, Mohammed breaks off with his occasional hookup before falling in love with a strange visitor named Thomas; Laura finally takes the chance to encounter her long time crush Rosamel; and Bowie -- well, things are different for Bowie.

All along there are occasional spooky encounters with Mr. Anabin and Bogomil, some definite indications of magic, and then the realization that there is a new more powerful entity in Lovesend, a goddess named Mala Mogge, whose servants are Anabin and Bogomil -- and Mohammed's new boyfriend Thomas. Mala Mogge is a tacky individual, evil incarnate in ugly costumes and shabby temples, and she is looking for her lost key -- which she is convinced one of the returnees has. And that's what the novel turns on -- what is this key? Where is it? And should whoever has it cooperate with someone as vile as Mala Mogge?

The novel is a bit of a slow burn. It's never not interesting, but it takes a while to cohere -- I think for good artistic reasons, but readers do need to stick with it. [I should add that upon letting the book simmer in my memory for a while, I have come to feel that some judicious cutting would have done it some good.] We do get an extended look at life in Lovesend -- the coffee shop, the Cliff Hangar bar, the school, Little Moon Bay. And we learn a lot about not just the main characters, but people like Mohammed's grandmother Maryanne, who writes as "Caitlyn Hightower"; and Rosamel Walker, the sassy Black Lesbian; and her friends Natalie and Theo, whose parents own Thai Super Delight; and Daniel's little sister Carousel; and the statues Maryanne Gortch bought, of Black women whose achievements are in danger of being forgotten; and of course the back history of Bowie, and Thomas, and a girl named Avelot.

The novel comes to a climax after much chaos, some honest tragedy, some triumph, and some compromise. Towards the end the slow burn ignites, and there are some truly wrenching passages. Having said that, the resolution felt just slightly flat -- perhaps I simply wanted too much. It's an honest conclusion, to be sure -- it doesn't cheat. But it doesn't quite astonish. Still -- it's a novel above love -- and love's end -- and love send -- and maybe love zen! -- and successfully so. It's also about doors, and revenge, and magic, and death, and family. It's a very good novel, not quite a great novel, but a very fine first novel. 

Resurrected Review: Trash Sex Magic, by Jennifer Stevenson

This is a review I wrote back in 2004 for the Internet Review of Science Fiction, a quite impressive webzine devoted to, er, reviews (and essays, etc.) of Science Fiction. It was founded by John Frost, and lasted until 2010. I contributed a couple of pieces.

Trash Sex Magic was Jennifer Stevenson's first, and it came out from Small Beer Press. She published a few more novels for Ballantine in 2008: The Brass Bed, The Velvet Chair, and The Bearskin Rug. I read the first couple of those and found them light sexy fun. They are paranormal romance with mystery elements. Since then most or all of her many novels have appeared from Book View Cafe, and seem to be in a similar mode, and are set (mostly?) in the same paramormal version of contemporary Chicago, called Hinky Chicago.

Resurrected Review: Trash Sex Magic, by Jennifer Stevenson

a review by Rich Horton

Jennifer Stevenson, a Chicago-area writer, has published a few short stories, but Trash Sex Magic is her first novel. It is set near the Fox River, in a version of Geneva, Illinois (called here Berne or perhaps Rimville). A real estate development is going up, but a few trailer owners who are about to be displaced are holding out.

The story is made up of a complicated, one might say organic, web of interactions among a large cast. Perhaps the main character is Raedawn Somershoe, a young woman living among the trailer park holdouts. Rae holds the group together, earning most of their money, acting as something of a voice of sanity. The rest of the locals' lives are intertwined, like vines or tree roots, with Rae's life. There is her older but still aggressively sexy mother, Gelia; and Gelia's main squeeze, an elderly black man named Erny Brown. There is the extended Gowdy family: Cracker Coombs, their disreputable uncle; King Gowdy, the straitlaced son who has just returned from Alaska and wants to take Rae away from all this; Cracker's basically feral twin children, Mink and Ink; and King's brothers: Willy, who is coming to terms with his homosexuality, and Davy, a rather simple teenager.

The outsiders represent the real-estate company. Central among them is Alexander Caebeau, a Bahamanian construction worker, heartsick at tearing down beautiful trees to put up ugly buildings, heartsick even more because he's missing his home island, and falling very quickly in love with Rae.

John Fowier is a sleazy executive, scared by the sudden seductiveness of Raedawn, plotting a backhanded way to get the holdout properties for his development. And Suzy Wohnberg is John's associate, bitterly aware that the price for advancement in the company will be sleeping with John.

All of the above seems not at all fantastical, but we soon gather that Gelia and Raedawn have somewhat "elemental" powers. Many of these powers revolve around a huge tree that the two women each treat as a lover (each jealous of the other). There is a perhaps tragic family secret concerning the tree. The plot action is precipitated by the construction workers cutting down this tree. Somehow Alexander Cabeau, as he is drawn to Raedawn, also finds himself taking on treelike characteristics. And the elemental powers of the Somershoe women and their extended family manifest in other ways—the Fox river is rising, and moving in unexpected directions, and foxes turn up in other curious ways.

The novel takes place over the course of only a few days. It's told from a dizzying variety of viewpoints. I do think the multiplication of viewpoints is a bit excessive—for example Davy's and Willy's stories seem mostly superfluous. It resolves rather definitely, though, leaving a few acceptably dangling threads. I enjoyed the novel throughout and read with interest and involvement. It's a strong first novel, a wild book, well-imagined and well-written, with absorbing characters.

Review: The Quiet Woman, by Christopher Priest

Review: The Quiet Woman, by Christopher Priest

by Rich Horton

The late Christopher Priest (1943-2024) was one of the greatest SF writers of his generation. He made an early splash with novels like Inverted World and A Dream of Wessex (aka The Perfect Lover), followed by The Prestige, which was made into a succesful movie by Christopher Nolan, and then by any number of stories and novels in his Dream Archipelago sequence. I wrote an obituary of him for Black Gate here. 

I am scheduled to be on a panel at Readercon next month concerning Priest. In preparation for that, I'm reading or rereading a number of his novels. So don't be surprised when you see a number of reviews of his work on this blog in the coming weeks. I'm starting with one of his lesser known novels, The Quiet Woman. This was published in 1990 in the UK, but didn't get a US edition until 2005, and that from the small press Cosmos (an imprint of Wildside Press.) 

Alice Stockton is a writer, recently divorced and as a result living in a village in Wiltshire, instead of in London. She has just submitted her latest book for publication, but, shockingly, it has been impounded by the Home Office, and she can't get any information about why. And then the one friend she has made in her new village, an elderly woman named Eleanor Hamilton, is brutally murdered. 

So far this seems like a fairly typical dark British thriller/murder mystery. But then Alice learns that Eleanor had a son -- a son she had never mentioned to Alice. Meanwhile Alice decides that her next book will be about Eleanor (her specialty is books about the lives of women.) Eleanor was also a writer, though she was cagy about her publishing history to Alice -- and it takes some time for Alice to learn the name she used as a writer (of children's books, indeed, books that Alice had read at the appropriate age.)

We get chapters from the son's point of view as well. His name is Gordon Sinclair, and we learn that his father and his older brother died in a terrible accident when Gordon was very young, after which, in his words, his mother went mad. Gordon has a difficult childhood, and copes in part by creating an imaginary world of his own. In the present day, he has a job in public relations of some sort, in which he rather sinisterly manipulates the news -- manipulates reality, one might say -- for his clients' advantage -- and his clients may include the government. Or perhaps some of this is his imagination?

The story gets slowly weirder. Eleanor Hamilton's political activities come into focus -- she was an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. And apparently there has been a meltdown at a French nuclear reactor close enough to England that fallout reached Alice's village. England's political situation seems darker than it was in our timeline, with much more active government censorship, as evidenced by the treatment of Alice's seemingly harmless book. Eleanor's stories about her past are faintly ominous. Gordon Sinclair seems a creepier figure. Alice worries about her physical condition -- has the fallout affected her? And what about the alien ships that land in the nearby farms, leaving crop circles? Not to mention the sordid sexual assignations between Alice and Gordon in the past -- though neither seems to recognize the other in the present day narrative.

It coheres in the end, with a scary and tricksy and slightly ambiguous resolution. It is in this sense a very Priestian book. I don't think it stands with his very best work, like The Prestige, or A Dream of Wessex, or his several more recent Dream Archipelago books such as The Islanders. But it's a solid work, spooky at times, if at other times I did feel that Priest may have overegged his pudding. 

Review: "The Contract" and "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity", by Margaret Cavendish

Review: "The Contract" and "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity", by Margaret Cavendish

by Rich Horton

I recently reviewed Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, a significant piece of proto-SF. (Review here.) The writer is one of the more interesting authors, a fascinating, ambitious, and accomplished woman. She was born in 1623, the youngest child of Sir Thomas Lucas. They were a Royalist family. In 1644, she went into exile in France with William Cavendish, the Marquess of Newcastle, and they married in 1645. He was 30 years her senior, and had five children by his previous marriage -- she never bore him any children, but the marriage seems to have been a loving and successful one. They returned to England after the Restoration, and William's title was elevated to Duke of Newcastle, so that Margaret Cavendish is known as the Duchess of Newcastle (or Newcastle-upon-Tyne). She died in 1673.

Cavendish was a very prolific writer, on philosophical subjects and natural history. She also wrote some 20 plays, and several works of fiction, poems, a memoir, and a biography of her husband. Besides The Blazing World her most significant works of prose fiction are these two stories, which were first published in her 1656 book Nature's Pictures drawn by Fancy's Pencil to the Life. That book is an extended collection of a variety of works, in both prose and verse: essays, morals, fanciful descriptions of nature, an autobiographical essay, etc. The full book apparently has not been reprinted since the 17th Century. These two stories, along with The Blazing World, make up the Penguin Classics edition The Blazing World and Other Writings, edited by Kate Lilley, and first published in 1992. I assume, then, that in Lilley's view these stories are her most interesting pieces of prose fiction. 

The recent sort of rediscovery and rehabilitation of Cavendish as a major early woman writer seems deserved and belated. I think her relative neglect (though she was never forgotten) stems from a few causes -- skepticism about women writers, for one thing (in her lifetime it was often assumed that her husband actually wrote her works), but also resistance to her stubborn royalism and belief in absolute monarchy. Also, to be completely fair to her critics, her works, some self-published, really could have used the attentions of an editor, if simply to normalize such things as spelling and paragraphing, but also to clean up some really infelicitous prose. (I'm aware that in the 17th century spelling and such were not nearly standardized to the extent they are now.) Also, her philosophical speculations, while intriguing, have mostly become out of date due to scientific discoveries, though they were in keeping with such speculations back then, and,  in fact, she apparently published the first discussions of atomic theory in English. Even so, her fiction (and her biographical and autobiographical work) is more rereadable to us now.

At any rate, having read The Blazing World, I figured it made sense to get this Penguin Classics edition, partly for the very useful critical material included, and partly for the more rigorous editorial attention Lilley gave the text. And, of course, for the other two stories. They are both shorter than The Blazing World: "The Contract" is a novelette, and "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" a novella, by SFWA standards anyway. "The Contract" is not fantastical, but "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" definitely is -- an allegory set in an invented world, with one extended section set among a quite fanciful variety of humans.

"The Contract" concerns a young woman, named Deletia, heir to a significant estate, who is raised from infancy by her uncle. The uncle was friends with a Duke, and the two men agreed that the child should marry the Duke's second son. However, the son was not interested in betrothal to a child of (at the time) seven, and instead continued his rather debauched ways. Under pressure, he did agree to a contract of marriage, but thereafter ignored her. The child's uncle then arranged for his ward to have a very broad education.

When Deletia reached her teens, she learned that her supposed husband had instead married his latest married lover after her husband died, and had also become the heir to the Dukedom. This did not worry Deletia, for she knew she was blameless, and in fact she felt she had dodged a bullet, so to speak, by not being allied to an immoral man. And she was happy to continue her studies, now encompassing the natural sciences. But she was a very beautiful girl, and her uncle finally decided to introduce her to society. There she soon became a sensation (due rather more to her beauty than her accomplishments, alas) and attracted the attentions of an older man, a Viceroy, who wished to marry her. But she also had again met her contracted husband, now ascended to his Dukedom, and fallen in love. Still, she refused to become the Duke's mistress, and also refused to marry the Viceroy ... all leading to a courtroom drama in which the young lady uses her knowledge of the law to prove that she is the Duke's rightful wife based on the contract executed when the two were much younger. 

It's a curious work -- unsatisfying as a romance, in that the young Duke does not seem worthy of the heroine's affection, and a bit convoluted in working to a satisfactory conclusion, complete with a double marriage. But it's a fierce defense of women's intellectual abilities, and their right to a full education. And it's an enjoyable enough story to read.

"Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" is a stranger work. Like "The Contract", and for that matter, The Blazing World, it foregrounds a woman of great accomplishments and abilities, and indeed this heroine spends much of the story disguised as a man, and acting as one, to the point of engaging the affections of "his" Queen. It's highly allegorical as well, and is set in an invented world. 

A young woman, Affectionata, born in the Kingdom of Riches is forced to flee due to a war. Intending to make it to the Kingdom of Security, she ends up in the Kingdom of Sensuality, but without anyone to protect her, she is sold to a "bawd" (mistress of a whorehouse), who offers her to a debauched Prince. However, Affectionata (now called Miseria) refuses the Prince's attentions, and threatens to kill herself instead of submitting. Over time the Prince falls sincerely in love with her, but she will not have him without marriage, and the Prince is already married. To escape his importunities, she dresses as a boy (calling himself "Travellia") and stows away on a ship. 

It turns out the ship isn't heading in the direction Travellia hoped, so he vows to work for his passage, and before long he has become so useful to the ship's master that the master adopts Travellia as his son. But their ship is wrecked, and they end up in a strange land, described in detail, with unusual plants and animals, and strange (though clearly human) people. The master and Travellia (the only survivors of the wreck) are taken to the capitol city, and meet the King, but seem destined for the dinner pot (as these people are cannibals, and even raise the people of their lower classes for meat.) The two escape by claiming to be messengers of the gods, and indeed in the process convince these people to abandon cannibalism.

In the meantime the Prince has learned that Affectionata has escaped. She left him a letter, admitting that she loved him but would not have him unless he could marry her. In despair, he decided to chase after her -- but the ship he was on was captured by pirates. However, the Prince soon became the leader of the pirates, and ended up staying at sea. Where, of course, as one does, he quickly captured the small boat that Travellia and his adopted father had used to escape the cannibal kingdom. After some further pirate adventures, the Prince discovers Travellia's disguise, and again attempts to make her his mistress, but she still refuses, and she and her father again escape.

The Prince ends up at the Kingdom of Amour, while Travellia has made his way to the Kingdom of Amity. The Prince becomes an adviser to the King of Amour, while Travellia becomes an adviser to the Queen of Amity, who is soon enamored with him. But the King of Amour has long wanted to marry the Queen of Amity, and decides to go to war when she won't have him. In the course of things, the Prince leads the armies of Amour, while Travellia leads the armies of Amity, and both have successes and failures. The resolution, predictably perhaps, turns on the two reconciling (now that, conveniently, the Prince's wife has died back in his home country.) And the Queen of Amity is convinced to turn her affections from Travellia -- now that he is a she again -- to the King of Amour.

I enjoyed reading both these stories -- a bit more than I enjoyed reading The Blazing World, actually. That story has more interesting speculative ideas, but little to no plot, and it becomes quite tedious at times. Both these stories have plenty of action, and "The Contract" has a coherent plot. Both are marriage stories, though it must be said that the central romance is disappointing in each case, with the main female character falling for an objectively pretty awful person. But both stories truly center female intelligence, female agency, female learning. 

And especially in "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" there is some pretty intriguing play with gender. Affectionata/Miseria/Travellia is referred to by both male and female pronouns, takes traditional male roles, and at the end will be taking a major role in ruling her newly adopted country. It's also interesting to note that both stories feature the female protagonists marrying older men who have been previously married -- just as Margaret Cavendish did. (It's interesting that in the marriage between the rulers of Amour and Amity the author seems clearly to prefer Amity. One could wonder if that's a hint to the nature of her marriage to a much older man.) There's no doubt that these stories are often weird, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes loopy -- but they are also quite interesting.