Birthday Review: Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart

Today is Barry Hughart's 85th birthday. Here's a review of his most famous novel (of only three), Bridge of Birds, a lovely book.

I reprint it at I first wrote it, so I'll explain the reference to Alexandria Digital Literature briefly. It was an attempt at a book recommendation system (eventually combined with an early e-publishing venture). It worked very well, but it never caught on widely, I think for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being that it didn't get lucky. But the other reason was that it worked well but it depended on a fairly devoted group of earnest users, because the ranking scale had 7 gradations (as I recall!), and the system worked best when you and others like you ranked lots of stories. (Compare Pandora's three gradations.) That said, it provide ME a bunch of great book recommendations.

Review Date: 22 April 1997

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart
Del Rey, 1984, $5.99
ISBN: 0345321383

(Cover by Mary Meitzelfeld)

I have enjoyed playing around with Alexlit (Alexandria Digital Literature, which is here) quite a lot, but until now I have mainly just rated and entered stories, doing little with the recommendations beyond looking with interest at the list. For some little time now the top- recommended book for me has been Bridge of Birds. As it was published in 1984, I was somewhat skeptical of my ability to find it: however it is still in print from Del Rey, and I was able to find a copy at Book Stacks. [Alas, Book Stacks, later Books.com, is no longer. There is an omnibus of the three Hughart novels, available from the Chicago SF bookstore The Stars Our Destination. {Double alas, The Stars Our Destination, a wonderful store, is also long gone!}] I placed it at the top of my TBR pile, and having read it, I can report a definite success for Alexlit. This is a very fine novel, charming, amusing, moving, often strikingly beautiful, often rather horrifyingly bloody. [The book and its two sequels seem to be out of print, but I believe it is readily findable used, and I believe there is a Kindle edition.]

The story is a fantasy set in Ancient China, at a time roughly corresponding to the 7th century AD, best I can tell. The narrator is Lu Yu (not to be confused with the author of The Classic of Tea), who is usually called Number Ten Ox. The story opens with the yearly silkworm spinning at Number Ten Ox' home village: but instead of the bounteous harvest of silk the villagers expect, all the silkworms have died: much worse, soon the children of the village are afflicted with a terrible plague. The locals can do nothing for the children, so they send Number Ten Ox to Peking to find an expert. But they have miscalculated the expense of expert help, and the only expert they can afford is Li Kao, Master Li, who has a slight flaw in his character.

Master Li and Number Ten Ox are soon off on a series of searches, from end to end of China, trying to find the Great Root of Power, which may be the key to a cure for the children. Along the way they encounter gods and goddesses, monsters and ghosts, wise men and terrible tyrants. At first the book seems to be a fairly unstructured, though continually entertaining, collection of escapades. However, an underlying structure emerges, in the form of an old legend, and a children's rhyme and game. By the end, Master Li and Number Ten Ox find that much more is at stake than the fate of the children of the village. In particular, Number Ten Ox' attitude is well- depicted: throughout his adventures, he thinks always of the children, in a true-feeling and very affecting way.

(Cover by Kaja Foglio)

The resolution to the story is very satisfying, and also beautifully depicted. Puzzles are solved, emotional knots untangled, ghosts set free, tyrants deposed, and all is neatly unified. At the simplest level the book is an always amusing, often very funny, light fantasy: at another level it achieves real emotional power. It is also an astonishingly bloody book, but somehow we care and even mourn for the many victims even while the tone remains light. In passages the prose achieves real beauty, in particular a prayer which Hughart adapted from a Chinese source, and also the description of the bridge of birds. I recommend this lovely fantasy very highly.

(Needless to add, I hope, is that this is a Western man's fantasy China, not resembling, very much, the real place, its real history, nor even how contemporary folks of Chinese descent likely few the elements Hughart has assembled.)

Birthday Review: PITFCS, by Theodore R. Cogswell

PITFCS, edited by Theodore R. Cogswell

a review by Rich Horton

Theodore R. Cogswell was born March 10, 1918, so he'd have been 101 years old today. (His hometown, Coatesville, PA, was also the home of the great writer W. M. Spackman, who was 13 years older than Cogswell.) Cogswell died in 1987. He was primarily an academic, at Ball State in the 1950s, and by the end an English teacher at a junior college. (Algis Budrys claimed he "couldn't be bothered to publish, and couldn't be bothered to get his Ph.D", which hampered his career.) He wrote some 40 SF stories between 1952 and 1981 (though the largest part by far appeared through 1962), plus one novel, a Star Trek tie-in, Spock, Messiah!, written with Charles Spano. He is still by far best remembered for one story, his first, "The Specter General", from Astounding for June 1952, and later reprinted in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume IIB. One more story is even better, I think -- "The Wall Around the World", from Beyond in 1953.

His writing career, then, never really took off, though as noted he did publish at least a couple really lasting stories, which is more than a lot of folks have done. But he did something else of real significance for the SF field. This was his editing of the "fanzine for pros" called Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies, usually abbreviated PITFCS. This ran for 17 issues between 1958 and 1962, with one last issue published in 1979 but mainly printing stuff left over from 1962. He prepared this book, a collection of most of the material from PITFCS, in 1985, but Advent didn't publish it until 1993 (though it is dated 1992.) It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book.

As I said, this book is primarily the contents of PITFCS, though it includes one issue of another Cogswell fanzine, Digit, comprising mostly humorous poems by a number of SF writers riffing on the ambiguous pronunciations of names like Leiber, Boucher, and Poul (Anderson). Not all of PITFCS is included -- the Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggests that what is missing is discussion of a "particularly ugly controversy involving Walter M. Miller". (I have no idea what that controversy was -- I wouldn't be human if I wasn't curious about it, but I assume it was not included in the book for good and proper reasons.)

The book is huge -- 375 close packed 8 1/2 by 11 pages. (Something in me wishes the format was 7 by 10 in homage to the pulps!) Each issue after the first consists of a short editorial note and a series of letters from the subscribers (often, of course, in response to material from the previous issue.) The list of contributors is huge -- prominent names from within the field include Judith Merril, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Algis Budrys, Rosel George Brown, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett, Kate Wilhelm, Avram Davidson, Damon Knight, Miriam Allen de Ford, Lloyd Biggle, Donald A. Wollheim, Sam Youd ("John Christopher"), John Brunner, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, etc. etc. There were several contributors known primarily for work outside the genre: Richard McKenna, Kurt Vonnegut, John Ciardi, Michael Frayn, and Kingsley Amis most obviously.

What was discussed? Some shop talk, for sure -- there was an exchange about the value of editors, some happy to do rewrites on request, others against it. There was discussion about controversial works of the time, notably for example Starship Troopers -- and, indeed, James Blish vowed to write a response to it in novel form. (This became Mission to the Heart Stars, one of Blish's worst books.) There was a fascinating exchange about Budrys' Rogue Moon, and how he cut it for the magazine publication, and possible alternate titles. There were political discussions -- for example, a bit about Chan Davis' encounter with McCarthyism (which is why his career as a Math professor took him to Canada.) There were versions of the age-old debate "Is Science Fiction Literature?" There were discussion of John W. Cambpell's enthusiasms, such as the Dean Drive. Perhaps most significant, there was extended discussion of the possibility of forming an SF Writers' Union -- discussions that were critical in leading eventually to the formation of the Science Fiction Writers of America. And of course there was gossip.

I'm not sure how wide the true audience for this book is -- I know I'm not the usual case. But I absolutely loved it. It's probably my favorite book "about" Science Fiction, and the Science Fiction community, of all time. And it's still available, from Advent Publishers (via NESFA.) So -- if you are part of the SF community, if gossip and elevated gossip about issues dating back 50 years is of interest to you, this is a wonderfully fun book to have. That said, these issues hanker back to ancient times, sort of, and for many people likely this won't mean much of anything, which is fine too, of course.

A Forgotten Ace Double: The Blind Worm, by Brian M. Stableford/Seed of the Dreamers, by Emil Petaja

Ace Double Reviews, 28: The Blind Worm, by Brian M. Stableford/Seed of the Dreamers, by Emil Petaja (#06707, 1970, $0.75)

(Covers by Jack Gaughan and Gray Morrow)

The Blind Worm is Brian Stableford's second novel. (His first, Cradle of the Sun (1969) is Stableford's only other Ace Double.) It is about 56,000 words long. Stableford was born in 1948, and his first story, a collaboration with Craig Mackintosh called "Beyond Time's Aegis", as by "Brian Craig", appeared when he was only 17, in the November 1965 issue of Science Fantasy. He has also written as Kay Stirling, John Rose, and Francis Amery, though the Stirling and Rose pseudonyms may have only been in fanzines. (The "Brian Craig" pseudonym was later used for some gaming tie-ins and at least one more collaboration with Mackintosh. The Amery pseudonym was used for a brief series of stories in Interzone a few years ago.) He first attracted attention (though not very much, I suppose) with two series for DAW in the early 70s: the Hooded Swan books about a spaceship pilot named Grainger who is host to an alien mind-creature; and the Daedalus books, about an ecological mission to a variety of troubled colony planets. Stableford published quite a few books, mostly for DAW, until the early 80s. He reappeared in the late 80s with a highly-praised group of books about an Alternate Historical Victorian England with werewolves. Throughout the 90s his reputation has only grown, with an impressive list of rather hard SF stories mostly on biological themes, many linked as part of his "Emortality" future, which culminated in 6 novels, the last being 2002's The Omega Expedition.

I was very impressed by Stableford's work of that era, which I think among the best biologically-oriented SF -- thoughtful, original, extrapolatively exciting. At that time I made a point of reading the Hooded Swan and Daedalus books, which are solid if minor work: rather cynical, often focussing on interesting biological ideas (especially in the Daedalus books), certainly worth a look, but not as good as his mature stuff. Much of Stableford's energy in recent years has been focussed on translations from the French.

The Blind Worm is a fairly ambitious novel that didn't really work for me. It's very much a novel of its time -- strongly influenced by the New Wave. There are three parts, each of similar length. It might almost have been originally published as three stories, though I can't find any evidence of that. In the first, "The Quadrilateral", we are introduced to Earth in the far future. The seas are dry, and the land is dominated by the Wildland, a hive mind of plants. A few humans still live, tolerated by Sum, the controlling mind of the Wildland. One human King, John Tamerlane, wishes to reestablish human presence in a deserted city in the dry Great Gulf. He and his motley fellows, the hero Vanice Concuma, the woman Zea, the wild man Silver Reander, and the boy Swallow, offer Sum a bargain: if he will cede them this city, Swallow will use his telepathic powers to link Sum with the other three components of the Quadrilateral -- hive minds in three other universes. Accompanied by the Blind Worm, a construct serving Sum, and by the ancient man Jose Dragon, creator of the Blind Worm, they journey to the other universes to try to complete the Quadrilateral, with ambiguous results that mostly involve everybody dying. In the second part, "Blind God", the Blind Worm has been granted Godlike powers, and he uses them to resurrect the dead humans, and recruits them to a struggle against his creator, Dragon. In the third part, "The Army of the Dead", all the dead humans in the abandoned City in the Great Gulf have reanimated as zombies, and are attacking the Wildland. The Blind Worm, in another guise, again recruits the Black King Tamerlane and the hero Vanice Concuma to try to battle this army, and to enter the City and vanquish whatever being is behind the army of the dead.

I was bothered throughout by a feeling that much of this was arbitrary -- that Stableford was making it up as he went along. Some of the ideas and imagery are impressive -- but not, to my taste, terribly interesting. And the characters themselves are not very involving, and also seem arbitrarily motivated. It seems that Stableford was trying for a philosophically challenging novel, but he really didn't have the skills to dress it in interesting enough plot/prose/characterization.

Emil Petaja (pronounced Puh-TIE-uh, apparently -- I had always thought it Puh-TAH-huh) was a Montana-born writer of Finnish descent. He was born in 1915 and died in 2000. He became a friend of the near-legendary SF artist Hannes Bok at an early age, and lived with Bok for a time. Petaja wrote stories and poems, some Lovecraftian, and began to sell to the pulps in 1942. He wrote SF and also mysteries for about a decade, then stopped writing and worked as a photographer in San Francisco. He was lured back to the field in 1965 or so -- possibly by Fred Pohl, who bought stories by a number of old pulpsters (such as Robert Moore Williams, A. E. Van Vogt, Bryce Walton, and Jerome Bixby) for Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow in the mid-60s. His first novel was published in 1965, his last in 1970. He may be best known for his cycle of four novels (a fifth remains unpublished) based on the Finnish legend cycle the Kalevala. He was the first SFWA Author Emeritus, in 1995. 8 of his novels were Ace Double halves, including of course Seed of the Dreamers, his last published novel. It is about 37,000 words long.

Seed of the Dreamers opens with a "starcop", Brad Mantee, fetching a scientist who has gone insane and killed several people. The scientist's long-lost daughter, the beautiful Harriet Lloyd, intervenes and the scientist escapes in Brad's spaceship. Brad scoops up the daughter and takes her spaceship -- with her help (she can sense her father's location via psi) he tracks him to an uncharted planet.

To this point I was disgusted. The story so far is sexist, and silly, and implausible, and not very interesting. Things seemed to get worse when nearly the first thing they encounter on the planet is a group of naked black savages who seem straight from the pages of H. Rider Haggard. Luckily, before I could throw the book across the room, it is revealed that these people actually ARE straight from the pages of Haggard! It seems that an alien race from across the universe is trying to understand humans. The only material they have is some illicit fiction, coincidentally almost all from the 19th and 20th Century in the English language, that Brad had hidden on his spaceship. (Fiction of any sort is illegal in this future galactic society.) So they have created constructs based on the various stories and populated this world with them.

The rest of the story concerns Brad and Harriet dealing with people who think they are in stories from Haggard, Baum, Shakespeare, Hilton, and Burroughs. They must find a way to convince these people that they aren't really inside these stories, and that they can throw off the dominion of the alien race and chase the aliens from the galaxy. Or something. It didn't really make much sense to me.

It's a very very very silly book. And it's mostly not fun silly -- just stupid silly. There is some unintentional humour -- for example, apparently Petaja couldn't use Tarzan because the books were under copyright (or the character is trademarked or something). So he introduces a character named Zartan the Stupendous, Lord Staygroke. I don't think I was really supposed to break into guffaws at this point, but I couldn't help it.

I suspect Petaja could do a little better than this -- on the face of it this seems possibly an uncharacteristic work. But it certainly isn't very good.

Birthday Review: Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon

Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon

a review by Rich Horton

Today is Elizabeth Moon's birthday, so I've resurrected a review I wrote a long time ago of the first of her Kylara Vatta novels. I'm a big fan of both of Moon's long Military SF series -- the earlier series, sometimes called the Heris Serrano books, but more amusingly, in James Nicoll's coinage, the "Aunts in Space" books; and the later Kylara Vatta series. Both series are bifurcated, with an initial sequence of a few novels, followed fairly directly by a new but related sequence. I'm posting this review because it's of the first novel, but I should add that this wasn't my favorite novel in the Vatta's War sequence -- it got better as it went along.

Trading in Danger was Elizabeth Moon's second novel for Del Rey after leaving Baen. The Speed of Dark came first. It was a near future look at an autistic man and a potential treatment for autism. Trading in Danger was a return to military SF, with an overtly "commercial" aspect, as it is about a commercial shipping company.

This was the first volume of a new series called Vatta's War. As such it may be regarded as primarily an introduction to a character and setting, and looked at that way it works OK. But it's a bit disappointing on its own. (After the Vatta's War books, Moon recently began a new "subseries" called Vatta's Peace.)

Kylara Vatta is a 21 year old nearly read to graduate from her planet's Space Academy, when she is summarily dismissed for having helped a fellow cadet who ended up embarrassing the Academy. Fortunately she is the daughter of the CFO of a very respected family-owned space transport company, Vatta Transport, Ltd, and she has a position to return to. Despite her youth, she is immediately assigned a Captaincy in Vatta organization, and she is given an old ship, with orders to take it on one last shipment and then to bring it to a salvage yard and scrap it. This is seen as a presumably routine first assignment.

But on the way she sees an opportunity to make some money for the company -- possibly enough to refurbish the ship and keep it for herself. She agrees to pick up a shipment of agricultural equipment and take it to a fairly new colony planet. Unfortunately, the place she goes to get the equipment turns out to be on the brink of civil war, and on top of that her old ship finally breaks down and she is stranded without FTL capability. And then one side in the war takes the almost unprecedented step of destroying the ansibles, leaving her (and the entire system) out of contact with the rest of the Galaxy. Her ship is unarmed, so she is forced to cooperate with mercenaries who demand that she intern some personnel from other ships the mercenaries have captured. Before long she is facing mutiny, a further damaged ship, starvation, and eventually the humiliating presence of a senior Vatta captain.

As I said, I like Moon's military SF, and I tend to fall for her female heroes, and this book is no exception that way. I liked Ky and will keep reading her series. But this book itself is unsatisfying in several ways. Some of it is not convincing -- for instance her convenient ouster from the Academy just didn't make much sense to me. (And the reaction of her boyfriend ... well, I won't say, but I didn't believe it, either. Though it's a very minor point.) Furthermore, there are annoying loose ends, such as what is really going on in the war she gets embroiled in, and particularly, why did a certain group blow up the ansibles?: they are never given a plausible reason to have done so (it is stated to always backfire, and it certainly seems to do so in this case). The overall action is just a bit flat. I've often criticized Moon's tendency to have overly sneering, evull, villains: that's mostly not the case here, which on the face of it is good, but which also reflects a certain lack of a coherent conflict in the book.

[I add again, the the series gained a perfectly coherent conflict in subsequent books, and I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.]

Brief Birthday Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Today would have been Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 91st birthday. (He died in 2014.) In his honor then, here's what I wrote shortly after I read his most famous novel, probably about 20 years ago. What I wrote was quite brief, basically a capsule.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Nobel-Prize Winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is, I dare say, one of the most famous books of, well, the past One Hundred Years. I've read some shorter stuff by Marquez in the past, and only liked it indifferently. But this is his magnum opus, by most accounts his finest work, and I was looking for something "big" to read.

It's quite a remarkable book. It took me a while to let the comic spirit of the book take over: it's really is a comic novel, and I originally approached it too solemnly. On the other hand, once I thought it was purely comic, the atrocities started to occur. The book is full of outsize characters, and outsize events. Much of the book tells of an extended Civil War, and also there are many murders, a horrifying massacre, absurd accidents, women dying in childbirth, incest, ...  The scope of imagination is enormous, and quite original. The book is about one family, the Buendias, and the town, Macondo, that their patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, founds. The entire history of the town is detailed, and this is also the history of this family. As I said, it is at one important level very comic, but, even aside from the atrocities, its quite sad as well.

Fantastical events occur throughout, which result in the book being called "Magical Realism".  There is a lot of debate over whether MR is just fantasy by someone who doesn't want to be lumped in with genre writers, or something separate. I would argue strongly for the latter: MR, as represented by this book, has a strongly different "feel" from fantasy. One explanation is that the use of the fantastic is something of a political strategy -- an argument that I think might be convincing as to the motivations of the writers, but which doesn't seem helpful is explaining the effect of the strategy on the reader. That is, the Magical Realist aspects transcend any political (especially locally or historically political) aspect.

The main problem I had with One Hundred Years of Solitude was a certain difficulty in becoming absorbed with the characters.  They are so unusual, so obsessed with things I have little sympathy for, that, while I stayed interested in them, I was never fully involved. Despite that, though, this is a fascinating, and thought-provoking novel, and one which I think will stick with me, and grow in memory. I should add that the much praised translation, by Gregory Rabassa, seems to me (not a Spanish reader) to be very successful. [And I can only say that, yes, the novel has stuck with and grown in my memory, in such a way that I consider it a very great novel now.]

Birthday Review: Stories of Gregory Feeley

Greg Feeley turns 64 today. He is one of the best and most intelligent SF writers working today, though alas not as prolific as some of us might hope. He is also an incisive and unsparing critic. I say "SF writer", and that is surely true (and Greg strongly identifies as part of the SF community), but, as you will see me say in the reviews I've published below, much of his work is not really SF, or ambiguously so. This is not in the least a problem -- an SFnal imagination surely informs the historical works I've discussed, and, in any case, for me and many other readers, what matters most is the work, and the work should be in the best form or genre for itself. I read widely outside SF, though SF is the core of my reading, and SF is what lights me up even when it's bad, but Greg's writing (critical as well as fictional) is a demonstration that the field of literature is wide, and that we should not be building walls but welcoming great work from wherever it comes, genre-wise or culture-wise.

Some of my favorite Feeley stories date to before I was reviewing for Locus. I think I may have reviewed some of these for Tangent, but it looks like I've lost my original electronic copies of everything I wrote for Tangent, which at this remove seems a terrible loss to me. (It didn't even occur to me, decades ago, that I would want to keep them.) Anyway, as for Greg's stories, the likes of "The Drowning Cell", "The Weighing of Ayre", and "Animae Celestes" (among others) are not to be missed.

Locus Online, 12 April 2001

[This is extracted from a longer piece I did for Locus Online called Two Fine Novellas From Less Travelled Places, which also reviewed Paul di Filippo's "Karuna, Inc.", and in which is discussed the market for novellas -- a discussion which is terribly out of date by now.]

"Spirit of the Place", by Gregory Feeley, is an impressive fantasy novella based on an historical incident, indeed, an incident which is still generating controversy and political maneuvering to this day. The story is set in Greece in 1802, as the ship Mentor, owned by the Scottish Lord Elgin, takes on a number of crates containing marble friezes and metopes removed from the Parthenon. These are the so-called "Elgin marbles," which after much debate were sold to the British Museum by Elgin, and which remain there today, despite many appeals that they be returned to Greece.

This story is told through Elgin's personal secretary, William Richard Hamilton. He is to accompany the marbles to England on the Mentor. Once the ship is underway, there are murmurs among the crew of whispers and strange noises from the hold. Hamilton ventures down, and encounters something very strange indeed, a "spirit" resident somehow in the ash planks which were just used to repair the Mentor. The rest of the story recounts Hamilton's relationship with this spirit.

The story is well-told, bolstered with careful historical details, and with careful references to the literary and mythological history of nymphs and dryads. Hamilton's relationship with this "person", as he is compelled to call her, is ambiguous and somewhat painful. His character and the spirit's character are well-depicted, and the resolution takes part of the Mentor's actual history and portrays it in a new light. The story itself is only indirectly about the Elgin marbles, but its depiction of the pain of the nymph of the ash tree at her uprooting is a fine metaphorical version of the cruel removal of the great sculptures in the Parthenon from their rightful home. As with much of Feeley's work, the action of his story becomes a sort of metaphor for the thematic matter of the piece. This is excellent work, and I hope it comes to the attention of SF readers.

Locus, January 2003

Beyond the Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, concerns what might lie "beyond" the end of the universe. All in all it's a pretty decent book, though the repetitive nature of many of the stories does pall a bit. Gregory Feeley opens the book very strongly, with possibly the best story, "False Vacuum", initially, and intriguingly enough, about a far future Muslim Earth, in which non-Muslims have all left as machine intelligences. A young woman encounters some of these intelligences, and learns a bit of their nature -- and then the story shifts gears, to put a different focus on things.

Locus, April 2004

Perhaps the best story in The First Heroes is Gregory Feeley's "Giliad", a very good post-9/11 reflection. It is barely SF or not SF at all, nor even historical fiction, but it still occupies the same imaginative space, it seems to me. The narrative intertwines several points-of-view, mainly that of Leslie, a contemporary woman in the fall of 2001. Her husband is beta-testing a new computer game, Ziggurat, a sort of Civilization variant set in Bronze Age Sumer. Leslie studies Sumer, and dreams of a Sumerian girl faced with war at the beginning of history. Meanwhile, at the time Francis Fukuyama fatuously called "the end of history", history advances quite brutally -- at the World Trade Center, in Afghanistan, and of course in Iraq, collocated with Sumer. There is a brief interval showing an SF writer (unnamed but recognizable as James Blish) worrying about another possible "end of history" in the Bomb-haunted 50s. An absorbing and thoughtful novella.

Locus, May 2004

Gregory Feeley seems determined to make things hard on SF award nominators: "Arabian Wine" (Asimov's, April-May) is his second outstanding novella to appear in an SF venue this year, but like "Giliad" (from The First Heroes) it is not really SF. "Arabian Wine" is a long novella (cut from a short novel) concerning Matteo, younger son of a Venetian merchant family in the early 17th Century. He has encountered the invigorating properties of a drink called "caofa", and he hopes to make it popular in Europe, and thereby make a fortune for his family, and perhaps also to revivify Venice itself. He is also involved with a young man working on a steam engine. And his mistress is engaging in small-time witchcraft on the side. Any or all of these activities might engage the unwelcome attention of various Venetian authorities. This is an absorbing tale set in an unfamiliar milieu, and dealing with the introduction of new technology -- SFnal enough, eh? In the end though it is mainly, and movingly, about a man ground in the gears of the apparatus of an autocratic state, about the impact of Islam on the West, and about coffee.

Review of Arabian Wine, from the March 2005 Locus

Gregory Feeley's "Arabian Wine", published in Asimov's last April-May, was one of the most celebrated stories of the year. I thought it perhaps the best novella of 2004 (with only another Feeley story, "Giliad", to challenge it). It is on the preliminary Nebula ballot as I write. And now a longer version appears in a lovely edition from the small press Temporary Culture.

The novella was, in fact, cut by Feeley to fit the length restrictions of the magazine. Thus the new version is really the original version of the story, and indeed the preferred version. It is nearly half again as long, at roughly 40,000 words on the borderline between novella and novel. The novella is an excellent work, but the novel is better, a fuller and richer story, recounting for the most part the same events but with elaborations both at the micro level (a line here and there) and the macro level (not so much new scenes as expanded scenes). There are significant additions – considerably more detail of the protagonist's time in Alexandria, an instructive encounter with a young boy in the Arsenal, more interactions with his not always fully supportive family. But perhaps more importantly there are lines and paragraphs which make the narrative richer, more detailed, throughout. Pace is not an issue – the story unfolds just as it should at the greater length.

The central character is Matteo Benveneto, a younger son of a Venetian trading family. He is unable to travel for the family because he is subject to severe seasickness. But on his only journey he was introduced to coffee – kahveh, caofa, "Arabian Wine". Back in Venice he pursues two projects. He hopes to introduce coffee to the European palate and establish his family as a leading distributor. And he is assisting his friend, Gaspare Treviso, in developing a steam engine for the potential use of the Venetian state. This is all against the backdrop of a stagnating Venice, in about the year 1600.

These projects are promising. The steam engine, designed to pump water out of the basements of buildings (certainly an issue in Venice!), is technically challenging but appears to work. And coffee is a hit with most of the people who try it. But there are political and cultural issues. Matteo deals with much of Venetian society, one way or another: a Senator; a representative of the Jewish ghetto; the deeply conservative artisans of the shipbuilding sector, the Arsenal; his own skeptical family; even his fortune-telling mistress. In the end he is ground, like his coffee beans, in the machinery of the authoritarian state: suspicious of change, riven by factions, unwilling to confront the reality of an altered political and cultural landscape. Matteo's fate is almost random, contingent upon the whims of those in power and the whims of simple fate.

This is not unambiguously SF. There are elements that may be speculative – most notably the fairly early efforts to build a steam engine – but nothing that violates what I know of history (unless an early scene amusingly hinting at the invention of espresso qualifies!). Nonetheless, the novel (as to be sure with much historical fiction) satisfies in an SFnal fashion. It is in part about the introduction of new technology to a society – surely a deeply science-fictional theme. It is also a depiction of an unfamiliar culture – again an SFnal theme. It is also of course relevant to contemporary concerns – for one thing it deals with the clash of Islam and the West; for another it deals with the wielding of autocratic power, all but uncaringly, against insignificant individuals. No matter the genre – "Arabian Wine" was one of the best novellas of 2004, and Arabian Wine will surely stand as one of the best novels of 2005.

Locus, February 2006

Jay Lake’s anthology TEL: Stories consists of 29 stories of an “experimental” nature. Many of these are interesting but not quite successful, but the best are quite good, particularly the opening story, Greer Gilman’s “Jack Daw’s Pack” (a reprint), and the closing story, Gregory Feeley’s “Fancy Bread”, is which the long life of Jack (of Beanstalk fame, it seems), and his ongoing struggle for bread, is a means of depicting, of all things, economic history – from a rather slant perspective.

Locus, November 2008

Otherworldly Maine is a fine collection of fantastical stories set in Maine, mixing reprints with originals. The reprints come from such storied writers as Mark Twain, Edgar Pangborn, and Stephen King, as well as some less well known people, and they are a fine diverse selection. The new stories are also good – the best is “Awskonomuk”, by Gregory Feeley (a writer we haven’t seen enough from lately). It’s not really SF or Fantasy, though its concerns are SFnal – a hobbyist archaeologist, interested in the possibility that Leif Ericson’s people got as far south as Maine, inquires into the history of an Abenaki woman whose DNA suggests a snippet of European ancestry. The fulcrum, in this villainless story, is the question of where the interests of First Nations people really lie – this woman, at least, cares much more about the future than a perhaps ambiguous past.

Locus, February 2011

Finally, I was glad to see new fiction from Gregory Feeley, though Kentauros is more than just fiction: it’s a beautifully written linked set of three essays and two short stories (one of them in two parts), all on the subject of Kentauros, the unfortunate son of a human king who dared to lust after the goddess Hera, and who was tricked into sleeping with a cloud simulacrum of her instead, engendering Kentauros, who in time would rape some horses, engendering the race of centaurs. The essays discuss that rather obscure bit of Greek mythology. One story tells of Kentauros’ difficult life, and the other is about Mary Shelley, and her relationship with Lord Byron and with Leigh Hunt, as she raises her son after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death. The Kentauros story comes up, but more central is Mary’s own life, her own genius, and her recollections of her husband, and a supposed poetic version of the Kentauros myth that Hunt suggest Shelley may have written. The book is fascinating in a scholarly sense, and also in a literary sense, and it is simply lovely as well.

Locus, November 2016

Even better, I thought, was Gregory Feeley’s “The Bridge of Dreams” (Clarkesworld, April), set in the very far future with a Norse-derived theme (I was reminded, a bit, of Roger Zelazny’s “For a Breath I Tarry”, not necessarily because of any direct similarities.) Heimdallr is a being living alone and maintaining an ice bridge between Plouton and Charon that he calls Bifröst, when a visitor, Garðrofa arrives with a summons from the Sheltered Gardens in the “Sunlit Realms” – the Inner Solar System – where the two, become one, will encounter the remnants of humanity, and people called kobolds, and a task that may involve treachery … It’s a mysterious story, redolent with convincingly weird posthuman details, effectively stranged by such devices as naming the planets recognizably but unusually. There is wildly high technology, and a certain elegiac tone, an elegant and careful prose, and some just cool ideas.

Birthday Review: Stories of Ann Leckie

Today is Ann Leckie's birthday. I was delighted to find her first SF story in Subterranean Magazine way back in 2006, and to reprint it in my Best of the Year collection. I was even more delighted when I later learned that we live in neighboring suburbs, and indeed that our children attended the same high school. And I was most delighted of all when she continued to grow as a writer, producing a whole series of excellent short stories, both fantasy and SF, and then winning a Hugo for her first novel, Ancillary Justice. She has written three more SF novels in the same universe, but her new novel, The Raven Tower, is Fantasy, in the mode (and, I believe, sharing a world) with many of her fantasy short stories, which are very interested in questioning the nature of the relationship between gods and humans. (The only downside of her success as a novelist, is, as with many short fiction writers turned novelists, she has published much less short fiction since her novels began appearing.)

Locus, September 2006

I have just recently discovered the new magazine Subterranean, and I have been quite impressed. Issue #4, guest-edited by John Scalzi, concerns SF clichés. Scalzi assembles a nice set of short stories, some of which are essentially japes, as one might expect, but most of which are quite serious attempts at breathing new life into some rather hoary ideas. And most are pretty successful. Scalzi features several very new writers, who acquit themselves admirably, particularly Ann Leckie, whose “Hesperia and Glory” inverts the John Carter template by having a Prince of Mars mysteriously transported to Earth.

Locus, December 2007

Speaking of online publications, “The Snake’s Wife”, by Ann Leckie (Helix, October) is a story of dynastic struggles between two regions in a fantastical world, and as such is somewhat traditional. But there are several legitimately shocking acts at the heart of it, and all is resolved starkly and honestly. The narrator is the third son of an ambitious king of an area devoted to a serpent god. His father, based on prophecies of his god, has decided to refuse the offer for his daughter’s hand of the prince of another land, this one devoted to a sky god, but under the curse of the serpent god. This land’s king is also acting based on his god’s promises. What follows is a story of war, forced marriage, mutilation, and revenge: ultimately suggesting that the promises of gods may come true but ought to regarded with great suspicion.

Locus, August 2008

And while discussing Helix I should mention a particularly strong story from the previous issue (April): Ann Leckie’s “The God of Au”, an original fantasy about the dangers – and benefits – of making bargains with gods, as a group of refugees comes to a remote island and agrees to the demands of the local god; with a variety of consequences.

Locus, December 2008

In the fine online ‘zine Lone Star Stories ... I also enjoyed Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky’s “Needle and Thread”, about a dressmaker charged to make a gown to turn a princess beautiful – but such magic is illegal. And, perhaps, wasted – the prince is not so interested in beauty. The characters are well done, the idea clever –, but it flattens into a somewhat conventional morality fairy tale, not quite what I’ve come to expect from either of these excellent new writers. Still, it does what it aims to do quite well.

Locus, July 2009

Clockwork Phoenix is the most experimental and often the most interesting of the impressive stable of four anthologies published by Norilana. My favorite story is Ann Leckie’s “The Endangered Camp”, which she says resulted from a sort of challenge to combine dinosaurs, post-apocalyptic fiction, and Mars – and does so beautifully as the crew of the first spaceship to Mars witnesses the asteroid striking Earth and wonders what to do.

Locus, February 2010

The February Realms of Fantasy I also like Ann Leckie’s “The Unknown God”, in which the god Aworo, in human form, returns to the city where he tragically misused his power, condemning a woman he loved to, he though, death. He learns she still lives, but in constrained circumstances due to his curse. And naturally she (and her own god) are not too happy with him. Leckie is as ever inventive and logical and grounded about the power and responsibility of godhood.

Locus, December 2012

I thought the Summer issue of Electric Velocipede one of its stronger outings. Ann Leckie's “Night's Slow Poison” is an enjoyable if somewhat old-fashioned story about a man from an isolated planet charged with protecting its main secret – how to navigate there – from its enemies. It's set on a spaceship heading to this planet, though the real interest comes as we learn the back story of the main character – his disappointment in love – or his family's financial distress – either of which, perhaps, might motivate him to treachery?

Locus, January 2015

Strange Horizons completed its annual fund drive in November successfully, and so published a bonus story by Ann Leckie, “She Commands Me and I Obey”. It's good  work, set on a space station, and told by a young novice at a monastery. It seems the rulers of the Precinct are determined by the results of games, and this year the longstanding ruler's champion is to be challenged by a particularly promising upstart. Leckie mixes in some familiar ingredients: the novice with a hidden past, the harsh fate of the games' losers, the hidden motives of the monks, and plenty of political corruption. So the story doesn't really surprise but it's involving and quite fun.