It's a magical world

Slonczewski, Joan. Still Forms on Foxfield. New York: Del Rey, 1980.

I was sold on this book as soon as I understood that it was about Quakers in space, and all in all, both as a science fiction book and a book about Quakers in space, it did not disappoint. For various reasons, though, I'm not sure how this book would play to people who don't have my particular background.

The book follows the colony of Foxfield, and in particular its main systems engineer Allison Thorne, when the unified government of Earth makes recontact with them and insists both that the Foxfielders accept their UNI citizenship and the various impositions, as well as liberties, that it entails. The Foxfielders are a bit of a wonder to the Terrans given that no one on Terra has religion anymore, while the Foxfielders are still practicing the Philadelphia Quakerism they learned from their ancestors, who took ship into the stars from the post-nuclear wasteland of Pennsylvania. It's funny how I'm relatively blase about the concept of New York being a post-nuclear wasteland, but talking about the irradiated ruins of Pennsylvania gets to me a little.

Slonczewski wrote this book after her time at Bryn Mawr College outside of Philadelphia, and it's interesting seeing in this book the viewpoint of someone who was convinced thirty years ago, when there were still Friends wandering around who routinely used informal English pronouns and could remember the time before the Hicksite/Orthodox division was healed. There's a lot of "thee" and "thou" and talking about the Queries and quoting of John Greenleaf Whittier, but there's also a much deeper feminist Quaker commitment at the level of the plot, which doesn't proceed by violence. Consensus and clarity in the Quaker sense of the terms rule the day, and Slonczewski is very good at describing the experience of Meeting, how sometimes you know you have something to say and you're compelled to say it and other times you sit there thinking about nothing in particular or fanfiction or your grocery list. The aliens who are native to the planet are also believably alien, and the Friends live together with them in a manner that is gratifyingly non-exploitative, just as the burgeoning conflict with them over the arrival of the Terrans is resolved believably.

I doubt I've succeeded in making this book sound interesting to those who didn't grow up attending Quaker schools in and around Philadelphia, but I really enjoyed it. It was also, on the level of "gee, the future has changed" an interesting mix of things that seem dated now (the idea of gay marriage as a radical thing in The Future), the historical (i.e. the sketched-out history of the nuclear apocalypse and its aftermath) and the things that I think may have been radical in 1980 but seem pretty unremarkable now, namely having a single mother as the protagonist. Or the fact that everyone on Earth is female and thus by default lesbians. There's a few weird moments with the Japanese systems engineer having to do with cultural history and the Japanese language, but all in all, this was a fascinating little book. And so, so Quaker--even more than Allison and her concern about whether she's letting her Light speak to her properly, the final image of ancient Celia Blyden, filled with the fire of her concern to be a public Friend and go back to Earth and speak truth to those who need to hear it, is as Quaker as it gets. I take off my hat to her, and to Slonczewski.

Jones, Diana Wynne. Charmed Life. 1977.
-----. The Lives of Christopher Chant. 1988.

I am not one of those people who read Diana Wynne Jones in childhood and fell in love for life. By whatever quirk of timing + the suburbs + publishing ??, the only Jones books I read as a kid were the Dalemark quartet, which I enjoyed at the time, but which didn't leave me hungry for more and which friends of mine who've read more Jones than I have tell me are not her best works. I kind of had already figured that. My apathy was cemented when I read Howl's Moving Castle after seeing the movie and thought the book was pretty terrible in comparison.

NB: I'm willing to revise my opinion of the book, if I reread it, but I'm not really willing to be browbeaten by the hardcore DWJ fans out there about my opinions on the movie versus the book, so please keep your thoughts on my heresy to yourself unless you can express them politely.

Of course, the very fact that I felt the need to make the above warning says something about the passion of DWJ fans for her works, and when Jones died last year the many wonderful tribute posts that people made, such as this one by Karen Healey and this one by rushthatspeaks, made me think that I should give Jones another shot. I also fortuitously lucked into a few random Jones books through friends moving away, and also through The Other Change of Hobbit's firesale last fall, so I figured I was set.

I started with the Chrestomanci Chronicles, and with volume 1 of the three-volume MMPB bind-up set, which contains the above two novels. I was really puzzled by the publisher's decision to lead with Charmed Life, because reading it first spoils some important plot points in The Lives of Christopher Chant and also sabotages some of the force of the ending. Well done, publisher. Also, the early 2000s cover art for the bind-ups is hideous--I'm happy to report that the recent reprint art is much better.

Jones is a really subtle writer. She'd have to be, to pack the force she does into the word limits of old-school YA, but I nearly missed the turning point of the whole story in Charmed Life, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's other bits that I missed too along the way. In some ways I'm sorry I didn't read Jones in childhood, because I just don't read as single-mindedly and wholeheartedly now as I did then (who does?), and because some plot developments that were obvious now might have been less so to me then, but I did enjoy these books, although Cat's passivity was quite annoying at times. Maybe the upside of reading her as an adult is that I did actually fully appreciate the irony and the humor, both on the characters' part and on the author's, all of which was pretty great. I'm also amazed that Jones was able to pull off a book in which the main character is so passive, and although Christopher might be an ass, he's an interesting ass. (I also find it significant that we see that he grows up to treat Cat in more or less the same fashion that he hated being treated as a child. Given Jones' history, it's not surprising, but it is the sort of touch of reality that I wouldn't expect from many writers.) I think Throckmorton wound up being my favorite character, closely followed by Julia, but that's not really surprising either.

Brennan, Sarah Rees. Unspoken. New York: Random House, 2012.

I think I liked this book best of all Sarah Rees Brennan's that I've read so far. Our hero is Kami Glass, the part-Japanese intrepid girl reporter of her sleepy Cotswolds town, Sorry-in-the-Vale. Sorry-in-the-Vale is distinguished by the Lynburn manor that looms over the town, but the Lynburns have been gone for the past few years--for most of Kami's life, actually. Of course, when the Lynburns return, and Kami learns that her imaginary friend is not all that imaginary, things start to happen.

I enjoyed this book--I enjoyed Kami, who has a wicked sense of humor and a wonderful fashion sense. I also enjoyed the diametrically opposite take on the "soul bonds" trope than is normal in fandom, and I enjoyed the modern update on Gothic novels. I also liked the secondary characters, and spoilery things that happen with them (I mean, here, Angela and Holly). I even enjoyed the mild melodrama and pathetic fallacies of the whole thing. Brennan carries it all off very well.

I do want to say, though, that even saying the fact that Kami and her brothers' names were chosen by their English mother does not really lampshade the fact that they are nothing like actual Japanese names. Brennan also biffs the way Kami refers to her grandmother (I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the word "sobo" in conversation--I had to look it up to figure out what she meant). So, with these caveats aside, this was a fun read with a plucky, brave female protagonist and a dramatic plot that I look forward to hearing more about, particularly after the ending. If you've liked Sarah Rees Brennan's other work, or if plucky girl reporters solving mysteries sound like your thing, I suspect you'll like this book.

Brennan, Marie. A Natural History of Dragons. New York: Tor Books, 2013.

ARC provided by the author, who is a friend of mine, on the condition that I would review it. Here it is! (Though, given how well it's been selling, I highly doubt that most people will need my remarks to make the decision whether to buy the book.)

A Natural History of Dragons is the first volume in the memoirs of Isabella, Lady Trent, the celebrated, pioneering (and female) dragon naturalist of a very cod-Britain where the dominant religion is based, for example, on Judaism. rushthatspeaks praised Brennan not doing the usual things in their review of Brennan's second-to-last book, A Star Shall Fall, and in thinking about it, I'm struck again by how much that applies, as praise, to this book as well. Most fantasy novels with feisty heroines whose souls rebel against the social constraints placed upon their gender make a point of their resistance to marriage; Isabella (although not without frank discussion of the soul-killing boredom it entails) submits to her mother's ideas of propriety after a rambunctious girlhood, and gets married within the first few chapters. Even more unusually for a female fantasy protagonist, she quickly gets pregnant--and has a miscarriage. It's after that, when Isabella is still grieving, that she persuades her tolerant husband Jakob that they should join the expedition of a prominent aristocratic naturalist to cod-Romania. The rest, as they say, is history.

A good chunk of the pleasure of this book is the richness of the setting and its details, particularly about the physiology of dragons; another is Isabella's very tart narrative voice (made even better that she's writing her memoirs in her august old age), and the gentle subversion of not a few tropes of this kind of travel writing, particularly as it was practiced historically. Brennan does more unexpected things with the plot and the denouement--since I went to see her at her reading at Borderlands Books, I can confirm that the series as a whole has an overarching plot of which only fragments are discernible in this book. But what's here is a lot of fun.

As a bonus, the book has ten absolutely beautiful interior illustrations by Todd Lockwood, who also did the gorgeous cover. People who say that traditional publishing has nothing to offer authors don't really realize how much a committed publisher can bring to the table, I say.

Johnson, Alaya Dawn. Racing the Dark. Chicago: Agate Bolden, 2008.

I got this book while it was available for free on Amazon.com (it's actually the first e-book I've ever read) because Johnson is one of the guests of honor at this year's Sirens conference. You should join us! It's been an awesome time for the three years I've gone, and I fully expect for it to be an awesome time again.

Racing the Dark, the first book in an unfinished trilogy, tells the story of Lana, who when the book opens is initiated into the sisterhood of divers on her island, who provide the community's main source of wealth via harvesting organic jewels from the mouths of fish. The jewels Lana finds on her first solo dive mark her out as having a great spiritual power, but she conceals this sign of her destiny and soon is forced to leave her island with her parents in light of the environmental upheaval that has turned the freshwater seas around her island brackish. Lana's father goes ahead of them to the capital to try to establish himself as an instrument maker, and she and her mother remain behind in the closest large port city trying to make a living as a barmaid and a laundry-girl, respectively. It was when Lana's mother turns to prostituting herself for money to buy medicine for Lana that I realized I wasn't reading a YA book (though, when Lana gets drunk and smokes weed with no consequences within the first few pages, I started to have my suspicions).

Despite the way it seems initially, this isn't a YA book. But it doesn't quite feel like an adult novel either, despite the fact that it quickly develops into a very epic epic fantasy that spans years, characters, and continents. It quickly becomes clear that the environment is profoundly out of whack: the spirits of the elements that were bound millennia ago are restless in their bindings, and they want to be free. I said on Twitter that the book's setting feels like the midpoint between FF: VII and FF: X-2, which is a reference to the fact that in one of the bonus scenes in FF: X-2 child pilot Shinra talks about possibly tapping the planet's geothermal energy and in FF: VII the geothermal power processing has nearly destroyed the planet. Environmental precariousness is a major theme in the book, as is the theme of humans being out of whack with their environment.

There are a lot of characters in here, some of whom die annoyingly early and others who linger too long (I personally loathed Kotaku from the very first time we got his POV), and I have to agree with oyceter's remark that Lana, for most of the book, seems rather passive. But in all honesty the narrative propels along fast enough that I honestly didn't notice, in part because the setting and the characters are pretty original: the language and the setting feel Pacific Island mostly, although much of the language and cultural details seem Asian (mochi are specifically referenced at one point). (On that note: characters aren't pictographs, KTHNXBAI.) All the characters in the book are people of color, which I also appreciated.

The structure was also, as I've implied, kind of whacked out--I continue to think that this book is more YA than not, except for how I don't know that it could ever be marketed as YA. Anecdotal evidence seems to be that the book got next to no marketing, or if it did, it was the wrong marketing, which is a crying shame. This is a really interesting world with a fascinating and varied cast of characters, and I will very much be seeking out the sequel, The Burning City, as well as the rest of Johnson's works.

Valente, Catherynne M. The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There. New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2012.

I really enjoyed The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, as you may imagine from my several posts on the topic of the book when it was merely a serial internet fiction, and I was very happy to receive this, the sequel, for Christmas.

A year after her return, sans her shadow, September is more than ready to return to Fairyland and the friends she left behind there. As one might expect from dealing with Fairyland, however, when she does get back in she does so widdershins to her expectations, and soon she realizes that she has to undertake another quest, this one less glorious but equally necessary. For the shadows of Fairyland Below, led by Halloween, the Hollow Queen, September's shadow, are inexorably leeching the magic out of Fairyland Above, and September must put right her own mistake and save both worlds, with help of dubious vintage from the shadows of her friends El and Saturday.

This book wasn't as absolutely entrancing as the first, but it was quite enjoyable, and I particularly liked the way September is slowly but surely growing up, and the way the Heartless imagery from the first book is deployed, changed, to devastating effect in this volume. I particularly liked several spoilery developments near the end, having to do with evil and redemption and who you can trust, although the denouement was somewhat less than what I might have wanted, somehow. In any case, I am very much looking forward to the next of September's adventures in Fairyland. Valente described the ending of the first as a stab to the heart of Narnia, and there are certain ways in which these books are unabashedly critical of certain hoary tropes of children's portal fantasy, and I really love that.

Larbalestier, Justine and Sarah Rees Brennan. Team Human. New York: HarperTeen, 2012.

I've enjoyed previous books I've read by Larbalestier and Brennan, and I've wanted to read this book since I heard them talk about it at Sirens 2011, when they said, "We wanted to write a book about the best friend in Twilight" and we all said, "What best friend in Twilight?"

The book follows Mel, a teenager in the vampire city of New Whitby, Maine, whose best friend falls in love with Victorian-era vampire Francis. Mel, needless to say, believes that friends don't let friends date vampires, and is determined to thwart this course of events; by the end of the book, everyone has been forced to examine their preconceptions, as well as who gets to make choices for whom.

I enjoyed Mel, who is Chinese-American and not afraid to tell people that they are racist (bonus: unambiguously non-whitewashed cover!), and I enjoyed Larbalestier and Brennan's hilarious writing, which is laid on particularly thick in the first part of the book, which is basically a straight-up, and very welcome, satire of Twilight. Eventually the book modulates to something more serious, but I didn't have a problem with the transition, and I enjoyed the story all the way through. It's not the deepest vampire romance ever, but it does very obviously subvert some of that subgenre's tropes in a very funny way, and it was a very enjoyable read.

Sagara, Michelle. Silence. New York: DAW Books, 2012.

Michelle Sagara West is one of my favorite authors, and has been since the seventh grade; I've read almost everything she's ever written, and when I saw that she was doing a YA trilogy, I was quite happy. Although Silence could not be inaccurately described as a YA paranormal (with hints of romance), anyone who's read anything of West's should know that she doesn't really write stories that can comfortably fit in an elevator pitch.

Silence is the story of Emma, a teenage girl in Toronto whose father died years ago and whose boyfriend died just last summer, and who discovers that she can see, and speak with, the dead. It is also the story of her friends, including Michael, who is on the autism spectrum; it is also the story of the hunters who are sent to kill her and who instead find themselves joining in her crusade. It is a story about grief and love and friendship, and I enjoyed it very much.

There are some of West's familiar themes in here, but given that this book is set in the contemporary world, there's also quite a lot that's different, or differently portrayed, than her other writing, and I enjoyed Emma and her typical West protagonist "won't take no for an answer" attitude. I also enjoyed that her friend group could be straight out of Mean Girls, but isn't; West, when she did the Big Idea on Scalzi, talked some about this aspect of the book being inspired by her own autistic son's experiences with people at his school. It was refreshing to see Michael being treated as a full person not only by the narrative but also by the people around him, to say the least.

In sum, this was a very different take on what could have been some very well-worn YA tropes, and I'm very much looking forward to the next two books.

Miéville, China. Railsea. New York: Del Rey Books, 2012.

China Miéville is one of the authors I consider a must-read, and I heard a lot of good things about this book before I read it. I was not disappointed! I don't think this is as good a book as Embassytown, but it is very, very good, and I certainly enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Embassytown and Kraken. Like Kraken, it is at times laugh outloud funny; like Kraken, it is not afraid to quarrel with literature--I particularly liked the bit towards the end when Robinson Crusoe was summoned up and dismissed in the space of two paragraphs, and as much as Moby-Dick is being put in the blender in, intermittently, the fore and background, there are hints of older narratives in here too, such as the Odyssey.

I wish I had finished the book in time to copy down some of the passages I dog-eared, because one of the pleasures of this book, as always, is Miéville's flair and verve with language, particularly his willingness to hack and poke and remake English into what he wants it to be. The book follows one Shem ap Soorap, a listless youth whose cousins get him a post as an apprentice medic on a moletrain, riding through the railsea in search of the giant mouldywarpes. (My sister, when I was trying to explain this to her: "How was I supposed to intuit the giant moles?") Shem's captain is searching for the great custard-yellow ivory mole that took her arm, Mocker-Jack; it is her Philosophy, and she is its, and like all captains of moletrains she dreams of fulfilling her quest and recording it in the Museum of Completion. Shem, an orphan, however, finds an artifact in the wreckage of an old moletrain that leads him down a different path, into the acquaintance of the explorer children, Caldera and Dero Shroake, who are determined to follow the traintracks of their lost parents.

This being Miéville, there is a lot in here about narratives and stories and intermittent passages in which the narrator addresses the reader directly, and this is the sort of thing that I eat up with a spoon; if all this metafictional meditation on story and fiction isn't to your taste, you may find yourself disliking the book. But I thought this was a great novel, and I loved the great and unremarked-upon number of female characters, and I really enjoyed the ending. (It doesn't hurt that I have a thing for trains in SFF novels, obviously.)

Has anyone been reading Dial H?

Russ, Joanna. The Two of Them. London: The Women's Press, 1986. [1978]

The late Joanna Russ was one of the giants of feminist science fiction (I have the T-shirt to prove it), and eventually it's my goal to read everything she wrote. This necessarily involves scrounging around in used bookstores, because a good chunk of what she wrote is out of print--though happily this particular novel is actually back in print, from Wesleyan University Press, which SFF fans should already know as the re-publishers of many of Chip Delany's under-appreciated books. I'm pleased to have a Women's Press edition of this one, though, since it matches my Women's Press edition of The Adventures of Alyx (thanks, Ireland!).

The Two of Them is the last SF novel Russ ever wrote. It follows the adventures of two agents of the TransTemp Agency, which features in some of the Alyx stories and which has only ever recruited one woman, Irene Waskiewicz, the protagonist of this novel. Irene and her partner/mentor/lover Ernst, who rescued her from the doldrums of adolescence in 1950s America and took her, literally, across the universe(s), arrive on the remote settlement Ka'abah, apparently practitioners of some warped and truncated form of Islam, to do their usual work, stealing information for the Agency. When Irene decides to take the would-be poet Zubeydeh out of the confines of her patriarchal society, however, the two of them discover some depressing truths about the place of women just about everywhere.

The novel is, for the most part, lively and depressing, which is a combination that Russ is good at. I did find Irene sympathetic, though I really didn't care for Zubeydeh (after Violet in Magic Under Stone, my tolerance for tiresome spoiled girls is at a low ebb), and I'm not broken up over Ernst's eventual fate, either.

Overall, I don't think this novel is as much of a mess as Brit Mandelo does--I'd urge you to read that post, as it's a really good discussion of the novel, but I found the fourth-wall breaking interjections by the author to be, if not quite hilarious, amusing, and the ending is bleak but also, against the odds, hopeful, though hopeful in that "Atlantic City" kind of way, I suppose. The central problem of the novel is the problem that Irene comes to discover, that there is no way out, no escape even for an extraordinary woman, and she isn't actually extraordinary. And even if she was, what right does that give her to even a temporary reprieve? Zubeydeh is saved because of her poetry, but what about all the other ordinary girls and women throughout the universe? Don't they deserve liberation too? In this context, the metaphorical ending of the novel, hopeful as it is, doesn't seem to outweigh what facts the narrative gives us about actual Irene and actual Zubeydeh.

( The Joanna Russ meme )