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starladyI obtained a review PDF of this collection from its editor Mike Allen (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
time_shark): having finished it, my review. The short takeaway is that it's an excellent read that repays the investment of time and attention handsomely; all of the stories herein live up to the billing as "new tales of beauty and strangeness."
As is the case with such things, I find myself wanting to talk about only those stories that lingered in my mind for what, I suspect, are almost entirely personal reasons; the stories I didn't mention here are equally interesting, and other people will no doubt prefer them to the ones I especially liked. I want to commend Allen, though, for choosing a slate of stories that by and large do genuinely expand the horizons of fantasy beyond the conventional, both in setting and in protagonists.
"Once a Goddess" by Marie Brennan (swan_tower) was inspired by a Nepalese goddess-avatar (Kumari Devi), but the story, which concerns what happens after a girl is no longer a goddess, reminded me variously of ancient Egypt, as well as of one of the most interesting and least known tropes of classical/Indo-European myth: the faded goddess. Helen of Troy is perhaps the example par excellence; she was once a solar deity, until time and misogyny downgraded her into a half-divine prize to be fought over by men. That the solar goddess in this story has a name that begins with H doesn't seem coincidental.
I've said other places that my favorite Star Trek book of all is Diane Carey's First Frontier, because it features dinosaurs and space travel, and Ann Leckie's story "The Endangered Camp" features many of the same elements as Carey's novel, except that in Leckie's version the highly evolved troodonts are Preserving themselves by colonizing Mars just as the asteroid brings down the curtain on their age on Earth. It's awesome.
"At the Edge of Dying" by Mary Robinette Kowal is a fascinating, and very different take, on magic and on an invasion by white would-be colonizers. "The Pain of Glass" by Tanith Lee was the first piece by Lee that I've liked in a while, probably because the violence was subdued rather than overt, and the whole was very quietly witty. "The Fish of Al-Kawther's Fountain" by Joanna Galbraith made me smile, not only because I like the idea of fish in a random house fountain being responsible for the fate of the world, but also because the fish are quite capable of saving the world despite the limitations imposed on them by the fact that they're fish.
"The Secret History of Mirrors" by Catheryne M. Valente (yuki_onna) is another brilliant story from CMV. I think that I've gone from never having heard of her to being a complete fan in a very short time, but Valente, being a fellow classicist, manages to consistently tickle my fancies--in this case, as well as the standards of fairy tales, myth, briliant, baroquely detailed imagery, includes lesbian nuns and echoes of Sts. Augustine and Isidore, those old medieval rogues.
The one story I really didn't like was "each thing I show you is a piece of my death" by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, again, I suspect, for purely personal reasons; like every story in the book, it's techincally well executed (though there were a few pieces I thought could use a few more commas, but again, personal preference). "each thing..." is very much a story in the vein of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, told in email transcripts, chat records, blog posts, and descriptions of video files, among other ephemera that make legible the audible and/or visual. Why are all the characters in these sorts of stories self-centered assholes? Just because it purports to be set in the "real" world doesn't mean that everyone in the real world is necessarily a jerk; everyone isn't, and I found the piece tawdry, predictable, and ultimately un-interesting (as opposed to House, which is one of the creepiest books I've ever read), but given the response to House of Leaves, I'm probably in the minority on this one. As always, YMMV, and Cat Valente herself, among other people, loved it, so there you have it.
At any rate, an excellent collection; I'm quite happy that the original awaits me in my "to read" pile even as I write this.
time_shark): having finished it, my review. The short takeaway is that it's an excellent read that repays the investment of time and attention handsomely; all of the stories herein live up to the billing as "new tales of beauty and strangeness."As is the case with such things, I find myself wanting to talk about only those stories that lingered in my mind for what, I suspect, are almost entirely personal reasons; the stories I didn't mention here are equally interesting, and other people will no doubt prefer them to the ones I especially liked. I want to commend Allen, though, for choosing a slate of stories that by and large do genuinely expand the horizons of fantasy beyond the conventional, both in setting and in protagonists.
"Once a Goddess" by Marie Brennan (
swan_tower) was inspired by a Nepalese goddess-avatar (Kumari Devi), but the story, which concerns what happens after a girl is no longer a goddess, reminded me variously of ancient Egypt, as well as of one of the most interesting and least known tropes of classical/Indo-European myth: the faded goddess. Helen of Troy is perhaps the example par excellence; she was once a solar deity, until time and misogyny downgraded her into a half-divine prize to be fought over by men. That the solar goddess in this story has a name that begins with H doesn't seem coincidental. I've said other places that my favorite Star Trek book of all is Diane Carey's First Frontier, because it features dinosaurs and space travel, and Ann Leckie's story "The Endangered Camp" features many of the same elements as Carey's novel, except that in Leckie's version the highly evolved troodonts are Preserving themselves by colonizing Mars just as the asteroid brings down the curtain on their age on Earth. It's awesome.
"At the Edge of Dying" by Mary Robinette Kowal is a fascinating, and very different take, on magic and on an invasion by white would-be colonizers. "The Pain of Glass" by Tanith Lee was the first piece by Lee that I've liked in a while, probably because the violence was subdued rather than overt, and the whole was very quietly witty. "The Fish of Al-Kawther's Fountain" by Joanna Galbraith made me smile, not only because I like the idea of fish in a random house fountain being responsible for the fate of the world, but also because the fish are quite capable of saving the world despite the limitations imposed on them by the fact that they're fish.
"The Secret History of Mirrors" by Catheryne M. Valente (
yuki_onna) is another brilliant story from CMV. I think that I've gone from never having heard of her to being a complete fan in a very short time, but Valente, being a fellow classicist, manages to consistently tickle my fancies--in this case, as well as the standards of fairy tales, myth, briliant, baroquely detailed imagery, includes lesbian nuns and echoes of Sts. Augustine and Isidore, those old medieval rogues.The one story I really didn't like was "each thing I show you is a piece of my death" by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, again, I suspect, for purely personal reasons; like every story in the book, it's techincally well executed (though there were a few pieces I thought could use a few more commas, but again, personal preference). "each thing..." is very much a story in the vein of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, told in email transcripts, chat records, blog posts, and descriptions of video files, among other ephemera that make legible the audible and/or visual. Why are all the characters in these sorts of stories self-centered assholes? Just because it purports to be set in the "real" world doesn't mean that everyone in the real world is necessarily a jerk; everyone isn't, and I found the piece tawdry, predictable, and ultimately un-interesting (as opposed to House, which is one of the creepiest books I've ever read), but given the response to House of Leaves, I'm probably in the minority on this one. As always, YMMV, and Cat Valente herself, among other people, loved it, so there you have it.
At any rate, an excellent collection; I'm quite happy that the original awaits me in my "to read" pile even as I write this.