pornokitsch

Review Round-up: Jesus, Bridesicles and New York City

Three recent releases with very little in common.

Will McIntosh's Love Minus Eighty (2013) is coming this June. I've not read him before, but from what I understand, Mr. McIntosh is sort of an ebook/indie sensation, not in the "sells like Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking" way, but in the "there's this guy quietly making great books in the corner" kind of way. Love Minus Eighty is his first UK print publication and it is a corker.

A hundred years in the future, death isn't... conquered, but it is beat-up a bit. Cryogenics and medicine have both advanced spectacularly, so if you've got the cash, you can hang on for quite some time. If you don't have the cash, but you do have insurance, you can freeze yourself - give yourself that tiny bit of hope that someone, someday will pay to bring you back. And if you don't have the cash or the insurance? Well, look both ways before crossing the street.

One pervy side-effect of this brave new world is the idea of the "bridesicle". Beautiful women in fatal accidents - and without insurance - are carefully preserved. Rich men drop by, interview them, and, if they like what they see, the 'suitor' pays to thaw/fix the young lady in turn for marriage (and all that entails). It is... horrible. Mr. McIntosh lets us know exactly how horrible it is - prostitution, grinding misery, the soul-crushing loss of all agency. It is one of the most grim and least titillating visions of the future ever committed to print. 

PK Interview: Frances Hardinge interviewed by Tom Pollock

Two great authors (and Kitschies finalists!) for the price of one.

Tom Pollock, of The City's Son and The Glass Republic, exchanged a few questions with Frances Hardinge, author of A Face Like Glass, Fly By Night and a handful of other amazing, beautiful books. Two of our favourite authors - young adult or otherwise - having a chat about world-building, rebellion, character development and cheese. 

-----

Tom Pollock: In A Face Like Glass's Caverna, you create a delightfully bonkers subterranean world: hallucinatory dairy products and amnesia inducing winery and bifurcated rulers and daring master thieves. It's a raucous, vivid and very broad mix. What made you pull in such a load of different fantastic elements into one novel?

Frances Hardinge: When I step out through my front door, I see a world that's raucous, vivid and a very broad mix. An imaginary world lacking those qualities would feel 'thin' and unrealistic to me. I'd find it hard to believe in it enough to write about it.

I do have my flaws as a writer, but 'lack of ideas' doesn't tend to be one of them. On the contrary, my world-creation tends to get out of hand unless I'm really strict with myself. There are always aspects of my worlds that the reader never sees because there simply wasn't room for them in the books (which are already a little on the tubby side).

Also, a part of my mind is a deranged alchemist, addicted to combining disparate things to see what happens. I like juxtaposing 'incompatible' ideas the way dreams do, then following through the results logically. I enjoy throwing together unlikely word combinations - words are sometimes at their most interesting when they're slightly surprised. I even have a long and exciting history of cooking disasters brought about by the same experimental impulse. (Don't ever try bacon and banana bolognese. It turns out that alliteration does not guarantee culinary success.)

Underground Reading: Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Dragonlance. 

I'm afraid this isn't going to be a conventional review, more a series of, er, discursive notes, all rather indelicately glomming together to form one of my more specious arguments.

As far as an actual review: 

I think the Dragonlance Chronicles - Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), Dragons of Winter Night (1985) and Dragons of Spring Dawning (1985) - is of a time and a (hand-wavey, theoretical) place. I've reread the three books recently, and that's not really an experience I'd recommend to anyone else. 

For the sake of this blog post/ramble, I'm more interested in the Chronicles influence, which I believe has been criminally downplayed.

So... what makes a book an influential fantasy - and by that, not just having an impact on one author, but across the entire genre? For the sake of some sort of structure, I'd argue that the answer is a combination of both innovation and ubiquity.

The former is pretty straightforward. Unless there's something innovative or new involved, there's no change to measure. Reiterating the status quo may be a type of influence, but we can't measure a negative. A book needs to do something different for us to track how those changes promulgate.

Similarly, without ubiquity - not just presence, but omnipresence - we can't assume that a book had the opportunity to make an impact. Arguably, for something to be an influence on this scale (genre-wide), it needs to be so large that it doesn't even matter if another author has read it. We can assume that someone in the publishing chain (from the rights team to the commissioning editor to the sales director to the copy editor to the agent) has read it and we can assume its presence is so vast that, even subconsciously or indirectly, its innovative presence has been somehow communicated.¹

One example - just to set a benchmark. George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is a major influence. It is the best-selling series in fantasy, and its presence on HBO has brought more new readers to genre fiction than anything since Harry Potter. Martin's work is a mainstream success, it has recognisable reference points that can be found in the fantasy books that followed and it is very, very good (that latter point isn't actually relevant in this context, but still a Nice to Have). It is hard to make any sort of claim that Martin's books aren't influential on modern fantasy.² 

Ground rules established.³ 

Which brings us back to another series, predating Martin's by ten years, that possesses the same critical combination of ubiquity and innovation: Dragonlance.

Review Round-Up: Three More Novels of Note

Another round-up: Chris Marnewick's The Soldier Who Said No, Gail Carriger's Etiquette and Espionage and Robert Jackson Bennett's American Elsewhere. Three more unequivocal "yes" reviews.

It is hard to believe that Chris Marnewick's The Soldier Who Said No (2010) is only 310 pages. So very, very much happens, but it never seems rushed. Pierre De Villiers is a South African expatriate, living in New Zealand. As the book opens, he's suspended from his job as a policeman for a fit of temper. At exactly the same time, someone makes an attempt is made on the life of the Prime Minister. The assassin uses a Bushman weapon, and, as the coincidences stack up, De Villiers becomes the prime suspect. 

Shockingly, Pierre has even worse things to worry about. His health is rapidly declining and the doctors confirm the worst: cancer. It is hard to find a man with more going wrong in his life.

Yet even this isn't even the low point for Pierre. That came years before, when he was a soldier assigned to do some of the military's more secretive mission. Upon refusing to complete one particularly unpleasant assignment, Pierre became "the solider who said no" - a man hunted down by his own countrymen. 

The Soldier Who Said No cycles between Pierre's past and his present as he works to solve a mystery that spans two continents and time periods. Pierre's a man falsely accused. In the present day, he's hunted by the (hilariously bumbling) New Zealand authorities. In the past, he's pursued by more predatory figures. In both times, he's debilitated - by cancer, starvation or inury. Yet even with all this happening, Mr. Marnewick writes at a surprisingly languorous pace. There's never sense of rush, everything unfolds smoothly and at a natural pace. Despite the action, this isn't a Bourne-style thriller. Pierre's life is certainly packed with drama, but Mr. Marnewick expresses it subtly, and often through the little things: examining street signs, discussions at meals, casual discussions with his radiotherapist...

Mr. Marnewick leaves the reader with the sense that the entire assassination plot was simply a device to explore a fascinating character, and not the other way around.

Review Round-Up: Five Novels of Note

Five books I've read recently that I just flat-out liked: Henrietta Rose-Innes' Nineveh, Mary Gentle's Black Opera, Carlos Fuentes' Vlad, Andrew Motion's Silver and Harry Karlinsky's The Evolution of Inanimate Objects. 

These all deserve longer reviews.

Nineveh (2011) by Henrietta Rose-Innes

My big ol’ grab bag of South African fiction has yet to disappoint me, but Nineveh is my favourite so far. Katya Grubbs is an exterminator - more a relocator, actually, as she’s a fundamental believer in vermin’s right to life. A swarm of mysterious beetles infests an idyllic suburb and Katya is hired to do her thing. Her investigation brings her in contact with pests of all shapes and sizes - including the suburb’s sleazy developer and her own wayward father.

Part Gothic, part mystery, all amazing. Despite the lack of any SF/F elements, Nineveh is a contemporary urban fantasy classic, along the lines of Zoo City and King Rat; a tale about a hidden world and the people (and critters) beneath our notice. This is all topped off by a genuinely surprising ending that, although it shocked me, couldn't have been more perfect.

I don't know if Nineveh is available outside of South Africa, but, if you're in any way tempted (and I hope you are) it is worth sending an email to the Book Lounge.

Below the jump... vampires, pirates, opera and forks.

Review Round-up: What's Black and Red and Everything?

Still playing review catch-up, this time with Megan Abbott's The End of Everything, Jonathan Craig's Red-Headed Sinners and Stanley John Weyman's The Man in Black.

Red-Headed Sinners (1953) by Jonathan Craig is a less-than-outstanding example of vintage noir, but still has some interesting points by which to recommend it. Jeff Stoner beats up a witness in the interrogation room and is sacked as a cop. He can't understand why he did it - the woman was provoking him, but certainly didn't deserve the throttling he gave her. Jeff figures that the only way he can restore his reputation is by solving the original crime (a jewellery theft). Unfortunately, as he prowls the city in search of witnesses, they all keep dying - and it may be that Jeff's the murderer. 

There's a lot of heavy-handed pop psychology involved, but Red-Headed Sinners is a solid job of telling a story from Jeff's (very troubled) point of view. Mr. Craig teases the "wrongly accused" formula, but it becomes readily apparent that Jeff Stoner really is the murderer. The tension is then built up around whether or not he'll realise that and, if so, if there's some sort of ultimate act of redemption he can perform.

Noteworthy? This is also one of those novels in which the protagonist is perpetually drinking. Jeff imbibes such a quantity of bourbon that I was feeling pretty hung-over by the time the book concluded.

Review Round-up: Time After Time

Paul Witcover's The Emperor of All Things and Julie Cross' The Tempest - two books about time and what makes us tick.

Paul Witcover's The Emperor of All Things (2013) is the start of a sprawling epic. Set in 1758, it features Daniel Quare, a talented journeyman in the Worshipful Company of Clockworkers. The Company is one of the cornerstones of the British Empire, for, as many a general knows, precise time measurement is the key to many a maneuver.

But the remit of the Company extends even further than just making good clocks: it investigates (and quashes) any sort of innovation into time-keeping devices. Daniel's role is a complicated one. He's a double agent within the guild, playing one faction against the other in order to satisfy his own need to learn more about the nature of time.

He's also curious about his own heritage (he's an orphan, naturally). And super-duper curious about the crazy new timepiece that he picked up from the unconscious body of a (sexy) cat burglar named Grimalkin. Something something fairies. Something something French spies. Something something war across dimensions. Did I mention "sprawling epic"? This is a really ambitious book.

For the most part, Mr. Witcover pulls it off: the fairies and the orphans and the cat burglars and the French and the dragons and the time and the espionage. Largely, this is achieved by sacrificing Daniel's agency; he comes across as one of the world's last true innocents, bounding from place to place, attentively listening to vast amounts of exposition.

Granted, being an epic amongst epics, it is revealed that Daniel is Extremely Special, and all the stories that the reader picks up are, inevitably, related to Him. (Of course, any reader that didn't pick up on "Extremely Special" at the word "orphan" is really the last true innocent.)

New Releases: Ice Forged by Gail Z. Martin

Blaine McFadden (I know, right?) kills his father, a long-overdue and universally appreciated act of retribution. Lord McFadden was a brutish thug that had been tormenting Blaine his entire life. Just to be 100% Evil, his hobbies included a) raping his teenage daughter and b) gloating about it afterwards. Still, the law's the law, and, in the greatest act of legal injustice since the opening minutes of Con Air, Blaine is punished to transportation to Edgeland.¹

In Edgeland (cold, mountainy, distinctly unfun), convicts mine rubies whilst being crushed under the heel of a corrupt military governor. By serving three years of back-breaking labour, convicts earn their 'freedom', and, as 'colonists', they allowed to perform the same back-breaking labour but for a tiny wage.

Now, after serving six years in this awful place, Blaine has actually managed to thrive - well, relatively speaking). Not only is he the party leader (his group includes a fighter, a bard, an engineer and an assassin), but Blaine's also a respected member of the colonial community. When the supply ships stop coming and the frosty plains of Edgeland become an even more miserable place, Blaine becomes a pivotal figure in the battle for survival that ensues.

Meanwhile, back on the continent, four kingdoms have all gone to war and things are looking grim. Mad King Edgar has unleashed his war sorcerers and Good King Merrill is reluctantly forced to follow suit. As powerful tides of magic wash over the land, all the kingdoms suffer, and the world is changed forever.² 

Underground Reading: To Demons Bound by Robert Vardeman and Geo. W. Proctor

It is easy to forget how lucky we are as modern fantasy readers. 

Today's fantasy isn't perfect. Far from it. There's sexism and racism and cultural appropriation and homophobia and rapiness and torture-porn and wankily pretentious pseudo-philosophy and ill-thought defenses of genocide... but... even with all that, the genre is so much better than it was. 

That's really important to keep in mind.

When we think about the fantasy fiction of the 1980s, we tend to remember two types of book: the stuff that's genuinely good and the stuff that we appreciated personally. The former, God help me, is pretty starved of examples. John Ford's The Dragon Waiting, perhaps? Fevre Dream? Early Discworld?! 

The latter category, for me at least, overflows with genial rubbish. David Eddings' Belgariad, the Dragonlance Chronicles, the Shannara books, really, damn near everything else on this list. Stuff that I'll secretly re-read on a regular basis, but wouldn't feel 100% secure about recommending to strangers. Or my mother. These are the books that hit me at the right time in the right place. We've all got them. 

But for every Mort or Pawn of Prophecy, there were hundreds, nay, thousands of other fantasy books. And they were awful. The chainmail bikinis, the nymphomaniac witches, the mulleted barbarians with names like Throg and Brak, the moonlit landscapes with wolves and dragons... We feel safe now, but only because we're safely hidden behind a successful HBO series, Peter Jackson's Academy Awards and a half-dozen China Miéville Guardian profiles. But our loinclothed past still lurks in Oxfam bookshops, library sales and in a thousand basements. Oh, we laugh now – but also we fear.

And, taking Robert Vardeman and Geo. W. Proctor's To Demons Bound (1985) as one example of our disastrous history, we've a lot of which to be afraid. 

New Releases: The Daylight War by Peter V. Brett

Here's your spoiler-free review in 15 words:

If you liked the first two, you'll like this one. If you didn't, you won't. 

Or read on.

The Daylight War is the third book in Peter V. Brett's series about a demon-plagued dying earth. The set-up is still the series' most appealing attribute: a world where, every night, brutish monsters rise from the earth to rend and slay. Prior to the events of The Warded Man (the first book in the series), people merely cowered behind 'warded' walls after the sun goes down, but the rediscovery of combat magic has led to a counter-attack by humanity. 

Arlen Bales, the rediscoverer in question, is believed by most right-thinkin' people to be the "Deliverer", a messianic figure, here to save folks from the demons. Jardir, the leader of a country of shameless Arabic analogues, also has possession of the combat magic - courtesy of some devious backstabbery. He's believed to be the Deliverer by his people. Although the two are mature enough to recognise that the demons are the main problem, both Arlen and Jardir each want to be the one and only Chosen One. Thus the "daylight war" - puny human vs puny human while the demons lick their chops and wait for sundown.

Caught between Arlen and Jardir are their wimmenfolks - Inevera, Jardir's first wife, and Leesha, a healer who has earned the affections (nudge, wink) of both men. The two women are powerful rivals and this book is their story...

...except it isn't.

Just check out the plot blurb on Amazon and the summary on the publisher's site. Neither even  mentions the name of a female character. Inevera and Leesha may be the point of view characters for the vast majority of The Daylight War, but, as the blurbs confirm, the book is in no way about them.

Lots and lots of spoilers from here on out. If you're still trying to figure out if you should read this book, please see the 15 word review at the top of the page.