Reading in May

This collection felt like being handed a treasure map. Suddenly, I know just where I’m going when exploring this bizarre sub genre. Yes, not all of the stories worked entirely – Kathe Koja’s, for instance, was too bizarre and irrational for me to get any emotional connection with at all – but the ones that did drastically outweighed the others, and even the not-so-great stories are never trite or boring. If you’re interested in The New Weird, and somehow have not read this yet, it’s absolutely essential.


This was a very interesting biography-esque book, primarily consisting of letters to and from Bulgakov. My only complaint is that the summaries at the beginning of each chapter (detailing the overall events of his life, so as to give the letters some context) could probably have benefited from being spread throughout, rather than lumped at the beginning, as it felt odd in some of the lengthier chapters to go from reading about Bulgakov’s death say, to reading a letter he wrote four years earlier about his dinner plans. Still, if you’re interested in Bulgakov, this’ll shed quite a bit of personal and professional light on the man.


Almost every story in this collection is about finding subtle holes in our understandings of the world, in deconstructing almost every kind of happiness that people find for themselves. That’s not to paint this as a wholly grim work, though, because the beauties of the work come from those same interactions and observations. If I was to compare the writing to any one author, I’d probably go with Stephen King, as odd as that sounds. The stories here, like in King’s work, are not based on forward motion, but rather a flashback and musing filled contemplation of a man’s life, or at least a part of it. This is a quiet work, but an interesting one too.


Though no one part of The Neutronium Alchemist is as jaw dropping as the what’sgoingon!? segment of the Reality Dysfunction, the book as a whole is much stronger, with most of the issues I had with the first book ironed out. Well, except its own infuriating cliffhanger ending. Still, these books are the epitome of wide screen space opera, as far as I can tell, and I can’t wait to dive into The Naked God. Review coming when I’ve finished the series.


20th Century Ghosts is at once exactly what a horror collection should be (disturbing, supernatural, even morbid on occasion), perfectly aware of every one of your expectations (Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead works precisely because it’s nothing like what you expect), and something completely different (such as the touching Pop Art, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read). If you’re interested in horror, you need to read this as soon as possible. I’ll definitely be returning to these stories on here, though I’ll need some time to gather my thoughts, I expect.

[Note: At the time of writing I still have not read My Father’s Mask, so, technically, I haven’t finished the book. All the same, I’m going to finish the collection by tomorrow (so still May) without a doubt, and I’m unsure about the status of my internet then, so I figured it was better to go through with a blank than to procrastinate and miss the end of the month.]


The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon seems, at first, like it’ll be an excellent novel. The young girl’s voice is perfect, and the minutia of her struggle to survive, lost, in the woods is gripping. Then the supernatural comes in and – who’s surprised? – it all goes to hell. Not the hell of fire and brimstone, but rather one of wholly absent tension and dues ex machine. Yay. Full review coming at some point.


Apartment 16’s a character driven horror story, and as such it’s a good thing that the characterization’s generally excellent, and the walls positively drip with atmosphere. There are a few problems herein – the ending was a bit of a letdown, Apryl’s character isn’t as captivating as Seth’s, and god do I hate that Y in Apryl – but none of them really matter when stacked up against the work as a whole. Review coming soon.


The first quarter or so of this book was fairly difficult, to be honest. It’s fairly standard in fantasy to have a period of disorientation – nothing makes the world seem quite so exotic and strange as being clueless about it, after all – but here that period goes on for well over a hundred pages, and it starts to get quite annoying. Still, the book does eventually come together. The writing is, as you would expect from Mieville, excellent, and the narrative’s incredibly fun. This isn’t my favorite of his works, but it’s certainly not a disappointment.


This book of essays turned out to not be my thing. At all. Individual portions of essays were appealing – the book had two quote-worthy passages, which was quite impressive for a volume of only 139 pages – but every single one of the essays felt meandering and disjointed, an effect that was only exacerbated if the reader reads more than one in a sitting. Before long, all the boundaries between them break down, whatever hard-to-detect main ideas there might have been long lost, and you’re just drifting along on an endless small-wonders ramble.


Swainston’s novel was one that I was quite looking forward to, and it didn’t disappoint. The Year of Our War is a bizarre, character driven story that looks into immortality and how societies – and people – progress over time. My full review is here.

Steph Swainston - The Year of Our War

I wanted to ask the Emperor how life was, back when god walked the earth. What did it really look like? Sound like? What did it mean to live when everybody knew everything? While San wrote, the pen scratching, I tried to imagine existence with god nearby, enjoying its creation, when there was no Insects, no Castle – this two-thousand-year-old stone, just lush grass. The Fourlands does not really belong to us – it is god’s playground; god gave us responsibility for its creation, which we have failed to defend.

As ever, San read my mind. Almost imperceptibly, he said, “Once there was peace.”

The Year of Our War is a book that, at first, looks just about as generic as fantasy can get. We’ve got a (literally) faceless, inhuman enemy; we’ve got an immortal protagonist who can fly and, due to his ability to access the Shift, may be instrumental in the war against the Insects; we’ve got a series of squabbling, immortal lords, generally far more interested in increasing their own fortunes than in banding together and actually accomplishing something; and, to cap it all off, we’ve got a semi-divine Emperor ruling over the whole thing. And yet, The Year of Our War is anything but a traditional fantasy. The novel is set apart both by the excellent characterization and first person prose of its main character, Jant, and by its interesting take on immortality.

Now, I’ve seen some people say that Jant is a poor character because of his weak personality. This is absolutely baffling to me. It’s true that Jant is not the driving force behind most of the events of the book, but since when does a character not being a traditional hero invalidate their depth? Jant’s very much the junior among the immortals of the Emperor’s Circle, and he is constantly dragged into the schemes of the older, more powerful, and more forceful immortals. Since before his time in the Circle, he has used the hallucinogenic scolopendium. His drug use is one of the few things that sets him apart amongst the immortals, and his habit has, if anything, worsened. It hasn’t, however, given him a degree of control over his own life; instead, he’s just added yet another master yanking him in yet another direction. One of the only times he’s ever taken direct control of something in his life was to commit a terrible crime that he now regrets. He’s conflicted, intelligent, and immensely self centered. He is absolutely oblivious to the feelings of those around him, something never more obvious than the scenes with his wife, Tern. All of that points to a deep, realistic character to me, even if he’s not the easiest to always cheer along with.

Jant isn’t always the most honest, nor knowledgeable of narrators. When one of his ideas backfires, he rarely admits guilt. Any events that took place without him present might as well not have happened, as far as his recollections are concerned. This gives the book a meandering feel at times, because sub plots are dropped and resumed almost at random. This can be annoying, yes, but it also gives the book a more lifelike feel, one that timelier pacing would be unable to provide. Paradoxically, the focused nature of the narrative is what lends The Year of Our War its sense of scale. When Jant returns to an area unmentioned for a hundred pages, only to find it burned to the ground, it’s apparent that the war with the Insects is bigger than any one person can comprehend.

The thematic crux of The Year of Our War is the immortality of the Circle. Though at first it seems to be handled in a comic book sense, where immortality and blessing are simply means to kill monsters better, it soon becomes apparent that the longevity of the Fourlands’ rulers dictates every aspect of their culture. This is explored in what is by far the book’s most interesting sub plot, Swallow’s quest for immortality on the basis of her musical skills. When she goes up to the emperor, he says:

“Do you think music requires an immortal guardian, as Lightening controls the skill of archery? Would it better if music was left to change and develop as future people wish?”

Since its policy makers are immortal, the Fourlands have essentially stagnated. This isn’t a Warhammer-esque stagnation, where progress is lost forever, but, as long as the immortals reign over their disciplines, true progress cannot take place. How could a musketeer outperform the god of archery, and, if he could not, how could the invention ever take hold in such a society? The immortals, however, only control the arts of war, and the rest of the society can progress at a standard pace. This leads to the interesting (though occasionally hard to swallow) existence of a society where people wear T-shirts and kill each other with swords.

This stagnation extends to characterization as well as to setting. One of the major complaints that I’ve seen about The Year of Our War is that the supporting characterizations are shallow. I don’t completely agree in all cases, but I’ll admit they have a point – I just think the one dimensionality of certain characters is intentional (though, as I’ve said on here before, interesting thematic decisions don’t always translate well to enjoyable reading). When a character becomes immortal, they’re frozen at whatever age they happen to be at, arresting their own development:

“How old have you been for two hundred years, Comet?”

“Twenty-three. But I’ve grown wiser!”

“Have You? I think it would be a shame to deny the Fourlands the music she would make if she were to grow more mature. When she gains more experience, her music will be so improved that the rest of the world will learn from it.”

Of course, the members of the Circle don’t think that they’ve been treading water for thousands of years:

Many [immortals] are jaded and love innovation; some of us, like myself, invent to make our lives easier and to prove we are the best specialists in our various professions. The more confident immortals embrace novelty and would welcome Swallow’s continual creation.

While at first convincing, Jant’s words soon ring hollow. First of all, the end of the first sentence is very telling: to prove we are the best specialists in our various professions. So, while Jant may pass his time by inventing gliders, you’re not going to see Lightening rendering himself obsolete by inventing (or even endorsing) handguns. The older immortals are all trapped in their own pasts. Lightening still squabbles with Mist over territorial disputes forgotten before any living mortal was born; Mist is unwilling to acknowledge Ata’s innovations, because something that daring would be unthinkable in the more traditional time that he’s a product of.

The Insects, a faceless enemy that endlessly encroaches on the borders of the Fourlands, drive almost every event in the novel, but they’re probably the least interesting part of it. They’re suitably terrifying off screen, of course, but the Circle’s prowess defangs them a tad in direct confrontation. Really, the main problem facing the human armies seems to be a lack of arrows, and, as such, I have a simple plan for victory: all T-shirt factories have hereby been taken over by the state, and they will produce either A. arrows, or B. quivers to hold said arrows. If every archer brings, say, fifteen quivers, instead of the customary four arrows, I’m confident the Insects would cease to be such a big deal.

And then there’s the Shift, an altogether different realm in which the rules of reality are totally different, accessed by overdosing on scolopendium. I don’t understand how there are so few Fourlanders there, if an overdose is really all that’s needed, and if scolopendium is as often abused as Jant’s flashbacks would have us believe, but that’s a miniscule point. The Shift is a breeding ground for the bizarre, and it would be easy to let it grow whimsical to the point of irrelevance, but creatures like the unsettling Vermiform insure that there’re some teeth in the whole affair, and I’m looking forward to learning more about what the hell it is in future volumes.

The Year of Our War is an excellent debut. I’ve seen a whole host of reviews that have called it a Miéville clone, and I just don’t really get that. It’s about a self centered character who flies, so alright, I guess that’s a superficial similarity to Perdido Street Station. They’re both New Weird, but I don’t think genre’s enough to acquire rip off status. They’re both concerned with questions of immortality and an eternal war…oh, wait, no; they’re not. Maybe I’m being silly, but I don’t know how a book can be a pastiche while exploring wholly different themes. The Year of Our War has got some flaws, some of which are easily excusable and some of which are not, but it makes up for all of them with its tight focus and interesting ideas. If you’re interested in New Weird, this is something you need to check out.

An Addendum to Up and Coming (and Essential?) in May: Above the Snowline

These lists always turn out to bite me in the ass a bit. By the time the month's over, without fail, I will have discovered at least one thing that is just as necessary as anything on the list. As April rolled around, I saw Shine on a shelf and realized it came out far earlier than I realized. A few days ago I finally got around to looking up some of Ligotti's work, and what do you know, his Songs of a Dead Dreamer was (theoretically) rereleased in March.

This time's a bit different, though. I knew about this book at the time, but I didn't throw it up for the same reason that I didn't put Hobb's new releases up, despite my enjoyment of Hobb: I feel really uncomfortable having a latter book in a series that I haven't read. What happens if I read the series and it turns out to be shit? Now, I haven't read the whole series, here, but I've read the first book, and, from what I can see, this release is (wholly?) absent in the parts of the 'net that I frequent. The author is Steph Swainston, and the book is Above the Snowline:


I can't say much about it, having not read the preceding two volumes, but I will have quite a bit to say about her debut, The Year of Our War, in the coming days, and, if this is anything approaching that novel's quality, this is something to watch out for.

Up and Coming (and Essential?) in May

I quite liked The City and the City, but it only felt tangentially like a Mieville novel. The weirdness and interesting themes were there, but everything felt quite muted. Even if it’s not set in Bas Lag, Kraken looks like it’s going to be a lot closer to Mieville’s more colorful works. There’s a decently sized sample floating around I haven’t read the whole thing (I generally prefer to devour something in a few sittings, rather than taunt myself with excerpts), but I couldn’t resist the opening, and I love the writing there. Several reviews of this are out so far, all glowing, including Wert's and The Speculative Scotsman's.


Apartment 16 looks like a dark, claustrophobic horror novel, but what’s got me most excited are the great reviews. James came first, and he convinced me that this was something I had to look into. When the Speculative Scotsman joined him, I knew I needed to read this sooner rather than later. If you’re into horror, this seems like a pretty safe bet from where I’m sitting.


Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet was an excellent read and just the kind of thing that makes me desperate to read more of an author’s work. The prose was both beautiful and precise throughout, the characterization superb. Leviathan Wept is a collection of his short stories (some of which are award winning) that looks perfect for filing that urge. You can get one of the stories, the The Cambist and Lord Iron, here for free.

UPDATE

And, finally: