I’m really enjoying these recent Hank Davis anthologies, especially The Baen Big Book of Monsters and Things from Outer Space. As I’ve mentioned before, no one else today is collecting writers like Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber, and Fredric Brown and packaging them in mass market anthologies for under 8 bucks. Davis is making the greatest SF writers of the 20th Century accessible to casual modern readers, and that’s no small thing.
Plus, his anthologies are a blast.
His most recent, If This Goes Wrong…, showed up just after Christmas. It collects 17 tales of off-kilter futures originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy, World of IF, Analog, and other fine publications. Just think — some kid in Oklahoma picked this book up and discovered the science fiction of the pulps for the first time. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.
It’s been a few months since I’ve done one of these. Partly that’s for personal reasons that I won’t go into here, and partly it’s because I haven’t received a lot of submissions lately, so I went looking for a book to review, and I ended up with one that proved a little longer than I anticipated. (If you’d like to submit a book for me to review, please see the instructions.)
This month’s self-published book review is of Dawn of Wonder, by Jonathan Renshaw, a 700-page novel of epic fantasy. Mr. Renshaw doesn’t need my help selling his book, as he’s sold over 200,000 copies, has over 2,500 Amazon reviews, and has won a bevy of awards. But it is a self-published book, and I was curious whether it could live up to the expectations.
It is certainly a well-written book, with rich and poetic language and strong characterization. Aedan, the main character, is instantly likeable, adventurous and bold but with a grave weakness that will haunt him throughout the novel. We’re first introduced to Aedan as a boy, together with his friends, most notably Kalry, the daughter of the local noble. When tragedy strikes and Kalry is lost to slavers, Aedan is blamed, and his family has to leave the area. It is here that we are introduced to the source of Aedan’s fears and weakness, his father’s abusive temper. When they arrive in the city of Castath, Aedan’s father separates from his family to return to the criminal lifestyle he had practiced before marrying.
Aedan quickly decides that what he wants is to become a soldier, independent of his father and the domineering woman his mother finds shelter with, and more importantly, able to pursue revenge on the nation of slavers who took Kalry. When he seeks out the training to become one, he quickly catches the eye of General Osric, and is offered a place at the Academy, studying to become a gray marshal, the spies and scouts who are Castath’s first line of defense. Believing that becoming one would give him an even better chance to avenge Kalry, he leaps at the opportunity.
I was reminded of something while perusing Thomas Parker’s laudable Master List of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror Literature last week ( or “The List” — posted HERE on Black Gate).
Each of us likely has a book or two (or ten) we adore – absolutely cherish and consider indispensible – that will never appear on any of these lists (unless we compile our own list).
These are gems worthy of our love, yet they are just not that well known, or they have been overlooked or mostly forgotten. Some books, after all, are trees that grow for hundreds of years, while others are flowers that bloom in glory and then are gone.
Later on I might mention a few that I admire, but I will not be arguing that any of them should be on Parker’s or any of the other lists. My thesis here is simply that there are far more great books than can be squeezed onto a top 500 or top 700 or top 5,000. And that’s wonderful news, isn’t it?
Put another way: If some horrible cosmic accident occurred in the multiverse that wiped out all 700 of the books (and book series) on Parker’s list – suddenly none of them existed here on our version of Earth – much of our great fantasy, science-fiction, and horror literature would be lost, granted. Still, I believe we could, from what remained, start right back at square one and compile another list of 700 books just as worthy and strongly representative of the genres.
Of course, why we even need such lists is simple: One reason there are so many great books and so many good books is because there are so many books. Period. (With between 600,000 and 1,000,000 new ones being added each year in the United States alone.) And, as you might guess, the ratio of the good to the bad, mediocre, ambivalent, hackneyed, limp is, well, daunting. If you try to find the great or the good without guidance, the odds are stacked against you. Like going alone to Manhattan without a map and just assuming you’ll walk around and stumble into the best places.
In Ireland in 1895, a woman named Bridget Cleary was burned following accusations that she was a changeling. Her horrific demise serves as the inspiration for The Hidden People by Alison Littlewood, a book of arresting power and unbearable sadness. I can understand why. Try to think of something more tragic than being executed for a crime you’re powerless to understand.
Albie Mirralls, the novel’s protagonist, faces a similar dilemma. When he learns that his sweet-natured cousin, Lizzie, was murdered by her husband after he became convinced she was one of the fae, he travels to her home in Yorkshire. There he uncovers the sordid tale of her death in the shelter of her cottage, all the while succumbing to an exquisite madness. When his wife, Helena, travels from London to join him, the situation becomes perilous. But compared to a shocking revelation concerning a supposed friend, it pales.
Littlewood’s writing routinely takes your breath away with its astonishing beauty. She wields a tremendous command of language, bordering on peerless in the way she describes the ethereal nature of the surroundings. I visualized the sickening idyll of Halfoak, the bucolic village nestled in the heart of Yorkshire, so clearly that I could have closed my eyes and awoken in the novel. In a novel that places tremendous importance on the endless summer of the village, Littlewood’s descriptions resonate powerfully. They add a definite sense of unease to the plot.
Among the additional effective qualities of the book were the bleak plot points and suffering characters. No one has an easy time of it. Even some of the most famous tragedies, like Romeo and Juliet, have nuggets of humor, but not so with Littlewood’s tale. Chapter after chapter, Albie suffers agonizing emotional and physical ordeals, never once receiving the much-needed comfort of comic relief. It’s possible Littlewood could have included nuggets of dark humor about the superstition surrounding the fae. But the novel offers not a moment to laugh with yourself.
Nor do the characters have any reason to feel joyful. Least of all Essie Aikin, the mother of a baby who is stolen from her home. I felt a stronger amount of pity for her than for Albie, whom I admit I had no strong feelings for until the end.
Another character I cared for was Albie’s wife, Helena, who tries to support Albie through the visit. The dissolution of love for devastating reasons will twist your heart.
There are a few novels I will return two over and over. García Marquéz’ One Hundred Years of Solitude is one. Dan Symmons’ Hyperion is another. I’ve been back to R. Scott Baker’s Prince of Nothing series a few times.
But my pile is shrinking. I’ve grown as a reader and can’t read Dune anymore, and I haven’t tried to go back to Tolkein in probably a decade. But one truly haunting work is Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood and Lavondyss. The novels won the World Fantasy Award in 1985 and the BSFA Award in 1988 respectively, if my dates aren’t off.
The two novels center on three families who live around Ryhope Wood, which is one of the last ancient, undisturbed forests in England, meaning that its roots and its ghosts are truly ancient. Now, there are lots of people who evoke deep time in their writing. Tolkein obviously. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Steven Erikson.
But reading Holdstock is to viscerally experience layers of deep, Jungian time. The wood is haunted not by ghosts of the past per se; it is haunted by the ancient memories of ghosts that each person carries within them, all the legends, remembered in story and forgotten.
Peter S. Beagle has, by dint of his enduring classic The Last Unicorn, become the patron saint of these creatures among fantasy authors. But more than this, Beagle has become to fantasy writing a sort of patron saint of the longing that unicorns (when exhumed from the candied, polychromatic encrustations of the popular imagination) have come to embody. Beagle has resurrected the unicorn as a symbol to be reverenced, whether in his early novel or, as I have argued recently in another review, in the person of Lioness in his recent Summerlong. Unicorns represent the quiet desperation for a touch of otherworldliness, of the desire for something beyond or above or even just beside to press up against our daily lives. It is this longing for visitation that runs through his latest work, the short book In Calabria, and plays out on the confines of a rustic farm and in the life of a single isolated farmer.
Claudio Bianchi is an old man. He lives alone on a hillside farm in Calabria, the region of Italy forming the mountainous toes of the country’s famous boot outline. Calabria is scenic and slow, off the beaten path. Beagle plays into the timelessness of the place. His protagonist is timeless and isolated as well: solitary, cranky, and proud of the tiny, half-ruined farm he cultivates in the same manner his ancestors did a hundred years before. Beagle, who has had his share of trouble lately and perhaps longs for the sort of escape Bianchi’s life represents, sets a stage of idyllic isolation in rustic Mediterranean splendor. “The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone,” we are told early on in the story. “And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them.”
It is not, however, this isolation and timelessness alone that draws a unicorn to Bianchi’s farm to give birth. Rather, Beagle leads the reader to understand it is Bianchi’s crusty humility and his compassion for and amiable companionship with the animals that share his land. It may also be because Bianchi is a poet. His reputation as such among his neighbors is something of a puzzle, as he never shares his poems or publishes them. He simply takes pleasure in fitting words together, in working them the way he works the soil, and leaves them hidden in the drawers of his desk. For perhaps all these reasons, a unicorn appears in Calabria and chooses a hollow in view of Bianchi’s back window to give birth to her young. “I am past visitations,” Bianchi asks the pregnant unicorn when it first arrives. “What do you want with me?”
Ada Palmer’s debut Too Like the Lightning was one of the most acclaimed SF novels of last year. The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog selected it as one of the Best Novels of 2016, and Rich Horton included it in his 2017 Hugo Nomination list, saying:
A fairly seamless mixture of SF and Fantasy… Too Like the Lightning is set several centuries in the future, in a world divided into “Hives,” cooperative family-like organizations with different strengths. The narrator is Mycroft Canner, who, we slowly learn, is a criminal… but who is also quite engaging, and an important mentor to an amazing child who can bring inanimate things to life. This novel introduces a conflict – a threat to the world’s balance of power – and also intricately sketches the complex background of this future, and introduces a ton of neat characters. Then it stops, which is its main weakness – it is but half a novel. The sequel (Seven Surrenders) is due in March 2017.
Seven Surrenders, the second novel in what’s now being called the Terra Ignota series, arrives in hardcover next week from Tor Books. It is 400 pages. The Will to Battle, the third book in the series, is scheduled to be published December 5, 2017. It is 368 pages. Both books will be priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. Read the first four chapters of Too Like the Lightning at Tor.com, and the first two chapters of Seven Surrendershere.
A few weeks back I gave you the list of preliminary ballots for The Horror Writers Association (HWA) 2016 Bram Stoker Awards. Not only is this award the most awesome visually, but any of the works honored by making the preliminary cut are more than worthy of your cold-weather binging.
However, on February 23rd the HWA announced the finalists for the Stoker in each category. So if you were having trouble deciding where to begin, this should help narrow the field as each category now contains five works only, from which one will be chosen to receive the lovely little haunted mansion to forever grace their mantelpieces.
So here they are…
Superior Achievement in a Novel
Hard Light, Elizabeth Hand (Minotaur)
Mongrels, Stephen Graham Jones (William Morrow)
The Fisherman, John Langan (Word Horde)
Stranded, Bracken MacLeod (Tor)
Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, Paul Tremblay (William Morrow)
I’ve been friends with Sharon Shinn ever since we co-hosted a writing workshop at Capricon here in Chicago some years ago. Turns out that’s a great way to bond: giving grueling assignments to aspiring writers while grading their efforts with a cruel eye. Try it some time!
Something else you should try is Sharon’s Elemental Blessings series, which just wrapped up with the fourth volume, Unquiet Land, which arrived in hardcover in November. C.S.E. Cooney, in her report on Royal Airs, described it as follows.
The Elemental Blessings series… take place in the Kingdom of Chialto. It’s an exciting time in this secondary world, with “smoker cars” taking over for horse-drawn carriages, the blushing dawn of flying machines, alliances forming and falling apart with realms across the mountains and seas, the delicate balance of power between the regent, the primes of the Five Houses, and the heirs to the throne.
Ace Doubles are a popular topic at Black Gate. I suspect there may even be a bit of friendly competition to see who can unearth items not already reviewed. While John O’Neill and Rich Horton most certainly have a lead on the rest of us, it is a pleasant experience to find a book that has not yet been dealt with and add one’s own commentary.
That was the case with D-391, originally published in 1959:
The World Swappers by John Brunner
Siege of the Unseen by A.E. Van Vogt
I took a deliberate break from my ongoing analysis of Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga to clear my mind, and I needed something to tide me over. Working alphanumerically through my growing Ace Double collection, the first unread book that came to hand was this somewhat tatty volume. (Well technically it was a western — D-034 Hellion’s Hole/Feud In Piney Flats by Ken Murray (1953) — but the allure of Messrs Brunner and Van Vogt proved too great.)
