This one is absolutely essential to any collection of modern SF.
THE BREAD WE EAT IN DREAMS
By Catherynne M. Valente
Subterranean, $40 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-59606-582-6
Valente, who has half-seriously described her folklore-heavy fiction as "mythpunk," offers a collection of short fiction and poetry covering a variety of styles and themes. A lot of them have a playful combination of the literal and mythological—introducing the characters of the ancient tales, with all their magical attributes, into the everyday world we inhabit.
Take the opening tale, "The Consultant." It's told in a hardboiled private eye voice straight out of Dashiell Hammett, except the first-person narrator is a woman. In another, unexpected direction, the story takes a sly look at the archetypes and patterns of the folklore it draws on. The scene is perfectly set for what follows.
"White Lines on a Green Field" starts with a high school football hero—except it's Coyote, the antihero/trickster of American Indian myth. The story is full of the ambience of small-town high school life, with its rituals and its cliques, its desperate search for the right dress to wear to homecoming and the climactic tension of the Big Game. With Coyote in charge, everything seems raised to a new magical dimension. But Bunny, the narrator, is the only one of Coyote's girlfriends who doesn't fall for the magic. Yet in the end, she's the only one who doesn't end up disappointed—perhaps because she also partakes of the Indian mythical world in which Coyote exists.
Other stories have a more transparent metaphorical layer; "How to Raise a Minotaur" takes the question of dealing with an intractable child to a more or less logical extreme, and has some fun playing with the literal and figurative results, bouncing myth against the assumptions of modern family life. "In the Future When All's Well" gives a young girl's viewpoint on a world where everyone's turning into vampires. And "The Wolves of Brooklyn" starts with a simple premise— the invasion of the borough by the wild canines—and evolves consequences, not at all the ones you might expect.
Valente's sense of humor shows in these stories, but it dominates the poems. For example, "Mouse Koan" starts with the cosmic egg of the Big Bang universe, noting all the things it includes—such as "the heat death of prime time television." "The Secret of Being a Cowboy" confides, "Most of us are girls," and "We have a dental plan." "What the Dragon Said: A Love Story" starts off with a bar joke.
Several of the stories here were previously published in magazines or online, including "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While," set in the world of her three "Fairyland" novels, and "Silently—and Very Fast," which was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula. If you're just catching up with Valente, a fair number of her books and stories are available either in paperback or in e-editions—or even free online. But for those already familiar with her work who want a permanent addition to their collections, this deluxe hardcover should be just the right speed.
EIGHT MILLION GODS
By Wen Spencer
Baen, $25.00 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3898-1
Here's a stand-alone novel about Nikki Delany, a young writer with obsessive compulsive disorder, who finds herself in the middle of Japanese mythology come to life.
The novel starts with a policeman banging on her apartment door, accompanied by her mother, who (as it turns out) is convinced she belongs in a mental hospital. Since her mother is a U.S. Senator, the policeman is at first inclined to take her seriously. But with some clever moves, Nikki manages to escape—and heads straight for Japan, where her high school friend, Miriam, starts her on the process of acculturation. Miriam has been in Japan a few months longer, and can give Nikki a few pointers on the society, but basically neither one of them has much chance of fitting in.
That becomes evident when the two women start talking about one of Nikki's novels and draw the attention of the local police, who think the plot wrinkle Nikki's just told Miriam about is an actual murder. She tries to convince them—not helped by the language barrier—that it's all just a story, only to learn there's been a real murder that eerily matches the details of the one she made up. And since she's talked about it all on her blog, some crazy fan could have read it and put the idea into action.
Freed from custody after Miriam alerts the American consulate, Nikki starts writing to exorcise her compulsion—and to try making progress on the novel she's been working on. (She's under contract for a romance, but she somehow feels compelled to kill off her romantic leads.) Then she starts wondering just how closely her supposed crazy fan actually followed her scenario for the murder. She goes to the murdered man's building, and discovers that too many details of the real murder match her fictional scenario—and panic sets in. Has the crazy fan hacked her computer to get the details? Is he following her? She's preparing to flee the city—and then the real nature of her problem reveals itself.
Nikki has drawn the attention of a tanuki, a raccoon-like shapeshifter out of Japanese myth. Next thing she knows, a minor Japanese god—Atsumori, who appears to her as a teenage boy—takes her under his protection, and explains what has been happening. Nikki is an oracle, and what she writes is true.
In Atsumori's company—not entirely at her own free will, because he has the power to take over her body to go where he needs to—Nikki sets off on an adventure that ultimately involves many more gods, demons and tanuki, the yakuza, and various allies she has met through her interest in anime and manga (two interests she shares with Spencer herself). Also, a character named Scary Cat Dude she created in hopes of a romantic hero is tracking her... a problem of a different sort, especially after he too turns out to be real. And just in case we've forgotten the opening scene, her mom from Hell shows up determined to put Nikki in a mental hospital once and for all.
Spencer is a good storyteller, with a knack for pulling interesting plot surprises out of left field (a task made somewhat easier by her choice of setting). But Japan and its culture have also made a significant impact on our mainstream culture, accelerated in recent decades by the popularity of Japanese media. So while some readers will find a touch of the exotic in her Japanese folklore and setting, others will find it pleasantly familiar. And many will consider it a welcome break from the standard monsters of much current SF— not everyone wants every book filled with vampires and zombies.
A well-paced story with interesting characters and setting—give it a look if you're in the mood for something a little different.
THE GIST
By Michael Marshall Smith
Translated by Benoit Domis
Retranslated by Nicholas Royle
Subterranean, $35 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-59606-561-1
Here's an interesting experiment: a story written in English by one author, translated into French by another, and back into English by a third—who has not seen the first author's original text or communicated with him about it other than to agree to the project. What makes the project so interesting is that the story itself is about a translator faced with an apparently untranslatable text.
The story, which runs to about twenty pages in the original version, opens with the narrator, John, meeting one of his clients—a London-based rare book dealer named Portnoy. John begins by refusing the assignment he's being offered, in part because Portnoy owes him money. Portnoy—apparently reluctantly— writes out a check for 750 pounds for three older jobs, and then offers John 1,000 pounds to take on the new project, upping the ante to 1,200 almost before John has time to react.
John protests that the job is impossible—the text is either a fake or nonsense. He can read an impressive number of languages: the usual French, Spanish, Russian, German, plus more obscure ones like Basque, and some no longer extant, such as Lange d'oc. All come easily to him— though he has a strange block against speaking any of them. Because of this gift, he ekes out a living as a translator, living in a shabby apartment lined with reference books and little else. But Portnoy's offer will pay
his rent for months and buy him a much-needed new computer. And the dealer appears to be willing to accept "the gist" of the story in lieu of a more exact translation. John takes the book and heads home.
Instead of sticking to the project, he spends much of the next week getting drunk in pubs. The bartender—and others—tells him he has been muttering something incomprehensible. He has blackouts, and he's developing a nasty cough. And he finds himself getting false memories. The story has a twist ending that deserves not to be spilled here, other than to say it's also about translation—in a somewhat different sense, and that the story would have been a good fit for a genre magazine.
The appearance of the story in three versions—original English, French translation, and translation back into English—adds an interesting twist to the project. I've undoubtedly missed things due to my rusty French, last regularly used in grad school. But you don't really need to read French to enjoy "The Gist." There's a good deal of interest and pleasure comparing the two English versions.
Smith's initial version is informal and slangy, with some characters using nonstandard grammar. He also drops in the occasional odd word like "eldritch" or tricky metaphor, giving Domis some interesting challenges. One of the top translators of English-language horror fiction into French, Domis does what appears to be a smooth job, finding equivalents for Smith's quirky idioms and giving his narrator a similarly shabby feel, though some of the odder vocabulary, like "eldritch," is dropped for lack of an exact equivalent. And the story ends up a touch longer in French.
In the retranslation by Royle, himself a well-received novelist, some of the fine points of the original are lost. For example, John's sometime girlfriend Cass now speaks more grammatically, and thus seems a bit more refined. John's language is somewhat less quirky, too, and he seems a bit wordier—though the story as a whole is actually a bit shorter. But the overall plot—the gist—comes through admirably. And that, of course, is the point of the exercise.
Anyone interested in linguistics will find this one intriguing—especially anyone who reads French fluently.
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