One of the reasons for that quick engagement is that River of Stars is largely an unabashed hero tale concerning Ren Daiyan, whom we first meet as the 15-year-old son of a minor provincial clerk, practicing his archery and learning to read from an embittered failed scholar of a teacher. Daiyan is drafted by a local prefect to join his armed guard, and on his very first mission dispatches seven would-be thieves with an efficiency that would do Legolas proud. He almost immediately disappears into the forest, emerging later as a famed bandit with Robin Hood-like overtones, gaining a loyal companion and initiating, as we are occasionally reminded by asides referring to later chroniclers, his growing legend. Parallel to this is the story of Lin Shan, the brilliant and inquisitive daughter of a minor scholar, who we initially meet eagerly absorbing the glories of a regional Peony Festival, and fatefully meeting a former prime minister and a famous exiled poet. As with Under Heaven, the female point of view of Shan is narrated in present tense, lending a sense of immediacy to complement the more chronicle-like tale of Daiyan. Perhaps it’s partly for this reason that Shan, whose brilliance is not merely proclaimed but demonstrated both through actual examples of her poetry and some crucial instances of her Holmes-like skills of deduction and inference, is easily the most appealing figure in the book, and one of Kay’s most memorable characters in general.
Compelling as these central characters may be, this hardly suggests the truly epic scope of the narrative or the richness of the minor characters, from the hapless poetry-loving emperor, to the shrewd but brutal leaders of threatening northern tribes, to a venal court official and his Lady Macbeth-type wife. One of the advantages of using Chinese history as a template is that it gives Kay a stage that can credibly accommodate military campaigns putting tens of thousands of soldiers at risk over thousands of miles of territory (including an almost mordantly comic subplot involving an army that reaches its destination only to notice that it forgot to bring the siege engine), as well as wildly decadent projects such as the Flowers and Rocks Network, unearthing and moving giant stones cross-country – at expense of human and animal life, not to mention defacement of the landscape – to decorate the emperor’s gardens. There are even ominous hints about the early development of footbinding, which lends a chilling sense of the extent of the oppressive gender politics Shan is up against. In brief, Kay does not pretend that the society of Kitai, homeland to both the major characters, is even particularly worth defending, with its brutal social and sexual injustices and its madly incompetent military. But the story finally returns, in a fateful and heartbreaking decision which Daiyan feels compelled to make, to the question of individual honor and integrity. This is no innocent Middle Earth threatened by Mordor, but a highly problematical society in which such honor is hard to locate. It’s one of Kay’s recurring themes, and it’s never been handled with such complexity, scope, and insight as it is in River of Stars.
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The first thing you notice about Sofia Samatar’s extraordinary debut novel A Stranger in Olondria, quite literally from the opening sentence, is the hypnotic lyricism of its prose: ‘‘As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses.’’ On rare occasions, her fondness for figurative language almost overreaches (‘‘We passed through like a wayward draft’’), but there is no doubt that we are in the hands of a gifted stylist whose language alone is enough to draw you into her tale. The other first thing you notice is that the novel features a frontispiece map – often a signal of an oncoming quest narrative – filled with mellifluous but unidentifiable place names, sometimes suggesting vaguely Celtic roots (Belenduri, Balinfeil, Olondria). I confess I’ve come to approach such maps with a degree of apprehension, since experience teaches that some authors who go to such lengths with geography fully intend to trap us there until we’ve passed through every last village somewhere in volume thirteen.
It turns out there’s not much to worry about, though, because A Stranger in Olondria is less a conventional epic than a gorgeously imagined ghost romance, which undermines its apparently familiar quest setting at almost every turn. I have no idea if Samatar intends to revisit this world (although an incipient war at the end certainly leaves open an invitation to do so), but the fact is that her Olondria has less in common with Middle-earth or the Four Lands than with Le Guin’s Orsinia or even Thomas Mann’s Venice, and that map actually becomes quite useful in terms of understanding both the trade routes and cultural isolation that are central to the narrative. Both of these are crucial to the coming of age tale of her narrator, Jevick of Tyom, whom we first meet as a quick and intellectually curious child in the remote and almost entirely illiterate village of Tyom on one of the ‘‘Tea Islands,’’ some distance from the mainland. Jevick’s household includes his brusque father, a successful pepper merchant, his birth mother and stepmother, and his mentally challenged older brother Jom. Realizing that the future of his business – and his family’s well-being – depends on Jevick, the father hires a tutor named Lunre from Bain, the major city and trading port of the fabled and sophisticated Olondria. Jevick takes to his lessons eagerly, discovering, in one truly remarkable passage, that letters and numbers might be arranged to tell stories, and not merely to total up accounts.
From here on, the novel becomes in large part a romance of reading, and a celebration (quite literally) of the power of story. When his father dies unexpectedly, Jevick inherits the responsibility of traveling to Olondria to sell peppers, and aboard the ship encounters a young woman, Jissavet, who is dying of a hereditary wasting disease and hopes to find treatment in Olondria. Upon arrival, Jevick is quickly seduced (also quite literally) by the glamor and excitement of the city, and gives little further thought to Jissavet and her mother – until he finds himself haunted by Jissavet’s ghost, or what the Olondrians refer to as an ‘‘angel,’’ who implores Jevick to rescue her buried body and burn it according to her native tradition. When Jevick reveals that he has met an angel, he finds himself under arrest and at the center of an ongoing struggle between a materialist government determined to wipe out all traces of what they view as local superstition, and a priesthood who view him as a valuable asset in retaining their own power. After escaping a deadly massacre, Jevick undertakes an arduous mountain journey, trying to save a wounded companion while hoping to find a way to release the spirit of Jissavet, with whom he is increasingly falling in love. Jissavet’s own tragic tale, revealed late in the narrative, is only one of several interpolated tales (including Lunre’s) which lend a surprisingly dense complexity to a novel which, by most genre fantasy standards, is relatively modest in scope. But just about every piece is in place here – it’s the rare first novel with no unnecessary parts – and, in terms of its elegant language, its sharp insights into believable characters, and its almost revelatory focus on the value and meaning of language and story, it’s the most impressive and intelligent first novel I expect to see this year, or perhaps for a while longer.
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In his introduction to The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven, Jonathan Strahan (a colleague here at Locus as well as a podcast partner) cites Paul Kincaid’s now-famous critical essay on a few year’s best anthologies in The Los Angeles Review of Books as having generated ‘‘probably the single most interesting discussion of science fiction and fantasy during the year,’’ and he’s right; Kincaid’s essay was well reasoned, civilized, and provocative in exactly the ways it means to be, in arguing that much SF is showing signs of exhaustion, or of losing faith in itself and its futures. It also, not surprisingly, prompts us to reconsider exactly what function is served by this kind of annual overview: are we looking at the state of the SF literary art, or the state of the editor’s tastes, or simply the latest trends? The spiritual granddaddy of Kincaid’s essay is probably John Barth’s 1967 essay ‘‘The Literature of Exhaustion,’’ in which he argued that the tradit
ional forms of fiction as inherited from (mostly) the 19th century had essentially played out their possibilities, and spent a fair amount of time championing Jorge Luis Borges as a model for a new kind of fiction. Ironically, Borges’ own legacy in short fiction is nowadays more evident in SF and fantasy than anywhere else, ranging from such philosophical fictions as Ted Chiang’s ‘‘Exhalation’’ to the self-deluding faux-anthropological tone of Theodora Goss’s ‘‘Beautiful Boys’’ in Strahan’s current anthology. This says something about the state of SF, and Strahan’s anthology repeatedly illustrates that state in ways that both refute and don’t refute Kincaid’s argument.
The chief difference between Barth’s and Kincaid’s view of ‘‘exhaustion’’ is that Barth was talking mostly about form, and Kincaid mostly about content. Barth wasn’t arguing that the grand themes of fiction were used up, but simply that there were newer and more interesting forms with which to explore them (including fantastic literature). SF and fantasy, on the other hand, are usually thought of almost entirely in terms of content, which leads Kincaid to wonder if SF has lost faith its futures and begun looking backward, or to worry about whether a given story belongs in genre at all, based on the degree of its fantastic content. Strahan, an editor with a literary bent who nevertheless shows an appreciation for the classic tropes, may be less in thrall of those tropes than some other editors, but there’s certainly some familiar material in his book that would seem to lend credence to Kincaid’s concerns. For example, Ken Liu’s ‘‘Mono No Aware’’, given a certain pride of place as Strahan’s final selection, is built around two of the hoariest SF clichés of all – the giant asteroid destroying the Earth and the brave spaceman sacrificing himself to save the ship. Yet Strahan presents the story as evidence of one of the more ‘‘encouraging trends’’ of SF, of its moving away from the ‘‘white male Anglo Saxon Mayberry of its youth.’’ And indeed, Liu’s casting the story in the context of a Japanese-American character trying desperately to maintain vestiges of a culture he barely remembers, even using fragments of Japanese poetry as structural elements, makes it seem new, and even quite moving. There are a number of examples of non Anglo-American cultures represented in the book; another is Ted Kosmatka’s wonderfully titled ‘‘The Color Least Used by Nature’’, which concerns a young boat-builder on a remote Pacific island (Kosmatka seems to be developing a sort of dual career, with thriller novels on the one hand and relatively muted, carefully considered stories of the sort he has always written on the other.)
Time and again in The Best of the Year, we find stories whose innovations, whose newness, lie in form rather than content – stories that imbed other stories, stories that break in half, stories that employ folkloristic voices or postmodern fragmentation, stories that offer alternative points of view or cultural orientations, one (Robert Shearman’s pleasantly goofy ‘‘Joke in Four Panels’’), that even takes place entirely within a Peanuts comic strip. Some are almost radical in form, like Kij Johnson’s ‘‘Mantis Wives’’, which builds a kind of horror tale without benefit of much discernible plot by simply presenting the mating habits of mantises in a series of suggestively titled sections. Catherynne Valente also uses subtitled sections (reminiscent of the SF archetype for this technique, Pamela Zone’s ‘‘The Heat Death of the Universe’’) in her alternate 1950s post-nuclear ‘‘Fade to White’’, adding in some dead-on Brunner-like parodies of period TV commercials that also echo The Space Merchants. Kelly Link begins with what appears to be a familiar generation-starship tale with stylistic echoes of Bradbury (it appeared in a tribute anthology), but shifts gears radically when the crew members begin telling each other stories, one of which involves the two houses of the title, constructed as part of a conceptual art installation. It’s not the only occasion in which a story calves off another, unexpected tale: K.J. Parker’s ‘‘Let Maps to Others’’ begins as a shrewdly satirical academic tale about rival scholars and a lost manuscript, but uses the resolution of that story to slingshot a very different maritime adventure involving a long-lost island. Similarly, Peter Dickinson’s ‘‘Troll Blood’’ begins as a kind of academic mystery involving a young woman aiding an aging scholar in the translation of an Old Norse manuscript, but turns (through a rather strained set of coincidences) into a full-fledged Beowulf-like adventure. Rachel Pollock’s ‘‘Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls’’ introduces us to a vaguely supernatural gambler who earns his real living helping free recently deceased souls from a kind of limbo; it could easily end with the completion of his latest assignment, but instead segues into his own backstory, a tragedy involving his wife and daughter that shifts our perspective of him utterly. Neil Gaiman’s rather slight ‘‘Adventure Story’’ presents tantalizing fragments of a full-scale pulp adventure that the narrator’s father may once have had, but its real substance derives from the obliviousness of his mother as she relates the tale, which to her is no more of an adventure than running into an old friend in a parking lot.
In other words, there are a fair number of stories here that could look familiar or even retro if all you’re looking for is content. A few authors, predictably, mine territory that they have staked out before. Paul McAuley’s ‘‘Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring, Racing, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden’’ is a kind of sequel at some distance to his Quiet War stories, but is a haunting tale in its own right, and takes full advantage of the richly imagined outer solar system civilization that he developed in those tales. ‘‘Katabasis’’ is one of the most accomplished of Robert Reed’s recent ‘‘Great Ship’’ stories – set in a Jupiter-sized planet hollowed out and circuiting the galaxy, picking up various societies and cultures as it goes – not because of the spectacular setting (which threatens to become too all-purpose for its own good), but because of the memorable title character, a guide who tries to lead humans on a hazardous trek (another old-SF trope). Eleanor Arnason invokes her Hwarhath culture for ‘‘The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times’’, but it’s really an ingenious folktale parable of trying to outsmart Death.
Folklore, in fact, is another recurring theme here, and another example of how fantasy authors can manipulate familiar materials into new shapes. I’ve already mentioned Peter Dickinson’s ‘‘Troll Blood’’, but one of the most original and compelling discoveries in the book is Karin Tidbeck’s ‘‘Reindeer Mountain’’, which invokes the Swedish vittra nature spirits in a story of a contemporary family whose eccentric uncle is facing eviction. Similarly, Pat Murphy’s ‘‘About Fairies’’ is a thoroughly contemporary tale about a woman working for a web design company trying to exploit little girls’ love of fairies, but along the way it offers some acerbic (and quite funny) observations about Tinker Bell, cats, and a possibly magic mirror. It resonates well with one of Ellen Klages’s most graceful, understated, yet chilling stories, ‘‘The Education of a Witch’’, in which a young girl, taken to a drive-in movie of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, finds herself identifying, to her parents’ dismay, with Maleficent the witch, and developing some strange powers of her own. Nor is this the only witch in the book. Peter Beagle’s ‘‘Great Grandmother in the Cellar’’ involves a family’s efforts to defeat a male witch who has placed an enchantment on the narrator’s sister; it doesn’t quite have the resonance of some of Beagle’s recent autobiographical tales, but is, predictably, beautifully told. The mother in Steve Rasnic & Melanie Tem’s ‘‘Domestic Magic’’ is a singularly inept and sadly demented witch, but the considerable emotional punch of the story derives less from magic than from the boy Felix’s determination to protect his little sister. Similarly, Megan McCarron’s ‘‘Swift, Brutal Retaliation’’ is in its genre particulars a familiar poltergeist tale, complete with exploding crockery and a family ghost, but the real focus is the two rival sisters, given to playing cruel pranks on each other, who have to come to terms with the death of their older brother and the inability of their unmoored parents to help them much with it.
UFO lore is invoked in
two of the best stories here: Margo Lanagan’s ‘‘Significant Dust’’, with its waitress in a remote café trying desperately to come to terms with the death of her sister and possibly encountering some sort of visitation, and Andy Duncan’s ‘‘Close Encounters’’, with its disillusioned old codger regretting his past notoriety as a UFO abductee but finding himself drawn back into it with the arrival of researchers from a university. Another of the most powerful tales draws vaguely on similar lore, but is mostly unclassifiable: Molly Gloss’s remarkable ‘‘The Grinnell Method’’ tells of a lonely ornithologist on the Washington state coast in the 1940s whose observations are disturbed by a violent storm with odd green lightning, after which a strange rupture appears in the sky. The mystery is never quite resolved, but the woman’s tentative relationship with a young girl whose interest in nature observations reminds her of her own seems to hold out some sort of promise.
There are, of course, some excellent tales here that echo some of the more highly visible trends in recent SF and fantasy as well. In addition to Catherynne Valente’s ‘‘Fade to White’’, Strahan offers a handful of variations on dystopian worlds. Nalo Hopkinson’s characteristically visceral ‘‘The Easthound’’ concerns young people trying to survive in a dark, post-catastrophe world where adults may at any moment ‘‘sprout’’ into werewolf-like creatures, while Caitlín R. Kiernan imagines a kind of alternate history, steampunk post-apocalypse in ‘‘Goggles c. 1910’’, where children are sent to forage for food in ruins plagued by packs of vicious dogs. The most unusual such dystopian society is the one in Christopher Rowe’s ‘‘The Contrary Gardener’’, the lead story. Rowe never seems to pay much attention to what anyone else is doing, and thus his oddly familiar but bizarre worlds are entirely his own; in this case, without going into much detail about his quite original plot, we might credit him with inventing the veggie dystopia. The most startling and timely story of all, given events that have transpired since its initial publication, is Jeffrey Ford’s ‘‘Blood Drive’’, in which schoolkids and their teachers come to school each day fully locked and loaded, with results that are no less shocking for all their predictability. Of all the stories here, it most clearly asks how close we might already be to the sort of dystopia it describes.
Locus, April 2013 Page 9
