Locus, February 2013

by Locus Publications

  That aside, what makes Six-Gun Snow White such a force is Snow’s journey through a broadly familiar plot. Valente has captured what makes that old story work and infused this dark, lovely new story with that life, making it both comfortable and strange.

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  At its core, Adam Roberts’s By Light Alone is a book about economics and class that is premised on a simple supposition: what if some technology came along that allowed the haves to no longer worry about providing the have-nots with food? And what spun out of Roberts’s fertile brain is a brilliant book about, yes, economics and class, but also about families and power and gender.

  The story opens on George and Marie, two married one percenters on a ski vacation. They’ve brought their two kids, who are both status symbols and devoutly loved, and left them in the care of a nanny, who has benefited from the aforementioned technology. With ‘‘New Hair,’’ humans can now live like plants and generate all of the nourishment they need from the sun.

  The rift between the new hair-having underclass and the few elites who remain grows ever wider as wealth grows ever more concentrated and the environment ever more chaotic. But couples like George and Marie are forced into contact with the longhairs whose work can’t be done by machines. It’s this friction – between ‘‘real people’’ and the ‘‘longhairs’’ – that releases the first domino in this intricate story.

  A book about economics shouldn’t be as engaging as By Light Alone is, but Roberts is skilled at meshing both idea and character in a way that makes each feel equally vital. While the plight that George and Marie find themselves in is what drives you to keep reading, it’s the underlying social reasons for their plight in Roberts’s constructed future that make this a book ripe for re-reading and reminds you how powerful science fiction can be.

  •

  Writer Adam Christopher loves comic books and that love is between each and every line of Seven Wonders, his story about a little city in California where a few people would be right at home in a pulp magazine.

  San Ventura is a lot like Buffy’s Sunnydale: while there are superheroes and -villians scattered across the globe, San Ventura is where all of the action is. It’s a lousy place to live, what with all of the super fights that inadvertently lead to mundane deaths. The city is ruled by the Cowl – and the Cowl is matched by the Seven Wonders, a loose assemblage of heroes whose powers range from superspeed to mind reading to tool making. It’s a tenuous system at best.

  Enter Tony, an ordinary guy terrified by the city in which he is forced to live, who suddenly develops superpowers of his own. As if that didn’t destabilize the balance of power enough, the Cowl seems to be losing his powers. There are also a couple of average cops who are trying to solve a super-murder. Oh, and there are aliens on their way who are bent on destroying the Earth.

  It’s a lot of plot to juggle, frankly, and Christopher is not entirely successful at keeping all of the balls off of the ground. A few story lines peter out rather than decisively end. While Tony and the Cowl feel like fully fleshed out characters, the rest of the large cast are about as substantial as the pulp they were inspired by. Christopher’s San Ventura and the world around it – one in which there are aliens and a moon base and teleportation and superheroes – is strangely weightless. It’s hard to care what happens because actions seem to have little consequence.

  That may be an intentional homage to the flimsy serials that inspired Seven Wonders – but something is lost in translation. Without the colorful pictures to distract you, the plot grows increasingly hard to suspend your disbelief in, until the last big battle is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

  Still, Christopher’s passion for pulps shines through and this is clearly a work born from that love. There are a few moments that shine, like the other superheroes, such as Red Tape and Captain Captain, who wander through the background, but the book as a whole doesn’t soar.

  •

  What’s most striking about The Friday Society is not its steampunk London goggles-and-dirigible set pieces nor writer Adrienne Kress’s jaunty voice, but its main characters. These three young women – Cora, Nellie, and Michiko – stand out because they are rare gems in young adult fiction: female characters who have every tool they need to be self-saving damsels who choose their own distress. In fact, running throughout the book, sometimes just under the surface and sometimes more overtly, is a cheeky argument for the importance of strong female characters, both heroes and anti-heroes.

  Kress’s story involves a familiar fantastic London, one full of mad inventors and steam. The plot is its own clockwork that smoothly ticks from dead body to sword fight to grave robbers to exploding monuments. All of the pieces fit well, including each young woman’s unique strength; Nellie, for example, is a limber magician’s assistant who can pick any lock.

  The writing itself feels appropriately sassy, even if its sass can feel a little forced. But the chapter headings, like this one:

  Just Your Average Turn-of-the-Century Slumber Party with a Dead Body.

  You Know How It Is.

  give both a great sense of the joyful spirit of the book and provide relief when the going gets dark.

  The Friday Society never stays dark for long, however, and our three heroes do what is required of them, then set up the rest of the series, should it become one. I hope it does, if only because I want my daughter to be able to read it when she’s just a little bit older.

  –Adrienne Martini

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  SHORT REVIEWS BY CAROLYN CUSHMAN

  The Peculiar, Stefan Bachman

  Iron Hearted Violet, Kelly Barnhill

  Vessel, Sarah Beth Durst

  Sanctum, Sarah Fine

  Son, Lois Lowry

  Velveteen vs. the Junior Super-Patriots, Seanan McGuire

  Imager’s Battalion, L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

  The Sweetest Spell, Suzanne Selfors

  This month I mostly played catch-up, trying to look at 2012 books we might have overlooked.

  Stefan Bachman, The Peculiar (Greenwillow 978-0-06-219518-0, $16.99, 376pp, hc) September 2012. Cover by Thierry Lafontaine.

  Steampunk and faeries mix in this darkly charming midde-grade fantasy novel. In this grim world, faeries broke into England in the city of Bath. Humans learned to combat them in part through the use of clockwork, which serves as a sort of antitdote to their magic, leading to the development of a rather steampunk civilization. Faeries are mostly restricted to the faerie slums of Bath, where young Bartholomew Kettle and his sister Hettie live in hiding, both halfbreed ‘‘Peculiars’’ sure to be murdered if discovered by either humans or faerie. Bartholomew’s getting old enough to chafe at his restricted life, and stubborn and cocksure enough to get himself into real trouble. Meanwhile, in London, a rather hapless MP, one Arthur Jelliby, stumbles onto a plot that involves killing Peculiars; nine children have been found murdered in an unknown way. Jelliby’s reminiscent of, if more intelligent than, a typical Wodehousian ‘‘silly-ass Englishman’’ type, but he’s got a conscience that makes him more effective than he initially appears. Bartholomew and Jelliby stumble into each other and work together to stop the killings and the possibly world-shattering plot behind them. We get some wonderfully weird and grotesque scenes to go with a pair of interestingly unlikely heroes, for a fun adventure – and very impressive first novel.

  •

  Kelly Barnhill, Iron Hearted Violet (Little, Brown 978-0-316-05673-1, $16.99, 424pp, hc) October 2012. Cover by Iacopo Bruno.

  Stories are at the heart of this middle-grade fantasy novel, but Princess Violet isn’t your usual fairy tale paragon – she’s actually rather plain, her hair is unmanageable, she’s stubborn, and sometimes too intelligent for her own good. But all her life she’s heard the stories with their perfect princesses, and when she stumbles across a forbidden book and awakens a dark creature she’s vulnerable to its seductive promises of perfection – while her father and her best frie
nd are off looking for dragons, and her mother is too ill to notice. Behind the action is an ancient story of gods and dragons and the reason this world has a mirror sky, which gives this otherwise rather basic medieval fantasy an interesting flavor, but the story doesn’t quite jell. In particular, it’s hard to root for Violet after she makes mistake after mistake, even though she eventually comes around and rides to the rescue.

  •

  Sarah Beth Durst, Vessel (McElderry 978-1-4424-2376-3, $16.99, 424pp, hc) September 2012. Cover by Jaime Ibarra.

  A girl trained to be a divine vessel ends up on a quest for her missing goddess in this young-adult fantasy. Liyana fully expects to die when the goddess Bayla take over her body, but the goddess doesn’t come when the ritual calls. Liyana’s desert-dwelling clan, already facing disastrous drought, abandons her, but then an embodied god turns up: Korbyn, the Raven trickster, on a mission to find five missing deities, including Bayla. For that he needs their vessels; Liyana joins him to find the other four. Meanwhile, a neighboring empire also suffering from the drought prepares to invade the desert lands and take their magic, which could destroy everything. Magic, desert survival, possible war, and a bit of romance overly complicated by gods all combine in a rewarding adventure that avoids obvious solutions.

  •

  Sarah Fine, Sanctum (Amazon 978-1-6121-8442-5, $17.99, 417pp, hc) October 2012.

  Suicides get the hell they want – sort of – in this powerful young-adult fantasy. Abused foster child Lela Santos once tried to kill herself and ever since has had dreams of a hellish city where suicides end up. She’s starting to turn her life around with the help of a new home and best friend Nadia, but then Nadia kills herself, and Lela has visions of Nadia in that city. Lela stumbles on a way to follow, determined to rescue her friend, but finding her in a city full of the terminally depressed and desperate, all locked in their own pain, isn’t going to be easy. Then Lela gets caught by a dangerous and frighteningly attractive city guard with ideas of his own for her. Lela’s tough, almost improbably so, but it’s fascinating watching her force her way through this weird version of hell on a mission that seems doomed from the outset. An intriguing young-adult novel, the first in a series, and a very impressive first novel.

  •

  Lois Lowry, Son (Houghton Mifflin 978-0-547-88720-3, $17.99, 393pp, hc) October 2010. Cover by Charles Brock.

  The final book in the Giver quartet weaves together elements of all the loosely related books in this YA fantasy series. Much of it runs parallel to the dystopian The Giver, the Newbery-winning first book in the series, returning to the closely regulated community in which it all started. There, Claire is told at 12 that she will be a Birthmother, one of the young women chosen to bear Product - babies - to be farmed out to other members of the community. But her first delivery goes wrong; her child has to be cut out, and Claire is assigned to work in a fish hatchery. She’s not supposed to know anything about the child, but accidentally learns it lived, and was a boy. She manages to get to know the child without anyone realizing their relationship. Readers of The Giver will of course realize the boy is Gabe, rescued from the community by the boy Jonas. This novel instead follows Claire, who finds her own way to escape the community in the uproar, but spends years learning about life outside before finally being reunited with her son, who will have to face an old evil to save her. Lowry’s work is more allegorical than standard genre fare, but remains powerful as it wraps up several threads from this celebrated series.

  •

  Seanan McGuire, Velveteen vs. the Junior Super-Patriots (ISFiC Press 978-0-9857989-1-8, $30.00, 211pp, hc) November 2012. Cover by Dave Dorman.

  McGuire’s charming new collection seems like the sort of thing that would spring from an inspired bout of superhero role-playing, taking a ludicrous power and coming up with interesting ways to use it. In this case, Velveteen (named for the Velveteen Rabbit, presumably) has the ability to animate ‘‘totemic’’ objects, primarily dolls and stuffed animals. The nine linked stories (originally published on McGuire’s website) pick up with the adult Velma Martinez, struggling to live a normal life. Through flashbacks, we see how she was effectively sold by her parents when she was 12, after her powers were revealed. She ended up under the control of the marketing department of The Super Patriots, Inc., becoming part of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division. At 18 she decided she wanted out, but her past haunts her – and neither crime nor Marketing will let her be. There’s some action, but the real focus is on the humans behind the masks, in this world where superhumans are common enough to be licensed, yet rare enough to be valuable commodities. Between the idiocies of marketing and Velveteen’s own unlikely powers, which turn out to be surprisingly useful, this is a highly entertaining set of stories.

  •

  L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Imager’s Battalion (Tor 978-0-7653-3283-7, $27.99, 509pp, hc) January 2013.

  The sixth volume in the overall Imager Portfolio series, third in the prequel series featuring scholar/imager Quaeryt, finds him a subcommander in the army of his brother-in-law Lord Bhayar, ruler of Telaryn. His own imaging ability no longer secret, Quaeryt leads his battalion, and his special unit of imagers, as their forces move deeper into enemy territory – where ancient ruins provide Quaeryt with new puzzles regarding imaging and the pursuit of power. Though entertaining, this is very much a middle volume in the series, full of troop movements, new imager tactics, and Quaeryt’s ongoing ethical qualms about using his abilities to kill, but little by way of character development; definitely not the place for new readers to start.

  •

  Suzanne Selfors, The Sweetest Spell (Walker US 978-0-8027-2376-5, $16.99, 401pp, hc) August 2012.

  If you can accept a rather bizarre premise – that chocolate is a rare substance only produced by magic – this young-adult fantasy novel is a charming tale. Emmeline is one of the poor Flatlanders living in poverty and virtual slavery, but even among her people she is disregarded, club-footed and considered cursed, with a weird knack with cows that is more embarassment than benefit. She wishes for a normal life, but soon has deeper concerns: her father, her only family, is taken away to join the army, and then a flood comes and sweeps her away, dumping her by a dairy farm, where for the first time she tries churning butter and ends up making chocolate instead. She becomes the focus of schemers wanting to corner her wondrous ability for themselves, and after a series of misadventures realizes that much she’s been taught about the kingdom is a lie – and she might actually have the power to make some changes.

  –Carolyn Cushman

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: DIVERS HANDS

  The Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord

  American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, Gary K. Wolfe, ed.

  Diverse Energies, Tobias S. Buckell & Joe Monti, eds.

  Days of Blood and Starlight, Laini Taylor

  JAMES BRADLEY

  The Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord (Del Rey 978-0-345-53405-7, $25.00, 312pp, hc) February 2013.

  Karen Lord’s sophomore novel may take its title from Voltaire, but in many ways its heart lies in Ray Bradbury’s sad, strange ‘‘Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed’’, the allusive title of which is invoked several times in the novel and again in its afterword.

  It’s an interesting choice, and not just because it underlines the novel’s interest in the way those who leave their homes are fated to be changed by what they find, but because of the manner in which The Best of All Possible Worlds echoes both Bradbury’s story’s sense of dislocation and loss and its reliance on the idea of a people left homeless on an alien world with its own past and history by the destruction of their own world.

  Despite the allusions to Bradbury, The Best of All Possible Worlds probably owes even more to Ursula K. Le Guin, and her psychologically astute, anthropological mode of science fiction. Even the future it imagines, in which four races of humanity – the c
ool, aloof Sadiri; the empathic and sensual Ntshune; the mechanically adept Zhinuvians; and the questing, contradictory Terrans – were seeded by the semi-mythical Caretakers millions of years ago, each developing separately until they evolved the technology to leave their homes, is reminiscent of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle.

  Lord’s universe has its own wrinkles of course, the most important of which is the fact that each strand of humanity possesses different psionic abilities, abilities that have altered and evolved as the races have intermingled and interbred.

  This intermingling is most pronounced on the world of Cygnus Beta, on which most of the action of the novel takes place. Settled by refugees from various disasters and conflicts (and, less plausibly, by small populations of pre-Contact Terrans removed from places such as Hamelin to safeguard against the possibility that the quarrelsome and unpredictable Terrans might wipe themselves out), its considerable geography appears to provide contexts for a variety of essentially self-governing communities, some part of a wider Cygnus Beta culture, others – religious, politically separatist, or devoted to various forms of psionic discipline – more exclusive.

  As the novel opens, Cygnus Beta has become home to yet another displaced group, this time part of what little remains of the Sadiri, whose homeworld has been poisoned by an offshoot population. Were this not disaster enough, the question of Sadiri survival has been further complicated by the gender imbalance of the survivors, the bulk of whom are male.

  Conveniently for the Sadiri, arranged marriages are not unusual in Cygnian culture. And so, with the help of the narrator, Grace Delarua, a Cygnian Government biotechnician, a small team of Sadiri led by Sadiri official Dllenahkh begin to visit and assess various Cygnian communities for potential partners.

  This process, which leads to a series of encounters with different communities, occupies most of the novel, but it’s really just the backdrop to the growing affection between Grace and Dllenahkh. As such romances demand, the pair are, at least initially, an unlikely couple: Grace, part Ntshune, is practical and direct, her psionic abilities limited to a capacity to set off laughter, while Dllenakh is seemingly the classic Sadiri: impassive, methodical, a little stiff. Yet as their experiences bring them closer, a deeper bond develops between the pair.