by Jean Roberta
For the past two weeks, I've mostly been reading student assignments. However, the two recent books sent to me by Lethe Press are much more interesting.
“Almost five years ago, right before I turned fifteen, people stopped asking what I wanted to be when I grew up because it was obvious I wasn’t going to. That’s when I got my diagnosis. Acute blah-blah-blah leukemia. That’s what I heard, anyway. The words that doctors use in these situations have way too many syllables making them almost impossible to remember.”
This is how Jake Margate, the narrator of Never Rest by Marshall Thornton, introduces himself. According to the blurb on the back of the book, this YA novel is a version of Frankenstein. The comparison seems apt, but this modern version is both more and less horrifying than the original.
Jake has gone through years of nauseating, exhausting, ultimately useless treatments, and he is ready to give up. So are his conventional doctors, who try to prepare his mother to accept her only child’s impending death.
Jake’s mother is a key character, and she is determined not to accept the loss of the son for whom she has sacrificed so much. She is divorced from Jake’s dad, who morphed from a struggling musician (before the divorce) to a software-inventer with a second family and a more upscale lifestyle. As Jake explains: “He had spares. She didn’t.”
The narrative sounds completely convincing because it is told in Jake’s pitch-perfect adolescent voice. He can’t hate either of his parents, although he suspects that his mom would like him to blame his dad for “selling out” and remarrying. Jake’s father has made an effort to stay in his life, but his mother has been almost fanatically determined to save him at any cost.
Although Jake tries to assert himself as a legal adult, his mother has had to make painful decisions for him for so long that she is not willing to give up. She moves him into a shady, isolated “clinic” run by Dr. Harry, who admits that his treatments are experimental and that he can’t predict how his patients will respond.
In this last-ditch facility, whose costs are not covered by any American medical insurance, Jake meets other dying young people, including a friendly boy called “Goth,” whose parents actually named him Goliath. Despite his name, Goth is abnormally small, and he has had cystic fibrosis from birth. He and Jake realize that they want to be more than friends.
After being given a substance called “Property Five,” Jake is assured that his cancer has disappeared, but Dr. Harry keeps anxiously testing his “vital signs.” At one point, the doctor pushes a protesting “nurse” out of the room so that he can restart Jake’s heart. No one gives Jake enough information about his condition, but he gathers enough clues to form a very disturbing hypothesis.
Despite the macabre plot premise, this novel is full of the black humour of a young man who has always been the victim of fate and adult power. The reader comes to care about Jake and Goth, and to hope a miracle will enable them to have a life together.
Nothing has really been resolved by the end of the novel, but Jake seems to have caught his mother’s determination, and he is not willing to let Goth die.
After Jake has given Property Five to his lover, he watches Goth open his eyes.
“’What happens next?’ he asked me again.
This time I answered: ‘I don’t know.’ I caressed his cheek with one hand. He was already cooling. That made me happier than I’d been in a very long time.
We’d figure it out. We were ready.”
The other book is an anthology of speculative fiction, Survivor. Edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke, this collection is about mostly young, resourceful survivors of extreme conditions. Some of these stories are post-apocalyptic, and some are about survivors of social or personal injustice.
In the space opera “Scream Angel” by Douglas Smith, “scream” is a highly addictive, hallucinogenic substance extracted from the oppressed inhabitants of a colonized planet. Trelayne, the central character, has a change of heart when he fully understands that his employer, the Merged Corporate Entity, is keeping him under control by keeping him addicted so that he will co-operate in committing genocide.
“On Abydos, Dreaming” by John Linwood Grant is another space opera that sensitively explores religious differences and the ethics of creating artificial intelligence.
“The Good Liar” by Steven Grassie is set in a kind of medieval alternative universe, somewhat reminiscent of Star Wars, in which a brilliant woman manipulates the men in power to avert an unnecessary war.
“Mold” by Eric Gern is a witty contemporary story about a mother escaping with her two children from a violent husband and a house with mold in the attic. Told by the son, the story shows why he would rather lock himself in a car filled with the unusual, ever-growing green stuff than let himself be taken prisoner by his belt-wielding father. In the end, the mold functions like karma.
“A Stitch in Time” by Canadian writer Tonya Liburd is a heartbreaking story of another abused young man who can’t accept the sudden death of his girlfriend, who seemed like the only person who could really love him. He buys a magic spell that enables him to go back in time to a concert where he can make love to her, over and over. Yet the present contains possibilities, and he has to make a choice.
Limited time and space don’t allow me to summarize all sixteen stories in this anthology, but they are all well worth reading. When conditions are extreme, fictional characters show more strength and creativity than they knew they had.
------------------------
Showing posts with label speculative fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speculative fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Friday, July 20, 2018
Hot Off the Press, Part 1
by Jean Roberta
For the past few weeks, I’ve done more reading than writing. I’ve plowed through six recent books, and started reading a seventh.
Steve Berman of Lethe Press often sends me gifts through the mail: uncorrected advance proofs of Lethe books that aren’t available to the public yet. He doesn’t ask me to review them, but the request seems to be implied.
The latest batch consists of:
1) Forget the Sleepless Shores, a collection of stories by classics scholar and poet Sonya Taaffe (from New England).
2) Does It Show? A novel in the “Phoenix Court” series by Paul Magrs from northern England.
3) Perennial: A Garden Romance, a slim volume by fiction-writer and cancer-survivor Mary Anne Mohanraj of Chicago.
4) Read by Strangers, a collection of stories by Philip Dean Walker (who lives in Washington, D.C.)
All these books are scheduled to be released in August.
Forget the Sleepless Shores is the one I read first. The title put me off because I thought it looked pretentious, and it has no clear relevance to any of the stories. Another aspect that both charmed and irritated me was the author’s poetic style in fiction. She clearly prefers to “show, not tell,” and is unwilling to “murder her darlings” (clever turns of phrase that don’t advance a plot). There is so much description of water in this collection that I felt as if I had to dry out between stories.
To sum up, I found Sonya Taaffe to be an acquired taste. However, her work rewards perseverance.
Here is the opening paragraph of “Chez Vous Soon,” the story of a doomed sexual relationship:
“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handsful of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”
The viewpoint character, “Vetiver” (who prefers her middle name to her first name, Julia) is going to visit her artist lover in the run-down apartment where he is obsessively trying to capture the look, sound, smell and feel of Autumn on canvas. The word-pictures in the story illustrate his efforts to express what seems inexpressible, at least to him. Asked if he has taken his medication for mental illness, he responds that he doesn’t want to blunt the power of his mind when he is working. The distance between the lovers seems unbridgeable, and the tragic outcome seems inevitable.
Most of the stories in this collection were previously-published in various anthologies and journals of speculative fiction (the on-line journal Not One of Us ran five of them), and therefore they are inconsistent in length, theme, and impact.
The author’s literary style is excellent for creating atmosphere, and the stories about the spirit world are effectively spine-tingling, even though most aren’t clearly identifiable as horror stories. (Or at least they have little in common with the work of Stephen King.)
Several of these stories seem to channel the voices of immigrant ancestors, translated from Yiddish and various other European languages. In “The Dybbuk in Love,” a contemporary woman is the love-object of a man who is long-dead but is capable of temporarily possessing the bodies of the men in her life.
The most brilliant of the stories that invoke Jewish folklore is “The Trinitite Golem,” in which an animated bomb confronts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who created it. Here is the clinical description of its making:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take thirteen and a half pounds of 8-phase plutonium-239, stabilized by alloying with gallium at three percent molar weight and hot-pressed into solid hemispheres of slightly more than nine centimeters in diameter, electroplate with galvanic silver to reduce chemical reactivity and encase within seven-centimeter tamper of neutron-reflecting uranium-238.”
The recipe for the “golem” continues in detail, and is then followed by a recipe for the ruined creator, a kind of twentieth-century Victor Frankenstein:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take one theoretical physicist who has not published a paper in four years, who a dozen years ago made himself over into a director and administrator as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he once metamorphosed a misfit rock collector from Riverside Drive into a mesmerizing polymath with quotations in nine languages at his Chesterfield-callused fingertips, the benefit being the A-bomb, the cost being the rest of his concentration, and then in open court and the public eye strip him of all authority and trust.”
All this accurately reflects the life-story of Oppenheimer and the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. (I looked him up.)
Space doesn’t allow me to discuss all the stories in the collection, but several others are also brilliant and haunting.
Did I mention water? I was intrigued by “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts,” a story based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft. Taaffe’s story was originally published in Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (Dark Regions Press, 2016).
Two of us here at the Grip have written very different versions of that same Lovecraft piece. Lisabet posted a spoof, “The Shadow Over Des Moines,” here quite awhile ago.
My version of the story, “Innsmouth Blues” (narrated by an African-American schoolteacher of the 1920s) appeared in Equal Opportunity Madness: A Mythos Anthology (Otter Libris Press, 2017). This anthology was intended to overturn Lovecraft’s prejudices.
Taaffe’s more serious version focuses on the process of transformation, in which a contemporary woman who is at least “half-deep” (descended from “the people of the sea”) comes of age by desperately trying to return to her true home in the Atlantic. The references to an incomplete genocide, from which the scattered survivors reconstruct a group identity over several generations, echo several historical atrocities.
When the book becomes publicly available next month, I recommend buying a copy.
Stay tuned for my descriptions of the rest of my recent reading-matter. I’ll try to be more concise!
For the past few weeks, I’ve done more reading than writing. I’ve plowed through six recent books, and started reading a seventh.
Steve Berman of Lethe Press often sends me gifts through the mail: uncorrected advance proofs of Lethe books that aren’t available to the public yet. He doesn’t ask me to review them, but the request seems to be implied.
The latest batch consists of:
1) Forget the Sleepless Shores, a collection of stories by classics scholar and poet Sonya Taaffe (from New England).
2) Does It Show? A novel in the “Phoenix Court” series by Paul Magrs from northern England.
3) Perennial: A Garden Romance, a slim volume by fiction-writer and cancer-survivor Mary Anne Mohanraj of Chicago.
4) Read by Strangers, a collection of stories by Philip Dean Walker (who lives in Washington, D.C.)
All these books are scheduled to be released in August.
Forget the Sleepless Shores is the one I read first. The title put me off because I thought it looked pretentious, and it has no clear relevance to any of the stories. Another aspect that both charmed and irritated me was the author’s poetic style in fiction. She clearly prefers to “show, not tell,” and is unwilling to “murder her darlings” (clever turns of phrase that don’t advance a plot). There is so much description of water in this collection that I felt as if I had to dry out between stories.
To sum up, I found Sonya Taaffe to be an acquired taste. However, her work rewards perseverance.
Here is the opening paragraph of “Chez Vous Soon,” the story of a doomed sexual relationship:
“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handsful of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”
The viewpoint character, “Vetiver” (who prefers her middle name to her first name, Julia) is going to visit her artist lover in the run-down apartment where he is obsessively trying to capture the look, sound, smell and feel of Autumn on canvas. The word-pictures in the story illustrate his efforts to express what seems inexpressible, at least to him. Asked if he has taken his medication for mental illness, he responds that he doesn’t want to blunt the power of his mind when he is working. The distance between the lovers seems unbridgeable, and the tragic outcome seems inevitable.
Most of the stories in this collection were previously-published in various anthologies and journals of speculative fiction (the on-line journal Not One of Us ran five of them), and therefore they are inconsistent in length, theme, and impact.
The author’s literary style is excellent for creating atmosphere, and the stories about the spirit world are effectively spine-tingling, even though most aren’t clearly identifiable as horror stories. (Or at least they have little in common with the work of Stephen King.)
Several of these stories seem to channel the voices of immigrant ancestors, translated from Yiddish and various other European languages. In “The Dybbuk in Love,” a contemporary woman is the love-object of a man who is long-dead but is capable of temporarily possessing the bodies of the men in her life.
The most brilliant of the stories that invoke Jewish folklore is “The Trinitite Golem,” in which an animated bomb confronts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who created it. Here is the clinical description of its making:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take thirteen and a half pounds of 8-phase plutonium-239, stabilized by alloying with gallium at three percent molar weight and hot-pressed into solid hemispheres of slightly more than nine centimeters in diameter, electroplate with galvanic silver to reduce chemical reactivity and encase within seven-centimeter tamper of neutron-reflecting uranium-238.”
The recipe for the “golem” continues in detail, and is then followed by a recipe for the ruined creator, a kind of twentieth-century Victor Frankenstein:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take one theoretical physicist who has not published a paper in four years, who a dozen years ago made himself over into a director and administrator as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he once metamorphosed a misfit rock collector from Riverside Drive into a mesmerizing polymath with quotations in nine languages at his Chesterfield-callused fingertips, the benefit being the A-bomb, the cost being the rest of his concentration, and then in open court and the public eye strip him of all authority and trust.”
All this accurately reflects the life-story of Oppenheimer and the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. (I looked him up.)
Space doesn’t allow me to discuss all the stories in the collection, but several others are also brilliant and haunting.
Did I mention water? I was intrigued by “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts,” a story based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft. Taaffe’s story was originally published in Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (Dark Regions Press, 2016).
Two of us here at the Grip have written very different versions of that same Lovecraft piece. Lisabet posted a spoof, “The Shadow Over Des Moines,” here quite awhile ago.
My version of the story, “Innsmouth Blues” (narrated by an African-American schoolteacher of the 1920s) appeared in Equal Opportunity Madness: A Mythos Anthology (Otter Libris Press, 2017). This anthology was intended to overturn Lovecraft’s prejudices.
Taaffe’s more serious version focuses on the process of transformation, in which a contemporary woman who is at least “half-deep” (descended from “the people of the sea”) comes of age by desperately trying to return to her true home in the Atlantic. The references to an incomplete genocide, from which the scattered survivors reconstruct a group identity over several generations, echo several historical atrocities.
When the book becomes publicly available next month, I recommend buying a copy.
Stay tuned for my descriptions of the rest of my recent reading-matter. I’ll try to be more concise!
Friday, July 6, 2018
The New Pandora
by Jean Roberta
For me, there is a thin line between an unfinished piece (usually a short story that wants to be a novel when it grows up) and one that is more-or-less finished but apparently not publishable in its current state.
I recently took another look at a long story I wrote several years ago. It is based on Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a male monster in his makeshift lab, and it refers to contemporary same-sex parenthood, especially lesbian couples becoming parents when one of the women is artificially inseminated, often with sperm from a man in her partner’s family.
The problem with my story is that it has two parallel plots: a dispute over the creation of a “daughter” in the present day, and a set of letters (roughly circa 1818, when the first version of Frankenstein was published) written by Margaret Saville, ancestor of the present-day mad scientist.
This is all probably too much for a short story. The original version was rejected for an anthology, and lately, a shorter version was rejected for an on-line journal of speculative fiction.
It seems as if I have to limit the story to the contemporary plot OR rewrite it as historical fiction, saving only the letters about the creation of the monster, the “new Pandora,” in the late 1700s. Or else I have to rework the thing into something long enough to stand on its own, probably with alternating chapters in different eras.
Here is the opening section of the current version, "Pandora II:"
-------------------------------------------------
To make things clear from the beginning, I’m Liz the librarian. I never thought I would move in with a science nerd like Victoria (who doesn’t accept shortened versions of her name) until I did. I wasn’t thinking with my mind.
After two years, we talked about having a baby. Some of our friends thought that lesbian couples who go sperm-hunting to have their own babies are slaves to the capitalist patriarchy. I didn’t care. I wanted to become a mother while my biological clock was still ticking. Having a girl was less important to me than having a baby who would be related to both of us.
“Babies take so long to raise.” Victoria sighed. “And I don’t think there’s a way to guarantee you’ll get all the features you want in a kid: intelligence, good health, strength, beauty, female plumbing.”
Victoria seemed to be at her peak: her classic features and creamy complexion were photogenic, and she was athletically slim. Combining our family genes seemed like a good idea. A procedure involving her brother’s sperm could result in a little miracle.
I tried to imagine the sensations of breast-feeding. Then I remembered that motherhood was not supposed to be overtly sexy.
“You can’t control everything in life anyway,” I told her. “You have to go into parenthood with an open mind.”
She slid her feet to the floor as she sat up, making room for me to sit beside her. Victoria was in a long-hair phase, at least where her scalp didn’t resemble a closely-mowed golf course. Her dark braid caught the light as it swung forward.
“We both disappoint each other sometimes, honey,” she reminded me. “I’m not complaining, but think how much more frustrating it would be to raise a child, trying to instill our values in her, coping with colic and scraped knees and birthday parties. And when she seems almost grown, we lose her when she rebels against us, drops out of school, and runs off with some asshole man.”
I didn’t think that outcome was inevitable. “But if we show our child a better way—“
“We’d still be fooling ourselves.” Victoria stood up. “We need a daughter who already has the right mind-set. We don’t have to leave it to chance.”
“You want us to adopt? How would that be risk-free?”
“You need to meet someone.” She stood up, turned off the overhead light, and walked through the indoor dusk to the coffee table where her laptop waited to be of service.
I saw the logo of Bio-Tech Laboratories, Victoria’s employer, on the small screen. Victoria continued typing.
A transparent, three-dimensional image of a woman appeared in front of me. “Hello, Pandora,” Victoria greeted her. “She’s a hologram,” she explained to me.
“Good – evening, ladies,” came a hesitant but fluty voice from the laptop. The image appeared to dip slightly in a delayed curtsey. She wore a full-skirted gown that obscured the shape of her body below the waist. Her hair was gathered into a large bun at her neck.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
As if in answer, the voice explained: “I am five feet tall, and seven stone in weight. I was created in 1795 from the remains of three gentlewomen who were chosen for their beauty and their accomplishments. I was named Pandora after the first woman formed by the gods of ancient Greece: she who had every gift.”
Pandora turned around slowly. As she did, her clothing disappeared. She looked like a ghostly female statue with small, high, well-shaped breasts, a visible ribcage and hipbones, graceful buttocks, and girlish legs. The eerie smile on her face never changed. It reminded me of the “Attic smile” on the faces of Greek statues.
I felt shaken. “I bet she didn’t go out like that in the 1790s.”
Victoria grinned. “How do you like her?”
“I want to know why you brought her into our front room. And what she has to do with our conversation about raising a child.”
Victoria pressed a button, and Pandora disappeared. “She’s the project I’ve been working on. The biologist who hired assistants to put her together in the 1790s left notes and diagrams, so we reconstructed her in this form. The next step is to –“
“No,” I interrupted. “Don’t tell me you’re going to dig up bodies to bring her back in real life. There’s a certain novel about a monster that a mad scientist made that way as an experiment. The story doesn’t end well.” I knew exactly where to find that book in the public library, and how many borrowers asked for it every week.
“The novel was based on the real case, Liz. We know a lot more about human development now. We don’t have to raid the cemetery for material. Some tissue can be grown in the lab, and we won’t set her loose to wander the countryside.” Victoria radiated the energy of a fanatic.
“Okay. Okay.” I stood up and turned on all three table lamps to shed light on the subject. I felt a headache coming on. “You and Eric can have fun building an antique woman in the lab. I won’t even ask what you plan to do with her after you’re finished. But she’s not living here with us.”
“It’ll probably take us another year to finish, anyway. Think about it, Liz. She’ll be custom-made. Nothing left to chance, or the randomness of heredity. You don’t know how much love she has to give to her family, the ones who accept her as their creation.”
Ice-cold fear raced up my spine. “Jesus, Victoria. Can you hear what you’re saying?”
“You don’t know her background. She had so much potential. Everyone knows about Frankenstein, but no one outside the family knows the real story because the actual letters were never published. There are five printed copies, and I have one. You need to read it.”
“Whoa, woman.” I paced the floor because I couldn’t stand still. I grabbed Victoria by both hands. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
She pulled away, and closed the laptop. “About reading Margaret Saville’s letters? You’re always reading, Liz. Why don’t you want to read them?”
“You’re talking about three or four things at once. I’ll read anything you give me to read, but we were talking about having a baby. Or adopting, or whatever. A baby of our own. Why do you want to bring a dead woman back to life?”
“That’s not really what we’re doing,” she explained patiently. “No one knows how to create a child in the lab who will grow up, unless we start with a fertilized egg, and that’s not much different from normal conception. Same process, different location. Do you see what I mean?"
My head was spinning.
Victoria was on a roll. “If we have to give Pandora an age, I’d say she’s only about twenty-one.”
I had seen library patrons in their early twenties, and I wasn’t convinced that Pandora had anything in common with them. I looked at Victoria, trying to beam common sense into her mind. “I need a drink. We’ve got an open bottle of merlot.”
“Bring me a glass, baby. Maybe that will help.”
By the time I returned from the kitchen with two glasses that glowed ruby-red in the lamplight, Victoria was holding a leather-bound volume. “Petticoat Lazarus, or The New Pandora,” she read aloud. “These are the letters of Mrs. Margaret Saville, my English ancestor. Eight or ten generations back. I’m not sure, but that’s not important.”
----------------------------------------
Note on names: in the novel Frankenstein, the central character, Victor, has a fiancee named Elizabeth. (In the original version, she is his cousin.) Margaret Saville is the sister and confidante of the sea-captain Robert Walton, who sends letters to her about the strange, pitiful man, Victor Frankenstein, whom he rescued somewhere in the Arctic, and whose story he relates.
In my version, Margaret Saville and Lady Roberta Walton are discreet lovers who run a home for gentlewomen in distress. One of their tenants is a certain Swiss lady who calls herself Victoria Beaufort because her actual family name has become notorious. (In Frankenstein, Beaufort is the maiden name of Victor Frankenstein’s mother.) Mademoiselle Beaufort says she is grieving for her child, but then the two Englishwomen discover that her “child” is an adult woman that she constructed out of body parts, and who resents being called an abomination. She resents it so much that she kills those who insult her, or who sexually assault her, and the inventor feels responsible for the carnage.
It seems I have made a monster out of different story-parts. I really hope I don’t have to kill it.
For me, there is a thin line between an unfinished piece (usually a short story that wants to be a novel when it grows up) and one that is more-or-less finished but apparently not publishable in its current state.
I recently took another look at a long story I wrote several years ago. It is based on Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a male monster in his makeshift lab, and it refers to contemporary same-sex parenthood, especially lesbian couples becoming parents when one of the women is artificially inseminated, often with sperm from a man in her partner’s family.
The problem with my story is that it has two parallel plots: a dispute over the creation of a “daughter” in the present day, and a set of letters (roughly circa 1818, when the first version of Frankenstein was published) written by Margaret Saville, ancestor of the present-day mad scientist.
This is all probably too much for a short story. The original version was rejected for an anthology, and lately, a shorter version was rejected for an on-line journal of speculative fiction.
It seems as if I have to limit the story to the contemporary plot OR rewrite it as historical fiction, saving only the letters about the creation of the monster, the “new Pandora,” in the late 1700s. Or else I have to rework the thing into something long enough to stand on its own, probably with alternating chapters in different eras.
Here is the opening section of the current version, "Pandora II:"
-------------------------------------------------
To make things clear from the beginning, I’m Liz the librarian. I never thought I would move in with a science nerd like Victoria (who doesn’t accept shortened versions of her name) until I did. I wasn’t thinking with my mind.
After two years, we talked about having a baby. Some of our friends thought that lesbian couples who go sperm-hunting to have their own babies are slaves to the capitalist patriarchy. I didn’t care. I wanted to become a mother while my biological clock was still ticking. Having a girl was less important to me than having a baby who would be related to both of us.
“Babies take so long to raise.” Victoria sighed. “And I don’t think there’s a way to guarantee you’ll get all the features you want in a kid: intelligence, good health, strength, beauty, female plumbing.”
Victoria seemed to be at her peak: her classic features and creamy complexion were photogenic, and she was athletically slim. Combining our family genes seemed like a good idea. A procedure involving her brother’s sperm could result in a little miracle.
I tried to imagine the sensations of breast-feeding. Then I remembered that motherhood was not supposed to be overtly sexy.
“You can’t control everything in life anyway,” I told her. “You have to go into parenthood with an open mind.”
She slid her feet to the floor as she sat up, making room for me to sit beside her. Victoria was in a long-hair phase, at least where her scalp didn’t resemble a closely-mowed golf course. Her dark braid caught the light as it swung forward.
“We both disappoint each other sometimes, honey,” she reminded me. “I’m not complaining, but think how much more frustrating it would be to raise a child, trying to instill our values in her, coping with colic and scraped knees and birthday parties. And when she seems almost grown, we lose her when she rebels against us, drops out of school, and runs off with some asshole man.”
I didn’t think that outcome was inevitable. “But if we show our child a better way—“
“We’d still be fooling ourselves.” Victoria stood up. “We need a daughter who already has the right mind-set. We don’t have to leave it to chance.”
“You want us to adopt? How would that be risk-free?”
“You need to meet someone.” She stood up, turned off the overhead light, and walked through the indoor dusk to the coffee table where her laptop waited to be of service.
I saw the logo of Bio-Tech Laboratories, Victoria’s employer, on the small screen. Victoria continued typing.
A transparent, three-dimensional image of a woman appeared in front of me. “Hello, Pandora,” Victoria greeted her. “She’s a hologram,” she explained to me.
“Good – evening, ladies,” came a hesitant but fluty voice from the laptop. The image appeared to dip slightly in a delayed curtsey. She wore a full-skirted gown that obscured the shape of her body below the waist. Her hair was gathered into a large bun at her neck.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
As if in answer, the voice explained: “I am five feet tall, and seven stone in weight. I was created in 1795 from the remains of three gentlewomen who were chosen for their beauty and their accomplishments. I was named Pandora after the first woman formed by the gods of ancient Greece: she who had every gift.”
Pandora turned around slowly. As she did, her clothing disappeared. She looked like a ghostly female statue with small, high, well-shaped breasts, a visible ribcage and hipbones, graceful buttocks, and girlish legs. The eerie smile on her face never changed. It reminded me of the “Attic smile” on the faces of Greek statues.
I felt shaken. “I bet she didn’t go out like that in the 1790s.”
Victoria grinned. “How do you like her?”
“I want to know why you brought her into our front room. And what she has to do with our conversation about raising a child.”
Victoria pressed a button, and Pandora disappeared. “She’s the project I’ve been working on. The biologist who hired assistants to put her together in the 1790s left notes and diagrams, so we reconstructed her in this form. The next step is to –“
“No,” I interrupted. “Don’t tell me you’re going to dig up bodies to bring her back in real life. There’s a certain novel about a monster that a mad scientist made that way as an experiment. The story doesn’t end well.” I knew exactly where to find that book in the public library, and how many borrowers asked for it every week.
“The novel was based on the real case, Liz. We know a lot more about human development now. We don’t have to raid the cemetery for material. Some tissue can be grown in the lab, and we won’t set her loose to wander the countryside.” Victoria radiated the energy of a fanatic.
“Okay. Okay.” I stood up and turned on all three table lamps to shed light on the subject. I felt a headache coming on. “You and Eric can have fun building an antique woman in the lab. I won’t even ask what you plan to do with her after you’re finished. But she’s not living here with us.”
“It’ll probably take us another year to finish, anyway. Think about it, Liz. She’ll be custom-made. Nothing left to chance, or the randomness of heredity. You don’t know how much love she has to give to her family, the ones who accept her as their creation.”
Ice-cold fear raced up my spine. “Jesus, Victoria. Can you hear what you’re saying?”
“You don’t know her background. She had so much potential. Everyone knows about Frankenstein, but no one outside the family knows the real story because the actual letters were never published. There are five printed copies, and I have one. You need to read it.”
“Whoa, woman.” I paced the floor because I couldn’t stand still. I grabbed Victoria by both hands. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
She pulled away, and closed the laptop. “About reading Margaret Saville’s letters? You’re always reading, Liz. Why don’t you want to read them?”
“You’re talking about three or four things at once. I’ll read anything you give me to read, but we were talking about having a baby. Or adopting, or whatever. A baby of our own. Why do you want to bring a dead woman back to life?”
“That’s not really what we’re doing,” she explained patiently. “No one knows how to create a child in the lab who will grow up, unless we start with a fertilized egg, and that’s not much different from normal conception. Same process, different location. Do you see what I mean?"
My head was spinning.
Victoria was on a roll. “If we have to give Pandora an age, I’d say she’s only about twenty-one.”
I had seen library patrons in their early twenties, and I wasn’t convinced that Pandora had anything in common with them. I looked at Victoria, trying to beam common sense into her mind. “I need a drink. We’ve got an open bottle of merlot.”
“Bring me a glass, baby. Maybe that will help.”
By the time I returned from the kitchen with two glasses that glowed ruby-red in the lamplight, Victoria was holding a leather-bound volume. “Petticoat Lazarus, or The New Pandora,” she read aloud. “These are the letters of Mrs. Margaret Saville, my English ancestor. Eight or ten generations back. I’m not sure, but that’s not important.”
----------------------------------------
Note on names: in the novel Frankenstein, the central character, Victor, has a fiancee named Elizabeth. (In the original version, she is his cousin.) Margaret Saville is the sister and confidante of the sea-captain Robert Walton, who sends letters to her about the strange, pitiful man, Victor Frankenstein, whom he rescued somewhere in the Arctic, and whose story he relates.
In my version, Margaret Saville and Lady Roberta Walton are discreet lovers who run a home for gentlewomen in distress. One of their tenants is a certain Swiss lady who calls herself Victoria Beaufort because her actual family name has become notorious. (In Frankenstein, Beaufort is the maiden name of Victor Frankenstein’s mother.) Mademoiselle Beaufort says she is grieving for her child, but then the two Englishwomen discover that her “child” is an adult woman that she constructed out of body parts, and who resents being called an abomination. She resents it so much that she kills those who insult her, or who sexually assault her, and the inventor feels responsible for the carnage.
It seems I have made a monster out of different story-parts. I really hope I don’t have to kill it.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Pre-Millennial and Space-Age Reading
by Jean Roberta
For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending whole days revising my old erotic novel, Prairie Gothic, which was available as a download from a British publisher, Amatory Ink, from 2002 to 2006, when the publisher folded. I wrote the novel in 1998, when I had more enthusiasm than skill, and I had a paid two-month break from my teaching job, which in those days didn’t offer many other perks. (No expense account, no job security.)
After rereading this saga, most of which I had forgotten, I decided to keep the period flavour as well as the local colour. However, the head-hopping now makes me groan. It demonstrates my concept of “omniscient viewpoint” at the time.
What to do? There are two central characters, and several secondary ones who have valuable insights into the comedy-of-errors relationship between the two stars. I don’t want to lose all the snark from the sidelines.
The original novel was divided into nine rambling chapters of uneven length. I’ve been breaking them up into chapters of 2-4K. I think this makes the narrative more digestible, and also allows me to stay in one head per chapter, even though it seems necessary to head-hop between chapters. (For example, chapters 1-4 focus on Kelly, a young woman who goes to the local gay bar for the first time, and meets several regulars. Chapter 5 has to show the viewpoint of Kelly’s new girlfriend Vivienne, because she is visited by her bad-news ex while Kelly is in self-exile on the family farm. Chapter 11 must show the viewpoint of Rae, who has an uncanny experience with a ghost.)
This format allows me to flesh out a few details that were simply mentioned in passing in the original version. The original is only 56,000 words long, which is short for a novel. I expect the new version to be considerably longer, which will make it more of a standard size.
Once the shiny new version is ready, I plan to offer it to a certain publisher. If the novel isn’t accepted there, I plan to post it on Excessica.com. I’m excited to know that one of my early efforts can be recycled, and not left to waste space in my “Documents,” too good to delete but not good enough to resell.
Lethe Press recently sent me two books for review. I wrote a review of the anthology, His Seed: An Arboretum of Erotica, edited by Steve Berman, published under the new Lethe erotic imprint, Unzipped, and posted it on Facebook.
Here is a brief overview:
It’s hard to believe there is a theme in erotica which has not been overdone and yet seems visceral, organic and succulent. Here it is: sex between men, in which plants play various roles. This is not a joke. Several of the stories in this collection have horrifying endings, based on the undeniable fact that plants need nutrients, some of which are found in human bodies. Of course, this fact can also lead to interdependence, or mutual cultivation.
The stories cover a wide range of genres and tones, from stories that are basically sex scenes to fantasies about the Green Man or the Woodwose, the spirit of the forest in the form of a virile man. (One of these is a moving tale by our own Connie Wilkins about a man who has lost his lover in the first world war, but he discovers the Green Man living eternally in his native England.)
Among the sex-scene stories is “The Greenhouse” by Spencer Krell, in which a semi-sentient (genetically-modified) pumpkin vine makes advances to its cultivator, Aaron:
“He’d been about to get back to work once more when he felt a slight tickle against his ankle.” This is not random contact; this is seduction.
Even for readers who are not gay men, these stories are entertaining and unsettling. Plants are the ultimate alien lovers, beings who are clearly alive in some sense, yet who are profoundly different from human beings.
According to the editor’s introduction, this anthology was compiled on a dare. I would say the experiment works so well that it wouldn’t surprise me to see more plant-themed erotic fiction some time, but I doubt if a copycat collection could outdo this one.
The other Lethe Press book is a single-author collection of speculative fiction by A. Merc Rustad, who is identified as “a queer trans-masculine non-binary writer and filmmaker who likes dinosaurs, robots, monsters, and cookies.” The collection is titled So You Want to Be a Robot, and consists of 21 stories. I haven’t written a review of this book yet, but it is fabulous, especially for a reader who has seen individual stories by this author in various places, but not all together.
Picking a favourite story in this collection is hard, because each one pulls the reader into an alternative world that is both completely unreal and completely believable on an emotional level.
For those of us who wonder if there is any hope for democracy or justice, “The Gentleman of Chaos” is grimly satisfying. Here is the opening passage:
“People call him the Gentleman of Chaos, but he is not gentle.
By popular count, he’s assassinated thirteen kings, seventy-two princes, one thousand nobles, and five queens.
By popular legend, he’s immortal, a god of commoners, a death-demon summoned to feed on corruption, a shadow that devours the unjust. He never unmakes the innocent, it is said.
He is not gentle; I have seen what he does.
But I tell you this: part of his title is true. He is a man. And men can die.”
The rest of the first-person narrative shows how ironic this description is. For one thing, the “gentle” in the term “gentleman” originally indicated high social class; it is more closely related to “genteel” than to the modifier in “gentle touch.” For another thing, the being who eventually takes on the title in the story is mortal, but not exactly male.
This shadowy executioner is a kind of personification of karma or logical consequences. Even if there is no benevolent Deity, a ruler who slaughters everyone who might threaten his power tends to create more and more opposition. Sooner or later, the dictator's paranoia bears fruit.
One theme in this collection is that apparently inanimate objects have wills of their own, whether they are human-made robots/androids, engines, or natural phenomena such as mountains. In this sense, this book of non-erotic fantasy and sci-fi goes well with the “arboretum” of plant stories. I highly recommend them both.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending whole days revising my old erotic novel, Prairie Gothic, which was available as a download from a British publisher, Amatory Ink, from 2002 to 2006, when the publisher folded. I wrote the novel in 1998, when I had more enthusiasm than skill, and I had a paid two-month break from my teaching job, which in those days didn’t offer many other perks. (No expense account, no job security.)
After rereading this saga, most of which I had forgotten, I decided to keep the period flavour as well as the local colour. However, the head-hopping now makes me groan. It demonstrates my concept of “omniscient viewpoint” at the time.
What to do? There are two central characters, and several secondary ones who have valuable insights into the comedy-of-errors relationship between the two stars. I don’t want to lose all the snark from the sidelines.
The original novel was divided into nine rambling chapters of uneven length. I’ve been breaking them up into chapters of 2-4K. I think this makes the narrative more digestible, and also allows me to stay in one head per chapter, even though it seems necessary to head-hop between chapters. (For example, chapters 1-4 focus on Kelly, a young woman who goes to the local gay bar for the first time, and meets several regulars. Chapter 5 has to show the viewpoint of Kelly’s new girlfriend Vivienne, because she is visited by her bad-news ex while Kelly is in self-exile on the family farm. Chapter 11 must show the viewpoint of Rae, who has an uncanny experience with a ghost.)
This format allows me to flesh out a few details that were simply mentioned in passing in the original version. The original is only 56,000 words long, which is short for a novel. I expect the new version to be considerably longer, which will make it more of a standard size.
Once the shiny new version is ready, I plan to offer it to a certain publisher. If the novel isn’t accepted there, I plan to post it on Excessica.com. I’m excited to know that one of my early efforts can be recycled, and not left to waste space in my “Documents,” too good to delete but not good enough to resell.
Lethe Press recently sent me two books for review. I wrote a review of the anthology, His Seed: An Arboretum of Erotica, edited by Steve Berman, published under the new Lethe erotic imprint, Unzipped, and posted it on Facebook.
Here is a brief overview:
It’s hard to believe there is a theme in erotica which has not been overdone and yet seems visceral, organic and succulent. Here it is: sex between men, in which plants play various roles. This is not a joke. Several of the stories in this collection have horrifying endings, based on the undeniable fact that plants need nutrients, some of which are found in human bodies. Of course, this fact can also lead to interdependence, or mutual cultivation.
The stories cover a wide range of genres and tones, from stories that are basically sex scenes to fantasies about the Green Man or the Woodwose, the spirit of the forest in the form of a virile man. (One of these is a moving tale by our own Connie Wilkins about a man who has lost his lover in the first world war, but he discovers the Green Man living eternally in his native England.)
Among the sex-scene stories is “The Greenhouse” by Spencer Krell, in which a semi-sentient (genetically-modified) pumpkin vine makes advances to its cultivator, Aaron:
“He’d been about to get back to work once more when he felt a slight tickle against his ankle.” This is not random contact; this is seduction.
Even for readers who are not gay men, these stories are entertaining and unsettling. Plants are the ultimate alien lovers, beings who are clearly alive in some sense, yet who are profoundly different from human beings.
According to the editor’s introduction, this anthology was compiled on a dare. I would say the experiment works so well that it wouldn’t surprise me to see more plant-themed erotic fiction some time, but I doubt if a copycat collection could outdo this one.
The other Lethe Press book is a single-author collection of speculative fiction by A. Merc Rustad, who is identified as “a queer trans-masculine non-binary writer and filmmaker who likes dinosaurs, robots, monsters, and cookies.” The collection is titled So You Want to Be a Robot, and consists of 21 stories. I haven’t written a review of this book yet, but it is fabulous, especially for a reader who has seen individual stories by this author in various places, but not all together.
Picking a favourite story in this collection is hard, because each one pulls the reader into an alternative world that is both completely unreal and completely believable on an emotional level.
For those of us who wonder if there is any hope for democracy or justice, “The Gentleman of Chaos” is grimly satisfying. Here is the opening passage:
“People call him the Gentleman of Chaos, but he is not gentle.
By popular count, he’s assassinated thirteen kings, seventy-two princes, one thousand nobles, and five queens.
By popular legend, he’s immortal, a god of commoners, a death-demon summoned to feed on corruption, a shadow that devours the unjust. He never unmakes the innocent, it is said.
He is not gentle; I have seen what he does.
But I tell you this: part of his title is true. He is a man. And men can die.”
The rest of the first-person narrative shows how ironic this description is. For one thing, the “gentle” in the term “gentleman” originally indicated high social class; it is more closely related to “genteel” than to the modifier in “gentle touch.” For another thing, the being who eventually takes on the title in the story is mortal, but not exactly male.
This shadowy executioner is a kind of personification of karma or logical consequences. Even if there is no benevolent Deity, a ruler who slaughters everyone who might threaten his power tends to create more and more opposition. Sooner or later, the dictator's paranoia bears fruit.
One theme in this collection is that apparently inanimate objects have wills of their own, whether they are human-made robots/androids, engines, or natural phenomena such as mountains. In this sense, this book of non-erotic fantasy and sci-fi goes well with the “arboretum” of plant stories. I highly recommend them both.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Women and Magic, Part 1
by Jean Roberta
Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, edited by Catherine Lundoff and JoSelle Vanderhooft (Lethe 2011) is an anthology of a dozen stories. A review copy was sent to me years ago, but I didn’t find time to read it until lately. The two herbs named in the title are either healing or poisonous, depending on how they are used: in poultices, remedies, or spells.
Two of the stories in this collection were reprinted in the 2012 edition of Heiresses of Russ (co-edited by Sacchi Green and publisher Steve Berman), an annual best-of collection of published lesbian spec-fic. Several years later, I was invited to co-edit Heiresses of Russ 2015. Several weeks ago, I received a gift copy (for review?) of Heiresses of Russ 2016.
So I’ve learned that in the 21st century, there is no shortage of fantasy and sci-fi stories in which the protagonists are women-loving women. The genres of the stories range from “high fantasy” or sword-and-sorcery to steampunk, slipstream, projections into the future of current technology (science-fiction), parody, and horror.
The lesbian relationships in these stories range from casual hookups among adventurous young women to long-term nesting to working/romantic partnerships between women with complementary skills. However, none of the sex in these stories is explicitly described.
To add to my pile of stories by/about women, I recently received the first five chapters of an upcoming novel, The Lost Art of Letter-Writing by Menna van Praag, to be released on February 16, 2017. This writer is a young woman in Cambridge, England, who writes fantasy romances set in her city. So far, they are: Men, Money and Chocolate (novella), Happier Than She’s Ever Been (sequel), The House at the End of Hope Street, The Dress Shop of Dreams, and The Witches of Cambridge. Over a year ago, I picked up a reduced-to-clear copy of The House at the End of Hope Street in a bin in my local Safeway store, and I was charmed. I signed up for the Menna van Praag (MVP) newsletter on-line. This is how I know that she and her husband now have two children, and that she struggles to find writing time.
To start with Hellebore and Rue, since this is the oldest book in the pile, I was impressed for several reasons: the stories are really varied, they are by authors I’m fairly familiar with, as well as ones I’d like to know better, and they include some Canadian content.
One of the authors, Rrain Prior, comes from the prairies (Manitoba, just east of where I live), and the protagonist of her story is a bounty hunter named “Key” who was hired to trap a rogue Salamander (elemental spirit) that starts wildfires. This story seems to foreshadow several actual fires that occurred later, particularly the one that largely destroyed Fort McMurray, Alberta, to the west of me, in spring 2016, and forced the evacuation of thousands of people, including a writer I know. (To this date, it is the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history.) Where is Key when she’s needed?
Another story in this collection, “Counterbalance” by Ruth Sorrell, is set in Toronto, although it was written by a writer from Birmingham, England. This story, like several others, deals with kitchen magic (e.g. an ability to make a cake from raw ingredients on a hot summer day without turning on the oven) which requires an exchange of energy in the world. A supernatural villainess tries to seize too much power, only to find that the kitchen witch has allies.
Space doesn’t allow me to describe all the stories in this book, but the theme of undercover witches runs through several of them. “Witches Have Cats” by Juliet Kemp is probably the funniest; in this story, a woman with latent psychic power but no knowledge of how to use it effectively has a cute but clueless puppy rather than a cat as familiar. The process of learning how to wield one’s power is shown as parallel to the process of “coming out” as queer.
In “D is for Delicious” by Steve Berman, a school nurse facing retirement is introduced to the witchy tradition of feasting on children in order to prolong her life. Of course, she resists at first, but she has resisted so much of her appetite for pleasure that at last, she decides to give in to it, having been seduced by a tempting sister-witch.
The female police officer who returns to a small English town from the city in Rachel Green’s “A State of Panic” is probably the most complicated kitchen witch of the bunch. This story is a self-contained murder mystery, but it is better-understood as one of this author’s “Laverstone” tales (including a novel, An Ungodly Child), set in a town with an unusual number of supernatural beings due to a portal which was never properly closed. In this story, local landmarks include Moot Point and Hobbs’ Wood (as in “hobgoblin”).
The stories that are not set in the world as we know it feature women with professions that don’t exist here. In “The Windskimmer” by Connie Wilkins, the greenmistress who can control plant life has a history with the wind pilot who sails airships. Although their specialties seem to have nothing in common, it turns out that they were once sent on a joint mission that threatened the earth for the sake of victory in war. Their agreement to right an old wrong also reignites their love for each other. This story is one of the more satisfying of the other-worldly stories because the reader is not left wondering WTF?
If I have any complaint about anything in this collection, it is that some of the writers rely too much on the formula: Show, don’t tell. Characters suddenly appear with a clap of thunder, and exude attitudes of various kinds, without much explanation of where they came from or what they want. Fantasy writers of the past (who are still read, I might add) didn’t seem to dread world-building in the form of long introductions or info-dumps which could inform readers about the culture and history of the setting. In some cases, info was dumped into a Book of Lore which was left someplace where the protagonist (and reader) could find it. Some of the stories in Hellebore and Rue left me wishing I could find a book of spells, a long footnote, an appendix, or a concordance.
------------
Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, edited by Catherine Lundoff and JoSelle Vanderhooft (Lethe 2011) is an anthology of a dozen stories. A review copy was sent to me years ago, but I didn’t find time to read it until lately. The two herbs named in the title are either healing or poisonous, depending on how they are used: in poultices, remedies, or spells.
Two of the stories in this collection were reprinted in the 2012 edition of Heiresses of Russ (co-edited by Sacchi Green and publisher Steve Berman), an annual best-of collection of published lesbian spec-fic. Several years later, I was invited to co-edit Heiresses of Russ 2015. Several weeks ago, I received a gift copy (for review?) of Heiresses of Russ 2016.
So I’ve learned that in the 21st century, there is no shortage of fantasy and sci-fi stories in which the protagonists are women-loving women. The genres of the stories range from “high fantasy” or sword-and-sorcery to steampunk, slipstream, projections into the future of current technology (science-fiction), parody, and horror.
The lesbian relationships in these stories range from casual hookups among adventurous young women to long-term nesting to working/romantic partnerships between women with complementary skills. However, none of the sex in these stories is explicitly described.
To add to my pile of stories by/about women, I recently received the first five chapters of an upcoming novel, The Lost Art of Letter-Writing by Menna van Praag, to be released on February 16, 2017. This writer is a young woman in Cambridge, England, who writes fantasy romances set in her city. So far, they are: Men, Money and Chocolate (novella), Happier Than She’s Ever Been (sequel), The House at the End of Hope Street, The Dress Shop of Dreams, and The Witches of Cambridge. Over a year ago, I picked up a reduced-to-clear copy of The House at the End of Hope Street in a bin in my local Safeway store, and I was charmed. I signed up for the Menna van Praag (MVP) newsletter on-line. This is how I know that she and her husband now have two children, and that she struggles to find writing time.
To start with Hellebore and Rue, since this is the oldest book in the pile, I was impressed for several reasons: the stories are really varied, they are by authors I’m fairly familiar with, as well as ones I’d like to know better, and they include some Canadian content.
One of the authors, Rrain Prior, comes from the prairies (Manitoba, just east of where I live), and the protagonist of her story is a bounty hunter named “Key” who was hired to trap a rogue Salamander (elemental spirit) that starts wildfires. This story seems to foreshadow several actual fires that occurred later, particularly the one that largely destroyed Fort McMurray, Alberta, to the west of me, in spring 2016, and forced the evacuation of thousands of people, including a writer I know. (To this date, it is the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history.) Where is Key when she’s needed?
Another story in this collection, “Counterbalance” by Ruth Sorrell, is set in Toronto, although it was written by a writer from Birmingham, England. This story, like several others, deals with kitchen magic (e.g. an ability to make a cake from raw ingredients on a hot summer day without turning on the oven) which requires an exchange of energy in the world. A supernatural villainess tries to seize too much power, only to find that the kitchen witch has allies.
Space doesn’t allow me to describe all the stories in this book, but the theme of undercover witches runs through several of them. “Witches Have Cats” by Juliet Kemp is probably the funniest; in this story, a woman with latent psychic power but no knowledge of how to use it effectively has a cute but clueless puppy rather than a cat as familiar. The process of learning how to wield one’s power is shown as parallel to the process of “coming out” as queer.
In “D is for Delicious” by Steve Berman, a school nurse facing retirement is introduced to the witchy tradition of feasting on children in order to prolong her life. Of course, she resists at first, but she has resisted so much of her appetite for pleasure that at last, she decides to give in to it, having been seduced by a tempting sister-witch.
The female police officer who returns to a small English town from the city in Rachel Green’s “A State of Panic” is probably the most complicated kitchen witch of the bunch. This story is a self-contained murder mystery, but it is better-understood as one of this author’s “Laverstone” tales (including a novel, An Ungodly Child), set in a town with an unusual number of supernatural beings due to a portal which was never properly closed. In this story, local landmarks include Moot Point and Hobbs’ Wood (as in “hobgoblin”).
The stories that are not set in the world as we know it feature women with professions that don’t exist here. In “The Windskimmer” by Connie Wilkins, the greenmistress who can control plant life has a history with the wind pilot who sails airships. Although their specialties seem to have nothing in common, it turns out that they were once sent on a joint mission that threatened the earth for the sake of victory in war. Their agreement to right an old wrong also reignites their love for each other. This story is one of the more satisfying of the other-worldly stories because the reader is not left wondering WTF?
If I have any complaint about anything in this collection, it is that some of the writers rely too much on the formula: Show, don’t tell. Characters suddenly appear with a clap of thunder, and exude attitudes of various kinds, without much explanation of where they came from or what they want. Fantasy writers of the past (who are still read, I might add) didn’t seem to dread world-building in the form of long introductions or info-dumps which could inform readers about the culture and history of the setting. In some cases, info was dumped into a Book of Lore which was left someplace where the protagonist (and reader) could find it. Some of the stories in Hellebore and Rue left me wishing I could find a book of spells, a long footnote, an appendix, or a concordance.
------------
Sunday, September 11, 2016
more books in the bag
by Jean Roberta
Since I get to post on Friday, I have until Monday to add another post(script). I think.
I just thought I would add the list of books I’ve read lately that I promised to review.
Zander Vyne’s Tales of a Vampire Hunter Omnibus Collection (Books 1-3) is a thrill ride in which vampires (infected with vampirism) and hereditary vampire hunters are sexually attracted to each other, but their encounters are likely to be deadly for someone. A Romeo-and-Juliet pair from opposite sides who don’t kill each other have to run from their numerous enemies, so these 3 volumes (Immoral, Depraved, Bespelled), packaged together, are a road-trip saga. I’ll say more when I’ve finished a review.
Wilde Stories 2016, edited by publisher Steve Berman (Lethe Press) is an annual anthology of the year’s best gay-male speculative fiction. Some of these stories are literally haunting, and many deal with the loneliness of sensitive teenage boys on the brink of realizing what it is that makes them unconventional. All these stories were originally published somewhere else, some in Strange Horizons (magazine), which actually pays for reviews of 1-2K. So I wrote a long review of Wilde Stories, mentioning themes and motifs, and sent it to them. I haven’t heard back. Wish me luck.
When Steve Berman sends me a gift package of books for review, it usually includes more than I asked for. Along with Wilde Stories, I got Lily by Michael Thomas Ford (Lethe Press), a charming coming-of-age lesbian fantasy story in which Lily, a girl who can see other people’s deaths when she touches them, is taken away from her enchanted seaside home by her mother after the death of her fisherman father on Lily’s thirteenth birthday – which she foresaw and for which she feels horribly guilty. She doesn’t object when her mother agrees to join a travelling gospel show from Hell because Lily hopes to be cleansed of her “sin.” What she really needs to do is to rescue a more desperate prisoner and bring her home. The debunking of Christian piety and the regular appearances of Baba Yaga, the traditional Russian witch in a house on chicken legs, are delightful. And the illustrations are as good as the narrative.
Mantled in Mist by Rory Ni Coileain (Riverdale Avenue Books) is one of the novels I agreed to judge for Elisa Rolle’s Rainbow Awards. It’s the sixth novel in the “SoulShare” series of m/m erotic romances about glamorous male Fae from “the Realm” who must keep a shapeshifting monster (the Marfach) out of their world while each of the Fae must find his mortal, human soulmate. The sex is sizzling, and the dialogue is both witty and full of Gaelic, which is translated for the non-Irish reader. I was especially amused by the scene in which our hero, Fiachra, is hurled by the pissed-off spirit of an oak tree in Scotland to Central Park in New York, naked and with acorns rolling off him. The plot is both fast-paced and convoluted, but if you read carefully, you can follow it. I assume that anyone who reads this novel for pleasure would probably want to read the previous five volumes first.
Hadrian’s Rage is a novel I should have reviewed months ago, but I couldn’t open the digital versions sent to me by the author, so I ordered a paperback from Amazon. It’s definitely worth the price. This is a sequel to Hadrian’s Lover, a self-published novel by Patricia Marie Budd, a high-school teacher (who was exiled from her home in Fort McMurray, Alberta, when the place was ravaged by fire in summer 2016) about a post-apocalyptic nation, Hadrian (in the former Canada, bordering on Hudson’s Bay), which is protected from the rest of the world by a wall, and where the founders decided that same-sex relationships must be enforced by law to keep the population stable. Their reasoning is sound: since heterosexual males have caused most of the world’s problems, including overpopulation and the rape of the earth, they simply must be stopped, and women must not be allowed to mate with them. Of course, trying to police human sexuality causes problems. I’ll write a review a.s.a.p. My review of Hadrian's Lover is on Goodreads. Both books are constructed as newscasts, reports from judges, military officers, psychologists and other experts, and short third-person summaries. It's a very effective way to build credibility, and luckily, the second novel is much better copy-edited than the first.
Since I get to post on Friday, I have until Monday to add another post(script). I think.
I just thought I would add the list of books I’ve read lately that I promised to review.
Zander Vyne’s Tales of a Vampire Hunter Omnibus Collection (Books 1-3) is a thrill ride in which vampires (infected with vampirism) and hereditary vampire hunters are sexually attracted to each other, but their encounters are likely to be deadly for someone. A Romeo-and-Juliet pair from opposite sides who don’t kill each other have to run from their numerous enemies, so these 3 volumes (Immoral, Depraved, Bespelled), packaged together, are a road-trip saga. I’ll say more when I’ve finished a review.
Wilde Stories 2016, edited by publisher Steve Berman (Lethe Press) is an annual anthology of the year’s best gay-male speculative fiction. Some of these stories are literally haunting, and many deal with the loneliness of sensitive teenage boys on the brink of realizing what it is that makes them unconventional. All these stories were originally published somewhere else, some in Strange Horizons (magazine), which actually pays for reviews of 1-2K. So I wrote a long review of Wilde Stories, mentioning themes and motifs, and sent it to them. I haven’t heard back. Wish me luck.
When Steve Berman sends me a gift package of books for review, it usually includes more than I asked for. Along with Wilde Stories, I got Lily by Michael Thomas Ford (Lethe Press), a charming coming-of-age lesbian fantasy story in which Lily, a girl who can see other people’s deaths when she touches them, is taken away from her enchanted seaside home by her mother after the death of her fisherman father on Lily’s thirteenth birthday – which she foresaw and for which she feels horribly guilty. She doesn’t object when her mother agrees to join a travelling gospel show from Hell because Lily hopes to be cleansed of her “sin.” What she really needs to do is to rescue a more desperate prisoner and bring her home. The debunking of Christian piety and the regular appearances of Baba Yaga, the traditional Russian witch in a house on chicken legs, are delightful. And the illustrations are as good as the narrative.
Mantled in Mist by Rory Ni Coileain (Riverdale Avenue Books) is one of the novels I agreed to judge for Elisa Rolle’s Rainbow Awards. It’s the sixth novel in the “SoulShare” series of m/m erotic romances about glamorous male Fae from “the Realm” who must keep a shapeshifting monster (the Marfach) out of their world while each of the Fae must find his mortal, human soulmate. The sex is sizzling, and the dialogue is both witty and full of Gaelic, which is translated for the non-Irish reader. I was especially amused by the scene in which our hero, Fiachra, is hurled by the pissed-off spirit of an oak tree in Scotland to Central Park in New York, naked and with acorns rolling off him. The plot is both fast-paced and convoluted, but if you read carefully, you can follow it. I assume that anyone who reads this novel for pleasure would probably want to read the previous five volumes first.
Hadrian’s Rage is a novel I should have reviewed months ago, but I couldn’t open the digital versions sent to me by the author, so I ordered a paperback from Amazon. It’s definitely worth the price. This is a sequel to Hadrian’s Lover, a self-published novel by Patricia Marie Budd, a high-school teacher (who was exiled from her home in Fort McMurray, Alberta, when the place was ravaged by fire in summer 2016) about a post-apocalyptic nation, Hadrian (in the former Canada, bordering on Hudson’s Bay), which is protected from the rest of the world by a wall, and where the founders decided that same-sex relationships must be enforced by law to keep the population stable. Their reasoning is sound: since heterosexual males have caused most of the world’s problems, including overpopulation and the rape of the earth, they simply must be stopped, and women must not be allowed to mate with them. Of course, trying to police human sexuality causes problems. I’ll write a review a.s.a.p. My review of Hadrian's Lover is on Goodreads. Both books are constructed as newscasts, reports from judges, military officers, psychologists and other experts, and short third-person summaries. It's a very effective way to build credibility, and luckily, the second novel is much better copy-edited than the first.
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