Author: Emera

Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card (2002) E

Date read: 8.22.09 (re-read; originally read in about 2004 or 2005)
Read from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

N.B. This review is probably not very accessible to anyone who hasn’t read any of the Shadow Saga sequels to Ender’s Game, as this comes nearly at the tail end of the series. If you haven’t read any of the series, you may also wish to not read this review for fear of spoilers.

Some poor decision-making on the part of Peter Wiggin, adolescent Hegemon extraordinaire, leaves the fledgling Hegemony and its resources in the hands of Achilles. Though nominally disgraced in the eyes of the world after the revelation of his international-scale treachery, Achilles is as dangerous as ever. His new power puts him in position to re-enter the game of political manipulation, and sends Bean and Petra – his most hated enemies – into hiding. Meanwhile, the other members of Ender’s Jeesh continue to jockey for the precedence of their respective countries, while themselves often ignored or manipulated by their own governments. In short, the world is paying the price for having nursed a generation of young Napoleons, and Bean and Petra find themselves at the center of events, just when they have come to realize that what they value most is simply each other’s happiness.

My main impression of this was: bridge novel. It’s so obviously written as the sort of mid-series book that has to begin at one place, and get to another, such that while I was fairly engaged when reading, I kept on losing interest in following it as a whole. Overall I’ve become slightly disenchanted with Orson Scott Card, both on the basis that I find many of his political and personal opinions repugnant and on the basis that… frankly, I don’t think he’s a genius as much as I used to anymore. I’ve been re-reading the Shadow series because the final book hadn’t yet been published when I first ran through the series, so I’ve had to catch up again. A lot has changed in how I read in these past few years, so while Ender’s Game is still next to sacred in my canon and thus I don’t let myself nitpick it, it’s easier now to see the flaws in the rest of his books.

Continue reading Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card (2002) E

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) E

Date read: 8.27.09
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Henry DeTamble travels, involuntarily, in time; Clare Abshire is the woman who has loved him since she was 6 years old, and he, displaced in time – but in his own timeline already married to her – introduces himself to her in a meadow. The Time Traveler’s Wife charts the the convoluted course of their love, and all the hazards, vagaries, joy, and anguish that Henry’s strange condition brings into their lives.

Kakaner has been begging me to read this for years. This August I finally gave her the satisfaction of receiving a barrage of emails from me exclaiming over the book as I plowed through it in a handful of days. I was absolutely sucked in, and despite her warning that she’d found the first 100 pages of the book slow going, the first half-ish of the book was actually my favorite. I loved the slow back-and-forth as Clare works her way through life to her first meeting with in-time Henry – I found the scenes of her childhood and young adulthood (and the interspersed glimpses of Henry’s childhood and his first, innocently bedazzled experiences of time travel) beautiful and singularly lush, and I loved feeling so connected with Clare as a character, so immersed in her experience of growing up, and feeling as intensely as she does the anxiety and excitement of each impending encounter with Henry. (Sucker for young love, right here.)

Continue reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) E

If you’ve ever felt inadequate about your bookshelves…

…take a look at Neil Gaiman’s library. As featured in Shelfari, which appears to be a sort of Facebook for people obsessed with books.

The only other time I’ve seen that many (predominantly) genre books in one place is, well, never. (Maybe Kakaner has seen more, given that she’s personally ransacked the catacombs of the MIT Science Fiction Society Library, but I’m still betting that Mr. Gaiman’s shelfapalooza could hold its own.) Also, this is apparently only “the downstairs library,” as the “upstairs library with all the good reference stuff in it” is not featured.

….uh.

It’s pretty delicious to go through each full-size photo and check out the individual books – like four copies of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Swan Sister, and a Swedish (?) edition of one of the Sandman volumes.

Now excuse me while I go and take a cold shower.

The Inside, by Isaac Marion (2008) E

Date read: 2.6.09
Read from: Originally borrowed from Kakaner; now in personal collection, via Burning Building
Reviewer: Emera

At twelve, David falls asleep on a schoolbus, and meets, literally, the girl of his dreams. In real life, he grows up, marries a woman he thinks he loves, and proceeds to destroy both of their lives. He is unable to shed the belief that somewhere beyond the world he sees every day, there’s another one that’s more vital, more beautiful – and most importantly, is home to the girl whom he still glimpses in maddeningly brief and unpredictable snatches. Soon, even his waking life is invaded by the inexplicable: radio towers appear and disappear; cryptic cassette tapes appear on his welcome mat; he wakes up in his car in places that he doesn’t remember driving to. David is terrified, infuriated, and eventually obsessed by these “messages,” desperate to take control and escape a life that seems to hold no meaning except for the conviction that love lies elsewhere.

The Inside is a strange book. Though I hate to pin it down with genre terms (I know, then why am I doing it?), it’s most easily described as part psychological horror/suspense, part romance, part weird. After Kakaner lent me her copy (I bought my own later), I was haunted by it every moment that I wasn’t actually reading it, quite as obsessed as David, and a little frightened. Ultimately, I didn’t even care so much about the eventual reveals as I did about the process of getting to them, which is absolutely absorbing, often moving, and beautiful in a crazed, pained kind of way. I do think the novel falters towards the end, which I found somewhat rushed and a little incoherent, and there are certain other moments when Marion tries too hard to maintain the book’s tone, and slips into wryer-than-thou territory. Overall, though, Marion is an extremely assured writer, with a distinctive, effective voice and good control of pacing and plot.

Continue reading The Inside, by Isaac Marion (2008) E

New books for August

In an effort to stave off our ridiculous acquisitions rates, Kakaner and I have undertaken a pact not to buy any more new books until… well, for as long as we can possibly restrain ourselves, and hopefully we’ve actually read the greater part of the books we’ve bought but haven’t yet read. But prior to that, I, of course, bought a lot of books this summer. Ahem. Here are some of the ones that I’m most excited about.

A 1905 (?) edition of Lafcadio Hearn’s  A Japanese Miscellany (originally published 1901) – I’ve been wanting to find a copy of his Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things for ages, with little luck given his relative obscurity. So I was astonished to see three beautiful, first-edition-or-nearly hardcovers of his works on a shelf at Skyline Books in New York City. No Kwaidan, but this seemed the next best thing. 1905 is pencilled in on the endpapers, but I suspect from this nifty index of Hearn’s work that I have the 1906 edition, which would make it second edition.

Continue reading New books for August

Valente on The Red Tree and horror

Author Catherynne M. Valente made a beautiful blog post yesterday on her reaction to reading Caitlin R. Kiernan’s newest release, The Red Tree. She discusses how she read the book, her early relationship (read: obsession) with horror novels, New England’s unique signficance in the horror genre, and what really lies at the center (or bottom) of horror – that is, not gore, but death, and secrets, and the horrible tension of not knowing them:

I just want to know. I always want to know. I want to know the secret at the bottom, and maybe horror as a genre still eats at me because it will not give me that answer, and so I can stay at the swollen, drawn out moment before revelation, the pre-orgasmic stretching before the inevitable tumble into disappointment and continuity errors. Good horror almost never shows all its cards, and yet I know the Queen of Spades and Clubs, oh, my terrible black Queens are there, and they would tell me all their worst deeds, if I could only keep my eyes open when the scary parts come, if I could only go down into my own basement, where the earth is frozen and lumpy and moldy, where I cannot bear to look.

I, for one, would be way excited to see Valente do a horror novel, which is what she certainly hints at wanting to do at the end of the post. Also, of course, this makes me want to get on top of reading Kiernan’s work – Alabaster came in the mail for me just this week!

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Catherynne M. Valente

“Behind the Mirror,” by Yoon Ha Lee (2007) E

Date read: 8.10.09
Read in: Coyote Wild
Reviewer: Emera

Yoon Ha Lee’s flash fiction (I did a word count out of curiosity – 223) “Behind the Mirror” is lovely, sad, and unsettling, and has one of the most memorable single lines I’ve read, that could be a poem all by itself. The story has an appropriately vanishing feel to it, a sort of silvery evanescence. I found one paragraph a little overwritten, which is troublesome in such a short piece, but it doesn’t really hurt the story as a whole.

“Behind the Mirror” appears in the first issue of online speculative fic/poetry quarterly Coyote Wild. Take a minute out of your day to enjoy Lee’s story. (That’s why I love short fiction – you can pop one in here and there so easily.)

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Yoon Ha Lee

Hugos a go-go

The winning Hugos have been declared, and I suspect that no one was too surprised by the results. For one, Neil Gaiman‘s The Graveyard Book did indeed take best novel, making this Gaiman’s fourth Hugo win, out of six nominations – one of which, for Anansi Boys, Gaiman actually turned down. Not a bad record, eh?

Other familiar names on the winning list included Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, Ellen Datlow, Doctor Horrible, WALL-E… I was also very happy to see that Weird Tales won for best semi-prozine only two years after its reorganization/makeover, and that Electric Velocipede won for best fanzine.

Awards season

I can’t say I’m qualified to blog about genre fiction awards season, given that I generally straggle at least one year behind current offerings in the field, but I’m still having fun following the buzz surrounding the 2009 Hugo Awards and World Fantasy Awards, the shortlists for which have been released.

SF Signal has an interesting panel feature asking a dozen-odd genre folk the following questions about the Hugo Awards:

1. How would you rate the track record of the Hugo Awards at directing readers to the best that the genre has to offer?
2. How well do you think the Hugo shortlist, year over year, represents to the outside world what speculative fiction has to offer?
3. Which of this year’s finalists do you predict will receive the Hugo award for Best Novel?
4. Which of this year’s finalists do you think should receive the Hugo award for Best Novel?
5. Which books do you think were missing from this year’s list of Best Novel finalists?

It went on a bit long for me, so I stopped halfway through, but of what I read, I found Paul Graham Raven‘s answer to #2 particularly interesting and well-articulated. Steve Davidson’s responses were also useful in considering the history, scope, and overall “purpose” of the awards – mainly, that the Hugo Awards were not primarily conceived of as writing awards, but as gestures of recognition to a variety of figures in fandom. I guess that the idea of “best” is compelling enough that that ends up being the focus, as with all awards.

The top two trends in responses:

  • The Hugo Awards, being based on the votes of a small subset of people, are more likely to reward a particular sort of popularity than, necessarily, literary merit. This is expressed with varying degrees of resignation and ire by nearly every panelist.
  • Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book seems the top pick for best novel, with potential but unlikely competition from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. (It’s a battle of the Nei/als, as one panelist put it.)

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Hugo Awards nominees
World Fantasy Awards nominees

“Urchins, While Swimming,” by Catherynne M. Valente (2006) E

Date read: 8.5.09
Read in: Clarkesworld, Issue 3
Reviewer: Emera

Catherynne Valente‘s short story “Urchins, While Swimming” left me wide-eyed and breathless. It’s a simple, sorrowful, beautiful story, filled with unforgettable imagery and lyrical language. It’s about love between mothers and daughters, and falling in love, and the Russian rusalka myth. (Unless you already know it, you might not want to read it until after you’ve read the story.)

Below, a few of my favorite lines:

“The stars were salt-crystals floating in the window’s mire.”

“Artyom ate the same thing every day: smoked fish, black bread, blueberries folded in a pale green handkerchief.”

“…she did not say we drag the lake with us, even into the city, drag it behind us, a drowning shadow shot with green.”

For this story, Valente won the 2007 StorySouth Million Writers Award for Best Online Short Story; very cool, and deserving. Kakaner also lent me her copy of Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden this weekend, and now I’m even more excited to start it.

Also, since both of us are so partial to short fiction, we’ll probably be inaugurating a secondary review index for short stories alone, which will require a monumental amount of effort, but hopefully be rewarding.

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Catherynne M. Valente