Ursula

100 SF/F books James Davis Nicoll thinks you should consider reading, by way of various people.

The books on this list that I know I've read but can't remember anything about are all 1990s lesbian-inflected cyberpunk. I'm surprised that Lisa Mason's Arachne, a book about an angry lawyer and a falling-apart robot that reads a little bit like a forerunner of Max Gladstone, isn't also on the list.

( 100 books )

Suggest a topic, and I'll post about it in January?

Aliette de Bodard sent me a review copy of her new novella, In the Vanishers' Palace. This book bills itself as an f/f retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It is, by a fortunate coincidence, the third queer Beauty and the Beast novella I have read this year: the others were Aster Glenn Gray's m/m fantasy Briarley, set in England during World War II, and an as-yet-unpublished aromantic take on the fairy tale, set in ancien régime France, which I will tell you all about as soon as you can buy it.

There are a set of questions that one asks when embarking on a retelling of Beauty and the Beast: how was the Beast transformed? Who are the Beast's invisible servants? What is the palace? Who is the fairy that transformed them all? Wasn't it immoral to curse an entire palace and all of its inhabitants, along with the Beast? How can the Beast justify trapping another person in an enchanted palace, no matter what promises have been made about love? Who are Beauty's family, and why did they agree to give Beauty up?

Briarley answers these questions head-on; its invisible servants, in particular, are delightful. In the Vanishers' Palace offers layers of hypotheses. It's not so much a retelling of Beauty and the Beast as an argument with it. In true fairy-tale fashion, the argument focuses on what is beautiful and what is good. (I'm sorting out my own argument about structure, here, so my language is necessarily stark. That's a disservice to the book's sense of beauty, which is complex and made of shifting light.)

In the first layer of answers, Beauty is Yên, a poor teacher who lives with her mother the doctor because she has failed the imperial exams. The Beast is Vu Côn, a dragon. She's a river spirit, with antlers, whose robe trails water and words. Like Yên's mother, Vu Côn is also a doctor: she takes Yên as the price for a magical healing, and Yên goes because the elders of her village are willing to trade her away. The palace belonged to the Vanishers, beings who manipulated genes and magic, broke the world, and left. That makes the Vanishers our fairy, in some sense, and their vanishing the curse.

The next layer becomes evident when we ask who was transformed, and why. Vu Côn is a dragon; but she has always been a dragon. She shifts between more-human and more-draconic forms for her own reasons, not the Vanishers'. Perhaps it would make more sense to think of Vu Côn as one of the palace's servants: she served the Vanishers, and she's still trying to carry out the duties of a dragon, even though the context of her work is gone and the world has changed around her. Meanwhile, Yên's shape is less certain. She's not a constant, steady Beauty; she doesn't know how she fits into either the village or her palace, and that uncertainty of mind is mirrored by an uncertainty of body, flickers in her pulse, a sudden intuition for magic.

Maybe the entire planet is the palace: after all, the Vanishers changed it, and then left. There's no easy spell to make it right again, though; kisses won't restore things, true love or not. The only answers here are partial and contingent. Much of the tension of this book involves the pull between power, duty, and responsibility: when do you have to try to fix things? If you broke them the first time, when do you have to try again? When is it your duty to sort things out on your own, and when do you need to ask for help?

One of the things I admire about this book is the way it takes both healing and teaching seriously as forms of power. The men who matter in this book (Vu Côn's husband, a farmer, a legendary scholar) all happen to have died before the story starts. We see women and nonbinary people trying to sort out what to do with the world. In particular, we see some of them grabbing for power and fucking things up. Healing and teaching are often coded as feminine, subservient, and selfless, but this story centers on the ways they are aggressive. These are forms of leadership, decisiveness, imposing your will on the world and pulling other people with you.

Sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you fall in love with a river.

I read Kameron Hurley's Apocalypse Nyx courtesy of Netgalley.

"It's selfish to make somebody's life or death about you. It was her life. Let her live it as she chose."

Apocalypse Nyx is a series of short stories about the protagonist of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha series. Each of the first few stories describes the way Nyx met a member of her team. (There are some discrepancies in the timeline, but Nyx isn't the most reliable source.) I think the ideal reading order would be to pick this collection up after the first book: Nyx and her team are still very young, in these stories. Though none of them exactly grow wise, their relationships shift over the course of the trilogy in a way that these introductions don't reflect. On the other hand, if you miss Nyx's first team, before compromise and explosions and politics tore things up, this collection is a chance to spend time with them again.

The most unexpected story is the last one, in which we meet parrot shifters who have chosen not to be human circling around a tower, and learn that although Nyx is a terrible shot, she's genuinely good at disarming mines. Nyx is also good at staying alive, and slightly better at keeping a team alive along with her than she would like to admit. I hesitate to call her honest, but she has a weird compelling straight-line stubbornness that I keep coming back to.

I spent the afternoon doing a bit of pre-cooking for Pennsic. There's always a tradeoff, when cooking medieval food, between precisely reproducing a recipe and cooking the way medieval people actually cooked, making substitutions based on season and availability. This time, I leaned fairly hard toward the latter approach. I made a beef "hodgepodge" or stew, a greens dish, and medieval hummus; I'll freeze them all for later use.

( hodgepodge )

( greens )

( medieval hummus )

I'm out of salted lemons, now, which makes me sad. I already got someone to bring me lemons from California once this year; this time, I think I'll have to make a batch with storebought lemons.

I read Hannu Rajaniemi's Summerland courtesy of NetGalley.

Hannu Rajaniemi's first novels, the Jean le Flambeur series, involved an elaborate heist in a posthuman universe where people could make near-infinite copies of themselves. Summerland retains the preoccupation with immortality, but the setting is different and the weirdness builds more slowly. The story's architecture is built around a spy novel: it's 1938, there's a war in Spain, and British and Soviet spies are playing cat and mouse. The difference from our own history is that, in this book, ghosts and electricity are linked: with sufficient technological support you can go straight from life to afterlife (for the British, Summerland) without Fading like ordinary ghosts. Afterlife in Summerland is painfully bourgeois, but the narrative slowly makes it clear that death is more complicated than a simple Ticket to a ghostly city. There are some interesting alternate-history comments on the way that technological development changed, when an afterlife became an option.

Any ghost can see the emotions of the living, which complicates the efforts of spies and counter-spies. The heroine, Rachel, is a spy who has done reasonably well for herself in a mostly-male profession. One of the ways that she manipulates the ghosts is by channeling her justified anger at the sexism all around her. To me, those pieces felt a little bit too obvious: in my own experience with mostly-male professions, the big things are exhausting and tacitly understood, so when you need to shout you yell about small, anomalous things.

In many ways, Summerland feels similar to Ian Tregillis' Bitter Seeds, which is another novel about spies, occult-powered technology, and the Second World War. But in Bitter Seeds characterization takes second place to horror. Both books have women married to war heroes who grieve the loss of children, but in Summerland the strengths and failures of the relationship both seem more real, and the eventual rapprochement feels earned.

At the very end of Summerland, we see a glimpse of the broader universe, beyond Summerland and the equivalent Soviet enclave. I hope this is a promise of more books to come.

fiction in progress

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant. As I'd expected, my library copy expired; I'll pick it up again once I make it back to the front of the queue.

Aliette de Bodard, The Tea Master and the Detective. I'm here for the spaceships, rather than the Sherlock Holmes references (I never really got into the latter, which is sort of odd, given the amount of nineteenth-century pulp I've read); I like the spaceships very much.

short fiction

Jonathan Strahan (ed.), The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, volume 12. I acquired this from NetGalley because the list of featured authors on the cover included Geoff Ryman. Turns out this was a lie: the NetGalley cover copied the author names from last year's volume 11, and the version that's for sale now has an entirely different list.

Strahan's introduction is awful. He's trying to sound unbiased, like someone who could choose the very best science fiction and fantasy in an absolute sense, but ends up seeming pompous and dull. The most important things that happened in science fiction last year, he says, are that the United States elected a "controversial" leader (this comes off as praise-by-insufficient-hostility, which I'm guessing he didn't intend) and lots of people bought novellas. Some of the novellas were "bestsellers" and some were "critically acclaimed", but Strahan refuses to assign both descriptions to the same story.

Strahan's choice of stories, on the other hand, is pretty good. I'm reading this the way I usually read big fat anthologies, skipping ahead whenever something doesn't grab me immediately, but I'm definitely reading more than I'm skipping. Thus far I've particularly enjoyed Tobias Buckell's "Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance", Vina Jie-Min Prasad's "A Series of Steaks" (hilarious use of 3D printing!), and Yoon Ha Lee's "The Chameleon's Gloves" (Lawful Good Kel general! who is not actually the protagonist, but that's fine, I have priorities), which due to the cover error I didn't know to look forward to.

I suppose I should figure out what last year's Geoff Ryman story was?

The barony's submitting a badge with a person on it. Official heraldic submissions are supposed to use Crayola markers, since they have predictable colors and stand up to being mailed all over the country. But your basic pack of Crayolas doesn't have a shade for "Caucasian human proper".

I waffled between a pack of "multicultural" Crayolas and the extravagance of a six-pack of Copics in various flesh tones, and ended up with the latter. They are extremely satisfying.