lisa_goldstein | Recent Entries

I’ve had a new Spanish teacher for a while, a woman in Costa Rica who teaches over Skype. I took classes from her when I was at a language school there and I thought she was terrific, and she’s even better one-on-one. Of course individual classes mean that I can’t hide among other students, but I tell myself that that’s a good thing.

We’ve been reading a book of novellas called Archipiélagos, by Alma Mancilla -- and I’m starting to dislike the stories intensely. The first one, “El Oficial Jean,” is about a police inspector who is sent to a small Canadian island, Isla de Arena (Sand Island), to look for a missing girl. He moves listlessly through the island, conducting interviews with a series of grotesques. Finally he discovers a dead body and returns home, but the body turns out to be that of a man.

In the second story, “Recep,” the title character is a sailor, originally from Turkey and now a Canadian citizen. He is shipwrecked with his crew on Sand Island, and after a stay in the hospital he goes back to Turkey, living in the house of his dead grandparents. For some reason he decides to look for Ipek, a woman he broke up with thirty years ago. He moves listlessly through Istanbul, conducting interviews with a series of grotesques, but in the end he goes back to sea without finding her.

These stories have everything I dislike in fiction. The characters barely have any motivation (Recep still isn’t sure how he feels about Ipek), they dislike the people they meet, they spend whole days off from their searches lying in bed or staring off into space. Their guesses about what is happening are so far off the mark they seem like comedy, though I don’t know if the writer intended that. In the end, not only do they fail, they take nothing away from their experiences.

My teacher says that this kind of story is more popular among latinoamericanos, that they seem to find it easier to live with uncertainty and mystery. I tell her that in the US we want to like or feel something in common with the main character, and we prefer to see most of the loose ends tied up -- though I agree with her that this can sometimes lead to stories that are rote or formulaic. I wanted the inspector in “El Oficial Jean” to discover clues about the missing girl, some of which would lead to other clues and finally to finding her, dead or alive. I wanted Recep to find Ipek and for their relationship to play out in some way -- she’s married and has forgotten him, she’s happy to see him, he realizes that he never liked her or that he loves her, though i realize that with a happy-ever-after ending there's that risk of devolving into cliche.

After we finished the first two novellas I asked her if we could read something else. She pointed out that there are only two more in the collection, and that the stories interconnect and might come to a resolution at the end. When that didn’t move me she held out another inducement: After this book we can start on Pedro Páramo.

I saw the movie of Pedro Páramo on Netflix recently. The novel it’s based on, by Juan Rulfo, is one of the earliest examples of magic realism in Latin America; it was published in 1955, 12 years before One Hundred Years of Solitude, and some critics think it’s even better than Gabriel García Márquez’s novel. Despite the fact that I’d loved One Hundred Years of Solitude when I first read it, and that I’ve been studying Spanish for a while now, I’d never heard of it until the movie came out.

The movie is about a man looking for his father, the title character, and discovering that the town where his father lived is in ruins. As he searches he comes to learn how his father’s cruelty destroyed the town.

The story moves seamlessly between past and present, life and death, reality and fantasy. In one flashback scene, a man knocks on a woman’s door at night. He’s been visiting his girlfriend, but, as he tells the woman, he found out that the girlfriend doesn’t exist. “I’m so sorry,” the woman says. “You’re dead.” That’s the kind of comment to send a shiver all through your body.

I’m eager to read the book, so I agreed to plow through the rest of Archipiélagos. If Pedro Páramo as good as the movie, or even if it isn’t, I’ll review it here. I might even have something positive to say about Archipiélagos, though right now I doubt it.

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Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber. As with The Dawn of Everything, which Graeber wrote with David Wengrow, Debt shows us that the history we’ve been taught about something, in this case money, is far too simplistic and probably wrong. I thought his explanations were fascinating, but the main thing I got out of the book is that the international finance system is more complicated than I ever imagined. (Check out what he says about the International Monetary Fund, for example.) Anyone who’s dissatisfied with the current system should read this.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism, by Grady Hendrix. Like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," My Best Friend’s Exorcism takes a common high school problem and puts a supernatural spin on it. In this case, Abby wants to know why her best friend Gretchen first ignores her and then turns hostile toward her. It’s a terrific view of high school friendship, though a lot grosser than most.

White Cat, Black Dog, by Kelly Link. Link creates magical worlds in just a few pages, whole and entire. The stories in this collection are based on fairy tales, making them more approachable than some of her other fiction, and nearly every one is filled with enchantment. Possibly a good place to start if you’re interested in Link’s work.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar. The character known as the boy is on a mining ship that travels through space, finding asteroids and extracting their minerals. He has been chained to his fellow slaves for as long as he can remember. Suddenly he is taken upstairs, given an anklet instead of a chain, and put in the charge of a woman called the professor. Upstairs is softer and brighter, the food is more varied and the smells are different, but the boy is unable to take anything in without the familiar weight of his chain.

Eventually he learns that he has been given a scholarship because of the drawings he’d scratched on the walls of his cell. He tries to adapt himself to his new home, to figure out what his tasks are in a place where there are no spoken orders. The contrasts between slaves and privileged people are sharply observed; no matter how well-intentioned the professor is she can never understand the boy’s experience and most of her interpretations about his behavior are wrong.

Meanwhile the boy is occupied with the Practice, teachings he learned from a chained man called the prophet. “It is the mesh,” someone on the ship -- we never learn who -- thinks. “Entanglement. Vibration, brightness, scent.... The hand grips. The drowned return. It is the bond, the chain that grows in all directions: for the Chain of Being is not up and down.”

As the boy’s awareness grows he finds a link with the prophet’s daughter, who had been taken away to another ship. He turns his back on the upstairs and sets off to bring her back -- and the story changes, from a narrative on the differences between enslaved and free people to a meditation on what connects us.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin Stevenson. A well-plotted mystery, with surprising twists and humorous moments. Ernest Cunningham’s family has gathered at a remote inn to welcome his brother back from jail. There’s the requisite murder and Ernest, who has self-published how-to books about writing mysteries, is certain that he can solve it.

What sets this book apart is that it’s also a clever meta-mystery. Cunningham, an expert on the genre, opens the novel with Ronald Knox’s “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” and promises that he will scrupulously follow them. * Every so often, though, he seems violate one or another -- and just as this thought passes through the reader’s mind Cunningham / Stevenson stops the action and explains how what he did was permissible after all.

And he does tell the truth; any misunderstanding usually arises because of his tricky phrasing. When Cunningham meets a character named Juliette, for example, he says, “You won’t hear about us locking lips for another 89 pages, when I’m naked, if you’re wondering.” Ah-ha, the reader thinks, romance. But after the prescribed number of pages Ernest nearly drowns in a freezing lake and needs artificial respiration. Ah-ha, no romance after all. But not so fast ...

It’s clever, but the cleverness doesn’t overwhelm the mystery, which has plenty of revelations in store.

* For example, “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear...” The commandments were written in 1929, which is probably why Knox makes no allowance for twin sisters.

-----

An impossible book to review:

Black Sheep, by Rachel Harrison. Vesper Wright escaped her overly religious family when she was eighteen. She decides to go back for her cousin’s wedding, but at a pre-wedding party we discover...

Well, that’s the problem. There’s a major shock on page 48, something far enough along that it would definitely constitute a spoiler if a reviewer gave it away. On the other hand, this new information is essential to the plot. There seems to be no way of writing about this book: a review would either take away the delightful jolt when the narrative turns itself inside out, or so tangle itself in generalities that it would make no sense.

I should say that Black Sheep isn’t part of my best of the year list; I just mention it because I’ve never encountered this particular problem before. It’s an amusing read, though, so you might like it. Just don’t check out page 48 ahead of time.

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In some respects the best story in The Last Dangerous Visions is J. Michael Straczynski’s “Ellison Exegesis,” an account of his friendship with Harlan Ellison. It takes up 14% of the Kindle edition — but it’s so fascinating it’s worth the space. Among other things Straczynski tell us why Ellison had never been able to finish the anthology. [The following is possibly a spoiler if you want to read it for yourself.] Based on a documentary Straczynski had seen while getting a psychology degree, he concluded that Ellison was bipolar. I’d seen Ellison around when I lived in Los Angeles, and although I’m not a psychologist, this explanation does make sense — except that he seemed to have not alternating manic and depressive episodes but one long manic episode that lasted from the beginning of his career to about the middle, and then one continuous depressive slide to old age.

Because of his depression he couldn’t write, couldn’t take care of simple organizational tasks, and toward the end of his life couldn’t even leave the house. Straczynski doesn’t present this as an excuse for his failures, for TLDV and other works, but as a tragic reality. It might even silence the critics who kept complaining about Ellison’s many missed deadlines. It might not, of course; I can’t imagine a change of heart from some of them.

Straczynski comes across as something between a mensch and a certified saint. His admiration for Ellison, shading into hero-worship, started in his childhood and continued after he’d met the man and throughout Ellison’s life. Whenever Ellison asked him for a favor he would say, “Of course” unreservedly, without even asking for details.

This would sometimes get him into trouble. Once he agreed to host the Pacifica radio show Hour 25 when Ellison couldn’t do it any longer. * Another time Ellison was confined to a hospital on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold and begged Straczynski to get him out. It was the only time Straczynski put conditions a request; he told Ellison he would spring him from the hold, but only if Ellison would seek professional help. And he did, but unfortunately it didn’t seem to help.

“Ellison Exegesis” is also a sort of coda to Straczynski’s autobiography, Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood, which is a fascinating and horrible history of growing up with the worst family in the world. It’s clear that Ellison was a substitute father to him, and the relationship seems to work on that improbable basis — though they were other things as well, peers, friends, co-workers, sympathetic listeners. Ellison had hurt and insulted people — and of course had helped others immeasurably — and the “Exegesis” gives you a better understanding of both the protagonists of this story.

* Ellison asked me to be on the show if I was ever in Los Angeles, but by the time I made it there Straczynski had taken over. It was great, though — Arthur Byron Cover joined him and we had a terrific time. A part of me felt relieved by the change of hosts; people had warned me that Ellison would ask the question, “What was the worst thing you ever did?”, and I had no idea how to answer it. You couldn’t say anything that was too personal or made you look like an asshole, of course, but that left only minor peccadillos. And Ellison had a sixth sense for when someone was lying.

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Harlan Ellison first announced The Last Dangerous Visions, the third anthology in the Dangerous Visions series, in 1973. Various publication dates came and went over the fifty years since then, but the book never appeared. Before Ellison died in 2018 he made J. Michael Straczynski the executor of his estate, and Straczynski promised to finish the work.

And, amazingly, he did. Here it is, real, solid, out in the world. I want to make sure I give Straczynski full credit for his success, because the things I’m going to say next are not nearly as nice. (Though I have an idea for another, more positive post — I’ll see how this one goes.)

There are 23 stories in TLDV and a series of “Intermezzos.” Compare that with Ellison’s Table of Contents from 1979, which Straczynski reproduces in the Afterward: three volumes of approximately 100 stories for a total of 720,000 words. Ellison’s proposal feels like an intoxicating alternate history now, with new stories by Daniel Keyes, Vonda McIntyre, Michael Moorcock, John Varley, Avram Davidson, Edgar Pangborn, and Connie Willis, among others. I don’t know about you, but I would have loved to read “Himself in Anacreon” by Cordwainer Smith, or “Childfinder” by Octavia Butler. The Wikipedia entry for TLDV says these stories have already been published and I want to go dig them up, but like a lot of my good intentions I’ll probably never do it. *

Straczynski explains the drastic cuts, making a good case for why the anthology is so reduced. A lot of authors had grown impatient with the ever-receding publication date, bought their stories back, and sold them elsewhere. In addition, Ellison admitted to Straczynski that he’d accepted stories that “should be led out on a leash,” but that he couldn’t bring himself to cut them. Straczynski had no such compunctions. Finally, Straczynski writes that the reactionary climate of the seventies and eighties had authors self-censoring. “Most of the established writers who had gladly taken the freedom offered by those first two volumes… were now keeping their heads down to stay out of the line of fire, while the new writers were hesitant to piss off the Powers That Be who could end their careers before they had even properly begun.” **

But the anthology still somehow remains mired in 1973. It contains twenty men, three women (P.C. Hodgell, Mildred Downey Broxon, and D.M. Rowles), and one person who identifies as gender-queer, Kayo Hartenbaum — a gender ratio that these days rarely appears even in most conservative magazines. Straczynski explains that Ellison had originally included more women authors but that a lot of them had pulled their stories. To his credit, he had very much wanted to publish a story by Vonda McIntyre that Ellison had bought, but McIntyre’s estate had “decided to override Vonda’s express wishes on the grounds that the book would be too male.”

Most of the authors are from the US. Of the others, one is Australian, one English, one, Cory Doctorow, is from Canada but now lives in the US, and there are two for whom I can’t find a country of origin. I also can’t find any information on how many people of color are included in the anthology — which is fine by itself, but without that data I can only guess at a number, and my guess is one-half of one writer. That is, I think Ty Franck, who writes with Daniel Abraham as James S.A. Corey, is Hispanic, but I can’t track this down on the Interwebs. There are probably a few more that I don’t know about.

Straczynski was aware of the problem. He writes: “But I still felt there was something missing. The stories withdrawn over the years by women writers and writers of color had left the book demographically unbalanced in ways that hadn’t been the case when TLDV was first being assembled.” And so he asked for submissions from the following people: Max Brooks, David Brin, Cory Doctorow, James S.A. Corey, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Cecil Castellucci.

I don’t know why Straczynski offers this list in his defense. Number of women: none. Number of writers of color: one-half, as I mentioned above. Straczynski will say, I’m sure, that he’d tried asking women and other WOC as well, but they’d turned him down or hadn’t responded. Well, TRY HARDER.

There’s a bigger problem, though, and this one doesn't have a solution. Since the seventies a lot of movements and manifestos have exploded through sf: cyberpunk, feminism, experiments with gender, grim-dark fantasy, a push for more writers of color and more writers from non-English speaking countries. Many of these tendencies tore the field apart for a while, but in the end it emerged stronger, a bit roughed up but also larger, more generous and thoughtful.

Most of the stories in TLDV were written before any of this. They have an ancient, musty feel to them, like a rarely visited attic. They’re set in the US or on spaceships and space stations that feel like the US, and they’re peopled by characters that are mostly male, white, and straight. ***

Of course there’s nothing Straczynski could have done about this. He’d been handed a time capsule, a dusty museum display from another era. Asking newer writers for submissions was a good start, though, as I said, he didn’t go far enough.

But the stories also lack the thrill and shock of the first two volumes. Maybe, as Straczynski says, people had stopped writing about taboo subjects. Maybe it’s impossible to recreate that long-ago excitement of the first two books. Maybe subjects that were dangerous once upon a time, like gay characters, are commonplace now. Maybe so many ground-breaking stories have been written, in part because of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, that it’s harder to come up with risky or prohibited topics.

The stories themselves aren’t bad; TLDV reads like several months of a better-than-average magazine. Except for the problems mentioned above, it doesn’t even feel all that dated, though every so often some old-fashioned tech pulls you up short. I liked Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “First Sight,” about a diplomat who shows a group of aliens how humans perceive things, with tragic results; Dan Simmon’s “The Final Pogrom,” in which a scientist thinks he has discovered a cure for anti-semitism, while another Holocaust rages outside his lab and blocks his efforts to release the cure into the world; and D.M. Rowles’s “Intermezzos,” dispatches from other realities, eerie and luminous.**** I’d recommend the volume for these and other stories, and for historical interest.

Someone somewhere is going to say that I’m bad-mouthing the anthology because I hadn’t been invited to submit a story. I don’t know what I can say to this except, “I’m not bad-mouthing the anthology because I hadn’t been invited to submit a story.”

* I heard one author on the 1979 list say that they wouldn’t mind if TLDV stayed in publication limbo forever, because their story had been written early in their career and was not very good. And no, it isn’t in the final volume — much to this person’s relief, I’m sure.

** I never noticed this, and I started publishing in the 1980s. On the other hand, I’m not an editor.

*** Exceptions are Brooks’s story “Hunger,” written as a letter from the People’s Republic of China, and Broxon’s “The Danann Children Laugh,” which could only take place in Ireland.

**** I knew a lot of people who went to Clarion the same year as D.M. Rowles. As the years passed and the anthology failed to appear, she lamented, “I’m a has-been, and I’ve never even been a been.” I wonder where she’d be now if TLDV had been published fifty years earlier.

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the last dangerous visions

We’ve been looking for a dog since the beginning of the year. We had a lot of requirements, maybe too many: female, forty to sixty pounds, young but not a puppy. We also didn’t want a dog that pulled us on a walk or a herding dog that tried to drive us like sheep.

We searched a lot of web sites for rescue organizations and looked at a lot of dogs, but none of them fit. A few times we arrived to meet a dog only to find that someone else had just adopted it. It began to seem impossible. Surely, I thought, finding a dog that needed a family couldn’t be that hard.

Last month I saw a dog on a rescue site and we went to visit her. The dog had looked like a German shepherd in the picture, but she turned out to be smaller and maybe even part dachshund. We’re looking for something bigger, we said, and they brought out a gorgeous dog (I thought, anyway), black and wheat-colored like a shepherd but leaner, more delicate.

“Forty pounds, three years old,” they said, which sounded perfect. We walked her: no pulling. We played with her: no bad behavior. She seemed heavier than forty pounds, though, so they put her on a scale and she weighed sixty pounds, the extreme limit of what we wanted. And after a while we were pretty sure she was younger than three years old, closer to one year with a strong puppyish disposition. At this point I was starting to wonder if she was even a dog.

It was too late, though. I’d fallen in love with her. And so, Reader, we adopted her.

The adoption had happened so quickly that we knew very little about her. Later I read her paperwork: she’d been found about three weeks before we met her, wandering around farmland near Bakersfield. The rescue people had named her Lilly, but on the drive home I thought she looked more like a Maisie, and since she hadn’t been called Lilly for very long she was OK with the new name.

She seemed never to have been in a house before; she looked for the tiny people behind the television set, and she jumped the first time she heard a toilet flush. She’s still fascinated by the handsome dog behind a floor-length mirror, still wonders why her nose hits a hard surface when she tries to make friends. It’s possible that her last owner(s) had never let her indoors.

Unfortunately, it turned out that she had been overwhelmed by her new surroundings at the rescue place, and so her behavior there was more subdued. When she got comfortable with us her true character came out. Not only does she pull on walks; when she sees a squirrel she jumps, she twirls, she cries out in ecstasy, she tangles herself and us in the leash. We used a collar called a Halti — it turned her head to the side whenever she tried to pull — and she chewed through three of them before we finally wised up and got something else. When she sees a squirrel from a window she runs crazily around the house, climbing the walls. (Literally. There are paw prints.) She has strong herding instincts, nipping at us to wake us up or to go for a walk. (Oh, German shepherd. I get it.)

Doug and I talked seriously about taking her back. The only thing that saved her, I think, is that she’s so incredibly cute. She saw a squirrel in a tree in the backyard, jumped up on a wide banister on the porch and tried to reach it from there, then ran completely around the yard, jumped on the banister, and did the whole thing again. Because… she’d thought the branches might have gotten closer in the meantime? She did the same thing indoors with a rawhide bone, running around and then pouncing on it like the tiger from Calvin and Hobbs.

She’s also very affectionate. She puts her head on my feet when she lies down, and my heart just melts. She bonded with us almost right away. And she’s beautiful: a few days after we adopted her I saw a picture of a Belgian Malinois and realized that she has that breed in her as well. She’s smaller than a shepherd and her nose is black up to the eyes, as if she’d dipped her head in a vat of dark chocolate. Her face is narrow and her expression alert, taking in everything around her.

We called a dog trainer who showed us a better way of walking her. We talked to a woman in the neighborhood who volunteers at a dog shelter, and she gave us some tips. Sometimes Maisie seems to understand something, but her progress is slow and uneven. Still, it’s clear she wants to be a good dog, though her puppy brain sometimes gets in the way. She’s learned Sit and Stay and No and Maisie, and she will come if you have a treat in your hand but rarely otherwise. She also knows the words Bad Dog, which are only used for something terrible.

Doug and I think there’s a good dog in there somewhere, like a sculpture in a block of marble. We’re both working hard to bring it out.

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maisie

I don’t know if anyone but me would be interested in this, but — Timothy Snyder (history professor at Yale, author of On Tyranny) gave a talk called “Wonder Woman and the Orcs: Ukrainian History and Western Fables.” He starts by saying that Ukrainians call Russian soldiers orcs, and he points out that J.R.R Tolkien got the word orc from Beowulf and Scandinavian Eddas, and that because Kyiv was settled by Scandinavians, Ukrainians would have used the same word a thousand years ago. It was fun hearing Snyder talk about The Lord of the Rings, a subject I know something about, as opposed to the Habsburg dynasty or the Mongolian conquest of Russia. And unlike some he has a good understanding of Tolkien, though it’s not his field.

As for Wonder Woman, he talked about the genesis of the comic book and the radical ideas of the two women and one man who invented her. Then he went back more than two thousand years to the Scythians, and the discovery that about a third of their soldiers were women. Of course people had at first refused to believe that women could be soldiers, and when their graves were excavated archeologists claimed that the bodies, buried along with their horses and swords, were of men, though smaller men with strangely configured pelvises. Finally their DNA was tested, and the disbelievers had to give in. The Scythians lived in what is modern Ukraine, and Ukraine, unlike Russia, has women soldiers.

At first I wasn’t sure what Snyder was getting at with all this, though I didn’t think it was that the word orc had survived in the collective unconscious of Ukraine for a thousand years. But it was nothing more, and nothing less, than the fact that we’re all connected, that a Scandinavian saga takes place in what is now modern Ukraine and that female Scythian soldiers used a lasso similar to Wonder Woman’s. At the end Snyder says, “It’s not so crazy to think that, even if it will all come to an end some day, you should still destroy the ring.”

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This is from a “Chocolate and Bookstore Crawl” — everything I love fitted neatly on one sign. Okay, there could be a few more things on there, but that would be crowding it.

The Crawl was put on by Charlie Jane Anders, and was, um, a month and a half ago. Yeah, I should post more often.

Edited to add: Snyder's talk is here.

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My short story, "Howard and the Golem," is out at Interzone Digital. It's free to read -- here's the URL. I posted the art for it below, on December 13.

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howard and the golem

The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron — What happened to Molly Doran and Jackson Lamb in Berlin? We’re given hints of some tragedy in Herron’s earlier spy novels, a failed assignment that ended with Doran losing her legs and Lamb turning cynical and slovenly, or more cynical and slovenly, happy only when he’s insulting people. Finally, after eight books and a number of novellas, we learn their story.

In 1994, Alison North (a code name) is sent to Station House in Berlin. The Wall has fallen, and Station House interviews spies from East Berlin and evaluates the secrets they’re trying to sell. Alison is there to make sure the station is “running according to official protocols,” but she has another job as well. Brimley Miles (another code name) is high up in the station hierarchy; rumors have come to London about some questionable actions and she is supposed to find out what he’s up to. Unfortunately she’s a near-novice, in over her head — and, she starts to suspect, deliberately placed in Berlin because of her inexperience.

In the present, some people are trying to expose Alison’s story, which has been covered up and exists only as a file in an ancient archive. Other people are desperate to prevent it from coming to light, among them MI5’s First Desk Diana Taverner, who keeps a firm lid on any criticism of her domain.

Even after the long wait, the story satisfies on every level. We see why some of the characters act the way they do, and we learn more about some of the others (one in particular turns out not to be as benign as I’d thought). The plot is as fiendishly twisty as always in a Mick Herron novel. It has less of Herron’s trademark humor, but then what happened to the agents isn’t all that funny.

I wanted more about Berlin after the Wall came down, the whole spy-vs.-spy atmosphere. Alison goes to the Alexanderplatz, but we don’t get a picture of the absurd TV tower looming over Berlin like a giant disco ball. Or there’s the Adlon Hotel, a staid, fusty relic of the Soviet era: what had the old fossilized spies of the East thought when their domain was invaded by flashy tech bros from the West? I just visited the city, though, so this might be more a desire to go back than a criticism.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R. F. Kuang — This came out in 2022 but I only read it this year and wrote about it here. It works on a lot of levels: as an exciting story, as a novel of parallel history set in 19th-century England and China, as a fantasy with a coherent system of magic, as a critique of imperialism. I was surprised it didn’t win the Hugo.

Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang — Is it possible to read an entire book in a state of cringe? The protagonist does so many stupid, objectionable things, and is so oblivious about them, that you can barely continue reading. And yet you can’t stop.

Yellowface is a mainstream novel; I read it because I was so impressed with Babel. June Hayward and Athena Liu are writers, but while June has published one book that sold poorly Athena’s novels are literary bestsellers, with all the accompanying perks: photo spreads and Netflix options and invitations to conferences. June is envious, and her envy takes some toxic forms; for example, she thinks Athena’s success is partly due to the fact that she’s Asian. (June is white.) I can even feel sorry for her, just a bit; every author knows how soul-destroying that kind of envy is.

June and Athena are together when Athena dies suddenly. Athena writes her books on a typewriter, not a computer, so it’s easy for June to take the latest manuscript and pass it off as her own. Soon she’s living in Athena’s world of huge advances and lunches with editors and high-level marketing discussions. (As a writer, I couldn’t help celebrating a little during this part. I mean, it looks like so much fun. I kept thinking, So this is what it’s like.) There’s just one tiny flaw: people are starting to wonder how a white woman could write so authentically about Asian lives.

Then her foolish decisions come back to haunt her. For this book she decided to use the name Juniper Song, her real first and middle names. (Her mother was a hippie.) But Song is also an Asian surname, and so, of course, readers think she’s Asian, even though she doesn’t hide the fact that she’s white. Other problems are cropping up as well. Athena’s mother has some questions. Someone on social media implies they know something. June can’t come up with another novel to follow her breakout success. (This, to me, was one of the cringiest parts. She actually asks people what the Asian experience is like. No one can possibly be that clueless, can they?) She thinks she sees Athena’s ghost.

You want her to fail, because she shouldn’t be allowed to profit from someone else’s hard work, and because she remains so lacking in awareness. You want her to succeed, because exposure would destroy her life. Can someone who is white create a true portrait of a culture not her own? Is it cultural appropriation for a white person to write about characters of color? What constitutes authorship? (June rewrites some of the novel, another cringe moment.) Don’t all writers, in a sense, steal from other people’s lives? If June succeeds in the same way Athena did, doesn’t that mean that Athena being Asian had nothing to do with her achievements, and why doesn’t June realize this?

Julia, by Sandra Newman — This is an “Oh, yeah?” book, one where you hear the premise — in this case, George Orwell’s 1984 told from viewpoint of Julia, Winston Smith’s lover — and think, “Oh, yeah? And how’s that going to work?” And yet, amazingly, Newman pulls it off.

Julia has her own agency here, something that isn’t really true of Orwell’s novel. She’s more down to earth than Smith, more capable of enjoying herself, more adroit at navigating the system. “I’m rather good at staying alive,” she says in 1984, but Orwell never showed how much she has to compromise to survive, and how morally questionable some of her compromises have to be. She enjoyed sex in the original novel, but there it was presented as a rebellion against Big Brother; here it just means she enjoys sex.

You begin to realize how pallid the original Julia was, how much she existed just to listen to Smith’s mansplaining. And Smith turns out to be a doubleplusgood mansplainer. “If there is any hope… it must lie in the proles,” he says sententiously to Julia, talking about the great mass of people who aren’t in the Party.

“Julia said, ’So you’ve spoken to a great many proles?’

“‘How could I?’ Winston said, affronted. ‘I risked a great deal by speaking to that one old man.’

“At this, Julia dropped back and stooped to fiddle at her bootlaces so he wouldn’t see her laughing. Poor Winston! He’d talked to single prole, and felt he knew all there was to know about them! She didn’t have the heart to tell him how many proles she’d dealt with over the years.”

Julia was the only female main character in 1984. Newman makes up for this by populating the world with more women, as well as a few gay people and people of color. When only men are in power, when there is only Big Brother at the top of the hierarchy, the outcome for women is never good, and in Julia their experiences are often worse than those of men.

Orwell’s Oceania is a dreary, shabby, circumscribed place, a mirror of England after WWII. Newman’s world is larger; you can even have fun there, if you keep to the margins and don’t call attention to yourself. It’s a vision informed by the breakup of the Soviet Union and knows that everything must end, that the future isn’t “a boot stamping on a human face forever.” The boot lets up every so often, even if, unfortunately, it sometimes comes back later. 1984 was a necessary book, a brilliant examination of what makes up a dictatorship. Julia fills in the parts that Orwell overlooked.

My Brother’s Keeper, by Tim Powers — Here’s another “Oh, yeah?” book, coming just after Julia thanks to the magic of alphabetization. In this case the premise is even more dubious: “What if Emily Brontë fought werewolves?”

But… Well, Emily and her brother Branwell were both bitten by strange-looking dogs. Emily spent a lot of time wandering the moors, and who knows what she got up to there? Why did Branwell have to leave London in a hurry? What kind of name is Brontë, anyway?

My Brother’s Keeper draws you into this twilight parallel world, and after a while all of your objections fall away. You feel the loneliness of the Brontës and the desolation of the moors all around them, a solitude that heightens the terror when they’re attacked by supernatural forces. Emily is a great character, as tough and independent as a woman could be in that time, fighting unnatural creatures and protecting her family. There’s also a possible werewolf inspiration for Heathcliff and — one of my favorite characters — a terrific dog.

If you’ve read anything about the Brontës you know that the story didn’t end well, but Powers somehow turns their tragedy into victory. I’ve seen reviews that grouse about the Catholicism in some of Powers’s books, but I figure that if you don’t like the religious elements you can always think of them as part of the fantasy. And I remember what Charles Brown of Locus once said: that Catholicism is (more-or-less) coherent within itself, and so Catholic writers — J.R.R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, Tim Powers — are terrific at world-building. That certainly works to Powers’s benefit here.

Adrian Tchaikovsky — This was my year to discover Adrian Tchaikovsky. I can’t review each of the six books I read, so I’ll just say that Tchaikovsky’s aliens are truly alien, and that he deals with deep time better than almost anyone. In the series comprising Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory, humans have nearly destroyed the Earth. Just in time they send out spaceships to seed life, along with an uplift neurovirus that can speed up evolution, hoping to leave some remnant of humanity somewhere. Things do not go as planned, and the books follow the long, long evolution of several species, watched over for all that time by a semi-sane woman whose personality has been uploaded to a computer.

In these books various species meet and nearly fight each other, but they usually reach an understanding with both sides coming out richer for it. After all that rationality, the books of The Final Architecture — Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, and Lords of Uncreation — are surprisingly bloodthirsty. Aliens called the Architects blow up planets that host intelligent life, including Earth, and the humans who are left make uneasy alliances with other aliens who have also lost their planets. There are Intermediaries who can sometimes communicate with the Architects but who mostly die or go mad; there are aliens that leave some humans with the overwhelming desire to worship them; there are women soldiers created by parthenogenesis who look more or less alike; there are people who, partly as a reaction to these soldiers, want to stop all genetic modification and Make Humans Great Again. And there is another universe with different rules, the Unspace; going through it allows you to travel to other planets, and it could also hold the secret to why the Architects are so fixated on destruction. Unfortunately, something terrifying lurks there, keeping the Intermediaries from finding the ultimate answer.

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adrian tchaikovsky,
babel: or the necessity of violence: an,
julia,
mick herron,
my brother's keeper,
r.f. kuang,
sandra newman,
the secret hours,
tim powers,
yellowface

This is the art for my short story, "Howard and the Golem," which will come out from Interzone Digital (IZ Digital) on January 11. The bookstore is great, even more cluttered than I'd imagined it, and the Hebrew letters are correct, if a little shaky.

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howard and the golem

1. My plane landed and everyone stood up, and then a flight attendant came on the intercom and said, “The golden retriever is not here.” The woman in the row ahead of me said, “Code word or no?”

2. Somewhat depressingly, I just found out that Robert Kennedy, Jr., the crank and anti-vaxxer, is now published by Skyhorse. Skyhorse put out my book Weighing Shadows, but it looks like they’ve turned evil in the meantime.

3. I sent my brother this photo with the title “Scary Tree.”

“That’s not a scary tree,” he wrote back. “This is a scary tree.” I have to say he has a point.

Things pile up when you never write blog posts. So here’s some news and things, in no particular order.

1. My short story “In the Fox’s House” is in the September/October issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, what editor Sheila Williams calls the “Slightly Spooky Issue.” Mine isn’t as scary as some of the others, but I haven’t read all of them yet. (I always read magazines or anthologies with my stories, secretly hoping it’s the best one.)

2. I sold another short story, “Howard and the Golem,” to IZ Digital, an offshoot of Interzone. It’s humorous — well, at least I hope it’s humorous. There don’t seem to be many funny stories out there these days, and I wonder if that’s because the future looks so grim. If I was in my twenties or thirties, which is when most people start writing, I wouldn’t be very cheerful either.

Gareth Jelley, the editor, says it will probably be published in the first week of December.

3. Here’s the weirdest fact I heard in a long time. The Smith in this story is John Smith, the one in the history books with Pocahontas: “Before coming to the New World, Smith worked as a mercenary for a Transylvanian prince. In 1602 he cut off the heads of three Turkish soldiers in single combat.” For this service the prince gave him “a coat of arms of three heads arranged in a triangle on a shield.”

I’m not terribly fond of vampire stories, but if anyone needs a plausible way of bringing Eastern European vampires to the New World, here it is. (This is from Goodbye, Eastern Europe, An Intimate History of a Divided Land, by Jacob Mikanowski. There’s no possible way anyone can write the history of Eastern Europe in a book of 376 pages, so this is mostly vignettes of various times and places. Still, most of them are pretty interesting, like this one.)

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What are you reading right now?

I’m amazed by the number of terrific women writers working today: Tamsyn Muir, Arkady Martine, Ann Leckie, Rebecca Roanhorse, R. F. Kuang, T. Kingfisher. * There’s a lot more of them than when I started reading sf, so I’m spoiled for choice. I’ve also been reading Adrian Tchaikovsky. It took me a while to pick up one of his books because of two words -- “giant spiders” -- but I like what I’ve read so far.

* I forgot Martha Wells and Charlie Jane Anders. And probably a whole bunch more.

Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?

To start with, there are no shortcuts. You have to sit down every weekday to write, even if you’re blocked. Read pretty much everything and study how an author pulls off something particularly brilliant or, conversely, figure out why the story you just read is particularly terrible. Imitate the good ones until you understand more about style, then stop imitating. Write about things that excite you or anger you or scare you instead of just following a trend or writing for a market. Write the stories you feel need to be told, the stories only you can tell. Have fun -- if you’re bored, the reader can tell. Oh, and get an agent.

What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?

I’ve worked in bookstores a lot. It hasn’t helped my writing that much, except for allowing me to get books at a discount, which let me read widely in a lot of genres and research topics I was interested in. Also, people who work in bookstores are usually quirky and idiosyncratic, and know an impressive amount about weird subjects.

I’ve also taught at Clarion and other places. It sounds like a cliche, but I learned about as much from the students as I taught them.

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My brother writes from Los Angeles to say they've survived the tropical storm, this despite the fact that an earthquake had come along with it. I wrote back to ask, "What's next? The plague of frogs?"

But if God is smiting Los Angeles with the Ten Plagues, what does he want? The only thing I can figure is, he's demanding an end to the Writer's Strike. He's missing all his favorite shows.

How did you break into writing?

I wrote a short story, and a friend of mine told me I should turn it into a novel. So I wrote the novel, which became my first book, The Red Magician. I sold it to the second editor I sent it to, Ellen Kushner, who was at Pocket Books at the time.

Beginning writers usually hate this story because it seemed so easy for me. I want to assure them that my career was just as rocky as most people’s. For example, after writing a novel I couldn’t figure out how to write a short story for a long time.

What inspired you to start writing?

I can’t remember when I started wanting to be a writer. Maybe it was when I read my first book. Creating an entire world out of your head seemed the coolest thing anyone could possibly do. It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought, though. When I was in college I took a summer between classes to do nothing but write, and I went stir-crazy. Did people really lock themselves in their rooms with only a piece of paper for company? (This was before computers.) But after a while I started to like it.

If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?

Two choices, at opposite ends of the spectrum: I’d like to live on one of the islands in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. Not only would there be the possibility of seeing dragons and wizards and magic, there’s also daily life, which in Tehanu seemed slow but fulfilling: herding goats and spinning their fleece, planting and growing crops, visiting your neighbors, telling stories by the fire, and every so often consulting with the local witch about the weather or an illness. My other choice is about as far away as you can get from that, Iain Banks’s Culture, a technological utopia where AIs fulfill most of your needs, there are amazing scientific breakthroughs, and you’re free to do whatever you want, including exploring other planets and societies.

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My story "In the Fox's House" comes out in the September/October issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and they interviewed me about it and other things. I'll post it in parts here, or you could read the whole interview here.

How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?

The story started when a friend of mine told me about videos online that showed foxes jumping on trampolines in people’s backyards. Foxes can be tricky or untrustworthy in the old tales, so I wondered what those foxes were up to.

What is your history with Asimov’s?

I’ve sold stories to Asimov’s nearly from the beginning, to Shawna McCarthy, Gardner Dozois, and now to Sheila Williams. All of them knew a lot about editing and gave me great feedback. If any of them rejected a story I was pretty sure there was something wrong with it, and I’d continue working on it or, sometimes, put it away to look at later.

Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?

I like to write stories about magic in the real world, where there’s a possibility of something astonishing or mysterious just around the corner, in a place you’ve passed a hundred times before. And I like showing what happens when the borders between the two worlds become blurred, and what that does to the main character, if it frightens them or changes them or makes them understand something important.

How do you deal with writers’ block?

Not easily. I once read a piece of advice to writers that helps every so often: Pretend you are writing a letter to an author you admire, explaining your problem and asking for solutions. Of course you will never send this letter; instead it’s a way of putting yourself into the mindset of someone who has solved the kind of difficulty you find yourself in. Once I was having trouble with the plot of a novel and I addressed a letter to Nancy Kress, someone who I think is brilliant at plotting. A long time later I told her what I’d done and she said, “Well, you owe me a letter now!” The letter was long gone, though, and it was so filled with despairing cries for help that I could never show it to anyone.

  To be continued...

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The Red Magician got a review in The Portalist in 2017, but I've only discovered it now. "8 Spellbinding Fantasy Books That Will Make You Believe in Magic" says, "Young Kicsi will learn that love, redemption, and survival are often the greatest magic of all."

And on a completely different subject, here's a quote from Leigh Bardugo's Hell Bent I've been meaning to post for a while: "Omnia dicta fortiori si dicta en Latina" -- "Everything sounds more impressive in Latin." Now I'm looking for somewhere to use it.

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The museum in Krefeld I’ve written about, the Villa Merlander, asked to see old photographs of my father and his family there, and I sent off about twenty-five of them. The clerk at the post office told me that they couldn’t go as registered mail because I’d used brown tape on the package, which strikes me as bureaucratic interference raised to a fine art, so I sent them by regular mail and hoped for the best.

A few days ago I got a letter from the photo archivist. One of the photos, dated 1916, had been turned into a postcard, something people did back then. It showed my grandfather and his motorcycle on the front, but we could never read the writing on the back, which was very faded, written in old-fashioned script, and in German. It turns out that he was writing from a hospital, that he’d gotten wounded during World War I. I’d known that he’d been a courier running messages to and from the front, but I’d never heard that he’d been wounded.

There was also a series of photos of people — my extended family, probably, though I didn’t recognize most of them — standing in front of some kind of business. The archivist identified it as a hotel in the mountains, near hiking trails in the forest. And it’s still there!!! — making it at least 95 years old. In fact it’s near Koblenz, where we’d stayed. The next time we go to Germany we might visit and show them the photos.

All this is exciting to me. My father died when I was twenty, before I got the chance to ask him questions, before I even felt more than the vaguest curiosity about his life. And he rarely talked about his past; it might have been too painful, or he might have been raised to keep things to himself, or both.

The archivist said that he was going on vacation and would write more when he came back. Very frustrating! It’s like reading a book and having to wait for the sequel.

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krefeld

The Berlin airport is practically constructed to confuse you. There are few signs telling you where to go, and the agents are unhelpful. Doug and I print out tags for tracking our luggage, but we both make mistakes and have to get in line and talk to an (unhelpful) agent, who prints out replacements but says that our luggage probably won’t be waiting for us in San Francisco. The plane is late taking off, so in Zurich we have have thirty minutes to reach our connection, and it’s so far away we feel like we’ve walked all the way through Switzerland to get there. But we make it.

I fall asleep immediately. I’m weirdly fascinated by the display showing the plane’s trajectory, and I wake up every so often to see how far we’ve gone. And we find our luggage! Another little miracle. We get home and go to sleep for about a week.

We go to another memorial to the Berlin Wall. At this point I’m worrying that I’ve turned into a tourist of other people’s painful lives, like some visitors to the Holocaust museum seem to be, so I try to stay aware and respectful of the history the memorial depicts. You start at an information center and go on to what used to be a ghost metro station. The metro had run through three stations in East Berlin without stopping, stations that had closed down so no one could use the train to get to the west, and as time passed they had started to fall apart and gather dust. People had tried to make it to West Berlin through the tunnels, and some of them had succeeded.

The station is being used again, but the upper floor has been left pretty much the way it was, with areas blocked off by broken concrete and signs in an old-fashioned font. It’s eerie.

We go on to what’s supposed to be the last remaining pieces of the Wall. (I’m surprised all the rest is gone, but apparently everyone wanted to forget it as quickly as possible.) There were two walls and a “death strip” in between; if you made it to the strip you would trigger lights and alarms and probably be shot by a guard in a watchtower. Grass covers most of the strip now, and steel posts show the names and photos of people who died trying to cross over.

The actual Wall. Probably not the actual graffiti, though.

This is what a segment of the United States wants at the southern border, I realize, something loud and terrifying that ends in death. Not the rickety contraption put up by trump, which can be climbed easily and blows over in a strong wind.

There’s a museum, with the history and people’s stories. The fifth floor is a lookout post that shows you what West Berliners would have seen, the Wall and the death strip between them, and the watchtower over everything. For a while people in the west could climb parts of the Wall and see friends and relatives on the other side, but then that too was forbidden. You could still visit if you had permission, and you could write letters, though of course they were read by officials before they were passed on.

What was that like, to be only miles from your loved ones but unable to see them or talk to them? And what was it like to meet them again after thirty years, when the Wall came down? Has anyone written a story about extraterrestrials putting a barrier over half a city and doing… something… to the inhabitants for several decades, and what happens when the barrier goes away? I’d write it, except I have no idea what the aliens would be up to.

We go back to Museum Island, but the museum I want to see, the Pergamon with the Ishtar Gate and some Assyrian artifacts, has a wait of two hours. This is the last day of our vacation and we’re pretty tired, so we’re sort of relieved to go back to the hotel and take a nap.

I found out later that Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy came to Berlin five days after we left. We saw a lot of yellow and blue Ukrainian flags, which was heartening.

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