May 22, 2013
Super Bass
Is Gian’s love for the Summer King stronger than his hate?
May 15, 2013
The Button Man and the Murder Tree
An all-new Wild Cards story
May 14, 2013
Shall We Gather
When one world brushes another, asking the right question can be magic…
May 8, 2013
Fire Above, Fire Below
The dragon below our city has died. What is to be done?
Deborah Coates brings to her contemporary fantasy a breath of horror, a frisson of the quiet dread that comes from a really good ghost story. Wide Open (2012) was good, an excellent debut.
Deep Down is better. It marries Wide Open’s chilling atmosphere, deeply-felt, evocative North Dakota landscapes, and vivid characters to a much smoother and more integrated narrative, one whose climax and conclusion comes together much more naturally, much more organically, than its predecessor.
When We Wake is New Zealand author Karen Healey’s third novel, after Guardian of the Dead and The Shattering. It’s an excellent YA novel. It’s also really excellent science fiction: I stayed awake far later than I would otherwise have done to finish it.
In 2027, sixteen-year-old Tegan Oglietti dies. A hundred years in the future, her cryonically preserved body is revived by the Australian military—the first successful cryonic revival. The Girl Who Died is an instant celebrity and the government’s favourite guinea pig. All she wants to do is grieve her old life and try to build some semblance of a “normal” new one, but with her footsteps dogged by the media, a fundamentalist sect who believes she should commit suicide, and a minor case of futureshock, it’s not that easy. But Tegan’s stubborn. She goes to school, she makes friends. Bethari, the army-brat young journalist. Joph, the brilliant chemistry student walking around in a haze of her own creations. Abdi, the talented musician from Somalia who’s almost as much an outsider as Tegan is in immigrant-hostile 22nd-century Australia.
Today I’m going to step outside the confines of the SFF genre—to break free!—and talk about television.
I have to break free from the confines of skiffy to talk about television that’s both ongoing, that I like (and thus can recommend without ten thousand caveats), and that centres on women, a woman, or non-male-identified people in general. So today, let’s break out as far as 1920s Melbourne....
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is an Australian show, based on a series of cosy detective stories by Kerry Greenwood. The first season began airing in the Antipodes early last year and in the US in the autumn, and is due to come to the UK some time this year. A second season is expected in 2013.
Recently, a relatively fruitless research trip took me around a couple of new-to-me museums. In the course of my perambulations, I came across several visually arresting pieces that have a bearing on the discussions we’ve had here on Tor.com, about historically authentic sexism and cop-out arguments.
So this week, I thought I’d present some visual arguments for the historical validity of many ways of representing many different sorts of women, from Hellenistic Greece to seventeenth-century France.
The photo quality is decidedly amateur. And the naked female wrestlers may or may not be work safe.
When you lay out the recent examples of older women in science fiction and fantasy, you find a decided lack.
Or at least I do. (Let me ’splain.)
By “older,” I mean women whose concerns are those of motherhood, middle age, old age: women who believe in their own mortality, who wear the weight of their pasts as well as their responsibilities to the future, who have a place in the world: a place that may or may not be comfortable, or suitable, but worn in around the edges and theirs. By in science fiction and fantasy I mean acting as protagonists, or as mentors whose importance to the narrative is not sidelined or minimised by relentless focus on the youthful angst of less mature characters.
Romance is a genre with a long history of attracting opprobrium. Especially among certain sorts of sci-fi/fantasy fans: all those feelings getting in the way of science and politics. Add queerness, and the enthusiasm level seems to go right down....
Me, I suffer intermittently from depression and anxiety. When I’m in a slump—or when I’ve been freaking out, as postgraduate students do, and trying to do shitloads of work in not nearly enough time—I don’t want to be reading big crunchy juicy books full of bittersweet pain or complicated politics or ethically complex issues: I want to read books that ask little of my attention, and give a lot back in terms of comforting entertainment. Last year, not for the first time, when I went looking for the comfort food of SFF literature, I kept coming up against a brick wall, one ably described by Foz Meadows in her “The Unbearable Lightness of Default Settings” in December:
“Time is not successive,” he said. “It is concrete, constant, simultaneous, and not uniform.”
I don’t know how to describe Argentine writer Angélica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar, only the second of this award-winning author’s books to be made available in English. Translated by Amalia Gladhart and published by Small Beer Press, Trafalgar retains a conversational charm at once both luminous and quotidian. It is odd, and fluent; intriguing, and quiet; amiable and interesting: at one and the same time both deeply thoughtful and immensely playful.
Joining us today to answer a few questions is Kameron Hurley, author of the Bel Dame Apocrypha. Her first novel, God’s War, won the 2011 Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award for best début, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Nebula Award for best novel. Let me note for the record? The subsequent novels of this particularly vivid, imaginative, and violent trilogy, 2011’s Infidel and 2012’s Rapture, are even better than the first instalment.
Yes, I like them a lot. And I think if you like your science fiction brutal, character-driven and morally complex—oh, and somewhat on the feminist side—there are good odds you might like them too.
Now, to the questions:
In this ancient and nearly forgotten age lie the modest origins of my immodest career: my childhood and my first foreign expedition, to the mountains of Vrystana.
I have a confession to make. As a fan of the Onyx Court series, and the intelligent, layered use Brennan made of history there, I’ve been looking forward to reading A Natural History of Dragons since I first heard it was to be published. And it didn’t disappoint me in the least*—in fact, I’m already pretty sure it’ll be one of my favourite books of the year. (Read an excerpt here.)
*As the trail of my small-hours squeeing on Twitter after I finished it will attest.
Last week, I seized the opportunity to talk about the books I enjoyed most from the last couple of months of 2012. This week, I figure, it’s a good time to talk about what I’m most looking forward to from the first half of 2013.
And console myself for the fact that there’s very little coming out in January that appeals... What is it about January, anyway? Such a horribly depressing month in the northern hemisphere. Oh, yes! Doesn’t Michelle West have a new book out this month? Battle (DAW), the fifth in her House War sequence. I should really get properly caught up with Skirmish so I can read it....
Titan Books’ cover for James P. Blaylock’s newest novel, The Aylesford Skull, inscribes STEAMPUNK LEGEND below the author’s name. It’s true, Blaylock’s one of the original trio—the others being Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter—whose work in the eighties defined, or perhaps invented, steampunk as a literary subgenre. The Aylesford Skull marks his first novel-length return to Victorian England since 1992’s Lord Kelvin’s Machine, and it marks my own very first acquaintance with his work.
Accustomed as I am to hearing “steampunk” and thinking of Priest’s Boneshaker and Carriger’s Soulless, Chris Wooding’s Retribution Falls and Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan, Blaylock’s languid pace and studied absence of over-the-top cogs-and-wheels and steam-powered machines comes as something of a culture shock. He’s taking it seriously! You’re not supposed to take it seriously!
It’s—is it really January already? Damn.
Well, while we’re all recovering from the shock of finding ourselves in a whole new year, I’m going to seize on the new year thing as an excuse to tell you all about the books I’ve really enjoyed in the last couple of months.
But first, a shout-out for a film.
Because I'm going to talk about something in the body of this post that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I want to bookend it with some palate-cleanser.
So, first: Tansy Raynor Roberts has a pretty entertaining series of posts on Xena: The Warrior Princess. (I have very fond memories of watching Xena on DVD with some other persons of historical bent. We found the Greek in “A Day in the Life” very confusing, until we realised whoever had done the cards had confused the orthography of their nus and upsilons. And oh, the mad yet-classically-appropriate approach to myth reuse and recycling! And the lesbian subtext. Good times, good times.)
So, what's up with all those guys in the last few months complaining about “fake geek girls”? (There's Scalzi's post on the sod from CNN in July, and then mid-November some comics artist bloke decided to have a go at female cosplayers for being neither geeky nor hot enough to satisfy him... and there are more, I'm sure.)
[The stench of misogyny is in the air, I fear. A foetid stink, rich with feculent particles...]
Strange aliens. Mysterious artefacts. A cold war that used to be hot. A pilot with a dark secret in her past, and a troubled present. Disarmament treaties for weapons of mass destruction. Plots. Politics. Prospecting. Strange technology. Aliens. Bureaucracy. Terrorism.
With elements such as these, I’m a little surprised that Laura E. Reeve’s Major Ariadne Kedros novels didn’t make a bigger splash. Peacekeeper came out in 2008, followed by Vigilante and Pathfinder. All three are already out of print.
I’m quite fond of them, because while they’re a species of military space opera, their military aspects are those of a peacetime military. So we get intelligence and counter-intelligence operations and uncomfortable co-operation with old enemies, bureaucratic audits and the problem of your own side’s politicians, sabotage and spies and lots of manoeuvring. They have a civilian perspective much military space opera neglects to include. And Reeves humanises both sides of the conflict between the Terran League and the Confederation of Autonomist Worlds.
Let’s talk about the Edge, Andrews’ secret, magical, and weird border between a United States that resembles this world’s one (referred to as “the Broken,” where magic doesn’t work), and “the Weird,” a world where magic is real, where different kingdoms contend over a similarly-shaped continent. The Andrews writing duo has set four loosely-linked novels within this context, all with a romance focus. Of them all, Steel’s Edge is the first which I actively enjoyed, because it breaks the pattern of “romantic” relationships established in the Edge continuity to date.
Last time, I was a little unflattering about Meluch’s most recent series, the Tour of the Merrimack. So I thought I’d leave my brief casting-of-the-eye over her work with a book I can be mostly heartfelt and enthusiastic about: 1985’s Jerusalem Fire.
Jerusalem Fire. It’s odd and imperfect and some of its opinions, where it touches—briefly but emotively—on the Jewish and Arabic population of far-future Jerusalem, make me twitch. But as an examination of character, of the price exacted by war on two different men, it is an excellent novel, and interesting science fiction.
Resident Evil: Extinction grossed $147 million on its 2007 release. Narratively, it may well be the weakest instalment in the franchise:* the combination of its sere desertscape and mad-scientist-lair settings fail to disguise a fundamental structural/thematic incoherence that make it, despite its best efforts, a decidedly off-kilter affair. Whether or not one can get invested in the outcome of l’affaire Alice here depends on how ridiculous one finds the mad science plot... and I find it too ridiculous for words.
*As before, all my generalisations must be taken to exclude Retribution.
Today, we’re continuing our focus on female writers of science fiction space opera (or at least, my interpretation of this category) with a look at the most recent works of R.M. Meluch: her Tour of the Merrimack series. Jo Walton has already discussed these books here on Tor.com, but I want to take another look at them from a slightly different perspective. (Because I’m contrary like that.)
Right, so. I like to play cheering section here, and I find there’s a lot to enjoy in R.M. Meluch’s first four Tour of the Merrimack books. (I have yet, I confess, to read the fifth one.) I enjoy them bunches—but I also want to acknowledge the fact that there’s a hell of a lot of problematic shit floating around here.
[And it’s not just limited to Meluch’s millennia-long conspiracy that led to Romans In Space.]
The first Resident Evil film, released in 2002, grossed over $100 million worldwide. 2004’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse did even better than its predecessor, taking nearly $130 million. Columnist Roger Ebert proved equally critical of them both, calling Resident Evil a film in which, “large metallic objects make crashing noises just by being looked at,” (ChicagoSun-Times, March 15, 2002) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, “an utterly meaningless waste of time. There was no reason to produce it, except to make money, and there is no reason to see it, except to spend money. It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects.” (ChicagoSun-Times, September 10, 2004.)
All due respect to the honourable Mr. Ebert, but he’s rather too harsh on my favourite B-movie series. There’s a lot to be said for films that know they exist to be B-movie action/horror flicks, and then set out to be the best possible B-movies they can be. They know they have no real statement to make about the human condition, and they revel in it. Zombies! Monsters! Evil corporations and underground bases! Amnesia! Untrustworthy artificial intelligences! Plots!
...And that’s just the first film.
I know nothing about anime, except that the animation style can usually be relied upon to—at best—distract me, and at worst annoy the hell out of me.
There’s a whole digression that could be had here about reading/viewing protocols, and learning to parse the conventions of different media. I have similar issues when reading comics or BDs, because I do it so seldom: you need a certain degree of familiarity, of immersion, I think, before you start to understand what the medium expects of you in return.
So when someone recommended Claymore to me, you’ll understand that I may have been a little dubious. And you may guess that I passed lightly over this recommendation—until another friend of mine told me I should watch it, and accompanied their insistence with a link to Ana Mardoll’s episode-by-episode deconstruction for the oh-so-many reasons why.
People! This thing was meant for me!
