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Brit Mandelo

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Fiction and Excerpts [5]
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Fiction and Excerpts [5]

Life for Death for Life: Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton

Thu Sep 20, 2018 2:00pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]

Strange Grace is a standalone young adult novel from Tessa Gratton (also author of recently-released The Queens of Innis Lear) set in a town that knows no lasting hardship due to a pact with the devil. Illnesses pass in a night; wounds heal without infection; babies are born healthy with safe mothers; crops thrive under perfectly timed rains. However, the pact is upheld by the sacrifice of a young man every seven years to run the devil’s forest and see if he comes out victorious. The sacrifice of one allows all to live peacefully. None are forced—the trial is an honor.

Mairwen Grace is the only daughter of the town’s bloodline of witches, linked to the forest as her ancestors were before her, all the way back to the woman who made the original bargain. The witches form the liminal border between forest and town, life and death. However, when the bargain falls awry only three years after the last sacrifice, Mairwen and her closest companions, Arthur and Rhun, have a duty to determine the cause—whether they agree with the true nature of the bargain or not.

[Read more]

Dig to the Insides: Alien Virus Love Disaster by Abbey Mei Otis

Mon Aug 13, 2018 2:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

Abbey Mei Otis’s first long-form collection, Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories, is a powerful debut volume published by the perennially impressive Small Beer Press. The book contains twelve stories with publication dates spanning the past eight years, including “Sweetheart” which appeared on Tor.com in 2010. Otis’s fiction has a dynamic blend of contemporary and speculative approaches, diamond-edged and furious in her exploration of power, oppression, and grief.

The titular story also serves as a statement of themes: outsider or abject characters; viral, haunting, gruesome physicality; hunger mixed with passion and crooked adoration; cataclysm before-during-and-after. It isn’t a pleasant or simple experience for the audience. The bodies in Otis’s short fiction are subject to a grim though often lyrical brutality, one step too far for comfort at all times, and their suffering does not generally lead to a positive outcome.

[A review.]

The Book as Archive: An Informal History of the Hugos by Jo Walton

Tue Aug 7, 2018 4:00pm 11 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Collecting the column series that ran from 2010-2013 on Tor.com, An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953-2000 contains Jo Walton’s original year-by-year exploration posts, brief essays on select nominee novels, and occasional threaded comments from regular contributors such as Gardner Dozois, David G. Hartwell, and Rich Horton. The result is a hefty, handsome hardcover that physically archives a digital experience. The crossplatform hybridity of the book is in and of itself fascinating and makes for a dragonfly-in-amber effect on reading.

It is not, then, a nonfiction book about the history of the Hugo awards (though of course it also is) but the archive of a conversation that has historical and critical resonances, a “personal look back” that doubles as a valuable reflection on an otherwise insufficiently documented moment in time. Since the original column ran the field has also lost David G. Hartwell (2016) and Gardner Dozois (2018). Their contributions here are preserved from the changeable digital medium, their voices in conversation surviving for future audiences.

[A review.]

This is a Call to Arms: The Descent of Monsters by JY Yang

Tue Jul 31, 2018 2:30pm Post a comment Favorite This
Art by Yuko Shimuzu

Third in the Tensorate Series, The Descent of Monsters is the record of an investigation conducted by Chuwan Sariman into the gruesome destruction of the Rewar Teng research facility by one of its captive creatures. Sariman is a foul-mouthed Tensor of foreign background whose role in the Protectorate has never been secure. Married to a pirate and motivated via an internal sense of justice rather than an external set of politics, she’s not cut out to conduct a cover-up.

Though it’s clear that’s what’s expected of her.

However, the presence of Rider and Sanao Akeha at the corpse of the escaped creature complicates matters for both Sariman and the Protectorate. The Investigator is determined to get to the bottom of the realities hiding behind the façade of Rewar Teng, though it means becoming an outlaw herself.

[A review, minor spoilers.]

Every Day was Another Body: Apocalypse Nyx by Kameron Hurley

Tue Jul 17, 2018 3:00pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

Nyxnissa so Dasheem—ex-soldier, ex-assassin—is a disreputable and legally questionable bounty hunter, hurtling toward her own demise by way of as much whiskey and as many poor choices as she can manage. Apocalypse Nyx collects five original stories about her, four of which were previously published on Hurley’s Patreon for subscribers. All of the stories in Apocalypse Nyx take place prior to the events of God’s War (2011) and often gesture toward latter events in the Bel Dame Apocrypha series, sometimes with grim foreshadowing.

The world of the Bel Dame Apocrypha is as compelling as ever: biotechnological warfare, magic-oriented bugs on all surfaces, collapsing social order, matriarchal control, the list goes on. These novellas, however, are more concerned with action-adventure than continued development of the milieu—each follows one job that Nyx takes on for herself and her crew, from start to finish.

[A review.]

Stories to Live Within: The Gone Away Place by Christopher Barzak

Mon May 14, 2018 2:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

A sudden outbreak of tornadoes devastates Ellie Frame’s small Ohio town one spring morning, killing more than ninety people—including her best friends and her boyfriend who were trapped at the high school while she was skipping classes. However, those who were lost in the storm still linger, their ghosts haunting the town and their loved ones, unable to move past the liminal space Newfoundland has become.

The Gone Away Place collects the testaments of Ellie, her parents, and various ghosts as she tries to make sense of her own survival in the face of unfathomable destruction.

[The Gone Away Place is more of a meditation on loss than it is a novel.]

Anybody Could Write a True Story: Black Helicopters by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Tue May 1, 2018 2:00pm 4 comments 1 Favorite [+]

The sea off the coast of New England has gone foul with the poison of a fallen star. Ptolema, an agent of the same sort as the Signalman but employed on a different shore, must unravel the chess game in action around her to resolve a potential apocalypse. The pieces in motion include a pair of psychokinetically gifted twins separated by a sinister doctor at the behest of a rival agency, the devouring filth of the tainted sea, attempted assassinations and misplaced pawns.

These singular figures—the Signalman, Ptolema, the doctor Twisby—and their vast, invisible agencies are a horror equal to those from out of space. However, their interventions might also be the one thing keeping our species afloat on unkind cosmic waves.

[A review.]

Out of Many: Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller

Wed Apr 18, 2018 1:00pm 1 comment Favorite This

Blackfish City is Sam J. Miller’s second novel, the first for adult readers. In a post-climate-collapse world, the floating city of Qaanaaq is a social and technological marvel marked by vast disparities in wealth amongst its populace, ruled in large part by artificial intelligences and mysterious shareholders. The city is on the cusp of upheaval, though, as a viral disease ravages its population without control and the availability of real estate continues to cramp tighter and tighter. However, when a strange woman comes to the city riding an orca whale with a caged polar bear at her side on a mission of revenge, the results will change the entire structure of Qaanaaq.

The reader experiences the novel through various narrators: Kaev, a journeyman fighter working odd jobs for his crime boss ex-lover; Soq, a slide messenger whose gender is an impossible to categorize project and whose motivation is the potential destruction of Qaanaq; Fill, a rich young gay man who is desperately empty of purpose and drive; and Ankit, a political canvas worker for an Arm manager whose campaign is failing. These disparate voices, strung together across the domains of Qaanaaq, unite against odds when faced with a shared foe.

[Read more]

Glam/Heart: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Tue Apr 10, 2018 2:00pm 5 comments 2 Favorites [+]

With the delightfully garish neon tagline “In space, everyone can hear you sing” emblazoned across its cover, Catherynne M. Valente’s newest novel Space Opera is a marked shift from the seriousness of Deathless (2011) or Palimpsest (2009). It is, in fact, nothing less than intergalactic Eurovision in the fine stylistic tradition of Douglas Adams—madcap, bizarre, comedic, and shot through with a certain wholesome kindness.

[A review.]

Shift and Stance: Susurrus on Mars by Hal Duncan

Fri Apr 6, 2018 2:00pm Post a comment 3 Favorites [+]

Susurrus on Mars, published in late 2017 by Lethe Press, follows the flirtations and observations of Susurrus—the god of small breezes, a child of Zephyros and Ares. In large part the novella revolves around the courtship of Jaq and Puk, two young men who meet in Erehwyna, a terraformed Martian settlement. The novella contains eight sections, each subdivided into various philosophical and narrative segments, that come together at the close to tell a multifaceted tale of grief, attachment, and adoration.

A tapestry of scenes and reflections, Susurrus on Mars requires the reader to settle in for the ride and allow the threads to coalesce into their fantastical, complex whole. For the audience with the patience and interest to do so, it’s intensely rewarding and is, in some sense, an experience almost as much as it is a text.

[A review.]

Series: Queering SFF

And They Found Us: Monster Portraits by Del and Sofia Samatar

Tue Mar 6, 2018 3:00pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]

Written by Sofia Samatar and illustrated by her brother Del Samatar, Monster Portraits is a short art-object of hybrid fiction/autobiography—about as interstitial as it gets—that “offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s.” The text for this collaborative work was a prior finalist for the 2013 Calvino Prize; Rose Metal Press brings it to readers for the first time, filled with strange and alluring illustrations.

Monster Portraits serves the function of philosophy, or poetry: the text makes offerings, sketches connections, and requires leaps of juxtaposition as well as freefalls into implication. Each line is a treat to be savored and allowed to meld with its companions over a slow, methodical, reverential reading experience. The “happening” of the text is not located in the plot where our protagonist-author collects interviews and sketches of various monsters but in the lyrical, metaphorical weight of those vignettes taken in concert.

[A review.]

Oneness through Time: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh

Thu Feb 22, 2018 2:00pm 1 comment 2 Favorites [+]

Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories is the first North American collection from physicist and writer Vandana Singh, published by Small Beer Press. Of the fourteen stories, all but one are reprints collected from across the past several years; the final piece, “Requiem,” is a novella original to this book.

The effect of this collection is something like a tessellation. The stories are variations on a theme, marrying individual humanist intervention with the sweeping reach of scientifically-based extrapolation. Singh’s worlds are delineated within a rigorous framework that nonetheless leaves edges that either interlock or fade into each other. The titular story, itself originally published on Tor.com in 2015, is a peak example.

[A review.]

An Inkling of the Strange: Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath

Wed Jan 31, 2018 3:00pm 1 comment 2 Favorites [+]

Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck’s short fiction collection, Jagannath, is getting a new edition from Vintage. Originally published in English by the tiny press Cheeky Frawg—the passion project of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer—the collection contains thirteen pieces of short fiction that range from whimsical to intensely discomfiting, all having a distinct touch of the surreal or the weird. Many of the pieces in question had never previously been published with English translations—though, of course, some were originally published in magazines like Weird Tales.

Jagannath received a great deal of word-of-mouth support from folks like China Mieville, Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Lord, and Karen Joy Fowler, and was reviewed quite favorably by Stefan Raets here on Tor.com. Tidbeck’s fiction is also acclaimed in her home country. As a fan of international fiction and someone interested in inclusivity in the speculative fiction community, I was particularly pleased to get my hands on this book, and it doesn’t disappoint.

[Read more]

The First Sisters: Naondel by Maria Turtschaninoff

Thu Jan 11, 2018 2:00pm Post a comment 1 Favorite [+]

In Maresi, translated and released last winter by Amulet Books, readers came to know the Red Abbey: a separatist women’s island, full to the brim of magic, sisterhood, and strength. Turtschaninoff returns us to that world with Naondel, a powerful, brutal prequel that reveals the origin of the Abbey and the trials of the First Sisters. As the flap copy says, “told in alternating points of view, Naondel is a vivid, riveting exploration of oppression and exploitation—and the possibility of sanctuary.”

Naondel is at times a harsh novel. The frame of the story is that this book forms a recorded history for the archive of Knowledge House, as referenced in Maresi; the women whose stories are recorded here suffer immense cruelty and degradation in their long captivities. While this is balanced for the reader in the obvious knowledge that the protagonists do survive to found the Red Abbey, given that it’s a prequel, it is nonetheless a harrowing experience.

[A review.]

Where Your Own Talents Lie: The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

Wed Jan 3, 2018 10:00am 2 comments 2 Favorites [+]

The Cruel Prince is the first of a fresh trilogy from lauded young adult author Holly Black. Raised in faerie as Gentry by her adoptive father though she herself is mortal, Jude is on the cusp of adulthood and has lost her patience for powerlessness. Her sister Taryn has decided to wed into the Court; Jude, on the other hand, has set out to become a knight. However, these plans fall afoul of the continual and deadly intrigues of the High Court of Faerie—prompting both sisters in different directions and Jude, our protagonist, onto a dangerously ambitious path of connection to the crown.

Magic is a constant in all of Black’s novels, particular the sort of magic that leads to ethical difficulties and hard decisions. Faeries and fey courts also feature frequently. However, this novel marries and then evolves these previous themes in a startling, lush, fast-paced tale of one young woman finding her place on an ever-changing, unpredictable political field. There’s a raw, honest approach to the concept of power—who has it, who doesn’t, how to get it—that is central to the novel and gives it a refreshingly unique perspective.

[A review.]

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