The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt.3: Eleanor Arnason

 

The Pleasure of Reading Nghi Vo

by Eleanor Arnason 

 

 

Gaylaxicon was in Minneapolis this summer, and I went. It’s a good con, and I hope it continues happening. In any case, one of the guests of honor was Nghi Vo. I am way behind in reading current SFF, so I hadn’t read her work. But I figured I ought to check it out and 
picked up The Empress of Salt and Fortune in the dealers’ room. I liked it so much that I went back to the dealers’ room the next day, bought the second book in the series and got it autographed by Vo. 
 

 When I got home from the con, I tried to buy the third book at my local independent bookstore, but it is currently out of print. However,  I got books # 4 and # 5. What do I like about them? Several things: they are short, part of Tor’s novella series. Too many books are too long. Second, they share a universe and a main character, a traveling cleric who wanders through the stories of other people. 

 

The books can be read in any order according to Vo. I read them in the order of publishing, except for # 3, which I will buy as soon as it is reprinted. I like linked stories and shared-universe stories a lot. Finally, the books draw on the folklore of East Asia, Vietnam in this case. I think the mammoths are not East Asian, and I’m not sure about the companion birds who remember everything: feathered recorders. Vo’s stories are strange,
 often disturbing, and wonderful. I like the companion hoopoe, the wandering cleric, the foxes and tigers and mammoths… I just discovered that # 6 is available. I will see about ordering it today. 

 

 Eleanor Arnason has written several novels and many short stories. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People (2001), won the James Tiptree Jr. award for gender-bending science fiction and the Mythopoeic Society Award for adult fantasy. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords (1995), won a Minnesota Book Award. In 2018, Aqueduct reissued Ring of Swords with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin, as the fifth volume in its Heirloom Books series. Aqueduct Press published her collection Big Mama Stories in 2013, her Lydia Duluth adventure, Tomb of the Fathers, in 2010, and her collection Ordinary People in 2005. In 2016 Aqueduct released  e-book editions of The Sword Smith, To the Resurrection Station, and Daughter of the Bear King. In 2017, Aqueduct published a collection of her Hwarhath stories, Hwarhath Stories, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named to the James Tiptree/Otherwise Award's Honor List.