The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.16: Vandana Singh

Reverberations: Books, Movies, Music
by Vandana Singh

This year I read more books than I can remember, but there are some that stand out. Below are my impressions of a selected few, some recently published, others veterans of the shelves.

Let me start with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. This is an ambitious work, detailing the life of a missionary who goes to the Congo with his wife and four daughters, during the time when the shackles of colonialism are about to be thrown off. The story is narrated in the voices of the five women, in a manner that seems impossible to pull off, but the book is very effective and very powerful. I dislike missionaries of any kind on principle, with exceptions for certain individuals, but Kingsolver takes a very complex and interesting position. And the language! It changes for every voice, very effectively.

Her 2013 book, Flight Behavior, is set in our own troubled times. Against a canvas of a world changing due to global warming, Kingsolver sets a young, bored housewife in Appalachia with her two kids, and a scientist and his team, as alien in the boonies as anywhere, and millions of monarch butterflies, who have strayed off course to land in this conservative, rigidly religious small community. Kingsolver does a wonderful job of detailing a very localized situation in a way that nevertheless conveys the global problem of climate change. She’s so much better at it than Ian MacEwan in his book Solar.

Then there’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. What to say about Karen Joy Fowler’s book except that it is extraordinary? I generally love her work, but this work exceeds her own standards. There are very few serious books out there that give a voice to the great voiceless beings of our planet, and do so in a small, localized setting of one particular American family. Told in the voice of a young woman struggling to come to terms with an event that devastated her family, the almost offhand style somehow manages to convey the universal theme of what it means to be human. A magnificent work that calls from its readers an answering intelligence and lots of tissues.

I read a number of Maureen McHugh’s short stories before I read Mission Child, which is a relatively old work. Her short stories are direct, to the point, and very effective. I am still shuddering from “The Naturalist,” for instance, which is about a zombie preserve. Mission Child is a novel that to me seemed somewhat incomplete because it engaged only half-heartedly with some larger questions that it raised. But what started off as the story of a young woman’s journey through a troubled land on a distant world became a surprisingly complicated, nuanced work. I do wish it had engaged more strongly with the notion of appropriate versus imposed technology in a world where a second wave of high tech colonizers have come to an already existing, pre-technological polyglot, tribal culture of original settlers. Still, well worth reading.

I have to see Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, since it is about quantum physics and history, but since that was not possible at the moment, I read instead his book Spies. It was well written but perhaps a little over-dramatic. One stand-out was the way the adult narrator realizes the significance of key events in his boyhood during the second world war – and how memory is so much more a collage of impressions than a chronological record. Interesting.

Incidentally I have to add Janet Frame to the list of mainstream writers whose works rely heavily on an appreciation and awareness of the non-human world. This is my complaint about so called realistic fiction – that it pretends there are only humans in the world, and rocks, trees, pigs, and wild geese don’t exist. Janet Frame’s stories are set in New Zealand, and in their sensitivity to place and to the living world, they are almost spec-fictional in feel. Some of her short stories (I haven’t read her novels) are in the fabulist mode, and her use of language is poetic and evocative. I read the collection Prizes and Other Stories although this was over two weeks ago. I’ve also read George Saunders’ The Tenth of December. So many of this writer’s stories are spec-fictional – reading his work, one gets a familiar jolt of anticipation, appreciation and recognition. His stories are unflinching, often disturbing, and his critique of unexamined capitalist norms in our society is timely indeed.

I finally finished reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I had read part of it before and then been distracted by life, but after I saw the movie I was moved to pick it up again. As is often the case, it was a lot better than the movie, although I did like the movie. There are two overlapping ways this novel is subversive. One, it manages to foreground a whole galaxy of characters, not only in space but also in time, thus going against the entire raison d’etre of the modern novel, which tends to follow linear paths describing the life of an individual, the most extreme form of which I call the ‘lone ranger’ model. Two, by doing what it does, it manages to make the case that everything is connected without being glib about it, and suggests that the idea of individualism, while useful in many contexts, becomes less useful and perhaps downright misleading in the big picture.

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria is surpassing strange and wonderful. How a journey, and reading, and books, transform a young, naïve traveler is a tale beautifully told, in a language rich with detail. It would have been no more than a pretty travelogue except for the consequences of a chance meeting near the beginning of the book, which we (and the protagonist) have half-forgotten until we realize its consequences in the latter half. So like real life, where some small encounter we push to the back of the mind might return to disproportionately affect our lives.

I also read Gregory Frost’s Shadowbridge, an incredible confection of the imagination, but with complex aftertastes and dark seasonings. Some aspects of it had a Miyazaki-like touch of the strange, and the inventions of place and character were fascinating. It did end rather abruptly, which makes me wonder if the sequel completes it in a satisfying way – it’s on my list for a winter read.

I have to mention, even if in passing (since I railed at length about its faults) Kim Stanley Robinson’s monumental 2312. I generally like his work quite a bit but this one was marred by serious problems, on which I have expounded at length elsewhere. http://vandanasingh.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/why-ksrs-2312-is-a-fail-on-many-counts/.

I am not a very adventurous reader in the sense that there are categories of books I simply cannot bring myself to read. No horror for me (I do need to sleep, that’s all, it’s nothing personal), in general no high fantasy either (I’ve read the classics, thank you, and I find most Eurocentric fantasy terribly homogenized and boring, with rare exceptions). Hard SF in the Campbellian style makes me nauseous. Probably the books I enjoy fall in a fairly narrow band. As I grow older I find myself drawn less to clever, brilliant stories than to stories that are complex, intelligent, and compassionate toward their characters. I prefer stories with layers, so that you can enjoy them at multiple levels; stories that speak simultaneously to the conscious and the unconscious, and leave you with reverberations long after the last page is turned. When I look back at many of the works I’ve praised above, they give me an immediate sense of place and character. I don’t think there is a word to describe easily that feeling of displacement and immersion – it is as though a sense other than the five familiar ones is awakened, and one simply knows where one is, and who the people are, and the smells and the noises as well – but also that one is changed for being in that place.

As for movies – I really enjoyed the special effects in the movie Gravity, and it was great fun seeing what the film-makers got right about the physics, and what they got wrong. In fact I took one beginning physics class to it and they had to figure out a bunch of stuff, calculations and all. The premise is just crazily improbable, and there’s practically no story, but what the hell, it was gorgeously done. Cloud Atlas, as I’ve mentioned above, was different as a movie compared to the book, and as often happens, the book is better. But the movie on its own was worth watching. I say this as someone who tends to have very little time for movies – I will stop halfway unless it is really quite compelling. This one, I watched straight through.

Although I saw it in fullness many years ago, I’ve also been watching clips from the Bollywood blockbuster 3 Idiots. What a great movie! About students from an engineering college, it is filled with classic Bollywood touches like singing, dancing, and melodrama, but also with wit, academic humor, and intellectual inspiration. There’s a little too much bathroom humor for my tastes, but other than that, this is a film that is thoroughly intelligent and enjoyable.

A recent rediscovery is a French film I first saw in college: Le Maitre de Musique. It was my first introduction to opera, thanks to my Korean roommate, with whom I saw it. I found recently that the entire movie is on youtube. Not a whole lot of story, but the music! Which brings me to the subject of music.

Ah, music. It’s hard for me to talk about it because either there is some playing in my head or outside it. I love everything from Indian classical vocal to Verdi to classic Hindi film songs, to Led Zeppelin to various kinds of folk. I’ve been singing since probably before I was born. Here’s just a sprinkling of what I’ve been hearing this year:

From the movie Rudaali – a song of desert rain and the lover who hasn’t yet come home http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbeCiUh7vdg

From the movie Lekin – more Bollywood folk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7dn5RZjEYk

A folk song from the movie Dilli 6, which is fairly recent, and has some fantastic music from many Indian musical genres. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sstey_Eg4Xc

The Punjabi singer Rabbi ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTxZy32Fv_0 ) sings a song by Sufi mystic Bulleh Shah.

The ultimate song of parting, so powerful I had to write an entire story (well, actually two) around it: Jagjit Singh, and his wife Chitra singing Babul Mora, a composition by Wajid Ali Shah, a deposed ruler from British colonial times. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc1pyQsfiO4

Verdi’s Sempre Libera from Le Maitre de Musiquehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K88OGGP4i_U




Vandana Singh is the author of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (Zubaan, 2009), numerous fine short stories, and two novellas published by Aqueduct Press in the Conversation Pieces series: Of Love and Other Monsters and Distances, which won the Carl Brandon Society's Parallax Award and was on the Tiptree Honor List. She lives near Boston, where she teaches physics.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.15: Carrie Devall

Pleasures of 2013

by Carrie Devall

 

2013 was the first year that I spent a lot more time listening to fiction and people talking about fiction than reading fiction on the page.  I read ebooks on my phone during the commute and listened to podcasts and audiobooks during runs and workouts, with only a small amount of time to read paper books.  This changed my tastes somewhat.  I also listened to many books I would not have read, due to the limited availability of books in audio formats.

 

One highlight of this year’s listening was Richard Bowes’ story “The Queen and the Cambion.”  I first read this in his Aqueduct story collection, The Queen, The Cambion, and Seven Others ebook, and it was good.  However, Wilson Fowlie’s podcast reading of this story (PodCastle # 257) added a whole other layer, fleshing out the characters, Queen Victoria and Merlin, and making the prose pop.   I was also very happy to get to purchase two new Rick Bowes books in the same year, as Dust Devil on a Quiet Street came out through Lethe Press.

 

I was also pleased to find out that a story I had recommended to many people but that was only available (as far as I knew) in old paper copies of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Charlie Jane Anders’ “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word,” had been reprinted in Lightspeed in audio format.  This story not only explores the possibilities for gendered bodies in a thought-provoking manner, it does so with class and/or caste as a primary feature of gender.  I was glad to see that it had not aged at all and was still as provocative, and now is easily accessed.

 

On a non-SFF tangent, I was surprised to enjoy the audiobook for Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life, as much as I did.  This audiobook is greatly enhanced by being read alternately by Keef himself, his pal Johnny Depp, and John Hurley.  At times, Richards recounts stories from growing up in Dartford in the aftermath of WWII, the formation of the Rolling Stones, their initial obsessive search for blues authenticity, the perils of touring in America, and partying with the long list of names you would expect.  He makes insightful comments about the personalities and the dynamics that were playing out between them that makes this a lot more than an exercise in name-dropping.  At other times, he gets into deep discussions of the structure of blues music, the technical things he and other players did to get the rich and unique sounds they are known for, and the vagaries of the music business.  The biggest surprise was that he addresses Stones-style sexism and racial appropriation, not quite head-on and by no means ‘perfectly’ but more than once and with more sensitivity than I expected.

 

I’m currently reading Ruth Long’s The Treachery of Beautiful Things, a YA take on becoming lost in fairyland that is very creepy.  I started the year reading Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, which takes a more cerebral and convoluted route through the same territory, focused on questions of what is real and what is not and just who can make that distinction with any authority.  His take on similar source material was also a compelling read.

 

I read and watched a lot of horror this year, and the best of the lot had to be Carrie, the 2013 remake.  Obviously, I’m biased towards the title, and I love the Stephen King book.  I’m also a big fan of Kimberly Pierce, the director of Carrie, based on her prior movies Boys Don’t Cry and Stop Loss.  She brings the same kind of layering and focus on what is behind the violence to Carrie, and weaves together timeless and new forms of bullying in interesting ways.  She makes it clear that she is bucking the teen horror movie trend of having the girl from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ be the menacing evil, such as in The Craft.  She also draws the horror even more directly than King did from the clash between fundamentalist phobia of sex and eroticism with teenage coming into being and the body, adding a modern flavor with social media and allusions to the recent wave of school shootings.  Julianne Moore, as Carrie’s mother, as well as Chloe Grace Moretz as Carrie White do an amazing job of making that work without crossing into caricature.

 

The most unusual movie I saw I 2013 was Strange Frame, an animated musical scifi lesbian adventure movie.  I was hesitant about expecting too much after seeing trailers.  On the one hand, it was focused on lesbians of color, the music sounded great, the animation was very stylish and well-produced, and Tim Curry, Karen Black, Alan Tudyck, and George Takei are among the voice actors.  On the other hand, a dude made it, like the celebrated “lesbian” movie of the year Blue is the Warmest Color.  But the narrative is very engaging.  The music and animation are lush and enhance the story, which succeeds pretty well as a scifi film and as a love story.  While I wish lesbians in movies that try to sell to a wider audience did not always have to display their bodies to men in a monetized context in order for the movies to be deemed ‘sexy’ enough for prime time, this is used in a hearty critique of the entertainment industry and the animated heroines are not one-dimensional.

 

The book I have been reading for the longest period of time in 2013, which is a testament to its thriller pacing and captivating little details, is Reamde by Neal Stephenson.  I am only two thirds of the way through its 1,000-plus pages, and I’ve been reading it in between finishing other books just for the sake of finishing a complete narrative, but it has remained a page turner that I can’t put down for long.  The plot is somewhat far-fetched and not all that different from the other cyberpunk thrillers I’ve read, but the wide-ranging characters really got under my skin and made me want to know what happens next, in the “real world” and the cyberworld of the MMORPG run by one of the main characters.  It also makes me laugh out loud a lot on public transportation, and then have to look furtively around to make sure no one noticed. 

 

A similarly far-fetched and funny novel I devoured in short order was Rule 43 by Charles Stross, a quicksilver story about cybercops, a serial killer, and a family guy just trying to get their lives together after being released from prison for cybercrimes.   An added bonus is the fact that none of the characters are very “straight,” which at times is a little stilted but overall rings true and adds that much more room for plot-complicating entanglements.  Another thriller that never stopped moving was Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising, which I happened to read just as Greenpeace activists were being arrested by Russia in the Arctic.  I also whipped through all of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s crime thrillers about an Icelandic lawyer who solves gory murders with supernatural or occult themes while raising her two teenagers.

 

The funniest book about science I read in 2013, though not science fiction, was Lake Overturn by Vestal MacIntyre.  Slightly more subtle than Carrie (and Footloose), this book uses the clash between fundamentalism and a science fair to tell engaging stories of a variety of gay and straight people in a town that is too small for their lives. 

 

Somehow, this reminds me of a very quiet book that was at the same time a very powerful exploration of what it takes to live as an artist or writer, Fair Play by Tove Jansson, of Moomintroll fame.  Her other novels that I read this year, The True Deceivers and The Summer Book, were also very good, but Fair Play was incredibly subtle and intricate, using very few words to great effect.

 

Carrie Devall writes obfuscating legalese and science fiction from Minneapolis, MN, when not running or skiing.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.14: Richard Bowes

Reading Pleasures, 2013
by Richard Bowes

Before and Afterlives by Christopher Barzak, Lethe Press (2013)

"Dead Boy Found" is probably the best known story of the seventeen collected here. It became the opening chapter of his Crawford Award winning first novel One For Sorrow, which in turn became the basis for the movie Jamie Marks Is Dead. In it, a bright, unnoticed kid trapped in an unhappy family living in a dreary rust belt town, falls into a kind of love with the ghost of a dead boy.

With Barzak, the mundane and the exotic, the human and the supernatural, meld. His Nebula nominated "Map of Seventeen" is narrated by a perceptive, unsentimental seventeen year old girl preparing for college and a career. She's confronted by her artist brother's return from New York City with a male lover whom she discovers is a merman and encompasses this quite neatly.

The women in these stories tend to be strongly etched characters. Another Nebula nominee, "The Language of Moths" presents the non-communication of an autistic sister and her younger brother working his way to his sexual identity. It's the sister operating almost in an alternate universe who finds a way to "speak" to her sibling. The narrator of "Smoke City is a woman who has escaped that underground city on the "fourth river" beneath Pittsburg. She has married and is functioning in the world we know. But with the iron logic of myth and fairy tale she must return, raise a family as tribute to Smoke City's "Captains of Industry," before making her way back to our world.

The men in his stories often are outsiders trying to work their way into this world." The Boy Who Was Born Wrapped in Barbed Wire," is just that: a child unable to touch another or to be touched without inflicting pain and damage. His longing for contact is palpable. His solution is heart rending.

Frequently in Barzak's stories the mundane is confronted by, confounded by, the exotic. The first of his stories I read, back in 2001 before his name meant anything to me, was "Caryatids", in which a rent boy on a hostile and alien planet changes his sex. This is done at the behest of a john/doctor who has a short intense fling with him then has other things to do. At the end we see the POV taking a place at least for the moment with the female prostitutes around a fountain - life goes on. The second story was "Plenty" the story of two friends, students in the sad ruins of Youngstown Ohio and a mysterious old woman with a magic that produces a Rust Belt Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. The third story read like an artful combination of the two. "Born on the Edge of an Adjective" is narrated by Marcus, a young teacher/composer in Youngstown, fretting over the loss of Neil, a lover who has gone off to San Francisco. Both are wonderfully self-centered. Neil finds first a bar full of refugees from Eastern Ohio and then Margaret, a woman who promises to take him away from this world. Marcus disbelieves this, wants him to come back. But in the end both Neil's and Margaret's cell phone numbers are no longer in service. An alien abduction? Perhaps, but with a bit of regret Marcus picks up the career he's been neglecting and carries on.

The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson, Grove Press (October 1, 2013)

The novella, once a mainstay of fiction both mainstream and genre, seems to be fading away. Maybe a few mad shots like this masterful, mad, historical horror by Jeanette Winterson will get it back on its feet.

The scene is early 17th-century England in the wild country of Lancashire, a decade after Elizabeth, seven years after Guy Fawkes and the Catholic Gunpowder plot, Witches and Catholics, especially priests, are the enemies of King James and Lancashire is full of both. The Daylight Gate is a local belief, a portal into Hell that appears each day in the twilight. The central character is Alice Nutter, a local gentlewoman who has lived in London and made a fortune inventing dyes. She allows witches on her estate not because she believes in their magic but because she pities them, especially one frightening hag who was her lover. She shelters a priest with whom she has been in love in her house. Alice, as we learn, was a confidant of John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's astronomer and a scientist, occultist, astrologer when those things were not incompatible, Dee was Alice Nutter's teacher. Satan himself may have courted her. Intelligent, seductive, impervious to danger, Winterson's Alice, is a fascinating character who refuses to turn her back on the oppressed women (and men) accused of witchcraft and Catholicism even as the King's operatives close in.

Winterson is not and has never been a decorous and nice writer (thank God). The witches (too many, really, to keep straight) are dirty, untrustworthy, demented. The prisons and the torture are horrible. The abandoned towers and buildings that dot the landscape are grim. The story is riveting. In these short days, I felt the Daylight Gate flickering even in city twilight. You can and will read this book in an evening.

At Last -  by Edward St. Aubyn, 2012 Farrar, Straus & Giroux

This is the fifth and final of the "Patrick Melrose" novels which follow the career of Melrose, scion of an aristocratic British family, (like the author St. Aubyn).

The series began with three quite short books, all knife-sharp and often deadly amusing despite their themes. Never Mind is PM as a child in his parents' summer home in France in the 1960's. The mother is a dizzy, unhappy, wealthy woman. The father is a high born English brute who repeatedly molests his son. Alone, this novella would be a nightmare - horror without the genre label.

Bad News, the second book, is Melrose in New York circa 1980's to claim the ashes of his father who has managed to die there unrepentant and disgusting as ever. PM has acquired a rampant drug habit. St. Aubyn's description of NYC from the Mudd Club to the open air heroin market in Central Park was enough like the one I'd experienced some years before to convince me of the authenticity of the earlier book and the ones to come.

Some Hope is Melrose another decade or so down the line, cured of addiction at the cost of most of the money he inherited from his father, starting out in a career as a lawyer. The centerpiece of this book is a weekend at a stately home with Princess Margaret as the star attraction. The portrait of Royalty and the aristocracy is far from what one saw in "The Queen" or "The King's Speech". The matter-of-fact, "Of course the only thing real about them is their artificiality," adds to our confidence that we're reading the truth.

Having read these I couldn't help but read Mother's Milk, a rather sad coming-of-middle-age tale. Melrose is married and unfaithful with a couple of unlikely children to whom he's not a bad parent and a confused, not-overly-bright mother who gives away her fortune, including the house in France, to a New Age charlatan.

At Last was read out of a sense of duty. But I'm glad I did it. Melrose's mother has died and is being buried. All the survivors of his parents' generation appear in all their glorious self esteem. Melrose and his wife are separated. He is not really a worthwhile person but is an old friend with a fascinating story; I'd grown fond of seeing him once in a while. And when it turned out that a small bit of the family fortune (he lives in a world where a couple of million isn't much) was in a trust that would pay him a nice sum each year, I was happy for him. It gave a sense of closure, a feeling of, "Don't have to worry about him."

Someone once pointed out that the rich are just like you and me except they have money.

Mr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi: Riverhead Trade (2012)

Easy to read/hard to define, wonderful/full of wonder, this novel was described to me as a fix-up. Now I've written a few fix-ups (sometimes called mosaic novels), and it's a form I love. In the classic incarnation it's a bunch of short stories on a common theme strung together in a coherent narrative (Wolfe's Fifth Head of Cerberus, Disch's 334, Gaiman's Sand Man collection are examples).

But Mr. Fox is more than that definition. It is all original work and a far deeper riff. The title suggested to me the English folk tale "Mr Fox". That story itself is a variation of the folk story the French call "Bluebeard" and the Germans "Fitcher's Bird." Those well known versions (and dozens of others including Angela Carter's "Bloody Chamber") differ in setting and incidents but with a common theme of brutal murder.

This novel is an extended series of variations. The first variation, the one that gives form to the later ones, is a magic realist Manhattan in the 1930's with an enigmatic writer (Mr Fox) and a woman who might be his muse or a somewhat deranged fan or any number of things. I had the folktales on my mind and expected the Bloody Chamber to make an appearance. Gilles de Rais the 15th-century serial child-murderer is often cited as the model for Bluebeard. Instead we slip out of their story without any bloodshed and slide into the next and out of that and into another. I believe the hint of murder is intentional on Oyeyemi part. It makes taut all of the female/male relationships we see. We return periodically to variations on the writer, the wife and the real enough muse/mistress he has invented/imagined or actually has. But we also visit a Paris reached from China by taxi, a school in Europe where boys are taught how to become the husbands of fantastically rich and complicated women, a lighthouse. Unlike the fairytales, foxes, real and polymorphous, run in and out of the novel. Are they a distraction or a reminder?

Death and violence does lurk. A beautiful and self destructive fashion model has a father who has killed her mother and who keeps trying to get her to visit him in prison. She ends up in the house of a man whose wife has died, perhaps by his hand.

Some sections are short and sweet, some are long and generous. Each time one thinks one understands where it's taking you, one is wrong. Instead of being maddening this is hypnotic. The first thing I thought when I finished the book was that I wanted to read it again.

Richard Bowes has published six novels, four short story collections and seventy stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, an International Horror Guild and a Million Writer Award. 2013 was a busy year for him: Aqueduct brought out an illustrated book of modern fairy tales, The Queen, the Cambion and Seven Others. Lethe Press published a new novel, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, and republished Bowes' 1999 Lambda Award Winner, Minions of the Moon. Also out this year is If Angels Fight, a career-spanning story collection from Fairwood. 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.13: Fiona Lehn

The Pleasures of  2013
by Fiona Lehn

I’ve read, viewed and listened to gobs of stuff this year, and my two favourites by far are the science fiction television series Fringe, and the last work of the late, great, Christa Wolf, City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud.

Christa Wolf, one of former East Germany’s most respected and revered writers, passed away in 2011 at the age of 82. Her writings spanned from documenting her adolescence in Hitler Youth to examining self-determinism for women in a fascist society, to feminist retellings of the tales of Medea and Kassandra of Troy. Her last book, City of Angels, or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, was published in German a year before her death and released in English translation in February 2013. It has been billed as Christa Wolf’s last “autobiographical novel” by some and remains true to the introspective yet universal writing style Wolf developed over her long writing career. Premise: following the reunification of Germany and subsequent dissolution of East Germany, Wolf spends a year in Los Angeles as a guest of the Center, a kind of creative think tank which offers nine-month residencies to “envelope-pushing” established writers, scholars, and artists from around the world.

Although Wolf admittedly doesn’t fulfill her purpose of writing a book while there, the notes from her life at the Center and in Los Angeles form the foundation of a book built with a circling, layered structure that sometimes reads as a journal, sometimes a mystery novel, sometimes as a dream. Only a master of craft such as Wolf could achieve simple clarity amidst such complexity. Wolf is the speaker. Wolf is the protagonist. As an eighty-year-old woman who lived most of her life in East Germany now in Los Angeles (land of plenty yet also of many homeless) where she barely speaks enough English to get by, she has the reader’s sympathy from page one. When Stasi files are released that reveal Wolf’s participation as an informant, Wolf must question her own memory as well as her identity in the midst of a vicious media response. I’d always envisioned Wolf as solid and staunch, strong-willed, outspoken. But while reading this book I began to see her as a person very much afraid, who has been afraid for most of her life. In fact, it took the public outing of her Stasi files for her to stop being afraid.

The story is about self-determinism, facing fear, and fighting against forces larger than oneself. It examines loss of country and exile through the lens of one whose country no longer exists. Reading City of Angels, or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud elicited the same feeling in me as when I first read Wolf’s early novel The Quest for Christa T. over 20 years ago, and when I read her many works since then. Her struggles and themes somehow mirrored my own although I was half her age, product of a middle class Californian upbringing. Is that the universal secret of her success? That she somehow speaks to everyone in this way? Or is it merely my link to her—one that is somehow forged despite our cultural, age, and experiential differences? I suppose it is her ability to tap into the pulse of humanity, really, the thing every great writer achieves.

In the science fiction tv series Fringe (2008-2013), Agent Olivia Dunham works in “Fringe Division,” investigating cases outside of the FBI’s general scope. Dunham’s team consists of FBI agent Astrid Farnsworth, genius and mad scientist Walter Bishop, and his con-artist son Peter Bishop. Over five seasons, they discover and explore parallel universes, time travel, and supernatural and scientific phenomena. Overarching themes include the moral and ethical responsibilities of scientists, the effects of childhood trauma on people throughout their lives, romantic and familial love, free will versus destiny, and the challenges a female agent faces in a male-dominated world.

I’ve enjoyed the influx of feminist science fiction television series over the past few years, including shows such as Sanctuary and Warehouse 13. I hope it is a trend that will become the norm. As its name indicates, however, Fringe stands outside the norm. This is in part because the cast, lead by Anna Torv and featuring Blair Brown and John Noble, delivers compelling and touching performances. It’s also because they are given so much to work with—intriguing plots, complex characters, first-rate dialogue and production values. The narrative arc from season one through season five brings the viewer back to where she began.

Like all great art, Wolf’s final work and the epic Fringe series gift their audience with a deeper understanding of self and the world. (This isn’t my puniest Aqueduct review, I gotta say. Serious art requires serious words, I guess.) Happy viewing, reading, listening, and mbling along the aqueduct, and all the best in 2014!

Fiona Lehn made her first professional sale of fiction in 2008 when “The Assignment of Runner ETI” won third place in the Writers of the Future contest. From 1993 to 2006, she co-produced several CDs of her original songs and performed across the U.S. From 2007 to 2011, Lehn served on the editorial collective of Room, Canada's oldest feminist literary magazine. Though Fiona grew up in Stockton, CA and is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, she lives now in Vancouver, BC as a Canadian citizen. Aqueduct Press published her novella The Last Letter as a volume in its Conversation Pieces series in 2011.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.12: Andrea Hairston

Science Fiction and Fantasy Define Our Humanity
by Andrea Hairston

I never have enough time to read all that I want to read. Still, my local bookseller, Broadside Books, rejoices to see me walk in the store. I collect the books I want to read, even when I am too jammed-up to get to pleasure reading. Delicious books are stacked around my house and office, towers looming over all that I do—millions of pages, curling in humidity and sighing out dust. Books chatter, whisper, and bray at me. But, this is not horror. It’s romance. Books are very seductive, very compelling. A juicy book is my reward for doing the tedious or odious tasks I don’t really want to do, but have to slog through. Books are what I use to persuade myself not to waste precious time dithering. A book-reward snaps me right out of the deadliest of procrastination fits. 

SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed by Martin A. Nowak with Roger Highfield was the book that helped me clean my office—which was suffering from four years of writing and teaching mess! Theoretical biologist Nowak argues that cooperation is competitive—it allows us to succeed in the struggle for survival. Altruism evolves. Morality is in the genome. Reasonable, slightly unpredictable generosity trumps selfish, rigid, fire and brimstone, dog-eat-dog genes. Nowak’s research points to cooperation not competition as underpinning innovation. Cooperation is the architect of creativity throughout evolution and the impetus for the evolution of our big brain. Stories facilitate cooperation. Stories and storytelling allow us to be shapeshifters and mind readers. These same ideas are brought up in other books that I enjoyed while digging out my desk and trying to make space for my next writing projects:


James Gleick’s The Information: a history, a theory, a flood

Annalee Newitz’s Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

Pat Shipman’s The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human

Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods’s The Genius of Dogs

Frans De Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates.

Our ability to be social animals relating to others with large memories, big vocabulary, and a repertoire of strategies based on accumulated knowledge that we didn’t directly experience (stories) is a defining quality of our humanity. It doesn’t give us sovereignty; it doesn’t make us the only subjects, but living in the shadow of the future has a marvelous impact on us.

Science Fiction and Fantasy define our humanity!

Besides binging on non-fiction related to cooperation, evolution, and humanity, I got into near future techno-thrillers. I particular enjoyed Homeland by Cory Doctorow and Blackout by Marc Elsberg. Unfortunately, Blackout has not been translated from German into English yet—but you could get it in Japanese! Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear was a rip-roaring adventure-fantasy and an imaginative exploration of gender, power, and possibility. Bear’s dramatic mix of procreative power, wizardly magic, and necromancy was a seductive read.

I watched Season 2-5 of Fringe—no commercials, just straight story on the DVD. Watching Olivia Dunham save the world from evil geniuses (cut off from their emotions) before drifting into dreams was my summer rest and inspiration. The film that stayed with me was Any Day Now, starring Alan Cumming, Garret Dillahunt, and Isaac Leyva.  Any Day Now tells the story of a teenager with Down syndrome abandoned by his parents and taken in by two gay men in the 1970’s. The couple want to make a family with the boy but social services and the courts get in their way.

I have to give a shout out to my students this semester in Playwriting and Black Women Playwrights Interrupting the Master Narrative. The students’ final projects and plays were a treat to read, which made grading particularly painless. More importantly, the students offered marvelous insights, engaging dramatic narratives, and much hope for future books, play, novels, and films.

 

Andrea Hairston is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has created original productions with music, dance, and masks for over thirty years. She is also the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Her first novel from Aqueduct Press, Mindscape, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was shortlisted for the Phillip K Dick Award and the Tiptree Award. Her second novel, Redwood and Wildfire, published by Aqueduct in 2012, won the James Tiptree Jr. Award as well as the Carl Brandon Kindred Award. She will be a guest of honor at the 2014 Readercon. Her next book, Lonely Stardust: Two Plays, a Speech, and Eight Essays, will be released by Aqueduct in April.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.11: Lisa Tuttle

Pleasures of Reading: 2013 
by Lisa Tuttle 

More and more I find myself turning to crime/mystery novels rather than science fiction or fantasy when reading for pleasure. One of my best new discoveries this year was from 2008, Night of the Mi’raj by Zoë Ferraris (published in America as Finding Nouf.) I bought it several years ago on a recommendation from Gwyneth Jones, but it got lost amongst the many piles of unread books in the house until I came across it again at the perfect, serendipitous moment. It may be unfair to classify this one as a genre novel, because although it is about a detective investigating a crime, the unusual setting (Saudi Arabia) and the fact that the detective is an unmarried Muslim male who needs the help of a woman to whom he is not related in order to uncover the truth behind the disappearance of another woman from a wealthy, powerful Arab family is more important than “whodunit.” As well as being a good read, it offers insight into another culture, and is quite a profound look at the politics of gender.

Sharyn McCrumb – my other happy discovery – also combines a satisfying, convincing tale of detection with deeper, thought-provoking issues – many of them involving differences between men and women -- in If Ever I Return, my Peggy-O, a potent time-capsule set in 1986 but looking back to the ‘60s and Viet Nam. What a treat: there’s a whole list of her other books I look forward to reading.

 I ordered a copy of Elizabeth Hand’s Available Dark earlier this year, just as soon as it was published in the U.K. I had not expected there to be a follow-up to Generation Loss, her first novel about Cass Neary, a burnt-out photographer and low-life wreck from the punk era who winds up in the middle of a crime scene and then, although her own behaviour can be criminal, becomes a sort of detective in pursuit of answers, but there is a brilliant inevitability to Available Dark, which is possibly even weirder and darker and certainly just as compelling as the first book.

 Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran is the sequel I’ve been waiting for ever since I read City of the Dead (aka Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead) a couple of years ago. I picked that up because it was set in New Orleans (post-Katrina) and sounded different. It certainly was. Mystery readers of more classical tastes, in which every strange event turns out to have a rational explanation, may not approve, but the crossing of literary genre boundaries made me love it. The author plays with the whole idea of what it is to be a detective, and Bohemian Highway (set mainly in California, with flash-backs to earlier times in New York) is possibly even better than the first book. My one complaint is the cliff-hanger ending, with volume three nowhere in sight. That’s the risk with reading a book the same year you buy it, instead of storing it away to mature and develop offspring.

 Much as I loved all of the above, and a couple of oldies I can’t quite believe it has taken me so long to get around to reading, especially because they really are every bit as great and essential as I’d been told (Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann and Little, Big by John Crowley), my book of the year is We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. I won’t even say anything more about it except: Read it, if you haven’t already.

Lisa Tuttle is the author of numerous novels and short story collections. She has also published nonfiction and more than a dozen books for younger readers. In 1974 she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and, in 1987, the BSFA award in the short fiction category. Aqueduct Press published her novella My Death in 2008 (which is now available as an ebook). Born and raised in Houston, Texas, she has made her home in a remote rural region of Scotland for the last twenty years.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.10: Nancy Jane Moore

Pleasures 2013
by Nancy Jane Moore

As I started thinking about my favorite books of this past year, The New York Times published a list of the five best works of fiction from 2013 and I learned – to my surprise – that I’d read two of them: Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.

It’s an interesting list: four of the five books are by women, and two would fit comfortably in science fiction or fantasy – at least, I assume the George Saunders collection Tenth of December includes some sf/f, since that’s what he usually writes (I’m sure his publisher denies it). Life After Life is certainly sf/f, though I imagine Atkinson’s publisher denies it, too.

In the past I have rarely been interested in the books crowned by the Times as the best of the year. However, I have put the Saunders collection on hold at the library (I’ve been intending to read more of his work) and am now reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. More and more these days I find myself reading books regardless of their genre label. This isn’t because I’ve finally grown up and stopped reading “juvenile” genres like science fiction and fantasy; rather, it’s because a lot of writers pegged as literary are now writing books that incorporate imagination and ideas. Which is to say that “serious” fiction has improved greatly since the late 1970s, when I gave it up and ran off to read science fiction.

However, neither of the two “top five” books that I have already read are among my favorites of the year. I just didn’t enjoy Life After Life, though I thought the device of ending one chapter with the main character’s death and opening the next with her having survived the crisis that caused her to die was very effective.

I was extremely disappointed by The Flamethrowers, which started so promisingly with a young woman riding a large motorcycle across the country and planning to participate in land speed trials as “land art” en route. At last, I thought, a book about a young woman artist from the 1970s that’s about her, not about her sexual relationship with an older mentor. Alas, the book turned out to be about her sexual relationship with an older mentor. Even when the main character – known only as “Reno” for her hometown – gets involved with Italian revolutionaries, she is still just a pawn in the world around her. I’ve read that story before, all too many times.

 But this is supposed to be a post on the pleasures of reading, not the disappointments, and I did read some great books this year. At the top of my list: Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves. Since I knew I was going to get the book the minute it came out – if Karen Joy Fowler composed copy for the back of cereal boxes I’d buy those even if hated the cereal – I did not bother to read reviews, which allowed me to be surprised where I was supposed to be surprised. I read a recent interview with Fowler in which she addressed the issue of whether or not she’s a science fiction writer by saying, “I don't know if I write science fiction or fantasy, but I'm writing for science fiction and fantasy readers.” Yep.

Nicola Griffith’s Hild is also one of my favorite books of the year. Like Fowler, Griffith does not confine herself to any one genre, though also like Fowler, I think her books will interest sf/f readers regardless of whether she is writing sf, thrillers, or – as with this one – historical fiction. This book pulled me into 7th Century Britain, making the dirt and menace of the times very real and yet allowing me to live fully in another world – one of the real pleasures I get out of fine sf/f. I can hardly wait for the sequel, because – in time-honored fashion – I want to know what happened next. An sf favorite of mine from this year is Therese Pieczynski’s novelette “Strange Attraction,” which was published in a two-fer book called New Under the Sun along with Nancy Kress’s novella “Annabel Lee.” I should confess that I read this story while it was in progress and loved it even in the beginning when it still needed work. It incorporates a very imaginative take on physics with a core story of female friendship. This work not only passes the Bechdal Test, it upends it.

 I was disturbed by Deb Taber’s Necessary Ill, which I think is the proper response to that book. Of course, I’m an sf/f reader: I like being disturbed by what I read.

I also liked Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings Bad Kings, which tells the story of a nursing home for kids with disabilities from multiple points of view. This is a good example of how fiction can make a more compelling case for social change than factual reports. When you’re identifying with a character, it’s a lot harder to think you should relegate that person to a warehouse.

 I have been making my way through Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January mystery series and have enjoyed the books a great deal. These books, set in New Orleans in the 1830s, are about a “free man of color” dealing in a world defined by slavery. January is something of a superhero – a gifted musician, a well-trained surgeon, and a large man with good fighting skills who speaks several languages and can change his mode of communication depending on who he is addressing – but that allows him to end up in a variety of adventures, giving the stories structure. Meanwhile, Hambly is telling us some of the real history of that period. As with Griffith’s Hild, I find myself enjoying spending time in this world while being grateful I don’t have to live in it.

Earlier this year I finished Tana French’s series of police procedurals set in modern Ireland: In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor. These books will destroy any romantic notions you may cherish about Ireland, since most of them take place after the economic collapse of the Celtic Tiger. Dublin, like most major cities, is unaffordable, and police work puts people in the path of the dark and ugly side of life.

On the non-fiction side, I liked Annalee Newitz’s Scatter, Adapt and Remember. I worry about climate change, but I tend to have faith in the ability of human beings to muddle through disasters, and I enjoyed this look at the possible ways we’ll do that muddling.

 Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? addresses the economic problems posed by the growth of digital technology. Pointing out that the technology was designed for give and take, he argues, among other things, that we should all be paid for that data that corporations harvest from our online activities. Lanier is a digital tech insider whose criticism of the field is not driven by Luddite thinking but rather by an understanding of how it can and should work.

But my favorite non-fiction book of the year was Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing. I re-read it to prepare for a WisCon panel and found it as powerful as ever.

I seem to be reading a lot of fiction these days. That may be because I’m not watching much TV – nothing I’ve seen lately comes up to the standard of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and there are only so many times I can re-watch it – and am annoyed and bored by almost every movie I see (which isn’t many because the ones that aren’t bad adaptations of old TV or wowie-zowie special effects extravaganzas sound too depressing to see). I did like Fruitvale Station, which I saw in Oakland a few blocks away from where the real story happened. It was, of course, depressing.

Nancy Jane Moore’s latest novella is Ardent Forest, a retelling of As You Like It set in a post-apocalyptic Central Texas, available from Book View Café. In 2013 she had short stories in PS Publishing’s Memoryville Blues and five other anthologies.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.9: Alisa Alering

Of Time Travel, Murder, and Beautiful Chickens
by Alisa Alering

 One thing I discovered, looking back over my Goodreads inventory for highlights of my literary year, is that I didn't read as many books as usual--even counting the audiobooks I get through at a good clip on my walks around town. I've been working on my own novel this year, and the effort has exhausted my word centers. It's become ever more difficult to find a book that constitutes a pleasure: neither too difficult nor too facile, and most definitely not related in theme or voice to what I'm trying to accomplish.

While at the CSSF Novel Writers Workshop in Kansas this summer, instructor Kij Johnson mentioned that she found the cure for this malady in old favorites like P.G. Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer, and Patrick O'Brian. That conversation led to my current crush on O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. I never imagined that novels about naval history would hold any interest for me, but the charm of these books lies in the characters. I’m four books in and I still don't know what a topgallant is, but I find it doesn't signify.

 In other reading, I discovered an interesting confluence in Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, both of which deal with Time Travel and The Bad Things That Happen to Women. I've long been a fan of Atkinson. I'm convinced that her entire Jackson Brodie detective series is a cumulative commentary of relentlessly feminist bent (cf. The Bad Things That Happen to Women) disguised as engaging genre stories. Her non-genre latest, Life After Life continues these themes in a different way, exploring the timeline of Ursula Todd as she lives and dies repeatedly, each time learning (if unconsciously) from her fatal mistake and living on until the next. Many of her lives are at the mercy of world events (e.g., the 1918 Influenza, WWII). But others branch from Ursula's own decisions, such as how she responds to an assault by her brother's school friend on the eve of her 16th birthday.

Beukes spreads her net more widely, focusing on the lives (& deaths) of multiple women. The "shining girls" of the title are young women of the 20th century who attract the attention of a time-traveling serial killer because they "shine" too brightly. The protagonist, Kirby Mazrachi, is a survivor who fights back. She has an older male sidekick, but she does the dirty work herself. In an interview (https://blog.zolabooks.com/lauren-beukes-the-shining-girls-qa/), Beukes says her "graphic depictions of the killer's attacks are meant to upset the reader, and to keep the reader with the victim, rather than riding voyeuristically on the shoulder of the killer." It's a laudable intent, but a risky strategy. She did make me cry while walking down the street so perhaps she pulled it off.

I also enjoyed Karen Joy Fowler's, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which seems especially relevant in light of the NIH's June decision to retire most of its laboratory chimpanzees and recent legal challenges to extend personhood rights to non-humans.

Additional shout-outs to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah; Joan Slonczewski's The Highest Frontier--read in preparation for WisCon 37; Anna Funder's Stasiland, non-fiction stories about life in East Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall; Elizabeth Wein's WWII-era YA thriller, Code Name Verity; and for rollicking YA supernatural silliness, Libba Bray's The Diviners.

Short stories:
• "Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken," by Elizabeth Ziemska. Interfictions 2. (2009) [reprinted in Strange Horizons, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20130729/2beautifulchicken-f.shtml]

◦ A gorgeous story of history, culture, whimsy, science, family, grief and wonder. Probably my favorite story all year.

• "The Grinnell Method," by Molly Gloss. Strange Horizons, September 3-10, 2012.

 ◦ Winner of the Sturgeon Memorial Award 2013. Lyrical, precise, naturalistic. The closely-observed details of this story stuck with me long after I finished.

• "Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters," by Henry Lien. Asimov's, December 2013.

◦ Unforgettable voice, fun world-building, and my favorite thing of all: at the end of the story, the horrible little monster of a protagonist doesn't learn a single thing.

• "Holy Days," by Kodiak Julian. Writers of the Future v.29 (2013)

◦ Beautifully written examination of the consequences of some rather unusual holidays. I definitely want to see more from Julian.

• "The Metaphor of the Lakes," by Yarrow Paisley. Shimmer 17, Fall 2013.

◦ Voice, voice, and voice. This epistolary first-person narrative had me from the very first line.

Podcasts

• The always entertaining and educational Writing Excuses.

• My new fascination, Emma Newman's Tea and Jeopardy. Do join her for a spot of peril.


 TV

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (based on the novels by Kerry Greenwood), is an Australian TV series featuring a female detective in jazz-age Melbourne. Calling Phryne Fisher an independent-minded woman is a bit of an understatement. Not only does she solve murders and right wrongs, she "does exactly as she likes, does not make false promises or break hearts, and explains to her lovers that they don't own her." Though it's a bit camp overall--and ¬¬that may be part of the appeal--the first series has attempted to explore genuine social issues of the time and place. Did I mention that Miss Fisher's costume are fabulous?

Alisa Alering's stories have appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 4 (Mythic Delirium), Flash Fiction Online, and Secret Histories & Missing Links (Aqueduct Press). She is a graduate of Clarion West (2011) and winner of Writers of the Future (2013). She supervises "The Writer's Room" column for Waylines magazine. www.alering.com | @alering

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.8: Cheryl Morgan

Aqueduct Year in Review 2013
by Cheryl Morgan

I’d like to start this year with a couple of books that are nothing to do with fiction. Rather they are by prominent gender theorists: Kate Bronstein and Julia Serano. Both, I think, will interest the Aqueduct Press community.

I’ve not been a big fan of Kate Bornstein’s earlier works as they seem, from my vantage point, to have ended up being used more to cause divisions within the trans community than to enlighten people. Since then, however, I have got to know Kate a little and understand where she is coming from. Also her New Gender Workbook is a lot more balanced. And it is a great deal of fun. It should be very useful for giving to people who think all of this gender stuff is a bunch of po-faced academics arguing about theoretical irrelevancies.

Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl is the book I normally recommend to people wanting to learn about trans issues. I have been looking forward to her next venture for some time, and I’m delighted to say that Excluded doesn’t disappoint. Ostensibly about the way in which trans women have been excluded from feminist spaces, the book takes off from there to examine the whole idea of how we should advocate on behalf of marginalized groups, both as members of them and as allies. I heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in intersectional feminism.

Back with the fiction, four books particularly stand out for me this year. Two are fairly obvious: Guy Gavriel Kay’s River of Stars and Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The other two are by women.

Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice has been the talk of the Internet this year; and deservedly so. While there have been science fiction books before that have played with ideas of gender by introducing characters whose biological sex is fluid or androgynous, no one, to my knowledge, has achieved that purely through language. It is clear that some of the characters in the book are gendered. Others may not be. When aliens speak gender may be indicated, but the people of the Radch Empire have no gendered pronouns. The central characters in the book are all Radch, and when they speak they refer to everyone as “she”. We gendered beings have no idea whether the persons they are speaking about are gendered in some way or not. It is delightful.

 The new Nicola Griffith novel, Hild, contains only homeopathic quantities of fantasy. And yet, much like a work of Magic Realism, it is set in a world where everyone believes in magic, and consequently for them magic does exist. That world is 6th Century Britain, a fascinating mixture of native Celtic tribes and various types of Germanic colonists, plus the occasional hold-over from Roman times. Europe is slowly dragging itself back into civilization following the post-Roman chaos, and it is by no means certain which tribes, which petty kings, will triumph. Success will depend as much on possession of natural resources, skill in trading, and diplomacy with this strange Pope in Rome and his zealous priests, as it does on force of arms. Griffith does a magnificent job of creating this world, and because her central character is female it is a world we see very much through women’s eyes.

2013 has also been a year in which Afrofuturism has come to the fore. You are doubtless all familiar with Ytasha Womack’s fabulous book with that title, with Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, and with the various anthologies showcasing writers of color. I’d therefore like to focus in particular on a writer you may not have heard of because her book is only out in the UK. Stephanie Saulter is Jamaican by birth and spent many years in Miami working for Island Records before moving to London and becoming a high powered consultant. Now she has given that up and turned to fiction. Her debut novel, Gemsigns, is an excellent new take on the idea of genetic engineering creating new types of human, and using that as a metaphor for the way in which marginalized groups are deemed less than human in present day society.

One of the reasons that I have got to know Stephanie is because I am now regularly helping host a community radio show on Ujima Radio in Bristol. Ujima primarily serves the Afro-Caribbean community in Bristol, and the Women’s Outlook show concentrates primarily on issues of interest to women in that community. We’ve done features on equalities law, on female genital mutilation, on natural childbirth clinics and so on. But because they have me they also touch on LGBT issues, and do a lot about books. I’ve brought a lot of local SF&F writers into the studio, and have had Stephanie on twice. Some of the interviews are now available through my Salon Futura podcast stream, and fairly soon I hope to have my hour-long Afrofuturism show available.

Talking of podcasts, the SF Crossing the Gulf show put together by Karen Burnham and Karen Lord continues to be one of the best SF-related shows available. Only The Writer and The Critic comes close in terms of in-depth analysis of the chosen texts. Both shows are highly recommended.

I’m continuing to spend a lot of time in Finland, and was deeply upset to see my friends lose their 2015 Worldcon bid by only 35 votes. They are bidding again for 2017. Do please consider voting for them. Finnish fandom is run by women. And they have no gendered pronouns.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer are also big Finnophiles, and this year they published another fine novel by the great Leena Krohn. Datura is the story of a young woman who is given a datura plant by family who don’t realize how dangerous it is. Hearing that it is supposedly an herbal cure of asthma, she begins to eat the seeds. Because she works for a magazine that specializes in stories about strange occurrences (presumably loosely based on Fortean Times), she fails to understand what effect the plant is happening to her. The book is as odd as you might expect.

This year’s discovery from Finland, however, was a Swedish writing team: Sara Bergmark Elfgren and Mats Strandberg (they are not a couple). They have a phenomenally successful series of YA books, of which the first two, The Circle and Fire, are out in English. Getting any non-crime novels translated from Swedish is an achievement, but novels about a group of teenage witches living in a small town in rural Sweden are not the sort of thing you would expect to become a global phenomenon. Thankfully the issues faced by teenage girls are pretty much the same all over the Western world. Also Sara and Mats write really well.

Much further afield, Elizabeth Knox has two books out this year: a YA fantasy, Mortal Fire; and an adult horror novel, Wake. Knox continues to struggle to get her work published outside of her native New Zealand. I cannot for the life of me understand why. Find those books if you can.

 I don’t get to the movies much, so I generally don’t see big films until they are available on disk. I have, however, bought a Blu Ray player, and now have a new appreciation of the special effects work in Blade Runner from before the days of CGI.

One fairly recent film I was very impressed with is Cloud Atlas. I love the novel, and could not for the life of me see how it could be adapted for the screen. The Wachowskis have done an amazing job.

 The Doctor Who 50th anniversary special was about as bad as I expected, save for the brief appearance of Tom Baker. I hated pantomime as a kid, and it doesn’t get any better with age. However, An Adventure in Space and Time, the dramatized story of the creation of the series, was magnificent. It was pulled from iPlayer fairly quickly, so I’m hoping the BBC has a disc release on the way.

Talking of the Doctor, Delia Derbyshire was one of many musicians featured in Adventure Rocketship #1 (weirdly subtitled Let’s All Go to the Science Fiction Disco). This is a rather strange publication: a magazine published as a book, containing both fiction and essays, all of them about the intersection of science fiction and popular music. I loved it so much that I talked the editor, Jonathan Wright, into letting me do an ebook edition. It, via an essay by N.K. Jemisin, is also responsible for one of my few new musical discoveries this year: Janelle Monáe.

Will you be electric sheep? Electric ladies, will you sleep?
Or will you preach?

 Goodness only knows what Phil Dick would have made of that. Given that I get called a freak on a regular basis, I’m with the Archandroid.

Cheryl Morgan is the owner of Wizard’s Tower Press and the Wizard’s Tower ebook store. She blogs, reviews and podcasts regularly at Cheryl’s Mewsings.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.7: Nisi Shawl

Books, Actually
by Nisi Shawl

This year my youngest sister died.

I was listening to my “Strict Machine” Pandora station when Dad called with the news: Gina had not survived her emergency surgery. The songs playing were Zero 7’s “Destiny” and Massive Attack’s “Paradise Circus.” The lyrics of neither pertain to what had just happened. But if the evocation of grief is a pleasure, these songs, and, in fact, all of Zero 7’s music, give me pleasure—the kind wet with tears.

Upon returning from the funeral I became infested with the worst of classical earworms: Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C# Minor. Like Massive Attack and Zero 7 it roused in me thoughts and feelings about unsought death: intimations, denial, struggle, acquiescence. Pop earworms can be evicted by simply replacing them with other, more insidious melodies. Not so with “The Prelude.” I tried overplaying it, usually a sure path to revulsion, but that only deepened my addiction. Fortunately the pianist in the apartment below mine began practicing several Inventions, and the sewing-machine-like regularity of Bach finally overcame the haunting melancholia of Rach.

Since the only music I care for these days makes me sad, I’ve turned for solace to books. Fortunately, as a reviewer and reviews editor I have access to lots of them for free. So many of the books I’ve enjoyed—though not all—are about sisters. And immortality. Which I wish she had had.

The sisters in Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood are robot clones. They don’t have bodies, though they can be murdered, or die due to misadventure. Following Stross’s narrative across interstellar space, into forced surgery, and down through thousand-foot layers of icy slush, I realized that I was following him. A novel experience for me with this author, and one that makes me recommend Neptune’s Children to anyone who wants to read a really accessible thinky-nerdy-economicky-space opera.

J.M. Sidorova’s debut, The Age of Ice, tells the story of an accidental immortal living for a couple of troubled centuries. It was finely absorbing,a funny and sensual and surprisingly sympathetic rendering of a man who can’t seem to come to terms with his fortunate problem. Sea Change, another debut novel—this one from S.M. Wheeler--was a Grimm and gritty take on fairy tale quests. The heroine wants to save her friend. I was enchanted, drawn below the mirror-bright surface of this book to the rough depths Lilly descends to. She loses everything in trying to save her friend. In the wake of Gina’s death, non-romantic love has come to mean much more to me.

Then there was Hild, by Nicola Griffith. It is, simply, the best book I read this year—and there were others that came damn close. But Hild wields more beauty, strength, passion, wit, sex, fear, glory, grue, delicacy, and magnificence than any book has a right to. Griffith, as Eileen Gunn put it, “writes like a commando”—she takes you away to wherever she wants and you can’t refuse to go. I went. I’ll go back again willingly for any sequels she cares to manifest.

If not for Hild, perhaps A Stranger in Olondria—a third debut novel—would have been my pick for the year’s best. Sofia Samatar’s story of a colonial smitten with the immortalizing power of the written word would have been enough of a tour de force for most new authors. But to that she adds the most compelling ghost I’ve ever come across, and realistic political manipulations that threaten to kill her naïve hero. And Samatar’s lovely language is to swoon for.

Or, perhaps, I would have gone for my most recently completed read of the year: Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Sisters again. Trans-species sisterhood. Questions are raised about memory, reality, sentience, intentions. In a moment that tears aside narrator Rosemary’s assumptions about her chimpanzee sister Fern, I saw a reflection of a behavior commonly accepted as human, but rejected by her as bestial. What, I wondered, was the difference? I’m still wondering. That’s what Fowler does for me. Makes me wonder.

I’d rather dwell in wonder than sorrow. I’d rather be taken away to another time, another place than live where I am, in the midst of my regrets. Until I finish writing my own novel, “Everfair,” which I now classify to myself as work Gina would have wanted me to do, I’ll seek what comfort I can find in the writing of others.

 Nisi Shawl is the author of Filter House, which won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, Something More and More, her WisCon GoH collection, and, with Cynthia Ward, the co-author of the celebrated Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and the editor of The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 5: Writing and Racial Identity, all of which are published by Aqueduct Press. This year Aqueduct Press published Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, which Nisi co-edited with Rebecca Holden. She reviews science fiction for the Seattle Times, is a member of the Clarion West board, teaches writing workshops at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA., and is the reviews editor of The Cascadia Subduction Zone.