Short SF Marathon Day 11: Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, N. K. Jemisin, Xia Jia

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, “Where the Trains Turn.” Tor.com, November 19, 2014.

Because I didn’t really look at the link and skipped the introduction at Tor.com as it tends to spoil the stories being introduced, continuing a long introduction tradition, I only realised the author was Finnish when I got distracted by his slightly awkward English. Actually, if I’m completely honest, I first thought he was German, because the main character, the overtly strict, literal mother is such a German type, though apparantly her type is known in the Nordic countries as well (and indeed, over here in the Netherlands as well). She reminded me in fact of a certain poster to the rec.arts.sf.written.* newsgroups of a decade and a half ago, completely incapable of understanding anything that wasn’t flat, literal truth but still convinced she herself was completely logical and it was the rest of us that were ignorant and not making sense. It’s a type of person you don’t encounter quite as much in Anglosaxon countries, these being too romantic in nature to breed these people.

The slightly clumsy translation by Liisa Rantalaiho (especially compared to the Xia Jia story below) both hinders and helps the story. It helps because it’s just alien enough to “proper” English to showcase that this isn’t set in the familiar UK or US, hinders because it makes for awkward reading at the start.

I’m not sure what I thought about the story as a story: it felt overtly long to me, but again, that may have been the English as well. In one way this is based on the similar conceit as Jo Walton’s novel My Real Children, as the protagonist remembers her son who never existed; in another this is a horror fantasy stories about trains and the idea that some trains can leave their tracks and are hungry to kill. The mixture of the two didn’t quite hold together for me, but the second half of the story was better than the first.

N. K. Jemisin, “Stone Hunger.” Clarkesworld, July 2014.

A short fantasy story about a girl in a post-apocalyptic world, who can eat energy, all sorts of energy, who is on the trail of a man who can do the same and by doing so killed her city. A story of revenge and survival and perhaps moving beyond it. Some interesting ideas here, a neat setting that I’d be curious to see Jemisin do more with.

Xia Jia, “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy.” Translated by Ken Liu. Clarkesworld, September 2014.

It’s interesting to read this translated story after the previous one. Here, if you hadn’t been told this was a translation, you’d be hard pressed to notice. Is this because Ken Liu is Chinese-American, at home in both languages and cultures to an extent Liisa Rantalaiho isn’t, or did the latter make a deliberate choice in translating the way she did?

In any case, what you have here are five vignettes centered around Spring Festival or Chinese New Year, slice of life stories about family, all revolving around the ways technology interfaces or intrudes into our social lives. It’s neither celebratory nor condemning, which is rare in science fiction.

My favourite books of 2014

As always I will do a post looking at the statistics of my reading habits this year in early January, over at Wis[s]e Words, but for now I’d like to lift out the books that stood out the most for me in 2014, in no particular order.

Cover of The Martian

The Martian was one of the books with a lot of buzz behind it this year. Originally self published in 2011, it was picked up by a mainstream publisher (Random House) and rereleased with some alterations. It’s, with one exeception, the most heartland science fiction novel I’ve read this year, set smack in the heart of the genre. There have been other novels about astronauts losts on Mars before, other Robisonades. but the ones I’ve read tended to be dull and badly written. The Martian is the first one that had the same excitement as Robinson Crusoe offered in finding clever solutions to how to survive a hostile climate, but without devolving into wish fullfilment like the latter part of Crusoe did. Weir also doesn’t fall into the trap of making his stranded astronaut a Heinleinesque superman able to save himself entirely true his own efforts; instead it does take the full resources of NASA to save him.

Cover of Ter Ziele

In August I went to my first Worldcon, in London, which left me buzzing with excitement and a renewed interest in science fiction and fantasy fandom. It also spurred me on to get back into reading Dutch language fantastika, so I started off following various Dutch SFF people on Twitter, as you do. It was thanks to this that I got to know about Esther Scherpenisse’s Ter Ziele, a chapbook collection of two short novellas. The first story in particular hit me, dealing as it does with death, grief and letting go. It’s no surprise it won the main Dutch prize for science fiction/fantasy, the Paul Harlandprijs. I hope Esther Scherpenisse will write and publish more before long.

Cover of Ancillary Sword

Ann leckie’s Ancillary Justice was one of the best if not the best science fiction novels I’d read last year, so my expectations for the sequel, Ancillary Sword were high. Leckie didn’t disappoint me. Paradoxically it both took place on a smaller stage than the previous novel and concerned itself with bigger matters. Most of Ancillary Justice revolved around Breq’s struggle to come to grips with her own identity and her quest for vengeance, her inner turmoil, but Ancillary Sword has those struggles if not entirely resolved, so much so that she’s in full control here. And whereas the focus of the original novel, thanks to its novel use of pronouns, was mainly on gender, here it is on the impact of colonialism, something science fiction as a genre direly needs to come to grips with. Too often after all it views things from the perspective of empire, rather than its victims; Leckie firmly reverses this.

Cover of Otherbound

Corinne Duyvis is another Dutch SFF writer, but one who writes in English. Otherbound is her début novel, a young adult fantasy. What sets it apart from the hundreds of other young adult fantasies are several things. First, there’s the ingenious concept of the protagonist, Nolan, being forced to live somebody else’s life, see through a stranger’s eyes, every time he closes his. Second, Duyvis makes this into a disability more than a superpower. If every time you blink you see through somebody else’s eyes, it’s bound to distract you from the real world. And that has consequences. It’s not the only way Otherbound deals with disability; all three main characters are bound together by their disabilities, their lives interwoven because of it. Third, she has also seriously thought about the consent issues of being able to share someone’s life so intimately. And she manages to do all this and write a gripping adventure story too.

Cover of The Mirror Empire

I read Hurley’s first novel, Gods War, last year and that had been a good if flawed novel. The Mirror Empire is a cut above it. Hurley’s first venture into fantasy, it’s one of the novels, with Otherbound and Ancillary Sword that immediately made it on my Hugo shortlist for next year. In some ways it is a traditional epic fantasy, complete with a Big Bad that needs to be defeated, but what makes it special is its worldbuilding. The world of The Mirror Empire is one of the more fully realised, interesting and novel I’ve read in a long time and she manages it without “the great clomping foot of nerdism” stomping down on the story. Hurley supported The Mirror Empire with a promotional blog tour which is also worth reading to learn more about the background to which it was written and which explains some of her choices.

Cover of The Steerswoman
The Steerswoman series I knew about from other fans raving about it since the mid-nineties at the very least, but I never encountered the books in the wild, until James Nicoll linked to Rosemary Kirstein’s post offering the ebooks for sale. So inbetween walking from one panel to another at Loncon3, I bought the entire series. I was glad I did. What at a first glance looks like fantasy and starts out feeling like a standard if well written fantasy quest story, morphs gradually into the hardest science fiction series I’ve ever written. Because what you have here is a woman finding out the truth about the world she lives in through deduction and induction, through doing thought experiments and practical confirmation of them, without ever cheating, without being fed clues by better informed characters, without using magical technology or jumping to conclusions she shouldn’t be able to make. It’s a brilliant series too little known because for various reasons it took Kirstein over three decades to write the first four books of it and it’s still not finished. But don’t let that stop you: each book stands on its own and each is better than the last.

Cover of Dhalgren

Question: what are the two places man will never reach? Answer: the heart of the sun and page 100 of Dhalgren. An old joke, but one that indicates Dhalgren‘s reputation as a difficult book. Which didn’t stop it from being one of science fiction’s first runaway bestsellers. Personally I didn’t find it that difficult to read, just long, because I just let myself flow along Delany’s narrative. If you go looking for a proper, standard sf, story, you won’t find it here. But it is about cities and independence and queerness and the gloriousness of our bodies, ourselves and all sorts of weird seventies shit. This is one of those books that are hard to review or recap, require some investment of time and effort to get the most out of it, but do reward you if you do so. Delany is such a good writer that I wouldn’t mind reading his interpretation of the Manhattan phonebook, as long as he keeps off the booger sex.

Cover of Lagoon

I also read Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death this year, but Lagoon was the better book, another Hugo candidate for me. Written out of frustration with the South African sf movie District 9, this is her version of an alien invasion, set in Lagos, Nigeria. That setting already sets it apart from the ordinary run of invasion stories, usually set in the States or sometimes Europe. But there’s also Okorafor’s unapologetic use of Nigerian English rather than “standard” English. For somebody like me not used to it, this made it slightly more difficult to read at times, but no more so than when some fantasy writer has put made up Elfish words in his fantasy. Then there’s the genre breaking Okorafor cheerfully commits here as well, as one chapter frex is told from the perspective of a spider trying to cross a tarmac road, a self aware and evil tarmac road looking for new victims to devour…

Cover of Zero Sum Game

Zero Sum Game is S L Huang’s début novel, a fast paced technothriller, which I only discovered because of her post about last year’s SFWA controversies. That got me reading her blog, curious for her novel, so I bought it when it came out. What I most liked about the book was its heroine, Cas Russell, a math savant who can e.g. calculate the paths of a stream of bullets shot out by a semi-automatic in realtime quickly enough to dodge them all. If you think too much about this power it gets ridiculous, but Huang moves the action quickly enough to not give you the chance to do so. Cas is also, as becomes clear quickly, somewhat of a damaged individual, somebody with no sense of morality but not a sociopath, who has to rely on other people’s sense of what’s right and wrong, which doesn’t always end up well. Currently I’m reading the sequel, Half Life, coming out soon. Expect a review in early January.

Cover of Ascension

Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension was a book I completely discovered by accident, on the sales rack of my favourite Amsterdam bookstore. What pulled me to it was the woman on the cover, as black women don’t often feature on sf covers, not even when they are the protagonist. And it turned out this was the protagonist, a lesbian, disabled woman of colour working as a starship engineer in a dead end job in the middle of a depression caused by a new technology that makes starships almost obsolete. This is a book about sibling rivalry, love, both romantically and otherwise and the difficulties of living true to your own life when you’re poor and almost powerless. It’s also about making choices and having the courage to stand behind them. It’s a brilliant novel, one that should’ve been a contender for the Hugo and Nebula Awards together with Ancillary Justice, but which sadly didn’t get the buzz that book got.

Cover of The Blue Place

Finally, I need to mention two of the books I found the hardest to read this year, Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place and Stay, the first two novels in a crime thriller trilogy. What made it hard for me was that these books revolved around a death, a death I saw coming throughout The Blue Place and hoping Griffith would find a way to avoid it, while Stay deals with the fallout with that murder. The grief and sorrow in the latter were so real that I had to set it aside the first time I read it, in August, because it reminded me too much of my own loss, the death of my wife three years ago. But if it was hgard for me to read, it was harder for Nicola Griffith to write, twelve years after her little sister died, with her older sister dying through it. It’s no wonder it caught grief and sorrow so well.

Other books I could mention here as well: Sarah Tolmie’s The Stone Boatmen, for me another Hugo candidate. Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book so Great, an enthusiastic anthology of book reviews. Fly by Wire, William Langewiesche’s great explenation of just why captain Sullenberger could put down his Airbus 320 down safely on the Hudson after being hit by a goose. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar and Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone, both read for the John Campbell Award, both very good in their own way fantasy stories. Tobias Buckell’s Hurricane Fever a great near future technothriller romp. Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen vs the Junior Super Patriots/The Multiverse: maniac superhero fanfic that hits all the feels. Aliette de Bodard’s On a Red Station Drifting: family orientated flawed but interesting space opera. N. K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood duology: Egyptian inspired, but not derivative fantasy. Richard Penn’s The Dark Colony: a near future, non cheating hard science fiction police procedural set in the Solar System. Oh, and of course there’s all the Norton I read this year, none of which disappointed.

The Dreamblood Duology — N. K. Jemisin

Cover of The Killing Moon


The Killing Moon & The Shadowed Sun
N. K. Jemisin
415/504 pages
published in 2012

Have you ever reached that point where you’ve read twothirds of a fantasy trilogy, quite like the writer but don’t want to read the last novel because it would mean rereading the first two? Yeah, that happened to me with N. K. Jemisin’s The Inheritance Trilogy, so instead I read her new series, The Dreamblood duology. Both The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun were published in 2012 and can be read as standalones, though you’ll miss a lot of the background if you only read The Shadowed Sun.

One of my ongoing frustrations with fantasy in general is how few novels take their inspiration from anything but medieval Europe. Medievaloid worlds as filtered through Tolkien and his imitators — where you can find pipe smoking peasants eating potoes with their turkey but few people of colour –are a dime a dozen, but books with Egypt as a source of worldbuilding are rare. In fact, The Dreamblood duology is the first series I can remember reading with Egypt as the inspiration for its setting, polytheism, annual flooding river surrounded by desert, powersharing between the priesthood and nominal god-king and all. What’s more, Jemisin was also inspired by Egypt’s historical relationship with Kush, the kingdom to the south of it in what’s now Sudan, who shared its culture and at times actually ruled it. In short, this is one fantasy in which pale Northern European heroes are in short supply.

Of course whenever any author moves out of the ruts of medievaloid fantasy they run the risk of cultural appropriation, of exchanging one set of cliches for another. Which may be why Jemisin is at pains in her foreword to establish that while she was inspired by Egypt and Kush, Gujaareh and Kisua aren’t meant to be exact mirrors of them. Certainly the religious setup, while superficially reminiscent of ancient Egypt, doesn’t look anything like the real Egyptian pantheon.

Instead the religion in the city state of Gujaareh revolves around moon goddes worship, of Hananja, the Goddess of the Dreaming Moon, much larger than its companion the Waking Moon and whose description makes clear that the Dreaming Moon is actually a gas giant around which the world revolves. No wonder than that it plays such a large role in Gujaareh religion, with Hananja’s priests, the Hetawa, ruling the city state in tandem with its prince. They’re responsible for public justice as well as public health, using dream magic tithed from the city’s population, magic that comes in different flavours as dreams come in different flavours and is cared for and used by seperate classes of priests.

And the most elite class of priests are the Gatherers, the priests who gather those too sick or old or selfish to seek the peace of the goddess on their own. Instead Gatherers like Ehiru visit these people in their homes, bringing the peace of the Goddess to them. All voluntarily done of course, with the exception of those found to be corrupt.

For Nijiri, recently apprenticed to Ehiru to learn to become a Gatherer, this is right and proper. Gatherers serve the Goddess just as Sentinels and Sharers and all the other priests and priestesses do and some would say theirs was the noblest path, bringing peace to those who suffer. The Kisuati envoy Sunandi is more cynical; in Kisua all these magics are suspect and the Gatherers look like just a thin excuse to murder enemies of the Goddess. And now that her old mentor has been murdered for discovering proof of the use of magic even the priests of Gujareeh find an abomination, she’s afraid that sooner or later the Gatherers will find her corrupt.

There is in fact corruption, but not in her. Rather, a parody of a Gatherer is loose, a demon that seeks dreamblood of anybody it comes across. What’s worse is the reason it exists: somebody deliberately set it loose on Gujareeh and is protecting it. To what end, Ehiru and his assistent Nijiri undertake to find out before whoever is behind the demon achieves it. Sunandi is doing the same from her end and of course she and Ehiru meet and come to a grudging respect, having to work together to end the threat to both their countries.

The plot was gripping enough to keep me awake during the daily commute in the darkest days of January, but it’s the world building that’s the real star of this novel. It’s not just the Egyptian inspired society of Gujareeh, but the fact that it isn’t populated with just more white people. Jemisin is a writer with things to say about race and gender and she’s great in doing so in a way that it doesn’t become didactic.

Cover of The Shadowed Sun

The Shadowed Sun takes place ten years after The Killing Moon, at the end of which Gujareeh has been put under a Kisuati Protectorate. That had been the only way to contain and destroy the evil taking place in the city state, to prevent it from spreading abroad. Now however the inhabitants are suffering under the Kisuati yoke, no matter how light, especially in the disrespect directed to the priesthood. Sunandi, now the Voice of the Protectorate in Gujareeh knows better than most Kisuati the bond between the citizens and their priests and she does her best to keep provocations at a minimum. Nijiri meanwhile, grown out of Ehiru’s shadow and a full grown Gatherer, knows this is not enough and things need to change again.

Change is coming internally, in the form of Hanani, the first female apprentice to the Sharers, the healers amongst the priests of Hananja. This is change that’s not everywhere received well, as the Gujareeh people believing very much in different roles for men and women, with the latter being goddesses that should be revered at home. Which is very much the usual sort of bullshit propagated by, well, men, something also noted by Sunandi in The Killing Moon.

Change is also coming from outside, in the form of Wanahomen, the heir to Gujareeh’s prince, who died in the previous book. Afther the Kisuati invasion Wanahomen’s mother fled to the barbarian desert tribes that had always been a thorn in the side of Gujareeh and now Wanahomen hopes to use them to overthrow the Kisuati Protectorate.

Meanwhile another dream evil is stalking the streets of the city states, but whereas in the first book it had been a nightmare made flesh, this time it is an epidemic of fatal nightmares. Once again dream magic is used for political gain without thoughts for the consequences of such use.

With The Shadowed Sun Jemisin managed to produce a sequel that follows on logically from the previous book without being more of the same. She manages to explore Gujareeh’s society and its attitudes to gender relations more without using strawmen or having it be extraordinarily similar to our own. What I liked especially was how both Gujareeh and Kisua have more and less “progressive” aspects to their respective societies, in ways that made sense.

To conclude then, this duology was one of the better fantasy series I’ve read in the last couple of years, an improvement on Jemisin’s already impressive writing in her first series.