Recent Reading Roundup 25

If I finish the book I'm reading right now (J.R.R. Tolkien's collection of essays The Monsters and the Critics) before the end of the month, I will have read as many books in April as I read in the three months preceding it.  That's what reading holidays and volcano-induced delays will do for you.  Of course, this is far too many books to give any of them an in-depth look, so here are some quick thoughts about some of them.

1. Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente - Valente's latest novel, currently on the shortlist for the Hugo award, took a while to win me over.  A portal fantasy in which the fantastic world (the titular city) is reached via sexual contact, with visitors to the city 'infecting' their partners and giving them access to the portion of it that is tattooed on their skin, Palimpsest revolves around four such visitors--a lonely Californian beekeeper, a New York locksmith obsessed with the death of his sister, an Italian antiques dealer infected by his wife, who leaves him soon after to fully pursue her obsession with Palimpsest, and an aimless Japanese woman--who are bound together by their simultaneous arrival in the city, and must find each other in the real world if they want to travel to it permanently.  The first half of the book is understandably concerned with introducing both the characters and the reader to the city and establishing its allure, but Valente's imagery in these chapters is rife with the same writerly tics that were minor irritants in the two Orphan's Tales books and which here, when she's creating her own fantasy world rather than riffing on a familiar mythical setting, become a hindrance to the very immersion she's trying to achieve.  Her imagery relies heavily on words that have exotic associations (lots of spices and herbs, for example), and these seem to have been chosen more for that evocative power than because they make sense in context or create a meaningful image.  I found it hard to believe that Valente herself could picture the places she was describing, much less picture them myself.
   
   In its second half, however, Palimpsest's focus shifts from the city itself to the characters' reactions to it, and the novel became a great deal more satisfying and involving.  Valente's depiction of the main characters' growing obsession with the city, and their discovery of a Palimpsest subculture, comprising everything from support groups to sex clubs, is very well done, and the ambivalence that permeates her descriptions of the determination with which those who are infected by Palimpsest seek to rack up new locations or achieve the holy grail of emigrating to it recalls M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart and Nova Swing.  Also, near the end of the novel the city itself becomes a great deal more interesting, with the various puzzle pieces laid out in the early chapters coming together into a semi-coherent history of the city (this reminded me of the similar process of piecing together the history of Ambergris that is one of the chief pleasures of Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen).  Though I wish that a little more had been made of the hints Valente drops near the end of the novel, that Palimpsest is a great deal less fantastic than visitors to it believe, and that its inhabitants are befuddled and exasperated by the influx of tourists looking for meaning and purpose in what to them is nothing more exotic than their home, I nevertheless found Palimpsest an intriguing and enjoyable read.
   
   
2. A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel - I liked Mantel's universally lauded Wolf Hall but had some reservations with it, rooted mainly in my awareness of how she was twisting and manipulating history to suit the spin she wanted to put on it, and thought that A Place of Greater Safety, which discusses a period and individuals I know a great deal less about, might suit me better.  Instead, I'm forced to contemplate the no doubt enormous skill it must take to make a story about the central events of the French Revolution tedious and soporific.  In part, this is clearly a deliberate choice by Mantel, who tries to stress the fact that the famous events of the Revolution--the storming of the Bastille, the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the Terror--were part of a much larger, more complicated, and less exciting sequence of events, most of which took place in committee rooms and parliaments.  But there have been riveting stories told in such settings (HBO's miniseries John Adams, to name but one) and Mantel, instead of dramatizing history, chooses to focus on her protagonists'--Maximilien Robespierre, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Camille Desmoulins--personal lives.  Instead of facing head on the fact that these three men claimed to be the enemies of tyranny and ended up erecting one, that they overthrew their government for the sake of human rights and then enabled and enacted judicial murder on a scale previously unheard of in human history, instead of trying to make recognizable and perhaps even sympathetic human beings out of such contradictions, Mantel tries to elide over these difficulties by concentrating on the characters' romances, bromances, and difficult relationships with their fathers, all of which we've seen before.
   
   Whereas in Wolf Hall recasting Thomas Cromwell as an ordinary and sympathetic person helped to demystify him and the times he lived in, in A Place of Greater Safety a similar process of demystification renders Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins inert because it forces out precisely those aspects of their character that make them worth reading about.  Like Wolf Hall, which cuts off just before Cromwell's political machinations take an unsavory turn (he was, for example, the architect of Anne Boleyn's false conviction for adultery and treason), A Place of Greater Safety is manipulative, expecting us to sympathize with its protagonists and dread their inevitable undoing, but though the novel's final fifty pages, in which two of the protagonists are sent to the guillotine by the third, are its best and most intense, they also foreground Mantel's manipulation in a way that Wolf Hall avoids.  These men deserve to die, far more than many of the tens of thousands who have gone before them, and for whose deaths they share responsibility, and Mantel hasn't done nearly enough character work to make us regret this clearly-deserved end.
   
   
3. Graceling by Kristin Cashore - the last stop on my not-exactly-whirlwind tour of 2008's most-buzzed YA novels, Graceling proved a sour note to end on.  I haven't loved every single YA novel I've read in the last couple of years, but Cashore's debut is the first that truly made me wonder whether I was too old to be reading in this category.  The novel's premise--it takes place in a fantasy world in which certain individuals, called the graced, are born with innate talents, and Katsa, the teenage heroine, appears to have a grace for killing--has a lot of inherent potential for drama.  Katsa was not only born with a fearsome skill (expressed for the first time when she accidentally kills a visiting cousin at the age of eight) but has been exploited for it from a very young age by her uncle, the king, who uses her as his thug and enforcer while hiding behind the rumors he propagates of her cruelty and bloodlust, even as he exerts control over her every choice and movement.  Its execution, however, is practically benign, downplaying much of the difficulty and horror of Katsa's situation.  The worldbuilding is also much too simplistic, and often casts a shadow on the novel's plot and characters, as allegedly real people are forced to move in cardboard-thin political and social systems.  Katsa, for example, has rebelled against her uncle by establishing a network of noblemen and warriors that spans several kingdoms whose purpose is to promote justice and right wrongs, but in practice it operates like a fantasy-world A-Team.  Later in the novel, Katsa is stunned by the realization that she can take a lover without marrying him, which she then does with hardly any qualms or consequences, when the very fact that such a possibility had never occurred to her before would seem to suggest that she lives in a society in which extramarital sex is forbidden and punished.  There are some nice notes in Graceling--as other reviewers have noted, Katsa is the epitome of the badass female heroine, and her journey over the course of the novel towards independence and self-control makes the perfect counterpoint to her innate skills; her romance with another graceling called Po is a well-sketched portrait of a relationship in which the woman is in almost every way the stronger partner, and there's an engaging sequence near the end of the novel in which Katsa and the young princess she's protecting escape their enemies by traversing an impassible mountain range in the dead of winter--but they don't quite make up for what is, on the whole, a thin and unsatisfying novel.
   
   
4. The Dazzle of the Day & The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss - I've been aware of Molly Gloss since her story "Lambing Season" was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula several years ago, but this was the first time I'd read any of her novels, which range across several genres but have in common an interest with frontier living and with the small, tightly-knit, rural communities that grow on these frontiers.  The Dazzle of the Day is, as far as I can tell, Gloss's only overtly SFnal novel, a family saga that takes place, for the most part, aboard a generation ship whose journey is nearly complete and whose inhabitants have to choose whether to colonize the planet they are now approaching or stay in the safety and comfort of the ship.  The colonists are Quakers, and one of the chief joys of the novel is its exploration of their mores, outlooks, and social structures (though on the latter count I'm not sure how much is Gloss's invention and how much a reflection of real Quaker lifestyle).  The result is a very different kind of space colonization novel, whose characters--thoughtful, reticent, introspective--are constantly questioning the choices that have brought them to this point, constantly on the verge of renouncing the plan to leave footprints on the surface of an alien planet.  This is a low-key, slow novel (a little too slow, and too concerned with the minutiae of Quaker society, in its middle segments), but also beautifully written, and, in its depiction of a space-faring future that is so different from our frenetic, grasping way of life, quietly shocking.
   
   The Hearts of Horses is a historical novel which takes place in rural Oregon near the end of the first World War.  The heroine, Martha Lessen, is a young woman traveling between farms, earning her living by gentling young horses for farm work.  This is the epitome of a low-key novel, told in episodic segments detailing Martha's growing acquaintance and friendship with her clients and neighbors, veering off into their stories, and spending a lot of time on the business of how to gentle a horse, with most tension and high emotion described obliquely and with a terseness that seems to suit the farmers, ranchers and cowboys who make up the novel's cast.  And it is quite lovely, Gloss's spare language illuminating her characters and situations perfectly, and just as the novel's wholesomeness begins to rankle, revealing a dark undertone as she alludes to or outright describes what the characters are unaware of or ignoring--the fact that the reflexive patriotism that has swept over their community is responsible for sending young men to be slaughtered in a pointless war, the anti-German sentiments that rear their heads as a result of this patriotism, the wasteful wartime farming practices that will, in a decade's time, create the Dust Bowl effect and kick-start the Depression.  Still, The Hearts of Horses is not a social or political novel.  At its core it is exactly what it presents itself as--a quiet, beautifully written, moving account of life in a corner of history notable mainly for being ordinary and unremarkable.
   
   
5. Pavane by Keith Roberts - the great-granddaddy of alternate history, Pavane posits a world in which Elizabeth I is assassinated shortly into her reign, causing the collapse of the English Reformation, cementing the Catholic church's grasp over all of Europe, and stymieing social, political, and technological progress for centuries.  When the novel opens in the 1960s, Europe is still feudal, the ruling monarchies are still largely controlled by the church, and the standard of living for most is barely more than medieval.  The novel is made up of a series of linked stories spanning several decades, which do the double duty of illuminating how Roberts's world works and charting a sea-change in it, as some force--perhaps futuristic, perhaps magical--begins moving mankind back towards democracy, humanism, and technology.  The details in Pavane are nicely done and frequently disconcerting--the haulier whose trucks are dragged behind a coal-powered locomotive, the secrets and rituals of the guild of signalers, whose semaphore towers are the only means of rapid communications (one wonders whether Terry Pratchett got the idea for a similar institution in the Discworld from here).
   
   It's on the macro level that the novel falls flat.  It's hard to believe in a church that is capable, much less willing, to hold back technological progress and the geopolitical and economic boons that come with it, or in a Europe that would be prevented from pursuing these for centuries.  To a modern reader, it is also particularly glaring that Roberts's future is so complete Euro-centric.  One would expect non-European cultures to move into the power vacuum created by Europe's stagnation and dominate the planet as Europe did in our history, but besides a passing reference to colonies in North America, the world outside of Europe is hardly mentioned, and global history appears to proceed largely as it did in our world even absent the mechanisms that steered it in this direction.  If Pavane were simply a story springing from an unlikely, even impossible premise it might still be a worthy read, but the novel's whole point is that the stagnation of Europe was necessary for humanity's survival, that the church has been colluding with beings from the future to prevent nuclear war by keeping humanity from acquiring technology it isn't yet wise enough to use.  Which just brings the shortcomings of Roberts's premise into focus, not least of which his assumption that only white people can build nuclear bombs.
   
   
6. Far North by Marcel Theroux - if there's any one reason to be glad that I went on this reading vacation (besides, you know, a week off, in a castle in Wales, with lots of good books, good food, and good friends) it's that it gave me the chance to read Far North, which is currently well in the running for the position of my favorite read of 2010.  Theroux's novel, currently on the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist and I hope, tomorrow night, the winner, shows all those other post-apocalyptic literary science fiction novels (well, The Road) how it's done.  It is narrated by Makepeace, the last inhabitant of what was once a utopian, back-to-nature settlement in the wilds of Siberia.  Makepeace's parents came to Siberia hoping to divest themselves of a technological lifestyle that, they felt, was cutting them off from their humanity, but in the leaner times that have followed--the actual nature and scope of the apocalypse is never mentioned, but it involves hordes of refugees descending on the towns desperate for food, shelter, and safety--Makepeace considers this a foolish affectation.  For some time the town's enforcer of law, she now find herself lonely and eager to discover whether humanity has survived and if so, in what form, and begins a years-long odyssey.  It's strange to say this about a novel like this one, which posits not only the end of the civilization we know but the emergence of a brutal, uncivil one populated by religious fundamentalists and slavers, but Far North is not at all depressing.  Mainly this is due to Makepeace, whose voice is brilliantly realized, and who balances her cynicism about human nature and the future of humanity with a strength of will that sees her determined to live through even the worst of her ordeals.  Which isn't to say that Makepeace is superhuman or a saint.  At various points in the novel she is helpless, craven, and complicit in atrocities, but she also maintains her core of self, her willingness to do the right thing if it's at all possible, and her ability to empathize and connect with others.  The result is a novel that is hopeful through its hopelessness, perfectly positioned between Makepeace's twin realizations that the world is not worth living in, and that living in the world is all there is.
   
   
7. Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding - the consensus on Wooding's novel seems to be that it is the least, and least deserving, of this year's Clarke nominees, but nevertheless a rollicking, fun adventure of a type we should see more often (see: Niall, Dan, Nic).  I beg to differ.  I agree with Dan that the genre landscape (hell, the literary landscape in general) could use more swashbuckling adventures with at least some nutritional value, but I don't think Retribution Falls, which has been universally and quite accurately described as Firefly with airships, is that book, or that the comparison with Joss Whedon's TV series does it any favors.  For one thing, it just isn't that rip-roaring.  It takes a lot more skill to write exciting action scenes and zingy one-liners than it does to script them, and Wooding isn't quite up to snuff.  Retribution Falls is often slack, with the result that its snappy comebacks fall into place with depressing predictability, and its action scenes fail to ignite.  The characters are an even more distressing affair.  Especially for a novel whose point is to follow the process by which the crew of the airship Ketty Jay are transformed from a rag-tag band of outlaws and miscreants with nowhere else to go into a coherent group, Retribution Falls pays surprisingly little attention to most of its characters, allowing most of them to fade into the background while concentrating mostly on its ne'er-do-well captain, Darian Frey, who makes a greedy and short-sighted decision to accept a robbery commission that seems too good to be true, and ends up framed for murder.  Two other characters, aristocrat and dark wizard on the run Grayther Crake and the Ketty Jay's newest crewmember, Jezibeth Kyte, also have points of view, but the novel is anchored by Frey and his growth into the role of captain, which is unfortunate as Frey, who has been described as a more dickish version of Mal Reynolds, is actually something much worse--he is a whiner, and rather stupid to boot, and his growth over the course of the novel just barely brings him to the baseline of functional adulthood.  That Retribution Falls hinges on him thus makes it quite an unpleasant read, at no point as much as when Frey encounters two of his former lovers, both of whom are depicted as pathetic grotesques, made horrible by his betrayal of them and condemned for that fact.  These depictions (and those of the Ketty Jay's two female crewmembers, who aren't, for the most part, humiliated as Frey's former lovers are, but are underdeveloped) make Retribution Falls something much more unsavory than underperforming swashbuckler with an annoying main character, and taken together these faults make for a book that I simply can't love as so many others have.
   
   
8. The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness - Ness's follow-up to the intense, explosive The Knife of Never Letting Go picks up precisely where the first volume left off, with young teens Todd and Viola discovering that the sanctuary they've been seeking from the pursuing army of Mayor Prentiss, who killed all the women in Todd's town and is trying to take over the planet they live on (to which end he wants Viola, the representative of a colony ship on its way to the planet, by his side) has already fallen to him.  They are separated, and, with great reluctance, end up following very different paths as they struggle to survive under enemy occupation--Todd, taken in by the mayor, becomes a collaborator; Viola, who falls in with the town's disenfranchised women, including a charismatic disgraced politician and former warrior, becomes a terrorist--and to reconnect with each other.  The high-pitched intensity that made The Knife of Never Letting Go such an irresistible read is in full effect here, and because issues of gender are less prominent in this novel, the problems I had with the previous volume's handling of gender roles become less of an issue.  Instead, the focus of the novel is on how anyone, male or female, can live honorably while surrounded by evil, and on the compromises that such a life forces on one's conscience.  The Ask and the Answer is plagued by some of the same problems that hobbled The Knife of Never Letting Go--it is manipulative as all get out; the frenzy with which Todd and Viola cling to each other, search for each other when they're separated, and yearn for each other's presence and approval quickly becomes overbearing and repetitive; and there is a tendency to woobify Todd, to expect the reader to feel sorry for him because he feels guilty for having done terrible things, that I found off-putting.  Nevertheless, this is a hell of a read and a hell of a follow-up to The Knife of Never Letting Go, and I'm quite curious to see how, and how neatly, Ness will wrap up the story in the series's concluding volume, Monsters of Men.
   
   
9. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters - my love-hate relationship with Sarah Waters's bibliography continues apace.  After greatly enjoying her most recent novel, The Little Stranger, I decided to give her fourth book, The Night Watch, previously ignored because of my bad experiences with her first and second books, a try, with less than stellar results.  The Night Watch moves backwards in time, beginning in 1947 and skipping back to 1944 and then 1941 as it follows several characters, mostly gay men and women, in wartime and post-war London.  In 1947, former ambulance driver Kay is depressed and out of sorts, lacking the purpose that rescue work once gave her life; office worker Helen's relationship with up-and-coming writer Julia is one the rocks; Helen's coworker Viv is stuck in a relationship with a married man; Viv's brother Duncan, recently released from prison for an unspecified crime, is working a dead-end job in a charity factory and spending most of his time with his elderly landlord.  As the novel moves backwards in time we find out how the characters got in these situations, but the point of the exercise escapes me.  There's something almost malicious in the way Waters forces her characters through the motions of trying to make a better life for themselves after she's already shown us that what lies at the end of all their paths is a quagmire.  It might almost have been more bearable if the 1947 section showed the characters dead or arriving at an irrevocably tragic ending.  The fact that they're all stuck, held in place mostly by their psychological hangups, makes the process of learning how they got to that point, all the while knowing that there will be no extra chapter in which we learn whether they got out of it, almost too awful to bear.  Unless it's this maliciousness that Waters wants to convey, I'm not sure what she was trying to do with the novel, which is otherwise very well observed, describing war-time London and the upheavals the war creates in social roles, especially for marginalized groups like women and gay people, with evocative clarity.  Like most of Waters's novels, The Night Watch is a slick piece of writing, but I didn't find it a very enjoyable read.

Home!

At long last I am back in the holy land, after a seven-leg, thirteen hour trip comprising four different kinds of trains (one of which, the London Underground, very nearly scuttled all my plans when the tightest change of the lot became a great deal tighter due to a mechanical failure on the Circle line), two countries, and one rather pleasant flight from Paris.

Kudos are due to Niall Harrison and Nic Clarke, for opening both their home and their library to me while I was stranded, and to my airline El Al, for handling my (and, from what I've heard, many other passengers') case with impressive grace and efficiency, and making it their priority to get stranded passengers home, or as close as possible to it.  Less praiseworthy are my phone company Orange, who threatened to disconnect my phone due to irregular usage, and did so just as I was traversing France, cutting me off from the people in England and Israel waiting to hear about my progress.  While it's understandable that the huge spike in my phone usage this week should have raised a red flag, the fact that neither I nor my family in Israel were able to get through to the number where said decision could be reversed is not, and the fact that my mother was asked to pay the current balance of my account, more than a week before it's due, in order to reconnect the phone is risible.  Also failing to deal with the crisis were RailEurope, from whom I tried to purchase train tickets several times only to find the task impossible online (no sale of tickets less than seven days in advance), on the phone (constantly busy, no call handling system to put people on hold) or in person (lines around the block of the one location in the UK where tickets for trains on the continent could be purchased, no attempt to manage or inform the crowd).

My plans for the weekend are to rest, catch up on some small part of my huge TV backlog, and try to assess just how much this little adventure has cost me and whether there's any chance of recouping some of my expenses from my insurance company.  Next week I will hopefully blog about some of the books I read on this holiday, and then maybe resume something like a normal blogging schedule.  In the meantime, I leave you with these gorgeous pictures from Iceland, and the obvious response to same.

Asking the Wrong Questions, the Blog in Exile

The plan for today was to land in Tel Aviv at an ungodly hour of the morning, get home, sleep for a bit, and then write a post about my journey in the evening.  Unfortunately, everyone's favorite volcano Eyjafjallajoekull had other plans, and I have joined the ranks of tens of thousands of other stranded travelers all over Europe.  Attempts at securing an alternate route have thus far proved futile--I have a booking for a flight leaving Madrid on Tuesday night, but at present I haven't been able to make train or bus reservations for the London-Madrid leg, and the likelihood that I'll manage to do so grows slimmer by the hour.  Happily, my situation is quite comfortable.  Not only do I have a place to stay, thanks to the kindness of Niall and Nic, but it is stacked to rafters with books, so that if it weren't for the uncertainty of my situation I would quite happily settle in for another reading week.  Plus, if you're going to be stranded in a foreign country, there's something rather grand about being stranded by a volcano rather than a strike or a storm.  I'm already planning how to drop it into conversation--"I had to crash in my friends' spare room... because a volcano erupted!", "I missed my meeting on Monday... because a volcano erupted!", and so on.  And it is, of course, very humbling to realize how completely for granted we take the ability to hop across continents, how vast those distances are in reality, and how helpless we are when some aspect of our technology-driven society is taken away.

Still, though the trip isn't quite over, I thought I'd write a bit about my adventures thus far.  Niall has written a long and detailed report on Eastercon 2010 which describes my reactions quite accurately as well (minus, of course, any previous experience with this convention).  I enjoyed meeting people--those I'd met before, those who have been my online friends and acquaintances for quite some time but whom I'd never seen in real life, and those who were completely unknown to me--very much, and had some lively and enjoyable conversations at the various and rather crowded pubs and seating areas in the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, where the convention was held, but the program itself didn't grab my interest (so much so that I haven't got much in the way of panel notes).  I was on two panels myself, one, arranged at the last minute, about issues of cultural appropriation as they relate specifically to the UK and its history of empire, in which I was the outsider's voice.  I thought the panel went quite well, not least because the audience seemed very clued in and ready to take the discussion past the basics that have proved such a hurdle in previous iterations of this conversation (indeed, the audience may have been more clued in than the panelists in some respects--as in the case of the black woman who spoke about her experiences encountering racism in genre books as a child).

My second panel, about reviewing, raised several interesting points but ended up a rather rambling affair, moving from the changing face of media distribution and consumption to the dreaded print vs. online reviewing discussion to the question of whether reviews should contain spoilers without finding much of a common thread.  Other interesting panels included a discussion of female superheroes, which veered amusingly between the panelists listing their favorite characters and expressing despair at the state of the field when it comes to giving them interesting stories, the Not the Clarke Award panel, whose panelists rather failed to stick to the established format of tossing one book after another from the shortlist--all were agreed that Chris Wooding's Retribution Falls should be the first to go, but after that point every panelist had their own favorites and least favorites, and the ultimate conclusion was that each of the remaining five nominees was flawed but still a worthwhile book--and a panel about Dollhouse, which despite the creepy behavior of one of its panelists (as noted by Niall and expanded upon in the comments to that post by the panelist himself) managed to be thoughtful and intelligent in its discussion of the many issues raised by and surrounding this strange and frustrating show.

After that I continued to Oxford for a few days with friends, which also included some book shopping to supplement the not-unimpressive haul I brought back from the Eastercon dealer's room, and then on to Wales for reading week, a tradition of several years' standing with Niall's group of friends.  There were 18 of us at Wynnstay Hall, and we had a wonderful time cooking, eating, playing board games, having a murder mystery night (at which we all had too much fun getting in character to actually bother with the mystery, especially once it turned out that one of the guests was The Doctor, played with pitch-perfect acerbity by Graham Sleight), and reading many, many, many books.  Notable reads of the week include The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss, a low-key but evocative story about a female horse-trainer near the end of the first World War, Clarke nominee Far North by Marcel Theroux, a post-apocalyptic story with a beautifully drawn main character which has unseated The City & The City as my pick for the award, and the title novella in Kelly Link's YA collection Pretty Monsters, which can best be described as Kelly Link's take on Twilight, and is just as clever and thought-provoking as that description suggests.

Between reading week and constant travel, books have dominated my cultural consumption for the last couple of weeks while an enormous backlog of television episode accumulates back home (I did, however, watch Sherlock Holmes on the flight to London, and though I admit that the conditions might not have been ideal found myself far more engaged by the look of the film and by its soundtrack than by the characters or plot).  An exception, however, had to be made for Doctor Who.  For the first time in my time as a fan of the new series, I found myself watching it among other fans--in Niall's hotel room at Eastercon, on the big screen at Wynnstay Hall, with friends here in Oxford last night.  This has certainly affected my experience of the show--I doubt there will be as many delighted shrieks of laughter at the Daleks' "WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF TEA?" in Israel--to the extent that it's a little hard to disentangle my reaction to the show from its rather ecstatic reception here.  On the whole, I like what I'm seeing, without feeling that the new Doctor, new companion, or new showrunner have quite found their footing yet.  What pleases me most is that the three episodes I've seen have all been much plottier than most of Russell T. Davies's stuff, and have stopped to consider how traveling through time affects the characters' lives rather than simply using it as a means of bringing the characters into the story (the manner of The Doctor and Amy's first meeting; Amy, finding herself thousands of years in the future, wondering what she did about a wedding that is still a day away in her personal timeline), but I'm not quite convinced that Eleven is his own Doctor yet, and am even less convinced that Moffat knows what to do with Amy now that he's, apparently, rejected Davies's approach of making the companion the most important person in the Doctor's life.

And that, for the time, is my report.  I suspect it'll be well into the week, at least, before I'm back home, and I may end up doing some proper blogging before then if the spirit so moves me.  But in the meanwhile, this is your correspondent in Oxford, signing off.

The 2010 Hugo Awards: The Hugo Nominees

Coming to you straight from Eastercon 2010, piping hot Hugo nominations--unless you've already got them from one of the people who were tweeting or liveblogging or webcasting the event, which I considered doing before deciding that that would just not be the AtWQ thing, and that I'd much rather add my thoughts about the nominees to the lists.

It has been confirmed that there will be a Hugo voter packet again this year, but I promised myself to cut back on my emotional involvement with this award, and decided I'd only purchase a supporting membership of Aussiecon if there were nominees I truly wanted to see win.  As you'll see in a moment, this has not been the case.  As usual, I will review the short fiction nominees (assuming the ones I haven't read are made generally available).

For those keeping track, there are eight female nominees out of 23 nominated works in the four fiction categories.

Best Novel:

• Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
• The City & The City by China Miéville
• Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
• Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
• Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

I certainly can't complain about this shortlist given that three of nominees were on my ballot (though I must say I'm surprised that Palimpsest got on).  The City & The City, incidentally, won the BSFA award earlier this evening, and at Eastercon's famous Not the Clarke Award panel it was the panelists' choice for both the book they thought should win the award and the one they one they thought would win it, and of course it is also on the Nebula ballot.  It is thus positioned to make a clean sweep of 2010's genre awards--of the other Hugo nominees, it seems to me that only Boneshaker represents a serious threat.

Best Novella:

• "Act One" (PDF) by Nancy Kress (Asimov's, March 2009)
• The God Engines by John Scalzi
• "Palimpsest" by Charles Stross (Wireless)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow
• "Vishnu at the Cat Circus" by Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days)
• The Women of Nell Gwynne's by Kage Baker

"Vishnu at the Cat Circus" was on my ballot, but with the exception of Morrow the other nominees are all writers whose previous work has left me cold, so I can't say that I'm thrilled by this ballot.  It's interesting to note that only one of these nominees came from a magazine, and that three were published as individual volumes.  I noticed a paucity of novellas in my reading of short fiction venues, and it seems that other nominators ended up going further afield for their choices.

Best Novelette:

• "Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com)
• "The Island" by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)
• "It Takes Two" be Nicola Griffith (Eclipse 3)
• "One of Our Bastards is Missing" (PDF) by Paul Cornell (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 3)
• "Overtime" by Charles Stross (Tor.com)
• "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest, Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster (Interzone 220)

I'm very pleased for "The Island" and "It Takes Two" (though not quite as pleased as I would have been if Helen Keeble's story had gotten on the ballot), and though I've loved neither the Swirsky or Foster stories as well as others, both are interesting and well written.  So even though the Stross story isn't much to write home about, if the Paul Cornell is decent this will turn out to be quite a strong category.

Best Short Story:

• "The Bride of Frankenstein" by Mike Resnick (Asimov's, December 2009)
• "Bridesicle" (PDF) by Will McIntosh (Asimov's, January 2009)
• "The Moment" by Lawrence M. Schoen (Footprints)
• "Non-Zero Probabilities" by N.K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld)
• "Spar" by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld)

I didn't even know Mike Resnick had an eligible story out there--I was sure this was the year the Hugo nominations would finally be clear of his name.  Oh well.  "Bridesicle" and "Non-Zero Probabilities" are good stories, and I'm planning to reexamine "Spar," whose ecstatic reception had left me rather baffled.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

• Doctor Who, "The Next Doctor"
• Doctor Who, "Planet of the Dead"
• Doctor Who, "The Waters of Mars"
• Dollhouse, "Epitaph One"
• FlashForward, "No More Good Days"

Sweet lord.  Given what a poor showing genre TV gave in 2009 this was never going to be a strong ballot, but I hadn't expected it to be quite this bad.  It's really hard to decide what's most depressing about this shorlist: that "Epitaph One" is up there despite being a mediocre hour of television worthwhile mainly for its (by now spoiled) promise, the three Doctor Who specials, only the first of whom was even marginally enjoyable, or the fact that the field was so barren this year that something as bland and unremarkable as the FlashForward pilot gets a nod.  Upon further reflection, what's most depressing about the short form ballot is that the awards administrator took care to stress that the last Doctor Who special, "The End of Time"/"Journey's End," will be eligible for this category next year.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:

• Avatar
• District 9
• Moon
• Star Trek
• Up

I can't decide whether it's a cruel irony or divine retribution that the only worthwhile bit of writing Russell T. Davies did in 2009, Torchwood's Children of Earth, got locked out of a Hugo nomination by one of the most predictable slate of nominees in quite some time.  I'm please to see Moon and Up, but suspect that both will lose to either Star Trek or District 9.

Best Related Work:

• Canary Fever: Reviews by John Clute
• Hope-in-the-Mist by Michael Swanwick
• The Intergalactic Playground by Farah Mendlesohn
• On Joanna Russ, edited by Farah Mendlesohn
• The Secret Feminist Cabal by Helen Merrick
• This is Me, Jack Vance by Jack Vance

This is quite a remarkable slate of nominees.  I haven't read any, though several intrigue me, but what's fascinating about it is that after several years of leaning in this direction the category has shifted entirely into non-fiction writing, with no art books in sight.  There's also a dominance of critical work (and I suspect that Michael Swanwick's Mirrlees biography also shades into critical writing).  Which is exactly what I'd like this category to be--a place for non-fiction about the field, and an opportunity to recognize excellent critical writing about the genre.

Best Graphic Story:

• Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?
• Captain Britain and MI3 Volume 3: Vampire State
• Fables Volume 12: The Dark Ages
• Girl Genius Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm
• Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse

Best Professional Artist:

• Daniel Dos Santos
• Bob Eggleton
• Stephen Martinière
• John Picacio
• Shaun Tan

Best Semiprozine:

• Ansible
• Clarkesworld
• Interzone
• Locus
• Weird Tales

Best Fanzine:

• Argentus
• Banana Wings
• CHALLENGER
• Drink Tank
• File 770
• StarshipSofa

Best Fan Writer:

• Clare Brialey
• Christopher J. Garcia
• James Nicoll
• Lloyd Penney
• Frederick Pohl

Best Fan Artist:

• Brad W. Foster
• Dave Howell
• Sue Mason
• Steve Stiles
• Taral Wayne

Best Editor, Long Form:

• Lou Anders
  
• Ginjer Buchanan
• Liz Gorinsky
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• Juliet Ulman

Best Editor, Short Form:

• Ellen Datlow
• Stanley Schmidt
• Jonathan Strahan
• Gordon Van Gelder
• Sheila Williams

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer:

• Saladin Ahmed
• Gail Carriger
• Felix Gilman
• Seanan McGuire
• Lezli Robyn

Away, Away

This blog has been quiet enough recently that such an absence might go unnoticed, but for the next two weeks I'm going to be on holiday in the UK.  This weekend I'll be attending Odyssey, the 2010 Eastercon at the Radisson hotel in Heathrow airport, and following that I'll be visiting friends and hopefully charging up on blogging fodder.  I'm participating in a panel, on Sunday the 4th:

Writing Meaningful Reviews of TV Shows and Books.  12PM-1PM.  Room 41.  Too often reviews of TV programmes (or books) are a knee-jerk reaction condemning (or praising) a production while considering just one or two facets. What should a detailed review consider? How can we analyse more deeply? John Clute (mod), Chris Hill, Abigail Nussbaum and Alison Page.

Other than that, I'm trying something new by taking my laptop with me, but will endeavor to spend more time offline than on, so though I may pop up on occasion, normal service won't resume until the middle of the month.  I leave you, in the meantime, with the following links:

• The shortlist for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award was announced yesterday.  Niall has a roundup of reviews, and of reactions.  I agree with the general consensus, that what's controversial about this year's shortlist is how uncontroversial it is, and confess a preference for the slightly out there choices of previous years.  That said, the solidity of the list can't be argued with, and the three nominees I haven't read (the Robinson, Theroux, and Wooding) all look appealing.  This weekend will also see the announcement of the 2010 Hugo nominees at Eastercon.


• It started with the Tournament of Books a few years ago, and by now March on the internet is wall to wall zany tournaments.  This year's ToB has proved something of a disappointment, due to two rather pointless judgments in its third round, one from a judge who spent more time discussing the contestants' physical appearance than he did their contents, and the other from someone who did not actually appear to care about books in general nor to have read his contestants in particular.  Together, they crossed the line from the irreverence and idiosyncrasy that makes the ToB fun to a seeming randomness that renders it pointless.  Happily, Jezebel has been running a cake vs. pie tournament, which though featuring some baffling decisions (red velvet cake--a cake whose distinction derives from food coloring--has made it to the quarter finals) offers, in the passionate and devoted comments of its participants, some of the best comedy to be found online this month.


• At the group blog Big Other, A.D. Jameson has been writing a multi-part retrospective of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, now up to its fourth installment (1, 2, 3, 4).  I'm not a big fan of comics in general, and when I read it a few years ago I admired The Dark Knight Returns, and realized how important it was to superhero comics and the development of the Batman character, without becoming particularly attached to it, but Jameson's series is nevertheless fascinating.  He discusses the state of comics, both from a storytelling and technical perspective, at the time Miller envisioned the series, and analyzes the physical arrangement of the comic's pages to reveal the ways that Miller took full advantage of his medium's abilities.  It's a fascinating, in-depth reading.

Jewish Fantasy, The Conversation

Michael Weingrad's "Why There Is No Jewish Narnia" has been the gift that keeps on giving for the genre/Jewish blogosphere for the last month.  Counting just those posts that have linked back to my response to the essay, there have been dozens of discussions sparked by it, reaching as far as blogs at The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The National Review.  Here are a couple of later additions which, I think, have really broadened the conversation.

• coffeeandink's "Religion != Christiany" is more a discussion of the discussion of Weingrad's article, and touches on subjects that she's talked on with some passion before (some of which were also brought up in the 2009 iteration of RaceFail).  Specifically, the tendency to forget the privilege of being Christian in historically Christian countries, and the different levels of privilege that other, non-Christian religions enjoy (as Micole points out, Judaism currently enjoys a significantly more privileged status than Islam).  She also touches on gradations of privilege within Judaism--between white and non-white Jews, assimilated and non-assimilated ones.
  
  My response to this article is very much an outsider's.  I've grown up utterly disconnected from this experience of Judaism as a minority culture.  As an Israeli, I have Jewish privilege (we will leave aside for the moment the enormously complicated question of inter-Jewish strife, and the way that politics and culture in Israel tends to favor certain streams of Judaism over others), and articles like Micole's invariably cause me to feel incredible gratitude for that fact, for everything from not being bombarded by Christmas carols in November (or December, for that matter) to the fact that this Monday and Tuesday--Passover night and day--are national holidays here.  On the other hand, they also remind me that that privilege (or, more accurately, the ethnic and racial privilege attached to it) continues to make life difficult for non-Jews in my country.


• Janni Lee Simner writes about the expression of Judaism within literature, and specifically fantasy literature, and raises an interesting point.
  
  

  Mostly, though, I found myself thinking about the fact that the author strikes me as looking for "Jewish fantasy" in the wrong place: in the trappings of the worldbuilding. I've only written two clearly Jewish stories ... But of course all my stories are Jewish. It informs my worldview. ... in the draft I just turned in, which is now sitting on my editor's desk, I went around with issues of forgiveness--I have characters who played a direct role in the War that destroyed their world, and who are still living with what they've done almost 20 years later, and those characters also are speaking up a little bit more in this book than in the first book I wrote set in that world.

  So. I'm aware that, in Jewish theology, prayer is a way of repenting for wrongs done against God, but that harm done to another person can only be made right by directly making amends to the person who was hurt--only the individual who was harmed can grant forgiveness for that harm. ...  I became more and more aware, as I wrote this book, how much that influenced how my characters who played a role in the War dealt with the fact, as well as which responses both they and I had sympathy for.

  Which to my mind makes this book about faeries, with little religion on stage, a Jewish book.

• Finally, a response from Weingrad himself (whose last name, it transpires, I consistently misspelled in my response to his original article.  Gah), again in Jewish Review of Books.  I don't come away from this second article with any clearer a notion of what Weingrad is looking for when he asks for Jewish fantasy, but it does provide a more detailed discussion of some of the more famous Jewish writers of fantasy who had been left out of the original article, including Neil Gaiman and Guy Gavriel Kay.

In Good Company: Thoughts on Persuasion

Some way into Jane Austen's Persuasion, heroine Anne Elliot is deeply distressed when she overhears a conversation between her former fiancé, Captain Wentworth, and the girl he has been flirting with, which makes it clear that Wentworth considers Anne weak-willed, and holds her in disdain for breaking off their engagement eight years ago, when he was a penniless lieutenant with no prospects, on the advice of her mentor Lady Russell.  Mind churning, Anne is glad when the three are joined by the rest of their group, thinking that "Her spirit wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give."  That line seems to me to sum up Anne, and indeed the whole of Persuasion, perfectly.  Anne Elliot is exactly the sort of person who is always most alone in a crowd.

Persuasion is an odd entry in Austen's bibliography.  Her last novel, it is the most sober of the six, with very little of the sharp, acidic humor that characterizes most of her writing.  In other Austen novels, characters like Anne's vain father Sir Walter, whose chief enjoyment is reading and rereading his family's entry in the Baronetage, and her sisters, proud Elizabeth and self-pitying Mary, would be figures of, admittedly quite barbed, fun.  In Persuasion, they are grotesques, and their ridiculousness is more often used to evoke horror rather than humor--that the petty concerns and selfish passions of these worthless people should proscribe and direct nearly every decision in Anne's life.  Persuasion is also the most blatantly romantic of Austen's novels.  Its plot is a straightforward Cinderella story--an unappreciated but superior young woman longs for a prince to whisk her away from her unhappy life, and then he does--and the terms in which it is related are earnest and heartfelt.  "You pierce my soul," Captain Wentworth writes Anne at the end of the novel.  The same writer who in her other novels could never seem to write a confession of love without either stepping away ("Elizabeth ... immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change ... as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances.") or poking fun ("exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire."), and usually both, here gives us such protestations as "I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago.  Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.  I have loved none but you."

What's most unusual about Persuasion, however, is that unlike all of Austen's other novels it doesn't revolve around the protagonist's growth.  Anne Elliot, who is unique among Austen's heroines for being a woman rather than a girl, is a finished person, and one that Austen quite obviously finds admirable.  There is in Persuasion none of the not-so-gentle authorial poking and prodding that Fanny Price--probably the Austen heroine who comes closest to Anne's mixture of self-possession, selflessness, and moral rectitude--endures in her own novel, because Anne has none of Fanny's flaws.  She's mature and confident enough to know her own worth and can hold her ground when it really matters.  Neither does Captain Wentworth undergo a Mr. Darcy-like transformation, though one might very well be in order given that he spends the first two thirds of the book coldly ignoring Anne, insulting her to her face, and flirting with another woman in front of her (and in the process leading that woman on).  Most of this is inadvertent or unwitting, but that's not usually an excuse for an Austen hero.  Persuasion, however, keeps making excuses for, and trying to downplay, Wentworth's behavior, and his journey is mostly about letting go of his anger towards Anne and realizing that he still loves her.  Even this revelation isn't the source of the novel's tension.  There's never much doubt that, if they can only keep from attaching themselves to anyone else (never a great temptation), Anne and Wentworth's reunion will happen--"We are not boy and girl," Anne thinks, "to be captiously irritable, misled by every moment's inadvertence, and wantonly playing with our own happiness."

What Persuasion is actually about is Anne's search for a place, a group, in which she no longer has to feel alone.  In one of the novel's most famous exchanges, Anne's cousin Mr. Elliot asks her what her idea of good company is.  Upon hearing Anne's requirements of "clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation," he laughingly replies that "that is not good company, that is the best."  But the best company is exactly what Anne, who is terribly lonely, terribly unappreciated, and terribly under-stimulated, is looking for, and Persuasion is made up of set pieces in which she moves from one social group to another (each time observing how completely the social mores and priorities change, how what seemed vital in one setting becomes a trifle in another), looking for that perfect fit.  She doesn't find it in her father's cold, unloving house, where family pride trumps manners and propriety, nor among her brother-in-law's family, the Musgroves, who though warmly appreciative of her are not on her intellectual level, nor in the stuffy drawing rooms in Bath, where the gossipy, fashion-obsessed chatter rises to a deafening din.  Anne finds her place among the retired officers of the British Navy. 

Persuasion is a book-long paean to the navy, whose officers are described as friendly, courtly, virtuous, loyal, and intelligent.  Anne is struck by these qualities in Captain Wentworth and his brother-in-law Admiral Croft, but upon falling into a whole set of former officers at Lyme, she feels "such a bewitching charm in a degree of hospitality so uncommon, so unlike the usual style of give-and-take invitations, and dinners of formality and display, that Anne felt her spirits not likely to be benefited by an increasing acquaintance among [Captain Wentworth's] fellow officers.  "These would all have been my friends," was her thought".  Of course, Anne can't enter the society of the navy on her own power.  It's her reconciliation with and marriage to Wentworth that achieve this, and so the novel's central romance is actually a means to the end of finally placing Anne in that best company she's been longing for, of finally ending her loneliness.

There are two points that mar my enjoyment of Anne's journey from loneliness to the society of her peers.  The first is that, whether intentionally or not, this journey is also one in which Anne rejects relationships with women--which dominate the circles she moves in in her father's house, among the Musgroves, and in Bath--in favor of those with men.  Sisterhood, whether literal or figurative, is never an unalloyed good in Austen's novels.  Even in novels like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, in which the heroines' relationships with women are often deeper and more significant than even the driving romance, there are negative examples of sisterhood--Lydia, Kitty, and Mary Bennet, or Lucy and Anne Steele--and in novels like Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey positive relationships between women are often drowned out by toxic ones.  In Persuasion, however, there is not a single example of positive, nurturing female friendship, and most of the female characters other than Anne are deeply flawed.  There are wicked, selfish women in the novel--Elizabeth, Mrs. Clay--and foolish ones--Mary and the entire Musgrove tribe--but even those women Anne thinks highly of turn out to be unsuitable as friends and confidantes. 

Lady Russell is the most obvious example--the whole of Persuasion is concerned with Anne establishing firm boundaries between herself and the woman who has been like a mother to her, and whose influence over her she now views as a source of harm.  Lady Russell's attempts to exert a similar influence on Anne in the second half of the novel, by persuading her to marry Mr. Elliot, are met with steely, unbending refusal, as well as a subtle weakening of Anne's regard for her mentor for failing to doubt Mr. Elliot's intentions as she does.  Mrs. Smith, with whom Anne appears to have struck a friendship of equals, and who seems to be acting as Anne's friend when she provides her with concrete proof that Mr. Elliot is a cad, is actually one of the most designing characters in the novel.  Even knowing Mr. Elliot's character, she encourages Anne to marry him in the hopes of advancing her own interests through their marriage, and only reveals the truth once it's clear that she has nothing to gain from lying.  Given her dire straits, it's hard to blame her for grasping at any available straw, but she's hardly a moral character or a good friend.  The only truly admirable female characters in the novel are the ones Anne sees from a distance, from whom she is separated from by the lack of an entry pass into their world--the navy wives, Mrs. Harville and Mrs. Croft (the latter may very well be the coolest female character in an Austen novel--she has sailed as far as the East Indies with her husband, and calmly takes the reins from him when they're out driving in their carriage).  It is, however, significant that even in the absence of that pass Anne manages to strike up an intimacy with a navy man, Captain Benwick (who may be the only character in the novel she considers an intellectual equal), and that the most open, honest and emotional conversation she has with any character in the novel is with another naval officer, Captain Harville.

My second issue with Persuasion is with Anne herself, and with the fact that, at some point over the course of the novel, her loneliness comes to seem less like a predicament and more like a choice.  Anne is, as I've said, a Cinderella heroine, someone who is put-upon and unappreciated.  But Anne is no Fanny Price, an emotionally battered, financially dependent, mousy person who probably can't bring herself to speak out against her mistreatment.  Neither is she Elinor Dashwood, who suffers silently until she's dealt one blow too many and then explodes with anger and frustration.  It's true that her position as a single woman in Regency England means that the choices available to Anne are not so much broader than the ones available to Fanny.  She can't just pick up and leave a setting that doesn't suit her, but I'm not sure that she wants to.  I think that Persuasion wants us to think of Anne as saintly, someone who can put up with her father's vanity, her sisters' pride or dependence, her in-laws' silliness, without losing her patience or composure, but the superiority with which Anne views almost everyone she encounters in the novel belies this approach.  There is something off-putting about being the sort of person who spends their life believing themselves to be superior to everyone else and detaching themselves from their surroundings because of that belief, even if it is entirely justified.  It smacks of not trying hard enough to find one's own level.  Anne seems to enjoy being the smartest person in the room, the one who sees and silently laughs at everyone else's foibles and weaknesses, a little too much, and the novel lets her get away with this.

We are enjoined, of course, from mistaking characters for their author, and lord knows that Jane Austen has suffered from this fallacious tendency far more than most, but it's impossible to know more than a little of her life and not wonder just how much of Austen, or of her idealized image of herself, there is in Anne.  It's easy to imagine Austen as the smartest person in the room, as someone whose superiority over others was a source of both pleasure and loneliness.  Is this why Anne is missing the flaws that makes Austen's other heroines so human and so real?  Is this why she's inhumanly saintly where a real person in her position would be just a little bit wicked?  I'm dipping my toes in forbidden waters and so I'll stop, but whether or not I'm on the right track, the fact remains that there's something not quite right about Anne Elliot, something that stops Persuasion, despite being one of Austen's finest technical achievements, and one of the most romantic stories I've ever read (I swoon at Captain Wentworth's letter.  Every time), from quite working.  In the novel's penultimate chapter, Anne glides through her father's house in Bath, rapturously waiting for Captain Wentworth to formally ask for her hand in marriage, benevolently observing the characters who have imposed on her throughout the novel: "Mr. Elliot was there; she avoided, but she could pity him. The Wallises -- she had amusement in understanding them. Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret -- they would soon be innoxious cousins to her. She cared not for Mrs. Clay, and had nothing to blush for in the public manners of her father and sister."  Ignoring them, she finds a quiet corner, and talks about the past with Captain Wentworth.  It's hard not to think that, instead of finally finding her good company, Anne has found someone with whom she can feel superior, someone to be alone in a crowd with.

Self-Promotion

With the Hugo nominating deadline only a few days away, Strange Horizons is covering some of 2009's short fiction, with a very fine roundup review by Alavaro Zinos-Amaro (who among other things has made me rethink Kij Johnson's "Spar," a story I found impressive, but not to extent that other short fiction reviewers, who have consistently crowned it one of the best short stories of the year, have) and a slightly less in-depth one by myself which covers some of the stories mentioned in my draft Hugo ballot.

In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield

Kit Whitfield's In Great Waters is a novel that has received ecstatic reviews from very nearly everyone who has written about it, including some of my close friends and favorite reviewers.  As you can imagine, this made me both eager and nervous about reading it myself, but I was certainly more the latter than the former after I read Whitfield's first novel, Benighted, a profound disappointment which I found "slow-paced, overlong, rather poorly written, and not doing nearly as much as it should with its excellent premise."  Even assurances by Martin Lewis that In Great Waters represented a huge leap forward for Whitfield didn't allay my concerns, and I nervously left the book for the very end of my Hugo reading.  I needn't have worried.  In Great Waters is not only a very fine novel, it seems to address each and every one of my complaints about Benighted: it is impeccably plotted and paced, very well written, and best of all, fully explores and plays with its inventive premise.

Said premise is that merpeople, here called deepsmen, exist, following the ocean currents in nomadic tribes, vulnerable to human contraptions like fishing nets, but also capable of ripping apart most sailing vessels.  In the 9th century, an alliance was struck between deepsmen and the city of Venice.  A human-deepsman half-breed named Angelica secured the city's naval superiority by directing her tribe's attacks on the foreign fleets besieging it, married the Venetian Doge, and dispersed her children and grandchildren among the royal courts of Europe.  For a seafaring nation, a ruler with deepsman blood, who could secure the protection of their local tribe and direct them to attack the fleet of their nation's enemies, quickly became a necessity.  Whitfield constructs a world in which royalty is less a social or political construct than it is a function of biology, with characters often referring to the physiological attributes of hybrids, such as their vertebrate legs (actually bifurcated tails) as the attributes of royalty.  This simultaneously strengthens and weakens the position of the royal families, who on the one hand can't be ousted by power-hungry but fully human nobles, but on the other hand are vulnerable to attacks from any sailor's bastard (a word which in Whitfield's novel is applied exclusively to non-royal half-breeds), or from hybrids deliberately created by those same nobles.  The conception or concealment of bastards is thus outlawed and punishable by death--a sentence which is also applied to the hybrids--but as the decades and centuries pass the royal houses of Europe become more and more interbred, until a healthy, sane, and fertile royal is the exception rather than the rule, and by the time the novel opens (an exact date is never given, but the setting feels 16th-17th century) are so weak as to be ripe for the picking.

Into this world come our two protagonists, Henry and Anne.  Henry is a bastard, raised for the first five years of his life underwater with his mother's tribe, then abandoned on the English shore when he--weaker and slower than full-blooded deepsmen--becomes too troublesome for his mother to protect and care for.  He's found by a scholar named Allard, who brings him to the attention of Lord Claybrook, a high ranking courtier who has his eye on the English throne.  Anne is the youngest princess of the failing English royal house.  Her grandfather Edward, the current king, is old, and though her father William is healthy, the heir presumptive is his brother Philip, a physically and mentally handicapped dead end.  William tries to secure his line's survival by marrying the Romanian princess Erzebet, but their union produces only daughters--Anne and her older sister Mary--and though Mary is entirely healthy and mostly human in her appearance, Anne is a genetic throwback whose face is phosphorescent (later revealed to be an attribute of deep-dwelling deepsmen tribes), and in the atmosphere of panic created by Philip's birth, is soon rumored to be retarded herself.  When William dies, both the court and England's relations with its deepsman tribes are left in Erzebet's hands, and when she dies under mysterious circumstances the responsibility for the latter devolves to Anne and Mary, then only in their early teens, while their grandfather searches desperately for acceptable husbands for them who will ensure England's stability and the continuation of the royal line.

The first two thirds of In Great Waters are spent following the childhood and very quick maturation of its two protagonists in two parallel plot strands.  Like a lot of authors who throw children into settings rife with politics and intrigue, Whitfield makes both of her protagonists much too savvy, observant, and intelligent to be believable, but she rather cleverly draws attention to this fact, and explains it by making it a component of Henry and Anne's inhuman ancestry.  Henry, we're told in the novel's very first sentence, "could remember the moment of his birth," and from that moment until he's abandoned on land it's clear that deepsmen development is much faster than the human kind, that Henry is expected to learn how to fend for himself and function in the tribe much faster than a human would.  It's also made clear that this accelerated development also expresses itself in a chilliness in both Henry and Anne's natures--they are both, quite literally, cold fish, regarding others less with fuzzy mammalian attachment than in coldly utilitarian terms.  Anne's sister Mary is her rival for Erzebet's attentions, and even at four years old Anne calculates whether to accept Mary's friendly overtures or work against her, while five year old Henry plays games of dominance and control with Allard.  (Mary, meanwhile, is a great deal more affectionate but also less ruthless and politically savvy than Anne, and it's one of the novel's few missed opportunities that it does relatively little with her, and doesn't fully mine the differences between the sisters nor explore the suggested correlation between Mary's more pronounced humanity and her more human appearance.)

What's most interesting about In Great Waters is how it stresses that, despite my comments above, the tension between compassion and unsentimental pragmatism doesn't parallel the division between human and deepsman, that though the humans profess to love their fellow man and desire mercy and forgiveness, Anne's civilized background embodies that tension just as much as Henry's savage one.  Deepsmen society, as seen through Henry's eyes at the beginning of the novel, more strongly recalls an animal pride than a human tribe.  Deepsmen have no crafts, agriculture, or animal husbandry, and very nearly no history, art, or culture.  Tribes are run by a strict rule of the survival of the fittest, and the protocols for establishing their hierarchy are clearly modeled on the natural world--males fight in single combat over females or leadership, and excess young men are often driven out of the tribe.  Henry's expulsion from the tribe is an example of these protocols in action, and once on land he continues to act them out, challenging Allard and the other humans he encounters to fights in order to prove his dominance, and reacting with puzzlement when it's assumed that he feels a son's love and attachment to Allard and his wife.  At the same time, Henry recoils in disgust from the political machinations Claybrook sets in motion in order to put him on the throne.  He's more than willing to kill King Edward in single combat, but doesn't understand why an army must be assembled, and perhaps killed, to resolve what should be a simple test of strength, or why another bastard child, discovered several years after Henry is, must be put to a cruel, torturous death even though it is too weak to fight.  The death of the bastard child is the crux of the novel for Henry, but it is also so for Anne.  Raised in the bosom of civilization, her life proscribed by ritual and tradition, her time spent studying languages and rhetoric (while Henry adamantly refuses to learn how to write or speak a second language), Anne nevertheless finds herself struggling with the same questions as Henry when faced with the child's execution.  "Should we be merciful to our enemies?"  She asks Erzebet, and finds no good answer.

If there is a complaint to be leveled against In Great Waters, it's that sufficient sparks fail to fly when Henry and Anne finally meet, and that the last third of the novel, in which they join forces in order to secure England's future, is a bit of a letdown.  The two clash marvelously against one another in their first few encounters, matching wit for wit and unflappable calm for unflappable calm, but once the obvious alliance is made (for some reason, the idea of marrying Henry to Mary or Anne never occurs to Claybrook) the novel goes a little slack.  One almost suspects that Whitfield was undone by her desire to undermine the romantic expectations that her setup creates--if the bulk of your novel follows the parallel and equally unhappy stories of two chilly, pragmatic young people of opposite genders, it almost seems required for their meeting to result in a searing romance--and though I can understand that desire (and indeed, given how poorly handled the romance in Benighted was, applaud it), I think that Whitfield couldn't quite come up with a suitably exciting substitute for it.  Romantic or not, the final meeting and partnering up of Henry and Anne should have been explosive.  Instead they become slightly nicer and more accommodating towards one another, for no reason other than the same political instincts that have driven them throughout the novel, which now tell them to appease each other.

Still, there is much to enjoy in those chapters of In Great Waters in which Henry and Anne play off each other.  The two see the world in such completely opposed terms that their interactions are almost dizzying.  Anne is devout, and derives much of her morality--which ultimately drives her to save Henry from the stake--from her Christian faith.  When Henry learns about Christianity, however, he is appalled: "The landsmen weren't just strange.  They were stupid, bone-deep stupid.  They were mad."  The same resistance to the Christ story and its inherent irrationality is also what makes it clear to Henry that the story of Angelica's miraculous emergence from the sea just as the people of Venice needed her most is a political fabrication, and unlike humans he lacks both the ability and the desire to overlay reality with narrative.

It struck Henry, listening to Westlake tell his stories, that the nastiness of the landsmen's possessions, the straight lines and enclosing roofs and binding clothing, could be explained by this.  They didn't notice them.  They looked at clothes and thought of ceremonies; they looked at buildings and thought of their owners.  Always the ideas, and never the things themselves.  They couldn't feel what was up against their skin; the world, thriving and struggling and vitally, irrefutably real.

What's best about In Great Waters is how fully in layers these two worldviews--Henry's materialism, Anne's spirituality; the savage, animalistic mindset that sees no purpose in intangibles, in language that is anything more than utilitarian, in social constructs that extend beyond the tribe and beyond the moment, versus the human tendency to create complex, pie-in-the-sky structures, which gives us history and art and culture and science, but also cruelty and war and needless slaughter--until there's no choosing between them.  By the end of the novel all that's left is to accept, as Henry and Anne do, that they are fundamentally of two different species and will never truly understand one another, and yet it's precisely out of that alienness that they manage to find room for the compassion that has eluded them for so much of their lives, each rejecting just enough of the ideas they've grown up with while still remaining true to themselves.  At several points during my reading it occurred to me that In Great Waters, with its emphasis on court politics and its period setting, might appeal more to readers of historical fiction than to genre fans, but it's this ending and the light it casts on the events of the novel that shows how perfectly suited it is to the latter group--it is a pitch-perfect, and utterly persuasive, description of the meeting and coming to terms of humans and aliens.

The 2010 Hugo Awards: My Draft Hugo Ballot

The deadline for submitting Hugo nominations is still two weeks away, but following in Niall's footsteps I thought I'd put my preliminary choices up as a way of encouraging others to give them a try and maybe nominate them as well, or to try to talk me out of them and into others.  I'm not quite done with my reading yet: there are several novellas I still want to get to, and in the best related book category my reading has been as paltry as usual, though I'm hoping to manage Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.'s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction and Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James's A Short History of Fantasy before the nominating deadline.  For other perspectives, you might want to take a look at ballots by Joe Sherry, Martin Lewis (1,2,3), Rich Horton, and Rachel Swirsky (1,2,3, though as these are Nebula nominations not all of her choices are eligible for the Hugo).

Best novel:

• The City & The City by China Miéville
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
• In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield
• Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
• Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Of these, I suspect that the Miéville is a lock, and wouldn't be surprised if the Bacigalupi gets a nomination as well.  The Whitfield, about which I hope to write a bit later this week, strikes me as a longer shot, which is a shame because it's one of the more enjoyable and inventive books I've read in some time, and should especially appeal to the contingent of Hugo voters who are crossover historical fiction fans.  I'm debating replacing either Palimpsest of Yellow Blue Tibia with Stephen Baxter's Flood, but I think that I will end up sticking with those two (somewhat amusingly, given Valente's recent comments on Roberts's novel).  I liked Flood, but in a chilly sort of way, and as I am planning to nominate Baxter in the novella category I feel OK about giving it a miss here.

Best novella:

• "To Kiss the Granite Choir" by Michael Anthony Ashley (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Oct 8-22, 2009)
• "Earth II" by Stephen Baxter (Asimov's, July 2009)

I've read very few prospective nominees in this category, hence the short ballot.  In the next two weeks I'm hoping to read another Baxter novella, "Starfall," as well "Sublimation Angels" (PDF) by Jason Sanford, "Wives" (PDF) by Paul Haines, "Horn" by Peter M. Ball, and "The Language of Dying" by Sarah Pinborough.  I'd like to read Ian McDonald's "Vishnu at the Cat Circus," from Cyberabad Days, but I doubt I'll be able to get my hands on it before the deadline.

Best novelette:

• "A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc; or, A Lullaby" by Helen Keeble (Strange Horizons, June 1-8, 2009)
• "It Takes Two" by Nicola Griffith (Eclipse 3)
• "The Island" by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)
• "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster (Interzone 220)
• "Blood Dauber" by Ted Kosmatka & Michael Poore (Asimov's, October/November 2009)

Novelette is the category in which one usually makes painful concessions, but startlingly I found myself falling short of five beloved nominees this year.  I've written already about the Keeble, Griffith and Watts stories, but I'd be open to replace Eugie Foster's Nebula-nominated novelette, or the Kosmatka/Poore.  Both are impressive but not quite on the level of the other three.  One prospective replacement is "The Armies of Elfland" by Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick, from the April/May 2009 Asimov's (Gunn and Swanwick seem to have hit on a winning formula--their collaboration in Tor.com, "Zeppelin City," was also quite successful).  Another is "Kreisler's Automata" by Matthew David Surridge, from Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Best short story:

• "Non-Zero Probabilities" by N.K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld, September 2009)
• "The Moon Over Tokyo Through Leaves in the Fall" by Jerome Stueart (Fantasy Magazine, September 7, 2009)
• "Hangman" by Erin Cashier (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 12, 2009)
• "Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh (Asimov's, January 2009)
• "Blue" by Derek Zumsteg (Asimov's, August 2009)

In this category, meanwhile, I'm pretty sure I have my final ballot.  I've written about the Stueart story already, and will have some more about the Jemisin and McIntosh next week in Strange Horizons.  Cashier had two interesting stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies in 2009, but in the end I decided I liked "Hangman," a nicely done Western fantasy, the best of the two.  "Blue" is a darkly funny story about two astronauts on a dying ship, the last surviving members of their crew, who spend as much time sniping at each other as they do trying to keep from being swallowed by a black hole.  The personalities of the two characters are perfectly sketched.

Some thoughts on short fiction venues: Strange Horizons isn't as well-represented here as I would have liked, but for overall quality and breadth of genres and topics it remains the best magazine in the field, on- or offline.  Beneath Ceaseless Skies is nipping at its heels, though it's aided by its narrower focus on epic and secondary world fantasy.  I found Fantasy Magazine extremely variable--some of its stories were excellent, some barely publishable--and Clarkesworld, though a great deal more professional, not usually to my taste.  Tor.com is the big disappointment of the year.  I don't know whether the site reads slush or accepts unsolicited submissions, but there must be good money in publishing there, and yet the stories one offer are depressingly samey--literally so, as the site published its second Charles Stross Laundry story in two years in 2009, and two stories in a single year by Harry Turtledove, both about has-been baseball players in the first half of the 20th century.  So far its only real excuse for existing is having also published two Rachel Swirsky stories.  In print, Fantasy & Science Fiction did not have a good year.  The magazine switched to a bi-monthly format this year, and also, in celebration of its 60th anniversary, set aside a portion of each issue in order to reprint some of its editors' favorite stories.  A nice idea in theory, but in practice these stories tended to overshadow the already reduced original offerings.  Asimov's, meanwhile, improved on me quite a bit in 2009, with quite a few stories on my ballot and even more importantly, much higher overall quality.

Best dramatic presentation, long form:

• Moon
• Up

This is the category I'm least interested in because the ballot is already so easy to guess.  Avatar, Star Trek, District 9 and Coraline are locks.  The fifth slot could go to either Moon, Up, or Torchwood: Children of Earth.  None of which would be terrible choices, though I'd obviously prefer Moon, but as I'm already a little depressed at having to choose between them in order to make room for Star Trek and Avatar, I'm choosing to think about the category as little as possible.

Best dramatic presentation, short form:

• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "Born to Run"
• The Middleman, San Diego Comic Con table read
• Being Human, episode 1.3 (Annie learns the truth about her murder)
• Ashes to Ashes, episode 2.1
• Futurama, Into the Wild Green Yonder

Lots of people I know are nominating Dollhouse's "Epitaph One," but even before my crushing disappointment with the show's second season, and particularly with "Epitaph Two: The Return," I wasn't planning to do this--taken on its own it simply wasn't a very good hour of television.  Not that most of these are much better.  The Sarah Connor finale was magnificent and I loved the Middleman table read, but the other three are compromise choices.  It simply wasn't a very good year for individual TV episodes.

Campbell award:

• J.M. McDermott
• Felix Gilman
• Erin Cashier
• Alice Sola Kim
• Patrick Ness