Although it only marginally features any fantastic elements (mainly a rather ingratiating spirit), E. Lily Yu’s luminous first novel
On Fragile Waves has a lot to say about both the power of story and the limits of what stories can do. We first meet Firuzeh, the central point-of-view character, as a ten-year-old trying to escape with her family from a war-ravaged Afghanistan in which her earliest memories – rendered in a kind of impressionistic child-cenetered prose-poetry that oddly reminded me of the opening of Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – are punctuated by the sounds of fiery explosions. As they make their way through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia toward what they view as the promised land of Australia, Firuzeh’s mother Abay tries to keep her and her brother Nour entertained with stories of classic Persian heroes like Rostam and his powerful horse Rakhsh. Almost equally fanciful, although Abay doesn’t know it yet, are her visions of a
It goes without saying that I’m not exactly the target audience for Charlie Jane Anders’s new YA trilogy, which begins with
Victories Greater Than Death. But, as I’ve argued before, there’s a huge overlap between YA and SF readers. A good deal of classic SF works perfectly well as YA, and some tropes are essentially the same in both genres: geek valorization, children with secret powers, nonconformist outsiders and conformist bullies, clueless teachers and dim authority figures. All a successful YA novel really needs to do, then, is turn its adult readers willingly into YA readers, and with SF readers that’s not a very tall order: it’s simply a matter of tweaking the protocols. In the case of
Aliette de Bodard seems fascinated by relationships with huge power differentials – angels and mortals, giant mindships and modest students, dragons and young teachers, etc. Thanh, the protagonist of
Fireheart Tiger, is a princess of Bình Hải, a small Vietnam-like country seeking to gain protection from the more powerful neighbor Ephteria, and Thanh is assigned by her rather too-critical mother to lead the diplomatic negotiations. Those negotiations quickly grow more complicated and personal when Thanh discovers that the delegation from Ephteria includes the princess Eldris, Thanh’s former lover from the time in which Thanh studied in Ephteria, nearly as a political hostage. The prospect of marrying Eldris is a fairly obvious way of forging an alliance between the two nations, though – once again – it would hardly be an equal relationship. Complicating matters even further is the memory of a palace fire in the capital city Yosolis, which Thanh escaped accompanied by a se
It’s not too uncommon for an SF story to split itself between different time frames separated by centuries, with the causal links between frames only gradually made apparent – M. John Harrison’s
Light is a well-known example – but the odd structure of Adam Roberts’s
Purgatory Mount still seems pretty bold, as does the novel’s shifting tone from Clarkean far-future SF to gritty dystopian naturalism to earnest moral debates about responsibility and atonement. We begin in that far-future on the kilometer-long starship
The Forward, whose five crew members, all named after Greek gods, are described as “gifted with magic (in the Clarkean sense of the word)” and whose shipboard computer is called a “hal.” They’ve just discovered an enormous alien artifact on a remote planet – a 142-kilometer-high pyramidal structure which so resembles Dante’s mountain in
“History is a fairy tale”, a subtitle in Veronica Schanoes’s story “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga”, could almost serve as an epigram for the whole of her first collection,
Burning Girls and Other Stories. Schanoes, who is a scholar of fairy tales, feminism, and Jewish literature and history, brings all of her considerable resources to bear in these 14 stories, which include most of the short fiction she published since 2003. And while there is an occasional tendency to embed snippets of historical lectures as a kind of ballast for her more visceral nightmares – “Truth can be told in any number of ways,” she tells us in the Goldman story – it never mitigates the passion and anger that is the real engine of her fiction. Almost as if to illustrate, the Goldman story begins by offering us alternate fairytale and historical modes of narrative: “Once upon a time there was a girl, the third and youngest daughter of a merchant” begins one paragraph,