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
Tordotcom Publishing is thrilled to announce that Nghi Vo is returning to the empire of Ahn and the Singing Hills Cycle. Ruoxi Chen has acquired
Into the Riverlands and two more novellas in the award-winning series, which began with
The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The deal, for World English rights, was brokered by Diana Fox at Fox Literary.
Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young women far from home, and an older couple who are more than they seem. As Chih runs headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves far more entangled in the history of the riverlands than they ever expected to be.
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