words and images
The fiction we now call Fantasy is largely a mid-twentieth century invention with roots in older mythologies. Here I want to look at some novels from the Dark Ages of the genre, the 1960s and early 70s, rooted explicitly in the Dark Ages of Europe. All of them are far too good to forget.
Finding a good new-to-me writer and series is always a delight and I’m celebrating my discovery of Aaronovitch and The Rivers of London by putting them in the context of some books I’ve known much longer.
A mash-up of Fleming – Deighton – Le Carre spy novels and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos? Why not? And some cubicle-life workplace humour for light relief? Sure. The result won’t be to everyone’s taste but some of us will find it to be great (gory, gruesome) fun.
Continue reading “Magical London – Gaiman, Stross and Aaronovitch”
Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
Thich Nhat Hanh
Rider, 2021 plumvillage.org/books
Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet is a very worthwhile book with a couple of odd aspects.
The general reader is likely to read it exactly as it is presented, as a book by Thich Nhat Hanh (“Thay” to his many followers) with commentaries from one of his senior students. As such, it is wise, gentle and encouraging, like everything else of his that I know.
Black Swan – a Koorie Woman’s Life
Eileen Harrison and Carolyn Landon
Allen & Unwin, 2011
All reviews say more about the reviewer than they pretend to, but this one is far more personal and autobiographical than most.
Black Swan came to me as a review copy when it was first released, but the newspaper I freelanced for wasn’t interested so I set it aside for myself. It has been on my shelf ever since. In the aftermath of thinking again about Singing the Coast, its time has finally come: its parallels and contrasts with that book and with my own life made it particularly relevant to me this year.
Eileen Harrison was born into a large, close-knit family on the Aboriginal Mission at Lake Tyers on the Gippsland Lakes. She grew up there, attending the mission school while I was attending the state school in Leongatha, 250 km away. I went on to secondary school; she was not allowed to. Rather, she and her family were uprooted by a new government policy and sent to the Western District, far from extended family.
This is a collection of tiny reviews of science fiction and fantasy. They are books which I liked enough to recommend but haven’t reviewed at length (often because I couldn’t find time). The collection is structured like a blog, with the most recent additions at the top; dates given are the dates they were added. The collection began as a comment-string to an identically-titled post on Green Path which drifted away from its environmental theme and into general SF.
• Zen Cho • Every Version of You • The Scar • Babel • The Year of the Jackpot • Children of Memory • Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits • Reconstruction • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida • The Anomaly • Flyaway • From Here On, Monsters
Zen Cho was born and raised in Malaysia and now lives in England. Her first fiction appeared in 2015 and she has been collecting awards ever since, so she is definitely a writer to watch. Here are two of her recent books.
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (novella, 2020) is set in a pre-modern tropical country in which the Chinese minority is being persecuted. Its protagonist is a young nun who has escaped the razing of her monastery and joins a group of bandits carrying sacred relics through the jungle to safety. Black Water Sister (novel, 2021) centres on a young woman returning to Penang after education in America; but in Penang she is embroiled in the old feuds of her (ethnically Chinese) extended family.
Both books depend on Chinese folk religion, with its rich array of ghosts, gods, demons and magical powers, all of which are as real as the heat and humidity but even more challenging. They are, therefore, paranormal fantasy, and we might insert “YA” in that label, since the target readership seems to be teenage girls; but they are more interesting than most of the genre because they immerse us in unfamiliar cultures and new supernatural realms. Both are very good but I preferred the novella.
(14.10.24)
The idea of uploading ourselves to hardware has been a staple of SF for decades. In Grace Chan’s Every Version of You (2022), almost the whole human population uploads to the cloud in the 2080s, to live there in virtual-reality communities. Back in the real world, the global population drops to a few thousands while the necessary computing infrastructure is maintained and extended by androids. “Was this evolution or extinction?” one of the remaining real people asks, and, even more poignantly, “Are they [the uploaded] still us?”