[EN] The Four Profound Weaves, by R.B. Lemberg

A richly-woven, multi-faceted work of fantasy about time and hope

There is a structure that lends itself well to fantasy or a certain strain of it: a great evil descends and destroys the sheltered home of a young protagonist, sending them out into the world, on a journey where they will come into their own and defeat the evil. If you look hard enough, you can see the bones of that plot in R.B. Lemberg’s The Four Profound Weaves, but they twist that plot skillfully, introducing elements that change the story and make it very different from your typical Campbell-flavoured fantasy.

A lot of the differences come from the characters. Uiziya e Lali and the nameless man, the two narrators and protagonists, are not wide-eyed youths; they are both in their sixties, they have or had families, they loved and lost. At the same time, their personal development is stunted in various ways: the nameless man delayed his transitioned at the request of his partner, while Uiziya hasn’t completed her training in the art of magical weaving. Thus we still get a coming of age story, but one that shows that life isn’t over once you hit 35, there’s still room to grow and change, even if it’s harder. At the same time, it is a story that is enriched by the weight of everything they’ve been through, the vagaries of their life and the losses they suffered at the hands of the Collector.

Another aspect that contributes to the richness of the story is the worldbuilding. The Birdverse, of which The Four Profound Weaves is a part, is not the typical vaguely European, quasi-medieval setting and the story doesn’t focus on wealthy nobles, as the Western European-style fantasy all too frequently does. It focuses instead on ordinary people and the worldbuilding consists of their cultures and customs rather than fictional family trees. As a result, an archetypal story takes place in a world that feels very much lived-in, presenting interesting ways of conceptualising gender, family structures, etc. In terms of worldbuilding Birdverse seems to have a lot in common with domestic fantasy.

At the same time, though, The Four Profound Weaves, is essentially a heroic fantasy story, telling of a struggle against an evil ruler: the Collector, who steals valuable artifacts from the cultures he conquered and locks them away in the palace as a means of “protection” (in clear parallel to the looting that colonial powers undertook in real world) – but it’s more of Sam and Frodo’s walk to Mordor than armies and battles. The protagonists are no warriors, there is no prophecy that foretells their triumph. Their journey is filled with fear and doubt, dead ends and failures, which feels very relatable – and yet Uiziya and the nameless man push on because of their friendship with each other. The cost of resistance is paid with emotional and physical hurt as they are tortured and wounded in ways that cannot be completely cured (and Lemberg focuses a lot on the aids, like canes and wheelchairs, that they require during their journey). And in the end it's not military power that prevails against the Collector. If there is anything that can topple dictators, it’s helping those who were hurt by them and a collective struggle. There will be bodies, dead or wounded, but eventually they will reach such numbers that their weight will crush the oppressors – as long as we, the living, keep remembering, and giving them voice, and pushing onward.

It is a grim note of hope – with an awareness of the terrible cost of fighting for justice – but it’s hope nonetheless.

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[EN] A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker

I’ve been thinking how to approach this review for a while and maybe it’ll be best to just deal with certain aspects head on.

There comes a moment when certain books become seemingly prescient. I’d say it’s especially easy with SF: if you pay attention, notice certain trends and extrapolate from them, you’re bound to hit something that comes true eventually.

A nation-wide lockdown following an epidemic takes a special bit of synchronicity, though.

A Song for a New Day originally came out in September 2019. I didn't get around to it then. A year later, reading the opening section felt more than a little uncanny. In it, we follow Luce, a singer-songwriter on tour with her band, as she gives what turns out to be the last live performance before a string of terrorist attacks and an epidemic lead to a ban on gatherings. The ensuing chaos of trying to get home, separation from friends and loved ones, lack of information, finding out about illnesses and deaths, felt very real and affecting in light of what the world has went through in recent months.

You might want to bear that in mind when you start reading.

That being said, this isn't a book *about* the pandemic. It feels a little disorienting (after all, we are still grappling with the prospect of long-term consequences of COVID-19), but Luce's storyline soon skips to the aftermath: the epidemic doesn't seem to pose a significant threat, and yet the world is fundamentally changed by it.

We observe the changes from the perspective of the second protagonist, Rosemary, a young woman from a small town who starts out working for a thinly-veiled Amazon analogue and soon becomes a recruiting agent looking for musicians playing underground to sign on for a virtual reality streaming platform.

The changes mostly have to do with increased atomisation of society (something that our pandemic also seems like an accelerant for). With the ban on mass gatherings, there are no more legal concerts (I think it's fair to assume cinemas are closed down, too) and people tend to huddle in their own close-knit communities. There are glimpses of a paranoid, mistrustful world, where travelers passing through small towns are trailed by police and refused accomodation, while groups of like-minded people sharing their interests have to devise elaborate safeguards against crackdowns and infiltrations.

All this forms a background for a depiction of an art world gripped by major corporations – they control the technology that can bring the artist to the audience, and therefore they get to decide who to platform and how to present them. The choice is either to join in or toil in obscurity, barely scraping by.

Rosemary idealistically joins the streaming company in the hopes that she can help artists connect with an audience, but soon comes to see the darker, more predatory aspects of her employer's activities. Meanwhile, Luce struggles to find meaning and carry on doing what she loves most – performing live – in a world that became fundamentally unfriendly to it. Their paths criss-cross throughout the novel, illuminating various aspects of the situation, and posing difficult dilemmas: is it better to preserve more authenticity with a limited reach? or is it possible to divert some of the power of large media companies to serve your own ends without completely compromising your ideals?

In the end, though, I keep coming back to the pandemic. I remember starting to leave the house during and immediately after the initial lockdown, just for a short while to grab some sun and air. I remember watching people with wariness and suspicion when they didn't wear a face mask outside or when they stood closer than 2 m from me. I remember how those feelings relaxed with the relaxing of guidelines and increased understanding of the most risky situations for viral transmission. (It's important to bear in mind that this can all vary from country to country given the different handling of the pandemic, as well as from person to person). Reading about Rosemary's panic during underground gigs or her nervousness while riding on a public transport resonated with those memories. I know we are all waiting for a vaccine or some other development that will eliminate the risk completely, but sometimes I wonder what if the risk never entirely goes away? What level will be acceptable if it won't go down to zero? What if it always lurks, just like it potentially lurks in the novel? (since we never find out what happened with the epidemic).

And so A Song for a New Day became a very thought-provoking book for me. It asks at what point should we move past fear (I don't necessarily have an answer here and live music events are quite far down the list of things I'd be comfortable participating in atm). It also reminds us what waits on the other side of it – the joy of unmediated human contact and the potential for change that we can only tap into when we are together.

It's an important reminder.

I received an electronic review copy of this book via NetGalley. This is an honest review.

[EN] The Midnight Bargain, by C.L. Polk

A gripping feminist fantasy

The Midnight Bargain is a romantic fantasy set in a magical version of Regency England. Everyone has the capability to do magic (which is here based on rituals and spirit possession), but only men are allowed to become fully-fledged magicians. Due to the risk spirits would pose to fetuses, women are only allowed a rudimentary magical education and upon marrying they are forced to wear collars that dampen their magical gift.

The protagonist, Beatrice Clayborn, has her heart set on becoming a magician, even if it means forgoing marriage and children. Unfortunately her family, thrown into financial difficulties by her father’s bad investment, banks everything on her marrying well. And Beatrice’s own resolve starts to falter when she meets Ianthe Lavan, a kind and intelligent heir to a powerful trading dynasty...

My first association upon reading the synopsis was The Harwood Spellbook series by Stephanie Burgis – a fantasy romance also set in a magical Regency England and dealing with women being prevented from pursuing magic. The similarities, however, are very superficial. The Harwood Spellbook, while not lacking in drama, is explicitly written to be fluffy and uplifting. You can see that even in the structure of society, which has strict gender divisions, but is actually matriarchal, with women dealing in politics. The Midnight Bargain deals with similar themes of women’s agency and right to pursue their calling, but in a more serious manner, with women being subjugated based on their reproductive capabilities. And C.L. Polk doesn’t pull punches; the very concept of a marriage collar is upsetting, but it gets even more visceral when at one point we get a description of exactly how it feels to wear one. It was hard reading for me as a person who isn't subject to reproductive oppression in real life. But there are other aspects to Beatrice’s situation, too: the way she has to grovel in front of potential suitors who are well aware of the power they hold and lord it over her; or the way her family completely dismisses not just her ambitions, but the notion that she could propose other solutions to their problems, not to mention the full-on emotional abuse from her father.

You might have noticed I described The Midnight Bargain as a “romantic fantasy” and The Harwood Spellbook as a “fantasy romance” – this is because I agree with the notion that a romance needs a happy ending (whether a happily-ever-after or a happily-for-now) and for a large stretch of TMB I wasn’t at all sure what Beatrice was going to choose and whether she would end up with Ianthe at all. (Spoiler: they do end up together.) That doubt is, I think, a testament to how well-constructed the central dilemma is and how skillfully Polk manages all the developments and complications: Beatrice wants to become a magician in order to realise her ambitions, but also help her family at the expense of marrying. Her family, however, puts pressure on her by staking everything on a financially successful marriage. As Beatrice fights to achieve her own aims, her prospects dwindle, making the situation more and more desperate.

Ianthe represents a seductive possibility: he’s kind, intelligent, values Beatrice as a person, and he comes from unimaginable wealth. She could have a fulfilling marriage to him, solve her family’s financial problems, and even (since Ianthe comes from a culture more enlightened than the barbaric Chaslanders who control their wives’ magic permanently) perform magic in a limited capacity once she has children. That option starts to look more and more tempting as the complications start to pile up, but the big question that Beatrice has is: should she have to compromise at all? Is “slightly less oppresion” an acceptable – reasonable – alternative to “more oppression”? I’m writing this review in Poland, where the struggle for abortion rights had been stuck for decades in “reasonable compromise” mode (i.e. abortion is forbidden, except in some cases) before the conversation has been hijacked by right-wing extremists, so the question that Polk poses in the book feels as vital as the answer obvious.

I talked about the love interest, but I think it would be a big disservice to the book not to talk about the women surrounding Beatrice. At the very start of the book, she clashes with Ianthe’s sister, Ysbeta: they both crave a book that would help them expand their magical abilities. The struggle over a limited resource eventually gives way to an uneasy alliance, but that first scene is emblematic of other relationships, too, with Beatrice’s mother and sister, and other characters. The supporting cast offers a complex look at how women struggle to adapt and find a place for themselves in a precarious, oppressive system; how they might choose to risk their position to help others or hinder them in order to preserve their own sliver of security.

In the end, The Midnight Bargain offers a forceful answer to the problems it presents, even if there are certain aspects that feel glossed over and that I would like a little more engagement with (like the questions of consent and bodily autonomy surrounding spirit possession, or the resolution to Beatrice and her father’s relationship). At the same time as weighty matters relating to women's liberation, there is also a lot of suspense and humour (as in the scenes where Beatrice acts under the influence of Nadi, the spirit of chance) that makes it an energetic, breezy read. A most successful marriage of elements, I would say.

I received an electronic review copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[EN] Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders, by Aliette de Bodard

I have some broad knowledge of the Dominion of the Fallen setting, but the books still wait for me on my kindle. I thought “Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders” might be a good taster of the series. I don’t yet know whether it is, but I know I’m intrigued and want to read the whole series even more.


What strikes me most after a few days mulling over the book, is the mixture of tones. On one hand, there is a fair share of playfulness and humour in the setup of “a couple goes to visit the family of one of the spouses... except they’re an imperial dynasty”, as well as the dynamic between Thuan – a bookish dragon prince who abhors political games and left his family’s domain behind – and Asmodeus – a charming and murderous fallen angel (it's a bit like if “Hannibal” featured a non-abusive relationship and was a rom-com).

On the other hand, we have the backdrop of a struggling kingdom and topics of inequality, justice, political unease, oppression. While on their visit, Thuan and Asmodeus are thrown into a murder investigation that’s quickly revealed to have wider implications. In the course of the investigation, Thuan struggles with loyalty to his family and his desire to be left in piece, as well as some blind spots resulting from his privileged upbringing.

Those two aspects mesh together pretty well, although I was occasionally confused about how seriously I should take stuff like Asmodeus’ propensity for murder (in the end I think he’s far more discriminate and restrained than Thuan gives him credit for) or one character advocating executions as a way of restoring order (but the ethos of the book ultimately leans towards kindness, not despotic rule).

The style of the book is detailed but very clear and the plot strikes a great balance between the intrigue and personal scenes between Thuan and Asmodeus. I greatly enjoyed how much of the book was dialogue driven, with a lot of space devoted to the way things are phrased, what is said and unsaid, the characters trying to parse what the other party is communicating and untangle the complex webs of meaning. Because of that the book felt tense even though there wasn't a lot of action as such.

This is a short and entertaining read, a hybrid of crime story and romance (in typical romance fashion Thuan and Asmodeus experience some conflict and while their marriage is never really threatened, both of them seem to grow a little by the end and learn to appreciate the other’s perspective on the situation) with some pleasantly weighty socio-political considerations. I am eager to dive into the main series.

Note: I received an electronic copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[EN] By Force Alone, by Lavie Tidhar

Power and ideology

I approached By Force Alone with both excitement and trepidation. I enjoy seeing new takes on Arthuriana and the time after the Romans withdrew from Britain is a fascinating period. At the same time, I tend to be wary of cynical and brutal stories because they run a risk of devolving into an exercise in empty misery that masquerades as profoundness.

Overall, I'm happy to say that my worries were unfounded. Don't get me wrong: it's a pretty bleak story. It's just that the bleakness has a purpose and isn't all there is to the book.

I've seen Tidhar describe the book asessentially King Arthur for the Brexit era and you can see that in the book's preoccupation with myth-making, with the way people and events get turned into stories – and the fact that the stories are tools made by someone for a specific purpose (and not a good one, of course) – as well as in its focus on the tensions between the various groups that dwell or arrive in Britain.

It's also a book that doesn't fall for romanticism of conquests, warriors, kings, the glamour of fighting and fucking. In fact I'd say it's completely disillusioned with power, and absolutely clear about how base the drive for power is, how utterly miserable it makes the world.

But it's not just shit and mud and misery. By Force Alone is in a way a reversion of the Clive Owen King Arthur movie. Where the latter was gritty 'realism' masking a typical Hollywood yarn that sands off all the edges (including Lancelot dying so that Guinevere can't cheat on Arthur), the former is historical materialism coated in a mish-mash of absolutely buck wild ideas. Some of them are deep cuts from Arthurian legends (such as Cath Palug, a ghost mer-cat), some are taken from folklore (like the Fae) – and then there are elements from other genres that Tidhar mixes in (Lancelot knows kung fu in this one, and where Tidhar ultimately goes with the Grail is best left unspoiled, although earlier parts might remind readers of Jeff Vandermeer's Reach Trilogy).

Those elements disrupt the bleakness and make the book very entertaining. And while everyone is a murderous asshole to an extent because everyone is willing to go along with Arthur in order to climb the ladder, there are characters who also exhibit sympathetic traits. Arthur himself seems most consumed by the lust for power and it's interesting that the reader always sees him at a remove. But there is Gawain who's dragged into stuff against his will; Lancelot who's torn between desire for riches and more elusive pursuits and who's increasingly Done With Shit; sir Pellinore chasing after his Questing Beast; and possibly the coolest Guinevere I have ever encountered. It was also really cool to see some gay and lesbian characters, as all too often fantasy books that pretend to a degree of historical realism mistakenly assume queer people did not exist in the past.

The book is long, but moves at a brisk pace, jumping in time, switching perspectives, never overstaying its welcome. It occasionally can feel a little disjointed and certain characters seem to just drop out of the narrative (I would have loved more Guinevere); but the novel feels very purposeful in how it stays very little in Camelot once it's established. The characters can't really enjoy the wealth and splendour they chased after – nearly as soon as they've 'made it' a rot sets in and the time comes for a doomed fight against another young upstart who wants a shot at the crown. I also really enjoyed the prose style: it's concise and not too ornate, but has a slightly elevated register that brings to mind epic poetry.

By Force Alone is a very cool revisionist take on Arthurian legends, one that seems to come from a similar place to Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora's Once & Future. It skillfully mixes a bleakness of outlook with some pleasantly bizarre ideas and a touch of humour in a very enjoyable way.

Note: I received an electronic review copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

[EN] Doctor Mirage, by Magdalene Visaggio, Nick Robles, Jordie Bellaire

 Doctor Mirage used to see ghosts – including her late husband, whim she tried to resurrect – but something went very wrong. Now she’s on a journey with a pill-popping teenager. Will she break free or is a fate worse than death awaiting her?

I like Magdalene Visaggio’s writing for anchoring the trippy weirdness of her premises to emotional and existential arcs of her characters. Doctor Mirage is no different and an expedition into the land of the dead is intimately connected to the protagonist’s loss of powers and her husband. At the same time it introduces tension between her and Grace, a teenage girl who maintains that they are in hell and need to get out: Mirage is tagging along, but with her own agenda. This occasionally leads to conflict between the two characters, which with time becomes a tad repetitive, as it largely hits the same beats issue-to-issue, but at the beginning at least makes their dynamic more interesting.

It would be a spoiler to say what the purpose of the journey ultimately is, as there are a few twists and turns along the way. I will say that Visaggio never loses sight of the human element and ties the story to struggles all of us experience. The ending has interesting things to say that are uplifting, but quite different from the trite sentiments we usually hear.

As for the visuals, Nick Robles does a great job with the design, particularly of the monsters, and I am in love with the work of Jordie Bellaire, who makes the transition from ordinary world (or what passes for it) to the realms of the deat absolutely incredible. The colours in the latter are very psychedelic purples, yellows, pinks, blues, strange smears and blobs that don’t conform to the linework. It’s a fantastic effect and made the comic a joy to look at.

If you’re a fan of Visaggio’s work on Eternity Girl, you’re going to love this. If you’re into gnostic, psychedelic weirdness – you’re going to love it, too.

I received an electronic review copy via NetGalley. This is an honest review.

[EN] Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel, by Julian K. Jarboe

 Warren Ellis said that we already live in the future, we just don’t notice it. It makes sense, therefore, that Julian K. Jarboe uses the future in their stories in order to better illuminate the present.

Although the stories in this collection vary strongly in terms of length and genre, the dominant note for me is near-future dystopia. Climate change drowning cities and rich tourists moving in to gentrify everything that’s left (plus the underwater ruins), locking the citizens in strictly controlled zones, while late capitalism sends precarious part-cyborg employees to work on the Moon with no holiday (after all, everyone is essential personnel). It sounds wild, but for many people it’s already part of their lived experience.

As such, the characters mostly focus on survival rather than fighting to change the world they live in. It frequently feels too vast, complicated, and powerful to be changed by a small group of individuals. The best one can do is to cling to the communities one has for as long as they last; particularly since the characters frequently don’t quite realise the extent of the abuse and exploitation they are subjected to: it’s usually taken in stride and described very matter-of-factly (see for example the family abuse in the title story). It’s a very effective way of making the readers feel for the characters.

The fantasy pieces – “The Seed and the Stone” and “We Did Not Know We Were Giants” – seemed to me to be the few more outwardly positive stories in the collection, as there seemed to be more that the characters were able to do to change their situation, particularly in the latter, with its themes of apotheosis and wrenching control away from inscrutable and unpredictable powers.

Among the stories written in a more literary realist fashion (I’m thinking slice of life, not strongly driven by plot, focused more on personal epiphanies, such as “Self Care” or the titular “Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel”), there are also a few that utilise strong central metaphors to talk about certain experiences. “The Heavy Things” has been a favourite of mine ever since I read it in Transcendent 3 and it’s a frankly terrifying portrait of reproductive violence that removes the bodily autonomy of people experiencing periods. “Estranged Children of Storybook Houses” is a similarly affecting story about a neuroatypical person searching for their place in the world (and what a great idea to use a metaphor of the changeling, given that a popular theory is that they were a figure representing neuroatypicality), while “I Am a Beautiful Bug!” is a playful riff on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” that talks about the alienation (not to mention oppression) that befall you once you undergo a significant alteration of your body. This is a great use of the fantastic and I enjoyed all of those stories very much.

Aside from full-length short stories (some of which probably cross over into novella territory), there is also flash fiction that borders on prose poetry and some poems. They showcase Jarboe’s facility for beautiful, poetic language*, though of course the longer stories are also full of sentences you want to underline and re-read over and over.

* See for example a bit from “The Android that Designed Itself”: Make me large and soft and rolling: a photovoltaic mucus that envelopes all it touches. Make me edible but make me poisonous. Give me one of every face that has ever been called ugly. Give me one of every skin that has ever been called excessive. Give me a way of moving that no space can admit or accommodate, and then reshape the entire world to hold me. I could go on.

This is a collection that captures very well what it’s like to live under capitalism while (gender)queer, disabled, mentally ill, when you are unwilling or simply – particularly – unable to climb higher in the great chain of oppression. But it also offers moments of joy and liberation that come with the possibility of self-expression and with finding your community. The rareness and fleetingness of those should make us all the more determined to fight the forces that threaten to take those things away from us.

Thank you to the author for sending me an e-ARC of this collection in exchange for my honest thoughts.

[EN] Homesick, by Nino Cipri

 I encountered Nino Cipri’s stories twice recently – in the Transcendent anthology of best transgender-themed speculative fiction and in Capricious magazine’s Gender Diverse Pronouns issue. In both cases Cipri’s stories were among the highlights for me, so I didn’t hesitate much before requesting Homesick. They are a writer I want to read more of.

Homesick is a very tight collection. It doesn’t just present every story the author’s written up to publication – the nine stories contained in the book share some thematic concerns, as well as a general emotional vibe of unsettling strangeness. More than science fiction or fantasy, Homesick brings to mind ghost stories or weird fiction: sure, there is a time machine in one of the stories or superhero/magical girls in another. But more often than not, the characters have to contend with something inexpicable: a poltergeist in the closet, vomitting up iron keys, the ocean behind their clients’ couch – and the magical girls have all been resurrected after meeting tragic fates.

When I think of homesickness, I think of profound unfamiliarity; of being in a place or situation that is not mine; of not having any company I could rely on for help or comfort. That is the vibe I largely got from Cipri’s stories, where the characters are frequently lonely and have to deal with alienation in their professional and personal lives, as well as in a larger existential sense. The best example might be Presque Vu, where the protagonist’s job as a driver for an Uber-like company leaves him shunning the company of most people, and where all the characters are haunted, both by strange objects turning up out of nowhere (keys you have to throw up, cassette tape tangled in your hair when you wake up, strange phone calls) and by mysterious wraiths that crowd the streets of their city.

This is not to say that the stories are necessarily always sad or cynical. While they are often fairly unnerving and frequently end before a complete resolution, the characters do sometimes manage to achieve some connection, however temporary, that provides them with a measure of comfort. There is also a lot of humour in dialogues (which sometimes sounds like the characters speak nothing but one-liners, but not frequently). And playing with form! One story is a magazine quiz, one a trascript of audio recordings, one contains excerpts from documentary interviews. This also imbued the collection with a sense of playfulness that relieved the often difficult emotional content.

Homesick is a very strong collection that offers a wonderful dose of speculative fiction from the more literary, border-blurring end of the spectrum. If you enjoyed stuff like Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, I think you will enjoy Homesick as well.

Thank you to the publisher, Dzanc Books, for sending me an electronic review copy in exchange for my honest thoughts.

[EN] Algorithmic Shapeshifting, by Bogi Takács

 

Playful, rich, and inventive, this first poetry collection from Bogi Takács tackles the problems of the world head-on while also inspiring to rise above them.

Algorithmic Shapeshifting is a varied book; the earliest poem in it was first published in 2011, with the latest ones being new to the book. The situations and stories described within range from secondary-world fantasy to outer space, to distant past, to modern-day Hungary. But in some ways it also feels like one story, or maybe like it forms a pattern on a tapestry: clear thematic strands weave through and reemerge, uncontained by the four sections into which the books is divided.


The first thing that struck me about Takács’ poetry is that it’s intensely trans-personal. There is a desire for transcendence, framed not as a way of detaching oneself, but quite the opposite – as contact with the world. This can mean the joys of collaboration (The Iterative Nature of the Magical Discovery Process) or forming a family, bodily transformations that have an element of kink to them (Gently Chew to Soften the Ridges, Overlays), but also an attachment to history and tradition (Six Hundred and Thirteen Commandments), or the numinous in nature (Outside-in / Catalytic Exteriorization). There is an interplay between wanting to leave the body – even if only temporarily – or have it transformed and the body being the medium through which you can feel and realise that want. It’s a joy that wants to burst forth, carried by the richness and sensuality of the language:

“I stagger through a nighttime landscape
of power lines while the light of the full moon
scatters, flickers in pools of groggy dark water
and the grid hums inside my chest cavity”

– from Outside-in / Catalytic Exteriorization.

This exuberant, fluid mode of being encounters certain challenges when confronted with the world. There are institutions that will bring their absolute best (meaning: worst) to control you because you’re only valuable if you’re of use to them (The Handcrafted Motions of Flight) and, currently, in many places of the world (including – though not limited to – the US, where the author lives, Hungary, where e comes from, and Poland, where I live) there is a rising tide of intolerance and outright fascism: a movement for a tightly confined and prescribed existence that wants to annihilate any deviation and transgression. And so in certain poems the lyrical language is poured into forms we don’t necessarily associate with poetry – most notably in The Oracle of DARPA, where a transcript of an interrogation is being disrupted by bursts of poetry, transformed and trans-scribed. The rules and conventions belonging to certain forms can be more than a tool of oppression: they can be a game. Some poems become more or less reliable guides and sources of advice that can lead you in interesting directions or save your skin (Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting; The Tiny English-Hungarian Phrasebook for Visiting Extraterrestrials). Takács’ poetry is infused with a sense playfulness, levity, and humour, and so the formats become a source of fun and subversion that breaks even the constraints of the book as a medium and object (You Are Here / Was: Blue Line to Memorial Park, a transcript of an interactive poem which you can – and in my opinion should – proceed through here).

As it progresses, the collection seems to dip steadily closer to present-day Earth, with the third section ending with the striking Two-Tailed Triptych: a melancholy look of an emigrant at a homeland drifting increasingly rightwards (I can certainly relate). But then the last part is once again a reaffirmation of the radiant Being whose manifestations recurred in different guises throughout, as well as the possibility of love and connection. Algorithmic Shapeshifting tells us that we – as members of gender, sexual, and ethnic minorities, as migrants, as people – are so much larger than everything that would reduce us to spare parts or fuel for the machines of hate. We cannot be contained.

Disclaimer: I received an electronic review copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.

„Niepełnia” i Popmoderna

Stała się rzecz wspaniała: portal Popmoderna, który zawiesił działalność rok temu (kolejna oznaka tego, jak straszny był 2016), powrócił przed dwoma tygodniami! To jedno z fajniejszych moim zdaniem miejsc w polskim internecie, gdzie pisze się o szeroko pojętej kulturze – pop- i niekoniecznie.

Cieszę się z tego powrotu nie tylko dlatego, że będę miał co czytać, ale również ze względu na to, że zostałem zaproszony do ponownego nawiązania współpracy. W związku z tym od czasu do czasu na Popmodernie będą się pojawiać również moje teksty.

Pierwszy z nich właśnie zawitał na stronę. Jest to recenzja intrygującej powieści Anny Kańtoch pt. Niepełnia. Od lektury Czarnego jestem miłośnikiem nieoczywistych fabuł tej autorki, z przyjemnością zatem podjąłem próbę rozwikłania, o co tak właściwie chodzi w jej najnowszej książce. Zachęcam do lektury Niepełni i własnego omówienia tejże.

[EN] The Overneath, by Peter S. Beagle

I’m far from an expert on the books of Peter S. Beagle. I’ve only read The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place. The impression I’ve got from those two is that what he writes are not so much stories as tales. Even though they were created in the last few decades (and, like A Fine and Private Place, take place in a contemporary setting), they feel ancient, steeped in the old traditions of oral storytelling – so much so, that Polish SF writer Jacek Dukaj The Last Unicorn “the last fairy tale” in his review. In light of all this, I was very eager to read The Overneath so that I could see whether Beagle’s short stories – representing a more varied sample of his output – have the same quality.

The first four stories definitely fall into the category of “tales” – they take place long ago and far away (and, in the case of The Green-Eyed Boy, featuring Schmendrick the Magician, in the world of The Last Unicorn) and resemble folk stories the most. My favourite of the bunch is by far The Story of Kao Yu, which draws inspiration from Chinese folklore and follows a wandering judge, a wise, kind and honourable man, who becomes smitten with a beautiful thief. What in the hands of a less-skilled storyteller could become a cliché (and old man longing for a young woman), in Beagle’s telling becomes a slightly melancholic, humane tale where both characters are allowed to retain their agency.

The collection shifts somewhat after that and what follows are unmistakably stories. This in and of itself is not a judgment on their quality; Trinity County, CA, for example, is a humorous, inventive story that achieves a great effect through its juxtaposition of the mundane realities of being a ranger in remote woodland areas with the fact that the job of the main characters is tracking down people who keep contraband dragons. A similar effect is achieved is Kaskia, in which Beagle makes the realist story of a man in a disintegrating marriage who strikes up an online friendship fresh by the simple fact that his computer connects him with an alien being in a completely different part of the universe.

In fact, most of the pieces, regardless of whether they’re tales or stories, possess a mix of hope and melancholy that is, as far as I can tell, unique to Beagle alone. The characters often regard the world with a curious mixture of hope and cynicism: they are certain that nothing good can happen to them, and yet, despite that, they hope that it will – the same attitude is often displayed by the voice of the narrator as well. The best example of that may be The Green-Eyed Boy and Schmendrick Alone, because they utilise a character we already know very well from The Last Unicorn and create a powerful resonance with each other: in both Schmendrick experiences a tenuous connection with someone, a spark of warmth and companionship, but has to leave it behind when his magic gets wildly out of control. Because it happens twice, the effect compounds, making the reader acutely aware of the desperate loneliness that haunts the character.

This infusion of emotions elevates a lot of the stories in the collection, such as Music, When Soft Voices Die – Beagle’s attempt at steampunk – that reads a lot like a classic ghost story, until the poetic, achingly beautiful reveal of what it is exactly that haunts its protagonists. In fact, the collection seems to stumble precisely when the stories lack the warmth and wisdom – as in The Way It Works Out and All, which seems no more than a demonstration of a fantastical concept, or in Underbridge, which aims at a story of a man pushed to monstrosity by his obsession and alienations (it brought to my mind characters from Edgar Allan Poe’s stories), but feels mean-spirited in a way that struck me as wholly uncharacteristic of Beagle and in effect created a strong dissonance with the rest of the collection.

Unicorns are a recurring motif for Beagle (they feature, in very different versions, in three stories in this collection), so it seems fitting that one appears at the very end. Olfert Dapper’s Day starts as a story (a very good one, although a big part of that might be my predisposition to like stories about conmen) – and then, at some point, with the appearance of the unicorn, the story seems to transform into a tale of a man who, if not exactly bad, was never particularly good, and who suddenly has to use his one true talent – lying – not to serve himself but to save another person. In the end, he loses something, gains something, and I felt that he will never be the same again, although it would be hard to define how exactly was he changed.

This is one of the stories that demonstrate what I love about Beagle best: his characters are often weak and failing, yet all the more heroic when, through chance or grace, they manage to rise to the trials that stand before them. At his best, he opens your heart up and, through his writing, makes you want to speak in poetry. And that’s exactly what happens when you read The Overneath.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[EN] The New Voices of Fantasy, anthology

This is not fantasy in the sense of “imaginary adventures in secondary worlds”. This is fantasy in the broader sense of “writing about impossible things”. A lot of the stories in the collection take place in the real world and combine pressing personal/social issues with strange, fantastic occurences. At worst, they are brief flights of fancy or allegories where you think “oh, right, X stands for Y” – but that’s only a handful. At best, they create complex knots of meaning that cannot be reduced to a simple moral, ones that you’ll be able to tease out over many evenings, while feeling them instantaneously on a gut level. The anthology as a whole goes to the very limits of what fantasy can do.

A lot of the stories are award-nominated or -winning, so I feel they merit going through one by one. Here’s what I thought about all of them.

* Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers, by Alyssa Wong – a vampire story with a twist: the protagonist feeds on dark, violent impulses and thoughts. She swallows the darkness, but the darkness threatens to swallow her when she feeds on thoughts of a killer. I loved her complexity: she is broken and flawed, and pushes people away, but we learn a lot about what made her be that way. The story has great wordlbuilding, slowly opening to show us a glimpse of a whole society of people (beings?) that are like the main character. With all the darkness, the story never loses its humanity: it’s a very touching tale about the struggle to allow yourself to be loved.

* Selkie Stories are for Losers, by Sofia Samatar – this story shares a few elements with the previous one: it is also about the relationship between mothers and daughters, about stuff that screws you up. The protagonist embarks (tentatively) on a new relationship, all the while remembering how her mother, a selkie, abandoned her. The narrative is quite fragmented, woven through with different stories about selkies and the narrator’s thoughts and responses to them – the result is aching, urgent and full of longing and resentment. As much as you wish the protagonist could be healed, you fully understand why she won’t, at least not any time soon. A sweet and quietly heartbreaking story.

* Tornado's Siren, by Brooke Bolander – a tornado falls in love with a girl. At first she runs, trying throughout the years to lead a “normal” life, not even realizing how stiffling it is for her. The main idea feels a bit like a clever spin on The Wizard of Oz, and it’s a fascinating concept, but the story suffers in comparison to the previous two stories, as it’s not nearly as complex. And the message ends up being very simple as well: don’t be afraid to lead a different life.

* Left the Century to Sit Unmoved, by Sarah Pinsker – there is a pond outside the town. When people jump in, sometimes it swallows them and they never return. People jump in anyway. Much like that pond, the story is simple and unassuming on the outside, but quietly opens onto vast reservoirs of emotion. Accepting loss, feeling young and on the cusp of growing up, being alive. Rather than telling you about all those things, the story makes you feel them, with all of their enormity. One of the best stories in the collection for me, thanks to its sheer evocative power.

* A Kiss With Teeth, by Max Gladstone – a vampire leads a quiet, suburban life with his wife (former vampire hunter) and son. He’s feeling dissatisfied with his life, but tries to contain those feelings. Then, when his son struggles at school, he meets one of his teachers and starts to get the cravings. Much as I like the portrait of marriage this story presents in general, the resolution to the protagonist’s issues, and the whole concept of suburban vampire, the relationship between the real-life issues the story portrays and the fantasy elements is quite simple, so this one is not as good as the more thorny and complex stories mentioned earlier.

* Jackalope Wives, by Ursula Vernon – the jackalope wives take off their skins and, as beautiful women, dance in the night. A young man tries to steal and destroy the skin of one of them – with disastrous results. Grandma Harken – a brusque, no-nonsense figure – takes it upon herself to fix the resulting mess. The story is steeped in American folklore, at times feeling not unlike American Gods, but deeper, more mysterious. Like it was part of folklore itself, rather than just a post-modern variation on it. Very good and very touching.

* The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, by E. Lily Yu – a story of political turmoil, imperialism and striving towards a utopia. And yes, it really is about wasps and bees. This again feels like a more complex story, without easy correspondences – this is not Animal Farm – but with a lot to say about how the seeds of change might be sown, even when its initiators perish in the process. A tale as glorious as the revolution.

* The Practical Witch's Guide to Acquiring Real Estate, by A.C. Wise – exactly what it says on the tin, and not much more. There are several tiny tales, or anecdotes, embedded inside, and I wish there were more of them, because they demonstrate what could have been done with the premise. Other than that, I don’t have much to say about this one.

* The Tallest Doll in New York, by Maria Dahvana Headley – on Valentine’s Day, the buildings come alive. This is a sweet, charming story, where everything works as it should. A nice, satisfying breather after the first half of the collection.

The Haunting of Apollo A7LB, by Hannu Rajaniemi – by turns funny and quite touching, this is a story of a haunted space suit that comes to visit a person important to both it and the person who once occupied it. I like the light infusion of racial politics that helped to deepen the story a little.

Here Be Dragons, by Chris Tarry – two wandering conmen pretending to save towns from dragons of their own making return to their families and struggle with settling down. As much as I like stories that deal with masculinity (because it is in crisis and we – by which I mean men, who much too often try to put that burden on the shoulders of feminists as a way of impeding the struggle for women’s rights – should be analyzing it and proposing ways out), this was a bit challenging for me to read, because I like stories where people do manage to change and adapt and become better. This story, while it did a very good job with portraying the narrator’s struggles with his new role as stay-at-home father and homemaker, as well as the temptations that his old lifestyle offered, did not give me that.

* The One They Took Before, by Kelly Sandoval – a woman thrown out of Faerie browses Craigslist in search of hints of their presence. This is an affecting story of loss, trauma and addiction. In that last respect it bears passing similarities to Here Be Dragons, while the emotional tone was more like Selkie Stories are for Losers. The contrast between the subtle, wondrous magic of faeries and the mundane realities of internet advertisements worked well, and the portrayal of the protagonist’s struggle no to give in to the allure of her past was very affecting.

* Tiger Baby, by JY Yang – a young woman working a boring job dreams of becoming a tiger. Loved the quotes from Blake’s The Tyger woven into the narrative, as well as the evocation of the protagonist’s feelings of disaffectedness and disconnect from her job and family life – as much as I thought the text looks down a little on those who adapt and somehow push on through the dreary realities of life, I felt on a visceral level the main character’s desire to escape in a way that I didn’t in Tornado’s Siren. The ending was surprising and funny, with the protagonist’s wishes coming true, although not quite in the way she expected them to.

The Duck, by Ben Loory – a duck falls in love with a rock. This is a very short story, written in a children’s-book style (and with a similarly simple message) that throws enough weirdness and even genuine pathos into the mix that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, even though it really is quite simple in the end.

* Wings, by Amal El-Mohtar – this is Amal El-Mohtar, so of course it’s poetic and extremely well-written, but it didn’t speak to me at all. It seems to me that it was about fleeting moments of instantaneous connection, when the right person (not necessarily in the romantic sense) comes along and you instantly click, but it was too impersonal. We never learned anything about the main character – maybe that was part of the point, as she only ever told her secrets to one person, but in that case, well – I’m not going to feel guilty for not connecting with her. I tried.

* The Philosophers, by Adam Ehrlich Sachs – three very short stories about fathers and sons, and philosophers. I love, love, love this sort of thing, which brings to my mind short pieces of Calvino and Borges. In this instance, they are all very well executed, slightly absurdist parables that illuminate some aspects of the themes of the whole, but defy succinct interpretation. My favourite of the three was The Madman’s Time Machine, which plays with the Grandfather Paradox in a very interesting way.

My Time Among the Bridge Blowers, by Eugene Fischer – a pointed satire on “benevolent” colonialism, written as a diary from an expedition a man undertakes to a remote mountain village of the titular Bridge Blowers. He is generally a good person and quite oblivious to the problems of his attitude, and the narrative does a stellar job of portraying the dissonance between how he sees himself and his actions and how he comes across to the villagers. A quietly funny story with a lot to say.

* The Husband Stitch, by Carmen Maria Machado – a woman with a ribbon that she never takes off her neck (if you’re into urban legends, you probably know what’s up with that) tells a story of her marriage. A wonderful, sex-positive, bittersweet and scary story that excels at portraying the small horrors of patriarchy, where men (even, as the story explicitly points out, and it’s that insight that makes it brilliant and absolutely soul-shattering, good men) feel entitled to the entirety of a woman’s body and soul. The Husband Stitch was thoughtful and excellently written, and now I am very happy that I have Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection on pre-order. Also, men should be forcibly made to read that story (and, I don’t know, write a 3,000-word essay on it to demonstrate they understood).

* The Pauper Prince and the Eucaliptus Jinn, by Usman T. Malik – a grandfather tells his grandson a story that launches the latter on a search for his legacy and, possibly, the key to metaphysics. This story introduces a huge imbalance into the collection (at over 20,000 words it takes up a quarter of the whole book and qualifies more as a novella than a short story), but I get why the editors wanted to put it in the book. The main character’s (a Pakistani American) struggles with his identity are portrayed in a very affecting way, and the story successfully mixes his personal quest to get to know his family history with the fate of a much larger (though largely unseen *wink wink*) part of the world. Reminiscent of Gaiman and G. Willow Wilson, but very good in its own right.

In short: this is 100% the sort of anthology that you would expect Peter S. Beagle to put together. If you know and love his writing, read it. If you want to broaden your understanding of what fantasy can do, read it.

PS. An overwhelming majority of the stories gathered here have been published first in online magazines (I marked them with an asterisk). That tells you a lot about where to find the best speculative fiction nowadays, I think.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Dziesięć twarzy (męskiego) pożądania. „Pożądanie. Antologia…”

Czytając listę nazwisk na okładce Pożądania, od razu można zauważyć dysproporcję w liczbie autorów i autorek. Sugeruje ona mocno, że w zbiorze dominuje męski punkt widzenia. Ta sugestia w miarę czytania tylko się potwierdza – choć podział przebiega po linii nieco mniej oczywistej, to w przeważającej mierze zgromadzone historie opowiadają o mężczyznach, o tym czego i jak pożądają.


W serwisie Poltergeist ukazała się moja recenzja Pożądania. Antologii opowiadań miłosnych, zmysłowych, erotycznych i dziwnych, przygotowanej przez wydawnictwo Powergraph. Zachęcam do lektury!

Jestem tym, kim jestem. Szczepan Twardoch, „Morfina”

Polak. Niemiec. Mężczyzna. Mąż. Ojciec. Oficer ułanów. Nieudany artysta. Bon vivant. Dziwkarz. Łajdak. Morfinista. Wszystkie te, niektóre z pozoru sprzeczne, określenia można odnieść do Konstantego Willemanna, który budzi się na kacu w okupowanej – "zgwałconej", jak sam mówi – Warszawie. Klęska wojsk polskich w kampanii wrześniowej jeszcze nie do wszystkich w pełni dotarła. Główny bohater także próbuje jeszcze toczyć swoje życie dotychczasowym torem, ale już od wyprawy na targ na samym początku powieści widać, że jest to niemożliwe. "[S]tary świat się upłynnił, [...] upłynnił się porządek rzeczy jak rozpuszczony kryształ" – mówi Willemann. Od teraz może już tylko miotać się, poszukiwać form, które opiszą, kim jest, i które nadadzą jego życiu jakiś sens.


W serwisie Poltergeist ukazał się mój tekst poświęcony Morfinie – nominowanej do Paszportu Polityki powieści Szczepana Twardocha. Zapraszam do lektury.