Marie Brennan's Blog, page 3

New Worlds: Dystopias

The New Worlds Patreon loops back this week to deliver on the second installment of what I originally thought was going to be a single essay, with the darker vision of dystopias. Comment over there!

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New collection: The Atlas of Anywhere!

Well over a decade ago, I first had the idea of reprinting my short fiction in little collections themed around subgenres. When I sat down to sort through my existing stories, I found they fell fairly neatly into six buckets, each at or approaching roughly the cumulative size of a novella: secondary-world fantasy, historical fantasy, contemporary fantasy, stories based on folktales and myths, stories based on folksongs, and stories set in the Nine Lands.

Five of those six collections have been published so far: Maps to Nowhere, Ars Historica, Down a Street That Wasn’t There, A Breviary of Fire, and The Nine Lands. The sixth is coming out in September, but it’s not surprising, given the balance of what I write, that secondary-world fantasy has lapped the rest of the pack — more than once, actually, since The Nine Lands is also of that type (just all in a single world), and also my Driftwood stories hived off to become their own book.

So yes: as the title and the cover design suggest, The Atlas of Anywhere is a follow-on to Maps to Nowhere! Being short fiction collections, they need not be read in publication order; although a few settings repeat (both of them have a Lady Trent story inside, for example), none of the stories are direct sequels that require you to have read what came before. At the moment it’s only out in ebook; that is for the completely shameless reason that replacing the cover for the print edition later on would cost me money, and I have my fingers crossed that in about two months it will say “Hugo Award-winning poem” rather than just “Hugo Award-nominated.” (“A War of Words” is reprinted in here: my first instance of putting poetry into one of these collections!) But you can get it from the publisher, Book View Cafe; from Apple Books; from Barnes & Noble; from Google Play; from Kobo; from Indigo; or, if you must, from Amazon in the UK or in the US (that last is an affiliate link, but I value sending readers to other retailers more than I do the tiny commission I get).

Now, to write more stories, so I can put out another collection later!

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Poem! and BayCon!

It’s sad to see Worlds of Possibility winding up its run, but I’m honored to have a piece in the final issue: “Story Sits in Places,” a poem named in honor of Keith Basso’s classic (and fascinating) anthropological work, Wisdom Sits in Places. You can pick up the issue here, or subscribe to get access to all the past issues as well!

Also, BayCon is coming up fast! I have finally updated my damn Appearances page for the first time in . . . nevermind, the exact lag doesn’t matter. >_> But yes, Alyc and I, as M.A. Carrick, are among the Guests of Honor this year! We’ll have sample pattern decks to show off (we paid to expedite just a few of them via air mail, just for the con), and we’ll have a table in the dealers’ hall that may have some of the art for sale, and I’ll update here once we have our finalized schedule. But if you’re attending the con, definitely come say hi!

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New Worlds: Utopias

Every so often, a topic for the New Worlds Patreon grows beyond the scope of a single essay. So it is with what was supposed to be a post on utopias and dystopias — but let’s start on the nicer end! Comment over there . . .

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New Worlds: Courts and Appeals

Second time’s the charm? I thought a while ago that the New Worlds Patreon was done with legal topics, but then I thought up a couple more, of which this is the last. We’re looking at the different types of courts and what they’re for — comment over there!

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Books read, May 2025

A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher, narr. Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. This is the first of Kingfisher’s novels I’ve read (well, listened to), and I had a bit of tonal whiplash. On the one hand, there is some really awful stuff that happens here; on the other hand, the rest of the book feels almost . . . cozy? Like, by and large this is a story about people realizing a character is being abused and going to great lengths to show her kindness and help her escape her abuser. But also, abuse — along with brutal murder and various other things. I wonder if I would have found it less whiplash-y on the page than in audio, where the narrators’ voice wouldn’t have been setting a particular mood. I also suspect I was not well-served by knowing the folktale that ostensibly underlies this story; in truth, the novel bears very little resemblance to that tale, and expecting more caused me to wildly misread one character until fairly late in the game.

The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues, Beth Lincoln. Sequel to A Dictionary of Scoundrels, which I noted at the time felt like it had reached a good conclusion and didn’t really need a sequel (though I would read more about the Swifts at other points in time, maybe). Turns out, Lincoln had a good answer to that! This book takes Shenanigan Swift and various other relatives across the Channel into France, there to deal with their distant — and deeply estranged — cousins, the Martinets. This book is every bit as bonkers as its predecessor, but it introduces enough sorts of new bonker-dom to not feel like it’s treading water. And there is more fun with language, which is absolutely part of what I’m here for. I hope there will be a third book, and more after that!

Buddhist Folk Tales, Kevin Walker. This was an odd collection. The author is apparently a professional storyteller who converted to Buddhism, so this mixes both actual traditional stories (many of them from the Jataka tales) with others he’s made up — or in one case, a story made up by students of his, used with permission. Mostly it left me feeling like I should get a straight-up collection of Jataka tales, as I didn’t find this book all that satisfying.

The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul, Eleanor Herman. Do not read this if you are easily nauseated by descriptions of gross things. If you can tolerate those, however, it’s fascinating.

Although the title references poison, and Herman does spend a little time talking about deliberate attempts to off people with various toxins, the focus of this book is really in the subtitle: Herman’s thesis is that people in the late medieval and early modern period had WAY more to fear from their environment than from any would-be murderers. Poor sanitation, contaminated food, and so, so much lead, mercury, arsenic, antimony, sulfur, etc. basically guaranteed that any person of wealth — the same people who feared poisoning — had a lot of ways to fall suddenly and suspiciously ill. And when medical science isn’t yet advanced enough to distinguish the cause of your stomach pains or difficulty breathing, it’s easy to declare you’ve been poisoned.

The central part of the book delves into that in depth, because it’s a series of case studies about historical individuals who were rumored to have been killed by poison. Herman gives the background on the individual and looks at the contemporary accounts of their symptoms and demise, then turns to modern analyses of the evidence (including, where applicable, forensic examination of their remains) to give a verdict on their most likely cause of death — which occasionally was indeed a massive and likely deliberate dose of poison! This was my favorite part of the text, but also rather hard reading, because most of the people under discussion did not have an easy passing. (For my own curiosity, I also did some side research on whether they could have been saved with the medicine of the time, had anyone known what was really going on. Most of the time, the answer was no.) Then it closes with a brief discussion of poison use in our own era, especially the extensive Russian efforts to develop exotic and unprovable means of murder.

Vespertine, Margaret Rogerson. I really enjoyed Rogerson’s novel An Enchantment of Ravens, which is unrelated to this book. This is a world where, following a cataclysm a long time ago, the dead don’t rest easy unless they are given proper rites; to ensure that — and to deal with spirits that escape the net — there is a religious order dedicated to handling their ghosts. Furthermore, some of those spirits get bound into artifacts so their powers can be used by priests and nuns for the defense of the realm.

I don’t mean it as a sideswipe when I say this reads a lot like the fantasy sibling of Ninefox Gambit. When a massive wave of malevolent spirits threatens the countryside, the main character, a novice named Artemisia, inadvertently finds herself wielding a high relic: an artifact that contains the most powerful type of spirit, so strong that it actually possesses her. Since she never got trained in how to do this, she doesn’t know how to banish it back into the relic, so she’s going through the story in an uneasy alliance with an entity that will happily take over her body and use her to murder everybody in sight.

The ISFDB lists Vespertine as the first (and so far only) book in a series, but it works well enough as a standalone. If there do wind up being sequels, though, I’ll happily read them; this was an engaging story in an interesting world.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, Tabitha Stanmore, narr. Anna Wilson-Jones. I liked this one enough that after listening to it in audiobook from the library, I turned around and bought myself a physical copy.

Stanmore is explicitly pushing back against the internet view of medieval and early modern magic, i.e. “female witches keeping alive ancient traditions get persecuted by the mean men in the Church.” Citing tons of historical case evidence, Stanmore shows that people at the time — particularly in England, though she does touch on other parts of Europe occasionally — absolutely distinguished between witches (bad, and of either gender) and cunning folk (good, and of either gender, though over time there is a drift towards men), and they made regular use of the latter. Service magicians, as Stanmore terms them, filled a number of needs in society; when they show up in court records, it’s because they had a disappointed client suing them for fraud, or they strayed too far into dangerous territory (e.g. trying to curse someone to death).

So yeah, if you saw that post going around Tumblr about priests doing “wizard shit” and telling their superiors they keep trying to explain to their flocks that it isn’t real but everybody expects them to do wizard shit, this is basically That: The Book. But very well-supported with citations.

The Lies We Conjure, Sarah Henning. I am not generally an eager audience for the genre of Rich People Behaving Badly, even when it’s the fantasy variant thereof. The premise of this one, however, was interesting: a pair of sisters get hired by a rich old woman to masquerade as her granddaughters for a night at a family reunion. It’s only after someone’s been murdered and the estate has been locked down that the sisters realize literally everybody else there is a witch and assumes they are, too — and that odds are very good they’ll be killed if this secret cabal of powerful people learns they’ve been infiltrated by outsiders.

Over the course of the next several days, as they get sent on a both a murder investigation and a kind of magical scavenger hunt to figure out who will be the next leader of the witches, there are of course tons of ugly familial secrets that come tumbling out. I was slightly disappointed that the sisters don’t have to dance harder to convince everybody they’re who they claim to be — the witches assume early on that the girls’ memories have been magically manipulated to make them forget what they used to know — but that would have required them to be master con artists rather than two teenagers who happen to look enough like the old lady’s granddaughters to pass muster, so I’ll cut it some slack. This had interesting characters and good tensions between them, and I enjoyed it.

The Serpent Called Mercy, Roanne Lau. This does the thing I really like, where there’s a ton of worldbuilding that isn’t strictly needed to make the plot go, but it makes the setting feel more three-dimensional and lived in. The core of the plot focuses on gladiatorial-style battles between “conquessors” and magical beasts brought in from outside the city, and a pair of poverty-stricken friends (who do NOT wind up in a romance together!) who decide to risk their lives in the arena in the hopes of winning enough money to raise their status in a highly unequal society. But around that there’s all kinds of other stuff, like the religion one of them practices very devoutly, and the backstory of how their ancestors came to live in that area, and the weird magical powers people can sometimes access for a very brief time — there used to be other magic, but their ancestors lost it when they migrated — and so on and so forth.

Much like Vespertine, this tells a complete story. Here, however, there is an obvious dangling thread for sequels, in the form of a notorious thief whose exploits against the wealthy keep being mentioned in passing, so I suspect there may be at least one more book, sales permitting.

The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens, Nicola Clark. As Marissa Lingen noted in her review (which is where I heard of this book), by “Tudor queens” what we actually mean is “queens of Henry VIII.” But I guess “Henrician queens” would not be as catchy.

That’s not a slam on the book overall, though. Much of the reason Clark takes this period as her focus is that Henry VIII’s serial matrimony — often to an attendant of a previous queen — made this an unusually tumultuous time to be a lady-in-waiting. Not only are the royal households repeatedly being dissolved and reconstituted, but the intrigues surrounding the behavior of certain queens and the uncertainty of what will happen tomorrow meant there were opportunities both to advance your family’s interests at court, and to get you and your family in a great deal of trouble. And what does “loyalty” mean when you’ve sworn your oath of service to a woman who is now out of favor with the king you also serve? Some ladies-in-waiting stayed fiercely faithful to their mistresses; others dropped them like a hot iron. Throughout the book, Clark is very clear that being a lady-in-waiting didn’t mean you were a piece of furniture: they were an essential part of the machinery of court as well as active political agents in their own right, albeit ones whose actions were constrained by the sexism of the time. Very much recommended for anybody who would like a look at that court machinery, insofar as we can reconstruct the smaller pieces from the documents that survive.

He Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan. Sequel and conclusion to the Radiant Emperor duology, which presents an alternate version of the transition from the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty to the Han-led Ming one.

There is not enough therapy in the world for some of these characters. Two of them are basically powered by rage and self-loathing; another has replaced that with howling amounts of dissociation. Even the most functional character here (the protagonist) still has a nigh-terminal case of “it’s impossible for this not to happen when I want it so much.” If you want a front-row seat to trauma playing out, here ya go. I think it’s very well done overall, though after a time I started wishing that each individual instance of watching somebody spiral down into their own personal hell was just slightly less in-depth, as the amount of time spent marinating in those was quite large. But for all of that darkness — and boy howdy is there a lot of it — things actually turn out pretty well. Not for everybody, of course, but the fear I had at the end of the first book did not materialize. This is ultimately an alternate history, so even though you still end up with a Zhu Yuanzhang founding a Ming dynasty, it’s not the same Zhu Yuanzhang, and so there is every reason to believe it might have all the good features of the actual Hongwu Emperor’s reign, with less in the way of murderous purges.

When Among Crows, Veronica Roth, narr. Helen Laser, James Fouhey, and Tim Campbell. Probably a novella, based on the audio length. Contemporary, Chicago-set fantasy focusing primarily on creatures from Polish folklore, but not exclusively; there’s mention made in here of . . . I may not be remembering the name correctly, but I think it was the O’Conner-Vasquezes, a blended banshee/llorona family, which was a nice touch. This plays out over the course of just a few days, but it does a good job of packing enough intensity into the events that I believe in the relationships that get built along the way, as a visitor from Poland strikes a bargain to get help in seeking out the witch Baba Jaga. As seems to be a theme with this month’s titles, this works perfectly well as a standalone, but there’s a sequel coming later this year.

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks. I’ve seen a couple of books lately that center on train journeys, so I guess that’s having a Moment right now, but by and large this is a very different setup from a lot of the novels out there, which is part of what drew me to it. It’s the late nineteenth century, I think (I forget the exact year), and it’s years since Siberia suddenly and inexplicably became overrun with . . . something. Some kind of strangeness dangerous enough that the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was an even bigger undertaking than it was in reality, and now passengers are cautioned not to spend too much time looking out the windows, as even seeing what’s out there can have odd effects on the mind.

The novel is entirely the story of a single journey, from start to finish (with a little bit before and after). There are a few moments in here which edge toward horror, but the number one word I’d use to describe it is tense. As in, one night I took a break from reading it because there were so many things poised to go disastrously wrong, and I didn’t know which one was going to blow up first. The ending is not a downer, though, and the narrative even has some sympathy toward characters who honestly brought their fates upon themselves. So long as you don’t mind never actually getting an explanation for what happened to Siberia — that is not a question this book has any interest in answering — it’s very well-done. The only reason I didn’t inhale the whole thing faster was that my nerves couldn’t take it.

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New Worlds: (Don’t) Kill All the Lawyers

Do we really need lawyers? Yes, yes we do — but also, it’s not hard to see why they’ve wound up with such a negative reputation. Yep, the New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at the legal profession . . . comment over there!

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New Worlds Theory Post: Easy-Access Worldbuilding

At Chez New Worlds Patreon, five Fridays in one month means an additional essay focused on some aspect of craft or theory. This time around, it’s the notion of worldbuilding that is “easy” for the reader vs. “hard” — comment over there!

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New Worlds: Irrigation and Flood Control

The topic for this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is just as vital to today’s society as it was to those thousands of years ago: how to get water to where we need it, and keep it out of where we don’t want it. Comment over there!

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while I’m at it, another fountain pen question

How the hell do you use a shimmer ink in a fountain pen without it clogging up the moment you look away?

I have tried this precisely once, and the results were so bad that for the first time in my life, I purged the ink out of a pen rather than using it up. I don’t know if the answer is “the pen you used is clog-prone” (Pilot Vanishing Point; I haven’t had issues with non-shimmer inks) or “only ink with shimmer if you’re intending to write a bunch immediately, because six hours later it will be causing problems” or “use a dip pen” or what, but it seems like other people are able to use shimmer inks more successfully. Is there something I’m missing?

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