Sarah Chorn's Blog, page 96

A Good Quote

Recently, as many of you know, I’ve been hosting a feature on my blog discussing the various reasons that people love speculative fiction. I think this genre moves all of us in different ways, and because of that, it means something different to everyone. I love celebrating unique perspectives.

I also love collecting quotes.

This is a rather well-known quote among the genre crazy fans (like myself), but I love what George R. R. Martin says, and I love how he says it. That’s probably why I tend to collect quotes out of books and look up things authors say. I hoard them like a dragon would hoard his treasure. Authors say such incredible things that resonate so profoundly with me, so much better than I ever could.

Books will never bore me for that reason, and neither will the people who work so damn hard bringing them to life.

So I’m smashing my love of genre, and my love of quotes together in this post. Enjoy.

The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth.

― George R.R. Martin

What Speculative Fiction Taught Douglas Thompson

About the Author

As well as numerous short stories in magazines and anthologies, Douglas Thompson is the author of seven novels: Ultrameta (2009) and Sylvow (2010) both from Eibonvale Press, Apoidea (2011) from The Exaggerated Press, Mechagnosis from Dog Horn (2012), Entanglement from Elsewhen Press ( 2012), and Volwys and Freasdal from Dog Horn and Acair Publishing respectively, both due in late 2013/early 2014. He is also chairman of the Scottish Writers Centre, based in Glasgow.

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SFF: Dreaming The World’s Mind

Thanks Sarah, for the chance to provide a guest post for your blog. Your enthusiasm for SFF sounds boundless, rightly so for its capacity for unbridled invention, but you also make some excellent point about good Science Fiction and Fantasy really being about the here and now, not escapist nonsense as some ill-informed detractors seem to think. I didn’t even realise I was writing Fantasy (or ‘Slipstream’, a surreal branch of it) until the London writer and editor Allen Ashley unexpectedly accepted one of my short stories for his “Subtle Edens” Slipstream anthology (Elastic Press, 2008). Up to that point, I thought I had simply being writing the only kind stories that made sense to me as a way to deal with the world. I don’t as a rule conform to any rules (paradox!) for anything, if I can avoid them, so it was a big surprise to find I fitted into a ‘genre’ I had never read…. Or almost. In fact I’d read Slipstream classics like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy before the term was known to me. I’d read some Sci-Fi like Greg Bear’s Blood Music and Fantasy like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, but had thought my own fiction was just eccentric mainstream.

Now what I’ve learned, five years and five books further on, is that Speculative Fiction (to use the shy Margaret Atwood’s more politely prophylactic term for it all) is in fact the best vehicle, perhaps the only one, that can enable a writer to tackle complex social issues in a way that can convey an effective message along with humour and without heavyweight melancholy.

I mean try writing about rape or domestic abuse in purely realist literary terms and you might create a work of great power, but it is going to be a harrowing read that leaves the average reader morose and despondent. Tackle the same subject in a magic realist mode and you may shed light on the imaginative inner lives of the victims of those situations, and the hopes and dreams that keep them going.

The story I’ve just had published in Hic Dragones new anthology “Impossible Spaces”, called “Multiplicity”, tackles a heavyweight subject (or several): the meaning of individualism in the face of the cycle of birth and death and sex in a mass society. Encountering the outer regions of a black hole, the crew of a large space-going vehicle experience a dramatic distortion of space and time in which multiple versions of themselves each age backwards and forwards at accelerated rates, turning into children then babies, old people then dying, and so forth. As new babies appear to take the place of the dead, the DNA of the new arrivals is a random mix gathered from people nearby, so that by the time the effect ceases each crew member has become a descendant of themselves whose DNA is polluted by his fellow crew members. Taken literally, this alarming scenario just seems frightening, but taken as an allegory it can be seen as a microcosm of the lives we are all living here right now on Earth. It’s just the fact that time is moving forward and slowly that blind us to the weird and miraculous reality we’re moving through each day.

Try tackling those same issues in a straightforward literary way and you would need a much longer story and a patient audience willing to listen to your sociological diatribe. In speculative fiction, a much more concise game can be played that is (hopefully) both humorous and insightful.

Another example would be a short story of mine called “Narcissi” that will be published this summer in the British Fantasy Society Journal. Among many other things, this is a story about rape. A man writing about rape? Dodgy eh? But in the story I have an alien creature (whose sex cannot be known in our terms) being raped by a terrestrial man, who then finds out months later that in fact the alien was raping him back and his body has been seeded with hundreds of tiny alien larvae who paralyse him and start hatching out all over his body. Sounds horrific? Well, it’s meant to be, because the experience of the man in the story is intended as a metaphor for what it feels like for a woman to be raped: i.e. paralysed, abused, demeaned and terrified. I don’t think it’s easy to convey that to people in a straightforward realist story because the subject is so emotive and distasteful. But through speculative fiction, what Jung would call “repressed material” can be dragged out into the light and examined. It’s the same mechanism by which our subconscious minds create dreams and nightmares I suppose. In fact, I would define the speculative fiction writer as the ultimate lucid dreamer, with a pen in his hand (or a keyboard at her fingerprints).

I’m sorry for being so presumptuous as to use my own work as an example in the above, but it seemed the best and most direct way I could think of to demonstrate to readers the nuts and bolts of how Science Fiction and Fantasy can tackle the major social and psychological issues of the real everyday world.

Each to their own, but personally I think the editors and critics who are currently asking for “realistic” science fiction are spectacularly missing the point. If you want to find out what happens in the future just hang around long enough and you will see it will happen. But if you want to change the future (and the way our planet’s going, I would suggest that we should) then you need to write (and read) good science fiction. Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, Orwell’s 1984, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Zamyatin’s We –books like these were not about the future but about the society’s of their time, societies which in some small but critical way they helped to change. Governments may spy on us, but now they will always be open to charges of being “Big Brother”. They may lie to us, but their neologisms will now always be pilloried as “Newspeak”, and the head office their lies come from as “The Ministry of Truth”.

Words are important. Good words can usher in golden ages. But words also kill, because bad ideas kill. Nazism took hold of the misunderstood ideas of Nietzsche (regarding the ‘superman’). Communism misunderstood Marx and Trotsky. Sadly, many of the world religions continue to cause conflicts and death today because of zealots misinterpreting well-meaning ideas designed for societies centuries and millennia into the past.

The internet, surely the most dramatic paradigm shift of most of our lifetimes, has created what I would call “The world’s mind”, a mind in the constant process of dreaming and imagining its own possible futures, through the media of books, film and politics and so forth. The good writers of science fiction and fantasy are like psychoanalysts, able to examine the traumas and neuroses of that huge, somewhat deranged mind. Politicians might think they are in control of the thoughts flying around in that brain every day, but increasingly they are not, we are: a vast fluid consensus of millions of educated and reasoning minds. Ideas are the gold of the twenty-first century and writers are the lonely prospectors, panning through the murky rivers on those distant hills at the edge of our known worlds.

Alif the Unseen – G. Willow Wilson

About the Book

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen. With shades of Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, andThe Thousand and One Nights, Alif the Unseen is a tour de force debut—a sophisticated melting pot of ideas, philosophy, religion, technology and spirituality smuggled inside an irresistible page-turner.

433 pages (Hardcover)

Published on June 19, 2012

Published by Grove Press

Author’s webpage

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I have to admit that there is one trope that I am so incredibly sick of that I almost completely veer away from those books because they just make me mad for even existing. So what is it? I’m sick of the thickly accented dark person from (insert foreign country here) who is terribly evil and trying to destroy the whole planet. These people usually have big beards and dark brown or black hair. They sit in tea/coffee shops all day and laugh with evil intent while they plot, plot, plot. It just bothers me. Why, for the love of (insert holy thing here) can’t the ultimate evil guy be pale and talk the same way I do for once? This bugs me so deeply that I can’t even handle movies where the evil dude is a (clichéd) Russian mobster or the terrorist from the Middle East. Come on. It’s been done. Move on.

With that little rant out of the way, perhaps you can understand why I hesitantly approached Alif the Unseen. My automatic thought was, “Fantastic, another evil Middle Eastern dude. Wonderful. Just what the world needs. Lets trope up an already ravaged part of the world.” Well, then I got the book, and I read a bit about Wilson, and my interest was peaked. It took me an entire page to realize that all of my ranting and my predisposition toward hating the trope of the evil thickly accented guy was completely, absolutely, and totally misplaced.

Alif the Unseen is nothing that I expected, unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and because of that, I loved it.

Alif the Unseen is a fascinating hodgepodge of urban fantasy, cyberpunk, Middle Eastern mythology, and some thriller thrown in for good measure. To put the cherry on top of this sundae, Alif is a true antihero (and I’m a sucker for the antihero). He is a young man of mixed Indian and Arab descent, living in a Middle Eastern police state. He spends his days (and nights) protecting whoever pays him from the State’s cyber eye. He doesn’t care who they are or what they do, if they pay him enough money, he’ll protect their online identities from the state and therefore keep them from getting arrested. He’s out for himself. He enjoys the money he makes from hacking, but it’s the tangoing with danger and the coding that really seems to get him off. Alif is a captivating character. He thinks about little outside of his own comfort. Once his lover jilts him, his world is turned upside down. The state finds out who he is, and he is forced on the run with his innocent neighbor.

Wilson does a great job at showing just how ignorant and unprepared Alif is, despite how dangerous he knows his job could be. Once he’s out of his house and on the run with people depending on him, Wilson shows how Alif crumbles under pressure. This isn’t just any antihero, this is your everyday teenager, in it for himself with little thought to the future. When Alif hits the road, Wilson showcases Alif’s personal flaws quite believably. The fact that, in many situations, Alif’s companions appear stronger and often smarter than he is, is a fascinating twist on the average antihero character. Wilson truly created a believable, sympathetic protagonist in Alif.

That being said, Alif the Unseen takes place in a Middle Eastern police state, something myself, and most of my readers probably don’t understand or truly comprehend. The cultural divide is real, and it is acutely felt. This can cause the reader to feel a bit divorced from the characters and events. It’s hard to fully relate to someone and someplace you don’t understand and haven’t ever come even close to experiencing. However, that’s part of the magic. Alif the Unseen is, in many ways, a crash course on Arab culture. There are so many tiny cultural details sprinkled throughout the book, it’ll be impossible not to see this culture in a new, thoughtful light. For example, there is one part toward the start of the book where Alif is discussing his first meeting with his lover. He talks about how he envied her her veil because he was exposed and nervous and she got to watch him, unseen, behind her protective fabric. That’s a perspective that, here in the West, we so rarely hear. I should also note that Wilson mentions that the Arab Spring has influenced this book, and the tense political tones, police state, and many of the happenings in Alif the Unseen reflect that. Wilson really brings the chaos to light in a way that the Western person can understand, and their immersion in the events in the book will truly help most readers sympathize in ways they probably couldn’t have before.

The Jinn are well done and when coupled with the exotic location and the foreign culture, they seem to fit perfectly. Vikram adds a nice humor and a dark, sarcastic bite that is necessary for the tone of Alif the Unseen. Furthermore, the use of Jinn, a surprisingly ancient mythological caricature, juxtaposed with modern, and supermodern technology is nothing short of genius. Alif the Unseen is not only an education in Middle Eastern culture and belief, but it’s also an elegant clash of ancient and modern. Seeing how the two live together, the myths staying true to their ancient forms, while technology alters the face of the world, is fascinating.

The plot is absorbing, engaging and moves at a fast pace. It also has plenty of unpredictable twists and turns that will keep the tension ramped up and readers endlessly guessing. If the plot doesn’t engage you, the atmosphere, culture, and characters surely will. No matter why you pick up Alif the Unseen, you will almost surely find yourself devouring it surprisingly fast. Toward the end, the events build up to a nice crescendo. However, once that crescendo peaks, the ending happens rather abruptly. Events all become sorted out, but the somewhat jarring end, after being so deeply absorbed in the book, the sudden ending felt almost like I was getting whiplash. One minute I was in some exotic land that I couldn’t get enough of, and the next thing I knew, it was over. The truth is, I didn’t want it to end, so no matter how Wilson had ended the book, it would have bothered me. There are a precious few books that affect me that way.

Alif the Unseen is one of those books I could go on for days about. It’s so incredibly engaging, thought provoking, deliciously foreign, believable, strange, intense, emotional, painful… I’m not sure how many other words I need to throw out there to properly convey how intensely I loved this book. Wilson does urban fantasy right. Authors take note. G. Willow Wilson is someone you need to watch. Alif the Unseen is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

Alif the Unseen is nominated for the World Fantasy Award and it’s a well deserved nomination. Congratulations to G. Willow Wilson for getting the deserved recognition that she deserves for this incredible book.

 

5/5 stars

Books I’m Eyeing

Books I’m Eyeing is a (hopefully) weekly series wherein I show you the books that have intrigued me, and the blogs and reviews we can all blame that on. My goal is to make my library hate me because of all the holds I have placed. This feature will show you just how I’m accomplishing that.

Do any of these books interest you? Or are there some that I’ve missed but should check out? Let me know!

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First, news: TO EVERYONE AT WORLDCON – I hate you all.

Now, onto my list of books.

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A Different Kingdom – Paul Kearney

(Re-released January 2014)

Discovery blamed on: Only the best SciFi

About the Book

A different kingdom of wolves, woods and stranger, darker, creatures lies in wait for Michael Fay in the woods at the bottom of his family’s farm.Michael Fay is a normal boy, living with his grandparents on their family farm in rural Ireland. In the woods there are wolves; and other things, dangerous things. He doesn’t tell his family, not even his Aunt Rose, his closest friend.

And then, as Michael wanders through the trees, he finds himself in the Other Place. There are strange people, and monsters, and a girl called Cat.

When the wolves follow him from the Other Place to his family’s doorstep, Michael must choose between locking the doors and looking away – or following Cat on an adventure that may take an entire lifetime in the Other Place.

This is Paul Kearney’s masterpiece.

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The Black Guard – A.J. Smith

Discovery blamed on: The Speculative Scotsman

About the Book

The launch of an heroic fantasy saga set in the lands of Ro, an epic landscape of mountain fortresses, vast grasslands, roiling ocean and slumbering gods.

The Black Guard is the first in a major new fantasy series, The Long War, set in an invented world somewhat similar to medieval Europe in terms of technology, heraldry and ethics. Magic features in the world, but is rare and mostly confined to the various priesthoods. The city of Ro Canarn has been assaulted by Knights of the Red. Amongst them is a Karesian Enchantress of the Seven Sisters, intent on manipulating the men of Ro to her ends. Her Sisters intend the assault to be the first move in a longer game, a war intended to destroy worship of the Gods of men and bring back the malevolent Forest Giant of pleasure and blood.

The young Lord of Canarn, and one of his closest friends, plan a desperate gambit to take back the city, whilst his sister journeys north and confronts more of the Sisters’ schemes as they try to conquer the rest of the lands of men.

Divided by geography and surrounded by enemies, a disparate group of Clerics, Priests, Knights, criminals and warriors must defeat overwhelming odds to seize back the lands of men from those unknowingly under the sway of the Dead God and his Enchantresses.

The Duke of Canarn is dead, executed by the King’s decree. The city lies in chaos, its people starving, sickening, and tyrannized by the ongoing presence of the King’s mercenary army. But still hope remains: the Duke’s children, the Lord Bromvy and Lady Bronwyn, have escaped their father’s fate.

Separated by enemy territory, hunted by the warrior clerics of the One God, Bromvy undertakes to win back the city with the help of the secretive outcasts of the Darkwald forest, the Dokkalfar. The Lady Bronwyn makes for the sanctuary of the Grass Sea and the warriors of Ranen with the mass of the King’s forces at her heels. And in the mountainous region of Fjorlan, the High Thain Algenon Teardrop launches his Dragon Fleet against the Red Army. Brother wars against brother in this, the epic first volume of the long war.

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The Woken Gods – Gwenda Bond

Discovery blamed on: 52 Book Reviews

About the Book

The more things change…

Five years ago, the gods of ancient mythology awoke all around the world.

The more things stay the same…

This morning, Kyra Locke is late for school because of an argument with her father.

Seventeen-year-old Kyra lives in a transformed Washington, D.C., dominated by the embassies of divine pantheons and watched over by the mysterious Society of the Sun that governs mankind’s relations with the gods. But when rebellious Kyra encounters two trickster gods on her way home, one offering a threat and the other a warning, it turns out her life isn’t what it seems. She escapes with the aid of Osborne “Oz” Spencer, a young Society field operative, only to discover that her scholar father has disappeared with a dangerous Egyptian relic. The Society needs the item back, and they aren’t interested in her protests that she knows nothing about it or her father’s secrets.

Now Kyra must depend on her wits and the suspect help of scary Sumerian gods, her estranged oracle mother, and, of course, Oz–whose first allegiance is to the Society. She has no choice if she’s going to recover the missing relic and save her father. And if she doesn’t? Well, that may just mean the end of the world as she knows it. From the author of Blackwood comes a fresh, thrilling urban fantasy that will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman, Cassandra Clare, and Rick Riordan.

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Cold Steel – Kate Elliott

Discovery blamed on: The Founding Fields (actually, I need to read book 2 before I get to book 3, but the fact that it’s out slipped my radar)

About the Book

Trouble, treachery, and magic just won’t stop plaguing Cat Barahal. The Master of the Wild Hunt has stolen her husband Andevai. The ruler of the Taino kingdom blames her for his mother’s murder. The infamous General Camjiata insists she join his army to help defeat the cold mages who rule Europa. An enraged fire mage wants to kill her. And Cat, her cousin Bee, and her half-brother Rory, aren’t even back in Europa yet, where revolution is burning up the streets.

Revolutions to plot. Enemies to crush. Handsome men to rescue.

Cat and Bee have their work cut out for them.

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Crash – Guy Haley

Discovery blamed on: Zachary Jernigan

About the Book

This thrilling novel lifts some of the fiercest contemporary concerns of stock-market crashes, overpolulation and who rules society, to deliver a novel that finds answers beyond the stars – but will that be enough to overcome history and survive? • The Market rules all, plotting the rise and fall of fortunes without human intervention. Mankind, trapped by a rigid hierarchy of wealth, bends to its every whim. To function, the Market must expand without end. The Earth is finite, and cannot hold it, and so a bold venture to the stars is begun, offering a rare chance at freedom to a select few people. But when the colony fleet is sabotaged, a small group finds itself marooned upon the tidally locked world of Nychthemeron, a world where one hemisphere is bathed in perpetual daylight, the other hidden by eternal night. •The Market rules all, plotting the rise and fall of fortunes without human intervention. Mankind, trapped by a rigid hierarchy of wealth, bends to its every whim. To function, the Market must expand without end. The Earth is finite, and cannot hold it, and so a bold venture to the stars is begun, offering a rare chance at freedom to a select few people. But when the colony fleet is sabotaged, a small group finds itself marooned upon the tidally locked world of Nychthemeron, a world where one hemisphere is bathed in perpetual daylight, the other hidden by eternal night. Isolated and beset, the stricken colony members must fight for survival on the hostile planet, while secrets about both the nature of their shipwreck and Nychthemeron itself threaten to tear their fragile society apart.

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What Speculative Fiction Taught Freya Robertson

About the Author

I’m Freya. I’m a writer, a gamer, a military historian, an archaeologist, and a lover of chocolate.

My first epic fantasy, Heartwood, releases from Angry Robot in November this year (and it’s now available for pre-order! Click here for more details.) I’ve just finished writing the first draft of the sequel, Sunstone.

I’ve also now released an anthology of speculative fiction called Augur. Order details are below or read more about it here.

Contact Information

Website

Facebook        

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Amazon

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I write epic fantasy for Angry Robot Books. The first in the series, Heartwood, comes out on October 29th. The book features many of my loves—medieval warfare, Templar-style holy knights and a nature-based religion, to quote just a few. I’ve been interested in these things since I was young (so for about a hundred and fifty years!)  and thought I had a wide range of knowledge about the medieval period, but it was only when I created my own world that I realised how much I didn’t know.

The kind of things I had to research were:

 

How far a horse can travel in a day. (About 25-30 miles at a reasonable pace. This affected the scale of my map and how quickly the characters could get from one town to another.)
How to make the names of characters from various lands sound different. (I drew up lists of Germanic names, Saxon names and Celtic names for three of the countries. The knights of Heartwood are all based on Latin words—for example Procella (the name of the female leader of Heartwood’s army) means ‘storm’.)
What sort of armour would the knights be wearing? (I didn’t want to mix plate with chain mail, although I knew that often plate pieces would be buckled on with chain pieces filling in the gaps.)

 

I also wrote pages on medieval food, medicines, castles and towns, and I researched a typical monastic day, adapting it for the shorter Heartwood day and breaking it down into regular Campana or bells that marked the various religious services. Researching Heartwood taught me a huge amount about the medieval period, and I hope I’ve filtered a percentage of what I learned into the book in an interesting way.

I’ve also just brought out an anthology of speculative fiction called Augur (and other stories). This includes fantasy, sci-fi and historical stories, and a fair bit of research went into most of these.

For the sci-fi story after which the anthology was named, I researched the fascinating topic of South African goldmines and discovered that at five kilometres below the Earth’s surface, the average temperature of the rock face is sixty-five degrees Celsius (150 degrees Fahrenheit).

For the story A Token of Vengeance, I researched the signs of the plague called the Black Death and read about the way victims’ lymph nodes would swell, turn black and then sometimes burst. (Yuck.)

For the speculative story The Great Escape, I researched Houdini, the famous escapologist, and found out that his wife held a séance every year on October 31st for ten years after his death (although he never came through.)

For the historical story To Be a King, I researched Celtic Britain, and discovered that warriors used to stiffen their hair with limewash, and that the necklaces they wore were called ‘torcs’.

I found out loads of other useful (and sometimes not so useful!) information – for example the capital of Bermuda is Hamilton, and ‘robot’ is a Czech word that means ‘slave’. I learned so much! But that doesn’t mean that speculative fiction is just a list of facts. Great speculative writers blend in this information in such a way that you’re learning while you’re also being entertained.

Grab a sci-fi or fantasy book you’ve read recently, and tell me something you’ve learned. I’ll send one lucky commenter a free copy of Augur.

Freya

Flesh and Fire – Laura Anne Gilman

About the Book

From acclaimed bestselling author Laura Anne Gilman comes a unique and enthralling new story of fantasy and adventure, wine and magic, danger and hope….

Once, all power in the Vin Lands was held by the prince-mages, who alone could craft spellwines, and selfishly used them to increase their own wealth and influence. But their abuse of power caused a demigod to break the Vine, shattering the power of the mages. Now, fourteen centuries later, it is the humble Vinearts who hold the secret of crafting spells from wines, the source of magic, and they are prohibited from holding power.

But now rumors come of a new darkness rising in the vineyards. Strange, terrifying creatures, sudden plagues, and mysterious disappearances threaten the land. Only one Vineart senses the danger, and he has only one weapon to use against it: a young slave. His name is Jerzy, and his origins are unknown, even to him. Yet his uncanny sense of the Vinearts’ craft offers a hint of greater magics within � magics that his Master, the Vineart Malech, must cultivate and grow. But time is running out. If Malech cannot teach his new apprentice the secrets of the spellwines, and if Jerzy cannot master his own untapped powers, the Vin Lands shall surely be destroyed.

In Flesh and Fire, first in a spellbinding new trilogy, Laura Anne Gilman conjures a story as powerful as magic itself, as intoxicating as the finest of wines, and as timeless as the greatest legends ever told.

384 pages (Hardcover)

Published on October 13, 2009

Published by Pocket

Author’s webpage

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A while ago I asked people to offer up books with unique magic systems. Flesh and Fire was one book that was mentioned several times, as the magic system is based on wine. Of course I had to give it a try. Flesh and Fire also happened to be the first book I’ve read by Laura Anne Gilman.

Flesh and Fire is the first book in the Vineart War trilogy, and it was nominated for the Nebula award in 2009. It’s easy to see why. Gilman has a way with her writing. It’s smooth and lyrical. She takes a complex magic system which could easily boggle the non-wine-guru’s mind and boils it down to easy to understand, simple parts. Not only does she make it understandable, but her lyrical, flowing prose suck the reader in almost before they realize it. Her world comes to life under her ministrations, and the details are so finely wrought that you can picture the vine-covered hills, and smell the loom, and feel the magic in the fruit. When Jerzy starts to work with the wine and learn the craft, you can feel his sore muscles and you sympathize with his desire to learn, as well as his frustration with grasping difficult concepts. It’s actually quite amazing how Gilman can take such a vast, complex world and magic system and make them so incredibly understandable to readers who are both wine aficionados and those who aren’t.

Flesh and Fire is essentially Jerzy’s story, though other perspectives are woven in. Despite the fact that the other viewpoints are fairly minor, they do serve to give the world and the situations that are unfolding context. They also give the world color and help define the sprawling landscape that Gilman has created. Gilman created an epic fantasy with a sprawling world and unique magic system, and also managed to create a few key characters that help define the landscape, politics and magic system. That being said, this is the first book in an epic fantasy trilogy, and while plenty happens, it does have a distinctly “first book” feel. What I mean by this is, Flesh and Fire feels like more of a buildup than an actual, self-contained book. There is a lot of world building taking form of the complex magic system, political tensions, religious development, and more. Gilman uses her caste to mostly make sure that the reader understands her creation, while the plot is almost secondary.

Normally that might be a point of contention for me, and it might be for some readers because all of the building does make the plot feel very slow. However, in the case of Flesh and Fire, with such a vast world, complex politics, and a magic system that is truly one-of-a-kind, I needed one book of building or I wouldn’t be able to completely understand or enjoy the plot in the other books of the trilogy. As I mentioned before, that might not be the case with everyone, and I’m sure there will be plenty of people who’d rather have a plot and fill in the building gaps themselves, but for others like me, one book of development before the plot takes off might be exactly what the doctor ordered. Though it should be noted that the wine based magic system might take some time for people to understand, and thus the book might take some time to really get into. The effort pays off ten-fold.

One unique quality of Flesh and Fire is how it’s not constricted to one class of people. So many epic fantasy books almost completely comprise the ruling class, or the slums, but rarely do epic fantasy books tango in both pools. Jerzy starts out as a slave, and in an almost Carol Berg sort of way, his slavery becomes an important catalyst to his change of fate. Regardless of the fact that he is only a slave for a short time in the book, his time spent in slavery is a huge force that shapes his personality and mannerisms. Though he moves up the social ladder, slavery is always there. However, Gilman makes slavery, a despicable practice at the best of times, interestingly meaningful to her magic system. Though she never glorifies it, it’s interesting how the Vinearts almost become antiheroes with their slavery practice and the reasons behind why they do it.

Jerzy starts out fairly young and while readers of Flesh and Fire will watch him grow and evolve as events transpire, there is really an air of “The Chosen One” about him, despite the fact that he really isn’t chosen, he just happens to be in the right spot at the right time and interesting things happen. The reason he feels “chosen” is probably because of his rise from slavery into something more and how important he becomes in the events that unfold around him. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, but readers should be aware that the feel is in this book. That feel might cause some readers to feel like Flesh and Fire is a touch clichéd with characterization, though in my humble opinion, if that feel is there, it’s incredibly minor.

Master Malech plays a key role in Jerzy’s discovery, as well as the world building, and Jerzy (and the reader’s) magic system education. He’s an interesting character, probably the most interesting to me because Gilman purposefully creates him as a rather shadowy figure who has a distinct anti-hero feel to him. He’s a mystery. He is out for his own benefit and has no qualms about it. You never really get to know him, but he’s developed in such a way that the reader can’t help but wonder about him and his mysterious past. He not only plays a key role in Jerzy’s development and the reader’s education, but he often drops hints about the land he was from (which is very far away) and unique foods, as well as other small hints. These hints actually end up being an incredibly powerful world building tool for Gilman. Through Malech she creates a sprawling world full of intricate details that really make the landscape and cultural nuances pop with minimal infodumps.

As I mentioned above, much of this book is world building. And much of that world building happens through Malech and Jerzy. Readers will sit in with Jerzy through his many lessons. This might feel info-dumpy to some readers, but Gilman handles it with finesse and the education never felt oppressive or slow, probably because the world is so complex and fascinating. A combination of Gilman’s powerful, lyrical writing and the unique world she creates makes any infodumps bearable. Honestly, when I think about it, I’m truly not sure if there was any better way Gilman could have done it and I think she deserves kudos for making such a huge world so interesting, despite the fact that the first book is mostly spent building and developing it. I never thought I’d enjoy a book so heavily steeped in world building so damn interesting and entertaining.

I’m using the word “unique” a lot in this review, but I’m not sure what other word would fit as well as that one. “Unique” summarizes Flesh and Fire perfectly. Everything about it is enchantingly different. Flesh and Fire is a “must read” book for anyone interested in memorable magic systems, coupled with an intricate, nuanced, and detailed world. Gilman is a shining example of how the foundation book of a series can be well done and fascinating. Flesh and Fire is absorbing, and Gilman’s smooth prose serves to hook the reader before they even realize they are hooked. The best quality of this book, however, is the fact that Gilman manages to enchant the reader. Flesh and Fire is epic, interesting, and most importantly, magical. I will never look at wine the same again.

 

4/5 stars

What Speculative Fiction Taught Ria Bridges

About the Author

Ria is an ex-pat Brit living on the east coast of Canada, sharing her home with a human roommate, 5 cats, and a glorified budgie named Albert. In between booking travel plans for people with far more money than she’ll ever make, she spends her time playing video games, reading too many books, and drinking far too much tea. She can be found posting book reviews at Bibliotropic, or hanging around on Twitter and Facebook.

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What has speculative fiction taught me? It seems like such a simple question to answer. Love, hope, community, that there are better worlds out there and we have the power to make them. The usual answers, and all of them are good ones. But my introduction to the world of SFF wasn’t the same as what most people experience, and this question has been a hard one for me to answer partly because I’m not sure how much of myself to divulge.

But what means anything without context?

I wasn’t always a bibliophile. For years, I was an outcast kid but I didn’t find solace in books. I found solace in TV, in playing pretend with my imaginary friends (and indeed, making myself into half a dozen imaginary someone-elses), and in playing Sonic the Hedgehog until my thumbs ached. Books? Why would books come into it? I had plenty of entertainment without needing to resort to books!

The real clincher was my parents, who had an… interesting approach to discipline. When they decided that I didn’t appreciate my belongings enough, they would take them away. Not just the one they didn’t feel I appreciated. All of them. Twice in my life, I spent a month not being allowed to leave my bedroom except for school, food, and bathroom visits, with nothing in there save my bed and my clothes.

It was then that I found comfort in books. First it was my schoolbooks, and I can’t tell you how many times I read by 3rd grade social studies book from cover to cover, for lack of having anything else to do. Then I discovered my school’s library, and started getting books from there. My parents had no problem with me reading during the course of my punishment. I suppose even they figured that it was too cruel to let a kid sit alone in their room all day with nothing to do but stare at the four walls until bedtime.

But that was the starting point. And I figure I beat the odds, in a way. It would have been so very easy for my brain to associate reading with punishment, a thing you do when you literally have nothing else with which to occupy you. But it didn’t. Reading opened up new worlds to me, an escape from that bedroom, new friends with whom to have grand adventures. And I hadn’t even discovered the SFF genre yet!

Flash forward to high school. My life was little different, except that I read far more than used to, and was an unashamed bibliophile by that point. But SFF still wasn’t on the horizon. Until I met my high school crush, who, one summer when we were bored and lazy from the summer heat and didn’t know what to do, handed me a book. “Here,” she said. “It’s got gay characters, but if you can get past that, I really think you’ll like it.” (Why she gave me a warning about homosexual characters, I’ll never understand.)

The book was Mercedes Lackey’s Magic’s Pawn. I read it. And read the rest of the trilogy. And then I think I read it again, because holy crap, books about magical worlds and great adventures are a thing? They really exist? Where have they been all my life?

It was all downhill from there. I read all of the Wheel of Time novels that were out. I read what I could find in the library, both the city’s library and my school’s considerably smaller library. I scoured used bookstores for new fantasy novels. I read traditional fantasy, urban fantasy, a bit of sci-fi. I wrote fanfiction. I was already watching some speculative stuff on TV (read: I was obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but this was something altogether different. This was books, and that was way better than TV!

In SFF, it felt like I’d filled a hole I didn’t even know existed. It was the excitement of a new adventure. It was the wonder of exploring a new world. It was comfort, like coming home. It was peace, like finding a home.

In speculative fiction, I found a sense of belonging that has never gone away. I have a community now, people who are as diverse as they come and yet we all share at least one thing in common. As someone who suffers from serious social anxiety and would rather turn invisible than talk to people most days, this is something I’m endlessly amazed at. I have friends! I have a group of people with whom I’d have no trouble sitting down with over a never-ending cup of tea and having long discussions with, and I would have fun doing so. I wouldn’t be sitting there, squashing my opinions for fear that they’re think I was weird, because they’re just as weird as me, and about the same things.

It shows me new worlds, new ideas, and makes me wonder why I can’t live there. And in so doing, it makes me want to bring the best parts of those worlds into my world. Justice, idealism, hope for a brighter tomorrow. Strength that I draw from the trials of the characters whose adventures I follow. Lessons that I learn alongside them. Through other worlds, I expand my knowledge and understanding of my own world, I get exposed to things I might not otherwise experience. I see stories in which people can live according to their strengths, either because their society works that way or else they’re working to make their society that way, and I get hopeful that I, too, can someday live that kind of life, where I change the world around me to what it ought to be and cease changing myself to what I think the world is telling me I ought to be.

I’m not going to lie. I use reading as an escape, too. When things have gotten hard in my life, my first reaction is to pick up a book and lose myself in it, forgetting that the real world exists and surrounding myself in something far more entertaining, where the characters do something to make their lives better and, by proxy, make me feel like my life is a little bit better too. This past year, while I was struggling every day to overcome the unpleasant effects of a tumour growing inside me, reading was solace. Peter V Brett’s The Warded Man got me through my first hospitalization. (If these people can survive demon attacks, then I can get through a few days of discomfort, being prodded and scanned and transfused.) I can’t tell you how many books got me through the post-surgical recovery process.

Speculative fiction has helped me to come to understand not only who I am, but also who I can be, and given me the strength and foresight to reach those goals. It may not be the only thing responsible for this, but it’s been a large enough part to be noteworthy. It’s expanded my horizons, taught me more about the world I live in, given me amazing perspectives on issues that I face each day. It’s helped me to learn that while not everyone can be the hero, they can still be the main character in their own story.

And as someone who used to think that all they were good for was bit parts, even in their own life, that’s a monumental discovery.

What Speculative Fiction Taught Tracy Fahey

About the Author

Tracy Fahey loves to write about all things Gothic. She writes tales about memory, loss, the uncanny and otherness.   You can read her latest story, ‘Looking for Wildgoose Lodge’ in the anthology Impossible Spaces’(July 2013), edited by the redoubtable Hannah Kate of Hic Dragones and available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Impossible-Spaces-Hannah-Kate/dp/0957029284.  Tracy has delivered papers at national and international conferences on Irish Gothic, dark domestic space, ghost estates, castles, folklore, werewolves, the monstrous and fairy tales.  She is creative director of an art collective, Gothicise (www.gothicise.weebly.com) based in Limerick, where she also runs the Department of Fine Art in the Limerick School of Art and Design.  In her spare time, what little of it remains, she is working on a PhD on the intersections between Irish Gothic and folklore .

What I’ve Learned From Speculative Fiction

I could write an epic on all that speculative fiction has taught me.  From my earliest encounters with local folktales and the Brothers Grimm my tastes have been shaped by strange spaces and whatever dwells within them.  Fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and most of all, tales of the supernatural continue to haunt and enchant me in equal measure.

But what have I learned from speculative fiction?  What haven’t I?  Let’s make a list and then mull over one of my lessons learned…

Speculative fiction has taught me

How to dream when the world is a cold and unfriendly place.  Bullied at school?  Unhappy childhood?  Lonely teen?  Speculative fiction is your friend.
How to create new worlds.  Fearlessly.
How to write through endless and thorough reading of excellent work.
How to experience true envy through endless and thorough reading of excellent work.
How to escape from the mundane.  A book is my ticket to ride.
How to crystallise dreams in words, how to trap images in your gossamer net of words.
How to have fun with a pen.  What’s more fun than writing?  You are a GOD!  Settings arise from your imagination.  Characters bend to your will.
How to view academic research area from a different, creative angle.  It’s an extraordinary feeling, like having the multiple, fractured vision of a Picasso portrait.

Most of all speculative fiction has taught me the value of stories.  In stories lie immortality.  Tales, once read, continue to haunt me like a myriad of ghosts.  As I child I couldn’t look behind me when running in the front door at night; if I did the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk would get me.  (To this day I still don’t dare look over my shoulder on a dark night).  The creepy, doomed girls in Misty comics terrified me, lost, abandoned, trapped in paintings, wrong time periods, other realms.  I remember reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House for the first time, and the agony of fear that gripped me, the blinding need to get up and switch on lights, any lights, all lights.  My head is continually awash with stories and all they entail – fantastical lands, bloody fairy tales, dark carnivals and haunted houses.

So, stories live on.  We pass through them and they pass through us.

In the world of words, we are privileged to be listeners, weavers, tellers.  As a child I came to realise and relish the dreadful delights of story-telling.  My grandmother, our sole baby-sitter, would commandeer our attention with endless tales of local fairies, banshees, curses, and, most memorably, a story of an Irish Land War atrocity, where an entire family were burned to death by local neighbours.  This story continues to possess me to this very day, and is in fact the basis for my story in the Impossible Spaces anthology – “Looking for Wildgoose Lodge.”  The ghastly episode took place in 1816, but the deed and its subsequent punishment (eighteen men, possibly guilty, were hanged and gibbeted within sight of the Lodge) were deemed so awful that the story went underground, and was only re-told only inside family homes, transmitted orally from family member to family.  It could never be openly discussed as relatives of all the key players – victims, informers and executed criminals alike– all remained living in the same, small, rural area.  Now that the ghost has finally been exorcised in the 21st century, the stories are at last being compared, and it turns out that each family has its own special variant that has been handed down through the centuries, unpolluted by any canonical version.  One family tale has the titular Lodge positioned in a different site, another features a blighted tree growing beside the Lodge, and my grandmother’s version comes with a side-curse on the landed families that signed the warrant issued for the arrest of the murderers.

Telling stories magically connects you to a wider circle of storytellers.  With the tale of Wildgoose Lodge, my grandmother told it my mother, she told it to me, her parents told it to her.   I don’t have children.  But my story, “Looking for Wildgoose Lodge” now sits in a book.  People will read it.  Some variant of it will survive through my transmission.

So for all its magical properties, impossible frontiers, and brave new worlds, the most valuable lesson that speculative fiction has taught me is that I should look to my own experience, my own myths, my own stories, and to re-cast them into tales that might haunt others and in turn, inspire them to tell or re-tell or to re-fashion them into something else in the years to come.  As WB Yeats wrote in one of his late, passionate angry poems, The Circus Animals’ Desertion “I must lie down where all ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.

Remember your stories.  Then make sure others do.

What Speculative Fiction Taught Paul Weimer

About the Author

What can I say about myself? 37 years old, native of Staten Island, New York, living between the coasts in Minnesota (The Great White North!). Roleplayer. Science-geek. Amateur Photographer. Lover of Science Fiction, Fantasy and History. (Avid Reader!) Technical Office Professional.

You can find Paul on Twitter,Facebook, SF Signal and a slew of other websites. 

Holding out for a Hero

In modern society, the people held up as heroes are, too often, praised for their physical prowess. Sports figures, particularly. While we are told again and again they aren’t role models (especially when they get involved with things they should not), the archetype goes back, as many things do, to high school. Its the High school quarterback, paired with the head cheerleader, of course, who is the classic archetypal model of a mimetic fiction action hero.

While other kinds of heroes exist, from the brave firefighter facing an inferno,  to the man willing to walk 200 miles to be a part of the March on Washington, to the woman willing to keep a OB/GYN clinic open even against prejudice and hatred, in the end, our society seems to value the physical hero more than heroism of other sort. Its as if we are hardwired to respond best to these kinds of heroes.

And  in fantasy and science fiction, there are heroes of this stripe. There are plenty of classic warrior heroes for people to identify with in fantasy and science fiction. Knights of the round table, roaming out to do good. Aragorn the heir to a Kingdom he has to first save from Mordor before he can contemplate taking a throne.  Conan the Barbarian.  Druss the Legend. Xena Warrior Princess.

However, none of these, in or out of genre,  are really heroes I can deeply identify with and emulate. My lack of physical strength and dexterity are routinely mocked by anyone who has spent any time in my company. I once managed to hit my own ear trying to throw a punch.  And yet, the joy and what speculative fiction has taught me is that there can be other kinds of heroes. Heroes that I might identify with.

“Merlin is my hero” proclaims Arthur Freyn in the beginning of the movie Zardoz.  And I agree with him!  And Merlin is not the only hero of his class. Through speculative fiction, I met the kinds of people who become heroes that I can identify with. Pug, in the Raymond Feist novels, going through trial and fire to become a magician. Jimmy the Hand, Squire James, was a lot of fun, too, being a squire who still keeps his hand in his thieving business. I liked them both far more than the more standard heroes like Prince Arutha.

Bilbo Baggins of the Shire, who used his courage, quick thinking, and a certain magic ring to defeat spiders, outwit elves, riddle with a dragon and come home with a share of the treasure. Thorin Oakenshield might have been the hero dwarf of the company, but it was Bilbo who was much more  the character I most wanted to be.

FitzChivalry, the titular hero of The Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb, too, uses guile, skill, stealth and his wits. He learns to be an assassin, learns magic, and progresses and grows over the subsequent novels. He pays heavy prices, sometimes runs away from his problems, but when the chips are down, he rises to the occasion.

And the character in the Harry Potter series I felt the most akin to? Not the “sports jock Harry”. Not the big brash family centered around Ron Weasley.  No it was bookish Hermione Granger, at Hogwarts solely because of her skill and ability. . I suspect that if I was 25 years younger when I read the Harry Potter novels, I would have had a major character-crush on her.

Is it any wonder that in Dungeons and Dragons, I tend to play Magic Users,  Clerics and Rogues much more often than Fighters or Paladins?

It is these sorts of heroism, the heroism of the mind, of quick thinking, of courage, of loyalty, of skill and knowledge, more than heroism because one has a magic sword or can swing a fifty pound battleaxe, that really makes for heroes that I can emulate, aspire to be, look up to, and identify with.

And, heroes I can identify with are hardly restricted to the fantasy side of the genre, either.

Consider Jimmy Pak, skillful enough to have smuggled a skybike on the mission to explore the titular ship in Rendevous with Rama? Biking across the skies of Rama to get to the inaccessible far side of the ocean and cliff. That took daring, skill, and bravery to pull off.

Or perhaps Hari Seldon, the mover and shaker behind the First and Second Foundation. A figure determined to, by hook, and by crook, to keep the deep darkness at bay and bring about a new and better galactic Civilization. He was hero as chessmaster, setting things in motion hundreds of years in advance. I was shocked, the first time I read Foundation, to encounter The Mule, who seemed tailor made tto unknowingly ruin his plans…

Or Jame Retief, the hero of Keith Laumer’s Retief novels and stories. Even if he did use fisticuffs more than I would be prone to do, he was the antithesis of a do-nothing bureaucrat, exposing alien plots, making the best diplomatic deal for Earth in his role in the  Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, and foiling the enemies of Man.

And who didn’t want to be Han Solo, with his own ship, the best partner a guy could have, and he gets the girl by the end of the trilogy?

So, with heroes like this to show the way, I, too, can have heroes  that I can aspire to, and identify with. I, too, can be a hero. That’s one of the many things that speculative fiction has taught me.

Not A Review: Transcendental – James Gunn

Warning: This is NOT A REVIEW. This is an epic sized rant-fest. Why? Because I didn’t finish this book, but the publisher sent it to me. I gave it my best college try (which I address at the end of the review) so I’m putting up my overall feelings anyway. I apologize for the sarcastic tone. Sometimes a girl has to get things out of her system. I’m sure you understand.

About the Book

Transcendental, an epic, high-concept space opera, is a Canterbury Tales of the far future in which beings from many planets hurtle across the universe to uncover the secrets of the legend of Transcendentalism. Riley, a veteran of interstellar war,  however, is not journeying to achieve transcendence, a vague mystical concept that has drawn everyone else on the ship to this journey into the unknown at the far edge of the galaxy. His mission is to find and kill the prophet who is reputed to help others transcend. As the ship speeds through space, the voyage is marred by violence and betrayal, making it clear that Riley is not the only one of the ship’s passengers who is not the spiritual seeker they all claim to be.

As tensions rise, Riley realizes that the ship’s journey is less like the Canterbury Tales and more like a harrowing, deadly voyage on a ship of fools. Looking for allies, he becomes friendly with a mysterious passenger named Asha, who, like so many others on the ship, is more than she appears. But while she professes to be just another pilgrim, he comes to realize that like him, she is keeping secrets could be the key to Riley’s assignment, or might make him question everything he thought he knew about Transcendentalism and his mission to stop it.

This long-awaited novel is a grand space adventure of exploration, intrigue, redemption, and the universal spirit that unites all beings.  This is a real departure for Gunn, a novel of grand scope and high concept, a capstone to the career of this Grand Master of science fiction.

304 pages (Hardcover)

Published on August 27, 2013

Published by Tor

Author’s webpage

This book was provided for my review by the publisher.

—–

I hate to admit it, but I couldn’t finish Transcendental. I got about 100 pages into it before I admitted defeat. The truth is, when I got my hands on this book, I was beyond excited. James Gunn is a name that packs some serious punch. He’s a well-known author and that kind of name recognition carries some weight. It makes geeky people like myself get really excited.

Then I read my 100 pages, and my smile started to fade.

The problems with Transcendental are numerous. First, the lack of any real history creates an automatic divide between the reader and the story. There’s nothing there to care about. The reader is thrust into a situation with a bunch of pilgrims, each of whom are absolutely (almost unbelievably and too-perfectly) otherworldly in appearance. They are traveling somewhere for some purpose after some hinted-at violence of some sort or another (notice, lots of vague hints here, because “vague” is what fills up a lot of the first bit of this book). It feels so incredibly contrived that it’s unbelievable. There isn’t any history for me to wonder about or connect with. Instead, I’m just thrown into a pulpy mess of a situation without any real direction. I tend to lose patience with that sort of thing fairly quickly.

The aliens, as I mentioned, are all incredibly otherworldly. This is something I expect from space opera type books. The issue is that the creatures are so alien and otherworldly that they almost seem to be weird just for the sake of being weird. That’s fine, and it can be fun for things to be weird, but in science fiction, as well as with anything else, the weird needs to be reigned in a bit so the reader can believe it. There should be some sort of a system the reader can understand, or some universal laws they can use to mentally come to grips with the world/universe/whatever.

The absence of some sort of universal structure, mixed with the lack of history, is probably what made the alien life so unbelievable for me. There’s an alien flower, an alien weasel, an alien who is referred to as the “coffin alien,” and numerous others. While this is all very SciFi, the creatures fold under any real scrutiny. These issues mix together into some horrible stew that just pushed me over the edge. For example, the main character Riley decides to enter some sort of protective agreement with an alien, as all of the pilgrims are in some vague sort of danger. That’s fine, but when you really think about it, neither Riley, nor this alien knows anything about each other. They barely share the same language. Then they form two different teams of people (none of whom know any of the others, and half of them can’t talk to the other half, so where’s the trust? Motivation? Bueler?) and somehow they all decide to band together and protect each other. It makes no sense to me. Gunn makes such a huge point of making these aliens look so, well, alien, but they don’t act alien. Hell, they don’t even act believably within the (vague) context of the situation.

Then you add all the cliché points, like the mysterious woman (who is, evidently, cat-like. If my senses are correct, there will probably be some sexual tension surrounding her, as she seems to be the only woman in sniffing range of the plot), the Arab-looking captain who is all business and never seems to reveal enough information, the protagonist who is “under cover” (and an epic badass), the aliens that are so alien that they just must be believable (/sarcasm font). Top it off with some very poorly edited writing and an incredibly lackluster, world with a pulpy and directionless plot and you have an epic, space opera sized mess.

I hate math, and one of the reasons why is because I hit a wall where I think, “Why should I care?” I don’t care how many apples Johnny has. I’m not going to eat them, carry them, or buy them. He can count his own apples, thankyouverymuch. I had the same reaction to Transcendental. I just didn’t care. After 100 pages, I couldn’t even pretend to care. I couldn’t fake it. I reached that point that I reach with story problems where my brain just turns off and starts drooling. Maybe I’m being a bit unfair. Maybe it got better after 100 pages. I’m sorry to say, with a name like James Gunn, I expect a lot and this didn’t deliver.

This might just be the wrong fit for me. I have full faith that somewhere out there is a person who will pick up this book, read it, and think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. They’ll probably enjoy counting Johnny’s apples, too. I envy them, whoever they are. If I had that sort of mind, I probably would have had better grades in college.