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Breathmoss and Other Exhalations
This collection of literary short fiction combines fantasy, science fiction, and horror in vivid settings, peopled with ordinary humans with normal relationships, and the interaction of the mundane with the fantastic. In "Breathmoss," a young girl must cope with the relationship with her family, love, and a community set in rigid custom, where males are a rarity. In "Verglas," a man must decide to leave his humanity by going native on an ice world or abandon his family. The events leading to the formation of the current government, the repression of Jews and homosexuals, and the horrors of being a closet homosexual in such a regime are examined in "The Summer Isles." Other stories encompass a scientist who searches for extraterrestrial intelligence; a rigid, aged man finding magic by a pool; and an 18-year-old girl who gains the reputation of being a death flower during WWII.
Contents:
Breathmoss (2002)
Verglas (1996)
The Chop Girl (1999)
The Noonday Pool (1995)
New Light on the Drake Equation (2001)
Isabel of the Fall (2001)
The Summer Isles (1998)
Contents:
Breathmoss (2002)
Verglas (1996)
The Chop Girl (1999)
The Noonday Pool (1995)
New Light on the Drake Equation (2001)
Isabel of the Fall (2001)
The Summer Isles (1998)
309 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2004
2 people are currently reading
128 people want to read
About the author
Ian R. MacLeod
174 books127 followersIan R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His most recent novel, Wake Up and Dream, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series Playhouse Presents. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 29, 2022
In his introduction to this collection MacLeod says that works of fiction are complex lies and if you’re going to do it well you really ought not to stick to realism so much as make your lies as big as possible in order for readers to recognise something they’ve known all along.
In this book MacLeod’s lies are profound, considered, and each has a sense of inevitability about it, a revealed truth if you like. Not one of them is disappointing in any way.
Title story Breathmoss is set on the planet Habara where men are an extreme rarity – as they are in wider galactic society. Jalila was brought up in the high mountains by her three mothers (only one of them biologically so.) Gateways between the stars allow travel to other worlds in ships piloted by a chosen few tariquas.
The first action of the novella follows Jalila’s journey down from the mountains to the seaside town of Al Janb where after a few days she coughs up the breathmoss which had helped her to breathe the rarefied mountain air from her lungs, spilling it into the sea. From a site across the bay over the horizon rockets rise to the orbiting space station where the local Gateway lies. Macleod’s evocation of the sights and sounds of Al Janb, the society in which Jalila lives, its customs and trappings (dreamtents, tideflowers, that breathmoss) is masterful. Neither is he prepared to rush his story. The accumulation of detail is part of its strength.
One day Jalila notices a strange looking person fishing. The reader immediately knows this is a male, but Jalila has to be told, then her investigations reveal that he, Kalal, is in fact a boy not a man. Their friendship grows but does not develop in the way that the reader might expect. In fact her first lover is the local centre of teenage attention, Nayra. The crucial encounter of her life though is with an aged tariqua in a ruined castle someway out of town.
This is a beautifully told, wise story of coming of age, getting of wisdom, and time (or perhaps relativistic) travel.
In Verglas a lone settler on the planet Korai - always unnamed, though his wife Marion, and children Robbie and Sarah are given due recognition - comes to terms with his existence. It is an odd story, Marion, Robbie and Sarah having transformed into winged predators more suitable to the new world while their bodies remain more or less intact in a mound outside his base. A traverse across country - albeit inside a mechanical device - involves the use of many mountaineering techniques and terms and the inevitable accident provides tension.
The Chop Girl scratches that endless itch in parts of British culture to dredge up stories set in the Second World War. Our unnamed female narrator was a kitchen procurement orderly on a bomber base where she gained a reputation as a chop girl, a witch, a harbinger of death, after several men she had dallied with after a dance or evening together (with her always careful never to go the whole way) did not come back from their next flight. Then Squadron leader Walt Williams comes to the base, a man with a charmed life, survivor of many freak accidents. She soon senses there is something strange about him, an other-worldliness. MacLeod’s atmosphere of realism blended with spookiness is excellently conjured up.
The Noonday Pool features an ageing composer, Sir Edward, who lives near Worcester and is obviously modelled on Elgar. (An afterword explicitly states that he was, but is in most ways different.) The story is seen through the personas of Peg, a girl seemingly inhabiting the wild, Sir Edward, and his housekeeper Mrs France. Sir Edward is having trouble negotiating his old age and composing any more music. Peg is an enigmatic presence with feral tendencies - and who may even be a werewolf - Mrs France a down-to-earth, practical figure. The Noonday Pool is somewhere in the woods nearby to where Peg takes Sir Edward one day. The story resists explaining itself but like all MacLeod’s work is beautifully written.
New Light on the Drake Equation is the story of Tom Kelly, told from the retrospect of his old age and a last encounter with the love of his life, Terr. Tom’s consuming interest has always been the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, a search in which almost everyone else has lost interest now that no such life has been found elsewhere in the Solar System, not by the (modified) humans who have finally landed on Mars nor by the probe sent to Jupiter’s moon Europa. He still conducts his search from a mountain installation near St Hilaire, a village in the Massif Central of France which is also a centre for the night life of flyers, genetically modified people with wings, taking advantage of the thermals. In this world genetic adaptation is commonplace, even acquisition of a different language is achieved simply, by imbibing a vial of the appropriate serum, though Tom of course prefers the old ways. Replete with mentions of classic SF, in which Tom was enraptured in his youth, and a discussion of both the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox, it is threnodic in tone and in that last encounter with Terr becomes a ghost story.
Isabel of the Fall recounts a myth, or, rather, is a commentary on one, from the world of Ghezirah. In the aftermath of the War of the Lilies, Isabel, unremarkable, not too intelligent but not dim, not beautiful but not ugly, is taken from her orphaned origins to be an acolyte of the Dawn Church, trained to sing in the light of Sabil in the mornings from her minaret, directing it towards the mirrors that distribute it over her valley of Nashir; and sing it out again at night. A minor fault in mirror 28 leads her to examine the courtyard of the Cathedral of the Word – a vast library – where she sees a young girl, Genya, dancing. Her apology to Genya for the lack of light goes on to become a friendship which is a betrayal of both their churches, and precipitates the fall of the title. Although the tale has aspects of fantasy various bits of high tech are present in the piece and its Science Fictionality is confirmed when we find Ghezirah is a Dyson sphere.
The Summer Isles, an Altered History, has a tonal quality similar to Keith Roberts’s Weihnachtsabend except here Britain - aggrandised as Greater Britain and run by the Empire Alliance and its leader John Arthur - has not collaborated with a fascist regime but itself become one. Narrator Griffin Brooke (known by his pen name Geoffrey Brook) is a homosexual whose past links to Arthur from before the Great War (which the Allies lost in 1918 – presumably as a result of the success of the German Spring Offensive) lead to him being embroiled in a plot to remove Arthur from power. The Summer Isles of the title are off the coast in Scotland and a supposed refuge to which ‘filthy Jews’ have been sent for resettlement. Other camps on the Isle of Man have a more sinister character. The usual grace notes of altered history occur, King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis, for example, along with Churchill as Prime Minister in the 1920s and not making a success of it. But in the main this is an extremely well told story about life, regret and loss.
In this book MacLeod’s lies are profound, considered, and each has a sense of inevitability about it, a revealed truth if you like. Not one of them is disappointing in any way.
Title story Breathmoss is set on the planet Habara where men are an extreme rarity – as they are in wider galactic society. Jalila was brought up in the high mountains by her three mothers (only one of them biologically so.) Gateways between the stars allow travel to other worlds in ships piloted by a chosen few tariquas.
The first action of the novella follows Jalila’s journey down from the mountains to the seaside town of Al Janb where after a few days she coughs up the breathmoss which had helped her to breathe the rarefied mountain air from her lungs, spilling it into the sea. From a site across the bay over the horizon rockets rise to the orbiting space station where the local Gateway lies. Macleod’s evocation of the sights and sounds of Al Janb, the society in which Jalila lives, its customs and trappings (dreamtents, tideflowers, that breathmoss) is masterful. Neither is he prepared to rush his story. The accumulation of detail is part of its strength.
One day Jalila notices a strange looking person fishing. The reader immediately knows this is a male, but Jalila has to be told, then her investigations reveal that he, Kalal, is in fact a boy not a man. Their friendship grows but does not develop in the way that the reader might expect. In fact her first lover is the local centre of teenage attention, Nayra. The crucial encounter of her life though is with an aged tariqua in a ruined castle someway out of town.
This is a beautifully told, wise story of coming of age, getting of wisdom, and time (or perhaps relativistic) travel.
In Verglas a lone settler on the planet Korai - always unnamed, though his wife Marion, and children Robbie and Sarah are given due recognition - comes to terms with his existence. It is an odd story, Marion, Robbie and Sarah having transformed into winged predators more suitable to the new world while their bodies remain more or less intact in a mound outside his base. A traverse across country - albeit inside a mechanical device - involves the use of many mountaineering techniques and terms and the inevitable accident provides tension.
The Chop Girl scratches that endless itch in parts of British culture to dredge up stories set in the Second World War. Our unnamed female narrator was a kitchen procurement orderly on a bomber base where she gained a reputation as a chop girl, a witch, a harbinger of death, after several men she had dallied with after a dance or evening together (with her always careful never to go the whole way) did not come back from their next flight. Then Squadron leader Walt Williams comes to the base, a man with a charmed life, survivor of many freak accidents. She soon senses there is something strange about him, an other-worldliness. MacLeod’s atmosphere of realism blended with spookiness is excellently conjured up.
The Noonday Pool features an ageing composer, Sir Edward, who lives near Worcester and is obviously modelled on Elgar. (An afterword explicitly states that he was, but is in most ways different.) The story is seen through the personas of Peg, a girl seemingly inhabiting the wild, Sir Edward, and his housekeeper Mrs France. Sir Edward is having trouble negotiating his old age and composing any more music. Peg is an enigmatic presence with feral tendencies - and who may even be a werewolf - Mrs France a down-to-earth, practical figure. The Noonday Pool is somewhere in the woods nearby to where Peg takes Sir Edward one day. The story resists explaining itself but like all MacLeod’s work is beautifully written.
New Light on the Drake Equation is the story of Tom Kelly, told from the retrospect of his old age and a last encounter with the love of his life, Terr. Tom’s consuming interest has always been the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, a search in which almost everyone else has lost interest now that no such life has been found elsewhere in the Solar System, not by the (modified) humans who have finally landed on Mars nor by the probe sent to Jupiter’s moon Europa. He still conducts his search from a mountain installation near St Hilaire, a village in the Massif Central of France which is also a centre for the night life of flyers, genetically modified people with wings, taking advantage of the thermals. In this world genetic adaptation is commonplace, even acquisition of a different language is achieved simply, by imbibing a vial of the appropriate serum, though Tom of course prefers the old ways. Replete with mentions of classic SF, in which Tom was enraptured in his youth, and a discussion of both the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox, it is threnodic in tone and in that last encounter with Terr becomes a ghost story.
Isabel of the Fall recounts a myth, or, rather, is a commentary on one, from the world of Ghezirah. In the aftermath of the War of the Lilies, Isabel, unremarkable, not too intelligent but not dim, not beautiful but not ugly, is taken from her orphaned origins to be an acolyte of the Dawn Church, trained to sing in the light of Sabil in the mornings from her minaret, directing it towards the mirrors that distribute it over her valley of Nashir; and sing it out again at night. A minor fault in mirror 28 leads her to examine the courtyard of the Cathedral of the Word – a vast library – where she sees a young girl, Genya, dancing. Her apology to Genya for the lack of light goes on to become a friendship which is a betrayal of both their churches, and precipitates the fall of the title. Although the tale has aspects of fantasy various bits of high tech are present in the piece and its Science Fictionality is confirmed when we find Ghezirah is a Dyson sphere.
The Summer Isles, an Altered History, has a tonal quality similar to Keith Roberts’s Weihnachtsabend except here Britain - aggrandised as Greater Britain and run by the Empire Alliance and its leader John Arthur - has not collaborated with a fascist regime but itself become one. Narrator Griffin Brooke (known by his pen name Geoffrey Brook) is a homosexual whose past links to Arthur from before the Great War (which the Allies lost in 1918 – presumably as a result of the success of the German Spring Offensive) lead to him being embroiled in a plot to remove Arthur from power. The Summer Isles of the title are off the coast in Scotland and a supposed refuge to which ‘filthy Jews’ have been sent for resettlement. Other camps on the Isle of Man have a more sinister character. The usual grace notes of altered history occur, King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis, for example, along with Churchill as Prime Minister in the 1920s and not making a success of it. But in the main this is an extremely well told story about life, regret and loss.
September 9, 2007
I’ve failed at Macleod book before, but this is really a terrific short story collection. The stories of “Breathmoss”, ”Verglass”, and “Isabel of the Fall” plunge you into worlds of wonder and strangeness with a depth of surreal imagery and stories of mythic power. Melancholy and wonder mix and their depth of meaning and beautiful prose remind me of similar labyrinthine fictions of Gene Wolfe. “Chop Girl” and “Noonday Pool” would be highlights of any other collection but come of slight in comparison to these stories, but they are still beautifully written. “New Light on the Drake Equation” reminds me of M. John Harrison, in it a man probes the stars looking for sign of alien life while humanity around him becomes more and more alien. Then there is the alternative history novella “Summer Islands” and which is a fully realized and written account of a post world one fascist state in England with a great melancholy and doomed narrator. When compared with much lauded efforts like Philip Roth’s execrable “Plot against America”, it’s sad that this story is not getting the respect it deserves.
August 28, 2016
Absolutely, stunningly brilliant.
March 19, 2023
I don't usually give short story collections 5 stars, but I decided this one on a whole deserved it. As with most collections, there are some strong stories and some weaker ones. The strong ones were fantastic though. I have never read MacLeod before, but his best stories were beautiful. The characters carefully drawn and treated with a lot of empathy. Reminded in a way of William Maxwell. There don't seem to be outright evil characters, just people who sometimes make bad decisions (even if those bad decisions are sometimes catastrophic.) There was a great amount of humanity in this collection.
Breathmoss (5 stars): A beautiful coming of age story on an alien planet. Dealt wit issues of first love, unrequited love, coming to see your parents as human, and how both our past and future are unavoidable. The choices we make now effect our future lives, and we must accept that. It's still a part of who we are.
Verglas (5 stars): Another great story of family and what it means. In particular here, when some part of the family moves on and leaves a member behind. MacLeod did a great job putting that into a SF setting.
The Chop Girl (3-3.5 stars): A cute story, seemed inconsequential, though.
The Noonday Poll (3-3.5 stars): Never quite worked for me. And there was a moment where it seems an older man was lusting after a teenage girl that didn't sit right with me. It's fantasy, but still.
New Light on the Drake Equation (5 stars): This and Breathmoss are my favorites of this collection. The main characters really shine and a treated with a great amount of empathy, despite their flaws. It's the recollection of the final scientist working on SETI. The world around him has become like the SF novels/movies he read/watched when younger, but not in the way he expected. He seems to be looking forward, but clinging to the past. In particular, a lost love of his college days. It turned out to be a touching ghost story in the end.
Isabel of the Fall (4.5 stars): I thought this was a nice myth making exercise. As with all the stories of in this book, it is intensely focused on character. Here we follow Isabella, who seems to be the equivalent of a saint in the religion of her world. She helps control some of the many mirrors that bring sunlight to her world. She ends up being persecuted by her church, but makes a lasting change to the people of her world. It's interesting how she's very much treated as a regular human making usual choices in a somewhat selfish way, but due to circumstances makes a substantial impact on her people.
The Summer Isles (3.5-4 stars): An alternate history where Britain loses WWI and becomes a fascist state. It follows and aging, homosexual academic as he remembers his past. It's well told, like the others, and the character is sympathetic. I'm not a big fan of alternate histories. Also, this novella was turned into a novel later. It was clear some important events were missing in the novella (for example the novella references to "New Buckingham Palace" and a fire at "Old Buckingham Palace." A description of these events don't appear in the novella, but they do apparently appear in the novel.)
Breathmoss (5 stars): A beautiful coming of age story on an alien planet. Dealt wit issues of first love, unrequited love, coming to see your parents as human, and how both our past and future are unavoidable. The choices we make now effect our future lives, and we must accept that. It's still a part of who we are.
Verglas (5 stars): Another great story of family and what it means. In particular here, when some part of the family moves on and leaves a member behind. MacLeod did a great job putting that into a SF setting.
The Chop Girl (3-3.5 stars): A cute story, seemed inconsequential, though.
The Noonday Poll (3-3.5 stars): Never quite worked for me. And there was a moment where it seems an older man was lusting after a teenage girl that didn't sit right with me. It's fantasy, but still.
New Light on the Drake Equation (5 stars): This and Breathmoss are my favorites of this collection. The main characters really shine and a treated with a great amount of empathy, despite their flaws. It's the recollection of the final scientist working on SETI. The world around him has become like the SF novels/movies he read/watched when younger, but not in the way he expected. He seems to be looking forward, but clinging to the past. In particular, a lost love of his college days. It turned out to be a touching ghost story in the end.
Isabel of the Fall (4.5 stars): I thought this was a nice myth making exercise. As with all the stories of in this book, it is intensely focused on character. Here we follow Isabella, who seems to be the equivalent of a saint in the religion of her world. She helps control some of the many mirrors that bring sunlight to her world. She ends up being persecuted by her church, but makes a lasting change to the people of her world. It's interesting how she's very much treated as a regular human making usual choices in a somewhat selfish way, but due to circumstances makes a substantial impact on her people.
The Summer Isles (3.5-4 stars): An alternate history where Britain loses WWI and becomes a fascist state. It follows and aging, homosexual academic as he remembers his past. It's well told, like the others, and the character is sympathetic. I'm not a big fan of alternate histories. Also, this novella was turned into a novel later. It was clear some important events were missing in the novella (for example the novella references to "New Buckingham Palace" and a fire at "Old Buckingham Palace." A description of these events don't appear in the novella, but they do apparently appear in the novel.)
April 17, 2014
Interesting worlds, vivid descriptions and utterly passive protagonists that don't change or do anything. The best ending is bland, the rest being sadder. I didn't read the last two stories in the collection.
May 26, 2023
MacLeod je poseban pisac meni, prekrasne su mu tri priče koje sam uoravo pročitao jer su nažalost samo one prevedene kod nas.
To su priče : Dan dolaska
Novo svjetlo na jednadžbi
Dahovina
Dakle, svaka bolja od predhodne.
To su priče : Dan dolaska
Novo svjetlo na jednadžbi
Dahovina
Dakle, svaka bolja od predhodne.
October 7, 2012
My first Macleod book. I loved it and everything else he has written since.
October 19, 2015
Read title story.
December 27, 2023
(commenting only on Breathmoss)
The world is immersive and inventive, but the story itself is a drag and failed to capture my interest.
The world is immersive and inventive, but the story itself is a drag and failed to capture my interest.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews