Plume, 1988. 196p.

In her preamble to this collection of stories and poems which feature animals Le Guin refers to the denigration talking-animal tales receive at the hands of “grown-up” critics and theorists. They are seen as children’s fare and not worth serious consideration. But of course it is in pointing up the differences and similarities between species and their use in morality tales that their usefulness lies. And that usefulness is no small thing. It is to the credit of fantastic fiction – perhaps its glory – that only in its area can such things be fully explored. To know what it is to be truly human we must contemplate the non-human.

Le Guin has of course investigated the many different ways in which humans can be human beings, and in particular altered in sexuality, throughout her career, so this is no departure.

The lead tale here, the award winning novelette Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight, is I suppose a fantasy wherein a human girl, never named throughout, the sole survivor of a plane crash, is taken in by a community of animals. The animals appear to her to live as humans – and they talk of course – but have animal behaviours, especially in terms of waste disposal and sex. Their attitudes and behaviour are the norm here though and it is this simple transference that highlights the peculiarities of our species, our detachment from nature, our oddness. The strangeness of the milieu, the fact of the animals being animals, their kindness and the child’s simple acceptance of things is essential to the story’s success. It is, in the original sense of the word, fabulous.

The Wife’s Story and Mazes are stories of transference in which we get almost to the end before the true natures of the protagonists are revealed. The Direction Of The Road has an unusual narrator, a tree, and is a fine exemplar of the working through of an initial premise.

Trees are something of a Le Guin theme. There was of course The Word For World Is Forest and in (Hugo Award nominee) Vaster Than Empires And More Slow – in this collection – there are arboriforms which turn out to be part of a planet wide intelligence.

The White Donkey and Horse Camp are slighter tales which are nevertheless effective. Schrödinger’s Cat considers a third outcome to the famous thought experiment beyond the either/or that quantum theory appears to suggest. The Author of the Acacia Seeds and other extracts from the Journal of Therolingiustics is an amusing dissection of the academic style as well as a thorough exploration of the possibilities of language in the non-human world. May’s Lion is presented first as a true story then as fiction while She Unnames Them is a strange piece about the power of names to circumscribe, or provoke, thoughts and actions.

Included in the nineteen poems by Le Guin is one which is her own translation of one of Rilke’s.

Postscripts 22/23, PS Publishing, 2010. 394 p

The book – one of the most recent in the Postscripts series of anthologies – contains short stories encompassing a range of genres from SF, Fantasy and Horror through to mainstream but mostly in the speculative realm. There are too many stories to consider individually but the standard is high. Even if not all are entirely successful the book contains very few duds. One of the most effective tales is the title story, by Lucius Shepard, about a plot by a famous movie star to enravel his associates in the – perhaps simulated – murder of his girlfriend. Eric Brown’s The Human Element works well even if it re-visits one of his early themes, the relationship between an artist and his work. All the contributions are worth reading though I found Bully by Jack Ketchum too predictable. The Forever Forest by Rhys Hughes was curiously old fashioned, as if the author was trying too hard to convey otherness; it reads as if it might have been written in the 1950s. There’s also a story, Osmotic Pressure, by someone called Jack Deighton, which contains a fair bit of (arguably necessary?) information dumping.

Millenium, 1998. 292p.

The book contains two novellas and five shorter stories taking in SF, fantasy, thriller and mainstream. The title novella has quite the most unsympathetic narrator I think I’ve ever read. He is supposed to be British and Shepard gets the idioms correct but we use “at night” rather than “nights” and (mostly) don’t call the game “soccer.” Full marks for the effort though. It’s a strange tale set on a space station beyond the orbit of Mars, where the usual human venalities and appetites abound.

A Little Night Music’s SF gloss features reanimated musicians but is really about a failed marriage.

Human History is set in a post-apocalyptic world where strange creatures known as Captains exert control over the remnants of humanity. Things do not turn out well.

Sports In America is a straightforward tale about a gangland hit that doesn’t quite come off. The characters rattle on unnecessarily about baseball and American Football.

The Sun Spider is a fantasy/SF cross where a theoretical physicist has discovered life in the Sun.

All The Perfumes Of Araby, a story published in 1992 but set in 1992 and which has been somewhat overtaken by events in the real world – the Middle East has not evolved in quite the way depicted, there are as yet no inoculations against AIDS – has a female Desert Storm veteran wishing to recapture some of that experience by taking up with a smuggler based in Cairo. The smuggling goes wrong.

Beast Of The Heartland is about a declining boxer who has a chance of one last big payday. Shepard manages to find a new angle on this hoary old scenario.

Apart from the two non-speculative ones the stories as a whole show a tendency to start in the real, solid world and part way through shift into a more fantastic milieu. Their narrators are also keen to tell rather than show and to philosophise. Betrayals are common. The collection as a whole is really just what you’d want in fiction.

Over at Orion Publishing Group their Gollancz imprint is celebrating 50 years of publishing SF. They’re having a vote to see which of their chosen titles is the best. There are two categories, one for SF, one for Fantasy.

I thought I’d do this as an Ian Sales type meme.

The ones in bold I have read.

Gollancz top 25 SF titles:-

A Case of Conscience by James Blish
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Dune by Frank Herbert
Fairyland by Paul McAuley
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Flood by Stephen Baxter
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes *
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Pavane by Keith Roberts
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Ringworld by Larry Niven
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Separation by Christopher Priest
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

* as a short story.

As you can see I’ve read all but five of these.

Gollancz top 25 Fantasy titles:-

Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
Book of the New Sun (Vol 1&2) (Vol 3&4) by Gene Wolfe
The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg
Conan Volume One by Robert E. Howard
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
Elric by Michael Moorcock
Eric by Terry Pratchett
Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin
The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Little, Big by John Crowley
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
The Runes of the Earth by Stephen Donaldson
Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
Viriconium by M. John Harrison
Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan

Only seven from the Fantasy list, though.

For what it’s worth I voted for Keith Roberts’s Pavane and Little, Big by John Crowley.

PS Publishing, 2010. 394 p.

I have progressed halfway through this collection (in which appears my own story Osmotic Pressure) but have laid it down temporarily as I have more time to devote to longer works when I am on holiday. I will review it in full later.

Tor, 2007. 293p.

Having now read both it is apparent that Bloodmind and Williams’s previous book, Darkland, are indeed a thematic unity. While both are capable of being read as stand-alone novels they are essentially one book split into two.

Bloodmind is a lessening of sentience, a reversion to animal status, which occurs naturally from time to time to the inhabitants of the planet Mondhile, and in reverse to the creatures known as Selk on Vari Halsdottir’s world, Muspell. It is also induced artificially in the women of Nhem by their male rulers. This last barbarism is strictly necessary to neither plot nor resolution and, apart from being a piece of gender politics, it is difficult to see why else it has been included beyond giving one of the viewpoint characters a reason for being more or less on her own. (I did, however, note that Nhem is men spelled backwards with the interpolation of an h, which may or may not be significant.)

The narrative flits between the three planets and the women whose fates, along with that of the Selk, become intertwined but is mainly carried by Vari, the protagonist whose story links the two books.

As in Darkland the SF and Fantasy elements of Bloodmind do not sit well with each other. The tale is at base a fantasy with SF trappings bolted on and as a result fails on both counts.

Not one of Williams’s best I would say.

There is a span count of 1, sadly.

Kraken utilises Miéville’s common setting of London, albeit a strange London. This otherness beside the familiar is a strand in his work evident from King Rat and Un Lun Dun through to THE CITY AND YTIC EHT.

This one started out as if it may have been written with a film or TV adaptation in mind – one with a potentially light-hearted take – but soon veers off down strange Miévillean byways which may be unfilmable. For these are the end times and cultists worshipping all manner of weird gods abound.

It begins with a kind of locked room mystery as a giant squid, Architeuthis, has been stolen – formalin, tank and all – from its stance in the Darwin Centre, a natural history museum where Billy Harrow is a curator. He helped to prepare the squid for show and is thought to hold the knowledge that might allow all those interested in its recovery to find it. The police fundamentalist and cult squad, the FSRC, is called in to help investigate the disappearance which becomes more involved when Billy discovers a body pickled (in too small a jar) in the museum’s basement. And these are merely the first strangenesses to be encountered in this book. We also have the consciousness of a man embedded within a tattoo, a tattoo which moves and speaks. Then there is the double act of Goss and Subby – two shapeshifting baddies from out of time (they shift other people’s shapes) – and weird sects, cults and mancers of all sorts.

Never short of incident and brimming with plot the novel is probably a bit too convoluted, with too many characters for its own good, and its one-damn-strange-thing-after-another-ness can verge on overkill. But this is an unashamed fantasy, a form to which I am antipathetic when it is taken to extremes; and Miéville is not one for restraint.

While Kraken sometimes skirts along the edge of comedy it never fully embraces it. There are too many killings and acts of violence for comedy to sit comfortably. I might have liked the novel better if it had. Its main fault is that it never manages to settle on which sort of book it is meant to be, straddling various narrative stools such as police procedural, one man against the odds, woman in search of the truth about her vanished lover, etc.

This may be a reason why it failed to make the award ballot for this year’s BSFA Awards.

Pedantic asides:- Miéville did make me think what the plural of quid pro quo might be. (To my British mind Miéville’s anglicised formulation “quids pro quo” would mean getting money for something rather than a mutual back-scratching.) Taking the phrase as meaning “this for that” then the English plural, for the phrase as a whole, would be quid pro quos. For the Latin plural you would have quae pro quibus (these for those.) There are two other semantic possibilities; quid pro quibus (this for those) and quae pro quo (these for that.) Miéville also seems to think that “law” and “lore” are homophones. Not where I come from they aren’t. And the establishment is a dry cleaner’s, not a dry cleaners.

I believe Miéville’s next is to be set in space. It’ll be interesting to see his take on that.

Mutation Press, 2010. 270 p.

This is a collection of “Strange Fiction” with music as the linking theme. The stories range through various different types of SF and fantasy with some diversions into Horror. The authors mostly have low profiles though they all seem to have previous publications. In at least some of their contributions the relationship of the tale to the theme was tangential and most did not depend on music for their resolution. That is how it should be, though; a story has to work as a story after all, not fit an arbitrary arrangement.

To my mind the most successful tales were Richard J Goldstein’s Dybbuk Blues, concerning a charmed cornet and the fates of its players, Susan Lanigan’s The Accompanist, where the spirits of Robert and Clara Schumann inhabit the bodies of a teacher and pupil in a Music College, L L Hannett’s Breathing Life Into The Dead, about err…. breathing life into the dead and Gavin Inglis’s Fugue, where a driver crashes on a lonely road and hears a choir singing. Special mentions too to Jim Steel’s The Shostakovich Ensemble, a discography of a rock group from a Stalinist Britain, and Neil Williamson’s Arrhythmia, a kind of 1984 with added songs.

Nothing to do with the quality of the collection or its execution but one thing which irritated me was the occasional tendency for the font size to alter and then soon revert. I found it very distracting trying to decipher what the reason for this might be before concluding there was none.

As in all anthologies, or indeed collections, the quality was variable, but the stories here were never less than readable.

Puffin, 2004. 211p.

Nick Gifford is the name under which Keith Brooke writes fiction for young adults.

Matt Guilder finds out shortly after his grandmother dies that he is descended on his mother’s side from a long line of guardians of an interface between the normal world and Alternity, a place where dark forces lurk, eager to breach the gates and flood into the mundane world. His immersion into this long-standing struggle is precipitated by his parents’ break up and the subsequent move to live with his cousins near to the ancestral home, seat of the local transition point.

Even though the treatment is necessarily sketchy – the target audience doesn’t want to be bored, I suspect, and things move along swiftly – the author depicts his characters with skilful economy. We are given more than enough knowledge to understand their motivations despite there being nothing spare in the narrative. Nor is Matt free from doubts and fears.

This is young adult reading from which adults can also gain enjoyment.

Tor , 2007. 424p

We first meet Vali Hallsdottir on the planet Nhem, on an assassination mission. Due to an unfortunate love affair with a man who she feels betrayed her (it is a moot point, or insufficiently delineated, whether he actually did) she has come under the influence of the Skald and has vowed not to have sex except as an aid and precursor to killing someone. Vali’s Skald training means she can utilise the seith, a set of enhanced intuitions which is inbred but nevertheless has to be honed.

Asides. 1. The prelude to the assassination is described as a rape but, while to the man concerned it is – as by implication are all the sexual encounters on Nhem, where women have been reduced to the state of animals and are treated as possessions – Vali is complicit in the act (and moreover has to be to fulfil her mission) so the word is not entirely appropriate. Admittedly the true mot juste does not spring readily to mind.
2. Williams describes Vali’s usual sexual abstinence as celibacy. It is, rather, chastity; there is a difference.

Vali’s disguised ex-lover, Frey, accompanied her to Nhem where he seemed to betray her again. He is from the part of the planet Muspell known as Darkland which severed ties with the set of islands known as the Reach a long time before the action of this book since some men disagreed with women’s rights. As the depiction of life on Nhem illustrates, the book is riddled with sexual politics such as these.

Darkland is home to the vitki, people with even more enhanced powers than Vali’s. When Vali subsequently travels there to seek out Frey and gain her revenge she encounters a vitki called Thorn who has plans for her.

Williams has her characters on Muspell descended from islanders – specifically from Orkney, Iceland, Greenland and Eire. As it is set 2000 years after these people left Earth I’d have thought old names might have been forgotten. Yet places are called Stronsay, Tiree and Coll, and a stretch of water is known as the Minch. (This is a curious echo of Mike Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire trilogy where Scots, Russians and Scandinavians settled a planet they named Darien.)

Darkland often veers over from SF into fantasy territory; no more so than in the other strand of the narrative set on the planet Mondhile, where a young man called Ruan is strongly attracted to a mysterious tower embodying a dark energy of some sort and to the strange girl called Gemaley who lives there. The off-worlder who is also entangled with Gemaley is of course Frey. Alerted to Frey’s whereabouts by Thorn, Vali soon arrives on Mondhile, where the bulk of the book is set.

The novel is actually two different stories; a first person narration SF one centred on Muspell, the Reach and Darkland and a third person crypto-fantasy on Mondhile. Williams does attempt to give the dark powers on Mondhile an SF gloss but it is never convincing. So too with the presence of Frey on Mondhile which seems merely to be a device to bring Vali there. The SF-ness of the Muspell sections and the fantasy slant of the Mondhile segments did not sit well, I thought.

The problem may be that the overall story was probably conceived as being longer and had to be split for publication. (SPOILER ALERT – Darkland ends with a cliffhanger.)

The “sequel” – I wait to read it before being certain – is called Bloodmind. The idea of bloodmind is mentioned several times in this volume and is a temporary switching off of humanity in Mondhile’s inhabitants: again given a somewhat unconvincing, not to say sketchy, technological rationale.

I’ll reserve full judgement till I’ve read that book.