Tag: fiction

The Arthur C. Clarke Awards: Belated Post

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy2 Comments

And don’t I feel silly! I know I said I’d turn to the Hugo Awards short-listed novels next. Meanwhile–how, I’m not sure–I completely misunderstood the Clarke Awards timeline. The decision has already been made and the winner is:


Annie Bot, Sierra Greer (Borough)


Find it HERE.

The other novels on the short list include:

  • Private Rites, Julia Armfield
  • The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
  • Extremophile, Ian Green
  • Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, Maud Woolf

As with all of these short-listed novels, I plan to post capsule reviews. Unlike the Nebula Award, Hugo Award, and other short lists, I’m writing these reviews after the judges have made their choice, so my posts won’t have as much of a horse-race vibe to them! All that drama about which book will be chosen–gone. But these awards lists are fantastic ways to explore some of the best recent speculative fiction, so I’ll just post my reviews and proceed as usual–and postpone the reviews of the Hugo short list.

Luckily, I had already started reading the novels on the Clarke list, so here are my first two reviews, of Private Rites, by Julia Armfield, and The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley.

Private Rites, Julia Armfield, 2024 (Macmillan/Flatiron)

Find it HERE.

Except for two aspects, this is simply a realistic novel about three squabbling sisters. They quarrel for several hundred pages, their disagreements made even worse by the terrible weather, and then they stop. However, the setting is in near-future London, where climate change has put the city mostly underwater, so the incessant rain isn’t simply a depressing backdrop to the depressing account of the sisters’ difficulties. Instead, I suppose the sisters’ difficulties and the rain become an intertwined emblem of the terrible times that have come upon the world.

There’s another aspect to the novel, too. The opening is extremely disturbing and gory, making me wonder if I were about to embark on a horror novel. Then that opening gets seemingly dropped. Now, we all know about Chekhov’s gun, don’t we? The great playwright Anton Chekhov famously said that if he puts a gun in the first act of his play, he’d better have that gun go off by the third act. So I waited patiently (and then, sorry, impatiently) through hundreds of pages of sniping and fussing and rain for the payoff promised by the gory opening. In retrospect, I can see that the seeds of the developing plot are there. But they are so muted that nothing much actually happens for a long, long time–or so it seemed to me as a reader. There’s not much rising tension, just the low-level grinding tension we may all feel when we are trapped with family members or other close acquaintances with whom we are having a long-standing, toxic set of disagreements and misunderstandings. I did admire the realistic characterizations of the sisters.

I’m thinking maybe it would have been good if at least one of the three siblings captured our sympathy, but I do appreciate how skillfully they were drawn–and I’m not a reader who has to identify with or even like any or all of the characters in a novel. Every book doesn’t have to have sympathetic characters. Some books don’t need them or would be ruined if they had them. A book like this, with a message like this, frequently does have at least one character who works as an explaining presence, though, and all of these characters seem equally, evenly confused and deluded. The message about climate change is of course sorely needed, and yes, I’m sure it will be as depressing as it seems in this novel. When the novel’s payoff finally comes, though, it is kind of too little too late for me as a reader, and–maybe I’m dense–but how and why the novel’s final events happen is as murky as the dystopian weather.

The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley 2025 (Simon & Shuster)

NOTE: Corrected post, with the right link to Bradley’s novel. Apologies!

Find it HERE.

I had read Bradley’s novel at the beginning of the year, but its details had faded a bit in my memory, so I recently re-read it–not just because of this list, either. The novel is on a number of lists recommending great recent speculative fiction. It is an immensely entertaining and skillful novel, and I enjoyed it just as much the second time as I did the first. It’s a time-travel novel drawing partly on a real incident, the fate of the English ships Erebus and Terror when the 1845 Franklin expedition to the high Arctic is lost with no survivors. But only one of the time travelers comes from that past event; others come from other pasts. The seaman from the Franklin expedition disaster is the most important but also a woman from the plague-ridden 16th century, another whose husband was guillotined in the French Revolution, several war-scarred combatants from different eras, and more. There’s even a really fun, really subtle cameo almost-appearance by the World War I poet Wilfred Owen. These voyagers from other times disconcertingly pop through a time portal into a near-future London. The novel’s main character, part of a secret government team helping the disoriented time-travelers assimilate into the present, begins to question herself and her employers as the details of the project grow ever more sinister.

Bradley’s plot and narration are intricate, the characters are fascinating, and the slow burn of evolving love is compelling. Underneath it all lurks a dangerous plot to use the unmoored, traumatized time-travelers in a scheme the main character only thinks she understands. Suspense mounts: will she puzzle out what is really going on underneath all the gaslighting, will she be able to avert the looming terrible damage to people she has come to admire and even love, and will she be able to do it all in time? We readers hurtle through a dizzy and skillfully managed amalgam of thriller plot, love story, search for identity, lost history, and threat of disastrous future. The twisty plot–unlike some–really earns its stripes.

I hate feeling manipulated by a plot with unexpected zigs and zags. Not here. Bradley gives us just enough breadcrumbs to begin figuring out, with the main character, the chilling direction of the novel’s events. The main character stands in for us, the readers, as the plot’s trap snaps shut. If that were not the case, I wouldn’t have enjoyed re-reading the novel. A twisty ending that springs itself on the reader with cheap tricks will not reward re-reading. This novel works as much because of the characters and the hows and whys of the plot as for the way the plot ends.

I have been thinking of this novel as a serious contender for prizes like the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It didn’t win this one, but it would have been a worthy choice. And it is also on the Hugo Awards short list!

Next up: Extremophile, by Ian Green, and Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, by Maud Woolf.

It’s A Midsummer Night’s Eve: Fairy Abduction, Anyone?

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

I write this blog post on the evening of June 24th, which is the traditional date of midsummer celebrations all across Europe, even if it’s not the date of the actual summer solstice (and misleading as well, since that moment marks the beginning of summer in the Northern hemisphere, not the middle of it). In many countries, June 24th is St. John’s Day, commemorating John the Baptist. Midsummer Night’s Eve, I suppose, was actually last night, the evening before St. John’s Day. In some countries, the day of celebration is June 25th.

A quick personal reflection: this time last year I had just returned from a month-long sojourn in Porto, Portugal. If only I had stayed another month! Porto has one of the most colorful St. John’s Day celebrations, featuring the sniffing of leeks (???), the eating of sardines (well, sure, it’s Porto, isn’t it?), and the whacking of strangers with toy hammers (???????).

With that out of the way: in my own perverse celebration of Midsummer, on to three pretty recent novels of fairy abduction. They are: A Court of Thorns and Roses, by Sarah Maas (2015), Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (2018), and The Cruel Prince, by Holly Black (2018). All three might be thought of as YA, but I question that categorization. A Court of Thorns and Roses started out being thrust into the YA box, but then–especially because of the graphic sexual content–it was re-classified NA (New Adult), and by now it is in a category all its own, the hugely successful engendering of a new fantasy/romance hybrid, romantasy. Spinning Silver has a very adult feel about it–not in the sexual way but in the deftly mature way the novel handles themes, characters, intricate plotting, and above all, excellent writing. I suppose The Cruel Prince really is YA. More about that to come.

A Court of Thorns and Roses, Sarah Maas (2015)

Find it HERE.

What can I say about this novel that hasn’t already been said? I did try. See my review for last year’s midsummer fairy reads HERE. This novel and its sequels spawned an entire hybrid and hugely popular genre, romantasy, so much so that it actually goes by its widely-recognized initials, ACOTAR. The sex is hot. The fairies in all their shapes and iterations are hot. The main character starts out very much an abducted damsel in distress, but in later books, she grows a spine. So if you read Book One and are put off, just go on to read Book Two. Then if you really love it, keep reading. There are a bunch of them. I have to give the novel and its siblings a lot of credit for creating an intriguing and intricately described fairyland with elaborate customs, politics, and (did I mention this?) hot sex. I got sick of it/didn’t believe in it after a while, with its bathrooms apparently by Kohler, but okay, I kept reading. This book, along with all the many books it has influenced, is a true publishing force. With many another fan, you may want to cry out to the various incredibly buff fairies of ACOTAR, Steal me next! Steal me! Steal me!

Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik (2018)

Find it HERE.

I really admire this novel. It’s one of those books based on a fairy tale, but that’s misleading. Yes, it is based on the Rumpelstiltskin folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, but it is also a fascinating historical novel with fantasy elements. And in addition: fairy abduction. I won’t review this one at length because I already have, in my series of blog posts on novels that are fairytale retellings. See my review HERE. It’s a wonderful book. The main character is a spunky young woman, but I really don’t associate the novel with the all too frequent trivialities of YA. (You can see I have some prejudices about YA. You may not share them! I probably have them because I’m old and grouchy.) The fairies are as morally ambiguous as they always are. Delightful read.

The Cruel Prince, Holly Black (2018)

Find it HERE.

This brings me to The Cruel Prince, a novel I hadn’t read until now. I probably put off reading it because it is, indeed, YA (and its title is a little clunky). But I enjoyed this novel immensely, even though I’m not exactly the audience for it. I say that, and then I reflect that many, many readers of YA are adults. This is a good one, folks! Black’s novel is unlike Spinning Silver and ACOTAR in one important respect. Those two novels are what’s known as “second world fantasy” or “high fantasy.” This simply means that such stories are set from the get-go in a world far, far away from ours. Although–now that I think about it–novels of fairy abduction like those might actually transition from a “second world” (the fantasy world of the novel) into a “third world,” the parallel universe of fairyland, sometimes separated by a physical border, other times by some type of mystical transition from one realm to the other.

The Cruel Prince is different. This novel is portal fantasy, “low fantasy,” where the action begins in our own world and then transports the characters to a different realm (think Harry Potter). The fairy world of The Cruel Prince seems to exist side-by-side with the real world, too, again like Harry Potter. The characters can come and go. The fairy foster-father of the main character intrudes on her childhood world to murder her human parents and abduct her and her two sisters to his estate in fairyland. He is one of the fairy gentry there. Not a spoiler–this happens in one of the first scenes of the book. Such a gory beginning and such an exotic location as fairyland don’t prevent the main character from nipping across to the real world for a visit to Target. She reads as a real teen-aged girl. A teen-aged girl living a very strange life.

I know I keep mentioning Harry Potter, but this novel is actually nothing like Harry Potter, believe me. Black’s novel is full of court intrigue of the most delicious, well-plotted kind. It has a whiff of dark academia fantasy as the main character attends a sort of high school for fairy combat and lore, and more than a hint of horror. Think about that beginning. The foster father is a type of fairy known as a “red cap,” extremely violent and dangerous, known for dipping his cap in the blood of his victims. There’s the usual torn-between-two-lovers YA trope, handled here very subtly. And there’s the push-pull between the main character’s humanity and the fairy culture she aspires to blend into–especially poignant since the fairies, famously, are so amoral and dangerous that everything in the reader may scream “get out!” Besides, after reading Mirrlees (see my earlier post), I was especially intrigued that Black includes the dangers of eating fairy fruit as a hideous reference to the worst kind of drug addiction. I was also intrigued by the main character’s protective measures of Mithridatism. (Hint: you have to read to the last stanza to find out.)

Best of all, this is a first book in a series WITHOUT A CLIFF-HANGER ENDING!!!!! If you have followed my blog, you know how much I hate these. It’s the one thing (well, okay, also bad writing) that makes me refuse to go on with a series. Black is considerate of her readers. Sure, it’s clear there’s more story to come. But she doesn’t just chop us off at the knees. I plan to read on. This book was lots of fun, and Black is a very good, very satisfying writer.

WHAT NOW? Now I will move on to my reviews of the novels short-listed for the Hugo Award 2025.

The Nebula Short-Listed Novels: Reviews

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy1 Comment

The Nebula Awards, sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, have announced their short-list of nominated speculative fiction published in 2024. The short-listed books nominated for best novel are:

REVIEWED IN THIS POST:

REVIEWS STILL TO COME:

I’m reading the short-listed books in alphabetical order by author, which seems like a good random way to approach my task of reading and reviewing every one of the six before awards day. Today, however, I’m going to review Chandrasekera’s novel first, and then Barsukov’s. I think this pair present a good contrast: two difficult reads for very different reasons. I have taken a while getting these first two reviews out because–while I’m a fast reader–both of these novels are challenging to read, and that has slowed me down quite a lot.

Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom; Solaris UK)

Find out more HERE.

The marketing copy on the cover reads, “Will you follow me to the end?” That’s the question, all right. If you start reading this novel (can you even call this book a novel?), prepare for a long, wild ride–emphasis on “long.” The blurb on the cover is from the incomparable Ray Nayler, calling this book “hallucinatory.” That is right on the nose. I loved Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which rightfully won both Nebula and Locus awards last year. See my review HERE. I mentioned the amazing intersection of the world of myth and the gritty world of South Asian political turmoil in that novel. Chandrasekera’s new novel, Rakesfall, takes that mix and extends it in ways a lot of readers may not bother or have the stamina to follow. It’s a very challenging read.

Many of its parts were previously published as short fiction, so as one reviewer notes, the book is more of a collection than a traditional novel. I myself might call it an extended prose poem (VERY extended–300 pages, but it feels longer). A poem can be that long. I think right away of The Iliad and The Odyssey. But those epic poems work because the reader (originally: listener) follows a story line. I’m also reminded of Edmund Spenser’s 16th century unfinished masterpiece, The Faerie Queene. In that strange and huge poem, there are story lines galore, all overlapping, many iterations of the same story and characters in different forms and for different purposes. Rakesfall is more like that. There’s no one narrative line to keep you anchored, although a background story of two children and their endlessly repeating reincarnations and intertwinings do form a sort of through-line.

I see my examples are drawn from Western literature, which is itself a problem. I also see I’m exhibiting my bias for “story.” In Chapter 28, “Arranged Marriage,” a listener–who may be an iteration of a “character” we discovered earlier in the book, complains to one of the novel’s many sage grandmother figures: “This story. . . Isn’t it missing the bit at the end where you explain the moral, what the story means?” The grandmother’s reply: “There is no moral because this is a history, rather than a story.” Later she elaborates: “Stories have endings, and histories understand that nothing ever ends.”

So The Iliad and The Odyssey may not be good reference points. Rakesfall comes from a different world-view entirely–one that I’m not the best qualified to review. But Rakesfall, for all the grandmother’s denials, is about story, too, in a non-Western context. Deep into Rakesfall, I think we readers get a clue how we might approach Chandrasekera’s strange immersive object/novel. Chapter Twenty-three, “Electric Head in the Golden City,” begins this way:

Somadeva’s eleventh-century epic Kathasaritsagara, the ocean fed by rivers of story, is so called because it is fulfilled by many interflowing stories, some of which run deep within the ocean itself, cold currents far beneath the surface.

Somadeva’s vast collection of Indian myths was itself derived from an earlier work, Brhatkatha, a title translated as “the Great Narrative,” which has been lost. I know little about this, and what little I do know comes from Wikipedia, but the article in that much-maligned, hugely valuable online encyclopedia ends with a list of sources, so I invite any general non-scholarly reader to go there first and then delve deeper. The concept of “many interflowing stories” and “cold currents far beneath the surface” describes Rakesfall well.

The poetic language in Rakesfall is real (as opposed to that faux-flowery stuff passing itself off as poetry), and rich. Often, different registers of language intermingle, such as a highly poetic sentence followed by a pithy and often comic piece of slang. In a story about a king who sends a wrestler into a haunted cemetery, the wrestler unexpectedly encounters a beautiful woman amidst the ghouls and vampires. In a hilarious parody of heroic storytelling lingo, “Oh Shit, the wrestler says, embarrassed and unsure how to act. Ma’am, Whomst art Thou.” This particular story, by the way, is part of a seemingly endless recursion of stories, one detail leading to another story to another story and so on. The resolution, if it ever occurs, may take place many chapters later–or in a completely unexpected context and form. Or the reader will be proceeding painfully along some obscure line of thinking involving multiverses and strange dimensions, and suddenly one of these delightful little pieces of language will stop everything cold.

At the same time, the novel probes the root causes of present-day turmoil and violence. Chandrasekera folds a multitude of worlds past, present, and future into his novel’s pages, imaginatively and often savagely. These intersecting worlds reflect on the damage inflicted on humanity by oligarchy and autocracy, and especially the aftermath of colonialism. Any reader well-informed about Sri Lanka and its political and social struggles will be at a huge advantage, as I am not. I can only approach this novel as that creature Virginia Woolf once called “the common reader”–no particular expertise, just an intention to leap into the book and savor it as best I can.

And at its best, this novel is enthralling. I’m thinking especially of the story of the Hero, the King, and the Wasp, late in the novel. But there are long talky, opaque parts that try a reader’s patience. Again my bias for “story”! In a way, the novel is framed at the beginning and the end by listeners to “story” who divide into warring factions over what the story means, how to apply it. I suppose we readers are doing the same. Nevertheless, a patient reader will be well-rewarded if she sticks with this novel.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, Yaroslav Barsukov (Caezik SF & Fantasy)

Find it HERE.

This novel, too, I found a long, slow read. For me, though, the difficulty of getting through it was due to a very uncertain tone throughout. Some of it is slangy, some of it is self-consciously “poetic,” and the narrative and character motivations jump around in a disconcerting way, making it hard for me to follow. The author’s first language is not English, so perhaps that is part of the problem.

The set-up is intriguing. Two warring countries face off over a border. The interior minister of one, Shea, is charged by his queen to investigate the building of a tower that his country hopes to use to defend against its neighbor. When Shea gets to the border town, he discovers a baffling set of problems. The tower’s builder has miscalculated, leading her to use a dangerous technology to keep the tower from falling. An ethnic group distrusted by both sides has magical abilities related to the technology. Shea himself has a troubled personal history involving the technology. And palace intrigue threatens his authority. There’s almost a Ruritanian/Graustarkian feel to the world-building. All very thrilling–except the deeper I got into this novel, the more uncertain I felt about who was doing what to whom, and why. The more uncertain I felt about the motivations of almost all of the characters. And the more annoyed I got by poetic metaphors that seemed to go no place or were wildly misdirected. Sorry, everyone. I wouldn’t have finished this novel if I hadn’t felt obligated to review it.

But there–you see? Different readers, different tastes. This novel was nominated for a Nebula Award. That means tons of readers admire it. Look at this review, for example. Did that person and I read the same book? We did! The author has stated that he wrote it because of his conviction that disinformation is one of the leading problems of our time. See “a note from the author” here. I emphatically agree. And different readers read books for different reasons. For me, a great writing style is a necessity (although, as we see from that review, others like his style just fine). For other readers, plot and characters and world-building may be so much more important that they can overlook an awkward writing style. Depending on what you want out of a fantasy novel, you may like it.