The winged histories

IN A TYPICAL young adult disaster novel, society collapses and survival depends on a young woman's guts (and maybe her ability to pick a good love interest). Yet too often the world seems to end, and to exist, only for pleasantly middle-class communities, nuclear families and otherwise "normal" people by the standards of American media: white, straight, cisgender, abled and at least well-off enough that square meals aren't rare. Everybody else is mysteriously gone long before the apocalypse comes. Corinne Duyvis's ON THE EDGE OF GONE (Amulet, $17.95) is in some ways about what happens to those who usually go unmentioned. There's Denise, who is autistic; her sister, Iris, who is trans; their drug-addicted mother; and their absent Surinamese father. (The story takes place in near-future Amsterdam, and being half-Surinamese makes the girls black by Dutch standards.) When word comes that a comet strike will soon render Earth barely habitable, Denise and her family are among the unlucky thousands assigned to precarious shelters; they're pretty much doomed. Chance, however, leads them to one of the few remaining ships that haven't left the planet. This gives them an opportunity to join the lucky few who will escape to an Earth-like world in a distant star system - if, that is, the ship is willing to take on such a misfit family. Thus this becomes not only the usual allegory for millennials trying to cope with a changing world, but also an excoriation of Y.A.'s traditional shallowness. The problem threatening Denise isn't the comet but acceptance. She and her family might be all right if the new world order could find a way to equally value the disabled, the nonwhite, the non-binary and the people who need an artificial coping mechanism or two. With assimilation impossible, Denise first attempts accommodation - working harder and taking terrible risks to prove herself. When this, too, fails, her sister reminds Denise of another option: revolution. This is not necessarily of the violent kind, however. Instead of overthrowing a corrupt regime, Denise just has to get her fellow survivors to think differently about what survival truly means. A violent revolution might be easier. The pacing is a little slow, and many of the characters outside of Denise's family are flatter than they should be. Still, given the heavy themes the story juggles, immersion in this complicated family is probably a good thing. THE STORIES IN Carlos Hernandez's cheekily titled new collection, THE ASSIMILATED CUBAN'S GUIDE TO QUANTUM SANTERIA (Rosarium, paper, $17.95), paint intriguing vignettes in which characters contend equally with the trials of American race relations, ethnic assimilation, magic, technology and theoretical physics. Characters wend out of one story only to wend into another in a similar but different form, as if from a parallel universe; meanwhile, concepts that feel like anime parody (giant robot panda pilots - no, really, it's for a good cause) are accorded the same respect as ritual and ancestral pride. Yet despite the daring title and concepts, the stories themselves are curiously conservative, as when every woman in a story is either sexualized or dead. (Or weirdly both: In "More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give," the protagonist's awesome dead mother is nicknamed Milhuevos because she was shot by Castro's troops while bragging about her thousand unfertilized eggs.) Lots of science fiction and fantasy two-dimensionalizes women, granted, but it's disappointing to see the pattern in a collection that clearly interrogates marginalization and stereotypes. Another tiring pattern is the frequency with which Hernandez's mostly male protagonists express angst about their fathers or sons. (Daughters exist, but nobody seems to worry much about them.) This can be haunting on its own, as in the opening story, about a 60-something man scaling Everest to bring back his son - who, like Schrödinger's cat, might be dead and might be alive. Yet the theme recurs so often that by the time the reader reaches the title story at the end, perhaps the best of the father-son stories, it feels overdone. Nevertheless, this is a well-written and worthwhile collection, provided you don't expect it to live up to its title. READERS WHO LOVED Sofia Samatar's multiple-awardwinning 2013 novel "A Stranger in Olondria" may be pleased to know that THE WINGED HISTORIES (Small Beer, $24) is related, although it isn't quite a sequel. It stands alone in that the story no longer follows the earlier novel's protagonist, but a reader might benefit from knowing something about the ethnic and religious politics of Olondria - land of almonds, land of myrrh - before delving into this tale about its civil war. Or not. A mythopoeic summary of Olondria's history begins about a quarter of the way in, and there's a glossary at the back, but neither is really necessary to absorb this dense study of four characters. All are women, and all are integral to the war, though their contributions are frequently obscured in ways that will be familiar to any student of women in real-world history. Tav, the opening character, provides a forewarning. Although she starts like the heroines of many novels in being a noble-born teenager who rides off to become a "swordmaiden," Samatar quickly disabuses the reader of any romantic notions. Tav discovers that life as a soldier is grueling and cruel, that the politics pushing soldiers onto a battlefield are rarely worth their blood, and that fighting for a nation as one of its undervalued minorities holds a particularly bitter taste. The rest of the story is built around the fallout of Tav's revelations, though other characters take over the narrative. All of it is harrowing - and written in such heartstoppingly beautiful language there's a good chance readers will ignore the plot and spend a few hours just chewing on the words, slowly, to draw out the flavor. Then they'll need to read it again. Fortunately, this is a short book; also fortunately, there's a lot of novel packed into relatively few pages. A highly recommended indulgence. LIKEWISE, LEENA KROHN'S COLLECTED FICTION (Cheeky Frawg, $36.99) is inherently indulgent: It's massive, as befits the encapsulation of a prolific (Finnish) writer's life work, and it's multifaceted, deploying varied formats and lenses, including multiple translators, to present a complete picture. Within are short stories, several short novels, poetry, and essays about Krohn, including one by the author herself. Since most English-language readers will have encountered Krohn's work only via her epistolic novel "Tainaron: Mail From Another City" (translated in the United States in 2004), if at all, probably the most useful thing this collection does is put that novel into its proper context. It becomes rapidly clear that Krohn's work is not meant to stand alone. Creatures and characters string together in a constantly self-referential loop that's mostly lacking in plot or narrative - but there's significance to which characters reappear, and which themes Krohn addresses again and again. The doctor in the excerpted novel "Umbra," who confronts his own fears while ostensibly examining a neurotic sentient computer, might as well have worked at the old hospital in the excerpt from "The Bee Pavilion"; what seems to interest Krohn more than artificial intelligence are the struggles of the mind, and the struggles of individuals and groups to define it. It's debatable whether Krohn's works qualify as science fiction or fantasy, not that it matters. Missing is the "sensawunda" said to characterize the genre; Krohn's settings are fantastical and deeply weird, but they're mostly secondary to the people - or philosophy, or sociology - she really wants to explore. Even in a story like "Tainaron," in which the narrator writes letters describing a city populated by insects, Krohn focuses primarily on metaphors for the human condition. "Never trust a flower," the narrator's guide says, upon rescuing a citizen from a giant carnivorous plant. "Next time, think where you put your head." A caution relevant to any dweller in any city, insect-inhabited or not. This is a haunting, lovely book.

Samatar's lush sequel to A Stranger in Olondria is a story of revolution, religion, and electrifying love in four distinct voices. Tavis is close kin to the current Telkan, the ruler of the fantasy realm of Olondria, but she leaves behind the expectations laid on noblewomen to become a soldier-and then, with her cousin Andasya, to lead a new rebellion. Other viewpoint characters are Tialon, daughter of Ivrom, the Priest of the Stone, whose cult is overthrown in the revolution; Seren, a young woman of the nomadic feredhai, who becomes the beloved of Tav; and Siski, Tav's sister and one-time love of Andasya, who is the sole bearer of Andasya's terrible secret. Samatar gives each woman her own style of storytelling and view of events, so that the reader sees this episode in Olondria's history as though looking upon the scene through four different windows. Each character weaves her experiences and observations into the land's folklore and mythology. Samatar refocuses these viewpoints to present something perpetually and pleasantly startling and unexpected. Her prose is by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. Samatar's writing strongly recalls Guy Gavriel Kay's fantasy, which reads like historical fiction, but there are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.