Review by New York Times Review
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO RETELL A STORY? Does it mean dressing up a familiar tale in different clothes? Reading it against its grain? Replacing parts of a story like boards in a ship, until an old story's shape is built of entirely new wood? This month, I'm looking at recent books that are all retellings of one sort or another. I've long found fairy-tale retellings to be empowering, subversive or both. But I've never encountered anything quite like THE MERRY SPINSTER: Tales of Everyday Horror (Holt, paper, $17). In it, Daniel Mallory Ortberg twists folk and fairy tales into elegant garrotes evocative of Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Kingdoms of Elfin" by way of Donald Barthelme and traditional murder ballads. Throughout "The Merry Spinster," gender is as slippery a proposition as happiness. No one called "merry" actually is so, any more than a daughter is necessarily referred to as "she." Girls are named Paul, boys are named Sylvia; love is oppressive, abusive, exploitative and equal-opportunity in its dreadfulness, whether between friends and lovers, parents and children, or children and stuffed animals. The incongruities invite attention, prompt us to question our assumptions about gender with every startling juxtaposition of name and pronoun, and our assumptions about relationships with every pairing where love is vampiric and destructive. Each story makes space for reflection more than it makes claims - and every page flutters with anxiety so thorough I sometimes had to stand up and walk around before resuming my reading. Perpendicular to its gender play are questions of consent, labor, the warp and weft of gift and debt, all the things we give to and take from one another, especially property and pain. In the title story - a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" - Beauty encounters the following inscription in the library that's ostensibly hers: "The library is yours. "The books are mine. "Your eyes are your own. "What you read is up to me." These stories are full of suffocating generosity, aggression so passive it's like breathing splinters. There's not a single weak link in the cat's-breath chain of this collection - only an initial shock at what sort of experience the book is. If you're familiar with Ortberg's work as a humorist, either from The Toast or "Texts From Jane Eyre," this is something else; even the stories adapted from the "Children's Stories Made Horrific" series on The Toast have sharper claws, are more primly vicious. It may ruin tea for you, or teach you something of how not to be a terrible person. Either way, it's incredible. Speaking of tea, Aliette de Bodard's the tea master and THE DETECTIVE (Subterranean, signed limited edition, $40) IS a delicate, gender-bent recasting of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in the far future of her Xuya universe, the gorgeously mannered space opera setting of celebrated novellas like "The Citadel of Weeping Pearls" and "On a Red Station, Drifting." In a galactic slum called the Scattered Pearls belt, a sentient ship called the Shadow's Child struggles to make rent after a traumatic event in the course of her military duty forces her into a circumscribed civilian life. Where once she ferried people through perilous, reality-bending portions of space, she now makes a living as a "brewer of serenity," synthesizing cocktails of mind-altering drugs that help humans endure the "deep spaces" she can no longer travel. But when a woman named Long Chau engages her services to study corpses in deep space, the Shadow's Child finds herself needing to confront portions of her past she'd rather forget. This isn't a tidy transposition of Holmes and Watson into far-future space, for all that the elements of homage (Long Chau is an abrasive self-medicating "consulting detective") shine through. The Shadow's Child is a fully realized character in her own right, and the dislike she feels for Long Chau is sustained and justified. Instead it's a window onto a beautifully developed world that widens the meaning of space opera, one that centers on Chinese and Vietnamese cultures and customs instead of Western military conventions, and is all the more welcome for it. Kelly Robson's GODS, MONSTERS, AND THE LUCKY PEACH (Tor.com, paper, $14.99) is a story that retells itself. It's a brilliantly structured far-future novella focused on ancient history: Its locales are primarily Calgary in 2267 and Mesopotamia in 2024 B.C. In one, humanity has ravaged the planet's surface, moved underground, and has only just begun to make the surface habitable again; in the other, King Shulgi and Susa, a priestess, argue about new stars in the sky and the meaning of portents. The story's poles are past and future, sky and earth; everything in between thrums with a delicious tension carefully developed among the wonderful characters. Minh is a senior consultant at ESSA, a firm that specializes in restoring and maintaining surface habitats. Minh herself specializes in restoring rivers and has spent decades wrangling underground banks into funding aboveground projects - until the invention of limited-use time travel turns bankers away from long-term ecological restoration and toward shortterm profits from temporal tourism. But when Minh's intern Kiki draws her attention to a call for proposals to restore the Mesopotamian drainage basin by traveling into the past to study it, she jumps at the chance. Robson's world-building is fantastic; I'm always grateful for books that fold business and finance systems into their narratives in lively ways. She writes about strategizing on RFPs and securing funding like planning a heist, with absolutely delightful team-assembling dynamics and fake-it-tillyou-make-it bravado. I also loved the dynamic between Minh and Kiki, loosely echoing some of the boomer-millennial rhetoric of our present moment in complex and empathetic ways. My only problem with this book is its length; it reads like the first three acts of a perfectly paced and plotted five-act novel, to the point where I wondered if the rest had been cleanly sheared off at the printer's. It's a short story's conclusion to a novel's worth of development, and while I certainly hope that Robson will write a sequel, I can't help feeling dismayed by an amazing story that stops instead of ending. A novel that certainly doesn't skimp on length, Tessa Gratton's THE QUEENS OF INNIS LEAR (Tor, $36.99) IS a high-fantasy transformation of Shakespeare's "King Lear" set in a world where magic and ecology are intimately connected. On the island of Innis Lear, there is the high magic of reading the stars, and the low magic of wormwork and rootwater; when everything's in balance, these systems intersect in complex and fruitful ways. But ever since the starprophesied loss of his wife, Dalat, King Lear has capped the island's holy wells and devoted himself exclusively to the stars, forbidding the language of trees and roots, and going slowly mad while the island's crops and climate fail around him. Reading "Queens" is at first a study in finding analogues. While Lear is Lear, his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia become Gaela, Regan and Elia; Edgar and Edmund are Rory and Ban. But the Shakespearean counterparts are at most touchstones for the fully developed characters Gratton writes. Most notably, Gaela and Regan aren't petty, scheming villains; they're grieving daughters who've had to wonder for years whether their father murdered their mother. Gratton's decision to make Dalat black, from the empress-ruled Third Kingdom "an ocean and half a continent away," thoroughly enriches the story. A young Gaela is infuriated by the lack of songs praising dark skin; Elia, when she goes abroad, is assumed to be from the Third Kingdom, even though she doesn't speak its language or know its customs. While the storytelling is certainly decompressed - the novel has a somewhat ponderous prologue, seven different points of view, and a flashback every other chapter - "Queens" is always thoroughly engaging; right up until the end, I found myself wondering with increasing urgency whether this story, like " Lear," would end in tragedy. I'll leave you to wonder, too. amal EL-MOHTAR won the Nebula, Locus and Hugo awards for her short story "Seasons of Glass and Iron." Her novella "This Is How You Lose the Time War," written with Max Gladstone, will be published in 2019.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 22, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
De Bodard revisits her far-future Xuya universe setting with this gripping novella about damaged characters driven to search for the truth. The Shadow's Child, a sentient spaceship who was traumatized by her war experiences as a troop transport, makes a subsistence living at a habitat in the "provincial backwater" of the Scattered Pearls asteroid belt, concocting drug mixtures to help travelers function in the deep spaces. Then Long Chau, a consulting detective, hires her to help recover a corpse from the deep spaces so she can study how bodies there decompose. The corpse leads them both into an investigation that could reveal their own private secrets as well as the murky truth about the recovered body. De Bodard constructs a convincingly gritty setting and a pair of unique characters with provocative histories and compelling motivations. The story works as well as both science fiction and murder mystery, exploring a future where pride, guilt, and mercy are not solely the province of humans. Agent: John Berlyne, Zeno. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The Shadow's Child is a living mindship that was discharged from military transport service after an injury and now ekes out a living brewing teas to help space travelers, fully aware that her choice of profession is not without issues. When scholar Long Chau requests a corpse from space for scientific study, the sentient ship accepts the odd-if unpleasant-assignment, which shouldn't be too difficult as dead ships in deep spaces are, sadly, in larger numbers after the uprisings. However, the body she brings back turns out to have been murdered, and Long Chau insists on following the trail of a cold death in outer space. Impelled by her own stubborn interest, The Shadow's Child follows, soon realizing that her client's secretive past may point to answers in the investigation. This slim volume packs a visceral punch. Absorbing prose pulls readers into the dark, frigid space between stars, where ships can fail, physically and emotionally, as easily as people. VERDICT Set in de -Bodard's "Xuya" universe (The Waiting Stars), this novella offers sf fans an imaginative read.-Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
