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 Booklist Review
They say that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, but what if the fate of future generations depends on learning history for the very sake of repeating it? When most think about time travel, they consider the future; Robson instead imagines a time riddled with bioeconomic crises, doomed if the characters in her novel cannot replicate a biologically lush and forgotten past. Readers are transported back in time to 2000 BC with a team of scientists scrambling to collect information from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the hopes that they'll be able to replicate the biodiverse aquatic ecosystems in their own desolate future. The stakes are so high that some members of the team are willing to sacrifice anything for the sake of their mission, even if that means making the past pay for their mistakes. But as we all know, the past has a way of coming back to haunt you. Robson's science-fiction adventure, her first full-length novel, will leave you wondering: What's scarier living in the past or planning for the future?--Colias, Rachel Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Robson (A Human Stain) creates a high-tech far-future world radically altered by climate change and plague. In 2267, an ecological restoration team travels 4,000 years into the past to gather data to use in restoring a river ecosystem after climate change and other ecological disasters have forced most humans underground. The irascible Minh, who specializes in river restoration projects (and has six tentacle prostheses instead of legs), leaps at the chance to visit 2024 BCE Mesopotamia to collect samples to take back to the future. Joining her are Kiki, who goes to extreme lengths to join the team; tactical historian Fabian, an employee of the group that developed time travel; and Hamid, who's eager to study the plentiful animal life. Upon arrival, they discover a plethora of material, but they also wind up in the crosshairs of a Mesopotamian king and a moon priestess. Robson's work offers much food for thought, but the world is initially confusing and the story builds slowly. The second half, however, brings plenty of action as distrust and paranoia build among the group and they inevitably tussle with the locals. This richly imagined adventure marks Robson as an author to watch. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A high-concept story of time-traveling scientists trying to fix the future by returning to the past.Minh's generation has been working for years to try to repair the ecological damage done to the Earth, but the invention of time travel has drained funding away from these complicated remediation projects. Now Minh and her colleagues have the chance to tackle a time-travel project of their owngoing back to study Mesopotamia in a pristine state as preparation for restoring its ecosystem. Minh wants this job, but getting it won't be easy. Not only will she need to win over the funders; she'll have to find a way to work with her "ridiculously frenetic" young colleague Kiki, who wants this job for her own reasons. Robson (A Human Stain, 2017, etc.) has created a richly detailed world in which the environmental disaster that forced humanity to retreat below the surface of the Earth is so far in the past it's not even worth mentioning. Dazzling technology and an endearingly cranky main character make this an engaging read, but the plot gets off to a slow start, bogged down in the process of Minh and her colleagues' preparing a proposal and interviewing for the time-travel consulting job. The adventure that ensues when they do make it to ancient Mesopotamia is exciting, but the book suffers from packing all the suspense into its second half. The strong worldbuilding will appeal to sci-fi fans, but a slow-burn plot that spends too much time on the logistics of time travel weakens an otherwise appealing story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
