Languages of Water edited by Eugen Bacon
(MyMedia, 2023)
Reviewed by Harry Slater
I’m writing this review in a small, converted barn, staring idly out of single-glazed windows at a deluge of mid-October, English rain. My feet are cold. A handful of days ago it was muggy, close, the back-dampening humidity of the bayou, the kind of weather where shadows are the best company. There are blossoms as well as soggy fruit on some of the apple trees. This past month, everything has felt wrong. It seems a fitting setting to be discussing Languages of Water, a book which confronts the wrongness of climate change not just head-on, but from a range of different and intriguing directions. The book has at its core a short story by its editor, Eugen Bacon. It’s called ‘When the Water Stops’ and it runs to only six pages. In it, a small community in a never-specified African country runs out of water and turns to the only other readily available liquid to sustain themselves—blood. Specifically, human blood. This is a tale of utterly believable vampirism, one so close to us in time that only a week may have elapsed between now and then.
Continue reading…
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.
Promise by Christi Nogle
(Flame Tree Press, 2023)
There are two themes running through Christi Nogle’s collection of dark tales in Promise—time and unity. Time is bent, warped, broken, it curls back on itself, devouring pasts and futures, while people and creatures and robotic lifeforms create wholes from disparate parts, blending into new, often terrifying singularities. This is SF at the edge of the black mirror, delicate and intricate, layered and literary, shocking and confounding.
The first two stories are the most complete of the collection, rising and falling in eerie rhythms designed to unsettle. ‘Cocooning’ is a pandemic tale twisted back into itself. It sees a couple and their dogs quarantined, but we slowly begin to question exactly who is being protected from who, or what. The ending is a gloriously bizarre celebration of freedom and togetherness that upends traditional plague tropes for something altogether stranger.
The Night Field by Donna Glee Williams
(Jo Fletcher Books, 2023)
The climate fable is becoming a staple of modern SF. It avoids the rigour of hard cli-fi, throwing a catastrophe into the heart of some prelapsarian innocence, the sludge of reality coating a purer, more natural existence. The Night Field by Donna Glee Williams follows that template, and while it is a moving, often heartbreaking novel, there’s a simplicity to its message that undermines its good intentions. The book tells the story of Pyn-Poi, a young woman who has spent all her time in a forest she knows as The Real. Every year, when the rain comes, Pyn-Poi and her family head up onto shelves in a massive cliff, known as the Wall, to wait out the deluge, before returning to once again connect with the flora and fauna below. But a change happens, a putrid stench that comes with the rain and begins to make the inhabitants of the forest, and the plants themselves, sick.
Prophet by Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché
(Penguin Random House, 2023)
Reviewed by Anne F. Wilson
“I don’t care if it’s elves, I just need to know why and how it’s elves.”
To those who (like me) only knew Helen MacDonald from their beautiful and deeply felt nature writing, Prophet will come as a surprise. Once you know that they write fanfic, it all suddenly makes sense. Prophet is a science fiction thriller that came out of a lockdown project between the two authors, who had not met in person before they started to play with the ideas that led to the book. It was originally intended to be a novella, but one thing led to another, and here we are.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
(The MIT Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Duncan Lawie
This fresh publication as part of the Radium Age series posits The Napoleon of Notting Hill as worthy of fresh examination. It is a fun read, but a strange avatar of science fiction. Madeline Ashby’s new introduction shows where ideas in the book are reflected in subsequent history, as well as situating the novel in a literary context. Insightfully, she tells us that this tale “suggests that the best outcome is something that must be strived for, and that succumbing to the seemingly harmless aesthetic whims of a tyrant is still [none the less] succumbing to a tyrant.”
Mindbreaker by Kate Dylan
(Hodderscape, 2023)
Reviewed by John Dodd
When you have technology suitably advanced enough that it’s indistinguishable from magic, how would the world change?
Would it change?
Well, it would for those with the money and the power, and let’s be honest, that doesn’t come as a surprise. But what would they do with limitless power? Anything they want? Everything they want, and what if a part of that was using the poor to do things that even they couldn’t do?
Creation Node by Stephen Baxter
(Gollancz, 2023)
Reviewed by Stuart Carter
Is Stephen Baxter the undisputed master of “cosmic horror”? He certainly doesn’t do classic movie jump scares—quite the very absolute opposite, in fact! First, he’ll terrify you with your insignificance measured against the size of the universe, and then he’ll make you weep at these pathetic scales when compared with the mind-boggling timespans that lie ahead of us.
If that isn’t cosmic horror, I don’t know what is.
Then there’s the slow, inevitable creep of Flood in which we’re all doomed, and no can-do science types are coming to save us. That kept me awake a few nights after reading.
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson
There are influential books which are now rarely read. Some have slipped out of print through luck or complexities of ownership. Some, despite their influence, are barely readable; The Night Land falls into this category. When I noticed this new edition was abridged, I wondered whether I should be seeking a complete edition, but within pages of starting to read, I was grateful for any word excised. The prose is clotted; the story wearing; the dull detail of the journey, of eating and drinking each six hours—or discussing exactly why our narrator has delayed—is exhausting:
Yet, in truth, as I do now have knowledge, it was the North that drew; and I do seem to make a great telling about this little matter; but how else shall I show to you mine inward mind, and the lack of knowledge and likewise the peculiar knowings that did go to the making of that time, and the Peoples thereof, which is but to say the same thing twice over.
Babel by R.F. Kuang
(HarperVoyager, 2022)
Reviewed by Kevan Manwaring
Babel is a dark academia novel by R.F. Kuang, author of The Poppy War trilogy, and a dazzling academic herself. A Marshall Scholar and Chinese-English translator, with an MPhil from Cambridge and an MSc from Oxford, she is now engaged in doctoral study at Yale. This (possibly) standalone novel concerns a talented young Cantonese boy who adopts the name Robin Swift. He is plucked from the deathbed of his mother amongst the slums of his homeland by a strict Oxford professor, who cultivates his ward’s gift with languages to the point when Swift is able to become a student of the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—the tallest building in the heart of an alternative Oxford. Here, the power of translation is used to activate silver bars which generate the qualities evoked by the ‘matching pairs’ of the translated languages: energy, wealth, control. These drive the dominance of the British Empire, growing fat and powerful via the exploitation of the resources, slave labour, and talent of their ‘subjects’ from the colonies and from other countries.
Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (Second Edition) edited by Allen Stroud
(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023)
Impressively ambitious in scope, Allen Stroud’s monumental work now appears in a second edition, but with the inclusion of very contemporary updates ‘Historical Dictionary’ seems even more of a redundant title. All dictionaries are historical records from the moment of publication, however up-to-date the entries: the most recent ‘buzzword’ becomes a cultural curio within a few years. That said, a desire to be topical can result in a lack of perspective and depth: some of the most recent additions are rather embryonic and seem little more than placeholders (e.g., World Fantasy Award-winner, R.J. Barker, gets a rather sparse three lines; the significant, complex, and contested category of the ‘Anthropocene’ barely eleven lines—perhaps these will be fleshed out in a third edition?).
Review from BSFA Review 22 - Download your copy here.
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