eBook Review – The Lost Mask (Book 2 of The Bone Mask Trilogy) by Ashley Capes

I was really delighted and surprised by Ashley Capes debut in the fantasy genre (see my review of Book 1). I felt that for a debut novel, City of Masks, showed considerable polish. I think Capes has backed up well with The Lost Mask, all of our favourite characters and villains are here and there’s some interesting developments in world building that further expand on the world of City of Masks.

In many ways The Lost Mask is a typical book two in a trilogy, you will need to have read book one.  Capes is sparse on the info dumping paragraphs some authors/publishers include to bring readers up to speed( indeed I hesitantly suggest he hasn’t included any) and considering it’s only a year since book one was released fans shouldn’t need a reminder of who Vinezi or Ain are.

The major change I feel is a subtle shift in tone. With The Lost Mask,  I feel we have moved from a intrigue/thriller to adventure fantasy.  We still have the same set of beloved characters, but plot lines have crossed and so this book feels much more like King Oseto’s story to me.  There is less skulking in secret passages and imagining the carved faces of the Mascare, more dealing with the management of a dead and poisonous Sea Beast and preparing for open war.

In The Lost Mask, Sophia and Notch have teamed up in search of Sophia’s father who has fled to the Bloodwood.  Flir and Luik are employed in devising a plan for ridding the city of the Sea Beast carcass( which is poisoning the bay and the populace), and preparing for an imminent invasion.  The trouble caused by Venezi simmers and the truth behind the Greatmasks grows steadily more apparent. Seto, now King, realizes a long held ambition only to come face to mask with what that ambition is going to cost him.

I did enjoy book one for its fantasy cloak and dagger - the atmosphere created by the culture of the Mascare.  I felt that this element was missing in The Lost Mask (hence my comment about tone) but what the reader gets in exchange broadens the concept and the history behind the masks and the power of the Sea Beast’s bones. Like a good second book it broadens our understanding of the world and increases the stakes.

Unlike City of Masks, The Lost Mask finishes on a cliff hanger of sorts and leads us into what will be an interesting conclusion in the final book.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and hoped that we might see this series make a mark in the Aurealis or the Ditmars. Nevertheless if you like well paced fantasy with originality of concept, check this series out. 

This review is based on an early eArc provided by the author.

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eBook Review – War Stories by Jaym Gates & Andrew Liptak (Eds.)

There’s comfort for me, as a reader, in Military science fiction.  A result perhaps of early encounters with Star Wars (with its military elements), stories like Philip E High’s, Come Hunt An Earthman and the Battletech novels. Add to this, Saturday showing’s of 50’s and 60’s Hollywood war movies and its all very familiar territory.

At some point though I felt as though I grew away from the enjoyment of reading about a band of heroes running off to fight an evil enemy, an other. Naturally, as you grow up things fade to shades of grey.  Sure I can be entertained by Independence Day and the seemingly endless iterations of War of the Worlds, I can even appreciate the extremely well done, paint by numbers movie that was Battlefield: Los Angeles.  But to really enjoy Military science fiction these days, there’s got to be a bit more meat to the story, something along the lines of District 9 in literary form. War Stories fit that bill for me. 

Aliens, hi-tech goodies, horror, slow apocalypse, genetic experimentation and cyber warfare, it’s all here along with good deal of variety and smart storytelling. With such a wide scope the editors have broken the collection down into broad categories: Wartime systems, Combat, Armoured Force and Aftermath.  I note too, that in typing this there’s been an effort to try and present the totality of war, its mechanics, the combat and what comes after.

The collection starts with one story outside those categories, Graves by Joe Haldeman, which is more horror than sci-fi and is historical (Vietnam War), still a very nice piece though.  Following the Haldeman is Ken Liu’s In The Loop a story that really did set up my expectations that this was a collection I was going to enjoy. It seemed to underline the cost of war to its participants (even when distanced) as well as problem of relying on hi-tech equipment even when that equipment is designed with the best of intentions. Indeed most of the stories in Wartime Systems seemed to echo this last point. Equipment failure seems to add realism (at the same time as it adds story conflict) to all war stories.  The other two standouts for me in this category were: The Wasp Keepers, which explored the problems inherent with maintaining a peace through strict surveillance and the effect the suppression of outward violence can have on a populace and individuals and Non-Standard Deviation which I found to be a smart take on the development of AI enemys for training combat troops.

In the Combat category it was Linda Nagata’s Light and Shadow and Thoraiya Dyer’s One Million Lira, that caught my attention.  Light and Shadow examines the problem of how to develop the most effective soldier so that when they are placed under pressure they are calm and react in the most efficient way.  In Nagata’s world the military has achieved this through linked skull caps that bind the unit together and suppress emotions/reactions of individual soldiers when it’s determined appropriate.  The tone of the story echoed very much some current discussion the Australian community is having about treatment of veterans – how we train people to deal with combat stress but seemingly abandon them when that training eventually fails or the psychological effects catch up with individuals.  One Million Lira was simply a good, well paced sniper story featuring a female protagonist and antagonist, thankfully absent were powerful US or European powers, this was a dirty, low scale war fought between those left behind.

Warhosts by Yoon Ha Lee in the Armoured Force section was worth a second read and is possibly the best in the collection for me.  It mixed genetic and biological enhancement to a degree to which the reader feels that the humanoids presented are no longer really human. The conflict is between Purples and Reds, between forces that can manipulate their combatants genetically, grafting weapons biologically. It’s wonderfully visceral in its description and alien in its telling. I found Warhosts to be very unsettling in a good way.

Of the final section Aftermath, two stories stood out, combining previously used ideas to good effect.  In War Dog we follow the life of a retired major, a veteran of a war with China and the second American Civil War. It’s set in a Florida ruled by the Christian States of America,  home to fallout of chemical weapons that turn humans into walking fungal spores and where genetic abominations used in the war are hunted down.  War Dog is part love story, part statement on the harsh realities of the aftermath of War. The final story War 3.01 finished off the collection with an interesting take on psychological warfare - an information war fought inside our internet enhanced heads.

Intelligent and entertaining is how I’d describe War Stories with diversity in authors, content and storytelling.  I always felt as if I was reading something new.

This copy was provided free of charge.

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eBook Review – Writing Poems by Peter Sansom

Part of my poetry practice last year and this year was reading more poetry and reading more about poetry. Peter Sansom is a noted English poet and teacher of poetry. His Writing Poems was published in the mid nineties, making this book 20 years old and you may well question the relevance of a text two decades out of date. 

Thankfully, much of what Sansom has to say is relevant to an emerging poet today.  It’s relevance and applicability no doubt contributed to Bloodaxe Books decision to create it in ebook from in 2011.

Writing Poems is approachable, conversational in tone; a read enjoyable outside the information and opinion it attempts to pass on.  How relevant it is to the poet seeking to refine their craft will depend on individual experience.  I found the first three chapters full of timely reminders for myself, the later chapters on forms less relevant - the information here is widely available, though Sansom’s observations are entertaining and informative.

Looking back over the table of contents Writing Poems seems to break into two parts.  The first half deals with why we write poetry and how we should approach the writing of poetry, the later part focuses on mechanics. 

What I take away from the work is a focus on discernment, increasing my own experience through reading and writing - building a sense of knowing what might be good about my own work.  Building the capability to recognise whether a poem is being knocked back from publication because it doesn’t fit, or because the poem is lacking.

The information on the technical aspects of both form poetry and free verse are helpful, though I still find Stephen Fry’s Ode Less Travelled the best text I have read for getting iambic pentameter drumming in your ear.

Could a beginner pick this up and enjoy it?  Yes I think so, the tone is approachable and the technical details supported by a variety of modern examples.  I also think there’s a good deal of value for those, like myself who have had some small success and struggle with refining their work and producing something of more lasting value.

I borrowed my copy from the SA Library but you can purchase both the paperback and ebook through Booktopia.

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eBook Review – Stillways by Steve Bisley

I happened upon Stillways while lending support at a local gallery and craft shop. Steve Bisley is one of those iconic Australian actors, never perhaps appearing on the big screen internationally (except in Mad Max), but almost always there in supporting roles.  He’s much like Bryan Brown in that respect.  I have a fondness for the roles he’s played and his presence on air has been part of my cultural experience growing up.

Stillways  captured my attention and dragged me away from other more pressing reading work.  I am not a hug fan of memoirs, I have read about 3 in my lifetime, but I couldn’t stop reading.  There’s an honesty and earthiness in this book, humour and dark secrets.  And love, love that hits you square in the eyes in the final pages. I didn’t have cash with me to buy the book but was able to pick it up online.

The opening chapters read like prose poetry and had me wondering where Bisley had been hiding this talent.  There’s a palpable love of the physically environment of Stillways and Bisley’s descriptions bring the place alive in words. 

The soaking wind curves around the channel that empties Lake Macquarie into the Pacific Ocean. It blows across Pulbah Island and reaches to the sodden south. There is no rain, but a thin wetness. There is no whisper through the casuarinas brought by other winds; they are bowed and heavy now and all things feel sunk and riven.

This is the only way to see my home. This is the only true way to see my home.

 

The later chapters are perhaps less poetic, but I think the content is suited by the change of tone. Particularly around tales of school boy masturbation:

 

I masturbate a lot. We’ve got a masturbation club going at school. Chris Dodds is the current champion. The rules of the club are a bit loose and ill-defined, but it basically comes down to who cums first, wins. Doddsie’s got his dick in his hand more often than a biro, whenever and wherever the mood takes him, and it takes him a lot, and he doesn’t much care who’s around at the time. He has no shame. None of us do.

 

or indeed the troubled relation ship with his father:

 

Our sticks of choice are in our hands.

We have chosen carefully.

Too thin means they’ll break too early and the fury will continue with a belt or worse.

Too thick and the welts will be raw and deep.

There is a crunch outside and then another, measured and quickening.

My eyes go to my sister; her legs are buckling in preparation for the blows, her stout stick is quivering in her hand.

Then he is at the door.

Then inside with us.

His face is ruddy, white spittle blisters his lips and he is shaking and furious. He wrenches the stick from my sister’s hand and cuts a great whistling arc with it. Again and again the stick flails against her till she is screaming and pleading. ‘I’ll be good, Dad!’ she cries, and, ‘No, Dad, no! Please, no!’

 

It only covers Bisley’s life to age 15 ( I suspect another volume) but there’s more than enough of a life revealed in those pages to feel as though you’ve got value as a reader. Bisley comes across almost as a stereotypical larrikin. I think this book reveals that side of him that we see surface in many of his roles but there is also greater depth here.  If he appears a stereotypical rough talking, straight shooting Aussie, it’s because that’s his background.

Grab a copy while we are waiting for the next fabricated celebrity star to fall and fade.  Bisley’s life is  interesting and colourful, perhaps more so than many of the roles we have come to love him for.

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eBook Review – Horizon by Keith Stevenson

Keith Stevenson’s Horizon was released through HarperCollins’ digital imprint in November.  Keith’s been a stalwart of the Australian speculative fiction scene for many a year, mainly in his editor/publisher role at Coeur de lion publishing. So it’s good to see him surface with this product from one of the majors.

Horizon is Keith’s debut novel.  How has he fared, stepping away from short fiction and editing/publishing the longer works of others?

Very well I believe. 

In my reading at least, I have perceived a tendency for science fiction novels to move toward the centre in terms of combining narrative and the science of science fiction i.e. we move toward what is scientifically plausible (with some subtle handwavium) and the story centres on character.

I am thinking of James SA Corey’s works and closer to home, Patty Jansen. Space is generally a hostile place that puts characters under stress in extreme isolation. It’s fertile ground for human foibles to be pressured and exposed, for conflict to arise.

So that’s the approach Keith has taken with Horizon. 

The exploration vessel Magellan has been sent on a 34 light year trip to the Iota Persei system to explore the distant earth like planet,Horizon.  Staffed by a multinational crew it should be a testament to humanity’s ability to pull together in a crisis. Tensions between nations, however, play out between crew members even before they begin the Deepsleep (a half century of life suspension)  portion of the mission.  On waking, Commander Cait Dyson discovers her 2IC dead and their course changed. What was a bold mission into the unknown becomes a tense novel of suspense and second guessing.  Can they trust each other, the ships AI, the half human half digital intelligence Bren?  But most of all can they trust that the situation on Earth hasn’t changed in the 55 years they have been asleep?

Keith combines that sense of wonder we get from the extrapolation and explanation of big ideas (don’t worry, there’s no calculus) with tense mystery and suspense.  There’s competing personalities and agendas, some social and ecological commentary.  It proved to be a edge of the seat experience for much of my read.

Horizon’s strengths were in the presentation of the story world, the explanation of the workings of Magellan and the tense interplay between characters. I didn’t feel quite as convinced by the socio-cultural representation of Earth.  Certainly there was nothing that derailed the story but I felt at times that Keith had done such a great job at other elements that the background for the political and cultural situation on Earth didn’t quite have the same depth.

If you are hankering for some science fiction that makes sense and a tension building read, buy it. Good entertainment doesn’t usually come this cheap.

This copy was provided by the author.

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The Ark by Annabel Smith

The book is only the beginning.  But I’ll start there since this is a review.

The Ark presents a form of fiction that while not rare, is perhaps underutilised. I am talking about epistolary fiction, fiction told through letters or documents.  There are examples of the form stretching back six hundred odd years and smattered over all kinds of genre but if you were looking to write a novel it’s not the form I’d immediately choose.

Why?

I think it’s a form that battles against the audience’s expectations and experience. It demands quite a clever bit of structuring from the author and  the nature of its communication - essentially stop-start, (a document is experienced as a complete thing in and of itself and has to be written as such to attain verisimilitude) has the potential to break the readers flow.

Essentially it has to look and read like the real thing while delivering the same level entertainment expected of structurally easier formats.

I am, however, glad that Smith took up the challenge.  The Ark is a fairly big diversion from the work she’s previously published and I think she’s done well, very well.

In terms of story she delivers an interesting and timely scenario:

The year is 2041. As rapidly dwindling oil supplies wreak havoc worldwide a team of scientists and their families abandon their homes and retreat into a bunker known as The Ark, alongside five billion plant seeds that hold the key to the future of life on Earth. But The Ark’s sanctuary comes at a price.
When their charismatic leader’s hidden agenda is revealed it becomes impossible to know who to trust. Those locked out of The Ark become increasingly desperate to enter, while those within begin to yearn for escape.

It reads like an eco/survivor-thriller and it is.  The challenges presented by the form don’t seem to have hampered delivering a tense ending. The beginning is perhaps slower than your normal thriller but this is necessary to build the tension and get the reader reading between the lines.

One of the advantages of the form is that we, the reader, have different perspectives presented to us.  We begin to create one perception of the book’s reality based on the narrative explored in one set of emails, only to have that impacted or even undermined by revelations in other communications.  The reader is caught in a game trying to decide which character is presenting the most accurate state of affairs.  In that sense it’s perhaps more akin to a murder mystery thriller but without Hercule or Miss Marple to hold our hands.

So narratively,  The Ark worked very well for me.  The production of the book, raised the bar further.  If you are going to set a story in 2041 that occurs in cyberspace, then aside from say… presenting the story as an App (which Smith also did) you have to give the reader some small sense that they are not reading a book, you have to transcend the book to some extent. 

I did read my version in ebook form (I'm not sure if there is a paperback) which does a great job normally of simulating a standard paperback.  To break down that sense that we were reading a book though, Smith has designed the documents we read to appear as emails (ie not just text with address headers), blogposts, newspaper extracts, etc. Aside from verisimilitude it generates, this choice gives a literal change of scenery.

To have left the project there, would have been fine.  A nice terse future thriller, that makes some quiet comment on ecological issues and presents the reader with some variety in their narrative consumption. 

Smith went further giving us an expanded interactive multimedia experience and for that you can checkout thearkbook.com yourself.

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This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014.  Please check out this page for more great writing from Australian women.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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eBook Review – Forgotten War by Henry Reynolds

I read Anzac’s Long Shadow earlier in the year and found it to be a critical and refreshing look at aspects of Australia’s military history and the detrimental or skewing effect that our martial myths have on both our soldiers and the collective consciousness and culture of the Australian people.

Forgotten War is similarly a book that looks at our forgotten war(s) (the only ones fought on Australian soil for control of it) and our cultural amnesia in relation to it.  If I can crudely sum up an Australian’s sense of history it might go something like this.  Captain cook landed, settler’s and convicts arrived, there was isolated problems with the indigenous population but on the whole Australia is a peaceful nation of beer drinking sportsmen and women, that’s never known war on its own soil.

Forgotten War outlines succinctly and accurately that colonisation was not a largely peaceful process and that for a good 140 odd years settlers fought a series of conflicts for control of the continent and Australia’s aboriginal inhabitants resisted, forcefully and with some early successes until numbers, technology and the bushcraft of the colonisers improved.

White Australia has a problem with its acceptance of this history. It’s a curious situation.  I can understand the racist impetus to obliterate the Aboriginal side of this history. What could be worse than defeat?  Why, enforcing the view that you never really fought to defend your land anyway.  In doing so, however, we bury the history of white settlement and of white settlers, neglect the harsh realities they had to face, the conflict they fought.

This situation is as ridiculous as suppressing the reality of the Indian Wars in American history.

Reynolds has produced very accessible text, you needn’t be a history nut to enjoy this.  Indeed it helps open up that era of colonial settlement, and give it some balance.  You’ll understand why settlers living on the frontier walked to the wash house or barn fully armed and in twos.  Not because they harboured some unrealistic notion of the danger posed by Aboriginal warriors but because they had first hand experience of an ongoing conflict and a skilled and fast moving enemy.

Reynolds opens with an overview and lays out several points for consideration.  At what point did the narrative change from frontier war into something else? Can we call it a war?  What kind of war was it?  What were the costs of conflict in property, livestock and human lives (at 6000 settlers and 30,000+ Aboriginal dead it’s our countries third largest loss of life due to conflict).  Was a genocide carried out?

This book should get you thinking about why (when military historians regard the resistance as a conflict) we don’t honour the settlers nor the early aboriginal warriors in our military myth through the War Memorial, why we don’t teach the history of early conflict when it’s there in black and white print from the pages of almost any colonial newspaper. The only answer I can come up with is that it doesn’t fit some very deep seated and erroneous concepts of self, Australians have.

This book caused me to reflect upon my country’s singular reverence for its war dead.  Our Cult of Remembrance outstrips even religion in terms of what is sacrosanct.  Australians will rarely allow Diggers to be slighted, or the rose filtered view of our ANZAC soldiers to be questioned.  Suggest that perhaps we should move on, tone down the focus and you’d be tarred and feathered.

Yet I could find any number of folks who would not bat an eyelid at suggesting that Aboriginal people should forget the past – forget a conflict of 140 years, the deaths and the associated social and cultural costs.

This is a book every Australian should read if they want to be honest with themselves about the beginnings of our recorded history.

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eBook Review – Phantazein – Edited by Tehani Wessely

This collection was never intended to see the light of day, indeed as Tehani, the editor says, “it really shouldn’t exist”  Phantazein grew out of the slush pile of the submissions call for another Fablecroft anthology, Insert Title Here. 

As I was reading the slush, I uncovered several stories that resonated with me as working very well together but not, it seemed, in an unthemed anthology. To include them in Insert Title Here would have unbalanced the nature of that collection. These stories felt like they belonged in a different book altogether. A fantasy book. This book.

- Introduction, Phantazein.

Now my participation as a judge in the Aurealis awards precludes all but the most general commentary on a number of the stories in this collection. A fact that makes telling you how good it is rather difficult.

That being said you have Tansy Rayner Roberts with a fusion of Greek myth and fantasy in The Love Letters of Swans. If you have come to enjoy Tansy’s work, this is her doing what she does best, fusing her fiction talents with her professional knowledge of the classics.  Interesting to see her working with Greek myth/history as opposed to Roman.

Thoraiya Dyer, delivers an interesting take on Arabian myth in her story Bahamut. If you liked the historical stories presented in Gilgamesh Press’ Ishtar, Dyer’s work in fantasy, especially here, would work well in that milieu.

In Kneaded, SG Larner delivers a sickly sweet( I may never be able to drink Raspberry cordial again) tale that plays with elements of The Sugar Child and other folktales that involve baked or manufactured children.  Twelfth by Faith Mudge also gives us a dark and interesting perspective on those group of tales that fall under The Twelve Dancing Princesses line.  Working with fairytales I think can be a two edged sword, they are familiar and so it’s difficult to be original and you have centuries of expectation as to how and why these stories should be told.  Thankfully all the writers in this collection have managed to walk the blade edge.

The Nameless Seamstress is a beautiful tale by the late Gitte Christensen, presenting Chinese mythic elements.  Having read it, loved the ambience its execution conveys, I am truly saddened that we have lost this talent.

It’s good to see another work by Rabia Gale, a Pakistani American writer whose work I have followed for some time. Her Village of No Women, continues to show growth in her abilities.  I have always found her work to be distinctive and original and this story reaffirms my thoughts that she is one of those writers that can work with genre elements and reshape them to produce something original and distinctively hers. 

Thematically Phantazein seems largely split between retellings of fairytales and retellings or reworkings of ancient history/myth.  If you are a fan of the current trend of dark retellings of either of these sources then there’s enough dark here for you.  Not all stories end sadly but there is a gravity, a depth to all of them.

I love that Tehani included an illustrated work of poetry from Foz Meadows (illustrated by Moni).  You probably wouldn’t get Scales of Time outside of small press, or somewhere like Strange Horizons – a poem about friendship and love from the perspective of a dragon.

For a collection that seems to have magically coalesced, Phantazein is a solid production.  I’m not sure you could get a stronger collection by asking for direct submissions.  Kudos to Tehani’s eye for talent and story and kudos to the writers who took long raked over material in a lot of cases and breathed life and originality in to them.

Phantazein showcases the depth of talent Australia has in the fantasy field and gives us a glimpse at some other international authors who we may not be familiar with.

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This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014.  Please check out this page for more great writing from Australian women.

 

 

 

 

 

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eBook Review – Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins

Collins was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, and still is one of America’s most loved and successful contemporary poets both in monetary and critical terms. 

I am, as I have stated before, attracted to formalist poetry, to fairly distinct and repetitive rhyme and rhythm.  My enjoyment of Collins then, came as a bit of a surprise. 

Picnic, Lightning is a collection of everyday musings in poetic form and from what I can ascertain, this is standard for Collins’ kind of poetry.  Indeed his poem In the Room of a Thousand Miles presents us with a manifesto.  Though perhaps that’s too strong a word:

In the Room of a Thousand Miles

I like writing about where I am,

where I happen to be sitting,

the humidity or the clouds,

the scene outside the window—

a pink tree in bloom,

a neighbor walking his small, nervous dog.

And if I am drinking

a cup of tea at the time

or a small glass of whiskey,

I will find a line to put it on.

 

My wife hands these poems back to me

with a sigh.

She thinks I ought to be opening up

my aperture to let in

the wild rhododendrons of Ireland,

the sun-blanched stadiums of Rome,

that waterclock in Bruges—

the world beyond my inkwell.

…[read on]

This focus on the everyday, the mundane, the “suburban” as Collins himself calls it, has led some to view his work as a bit bland.  For sure, you won’t find rage here or angst.  You might find humour, wit and playfulness though and perhaps that puts people off that think poetry should be about important things (as If laughter and lightness aren’t important) or about “plumbing the depths of one’s soul”.  Collins is far more contemplative.

Personally I get the same sort of feeling reading Collins that I might reading Japanese forms like Haiku and Tanka, in that they are often very particular observations of the ordinary and yet more than that as well.  The diction and syntax is fairly straight forward, enhancing his general appeal and accessibility. The poems tend to seep in under your defences and a poem that first is about returning to the house for a book, walks you gently into a meditation on alternate possibilities/realities. 

Readers of speculative fiction might not view the following as all that strange but if you are fairly linear in your thinking, then this poem opens up possibilities:

 

I Go Back to the House for a Book

 

I turn around on the gravel

and go back to the house for a book,

something to read at the doctor's office,

and while I am inside, running the finger

of inquisition along a shelf,

 

another me that did not bother

to go back to the house for a book

heads out on his own,

rolls down the driveway,

and swings left toward town,

 

a ghost in his ghost car,

another knot in the string of time,

a good three minutes ahead of me—

a spacing that will now continue

for the rest of my life.

…

I enjoyed Picnic, Lightning for its relatively easy “entrance exam”, almost any lover of good written words could pick Picnic, Lightning up and enjoy it.  Many of the poems could have been formatted as prose, as flash fiction, but there is something to be be gained by the arrangement of line breaks, in drawing you eye and pacing your reading.  Collins draws your attention to the ordinary and most of the time finds for us the extraordinary. It’s his consistency in delivering this to the reader, I suspect, that grants him success. 

Death and pain are big themes in poetry but sometimes we need to be reminded of the extraordinariness of life.

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eBook Review – The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings by Angela Slatter

Angela Slatter has, along with her regular partner in fiction Lisa L Hannett, been one of those authors I have collected yet never really got around to reading due to the reviewing pile taking precedence over the personal reading pile.  Sure, I have read single stories on occasion, enough to know that the money I have put down on her other collections is well spent. The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings from Tartarus, is then the first collection that I have read in its entirety. It’s also possibly the first mosaic novel that I have read. 

It works well, both as a collection of separate stories and as collected narrative.  One of things that is hard to do within in a short story and which our best writers often achieve, is creating that sense of a wider realised secondary world within a small word count. 

What I think the mosaic format allows Slatter to do is give herself some wiggle room for story and style and let the layering effect of drip fed world details in each separate tale slowly envelope the reader to give us that realised world  That isn’t to say that Slatter isn’t doing a grand job of combining style, story and detail within each tale but that structurally the envelope of the mosaic helps in some cases to accentuate the impact of certain stories, while at the same time containing deviations is form and style in others.

In Terrible as an Army with Banners, Slatter crafts an effective piece of epistolary fiction. It’s distinct from many of the stories in the collection in terms of tone and style but works equally well in maintaining a sense of increasing dread and darkness.  Likewise The Maiden in the Ice meshed together horror elements that reminded me of The Ring with a a clever riff on a well known folktale.

 

For a while she tries to keep her eyes firmly fixed on her destination, on the silver-ash clump of sedge not so far—yet so very far—away. But the panic she’s tamped down hard gets the better of her, and she looks to the sparkling, treacherous ground upon which she moves, seeking the cracks, the veins, the fissures that are surely forming there.

But what she sees is something entirely different.

An oval face; skin sallow—in the sun it will become olive; dark-flecked, large eyes; thick straight brows; an unbalanced mouth, the top lip thin, the bottom full; and hair as black as Rikke has ever seen. Black as nightmares, black as a cunning woman’s cat, black as the water she is trying to escape. Older than Rikke, caught between girl and woman, and suspended in the solid lake as if she’s a statue, standing; head titled back, one arm reaching up, the other pointing downward.

from The Maiden in the Ice.

The Bitterwood Bible is a neat package that has allowed Slatter to explore, examine and re-imagine the fairy/folktale milieu.  There’s a balance achieved here too;  I never felt that I needed to rush through the stories to the larger resolution.  I was able to enjoy each of the tales as a separate entity and I suspect that were I to reread it as Lisa Hannett suggests in the afterword and focus more on the connections between each story, I would have another equally pleasant and slightly different experience.

I am left feeling the beneficiary of sumptuous and stylish storytelling, Slatter, I suspect is at her best here.

This book was supplied by Tartarus Press.

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Disclaimer:  I am a Judge for this years Aurealis Awards and some of the stories contained in this volume are eligible. Hence my review only comments on those not eligible and on how the collection works as a mosaic novel.

 

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This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014.  Please check out this page for more great writing from Australian women.

 

 

 

 

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eBook Review – The Godless by Ben Peek

It’s a big step moving from writing condensed, powerful and original short fiction to a multiple book, epic fantasy.  As different as say running a 5km run and a marathon.  In each case you use the same skill but the end objective, your tactics, how you cross the finish line or complete the work is different, enough to challenge the best runners or writers when they are used to one kind of event, one format.

So how did Peek fare?  He’s a very good short story writer (see Dead Americans) and The Godless is an epic in every sense of the word.

Granted a trilogy is not an uncommon sight on fantasy shelves but I get the sense that in some at least there’s a fairly straightforward structure designed to move the story along, hook in readers who will become loyal – an understanding if you will between commerce, story and entertainment that produces an easily digestible product, where the text is transparent. 

Then there are books like The Godless that I think need the space for the scope and definition of the storytelling.  The Godless is an epic, not just in terms of size but in its selection of characters and its apparent scope. 

The city at the centre of The Godless, Mireea, is built on the back of a dying god and for a significant part of the story I was unsure whether of not this was a metaphor, a creation story, for the gods as described seemed more of that ilk, primeval forces with human characteristics but godly dimensions. 

Then we have the Children of the Gods, humans gifted with longevity and power, humans that become immortals and whose life and power produce curious responses: a godlike ruler of animals, a reclusive enclave of detached natural philosophers, a crazed killer of nations.  Then there are the “cursed”, those unfortunates blessed with elemental fragments of the god’s powers who are either shunned because of the differences or are killed by their inability to control the powers they hold. 

What happens to a world existing in the twilight of the god’s powers when a new god appears, is the big picture The Godless series will attempt to answer.  But threaded through this epic tale are personal stories, personal tragedies that help to ground it.

It’s these personal stories, the characters that they spring from that I found most interesting, especially for the genre of epic fantasy.  We still have our sword and sorcery, our big battles, our scarred veterans and our young characters who we will follow on their journey.  But Peek has I think made some original and diverse choices in building and filling his world.  Our principle protagonist is not white, and not male - Ayae is an orphan, a refugee who up until our introduction to her  has made a successful transition to being the apprentice of a renowned cartographer.

Many authors paying lip service to diversity may have stopped there but Peek provides us with a diverse cast and that diversity is three dimensional - the ruler of Mireea, is a shrewd woman of middle age with the associated changes in body and shape that it brings for many of us.  The leader of “Dark”, a bunch of mercenary saboteurs, is an exiled black nobleman and the invading army of nationalistic Leeran’s, is white.  Men and women appear evenly in positions of power.  Now I am sure that some sections of the science fiction community might rail against such blatantly fair representation.  Me, well I see diversity done skilfully, diversity and originality that enhances story.  When your characters feel like real people more so than archetypes then I think the reader finds it harder to slot them into well worn parts, into literary set pieces that they have long grown used to reading and anticipating. Diversity created interest, which kept my immersed along with Peek’s writing style.

Peek’s writing asserted itself from the outset, I was very conscious of his style being an important part of the storytelling, of creating a sense of place and a mood. Some writing fades into the background, let’s the story do the heavy lifting.  What I found in The Godless was a very good mix of fresh story and styled prose.

Slowly, Mireea was becoming uniform: a city of shut buildings and empty lanes, the divisions of economy washed away and falling into memory like the sprawl of markets. Each new building shut up was a part of Mireea lost, and soon he would also be gone. If he was not, he ran the risk of being drawn into the units that the Mireean Guard were making from citizens. That he had no desire for.

If you are looking for a page turner I am not sure I would classify The Godless as such, which is a good thing.  I think you need to devote a bit more attention to it.  This is the first of a great epic and I get the same sense of immersion and depth of history that I got when reading A Song of Ice and Fire.  I want to know more about these characters, because they are fully realised and I can’t sate my curiosity by falling back on archetypes

So how did Peek fare?  Very well.  If you want to enjoy what is possible to achieve when you look outside the standard fantasy tropes give The Godless a go.

 

The e-Arc was provided by the publisher.

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eBook Review – Kontakt : An Anthology of Croatian SF

I have only recently come to appreciate the importance of a good translation. Only recently come to realise, indeed how much can change when a work undergoes translation, how much is lost or altered and perhaps why translation is so expensive i.e. you are not just paying someone to convert words, but to somehow embody the original meaning, intent, tone of the author in the new work. I would expect that to some considerable degree translation is almost as much of  an act of creation as writing the original work.

Which is why it is a pleasure to read Kontakt where the majority of the works were translated by the authors themselves with some additional editing by Tatjana Jambrišak,Goran Konvični, and Darko Macan. 

As Cheryl Morgan outlines in her preface Kontakt was initially put together as part of a showcase of Croatian science fiction and made available in a short print run for members of the 2012 Eurocon held in Zagreb.  This ebook edition has been rendered so that what was originally only available to a few, can now reach a wider audience.

Darko Macan, author and co-editor is upfront in his introduction, he and his co-editor have put forward a particular viewpoint.  Croatian Science Fiction is dark, its history is long and the years from which these stories spring begin around the time a war for independence was fought. 

It is the Croatian science fiction of the nineties and the naughts that we present to you in this book. The twelve included writers showcase, I believe, a good cross-section of voices and interests in the contemporary Croatian SF. I favoured, in choosing, the writers of continuous presence and a larger output. I erred, slightly, in favour of the upbeat notes (one or two characters were even spotted having fun) but I mercilessly stomped fantasy wherever I had the option to include science fiction instead – there is too much past in the Balkans already, so it is my firm belief we need not add any more.

But fear not, lovers of dark fantasy fiction, for Darko let a few fantastical stories through.

The collection kicks off with Bloodhound, by Milena Benini, a cyberpunk-ish tale with some of that darkness that Darko was alluding to.  Johnny Gobac a.k.a. Bloodhound, a hard-boiled half-dog ( I had an image of RIFTS Dogboys) on the search for a girl kidnapped by criminals producing certain unsavoury films.  It evokes a tone and a style that has links to the larger Cyberpunk movement but there’s a definite grittiness, a “what happens away from the chrome and neon” that we might not be used to from the American stream.

Dalibor Perković’s Hi-Tech Sex Lib, is proof that Croatian SF is not all doom and gloom. A humorous story about consumer time travel that focuses not on saving the world but on that most human of compulsions - sex and experimentation.  It asks the question, what would a couple do if they could meet their past or future selves.  Yes that question.  The ending is interesting and I can’t help thinking, that the saying  “that to truly love someone you must learn to love yourself” is apt here.

The Corridor by Darko Macan, apparently won international literary acclaim and I can see why.  It’s not a standard genre story, from the beginning the reader senses that it is more metaphorical, more surreal.  I felt as if the author was making comment on the absurdity of conflict of fighting against those who are just like us, those that share our humanity and the ridiculous and unquestioning nature of military life.  It’s worth a couple of reads and is one of the stories that made the most impact on me.

The Dead by Aleksandar Žiljak  somehow successfully merges a zombie tale with socialist sympathy.  Where you might say that US/UK zombie stories might be a comment on rampant consumerism, Žiljak shows that the shambling hordes can also be used as a criticism of capitalism.  Dead workers of the world unite!  A worthy story if you are tired of the run-o-the-mill Zombie tales.

I felt a bit detached from River Fairy by Ivana Delač, I think because the beginning felt a bit twee, but this may have been because I had just emerged from Žiljak’s story.  It is worth persevering though because it develops a nice fairytale quality i.e. dark and gruesome.

With De Cadenza we are treated to a bunch of sexual reprobates in space, it’s erotically humorous and baroque and a bit tongue in cheek. Despite its ornate and sumptuous delivery, I feel Danijel Bogdanović’s piece offers a refreshing palate cleanser.

And as soon as that palate is cleansed we are given Zoran Vlahović’s Every Time We Say Goodbye, a story more characteristically hard science fiction than perhaps the others and a war seen from the point of view of the wives of its warriors.  An interesting comment on the cost of war and on the reality of violence.

And war is a strong theme, as well as religion.  In Time Enough and Space we find ourselves in a Croatia that is receiving refugees from America, China and Russia after a limited nuclear war, families are forced to occupy rooms in houses, space and privacy are at a premium, until the protagonist finds a man selling space into another dimension.  Goran Konvični tips his hat towards Heinlein's Crooked House with this almost philosophical piece.

Katarina Brbora’s Avaleon and the Black Feather, features travelling to another dimension where God, Jesus and the Holy Mother are fighting against Satan in a Croatia on the black Sea ( migrations that occurred in our history never occurred in this alternative dimension), it’s less philosophical and more action orientated. 

The Executor, features an inquisitor of sorts, sent to rid an isolated village of a disturbance. Zoran Krušvar’s gives us an Executor, that is pompous, impatient and at heart a coward.   I had a sense of where the story was going due to the set up but Krušvar amped up the darkness and well, it was a very interesting and slightly gory finish.   

Despite Kontakt being a collection, a cross section of the Croatian science fiction community it  does seem to sit very well together. A lot of the stories have dark elements, even those that end well, perhaps this is what makes all of the stories seem to fit reasonably well together?  It’s not a darkness that seems oppressive though, maybe a little more honest, a little more realistic and world weary, carrying the weight of history and recent experience. 

I come away with a definite sense of the tone of Croatian SF, one that I think many Australian speculative fiction writers might enjoy, considering our penchant for the dark and weird.

This collection was provided by Wizard’s Tower Press.

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eBook Review – Gideon’s Angel by Clifford Beal

I finished The Raven’s Banquet Friday morning and because Beal had left me hanging off a cliff I dove straight into Gideon’s Angel and managed to finish it just as quickly.  They are both reasonably short novels by fantasy standards ie around the 250 page mark, but Beal has done a great job of filling them out, of making the most of the space.  I found Gideon’s Angel in particular well paced and like its prequel, compelling. 

In fact I think I enjoyed it more.

The supernatural element definitely comes to the forefront in Gideon’s Angel, it’s much harder to explain happenings away as the result of a drug induced vision or the effects of epilepsy.  It’s hard to deny the reality of a hound of hell making mince meat of your leg. 

Beal has been rather clever though in the way the story unfolds, much like an episode of Doctor Who deals with the Doctor’s appearance in historical England, the vast majority of people in the world of Gideon’s Angel are oblivious to the dark happenings.

And like a good Doctor Who episode Beal has given us some fan service, with everyone’s favourite Musketeer D'Artagnan making a lengthy appearance and for the poets amongst us, a certain Mr Milton is privy to the dark happenings, inspiring him no doubt to write a certain epic poem.

Now Beal is a trained swordsman and he has managed to let this training influence his fight scenes rather than overwhelm them.  I have read other works where the author’s expertise and display of such can throw you out of the text but Beal gives us the flavour without bogging down in description.  If you’re reading a work featuring swordplay who want it to feel like sword play is happening and not like you are reading a technical manual by one of the European masters.

So, excellent footwork Mr Beal.

So too on the gender front.  We have two female characters in Gideon’s Angel who get a reasonable amount of page time and who do have quite a bit of agency, Isabel the daughter of a Rabbi in hiding (whose knowledge of the Talmud comes in handy)  and Treadwell’s mistress Marguerite. We meet also with Anya the Gypsy fortune teller but all in all, I felt like their was more gender diverse participation in the story.  It must also be stressed that for Cromwellian England the central cast of heroes was also ethnically and religiously diverse.

If I were to be picky,  I have a small issue with the ending, which I won’t reveal but I will say it should have been problematic from the standpoint of resolution but for some reason it wasn’t.  I guess I felt I’d had my fill of action.

In any case I hope Solaris have signed Beal up for another book after these two, I’d really like to read the further adventures of Sir Richard Treadwell.

This book was provided by Solaris publishing.

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eBook Review- Stepping Over Seasons by Ashley Capes

I decided to get serious about poetry last year (and by serious I mean skill up, write, rewrite, resub. and read).  Part of that plan was seeking out current Australian poets and reading their work.  Something you’d think easily done in the era of the internet.

It’s been and continues to be an interesting journey.  But it’s not been a particularly smooth one.  Australian poetry still seems somewhat fragmented to me as something of an outsider, islands of culture rather than one big continent(and perhaps this has advantages).  The Best Australian poems series by Black Ink certainly helps but I have been steadily making my way around these various communities, and know that what’s to be found in these is not the full story. 

Ashley Capes was featured in one of these tomes, but I don’t believe that’s where I first came across him.  Perhaps it was Twitter or his blog. In any case I feel as If I have come to his writing without the imprimatur of some college professor or a salon like group of poets meeting in a bohemian cafe(please, poets still do this don’t they).  I think these kinds of discoveries, the ones we make ourselves without the influence of others are important, they allow a genuine connection.

Stepping Over Seasons is Capes’ second collection and I am late to the party( it was released in 2010) and if I were to pick one defining feature of this collection, it is his striking ability to present clear imagery succinctly, to let just the right amount of words carry the feeling and point of the poem.

That and he can take the most mundane of objects and imbue them with meaning.  Maybe he’s just deploying focussed attention, developed through his work with Japanese forms of poetry like Haiku and Senryu, which I know he’s a dab hand at.

A case or poem, in point is the first in the collection:

other objects

my wedding ring is a plain silver
barrel band. same as dad’s, very modest
and very hard to keep smooth,
with scratches I can’t keep track of and
don’t want to hide. it’s no good pretending
the marriage is perfect, no use
hanging all our memories and every
step of the future on just one symbol. other
objects speak of love, too. the weeping
maple we’ve shifted to every house, the
cup we fill with knives and forks
or the handwritten address you gave me
the night we met, walking the city
and flinging orange peel into hedges, things
that endure, things that have lines
and marks to prove them.

 

I am suspicious of ebullient expressions of emotion, they can easily ring false (it depends on the Poet and what you know of their life an experience) but Capes is often understated in his expression of sentiment. All this Ink speaks of the struggle of writing, of hoping and believing that this writing is going to lead somewhere:

 

…

if I sit up tonight and all this ink

becomes poetry, I could point the wheel

to a place we’ve never been,

watch Venice sink a little more

or show you stability in three bedrooms,

and looking back, you wouldn’t see

smoke stacks or the front door.

 

and August Rain sketches out beautifully the reality of being in that position where sometimes the only thing you can do for some one is be present. This is not not to say that the collection is all reserved, contemplative poetry.  There’s some cynicism and criticism that comes through in Overlook, a piece that criticises the great poets who romanticise their cities, a piece that challenges them to find in Capes’ home town “…   a moment worthy of haiku, where sewerage and the paper mill meet.”

I laughed out loud at Sunrise Today which dryly eviscerates morning television variety shows. Four years on this poem is still right on the money, proof of every claim that Capes lays at their feet. 

But I return again to his ability to focus, to deliver succinct, and inspired observations. A stanza from Small Town could be the epitaph of half the regional towns of South Australia with

marks on the footpath

don’t fade and the cemetery

never shrinks, only the town around it.

These three lines speak more truth about my experience of rural towns than anything you’ll find by Banjo. 

In one of those serendipitous moments I happened also to be reading a Ted Chiang short story about a society in which we have the ability to record and recall everything and anything we experience (imagine being able to prove that you had indeed put the toilet seat down).  Chiang is seductive in that piece, in that I almost feel that such a thing(as he outlines it) wouldn’t be so bad.  Then I read Capes’ Late Night, and suddenly the seductive reasoning was a little more shaky. It ends with…

I guess the great lie of our time is capture –

it’s comforting to believe

everything can be caught, recorded

and remembered,

so we don’t have to appreciate

anything in the moment.

 

Stepping Over Seasons, continues to resonate with me.  Just in writing this review  I experience that aha! moment again as I pluck out quotes for you.  This collection had a very high hit rate for me.  Capes I find to be a keen observer and communicator with his poetry, it’s some of the most enjoyable free verse I have read.

I encourage you to discover Ashley Capes for yourself.  You can buy the collection in paperback and eBook form, or you could encourage your Library to purchase it like I did.

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eBook Review – Talus and the Frozen King

The tagline reads Introducing the worlds first detective.  If you have ever wondered what Sherlock Holmes crossed with the Neolithic era might be like Talus and the Frozen King will give you a reasonable idea. 

The reader is introduced to two travelling companions on their way north following the Aurora Borealis in the hope that it will lead them to the place where all the worlds meet and one of the characters will be given one last time to talk to his dead wife. On the way they come across a settlement and hear the voices of people wailing.  Never one to overlook a mystery Talus and Bran (who is having second thoughts about their journey) make their way towards the village where they find that a King has been murdered.  Talus and Bran, are the only ones who can unearth the killer, but first they have to disperse the fog of suspicion that crowds around all strangers in this cold and isolated village.

The parallels between Sherlock Holmes and the two main characters are, I think obvious, and deliberate.  Talus, the book’s Holmes, is a story teller, a bard who doubts the existence of the spirit world, who sees truth in patterns and concrete evidence but who has difficulty with emotions and understanding love.  Bran, the Neolithic Watson, is a disfigured ex-fisherman, with a temper and a good axe-arm.  Talus pieces the clues together and uses Bran to tease out the connections in much the same way Holmes does with Watson.  We even have a criminal mastermind.

Talus and the Frozen King works well enough as a mystery and at keeping the reader guessing with a plethora of possible suspects and some interesting personal relationships. Where it fell down for me was in some of the world building.  Edwards does a good job with the creation of the landscape and the physicality of the setting but a couple of things dropped me out of the flow of reading.

Now Talus and the Frozen King is set in the Neolithic age, aside from physical evidence left by these peoples, there’s not much for a writer to go on, you’re essentially writing fantasy.  I found some of the names in the book jarring, they didn’t seem to ring true to either historical names (which is fair enough, you try finding a neolithic baby name clay tablet) nor any sort of naming/cultural convention set up in the world that’s been created. I felt as if the names were drawn from periods of history much later than the setting ie Talus is a Greek name, Tia an Egyptian queen from the 19th dynasty, Bran, a welsh name from the 12th Century.  There was a chance here I think to create a certain verisimilitude by having names that could be linked to the culture in some way.

How powerful and important are names to a book’s world building? This is highlighted in the name of Lethriel, one of the major characters in  Talus and the Frozen King.  If you dear reader are not automatically thinking of an elven princess you are lucky. Such is the power Tolkien’s pseudohistory/myth on the genre. It is such a seemingly small thing, but I felt there was a missed opportunity to spend a bit more time on the names of characters and how they might connect, support and evoke the setting.  Especially since it looks to be a continuing series.

The second issue I had was with an instance of what felt like klunky back story exposition early on in the book that explains some of Talus’ history.  It’s necessary for a later reveal but I was really conscious that I, the reader, was being told this information for a very important reason.  I like my back story drip fed a little more.

I think what Edwards has tried to do is ambitious, how do you create a Holmesian character in a world where philosophy, science and logic are still in their infancy. How do you create the world’s first detective without it feeling like it’s Holmes and Watson in bear fur. I think the answer lies in exceptional world and character building.  Which in all fairness is perhaps beyond what the author had scope to produce.  You can have a pacey murder mystery set in the Neolithic which is a fun, light read or you can spend 10 years trying to produce something resembling Hild.

The landscape was beautifully evoked but I wasn’t entirely convinced of the Neolithic world the characters inhabited in a cultural sense. I felt Talus and the Frozen King was still a fairly modern Holmesian murder mystery (and a reasonable one at that). So if you like Holmes and Watson-like characters in your murder mysteries and you are tired of the body count in Midsomer, give it a go.

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eBook Review – The Memory of Death: Death Works 4 by Trent Jamieson

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Trent was able to bring Stephen de Selby back because, honestly I thought he was tragically and irrevocably gone in the Business of Death.  Such is the god-like power of authors.

So de Selby returns 20 months after his heroic demise (a surprise for someone who is Death incarnate) and your favourite schmuck is back minus the power of the Hungry Death, it having been redistributed back among the 13 Regional Managers.  It seems that everything is back to normal.  Mortmax Industries are back to pomping the newly dead, ensuring their safe passage to the other side. Lissa is the new Regional Manager and de Selby’s cousin is her 2IC.  Nothing could go wrong could it?

But this is Stephen de Selby, the poster boy for awkward wrongness.  He finds upon his return that Lissa’s moved on and for some reason the personnel at Mortmax don’t like him very much (unless he’s on the end of a boot). 

The Memory of Death is clearly a departure from the story arc that was resolved in the first three books - our hero having risen as high as he could go has fallen a long way, we are back to the lovable, slightly dead schmuck that we all love.  The Memory of Death offers a new job and a new mystery for us to participate in. You could read the story fromthis point because Jamieson has done some fairly smooth backgrounding but I think the best way is to start with the first three books.

I will note that the Memory of Death is pretty much a novella at 97 pages(on Sony Reader software).  The writing is tight and smooth; fans will devour Jamieson’s action and wit in one sitting.  I was left reinvigorated and wanting more of Stephens awkward self deprecating blundering.

You can purchase Memory of Death from Momentum Books or from most reputable digital stores.

This book was provided by the Publisher.

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eBook Review – Dead Americans and Other Stories by Ben Peek

You know, since I got into this writing about Speculative Fiction gig, coming up on three years ago, Ben Peek’s always been there.  It’s odd that I haven’t actually read anything by him before(besides his blog posts).  Sure, I have work that he did with Twelfth Planet Press (on my notorious TBR-after-review–copies-are-done pile) but one thing leads to another and I never quite make it through that pile.

In some respects though, reading Dead Americans, which collects some of his best work over the last decade, is the best way to discover him.  You get to see a good range of work and you get to see a consistent facility with words and style.  I have no reservation in saying that he’d be one of Australia’s best writers.  He demonstrates in Dead Americans, the ability to play inside the science fiction genre, riffing off it’s history or building dark futures so real that you shake the ash from your coat after reading. Then with seeming ease he will walk you into some fractured liminal zone between genres where you don’t quite know where you stand or what the rules are.

Collections by their nature can be quite fractured, different pieces written at different times with different influences, but I find Dead Americans hangs together well.  There Is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You That It Must Be Precious, kicks off the collection. A story that took us to that fractured liminal zone straight away -  a Longmire meets the Twilight Zone filmed through a brown filter:

In the colourless bright light of the afternoon, Williams drove to where she lived, a spare key from the landlord, talking it out to himself—“Burnt down as a cover, killed cause she was too beautiful, maybe; beautiful to someone, anyway”—beneath the drone of the radio. Currie had a roommate, but no one had answered when the real estate called so, on instinct, he decided to go and have a look. Instinct, that was all. He did not know Amanda, did not know her family, and he took that to be a sign that she was a decent, reasonable human being, and someone who was not prone to burning down a mosque because she was too white and too Christian to leave the petrol can at home. Not that he thought she did that, anyway. The burnt out mosque was just a setting, a place where the event happened, where her burnt face had pressed itself into his mind, and he had not found a way to leave it behind, yet.

While Peek’s got us there in that zone, he switches direction, wrong footing the reader with The Dreaming City – the real tale of Mark Twain and his visit to Sydney.  At this point I am marvelling how he can twist early Sydney and Ned Kelly into the one story and maintain a style that while not a pastiche of Twain, certainly evokes a tone and style that points to him.

The deck was ragged, empty, and filled with invisible spirits: the till turned left and right, spun by the hands of an unseen and pointless sailor; above, the remains of the rigging flapped, trailing through the air as decayed streamers and confetti; while the cabin door to the captain’s quarters was twisted off its frame, and hanging on one hinge, the glass window shattered, leaving jagged points into the middle. Twain walked on rotting planks and passed broken railings that were circled with rusted chains.

It was a parade of death, cheering him towards the hulk’s rotting belly with relentless determination.

With Johnny Cash, Peek lost me a bit.  But the fault is mine, I think.  I just don’t have the reference points for what he is trying to achieve with this piece – a story told in a questionnaire where you only get to see the answers.  Perhaps it requires some subsequent rereading.  Nevertheless, it marks nicely the shift into more solidly science fictional material or a shift from liminal spaces that could be our world into the clearly delineated fantastic whether it’s science fiction, fantasy or a melange of both.

Possession starts our descent in both in narrative and tone.  Is it part of the Red Sun stories that follow?  It has The Returned – bronze cyborg’s fashioned out of parts of the dead and messenger crows, that feature in the following stories, but it feels a bit cleaner, polished (in a aesthetic, not technical sense, all his stories are polished in that regard), more hopeful than the other stories.  Perhaps the world of the Red Sun at another time. We are introduced to both Eliana, a botanist working in the Aremika Shaft (a practically bottomless fissure) – helping to heal it and the broken remains of a Returned, caught up in debt that won’t let her die. 

“I figured the Shaft would be a good choice. That was my idea. The Shaft. All you had to do was jump. I could never sit there and let a man cave my head in. That waiting, that—no. No. All I had to do was push Joseph back—let him get me in close, first, tell him I wanted to stand on the edge, tell him it excited me. That was all. Then I could just push him back. Then I could just jump. Then—then—I would be free.”

I have heard of these Red Sun stories ( a name coined not by Peek himself) and the three that follow are responsible for my “shaking the ash from your coat” comment above.  Three different stories focussing on different cultures or facets of a world, so dark and weird that it’s like a delicious oppressive weight, stories that have the texture of dried papery skin.  I felt like I needed a bath after reading them and this is a good thing

The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys had me in mind of new weird North Korea, a revered Queen sends her poor, undereducated, under resourced subjects to fight the might of Returned armies and the soldiers who suicide out of despair seek to return to life in the bodies of children.

At first, I thought that the doctor’s words had come back to frighten me, that it was just the lingering hint of a nightmare; but when I touched my right arm, the skin shifted, and phantom fingers pushed up against it. I screamed. It was not, perhaps, the most masculine response, but it felt—I remember it now as clearly as that moment when I first felt it—as if a hand had been trapped beneath my skin.

The Funeral, Ruined, gives the reader insight into the other side of the conflict shown in the preceding story.  Linette a veteran of the wars, is coming to terms with the death and return of her lover - what it means to have him die and the be reborn in the skin of another, what it means to her and what it means for death.  So much of steampunk/dieselpunk/insertpunk can be conceptual, about gadgetry.  The best of the genre uses those trappings, that atmosphere to ask the hard questions that good literature always asks.

In Under the Red Sun we are treated to how Returning can affect and be abused in a familial setting and true to the touchstone of all steampunk, the Victorian age, it features grave robbing and dark dealings.

With John Wayne (As Written by a Non-American) we emerge from fantasy and enter some social commentary, in a cowboy hat and carrying a shotgun from Wallmart.  While I enjoyed the story I think my lack of knowledge around the subject matter means I am missing some things here.  Likewise with the next story, Octavia E. Butler (a remix).  I was left thoroughly having thoroughly enjoyed this story as presented.  My suspicions that there was some meta-narrative, some dialogue with the genre going on was confirmed in the acknowledgments.  I need to read some of Octavia Butler’s work ( and indeed Peek’s story encourages me to do so) to fully appreciate it but its still an enjoyable read.   

theleeharveyoswaldband bookends the collection nicely, we finish up with a story about a one man band, who achieved success when he lost the other band members and was made famous by a bootlegger.  It’s played fairly straight until the end where we are wrong footed again.

I like that there are stories here that I might need to do some further reading to get a full appreciation of.  I like fiction that stretches me, that takes me into uncharted territory but it’s a good writer that can take you along and entertain you enough so that those deficiencies or gaps in your knowledge don’t hinder enjoyment.   Peek has done that here. 

I have looked at the cover and title of this book a number of times and asked myself the question, had I not known of Ben would I have picked up the work.  Sadly I don’t think I would have and that’s not a criticism of the publisher or Ben.  These pieces don’t fall into a nice neat marketable box.  The title in that sense I think targets a North American audience (and I can see why this has been done).  Australian’s not in the scene (and not aware of Ben’s talent) should read it.  Peek is one of those authors that can make something of their own in a genre- similar to Lanagan  You’re not reading Steampunk or New Weird, you’re reading Ben Peek’s Steampunk or New Weird. 

Having read this collection  I am eager both to discover his earlier novel and novella and to read his spin on epic fantasy in his forthcoming trilogy from Tor.

This review was based on an ARC provided by the publisher.

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For Australian readers Booktopia have a free shipping sale on at the moment (until tomorrow night).  You can pre-order Dead Americans now at nearly 40% off and they will still ship it for free in March.  Go here and use the code BIRTHDAY at checkout.

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