Dry Ice Factory

I picked up this fantasy novel at the last Seattle Potlatch on voidampersand's recommendation, and I didn't know much about it or the author before I started reading it. Within a few pages I looked the author up to confirm my suspicion that she was a poet. She writes prose like a poet: spare, careful, precise, and a little precious. The imagery is strong, and everything feels highly symbolic and subtly ornate.

The thing that makes this novel stand out is the highly original nature of the world it's set in. It's not remotely like generic Fantasyland, and it's not really like any other fantasy world I've read about, although there are aspects of it that reminded me of Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria. Part of this similarity might by stylistic too, since Samatar is also a poet writing a fantasy novel, but part of it is just how different the imaginary worlds are from anything else I've encountered. I've seen The Stone Boatmen compared to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels too, but I have to say that I didn't see it myself. But what I was going to say on this point was that it also strikes me as poetic, in the sense that poems are often about themselves and their own uniqueness. It's almost avant garde in the way it tries to avoid being generic, and yet it also avoids the incoherence that avant garde works can suffer from their lack of connection to anything familiar, at least for an audience unattuned to their individualistic meaning.

Anyway, it's a little difficult to summarize what The Stone Boatmen is about. It's about three cities that are all across oceans from each other and long out of contact although all were founded by the same civilization. One city specializes in rituals, one in poetry, and one in visions, and the deep matter of the story is how each of these things is a type of pattern-finding or meaning-communication. It's a multigenerational novel, with almost every chapter being about a new character who is a descendant of the characters in the previous chapters. It goes at least five generations deep, maybe six. If the story does have a similarity to standard fantasies it's in the way that it's mostly about the aristocracy. In the beginning a ruling family marries into a lower class fishing family, but after that all the characters are from the upper class, with basically unlimited resources to pursue their talents.

All the characters have talents, mostly falling into the three foci of the three cities. Another way that The Stone Boatmen makes me think of Samatar's novel is that both take religion seriously. In The Stone Boatmen this comes in the form of both ritual and vision. Perhaps the poetry functions as a kind of sacrament too. There is no overt religion with a church and gods, however, unlike in Samatar. (There are priests, but no theology to speak of.) Tolmie seems to be trying to tie everything together in the final chapter, but I confess that I'm not sure I understood her argument. It may have been an attempt to rationalize the visions of the future and the deep past that some of the characters experience in terms of pattern-finding. There are a number of twins in the story, and the final seer, Fjorel, observes that they are both identical and yet unique, and that this is true of classes of things in general. She has a revelation about this that may amount to realizing that the similarity of things is true through time, and this allows us to see into the past and the future. However, as I say, I'm not at all sure I understood the revelation.

This is also a non-genre story in the way that nothing much happens. There are adventures of a type, but not much in the way of swashbuckling. Characters and their relationships change, sometimes surprisingly, but it's not really a story of character either. Ultimately it's a story of discovery and ideas, and while I found it a little slow-going at times, I really appreciated the attention to detail and the strangeness of the whole endeavor. The uniqueness of the world is reason enough for the visit.

I pulled Swordspoint off my shelf because reading Georgette Heyer reminded me of it. Apparently I'm not the only one, because there in the first edition jacket copy is this quote from Peter S. Beagle: "Charming, exciting, and ironically provocative, rather as though Georgette Heyer had turned her hand to fantasy." I remember loving this novel when I first read it around the time it came out, but I didn't care for it as much this time. I'm not sure what the problem was the second time around, but it could be related to why Heyer almost immediately lost her appeal for me after the first novel I read. Maybe I don't actually like romance novels. Because Swordspoint is very much a romance, as in a story of love, and one of the things that was so striking about it back when it first came out (so to speak) was that it's a gay romance with more than a hint of S/M to it.

Of course another striking thing about Swordspoint that I found troublesome the second time through is that it's only a fantasy in that it takes place in a completely invented world. There's no magic, and it's not an Otherworld like Faerie. Neither is it a Ruritanian story, where the action takes place in an invented country that's still somehow part of our world. Swordspoint is set in an imaginary country that seems to be at the same level of technology as Europe in the Renaissance, so it does feel a little bit like traditional fantasy in that it's a world of swords, horses, ale houses, and aristocracy. While the story moves back and forth between the high class world of ducal places and the lowlife haunts of the impoverished, criminal Riverside district, where swordsman-for-hire Richard St Vier lives with his mysterious lover, Alec, it's mostly a novel of court intrigue, involving political machinations amongst the nobility, who are vying against each other for power and who hire St Vier to do their killing for them.

Part of my problem this time was that none of this felt very real to me. I know, it's a fantasy, what does reality have to do with it, right? Well, maybe nothing. But because it's all invented and because it's tied neither to history nor the alternate history and secret lore of Faerie, it felt like it was happening in a void in which none of the machinations really mattered. Again, maybe this is further evidence that I just don't care for romances, because the meat of the matter is the torrid, if playful, love of Richard and Alec. If you don't care about that (and I didn't this time), it's hard to care about the political intrigue that embroils them, although I will say that there are some ironic twists to the action invoking the law of unintended consequences that I did find very effective. But for me it lacked the weirdness and sense of alternate reality that I crave from fantasy and find in classics like Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter and Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (which Kushner cites as an influence).

Maybe I'm also in a sour enough mood right now due to personal circumstances that "witty" novels just aren't doing it for me. I remember thinking this was, in fact, a very witty, effervescent novel the first time I read it, but all the wit and high spirits seemed very flat to me this time around. The novel I read before this, Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, was also a romance but a very sour one, and it was much more to my taste. So I'm strongly hedging my review on this one, because I suspect that I'm just not in the right mood for Swordspoint right now. Alas, this has been even more the case for the sequel, The Fall of the Kings, which I've been reading since I finished Swordspoint and which does involve magic and secret lore, so maybe my problem isn't just with the romance. Your mileage is very likely to vary from mine, so make sure to read around about this very influential novel before you make a decision about whether to read it yourself. But of course, that's what you should always do.

Claimed is a fantasy novel with elements of horror. It opens with a ship discovering a volcanic island recently thrust up from the ocean and bearing what appears to be ruins of an ancient city. One of the crew finds a green oblong box and takes it with him. We next see him sell the object to a dealer in ancient artifacts in San Francisco. We switch once more in this fitful beginning to an old millionaire who has acquired the object and has some kind of seizure in the middle of the night. A young doctor is called in to tend to him, and an element of romance is introduced into the mystery when he immediately falls for the old man's beautiful silver-haired niece. The old man hires the doctor as a kind of guard, and bizarre events begin to unfold as the doctor gradually becomes aware that there's something unnatural about that oblong box.

This novel isn't quite as compelling as Stevens' Citadel of Fear or The Heads of Cerberus, but it still has a number of things to recommend it. Chief amongst these is the eerie, foreboding atmosphere she's able to conjure at times and the full bore explosion of fantastic imagery in the finale, which many people have pointed out bears some resemblance to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," published six years later. The other strength is the character of the old man, who is a successful capitalist who is notable for his fierce possessiveness -- which is depicted as a source of both strength and weakness and really gives the story its shape, leaving the protagonist doctor seeming a bit secondary despite his acts of heroism.

If Stevens has a failing as a writer, it's a lack of so-called narrative drive. All of her longer works suffer from too many scenes in which the characters sit around interpreting what has just happened, rather than doing something. Claimed suffers from this narrative passivity more than her best stories, and the insipid romance that she often manages to keep in the background is too much in the forefront in this one. Or maybe it's just that the doctor is such an uninteresting characters compared to the brash Irishmen of Citadel and Cerberus. The niece is practically a non-entity, so she also pales in comparison to the female protagonists of those two books.

This is not the kind of lost world adventure that was something of a specialty of Stevens', but more of a metaphysical fantasy along the lines of her novel Possessed: A Tale of the Demon Serapion, which was also serialized in 1920. On that front the novel succeeds in creating an otherworldly feeling, particularly in the climax, but also in a fine scene involving the doctor's aunt, who arrives on the scene as a blithe spiritualist whom he shamefacedly (as a man of science) asks for help. Indeed, it's really only the doctor and niece who are weak characters, since many of the secondary characters come off better. Stevens' descriptive powers as just as strong as always, and here she does a good job of characterizing the sea, which has a central role in the story. She also does a good job of evoking the foggy atmosphere of San Francisco, which makes me a little curious whether she had visited before she moved there after she stopped writing. Well, she could just as easily have picked it up from reading other adventure stories.

I believe I've now read everything that Stevens published except her first short story, which came out when she was 17, and the novel Avalon, which has never been reprinted perhaps because it has no elements of fantasy and is thus of little interest to the readers who have kept her name alive. She only wrote for a short period, so her body of work is not large. I'm still not sure what to make of the claims that she was influential on the developing genres of dark fantasy and science fiction, because I simply haven't read widely enough in that era to have much sense of what was common and what was new, but she is certainly a writer worth paying attention to. She's not doing too badly for a forgotten writer, since she's had a pretty good history of being reprinted. I highly recommend her to anyone interested in the pulp era of the fantastic.

[Magazine cover scan from isfdb.org.]

After reading The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, I was left with the impression that Francis Stevens (pen name for Gertrude Barrows Bennett) was a kind of outsider artist who used genre tropes in eccentric ways, perhaps due to her inexperience as a writer, and wasn't always in complete control of her material. Now having read the two novels she is perhaps most famous for, I've revised my impression. Theses are both supremely accomplished pulp novels in which she exhibits full control of the tropes and material. If they are somewhat eccentric, it's in the way that she blends genres, although it's important to bear in mind that she was writing at a time (her stories were published between 1917 and 1923) when the pulp magazines were only on the verge of specializing into specific genres of the fantastic such as horror and science fiction. But in terms of the skills of the writer, these novels seem superior to me than anything written by Homer Eon Flint, for example. Her imagination is similarly outrageous, too, although it runs more toward the occult and the weird than Flint's did.

Citadel of Fear was serialized in The Argosy magazine in September and October 1917. (I read the 1984 paperback from Caroll & Graf.) It's a remarkable novel that starts out as a lost world story set in Mexico. Two American gold miners -- one a big bull of an Irishman, who is the protagonist, and the other a clever sneak, who is the antagonist -- are lost in the Mexican desert when they stumble upon a mysterious hacienda. Soon they are taken to an underground city inhabited by pre-Toltec giants. A conflict amongst this strange race results in our hero being expelled from the hidden city. The action then moves forward fifteen years, when our hero visits his sister in the suburbs of a large city in the Eastern US. Soon the household is under attack from bizarre and mysterious creatures, and the main suspect is a sinister man who lives in a walled compound and claims to be breeding livestock. What he's really up to is much more outlandish than that, of course, and the novel climaxes in a supernatural conflict.

Citadel of Fear is very conventional in many ways, with a manly man as the hero and an early form of the manic pixie dream girl as his love interest. The lost world section of the story is fascinating for the way it creates its exotic pre-Columbian fantasy world, in which ancient Mexican gods vie for power. The action bogs down a bit in the middle part of book, as perhaps too much futile coming-and-going and vague bumpings in the night and comical-skeptical detectives prolong the slow reveal of what then becomes a wonderfully grotesque premise leading to the finale. As others have commented, if the early parts bear the imprint of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, there's more than a little bit of H.G. Wells' Island of Dr Moreau in the latter part of the book, although this is more science fantasy than science fiction when push comes to shove. It's here that Stevens' grotesque imagination is set free, and there is a nightmare quality to the climax that still carries quite a charge. It's also fascinating how Stevens retains a conflicted, mixed perspective of skepticism, Christianity, and paganism in the denouement, with a slight emphasis on the latter that seems a hallmark of the fantasy genre.

The Heads of Cerberus was serialized in The Thrill Book magazine in August through October 1919. (I read the 1952 hardback collectors edition from Polaris Press.) The Thrill Book was a short-lived attempt to publish a magazine specializing in the fantastic, and Stevens apparently sold them other stories that were lost when the magazine quickly folded. This novel begins in contemporary Philadelphia when another big bull of an Irish-American finds his friend blacked out from a blow to the head in an upstairs bedroom. Soon we learn about an ancient crystal vial with a Cerberus-headed stopper and supposedly containing dust of magical properties. When the dust is poured out, the two men and the Irishman's sister (where have we seen that before?) are transported first to a weird twilight fantasyland and then to a dystopian Philadelphia of two centuries in the future. Satirical and yet cracking adventures ensue, with a wonderfully unsettled resolution in which the transformative dust disappears with a gentleman of uncertain intentions.

The Heads of Cerberus is touted as possibly the first alternate world story. What's interesting to me about that aspect of the story is that the alternate Philadelphia ends up being specifically a kind of imaginary world even within the story itself. It isn't so much a parallel world as one that is conjured up by the imaginations of the protagonists, and thus it becomes a kind of metaphor for science fiction itself: a work of the imagination. I also found it interesting that the rationalization for how this other world was created/reached was very reminiscent of the rationalization for the parallel world in The Blind Spot by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, which was serialized in Argosy All-Story in 1921. Hall is usually credited for the occult aspects of that hybrid novel, and it must be said that Stevens handles the occult aspects of her novel much more competently than Hall does. Still, both novels have occult and science fictional aspects, and I'm not enough of a scholar of the era to surmise whether it's a matter of influence or of common practice in the pulps in those days.

A lot of claims are made for Stevens' influence on the developing genres of the fantastic. It appears that the admiring quote about Citadel of Fear that's still widely attributed to H.P. Lovecraft was not in fact written by him. It was written by someone named August T. Swift, which was long wrongly thought to be a pseudonym of Lovecraft's. I haven't seen any indication that Lovecraft commented on Stevens at all, although people see signs of influence, and I can see why. As for the claim that A. Merritt admired her work, there is no direct evidence that I've seen. Apparently for many years people thought Stevens was a pseudonym of Merritt's, and this was only debunked in the '50s. Again, you can see the similarities in the works of Stevens and Merrit, but is that a sign of influence? Whatever the case, Stevens remained a name to be conjured with amongst the cognoscenti of the fantasy pulps, and the fact that her work has been reprinted over the years attests to a continuing admiration, even if this has never led to fame.

One of the best articles I've found about her is Andrew Liptak's Kirkus Review piece, "The Influential Pulp Career of Frances Stevens". Here I learned that Gertrude Barrows published her first story in 1904 at the age of 17, thus establishing that she was interested in writing at an early age. (Other pieces I've read indicated that she was more interested in drawing early on.) Another interesting tidbit is that when she picked up the pen again in 1917, the pen name she wanted to use was Jean Veil, but Munsey magazine editor Bob Davis stuck her with Francis Stevens for some reason. Maybe he thought "Veil" was too obvious, but I like its artificiality.

Both of these novels are available in etexts, but I've read that a lot of the e-versions of Citadel of Fear don't include the whole novel, so be sure to dig a bit before you download one. Last time I checked, neither novel was available at the Gutenberg Project, and I think I only found one work by Stevens there. Another sign, perhaps, that she is arill undervalued. Whether she was influential or not, her stories and novels strike me as more than worthy to be included in the roster of forgotten writers mentioned in the jacket copy of Polaris Press: "Some of these old masters of fantasy -- and there are many others -- were A. Merritt, Murray Leinster, Homer Eon Flint, Ray Cummings, Garrett P. Serviss, J.U. Giesy and Francis Stevens." For me she joins Serviss and Flint as previously unknown writers of early science fiction who are worth exploring in depth.

[NOTE: The scans of the magazine covers were taken from isfdb.org.]

I read this book because it's a nominee for the Hugo for Best Novel, although even before I knew it was a nominee I had been intrigued by the title and the cover. When I found out that it was a novel of court intrigue, I developed doubts, but I remained curious. I have read novels of court intrigue that I enjoyed, but it's not a sub-genre I seek out. Also, Elfland and court intrigue are not something that I associate with each other. But I do love stories about Elfland and Faerie, so yeah, I was curious.

The protagonist is Maia, who is the half-goblin, half-elf son of the elvish emperor, living in exile since his mother's death because the emperor thinks nothing of him. The novel begins with Maia learning that his father and all his other sons (by other, elvish wives) have died in an airship crash, leaving Maia to inherit the throne. Maia enters a world of hostile high born elves, and he is completely unprepared. As he negotiates his way from one personal and/or political crisis to another, it quickly becomes clear that the airship crash was not accidental. Someone plotted against Maia's detestable father, and it appears they are plotting against Maia too.

Indeed, if the airships weren't enough, the court intrigue tells us this isn't the Elfland of Lord Dunsany. In my list of quibbles and complaints about the book, the primary one would be that it falls afoul of some of the criticism Ursula Le Guin leveled against Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books in her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie". The injection of Machiavellian (and later, Marxist!) politics into Elfland feels like the injection of the mundane into the magical. I suspect I'm out of touch with modern trends in Elfland, but I was actually uncertain why this particular story involved elves and goblins at all. Traditionally Elfland has been an otherworldly realm that works by different rules than the human world. Why bring what looks like human political struggle into Elfland? Why create an Elfland where time flows just as it does in the human world, where elves are mortal, and where magic is rarely spoken of and never actually practiced? By the end of the book I was beginning to see a glimmer of an answer to this question, but more on that later.

Related to this primary complaint was my feeling that the elves weren't very elvish. To reverse William Atheling's old formula, calling the people in this book elves is like calling a smeerp a rabbit. They look like elves, but they don't act like elves. Again, partly this is because what these elves do is plot and scheme for political power, which is a terribly worldly thing for an elf to do. But even physically there's a major oddity, which I struggled with from the start: the elves (and goblins) apparently have floppy ears that can be moved around, drooped, and pinned back to express emotion. They are like animal ears, specifically dog ears. This is a new feature in elves, and for the most part I didn't like the bathetic animal overtones it created. However, if the intent was to bring elves down to the level of the human animal, which is what I suspect is going on in a variety of ways in this book, it does succeed.

I felt equally unimpressed by the steampunk aspect of the novel in the beginning, because it just seemed as though airships and pneumatic tubes had been pasted on in a completely ornamental, unintegrated way. As the story progressed, however, the steampunk engineering ideas became more central to the plot, and in fact a big steam-driven engineering project developed thematic resonance with the story of Maia's unique political temperament. Furthermore, the steampunk elements were used to introduce a theme of Enlightenment and of scientific revolution in Elfland that seemed to directly challenge the idea of Elfland as a magical realm. As much as I continued to feel that this was a misuse of Elfland, this was the point at which I began to understand what the book was really up to. This wasn't really fantasy, this was a form of science fiction, and the intent was very much to haul Elfland into the mundane, mortal world. The elves were the aristocracy, and they were being dragged kicking and screaming into modernity. Once I understood this I thought, well, okay, if that's what you're up to, why not give us elves building steam spaceships and landing on the moon? That might be fun, actually, and this seems pretty obviously the first book in a series.

And despite my complaints and quibbles (elvish comic strips, really?), I did find this book completely gripping and enormously fun. It's a real page-turner. The death of the emperor and his heirs and Maia's succession to the throne are announced in the very first chapter, and the story moves from crises to crises, problem to problem, and from mystery to mystery after that. The science fiction novel it most reminded me of was C.J. Cherryh's Hugo-winning Cyteen. Both feature smart, isolated young people thrust into a world of constant crisis, constant confusion and fear, groping their way through an obstacle course of hidden menace toward an uncertain goal with only their wits and compassion as guides, desperate for any kind of kindness or friendship. Like Cyteen, this seems like a very fannish novel to me, with the half-breed Maia standing in for the kind of awkward, anxious, blushing, knowledge-hungry, socially-clueless, ostracized adolescent who reads the literature of the fantastic. He's ugly, and he doesn't know what to say to girls (or anybody else, for that matter). It's also a feel-good fairytale about kindness and justice being rewarded with power and loyalty. Maia must overcome the racial intolerance of elves (whose extreme whiteness is constantly emphasized and contrasted with goblin blackness), and he shows an enlightened attitude toward women, gays, and lesbians, too.

The Goblin Emperor has a pretty good shot at winning the Hugo both because it wasn't on a Puppies slate and because the other novel that wasn't is a sequel to the book that won the Hugo last year. The high fannishness of it doesn't hurt either. I would still say that this elves-without-glamor approach to Elfland is highly problematic in all the ways that Le Guin enumerated in her great essay (including a not very convincing attempt to Elizabethanize the language), but if Katherine Addison (a pen name for Sarah Monette) sends elves to the moon, I might just take the trip with her.

This is the first novel by Sofia Samatar -- a new writer who has burst on the scene with some big time award nominations. A Stranger in Olondria has been nominated for the Nebula, and her excellent short story, "Selkie Stories Are for Losers," is up for the Hugo.

Samatar writes poetry as well as prose, and it shows. (Sorry, I couldn't resist!) A Stranger in Olondria is full of well-wrought metaphors, one of which can be found in that QOTD I posted here the other day: "Sorrow followed my mother like a lover." The novel is a secondary-world fantasy that's notable for evoking not Northern or Middle Europe but Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The protagonist, Jevick, is the son of a pepper merchant. They live on a backwater island off the coast of Olondria, and Jevick's father hires a tutor to teach his boy the Olondrian language -- the language of civilization. Jevick learns to read, and he falls in love with books. Thus A Stranger in Olondria is full of quotes from Olondrian tales and poetry, and the novel is very much about the joys and perils of stories and reading. It's also, unexpectedly, a portrait of a saint as a young man. That's where the fantasy comes in.

As well as being a story about stories, it's a story about religion. In particular it's a story about a religious battle in Olondria between two cults, one orgiastic and the other (currently the state religion) penitential. When Jevick travels to Olondria as a young man, after the death of his father, he gets caught up in this clash of cults. He is devoted to neither, coming from the islands, which have their own pantheistic-animistic beliefs. However, he is visited (or, you might say, possessed) by a ghost, and thus he is considered a holy person by one of the Olondrian cults.

Samatar's poetic way with words is certainly a great draw, but she's equally adept at characters and their complicated relationships. We follow Jevick on a journey that brings him in contact with many different people, and all of them spring alive on the page. Many have elaborate stories that they tell Jevick. A Stranger in Olondria in some ways feels like a compilation of stories. Again, it's the drama of a reader in that way. The way these stories are woven with Jevick's own adventures and with the books he reads is truly marvelous. Nor is this a bloodless, scholarly exercise, even with all the quotations from other (imaginary) books. The novel builds to an emotional catharsis that I found quite powerful and profound. Sainthood comes from suffering and exile.

That said, there's material left unresolved. For example, the outcome of the battle between the two Olondrian religions, and for another the ultimate fate of the ghost's father. I believe Samatar has said she intends to write a follow-up, although the first one took her ten years, so I don't know if we should hold our breath. Even with the unanswered questions in this one, it's a very satisfying read. It's one of those books that I immediately want to reread, because the pleasures and the richness of the text were so extraordinary. It's an extraordinary debut, and "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" tells me she's not just a one-hit wonder.

This is the first novel by China Miéville that I've read, and I was certainly impressed. I read it because it's the book of honor at this year's Potlatch. The basic conceit is that two vaguely Middle European cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, exist as separate cities in the same geographical space. Inhabitants of one city "unsee" the inhabitants and buildings of the other in order to maintain a fiction of separateness. A mysterious organization called Breach enforces the separation and the unseeing. The plot of the story involves the murder of a woman whose body is found in Besźel but who appears to have been killed in Ul Qoma. Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad in Besźel, is ultimately required to work with his counterpart in Ul Qoma, as they begin to wonder if the legends are true about an invisible third city named Orciny existing in the interstices between the other two.

While the murder mystery is treated with full seriousness and given all the requisite genre trappings, to a large extent it also functions as an excuse to investigate the nature of the dual city, and Miéville has here created an endlessly fascinating sociological and political conundrum. It works like a piece of extrapolated science fiction even as it feels like something more Ruritanian. It's a what-if that could be located in the here and now. When you throw the crime story on top of that, you get a cross-genre work of the sort that used to be called slipstream and now sometimes gets classified under the category of interstitial arts. What is particularly clever about the book is that it's precisely about the virtual borders that cross-genre works live to straddle. The dual city occupying a single space becomes the perfect metaphor for the type of fiction Miéville has created here.

My only complaint about the novel is that the final reveal of the murderer is a monologue by Borlú that wasn't very interesting, at least dramatically. This is a problem for a lot of convoluted mysteries, where the explanation is less interesting than the mystery itself, and fortunately Miéville doesn't end on the reveal but gives us a coda about Borlú that's much more satisfying. The real raison d'être is the dual city, and the book does full justice to it. Each city is individual and eccentric, full of odd characters and odd details that leave a powerful feeling of lived-in polyglot history. Perhaps even more impressive is the way that Miéville grounds these cities in contemporary details and pop references, so it feels like part of our world of cellphones, internet, and globalization. It enhances the sense of estrangement by giving it a familiar 21st century context. This is not Cold War Berlin, or a segregated city in Jim Crow America, or even modern day Jerusalem, but it's a beautifully conceived imaginary city/city that makes us think about those historical cities and many other divided social spaces as well. I found it utterly captivating and alive.

I was young when I first learned that, while the incidents that can befall a man or a woman are as numberless as sunlit flashes flickering on the sea, what the same man or woman can say of them is as limited as the repertoire on the platform of some particularly uninventive mummers' troupe. Indeed, it is that repertoire. (Delany, "The Game of Time and Pain")

The final volume of Delany's Nevèrÿon series (which, over all, is also called Return to Nevèrÿon) ends with the same story that begins it, "The Tale of Gorgik". After reading all the intervening stories, returning to "The Tale of Gorgik" is like reading a brand new story. Everything in it, from the glancing views of Noyeed to the curious importance of the astrolabe that Myrgot gives to Gorgik, has been transformed repeatedly over the course of the series in such a way as to become practically unrecognizable. In fact, there was a section early in "The Tale of Gorgik" that connects it beautifully with "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" that I could not for the life of me remember reading when I read the tale in the first volume just last July! So I dutifully pulled out my copy of Tales of Nevèrÿon, and sure enough, that section of the story wasn't in the earlier version. This is a master stroke by Delany, "returning" us to a tale that is no longer the same as the original. The impossibility of recovering origins is one of the main themes of the series, and Delany embodies it beautifully in his anti-narrative.

But this raises questions about how the series was structured, because the final appendix of the third volume, Flight from Nevèrÿon, made it clear that it was intended to be the final volume of the series. Return is thus an excess volume of sorts, which again fits Delany's theme. But was it planned that way? In the appendix/preface to Return K. Leslie Steiner (a fictional scholar) tells us that the second story in the book, "The Tale of Rumor and Desire", was originally written to serve as a bridge (of lost desire?) between "The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers" and "The Tale of Fog and Granite" in a proposed collection of the shorter works in the series, excluding the long novel, Neveryóna, which "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" would replace in the sequence. The collection never happened, leaving "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" stranded. But what of the first story in Return, "The Game of Time and Pain"? Chronologically, this would be the final story in the series, showing us as it does the final success of Gorgik's efforts to free all the slaves in Nevèrÿon. Was it the lack of this closure in Flight from Nevèrÿon (in which Gorgik himself turns into an offstage rumor or legend in the end) that begged the question that is Return? Yet Delany uses this "closure" as a way to bring us back to a beginning that opens a whole new can of worms.

We are warned at the very beginning that we may want to read the book in reverse order, presumably starting with Steiner's appendix/preface, which comments on the entire series. The stories run in reverse chronological order, but it's easy enough to read "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" as a thematic comment on "The Game of Time and Pain", which is also very much about desire, and as mentioned above, "The Tale of Gorgik" has been revised to connect to "The Tale of Rumor and Desire," thus making it follow very nicely even though it is chronologically earlier. Complicating all this is the fact that "The Game of Time and Pain" tells us the final fate of Clodon, who is the protagonist of "The Tale of Rumor and Desire", but who is also a nameless character -- and impersonator of Gorgik -- in "The Tale of Fog and Granite" in the previous volume. The flow of chronology and causality and commentary in these tales is intricate and elaborate -- a tapestry as complex as any woven by the characters in this world, where the loom and spindle have only just been invented.

I've commented a lot on structure here, perhaps because it's easier for me to talk about than some of the more difficult thematic material. Another piece of structure: In "The Game of Time and Pain", we start with characters outside an abandoned castle arguing about whether someone is lurking in it. We move to Gorgik, bedding down alone in the castle for the night and then discovering another camper there and telling him a long story about how he found and lost himself, as a slave and as a liberator of slaves. Gorgik falls asleep and dreams of his dying old aristocratic mentor, Myrgot, who meditates on Gorgik's final visit with her, which intersects with a number of other characters introduced in the first book. Gorgik wakes up alone in the castle again. Finally we return to the characters outside the castle arguing again, this time comically, about whether anyone had been lurking in the castle the previous night. The frames of the tale are thus completely symmetrical, except for the dream of Myrgot, who represents a point of view that cannot be accounted for by strict narrative logic -- an intrusion of fantasy? (Even calling it a dream is an interpretation only barely suggested by the text itself.)

"The Game of Time and Pain" is, from one angle, a story about how Gorgik found himself, or perhaps liberated his own imagination (and thus himself), by realizing that he, a slave, shared a sexual kink (the fetishization of slave collars) with an aristocrat who owned slaves. "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" is about a drunken, dirty thug named Clodon -- a rapist, thief, and fraud whom we have in other stories seen impersonating Gorgik to criminal ends -- who fetishes women's feet and hands and has a tender encounter with the woman of his dreams. In tracing Clodon's history, Delany takes us back to an incident in Kolhari when the young Clodon, then a prostitute on the Bridge of Lost Desire, was talked into wearing a slave collar for a time to see whether he might like the S/M trade, which it turns out he doesn't. The added material in "The Tale of Gorgik" (which also adds a passing reference to the Bridge of Lost Desire that isn't in the original version) involves an even younger, pre-slavery Gorgik observing the young Clodon wearing the slave collar and then taking it off and tossing it into a cistern. It's implied that some of Gorgik's inchoate sexual feelings about slave collars started to take form in this wordless, distant, completely impersonal series of observations.

The series circles around sadomasochism from the very beginning, but it's probably safe to say that the theme of desire and sadomasochism grew richer and deeper over the course of the tales. I'm not the best person to comment on this theme, as my own understanding of desire is not particularly rich or deep itself. Still, I found the growth of Delany's accounting fascinating to watch, and it's also fascinating to consider how his career after this series has delved deep into the realm of pornography. The tales of Nevèrÿon are obsessed with discourse, desire, and power, and sadomasochism is in many ways the ultimate metaphor for all of these. The slave collar becomes one ring to riddle them all. Used as a sexual fetish, the slave collar catches but does not lock, and there you have an image of the incomplete or temporary closure that we see again and again in these stories.

Delany brings secret sexual desire to the center of his tales, and it is no doubt no accident that he incorporates commentary on Freud and Lacan into the stories as well. He insists that the hot, messy realities of sex and desire (which is a kind of fantasy, a kind of imagining) must be dealt with if we are to liberate ourselves, however incompletely or inconclusively, from the nightmare of history and slavery. It's true, while Clodon does achieve his libidinal dream, he's still trapped in a nightmarish life of impulsive misbehavior that will not end well for him. Yet his moment of satori is an ideal we can all aspire to, even as it is quickly lost again in time and pain. In an interview I found somewhere online, Delany talks about how this fourth volume was initially published under the title The Bridge of Lost Desire (which is the version I read) because at that time the series had been blacklisted by the chain bookstore B. Dalton's due to the gay material that had supposedly made the word Nevèrÿon poisonous. The Bridge of Lost Desire is a bridge in Kolhari where male and female prostitutes ply their trade. (Was Delany mocking B. Dalton's by including heterosexual desire and straight sex in "The Tale of Rumor and Desire"?) We cross the bridge again and again in these tales. It isn't named in the first book, but by the last it becomes, if only temporarily, the name of the book itself. The desire (the power, the discourse) lost in the process is -- stop me if I've told you this one before -- hauntingly similar to our lost memories of something that never really happened. Speak yet again!

Addendum in excess of a review: Well, I finally picked up a copy of Return from the uniform edition of the series put out by Wesleyan University Press. This edition adds composition (or completion) dates for the three tales. "The Game of Time and Pain" is given the date October 1985, which was the same year that Flight (the previous volume) was first published. "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" is given the date February 1987, which is the same year Bridge/Return was first published. This makes it seem as though Delany wrote the "closure" story either while or right after the third volume (allegedly the last) was published, but it sat there unpublished until he wrote the bridging story for the unpublished compendium of Nevèrÿon tales. Also interesting is that "The Tale of Gorgik" is given the date October 1976, which is probably its original composition date, despite the fact that it had material added to it after he wrote "The Tale of Rumor and Desire". Thus even this date is at least somewhat fictional. (I'm curious whether the uniform edition of Tales has the original version of "Gorgik" or the revised one, but I haven't had a chance to check that yet.)

Finally, I should note that in this edition the appendix is a somewhat modified version of Appendix B from the original edition of Flight. The modifications that I noticed were to change references to Flight as the final volume in the series, and to substitute references to Return instead. This reminded me that I had previously ascertained that the appendix/preface by K. Leslie Steiner from The Bridge of Lost Desire was moved to the beginning of the first volume in the uniform edition, where it serves as a preface to the entire series.

I imagine that this kind of convoluted textual history makes Delany cackle with glee. I find it pretty entertaining myself! However, I still noticed a couple of typos/misspellings in the appendix to the Wesleyan Return -- e.g., a reference to C.L. Moore's Jirel [of Joiry] is spelled Jeryl.

I read this novel when it first came out in 1983, but this is the first time I've reread it. I can't remember what I thought of it at the time, but my vague general impression of the Nevèrÿon series is that I really liked the first book and liked each proceeding book less than the one before. Now having read Neveryóna a second time, I have mixed feelings. It's a complex novel, and I'm not sure I understand what it's up to. Perhaps as a consequence of that lack of understanding, I often felt unengaged with it even as I remained intrigued by many of the ideas and scenes and scenarios. Maybe the novel, like Neveryóna itself, "becomes a shining symbol just out of reach."

This is a coming-of-age novel about a young woman named Pryn who leaves her mountain village on the back of a dragon to have some adventures in the wider world. But dragons in Nevèrÿon aren't quite the fabulous beasts of legend, and neither are Pryn's adventures. She arrives in the big city of Kolhari and immediately meets the legendary Gorgik, a former slave now leading a revolutionary anti-slavery movement, but the violence surrounding the revolution soon turns Pryn into an unintentional killer. Fleeing the scene, she falls in with Madame Keyne, a conservative businesswoman seeking to foment counter-revolution while stuck in a paranoid relationship with her mistress and her mistress' mad lover. All of this I found quite interesting, especially as Delany refigures and reconfigures episodes and ideas and items from the previous volume in the series, Tales of Nevèrÿon.

At this juncture, however, Delany does something pretty radical and has Pryn leave the city in the company of some smugglers and then, when she becomes convinced that one of them has impregnated her, stumble off to the small town of Enoch, where she falls in with a struggling working class family. This is an entirely more naturalistic section of the novel, and I confess I started to lose interest a bit as the tone and concerns shifted to an apparently much smaller, less mythical scale. On the other hand, I suspect that the deflation is intentional, because Delany signals both at the beginning and at the end of it that this is a different type of story that he might have told.

The final part of the novel moves to the southern part of Nevèrÿon, which is where the barbarians (and thus most of the slaves) are from. Pryn takes a job at a brewery, which gives us yet a different view of the world of business and capital, and she's invited to a party at the estate of a local nobleman, which is our first point of contact with the aristocracy that still rules this civilization. Pryn's notions of power and meaning are reconfigured yet again, and so, perhaps, are the reader's. The lost city of Neveryona and the mythical dragon Gauine have made ambiguous symbolic appearances and disappearances, and in the end Pryn is returning to Kolhari, befitting a book called "A Tale of Signs and Cities". But if my head was spinning a bit at this point, Pryn seems able to go with the flow.

Pryn's adventures encompass the whole range of class in Nevèrÿon, from slave to working class to lumpen proletariat, from merchant to aristocrat, from smuggler to class warrior. In that way her experience mirrors that of Gorgik in "The Tale of Gorgik," as they both become exemplars of civilization through their exposure to the fullness of what civilization has to offer, both low and high. However, the initial account of Gorgik is an explanation for how he became so powerful, where Pryn's tale is more modest. She rides a dragon, kills a man, and frees a slave, but she herself remains a figure outside of legend, if not outside of story. This makes Pryn a bit elusive, which is perhaps another reason I found the novel itself elusive.

Again, the difficulty of the novel seems intentional. Delany is constantly disrupting the pleasures of story with thorny outbursts of Theory. If that makes the novel elusive as a novel, I imagine that's the goal. He wants us to question everything, including the story and our identification with the characters. Everything is problematized, questioned, transformed, re-imagined. It's hard work, and it can be a slog. I often felt that I was in over my head, and I think that was a feeling I had more patience for when I was younger.

But there was much that I really liked as well, including things I wasn't sure I understood. The one thing I did remember from my first reading was a scene where Madame Keyne shows Pryn a kind of fountain in which gouges in a clay bowl at the top of the fountain are apparently copied exactly in sand in a lower bowl, as though the flowing water holds the memory or shape of the bowl it comes from. This is, as far as I can tell, the one piece of "magic" or inexplicable, anti-naturalistic phenomena in the novel, yet it's presented as fact, with an explanatory, learned discourse by Madame Keyne about how it all works. I do believe it's a kind of straight-faced joke, in contrast with the several other points in which this or that perfectly natural phenomenon is described as magic.

The other bit I just loved was the appendix, which is comprised of an exchange of letters between Charles Hoekstra, who is apparently an actual scholar of the ancient world, and S.L. Kermit, who appears to be a character created by Delany to write scholarly essays about the ancient Culhar fragment that's supposed to be the basis of all these tales. Hoekstra takes Kermit's scholarship to task, and Kermit's reply is a masterpiece of intellectual slapstick that even manages to incorporate a reference to mimeographed fanzines. After the difficult challenges of digesting the novel itself, this bit of comedy was a welcome dose of brandy.

I'm barely scratching the surface of this complex book, with its multiple meditations on economics, relationships, slavery, urbanity, invention, language, story, and sign. If it does soar on the wings of a dragon, it is the wings of the strange dragons of this world that can only fly from a high ledge down to the earth below and then have to climb laboriously back up to the higher vantage. It is, in fact, an ugly sort of flight, and yet what you see on its downward course gives you much ugly, elusive truth to think about.

I recommend, once again, Sylvia Kelso's essay about the whole Nevèrÿon series, '"Across Never": Postmodern Theory and Narrative Praxis in Samuel R. Delany’s NEVÈRŸON Cycle'.

The Fantasy of Origins and Identities

Tales of Nevèrÿon was first released in September 1979, which probably makes it the first book of Delany's that I read when it was new. (I became a Delany fan sometime after my first encounter with Seattle science fiction fandom in March 1979. Seattle was rife with Delanyites in those legendary days.) Over the years I've settled on Trouble on Triton, which was Delany's previous novel, as his greatest work of fiction, but having now read this one for at least the third time, I'd say it has a claim to that title as well. I believe ron_drummond would argue for Neveryóna, which is the next work of fiction Delany published, but I've never re-read it -- or any of the other books in the Nevèrÿon series -- a fact that I intend to redress in the coming months.

It's remarkable to think this book came out over thirty years ago, since my personal history with it makes me think of it as "one of the new ones". I would've been around nineteen when I first read it, and to read the five tales contained within its pages is to delve into the archaeology of my old selves. It's hard to remember what I thought of it back then, although I remember being fascinated from the start. Is this where I first encountered the concept of sadomasochism? It was still a few years before I got to know any practitioners, and by then I was reading other theoreticians of S/M like Pat Califia and trying to imitate Delany's analysis of S/M and slavery in my own paltry fiction. In the archaeology of my old selves I rediscover early ambitions that have now been long abandoned, like the old ruins explored and inhabited by the characters in the book.



Tales of Nevèrÿon is Delany's deconstruction of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre. It's Robert E. Howard's Conan by way of Joanna Russ' Alyx and Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. (Delany's critical writing about the Alyx stories, which incorporated his take on Howard, fed directly into these tales.) It takes place in a metafictional neolithic past where we can see the origins of civilization -- of things like writing and money -- and where all binaries -- black and white, barbarian and civilized, slavery and freedom, male and female, straight and gay, truth and fiction -- are reversed, refracted, and exploded. They are stories about the problem of knowledge. You might say they are agnostic stories -- about the absence of final or total knowledge. They are stories haunted and informed by absence. Tales of nowhere and nowhen.

We are first introduced to Gorgik, who is a slave in a mine who is taken up for a sexual dalliance by the noblewoman Myrgot. Gorgik's experience at the royal court, where Myrgot soon loses interest in him, gives him the basis to embark on a varied career that exposes him to every level of society, high and low, making him a unique embodiment of the civilized world. In the next tale we're introduced to Norema, an island girl who is taught by an aged female scientist named Venn. Norema's conventional life is disrupted by catastrophe as she reaches majority, and she leaves the island for the mainland. In the third tale we meet Small Sarg, a barbarian prince who is enslaved and purchased by Gorgik to become his lover, much as Myrgot had done with Gorgik earlier, but to far different effect. In the fourth tale Norema goes on a trade mission representing a businesswoman, and she meets a masked woman warrior named Raven whose mission is to assassinate the nobleman that Norema is supposed to do business with. In the fifth and final tale we discover Gorgik and Small Sarg conducting a war to liberate the slaves, and they encounter Norema and Raven in the forest for an inconclusive conversation.

By this point in his career Delany was a master story-teller. He knew exactly what tropes he was playing with and what readerly satisfactions he was denying or delaying in a tantalizing game of striptease, in which the story is slowly laid bare to reveal a mysterious void full of unending plenty. What is so masterful here, too, is how his philosophical and analytical abstractions are continually grounded in the grittiest, sweatiest, meatiest, most sensual physical details you can imagine. This is a world teaming with the complex variety of human experience and history, production and reproduction. It's a world constantly transforming and evolving and reflecting on itself, in which our understanding of what is happening or who the characters are is challenged again and again.

It's a hall of mirrors, infinitely reversing the image of a curious collection of objects: a rusty astrolabe, a rough rubber ball, a metal slave collar, a two-bladed sword, a three-legged clay pot, a great winged lizard. It's a collection of words that doesn't contain the stories after all, but sets them free. They are living still in our own lost civilization, if you know where to look for them.

[For a truly splendid academic analysis of these stories, see Sylvia Kelso, "Across Never": Postmodern Theory and Narrative Praxis in Samuel R. Delany’s NEVÈRŸON Cycle.]