my Readercon schedule

Saturday July 16

3:00 PM F Cities, Real and Imaginary. Jedediah Berry, Leah Bobet (leader), Lila Garrott, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Anil Menon. Great stories have been set in cities both real and imagined. Does a real city require different writing techniques from an imagined one? How well do you need to know (and research) an actual city? If you're making one up, how do you apply your knowledge of real cities? When can you "cheat"? When do you have to?

I have a degree in this. No, really. Should be fun.

Sunday July 17

11:00 AM RI Absent Friends: Remembering the People We've Lost This Year. Lila Garrott, Geoff Ryman, Sonya Taaffe (leader). In the past year, the field lost authors Diana Wynne Jones, Joanna Russ, James P. Hogan, E.C. Tubb, and Brian Jacques; artists Jim Roslof and Doug Chaffee; publishers April Derleth and Margaret K. McElderry; critics Melissa Mia Hall and Neil Barron; and others. Come join us as we celebrate their lives and work.

And this should be wrenching but necessary.

12:30 PM VT Reading. Lila Garrott. Garrott reads from 365 Reviews, No Waiting, a one-book-a-day-for-a-year blogging project.

Working title only; I have no idea what I'll actually call the assembled book. This is the first time I've done a solo reading. I suppose one must begin sometime. Anyway, I know it's the last slot of the con and everyone will be exhausted, but please do come, though I'm not sure if I will be more frightened if the room contains a lot of people or almost nobody.

my Readercon schedule

Saturday July 16

3:00 PM F Cities, Real and Imaginary. Jedediah Berry, Leah Bobet (leader), Lila Garrott, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Anil Menon. Great stories have been set in cities both real and imagined. Does a real city require different writing techniques from an imagined one? How well do you need to know (and research) an actual city? If you're making one up, how do you apply your knowledge of real cities? When can you "cheat"? When do you have to?

I have a degree in this. No, really. Should be fun.

Sunday July 17

11:00 AM RI Absent Friends: Remembering the People We've Lost This Year. Lila Garrott, Geoff Ryman, Sonya Taaffe (leader). In the past year, the field lost authors Diana Wynne Jones, Joanna Russ, James P. Hogan, E.C. Tubb, and Brian Jacques; artists Jim Roslof and Doug Chaffee; publishers April Derleth and Margaret K. McElderry; critics Melissa Mia Hall and Neil Barron; and others. Come join us as we celebrate their lives and work.

And this should be wrenching but necessary.

12:30 PM VT Reading. Lila Garrott. Garrott reads from 365 Reviews, No Waiting, a one-book-a-day-for-a-year blogging project.

Working title only; I have no idea what I'll actually call the assembled book. This is the first time I've done a solo reading. I suppose one must begin sometime. Anyway, I know it's the last slot of the con and everyone will be exhausted, but please do come, though I'm not sure if I will be more frightened if the room contains a lot of people or almost nobody.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

The Violet Apple and The Witch, David Lindsay (365 Books, Day 303)

Review from June 29th.

This is actually an omnibus of two novels: The Violet Apple and The Witch.

The Violet Apple, written in 1924, was Lindsay's last completed novel, and was never published during his lifetime. I am not certain why, as Charles Williams seems to have managed to begin a career writing the same kind of book during the time Lindsay's manuscript was bouncing from publisher after publisher.

And Charles Williams is the correct and direct comparison here: this is explicitly theological fantasy and though I know it would have been impossible for C.S. Lewis to have read it (it was not published till 1976), maybe there was something in the water, for The Violet Apple is an unorthodox and fantastical retelling of the myth of Eden. The protagonist, Anthony Kerr, a successful playwright, has a family heirloom which has been passed down for centuries, a Venetian glass dragon of great beauty and immense value, hollow and containing a seed which is supposed to be from the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The dragon is broken; Anthony plants the seed; the tree grows; there are two fruits. But the tree is a miniature and stunted thing, dying even as it bears, and the apples don't look a thing like apples as anyone knows them. Meanwhile, circumstances keep conspiring to throw Kerr together with his oldest friend's fiancée Haidee, although he himself is engaged to marry that friend's sister. In a moment of spite at the web of jealousy and confusion the four of them find themselves in, Haidee picks the fruit.

As with Sphinx, this is an odd fusion of the appearance of a drawing-room tragedy with a deeper level of allegory and the fantastical, but I think it is a lesser work than Sphinx. Sphinx is one of those novels in which every incident plays into the main theme, whereas The Violet Apple really has two plots, and the surface difficulties of social convention and which set of couples will marry are just as pointless and irrelevant as Anthony and Haidee, under the influence of the knowledge of the angels, find them to be. That may be the point, but it makes for an actually boring overlayer. The fantastical content, while more overt than in Sphinx, is consequently less menacing, more predictable. Sphinx is a book I recommend to anyone who likes complex fantasy, but this is specifically a book for those who like theological fantasy, to whom the argument is as interesting as the characters and images.

And yet, as a work of theological fantasy it is fascinating, because while it uses the story of Adam and Eve and has a resolution that appears at first glance Christian, it is not a Christian philosophy that Lindsay is arguing. It is the same complex not-quite-Buddhism not-quite-Calvinism that he always does hold, and it is odd to see these symbols used this way. That may have something to do with why the book was not published. Or it may just be the dullness of the domestic portions. It is also marred by a glaring sexism, of the sort at which one sighs and says 'par for the course for an author born in the 1880s, but'. I found it a rewarding read, mostly, although I got through parts of it with great impatience, but then I am a sucker for theological fantasy.

The Witch is another animal entirely. It is the novel Lindsay was working on when he died, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable, the one in which he was trying to synthesize absolutely all of his thoughts into one book written at the height of his power, the one he wanted to make a Great Novel and place among the immortals.

If he had finished it, he might have done so. I have certainly read nothing remotely like it. The protagonist is haunted before we even meet him, haunted from the book's first sentence, though that dawns on the reader gradually: he has heard a rumor that a young lady who is at a party he is attending is a witch. He does not meet her at the party. He questions what his acquaintances could mean by saying that. He meets with friends, receives business letters. But no interaction he has with anybody goes as expected, nothing is normal, his family break out into odd disquisitions, persons in the street tell him dreams they have had. The entirety of the world around him and everyone he knows seem to be conspiring to bring him, as if by coincidence, to a certain spot, whose history he is being told before he gets there, a spot known for centuries as a place of danger and sacrifice. There has never been any 'reality' in the book at all; he lost that when he began to fall down the walls of the world. She will be there, of course, waiting, at the bottom. He cannot tell whether she means him good or ill, or why she decided on him.

She means, it turns out, to send him in the flesh through the outer precincts of Heaven. This is not a benevolent motive, or, if it is, it is an incomprehensible and inhuman benevolence, because the metaphysics of that universe are such that it is pointless trying to distinguish between Heaven and Hell.

You can tell exactly where Lindsay got to, before becoming ill. It is a brilliant book, almost as good as he thinks it is, genuinely frightening and stirring and extremely unusual in the way that reality fractures and reshapes around the protagonist so that the reader can notice it and he can't. The philosophy of what Lindsay thinks this Heaven is is worked into the fiction indissolubly, and then, suddenly, it isn't, and the whole thing collapses into a bald statement of the philosophy involved, a lecture and no longer a novel at all, and then cuts off. I cannot recommend the lecture. It is boring and dry and repetitive and exhausting and syntactically crazy. The book before it is so good, and stops so quickly, and I can see why it was published, because it is not losable, but it has the eternal frustration of something that is never going to hit what it was aiming at. It is lovely and infuriating and I doubt he'd have finished it if he lived another twenty years, because the hundred pages here took him twenty-five. I can't in good conscience suggest anybody read it, but I also can't suggest not. Consider your annoyance threshold, and how sad you become at things that break off in the middle.

I am in no doubt, now, that Lindsay was a major fantasy writer, and that the majority of his reputation depends on his least characteristic book. A Voyage to Arcturus has impressive weirdness value, but it simply is not as good as The Haunted Woman, or Sphinx, or the non-disintegrated portion of The Witch. He was a genuine novelist, and could use both symbol and subtlety; I disagree with his metaphysics and cosmology so thoroughly that I understand why C.S. Lewis considered them actively blasphemous, but I certainly know what they are, and his innumerable fine shadings of worldbuilding thought; he had ideas about women that make me want to throw things, an innate class bias I doubt he ever once noticed, an unparalleled way with a visual image, and no sense of humor whatsoever. I do not think he will ever be popular, because if he had a time it has passed, but I could wish for him to have literary descendants, if they could learn to laugh at themselves a bit while still maintaining that amazing unsettling quality he has where you think you know where the next step is, and it isn't, and you put your foot on empty air and stumble. I have remaining to read that I can get of him only Devil's Tor, which should be interesting.

The Violet Apple and The Witch, David Lindsay (365 Books, Day 303)

Review from June 29th.

This is actually an omnibus of two novels: The Violet Apple and The Witch.

The Violet Apple, written in 1924, was Lindsay's last completed novel, and was never published during his lifetime. I am not certain why, as Charles Williams seems to have managed to begin a career writing the same kind of book during the time Lindsay's manuscript was bouncing from publisher after publisher.

And Charles Williams is the correct and direct comparison here: this is explicitly theological fantasy and though I know it would have been impossible for C.S. Lewis to have read it (it was not published till 1976), maybe there was something in the water, for The Violet Apple is an unorthodox and fantastical retelling of the myth of Eden. The protagonist, Anthony Kerr, a successful playwright, has a family heirloom which has been passed down for centuries, a Venetian glass dragon of great beauty and immense value, hollow and containing a seed which is supposed to be from the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The dragon is broken; Anthony plants the seed; the tree grows; there are two fruits. But the tree is a miniature and stunted thing, dying even as it bears, and the apples don't look a thing like apples as anyone knows them. Meanwhile, circumstances keep conspiring to throw Kerr together with his oldest friend's fiancée Haidee, although he himself is engaged to marry that friend's sister. In a moment of spite at the web of jealousy and confusion the four of them find themselves in, Haidee picks the fruit.

As with Sphinx, this is an odd fusion of the appearance of a drawing-room tragedy with a deeper level of allegory and the fantastical, but I think it is a lesser work than Sphinx. Sphinx is one of those novels in which every incident plays into the main theme, whereas The Violet Apple really has two plots, and the surface difficulties of social convention and which set of couples will marry are just as pointless and irrelevant as Anthony and Haidee, under the influence of the knowledge of the angels, find them to be. That may be the point, but it makes for an actually boring overlayer. The fantastical content, while more overt than in Sphinx, is consequently less menacing, more predictable. Sphinx is a book I recommend to anyone who likes complex fantasy, but this is specifically a book for those who like theological fantasy, to whom the argument is as interesting as the characters and images.

And yet, as a work of theological fantasy it is fascinating, because while it uses the story of Adam and Eve and has a resolution that appears at first glance Christian, it is not a Christian philosophy that Lindsay is arguing. It is the same complex not-quite-Buddhism not-quite-Calvinism that he always does hold, and it is odd to see these symbols used this way. That may have something to do with why the book was not published. Or it may just be the dullness of the domestic portions. It is also marred by a glaring sexism, of the sort at which one sighs and says 'par for the course for an author born in the 1880s, but'. I found it a rewarding read, mostly, although I got through parts of it with great impatience, but then I am a sucker for theological fantasy.

The Witch is another animal entirely. It is the novel Lindsay was working on when he died, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable, the one in which he was trying to synthesize absolutely all of his thoughts into one book written at the height of his power, the one he wanted to make a Great Novel and place among the immortals.

If he had finished it, he might have done so. I have certainly read nothing remotely like it. The protagonist is haunted before we even meet him, haunted from the book's first sentence, though that dawns on the reader gradually: he has heard a rumor that a young lady who is at a party he is attending is a witch. He does not meet her at the party. He questions what his acquaintances could mean by saying that. He meets with friends, receives business letters. But no interaction he has with anybody goes as expected, nothing is normal, his family break out into odd disquisitions, persons in the street tell him dreams they have had. The entirety of the world around him and everyone he knows seem to be conspiring to bring him, as if by coincidence, to a certain spot, whose history he is being told before he gets there, a spot known for centuries as a place of danger and sacrifice. There has never been any 'reality' in the book at all; he lost that when he began to fall down the walls of the world. She will be there, of course, waiting, at the bottom. He cannot tell whether she means him good or ill, or why she decided on him.

She means, it turns out, to send him in the flesh through the outer precincts of Heaven. This is not a benevolent motive, or, if it is, it is an incomprehensible and inhuman benevolence, because the metaphysics of that universe are such that it is pointless trying to distinguish between Heaven and Hell.

You can tell exactly where Lindsay got to, before becoming ill. It is a brilliant book, almost as good as he thinks it is, genuinely frightening and stirring and extremely unusual in the way that reality fractures and reshapes around the protagonist so that the reader can notice it and he can't. The philosophy of what Lindsay thinks this Heaven is is worked into the fiction indissolubly, and then, suddenly, it isn't, and the whole thing collapses into a bald statement of the philosophy involved, a lecture and no longer a novel at all, and then cuts off. I cannot recommend the lecture. It is boring and dry and repetitive and exhausting and syntactically crazy. The book before it is so good, and stops so quickly, and I can see why it was published, because it is not losable, but it has the eternal frustration of something that is never going to hit what it was aiming at. It is lovely and infuriating and I doubt he'd have finished it if he lived another twenty years, because the hundred pages here took him twenty-five. I can't in good conscience suggest anybody read it, but I also can't suggest not. Consider your annoyance threshold, and how sad you become at things that break off in the middle.

I am in no doubt, now, that Lindsay was a major fantasy writer, and that the majority of his reputation depends on his least characteristic book. A Voyage to Arcturus has impressive weirdness value, but it simply is not as good as The Haunted Woman, or Sphinx, or the non-disintegrated portion of The Witch. He was a genuine novelist, and could use both symbol and subtlety; I disagree with his metaphysics and cosmology so thoroughly that I understand why C.S. Lewis considered them actively blasphemous, but I certainly know what they are, and his innumerable fine shadings of worldbuilding thought; he had ideas about women that make me want to throw things, an innate class bias I doubt he ever once noticed, an unparalleled way with a visual image, and no sense of humor whatsoever. I do not think he will ever be popular, because if he had a time it has passed, but I could wish for him to have literary descendants, if they could learn to laugh at themselves a bit while still maintaining that amazing unsettling quality he has where you think you know where the next step is, and it isn't, and you put your foot on empty air and stumble. I have remaining to read that I can get of him only Devil's Tor, which should be interesting.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

All My Darling Daughters, Fumi Yoshinaga (365 Books, Day 304)

Review from June 30th.

Unusually for Fumi Yoshinaga, this is a set of interlinked stories centered on women, with a contemporary setting, and little explicit sex. The principal character has grown up with a single mother, and they still live together as adults. When the mother comes down with and then recovers from cancer, she decides to change her life, and marries a man three years older than her daughter.

This is the core for a web of explorations of female identity and the ways women live, the ways in which women decide whom to marry and the ways that love does and doesn't work out and the ways that women relate to their mothers. The stories are mostly very good, unexpected and subtle: the problem the adult daughter has with her mother's husband is that he's a decent guy who loves her mother honestly and deeply. She'd love it if he were a golddigger, because that would make some kind of sense to her, but this blindsides her.

There is one story that bothers me, though, both because it feels very different from the rest of the book and because it seems to buy into assumptions about women that the rest of the book is bent on disproving. A friend of the young husband, a professor, is blackmailed into sex by one of his students, and the best way I can describe the way the story goes from there is that it is repeating that old canard that women really don't like nice guys and gravitate to people who will be nasty to them. This entire portion is disturbing on multiple levels.

Fortunately, it's only a single issue, and the rest of the book is really Yoshinaga at her best; I can't figure out why her judgment lapsed that way, especially since the rest of it comes together into a cohesive thematic whole into which that one simply doesn't fit. Skip that, and I recommend it highly, because it is moving and lovely and different. Yoshinaga's art, as always, is impressive, and it's nice to see her get to use a larger range of female character designs than she usually needs. I approve of the trend where more and more of her work is turning up in English translation.

(O powers that be: given all the recent Yoshinaga and the lovely recent editions of things like Saiunkoku Monogatari and A Bride's Story, perhaps we have all decided that josei is a viable commercial proposition now? In which case, can I have some Ebine Yamaji in English? Thanks.)

All My Darling Daughters, Fumi Yoshinaga (365 Books, Day 304)

Review from June 30th.

Unusually for Fumi Yoshinaga, this is a set of interlinked stories centered on women, with a contemporary setting, and little explicit sex. The principal character has grown up with a single mother, and they still live together as adults. When the mother comes down with and then recovers from cancer, she decides to change her life, and marries a man three years older than her daughter.

This is the core for a web of explorations of female identity and the ways women live, the ways in which women decide whom to marry and the ways that love does and doesn't work out and the ways that women relate to their mothers. The stories are mostly very good, unexpected and subtle: the problem the adult daughter has with her mother's husband is that he's a decent guy who loves her mother honestly and deeply. She'd love it if he were a golddigger, because that would make some kind of sense to her, but this blindsides her.

There is one story that bothers me, though, both because it feels very different from the rest of the book and because it seems to buy into assumptions about women that the rest of the book is bent on disproving. A friend of the young husband, a professor, is blackmailed into sex by one of his students, and the best way I can describe the way the story goes from there is that it is repeating that old canard that women really don't like nice guys and gravitate to people who will be nasty to them. This entire portion is disturbing on multiple levels.

Fortunately, it's only a single issue, and the rest of the book is really Yoshinaga at her best; I can't figure out why her judgment lapsed that way, especially since the rest of it comes together into a cohesive thematic whole into which that one simply doesn't fit. Skip that, and I recommend it highly, because it is moving and lovely and different. Yoshinaga's art, as always, is impressive, and it's nice to see her get to use a larger range of female character designs than she usually needs. I approve of the trend where more and more of her work is turning up in English translation.

(O powers that be: given all the recent Yoshinaga and the lovely recent editions of things like Saiunkoku Monogatari and A Bride's Story, perhaps we have all decided that josei is a viable commercial proposition now? In which case, can I have some Ebine Yamaji in English? Thanks.)

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.