Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

I’ve done a few of these; the first was H. Beam Piper’s classic short story Omnilingual, and I’m currently working on a large one made from a play script of Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Don’t worry—that one had a long and happy life, and died a natural death before I saved it from the recycling and turned it into art.) There’s an interesting transgressive feeling to using printed matter like this, even when it’s printed matter I caused to exist purely for the purpose; I don’t think I could bring myself to rip up a physical book that was still in a readable state. Play scripts are a different matter, because an upbringing in the theatre means I regard them as essentially ephemeral: there to be scribbled on, ripped up for prompt books, broken, repaired, and tossed away.

The other Issue I have around this is down to which texts are legitimate targets. Instinct, of course, tells me that they all are; if it’s a text then it’s there to be analysed, reinterpreted, made to jump through hoops. Cutting it up and sticking it back together in a different order—in an entirely different way, in fact—is basically the same thing as literary criticism, albeit interestingly disciplined by the inability to add any new text.

On the other hand, doing this to the work of living authors (and especially living authors I know) is socially and morally fraught. I can’t think of any legal justification for forbidding it, but that doesn’t mean a great deal when it comes to intellectual property versus artistic reimagining and community investment; just look at the perennial debates over fanfic.

It isn’t just the authors, of course. The idea of reifying e-books by printing them out, and doing things to them which can be done to a physical book—treating the digital text as though it were always intended to be paper and ink—is an interesting artistic one in itself, especially when it involves re-typesetting them. But any alteration in the formatting or typesetting of a digital text means changing the work of editors & designers, and while designing for the screen (even when screens are as diverse as those of modern computers & e-book readers) is a very different discipline to designing for print, I still respect the original designers enough not to second-guess their work.

What are your feelings on this? How would it make you feel if I did this to some of your work, and would it make a difference to you if I started with an electronic version or a physical book?

“This is the time of myths, Orphan. They are the cables that run under the floors and power the world, the conduits of unseen currents, the steam that powers the great engines of the earth.” — Inspector Irene Adler

The Bookman is set in an alternate Victorian era, and it’s intensely focused on the myths and legends of English literary geekdom. It has echoes of Alice Through The Looking Glass, Perdido Street Station, The Tempest, and The Eyre Affair, with a large chunk of Mayhew thrown in for good measure.

It’s set not long after 1887, several hundred years after an expedition to the Calibanic Isle results in the wholesale replacement of Britain’s ruling classes with giant poetry-obsessed lizards. Lord Shakespeare was the first of the great Poet-Prime Ministers; Moriarty is the most recent. And yes, that Moriarty. At the newly rebuilt Rose Theatre, Henry Irving performs his own adaptation of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner supported by Beerbohm Tree. (Described as a young actor; Tree was actually 34 and quite famous in 1887, and we know the book isn’t set any earlier because it mentions a new air from Ruddigore. I mention this nitpick, because it’s the only factual or chronological inexactitude I’ve been able to find in the course of an entire book of Victoriana.)

Opposition to Les Lézards’ rule is rising, however; Karl Marx, John (“Don’t call me Nevil”) Maskelyne, and Isabella Beeton meet in a cellar underneath a Charing Cross bookseller, and notorious terrorist organization the Persons from Porlock besiege literary figures with the nonsense of Edward Lear. And then there’s the titular Bookman, assassin and anarchist.

Tidhar’s style is rather readable, and drops into an intensely Dickensian mode for some descriptive passages. He clearly knows and loves London well, and does a very good job of bringing out the city’s character.

“He stopped in his walk through Leicester Square and bought one of the sausages so advertised, covered in oil, dripping fried onions, held in a soggy bun. Everywhere there was the smell of cooking foods, and the lights in all the public houses were burning, and the cries of the drinking class sounded, merry and loud, from every open window but were drowned by the street merchants.”

There is one problem I need to highlight, however, and that’s the Bechdel test failure. There are female characters; a couple of them are quite important to the political plot going on in the background, but they don’t get much screen time. The protagonist has a love interest, who spends most of the book dead, and a female relative who appears briefly and helps out. None of them get to talk to each other. Given that in this society, a woman can be an Inspector at Scotland Yard, that seems rather a missed opportunity.

Oddly, maps are relatively obscured inside fantasy texts themselves, in favour of the metadata at the front of the book. That comes in two basic types – window-frame maps, the ones that are useful illustrations of the maps the characters are using; and picture-frame maps, the ones that are blatantly only there for the reader. The Lord of the Rings, of course, gives us a good example of the second kind; right up front, we have a rather beautiful map of all the sections of Middle-Earth that our protagonists are going to visit, and a few more. It’s a nice piece of art, and it’s a good way of orienting the reader and foreshadowing some of the later events, but it completely changes some of the themes of the book – we don’t discover the extent of the world with our hobbit viewpoint characters, as they emerge from the bucolic, peaceful, and protected Shire into the world beyond Bree and then into politics on the global scale, but instead we’re waiting for them to catch up to the wide picture of their world that we have from the map.

(And if you’re dubious about the extent to which having a wide picture, rather than a narrow and clouded window, can change your perception of the story as a reader, imagine how it would feel to be following along on a map, clearly showing the narrow bridge and the exit, as the Fellowship stumble through Moria in the orc-haunted darkness.)

In a fascinating twist of publishing irony, the best example I’ve found of a window-frame map is The Hobbit; the map at the front is done in a faux-early-mediaeval style, with Old English runes, and it’s very clearly labelled as “Thror’s Map”. Arrows point off the edges, making a very, er, pointed reminder that the map is not the territory, and the orientation (with east at the top, in the traditional dwarvish style, mirroring the mediaeval preferences) helps with our sense of dislocation and reminds us that unlike modern people, the characters have no conception of global geography. All maps are contingent and relative.

In most fantasy books, maps are like wizards; they rarely if ever lie to you. There’s a scene in KJ Parker’s Memory where an inaccurate map wastes a lot of time, but then the problems when model meets reality are a frequent theme of Parker’s. Tellingly, none of her books have maps at the front, avoiding presenting any overarching geographical reality to the reader.

By definition, a real map will always leave something out (Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science” demonstrates one of the problems with completely accurate maps) but most fantasy books treat them as completely reliable once you know how to read them. Most fantasy underestimates the difficulty of traversing real landscape, travel times, packing, and everything else related to travel – it’s all terribly romanticised. (The Princess Bride in particular satirises this, with S. Morgenstern’s “translator’s note” eliding the fifty pages of packing and unpacking that were in the “original version”.) Handwaving a lot of this stuff away in the interests of fun is entirely reasonable, but maps in particular do make a political point. A map is a useful abstraction of a place, something a stranger can roll up and keep in her pocket for instant understanding and ease. Given that, it’s very hard to escape some colonialist implications.

And since (in the LotR-style books, which are by far the more common) the map is explicitly there for the reader’s benefit, we’re being quite colonialist ourselves. Of course, these are entirely imaginary worlds, but there’s a thriving subgenre composed entirely of cryptogeographica: maps, atlases, travel guides, and bestiaries of imaginary lands. It’s a point of pride with some of the writers, in fact, to make them functionally indistinguishable from the equivalent for real places.

There’s one way in which a fantasy map is always functionally equivalent to a map of a real place: it’s a reassurance that the setting is mappable. The whole of The Lord of the Rings takes place on the single curved world (though at the end, they depart on the level seas to Valinor, literally leaving the map) and wherever the action takes us, we can look it up; nothing’s going to veer off into otherworldly realms, or strange places that bear an ambiguous relation to the real world of the setting. (Or, on occasion, the real world itself – consider the dwarf-tunnels under Alderley Edge in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. They’re eldritch and otherworldly, but, well, that’s tunnels for you.)

There are always blank spots on any picture-frame map – Marlow, in The Heart of Darkness, is obsessed with them, in a neat twist on the colonialist viewpoint. They may contain dragons, tygers, Monopods, ants the size of dogs, spaceports, or lost cities of gold, but they only contain things that can fit; the Euclidean geometry of the map enforces this. Well, apart from the Hollow Earth, of course. But that’s fairly trivially mappable, using both sides of the paper.

With a window-frame map, on the other hand, we’re always reminded that the world extends beyond its edges, and there are far more things in heaven and earth than the book we’re holding dreams of. Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen is probably my favourite example here; we’re always shown most of the area in which the action of any given book takes place, but not all, and not how it connects to the rest of the world. In addition, there are always references to events and places that the characters know well, but we don’t see mapped; and that’s without even considering that a large proportion of the action takes place within other realms (generally referred to as warrens or holds) which can be inaccurately conceptualized as additional layers of reality with very different characteristics. Since Erikson’s an archaeologist, much of his work is concerned with the layers of history, and how the ancient worlds never quite go away. (Indeed, the long climax of Gardens of the Moon involves a literal grave-robbing.) So the idea of world layered upon world, with bewilderingly different aspects, and a multiplicity of ways to travel between them, is entirely appropriate there.

Some books, on the other hand, are aggressively not mappable. Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest is largely about city geography, as a reified metaphor, and providing a map would really be nothing more than an extended point-and-laugh sequence directed towards the book’s theme. On a similar note, China Miéville’s The City and The City would be very hard to map, and any map that could be provided would ruin the pacing. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series is famously not mappable at all—cities and entire countries move around between books, because the author just didn’t bother writing to the map, and I suspect the books are better for it.

I’m fond of books without maps myself, for the thematic aspects – I’m significantly less fond of stories that take place entirely on a mappable plane, and I like the ambiguity and the focus on the text that the lack of a map provides. But it’s a downright pity on the artistic front, because it’s one of the very few ways remaining to provide decent artwork along with fantasy novels. With a very few exceptions, books don’t have interior artwork any more (sometimes, when the author is also the artist, as with China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, or when it’s a deliberate stylistic pastiche, as with Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road) and covers are mostly shite.

Which brings me neatly to my next example, Robert Jordan’s (& Brandon Sanderson’s) Wheel of Time series. Whilst the Darrell K. Sweet covers are nigh-universally mocked, the maps inside are extremely pretty. My first-UK-paperback Eye of the World (the first book, before the series became so popular and so bloated) has a rather basic computer-drawn world map and some charming hand-sketched local maps, but they go through a few more iterations as the series progresses. By the time of Crown of Swords (book seven of about nine thousand), the hardback editions have not only detailed black & white double-page maps by Ellisa Mitchell, but a different version in full colour inside the front endpapers. Many of the books also have a map of a particular location, usually a city, somewhere inside when it becomes useful; most of those are really nice pieces of art in themselves.

Fantasy books with maps are often derided as being only for strategy-and-tactics wonks, but (like so many things about SF & fantasy) that’s a very naive and shallow reading. They have a lot of different effects on the text and the reader, and they’re lovely things in their own right.

It’s a dense, flavoursome book, making use of the blog medium—it’s basically in the form of a journal, with text formatting (including blacked-out text and nonlinear idea-clouds) and occasional embedded audio files without transcripts. I suspect it would make a screen-reader go screwy from time to time, but then a lot of SF does that in any case, with the density of odd words & names.

There are quite a lot of those here, since it’s thoroughly immersive, and the worldbuilding is decidedly non-Western. The viewpoint character, Salus Kobsarka-Nitannyi Niksubvya is a dark-skinned lesbian minority-immigrant, just beginning work with one of her political heroes.

You must forgive me when I make embellishments because I do not really remember the cirrus clouds in the sky or my thoughts as I dressed this morning, only the blue sky and the sun-shaped links I clasped around my dreadlocks. When I pose in front of the mirror every morning, I pull the transparent gyena up over my hair. To me, the gyena always suggests more … tantalizing … like the opening of a seductive dance in a film. A confession? While Kelis and I were engaged, I often lamented that she would stop wearing it after the wedding. I think that the bronze hair ornaments look beautiful beneath it no matter what any hotàkhi Shiji woman says.

It’s about a world shaped by colonization, oppression, and the struggle against them, but it isn’t about the oppressors at all; the plot circles around some of the consequences of this, the inevitable factionalism and complexity that you always get with real people and real situations. Mostly, however, it’s about relationships—romantic, sexual, professional, family, friendship—and the tensions between those and with principles or ambition. Between felt affinities and known affinities, perhaps; the truths of the heart and the truths of the mind, which can only be reconciled when one achieves akačehennyi.

There’s a glossary at the back of the book (well, insofar as blog novels have a back) which explains all the unusual words; if you’re the sort of person who likes those, it’s comprehensive and useful. Personally, I prefer to avoid them until afterwards, and enjoy figuring the words out from context. Nitannyi is a semi-stranger in the culture of the novel (a half-blood immigrant, brought up in the canyon dark) and I find the mixture of things she explains to us and things that are normal to her extremely good mind exercise. She’s also keeping this journal partly to improve her Tveshi, and Bohémier evokes that sense wonderfully in the language.

This book reminds me of Le Guin’s Hainish novels, but it’s very much a story told from the inside rather than from the outside. Definitely recommended, and to reiterate: it’s free online, so you have no reason not to give it a try.

Besźel and Ul Qoma would each individually be a typical Ruritania^[1], but it’s the interaction between them that produces the novum here. Instead of facing each other across a defined border, as other doubled cities do, they interpenetrate—share physical topology, while the psychogeographical landscape is entirely different in each.

The setting could only have been Eastern Europe, and not just for Balkanesque reasons; this sort of calm acceptance of surreal sociopolitical realities, and the concomitant black humour, is utterly characteristic of the literature of the region.

It’s hard to classify by type^[2], but then that’s the best kind of novel to think about in that way. The approach it takes to the inherent strangeness of the city and the city (a linguistic construction used in Besźel and Ul Qoma themselves—saying “the twin cities” or “the split cities” would be an extremely politicised speech act, because it would be an attempt to define the relationship between them) is thoroughly immersive, presented as it is by a first-person narrator who does not explain strangenesses to us.

Structurally, though, it’s a liminal fantasy in that it approaches and then (denies? subverts? co-opts?) the possibility of further strangeness hidden within the already bloody weird structure of Besźel and Ul Qoma.

That kind of liminality, an insistence on ambiguously negotiated boundaries, is mirrored in all the narrator’s relationships—unspoken agreements, unoffical arrangements, “they don’t know but they wouldn’t mind”. That’s how they do things in the city and the city, it seems…

[1] “Besźel” is probably taken from the Hungarian beszél, “to speak”. My Arabic-fu is rather more dodgy, but “Ul Qoma” could well be “The Summit”. Most of the initial establishment of place is done through language—the police slang mectec, or a trilingual pun in the name of a drug. The second book, set in Ul Qoma, makes much of the sheer size of the more economically advanced city’s building boom.

[2] The terms “immersive” and “liminal” come from Rhetorics of Fantasy (Mendlesohn – review here). And yes, I’m aware of the peculiarities of using a fantasy-specific theoretical schema on Debatable SF, but you use the tools that fit your hand…

This is a classic City Fantasy – the city of Thaiburley is just as much a character here as New Crobuzon, Lankhmar, or Haven are, and an inventively realized one. It’s a classic multi-level enclosed hive of scum and villainy, but a much gentler polity than most of the dystopias you see depicted like this—the ruling authorities appear to be both competent and well-meaning, for instance.

The author’s style is very discursive & up-front, happily explaining the action & his characters’ feelings to the reader; it’s not something I like, and I’d far rather see more description and less discursion, but I know a lot of SF readers do prefer it. The other two criticisms I have are that the book doesn’t pass the Bechdel test until halfway through, and the title. City of Two Opposed Yet Generic Fantasy Nouns is not exactly arresting – the effect it mostly has on me is to remind me that I still haven’t actually read City of Saints and Madmen yet, and I really should. The relevance of the title to the book is also rather ambiguous, though there are hints at the end.

Few of the thematic elements are unexpected: we have psionic magic, gruesome patchwork biotech, nonhumans communicating soundlessly and making artwork out of their excreta (distinct shades of Miéville there), street gangs, and incongruous levels of technology amidst filth, swords, and untreated suppurating wounds. They’re well integrated into an interesting, complex world, though, and this is a very solid debut for a series I’ll be wanting to keep an eye on.

Anyway, the book! Haven’t got it in front of me any longer, so this will be fairly brief.

The environment is basically South Asian in inspiration, but the heroine has travelled from a European-ish country. Downum doesn’t shy away from either skin colours or colonialism, and does a good job of depicting tensions between races^[2] & nationalities. The magic system is well thought out and interesting.

Oddly, the author Downum reminds me of most is Tamora Pierce (I’m thinking particularly of Wolf-Speaker and Trickster’s Choice), but this is definitely not YA.

[1] I’ll happily read first-class chick lit. But it’s too rare for me to want to look through it deliberately.

[2] Actual races, not this dwarves-and-elves shite.

It’s really good; only 75 pages, but fits a whole story into them, and a neatly plotted arc at that, with a lovely immersive first-person style and a beautiful sense of place. It’s really hard to find a good short novel these days, but this is it.

It’s basically a Swan Maiden or Selkie story, but with both a PoC and a feminist twist, and a strong dose of localized American myth. Normally, these folktales are told from over the shoulder of the hunter who catches himself a pretty magical wife, and the woman’s no more than a cipher and a trophy; sometimes she ends up going back to the sea or the lake, but that’s only there as a signifier for the man who caught her, or perhaps for the people who freed her – subject rather than agent.

This is the first retelling I’ve seen from the PoV of the normally thoroughly othered skin changer; the best I’ve previously seen is Mercedes Lackey’s Black Swan, which retells Swan Lake from Odile’s perspective. Getting to see the river’s children from within, with Campbell’s admirable economy of description, is a delightful change.

Gail, too, is a pleasant protagonist to live with – she thinks about things, makes decisions, cares about people, and kicks arse when she needs to, but not often enough to seem unrealistic. Definitely recommended.

It’s a classic coming-of-age-into-magical-powers tale, as Will Stanton discovers he’s the last of the “Old Ones” (special magic immortal people) to be born, and that the “Dark” (an immanent power, not fully explained in this book, which seeks to do all the usual things) is about to try something really nasty.

It was rather a surprise to find that since I’d last read this, I’d been spending time in the setting – Buckinghamshire has changed a lot since it was written in 1973, but Windsor Great Park is still very much there. Unlike the first book, it’s very much at-home – magic changes the world, overlays a new mystery onto it (mostly through timeslips) but it’s still Will’s own home, bounded by Roman roads and running water, and still very English and very much a family story.

Whilst Will’s needed to save the world, this mostly seems to be a matter of arbitrary destiny rather than any particular skill or competence on his part, and the reasons for any given plot McGuffin are shrouded in myth. Which isn’t a bad thing at this point in the series! I have all five books here, and I’m making a point of not reading each one until I’ve written about the last; otherwise, I won’t be able to treat them separately at all.