Posts Tagged ‘short stories’
hello world!
Posted on: March 7, 2021
Oh hi! I haven’t forgotten about this blog, i swear! I fact, at least 3 times a week I say to myself “I really oughta write something for my blog”, and then before I know a week has flown by. I keep saying “I’m going to get up early on Sunday and blog!” and then instead, I sleep. Life is funny like that.
I’ve read a LOT, and I got a lot going on right now*, so you get mini reviews!
And what a selection do I have for you! Epic fantasy, scifi short stories, and contemporary thrillers!
Have you seen this fricken gorgeous cover art on Rebecca Roanhorse’s novel Black Sun? Are you kinda bored with Euro-based epic fantasy, but want your politics, your intrigue, your religion, and your insurrection? This is the book for you! Also! Excellent characters, fantastic world, paced perfectly, damn enjoyable read. I zipped through this book. I was a little worried at first, because the first chapter is brutal and kinda gross, but the rest of the book isn’t like. And? Is this epic fantasy with a female gaze? Yes, yes it is. And it was nice. Also Mesoamerican epic fantasy may be my new groove. Forget grog and stew, I’m more about chocolate and corn and squash!
Something I really liked about Black Sun was that people are constantly asking other people “yeah, but what next?”. I feel like a lot of epic fantasies suffer from this weirdness of a time vacuum, that the characters only exist for this specific story, and no one has a “what’s next” in their life, the characters aren’t even thinking about the rest of their lives, they should have taken that note from Samwise! Anyway, I appreciated that characters in Black Sun are always thinking about the future, and pestering other people “yeah, but what are gonna do, after that?”. It makes them all seem more like real people.
The issue I had with Black Sun isn’t a Roanhorse problem, this is a me problem. I 100% suck at keeping track of lots of characters. Black Sun doesn’t have tons and tons of point of view characters, but just enough that it was too much for me. Anyways, my OTP is Xiarapio. I was itching for their chapters because that plasma hot sexual tension between the two of them! And I feel bad for them, because they’ve got, well, other things going on, definitely not a good time to get into a relationship, but damn, those sparks!!
A very good friend gifted me with a copy of Behind her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough, and like the jackass friend I am, I put it on my bookshelf and forgot about it. Then someone mentioned it on twitter, and I was in the mood for a contemporary thriller, and BOY DID THAT BOOK DELIVER! I’m not even going to compare it to other thrillers for fear of giving stuff away. Let’s see, what can I tell you? Divorced Louise meets a nice guy, David, at a bar one evening. Next week she finds out he’s her new boss! (that sounds so cliché, I know, but stay with me, ok?) They both know it’s wrong because he’s married, but he’s miserable in his marriage, and she misses the feeling of being wanted. Then she befriends David’s wife, Adele, who is sweet and lonely. The story flip flops between Louise’s and Adele’s point of views, and how they are both trying to keep David from finding out they are friends. Louise is flustered by the entire thing, Adele is just a smidge manipulative, and David treats Louise like a queen but is super controlling with his wife Adele.
What these two women are going through, and how Louise questions everything she does, and how Adele seems to over plan things, and what isn’t said, I couldn’t put this book down! I loved Louise’s inner monologue, she’s vibrant and complicated and loves her son and is frustrated her first marriage didn’t work out and she just wants to be loved. She’s torn between “my son is the only man I need in my life!” and wanting an adult relationship where she’s appreciated and loved. I loved that this book had Louise’s emotions and complexities front and center.
The twist had me falling off my chair.
Robots have no Tails, by Henry Kuttner
What fun this collection was! I never know what to expect with pulp fiction, will it be good? Will it be super dated? Will I get the references?
Ok, sure, I’m sure there were some references I missed, as these were written in the 1940s. But? They were great! And hilarious! Kuttner’s Galloway Gallagher jumps off the page, even as he’s passing out on the sofa from having had too much to drink. And you don’t want Gallagher to stop drinking, because it’s only when he’s shitfaced drunk does he invent the wildest things . . . .
Gallagher sounds like the kind of character an author would make up during a drinking game with friends, maybe at a scifi convention. Imagine a talented inventor, who makes amazing machines and robots out of what’s laying around his lab (the original McGuyver?), but the inventor can only invent things when he’s absolutely drunk. Sober, he can barely change a lightbulb, and has no memory of what he created the night before. Gallagher often wakes up surrounded by wild inventions that he has no memory of being contracted to create. . . screwball comedy ensues!
This volume of all the Gallagher stories has an introduction by Paul Wilson, and also an introduction by Kuttner’s wife C.L. Moore. Wilson talks about the environment in which these stories were written, and Moore talks about their life when Kuttner was writing the Gallagher stories, and how the drafts made her laugh so hard she was worried about disturbing their neighbors.
“Time Locker” is the first story in the volume, and considered the “least Gallagher” of the bunch, but it was one of my favorites. Gallagher has invented a weird locker-thing, that you can put something in the locker and it disappears, but then you can pull it out again. A perfect place for a crook on the run to hide the documents that will incriminate him! With crooks and lawyers stopping in at all hours of the day at Gallagher’s lab, how is he supposed to be able to concentrate to figure what this darn locker-thing actually does, and why he created it? This story has an absolutely fantastic twist at the end!
Someone on twitter (thank you, whoever you were!) recommended Vandana Singh’s short story “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination”, and offered a link to the story on Tor.com. I gave it a whirl, and was immediately hooked. In reminded me of Ken Liu’s short story “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species”, and I recognized my favorite method of story telling, which at first glance can seem to be stories that dance around a plot and characters while resolutely refusing to be trapped by said plot. And yet, so much is communicated about what is happening and sometimes why those thing happen, and what those things mean to the people they are happening to.
I guess it’s more like a fantastical story telling version of future archaeology?
Let me unpack that a little.
In Liu’s short story, there is no plot, there is no characters, there is no conflict. If you’re zipping through the story, you won’t recognize the beginning, middle, or end, but if you read a little closer, it’s all there. It’s just a story that gives a few paragraphs about a bunch of space-faring alien civilizations, and how they make books – how they ensure others can access their stories and their thoughts. Within the story, there are no human interactions with the aliens, no earthly judgements of their societies. It is as if to put a human character in would a barrier between the reader and the records of these cultures. Singh’s “Ambiguity Machine’s” felt like that too – no barrier between the records of events and the reader, no “main character” to pass judgement or offer opinions, just records of what had happened, along with a request that someone interpret the records.
For my brain, these two stories, read 8 years apart from each other, were like hearing two pieces of music that were different, but seemed to be talking to each other, even though they had never met. (yes, I know I’m weird) (and i don’t know, maybe Signh and Lui are good friends? I have no idea)
Suffice to say, after reading Signh’s story, I immediately ordered a paperback copy of her collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Select Stories. And when the book arrived, the first words out of my mouth were “oh, shit”.
You see, I like to read before bed. Usually, i’m already half asleep when I crawl into bed, so I’m looking to read something that if I find myself reading the same paragraph 5 times, or fall asleep halfway through, it won’t matter too much. A short-ish story, something 5-10 pages, out of an anthology or collection is perfect for this.
None of the stories in the Singh collection were short, and none of them looked like “easy reads”. As I got further into the collection I realized these were not stories to drift away to, while falling asleep at night, these were stories to read in the morning, with strong coffee, and to spend the day absorbing and thinking about them, so as to then dream about them at night.
Everything I have read so far in this collection has been heart achingly beautiful, each story requiring me some time afterwards to come back to myself. These stories are vistas.
(I feel really bad for whatever I read next. No matter how good it is, I fear it will be mediocre in comparison to this collection)
I’m going to tell you about “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination”, and about “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra”, even though I have more favorites. Those others will have to wait for another blog post, I supposed. “Ambiguity Machines” had me globetrotting via googlemaps, and “Somadeva” had me falling down the world’s best internet rabbit hole.
Ambiguity Machines was original published at tor.com in 2015, here’s the link:
https://www.tor.com/2015/04/29/ambiguity-machines-an-examination-vandana-singh/
Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra was originally published in 2010 at Strange Horizons, here’s the link:
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/somadeva-a-sky-river-sutra/
warning, if I interpreted something correctly, there are major spoilers ahead for “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination”, and I guess maybe spoilers also for Somadeva? so hey, click on those links and enjoy some gorgeous fiction before reading the rest of this blog post. 😉
I’ve been dipping my toes into Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, edited by Jonathan Strahan. The cover led me to believe this is all robot stories, but what I found was more a spectrum of cyborg, to disembodied AIs, to actual robots. As with all anthologies, some stories are forgettable, and some shine like supernovas.
I’ve not read everything in the antho yet, and maybe I never will.
But here are some stories that have already made an impression on me.
The Hurt Pattern, by Tochi Onyebuchi – What is this doing in a fiction anthology? Other than the “connect yourself to your computer at work, and then literally unplug”, the rest of this sure doesn’t feel like fiction. To pay off his student loans, Kenny gets a job sorting data. Obvs, his job is more complicated than that, but he’s good at the work, and he makes friends. He makes some dangerous connections involving why certain cities are more violent than others, and how the uptick in violence is connected to, well, that’s spoiler territory. This story gonna make you mad.
Brother Rifle, by Daryl Gregory – A Marine suffering from PTSD alongside his traumatic brain injury. He doesn’t understand how this therapy is supposed to work, and worse, he feels like he is imposing on his family. How exactly, is this implant supposed to safely let him start feeling emotions again? What’s the deal with the patterns on the cards? What’s the difference between a robot and someone who lost all emotion through a brain injury and now has no power of attorney over their own self? Story is a bit of a slow burn, that kind where you think you know where it’s going, and then that last scene hits you like a ton of bricks. Lots in this story hit close to home for me – how mental illness and PTSD is handled, how we expect people to magically get better after a few months of therapy. If i read this again, i’m gonna cry.
Bigger Fish, by Sarah Pinsker – quite the comfort read, which was sorely needed. A private detective is hired to investigate the death of a “gazillionaire water tycoon”. The man was home alone, with only his personal robots. This was a nostalgic Asimov-esque I Robot style story – obviously the robots killed the guy, but how to prove it, when a robot can’t harm a person? When you’re ready for a unicorn chaser, read this story.
A Guide for Working Breeds, by Vina Jae-Min Prasad – super cute story, told entirely through online messages between two robots who become friends through a mentorship program. They have drastically different personalities, so it’s super adorable when the “killer” starts buying gifts for the young upstart. Sometimes even a teacher can learn a thing or two. This story is the perfect one to open the anthology – it is bright, optimistic, and laugh out loud adorable. Maybe it’s because one of the ‘bots mentions dogs right at the beginning, That i couldn’t help but view both of these characters as robotic dogs, the young one as a cheerful, floppy eared puppy, and the older one one as a grizzled guard dog.
Fairy Tales for Robots by Sofia Samatar – just an absolutely beautiful story. As the protagonist spends one entire night telling fairy tales to her sleeping robot, she realizes how much fairy tales maybe do belong to robots, what with all the sleeping without dying, and the constant drudgery, and the ability to eat something poisonous and not die, and the oddities of how fairy tales allow characters to do superhuman things. We learn a few things about the narrator, how she sees herself compared to how the world sees her. And why shouldn’t robot children be told stories about impossible things? This story is buried in the back of the anthology. My advice is that you read it first.
I like this idea of there being a spectrum between human and robot. Does a pacemaker make you a cyborg? What if you have a steel pin in your leg? How about an artificial limb, or a wheelchair that moves based on your brain waves?
Based on the cover art, I was worried this anthology was going to be “Robot Adventures!”, luckily, it isn’t. It’s mostly about humans who are on the cusp of something, and choosing to deal with those feelings, or suppress them.
We’re in the middle of a heat wave, the novelty of getting to work from home has worn off, and I’m in a reading rut. Buckets of books to read and review, a ton of amazing stuff on my kindle app, and i’m just not in the mood for it right now.
on the plus side, I’ve got some fun crafts I want to work on, my little balcony garden is going crazy with tomatoes and herbs and green onions and flowers, and I’ll never run out of cool recipes that that I want to try to make.
So, I’m going to make fun foods, read more cookbooks, harvest my basil and mint and parsley, coax my peppers and tomatoes to fruit, and binge watch the Netflix show Dark.
Just a few recent reads –
I enjoyed the hell out of Your Rover is Here, by LP Kindred, in FIYAH Issue #14. This is the urban fantasy / keep the family magic a secret I’ve been looking for for years. The voice in this story is fantastic. The narrator, he’s just going about his business. He drives for a rideshare app. And when a fare brings violent magic into the car, he has to fight back to stop even more violence. So what happens when you use secret magic to stop a dangerous explosion, and you lose your car (and your source of income) in the process? Seriously a great story. I kept meaning to read the rest of the issue, but just kept coming back to this story.
I bought the print copy of Clarkesworld Year 11, volume 1. It’s a bucket of fiction that was published in Clarkesworld. I usually really like what gets published in that magazine, but my eyeballs struggle with walls of text. I’ve only read a few stories, and haven’t connected with many of them yet.
Been binge re-watching the Netflix show Dark. The 3rd season just dropped, so hubby and I are rewatching the first two seasons as fast as we can. this IS the show of the summer! umm, how to explain? Think Twin Peaks meets Stranger Things, plus a metric ton of time travel. And the soundtrack! omg, so good!!
DO: watch the show and take your own notes for a family tree. Different story lines follow different generations, so you’ll want to keep track of who is married to who, who is the parent and child of who, etc.
DON’T: use google to learn about this show. the less you know about the show and the plot going in, the better. the internet is solid spoilers.
not a spoiler: the first time I saw season one, I though Jonas was a cool but annoying character. Why is he so quiet? Why doesn’t he seem to react to things? why does he seem so passive? Yeah, he’s might be quiet, but he is NOT passive. the poor kid is a bundle of nerves and a total mess inside.
I’m not a super crafty person, but I have two crafts I want to work on this summer. I’d like to create a Braille sampler (remember samplers?). My mom let me borrow one of her embroidery hoops, and I bought some tiny beads to be the Braille “dots”.
I’m getting bored with the fabric masks I have. I bought some fat quarters to experiment with the bandana “bank robber” style face covering, where it’s a square folded into a triangle, and you tie it across your face and knot it at behind your head. OK, so that was working pretty good. . . then I saw these kinds of “face veils” online:
and i thought to myself “Self, that looks COOL. and it covers your nose and mouth, and it isn’t BORING”.
so, next iteration, was I took my triangle folded fat quarter, and instead of knotting it behind my head, I bobby pinned it. where the two ends overlap, I put three downward facing bobby pins, and to “tighten” the mask, I pulled on the ends, pulling them through the bobby pins. It was super comfy, and not boring. . . but I still wanted to mess with it some more . . . .
The craft store was OPEN! This is the first time I have been to a retail store that wasn’t a grocery store! I got to BROWSE! and walk through aisles of random crap I didn’t need! I bought a few plastic hair combs, some seam binding, some cotton bandanas, and a bundle of fat quarters. A few things I want to experiment with – sewing the corners of the bandana directly to the top of the comb, and then put the comb tines down into a messy bun or ponytail, and attaching bobby pins to the comb, so they can “tighten” the mask while the comb holds everything place.
Ideally, I’m going for something where it’s the comb that holds the mask in place, and the fabric lies gently over my nose and mouth, with no pressure on the bridge of my nose or my ears. And in the picture above, there is stuff on the bottom of the mask, weighing it down. I can do something like that too!
Regardless, this will keep me out of trouble for a few hours, and I’ll get some cool belly dancer style face veils out of it. Doesn’t seem like the new normal is gonna go away anytime soon, so I might as well have some crafty fun with it, right?
Cooking adventures – I couldn’t find any one to one gluten free flour at the store, but they did have brown rice flour and teff. Whadya do with teff? You make Injera! First batch was tasty but undercooked because I didn’t have my pan hot enough. will one million percent be making injera again!
The link in the paragraph above is to Mark Bittman’s injera recipe. this recipe is great for midwesterners like me – measurements in cups and teaspoons, it doesn’t make a ton, the batter only ferments for a day or so. Injera is a traditional Ethiopian bread, here are some more traditional injera recipes, from Ethiopian sources:
Marcus Samuelsson’s Injera recipe
from How to Cook Great Ethiopian Food
Adane’s Ethiopian Food Youtube video for 24 hour Injera
Mama’s Majet youtube video for Injera
Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee
Posted on: June 28, 2020
Anyone else “save books for special occasions”? Like, you’re going on vacation, or a long train ride, or you know you’ll be home recovering from a surgery, or something?
I bought Hexarchate Stories when it came out last summer, because I absolutely had to have it. When the order arrived, I gently put the book away, unopened, knowing I was saving it for a rainy day.
There was no specific rainy day in mind, but I knew a day would come, when damnit, I just wanted to hang out with Cheris and Jedao and everyone else again. Yes, Sure, there was a good chance horrible things would happen to them (holy shit, did you read Revenant Gun??), but I wanted to see them again.
I’ve had plenty of favorite scifi/fantasy characters over the years, people who I can’t get enough of. Locke Lamora. Vlad Taltos. Mendoza (and Joseph, and Lewis). and now Jedao firmly joins that list.
(yes, yes I do have a thing for orphans. i also have a thing for loyalty, heartbreak, long simmering anger that can happen in the same moment as the unexpected joy of a wonderful meal, and that the journey is more important that the destination. )
So anyway, there is no rainy day, so specific occasion, all I have is all of this *waves handles wildly, implying everything *. I needed some escapism, I needed some snark, and damnit I needed some Jedao. And boy did Hexarchate Stories deliver in the best possibly way. I meant to slowly read this, teasing it out? Yeah nope, read the whole thing in like 3 days, then reread a few favorite stories. Will probably be rereading most of the book, because I can, and because it’s that good.
Hexarchate Stories is tons and tons of short stories, flash fiction, and a few longer stories from Jedao and Cheris’s youth. Which means, if you haven’t read Machineries of Empire trilogy, go read that first, otherwise most of these short stories aren’t going to make any sense to you. About half of these stories were previously published online, and about half of them are original to this collection. If you’d like a taste of what to expect, there’s links to some of these on Yoon Ha Lee’s website.
Remember how anguish-yand emotionally wrenching Machineries of Empire was? Good News, the majority of the stories in Hexarchate Stories don’t have any of that! Many of these are super short, they are just moments in people’s lives, there is humor and snark and people just living their lives. The stories are presented in mostly chronological order and there is a timeline at the beginning of the book. Lee gives Author’s Notes at the end of each story, just a few sentences maybe about something funny that inspired the story, or that it game from a flash fiction story prompt, or that it had plot holes that needed be fixed, etc. By the way “chronological order” means we get plenty of stories of Jedao’s youth and him as a teenager, and some stories of Cheris’s youth. Them as kids? omg YES PLEASE.
#HaveRead #AmReading
Posted on: June 20, 2020
the familiar blogger refrain:
I’m not in the mood to write this book review. I know, I’ll read another book . . . falling even further behind on reviews I had planned to write.
I haven’t written a review in a while, but I’ve been reading a ton, and I’ve got plenty of review notes written down in my head.
Some books I’ve read recently:
sorry for the crap blurry photo!
Star Trek: Collateral Damage, by David Mack. I’ve read some TOS Trek novels, but never read a TNG novel. I had no idea what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect to love this book so much. Great characters, Worf rolling his eyes, Laforge saving the day, Picard being Picard, excellent banter and even more excellent side characters. I worry that I’ve now been spoiled, that no other TNG novel will entertain me as much as this book entertained me.
Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett – 2nd book in his new trilogy. Certainly doesn’t suffer from “middle book syndrome”. NONSTOP action. I love the magic system in this world, but I’m struggling to care about the main characters. My fave characters were a side character who is super close to his trauma, and the bad guy, because he’s pretty cray-cray. Buckets more on this later, but i think the reasons I’m struggling to connect with the main character is because SO MUCH ACTION is getting in the way for me, and she’s like 19 years old, so she relates to the world in a different way than 40 year old me relates to the world.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson – while stuck at home during a pandemic, why not read a book about a pandemic that ravages earth? Loved how the story opens, super loved the end, the middle was a little draggy for me. I feel like The Girl With All The Gifts is sort of a modern take on I Am Legend? I haven’t seen the movie of this, by the way. Also, didn’t realize I Am Legend is a novella? the paperback is jam packed with a ton of Matheson short stories, mostly quick sharp horror stories, lots of which take place in funeral homes. they are deliciously creepy.
If you love gorgeous artwork and Central Asia, Bride’s Story is for you. I basically shop for dresses out of the pages of this manga. So much gorgeous embroidery! the dresses! the shoes! the head dresses! the jewelry!!! the plot jumps around between a bunch of different families, and in volume 11 we are with Mr. Smith and Talas. Their story is super heartbreaking, and I want them to find happiness, and I don’t know if they will. Smith is such an adorable doofus. There’s a great side story in this volume about what happened to his pocket watch, and the “legends” that sprang up around the watch. I feel like that lady who wanted to buy Talas’s embroidered clothing – I suck at embroidery, but i love it and I’m happy to pay a pretty penny for it.
Memories of Emanon by Shinji Kajio and Kenji Tsurata – totally different art style than Bride’s Story, but I love, LOVE the art style of Memories of Emanon! The story takes place in the late 1960s, a young man is traveling home on a ferry in Japan. The ferry is going up the coast, it’s going to take him 17 hours to get home (sorta like a really, REALLY long train ride in the US). He meets a young woman on the ferry, and she tells him the wildest story. What she’s saying can’t possibly be true, can it? Great story, fantastic artwork.
I haven’t finished reading Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee yet, but I’m near the end. I bought this collection last year, and was “saving it for a special occasion”. If you read my last blog post and the comments, being on the upswing from whatever-that-was seemed to be a special occassion, so I picked up Hexarchate Stories. Young Jedao! and his siblings! and his mom! and calendars and birthdays and servitors and omg I love this book so much! there is a ton of flash fiction in here, and it’s been fun to analyze the flash fiction, see how to tell a story in just a few pages. truly, reading this book has been heavenly. as soon as I finish it I’m going to read it again (I feel like I did that with one of the Machineries of Empire books too?). Confession – some of my super fave stores have been the sexy/smutty ones.
some e-books i’ve read/am reading:
The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson – holy shit damn. this book is everything! I have handwritten notes for a review and still there is just SO MUCH. (also, for reasons that i’ll tell you later, finishing this book and then immediately picking up the Star Trek book had me laughing my head off). This book doesn’t come out till later this summer, so I need to figure out when i can post a review and how much I can talk about, because I don’t want to spoil anything.
I just started reading Machine’s Last Testament by Benjanun Sriduangkaew this morning, and I’m loving it. An AI controlled sanctuary city, where if you can get in, you’ll be happy and safe (for AI definitions of happy and safe). It’s a sort of prequel to And Machines Shall Surrender, which I loved. Basically, if you’re trying to figure out what kind of stories and prose styles I love, read anything by Sriduangkaew, and you’ll know.
What have you been reading lately?
and if you like short fiction, and want your TBR to explode, check out this series of interviews I’m doing at Nerds of a Feather, with staff members at Hugo nominated semiprozines! When this series ends, I’ll be doing an interview series with the nominees for best fan artist. Huh, i guess that explains why i haven’t been writing a ton of reviews lately. . .
Best Possible #FirstWorldProblem
Posted on: May 3, 2020
- In: Kage Baker
- 9 Comments
Friends, I have the best possible #firstworldproblem.
I got to read TWO Kage Baker collections, at the same time! In the Company of Thieves, is all (you guessed it) Company stories, and The Best of Kage Baker is a mish mash of all sorts of wonderfulness. In fact, I am still working my way through The Best of Kage Baker, savoring it bit by bit. The Best of, so far seems to be about half Company stories, and half other stuff.
And eeeee!!! The Best of Kage Baker has illustrations!!!
Here’s some thoughts on what I’ve read so far:
The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park – I have such a soft spot for this story. It’s a very quiet story, it’s a slow burn. Ezra doesn’t have lofty goals, and neither do it. His reason, tho, is pretty tragic. He does right by Kristy Ann, and it’s probably a good thing that he never tells anyone, as I don’t think they’d understand his loving intentions.
Hollywood Ikons – Religious paintings that can fry your brain because they were painted using secret mathematical formulas possessed by Imhotep? And Joseph was Imhotep? If Tim Powers wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and made it a buddy comedy involving manuscript preservation, cro-magnons, and Hollywood landmarks, you might get something close to Hollywood Ikons. This story pushed all my buttons in the best possible way! Also, note to self: if doing a google search on what the heck Joseph is talking about, search “Byzantine ikonography”, instead of “ikon”. “Ikon” brings up pages upon pages of a K-pop boy band.
The Women of Nell Gwynne’s – I know I’m supposed to like stories like this. Steampunk! Gadgets! Women who have fallen on hard times and now make the best of things by becoming paramours who are also spies and potential blackmailers! Flouncy dresses! And I know this story won about a million awards for being steampunk! Gadgets! Company! Funny sexy stuff! But the funny sexy scenes didn’t do much for me, and tbh I have always struggled with steampunk. If it’s your thing, you will love this story. But I’m sorry, I’m meh on Nell Gwynne’s. Can’t a woman be of service to the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society without, well, servicing the gentlemen? We can provide people with miniature cameras, buttons that dissolve into sleeping pills, and internal combustion engines, but we can’t devise a way for a “fallen woman” to make a living without selling her body? I’ll shut up now.
Noble Mold – Joseph pretending he’s a priest and Mendoza doing a bad job pretending that she doesn’t want to kill him? Of course I loved this story!! Joseph has this long game point of view that I appreciate. (ugh, i guess that’s called wisdom? or something?) Mendoza is on the hunt for a particular plant, and the family who owns the property is very, very reluctant to let her dig it up. There’s a 60 year old secret here. Joseph has to protect his own secret, the family’s secret, and yet somehow still get that plant dug up! Luckily, he’s really good at creating miracles. After all, he’s the guy who played Imhotep! Noble Mold is freakin’ fantastic.
Old Flat Top – wait, is this Budu, who I love? Nope, but it is someone who worked with Budu! And his job to sit at the top of the mountain, and keep the early humans who live in the valley below from killing each other. He’ll pretent he’s a god, if that’s what it takes to make sure these idiots don’t kill each other. And every so often, a brave youth climbs the mountain, in search of the god of the mountain. Man, I could read a million stories of the Enforcers. These guys! Life is pretty simple for them, their values are very black and white, their job is to protect and make sure early humans survive. I like how the Enforcers make everyone else think more about everything. Especially since the Enforcers don’t really care about making people think, which makes watching their interactions even more fascinating for me!
Hanuman – I was laughing my head off reading this story. Why, you ask? Because this guy, Hanuman, is hitting on Mendoza, and he thinks he has a chance with her! She gives him the time of day, because she’s recovering from an injury and she doesn’t have anything else to do, and she’s polite and he’s inoffensive. Could it be? Could Mendoza be making a new friend? I was so happy that she was having a nice time, and maybe making a new friend!!! Is she going to let someone in? And then. Well, that sure made me stop laughing, and I feel a bit of an ass for laughing at the beginning and wondering if this was the start of a beautiful friendship between Hanuman and Mendoza. After all that, if I was Mendoza I’d stomp off into the forest and not talk to anyone for another 200 years. And people wonder why she has trust issues!
Maelstrom – another one where I laughed and laughed and laughed! And finally, a funny story that actually has a happy ending! On Mars, Mr. Morton has built the Edgar Allan Poe Center for the Performing Arts. What follows is a laugh out loud, raucous, joyous, Muppet Show-esque comedy of errors, complete with nervous directors, terrible actors, even worse understudies, and Martians with hearts of gold. I adore Alf so much! And I love Baker’s Mars – a family of misfits, eccentrics, dreamers, and adventurers. Maelstrom was exactly what I needed. I hope as I get further into The Best of Kage Baker, that I get to hangout some more with these characters.
Stay tuned, for more Kage Baker!
or whatever book I pick up next!
This was the book I didn’t want to review.
I didn’t even want to read it.
I don’t know why, but I felt the need to save this book for some time when I really needed it. Like it was the last bottle of whisky from a famous yet shuttered distillery. And once I opened it, it would evaporate and soon barely the scent would remain.
When I did crack the book open, of course the first story I read was The Battle of Candle Arc. And then I read that story again. And then I read Iseul’s Lexicon, which I then, read again.
I consumed this collection in such a strange way, I consumed it the same way I use a cookbook. Once I identified a story I enjoyed, I’d reread it three, or four times, getting into into my rotation. When I felt ready, I’d try another story/meal.
Strange, I know. But you already know that I’m strange.
The time came for me to start thinking about the review.
I didn’t want to write it. I didn’t want to put Conservation of Shadows back on the shelf along with all the other books that “I’m done thinking about”. I’m not ready for these characters to not be in my life anymore. Can I reread these stories any time I want? For sure. But there’s something different about a book that is floating around the house because you are still thinking about it, and a book that you’ve put back on the shelf and categorized in your mind as “I’m done thinking about that book”.
This is what Yoon Ha Lee does: writes fiction you don’t want to stop thinking about. You might be done reading the book, but the book isn’t done with you.
To write this review, I’ve made a bargain with myself: I purchased Hexarchate Stores, so I can dive right into that, and Conservation of Shadows is going to live on the coffee table for a while longer. This review is not an agreement that I’m done with this book. In fact, it’ll be really fun to reread these stories in 6 months or a year, and see if they have changed, or if I’ve changed.
Thank you for letting me get all of that out of my system and put words to my feelings. You’ve been very patient. I guess it’s time I talk about this collection, yeah?
Most of the stories touch on language (which of course, I have zero interest in), colonialism and occupation, assimilation, destruction of cultures through destruction of their language, how sometimes things just don’t translate, and how war makes us strangers to ourselves.
One last thing before I actually talk about the stories! Fun new words!
sumptuary morphophonemics escritoire
logographs entelechy
Isn’t “escritoire” just the most beautiful word you’ve ever seen?
Ok, I am getting to the stories now, I SWEAR. In no particular order:
the Little Red Reviewer 
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