Short and sweet(ish) July 14, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, novellas, reviews.Tags: aliette de bodard, dominion of the fallen, of dragons feasts and murders, oh if tomorrow comes, samantha shannon, the bone season, the bone season series, the dawn chorus
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I am very happy with this new trend of authors publishing novellas set in the same universe as their series of novels. It seems to lead to works which explore relationships, characters, or corners of their imagined worlds that there just wasn’t space for in the novels — and therefore gives their fictional worlds and characters more space and three dimensionality. This kind of novella can be used to make space for missing moments in the preceding narrative, or — my very favourite kind of story — show what happens after the final page is closed. I’m a nosy reader: I want to know what happens after the story ends, and what the characters do in their downtime, in moments of cosy domesticity.
The answer to that in Aliette de Bodard’s novella Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders is ‘solve a murder mystery.’ Her characters certainly don’t get much in the way of downtime! The book sees Thuan and Asmodeus — dragon prince and fallen angel respectively, joint heads of the fallen House Hawthorn — return to the kingdom under the Seine to celebrate Tết with Thuan’s family. But any hope of a peaceful, pleasant holiday is shattered almost immediately, when the pair uncover a murder, a potential coup, and a court rife with tension, plotting, and corruption. One of the things I loved most about this couple in the preceding novels in de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series was their contrasting — and conflicting — ways of dealing with problems: Thuan preferring to work within existing systems and come up with a diplomatic solution, his husband Asmodeus preferring to blast his way through any impediment with threats and violence. These contrasts are on full display in Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders, to excellent effect — but what the novella also shows is how those contrasts are complementary, and when these two formidable supernatural husbands work together, things have a way of working themselves out. I really appreciated this element of the story: for all that it is a fast-paced whodunnit (as well as an exploration of the poisoning effects of institutional corruption), it’s a relationship study as much as it is a murder mystery, written with exquisite subtlety.
Samantha Shannon’s The Dawn Chorus also brings its central relationship to the fore. This novella has two interwoven strands: flashbacks to missing moments in the earliest book in Shannon’s Bone Season dystopian series, and scenes which take place in the immediate aftermath of the third novel. The series really doesn’t give its characters much time to breathe, and in some ways The Dawn Chorus represents just that kind of pause — it gives the narrator, revolutionary Paige Mahoney, and her friend, former captor, and sometime lover, the Rephaite Warden — the space to work through the various tensions, traumas, and sheer overwhelming emotions generated by their terrifying existence and complicated relationship. It’s a story about recovering from trauma (and fiercely independent, untrusting Paige letting Warden help her recover) — its action picks up just after Paige has been rescued from weeks of torture and her impending execution — but in spite of this heavy subject matter it’s also a rare chance for the two characters to be alone for almost the first time since they met. Theirs is a relationship that carries a lot of baggage — they met in seriously unequal circumstances, and the novella is in part a way for them to finally address that openly — and matters aren’t helped by the fact that Paige’s torturer constantly brought up this relationship as yet another weapon to wound her. But here, for once, in their safe house in Paris, Warden and Paige’s relationship doesn’t have to be a performance for either their enemies or their allies. Now they simply need to work out what that relationship does look like, away from the eyes of others.
I really hope to see a lot more such novellas from both authors, set in their two respective dystopian universes. I particularly appreciate that in these kinds of books, both de Bodard and Shannon can give a lot more prominence to emotions, romantic relationships, and self-reflection than is possible to give the characters in either main series of novels. The novellas both flesh out, and give further emotional context to, characters’ actions in the wider series. I’d been stuck in a bit of a reading slump, but reading these two novellas in quick succession has made my next choice of books clear: a reread of both The Bone Season and the Dominion of the Fallen series!
Out of the abyss August 1, 2019
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: aliette de bodard, dominion of the fallen, oh if tomorrow comes, the house of sundering flames
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If I had one word to describe each book in Aliette de Bodard’s magnificent, gothic Dominion of the Fallen trilogy, the first book’s would be survival, the second hope, and the third, justice. It’s a cautious, qualified kind of justice that we find in The House of Sundering Flames, but the seeds of a better future are there.
In this final book of the series, several different strands of story intertwine. The Fallen Houses of Paris are struggling to make sense of an unknown power that’s attacking and destroying their kind. Philippe and Isabelle live with the Houseless community of Vietnamese migrants, where eking out a living and refusing to get drawn into the political conflicts of the Houses is the best they can hope for. And the dragon prince Thuan struggles in the face of racism and hostility to settle into his new role as husband to the Fallen Asmodeus and co-head of House Hawthorn.
Atmospheric and dark, this is a book by an author at the top of her game. It’s tricky work, balancing explosions, intricate political manoeuvrings, several love stories, and the fierce, communal will to survive of a downtrodden but determined group of dispossessed people, but de Bodard pulls it off brilliantly. My favourite moments would have to be those focused on the Asmodeus-Thuan romance — a careful, cautious dance by two powerful beings used to guarding their thoughts, and to the lone exercise of authority. Their slow journey towards trust is a microcosm of the larger theme of the book: survival built on compromise, but not at the expense of justice.
The other moments in which this book shone brightest for me were those which highlighted parenthood, family, and community. Aliette de Bodard never writes about lone, isolated heroic saviours — and I love her books all the more for it. Hers are always worlds in which adventure is a family affair, raising a child is the work and responsibility of a community, and the everyday labour of parents — especially mothers — is imbued with heroism and celebrated accordingly. The House of Sundering Flames is no different. Her characters may be fighting for survival, but they always have time to feed a child, learn recipes from a grandmother, or check in on a neighbour. Without this, it’s clear that survival would be worthless.
As the tension builds and the threats grow greater (including one truly gothic moment in which ancient houses quite literally begin to devour their own), de Bodard’s feuding factions of mortals and immortals, powerful and powerless must make a decision: die alone, or stand together. It’s a chance to right ancient wrongs, and take the first, difficult steps towards a world in which everyone in this brooding, scarred, post-apocalyptic Paris might have a chance at a future.
Hope in the ruins November 3, 2018
Posted by dolorosa12 in blogging, books, reviews.Tags: aliette de bodard, books, in the vanishers' palace, novellas
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A dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast where both characters are female, the cultural setting is Vietnamese, and the Beast is a dragon: there is nothing about that sentence I don’t like. As you can imagine, therefore, I was awaiting Aliette de Bodard’s latest novella, In the Vanishers’ Palace, with great anticipation. It was definitely worth the wait! Her Beauty analogue is Yên, a failed scholar eking out a precarious existence helping her mother with her medical work in a community that despises them. An attempt to heal one of her friends of sickness has unintended consequences, and results in Yên being given to a dragon, Vu Côn, in indenture. Yên fears abuse and death at the dragon’s hands, but from this unpromising start, love, hope, and healing blossom. Like the fairytale original, In the Vanishers’ Palace is a love story between captor and captive — and it certainly doesn’t shy away from this element — but it takes that love story in intriguing and unexpected directions. Instead of being a lonely and cruel recluse, Vu Côn is a worried and overworked mother, and Yên becomes tutor to her two children. And instead of Yên’s love making her monstrous lover human, Vu Côn’s dragon identity is part of the appeal, and she remains a dragon to the end.
In the Vanishers’ Palace takes place in a world reeling from rapacious colonialism. The eponymous Vanishers are no longer present, but the effects of their greed had reverberations felt long after their departure, from the depletion and degradation of food sources to the supernatural threats that haunt the margins of the story. Rồng, or dragon spirits in Vietnamese folklore, are benevolent, but Vu Côn, responsible for killing people made ill by the plagues left behind by the Vanishers, has become something to be feared. And, as de Bodard notes, the Vanishers’ cruellest act of devastation is to the colonised people themselves, whose very values and sense of self have been transformed (and not for the better), leaving them unmoored and ill-equipped to deal with the difficulties they face.
De Bodard opted to self-publish this work, and has stated at several points that this was a conscious decision in order to avoid any painful compromises in terms of plot, characterisation and representation. While the resulting work is excellent, it’s a pretty damning indictment of the current SFF publishing scene if the only way to end up with a story where queer relationships are normative, trans and/or nonbinary people are present and visible, and where colonised people are allowed to express fury and rage at their predicament without editorial pushback is to self-publish. It may be that this self-publishing choice was merely a precautionary measure, but if not, I sincerely hope that the quality and reception of In the Vanishers’ Palace makes things easier for other authors hoping to (self- or traditionally) publish work in its vein.
This being an Aliette de Bodard story, there are all the familiar and fabulous features that I’ve come to expect in her work: loving and mouth-watering descriptions of food and cooking, a refusal to flinch away from the devastating effects of empire and colonialism, and an intricate exploration of the different ways survival can look. This last is crucial, and resonates deeply with me. De Bodard rejects an individualistic interpretation of heroism, where a lone, special individual bravely solves the world’s problems alone. Instead, courage in her writing is all about (inter)dependence and community building — the little acts that forge and strengthen networks, reinforce familial and non-familial bonds, and the way that sometimes merely surviving and helping others survive is its own victory. De Bodard’s writing is at its exquisite best when it’s focused on hope in the ruins, and this shines through most beautifully in In the Vanishers’ Palace.
Authorities and adaptations May 17, 2018
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: aliette de bodard, books, louise o'neill, short stories, tessa gratton, the queens of innis lear, the surface breaks, the tea master and the detective
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The three works reviewed here share two common elements: they are broadly concerned with families – particularly the relationships between women and girls within families – and they are adaptations or reinterpretations of prexisting stories. One is a feminist retelling of a fairy tale, the other takes on a Shakespearean tragedy, and the third reimagines Sherlock Holmes and John Watson as citizens of a vast, space-faring civilisation of the future.
Aliette de Bodard’s novella ‘The Tea Master and the Detective’ is a return to her Xuya universe, the setting of much of her short fiction, in which sentient spaceships known as mindships transport human beings across the vastness of the universe, and whose history and culture is heavily inspired by those of Vietnam. The Xuya stories share a common setting, but most can be read in isolation, as is the case for ‘The Tea Master and the Detective’. In this work, Conan Doyle’s Watson becomes The Shadow’s Child, a traumatised war veteran mindship who now makes her living creating the blends of tea that enable human beings to travel through deep space, while Sherlock Holmes is Long Chau, an abrasive genuis with secrets of her own. Every interaction of the pair is a joy to read, and in flipping the genders of Conan Doyle’s original pair, de Bodard has given readers a great gift: a female character who is allowed to be traumatised and grieving, and a woman who is allowed to be intellectually brilliant, sharp, and occasionally uncaring about the effect her behaviour is having on others, without condemnation or judgement. As the pair investigate the mystery at the heart of the story, the reasons for their respective emotional states are revealed, with skill and sensitivity. ‘The Tea Master and the Detective’ features all the great little touches I’ve come to expect from de Bodard’s fiction: lovingly described food and tea blends, the recognition that food and meal traditions are a significant element of worldbuilding, an emphasis on family that goes beyond the typical Western nuclear family triad of mother, father and child, and the highlighting of the importance of the work of community-building, supporting, and sustaining. I doubt this will be her final foray into the Xuya universe, but I very much hope it’s not the last time we see these particular characters.
The Surface Breaks is a feminist retelling of The Little Mermaid which seems drawn in equal parts from Hans Christian Andersen and Disney. While not exactly subtle, Louise O’Neill’s YA novel is certainly satisfying to read, if only because the escapism of seeing a group of teenage girls (or in this case, mermaids) triumph over the constraints — with obvious real-world parallels — that bind them is its own reward. O’Neill’s little mermaid is Muirgen, the youngest daughter of the abusive, tyrannical ruler of an underwater kingdom. The twin pillars propping up his rule are lies about its recent history, and a rigid, hierarchical, highly misogynistic social structure. Mermaids are to remain passive, decorative and pliant, adhering to a rigid standard of beauty, seen but not heard, leaving all the functions deemed powerful and important to the men. Because he’s smart enough to realise that his daughters, if united, could challenge his authority, Muirgen’s father plays his them off against each other, forcing them to compete for scraps of love and agency so that they’re kept in a state of almost perpetual mistrust and animosity. Muirgen daydreams of the human world above the surface, fantasising that it offers more opportunities and freedom to its daughters. However, when the chance to escape there arises, Muirgen’s illusions are brutally shattered. Rendered literally voiceless as part of the deal that gives her human legs, Muirgen is forced to confront the fact that although twenty-first century human sexism is more subtle, women are still constrained, dismissed, devalued and abused in myriad ways. Rather than leave her little mermaid with the two terrible choices of instant fairytale love-at-first-sight or annihilation, O’Neill presents Muirgen with a third option: support and believe women, make common cause with her sisters, and look unflinchingly at the flimsiness of the constraints with which the men in their lives have bound them. It is only this sisterhood that will save them, and restore their agency and voice.
In her King Lear retelling, The Queens of Innis Lear, Tessa Gratton is also deeply concerned with issues of female agency and voice. Although in some ways this is the most straightforward adaptation reviewed here — Gratton has kept most of the original characters and plot structure intact — it fleshes this out with a deep focus on its characters’ psychological motivations. Thus it is more than sheer acquisitive envy that motivates Ban, Gratton’s analogue to the illegitimate Edmund, while the lingering grief at their mother’s death (and their suspicions about their father’s role in it) gives greater substance to Lear’s older daughters’ grievances against him. The Innis Lear of Gratton’s novel is a kingdom deeply at war with itself, with tensions — between worship of nature and its king’s worship of the stars, between its ageing king and his three daughters and their very different types of power, and between its fractious nobles and the powerful kingdoms that surround it — thinly papered over and obscured beneath a fog of secrets and unsayable truths. If I had one quibble, it would be that there are perhaps too many point-of-view characters — although this does allow Gratton to focus on different characters’ motivations while enabling her to keep these motivations secret from the other characters, to devastating effect. A lot of the exquisite pain of The Queens of Innis Lear lies in its tragic inevitability, and knowing, as a reader, what drives certain characters to make the choices they do.
There are so many moments of quiet devastation: the moment when Elia, Gratton’s Cordelia analogue, realises she’s so passive and reactive that people think of her as a sort of buffer, the calm shore against which crash the waves of other people’s emotions, selfishness, and sheer greedy need, or the tragedy of Ban, who is so accustomed to being treated not like a person but rather as a tool or weapon to be wielded that he gives his devoted loyalty to the first person who asks to use him so, rather than demanding or assuming. But the greatest emotional weight lies in the fraught, tense relationship between Lear’s three daughters, who would be better served with trust, support and love, but whose father’s actions have made such things impossible. As everything hurtles towards its destructive conclusion, The Queens of Innis Lear makes a plea for balance and reconciliation. The book is not telling us to focus on the earth beneath our feet at the expense of the stars in the sky, but rather to focus on the people around us. Only then will we strike the right balance between earthly practicalities and starry contemplation, and only then will tragedy be averted.
Female characters in The House of Binding Thorns April 23, 2017
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: aliette de bodard, dominion of the fallen, monica furlong, the house of binding thorns
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One of my favourite series of books, which I have been reading and rereading since childhood, is Monica Furlong’s Wise Child and Juniper duology.* This series of books is historical fantasy, set in early medieval Cornwall and Dál Riata, and the main reason why I keep coming back to it, like a well that never runs dry, is its emphasis on the day-to-day, ordinary work of women — spinning, weaving, harvesting and storing food for winter, gathering herbs and brewing beer — which it imbues with a kind of power and magic. Most of the important relationships in these books are between girls and/or women. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I feel that books like this did a lot to shape my narrative preferences, especially the idea that you can have a perfectly interesting story which involves few male characters, and focuses on stereotypically ‘female’ activies without a battlefield in sight. Consciously or unconsciously, I find myself searching for these kinds of stories — stories where the domestic sphere isn’t devalued, where a sense of community, communal activity and interdependence is prioritised, and where ‘women’s work’ drives the plot.
The House of Binding Thorns, the second book in Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, perfectly encapsulates these qualities. I knew I was in for a treat when I read one of the posts de Bodard had written in the week following the book’s publication, ‘The Fallacy of Agency: on Power, Community and Erasure’, and found myself nodding in vigorous agreement:
The other thing about dismissing powerlessness is that it devalues and erases the oppressed. It’s saying, essentially, that the less power one has, the less worthy of a story one is. That if someone is truly oppressed, and the story isn’t about some brash rebellion, some gaining of that overt power, then it’s not worth telling. That being oppressed is some sort of grey, featureless state where nothing worth notice happens—that there are no sorrows, no joys, no everyday struggles, no little victories to be snatched. That, in short, the only story of oppression worth telling is the brazen breaking of it.
The other thing that overemphasising agency does is that it makes it sound like a bad thing to be dependent on others, and especially being part of a community you can rely on. This is problematic on several levels: the first and most important one is that we are not and were not meant to be self-reliant (raising a child, for instance, is seen today as the job of a nuclear family, but it’s frazzling and exhausting and really much easier if we come back to the way it was done: by the extended family/community). Admitting that one can’t do everything alone isn’t a moral failing or a weakness: it’s deeply and fundamentally human.
This latter point is crucial in appreciating just what de Bodard has achieved, particularly with her female characters in this book. Set in a ruined, post-apocalyptic Paris run by conflicting Houses led by fallen angels, along with a Vietnamese dragon kingdom under the Seine pursuing its own agenda, The House of Binding Thorns abounds with a multiplicity of female characters. And, unlike Furlong’s work, which achieves a sense of interdependence and community by limiting women’s stories to a single sphere, de Bodard’s book allows women to exist in multiple spaces and pursue different aims. She by no means devalues the domestic: a fair portion of the book takes place in kitchens, living rooms and marketplaces, and is concerned with pregnancy and childbirth, preparing food, sharing out precious resources within immigrant communities, tending to the sick and so on. But alongside these women who concern themselves with the work of nurturing, protecting and sustaining fragile communities, there are also women exercising power overtly, politicians and wielders of supernatural power.
She allows for women who are steely and ambitious, and sets them beside women who are self-sacrificing or powerless, and gives space to all their stories. There are white women and women of colour, queer women and straight women, cis women and trans women, mothers and grandmothers and women who would never dream of having children. In other words, The House of Binding Thorns gives voice to as full a range of women’s experiences as possible. The world of the Dominion of the Fallen books is in some ways incredibly bleak: it’s a ruined and blasted landscape, rife with inequality, filled with self-interested immortals locked in endless political battles over what remains, and humans whose only choices are servitude or precarious survival outside the House system. However, de Bodard shows the glimmers of light that persist: bottles of fish sauce, hoarded and passed around migrant communities, the hard-won joy of learning a new language, the birth of a child, or the unstinting love and support of a beloved partner. There is hope amid the ruins, even if it only exists in tiny spaces, carved out at great cost.
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*Years later she published a third book in the series, Colman, but I have not read it.
These are the things I would do for linkpost November 13, 2015
Posted by dolorosa12 in linkpost.Tags: aliette de bodard, australiana, isabel yap, isobelle carmody, jill s, mari ness, natalie luhrs, obernewtyn chronicles, the red queen, world fantasy awards
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This post is going to be a bit Isobelle Carmody-heavy. The final Obernewtyn book came out, and I am not okay.
Monica Tan interviews Carmody in The Guardian:
Elspeth’s question is how to exist in the world, to be what she is and to find people who would allow her to be what she is. I think it’s everybody’s question to find a place in the world and to find your tribe, but the world itself has to find a way to let groups of people exist with one another.
Fran Kelly interviewed Carmody on Radio National:
[Readers write to me saying] they feel they survived childhood because of those books.
I appreciated this post by Jill S, ‘Dragons and poison chalices’:
I’m gathering my community of support. We are small but mighty. And this community reminds me daily that there are people in the world who can support my dreams and don’t feel threatened by them. So when you find someone who cheers you on, wholeheartedly, without fear that you are going to diminish them, cling tight.
I highly recommend ‘A Cup of Salt Tears’, a new-to-me short story by Isabel Yap.
I appreciate the work that Natalie Luhrs does in keeping records, bearing witness, and holding people to account. This report on the recent World Fantasy Convention was excellent:
In my experience, when many con-runners talk about best practices, what they mean is the way it’s always been done–and the way they’re most comfortable doing it.
Mari Ness’ post about problems with accessibility at the con (namely, that it was abysmal) is also an important read:
Because, unfortunately, this is not the first disability/accessibility problem I have had with conventions, or the first time a convention has asked/agreed to have me on programming and then failed to have a ramp that allows me to access the stage. At least in this case it wasn’t a Disability in Science Fiction panel that, incredibly enough, lacked a ramp, but against that, in this case, the conrunners were aware I was coming, were aware that I use a wheelchair, had spoken to me prior to the convention and had assured me that the convention would be fully accessible, and put me on panels with stages but no ramp.
Aliette de Bodard offers her thoughts on the (long overdue) decision to replace the WFA trophies with something other than Lovecraft’s head:
It’s not that I think Lovecraft should be forever cast beyond the pale of acceptable. I mean, come on, genre has had plenty of people who were, er, not shining examples of mankind, and I personally feel like the binary of “this person was a genius and can do no wrong/this person is a racist and can therefore do nothing of worth” doesn’t really make for constructive discussion. (but see above for the “we should give everything a fair chance” fallacy. I’m personally not particularly inclined to give reading time or space to a man who thought I was an abomination, and I will side-eye you quite a bit if you insist I should). It’s more that… these are the World Fantasy Awards. They’re not the H.P. Lovecraft Awards, so there’s no particular reason for him to be associated with them: doing so just creates extra awkwardness.
And on a much lighter note, this story is just the most Australian thing ever: paramedics in Queensland have stopped asking patients the name of the prime minister, because nobody can keep track.
“We would ask patients that question because it gave us an idea of their conscious level and ability to recall events,” Mr Abood said. “But the country’s prime ministers are changing so often, it’s no longer a good indication of their mental status.”
Mr Abood once asked a patient to name the prime minister, only to be told: “I haven’t watched the news today.”
I had a good laugh at that.
Geata Póeg na Déanainn 