Cronin, y1 (2012)

Sherrie Cronin, y¹, Cinnabar Press, 2012. Pp. 338. ISBN 978-0-9851561-1-4. $9.99.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

y¹, the second of a projected six-part series of novels by geophysicist and seismologist Sherrie Cronin, is a complex and deceptive book to describe. On the surface, it is about the struggle of people who are physically, sexually and emotionally different to find a place and be accepted in that place. Also a murder mystery, several love stories, as well a kidnapping and an exposé of the pharmaceutical industry unfold during the course of the novel. This complex plot, which seems too much for a single volume, is nonetheless interesting and readable, spoiled only by infodumps of propagandist social and economic theory, and poor portrayal of women.

Karey, Lilith's Reflection (2012)

Brigitte Wynn Karey, Lilith's Reflection: The Unseen. Trafford Publishing, 2012. Pp. 316. ISBN 978-1466936430. $18.70.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

Lilith's Reflection: The Unseen, self-published through the pay-to-publish Trafford Publishing by Brigitte Wynn Karey, author of two previous novels (including Lilith [2008], to which this is sequel), is a re-telling of the contentious story of Lilith, one of the fallen angels. While this is a promising backdrop for a story examining human relationships and the possibility of forgiveness, it falls badly short of its potential because of some deeply implausible plotting, and the terrible state of the writing.

Ramey (ed.), Triangulation: Morning After (2012)

Stephen V. Ramey (ed.), Triangulation: Morning After. PARSEC Ink, 2012. Pp. 209. ISBN 978-09828606-2-5. $15.00.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

This collection of twenty-four original stories is the eighteenth annual release in the Triangulation series from the writers’ group PARSEC which is also the Con-runner for the Pittsburgh, PA Confluence. The anthology series has earned a long-standing and very positive reputation for providing a platform for new writers, a reputation which is well continued in this varied collection of stories.

Reamer, Primary Fault (2012)

Sharon Kae Reamer, Primary Fault. Terrae Motus Books, 2012. Pp. 366. ISBN 9781475123098. $14.95.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

This is an remarkable first novel by a woman writer with impressive scientific credentials. Raised in Texas, Sharon Kae Reamer studied Geophysics at the University of Texas then, Ph.D in hand, moved to Germany to start a family and a career as a seismologist; after several years running her own consulting firm she returned to teaching at the University of Köln. The depth of her seismological and geographical knowledge shines through every page and adds credibility to the story details of this very readable, contemporary fantasy thriller.

Ibura Salaam, Ancient Ancient (2012)

Kiini Ibura Salaam, Ancient, Ancient. Aqueduct Press, 2012. Pp. 253. ISBN 978-1-933500-96-6. $18.00.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

This new collection of arresting and beautiful stories by Kiini Ibura Salaam draws the reader immediately into a world of magic and struggle. The author describes herself as, “...a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. The middle child of five, she grew up in a hardscrabble neighborhood with oak and fig trees, locusts and mosquitoes, cousins and neighbors.” Her fiction has been included in such publications as: Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, Dark Eros, FEMSPEC, Ideomancer, infinitematrix.com and PodCastle.org. She works as an editor and copy-editor in New York. This collection of moving stories interleaves many themes, perhaps the most effective for me being the alienation of the foreigner.

Hamer, The Charter (2012)

Gillian E. Hamer, The Charter. Triskele Books, 2012. Pp. 399. ISBN 978-0-9571932-1-5. £2.99 e-book/£6.99 print.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

In many ways The Charter is a straightforward crime-thriller. Sarah Williams Morton has returned to Moelfre, the small Welsh town on the Island of Anglesey where she grew up, to attend the funeral of her father, Professor Owen Williams. She had not been back there since she fled her father’s drunken, controlling, behavior many years before. Now a successful Londoner, with her handsome, rich, husband, Dominic Morton, beside her, she is painfully aware of the local communities resentment of her and their animosity towards her father.

Flowers, Gaelen’s Gold (2012)

M. K. Flowers, Gaelen’s Gold. Kestralane Publishing, 2012. Pp. 544. ISBN 978-0-9832429-0-1. $14.95.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

A common elf out hunting finds a mysterious box with a baby girl in it. He leaves her with a childless dwarven couple. Sixteen years later, the baby, now grown into a prodigious young woman named Gaelen, learns that she is a wizard and that the High Elves hunting her have decreed she must die because she is a powerful mana or magic user. This enormous book by father and daughter writing team M. K. Flowers, Gaelen’s Gold incorporates a number of familiar fantasy themes: coming of age, evil or misguided rulers and finding ones place in life—to list just a few. Along the way we meet more elves, scores of soon-to-be-dead goblins, dwarves, stone giants, wood fairies, more wizards and a cheerful dragon, Luminant. Dedicated to a dead brother and son, and described as “a labour of love,” I wish I could say I enjoyed reading this book. The authors have pulled together a vast assortment of tropes from Tolkien, Game of Thrones, the Bible and Walt Disney’s Fantasia. The description of the dwarf schoolhouse evokes The Flintstones. Just getting to the end of the pages was a prodigious task.

Wolff, Sacrifices (2012)

Tarah L.Wolff, Sacrifices: Embraced by Darkness book one. Self-published/Amazon Digital Services, 2012. Pp. 398. ISBN: 978-0-9850228-0-8. $15.00.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

Four women strive to determine their destinies; to live with the choices they have made or that have been made for them. Sacrifices, a first novel from Tarah L. Wolff, deals with the struggles that women face to take control of their lives. The decisions they make will determine not only their own fate but the safety and future of their country. This is the first book of what is planned as an epic fantasy saga; the players are introduced and like the opening moves in a game of chess, at the end of this book they are all in place for the battles to come. With what seems like a cast of thousands and multiple intertwining plot lines, this is a very ambitious beginning for a new author.

We first encounter the Warlord Osondrous when, on a simple journey from her own Castle of the Wards to review her troops in a not so distant castle, she just barely survives an assassination attempt. After decades of peace, strange and unsettling events have begun to proliferate. Tempers flare that should not: Telenay, Osondrous’ human second in command strikes the an innocent woman. The King Ward is missing and now this attempt on the Warlord’s life makes it clear that the coming danger cannot be ignored.

This is a book full of strange and engaging characters, As well as Wards, Healers and Warlord—humans with powerful magical abilities—there are Centaurs, War Horses and Darkhalks, humans who have given away their personalities to serve the Castle of the Wards; and Implins, small creatures who exist to serve and be loved, much like useful pets. And this is only on the good guys’ side. While this could easily have descended into a kind of D&D-esque monster saga, Ms Wolff has succeeded in making the most of the major characters glow with authentic personalities.

This is no courtly Troubadour-inspired romantic fantasy. Life outside and inside the castle is dangerous and brutish. Unless a woman can claim a better reason for her presence, she exists to serve the soldiers of the castle in every way. They are waitresses, cooks and sexual gratifiers. The best they can hope for is that the soldier who claims them will be kind. Rape however is forbidden. Women who have risen to a more valued level (Warlord, Ward or Healer) are allowed and do initiate almost any kind of sexual licence.

For good or ill, the sexual mores of this unnamed country form the underpinnings of many of the decisions made by the protagonists. It is an area that the author has clearly given much thought to in her world building. This is why the absence of any hint of same-sex relationships seems to me to be a serious flaw. Despite the problems caused by various prohibitions on human / non-human intercourse, the possibility of LGBT contacts is never considered. Well known female authors of epic fantasy from Storm Constantine to Laurell K. Hamilton have been exploring these issues in their best-selling sex-pics for many years. There is no longer any justification for ignoring LGBT issues in a novel that has sexual relationships as one of its key themes.

The setting: to bring an end to the 500 year war between the Fae and the Draegoone, the ‘King’ Ward, Lionel created the Killing River, dividing the country into three sections. The Fae were sent to the West on the fringes of The Swoon, while the Draegoone occupied the East section along with a strange race known as the Vamepire. The humans and their supporters were given the middle section. The races are separated by a river so noxious and deadly that nothing can cross over or above. Only when a new King Ward is crowned does the power of the Killing River diminish enough for the Fae and Draegoone to cross and continue their deadly feuds.

After a long period of peace and stability in the central, human-ruled area, someone, possibly a mysterious Red Man, wants to use the next King Ward ascension to launch a war against the Castle of the Wards and its inhabitants. From the rape-seduction of Jezeline, which brings on her powers, to the murder of the unstable and ineffectual King Ward, Shankan, we only slowly become aware of the dangers posed by the Red Man. The structure of the book with the POV shifting from woman to woman in successive sections, works very effectively here. As each woman’s story unfolds from her perspective, there is little need to interrupt the forward motion with excessive info-dumping.

Four human women, lives intertwined, each have critical roles to play in the coming battle:

My favourite character in the book is Osondrous. Trained from childhood as a warrior, she has fought to achieve the highest military position in her country. She is the Warlord. Still young and inexperienced in the ways of managing people, when the King Ward is discovered dead, she must deal with strange almost supernatural pressure to have herself crowned. She does not know that on the day of a new King Ward’s ascension the Killing River diminishes enough for it to be crossed. For me Osondrous is the most interesting of the key women. In her struggle to master the people skills needed to do the job being forced on her, we see a fully realised human: bored, angry, loyal, passionate, imperfect but determined to do her best. Wilful and trained as a solder, her struggle to become worthy of the challenge she faces is monumental and engrossing.

Karaly, a young healer, deeply troubled by a forbidden love for her Darkhalk protector, does not consider what problems her actions will cause for colleagues in the Castle of the Wards. I find her the least likeable of the four women as she seems so wrapped up in her own emotional issues that I want to reach out and shake her. In many ways, the standard ‘wilful woman’ whose foolish actions advance the plot, her character is the least fully developed of the four.

In Jezeline, the author has created another complex and fully rounded character. Born and brought up on a horse breeding farm in a distant province, she had never imagined that her life would be anything different. On her sixteenth birthday, she encounters a powerful red-headed man who seduces her, bringing on the magical powers of a Ward. The insatiable sexual hunger created by the Red-headed Man sends her on a journey that will lead her to become the lover not only of the King of the Vamepire but also the heir apparent of the Draegoone.

Constance is a cipher. Her story seems to be an icon for the situation of women in this world. Attached to the castle as a servant, she hopes to one day be accepted as a trainee Ward. Just before her sixteenth birthday when she must choose her first lover, she is raped by a guard, Marcus and two friends. In a spectacularly gruesome scene, that provides still another picture of how brutal and violent this world is, Osondrous punishes the rapists with what are truly fates worse than death.

In Sacrifice, Ms Wolff has created an entire stage full of interesting and complex characters, many with their own unique identities. However another issue for me, is the universal whiteness of the characters. We get a vast array of human and non-human characters, centaurs, draegoone, vamepire, fae and so on but no indication that any of these has any skin colour but white. This seems retrogressive. Nowadays, people of colour now do make valuable contributions to many successful fantasy epics. After the success of books like The Hunger Games, their absence in a planned epic of this type is troubling. The story itself is compelling and believable and the writing moves along briskly. Despite the vast number of characters and a complex plot, the information is presented in such a vivid and clear fashion that I had no difficulty following the action.

A few weeks ago there was a Twitter discussion about women writers of epic fantasy. Among the issues raised was: why do men not want to read epic fantasy by women. I did some research on this topic and unearthed this discussion started by Katie Elliot, herself a fine writer of epic fantasy, Do females write epic fantasy differently than males do? If so, how and why? The question elicited over 200 passionate responses, but for our purposes Kari Sperring’s trenchant analysis seems the most useful:

“Oddly, I've been thinking about this, too. I think there's a perception of difference—there is an assumption that the women will be all emo and relationships and misunderstood witches, while the men deal with the Big Stuff—the swords but also the Important Politics. But the truth is that I think there's not that much real difference and that women in epic fantasy are writing some very interesting, important, subversive, political stuff and not being recognised because the assumption gets in the way.”

Sacrifices offers a multitude of awesomely bloody fight scenes, political intrigues and a full array of emo inducing exotic sexual activities, including several inter-species couplings. All are described in enough luxurious detail to satisfy almost any reader.

From the biographical material provided at the end of the book, it seems that the writing was in part an attempt to exorcise a number of traumatic personal events. If so, I say BRAVA! Far cheaper than a course of psychotherapy and far more useful.

Embraced by Darkness, Book Two, Stricken is due Christmas, 2012. As well looking forward to seeing how the characters’ lives develop, it will be interesting to see how the conflicts between the Fae, Draegoone and the Vamepire are resolved and what kind of King Ward Osondrous will become.

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Olsen, The End (2010)

Nora Olsen, The End: Five Queer Kids Save The World. Prizm Books, 2010. Pp. 270. ISBN 1610401166. $13.95.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

The End is a first novel by Nora Olsen, whose goal is “to write fun books that anyone can enjoy”, but she especially wants “LGBT teens to be able to see themselves in [her] books”. It is published by Prizm Books and is young adult science fiction of interest to LGBT teens. Five queer teenagers receive magic amulets that can help them to save the world from nuclear disaster. They must learn to trust each other and work together in order to accomplish this. Ms Olsen tells an engrossing story that is well plotted and moves briskly along to a satisfying and believable resolution.

Thompson, Apoidea (2011)

Douglas Thompson, Apoidea. The Exaggerated Press, 2011. Pp. 211. ISBN: 978-1471007897. $10.82 / £6.99.

Reviewed by Martha Hubbard

In his new book, Apoidea, Douglas Thompson proposes a chilling and potentially all too real scenario. Sitting in his hermetically sealed, climate controlled, home-compound in the Colorado desert, Gert Villers is feeling very pleased with himself. His creation, his children, miniature silver, bee-like creatures, ‘apodroids’, developed to take on the task of pollinating the world’s harvests after the death of natural bees, has made him unbelievably wealthy and given him a sense of satisfaction few ever achieve.

Nothing stays the same forever and Gert’s idyll is about to change irrevocably. The U.S. Government in the shape of Major Bob Brautigan wants Gert’s apodroids to use in the war against its enemies. Soon other visitors, Steve Dobs of Lemon, and Bill Yates of Winterra also request a piece of the apodroid pie. Gert refuses all of these requests even as he realises that events are moving out of his control.

Far down south in Mexico City, Del Freemont, a disgraced former employee also has plans for Gert and his apodroids. He arranges for Gert to be kidnapped by the apos, reintroduced to Del and shown a vision of the future potential for the apodroids. While Gert is in the desert, a swarm of apodroids invade the pentagon and kill Major Brautigan. Staggering back to his compound he is placed under house arrest by soldiers who refuse to let him see his wife Marielle. This does not prevent the apodroids from killing Bill Yates and making a near fatal attack on Steve Dobs. In addition, more than half the world’s AI bees have stopped working. Without their pollinization of the world’s crops, the world’s economy will crash and millions will starve.

Because the government and Gert’s other company officers are convinced he is behind these actions, they are treating him like a criminal. Frustrated and angry, he is surprised when a voice from the air-vent system tells him that he is to be rescued. The apodroids drug him, then form a swarm which first tunnels out of the compound and carries Gert away into the desert. Now in the eyes of the world and his family he is an escapee as well as a criminal.

Del’s plans for him continue. Plastic surgery and months of retraining create a new man. When the time is right, Vernon Hopkins is turned loose. He begins an odyssey that, guided by his creations, will take him down through Texas, picking up the lovely and troubled Melissa along the way. Finally Vernon and Melissa make it into Mexico where Del has been waiting for them. He takes them to the cave system where he has set up a control centre. He needs Gert’s engineering expertise to solve a problem that he has been unable to master. But has Del now become another enemy who wants to control of the apos for his own purposes? The answer to this provides the shocking climax of Gert/Vernon’s adventure.

I was drawn to this book because of my long term involvement with the organic and local food movement where I live. Here we are all too aware of the dangers of limiting species variety, of food contaminated by pesticides and antibiotics. As the book says: the need to create an artificial means of guaranteeing pollination after the destruction brought about ‘by our monoculture and selective breeding. As well as the excessive use of pesticides,’ is an all-too real possibility. Currently scientists are baffled by the devastating rise of ‘hive-death’.

‘In 2007, about one third of the US domesticated bee population was wiped out as a result of a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), with some commercial hive owners losing up to 90% of their bees.’ (BBC, 28 September 2010)

More insidious is the spread of monoculture genetically modified crops. These, developed, sold and controlled by enormous agri-businesses like Monsanto, are causing wide-ranging problems in many of the developing countries that have adopted them.

‘Shankara ... facing the loss of his land due to debt, drank a cupful of chemical insecticide. Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years’ earnings, he was in despair. ... Shankara’s crop had failed—twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India’s ancient story. But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops. Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead. Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts—and no income.’ (Daily Mail, 28 February 2012)

All over the world, governments and farmers are handing control of their livelihoods and nutritional security to giant corporations that have greed as their primary motivator. These are very real issues that have been brilliantly addressed writers like Paolo Bacigalupi in The Windup Girl. Apoidea is a worthy member of this pantheon.

However, an event last week set me to thinking. First was the rescinding of Kormen for the Cure’s decision to cease funding Planned Parenthood The initial announcement of Kormen’s plans, set off a firestorm of reaction, debate and determination to protect what most regard as a critical agency assisting women. A support PP campaign was spontaneously born that generated substantial donations. Kormen’s newish right wing director Karen Handel subsequently resigned. Regardless of which side of the issue you stand on, what was truly remarkable was the speed and effectiveness of the response on various social media. Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal et al. were a-buzz from morning to night.

This is where I saw the real parallels with Apoidea. What is interesting, exciting and frightening is the power of the hive mind, its uncontrollability, once set in motion, as Del learns to his detriment. Individually an ‘apo’ has limited intellectual capacity; collectively, in the tens of thousands they can learn, reason, plan and carry out complicated group activities that in the book make them a formidable force. In the way that many of the most important events of 2011, the Arab Spring and OWS were reported and driven by multitudes using social media hint at a sea-change in the way revolutions are carried out, the rise and proliferation of linked world wide social media may be a seminal event on the same history changing order as the Gutenberg printing press.

A few small quibbles: The use of blatant name jokes i.e. Steve Dobs and Bill Yates is not really bad—just silly. More annoying were the polemics and propaganda during Gert and Melissa’s road-trip. These create mind blank-out and turn-the-pages moments that interrupt the forward movement of the adventure. This seems to be a dangerous trap some authors fall into when they feel the message is so important it overrides the need to concentrate on the story telling. The message should be in the story; the story itself should be the message.

These aside, Apoidea is an exciting adventure story that raises some challenging questions about the world we are creating.

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