James (ed.) Warrior Wisewoman 3 (2010)

Roby James (ed.), Warrior Wisewoman 3. Norilana Books, 2010. Pp. 302. ISBN 9781607620617. $12.95 / £9.50.

Reviewed by Djibril al-Ayad

Warrior Wisewoman 3 is an ambitious and impressive anthology from Norilana Books’ science fiction division, a publisher responsible for speculative series’ including MZB’s Sword and Sorceress and Lace and Blade. The explicit theme of the Warrior Wisewoman series of books is that of science fiction with a strong female protagonist. The editor James is keen to point out in the introduction (12) that almost half of the stories in this volume are written by men, and she plays down the idea that such a collection might favour female authors. This is a fair point, but insistence on the fact that she doesn’t know the sex of an author until she’s decided she’s interested in a story is an uncomfortable reminder of the “colorblindness” fallacy in discussions of race; with a near 50/50 split in the ToC, however, I’m obviously not suggesting latent sexism in this case. And indeed the contents of this volume show a very wide range of approaches to questions of gender, from the unspoken inclusion of strong women to the explicit addressing of gender inequalities and prejudices; some of the best stories in this overall fine anthology sit at either end of this spectrum. The question is, does this focus on strong female protagonists result in a different kind of science fiction than a more mainstream anthology might?

Several of the stories in this collection take a “slice of life” approach to their subject matter: rather than a classic story structure with problems overcome or journeys undertaken, more than one of these stories have an anticlimactic shape with the protagonist enduring, surviving or demonstrating humility, and living to face another day. Perhaps this is a male reviewer criticizing “female” virtues, but I think there are also issues of genre in this question. The stories in this anthology are science fiction in the technical sense that they are set in a world recognizable as our own or in one of humanity’s possible futures, and the settings are explained in terms of science and rationality rather than supernatural or faith, but few if any of these are “hard science fiction” or stories whose climaxes involve the solution of technical problems; nor are there action stories whose conclusions require the physical defeat of a foe (although there are military SF stories, some of which are quite disturbing).

One complaint: the editor’s one-sentence summary/introductions at the top of each piece add nothing to the story that follows, and in some case are spoilery and irritating. I ended up deliberately avoiding reading them, and having to avert my eyes became a major irritant at the start of each new story. This is a personal preference, but I really wish editors wouldn’t feel the need to do this.

There are several excellent stories in this anthology, including the first several in the table of contents (good scheduling on the part of the editor there: most memorable pieces toward the beginning and end as well as spread evenly throughout the listing). The first story that really stood out for me was Aimee C. Amodio’s ‘Tourist Trap’, a beautifully written and unsettling story full of harsh truths, unflinching philosophy, and glimpses of beauty in the cruelest environments. The protagonist is Haryn, a tourist guide on a beautiful world where the rich come for decadent vacations, but the locals, the guides and other inhabitants of this alien planet, who have developed an intricate and expressive sign language because of the danger of exposing their hearing to the savage wild. The antagonist, the sentient alien ocean, perhaps the most terrifying, implacable, and just plain alien extraterrestrial intelligence since Lem’s Solaris. The story gives us the conflict between locals and tourists, demonstrates the beauty and foreignness of non-spoken language in a way that I have never appreciated before, and demonstrates the importance of respect for nature, even when that nature is in danger of killing you. A wonderful story that belongs in any collection of mind-expanding science fiction.

‘Mayfly’ by Gary Kloster is one of several stories in this anthology whose villains are trying to create a world without life-saving technology; in this case it is short-lived men angered by a vaguely described breakthrough that grants women eternal youth, but mysteriously doesn’t work for males. The science is very much second fiddle in this piece, but the protagonist, a 250 year old woman with the body of a teenage girl (who walks all over the men in the story, both intellectually and in quality of characterization) convincingly explores important issues of gender inequality, the value of life, the perniciousness of “non-prejudiced” conservatism. The victory in this story is won by violence (and more “magical” technology), but this is a story of ideas above action.

Another story that broke the mold, for me, and addressed important issues of gender and cultural respect was ‘Bearer of Burdens’ by Melissa Mead. In this lovely, understated piece the viewpoint character is male, an off-world genius artist brought to a closed, very constrained society to paint a very sensitive commission; but the heart of the story is his subject, Bearer Amberlynn, an enormously fat woman who takes on the griefs, joys and food offerings of her community. The painter’s task is to capture the Bearer’s beauty and show it to the world, while helping Amberlynn and her maidens gain a little freedom from the conservative Mandators who control everything in this world. A beautiful, delightful, infuriating and heartbreaking story.

The stand-out piece for me (and one of my candidates for top story of 2010 so far) was John Walters’s ‘Dark Mirrors’, a gritty military SF piece set in a brutal prison during a nightmarish interplanetary war that humanity is losing. Despite its setting, this story does not rely on violence for its climax. Rather, Walters demonstrates again and again (in both medium and message) the true meaning—and the true power—of pacifism, without excessive sententiousness or moralizing. In little details that you don’t see unless you’re looking for them, as well as in the big picture told only through infodump, we see violence begetting violence, we see that even winning a conflict through combat takes you further away from your desired ends. A gorgeous piece of writing; if this had been the only story worth reading (which it assuredly was not), ‘Dark Mirrors’ alone would have made this fine anthology worth reading.

A few of the pieces I am less able to praise so unreservedly, not because they are weak stories (I don’t think there are any of those in this volume), but because they left me unsettled or unhappy with the conclusion.

In ‘Natural Law’ by Alfred D. Byrd a diplomat causes a major diplomatic incident by secretly and illegally subverting the suffering that would be caused by the policies of a cult of “natural humans”. This could have made an interesting and dramatic conflict, but never explores the possibility that interfering with another culture’s mores is in fact wrong, and therefore remains one-sided and shallow moralizing. Therese Arkenberg’s ‘To the Altar’ is even more disturbing; a well-written story of an unending and increasingly jingoistic war, and the convincing process by which the peace-loving president of one nation comes to the decision to use a nuclear bomb to strike a crushing blow, kill countless innocent civilians but end the war. Alternative course are never explored, leaving the impression that this story does little more than justify atrocities like Nagasaki and Hiroshima (and of course the strategic killing of innocents by bad guys too) rather than tell a new story or explore moral complexity. ‘The Truth One Sees’ by Kathy Hurley is a story that uses science fictional conceits—hidden aliens, holograms and other hi-tech trappings—to bolster a psychic protagonist and some cheap stereotypes about closed-minded skeptics.

On the whole this anthology works extremely well, with a very diverse mix of story types and narrative adventures, stories that ask questions and challenge the reader’s expectations rather than merely providing escapism or flash-bang action and entertainment. Such variety and diversity makes it difficult to answer the question of whether this collection of female-focused science fiction has a different tone from the genre at large. Perhaps the focus on protagonists (heroines) who have ethical decisions to make rather than wars to win; who triumph through empathy or diplomacy rather than a strong arm or merciless spirit; whose adventure involve the desire for children rather than riches; whose concerns are at the human level rather than involving whole empires or planets. These are all stereotypes, and any one of them would be problematic and borderline offensive if stated as a generalization. As a break from science fiction commonplace, however, it makes for an anthology that this male reader finds refreshing and original, and of incredibly high quality.

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Grimwood, The Places Between (2010)

Terry Grimwood, The Places Between. Pendragon Press, 2010. Pp. 111. ISBN 9781906864200. £7.99.

Reviewed by N.A. Jackson


If there is such a thing as an over-arching cultural obsession these days, it might be the fascination with identity, and Terry Grimwood’s novella taps into this obsession in an interesting way, blending elements of realism and fantasy in a sort of ‘dark night of the soul’ for the main character. The Places Between is a psychological novel exploring the fear and alienation that exist within relationships. Grimwood tackles that most slippery of topics: the male/female divide and the sometimes violent attraction and repulsion between the sexes. This is the driving force behind the novella and not even the most vivid of his well-conceived monstrosities can eclipse that most alien of landscapes, the human condition.

Morris (ed.), Cinema Futura (2010)

Mark Morris (ed.), Cinema Futura. PS Publishing, 2010. Pp. 271. ISBN 978-1-848630-95-6. £25.00 / $38.75.

Reviewed by Kate Onyett

As a collection of essays, one of the best places to start in ascertaining whether the book has/will hit its mark is in the editor’s forward. It will, after all, be the editor’s guiding hand that will to a greater degree determine the book’s direction. As it turns out, this book emerges from a freely admitted—nay, a proudly stated—ambition to catalogue a genre that the editor, Mark Morris, has a long had an abiding fascination for. He begins with a very personal snippet about the effect of his first horror film on his eleven-year-old self. And recalls the experience with “fondness and nostalgia.” Having equated horror with science fiction in the arena of speculative fiction, this personal, visceral response is the vein in which he wants his book to run. Morris claims that after the publication of a collection of horror essays he edited, he intended for there to be a ‘sci-fi’ follow up, and he is proud of the result (my emphasis). This is a book that wants to present, not the grave, dry and deeply technical, but the personal and the affecting, from the viewpoint of the affected; moreover, an affected that can lucidly, amusingly, interestingly, describe and to some extent examine the effect they took on board. In describing the brief he gave to his contributors, Morris states that they had ‘carte blanche’ to choose their film, but it was one they had to “champion.” This is no book for the intellectually distant. This is a collection of responses that range from, yes, something of an academic flavour (mentioning in passing social, economic, political and ethical considerations), to the anecdotal, the flippant, the emotional. As Morris himself says, this is a highly subjective book. Perhaps therein lies the base of its charm; it lays the innate subjectivity of any review book, any book of ‘essays on’, wide out into the open. But instead of trying to hide this facet like a dirty little secret as so many ‘intellectual’ tracts attempt to do, it plays on it as a strength. By the writers’ enthusiasms, we are enthused; by their passion and apocryphal moments, we can be recharged, too.

Mellon, Napoleon Concerto (2009)

Mark Mellon, Napoleon Concerto. Treble Heart Books, 2009. Pp. 342. ISBN 9781936127085. $13.50.

Reviewed by Aishwarya Subramanian

It is 1806. Napoleon Bonaparte rules France and most of Europe. Yet Britain remains out of reach; however strong Napoleon may be on land, at sea the Royal Navy is supreme. Then an engineer named Robert Fulton meets an Irish ex-naval captain named Wolfe O’Sheridane at a Paris salon. Fulton has a design for a powerful engine and his new friend has the audacity required to get them both an interview with Josephine herself. Mark Mellon’s Napoleon Concerto (the title is presumably a reference to Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon Symphony) is a steampunk, alternate-history retelling of the Napoleonic wars as they might have happened had France possessed the naval might necessary to challenge the British on their home ground.

It’s an idea that, if thoroughly researched and well worked, has the potential to be both a fun thought experiment and a romp. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way.

From the start, Mellon throws us possibilities that might be interesting. At the beginning of the book the major point-of-view character appears to be Robert Fulton himself. Fulton is a genius, though the author soon seems to forget that aspect of his character. He’s fond of money and status and averse to taking risks. All of these traits make him extremely unhappy about the schemes into which his association with O’Sheridane leads him. Moreover, O’Sheridane through Fulton’s eyes appears almost the charismatic fellow the the text seems to expect the reader to believe he is. Fulton’s attraction towards O’Sheridane is pretty extreme—there are moments when Fulton is noticing O’Sheridane’s “muscular thigh next to [his]” where one would think the novel was going in an entirely different direction. This is a point of view (and possibly a relationship) that might be quite fun to explore.

Almost immediately, though, the novel’s focus shifts from Fulton’s contemplation of the Irishman to O’Sheridane himself. O’Sheridane remains the book’s focus for most of the rest of the plot, bar a short period towards the end where Bonaparte takes centre stage. But O’Sheridane is entirely uninteresting. He is too typical an Irishman—the name that could have come out of a bad Mills and Boon romance aside, he is reckless, audacious, red-haired and green-eyed and charming with the ladies. He is a passionate Irish nationalist, and we soon discover that his services to Napoleon are rendered with the condition that should the French triumph, Ireland will be freed.

O’Sheridane’s storyline once again shows the possibility of being interesting with the introduction of Ghislaine, a beautiful widow with her own reasons to be distrustful of Bonaparte. Much is made of Ghislaine’s brilliance, and her capacity to outwit people. On meeting her O’Sheridane is “intrigued by the prospect of how far she would go in her efforts to manipulate him.” So was I. It doesn’t happen.

Ghislaine is one of two female characters in this book, the other being Josephine. This may not be a particularly low number for a war novel set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it is certainly unnecessarily low for a novel set to a large extent in Parisian society. Josephine is just portrayed as shrewd, but overly fond of shopping. Ghislaine fares a little better, since as I mention above the book makes much of her intellect. Yet we never actually see this intellect, only hear other people referring to it (often in rather cringeworthy terms: O’Sheridane explains that “for a minute I thought myself in conversation with an exceptionally well-informed minister of the Council of State rather than a beautiful young woman”).

As for the war itself, Fulton’s engine destroys the careful balance of power that prevails at the beginning of the book so that everything that follows is distinctively one-sided. This is not necessarily a bad thing; in the real world most armies are not entirely evenly matched, and the portrayal of a country’s defeat is probably far more realistic. And Mellon’s shipboard battles are some of his best writing. On the other hand, a conflict where one side doesn’t have the ghost of a chance isn’t exactly riveting.

And this is what is strange about Napoleon Concerto. Potentially interesting characters and situations are continuously tossed out or forgotten about. No character actually undergoes any sort of development; what we know about them as soon as they are introduced (Fulton is greedy and materialistic; Ghislaine is pretty, clever and attracted to O’Sheridane; O’Sheridane is reckless, soulful and Irish) is what we know about them at the end of the book. Perhaps Napoleon himself is the only character to escape. And yet it’s never clear what these elements are being jettisoned in favour of; certainly not plot.

Napoleon Concerto is a book containing a number of possible plots and fascinating characters. But in touching on all of them Mellon does justice to none.

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Storrs, TimeSplash (2010)

Graham Storrs, TimeSplash. Lyrical Press, 2010. Pp. 261. ISBN 9781616501235. E-book $5.50.

Reviewed by Keith Lawrence

A crime thriller set in the near future, TimeSplash centres on a new form of terrorism, a destructive form of time-travel, and the efforts of the two young protagonists to prevent a catastrophe that will devastate a European city. Graham Storrs’s previous published works have been thoughtful short stories in magazines such as Concept and Bewildering Stories (and indeed here in TFF), but this is his first published novel. The publishers, Lyrical Press, deal mainly in ebooks, and their stable encompasses works from a wide range of genres. Although this novel is marketed both by Lyrical Press and Storrs himself as science fiction, the plot more closely resembles the sort of cold-war spy thriller beloved of beach-readers.

The core of any time-travel story is the nature of time. Is time a mutable thing, a flow of cause and effect which can be altered by time travellers to affect their own present (as in Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant); is it a fait accompli, in which travellers can only observe or at most become part of a preordained chain of events (as in the film Twelve Monkeys); or is it something in between? In TimeSplash, time is envisioned as closer to the latter, something like a glass of water into the depths of which bubbles can be pushed through a scientific straw. The bubbles rush back to the surface and behind them the waters of time heal up just as they were, but the ripples they leave on the surface are devastating.

This attitude towards time neatly avoids excessive complication, but does mean that the time-travel scenes of the book are essentially exotic backdrops before which the action can occur. They perform this role as handily as any foreign port or exclusive casino in a Bond film, and the descriptions of the localised disruptions that dog the time-travellers are engaging.

The plot is not especially complicated, but suits the book well—the pace of the story proceeds evenly and without dragging at any point. It’s interesting, though, that TimeSplash resembles a modern crime thriller not only in its strengths but also in its weaknesses. Some of the dialogue seems clunky, and although the characterisation of the main protagonist (Jay) is relatively even and unremarkable, the two most important supporting characters are rather two-dimensional.

Sandra, the female protagonist, is a woman out for vengeance whose fatal attraction to cruel men seems to be miraculously cured by Jay’s clean-cut niceness. There are very few female characters who appear as more than an adjunct to the men in this novel, and although Sandra’s part is more substantial it appears to be little more than a simple morality play—Sandra’s failings are sexual and her redemption tied to the love of a good man. In many ways the future of TimeSplash is a bit of a Parson’s Egg—the technology of the mid-twenty-first century, the sexual politics of the mid-twentieth. Although Sandra finally prevails, the middle of her story (in which she is effectively punished for consorting with Sniper, the story’s antagonist) seems more pointed than its conclusion. This progression is echoed in the misfortunes of the only other woman of note: Camilla, a handler put in place in Sniper’s organisation by his terrorist backers.

Sniper himself is potentially an interesting character—his motivation for making the devastating timesplash which Jay and Sandra must work together to foil is actually much more plausible than that of many fictional villains. Sadly, particularly towards the latter half of the book, he rarely appears in any scene without it being used to demonstrate that he is milled from a block of solid evil.

I read the e-book version of TimeSplash. At the time of writing this was the only way to get hold of the book, although it had just been picked up by Big Bad Media for publishing in both physical and audiobook formats, enhancing Storrs’s already thorough work at making the book available and supporting readers and potential readers. The TimeSplash website features links to reviews, vendors, and even fan fiction. For the technically-minded, Storrs helpfully provides a list explaining which formats you will receive if you buy the ebook from any particular vendor, including whether or not they are sold with DRM. Buying from Lyrical Press directly gets you access to 7 different DRM-free formats of ebook, hopefully catering nicely for all forms of hardware—I saw both the EPUB and PDF formats, and apart from a few niggles with the formatting of the EPUB, they were both made to a high standard. This is all extremely laudable, and something I hope other writers and publishing houses will emulate.

I had mixed feelings about TimeSplash: I liked it less than I wanted to, and in particular I would find it difficult to recommend it to my female SF-loving acquaintances. I found it thought-provoking only in a sense that I suspect Storrs did not intend (i.e. regarding the characterisation of women)—a shame, since Storrs’s short stories have tended to be deeper. As a straightforward terrorism thriller in which the time-travel elements are clever window-dressing, TimeSplash works well; it is a competent story and although the plot is nothing special it is a pleasant read.

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Bull Spec #2 (2010)

Bull Spec issue 2, Summer 2010. Pp. 64. ISSN 2152-5234. $8.00.

Reviewed by Steven Pirie

I tend to prefer full-sized magazines. Digest sized magazines are fine, but in my opinion they’re never going to match holding a glossy, full-sized offering. There’s the extra detail that can be gleaned from the artwork, and the contents appear far less pinched. Fonts tend to be bigger, too. Bull Spec, as you might have gathered, is a full-sized speculative fiction magazine, with colour covers front and rear, and colour first page and last.

I thought at first this was a magazine purely for fiction, but in fact Bull Spec is very much compartmentalised in that all the fiction is offered first, followed by a graphic short, then poetry, then interviews and features, and an editorial. It struck me as an unusual layout—most, if not all, magazines I’ve read tend to interweave such material—and I can’t quite decide if I like this particular way of doing things, whether it felt clunky to read everything in segments. And then I think, why not be a little different in layout?

Tidhar, Cloud Permutations (2010)

Lavie Tidhar, Cloud Permutations. PS Publishing, 2010. Pp. 130. ISBN 9781848630437. £12.00.

Reviewed by Sarah Ann Watts

Cloud Permutations is a novella set on a planet called Heven with a magical South Seas setting. Kal is a boy who just wants to fly, but flying on Heven is tabu, against kastom, and carries a fatal penalty. A very young Kal is warned by his grandfather, ‘One should never speak lightly of clouds.’ Clouds are a mystical and powerful force in this world, ever present in the skies they inspire an almost religious awe and are regarded with respect and fear.

Kal and his friend Vira slip away from school to build a kite, named after the original ship, the Hilda Lini, that brought the people of Man Vanuatu to their new world. Here they have established a new society based on the culture of the world they left. Kastom is everything and traditions endure—like meeting in the nakamal in the shade of a nambanga tree brought from ‘Old Earth’, and the drinking of kava.

“But this, Kal thought, was not Earth. This was Heven. It was a new world, his world and he would not bow down to kastom. He wanted—desired—to fly. And flying had been forbidden by kastom.”

Kal and Vira rebel against this tabu, and the retribution is immediate. Vira falls from the sky and Kal is exiled from his home island Epi to the floating island of Tanna. The decision to exile Kal is taken more in sorrow than in anger—‘those who live in the sky have been offended’ and so Kal must leave. Arriving at the floating island of Tanna he is greeted by the mysterious Moli Solomon, ‘wan woman blong wotadroing’ and learns there is a dark tower in his future.

“It waited for Kal. It had waited for a long time. How long, perhaps, only the clouds really knew.”

So Kal becomes the boy of the prophecy, meets a new friend, Bani Voko Voko Leo, ‘a thief by reasons of ideology’, who has his own prophecy to fulfil. Bani invites Kal to join him on a ‘small trip’—possibly the most casual invitation to a quest since Bilbo Baggins rushed headlong out of Bag End without a handkerchief. Kal sets sail from Naetsaed on a ship called the Sanigodaon with Bani, three students and Captain Desmon for the island of the Narawan, or ‘other’. Soon he discovers that there is so much more to Heven than the small part of it that his people colonised and made their home.

This is a tale that has everything. Described as a planetary romance and with a setting that begs for the Avatar 3D treatment, it is nevertheless the detail and honesty in the characterisation that does so much to bring the story alive and make it real. In some ways it is rite of passage—Kal grows up, he finds a friend and falls in love—and yet there is so much more.

Lavie Tidhar makes inventive use of Bismala language: sometimes there is a translation and sometimes the meaning hovers elusively just out of reach. It is a game he invites the reader to share—there is an inspired chapter heading that invites a gasp of appreciation and many other resonances and allusions lie in wait beneath the surface of the story. This playing with the reader invites complicity; the reading experience takes on something of the dynamic of a story teller telling tales to an audience around the fire.

It is perhaps not only Moli Solomon who draws fabulous images on water. Her creator shares something of the same art, giving us cloud castles that drift just out of reach yet linger in the mind. I felt like a child who didn’t ever want the book to close or the story to end.

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Pincent, Magic Mirror (2010)

Ed Pincent, Magic Mirror. Eibonvale Press, 2010. Pp. 354. ISBN 9780956214799. £12.99.

Reviewed by Jaym Gates

Magic Mirror is a giant compendium of 44 of Ed Pincent’s graphic works from over the years (1982-present), personally selected by the artist and including out-of-print material. The pieces range from one page in length, to the 90+ page story ‘Saga of the Scroll’. The illustrations are entirely black and white. Pincent has been heavily involved in the small-press British comics scene, at one point buying the magazine and distributor Fast Fiction. His work has also been published in Australian magazines such as Escape Magazine, Knockabout Comix and Fox Comics.

Baddeley, Vampire Lovers (2010)

Gavin Baddeley, Vampire Lovers: Screen's Seductive Creatures of the Night. Plexus Publishing Ltd, 2010. Pp. 192. ISBN 9780859654500. £14.99/$19.95.

Reviewed by Kate Onyett

Gavin Baddeley is a new writer to me. There appear to be no formal academic credentials attached to his previous oeuvre, but there is a list of cheerfully robust gothic titles to his name: novels, examinations of lurid episodes in history (‘Devils Histories’ series), ‘guides to’ themes of gothic subculture and a profile of Marilyn Manson. Baddeley is vaunted as an ordained Priest in the Church of Satan and journalist, with Kerrang! Magazine dubbing him 'King Goth' and The Journal of Popular Culture naming him as 'the patron saint of Gothic journalism' (quotes from author’s blurb on Amazon). His books are widely promoted through multiple sites that link back to commercial giant Amazon, establishing pop-culture appeal. I approached Vampire Lovers as a newcomer to his work; expectations based more on the saturation of vampire-themed books on the market, and wondering how Baddeley could make his stand out.

Slavnikova, 2017 (2010)

Olga Slavnikova, 2017. Duckworth Overlook, 2010. Pp. 414. ISBN 9780715639108. £16.99.

Reviewed by Nader Elhefnawy

Acclaimed Russian writer and critic Olga Slavnikova’s 2017: A Novel won her a second Russian Booker Prize three years ago. London-based Duckworth Publishers has recently released an English-language translation by Marian Schwartz, which given Duckworth’s list, can be taken as either a rare foray into speculative fiction (like their publication of Brian Aldiss’s HARM back in 2007), or a reminder of the often blurry line between “literary fiction” and “science fiction.” (As might be expected given Slavnikova’s standing, and as I quickly confirmed, the latter strikes me as more useful.)

2017 centers on a gem-cutter named Krylov living in a large city in Russia’s Riphean region at the titular near-future date. (The city is unnamed, and the fictional Riphean mountains are only vaguely located for the reader, though it has been common to take them as drawing on Slavnikova’s native Urals.) In the book’s opening pages Krylov is at the train station, seeing his old colleague Professor Anfilogov off on a prospecting expedition in the Riphean mountains. Before he departs the scene he encounters a mysterious woman named Tanya, with whom he begins an unconventional liaison. Meanwhile, a bizarre replay of the events of a century before—the October Revolution of 1917—seems to be getting underway inside the country.

There is a touch of the thriller here in Krylov’s involvement in the illicit gem trade, and the intrigues in which his affair with Tanya embroils him, the stirrings of political revolution, and later on, the business scandal Krylov finds exploding around him. However, the thriller elements are essentially a framework for Slavnikova’s satirical portrait of an ultra-commodified, decaying world where humanity has become superfluous.

To be frank, I found many of Slavnikova’s themes and techniques rather familiar. The novel’s preoccupation with authenticity and its absence in a late capitalist context; the exhaustion of history and politics; the touches of conspiracism and anachronism; the epistemological pessimism and the declarations of humanism as dead; the science fictional and fantastic touches blurring the boundaries of what is conventionally thought of as reality (and the organic and inorganic); the quality of rendering the familiar strange, and the deliberately oblique, diffuse, even hazy storytelling which deprives almost everything of solidity—this has been standard, even textbook postmodern fare for decades.

Nonetheless, the central subject, Russia one hundred years after the Bolsheviks, is a substantial one, and the book is compellingly ambitious in taking it on. Some parts of the story are quite memorable, like the depiction of the funeral home business run by Krylov’s ex-wife Tamara, which offers its customers a lottery drawing with prizes like Caribbean vacations. (The “Masker’s” revolution, in which Red Cavalry did battle with White Guards, is nothing short of brilliant.) There is an impressive touch of atmosphere in various places in the story, and the whole effectively conveys a sense of a shabby, decrepit, unreal world.

Yet, the novel only occasionally reached that level, and the fragments never quite added up to the postmodern epic the book seemed to be aiming for. The Riphean mountains intended to offer a counterpoint to Krylov’s city never came alive for me, and for that matter, neither did Krylov. Additionally, the narrative rarely gave me a sharp sense of the extremes of which Slavnikova’s characters speak, and which are essential to the story—those extremes of greed and commodification run amuck, of wealth and poverty, of the vulgarization, marginalization and even destruction of what should be respected as essential to life, even the best bits losing some of the punch they should have had. The vast journalism on the state of post-Soviet Russia I have seen these last two decades (fact more striking than fiction in this case), and a great deal of far less celebrated fiction (from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to Frederik Pohl’s The Space Merchants to the cyberpunk science fiction writers of the 1980s and their heirs) have much more vividly conveyed such visions.

Consequently, Slavnikova’s 2017 did engage me as a reader, but less often and more briefly than I hoped, especially given what the book accomplishes when it is at its best. When it was over, I felt that the book fell short of both its promise, and the unqualified praise that it has attracted from many reviewers, though its strengths still made it worthwhile.

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Connell, Metrophilias (2010)

Brendan Connell, Metrophilias. Better Non Sequitur Press, 2010. Pp. 102. ISBN 0974323578. $12.00.

Reviewed by Nathan Lea

Metrophilias is a collection of short stories that explore the nuances of obsession and desire whilst focussing on a series of individuals in thirty-six different cities across the world. The obsessions range from the unusual to the bizarre to the grotesque: whilst they include descriptions of sexual pleasure derived from intercourse with amputees, deep meditation leading to orgasms after physical contact with blades of grass and insect feet, through to the total consumption of one character by his fervour for absynthe, the author writes without judgement in a detailed, honest and revealing style. These are difficult themes, and whilst grotesque in many ways, the reader is compelled to read on and honestly explore this raw yet fundamental aspect of the human condition (though in one case, the focus is on a woodland creature’s desire).

There are several striking features of this book, even aside from the vulgarity and bizarre nature of the desires. The lavish, beautiful and ekphrastic descriptions of the settings in which these tales are told, the wealth of immersive storytelling that truly captivates the reader and eases them into caring about the characters in such short stories, the honesty about the wish to keep reading and open mindedness that it demands of the reader, and the detail that the stories go into in terms of mapping desire and raw physical need to a credible piece in an incredible and often outrageous premise are especially noteworthy. There is also the use of sensuality and contradiction: food as a metaphor; much told with little; cities and people described in wonderful detail, all of which make these works breathe. Throughout the stories there is a dry humour interwoven with an earnestness and seriousness that demands respect. With so much richness, the reader needs time to absorb and appreciate these features.

I would be remiss if I did not complement Connell on his technical skill. Each character has its own voice, each story its own spark. These tales are rarely formulaic, and each has its own tale to tell. This work has an air of Catullus, Sappho, and Ovid, all of whom have explored the nature of desire, love, need and obsession using earnestness and humour. This is not to say that Connell is unoriginal or inadvertently seeking “money for old rope”—indeed, the exploration of desire is all the more vivid and revealing because he truly pushes all boundaries by using the bizarre and unthinkable, sometimes detestable, to flesh out the details. One small criticism is that on occasion, the style becomes so intensely and literally expressed that it is almost too much to swallow. However these issues can be overlooked given the overall quality and use of a philosophical style in some of the stories.

The notes of the book do say that some of these works had appeared elsewhere with a corresponding list of publications over the last decade, and as a collection of stories that explore desire and obsession, I found that reviewing this work raised questions about the significance of gender in this exploration of desire: I am left wondering how a female reader might take to this book. It is worth noting that the majority of the protagonists are male and the folly of men when succumbing to their desires is clearer than their female counterparts, who have a far more measured response (which one might argue is art imitating life!). It would not be fair to go as far as to definitively conclude that this work suffers from a gender or other cultural bias or assumes a male audience—in fact it seems to attempt an even-handed style where gender is concerned and it would be inappropriate for me to speculate on how a female audience might respond. That said, this work does focus on desire and obsession, and need not necessarily be expected to address gender explicitly.

I can certainly recommend Connell’s Metrophilias. Try to read one story at a time, maybe before bed. Each of the stories should be given appropriate time to digest so that you can appreciate their nuances.

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Wilson, They Had Goat Heads (2010)

D. Harlan Wilson, They Had Goat Heads. Atlatl Press, 2010. Pp. 148. ISBN 9780982628126. $12.00.

Reviewed by Terry Grimwood

One of my favourite albums is Rain Dogs by the unique Tom Waits. From the first track you are transported into a dark, surreal, noir-ish universe of accordion-playing slaughterhouse workers, ships captained by one-eyed dwarves, a woman with a set of tear tattoos (one for every year he's away, she says) and the most menacing version of ‘The Rose of Tralee’ you are ever likely to hear. Why am I muttering about Tom Waits when I should be reviewing D. Harlan Wilson’s collection, They Had Goat Heads? Well, it’s because this book took me instantly into that dark, threatening, often incomprehensible, Waitsian world. In fact, I had the album’s songs spiralling through my head all the time I was reading the book.

They Had Goat Heads is best swallowed whole. A set of individual stories, vignettes, flash fictions and single-sentence narratives, it is by turns menacing, hilarious, eccentric, surreal and downright incomprehensible. Taken as a standard collection the book is difficult and a little too splintered to be fully appreciated, but as a complete work it is almost an epic poem of the absurd.

Kafka-esque enigmas litter the book, flavoured darkly with hints of menace. For example in ‘PO Box 455’, the narrator visits a post office and finds himself confronted by layers of ludicrous bureaucracy which include a visit to the Key Insertion Room, where keys are, well, inserted. Every so often a trapdoor slides open in the ceiling, then slides shut again, a touch of delicious menace that unnerves as well as puzzles. In fact this entire story could be read as a satire on the plethora of mostly unnecessary processes and procedures that control the modern world and end up achieving nothing other than the fulfilment of their own self-contained existence.

Two excellent stories provide interludes of Pythonesque humour. The first is ‘The Arrest’ in which a number of unnamed characters attempt to arrest each other with increasingly farcical violence. The story is told with great comedic energy and reminded me in many ways of the opening passages of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (read it as well as this book and you’ll see what I mean). The second stand-out comedy was ‘The Storyteller’ in which the narrator is pursued and beaten down by a colleague who insists on telling him a story.

‘The Kerosene Lantern Tour’ is a further mix of humour and utter futility. A guided tour of a lantern is now in its 86th day and begins to fall apart as the tourist themselves engage in the most bizarre activities and the guides run out of things to say. ‘Strongmen and Motorcycles (and Monkeys Too)’ has one of he best first lines I have ever read, and it maybe it is true. ‘Balloon’ asks an interesting question about the nature of murder.

Lurking in the midst of all this insanity and mayhem is a graphic story called ‘The Sister’, illustrated with unnerving skill by Skye Thorstenson. This tale is an unsettling slice of very black humour and horror in which atrocity is piled on atrocity with a matter-of-factness that makes the darkness even more disturbing.

While we’re on the subject of illustration, the book’s cover art (the work of Brandon Duncan) is delightfully surreal and its orange brown and yellow colour-scheme gives it a distinctly pulp-feel—an irony in itself because pulp fiction this book is not.

The narrative style is simplistic yet complex, detailed descriptions of the strange, conversations, rituals and actions of the protagonists, reminiscent of a cross-eyed, cross-tempered Ben Turpin berating Laurel and Hardy with an angry “You gave to him and he gave to you and you gave to him, you’re all nuts!” Many of the stories have no obvious plot or direction, yet, as stated earlier, reading the book as a whole, complex work rather than a dip-in collection gives a sense of the absurdity of the world in which we live, the pointlessness of bureaucracy and, sadly, our own obsessions and actions, and the random nature of life itself.

Often infuriating and puzzling, but glorious anarchic, satisfyingly different and immensely rewarding, They Had Goat Heads is not an easy read, but then shouldn’t difficult be an essential part of our reading experience?

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