Mad Times

Sharyn November is the editorial director of Firebird Books, and this is an anthology of original sf and fantasy short fiction from authors with books published by Firebird. I liked that each story was accompanied by a brief note about the story by its author as well as a bio of the author.

My usual practice with short story collections is to give a couple lines about each story. It’s been a month since I finished it (yes, I’m that far behind in getting reviews written), so we’ll see how well I remember them…

“Cotillion” by Delia Sherman: Since I picked the book up because it was the same publisher as Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin which I’d just reread, I was amused to discover that the first story was another retelling of Tam Lin, this one set in New York City in 1969.

“The Baby in the Night Deposit Box” by Megan Whalen Turner: The entire story came rushing back when I read the title. A fun little changeling story set, as the title implies, in a bank.

“Beauty” by Sherwood Smith: A plain looking princess is kidnapped by a handsome enemy of the kingdom. Based on one of her books, apparently.

“Mariposa” by Nancy Springer: At the doctor’s office, a young woman learns that the cause of her malaise is that she has lost her soul. She goes in search of it. A little on-the-nose, but entertaining in spite of it.

“Max Mondrosch” by Lloyd Alexander: A man fails to find a job despite working quite hard at the search. Odd little tale.

“The Fall of Ys” by Meredith Ann Pierce: A fable of arrogant self-interest. Feels classic.

“Medusa” by Michael Cadnum: Point of view of the title character. Deepens the story.

“The Black Fox” by Emma Bull illustrated by Charles Vess: Sassy comic book version of an old folk song. Fine example of the talents of both Bull and Vess.

“Byndley” by Patricia A. McKillip: Complex tale about a man trying to get back into Faerie.

“The Lady of the Ice Garden” by Kara Dalkey: The Snow Queen reimagined in feudal Japan.

“Hope Chest” by Garth Nix: Another one easily remembered from its title. A baby is left on a railway platform in a small town. Along with the usual cryptic note, this baby comes with a steamer trunk that no one can open. When the baby turns 16 things get interesting.

“Chasing the Wind” by Elizabeth E. Wein: A young woman is flown across Kenya in a single-engine plane in 1950. No traditional fantasy elements here, but the world of a bush pilot is pretty fantastical in a different way.

“Little Dot” by Diana Wynne Jones: Story about a wizard, a beast, and a cat told from the cat’s point of view.

“Remember Me” by Nancy Farmer: A family road trip in the desert, an out-of-place sister finds her place.

“Flotsam” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman: A lost boy shows up at the neighborhood basketball court. Really really lost. I really liked the characters in this one.

“The Flying Woman” by Laurel Winter: Two magical children are abandoned on an island and visited by a flying woman.

I liked all but a couple of them. Good collection.

This long-out-of-print novel has been re-released by Firebird Books in a handsomely produced trade paperback. I’ve still got my old mass-market paperback around here somewhere, but it’s nice to have a good reading copy of this book.

Originally published as an entry in Tor’s fairy tale series, it is a retelling of an old fairy story. In this case the ballad of Tam Lin. This is not at all vital information to the enjoyment of the book, however. Dean’s books are always focussed mainly on their characters, and the plot, while not an afterthought, seems inevitable and somewhat mundane, sort of like real life. The book’s main character is Janet Carter, a newly matriculated college student at a midwest liberal arts college (modeled on the one where Dean was an undergrad). The other characters are Janet’s dorm room mates, her family, her teachers, and other students. The fantasy elements and the links to the ballad are subtle and, to Janet, somewhat bewildering.

Janet is an English major, but she falls in with a crowd who are mostly classics majors, so there are many many references to English and classical literature thrown about as if everyone had read Homer in the original Greek or had memorized Shakespeare’s plays as a child. In less capable hands this sort of lofty material could be off-putting, but instead, at least for me, the result is rather charming and makes me wish I’d spent my youth reading plays instead of whatever it was I did do.

This pattern of things which should be annoying failing to illicit that response recurs in several areas of the book so I would be leery of recommending it to others in fear that I am somehow among the small perfect audience for the book. However Tam Lin has many fans (besides me if I haven’t made that clear) so perhaps it is merely a property of the book itself. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

This book comes before Widdershins in the continuity of de Lint’s Newford stories. That doesn’t matter too much as you’re reading either story, but there are some relationships that begin in this book that make Widdershins make a little more sense.

Rather than just having faerie permeate the modern world as he usual does with his urban fantasy novels, this book has faerie saturating cyberspace as well. The plot is pretty much boilerplate de Lint (see my Widdershins review for a description). But as usual, the attraction of the book is less in the plot and more in the characters and how they manage when suddenly confronted with the presence of magic in a world they thought was governed by knowable scientific principles.

Christy Riddell’s girlfriend Saskia who if you’ve been reading the books for a while you’ll know was somehow born out of the Wordwood web site disappears when a virus attack takes down the site. But she’s not the only one, lots of other people went poof at the same time. Christy and his friend Holly who helped create the site work to organize a rescue mission into the faerie otherworld where the Wordwood manifests as a real place.

It sounds pretty cheesy, but as long as you’re willing to engage your disbelief suspension equipment, the adventure is exciting and reveals cool stuff about some of the characters.

In writing this review I remembered to go google the Wordwood and discovered that some fans have set up a wiki at http://thewordwood.info/ to simultaneously document de Lint’s work and emulate the Wordwood site in the books.

As with many of Sawyer’s science fiction novels, this one starts off with a purely human problem. Heather Davis and Kyle Graves have been separated for nearly a year when their daughter Becky brings them together to make an announcement that threatens to sunder the family completely. This family drama is accompanied by a parallel drama in Heather’s work where she is part of a global effort to decode an alien transmission received from Alpha Centauri A. Heather has a breakthrough and determines that the message is instructions for building a machine. When she constructs it she discovers that the machine will affect not only human society, but also her own family in far-reaching ways.

While there are a dozen different ideas being explored here, one of the biggest ones is how pervasive transparency in human relationships would affect society and individuals. It’s a theme Sawyer has explored in other books, in particular his series that started with Hominids. This book takes the concept further, but shares that one’s optimism positing that if only we could review what really happened to people in a situation, the result would be a kind of utopia. While the situations that Sawyer puts together do seem to collapse into a solution when easy review becomes available, I’m not convinced that this is a universal cure for what ails humanity. I’m hoping that this doesn’t become to Sawyer what telepathy became to Spider Robinson, the one-cure-fits-all-ills that made many of Robinson’s books so predictable.

More evidence that Alice will sacrifice propriety if it comes into conflict with other priorities like getting in the sweet spot for the maximum warmth from the furnace vent.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking home from the rental car place after returning a car. It’s about a two mile walk and along the way I thought about transportation. Part of the reason I was walking was that I missed the Metro 200 bus by about a minute so it was going to be a half-hour wait for the next bus. This minor frustration made me think of all the other minor frustrations associated with any method of transportation other than getting in your car and driving.

It occurred to me that these small things make a big difference in our choices of how to get around. So as I walked I tried to see small impediments to my walking and think about how they might be removed. That bench would be a nice place to rest only it’s covered with moss and blackberry brambles. I could cross this street if only the crossing signal button worked. It would be easier to get to that grocery store if there had been a sidewalk included in this parking lot.

A lot of these things are theoretically the responsibility of the city’s maintenance and design staff. But I have talked to some of those people and I know that they are all overworked and overwhelmed. Walking and cycling are sort of fringe concerns when you’re designing a road intersection or a shopping center. There just aren’t enough of us to make the effort worthwhile.

I thought about getting the city switchboard on speed dial on my phone so I could bring these things to their attention as I see them. But I can see where that’s going to lead. “Oh no, it’s Youngstrom on the phone again with another crossing button on the fritz.” Some of the things I could just fix. It would be easy to go clean off that bench. But some require either help from the city or vigilance in design reviews.

So I thought about how I could keep from being a simple annoyance. What I came up with was that if I was a representative of a group who share my concerns about non-motorized transportation then my gripes might hold more weight. And if there was a group, maybe I wouldn’t be the only one complaining. But there isn’t a group.

You see where this is going? I decided to form a group. I thought about it for a while and the thoughts had that fun sparkly feeling about them. Ideas kept coming. I kept jotting them down. Pretty soon I had a big pile of thoughts and I was still excited about it. Me. Excited. Clearly this is something I should pursue.

So I came up with a name with a cool acronym. It’s GAIT for Getting Around Issaquah Together. I registered a domain: http://gettingaroundissaquah.org/ and today I put a blog there. For now it’s just me. I’ll use the blog to talk about my ideas for what the group should be and do. I’ll talk about my initial forays into addressing those small issues that make walking and biking harder than it should be. If more people are interested then maybe I’ll take the next step and make it a real organization.

If you want to watch me stumble down this new path then add http://gettingaroundissaquah.org/ to your reading list.

Theo was helping me stay focused on the song we were playing at drumming the other day.

You know how a few weeks ago I said that Alice has a highly developed sense of propriety? Well, except when she doesn’t.

And lest you think that she was just lying there like that, see below for a little animation of the photo shoot this was an outtake from.

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