[EN] The New-ish Voices of Fantasy

(Disclaimer: I received the electronic ARC of this from NetGalley and publisher in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are entirely my own.)

Edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, The New Voices of  Fantasy clearly is an accomplished work. It does what it has surely set out to do: offers a strong and relatively diverse overview of some of the most interesting perspectives in the field today. Still, it is not without some problems of its own.

(I took a  really blurry picture. I apologize. My phone camera has seen better days.)

So, if I were to be (sort of) blunt, there are some stories by writers whose strength clearly does not lie in short story writing.

But let’s go back to the beginning. I am not particularly sure that the “new” part of the title is fully deserved: the authors showcased may not be the bigges names or luminaries of the field and it’s entirely probable that their star will only continue to rise, but, say, Hannu Rajaniemi has been publishing for over a decade now. Still, quite a few of the authors seem to fit the call well: they debuted in the last few years and have accomplished enough to have “voices” of their own. (I have heard about quite a few, particularly the recent nominees for some of the most recognisable awards in the field. I was happy to make my acquaintance with more.) As to the fantasy… the genre is not treated particularly restrictively here (to me, for instance, Sachs and Malik in particular were on the verge of falling right off the fence), but that’s hardly a bad thing: in fact, I wouldn’t have minded more experimentation with form to justify the title.

To go into more detail, let me approach the collection story after story, more or less. The volume opens with Alyssa Wong‘s Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers; one of the stories I’ve actually known before reading them in this collection. A monstress who devours feelings and thoughts of her victims struggles to combine her taste for evil with her feelings for a more innocent and wholesome friend. I actually enjoyed it more on re-read: it’s still a little chaotic for my taste (…the food themes invite terrible puns, I honestly apologise), and for me, the beginning and the ending don’t exactly seem to fit the same story, but there’s real emotion, evocative descriptions and more than one way to read the story. It’s not fully polished, perhaps, compared to newest Wong, but it has staying power.

The next in line is Sofia Samatar‘s Selkie Stories Are for Losers: a short story about the child of a selkie mother, or a child abandoned by the moth. I’ve reviewed it on my goodreads separately already, so just to re-iterate: it’s a true gem. I loved it on re-read more than I did when I read it first; the melancholy is palpable, the way it balances genres and themes is masterful. It’s so short, and yet creates entire universes, telling stories within stories, imbuing its characters with life. It’s a selkie story about selkie stories; it’s a love story about living with loss and living with pain. I am sure I will go back to it again, and I’m not a re-reader by habit.

After the two strong punches at the beginning, Brooke Bolander‘s Tornado’s Siren, where a tornado loves a girl, who goes off to be straight before realising that straightness isn’t that much fun, unfortunately suffers by comparison to the previous two. It’s not a bad story, but it’s fairly, um, straightforward; it lacks the urgency of Wong or the complexity of Samatar. I found its protagonist’s youth (she gets married quite young and realises the marriage isn’t for her some two years later, if memory doesn’t fail me) to take away from the story from me; I think the weight of age and time might have given it more force, made her choices more difficult. In your early twenties, you can still pick up and change everything so many times. (She said from her old old old perspective of 31, when all the best things are already behind her. Not.)

The next story deals with age too, and with youth, but in a way that I found much more touching, perhaps too much so. Sarah Pinsker‘s Left the Century to Sit Unmoved is a universe unto itself: in a small village, there’s a pond. People jump into it. Some emerge; others disappear never to be seen again. I don’t know if I have much to say about it that I want to share: it was painful to read, but it was painful for how good it was. One of my favourites. I was never the kind of young person who jumps (I wasn’t even the kind of young person who does regular summersaults for fear of an accident that could befall me); and yet. Blending psychological insight, horror and fantasy, this is a story that will definitely stay with me. Highly recommended.

And then there’s Max Gladstone‘s A Kiss with Teeth, which will probably stay with me, but I’d much rather it wouldn’t. I honestly don’t care if Dracula’s son has AD(H)D and if it takes a lot of effort not to murder young women. I honestly don’t feel the need to read even well-written stories about “sympathetic” murderous stalkers. I don’t care for predator-prey fantasies starring married dudes who feel entitled to excitement they are no longer getting from settled life. I think it was ill-conceived.

An antidote to that toxic masculinity came next. Ursula Vernon‘s Jackalope Wives deserves all the accolades it has won and then some. Merging humour and horror, this story does mood and character justice. It’s a little Pratchett, a little Gaiman (in his better moments) and a lot of original and memorable writing all its own. I look forward to reading a lot more from Vernon.

E. Lily Yu was the first author entirely new to me in this collection. And what a meeting! The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees was an unexpected delight. From the antropomorphic insects to the original framing story with humans, I couldn’t put it down and when the story was over I wished it could have been longer. Second new author, A.C. Wise, didn’t disappoint either: her original metafictional The Practical Witch’s Guide to Acquiring Real Estate can be read on so many levels, and manages that feat without introducing as much as a single “proper” character. And yet, it writes a world that gives food for thought; it meditates on parenthood, and misogyny, and responsibility.

Alas, this, for me, was a breaking point of sorts, and the latter half of the collection failed to rise to the same heights (with some exceptions). I found Maria Dahvana Headley‘s Valentine’s Day walking New York buildings in The Tallest Doll in New York City unmemorable and, in a way, boring to read about. Hannu Rajaniemi‘s The Haunting of Apollo A7LB is quite readable, but entirely too obvious and one-note (its ending is beyond predictable). Kelly Sandoval‘s The One They Took Before, while hardly bad, suffers from the same problem: its ending is almost too fitting and too conclusive, making it quite obvious that last moment is the raison d’etre of the whole thing (though my lack of interest in all things fae may be to blame). JY Yang‘s Tiger Baby didn’t quite do anything terribly exciting or new with its changeling premise. I honestly can’t quite figure out how Ben Loory‘s The Duck makes sense in the context of this collection, and its ending is almost offensively boring (to say any more would be a spoiler but… I was unimpressed).

A little better was Amal El-Mohtar‘s Wing, which, like any El-Mohtar, is beautiful and poetic, but more of a prose poem than a story; I wish it had more heft.

Oh, I seem to have skipped one. Namely, Chris Tarry‘s Here Be Dragons. Skipping it is what I would recommend, actually. There’s some potential in that story about gender roles in a semi-fantasy world of absentee fathers / dragon hunters who are actually conmen, and their abused working mother wives, and their abused children. Unfortunately, the potential is lost in one of the worst story endings I’ve read in a while. Ultimately, the critique of toxic masculinity that could have been is undermined, and any change for the better is only ever illusory and temporary. What a pity, and not as funny as the author may have hoped.

And on to the last stretch. I’m not quite sure how I feel about Adam Ehrlich Sachs‘s trio of father-son stories / philosophical parables, aka The Philosophers. I found “Our System” to be eye-roll inducingly pretentious, to be quite honest, and hardly fresh. But then, “Two Hats” had its odd appeal, and the conclusion, “The Madman’s Time Machine”, was charming and clever. Overall, I’m not sure I’d classify them as even remotely fantasy – they’re very American post-postmodern fiction – but at least they were fun to read. Unlike Eugene Fischer‘s My Time Among the Bridge Blowers, which was the only story I just couldn’t connect to on any level from the beginning until its end. I’m quite into postcolonial fiction, and metafiction, but I legitimately spaced out reading this story, and if I had to explain or summarise its plot, I’d flunk the test. I can’t even tell if it was or wasn’t good. Oh well; not everything is for everyone.

And then there was the story that was for me from beginning until its end. I’ve already read Carmen Maria Machado‘s The Husband Stitch, but this time, knowing its conclusion even more exactly than before (since, of course, in this story about a woman wearing a mysterious ribbon on her neck, the ending is preordained in a way), every beat was felt more fully. It has everything: strong critique of ways in which women willingly suborn themselves to men, visceral description of sex in all its joy, dirt, creepiness, betrayal and danger (which is why I would never call it “sex positive” – it contains a lot of sex, but this is not sexuality imbued with positive value in itself; it is sex as part of life but an indubitably dangerous one, one that can cheat and mislead, one that can and often does involve violence and abuse, and that can serve to disguise that violence; vide the title), urban legends within stories within stories, playing with form, breaking the fourth wall, and voice, such an amazing, strong, uncomparable VOICE.

And to think it’s not even, in my humble opinion, the best Machado can write.

Machado’s story, to me, would have been a great note to end the collection on. Alas, instead, the last (honorary, I suppose) spot is instead given to Usman T. Malik‘s (very magic realist) The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn. It’s a very strong (very long) story. It has a lot to say about identity, memory, forgetting, immigrant experience, kinship. It is also astonishingly (to me) gender-biased. Its story of a grandson re-connecting with his heritage through late grandfather’s life story, gaining access to the future and in the process losing the past, would have worked as well without the stereotypical portrayal of women and their relegation to the role of mothers to future (male) generations. Sara, the protagonist’s partner, has a name, and a job, and even a family history, but she is completely flat and two-dimensional on the page. She sends the hero off on his “manventure” and awaits his return with the prize of his future son. Men of this story consume women and enter into true relationships with other men. A pity; it could have been truly excellent otherwise, if I weren’t left growing increasingly annoyed by the story’s treatment of women.

The best stories of this collection would have been enough to justify its existence; other good stories made for gripping reading; I think a few could have been cut resulting in a stronger average, but it was certainly interesting to see what’s happening in the genre right now, according to the editors. What it seems to be is blending of boundaries between literary and genre fantastical stories (as well as horror); a significant amount of interest in queer and underprivileged perspectives; a diversity of both authors and subject matter; attempts at grappling with toxic masculinity (unfortunately, not always successfully). That, on the whole, seems to bode quite well. I certainly have been reminded of and acquainted with a few authors to look out for in the future.