Review of "The Best American SciFi and Fantasy 2022"

The "Best Science Fiction and Fantasy" anthologies are always a good source of interesting tales. All of the stories in the 2022 version (edited by Rebecca Roanhorse) are high-quality - there wasn't one story that didn't seem like it was best in class. But like any collection of stories from multiple authors, some worked for me, and some didn't. Here are the ones that I can't stop thinking about:

1. Meg Elison, The Pizza Boy. Pizza delivery... in space! A blue-collar captain struggles to make and deliver pizzas in a future of bureaucracy and scarcity. When will he find enough mushrooms? Unexpected twist at the end.

2. Aimee Ogden. The Cold Calculations. A response to Tom Godwin's famous The Cold Equations, but 100% angrier and with an ingenious - but seriously ugly - solution to the problem.

3. Nalo Hopkinson, Broad Dutty Water: a Sunken Story. Wonderfully inventive story of a woman whose collection of impromptu bio-implants take her to a place she never expected. An unpredictable tale that's also memorable for its post-glacier melt setting.

4. Sam J. Miller. Let All the Children Boogie. Two misfit teens explore alternative music and gender identity while trying to decipher the messages from a mysterious voice that interrupts their favorite radio station. Sympathetic and moving.

5. Kelly Link. Skindler's Veil. A long story about a college kid who ends up house sitting for Death. Or some form of demi-god. Doesn't matter: I classic dose of that wonderful Link magic. Looking forward to digging into her latest collection White Cat, Black Dog.

6. Peng Shepherd. The Future Library. An imaging of what would happen if the real Future Library fell prey to climate change politics. A sad, moving fantasy.

7. Catherynne M. Valente. L'Esprit de L'Escalier. What if Orpheus had succeeded in bringing Eurydice back from the underworld? Valente's irreverent take imagines the scene as a failed marriage between an egomanic and a zombie. Extremely entertaining.

8. Rich Larson. Tripping Though Time. A waiter serves drinks to time-traveling tourists who gawk at famous historical natural disasters. The class consciousness in this one reminded me of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black collection.

9. Maria Dong. The Frankly Impossible Weight of Han. Stick with this one through the overtly meta comments as the structure of the tale reveals itself. Wonderfully moving mix of scifi, folklore, and religion.

First Lines of Catherynne M. Valente's "Deathless"

"In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her."

- Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

I've read a number of Valente's books before - Palimpsest, and part of In the Night Garden - and while I've appreciated her artful and moving prose and imagery, I've been left cold by an issue I have with a lot of fantasy writing: the stakes don't feel real. The fantasy gets in the way of true pathos. I did not have that issue with Deathless.

I picked this up, honestly, because of Koschei the Deathless's amazing role in Mike Mignola's brilliant  Hellboy comics. But Valente transforms what in the original myth feels like a muscly thug, a simple cypher for imminent death, and turns him into a sympathetic figure, as someone who revels in his role but has not yet become it. And yet he's a strangely distant figure in the novel - most of the book focuses on Marya Morevna's entry into and exit from mythology. This is Valente's genius: she writes not only an updated retelling of the Russian myths in their amazing strangeness and complexity (for example, there's a Tzar of Birds here) but also comments on a meta level on myth-telling in general. It's an odd dance and I can't say that I understood it all - but the book was a hell of a journey and I enjoyed every minute of it.

First Lines of Kevin Lucia's "Liminal Spaces"

 "I'm sitting, crisscross-applesauce, in the deepest part of the deepest end of the Twin Oaks Community swimming pool, but down here, I may as well be sitting on Mars. My eyes are closed, have been closed, for about five minutes."

- from "Written in Water," by Robert Ford, the first story in Liminal Spaces: An Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction edited by Kevin Lucia.

Lucia writes that this anthology offers takes on "dark specultative stories about the in-between. ... Neither here nor there. Strange stories about poeple and places lost in a shadowy, hazy middle-ground." Thus these are tales a person or a place with a dark- often occult - secret, and the fun comes from the journey of discovering that secret. I enjoyed it but like with most collections there mixed results based on your personal taste. For example, Jessica McHugh's "Back to One" and Chad Lutzke's "Womb with a View" were too grotesque for me. But most were quite entertaining. My highlights were "The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own," Gwendolyn Kiste's take on the Black Dahlia; "Mirror, Mirror" Joshua Palmatier's fantasy offering; "O Adelin," Michael Wehunt's Lovecraftian post-apocalyptic tale; and the twisted logic of Norman Prentiss' "Cabinet People." 

Review of David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks"

David Mitchell is a smart man. He’s written six novels, and like any good postmodernist, all of them have both small and large connections with each other. (More astute readers than I have found them all – check out this Good Reads review for a summary.) Decrypting these puzzling connections both within and between his books, and pondering what they mean, is a lot of the fun of reading Mitchell. And unlike, say, the puzzles of Christopher Nolan’s films, where amazing characterization –being caught in another’s thoughts and voice IS the meaning – Mitchell strives for more. His last book, The Bone Clocks, just leaves me wondering just what exactly that more is.

The hyper connectedness of his novels hints at some kind of vague spirituality, of a (benevolent?) energy making order out of the universe’s chaos. It’s what seemed to be behind the various reincarnations of the characters in Cloud Atlas, for example. But in TBC the connections are revealed to not be the result of a mysteriously divine process, or even the whims of an obscure deity; rather it’s a shadow society of supernatural beings. And, naturally, there’s a good group and an evil group of these characters. Make no doubt about it, by the 3rd quarter of the book, Mitchell has fully embraced fantasy. At first I thought Mitchell might be writing a parody, but no: the TBC is in earnest, writing about astral battles with the same conviction and energy as the “real world.” He even comes up with his own obscure and confusing terminology (Horologists! Anchorites! Psychosoterica!). And while an author like Thomas Pynchon might play with the genre to make it serve his own purposes, creating an ironic detachment while commenting on the meaning of it all, Mitchell makes it the driving force of his story.

I found this approach to be reductive and unsatisfying, taking away the power of what came before. By reducing the hints of a larger pattern to the universe in favor of good vs. evil, it abdicates the field he set up by reframing it midway through the game. And I write this as a fan of fantasy novels, one who believes that, say , Neil Gaiman or Ursula LeGuin have a lot of meaningful things to say about our world. So fantasy is not in and of itself a bad thing. So why does Mitchell’s fantasy not work for me while others do? I suspect it’s because authors like Gaiman and LeGuin present those elements of their stories from the beginning, and so you’re on constant footing throughout.  But when Mitchell, who has written so insightfully and beautifully about the nature of reality and our perceptions of it, introduces fantastic elements into an interconnected world previously without it, – well, I felt let down. Like he belittled what came before it.  (Which is a funny thing to say about a book like Cloud Atlas that did include SciFi and Fantasy elements, but I felt the two books dealt with it differently.)

Now, all of this isn't to say that TBC is not an excellent book. On the contrary, the novel contains the same furiously addictive prose, the excellent characterization, diving into motivation, seamless weaving of historical events and trends into the plot as the best of his work. I was thoroughly entertained. But by the end of the book, the edge was taken away. In the final section, I never was too concerned with Holly and her children, despite the mounting tension and danger – you just KNEW Marinus would appear and save the day. And my ambivalence of TBC stems from my mourning of that mystery. I’m curious to see if he continues the fantasy in his next book, supposedly “set in the same universe” as The Bone Clocks. Because regardless of what I've written above, he’s still one of the best authors writing today. I can’t wait for more.

Related Reading:
The Theory behind the "Cloud Atlas" Film
The New Language of the Cinema
Belief is Both Prize & Battlefield
Dramatic Taylor Calling

Book Review: Game of Thrones and More

I was a latecomer to the Game of Thrones novels as my introduction came through the excellent HBO series. The show was so consistently excellent that I was forced – forced! – to pick up the book because everybody knows that the books are always better than the movie. (There are, of course, notable exceptions like Blade Runner, but not many.). A Song of Ice and Fire - the title of all of Martin's novels - is no exception to this rule. Taking nothing away from the wildly entertaining show, George R. R. Martin books show his incredible talent as a storyteller and first-class world builder. His books are intimidatingly long - all are 700 pages or more - and for this reason, rather than reviewing the three novels I've read (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords) I've simply written an unordered list of my reactions to the books. Note that there are spoilers!

Best:

• Scene. Perhaps as a result of his years working in the movie industry, the episodic nature of his novels – each chapter is told from the POV of one of the characters – works masterfully. Almost every scene ends with a dramatic cliffhanger that feels like a natural culmination of what happened before while leaving you starved for more.
• Shades of Grey. Martin revels in ambiguity. The novels expand upon many of the no win situations that the characters find themselves in. Look at the famous one: Neddard Stark continually does what on its face appears to be the right and honorable thing to do. However, things are not that easy, and Stark's behaviors dooms him in Martin’s realpolitik world. This might be the grimmest fantasy series I've ever read.
• Mixed emotions. Martin always shows you both sides of the situation. For example, because he's a horrible person doing horrible things, you find yourself wishing for King Jeoffrey to die. When he finally does, Martin doesn't let you forget that Jeoffrey's a 13 year old boy that never had a chance at a normal life, having been spoiled and pampered and used as a political pawn. None of this excuses his awful acts, but it does make you pause.  

Faults:

• Details. Damn the guy is a completist. He details the power structures and families in such numbing detail that it becomes exhausting to impossible to follow the complex lineages - and that's with a guide in the back of the books! Quite frankly I don’t care about a fraction of most of these minor characters and backstory, since most of them are minor to nonexistent characters. 
• Sexism. There’s a casual sexism to the books that pops up occasionally, usually when talking about whores, that is disconcerting. This becomes doubly so when you see it acted out on screen in the series, dramatized most with 

Differences to the HBO Series:

• Theon. I was pleasantly surprised that the books contained little to no Theon Grayjoy! The series had way too much of his torture-porn story line that not only served no point but was absolutely disgusting to see depicted on screen.
• Sansa. While I’m not a Sansa fan - she's way too passive in the show to be entertaining - in the books, you receive so much insight into the thought processes behind her mask that you sympathize with her rather than tiring of her empty expressions. 
• Wilding Love. The relationship between John Snow and Ygrette, so subdued in the book, is amplified to 11 in the series, not always for the better. Still, I did love hearing Rose Leslie say "you know nothing Jon Snow!"

First lines of George R.R. Martin's first three "Song of Fire and Ice" novels

I've been lax at posting these lately, but over the summer I plowed through the first three novels in George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy. Here are the first lines of each of them:

Game of Thrones

"The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer. They set forth at daybreak to see a man beheaded, twenty in all, and Bran rode among them, nervous with excitement."

Clash of Kings

"The comet’s tail spread across the dawn, a red slash that blew above the crags of Dragonstone like a wound in the pink and purple sky."

Storm of Swords

"The day was grey and bitter cold, and the dogs would not take the scent."

Some quick reactions:

• Well-written and amazingly entertaining. Despite their incredible size, these books kept me riveted.
• Ambiguous. Martin doesn't shy away from the shades of grey in all of his characters. At times, you root for the "evil" characters and wish for the "good" ones to die. Fun!
• Complex. Martin has constructed and incredible world filled with a wonderfully complete and nuanced history.
• Genuinely unpredictable. Part of the fun of the ride of these books is that you never know what's going to happen next... unless of course you've seen the TV show.

I need a break from the Song of Fire and Ice epic for a bit - mainly because my bedside table is filled with books that are crying to be read (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of Pilgrimage, The Bone Clocks, Gone Girl, etc.) but i'll be coming back before too long.

New Years Eve Tab Dump!

So I can start the year with a clean browser. So here goes, in no particular order:

Tim Kreider argues that Kim Stanley Robinson is our best political novelist:

Robinson argues that, now that climate change has become a matter of life and death for the species, it’s time for scientists to abandon their scrupulous neutrality and enter into the messy arena of politics. Essentially, Robinson attempts to apply scientific thinking to politics, approaching it less like pure physics, in which one infallible equation / ideology explains and answers everything, than like engineering—a process of what F.D.R. once called “bold, persistent experimentation,” finding out what works and combining successful elements to synthesize something new. He scavenges ideas from the American Constitution, the Swiss confederacy, “the guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on” to construct his utopias. The major platform planks these methods lead him to in his books are:

• common stewardship—not ownership—of the land, water, and air
• an economic system based on ecological reality
• divesting central governments of most of their power and diffusing it among local communities
• the basics of existence, like health care, removed from the cruelties of the free market
• the application of democratic principles like self-determination and equality in the workplace—which, in practice, means small co-ops instead of vast, hierarchical, exploitative corporations—and,
• a reverence for the natural world codified into law.

Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there’s no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.

Cayte Bosler, in an examination of the benefits of awe, quotes Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota explaining the concept:

"The experience of awe is one where you are temporarily off-kilter in terms of your understanding of the world," explains Vohs. "People mostly walk around with a sense of knowing what is going on in the world. They have hypotheses about the way people behave and what might happen; those are pretty air-tight. It is hard to get people to shake from those because that’s just how the brain works. We are always walking around trying to confirm the things we already think. When you are in a state of awe, it puts you off balance and as a consequence, we think people might be ready to learn new things and have some of their assumptions questioned."

Didn't realize that women struggle with monogamy more than men! That's interesting enough in and of itself, but Amanda Marcotte has an interesting take on the social implications of this discovery: 

What’s really fascinating is that with this shift in understanding comes a profound shift in how we as a society are deciding to respond. There will be no shrugging of the shoulders and tossing around the word “hard-wired” to rationalize women disappointing male expectations of passionate monogamous sex. Instead, as Daniel Bergner writes [in the New York Times], a ton of money is being spent on developing a drug women can take to restore their desire for their husbands. The drug, called Lybrido, is in clinical trials now with the hope of writing an FDA application by the end of the year.…
When people believed that boredom with monogamy was a male trait for women to endure, interest in fixing it was pretty low. Now that we understand boredom with monogamy to be a female trait for men to endure, it’s suddenly a Problem—with possible solutions. Though frustrating, this is ultimately probably a good thing. Since most of us want to be monogamous, it’s about time we took seriously the need to keep it interesting.

The video for Boards of Canada's "Reach for the Dead" off of their amazing (seriously, go buy it right now) Tomorrow's Harvest.

Jack Gilbert's great response to the question "What, other than yourself, is the subject of your poems?"

Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives—until it’s too late. Though I understand that often you don’t have a choice.

David Atkins, writing at Hullabaloo, analyzes some of the current libertarian thinking out there about technological advances are leading us and comes to a different conclusion. 

The history of middle class societies that lose their footing in an age of mass inequality and labor destabilization suggests that a more progressive social contract will emerge under the threat of revolution. The other, only slightly less likely possibility is a fascist regime that attempts to lay all the blame on "The Other". A slow, comfortable descent into class-based Social Darwinism seems less likely than either option, though it's certainly possible.
But these are indeed the questions we will be compelled to answer. The fact that we will have to confront this decision one way or another makes it hard to take seriously the massive fights over, say, Obamacare. In 15 years a natural unemployment rate of 15% accompanied by unimaginable devastation due to climate change will necessitate the sorts of programs, solutions and political turmoil that will render most of today's arguments utterly obsolete.
The future will belong to those who prepare public policy for that eventuality, and who work to put politicians in power who are ready to enact that policy when the time comes, and when the demographics of the nation have altered enough to make it possible.
Whatever happens, the libertarian fairy dreams of men like Tyler Cowen must not be allowed to become realities.

Brain Pickings has an excellent "best of the year" post. From that, I found this amazing analysis of how we experience time, mainly based on Claudia Hammond's book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. You really have to read the whole thing, but here's part of the conclusion:

We will never have total control over this extraordinary dimension. Time will warp and confuse and baffle and entertain however much we learn about its capacities. But the more we learn, the more we can shape it to our will and destiny. We can slow it down or speed it up. We can hold on to the past more securely and predict the future more accurately. Mental time-travel is one of the greatest gifts of the mind. It makes us human, and it makes us special.

The Indian supreme court is debating if it should allow compulsory yoga in its secular schools. This could be problematic because, as Mark Movsesian explains:

In traditional understanding, yoga is itself a religious act. The postures themselves lead the practitioner to God, whether the practitioner intends this or not. In traditional understanding, in other words, one can’t separate the religious and secular aspects of yoga and one really shouldn't try. Indeed, some American Hindus object to the way our popular culture treats yoga as a designer gym routine. Much as many American Christians seek to “Keep Christ in Christmas,” the Hindu American Foundation has mounted a campaign to “Take Back Yoga” for the faith.

Personally, while there's an element of spiritualism in most yoga practice that I find interesting, i'm a dilettante in this respect. I certainly don't find the poses in and of themselves to have a higher meaning - to me, it's more the breath and combining that with the poses (i.e., finding a meaningful rhythm of breath and movement) than anything. Plus, as my relative Adam pointed out, there are so many different types of yoga out there it's impossible to lay judgement on the whole field of movements.

In an interesting Tor series exploring the sources that led Gary Gygax to create Dungons and Dragons, an article on HP Lovecraft contained a good summation of the author's appeal:

Lovecraft seems less like a storyteller and more like a historian or an archeologist of the cosmically terrible. He’s in touch with forces beyond our reckoning and he’s conveying that truth to us. That’s the game he’s playing as a writer, but he’s damn good at it.

Words can't express the experience of watching this. Ah, celebrity singers:

Thanks for reading! See you next year.

Book Review: The Night Circus

I picked up Erin Morgenstern's debut novel on the strength of a mesmerizing excerpt  that started out: “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.” Dramatic, is it not? The first part of the book continues in this vein, telling the story of how the le Cirque des Rêves comes to be and detailing how it’s connected to a contest between a pair of mysterious star-crossed magicians. It’s easily the most entertaining part of the novel.

But like a dull superhero with a fascinating origin story, the novel rapidly loses steam after the circus opens. A love story emerges, but despite Morgenstern's best efforts, it lacks passion. You read many, many descriptions of the Night Circus' fantastical attractions, including an ice castle, an elaborate labyrinth, a room filled with scents that transport you to different places in time, impossibly intricate clocks, and so on. Taken in isolation, some of them do indeed transport you into another place; taken together, they all meld together so that no one scene really distinguishes itself. The result is a perfect circus, effortlessly pulled together, with no failures or picture of the sweat and blood that must have occurred behind the scenes. The circus is like a diamond without flaws, and you walk around it, vaguely stunned by its shiny perfection, but kind of bored because of the lack of drama in it all. It's capped off by a rather predictable ending.

This came off more negatively than I meant, but all in all, while The Night Circus was a diverting read, it never lived up to the promise of the beginning. Here's hoping Morgenstern can keep her momentum next time!

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox.

The New Horror in Short Stories

...I was beat. Arguing with the children, a trip to the dentist, then endless shopping for invisible things--toilet paper, glue, salt. Things no one ever knows are there until they're gone and are then needed desperately. An invisible day where you exhaust yourself running around, doing thankless errands that are necessary but meaningless: the housewife's oxymoron.

- Jonathan Carroll, "The Sadness of Detail", page 207 of Poe's Children.

Poe's Children is a compilation of what editor Peter Straub labels the "New Horror" - authors that strive to escape the ghettos of typical horror fiction in favor of "literature" (or at least genre mixing). Like all short story anthologies, not all of the stories are successful, even if they all are variations of a theme. So far, the ones that  work for me are the ones that provoke a visceral reaction - either of horror, disgust, or wonder. To me, that's what horror as a genre is all about - lifting you out of he mundane world Carroll describes so aptly above. For example, Kelly Link's “Louise’s Ghost” is a story that's certainly interesting and has a fun conceit - the entire story is about two women both named Louise so it's difficult to tell who is doing or saying what for a while - but it didn't present any wow moments to me (unlike the other stories she presented in Stranger Things Happen). No, the strongest stories here either shock like Dan Chaon's “The Bees” (a truly disturbing tale of supernatural redemption) or present a situation to you in an entirely new way like Carroll's story or Elizabeth Hand's “Cleopatra Brimstone” (the best story i've read in 2001, hands down).

Still only halfway through the book, but so far it's half hits, half misses. A pretty good showing in my book. Hey, hitting .500 would win you the batting title and $250 million dollars, so Straub did something right!

Cross Posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox

Fantasy Novels

In the literature world, to say the word fantasy is to bring to mind cheesy, melodramatic writing of ancient lands and characters with strange names who go on quests and meet mythical creatures. You know, swords, cloaks, tunics and dragons. Primitive technologies but advanced skills presented under the guise of magic. As a genre, fantasy is typically viewed with even greater distain than scifi, and I must admit that I’ve fallen prey to this assumption as well. For the fact remains that like any genre, there’s a lot of gawdawful fantasy writing out there. Having said that, there's also a lot of excellent storytelling occuring under the cover of fantasy fiction, and i'm going to write about two of the best authors here: China Miéville and Usurla Le Guin.

I've read a few of Meiville’s books, but was most taken by Perdido Street Station and The Scar, two novels that take place in the same world but do not tell the same story. They are not masterpieces – they're overlong, for one, and perhaps because of that are a bit repetitive – but they are fascinating. He’s a fantasy author that straddles the border with horror (another ghetto genre!) with great aplomb.

The Scar in particular has stuck with me. At a high level, it's about the city of Armada, a floating city made of thousands of ships, whose leaders quest to send the entire city to the Scar, a mythical place where reality breaks down and anything is possible. The book uses ancient technologies to achieve modern ends in the manner of steampunk, but in my mind avoided the triteness of that sub-genre with fresh imagination: The Scar’s amazing inventions and creatures contributes to fully realized world, one that’s so successful Miéville used it in at least three books. It's an extremely engaging book, and is most successful when Miéville's explores the implications of the fantasy twists of his world or when he indulges his love of horror; for example, a scene where a character dives deep into the ocean and is stalked by shadowy creatures is absolutely chilling in effect and cinematic in scope. I saw the scene in my head and it scared the piss out of me.

My main problem with Mievelle is his occasional lapse into cliché – not fantasy cliché but just plain cliché – and his knack for anticlimax. For example, Amarda quests to capture the Avanc (a gargantuian lake monster from another dimension) and this task is built up over half the book as an incredibly hard task, as a universe-changing event, and yet once the Avanc is captured, this incredible feat is quickly accepted as a given and the book just moves onto the next plot point. The buildup never equaled the payoff, and this continued over the course of the novel gets trying. And perhaps it’s an English thing, but his continued use of the word “brine” as a substitute for “water” is trying.

Another type of fantasy writing alltogether is Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. LeGuin, a skillful author, is an old school Fantasy writer with a storytelling skill and feminist perspective that enable her to present wonderful stories for those people who can get past complicated names and phrases like “Pelnish lore.” The Earthsea saga is set in a world of thousands of small islands surrounded by mostly uncharted ocean. The original trilogy is about a powerful magician called Sparrowhawk, and his adventures as he grows into a powerful ruler and how he unites and saves the islands of Earthsea. It’s a world where dragons and magic are prevelant, and despite its complexity, is marketed as children’s books (in my mind, in the same manner as the Harry Potter books).

My favorite of the series is the second novel, The Tombs of Atuan. It was an easy read, and is separate from the rest of the books in that it’s essentially constructed as a standalone story (analogous to the non-conspiracy X-Files episodes). These types of stories serve as a digression from the main narrative, but typically teach us something about our heroes (usually from an oblique perspective) while incrementally enhancing the major narrative. In doing so, TToA touched on a lot of the series’ major themes: duty, responsibility, coming of age, etc. but did so in a fresh way, if not with the freshest prose. Le Guin, as good as a writer she is, can be prone to a lot of the fantasy clichés – although she’s been writing long enough that perhaps she indulges in some harmless self-plagiarism (which could an unavoidable aspect overproduction: see Stephen King or (in music) Ray Davies). For instance, the book contains a lot of “steely glances,” and her hero is inevitability tough and yet tender when it counts (or “Thoughtful and severe,” as LeGuin puts it on page 160).

All this would be as cheesy as the cover of my edition , if it weren’t for the skill in which she weaves the creation of her world into these books. And that's probably what ultimately draws me into these novels: the fun of living in a world of amazing creatures and fantastical things. I love reading about Miéville's Khepri (humanoid scarab beetles) and Cactacae (enormous cactus-people), with their everyday problems, hopes, and desires. I love losing myself in the intricate mythology of Earthsea, which is a mixture of multiple different religous and historical sources. These books are a refreshing escape from what can all too often be a humdrum life, and I highly suggest that you give them a try.