Introduction

Oh my, what a month! Since getting the last issue out I have been in Seattle, Cardiff, London and now Somerset. At that, of course, came on the back of the unexpected trip to Sydney. Hopefully the coming month will be quieter, because I need to get the next issue out before Worldcon.

Talking of which, the deadline for voting on the final Hugo ballot is the end of this month. If you haven’t voted yet, don’t worry, there is an online ballot available at long last. You can find it here.

And now for an issue stuffed full of Australian books, plus a few items held over from last issue. Enjoy!

In this issue

Westercon Limps On – Another year, another lackluster event

Interacting in Cardiff – The Glasgow Worldcon gets planning

Wraeththu Grows Up – Storm Constantine returns to the world that made her name

Etched in the City – K.J. Bishop works alchemy with art

Send in the Crows – Cecilia Dart-Thornton gets feathered help with some initially lame fantasy

Sand and Sun - Sean Williams continues his Australian fantasy

Song of Despair - Isobelle Carmody gets depressed about the state of the world

New Talent - Trudi Canavan brings magical powers to the working classes

Art for Art’s Sake – L.E. Modesitt makes the case for a little beauty in life

The Matter of Troy – Sara Douglass brings Aeneas’s descendants to Britain

Riding the Ghost Train – David Mitchell struggles with reality

Short stuff – More Hugo nominees

Miscellany – The Locus Awards plus Clarion and Earthlight in trouble

Footnote – the end

Westercon Limps On

This year’s Westercon proved to be something of a statistical anomaly: I was in Seattle for four and a half days and didn’t see a single drop of rain. Sadly the convention itself was rather more in keeping with expectations, being somewhat lackluster.

One thing that we did not get, much to everyone’s relief, was the expected black tide. The convention was held in the same hotel as the annual Norwescon event. I’ve never been to it, but I’m told by people who have that it is populated largely by people who like to dress only in black and play very loud music. We did get a performance by a band called BloodHag one afternoon, which made conversation difficult around the exhibit halls for a couple of hours, but other than that the con seemed quite normal.

The hotel, a Doubletree at SeaTac airport, did tolerably well. The function space layout resulted in most of the programming being upstairs, but no one seemed to mind. Importantly, although it is an airport hotel, there were plenty of places to eat within easy walking distances. They were not always good places to eat, but most of them were cheap and that seemed to keep people happy too.

The dealer’s room was a good mixture of different types of vendor. Dave Clark tells me that his book sales went quite well, but Scott Dennis was disappointed with t-shirt sales. Score one for the people of Seattle for being more interested in books than clothes. The art show was large and of good quality. Goodness, I nearly bought some stuff, which is quite unusual.

While the exhibits were very good, the program was distinctly uninspired. The con’s science GoH, Dr. Michio Kaku, was very popular, but apart from that there wasn’t much on. I found only two items that I wanted to see. One was a panel on e-zines and e-publishing, but the e-zine part of it turned out to be mainly about selling stories online. The panel concluded that it is very hard to make any money out of the Internet. I think I could have told them that. The other was a session on Paul Allen’s proposed SF museum, of which more later.

More importantly the organization of the programming was awful. The panels were scheduled in one-hour slots, but there was no length control so most panels ran their full 60 minutes or more. The popular ones over-ran considerably. For example, the SF museum panel cut 5 to 10 minutes into Bruce Sterling’s GoH speech. And of course there is always a temptation to over-run if you can’t start until 10 minutes after your scheduled time because people are still drifting from other panels that finished late. Proper time control of panels isn’t hard. I don’t understand why people don’t bother to do it. Also someone should have told the programming folks not to put everyone on a panel who asks to be on it. There were several panels with seven or more members, and one that listed 22 on the room schedule, although thankfully it looked like only 8 or so turned up.

The big event of any Westercon is the Locus Awards banquet. As usual with such things, the food isn’t great, but at least it only cost $25 which was, for example, less than a meal in the hotel restaurant. More importantly, it was an opportunity for various industry people to clown around and have fun, and to give out some awards. Having expert comedienne, Connie Willis, as toastmaster helps enormously. If you hear anyone telling amusing stories about Connie’s male hula doll, they all started here.

One of the nice things about the Locus Awards is that as well as giving a plaque to the winning author they also give a certificate to the winning publisher. As token Brit at the banquet I was asked to accept one of these certificates on behalf of Pan Macmillan, the UK publishers of The Scar. Wow. Yes, I was horribly nervous, but also deeply honored. Hopefully I didn’t stumble too badly over reading Peter Lavery’s excellent acceptance speech.

It was a good night for China. Not only did he win Best Fantasy Novel for The Scar, but also Best Novella for The Tain. Of course that doesn’t mean that he beat out Coraline: the Locus Awards have a special category for Best Young Adult Novel, which if course Neil won. He also got Best Short Story for "October in the Chair". Neither China nor Neil were there, though Neil did manage a superbly funny acceptance speech in which his acceptor, Artist GoH Lisa Snellings, was required to read out a long screed on what a wonderful person Neil is and why she admires him so much. I’m sure it was all pre-planned, but Lisa’s mock outrage was perfectly delivered. The Best SF Novel award went to The Years of Rice and Salt as I expected. Kim Stanley Robinson wasn’t there either, though he had least distance to travel. The award was accepted by Kathleen Ann Goonan. Three cheers to Alex Irvine for actually turning up to collect for Best First Novel for A Scattering of Jades. Bob Eggleton was also there to get an art award and do the hair thing, which of course was cool. Full details of the award winners, including a few silly special awards, are in the Miscellany section.

Meanwhile, back to the SF museum. Greg Bear, the chair of the Advisory Panel, turned up to introduce this, but he left most of the presentation to the professional museum staff who came along with him. Clearly this thing has a lot of momentum behind it already. The web site is up, lots of exhibits have been or are being acquired, and plans for the layout are very well developed. You can learn more from the museum’s web site. It sounded like a lot of thought had been put into how visitors should experience the museum and I suspect it will be great fun. How long their determination to focus on books as well as media SF will survive commercial pressures I’m not sure. What I suspect will happen is that the museum will concentrate on movies and TV but will use that to lead people into books where possible.

By the way, the museum will probably not end up being called Science Fiction Experience. The museum staff has discovered that another commercial organization in the field is using the term SFX. Darn those Brits anyway.

One rather bizarre piece of information that came out of the session was that, according to the museum staff, there is much confusion amongst the general public as to what "science fiction" actually is. Focus groups had revealed that young people in Seattle do not associate films like The Matrix or Star Wars with the term "science fiction". That’s worrying for the museum because it means that people who liked those films would not automatically expect to find stuff about them in an SF museum. We did not get to learn what those kids thought "science fiction" meant, but I have a horrible feeling that it was "believing in UFOs". (Kevin adds a comment that our local cable TV company has a program category calls "sci-fi & paranormal", presumably on the assumption that they are very similar things.)

And finally we come to that other traditional piece of Westercon excitement, the Site Selection vote. This year we were choosing between a location near San José (a bid led by some of the folks who run BayCon) and Calgary (led by John Mansfield, the chair of the Winnipeg Worldcon). Much to everyone’s surprise, it was a resounding victory for Calgary by 136 votes to 59. It will be great to get to visit somewhere new, but the result immediately prompted more discussion of Westercon’s future.

Why? Well consider this. Last year’s Westercon was in LA but drew less than 1000 people, much fewer than the annual Loscon. This year attendance got up to over 1400, but this is much less than a normal Norwescon. BayCon this year had an attendance of 2300, but only 59 of them could be bothered to back a BayCon-led bid for a Westercon. What is the point in having a travelling convention that consistently attracts fewer people than the regular local conventions in the places it visits? Does anyone care anymore, and if not, should we perhaps put Westercon out of its misery?

Sunday afternoon came around eventually and it was time for Kevin and I to try to get home, or to another convention. It is slowly dawning on me that if you are reasonably flexible in your travel schedule then you can fly an awful long way in America. All of the American airlines habitually overbook their flights because they know that disorganized business travelers often don’t turn up on time (they are not paying for their tickets so they don’t care about the cost of re-booking). But the airlines are not very good at guessing exactly how much margin they can leave, and they nearly always end up with too many passengers for peak time flights. Thus, if you have a flight booked for Sunday evening, you can generally rely on being offered a bribe of a free flight to travel on Monday afternoon instead.

Kevin and I got "bumped", as they call it, on the way back from Wiscon. Consequently we got vouchers from Northwest and our flights to Toronto for Worldcon cost us a whopping $12 each. We got bumped by Alaska coming back from Westercon, and had a connecting flight on Monday not been late we would have got bumped again. I’m planning to use the free flight they gave me to go to Foolscap in Seattle in September, and Kevin is looking at going to a con in Calgary. I could have got bumped on the way back from ICFA and got a voucher for Continental, but I was still employed at the time and could not change my schedule. Now that I’m self-employed again I intend to be very flexible and make a lot of use of this fabulous source of free airline tickets. All I need to do is remember to pack some clean clothes and toiletries in my carry-on bag, and take lots of books because you spend a lot of time stood in line. Hey, it is even tax free!

Interacting in Cardiff

The weekend following Westercon saw a staff weekend for the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon, Interaction. This took place in Cardiff, thousands of miles from Seattle. Ben Yalow and I made both events.

There being not a lot of actual work to do on a Worldcon more than 2 years out from the event, much of the weekend was given over to planning and team building. There were sessions on things like effective communication and avoiding burnout. I found this very encouraging, it being evidence that the Interaction hierarchy knows a bit about management theory and intends to take a very professional approach to their event. Some fans were not very comfortable with this. Claire Briarley had a good excuse — she had just come from a 3-day management training course at work. However, if the weekend managed to deter some of the people who think that putting on a Worldcon is "just like a big Eastercon", or that "fannish" means not having to care about the quality of the event then that will have been a good thing.

The most detailed training exercise of the weekend was that old convention favorite, "dealing with an utterly incompetent hotel". I’m pleased to say that I passed the "sorry, we have no record of your reservation" test with flying colors. Others who opted for the "trying to find the hotel using the highly inaccurate directions on the web site" spent up to two hours lost in Cardiff on Friday afternoon. The less said about the hotel food the better, although Jonjo did apparently manage to get a decent lunch service out of them on Sunday. (I failed the "have faith in your facilities liaison" test here, of which more later.) In case you are wondering, the hotel was a Hannover International — part of the same chain that owns the Hinckley Horror, so I guess we should not have been surprised about the food.

As it turned out, however, most of the attendees had a good time and felt that they had learned a lot. And of course we did not spend all of our time in conference sessions. Cardiff has had a tremendous face lift since I used to go there to see my grandparents when I was a kid, and the place is full of interesting restaurants. On Saturday night a large group of us headed down to the elegantly redeveloped Tiger Bay, formerly the slum home of Jamaican, Ethiopian and Somali sailors, to sample an excellent Japanese restaurant. The food was very good, and much Kirin beer, plum wine and sake were consumed (see the photos on the Emerald City web site for proof). The star dish of the evening was the raw squid; the eating of which must have done much to stave off any imminent invasion by Great Old Ones. Sparks insisted that it tasted like placenta, and that this was a good thing. Having never eaten placenta I can’t comment on his culinary wisdom, but the squid did taste good.

After the meal the older and more staid of us, such as Vince Docherty and I, went back to the hotel and to bed, whilst the young, adventurous and/or seriously inebriated headed off for a gay nightclub and danced until dawn. Due to the amounts of alcohol involved, the exact details of that part of the evening are somewhat hazy. Therefore we shall probably never know the truth about what went on regarding the young man in the leather thong, or whether this occurred before or after Pat McMurray fell asleep. It did, however, provide endless entertainment on Sunday morning and doubtless several fannish urban legends have been created.

In addition to our convention, Cardiff was also hosting two other major international events that weekend. The first was the World 9-Ball Pool Championships. I decided that it would be best to steer clear of the hotel’s snooker room over the weekend in order to avoid extreme embarrassment. The other was a food and drink festival at Tiger Bay. Being utter reprobates, Sparks and I skipped lunch and the afternoon session on budgets and went to see what goodies we could find.

There was, of course, laverbread, and the very wonderful Llanboidy cheese. I was also delighted to see a stall selling Oggies — the traditional beef and leek pastie that was just as much a staple diet of coal miners as the more famous Cornish variety was of tin miners. We also discovered a stall advertising the opening of a Welsh whisky distillery after an absence of over 100 years. Sadly the first batch of the single malt had not yet finished maturing so we could not taste it. They did have a bottle on show, but the woman behind the stall confessed that it was full of cold tea, thereby giving Sparks an excuse to make rude jokes about the taste of Welsh whisky. Still, the whisky cream liqueur was very nice. So were the venison casserole that we found, and the Turkish food. We were rather full by the time we found the Spanish stuffed tomatoes but they looked good too.

So, all in all a very successful weekend involving copious quantities of good food, good alcohol and good company. Plus a lot of very good vibes about a forthcoming Worldcon. It is wonderfully refreshing to find a Worldcon committee that wants to learn from past experience, wants to attract lots of people to their event, and wants to put on a spectacular show. Hopefully this attitude will survive as additional staff are recruited.

Wraeththu Grows Up

"You can never go back" is a common piece of advice to people who talk to you of idyllic former times, and it is generally good advice. Time changes everything, and the remembered world of your youth goes away. The same advice should probably apply to authors and the books that made them famous. But fans nag you, commercial pressures push you, and sometimes you just want to do it. For whatever reason, Storm Constantine has returned to the world of the Wraeththu. Thankfully she knew that things had to change.

I still have not got round to reading the first Wraeththu trilogy, but Constantine does an excellent job of providing sufficient background in the new volume to avoid any disorientation. It is quite clear what the Wraeththu are, and if you have read some of Constantine’s more recent work you can make good guesses as to what they are like. It is equally clear that there were issues that needed to be addressed. Some Wraeththu fans will, I suspect, be upset by what Constantine is doing here, but I think that it is something that had to be done.

The first word that comes to mind when I think of Constantine is "Goth". And sure enough, the first quote that Tor put on the back of The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure is that one from Neil Gaiman describing Storm as a "Gothic queen." In addition, we know that the Wraeththu are tall, slender, long-haired, androgynous and moody. But they don’t all dress in black and listen to depressing music. There is a lot more to the Wraeththu than their Goth ancestry.

To start with there is the sex. The Wraeththu are perhaps the ideal slash heroes, given that they look like pretty gay boys and are androgynous allowing them to play either sex role easily. Also Constantine saw to it that they were created hypersexed and uninhibited, ensuring that they would want lots of sex lots and get on and do it at every opportunity. I can think of a lot of words to describe Goths, but uninhibited is not one of them.

And yes, I did say "created" back there. For the Wraeththu stories are also post-apocalyptic SF. Here my lack of knowledge of the background is going to show, but as far as I can gather from the new book the Wraeththu were created through genetic manipulation in a time of massive social breakdown. They were intended to be the new human race, and ended up rapidly precipitating the end of the old one. And here we come to perhaps the most important thing about the Wraeththu: they are a bunch of adolescent boys.

Most, if not all of the Wraeththu books are set at the beginning of Wraeththu society. Their original makers are either dead or in hiding, but the Wraeththu have found that they can make more of themselves from human boys through a process called inception (which conveniently involves lots of blood and sex). This provides a useful tribal initiation routine, and once converted the new Wraeththu can join his mates in a life of wild abandon, partying, killing and sex. For some of the wilder Wraeththu tribes, this is all that there is. But some more farsighted folks realize that there is a need to build a society, and that The Lord of the Flies is not a suitable Bible for their race. Then again, being androgynes, there is something that can put a stop to this life of teenage fantasy. Wraeththu can get pregnant. And given that they are all boys in mind, if not in body, this causes considerable consternation.

Some of the most interesting parts of The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure are where Constantine gets to examine the reaction of the Wraeththu to their gender roles. For example, one of the main characters in the book, Ulaume, enters the story as a ruthless, power-hungry flirt but ends up for a while as "mother" to an abandoned Wraeththu child. Then there is Flick, who seems to have the nest-building instincts of a human female and who spends so much of the book getting into situations that are traditional for female characters that it is hard for the reader to think of him as a "him."

Yet perhaps the most glaring flaw in the whole Wraeththu edifice is that they are all men. Constantine set out to create a race of androgynes, but she appears to have realized that what she has done is create a race of men that can reproduce. Therefore, the most important thing for her to do in the new book is to produce Wraeththu from women and see what happens.

The heroines of our story, if we can use such a word, are Lileem and Mima. Lileem is a natural-born female Wraeththu, or Kamagrian, and Mima is a human female whom she accidentally manages to incept. Once they discover that they are not unique freaks, they start to notice differences between themselves and the Wraeththu.

Of course there is an unstated assumption here that all of the guys are wildly happy to discover that they now have vaginas and a decided interest in using them. Perhaps Constantine thinks that if this somehow gives them a new means of dominating other guys they won’t be too upset about it. Perhaps she’s right. But clearly for the girls waking up to discover that you have become Barbie with a penis is not exactly ideal.

Constantine does have a little bit of fun with this, and you can’t help but think that she’s having a quiet dig at feminist separatists.

Oops. So much for creating a perfect, androgynous society. Constantine is correctly recognizing that there is more to being male and female than one’s sexual organs, and she has begun to work this out. There is, of course, a whole minefield of beliefs and attitudes to explore here: from the straight to the gay to the transvestite, transsexual, transgendered and goodness only knows what other distinctions have been invented. Probably wisely, Constantine steers clear of getting bogged down in such categorizations, and instead concentrates on people.

One of the best things about The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure is that at long last Constantine is writing about ordinary folks. OK, so one of the major characters might be the King of All Wraeththu, but he’s still an ordinary guy with ordinary concerns. It has been almost a trademark of Constantine’s books that they are full of amoral, power-hungry characters who spend much of their time hurting each other, either through sex-related violence or sexual jealousy. I get the impression that the Wraeththu were originally intended to be above all that, in that they were sufficiently animal that violence was a normal part of life, and sufficiently uninhibited that sexual jealousy did not exist. In the new book, both Wraeththu and Kamagrian are all too human.

Being human, and not just wild boys, the Wraeththu have to do one other thing: they have to grow up. And that means more than just creating kingdoms. It means learning to live with one another on some basis other than dominance games. It means forging relationships based on affection rather than fear. Above all it means learning and changing as time goes on. The characters in The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure do that in a way that I suspect the original Wraeththu would not have done. We all get older, authors included, and what we might have written in our youth may seem naïve or irresponsible now. In this new book, the people and world of the Wraeththu have grown up in many different ways, and Storm Constantine has demonstrated a splendid maturity as an author.

There are, apparently, two more books planned. Constantine tends to work in trilogies, though she does have the good grace to keep them to three volumes each. I’m not sure whether I am pleased about this or not. The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure achieved a pleasing degree of closure all by itself. And yet there were clearly story threads left incomplete. Possibly Constantine eventually intends to reach some sort of compromise between her two Wraeththu genders. I can’t tell, but I do know that it will be interesting finding out.

The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure – Storm Constantine – Tor – hardcover

Etched in the City

Experienced editors say that they can generally tell whether a submission will be any good or not from reading the first few paragraphs. Conversely, those same paragraphs can also sell you that a book is going to be very good indeed.

If K.J. Bishop asks you to come and see her etchings, beware, for she is an alchemist and transformation is on her mind.

Perhaps it is an Australian thing, for Australia is a land of extremes and contrasts. The Etched City begins in the Copper Country, which is of course the red desert; more Mars than Earth. In the time of the book it is a land of failed empires, dead cities, and Mad Max-like bandits. In this desert we find Gwynn, a former mercenary turned bandit leader turned desperate outlaw, and Raule, his former company doctor. Both of them have decided that life on the run is no longer fun, and that it is time to start a new life.

So we get contrast. The city of Ashamoil is not far off, but it is in a Queensland-like tropical world of torrid heat, torrential rain, giant spiders, and crocodile infested rivers. In this place, Raule and Gwynn try to start again.

Raule, being a doctor, has a few shreds of morality left to her. Turned away from the university because she has no formal qualifications, she elects to work in a charity hospital in one of the slum areas of the city.

Gwynn is an iceman. He is a foreigner from a snow-covered land. Perhaps it is Antarctica. The book says it is to the north, but that is correct by Australian reckoning. His skin is pale and he has to hide it from the sun in a big, black coat and wide-brimmed hat. Unlike the doctor he has no morals. He may never have had any. Expert with both sword and pistol, he easily finds well paid employment as an enforcer for a local gang boss and slave trader, Elm. The name Gwynn means "white" in Welsh.

It may be that Gwynn has no heart. But two people are determined to prove that theory wrong. The first is the Rev. Working as a provider of spiritual sustenance to the dying inmates of Raule’s hospital, he sees saving Gwynn’s soul as a worthy challenge, one that might finally restore him to the grace of God, whence he has fallen. The theological debates between the Rev and Gwynn form much of the backbone of the rest of the story.

The Book of Alze
(A German treatise on Alchemy)

The other eyes on Gwynn’s soul belong to the artist, Beth Constanzin. Seeing his handsome form in the street, she determines to work a transformation on his frozen being. She creates an etching: "The Sphinx and the Basilisk", and puts it for sale in the market. The Basilisk is recognizably Gwynn, with his dark coat patterned with peacock feathers. The Sphinx is a beautiful woman with flaming red hair. Gwynn buys the etching and sets out in search of the flame-haired temptress. When they meet, the white and red tinctures will be in place and the transformation will begin.

The world of The Etched City is not a stable thing. It warps and flexes in and out of reality. Ashamoil is its own place, but its genes contain echoes of Viriconium, Nesus and Veniss. Raule discovers that the city is suffering an epidemic of strangely mal-formed babies. The Rev, in quiet inebriated moments, hatches insects from the palms of his hands. Beth tells Gwynn that they are not the same species, and it seems possible that this is not just a cute comment about gender. In the market there is a beggar with a beautiful flower growing from his navel. He lets people try to pull it out for a shilling a go. No one can. Ashamoil feels like it exists on the cusp of some great potentiality, and only a small push is needed to bring everything crashing down.

Hopefully the various people who hand out best first novel prizes have heard of this book, because they should be lauding it. It is a paperback, so it should be shortlisted for the Phil Dick Award too. Depending on what else turns up this year, it may even make my Hugo list. The Etched City is astonishingly good for a first effort. It is not, perhaps, in the same class as Neuromancer, but it is very splendid and it is a shame that being placed with a small press publisher it is unlikely to get the recognition it deserves. Thankfully Pan Macmillan in London have picked it up, so UK readers will be able to enjoy it next January. Amazon do have the Prime edition listed, but I’m told it can take them a while to deliver as they don’t keep many copies in stock. Don’t worry, it is worth the wait.

Oh yes, nearly forgot. K.J. Bishop lives in Melbourne. Yay!

The Etched City – K.J. Bishop – Prime – softcover

Send in the Crows

Part two of Cecilia Dart-Thorton’s Bitterbynde trilogy is a somewhat uneven work. For around 250 pages it exhibits some of the worst features of modern fantasy fiction. Then three crows intervene and things get interesting again.

Let us start with the bad stuff first. At the end of The Ill-Made Mute our heroine had gone from being a presumed servant boy of great ugliness to a young woman of considerable beauty. By half way through The Lady of the Sorrows she is already betrothed to the incredibly handsome, utterly charming and perfectly skilled at all things King-Emperor of most of the world. Boy that girl works fast. Of course she has to suffer terribly along the way. Why, before it becomes known that the King-Emperor is madly in love with her, some of the courtiers are actually rude to her, and make fun of the fact that she doesn’t know how to use her cutlery properly. How terrible. It must be awful being fated for greatness.

What irritates me most about this is not the ease with which heroines rise to glory, but the assumption that royalty is automatically perfect in every way, and that this is obvious to everyone who meets them. And this even in a world in which many of the ordinary nobility are shown as being fairly unpleasant (or at least as unpleasant as anyone is allowed to be in a piece of escapist fiction). I’m sorry, but every time Dart-Thornton gushed about how wonderful this King-Emperor James was, I found myself thinking about Prince Charles. This is not the sort of effect I want from reading.

But lo, as I said, just over half way in three crows make their appearance. This is not, in fact, Her Triple Self. Dart-Thornton has elected to deviate from folklore a little and perform an unasked-for sex change on Ireland’s fearsome battle goddess — something for which the unfortunate author will doubtless suffer horribly for all eternity. But no matter, Her Deathliness works her magic anyway. Huge tragedy; hundreds, if not thousands, lose their lives most spectacularly. And all because our heroine is incredibly stupid. Oh well, she is apparently the only blonde left in the entire world, so perhaps she has the dumbness of an entire race stored up in her pretty head.

Anyway, with our heroine and her two maids apparently the only survivors of this great disaster, we go on to get 150 pages or so of plot denouement. It would have been nice if we could have found out some of this along the way, but Dart-Thornton has elected to dump the entire backstory on us in one go. Thankfully she does it with another story, not just exposition, and it turns out to be moderately interesting. Or at least interesting enough to have me buy the final book in the trilogy at Westercon to find out what happens. (Aside, of course, from the heroine and the King-Emperor being reunited and living happily ever after, which I suspect we can take for granted.)

There are, of course, a few little Australian references to pick up on. I’m prepared to forgive Dart-Thornton a lot in exchange for her spending a page or two on the glories of the wedge-tailed eagle, fabulous bird that it is. Quite why she felt it necessary to destroy the entire island of T/a/s Tamhania, whose peasant inhabitants bore a strong resemblance to the citizens of Innsmouth, is a mystery to me. Must be some inter-state rivalry thing.

Those of you who enjoyed the high quality descriptive prose in The Ill-Made Mute will continue to be enchanted in this new volume. Dart-Thornton is one of the best at this sort of thing I know of. Equally those of you who enjoyed the frequent re-tellings of bits of faerie folklore during the story will also be happy. Anyone who prefers a bit of plot, and ideally one that makes a bit of sense, will be much less pleased with this book.

The Lady of the Sorrows – Cecilia Dart-Thornton – Warner – Publisher’s proof

Sand and Sun

One of the problems with the traditional three-volume structure for SF&F series is that part two almost always marks time. The right way to do it, I think, is the structure that Jon Courtenay Grimwood adopted for his Arabesk series in which each book was more or less a complete story in itself with its own pacing and its own conclusion. Sean Williams, in the second part of the Book of the Change, has gone for the more traditional route in which the characters get shuffled around, background gets filled in, and everything gets set up for the climactic final volume. The Sky Warden & The Sun is readable in its own right, which is just as well as it is ages since I read the earlier volume, The Stone Mage & The Sea. However, the first half of it would have been a lot less dull had it been a book in its own right.

Williams has also opted for the traditional young boy with awesome powers plot line. However, rather than load the kid down with prophesies about how he is going to save the world, he has taken the far more believable route of having various interest groups squabble over control of him. In some ways the series is reminiscent of Dune. In addition to the setting in the Australian desert, there is the suggestion of a planned breeding program to produce the boy, plus an affair of the heart in which the boy’s mother runs off with the wrong man, much to the consternation of her superiors.

Book one of the series held the interest well because it introduced the fantasy world and slowly revealed the details of young Sal’s background. It also ended on a nice climax with Sal, freshly orphaned, fleeing the coast and the manipulative Sky Wardens who control it, to seek sanctuary in the desert Interior, the domain of the Stone Mages. In book two, Sal spends a lot of time fleeing across the desert and then seeing new and unusual sights as he is introduced to Interior society. It is not until around page 275 when the Sky Wardens finally catch up to him that that the plot really takes off again.

Having said that, Williams does a nice job of creating a society that would work in central Australia and makes suitably spooky use of the remains of present day society. Also, once he finally gets into gear in the final part of the book, the story grips the reader once again and provides a satisfying climax. The way in which the plot portrays Sal as a victim of competing groups of manipulative and greedy adults is nicely done. I still think that Williams’ solo SF work is better than his fantasy, and he is most certainly wasted writing Star Wars novelizations, though I am sure it brings in much needed money. However, this fantasy series is well above the run of the mill trilogy. It has no dragons, no elves, and no all-powerful but fatally dim evil overlord. In other words, it is good stuff.

The Sky Warden and The Sun - Sean Williams – Voyager - softcover

Song of Despair

I reviewed Darkfall, the first installment of Isobelle Carmody’s Legendsong trilogy way back in issue #26, dated October 1997. I have finally got hold of part two, Darksong. The cover date is 2002, but the book wasn’t in the shops when I was in Australia last August so it looks like it took about 5 years for the second volume to hit the streets. Of course if I had a house out on the Great Ocean Road in Australia then I would find it difficult to get down to writing as well. I’d just want to enjoy the weather and the view. And Carmody does mention in her acknowledgements that she finished the book at a friend’s house in London, surely a far better location for having to sit in front of a word processor.

Of course the book is also of sufficient size to have the entire nation of cockroaches squealing in fear about weapons of mass destruction. It is easily two normal novels in length, and perhaps could have been done in two parts were it not for the sacred trilogy structure. Or possibly Carmody might have chosen to write less. She seems to have been influenced somewhat by Stephen Donaldson and so there is an awful lot of obsessive introspection on the part of the two main characters. Personally I could have done with less of that.

Carmody, however, clearly feels that it is important. This is one of those fantasy novels in which characters from our world travel through a portal to the fantasy world and, thanks to their actions in that world, they, and in this case probably everyone in our world, are somehow redeemed. Carmody is convinced that our world is in terminal decline full of nothing but utterly awful things and that we need exposure to something more noble to save us. As the quote below shows, she does occasionally put her finger on what is wrong, but this too gets tiresome as she continues to overdo it.

In any case, while there are clearly things about out world that our deeply unhealthy, I don’t see that a world that has hereditary kingship and slavery can be held up as a shining beacon of morality. Of course the kings have always been honest and good (until now when our heroines come to put things right); of course no one ever starves because the king and his chieftans would not let that happen; and the lack of telephones and medicine are not a problem because anything really useful in our world can be replicated by magic in the fantasy one.

Which is not to say that this is a bad fantasy novel. Carmody clearly understands that there is a point to fantasy above and beyond thrilling tales about elves and dragons. Her world is innovative and imaginative. But her moral message is undermined by a persistent tendency to deny any value to things modern and at the same time romaticize things medieval. Which is a shame, because she is a good writer. Her Obernewtyn series, which she wrote whole in high school and college, has got her US publication, and I’d like to see her more recent stuff do well too. But on the basis of the first two volumes (and let’s hope we don’t have to wait another five years for the conclusion) I cannot recommend Legendsong to US or British publishers.