The Etched City, KJ Bishop

Set first in the dustbowl wasteland of the Copper Country, Bishop introduces the battlefield sawbones Raule and her gunslinging companion Gwynn. The duo’s relationship of necessity is cemented as they flee the justice of “The Army of Heroes,” a force created to put down a rebellion in which they were active participants. Wanted and destitute, they make for the uncharted Telute Shelf to find new lives amid the sprawling metropolis of Ashamoil. Gwynn’s ruthless knack for violence sends him to the top of the town as an enforcer for the Horn Fan Cartel and its bustling slave trade. Raule, meanwhile, heads to the bottom where she tries to erase her brutal past through ministrations to the city’s forsaken. Between the opposite poles of Gwynn and Raule is a languid tale wandering through a sideshow menagerie of lovelorn mobsters, debased priests, brutal imperialists, sorcererous drug dealers, gangland warlords, and otherworldly artists that deftly examines the nature of violence, compassion, spirituality, redemption, and reality.

I confess: it took me two attempts to read The Etched City. The first time I couldn’t make it through the first section, which spans sixty-seven pages and involves sand. A lot of sand. I’m not a fan of vast empty deserts. In retrospect, I can see why the section is there–to establish two of the main characters, Raule and Gwynn–but I also think it could have been condensed to thirty pages or even less.

 

Jeff VanderMeer’s CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN

City of Saints and Madmen is one of the most dangerous books I’ve ever read. After a few pages, paper cuts started appearing on my thumbs. By the time I closed the hefty volume, my thumb sported six cuts, my forefinger four. At the time of this writing, most have yet to heal. They still sting.

Now that’s what I call edgy.

 

Ekaterina Sedia’s THE SECRET HISTORY OF MOSCOW

Every city contains secret places. Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s is no different, its citizens seeking safety in a world below the streets – a dark, cavernous world of magic, weeping trees, and albino jackdaws, where exiled pagan deities and faerytale creatures whisper strange tales to those who would listen. Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia. In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and flies away – prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances. Their search will take them to the underground realm of hidden truths and archetypes, to find themselves caught between reality and myth, past and present, honor and betrayal . . . the secret history of Moscow.

The Secret History of Moscow is an empty chore. You go in with nothing, you come out with ditto, minus the X hours you spent on an unrewarding, tiresome novel. I felt the tiniest ember of satisfaction for having pushed on (boulders! uphill!) to the end, but even that is negated by the realization that I could have–and should have–read much better books, of which there’re no shortage on my backlog. In fact, I kept thinking the whole time that Secret isn’t much more than a watered-down Neverwhere (which I don’t even like), except Russian, and how much better The City & The City is.

 

Enki Bilal’s NIKOPOL TRILOGY

It’s the year 2023 and Alcide Nikopol has been revived from a state of suspended animation after 30 years orbiting Earth. In the meantime, the planet has suffered two nuclear wars, and France is ruled by the ruthless dictator J.F. Choublanc. The immortal gods of Egyptian antiquity have also reawakened to revive their rule over humanity, and they now hover above the crumbling technopolis of Paris in a massive stone pyramid/airship. Horus, the renegade falcon god, takes possession of Nikopol’s body, rendering him immortal, and concocts a conspiracy to overthrow the Choublanc regime.

This is a very strange, and very interesting, graphic novel. Prior to reading it, I watched the feature film Immortel (Ad Vitam), which was adapted from this trilogy and which is markedly different. Also contains a rape, which happily the comic doesn’t–I’m still unsure why Bilal thought that would be a good addition to the film really, or the whole “Horus must find special woman to bear his offspring” horseshit which reminds me of the things I discussed here regarding female vulnerability, but this isn’t a review of the movie.  Instead it is a review of the comic. Which gives a lot more agency to the character in question, to wit the blue-haired lady on the cover, Jill Bioskop.

 

RATS AND GARGOYLES, one of the books that inspired China Mieville

Rats and Gargoyles was a long, trudging read. Not because it’s a bad book, but I’m in no hurry to proclaim it a stunning triumph of the weird, either.

 

PALIMPSEST and the dubious sexual politics

The city of Palimpsest exists somewhere outside our reality, accessible only during the sleep that follows sex. The immigrants to Palimpsest, marked forever by the tattoo-like impression of a map on their skin, seek out one another for real-world sexual adventures that function as passports to new otherworldly quarters. In outstandingly beautiful prose, Valente describes grotesque, glamorous creatures sometimes neither human nor animal, alive nor dead, and mortal travelers who pursue poignant personal quests to replace the things (and people) they’ve lost. Valente’s fondness for digression at times makes for a difficult read, and her fable of quest and loneliness is less an engrossing fairy tale and more a meticulous travelogue of a stranger’s dream.

My first thought: so are asexuals SOL or what? I mean sure, at the best of time we’re invisible as fuck-all, but this is a whole new level of exclusion.

 

Valente and Lee: Orphan’s Tales and Secret Books of Paradys

You know, when a terrible, terrible writer writes about fucking elves dancing in a fucking starlit meadow in a fucking enchanted forest, he or she is probably trying to evoke a sense of wonder. Something beautiful. A fantasy. But the problem with that is, it’s elves. It’s yet another starlit meadow. It’s yet another enchanted forest, which no doubt Our Hero is about to venture into, set on yet another Fantasia Generica variation, which is threatened by yet another Evil Overlord bent on destruction and desecration of all that is natural, beautiful, and good. We see this, and we call it escapism. “Escapism” is used to excuse mediocrity; “escapism” is what you cite when someone points out that those Harry Potter books are not that good or that batch of paranormal romance novels or that yaoi fangirl-bait in novel form are really, really shitty. What’s wrong with elves and dragons and evil people who are hideous psychopaths, and good people who are pure and beautiful? It doesn’t have to be original, or well-written, or intelligent, you don’t have to think about it. It’s just for fun and it’s “escapist.”

Fun may be subjective, but I fail to see how it’s an escape.