Once upon a time, but within memory of those living, science fiction was the dominant form of fantastika, and fantasy—epic, urban, barbaric, fabulaic or otherwise—was the minority mode. Something about the American Century up until, roughly, 1970 made the public hungry for bold and heroic visions of the future, and the kind of technocratic, streamlined, ultra-competent types that populated such scenarios. Technology seemed unstoppable and beneficial, albeit with occasional side-effects, and brighter tomorrows beckoned. Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke occupied the center ring of the imaginative circus, while off to the side in the shadows a few underestimated bumpkin acts like Frodo and Conan and the Last Unicorn quietly began to draw interested stares. Then the famous Ballantine Adult Fantasy series of books, launched in 1969, commenced to sway the crowds—or perhaps reflect new circumstances on the ground. Arriving in 1972, Watership Down appealed to millions. The true tipping point occurred in 1977, with Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, the first of Tolkien’s commodified progeny. In 2015, according to the statistics maintained by the trade journal Locus (issue 661), there were 396 original SF novels versus 682 original fantasy novels. Add in 183 horror novels, and 111 paranormal romances, and the scales tip irrefutably toward those special visions that arise from the Sleep of Reason.
The rising popularity of fantasy seemed to encourage a growing number of women writers to come to the fore. The short canon of wonderful female fantasists from a prior generation–a list that would include E. Nesbit, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Evangeline Walton, Jane Gaskell, Katherine Kurtz, and Angela Carter–was rapidly supplemented. Today we consider three current representatives from this new generation of strong and innovative writers working in the realm of fantasy — and one new work by an established master that argues for fantasy’s deep relevance in our lives.
Leanna Renee Hieber’s previous novel, The Eterna Files, gracefully delivered to us a stimulating brand of occult steampunk—as opposed to the hard-edged science fictional steampunk of Gibson & Sterling—which featured colorful, multivalent heroes and heroines, wicked villains, and intriguing themes. She maintains the high standards of the first book in the sequel, Eterna and Omega.
In the New York City of 1882, the work of the Eterna Commission is in disarray. Seeking supernatural methods of life extension for the good of mankind, they were attacked by unknown forces, and prime researcher Louis Dupris was killed. His lover, the psychic Clara Templeton, remains distraught but determined to seek accountability and revenge. Her mentor, an older fellow known to the world as Senator Rupert Bishop, stands firmly by her side, along with a cadre of other misfit adepts, including Dupris’s own ghost! The vibe here is very much the classic Doom Patrol of DC Comics, if not quite that of Marvel’s X-Men. But all couched in the elaborate politesse and language of the Victorian era. Flailing about in the wake of disaster, the Eterna people suspect that some Brits known as “Omega” might be the malefactors.
Meanwhile, in London, the Omega bureau—a division of Queen Victoria’s law enforcement tasked with dealing with paranormal foes, and led by gruff cop Harold Spire and his ninja assistant, Rose Everhart—thinks in equivalent mistaken fashion that the little-known Eterna group in America is behind their own troubles, which center around the machinations of Beauregard Moriel (a surname not unreasonably akin to “Moriarty”) and his Master’s Society. Invoking murderous monsters from another dimension and using the new science of electricity along with the mana extracted from the excruciations of innocent victims, Moriel plans to launch an army of the undead on London. His tentacles extend to the USA as well.
Having played off the two good groups against each other in the first book, Hieber finally unites them here, sending, first, Rose to New York, then Clara and company to London, for a pull-out-all-the-stops showdown with Moriel. Her levels of inventiveness are consistently surprising; her plotting is suspenseful; and her meditations on the nature of good and evil and the interzone between them are weighty. (Queen Victoria herself stands culpable of abetting Moriel.) Hieber has a lot of fun integrating the two disparate teams, and especially in teasing out the archetypical sisterly relationship between Rose and Clara.
From the very first page, Hieber succeeds in conjuring up the pure Victorian/Gothic umwelt, in a non-ironic yet not unthoughtful manner. Consider this passage as an example:
An unkindness of ravens had gathered to add to the cacophony from the tops of a nearby tree that arched over Trinity’s brownstone Gothic eaves and overlooked the graves. Every-thing dead and living lifted keening protest; wailing and squawking, these ravens as much harbingers as they were scavengers.
A dread power was about to unleash itself over England and America. This was dawning on those in the spirit world who remained attuned to the living. The two countries were woefully unprepared for the black tide that would rise like a biblical plague. Only in this case, the surge would be sent from devils, not from God.
In such capable hands, the reader might frequently find himself or herself giving vent to the same emotions as Clara’s lover, when he looses “a gamesome huff of contentment.”
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Stephanie Burgis sets her Congress of Secrets during the famous Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), a rich and stimulating pageant of larger-than-life figures, whether real—Metternich, Talleyrand, Emperor Francis of Austria—or of her own invention. Whereas a book like Hieber’s presupposes and demands an alternate timestream, where consensus history can be seen to flow differently, accommodating, for instance, mass eruptions of the undead in London, as witnessed by hundreds, Burgis’s novel is the kind of interstitial fantasy or “secret history” akin to something by Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon. All her events could have transpired under the noses of the unsuspecting public and simply failed to enter the history books due to conspiratorial plotting. This type of book offers slightly different frissons than its cousin, often concentrating on realpolitik power dynamics.
Our two main lodestones in Congress of Secrets are characters with a deep connection, though they have long been kept apart by circumstances. A third, and slightly less important viewpoint figure enters their dyad only at the novel’s incipit. Lady Caroline Wyndham was born Karolina Vogl in Vienna. Her father, Gerhard, was a humble printer who devoted much of his labors to publishing incendiary material which the authorities eventually could not suffer to exist. So when they destroyed Vogl’s presses, they arrested father and eleven-year-old daughter. But one member of the firm escaped: Michael Steinhüller, apprentice, a few years older than Karolina, and the object of her puppy love.
Over the next twenty-four years, Michael would transform into a rogue and con man who lived by his unethical wits. Karolina, separated from her father, would spend four years in the prisons of Emperor Francis, under the awful ministrations of Count Pergen, chief of secret police. Unbeknownst to all, Pergen is a wizard and alchemist, whose main task is stealing psychic energy from young children such as Karolina and funneling it into himself and Emperor Francis. Once Karolina ages out of usefulness, she is deemed no threat and tossed into the streets; but against expectations, she begins the process of shaping herself into someone rich and powerful enough to take revenge. Towards her absent old love Michael she feels only hatred, because he seems to have deserted her and her father.
Before you can say “The Count of Monte Cristo meets Darth Vader,” Karolina is in Vienna to enact her plans. Michael is coincidentally there also to conduct a new scam. He was ushered into the city hiding inside a caravan of the friendly and gullible young showman, Peter Riesenbeck, our third protagonist. Peter’s good deed will backfire on him, as he gets swept up in the paranoid dragnet run by Count Pergen & Company.
Burgis’s recreation of period Vienna is sensual and vivid, stemming from much good research and from personal familiarity with the modern city. She does not betray the authenticity of her historical figures, and renders her imagined folks thickly enough to go toe-to-toe with the big guys. The reunion and subsequent love-hate relationship between Carolina and Michael is sweet and teasingly well done. Suspense and thrills abound in what is essentially a caper novel. But Burgis also layers in some potent subtext about authoritarianism and the freedoms we take for granted.
It was hard to remember, sometimes, that boys like this, even here in Vienna, hadn’t grown up with the institution of a free press as Michael had. They’d grown up with a government terrified by the French revolution, committed to repressing all dissent—to making the act of criticism itself a crime. Even at the university itself, there’d been a purge of professors in the 1790s, and those who’d remained had learned to forget all their inconvenient theories of natural law and social contracts.
Apply those words to 2016 as you will.
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When the term “urban fantasy” first began to receive wide usage, around the start of the 1980s, it referred to books with modern settings naturalistically rendered, into which uncanny doings and beings of all stripes intruded. The pulp magazine Unknown had pioneered many such tales. By 1970, a book like Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber revealed state-of-the-art sophistications. Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness (1977) provided a prime example, as did John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981). But then the growing popularity of paranormal romances allowed that mode to usurp the term, so that nowadays the label seems to get affixed to nothing but endless volumes full of plucky youngsters battling and romancing the hoary bugbears of a Gothic past.
Barbara Barnett’s The Apothecary’s Curse is solid and gripping urban fantasy of the old school, and might on the strength of its telling help to revive the original usage of the term. Additionally, it walks the wire between magic and science to fine effect.
We open with a vignette from 1902, in which two mysterious men converse at a party with Arthur Conan Doyle. Although Holmesian motifs do pop up in the bulk of the narrative, the true practical and symbolic significance of this encounter remains hidden till the last chapter, given in a great reveal. But let us turn our attention to the pair of odd ducks. They are Simon Bell and Gaelan Erceldoune. What we will learn about them, over the course of separate accounts—one thread set in the 1800s, one in the present day—is that they are immortals linked by many shared passions and antagonisms. Gaelan is the older: he accidentally made himself undying in the 1600’s, when he concocted a plague antidote from a mysterious grimoire supposedly gifted to his family by the fairies. (Or is it a book of pre-technological science?) In the 1800s, his path crossed with Simon’s, and through elaborate circumstances, he conferred immortality on Simon as well. That long Victorian adventure is given at intervals so that it may complement the realtime narrative.
It’s the year 2016 in the city of Chicago, and Simon is living large, as a famous author of Holmesian pastiches. Gaelan, more stressed and ragged, runs a rare-book store as a cover for his quest for the original book of magic, which went missing in the 1800s. Both men are “half in love with easeful death,” and anticipate ending their extended lives if they ever find the right spell. But Gaelan’s existence is more tortured, and when he experiences what should be a fatal accident that leaves him impossibly intact, his inexplicable and very public survival draws the attention of doctors and scientists eager to dissect him and learn his secrets. One of the researchers, Dr. Anne Shawe, eventually comes over to Gaelan’s side, and now it’s her and the two immortals against a greedy world.
Barnett injects plenty of melodrama into the Victorian thread, and lots of thriller-type action into the contemporary narrative. But all the clever plotting does not obscure her deft treatment of the ethical, emotional and philosophical issues of immortality. She truly conveys the weight of the centuries in her depiction of Simon and Gaelan. As well, several affairs of the heart receive splendid play.
Combining a little of the transtemporal fatedness of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander with the sparring immortals from the Highlander film franchise, Barnett has created a unique urban fantasy that delivers pure magic intertwined with the quotidian demands of our daily lives—even if we are not all immortals.
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To most readers, I suspect, the purest and most archetypical and most concentrated form of fantasy involves what Tolkien very cleverly and usefully dubbed a “subcreation.” A universe as manifold and intricate as our own, exhibiting a deep history but separate from the world we know, even unto its languages, where the author functions as an omniscient demiurge behind the scenes. In Rachel Neumeier’s The Mountain of Kept Memory we have a textbook example of how to do up such an alternate continuum to high standards. But Neumeier adds a delicious twist, albeit a classic one. I don’t feel much compunction in revealing her secret angle, since most veteran readers will suss it out early on from her plentiful yet not over-obvious clues. It is this: the seemingly magical and distant world of her tale is really our post-disaster future, some three thousand years hence. In this regard she has created a book firmly in the line of descent from such landmarks as Samuel Delany’s The Jewels of Aptor and Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East series.
Two rival kingdoms exist on either side of the Narrow Sea (a body of water which on the frontispiece map suspiciously resembles the English Channel). Tamarist is the aggressor, so naturally our sympathies lie with Carastind, where our protagonists live. (But we will come to experience mixed allegiances.) The major folks in Carastind are Prince Gulien, twenty-five years old, and his sister, Princess Oressa, twenty. Their misguided sire, Osir, still rules, and his various follies have invited invasion by Prince Gajdosik of Tamarist. In a desperate attempt to save his country, Gulien journeys to the sacred Mountain where a deity named the Kieba lives. Maybe her renewed patronage can save Carastind. Gulien’s quest partially succeeds, and Prince Gajdosik is defeated and sent packing. But then events necessitate Oressa paying a visit to the Mountain, and there she finds a sly, returned Gajdosik and company seeking to undermine the Kieba and steal her favors for themselves.
From this point, the narrative splits, rejoins, and splits again several times, in a dizzying and satisfying weave. Gulien must manage a second invasion from Tamarist, involving the principled Gajdosik’s utterly evil brother, Bherijda. Ancient secrets of the Kieba are slowly revealed. Oressa returns to her city; her father shows some surprising spunk; magical or super-science weapons are deployed; and finally all the players are assembled within the Mountain of Kept Memory to meet their various fates.
A lot of the charm of this novel derives from Oressa’s feisty and courageous personality. She recalled to me Ysabeau Wilce’s Flora, from Flora Segunda. Here she is, showing confidence at a pivotal point. “It wasn’t that she doubted her decision exactly. Only…it was such a big decision. Bigger and more important, maybe, than any other decision she’d ever made in her entire life. But she didn’t have any choice other than to stand up and make it, because nobody else here would—nobody else here even could.” Gulien and Gajdosik exhibit differing types of heroism. King Osir is a kind of Lear figure. And Bherijda brings the villainy. As for the Kieba, we have a figure worthy of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha.
Ultimately, Neumeier succeeds in forging a special kind of fantasy, a “science-fantasy.” This once-popular genre, in the words of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, “is normally considered a bastard genre blending elements of sf and fantasy; it is usually colorful and often bizarre, sometimes with elements of horror although never centrally in the horror genre.” If you can imagine the crepuscular and brooding Tanith Lee writing an episode of the original Star Trek, you’ll have a sense of what Neumeier pulls off.
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It’s safe to say that none of the accomplishments of these four writers would have been possible without the pioneering work of Ursula K. Le Guin. It would be nice to have included Le Guin here upon the occasion of a new novel, but she has recently confessed to being more or less retired from that game. Luckily, however, she has a fresh collection of essays, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books 2000-2016. This heterogenous volume holds a plentitude of insights and wonders: keen observations on many individual books, a memoir of growing up in a very special house, a journal from a writer’s retreat, and other joys and hard-won wisdoms.
But two essays in particular bear on our topic. First comes “’Things Not Actually Present:’ On Fantasy, with a Tribute to Jorge Luis Borges.” Here Le Guin reaffirms her longstanding cri de coeur, that “Fantasy is, after all, the oldest kind of narrative fiction, and the most universal.” Her stirring tribute to the unfettered powers of the imagination and its role in charting and promoting the future of civilization justifies all our attention on a type of literature often deemed appropriate only for, as she mocks, “children and primitive peoples.” As she concludes: “[Fantasy fulfills] the most ancient, urgent function of words: to form for us ‘mental representations of things not actually present,‘ so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.”
The second relevant piece is titled “Disappearing Grandmothers” and constitutes Le Guin’s own compressed take on what Joanna Russ dealt with at length in her How to Suppress Women’s Writing. It’s useful to keep in mind Le Guin’s keen observations on the many obstacles women authors face as we allot coverage in the future to female fantasy writers.
But I fear this very essay of mine has violated one of her prohibitions. “Books by women are often grouped together in a joint review, while men’s books are reviewed individually.” Nonetheless, I proclaim my innocence and good faith against this over-stringent ukase. This blanket denunciation seems to me to demean the effectiveness of short reviews—often a necessity in the current oversaturated media landscape—and to overlook the common and necessary and even useful journalistic practice of creating reader interest and sussing out patterns by grouping items that share some trait. I can’t conceive, for instance, that Marilyn Stasio’s long-running column on crime novels in The New York Times Book Review has somehow been guilty of demeaning men and women alike by offering only short group reviews for decades.
With that self-defense, I like to imagine that these grouped reviews of a quartet of female writers have highlighted the wide variety of fantasy being practiced in 2016 — a subset of the great work being done by women (and men) who dare to dream beyond the fields we know.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/worlds-of-the-new-dreamers-fresh-fantasy-from-women-writers
Sig Nordal 