So you’ve built your immigrant family a fortune out of your cosmetics business, and accustomed your children to the privileges of the upper class — and then the financial crisis of 2007 washes away your wealth in one terrible wave.  What’s a man like Charles Wang to do?  Time for a family road trip across the country — and an improbable dream of recovering long-ago-lost estates in China.   Jade Chang’s inventive and timely family tragicomedy The Wangs vs. the World  (a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection) begins from that premise and rockets into a high-velocity tale of pride and persona, money and manners, jealousy and joy.

A few weeks ago, Jade Chang took the stage at Barnes & Noble’s Upper West Side Manhattan store alongside award-winning poet and Buzzfeed culture editor Saeed Jones to talk about The Wangs vs. the World, the myth of a lost legacy that she borrowed from her own familiy’s chronicle, and the delicate art of bringing fictional characters to life in a contemporary setting.  The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Saeed Jones: I guess to start, an important idea throughout the book is: Where do we come from? Who are we? Who are we in the context of our families and our heritages? So I wanted to start with you, asking: How did the Wang Family come to you?

Jade Chang: Well, I think the first thing that really came to me was this first chapter, and Charles Wang’s voice, which is a very angry, very over-the-top, very kind of driven, but also really, I think, funny and very heartfelt kind of character. He is a man that I have seen a lot, actually. I think there are a lot of immigrant businessmen who are very much . . .

SJ: Running for president. I’m sure that’s who you were talking about.

JC: Absolutely. Yes. But there are a lot of people very much like Charles Wang, whose stories are never told. This is not the kind of person who we see in literature, in movies, on TV, and I knew that I wanted to tell that kind of story. I knew I wanted to tell a very over-the-top, exciting story that would feel like it was a new take on the immigrant novel.

SJ: You have to hear Charles’s voice. Because I think if you’ve already read the book, or even just looked at the first paragraph, he’s a character that comes at you with the full force of history. Yet, he’s absolutely human, and that was the first thing that kind of grabbed me by the collar. Would you read the first section?

JC: OK. I’m not going to set it up at all, because we’re right at the very beginning. But I will tell you that it begins in Bel-Air, California:

Charles Wang was mad at America.

Actually, Charles Wang was mad at history.

If the death-bent Japanese had never invaded China, if a million — a billion — misguided students and serfs had never idolized a balding academic who parroted Russian madmen and couldn’t pay for his promises, then Charles wouldn’t be standing here, staring out the window of his beloved Bel-Air home, waiting for those calculating assholes from the bank — the bank that had once gotten on its Italianate-marble knees and kissed his ass — to come over and repossess his life.

Without history, he wouldn’t be here at all.

He’d be there, living out his unseen birthright on his family’s ancestral acres, a pampered prince in silk robes, writing naughty, brilliant poems, teasing servant girls, collecting tithes from his peasants, and making them thankful by leaving their tattered households with just enough grain to squeeze out more hungry babies.

Instead, the world that should have been his fell apart, and the great belly of Asia tumbled and roiled with a noxious foreign indigestion that spewed him out, bouncing him, hard, on the tropical joke of Taiwan and then, when he popped right back up, belching him all the way across the vast Pacific Ocean and smearing him onto this, this faceless green country full of grasping newcomers, right alongside his unclaimed countrymen: the poor, illiterate, ball-scratching half men from Canton and Fujian, whose highest dreams were a cook’s apron and a back-alley, back-door fuck.

Oh, he shouldn’t have been vulgar.

Charles Wang shouldn’t even know about the things that happen on dirt-packed floors and under stained sheets. Centuries of illustrious ancestors, scholars and statesmen and gentlemen farmers all, had bred him for fragrant teas unfurling in fresh springwater, for calligraphy brushes of white wolf hair dipped in black deer-glue ink, for lighthearted games of chance played among true friends.

Not this. No, not this. Not for him bastardized Peking duck eaten next to a tableful of wannabe rappers and their short, cubby, colored-contact-wearing Filipino girlfriends at Mr. Chow. Not for him shoulder-to-shoulder art openings where he sweated through the collar of his paper-thin cashmere sweater and started at some sawed-in-half animal floating in formaldehyde whose guts didn’t even have the courtesy to leak; not for him white women who wore silver chopsticks in their hair and smiled at him for approval. Nothing, nothing in his long lineage had prepared for the Western worship of the Dalai Lama and pop stars wearing jade prayer beads and everyone drinking goddamn boba chai.

He shouldn’t be here at all. Never should have set a single unbound foot on the New World. There was no arguing it. History had started fucking Charles Wang, and America had finished the job.

SJ: Wow! So I immediately have a few thoughts — and let me know if you agree. In a moment of absolute crisis, your family fortune is about to be destroyed because of the financial crisis of 2008 — who has the presence of mind to notice the Italian marble? The details are so rich, and you immediately get a sense that father is a force of nature. Which then brings us to the next question. What would it be like for this person to be your father?

JC: Good question. So it’s through the three kids that we figure that out. I wanted to look at it from a bunch of different angles.

So the oldest daughter is Saina. She is an artist. She was very successful, and then has recently retreated from New York City in disgrace. I think she is probably the one who is most similar to her father. She has that same kind of desire for bigness, that same drive, that same desire to really kind of be part of the larger story and say something, and make some kind of mark.

Then there is the middle son, Andrew, who I have a real soft spot for. He’s in college. He is holding out for true love, but he’s also a wannabe stand-up comic — there’s a few stand-up comedy sets for him. He wants a more traditional kind of dad —  the kind of dad who is going to play softball with him. But Charles happens to be the kind of dad who is going to introduce him to some models and ask him if he’s gotten with them yet — which is not what Andrew is looking for.

SJ: One thing about Charles is  that he thinks the point of America was to have sex and learn how to play the guitar. He’s not pressuring his kids in the way I think even the kids expect.

JC: Yeah, exactly.

SJ: How did you get to that point? Was he always going to have that relationship with them?

JC: Then there’s the youngest daughter, Grace.

SJ: She’s very angry.

JC: She feels things very deeply, yes. She is currently in high school. She gets pulled out of her boarding school to go on this cross-country road trip with her family.

But I think part of it is that there are so many different ways to be a person. Right? There are so many different ways to be a parent. There are so many different ways to be an immigrant or a person of color in America. And this father . . . I’ve seen guys like that. I’ve seen kids who have grown up in families like that. And yeah, there is part of me that is like, “What is up with this group?” But that’s what made it a story that I wanted to tell. For me, things are so much more exciting if they’re just way over the top.

SJ: Yeah, and complicated. What’s cool is that when we see people like Charles or Andrew or Grace or Saina, we see only one side of them. Right? Because often, I think, we see characters either as individuals out in the world, and in romance and in relationship and building their own lives, or we see them in the context of their own family. Often we don’t get to see both sides forced together in such a way. Was that a challenge to write it in that way, where we get to see the facets?

JC: That’s interesting. I don’t know that I had really thought about it that much. But I do think that I always want fiction to show everything. I want to see people in all parts of their lives, but I also want to see them eating. I want to see them having sex. I want to see them taking showers. There are no showers in here — next book, there will definitely be some bathroom time.

SJ: It’s important to leave your options open.

JC: It’s important. It’s part of life. But you know, that I think that I really wanted to tell a story that went into every part of somebody’s life. I think often in books that kind of like have a glitzy fun side, we often don’t see the family.

SJ: Right. With a character like Grace, who is very precocious, she’s aggressive, she says she knows what she wants even if she maybe doesn’t always. Often that kind of character, it’s really fun, and great to see her at school by herself, kind of tearing into her roommate, or colorizing suicide. But then, when we have to see that same child in the context of her family, and whether that’s listening to the siblings on the phone or talking to her dad , it’s another facet to the diamond.

JC:  Exactly. Also, we know that each person is so many layers. Right? You know that when you guys go home and you’re with your families, the way that you relate to them is totally different than I think maybe when you relate to a friend, or someone you have a crush on, or someone who you’re trying to impress in the work world. I remember the first time that I really kind of got this, it was my first job out of college. I was an intern at the L.A. Weekly, and it was this very alternative newsweekly, and one of the people who worked there was a performer named Vaginal Davis.

SJ: Oh, that’s why you couldn’t remember what her job title was.

JC: Right. I only remember her name. Another person who worked there was a performer who had recently gotten into some serious trouble with the NEA, named Ron Athey. I remember one day I was out in the parking lot. It was like a mandatory valet system. I was out in the parking lot, and I looked at the kind of panel of keys, and I saw this one set of keys that kind of looked like mine. It had a Ralph’s Club card on it. (Ralph’s is one of the supermarkets in Los Angeles.) It was Ron Athey, like, renegade performer, who of course also wants to save money at Ralph’s.  That moment still sticks out in my mind so clearly.

SJ: No one is any one thing.

JC: Yeah, no one is any one thing. Everyone is sort of very normal, day-to-day prosaic things, and also, every kind of crazy kind of thing they can come up with as well.

SJ:  Can you talk about the structure?Some of the sections are even just a page or two long, and then we’re seeing another perspective. We’re all very postmodern here, but it doesn’t feel like we’re being jostled about. It’s so interesting. We’re getting an individual feel as we’re getting the whole family. That seems really complicated and hard to pull off. How did you do that?

JC: I’m not sure. I worked on this book for a really long time. That’s kind of how.

The book is told from alternating points of view. Each of the five family members, you see chapters told entirely in their voice. Writing in close-third like that, where it’s third-person but you’re essentially seeing the world from their eyes — I really enjoy that. I like that sense of being able to both have that omniscience of knowing everything that’s happening in their world, and yet also seeing something through a very particular specific set of eyes.

SJ: Absolutely. One of the first times I noticed it was with Grace, for example. She’s sharp and cutting and sassy, and then right at the end there’s a line in third person where you see a moment of her admitting . . . where maybe she wouldn’t have said it herself, but the perspective allows her to see that. She’s still trying to figure out what happened in her own family with her mother. I thought that was really powerful, because, of course, she’s really tough — she’s not just going to come out and say that.

JC: Yeah, exactly. I think you can also show more empathy for your characters than your characters might necessarily have for themselves.

SJ: Because you love these characters. Did you have fun writing one kid more than the other?

JC: You know, I think that definitely I really enjoyed writing Andrew, who is the wannabe stand-up comic. Because I wrote two stand-up sets for him, and that was really fun to research. I took an improv class.

SJ: Really? Oh, that’s so great.

JC: I did. Yeah. You know, half of the people under forty in Los Angeles have probably also taken improv classes.

SJ: Touché.

JC: It’s not that unusual. But I wanted to know what it felt like to stand up in front of a room full of people and try to make them laugh . . . and the kind of fear that someone might feel when they can’t. So researching him was so fun. He also has this sweetness that I really feel for.

SJ: Did you do particular research for Saina, since she’s an artist?

JC: For a long time, I worked as an arts journalist. So for her, she definitely helped me fulfill my secret dream of being a conceptual artist, in that I got to come up with a bunch of different art projects for her that she did. But in terms of special research, I think I had gotten so much of that. I got to be immersed in the art world just in that job.

This book is a way to play out all the other jobs that I kind of wish I had. I get to, like, design things, do stand-up . . .

SJ: Obviously, when life comes hurtling at people, the way people respond is fascinating and illuminating.  At one point, all the kids find out what their trust fund would have been, what they just lost, and it’s been abstract. So it’s interesting that his response to this disaster is: We are going to gather all of our family together, we’re going to get into a station wagon . . .

JC: A Mercedes station wagon.

SJ: Of course. You lose everything, but not everything. And do a road trip across the country (which you could literally not pay me to do with my family under the best of financial circumstances), go live with our daughter, and then do what?

JC: And then, try to reclaim the land that the Communists took from his family in China.

SJ: An especially important part of that amazing opening paragraph. How did you come up with the way that Charles was going to both respond to disaster and chart a course forward?

JC: People often ask me if this book is based on real life at all or if any of it is true. None of it is true except for the Wangs’ family story. Both of my parents are from parents who had owned a lot of land in China for generations, and then, because of World War II, the rise of Communism, the Chinese Civil War, they were essentially chased out of China, and there are all kinds of harrowing stories of boats taken under cover of night, and running down roads while Japanese warplanes fired at them.

So both sides of my family fled to Taiwan, and my parents both grew up in Taiwan. They grew up with their parents always talking about the land that we lost, the land in China — we need to go back and reclaim that land in China. I think that loss and that desire definitely filtered down to them. Although to me, it doesn’t seem like a real thing, I think that the mythology of it feels very potent to me. So in thinking about Charles’s drive…

SJ: Which is this kind of epic, Herculean . . .

JC: Yes, this quest, his impossible quest. Because the Communist government is never going to say, “Here you go. Sorry, dude. We didn’t mean to take all this.” So that was, in a way, something that’s always been with me.

SJ: You’ve mentioned that part of the appeal of  writing this book was that you get to explore the different professions and lives that you’ve always been curious about. Were there any particular moments maybe in the book that surprised you?

JC: I’m a very forgetful person. There are parts of the book that occasionally — and this is true — I don’t necessarily remember having written.

SJ: In writing you have a sudden idea in a character, you go, “Oh, this is how the character is going to react,” and then you go, “Whoa, I didn’t know Charles would do that or Grace would feel that way.”

JC: Honestly, I don’t think so. Some writers really kind of like to talk about the characters speaking to them from on high. And that is a perfectly valid way to feel and to write. It does not happen to be the way that I feel or write. I am the master of these people. I created them. I think what they do doesn’t surprise me in that way. I outline pretty extensively, and I do know what’s going to happen, but I don’t know how I’m necessarily going to get from one point to another.

SJ: It makes sense. Because they are all such strong personalities. They were definitely very much rooted in what they thought was their lives and their futures before everything changed.

Can you talk about Grace in that way? She has a lot of really elaborate ideas about the world, like the way she talks about all of the art she has in her dorm room.

JC: Well, Grace is the youngest daughter, and she’s in high school right now, and she really is in this time. She was really exciting to write; I mean, the whole family is in a state of transition, but she is, of course, the person who, in her own life, is at the very most in a state of transition. So she’s kind of trying on all of these personas for size, and she’s trying to figure out who she wants to be, and who she thinks is cool. She changes the most emotionally. So in the beginning the pictures that Saina is talking about, she has all these photos on a kind of corkboard in her dorm room, and it’s like Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, who I don’t know if you guys remember . . . they were the artists who committed like a double suicide. They were  glamorized by Vanity Fair. It’s a really fascinating story. She has a photo taken by Diane Arbus, a famous photographer who also committed suicide. So I think at the beginning she’s trying on this idea of the glamour of not-being, of . . .

SJ: And the control.

JC: Yes, exactly. But then, as she goes on, I think that she starts to think about the world really differently. She starts to think about Love and Beauty as being very real things that she cares about.

SJ:  Of course, she grows up. But she really blossoms amid this . . .

JC: Amid the chaos, yes.

SJ: Was there a part of the book that was harder to pull off than you realized before you started it?

JC: Yeah. This book took me five years to write. It felt like fifty. There are two things. One that I was not surprised was really difficult:The book takes place during the financial crisis, and it’s something that happened that was talked about so much in real time. We were analyzing that as it happened. I wanted to talk about it in the book, but not in a way that felt like you were being kind of taught a lesson — except then I chose to, in fact, put it in a class where you were being taught a lesson. So the challenge of doing that while keeping it kind of fun to read was really hard. First of all, I had to understand everything that was happening there. And then, to try to write that.

SJ: And keep everything moving. The movement and the velocity is such an important part of the book.

JC: Exactly. Keep it snappy and exciting — but it took months to write. Then the other part, which you would think, having been a journalist for years, I would be kind of OK at. There is an article in the book that someone writes about Saina that kind of glorifies her while taking her down at the same time. It’s the kind of article like, say, New York magazine does so deliciously.

SJ: And often about artists.

JC: Yeah. I think there is that sense of how did they get so famous and celebrated, and then, “Look at them now.” That also took me forever to write and then ended up being mostly cut out.

SJ: The last question: you’ve been out, and you’ve done a few events. What’s been your favorite reader reaction so far, or surprise from that end?

JC: I’ve had several people tell me that they feel like they see themselves or their families, or they feel like it’s a kind of story that both feels familiar to them and that feels like they haven’t sort of seen it. That just makes me really happy.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/reclaiming-the-loss-saeed-jones-talks-with-jade-chang

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.”

* * *

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.

* * *

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