Fast Ships, Black Sails (and stuff)

It would have been great if I'd finished reading this in time for "Talk like a Pirate Day," but alas it was not to be. Since starting this work/school schedule, I've dropped from reading 4-6 books a month to only finishing 2. And I'm writing even less. It appears that for this semester at least, actual writing has been displaced by doing stuff with the fencing community. Then I'm working full-time, plus an extra 6-7 hours a week to make up for time spent in class, then 5-10 hours a week on the homework... anyway, it's a very stressful semester. Next semester should be better--the class I'll be taking will have just as much homework, but it will be offered in the evening instead of the afternoon. I'll be able to work normal instead of extended hours, and I expect life to be quite improved. And someday I'll be finished with my Masters altogether! (ETA Winter 2010) I can hardly conceive of all the free time I'll have then... but I dare to dream.

But what about the book? This anthology is a lot of fun, opening with delightful stories by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette, Rhys Huges, and Kage Baker. One thing I found most interesting about this compilation is how it lays out so many tropes associated with the pirate tale sub-genre. "Boojum" by Bear & Monette takes on the ship who cares for her crew (here with a literally sentient ship swimming in the vastness of space). Baker's "I Begyn As I Mean to Go On" takes on tales of hidden treasure, curses of the dead and terrifying islands and islanders. She also focuses on the historical and religious context of the pirate tale--particularly the Catholic faith of the Spanish traders, sailors and missionaries involved in the Atlantic of the time of piracy's romantic peak--themes that other authors in the collection also utilize. Howard Waldrop's "Avast, Abaft!" runs a bunch of stock tropes together in a literal mash-up involving the HMS Pinafore, the Pirates of Penzance and Dick Deadeye, amongst others. Kelly Barnhill's story involves the lure of sea, and people for whom saltwater flows in their veins--such people cannot be kept shorebound. Justin Howe's "Skillet and Saber" aims a ship's boy towards violence and cannibalism. Conrad Williams' "68 07' 15" N, 31 36' 44" W" portrays monomaniacal obsession.

In another sf take on the take, "Pirate Solutions" by Katherine Sparrow looks at piracy, either maritime or cybernetic, as freedom. Also on the sf side, David Freer and Eric Flint's "Pirates of the Suara Sea" shows us how ships that are the prey of pirates can turn the tables, even on alien seas. The final sf offering, Jayme Lynn Blaschke's "The Whale Below" shows how even the most straight-forward plunder can go horribly wrong when the deckhands take things into their own hands.

Brendan Connell's "We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Stars" deals with colonialist relationships with non-European islanders. Offering an alternate-history twist, "A Cold Day in Hell" by Paul Batteiger gives us the cat-and-mouse game of national navy vs. pirate in a 16th century where the "little ice age" instead froze the very seas. (We'll not inquire as to how any of the surviving population found food.) Naomi Novik, counterintuitively not writing in her Master-and-Commander-with-dragons universe, takes on the kidnapped-aristocrat trope and the woman-going-to-sea-disguised-as-a-man trope all in one go in the enjoyable "Araminta, or, the Wreck of the Amphidrake." Closing the book on a strong note, Garth Nix's creations Mr. Fitz and Sir Hereward plot a course (sorry, couldn't help myself) for the (almost)-impossible-to-reach-bastion and creatures from the abyss in "Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarskoe."

And for flat-out over-the-top fun, I will mention my favorite of the anthology, located right near the front: Rhys Hughes' "Castor on Troubled Waters," one of the tallest of tall tales I have ever had the pleasure to read.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention a few stories that didn't work for me. Steve Aylett's "Voyage of the Iguana" seems to be absurdist humor in the vein of W. E. Bowman's The Ascent of Rum Doodle. That would be fine--I for one love Bowman's comic novel--except that in "Iguana's" case things seems to simply drag on too long. Chalk this up to senses of humor being notoriously individual; I imagine a lot of people will find it hilarious, but I ended up skipping to the next story after a few pages. I also found "Ironface" by Michael Moorcock to be a weak offering, but that is probably because I have not yet found my way into his "Eternal Champion" universe, of which this three page vignette appears to be part. I imagine that people better versed with Moorcock will find it more enlightening.

However, as a whole I found the stories here both fun to read and thought-provoking. I had never before reflected on the richness contained within the microcosm of pirate's tales until the amazing variety of the stories here drew it to my attention. Bravo to the authors and editors!

SFWA European Hall of Fame, James & Kathryn Morrow, ed.

This review originally appeared at SFRevu.com

James and Kathryn Morrow have presented us with a labor of love in the SFWA European Hall of Fame, and it is a remarkable achievement. It contains sixteen stories from thirteen countries, each a memorable piece, each beautifully translated. There is no question that English-speaking SF/F fans would be interested in European (and Chinese and Indian, etc.) fiction if only there were more and better translations available. As some of us may remember, having perhaps read less-than-perfectly translated Jules Verne, translation is an art, not a science. By combining efforts and communication between the translators, writers and editors, and making use of the enabling medium of email, this collection provides us with the amazing styles and atmospherics of the story tellers, not just their raw content.

Not that their content is in any way uninteresting. In this volume we see a high density of political concerns from several angles, especially dystopian ones. We also see that fantasy motifs are crossing over into European science fiction as much as they are in English SF, with beautiful and fun results. There is obviously no "European" style here, as each author is uniquely their own. However, one can make some broad generalizations based on these stories, such as Northern European stories seeming darker than Southern ones, and stories from ex-communist countries being more overtly political than their American allied counterparts.

The politically-leaning stories range from the quietly elegant to the abundantly absurd. "A Birch Tree, A White Fox," from Russian author Elena Arsenieva, deals with the power of enforced silence on an alien planet, a piece of poetry. "Sepultura," from Italian author Valerio Evangelisti deals with the plight of political prisoners in a near-future Brazil, with echoes of both Dante and the native religions. "Baby Doll" from Finland's Johanna Sinisalo disturbingly deals with the sexualization of youth, forcing teen angst and behavior on children of seven or eight. From Poland we have "Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay Noo." by Marek S. Huberath, a story of monsters and mutants in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, which does a remarkable job of humanizing its characters while never shying away from their deformations. "The Day We Went Through the Transition" by Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero is a straight-forward time travel story dealing with the importance of the post-Franco Spanish transition to democracy between 1975 and 1981. "Some Earthlings' Adventures on Outrerria" must be the oddest story in the collection, from Romanian Lucian Merisca. It is both a Lewis Carroll-esque surreal dance of alien courtly etiquette, and a post-colonial commentary on Earthly politics. Runner-up for weirdness and whimsy must be "A Night on the Edge of the Empire" by Portuguese author Joao Barreiros, an "Innocents Abroad" take on an alien ambassador traveling incognito on Earth, with pointed commentary about political activism and tolerance for the Other. Finally W.J. Maryson, a Dutch author, brings us a dystopia of perfection in "Verstummte Musik," a story of political escape full of the tension between beauty and death.

Of the more stylistically oriented pieces we have the two French entries, "Separations" by Jean-Claude Dunyach, dealing with ennui, romance and maturity by traveling through a worm hole with quantum repercussions, and "Transfusion" by Joelle Wintrebert describing with a woman assuming power over herself and her demons in a physical, sensual and spiritual way. Both of these tales are very dark in their tone. The Czech entry "The Fourth Day to Eternity" deals with time loops of the main character's own making, and the battle he must repeatedly fight. "Athos Emfovos in the Temple of Sound" is a mythic anti-war story, the sort of thing that could only be written by a Grecian author, in this case Panagiotis Koustas. The famous Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko contributes a piece reminiscent of early Heinlein, "Destiny, Inc.," in which a company presents itself as able to swap people's destinies around, free of charge. TANSTAAFL. Andreas Eschbach contributes a piece that goes straight for the extreme sense-of-wonder SF sentimentality with "Wonders of the Universe," a story of a dying astronaut on Europa. It's not subtle, but it's a good candidate to bring a tear to your eye. Spanish author Jose Antonio Cotrina brings us "Between the Lines," a fun fantastic story of a young man who learns to literally read new things between the lines of books. Finally pseudonymous Danish author Bernhard Ribbeck writes "A Blue and Cloudless Sky," a story about time travel, space travel and religion.

With any collection of this sort, one can argue about the editorial choices. For one, given the inclusion of such becoming-famous-in-English authors as Johanna Sinisalo (Troll – A Love Story), Sergei Lukyanenko (The Night Watch series) and Andreas Eschbach (The Carpet Makers), why not include something from Zoran Zivkovic, for instance? Or perhaps the better known authors should have been excluded in favor of newer authors needing more exposure? I'm sure these were painful decisions that the editors had to make, being faced with trying to represent all of European science fiction with only sixteen stories. A more significant quibble of mine would be that from this collection one would think that European SF was almost, but not quite, unrelentingly dark, with only "Transition," "Outrerria," "Edge of the Empire" and "Between the Lines" containing much in the way of humor, and even then only "Transition" and "Between the Lines" having anything resembling happy endings. It's impossible to know if that is a coincidence, a reflection of the editors' preferences, or the real state of European fiction.

Trifling issues aside, the editors are to be thanked for putting together such a beautiful collection of works that we might never have read otherwise. Science fiction is the literature of ideas, and the more geographically diverse the authors, the more broad the spectrum of ideas we will be exposed to. The fact that the editors were able to do so while still conveying the beautiful styles and poetry of the authors involved is icing on this already substantial cake.