When reality intrudes on fantasy

Review of Rosa and the Veil of Gold by Kim Wilkins.

If I had seen this book in the shop, I wouldn’t have picked it up. That’s a terrible thing to say, and once again, I have learnt not to judge a book by it’s cover. But because I had been given the book, I felt obliged to bump it up on the reading list (curiousity had something to do with it, too, I admit). And I’m terribly glad I did!

Kim Wilkins is not as well-known as she ought to be, at least not in the parts of the northern hemisphere where I hang out. In Australia, where she lives, she has received no less than four Aurealis Awards (although two of them were for the same book, The Infernal, which apparently won for best fantasy and best horror novel in 1998) and one Ditmar. After having read Rosa, I have no problem understanding why.

Rosa and the Veil of Gold is a fantasy story that draws on Russian folktales and on Russian history. Although the tale of how Daniel and Em end up in the folktale world of Skazki and how Daniel’s ex Rosa (and there is still love there, tragically) tries to get the magic necessary to come to the rescue provides the impetus here, this is really the story of how Skazki’s Secret Ambassador desperatly tries to keep the two worlds together. And he uses the Russian tsars and tsarevnas of all times to get what he wants.

What’s so brilliant about this book is that it subverts my expectations of what fantasy is, simply by taking things seriously. Daniel and Em have a miserable time in Skazki, cold, wet, and hungry; at no point do they go ”Oh, we’re in a different world! Let’s have a great adventure.” (Daniel is more likely to go ”Not good, not good, not good!” – but then he knows the old Russian tales better than I did.) Rosa tries the old pick-up-some-magic-before-saving-the-day routine and fails. It’s terrible and hopeless but never depressing.

There is love, but not of the kind you expect, either. Occasional sex, but no romance – well, there is, but not in relation to sex, well, not often. Instead, this is the fantasy book that has caused more vicarious agony the any other – and I hope I will have forgotten that particular scene when next I visit the dentist! And when there is violence, it is never clinical, never heroic, and surprisingly un-graphic.

And then there’s the ending. Like the rest of the story, it elegantly turned my expectations upside down. The eucatastrophy is here, but it is nothing at all like what Tolkien had in mind; I am not even certain whether it is a happy ending or not – it probably isn’t, not in the traditional sense. But it is definitely true to the story and the characters. And still, like all epic fantasies (and Wilkins has written a nicely epic work), the world hangs in the balance, a time abyss opens up, everything is finally up to the protagonist – who does the opposite of what I hoped, wanted, and, yes, expected.

I recommend Rosa and the Veil of Gold to anyone who wants to read a fantasy story that plays with genre conventions without making fun of them. Wilkins shows us that it’s time to stop working the same old patterns over and over again – there is a Cauldron of Story out there with a lot more in it than we think. And to paraphrase H. P. Lovecraft: if everything else is as realistic as can be, we can buy the monsters, too.

And, of course, afterwards I got much more from the cover than before. That figures.

Winners Of the 2012 SF&F Translation Awards

Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards
PO Box 64128, Sunnyvale CA 94088-4128 USA

info@sfftawards.org; http://www.sfftawards.org/

July 21st, 2012

The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is delighted to announce the winners of the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2011). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form. The jury has additionally elected to award two honorable mentions in each category.

Long Form Winner

Zero by Huang Fan, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom (Columbia University Press)

Long Form Honorable Mentions

Good Luck, Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, translated from the Japanese by Neil Nadelman (Haikasoru)
Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (Little, Brown & Company)

Short Form Winner

”The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #59, August 2011)

Short Form Honorable Mentions

”The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, translated from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen (PS Publishing)

”The Green Jacket” by Gudrun Östergaard, translated from the Danish by the author and Lea Thume (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)

The winners were announced at Finncon 2012 , held in Tampere, Finland. over the weekend July 19-20. The awards were announced by jury member Irma Hirsjärvi and ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan.

The winning authors and their translators will each receive an inscribed plaque and a cash prize of $350. Authors and translators of the honorable mentions will receive certificates.

Jury chair Dale Knickerbocker said, ”The jury would like to thank all who nominated works, and compliment both the authors and translators for the fine quality of this year’s submissions. While both the winner and honorable mentions in the long fiction category had their supporters, we ultimately chose Huang Fan’s novella Zero (translated from the Chinese by John Balcom) as the winner. The author skillfully weaves elements from the masterpieces of dystopian fiction into his own very unique text, and the translator successfully communicates the work’s stark, frightening nature. Zero‘s surprise denouement takes Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle a step further, wedding it with a touch of Asimov’s The Gods Themselves.”

”This year’s winner in the short fiction category, Chen Qiufan’s ”The Fish of Lijiang” (translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu) was described by our judges as ”brilliant,” ”original,” and ”a lovely and devastating story, beautifully written and translated.” It presents an interesting take on mental illness and wellness, work, and future technologies. In the tradition of the best SF, it offers a convincing extrapolation of the economic and consequent social changes that China has undergone in the past 30 years.”

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe added: ”I’m delighted that the hard work of our distinguished jurors has resulted in such an impressive list of winners and nominees, and – equally important – that the international science fiction and fantasy community has taken this award to heart in terms of supplying nominees and suggestions for nominees. Congratulations not only to the winning authors and translators, but to everyone who has helped make these awards a viable and invaluable project.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a 2011 fund-raising event for which prizes were kindly donated by George R.R. Martin, China Miéville, Cory Doctorow, Lauren Beukes, Ken MacLeod, Paul Cornell, Adam Roberts, Elizabeth Bear, Hal Duncan, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Juliet E. McKenna, Aliette de Bodard, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, Twelfth Planet Press, Deborah Kalin, Baen Books, Small Beer Press, Lethe Press, Aeon Press, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kari Sperring, Helen Lowe, Rob Latham and Cheryl Morgan.

The jury for the awards was Dale Knickerbocker (Chair); Kari Maund, Abhijit Gupta, Hiroko Chiba, Stefan Ekman, Ekaterina Sedia, Felice Beneduce & Irma Hirsjärvi.

ARESFFT is a California Non-Profit Corporation funded entirely by donations.

Contact

info@sfftawards.org; http://www.sfftawards.org/
Cheryl Morgan

Believe it or Not

An interesting discussion about the nature of literary belief and the possible suspension of disbelief in fantasy is taking place on the blog of Swedish writer Stefan Ingstrand. Come and join us.

Fantasy and the Panopticon

Two unrelated clusters of thoughts came together in my mind as I prepared a chocolate cake. One cluster originated in two journalists who recently – and unrelated to each other – asked me why people read fantasy. The other came from the amount of blogging I’ve done over the past month (not this blog, as you can see, but a travel blog for my family and friends at home), my Facebook denial, and the BBC radio series The Digital Human.

Although I have heard numerous ideas about why people (or children or young adults) enjoy fantasy, most if not all have been more or less unfounded guesses. Some of them are probably right, but they are still guesses (only lucky). Occasionally they have been generalised from personal experience, sometimes extrapolated from a few informants. I have found very little in terms of research, however. No interviews, no sureys, no reader-respons studies. (That in itself is interesting, but a different topic.)

What, if anything, has this to do with online presences? Well, it struck me that one fairly popular guess about why we read fantasy has to do with escape. Tolkien suggested that it was a noble escape (of the prisoner) rather than the flight of the deserter. I agree with those people who feels that perhaps the prisoner should stay put but that deserters may be on to a good thing, but I see JRRT’s point. Since escapism is a dirty word, others, including myself, have tried to phrase it more nicely, as vacation or thought experiment, or described it (again along Tolkien’s lines) as some kind of literary belief.

If it is an escape, what is it that fantasy allows us to escape from? What is so stifling and oppressive about reality that we feel that fantasy provides a much-needed way out? The moral greyness of the actual world has been proposed, its clutter and complications, its sense that the tiny individual cannot affect the world. I offer a new reason: the panopticon.

The original panopticon was proposed by Jeremy Bentham as a prison model. Basically, the idea was that each prison cell could be supervised at all time. The prisoner did not know exactly when (if at all) he was under supervision, however, and would thus adopt a self-regulation behaviour. The principle on a social level was presented most famously in Orwell’s 1984. And we’re living it. Of our own free will. We’re status-updating, tweeting, blogging, mailing, and social networking our lives into a cloud where all information about us is accessible. We upload photos of our friends and tag them (not to mention face-recognition software). We’re offering personal data and usage patterns in exchange for ”free” online services. And we feel we have to do it.

This social panopticon goes way beyond anything I’ve seen in any fantasy novel, even in the more opressive ones, such as Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels or Lynch’s Camorr. Sure, often the society is pseudo-medieval, so a totalitarian security service may be a bit too much to expect. But so many fantasy texts offer the equivalent of Galadriel’s Mirror and Palantiri – crystal balls, magic mirrors, and scrying devices galore – that the technical (well, magical) possibility is there. The interest, however, seems not to be.

The fantasy world, whether based on our own or completely imaginary, appears to offer a refuge from the all-seeing eye. Spying, for there is a great deal of that, is a personal service provided by the enemy, not a social obligation carried out by ones friends. Fantasy heroes are spied because someone rather dislikes them; in the crazy world of fantasy, spying is a bad thing, to be avoided if possible. It certainly is not a social obligation.

For someone who is growing up with a mobile phone all but surgically attached to their body and constantly reachable online, maybe that is the escape desired from fantasy? Or is the attraction actually a titillation of horror and disgust at a life lived so anonymously, where lives can be lived without leaving a digital trail other than the results of one’s actions? Again, I’m guessing, and I’d be happy to hear from anyone who knows better than me.

Finalists for the 2012 SF & F Translations Awards

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – MAY 21ST, 2012

The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2011). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form.

Long Form

• Good Luck, Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, translated from the Japanese by Neil Nadelman (Haikasoru)
• Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti (Bloomsbury Qatar)
• The Dragon Arcana by Pierre Pevel, translated from the French by Tom Clegg (Gollancz)
• Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (Little, Brown & Company)
• Zero by Huang Fan, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom (Columbia University Press)

Short Form

• “The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #59, August 2011)
• ”Spellmaker” by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel (A Polish Book of Monsters, Michael Kandel, PIASA Books)
• ”Paradiso” by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Liquid Imagination #9, Summer 2011)
• ”The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, translated from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen (PS Publishing)
• ”The Short Arm of History” by Kenneth Krabat, translated from the Danish by Niels Dalgaard (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)
• ”The Green Jacket” by Gudrun Östergaard, self-translated from the Danish (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)
• ”Stanlemian” by Wojciech Orliński, translated from the Polish by Danusia Stok (Lemistry, Comma Press)

The nominees were announced at Åcon 5 http://aconfive.wordpress.com/, a joint Finnish-Swedish convention, over the weekend May 19-20. The announcement was read by Guest of Honor, Catherynne M. Valente.

The winning works will be announced at the 2012 Finncon on the weekend of July 21-22 http://2012.finncon.org/. Each winning author and translator will receive a cash prize of US$350. ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and jury member Irma Hirsjärvi will be present to make the announcement.

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe said: ”I think this list proves that once you start looking for it, the diversity and quality of translated science fiction and fantasy are considerably greater than most of us had suspected, and I hope the nominations list calls attention to works too often overlooked by the usual awards processes.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a 2011 fund-raising event for which prizes were kindly donated by George R.R. Martin, China Miéville, Cory Doctorow, Lauren Beukes, Ken MacLeod, Paul Cornell, Adam Roberts, Elizabeth Bear, Hal Duncan, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Juliet E. McKenna, Aliette de Bodard, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, Twelfth Planet Press, Deborah Kalin, Baen Books, Small Beer Press, Lethe Press, Aeon Press, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kari Sperring, Helen Lowe, Rob Latham and Cheryl Morgan.

The jury for the awards was Dale Knickerbocker (Chair); Kari Maund, Abhijit Gupta, Hiroko Chiba, Stefan Ekman, Ekaterina Sedia, Felice Beneduce & Irma Hirsjärvi.

ARESFFT is a California Non-Profit Corporation funded entirely by donations.

Contact

info@sfftawards.org; http://www.sfftawards.org/
Cheryl Morgan

Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards
PO Box 64128, Sunnyvale CA 94088-4128 USA

Fantasy in Mainstream Clothing

1Q84
by Haruki Murakami

At nearly 1,000 pages, this is a novel (in three volumes) that is not universally loved (in fact, a reviewer for The Atlantic calls it the biggest literary letdown of 2011). I can see why. And yet, I really liked it.

Let me begin with my two complaints, and then I can wax lyrical about this work. 1Q84 is a long book, and I often felt that it was longer than it needed to be. While Murakami is a very competent writer, and while his descriptions are often vivid and powerful, he sometimes has the tendency to go on a bit. Every now and them – often enough to annoy me, unfortunately – he launches into descriptions of characters, places, or events that go on for a bit, and there is a tendency to revisit key scenes without actually bringing much new information to those scenes. This is part of his artistic expression, certainly, but it didn’t work for me.

For all the length of the book, however, I also felt that some threads remained loose at the end, with only hints at how they were meant to tie up. There is a clear parallel to the central story within the story here, but it still gnawed at me when I had finished the book.

(Oh, and at one point, the narrator makes an inconsistent intrusion into the narrative, but that’s a minor point, and the single occurrence rather emphasises the consistency of the narration; after all, Tolkien made more such mistakes than that.)

This said, I quite enjoyed this book. With its parallel world, supernatural beings, magic, and paranormal powers, it is undenyably a fantasy story. At the same time, it is so straight-forwardly written, that at times, it feels as if it is completely unaware of the genre’s existence. At other times, the text enters a conscious debate with the genre in particular and literary writing in general.

The story consists of two major story-lines, to which a third is later added. Each story-line is presented from a particular character’s perspective. Tengo is a young man who teaches part-time at a cram school and spends the rest of his time trying to become a writer. Aomame is a young woman who works as a gym instructor and assassinates wife-batterers on the side. Their lives are ordered and controlled, but descend into confusion and chaos when they are dragged into events in some way concerning a strange cult/religion called Sakigake.

Unlike much fantasy, in which we expect the magical to happen, Murakami so focuses on the mundane, everyday normality of his Tokyo characters that when mystery is insidously introduced, it feels truly mysterious. That the occasional spokespersons for the fantastic (as it were) crop up to deliver infodumps so the reader and the protagonists can get up to speed with what’s happening does not detract from this sense of mystery; in fact, these infodumps are delivered in such a drawn out or convoluted manner that they feel almost banal (I did shout ”Get on with it!” at one occasion), but mostly, that’s actually for the better.

A further aspect of the novel that I found intriguing was the many explicit discussions of writing. Both Tengo and Aomame get into conversations about how to write fiction. Tengo, in rewriting the fantasy story Air Chrysalis, has to deal with the methods of writing the fantastic — how, for instance, does one portray a world with two moons to people used to only one? — and Aomame repetedly considers Chekhov’s gun: is it true that once a gun is introduced in a story, it must be fired? In dealing with this, Murakami offers his own interpretation of Chekhov’s dictum.

The title suggests obvious parallels with Orwells 1984 and (despite what Allen Barra suggests in his Atlantic review) it is easy to see numerous allusions. Yet, I’m tempted to read it from a traditional fantasy perspective, too, something the reader is clearly invited to do (but which mr Barra failed to see, regrettably). Despite the apparent ”fantasy innocence”, there is a commentary here on the way the genre borrows from myths and stories to make them their own. Even the powers of stories (there are several) are displayed, discussed, used. Reading 1Q84 from a mainstream perspective may fail to satisfy. As an attempt to negotiate between fantastic and mimetic, I found it fascinating.

I warmly recommend this book, but only if you can read it at a leisurly pace. It is a story that takes its time. The plot is moving slowly ahead, constantly switching story line and perspective, naming only the most vital characters. If one is prepared to accept this, however, it is a rewarding read.

Setting up for ICFA 33

For two days, I have helped setting up the book room for the up-coming International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Several tonnes of books (literally) have been brought and unpacked, all of them of or on the fantastic in some way or other. Some of these books can be seen in the picture below (including also David Hartwell and his team, including Stefan Ingstrand, holding up a piece of newly acquired artwork.)