Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body

Posted on 7 April 2018 by Barbara Howe

In Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body by New Zealand-born author Simon Petrie, hard science fiction intersects with another of my favourite genres, crime fiction. In a mining colony on Titan, Saturn’s moon, a young woman, Tanja Morgenstein, walks out of an air lock and takes off her helmet. Psychologist Guerline Scarfe is simply doing her job, as required by the local law, in investigating the reasons for Tanja’s suicide. She is not, at first, overly surprised by Tanja’s wealthy parents’ resistance—they are, after all, in shock over losing their daughter—but her concern grows as she probes deeper and their hostility turns to threats.

Throw in a dead brother, a traumatised boyfriend, pressure from Gureline’s boss to drop the investigation, and a nail-biting nighttime flight across Titan’s frozen landscape, and you have a classic detective story with a savage, high-tech twist. It’s no surprise to me that the story won this year’s Sir Julius Vogel award for Best Novella. I look forward to reading more about Guerline Scarfe.

Audience: Suitable for teens and up. No sex and minimal implied violence.

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ConClave3

Posted on 2 April 2018 by Barbara Howe

ConClave3, New Zealand’s 39th National Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, was held this past weekend in Auckland. I did not, as I had hoped, win a Sir Julius Vogel award for either Best New Talent or Best Youth Novel (for The Locksmith), but simply being a finalist was a good thing, and losing to Gareth Ward is a respectable outcome. I’m a third of the way through his The Traitor and the Thief and quite enjoying it.

I came back loaded with enough suggestions for interesting authors and books to read that exploring them all will probably keep me busy until next year’s convention, GeyserCon in Rotorua. Along with all the others already on my To Be Read pile, I’m unlikely to ever run out of new books to read.

We indulged ourselves a little on Monday and did something we’d been talking about doing ever since we moved to Wellington: we took the train (the Northern Explorer) home from Auckland. It made for a long day, not helped by the delays introduced by work crews taking advantage of the reduced traffic on the long Easter weekend to make repairs on the rail lines, but it was a pleasant, relaxing way to travel. The weather was good, giving us many panoramic views, including this nice one of Mt Ruapehu.

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In Memoriam

Posted on 10 March 2018 by Barbara Howe

Two weeks ago, the world lost a wonderful teacher.

In her ninety years, Sarah Lucinda Davison Howe touched many lives. As a professional, early in her career she taught in the public schools and later gave music lessons out of her home. She taught reading as a volunteer for the Gaston County Literacy Council and Sunday School as a volunteer for her church. Those weren’t her only volunteer efforts: she served as a Certified Lay Pastor, she sang in the choir, and seemed to have a hand in just about every facet of church life.

She slowed down as she aged, but well into her eighties she was still playing piano for Sunday services in the retirement home where she spent her last years.

She was never loud or pushy or self-aggrandising. When others recognised her efforts, she didn’t quite know what to do with the praise. The Rotary Club honoured her for her years of volunteer labour for the Literacy Council, but the plaque naming her a Paul Harris Fellow never got hung on the wall; her walls and dresser tops were filled with photos of family and her older daughter’s paintings. She was one of the legions of quiet, dedicated, extraordinary ordinary people who go about the hard work, day in and day out, year after year, of making their community, and the world, a better place.

We’ll miss you, Mama.

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WOW

Posted on 17 February 2018 by Barbara Howe

We were down on the South Island this past week, taking a short family vacation before delivering our daughter to the University of Canterbury for the start of the school year. For me, the highlight of the trip was the WOW museum in Nelson, and getting to see some astonishing examples of creativity and craftsmanship up close.

My daughter and I both came away inspired, with our heads full of ideas. Over the next few days, while we rolled through the gorgeous South Island countryside or soaked in the thermal pools at Hanmer Springs, I dreamed about what one could do with quilting and appliqué; she hunched over her laptop, drawing costumes involving scale mail and dragon wings, inspired by a different WoW (World of Warcraft).

Will either of us ever have the time and skill to pursue any of these ideas and bring them to fruition? Maybe. More likely not. But it’s still fun to dream.

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Year of Wonders

Posted on 3 February 2018 by Barbara Howe

The year is 1665. Bubonic plague is sweeping through London. Further to the north, in Derbyshire, the plague comes to the mining village of Eyam through a delivery of flea-infested cloth. The journeyman tailor sewing the cloth sickens and dies, but the villagers ignore his pleas that they burn the clothes he made for them, and the disease spreads.

This much is historical fact. So are the events that follow, making this such an unusual story. The current Church of England rector and the former Puritan minister together persuade the villagers to quarantine themselves, allowing no one to enter or leave the village until the disease has run its course, to prevent the plague from spreading further and potentially killing many more. The quarantine does, however, mean that many who might otherwise flee and survive, instead stay and die. Before the quarantine is lifted, more than a year after the first death, at least 260 people die, out of a population somewhere between 350 and 800 (the records don’t all agree).

These are the bare dry bones of history. In the novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, that story meets literature and becomes art. Those bones take on flesh and blood, and become living people. This is a beautifully written, moving account narrated by a young widow, Anna Frith, who works as a servant for the rector and his wife. It is a tale of grief and loss, anger and horror, fortitude and endurance. It is about loss—of friends, family, and faith—and about self-discovery and finding new reasons to live when the worst that could happen has come and gone. It is a bit slow-moving, but there’s plenty of drama along the way: love, lust, jealousy, murder, madness, opium-infused dreams, a witch hunt, and a harrowing descent into a lead mine.

The story starts near the end, after the quarantine has been lifted, with the heroic rector non-functional, having lost his religion along with his wife. It then steps back a year earlier, before the plague arrived, travels forward linearly, and comes back to the narrative starting point about thirty page from the end.

For the majority of the book—up until the last fifty pages—it was a lovely story, telling the tale of ordinary people under extreme pressure, with both villains and heroes, selfishness and generosity. The main complaint I had—a minor one I was more than willing to forgive—was that the narrator’s voice was too sophisticated, and with far too large a vocabulary and too modern a mindset, for the woman she was supposed to be: an 18-year-old miner’s widow who had never been far from her village, and who had only lately learned to read.

And then, unfortunately, in the last 50 pages (out of 308), the story went off the rails. Perhaps the author couldn’t figure out how to build to a climax rather than having the story just end or peter out, but the result is not a satisfying conclusion. Drama turns into melodrama, characters behave out of character, and the story morphs into some sort of action-adventure/bad romance mashup. The epilogue, in particular, came out of nowhere and was completely unbelievable. I’m taking a star off my Goodreads rating for that alone.

Some other reviewers felt that the ending ruined the whole book. I didn’t. I feel the rest of the book has enough merit before to make up for the disappointing ending. Just be forewarned.

Audience: Adult. Some violence, non-graphic sex, graphic descriptions of the effects of the disease.

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The Five Hundred Kingdoms

Posted on 20 January 2018 by Barbara Howe

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sucker for fairy tales. It shouldn’t be surprising then that Mercedes Lackey’s Five Hundred Kingdoms series appeals to me. In this fantasy world, the magic system is The Tradition: a mindless force that tries to push people’s lives down familiar pathways: Sleeping Beauty, the Crystal Mountain, etc.

Unfortunately, The Tradition doesn’t care if the story has a happy ending or a tragic one, and sometimes the pressure pushing someone in one direction builds to the breaking point when the story doesn’t quite fit. Like Elena in The Fairy Godmother who should have been Cinderella, if her prince hadn’t been eleven years old.

This is where the godmothers and other intermediaries between the humans and the fae come in, to steer stories towards happy ending by manipulating or diverting The Tradition, or even occasionally breaking the old patterns and creating new ones.

The Tradition is a clever idea, and the world of the Five Hundred Kingdoms gives Lackey free rein to have fun exploring and combining a wide assortment of fairy tales.  Beauty and the Werewolf, for example, is a mashup of werewolf stories, Little Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast. The sources are mostly northern European, but she also draws from Greek and Japanese traditions, and possibly others that I didn’t notice.

There are a half-dozen books in this series, starting with The Fairy Godmother, and they are all light, fluffy fun with happy endings. Or maybe not so light—The Fairy Godmother is nearly 500 pages—but they are easy reads, and after blogging about the Children of the Black Sun in the last post, I needed that.

They do, however, have a few problems:

  • They remind me of this quote: if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. Lackey is a very prolific author, publishing at the rate of five or six books a year, and it shows. They could all have used another editing pass, trimming out redundancies and tightening the story by fifty to a hundred pages. Catching some of the internal consistency errors, sloppy writing, and typos would have been nice, too.
  • Beauty and the Werewolf is really annoying, mainly because it rather misses the point of both the werewolf and Beauty and the Beast stories. The beast should be a riveting and, at least initially, morally ambiguous character; this one is dull, and upstaged by his half-brother.
  • And finally, there are sex scenes in at least two: The Fairy Godmother and Fortune’s Fool. (There may be others. I don’t remember; it’s been a while since I’ve read the whole series.) The scenes are short and easily skipped, but seemed jarringly out of step with the tone of the rest of the material, which would otherwise have been suitable for even pre-teens. Moreover—and more unforgivably—the romance in The Fairy Godmother equates lust with love and glosses over sexual assault. (So does Beauty and the Werewolf.) I realise this is not uncommon in the romance genre, and this series is published by Luna Books, an imprint of Harlequin, but this may be part of why I don’t read much in that genre, despite loving a good romance.

Audience: Varies. Minimal violence, but a few sex scenes.

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Children of the Black Sun

Posted on 12 January 2018 by Barbara Howe

What choices can you make when there are no acceptable choices left? That seems to be the question raised in Australian author Jo Spurrier’s Children of the Black Sun trilogy.

This is one of the best fantasies I have read in years, and deserves a wider audience outside of Australia than it seems to have gotten, but it is not for the faint-hearted. Engrossing? Yes. Gory? That, too. Dark and gritty? Absolutely.

Once protected by powerful mages, the Ricalani people abandoned magic a century ago, making them ripe for plunder. In a three-way war, the Ricalanis are struggling against cultural obliteration as they are slowly overwhelmed by the conquering Mesentrian’s encroaching settlers, or are carried off as slaves to the neighbouring Ashkarian empire.

The main characters are all, in one way or another, badly damaged, both physically and emotionally. There is Sierra, a natural mage, who draws power from the sensations, both pleasure and pain, of others. Isidro, a fugitive nobleman, was a warrior until the villains of the story crippled him, a cruelty compounded by the unforgiving landscape that gives the inhabitants no resources to spare for unproductive adults. And finally there is Rasten, both abuser and abused, awaiting his opportunity to turn on his master, the king’s chief torturer.

I can’t, in a few paragraphs, do justice to the plot, but in a nutshell, it was about underdogs standing up for themselves and the people they cared about. What else was it about? Pain and endurance. Revenge, forgiveness, and redemption. Betrayal and trust. Teamwork, leadership, and brotherly love. Sadism and compassion. Oh, and did I mention pain?

One of the aspects of this story I liked is the nuanced view of the parties in the conflict. There is one unredeemable villain but most are somewhere on the spectrum, neither entirely good nor evil. They are simply human beings, on all sides, all caught in brutalising circumstances that leave them few options. Actions that might seem despicable are sometimes, in context, rational.

Spurrier has done a superb job of world-building. Her writing abounds with sensory details, from the crunch of snow underfoot to the smell of freshly cut spruce, that make her subarctic world believable. You can almost feel the cold creeping into your bones as the protagonists skulk through the woods in their winter whites.

And then there are the women: Sierra, Delphine, Mirasada, Nirveli, and other minor characters, all terrific.

There are three books in this series: Winter Be My Shield, Black Sun Light My Way, and North Star Guide Me Home. (Love those titles!) But don’t be fooled by the packaging; this is one long story (~1300 pages of it) in three volumes. The first book ends in a cliffhanger, and there is only a partial resolution at the end of the second. If I had realised that before I started, I might not have read the first book then, but a hundred pages in, I was committed. I had to find out how it turned out.

It is fair to say they are not consistently page turners. I read them in fits and starts, at some points flying through the pages and staying up too late reading; at other times I got bogged down in the political manoeuvrings or repetitious misery. There were several times when I had as much as I could stand of the agonies these poor people suffered, and I set the book aside for a week or three until I could face them again. I started Winter Be My Shield in September, and finished North Star Guide Me Home in December—not quite four months. Even though I put them aside a few times, I kept coming back because I couldn’t get this story out of my head.

Audience: Adult. Violence, gore, sexual abuse, physical and psychological torture. Lots of it.

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Happy Holidays

Posted on 22 December 2017 by Barbara Howe

It’s warm summer weather here in Wellington, with the pōhutukawa trees (also known as the Kiwi Christmas trees) in full bloom.

I don’t expect to be posting as regularly for the next couple of months—I’ve been working too hard, and want to relax a bit and enjoy the fine weather while it lasts. So, for now, I wish everyone reading my blog a safe and happy holiday season, whatever holiday it is you celebrate.

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Turning over a new Leaf

Posted on 16 December 2017 by Barbara Howe

I’ve turned over a new Leaf, and will no longer be burning fossil fuels on my daily trek to work.

To be accurate, my all-electric Nissan Leaf is not new; it’s a 2014 model with 40,000 km on the odometer, but it’s new to me, and I’m enjoying it. It’s fun to drive. Due to technology limitations and trade-offs between battery weight and range, older electric cars had a reputation for being a bit pokey, but that’s no longer true. If you don’t believe it, watch this video of the first electric car to win the Pikes Peak Hill Climb (2015). Don’t watch if you’re prone to motion sickness. (I’ve been up Pikes Peak, by the way. That road gave me the willies even at a crawl.)

The car in that race was a one-of-a-kind, to be sure, but these days high-end electric cars perform as well as high-end conventional cars. My family sedan isn’t a Tesla, but when I stomp on the accelerator, it moves. It’s got more than enough pep for a commuter car, and it sails right on up Tinakori hill, at the end of my homeward journey, with much less obvious effort than my old car did.

Electric vehicles (EVs) may be pricier up front, but are less expensive to run, especially when you factor in lower maintenance costs from fewer moving parts. A recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists shows that even in the U.S., where gasoline is cheaper than the global average[1], EVs are a good economic choice as well as being better for the environment. As the cost of solar power continues to drop, battery technology continues to improve, and as more EVs become available, the cost of ownership will keep doing down. Here in New Zealand, where most of our electricity comes from renewable sources, the choice will soon be a no-brainer. EVs are the future.

[1] Fuel prices: at around 2 NZD per litre for petrol (gasoline) here in Wellington, and an exchange rate of 1.00 NZD == 0.70 USD, that’s about $5.30 US per gallon. The current global average is about 1.10 USD per litre.

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Gaudy Night

Posted on 9 December 2017 by Barbara Howe

I’ve already written about Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, but Gaudy Night, the penultimate book in the series, deserves a post of its own. Gaudy Night does not conform to genre conventions. Yes, it is a mystery, but it is also much, much more: a literary novel containing a story of a woman coming to terms with both her past and her future, a reflection on a writer’s role in giving life to fictional characters, and one of the best romances I’ve ever read, between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane.

Although Lord Peter appears in it, it’s really Harriet’s story. Returning to her alma mater at Oxford for an alumnae reunion (the titular Gaudy Night), Harriet is apprehensive about how she will be received. She has, after all, in the years since she graduated, been on trial for murder and had her scandalous personal life splashed across the tabloid headlines. (Remember that in the 1930s an unmarried woman living with a man would be a social outcast.) On her arrival, she is surprised to find that the dons (the teachers) are glad to see her. Shortly afterwards, when a nasty prankster with a poison pen begins making trouble at the college, they ask for her help. Harriet returns and takes up residence, ostensibly doing research for a book, but really to nose out trouble. She turns to Lord Peter for help as the malicious behaviour escalates, and she herself is attacked with murderous intent.

Anyone looking for a fast-paced thriller with lots of gore, forget it, and if you value plot over character development, this probably isn’t for you either. By modern crime novel standards, Gaudy Night is slow-moving and almost non-violent. One character is driven to attempt suicide and Harriet is injured, but no one dies.

Personally, I remember characters, not plots. If a writer’s work doesn’t include memorable characters, I won’t be back for more, no matter how intricate or surprising the plot is, but this book is one I have reread several times. Part of the appeal, particularly for aspiring writers, is watching Harriet struggle to bring her fictional characters to life, to make them well-rounded, believable human beings. Harriet Vane can be seen as Sayers’ alter ego, wrestling with the same problems Sayers wrestled with, and, we might hope, succeeding as well as Sayers did.

Audience: Teen and up. No sex, minimal violence.

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