The Tangleroot Palace
Marjorie Liu
Titan Books
320 pages
Review by Veronika Groke
In The Tangeroot Palace, American novelist and comic book writer Marjorie Liu brings together seven short stories originally published at different points between 2009 and 2016. As one could expect, the resulting collection is eclectic, each story, in Liu’s own words, ‘capturing a different stage of me, who I was, who I was becoming.’
Like in all collections of this kind, not all stories are equally strong, though opinions of which ones fall into which category are likely to vary. In her introduction, Liu names the first story, ‘Sympathy for the Bones’, as one of her own all-time favourites; however, while I enjoyed the story’s dark subject matter (a young apprentice witch seeks the forgiveness of those she helps kill with the help of home-made hoodoo dolls to ensure her own safety), I didn’t get on with its stylistic idiosyncrasies. The odd grammar Liu has her first-person narrator talk in gave me the impression of sloppy editing, and I was bracing myself for a rough reading ride — only to be floored by the second story, ‘The Briar and the Rose’.
Throwing in some elements from Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin for good measure, ‘The Briar…’ takes the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty and inverts it to create a story that is simultaneously deeply familiar and breathtakingly new. The princess is still asleep in the tower, waiting to be rescued, but any prince-like characters the story has to offer are marginal figures unlikely to rise to the occasion. Rather, Liu presents us with a scenario in which not only the roles of victim and villain, but also that of hero, are taken on by women. Briar the Duelist is rather more interesting than your usual Prince Charming: a taciturn, ruthless mercenary with a tender streak who believes as much in the power of knowledge as in that of the sword, she is an unstraightforward hero whose heroism is thrust upon her purely by circumstance.
In the following story, ‘The Light and the Fury’, we encounter another reluctant hero, albeit in a very different setting. In an alternate history in which China is at war with Britain over dominance of the Pacific, war hero and super soldier Xīng MacNamara struggles to come to grips with her own identity as she is forced to confront both the enemy and her own past. This is where we begin to get an idea of the full extent of Liu’s mastery: though dealing with similar themes and characters as the previous stories, ‘The Light…’ is written in a very different style. Liu, it turns out, is a writer who can pull off a vast range of genres equally convincingly, from fairytale and fantasy to Southern Gothic and hard-boiled science fiction. Her stories almost seem made from different fabrics: some, like ’Sympathy…’ or ‘After the Blood’, are dark, heavy, and dripping like treacle, putting me in mind of Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice or Neil Gaiman at his best; others, like ‘The Last Dignity of Man’, are crisp and modern like the cloth in an expensive suit.
Perhaps not all that surprising, considering that Liu is a self‑confessed comics nerd (and one who writes for Marvel Comics, no less), the nature of heroism, and the question of what makes a hero (or villain, or monster), constitute a recurrent theme in the collection. The protagonist of ‘The Last Dignity…’ adds another level of mindbendingness to this theme by undermining the distinction between heroes and villains altogether. Successful businessman Alexander Lutheran is a self-styled Lex Luthor who fantasizes about finding a ‘real-life’ Superman to be his love interest. Starting off with the suggestion that Alexander’s motivation for this pursuit is purely amorous, the story soon turns in on itself to reveal that what’s really driving him above all else is his nagging moral conscience: convinced of his own failings as a human being, Alexander is obsessed with the idea that, if he himself doesn’t have it in him to be a superhero, it is his duty to become a supervillain so as to flush out a real superhero who will not only save him, but also the world as a whole.
Rather than a flawed hero struggling to be ‘good’, what we get is a flawed villain struggling to be ‘evil’. In a similar vein, the wonderfully dark ‘After the Blood’ leads us down the well-trodden zombie apocalypse path (a virus killed off large parts of the population, changing the survivors in monstrous ways), only to confront us with the uncomfortable truth that some of them were, in fact, monsters all along. In prose that is delicious in some places (‘her blood was heavy as honey’), refreshingly original in others (‘Henry was a good-looking man when he wasn’t burned alive’), Liu draws her readers into worlds that uncompromisingly operate according to their own logics by often presenting unexpected conclusions in disarmingly commonsensical ways: after the zombie apocalypse, Amish people will inherit the power because they know how to farm and live without electricity; genetically engineered monster worms deserve sympathy when maltreated; vampires and werewolves aren’t magical, they’re ‘just other kinds of people’.
Along with her remarkable versatility as a writer, it is her ability to make readers question the seemingly obvious that sets Liu’s stories apart from others of the same kind. Liu doesn’t do twist endings as much as stories that are twisted all the way through, like the branches in the eponymous Tangleroot Forest. Yet while Liu’s characters may occasionally get lost in the woods, her storylines never do. Charming and menacing to equal degrees, they confidently invite her readers to follow along and embrace the darkness within.
Braking Day
Adam Oyebanji
Jo Fletcher Books
359pages, 2022.
Review by Duncan Lunan
Braking Day is set in a fleet of three multi-generation starships on approach to Tau Ceti. It’s not a starship novel like Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky or Aldiss’s Non-Stop: the characters know where they are, what they’re doing and what’s to happen next - the title is not a misprint. There are plenty of convincing details to confirm that: the Home Star (never Earth) is correctly placed in Boötes, and the Destination Star’s system is correctly described as ‘dirty’, filled with comets, asteroids and dust, so the approach is going to be tricky. There’s a lot of work for the engineers in readying the ships for the big day – the spin of the inhabited wheels has to be stopped and the main drive fired up for the first time in years. Understandably, with spares in short supply, their motto is “Try not to break stuff”.
The ships are big: they carry thousands of people, in counter-rotating wheels like Stanford Torus habitats, enough to avoid the dangers of genetic drift in a small population after landing, and enough to absorb the losses of an impact in flight which has killed hundreds in one wheel and rendered another almost useless. Though not identified, the propulsion system has a big engine bell aft, acceleration is at a significant fraction of a gravity, there’s an intense radiation flux during it, there’s a long spine of fuel tanks between the drive and the habitat wheels, yet the subsequent radiation is low enough for the engine room (which has ‘sub-coils’) to be visited, even sabotaged. By a process of elimination, it has to be beefed-up pulsed fusion like the British Interplanetary Society’s ‘Project Daedalus’ study. My one quibble is that all they know about the Destination Planet is that it exists, is roughly Earth-sized, and has comparable temperatures with methane and ammonia in the atmosphere. Even for a planet as small as Earth, at 12 light-years’ distance we could tell most if not all of that, if not now then very shortly, with the ground and space-based telescopes coming online in the next few years.
In the 1967 discussions which led to my book Man and the Stars (Souvenir Press, 1974), after we had been briefed on ‘Life, as we know it’, by the late John W. Macvey of Saltcoats, the late Andy Nimmo argued that the ‘foreseeable mission’ based on near-future technology was unworkable, both practically and politically. An ‘acceptable’ interstellar colonisation mission would require not just preliminary reconnaissance but experimental bases, and rapid links to Earth to deal with unexpected contingencies – in other words, faster-than-light travel. We got a lot of flak for continuing the discussions regardless.
As in Edward Ashton’s recent novel Mickey7, what has motivated the launch of a foreseeable mission is the likelihood of totally destructive war on Earth, and in Braking Day there’s a similar situation. There are no messages from ‘the Homeworld’, nor any expectation of them, at any point. The conflict, which had reached a near-religious intensity, was between those who accepted the use of LOKIs, Loosely Organised Kinetic Intelligences (near-autonomous robots), and those who regarded them as a fundamental threat to the human mind and spirit. What most of the Braking Day characters don’t know is that there was a fourth ship, a lot larger and crewed by the pro-LOKI faction, also heading for Tau Ceti. The intellectual disagreement became hatred when plague broke out on the fourth ship and the fleet refused to accept refugees, even children, even when sent on one-way trips across. That ship has now gone dark, and the survivors aboard are planning a long-delayed revenge.
One detail on which our 1967 discussion group disagreed with John Macvey was his insistence that starships would need strict military-style disciple, including the death penalty for insubordination. Within the Braking Day fleet, this has polarised into a caste system of officers and crew locked in mutual contempt. The central character, Ravi, is ‘crew’, but has antagonised both sides by qualifying for engineer training – technically an officer’s post, but there are gradings even among those. The crew includes petty criminals like his father, who pushed his luck too far and got recycled – so most of his family despise him, with only his dissenter cousin Boz still on his side, while his girlfriend, who’s an officer, is two-timing him and laughing at his aspirations behind his back. Actually, she’s a member of a supposedly environmentalist group, who like their privileges the way they are and want the voyage to continue indefinitely – that’s why she conned him into a clandestine visit to the engine room.
Then he begins to have headaches, then visions and finally nightmares, caused by a dissenter in the hidden ship’s crew, who’s trying to warn him through his implants about the coming conflict…
From there on it gets complicated, and continues to the end as a page-turner which I won’t spoil. The only thing to mar my enjoyment was a set of increasingly coy references in the names. The hidden starship is called the Newton, so its core computer is referred to as ‘Isaac’ – fair enough. But on both ships, one of the principal families is called ‘Ansimov’; and one of the more prominent LOKIs is called ‘Olimaw’. It had me wondering if Ravi’s ship’s computer was called ‘Archie’ in tribute to the late Archie Roy, Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow Uni and himself a writer of SF and supernatural thrillers. But no, it’s because the ship is called Archimedes.
The Other Side of the Interface
Duncan Lunan
Other Side Books, 2020
Review by Phil Nicholls
This collection of seven short stories, plus drabbles, is very much a continuation of Lunan’s earlier collection From the Moon to the Stars (Other Side Books 2019). The stories in Other Side are divided into three parts, with the first having the strongest link to his earlier collection. Here we have four more stories in Lunan’s interface setting introduced in part two of From the Moon.
The latest interface stories follow a similar style, with McKay and the RLV spaceship combining rescues and exploration in vividly described settings. ‘The Galilean Problem’ dives into Jupiter’s atmosphere, while ‘How to Blow Up an Asteroid’ is a tense story about saving Earth.
‘Raltenna Warning’ set on the planet Doon expands the galactic politics of the interface setting and doubles as a prelude to the longer ‘Raltenna Takeover’, a 90-page story. Here the Earth is under attack from sinister aliens. Lunan probably had enough material for a novel, but chose a succinct writing style, briefly describing action scenes that another writer might have extended, such as this dogfight in the RLV:
“He got behind two more transports and sent them flaming earthwards, ignoring a fresh missile attack from astern.”
The three stories in part 2 represent the broad range of Lunan’s writings. ‘The Square Fella’ gives too much away in the title, but was my highlight of the collection. The science remained strong, mixed with an unusual setting and fascinating concepts. The story ended leaving me wanting more.
‘The Great Australian Vampire’ also suffers from a spoilery title, although the strong setting and engaging characters breathe life into the story. Finally, ‘Glasgow’s Forgotten Castles’ is a light-hearted re-imagining of the city’s history, more humorous non-fiction than a conventional story.
As explained in part 3, drabbles are exactly 100-word stories, with the name taken from a Monty Python sketch. Lunan includes four drabbles in Other Side, as excellent examples of the sub-genre. These days they would be called flash fiction, but I think the term drabbles has more charm.
Another highlight of the collection was the extensive writer’s notes included after every story. Lunan offers both the history and context of the story, as well as more conventional insights into the process of writing each one. As with the previous collection, these far-ranging notes represent engaging snapshots of Lunan’s journey as a writer and glimpses of the state of SF through the 1970s.
Science Fiction is always in a conversation with itself and Lunan notes how the title for The Other Side of the Interface is a response to Arthur C. Clarke’s Other Side of the Stars. This collection is in the same style as Clarke, especially the RLV stories, with a solid foundation in science.
Interface completes the reprinting of Lunan’s earlier stories and the two volumes represent so much SF history from the 1970s. Both collections have much to offer for SF historians and fans alike.
The Kaiju Preservation Society
John Scalzi
Tor/Macmillan
272 pages, 2022
Review by Joe Gordon
Jamie (whose gender is never explicitly mentioned) has put up with corporate nonsense and an entitled trust-fund owner of the tech start-up they are working at, to try and get ahead, only to find themselves laid off, right as the Covid nightmare is manifesting and Lockdown beckons. The only job they can find is delivering food during the Lockdown, and in a bitter irony for a company that her former tech company did the software for. Depressing as this is, it does lead to the happy accident of delivering to someone – Tom – who turns out to be someone they vaguely know, a friend of a friend sort of thing. And on hearing of Jamie’s recent employment woes, Tom reveals the animal protection charity he works for has been left short-handed at the last minute and he’d much rather have someone he knows if he can manage it.
Tom can’t tell her the full details, it is all very secretive, but it involves working with “large animals”, Jamie’s work would mostly be grunt work of helping to move stuff and supporting the science and tech teams, and the remuneration package is superb. Grabbing this offer, Jamie is soon given numerous shots for various diseases – including an early form of the Covid vaccine, not yet out to the public – and bundled off with a team of returning staff and some other new recruits to an airbase in Greenland.
The destination seems puzzling – what large animals are they working with here? But Greenland is just a way-point – from here they take a special portal, one of just a handful secreted around the globe, to, well, Earth. Except this is a parallel Earth, one where giant monsters, the eponymous Kaiju – are the dominant species. It transpires there are indeed numerous parallel worlds to our reality, but this is the only one we’ve been able to access, and only since the Atomic Age: nuclear energy, especially large-scale explosions, thins the walls between the worlds for a while. In fact one 1950s A-bomb test in the Pacific brought over a Kaiju looking for a radioactive snack, only to encounter the US Navy (yes, in this world the inspiration for Godzilla were the stories that leaked of this Kaiju incursion!).
In Scalzi’s world one of the reasons the atomic test ban treaties were agreed by world powers was not just for safety in our world, but to prevent more of these enormous creatures coming through – imagine if one entered our world near a major city. Of course only a few people know the reality behind this – the organisation, a number of senior members of world governments, and a few big corporate heads who also donate to the budget for operations (nice parallel to the billionaires having their rocket-measuring competitions at the moment, and yes these CEOs are just as big a bunch of numpties as you’d expect).
While bad things can and do happen to good people, for the most part this is a joyful romp of a book – it’s laced with a lot of humour (which will not surprise many Scalzi regulars), and the main characters (and even most of the supporting cast) are immensely likeable and indeed, loveable. Actually, I came away from this with the sort of warm feelings for the characters as I have from Becky Chambers’ wonderful books, while Scalzi also works in some sound ecological themes and the sheer sense of wonder at such creatures really existing.
In an afterword, Scalzi reveals this was not the book he was originally writing; he was partway through something far darker when Covid hit. Lockdown, then falling ill himself, then a computer failure eating several thousand words of the work in progress, and he realised he just couldn’t finish it. Tor was understanding – it has been a weird two years for everyone – and with the weight of that book lifted from him, the Kaiju story popped into his head, and he wrote it swiftly, offering up instead of that grim, dark tale, something full of wonder and joy and humour. I don’t think I realised how much I needed this book, it left me content and smiling. An utter delight.