Dec 07 2018

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Not every fantasy features swords and sorcery, though most of them involve a mythical creature of one sort or another. Amor Towles names his in the title: A Gentleman in Moscow. In midsummer 1922, following a brief trial, Count Alexander Rostov is not ordered immediately shot as a class enemy. It seems that senior Bolsheviks value a pre-revolutionary poem that appeared under his byline, and so the usual punishment is held in abeyance. Instead, he is marched out of the Kremlin and ordered to return to the Hotel Metropol, where he has spent the previous four years. He is further ordered to remain inside the hotel for the rest of his natural life. If he sets foot outside of it again, revolutionary justice will take its course, and he will be shot.

The Party has left him his life, but it does not leave him the luxurious suite where he had lived since 1918. He is required to relocate to a small room in the attic, near the utility stairs. “Up they wound three flights to where a door opened on a narrow corridor servicing a bathroom and six bedrooms reminiscent of monastic cells. This attic was originally built to house the butlers and ladies’ maids of the Metropol’s guests, but when the practice of traveling with servants fell out of fashion, the unused rooms had been claimed by the caprices of casual urgency—thenceforth warehousing scraps of lumber, broken furniture, and other assorted debris.” (pp. 10–11) That small room is to be the Count’s indefinite home, the hotel the limit of his world.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/07/a-gentleman-in-moscow-by-amor-towles/

Dec 02 2018

Night of Stone by Catherine Merridale

“We made the journey in 1997, at the end of October. The winter had set in early that year, and even St Petersburg had its first covering of snow. Outside the city, and especially as we travelled north, the snow had taken over the landscape completely, levelling the gentle contours of the forest floor and turning the black pines a brilliant white. We had left the city at midnight, and now, as the late sun rose, we were already in another world. Lake Onega lay becalmed, a dead sea of rose and grey-blue. ‘It’s like a fairy story, isn’t it?’ whispered one of my neighbours [on the train]. The remark would have been banal in any other setting. But the woman who had said it, a paediatrician in her thirties, was trying to control fresh tears. It is hard to find things to say when you are on your way to a mass grave, the burial place of murdered grandparents whom you never knew. There are no social conventions to cover unmourned loss. ‘They brought them here in their shirts, you know’ she continued. ‘It must have been so cold. They would have been frightened, wouldn’t they?’ …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/02/night-of-stone-by-catherine-merridale/

Nov 30 2018

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

Connie Willis at her best tells tales of engaging characters in surprising situations and then lands an emotional blow that can still be felt a decade or more later. I can’t, offhand, think of another author who has done what Willis does two-thirds of the way through Passage. When she’s merely very good, Willis can do anything from a romp to a heartfelt sideways look at people and research, or a screwball comedy trying to get out of a Hollywood dystopia. Even Willis that I think ought to be pared down a great deal offers lovely moments, and a strong ending.

Crosstalk ramps up the madcap, throws in a good bit of family, and leavens it with some interesting almost-here tech crossed with the all-too-believable speed and dysfunction of the contemporary tech industry. Briddey Flannigan is a manager at Commspan, a telecommunications company that feels a lot like the labs in Bellwether. Lots of people are very busy, but only a few are actually getting things done. Briddey, as Willis refers to her throughout the book, is in middle management, and is romantically involved with Trent Worth, a senior vice president. The company is a fishbowl of intrigue and gossip, but that’s nothing compared to the intrusiveness of Briddey’s family. They are a large and loud Irish-American clan, with everybody up in everybody’s else’s business, particularly some the aunts who promote an Irishness that people from actual Éire would be hard pressed to recognize.

The first chapters send up the intersection of office life, technology, and romance. The characters around Briddey are so full of their own preconceptions and concerns that Briddey can barely get a word in edgewise, let alone get anyone to actually listen to what she is saying — one of the many forms of crosstalk that fill the novel. The company also has a resident reclusive genius who’s skeptical of the very tech that he is instrumental in developing; but he’s not so skeptical that he won’t deliver a new wow product to keep Commspan riding the wave. Among the aunts, mom, cousins and siblings of her voluble clan, Briddey has a niece, Maeve, who is a girl tech genius with a mischievous streak, “The last time [Briddey had] been with the family, Maeve had done something to her phone so that half the time it said it was [Trent] when it wasn’t, and Briddey hadn’t been able to fix it.” (Ch. 1)

The latest rage in this near-future world is the EED, a supposedly minor surgical procedure to implant a device that will enhance an emotional connection with someone who has received a matching device by enabling direct transmission of feelings. It’s not meant to be telepathy, but the next best thing. As Crosstalk opens, Briddey and Trent have just agreed to get implants, presumably as a prelude to marriage and happily-ever-after, along with all the fruits of success at Commspan. Things go wrong, of course.

Briddey starts hearing voices, not just the vague feelings the EED is supposed to transmit, and the one voice she is definitely not hearing is Trent’s. The product Commspan is supposed to release next is meant to connect people along the lines of the EED, but if the implants work so strangely for Trent and Briddey, then the company’s plans to steal a march on Apple could come crashing down. And all the while Briddey’s family keeps butting in with worries, concerns, news and views about everything except what’s worrying Briddey. More crosstalk.

The din gets louder and the book gets faster until, at the end, Briddey figures out what’s going on and what she wanted all along. The ending is not a great surprise, but getting there is quite fun. It’s warm, sometimes zany, sometimes tart, and in the end the signal comes through on a clear channel.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/30/crosstalk-by-connie-willis/

Nov 29 2018

Maria Stuart by Friedrich Schiller

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent queen?” is something that Elizabeth I of England does not ever quite say in Schiller’s five-act verse drama, Maria Stuart, but the sentiment lurks behind practically everything that she does say. The play begins with Mary, Queen of Scots, under house arrest in Fotheringhay, the place that will eventually become the location of her execution. In the early scenes, Mary swings among the modes that Schiller depict her in throughout the course of the tragedy: prayerful, her thoughts fixed on God and eternity; hopeful of release through the mercy of her cousin Elizabeth; proud, disdainful that any court of mere lords and earls should try to judge her, a sovereign queen; crafty, using any means at her disposal to convince people to plot to win her freedom and return to power, and heedless of how easily that could cost their lives; remorseful about the choices that she has made that have led her to this pass.

Elizabeth first appears in the second act, facing choices more complex than those that consume Mary’s attention. Elizabeth is considering a French marriage to make an ally out of England’s traditional enemy, and she discourses long about a sovereign’s lack of freedom, about owing everything and every action to her country and her people. She is at once not particularly happy to be queen but certainly has no intention of giving it up.

The action of the play touches on various efforts to free Mary, on Elizabeth’s unwillingness to directly order Mary’s execution, and Mary’s keen desire to meet Elizabeth face-to-face, convinced that such a meeting will lead to mercy, perhaps even to freedom. I found that Maria Stuart had less drama than Schiller’s other historical plays — The Maid of Orleans or The Death of Wallenstein — and far less than the semi-historical William Tell. In the latter, everyone knows about the scene with the bow and apple, but the way that Schiller executes it makes the event surprising, and powerful. Even The Death of Wallenstein, an ending telegraphed by the title, has better suspense around how the events transpire and what they have to say about ability and ambition (a theme also explored in Maria Stuart).

There is also some dramatic tension around the various lords in service to Elizabeth, particularly Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Dudley was long Elizabeth’s favorite, and he hoped to become her husband. In Schiller’s telling, he also had a youthful interest in Mary. Over the course of the play, he appears to support both at various times. When he receives a letter from Mary detailing plans to free her, is he her savior in the heart of her enemy’s court? When his role is uncovered, is he the true servant of the Crown, luring its enemies into a trap to expose their treachery? Does he even know which side he serves?

I was less convinced by Elizabeth’s temporizing. Some of that may simply be the temporal distance from the play, which premiered in 1800. Crowned heads still ruled, rather than merely reigned, across much of Europe. At the time Schiller was writing, the idea of executing a king or queen possessed a special horror because of the revolutionary terror that had followed the beheading of France’s Louis XVI seven years before the play’s first performance. Elizabeth’s characterizations of the crowd — asking for one thing one day, demanding its opposite the next — owe as much to the later century’s events in France as to anything that took place in her England. Some of her advisers say the same, adding that no sooner will she have had Mary executed at the crowd’s behest than it will criticize her for having done just that. Eventually, Elizabeth seems to say, “Well, what can ya do?” and signs an order for Mary’s execution. She does not directly say it should be delivered, however, and the speed of the order’s delivery and implementation appear to owe as much to courtier ambition as to royal intent. When it is too late, Elizabeth tries to disclaim her desire to be rid of Mary. I was more annoyed than moved.

Mary’s final hours, however, provide some of the play’s best scenes, with the execution itself as effective as the high points of Schiller’s other historical dramas. The ending, which leaves Elizabeth bereft of advisers to face the consequences of Mary’s execution, has no historical basis, but it fits the play.

Maria Stuart has been translated into English several times, and continues to be performed, including a West End production in 2005 that traveled to Broadway in 2009. It joins a vast number of plays, operas, novels, television, and movie treatments of her life.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/29/maria-stuart-by-friedrich-schiller/

Nov 28 2018

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson

Oof, I did not expect The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps to end as a tragedy, nor when it did. Looking back, though, I am not at all sure that the ending is a tragedy, at least from the perspective of the principal characters. Glancing at my review of Kai Ashante Wilson’s other novella set in this world of strong magics and desert caravans, I see that its ending also took me by surprise. Straightaway, there is one of Wilson’s strengths as an author. (I read this novella on my Kindle, and there is a substantial excerpt from A Taste of Honey following The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, so it looked like I was further from the end than I was. Sneaky!)

The two novellas share a world, one roughly cognate to earth, and the stories take place in and around the equivalent of the Mediterranean. In Wilson’s world, the greatest wealth and power are to be found in the city of Olorum. Reading A Taste of Honey, I thought Olorum would be a Maghreb city, on the southern shores of the sea; from the geography in Wildeeps, I thought it south of the parallel Sahara, for Wildeeps is a story that takes place in a caravan in and around its visit to an oasis city known as the Station at the Mother of Waters. The leading characters are all members of the guards who have protected the caravan so far, and will do so again after the break at the Mother of Waters, as the train of people and camels crosses the magical and monster-infested Wildeeps to get to the fabled wealth of Olorum.

Some of the guards are old, and some are young, some are veterans of many trips, some have left home for their very first adventure. They all follow their Captain, whose preternatural speed and endurance are just a few of the hints that he is far more than he seems. The Sorcerer, one of those making his first journey across the deserts and the Wildeeps, tries to pretend that he is not much more than he seems — he would not have his nickname if he hadn’t already shown some supernatural ability — but does not convince the others.

Over the course of the novella, Wilson gradually shows more and more of the Captain and the Sorcerer. He sketches the other guardsmen (they are all men, as far as is known), giving them vivid personalities and hinting about all the different places they have come from to take on this risky journey. Seeing the camaraderie within the company, mixed with rivalry and the knuckleheadedness of some young men, is one of the pleasures of this story. Another is perceiving how Wilson’s world works, based on the glimpses this tale shows. Socerer of the Wildeeps is a story in the world, not of the world; that is, its characters do not shape the world with their actions. Their stories are important to a reader because Wilson has drawn convincing human beings, and what happens to them matters, and that is more than enough to carry the weight of the story.

I think that A Taste of Honey is a better work, but I also think that Wilson could not have written it without having first written Wildeeps. They both show fascinating parts of a rich setting, and Wilson populates them with people who feel real, whose heroism and stoicism are moving, whose follies are exasperating, and whose ultimate fates have stayed with me long after I finished the novella.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/28/the-sorcerer-of-the-wildeeps-by-kai-ashante-wilson/

Nov 28 2018

Firefly: Big Damn Hero by Nancy Holder and James Lovegrove

First, can I talk about just how beautiful this book is? Titan sent me a hardback copy which, as always, has an incredible cover. That dust jacket needs to be felt to be believed. And it comes with a ribbon bookmark! I don’t usually go gaga over the physical format of a book, but this truly feels like a collectible.

The contents are fairly accessible for people new to the Firefly universe (or ‘verse, as it’s known) but the book will really shine for Browncoats who’ve seen every episode plus the movie. While it’s no surprise that Nancy Holder knows the mythos back and forth, James Lovegrove masterfully continues where she left off to produce a damn fine piece of writing. You know how sometimes you read an official novelization and it reads more like self-inserting, wish fulfillment fanfic than something that feels authentic to the characters and series? This book skillfully avoids any of that while still illuminating not only a huge chunk of Mal’s past but also showcasing a perfectly plausible chapter in the adventures of the Serenity’s crew.

I did have several reservations that have little to do with Mr Lovegrove’s writing. In fact, in many parts, it feels like he does his best to make up for the premise he has to work with, tho how much of this is due to Ms Holder’s benign influence is unknown. The problem, of course, is how weirdly the Browncoat experience feels like revisionist Confederate history. It’s not, but it’s hard to ignore the parallels of romanticism, among others, that make for uncomfortable reading in the era of Cult 45.

My second issue was with how poorly the crew of Serenity treat Jayne. There is a lot of telling instead of showing as to why, and it sets up this weird dichotomy where Mal is a precious fragile bb who must be tended and deferred to whereas mean ole Jayne is always right but everyone hates him because he refuses to kowtow. I kinda want to go back and watch the series again to see if this was always a problem and I never noticed before, or if this is specific to this novel. Tbh, I kinda want to go back and watch the whole show again period. And? I’m totally panting for more of these books! It makes me so happy that two more are guaranteed. I’m also hoping that they go beyond (unfilmed) chapters and tell us what happens after the movie (which I’m currently watching on Netflix having turned it on since the beginning of writing this chapter, whee!)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/28/firefly-big-damn-hero-by-nancy-holder-and-james-lovegrove/

Nov 18 2018

Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) by Kendare Blake

So I’d been avoiding this book for a while, despite owning another of Kendare Blake’s acclaimed novels (Anna Dressed In Blood, one of many on my To-Read pile) because, while the premise is interesting and the author’s reputation confidence-inspiring, I thought Queen Katharine’s power incredibly lame compared to the other two. She can ingest any poison, wooo, whereas Queen Arsinoe can command flora and fauna while Queen Mirabella can command the elements themselves. But then HarperCollins sent me this book in the course of my completing a survey on fantasy novels for them (with the caveat that they’d ask me several questions about it later on, ofc) and I figured, ah, hell, why not, it looks like a quick read anyway.

And it was, but not only that, it was good! Katharine’s powers in the blurb are deliberately underplayed, as is the fact that this book isn’t just about three queens (a la Black Trillium: shoutout to a classic!) but also about the people and politics they’re surrounded by. It’s a sprawling family saga with surprisingly complex relationships, distressing setbacks and shocking plot twists (and a love triangle that isn’t super stupid,) and I’m really glad I was, shall we say, compelled to read it. I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the series, tho probably in the New Year, as I have fifteen more books to read and review before the end of the year. Adult me tries to tamp down my rising panic with the knowledge that young, vicious me would cry with happiness at the fact that I’m living her dreams rn.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/18/three-dark-crowns-three-dark-crowns-1-by-kendare-blake/

Nov 08 2018

An Interview with Aliya Whiteley, author of The Arrival Of Missives

Q: Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did The Arrival Of Missives evolve?

A: It started with the voice of my main character, Shirley, and grew entirely from there. I loved her straight away; she’s a teenager who is both naïve and confident, determined and doubtful, and she has all sorts of emotions rolled up together. So I tried to capture that first and as the voice grew I realised she wasn’t living in contemporary times. I placed her in 1920, in a village in Somerset, UK, and the rest of the story unfolded from there. It was a scary journey because I’ve never written historical fiction before but as the story progressed I realised that I was still writing science fiction too. It was only a case of approaching it from a different perspective, which made it a really rewarding challenge.

Q: I loved how both stories in this volume exploded traditional science fiction’s patriarchal bent, and I want to give copies of this book to every sci-fi fan I know. Which led me to wonder whether you write with any particular audience in mind, and if there are any particular audiences you hope will connect with these stories?

A: I’m a really selfish writer. I write stories that I think I’d like, and then just hope that other people will agree! But I don’t write to reach a certain type of person so much as think that it would be great if it reaches anyone at all. And if it fails to do that: well, at least I enjoyed the ride. I’ve always enjoyed stories that really take me by surprise, so I try to find that in the writing process. I hope Missives does that.

Q: Despite the very different ways it was presented — in a straightforward fashion in TAoM but in a far more metatextual, one could even say satirical, mode with The Last Voyage Of The Smiling Henry — I was struck by the theme of social conditioning that ran through this book. Do you consider yourself at all a political author?

A: I suspect everything I write is political without examining it too closely. I don’t really think about it while I’m writing because I’m caught up in the voice, and where it takes me. Afterwards I can see that themes have emerged and when it was time to choose a story to accompany Missives for the US release then The Last Voyage of the Smiling Henry felt like the right choice because it shares themes with Shirley’s story, but those themes are presented in an entirely different way. They’re both about how we respond to what we consider to be the status quo, I think.

Q: You’ve stated elsewhere that Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is the first book you read that struck you with its inventiveness, and credit William Hope Hodgson with inspiration for TLVotSH. What other books and authors have made you think, “I have got to write something like this someday!” (and then possibly subvert it entirely!)

A: I think that all the time! Whenever I read something I enjoy I want to give it a whirl myself. But with the books that I’ve loved the most I sometimes feel as if I really wouldn’t want to even try to write something along similar lines. George Eliot’s Middlemarch scares me and inspires me in equal measure; imagine being able to write something so wonderful. And the novels of Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene are the places I go to when I don’t want to see the craft of writing at all but just get utterly lost in the magnificent prose.

I did find the courage to use DH Lawrence as my inspiration for certain key moments in Missives. I’ve loved Lawrence since first reading The Rainbow when I was sixteen (the same age as Shirley), and he was a huge influence on this book.

Q: How did you learn to write? Did you have a teacher who inspired you in the same way Mr Tiller initially inspired Shirley, though hopefully with less personal fallout?

A: I took a module in Creative Writing at University that absolutely captivated me, and from that point on I knew I wanted to be a writer. The strength of my feelings about it really took me by surprise, so I suppose you could say my crush was on the subject rather than the teacher! But my teacher for that module was amazing, and he has continued to be supportive since those university days. We keep in touch and I send him my books; I thanked him in the acknowledgements for Missives, along with other teachers I know and admire.

Q: Do you adhere to any particular writing regimen?

A: I try to write every day but some days are easier than others! I write my first drafts in longhand and it’s the process of typing up those handwritten sentences (some more legible than others) that really brings the book to life.

Q: Are you a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) or a plotter?

A: Absolutely a pantser, although that’s the first time I’ve ever come across that description for it. It’s all about finding the voice and the character for me, and then I let them take me wherever they want to go. Usually I have a few key moments in my mind, but that’s about it, and I never know the ending.

Q: What are you reading at the moment?

A: I mentioned Iris Murdoch earlier; I’m reading The Time of the Angels, which is dark and creepy and magnificent.

Q: Are there any new books or authors in speculative fiction that have you excited?

A: I’ve just finished Tade Thompson’s Rosewater – I’m hugely enjoying that mixture of big ideas, science fiction, and noir. And there’s a collection of ecologically-minded speculative fiction short stories called Lost Objects by Marian Womack that had me spellbound. Both of those books feel like they’re engaging with our rapidly changing future rather than recycling existing ideas.

Q; You’ve stated on your website that you tend to be drawn to writing about “the darker side of life.” How did this influence your choice of speculative fiction as your primary means of expression, after debuting in other genres?

A: I don’t think I ever consciously chose a genre, and that’s probably why my stories often use lots of different genre elements without really belonging to just one. I first wrote romantic novels and then crime for a while, but in all my books an element of weirdness, or speculative fiction, crept in and I think that’s probably because of my interest in darker themes. I’ve always been looking to explore the strangest elements and emotions of being human, whatever the genre.

Q: Is there any chance we’ll be able to look forward to reading Shirley Fearn’s continuing adventures? I, for one, really want to see what she does next.

A: I keep trying to picture what happens to Shirley next but my thoughts change on her future every single time, and considering the conclusion of the book that seems like a perfect outcome! I’ll just keep imagining all the adventures she might embark upon and maybe one day I’ll prefer one over all the others and I’ll write that one down.

Q: What can you tell us about your next project, Shirley-related or otherwise? And will you be reviving your Patreon project in the foreseeable future?

A: I’ve got a new book out in the UK this week; it’s called The Loosening Skin (published by Unsung Stories) and it’s a noir-tinged detective story that travels in unexpected directions. It will be published in the US by Titan Books in the near future. Titan will also be publishing a novel of mine called Skein Island, which involves archaeology and Greek myths. So there’s a lot going on right now! I’ve put my Patreon project (to write a strange short story every month) on hold for the time being but I’m hoping to get back to it at some point. What’s great is that The Last Voyage of the Smiling Henry grew from that Patreon project, as well as lots of other ideas that I’m still working on, so it’s been great in terms of finding new inspiration.

Q: Tell us why you love your book!

A: I love Shirley and her realisation that the world is so much bigger than her small village. She was a joy to write. She made me laugh but she also broke my heart a little bit. She brought back all those complicated feelings of growing up and realising that everything is not black and white, and people cannot be trusted, no matter how knowledgeable they seem to be. I hope readers love her too, and find a reminder of their own experiences in hers.

~~~

Author Links

Aliya Whiteley

Twitter

~~~

The Arrival Of Missives was published in the US on November 6th 2018 and may be found at all good booksellers. My review of the book itself may be found here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/08/an-interview-with-aliya-whiteley-author-of-the-arrival-of-missives/

Nov 08 2018

Vicious (Villains #1) by V.E. Schwab

Or, as I like to think of it, A Tale Of Two Sociopaths.

In a world where people with superpowers are called ExtraOrdinaries (or EOs, for short) two brilliant college students decide that it isn’t enough to study them and try to figure out how they came to be. Eli Cardale and Victor Vale are roommates with families who are neglectful or worse, and find in each other a kindred spark of, to put it bluntly, sociopathy. Both pre-med, they think they’ve figured out what makes an EO, so decide to see if they can undergo the process themselves. It’s not a spoiler to say that they do, coming out with vastly different powers and vastly different views on what to do with them. Eli’s betrayal sends Victor to jail for a decade, and when Victor gets out, he’s hellbent on revenge.

I really enjoyed this twist on the superhero genre, especially since our main characters aren’t really good guys. My favorite character by a country mile was Mitch, and I hope the sequel explains a little of his “curse”. Personally, I thought he was a rolling badass, especially on the climactic night of the book’s narrative. I also really enjoyed Sydney, and appreciate the fact that Serena, while nuanced, was still clearly a villain. And most of all, I really liked the way the book acknowledged the different levels of sociopathy, even if it sometimes felt as if all the characters were chosen to be illustrative of the lower two levels of the D&D alignment chart.

I’m probably looking forward to reading the sequel to this more than any of VE Schwab’s other novels, but it’s definitely raised my already rather high opinion of her writing. Good, solid entertainment that leans on the darker side of morality without descending into sickening, whether violent or maudlin, tropes.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/08/vicious-villains-1-by-v-e-schwab/

Nov 06 2018

The Arrival Of Missives by Aliya Whiteley

This is a volume that is dead set on subverting our expectations of science fiction, and succeeds at that goal brilliantly. Packaged together with the short story The Last Voyage Of The Smiling Henry, the title novel (I know that some might argue that its 133-page length renders it more of a novella, but I, for one, laud the return of the short, standalone novel) starts out as a fairly typical post-Great-War bildungsroman featuring the teenaged Shirley Fearn, who dreams of a meaningful life beyond her small English farming village. She is in love with her schoolmaster, Mister Tiller, a veteran of the fighting in France, whose body has been impossibly changed by a near-death battlefield experience. But he has plans for her that have nothing to do with his own physical desires, as he takes her into his confidence for a May Day celebration that he hopes will change the course of history.

And then? Things go amazingly crazy. It would be a disservice to tell you more, but I will say that when I finished The Arrival Of Missives, I desperately wanted a longer book, a 300+ page behemoth, a multi-part series of such behemoths out of this. I want to see where Shirley goes next, I want to see her fight and win. I was so impressed by how Aliya Whiteley takes this dreamy young girl, seemingly destined to play such a crucial role in the proceedings, and makes her even more important by virtue of her self-determination. It is an audacious coup of storytelling, and an excellent reminder of how each and every one of us is capable of breaking the shackles of expectations to claim our own ambitions and victories.

Subversive in a different, less subtle way is TLVotSH. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that it’s essentially an adventure story very much akin to the popular fiction of the turn of the 20th century, only with the genders reversed. I grew up reading a lot of that type of fiction, and younger me never really grokked the casual sexism on display, filing it away in my brain as “this book could really use more interesting women” instead of truly seeing how damaging (and pervasive!) this worldview could be. I’m not sure if Ms Whiteley wrote this story as an antidote, as satire or as counterpoint to those predecessors, but reading it really hit home how little earlier authors thought of our entire sex. Ms Whiteley’s ability to put an entire subgenre of literature into perspective while still entertaining with a quality sci-fi read is astonishing, if not outright genius.

Anyway, I really loved this volume, not only for the wildly entertaining plots but also for the penetrating insight into the importance of female characters wresting their own agency in the face of all odds. More please, Ms Whiteley. With that in mind, stay tuned for an interview with the author herself, and check out the other stops on her blog tour!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/06/the-arrival-of-missives-by-aliya-whiteley/