This collection of short stories by Jemisin, the first person to win the Hugo award for best novel three years in a row (most recently for The Stone Sky, 2017), eloquently develops a series of passionately felt themes.
Many of these science-fiction and fantasy tales explore the nature of resistance. Some do so on a personal scale: In “The Elevator Dancer,” an office worker and a security guard separately search for the tiniest drop of joy in a grim theocratic future, while in “Valedictorian,” a high school student fiercely challenges herself to excel while knowing that alien forces outside her community take a specific interest in the best and brightest. Other stories fight back with a wider scope. “Red Dirt Witch” begins with a mother’s struggle to protect her children but ends with a family’s commitment to the civil rights movement. “The Effluent Engine” takes place in an alternate 19th-century New Orleans where a Haitian spy seeks technological support for her island’s resistance to the French. In contrast, “The Trojan Girl” is set in a virtual future where rogue bits of code quest for freedom and enhanced capabilities. “Cloud Dragon Skies” is a cautionary tale about pollution and the dangers of ignoring local culture, while “L’Alchimista” and “Cuisine des Mémoires” celebrate the pleasures and profound power of food. Others are specific and defiant responses to classic sf stories. The collection also includes an early version of the Broken Earth universe and a lovely tragedy set in the lands of the Dreamblood duology.
These stories span Jemisin’s career; they demonstrate both the growth and active flourishing of one of speculative fiction’s most thoughtful and exciting writers.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-49134-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Categories: GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | FANTASY | SCIENCE FICTION | SHORT STORIES | EPIC FANTASY
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A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.
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Manic parodist Moore, fresh off a season in 1947 San Francisco (Noir, 2018), returns with a rare gift for Shakespeare fans who think A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be perfect if only it were a little more madcap.
Cast adrift by pirates together with his apprentice, halfwit giant Drool, and Jeff, his barely less intelligent monkey, Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, jester to the late King Lear, washes ashore in Shakespeare’s Athens, where Cobweb, a squirrel by day and fairy by night, takes him under her wing and other parts. Soon after he encounters Robin Goodfellow (the Puck), jester to shadow king Oberon, and Nick Bottom and the other clueless mechanicals rehearsing Pyramus and Thisby in a nearby forest before they present it in celebration of the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the captive Amazon queen who’s captured his heart, Pocket (The Serpent of Venice, 2014, etc.) finds Robin fatally shot by an arrow. Suspected briefly of the murder himself, he’s commissioned, first by Hippolyta, then by the unwitting Theseus, to identify the Puck’s killer. Oh, and Egeus, the Duke’s steward, wants him to find and execute Lysander, who’s run off with Egeus’ daughter, Hermia, instead of marrying Helena, who’s in love with Demetrius. As English majors can attest, a remarkable amount of this madness can already be found in Shakespeare’s play. Moore’s contribution is to amp up the couplings, bawdy language, violence, and metatextual analogies between the royals, the fairies, the mechanicals, his own interloping hero, and any number of other plays by the Bard.
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243402-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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Fierce, poetic, uncompromising.
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This extremely urban fantasy, a love/hate song to and rallying cry for the author’s home of New York, expands her story “The City, Born Great” (from How Long ’Til Black Future Month, 2018).
When a great city reaches the point when it's ready to come to life, it chooses a human avatar, who guides the city through its birthing and contends with an extradimensional Enemy who seeks to strike at this vulnerable moment. Now, it is New York City’s time to be born, but its avatar is too weakened by the battle to complete the process. So each of the individual boroughs instantiates its own avatar to continue the fight. Manhattan is a multiracial grad student new to the city with a secret violent past that he can no longer quite remember; Brooklyn is an African American rap star–turned–lawyer and city councilwoman; Queens is an Indian math whiz here on a visa; the Bronx is a tough Lenape woman who runs a nonprofit art center; and Staten Island is a frightened and insular Irish American woman who wants nothing to do with the other four. Can these boroughs successfully awaken and heal their primary avatar and repel the invading white tentacles of the Enemy? The novel is a bold calling out of the racial tensions dividing not only New York City, but the U.S. as a whole; it underscores that people of color are an integral part of the city’s tapestry even if some white people prefer to treat them as interlopers. It's no accident that the only white avatar is the racist woman representing Staten Island, nor that the Enemy appears as a Woman in White who employs the forces of racism and gentrification in her invasion; her true self is openly inspired by the tropes of the xenophobic author H.P. Lovecraft. Although the story is a fantasy, many aspects of the plot draw on contemporary incidents. In the real world, white people don’t need a nudge from an eldritch abomination to call down a violent police reaction on people of color innocently conducting their daily lives, and just as in the book, third parties are fraudulently transferring property deeds from African American homeowners in Brooklyn, and gentrification forces out the people who made the neighborhood attractive in the first place. In the face of these behaviors, whataboutism, #BothSides, and #NotAllWhitePeople are feeble arguments.
Fierce, poetic, uncompromising.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-50984-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FANTASY | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
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