Electra reads

Walker, Wendy. The Secret Service. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics, 1992. This is the kind of book that one hears about vaguely for years. I have the memory that Garth Nix actually mentioned it in a recs page on his website at one point, but I think I'm wrong, though it was definitely that general era, i.e. middle school, when I first saw it mentioned. I have also seen it in coffeandink's classic post on Notes toward a definition of 'fantasy of manners', which I periodically dip back into. Last spring I happened to have the brilliant idea of seeing whether the Stanford library had it. They do and I got it, because Stanford students don't read. It's so obscure it has an entry on writersnoonereads, but Worldcat reveals that a number of university libraries have copies. I'm glad I didn't manage to track it down before now, as I am quite certain that I would not have been able to appreciate its pleasures in middle school.

The book is nominally about the desperate actions of a set of characters employed by the eponymous British Secret Service of the title, which on one level is a rather droll pun, because the chief espionage tactic of the Secret Service in this alternate Victorian England is transfiguring themselves into tableware. (Also flowers and statuary. If you like the decorative arts, this book is for you.) The novel follows a varied cast of characters: the Corporal and Mrs. Morgan, who recruit, train, and dispatch young Polly and Rutherford to the Continent to follow the positively Baroque plot of a troika of villains against the English royal family. Rutherford is a chauvinist ass overly enamored of his own manly capacity for decisive action. Polly is calm, collected, and secretly joins the Service out of a thwarted ambition to tread the boards.

I say the book is nominally about this rather Baroque plot because, as Ray Davis argued (rightly, I think) in his essay about the book, the book is not a fantasy of manners but actually Mannerist fantasy, and  the action is not actually the point of the book. The most action comes in a 120-page hallucination by a character who is in a coma. The rest of the time, action is literally depicted off page, delayed, described indirectly. It's no accident the impulsive ass Rutherford, whose allotted role is to transmogrify himself into a blooming rose, is repeatedly "bound, once more, to forfeit the game of action" (205). Perception is the real game; most of the meat of the novel actually lies in describing characters' perceptions of each other and various objects, most interestingly when Polly and Rutherford experience the world as objects, but very thoroughly for other characters, according to their worldviews, as well. Worldview is the key to perceiving and exploiting each villain's weakness, and it's no accident that the last villain standing destroys himself through an excess of perception partially brought on by his desire to be eternally perceptive. (The novel is so Mannerist that the chief villain, the Cardinal, literally looks like a famous El Greco painting of St. Jerome as a Cardinal.) The other thing about the book's Mannerism is that it allows Walker to gently but thoroughly subvert the gender roles of the characters. Action is delayed, deferred, denigrated, but it's the women of The Secret Service who are the true agents in the stories--Mrs. Morgan, who recruits Polly; Polly, who is a total badass and proves it in her own coma state; the Marchionness, who brings her plans to fruition with utter aplomb; Sylvie, whose self-will upsets decades of plots; Rosamund, who was brought up to be a pawn in the game but nonetheless has the wit and the pluck to evade the traps of the story that was set for her and who eventually passes out of the narrative entirely, having gone utterly beyond its ken. Rutherford, by contrast, cocks everything up when he does take action, and spends a humorously long interval contemplating his fear of having to flower and be subject to the penetration of the Baron's connoisseur's gaze. Crucially, as is proven in the scene when he projects his delusions onto a garden hedge, his perceptions are not well aligned to actuality.

Elliott, Kate. Cold Magic. New York: Orbit Books, 2010. While I don't quite consider these books "epic fantasy" according to my own idiosyncratic definition (those doorstop paperbacks, okay, those are just central for me), Elliott has written what may be the most successful epic fantasy sequence by a woman, The Crown of Stars books - but I have been given expert advice not to start there, and anyway "an Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency fantasy adventure with airships, Phoenician spies, the intelligent descendents of troodons, and a dash of steampunk whose gas lamps can be easily doused by the touch of a powerful cold mage" sounded pretty darn awesome. And it is PRETTY DARN AWESOME. You can read my review below, or read this awesome tumblr review. Hint: I suggest reading both. I think Elliott has done some really cool, and really noteworthy, things with this book. First of all, this is a really alternate history, going all the way back to the 200s BCE (in terms of the Rome/Carthage conflict) and back even further, in that the intelligent descendants of troodons live in the Americas and have founded a city in the Antilles with assorted radicals, rabble-rousers, and free-thinkers. BRB SHEDDING TEARS OF JOY. The plot of the book follows Cat Hassi Barahal, whose family's contractual obligation to the cold mages of Four Moons House throws her into the company of one of their most powerful and proudest scions, one Andevai. Cat soon learns that as well as saving her own skin, she must keep her beloved cousin Bee from the clutches of Four Moons as well. The important point about the plot is that it moves along at a lightning pace and is MADE OF AWESOME. The important point about Cat and Bee is that they are both MADE OF AWESOME, as you would expect from two daughters of a house of spies and mercenaries. And, among other things, I really loved their close relationship and how well they work together as well as how much they love each other. CAT AND BEE FOREVER.

Healey, Karen. When We Wake. New York: Little, Brown, 2013.

I have read and enjoyed Karen Healey's previous two books, and I really enjoyed this one a lot too. I think it might be her best one yet. When We Wake is several things at once: a cautionary tale of climate change, a fast-paced SF YA thriller, and a futuristic take on the story of Snow White. The story follows sixteen year-old Tegan Oglietti, who is shot at an climate change protest in Melbourne in 2027 and wakes up 100 years later, in 2128. In the interim the United States has split into several separate countries and Australia has become the world's leading superpower, with a draconian No Migrants policy to match. Although some social issues familiar to Tegan and to us are totally absent--same-sex marriages are totally normal, and Islamophobia is now right up there with fear of the left-handed--others have only gotten worse. In particular, although Australia and other wealthy countries practice conservation policies that would make today's environmental activists weep, climate change has continued with little if any abatement, and some people are starting to fear that it may eventually lead to mass extinction. Xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment leave many would-be Australians in permanent refugee camps, out of sight and out of mind. To my mind both as a reader of SFF and as a historian, Healey's future is both thoughtfully and realistically laid out. (It's a minor theme, but the continuing development of journalism and personal devices, to say nothing of slang, in the age of blogging, the internet, and personalized advertising is also believable and interesting.)

Tegan's perspective on all of this is believably complicated--as both a self- and socially aware young person, she has a decent amount of perspective on the things that have and haven't changed, but she's also dealing with, in her terms, not her own death but the death of everyone she knew and loved. On top of that, the organ donor release form that she signed is interpreted in such a way that she essentially lacks rights to her own personhood, and it's only after some clever and brave maneuvering on her part that she's allowed to attend Australia's most prestigious private school. There she makes a trio of new friends, who together bring several useful skill sets to Tegan's continuing quest to figure out why exactly the government brought her of all people back, and what the real purpose of Operation New Beginning is. (Also Tegan names Bruce Springsteen as one of her favorite musicians at one point, even though her first love is the Beatles. On that note, the chapter titles are a particularly clever touch.)

West, Michelle. Battle. New York: DAW Books, 2013.

Michelle West's books are awesome and everyone should read them. This book, the fifth in the House War sequence, picks up almost directly after the events of last year's Skirmish and I loved it just as much as I did the last one. Things continue to happen, Jewel and her den continue to be awesome in different ways, and there continues to be a lot of sarcasm and dark humor thrown around, which I appreciate because that is basically how I roll.

I said on Twitter that I was highly impressed with the way that Battle shows that West has been tieing characters, plots, and meaningful details together across 13 books and counting, because it's in Battle that we begin to see even more strands of the overarching story weaving together at last. I have been a fan of this overarching story since I first picked up The Broken Crown in 1997 and didn't fully understand what was going on but knew I loved it anyway, and it was a pleasure in this book not only to see that but also to get some rather large revelations about certain beloved characters, as well as to see other characters finally undertake tasks we've known they must one day undertake for six books or so.