#mordew

I have recently noticed that I'm drawn to the sub-genre of fantasy books that involve a person, or group of people, who secretly discover a huge magical secret that they do not fully understand and will never fully understand. So yes, fantasy books, but mostly 'other world' books and whatever the opposite of books with 'a good magic system' are. I know some people are into that, but I always avoid books where the magic makes sense, I like it to be confusing and oblique and mysterious. Ditto books with a grizzled anti-hero protagonist, not interested.

Examples of this I've enjoyed include:

The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis - where Uncle Andrew has learned a few shreds of information from an elderly relative about magic. He then experiments and plots for years and finds the doorway to the wood between the worlds without having any real knowledge of what he has found or what to do with his discovery and gains no benefit from it.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - (spoiler), where a group of academics and hangers-on under the thrall of an outsider anthropologist find the way into a world hinted at in pre-historic texts. I love how the implications of this discovery are so huge, but those that can visit this world are incapable of fully exploring or sharing their discovery because of their competitive and sadistic natures. Even further worlds are hinted at but nobody visits them.

[Limited bits of] The Magicians by Lev Grossman - I haven't been able to re-read these books since they came out because I find many of the characters so unbearable, however, those sections where the students who fail to get into the college try to piece together magic on their own, or where the Chatwin children find their way into Fillory, or particularly where Quentin attempts to create his own world at the very end, are very compelling.

[Bits of] Fairy Tale by Stephen King - I found the fantasy world itself fairly irritating, but the way into it was great, and the discussion of how the fantasy world would likely be exploited if the knowledge was spread further was something I hadn't seen before.

Little, Big by John Crowley - I love how the existence of Faerie is taken as a matter of fact by the Drinkwater family, but there's no rhyme or reason to how it 'works'. It's unclear what exactly is going on half the time and all is enjoyably dream-like.

I also intent to give the Gormenghast books and Mordew a go soon, as they seem up my alley, and I think I've read all the Lovecraft stuff in this vein. I always liked the Lovecraftian bits of the Discworld book Moving Pictures too, which was my favourite as a kid- I like when the magical discovery gets too real and everyone just runs away, realising it's better left alone.

click for better quality & to see the full image. sometimes they get cut off weirdly!

*Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead

I just finished reading Mordew by Alex Pheby, the first book in the Cities of the Weft trilogy.

This was a strange book that's like a mix between Charles Dickens, H. P. Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe, and Angela Carter in a weird, unstable blend and it was difficult to rate. There many things I enjoyed, but a lack of interiority from the main character held it back a lot.

Tagged by the exquisite @xserpx (back for more, I see!) 😎

1. The Empire Must Die: Russia's Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917 by Mikhail Zygar - As someone who’s been very invested in making a fantasy revolution actually work, and not resorting to the typical “revolutionaries make everything worse” roads and/or wanking off to the status quo or the idea of “The Good King” trope, the way a Russian fellow on my fandom Discord mentioned this book awhile ago made it one of the perfect primers to fulfilling that substance.

Not only does it go into the real life grit of the Russian Revolution, a subject that I am (woefully) undereducated in the proper nuances of, but from the way they spoke of it, it’s nonfiction written like a fiction story, following important historical figures with almost POV styles to the proceedings of it all, so it sounds to be a promising transition from my typical fictional trappings. But the biggest draw of reading it is what they said about its tone: that it grabbed them in that you’re reading about this tragic event, knowing fully ahead of time the gruesome details of history, and it’s written in a way that can give you such hope that things might turn out okay... until they don’t. And that’s a tone I wish more revolutions in fantasy portrayed: that feeling of not knowing how great events turn out in the end. If there even is an end, because nothing ends, nothing ever ends.

It’s absolutely a book I want in my corner by the end of the year, I want all the wealth of experience in revolutions, and this nonfiction promises the frisson of history with the lived-in perspective of people throughout history, from the lowest peasant to the highest nobleborn, all with their motley of characterization, each carrying their virtues and vices. I’m especially interested in how sovereignties handle the violent transition from one rotten system to a more unstable world, full of uncertainty, and how the people get swept along through it all.

2. Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham - SO. As someone who very recently reread a good chunk of The Dagger and the Coin (some of the earlier material doesn’t hold up, women-wise), it still broadly holds up, and I’ve always appreciated Abraham’s focus on the lesser-known nuances of fantasy stories, like economics, the psychology of tyranny, the difference between certainty and truth, and how cult of personalities can gestate in the heart of an imperialistic state and curdled horribly into police states that threaten both inwards and out. And as someone who wants to write a relatively more geopolitically static fantasy story, a fantasy that has a more urban focus without being wholesale set in modern times? Well, Age of Ash hooked me so hard, I’m wondering if I should spring for the (granted, discounted) hardcover right away.

Abraham is in a similar class of writer for me as Abercrombie in terms of taking in criticism and having thoughtful approach to how he addresses his future writing, yet whereas Abercrombie is more willing to go wilder swings at genre and tone, Abraham does into the structure, given the trilogy’s promise of all three books being concurrent with each other, but focused on different characters. Beyond that, Tor’s review of the book has much to promise: ordinary people dealing with exceptional circumstances, a vibrant city, independent and thriving with its own ecosystem like an organism, a narrative especially seeped in the slums of a fantastic world through mundane eyes, and being a narrative slow burn to boot.

All that promises to be fertile research fodder for my own story, even if Abraham’s name wasn’t attached to it. That it also focuses on two lowborn street urchins roaming the streets, seeking ways to survive is just the rub to a glowing set of reasons. I love urban fantasy stories that aren’t hugely set in modern times, because it allows us to get a picture of the common people in uncommon times and world, and see what they were like, how another’s people lived throughout ecosystems made of brick, bread, and blood.

3. She Who Becomes the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan - I’ve been seeking out more Chinese-inspired fantasy stories, partly for obvious reasons (I’m Chinese, even if I’m a second-generational immigrant to Canada), partly to support more Asian authors (because they need all the support we can give them), but lastly, partly for my own research into how to portray my own Chinesesque (granted, they’re an immigrant to pseudo-Europe) protagonist, but my protagonist’s going to have gender ruminations so... a genderqueer Chinese protagonist sounds pretty damn sweet to read and is a nice bonus to the above reasons. @xillionart read it recently and seemed to dig the gender elements of it all, and it only made me all the more excited to dig into it!

The more I read into its premise, the more its themes of unbelonging, alienation liminal spaces, blurring of boundaries appeals to me, personally, but also as something that could be good research for how to depict my own protagonist, when I take a game effort at it. That being said, I’m just flat-out very appreciative of more genderqueer protagonists/characters in fantasy and that would help make me buy and read this. That being said, that alone wouldn’t have made me interested. Plenty of queer books can technically be written mediocrely or ride the coattails of its representation. That’s fine, plenty of more heteronormative books coast on its bullshit too. From what I read, though, Parker-Chan pens a brutal, tonally depressing tale of war and conquest, full of morally ambiguous characters who commit their share of terrible acts, but for understandable reasons. That warms the black coals of my heart.

I’ve got the book in my personal library right now. Had it for awhile now. I’m actually wondering if I should buy a second copy, just so I can give it to someone else, maybe a friend, and support Parker-Chan more. Chinese-centric fantasies are actually a field that I’m underserved in, and I hope She Who Became the Sun, Jade City, and The Grace of Kings are good primers to an underrepresented (by actual Chinese writers through Western publication institutions) cultural field that I wish all the best towards its growth.

4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky - Honestly, despite having Notes from Underground, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment in my personal library for a decent while now, and having recently bought The Brothers Karamazov, it’s almost astonishing that I haven’t dug into Dostoevsky yet, considering that aforementioned Russian fellow mentioned that Dostoevsky plumbs the darkest depths of his characters’ psyches and that sounds pretty much in my corner as a character-builder.

Now, why have I decided to read him this year? It’s not for research fodder, given Dostoevsky died before the Russian Revolution, nor does he have any particular insight into any of the settings or works I’ve got planned at all. However, his characterization seems beyond measure, especially among Russian classic writers, even the reccer admitted that much, even if they said Dostoevsky underserves the non-POVs as a result. Which is a shame and I heard Tolstoy does better there, but I’ll get to him someday, if I ever want to try him out, given that I’m not sure I vibe with Tolstoy, nor his massive tomes. But the breaking point of why I wanted to try him out this year? Well, someone was reading Crime and Punishment in my fandom Discord and posted snippets and I realized... Dostoevsky’s pretty hilarious. There’s a playful sort of petty, pedantic and crude humor across his works that I feel would be very appreciated once I get into my own fantasy works. It always seems to me that American fantasies are so self-serious that there’s little levity or room for humor, which is why I love Abercrombie’s brand of grimdark more than others, and that’s a quality I wish to emulate.

I’ve been meaning to crack open more classics nowadays, because it’s an area that I’ve been underserving myself. That being said, I wanted to spread beyond American/English classics, read more than one land’s literature and broaden myself further and beyond the horizons, and Dostoevsky’s gift with characterization and his petty humor sounds like an area that would serve my future writing well, which is why he’s got a standing invitation on my TBR list.

5. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler - As with Eliot, the amusing irony to me is that I’ve recced Butler to countless people on multiple occasions, but I’ve never actually read her. Granted, I only have Parable of the Sower owned and that was very recently bought, but I’ve read enough of her nonfiction and interviews that it breaks my heart that I have a sci-fi block for so long because every passage I’ve read out of her hurts me because there’s such an incision and depth to Butler’s writing that bleeds me.

I could get into more on why Butler attracts me: as @books-and-doodles mentioned to me, she doesn’t indulge in the technobabble that other sci-fi books, especially the hard ones, suffer from (and before anyone says anything about contemporary sci-fi books, I cracked open A Memory Called Empire’s preview and its first few pages alone wham-bammed me with technobabble up the wazoo), just from the few snippets I’ve read, Butler’s got the emotion and depth that sci-fi needs for me to be invested in, her characterization sounds rich and complex, her themes are heavy and philosophical and full of thoughtfulness and the political conviction and substance 99% of all writers lack and/or cannot convey onto the page, and that she ruminates on gender in the 1980s is a cherry on top of the sundae of richness she promises for me, a genderqueer person.

Butler’s been a seminal figure in science fiction for decades, but she’s been underrepresented, compared to the likes of Azimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Just from the few snippets I’ve read, it astonishes me how anyone can read a sliver of text from her and not come out thinking she’s better than all three of the above altogether. Let’s not mince words, a great chunk of that has to do with sexism and/or racism, especially in the institutional neglect of her name being upheld, compared to those other (male and white) seminal figures. She’s spoken of in hallowed tones, but not as much as the above, and it’s a bleeding shame. I look forward to reading a great author’s works and giving Books another reader to informatively geek out over Butler.

Honorable mentions, because I couldn’t localize to top 5 books (this list was, again, originally over ten like last time!):

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin - The Fifth Season was easily one of the best sci-fantasy novels I’ve read, arresting and harrowing and melancholic and painful, with one of the best recent protagonists ever and while I’ve heard “not as good” misgivings about it from others, I remain looking forward to reading the sequel.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - Funny story: I heard about Ishiguro before Books brought him up, because I found his The Buried Giant on sale 30% off, and immediately yoinked it, but I’ve never actually read him. Books speaks about him in glowing tones, so I’m definitely going to try him out this year.

Beloved by Toni Morrison - Because all of her books are discounted 25% off in my bookstore’s online catalog and I own her most seminal work. It doesn’t hurt that a teacher twitter (same one as who recced Eliot) spoke glowingly of her from a sentence-to-sentence empathy level.

Babel by R.F. Kuang - So, funny story: I noted the author, saw the cover, read the intriguing premise, and then my bookstore’s online catalog discounted it 30% off. I mulled over buying the hardcover for days, but eh, Kuang’s new. Might as well support her.

Mordew by Alex Pheby - This is really just the dark horse of my 2022 list, because it came utterly out of nowhere. I forgot how I came across it, but an urban fantasy dealing with a more static location and that premise? Also, British author with likely British humor? Buying it.