Rule Britannia – Page 4

Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories

Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Storiesis a cromulent collection of short stories, though uneven like most (maybe all) multi-author collections. I do appreciate the emphasis by editor Kelly Link on steampunk stories outside of the now-iconic Victorian London steampunk setting. I like the thickly urban setting – it’s what drew me to the sub-genre in the first place – but I can get fiercely irritated with the way some steampunk fetishizes the upper class twit of the year with his goggles and laboratory that I sometimes find in that setting. So, to the individual stories.

“Some Unfortunate Future Day” by Cassandra Clare: Inoffensive piece of atmosphere that fails to say anything at all, cutting out right when the real narrative choices need to be made. The daughter of a mad scientist is abandoned by her father to go fight in some ill-defined war, leaving her in the care of Romantic talking dolls in a crumbling Gothic house. A soldier falls out of the sky, which leads to a lot of naive narrative imaginings from the girl, and then the obvious use of a Chekhovian timepiece and then…the end! It’s like a chapter cut out of a larger narrative where all the implications come to fruition in the next chapter. But the story is pretty enough, I guess, and the only thing I really hated was the entirety of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64 used as an epigraph. Seriously, who does that for a short story? Ugh.

“The Last Ride of the Glory Girls” by Libba Bray. I would absolutely kill for a Glory Girls novel, which is not to say this doesn’t function as a short story. Reminded me strongly of Firefly, with its frontier planet full of harsh religion and frontier cruelties, written in a stylized dialect that totally works. Pinkertons, train heists, girl bandits, divided loyalties: all the things that make Old West stories a hand-to-hand combat of colonialism. There is also arresting baptism by sludge sequence here, a very tactile metaphor for the industrial revolution, etc etc.

“Clockwork Fagin” by Cory Doctorow. Very anecdotal story, told in the first person by a boy matriculating in an orphanage of children mangled in punk-shifted industrial factories. “Clockwork Fagin” is obviously a Dickens riff – Fagin was the antagonist in Oliver Twist – with its social consciousness and the plight of youngsters in the industrial machine. Full marks for being a story that doesn’t fetishize the corsets and monocles set, instead focusing on the organized rebellion of the working class. Workers of the world, unite!

“Seven Days Beset by Demons” by Shawn Cheng. Seven deadly sins in comic form with perplexing steampunk ornament and terrible lettering. At least it’s short.

“Hand in Glove” by Ysabeau S. Wilce. Too smart for her own good detective gets on the trail of a serial killer, despite an indigent man having already been convicted to hang for the murders. Some of the plot mechanics were unsuccessful – I didn’t like the mad scientists much – but the narrative voice is snappy, and the overall aims of the story worthy. The ways entrenched bureaucracies, like the police force, use and abuse science are always worth examining.

“Ghost of Cwmlech Manor” by Delia Sherman. Not really to my taste, but a goodhearted little story. Cwmlech Manor is haunted by the ghost of the once mistress of the manor, killed in the English Civil War by Cavaliers looking for loot. The main character is a plucky girl type, who is pragmatic about her romanticism.

Best of all, I loved the story that went with [Cwmlech Manor] – very romantic and a girl as the hero – a rare enough thing in romantic tales, where the young girls always act like ninnies and end up dead of a broken heart, often as not.

You can see the grammar is tortured, but the sentiment is neat. Her remark about the legend ends up describing her own story. Go girls.

“Gethsemane” by Elizabeth Knox. A perplexing story, one with interesting themes that never came together satisfactorily for me. The setting on a Caribbean island (?) was cool, as were the racial themes: passing, folklore, even the old school non-Romerian zombie. But the plot ranged over too many characters, and shifted perspectives weirdly. I admit I just didn’t get it, but I suspect there was something here to get.

“The Summer People” by Kelly Link. Editor, edit thyself! Which is a bitchy thing to say, and I don’t really mean it. This isn’t a bad story at all, but its steampunk elements are so nominal as to make it feel like a shoehorn job in the collection. It’s not even so much that I don’t think magic has a place in steampunkery – there’s a growing body of dash-punk work out there that shifts history by magic instead of technology – but that this magic doesn’t really do that. That said, I enjoyed this story about a girl tasked with minding the summer people, who we first are to understand are summer vacationers to her poor, rural setting. I liked her relationship with a vacationer-turned-resident, a girl who is slightly enamored of all the folksy poverty, which is of course only folksy to outsiders. The ending is a bit obvious, and the denouement more truncated than I would like, but a good story anyway. Fine, Kelly, you win.

“Peace in Our Time” by Garth Nix. I’m on record as a Nix fan, but the more I see of his short fiction, the more I think he shouldn’t write it. The narrative voice was daft and grated, and the characterization poor. It wasn’t so much a story as a situation, one that ended in a OH DO YOU SEE? reveal that hearkened to the hokiest of Twilight Zone endings. Bah.

“Nowhere Fast” by Christopher Rowe. Another short story that ends right before it should get interesting, where the real conflicts are going to begin. I don’t feel as irritated by this as the Clare short story, because at least this world is aiming for something more than pretty but useless. This is one of those post-apocalyptic utopias that no one bothers to write anymore – two generations past peak oil in a fiercely local America. A boy in a car, of all things, shows up in town, which kicks over a bunch of anthills. Given how bound up in our national identity the automobile is, it was interesting to consider the American landscape without them.

“Finishing School” by Kathleen Jennings. Another comic. Slender reimagining of the invention of flight, this time by a daughter of Scottish and Chinese parents who is stuck in an Australian school for girls. Nice metaphors of girlish exuberance. When a friend’s mom got divorced, she took Amelia as a middle name. We long for flight sometimes, and sometimes we should get it.

“Steam Girl” by Dylan Horrocks. I think I’m going to call this one out as the stand out of this collection. A nerdy, chubby boy semi-befriends a poor, outcast girl. She tells him stories of Steam Girl, an obvious self-avatar grown long-limbed and beautiful in her pulpy imaginings. Horrocks has a good sense of the teenage outcast – not the romantic one, with his bangs in his eyes, but the real kind: uncomfortable in his body, clueless, and slightly horndoggish, but not in a particularly nasty or cruel way. Escapism is important for people who have something to escape from, and this story is so sensitive to that equation.

“Everything Amiable and Obliging” by Holly Black. Fine, I guess, but I don’t think all the implications of the central metaphors here were considered, so I feel all squicky in the end. A girl falls in love with a house automaton, and her family tries to dissuade her from her love of the dancing instructor robot. He’s part of the hive consciousness of the house, and there’s a lot of shouting and stuff about loving robots designed to give you exactly what you want. That’s not the squick part for me. The squick part was when this was equated with the other girl’s lack of agency in her own relationships, and then my brain started shouting, but wait! Are we characterizing the working class as automata? Are we really saying girls lack agency? I can see where Black was going with this, I just don’t think it was thought out enough.

“The Oracle Engine” by M. T. Anderson. A Roman steampunk story. And not modern Roman, but the Classical kind. Holy shit, but this was fun. Written in that gossipy historian’s voice, the one that relates a bunch of folklore and quotes the classics, and then pulls back demurely and says there isn’t any basis for that conjecture. I was fully expecting a Mechanical Turk at the center of this story, which, if you are not familiar with the concept, was a chess-playing engine invented in the 18th C, but turned out to be a dude hiding in a box and not an automaton at all. (Amazon has named it’s crowd-sourcing venture after this, and this enterprise is why capchas have gotten so freaking annoying.) That would have been neat, but the actual center of the story is so much cooler and weirder. GIGO.

Oh, and also? The scientific ornament was brilliant. Archimedes almost invented calculus, for crissakes, and while there’s no guarantees that the lunatics of the Middle Ages wouldn’t have lost his discoveries – like they did with how to make concrete – had Archimedes’s discoveries become widely known, it is a fun thought experiment to consider.

Dawn of the Truly Dreadful

I heard this story once from a friend of mine – I make no claims to its veracity – about a guy who ghost-wrote an autobiography for some minor Playboy bunny/starlet. It was a good gig for a struggling writer: he spent some weeks organizing the depressingly non-sordid details of a woman’s life that culminated in being publicly nekkid, banged out a manuscript (sorry, is this a pun?), and then was paid for the time and bother. The real bummer was that at roughly the same time, the book that he’d written – his real baby, the one he birthed laboriously with the usual screaming, love and bleeding that goes along with writing something important to you – was published to polite obscurity, and then vanished into a more complete obscurity. There were a few reviews, not negative ones, just indifferent, which has its own kind of soul-killing burn. Reviews of the nekkid memoir were good; reviewers were pleasantly surprised that Ms. Bunny seemed intelligent and funny. Maybe not needless to say, the intelligence and humor were solely the addition of the ghost-writer. “Huh,” everyone said. “I guess she’s not the complete idiot we took her for. Weird.” Cue writerly melt-down, drinking, etc.

So now when I start in on some ad hominem attacks on Mr. Hockensmith’s book, which I plan to do, with feeling, please understand that I have some empathy towards that broken wreck of a writer he must be, gibbering as he takes long pulls on a bottle of Jack, editing his unfinished masterpiece that will vanish without a trace while idiot readers such as myself buy shit like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. I am culpable in the vicious cycle that rewards publishers for pumping out garbage with good titles, great covers, and an originally clever idea that can be endlessly mimeographed into a purple-blue stew of endlessly derivative works. Android Karenina? Oh yes. Jane Slayre? Sign me the heck right up.

Steve Hockensmith is a robot. No, strike that, he’s a committee of robots commissioned by the marketing department of Quirk books for the purposes of penning (keyboarding? coding?) a quick and dirty cash-in to the unexpected success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I liked Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – what? It was fine, really, and my estimation of it has improved upon reading its prequel. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for all its faults, didn’t betray its source materials. Seth Grahame-Smith, the author, clearly had read Austen’s work, and read it enough to stitch in some zombie mayhem in places where zombie mayhem might be appropriate. (Although, really, the title should have read Pride and Prejudice and Ninjas because the best scenes – like Lizzie and Lady Catherine de Bough having a ninja throw-down – centered on the martial arts. Still, whatever, he meant no disrespect.

Mr Hockensmith has never read Pride and Prejudice. He rented the BBC adaption which he watched on mute while talking on the phone. I’m not impugning this activity; descriptions of doing this very thing made Bridget Jones’s Diarysuch an enjoyable read. I could, and at length, bitch about all of the violations and betrayals of Austen’s characters and historical facts in Dawn of the Dreadfuls, but Elizabeth has already beaten me to the punch. So, I’m here today, my friends, to bitch about the zombies. As some of you may be aware, I have a thing for zombies. Even though I should know better, I bolt down all kinds of trashy crap just because it has some undead lumbering around in it. Om nom nom, as the kids say.

And even though I just went through this big apology for buying and reading trash fiction, I don’t really feel all that bad about it, and I think maybe writing good trash is harder than it looks. Certainly there’s no magic formula in the trash department, just like there isn’t for writing non-trash, but I think probably writers should at least seem like they give a crap. Writers should have the tiniest respect for the readers for whom the $10 they shell out in the store is the smallest price they pay – the big cost in in the time they invest. Even in my skimmiest of readings, I’m going to give a book 2 hours of my freaking life. I’m reading this trash because I like both Austen and zombies, and when he disrespects both of those things, he disrespects me as a reader.

Mr. Hockensmith never figures out where his zombies are coming from, how they work, and most importantly, what they mean, which I’ll go off about later. So, okay, the dead rise, just randomly, because it’s warm? Fine. Then why is it also a contagion that can be passed on by a bite? And then why can you amputate the bitten limb and not zombify? So, one of those magical contagions that doesn’t enter the bloodstream? This is getting into not-fine territory for me. I don’t mind magic, really I don’t. Pretty much any explanation of zombies is going to resolve down into magic because of physics and reality. But for crying out loud, have a little sense of craft, man.

But really, zombies are incidental, an excuse for a sex farce that includes things like Mrs. Bennet being mistaken by her daughters as a zombie when she goes scritch-scratching on the doors of Mr.~~Oscar~~ Bennet’s room so he can impregnate her with a male heir. There are more nut shots in this book than zombie kills. Which brings me to my next complaint: there are many conventions of zombie fiction, and sex farce is usually a pretty low one on the list. There’s some good zombedies, but they, like the serious stuff, tend to rely on gross-out and gore over nut-shots and a bit with a dog. (This is why I rather liked Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter– the author there respected the gross.) I’m not saying zombie stuff should be sexless, but it’s less slap-and-tickle and more icky sex.

So, fail on zombie mechanics and fail on zombie genre sensibilities. Now how about the zombie-as-metaphor? I don’t expect Mr. Hockensmith to devote his valuable time nurturing an obsession with the undead. I don’t expect him to write a treatise about how the zombies have their beginnings in colonial moral queasiness about the Caribbean slave-island nightmares they created and maintained – the original zombies were, after all, controlled by a Voodoo Priest, whose black skin, semi-Catholic idolatry, and ability to marshal people who lacked agency, autonomy and souls (read: slaves) struck to the heart of (British) colonialist fears. Slave uprising in Haiti, anyone? When Romero came along and skinned this rabbit good in Night of the Living Dead, he repurposes the Big Black Bad into the hero Ben, whose calmness, rationality, and authority allow him to survive the ~~Marxist~~ zombie uprising only to get cut down and hauled off by good ole boys. The revolution may be televised, but it’s an edited version.

So okay, maybe Mansfield Park, with the Bertram family and their ominous-sounding “holdings” in Antigua, moral rot, and vapidity would have been a better fit for this kind of mash-up. Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, is in some ways the perfect picture of a British Regency abolitionist – she’s extremely principled to the point of being a moralizing prig, but she’s developed those principles by being raised by a family who, it is coyly hinted, were slavers, who abused her almost casually, because their money, their lands, their status is built out of human cargo (which still stands as one of the most tortured euphemisms ever.) Still though, something could be said for the Bennets as a rising middle-class, mocked by the wealthy and titled for their familial relations who are *gasp* in trade, but hamstrung by both an entitlement system and their own spendthrift ways – Mr. Bennett – whose first name is anything but freaking Oscar, I might add – does say at some point in the real P & P that the girls wouldn’t need to fling themselves at any passing man if he’d been a little more careful with his finances. Grr, arg, brains.

Anyway, what am I on about? Oh, yes, zombies. Zombies are about class, and race, and the hard economics that there are always more, and many more, have-nots than haves. Hockensmith seems to get this for maybe five seconds when he starts into a sub-plot where the Bennets lose face for training to fight the zombie hordes and then it gets them into hot water socially – maybe we’ll get into how the middle class often pretends to itself to have the problems of the leisure classes – you don’t think inheritance laws and “death taxes” have anything to do with you, do you? because they don’t – while surreptitiously working for a living. (Actually, there’s some cool stuff about law and the undead in Ian McDonald‘s Terminal Cafe.) But instead, some dumb plan to use some caricatured tail-chasing Baron to increase their standing is enacted, complete with more sex farce & nut shots. *possible spoiler if you still care* Cue Lady Catherine riding in on her white horse – I’m not making this up – and irritatedly saving Hertfordshire. Noblesse oblige & zombies, you can shove yourself up your own keyster.

Fail, fail, fail. I want to be entirely clear: I’m not opposed to trash fiction. I was fully on board to eat some brains and gross-out and squeal. All the stuff about slave uprisings and economics that I went on about would have been a bonus, but I wasn’t hoping for that. Not everyone can be John Carpenter, tossing off garbage with biting social commentary. And apparently not everyone can be Seth Grahame-Smith either, and by everyone I mean Steve Hockensmith. I’ve been trying not too cuss to much in this review, but in sum, fuck this.

Hound of the Baskervilles!

So, in interests of full disclosure, I’m “friends” with Jamie Chase who did the art in The Hound of the Baskervilles. I shouldn’t even scare quote that, because it could come off as bitchy. I’ve met him several times at Bubonicon, I’m friends with him on facebook, and I’m a pretty enthusiastic fangirl of his art style, but we’re not, like, borrowing each other’s clothes. He’s pretty awesome though, and I had a conversation with him and a bunch of other folk maybe two years ago about this Sherlock Holmes comic he was about to start work on. So I totally squeed when I saw the finished product on Netgalley. I remember when! That never happens for me.

My art education is pretty heterodox. I worked as a picture framer for nearly two decades, so I have a scatterdash education in print-making techniques so I could identify a lithograph from a giclée – which, fun fact, the word giclée comes from the French word for “spray”, referring to the spray of ink from an ink jet printer. No one has any idea what’s going to happen with ink jet ink in 50 years – it might just fall apart or go blue like photographs – so art buyer beware on that front. Not that this has anything to do with anything, and the point of this paragraph is supposed to be about how I deal with art.

You frame an incredible amount of populist garbage as a picture framer, so just because I never had an academic education, doesn’t mean I believe the line that fine art world is out of touch with human emotion and too avant garde for its own sake or something. I mean, yes, the fine art world is this ridiculous circle jerk, but popular couch art is depressing too. I ended up gravitating toward abstract and genre art in my second decade framing, and I super appreciate people like Jamie Chase, who are doing these really odd things with vernacular, stuff that looks initially like a straight take, but there’s this cloaked subversion in it. God, I love his stuff so much.

So, anyway, I also have some deeply held beliefs about Sherlock Holmes. I read the absolute crap out of every single word Conan-Doyle had on the subject when I was a teen, in addition to some words other writers had on the subject too. (Like the series by local historian Larry Millett, which has Holmes solving fun Minnesota mysteries like in Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders.) Holmes, more than a lot of writing which gets fan-fictioned to death (like Jane Austen, for example), lends itself to adaption. Holmes is a pulp serial, and Conan-Doyle himself was seriously lax about chronology and canon. Watson took a bullet magically in both his shoulder and his leg while he was a doc in Afghanistan. You can fall into some serious nerd-fests trying to determine how many times Watson married and when exactly everything happened. Which is hilarious, because obviously Conan-Doyle was writing everything half-drunk, banging it out on a cost-per-word basis. There’s something brilliant about his slovenly prose, the way it rushes and jumps. The number of times he uses the word “ejaculate” to mean “exclaim” is enough to twss the modern reader into teh funnies. But Conan-Doyle’s prose fairly hurtles, immaturity aside, which makes a graphic adaption that excises most of the text a little sad.

The Hound of the Baskervillesis an odd case, because it’s so incredibly famous, so iconic, but it’s not real typical of Holmes. Or, you know it is in the sense that Holmes tends to be really idiosyncratic. For one, Holmes stories tend to be urban, situated in the colonial crush or London, but there are a couple out in the Gothic hinterland, like the one with the bicycle or the one with the snake. (Sorry, I’m not bothering to look up their real titles.) So there’s precedent. The weird part is how focused on Watson Baskervillesis – how he’s left without Holmes for ages in the moors. Sherlock takes Watson down at the very beginning with the trick with the walking stick, and it’s pretty funny how that works – the authorial intervention of Holmes’s interpretive dick-move unsettling everything Watson observes in the later plot.

Because, the other thing about Baskervillesis how soapy it is, how domestically Gothic. Stripped of the Doylian prose (sorry for this adjective), Baskervillesreads really Scooby Doo, what with the land deal mechanics of the plot and the fact you meet the villain straight away. (Spoiler alert, sort of, but there are very few characters here, in true Gothic style, and the red herrings are telegraphed in flaming semaphore.) So, on a technical level, I think a graphic version of Hound is a little hamstrung, especially one as faithful as this one, because the whole thing reads sillier than it does long form, what without all of Watson’s ejaculations.

What? God! Why do you have to be so immature!

Chase’s art is really sepia, with all the color bled out, and it took me a while to embrace it. I’m on record as a fangirl, but sometimes I have to be lead to the water before I drink. I was expecting something more Frazetta-pulp, more kaleidoscopic, because I think this would really work with stuff like The Sign of the Four what with its blow-darting aborigines and evil Mormons, etc, etc. But we’re in Goth-land here, and the Gothic is the world of the scary, soapy, reaction-shot close-up, and that’s what Chase delivers. Dude knows what I want before I want it. <3

So, anyway, I enjoyed this take on Holmes, but I think it’s a little hobbled by how the source material translates to the image, even with images as strong as this. I felt like the libretto – or whatever it’s called in comics – spent a lot of time hitting the obvious, quotable stuff in Holmes – the game is afoot! elementary! – while kinda missing the stuff that really makes Holmes the shit. But I seriously, seriously can’t wait for other Holmes adaptions from this team, because I think given this practice, they could come up with something mind-blowing. Eeee!