June 2023: superlatives for the rest of it

An end-of-month roundup for the books not covered in my American Classics, Woolf reread, or Love Your Library posts. Looking at these, it’s obvious how much science fiction and fantasy I’ve been consuming this month! What can I say? I like it. It’s nothing like the literature I work on academically. That’s restful.

most reader-resistant: Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny (1967). I tried to start this on the coach back from Newcastle and absolutely could not focus on it at all, but I had better luck once back home, and ended up quite liking it. It’s an SF classic, the story of a race of superhuman beings who have adopted the personae of the Hindu pantheon, and who turn out to be the technologically augmented crew of a crashed starship. Descendants of the passengers form the majority of planetary society, prevented from developing any significant science or tech (like, the printing press) through a deliberate program of suppression. Structurally, it’s complex—most of the book is a flashback but you don’t necessarily know that to start with, and the chapters all have an episodic, standalone feel—and it’s difficult to truly love the characters, who, perhaps because of their godlikeness, rarely feel real or rounded. It’s interesting, though. Why write this book? Why write it this way? Why Hindu gods? (Zelazny was not Hindu or Indian and the religious trappings really are trappings, disguises for the advanced tech weaponry wielded by the crew-gods.) Maybe the answer is just “the 60s”.

best proof that publishing order =/= reading order: The Book of Lost Tales, Vol. 1, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Tolkien (1983). This is technically the first volume of the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth series, which Christopher Tolkien collected and edited and to which we owe a lot of our understanding about his father’s work. That said, I think it’s not the place to start. You don’t have to read HoMe in publishing order because they’re not narrative; they’re essentially works of literary-critical archaeology, excavating versions of poetry and prose by chipping away at fragments discovered in notebooks and on scraps of spare paper. (Tolkien’s handwriting was evidently terrible and he drafted in both pen and pencil, which was apparently becoming faded even in the ’80s.) I should really have read the (non-HoMe) Unfinished Tales first, and then maybe started my HoMe reading with The Return of the Shadow or Morgoth’s Ring. All this is very inside-baseball, anyway, and I don’t expect anyone who isn’t keenly into Tolkien to care.

most insanely ambitious: Ash, by Mary Gentle (2000). I started this literally months ago: it’s well over 1,000 pages long and I had an ebook version, which I read whenever at a loose end in environments that precluded me carrying physical reading material (very crowded Tubes, for example, or when whatever I was reading in hard-copy was cumbersome). It begins as a playful postmodern take on academic historiography, focusing on the life of a teenaged female mercenary captain in 15th-century Burgundy. Its shifts of genre—from historical fiction to historical fantasy, to academic thriller, to science fiction—are in part what account for its incredible quality of what Jo Walton calls “grabbiness”. The other reason for that is Gentle’s total immersion in her world; she completed a Masters in War Studies to write this, and is a historical reenactor in her spare time, so her knowledge of the era she writes about is deep and convincing and compelling. (Lots of detail about, for instance, how armor does or doesn’t fit, if you’re wearing someone else’s or even your own after gaining or losing muscle mass. If you don’t like this sort of thing, don’t read Ash; if you do, and I do, you are in for a treat.) There’s no lazy shorthand about historical prejudice: women and children are raped as prisoners of war, but equally, some of Ash’s most capable military deputies are women; there’s no single, monolithic attitude to homosexual activity, but rather a mosaic of responses that change depending on location, personalities, context. When you finally start to work out what is going on, it’s mind-blowingly satisfying, and somehow, all 1000 pages seem genuinely necessary to the plot, which is not something I think I have ever said about anything else. (In America it is published as 4 separate volumes.) Entirely unlike anything else I’ve read, it left a huge void in my life once I was finished with it. A book of 2023 for sure.

hardest to know what to say about: Mortal Remains, by Christopher Evans (1995). I have absolutely no idea why this was on my ebook app; it must have been mentioned in a roundup or list by someone I like and then only cost 99 p, or something. It’s got an arresting first chapter, in which a woman with two husbands (both of whom she’s ambivalent about, one of whom is pregnant via an external womb-pouch) rescues another womb-pouch from a crashed spaceship and finds her family targeted as a result. The unusual family structure stuff doesn’t really go anywhere after that, which was a shame, although I liked the plot’s economical time leaps (a year passes between two chapters; it’s the sort of thing writers seemed to do a lot more in 1995, presumably due to still-prevalent publishing norms about book size and paper cost), the constant presence of biotech (things like cloaks and houses are engineered organisms, which makes for some fun reading), and the villains’ increasingly loose grasp on reality is well conveyed and scary. I liked it, it was not world-changing, it’s worth a read if you come across it.

most liked against my better judgment: A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske (2021). This was sold to me as a charming, sexy, queer magical romp set in Edwardian England, and it is indeed all of those things. Given my love of Sorcerer to the Crown and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, this was very good news. However, Marske honed her craft through writing fan fiction, and the novel is distinctly fan-fiction-esque, not in the sense that the writing is incompetent or undercooked (although there are some infelicitous errors; you cannot, for example, be “a Natural Sciences man” if you attended Oxford, since that is a degree offered only by Cambridge), but in the sense of deliberately setting up and then fulfilling tropes like “yearning”, “enemies-to-lovers”, “forced proximity”, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that, truly. They are basically romance tropes that fanfic has adopted, and I do not object to the entire genre of romance. It is especially good if you write sex as steamily as Marske does and can also whip up a nice plot about murder, entitlement, arcane objects invested with power, and classism. On the other hand, Marske’s two main characters—Edwin Courcey, from a magical family but with only a small amount of magical power himself, and Robin Blyth, from a non-magical family and assigned to a secret parliamentary liaison role with the Magical Assembly quite by accident—are both gay men. Marske herself identifies as queer, but there’s a known fandom problem with fetishising the relationships of gay men, making them safe fantasy projections of the reader’s self without that joy and acceptance translating to real life. Do I think that’s what Marske intended to achieve here? No. Do I think that’s how most readers are going to read A Marvellous Light? Also no. Did reading a lot of very recognisable stereotypical romance behaviour in a m/m context as a straight woman make me wonder about the ethics of me personally consuming this kind of text? Sure did. The thoughts of others, if you have them, would much appreciated.

(Unrelatedly, I can’t read, type or say the title without doing this in my head. Skip to 03:47. Oh, the perils of being a choral musician from a young age.)

What books have you been enjoying in June?