DreamHaven

Almost thirty years ago, Cameron Reed published her first novel, The Fortunate Fall, to much acclaim. In 1996, she won an Otherwise Award for a short story. Both author and award went by a different name then. Now Cameron Reed lives not too far from DreamHaven Books, with her found family, all of whom I’ve known for the thirty years she’s been working on this book.

What We Are Seeking is a book about transitions. It begins with an elegantly described transition on a starship, from zero gravity “summer” to low gravity “winter”, in order to decelerate to respond to a distress call. The human colonies on the planet Scythia have been nearly destroyed by its existing species, and have recently realized that one of them may be intelligent.

Passenger John Maraintha is forced to disembark with translator Sudharma Jain to aid the planet’s human colony with their first contact with an intelligent alien species. Both men know they will likely never be able to return to their home worlds. For Sudharma, this change is the fulfillment of a dream; he will need to become part-alien in order to properly communicate with the native Scythians. But John had planned to someday return to his home planet.

John is from a world where marriage is considered an illegal form of slavery, and so is resistant to the idea of permanent relationships. Though he easily switches from one lover to another, and has no problem with gender transitions, he is less comfortable with other life changes. In order to find a place on Scythian society, he must learn to accept that others are not only willing to make major transitions, but that some actually live for them. He must accept who others are and who they wish to become.

What We Are Seeking is a complex web of changing relationships, offering insight into current feminism and gender politics. But it can also be enjoyed as science fiction adventure. There’s galactic exploration, the future of the human race, survival in a hostile extra-terrestrial environment, and first contact with some really weird aliens. If you find yourself reconsidering your views on alien species, marriage or gender, that’s just a bonus.

The cover of this book features a bright pink, one-eyed, tentacled monster and claims that it is a “Sapphic Moby Dick in Space!” I pretty much fell in love with it in the first sentence, which is, “Call me . . . call me whatever the fuck you want.” The person who is not Ishmael is female, raunchy, and a very good writer. She has no problem poking fun at Moby Dick while remaining true to its nihilistic heart.

Not-Ishmael’s story might be similar to Melville’s but her words, attitude, and philosophy are entirely her own. For one thing, everything happens in the far future after humans have colonized the solar system. For another, there is a lot more sex. Yet, the story is a progressive descent into Hells inherent both in an uncaring universe and in the unreliable human heart. It is also, frequently, laugh-out-loud funny.

In a moment of despair brought on by a combination of restlessness, self-deprecation, and poverty, the unnamed narrator signs on aboard the hunter-ship, Pequod. She signs on with her sometime lover, called only “Q”, a mysterious Terran woman who is a harpooner and speaks mostly in incomprehensible Latin phrases. They are hunting Leviathans deep in the uncharted skies of Jupiter. The cerebrospinal fluid of those Leviathans (called spermaceti, which the narrator thinks is hilarious) provides the power to keep alive the failing colonies of exiles from a ruined Earth.

It is dangerous and foolhardy mission, made even more dangerous and foolhardy by the captain’s obsession with tracking down the Möbius Beast, the legendary white Leviathan that she claims is responsible for the loss of her leg. Of course, Not-Ishmael is helplessly, and somewhat pathologically, sexually attracted to “Captain A.” This does not stop her from observing and sometimes sleeping with the rest of the crew, as their voyage leads them deeper into the skies of Jupiter. They all go somewhat mad long before they stab at the unconquering Leviathan from hell’s heart.

Yes, you have heard this story before. But not like this. Hell’s Heart is not fanfiction that adds lesbians and makes everything funny. This is a reverent (and irreverent) retelling that uses science fiction to add modern ideas to an old story. Nor does it fix all the mistakes. The conclusion is right there in the cover copy, “Spoiler: We lost.” And yet it is still glorious. The best science fiction deals, directly or indirectly, with what it means to be human. Perhaps we are the most human when obsessed with vengeance and grappling half-mad with the incomprehensible maw of death.

“Here is Hell’s Heart. Here is the face of every god and none.”

This is a first novel by Kalie Reid, who is a Portland, Oregon native who now lives in Northern Ireland. To no one’s surprise, she lives with a cat. I was drawn to The Sacred Space Between by the title, and kept reading because of its intricate, mysterious magical system and the gorgeous prose.

The book feels like a nineteenth century Gothic romance, possibly because there is a lonely house surrounded by bleak, windswept moors. The moors are dangerous and unwelcoming, but their isolation also seems to provide a refuge, though no one seems at first to know why they might need one.

Maeve is an iconographer at the Abby, a religious institution which has turned the world’s magic into a well-controlled form of faith. The actual magic is done by Saints, through prayers to their painted icons. Maeve is very good at painting icons, but after unusual things happen during the sitting for a new icon, she is sent away to paint an icon of an exiled Saint named Jude. Maeve does not know whether this is punishment or praise. No one, including Jude, knows what terrible things he did to result in exile.

In Jude’s house on the moors, they learn that neither of them fully understands how the magic really works. Jude is convinced that understanding the magic and exposing the Abbey is critical, but Maeve wants to hold on to her faith. They must learn to trust each other. And, of course, they find themselves falling in love. They will need every bit of that trust and love to survive the betrayal the Abbey has in store for them.

For those who like romance, this is a moody slow-burn with plenty of pining and the promise of intimacy at the end. (It is not, however, cosy. The Abbey is physically and mentally abusive, and serious violence is eventually necessary.) For readers of fantasy, The Sacred Space Between provides a solid, unique magical world along with some interesting musings on the nature of memory and faith.

I’d never heard of this book, or its author. So I was quite surprised when we got almost fifty orders for it February. Turns out that Jessie Sylva is a “recovering lawyer” who just started writing. She lives in Canada with her wife and two cats. How To Lose A Goblin in Ten Days is her first novel. She calls it a “cozy fantasy [with an] emphasis on queer joy.”

The book is a very cozy romance. Pansy is a halfling girl who is a terrible farmer, but a very good cook. Her taste in furnishing runs to squeaky clean and excessively frilly. Ren is a non-binary goblin who loves good cooking. They can grow food anywhere, including in the dirt they bring inside the previously-abandoned cottage they’re forced to share with Pansy. Of course, halflings and goblins are natural enemies so clearly, one of them must move out within ten days. They argue. They try to trick each other. They eat delicious food together. They get a cat. There is only one bed.

The world of Pansy and Ren is inhabited by fantasy races drawn from Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons tropes. There is some magic, in the form of an ongoing vague war between wizards and demon lords, in which halflings and goblins are recruited (read: used) by opposing sides. But, unless you count being able to overcome decades of prejudice with a few well-chosen words—and possibly the alluring shape of someone’s ears—there isn’t much fantasy.

But the enemies-to-lovers romance is sweet and satisfying. The evil wizard who shows up eventually is hardly more evil than the busybody neighbor lady who hates goblins, though he is more prone to bloodshed. The disapproving townspeople are easily convinced along the path to acceptance, eventually. Pansy and Ren themselves are barely able to fight with each other. So, despite many obstacles, it is always comfortably clear that love will win in the end.

On May 4, 1970, a troop of National Guardsmen shot fifty-six M1-armor-piercing bullets directly into a crowd of student protesters, killing four of them and severely wounding nine others. The Guard had been sent to quell student demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, but the presence of armed men served only to increase the students’ anger. I was fourteen years old, and saw the resulting outrage and eruption of student protests that followed. I believed it was a turning point against the war in Vietnam. In fact, the war did not end until I was a sophomore in college, five years later.

Derf Backderf was ten years old at the time, and living in the next town over. He saw the truckloads of Guardsmen patrolling his own town. He became an award-winning journalist who produces, essentially, documentaries in graphic novel form. His graphic novel detailing the five days leading up to the Kent State incident is a “dramatic recreation” based on “eyewitness accounts, detailed research, and investigation.”

Kent State follows the mundane lives of several students, including the actions and opinions of the four students who were killed—or at least what could be pieced together later from interviews with their friends and family. It follows the testimony of a student who claimed at the time to be an FBI campus informant, but may not have been. It also documents the incident through the eyes of the only National Guardsman ever willing to speak about the tragedy.

Kent State assembles a picture of fearful confusion, hatred born of possibly-deliberate misinformation, and an absolute refusal of anyone in power to take responsibility or even give a clear command. The book is a stunning and wrenching account of the evolution and eventual cost of mutual paranoia and misunderstanding.

Disclaimer: I read Kent State and wrote this review in the days following the ICE murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

These days, we have a different set of lies, misdirections, and paranoid notions. The government has decided that protestors are terrorists rather than communists. We have scared, inappropriately-trained boys under the command of bitter, hardened men, but now they are signing up as ICE agents instead of escaping the draft by enlisting in the National Guard. Some of us dare to call the deaths “murders” instead of “killings,” though heavily-armed men still claim to be in fear for their lives at the hands of peaceful but angry protesters.

The murders at Kent State were never punished. There were a series of cover-ups—false claims of hordes of students charging the Guardsmen; mixed up or hidden ballistic evidence; judges acquitting Guardsmen for no reason; politicians telling outright lies. No Guardsmen ever admitted to any wrongdoing, though several student protesters were jailed. The general public blamed the students.

The book is essential reading for those who wish to continue an ongoing fight for justice. We now have video cameras on every phone instead of eyewitness reports, so perhaps we will be more successful. But it has never been without cost. Richard Nixon was later taped saying, “You know what stops them? Kill a few. Remember Kent State?” He was speaking about the civil rights protests in 1971. Nixon resigned, but not until 1974. His legacy of distrust and hatred obviously still lives on. It has been and still will be a long road.

In this retelling of Cinderella, “Ella” is murdered by her stepmother and becomes a ghost inhabiting the house that once belonged to her father. Unfortunately for Ella, even as a house she still can be persecuted by her stepmother and stepsisters, and forced to do all the housework. If you know the fairly tale of Cinderella, you know that eventually there will be a fairy godmother and a Royal Ball with a Prince on display. But, as it says on the cover copy, “You’re halfway right, and all the way wrong.”

This is one of the most inventive fairy tale retellings I’ve ever read. Like Cinderella, Ella spends very little time feeling sorry for herself. Unlike her fairy tale version, Ella is smart and intrepid and beginning to take charge of her own not-life well before the Royal Ball is rumored. The bargains she makes are her own, for her own reasons, which have nothing to do with being rescued by a Prince. But the truly wonderful thing about the book is that the other characters—including the woman-resembling-a-fairy-godmother, the step-trio, and the Prince—also have agency. This is a story that can only be told by a writer who is able to break away from the Prince/Princess narrative and forge a different sort of happy ending.

Chih is a Cleric of the Singing Hills, a fading order of non-gendered monks whose duty it is to record history. They travel with Almost Brilliant, a bird-like creature who remembers everything back to her ancestors’ memories of the Xun Dynasty. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, they arrive at the now-deserted palace on Lake Scarlet, that once was the home in exile of the Empress In-yo. There, they catalog the items they find. They are aided by Rabbit, a handmaiden who may be a ghost.

As each precious artifact is revealed, Rabbit reveals a small gem of a story about the lives of the former inhabitants of the palace. The sum is a history of how the exiled Empress arrived at and left Lake Scarlet. Woven through the history is a wrenching but beautiful understanding of exactly what it might cost for the powerless to come into power. It is a history of sorrow and loss and triumph, told by the things left behind.

According to Cory Doctorow, we are living in the Enshittocene, wherein the once-friendly internet is being turned against us, not by evil attacking AI robots, but by giant tech corporations. I found the various usages of the word “enshittify” rather hilarious, until I realized that Doctorow is correct, and enshittification is actually not very funny. I caught on pretty quickly because bookstores were the first things to be attacked by the new tech giants (see the third chapter: Case Study: Amazon, page 20), and DreamHaven survived partly because we were on-line way before Amazon.

Enshittification is the transformation of the internet from a user-friendly way to connect with others, to an intrusive mess designed to funnel boatloads of money and private information into a few giant tech companies. Doctorow carefully traces how this was done, beginning with secret data collection and hidden tricks of internet pricing. They took advantage the current governmental reluctance to regulate anything, and crafted new laws to prevent competition. Eventually they were able to erode the basic honesty of tech workers, and the usefulness of their products declined. The details of these are very simply (and snarkily) explained in the book, despite many of them being pretty complicated.

The book is subtitled “Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” I’m not sure the worsening is sudden, since problems seem to me to be rooted in Reagan-era deregulation and end-stage capitalism. Doctorow really only deals with the enshittification of the internet—now called the “enshitternet”—which arrived well after Reagan. But, honestly, shit on the internet may totally be able to enshittify the world.

Doctorow confirms what we booksellers always suspected—that Amazon was losing money on every book sale. What we didn’t know was that Amazon had enough money to do this indefinitely or, at least, until it had intentionally put a lot of us out of business. From there, it was able to acquire a currently-legal monopoly on books and then everything else. After all, Amazon is secure enough to sell this book. Though, if you buy an e-copy, you’re only renting access to it, which they can remove any time they want.

Happily, Doctorow spends no words predicting that things will get worse from here, though that may be just because of course it will. He also, in the last section of the book titled “The Cure,” has very few suggestions for individual action. But he does offer some bright spots—a few small-but-worldwide government shifts that he believes will eventually lead to positive changes. Overall Enshittification makes for an informative and surprisingly entertaining read.

This novel is already a New York Times bestseller, because Lev Grossman is also the author of the very popular series “The Magicians.” It has cover blurbs from George RR Martin, Rebecca Yarros, Oprah Daily, and the Wall Street Journal. It is also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. I expected to hate it. I didn’t think the world needed another King Arthur story. Now I think it should win the World Fantasy Award.

The plot does not follow King Arthur himself, not really; but the tragic shadow he casts is large enough to be visible on every page. The hero is Collum of the Out Isles, a seventeen-year-old of no particular parentage who happens to be the best fighter in a tiny village. (I think he is the only character in the novel that Grossman invented.) With no other options, he steals a horse and armor from his abusive guardian, and heads for Camelot, as heroes do. He is just in time to miss the final battle between King Arthur and his son Mordred. He finds himself set upon the final quest of the Round Table, with the few remaining knights of Camelot.

Like Collum, the remnants are a suspect bunch, none of whom really live up to their legendary counterparts. Sir Scipio is a Roman legionnaire lost in time, Sir Palomides the Saracen is a minor prince from Bagdad, Sir Dinidan is a trans man trained under a lake near a convent. They are knights in shining armor, in an age where magic is real and armor shouldn’t have been invented yet. They get drunk and sweaty and piss in unsavory places. Their moments of heroism are often misguided, and always bloody, but nonetheless guided by courage and attempted righteousness. They’re doing their best, like Arthur did.

The legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, in all its many versions, is a centuries-long conversation about loyalty, power, and morality. Every generation adds its own message to the story. This retelling has all the tragic resonance of The Once and Future King, mixed with some of the absurdity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Grossman’s Arthur is caught between the old magic of Fairy and the new magic of the Christian God, and ultimately abandoned by both. The Bright Sword is a brilliant retelling of his story, made for these troubled times.

Despite being shortlisted for both the World Fantasy and the Hugo Awards, The Tainted Cup is not really either fantasy or science fiction. Yes, there is an Empire threatened by enormous, destructive horrors that come from the ocean depths every wet season. And there is a detailed, invented civilization which fights these leviathans using advanced biological techniques. But the book is a solid murder mystery. It features an absolutely delightful, neurodiverse detective, and her equally interesting new assistant.

Anagosa Dolabra is a high-ranking Iudex Investigator, sent to a backwater town not far from the sea wall that keeps the leviathans away. There, presumably, her idiosyncratic behaviors will be less intrusive. Her newly assigned assistant, Dinios Kol, doesn’t actually know very much about her. Din just knows that they have been assigned a gruesome murder case, and that, since Ana rarely leaves her sensory-protected rooms, he will be the one doing the actual legwork.

Almost everyone in this world has been augmented—physically or mentally or both—by carefully developed serums, grafts, spores and implants. Despite rigorous biological and bureaucratic oversight, these improvements can have permanent and debilitating side effects. Din doesn’t know how Ana has been augmented, or if all those augments are functioning properly. Din himself has been successfully augmented to become an “engraver,” able to remember absolutely everything he sees and hears.

Din really doesn’t want to remember the scene of his first murder case, clearly some sort of biological event gone monstrously wrong, but he faithfully collects and brings all the details back to Ana. Her brilliant deductions and his sometimes-unwilling attention to detail are the perfect combination for solving such crimes. They have a wonderfully sardonic relationship leading to a growing mutual respect. This serves them well as additional murders are uncovered and the case edges deeper into the politics of the Empire. They must move closer to danger, too. Some of the murders caused a breach in the sea wall, and it’s only a matter of time before a leviathan makes its way through it.

There are hints that there are more secrets waiting for Ana and Din to find them, but The Tainted Cup is a complete novel without cliffhangers. A sequel, A Drop of Corruption, is already available.

Malaysian-Chinese author Yangsze Choo is a New York Times bestselling author, and this book already has many prestigious reviews. It is also now a nominee for the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. Despite being based clearly on the Eastern mythology of hulijing (fox spirits who seek enlightenment in human form), it felt to me more like a mainstream novel. Choo has a simple, eloquent style, with lovely descriptions of the landscape as metaphor, reminiscent of Chinese poetry. The Fox Wife is a comfortable book, slow-moving and dreamy, full of the magic of the ordinary.

Most of the novel is narrated in first-person by Snow (Xue’er in Chinese, Yuki in Japanese), who takes every opportunity to remind the reader that she is a fox. She never takes the form of a fox, though presumably she can. She was present for events in the distant past, but seems to have no real understanding of history. Foxes are mischievous, she tells us, too curious, and impulsive. To me, she seemed childish despite her age.

Though it means stepping off her path to enlightenment, Snow is on a quest for revenge for the death of her child. She is following the trail of a mysterious photographer, made possible by the rarity of photography in 1908 China. She intends to kill him. She says very little about her child, except to reminisce about the horror of her loss. She never mentions the husband she must have had in order to be the fox’s wife.

Happily, there is also an interwoven story, of an old man, possibly dying, named Bao. His story is told in the more traditional third person, present tense. I found him much more interesting. As a child, he and a long lost childhood friend, had an encounter with foxes, a memory now hazy and relegated to imagination. But he can, very reliably, hear lies, which makes him a good detective. He is an otherwise unremarkable person, quiet and somewhat lonely, but more or less content with his life. He is on the trail of a series of disappearances and deaths, that eventually link to the same photographer.

The journeys of Snow and Bao are joined as much by attitude as by the crossing of their paths. Their search for the photographer is almost incidental. Their magic, real as it is, seems unimportant. It is the people they both meet along the way, and the small kindnesses they give and receive, that are important. Snow’s kindness comes from naivety and Bao’s from an unhurried wisdom, but they are both truly seeking connection, and ultimately find it.