1) "Alif the Unseen" by G. Willow Wilson
Modern hacker culture and ancient Muslim mysticism collide in the debut work of fiction from Wilson, better known as a graphic novelist.
Alif, the pseudonym of the Arab-Indian hero of this novel, is a young hacker living in an unnamed city in the Persian Gulf, providing support to various groups who want to avoid government censors. Heartbroken when he discovers his love has been betrothed to another man, Alif writes a program that can help him secretly detect her online activity, but the program catches the attention of the government, setting in motion a convoluted series of adventures involving an ancientArabian Nights-esque tome called the Alf Yeom, religious leaders, otherworldly creatures and, quite literally, the girl next door. The most engaging members of this menagerie arrive early, including Vikram the Vampire, an imposing guide to the world of the jinn, and a female American Muslim-convert who sheds light on the mysterious text. Both give Wilson an opportunity to explore the more mystical elements of the Koran in particular and Islam in general, and she also clears plenty of room to discuss repressive regimes and East-West understandings. The novel is timely, especially as it surges toward an Arab Spring-themed conclusion. But though Wilson, a Muslim convert (documented in her 2010 memoir, The Butterfly Mosque), displays a savvy knowledge of Muslim arcana, the story is overstuffed with left turns and a host of characters and bogs down in jargon about hacker tools and techniques. Given relatively short shrift are samples from the Alf Yeom itself, which, when they do appear, offer some wry fables that are engaging in their simplicity. Larger doses of those stories’ pithiness and charm would give this thriller more spirit.
Wilson displays an admirable Neil Gaiman-esque ambition that isn’t quite matched by this oft-plodding tale.
2) "The Brides of Rollrock Island" by Margo Lanagan
In this spellbinding, intricately layered novel, the Printz Honor winner (Tender Morsels, 2008) puts her unique spin on selkies—haunting, mysterious, seal-human shape-shifters in a world of hardscrabble fishing villages, lonely islands and cold, restless seas.
At the story’s heart is unattractive, abused Misskaella, whose harsh life on Rollrock Island changes when, at age 9, she awakens to powers that include an exhilarating, terrifying connection to the island’s seals. Left largely unguided to develop her gifts, Misskaella grows up unloved, unmarried and feared. A secret joy makes life bearable, but loss soon follows. When she learns to draw forth a beautiful woman from a seal, life changes again. Island men set aside their human wives—girls and matrons who once ridiculed Misskaella—and pay whatever she asks for seal wives. Beautiful, strange, sad, they’re truly loved by the husbands and sons who refuse to see their unhappiness. Earthy, vigorous characters and prose ground the narrative in the world we know, yet its themes are deep as the sea. Daniel, son of a human father and his seal wife, wonders why “whosoever’s pain I thought of, it could not be resolved without paining someone else.” Intentions and actions, cause and effect are untidy and complicated, raising questions that will require generations to answer.
Bracing, powerful, resonant. (Fantasy. 12 & up)
3) "The Shadow Year" by Jeffrey Ford
From Edgar-winner Ford (for The Girl in the Glass, 2005), a tale about three kids, a small town and the banality of evil.
The narrator is a sixth grader who has an older brother and a younger sister. They have an absentee father who works three jobs and an alcoholic mother. Were it not for the fact that they love each other—though none of them ever speak the word—it would be a family hell-bent on dysfunction. Still, for the most part, they’ve been able to consider themselves ordinary, until the night of the scream, the “shrill scream of a woman, so loud it tore the night open wide.” And so begins the Shadow Year, a year dark with every possibility of violence and loss. Enter the prowler, a tall, thin man with expressionless, skeletal features, white hair, dressed, at every sighting, in a long white coat. People vanish. Shy, awkward little Charlie Edison is the first, and other disappearances follow. There are harrowing confrontations, brushes with death, a brief alliance with a ghostly presence. In their basement the children have constructed a clay and cardboard replica of their local community, its neighborhoods and citizenry, complete with a representation of their elusive nemesis. It’s a town in flux, changing inexplicably and mysteriously. The conviction grows among them that by studying their model, they might be able to chart the terrifying progress of the prowler as he goes about the business of selecting targets. And then one day there’s every reason to believe it’s their own house he’s scoping.
Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too. For those of you—and you know who you are—who think the indispensable element for good genre fiction is good writing, this is not to be missed.
4) "Tender Morsels" by Margo Lanagan
5) "The Drowned Life" by Jeffrey Ford
Sixteen stories ranging from the wildly surreal to the commonplace and poignant, from Ford (The Girl in the Glass, 2005, etc.).
In “The Drowned Life,” the opening story, a financially beset husband and father finally chooses to go under—literally. His life having ended “not with a bang but a bubble,” he finds himself the newest citizen of a weird subterranean world in which grocery stores and houses float by, and the indigenous population, in various stages of decomposition, goes about its waterlogged business as if in some kind of sunken village of the damned. “In the House of Four Seasons” is like a trip through Alice’s looking glass—complete with bizarre confrontations and logic turned on its head—conducted by a seemingly sensible guide who is, in fact, mad as a hatter. Ford shifts the mood drastically for “Present from the Past,” a sharply observed, fully empathic story of a family coping with the pain, anger and long-smoldering resentments that can attend a death watch. “The Scribble Mind” will leave readers puzzled and perhaps a bit unnerved by its story about a strange woman with a strange obsession. Like Ford’s imagination, his sense of humor never sleeps; it’s also on the strange side. In “The Dreaming Wind,” for example, a parrot swaps heads with a child’s doll: “The bird still spoke but prefaced every screeching utterance with a breathy, mechanical rendition of the word ‘Mama.’ ”
Impressive eclecticism, enhanced by the pleasures of quietly quirky prose.
6) "Illyria" by Elizabeth Hand
7) "Dark Matter" by Sheree R. Thomas
A first anthology of speculative fiction by black writers: 25 stories, 3 novel excerpts, and 5 essays, the oldest piece an 1887 tale of a bewitched vineyard, the majority from this year. Included are a couple of acknowledged classics: Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” about the effects on sexual behavior caused by astronauts who are themselves asexual; and Octavia E. Butler’s wrenching masterpiece, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” about a genetic disease whose victims helplessly mutilate themselves. In an excerpt from the 1931 novel Black No More, George S. Schuyler wonders what would happen if black people simply and easily became white. Derrick Bell imagines alien visitors whose only desire is to depart with all America’s blacks. In W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 tale, a comet kills everyone in New York except a poor black man and a rich white woman. Other topics encompass: Adam and Eve, vampires, music, modern folk tales, astral traveling, VR, multigenerational starships, female warriors, an American woman caught in the gears of an African civil war, the Ark, Santa, alien contact, UFOs, alien abduction, and robots. The essays are equally fascinating. Delany examines racism and science fiction—it’s largely unconscious but present, he reports. Walter Mosley predicts an imminent explosion of new, black SF writers. Charles R. Saunders becomes generally unhinged about Mike Resnick’s African fables. Paul D. Miller explores music and black identity. And Octavia E. Butler wonders how much reality is too much.
Read. Enjoy. Ponder.
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