Rock Goddess ‘This Time’ CD

‘Are you ready?’ Jody Turner screams as this album kicks in. 32 years after their third album Rock Goddess are back with a fourth. It’s been on repeat in my car for a week.

This Time features the original Rock Goddess line-up of the Turner sisters, guitarist/singer Jody and powerhouse drummer Julie, along with bassist Tracey Lamb. Soundwise it is still the classic NWOBHM power trio of the early 80s, but better.

It’s a simple formula, chunky riffs and shoutalong fist-punching choruses. A careful listen reveals depths that list RG above the herd. Take track two ‘Obsession’ where the riff pushes into Julie’s drum patterns at just the right point to emphasise a sense of pressure. Or the brief rumble of Tracey’s bass lifting Jody’s solo in ‘Why Do We Never Learn?’ Throughout the album I’m increasingly aware of the fluidity of Julie’s drumming. Rarely flamboyant but almost always nuanced and pinning everything above it in place. Mixing Tracey’s bass high helps too.

Then there’s the more melodic ‘Drive Me Away’ that almost but doesn’t quite break into an epic ballad album closer.

The other thing that lifts Rock Goddess above many others is the tenor of Jody Turner’s lyrics. Even back in her teens she explored a strong woman’s perspective on flawed relationships. Here she asserts her independence on ‘Flying To See You’ and turns the tables on ‘It’s My Turn’. Not clichéd man-hating or simple role reversal Jody’s characters reveal weakness as well as strengths, are driven by self-esteem more than rage.

Young Jody, although a distinctive vocalist, was occasionally prone to overdone screaming. This time she’s more in control, gravelly and breathy in turn, but belting the choruses.

It’s not the perfect album, ‘Why Do We Never Learn’ is probably the weakest song, despite the aforementioned solo. I like ‘Calling To Space’ but can’t quite work out what it’s saying. There’s a bit of repetition but simplicity can work, and many acclaimed albums are less varied. Quibbles though. This is an album I expect to keep coming back to when I need some classic new wobbum rawk!

And I am so looking forward to hearing these songs live this week.

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Signal to Noise – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

You have to admire a novel that almost immediately but briefly digresses into a discussion of the best concept album ever* all whilst developing the protagonist’s harsh yet sympathetic personality.

Mercedes Vega or Meche returns to Mexico City for her father’s funeral, 18 years after leaving, 20 years after last seeing him. On the ride from the airport her cousin reminds Meche of an old friend, Sebastian, and buried memories resurface.

15 year old Meche is the awkward nerd with a love of music. Her friends Sebastian and Daniela similarly are isolated, linked as much by their differences as their similarity. Her mother is largely absent working, her father a musician and drinker. So Meche is loosely supervised by her grandmother who has oblique ideas around magic and witchcraft.

By chance Meche discovers that the record she played focuses a form of magic against a school bully. Angry thoughts listening to ‘Break On Through’ lead, in her mind, to the unexplained fall suffered by her bully on the stairs. She recruits Dani and Seb to experiment with old records in an abandoned factory.

“Guys, I just want to remind you I have to be home by seven,” Daniela said. “I’m also not allowed to do any Satanic stuff.”

Moreno-Garcia skillfully sketches characters through little, often humorous, asides. Amongst other qualities, Signal to Noise is frequently a funny novel.

Back in 2009 the funeral preparations reveal the relationship between Meche and her mother through the difference in their relationships with the late Vicente. Meche has buried him emotionally long ago. Natalia, remarried, still organises the wake, the party, the food.

The teen sections of Signal to Noise have a YA feel. The trio’s responses to school, other people and each other reflect youthful concerns. Fancying the boy who is out of reach, trying to find the right clothes with no money, worrying about being caught by parents. Meche argues with her mother about spending all her time with Sebastian. Sebastian ruminates on his poor family and being bullied. Daniela is ill and thus over-protected by her parents and longs for the freedom she thinks her friends have, but fears it too.

Sebastian wanted it. He wanted that corny, fabricated music video universe in which a couple could pop up from under the waves, water dripping from their bodies, embracing each other.

These moments, where Moreno-Garcia drops in reference to popular songs (in this instance Timbiriche’s Tu Y Yo Somos Uno Mismo) enrich Signal to Noise for me, both fixing the scenes in time/place/culture and developing the characters through their interaction with the music. They bring Meche and Sebastian to life by proxy. The novel could almost have a linked playlist for the reader so inclined.

Later, Meche reflects on Miguel Bosé’s hit Nena.

When Bosé sang about an impossible woman with an insatiable mouth and they fought — and rolled around the floor — it seemed gritty and true. A fucked up relationship, but fascinating all the same.

The 1988 settings show aspirations and anxieties in working class Mexico City. The 2009 scenes haven’t changed but the people have. Meche has, by leaving, changed everything she left behind.

In Mexico City everything returns. The rains and the past and everything in between.

Meche sees Sebastian across the street, neither acknowledges the other. She contacts Daniela but it is clear she begrudges her former friends putting an end to the magic and the friendship.

Why has Meche stayed away from her father for so long? How did the magic go wrong?

At one point Meche cautions against too much use of magic, yet we know she resents the end of it.

“It’s like reverse engineering.” …

“Umm… it’s when you lack the software specifications so you poke around the program interface trying to find the solution. That’s what we are doing with the magic.”

That, of course, is how the fantasy writer usually defines her magic. Working backwards from the results. Here it is also how Moreno-Garcia tells much of her story. It works because magic and music are, in this novel, both plot device and thematic device. The escapism and the empowerment they bring coincide for Meche. Her father was a musician, a would be writer on all things pop and Hispanic. Meche’s estrangements and attachments are tied this way. It creates an intriguing tension.

Ultimately the two strands are unbalanced; 1988 could exist without 2009 but not the reverse. The teenage adventures, bordering on teen cliché occasionally, are dynamic. The later scenes are predominantly introspective. Older Meche is unpleasant albeit understandably at times. The teenage desire to be attractive to the in-crowd, whilst simultaneously despising them, more identifiable.

Signal to Noise is a debut novel but by an experienced author and editor. It takes an unusual idea and builds on it, foregrounding her community, the people and the city above the magical conceit.

I’ve argued before that there is a difference between fantasy taking place in a city, and Urban Fantasy where the specific city environment is significant to the novel. It is hard to imagine translating Signal to Noise wholesale from Mexico City to New York or London without losing all personality and substance.

The throwaway details the author uses, like Sebastian getting too old for his supermarket bag packing job at 15, depict a culture not just a story. The tunes, their significance historically and personally, are introduced deftly too. Passing references build a bigger picture. Meche fancies blond Constantino not dark Sebastian but this contrast is dropped in not laboured.

Signal to Noise is fun, cleverly constructed and original. On those grounds I recommend it.

It is also significant in the nuanced depictions of poor, working class lives. Fantasy glosses over this a lot. Moreno-Garcia’s characters live it. We need books like this.

Note :

*he didn’t know Alan Parsons Project because they sang Games People Play from The Turn of a Friendly Card which, in her opinion was a very nice concept album. Not the best, but nice. The best was an easy pick. Most people would probably say the concept album of all time was The Dark Side Of The Moon, but Meche preferred The Kinks’ Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). Her parents had met thanks to that album.

The Trelawny Collection #2: Trelawny with Shelley and Byron – Joaquin Miller 1893

Continuing my working through biographies of the old rogue Tre, this brief pamphlet is my most recent acquisition and only in scanned e-book format.

In my previous post I implied that Richard Edgcumbe was the sole biographer to actually know Trelawny. In fact the Californian writer Joaquin Miller also had some acquaintance with Tre.

Edward John Trelawny of London, Italy, Greece, Wales, the whole world in fact, was certainly the most singularly fortunate man I ever met, and I have known not a few notable and brave men.

Thus in his opening sentence Miller eulogises Trelawny and adds his own story in. We learn subsequently that Trelawny ‘must have been far up in the eighties when I saw him’, that Trelawny sent Miller copies of the revised Recollections but also ‘for aught I know he may still be living.’ (Tre died 11 years before Miller wrote this.)

Miller spends several pages thus setting the scene, stressing repeatedly Trelawny’s rough edges and ‘cold-blooded, not to say brutal, acts’ in advancement of his theme.

No one can help wondering all the time how it happened that this bloodless fellow claimed to be the best friend of these two most sensitive of all noble-born Englishmen from the day when he first met them till he laid them in the grave.

Miller shifts slightly to almost literary reviewer as his subject becomes not quite Trelawny but Trelawny’s writings. He excuses what he describes as ‘lies’ about the poets as ‘born of the very air and time in which the book was first concerned’ which may have some validity, but then follows up naively ‘here is a pleasant bit about Shelley which must be true’. So anything bad about Shelley we question but praise we must believe.

The passage Miller quotes then is the famous story of Shelley reading standing resting on the mantlepiece all day. Of all Trelawny’s writings this passage seems to have been most widely adopted as characterising Shelley.

Alongside this Miller quotes Shelley’s funeral scene but fails to note how lyrical Trelawny could be in such passages whilst more straightforward elsewhere.

On Byron subsequently Miller describes some of Trelawny’s words as showing a ‘sweet and restful occasion’. There is an account of an alleged conversation laden with irony for the 21st century reader but rendered in more innocent manner by the American biographer.

That said Miller does question Trelawny on detail if not spirit.

I here quote a few paragraphs from Trelawny’s account of [Byron’s] death; observing that if he is not entirely truthful here he at least seems entirely so, and prudent, too, and thoughtful of Byron’s friends at home and all the world.

The time with the poets being done it would seem too that Trelawny’s drama was over, but Miller acknowledges that his subject continued an active life in the Greek Wars of Independence ‘as if he had not yet been favoured enough by the gods of song — think of it!’

And then abruptly, mid description of the assassination attempt in Mavre Troupa and it’s aftermath, mid sentence, this edition of Miller’s pamphlet ends. He has already told us there is no space for more, so how much is missing I can only speculate but i suspect no more than 3 orv4 pages presumably summarising Miller’s thoughts on Trelawny. These we know from his opening and other comments are somewhat awestruck but mixed with an idealised view of noble-born Englishmen and class perception.

Miller’s quotes of long passages from Trelawny’s own accounts mean that really it is as well to go to the source and skip this partial (in both senses) text.

Note: the missing pages here are clearly the responsibility of the publishers of this scanned edition HardPress (Miami) who brag about not using OCR to avoid ‘introduced errors’ yet not only miss pages but more glaringly add a generic e-book cover misspelling Shelley.

Albums of 2018

Slightly belatedly, a rundown of 2018’s best albums.

A year where keeping up in any genre was difficult so being eclectic like me, well, how the hell do I not miss great stuff? Not many of my established favourites, the ones you’d expect me to list, released albums this year. A few new favourites arose though.

And there were a few I came across too late to fully assimilate for list purposes. Farai, the London based Zimbabwean electro artist with a voice reminiscent of Ari Up for instance.

Quick note too. Unreleased track of the year was Gasteruption Jaculator by Mary Epworth a highlight of her live set I can’t wait to hear recorded.

But here’s what I did love…

30 Gaye Su Akyol – Istikrarli Hayal Hakkikkattir

Gaye Su Akyol has classic pop style and her band traditional Turkish folk meets psychedelia. Her voice cuts through on impassioned songs of press freedom and other vital topics.

29 Lubomyr Melnyk – Fallen Trees

Contemporary classical piano at it’s most blissful enhanced occasionally by the stunning voice of Hatis Noit.

28 Ammar 808 – Maghreb United

If Melnyk was for quiet moments, this needs volume and bass. Electronics and North African instruments bring modern and ancient into something new.

27 Cupcakke – Ephorize

Sexually explicit and very much positive feminist hip hop from Elizabeth Harris.

26 Maisha – There Is A Place

Pharaoh Sanders influenced spiritual British jazz with lush strings supporting.

25 Deafheaven – Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

You’d expect anything described as genre agnostic to intrigue, this is, if not exactly Black Metal, certainly Very Dark Grey Metal.

24 Hookworms – Microshift

Their abrupt split after abuse allegations against their frontman overshadows a fine contemporary indie record.

23 David Byrne – American Utopia

In a way this is Byrne’s entire career. Adventures in rhythm beneath oblique political abstracts.

22 Saxon – Thunderbolt

I do like me some New Wobbum and nobody embodies its joys more than Barnsley’s finest.

21 Tony Kofi & The Organisation – Point Blank

Kofi’s hard bop sax joins the B3 driven Organisation on a selection of grooves.

20 Anna von Hausswolf – Dead Magic

As soon as I heard lead track ‘The mysterious vanishing of Electra’ I knew this was great. Howling gothic squalls of pipe organ and vocals that are part-Kate Bush part-Diamanda Galas are only part of this epic.

19 Anna Calvi – Hunter

A grower. Calvi’s sensual guitar and lyrics take time to infuse. It’s the apart contradictions of moody and frenetic that gradually make haunting sense.

18 Zeal & Ardor – Stranger Fruit

Yes the title is relevant to both Billie Holiday and Seamus Heaney. Taking black metal to spiritual and field songs seems unlikely but I can’t stop playing this late discovery.

17 Dirtmusic – Bu Bir Ruya

A step East into Turkey away from previous West African adventures modifies the detail of Chris Eckman & Hugo Race’s music but not the restless spirit. And songs like Border Crossing are vital today.

16 Ólafur Arnalds – Re:member

The intellectual heir to Bill Evans’ Conversations with Myself as Arnalds has written algorithms to play two more pianos responding to his highly structured compositions as he plays.

Half way and we’ve had jazz in various forms, hip hop, metal, classical and indie, and the outright avant garde. What next?

15 Hatis Noit – Illogical Dance

Nominally an EP but long enough and good enough. Japanese vocal artist Hatis Noit is another who convinced me on a single track, the glorious hymn Angelus Novus. I drove to Wakefield recently to hear her sing her self-sampled looped pieces.

14 Let’s Eat Grandma – I’m All Ears

A more robust, balanced record than their debut. LEG are now 19 years old but keep enough whimsy to balance their doomy witch pop.

13 Anna Meredith – Anno

If you ask me Anna can do no wrong at present. This album reworks Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with her own compositions and brings out the best of both.

12 Tomorrow We Sail – The Shadows

Another melange of influences, or echoes (shadows?) of prog, orchestral folk and more. Soaring, melancholy vocals and carefully layered instrumentation are as effective live.

11 Nils Frahm – All Melody

Of the various superb classical inspired pianists around Frahm is both the most playful and physical. Listening to part of this one can feel the thwock of finger on keys the way guitar records sometimes carry the slide of finger on string.

10 Gwenno – Le Kov

Whodathunk a song about cheese in Cornish would be one of the catchiest things all year? The whole album is like that, beautiful upbeat melodies and lyrics that could be nonsense for all I really know but sound great.

9 Kamasi Washington – Heaven and Earth

More Pharaoh than ‘Trane to my ear despite the standard comparison, but Kamasi continues to build and expand and soar. Maybe a triple CD was a little much but the album closer ‘Will You Sing?’ makes the journey complete.

8 The Lovely Eggs – This is England

Holly & Dave’s punk pop surrealism actually has a grounding in the quotidian that is often missed. It’s what makes this diverse mix of tunes work. That and the bloody good tunes.

7 Erland Cooper – Solan Goose

This I can’t wait to see live in March. Evocative pieces linked by Orcadian names and legends of great seabirds.

6 tAngerinecAt – Many Kettles

Punk as fuck. Hurdy Gurdy and penny whistle ? With electronics? Lyrics about gender and ethnicity and oppression and abuse?

Absolutely.

5 Neko Case – Hell-On

You kinda know what you’re getting with Neko by now. But still she surprises. Brutal honesty, tender warnings, oblique yet head on challenges to patriarchs and abusers. And that voice. Joined here by Mark Lanegan and Beth Ditto amongst others but it’s Neko at her most glorious. Which makes it very great indeed.

4 Janelle Monáe – Dirty Computer

Genius. Prince-level, Bowie-level, conceptual genius and the chops to bring it together. Janelle gets in your face, makes you dance, makes you think.

For extra enjoyment view the full concept Emotion Picture. Like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, this is a full package.

3 Park Jiha – Communion

Korean instrumental music, classical, traditional and jazz intertwined on beautiful traditional instruments. This was album of the year for months.

2 Sons of Kemet – Your Queen Is A Reptile

Blistering jazz from South London. Driven largely by Theon Cross’ pulsing tuba, featuring ranting and exultant vocals, and running with Shabaka Hutchings sax. Each track honours a great woman including the likes of Harriet Tubman and Doreen Lawrence. ALSO number 1 for months.

1 Haiku Salut – There Is no Elsewhere

Then there was this. Haiku Salut with their third collection of cinematic, beautiful pieces of instrumental music. Unusual structures, multiple instruments and melodic lines that take you somewhere but don’t always show you how to get back at least not directly. This is good.

And there it is. To be fair any of the top 5 could shuffle to the top on a given day. That’s a sign of a great year. A diverse, eclectic, great year.

The Best of Connie Willis

The novels of Connie Willis are popular enough that maybe I don’t need to tell you about them, but how about her short fiction? Time Is The Fire is the first UK collection of Willis’ shorter fiction and features ten stories originally published between 1982 and 2005. Eight of them won the Hugo Award, the other two were amongst the five that picked up Nebulas. That’s some record.

So this is a collection subtitled ‘The Best Of Connie Willis’, although qualified (sub-subtitled, as it were) on the cover as ‘The Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Short Fiction’. What makes it so good? Are there recurrent themes that explain Willis’ huge popularity?

Lisa Tuttle has a go in her introduction, identifying a number of Willis protagonists on quixotic quests:

worrying that they’ve misunderstood something important, and consumed by the certainty that there is little time left to get it right. Sometimes these quirky quests are personal obsessions, but sometimes (because these are science fiction stories) the fate of the whole world may hinge on the timely discovery of the right clue by one bright yet basically powerless person.

For me that is one of the charms of the best of these stories, that Willis’ characters aren’t omnicompetent superheroes but closer to ‘ordinary’ people. It is also one of the annoyances, as Willis then frequently creates implausible setups for them. Looking at ‘Fire Watch’ from a rational, traditional SF position the premise that a historian who studied St. Paul could mistakenly be sent back in time to St.Paul’s Cathedral during the blitz is borderline ridiculous, but Willis isn’t that kind of writer. As others have noted, her model is often closer to Golden Age Hollywood’s screwball comedies than to Golden AgeCampbellian SF. ‘Fire Watch’ even makes this opposition clear when the narrator challenges his tutor over the examination focus on numbers rather than people’s lives.

The other stories of history here (they aren’t historicals as some would have it, but stories about history) are funnier than ‘Fire Watch’ and less poignant. ‘The Winds Of Marble Arch’ has a farcical runaround plot about conference attendees trying to arrange theatre tickets and some classic screwball banter where Willis shows off her love for the Underground. Interspersed with this are echoes of the Blitz seeping through from the past in ‘winds’ through the station tunnels. It isn’t a serious story on the surface, Willis’ London is romanticised and unrealistic for comic effect, but in contrasting this with the haunting winds there is a serious point about theme-park history and tourism. ‘Inside Job’ meanwhile has a fake medium who is actually genuinely channeling HL Mencken (of whom poignant is the least appropriate adjective.) Mencken may be less familiar to UK readers and this story perhaps suffers for that.

And then there is ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation Of Two Of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective’ a mock-scholarly piece on the belle of Amherst encountering Wells‘ martians. Laden with footnotes, and of course footnotes on footnotes, it has some of Willis’ most directly funny writing.

(As an aside, and referring more to the novels, her much praised historical accuracy is nothing of the sort, she gets so many easy details badly wrong that some readers cannot immerse themselves.)

Several of these stories are slow-burning, taking 50 or more pages not to transmit an idea but to build relationships and settings. The stories of history go to lengths to create a sense of verisimilitude. The comedies focus on dialogue and comic juxtapositions. The unusual Christmas story, ‘All Seated On the Ground’ is like that. Willis plays the screwball card again. Stock characters are played with whilst a romance develops, the author shows off her detailed knowledge of Carols, and a point is made about communication with aliens and with other humans.

Less romantic, and in some ways less impressive are the older stories here. ‘Fire Watch’, ‘Even The Queen’ and ‘A letter From The Clearys’ date from 1982. The latter is reminiscent of stories I’ve read by Eudora Welty and by Kit Reed (acknowledged here by Willis in her various comments.) It is a post-apocalyptic story that reveals its darker side between the lines, but doesn’t quite surprise and doesn’t have the quirky pseudo-characterisation of later stories. ‘Even The Queen’ is another story where a regimented society is faced with a revolution based on human actions. The subject matter may have been challenging in 1982 but the basic theme is one SF has mined many times before and since.

My favourite story here is ‘At The Rialto’ which more neatly ties its SF premise to its comic set-up. Again academia comes in for some gentle ribbing, but in a less long-winded way than say ‘The Winds Of Marble Arch’ as Willis plays with quantum theory and hotel booking systems to comic effect.

Time Is The Fire also includes Connie Willis’ own introduction, afterwords to every story, her Worldcon Guest of Honour speech and not one but two SFWA Grand Master speeches. To be honest, you can skip any two of the three speeches and not miss much. The introduction also covers some similar ground, but hey some people like that. A lot of people like Connie Willis too, as exemplified by the list of awards she has won. Your mileage may vary on whether all or some were deserved as truly the ‘best’ stories of their year, and for me, if I was selecting the actual Best of Connie Willis there are stories I’d swap for at least a couple here. (‘Schwartschild Radius’ and ‘All My Darling Daughters’ since you ask.) Nevertheless as one of the few women SF authors to gain consistent attention she deserves this collection. It might be nice to see some critical attention too that judges Willis on her own terms, as a writer of character-driven, romantic, screwball comic SF that makes up in charm, warmth and humour what it occasionally and deliberately neglects in plausibility.

Vonda McIntyre – a brief view

Originally published on Gollancz sfgateway.com in 2014

In the Nebula-winning novella “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” a healer, Snake, uses three specially bred snakes to inject medicines to the sick. Whilst saving the life of a young boy one of her snakes is killed by his suspicious family. Unfortunately these dreamsnakes are almost irreplaceable and a healer without one is seriously limited. Snake must set off back to her people and beg for another chance.

Vonda N. McIntyre depicts an isolated community, unaware of the world beyond theirs, and crippled by fear of it. Snake fails to engage with them and they refuse without recognition.

“Are you afraid?”

“I will do as you tell me.”

Snake is an outsider, and they fear her. She has medicine, her snakes, that they need yet do not understand and so fear, and through their fear, destroy them. McIntyre makes all of this explicit whilst drawing the reader through the imaginative, original details of her concept: The Dreamsnake. It is a story full of emotion, the saving of a child, the tentative bonding of Snake and one of the family, the tension when Grass is killed. It is also a story that recognises some reasons why people fear the other that are less often articulated. Ignorance is obvious, but guilt leading not to reconciliation but deeper discomfort and fear is as interesting here.

“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” later became the opening of the Hugo-winning novel Dreamsnake, a book that is curiously hard to find these days. Dreamsnake follows Snake as she tries to find her way back to her people in the faint hope of forgiveness for losing Grass. It is in many ways a classic, episodic, SF fantastic journey across what we gradually learn is a post-apocalyptic world. Along the way she meets a trio in a polyamorous relationship which is shown to have an equally balanced power dynamic. The community in “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” also appears to have some kind of polygamous partnership system implied, but it is clear there that they have a leader. She is a woman.

When Snake reaches a town she finds a society where physical perfection is not only the ultimate desire, but those who fall short are excluded, hidden and abused. Snake befriends and rescues a young girl scarred from a fire who has been abused and mistreated since.

There is a link to McIntyre’s first novel The Exile Waiting, as the world of Dreamsnake is the outside world of that novel’s city-locked setting. There is no need to read these in order however. Though the City is mentioned it is only seen as Snake attempts to gain entrance and refuge but is turned away.

It may seem that Dreamsnake is a polemical novel, and it is true that McIntyre was an outspoken feminist commentator on 70s SF alongside better remembered writers such as Joanna Russ. She certainly doesn’t pull punches, and several set pieces nicely subvert expectations. Dreamsnake is a clever novel though, McIntyre works on multiple levels simultaneously. There is drama and action, social comment, and romance, and there is a neat trick when the gender of one character is never revealed. I must confess I didn’t spot that until I read an interview elsewhere, and I realised I had made an unfounded assumption like many other readers, as I’m guessing was McIntyre’s own expectation.

As noted McIntyre’s work can be hard to find now, though she does sell her work from BookViewCafe. For many years it seemed her only available work was her Star Trek spin-off novels. Her collection Fireflood & Other Storiescovering her 1970s shorter work was published in the UK and is worth looking for. Aside from “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” the collection also includes ‘Aztecs’ which became part of the novel Superluminal. ‘Aztecs’ opens in hospital, Laenea is recovering from surgery to replace her human heart with an artificial one so that she can undergo the rigours of a space Pilot’s existence. This need to become transhuman to develop space flight was common in 1970s SF, see also McCaffrey, Spinrad, Delanyand others, but McIntyre examines more closely the process rather than the aftermath as Laenea fights through her ordeals to maintain her humanity. McIntyre frequently returns in her work to ideas of biocontrol, conscious manipulation of body functions. In Dreamsnake the idea of birth control via biocontrol allows for a tender, intimate scene which gently challenges egotistical views of sexual prowess. ‘Aztecs’ takes this further as Laenea strengthens her abilities to manipulate the artificial heart rather than be governed by the natural stresses of her human heart. Again the author is not afraid to make individual points within the bigger picture.

A man moved up behind her while she was in the dim region between two streetlamps. “Hey,” he said, “how about–” His tone was beligerent with inexperience or insecurity or fear.

Elsewhere in stories such as “Fireflood” and especially “The Mountains of Sunset, The Mountains of Dawn” McIntyre achieves an elegiacal poignancy whilst raging against the dying of the light that is not death but institutionalisation. Her protagonist in the latter story particularly spans generations and refuses to accept the constraints of the new at the cost of her freedom.

The work for which Vonda N McIntyre is about to become famous however is at least superficially nothing like those works discussed so far.

Her 1998 Nebula Award-winning historical fantasy novel The Moon & The Sun is currently being filmed in Australia with Pierce Brosnan, William Hurt and Fan Bingbing in starring roles. In Versailles at the court of the Sun King Louis XIV a young woman comes into contact with a sea monster. Her natural philosopher-priest brother has captured it for the king. Marie-Josephe is a lady in waiting to Louis’ niece, and much of this novel entertainingly depicts events at court. She is also a talented artist though obviously not allowed to pursue this, but her brother allows her to sketch the sea monster for his studies. She is also openly mocked by the Pope for her daring to think she can compose music. It becomes clear that Marie-Josephe has a truer understanding of the monster than Yves, and her empathy reveals it is not a sea monster but a sea woman, a mermaid. Both women along with Marie-Josephe’s maid Odelette are trapped in their roles, literally and metaphorically, but each comes together to break out. Odelette, initially a slave from Martinique, is revealed to be Turkish, Marie-Josephe it is implied is possibly mixed race also from Martinique and McIntyre deftly uses assumptions of identity around these and other characters including gay members of the court to subvert standard genre tropes. It is in the fears and superstitions of the court that The Moon & The Sun comes to resemble Dreamsnake, in the breaking of institutions that it echoes other earlier works by McIntyre. Her ability to tell a moving story from the point of view of an ‘alien’ is also evident in many of her short stories.

On that 1998 Nebula ballot McIntyre beat luminaries such as Connie Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold and something called A Game Of Thronesby George RR Martin. (Whatever happened to him?) Despite this, she has almost been forgotten. On the strength of Dreamsnake, Fireflood and The Moon & The Sun she ought to be read more widely and discussed.

Pat Murphy – a profile

Originally published on Sfgateway.com

Pat Murphy says her favourite bird is the mockingbird because ‘it never sings the same song twice.’ So far the same can be said of Murphy herself. Some writers find a genre seam and mine it successfully (and some exhaust it sooner than they realise) but Pat Murphy has spent her career questing around the edges of genres often probing in multiple directions at once. It’s an approach made explicit in the title of her first collection Points Of Departure, but most obvious in her strange, brilliant novel Adventures In Time & Space With Max Merriwell. Along the way she has picked up a string of Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Philip K Dick Award nominations. Despite this variation, there are consistent aspects to her fiction that reward her fans richly.

As Emma Bull said:

Pat Murphy’s stories make me look at the world around me, blink, and look again. See what’s there, they say. See what could be there. See what isn’t there, but should be, what must never be there and is.

That’s the thing I love about many of Pat Murphy‘s stories: her protagonists don’t blink in the face of the fantastic but openly engage with it. Elizabeth Butler is not threatened by the Mayan ‘ghosts’ she sees in The Falling Woman. Jennifer in ‘About Fairies’ assumes that fairies exist because why wouldn’t they? And Mrs Jenkins knows that ‘A Falling Star Is A Rock From Outer Space’ but is also able to accept that her falling star is more than that. It is this equipoise that allows the artists of The City, Not Long After to use imagination to defeat an enemy unable to see beyond imagination.

That liminality, the way Murphy rather than have a foot in fantasy and a foot in reality actually crosshatches them, is something rare in SFF. She doesn’t straddle genres but melds them. There And Back Again for instance, sort of looks like The Hobbit retold as a steampunk space opera version of The Hunting Of The Snark with feminism, pataphysics, and a knowing cleverness that adds bite to its amiable charm. On the other hand Adventures In Time & Space With Max Merriwell is a romantic murder thriller on a Love Boat avatar in the Bermuda triangle all explained by quantum mechanics. And a direct sequel to There And Back Again and to Wild Angel the story of a young woman brought up by wolves in gold rush California.

There And Back Again we are told, is actually written by somebody called Max Merriwell. Wild Angel credits a Mary Maxwell, and in Adventures we meet a third Murphy pseudonym, thriller writer Weldon Merrimax. In what I want to call hyperphery Murphy has one of her pseudonyms as a ‘real’ character whilst the other two are both real and illusory, carried over from the earlier books and jousting for pre-eminence, meanwhile a character called Pat Murphy (there’s also a Patrick) resolves things with scientific explanations straight from the real Pat Murphy‘s work at the San Francisco science museum The Exploratorium. Then the wolves appear . . . clearly Murphy is having fun and so does her reader.

Earlier in her career, the Nebula award-winning The Falling Woman (now reprinted as a Fantasy Masterwork) approaches time in the same manner. On an archaeological dig in the Yucatan Elizabeth Butler (a rare middle-aged woman protagonist in SFF) sees a woman from a 1000 years ago and the woman can see Elizabeth. Murphy uses this to debunk a few misconceptions about Mayans, about women, and as these misconceptions are Anglo-American in origin, by doing so she ultimately neatly punctures some of white America’s myths about itself. Confused? You won’t be. It’s a charming, poignant, wistful book and an important one too.

American myths of the need and the desire to rebuild America post-holocaust are prominent in SF, and at the time of Murphy’s third novel, The City, Not Long After were a popular trend. (Think David Brin‘s The Postman for instance.) I hope it’s not considered derogatory to label The City, Not Long After as a novel that could only have been told about California and about San Francisco. It has a free spirited imagination and a glorious non-violent response to military aggression (see also Murphy’s friend Lisa Goldstein‘s equally brilliant A Mask For The General) that fits perceptions of that city perfectly. It may sound twee, but Murphy’s ideas influenced by the likes of Stelarc are intriguing, bringing art and technology together in social contexts and she is realist enough to offer a truly shocking ending.

At shorter length Murphy’s body of short fiction collected in Points Of Departure is so good that it became not only the only collection to win the Philip K Dick Award but the only one ever shortlisted to date. Here are tales of ‘The Women In The Trees’ a simple tale of an unhappy wife’s escape made powerful by second-person telling; of a dead young woman whose identity is transplanted into a chimpanzee in the unforgettable Nebula winner ‘Rachel In Love’; of a man planting ‘His Vegetable Wife’ from a seed which Karen Joy Fowler called a ‘nasty’ story; and those people who live between realities ‘On The Dark Side Of The Station Where The Train Never Stops.’ There are fantasies, straight SF, twists upon classic tropes and remarkable new ideas told mostly without flash but a crystalline core that sustains the visionary surrounds.

Although each of Pat Murphy‘s works are so different from each other, and in many ways different from any other SFF around, they resemble genre works in ways that make them instantly recognisable. At the same time their liminality, the deeply embedded crosshatching of time streams, of genres, of realities, of characters, challenges our worldviews the way SFF is supposed to do. Occasionally I’m tempted to say that the layers of Murphy’s storying mean that even individual stories don’t always look like themselves. Take how the romantic comedy of Adventures In Time & Space is really a serious depiction of quantum mechanics, or a tense thriller. “Each of us looks for patterns in his own way.” Elizabeth Butler

writes in The Falling Woman and later “A society defines what is normal and what is crazy – and then says anyone who challenges the definition is crazy . . . Each culture defines its idiosyncrasies and then forgets that it has done so.” Pat Murphy is our perfect crazy-normal reminder that our patterns change as we change and we can leave them behind to create new ones or indeed that they need not be consecutive patterns but concurrent. Elizabeth does this with the return of her daughter into her life; Pat Murphy the character imposes the patterns of quantum physics upon the fictional characters around her (and in doing so tells us she knows it is a pattern i.e. fiction.); Bailey Beldon may go There And Back Again in a pre-established pattern from Tolkien, but his pattern is equally Carroll’s Snark and Campbell’s Hero; and the irony is of course that they are all Pat Murphy‘s patterns.

‘About Fairies’ one of Murphy’s most recent stories, sums much of this up for me.

“My name is Jennifer. I am on my way to a toy company in Redwood City to have a meeting about fairies.” For Jennifer though the fairies are not the Disneyfied Tinkerbelles with pink dresses and sparkles but dark, amoral or even malevolent. “Tiffany’s fairies drink dewdrops and sip nectar from flowers. Mine prefer protein.” They may also be real or a virtual creation. A child’s imagination or a means of facing death. “People believe what they want to believe” Jennifer says at one point. Pat Murphy, ultimately, offers us not merely a choice of truths. Most authors do that. She offers us truths we have not seen previously and she shows how those truths co-exist, often uneasily but symbiotically. She writes serious feminist Fantasy that is also charming funny romantic SF at the same time as it is gripping thriller and even absorbing science demonstrations. You may learn from them or just enjoy them . . . I did both.