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To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. It’s unwise, though, to think you know how it’s going to go, or how it’s going to end. That’s to be known only when it’s over.

• Title: Gifts
• Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
• Genre: Fantasy
• Year: 2004

It’s easy to take a figure like Ursula K. Le Guin for granted and, even though she’s been producing consistently brilliant fiction for over forty years (she is a Nebula Grandmaster after all), it seems the genre buzz always follows the latest craze or new writer making a big splash. Well, Le Guin isn’t about buzz and hype, and she’s a better, wiser writer by miles than most of what you’ll see on the fantasy shelves of today. And it would be a mistake for fans of fantastic fiction to overlook her recent series entitled Annals of the Western Shore, of which Gifts is the first volume, just because these books are marketed as Young Adult novels.

Let me say right now I don’t understand the whole YA thing; when I was a ‘young adult’ (large child more like) the distinction did not exist: there were kid’s books about farm animals wearing hats and licorice houses, and there was the rest of the library. So whether Gifts makes sense as a YA or not I don’t rightly know — but I do know it’s written with a rare kind of intelligence and insight that characterizes the best fiction. I suppose the young protagonist and his difficulties in coming to terms with his gift, in coming of age, is a natural fit for the YA audience; but regardless of marketing distinctions this is a book anyone should enjoy.

Gifts is told by Orrec, a boy that grows into manhood over the course of the novel. His father is a brantor, the head of an Upland clan, in a rural world of small farms and pasturage and cattle raiding reminiscent of the medieval Scottish Highlands. The Uplands are dominated by various clans, and each possess a gift, an innate magical power. Some gifts are beneficent, such as the power to heal; and some can be used for good or ill, as Gry, Orrec’s best friend, is able to use her gift of knowing animals to train them or summon them for a hunt. But many gifts, such as the power to twist a man’s limbs or inflict a slow, wasting illness, are destructive — Orrec’s family gift is such a power.

As a child, Orrec eagerly looks forward to using his power, which manifests itself in early adolescence, around the age of puberty. His family gift is that of unmaking, literally turning order into chaos; at a glance dissolving a tree into a mound of blackened fiber, or turning a beast — or man — into a sack of deliquescent flesh. Orrec delights in the tales of his ancestors who used the power to protect their clan, even the dark tale of one who went mad and had to blind himself to protect those around him. But Orrec’s development of the gift does not go smoothly, and it is thought he may be a danger to others, and himself must wear a blindfold to ensure his family and friends do not come to harm — as well as to protect himself from the demands that would be placed upon him. The hint of such a ‘wild gift’ is enough to intimidate the enemies of his father, for a time, but things begin to develop differently than expected as Orrec learns just what his blindness may truly mean.

Le Guin writes with an amazing eye for the mundane details of life, and her sparse, earthy prose conveys Orrec’s world with authenticity and simple beauty. Her characters, too, are smartly realized and completely natural; and one thing she’s done especially well is realistically convey how the possession of a gift affects the personality of the gifted. Combine this with a world rich in folklore and family history, and compelling conflicts at every level of the story and you have a novel from a master storyteller at the height of her powers, and one that has me eagerly looking forward to the remainder of this series.

Gifts at Amazon

It’s that time of year again. The third issue of Flashing Swords under its new editorial team has come out this month, full of great stuff for fans of adventure fantasy fiction. It’s chock full of tales from folks you know, like Michael Ehart, Christopher Heath, and Bruce Durham, plus some great stuff from newcomers to the magazine. If you like tales of warriors and rogues, heroes and villains, worlds forgotten and worlds that never were, then check out Flashing Swords for fiction with a pulse.

Get Flashing Swords Issue 10 at Lulu

And did I mention I’m in it? Both my short piece The Sea Kings’ Champion and the first part of a series of articles on Viking Age weapons are in this issue — so check it out.

I was thrilled to hear the news that Charles R. Saunders would not only be continuing publication of the Imaro series through Sword & Soul Media, but that he had another hero whom I had yet to discover — the female warrior Dossouye — and that a collection of her tales was already available. Well, having bought and read it as fast as I could, I’m pleased to say it’s a book I would recommend to all fans of Sword & Sorcery and Fantasy fiction in general. Check out my full review at Black Gate by clicking the link below.

Dossouye reviewed at Black Gate

Dossouye is of the quality that you’d expect from the author of Imaro — Saunders’ masterful world-building and smooth prose are as good as ever — but it also creates a world and a protagonist with a subtle difference. It’s not only a great tale of action, but a story with depth, and it leaves a haunting resonance that lingers after you have turned the last page.

Dossouye at Lulu

The Return of the Sword just received a good review over at The Fix, a review site dedicated to genre fiction that looks at a lot of small press work. Reviewer Janice Clark, who acknowledges that sweaty heroics and clanging battles aren’t normally her preferred reading fare, seems genuinely impressed with the quality of the offering. I was really glad to see that she was able to make a connection with this sort of fiction when she realized that heroes can be driven by fears and weakness just like the rest of us — and as she says quite perceptively: “It’s not just about the fighting. It’s about overcoming.” It’s good to see The Return of the Sword making that sort of impression on someone who isn’t normally a fan of the genre.

Review of The Return of the Sword at The Fix

And here’s a sample of what she said about my own contribution to the anthology, The Wyrd of War:

I liked the way the author remained tightly in Vendic’s point of view, drawing the reader intimately into the story. The descriptions of the battle and the twisted creatures fighting it add a strong note of reality. I was there, whether I wanted to be or not. . . . The surprise, for me, was the kick in the stomach I felt at the end, even though I half-expected it. Very well done. It gave me the shudders.

I couldn’t be any happier than to know something I wrote had that effect.

Offerings from Flashing Swords Press continue to score well at The Fix, and it’s a site well-worth checking out as it covers a broad array of short fiction venues from magazines to anthologies.

Ticking: a thousand clocks echoing into endless dark, the motion of a million gears grinding and churning, a morass of straining forces clashing against shaped metal, a finely tuned symphony of coordinated motion, culminating in a single tick — repetitive, deafening, implacable. The mind of Grandfather Clock.

• Title: Whitechapel Gods
• Author: S.M. Peters
• Genre: Victorian Steampunk
• Year: 2008

The simplest definition of steampunk to my mind is ‘a work of technological fantasy’ because, no matter what other elements may be deemed essential for the classification of something as steampunk, it’s the fantasy of impossible machines that define the heart of this increasingly popular sub-genre. From the alternate history style steampunk of Gibson & Sterling’s The Difference Engine, to the otherworldly steampunk of Mieville’s Bas Lag trilogy, the infusion of the mechanical alongside the magical (or as, itself, a kind of magic) seems a clear and lasting trend in today’s fantastic fiction.

Victorian London is the de rigueur setting for many steampunk tales; the great, foggy metropolis, at once the center of industry and empire, has captured the imaginations of a new generation of writers. But the London of steampunk is a London that never was, part Dickens at his darkest, and part fever dream of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I sometimes think that science fiction has come so close to the future that it’s only natural now to look back, not so much at the past, but at futures that never were. Steampunk is a sub-genre that really traces its origins to the Victorian Science Fiction of Wells and Verne, and looks back at the possibilities of that age.

Whitechapel Gods, S.M. Peters’ first novel, is set wholly in a nightmare London undergoing an industrial revolution to the nth degree. But the guiding lights in such a transformation are not captains of industry, but the vast mechanical powers — essentially gods on earth — of Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine. The Baron Hume, the man responsible for calling these gods into being in the first place, rules as something like their secular representative with his powerful army of Boiler Men; but it soon becomes apparent that he, and the gods themselves, have somewhat divergent motivations.

The story revolves around Oliver Sumner, one-time leader of a failed uprising against the Baron, and his small band of revolutionaries. Only the oldest member of this group can remember a London that wasn’t a totalitarian machine state ruled by strange gods, but the ideal of this better London is a stark contrast to the world of furnaces and factories and the seeking eye of Grandfather Clock — who watches from every clockface and timepiece in the city. The plot moves at a cinematic pace despite a few fumbles, and there’s enough action and wow-factor to excuse a few missteps in scene setting or some vagueness when it comes to relationships among the characters or the nature of the world as a whole.

But the most striking and laudable aspect of Whitechapel Gods is its celebration of the steampunk aesthetic. The book isn’t about an extrapolation of plausible inventions, a ‘what could have been’ approach that crops up in much of the genre, nor is it about creating an authentic period London grappling with elements of invented history. Instead, it’s about the sooty, ticking, grinding look and feel of malignant industry — and in this baroque evocation of dark mechanica it succeeds admirably. Peters, taking a page from the cyberpunk book, doesn’t just stop at factoryscapes and steam-powered machines either, but goes full out for a man-machine integration in the form of the clacks, a disease that literally replaces flesh and bone with mechanical parts of steel and iron. The infected dregs of Peter’s London, sprouting iorn spikes, brass bulbs, and whirring gears from their skin, bleeding oil, recall the plight of the real urban industrial poor of this era, whose humanity was subjugated to the dictates of the factory machine.

It’s strange, haunting images such as that that are the real pay-off in Whitechapel Gods, and the inventive and creepy combinations of the mechanical and the biological on display are the strongest aspect of this novel. Whether Peters continues to write in this vein, or if his next project is wholly different, he is certainly a new writer to keep and eye on, and Whitechapel Gods is a strong contribution to the ever-expanding steampunk sub-genre — one that unapologetically melds action and aesthetic to create an original and accessible novel.

Whitechapel Gods at Amazon

My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable.

• Title: 20th Century Ghosts
• Author: Joe Hill
• Genre: Horror/Surreal/Literary
• Year: 2005

Either you know who Joe Hill’s father is, or you don’t. Once you do know, it’s hard to read his work without the comparison somewhere in the back of your mind . . . until of course you realize that Joe Hill is a writer with a voice and style all his own, and a damn fine one at that. So I won’t be talking about his dad in this review.

20th Century Ghosts is a collection of sixteen shorts loosely characterizable as horror, but with strong surreal, magical realist, and literary elements. But like the best fiction, these stories defy easy classification, they make that rare leap from being stories of a certain kind, to being stories of a certain mind. The stories in 20th Century Ghosts are best described as Joe Hill stories, and his distinctive voice comes through in each and every one.

The anthology opens with Best New Horror, a story that plays with genre tropes and cliches and the metafictional awareness of the elements of a horror story, and yet still manages to feel like what it’s deconstructing by the end. It’s a great preparation for what is to come, stories that are both self-aware yet unafraid to embrace the genre.

A surrealist thread is strong in Hill’s short fiction, and Pop Art, the first sentence of which is quoted above, is perhaps the best story in a collection of strong pieces. Pop Art concerns a boy and his best friend, Art, who is described as having a body like a pool toy — he is literally inflatable, and has to deal with the constant threat of punctures. Art doesn’t fit in, how could he?, but the abuse and resentment he suffers seems all to real. In the end, he proves too ephemeral, too lofty, for the world we live in. What Hill does well again and again is capture the feeling of the outcast, and many of his stories deal with children who do not fit in with their peers, and Pop Art is an amazing example of his ability to create genuine emotion from absurd or over-the-top situations. There is a great subtlety and sense of proportion at work in these stories, and a palpable care in their construction, and no matter how bizarre the situation (such as in the Kafkaesque You Will Hear the Locust Sing, which might be described as The Metamorphosis for a post-Columbine age), Hill evokes real feeling.

The relationship of fathers and sons is another Hill theme, my favorite example of which is Abraham’s Boys, about the two sons of Dracula’s Abraham Van Helsing growing up in turn of the century rural America. Van Helsing is an uncompromising patriarch, grim and ruthless, constantly on guard against the dangers of the night, and naturally such a father makes for strange sons. And like his biblical namesake, this Abraham is also ready to make sacrifices.

Hill loves to play with genre elements to create something new, and his work his full of references that will make a fellow fan smile. From Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead, a story about lost opportunities for love among zombie extras during the making of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead; to The Cape, which takes every boy’s dream of superheroic flight and filters it through a bitter young man’s sense of failure; to the excellent Voluntary Committal, which uses a Lovecraftian framework to tell a story about an unusual boy (call him an expert it non-euclidean geometry) and his brother — Hill celebrates the genre with originality and real affection.

There are a few more or less straight-forward supernatural or horror tales here as well, such as 20th Century Ghost, from which the collection derives its name. But whether Hill is dealing in ghosts, killers, misfits, or children, he is never a sensationalist, never one to take a cheap shot or hold the reader’s hand. There is real mastery in Hill’s short fiction, and a tremendous sense of possibility. While I’ve read and enjoyed his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, I think it is in his short fiction that Hill shows his true gifts as a writer and storyteller. I highly recommend this collection for anyone that enjoys a dark tale.

20th Century Ghosts on Amazon