New Books Spotlight: March 2021

Welcome to another (slightly belated) edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 new and forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about?

Chambers, Becky. The Galaxy and the Ground Within [Harper Voyager]
Publisher's Description:

Return to the sprawling, Hugo Award-winning universe of the Galactic Commons to explore another corner of the cosmos—one often mentioned, but not yet explored—in this absorbing entry in the Wayfarers series, which blends heart-warming characters and imaginative adventure.

With no water, no air, and no native life, the planet Gora is unremarkable. The only thing it has going for it is a chance proximity to more popular worlds, making it a decent stopover for ships traveling between the wormholes that keep the Galactic Commons connected. If deep space is a highway, Gora is just your average truck stop.

At the Five-Hop One-Stop, long-haul spacers can stretch their legs (if they have legs, that is), and get fuel, transit permits, and assorted supplies. The Five-Hop is run by an enterprising alien and her sometimes helpful child, who work hard to provide a little piece of home to everyone passing through.

When a freak technological failure halts all traffic to and from Gora, three strangers—all different species with different aims—are thrown together at the Five-Hop. Grounded, with nothing to do but wait, the trio—an exiled artist with an appointment to keep, a cargo runner at a personal crossroads, and a mysterious individual doing her best to help those on the fringes—are compelled to confront where they’ve been, where they might go, and what they are, or could be, to each other.

Why We Want It: Chambers has said this will be the final Wayfarers novel and we can't pass up one last opportunity to visit this galaxy full of very different people trying to do right by each other.

Gailey, Sarah. The Echo Wife [Tor]
Publisher's Description:

I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married.

It took me so long to hate him.

Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be.

And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband. Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.

Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

Why We Want It: Well, first and foremost, it's Sarah Gailey. It's also one of the best sci fi thriller concepts I've seen in years. Did I mention that it's Sarah Gailey? There's no way we'd be passing this one up.

Martine, Arkady. A Desolation Called Peace [Tor]
Publisher's Description:

A Desolation Called Peace is the spectacular space opera sequel to Arkady Martine's genre-reinventing, Hugo Award-winning debut, A Memory Called Empire.

An alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options.

In a desperate attempt at diplomacy with the mysterious invaders, the fleet captain has sent for a diplomatic envoy. Now Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass—still reeling from the recent upheaval in the Empire—face the impossible task of trying to communicate with a hostile entity.

Their failure will guarantee millions of deaths in an endless war. Their success might prevent Teixcalaan’s destruction—and allow the empire to continue its rapacious expansion.

Or it might create something far stranger . . .

Why We Want It: A Memory Called Empire was an incredible debut (see Adri's review), winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel - it's a significant science fiction novel that will be read for years. There was a larger story set up in that first novel, plus the hope that Martine could write a follow up that lived up to the promise of A Memory Called Empire. Spoilers, it does. Adri has reviewed A Desolation Called Peace here and I've read it as well. It's excellent.

Polk, C.L. Soulstar [Tor.com Publishing]
Publisher's Description:

With Soulstar, C. L. Polk concludes her riveting Kingston Cycle, a whirlwind of magic, politics, romance, and intrigue that began with the World Fantasy Award-winning Witchmark. Assassinations, deadly storms, and long-lost love haunt the pages of this thrilling final volume.

For years, Robin Thorpe has kept her head down, staying among her people in the Riverside neighborhood and hiding the magic that would have her imprisoned by the state. But when Grace Hensley comes knocking on Clan Thorpe’s door, Robin’s days of hiding are at an end. As freed witches flood the streets of Kingston, scrambling to reintegrate with a kingdom that destroyed their lives, Robin begins to plot a course that will ensure a freer, juster Aeland. At the same time, she has to face her long-bottled feelings for the childhood love that vanished into an asylum twenty years ago.

Can Robin find happiness among the rising tides of revolution? Can Kingston survive the blizzards that threaten, the desperate monarchy, and the birth throes of democracy? Find out as the Kingston Cycle comes to an end.

Why We Want It: After Stormsong, we'll follow Polk anywhere (and Witchmark was pretty darn good as well!) and Robin's story is one we're excited to read.

Wagers, K.B. Out Past the Stars [Orbit]
Publisher's Description:

Gunrunner empress Hail Bristol must navigate alien politics and deadly plots to prevent an interspecies war, in the explosive finale to the Farian War space opera trilogy.

When Hail finally confronts the Farian gods, she makes a stunning discovery. There are no gods—only the Hiervet, an alien race with devastating powers who once spread war throughout the galaxy long before humanity’s ancestors crawled out of the sludge of Earth’s oceans.

But this knowledge carries with it dire news: the Hiervet have returned, eager to take revenge on those of their kind who escaped. And they don’t care who gets caught in the middle of the battle—Shen, Farian, or Indranan.

Once again, the fate of the galaxy is on the line and Hail will have to make one final gamble to leverage chaos into peace.

Why We Want It: Wagers is a particular favorite of several of our writers and we have adored her Indranan War and Farian War novels. Out Past the Stars wraps up the story of Hail Bristol. We've been following Hail since Behind the Throne and this has been a killer series.

Yu, E. Lily. On Fragile Waves [Erewhon]
Publisher's Description:

The haunting story of a family of dreamers and tale-tellers looking for home in an unwelcoming world.

Firuzeh and her brother Nour are children of fire, born in an Afghanistan fractured by war. When their parents, their Atay and Abay, decide to leave, they spin fairy tales of their destination, the mythical land and opportunities of Australia.

As the family journeys from Pakistan to Indonesia to Nauru, heading toward a hope of home, they must rely on fragile and temporary shelters, strangers both mercenary and kind, and friends who vanish as quickly as they’re found.

When they arrive in Australia, what seemed like a stable shore gives way to treacherous currents. Neighbors, classmates, and the government seek their own ends, indifferent to the family’s fate. For Firuzeh, her fantasy worlds provide some relief, but as her family and home splinter, she must surface from these imaginings and find a new way.

This exquisite and unusual magic realist debut, told in intensely lyrical prose by an award winning author, traces one girl’s migration from war to peace, loss to loss, home to home.

Why We Want It: On the strength of "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" Yu won the John W. Campbell Award (now Astounding) for Best New Writer back in 2012 and we've been reading her ever since. We're particularly excited to read her debut novel.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Interview: E. Lily Yu, author of On Fragile Waves

E. Lily Yu has been publishing short fiction for over a decade. Her debut novel, On Fragile Waves has been described as poetic, heartbreaking, and masterful. NOAF's own Adri described it as an excellent read that she found deeply satisfying. 

On Fragile Waves follows the story of an Afghani family as they flee war-torn Afghanistan in hopes of a safer life elsewhere. Told mostly through the eyes of their young daughter Firuzeh, there are things she is too young to understand, and even more things her parents desperately try to shield her from. As the family attempts a desperate and dangerous sea crossing, and ends up in a filthy refugee camp, how much can they really shelter her and her younger brother from?  Needless to say, On Fragile Waves is not an easy book to read. And yet it is a gorgeous story filled with moments of joy and wonder and imagination. 

Yu won the  Astounding award for best new writer in 2012. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Clarksworld, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Apex, and been reprinted in multiple "best of" anthologies.  She's been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards.  If you'd like to sample her fiction before diving into a novel, many of her short stories are available to read online.

You can learn more about Yu and her work, and access her newsletter The Paper Airplane,  by visiting her website, elilyyu.com. She was kind enough to talk with me about what inspired On Fragile Waves, the book's journey to publication, how long it took to get the drafts just right, and more.  Let's get to the interview!

 

NOAF: The main character in the story is Firuzeh. Tell us about her. What kind of person is she? How did she come to love storytelling?

 
E. Lily Yu: I think she is the kind of person who dislikes being talked about when not present. I will let her speak for herself.

 
NOAF: Where did the idea for On Fragile Waves come from?

 
E.L.Y.: I was in Canberra for the 2010 federal elections. The issue of asylum seekers was one of the top five policy issues under debate. That surprised me. The deeper I looked, the more fractal the issue became, involving private prison companies around the world, including Wackenhut in Pennsylvania and G4S in the UK. More surprisingly, very little was being written about the subject in the US or even the UK at the time; I don’t think I saw coverage in the NYT until 2013, when I had already finished a first draft of the novel. But Australia’s 1992 policy of indefinite detention of asylum seekers, unique among advanced nations at the time I began writing, was adopted by Israel in 2012, then attempted in the US in 2013, though a federal judge in Texas struck it down.

 
NOAF: The family is fleeing war-torn Afghanistan, and faces barriers everywhere. Smugglers, refugee camps, ridiculous immigration policies, and then the expectation that they will instantly assimilate. What research did you do to understand what Firuzeh and her family would go through?

 
E.L.Y.: I traveled to Jakarta, Melbourne, and Kabul, visited detention centers, interviewed detainees, advocates, and refugees, read stacks of books and papers, and learned some Persian. I had written the journey from Jakarta to Ashmore Reef before Luke Mogelson and Joel Van Houdt published their account of the asylum seekers’ route in the NYT, and I felt satisfaction and relief in getting that part right, at least.

 

NOAF: This book took many years to see publication. What can you tell us about your own journey to publication for On Fragile Waves? How is the final version different (if at all) from the idea you first started with?

 
E.L.Y.: The first draft didn’t work. I tossed it and wrote a second draft that didn’t work for different reasons. Same thing with the third. The fourth draft worked. That is the clearest and most distinct difference, for me. I could tell you I cut 50,000 words between drafts, or that the structure and POV changed repeatedly, but that’s paint and ornamental plasterwork. The book didn’t work, and then it did.

 
I am grateful to the friends and colleagues who suffered through drafts 1, 2, or 3 in order to tell me it didn’t work.

 
NOAF: You've been publishing short fiction for over ten years now. How has your writing process and your style changed over the years, if at all?

 
E.L.Y.: I have become gentler with myself.

 
NOAF: In your newsletter, The Paper Airplane, I got a chuckle out of your list of fungi that you “take personally”, and I especially don't ever want to smell something that feels like getting hit on the head with a baseball bat made of garlic. How did you get into mycology? Any fun or funny stories about mushroom hunting?

 
E.L.Y.: Thank you for reading my odd little project. For the record, garlic pinwheels are delicious on crackers.

 
I have always been interested in mycology—my college admissions essay was on boletes and Mussorgsky’s “Gathering Mushrooms”—but it’s unwise to go mushroom-picking without a local expert, and I didn’t have that until I moved to the West Coast.

 
At one point I thought I’d try preserving the Pseudohydnum with the common name of cat’s tongue in vodka, because the common candying recipes left me with gummy bits smaller than M&Ms, at the cost of a great deal of labor. That was a terrible idea.

 
NOAF: Now that On Fragile Waves is out in the world, what's next for you? Do you have any current or new projects you can tell us about?

 
E.L.Y.: Various drafts of various things are in flight, most pressingly revisions for a libretto for a short opera I’m collaborating on with Steven K. Tran for the Seattle Opera.

NOAF: Thank you so much!

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.  

 

Microreview [book]: On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu

A lightly speculative story of a refugee family, told with unflinching empathy

Content Warning: On Fragile Waves contains violence (individual and systemic), abuse and racism

I'm excited by Erewhon Press, the new independent SFF publisher on the block whose offerings almost all seem tailor made to hit my "must read" list. One of the earliest stories I got excited for in their catalogue was On Fragile Waves, a intriguing looking tale of refugee migration from author E. Lily Yu. Originally slated for a 2020 release, On Fragile Waves was pushed back to early this year, and now this prettiest and bleakest of stories is finally coming into the world.

On Fragile Waves is a refugee story, centred around young girl Firuzeh Daizangi, along with her younger brother Nour, and her parents (generally referred to as Abay and Atay, but named Bahar and Omid), as they flee Afghanistan and attempt to reach Australia, falling foul of the country's inhumane policy towards refugees in the process, before finally trying to begin making a new life for themselves despite their still-uncertain status in Melbourne. Firuzeh's story is one impacted by both the deep traumas of her refugee experience, particularly during the boat trip from Indonesia and her family's subsequent stay in Nauru, and the more mundane challenges of being a loved but often overlooked, or overburdened daughter, with an irritating, spoiled younger brother and parents trying to adapt to challenges of their own.

The other defining aspect of Firuzeh's experience is the book's speculative element -although it's important to note that readers approaching On Fragile Waves solely because of its speculative content are likely to come away disappointed. During the family's journey to Australia, Firuzeh meets another girl, Nasima, whose is also fleeing the country with her parents. Self-important, status conscious, and confident about her new life, Nasima isn't a particularly pleasant friend to Firuzeh, but she nevertheless offers continuity and connection which is cut tragically short during the boat ride the two share from Indonesia. Afterwards, Firuzeh begins to see and confide in Nasima's ghost to make sense of developments in her own life, and even to begin to imagine (or exert?) some tenuous control over certain circumstances. The connection between the two girls, despite their brief friendship and diverging paths, underscores the fragility which forms the book's core (the clue is in the title). Everything that separates Firuzeh's life from Nasima's death is built on fragile foundations, and one moment of luck - and Firuzeh and her family have to build their lives within a system that never lets them forget it.

On Fragile Waves is mostly told from Firuzeh's perspective, in sparse but often beautiful prose, but it diverts often into different perspectives and voices, building up a picture of the people around them. These range from the small-minded racist guard whose chapter only serves to highlight the difference between his internal monologue about his actions and their external impacts on the refugees he holds power over, to the language tutor who volunteers with the family, to Nasima's older brothers, already in Australia and waiting for the rest of their family. Each of these chapters takes on a different tone and voice, and the effect is a novel whose prose is a fundamental part of its characters. There are also chapters where the narration becomes significantly more fragmented and poetic, including an opening which effectively summarises Firuzeh's first six years and introduces, in just a few lines, the interplay between threat and beauty in which the rest of the novel takes place, and later on, some of her dreams are told in the same style. One or two stylistic choices aside (the lack of quoted speech always takes a little while for me to get used to), On Fragile Waves isn't a demanding read where its prose style is concerned, but it is a book that encourages its reader to pay attention to style and language to get the most out of it. There's also a distinct separation between the first half of the book, which covers the family's journey from Afghanistan to Nauru and their time there, and the second half in Australia: it feels like because we see Melbourne through the eyes of an older Firuzeh, there's more direct representation of the interpersonal complexity, as well as a greater understanding of her parents' trauma and how it continues to affect them. In contrast, the family's time in Nauru contains more depictions of overt brutality and horror, but some experiences - like Firuzeh's brief befriending of a camp sex worker, and an attack perpetrated against her mother for being late for a bus - are beyond her capacity to process in the same way as the audience does, leaving us to piece together the broader dynamics from her incomplete perspective.

Yu - who is from the USA - has noted that a decade of research went into On Fragile Waves, and there's even a chapter with a self-deprecating self-insert character (a US researcher who doesn't know any of the right questions to ask of the refugees she is interviewing, and has to be set on the right path by a more experienced Australian woman.) The question of authenticity is, on one level, hard to escape from - is Yu the right person to be writing this refugee story? Does this capture the reality of the experience? - but it's not a question that I, as a British person with no refugee experience, can begin to answer. What I can say about On Fragile Waves is that its empathy leaps off the page: an empathy that doesn't shy away from showing characters at their lowest, or darkest, or most destructive, but is always fundamentally generous about the circumstances and motivations that underpin those dark moments. I found it impossible not to feel for almost all of the characters (shitty racist camp guards obviously being among the exceptions), even when their motivations conflicted or it was obvious that one character's emotional response to a situation was notably shallower than the other parties involved. For instance, Grace Nguyen, the language teacher who volunteers with the Daizangis, laments the amount of food at that Bahar insists on her leaving with and considers her Vietnamese family's own refugee experience; we know from Firuzeh that the food Grace has left with will result in the Daizangi family themselves going hungry, in the name of maintaining a form of hospitality which doesn't even cross the cultural divide particularly well. Yu's choice of narrator, and the detached way the narrative plays out, seems to reflect that focus on seeking empathy rather than full understanding Firuzeh's childish reactions to her circumstances require a different sort of narration to what her mother or father's perspective might look like, and I think it was the right choice for the book to avoid making any specific judgement about her parents' motivations. This story isn't the right one to give them a direct voice, and I think that's OK.

On Fragile Waves is a hard book. Given the subject matter, there's no responsible way for it to be anything but a hard book. But it's also a book which ends, however tentatively, with a feeling of hope: that despite systems of oppression, people do survive, and things do get better, and there will always be people who care and try to do right by each other even when our experiences make it hard for us to understand. Despite that, I think it's an excellent read - one which I devoured in an afternoon and found myself deeply satisfied by. If this is where Erewhon is going with it's line, I'm more invested than ever before.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 A deeply empathetic story that works within the boundaries of its own undersatnding

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Reference: Yu, E. Lily. On Fragile Waves [Erewhon, 2021]