Microreview [book]: Divine Heretic by Jaime Lee Moyer

Jaime Lee Moyer’s Divine Heretic provides us with a story of a Joan of Arc who, while not being strictly true to the known historical facts, nevertheless brings us a fantastical story of a unique character in European history.

On May 30, 1431, a nineteen year old young woman was burned at the stake in Rouen. The capital charge: crossdressing as a man. The other charge, heresy, was not a capital charge save for a repeat offense. The nineteen year old had changed the flow of history with her support of the Dauphin,  Charles VII of France, helping him take key cities, and seeing him crowned at Reims. It is no exaggeration that without her and her claims of divine aid for the Dauphin, there would be no France, today.

The young woman was, of course,  Joan of Arc. In Jaime Lee Moyer’s Divine Heretic, we get to see a very different, and very personally focused look at her story.

The novel establishes that this is going to be a different, and an SFFnal take on Joan of Arc, early on in the novel. In our real world, Joan claimed that the Archangel Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret in visions spurred her to support the Dauphin  In Divine Heretic, in the vein of her previous Maid Marian novel Brightfall, the author recasts these visitations are recast as being not angels, but rather something much more akin to Fae Princelings. Her Joan is quite quickly aware that the visitors are not from God, and so the novel sets up a tension between these three entities who very definitely want to manipulate Joan to do as she did in our own history--make her way to the Dauphin and help reclaim France, and Joan’s own desires for autonomy and freedom.

Thus, unlike the uncompromisingly outward face of the divinely inspired and bolstered Joan of Arc that we know from history, this is a Joan that is extremely reluctant to follow the commands of the “divine visitations”. The story of the novel is the tension between Joan’s resistance to those commands, what the trio of beings do to try and influence history through her, and Joan herself growing to maturity, and finding what she wants, what she needs, what she wants to stand for. Joan of Arc is a symbol of female power, autonomy, and strength, and in the novel, the author sets about to show how very human is, and yet show the core of strength that would be recognized far and wide.

So much of this story takes place before Joan ever meets the Royal Court and becomes the Joan of arc that we know. She’s a peasant girl, growing up in a devastated French village that sees periodic raids by the English. This Joan’s hatred of the English is not divinely mandated or inculcated, she doesn’t need angels or anyone else to have a justified hatred of the English. Where a lot of the novel’s strength lies is in giving a grounded and unvarnished look at what life, death war, and injury is like in 15th century France wracked and wrecked by the Hundred Years War. It’s a hardscrabble sort of life and a depiction of a life that in a secondary world fantasy would be lauded as being part of the grimdark tradition. The author’s previously demonstrated skill at evocating a historical time and place serves her very well here. She pulls no punches, characters injured or hurt take agonizing amounts of time to heal up, helping to further intensify the narrow and focused first person point of view on Joan and what she is going through. This is heightened by the trio of entities, who take action to make sure that Joan, as unwilling as she is, will go to her ordained destiny.

Readers who are coming to the novel who want the Joan of Arc that we know from history are, quite frankly, going to be disappointed in Divine Heretic and I would strongly counsel that the novel is not going to suit them very well. It’s very difficult, I think, to humanize a historical figure that quite literally has become a saint (Joan was retried 35 years after her death, and found innocent, and her stature, legend and myth grew until her canonization in 1920). There is a lot we just don’t know about her and the nature of her visions. Admittedly, even though the portrayal here is Joan's growth into a young woman, much of which we do not know, and is free for the author’s invention, when the historical events that we know of Joan and the events of the novel line up, this Joan is definitely and definitively different than what we see from the historical records. This is not a Joan who wrote harrying letters to the Hussites, for example. This is a pious Joan but not one of uncompromising idiosyncratic orthodoxy. The author uses myth and legend as the sources of Joan’s power and giving her the ability to inspire and bolster the French cause. And in the process, makes her invariably human, complicated, well rounded, and readable as a character.

I personally prefer the headcanon that Divine Heretic is an alternate historical take on Joan of Arc, rather than the Joan of Arc that we know. In that way and in my mind, that reconciles the sometimes vast differences of invention that the author brings to the character, and also some of the sequence of historical events. That said, it is a good and vivid alternative historical take on Joan of Arc while providing a view on her world and times that definitely applies to our own world. If novels really are about our life and times no matter when they are set, Joan’s story of a young woman striving for autonomy, strength and freedom is a message and story that resonates in 2020 as much as 1430.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 Well depicted and well described sense of place for 15th century France, we get a good sense of Joan’s world and upbringing as seen by the author. +1 for a complicated and interesting unique look at Joan of Arc as a character. 

Penalties: -2 This is not the historical Joan of Arc you may be expecting from this novel

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 :an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Reference: Moyer, Jaime Lee. Divine Heretic [Jo Fletcher Books, 2020]

The Hugo Initiative: Mind Meld: Favorite Best Novel Hugo Winner

Editor’s note: For years, the essential sci-fi blog SF Signal published Mind Meld, a regular column that featured a weekly roundtable discussion of the tropes, themes, politics, and future of genre fiction. The Mind Meld solicited answers from writers, editors, readers and fans on a rotating basis. After the closure of SF Signal, this feature was picked up and continued for a time by the Barnes and Noble Sci Fi Blog. We at Nerds of a Feather are proud to honor those traditions today as part of our Hugo Initiative.

Today’s Mind Meld question is the following...

What is your favorite winner of the Hugo award for best novel? Why?


Charlie Jane Anders is the Hugo Finalist co-host of Our Opinions are Correct, as well as the author of All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is my favorite Le Guin novel, and I think about it all the time. The story of a physicist who travels from a dirt-poor socialist anarchist world to a decadent capitalist one, this book asks so many important questions about money, property, scientific progress, and the balance between the individual and society. And even better, it doesn't really give us any easy answers. Le Guin probes the flaws in both Urras and Anares with great precision, while managing to make both worlds feel real and lived-in. And when you read all of her Hainish novels and stories in one go, as I highly encourage you to do, you start to realize that this novel's hero, Shevek, has an impact that extends far beyond these two worlds --- Shevek invents the Ansible, a instantaneous communications device that provides a crucial plot point in many of the other Hainish stories. The natives in Le Guin's "The Word For World Is Forest" are only really saved because of an Ansible, and it also helps in many other stories to provide a crucial connection to the wider universe. For all its focus on the fate of two worlds and the never-ending clash between ownership and collectivism, The Dispossessed ends up being a story of how technology can connect us to many other worlds and help us to realize that we're all connected.


Casey Blair writes speculative fiction novels including the cozy fantasy web serial Tea Princess Chronicles, which is available online for free. She lives among the forests of the Pacific Northwest and is most frequently found trapped by a cat. Follow her on Twitter as @CaseyLBlair, or visit her website at caseylblair.com. 

On one hand my answer is N.K. Jemisin, particularly The Stone Sky for the glorious, visceral thrill of such a brilliant author and series being uplifted by the voters to stick a metaphorical finger in the eyes of racist naysayers by winning three times in a row. Every book in the Broken Earth series is unflinching, and reading the truth Jemisin lays bare in it and knowing people have recognized the value of her work is incredible. It was a powerful series to read, and it was powerful to see it win every single time.

But for me it is also Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls, which was my first encounter of a fantasy book that centered an older woman and mother who still gets to experience adventures. Bujold's work is always stunning, but this one in particular mattered for me to read: among a great deal of heavy narrative lifting, it was also a dream of a future for women where we exist, and are relevant, and can have fun past our early twenties or past bearing children. Reading that masterfully wrought story and realizing how rare this aspect was and is in our fantasy changed how I thought about the genre, the world, and what it mattered for me personally to do in both.


Cheryl Morgan is an editor, critic, publisher, radio presenter, occasional writer of fictions, and
possibly a few other things that she has forgotten. Most of her writing can be found via her blog,
Cheryl’s Mewsings and she is on Twitter as @CherylMorgan.

I have often been asked to pick my favourite science novel. That’s not an easy question, but it is actually easier in some ways than picking my favourite Hugo winner. After all, people rarely agree on which novel is the best of the year. If they did there would be no point in having the Hugos. So in many years my favourite book fails to win the Hugo. Indeed, quite often it doesn’t even make the final ballot (Cathrynne M Valente’s Radiance being a case in point). As a result, the exercise of picking a favourite Hugo winner becomes more a matter of picking a favourite among a bunch of books that I thought were a bit meh, or even actively disliked.

Thankfully there are some years in which books I did like were winners. I still have a soft spot for China Mièville’s The City and The City, for example. I also love Ancillary Justice, and the whole of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. (Are the Hugo winners getting better, or at east coming closer to my taste?) But I’m slightly nervous of picking something recent in case it doesn’t pass the test of time.

A case in point is William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It is a book I loved when it came out. It also
kickstarted the entire cyberpunk genre. It is clearly a very important book. But is it still a favourite, now that we live in a world in which cyberspace has proved very different to the one that Gibson imagined? The real internet is far more like something out of Pat Cadigan’s Synners than out of the Sprawl Trilogy. Of course, there are also books that I haven’t read. And there are books that I read so long ago (The Demolished Man, for example) that I have no idea whether I still like them or not. I have this year’s Hugo reading to do, so I’m not going to be re-reading the backlist for this project. So where does that leave me? Well, there are a handful of absolute classics of the genre on the Hugo Winner list, and among those I am fortunate enough to find one of the books I often mention when people ask me for my all-time favourite science fiction novel. That book is The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin. What is so special about The Dispossessed? Well to start with it is by Le Guin, who is as close to a  genius that our genre has produced (and note that Gene Wolfe did not win a Hugo with any of his novels, nor did Octavia Butler). But the main reason I love it is that it does a thing that many science fiction novels try; and does it superbly well. The Dispossessed is a Utopian novel, harking all the way back to Thomas More’s original. Whereas More’s Utopians dig a channel to separate themselves from the mainland, the people of Anarres have gone to live on an entirely separate world. They have, in classic Utopian manner, tried to create a perfect society. And, just like everyone else who tries this, they fail. Le Guin understands that one man’s Utopia is another man’s Dystopia. What suits some of us does not suit all of us. Also, humans are naturally competitive, and any attempt to create a totally egalitarian society is doomed to failure. Someone will always find a way to make themselves seem better than everyone else, even if that is only “better” by their own definition. As a result, The Dispossessed is less of a political polemic and more of an extended analysis of the merits and demerits of different forms of social organisation. It is a book that debates with itself, and makes a very good attempt at doing so neutrally and fairly. Obviously there are those who think that the book is a stunning portrayal of the evils of Capitalism, and others who think it is a stunning portrayal of the evils of Communism. I think both of those groups are wrong, and I think Le Guin would be disappointed in their reaction as well. This attempt at a balanced political analysis puts The Dispossessed head and shoulders above so many other science fiction novels that have attempted to portray utopian societies. (I’m thinking in particular of Sheri Tepper who kept trying to enforce correct behaviour by various sorts of mind control.) I wish there were more books out there that admitted that they don’t present a solution to problems of mankind, and indeed that no such solution is possible. People are individuals, cultures are individuals. Attempting to impose a one-size-fits-all solution will always be a disaster for a lot of people. We need that lesson more than ever right now.


Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of 30 novels and over a hundred short stories, and her hobbies of rock climbing, archery, kayaking, and horseback riding have led more than one person to accuse her of prepping for a portal fantasy adventure. 

She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch. 

“Favorite" is a hard question, and probably changes depending on my mood. But I can tell you the most formative one for me, which is John Brunner's STAND ON ZANZIBAR, a dazzling and difficult novel that manages to be cyberpunk before cyberpunk was a thing. I read it when I was very young, and I've reread it at intervals since. The actual metric of whether science fiction is any good or not is not whether it manages to predict the future, and yet STAND ON ZANZIBAR and its companion novel THE SHEEP LOOK UP manage to predict algorithm-targeted advertising, fake organic food, spree killers, and a number of other issues that feel pretty relevant today. Stand on Zanzibar is very concerned with overpopulation as an "if this goes on" kind of issue, which sometimes makes it feel a little dated, but the concern with corporate control of media, fake news, and the management of what people think and feel through information siloing are eerily prescient.

The book's written in a non-trad format that was radical enough for its day that there's actually a note at the beginning explaining how to read it, but any modern reader who can handle recent Hugo-winning novels (or Alfred Bester or Ursula Le Guin, for that matter) won't find it too daunting, I think.


Michael J. Martinez has spent 20 years in journalism and communications writing other people's stories. A few years ago, in a moment of blinding hubris, he thought he'd try to write one of his own. So far, it's working out far better than he expected. Mike currently lives in the Los Angeles area. He's an avid traveler and beer aficionado, and since nobody has told him to stop yet, he continues to write fiction.. His latest novel is MJ-12: Endgame.

I’m extraordinarily pleased to be doing another mind meld and I hope this feature finds a permanent home soon. I’m less pleased about having to actually choose my favorite among the Hugo Award winners for Best Novel. It’s honestly not fair. Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War? The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin? Dan Simmons’ Hyperion? I mean, Neuromancer is on this list! We got several Connie Willis books, some Kim Stanley Robinson novels, we got Neil Gaiman, Ann Leckie’s awesome Ancillary Justice, John Scalzi’s too-much-fun Redshirts and N.K. Jemisin’s brilliant landmark Broken Earth trilogy in a historic three-peat. I almost went with Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel by Susanna Clarke, which remains one of my favorite books and was a true pleasure to read. But if I’m truly honest, I need to go with Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

Right? I know. I’m the last guy to get all literary, believe me. I’m not necessarily a fan of Chabon’s other works. But this book in particular stuck with me, made me think, opened some doors in my head and is a tiny bit to blame for my own career. I’d had an interest in alternate history and historical fantasy works for years, going back to The Guns of the South by the iconic and amazing Harry Turtledove, as well as Fatherland by Robert Harris. I liked the intellectual exercise of plotting history based on changes to these wonderful inflection points. They planted the seeds that would bloom in my brain years and years later and lead me down a similar road. Chabon did all this, of course, in developing the community of Sitka, Alaska, turning that sleepy little town into a bustling haven for the Jewish people during and after World War II. He imagined a very divergent post-war society with all kinds of cool details only alluded to in the book. But what he did so well, and what truly captured my imagination, was not his political alternatives, but his cultural ones. Here, he took Jewish culture and used his setting details to truly make it a living, breathing thing, divergent and strange but yet recognizable and comfortable all the same. And he populated the story with truly memorable characters and a resonant story. All of this combined to make Chabon’s alternate history truly immersive. In some alt-histories, I find myself still comparing the divergences in history as the story moves forward. But in The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I surrendered completely and utterly to the story. The brilliant setting was yet another character, permeating the narrative perfectly.

Did I have more fun reading Strange and Norrell and Redshirts? You betcha. But Chabon was perhaps the most brilliant example of the kind of alternate history that I aspired to write years later.


Nebula-nominated Beth Cato is the author of the Clockwork Dagger duology and the Blood of Earth trilogy from Harper Voyager. She’s a Hanford, California native transplanted to the Arizona desert, where she lives with her husband, son, and requisite cats. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.

Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. What makes it stand out among so many excellent Hugo winners? First of all, it's the second book in a series, following up the excellent Curse of Chalion. As much as I loved that book, however, Paladin resounded even more for me because of its heroine, Ista. She's an older woman who has lost her husband and child. Other people underestimate her, assuming her to be fragile and insane after all she has endured. Ista is a woman who wants to escape and truly live again, and as someone with major anxiety and depression, wow, can I relate. This is one of those books that I wished would never end. Fortunately, there ARE more books in this setting; in particular, the Penric novellas are cozy and wonderful, and I am woefully behind in reading the rest of them. I should correct that. Thank you for reminding me to do so, Mind Meld.


Marguerite Kenner is a native Californian who has forsaken sunny paradise to live and work with her partner, Alasdair Stuart, in a UK city named after her favorite pastime but pronounced differently. She manages her time between co-owning Escape Artists, editing its YA imprint Cast of Wonders, lecturing, grappling with legal conundrums as a lawyer, studying popular culture (i.e. going to movies and playing video games), and curling up with really good books. You can follow her adventures on Twitter.

My favorite best novel Hugo winner is from 1982 -- 'Downbelow Station' by C. J. Cherryh. I still own my first copy of it, a dog-eared, well-loved paperback. Captain Signy Mallory was the first 'unlikable woman' protagonist I remember resonating with, and I think I still know all the words to the filk song...









Sara Megibow is a literary agent with kt literary out of Highlands Ranch, CO. She has worked in publishing since 2006 and represents New York Times bestsellers authors including Margaret Rogerson, Roni Loren, Jason M. Hough and Jaleigh Johnson. 

My favorite winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel is THE WINDUP GIRL by Paolo Bacigalupi. It was 2010 and I was a newbie agent only four years into my publishing career. My local sci-fi con is MileHi Con in Denver and Paolo Bacigalupi was one of the guests that year. Way before the con (and before the Hugos), I read THE WINDUP GIRL and fell in love with it – the writing, the characters, the mind-expanding nature of the world – all made for an amazing and memorable read. What made this book extra special for me, though, was the opportunity to hear the author speak in person. I can’t quote the panel accurately all these years later but I do remember how Mr.
Bacigalupi described imagining the concept and creating THE WINDUP GIRL from there. Listening to him speak about his work helped me appreciate the nuances and conflicts in his book even more. Cons can be expensive but if it’s in the budget they are an amazing experience! THE WINDUP GIRL sits on a place of honor on my bookshelf because meeting the author in person after already having fallen in love with his book was such a wonderful experience.


Jaime Lee Moyer is a writer of fantasy and science fiction, herder of cats, occasional poet, and maker of tangible things. Her first novel, Delia's Shadow, was published by Tor Books, and won the 2009 Literary Award for Fiction, administrated by Thurber House and funded by the Columbus Arts
Council. Two sequels, A Barricade In Hell and Against A Brightening Sky, were also published by Tor. Her new novel, Brightfall, came out from Jo Fletcher Books on September 5, 2019.

In 1979, Vonda McIntyre’s novel, Dreamsnake, won the Hugo for best novel. I didn’t discover the novel until years later, one of the few books I hadn’t read in the paperback rack at the library. The three racks full of paperbacks were a constantly changing treasure chest of SFF books, and Dreamsnake was definitely a treasure. I remember falling in love from the first word. The protagonist of this novel is Snake, a young healer who relies on her three snakes, Grass, Mist, and Sand, to heal the people who seek her out. Grass is her dreamsnake, rare and precious and hard to come by. When a desert tribe asks her to heal a very sick little boy, Snake knows these people are afraid of her, and afraid of her snakes. What she doesn’t realize is how deep that fear runs and what it will cost her. Snake blames herself. McIntyre painted a vivid picture throughout Snake’s travels of what it means to be different and other, to be needed and feared at the same time, and did so in a way that felt emotionally true. I saw so many parallels to the real world. Great characters, and excellent worldbuilding, suck me into a book every time. This book made a lasting impression on me. Not only is Dreamsnake my favorite Hugo winner, it’s in my top ten list of all-time favorite novels.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Microreview [book]: Brightfall, by Jaime Lee Moyer

Jaime Lee Moyer’s Brightfall provides a new and magical spin on the post-Merry Men life of Marian, Robin and his companions in Sherwood Forest

The rebellion led by Robin, Earl of Loxley, and his companions in Sherwood Forest is long since over. The companions, while in touch, have mostly gone on their separate ways  Even the power couple of Robin and Marian are estranged, Robin having gone to a Monastery years ago for reasons not very clear--especially since this leaves Marian as a  single mother to raise two children. Fortunately, Marian’s powers as a witch help make up the gap. However, when it turns out that members of their former band  and their loved ones are dying in mysterious ways, Marian suspects a Faerie connection, and she will have to work with her estranged husband to find the truth of what is happening and why before that death comes for her and her children.

This is the core story at the heart of Brightfall, a Historical Fantasy novel by Jaime Lee Moyer.

Robin Hood stories are of course extremely common, it is a legend, story, myth that is endlessly reinventable for any time and place where there is injustice, power imbalance, and those who would give up their own comfort and power to help others. It’s one of the core stories of humanity, and many cultures have one. The swiss marksman William Tell is very much in this same vein as Robin Hood. Zorro also gets some of his roots in Robin Hood. A book I read last year,  a Chinese literary classic, The Water Margin by Shji Na’ian, could be thought of very inaccurately as “Robin Hood in Song China”.

Less common, however, is exploring what happens when the true King (Richard the Lionheart in the case of the Robin Hood myth) has returned. It is usually happily ever after, into the sunset, and the story ends. You occasionally get a movie like “Robin and Marian” but they are rare. MOyer decides to venture into the same sort of territory. Marian and Robin married after the well known events, but then parted years ago for reasons only fully explained and realized in the narrative. The Marian that Moyer describes is a single mother, stronger than she herself thinks, independent, nurturing, caring and willing to do what is necessary to protect those she loves. Making her a witch and connected to the decaying world of Faerie, whose influence on England is surely and steadily waning, gives her additional agency as well.

The other characters in the novel, human and otherwise, are the strength, power and richness of the novel. Beyond Marian herself, Robin comes off as a prat at first, someone to intensely dislike and hate because of his abandonment of Marian. The reasons how and why he did so, and his ultimate connection with the unraveling of the plot, humanize him to a degree, but the writer’s and reader’s intended sympathy comes off the page intended for Marian. Even by the end of the novel, I still thought he was a prat for his actions, even if I ultimately understood the how and why of them by the end of the novel.

 Marian, as a witch, has a bond with animals, magical beings, and the Fae. These connections help make Marian Moyer’s in a solid and unique way, making her stand out and providing plenty of characterization. and I particularly liked Bridget, the fox.  There is also a dragon, much diminished in these less magical times that she lives in. The Fae themselves come across as alien, inhuman, oddly passionate, strange, ethereal and in the end, characters of their own. It came as no surprise to me how the ultimate antagonist of the book was tied to the main characters of the novel. The problem and issues are very much social and character based ones, and even if the Fae are alien, the motives of the ultimate antagonist makes sense in that alien context. Solid and deep character relationships are a core feature of Moyer’s books, and Brightfall continues in that tradition.

And yes, since this is a Jaime Lee Moyer book, there is a ghost involved in the doings.The ghost’s identity and tie to the narrative, and to Marian, and ultimately to the plot, make sense, although I think it could have been fleshed out a tiny bit more. As it stands right now, the ghost’s presence feels a tiny bit vestigial for my tastes. The ghost is for the most part much more relevant to the character of Marian than to the plot itself, but we don’t feel that as much as we might or should.

I did like the Sherwood Forest that Moyer depicts. The cover of the book is a map of Sherwood Forest itself, and there is a good sense of place that we get to 14th century Sherwood Forest. We get a variety of settings, starting with the relatively safe and protected home of Marian, and journeying outward to more stressful and more fraught locations for Marian. The geography of the story gives the sense of a journey outward from relative safety into a more dangerous world, to confront a danger that, unaddressed, will eventually come and destroy that haven of safety, even as all of this occurs within the bounds of the famous forest.

Overall, Brightfall is a strong character study of a post-Sherwood Marian, with a good set of characters around her that richly fill her magical forest.
---

The Math

Baseline Assessment 7/10

Bonuses : +1 for a really strong and well developed main character and character relationships throughout the novel.

Penalties : -1 A little lack of use of things like the Ghost and a few other aspects of the world could have used some more heft.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

***
Reference:  Moyer, Jaime Lee , Brightfall  [Jo Fletcher Books, 2019]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.