Microreview [Book]: Prime Deceptions by Valerie Valdes

The continuing adventures of Captain Eva Innocente, using a dark part of Eva’s history as a hook for further shenanigans among the crew of La Sirena Negra.

When last we left Captain Innocente and her crew, Eva had gained a co-Captain to her enterprise (Pink), a relationship with another crew member, and a continuing problem with the crime syndicate of The Fridge. More than that, though, a crew’s got to eat and a ship always needs fuel. But what Eva doesn’t expect in taking a mission to find a missing scientist is a trip back to a dark and painful place in her past, the planet of Garilia. The sins of Eva might yet break the small found family she has built on the La Sirena Negra. And, in addition, the scientist  might yet give the science organization The Forge (including Eva’s sister)  the chance to build and activate something truly dangerous.

All of this is the matter of Prime Deceptions, the sequel to Chilling Effect, by Valerie Valdes.

For all of its interstellar Gates, the worldbuilding on the planet Garilia, and the various plot lines, where the novel shines is in the personal story of Eva, and her connections with the crew. The novel poses a thorny question--if you have done what is unquestionably a very bad thing (and no mistake, the revelation of Eva’s past on Garilia shows what she and her father got up to is definitely a horrible set of actions, no matter what mitigating factors exist), can you go forward from that? How do you tell people, today, about something looming so large in your past that it threatens to overwhelm the present? How will you handle their reactions? How can you live with yourself for withholding that past? The central story of Prime Deceptions (and the titular reference) is to Eva’s activities on Garilia years ago. The author handles the internal pain of Eva rather well, and it’s an interestingly crafted balancing act.

The introduction of the darker material and the ghosts of Eva’s past is an interesting evolutionary development for the character, the book and the series. It does force the reader, as well as the crew of the ship, to reassess Eva, her past and her story in the light of new information, and it was for me, a humanizing and deepening moment for Eva. It also explains a nagging part of Eva’s backstory, and that is why she wound up in her sometimes hardscrabble existence in the first place. It puts some of the things that Eva has said and done in Chilling Effect in a whole new light and I wonder if this part of Eva’s story hasn’t been in the author’s pocket all along. 

I do want to assure readers, though that for the dark plotline of the past of Eva, the novel is more akin to Chilling Effect in the main.  Like Chilling Effect, the tone of Prime Deceptions is generally humorous and light (althjough there are some dark things in Chilling Effect, too, Prime Deceptions takes it deeper). Pop culture references, lots of Cuban swearing, and always the sense of fun adventure are the main tone of the book. The author doesn’t brush Eva’s history under the rug, but in the main the novel keeps on with the style of the previous novel. There are character developments (as Eva and Vakar humorously try to work a relationship), Pink’s status as co-captain, Min (whose story ties up with the main plot) and then of course the psychic space cats. Despite them being on the cover, the psychic space cats of the first book really were there in a cameo capacity, and in a way gave the novel an outside looking even fluffier feel and look than the book actually had. In Prime Deceptions, the psychic space cats (one in particular,Mala ) have a larger, and also plot-relevant role.The story is meta enough that Eva, when she meets the Forge for the first time, complains openly that it does sound a lot like The Fridge. Fighting robots, space battles, epic shopping trips, and Eva colliding with her Mother (a formidable a personage as Eva’s father, and we see a lot of where Eva gets some of her personality from) are all here, and keep the pages turning. 

I also enjoyed the expansion of the worldbuilding and the world provided. Eva’s universe feels like a cross between Mass Effect, with a hint of Borderlands, run through Valdes’ creativity and point of view. One delightful and frustrating consequence of reading Valdes’ novels is a craving for Cuban cuisine. Younger me, long ago, reading novels with food pills and barely discussing food in a SF novel would have been amazed at Eva lamenting that she could not get any of her mother’s meatballs. Food is culture, personality and worldbuilding, and Valdes knows and leverages that. And there are amazing places depicted, even beyond the thorny and complicated Garilia, which dominates the narrative and could be reviewed on its own for its exploration of themes of colonialism, dominance, revolution and cultural appropriation. There's Evercon, ,the equivalent of a Comicon (but running 24/7/365)  on Pluto’s moon Charon. Abelgard, a garden world with an underground society of robot fighting. The Ancient Alien Proarkhe technology gets explored and deepened throughout the novel, too. It’s a rich and interesting ‘verse and we get to see a sheaf of interesting places, with a found family set of characters to bring us to them.

Finally, there are the plotlines. Valdes, like in Chilling Effect, is very good at layered and intersecting A and B plots, providing reason and through lines to give the reader, and also her characters, reasons to bounce around the local group of stars on their Fed-ex like chases. Be it the mystery of Min’s brother, whatever the heck is going on with the mysterious Pokemon like Pod Pals, the Forge-Fridge Cold War and what both sides are up to on their own, and the consequences of Eva’s previous time on Garilia all braid and weave together. It keeps that light tone from the first novel in terms of its plotting, which can be a feature for some. I do think readers who want a decent amount of crunch to their space opera plotting might be put off, just like in Chilling Effect. Overall, I think Prime Deceptions is an entirely more successful novel than the first and I look forward to more books from Valdes, hopefully with this set of characters and verse. 

See Adri Joy's review of Chilling Effect, right here on Nerds of a Feather.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 Interesting depth and development to the main character and her history, which meshes interestingly with lighter tones of the book; +1 for interesting and diversely described and explored worldbuilding. Valdes’ verse would be a fascinating place to visit.

Penalties: -1 Breezy plotting is a delight to read--but it might put off some Space Opera readers looking for more heft.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 Well worth your time and attention

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

Reference: Valdes, Valerie. Prime Deceptions [Harper Voyager (US)/Orbit (UK), 2020] 

Interview: Cole Nagamatsu, author of We Were Restless Things

Cole Nagamatsu and I have something in common: we have enjoyed writing down our dreams, to be able to remember the interesting ones.  Nagamatsu uses her dream journal as a writing exercise, and on the other hand I haven't done a dream journal in years and I should really start one again (submitting dream to Daily Nightmare doesn't count as dream journaling!).   I bring up dream journaling because it's fun, and because it is a goodly part of Nagamatsu's debut novel We Were Restless Things, which came out in October.  An atmospheric contemporary fantasy, We Were Restless Things is a coming of age story where teenaged friends are dealing with the mysterious death of a friend, along with all the other things that make a coming of age story so engaging.

With and ensemble cast and multiple points of view, We Were Restless Things is perfect for readers who enjoy stories that unfold slowly, as the characters put the pieces together. We all have secrets we keep, things we don't even know about ourselves, which can make the puzzles of our family and community even harder to put together.  Among other things, We Were Restless Things touches on how we communicate our needs, when we don't know how to communicate, and aren't sure what we need. That last phrase, if you were wondering, is me in a nutshell.  (which makes me really, really want to read this book!)

While this is her debut novel, Nagamatsu is no stranger to the art of writing well. Her short stories have appeared in West Branch, Tin House, Podcastle, cream city review, and elsewhere, she has been involved with Pitch Wars for a few years, and is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Psychopomp Magazine. You can learn more about Nagamatsu by checking out her website colebn.com and by following her on twitter at @JuniperJazzz.

Nagamatsu was kind enough to chat with me about We Were Restless Things,  her writing process, dream journals, the adventures of Pitch Wars, and more!

 

NOAF: Congratulations on We Were Restless Things! What is this story about and where did the idea for this story come from?

Cole Nagamatsu: Thank you! The book takes place in a small, fictional Minnesota town in the aftermath of a local high schooler’s death. Link Miller was found drowned on dry land in a small forest, miles from the nearest body of water. The book follows a few characters as they deal with the loss and piece together what happened. Link’s friend, Noemi, believes his death is tied to a lake only she is able to find, which disappears and reappears in the woods unpredictably. She’s fairly certain of this because she’s getting text messages from Link’s ghost, telling her so.

As for the story idea, it came from a few places. I’d moved to Minnesota for work not long before starting the novel. I’m from the east coast, so living somewhere so far from the ocean made me homesick in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In part, creating the setting of the book may have helped me settle into my new home. The antagonizing force of the woods in the novel was somewhat inspired by reading Angela Carter’s “The Erl-King” from The Bloody Chamber. Following reading that story, I read more European fairy tales about forest and freshwater entities, so to some extent the plot of my book was sparked by the question of what it might be like for one such entity to live in the modern day midwestern US. Finally, my main character, Noemi, keeps a dream journal that eventually influences the plot. I’ve always written down my dreams as well, so I can better remember the really interesting ones. It’s a sort of writing exercise for me, so I started to recreate that same exercise for my novel: crafting dreams the main character might have and deciding how they reflect her feelings about the tensions in the novel.

NOAF: We Were Restless Things is told from multiple points of view. Which character's point of view was your favorite to write? Whose point of view was the most challenging to write?

CN: Link may have been my favorite to write. He is not one of the predominant POVs, so it was a refreshing change of pace when I got to explore his voice. Also the fact that he’s a ghost, narrating the story in first person was fun. He had access to a lot of information other characters did not.

The POV of Amberlyn, Link’s sister, was probably the most challenging to write, just because her role over the course of revising the novel changed a bit, whereas the other characters stayed closer to what I had outlined for them in the beginning.

NOAF: I kept a dream journal for years, so I love that you include Noemi's dream journal as part of her chapters. Dreams can be meaningful, metaphorical, peaceful, but they can also be completely absurd. Why did you decide to include whole sections about her dreams?

CN: There were even more of them originally, but not all of them were necessary. Some just explored different anxieties Noemi had about aspects of her life—not knowing her father, for instance—but those entries that didn’t center on the major plot were the ones I cut. The ones I kept tied directly into the woods imagery. They’re all sort of bizarre metaphors for how she’s feeling, and the woods then interprets them literally. She stages photographs inspired by her dreams, and that’s all the woods knows of her. So what would something as intimate and surreal as a dream look like to a person who doesn’t even know the dreamer? I thought that was really interesting. It let two characters who both have trouble communicating their feelings to others connect in an unexpected way, even though Noemi doesn’t realize that’s what’s happening for most of the novel. Since they end up impacting the plot, it made sense to me that readers be able to read them. Plus, as a reader, I often enjoy when books incorporate different textual artifacts as an element of storytelling.

 

NOAF: A major theme in the story is “coming to terms” with a variety of things – grief, loss, accepting yourself. But this story is also a supernatural mystery involving an impossible death. How did you balance the mystery elements with the coming-to-terms elements?

CN: I gravitate toward stories where the supernatural elements start out as subtly bizarre because I enjoy piecing ideas together as I read—not just in terms of gathering clues, but also interpreting metaphors. This story has elements of mystery, but I think it’s driven more by the characters and their feelings. I wanted the supernatural elements in the story—in addition to just being interesting on their own—to stem from the characters. For instance, Link’s ghost texts Noemi throughout the novel. Her grief haunts her, and his ghost is, on one level, a literalization of that grief.

Also, Noemi is asexual, but she’s very aware of when guys are interested in her. I think a source of her stress when navigating relationships with people who show romantic interest comes from trying to make both her desires and boundaries understood, when she is still very much in the early stages of figuring those out for herself. The woods are a physical manifestation of a male gaze, and dealing with the woods mystery means navigating a supernatural version of a relationship with someone who inherently wants things which conflict with Noemi’s wants. I see the supernatural aspects of the book as intrinsically linked to the “coming-to-terms” aspects.

NOAF: What was your writing process like for We Were Restless Things? Did you know from the start you'd be including multiple points of view? Did you plot it or pants it (or something in between?)? Since this is a mystery, did you write the end first?

CN: I plotted it out very thoroughly beforehand. I did always know I would have multiple points of view, and there were originally even more in the first draft than survived the editing process into the final book (though the plot events remained close to how I envisioned them). I usually plot things out in advance when writing, but for this book I stuck to my outline more closely than I usually do, which actually made writing it less stressful. Even though I had the ending planned out in advance, I didn’t write it first. I always have to write the scenes in the order I plan for them to occur. That can create a barrier if I hit a scene that’s tricky and ends up stalling the writing process, but I’ve never been able to write scenes without already have written the ones that lead up to it.

NOAF: You're also the Editor in Chief of Psychopomp Magazine. How did you get involved with that magazine, and what is your favorite thing about being involved with short story publishing?

CN: I co-founded the magazine with my partner and co-editor back in 2013. I don’t really write many short stories, but I enjoy reading them (even though novels are my first love). My favorite thing about being an editor is when I come across a short story among our submissions that I fall in love with. Some of my favorite line-level writing happens in short stories. They’re a very compressed form of narrative. When I read, in addition to enjoying characters and story, I like to pay attention to word choice and the rhythm of sentences. Because of their length, short stories lend themselves especially well to that approach.

NOAF: You've been a mentor at Pitch Wars since 2018. As a mentor, what do you do? Why did you get involved with Pitch Wars, and what’s been your best experience with the program so far?

CN: I originally got involved in Pitch Wars as a mentee in 2016, and I had a good experience, so I wanted to pay it forward, so to speak, as a mentor. The best experience has been working with my mentees. I’m kind of a shy person, even online, and Pitch Wars has helped me connect with other writers. I get to read manuscripts that are emotionally moving and stay immersed in them while helping the writers revise. Querying agents can be stressful, and rejections discouraging. Mentoring with Pitch Wars means I have the chance to support writers who are going through that process.

NOAF: Do you have any exciting current or forthcoming projects you can tell us about?

CN: I just finished writing an adult manuscript, and I’m now working on another YA for Sourcebooks Fire. It’s set to release in 2022. I don’t have a title yet, but it’ll be another standalone novel with elements of fantasy. It’s set on the east coast, and it started out as a fairy tale retelling, but that turned out to be more restrictive than I expected, so it’s moved in a different direction. It’s still very much in the drafting stage, as I tend to write slowly.

NOAF: Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation! 

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]: The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk

Combining magic, romance, intercultural politics and the struggle against patriarchy, The Midnight Bargain is a delight from start to finish

Beatrice Clayborn is a woman with plans. As a woman from a high-class family in the highly patriarchal society of Chasland, she is expected to spend her first "Bargaining Season" attending dances, handing out her card to eligible suitors, entertaining callers and finally settling down with a man who is comfortable trading her talent for sorcery for the financial resources to get her family out of crippling debt. It's a deal that will secure her family's future and ensure that her sister can benefit from the finishing school education she couldn't afford, but there's one problem: for Beatrice to marry, as a woman with magical abilities, means that she will have to give up her magical powers, putting on a warding collar throughout what her husband deems to be her childbearing years in order to prevent her from being attacked by spirits during a pregnancy. Beatrice has far more attachment to her magic than to a future as someone's wife, and if she can only find the text she needs for a specific ritual, she can call a greater spirit into herself and become both powerful and unmarriagable: a combination that will offer her freedom to help her family in her own way.

What Beatrice hasn't reckoned on is the arrival of the Lavan siblings, both attending this Bargaining Season from the more powerful neighbouring country of Llanadras. Ysbeta Lavan quickly establishes herself as a rival to Beatrice's scholarly knowledge, before establishing that she has the same goal: escaping a politically convenient marriage to one of Chasland's most eligible elites. Her brother, Ianthe, establishes himself as an obstacle of a rather different kind, because he's smoking hot and totally amazing and it's not long before the two are rather hopelessly in love. Ianthe offers the chance at marriage in relatively more egalitarian Llanadras, where Beatrice could still practice minor magic but not call a greater spirit and train as a sorceress, and the Lavan's wealth means it would support her family as well. Of course, if that were actually a solution to Beatrice's real problems, we wouldn't be reading a book about it, and thus begins a romance that's as much about the growth of the individuals involved as it is about their growing together.

The Midnight Bargain benefits from an absolutely delightful setting, with a plot that breezes by in a whirl of regency intrigue. Over the course of her season, Beatrice encounters dances, card parties, picnics, chance meetings at bookshops, symbolic greenhouse conversations with prospective parents-in-law, heated debates in carriages and over breakfast, and even a fabulous boat party, with each set piece given exactly the time it needs to unfold and advance the plot while leaving plenty of time to enjoy each one. Of course, the patriarchal nature of Chaslander society is always on display, and every charming, witty conversation or clever use of feminine wiles comes with an edge: this is a society which burns alive women who give birth without shutting themselves off from magic, after all. Beatrice never loses sight of the game she's playing, in which she's expected to balance the number of men she encourages to chase her until she can strike the best possible deal and get smoothly handed off from father to husband. It's a tricky balance even before factoring in the danger of her attempts to escape the system entirely, or the occasional murder attempt by a jilted suitor, or the fulfilment of bargains made to Nadi, the luck spirit Beatrice invokes to help her in her quest. Beatrice's multiple competing dilemmas and the constant novelty of the scene changes kept me thoroughly hooked on The Midnight Bargain, without ever being overwhelmed or weighed down with the amount of drama it threw at me.

It helps, of course, that Beatrice is a very easy protagonist to love. This being, at heart, an m/f romance, the relationship between Beatrice and Ianthe just about edges out everyone else in terms of screentime, and that's no bad thing: Ianthe is perhaps a little too willing to let go of his ingrained cultural biases about the role of women, but I can't dispute that not being an ass about Beatrice's ambition makes him far more enjoyable to spend time with. Much of the worldbuilding of The Midnight Bargain is built on its portrayal of the different cultures of Chasland and Llanandras, with the cultural power very much held by the latter.  Unlike Chasland, where women are expected to have as many children as possible and sorceresses therefore need to wear warding collars from marriage to menopause, Llanandras allows women to plan their families and only ward themselves while pregnant or trying for children. The assumption of cultural superiority underpins the Lavan siblings' interactions with Beatrice, particularly when her feelings for Ianthe begin to conflict with her desire to pursue magic. For Ianthe, learning to respect Beatrice means interrogating his biases about the role of women in his own culture, and to take her ambition and talent seriously, and he rises to the challenge brilliantly, bringing several more juicy plot twists along the way.

Ianthe isn't the only important relationship in Beatrice's life: her growing friendship and trust with Ysbeta is just as important, as the two learn to work towards their mutual goal. Ysbeta's relationship with Beatrice is also shaped by her assumptions about the superiority of her own culture, and also by her judgement of Beatrice's sexuality: it's not outright stated in the text, but it's pretty explicit that Ysbeta is aromantic, and she finds it impossible to believe that Beatrice wouldn't be better off abandoning her magical dreams even as she pursues the same goal. Ysbeta is a wonderful character and her chemistry with Beatrice is just as good as Ianthe's (until the reveal of her sexuality, I was open to this becoming a poly romance, but it was not to be). The only point at which her characterisation falls down is a spoilery late book scene, which hinges on withholding key information and a point of distrust between Ysbeta and her brother at a point when it felt like their character arcs should have moved past that point. It's a key moment to setup the book's climax, but it was the only point where I felt that The Midnight Bargain's character arcs were at odds with what its intricate plot was demanding of them at that moment.

I could go on for days about the other wonderful characters and moments in this book: aside from the main trio, there's also Beatrice's novel-reading, political-game-playing sister Harriet, her quietly supportive mother, the cast of other ingenues and men in the bargaining season who are pursuing various agendas of their own, and of course her difficult, patriarchal father, who fails to take seriously any of Beatrice's attempts to bring him into her plans for her own future. There's also Beatrice's relationship with Nadi, the luck spirit she initially conjures to help her through a dangerously high-stakes card party, and then continues to work with throughout the book, through whom the majority of the book's magical component is conducted. Nadi and Beatrice's relationship both deepens and challenges our understanding of the spirit bonds which form the heart of The Midnight Bargain's magic system, offering a counterpoint to the universally held assumption that sorcerers must control and dominate the spirits they work with for the bond to be effective. It is also, like everything else in this treasure of a book, an absolute delight.

And that's my main takeaway from The Midnight Bargain: this is just a delightful book, from start to finish, in a way that balances intrigue, incisiveness, drama and flights of fancy to create a reading experience that was pure enjoyment for me. If you're looking for any of the above, in a magical period romance setting, you really can't go wrong with this book.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses:  +1 Everything about this book just made my heart very happy. If that's not worth a point, nothing is.

Penalties: Nothing, it is too fun to take things away

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: Polk, C.L. The Midnight Bargain [Erewhon, 2020]

Nanoreviews: Over the Woodward Wall, Vagabonds, The Ministry for the Future

Baker, A. Deborah. Over the Woodward Wall [Tor.com Publishing]

A. Deborah Baker is, in turns, the second pseudonym of Seanan McGuire (after Mira Grant) AND a character in McGuire's quite excellent novel Middlegame (I wrote it about it here). In the novel, Baker was an alchemist and the author of a children's book that was used as a bit of a framing device throughout the novel as well an internal device used by the character Baker to influence the world of Middlegame.

That children's book was spun out in drips and drabs throughout Middlegame, but now, writing as A. Deborah Baker in our world, Seanan McGuire tells that complete story of Avery and Zib - two characters which mirror those of Roger and Dodger in Middlegame. I'll admit to being curious as to the price of admission for Over the Woodward Wall. This is Seanan McGuire's first middle grade novella and it works as a straight up adventure story, a bit of a portal fantasy as is McGuire's wont. I think Over the Woodward Wall works on its own because, frankly, I don't remember the specific ways it ties into Middlegame. I do wonder, though, if a reader had no knowledge of Middlegame would still have that same reaction.

Though it is directly tied to Middlegame, Over the Woodward Wall is almost more properly related to McGuire's Wayward Children series despite the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with Wayward Children - but it is that sort of story. Over the Woodward Wall is a story of children who don't quite belong and the juxtaposition of children who are almost exact opposites and are exploring a world that is not their own. As a middle grade novel, I'd love to know how it works for middle grade readers. For longtime readers of Seanan McGuire who loved Middlegame, it works and that's what matters.
Score: 7/10

Jingfang, Hao. Vagabonds [Saga]

My biggest problem with Vagabonds is that, under the weight of expectation from years of anticipation and the author's previous Hugo Award for the novelette "Folding Beijing", the novel itself is ordinary. Vagabonds is not, as the dust jacket copy would have readers believe, "a work of literary fiction that transcends genre". I may be annoyed at the marketing presumption of a publisher which should know better (Vagabonds is firmly in the core of the genre), but it is the simplicity and the often didactic nature of the novel that really lets me down as a reader. 

I would compare Vagabonds favorably to Cixin Liu's Hugo Award winning novel The Three-Body Problem as readers who appreciated that novel will likely also appreciate Vagabonds, but the problem is that I am not one of those readers and The Three-Body Problem is one of my bigger genre disappointments in recent years. Tonally, Vagabonds has much of the same feel - though I am uncertain as if that has more to do with Ken Liu's translation (he was the translator for both novels), an innate similarity between the two novels, or if I am simply conflating two novels written by Chinese writers and seeing something that isn't there. 

To continue this comparison for a moment - I am not saying Vagabonds and The Three-Body Problem are remotely telling the same story, but rather there is a strong similarity in the way the characters speak and think and over-explain intellectual concepts. It is with this that I have the strongest issue. I don't know enough to know if it is a cultural storytelling technique, a translation choice, or just something that I'm bouncing off of. Either way, I am not the audience for Vagabonds - but those who appreciated The Three-Body Problem will find much to enjoy here.
Score: 6/10

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future [Orbit]
It may be a stretch to call The Ministry for the Future the last major novel of Kim Stanley Robinson, though I listened to an interview with Robinson where he did suggest this may be exactly that because he was changing his novel writing focus after the intensive work to put together this novel and the last several. If so, The Ministry for the Future is one heck of a way to close out this chapter of his career.

Though it begins with absolute horror, The Ministry for the Future is ultimate a hopeful novel. Robinson looks hard at our present and pushes towards the global, societal, ecological, and economical catastrophes that are looming and makes them happen. Then, he offers hope for how humanity could (and arguably must) transform our cultures to tackle the very real climate breakdowns that are occurring. This isn't much of a spoiler to say that it would require a fundamental change to human culture and that there will be some nations (the United States, say) who lag behind in effective response.

The Ministry for the Future is an impressive work of imagination and prognostication. It offers a road map that we are unlikely to take until things are too late, but then that is not much different from the path taken in the novel.
Score: 8/10


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

Nerds on Tour: Interview with Translator Rachel Cordasco

When I first got into blogging, and widening my SF reading horizons, I'd often visit The World SF Blog, run by Lavie Tidhar.  That site came to a natural end back in 2013, and I waited patiently for someone to take up the mantle of showcasing international speculative fiction. My wait paid off! In 2014, Rachel Cordasco became a fellow irregular at SFSignal, and then she started her own website, SF In Translation, which offers running lists of translated speculative fiction, reviews, interviews, essays, and more.  SF In Translation was the new World SF Blog I'd been waiting for! (You can also follow her on twitter at @Rcordas)

Cordasco is herself, a translator,  she translates from Italian to English.   She's translated work by Clelia Farris, Serena Fiandro, Maurizio Cometto, Nicoletta Vallorani, and had their stories published in magazines such as Samovar, Clarkesworld, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.   Cordasco has written essays and reviews promoting international voices at Tor.com, SFRA Review, Book Riot, Locus, and many other magazines and websites. 

I've interviewed plenty of writers, and editors, and artists, so it is very excited for me to get to interview translators as well!  What do you do when you run into a phrase or pun that just doesn't quite work in English? How do you get something you translated published in an English language magazine? Cordasco answered those questions, and many more, below.   Let's get to the interview!

 NOAF: How did you get started with translating science fiction and fantasy? What languages do you translate?

RC: I started translating short speculative fiction about a year after launching SFinTranslation.com. At that time, I noticed that relatively little Italian speculative fiction was available in English and, having studied Italian several years before, I decided to give it a try. I’ve always loved learning languages, and I translated a bit in college (French Symbolist poetry), so bringing Italian sf into English was a rewarding challenge. If I had unlimited amounts of time, I would brush up on the Hebrew, Russian, and French that I learned in my younger days and try to translate some sf written in those languages, but for now, I look forward to bringing more Italian sf into English.

NOAF: How do you find works to translate into English? Does the author contact you, or do you contact the author?

 RC: My route to translating Italian sf was definitely unusual. I initially reached out to an Italian editor whom I knew on social media, and he sent me a few stories. Then other writers started contacting me directly, asking if I would be willing to translate their work. Eventually, I connected with Francesco Verso, who started sending me stories by Nicoletta Vallorani and Clelia Farris, with whom I’ve built a great translating relationship. Additionally, a couple of years ago, I found an Italian sf e-zine and started reading some stories there, which is how I met Serena Fiandro, for whom I’ve translated two stories.

NOAF: As the translator, what's your role in getting the short story published in an English language magazine? (are you involved with the submitting the story to magazines, writing cover letters, dealing with editors, etc?)

RC: I always offer to be the one who submits the final English version and discusses the details with the editor if the story is accepted. All of the authors with whom I’ve worked have been happy with this arrangement, but of course they are looped in to all final decisions.

NOAF: What do you do, when you run into a word or phrase in another language that just doesn't translate to English? What about rhymes or word puns, how do you deal with those?

RC: I love this question because it goes to the heart of what I enjoy about translation. My mind loves to chew on words and phrases in Italian in order to reflect them accurately and appropriately in English. I’ve had many wonderful discussions over email with Clelia Farris, for example, about how a particular Italian idiom might be reflected in a similar kind of English expression. In some of her stories, she uses Sardinian terms and puns, which is challenging but quite rewarding to think through. In some cases, I add a footnote to explain the pun, thereby giving the reader a kind of mini-lesson in Italian while showing them just how fun the language can be. Two of my favorite examples are from Clelia’s story “Gabola”: in one case, she uses the Sardinian word “nonnixedda,” which contains the word “nonna” (Italian for “grandmother”) and a diminutive (-xedda), leading me to choose the English word “Granny.” In the second case, Clelia uses a word that refers to heaping curses on someone, which I thought through by falling back on my knowledge of Yiddish curses!

NOAF: When you first started translating, did you have any misconceptions? If yes, what were they?

RC: Since I never formally studied translation practices, I found myself working through many of the usual questions translators face (which I subsequently read and heard about thanks to books on translation theory and some translation podcasts). Like some translators just starting out, I stayed so close to the texts I was working on that the English version seemed a bit stilted. Only after several translations was I able to relax and feel comfortable straying from the text in order to make the English readable and enjoyable. The authors I’ve worked with have been crucial in helping me do this and in supporting my choices.

NOAF: As a translator, what are some of your biggest challenges?

RC: I still struggle with how literal I want my translations to be and how confident I am in my word and idiom choices. Only time and experience will help me gain that confidence.

NOAF: How does it take you to translate a short story? How about a novel? 

RC: I haven’t tackled any novels yet, though I did translate six of the seven stories in Clelia Farris’s collection Creative Surgery within a three-month period. Because I translate slowly and I only have time in the evenings and on weekends to do it, short stories can take me several days.

The authors I work with understand this and never rush me, knowing that I’ll take the necessary time to make the translation the best it can be.Because I translate slowly and I only have time in the evenings and on weekends to do it, short stories can take me several days. The authors I work with understand this and never rush me, knowing that I’ll take the necessary time to make the translation the best it can be.

NOAF: Thank you so much Rachel!

 

 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]: Legacy of Ash by Matthew Ward

A new fantasy series in a war-torn Republic, where old supernatural threats are as dangerous as the political maneuverings that threaten all sides of the conflict.

Duke Josiri Trelan and his sister Calenne are the daughters of a rebel.Decades ago, their mother raised a banner of revolution against the Republic of Tressia, only for it to be bloodily cut down. Rather than death, or exile, their punishment has been to magically enclose them on their estate, a unique form of house arrest. The Southshires around them still remember the Phoenix their mother, and perhaps the South will yet rise again. But when scions of the huge Hadari Empire need a short, glorious war to cement their position in Hadari politics, Tressia looks like a tempting target. The Southshires are right in the path of conquest. And the best person to help the Southshires? Vikor Akadra, the man who killed Josiri and Calenne’s mother.

Oh, and several Gods (or at the very least, supernatural beings of some potence)  have plans for various people caught in this conflict. And someone, something darker, long thought gone, as well is stirring. 

This is the story of Matthew Ward’s Legacy of Ash

In many respects, this is a down the middle straight fast pitch of an epic fantasy. A thick, wide scale book, Kingdom level politics and conflicts, multiple points of view, a heaping of magic, and lots of characters in conflict, especially with themselves and each other. I had picked this book up to read specifically because I was looking for a form I was well comfortable and familiar with. Although Ward is not an author I had ever read before, I was looking for an experience that was well within my comfort zone for usual reading. And I got that in Legacy of Ash in spades. This is a well executed epic fantasy of a type I’ve been reading for decades. Sometimes you want the classic form. 

What I got beyond that, as always, was me finding resonance with other authors, and seeing what Ward brings that is new to the party. The touchstones for the setting, and worldbuilding and overall feel of the magical setup for me center David Mealing’s Ascension Cycle, Sarah Kozloff’s Queen tetralogy,  and R S Ford’s War of the Archons. Ward is not as grimdark as Ford, and the Republican politics and the lack of the “Frontier” mentality make it a distinct voice from Mealing. It’s not the heroic mindset of Kosloff, either. But all three have that squabbling between earthly powers even as supernatural ones lend a hand, sometimes on their own, and sometimes clearly with agendas that cross with each other. Readers who enjoyed one or more of those series will find much to favor here in Legacy of Ash, and readers who enjoy Legacy of Ash can find these books as interesting continuation points in different epic fantastical directions. 

The worldbuilding with Gods as mentioned above has resonances with the work of other authors. Ward does some clever twists of his own, however. The Gods/supernatural beings are mysterious, have agendas, manipulate their mortals and act in seemingly capricious ways. There is definitely a sense of an iceberg here, meeting the Raven, Lunastra/Ashana (I do appreciate the very polytheistic touch of having Gods with multiple names for different nations and peoples) and the Huntsman give the sense (as well as some other hints) that they are not the only Powers, but they are the ones involved with the narrative at current. I get a sense that the author is laying down the background for a greater and larger conflict between these powers. 

Technological magic is a neat bit of invention as well. The Republic has two types of magical warriors, the humanoid Kraikons and the lion-like Simarka. They are pretty much similar to technomagical golems, but their construction and control and who and why they are built (which becomes very plot relevant) gives the action and war sequences an extra flair and edge. They definitely can turn the tide of battle, but Ward carefully makes them only one important element to a battle, and not an overwhelming factor.

 Expanding on that, the physical conflicts, battles and otherwise, is where a lot of the story strength is spent and spent well. With the theme of a impending invasion by the neighboting, dominant Empire and the internal conflict within the Republic, complete with insurgency, and the very violent, Renaissance level world means that there are action sequences that run from duels in a street all the way to set piece battles. The latter is particularly well done, showing the ebb and flow of war and its fortunes, flaws and follies. The pulse pounding roar of physical action is where the narrative kicks into overdrive, and all of the point of view characters (and in at least one case very unexpectedly) get their turns to shine, or at least get dunked in the experience. War is hell, and this book makes no bones about it and secondary characters often have a shockingly short but realistic  life expectancy.

The other strength of the book, and it feels really relevant for 2020, is the politics. There is a car crash sort of viewing of the politics in the novel as people do questionable things, fail to trust, fail not to trust and hold onto power by some very bad or at least questionable things. It feels like a metaphor for our world today and in a real way it was comforting to fall into the travails of the Tressian Republic and their political issues as an escape from contemporary events. The antagonists have an agenda, and for all of their evil, and crossing the moral event horizon, the path of their evil makes sense rather than just being random mustache twirling. The book has a lot to say about the uses of power, about who and what to be loyal to, and the consequences of that loyalty. 

One thing that I think is a real weakness of the book, somewhat at odds with its door stopper length, is that some of its pacing is too fast and perfunctory. There is a lot of plot here in the single volume, an entire duology in a single volume. That’s fine as far as it goes, but the gear shifting and the pacing of the plot sometimes really feels off. A plot that arises in the last portion of the book, that I expected and thought would be the focus of a whole second book, is taken care of in relatively straightforward and fast fashion, too much, I feel, given the gravity of those events. Simultaneously, a major POV character disappears from the narrative for what I think is a disproportionate amount of time given the narrative weight of the character.  

Overall, despite those faults,  the novel shows excellent promise for the world and plotting. I hope that the author will let his characters, and his story, breathe a bit more, in the subsequent book in the series. 

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for excellently done action scenes, the part of the novel where the novel really sings

+1 for an interesting set of magic systems and background

Penalties: -1 the last portion of the book highlights a narrative pacing problem throughout the book and puts it into uncomfortable overdrive.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 Enjoyable but not without its flaws.

Reference: Ward, Matthew. Legacy of Ash [Orbit, 2020]

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

Thursday Morning Superhero: Good News Edition

 As we get closer and closer to the end of 2020, we can all use some good news.  I wanted to share some good comic book news in my second to last TMS post this year. 

Good News #1 - Beef Bros on Kickstarter!

Aubrey Sitterson has team up with Tyrell Cannon and with colors from Fico Ossio to deliver the feel good book of the decade!  Dubbed as an aspirational leftist superhero comic featuring a pair of himbos who take on sketchy cops and landlords.  The colors and art are bodacious and Sitterson is challenging his supporters with a variety of beefer challenges to spread the positivity that is enveloped in this book.  I thoroughly enjoyed Sitterson's "The Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling" and "No One Left to Fight" which also featured Ossio on colors.  Join me as a fellow Beefer!

Good News #2 - The return of Sweet Tooth and Netflix news!

Earlier this year I mentioned that Sweet Tooth was optioned by Netflix, but now production has started in New Zealand and I am hopeful that this will translate well to the small screen. In potentially more exciting news, Sweet Tooth: The Return dropped yesterday and I cannot wait to explore the world that Lemire created again. I will admit that due to the distraction of the news cycle I did not make it to my LCS to pick up a copy, but I cannot wait to read it later this week.  

Good News #3 - SDCC Holiday Merchandise!

Even though the conventions to 2020 went online, I still find joy every time I see the SDCC logo or Toucan. My son's virtual background on Zoom is the San Diego Convention Center so when I saw that SDCC was offering holiday merchandise I started immediately planning some Christmas gifts. I particularly like the denim jacket, the Hall H pin, and Holiday Ornament.  The "Front of the Line" pin is a bit of a taunt, but I thought that was also a nice touch.

POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.