2009 Hugo - THE GRAVEYARD BOOK by Neil Gaiman

The first thing that sticks out about the 2009 Hugo nominations for best novel was that the majority of nominees were young adult books.  John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale from his "Old Man's War" series and internet darling Cory Doctorow's "kids fight the power" novel Little Brother both targeted younger audiences, as did Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which actually won the prestigious Newberry for children's fiction as well.  This is more a reflection of the current publishing market than anything else - the huge publishing successes of the past ten years have been young adult works like the Harry Potter series (excellent) and the Twilight series (blech).  The other big success story in fiction were the Dan Brown books, which have some adult themes but are still written at a five-year-old level.  So, young adult books sell more and make more money as intellectual properties, ergo, more big authors write YA books (which isn't inherently a bad thing).

This win also continues the dominance of fantasy, and particularly the kind of urban fantasy that Gaiman helped to pioneer (and which seems to have surpassed most other speculative fiction in the market).  In other words, there's a lot about the nominations and win in the novel category to give old school sci-fi fans reason to worry and wring their hands.  At the end of the day, however, you have to admit that this is a well-written, fun little novel that ranks among Gaiman's best.

They plot is a play on the Jungle Book, only here the orphaned baby isn't raised by animals in the jungle.  Instead, he wanders into a quiet old graveyard where he is adopted by ghosts (and a few other supernatural creatures of the night) who named him Nobody Owens, or Bod for short.  Bod communes with the spirits (who are all rather sweet and harmless), learns important life lessons, and discovers the ways of his adopted parents - including the abilities to escape perception and walk through walls.  He also encounters some of the hazards of life with the dead - ancient spirit guardians and gruesome ghouls.  It's all very episodic, but Gaiman weaves this strands together quite well in the penultimate chapter, when Bod must confront the supernatural killer of his parents.

So, it's light, but very good, Gaiman reading.  And it is a nice reversal of his usual formula in that Bod's biggest challenge is always moving from a supernatural milieu into everyday normal human life, instead of the typical vice cersa.  Like a lot of good YA literature, there are some universal themes about growing up that can appeal to adults as well.

Grade: B+

By the way, that's all the Hugo novels! Click the Hugo novel tag, and all the winners are there! I dare you to!

That's the end of my original plan, but I've added so much that I still have a couple of weeks to go.

2007 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – PAN’S LABYRINTH

The 2007 Long Form nominees are probably the finest class the Hugos ever had.  This is the first time I’d take the Hugo film nominees over the Oscar nominees.  It’s great that Scorcese finally got an Oscar, but The Departed is not his best film, and if you want a brilliant and twisty tale about identity, I’d go with The Prestige first. The best foreign language film about conflict in the ‘40s might have been Letters from Iwo Jima…but Pan’s Labyrinth is a lot more original.  I didn’t see Babel, but I’ve heard it’s a ridiculously depressing tale by a Mexican director, and I doubt it’s as good as Children of Men..also a depressing film by a Mexican director. Little Miss Sunshine may be quirky and fun, but it can’t be as quirky A Scanner Darkly, though drug-induced paranoia isn’t half as freaky as child beauty pageants. And, who needs a meditation on the ambiguous duties of the modern British monarchy like The Queen, when you can just cheer for blowing up the British government in V for Vendetta?  It’s an across-the-board sweep!

It’s also interesting that we had three dystopias and a fantasy set in the real-world dystopia of fascist-controlled Spain.  It’s a dark set of movies, and Pan’s Labyrinth is a real contender for darkest of all. In 1944, a young girl named Ofelia moves in with her new stepfather at an isolated estate in Spain. Ofelia’s mother is pregnant, and her new stepfather is a monstrous captain in the fascist military that has seized control of the country in a long Civil War. The Captain is rooting out one of the last bands of resistance fighters, and much of the movie is concerned with this fight.  Ofelia’s best friend in the household, a servant woman named Mercedes, is in love with one of the resistance fighters and secretly aiding them.

Ofelia, horrified by her stepfather and neglected by her mother, discovers/retreats into a fantasy world that she reaches through a labyrinth on the estate.  She meets an ancient faun who tells her that she is a lost princess from a fantasy kingdom, and after she completes three tasks, she can return there. The tasks pit Ofelia against funky cgi creatures. At first, her adventures cause some slight friction with her family as she disappears and returns covered in muck, but they seem far removed from the violent conflicts of the region.  Slowly, however, they force Ofelia to respond to and confront her stepfather’s cruelties.

I can’t say that I liked this film better than Children of Men or The Prestige, but I do think it’s a fitting winner because it’s essentially about the politics and ethics of fantasy.  The film is the brainchild or director/writer Guillermo del Toro, who made some mainstream genre films for the US, including the Hellboy movies.  Del Toro grew up steeped in comics and fantasy, and his works are all very much in that world.  He’s kind of a fanboy. He also has an incredible imagination, and his designs for some of the creatures are what first captured attention for this film (see the trailer for how).

Guillermo del Toro is as familiar as anyone with old accusations that genre fiction is escapist, and somehow, therefore, less worthy than realistic fiction. Pan’s Labyrinth is a powerful statement on this subject (mush like Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which came out a few months later), as we see the importance of escapism in Ofelia’s life, as well as the role that fantasy eventually plays in undermining the captain.  It’s a sharp and personal testimonial from del Toro, wrapped up in a beautiful and affecting package. The Hugos could hardly go wrong with this set of nominees, but I’m especially happy with this result.



Grade: A-

2006 Locus Fantasy and BFS - ANANSI BOYS by Neil Gaiman

Oh man, is this blog still going? If you're still out there, we're in the home stretch folks.


Anansi Boys was actually withdrawn from Hugo competition by the author.  Based on the nominations it received, it might have given Spin a run for its money, and Gaiman might have racked up another novel Hugo.  It's nice of him to share the wealth, and, considering that this is a much lighter read than American Gods (and that Gaiman had another novel Hugo coming before the end of the decade), it was probably for the best.

In fact, Anansi Boys almost feels like a discarded subplot from American Gods; it shares a character in Mr. Nancy, who is actually the African trickster spider-god Anansi.  At the beginning of the novel, Anansi dies, and his son, Londoner "Fat Charlie" Nancy goes to the funeral.  As a result, he meets his brother, the current incarnation of Spider, and (remember, this is a Neil Gaiman novel) gets drawn into a mythical world of gods and mischief.

Gaiman goes for a much lighter mood in this novel than many of his others (outside of Good Omens), and it almost had the feel of Tom Robbins or Douglas Adams...without the virtues of their best novels.  In fact, this novel was a little *too* lightly comic.  Tricksters walk a fine line between clever and annoying, and Spider ends up on the wrong side of the line quite a bit.  So, not my favorite Gaiman book, though still fun.

Grade: B-

2003 Hugo Dramatic Presentation Short Form – “Conversations with Dead People,” BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

Hey, I managed to wrangle a relatively Halloween-appropriate post out of this blog for once.

I think it’s fair to suggest that this brand new Hugo category (my first since dramatic presentation debuted in 1958) wouldn’t exist without this show.  For better or for worse, most of the vampire/monster-centric trends in the last decade of sf probably wouldn’t exist either.  Buffy started in 1997, and offered a grab-bag of monsters, demons, superhero and fantasy elements in a groundbreaking, serialized, hilarious hour-long television show.  The show offered brilliant culminations of long-running storylines in episodes like “The Becoming,” “Graduation Day,” and “The Gift,” as well as brilliant one-off episodes like the dream-centered “Restless,” the silent “Hush,” the flashback-heavy “Fool for Love,” and “The Body,” the best examination of death in the history of television.  I don’t know exactly why the “short form” category was created, but I have to think that everyone watching the excellent musical episode “Once More with Feeling” inevitably lose to The Fellowship of the Ring in Dramatic Presentation had to have something to do with it. The proliferation of sf tv (in part inspired by Buffy) also played a significant role, although the great age of the space opera tv show (the ‘90s) had already passed for the most part (though I'm sure no one realized that at the time).

I think pretty much everyone knows about the show’s quality and influence now, though I also know that many people avoided it for years because of the silly title, or due to a general, irrational fear of gothic fiction, vampire fiction, and/or "girl cooties."  If you did miss it a) shame on you.  It’s on Netflix streaming.  Go watch it now, and bear with it through that rough first season and a half, and b) it’s the story of a teenage girl granted superhuman powers to fight vampires and demons.  She gets a Watcher, who has access to knowledge of the supernatural world, and she enlists various friends, who, over the series’ seven season, get their own superpowers.

This episode is from the final season, which is the weakest since the first, but, hey, the series is innovative, hugely influential, and deserves some recognition before it ends.  This is probably the most experimental in the generally-restrained season seven (though the previous episode “Him” does some fun comedic stuff).  It follows four separate storylines, told more-or-less in real time, of the main characters encountering dead people.  Buffy (Sarah Michelle Geller) meets a vampiric version of a high school acquaintance and chats with him.  Buffy’s sister, Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), is haunted by what appears to be the ghost of her mother.  Buffy’s witch friend Willow (Allyson Hannigan), communicates with her dead girlfriend through a ghost.  And, two of Buffy’s enemies from the previous season are lured into demonic acts by a manifestation of their dead friend.  All of this leads to some great character moments – we get to see how other high schoolers saw the Buffy of the first few seasons, and we get to mourn some of the major character deaths of the previous two seasons – while also advancing the plot and forwarding the “Big Bad” of this season.
It’s also a nice actor’s spotlight.  Geller always made a tough role look easy, and both she and Hannigan are very underrated.  Trachtenberg is the only one who struggles, but she was only sixteen, and the writers always had her screaming about something, which has to be tough.  The episode was written by Jane Espensen, the series’ most consistent scribe besides creator/geek icon Joss Whedon, and this script displays her customary wit and grasp of character.

The episode represents the great blend of action, fantasy, horror, comedy, and character that made the series so great, and it probably is the best episode of the final season.

Grade: A-

Grade for the series: A

2002 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Fantasy - AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman made his name writing the Sandman series for Vertigo comics through most of the '90s. That series followed the adventures of Morpheus, the god of dreams, and wove together a wide variety of myths and legends to create a really fascinating setting for some innovative-yet-archetypal storytelling. Gaiman continued along the same lines with his novels, and he really broke through with this, his fifth, which dominated the major sf awards (and helped start the trend of fantasy's dominance in the '00s).

Gaiman usually comes off as the quintessential Brit in his writing, but he moved to the US (actually to my current neck of the woods) before this novel. Perhaps as a result, American Gods actually feels a lot like good Stephen King to me. Gaiman's works are usually about normal people thrust into magical worlds and given a destiny (In King's works, the people are a bit more blue collar, and they're less likely to get a destiny and more likely just to be trying to survive). In American Gods, the central character is a Minnesotan named Shadow, who begins the novel in prison. His wife dies, leading to a slightly early release, and Shadow ends up employed as the bodyguard of a strange man named Wednesday. From Wednesday, Shadow learns that gods are real, but they are created by human beliefs - America is overcrowded with gods because of its immigrant past, and the gods from the Norse, Greek, Hindu, and Egyptian pantheons (among others) must compete with modern technology for their survival. Shadow has all sorts of surreal encounters with these beings (both friend and foe) and most of them are extremely interesting. There are also a few very nice twists along the way (the best twists are the sort that make you exclaim "of course!" but that you still never see coming - the identity of the central villain here fits that description perfectly).

Gaiman does dodge Christianity for the most part, which seems odd considering the book's conceit and the nature of faith in the United States. I don't particularly blame him for dodging that can of worms, but it could have added another layer to the novel.

So, it's a fun novel, and just enough of a departure from his previous work to explain (and, I'd say, to warrant) his sudden wide recognition and mainstream success. Neverwhere is my personal favorite, but I'd still recommend American Gods first, especially to a fellow American. Great stuff, and a worthy winner from the fantasy side of the tracks.

Grade: A-

2001 Arthur C. Clarke and BFS – PERDIDO STREET STATION by China Mieville

There’s no denying that expectations play a big role in how I see these books.  Here we have a book by an author whose work I've liked, who has the sort of social science perspective that I love in my sf, and it’s one of the foundational works of the intriguing “New Weird” sub-genre.  I really wanted to love this novel, and I’m pretty bummed that I didn’t.

It gets off to a great start.  The main attraction here is the world-building, and the opening chapters are chock full of it.  The setting is the city of New Crobuzon on the fantasy world of Bas-Lag.  There’s magic, steampunk technology, and a variety of weird, hybrid sentient species, taken from different world myths.  The khepri have insect heads like an Egyptian god, the vodyanoi are frog people from Russian folklore, the garuda have wings and bird heads and are inspired by Hindi stories, the cactacae are cactus people based on the venerable folk story Final Fantasy.  There are also odd-looking people called Remade, deformed in imaginative ways by magic (er… “thaumaturgy”).  The infrastructure of the city is wonderfully described – part of it is in the massive skeletal ribcage of a long-dead giant beast, it’s full of zepellins and trains, and there's a rich sense of the geography from the gritty streets to the high spire in the center.  Mieville’s descriptions not only evoke a fully-formed urban aesthetic, but also a whole host of accompanying suggestions of class and race, which are missing from most nobility-obsessed high fantasy.

The protagonist is Isaac der Grimnebulin, a human scientist who’s dissatisfied with academic life.  He lives in a bad part of town, and often visits an even worse part of town to hang out with his artist friends, including his khepri girlfriend Lin.  Around the same time Lin and Isaac both get big commissions.  Lin is to sculpt (out of khepri-mucous and berries) a statue of a horrifically self-Remade druglord named Mr. Motley.  Isaac is to create a flying apparatus for a garuda who’s lost his wings, named Yagharek.  Improbably, these plot lines come together when a super-drug producing Lovecraftian moth-thing escapes Isaac’s care and rampages throughout the city.  Isaac must team up with Yagharek, sentient steampunk constructs, a demented giant spider called The Weaver, and others, to hunt down the moths.

Yes, it’s self-consciously weird.  I like that about the novel, but I think there’s a fundamental schizophrenia here.  Mieville wants to have crazy beasties, perpetual motion machines, magic, and steampunk, and he wants to tell a straightforward action tale.  He’s not able to pull off both.  Most of the book, including the entire second half, bogs down in endless fights, chases, and climbs, and Mieville seems committed to giving us a detailed play by play of every move.  The hunt for the moth monsters comes to consume the book, pushing aside its weirdness and any deeper significance.  Did Mieville really come up with all of these ingenious freaks just to have them team up for a super-battle?

Among the things that get lost in Mieville’s pursuit of Weird action is social commentary.  As I said, there are rich suggestions of class and race as issues, and there’s a vague critique of the city’s authoritarian government, but Mieville never really develops these ideas.  Mieville has a Ph.D. in International Relations (though I guess he was still finishing up when this came out), so I expected the novel to be about society on some level.  It seems that Mieville is creating metaphors in New Crobuzon, but they’re not particularly well-developed or evocative.   Again, action and self-conscious weirdness get in the way.

I can’t say I particularly cared about the characters either.  Isaac is grumpy, consumed by work, and ambivalent about his feelings for Lin, which adds up to something that’s certainly not generic, but not particularly compelling either.  Everyone else is pretty much a cipher, at least until the final chapter adds layers to Yagharek.  Not being invested in the characters made those endless second-half action sequences even more interminable. Weird also gets in the way of the prose at times. Mieville shows flashes of his talent here, and the descriptions are far richer than your average sf, but he comes up with some off-putting metaphors (e.g. “his body wobbling like a bloated testicle”) and strange diction (“his body was thin…with a healthy emaciation”).  I might applaud the originality of his language if I wasn’t so busy throwing up. Add in the aforementioned overwrought descriptions, and I wanted to yell at Mieville to put the thesaurus down and get on with it.

It was almost like I could see Mieville finding his voice as a writer throughout the novel.  He immediately turns the fantasy genre on its head, but then he doesn’t do much with the new world he’s made.  The ideas are there, but they need to be more developed in less space (I suspect I’m going to find many more books about a 1/3^rd too long in this decade, as pagecounts continue to grow, more due to trends in publishing than to any actual artistic reason).  I wanted this book to be so much more than it is, but I am still going to check out the other two Bas-Lag books.

Grade: B-

2000 Locus Fantasy – HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter is a multi-billion dollar phenomenon. It has probably made more money and penetrated into the popular consciousness more than anything else I’ll talk about on this blog with the possible exception of Star Wars. I think the real turning point of the phenomenon, the moment that it truly broke the bonds of the fantasy genre and the juvenile audience was right around 2000, when Goblet of Fire came out and the first film went into production. At least, that’s when I first heard about it, and it’s about the time that the awards I’m covering took notice.

The novels follow an orphaned and neglected boy named Harry Potter as he turns eleven and discovers that a) magic exists, b) he can do magic, c) he’s expected to attend a school for wizards, and d) he has a destiny as the unwitting defeater of the evil Lord Voldemort. It’s a perfect wish-fulfillment scenario, but it also allows Rowling to play with some of the tropes of urban fantasy, an area where I think the films have focused more. In the novels, it’s almost suburban fantasy, as the real world (or “muggle,” in Rowling’s parlance) contrast is the suburban, dull, and downright abusive Dursley family.

Each of the seven novels in the series focuses on one year of Harry’s school at the wizard school Hogwarts. I think this might be Rowling’s most brilliant conceit, as it gives her a sold formula to follow or subvert as needed, and it allows the series to grow and mature along with its protagonist. The early books are short and clever, but fairly childish. The latter books are heavy, and filled with character deaths and epic battles. The two award-winning volumes slide right into the middle at three and four, which results in a nice balance of light and heavy, and this is probably my favorite era – the formula hasn’t broken, but it’s maturing.

Prisoner of Azkaban may be my favorite for this very reason. It manages to maintain some of the series' early innocence and charm, but the threats seem more real than ever, and Rowling does a great deal of world-building that hints at the magical world outside of Hogwarts and gives some more background to some of the characters. Sirius Black, a key follower of the dark wizard Voldemort, has escaped from the nototious Azkaban prison. He betrayed Harry’s parents, and there are hints that he is coming to kill Harry himself. Meanwhile, Dementors, the grisly and ghostly guards of Azkaban also frighten and endanger Harry as they hunt for Black. There are the usual number of intricate, interlocking mysteries that you get in a Harry Potter book, as well as some of the usual magical gadgets; this has my favorites: an interactive map of the school grounds and a limited time travel necklace that Rowling puts to great use.

It may be obvious by now, but I am a fan of these books. Rowling is a great plotter, and she reweaves some tired fantasy tropes into something that feels both original and classic (I’ve heard it claimed that these books rip off Earthsea and/or Ender’s Game, but I don’t see it. The school setting is old and oft-used, and the mood is completely different. Orson Scott Card sure seems convinced though!). The prose makes for a fast-paced read, though it can get a little precious, even for a children’s book. Still, the books are fun and exciting, and I think they offer plenty for adults. But you’ve probably already read them, so you don’t need me to tell you.

Grade: A-

I also want to mention that the film version, directed by the excellent Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, ifantastic. By far, it’s the best of the film versions, as it steers away from the childish schlock of Chris Columbus’s first two films and creates a new visual style that clearly influenced all of the subsequent films. He really plays up the urban fantasy elements, and his Hogwarts is more spacious and engrossing. It was nominated for a Hugo in 2005, and maybe should have won (actually, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind should have won, but that’s a debate for another day). I highly recommend it.

2011 Clarke - ZOO CITY by Lauren Beukes

Noir sf has become quite the trend in the last few years, with recent Hugo winners Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The City & The City doing rather classic versions of the genre in recent years, among others. It makes a lot of sense, as the genre has always been about introducing a new world – whether it’s the criminal underworld of LA or San Francisco in the 1940s or a fictional bifurcated city in Eastern Europe, these gritty stories let the reader explore a place they’re probably not familiar with in a manner that’s almost anthropological. We get to learn the laws, the leadership structure, probably a bit of history, and the social mores, all at their rawest. Beukes novel fits nicely into this emerging trend, and, at least as far as North American readers like myself are concerned, it gets to do double duty. It introduces us to the criminal underworld of modern South Africa, with its violent tsotsis, refugees from horrific African wars from Rwanda to Congo, and 419 scams. But, it also gives us a fantasy element of animal familiars that attach themselves to certain people and grant magic powers (African myth and magic lurks behind most of these ideas). In Johannesburg, these people have been segregated into a slum called “Zoo City.”

Zinzi December is “animaled” with a sloth, and she’s gained the power to find things that people have lost, which she uses to do cheap detective work in Zoo City. She used to be a journalist, but drug addiction put her into a life of crime, and landed her in jail then in Zoo City. She still works email scams to pay off some of her debts. Meanwhile, her refugee boyfriend learns and reveals some things about his own past that begin to disrupt Zinzi’s life. In an effort to work her way back into her former career, she takes a bigger case involving a pair of young pop stars that also brings her into contact with a string of murdered "zoos." These plots begin to intertwine as the usual gritty, ultraviolent noir hijinks ensue.

There’s a lot to like about this novel. Beukes’s writing is strong, Zinzi is a very compelling character, and the sociological details she’s invented for the zoos are well-thought out and compelling. She’s done exactly the sort of world-building that I want from a fantasy novel. Her portrait of Johannesburg is also quite rich, and I think I would’ve enjoyed this novel almost as much without the fantasy elements. On the other hand, I did think the fantasy elements were underplayed at times. The novel goes for long periods in which the animals aren’t much of an issue, and the pop star storyline especially felt off topic for most of its run. Beukes has a lot more she can do with this concept, and I almost wondered near the end if she was holding material back for a sequel. Some of the noir stuff can get a bit generic as well. In the end, I’m not sure the novel is as unique as its concept and world promise. It’s certainly a worthwhile urban fantasy read though, and at the least, it shows how much can be done with the sub-genre without resorting to vampires and werewolves.

Grade: B

1993 Locus Fantasy and WFA – LAST CALL by Tim Powers

Tim Powers is pretty well-known in the sf community, but it still surprises me that his name isn’t even more widely circulated. Two of the hottest sub-genres of speculative fiction these days are steampunk and urban fantasy. Powers’ 1983 novel The Anubis Gates is considered a foundational text of the former, and this novel should probably be considered a foundational text of the latter.

The novel mixes the mythic history of the rapid growth of Las Vegas, which is closely tied to Bugsy Siegel and the mafia, with the superstitions of chronic gamblers and playing cards’ roots as tarot cards. In Powers' world, luck and probability can be manipulated under the right conditions, and enacting certain rituals can elevate some players and destroy others. In the late 1940s Scott Crane’s father enters a contest to take the metaphysical position of “king” of Las Vegas from Bugsy and chooses to sacrifice his sons. Scott escapes and a wily cardshark named Ozzie adopts him. In 1969, Scott loses his soul in a magical card game with a tarot deck. In the present, this debt has come due, but a desperate cancer patient named Archimedes Mavroanos seeks Scott out when he learns that probability seems to bend around him. The two go on a quest to Vegas to save Scott’s soul. And a whole bunch of other stuff happens.

The first hundred pages of this novel were really irresistible. Powers uses the simple yet propelling prose of noir fiction while also creating the sense of a rich and complex magical world with its own rules just beneath the surface. That sense of a secret world is the essence of urban fantasy, and I haven’t seen anyone but Neil Gaiman do it better than Powers does here.

The great momentum of the opening chapters does fade, however, as Powers’ plot gets increasingly complex and more and more characters join the fray. My plot synopsis didn’t even touch Scott’s adopted sister and her family, Scott’s zombified brother, Scott’s dead wife, the hapless assassin, various fortune-tellers, or the boy raised in a giant Skinner-box to be the greatest gambler ever. These are all great ideas, but they also get in the way of the plot, and the novel really loses its momentum in the second half. And, it all comes together just a little too neatly in the end. It’s a very fun book that creates a compelling world of magic within our own, but a slimmer, more efficient version could have been truly great. Still, Last Call is nearly so.

Grade: B

1985 World Fantasy Award (tie), 1984 BSFA - MYTHAGO WOOD by Robert Holdstock

Robert Holdstock passed away last November, and this novel’s success and influence within the fantasy genre garnered a lot of remarks on many of the sites I frequent at the time. Based on the cover to my addition, I sort of expected this to be a high fantasy/sword and sorcery novel. Instead, I was surprised to find a lot of precursors to the urban fantasy of the likes of Neil Gaiman.

The novel is narrated by Stephen Huxley, a British World War II veteran who returns to his family’s estate in the late 1940s after his father’s death. Huxley’s father was an Oxford professor who had spent most of Stephen’s youth exploring the nearby Ryhope Wood and spinning magnificent fantasies about the forest. Stephen finds that his brother Christian has become similarly obsessed, and he is drawn into the mystery of the wood himself when he finds a shallow grave with a woman’s corpse on the grounds and meets a beautiful young warrior woman named Guiwenneth. Ryhope Wood, it turns out, is a magical forest that warps space and time where embodiments of British myth – called Mythago – dwell. Eventually, Stephen enlists a Royal Air Force veteran named Harry Keeton to mount an expedition into the wood to find the warrior woman with whom he has fallen in love.

Mythago Wood is very well-written and the narrator has a compelling voice. The first half really drew me in with some intriguing mysteries and a well-established mood. Harry Keeton is a fantastic character – a stoic Brit who puts on a brave face as he challenges the unfathomable Wood. I really like Holdstock’s choice to set this so close to the war and populate it with veterans; the horrors of the war subtly hang over everything that happens here, and the escapism of the Wood contrasts with and parallels the conflict. However, as the characters unraveled the mysteries of Ryhope Wood, I found the place less and less interesting. The idea of embodied myths certainly has potential, but the metaphysical workings of the place killed a lot of the tension for me – once we learn that the Wood is shaped by human thoughts, its rules can shift dramatically, and the outcome is predestined…well, there’s not much suspense left at that point.

Also, I was left unsatisfied by the central romance with Guiwenneth. As a Mythago, she is the embodiment of fantasies…apparently male fantasies. She’s big, strong, beautiful, young…and that’s about all we get from her. She’s free of the encumbrances of personality or agency, which makes the characters’ obsession with her slightly disturbing. Since so much of the novel turns on Stephen’s quest for his love, the shallow physicality of that passion undercut the drama. It’s even more bothersome that Guiwenneth is really the only female character in the book. I know the sequel follows Keeton’s sister, so I could easily imagine Holdstock redeeming himself on the gender front, but I felt the lack of a real, believable female presence in this novel.

Grade: B

1982 World Fantasy Award – LITTLE, BIG by John Crowley

Little, Big is a lot of things, some of which are contradictory: dreamlike fantasy, family saga, metaphor for the twentieth century, quirky, epic, mysterious, complicated, simple, and on and on. The title is quite fitting: on one level it’s an intimate story of a family growing and changing over time; on another level it is an epic story of changes in American life told through the metaphor of a faeirie war. Whatever it is, it’s gorgeously written. Crowley’s prose and his metaphors are rich, evocative, and enthralling.

The plot involves a young man from The City (clearly New York, though never named) named Smoky Barnable walking to meet his fiancée, Daily Alice Drinkwater at a strange rural home in Edgewood. Of course, this home is at the “edge” of a mystical wood, populated by different breeds of faerie and old, fading magic. For the rest of the novel, we follow Smoky and Alice through their lives and flash back to Alice’s eccentric family. We learn about her strangely spiritual architect great-grandfather who sought to replicate the geography of a magical multiverse in the construction of his own home, and her grandfather who cursed himself to be loved by all young women. We also spend a great deal of time with her son, Auberon, who also works to understand the strange world at Edgewood and find his own Destiny, and love, in The City, now changed much for the worse (New York in the 1980s was not a pleasant place). In the background we have The Tale, the epic confrontation between old magic and the new modern world that plays out through the lives of the Drinkwater-Barnable family.

I’d heard a lot about how great this novel was…and perhaps it was a bit overhyped to me, as it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. On the one hand, Crowley's merging of the intimate and the epic is brilliantly accomplished – on the other, it left me a bit disconnected from the characters. Their overshadowing Destinies took away from their reality and relatability. For instance, when Smoky is led somewhat astray from Alice several years after their marriage, it seemed more the workings of magic than a true reflection of Smoky’s feelings and being.

But, saying that I didn’t like the novel as much as I expected too is not too harsh a review – considering I had been told that this was one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century by several sources. I still enjoyed the novel very much, and I had to admire Crowley’s amazing craft, from the gorgeous and illuminating metaphors that litter almost every page and the folksy but precise prose to the bigger truths that Crowley sought to uncover. I’d certainly recommend this book, especially to fans of urban fantasy (eg Neil Gaiman), as this is one of the founding texts.

Grade: B+

2010 Hugo nominee, graphic fiction: Fables Vol 12: The Dark Ages Written by Bill Willingham; Pencilled by Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)

Fables has been the hot comic out of DC’s Vertigo press for the past ten years. It is to the 00s what Sandman was to the 90s in many ways. Still, I got kind of sick of it and dropped it around issue #40. It’s still going though; it’s nearing issue #100, and this volume collects #76-82.

The basic concept of Fables is that all of the characters from various literary/folklore traditions are real: Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Sinbad, Pinocchio, Mr. Toad, Boy Blue, etc. They once lived in different fairy tale worlds, but they were pushed out by a massive invasion by a force they call The Adversary. For most of the twentieth century they’ve lived incognito as refugees in Manhattan. Writer Bill Willingham comes up with some fun twists here: Prince Charming is a bit of a philanderer (having had relationships with Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty). Non-human characters have to be kept on a special farm. The Big Bad Wolf is trying to reform. etc. The set-up really is great, and I was quite taken with it at first. However, I dropped the series as it became more and more involved in the over-arching story of war with the Adversary (I also found the reveal of the Adversary’s identity, which I won’t spoil here, rather disappointing). This volume takes place in the aftermath of said war, but things haven’t changed all that much from when I dropped off.

The central focus in this volume is on the instability caused by the removal of the Adversary from power, and there are several parallel plotlines that deal with the war’s aftermath. There are threats of new warlords arising and a new powerful enemy appears from the Adversary’s former dominion, the amnesty of a former enemy is becoming a hot issue in Fabletown, and the fables must bury their war heroes while the war wounded are still struggling to survive (there are some major character deaths here and in the previous story). I saw some clear parallels to the aftermath of the Iraq War, though Willingham (a vocal conservative) avoids anything too pointed. There’s also a reference to our old friend Fritz Leiber in the form of Freddy and Mouse, analogues of his fantasy anti-heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

The art is fantastic here. Regular series artist Mark Buckingham is excellent. He works in the fairly straightforward Vertigo house style, but there’s just a touch of cartoonish whimsy in his characters, maybe even a bit of Disney. Indie legend Mike Allred also does a fine issue at the beginning of this collection. There’s a lot to like here, and I’d highly recommend this series to fantasy fans looking to dip their toes into a mature, but fun, urban fantasy comic. I don’t think I’ll be jumping back on; for me, the idea wore out its freshness for me long ago. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see this as a perennial nominee in this category.