The dialogue stands out for its wit, natural quality, and intentional omissions. This adult novel is a love letter to code-switching and its many forms: exchanging phrases in multiple languages, finding loopholes, and thriving under restrictive rules, adapting to different worlds. It is its own power and talent. While readers looking for escapism will enjoy the fantasy, “Bitter Medicine” highlights the wonders of our world. Tsai’s storytelling celebrates the incessant pursuit of human connection and its fragility. There are always more places to travel to, foods to try, and experiences to enjoy with loved ones. Prepare for a renewed lust for life.
Mochi Magazine
“It’s like James Bond crossed with, um, ‘Supernatural,’” Newitz says. “There’s elves and other supernatural creatures, and their magic is tied to various kinds of medicine. I can’t even explain it. It’s a delightful romance spy thriller with magic and elves. You just have to read it.”
Cosmic Log
I like to think of myself as a varied reader. I have broad tastes, but generally, I like science fiction and fantasy, romance, and medical and nature nonfiction. This year, however, there are two memoirs that have piqued my interest, plus a good crop of nonfiction. Without further ado, and certainly without any special favor, here is a list of ten books I’m looking forward to reading this year. Hopefully.
The Booked Unicorn
R.B. Lemberg returned us to their evocative, lyrical Birdverse with its first full-length novel, THE UNBALANCING, featuring a decidedly complex, conflicted, and neuroatypical central character with a truly distinctive and poetic narrative voice.
Locus
That is why we write fantasy, and it is why we read it: to imagine different worlds than ours, and examine the way forward. In that, Lemberg has crafted a a much-needed novel for the inhabitants of a tired world.
The Fantasy Review
The more I read of the Birdverse, the more fascinated I become with this fantastic and fantastical place. The story in THE UNBALANCING is complete in and of itself, but it hints at depths that I found myself wishing I knew better. In other words, I loved it AND I wanted more.
Reading Reality
There is an ash tree in the middle of our forest on which my brother Dusty has carved the runes of his loves. Like the rings of its heartwood, the tree’s age can be told by the number of carvings on its bark. Dusty loves . . . begins the legend high up under the first branches. Then the litany runs like an old tale down to the tops of the roots. Dusty has had many, many loves, for he is the romantic sort. It is only in taste that he is wanting.
If he had stuck to the fey, his own kind, at least part of the time, Mother and Father would not have been so upset. But he had a passion for princesses and milkmaids, that sort of thing. The worst, though, was the time he fell in love with the ghost of a suicide at Miller’s Cross. That is a story indeed.
It began quite innocently, of course. All of Dusty’s affairs do. He was piping in the woods at dawn, practicing his solo for the Solstice. Mother and Father prefer that he does his scales and runs as far from our pavilion as possible, for his notes excite the local wood doves, and the place is stained quite enough as it is. Ever dutiful, Dusty packed his pipes and a cress sandwich and made for a Lonely Place. Our forest has many such: dells silvered with dew, winding streams bedecked with morning mist, paths twisting between blood-red trilliums—all the accoutrements of Faerie. And when they are not cluttered with bad poets, they are really quite nice. But Dusty preferred human highways and byways, saying that such busy places were, somehow, the loneliest places of all. Dusty always had a touch of the poet himself, though his rhymes were, at best, slant.
He had just reached Miller’s Cross and perched himself atop a standing stone, one leg dangling across the Anglo-Saxon inscription, when he heard the sound of human sobbing. There was no mistaking it. Though we fey are marvelous at banshee wails and the low-throbbing threnodies of ghosts, we have not the ability to give forth that half gulp, half cry that is so peculiar to humankind, along with the heaving bosom and the wetted cheek.
Straining to see through the early-morning fog, Dusty could just make out an informal procession heading down the road toward him. So he held his breath—which, of course, made him invisible, though it never works for long—and leaned forward to get a better view.
There were ten men and women in the group, six of them carrying a coffin. In front of the coffin was a priest in his somber robes, an iron cross dangling from a chain. The iron made Dusty sneeze, for he is allergic and he became visible for a moment until he could catch his breath again. But such was the weeping and carryings-on below him, no one even noticed.
The procession stopped just beneath his perch, and Dusty gathered up his strength and leaped down, landing to the rear of the group. At the moment his feet touched the ground, the priest had—fortuitously—intoned, “Dig!” The men had set the coffin on the ground and begun. They were fast diggers, and the ground around the stone was soft from spring rains. Six men and six spades make even a deep grave easy work, though it was hardly a pretty sight, and far from the proper angles. And all the while they were digging, a plump lady in gray worsted, who looked upholstered rather than dressed, kept trying to fling herself into the hole. Only the brawny arms of her daughters on either side and the rather rigid stays of her undergarments kept her from accomplishing her gruesome task.
At last the grave was finished, and the six men lowered the coffin in while the priest sprinkled a few unkind words over the box, words that fell on the ears with the same thudding foreboding as the clods of earth upon the box. Then they closed the grave and dragged the weeping women down the road toward the town.
Now Dusty, being the curious sort, decided to stay. He let out his breath once the mourners had turned their backs on him, and leaped up onto his perch again. Then he began to practice his scales with renewed vigor, and had even gotten a good hold on the second portion of “Puck’s Sarabande” when the moon rose. Of course, the laws of the incorporeal world being what they are, the ghost of the suicide rose, too. And that was when Dusty fell in love.
Beagle (The Overneath) showcases his versatility and ability to entertain even as he challenges expectations in 13 fantasy shorts from throughout his career.
Jane Yolen’s introduction helps place Beagle and his work into further context. The result is both an ideal entry point for newcomers, and a lovely way for existing fans to revisit or rediscover old favorites.
Most ghost stories begin or end with a ghost. Not this one. This begins and ends with a love affair. That one of the partners was a ghost has little to do with things, except for a complication or two.
The heart need not be beating to entertain the idea of romance. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of the universe.
To think otherwise is to miscalculate the odds of love.
Andrea Crow did not look at all like her name, being fair-haired and soft-voiced. But she had a scavenger’s personality, collecting things with a fierce dedication. As a girl she had collected rocks and stones, denuding her parent’s driveway of mica-shining pebbles. As an adolescent she had turned rock collecting into an interest in gemstones. By college she was majoring in geology, minoring in jewelry making. (It was one of those schools so prevalent in the ’80s where life experience substituted for any real knowledge. Only a student bent on learning ever learned anything. But perhaps that is true even at Oxford, even at Harvard.)
Andrea’s rock-hound passion made her a sucker for young men carrying ropes and pitons, and she learned to scramble up stone faces without thinking of the danger. For a while she even thought she might attempt the Himalayas. But a rock-climbing friend died in an avalanche there, and so she decided going to gem shows was far safer. She was a scavenger, but she wasn’t stupid.
The friend who died in the avalanche is not the ghost in this story. That was a dead girlfriend and Andrea was depressingly straight in her love life.
Andrea graduated from college and began a small jewelry business in Chappaqua with a healthy jump-start from her parents who died suddenly in a car crash going home from her graduation. They left a tidy sum and their house to Andrea who, after a suitable period of mourning, plunged into work, turning the garage into her workroom.
She sold her jewelry at craft fairs and Renaissance faires and to several of the large stores around the country who found her Middle Evils line especially charming. The silver and gold work was superb, of course. She had been well trained. But it was the boxing of the jewelry—in polished rosewood with gold or silver hinges—as well as the printed legends included with each piece that made her work stand out.
Still, her business remained small until one Christmas Neiman Marcus ordered five thousand adder stone rings in Celtic-scrolled rosewood boxes. The rings, according to legend, “ensured prosperity, repelled evil spirits, and in seventeenth-century Scotland were considered to keep a child free of the whooping cough.” She finished that order so far in the black that she only had to go to one Renaissance faire the following summer for business.
Well, to be honest, she would have gone anyway. She needed the rest after the Neiman Marcus push. Besides, she enjoyed the faire. Many of her closest friends were there.
All of her closest friends were there.
All three of them.
Simon Morrison was the son and grandson and great-grandson of Crail fisherfolk. He was born to the sea. But the sea was not to his liking. And as he had six brothers born ahead of him who could handle the fishing lines and nets, he saw no reason to stay in Crail for longer than was necessary.
So on the day of his majority, June 17, 1847, he kissed his mother sweetly and said farewell to his father’s back, for he was not so big that his da—a small man with a great hand—might not have whipped him for leaving.
Simon took the northwest road out of Crail and made his way by foot to the ferry that crossed the River Forth and so on into Edinburgh. And there he could have lost himself in the alehouses, as had many a lad before him.
But Simon was not just anylad. He was a lad with a passionate dream. And while it was not his father’s and grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s dream of herring by the hundredweight, it was a dream nonetheless.
His dream was to learn to work in silver and gold. Now, how—you might well ask—could a boy raised in the East Neuk of Fife, in a little fishing village so ingrown a boy’s cousin might be his uncle as well—how could such a boy know the first thing about silver and gold?
The answer is easier than you might suspect.
The laird and his wife had had a silver wedding anniversary, and a collection was taken up for a special gift from the town. All the small people had given a bit of money they had put aside; the gentry added more. And there was soon enough to hire a silversmith from Edinburgh to make a fine silver centerpiece in the shape of a stag rearing up, surrounded by eight hunting dogs. The dogs looked just like the laird’s own pack, including a stiff-legged mastiff with a huge underslung jaw.
The centerpiece had been on display for days in the Crail town hall, near the mercat cross, before the gifting of it. Simon had gone to see it out of curiosity, along with his brothers.
It was the first time that art had ever touched his life.
Touched?
He had been bowled over, knocked about, nearly slain by the beauty of the thing.
After that, fishing meant nothing to him. He wanted to be an artisan. He did not know enough to call it art.
When he got to Edinburgh, a bustle of a place and bigger than twenty Crails laid end to end to end, Simon looked up that same silversmith and begged to become the man’s apprentice.
The man would have said no. He had apprentices enough as it was. But some luck was with Simon, for the next day when Simon came around to ask again, two of the lowest apprentices were down with a pox of some kind and had to be sent away. And Simon—who’d been sick with that same pox in his childhood and never again—got to fetch and carry for months on end until by the very virtue of his hard working, the smith offered him a place.
And that is how young Simon Morrison the fisherlad became not-so-young Simon Morrison the silversmith. He was well beyond thirty and not married. He worked so hard, he never had an eye for love, or so it was said by the other lads.
He only had an eye for art.
Now in the great course of things, these two should never have met. Time itself was against them, that greatest divide. A hundred years to be exact.
Besides, Simon would never have gone to America. America was a land of cutthroats and brigands. He did not waste his heart thinking on it, though, in fact, he never wasted his heart on anything but his work.
And though Andrea had once dreamed of Kathmandu and Nepal, she had never fancied Scotland with its “dudes in skirts,” as her friend Heidi called them.
But love, though it may take many a circuitous route, somehow manages to get from one end of the map to another.
Always.
All in all, this book was an absolutely pleasure to read, one that went by quickly, delighting and entertaining throughout. Recommended.
Advance the Plot
this was such a fun concept for a Weird Western novel, Josh Rountree has a great voice within the pages and had great characters. I was hooked from the description and thought it worked as both a western and a supernatural story.
Kathryn’s Book Review and Other Thoughts
Brought to you by the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA), Boskone is an annual science fiction convention, the oldest in New England. NESFA is a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation and both NESFA and Boskone are run and put on entirely by fan volunteers.
What isBoskone?
Boskone offers a massive selection of readings and panels. To find any of these authors, check out the entire schedule.
The winner of the 2023 Crawford Award, presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for a first book of fantasy published the prior year, is Simon Jimenez for his novel The Spear Cuts Through Water (Del Rey). Jimenez had previously published a well-received science fiction novel, The Vanished Birds (2020), but The Spear Cuts Through Water is his first fantasy book, making it eligible for the award.
2023 IAFA Crawford Award
The awards committee also named a shortlist including Maya Deane, Wrath Goddess Sing (William Morrow), Naseem Jamnia, THE BRUISING OF QILWA (Tachyon), Alex Jennings, The Ballad of Perilous Graves (Redhook), and Jacob Kerr, The Green Man of Eshwood Hall (Serpent’s Tail)
Naseem Jamnia’s distinctively titled The Bruising of Qilwa, which also is one of the two most interesting first novels I read this year (see below for the other), with its nonbinary healer as protagonist, its powerfully-developed themes of colonialism, marginalization, and oppression, and its systems of blood magic worked out with such consistency that they begin to look like actual hematology.
Gary K. Wolfe
I love books with magic and I thought the magic system in this book was well thought out and easy to understand. I love that this book talked about immigration, affordable healthcare, and prejudice. This book handled these subjects very well. The writing is so beautiful and lyrical. I love that this world is queer normative and am hoping for more books written in this world. I highly recommend this gem of a book.
The Reading Rebel
Rating: 5 stars
This is a Dark Matter Zine podcast and I’m your host Nalini Haynes. Today I’m talking to author Naseem Jamnia about their book the Bruising of Qilwa. My review for this book is here.
Dark Matter Zine
Activist, editor, and writer Terry Bisson is the award-winning author of over 40 novels, numerous short stories, comic book adventures, and screenplays. His best known novels include Wyrldmaker (1981), Talking Man (1986), Fire On the Mountain (1988), Voyage To the Red Planet (1990), The Hole In the Hole, Pirates of the Universe (1996), Saint Leibowitz And The Wild Horse Woman (1997 with Walter M. Miller, Jr.), The Pickup Artist (2001), NUMBERS DON’T LIE (2001), and Any Day Now (2012). Bisson produced several movie novelizations including Virtuosity (1995), Johnny Mnemonic (1996), The Fifth Element (1997), and Galaxy Quest (1990).
Outside of comic book stories for series such as Creepy, Eerie, and the short-lived Web Of Horror (which he also edited), Bisson published no short fiction until 1990. These works headlined by “Bears Discover Fire” (made into an acclaimed short film and winner of the SF Chronicle, Asimov’s Reader, Locus, Hugo, Sturgeon, and Nebula awards), “Press Ann,” “They’re Made Out of Meat” (made into an acclaimed short film that won the Grand Prize at the Seattle Science Fiction Museum‘s 2006 Film Festival), “The Shadow Knows,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” “Necronauts,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and “macs” (winner of the Locus, Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and Nebula awards) cemented Bisson’s reputation as a master storyteller. Many of these acclaimed stories were collected in Bears Discover Fire And Other Stories (1993), In The Upper Room and Other Likely Stories (2000), GREETINGS AND OTHER STORIES (2005), Cuando los osos descubrieron el fuego (2007 Spain), The Left Left Behind plus… (2009), Billy’s Book (2009 also as Billy’s Picture Book [2020 with illustrations by Rudy Rucker] and Billy’s Book: True Crime for Kids [2020 with illustrations by Rudy Rucker]), Tva Baby And Other Stories (2011), and They’re Made Out of Meat and 5 other All-Talk Tales (2019).
Bisson’s non-fiction articles and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Monthly Review, Glamour, Sf Age, Automotive News, New York Newsday, Writer’s Digest, Common Ground, Covert Action Information Bulletin, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Whole Earth Catalog, and others. Among his numerous book length nonfiction are Nat Turner: Slave Revolt Leader (1988), Car Talk With Click And Clack, The Tappet Brothers (1991 with Tom and Ray Magliozzi), A Green River Girlhood (1992 with his aunt Elizabeth Ballantine Johnson), and On A Move: The Story Of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2001).
While a student at Grinnell College (Iowa) in 1961, Bisson was involved with student protesters who supported President Kennedy’s proposed test-ban treaty and “peace race.” While protesting in Washingto, Bisson along with 13 other classmates, dubbed the Grinnell 14 by the press, met with Kennedy’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. They were the first such group to meet with anyone from the Kennedy White House. This event is seen as the impetus for the student peace movement.
Among all these other accomplishments, Bisson is the editor of the Outspoken Authors Series for PM Press which features such SF icons as Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. LeGuin, Rudy Rucker, Cory Doctorow, and Kim Stanley Robinson. In conjunction with Tachyon Publications, he hosts the monthly SF in SF reading series in San Francisco.
All of at Tachyon wish the sensational Terry a happy birthday. Keep on keeping on.
