It’s time foe the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards for 2023! I was asked to be a judge again; and, this year will be the 3rd year I’ve participated in this speculative awards with other bookbloggers. I’m very excited about this year’s awards and nominees!
Best Fantasy Novel
THE UNBALANCING by R.B. Lemberg Spear by Nicola Griffith The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher Swallow:Efunsetan Aniwura by Ayodele Olofintuade The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller
One of Autostraddle’s best books of last year, this fantasy novel set in Lemberg’s acclaimed Birdverse features world-building deeply rooted in neurodiversity, queerness, nonbinary identity, and transness. The story follows two lovers, a poet and a starkeeper, as they simultaneously fall for each other while their island home approaches a fated doom. (As you might guess from that description, THE UNBALANCING is a loose retelling of the Atlantis myth). This fantasy book really has it all, from complex diverse characters, a unique magical system, careful explorations of the intersections of queer and neurodivergent identities, romance, lyrical writing, and more!
At this point Lemberg could just scream and I would probably find it fascinating. They are an amazing creator. Their world is fantastic. I hate magic, because it seems so uncontrolled and saves the day too easily. This book has wild magic, but it isn’t what saves the day (though this is not a spoiler in the way you are thinking, because magic very much does play a major role in the ending.)
One of my favorite parts of this is the way gender and sexuality work. There are so many genders that are just accepted. There is no real fight or discussion. They just are.
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. And I found it in Geometries of Belonging: Stories & Poems from the Birdverse, a collection of many of the foundational stories of this marvelous place. I’m looking forward to diving in and learning that MORE – and soon!
But overall I’m very glad I picked this up, and enjoyed the ways that it played with romances of many types and stripes and definitions. That “love is all there is is all we know of love” doesn’t have to mean that all loves are exactly the same type.
I loved every single one of these stories from mermaids, to djinn, to rabbits, and ghosts. The variety was so much fun. I often found I wanted to continue the story with the characters even though it was over. That’s a sign of great writing.
If you’ve never taken a look at any of Jane Yolen’s novels, take a look at these short stories. Her work spans multiple genres, so there might be something for you even if high fantasy isn’t your thing.
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.
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 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.
Magic, polyamory, trans solidarity, epic journeys, political intrigue, fear, loss, love, healing, and even Aunt Death all somehow fit — and more impressively come together in a powerful way — in R.B. Lemberg’s new novella THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES.
It is a supremely balanced book, focusing only on the most necessary details to get the story across. In that sense, the book is both ethereal and ephemeral: graceful, delicately wrought, and fleeting. That said, THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES has an incredibly layered plot where we find that nearly every new character is someone our protagonists have met before. To me, though, what really distinguishes this work is how it embraces trans elders as leaders, changemakers, rabble-rousers, and magic users.
THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES is a short book, probably more around novella length. I’m impressed with how much culture and worldbuilding Lemberg managed to fit in, but it never feels too much. As you follow Uiziya and nen-sasair, you get more understanding into the different cultures they’re from and their own relationships with gender. Among Uiziya’s people, transformation is not shameful and she chose to make her transformation at a young age. Among nen-sasair’s people, transformation is not commonly done publically, and he struggles with his new roles the cloistered world of men after having lived as a trader, wife, mother, and grandmother for so long.
[…]
Recommended for: People who love prose, interesting magic, slow stories, and weaving
Lemberg’s writing style is poetic without being impenetrably dense, and it reminds me of Ursula Le Guin’s prose at its finest. (I’m sure RB would be pleased with that comparison! I know that “Stone Telling” is meaningful to them.)
I highly recommend this book. You can find it at all the usual suspects.
THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES has the feel and the sense of a myth in the making, or perhaps a fairy tale. Reading it has filled my head with a weave of more thoughts – profound or otherwise – than one would think that a book this slim would hold between its pages.
It’s the kind of story that, although I’ve finished reading it, I feel like it hasn’t finished with me yet. Perhaps its that the lesson of the fairy tale is still being absorbed.
[…]
Escape Rating A-: I’m all over the map about this one. In the end, I loved it, but the beginning was slow. I think that part of that was because this was my first trip to Birdverse, and it took me a while to get my bearings in it.
Also, the story begins slowly because it feels like it is meant to. Both of the protagonists have spent 40 years not living their truths. That’s a long time to wait for anything, let alone wait to fulfill their dreams. But they’ve been holding themselves back, so it seems natural that it would take them a while to get moving toward a future that they’ve been inching towards at a snail’s pace for so many years.
DRIFTWOOD (2020) is a charming, meditative, and often poignant collection of linked stories by Marie Brennan that mostly succeeds both in its individual tales and as a whole, though I had a few issues. But given that one of those is it was too short, it’s still an easy book to recommend.
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I absolutely love the setting, which serves up endless potential for stories, since each one reveals a new world to us. Driftwood has a bit of a Calvino-esque feel to it, particularly Invisible Cities, one of my all-time favorite works of fiction. You’ve got visits to different worlds (cities), a sense of the fantastical, each new setting told as a story, some lyrical language. And, as with Calvino, a bit of a haunting sadness. Brennan uses the rich potential of the setting premise to deliver some beautifully original images/ideas, which I won’t ruin by noting here.
A collection of simple stories, each self-contained but building into a cycle that is more than the sum of its parts, DRIFTWOOD is a fascinating and rewarding creation, conveyed in prose that can range from the solemn to the bitter to the darkly humorous but is never less than engaging. Brennan is at home sketching the linguistics of a world, bringing alive a marketplace (‘…a thousand spices, each one distinct on the tongue. Aromatic flowers that danced in the gentle air, their seeds spreading I the ceaseless light. Serpents doxing in the warmth, sold as pets, as sacrifices, as food…’) or imaging its complex religious life as she is evoking the long-lived, continually reborn bar, Spit in the Crush’s Eye or describing with great flair the adventurers who brought the balloon to Driftwood and sought to map it – undermining the solemnity of purpose expected in a fantasy novel by saying they did it simply because it seemed a fun thing to do. Everyone might be doomed, swirling away into the pit, but there are lives to live and people here to live them. Finding a calm place between denial of the inevitable and obsession with it seems to be key – in Driftwood as in our own world(s).
Escape Rating A+: Some books are just WOW! And DRIFTWOOD is definitely one of those books.
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Many of the stories in DRIFTWOOD have been previously and separately published, but together they make a surprisingly wonderful and cohesive whole. A whole that is entirely too short but begins, middles and ends exactly where it should. A beautiful puzzlement and a fantastic read
I’ll admit I was unsure about this book when I first started reading, but it drew me in bit by bit and I was enthralled by the time I finished reading.
With its unique setting, ‘Driftwood’ offers a refreshingly different take on the apocalypse. There are no zombies, no nuclear or natural disasters, no tales of people resorting to looting or cannibalism. Instead, it focuses on the deeper and more personal aspects of an apocalypse. The question of what people will do when their world and their culture and their civilisation is disappearing, slowly slipping away to an inevitable doom, is endlessly fascinating. The most interesting feature of this is the variety which Brennan’s setting allows; from those who try to deny the inevitability, such as the King of the Miqerni, to those like Noirin who simply want to ease the loss and for the memories of her people to last as long as possible.
