Silently and Very Fast

Some books resonate at the exact frequency of the human heart. Silently and Very Fast is one of them.

Elefsis is a machine intelligence who first learned to speak in similes, whose habitat is the internal brain- and dreamscapes of five generations of the same family, and who now has now found itself bound to Neva – the final angry, secretive scion of the Uoya-Agostinos – under circumstances it does not fully understand, and which Neva herself is reluctant to explain. Who is Elefsis? How deep a routine is love? How long a lesson is grief? What, ultimately, does it mean to be human?

No matter what she writes, Valente herself seems to function as a literary triple-goddess: a three-in-one of Poet, Mythmaker and Mythbreaker. Her stories crack fairytales open like eggs, mixing their yolks with myth and grief and feminism and the outrageous beauty of poetry until something wholly new is produced: a critique of the mythic that nonetheless refracts the power of our oldest stories and turns them seamlessly to new ends. At various points, Silently and Very Fast evokes comparison with China Mieville’s Embassytown, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Tad Williams’s Otherland and Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone – and yet it is also Inanna and Psyche, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Hansel and Gretel, Prometheus and Matryoshka dolls and turtles all the way down and, because this is Valente, Persephone emerging from the underworld. (It is not coincidental that Elefsis begins as five bright jewels – five pomegranate seeds – only one of which is taken into the body of a girl-who-is-more-than-a-girl, and whose consumption initiates transformation.)

The whole novella is an exquisite balance of grace notes; at one point, Alan Turing is reborn as the Prince of Thoughtful Engines in a story-within-a-story that is itself a reworking of Snow White. Beautifully structured, poignantly characterised and breathtakingly relevant, Silently and Very Fast is a paean to the idea of stories as identity, with everything from family to consciousness to grief described as an ever-evolving narrative told both by and for its participants. It is an exploration of the mythic and the human whose fulcrum rests on the truth and power of interior landscapes, the worlds we hold inside ourselves becoming oroborous with the worlds we help to make.

Unlike with Valente’s Fairyland, I didn’t cry out loud while reading this book. But its depth and beauty kept me vibrating on the edge of tears the whole way through, that pulse-tight gasping where every word lands on the heart like a kiss, like electricity, and leaves behind a mark. This year, Silently and Very Fast has been nominated for a Hugo award for Best Novella, and I will be extraordinarily startled if it doesn’t win. But even if the unthinkable happens, you need to read this book. Trust me: you won’t finish it the same as when you started.

The Year in Books: 2011

2011 involved unprecedented levels of book-related awesome. That’s a big call to make, because as you may have noticed by now, I read voraciously, constantly, and have done my whole life.  Undeniably, one of the things that made 2011 so special was my discovery of Amazon – or, more specifically, the belated realisation that I am a grown woman with my own income and can, as such, buy books on the internet whenever I want. I can’t rightly explain why it’s taken me so long to realise this without delving into the twisted warren of personal psychology, but the practical upshot is that for the past few years, every time I’ve heard about an interesting book or author whose work I can’t find that the local bookshop – which, frankly, is most of the time – I’ve been tagging it on my Goodreads shelf and then sighing over its inaccessibility. Internets, I don’t know what to tell you: I am a complete moron, basically, but all of a sudden, it suddenly occurred to me that I could buy these books online. Hallelujah!  Huzzah! And so I did, and it was awesome.

It is worth pointing out that my husband is suddenly very, very keen on the idea of me getting a Kindle. Every time a new book finds its way into the house, he twitches. There are two good reasons for this, namely:

1. We are rapidly running out of shelving space; and

2. The next time we move, he’ll be the one hauling all my boxes of books down four flights of stairs.

The point being, it’s not just my consumption of books that went up in 2011, but the purchase of them, too. Not only was I trying new things, but suddenly I had a back catalogue of literally hundreds of books I’d been wanted to read for ages, plus the means and opportunity to buy them. And I am here to say, they did not disappoint. Of the 156 titles I read in 2011, only a very few rubbed me the wrong way, and even those still tended to be worth reading. The rest were, by and large, brilliant, which perhaps explains why I chewed through so many so fast. And here is where we come to the reason why 2011 was such a staggeringly awesome year, bookwise: because not only did I read many an awe-inspiring book, but in the process, I became infatuated with many an awe-inspiring author. Not since I was a teenager discovering SFF through the greedy acquisition of second-hand paperbacks has there been a time when so many new writers have instantly made the transition from ‘person whose books I enjoy’ to ‘canonical favourite author’, the latter state being distinguished by the fact that I must have their books, all of them, NOW.

There’s something very special about being made to feel that way again – as though a genre you’d thought you’d known had suddenly opened back up again, richer and even more awesome than ever. And thus I give you, in order of their discovery, my:

Top Ten Authors of 2011

1. China Mieville

A few years ago, I bought a beautiful but unwieldy copy of Perdido Street Station. Perhaps I was just too young for the book, or my expectations of it were such that I couldn’t get into the rhythm of it – either way, I ended up putting it aside. Not long after that, I tried again with Un Lun Dun, but despite enjoying the story, I was so distracted by its similarities to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere that, three quarters of the way through, I put it down and never remembered to pick it up again. And then, in 2010, I bought a copy of the newly-released Kraken – third time’s the charm, I thought – and decided to save it for just the right occasion. And then came Worldcon, during which time I actually ended up meeting China Mieville. Very kindly, he signed my copy of Kraken – and then I heard him read a chapter of it aloud. All of a sudden, it was like a key had turned in my head: everything about his writing that had puzzled me locked into place, and though I was too overwhelmed and exhausted to tackle such a big book at the time, when I finally picked it up in January 2011, I devoured it in something close to a day. Mieville is powerfully, sometimes exhaustingly awesome: his intertwined language and concepts appeal to something deep in the brain, and once you’re inside his stories, it’s impossible to let go. Even better, he’s become an author whose work I can share with my husband: we both loved The City & The City, and were subsequently blown away by Embassytown. Since then, I’ve also finished Perdido Street Station and have a copy of its first sequel, The Scar, ready to go.

2. N. K. Jemisin

Back before its release, I read a free sample chapter of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms somewhere online. I don’t remember who, if anyone, directed me towards it, but the story stuck with me, and when the novel hit shelves, I wasn’t surprised to see it getting great reviews. Not being able to find a copy locally, this was one I had to wait to get, during which time friends kept recommending it, amazing reviews kept cropping up, and I kept getting impatient. And then I finally bought a copy, and it was brilliant, and shortly devoured both sequel volumes, The Broken Kingdoms and The Kingdom of Gods, which were equally as good. Jemisin’s worldbuilding is exquisite, her style both poetic and gripping, but it’s her psychology that really sells me: ambition, need and culture all shape her characters as well as their innate, sometimes difficult personalities, and their interactions are a pleasure to read. She also writes an entirely awesome blog about entirely awesome things, thanks to which I’ve come to think about a lot of important issues I might not otherwise have considered. Her next novel, The Killing Moon, is out this year, and I absolutely cannot wait to lay hands on it.

3. Cory Doctorow 

Technically, this is a cheat, because I first read and loved Little Brother way back in 2009. But for whatever reason, I didn’t follow through with more of his work until last year, when I ended up reading For the Win and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Doctorow’s strong technology themes – and the ease with which he makes them not only interesting, but significant, to relative laypersons like me – are a large part of what makes his work so compelling; but it’s the social justice elements that get me in the chest. The rest of his books are now in my scopes, and hopefully I’ll get to one or more of them at some point in 2012.

4. Octavia E. Butler

I’d heard of her. I wanted to read her books. But I had no idea where to start, and I was tentative in the way I always am when it comes to science fiction greats, because so often I go in optimistic and then find out that really, these stories aren’t for me. But when I came across an omnibus edition of Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy in the local second-hand bookshop – Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago in a single volume – I decided to plunge ahead. And oh, man. Look, internets: you don’t need me to tell you how amazing, how absolutely jaw-dropping Butler is, because you already knew before me. I was literally broken apart by these books, and though they’re still the only ones of hers I’ve read – stories that powerful need to be rationed, like absinthe or Belgian chocolate – they nonetheless burned themselves into me forever.

5. Paolo Bacigalupi

This is something of an odd one. I made sure to read The Wind-Up Girl after it won the Hugo, and when I did, my reaction was… mixed. (For the curious, my review is here.) There were parts of the story I loved, and others I hated; I came away with a lot of thoughts, but despite the more negative aspects I perceived in the book, I also couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s difficult to articulate why, but sometimes I can have a very Slap Slap Kiss relationship with certain stories: for all my criticisms, I’ll end up loving them more than other works with which I found no fault, because they challenge me. Uncharitably, this is just because I’m a deeply contrary person, but I also suspect it’s because when you see things you absolutely love laid alongside things that make you bristle, you’re forced to rip apart various narrative seams – both in the book and in your head – to find out why you’re reacting that way. This process cannot help but be informative, if not transformative, and the upshot of all my angsting was that the very next month, I ended up buying Ship Breaker. Which, flat out, I absolutely loved. Could not put it down. So not only is Bacigalupi an awesome author, he’s one who makes me think, too – and that is always good.

6. Catherynne M. Valente

The book I started with here was Palimpsest, and – as with The City & The City and The Wind-Up Girl – part of the reason I read it was the Hugo nomination. As is often the case with me, I was nervous: I’d picked up a copy in a bookshop once before, but due to whatever quirk of mood or temper that particular day, I’d decided against buying it. But during a trip to London that happened to coincide with my birthday, I’d decided to give Valente a try, and so set out to acquire a copy of In the Night Garden, which a friend had recommended. Alas, London did not yield me that particular book – but I did find Palimpsest, and so decided, on the basis of the Hugo nomination, that my younger self had no idea what she was talking about. Thus, I bought it, and read the whole thing in a single sitting, curled up in bed in an excruciatingly cheap hotel in the middle of the day. Valente is a poet, and the way she braids this skill with mythology and imagery and longing absolutely kills me. Later in the year, I won an ARC of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making in a Twitter contest. It quite literally moved me to tears, and my review of it is here. After that came Deathless, which was unbelievably good; and in my pile of books-to-be read for 2012 are copies of In the Night Garden and Myths of Origin, which I’m really looking forward to. And, like Jemisin, Valente also writes a kickass blog.

7. Carrie Vaughn

I briefly met Carrie Vaughn at Worldcon in 2010. She was a really lovely person, and on the strength of that I decided to check out her work. This started with Kitty and the Midnight Hour, the first of her best-selling urban fantasy series: there was a lot to like in terms of writing and characterisation, but what really hooked me was Kitty’s job as a radio DJ. So often in UF, the heroines are kickass women doing kickass jobs from the get-go, and while that’s also a type of story I also adore, there was something really special about Kitty being (so to speak) an everywolf – a kind, competent woman doing something she loved, then rolling with the punches when things went sideways. Even so, I was intrigued by the variety of what Vaughn was writing, and so my next port of call were her stand-alone novels: Discord’s Apple, After the Golden Age, Voices of Dragons and Steel. Of these four, my far-and-away favourite was After the Golden Age, which is about a forensic accountant whose parents are both superheroes. What continually impressed me was Vaughn’s versatility: her willingness to play with different ideas to see what happened, and the fact that her heroines – much like Kitty – always feel like very real, relatable women, rather than untouchable action heroes.

8. Lois McMaster Bujold

Early in the year – on the same London trip where I bought Palimpsest, in fact – a writer friend strongly recommended I read some Lois McMaster Bujold. I stored his advice away, and then, during a particularly fulsome Amazon binge, ordered Shards of Honour, the first novel in the Vorkosigan saga. You may judge my reaction to this book by the fact that its heroine, Cordelia Naismith, is now one of my fictional rolemodels for 2012. I cannot even begin to describe how much I love these books. The politics are vicious, intricate and utterly believeable, the action is breathtaking, and the characterisation is pitch-perfect. In addition to Shards of Honour, I managed to get through Barrayar, The Warrior’s Apprentice, The Vor Game, Cetaganda, Ethan of Athos and Brothers in Arms before the end of December; Mirror Dance and Memory are sitting in my to-be-read pile, and as of this afternoon, so are all three volumes of her Chailon series, fortuitously acquired at the second-hand shop. If I could marry her brain, I would. In a nutshell: squee!

9. Laini Taylor

I picked up a copy of Daughter of Smoke and Bone at the local Waterstones. I’d been seeing it reviewed online, but for whatever reason, it hadn’t really registered. The fact that it was shelved with fantasy rather than YA is what made me notice it, because it’s not so often that you see a book that transitions like that; and besides which, it was a signed special edition. So I decided to give it a try, which  turns out to have been one of the best decisions I made all year. As well as being an author, Taylor is also an artist, and her visual imagination comes across beautifully in her worldbuilding. And just, you guys: THE WORLDBUILDING. And the plot. And the characters. And the everything. Without wanting to give too much away – which is actually sort of impossible, so spoiler alert – this book is now my benchmark for any and all stories featuring:

1. Angels and demons;

2. Impossible romance; and

3. Reincarnation plotlines,

because Daughter of Smoke and Bone manages all three like a boss. (End spoilers.) So then I looked up her other works, and was kicking myself when I realised I’d actually seen her Dreamdark books when they first came out, and hadn’t picked them up! Truly, Past Foz is an idiot. But this has now been rectified: both Blackbringer and Silksinger were marvelous, and I cannot wait to see what she writes next.

10. Nnedi Okorafor

I can’t remember whether I first heard of Nnedi Okorafor because of Who Fears Death or because I’d been seeing reviews of Akata Witch cropping up around the place, but either way, I wound up following her on Twitter. The more I heard about her  talk about the themes in her books, the more I knew these were definitely stories I wanted to read, and so without having read anything more than a short story of hers, I ordered Who Fears Death, Akata Witch and Zahrah the Windseeker online. I read Akata Witch first, by way of easing myself in: at least one person had warned me that I might find Who Fears Death harrowing, and in case that were so, I wanted to have read some of her other work beforehand. As things turned out, though, I loved all three books. Okorafor’s constant themes are Africa, culture, feminism, and the power of the outcast, and all her books are breathtaking. Right now, there’s a copy of The Shadow Speaker sitting in my to-be-read pile, and I know that it won’t disappoint.

So, there you have it! Ten awesome authors, all discovered in the space of a year. Seriously though, this whole list should be subtitled How Foz Was Late To The Party, because these are all writers whose excellence has been well-known to other people for years. Only the stubborn idiocy of my younger self is to blame for not having discovered many of them earlier. Damn you, Past Foz! But then, if Past Foz hadn’t been an idiot, I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of finding them all in one go, and 2011 wouldn’t have been nearly so amazing. Nonetheless! To compensate for the fact that everyone on Earth was quicker off the mark than me, here is a secondary list of excellent books to see you on your way. In no particular order:

Five Awesome Books from 2011

1. Water to Burn, by Katharine Kerr

The second book in Kerr’s new urban fantasy series about the exploits of psychic agent Nola O’Grady, following on from by License to Ensorcell, with the third book, Apocalypse to Go, which I was lucky enough to read in draft, about to be released. Rather than rhapsodize anew about why these books are amazing, I’ll direct you instead to my previous review, but in case you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, just trust me: they are.

2. Delirium, by Lauren Oliver

This book is easily my favourite YA dystopia. The worldbuilding is brilliantly in-depth without being overbearing, the writing is excellent and the characterisation solid, but the sheer power of it is what works: a broken world disillusioned by the problems of 21st century romance, twisted into a passionless society from which only the young or mad can escape.

3. The Shattering, by Karen Healey

Three friends. Three dead brothers. A perfect town. A secret. Read this book; it’s amazing. My review is here.

4. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

An incredible circus. A contest between magicians. Forbidden love. Beauty! Magic! Adventure! What more do you want? Exquisitely written and characterised, The Night Circus took my breath away.

5. The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells

Shapeshifter Moon doesn’t know who his family were; he doesn’t even know what race he is. Finding out takes him on a journey across an amazing, vivid fantasy world, full of a gorgeous variety of cultures, peoples and magic. This is the sort of book you didn’t know you’d been yearning for until you picked it up – so trust me, and do.

So that’s it, folks – my year in books for 2011! What was your year like?

Cake Tales

It started at about ten o’clock this morning. My husband, Toby, laid low by a bout of Man Flu, was lying on the lounge, snuffling piteously while I checked my email.

“Where’s my cake?” he lamented. “Will you make me a cake? I’d like one! CAKE!”

Of course, I refused this request with the asperity and hauteur it so obviously deserved. (As anyone experienced with Man Flu knows, indulging the sufferer’s whims only serves to reinforce the belief that they are, in fact, dying of bubonic plague, or possibly Ebola, rather than experiencing mild hayfever, the common cold, or – as is most usual – a hangover.) I am many things, but an on-demand cake wizard is not among them. Moaning his disappointment, my beloved reconciled himself to a cakeless existence and instead began reading China Mieville’s Embassytown, thereby redeeming himself.

Some hours passed. We had salad for lunch. I finished my editing and answered some outstanding emails. I was mooching about on Twitter in a guiltless sort of way when, all of a sudden, it struck me: banana and ginger cake, possibly with some sort of vanilla/cream involvement. Not only that, I already had most of the ingredients – some of them desperately needing to be used prior to rapidly approaching expiry dates – such that the cost of the missing elements would be negligible. I began to Tweet my enthusiasm for the project, and received only enthusiasm in return. I could do this.

By this time, Toby had relocated to the bedroom. I walked in and poked my head around the door – slyly, in the way of one proffering an unexpected treat.

“How serious were you about wanting cake?” I asked. “Because I’m totally making one. Banana and ginger.” I will admit to having emphasised these last words with a certain zealous relish.

“Can it be chocolate?” Toby asked. “Chocolate goes well with ginger and banana. I like chocolate cakes.”

I frowned. Chocolate had not been on the agenda, but perhaps compromise was possible. “We’ll see,” I said. With this established, I began the fifteen-minute trek to Morrisons, a franchise which, despite their aggravating stance on ID and alcohol purchases, nonetheless retains a good range of items. I purchased my sundries, walked back home, did the washing up, and began to arrange my ingredients on the far bench. My plan was simple: take my existing banana cake recipe, then add ginger, cinnamon and – in keeping with Toby’s request, albeit filtered through my own preferences – white chocolate. Midway through this process, however, it became wretchedly apparent that, contrary to what I’d thought, we had no vanilla essence in the cupboard.

“Rats,” I said (or some other expletive that may or may not have been stronger) – and set out again, this time barefoot and at a run, to the slightly closer corner shop at the end of our street. They had vanilla essence; I ran home, added it to my pile, turned the oven to 180 degrees, and began mixing.

In went the eggs, sugar, vanilla and butter. In went the flour, cinnamon, ginger and milk. I’d just got to the bananas when it occurred to me that the oven was being unusually silent. Given that I don’t bake regularly enough to trust that I know how to work the oven, my first reaction, on opening the door and discovering a cold, decidedly un-heated interior, was to ask Toby whether I’d turned it on properly. He poked at the door, turned the dial on and off a few times, removed and replaced the knob, tried the switch, crouched down to peer masterfully at its innards, and declared that my best bet was to leave it be and hope it started to get warm.

Given my significant doubts as to whether this would work, and refusing, after so much effort, to be thwarted by broken technology, I continued mashing my bananas, stirring the mixture, and finally dropping in most of the white chocolate drops. The oven, stubbornly, remained cold.

I formulated a plan. By which I mean, I rang my friend Sarah, who had just got home from Amsterdam, and asked if I could come round and borrow her oven. She said yes.

I informed my husband, packed my things, and started to walk.

There’s a certain sort of stare that members of the general public reserve for girls in weird t-shirts carrying clear plastic mixing bowls full of miscellaneous goop with wooden spoons poking out the end at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon – which is to say, I was stared at as though I might, in fact, be a crazy person. Possibly if the spoon had been less obvious, or the bowl more opaque, the reaction could have been different, but as things stood, even little old ladies were giving me weird glances. I ignored them, head held high, and rang the bell to Sarah’s house.

It should be mentioned at this point that Sarah lives in a student sharehouse with approximately eight other people, only half of whom I know. The slender, surprised-looking youth who answered the door belonged to the other half. Confronted by the sight of a strange woman holding a clingwrapped mixing bowl and a plastic bag full of cooking paraphernalia, he nonetheless waved me cheerfully into the house at the mention of Sarah’s name.

Moment later, Sarah herself emerged and joined me in the kitchen. As the oven preheated, we talked about Amsterdam while she chopped onions for an early dinner and I got out the icing sugar, vanilla, butter, cream and white chocolate drops and started to mix my icing. (Clearly, the overwhelming virtue of having salad for lunch three days in a row had manifested as cathartic desire to balance the calorie scales.) The cake went into the oven; the icing went into the fridge. This left me with a problem, vis-a-vis the leftover cream: there was no easy way to transport it back home, and it seemed like a waste to leave it be. For reasons unknown, this translated into my trying to change it – first with a whisk, and then with a fork – from runny to whipped.

Thus it was that when four of Sarah’s housemates (who I did know) and a friend of theirs (who I didn’t) came home, they found me sitting at their kitchen table, morosely churning a bowl of cream while Sarah cooked bolognese. It is either a testament to the nature of student sharehouses in general or these friends in particular that not a single one of them asked what I was doing there or why it involved cream, all completely unsurprised when I explained that my oven had broken and so I was using theirs, of course, as though interloping cakes were a common occurrence everywhere.

And so we talked. After forty minutes, the cake was done: I bundled it onto a borrowed plate, packed up my utensils, determined that yes, I could carry both the cake-plate and the icing bowl at the same time without endangering either of them, and prepared to go. Except that I needed to gladwrap the cake for safety. Sod’s law being what it is, all I needed on the home stretch was for some obnoxious passerby to bump me and send the fruit of my labours sprawling into the gutter. Unfortunately, this meant wrestling with a de-boxed roll of clingwrap that had twisted and torn into a sort of cylindrical Rubik’s cube. That took another five minutes – until, just as I unraveled the last thread, Sarah remembered that there was, in fact, an in-tact roll in the next drawer down I could’ve used. (In the end, I used a piece from each one, just in case.)

And then I walked home: bag over my shoulder, plastic bag on my right arm, icing bowl with spoon in my right hand, gladwrapped cake plate in my left. Again with the stares, though this time, at least, they were fewer.

Midway home I realised I’d left my favourite black jacket hung over Sarah’s kitchen chair. Of course. 

But in the end, nothing could dull my triumph. I chilled the still-warm cake enough that the icing couldn’t immediately dissolve. I summoned my husband (who grumbled at having to put down Embassytown) and served the cake.

Who says persistence doesn’t pay?