World Fantasy Award Winners

The winners of this year's World Fantasy Award were just announced. 

The competition was tough this year; up for best novel was the Hugo award winning Among Others, but Jo Walton, and the soon-to-be-a-movie Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman. 

Heavy hitters like G.R.R. Martin and Stephen King were also represented, Martin for his latest addition to the Game of Thrones and King for his time-travel/alternate reality 11/22/63. 

But the winner was an obvious choice for me this year.  I've blogged about it already, raved enough elsewhere, and couldn't be more pleased that Osama by Lavie Tidhar was chosen as the winner of the World Fantasy Award. 

Osama Review . . . Donnie Darko meets L.A. Confidential

Osama, by Lavie Tidhar, is the story of Joe, a surname-less detective hired by a mysterious woman to track down Mike Longshott, author of Osama: Vigilante.  Written in a kind of post-noir Chandler-esque chic, it quickly becomes apparent that Joe inhabits a world markedly different from our own, where certain notable events either never happened, or went off on an oblique.  Tidhar's sense of place is impeccable, from the rain-swept streets of Vientiane to the wilds of London (on both sides of the surreal), to Kabul, where Tidhar evokes ten or more years of bombings compressed into a single instant--the absurdity of this moment,  and others, drawn out by snippets throughout the book.

Absurdity seems to be what this book is about; the absurdly disproportionate response by a superpower against terrorists a world away, the absurdity of a war against terror, the absurdity of men destroying themselves as a last gasp at communicating their own creed.  Mike Longshott is the absurd moniker taken by an Afghan man who glimpses the world beyond the veil, our own world, and attempts to comprehend it absurdity by capturing it in fiction.

On the surface, this is the story of one man's search for Mike Longshott, but classifying this subtle and haunting book as alternative history or science fiction is to miss the point.  Tidhar manages to blur the real and the unreal in such a way that truth and fiction combine in such a way that we're unable to distinguish one from the other.  And maybe that's the point.  Because by the end we're left with a man who's seen beyond the veil of the real into a world of gross surveillance, paranoia, and killing for the sake of terror.  Ultimately, Osama is a haunting soliloquy about this strange new world none of us could have foreseen and hardly any of us understands.

I would recommend this book to a friend.

Alif the Unseen Review

Salon.com

I expected more from this book.  Maybe that was its downfall.  Written by G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen treads a fine line between magical realism, and the fantasy genre.  It's the story of Alif, a hacker tag for a young man living in an unnamed city somewhere on the Arabian peninsula.  He provides data security against aggressive State security; born out of the Arab Spring, this is a trenchant subject, and despite helping to protect agitators and revolutionaries, Alif is strictly a gun-for-hire.  Or, perhaps he's something else.  Instead of actually fighting the battles of his peers, he simply provides them anonymity.

Anonymity is a resounding theme throughout the novel.  People are rarely referred to by their names--Alif, as I've already stated, is not his real name, and though we're offered hints about his true identity, he remains essentially nameless.  Characters throughout the book are disguised by their aliases, as an erstwhile Saudi prince is referred to as often as not by his own hacker tag.  A young American woman studying in the city is known only as "the convert," and the slew of magical beings (including one pretty nifty jinni) are compromised by the fact that few people even believe in their existence.  A young woman in a niqab exists only as glimpses of skin and kohl-lined eyes.

With this pervasive theme resounding through the book, I expected a subtle reflection on state security, the need for privacy in a democracy, and indeed, the book touches on each.  Clearly, a book about a hacker who provides secrecy-services is going to involve those layers of secrecy undone, and Wilson obliges.  When Alif comes into possession of a book reputed to have been written by jinn, he is suddenly the object of the man in charge of hunting down all those people Alif has been hired to protect.  With the very real threat of the State looming behind the hunt, Alif knows that to be captured is to risk torture and death.  Yet the book seems to indeed possess a kind of magic.  Not magic in the fantasy sense, but magic in the coding sense, since it offers insights into building the most powerful computers on the planet.

Wilson's technical naivety shines through here.  Though she manages to get some of the technobabble correct, it lacks of the feel of a truly knowledgeable writer--something that Neal Stephenson and William Gibson have been perfecting over the last two decades.  But I forgave her the shallowness of her technical prowess--this is, after all, a fantasy (or very nearly).  With the hint of jinni in the wings, and set in Arabia, it seems far too easy to populate this world with a sideways world of jinn, effrit and other magical creatures out of The Arabian Nights.  This might have been handled poorly, but by acknowledging her sources, Wilson allows the reader to maintain the sense of disbelief necessary to plod through the abusively ponderous second act into the third.

Which is about where the story falls apart.  What began as something subtle and nuanced becomes a diatribe about modern belief--about the lack of belief inherent in modern society.  Constantly preaching, Wilson's aforementioned "convert" seems to be a poorly veiled (sorry about the pun) version of herself, experiencing the inconsistencies of all modern religions, and the necessary faith one requires to follow them.  This feels both sudden and inconsistent with the tone and pacing of the book prior, and hardly matches the themes she so carefully crafted at the outset.  Indeed, one is forced to wonder if she experienced a crisis of faith while writing this books, as I experienced while reading it.

Real life rarely intrudes, or at least informs, books.  Certainly, the events of the real world might alter the way in which I perceive a particular book, but as I was reading Alif, extremists in Libya set fire to the American embassy in Benghazi and killed the American ambassador.  Meanwhile, protests had been sparked in Egypt over a controversial film depicting Mohammed as a philanderer and a pedophile.  Subsequent protests have since been staged throughout the world, including Australia.

The anger I felt at the death of our ambassador no doubt colored my perception of this book.  And I can't help read into it the way in which the Arab Spring has metamorphosed into a wild grasping for power, as all revolutions must eventually go.  I doubt my sense of disappointment with the novel would have been alleviated if the assassination has not occurred, yet I can't help wonder if some of my own residual anger tempered this review.  I like to think that I am more impartial than that, but I have to admit that it may have.  So, take this with a bit of salt; overall, I thought the book was flawed, with great potential that Wilson was unable to exploit.

I would not recommend this book to a friend.

Those Across the River Review

Fleeing the North in disgrace, WWI veteran and failed academic Frank Nichols and his soon-to-be wife Eudora, arrive in a tiny Georgian hamlet where Frank has just inherited the home of his recently deceased aunt.  Under the strict injunction to sell the house and absolutely not to move to Whitbrow (the aforementioned tiny hamlet), Frank does exactly the opposite.  But haunted by the specter of war, and the stigma of both cuckoldry and adultery, Frank takes this opportunity to be heaven-sent.  It doesn't hurt that just across the river is the ancient Savoyard plantation, where his great-grandfather was known to have treated his slaves so inhumanely, that they eventually rose up and slaughtered him.  Hoping to segue family tragedy into a book which might serve as passport back to his academic career, Frank is lured across the river and confronted by memories that simply refuse to die.

This very basic summary hardly does the book justice.  First of all, this is a supernatural horror story, and is currently up for nomination to win the World Fantasy Award.  Second, it deals with subject matter far more literary than this genre is used to.  The mental wounds that Frank suffered in the trenches of WWI still torment him; moreover, from the outset we're informed that while he's a nice guy, he's not above sleeping with another man's wife.  From this fragmented moral landscape, we're also offered a piquant reminder of the suffering and inhumanity of slavery.

This book is remarkably smart, not only in its subject matter, but also in the way that it deals with the persons of Frank and Eudora Nichols (as they eventually do marry).  Told in the first person, however, it necessarily focuses on his triumphs, defeats, fears and the quotidian tragedies that comprise human existence.  It doesn't surprise me at all that this book has been picked up to be made into a movie, directed by Tod "Kip" Williams, who directed Paranormal Activity 2.  Commentators have noted that Christopher Beuhlman writes like a combination of Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King, which is not an inapt comparison.

The singular flaw in the novel, however, comes late in the second act, and continues throughout the third act.  Once the mystery is revealed, and mortal lives are placed in danger, Beuhlman fails to utilize the wealth of characterization he has developed in the previous act.  Indeed, the first act reads so well because of the deeply characterized human beings who inhabit the fictional world of Whitbrow.  Their deaths, when they come are tragic, but we never have a sense of who they are under pressure; indeed, by the start of the third act they have simply disappeared and two new characters are introduced to help our protagonist win the day.

But this shortcoming is minor, and really only occurred to me after the fact.  It hardly detracts from the overall story.  It kept me up well past my bedtime and I can't say that I minded.  In fact, this might be my favorite book of the year and I heartily recommend it.  

What Good's An Award If No One Knows About It?

Awards

Recently a buddy of mine commented that until he started hanging out with me he never knew that there were literary awards.  He's not sheltered, nor was he raised in a barn, nor on Mars and only recently been returned to teach us the Martian ways of peace and "grokking."

Anyway, it got me thinking that maybe the world of genre awards are kind of like Employee of the Month awards.  They're great, and they acknowledge your good works but the only people who see them are fellow employees.  Normally they're tucked away somewhere near the bathrooms, or by the employee break area.

Sciencefictionworld.com has a great guide to previous years genre award winners, be they fantasy or sci-fi, and I encourage you to go take a look.

Let me know what your fave sci-fi or fantasy is in the comments.