THE MAN WHO BRIDGED THE MIST, Hugo & Nebula Best Novella Winner

THE MAN WHO BRIDGED THE MIST
KIJ JOHNSON
Author's Website
Free Download!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The river of Mist, an almost living organism, divides the Empire in two. A few Ferries make dangerous and treacherous journeys across the Mist when they can, trusting in good fortune and the uncanny skills of those plying the trade. *** A bridge across the Mist will greatly ease the suffering of those who risk crossing the river. The last bridge builder sent by the Empire died while building it. *** Kit now comes to the town of Nearside to complete the task left unfinished by the dead bridge builder. Will he be the man who will finally bridge the Mist?

This novella won both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards for Best Novella of 2011.

My Review: My Goodreads friend Nataliya recommended this novella to me today. The title, as beautiful and evocative as this author's debut collection of short fiction's was (At the Mouth of the River of Bees), hooked me; the Doc's warble of rapture sealed the deal.

There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials.

Bless you, dear Doc, bless you and those whose hurts and harms you heal with that magiqckal ability to see and fix a pattern. This story was a piece of my own pattern that was missing, and you gave it to me.

This tale of a man in a world not entirely like our own, a man whose purpose is to function and whose function is to build, that needs a way to communicate and connect its parts. Technology isn't advanced, and there's not even a HINT of majgicqk to sully the handsome, spare caternary curve of the story. It is a story of a world beset by troubles we know bone-deep, connection and confusion and longing and fear. And every character, no matter how fleeting their time or how small their space on the page, carries the weight of their piece of the pattern fairly and squarely. This is how I know I'm in the presence of top-quality writing. I see the pattern, I sense the supporting structure, and I am still *in* the story. Many writers write lovely sentences and many others imagine some strong characters, relatable and investible, and many many more create stories that bind and grip and sweep and carry me away. A very few do two of these things, and a vanishingly small number do them all. In this work, Johnson has done them all.

In a fortyish-page novella, five years of toil and change and death and learning fold into a structure as deceptively simple as an origami crane. The slow and unhurried pace at which the folds present themselves belies the time it took to craft them as well as the conciseness of their delivery. It is never easy to be brief. It is much more demanding to satisfy the jaded, spoiled-for-choice reader in a compact package.

“The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort. Tonight do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry’s headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things. A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I’m waiting until I know how I will be changed.”
“You never know how things will change you,” Kit said.
“If you don’t, you have not waited to find out.”

Simple, direct, truthful, and (for me anyway) resonant with truth.

Perhaps the defining moment of the story, the bridging of the Mist River, came for me when Kit and Rasali experience a deeply, intensely frightening encounter with the Mist. Reflecting on it, and on the death that comes for us all at some time we can't know for sure, Kij Johnson rang my eyes like gongs:

“If {Death} comes for you?” he said. “Would you be so sanguine then?”
She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.”

Won't it, though?


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

CLAN RATHSKELLER by Kevin Hearne, Day One of the meme: A book that made you laugh

CLAN RATHSKELLER (Iron Druid Chronicles #0.5)
KEVIN HEARNE
Free PDF
Available now!! What are you waiting for?!?

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This is a free short story that takes place ten months before the events of Hounded, the first book in the Iron Druid Chronicles.

My Review: Atticus gets naked in a Christmas-packed Tempe mall, helps Santa's elves (who're actually gnomes on a vendetta) get revenge against a kobold (did you know that Pompeii was destroyed because some kobolds were ticked at a local wizard? neither me, ain't history grand), and kills a faery with a pickup truck.

Oberon, meanwhile, pines for a sandwich, a muffin, some sausage...anything! Anything! Hungry!!

Eighteen pages, maybe 15 minutes to read, and a goodly amount of snorting, giggling, and musing on how much I wish this reality was the one I lived in.

WAKULLA SPRINGS, a novella up for a Nebula...rich and atmospheric and good fun

WAKULLA SPRINGS
ANDY DUNCAN & ELLEN KLAGES
Tor.com Publishing
$2.99 Kindle Single, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Wakulla Springs, in the deep jungle of the Florida panhandle, is the deepest submerged freshwater cave system in the world. In its unfathomable depths, a variety of curious creatures have left a record of their coming, of their struggle to survive, and of their eventual end. And that's just the local human beings over the last seventy-five years. Then there are the prehistoric creatures...and, just maybe, something else.

Ranging from the late 1930s to the present day, Wakulla Springs is a tour de force of the human, the strange, and the miraculous.

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

My Review: This novella, approximately 99 pages, was free because of its nominated for a 2014 Nebula award. While I liked the story a lot, and saw the good writing and the deft plotting, I don't see how on earth it's SFnal but horrorful.

I was very taken with the multi-generational premise. We travel from mother to son to granddaughter to mother again, and that kind of structure mirrors many of my experiences of the world: We frequently return to origin points to discover, to nourish, to measure ourselves against a yardstick we know others in our personal world have used before us. The fact that the yardstick is Olde Tyme Movies made it more fun for me. I like the 1930s and 1940s B-movies because, like TV shows in our day and age, they represent the low culture, the mass market, the common sensibility of their time. It's fascinating to compare the bugaboos and the stereotypes of those times to our own times.

So as we visit the deeply circumscribed world of African-American women under Jim Crow laws, moving to the early civil rights struggle, and finally to the modern era's deep concern with the environment...the highlights of the past 75 years...I was carried along as characters I liked and admired did their best and lived their lives and made their peace with what life handed them, and made the best and the most of what that had to offer.

At novella length, there isn't room to do much more than rough in the kind of shades and shadows that make a novel such a satisfying read. The authors did a very good job of this indeed.

The last of the sun touched the very tops of the trees; everything else was shadows. Then even that light faded, the blue of the sky deepened, and the stars began to wink on. The moon rose over a bend in the river, and a trickle of white light made a river of its own, sparkling down the middle of the dark water.
All around her the grass and trees were a-hum with the soft shirring of unseen creatures. Mayola remembered what Odell had said in his tourist voice, about the fairies that lived deep below in the springs. In the daylight, she had known it for a tale, but now it seemed like it might really be true.

But the form "novella" means, by definition, less room to maneuver, and so these moments are like Florida's hammocks...bits of solid land amid a watery world. The trip is an eventful one, like any visit to an untamed landscape is. The events aren't all equal heights, either. They shouldn't be, of course, but the abandonment of the setting so lovingly described for the built environment, and not the nice part of it, in Los Angeles feels like the brakes of a jetliner do when you're landing in one: crunchbouncebouncescreeeeeeeewhoooooompaaaannnnnd stop. When the shift happened, I mentally dropped the book to three stars in sheer annoyance.

I was grudgingly adding back a half-star for the authors' continuing to follow the thread of monster-movie/Hollywood film/civil rights, in spite of the annoyance I felt at the change of scene, when the last chapter came along and back I was in Wakulla Springs.

Ah. Yes. That's better.

And the ending itself, the last paragraph of the tale, left me with a smile and an appreciative murmur of praise. Don't read this paragraph if you're spoilerphobic:

And beneath the river's surface, a creature reached for Anna's boat with a webbed hand, its talons approaching the metal hull. Then it changed its mind and kicked away, back down into the depths where it dwelled, away from the light.

That's a very apt, fitting, suitable ending for this tale of place and personhood and the world's infinite mystery. For all we look and study and learn and classify, there's always a deep place that is itself, and not ours nor any of our kind's business.

Gay Male SF AT LAST

New Review! One big issue I have with science fiction is its relative absence of gayness. Today I read an excellent short science fiction story WHEN YOU WERE PIXELS by Julio-Alexi Genao. It's a kind of gay male Fifty First Dates set in a Bladerunner-y dystopic future. This is what I've been looking for! Try it out.

I so often find that the SFnal setting in more-or-less romantic fiction is pretty lame. Not this time. It's got depth and it's got breadth. I am so so pleased! It helps that I'm Goodreads friends with the author, since I got to hear about the book that way. It's free to all comers, though, so I'm not unique!