Laurie Marks, “Fire Logic” (2002) – The word I find myself reaching for to describe this fantasy novel is “mature.” It has a very mature outlook on relationships, not denying the passions of its youthful protagonist, Zanja, but also depicting studied, thoughtful portraits of older characters, addicts, people from different and rival cultures. Marks doesn’t indulge in the lengthy worldbuilding of a lot of other fantasy writers- if anything, she errs on the other side, making the rival Shaftal and their Sainnite occupiers less distinct than might make sense. But that’s probably part of the point- Marks depicts well the spiraling violence of an insurgency/counterinsurgency situation, and concludes that Shaftal and Sainnite should put aside their differences and learn to live together on the same land. I get that, I guess, but maybe being an old insurgency student myself I can’t help but think that the Sainnites invaded Shaftal and it’s on them to rectify the situation, possibly by exiting. But anyway- Zanja is not from Shaftal, but from a tribal society living nearby (which the Sainnites eventually massacre in the sort of war crime that doesn’t exactly make you agree with Marks’s peacenik agenda… unless it does, I guess). She’s trained as a diplomat, and is a fireblood- here, many people are imbued with magic from one of the four classical elements. Zanja’s fireblood makes her intuitive, lightly precognitive, as well as willful and fickle. She falls in love with an earth witch who’s addicted to a Sainnite drug, and gets involved with the Shaftal resistance to Sainnite rule, before she begins to see the futility of the situation and its conflicts with her life and those who are close to her. Marks writes decent early-modern (they have gunpowder but only for pistols?) action scenes and her depictions of same-sex relationships seem to me to hold up well now, and must have been a revelation for 2002. Sometimes, her maturity and restraint get the better of her and the narrative drags somewhat as characters go back and forth over their assorted agonizing decisions and efforts to heal. There’s worse things to drag down a narrative, but it made reading more of a slog than it needed to be. ***’

Seth Dickinson, “The Monster Baru Cormorant” (2019) – This one goes to eleven. The sequel to one of my favorite fiction reads this year, “The Traitor Baru Cormorant,” TMBC squeezes in all kinds of stuff. Six or seven viewpoint characters introduced in successive chapters at the beginning of the book! Multiple overlapping conspiracies! Multiple fictional games introduced, illustrating Themes! Currency speculation, druggings, naval chases, cancer cults! Head injuries! Dickinson doing his white-guy best with an Africa-inspired fantasy civilization, to go along with his straight-guy attempt at a lesbian main character! It’s a lot.

I’d say it’s a little bit too much, especially at the beginning where Dickinson introduces all of these characters and sets them in motion, expecting you the reader to keep track. I’m pretty good at that kind of thing and I found it stiff going. It’s hard to know how to introduce the plot, it gets so intricate. At its most basic, the titular Baru gets sworn in to a small elite of conspirators that runs the republic-empire of Falcrest after starting and betraying a rebellion in one of the empire’s provinces in the last book. She plans on trying to take down Falcrest from the inside to avenge her own homeland’s takeover, but at what cost?! Moreover, everyone in the Falcrest-running conspiracy is also conspiring against each other. This bathes everything in a kind of itchy paranoia and disdain- they can’t talk to each other without acknowledgment of the ways they despise each other. The stakes are high so the competition is lethal- in theory. Everyone trying to do each other in gets a little tedious when no one dies…

Anyway, Falcrest is in competition with another sort-of empire, Oriati Mbo. In many respects they are opposites. Falcrest, seemingly modeled after Rome and revolutionary France, is uptight, regimented, looking to remake the world in its own image, whereas the Oriati, modeled after various African societies with maybe a dash of India thrown in, is looser and more relaxed. Both are intensely concerned with health, and their approaches are symbolic- Falcrest’s obsessive hygiene which tends towards the lobotomy pick, Oriati’s lore and ritual-science derived medicines. Both grab smaller societies into their orbit, Falcrest through financial shenanigans backed by military force, the Oriati by cultural exchange which shades into confederation.

Some people want war between the two, some warn such a war would kill millions and doom civilization, others agree but want war anyway (Baru sometimes flirts with this). The action of the book is structured around Baru and the junior members of the conspiracy she’s in trying to track down a secret cult that the senior members think explains Oriati’s seemingly miraculous ability to maintain itself amidst baffling diversity. They conspire against each other as they follow a breadcrumb trail across the sea. Their efforts are punctuated by attacks from a Falcrest navy admiral and a former conspirator-turned-killing-machine who are out to get Baru for some of her previous betrayals.

It’s a lot, and it stretched my capacity to remember and to care. There’s a whole plotline of flashbacks amid all this, there’s the never-ending churn of mysterious shady conspiratorial behavior between the people on the boat Baru is on, there’s plots within plots. It’s overstuffed. That’s not to say there’s not cool stuff in it. The ending was decent, in a Grand Guignol/early modern biological warfare kind of way. Where it gives her space to breathe — apart from constant repartee with her frenemies and mulling over her guilt — Baru’s maneuverings are fun. The worldbuilding isn’t bad, there’s just too much of it for one book. The bigger problem is centering all of his world around a conspiracies of special people (the Oriati aren’t run by a conspiracy ala Falcrest as such but their destiny is in the hands of a small number of people). It took me out of the story a little- that’s one thing first book got well, making Baru feel like a small, if important, part of a world that worked according to real-world rules. This felt less credible- the book is incredible, in multiple senses of the word. ***’

Seth Dickinson, “The Traitor Baru Cormorant” (2015) – Does it count as fantasy if there isn’t any magic in it? That’s just one of the questions raised by this excellent novel that I’ll just go ahead and call early-modern fantasy anyway. It has a lot of fantasy tropes; a young person with a destiny/quest, an alternate world, battles with pre-modern weapons, duels. It also has twisty feudal politics galore, driving comparisons to the Game of Thrones books, but for my money Dickinson gets a lot more done creatively in fewer pages than GoT.

Baru Cormorant lives on an idyllic island — pre-contact Hawaii divides by Lesbos — as a child but we all know that can’t last. The Empire of the Masquerade gets its hooks in things via trade followed by conquest. The Masquerade is an interesting invention. The product of a sort of Jacobin/Machiavellian type revolution, it is notionally a meritocratic republic, where all civil servants wear masks to anonymize themselves as servants of the people, hence the name. They make their way to empire more through cunning introduction of innovations that favor them — monetary policy, sanitation, education, etc. — than by military might, though they have a lot of the latter. All is not well with the Masquerade, though- part of their overarching rationalism is strict eugenics and conditioning programs, which entail a rabid homophobia among other issues.

Baru gets taken in as a child to a Masquerade school, but vows to never forget her two dads who the Masquerade kills or her mom, to whom she promised vengeance. She decides she will excel at the meritocracy game, gain high place in the empire, and use it to… here she waffles between “make improvements to her home’s position” and “throw off the Masquerade yoke” but whatever, she’s like eighteen. She excels in her training (at the cost of suppressing her own sexual identity) and is eventually appointed Imperial Accountant of a different restive province, Aurdwynn. Her patrons imply that if she can help make Aurdwynn governable, then she will get to move still further up the ranks.

Aurdwynn is basically Game of Thrones’ Westeros, to an extent where I wonder if Dickinson is making sly jabs at George RR Martin. Run by a welter of dukes, each with their own involved alliances, economies, heraldry, customs and so on, it’s a mess, and one that constantly rebels. Baru has her work cut out for her.

It’s hard to know how much to say about the plot of the book without giving it away. Suffice it to say we wind up with a very interesting depiction of an early modern (they have telescopes, frigates, and eugenics but no guns- most battles are fought by phalanxes) rebellion. Dickinson takes us through the back and forth of winning over dukes, losing dukes, forming something like a guerrilla army and using it, without losing any steam in the process. It’s a good match of solid plotting and innovative worldbuilding. The language tends towards the flowery and passionate- lots of lists of things joined by “ands,” for instance. But it works pretty well for the situation, especially as Baru finds it difficult to hold together the threads of her personality, including her suppressed sexuality.

Again, avoiding spoilers, we’ll just say that the book sets itself up for the sequel that came out recently. It seems things might get a bit more magical-er as Baru peers deeper behind the Masquerade, so it might become more conventional fantasy. I hope it maintains its footing in the early modern- republics, finance, proto-versions of things like people’s war and eugenics, these things make for a worthwhile niche in the fantasy world. *****

Nnedi Okorafor, “Who Fears Death” (2010) – Here we have a fantasy/scifi novel that draws from both Africa’s traditional storytelling and its contemporary issues and crises. The main character, Onyesonwu, is the product of rape as a weapon of war, in an ongoing conflict between the dominant Nuru tribe and the insurgent Okeke. Raised by her mother in an Okeke village, Onyesonwu is an outcast but develops magical powers- first shapeshifting into various animals, then numerous others.

The first third of the book is the best part, as she develops her powers, induces the local magicians to teach her against their resistance, and learns her destiny- to go among the oppressed Okeke far from home and bring an end to the fighting, as well as confronting the evil Nuru wizard who is helping spur the conflict.

The rest of the book drags, unfortunately. Okorafor is also a successful young adult fiction writer and it shows as she takes her characters out to the desert and has them get into teenage dramatics with each other. We go from learning the ins and outs of magic and ethnic conflict to protracted drama between Onyesonwu’s interchangeable friends with the suddenness that the end of “Huck Finn” becomes a hundred pages of minstrel routine. Quest narratives always have some back and forth within the group, but “Who Fears Death” loses a ton of momentum and never quite regains it. The ending has a pretty cool magical catastrophe in it but by then you can’t help but wonder at the book that could have been with this premise. ***’

Ayize Jama-Everett, “The Entropy of Bones” (2015) – I’ve seen kung fu movies, but I’d never read a kung fu novel before this one. It’s the story of Chabi, a teenage girl growing up on a houseboat in the Bay Area who, after some training from an eccentric old Indian guy, is capable of running fifty miles in a couple of hours every day and breaking every bone in someone’s body in a matter of seconds. The latter feat is accomplished not by strength tuning in to the titular entropy already extant in the bones themselves. All of this is imparted like it’s obvious common sense, which makes it more fun.

Obviously there’s something special about Chabi in terms of her physical capabilities. She’s also mute, but can speak psychically. This didn’t make much sense to me as a character feature until a minor reveal at the end. The book in general has a kind of loose, almost conversational rhythm, like Jama-Everett is telling you these stories over beers. Loose, but well-structured (like a barroom story one has told many times)- the details of Chabi’s powers, and the world she’s a part of, come out naturally. The world of the story is similarly tossed-together in the best way: entropy beings versus “liminals,” super-powered people like Chabi, and a few demigods and time travel thrown in.

Chabi winds up working for some suspiciously pretty hotel magnates once Narayana, her sensei, disappears on her. She knows there’s something wrong with them but can’t work out what. When a friendly demigod of the wind comes from the future and hips her to the whole entropy-being thing, she puts two and two together and realizes maybe Narayana wasn’t on the side of the continued existence after all, which is a bummer. She gets it together enough to fight a bunch of other superpowered fighters in a big final tournament the baddies put on, but of course she can’t fix the whole thing or there wouldn’t be a future conflict for the wind guy to come back from, would there? No, the forces of rhythm and weed (this guy likes weed) will have to continue to battle the forces of entropy. In all, this book was pretty fun and I’m going to look up some of the rest of his work. ****’