Recent News and Changes from Chez Rambo

The art for Issue 21 of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show has appeared on the excellent blog Sideshow Freaks of its most excellent editor, Edmund R. Schubert. The story’s title was originally Starling’s Wing – for what reason I’m not sure other than it was a phrase that occurred to me and which I liked for its 19th century flavor. I managed to work the title into the story in a somewhat laborious and contrived fashion with this passage towards the end:

When they reached the glade, they saw the twins playing beside the creek, catching minnows in the shallows. Madeleine sat on the bank on a quilt she had spread out. Hattie noticed with annoyance that it was one of her best, the one that usually sat atop her own bed, a pattern she’d invented herself called Starling’s Wing.

This story was rewritten several times in the course of the back and forth between me and Edmund, changing a) from a happy story to a sad one and b) changing villains. At one point Edmund confessed that his head was about to explode, but we straightened it all out.

The story started with a flourish of language and imagery that looks to Joyce Carol Oates’ The Bellefleur Mysteries.

On her fifteenth birthday, Hattie Fender contracted a fever that led to the loss of her hair, which until that point had been long and glossy and black as licorice. Her mother nursed her through the illness, then died herself of a fish aspic that had gone off.

Upon recovery, Hattie mourned her mother and resorted to patent hair restoratives, full of poisonous sugar of lead, sulphur, and copperas. The medicines forced a relapse, driving her back to fevered bed rest for three months more.

At seventeen and a half, she had become bantam egg bald and just as hard-shelled. At twenty-two, she daily polished her scalp with bay rum and bergamot oil, which left a perfumed trail behind her, so you could track her by smell up the stairs and out along the walk that watched the gun-metal waves lick at the clouds above the sea.

On her twenty-fifth birthday, two days after her true love’s disappearance, Hattie had her scalp tattooed with the twelve celestial houses. They marked off her head in long pie-shaped wedges, Scorpio over her left ear and Taurus over the right. When she stood still, no matter the location, she chose to stand in alignment with the sky, so the spidery black demarcations reflected the patterns of the stars.

Edmund, rightly so, made me move this from the place I had front-loaded it in to a place further in down the line in the story. He also made me chose a better title, which was fine, but more difficult that I had thought it would be. No title sprang out at me as perfect, alas, and so I went with using one of the significant objects, the mother of pearl frame around Jemmy’s picture.

I’ll be talking more about the process behind the story (and where the name Hattie Fender came from!) in an upcoming entry for Sideshow Freaks.

This is my first review for The Green Man Review, but I cannot help but feel I have somehow come full circle from the moment in a 2005 World Fantasy Convention bar when someone kept telling me how much they enjoyed my Green Man Review reviews and I kept mentioning they had the wrong Cat. Now all I can do is assume they traveled in time somehow. And so. Let’s look at a nifty book in the here and now, in what is hopefully the first of many reviews.

The Reader: War For The Oaks is a hardbound book presenting a photography project by Tim Cooper. It’s a slim little 8.5″³x 11″³ volume, clocking in at 96 pages. The pleasant interior design presents the photos nicely, along with some pretty arboreal details. The cover, whose design is unobjectionable but unremarkable, features a photo that lets the reader know exactly what the book is about: photos of people reading War For the Oaks in various Minneapolis locations.

There are a few books I have re-read so many times that they are an integral part of fantasy to me, and Emma Bull’s first novel, War for the Oaks is one of them, featuring Eddi McCandrey and her half-human, half-elvish band, the Fey. It was originally published in 1987; the paperback copy I’ve been carrying around for decades is battered and coverless now, but it was a pleasure to have the task of going back and reading it yet again in order to do this review.

I’m not alone in loving this story, and the book’s part in defining and shaping urban fantasy cannot be overestimated. Reading in many ways like a crisper, less Romantic version of Charles de Lint, Bull demonstrates in this book that despite being one of the quieter writers, she will become a major talent. Many nifty but commercially non-viable projects that we would miss if reliant only on traditional publishing have come out in recent years, often supported through crowdfunding; this one was a Kickstarter project. It’s delightful to see a project dedicated to the novel in this way, celebrating how much the book has meant to many readers.

Which is perhaps my major caveat. This book will enchant, down to their very toes and beyond, those who love Bull’s novel and know the city as well. Cooper’s photos show locations from the book in an order corresponding to the novel’s chronology, each time with people reading War for the Oaks somewhere in the picture. For someone who loves the book in part because of its setting, the sole disappointment may be that the photo are low enough resolution that sometimes it is difficult to make everything out.

Familiar with the book but not so much with the city? Mileage will vary here, depending both on one’s degree of affection for the book as well as how firmly the reader is attached to their vision of things. Someone with a mental vision that is particularly strong, in fact, might find it jarring to have it contradicted by these pictures.

Familiar only with the city? Here again mileage will vary radically depending on factors like how interested one is in examples of projects like this or if one is a book collector specializing in fantasy and science fiction (in which case, you’ve probably had the novel on your list but just never got around to it). Lovely extra details scatter themselves here and there throughout the book, as well as photos featuring other authors like Elizabeth Bear, Stephen Brust, PamelaDean, Marissa Lingen, Scott Lynch, and Patricia C. Wrede. Essays by Dean, Sigrid Ellis, Sarah Olsen and Katherine St. Asaph appear at the back, along with a poem by Alec Austin.

Familiar only with the city? Here again mileage will vary radically depending on factors like how interested one is in examples of projects like this or if one is a book collector specializing in fantasy and science fiction (in which case, you’ve probably had the novel on your list but just never got around to it). Lovely extra details scatter themselves here and there throughout the book, as well as photos featuring other authors like Elizabeth Bear, Stephen Brust, PamelaDean, Marissa Lingen, Scott Lynch, and Patricia C. Wrede. Essays by Dean, Sigrid Ellis, Sarah Olsen and Katherine St. Asaph appear at the back, along with a poem by Alec Austin.

I’ve stuck this on one of my shelves of favorite F&SF next to that battered paperback copy of War for the Oaks, because it’s definitely a keeper. Next time I’m at a con with the author, I may even take it along, because having it signed by the person whose book inspired so much passion would make it even niftier.

(Tired Tapir Press, 2014)

You can read this review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/books/recent-reading-eddi-and-the-feys-revival-tour/