All Tomorrow’s Futures
First, an update from editor Stephen Oram:
Just published by the British Science Fiction Association's critical journal 'Vector' is a review by the writer and technology journalist Mary Branscombe. On that note, we have some reviews on Amazon now (4 reviews and 7 ratings overall) and we seem to be dividing opinion - check them out. Now would be a very good time to remind and prod those people who have said they'll review but haven't gotten around to it yet.
We've also kept the kindle price at 99p/c for now so do feel free to mention that wherever it's relevant.
I plan on doing my own reviews of individual stories later this fall, after I’ve read them all. I may do the same with Take Me There, the fantasy anthology I was just accepted to a few weeks ago. That one should be out in July.
My Favorite Novel of the Year
In fact the only one I’ve finished so far.
Mat Osman’s The Ghost Theatre is an Elizabethan alt-history with an alt-religion called the Aviscultans, who worship birds in broad strokes. They refuse to eat birds, wild or domestic. They put nets up over their village at night to protect them. They watch the swirling patterns of flocking starlings as a form of divination.
Unlike some other recent favorites by Guy Gavriel Kay, it’s unclear whether this is a low-magic world or a no-magic world. The main character, Shay, falls into trances (both fake and real) that people take equally seriously (even Doctor Dee and the queen), and she has an unusually strong bond with a trained falcon, but there’s never any D&D-style supernatural fireworks, only stage magic, the magic of human cleverness and credulity.
As a book, it doesn’t really need those things. Osman’s descriptions of Elizabethan pageantry are exotic enough. I have no idea how realistic they are. Since Pompeii had running water and Elizabethan England generally did not, and modern India has cell phones but people are still shitting out in the fields, there’s no sensible standard as science fiction in general and Traveler in specific have led us to believe. Tech is patchy and contingent.
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
- LP Hartley
As shown in The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, the first episode of which, “Commoners,” I found for free on Roku, he also doesn’t need demihumans and non-human monsters to create that feeling of inhabiting another world. Though I do love those things, clearly and dearly.
Class conflict plays a big part in the novel, with Commoners being like the ranchers of the American west, tearing down fences and burning hedgerows in order to protest the enclosing of the commons.
For this Artangel commission, a masterpiece of re-enactment, Jeremy Deller orchestrated a re-staging of the violent confrontation between striking miners and riot police in South Yorkshire in 1984. The performance featured 800 collaborators, two thirds of whom were historical re-enactment veterans. The remaining third was comprised of miners and policemen who had, seventeen years previously, taken part in the confrontation.
The mixing of reality and fantasy for purposes of politics and self-expression is also a major theme of the novel. To see this playing out in our much more recent past, check out The Antisocial Network. I’ve seen and read quite a bit about the development of QAnon over the past couple of years, and this lays out the full process from 2chan in 90s Japan all the way to January 6th, 2021, with the most clarity and the most historical context, without getting bogged down in the “Who is Q?” question like the HBO series did.
Magic Birds
I especially love raptors. I always have, since repeatedly reading Jean George’s My Side of the Mountain as a child. I’m neither a nest-watcher nor particularly superstitious, but any day I see a hawk feels like a good day to me. Locally, red-tails and red-shoulders are most common, though we also have bald eagles, various owls, and at least one peregrine that I’ve seen perched on wires above the Total Wine parking lot.
In North Carolina, keeping and training a raptor is a long and involved process, requiring an apprenticeship with the North Carolina Falconer’s Guild. I would love to be involved with that group, but I can’t imagine Chloe the Wonder Dog accepting a bird into her service, as she has so generously accepted me and my wife.
(Falconry is not the same thing as keeping a bird in a cage as a pet, even a demanding bird like a parrot. Raptors have to hunt, for their physical and mental health. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t apply.)
The peregrine in the book, Devana, flies more at night than seems natural to me, but then according to the nest-cam folks (emphasis mine)
April 3, 2024: Carla and Ecco are diligently taking care of their nest since their first egg was laid on March 14. As they enter their third week of incubation, we can expect to see Carla on camera in the daytime. Female Peregrine Falcons typically feed at night when they have eggs, however, we have seen Ecco occasionally bring Carla food just before dawn – taking over incubation while she eats.
Raptors are generally not considered very smart or curious, being sort of hyper-focused on hunting and killing (something emphasized in The Ghost Theatre). There are exceptions among the caracaras, nine species of falcons who occupy the raven / crow / jay niche in South America, the only continent aside from Antarctica without any native corvids. I wrote a little bit about them once before,
and one particular species, the striated caracara of the Falkland Islands, is featured in the latest 2-part Nature episode.
But Back to the Book
London street-bird Shay leaves behind her ailing father and their people and joins the crew of the Blackfriars Theatre, because of a chance meeting on the rooftops, while she is fleeing the scene of a crime / prank / religious-political protest.
From a Guardian interview with the author:
“Every band,” he says. “Every acting troupe. They all set out feeling that they’re doing something fresh and new. But it’s like a Greek tragedy. It’s always hubris, and you always overshoot and think you’re better than you are. It’s always the same story. And it’s always fucking Icarus.”
I did a little bit of acting during high school, partly as a way to get out of taking Trigonometry, and I enjoyed it. Now that I live in Greensboro, it’s a bit ironic that our best production by far was based on O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief.” That was in large part due to Samantha Schaeffer, maybe five feet tall and what we refer to in the south as a pistol. Playing a rambunctious / evil ten-year-old boy was not a stretch for Sam. At the time, I felt like she’d been training for that role her whole life, but also that she had talent and could have followed up if she’d wanted to.
Next week, more on the topic of crime / prank / religious-political protest.
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