It’s full of heart, romance, and friendship, despite the miserable angst of several characters; it’s full of magic, despite gritty reality that includes financial strain and attempted roofies; and it contains some amazing revelations, along with some things that I was sure all along must be true.
Most of the works of Patricia A. McKillip that I’m most familiar with are from the 1970s and 1980s, from her amazing 1974 debut novel, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which Skiffy and Fanty discussed earlier this year, through the Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy, to her 1988 fantasy for juveniles, The Changeling Sea. But despite my losing track of her somehow, she kept writing amazing stories; her 2016 novel Kingfisher won the 2017 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and she kept writing short stories until 2020. Although McKillip died in 2022, it’s important to keep her works in the public eye, especially when most of those works remain so fresh and intriguing and beautiful. In the introduction to the new collection coming out Oct. 28, The Essential Patricia A. McKillip, Terri Windling talks about the subversive quality of McKillip’s fiction, overturning expectations (despite their age, McKillip’s stories don’t feel dated at all, with some pretty pointed social-commentary implications). In the same essay, author Ellen Kushner discusses how McKillip’s high-fantasy stories have some down-to-earth characters in them; conversely, the stories set in the present day contain myth and magic. This McKillip collection comprises 16 stories from as early as 1982 (“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath”) to as late as 2016 (“Mer”); also, at the end of the collection are two nonfiction pieces, “What Inspires Me: Guest of Honor Speech at WisCon 2004” and “Writing High Fantasy” (2002). Some are high fantasy, and some are urban fantasy. The shortest is seven pages, and the longest is 49. All of them are reprints, but all of them were new to me, and I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to read them now.
Memory is a subject that has long been of interest to science fiction writers, but naturally it is becoming much more topical with artificial memory extensions available via data files (notes and recordings) and the Internet. We’re not at the stage yet where actual memories can be preserved, transmitted, or uploaded, but those processes do seem likely to arise eventually. However, at that point, all sorts of moral and societal questions arise, such as, who gets control over those memories? In much of North America and Europe, the answer would likely be a combination of corporations and government. In Yiming Ma’s 2025 novel, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, the Party that rules Qin (and apparently most of the world) decides what memories are appropriate for upload to the network of everyone’s Mindbanks, and what memories should be deleted, with their holders destined for punitive re-education; however, quite a few people hold onto memories that they suspect may be borderline, and some choose defiance, however ephemeral. These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is structured as a set of short stories, framed with interstitial messages from one such rebel, who found a trove of unauthorized memories upon his mother’s death, experienced them, and decided to share them with the world despite the punishment he’s sure he’ll face. They’re not all his mother’s memories, not even most of them, but rather memories she somehow gathered from other sources throughout history, from what seems to be the past or present, to a near-future war, to shortly after the war, to a far future.
I enjoyed Eden Royce’s new book, Psychopomp & Circumstance, coming Oct. 21. It’s billed as a Southern Gothic fantasy, but for me, it’s much less about the fantastic and much more of a coming-of-age story, as a young woman learns to stand up for herself and make choices; she also learns some unsettling truths about her family and its history. From the author’s website:Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction, born to a family of free Black business owners in New Charleston. …When word arrives that her Aunt Cleo, long estranged from the family, has passed away, Phee risks her mother’s wrath to step up and accept the role of pomp—the highly honored duty of planning the funeral service. Traveling alone to the town of Horizon and her aunt’s unsettling home, Phee soon discovers that visions and shadows beckon from every reflective surface, and that some secrets transcend the borders of life and death.
It’s an entertaining heist story that can be raced through in a few hours (288 pages), but it also has some deeper themes to consider.
In Folklore: A Journey through the Past and Present, co-authors Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook take a scholarly but very readable look at British folklore. They convincingly treat folklore as an evolving presence in culture, not just the remnants of a vanished past (and they point out that even a lot of allegedly ancient customs are actually relatively modern). I’m no expert in the subject, but the authors’ broad grasp of the subject and reasoning about its various aspects seem quite sound. I found the book very interesting and often extremely entertaining.
