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Everyone Knows This is Nowhere: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

Everyone Knows This is Nowhere: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

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The Book of Elsewhere (Del Rey, July 23, 2024). Jacket design by Drusilla Adeline

Can someone who has been alive for 80,000 years find wonder and meaning in every day life? Would such an immortal still be capable of surprise, still uncertain about his own motivations, still unable to come to grips with the meaning of it all? After experiencing centuries upon centuries of the death of others, and frequently inflicting those deaths, do you become oblivious to the fate of mortal souls as just so many anthill denizens?

Is there anyone else out there like you? And why are you the way you are? Would the wish for mortality indicate a Freudian death wish, or instead a yearning to experience the existential perils and the perplexities of being that paradoxically imbue significance?

These are the intertwined questions posed by The Book of Elsewhere, a tie-in novel by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville based on BRZRKR, a 12-issue comic book (graphic novel?) co-written by Reeves. The title refers to when the protagonist suffers episodes of uncontrollable violence and goes “berserk” (get it?), although “suffer” is perhaps better applied to those in the line of fire of his rage.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Curious Child & the Covetous Dragon,” by Sara L. Uckelman

A to Z Reviews: “The Curious Child & the Covetous Dragon,” by Sara L. Uckelman

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A to Z ReviewsOver the past several years, I’ve embarked on a series of year-long review cycles at Black Gate. In 2018, I reviewed a story-a-day to coincide with an author whose birthday it was. In 2022, I selected stories completely at random from my collection to review. In both of those cases, the projects served to find forgotten and minor works of science fiction that spanned a range of years. They also served to make me read stories and authors who I haven’t read before, even if they were in my collection.

For this year’s project, I’ve compiled a list of all the stories and novels in my collection. I then identified the first and last works for each letter of the alphabet and over the next twelve months, I’ll be looking at those works of fiction, starting with Vance Aandahl’s “Bad Luck” and ending with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential.” Looking at the 52 works (two for each letter), I find that I’ve only reviewed one of the works previously. Interestingly, given the random nature of the works, only three novels made the list, while four anthologies have multiple stories on the list. The works range in publication date from 1911’s “The Hump,” by Fernan Caballero to Zweifler’s story from last year.

The first story in my collection by an author whose name begins with an U is Sara L. Uckelman’s “The Curious Child & the Covetous Dragon,” which is the second story in this series to originally appear in Wyrms, edited by Eric Fomley. Wyrms is a collection of drabbles, a literary format of exactly 100 words. In the interest of transparency, I’ll note my story “Best Policy” also appears in Wyrms. Finally, the last word of this sentence (including the introductory paragraphs) is the 300th word of this article.

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A to Z Reviews: Wheel of Dreams, by Salinda Tyson

A to Z Reviews: Wheel of Dreams, by Salinda Tyson

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A to Z Reviews

From 1992 through 1999, Del Rey books published a series of 27 novels under the “Del Rey Discovery” imprint. These books weren’t always first novels (at least three of them were actually the second books in their respective series), but they were all novels by relatively newly published authors, ranging from Nicola Griffith, Mary Rosenbaum, and L. Warren Douglas to Michelle Shirey Crean, Don DeBrandt, and Kevin Teixera. The 24th novel published under the imprint was Salinda Tyson’s fantasy Wheel of Dreams, which appears to have been her only novel, although she began published short stories in the 2010s. Wheel of Dreams, the 40th entry in the A to Z Review series, is also the first novel I’ll be discussing.

Wheel of Dreams opens with Kiera’s father hosting several travelers on an evening that culminates in Keira being sold to one of the travelers, a soldier named Roshannon, to be his wife. This is just the first indication of the level of misogyny which plagues the world in which Keira and Roshannon live. The morning after her forced wedding, Keira flees from Roshannon before he awakes, stealing his clothes so she can travel as a man. Keira’s goal is the city of Cartheon, where her dead mother had told her about when she was growing up.

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Ladies Are Dangerous: Dastardly Damsels, edited by Suzie Lockhart

Ladies Are Dangerous: Dastardly Damsels, edited by Suzie Lockhart

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Dastardly Damsels (Crystal Lake Publishing, October 11, 2024)

Dark fiction anthologies are currently very popular and, with a few exceptions, tend to be a medley of horror, fantasy, mild SF or something in between. I don’t like the expression “speculative fiction” but maybe this is an acceptable label.

Some are published exclusively in digital format, which explains why the number of stories included is getting increasingly higher.

The present anthology, for instance, features thirty-two contributions (including a couple of short poems). A distinctive characteristic of this book is that the contributing authors are all female (including the editor), and so are the leading roles in the various tales.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Dybbuk in Love,” by Sonya Taaffe

A to Z Reviews: “The Dybbuk in Love,” by Sonya Taaffe

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A to Z Reviews

Over the weeks as I’ve written these reviews, I’ve noted coincidences such as sequential stories that have similarities. Today’s review of a story about Jewish folklore just happens to be the one that falls on the morning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Originally published as a chapbook in 2005, Sonya Taaffe’s “The Dybbuk in Love” is a look at a traditional part of Jewish folklore.  Not as well-known as the golem,  which traditional states was created by Rabbi Judah Loew in sixteenth century Prague, the dybbuk dates to the same period and refers to the soul of a dead person that possesses a living person in order to achieve an unfinished goal.

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A First Rate First Novel: Daughters of Chaos by Jen Fawkes

A First Rate First Novel: Daughters of Chaos by Jen Fawkes

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Daughters of Chaos (Harry N. Abrams, July 9, 2024)

Back in 2021 I ran across a story collection by a writer I had never heard of – Tales the Devil Told Me, by Jen Fawkes. I wrote of it,

It comprises a set of reimaginations of fairy tales and other classic literature: there are radical takes on Rumpelstiltskin, the Odyssey, Moby Dick, Peter Pan, and more. In most cases they take a sympathetic view of the villain of the tale; and they are by turns witty and dark, extravagant and savage.

Fawkes has published one other collection, Mannequin and Wife. Now we have her first novel, Daughters of Chaos.

This is told by Sylvie Swift, who writes this for her twin daughters in 1877, 14 years after the events the novel depicts (and after their conception.) Sylvie and her own twin, Silas, were born as their mother died, and were raised in Kentucky until they were 14 by their devastated father and their ten years older sister, Marina. As they grow, it’s clear to Sylvie that Silas has an excessive fascination with fire – and he claims to see people in the fire.

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A to Z Reviews: “When the Morning Stars Sang Together,” by Isaac Szpindel

A to Z Reviews: “When the Morning Stars Sang Together,” by Isaac Szpindel

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A to Z ReviewsIsaac Szpindel’s “When the Morning Stars Sang Together” appeared in the 2004 alternate history anthology ReVisions, which Szpindel co-edited with Julie E, Czerneda, which explored alternative technological advancements. Szpindel’s story, set in the twentieth century, looks at a world in which Galileo reconciled science with the Church rather than being persecuted for championing the scientific method.

The main character has been given access to letters written by Galileo to his older daughter, Maria Celeste, who was a nun at the San Matteo convent. In real life, while Maria Celeste’s letters to Galileo have survived, his letters to her are lost.  Szpindel tells his story by alternating between the text of those lost letters and the events which are  happening to the modern scholar who is studying them and coming to conclusions that, in his world, as are heretical as the conclusions Galileo came to in our world in the seventeenth century.

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A to Z Reviews: “Side Effects,” by Julian Saari

A to Z Reviews: “Side Effects,” by Julian Saari

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A to Z Reviews

Julian Saari offers up a fish tale of a bar story in “Side Effects.” This  short piece is the only work he has listed on the Internet Science Fiction Database and it appeared in the August 1991 issue of Analog, alongside a Pern story by Anne McCaffrey and the second part of the serialization of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar, impressive company.

Given the nature of the short story, it is appropriate that Saari sets it in a bar, called Timonescu’s.  Even more appropriately, Timonescu’s is part of a fishing lodge, where one would expect the clientele to tell tall tales about the sizes of their catches, or more likely the ones that got away. To this end, the bar’s owner, Ion Timonescu approaches the story he is told be a stranger with a certain amount of skepticism.

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Neverwhens: In His Sunken House of… Doggerland… Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming

Neverwhens: In His Sunken House of… Doggerland… Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming

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Yeah…Doggerland.

For those not in the know, during the last Ice Age Earth’s seas were about 300 feet lower, revealing a vast amount of land. While no true Atlantis or Mu have been found, examples include a broad plain — and now sunken lakebed — connecting Australia to New Guinea, the Sunda Shelf — a massive sub-continent that unites most of Southeast Asia in a single landmass that includes places as far flung as Java and the Philippines, and Doggerland.

This last was a remnant of an even earlier land mass that had covered the Irish, Baltic and North Seas during the last glaciation, and where we now see the English Channel and the regions of the North Sea that separate the British Isles from Denmark and southern Norway there was land of marshlands and forests, filled with the last remnants of European megafauna such as lions, sabertooths, giant elk, and mammoths. Doggerland was slowly inundated by rising waters, transforming into an archipelago of islands, before being finally subsumed in the late Mesolithic era, likely by a tsunami event.

This lost land provides the setting for The Shadow Over Doggerland, a rather interesting collection of Mythos fiction spear-headed by prolific horror author Tim Medees and published by Nordc Press that asks what actually happened to the people of Doggerland? Was there some great ancient evil bent on destroying the world dreaming below the surface waiting to emerge?

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Some Remarks on an Unremarkable Space Opera: Galactic Gambit by Roy C. Dudley

Some Remarks on an Unremarkable Space Opera: Galactic Gambit by Roy C. Dudley

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Galactic Gambit (Lenox Hill Press, September 1971). Cover by Herbstman

In my recent looks at less-remembered novels of the ’70s and ’80s I’ve covered some obscurish works by well-remembered writers (Phyllis Eisenstein, L. Sprague de Camp) and some obscurish works by less well known but hardly unknown writers (Gerard Klein, Mick Farren), and even some quite little known writers (Atanielle Annyn Noel).

But this time I’m trying for something truly obscure — a hardcover from 1971 that is the only novel by its writer, from a publishing company that offered microscopic advances ($300) and sold only to libraries. The only semblance of a review of this novel I could find is in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia (of course!) and it reads in full: “US printing technician and author of Galactic Gambit (1971), an unremarkable Space Opera.”

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