Review: Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger

Jun 202024
 
Locus: Like Elatsoe, Sheine Lende is much more chill than your typical YA fantasy or YA mystery. The stakes are high, but it never feels stressful. There is little on-the-page violence, and even when things get heavy or dangerous, the reader always feels safe. Little Badger guides the reader through a fascinating world. The pace is gradual without being too slow, and is light on action. Things take the time they take. Little Badger doesn’t skip the reader ahead or speed things up for the sake of drama.
You don’t need to have read Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe to enjoy Sheine Lende, although it helps. This is a great novel to give to tweens and teens who like mysteries and fantasy but either aren’t ready for or aren’t interested in plots with romance or more mature action sequences. It reminds me a lot of Cynthia Letitch Smith’s Harvest House, another great YA mystery about Indigenous teens dealing with a disappearance and colonial violence. Darcie Little Badger is so good at what she does, and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

WE SPEAK THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN by Premee Mohamed

Jun 182024
 

The enlivening follow-up to the award-winning sensation The Annual Migration of Clouds.

Traveling alone through the climate-crisis-ravaged wilds of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, 19-year-old Reid Graham battles the elements and her lifelong chronic illness to reach the utopia of Howse University. But life in one of the storied “domes” — the last remnants of pre-collapse society — isn’t what she expected. Reid tries to excel in her classes and make connections with other students, but still grapples with guilt over what happened just before she left her community. And as she learns more about life at Howse, she begins to realize she can’t stand idly by as the people of the dome purposely withhold needed resources from the rest of humanity. When the worst of news comes from back home, Reid must make a choice between herself, her family, and the broken new world.

In this powerful follow-up to her award-winning novella The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed is at the top of her game as she explores the conflicts and complexities of this post-apocalyptic society and asks whether humanity is doomed to forever recreate its worst mistakes.

RAKESFALL by Vajra Chandrasekera

Jun 182024
 

Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell. There are wrongs that echo through the ages, friendships that outpace the claws of death, loves that leave their mark on civilization, and promises that nothing can break. This is one such story.

Annelid and Leveret met as children in the middle of the Sri Lankan civil war. They found each other in a torn-up nation, peering through propaganda to grasp a deeper truth. And in a demon-haunted wood, another act of violence linked them and propelled their souls on a journey throughout the ages. No world can hold them, no life can bind them, and they’ll never leave each other behind.

Tracing two souls through endless lifetimes, Rakesfall is a virtuosic exploration of what stories can be. As Annelid and Leveret reincarnate ever deeper into the future, they will chase the edge of human possibility, in a dark science fiction epic unlike anything you’ve read before.

Review: Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera

Jun 172024
 
Locus: To quote Tom Clancy (or was it Jeff Bezos?), it takes ten years to become an overnight success. I suspect Vajra Chandrasekera can relate. He spent a decade working on his craft, with short fiction published in various genre magazines and anthologies. Then, last year, Chandrasekera published his first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, which immediately caught fire, drawing plaudits and praise from critics and fans. Fast-forward to the present day, and the novel has been nominated for multiple prizes (the Hugo, the Nebula, the Lammy) and recently took home the Crawford award. I featured The Saint of Bright Doors on my Locus ‘‘Year in Review’’ essay and spoke ecstatically about the novel on The Writer and the Critic podcast. What makes it such an astonishingly good debut is Chandraesekera’s boldness – the imaginative, radical manner in which he fuses science fiction and fantasy, social realism, and surrealism. But if The Saint of Bright Doors is an experimental novel in (mostly) conventional storytelling clothing, Rakesfall bares it all, a full-frontal deconstruction of narrative and genre.
The patchwork, ‘‘fix-up’’ quality of Rakesfall means it never settles into a narrative groove. The setting, the voice, and the structure regularly change, forcing the reader to pause, to re-evaluate what’s happening. But while I might have been bewildered, I never felt lost. If anything, my mind was all abuzz, striving to keep hold of the threads, the intricate web, that ties these lives, these realities together.
What propels the narrative isn’t so much the dramatic set pieces (though the novel isn’t short on those; several of the chapters set in the far future are genuinely jaw-dropping) but the constant flood of ideas and new ways of thinking and perceiving the world. Chandrasekera reconceptualises Hindu and Buddhist beliefs such as akasha or the Akashic Record. He reframes Sri Lanka’s history of European colonialism as a play with a distinctively postmodern vibe. He brilliantly breaks the narrative to tell us a fable about Heroes, Wasps, and Kings and deliberately leaves out the moral (because ‘‘this is history rather than a story’’). He depicts a far future where tech lords and multinationals have devastated the Earth and have now colonised digital space, including the singularity. And undergirding this flurry of invention is a voice that is sometimes plain, sometimes wry and knowing, but more often than not overwhelmed with grief and anger. And even here, when the story is at its most vibrant, there’s an awareness, a recognition that a novel this playful, erudite, and caustic has its limits when recalling the histories, the stories, and the beliefs of those who died for the sake of Empire, progress and profit. Rakesfall may not seem as polished as The Saint of Bright Doors, but in my mind, it cements Chandraesekera as one of the genre’s most important, most vital voices.

2023 Nebula Award Winners!

Jun 132024
 

This past weekend the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announced the 59th Annual Nebula Awards® winners, and we’re excited to share that Vajra Chandrasekera and RSA Garcia were recognized in these categories!

Nebula Award for Novel

  • The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)

Nebula Award for Short Story

  • “Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200“, R.S.A Garcia (Uncanny 7-8/23)

Author Martha Wells has graciously declined her nomination as a novel finalist this year for System Collapse published by Tordotcom. In 2022, Wells also declined a nomination for novella and felt that the Murderbot Diaries series has already received incredible praise from her industry peers and wanted to open the floor to highlight other works within the community.

Catcon Ictineu Award

Jun 112024
 

Congratulations to DMLA author, Premee Mohamed, for THESE LIFELESS THINGS (Catalan translation) for winning an Ictineu Award! The Ictineu Awards were handed out at CatCon, the Catalan fantasy, science fiction and horror convention organized by the Catalan Society of Science Fiction and Fantasy (SCCFF).

Starred Review: Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger

Jun 072024
 

Bookpage: A prequel to acclaimed YA author Darcie Little Badger’s 2020 debut Elatsoe (which features Shane’s granddaughter, Ellie, as the protagonist), Sheine Lende is a powerful and deeply moving tale of family, grief, cultural identity and magic. As a Lipan Apache woman herself, Little Badger combines the myths and legends of her tribe with fantastical elements to tell a story that, while fictional, rings true. The universe the book occupies is almost identical to our own, except in Little Badger’s version of reality, the ancient folklores that have informed cultural beliefs and practices since time immemorial are made manifest in the real world—but they exist alongside representations of true and historic modes of systemic oppression used by the U.S. government against indigenous peoples like the Lipan.

This is not to say, however, that Sheine Lende is all darkness. Though frequently consumed by anxiety, doubt and grief, Shane is a vibrant character who continues to find joy in her family, friends and the world around her. And on a larger scale, Little Badger never portrays the Lipan Apache tribe as downtrodden or defeated. Much to the contrary, Sheine Lende presents a family and a people who have had atrocities small and large, but who, despite it all, turn toward the light.

 

Review: RAKESFALL by Vajra Chandrasekera

Jun 052024
 

Booklist: “[T]his is how she and I have spent our long and convoluted journey through time: joined at the hip, joined at the death, haunting each other, carrying each other.” Chandrasekera follows two entwined souls through an endless cycle of reincarnation and destruction in this slipstream novel, a poetic saga about identity and memory, colonialism and revolution, connection and commitment. It begins with a hauntingly enigmatic analysis of a TV show starring teenagers Annelid and Levert and set during a “war which is now over but never over.” Annelid is possessed by a demon in the jungle, and Leveret, a newly made revolutionary, is murdered. Though the show, watched by fans in the far future, ends with Leveret’s death, their story continues in the many nonlinear lives and worlds into which they reincarnate. These worlds, from ancient legends to a ruined, abandoned Earth, are woven from South Asian culture and populated with corrupt politicians and kings, revolutionaries, demons, living corpses, old gods, posthumans, artificial intelligences, and more. Chandrasekera employs multiple narrative forms and storytelling styles in this often difficult to parse but impossible to forget surrealist experience.

May Translation Deals

May 312024
 

Czech rights to Kel Kade’s LEGENDS OF AHN and KINGDOMS AND CHAOS, to Fantom Print, in a two-book deal, by Milena Kaplarevic at Prava I Prevodi, on behalf of Katie Shea Boutillier for Cameron McClure.

Polish rights to Robert McCammon’s MISTER SLAUGHTER, to Vesper, by Milena Kaplarevic at Prava I Prevodi, on behalf of Katie Shea Boutillier for Cameron McClure.

Portuguese (Brazil) rights to New York Times bestselling author Martha Wells’ ARTIFICIAL CONDITION, ROGUE PROTOCOL, and EXIT STRATEGY, the third, fourth, and fifth books in The Murderbot Diaries series, to Editora Aleph, by Cristina Purchio at International Editors’ Co. in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.

Ukrainian rights to Hugo Award finalist Vajra Chandrasekera’s THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS and RAKESFALL, to Zhorzh, by Milena Kaplarević at Prava i prevodi in association with Michael Curry.

Starred Review: THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST by Premee Mohamed

May 302024
 

Shelf Awareness: A woman forced into heroism races against time and sinister magical forces to save her family in the perfectly paced and deliciously threatening dark fantasy novella The Butcher of the Forest by World Fantasy Award winner Premee Mohamed (And What Can We Offer You Tonight).

“It was not yet dawn when they came for her,” the story begins, setting an ominous tone that only intensifies as men drag villager Veris Thorn before the Tyrant, her realm’s merciless conqueror. His two children have vanished into the Elmever, a parallel magic world that invisibly opens from a nearby wood, and he has heard that only Veris has ever brought a child back from it alive. He orders her to retrieve his children or “your village will be razed… and we will roast your people alive… and eat them.” Veris slips into the Elmever with only three tokens to guide her and a single day to retrieve the children. She must face poisonous magic; half-rotted undead beasts bent on devouring her; and elder beings who want her deepest self, all to save the children who will one day oppress her people in place of the Tyrant–if Veris can bring them out in one piece.

Mohamed puts a chilling twist on the fairy tale of the stolen child. Veris, a commoner in her late 30s with little power beyond her wits and experience, makes for a captivating heroine whose vulnerability and fear give the narrative the gasping tension of a horror movie. Butcher of the Forest is short, sharp fantasy at its finest.

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