Camera Obscura - Lavie Tidhar

Fashions in literature are interesting things. I'm beginning to think that steampunk isn't the new black. The new black is a rewriting of the most popular views of the past, turning it science fictional, extending it into alternate history, giving proper deference to certain key authors. Steampunk doesn't cover everything that's appearing right now, nor all the tributes some of these books pay to authors who have gone before.

Camera Obscura is Lavie Tidhar's new novel and it is one such book, sequel to The Bookman, and my latest e-review book from Angry Robot. It's as devoted to books as The Bookman was. The Bookman itself shared the devotion so so beautifully demonstrated in Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog. It starts with someone reading a book and it moves to Part One, titled after a famous Edgar Allan Poe short story. There are references to various works of literature throughout. Most were reasonably apposite, though I admit an Ernest Bramah one (about 2/3 of the way in) broke the mood somewhat.

Camera Obscura not historical. It's not even vaguely historical. It's set on the same Earth that Tidhar so lovingly described in The Bookman: a world built of literature, with steampunk accoutrements and a lizard queen and a forensic automaton. Tidhar's Tom Thumb is a tobacconist, but once was a circus performer. Tidhar chooses his literary antecedents carefully - he mixes and mashes his authors, but cautiously. This time he bases a considerable portion of his tale in Paris and some of his literature and characters are chosen accordingly. It's a surprisingly Chinese Paris. Also a surprisingly tourist Paris. It's as if the characters don't actually experience France, but are laid on a landscape devised of literary settings and move through it. It's a very stylised novel in this way.

The first part of Camera Obscura is a fast-paced old-fashioned mystery adventure, with some detective work and much exotic and strange happening. Then it transmutes into an SF novel, still with much exotic and strange happening, but with more explanation.

What's interesting about this book is Tidhar's language choice. He uses modern idiom and speech, gently toned down, but modern cadences. This makes the book very accessible and far less pretentious than some of its ilk.

One thing I didn't enjoy was a dynamic female protagonist who was more at the mercy of events and people and strange beings than she was dynamic. She was skilful and intimidating from time to time, at least, but more often she was buffeted and a little bewildered and that was before the real hurt descended. This is often true of protagonists of this kind of novel, as strange things unfurl and need to be understood, but right now I'm yearning for female protagonists who get by with the tools women use to get by when buffeted, rather than simply following the prescribed plot. Also, I started to wonder if she was human early on, so little regard did she have for clothes, food, drink and PMT. It's a stylised novel in this way, too, however, not a realistic one, so this is mere carping. Lavie Tidhar is a fine craftsman and his novel is well meshed. I would really have liked to see Lady de Winter with PMT, however - it would have made her much more a challenge to the swarming darkness. As it is, there's a moment of discord when de Winter finds her way of handling an increasingly strange situation - her earlier passivity is turned upside down. It's even given a good reason. That doesn't make me more comfortable with it - I suspect that I've read a few too many novels with passive women in it and Tidhar is reaping the grain from seeds that others have sown.

I found the structure curiously like that of The Bookman. This means I kept wanting to pull it to pieces and to reconfigure it just a bit differently, with more stylistic links between the first and last sections, for instance.

I keep wanting to pull Camera Obscura to pieces because it's a novel that's surprisingly easy to do this to. This doesn't make it a bad novel. In fact, I rather suspect it might be a very good one. Not high literature. More a lost heir of pulp. The top end of pulp. Reliably entertaining reading and interesting worldbuilding. (And I need to send out a search party for those last four sentences - bits of them have gone astray. If you discover the lost verbs, send them home right away and I'll give them a glass of hot milk and put them to bed - the other lost words can wait.)

Women's History Month: Cheryl Morgan

Making History

I am not an historian. History, after all, is written by the winners, and while I may have achieved a small amount of success in one field, I certainly don’t feel like a winner.

I could, perhaps, have become an historian. I very much enjoyed the subject at school. I also voraciously devoured stories of past times. But it was clear to me at the time that history was very much his story. It was about the winners, the men.

Oh, there were always exceptions: Helen, Cassandra, Dido, Cleopatra, Matilda, Eleanor, Elizabeth and Mary. But exceptions were what they were, and their stories, no matter how glorious, or more often inglorious, came to us filtered. They were always written by men.

To write about women’s history, therefore, requires a fair amount of original research. We don’t know as much about the women of past times as we do about their male counterparts. And we are not sure that we can believe what we are told. Take Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example: she married the King of France, then divorced him to marry the King of England; she was mother to Richard the Lionheart and John; and she was a leading figure in the Courtly Love movement. She must have been an amazing woman, but I can’t recall my history books even mentioning her. When I was a kid, the history of those times was all about Richard. I doubt that it is that much different today.

It is not only women, of course, who lose. History also tends not to talk about the poor, the conquered, the powerless. History is the story of the rich, the powerful, the mighty. Modern historians are making a determined effort to turn that around, but it is hard, because they have so much less to go on. Because to make history, to be remembered, you have to be a winner.

Let’s fast forward to today. Where is history being made? An obvious place is in encyclopedias. That’s where people are writing down information about how we live now, and about the past, which will be read by historians in the future. I’m going to single out Wikipedia, not because I think it is the best or worst of modern encyclopedias, but because its open nature allows us to see social dynamics being worked out in its creation.

In January this year the New York Times published an article claiming that less than 15% of the material in Wikipedia is written by women. Once again, history is being written by men. And is that because they are somehow “winning”? This blog post, exploring the reasons by more women don’t contribute to Wikipedia, and written by the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, no less, suggests that in many cases this is true. Just as in so many other aspects of life, women who want to edit Wikipedia have to fight to have their voices heard, or at least feel as if they do. Often they simply can’t be bothered, or don’t have the time, to play dominance games.

I’m not trying to single out Wikipedia here. It is simply that its open nature allows us to see easily the same sorts of conflicts that are played out every day in homes and offices all over the world. Sexism isn’t something that men necessarily choose to do. All too often it is an attitude that they have been raised to believe is natural and right, and which they have adopted without thinking. Getting rid of such attitudes is a project that will take generations, not years.

In the meantime, we have to leave what history we can. Those historians of the future won’t all be lazy. They won’t all turn to the most obvious sources. If we can leave our own history then it should be found, and hopefully taken into account. And that’s why I am happy to contribute to things like Women’s History Month. It says that we are here, and it says that we matter.




Cheryl Morgan is the non-fiction editor of the Hugo Award winning Clarkesworld Magazine. She also edits the literary review magazine, Salon Futura which is published by her company, Wizard's Tower Press. The company runs an online store selling DRM-free ebooks with no region restrictions.

Andy Remic Vampire Warlords (Book Three of the Clockwork Vampire Chronicles)

Angry Robot book time again (I read the books in clusters - this is the second last in this cluster):

How does one talk about a third book? First, one gives a warning. This review may contain spoilers if you haven't read the earlier books. Here, let me give you some anti-spoiler space.














What else does one say? If you liked the first two, you will like this? That's true in this instance. It has the same type of imagery and colour ('like ash confetti at a corpse wedding' works so beautifully in a sword and sorcery, over-the-top, steampunk vampire world). It has the same strange universe. It even has some of the same characters. Since I enjoyed the first two books, it was almost a given I would like this one. But what is it I like, besides the completion of the storylines I've been following and the wonderfully and depressingly absurd universe? (I still want to see Andy Remic and James Enge on the same panel at a convention - more reading of both writers just reinforces this view)

This book starts where the previous one left off (rather unsurprisingly, given that the last book left us all hanging off a vast cliff) with the Vampire Warlords (beings sickeningly between gods and humans) having been summoned. The writing is on the wall for humanity. The great hero Kell has been pushed too far. Most of the vachines (clockwork vampires) are dead, killed to raise the Vampire Warlords, and almost the first thing the Warlords do is crate a vampire army, using the knowledge of the once-human to dominate, instantly. Humanity is doomed to diminish, in vile slavery. On the way down, there will be much blood and guts and screams of agony. That's the way these things are.

All the rest is doom and fight and adventure. Of course it is. That's the kind of book it is. There's less humour in this last book in the trilogy, but more than enough derring-do to make up. There's also a band of heroes that is nicely mismatched, with Kell wanting to save his granddaughter's honour and his granddaughter wanting something quite different and… I think you'd better read it for yourself.

Women's History Month: Jane Routley

Is sex destiny? Some notes about creating a matriarchy.


I work in a blue collar environment where I have far more contact with tabloid newspapers than is probably good for my mental health. As a result I’m constantly confronted (and revolted) by how pervasive the gender double standard still is. Pull back the thin curtain of modern civilization and the outside world is back in Victorian times full of damned whores and God’s police - the most important women are mothers, divorcees are just out for what they can get from an unfortunate man and those who get mistreated by footballers asked for it.

It started me wondering what a world in which the double standard operated in women’s favour would look like. I thought I’d try and create such a world for my next fantasy novel. I didn’t want to create a feminist separatist world like for instance The Gate to Women’s Country or one where the men are enslaved as in a certain Star Trek episode. (Captain Kirk freed the men and left the women with lots of make-up so that they had something to fight back with.) I wanted one that closely reflects our own modern western world - where people are formally equal, but where the balance of power is skewed in favour of one sex - one, that has its historical roots in Matriarchy instead of in Patriarchy. After all I’m a fantasy writer. Why shouldn’t I write about a fantasy world where I can be on top of the heap?

( Click here or suffer pangs of unrequited curiosity. )