The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms absolutely hooked me, yet left me with little reason and less desire to read the sequels (it’s the first in a trilogy, apparently). The world building is superb, if limited to a small segment of the world’s society: magic heavy, high fantasy with cutthroat politics and fallen gods roaming an impossible palace in the sky.

But at the end, the main character, Yeine, turns into a goddess. This is after learning that she’d been implanted as a fetus with the soul of a murdered goddess (sort of Kali-like goddess – representing both birth/life and death) and also having mind blowing sex with an enslaved god (the brother/lover of the murdered goddess) named Nahadoth, but more commonly called the Nightlord. This ending had a consequence of upturning the structure of world we’d been introduced to, as well as taking most of the characters we’d come to know best out of play. Because the world we’d experience was such a small segment, there was no real sense of the impact of the changes and, one a micro level, there was a very real sense of disappointment that these folks we’d come to know would probably not be around for the sequel. So, a well done standalone novel for me, but a poor start to a series.

I do want to give the author credit for making the hero a woman of color with healthy attitude towards to sex (which is not to say promiscuous) who is not particularly physically attractive. It doesn’t quite pass the Bechdel test, but that’s nitpicking.

As a birthday present, my mother found me a copy of the first issue of Fantasy Magazine, published in February, 1953. Inside was a then previously unpublished novella by Robert E. Howard, entitled The Black Stranger. It stars (actually, almost guest starring) his most famous creation, Conan. Howard killed himself in the thirties, so didn’t live long enough to see his character become an icon and his stories the foundational texts of modern fantasy.

Howard is rather like Arthur Conan Doyle, in some respects. The quality of the writing is mixed, to be generous (Howard is a worse writer than Doyle, but better than another foundational pulp figure, Edgar Rice Burroughs, without whose John Carter stories, we likely would not have Star Wars). But despite the obvious inadequacies of Howard and Doyle, they both created something ineffably compelling in their most famous characters. They have also both not always been well served by the onscreen depictions of their characters. Holmes has always been so much elusive and complex on the page than in any of the television and movie versions (I’ll make an exception for the old BBC series starring Jeremy Brett, which were quite literal). Conan, too, is a far more interesting and three dimensional character on the page than he ever will be on the screen. The (relatively) recent movie actually reflected the cunning pirate of the printed pages, but at the expense of building a small and petty character. Schwarzenegger brought the subtlety of sledgehammer to his acting, while Oliver Stone and John Milius brought all their respective left and right wing paranoia to the screenplay and direction, respectively, but at least they combined to make him into something mythic, even if the finer points were trampled on, ground into fine dust, and finally tossed under steamroller before being buried under a Walmart parking lot.

The Black Stranger is written in the third person, but, except at the very beginning and the end, keeps the focus on other characters. Even when Conan reappears in the middle, the effect is of viewing him through others’ eyes. It is far from the best Conan story, which are generally some of the shorter ones, but there’s not really such a thing as a bad one, if you’ve got a taste for pulp.

Like Burroughs, Howard wrote when genre designations like sci fi and fantasy didn’t really exist. Look at the names of the early magazine and what do you find? Weird Tales. Astounding Stories. Amazing Stories. Howard and Lovecraft were pen pals and (sort of) friends and both published in many of the same periodicals, though that would not be true today. Howard has such an outsized influence that he effectively created (with co-creation credit going to Tolkien) the genre of fantasy out of the more nebulous genre of ‘weird.’

I read the later the other day but the first, I read some time ago, but just never got around to marking my thoughts. They were both nominated for Nebula Awards for best short story, which is how I came across them.

The first one is traditional sci-fi taking place in a wonderfully and economically crafted world and is basically a two person show between two people involved in organized crime groups (‘Syndicates’). One is a doctor who crossed them and is now banished to a climate change ravaged Earth and the other is an assassin. Both are women. In a variation on the idea of yakuza tattoos, the hitwoman has scars crafted onto her body to memorialize each assassination. Her final scar, done while on the run after her Syndicate was taken down by law enforcement, is to honor her lover, the man who sold their Syndicate out to law enforcement. She loved him and she wants him well remembered and she tells the tale while the doctor carefully cuts her and ensures that they will form scars. Yada yada. The mob killer is herself killed and the doctor cuts herself scars to remember her. Despire the ‘yada yada’ it’s a gripping little read. It’s available for free on Tor.com, so don’t be shy.

The second one is also available on Tor.com and it’s really a psychological ghost story told from the limited perspectives of two sisters – one on the edge of puberty and the other a little younger – in the days immediately after the death of their older brother by leukemia. His ghost haunts the two girls and causes the household tension to escalate. Oh, and the father is a cruel minded alcoholic and the mother self-medicates herself with prescription drugs. And the dead brother/son… well, it sounds like he was his father’s son, which is to say, a cruel little cuss. The ghost seems to pressure the girls into an escalating series of cruel pranks and retributions (it’s in the title: swift, brutal retaliation) and, during the final one, the ghost of the brother, who had already been engaging in some poltergeist-y destruction, starts smashing dishes and causing all sorts of chaos at dinner. And then it ends. No letdown, no satisfying conclusion – which is satisfying in its own way, because their is no real hope of one from those parents and because it is in keeping with the title. This story is about familial destruction, not happy endings.