Edited by Mike Allen
“The Gospel of Nachash” by Marie Brennan
“Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine’s Day” by Tori Truslow
“Crow Voodoo” by Georgina Bruce
“Your Name Is Eve” by Michael M. Jones
“Hell Friend” by Gemma Files
“Braiding The Ghosts” by C.S.E. Cooney
“Surrogates” by Cat Rambo
“Lucyna’s Gaze” by Gregory Frost
“Eyes of Carven Emerald” by Shweta Narayan
“Dragons of America” by S.J. Hirons
“Where Shadows Go At Low Midnight” by John Grant
“Lineage” by Kenneth Schneyer
“Murder In Metachronopolis” by John C. Wright
“To Seek Her Fortune” by Nicole Kornher-Stace
“Fold” by Tanith Lee
Reviewed by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Clockwork Phoenix 3 is subtitled: “New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness,” and I can’t imagine a more appropriate description for the stories in this book. The fifteen stories are a mix between science fiction, fantasy and slipstream. Some have historical elements mixed in. Some have steampunk tropes mixed in. All of them are certainly unique to my experience, whether I enjoyed them or not.
The book opens with “The Gospel of Nachash,” a story inspired by a conversation author Marie Brennan had with an Episcopal priest. A retelling of the creation story with a faerie Christ, the story is written in a style similar to the Bible itself. That alone may make some religious readers uncomfortable. It’s told through the point of view of Nachash, one of a people called the bekhorim, who is assigned the responsibility of care for the Tree of Life. One day he encounters the faerie Asaph, who chooses him as the first disciple and begins performing miracles as she quests to teach the bekhorim the mysteries of life and death.
Stories like this reflect the common mythology of many religions which have Genesis and Adam and Eve stories (i.e. their own creation myths). Whether these stories originated in the Bible or not is a matter of debate, but this story offers a unique perspective on such mythology through its fantasy lens. A decent story, although the lack of dialogue made me feel more distant from the characters and events than I cared for.
In “Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine’s Day,” Tori Truslow tells the story of Wynn, a scientist who sets about to study the life and rituals of the Merfolk. In the process, he meets a young mermaid he calls “Opal,” because her mer name is difficult to pronounce. As he studies her people and they allow him into their lives, he falls in love with Opal and begins to wish he could be a merman so that they could be together.
Told through a combination of narrative and letter reports sent from Wynn to his fellow scientists, the story fits the book’s subtitle well in its strangeness. The story ends in tragedy, which was a real downer. This wasn’t really my thing in all honesty, and, although it’s well written, I felt more could have been done to develop the characters and sell the romance between two worlds in the process.
Speaking of strangeness, Georgina Bruce’s “Crow Voodoo” is the story of Mortimer Citytatters, a crow, who makes a deal with a human woman named Jenny. He’ll help her write love letters to her soldier lover, Robin, who’s away at war. The letters are infused with crow magic and reading them helps keep Robin safe. In the end, the payment the crow exacts is steep, and, when Jenny gives birth to a baby, Mortimer takes the child as payment and raises her as a crow. When the child one day discovers that Jenny may be her mother, she sets out to find the truth.
This story was unique in its oddness, but I didn’t really enjoy it much. The only really good character was Savage, the daughter. Both Jenny and Mortimer do things which are less than admirable in the story, and Savage and Robin wind up victims in the process. I think Jenny could have been developed better to create more sympathy. Mortimer seemed shady from moment one, and, thus, I found it hard to buy Jenny’s initial trust in him. Interesting but not great.
Michael M. Jones’ “Your Name Is Eve” is the first story I really enjoyed. The story of two lovers, Clancy and Eve, who live out their romance through the dreams of sleeping humans is clouded in mystery. It’s hard to say much without ruining the ending, but their love affair is passionate and moving and the story was very well written.
Clancy is the main character and well developed and the surprises of who he is and what he’s doing offers a nice twist at the end. Appropriately enough, Jones says in his story notes at the end of the book that the story came to him in a dream. The entire story captures that dreamlike quality very well. Recommended.
“Hell Friend” by Gemma Files is the tale of Jin, a young girl growing up in Chinatown who lives a life controlled by the whims of her father and grandparents as she works for them at the family store. She befriends Wu Minshi, a ghost with whom she has a bit of a romance. I found this story strange and confusing and had trouble really understanding what the author was trying to say as well as the true identity of the characters. Jin’s point of view is very strong and she is well developed. The reader gets the sense that he’s inside the mind of a young girl. But nonetheless, the story’s conclusion that “we are seldom any of us what we seem” didn’t move me and the story wasn’t anything special.
“Braiding the Ghosts” by C. S. E. Cooney is another of my favorite stories here. The story of a young girl, Nin, who grows up under the tutelage of her dominating grandma, Reshka, this is another ghost story about people who learn to use magic to control ghosts and make them their servants. While learning about this process from Reshka, Nin maintains a dialogue with the spirit of her dead mother, Noir, who is a far more sympathetic and encouraging personage than her grandmother.
At her fifteenth birthday, Nin sets out to find her first ghost. Taking Reshka’s advice not to choose one too young or too old, Nin searches the headstones carefully looking for just the right fit. The ghost she chooses is a young man in his twenties who becomes almost like a protector for her. Their relationship blossoms to friendship and when Dark Eve comes, a night when ghost controllers must carefully hide to avoid their ghosts’ revenge, Nin’s ghost, Mason, is gentler and kinder than the other ghosts.
The relationships between Nin and her main companions, Mason and Reshka, are well developed and contrasting, and I found Nin’s point of view very strongly pulling me into the mind of a young girl, just as Files’ story did. The ending is a nice twist as is the relationship Nin develops with Mason, and Cooney did a great job of selling me on a story with a subject matter I wouldn’t generally find intriguing and would skip over. Recommended.
“Surrogates” by Cat Rambo is the science fiction tale of two lovers, Bingo and Belinda, who live in a world where surrogate clones are created to their specifications and act as sexual partners and servants to meet the needs their human companion either can’t or doesn’t want to fulfill. Belinda has also been implanted with a chip which alters her perceptions to show the world the way a person wants to see it. This includes the ability not to see people and things you don’t want to see. But Belinda’s implanted chip begins driving her and Bingo apart, and he insists she have it turned off so she can’t block him out on a whim.
Rambo is a good writer, but this story seemed rather depressing to me. The way Bingo and Belinda quickly take to sleeping with their surrogates made their love for each other seem less genuine to me, and there always seems to be a certain distance between them which makes their whole relationship feel empty and cold. Belinda’s character is more developed than Bingo’s and I never felt I got a good sense of his connection to her, so that when the ending occurred it almost seemed inevitable. Still, skillfully written and the prose makes it a more compelling read than expected given the aforementioned flaws.
“Lucyna’s Gaze” by Gregory Frost is the dark story of two people who wind up in a concentration camp under the Nazis during World War II. The narrator falls in love with a woman, Lucyna, while working as a delivery driver. He encounters her working at a bakery one day and, after that, can’t get her off his mind. Lucyna never shows much interest in him and ends up married to another man. Later, when they’re in the concentration camp, he sets out to find her again and finds a woman who is the shell of the woman he fell in love with.
The story is well written and asks a lot of questions which don’t get answered until the very end. The opening set up is well managed and makes the surprise ending work quite well. But aside from the craft of the story, it didn’t do much for me. Other than the natural sympathy one would have for people placed in a concentration camp, I never got a real sense of why Lucyna was worthy of the narrator’s devotion, and, as a result, his unfading passion for her was a difficult sell for me.
“Eyes Of Carven Emerald” by Shweta Narayan is another enjoyable story of the Greeks battling the Persians. The commander, Alexandros, has conquered a Persian city and there encounters a mechanical owl. The owl begins telling Alexandros the story of a prince who falls in love with a mechanical woman. Alexandros, suspicious the owl was made by his enemy to fool him, questions the owl’s motives and tries to rush the story by guessing its plot. The twists of the owl’s story’s plot diverge from what he and we might expect as does his relationship with the owl, which unfolds over several encounters through several years.
Based on an Armenian folk story, “Eyes of Carven Emerald” is an examination of how different world views and motives clash. Loving steampunk as I do, the owl immediately hooked me. I loved the mix of the fantasy setting in the owl’s story and the more ancient setting of the framing story of Alexandros and the owl. The story does raise issues about Alexandros’ sexuality, so for those resistant to such topics, the story should be approached with care. But I found it a good read and recommend it.
The story which follows, “Dragons of America” by S. J. Hirons turned out to be one of my favorites from. The tale of a man who lives in a conquered land inhabited by American dragons is a nice mix of historical setting with fantasy elements. Anselm Einarsson is an alchemy student whose father died hunting dragons. A source of embarrassment to Anselm, his mother and sister, Anselm thinks he’s left all that behind. Until an old friend offers to save his alchemy career with tutoring if Anselm will find and bring him a dragon egg. Following the notes and maps in his father’s diaries, Anselm finally agrees and goes in search of an egg. What he finds instead is the ghost of a dead dragon who ends up his friend and helps him finish the book on dragons his father had begun before his death.
I thought this was a different take on the dragon idea than I’d seen before. I enjoyed Anselm, who was developed well, and his interactions with his family and classmates were believable. The story takes some surprising but plausible twists and turns and winds up in a hopeful place, unlike many of the stories in this book. Recommended.
“Where Shadows Go At Low Midnight” by John Grant and “Lineage” by Kenneth Schneyer are the two shorts of the book. “Midnight” is the story of two young people (or are they) who leave a party to walk the streets one night wondering what happens to the shadows at night. Destined to be lovers, or so they believe, they inhabit a world built by ghosts.
A strange story, I didn’t feel the characters were very well developed, likely due to the story’s short length. The elements of mystery built into the story by Grant left me perplexed and unsatisfied. The dialogue was solid, but in the end, I had trouble remembering much about this story after I’d read the ones to follow.
“Lineage” by Schneyer is the story of a spirit manifesting itself in different people at different times. Told through a combination of research reports between archeologists and historical narratives, I found the structure didn’t allow time for much character development or much beyond a bare glimpse of the story beyond its premise. The story is well written but short and could have benefited with more thorough development.
“Murder In Metachronopolis” by John C. Wright was one of those rare stories I knew I’d love after the first paragraph. A private eye story, with definite echoes of a noir P.I. film, set in a time travelling future where Masters of Time whisk through time without concern for the possible impact, men like Jacob Frontino act as both investigator and policeman of those Masters who abuse time travel for their own ends. Then Frontino suddenly finds himself recruited to investigate a murder he’s told is his own. Drawn into the mystery with him, our journey is helped by the story’s unique structure. Instead of being presented chronologically, the story is broken up into numbered vignettes which the author has arranged in anachronological order. This may sound confusing, and in many cases it would be, but Wright skillfully handles it and the structure aids the mystery.
The story asks a lot of interesting questions about time travel and moral temptation. I thought the protagonist was a dynamic character of many layers and enjoyed the story thoroughly. One of the best in this collection. Recommended highly.
“To Seek Her Fortune” by Nicole Kornher-Stace is a solid steampunk story condensed from the author’s novel. The main characters are a Lady Explorer and her son, who have been travelling around on a stolen airship on various adventures, fighting off repeated predictions of their impending deaths.
The story moves along quickly and is well written but suffers from one flaw: the characters have no names. They are literally called The Lady Explorer and The Lady Explorer’s son. While Kornher-Stace deftly handles the switches of point of view mid-scene between the two, their namelessness keeps the reader at a distance, making it hard to emotionally connect with the characters. I wonder if they have names in the novel. It’s hard to imagine the author could sustain interest in characters without names for an entire novel. The exception, of course, being allegories like Pilgrim’s Progress. Despite this flaw, the story is a good read and recommended.
The anthology ends on a high note with Tanith Lee’s wondrous “Fold,” the story of a man who lives the last decades of his life alone in a self-sufficient apartment atop a tower. Orphaned as a pre-teen when his parents died in an air accident, Jintha sold the family business and bought the apartment which provides for all of his needs. All of his needs except human contact. His sole source of interaction with the world is through the love letters he writes to passersby on the sidewalk below who catch his interest and capture his heart. As they come and go from his life, so do the letters, sent out into the world like paper airplanes.
As sad as Jintha’s isolated, lonely life seems, his letters and attitude toward them are hopeful. And when found, sometimes even by the very people to which they were written, his letters change lives and encourage people to believe in themselves and recognize the blessing they’ve received. The story is a well written mix of melancholy and joy. It sucks the reader in with the power of Lee’s always masterful prose and encourages the asking of questions about the value of relationships, communication, and connection. Highly recommended.
Altogether an interesting anthology with seven of fifteen stories recommended. Of the others, three were solid, while five didn’t do work for me. That, however, doesn’t mean they won’t work for you. If you like unique, interesting perspectives, this anthology is for you.
Clockwork Phoenix 3
Edited by Mike Allen
Norilana Books, Tpb, July 2010, $11.95