{"id":9270,"date":"2009-12-08T12:22:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-08T19:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9270"},"modified":"2009-12-08T12:22:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-08T19:22:00","slug":"review-of-eyes-like-sky-and-coal-and-moonlight-by-cat-rambo-paper-golem-press-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9270","title":{"rendered":"Review of Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight by Cat Rambo (Paper Golem Press, 2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my blurb for Cat Rambo\u2019s new collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight<\/a> (Paper Golem Press, 2009), I wrote that reading her stories is like \u201creading the literature from worlds that don’t exist. She writes as that world\u2019s Dickens, its Calvino, its Fredrick Douglass, its E. B. White. Rather than merely relaying the events of other realities, as some fantasy and science fiction writers might, at her best Cat Rambo acts as a literary interpreter. Within these imagined fictions — sometimes disjunctive and metaphysical, sometimes lucid and deceptively simple — there are embedded many new ways for looking at the history and social realities of our own world. Dying little girls may not be carried away by winged pigs, but what does it mean that we want so badly to believe that they might be? Cat Rambo’s fiction invites these questions, but the ultimate interpretation is left for the reader to ponder, and to answer if she can.\u201d<\/p>\n

I attended Clarion West with Cat Rambo in 2005 and have been a devoted fan of her work ever since. I\u2019ve published her work on PodCastle \u2013 Magnificent Pigs<\/a>; Dead Girl\u2019s Wedding March<\/a>; \u201cI\u2019ll Gnaw Your Bones,\u201d the Manticore Said<\/a>; Foam on the Water<\/a>; In Order to Conserve<\/a>; and the upcoming Narrative of a Beast\u2019s Life, scheduled for January 19th. Paper Golem Press sent me an ARC of this book so that I could review its contents for possible publication in PodCastle, and so that I could blurb it, both of which I was more than happy to do.<\/p>\n

Cat’s stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and… everywhere. Once she burst onto the scene as a professional writer after Clarion West, she seemed to appear simultaneously in all magazines at once, as if she were at the center of some sort of physics-defying quantum phenomenon from a Star Trek movie.<\/p>\n

Rambo\u2019s collection features twenty fantasy stories, including a number of originals. Publisher’s Weekly calls Cat’s collection a “two-sided coin,” indicating that there are both excellent and weak stories in the collection. The reviewer seems to have taken against Cat’s fantasy world, Tabat, which has been developed over the course of stories, role playing games, and as-yet-unpublished novels. The reviewer says that these stories are full of “predictable genre tropes that fall flat.” I disagree with Publisher’s Weekly on the specifics — in my opinion, “Narrative of a Beast’s Life” is the strongest story in the collection, while “Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish” is one of the weaker ones — but the reviewer’s broader point is supportable. Rambo’s collection is sometimes uneven, as is perhaps inevitable in a collection of twenty stories.<\/p>\n

It’s not that I don’t love this collection. When Cat’s stories are at their best, they’re more than good — they’re emotional, triumphant, beautifully rendered and profound. Her best stories are among the best published anywhere in the industry. This collection is well-worth purchasing for the strength and beauty of stories like “Heart in a Box,” \u201cSugar,\u201d “Rare Pears and Greengages,” and “The Dead Girl’s Wedding March.\u201d<\/p>\n

The best stories in the collection are \u201c\u2019I\u2019ll Gnaw Your Bones,\u2019 the Manticore Said\u201d and \u201cThe Narrative of a Beast\u2019s Life,\u201d both set in Cat\u2019s Tabat. \u201cI\u2019ll Gnaw Your Bones,\u201d originally published at Clarkesworld here<\/a>, uses its fantasy setting to contemplate issues of personhood, eugenics, and everyday cruelty. The reader watches a sympathetic narrator commit an act that would be (rightly) condemned as evil in today\u2019s society \u2013 but which is normal to Tabatians, just as it was normal in our culture for decades.<\/p>\n

One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of fantasy and science fiction writers is the ability to place familiar things in an unfamiliar setting and, thereby, force readers to reexamine them. Take this metaphor \u2013 I used to live in Santa Cruz, California, where I was constantly surrounded by redwoods. At first, I paid attention to every detail of them \u2013 the beauty of the red trunks stretching upward, the light shifting through the needles, the smell of bark and soil. But as I lived among the trees, they became part of the background of my existence. It wasn\u2019t until I left for a while and came back to visit that I rediscovered them \u2013 unfamiliarity allowed me to regard each branch and gnarl anew.<\/p>\n

Cat\u2019s stories create a similar kind of disjunction when they recast slavery and eugenics in a fantasy setting. Her \u201cNarrative of a Beast\u2019s Life\u201d is a fantasy mirror of the slave narratives which were written and published by escaped slaves before the civil war and then used by abolitionists as tools for converting Northerners to their cause. Much contemporary African American fiction plays on slave narratives in some way \u2013 for instance, Jones\u2019s Known World<\/a> and Morrison\u2019s Beloved<\/a> have both been described as taking on the project of re-imagining the lost histories of people who could not tell their stories. Rambo\u2019s re-imagining of American slavery adds to this discourse in a different way, by altering the slave narrative subtly to create a new perspective for analyzing the original.<\/p>\n

Of course, \u201cNarrative of a Beast\u2019s Life\u201d also brings the slave narrative form to readers who may never have read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass<\/a>, in which case it has the potential to mirror the purpose of the original work by simply recreating a slave\u2019s eye view of slavery (a thing which, until very recently, was not considered particularly important). Slave narratives are interesting in their own right, as well as being politically and historically invaluable, and Rambo\u2019s homage is well-written and full of lush detail.<\/p>\n

The publisher\u2019s weekly reviewer appears to be one of those people who\u2019s never read Douglass. In light of their complaint that the story is “long-winded… without a trace of tension or intrigue” one must wonder what kind of threats would count as tension. Slavery and beating don\u2019t. Neither do castration and lobotomy, apparently. What does?<\/p>\n

Many of the strong stories are reprints. For instance, there\u2019s \u201cHeart in a Box\u201d from Strange Horizons, a retelling of The Little Mermaid that concentrates on the oft-forgotten detail that each of the little mermaid\u2019s human steps is incredibly painful. \u201cThe Dead Girl\u2019s Wedding March\u201d from Fantasy Magazine is a myth from a high fantasy world, its melancholy mood and slow, dark imagery rendered in beautiful prose. And \u201cThe Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race\u201d from Orson Scott Card\u2019s Intergalactic Medicine Show tells the sometimes poignant, sometimes funny story of P.T. Barnum and Jumbo.<\/p>\n

However, I was delighted to discover several excellent pieces among the originals as well. \u201cRare Pears and Greengages\u201d is a moving Victorian fantasy, imagining a Dickensian world where the unfortunate characters include magical creatures as well as humans. \u201cIn Order to Conserve\u201d is a witty ramble, posing a world in which concepts, instead of oil, are the non-renewable resource whose scarcity threatens society. Perhaps my favorite was \u201cThe Silent Familiar,\u201d a tale about a wizard whose dragon familiar decides to lay an egg, which made me smile with its quirky humor until it snuck up to a surprisingly emotional ending.<\/p>\n

The weaker stories come in two broad varieties. The first pair are urban fantasies \u2013 \u201cEagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish\u201d and \u201cDew Drop Coffee Lounge\u201d \u2013 which suffer from clich\u00e9 settings, lacking character development, and easy morals. Neither of these stories has a central spark of originality or the redeeming uniqueness of Cat\u2019s usual voice. Both are derivative, as though the eye that observed these stories is someone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The other weak stories are all from Cat\u2019s world of Tabat. Here, again, I find myself in agreement with the Publisher\u2019s Weekly reviewer \u2013 these stories are \u201cfilled with predictable genre tropes that fall flat.\u201d Cat\u2019s Tabat stories are excellent when they focus on the social conflicts of that world, its intricacies and ambiguities, the places where it deviates from other high fantasy realms. In stories like \u201cTwine of Flame,\u201d \u201cIn the Lesser Southern Isles,\u201d and the titular \u201cEyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight,\u201d the world of Tabat appears one-dimensional \u2013 and, like the urban fantasies, derivative — just another epic realm that could have been written by any author.<\/p>\n

While I greatly enjoyed Cat\u2019s collection, and while I would enthusiastically recommend it to any fantasy reader, I do think the collection would have benefited from some trimming. If Cat were presenting her best twelve fantasy stories \u2013 instead of her best twelve fantasy stories and eight lesser fantasy stories \u2013 then this collection would have read smoothly and powerfully, transitioning from one \u201cwow\u201d moment to the next. That streamlined collection would rival the best I\u2019ve read.<\/p>\n

Luckily, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight is still excellent. It\u2019s available at Amazon<\/a> and through Paper Golem Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my blurb for Cat Rambo\u2019s new collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem Press, 2009), I wrote that reading her stories is like \u201creading the literature from worlds that don’t exist. She writes as that world\u2019s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}