Gully Foyle

Admission into a magical school is the starting point for many a paranormal bildungsroman. Harry Potter is visited by a giant on his 11th birthday, and soon whisked off to Hogwarts, and, maybe more importantly, into a wizarding world that understands his true worth; the nascent wizard Sparrowhawk, talented and oh, so arrogant, goes from his meager beginnings on Gont to the vaunted school for wizards on Roke Island; the gifted student is identified, and jumps at the chance to escape a heretofore mundane existence. The magical school is a beacon of one’s extraordinary nature. Who would pass up an opportunity to realize their magical potential?

In Vita Nostra, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko turn this time-honored trope it on its head. Admission to the magical college at its center is terrifying, coercive, and deadly. Failure there is met with brutal results, and dreams of escape are quenched definitely and completely.

Alexandra Samokhina meets Farit Kazhennikov first on a beach holiday with her mother, on what I assume is the Black Sea. Sasha is a nervous 16, still hanging on her mother’s apron strings and swimming in the surf like a gleeful child while other kids her age are pounding out the beat in discotheques and smoking on street corners. She begins to notice a man with sunglasses everywhere she goes, a man whose presence fills her with dread, though to everyone else, he seems completely ordinary. After a series of near encounters that seem to loop through time, Sasha and Kazhennikov finally converse. He tells her she must wake up every morning at precisely 4 a.m., go for a run, and skinny dip in the ocean, swimming to the outer buoy and back.

Sasha completes the task dutifully (and with no small measure of confusion), and after every pre-dawn swim, she comes home and vomits up coins that look like the old Soviet kopecks. Until the morning the alarms don’t go off, and something bad happens to someone Sahsa cares about. Kazhennikov is both stern and vaguely apologetic: It is out of his hands what will happen if she shirks his prescripted actions, but happen it will. She continues her morning swims.

Meanwhile, Sasha has attempted to continue a normal life, immersing herself in the rounds of studying, test-taking, and socializing that characterize the life of a senior in high school. But Kazhennikov intrudes again, with more strange demands, and Sasha again acquiesces, with the sense that if she were to fail, recriminations more horrible than a heart attack that wasn’t fatal will be visited on her mother. By the time Sasha is ready to take her entrance tests to university, she’s vomited up dozens of occult coins, which she keeps in a purse hidden in her lower desk drawer.

This is when Kazhennikov tells Sasha, in no uncertain terms, that she will be attending the Institute of Special Technologies in the provincial town of Torpa.

In 1991, when I was 16 years old, I went on a school trip to the Soviet Union. It was March; in August the Soviet Union would break. We landed in Moscow and took an overnight train to our provincial destination, to Minsk in Belarus. The sleeper berths flopped down to pinstriped mattresses, where we slept uncomfortably while older Russian women slid open the door and yelled at us incomprehensibly at the top of every hour. We were disgorged into Minsk, and then into the dubious comfort of our host families. We came together again every school day into a strangely ornate room in School No. 30, a room designed with Soviet care to impress. I spent something like 30 days in that country, a place right on the seismic edge of irrevocable change. I think every one of us who applied to college wrote about our experience there in our entrance essays.

Vita Nosta—which means something like “the brief life” or “the brevity of life”—reminded me again and again of my time in a country lost to history, experienced by a version of myself that has been subsumed under years, decades, of who I’ve since become. Sasha boards a train and it takes her to provincial town where all the accents are wrong. She meets her roommates in a dorm in a school that no one, not even the son of the enigmatic Farit Kazhennikov, wants to attend. The pickles and boiled eggs; the curling irons and power outages; the cold radiators with laundry set upon it: all of this reminded me of my time on the edge of the Soviet Union, about to fall, about to shatter everywhere. It was a scary time and place for a careful kid from the Midwest. I had made my choice before I knew how dire the situation was. Sasha makes hers with the same kind of inexplicable terror. We had contingency plans to escape to Lithuania, Poland maybe, if things got too hot where we were, but I can’t even imagine now what would have activated those contingencies. That sort of thing is always too late, an idle daydream of safety, of escape.

Sasha and her fellow students at the Institute of Special Technologies work towards the inscrutable exams they’re expected, somehow, to pass. They’re given impossible mental exercises, passages of gibberish they’re to memorize and internalize. There are other, more normal classes: English, Gym, History; none of these provoke the fear of Specialty, a class in which failure will unleash unspoken horrors on their loved ones. Kazhennikov’s son Kostya fails an exam, and his grandmother dies. Sasha stumbles in her schoolwork, and the next time she speaks to her mother, her mother tells the story of a broken hand, but it could have been so much worse. Failure, escape: these are not options.

Even though Sasha doesn’t want to be there, and is terrified by both success and failure at the occult university that chose her (and not the other way around), she begins to succeed, insofar as anything in that place can be called success. Is she studying magic? It’s not quite clear. It’s certainly nothing so straightforward as dueling lessons and potions class—she listens to recordings of silence that are subtly different kinds of lack of sound, which tear up her mind in different ways. She encounters the usual enemies and friends and lovers and losers of a first year at college, but nothing, nothing, is what it seems.

The fantastic nature of the Institute is revealed gradually—clearly telegraphed in Sasha’s midnight swims in the Black Sea, but never quite in full flower, creating an odd sort of suspense that keeps the pages turning. Sasha begins to change, losing time, and waking with a sudden shock of scales glinting across her skin. The goal of her studies remains inscrutable, occult. The teachers insist one the importance of the curricula, but mostly it just feels like fear and threats. There is no Dark Lord looming outside the school grounds. There is no scar burning on her forehead. There is just the work, whatever it means.

Vita Nostra—published in Russian in 2008 and only the second novel by the Dyachenkos, revered for more than 20 novels penned in their native tongue, to be translated into English—is a remarkable story in many ways, not the least of which is because of how terrifying its supernatural school is: only attended out of coercion, with a magic that doesn’t feel desirable, but onerous and strange. It feels like the hard choices and the helpless quiescence of banal youth, tied up with a ribbon of magic with the sharpest of edges.

Vita Nostra is available now. Read our interview with its translator, Julia Meitov Hersey. 

The post In <i>Vita Nostra</i>, the Study of Magic is Scientific, Sinister, and Deeply Strange appeared first on The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.

Stan Lee, who became a towering figure in pop culture over an extraordinary eight decades in comics, died this week at the age of 95. Though his long life and career saw many phases, it was his work with Marvel comics that made him a legend.

But Stan’s stint with Marvel didn’t begin in the pop art era of the early ’60s for which he’s most famous. Family connections got him a job as an assistant at what was then Timely Comics under Captain America creator Joe Simon in 1939. The 17-year-old filled inkwells and picked up lunches until earning his first byline in Captain America #3, for a piece called “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge.” In that era, “literature” magazines generally got cheaper postal rates than did comics, so publishers made sure there were at least a couple of pages of straight text in every issue—typically forgettable bits of character backstory. This early work by Stan doesn’t stand out, except that it includes the first-ever instance of Captain America throwing his (mighty) shield—and, of course, for the career it presaged.

Stan began writing comics features and back-ups shortly thereafter. Turmoil at the company saw him landing a temporary editor job that never really went away, even during the three years of military service during World War II. Timely Comics became Atlas before evolving into Marvel in 1961. That same year saw Stan and artist Jack Kirby create the pop culture revolution that we still haven’t seen the end of.

Though inexplicably never having achieved quite the superstar status as some of their other creations, the debut of Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four made Marvel, and broadened the potential of the superhero genre immeasurably. The lead characters had no interest in secret identities, but lead their lives as celebrity adventurers while frequently feeling like freaks. They dealt with petty grudges and had problems paying the bills, none of which stopped them from facing down increasingly bizarre science fiction threats, from shape-shifting aliens to a planet-eating god and his surfboard-riding herald. That contrast—between the gritty and the cosmic—makes the long Lee/Kirby run on FF a high-water mark in superhero comics. The alchemy of that unlikely collaboration has never been matched—Kirby’s stunning art and wild ideas paired with Lee’s storytelling sense, and a flawless ability to deflate self-seriousness with a well-timed, if groan-worthy, joke.

Debate has raged for decades now about how much to credit Lee over his collaborators: giants like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and John Romita, all artists with unparalleled creative minds. But I’ve never seen it as a competition, even if these men sometimes did. Marvel’s method at the time—in which Stan might provide a plot outline that Kirby would develop and expand upon before Stan added dialogue and a final polish—meant a top artist might have a profound impact on the story and overall direction of a book. Stan’s fingerprints, nonetheless, were on every issue of every title released during that era.

And the tone—that blend of cool and self-consciously corny that had a grown man ending every piece of writing with “Excelsior!”—was pure Stan. His character was something akin to your coolest uncle. He was dorky and he knew it, and it came across as something like irony, before irony was a given. Stan also engaged with fans and readers as no comic creator had ever even considered—each book started with a splash page listing the names of all of the creators, ended with a letters page, and eventually included a “Bullpen Bulletin” in which readers would get updates on the lives of Marvel staff. There was soon an official fan club offering all sorts of tie-ins, even the tackiest of which worked just fine with the so-uncool-it’s-cool style that defined Stan’s public persona. Perhaps because of the soap opera elements that make the comics so compelling, it’s tempting to set creators against each other or reduce Stan’s role to that of pitchman, but that’s not fair to any of them. There was genius to spare in Marvel’s bullpen.

Lee’s is a remarkably diverse legacy. It’s impossible not to mention Spider-Man, in whom Stan and Steve Ditko (with help from Kirby and, later, John Romita) created a teen hero at a time when the youth culture in America was in the ascendant, but the dominant mode among that other company’s heroes was “Super-Dad.” With The Avengers, Lee and Kirby (and later Don Heck) built a team book that lost some of the cosmic grandeur and weirdness of the FF but amped the soap opera elements to 11. X-Men, even with an all-white cast, made a compelling case for diversity. The Hulk managed to be a hero despite his incredibly poor impulse control.

The list goes on and on, and includes another Lee and Kirby creation: Black Panther, the first major black superhero in mainstream comics. Lead by Stan, the mostly-Jewish lead creators at Marvel didn’t hesitate to sneak messages of religious and racial tolerance into their books, and the character of the heroic African monarch from a scientifically advanced society remains resonant, perhaps more than ever. Just last year, the movie was doing huge business while a 1968 “Stan’s Soapbox” column on hate and prejudice went viral after RZA cited it at a tribute event.

The energy in those ’60s Marvel books is undeniable. It was boundless. Addictive. And you still get the same charge reading those issues today. They’re all exploding with art and ideas, with knowing asides and fourth-wall breaking moments that invite you in, even decades later. The hip tone wouldn’t work without the sense that everyone is having a tremendous amount of fun—even if we can guess that they weren’t always.

Though Stan’s relationship with the company in later years was complicated and sometimes contentious, his remains the human face of Marvel in the hearts and minds of fans—even those who’ve never picked up a comic. His later projects never quite matched the critical and artistic success of his ’60s collaborations, but he retained an enviable amount of energy well into his 90s—doing new work in comics, visiting conventions, creating a charitable foundation, putting out a comic autobiography and, of course, making appearances in pretty much every single Marvel-related movie and TV show. (Of which there are, of course, very, very, very many.) He ranks as Hollywood’s top-grossing executive producer simply for having his name on so many of the biggest movies of all time. Almost 80 years after he first walked in the door of what became Marvel Comics, Stan saw his co-creations conquer the entertainment world. Only in the last year or two, and following the death of Joan, his wife of seven decades, did he really slow down.

Impossibly, these are just bits of Stan’s resume, and pieces of his bio: all very impressive, but only part of the story. Anyone who’s ever even loved superheroes grew up with Stan Lee: his creations are essential to our pop culture landscape, sure, but that face and voice have been in cartoons, movies, and TV shows for as long as any of us can remember. He’s been a smiling ambassador for the good and tolerant bits of comics culture, reminding us that it’s OK at any age to love mutants, Hulks, and Things; teens who dress like spiders and Russian spies (who also dress like spiders). Disabled people, including a wheelchair-bound professor and a blind lawyer, weren’t excluded. His heroes were often reformed villains, eschewing the idea that evil is indelible or that good isn’t subject to temptation.

Beside the weird alliteration, bad puns, and cheesy dad jokes, Stan and company gave us big ideas, and endless inspiration. In 2018, as in 1962, is there any more relevant lesson than Uncle Ben’s exhortation to leaven great power with a great sense of responsibility? With a pen, Stan Lee changed lives and created universes. He’ll be missed, but the work is immortal.

Stan Lee, 1922-2018

The post With a Pen, Stan Lee Changed Lives and Created Universes appeared first on The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.

The Long Price Quartet, by Daniel Abraham
A decade ago, Daniel Abraham, one half of the pseudonym James S.A. Corey (The Expanse novels and TV series) and a frequent collaborator of George R.R. Martin’s, quietly began one of the most complex and emotionally affecting epic fantasies of the 21st century with The Long Price Quartet. The series garnered critical accolades but remained under the radar and criminally underrated (the fourth volume was never even released in paperback). That will hopefully change with the release of this omnibus edition, including all four volumes of the series, each of which tells a standalone story that is connected to the others in ways that surprise and satisfy as the narrative jumps forward in time: the main characters are teenagers in book one, then adults, then middle-aged, and finally elderly; characters born in one book appear as major players in later chapters. Set in a universe where so-called “poets” are able to shape concepts into physical reality, a fragile system of city states survives in the wreckage of a once-mighty empire, it’s a remarkably different reading experience than much of epic fantasy. You’ll want to read this massive all-in-one volume all the way through.

Vita Nostra, by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
Marina and Sergey Dyachenko stand with the best writers of fantasy in Russia, but very little of their work has been translated into English. Hopefully, Vita Nostra—which has been hailed as perhaps their greatest work (it was named the best fantasy of the 21st century by the attendees fo Eurocon 2008)—will begin to change that. It’s the story of a young girl named Sasha who, after a series of bizarre and disturbing events, is enrolled against her will in the mysterious Institute of Special Technologies, where she will learn a very peculiar sort of magic—think philosophy and linguistics rather than spells and wands. Hogwarts this isn’t—the Institute is a cold, austere place, and Sasha’s exploration of magic offers all the charm of cramming for a post-grad final—but the novel somehow makes her coursework thrum with the drive and suspense of a thriller, all the way through the mind-melting ending.

Terran Tomorrow, by Nancy Kress
In the final volume of Nancy Kress’s trilogy based on her award-winning novella Yesterday’s Kin, the survivors of a last-ditch diplomatic mission to treat with the aliens who years earlier had visited our planet and brought with them a deadly plague returns in defeat. Upon arrival, the human delegation discovered a barren world rather than the advanced alien civilization they expected. And due to the time dilation of interstellar travel, when they make it back to Earth, they discover the plague has worsened, leaving only scant survivors. There is little time left for the returning scientists to use what little information they gathered on their journey to fight back, and find a cure for the extraterrestrial disease that is killing the human race.

The Winter Road, by Adrian Selby
Self-professed Tolkien fanatic Adrian Selby’s second novel (after 2016’s Snakewood) is far grimmer than anything you’ll find in Middle-earth. It’s the story of Teyr Amondsen, a warrior without a home leading a band of mercenaries protecting a merchant caravan. They’re headed into the Circle, a wilderness of eternally warring clans, in order to establish a trade route that could bring peace and prosperity to the land. The soldiers use a variety of plant-based substances to enhance their fighting abilities—and they’ll need every one of them, as a new warlord has begun uniting previously independent clans, making Teyr’s noble goal of taming the wild seems perpetually just out of her grasp.

Bedfellow, by Jeremy C. Shipp
Acclaimed horror writer Jeremy C. Ship offers up another slice of his dark imagination in this short novel, which charts the slow decline of a family forced to learn to live with the strange, human-shaped thing in a Space Jam t-shirt that settles into their home and refuses to leave. At first, the intruder terrifies the Lund family—but then, he is not; the creature seems to have the power to edit memories; as soon as the family has accepted him as a homeless man who saved their son from choking as they dined at a restaurant, he becomes a friend from work, a distant relative, even father Hendrick Lund’s twin brother. As the invading entity works to complete his own special project in the Lund’s spare bedroom, he continues to manipulate their minds, using their worst feeds and misdeed against them. Shipp constructs a constantly self-editing narrative that is all the more compelling for its shifting strangeness.

Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Tasha Suri draws on the history of the Mughals in her debut novel, set in the fictional Ambhan Empire. Mehr is the unacknowledged daughter of the governor of Irinah, an Amrithi descended from spirits. The Amrithi are outcasts, both desired and feared. Mehr is protected by her status until she performs magic, drawing the attention of the ancient, immortal founder of the empire and his disciples (known as the Maha), and leading to a forced marriage aimed at ensuring the dominance of the empire and the immortality of the Maha. Trapped by a suffocating social system and her own dire importance to the established order, Mehr must use her intelligence and courage to survive—and avoid waking the vengeful gods themselves.

The Sky-Blue Wolves, by S. M. Stirling
S.M. Stirling reaches a milestone with The Sky-Blue Wolves, the 15th book in his Emberverse series, the concluding book of the sub-series that began with The Golden Princess, and the final book of the Change, which encompasses some 18 novels and yet more short stories. We’re now decades past the titular Change that caused all electronics and most machines to stop working, and the world has become a very different place than it was, with redrawn borders and new powers to covet and fear. Crown Princess Órlaith Mackenzie struggles to preserve the peace her father the High King forged in the Western United States. With her ally Empress Reiko of Japan, she takes on the Yellow Raja, who have kidnapped her brother Prince John, and will have to face the Sky-Blue Wolves streaming out of Mongolia, riding under the ancient flag of Genghis Khan and seeking to conquer the world entire.

Creatures of Want and Ruin, by Molly Tanzer 
Molly Tanzer does it al; from her debut novel, named best book of 2015 by i09, to the “thoughtful erotica” she edits at her magazine, Congress, she’s proven to be one of the most distinct voices in contemporary SFF. Her followup to last year’s Creatures of Will and Temper mixes a dash of F. Scott Fitzgerald and a shake of H.P. Lovecraft into something wholly original. It’s the Prohibition Era. Ellie West engages in bootlegging in a desperate bid to pay her bills, and winds up acquiring some extremely unusual moonshine, which she brings to a party thrown by the out-of-her-depth socialite Delphine Coulthead. The supernatural liquor—brewed from poisonous mushrooms by a cult of devil worshippers— triggers horrifying, realistic visions of destruction, and hinting at the cult’s plans to drag the world back to “the good old days.” Delphine and Ellie must work together to figure out what’s real, what’s not, and what it all means. When the cult’s actions become extremely personal for Ellie, the stakes rise accordingly, as Tanzer balances wink-wink references to contemporary politics with pulpy tropes and solid storytelling.

The Night Angel Trilogy: 10th Anniversary Edition, by Brent Weeks 
Weeks’ debut novel The Way of Shadows was an instant hit when published in 2008, launching the career of one of fantasy’s best modern writers. This special 10-year anniversary edition collects all the three books of the trilogy (continued in Shadow’s Edge and Beyond the Shadows) chronicling the story of an orphan named Azoth, who trains to become an expert assassin, using magic to augment his deadly capabilities, then evolves into something greater—the fearsome Night Angel. This omnibus—which features a slick, striking all-black cover—offers the perfect opportunity for longtime fans to commemorate a landmark series, and for new readers to be introduced to the author’s skill at building intricate characters and compelling worlds. Also available in a signed edition from Barnes & Noble, while quantities last.

What new books are on your buy list this week?

The post This Week’s New Sci-Fi & Fantasy Books: Alien Viruses, Defying an Empire, and the Language of Magic appeared first on The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.