No shadow living ever bore a scar

Arriving home late last night (day with derspatchel, evening with rushthatspeaks, have I mentioned lately I like this Somerville life), I found a package waiting for me on the coffee table: Yoon Ha Lee's Conservation of Shadows (2013). This is the author's first collection of short stories. I've been waiting for it for years. Lee is one of the writers who feel like cult treasures even when their work appears in professional markets, because it seems impossible that no one has yet handed them All the Awards—these are finely written stories, furiously inventive, casually intricate, and above all intelligent. Graceful hard science fiction exists in the same universe as rigorously extrapolated elemental magic. Mathematical proofs and theorems seed stories the same way other authors figure their work with myth. Genres blur as much as influences and even the shorter pieces pack the emotional density and worldbuilding of books. (Seriously, there are authors for whom "Swanwatch," with its questions of music, trust, and the physical properties of black holes, would have been a first novel.) Especially, Lee retells history through the future in a way I haven't seen from anyone since Cordwainer Smith: I started reading about the Imjin War because of "Between Two Dragons." Language is a recurring concern in this collection. So is war. So is art.

And the title story is a Portal-inflected far-future remix of Inanna's Descent and I love it, not just because it was dedicated to me when it first came out, but because so many writers retell that story (including me) and so few of them show anything new about it. The underworld speaks in this one. I didn't see it coming.

I don't know what else I won't see coming from Yoon Ha Lee, but I am going to read the rest of this collection and find out.