No shadow living ever bore a scar

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What a lovely lovely review! Furiously inventive, casually intricate --that is wonderful praise. (I really like "furiously inventive")

I read "Swanswatch"--at your recommendation--and really liked it. I should read more.

[sovay]

What a lovely lovely review!

It's a lovely collection! I'm so glad it finally exists!

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

That title story is lovely, and I've just found and bookmarked "Swanwatch". Thanks so much for sharing this, and I hope the rest of the collection is equally pleasing to you.

[sovay]

That title story is lovely, and I've just found and bookmarked "Swanwatch".

"Between Two Dragons" and "The Unstrung Zither" are also favorites of mine, but I just read a story out of the middle of the collection, "Effigy Nights"—it proceeds logically from a premise of folklore (paper cutouts, animated by the patron stories of the city they represent in resistance of an occupying force) in a reasonably familar setting of planetary fantasy, and then twists and ribbons sideways into something much messier, although no less foreseeable in hindsight. It's here. Buy the book anyway.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

She makes me want to give up writing only slightly less than she makes me want to write more.

[sovay]

She makes me want to give up writing only slightly less than she makes me want to write more.

I'm glad that's how the ratio settles: I want a world with books from both of you.

[selidor]

I inhaled this collection on the flight to Canada. Lee is one of the very few actual hard science fiction writers around at the moment, and I really want to see her get more recognition. (Cordwainer Smith is a definite strong resonance; also Tiptree. But both those authors are so long ago: we need more modern writers to point to in ).
I'd read a bit over half of these before in Clarkesworld &etc, but it was worth coming for "Swanwatch" and the new language novella.

[sovay]

Lee is one of the very few actual hard science fiction writers around at the moment, and I really want to see her get more recognition. (Cordwainer Smith is a definite strong resonance; also Tiptree. But both those authors are so long ago: we need more modern writers to point to in ).

Agreed on all counts. There had better be nominations this coming year.

but it was worth coming for "Swanwatch" and the new language novella.

"Iseul's Lexicon"! I haven't gotten to that one yet. I am looking forward.

I do mean it about "Swanwatch." I read it first in Federations and it's that anthology's reason for existing as far as I'm concerned. It's so deft and there's so much in it and it doesn't feel compressed.

[selidor]

You're in for a treat: I think "Iseul's Lexicon" is one of the better stories in the book. It's also nice to see the story being given a bit of space: the compressed knife-slash of poetic prose is good for many of the ideas in this collection, but getting to stay with a story's characters for longer is a welcome luxury when so many of these stories are short-form.