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bloodygranuaileI picked up Patricia A. McKillip’s short story collection Wonders of the Invisible World several Readercons ago, and, like too many of my Readercon purchases, it sat around for a while. Last May I almost purged it while I was packing my books up to move; I rescued it largely out of guilt when I got the news last May that McKillip had died. I’ve never read any of her novels. I’m glad I didn’t purge the book, though, and I was prodded to actually read it by a Goodreads update that a friend of mine was also reading it. If I get on it now I’ll have someone to talk about it with, said my brain, and I chucked it into my bag last weekend, and started reading it in the bath at my mother’s place.
I am, as I have mentioned before, not very good at reading short story collections, although I seem to be very good at buying them, and when I do read them I tend to enjoy them enough that I think Hey, I should read these more. Wonders of the Invisible World has been no exception–some of the stories are sad and some are humorous; many have the comfortable dreamlike feel of most good fantasy short stories, of a little glimpse of a big world that isn’t overexplained, or sometimes even explained at all.
A few of the stories feature nineteenth-century British artist types of the sort that make all their friends pose like mythological figures for hours while they paint them and talk about poetry and whether women have souls and goofy shit like that, and these I found probably the most charming, because I have a weak spot for the Romantics and their earnest Ren Faire nerd bullshit. One of them involves a woman artist riding a kelpie to get away from a pushy douchebag in their social circle (this one is particularly satisfying because the douchebag actually realizes what a dick he’s being and decides to shape up); another involves the myth of the Jack o’ Lantern/will o’ the wisp on the moors of somewhere-or-other. They both made me want to have another pre-Raphaelite party (I’d have to clean up my backyard first).
While many of the short stories involve some element of magic being experienced by our protagonists in our world (or what seems like it), there are a few proper secondary world fantasies; these were a little longer and were probably my favorites of the ones that didn’t involve British pre-Raphaelites. “Knight of the Well” was a fun tale about a city with a magico-religious relationship to its water, which was threatened when the various water sprites and other nautical critters started acting up for reasons unbeknownst to the Water Mage, the Water Minister, and the sullen, lovestruck knight Sir Garner Slade. Garner is subjected to various indignities and shenanigans before the conflict is resolved, and it is very funny. I also enjoyed the little fairy story “Byndley,” about a wizard who had stolen something from the Fairy Queen and was having an arduous time attempting to return it.
These stories were all originally published between 1990 and about 2007 (the collection was released in 2012), and there’s a comforting familiarity to them even though I wasn’t previously familiar with McKillip as an author–they were written in a time that spans my formative years and so I guess will always feel the most “normal” to me, neither too old-fashioned nor too contemporary. The one thing where my sensibilities have changed enough that it kind of sticks out is the casual absence of queer people; other than that, this is just the kind of post-Angela Carter fairy-tale-influenced fantasy that I feel at home in, where the women have become people but nobody yet talks like Twitter has been invented. I should maybe check out her novels.
I am, as I have mentioned before, not very good at reading short story collections, although I seem to be very good at buying them, and when I do read them I tend to enjoy them enough that I think Hey, I should read these more. Wonders of the Invisible World has been no exception–some of the stories are sad and some are humorous; many have the comfortable dreamlike feel of most good fantasy short stories, of a little glimpse of a big world that isn’t overexplained, or sometimes even explained at all.
A few of the stories feature nineteenth-century British artist types of the sort that make all their friends pose like mythological figures for hours while they paint them and talk about poetry and whether women have souls and goofy shit like that, and these I found probably the most charming, because I have a weak spot for the Romantics and their earnest Ren Faire nerd bullshit. One of them involves a woman artist riding a kelpie to get away from a pushy douchebag in their social circle (this one is particularly satisfying because the douchebag actually realizes what a dick he’s being and decides to shape up); another involves the myth of the Jack o’ Lantern/will o’ the wisp on the moors of somewhere-or-other. They both made me want to have another pre-Raphaelite party (I’d have to clean up my backyard first).
While many of the short stories involve some element of magic being experienced by our protagonists in our world (or what seems like it), there are a few proper secondary world fantasies; these were a little longer and were probably my favorites of the ones that didn’t involve British pre-Raphaelites. “Knight of the Well” was a fun tale about a city with a magico-religious relationship to its water, which was threatened when the various water sprites and other nautical critters started acting up for reasons unbeknownst to the Water Mage, the Water Minister, and the sullen, lovestruck knight Sir Garner Slade. Garner is subjected to various indignities and shenanigans before the conflict is resolved, and it is very funny. I also enjoyed the little fairy story “Byndley,” about a wizard who had stolen something from the Fairy Queen and was having an arduous time attempting to return it.
These stories were all originally published between 1990 and about 2007 (the collection was released in 2012), and there’s a comforting familiarity to them even though I wasn’t previously familiar with McKillip as an author–they were written in a time that spans my formative years and so I guess will always feel the most “normal” to me, neither too old-fashioned nor too contemporary. The one thing where my sensibilities have changed enough that it kind of sticks out is the casual absence of queer people; other than that, this is just the kind of post-Angela Carter fairy-tale-influenced fantasy that I feel at home in, where the women have become people but nobody yet talks like Twitter has been invented. I should maybe check out her novels.