Tag Archives: world: new zealand

The last three NZ fantasies: Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams; Light in My Blood, by Jean Gilbert & William Dresden; The Crawling Wood, by Casey Lucas

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At the end of my list of books acquired in 2020 are these three from the Sir Julius Vogel Award packet; none of them particularly grabbed me, I’m afraid.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped:

What had happened? She’d left Ninky’s (at least she thought she had) and the Number Three had been carrying her forwards (at least she thought it was) and then there’d been someone … a merwoman who had asked in a concerned voice where she was headed … and without even waiting for her reply had taken her by the hand … dangerous, the oceans after dark, murmured the stranger … for one so young … and she’d felt relieved, rescued even, from untold horrors, as they sped forwards together.

Yet another fantasy that failed to grab me in the first fifty pages, so I put it down (well, closed the ebook file with no intention of reopening it). Derivative world-building, and uncertainty on my part as to whether it is aimed at a YA audience or not. You can get Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped here.

(Nice cover though.)

Second paragraph of third chapter of Light in my Blood:

Jack could still see the bioluminescent glow of the strange trees and flowers, the soft backlit atmosphere. Every glimmer. Every shimmer. The smell of Juliper and Bluebells as yet clung to the back of his nostrils.

I quite liked this to begin with – it’s a portal fantasy with teenagers from our world (from an anonymous suburban English-speaking country) becoming enmeshed in the magical and dynastic feuding of the world of Nön while navigating their own emotional connections, and even though it is the second of a series, I found it easy enough to get into and read it all.

But I rather went off it at the end; the continuing drip of minor but annoying typographic errors started getting to me; then there is a sudden yet inevitable betrayal; and then it turns out that we are left on a cliff-hanger to try and get us to buy the next book and find out what happens. I probably won’t. You can get Light in My Blood here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The Crawling Wood:

“You still feeling good about this gig?” he asked Gaz with a tilt of his head. Gaz shrugged a single time, quiet.

I’m afraid that I am pretty jaded with secondary worlds by now, and gave this only a few dozen pages before I gave up. You can read the entire ongoing Into the Mire webseries here.

These were the very last unread books that I had acquired in 2020, only four months after I finished the last unread book that I had acquired in 2019. I have been deliberately accelerating in recent times (also I have been merciless about putting aside New Zealand fantasies that didn’t grab me).

Last books acquired in 2020, read in August 2025 (Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams; Light in My Blood, by Jean Gilbert & William Dresden; The Crawling Wood, by Casey Lucas)
Last book acquired in 2019, read in April 2025 (Joan and Peter)
Last book acquired in 2018, read in November 2024 (The Geraldines)
Last book acquired in 2017, read in January 2024 (Rule of Law: A Memoir)
Last book acquired in 2016, read in August 2023 (Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan)
Last book acquired in 2015, read in November 2022 (Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait)
Last books acquired in 2014, read in October 2021 (The Empire of Time and Crashland)
Last book acquired in 2013, read in October 2020 (Helen Waddell)
Last book acquired in 2012, read in May 2020 (A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese dialogue 2000-2003)
Last book acquired in 2011, read in October 2019 (Luck and the Irish)
Last book acquired in 2010, read in January 2019 (Heartspell)
Last book acquired in 2009, read in December 2016 (Last Exit to Babylon)

That takes me to the fairly small pile of unread books acquired in 2021; I have hopes of finishing them this calendar year. (The 2022 pile is much bigger though.) The 2021 books will start with:

  • The Dream House, by Lee Berridge (shortest)
  • London Centric: Tales of Future London, ed. Ian Whates (unread sf book longest on my shelves)
  • A Tall Man in a Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson (top unread book on LibraryThing, also unread non-fiction book longest on my shelves)
  • Black Mountain, by Gerry Adams (unread non-genre fiction book longest on my shelves)

There will be a bit of a gap as I deal with the holiday backlog.

Dark Winds Over Wellington: Chilling Tales of the Weird & the Strange, by TL Wood

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Second paragraph of third story (“Last Chapter”):

Jebediah Cole came mostly from a place of fiction; imagination touched by the hand of experience, and peppered with a dash of wistful desire. A pastiche of the many strange and dodgy people Maurice once had the misfortune to know. An ex-armed-forces, ex-law-enforcement, leather-faced, battle-worn bounty hunter; he was a solid, deliberate, hulk of a man. Despite his rough edges, arrogance, and sexist attitude — and the fact that he was really little more than a walking cliché —his readers seemed to find the bloke endearing. His fans clamoured to hear more.

I’ve been zooming through my stash of New Zealand fantasy books acquired in 2020 with some disappointment at the rather unoriginal generic secondary world settings, but this one made me sit up and pay attention: these are almost all tales of fantastic intrusion, where the normal world of Wellington, which is realized in rich detail, becomes the unwilling host of something or some things more weird and awful. Most of the stories are very short (thirteen of them in 180 pages), so each basically represents one idea developed as far as it will go. There are a few recurrent themes – manipulative older men, ex-boyfriends named Joshua – but overall I was impressed by the number of different twists that Wood was able to put on a basic structure. Rather a delight. You can get Dark Winds Over Wellington here.

(Posting this early so that New Zealanders will see it.)

This was the shortest unread book of those I had acquired in 2020. Next on that pile, indeed on all three of my 2020 piles, is Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams.

Three New Zealand fantasies: We All Fall, by Helen Vivienne Fletcher; Tyrelia, by S.R. Manssen; Dragon Rift, by Eileen Mueller 

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Three more of the books that I had not got around to from the 2020 Sir Julius Vogel packet. One OK, two less so.

Second paragraph of third chapter of We All Fall:

Luca was there, waiting for me after not being able to talk last night. He grinned as he saw me, and I smiled, happy to have the distraction.

I thought this was OK. A short, effective story about a girl growing up in a circus family, getting to grips with disability, same-sex love and the paranormal stuff that seems to be happening around her. You can get We All Fall here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Tyrelia:

The Golden City was the capital of Medar and home to the Master. It was a conical mountain surrounded entirely by a moat and a tall, gleaming white wall. The only way in was via the drawbridge to the single gateway. The dwellings within the city were perched one above the other on the steep hillside, like decorations on an elaborate cake. Narrow roads wound their way between them. All the houses were whitewashed, with terracotta tiled roofs, and many had pots of brightly coloured geraniums hanging from the windowsills. The Master’s mansion, shrouded in cloud, crowned the city. It was said that it was covered in glittering gold.

This on the other hand failed to engage me and I put it down after fifty pages. The fourteen-year-old heroine is sent on a quest by rather nonchalant elders, and finds herself in a land of plenty which is obviously going to turn out as something more sinister. Possibly didn’t help that it’s the second book in a trilogy where I have not read the first. You can get Tyrelia here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Dragon Rift:

Ezaara was lost for words. Her mind spun. Roberto was captive. Surely Zens would kill him.

This is the third volume in a series of six, and I don’t think the other five would have helped convince me; it’s a world which is a knock-off of Pern with a few imports from Middle Earth, and lost me rather with the super-effective magical healing ointments. I just about managed fifty pages, but no more. You can get Dragon Rift here.

These three had all bubbled to the top of my rapidly dwindling stacks of books acquired in 2020. We All Fall was the shortest unread book acquired in that year, Tyrelia was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves and Dragon Rift was the most popular unread book acquired in 2020. The next shortest is Dark Winds Over Wellington, by TL Wood; the next on the other two piles is Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams.

From a Shadow Grave, by Andi C. Buchanan

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the future, there are many stories of those who go back. Those who go back to find a better time, and those who go back to change their own time. They go back to kill or to save, or for one to achieve the other. These stories centre on particular points in history, feature moral dilemmas and unintended consequences.

Brief but efficiently chilling story of a 1930s murder victim in Wellington, New Zealand, who comes back in three different alternative supernatural ways. One of the Sir Julius Vogel packet from 2020, which contains my dwindling pile of unread books acquired that year. You can get From a Shadow Grave here.

Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan, and The Blacksmith, by Barbara Howe

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Two more stories from the New Zealand pile, which I’ll deal with quickly.

Second sentence of third section of Ventiforms:

Pilot’s seat was a misnomer, really. Tailé just sat. Surprise flew herself. There was a bit of shaking, but Tailé was still able to eat her wrap as they descended. It was good, the eggplant tasted fresh, and the sauce was divine. She complimented the ship on it.

Very short piece about a mother looking for her lost son, and some memorably unusual aliens. Decent world-building for the length. You can get Ventiforms here.

Was my shortest unread book acquired in 2020 (and turned out to be even shorter than I thought). Next on that pile is We All Fall by Helen Vivienne Fletcher.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The Blacksmith:

“Ah, hell, Granny, what’d I do now?”

Third in a fantasy trilogy. I found it very clunky; a world with placenames partly borrowed from Britain and partly made up, with apparently normal Christianity and magic coexisting, and leaden exposition. You can get The Blacksmith here.

Was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Tyrelia, by S R Manssen.

Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed Marie Hodgkinson

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Second paragraph of third story (“The Garden”, by Isabelle McNeur):

Adams left a wife and a kid behind. I don’t know how he did it. I had enough trouble leaving my dog. For the first time in my life I had been glad my parents had already passed.

Collection of stories by Aotearoa New Zealand writers, all of which had previously been published elsewhere. I guess it was in the Sir Julius Vogel packet for 2020 as it won the award for Best Collection that year. A lot of the stories are post-apocalyptic; a lot of them are about how we lose contact with nature. Probably the two best are “Logistics”, by A.J. Fitzwater, which was on the 2018 Tiptree long-list, and “The Glassblower’s Peace”, by James Rowland, which had me looking up Venetian history. You can get Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer.

“Georgia on my Mind”, by Charles Sheffield

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Second paragraph of third section:

It didn’t work out that way. For one thing, I overslept and felt terrible when I got up. I had forgotten what a long, sleepless journey can do to your system. For the past five years I had done less and less traveling, and I was getting soft. For another thing, the rain had changed to sleet during the night and was driving down in freezing gusts. The wind was blowing briskly from the east, in off the sea. Bill and I sat at the battered wooden table in the farm kitchen, while Mrs. Trevelyan pushed bacon, eggs, homemade sausage, bread and hot sweet tea into me until I showed signs of life. She was a spry, red-cheeked lady in her middle sixties, and if she was surprised that Bill had finally brought someone else with him to explore Little House, she hid it well.

When I was doing my first run through stories that won both the Hugo and Nebula in 2004, I wrote:

Back in the summer of 1991 I was finishing up my M Phil in Cambridge, and dropped in one day on my supervisor, who at the time was the curator of the history of science museum. He welcomed me into his office, shuffled through some papers with strange cylindrical diagrams on them, and flourished them at me: “These,” he said, “are Charles Babbage’s original blueprints for the Difference Engine.” He had a tendency to do that. I remember one seminar on Newton where he brought in an authentic 17th-century widget, “just like Newton would have had”, and showed the original owner’s notes of how it had been used, almost casually indicating at the end that the original owner in this case had in fact been Isaac Newton. We would occasionally see the current Lucasian Professor, a post previously held by Babbage and Newton, trundling through the cobbled streets in his battery-driven wheelchair.

Babbage was all the rage in those days, it being the bicentenary of his birth, and with no less than three sf novels published the previous year in which Babbage’s difference engine was actually built (Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, S.M. Stirling’s The Stone Dogs, and William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine), and thus the computer was brought into being a century and a half before Bill Gates. Apart from those three novels and Sheffield’s novelette, which is dated as having been finished on December 31, 1991, there aren’t many stories with that theme, though steampunk as a genre keeps on going. In all three of those novels, the difference engine is at least partly responsible for revolutionising society.

Sheffield, however, takes it in a different direction: what if it were simply built in 1850 as a project of an eccentric couple in the farther flung reaches of the British Empire, and then forgotten? His unnamed narrator and his old New Zealander friend Bill Rigley team up to find out the truth behind the manuscripts located on a farm at the back end of nowhere. In fact, the largest surviving fragment of Babbage’s analytical engine was indeed discovered, along with various papers now in the Wanganui Museum, on a farm in New Zealand in the late 1970s by Garry Tee, to whom “Georgia On My Mind” is dedicated and who “is no more Bill Rigley than I [Charles Sheffield] am the narrator of this story.” However, in our timeline the Babbage material reached New Zealand via Australia in the hands of Babbage’s son and grandson when they emigrated, rather than being constructed from scratch.

Tee made his real-life discovery about the time that Charles Sheffield’s first wife died, in 1977, and the narrator of “Georgia on My Mind” has had a similar recent loss. The theme of nostalgia and loss runs strongly and powerfully through the story, permeating the excitement of the two friends as they look through the papers of Luke and Louisa Derwent from over a century before. Anyone who has ever been bereaved will sympathise with the narrator’s sharp intake of breath as a picture of Louisa reminds him of his dead wife. The setting of New Zealand is also richly portrayed, in the days before Peter Jackson made it as iconic as it now has become. And so we are not really prepared for what happens next.

It seems that the Derwents – a married couple, exiled from England because they were also, scandalously, half-brother and half-sister – had made contact with aliens – or at least intelligent non-humans – on Macquarie Island. One last letter written in 1855 reveals that Luke and the dying Louisa set off to the permanent base of the “heteromorphs”; there is just about enough information in the manuscripts to enable the identification of the site of that permanent base as being South Georgia, in the Atlantic Ocean. (The story’s title has nothing to do with the U.S. state of Georgia, let alone the former Soviet Republic of the same name, where I will be this time next week as I write these words.)

And so, just as the Derwents’ story finishes with preparation for a long and dangerous journey, “Georgia On My Mind” ends with our narrator and Bill Rigley preparing to follow the Derwents to South Georgia. But they will not be alone; word has leaked out, and a host of people from MIT, Livermore and the hard science fiction community are rumoured to also be converging on the island. For some readers, this somewhat recursive twist at the end spoils the story. Not for me. I read it as a tribute, 14 years on, to the support Sheffield drew from his professional and literary colleagues at the time of his bereavement, and a good end to a story whose plot was never intended to be fully resolved.

I should say that Garry Tee of the University of Auckland, on whom the character of Bill Rigley is based, found this review soon after I had posted it in 2004 and we maintained a friendly correspondence until he retired in 2018. If he is still around, he will turn 92 next month, so I do not feel offended that I have not heard from him in a while.

Edited to add, June 2024: Nigel Rowe emailed me to say that in fact Gary Tee died on 18 February 2024, only a few days after I had published this blog post. He was 91. There are two lovely obituaries here and here. Thank you, Gary, for your friendly correspondence with a random chap on the other side of the world.

Coming back to it two decades later, I still loved this story for bringing me back to my history of science days, the most intellectually interesting work I have ever done in my life. I wondered also if E.J. Swift was slightly inspired by it for The Coral Bones. And I think we can all do with a hidden history occasionally.

Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two women characters are Mrs Trevelyan and Louisa Derwent, who live more than a century apart.

The story has not been reprinted in English since 1998, in The New Hugo Winners, Volume IV where I first encountered it. You can also get it in:

“Georgia on my Mind” won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novelette presented in 1994 for work published in 1993. “The Franchise” by John Kessel was also on both final ballots. The Nebula ballot also included two other Hugo winners due to varying year / word count qualifications.

The other Hugos in the written categories went to Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Novel), “Down in the Bottomlands” by Harry Turtledove (Novella) and “Death on the Nile” by Connie Willis (Short Story). The Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo went to Jurassic Park. The other Nebula winners were Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Novel), “The Night We Buried Road Dog” by Jack Cady (Novella) and “Graves” by Joe Haldeman (Short Story).

Next up in this sequence: “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” by Mike Resnick.

Into the Ashes, by Lee Murray

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Major James Arnold studied the tussocked wasteland of the central plateau. Beyond the bleak rolling plains of tundra, the snow-capped peak of Mount Ruapehu dominated the skyline, magnificent despite the flurries of ash on the window pane. It wasn’t the first time Arnold had borrowed the office or stood in this spot, yet never had the situation been so grave.

This was one of the finalists for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards at CoNZealand last year. It turns out to be the third in a series where New Zealand law enforcers find themselves entangled with the ancient forces of Aotearoa, and I felt it depended a bit on having read at least one of the previous two to fully get what was going on. However, it’s well written and suitably tense – in the middle of an evacuation from a volcanic eruption, a group of dangerous prisoners escape and cause even greater mayhem. Will keep an eye out for this writer. You can get this one here.

This rose to the top of my pile of unread books by non-white authors (Murray’s family background is Chinese). Next on that list is another CoNZealand trophy, Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka.