Story of the week: "The Bone Swans of Amandale" by C.S.E. Cooney

Two months ago I said I generally disliked fairy tales, so imagine my surprise when I fell in love with Priya Sharma's reworking of Rapunzel in her short story "Blonde." Still, I figured that story would be the exception which still reaffirmed my overall hatred of fairy tales.

Except now I've also fallen for C.S.E. Cooney's novella "The Bone Swans of Amandale," a delightful reworking of "The Juniper Tree" and "The Pied Piper" with a good dash of swan princesses thrown in. Cooney's story takes fabulous liberties with all of these fairy tales and tropes, melding them into a heart-touching yet fun story narrated by a rat named Maurice.

Yes, the novella is narrated by a rat. Likely the best rat to ever narrate a fairy tale. You'll love Maurice even as he gnaws the flesh off dead bodies, as any good rat of the Middle Ages will do.

Perhaps the reason I've long hated reworkings of fairy tales is because most authors merely retell the original stories in modern settings or with different characters, a perfect recipe for banality. But in Sharma's "Blonde" and Cooney's "The Bone Swans of Amandale" the original fairy tales and tropes are mere touch-stones for deeper explorations of life and fantasy. Sharma and Cooney are not content to retell a fairy tale. Instead, they create something totally new which resonates with what came before but isn't beholden to it.

And both authors do this with such wonderful language. Just as Sharma is known for her beautiful short story writing, so too is Cooney known for her lyrical style. "The Bone Swans of Amandale" is a joy to read, with phrases and descriptions which absolutely delight (more so because they're uttered by a rat).

As a side note, Cooney says she wrote "The Bone Swans of Amandale" after seeing a Mercer Mayer illustration of rats — perhaps this one? — in the living room of Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner. For good measure, a comment Theodora Goss made to Cooney then inspired the swan princess character in the story. As Cooney says, "I defy you to spend any amount of time around Theodora Goss and not start hallucinating about swan princesses."

With a backstory like that, you can imagine how deep the fantasy roots reach with Cooney's novella.

"The Bone Swans of Amandale" was originally published several months ago in Cooney's short story collection Bone Swans. The novella is highly recommended, as are all the stories in the collection.

Novel recommendations for October 2015

I'm continuing my tally of the best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2015. Here's how it works: People send me their recommendations, which I add to the previous month's list. The list starts with those novels which received the highest number of recommendations. If I've reviewed a novel on the list I've linked the novel's title to that review.

The people who made the recommendations are named at the bottom (unless they wanted to stay anonymous). While a number of authors recommended novels, none of them were allowed to name their own works.

If you have SF/F novels to recommend send them my way or add them to the comments below (I'll update this tally until the end of October with any new recs sent in). Please limit recommendations to two novels per month per person. People who already recommended novels can send more recs each month. And before anyone even tries, it's not hard to figure out when people are trying to game my tally system. So don't ask people to flood me with recs for your novel.

Novels with multiple recommendations

• Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear (5 recs)
• The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard (5 recs)
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (5 recs)
• The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu (5 recs)
• Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (4 recs)
• Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (4 recs)
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik (4 recs)
• Updraft by Fran Wilde (3 recs)
• Court of Fives by Kate Elliott (3 recs)
• Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (3 rec)
• Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuchibas by Kazuki Sakuraba (3 recs)
• The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (2 recs)
• Tracker by C.J. Cherryh (2 recs)
• The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins (2 recs)
• Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald (2 recs)
• Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (2 recs)
• All That Outer Space Allows by Ian Sales (2 recs)

Novels with one recommendation

• Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak
• Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley Beaulieu
• Vision in Silver by Anne Bishop
• Long Black Curl by Alex Bledsoe
• Dead Heat by Patricia Briggs
• Time Salvager by Wesley Chu
• Gemini Cell by Myke Cole
• The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
• White City by Seb Doubinsky
• Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan
• Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman
• Last First Snow by Max Gladstone
• Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant
• Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
• Dead Ice by Laurell K. Hamilton
• Day Shift by Charlaine Harris
• The Drafter by Kim Harrison
• Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley
• Lightless by C.A. Higgins
• Dark Heir by Faith Hunter
• Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jone
• Angles of Attack by Marko Kloos
• Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace
• Cold Iron by Stina Leicht
• A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire
• Labyrinthian by Sunny Moraine
• The Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam
• Touch by Claire North
• The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
• Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older
• Windswept by Adam Rakunas
• Flex ('Mancer) by Ferrett Steinmetz
• The Flux ('Mancer) by Ferrett Steinmetz
• Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
• An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
• Vermilion: The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp by Molly Tanzer
• The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis
• A Headful of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
• Radiance: A Novel by Catherynne M. Valente
• Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig
• Oracle by Michelle West
• Weathering by Lucy Wood

Many thanks to everyone who shared with me their favorite SF/F novels of 2015: Aliette de Bodard, Richard Bowes, K Tempest Bradford, Maurice Broaddus, Adam Callaway, Robert davis, Diabolical Plots (David Steffen), Shaun Duke, Andy Hedgecock, S.L. Huang, Patrick Kelly, Aidan Moher, Cheryl Morgan, J. Oliver, Jeffrey Petersen, Liz Schiller, Joe Sherry, John H. Stevens, Jonah Sutton-Morse, Zoë Sumra, Charles Tan, Megan Tiedje, Sara L. Uckelman, Jetse de Vries, Eddi Vulić, Sean Wallace, Paul Weimer, Cynthia Wentworth, AC Wise. There were also a handful of people who asked to remain anonymous.

If anyone sees errors on this list (such as novels which weren't first published in 2015), let me know.

Story of the week: The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson

Novellas are back and hotter than ever. Not that they ever truly went away. Rather, publishers simply avoided novellas, saying it wasn't economical to release print editions of tales which were longer than short stories yet far shorter than full-length novels.

Thanks to e-publishing, that view has changed and novellas are booming. One of the best I've read so far this year is The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson.

This story follows the life of Demane as he leads a caravan across the magic-infused wildeeps. As a descendent of god-like beings who once lived on this perhaps-futuristic planet, Demane has powers and abilities beyond regular humans, who label him a sorcerer.

Except that things are not what they seem with Demane. Instead, the world Demane experiences may be merely proof that Arthur C. Clarke was correct and any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But that hardly reassures the people in the caravan, who both trust their lives to what they see as Demane's magic and are uneasy at the events around them which can't be explained.

That is the strength of Wilson's story — the things we can't explain. Wilson does an amazing job using his beautiful language to open up an ambiguous world for readers where what we believe to know isn't always what truly exists. Yet the powerful characters and world-building in Sorcerer of the Wildeeps pulls you through this uncertainty until you have no choice but to accept that in fiction, as in life, we often only learn what happens in hindsight.

Highly recommended. You can read an except of Sorcerer of the Wildeeps here.

Send in your 2015 SF/F novel recommendations

Early next week I'll be updating my monthly tally of 2015 science fiction and fantasy novel recommendations. If you have SF/F novels to recommend send them my way. The only catch is the novels must have been published this year.

My contact information can be found here. Don't forget to let me know if I can publicly thank you for making a rec or if you prefer anonymity.

Limit recommendations to two novels per month per person. And yes, people who already recommended novels can send more recs each month.

In case you missed it, here are last month's recommendations.

Novel of the week: Lightless by C.A. Higgins

I have a love/hate relationship with most hard science fiction. I love scientific accuracy and insight in the stories I read, but I despise how many hard SF authors falsely believe a focus on accuracy and technical details are more important than fleshed-out human characters which whom the reader relates.

There's a reason most people don't read technical manuals for amusement. That's because a story without humanity is not a story. Without realistic characters and drama, all the SF hardness and softness and everything in between matters not a bit.

Thankfully, this is a truth which author C.A. Higgins knows full-well because her debut hard science fiction novel Lightless is the perfect melding of hard science fiction and human drama. Lightless is, in fact, one of those rare hard science fiction novels which even people who don't like hard SF will enjoy.

Lightless is set on the experimental spaceship Ananke, launched by the all-knowing System government to test a new propulsion drive. On board is computer scientist Althea, who, in her love of computers and programming, has learned to ignore the oppressive political system she works for. However, when a pair of fugitives gains access to the Ananke, Althea is pulled out of her computer-focused world and must deal with a series of human and scientific conflicts which could completely destroy everything she knows.

Lightlight has something to satisfy all fans of science fiction, with plenty of action, big ideas, and characters you can relate to. And as a sidenote, Lightlight would make a mind-blowing film if the right director optioned the story. Hollywood, take note.

Lightless is highly recommended.