Review of David Anthony Durham's Acacia

David Anthony Durham is an accomplished writer. He has earned much praise for historical novels such as Gabriel's Story, Walk Through Darkness, and most recently for Pride of Carthage. He has won quite a few awards for those novels, including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Fiction Award and the Legacy Award. So it was with great curiosity that I read Acacia: The War with the Mein, as this is Durham's first foray into fantasy writing.

On the surface, Acacia appears to be set in a rather familiar world: ancient empire ruled by a kindhearted king, dark and mysterious forces gathering in the northern regions, mystical magi once powerful but now exiled from the realm. Sounds like a ready-made world ripe for exploration of the coming of age experience and how good will try to resist evil. Or perhaps it will resemble George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire in its protagonist center of a beleaguered father and four children (two boys, two girls) who are fated to come to grips with a world that is not that of fairy tales, to whom separation will lurk around the corner, ever followed by betrayal and the risk of capture by enemies.

However, appearances can be quite deceiving and in Durham's case, quite rewarding when one delves below the surface features of the story. The Acacian realm, ruled by the Akaran royal family, might appear to be prosperous and sedate on the outside, but there are troubling references to things such as the Quota, Mist, and the looming Lothan Aklun peppered throughout the first section and explored in more detail in the latter two sections of the book. The national myth about how Acacia was founded by a glorious ancestor named Tinhadin, who established the major traditions of the Akaran kingdom, is challenged by revelations from the purportedly "evil" Hanish Mein and the banished Santoth wizards. Things never are quite what they seem and it is with this backdrop that Durham's story really begins to unfold.

Durham writes from a limited third-person point of view perspective. His characters express their thoughts in sentences that brim with description but which manage to avoid going into excess. Sometimes, a lot is said in just a few words, as evidenced below when Corinn reflects on her mother's illness early into the novel:

As painful as this was, it was compounded by the fact that she saw herself in each portion of her mother's dying body. Her mother had given her the shape of her face, the character of her lips, the pattern of lines across her forehead. They had the same hands: the same rate of taper and length, the same character to the knuckles, the same thin fingernails, the same off-kilter slant to the small finger. The girl of ten had held between her palms an aged, decaying, fading grip on herself, like some strange conflation of the past with the present or the present with the future.

Though she often schemed the days away with youthful optimism, part of her was nagged by the fear that she would not live out the year. Or if she did it would be only so that she would first gain everything, then lose it all, then die. She had felt this way when she was ten, and then eleven and twelve and so on, but still the feeling was as strong as ever. The fact that she balanced these morbid thoughts with an otherwise effervescent nature was as confusing to her as it would have been to those who viewed her from the outside. She hid her darker musings as best she could, both alarmed by and ashamed of them. She often reminded herself that every living being faced death; few of them were offered a life of such rich potential as she. And perhaps she was wrong. Maybe she would live a long and joyful existence; maybe she would even find a way to live forever, ageless and untouched by illness. - Acacia, p. 52-53

Some might find that to be a bit too impersonal or "overwritten"; I did not. Instead, what I noticed is that little scenes such as that in the early section serve to foreshadow later personality developments. The Corinn of the later chapters is reflected well in that little passage. Each important character receives similar treatment. Although some fantasy readers may long for a character-centered point of view á la Martin, for example, Durham's approach allows for a more condensed approach towards exploring the world of Acacia and it's background. Durham writes well and he writes with a purpose. He easily could have had this opening book to a trilogy become a two or three book introduction, but his combination of spare description and excellent use of limited third-person point of view enable him to tell a sweeping story of character development and revelation of the world about in a single 576 page novel that concludes satisfactorily while still leaving enough issues unsettled as to leave space for the planned second and third volumes.

This is not to say that all readers will have an easy time getting into the novel. Sometimes the hardest part of the novel to write is the beginning and for those who are more used to action-oriented scenes, the focus on character development and the introductions of many PoV characters might make for rather slow reading at first. However, the rewards to be garnered by a close reading of this section are immense, as doing so will allow for a deeper understanding of the mechanics of Acacian society and how those mechanics often will have a ghastly effect on how the protagonists and antagonists alike are going to view the world around them. This is especially seen towards the end when one main character appears to succumb to the expediencies of control without understanding fully the implications behind ruling wisely. This world has many enemies. The most insidious do not (yet) have a human face, but they certainly are all the more disturbing for how easily they can corrupt well-intentioned people into giving into what is more easily done.

And this touches upon one of the layered themes of Acacia - alienation from intended purpose. From the creation "myth" of Acacia to the present situation, good intentions have gone horribly astray. From what has happened to the Santoth to the sources of the Hanish Mein attack, so much revolves around the forgetting of the ties that unite us in place of forging ties that bind people in often absently cruel fashions. One cannot read Acacia without seeing copious examples of our inhumanity to each other being reflected in the choices and actions of the characters. It is a fantasy in setting, but one which mirrors our own "real world" in many thought-provoking ways. There are levels here, levels with chains attached.

Summary: Acacia is a rewarding, reflective first novel in a planned trilogy that evokes much of our world and its history in its telling. Characters are written from a limited third-person PoV, with a focus more on character development than on action scenes. Very well-written, with descriptions revealed in small segments rather than in pages-long infodumps. Highly recommended for readers who enjoy historical fantasies and those who have read Durham's earlier work. One of the better epic fantasy openers that I've read in recent years.

Interview with Patrick Rothfuss, Part I

I'm crossposting this over at wotmania:

Patrick Rothfuss is the author of The Name of the Wind, the first of a trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicle detailing in (mostly) first-person narrative form the adventures and experiences of Kvothe - musician, magician, thief, assassin, and apparently an all-around legend-in-his-own-time badass. This novel, Rothfuss's first, is drawing quite a bit of acclaim from many parts of the blogosphere and spec fic websites. Pat was kind enough to agree to do a two-part interview with me (trust me, for full effect, two parts are needed for all of this). In the first part, we discuss briefly his background, reading fantasy while writing, how the story "reads," "worldbuilding," and tropes and sexism. But without further ado, since it's past 4 AM and I'm rambling, Part I:

Sometimes in order to understand a book, one has to know something about the author who wrote the book. What can you tell us about yourself, your background, and how it might relate to the creation of The Kingkiller Chronicle?

I don't think people need to know much about me to understand the book, or to enjoy it. The book stands by itself. Over the last several years, my life has been all about writing these books, but the books aren't about my life.

In the last couple of months people have come up to me, asking questions along the lines of, "Did you model the Masters at the University after your college professors?" I hate to tell them, "No" because it seems they really have their hearts set on it. I think they want the book to be based on something real because it feels real to them.

That said, I suppose it does help to know one piece of my background. I've been reading fantasy my whole life. That relates to the creation of the book. Because when I sat down to write it, I decided I wanted to do something a little different. The only ways you can avoid being cliché is by knowing your genre really well.

Fair enough, but you said something at the end that strikes me: knowing the genre. When you are writing, do you ever take a reading break and read within the genre, or are you much more likely to avoid reading genre fiction, as is the case of many other authors who have claimed a fear of having whatever they read then contaminate their works-in-progress?

While I understand the fear of contamination, as fears go I think it's a little silly. Do chefs not eat while they're creating new dishes? Of course not. Similarly I don't stop reading when I write. I'm a narratavore. If I don't get stories into me, I start to starve.

That said, I did read the complete works of sir Arthur Conan Doyle over the course of a week back in '96, and Kvothe turned into Sherlock Holmes for a chapter. It does happen. But it should be easy for a writer to spot and correct when it happens. That's no reason to stop reading....

Then again, I read really, really fast. I'll read a book under 400 pages in a day, provided it's interesting. So it's not like I'm immersing myself in someone else's text for weeks and weeks. The only reason I had that problem with Holmes was because I read ALL of Doyle at once. If I'd spaced him out with something else I probably would have been fine.

So, there really isn't anything lost-lasting to that adage that Borges adapted that said that when someone was quoting Shakespeare, he/she became Shakespeare? I thinking of 10,000 enraged monkeys right now typing away furiously to me, trying to refute me with a soliloquy.

You lost me.

I think it’s one of those metaphysical things best left to the imagination and out of an interview, le sigh. So moving on...

When I finished reading The Name of the Wind, I remarked that one of the strengths of the story to me was that it sounded more like someone telling a story rather than writing out a story. In writing the book, did you ever read parts of it aloud to get the pitch and tone 'just so,' or was there another technique that you used to craft the passages to be more "oral" in feel?

Reading aloud sounds like a good idea, but honestly, it doesn't work very well. Good dialogue in a book doesn't actually bear much resemblance to real-life dialogue. For example, if you've ever seen a word-for-word transcript of people talking, it doesn't read off the page very well. The trick is to make it *seem* like it's being spoken, not to make it speakable.

That said, there were some tricks (or you could call them techniques, I suppose) I used to make the story sound more spoken than written. Sentence fragments, for example. I used a lot of them because that's how people really think and talk. I used more casual language too, partly for the spoken effect, and partly because I didn't want the book to come off as dry and stiff.

One of the terms that I've heard bandied about, not just for The Name of the Wind but for a great many "secondary world" novels, is "worldbuilding." How would you define such a concept and how important of a role does it play in your stories?

Worldbuilding is key in good fantasy. Or at least it's the key to the sort of fantasy I enjoy reading. I want the world the book is set in to feel real. More than that, it should make sense. It should be internally consistent.

What do I mean by this? Well... if everyone in your world is riding a dragon, and dragons are carnivorous, then you better realize that that's going to have a huge effect on the industry and economy of your world. A horse can graze, a carnivorous animal can't. Similarly, if you've got a bronze age society, and you have a city with a million people in it. Well.... shit. You better have a really good explanation for me as to how they all find enough to eat every day.

It's like someone trying to build a house and never using a T-square. It'll keep the rain off, sure. But it's going to be ugly, and anyone who ever actually seen a nice house is going to know the difference.

Now for the second part. The key to good worldbuilding is leaving out most of what you create. You, as the author, had damn well better know the where all that dragon food comes from, but that doesn't mean that I, as a reader, want to read a five thousand word essay about you explaining it to me. I don't need to see the math, but I can tell by the details you provide whether or not you've thought these things through to their logical conclusions.

While I agree with what you said there, part of me, that smartass know-it-all grad student type, that part is puzzled by one thing related to this: Is worldbuilding fundamentally anything different from a super setting or local color, besides the author obviously having to have a world that isn't ours necessarily? Also, in your opinion, is it much easier or much harder to engage in a blank-slate sort of worldbuilding as opposed to having to work within the confines of established notions that in England, people speak English with different accents than those of Americans and that the food is reputed to be worse there?

Hold on, grad student?

*Pat goes to ask Uncle Internet a question or two*

Shit. I should have guessed. Academia has crudulated your God-given simplicity of expression, boy. Look at the size of that question. It's a hundred words long, and there are only two sentences. Sweet baby Jesus. You know what I could do with a hundred words?

What? Besides construct a world out of it? Then again, would epic academia be a fun, exciting, adventure-filled cathartic read, or would there something a bit too much on the human condition in it? Would there be an academic, if he or she were being interviewed about pedantic wordbuilding, who would dare quote the great Jack Nicholson and say, “you can’t handle the truth!" when it comes to epic clauses?

What? Epic clauses? Are we talking about Santa here? I dare you to either diagram that last sentence or re-write it using sentences with no more twenty words and one comma. I double dare you.

You’re on. As soon as I can figure out how to do that drawing/line symbol thingy here. My 5th grade teacher would be so proud of me! But I do know that “would there be an academic” is the beginning of a conditional if-(minus) then clause that contains multiple conditions in there, thus opening up the possibility for lots of epic clausal sequels. Or have I just been bullshitting too much here with too little rum to make it work?

Wow. Okay. You're taking the hard way out. I guess you're more attached to your commas than I thought.

In brief, worldbuilding is different than setting in my opinion. Setting is a room. A backdrop. It's scenery. But without good worldbuilding, you can't have realistic feeling scenery. You can't have cool, unique backdrops for your story.

Also, worldbuilding touches all aspects of your story. It touches plot and character as well. If you don't know the culture your character comes from, how can you know what he's really like? What god does he worship? How does he feel about other countries, races? How does that culture treat women? Do they have a strong ruling class? How does he feel about the government? Does he see a guinea pig as a pet, or as a food animal?

If you've build a good, solid world, you should know the answers to most of those questions. That means you know your characters on a much deeper level than you would if you just shrugged your way into a cookie cutter fantasy world.

Also, any realistically complicated world has problems. That means that you don't have to go scraping around for plot ideas. If your world is rich and complex, your story will complicate itself.

I never seem to take the easy way out But in all seriousness, this is a good answer. Moving on...

Looking at fiction writing of the past generation or so, what trends have you seen that may have influenced your writing? Besides the positive, what were some of the more negative trends or tropes that you wanted to avoid?

Unfortunately, a lot of fantasy is chock full of sexism and racism. A lot of authors don't even realize they're doing it, and a lot of readers don't know they're reading it. That's what makes it so scary in some cases. I've read some books where I find myself thinking, "When was this written? 1954?"

Over the last couple months I've received a lot of compliments about my female characters. Most of these are from women. When women say that they like your realistic, portrayal of women, that means something. That makes me proud.

I agree that there seems to be this underlying bent towards sexism and racism, mostly in ways to which the authors themselves appear to be blind, but it is curious to see a very real divide among male and female readers as to the likeability of characters such as Denna, for example. What do you think might be some of the characteristics of a Denna that might be unsettling to many (mostly male) readers?

Well, for one I think she's dangerously close to a real person. She's smart, speaks her mind, lives her own life, and doesn't take shit off anyone. That sort of woman terrifies a lot of men.

I half joking, but seriously, I haven't noticed a gender difference in who likes Denna and who doesn't. I know guys who love her, and women who find her off-putting. One guy wrote me to tell me that he had a bit of a crush on her. More than a bit, actually.

It used to bother me that not everyone felt the same way about Denna. Then I had an moment of clarity. I thought to myself. f I took a regular person and introduced her to a dozen different people, I get a dozen different reactions. The fact that people view Denna differently doesn't mean she's a bad character, it means she's a complex, real character.

Once I realized that, I stopped worrying.

***

Part II, to be posted a few days later, will get into favorite authors, fetishes and conventions, a certain tough hypothetical situation for the author, and monkey business. You will not want to miss this!

Upcoming changes

This is a relatively short post, but one that shall serve as an upcoming events type. In the next few weeks, there will be quite a bit of renewed activity, both here and at Other Fantasy. Plans are underway to create a special Reviews section for in-depth reviews of the latest in speculative fiction, as well as a few other wrinkles that ought to please many who visit regularly. We have begun a renewed commitment to bringing to our readers a greater awareness of what looks to be a fine bumper crop of young (or new, if you prefer to think of those over your age as "old", typed with a wry grin) talent.

Here, there will be many more reviews posted, as well as commentary on issues pertaining to the genres of the speculative and their fans. Expect to see in the next week or so an interview with Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind, a review of David Anthony Durham's upcoming Acacia: The War with the Mein, some reflections on the types of writings and stories that I enjoy most, and perhaps even Hobbit frolicking. There may also be a few surprises in store, depending on what can be arranged in the coming weeks. So do keep checking this site for more, as there shall be a lot more exclusive material here than ever before.

Keeping it "real": Reader values, Textual controversies

There is an interesting post over at Westeros that has raised some interesting points in regards to a particular series, that being R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy. Many readers there have taken issue with how the sordid topic of rape and the treatment of women has been presented when juxtaposed with similar traumas suffered by certain male characters there. Some have accused the author of being misogynistic in his writing, of "glorifying" female rape, while not showing the male rape in as "graphic" terms. Others have pointed out that the differences are negligible in descriptive terms; that unlike most other fantasy authors, Bakker has dared to show males suffering sexual violence; and that even if there were more female rapes to male rapes (bean counters?), that such occurrences would be within the norms of the type of society (late antiquity/Crusader era Mediterranean model) presented within the storyline.

But underlying this, I find something deeper and less easily shown than just reactions to one specific problem within one specific epic fantasy series. It appears that despite the claims of many that they read for "escapism" (a claim that I've used enough electronic ink in the past here and elsewhere to refute), that there are indeed certain core Reader values (I'll use this term instead of "cultural baggage," as it sounds more neutral) that are brought to the table
when a Reader begins to read and interpret a Text.

Claims to the contrary, it appears to me that most fantasy readers like a sense of "realism" to their stories. While they might enjoy imagining a "world" such as a Middle-Earth or Westeros or Three-Seas to name just a few of the myriad epic fantasy "secondary world creations," they appear, on the basis of numerous website messageboard posts, to eschew situations or ethics that run counter to theirs. In societies such as most "Western" ones where terms such as multiculturalism and gender equity have become grudgingly accepted at the very least, notions of a fair-skinned, light-eyed colored group battling swarthier, hairy, strange-speaking hordes of malicious intent seems to be at best quaint and at worst downright racist. Hot, sultry babes in latex-like leather fitting, eager to throw themselves at the mercy of the "Hero" have mostly gone the way of the dinosaur, replaced by competent, sophisticated, equal to any male-type of women who combine beauty, brawn, and wiles to make a more perfect package that is intended to symbolize the increasingly equal ground that women play in our own lives, even if there are still some idealizations left to be corrected. And same sex relationships, for centuries in many societies "the love which dare not speak its name," those are being shown more and more frequently as being as mutually loving and committed relationships as more "traditional" heterosexual relationships within the confines of fantasy literature.

All well and good. But what happens when there are discontinuities, when societies are based not on a loving patriarchal model (almost akin to some antebellum Southern comparisons of slavery to a kind-hearted master watching over and keeping his "children" in line, as if they were little more than livestock that needed to be fenced in and managed for the greater good of society) but on more brutal and cynical power structures, where people are not always people in the eyes of the privileged, that women and slaves were little more than chattel, and that rape was viewed as the release of sexual energies rather than as being the brutal imposition of force upon another to make the subjugated feel possessed and owned? In those cases, is the problem of the fantasy society being too "unreal" or being all too "real?"

From what I've observed, it seems that two seeming opposites are conflated at times. Talk about traumas such as rape, and many are going to want it to be more "off screen" or handled in a way showing the rape survivor's (incidentally, my use of this word shows a societal shift in the terms employed when discussing the passive sufferers of such traumas) dignity rather than being treated to any viewpoints of the rapers (rapist being a word that is not active enough, as it implies to me a singular, completed action rather than an ongoing system of unequal power relations) and how they view the world.

But yet our attitudes have changed. In as recent as the two World Wars of the 20th century, it was not uncommon or unexpected of advancing soldiers to "have their fun" and "release their frustrations" on unwilling recently-subjugated peoples. Torture, death, rape - these three all occurred quite a bit. Maybe not exactly encouraged, but certainly condoned on occasion by commanding officers and even practically accepted (in the same way that criminals accept that they will be punished after being sentenced) by the victims. Such a mindset is almost totally alien to us, but yet is often hinted at or displayed explicitly within the confines of many epic fantasies to show not just the "otherness" of these societies, but to demonstrate a bedrock "realism" that such fantasies based on medieval societies in particular must have in order to make their alterations and idealizations of a vanished past more palatable for the readers. Very real and yet unreal at the same time to many.

Is there any "fault" to assign here? Should writers be held accountable and be asked to consider how our society wants to view gender relations, power dynamics, attitudes towards the concept of being "human," etc. rather than almost slavishly (yes, I used this word quite intentionally) taking elements from our own past, from our own presumed and actual crimes, and dressing them up and presenting them in their full grotesqueness to a "modern" audience that wants to consider itself above such misogynistic (I think misanthropic would be a better word to use here, seeing how it's not just one gender but all of "humanity" that I'm considering in this piece, but I'll use for now the term thrown about in that one debate linked to above) notions? To a degree, I would say "yes," but not in the sense of requiring authors not to be sparing of the details of atrocity. I think that in the hands of talented and daring authors, such nasty and brutish details about our past can be used to turn a mirror on ourselves, to see our injustices that parade about in full display, to force us within the confines of an "imagined world" to consider the implications of our beliefs, our actions, and perhaps to inspire us to do something about it. If a writing is particularly brutal but is written with the intent to confront us with our blindness to such inequities, then such a writing might be considered a "moral" story, just as similar plays, poems, and stories (especially the Greek and Roman tragedies of Antiquity) over time have come to symbolize (hu)man's mistreatment of (hu)man. To accuse someone of "glorifying" things such as rape or murder or slavery would mean that the writer would have to not just mention it in detail, but would have to condone it, at least implicitly, rather than just showing how truly "evil" we have been in our pasts and in our presents today towards each other. Referring back to the book in question that sparked this post, I do not see any such glorification of such brutality. Instead, I recall quite vividly (not just in the reading, but in email exchanges with the author as I conducted two interviews with him in 2004 and 2005) that there was a sense of pessimism about our ability to cast off such nasty details of our collective past, especially when so many of us willingly blind ourselves to such horrors by use of things such as certainty in belief or in idealistic codes. So no, I wouldn't think of Bakker as being one condoning such atrocities (as we now at last see them), but rather pointing them out as being part and parcel of humans being blind and needy creatures who want order but yet cannot establish where order emerges from "the darkness that comes before."

However, such reader reactions are neither "right" nor "wrong." They reflect how we see the world. The novelist on the other hand, well... I think I will leave you, dear Reader, with this quotation from Stendhal's The Red and the Black:

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

And sometimes, as Stendhal full-well knew, the novelist is castigated for the mud reflected, being accused on occasion as being the creator of such filth. C'est la vie, o como prefiero decir en español, así es la vida.

"Elitism" is such an ironic title

Ever and anon such accusations are cast about, with some interesting rebuttals, such as this one by John C. Wright. But I cannot help but think there is a better word to describe the various sides/facets presented: insularism.

Go wherever you may go, on the web, around town, at work/school, and you're going to find this rather aggressive strain of provincialism. People not only unwilling to explore other vistas or to consider other viewpoints, but they are harsh and sometimes eager to stop up any discussion that does not center around them.

On the web, fansites in particular can be quite clannish, often displaying this insular attitude that I suspect is near the heart of this seemingly-interminable debate over "elitism." I post regularly at wotmania and have come across quite a few individuals who do not want to consider reading other fiction, much less that of a speculative strain, than that of Robert Jordan's. To a lesser degree, I have encountered similar attitudes at Westeros and Malazan Empire. It seems to be pandemic, only changing its outward forms.

Related to this is an interesting complaint that I have received lately from a few of the regulars at wotmania's Other Fantasy section. On occasion, I will see interesting discussions on other sites/blogs and I will post links to them, in part because it is a matter of common courtesy to the original posters to provide links to their contributions without appearing to have taken a substantial portion of their writings without attribution. Furthermore, when said links tend to be multi-page format with many commentaries (as in the case of blog entries), it becomes quite cumbersome, one would imagine, to provide this for readers who can just as easily click a link and read what they are inclined to read as to make their way through thousands of words to a rather incomplete, unrebutted end.

But yet there are those who refuse to follow links to other sites. It must be "ours," is what they seem to be implying when demanding that most anything of a discussion-oriented (or even sometimes news-focused) fashion be strictly copy/pasted or left unposted. Perhaps I am doing these people a disservice by thinking of them so, but part of me cannot help but wonder if this is but another manifestation of that insularism that I mentioned above. If it be not mine/ours, it is no good to me/us - is that what is happening on the web when it comes to the discussion of ideas? That intellectual theft is better than following a link to see what others are thinking/arguing elsewhere? That the boundaries of discussion stretch only as far as a single URL address and no further?

Perhaps not, but sometimes I begin to wonder if this might be the case. If so, perhaps there's no place like no single home for the wanderers seeking to know and to discuss more than what lies in any single locale.

Shakespeare's Memory

Although I originally intended to write this just for consideration at wotmania, I thought that I would post it here as well for people outside that site to see one of my preferred ways of giving my personal reflections upon a book just read.

I just finished reading the last-written collection of short stories that Jorge Luis Borges wrote before his 1986, collected as La memoria de Shakespeare (Shakespeare's Memory in English translation, contained within Andrew Hurley's omnibus translation, Collected Fictions). Written around 1983, there are only four stories contained within, but I feel that some, if not all of them, ought to be talked about in much the same fashion as his earlier stories from Ficciónes or The Aleph are discussed.

Before I did the virtual version of sitting down to write this review (having already had my tookus in park for a while), I scoured the web for reviews of Shakespeare's Memory. They were scant, perhaps in part because at first they were only available within the omnibus Collected Fictions. Perhaps it's because many reviewers are drawn to the first sparkles of creative light and are not willing to reflect upon the last refractions cast before the life's sun sets eternally. Whatever the reason, I want to devote some words to two of the four stories contained within, "Blue Tigers" and the eponymous story of "Shakespeare's Memory."

"Blue Tigers" is that of searching too far, of having the miraculous given unto you, in the guise of stones that multiply or disappear at will. It is a story that can be viewed as a reflection upon the Almighty and all of His names, or perhaps of our attempts to make order out of things beyond our ken. It was for me a cautionary tale, with multiple possibilities, but also rather straightforward in its storytelling and language. It is not another Tlön, nor did it need to be - it was its own story, possessing a unity of voice and style that did not hearken back to an earlier tale, but instead felt more as if it were written by a more world-wise and weary Borges, one who wasn't content with asking simply "What if?" but rather "Why this, perhaps?"

"Shakespeare's Memory" is one of the better tales that Borges has written. It is a reflection of how the Bard has had an influence on how we have perceived people and motives, but also a musing on how impossible it is to contain that dead man's "memory" within that of the living, vibrant souls, regardless of how "inferior" of a talent that person might possess in comparison. It is also a tale of personality conflation, of a confused jumble of images, emotions, and loves. It is a memory to be passed on rather than kept for oneself. It is, perhaps, a personification of the transmission of literature and ideas and how they are altered and transmuted by each person in line from the past to the now-present towards the future.

These two stories, along with "August 25, 1983" and "The Rose of Paracelsus," represent a Borges that still was continuing to probe questions about Self and Others, among other things. He just wasn't being as whimsical about it as he might have been earlier in his writing career. It would be a grievous oversight for people to neglect his latter fictional works in favor of the earlier work. One would miss out on the maturation process that took place through the various experimental stages that made up the last 50 years of his life. Borges was not a static stylist; his pieces have their own tunes. We just only have to open ourselves enough to consider that the old dog still had tricks to show us that he hadn't done before his last years and not judge the new act by the memories of before, lest it all become jumbled and hazy in our minds.

Hunting for post-modernist allusions in scifi and fantasy

I have to say, this has been bugging me for quite some time. Probably a year and a half ago I was discussing some book review related issues on one of the Polish message boards and wrote that it must be a typically Polish thing to hunt for post-modernist games in fantastic fiction literature. By post-modernist games I mean not only the structure related experiments but mostly all the intertextual tricks so often used by post-modernist writers.

Since alles schon dagewesen it becomes pretty obvious that, whether they want it or not, writers often repeat what their predecessors had written, but there is a certain group that clearly loves dropping various hints and allusions to other works of art (be they literature, paintings or films). This has recently become a popular habit in Poland to use such cultural allusions. What probably started 20 years ago with the publishing debut of Andrzej Sapkowski, currently is a popular thing, obviously loved by authors and readers alike.

We, readers in Poland, are passionate about hunting for such allusions, probably because we believe that makes us 'smart' and 'educated'. While this thesis may be argued, I must say that ever since I started various online discussion, I may have never seen foreign (meaning everyone but Poles) readers discuss such things about popular Western writers. The only example that axtually comes to my mind is a series of posts called 'Climbing Olympos', written by Dan Simmons French translator, when he was working on French edition of 'Olympos', which can be found here, here, here and here

But coming back to that online discussion I had and the argument I raised, namely that Poles must be particularly good in discovering all those little allusions, be that due to their experience or simply cause they are simply better educated. My opponents argued that I cannot know that but in fact I've been visiting various online message board or reading some notable usenet groups for almost 10 years now and honestly can't say that I've seen such discussions led by Brits or Americans. I wouldn't like to sound pretentious or start a war - I'm just curious why it so and why don't you find it interesting to discuss and delve into the background of the same novels or stories we all love reading so much?