UBC: Dragon in Chains & The Drowning City

[truepenny]

Downum, Amanda [stillsostrange]. The Drowning City. New York: Orbit Books, in press.

Fox, Daniel [moshui]. Dragon in Chains. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine, 2009.

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These are both books that were sent to me in hopes of getting a blurb, and they're both going to get one. What I wanted to say here--aside from recommending both of them--is a comment about how diverse the possibilities are in the genre of secondary world fantasy. Both of these books take place in imaginary worlds. Both reject default-fantasy-Caucasianism. Both are excellent. But they could not otherwise be more different.

The Drowning City takes place in an entirely imaginary city, Symir, which is a point of conflict between the Assari Empire (I suspect the echo of "Assyrian" is not accidental) and its reluctant rain-forest vassal state of Sivahra. The plot involves spies and necromancers and ghosts and demons and a volcano; it's fast-moving and a lot of fun (apparently, it's easier for me to read mysteries than other kinds of plots), and it's very well-written. In particular, the magic system, with its combination of the esoteric and the absolutely down-to-earth, fills me with utmost delight.

Dragon in Chains takes place mostly on the island of Taishu (which is Taiwan in a deliberately minimal disguise) and has dragons and emperors and all kinds of magic. It is written with intense and exquisite attention to language, so that I spent most of it breathless with admiration. It is very much about the effects of "great events" (in this case a rebellion which has hounded the emperor to Taishu) on ordinary people: the protagonists are a scribe's apprentice, a fisher-girl, and a jade miner, and people in authority are uniformly inscrutable and hostile, except for the emperor himself, who turns out to be a kind of inversion of the powerless ordinariness of Han, Mei Feng, and Yu Shan, for the very extent of his extraordinariness makes him personally very nearly as powerless as they are. And each of them, in the course of the novel, comes to have some kind of power of their own--although those powers are all different, all limited and contingent, and all as much grief as anything else. It is an elegiac book, and at the bottom of it all waits the dragon.

As I said, these are both excellent books, and aside from the fact that they happen in imaginary places, they could not be more different.

This is my genre. No wonder I love it.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

I may have lured some people who actually know things about Taiwan into reading it, however, so I have hopes of making other people do my homework for me more information eventually.

(Also, lest people not click through above, I'll reiterate here that nothing blatantly problematic caught my eye WRT cultural appropriation.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I've been pretty tempted to buy this one bring it into work, and see if anybody wants to read it. (I am in Taiwan and everyone else in my group is a local except one Koran expat.) However, I don't know that any of my colleagues are readers in general or fantasy readers in particular; the one woman who I do know read a lot left for a different job last fall.

[themadfish.livejournal.com]

At first I was really excited about something based after Taiwan. Cause I don't know of any other fantasy based off Taiwan. But now that I think about it, I'm slightly afraid of reading it. I'm a very liberal, pro-Taiwan democracy, anti-KMT, second generation American-Taiwanese, raised that way by my parents. I mean, I remember when I was living there in first grade, with my dad off in a protest that turned ugly, seeing it on the news and wondering if I'd see him on TV.

I don't want to be disappointed. It's one of those things that I'm a little too passionate about to read objectively. It could be a book that I'd normally enjoy, but because I'm reading it knowing that parts of it was based after Taiwan, I may end up scrutinizing it for political reasons. I don't want to do that and not give it a chance.

I'll probably read it eventually.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I know that feeling. I wish I knew enough about Taiwanese history/politics to give you an informed opinion.

[moshui.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't think you need worry. The seeds of the book of course came from my time in Taiwan, and the extraordinary history of the last fifty years; but the process from seed to book is so long and so complicated, the end result bears no deliberate relationship to contemporary Taiwanese politics. It's a fantasy, with pirates and jade and a dragon; it certainly shouldn't be read as any kind of allegory.

[themadfish.livejournal.com]

See, I figured it'd probably be something like that. I'm more afraid that I'll try to read it as some sort of allegory when it shouldn't be read as one. Like I said, I'll read it eventually. Just when I'm in the right frame of mind to read it objectively like I would any other book that has elements drawn from different cultures.

[moshui.livejournal.com]

Kate - if it's of any interest to you, here's the first response I've seen from a Taiwanese perspective (http://baladaily.blogspot.com/2009/03/jade-dragons-exiled-emperors.html).

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks!