Long Hidden

[psocoptera]

The first thing I noticed about Long Hidden was of course the gorgeous Julie Dillon cover.

The second thing was that it was typeset with almost no margins - was that a deliberate thing, a sort of riff on it being "Speculative Fiction From The Margins of History", that here there are no margins?

I was on page five when I came to the first line halftoned to grey. I spent a while puzzling over why that line - to emphasize? To undermine? It took me until the next grey bit to realize that occasional words, lines, or even pages were just randomly printed halftoned. In some cases they were actually unpleasant to read.

I worry that even mentioning that is the equivalent of making a tone argument - ha, I guess it's literally a tone argument. Obviously it has nothing to do with the quality of the stories. It's just something that jumped out at me; I guess I don't handle very many books that don't have that major-publisher slickness.

Okay, actual review of contents. As a whole, I have to admit I did not end up super enthralled by this anthology. I didn't really know much about the project when I requested the book, except that it was something people were talking about in SFF fandom. It turns out that it's all historical fantasy set between 1500 and the early 1900s that (as far as I could tell without doing research) did not include significant alternate-historical elements, like, did not actually change the outcomes of recorded conflicts. And I think this for me is not so much my favorite genre. I might dig the occasional historical fantasy story that vividly brings to life a time and place, or that's set in a place or period that I've personally visited or studied for some reason, but for the most part what really engages me about historical fantasy is alternate history. How dragons change the Napoleonic Wars. How vaccines change the conflict of the Incas and the Spanish. How time travel saves Europe from conquest by the Aztecs. That kind of thing has a zing for me that nothing in Long Hidden did.

That said, there are a few stories in here that I liked, that I would like to recommend to anyone picking up the anthology and curious about it as a place they might want to start their reading:

"Ogres of East Africa", Sofia Samatar. I thought I wasn't impressed by this at first, but, man, she's got a way with words.
"Free Jim's Mine", Tananarive Due. Man, I don't have quite enough critical vocabulary to talk about the things I want to talk about. This felt very "classic" to me, like, straightforward, simple, powerful, and I enjoyed it, being in many ways a very simple sort of reader.
"The Witch of Tarup", Claire Humphrey. This one made me smile the most (although I was disappointed they didn't end up in a threesome with Mads).
"Diyu", Robert William Iveniuk. Buddhist monk turned railroad laborer vs alien, oh yeah.
"The Colts", Benjamin Parzybok. Okay, this didn't entirely work for me, but I loved the POV and it's the most historically-grounded zombie explanation ever.
"Lone Women", Victor LaValle. I do enjoy a good Enemy Mine.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

I've been feeling sort of similarly, but didn't want to say anything because rosefox is on my friendslist, and I know they are very proud of the anthology. I think the point you make about it being historical fantasy without being alternate history is big for me too — I learned little details about people's everyday lives, but there was only one case where I had to run to Wikipedia to try to figure out a part of history I hadn't understood before, seeing it for the first time through a fun-house mirror. (The one where I had to do that was "Each Part Without Mercy", the one set in Madras, because I had no idea all these different countries were there.)

Reading it as an eBook has at least allowed me to avoid the weird halftone-printing problem, and the other typesetting idiosyncrasies. All my eBooks look the same.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

The only thing I looked up was whether the zombie-creating incident in Colts had really happened. (It did, although presumably with fewer zombies.) I was, uh, pretty disengaged from "Each Part", I barely remember anything about it now.

I sometimes consider how I would feel about authors reading my reviews. I do say a lot of things I wouldn't want to say to their faces, because that would be a really awkward and rude conversation, but that I think might be useful for other people considering reading the book. (Or that are just fun to get to say, okay.) And I try be clear about when I'm just not into something personally vs. think it sucks in some more generally relevant way. I don't know. If more than five people read these maybe I'd have to be more careful?

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it, so I don't have anything to say specifically, but that's interesting about liking alternate history fantasy. I haven't read that much historical fantasy, but most of what I've read has been the kind that doesn't alter recorded history, and I actually dislike alternate history fantasy. Something about the idea of messing with real-world stuff so you end up with clear counter-factuals unnerves me. (Yes I know that's a really weird thing for an avid fantasy reader to say.) If you're going to have dragons in the Napoleonic wars you'd better write it in such a way that other than the fact of dragons themselves everything else comes out the same--the results of the battles, the social progress, whatever--even if the dragons are the impetus for whatever did end up really happening. Whereas fantasy that's simply set in a historical society is just fine for me.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Heh, I love that the dragons actually change things. Not trying to argue, just enjoying that for any given preference there are always people who go different ways on it. ::grin::