Alexandra Pierce Reviews Medusa’s Sisters by Lauren J.A. Bear, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older, and The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3 edited by Allan Kaster
Medusa’s Sisters, Lauren J.A. Bear (Ace 978-0-59354-776-2, $28.00, 368pp, hc) August 2023.
Medusa may be one of the most familiar monsters from Greek mythology: snakes for hair, turns anyone who looks in her eyes to stone, eventually killed by Perseus because he looks only at her reflection. You can find carved images of her everywhere from the Roman baths in Bath to the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul. Recently her story has come in for a more sensitive treatment than the ancients afforded her, with novels like Jessie Burton’s Medusa: The Girl behind the Myth. Lauren J.A. Bear’s debut novel Medusa’s Sisters takes Medusa’s story and tells it differently, focusing instead on the sisters of Medusa.
Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa are triplets born to ancient sea gods well before the birth of Zeus and the other Olympians. They are human in form, unlike most of their family, who include the dragons Echidna and Ladon. Stheno and Euryale are immortal, while Medusa is not: she doesn’t have a finite life span, but from her birth it’s clear that she will eventually die. The sisters conform to some stereotypes about siblings: Stheno, the oldest, is the most responsible, frequently worried about her sisters and ignoring her own desires in favor of, particularly, Medusa’s. Middle sister Euryale, on the other hand, is often impatient with both of her sisters, and tends towards self-interest. And Medusa, the youngest, runs into experiences heedless of the consequences. The sisters do everything together as they grow up, and the idea that Medusa will one day die colors all their experiences.
The mythology around Medusa goes straight to the fact that her snake-hair is a curse from Athena, after Poseidon rapes Medusa in Athena’s temple (making the story particularly ripe for feminist retellings), and then progresses to Perseus slaying her. Bear, however, develops the sisters’ lives in much greater detail, by way of other stories from Greek mythology: they are present when Pandora marries the Titan Epimetheus; they visit the newly established Thebes, where Cadmus is king, and party with his youngest daughter, Semele. They come, eventually, to Athens, where they stay with a married pair of musicians. Here, Stheno and Euryale explore very different interests – music and sex – and consequently learn more about themselves, while Medusa spends her time at Athena’s temple. Their lives come apart with Athena and Poseidon and Medusa’s usual fate; Stheno and Euryale are likewise cursed, and together they end up on the island of Sarpedon to avoid killing more people.
Bear does not completely ignore the Perseus aspect of the story; his story is told in a few scattered chapters, so that when he arrives towards the end – as he must – he is not completely unexpected or unknown. He is, though, just a detail; the lives of Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa amount to far more than the culmination of a so-called hero’s journey, as Bear shows here. Indeed, Stheno and Euryale live beyond Medusa’s death because, while their lives are intrinsically connected, they are not defined by their sister.
Taking existing characters who are rarely named, let alone given complex interior lives, Bear tells the story of complicated, fallible, and intensely relatable women. This is a worthy addition to the canon of feminist retellings of Greek mythology.
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Malka Older (Tordotcom 978-1-25090-679-3, $20.99, 224pp, hc) February 2024. Cover by Christine Foltzer.
At the end of The Mimicking of Known Success, Mossa (the Investigator) and Pleiti (the academic) had solved a murder together, uncovered dark deeds at the university, and hesitantly rekindled their romance. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles picks up soon after those events, as Mossa comes to Valdegeld, the university, once again chasing down a case. This time, it’s a missing student. Such an event is not unheard of, even for mundane reasons like an extended holiday or switching campuses without letting anyone know. Given life on Giant – a colony that circles Jupiter where humans live in settlements connected by rings, and transport between them is via train, and there’s nothing but the gas giant below if you happen to fall – it’s also dangerously easy for someone to literally disappear into the depths, never to be found. When Mossa uncovers the fact that a distressing number of people having disappeared from the university over the last few years, not just that one student, she engages Pleiti to help her find some connection between the (possible) victims.
Mossa and Pleiti’s investigations lead them in unexpected directions as they consider the sorts of people who have disappeared from the university over the last few years, and uncover other, possibly related, rumours – of misused funds, inventions stolen, and discontent in some quarters at the way society is functioning. In The Mimicking of Known Success, one of the key issues was around how, and whether, to reintroduce animals and plants to an environmentally blasted Earth, and what that would mean for human recolonization. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is more focused on the realities of living in this new place humans have colonized, and how that society should function and be governed. It’s sympathetic to those who want to suggest and even experience alternatives, without ever suggesting that doing so will be easy.
The Mossa/Pleiti dynamic clearly riffs on the Holmes/Watson relationship. Mossa enjoys the investigations, while Pleiti is pulled in her wake, and Mossa is good at understanding human nature – at least when it comes to (possible) crimes. Pleiti has other commitments calling for her time, but ends up as the narrator of their adventures. The Holmes era is also reflected in the world of the story: a lot of tea and scones consumed; there’s a great deal of fog in the streets, and the use of gas lamps and other gas-powered technology – after all, they do live around a gas giant. However, while Mossa and Pleiti’s relationship may not be perfect, it’s a great deal more equitable than Holmes and Watson’s: Pleiti became appropriately annoyed at Mossa’s assumptions about how they might work together, in the first book, and Mossa has actually learned from her mistakes. Plus, of course, they are in a romantic relationship; figuring out how to be in that relationship is a thread throughout the narrative, given they are both professionals and have established lives in different places. I particularly enjoyed that these two adults act cautiously – not throwing everything over in a grand passion – while simultaneously acknowledging that the passion is indeed there. One of the most interesting moments is their visit to the moon Io, where Mossa grew up. People from Io are often regarded poorly by the people of Giant, so Pleiti is confronted with her own prejudices in that regard.
While it’s not necessary to have read The Mimicking of Known Success in advance of The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles – there’s enough back story to be getting on – it’s such a delight that you really should read it anyway, because then you get twice the Mossa/Pleiti joy. I can only hope that there will be more investigations coming Mossa’s way that will require Pleiti’s assistance (although hopefully no Reichenbach Falls).
The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-264-0, $18.99, 309pp, pb) August 2023. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3 is (obviously) the third volume by editor Allan Kaster collecting the year’s top stories about space and time. All the stories were originally published in 2022, in online magazines (Clarkesworld, Tor.com) and paper ones (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact), as well as in the anthology Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance.
By my reckoning, six of the stories come under the “tales of space” banner. Four of them revolve around humans interacting with alien races, with very different purposes and outcomes: “Bishop’s Opening” by R.S.A. Garcia; “Boy in the Key of Forsaken” by Eric Del Carlo; “The Sufficient Loss Protocol” by Kemi Ashing-Giwa; and “An Expression of Silence” by Beth Goder. “Proof of Concept” by Auston Habershaw, on the other hand, is from an alien’s point of view, as it learns who and what it is. My two favorites here were T.L. Huchu’s “The Mercy of the Sandsea” and Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s “The Sufficient Loss Protocol”. Huchu’s story – entirely about humans, in a future of planetary colonization – is a sobering and timely story about the consequences for individual soldiers who followed orders and thought they were doing the right thing, only to have society and their own hierarchy flip the script. Ashing-Giwa’s story is a deeply chilling examination of corporate exploitation of planetary resources, and of following procedures to their logical conclusion – with dreadful consequences.
Another five stories deal with the question of time. Michael Swanwick’s “The Beast of Tara” deals directly with the consequences of investigating time; Michael Cassutt’s novella “Kingsbury 1944” only loosely, and only possibly, connects with the concept of time travel, at its conclusion. Three of the time stories are my favorites from the anthology. In “The Lonely Time Traveler of Kentish Town”, Nadia Afifi considers the idea of time-travel tourism. Time travelers are a rare commodity, but because they are able to take other people with them when they go back in time, the British government has set up the Historical Tourism Board. Sasha is one such time traveler, who decides to make money on the side by illegally taking someone back to a particular moment in their family’s history. Through both the time-traveling and the incidental worldbuilding, Afifi presents a compelling and troubling vision of social ills, especially entrenched racism. Theodora Goss’s “A Letter to Merlin”, written in epistolary style, presents time travel in a completely different way from Afifi and yet feels similar in the way they both consider issues of interacting with history. Here, Janelle doesn’t personally travel back in time, but instead inhabits the body of someone from the past; in this instance, Guinevere, of the King Arthur stories. Last, and completely differently, Ian R. MacLeod’s “The Chronologist” presents a town where the progression of time has no external referent; instead, it’s dependent on their town clock, which needs to be tended by the Chronologist – a man who comes to town “according to the workings of a calendar… entirely his own.” A marvellously rendered story of small-town issues exacerbated by chronological isolation, MacLeod’s characters and storytelling make this a stand-out.
Indrapramit Das’s story “Of all the New Yorks in All the World” arguably fits into both the space and time categories, but also neither, dealing as it does with a multiverse. It’s a gentle story and is another favorite from the anthology. A few people are allowed to travel between worlds, and they are allowed to courier letters from a person in one universe to their counterparts in others – always going backwards in time, rather than to the same moment. The narrator is one such courier, who then fell in love with someone in another universe; the story revolves around dealing with his break-up and meeting his own world’s version of his girlfriend. It’s beautiful, and thoughtful.
All these stories clearly fit under the “tales of space and time” umbrella, while also having very little in common with one another. They explore different concerns, and come at the concepts of space travel or the issues of dealing with time in radically different ways. Questions of space and time are time-hallowed aspects of science fiction. Kaster’s collation of these stories in one volume demonstrates that – well more than a century after H.G. Wells, for example, wrote about space and time in The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine – authors are still finding new, exciting, and important ways to use space and time to explore contemporary ideas and, just as importantly, to tell rollicking good stories.
Alexandra Pierce reads, writes, podcasts, cooks and knits; she’s Australian and a feminist. She was a host of the Hugo Award winning podcast Galactic Suburbia for a decade; her new podcast is all about indie bookshops and is called Paper Defiance. Alex has edited two award-winning non-fiction anthologies, Letters to Tiptree and Luminscent Threads: Connections to Octavia E Butler. She reviews a wide range of books at www.randomalex.net.
This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.
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