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| Collection published: 2021 Contents originally published: 2011-20 Acquired: May 2021 Read: July 2021 |
I really enjoyed Zen Cho's Hugo-winning novelette "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again," about an imugi trying to become a dragon but instead falling in love with a grad student, so I was delighted when I obtained an advance copy of Spirits Abroad, a collection of her short fiction from the past ten years. (There was an earlier edition a few years ago, but this one adds a few stories.) Cho is a Malaysian-British writer of fantasy, and the stories here are organized into three sections.
The first, Here, is made up of stories set in Malaysia. Many, if not all of them, simply take Malaysian folklore beliefs seriously, and tell stories about them in the modern world. I really enjoyed almost all of them; we have stories about an emigrant to America coming home for her grandmother's funeral (but she's a witch), about someone who does smell magic and befriends a cat, about a young girl who gets wishes from a fish pond, about a young vampire. Many are about not fitting in and not meeting expectations because you emigrated, because you're a lesbian, because you can't do as well on tests as your parents would like. They have a certain appeal to the sf&f reader in that the Malaysian "worldbuilding" is pretty immersive, with little explanation of a bunch of terms that I, at least, did not know. But I like that kind of thing in my sf, so why wouldn't I like it when reading about a real culture that is "alien" to me?
The second, There, are stories set in the "West," mostly the UK, but just one in the US, but still largely drawing on Malaysian mythology. "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again" is in this section. Other highlights included a story about an awkward girl trying to save her college roommate from a bizarre stalker (who might be a mythological creature) and "Prudence and the Dragon," which is about a dragon coming to London for a sacrifice of a beautiful maiden... but he falls in love with someone who hasn't even noticed he's there. (This story takes place, I think, in the world of Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown novels.) Again, there's a lot of good stuff here; clever twists on mythology, and nice observation of culture clash. I don't think I bounced off a single story in this section.
Lastly comes Elsewhere, stories set in other worlds. This section is the only one where I really bounced off any stories; I didn't care for one told entirely in a sort of mythological register. I like sf&f... which is not quite the same thing as myth, even if they are related. But there are a couple good ones, "The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote" and "The Terra-cotta Bride"-- the latter is about automata in hell! My favorite was "The Four Generations of Chang E," the book's sole science fiction story, about lunar colonists and the way we have expectations for future generations and neglect the lessons of past ones.
I think I can claim this is the best single-author short story collection I've read in the last year (it edges out Exhalation for me), and I wish the short fiction Hugo Award finalists I'm currently working my way through were as consistently good as this is.
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