mark monday's Reviews > The Future Is Blue

Catherynne Valente is a phenomenally talented author: her writing overflows with creativity, new ways to describe everything from a person to a setting to an emotion, new ways to approach storytelling itself. Her style combines both postmodernism and New Weird techniques, and the lushness of her prose is reminiscent of Angela Carter and Tanith Lee (two of my favorite authors). I loved her novels In the Night Garden and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland.

Unfortunately, this collection was hit or miss for me. There were some wonderful stories (bolded below) but there were also some that I found to be completely unreadable. I'm always down for a challenge, but if things get too silly, too disgusting, and/or too shouty, I find that it's easier to just quit engaging rather than sticking it out and getting increasingly annoyed. Who has the time for that? I do that for people, may as well apply that philosophy to stories too.

All that said, for the most part the stories were perfectly fine. Each one was creative and unique, in their own way. And those stories that I loved - well, I really really loved them. At her best, she's one of the finest and most original of modern genre writers. She has a unique vision and she always goes her own way. An admirable writer.

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"The Future Is Blue" - in a post-apocalyptic future, a girl recounts the story of her life in the floating garbage dump called Garbagetown. A life with a loving twin, unloving parents, and a boy who loves her. A world that hates her because she saved them all from dreaming too big and destroying themselves. An eccentric tale, eccentrically told. Mood: wistful.

"No One Dies in Nowhere" - heron-headed Detective Belacqua has a problem: who has tortured and murdered this woman? In the afterlife, dying should be the least of one's worries! This is an ingenious, fully realized murder mystery set in a bizarre semi-Purgatory, dark yet compassionate. It asks an additional question: does God even care?

"Two and Two Is Seven" - the land of N is full of robots who need caring; their caregiver longs for the King who was once her paramour. This story finds Valente indulging her absurdist, Miévillian side - not my favorite side of the author - but still manages to arrange the fripperies around a core of genuine emotion - and eventually, schadenfreude!

"Down and Out in R'lyeh" - incredibly scatalogical farce, I think, set in Cthulhu's underwater lair. I actually don't know if it was a farce or if it turned into something else, because I stopped reading after not quite 2 pages. It was too disgusting to want to continue. Plus I was eating lunch.

"The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek" - a brilliant one-eyed maker of glass eyes meets her match in a one-eyed beauty from Venice. A clever and fun story. I loved the central conceit of inexplicably paired glass eyes, the second of the pair allowing one to see whatever the first eye is witnessing. A perfect tool for a one-eyed spy...

"Snow Day" - the daughter of a conspiracist mistress to many politicians finds herself no longer alone in her island villa as civilization as we know it appears to be ending: her sole friend has come with a color tv as a birthday gift, and thanks to surprise parthenogenesis, she has an infant-minded replica of herself to care for as well. The synopsis that I just wrote sounds incredibly bizarre. And yet this is a homey, cozy story, in its way. I loved that our heroine was self-taught via classic erotic novels, whose titles are intertitles within the story itself. A sweet tale.

"Planet Lion" - new planet, new species that look like lions, not-so-new human ambitions plus human love for experimentation = fucked-up yet vaguely amusing disaster on Planet X. This was wonderfully different. The many images of bizarre, predatory green lions, neurally-linked and having a taste for brains, shouting out the lovelorn dialogues of the crew they've eaten, was like nothing I've read before. Still not sure if their behavior was due to eating the crew or because of some kind of experimental sludge that was rained upon their world, but I don't really care about absolute clarity in a story this strange, clever, and somehow sadly moving.

"Flame, Pearl, Mother..." - in a nameless walled country whose noble children are born monstrous, a girl with the torso of a tower encounters a diabolist, plus a corpse-prince falls in love. This piece finds Valente in nonsense mode, but more Baum then Miéville. There are stories upon stories and I felt tenderly for the poor lovestruck prince, born in a dead body. The prose here is especially lush and lavish.

"Major Tom" - a man realizes his consciousness now inhabits a satellite. Wistful and sad; unfortunately also a bit obvious. I think this was meant to be a mystery, but any science fiction fan would be able to figure out what is happening fairly soon.

"The Flame After the Candle" - adventures in Alice's Wonderland. the story has two parallel strands: in the first, a bored and grouchy girl falls through a looking-glass into Wonderland; in the second, the elderly woman who was the inspiration for Alice has dinner with the man who was the inspiration for Peter Pan. This is an interesting experiment with some excellent writing (per usual), but not entirely successful - the two parts didn't speak to each other. Still, the adventures in Wonderland were wonderful and the conversation between real Alice and real Peter was surprisingly melancholy and affecting.

"The Lily and the Horn" - in this vaguely medieval setting, the fighting of wars with young bodies has been replaced by the fighting of wars at the dinner table. The table is set with poisons by a trained poisoner; at the table is an equally trained expert in antidotes and poison nullifiers. Representatives of those at war eat at this treacherous table; who survives shall determine which kingdom is the winner. This was a fantastic story - so original! Plus it features a secret lesbian romance. ❤️💛🖤

"Badgirl, Deadman, and the Wheel of Fortune" - it is regrettable that the collection's editor didn't excise this loathsome story about a young girl abused by her drug-addicted father's heroin dealer. Reminded me of Joyce Carol Oates at her worst. This was a repulsive waste of time.

"The Fall Counts Everywhere" - this is about some kind of arena battle between legendary characters and creatures, reminiscent of Super Smash Bros, mc'ed by some kind of robot. I think? This was unreadable cacophony, so I gave up after about 4 pages. My God, all those ALL CAPS!

"The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild" - in which I discover that too much wackiness makes me impatient enough that I'll just skip the story. This is my third skip in this collection, and I actually love this author! This year I've read a collection of incredibly depressing Steinbeckian stories and a collection of often horribly gross horror stories. Didn't skip a single story in either book. But I guess Total Absurdity is just a bridge too far for me. This story was totally absurd.

"The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland" - a brief prequel to Valente's modern classic The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, featuring the Green Wind, the Leopard of Little Breezes, and the Wyverary. Sweet little sliver of a story but entirely unnecessary.