"Fast Ships, Black Sails"
Sep. 8th, 2010 06:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sergebroom2008's anthology "Fast Ships, Black Sails", edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, is - believe or not - about pirates. Quite a few veer toward a humorous or whimsical tone, which I have come to realize isn't my thing - at least not in prose stories. There is one such story that did it for me, the one in which the Pirate King of Penzance has lapsed back into his old ways and goes off with a cargo of five daughters of another general, with the Pinafore's Captain Rackstraw in hot pursuit, until both ships come across Captain Hook. Then things get messy. Yes, it is an Howard Waldrop story. How did you guess?
In a more serious tone... Naomi Novik's "Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake" didn't quite succeed for me, but its setting was intriguing. And there remain three other tales in the book that definitely did work (again for me), and I'd be hard-put to choose a favorite among them.
”Boojum”, by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette, is related to Bear’s ”Shoggoth in Bloom”, I think, except that the latter was set on Earth in the 1930s while the former unfolds in the future, out in our solar system. Boojums are ships spawned in the atmosphere of gas giants. After one of them, the Lavinia Whateley, attacks and devours a steel ship, its pirate captain decides there’s money to be made by taking the captured cargo of brain canisters to the original buyers, Pluto’s Mi-go.
In Kelly Barnhill’s ”Elegy to Gabrielle, Patron Saint of Healers, Whores, and Righteous Thieves”, Marguerite years before incurred the wrath of the favorite mistress of the King of France when she refused to heal the woman’s unborn child, foreseeing that he’d otherwise ravage the world. During the escape to Martinique, her ship was boarded by a pirate who spared everybody in exchange for the promise that, upon the birth of her own daughter Gabrielle, she’d surrender the girl to him – a promise she had no intention of keeping, but Fate will decree otherwise.
Carrie Vaughn’s ”The Nymph’s Child” tells us that once upon a time a woman fell in love with her ship’s captain, a pirate who, when they were captured, ordered her to go on living. She left that life behind, but the Past one day shows up on her inn’s doorstep, demanding to know how she and her Captain successfully crossed the strait of the Iron Teeth when all ships before and after had been destroyed by the dragon living there.
Recommended.
In a more serious tone... Naomi Novik's "Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake" didn't quite succeed for me, but its setting was intriguing. And there remain three other tales in the book that definitely did work (again for me), and I'd be hard-put to choose a favorite among them.
”Boojum”, by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette, is related to Bear’s ”Shoggoth in Bloom”, I think, except that the latter was set on Earth in the 1930s while the former unfolds in the future, out in our solar system. Boojums are ships spawned in the atmosphere of gas giants. After one of them, the Lavinia Whateley, attacks and devours a steel ship, its pirate captain decides there’s money to be made by taking the captured cargo of brain canisters to the original buyers, Pluto’s Mi-go.
In Kelly Barnhill’s ”Elegy to Gabrielle, Patron Saint of Healers, Whores, and Righteous Thieves”, Marguerite years before incurred the wrath of the favorite mistress of the King of France when she refused to heal the woman’s unborn child, foreseeing that he’d otherwise ravage the world. During the escape to Martinique, her ship was boarded by a pirate who spared everybody in exchange for the promise that, upon the birth of her own daughter Gabrielle, she’d surrender the girl to him – a promise she had no intention of keeping, but Fate will decree otherwise.
Carrie Vaughn’s ”The Nymph’s Child” tells us that once upon a time a woman fell in love with her ship’s captain, a pirate who, when they were captured, ordered her to go on living. She left that life behind, but the Past one day shows up on her inn’s doorstep, demanding to know how she and her Captain successfully crossed the strait of the Iron Teeth when all ships before and after had been destroyed by the dragon living there.
Recommended.
