Let’s take a break from hard-hitting topics for a while and bring in some frikkin’ whimsy. The novellas by Amal El-Mohtar and Olvia Waite have wildly different settings: a small town on the border of Fae and the banks of a river where the water is highly-concentrated magic, versus a detective story in space. But they both involve societies that are about as benign as you would want (with some exceptions), and they have all the wonderful, fanciful details that make me wish there was some way to live inside that world. Even though a main theme for each story is murder.
The River Has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar
The River Liss runs north to south, and its waters brim with grammar.
There are an infinite number of ways for fantasy authors to portray magic, all with unique imagery and rules and where it’s sourced from (gods, monsters, years of study, or a lucky gift from birth). And with Amal El-Mohtar’s lyrical writing style, it feels particularly appropriate for magic to be based in grammar. Not just grammatical rules for spells, the actual concept of grammar, the way it constantly adjusts and morphs and alters reality from past to present to future. The River Liss that flows out of Arcadia (the Fae world) into mundane world is concentrated grammar, up until it passes through the willow forest that filters and absorbs anything magical.
Two sisters from a wealthy family have the duty once a season to sing to the largest willows that bracket the River. The sisters have beautiful voices that can even charm the Fae, they’re kind and intelligent, and they love each other more than anything else in the world. They’re also at an age where they’re realizing that nothing stays the same forever, especially not on the banks of the Liss.
The River Liss is always changing. It is one of the several enchantments of grammar that you can hear those words, the River Liss is always changing, and take it to mean it is changing itself, its length and breadth, its depth and its bends – or you can hear those very same words and ask, Changing what?
It’s a bittersweet revelation to the sisters that they can love each other completely, and also want different things and then have to worry about one day leaving, or being left behind. Things get even more complicated when the older sister has not one, but two suitors. El-Mohtar creates a magic-adjacent village with an industry based on grammar-altered willow wood (I do so love a fantasy marketplace), and then braids into the main story snippets of other fairy tales, no, sorry, snippets of other fairy songs. The story is part poem, part riddle, part love ballad and part murder revenge tale. And like a lot of good fairytales, the “winner” is the one who can find the best loophole while still staying inside the rules.
Murder by Memory – Olivia Waite
Near the topmost deck, in a small lift with glass walls and flickering buttons, I, Dorothy Gentleman, ship’s detective, opened a pair of eyes and licked a pair of lips and awoke in a body that wasn’t mine.
From the borders of Fae we go to the Fairweather, a generation ship with thousands of humans a few centuries into a journey to a new planet. Although generation ship probably isn’t the accurate term, because instead of generations living and dying along the trip, the passengers are able to have new cloned bodies grown whenever their current one wears out. Backup copies of all passengers are kept in memory-books in the ship’s Library. People like ship’s detective Dorothy who are trying to get past some grief and trauma are able to have their consciousness “shelved”, put in a restful stasis until they request to have a new body grown so they can return to the bustling civilization aboard the ship.
So when Dorthy abruptly wakes up all by herself in an elevator, in the wrong body, with the hallways deserted due to a magnetic storm and the ship’s AI about as close to falling-down drunk as a ship can get, she knows that something has gone very, very wrong.
I’m jolly glad you’re awake! Had to put you in a what’s a thing. Smallshape. Notship. Body!
“So I gathered,” I muttered. “But why?”
To save you! the ship went on. A giggle of triumph followed. You’re my favorite detective but don’t tell anyone and I don’t want to lose you and now you’re saved and everything is fiiiiiiiiiiine!
Starship societies are an irresistible concept to me. You’ve got an entire society contained in a fragile craft moving between the stars, complete with pocket gardens and restaurants and secret society clubs and yarn stores (yay, yarn stores!). Then Olivia Waite augments this mini-civilization with all the details of how immortality is handled, and the little customs that are created around the technology: relationship status being signaled by having your book “shelved” with your partner, paid-off debts are erased so they don’t follow someone down the centuries, memories are something that can be drunk as a cocktail in place of alcohol (think Maples in Fall, with a chaser of Bonfire Night). Everything is remarkably utopian, aside from the fact that some humans who are provided with everything will want more, and a technology that lets people cheat death just means having to find new ways to commit murder and make it stick.
I shivered. Gone. It was one thing for a body to die: three hundred years of dying and waking up and dying again had meant all of us were more or less used to the idea of bodily death at this point. But for a whole person to be gone – all their memories, all their skills, the essence of who they were – for it to be wiped from the record completely, with no way of ever getting it back…
The ship’s AI wakes up the ship’s detective to deal with a murder, one that’s even more serious than usual because someone aboard the ship has figured out how to erase memory books, so death becomes a permanent state rather than a temporary inconvenience. Dorothy is a methodical investigator, someone who wants a quiet, comfortable life but also can’t resist a mystery. Her investigation is made more complicated by the fact that the person who owns the body she’s currently using may be involved with the murder, but there’s no way to interrogate her or even know which of her associates is also a co-conspirator.
This novella is a strangely cosy space opera, with a crime that has a surprisingly mundane motive, combined with all the ways relationships change when they can last hundreds of years. It’s a fast read as well, almost short enough to be a novelette. Something about the way all the side-characters were introduced – the brilliant but hapless nephew Ritchie and his mixologist boyfriend who can make a mean Tropical Storm, the personable AI shipmind, the possible nemesis or future flame – made this feel less like a standalone story and more like a first chapter in what I’m sure will be more adventures of Dorothy Gentleman: Ship’s Detective.