Rendición

Abstract

narrative, Šindelka decides to take a tenpage detour into the boredom and stress of waiting for a train to leave a station. As a character study it also falls flat, as Andrei and Nina and Kryštof are prone to either long, unnatural diatribes on the nature of plants or over-the-top displays of emotion and grief (disappearing into the woods for days at a time, stripping naked, rubbing mud all over their bodies). This is, I suppose , a novel that really does seem to understand its immediate outer world better than anything interior. The journey through a flooded Prague, through fields of poisonous hogweed, through back alleys littered with cigarette butts is one worth taking, if you’re patient and willing to take it. J. David Osborne Tigard, Oregon The New Voices of Fantasy. Ed. Peter S. Beagle & Jacob Weisman. San Francisco. Tachyon. 2017. 336 pages. The New Voices of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, promises the reader exposure to the next generation of fantasy writers. These eighteen stories and one novella feature writers already known for being strong new voices of fantasy, like Sofia Samatar, and others, like Brooke Bolander, who’ve only published a handful of stories. Each is a shining example of the genre, featuring gorgeous sentences, images that stick in the mind, and heartbreaking loss. Readers of both fantasy and literary fabulism will appreciate this anthology. These new voices deal just as easily with contemporary times, worlds similar to our own, modern sensibilities, and futuristic details like space suits and real estate guides as with the folktale roots of fantasy. Technology, capitalism, and fantasy can comfortably coexist. One of my favorites, “The Husband Stitch,” by Carmen Maria Machado, harks back to the gender horror of old fairy tales while set in contemporary times. “The Pauper and the Eucalyptus Jinn,” by Usman T. Malik, the most stellar work in the anthology, follows an immigrant’s return home to Pakistan to investigate a mystery of family lore, uncovering a secret guarded by a jinn. In “A Kiss with Teeth,” by Max Gladstone, Vlad the Impaler gets a suburban dad update. Any anthology, especially one trying to predict the future, is bound to fail. There are always deserving authors left out, like Sabrina Vourvoulias and Seth Dickinson, authors who’ve written excellent and leading books of the genre, to name just a few, and writers on the literary side who might also come to define the future of fantasy. As the boundaries of fantasy have shifted and blurred, many of the stories included here could easily be included in an anthology of fabulism or magical realism. As a predictive text for who will write the blockbuster fantasies of the next decade, only time will tell. As a survey of the field of what new fantasy looks like now, this collection shows an excellent range of emerging writers, sure to be complemented by anthologies like The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Brenda Peynado University of Central Florida Ray Loriga. Rendición. Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 216 pages. Ray Loriga, born Jorge Loriga Torrenova in Madrid in 1967, has garnered the 2017 Alfaguara Novel Prize for Rendición (Surrender ), an engaging, thought-provoking dystopian novel with absurdist and fantastical elements. An experienced writer of ten novels, Loriga has also been active in filmmaking, collaborating as a scriptwriter with, among others, film directors Carlos Saura and Pedro Almodóvar. He also brought one of his novels, Caídos del cielo (1995), to the big screen as La pistola de mi hermano (My brother’s gun, 1997). Loriga has been characterized as an underground writer associated with Spanish dirty realism . Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs are often mentioned as writers who have had an impact on his work, and readers will note the influence of Kafka and Orwell in his most recent novel. In Rendición, an anonymous narratorprotagonist tells how he, his wife, and a child they have taken in are forcibly removed from their rural estate and relocated to the “transparent city.” War has been raging for a decade, and the couple’s two children have gone off to fight for their country. The...