Review of The Silmarillion by J R R Tolkien

The Silmarillion is a curious book, in various ways. While many (though not all) love The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, not so many of those who do have a great liking for Tolkien’s part mythology, part history of Middle Earth. It is a book that could only be published on the coattails of a massively successful fantasy series – The Wheel of Time and A Sonf of Ice and Fire, for instance – and would probably only be of interest to people who really liked the original story.

It’s also strange in its narrative focus. The early part of the volume is distinctly biblical in its style of writing and concerns the pantheon gods and lesser primordial beings – the Ainur – which gives it very classical Greek overtones. After that, though, the story gradually expands to become more novelistic in style – events are described in increasing detail and characters are given more dialogue.

Some of those who have read the book prefer the later parts for exactly this more character-centred stle. However, I first read it a long time ago and it was the earlier, mythopoetic part of the volume that always stuck in my imagination; it shaped my attitude towards fantasy cosmogony in my own creations. That said, the tale of Beren and Lúthien also got lodged in there, although less inspirationally so.

Reading The Silmarillion a second time – for the Tolkien discussion group I attend – I was struck by a few things. Firstly, my memory is not very good for lots of the details of the various sub-plots and characters that occupy various chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion – the long central part of the book that deals with much of the history of the Elves. This is largely due to the nature of the narrative being related.

It was the story of Fëanor, his jewels, his family and his people that especially interested me, but their story is dispersed throughout the Quenta. This arc story is interrupted by various notable episodes. There are a few chapters – that concerning Beren and Lúthien and the one about Túrin Turambar – where the narrative becomes rather more detailed than usual – and these are admittedly some of the best tales within the larger story. But, in some ways, they feel rather irrelevant, especially that of Túrin; Beren and Lúthien have a direct impact on the fate of the Silmarils, at least. It also occured to me that, if all three Hobbit films are successful, these individual tales from The Silmarillion might make excellent money-spinning successors.

Towards the end of the book, the attention shifts away from the Elves and towards Men. To me, this felt very anti-climactic. Men are lesser beings than Elves, having been given the crappiest gift imaginable – short lives and actual death – by Ilúvatar, the Creator. Even the villain of the latter piece, Sauron, is basically a cheap knock-off of his erstwhile boss, Morgoth. Much of what Sauron does has already been done by the disgraced god.

This relates to one of the overall themes of all the Middle Earth works – that of continual decline, a slow, inevitable fall from grace. The poignancy of this comes across extremely effectively in The Lord of the Rings, I think, but here, the sweep of history – and especially Man’s role in the latter parts of that history – render it a rather annoying kind of nostalgia.

My attitude towards the Ainur – the Valar, in particular – changed a lot over the course of reading the volume. At the start, they seem wonderfully noble and magical. By the end, however, they are distinctly haughty and uncaring – especially when it comes to Men. Their ban on anyone sailing west beyond sight of Númenor seems little more than divine racism and then tearing the world in two, punishing Elves and Men for the sins of Sauron is a fit of pique a two-year-old would be proud of.

Which observation segues into one of the more profound (and yet somehow irrelevant) critiques of Tolkien’s work: that it propounds a deeply reactionary message: some people are just better than others, some people’s ancestry gives them the right to rule their fellows. This is countered, of course by the fact that Frodo Baggins, a simple Hobbit from the Shire, saves the world in The Return of the King – but Frodo is also accompanied by his unquestioning servant, Sam; and, while Frodo sails off to retirement in the sky, Aragorn, descendant of the Kings of Númenor – a land that no longer exists – becomes king of Middle Earth (a large part of it, anyway).

All that being said, there is much that is good in The Silmarillion. The writing style, while antiquated – in different ways at different places – is carried off with an authority that makes you feel that you really are reading the collected myths and legends of a world. Many of the motivations of the human-scale characters are thoroughly believable and their often unpleasant ends have a sense of justice to them. And in terms of killing off characters, Tolkien definitely out-George R R Martined George R R Martin long before Westeros had been thought of.

I don’t think The Silmarillion is perfect, by any means, but anyone who’s enjoyed The Hobbit and TLotR should find their appreciation enriched by reading it. Or, given that the published form of the book was put together after Tolkien’s death by his son Christopher and Canadian fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, they may just find it an example of barrel-scraping.

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Review of The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A McKillip

I picked this book up recently at What the Book? in Seoul. McKillip is not one of the more well known authors, but I’ve read one of her previous works, The Riddle-Master Trilogy, and remembered it as interesting, low-key, well written, but a little slow and dull. Like that previous story, The Book of Atrix Wolfe is short, gentle, thoughtful, but less than totally gripping. Even at less than 250 pages, it took me a long time to get through it – I had other things that just seemed to demand my attention more.

However, I still liked the novel.

The story starts with a prologue set twenty years before the main narrative takes places and shows how one of the land’s most powerful wizards – Atrix Wolfe – is persuaded, coerced – tricked? I’m still not entirely clear on the motivation – into working some sorcery to facilitate a war of conquest. The resulting magical entity is uncontrollable and kills many and ends the war. The Hunter is awakened a couple of decades later when the prince born on the night of the slaughter discovers a paradoxical spellbook written by the wizard. The spell that created the Hunter turns out to have wreaked devastation beyond the world of mortals; the fey Queen of the Wood has been seeking her lost daughter for two decades.

The main character, Prince Talis Pelucir, is a bespectacled trainee wizard whose parents were killed (one directly, one indirectly) by a malevolent magical being when he was a baby. Remind you of anyone? This book was published a couple of years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, though, so it’s OK.

Another main character is called Sorrow – or Saro (in an American accent I suppose they’re homophones) – and sorrow is a major theme of the novel. Everyone’s lives have been overshadowed by the murder committed by the Hunter – and, inasmuch as the Hunter is his proxy, by Atrix Wolfe himself.

Another theme is the paradoxical nature of the spells written in the eponymous book. When trying to extinguish a candle flame, Talis instead shatters every nearby mirror. The ambiguously named Saro is unable to speak, and yet she is capable of magic, although the spells often rely on language. I suppose you can read into this the message that language is a kind of magic – why else do we read fiction, if not to be enchanted by things that are not real and yet somehow true?

I enjoyed reading the shapeshifting battles of Atrix against the Hunter. Wolfe changes himself into animals, leaves, stones, stone, water in his efforts to evade his overly puissant creation. The mute version of Saro has lived her life in the Pelucir castle kitchen, working as a pot scrubber. The environment and social hierarchy of the kitchen is also fascinating; the place is populated with a head cook, a tray mistress, undercooks, pluckers, spit boys, mincers, peelers, musicians (who announce meals with a fanfare) and more.

I think The Book of Atrix Wolfe is a better story than The Riddle-Master books, and I really wanted to be more engrossed by it than I was. It has a uniquely gentle and subtle but definitely high fantasy feel to it. I’m going to try to pay better attention to the next Patricia McKillip book I read.

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Review of Taliesin by Stephen Lawhead

When I first started reading this book – which I’ve had in my possession for a few years – I thought it was pretty good – not spectacularly well written, but journeyman-like. Then I kept reading, and it got worse and worse, and worse.

Taliesin is the first book of the Pendragon Cycle, a re-telling of the Matter of Britain – although Arthur apparently doesn’t turn up until the third book. Taliesin (pronounced tal-i-ESS-in), the historical figure, was a renowned Dark Age Welsh bard, some of whose supposed works survive in The Book of Taliesin.

The story of this volume is Y-shaped – two plot threads slowly come together about halfway through. One concerns Charis, an Atlantean princess and her escape from the doomed continent. The other is about Elphin, a young Celtic lord who discovers the baby Taliesin wrapped n leather in a weir. The whole book constitutes the story of Taliesin’s life.

As I said, it started off promisingly. Actually, I always found Charis to be quite uninteresting – she was little more than a mopey teenager. Elphin, I found much more sympathetic – as an unlucky youth, his discovery of the apparently magical baby and his marriage to a similarly ill-starred woman, turns his life around, and I actually found it quite moving. As soon as Taliesin becomes a man, however, the now Lord Elphin pretty much drops out of the narrative.

The more I read of this book, the more its flaws became apparent. The characters are quite two-dimensional – Charis is a starts off as a mopey teenager, and turns into a mopey adult with mad ninja skills from her years as a bull-dancer; Elphin is essentially the perfect man – there is absolutely no evidence for his lack of luck apart from what the narrative tells you; a minor character, Morgian, Charis’s half-sister, is evil-for no better reason than that’s what the plot requires.

It’s also full of clichés. When Charis realises Atlantis is doomed, no one believes her – of course. When Morgian intercepts messages between Charis and Taliesin and substitutes her own, no one thinks to double check. When Princess Charis and Prince Taliesin decide to marry, their previously chummy fathers can’t handle it.

Worse than all this and the various extremely convenient reversals and turns of the plot, is the writing – it’s always the writing. It reads like it was never edited. These days, books don’t get effectively edited because publishing margins are so tight and editors are over-worked – Taliesin was published twenty-five years ago, though. The descriptions are adjective-laden – and they’re always the obvious adjectives. And the book, while not being a massive doorstop of a tome, is still too long; it’s full of passages – whole chapters – that don’t advance the plot and just aren’t interesting. Here’s one low point of the text:

The hours passed one after another as the sun made its slow way through the dull, cloud-draped sky. Charis remembered nothing about the rest of the journey, except the deepest deadliest pain she had ever known and the darkest, emptiest, silence that received her heart’s anguished cries. She moved as in a dream, achingly slow, burdened with the most enormous weight of mind-numbing grief.

There’s really not much more to say about this book after that.

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Review of Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok K Banker

Prince of Ayodhya is the first volume of a modern retelling of the Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic about the ideal hero, Rama. I was quite looking forwards to reading it (even though I’ve owned this book for a good few years) – Indian or Hindu mythology seems to be very colourful and obviously part of a tradition just as august as the Graeco-Roman and Germanic mythoi (which is the plural of mythos) that inform our European outlook. In practice, though, reading it was a big disappointment.

The novel is set mostly during a single day in which Rama is declared the crown prince of Ayodhya by his father Maharaja Dasaratha and is taken on a journey by a millennia-old seer, Guru Vishwamitra, to kill a demon (or Asura) and protect a ritual the seer wants to conduct. This latter double task actually takes a week or more, but is squeezed into the last hundred or so pages of the 500-odd page novel. Much of the rest of the story is concerned with palace intrigue involving the maharaja’s three wives.

The story is colourful – with larger than life characters like the preternaturally mature Rama and his half brothers, the evil governess Manthara, the weary king Dasaratha – it has lots of Brahmanic magic going on and some big fight scenes at the end. But it’s also very shallow. The all the good characters are pure in thought a deed, while the bad ones are ugly or corpulent and simplistically single-minded. There is one minor demoness who has a conflict of motivations, but only because she has a crush on the fifteen-year-old protagonist. Rama, his brother Lakshman and Vishwamitra conquer their foes without any real danger to themselves. Well, Lakshman does get killed, but is resurrected at the cost of a soul … conveniently enough, that of the Asura they’re supposed to get rid of.

Worse than all of this, is the language and quality of the writing. It’s weak. It’s laden with lots of Hindu or Sanskrit terms – which isn’t a big problem, as it does lend a lot of authenticity to the text and there’s a moderately helpful glossary at the end. However, these words are used a little too liberally, especially when, for instance, you read a new word – ‘astra’, clearly a weapon of some sort from the context – towards the end of the book and turn to the glossary for an explanation and it just says ‘a weapon’.

The worst flaw of the book, though, is the use of modern idioms in a story set in ancient India. When magical beings transform from one shape to another, they ‘morph’. Rama, right on the very first page of the book, is described as a having ‘tight abs’. On more than one occasion the Vedic unit of measurement, the yojana, is compared to ‘Western’ miles. Perhaps such anachronisms were used to try to appeal to a global mass audience, but they end up making a mockery of the dignity of this ancient tale.

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Write return

I started writing again today. Proper writing – working on the short story I’d been writing back in February, before my extra-Korean adventures started. I only got a bit less than 400 words down, but it’s better than nothing, but my log shows that no one day’s worth of work made it into four figures, and in twelve sessions the word count is up to 8,000. I also read the story. As a first draft, it’s not that bad, but there are plenty of places where it can be improved.

I just need to ensure that I get into a good writing routine.

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Review of Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

I read the first book in The First Law trilogy, The Blade Itself, last year and thought it was decent but unoriginal and unspectacular – just about good enough to want to read more of the story. Which I’ve now done – and my opinions of it haven’t changed much; in fact, they’ve worsened.

The action continues on from the first book and is centred on three arenas: a cold northern land called Angland where a Union army battles a well organised horde of barbarians; a hot, dry southern land where crippled inquisitor Glokta must organise a hopeless defense of a Union colony; and a barren wilderness where a small band of viewpoint characters follow an old wizard to the edge of the world to find a magical rock.

Story-wise, structure-wise, I would use exactly the same word to describe this volume as the one I used to describe its predecessor: journeyman-like. Character-wise, it’s as basic as the earlier volume, except that this time there is much more character development. Even this evolution, though, is not much more than obvious and simplistic: snooty Jezal dan Luthar gets his face smashed in and learns humility; fierce, anti-social Ferro is shown a bit of kindness by Logen Ninefingers so she has sex with him.

Writing-wise, the book was pretty disappointing. Abercrombie never stops at one descriptive sentence or clause when several will do. Every chapter has a strictly adhered-to surfeit of long, dull paragraphs detailing what’s happening in the environment.

Many passages show a distinct lack of attention to detail. Here are three I noted:

Ferro knelt beside one of the pitted stones, her bow in one hand, an arrow nocked and ready. The wind made patterns in the tall grass on the plain below, whipped at the shorter grass on the slope of the hill, plucked at the flights of the seven arrows stuck into the earth in front of her in a row. Seven arrows was all she had left.

That’s right: one plus seven equals seven.

It was suddenly too late for heroics, and he knew it. It had been too late for a long time.

These sentences directly contradict each other.

Then he saw the grey face, if you could call it a face; a chunk of hairless brow, a lumpen jaw bursting with outsize teeth, a flat snout like a pig’s, tiny black eyes glinting with fury as it glared back at him.

Firstly – you certainly could call it a face … because it’s a face. Secondly, ‘lumpen‘ is not a fancy synonym for ‘lumpy’, as the author (and others) evidently thinks it is.

Another criticism I have of this book regards the Union army. The Union is supposed to be a powerful, expansionist kingdom-going-on-empire with colonies to the north and south of its homeland. But on the basis of the characters in this book, its military is staffed almost exlusively by vain, selfish cretins who couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Which leaves the story with a big believability deficit.

Nevertheless, I’m still – just about – inclined to get hold of the final volume in the trilogy, Last Argument of Kings, because, say one thing about Captain Maybe, say he’s a loyal reader who finishes what he starts.

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Review of The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age by Robert Rankin

This novel (published last year, but only recently obtained by me) is the sequel to 2010′s The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions; it’s own sequel, The Educated Ape and Other Wonders of the Worlds comes out in a few weeks.

Only one character is reprised from that earlier story – Darwin the monkey butler – otherwise, the only thing they share is the setting: an extravagant fin de siècle steampunk universe where, in retaliation for the War of the Worlds, the British Empire has destroyed the Martian civilisation by sending sick people to Mars on back-engineered spaceships; where the three powers of the solar system are the British, the Venusians and the Jupiterians; where horse-drawn carts share the streets with electric vehicles powered by Tesla’s wireless transmission of electricity.

The story starts with quite an effective chapter with baroque descriptions of a London music hall, the Electric Alhambra, that, while cheery and full of doggerel, nonetheless have a sinister undertone. And then there’s a dramatic murder. The story – at least from the point of view of one of the main characters, Cameron Bell, a man with the mind of Sherlock Holmes and the appearance of Samuel Pickwick – begins there. Colonel Katterfelto, however, has been planning for years to put together a mechanical messiah based on the plans of the mysterious but knowledgeable Herr Döktor; for the time being he’s at the bottom of the nightly bill at the Electric Alhambra displaying a mechanical minstrel – which is really a monkey butler in a tin man suit. And Alice Lovell, Bell’s unrequitable love-interest – also performs – with her acrobatic (and quite violent) kiwi birds. Meanwhile, the villain of the piece is making himself powerful enough to start a Third Worlds War.

In retrospect, all these elements don’t really work all that well together and the story would seem to be a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. Who is Herr Döktor and how did he get to have so much influence on the characters and events? How did the bad guy get to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer? Why is it only now that Colonel Katterfelto’s plans start to come together? What is the nature of Alice Lovell’s trippy guardian rabbit/kiwi bird? What happened to Aleister Crowley after Cameron shot him in the foot with a ray gun? Was the huge redding herring (the nature of which I will say nothing) really necessary to the plot?

Nevertheless, it all works quite well. In fact, this book and its predecessor represent a bit of change of style for Robert Rankin. The storytelling is a little more mature (while still being full of immature silliness), stylish and confident. I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again: his later work is not as laugh-out-loud funny as his earlier stuff, but it’s still a great pleasure to read.

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Review of Grimus by Salman Rushdie

This is Salman Rushdie’s debut novel – from 1975 (making it slightly older than me) – and the second of his books that I’ve read – the other being The Satanic Verses, from which, despite the fact that I read it quite a few years ago, a few scenes have remained quite strongly in my memory.

Grimus is not an easy novel to categorise, as people so like to do with novels. I suppose you would say it’s magical realism – it has elements of fantasy and science fiction, contains themes from Middle Eastern and Western traditions, but is definitely literary fiction in general tone (although you can’t really pin it down as being especially British, as the main character is American).

This main character, Flapping Eagle, is, in fact, Native American, younger brother of the troubled Bird-Dog. (Avian imagery features greatly throughout the novel.) Bird-dog absconds with a mysterious man, leaving Flapping Eagle with two vials containing a liquid that will make the drinker immortal and one that will kill. Flapping Eagle drinks the immortality potion and spends hundreds of years looking for his elder sister. Eventually, he is washed up on an island – in another dimension – that is home to an ambivalent bunch of immortals who arrived there in much the same way, although much earlier. The island is governed by a kind of absentee king, Grimus; Flapping Eagle makes it his quest to challenge Grimus and find Bird-Dog.

One of The Satanic Verses‘s flaws was that there were too many disparate viewpoints, making it difficult to follow and maintain interest in the novel. Grimus‘s narritive is focused on Flapping Eagle throughout, with only the occasional diversion. Nevertheless, it’s bursting full of diverse ideas: there are anagram-loving, dimension travelling, super-intelligent frog-beings called Gorfs (they live on a planet called Thera that orbits a star called Nus), there is Sufi mysticism, philosophy, comedy, tragedy, coming-of-age, dualities and opposites, social criticism … and no doubt other stuff.

One of the main ideas is the specious attraction of creating an ideal society. The immortals who live on Calf Island (Grimus named it Kaf, after the Arabic letter, but it didn’t quite stick) come there after exhausting many lifetimes’ worth of experience on Earth, but they are an insular group. Not only is their community self-sustaining, static and sterile, but each is caught up in their own obsessions. Ultimately, Flapping Eagle’s arrival shakes things up in good ways and bad ways, but he also succumbs to the lure of the settled, comfortable lifestyle – at least until his actions catch up with him.

Although I had a big hiatus in the middle of reading this book (arriving at my sister’s and getting caught up with video games and stuff), I enjoyed it a lot. It’s not without its flaws – some of the characters are under-used or are near-superfluous (Nicholas Deggle – an ambiguous character whose presence in Flapping Eagle’s earlier life is never really explained – gets left in a hut with a madwoman for much of the latter part of the novel), and the Gorfs are definitely a weird, though minor, ingredient in the mélange. The use of quotation dashes instead of inverted commas is something I find a bit pretentious. And the protagonist is a little lacklustre – more of a foil to the interesting characters around him.

Nevertheless, Grimus is a readable read, full of ideas and intelligence and references that reward further research. My copy was also free, having been given it by my friend Lawrence.

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Review of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Lud-in-the-Mist is another 1920s fantasy republished for modern readers as part of Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks series (contemporaneous works include The Worm Ouroboros, The King of Elfland’s Daughter and The Well of the Unicorn, which last volume I recently read and enjoyed). Mirrlees only wrote two other novels, neither of them fantasy. This volume enjoyed a revival in the 1970s, much the same as did The Lord of the Rings – hippies apparently liked the drug-taking theme. Neil Gaiman provides an introduction wherein he practically orgasms over the book – as well as giving away much of the plot.

The book has the feel of a Victorian fairy tale and concerns a made-up nation with Dutch and English characteristics called Dorimare. Dorimare borders the Elfin Hills, beyond which live fairies. These fairies largely have no contact with the Dorimarites, except for occasional bursts of fairy fruit smuggling. Fairy fruit afflicts the eater with an otherwordly ennui that often results with them running away to live with the fairies. Dorimarites hate and fear fairies so much that even talking about them is taboo; people prosecuted for smuggling fairy fruit are officially charged with trafficking silk.

The story revolves around Nathaniel Chanticleer, the lord mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, capital of Dorimare, and the various fey goings on that affect him, his family and the whole nation. Eating the fairy fruit has biblical connotations, but it also has a narcotic resonance for modern readers. While the inhabitants of Dorimare generally regard its consumption as an evil, it is ultimately portrayed in a quite effective ambiguous way. The fairies never really come into the foreground of the story, instead occupying the shadows, disguised and appearing in hallucinatory glimpses.

Instead, the story is firmly about the people of Dorimare, their desires and fears, their class tensions, their secrets. The novel is part fairy tale, part psychological fantasy; it even becomes a detective story for a few chapters later in the book. It has a gentle, didactic style to it; it makes you imagine the story being narrated by a Victorian nanny to her wards.

It’s a little slow to get going – the first couple of chapters are strictly for scene-setting, describing the country and its ways. It gets bogged down a bit in places and some subplots don’t add much to the overall story – I’m thinking specifically of the disappearance of Chanticleer’s daughter and her classmates. However, Lud-in-the-Mist is a very likeable story that stays in the mind because of the amibiguousness of its antagonists and of the Dorimarites’ relationship to them, and because of its engaging central character.

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Review of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2011 edition

This edition of what is probably my favourite genre magazine was a little below par. The best stories were the longest ones, but none of them was without its flaws. The highlight of the volume, among the various reviews – which are always interesting to read – was a review of Super 8 that mercilessly painted it as a simplistic rehash of E.T.

‘Quartet and Triptych’ by Matthew Hughes was a novella-length story about an obese professional thief in a far future world that resembled that of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. The setting was well presented and the main character suited it well and was entertaining to follow. However, some of the details didn’t make sense at all; for instance, a patch of alien vegetation had remained in the area it had been planted in the grounds of a mansion for thousands of years. The story was further spoiled when the protagonist was lucky enough to be rescued from certain death by a minor character who had good reason to arrest him, but didn’t.

‘Object Three’, a space opera-ish story (or ‘novelet’, to use the official terminology) by James L Cambias also focused on the theft of an alien artefact, although the characters and writing weren’t as good – but not at all bad. The world hung together better, and the climax of the story was more satisfying, more reliant on the main character. It was also a rather open ending, with the protagonist’s main goal only about to be achieved and the vast Maguffin that inspired the story not explained at all. I had mixed feelings about that. The betrayal and counter-betrayal that formed the emotional heart of the story didn’t quite work for me as the love affair between the two women involved didn’t really come to life.

‘The Ice Owl’ by Carolyn Ives Gilman, the other novella of the magazine, was a well characterised story set in a detailed and believable universe – one where interstellar travel is a reality, but, because of relativity effects, while it seems instant for the traveller, years or decades pass in the wider world. Human settlements are therefore quite independent. The background to the story involved a Holocaust-like episode that has left a legacy of ethnic distrust. The main character explored this through her relationship with a mentor – who entrusted to her a cryonically preserved ice owl, possibly the last of its species. The protagonist, a teenage girl, came across especially believably – her angst was surprisingly not at all annoying. The ending was a little contrived and more or less happy.

The only actual ‘short story’ (according to Hugo Award rules) was ‘The Klepsydra A Chapter from A Faunery of Recondite Beings‘ by Michaela Roessner. Stylistically, this was the most interesting piece in the magazine, being a faux academic paper about a woman’s researches into a water thief – as ‘klepsydra’ literally translates. The story explains that a klepsydra is actually a water clock, but the now-deceased researcher discovered that this name was based on a spider with very strange properties. An interesting read, but not much of an actual story.

There were three other stories in the November/December edition, but, although I have the names in front of me (‘Under Glass’ by Tim Sullivan, ‘They That Have Wings’ by Evangeline Walton and ‘How Peter Met Pan’ by Albert E Cowdrey), I don’t remember anything about them – which is probably review enough.

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