Ken Liu is a new and upcoming voice in SF&F these days. Liu’s work has an elegant, heartfelt charm that lulls you into whatever story he’s currently weaving for you. He won the Hugo Award for “The Paper Menagerie”, which you can listen to on Escape Pod; listen, and tell me if his writing has that soul that sits with you and spools a story into your ear—not sly, not pandering, but so open that you fall in.

And just because his work has that comfortable charm about it doesn’t mean that it can’t reach out and strike you through the heart and mind, bite your sensibilities and make you weep. That reach would be incomparably demonstrated in The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary (Free PDF) (Kindle). But perhaps that would not suit your taste today.

Fortunately, today, featured on io9.com is “The Perfect Match”, a story that’s probably been ironically shared through all the social networks by now. If you’re wondering what “Il Sospetto”‘s first movement (Allegro) sounds like, there it is above. Spoiler: if you’re not conversant in Italian, this is what it means. This paragraph is FULL OF IRONY.

Not only is Ken Liu an awesome storyteller, he’s also a pretty boss translator of works such as that of Xia Jia’s “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” and Ma Boyong’s “City of Silence” (part 1 and part 2).

You can follow more of Liu’s stories at his website.

The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland — For a Little While
by Catherynne M. Valente

Yesterday we covered Valente’s version of The Arabian Nights in The Orphan’s Tales; today we’ll be covering one story in the body of work that eventually landed her on the Times Top Ten Books for 2012: Valente’s Fairyland series.

While the first volume, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and the second, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, are not free to read, you can get a sublime taste of the series through the free story on Tor.com, The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While.

Valente possesses the wonderful ability to turn out her own mythology and folklore in a believable fashion, drawing upon a wellspring of cultures and yet creating something original in the making, rather than just a dolled-up version of Japanese folktales or Russian mythos or—in this case—European fairy-tales. In “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While”, Mallow meets with fanciful big cats who carry the winds, encounters a carriageless horse that Lewis Carroll would be proud of, and cast-iron ducks who feed on sparks and oil. Her imagination weaves new worlds in the nature of more familiar ones, which I think accounts for the popularity of the books.

As well, Valente’s writing skills in weaving description in the right amounts and when needed, and in setting a certain nature of storyteller’s style and pacing, are more than up to the task; her books and stories are filled with lovely, wistful passages that capture the ephemeral and dreamish state of European fairy-land in the best traditions of classics like Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist, John Crowley’s Little, Big, and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Another aspect I really admire about the Fairyland series are the leading characters; September in the books and Mallow in the story are, rather than boys or men walking into or otherwise encountering fairyland, instead girls. There’s a certain trope about men being strong enough and smart enough to withstand the feckless rules of fairyland, and women either living there or being carried away to be rescued. In Valente’s story, it is the girl who takes action, the girl who does the rescuing, the girl who is the active player in events. There’s also never any feminine-shaming for neither September nor Mallow; they are not weak just because they are not engaging in traditional masculine quest-seeking.

If you’re looking for a playful and yet suspenseful time in the world of Fairy, Valente’s stories are a perfect addition to a well-told tradition, bringing something new with the comfort of revered tradition.

Originally posted on Tor.com.

The Orphan’s Tales:
    In the Night Garden
    In the Cities of Coin and Spice
by Catherynne M. Valente

A mysterious girl in the royal extended family, some say a demon because of disturbing markings around her eyes, is banished from the palace. A very young prince discovers her living in the gardens on the kindness of servants.

Like all princes, even ones that don’t reach the waist of their eldest sister, he wants to save her. But the only way to remove the demon’s markings from her eyes is for her to tell, bit by bit, the stories written upon them.

Thus begins The Orphan’s Tales, a well-woven tapestry of fairytales-within-fairytales in the world of Ajanabh, both like and unlike its inspiration, The Arabian Nights.

The stunning Orphan’s Tales, by Catherynne M. Valente, is a two book work (in the way that Lord of the Rings is a three volume book), comprised of In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice (both Spectra Books). Her writing is a study in classicism—the rich retooling of stories either centering around or inspired by a wide variety of classics, from Asian folklore like Japan’s The Grass-Cutting Sword to fairy tales from England to Germany, from Norway to Russia, from the Middle East to Africa. The versatility of Valente’s knowledge shines bright as stars.

Unlike most modern retellings, she preserves the style and sense of world inherent in the originals—not simply copying them, but adopting them to an almost parallel world; they have their own histories and world-building. In Ajanabh the myths are quite different, leading to sensibilities that are familiar without merely mirroring their fantastic analogues.

The most striking difference is the base creation myth: the Night Sky was a black mare who tore stars into her skin—holes that filled with shining light from her blood. When she escaped the sky to explore the earth she created, she abandoned the stars. And, lonely and frightened, in despair, innocence, and arrogance, the stars descended to follow her—and thereafter ignite the beginning of storylines spanning continents and eras.

The familiarities to our fairytales and fantasies adapt to this setting beautifully. Because Valente draws upon many different wells of inspiration, we not only have dragons and talking (sometimes transformed) animals, but also kitsune and kappa, firebirds and ever-fruitful gardens, horse and witch tales paleological in origin, slave wizards and a sainted pirate—and still more.

These elements intertwine with the new stories of the stars, the latter the weft that holds together the warp of the former, in a dangerously addictive weaving. A kitsune grows up to be a pirate after she assists a dying star; orphaned children don’t end up in the woods, but in a disturbing undertow of the real world, working in sweatshops that generate money from the bones of the dead; a shaman of a horse tribe confronts, years later, a wayward questing prince as an old witch in a cottage.

Valente is also quite cruel in adopting the interleaving story-built-upon-story structure from Arabian Nights. There are four major stories in the two books of The Orphan’s Tales, and in all of them there are cliffhangers and lead-ins to other tales that drive the reader (or the frightened prince into staying, or the cruel husband into not chopping your head off) to read, and read, and read.

Not all sensibilities of the old tales are imported into The Orphan’s Tales. There is a sympathy for monsters and princesses, turning them into deeper characters with their own personalities and struggles, rather than simply the next item to check off on a quest. An ugly witch spearheads the first of the four major framing stories, introducing a quirky and humorous leucrotta¹, and a princess who is creepily monstrous². The leucrotta acts as a Jeeves to a literal kingfisher. A serpent goddess’ slaughter at the hands of an unwise and fearful husband³ is the undercurrent for much of the world’s mythology. A manticore is captured as a kitten and escapes to be part of a traveling play. And so on.

A tour de force of new fairytales, The Orphan’s Tales will absorb you into itself, only to let you go two books later, and you will miss it. Like all good stories.