Book Review: Bone Dance: A Fantasy for Technophiles by Emma Bull

Speculative fiction has long had a love affair with post-apocalyptic fiction—just in this last year alone M. R. Carey’s massive hit The Girl With All the Gifts took the science-fiction and fantasy communities by storm. But sometimes even the big releases in genre can end up left behind by history, and unfortunately this seems to have happened to Bone Dance by Emma Bull.

Emma Bull’s best known work is War for the Oaks, a hit novel that helped pioneer what we think of when we imagine urban fantasy: spunky female lead, contemporary real-world setting, and mythical creatures hidden from modern society. She has written other works, including Finder and her 2007 effort, Territory. Bone Dance, a science-fantasy, was released in 1991 and went on to be nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. So how is the novel itself?

The plot is set in a world after a nuclear war between the Americas. It’s hard to put into words, and I don’t want to spoil anything, so I recommend just reading a spoiler-filled review or, better yet, check it out for yourself. Unique for a fantasy effort, its magic involves both technology (it is subtitled A Fantasy for Technophiles, after all) and Louisiana Voodoo. Creatively, each chapter is named for a Tarot card. Most of Bone Dance’s setting is left unexplored outside of some of the characters’ backstories, so I found the sense of place to be one of the novel’s more disappointing aspects.

In terms of characters, they are well-drawn. Our narrator is Sparrow, a character who is neither man nor woman (though it has a fantasy explanation, so it’s iffy regarding representation); they're also asexual. Sparrow makes a living as a trader, and we find out rather quickly that Sparrow has had their mind taken over, which led to Sparrow losing hours with no memory of what happened. I’ll admit that Sparrow was my favorite character in the book: they’re smart, resourceful, brave, have issues with commitment and friendship that I related to immensely, and possess a great sense of humor. Bull also crafts other great characters: Sherrea, Frances Redding, Mick Skinner, China Black, and Theo. This book also serves as proof that writing a novel from a first-person perspective of someone who’s not female doesn’t keep/excuse you from passing the Bechdel test. (It also passes Kelly Sue DeConnick’s “Sexy Lamp Test,” so it’s a pretty feminist book.) While the story belongs to Sparrow, the other characters add their own agendas and backstories to the narrative, making them well-rounded—at least, well-rounded enough. 

Bull's prose is well-done, over all. There's a good balance in sentence structure and her descriptions are colorful, but she narrowly avoids purple prose. Sometimes, I felt she got a bit over descriptive, but these times were minor. 

There are problems—the pacing can be off; some of the swearing got excessive; Sparrow’s narration reaks of white privilege with the description of characters assumed white until they specify; Sparrow being the only non-binary character in the story, plus it being down to a speculative element; the black characters felt kind of Magical Negro; the implied rape vibes I got in one of the chapters made me extremely uncomfortable, and I don’t think it was handled adequately.

All things said, Bone Dance is a solid work. It’s not without its flaws, but it still works as entertainment due to its action, world-building, characters, and mystery. Even more importantly, it holds fairly relevant themes for a modern speculative reader: the right to choose your own identity rather than the one that was forced on you and not conform to what is seen as the default (in this case, cis male and heterosexual). I’d recommend it with some reservations.

Score: 3.5/5

Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan

The 1990s was an important decade for science-fiction—it saw the rise of the postcyberpunk movement and also the beginning of the near endless obsession with dystopian science-fiction. While dystopian sci-fi wasn’t new in the 90s, it did begin to become much more prominent in the award-winning or nominated books such as Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, and Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain. There was, however, more to the 90s than this—this was the decade that gave rise to the nanopunk movement, spearheaded by such acclaimed authors as Linda Nagata and our subject today: Kathleen Ann Goonan.

Ms. Goonan had already made a name for herself with her short fiction writing, but it was the publication of her first novel, Queen City Jazz, that made her a science-fiction mainstay. Her books have been nominated for (or, in the case of In War Times, won)  the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. This review in particular is about her acclaimed first effort, Queen City Jazz.

The novel is an interesting and highly ambitious experiment. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where nanotechnology has developed enough to literally regrow things (called “bionan”) which led to population-decimating plagues, it features such prominent elements as music (jazz, unsurprisingly), complex scientific theories, bees (or Bees, more accurately), and a city setting. Yet at its heart, Queen City Jazz is a story about people—how they interact with each other, their love and appreciation for art, how they long to improve themselves and the world around them.

In the novel, there are two conflicting perspectives on technology and the future, as exemplified by our protagonist, Verity: to close oneself off from technology, embrace religion, and remain celibate; or to embrace nanotech with ethical uses, have a secular humanist perspective, and be a sex-positive feminist sort. If you’re at all familiar with Goonan, you’ll know her own view is the latter, but this is no one-dimensional Sherri Tepper tract. Instead, Verity comes to decide her worldview through a long, hard-wrought journey and self-reflection. Kathleen Goonan also writes a very multi-layered story, one of love, of failure, and of putting things back together, both for oneself and for humanity as a whole. I won’t spoil it, but the plot is complicated and is more satisfying to be discovered on ones own.

Writing-wise, Goonan is solid. I did find it irritating how she constantly had Verity or another character ask a question with it saying, “she asked” or “he asked.” This is unnecessary in almost every use due to most conversations in the novel only containing two people. Otherwise her prose is bright and descriptive, and for the most part, she avoided being too adverb-happy. I can say, though, that she improved immensely in her other novels, even just by her vastly underrated second effort, The Bones of Time.

In terms of characters, I liked just about everyone. Verity is the sort of protagonist I’ve been missing from modern sci-fi—she’s tough and refuses to sit by and let people keep her in the dark, solves her problems by herself, and forms complex and meaningful relationships with those around her. And, despite being a teenager, romantic love does not consume her as a character. There is a minor relationship for her, but it's a very small element of the novel. Sphere was far more interesting than I’d expected when he first appeared; far from being the Magical Negro I feared when he turned out to be the only black character in the novel with good screen-time, he was a multi-layered and three-dimensional character. While his story helped Verity’s, he had his own life and motivation for helping her. Blaze may not have been in the novel very much, but I sure did sympathize with him. And in terms of Abe—all I can say is, Kathleen Goonan made me both love and hate the guy at the same time.

In terms of flaws, the novel took a long time to truly get to the most interesting moments. While character driven stories often have slow pacing, I gave up on the book several times before finally reaching the point where the pace sped up again, and found it almost as engrossing as it was for the first seventy pages. Also, I wish she’d explained why there didn’t seem to be that much diversity in the city—I suppose since the city was “designed” to be a certain way it can be excused, but since there didn’t seem to be that many people, even in the background of the narrative, who didn’t seem to fit the designation of “white or western European” or “black.” Outside of one or two characters, no one was (at least implied to be, based on unfortunate references to "slanted eyes") Asian-American. Hopefully in the other books we’ll get some notice over what happened to the Native American reservations. Also, I didn't see anyone in the novel anywhere on the LGBTQIA spectrum. This unfortunately is often common in Ms. Goonan's work.

In summary, Queen City Jazz is a good first effort that holds up pretty well considering over twenty years have passed since its release. With charming characters, beautiful prose, and a complex and unique plot, it manages to overcome its flaws and captivate the reader. In many ways, with its teenage girl protagonist and coming-of-age theme, it succeeds more as a young adult science-fiction novel than many modern examples of young adult sci-fi. I'd recommend it to folks 15 and up.

Score: 4/5