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Dramatic title, huh? Well, this part of Victoria’s story is pretty dramatic.
When we last saw Victoria, she was ensconced in Kensington Palace with her mother the Duchess of Kent, her half-sister Feodore, their governess Baroness Lehzen, various lesser servants, and the Duchess’ comptroller, Sir John Conroy (who ran the household, kept the books, managed the Duchess’ money) and his family.
By all accounts Sir John was an ambitious man. He took a look at Victoria’s uncles and made a shrewd guess that in all likelihood, they weren’t likely to produce many more legitimate children…which meant that at some future time, Victoria would become Queen regnant of England. This must have been a dazzling prospect to Sir John…the heiress to the throne of one of the most powerful countries in the world was right there before him, a child he could perhaps mold and influence…and perhaps he saw her as his ticket to greatness. Whatever it was he saw, it made him act.
His first plan was to make himself indispensable to the Duchess, and this worked; in short order she was completely dependent on him for almost everything in her life. Once Sir John had her where he wanted her, he started to play on her fears: here she was, a stranger in England yet mother of the nation’s probable future queen. Her late husband’s family was large and sometimes a touch irrational…what should happen if her precious Victoria should somehow fall into their hands? Sir John worked her into such a state that she began to avoid all contact with the King (George IV) and the rest of the family, fearing they might kidnap her child and bring her up at the dissolute, morally bankrupt court. Which meant that her sole company was pretty much Sir John and his family, plus her sister-in-law Princess Sophia, another Kensington denizen equally under Sir John’s spell.
So by the time Victoria was a girl of six and eight and ten, she lived an isolated life at Kensington, barely seeing even her cousins, and only rarely being permitted to play with the children of suitably aristocratic acquaintances of her mother. Her much older, much loved sister Feodore married a German princeling and took much of Victoria’s fun with her when she left for her new home, and Victoria’s only playmates were Sir John’s children, especially his daughter Victoire whom she came to detest. Instead she became extremely close to her governess, “dearest Lehzen”, who was fanatically devoted to her and who distrusted Sir John.
Sir John may have succeeded at isolating the little family and keeping them more or less under his thumb…but he failed drastically at influencing Victoria. Instead of cultivating her confidence and friendship, he treated her to a great deal of “chaff”, blustery, over-familiar teasing that she loathed. She was always polite to him–indeed, she had no choice as her mother would never have permitted her not to be–but underneath, she seethed.
Years passed, and between them Sir John and the Duchess maintained their stranglehold on Victoria. She was not allowed her own bedroom but slept in her mother’s room, and was not allowed to walk down a staircase unaccompanied (someone always had to hold her hand). She kept a diary which was read and “corrected” by her mother every evening. Dreary life for a young girl, wasn’t it?
To be continued…
cambs_town_owl_feedrozk_feedecosophia_feedThis week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
With that said, have at it!
ancillary_review_feedAlex Kingsley
Under Review:
Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny. Eliot Borenstein. Cornell University Press, November 2024.
Eliot Borenstein’s Unstuck in Time is a nonfiction examination of post-Soviet speculative fiction which posits that there is a kind of temporal confusion in the minds of Russian citizens: lacking a clear path forward that does not involve Putin, Russians can only look back, reimagining what was and fantasizing about what might have been. Borenstein posits that the fall of the Soviet Union has caused past, present, and future to lose all meaning for the Russian Federation.
Borenstein begins by introducing the Russian science-fiction subgenre of popadasty, which he translates as “Time Crashers”. The Time Crasher genre is characterized by an accidental, unexplainable trip into the past during which the protagonist either dramatically alters the timeline or has their own perspective dramatically altered, thus permanently shifting their view of the present. It is no coincidence that these trips often involve World War II, the last period in history in which Russia felt it had a sense of national actualization — it had a clear goal in defeating the Nazis, and it achieved that goal. The new futures the Time Crashers create often involve a similar sense of restored purpose.
In that same vein, other Russian media looks not at the past, but at an alternative present in which the USSR never actually ended. Borenstein describes Goodbye Lenin! and The Man Who Couldn’t Die, both about groups of people pretending that communism is still alive and well in order to keep a loved one alive and well (as the shock of the USSR’s collapse would kill them). In both narratives, the characters deny the reality of communism’s collapse for fear that the abrupt lack of purpose would be fatally devastating for their ailing relative.
But why did the dissolution of the Soviet Union manage to “unstick” the Russian mindset? According to Borenstein, it is “the collapse of teleology.” He argues that the Soviet Union encouraged its citizens to make sacrifices in service of the “radiant future.” When that radiant future failed to materialize, the populace was forced to accept the fact that generations had suffered in the name of a regime abolished with little fanfare. For the Russian citizens who believed in the mission of the Soviet Union, the world really did end not with a bang but with a whimper. Borenstein makes a strong case that, since the USSR was predicated on the very notion of borrowed time, it is no wonder that so much post-Soviet fiction imagines having some of the time back: in the form of a present where the USSR never ended, or a future in which the US has fallen. Or, better yet, a vacation back to WWII (i.e. The Great Patriotic War), which was the last time Russians had a sense of purpose and managed to achieve that purpose in the end.
In the final section of the book, Borenstein looks at fictional Soviet futures. The movement of “SovPunk” takes Soviet imagery and places it in the future, developing an aesthetic that could be framed as either utopian or dystopian, depending on whether the author takes a critical or a nostalgic view of the USSR. The end of this section looks at the subversive Russian cartoon Masyanya. The cartoon started as an irreverent sitcom and evolved into a scathing critique of Russian politics, ending with the titular character giving Putin the wakizashi on which he kills himself. While this is a morbid end to a humorous show, it represents a much more positive trend, which is Russian media that is either critical, hopeful, or both. Contemporary Russian fiction that looks to the future tends either toward dystopia or utopia, scrutinizing the trends of the past or imagining a prosperous future. While Borenstein notes that there are those who argue that utopias are tedious and boring because a perfect world lacks the conflict necessary for a story, he quotes scholar Frederic Jameson, who believes that utopian fiction is
not the commitment to a specific machinery or blueprint, but rather the commitment to imagining possible utopias as such, in the greatest variety of forms…The Utopian form itself is the answer to the ideological conviction that no alternative is possible.
As someone who has often written on the topic of the necessity of imagined futures (see my review of The Terraformers or my article on iterative revolution), I find Bornstein’s usage of Jameson’s framework particularly persuasive. Not only can art be resistance, but it is necessary for resistance. We cannot work towards a better future if we have no concept of what that future might look like.
As an American, it’s impossible to read Unstuck in Time and not see the parallels to my own country — and not simply because the US president is currently courting Putin in order to discover the secret sauce that allowed him to be president so long. (The sauce is totalitarianism.) Trump was elected with the claim of restoring the country to some kind of former glory. (Are the Russian voices yearning for the revival of the USSR not essentially saying, “Make the Union Soviet Again?”)
Borenstein discusses how the USSR dissolved as a consequence of sacrificing the present for the promise of a bright future. By contrast, the US is dealing with the consequences of sacrificing the future for a bright present. As Borenstein asserts, nostalgia stems from a sense of lost national purpose, but the perceived purpose of the US is drastically different than that of the Soviet Union. Since the Industrial Revolution, the history of the United States has been an uninterrupted string of monopolies, union busting, consumption, expansion, colonization, war, commercialism, trickle-down economics, and all the other trappings of hyper-capitalism. Now Americans are dealing with the fallout of this trend: cognitive dissonance and economic disparity. The retrospective narrative in American politics is not “remember when we had a purpose?” but rather, “remember when we didn’t have to worry about all the people we crushed to get here?”
Despite the bleak nature of both Russian and US regressive nostalgia, Unstuck in Time was a delightfully accessible read for someone like me, who was going into the text without any knowledge of modern Russian fiction, just a healthy love of sci-fi. Borenstein illustrates that, although much of nostalgic Time Crasher fiction is a symptom of lost national identity, there is still an impulse toward speculative fiction imagining a radiant future that doesn’t necessarily involve sacrifices in the present. So long as we can continue to visualize a path to the future we want (even if that path is not linear) then, in the words of Masyanya, “We’re not totally fucked.”
Alex Kingsley is a writer, comedian, game designer, and playwright. They are a co-founder of the new media company Strong Branch Productions, where they write and direct the sci-fi comedy podcast The Stench of Adventure and other shows. Their debut novel Empress of Dust was published by Space Wizard Science Fantasy in Fall 2024. Their short fiction has appeared in Translunar Travelers Lounge, Radon Journal, The Storage Papers, and more. In 2023 they published their short story collection, The Strange Garden and Other Weird Tales. Alex’s sci-fi plays have been produced in LA, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Alex is currently pursuing their master’s degree in English Literature with a focus on speculative fiction at the University of Illinois Chicago.
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bookviewcafe_feedArthur C. Clarke posited long ago that any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’d like to turn that aphorism on its head and suggest that any significantly advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Simply put, the magic of a world is part of its technology. It’s important to remember that as you craft your world. Consider, for example, what technologies we might not have developed if we had magical ways of achieving the same end. If most members of a society can start a fire just by saying, “Wood, burn,” why invent a technology to do it? That pretty much does away with such things as cigarette lighters, matches, and maybe interior lighting.
In the Mer Cycle trilogy (THE MERI, TAMINY and THE CRYSTAL ROSE), I intentionally used magic as technology. The folk magic in these books, like folk medicine, derived from the aphorism: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” If monk-mages need to make copious copies of important manuscripts, someone will invent the magical equivalent of a photocopier.
Writers who deal with military ordnance are aware of something called “collateral damage.” I think writers who deal with magic need to cultivate the same awareness. The magic we use in our stories has repercussions that can take any number of forms.
First, it usually costs the user something. Maybe it’s the normal wear and tear of extreme effort, the way a baseball pitcher pays for every slider or curveball he throws with strain on muscle and bone. When a starting pitcher throws seven innings of baseball, he requires four or five days to recuperate. What about your mage or shaman? What does it cost him to pull off a potent spell?
The toll magic takes on the user can be intriguing, dire, even humorous. Does Marvin the Magnificent become ravenously hungry whenever he pops off a nifty enchantment? Does every spell he casts lose him the ability to cast a similar spell for an hour?
What effect does the magic have on the people around the user, or anything else in his environment? In MAGIC TIME: ANGELFIRE, one of the characters wields magic with particularly nasty “feedback.” The character is a Blues musician whose songs draw refugees to safety. Unfortunately, they also cause innocent bystanders to change in unpleasant and unnatural ways. An additional twist is that his music is the only means of protecting someone very dear to the musician from a horrific predator. He finds himself choosing between her life and the lives of innocent strangers.
Next time: Keeping it Real (and Under Control)
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Visit Maya’s Bookshelf at Book View Cafe.
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Over at Strange Horizons there’s a new interview up with me and Pat Cadigan. Pat was born and grew up in the US and now lives in the UK. I was born and grew up in the UK and now live in the US. Pat and I published our first short fiction at about the same age—but on different sides of the Atlantic. That plus the fact that Pat’s a handful of years older than me but that the UK was always a few years behind on gender issues means that we have oddly parallel but rarely crossing experiences of being women in SF.
I’ve met Pat only twice in person and wish it could be more—I would love to have done this interview in person, with some cross-talk between us. In actuality, Kerry Ryan interviewed up separately but then spliced the answers together, and the result is an intriguing look at adjacent universes.
To whet your appetite, here’s a snippet from the beginning:
Kerry Ryan: Where did you find the confidence to write SFF at a time when the cultural climate wasn’t just discouraging but actively hostile?
Nicola Griffith: Psychotic self-belief! I knew from—I don’t even know how old I was—maybe as soon as I could spell my own name, that I was a dyke, and that meant I was never, ever going to be liked in that “ideal” way. Not as a nice Catholic girl. Not by my family, my church, my school, or the world in general at that time. There was no point trying to please people, because I never would, just because of who I am and the way I move through the world. It was impossible. So why bother trying? Why not aim for what I wanted?
Pat Cadigan: I grew up below the poverty line in what people called a “bad neighbourhood.” People would take one look at me and assume I’d get pregnant at fifteen, drop out, and end up in beauty school. That was the trajectory they imagined for girls like me.
My mother used to say, “People will see you as the child of a broken home. And if you get into trouble, they’ll blame me. So don’t screw up or I’ll kill you.” She was only half joking. But I had her as a model because we didn’t get abandoned by my father, we left him.
So that was my example: If things aren’t going the way you want them to, that’s just how it is—and so you fight. Either you get what you want, or you discover something else that’s worth wanting. What I saw growing up was women doing whatever needed to be done and not because they had money, or men, or family support, but because that was the only option. You want something? You make it happen.
And so we both did, in our different ways.
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The Atlas of Anywhere
Part of the Collected Short Fiction of Marie Brennan
Marie Brennan
Seek out extraordinary lands . . .
Strange guardians overseeing fate-bound duels. A priceless stone on a journey toward a bloody destiny. A thief determined to steal a worthless treasure. In her second collection of worlds-spanning fantasy, award-winning author Marie Brennan takes you back to the world of her famed heroine Lady Trent, through the land of her Hugo Award-nominated poem “A War of Words,” and onward to seven other fantastical realms, filled with pirates, demigods, and murderous creatures of winter’s cold night.
About the Author: Marie Brennan is the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent, the Onyx Court, other fantasy series, several poems, and over ninety short stories. As half of M.A. Carrick, she’s also written the Rook and Rose trilogy. Find her at swantower.com and on Patreon.
cambs_town_owl_feedrozk_feedrozk_feedrozk_feedrozk_feedrozk_feedrozk_feedrozk_feedrozk_feed - (no subject)wrongquestions_feed - Review: A Letter From the Lonesome Shore by Sylvie Cathrall at Locusbookviewcafe_feed - Queen Victoria, Part 3: The Prisoner of Kensington Palacecambs_town_owl_feed - Day 1 in the Big Beehive House.rozk_feed - (no subject)ecosophia_feed - June 2025 Open Postancillary_review_feed - Stalin in a Flower Crown: Review of Eliot Borenstein’s Unstuck in Timebookviewcafe_feed - Dabbling in Magic Part 1: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?nicolagriffith_feed - New interview up at Strange Horizonscambs_town_owl_feed - Is it possible to measure the discomfort that some architectural façades inflict on us?rozk_feed - (no subject)bookviewcafe_feed - BVC Announces The Atlas of Anywhere by Marie Brennancambs_town_owl_feed - CFCI’s Cambridge Union debate on *how* Cambridge should grow: upwards or outwards?rozk_feed - (no subject)rozk_feed - (no subject)rozk_feed - (no subject)rozk_feed - (no subject)rozk_feed - (no subject)rozk_feed - (no subject)rozk_feed - (no subject)![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeasmymeasure
