Locus has the nominees for the World Fantasy Awards and I was quite pleased to see Kij Johnson there as well as Emma Bull's Territory, Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel and Coyote Road. (You can read Kij's short story here and I encourage you to do so - this one remains one of the most impressive and original pieces of writing I've read in a long time.) The best bit I think is Terri Windling & Midori Snyder for Endicott Studio which will have its final issue up later this month and, I'm thrilled to report, includes an essay by me on the myths of the John Franklin expedition.

I studied the Franklin expedition and all the rescue expeditions which followed many times in grad school. (One semester I even took an entire course strictly on the literature of polar exploration.) A lot of myths died with Franklin and his men, while others struggled valiantly on, refusing to diminish even in the face of so much avoidable tragedy. Just what went wrong - and the sequence of events which led to the disappearance of two ships and their crews - has long been one of the most enduring mysteries of the Arctic. There's a lot to write there, and a lot of books (and articles and essays) have been written on Sir John, his wife, the men who sent him north and the men who tried to find him. (A lot of those guys became famous too.) In writing about the World Fantasy finalists this week though, Jeff VanderMeer seemed very disappointed that one recent Franklin book wasn't on that list: "Territory is one of my favorites from last year, and I'm happy to see it on the list. I also think the others are solid, solid novels. But I'd put Michael Cisco's The Traitor up against any one of them. Or Ekaterina Sedia's A Secret History of Moscow. Or Hal Duncan's Ink. Or, perhaps most criminally, Dan Simmons' The Terror, a novel that in scope and execution dwarfs everything just mentioned. "

I completely agree that Sedia's wonderful novel belonged on the list (I've already written at length about my love for it) but Dan Simmons' The Terror? That is a book that bothered me on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. I am not sure if my distaste for the book is due to my own academic background or my years living in a northern landscape but I was really bothered by The Terror and couldn't enjoy it on a thriller/horror level (like I have enjoyed Simmons' books in the past.) The biggest issue for me was that Simmons writes entirely about real people - actual sailors who actually died of unknown causes in the Arctic and were never found - and turns them into monsters. They are not just driven to eat the remains of their fallen crewmembers, they actually hunt and murder each other for meat. The whole time I was reading the final third of the book I couldn't help but think that if these guys put half the energy they did into killing each other into hunting for seals then they might have managed to save themselves. But in Simmons version of events it was not so much about survival but relentless murder mostly just for the sake (and pleasure?) of killing. At one point the ringleader (a guy who never rated more than casual mention in histories about the expedition), can't remember who he has ordered to kill who and why he has chosen some to live and some to die. It's like a polar Apocalypse Now in some ways and I guess on a fictional level readers might enjoy seeing a bunch of British officers and men try to trap and evade each other (all the while dying of starvation and cold) except these were real men and they wouldn't have done this; nobody ever did this. It just seemed wrong somehow to turn real men into monsters for the sake of story. And it didn't help that the officers all managed to be noble while the men were the murderers.

The other thing that bothered me about the book was the character of the native woman who managed to be (and I'm not exaggerating):

1. Beautiful
2. Mysterious
3. Conveniently not able to speak
4. Wise beyond her years in terms of survival
5. Possibly in control of the Yeti-like creature that attacks the sailors
6. A virgin (as verified by the ship's doctor in a passing mention that I still don't understand)
7. Sexually aggressive - and apparently quite the roll in the hay....even though she is a virgin (and the officer she "catches" is somehow the sexual neophyte)
8. The earth mother type who still merrily leads the way while pregnant or carrying a baby on her back
9. And she saves the big white hero from his own men - of course.

In case you miss how all powerful, all knowing, and utterly irresistible she is, Simmons throws in the myth of Sedna to convince you that the whole thing might be destiny somehow - that the white explorer must meet and be converted by the mythic icon of (apparently) all native woman. It was so 19th century in terms of viewing a native character and so 19th century in how the uneducated white men lose control of themselves and wreak havoc while the white officers can only wonder how it has all degraded to such an appalling level and so 19th century in that the single survivor would choose to - literally - "go native" with his sexy companion that I felt like I was reading a parody rather than a 21st century novel.

Just because the ships disappeared in the 19th century doesn't mean we have to regress to literary stereotypes when writing about them, does it?

Even now though, I don't know if it's me or Simmons that was wrong here. A ton of people whose opinions I value (VanderMeer among them) loved this book. But I don't and I can't. The history gets in the way of the fiction for me, big time. Is it wrong to think that you should tread a little more lightly on history - a little more respectfully? I don't know. But for the record there is no evidence in any polar expedition that a group of men ever rose up against the others and hunted them for food. Mostly they just died, cold and alone, thousands of miles from home. Mostly, they just died. And while that is not exciting, it is the way it was.

And there were no mute sex kittens roaming the high north either.

[Post pic of Franklin's ships: the Erebus & Terror.]