I was a bit surprised when in a comment someone mentioned not having heard of Sarah Tolmie. In the spirit of XKCD’s Ten Thousand, let me explain at least a little about who Sarah Tolmie is, and why you should be reading her fiction1.
An Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, Tolmie won a 2019 Rhysling Award for “Ursula Le Guin in the Underworld”; the poem was also nominated for an Aurora. Her The Art of Dying was shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Award. Unfortunately, poetry isn’t my thing, so let’s move on to prose…
Tolmies’ first published speculative fiction novel was 2014’s The Stone Boatmen. In it, three cities with a forgotten shared past resume contact with each other after ages of isolation. Time has allowed them to develop in very different directions. Tolmie could have told a tale of horrified xenophobia and exploitation. Instead, she took her story in a far more humane direction, weaving tales about the relationships that follow into an unexpectedly intimate short novel. Tolmie’s prose is markedly superior to the norm for speculative fiction.
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The Stone Boatmen
The Stone Boatmen earned a starred review from a member of Publisher Weekly’s faceless legions. Far more significantly, it won glowing accolades from Ursula K. Le Guin, which can be read here:
Certain imaginative novels never best-sell, yet remain alive, a singular treasure to each new generation that finds them—books such as Islandia, The Worm Ouroboros, Gormenghast. The Stone Boatmen has the makings of one of these quiet classics. It is lucid yet complex. Its strangeness fascinates, captivates. To read it is to find yourself in a country a long, long way from home, taken on a unforeseeable journey—and when it’s over, you wish you were still there.
Where The Stone Boatmen was quietly lyrical, 2014’s NoFood is straightforward (but still surprising) satire. Total Gastric Bypass has freed the world’s rich and beautiful from any need to eat food. This is quite a challenge for the planet’s restaurateurs, whose business model has traditionally involved feeding people. Visionary chef Hardwicke “Hardy” Arar saw a way to feed the unfeedable. Hardy’s NoFood may not serve food, exactly, but it doesn’t serve food so exquisitely the waiting list to not dine there is a year long.
NoFood’s future is off-handedly horrific—fortunes protect the rich from physical calamities but do nothing about personal foibles—and some of the stories that make up its tapestry are a little sad but NoFood is quite funny. Comedy is not common in spec fic. Successful comedy is even rarer.
2016’s Two Travellers collects two short pieces. In “The Dancer on the Stairs,” a traveller wakes on an unfamiliar staircase, trapped unless she can navigate the convoluted, utterly inflexible social niceties of an alien culture. “The Burning Furrow” similarly presents a character trapped between two cultures. Unlike the stair dweller, Dragan the cook understands the rules (or at least some of the rules) that consign Dragan and his family to lives divided between our modern world and his native realm. Soon Dragan and company will have to choose which world to remain in for the rest of their lives and while Dragan misses his homeland, his family is very keen on luxuries like antibiotics. Not to mention the matter of his pregnant daughter’s passion for a terrestrial boy….
The worlds of Dancer and Furrow are both magical but otherwise quite different. Dancer’s is artificial and claustrophobic while Furrow’s is far more organic. Both stories involve bridging cultural divides, something Tolmie tackles with an anthropological and narrative toolkit that owes a lot to Ursula Le Guin.
2019’s The Little Animals at first appears to be a straight historical, a fictionalized account of Dutch naturalist Antonie Leeuwenhoek and his pioneering forays into microscopy, which revealed an unseen world of minute “animalcules.” Leeuwenhoek’s world is not quite ours, however, as becomes apparent when Leeuwenhoek encounters an odd goose-herding girl who can hear the unseen microscopic life around her.
More ambitious than her previous prose efforts, The Little Animals is an entrancing gentle tale about science and natural philosophy, and the community around the Delft draper/scientist.
To sum up: Tolmie’s fiction may be unfamiliar to you, but this is a circumstance very easily corrected.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Full disclosure: I know the author personally. I know a lot of SF authors. In this case, I noticed on reading The Stone Boatmen years ago that Tolmie is also from Kitchener-Waterloo so I sent her an email because sending email to a perfect stranger on the basis of liking their books is a completely normal thing to do. We both work at the University of Waterloo, although I was hired there after I met Tolmie; UW has more SF folks connected with it than you may expect for an institution known mostly for STEM courses, courageous architecture, and a vast population of aggressively territorial geese. Working in the same building is, I admit, against the odds. Specifically, one hundred thirty four to one because I work in two of the two hundred sixty eight buildings on campus. To quote Pratchett, “Million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.” Thus it is in no way coincidental that she’s my designated representative in the event I win a Hugo this weekend, because she can just hand me the rocket rather than Dublin 2019 entrusting the trophy to Canada Post, whose motto isn’t “Indistinguishable from tossing your mail into a wood chipper” but could well be.
I think it’s the geese that make UW an SF haven. They’re probably eating thiotimoline.
Please, kind sir, do not neglect to mention Tolmie’s 2019 poetry collection, The Art of Dying, which I reviewed with rapturous warbles at the linked blogspot. The cover alone should make it part of everyone’s bookcase:
I thoroughly enjoyed “The Little Animals”. Even putting the fantastic element aside, the subject is a novel one for historical fiction. I am looking forward to the other novels and stories.
Thanks for this review! A new (to me) author whose works to explore, with a nice added bonus of beautiful prose? Yes, please.
4: unfortunately, poetry isn’t my thing. If it is yours, feel free to be effusive about it.
[You would have been my vote for fan writer if I was a Hugo voter, based on your reviews at jamesdavisnicoll.com (beats me how you review faster than I can add to my TBR pile and follow along…)]
Based on the three book covers used for this post, I wouldn’t have guessed that any of the books were speculative fiction if I saw them on a table at Indigo.
That said, The Little Animals looks amazing based on the fact that I like Stephen Jay Gould and Neal Stephenson’s System of the World.
Loved, loved, loved The Stone Boatmen. Read it from the library and then had to buy it. My library system doesn’t have any of her others, though, so I’ll have to buy them before reading them!
Perhaps I will start with Two Travellers, since it’s the combination of very fine prose and anthropological sensibility which I enjoyed so much in Stone Boatmen.
I am very, very disappointed by the lack of basic math you (and, implicitly, the Tor.commentariat [might it be shortened to Tormentariat?]) displayed. Probability that two independent random selections of one building in 268 (supposing of course that it is uniformly random, i. e. in fact that each one employs the same number of people; any real-life imbalance goes to increase the result) coincide is of course 268 / 268^2 = 1 / 268.
@JVjr, would you like me to explain the complementary error in your logic in #8? :-)
Well, I graduated in mathematical statistics and can’t honestly say I like the idea of having to spend the time rebutting, but… SOMEBODY IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET! ;-)