Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The introduction to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s new anthology, Fast Ships, Black Sails, says it all:

From Caribbean intrigue to pirate cooks, from unlikely romance to blood-thirsty attacks, Fast Ships, Black Sails has something for everyone.

And indeed they have. The book opens with “Boojum” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, a space pirates story. Black Alice is a sailor on the Lavinia Whateley, a Boojum or living ship. Her description is beautiful and deserved a Stephan Martiniere illustration:

(…) her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.

Black Alice has a good relationship with the Boojum, a relationship that can ultimately save her from a terrible battle with the alien race known as the Mi-Go who attack the ship in order to rescue the dangerous cargo their captain stole and that should not be there: human brains for the black market. When Black Alice has to go outside to fix a kind of “inflammation” in the body of the ship, the Mi-Go attack. Her pirate colleagues are butchered by the hostile aliens, but, as she is on the outside, she is safe—for now. Her only hope is to unplug the governor, the main circuit which enslaves the ship, so she can go out into the Big Empty, the cold vastness between stars. She manages to go unnoticed by the aliens and must count on the Boojum if she wants to get out alive—even if she must undergo an unorthodox transformation process in order to survive. A very good story and a good way to begin the anthology.

Rhys Hughes’s “Castor On Troubled Waters” is the ultimate fisherman story. It reminded me strongly of Gene Wolfe’s “A Cabin on the Coast,” but without the tragic element; on the contrary, it’s a romp! Old Welshman Castor Jenkins loses 100 pounds in a card game to his friends Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris and offers to go out and find a cash machine, promising to return quickly with the money. Which is what he does—in a manner of speaking. He returns an hour later and tells the strangest story. While we was withdrawing the money he was abducted by a horde of pirates and made to work for them for years as a lookout, visiting strange and exotic places.

Oddly enough, his friends indulge him, as if they are used to hearing preposterous tales from him. But things don’t stop there. He tells them that 50 years have passed, not one hour, and then he ends with the cleverest twist of all—which I can’t tell anything else about without spoiling the plot, but it’s one I bet readers will wish they could have used at some time or other when owing money to friends. Rhys Hughes wrote a hell of a story.

“I Begyn as I Mean to Go On” by Kage Baker is more of a classical pirate story, beginning with two castaways found by a ship, the Martin Luther, whose captain has acquired an ill reputation and fears that he will be deposed by his crew. The castaways are obliged to work on the ship by the laws of the sea, even though they are wary of the captain. When at last they fight a Spanish galleon and find the way to an emerald mine in fictitious San Cucao, South America, luck may be finally on their side—or is it?

Upon arriving, they witness a ghastly scene: a graveyard where a priest, Brother Casildo Fernandez Molina, has buried all the soldiers and civilians, including children, and is supposedly dead himself, but not without cursing the brothers Claveria Martinez before, on his own gravestone. But his tomb—open, because there wasn’t anybody alive to cover him—is empty, and they can’t find his remains. But that’s only the beginning of the horrors they must face. A mixture of classic pulp stories of the ’30s, with H. G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind,” and all the flavor of the Republic movie serials. A truly creepy story. Real good stuff.

Howard Waldrop’s “Avast, Abaft!” is a tribute to Gilbert & Sullivan, with all the fun and nonsense of their topsy-turvy Savoy operas like H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. How can you fight when you have to stop and sing every time? Life is not a breeze, but it surely is a musical! And with mermaids! “Avast, Abaft!” is a romp.

“Elegy for Gabrielle, Patron Saint of Healers, Whores, and Righteous Thieves” by Kelly Barnhill is one of the most beautiful stories in the anthology. About a miracle worker who wanted to have a child, even though she shouldn’t have one, and of the consequences of that act, it’s also a story about challenging one’s fate. Her child, Gabrielle Belain, has been attracted by the sea since childhood, even though her mother has taken care (resorting to some strong spells) that she never go to the ocean. But Gabrielle Belain (the witch, the pirate, the revolutionary, as the narrator of the story calls her) “becomes the obsession of the governor, who enlisted the assistance of every military officer loyal to him, every mercenary he could afford, and every captain in possession of a supply of cannons and a crew unconcerned about raising a sword to the child of a Saint Among Men.” (How her mother became known in the island of Saint-Pierre, where she gave birth to Gabrielle and has lived ever since.) At last, Gabrielle Belain—who has become as saintly a figure as her mother, curing people and making everything good and right—is captured and her execution scheduled. But will she be executed? The elegant ending owes a little to García Marquez’s magical realism.

Justin Howe does a good job with “Skillet and Saber,” but I wondered if perhaps this story was unable to achieve its desired effect within the medium of the written word. “Skillet and Saber” is full of imagery: a new, fresh sailor on a ship assigned to help the cook while at the same time running away from the advances of a gay captain; battles ensue, and there is even a cooking contest, which eventually turns into a battle where, naturally, the young cook’s apprentice must fight with saber and skillet. All in all, it’s a funny comedy but one which deserved a more visual treatment. I’d rather have seen it in a comic book or as an animated movie.

Carrie Vaughn’s “The Nymph’s Child” offers a slightly different take on the familiar fantasy trope of “The Chosen One.” Many years after the last voyage of the Nymph, a vessel which navigated the dangerous Iron Teeth and faced a powerful dragon that no other ship could even get close to, one of its survivors, Grace Lark, is approached by a former pirate-companion-turned-traitor who must navigate the Teeth one more time and wants to know how the captain (who was hanged due to the actions of that same traitor) accomplished it. It is all too apparent what will ensue; beautiful but obvious, the story lacks subtlety.

“68° 06′N, 31° 40′W” by Conrad Williams is a hard story. Imagine, if you will, Ernest Hemingway writing a pirate story. Or telling us about the Shackleton expedition. Style aside, Williams delivers a manly, harsh narrative concerning the obsession of a man on a voyage doomed from the beginning, where the captain leads his crew in search of a malefactor who seems to be evil incarnate:

Amputation means no pay. Anything else, death for example, would be a bonus. This man has a great debt of pain to his past. And mark my words, Captain. He’ll never fall. He’s weak, but he’ll fight till his seams part. That dog’s drenched in bad luck. His leg will rot with him still using it before he gives up the ghost.

The story begins almost noncommittally but suddenly becomes a kind of whodunit meets CSI meets Pirates of the Caribbean—and ends up as something truly terrifying. A dark, beautiful story.

In “Iron Face—a Vignette,” Michael Moorcock writes an old-fashioned space opera in the style of Edmond Hamilton. Featuring another version of Jerry Cornelius! It’s stylish and leaves us begging for more. Unfortunately, it’s a shame that it truly lives up to its name; it’s really a vignette, providing a bird’s eye view of an entire universe in two to three pages. Fortunately, there are a plethora of other Jerry Cornelius stories to delve into.

“Pirate Solutions” by Katherine Sparrow is one of the more original stories in the anthology, and also one of the weirdest, maybe because it’s so close to our real, daily universe. Three programmers at a party drink from an old rum bottle and suddenly start to act maniacally. Yet they have a purpose; they build a ship and go to sea, becoming pirates. They reach a distant shore where they gather and send messages in bottles and start programming:

They told us the story of how their collective, the Wôkòu, had found an old bottle on the beach with a message inside. A message I myself had written. A day later they discovered a bottle of rum in Ching’s government apartment. When they drank it they left behind their work of creating autonomous cyberspaces inside the great firewall of China and sailed here, much as we had done.

Their message in a bottle works all too well—like a virus, like a meme, a very strong and powerful one, an inescapable one, almost like something out of a Lovecraft tale. A piratical Necronomicon or maybe a viral memetic infection? Clever.

Brendan Connell’s “We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath The Stars” is a romp, a pastiche of classic stories such as Treasure Island, with famished pirates talking with extreme politeness even when they’re at the brink of death. It’s all about food here, and these pirates don’t discriminate between animals and human beings. Yummy.

“Voyage of the Iguana” by Steve Aylett is written mostly in the form of a pirate’s journal being read by a writer. As the protagonist promptly explains to the reader, “The log relates the events of a most undisciplined sea voyage. Captained by a Samuel Light Sebastian in 1808 for the East India Company, it was rarely mentioned with anything less than hollering ire and stabbing daggers.”

And that’s basically what it is. Not without a big dose of humor, which makes the story look like a Monty Python-ish tale in the form of a journal, with some witty, funny tirades. But alas, the story is too long and not very funny. It also ends too brusquely, which doesn’t help.

“Pirates of the Suara Sea” by David Freer and Eric Flint is the second tale of space pirates in the anthology, but, unlike “Boojum,” it takes place not in space but in an alien sea:

About the only thing I liked about the galaxy, was that it was neither. It was big—far too big for narrow imagining—it was chaotic, and it was technologically speaking as varied as bouillabaisse. And interstellar transport was not cheap. Hence, when harvesting the Marquat pods, for which there was an insatiable demand back on the core-worlds, from the hundreds of thousands of square miles of Altekar’s shallow seas, you could use locally made boats or go broke.

This story is told through the POV of a captain of a vessel—with humans and amphibian natives, the Altekars, aboard—which is attacked by pirates. They jettison the precious cargo of Marquat pods, and the captain recognizes his pirate captain counterpart and tries to turn the game to his advantage, for the price on the other captain’s head is tempting. An interesting, clever story with a good twist at the end.

Paul Batteiger’s “A Cold Day in Hell,” like Conrad Williams’s story, is a good, honest-to-God, terrifying pirates-in-ice tale. In what seems to be an eternal winter (or a world in a new Ice Age), the ships Ranger and Jane leave Boston in an expedition to capture The Queen’s Revenge and its captain, the legendary Frost, who is considered more than human—and may well be a monster indeed:

It was Captain Frost, for it could be no other. He was tall as a mountain in the haze and terror of the moment, broad as a tree. His great white beard seemed to trail off and become part of the smoke, his eyes like two points of blue fire above it. His hair streamed like the mane of God himself in all his vengeance, tied in locks with lit matches that burned and smoldered, wreathing his terrible white face with smoke.

The battle scenes are most convincing and thrilling. And even though it ends much too quickly, it’s a hell of a good story.

“Captain Blackheart Wentworth” by Rachel Swirsky is a cute story featuring pirate rats. It’s deadly serious, though, and certainly Captain Blackheart Wentworth, Rat Pirate of the Gully by the Oak, would make me walk the plank for calling the “tail” a cute one. This is no children’s or even YA adventure. Imagine Richard Adams with (a lot of) water. There is sex (interracial sex—a rat mating with a cat, of all things!), blood, and the thrill of conquest. All the elements of a fine pirate story.

Naomi Novik’s “Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake” shows us a strange alternate Earth where England is apparently governed by Roman deities. But in this world, women are treated the same as in our universe. And that’s why Lady Araminta, a noblewoman and practitioner of magic, must dress as a man when the ship in which she is traveling is attacked by pirates. But, alas, the disguise doesn’t circumvent her capture, even though she manages to fool the pirate captain for a rather long time (the card game scene is hilarious). In the end, a wreck on the shores of an island with a mysterious temple threatens to kill them all, but Araminta’s special “talent” may save them. In this respect, the solution is very much like the one in Carrie Vaughan’s “The Nymph’s Child.” A good tale, but one with an obvious ending.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke’s “The Whale Below” is the third alien pirate story. A pirate airship attacks whalers, but when they come aboard, there’s no one to be captured or killed. They must face their own greed when it comes to choosing between taking precious pearls and fighting (or fleeing) a kraken. A little bit on the stereotypical side when dealing with Spanish culture (all the characters are of Spanish extraction), and there’s even a small language error (Madre dios instead of Madre de Dios), but that may be attributed to the fact that languages change in time, what the heck.

Garth Nix’s “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe” closes the anthology. Featuring a captain and a metal-and-wood Pinocchio-like puppet who must face the fury of a cannibal captain who also happens to be a priestess of an unknown deity, it’s a good fantasy pirate story and a weird, baroque one. Estrangement (through devices including the Syndical Sea and shapeshifters) reigns supreme, and the form of the narrative is as important as its content. A fine offering indeed.

The VanderMeers have done it again. 2008 comes to an end with a more than positive balance for them, with three anthologies that are already helping to change and shape our perception of science fiction and fantasy for the 21st Century.

Publisher: Night Shade Books (Oct. 2008)
Price: $10.17
Trade paperback: 272 pages
ISBN: 978-1597800945