James Nicoll Reviews

Steven Brust’s 1987 The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars is the first volume in Terry Windling’s eight-volume Fairy Tales series, about which more later.

Protagonist Greg Kovaks is an artist. He has just hauled out the vast blank canvas that he calls the Monster. Like the canvas, his career so far is a blank.

When they were very young, Greg and his chums Robert, David, Dan, and Karen formed an artists’ collective. They rented space in which to work, and set out to transform the world. Now that they are all mature twenty-somethings [1], it’s time to assess their success to date.

Greg has achieved financial security. He can sponge off his girlfriend Debbie. The others do not appear to be as lucky. Recognition and adulation are in short supply. So is the rent money for their shared space. Has the experiment run its course? Should the group go their separate ways?

Greg thinks big thoughts about creativity, art, and the shortcomings of his friends as he struggles with the Monster. Can Greg and his pals overcome their immediate challenges or is the collective doomed?

Cue a parallel fairy tale plot. Csucskári and brothers have been given an enormous task by the king. The sky has no sun, no moon, and no stars. Someone must fix them there. Csucskári is determined to be that someone. All he needs do is overcome an assortment of monsters, survive the vengeance of the dead monster’s kin, and the sky will be transformed. Nothing easier, right?

~oOo~

Heads-up: if you don’t care for the g‑word in reference to Romany, this is not the book for you.

Windling’s Fairy Tales project was an attempt to salvage fairy tales from the children’s entertainment ghetto to which they had been consigned. There were eight books in the series [1]: The Sun, The Moon and the Stars by Stephen Brust (1987), Jack the Giant Killer by Charles de Lint (1987), The Nightingale by Kara Dalkey (1988), Snow White and Rose Red by Patricia C. Wrede (1989), Tam Lin by Pamela Dean (1991), Briar Rose by Jane Yolen (1992), White as Snow by Tanith Lee (2000), and Fitcher’s Brides by Gregory Frost (2002). I have read the Brust, the de Lint, the Dean, the Lee, and the Frost. Not sure that I’ve read the Yolen. All these books save Jack the Giant Killer were given eye-catching Thomas Canty covers. (When Orb, a Tor imprint, published Jack, they chose a different artist for the cover, a cover I found much less interesting.)

The series had an interesting history. It lasted fifteen years — not bad — and was divided between Ace (the first three) and Tor (the rest). Series don’t usually jump publishers like that, which suggests that Tor thought it had enough merit, and readership, to justify picking it up.

It happens I would rather rub Ajax powder cleanser with added bleach into my eyes than read Deep Thoughts about Art [3]. I am not the best audience for this novel. However, I did enjoy Brust’s portrait of Greg. Greg is sure that he’s a good guy and a great artist. Brust tells us enough about his protagonist to dispel any such illusions in the reader. This is a portrait of the artist as a pretentious jerk, a fellow who is completely unaware that he is damning himself with his own words [4]. I am certain this is deliberate on Brust’s part.

The group dynamics should be familiar to anyone who has been unfortunate enough to be involved in any sort of group artistic endeavor. The manner in which the collective is sneeringly dismissive of Karen, the member whose art sales do in fact cover her rent, is quite believable.

Oh, and something else I liked: art is shown to be something that regular people, not just geniuses, can do. Even Greg can do art (if perhaps not as well as he thinks he can). You probably can make art as well.

I don’t understand the parallelism between the modern story and the folk tale. Perhaps they are intended as mirror images: Csucskári is more than capable of accomplishing all of his tasks, whereas it’s not clear if Greg is up to just the one.

In sum, a perfectly readable short work that did not work for me — not because it’s bad, just that it ran up against some of my private peeves. It was not a good fit for me but it could be for you.

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars is available here (Orb), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Or perhaps the characters were thirty-somethings. I only own this book in paper, which makes searching the text more difficult.

2: Even though my review of the Tanith Lee claimed there were nine before listing eight. This would be a good time to go fix that error…

3: A question Greg does not ponder anywhere near as much as he should: wouldn’t his girlfriend benefit immeasurably if she were to dump him?

4: Brust gives us a scene in which one of the collective hesitantly asks if Greg’s self-plagiarism was on purpose. This is the sort of scene that sends me into bouts of self-doubt, as I know I must have inadvertently copied my own earlier work [5]. My readers who are also writers can probably sympathize.

5: Or perhaps my earlier self copied my own later work, which would be kind of cool.