James Nicoll Reviews

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2019 Gods of Jade and Shadow is a standalone fantasy novel. 

Bitter old Cirilo Layva is a very big frog in the extremely small pond of Uukumil. The Layvas are the family of consequence in the backwater Yucatan town. Cirilo’s worthless grandson Martin revels in his high status and does nothing to deserve it. 

Eighteen-year-old Casiopea Tun is less fortunate. She is a Layva, but her mother married against Cirilo’s wishes. Now Casiopea is poor, orphaned, grudgingly tolerated relative. She’s family enough to live on the family estate, but so low status that she is basically an unpaid servant. 

Casiopea tolerates her circumstances because she has been told that Cirilo’s will gives her a bequest of one thousand pesos, which would be enough for to start a good life elsewhere. Cirilo dies and Martin gleefully informs her that the bequest was a lie. She will get nothing. 

Casiopea decides to take matters into her own hands. She breaks into her grandfather’s locked chest, hoping to find something she can use or sell. No luck there. She does, however, find an imprisoned god. 

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2017’s Prime Meridian is a standalone science fiction novella by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

In the glorious world of tomorrow, anyone with enough money can buy a ticket to the Martian settlements. Anyone with the right credentials can indenture themself to buy that precious ticket.

Thanks to her decision to drop out of college to care for her dying mother, Amelia doesn’t have money or credentials. Instead, she is one of Mexico City’s precariate. A new life on Mars can only be a dream.

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Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s soon-to-be-released The Beautiful Ones is a standalone SF novel. (SF in my estimation; see the discussion below.)

Hector Auvray rose from humble origins because he is an extremely powerful, skilled, and artistic telekinetic. He may not be an aristocrat but at least he is famous and rich. 

Valérie Beaulieu is famous, rich, beautiful, and an aristocrat. None of this truly makes her happy, since women of her class have nothing they can really call their own. Her background and beauty have only made her a valuable commodity on the marriage mart. She knows that her impoverished family’s future depends on her. A dutiful daughter, she abandoned her one true love so that she could marry the wealthy Gaetan instead.

Hector was that one true love. Ten years after being spurned by Valérie, Hector has returned to the city of Loisail.

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Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2014 anthology Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse delivers exactly what it promises: post-apocalyptic tales told from Canadian perspectives. 

The moral here seems to be that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. 

Also, it’s not going to get better.

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2015’s She Walks in Shadows  (published by Prime under the less evocative but also less ambiguous title Cthulhu’s Daughters: Stories of Lovecraftian Horror ) was compiled by editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. The theme of the collection: 

The present volume assembles stories about women, by women. Why an all-woman volume? The first spark was the notion, among some fans of the Lovecraft Mythos, that women do not like to write in this category, that they can’t write in this category. […] We hope this anthology will help to dispel such notions. 

It’s always a mistake to think that the mere existence of an anthology filled with cosmic horror stories will dispel delusions rooted in knuckle-dragging prejudice. Still, despite the generally troglodytic nature of the Lovecraft community, this anthology won a World Fantasy Award in 2015. 

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2016’s Certain Dark Things is Canadian SF author Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s second novel. 

World reaction to the revelation that vampires really do exist has varied. Some nations opted for cautious, monitored co-existence. Others simply drove the vampires out. Twenty-first century Mexico did both: Mexico was for many years a haven for vampires fleeing their former home nations, but Mexico City was declared a no-go zone for the blood drinkers. 

Declaring it was one thing; enforcing it another. 

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Silvia Moreno-Garcia may not be quite as well known as Margaret Atwood but she too is a Canadian speculative fiction author, as well as a publisher and an editor. Although she has published enough short fiction to fill two collections, 2015’s Signal to Noise is her first novel.

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