Ian R. MacLeod, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations (Golden Gryphon Press, 2004)
A popular saying is "don't judge a book by its cover." Would it be such a bad thing, however, to judge it by its first paragraph? Upon opening this tome of short stories by multiple award-winning author Ian R. MacLeod and turning to the first story, the Hugo-nominated "Breathmoss," the reader is immediately confronted with this:
"In her twelfth standard year, which on Habara was the Season of Soft Rains, Jalila moved across the mountains with her mothers from the high plains of Tabuthal to the coast. For all of them, the journey down was one of unhurried discovery, with the kamasheens long gone and the world freshly moist, and the hayawans rusting as they rode them, and the huge flat plates of their feet swishing through purplish-green undergrowth."
If you can understand a word of this, then you are a better kamasheen than I, apparently. The stories here can be divided into two categories: the explicitly science-fictional ("Breathmoss," "Verglas," "New Light on the Drake Equation," and "Isabel of the Fall") and the more subtly science-fictional ("The Chop Girl," "The Noonday Pool," and "The Summer Isles"). The former, sadly, choke on their own uniqueness, clogged with so many alien terms it was almost like reading a text in a foreign language I only half understood. Along with that comes mostly unnecessary exposition on the fantastical worlds the characters inhabit, slowing down the already convoluted and difficult narratives. Ian R. MacLeod is an intimate lover of the run-on sentence, and his rambling paragraphs, coupled with sharp interjections of sci-fi terminology (some woefully unexplained, some revealed all too meticulously) make for one long, frustrating, and wholly unpleasant read. As an avid fantasy reader, I'm no stranger to foreign terms and made-up words and invented languages, but the sheer density of such make-believe in his stories is staggering. By the time one comes to the stretched-out end of one of these aggravatingly long-winded tales, the desire to comprehend the story itself is lost, replaced with a single-minded determination to safely navigate the thorny maze of MacLeod's prose.
The later category still suffers somewhat from MacLeod's garbled sentence structure, but the going is somewhat easier as the relatively contemporary settings (at least compared to the far-off future of the Thousand and One Worlds) reduce the amount of incomprehensible made-up jargon. One of the better works is "The Chop Girl," and its sombre reflection on life and luck. After three of her romantic encounters fail to return from their air raids, a female volunteer at a British air force base is shunned by the soldiers for bringing bad fortune -- until she's courted by a pilot with perfect luck. Delicate and sad, it was the only tale in this collection that I truly enjoyed reading. One decent story, and six tedious, jumbled, and pointless tales.
Writing about interesting ideas and new alien innovations and interstellar romance is all well and good, but any relation the readers may make with the book's characters is quashed by the author's twisted, dense, treacly writing style. The whole thing is rather like slogging through the moofa-clogged star rivers of Genifus 6G -- oh wait, I'm forgetting myself. For those unaquainted with the topography of Genifus 6G, this book is slower than than molasses flowing uphill in January.
