I first came across Jim Grimsley’s name in a trilogy of LGBT-themed genre anthologies published in the late 1990s and edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel: Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997, USA), Science Fiction (1998, USA) and Horror (2001, USA). The contents were a mix of LGBT+ authors writing genre and genre authors writing LGBT+. The former were generally more successful than the latter, but the three anthologies were good and are worth tracking down. Grimsley contributed a story to Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction and, to be honest, I remember nothing of it. But I obviously took note of the author’s name, and when his debut genre novel, Kirith Kirin (2000, USA), was published a couple of years later, I bought it, read it, and thought it interesting enough to keep an eye open for later novels by him.
Kirith Kirin is a relatively straightforward secondary-world fantasy, except for the fact its central romance is gay. However, in an extended series of appendices, a future history of the fantasy world documents a very science-fictional future. I thought that a fascinating twist on both secondary-world fantasies and the use of appendices in genre novels. When a pair of sequels to Kirith Kirin appeared — The Ordinary (2004, USA) and The Last Green Tree (2006, USA) — I bought both. However, it wasn’t until earlier this year I finally got around to reading the first of those two sequels…
And I found myself reading a novel very different to the one I’d expected. The Ordinary is a science fiction sequel to a fantasy novel. The two genres are cleverly knitted together. It’s not that the magic, or fantasy tropes, of the first book are explained as science in the second — as in, for example, Rosemary Kirstein’s excellent Steerswoman series — but the fact The Ordinary makes a whole of both science and magic.
Jedde Martel is an observer and linguist on the world of Irion, which is recognisably the world of Kirith Kirin. She is invited on a trade mission north to meet Irion’s mysterious rulers. They seem to recognise her, and it is only when she is abducted and magically sent back into the world’s past, to meet its actual ruler (one of the major characters in Kirith Kirin), that her situation is explained — as indeed is the plot underlying the story of The Ordinary.
The novel is not entirely successful. The story’s stakes are never completely documented, even though the jeopardy they represent drives the plot. The magic powers may be vital to the story, but in the build-up to the climax those powers grow increasingly more, well, powerful and correspondingly less plausible. It doesn’t help that the novel starts out reading like something by Ursula K LeGuin — and Grimsley does a creditable job of channelling her — but as the story ramps up the magic, and downplays the science, it sometimes feels like Grimsley isn’t sure which sort of novel he is writing.
And yet, despite a few longeurs, Grimsley paints a fascinating world, and manages not to tip over into ridiculousness. The Ordinary makes a better fist of its story than is the case in so many genre novels which deploy tropes uncritically with no regard to genre. And there are plenty of those. In The Ordinary, the fantasy and the science fiction tropes are carefully placed. Grimsley has thought about the two genres and how to meld them. He has not, as seems all too common these days, borrowed willy-nilly from either.
I read a novel last year — I might as well name it: A Big Ship at the End of the Universe by Alex White (2018, USA) — in which magic is present in a space opera universe. It was terrible. True, magic is arbitrary, entirely subject to authorial whim and not to some implied universal set of laws (which, of course, fictional magic systems all too often have, behind the scenes — see AD&D), but in A Big Ship at the end if the Universe, magic added nothing that couldn’t have been done by a space opera trope.
It was just a gimmick.
Magic is never a gimmick, never a replacement for science fiction tropes. In The Ordinary, it co-exists with science. It is, I suppose, a different worldview — but one that does more than simply dictate how a person perceives, or interacts, with the world. It also gives them power over the world.
I’m somewhat embarrassed it’s taken me over fifteen years to read The Ordinary, especially given I bought a copy when it was first published. I’m sorry too. Had I read it earlier, I could also have read The Last Green Tree. But both copies of the books I bought are in storage, and it’s only through lucky accident I have a copy of The Ordinary here with me now. And so read it.
Having said that, things would be more urgent, and I would be more annoyed at my delay, if Grimsley had written anything since The Last Green Tree. But his last work since appears to have been a memoir published in 2015.
A shame. I’d dearly love to see more fantasy/science fiction from him.
