mtvessel | Entries tagged with zen cho

Mar 2023
Black Water Sister – Zen Cho – Macmillan, 2021
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In a previous book of this author's that I reviewed, I complained that the Malay elements of the story were short-changed by being yoked to a British setting that didn't quite fit. No such problem with this one, which is a modern-day fantasy set in Penang and featuring deities, temples, vengeful ghosts and some deeply traditional family attitudes.
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Jul 2021
The True Queen - Zen Cho – Pan, 2019
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Diversity is a hot topic in media circles at present and that is clearly a good thing. Of course any consumer of films, TV and books should be able to find in them characters with whom they can identify, and far too many minorities are still under-represented. However, diversity does raise questions of narrative, particularly when applied to novels. How can you represent the full diversity of human experience when you have to focus on a limited cast of characters? Who do you leave out?

Sadly the answer to that has typically been: complicated women, people whose skin colour is not white, people with disabilities, those in the lower social orders, and queer people. Which is why the latest wave of diverse authors to have entered the SF/fantasy genre is exciting. Zen Cho is one of these and in her second novel she has pleasingly upped the ante on the diverse approach to fantasy and regency romance fiction that marked her first book by deliberately choosing to make all the main characters female and by expanding the milieu to include her own Malay heritage. But there has been some cost in the plotting and worldbuilding.
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Aug 2016
Sorcerer to the Crown – Zen Cho - Pan Books, 2016 / Spiderlight – Adrian Tchaikovsky - Tor.com, 2016
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I appreciate the arts but have little time for most contemporary manifestations of them. The main reason for this (apart, of course, from the time wasted due to Sturgeon's law) is that art, music and dance appear to have stopped evolving, instead diversifying into myriad forms of individual self-expression. Art is no longer a conversation between the artist, their predecessors and contemporaries, but a monologue - "look how clever, original and talented I am!". As most artists are not particularly profound thinkers, what new insights they have tend to relate to the minutiae of the social milieu in which they live, and for me their effusions generally lack analytical interest and deep emotional meaning.

Fortunately, the same is not true of genre fiction. One can tell this by the fact that identifiable styles and trends exist, for example steampunk, grimdark and Scandinavian noir, which can be analysed and, more importantly, moved on from. As a result, modern genre fiction, even when it is not startlingly original - and the two books to be discussed here have deeply familiar settings and character types - can still be interesting and worthwhile in a way that the artworks considered for the Turner Prize, for example, are not.
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Mark's Booklog

Twenty years of arguing with books

Entries tagged with zen cho

Malay Ghosts

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