Fiction Reviews
Seasons of Glass and Iron
(2026) Amal El-Mohtar, Arcadia – Quercus, £16.99, hrdbk, 195pp, ISBN 978-1-529-45264-8
I have not read much by Amal El-Mohtar but what I have (such as The River Has Roots), I have enjoyed. They have all been short stories; she writes well and her longer, but still short, stories are interesting, being mostly fantasy rather than science fiction, and good short fantasies are to be welcomed. She has won a number of awards, including a Hugo; several of these award winning stories are in this book.
It opens with the title story ‘Seasons of Glass and Iron’. Tabitha walks and walks in iron shoes, almost without rest; she has lost count of the years but she is on her fourth of seven pairs. Amira, a princess, lives alone on the top of a glass hill and, as long as she sits without moving, her suitors are unable to climb it; she is sustained by the golden apples that appear in her hands. One day Tabitha finds the glass hill and, as her iron shoes grip the glass, she arrives at the summit and finds Amira. As Tabitha walks round and round the summit, slowly wearing through the iron, they become friends, each telling the other their histories. Maybe they are the solutions to each other’s problems.
‘The Green Book’ follows a discussion between the scholars of a book and the book itself, which you might describe as haunted.
In ‘Madeleine’ we learn that, after her mother died of Alzheimer’s, Madeleine took part in trials for a new drug. Since then she has experienced very realistic flashbacks to various times in her life, which are now starting to include somebody she has never met.
‘The Lonely Sea in the Sky’ tells of Leila Ghufran who, the team’s psychiatrist says, is suffering from Meisner Syndrome, aka Adamantine Dissociation Syndrome, defined as being a preoccupation with diamonds, particularly of an extraterrestrial nature. Leila maintains that she is not ill, merely doing her job; she is, after all, a geologist stationed on the Triton base and studying the liquid diamonds found on Neptune. The material is known as Lucyite and its quantum entanglement properties allow for teleportation devices to be built. But is there a cost to using Lucyite?
With ‘And Their Lips Rang with the Sun’ an old woman explains to a stranger passing through her city about the fourteen girls on the temple roof who, every morning, perform the ritual dawn dance. Without this the Sun will not rise. What if they did not dance? She tells of how such a mistake once occurred and the unfortunate outcome.
‘The Truth About Owls’ describes how schoolgirl Anisa visits the Scottish Owl Centre and develops a love for the birds, thus changing her own future.
Throughout ‘A Hollow Play’ Emily writes letters to Paige in the form of notes in a journal, though Paige will only read the letters when the journal is full and sent to her. Emily explains that her new friends Kel and Lynette are not quite human and that Kel needs her help to get back home.
We meet Hessa in ‘To Follow the Waves’; she cuts stones for clients and infuses them with custom-made dreams. One day she makes a dream stone for herself and is surprised by the result.
‘John Hollowback and the Witch’ tells of a young man who would have been handsome were it not for the huge hollow in his back. He visits a witch and asks for her help with this terrible disfigurement. She will cure him but the price he has to pay is that he must learn and accept some very uncomfortable truths about himself.
As we learn in ‘Florilegia; or, Some Lies About Flowers’, Blodeuwedd was created out of flowers by wizardly uncles, to be the bride of Lleu Llaw Gyffes. She had no say in the matter and still has the needs of flowers, to have her roots in the soil. When the knowledgeable scholar Adain arrives, things are going to change.
With ‘Pockets’ Nadia finds a piece of fudge in her pocket, which is surprising as she does not even like fudge. Then she finds a lipstick, but it is not hers, and she continues to find strange things in the pockets of many of her clothes, even a gun. When she meets Warda, the latter has the opposite problem; when she puts items in her pockets they simply disappear.
Whilst I enjoyed these longer stories, there were several stories that were so short that I could not get to grips with them and understand what they were about, leaving me feeling that I had missed the point. Whilst the author clearly had an idea in mind, there needs to be enough story for the reader to understand (though perhaps you may). They are ‘A Tale of Ash in Seven Birds’, ‘Wing’, and ‘Anabasis’. There were also a few poems but poems have never done much for me and these were no exception; they are ‘Song for an Ancient City’, ‘Qahr’, ‘Thunderstorm in Glasgow, July 25, 2013’, and ‘Pieces’.
All told I found this collection to be very entertaining, full of very good and different ideas, and nicely written. Once again, a good demonstration that stories have a natural length and they do not all need to be novels.
Peter Tyers
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