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The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera

I wouldn’t say this was recommended by a friend so much as it was a friend asking me several times if I’d read the book and what I thought to it. Since I tend to have strong opinions on books, and if someone wants to know what that opinion is, then the book in question is either good enough, or bad enough, for me to invest an opinion in it. And what I knew about The Saint of Bright Doors (2023, Sri Lanka) wasn’t really in its favour: nominated for the Hugo and won the Nebula, two awards whose shortlists rarely align with my taste in genre fiction, and a modern fantasy in which magic sits alongside mobile phones, television, and so on…

And yet…:The Saint of Bright Doors is very good indeed. 

Mixing fantasy and mimetic fiction, as this novel does, is difficult and usually done badly (unless it’s a portal fantasy, which this isn’t). Chandrasekera pulls it off. That alone makes it a notable twenty-first century fantasy novel.

Fetter is the son of a god, the Perfect and Kind, but he lives with his mother, Mother-of-Glory, who raises him as an assassin, with the eventual plan of killing his father. By the time he hits his early twenties, Fetter is no longer an assassin and has moved to Luriat. The city is known for its “bright doors”. Doors which remain closed for a period of time become one-sided: door on one side, blank wall on the other. They cannot be opened and are painted in bright colours. To prevent this occurring, most doors have a glass or see-through panel.

Fetter masquerades as a student studying the bright doors, and gets involved with some revolutionary groups. He provides help to recent immigrants. But then his mother gets back in touch with him, and tells him of her past. How his father turned their island home into a peninsula, and then recreated the past so he had existed for thousands of years. Unfortunately, his followers have schismed, and one has become a brutal cult used by the authorities in Luriat.

Fetter is arrested and sent to an internment camp which seems to be much bigger on the inside than the outside (this reminded me of another novel, but I couldn’t think which). His father visits Luriat, and Fetter is brought out of the camp to see him. He refuses to bow to his father’s will. There is a pogrom, then a plague. Fetter fights against his father.

There’s a lot more crammed in there than just the above. There are books in which the author isn’t really sure where their story lies and so fills their story with far too many things. In parts, The Saint of Bright Doors feels a little like that, but somehow or other it all hangs together. Like the mix of magic and present-day technology, which shouldn’t work, but does.


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A Million Open Doors, John Barnes

Nominated for both the Nebula and the Clarke Awards. Barnes seemed to have a moment in the mid-to late-1990s, with a Hugo nomination, three Nebula nominations and three Clarke nominations. But no wins. And nothing since then except appearances on the Locus Award/readers’ poll pretty much every year until a decade ago (for his last published novel, in fact). A Million Open Doors (1992, USA) is only the second book by Barnes I’ve read – I read Mother of Storms (1994, USA) back in 1999.

A Million Open Doors is the first of four novels set in the Thousand Cultures. Taking place several centuries from now, Earth has colonised a number of worlds, each of which is home to one or more “cultures”, groups of people – ethnic, national, religious, some even completely invented. Like Nou Occitan, which is supposed to be some sort of Iberian Romantic culture of troubadours and duellists, but is really just massively sexist. The worlds were colonised by slower than light ships, but now “springers”, instantaneous transport, even across interstellar distances, connect them together.

When Giraut catches his paramour in flagrante delicto with a gang of “Interstellars” (youths aping what they think is an Earth culture by “beating up and degrading young girls”), he accompanies a friend to Caledony, which has just received its first springer. Caledony is a religious culture, which uses Christianity to justify some garbled economic philosophy. Giraut opens a school to teach Occitan culture – music, duelling, poetry, dancing, painting, etc – to the joyless Caledons. Unfortunately, the success of the Centre for Occitan Arts prompts a coup by hardliners, house arrest for the previous government, martial law and armed mobs on the streets.

To build support, Giraut and his liberal Caledon friends stage a camping trip across the continent, but there’s an accident in the mountains, resulting in several fatalities. While dashing back to get into communications range, Giraut discovers the ruin of an alien city. Meanwhile, while he was away, Council of Humanity troops have overthrown the hardliners…

Reading A Million Open Doors, I had trouble working out why it was science fiction. Yes, other planets, springers, spaceships, etc, but you could set the story on Earth. Some community full of rapists, another full of nutball religious types – I’m pretty sure you could find two towns that qualify in the US. Even the alien ruins could be the ruins of some prehistoric American culture. All the rest is just bells and whistles.

And when a science fiction novel is not science fiction, then what’s the point of it? And you also have to wonder why the novel appeared on two science fiction award shortlists. In other respects, it’s all just a little too textbook. Giraut is a male chauvinist, but he comes to value and respect women – and even falls in love with one who isn’t even attractive and whose physical flaws he mentions repeatedly. Two characters are killed irretrievably – the technology exists to bring people back using personality recordings, and there’s even an example to illustrate it, the victim of a brutal sexual assault, torture and murder. (This is not just everyday sexism, this is everyday sexual assault.) The bad guys get their just desserts – except, well, not really, a friend who insulted Giraut is humiliated (with a spanking), and the villainous pastor who seized power on Caledony is imprisoned off-world.

A Million Open Doors lost the Clarke to Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993, UK), and the Nebula to Doomsday Book (1992, USA) by Connie Willis (Sarah Canary (1991, USA), Karen Joy Fowler, or China Mountain Zhang (1992, USA), Maureen McHugh, would have been better winners). Even so, it didn’t belong on those shortlists. It’s mediocre, its one idea is in service to a story that doesn’t even need to be science fiction, and it’s offensive in parts.