Read This: recently read and recommended by Fran Wilde

A Particular Magic: Two Books from Ellen Klages

In a printed book, words can press together like a kiss or line up into a story. It’s all a matter of how the pages are folded or divided. It’s a particular bit of everyday paper magic that allows us to open up worlds.

In a similar way, Ellen Klages has combined physics and magic in not one but two books published during the turbulent spring of 2017. More than that, Passing Strange, a novella from Tor.com publishing, and Wicked Wonders, a collection of short stories from Tachyon Publications, seem at first glance to be entirely separate entities, but they, too, connect when folded properly.

Passing Strange tells the story of a city (San Francisco), and of a particular circle of artists, scholars, and entertainers—all women—hidden in plain sight within its borders. The novella goes back in time to chart the group’s history, but within that stilled frame, a speculation lingers. One day, perhaps, these women with whom we fall in love through Klages’s glorious prose—Haskell, Emily, Babs, Franny, Helen, Polly, and the luminaries they circulate with (including an off-stage Frida Kahlo)—will emerge from the pages of World War Two–era San Francisco into a freer and more tolerant time.

So too in Wicked Wonders, readers are surrounded by stories of magic, transformation, art, longing, sleight of hand, and the extraordinary hiding in plain sight. Franny, a cartographer of exceptional talent, folds maps and moves people through them in “Caligo Lane.” Jo Norwood meets an extraordinary companion in “Echoes of Aurora.” An extraordinary summer is the glorious heart of “Woodsmoke.” The terrifying otherworld is one child’s discovery and another’s secret in “Singing on a Star.”

Side characters in Passing Strange, including Franny and Polly, have featured stories in Wicked Wonders. These moments where the books meet up feel like magic in their own right as the world suddenly becomes bigger within the boundaries of Klages’s plots.

Klages is practicing a certain magic of her own between the two books because Franny isn’t the only one who combines magic and physics. The cartographer has a second counterpart in Wicked Wonders: Mrs. Zeno, who with a friend splits a piece of cake into particles that allow many worlds to exist at the same time in “Mrs. Zeno’s Paradox.”

Klages says in her story notes that she folded together manners and physics to arrive at “Mrs. Zeno’s Paradox.” This is something she does again and again: folds disparate ideas and themes together to form new worlds.

That Klages is toying with the laws of physics both on and off the page as a cat plays with a string or as a magician connects torn pieces of paper into a unified whole will come as no surprise to those who know her. That she’s laid this unity across two spectacularly different, altogether wonderful books and invited us to play along as well?

That’s the magic of it.