Filter House

by Nisi Shawl

Filter House collects fourteen stories by Nisi Shawl, with an introduction by Eileen Gunn (author of Stable Strategies). The collection offers a haunting montage that works its magic subtly on the reader's subconscious. As Karen Joy Fowler, Author of The Jane Austen Book Club says, ''This lovely collection will take you, like a magic carpet, to some strange and wonderful places.''

The eminent novelist and critic Ursula K. Le Guin writes: ''From the exotic, baroque complexities of 'At the Huts of Ajala' to the stark, folktale purity of 'The Beads of Ku,' these fourteen superbly written stories will weave around you a ring of dark, dark magic.''

Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order and Bad Monkeys calls Filter House ''A traveling story-bazaar, offering treasures and curios from diverse lands of wonder.''

Tobias Buckell, author of Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin, says ''Nisi Shawl uses the tools of future and fable, usually used to explore the other, the future, and the mysterious, to magically reveal what and who we all are here and today.''

Karen Joy Fowler declares, ''Sometimes enigmatic, often surprising, always marvelous. This lovely collection will take you, like a magic carpet, to some strange and wonderful places.''

And Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies, concurs that these are ''Remarkably involving stories that pull you along a path of wonder, word by word, in worlds where everything is a bit different.''

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Anthologies

276 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2008

About the author

Nisi Shawl is a founder of the diversity-in-speculative-fiction nonprofit the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. Their story collection Filter House was a winner of the 2009 Tiptree/Otherwise Award, and their debut novel, Everfair, was a 2016 Nebula finalist. Shawl edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars (2013). They coedited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2013).

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very impressed with this short-story collection from Aqueduct Press, a small Seattle publishing house. The title is well-chosen but gives only a hint of what's within. As explained in the foreword, a "filter house" is one small marine creature's strange-but-true adaptation, a set of organic filters that concentrates floating nutrients, helping it survive where sustenance may be thin. This is a neat conceit to use as a unifying theme for these disparate works, and it's indicative both of Shawl's observational powers and her science-fictional bent - though she turns out to be comfortable with all hues of the speculative-fiction spectrum.

Her characters have many different voices, but are always believable. Shawl has, in fact, also collaborated on a tutorial about how to write believably from other perspectives than one's own, called Writing the Other (Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, also from Aqueduct Press).

The stories are also geographically diverse - her settings range from undersea bases on a planet being terraformed to a setting far less common in SF: Detroit, Michigan.

Every story is worthwhile in its own way, but here are a few I think are standouts:
* "The Pragmatical Princess" - a humorous dragon tale worthy of Scheherezade.
* "Good Boy" - a deft reimagining of Vodoun in terms of the theories of John C. Lilly's influential Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Bio-Computer, a book that's been on my to-read list for quite some time.
* "Shiomah's Land" - which takes a very cliche'd opening (the naive mortal in awe of the "gods" and their shiny machines) and rings some very interesting changes on it. The final paragraph chilled me.
* And the stark, dry world of "The Water Museum" - no, it'd never happen just that way, but this classically science-fictional "if this goes on" is throat-parchingly plausible nonetheless.

Many of these works were published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, from which I fell away years ago, but I should probably go back if this author is representative of the magazine's current range and entertainment value. Nisi Shawl's strong narrative voice and diverse range are welcome additions to the field of sf.

This review has also been republished with permission, in the September 2009 edition of The Broadsheet, the web magazine for Broad Universe.

[Inda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently had the chance to attend a reading for Nisi Shawl's upcoming novel Everfair, a Belgian Congo steampunk novel-in-progress, set to be released in Feb. 2015. I was immediately taken with Shawl's storytelling prowess and needed something to hold me until her novel is release. I bought a copy of Filter House for that purpose. Let me just say that the beautiful storytelling doesn't just come from Shawl's reading of her work. It radiates from the pages of this collection of short stories that range in styles from fantasy to harder science fiction. I love that she creates worlds reminiscent of fairy tales as well as those that seem much more plausible in the not so distant future. Of all the stories, I must say "Maggies" runs as my favorite with a world that combines technology with humanity. I only wish it was a longer work, a full novel in itself. The world Shawl creates here has so many stories within itself and I would love to read more about it. But for now I'm just so happy I've had the chance to read this work. Fans of speculative genres should love this. Short story lovers should also appreciate it as well.

[Samantha (AK) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I waited a night to review this collection, mostly because I wasn't entirely certain how to review it. Nisi Shawl is a talented writer of speculative fiction, and she showcases it here with a collection so diverse that it was necessary to read slowly to avoid genre-whiplash.

These fourteen stories, connected by themes of life, (balance of) power, race, mysticism, ancestry, and the threshhold between girlhood and womanhood are startlingly diverse. They range from folk-tale to horror story; from hard sci-fi, to fairy-tale.

My favorites, for different reasons, are probably "The Huts of Ajala", "Bird Day", "Deep End" (which I first read in While We Were Dreaming), and "Good Boy".

"Wallamellon", "The Pragmatical Princess", "Shiomah's Land" and "But She's Only a Dream" were also excellent.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Filter House is an excellent collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories. I’d previously read Nisi Shawl’s novel, Everfair, but had difficulty with the pacing and expansive time frame. Overall, I enjoyed this short story collection a lot more. And it turns out that it won the Tiptree Award, which is entirely fitting for such a brilliant collection.

Perhaps my favorite story was “The Pragmatical Princess,” which follows in the long tradition of twisting old fairy tale tropes to use in a feminist way. Yet, “The Pragmatical Princess” successfully distinguishes itself from its predecessors. The story opens with Princess Ousmani, daughter of Musa the Magnificent and a distant cousin of the Caliph, chained to some rocks as a sacrifice to a dragon. Naturally, she and the dragon strike up a conversation and come to an arrangement. It’s a coming story, and I always love intelligent and sensible female characters. Also, it has a dragon!

However, the most memorable story in the collection is “Shiomah’s Land,” where a young girl and her mother have fled to a city of gods. When her mother is run over by a goddess’s chariot, the protagonist is taken in and raised as a plaything of the goddess. While I’d initially pegged the story as fantasy, it soon takes a turn for science fiction, revealing a far future society where a handful of post-humans posses technology beyond imagine while the masses live in ignorance and suffering. It’s a dark story, but one that I’ll remember for a long time to come.

Two stories in the collection imagine a world where water is scarce. I don’t know if these stories are set in the same future, but they have very different tones. In “Momi Watu,” the narrator is a working, single mother who’s oh so tired. The story opens with her caring for her daughter’s hair, which is kept long in spite of the widespread fear of lice that carry deadly diseases. The story follows an ordinary day in the life of the mother and daughter, showing the disquiet of the mother and the simple, child-like joy of the daughter. The other story, “The Water Museum,” focuses on a woman who runs a water museum, using a fortune of scarce water to create an amusement park of water run devices and aquatic environments. Others want to posses the water, and the story deals with her dealing with an assassin. I enjoyed the narrator’s personality and her caviler attitude towards assassins.

Nisi Shawl has a true gift for writing from the perspective of children. She’s able to capture a tension between innocence and knowledge that leads to deeply intriguing stories. “Maggies” and “Wallamelon” are the best of these. “Maggies” is a science fiction tale, set in a future where the protagonist’s father is working on terraforming a water-filled planet. The actual, physical work is done by “maggies,” genetically engineered humans. The maggies situation brings up themes of racism, slavery, and power dynamics. The young girl who narrates the tale becomes fixated on one maggie who is a sort of caretaker/substitute mother for her. Is the relationship healthy or loving? Or is it a privileged child placing demands for emotional labor upon an oppressed woman? It’s a deeply uncomfortable story but also one of the best of the collection. By contrast, “Wallamelon” may have darkness to it, but it doesn’t have the same looming feeling of danger as “Maggies.” The protagonist is a young girl who hears stories of the Blue Lady, a goddess that protects children. Turns out, the Blue Lady is not just stories.

“The Raineses” is another with a child protagonist, but it’s not as striking as the other two. The protagonist is a girl visiting relatives who are the caretakers of a wealthy house, and she sees and interacts with the ghosts of its past residents. Like other stories in the collection, “The Raineses” touches on America’s history of racial violence and discrimination.

I’m not going to go into every story in the collection, but others included are “At the Huts of Ajala,” “Bird Day,” “Deep End,” “Good Boy,” “Little Horses,” “The Beads of Ku,” and “But She’s Only a Dream.” My least favorite story in the collection was “Good Boy,” which mixed computer programming with voodoo. The story was inter-spaced with excerpts from a book on theoretical programming, and I think it was too obtuse for me. Plus, I never connected to the characters.

However, I far and away enjoyed most of the stories in the collection. I can’t wait to read more by Nisi Shawl!

Review from The Illustrated Page.

[Vasha7 · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s no accident that the main characters of several of the stories in Filter House are children, and parenting is central to others. Nisi Shawl is an elder who sits the reader down and says "Listen to this story, child, and learn from it." The didactic nature of the stories doesn’t make them dull, at all, and neither (with a couple of exceptions) are they so simple that you feel you’ve gotten all you can get out of them with one reading. The imitation folktales that open and close the collection are some of the best examples of that genre I’ve ever found. In general, ambiguity is not Shawl’s method, but subtlety is. However, I think "The Water Museum" is genuinely ambiguous (and "But She’s Only a Dream" was confusing, which is a different matter). They are also all serious, without many laughs, in spite of the presence of trickster characters. This is not a real weakness, though -- very rarely does it seem that Shawl is trying for humor and failing. In general (with maybe one or two exceptions), I thought this collection ranged from good to excellent.

[Miss Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is an impressive collection, there's not a single story here that didn't work for me. like some definitely worked better than others -- shout out to wallamelon, the pragmatical princess, and good boy! -- but i'd put off sleep to read any one of them.

the stories are a mix of sci fi and fantasy -- i guess you could stick them all under the umbrella of spec fic? -- and usually commenting on power in some way. i think it'll work best for sff fans because they mostly jump into the world with minimal explanation and in my experience sff readers are a lot more used to sitting back and rolling with the punches till explanations pop up (true story: i was in a class discussion once with a group of primarily non-sff readers and there was like an hour's back and forth on whether the fantastical events of a particular story were real or metaphorical or a commentary on the perceptions of childhood and meanwhile i was like '...welp, and here i was just thinking cool magical talking doll like a nerd')

4 stars

[sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. Nishi Shawl’s skill knows no bounds of genre, as this spans so many so well. I tried to scribble down a few notes after each one, but gave up after the fifth because I was so damn impatient to finish the rest, haha. I’ll mention a few of my favourites.

“Heads”, the first in the collection, has the rhythm of a folk tale and the wit of a trickster story. Perfect, in other words. It’s the story of Loanna, who tricked the god that made heads into giving her two, one of jewels and one of wood, on the night she was born. The imagery in this story is so rich — the rattle of cowrie shells, a forest in the evening, the glow of celestite and amethyst. I would read this story over and over to wallow in its sensuality.

“Watermelon”, the second story, was beautiful for all of the same reasons. I guess you could call this one a magical realism coming-of-age story. Like “Heads”, it too is told from the perspective (first person, this time) of a child. I love the way Shawl writes from a young perspective… so nuanced but so clear. It’s mysticism exactly as I remember it when I was that age.

“Princess”, the third story, was more straightforward fantasy. A princess is captured by a dragon, but they manage to “work things out”. It kinda reminded me of one of those stories I read a hundred times as a kid, and I loved it for that.

“The Raineses” was beautiful and spooky, like the feeling you get waking up early on a rainy day in a cabin in the woods. I must have read these sentences a hundred times: “The gentle mutter of rain through the eaves trough woke her. Her room was high up, a turquoise-colored place full of bunks and cots. […] Clouds hung low over the lake, almost seemed as though they would touch the trees. The rain would be here for a while, for all day probably. […] She went down to the back porch and stood over the bell. The rain was louder here, falling in fine streams from the porch roof, splashing on the sidewalk.” In my notes for this story, I wrote down that Nisi Shawl must have been an only child, since she so perfectly captured what solitude feels like when you’re young. (You can probably see the theme in why I love these stories.)

“Maggies” is one of the most interesting and inventive sci-fi stories I’ve ever read. (And the first — maybe only? — traditional SF piece in the bunch; funny since this book seems to be characterized as SF more often than not.) I would have loved this story to be longer, but I know a lot of its draw comes from its ambiguity. The world Shawl has constructed in this one is disorienting, like some weird near-future overlay on our own. The balance between the futuristic and humanistic elements was masterful. God, I hope Nisi Shawl never stops writing.

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

These were interesting, but there is something about some short story collections that make me feel like a voyeur - like I'm sitting in on the writer's therapy sessions, or they've started crying at a party and telling me about their mother or something - and that sensation was particularly acute here.

I thought the stories, in general, did some things really well - viewpoint, for one. They stuck with one person like glue. But that tended to backfire for me, perhaps because of the sci-fi settings the result was both claustrophobic and, in its hyper-specificity, made reaching a more grounded understanding of the worlds and people I was being introduced to very difficult. So things started to feel arbitrary, rather than organic. Or worse, they felt too much like Making a Point. Which is fine; allegory is good for science fiction, but you do have to mess it up a little and blur the lines.

I liked "Good Boy" the best, maybe.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The blurb on the cover says the stories are superbly written. The blurb is by Ursula K. LeGuin, who knows a thing or two about writing a good story. She's right--as I started reading each story I found myself being drawn into its world. The settings are extremely varied and each is well-realized, the characters beautifully drawn, their motivations believable, their language pitch-perfect.

I especially loved "Good Boy," but your favorite story may be a different one. Read the book and see.

[Brant · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of short stories covers a wide variety of sub-genres, from purely futuristic sci-fi (the Water Museum) to fantasy (the Pragmatical Princess, featuring a dragon), to ancestral mysticism (Good Boy, and the Raineses'). Many stories venture across these boundaries and weave times, places, and people into magical tales of humanity.

I enjoyed all but one of the 14 stories in this collection, and as expected there a few I really liked and a few that I thought were good but not great. Overall this is an impressive, imaginative, and well rounded collection of stories.

[Heron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal collection of short stories. Must read for folks who love speculative fiction.

[Anna Hepworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating collection of short stories, with a breadth of ideas that is very enjoyable -- at no point is there any sense of 'sameness' between the stories. Multiple use a spiritual tradition that I'm not familiar with, and the different perspectives from the different practitioners across the stories was masterfully done.

Despite having read this whole collection in an afternoon (on my second reading; I failed to actually write anything about it on my first) I can't point to a favourite story, because they are all fabulous. Supernatural, urban realism, futuristic SF, and more, they have a richness of writing, characters, worlds, that entrance.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Learned about Nisi Shawl from the “How Long Til Black Future Month” collection.

I feel like it takes a lot of craft to make a short story feel well developed and complete, satisfying. Some good concepts here, a lot of folklore-style tales or light fantasy, and some interesting characters, but: most of these stories end abruptly, without that feeling.

[Bryan Cebulski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nisi Shawl’s Filter House is kind of a wild collection of stories. I found two key observations on this book that serve as both the predominant strengths and weaknesses.

First is how eclectic it is. While the themes—revolving mainly around the nature of power, mother-daughter relationships, the idea of the human (or not) family—are consistent, the genre trappings could not be more diverse. Shawl’s imaginative prose tells of many, many worlds, from a magical modern day to folkloric ancient cultures to dystopian futures. I see that stories are grouped together due to their strong thematic connections, and in fact I think the many variations on the same core elements show just how intelligent Shawl is as a writer, but the distinct universes of each story made for a laborious reading process. It takes one a while to get adjusted to each story, place oneself within its internal logic and reality. The first reading of many of these stories can in fact be extremely frustrating seeing as how they often will just throw you into the thick of it, demanding you fill in the context on your own as you go along. Something brought up in the first paragraph may not be totally clear until the end. A common concept in their world may not be clearly explained but left up to the reader to infer. They are good stories in many ways, but by no means reader-friendly at first.

“Good Boy” is a colonial space opera wherein a pandemic is either creating widespread mental illness or people are becoming spiritually possessed. “Maggies” deals with the concept of the “human biocomputer” and mingles it with voodoo mythology. “Wallamelon” weaves a narrative around the phenomenon of the Blue Lady, a real-life urban legend. “The Water Museum” is a bizarre but not altogether inaccessible story of the narrator toying with her would-be assassin. These and the others all carry great concepts, absolutely. Yet they are so out of sync with each other on a genre level that transitioning from one to the next can be tiring.

Rest of the review at https://bryanonion.com/2016/09/03/sum...

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm conflicted about rating this one, partly because it's a story collection. Some of the stories were quite good, but others were less interesting; perhaps a preponderance of the stories here are 3-star stories. However, at her best Shawl, in stories like "Maggies", is reminiscent of Octavia Butler, and she combines many themes and approaches that aren't so common. It's interesting to see what Shawl does with the juxtaposition of afrofuturism and "programming and metaprogramming in the human biocomputer" or of voodoo/santeria and science fiction, even if they're not always entirely successful. Because of this, and because of a few can't-miss stories, I'm bumping it up to 4 stars instead of three.

[Elizabeth Hunter · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was fascinating to read this set of stories, all of which pull from traditions, cultures and experiences quite different from my own. There were times that I felt I was missing too many allusions to fully grasp Shawl's meanings and resonances, but the stories were still gripping and beautifully crafted. I was especially pleased to read "Wallamelon," which draws on the mythology of The Blue Lady that I first read about in this 1997 article and have thought would make fascinating background for a story.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do yourself a favor and check out this beautiful, moving set of diverse (in theme, character, voice, and genre) short stories. Shawl brings to life various mythologies of the African diaspora in highly original ways. This is speculative fiction in the best sense of the phrase. My favorites were the touching, heartbreaking "Wallamelon", as well as the intriguing sci-fi tale "Good Boy" in which characters blur the lines between mental illness and divine possession while a space colony is trying to cope with a pandemic. Highly recommended.

[Pamster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another amazing Tiptree winner! This may change to 5 stars for me as the stories seep in more. From the Tipree press release thinger:

Juror Catherynne M. Valente notes that most of Shawl's protagonists in this collection are young women coming to terms with womanhood and what that means "in terms of their culture, magic (almost always tribal, nuts and bolts, African-based magical systems, which is fascinating in itself), [and:] technology."

[Monty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of 14 fantasy, science fiction, etc. stories was interesting to read. Each story was so different in context, time period, style, characters and so on that I learned to stop after finishing one story before going to the next; or else I wouldn't be able to get on track with what the author had to offer. I really enjoyed most of the stories. I may read other books by the author.

[penny shima glanz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fourteen short stories in Shawl's Filter House draw you in with a deep and swirling magic. Each essay is unique in its own way and makes for wonderful short reading sessions as one does not need to read them in linear order to make sense of them. A very enjoyable read.
(edited for clarity from original writing)

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. Didn't quite finish reading this before Wiscon (the SciFi/Feminist convention where Ms Shawl was guest of honor), but I'm glad I devoted enough time to read all the stories. Lots of neat ideas, many fascinating characters, though I'm sure there were some parts that didn't resonate with me as they would someone more familiar with the background. So glad I read it, though!

[Joanna Chaplin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection. All kinds of stuff from fantasy to scifi. Educated main characters and undereducated main characters. I had trouble dealing with a steep learning curve on a couple, since the short form left no room for luxuries like expositions. But it helped me to think, which I usually like in fiction.

[Juliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really enjoyable collection of short stories. Lots of really different, thought-provoking stuff in here. The Tiptree Award folks can tell you about it far better than I can: http://www.tiptree.org/ . My favorite story was "Wallamellon."

[Catherine Schaff-Stump · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved some of these stories, especially the fantasies based more firmly in reality. I was more ambivalent about the SF and gun stories. All the stories are technically solid, some transcending the short story medium.

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this anthology. The stories were full of references to life things that I understood and appreciated. The stories were beautifully written and imaginative. I don't have a favorite story because I loved them all.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed collection of the mythical and the modern, the yoruba, the voodoo and hoodoo, the American South, the city of Detroit, and the stars. Ranging all over the past, present and future and mixing them up like batter, these are stories both beautiful and chilling, a great read.

[Amnah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nisi Shawl's stories are strange and magical, both prosaic and poetic, and often left me wanting more (which sometimes is a good thing, other times just frustrating). I haven't really read a lot of speculative fiction but this collection has definitely made me interested in reading some more.

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent short story collection, that took me an impossibly long time to read (no fault of the author). I'll be reading more from Ms. Shawl in the future.

[Chrysten Lofton · Rating 5 out of 5]

5.0⭐ “Leave it, Jasper,” I told him, motioning him on with my shears.”

**spoilers**

If you’re following my reviews, thanks for rolling with me ♡

It’s the fifth season of Stitcher’s LeVar Burton Reads, and we’re gifted with “The Water Museum” by Nisi Shaw.

Well, HELLO NISI. What. A. Wordsmith.

I feel like thus far, this might be my second favorite story of the season. I want to see more from her.

I kind of feel LeVar on the story falling a little short at first glance. I like the quirk, but I wasn’t WOW’d right away, once we started creeping to the end I was like...is this the same story??? This is a horror story! Ha!

Omg, I love it.

Filter House just graduated to my To-Read list. If/When I get to read it, I'll drop a secondary review on the full compendium below this one.

Thanks for reading, and If you wanna chat about the latest LBR episodes, hit me up in the comments and come meet with us at LeVar Burton Reads: The Community on Facebook.

- 📚☕♥

Goodreads Official Star Representation

5 - It was amazing
4 - I really liked it
3 - I liked it
2 - It was okay
1 - Did not like it.

[Christopher Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

The voices of these stories are what I will most carry forward from them. They're very different from the usual tech-heavy SF or the western-European-fantasy modes that are prevalent in speculative fiction. They're by turns generous, unrushed, ecstatic, wry, nurturing. As a writer I'm jealous of someone who can generate such immediately distinctive first-person narratives.

The matter that's derived from African sources is the most immediately engaging to me, because it's so fresh to my ears, but all of it is solid, main-sequence spec fiction, and it's really hard for me to pick favorite stories here. There are antebellum ghosts, dragons and princesses, far-future (near) immortals, soothsayers and genetically-engineered merfolk. Several of these stories, I can't believe that they haven't been expanded into novels or pulled into other formats.

This is just a tremendously enjoyable collection, and well worth your time to hunt down. I'll be pushing EVERFAIR into my TBR pile, based on the strength of this unique and engaging collection.