There is Liz Jensen on your SF radar screen?

If you’re anything like I was just a short time ago, you’ll have to honestly answer “nowhere.”

Jensen is not marketed as a genre author, nor reviewed in genre venues. And she doesn’t exactly rate big coverage from mainstream, establishment publications either—a result, I believe, of her slipstream nature, and her consequent falling in between two camps. And she’s British, which, sadly, often militates against a wide audience in the USA. (I suspect, based on the praise-filled British blurbs for her books, that she’s got a much higher profile in her native land.) These factors make it unlikely that Asimov readers will have a deep familiarity with her work. And that’s a darn shame, given her superb prose, witty fantastical conceits, narrative drive, and mature sophistication.

Her name first jumped out at me when perusing a monthly circular from the Science Fiction Book Club, which, to their vast credit, is offering her latest novel, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (Bloomsbury, hardcover, $23.95, 305 pages, ISBN 1596911883). We’ll get to this book in good time. But let’s have a look first at her five prior books.

Jensen’s maiden voyage was Egg Dancing (1995), and it possessed all the satirical verve and zing of a Kit Reed or George Saunders production. Bedraggled, hapless Moira Sugden is married to your typical mad gynecologist, Gregory, who is, unbeknownst to Moira, using her as an incubator to test his new treatment that will theoretically create a “perfect baby.” When Moira proves genetically unsuitable, he turns to his lush co-worker Ruby Gonzalez and scientifically knocks her up. Moira, understandably, finds this a bit much. When you factor in having to deal with a sister, Linda, who’s besotted with a TV evangelist, and a madhouse-incarcerated Mum who’s busy pottering about in an imaginary greenhouse (a mental construct that turns out to have real-world repercussions), then you can just imagine how Moira’s world threatens to collapse tragicomically around her ears—until she learns how to take names and kick some ass.

Jensen experiments bravely throughout with shifting points of view, and regales us with plenty of memorable quips and apercus amidst the shambles of Moira’s life. Moira thinks about her rival Ruby: “She was very flirtatious for a fat woman. Or perhaps just very fat for a flirtatious one.” All in all, a bravura debut.

Would Jensen simply repeat herself for her next outing? Far from it. Although her second book, Ark Baby (1998), arguably also centers around fertility and marriage, it is cast not as a contemporary melodrama but rather as a mixed steampunk/near future satire. One track concerns rogue veterinarian Bobby Sullivan. Sullivan lives in the then-future era of 2005, at a time when all of the UK is suffering from an inexplicable sterility plague. (His humiliating specialty is ministering to pets that act as child surrogates.) Forced to relocate, for various reasons, to a rural peninsula called Thunder Spit, he finds his life intersecting with two strange women, the twins Blanche and Rose Ball. The heroic sexual efforts of this trio will eventually shatter the sterility plague.

But the contemporary track takes a back seat to the wacky and resplendent Victorian half of the book. Here, we witness the strange birth and career of one Tobias Phelps, offspring of the Gentleman Monkey and a contortionist female. Phelps will eventually find the love of his life in the form of the immense Violet Scrapie, despite Violet’s having had the misfortune once to cook up the carcass of Tobias’s father. And of course Jensen sews up the two halves of her canvas expertly, melding past with present.

Jensen exfoliates her parallel plots with a wealth of hilarious details and incidents, much like John Barth or Neal Stephenson. Dealing with the hot-button Darwinian issues of human descent, she manages to extend the mantle of humanity across several species, illuminating the maxim that human is as human does, and that genes do not necessarily make the man. And once again, Jensen’s formalistic and linguistic experiments contribute to the enjoyment rather than get in the way.

With her third book, Jensen confirms her delightful and irrepressible hummingbird habits, as she flits to yet another mode. With The Paper Eater (2000), Jensen creates one of the best dystopias of recent memory, easily comparable to the work of Max Barry and Rupert Thomson. The man of strange habits from the title is a certain Harvey Kidd. The realtime frametale finds Harvey on a floating prison ship, where chewing on scrap paper to produce papier-mâché has become his sanity-preserving habit. (His skin is grey from ingested inks.) As Harvey interacts with his cellmate, we eventually learn his life story.

A psychologically troubled youth without a family, living on the artificial island “utopia” of Atlantica, Harvey created a virtual set of relatives for himself. He eventually went on to utilize these avatars in a giant series of fraudulent financial transactions. Betrayed by his real-life daughter, Harvey is imprisoned. He finds true love in the arms of Hannah Park, a government employee who exhibits her own psychological crippling. Meanwhile, the Orwellian government of Atlantica, which has been taking in the world’s hazardous waste for profit, finds that Harvey’s imaginary family provides the perfect hook for a terrorist explanation of why Atlantica is ready to sink in garbage. (I suspect that this whole riff is a clever homage to the 1998 episode of The Simpsons entitled “Trash of the Titans.”) But despite the government’s best (worst) efforts, the forces of reform win out, leaving Hannah and Harvey to live happily ever after—in their mutually supportive damaged way.

With echoes of Matt Ruff, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and William Gaddis, Jensen’s third book is a small neglected masterpiece.

Jensen surprises yet again with her fourth book—because at first she seemingly reverts to the near-mainstream domesticity of Egg Dancing. But as we soon learn, she’s really taking us to a different territory altogether.

War Crimes for the Home (2002) is the life story of Gloria Winstanley, an elderly Cockney lady with a life full of “secrets and lies,” to use the relevant title of Mike Leigh’s 1996 film. Like Moira’s mother in Egg Dancing, Gloria is an old lady confined to a not unpleasant but none-theless stifling nursing home. Her son Hank and daughter-in-law Karen make frequent visits but are unable to disturb Gloria’s façade, alternately dreamy and abstracted or irritable and spiteful. Gloria claims she has Alzheimer’s, but the reality is vastly more complicated. Gloria’s memory, we eventually learn, was tampered with hypnotically during World War II. In parallel tracks (as with Ark Baby), we witness the seminal events of the war that damaged Gloria’s psyche, as we also witness the events in the present that just may heal her, albeit with a certain measure of pain.

Gloria’s characterization of her plight as being caught up in a “time muddle” is a clue as to how this surreal, at times stream-of-consciousness book should be read. It’s really the female, homefront equivalent of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), whose protagonist was also unstuck in time. This becomes explicit at the end, when Gloria sums up her experiences thus: “I didn’t have no war like Izzi’s war, or any man’s war, I thought. The war I had, it was my little war, a woman’s war, a nobody’s war. There were millions of us living that war, thousands of girls like me. . . .” Jensen is out to portray the damages that warfare produces even many miles from the front line. And she does so with her typical humor and ingenious plotting and symbolical constructions. Gloria’s story becomes both macroscopically emblematic and microscopically unique.

By now I think you will note that Jensen’s protagonists are all a damaged lot, even bastards sometimes. Yet they are utterly empathy-inducing. It’s a hard trick to bring off, and the fact that Jensen succeeds over and over again is testament to her talents. The reign of warped souls continues in her fifth book.

Her fourth book, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004), ventures firmly into Patrick McGrath or early Ian McEwan territory: New Gothic. The child character, a nine-year-old French boy, who tells his story in a truly eerie, psychotic yet wise-beyond-his-years voice, has survived a cascade of near-fatal childhood accidents. Like a cat with nine lives, he’s used up eight, he feels, and is now embarked on his ninth. And what a life it turns out to be. An accident during a family picnic sends Louis into a coma. He is placed at a long-term-care institution run by one Dr. Pascal Dannachet. Attendant upon her son is devoted mother Natalie Drax. Seemingly no more than a bereaved parent, Natalie hides dark secrets about her and Louis. We learn through a series of convoluted revelations that she is really the monster behind the scenes of her unfortunate son’s malaise. But before the ultimate disclosure of her own madness and perfidy, she will ensnare Dr. Dannachet as yet another victim. His half of the narration chronicles an amour fou or folie à deux, and how he fights his way courageously back to sanity.

Did I mention that from his coma Louis is able to witness events and influence people telepathically? Oh, sorry, that’s just Jensen’s delicious black icing on the cake of madness. This book is the closest you can come in print to a film by Pedro Almodovar.

Surely you will have noted by now that Jensen is a tragicomic writer, mixing humor and pessimism in equal parts, or perhaps even favoring humor a tad. But The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is unremittingly bleak. As if to counterbalance this, Jensen turns in her latest novel, the aforementioned My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, to more or less pure farce (embellished delightfully with several B&W illos by Peter Bailey). What she delivers here is, improbably, a timeslip romance. But not the debased and simple-minded bodice-ripping kind. Rather, it’s a mix of Tom Holt and Kage Baker, Harry Harrison and H. G. Wells, James Blaylock and Lemony Snicket.

The year 1897 in Copenhagen finds our young heroine-narrator, Charlotte Schleswig, struggling to make a living as a whore. Burdened by the care of a gluttonous and slatternly mother (except Charlotte insists that Fru Schleswig, the slovenly pig, cannot possibly be related to a beautiful princess such as Charlotte), our working girl is always on the alert for a more lucrative scam. She believes she’s landed on easy street when she and her mother get a housecleaning job with Fru Krak, a rich and egotistical widow. While the elder Schleswig labors away sweeping up dust bunnies, Charlotte pilfers whatever’s not nailed down to pawn.

Fru Krak’s husband, it turns out, mysteriously vanished seven years ago. His disappearance is connected with a locked room in the basement of the Krak manor. Charlotte’s curiosity is aroused, and she breaks in one night with her mother. They discover a curious contraption, and before you can say “Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits,” they are accidentally transported to our era’s London. There they find Professor Krak hale and hearty, living among a surreptitious refugee community of fellow time-traveling Danes. (If this notion does not inspire immediate laughter, stop reading immediately.)

Charlotte is transfixed by the modern age, especially when she falls in love with a dashing young Scottish archaeologist named Fergus McCrombie. Soon she induces Professor Krak to sponsor a Christmas visit back to 1897, to introduce Fergus to her native era. (The visit coincides with the Professor’s own schemes anyhow.) But once back in “history,” everything goes wrong. Charlotte is separated from both Fergus and the Professor, and only her own ingenuity can restore the lovers.

Jensen has immense fun with this setup. Her depiction of period Copenhagen is rich and sensorily deep. (Nor is this choice of nationality for Charlotte merely arbitrary. Jensen invokes, both overtly and covertly, the spirit of Hans Christian Anderson and his famous fairytales as a template for Charlotte’s life story.) Of course we also get the expected but still humorously contrived reactions of a visitor from the past to modern life, as well as some neat chrono-paradox mindblowers. The characters are all humanly endearing, with every high-minded, principled stand undercut by carnality or vice-ridden selfishness. And yet the whole narrative is full of warm good-heartedness. All of these virtues are couched in Jensen’s vibrant prose that goes down easy, but which is also full of nuggets of observation and wit. “The Pastor . . . was a paunchy man in his middle to late years, with clattering false teeth that seemed to roam his mouth like a tribe of nomads in search of land on which to pitch camp.”

Discovering the work of Liz Jensen is like stumbling on a time-machine in a basement: you have no idea of where it will take you, but you know it’ll be a hell of a ride.

Consider for a moment the different characters of two well-known outlets for fantastical literature, as being representative of two schools of fantasy. I refer to the magazines known respectively as Realms of Fantasy and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. The former, helmed by Shawna McCarthy, who once sat behind the desk now occupied by our own Sheila Williams, seems to represent the more traditional end of the fantasy spectrum, presenting stories of a certain “commercial” and perhaps conservative stripe. The other zine, run by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, radiates a determinedly “postmodern,” slipstreamy vibe. Two poles of the fantasy spectrum, right?

It seems hard to imagine an author whose work might comfortably appear in both places. And by that, I don’t mean different stories from the same person, since many authors work alternately in varying modes, and could easily slant a particular piece toward one zine or the other. But rather, I’m referring to a hypothetical author who could write a single polymorphous, multivalent story and then plausibly sell that same story to either RoF or LCRW, where it would appear right at home in either venue.

But I believe I’ve found such an author in the person of Vera Nazarian. Her work treads a delicate tight-rope between the poles exemplified (perhaps ultimately problematically) by RoF and LCRW. The stories she chooses to tell have all the good old-fashioned narrative and thematic virtues of “commercial” fantasy while also sustaining enough allegorical, subtextual, and formalistic oddities to place them in the “postmodern” camp. A winning and striking combination.

Nazarian’s newest collection of sixteen stories—none of which, curiously enough, have actually appeared in either RoF or LCRW—is titled Salt of the Air (Prime Press, hardcover, $29.95, 266 pages, ISBN 080955738X). It comes with an insightful introduction by Gene Wolfe, which should be tip-off enough that we are dealing with high-quality goods here. Let’s take a walk through the stories, to see Nazarian’s range and concerns.

“Rossia Moya” is somewhat atypical for this volume, starting out as an SF piece. In the near future, the world has decided to cordon off a failed Russian state. Our protagonist is a woman, Russian-born (like Nazarian herself, a bit of autobiography that lends heft to this piece), who returns for one last visit to her homeland and finds herself taking an unpremeditated action of startling permanence. The story then opens out into a fantastical conclusion, much like Disch’s famous “The Asian Shore.” We should note the gender of the protagonist, since every tale herein is also seen through a woman’s eyes.

The standard fable of hideous male lover and at-first-unwilling female consort is inverted for “Beauty and His Beast,” wherein a young man trespasses on the garden of a bestial queen. Unfortunately, there is no happily-ever-after for this pair, an outcome sad yet somehow uplifting, a type of conclusion that Nazarian will employ again before this book is over.

Reading like Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005), “The Young Woman in a House of Old” might be my favorite tale here. Miss Marianne Mornay (what a perfect name!) is a human raised in a house of goblins, and finds her life in the outside world drastically hampered by her upbringing. Mournful yet ultimately accepting of the limits of destiny, she and her story might be a Charles Addams cartoon fleshed out.

“Absolute Receptiveness, the Princess, and the Pea” manages to conflate Oedipal longings with the famous fairytale, ending with a kind of O. Henry zinger. And for a change-up, Nazarian next channels Moorcock in an Elric-style tale of brother and sister mages, called “Bonds of Light.”

Tanith Lee seems a touchstone for me in placing Nazarian in a writerly lineage, and “The Starry King” harks to Lee’s sensibilities as it tells of a woman who manages to free a mythic figure bound in the celestial realm. Note the theme here also of attaining release from ethical burdens by sacrifice, for we’ll encounter it again.

Poor Janéh is a girl born without the ability to show expressions, in “The Stone Face, the Giant, and the Paradox,” although she seethes inside with the normal range of emotions. How she attains normality is the thrust here.

Nazarian’s fictions, aside from the opener, move through a pre-technological realm best known as fable-land, where royalty rules and magic obtains, but hoary clichés such as fated swords and rings, dragons and elves play no part. It’s an older realm than the rehashed Tolkien-land rip-offs, and the universal, timeless setting is part of the potency of her craft. “A Thing of Love” features one such cruel land where a female court executioner named Faelittal must face carrying out a certain death sentence that threatens to undo all her past equilibrium.

In a tale straight out of Robert E. Howard, Nazarian bring us a warrior named Iliss, who, having witnessed the death of her family at the hands of invaders from the far north, decides to kill their war-like god or die trying. “The Slaying of Winter” also features that extinction of heart-pangs by certain sacrifices that we saw in “The Starry King.”

Whiffs of Lord Dunsany emanate from “Sun, in Its Copper Season,” which tells of a woman whose sleep patterns literally govern the coming of night. Although Nazarian’s tone has, prior to the next story, “Lady of the Castle,” allowed small and brief glimpses of humor, she is generally a somber author. But “Lady . . .” which finds a poor roving singer named Ruricca NoOnesDaughter placed by odd circumstances onto a throne, to the resulting consternation of the nobility, including the lad who thought to inherit his father’s place, is rather slapstick.

“Wound on the Moon” is the first of two stories with a kind of Arabian Nights feel. This one tells of a thief who dares to go up against a merciless potentate. The other tale in this mode is “The Story of Love,” in which a girl abused by her father grows up surprisingly wise and healthy, save for one blind spot, which only a trip to a temple dedicated to the goddess of love can remedy.

The final three stories again exhibit Nazarian’s spacious range. “I Want to Paint the Sky” turns on a punning interpretation of the title, and is admittedly slight, yet ultimately joyous nonetheless. “Lore of Rainbow” conflates a woman’s mythic love affair and its collapse with the literal loss of color from the world. And “Swans” skillfully deploys the old trope of a magical garment that renders humans into animal form.

Nazarian’s prose across all these fine tales is uniformly expertly fashioned, never straining for effect or missing the chance to register a moment of insight. She’s a dab hand at catchy opening lines, such as: “The ageless young woman reposes upon a settee of gossamer silk, propped up by pillows and fanned by servants.” Or, “As the late afternoon sky stood lavender upon gold in the great city, the thief was imprisoned for the highest crime there was.” Her secondary characters are formed nearly as deeply as the various female protagonists, who seem to share a sisterly bond. Her fantastical conceits are either strikingly new or witty revamps of older ones. And she always manages to hew to time-tested narrative strategies while simultaneously layering in metafictional goodness.

With talent like this, it’s no wonder she should be welcome everywhere.