Revisited Locus Review: Blue and Gold, by K. J. Parker

This review was written in 2010, when Blue and Gold came out, and I honestly can't recall where it was published. Possibly nowhere! But a much briefer review appeared from Locus. 

There is an interview with "K. J. Parker" -- that is to say, Tom Holt -- in the most recent Locus. It's very interesting. Holt discusses the origin of his Parker pseudonym, and also mentions when the pseudonym became "open". That was some time after this review appeared. (When I sent the shorter version to Locus, Jonathan Strahan told me he had to ask Holt if he was OK with a certain comparison I made here -- Holt was fine with it, and I think my speculation and that of a number of other people contributed to his decision to reveal the secret identity of "K. J. Parker".) 

I'll also note that this was one of the earlier Parker stories I read, and I had no idea of the ubiquity and variety of his stories set in the world -- or some version of it -- mentioned here. The Davidson comparison doesn't hold up in that context. 

Revisited Review: Blue and Gold, by K. J. Parker

I'll start by saying quite simply that I had more pleasure reading Blue and Gold than just about anything I've read all year. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing I've read all year -- this novella is, after all, first and foremost about fun, and while fun is great (and we need more of it), sometimes one wants some meat as well. Yet to say that Blue and Gold is purely an entertainment is unfair as well -- in among the beautifully constructed plot and the cynical jokes there is some worthwhile commentary on man as a political beast.

The story is set in what seemed to me something of an alternate Rome or Byzantium, perhaps a bit like the Rome of Avram Davidson's Vergil Magus stories or his Peregrine stories. (I base this in part on the names of the main characters: the narrator, Saloninus, shares his name with a Roman emperor, and the other main character, Phocas, has the name of a Byzantine emperor.) More properly, I suppose, we could say that this is set in an unspecified fantastical history that bears some resemblance to late Roman empire times or to Byzantine times. Saloninus, our narrator, tells us he is the greatest living alchemist. Apparently that's true, though as he also tells us, he doesn't always tell the truth. Indeed, he opens the book by telling someone "In the morning, I discovered the secret of changing base metal into gold. In the afternoon, I murdered my wife." Whether either or both or neither of these claims is true is much of what the story is about.

Saloninus was a fairly prominent member of his society, and a promising student of the local university, when his Uncle died and the family fortune was revealed to consist mostly of debts. Since then he has led a checkered career, alternating between criminal acts and some fairly impressive scholarship. One thing that's kept him out of prison is his old friend Phocas, who was an obscure member of the Royal family when they met, but who improbably advanced to become the Prince. Saloninus is also married to Prince Phocas's sister. And he's been working on two alchemical projects for them: the secret of changing base metal into gold, and the secret of eternal youth. But when his wife dies, apparently after testing one of Saloninus's latest formulas, he becomes a wanted man. And so most of the story consists of his repeated attempts to escape, alternating with negotiations with Phocas, who still wants that secret of changing base metal into gold, and who perhaps isn't as broken up about his sister's death as you might expect.

All this is recounted very entertainingly. Blue and Gold is an extremely funny book through and through. The humor, and some of the darkness behind it, reminded me a good deal of Tom Holt's masterpiece, The Walled Orchard -- in all honesty, just about as high praise as I can give.As the story continues we learn, in a cunning and very well structured way, more and more of Saloninus's past as well as that of Phocas, and of the political situation in which they exist. It's really a beautifully constructed plot, which snaps home elegantly at the close. Where it is also revealed exactly why the book is called Blue and Gold: gold seems obvious enough, but why blue? The reason is the last delight in a book full of them.

Retro Magazine Review: Astounding, July 1955

Retro Magazine Review: Astounding, July 1955

Astounding Science Fiction, under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr., was the central magazine of the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction", which is typically considered to have lasted from 1938 through the 1940s. Campbell's influence was both good and bad, though I believe on balance the good outweighed the bad. He insisted on better prose from his writers than had been typical in the pulp magazines of the 1930s. He encouraged a greater focus on plausible scientific rationales for the speculations in the stories he published (which is not to deny that a certain amount of scientifically absurd tropes were still acceptable, nor that Campbell himself had an attraction to some very doubtful scientific ideas.) He was very supportive of new writers. His politics were certainly of the Right, but he was tolerant of stories by writers who disagreed with him. That said, he was also tolerant of profoundly imperialist attitudes, and sometimes racist attitudes; and his support of crank science led him to midwife the birth of Scientology by publishing L. Ron Hubbard's first Dianetics essay. In his latter years, Campbell's taste seemed to ossify, and his 1960s Analog (Astounding after a rename) was often boring, often obsessed with "psionics", though not worthless -- Poul Anderson's contributions remained interesting, and towards the end he published a few very interesting new writers, notably James Tiptree, Jr., and Stephen Chapman.

The Golden Age, in the common narrative, ended with the founding of two key competitors to Astounding -- The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1949, and Galaxy in 1950. The real story is muddier, as most stories are: the sister pulp magazines Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories had greatly improved by the late 1940s, and other magazines such as Planet Stories and Amazing Stories were mixing in some excellent fiction -- though to be sure often benefiting from the writers Campbell had nurtured. In my view, though, by 1950 the focus of the field had certainly broadened, due not only to these new magazines, and the improvement of older magazines, but also due to the emergence of books as a market for science fiction writers. Ultimately I think the science fiction of the 1950s was better than that of the 1940s -- standing on the shoulders of that decade's advancements, no doubt, but still superior, better written, and featuring a broader range of views. But Astounding soldiered on. And here is a look at an issue from right in the middle of that decade.

The cover for this issue is by Kelly Freas, who had just recently become a regular artist for Astounding, a role which he maintained nearly until his death in 2005 (his last new work for Analog appeared in 2003.) Interiors are by Freas, H. R. van Dongen (another long-time ASF artist) and by "Riley". I couldn't find out anything about "Riley" -- he illustrated five stories for Astounding in 1954/1955, and that seems to be it. (The ISFDB credits him for some illustrations (in other places) in the 21st Century, but I doubt those are the same person.)

The stories then, beginning with two by Eric Frank Russell, a Campbell regular.

"The Waitabits"

A Terran military team lands on a world they have been warned is unconquerable. The natives do indeed turn out to be unconquerable, but for an amusing reason. Decent enough, but I think a bit long for its substance.

"Tieline" (under the name Duncan H. Munro, presumably for the fairly obvious reason that it appeared in the same issues as "The Waitabits")

Men sent to an isolated "lighthouse" planet inevitably go mad. How can they be kept sane? A bad story -- the setup is strained beyond belief (they go insane on 10-year hitches -- why not try shorter hitches? Pets aren't allowed -- but that is pretty much contradicted by the eventual solution.).

"In Clouds of Glory", by Algis Budrys

I mentioned above Campbell's imperialist sympathies. It's not fair to evaluate anyone on a single story, but "In Clouds of Glory" is certainly a prominent exhibit supporting that description of his tendencies. It's a fairly early story in the career of Algis Budrys -- an author I greatly admire for his best work. This is early stuff, however, and Budrys was still developing his skills. On the other hand, by the time this story appeared, Budrys had published some 40 stories and a novel, including such outstanding work as "The End of Summer" and "Nobody Bothers Gus". In that company "In Clouds of Glory" reads to me as something written to order to satisfy Campbell. (And it has only been reprinted once, in an anthology co-edited by Jerry Pournelle and called Imperial Stars, Volume I: The Stars at War.)

The story concerns one Bill Demaris, who works for a shady organization called the Agency. His job is to go in disguise to alien planets, and foment wars, or manipulate wars, so that the Earth's favored side "wins". Demaris himself is bitter that Man's ambitions seem to stop at Pluto, however -- there are all those planets out there to conquer, so why aren't we? His newest mission has him undergoing a special treatment so that he looks like and smells like whichever alien race he's infiltrating, and worming his way into a place of trust, from which he can arrange that the local King for whom he "works" wins his war in the most damaging way possible. The trick ending is that the other guys in the war are also "helped" by a disguised Earthman, with the ultimate object being to pretty much leave the various planets involved ripe for the picking when Earth decides to conquer them. There's also some guff about the pampered rich people back on Earth being too soft for the job of conquering new planets, so that this secret Agency recruits only the toughest, who will of course eventually be the colonizers. Oh -- and one way they manage to get themselves hired as advisers everywhere is to poison the most influential of the aliens so they are too stupid to effectively operate. 

It's really profoundly offensive. There's a lot of pretty overt cynicism among the members of the "Agency" -- but no real regrets. After all, they're reasonably well paid, and Humanity Uber Alles, eh?  It occurred to me that Budrys might have intended the story to be satirical, but I don't think so, and if he did, the satire doesn't come through well.

"Rat Race", by Frank Herbert

Another fairly early story from a writer who would become very prominent about a decade later. "Rat Race" is a somewhat convoluted, but not uninteresting story. An investigator, visiting a mortuary to check up on a dead woman, sees some strange things -- a weird passageway, and disappearing tanks of -- something -- that don't seem to belong in a mortuary. He keeps following up, and the rather odd mortician shows signs of stress -- until he shoots the investigator and commits suicide. It's a science fiction story, so we can kind of guess what's going on -- the mortician is an alien. But why are aliens doing strange things with human bodies? The answer is a bit of a twist. I didn't quite buy all the steps it took to get there, but at least the story is after something interesting. 

"Earth, Air, Fire and Water", by Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley  and Algis Budrys started selling SF stories in the same year -- 1952 -- and were similarly prolific at the start of their career. (One could, through the 1950s but not really after that point, make a living selling short stories to magazines.)  Sheckley, at this point in his career, was better than Budrys, partly because he was often funny, partly because he was a clever writer in a way Budrys wasn't. Unfortunately, "Earth, Air, Fire and Water" isn't him at his best, not even close. A space pilot is on a mission to Venus, with two objectives -- recover some recording devices from an unmanned probe, and test a brand new spacesuit model. Upon landing, he puts on the suit and starts walking to the probe -- but there's a snowstorm and, for unconvincing reasons, the spacesuit is a problem and he has to take it off ... It's really just not a good story. It's filler.

"The Long Way Home", part 4 of 4, by Poul Anderson

This serial was Anderson's fourth novel, only his second science fiction novel for adults, after Brain Wave (1954). (A juvenile, Vault of the Ages (1952), and a Norse-based fantasy, The Broken Sword (1954), were the other two predecessors.) I read this long ago and I don't remember it well. It's about a spaceship testing a hyperspace drive that returns to Earth to find that the drive doesn't really work like they thought, so they are 5000 years in the future. It was published in book form as No World of Their Own, part of an Ace Double backed with The 1000 Year Plan, by Isaac Asimov -- which of course was Foundation after application of the Don Wollheim title-generation algorithm. I have that Ace Double, and I'll read it soon and report on it! Later reprints restored Anderson's original title, and apparently also restored some cuts Campbell had made (I'm not sure if the Ace Double also had those cuts restored.)

"Brass Tacks" and also Campbell's editorial

"Brass Tacks" was the letter column at Astounding, and it was noticeable for tending to be focussed less on the quality of the stories the magazine published than it was on nitpicking -- or seriously disputing -- scientific or other ideas -- not just from the stories but from the science articles and also Campbell's editorials. In this issue all three letters take issue with a very controversial essay by Donald Kingsbury from the April issue, "The Right to Breed". Essentially (as I recall) Kingsbury was advocating draconian eugenics policies -- only allowing "worthy" parents to have children, in order to prevent overpopulation. A torrent of letters came in, almost all (apparently) vociferously rejecting Kingsbury's ideas. Campbell's editorial this issue, "The Fanatic", claims that Kingsbury's objective was to show that one could write something stringing together facts with logical deductions from them to come to an awful conclusion -- and that the readers were supposed to see that the point was that the essay demonstrated how fanatics took things too far and made seemingly logical steps lead one to a terrible place. Kingsbury later confirmed this, and said that he had to revise the piece multiple times at Campbell's insistence to get it just right. The letters reprinted in this issue give three responses -- two by readers who missed the point and one by a reader who basically got it.

"The Reference Library"

This is Astounding's Book Review column, which was written by P. Schuyler Miller from October 1951 through January 1975 (shortly after I started reading Analog). (Miller had died in October of 1974.) In this column he covers a couple of nonfiction books about Mars, plus the novels Earthman, Come Home, by James Blish; The Mouse That Roared, by Leonard Wibberley; False Night, by Algis Budrys; and The Chaos Fighters, by Robert Moore Williams. He ranks them pretty much in that order. He also discusses two anthologies: Stories for Tomorrow, edited by William Sloane; and Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time, edited by Judith Merril. He has very high praise for both anthologies, especially Merril's. A couple more nonfiction books are covered: The Sun and the Earth as a Planet, edited by Gerard Kuiper; and Sun, Sea and Sky, by Irving P. Krick and Roscoe Fleming. And Miller finishes by mentioning a couple of (gasp!) fantasies, which he describes as "charming". These books are by a certain Professor Tolkien -- The Hobbit, and The Fellowship of the Ring. Miller does praise them, but doesn't quite seem to get them -- though he had not yet seen The Two Towers nor The Return of the King. (He also misidentifies a character he is sure the readers will be fascinated by: Tom Bombadillo.)

"Is Bode's Law a Coincidence?", by Roy Malcolm

This is a short science article, discussing the still well-known suggestion that planetary orbits follow a predictable pattern, that works for the Solar System if you consider the asteroid belt to be where a planet should have been. It works, to one degree or another, with the major moons of some of the planets. But ever since its discovery (co-credited to Johann Ebert Bode and to Johann Daniel Titius, both German astronomers of the 18th Century) people have questioned whether the pattern represents something real or is, well, a coincidence. This article sensibly discusses the state of things as of 1955 -- and I was surprised to learn that the question is still somewhat open in 2026. (I have generally believed that it was most likely just a coincidence.)

The bottom line, I think, is that this is a pretty mediocre issue of Astounding, redeemed to some extent by the Herbert story and perhaps by the Anderson serial. The magazine, even in the 1950s, was usually a bit better than this, I'd say -- but this does show signs of the decline that, really, continued until Ben Bova took over after Campbell's death. 

Reclaimed SF Site Review: Emphyrio, by Jack Vance

Here's another SF Site review I'm posting on this blog after the demise of that wonderful site. This review was written in 2000.

The UK imprint Millennium is reprinting a number of classic SF novels as SF Masterworks. This is an effort for which they deserve much praise. I have at hand number 19 of this series of reprints, a 1969 novel by Jack Vance, Emphyrio. [I should note that more recently this novel was reprinted by the Library of America as part of Gary K. Wolfe's selections of some of the best American SF novels of the 1950s and 1960s -- the volume with Emphyrio is American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968-1969.]

This is one of Vance's best novels, and in many ways a good introduction to this author. On display are many of the hallmarks of his mature style: his elegant writing, his wonderful depiction of local colour, his unusual social systems. Emphyrio lacks only the humour that is so often present in Vance: this is one of his more melancholy books. It's also better plotted than many of his novels, and it's a stand-alone.

The story concerns a young man in the city of Ambroy (on the planet Halma) named Ghyl Tarvoke. Ghyl is the son of Amiante Tarvoke, a rather unconventional inhabitant of Ambroy. Amiante is a master carver of wooden screens, one of the handmade products that Ambroy exports to the rest of the Galaxy, but he is rather solitary, and does not produce especially many screens, and does not participate in the religious rituals of Ambroy, which involve intricate leaping (saltation).

Ghyl's childhood is wonderfully presented. It's rather lonely, but happy, as Amiante's rearing of Ghyl bids fair to make him as unconventional as his father. Ghyl explores much of his city, which is ruled by a very few "Lords" or "Remedials," who control the utilities and services of the city, and provide a guaranteed minimum support lifestyle to the common people who co-operate, in exchange for control of the market for Ambroy's artwork. Various regulations are enforced, most notably an absolute rule against duplication of any kind, ostensibly to ensure the maintenance of Ambroy's reputation for completely original handmade art.

Ghyl makes a few friends, some who end up "noncups," or people living outside the welfare system. He also learns eventually that his father's unconventionality extends to illegal duplication: his father has a collection of historical documents, which he duplicates. He also teaches Ghyl the writing systems used in these old documents. One old document is an unfinished version of the legend of Emphyrio, a hero of the past on the planet Aume who helped humans throw off the domination of aliens from the mood Sigil. As Ghyl grows older, he remains isolated from most of his fellows, an isolation only enhanced by his brief affair with a Lord's daughter, and further exacerbated by his father's eventual punishment and death for his duplicating.

Finally Ghyl is pushed to a desperate act, kidnapping a Lord's spaceship. This leads to a journey offworld, where he eventually learns much about the true story of Emphyrio and the true nature of his own planet, of the Lords who rule it and the mysterious puppet makers of the moon Damar. The resolution is satisfying if a bit odd, with a nice twist. However, although the plot of this novel is satisfactory, the real pleasures, as with all Vance, lie elsewhere.

This book features, for one thing, a very satisfying depiction of an odd, lonely but happy, childhood. For a second thing, there is the culture of Ambroy, which is perhaps not so odd as some of Vance's social structures, but still fascinating, with its welfare system, prohibition of duplication, mysterious Lords, and unusual and mordantly amusing punishments. Thirdly there is Vance's always elegant prose, with his glorious touch for names of people (Amiante Tarvoke), alien races (the Garrion), and places (Daillie); and his knack for coining words (noncups, skeel, Remedials). And finally, his plots, even when unsatisfactorily resolved, often seem to be following conventional paths before suddenly taking unusual but believable turns. Vance's main weakness, besides his occasional trouble with endings, is his cavalier approach towards scientific realism. With some writers this bothers me, but I think it's best with Vance simply to ignore this. So what if his spaceships seem but cars that can be driven at FTL? That's not the point with Vance.

I might make a minor quibble about the production values of this book. It appears to use the plates from the 1979 DAW edition, slightly enlarged, and complete with typos. This is not as attractive as it might be. But I'm only quibbling: if the money thereby saved makes this project feasible, I'm happy. Besides, there is a nice new cover painting.

Repatriated SF Site Review: My Favorite Science Fiction Story, edited by Martin H. Greenberg

I was a bit surprised to realize that I haven't posted here in half a month -- but I have a good reason: my new grandson, Sylvester Took Whitman, was born, and my wife and I have been at Sylvester's home, babysitting his older siblings while my daughter was in the hospital, and welcoming Sylvester when he came home.

Here's another review that I wrote for the great but now sadly defunct website SF Site. This one is from 1999.

Review: My Favorite Science Fiction Story, edited by Martin H. Greenberg

In this new anthology, Martin H. Greenberg uses a gimmick that I've seen before, but one which still has legs. He has selected several prominent SF writers of the present day, and asked them to choose one favorite SF story. Their choices form this anthology.

Ideally, an anthology of this nature should have two aims: 1) simply to present a collection of outstanding stories, to participate, if you will, in the process of SF canon-forming; and 2) to throw light on the influences on the selecting writers. It might suggest what stories appeal to writers, as possibly opposed to readers (something in the way that the Nebula Awards do), and it might illustrate the development process of the field. It doesn't really appear that Greenberg had any special intent to reinforce this secondary aim, however.

For one thing, the authors chosen to select stories are not a particularly homogeneous group, either in age or in being members of any identifiable "school" or "movement." In addition, the stories chosen seem for the most part to be chosen as favorite reads, not so much as influences. This is not really a complaint, just an observation: what we are left with, thus, is mostly an anthology of the first type, a canon-building anthology.

The authors selecting stories are Arthur C. Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, Joe Haldeman, Frederik Pohl, Mike Resnick, Andre Norton, Alan Dean Foster, Poul Anderson, Harry Turtledove, Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and David Drake. A varied lot, including writers who emerged during Campbell's "Golden Age," such as de Camp and Pohl, some who emerged slightly later, as with Clarke and Anderson, and continuing to such comparatively recent stars as Bear, Willis and Bujold.

I've been reading SF for quite some time now, and I've always liked short fiction, so the bulk of these stories are familiar to me. I was pleased to reread Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea" for the umpteenth time: this story, Clarke's selection, may well have been mine if I were eligible to choose a story for a similar anthology. This is one of the most moving of all SF stories, and its theme lies at the heart of SF: the desire to keep exploring, the value of exploration for its own sake.

Other prominent selections include Frederik Pohl's brilliant story of what humans might become in the very far future, "Day Million" (chosen by Haldeman); C.M. Kornbluth's mordant SF Hall of Fame tale, "The Little Black Bag" (Pohl's choice), about a present day doctor discovering medical tools from the future, and the bitter misuse to which they are put; and Howard Waldrop's Nebula-winning tale of the fate of the last dodos, "The Ugly Chickens" (chosen by Turtledove). Also from the SF Hall of Fame are Lester del Rey's "Nerves," "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley Weinbaum, and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" by Cordwainer Smith. Each of these stories is famous, thus familiar. But at the same time each is famous for good reason, and I was happy to reread them. Certainly there is no harm in reprinting them again.

But any anthology will hopefully also include some surprises. I had never before read Ward Moore's "Lot, " for example. This is a story of the first day of a Nuclear Holocaust, and as such it has a bit of a dated feel. But it's really a depiction of a character, the markedly unpleasant man who is, he believes, fully prepared for this disaster. We follow his actions, filtered through his self-satisfaction, as he brings his family towards "safety" in the back country. The protagonist bears a striking resemblance, in more than one way, to another unpleasant SF survivor of a Nuclear War, Hugh Farnham of Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold. "Lot" in itself is chilling enough, though no real plot resolution is reached. I don't think the story requires one, thought there was a sequel, and there was also a somewhat well-regarded movie based on the two stories: a Roger Corman production, directed by Ray Milland (who also played the lead):  Panic in Year Zero!, from 1962 . At any rate, thanks to Connie Willis for selecting it (and, I wonder, meditating upon influence, how much this story affected her "A Letter From the Clearys").

Another story that I hadn't encountered before, and which I really enjoyed, was Poul Anderson's choice, "Black Charlie" by Gordon R. Dickson. This is a story about the nature of art, a difficult but worthwhile subject. Dickson's protagonist is an experienced art buyer, and he is approached by a man on a backwoods planet, who has some sculptures by a member of that planet's indigenous alien race. The sculptures are worthless, in objective terms, but at long last the art buyer is pushed into understanding the history behind the sculptures, and the character of the alien who produced them. Does this knowledge in the viewer make them art? I don't know, but the story is indeed art.

The other selections are by and large fine stories as well. I felt that the second Kornbluth story ("The Only Thing We Learn," chosen by David Drake) was a bit obvious, and nowhere near the quality of his best work, and the pieces by Eric Frank Russell ("Diabologic") and Robert Sheckley ("Untouched by Human Hands") were also somewhat slight, to my taste. Again, both writers have certainly produced stories that belong in anthologies like this. And Norman Kagan's "The Mathenauts" (Greg Bear's choice), while full of fascinating ideas, doesn't really work as a story. But four merely minor stories out of a collection like this is no great weakness, especially as I'm sure the next reader will feel differently than I do.

One other quibble concerns the book's production values, in particular the copyediting. The book is riddled with typographical errors, most of the sort where the correct word is replaced by another word, such that a simple spellcheck won't catch the error. This is becoming sadly common these days, but even so there were far too many in this book.

These quibbles aside, any collection that includes the stories I've mentioned -- as well as "Common Time" by James Blish, Keith Laumer's early Bolo story "The Last Command," Barry Malzberg's meta-fictional "A Galaxy Called Rome," and Roger Zelazny's moving "The Engine at Heartspring's Center" -- is well worth the price.

SF Site Resurrection: The Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones

Howard Andrew Jones died a year ago, on January 16, 2025. He was only 56 (and could have passed for 36!) He was one of the undersung stars of the modern day sword and sorcery field -- a fantastic writer, a first-rate editor, an exceptional critic with tremendous knowledge of the fantasy field in general as well as key related genres -- adventure fiction and historical fiction in particular. He was also, hands down, one of the purely nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and I was honored by his friendship for the past couple of decades.

He wrote three primary series of sword and sorcery novels and stories -- the tales of Dabir and Asim, the Ring Sword Trilogy, and his series, ongoing at the time of his death, about Hanuvar, a fantasy analog to Hannibal. All of these are very entertaining, and his career, a bit of a slow burn commercially (he deserved much better) seemed to be taking off when he was taken from us. I haven't written enough about his work yet, but I did review his first novel for SF Site, and so it is my latest SF Site resurrection. (If only we could resurrect Howard!)

(As ever, I print the review essentially unchanged, so the comments about Howard date to 2011.)

SF Site Review: The Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones

a review by Rich Horton

Howard Andrew Jones has been publishing stories about the scholar Dabir and the soldier Asim -- sort of an 8th Century Arabian version of Holmes and Watson -- for several years now, in places like Black Gate and Jim Baen's Universe. These have been consistently very enjoyable. Jones is an expert on Sword and Sorcery and Adventure fiction -- he has edited books of Harold Lamb's stories, he was the founding editor of Flashing Swords magazine, and the longtime Managing Editor at Black Gate. And he proved early on that he could translate his knowledge of fantasy adventure stories into the real thing. The Desert of Souls is his first published novel. (I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, that Howard is an associate of mine, and a friend, because of our shared experience at Black Gate.)

As with all the Dabir and Asim stories, The Desert of Souls is told by Asim. It is not really an "origin story" for the duo, though it comes early in their career, before they truly became close associates. (The actual origin story, previously published in Black Gate as "Whispers from the Stone" is incorporated in the book as a tale told by Asim to a traveling company.) This story also serves as something of an explanation for Asim's later career as a chronicler -- as the book opens he is shown being rather dismissive of a poet in his Master's service, but for a variety of reasons, including a prophesy that he will take up the pen, he changes his attitude.

But what of the story, you say, the story! It's quite as good as any of us fans of Dabir and Asim might have hoped. The two are both members of the household of Jaffar, a prominent judge in Baghdad and an associate of the caliph. Asim is the Captain of Jaffar's guards, and Asim is the tutor to Jaffar's beautiful -- and very intelligent -- young niece, Sabirah. Attempting to raise Jaffar's spirits after the death of his beloved parrot, Dabir and Asim happen upon an escaping thief, and recover a valuable ancient door pull. Dabir soon realizes that the door pull is connected with the disappeared ancient city of Ubar, and that it might be put to terrible uses. And when it is stolen by a Greek visitor associated with Firouz, a fire wizard from a group with a (rather justified) grudge against the caliph, Dabir and Asim are sent on a journey to recover the door pull before Firouz can get to Ubar and put it to whatever fell purpose he has in mind.

Things are complicated when they find that Sabirah has stowed away on the ship in which they follow Firouz. Not only is this bad because Sabirah will be in harm's way, but because her student/teacher relationship with Dabir has already set tongues wagging, and this will only increase suspicions of impropriety. (Which in this culture means one is risking one's head.) But the mission to stop Firouz seems more urgent. Their journey is full of mundane problems like seasickness, traditional adventure problems like sea battles and sword fights, and imaginative magical concerns. (I particularly liked the worm they encounter in the title Desert of Souls.) Jones manages two climaxes without making the second seem an anticlimax, as there is first an encounter in Ubar, and then a final resolution in Baghdad.

Dabir's approach is unrelentingly rational -- which is not to say he denies the reality of magic. Asim's is plainer, reflecting his soldierly background, which can get him in trouble when he fails to perceive Dabir's intentions. Both characters are excellently realized. The story is primarily about the adventure plot: the need to catch Firouz and stop him. But there is also an effective ongoing thread about the personal lives of the two protagonists. Jones also manages to interweave triumph and failure -- the characters do not succeed completely, and there are real costs to their falling short. This is a very satisfying first novel, and I will certainly be looking for the promised sequel. In the meantime, I suggest that any readers who haven't yet encountered this duo by all means buy The Desert of Souls, and also seek out their appearances at shorter lengths.

Resuscitated Review: The Wooden Sea, by Jonathan Carroll

Here's another review I'm reposting after the demise of the outstanding old SF/F review site, SF Site. Note that for the most part I'm leaving these reviews unchanged. This was first published in 2001, when The Wooden Sea came out. My comments are from back then, and I've read more of Carroll's work since then, and the writer comparisons I make might seem out of date. So be it!

Review: The Wooden Sea, by Jonathan Carroll

by Rich Horton

The Wooden Sea is a fine new novel from a very interesting writer. I'm only slightly acquainted with the work of Jonathan Carroll: I've read one early novel (Bones of the Moon) and several short stories that have appeared in genre sources, such as "Uh-Oh City." Still, I had an idea what to expect: a contemporary setting, veering off into very strange territory at some time; an ordinary person, deeply in love, faced with an unexpected and unexplainable threat to those he loves; and fine writing with a mixture of almost goofy humour and wrenching tragedy. And that's what we get here. (Writers who come to mind as comparison points are William Browning Spencer, Jonathan Lethem, and Bradley Denton.)

The Wooden Sea is narrated by Frannie McCabe, the 47-year old police chief of a small town, Crane's View, New York. Frannie is on his second marriage, and he has a teenage stepdaughter. He is sometimes plagued by the town's collective memory: he was rather a juvenile delinquent as a youth, and, in high school, he dated the girl who is now the mayor; but by and large he seems respected and happy. One day he adopts, almost perforce, a sickly three-legged dog named Old Vertue -- within a few days the dog is dead, and Frannie's attempts to bury the dog seem to set in motion a series of increasingly surrealistic events.

The strangeness starts out small, as it were: the buried dog disappears, and needs to be reburied. The dog turns up again, sort of, in an Old Master painting. And a high school girl dies of an overdose, leaving behind a notebook with tantalizing hints that she too was involved in these strange events.

From this point things become very odd indeed. The novel involves trips both forward and backward in time. Frannie's 17-year old self becomes a major character, as does a sinister businessman from decades in the future. Frannie finds himself presented with an ultimatum -- figure out what he needs to do in a week, or else -- with almost no idea of what he is to figure out, or what the "else" is. And this is to say nothing of the gods and/or aliens.

In a way, this book might be called "Science Fiction Magical Realism": it uses Science Fictional imagery in ways reminiscent of how more usual "Magical Realism" uses Fantastical imagery. (This is a term I've also been tempted to apply to Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist and M. John Harrison's Signs of Life, though I ought to emphasize that in most ways, these three novels are very different from each other.) On first reading, I had some difficulty with this: there's a temptation to make the book be about the Science Fictional events, and it really doesn't work that way. They don't end up making outward sense, and they aren't really properly resolved. But reading the book more as a mainstream (or, dare I say, slipstream) novel -- that is, as a story about the life of Francis McCabe -- works much better. We get a portrait of a believable man, a good man, and a happy man, facing a crisis from out of nowhere. The characters are very nicely done: Frannie, his younger self, his wife Magda and stepdaughter Pauline, his strange neighbour George Dalemwood. The action, for all its weirdness, is always interesting, though at times I felt a bit disconnected from things: at times things simply got too weird. The resolution is moving and bittersweet.

2025 Reading Summary

Here is a quick and dirty look at the books I read in 2025, and how they fit into various categories. To some extent, these categories simply track some of my personal interest: how many "classic" novels did I read, for example, or how many SF/Fantasy novels, or how many in the category of "Midcentury UK women writers", a group that interests me greatly. Some of these categories are more obvious: how many by women versus how many by men, how many translated novels did I read. I freely confess that I slotted these books into categories rather arbitrarily at times.

Here's the breakdowns first.

I read 91 books total. Magazine and invidudal short stories aren't counted, except for novellas published as separate books (including Dickens' five "holiday" novellas, though I counted that as only one book.) 37 books were by women -- about 40%, a bit of a comedown from last years' dead even split. (I blame that in part on reading 6 books by Anthony Trollope and 3 each by Charles Dickens and J. R. R. Tolkien -- if I just count authors the share of women goes up to 46%.) I've reviewed almost all of these book, either here at this blog, at my substack, or at Black Gate.

I read 8 novels in translation, 4 from the French, and one each from the Japanese, the Spanish, the Danish, and the Swedish.

27 books were Science Fiction, and 23 Fantasy. Eight of the SF books were from writers outside the genre, and three of the Fantasies. I read five crime or thriller novels, 14 that I would call "contemporary fiction" (essentially, books written after about 1925). There were 3 nonfiction books, and a rather low (for me) 3 in the category of "Old Popular Fiction" -- books from the late 19th century through the first couple or so decades of the 20th Century. Of the "contemporary" novels, seven were by midcentury UK women writers.

A lot of my reading was novellas -- the five Dickens stories, and quite a few SF/Fantasy stories, a total of at least 14, though a couple books I categorized differently were very short, such as André Breton's Nadja and Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron. 80 of the books were long fiction, novellas or novels, and there were 7 story collections plus one anthology. 10 of the novels I read were very long -- say 500 pages or maybe 175,000 words plus.

Following is the list of books I read, ordered alphabetically by author. More detailed comments on the best of them can be found here: My Best Books of 2025.

The Case of the Late Pig, by Margery Allingham

Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason

Spring List, by Ralph Arnold 

Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

On the Calculation of Volume I, by Solvej Balle

The Early Worm, by Robert Benchley

The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen

A Royal Pain, by Rhys Bowen

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost, by Chaz Brenchley

Nadja, by André Breton

Belinda, by Rhoda Broughton 

Evelina, by Frances Burney

Rakesfall, by Vajra Chandrasekera

Saint Death's Herald, by C. S. E. Cooney

Starhiker, by Jack Dann

The Artistry of Magic, by Helen De Cruz

The Tents of Wickedness, by Peter De Vries 

Some Trick, by Helen DeWitt

Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens 

A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures, by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar

Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile 

Treacle Walker, by Alan Garner

The Love of Monsieur, by George Gibbs

The River, by Rumer Godden

In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden

Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Den of Thieves, by Daniel Hatch

A Mourning Coat, by Alex Jeffers

A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher

Space Trucker Jess, by Matthew Kressel

Lies and Weddings, by Kevin Kwan 

The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman

Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner

This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren

Changing Places, by David Lodge

Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel

Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell

The Adventures of Mary Darling, by Pat Murphy

Where the Axe is Buried, by Ray Nayler

Collisions, by Alec Nevala-Lee

The Ante-Room, by Kate O'Brien

The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe

Miss Marjoribanks, by Margaret Oliphant

A Ladder of Swords, by Gilbert Parker

Haunt Sweet Home, by Sarah Pinsker

Major Arcana, by John Pistelli

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

Inverted World, by Christopher Priest

The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve

On Strike Against God, by Joanna Russ

The Female Man, by Joanna Russ

The Gipsy in the Parlour, by Margery Sharp

Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg 

The New Atlantis, edited by Robert Silverberg

Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford 

The English Air, by D. E. Stevenson

The Sleep of Reason, by Michael Swanwick

Naomi, by Junichiro Tanizaki

Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor

Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Fellowship of the Ring, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Two Towers, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Perilous Realm, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Wings of the Morning, by Louis Tracy

The Small House at Allington, by Anthony Trollope 

The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope

Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope

The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope

Miss Mackenzie, by Anthony Trollope

The Fixed Period, by Anthony Trollope

The Curious Case of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief, by Lisa Tuttle 

The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

The Children of Llyr, by Evangeline Walton

The Elfland Prepositions, by Henry Wessells

A Philosophy of Thieves, by Fran Wilde

Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell

Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky

Reclaimed SF Site Review: Deep Secret, by Diana Wynne Jones

Here's another review I did for the late great science fiction site SF Site, which gave me a huge leg up in my book reviewing career. This was one of my earlier reviews for them, from 1999, when Tor published the first US edition of Deep Secret, which first appeared in the UK in 1997. The review is as it appeared then, reflecting my relative newness back then to her work, and failing to note that she died in 2011 after a remarkable career.

Seldom recently have I simply enjoyed reading a book as much as I enjoyed Diana Wynne Jones' Deep Secret. Jones employs a mixture of engaging characters, interesting fantasy concepts, and a light touch with serious undertones, to create a novel that is infectious and absorbing. This is not new with her: I just discovered her work last year, and the YA novels Howl's Moving Castle and Charmed Life (which has certain similarities to Deep Secret) affected me in similar ways. Deep Secret, I should say, was marketed in the US as an adult novel, although I would imagine it would be appreciated by younger readers. (And to be sure, Jones' YA novels are certainly good fare for adults, and I have seen Deep Secret called YA anyway.)

Right from the beginning we know something is up, as narrator Rupert Venables is called away to the Koryfonic Empire, to give his stamp of approval as a Magid to a legal proceeding there. Koryfonic Empire? Magid? We are told that the Multiverse consists of worlds arranged in a sort of infinity figure, with one half (including Earth), negative magically (this is the Naywards half). These worlds tend not to believe in magic, and magic is harder to do there. The other (Ayewards) half are positive magically: for instance, creatures such as centaurs can exist there. The Koryfonic Empire is very important, as it occupies the exact middle of the infinity sign. And Magids are a variety of wizard, with the duty to subtly influence events on whatever worlds they are responsible for in the appropriate direction. Rupert is Earth's junior Magid, and he is fresh from helping out in Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, when he gets sent to the Empire.

Rupert is soon engaged in two succession problems. His mentor has died, and he must select a new Magid from among several human candidates. In addition, the Koryfonic Emperor is assassinated, and Rupert has to try to track down the proper heir -- a process complicated by the previous Emperor's paranoia, which caused him to hide away his heirs so they wouldn't try to take over before their time. Even so, Rupert has an unexpectedly hard time tracking down the various Magid candidates. Even the young Englishwoman, Maree Mallory, who should be easy to find, is surprisingly difficult to get in touch with. And when Rupert finally does meet her, he doesn't like her at all, and crosses her off his list.

An alternate narrative path starts to follow Maree, which ought to be a clue to any reader that Rupert may have a harder time avoiding her in the long run than he thinks. Maree's father has cancer, and she's gone to live with her Uncle, a fantasy writer. But her Aunt and she don't get along at all. Plus her boyfriend has dumped her, which complicates her veterinary studies. (He's another student.) And then she gets these annoying letters from Rupert...

Rupert finally decides to weave a spell (a working) to bring the various candidates (except Maree, whom he thinks he's already rejected) together, where he can find and interview them. The real world result of this is that they are all brought to a Science Fiction convention. (It seems to be an Eastercon, actually.) A convention at which (you guessed it), Maree's uncle is to be Guest-of-Honour.

As we should expect, the convention, the interviewing of the Magid candidates, and the question of the Koryfonic succession are all intertwined. Much of the action is superficially light in tone, including some funny bits involving the difficulty of navigating the hotel's corridors. But at the same time the concerns are deadly serious, and Jones doesn't cheat us there: real mistakes are made, people are really hurt and killed. So it's not just a light-hearted romp, and though it's often funny, Deep Secret is not a comedy.

What it is, is a thoroughly involving book. Jones is one of those natural storytellers: her books compel reading. The characters are real, and very likable. The plot is exciting, and resolved logically. The magical system is lightly sketched, but what we see is interesting and well drawn. The resolution is largely what we expect, but it also involves satisfying surprises. This book kept me up late at night, and made me eager for each chance to read another chapter.

It's not perfect: the overall setup, although interesting, is a bit strained, and a bit too lightly sketched, which reduced the immediacy of some of the events. And structurally there is a slight burp: the book ends, more or less, followed by an odd sort of coda, which fills us in on an earlier event that was missed in the main narrative. But Jones finds a way to round up that coda nicely, without causing too muffled an end to things. And I came away from this book a satisfied customer. Highly recommended. And hopefully, the publication of this novel in the United States is a harbinger of more Diana Wynne Jones to come, since her earlier works are not so easy to find in the New World.

Rescued Review: Uncle Bones, by Damien Broderick

Here is another review I first wrote for SF Site, back in 2010. With the demise of SF Site, I am slowly reprinting some of those reviews at this blog.

Uncle Bones, by Damien Broderick

a review by Rich Horton

Damien Broderick died this past April, three days shy of his 81st birthday. He was born in Melbourne, and late in his life lived for some time in Texas and for a couple of years in Portugal. He had an impressive career, as novelist, short story writer, editor, anthologist, and writer of popular science, that lasted over 50 years. I corresponded with him extensively for about a quarter century, and though we only met once in person I considered him a friend.

Broderick gained admiring attention for novels like The Dreaming Dragons (revised as The Dreaming), The Judas Mandala, and The White Abacus; and for nonfiction like The Spike. But to my mind he never received quite the notice, at least in the US, that he deserved. In 2009 he made a rather dramatic return to short fiction with a series of outstanding stories, mostly in Asimov's. In that year he published this book, Uncle Bones, which collected four novellas, one from both the beginning of his career but newly revised, another from 2009, and two from the early 80s, a particularly productive period for Broderick.

The title story was the first to appear in his late flood of new work. "Uncle Bones" is arguably a Young Adult story, and also a zombie story as well as pure Science Fiction: not at all the tiresome cliché zombie stuff we see altogether too much of these days. Jim lives with his mother and his uncle, but his uncle is dead. However, he has been reanimated by nanotechnology: he was lucky enough -- for certain values of "lucky" -- to get an experimental and not wholly successful treatment. Side effects include a terrible smell and flaky skin and worse. Jim knows another "Stinky," the sister of one of his friends. He's not sure what to think about the whole thing, but when it seems his Uncle might be involved in something shady, he tries to find out what's going on, with unfortunate results. It's an enjoyable story, if just a bit predictable and perhaps too convenient in its resolution.

The other new story is actually a very old one, though it appears in this book for the first time in this form. "A Game of Stars and Souls" is an expanded version of his first story, which appeared as "The Sea's Furthest End" in the first of John Carnell's famous UK original anthology series New Writings in SF, way back in 1964. (Broderick was just a kid at the time.) It was much expanded, with a contemporary subplot added, as a YA novel in 1993, also called The Sea's Furthest End. "A Game of Stars and Souls" extracts from the novel the expanded version of the original story, with some revisions: a 40,000 word novella, pure wild space opera, reminiscent (to me) of Charles Harness. (Though Broderick, in his afterword, cites Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos as his inspiration.) The story deals with the evil Galactic Emperor Jagannatha, in what seems to be the very far future. He has arranged for his weak son Chakravalin to marry Adriel Corydon, the beautiful daughter of the leader of an independent planet. Adriel has been genetically altered to be very beautiful, very smart, and to be able to control the emotions of others. She and Chakravalin fall in love, which is the plan, in order to motivate Jagannatha to spare Adriel's planet. But Jagannatha lusts after Adriel, and steals her from his son. Which sets in motion his son's rebellion... Tied in with this is a mysterious alien race, resident in the Singularity at the heart of the Galaxy, which has its own mystical motivations. It's not Broderick's best work, but it's fun and highly imaginative.

The best two stories are those from the 1980s. "The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead" appeared in 1980 in Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd's original anthology Edges. (Le Guin is not thought of as an anthologist, but she and Kidd edited two impressive books around that time: Edges and Interfaces.) This is a bravura performance, spectacularly written and stuffed with SFnal ideas. The title character is an historian from the future, and an Ainu, sent back in time to observe the fall of the "Old Galactics," an empire of Neanderthals. It's often provocative -- incest is a major theme, for instance, and so is personal hygiene, and so is genocide. (Neither the Ainu depicted here nor the Neanderthals have attitudes much in sympathy with 21st Century Western attitudes.) As I mentioned, the writing is arresting, often quite funny (as with the depiction of the Emperor's robots, modelled on Karl Marx and Adam Smith), sometimes punny, sometimes bawdy. I think it rather a discovery.

The other piece may be somewhat better known, but even so I don't think it has got quite the recognition it deserves. This is "The Magi," from Alan Ryan's 1982 anthology of religious SF, Perpetual Light. Broderick has said of this story: "Arguably the best story I ever wrote, and maybe the one I'll be remembered for, if I'm remembered for anything." Here Father Raphael Silverman, born a Jew, now a Jesuit, discovers a mysteriously beautiful but empty city on a distant planet. Meanwhile he is wracked by guilt, some of it survival guilt -- his family are all dead, mostly as a result of Greater Islam invading Israel, and some of it related to a shocking discovery he made on a rescue mission to the first human starship. The story is in dialogue with a much more famous SF story about a Jesuit, Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star," and the closing revelation about the aliens who abandoned the city Silverman discovers is lovely.

Review: A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures, by Charles Dickens

Review: A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures, by Charles Dickens

by Rich Horton

Charles Dickens wrote five novellas, of almost equal length (about 30,000 words) in the 1840s. The most famous of these by far is of course A Christmas Carol (1843). It was followed, one a year except 1847, by The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. Each novella was published as a slim illustrated book, the first two by Chapman and Hall, the latter three by Bradbury and Evans. The illustrators were a varied lot, often several to a given volume. (The most famous of them might be John Tenniel and Edwin Landseer.) 

I read A Christmas Carol first in my teens, and have reread it since plus seen many film and TV adaptations. (My personal favorite is The Muppet Christmas Carol, with Michael Caine as Scrooge, though many of the others are very good too, perhaps especially the Alastair Sim movie from 1951.) I had never read any of the other novellas, however, and so I went looking for them. But I found that most of the collections I saw were confusingly assembled. Some included only a couple of the novellas besides A Christmas Carol; others included some of Dickens' other Christmas writings, such as extracts from The Pickwick Papers, or other shorter stories Dickens wrote about the season -- "The Holly-Tree" and "A Christmas Tree" seem the most famous of those. I was feeling stubborn: I felt like there ought to be a collection of the main five holiday novellas! (Though, mind you, I do plan eventually to read some of these other stories!) So I gave up for a while and then by happenstance ran across a book called A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures, in a Half-Price Books. It was very reasonably priced, and attractive enough, so I bought it.

This book is published by Canterbury Classics, located in San Diego, though the book itself was
produced in China. It is part of a series of reprints called "Word Cloud Classics". As I said above, it's not bad looking -- bound in green faux leather, with the title embossed in red on the cover, and a number of quotes in smaller print (presumably the "Word Cloud"). It is barely edited at all -- there are a number of minor typographical errors throughout, and the introduction consists of a single page very briefly recounting the publishing history of these stories. But it does reproduce exactly the five "holiday" novellas I was looking for, in the order they were first published.

I read the book on purpose just as Christmas was approaching. It turns out, however, that the only story truly "about" Christmas is A Christmas Carol. The Chimes is about the New Year, quite explicitly. The Cricket on the Hearth is not really a holiday story at all, and neither is The Battle of Life, though one scene is set at Christmas. And The Haunted Man is indeed set at Christmas, but the story doesn't really concern that holiday, except that the winter setting and the proximity of the new year are important.

Thomas Parker told me that the Christmas novellas, while all worth reading, are each worse than their predecessor, and I'd agree that that's roughly true, though I think I'd rank The Cricket on the Hearth ahead of The Chimes, and The Haunted Man ahead of The Battle of Life. One thing the stories do have in common, save The Battle of Life, is the central importance of ghosts, fairies, or goblins to the plot, and a theme of regret for mistakes made in one's past, tied to a deep concern for the plight of poor people.

I'll very briefly discuss each story. I don't actually think I need say much about A Christmas Carol. It is subtitled "In Prose, being a Ghost Story of Christmas". It obviously deserves its enduring popularity. I won't bother to summarize the plot -- everyone knows it, I trust -- I'll only say that it's written with Dickens' customary exuberance, and his customary (but generally earned) sentimentality. It's a delight to read, its message is powerful, and its effects are affecting. It survives very well its adaptations, even those that make twists on the story, such as the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged! I'd recommend anyone who hasn't read the original story to be sure to do so -- but don't be ashamed to have enjoyed the films!

The Chimes, subtitled "A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In", centers on a very poor man name "Trotty" Veck, who works near an old church with great chimes that ring out periodically. Trotty's daughter Meg is ready to marry her similarly poor fiancé Richard. Trotty meets Will Fern, a man from the country charged with vagrancy, even as he cares for his young niece.. And despite his sympathy for his daughter's poverty, and for Will Fern's even more desperate straits (and political fervor), he begins to be affected by the lectures he gets from the sanctimonious Alderman Cute, who is certain that poor people are responsible for their misfortunes, and the hypocritical MP Joseph Bowley, who eagerly dispenses charity, but with conditions. Trotty climbs into the belltower and falls, and as the chimes ring out, he is transported to the future, and as a ghost sees the fate of Meg, convinced by arguments that she should not marry Richard because they are poor, and the fates of Will and his niece. The resolution -- as the New Year arrives heralded by the chimes -- is hopeful, much as with A Christmas Carol, as Trotty's vision of the future allows him to help.

A Cricket on the Hearth seems to be the best-known of these novellas besides A Christmas Carol. It is subtitled "A Fairytale of Home". (Vladimir Lenin reportedly hated it, which I'll take as a recommendation.) The title comes from John Milton's poem "Il Penseroso", and reflects a legend that to a cricket chirping on your hearth was good luck. (It is somewhat annoying to try to search for the source of Dickens' title and have AI and such confidently tell you it's from a Charles Dickens novella!)

The story is about John Peerybingle, a steady and hardworking carrier, but not learned, who has a very pretty but much younger wife, Dot. They have a child, and employ a rather silly nurse, Tilly. They are poor but not desperately so, and seem quite happy. One of their friends is Caleb Plummer, a talented but very poor toymaker, whose daughter Bertha is blind. Caleb's son Edward had been going to marry Dot's school friend May, but Edmund had gone to South America and not return, presumed dead. The miserly owner of the toy company where Caleb works now wishes to marry May, and her mother insists she do so. Meanwhile a strange elderly man comes and asks to stay with the Peerybingles. Dot eagerly allows him to stay, somewhat to John's surprise, and later distress, when he notices a young man (the elderly man out of his diguise) spending time with Dot. John gets very angry, but, influenced by the cricket on their hearth, refrains from violence and vows to set Dot free to be with a younger man if she so wishes. There is a secret here, of course, and one soon resolved to most everyone's satisfaction. It's a fine story, enlivened by the comic antics of Tilly, and the moving care Caleb Plummer gives to his Bertha, including describing their poor dwelling as a place of luxury.

The Battle of Life is simply subtitled "A Love Story". It's set in a small village built upon the site of a centuries past battle -- a ground once thought haunted, though now that old battle has passed out of memory. Grace and Marion are the daughters of Doctor Jeddler, who thinks the whole of life a joke. The older sister, Grace, is very solicitous of her pretty younger sister, regarding her as almost a daughter (their mother is dead.) And Grace believes that Marion loves a young man named Alfred, and she has determined that they will marry. But the reader perceives immediately that Marion is not so enthusiastic. Alfred does feel for Marion, but first he will spend a couple of years studying in France, hoping to marry her upon his return. But when he does return, Marion suddenly vanishes, at the same time as Michael Warden, a dissolute young man who has run through his inheritance and must flee England. The mystery of Marion's actions is explained several years later, when Michael Warden returns, his debts have been worked off, but without Marion. I'll leave the revelation for the reader to find, but I will say that I found the conclusion, though the general outline of it was easy to see in advance, a bit disappointingly handled in detail.

The best parts of The Battle of Life involve a few secondary characters: Doctor Jeddler's servants Mr. Britain and Clemency Newcome; and the local lawyers, Snitchey and Craggs, along with their wives. All are generally good people*, and very amusingly depicted, in the best Dickensian fashion. Unfortunately the plot of the story is a bit too routinely worked out. (*Of course the lawyers are Dickensian lawyers, so they have their shortcomings, but they are overall pretty honest.)

The Haunted Man's full title is The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. (Some sources give "A Fancy for Christmas-Time" as the subtitle, and that does appear to have been the case in the 1849 Harper Brothers edition. It's not clear to me that that subtitle was included in the English first edition.) The title character is Mr. Redlaw, a highly-respected Chemist and a sort of professor of his science. But he's an old and rather bitter man, due to having lost the woman he loved to a fellow student back in their college days. A ghost shows up -- apparently a spirit formed somehow from the Chemist's bitterness -- and offers him a bargain -- he can have the memory of all the ills done him removed, which should make him less bitter. But if he does so, anyone he touches will also have those memories removed. The Chemist accepts, and begins wandering the town, soon accompanied by an almost savage young child. He encounters his servant William Swidger, Mr. Swidger's father Philip, and William's wife Millie ("Mrs. William"), plus William's brother George, who is about to die after a life of ruin. One of Mr. Redwall's students, Mr. Denham, has abandoned his studies, and has taken ill. He's staying at the house of Mr. Tetterby, a not very successful newspaper seller who has several children. Millie is nursing Mr. Denham. But on each of these people (except Millie) meeting Mr. Redwall, they lose their memory of past troubles -- and somehow this makes their present situation seem worse, and they treat their fellows harshly. Mr. Redwall realizes what a plague he has become, and begs for a cure ... The moral is simple -- that our memory of ills as well as joys is important to deal with. As with so much Dickens, including other stories in this collection, the plight of the poorest people, especially children, is also highlighted.

I'm glad to have read this collection -- it's Dickens, so it can hardly be a waste of time. As noted, none of this stories besides A Christmas Carol is truly Dickens at his best, but all have their good points.

Resurrected Review: The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov

I call some of my reviews "Resurrected Review", typically when I grab something from my old blog or SFF Net newsgroup and republish it here. This one is even more truly resurrected -- it's one of very many reviews I did for the pioneering website SF Site, which was founded by Rodger Turner and John O'Neill back in 1997. John recruited me to write reviews for the site, and he soon became -- and remains -- a very close friend. John left to found the magazine Black Gate, which survives as a first rate website. Rodger Turner maintained SF Site for quite a while, but the changing nature of the internet eventually led to its end -- it was mostly finished by 2013, and formally closed in 2018, but the site remained until very recently. Rodger died in October of 2025, and SF Site left the internet not long after. I've been saving some of the best work I did, and some of that will migrate here.

This review dates to 2000, on the occasion of the Victor Gallancz SF Collectors Edition of the novel.

Resurrected Review: The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov

I've long been of the slightly heterodox (though far from rare) opinion that The End of Eternity is Isaac Asimov's best novel. It benefits partly from being unconnected to his various series (though there are hints, both within this book and in some of the later books, that there could be a tenuous connection). In addition, Asimov is interested in a significant, and resonant, theme, in a way the central theme of 50s SF: the human desire for exploration, and the concomitant link between risk-taking and expansion of the human spirit. This still works now, nearly at the turn of the millennium, though inevitably the theme needs to be viewed with a touch of irony. Finally, the story is cleverly constructed, and really quite well-written in spots, within the constraints of Asimov's goals and style.

There are weaknesses, to be sure. The central love story is awkwardly handled, and the treatment of women in general is creaky, while the characterization of heroine Noÿs Lambent in particular is uneven. And as with almost any time travel story, the clever structure of the plot tends to wobble on close examination: but that is a fault endemic to the form, and, I think, excusable here. I was a bit concerned about rereading this book now, not having read it in 20 years, though I read it multiple times as a teen. Would it hold up? With the one caveat that I couldn't quite buy his portrayal of women and romance (which I think I did pretty much accept as a callow teen), I think the book holds up fine.

The End of Eternity concerns Andrew Harlan, a Technician for the organization called Eternity. As a Technician, Harlan is an expert at determining and executing the Minimum Necessary Change in a timeline to attain a desired Change in history. For the Eternals, men who live "outside Time," monitor human history from the 27th century to about the 70,000th century, trying to maintain a stable society, with reasonable prosperity. They allow some trade between centuries, but for the most part they work at eliminating worrisome trends: excessively unusual social mores, dangerous technology such as atomic weapons, and, to be sure, excessive curiosity about the nature of Eternity.

As the book opens Harlan is shown committing a crime: in exchange for concealing a minor error by a functionary of one of the Eternity bases, he arranges to have the Life Plot of a certain woman tracked through a change. For, you see, when Reality Changes, everybody changes with it. And a woman you loved might suddenly be married, or have suffered an accident, or be altered in personality.

Flashbacks then show Harlan's history: his recruitment from a somewhat conservative century, his early career as an Eternal, his interest in Primitive history (from before the invention of time travel, thus before Eternity can manipulate history). Finally he encounters the alluring Noÿs Lambent, a woman from a sexually loose century, and the stiff, inexperienced Harlan falls in love, and before long is ready to risk the very existence of Eternity to keep his woman.

Asimov resolves his story, as I've said, fairly cleverly, in the process giving us a look at the creation of Eternity, and at the Hidden Centuries so far in the future that the Eternals can't penetrate, or aren't allowed to penetrate. He makes use of time paradoxes worthy of Charles Harness, but Asimov's presentation is so deadpan and rationalistic that he almost makes them believable. And in the end, he asks whether stability and general happiness is the most worthwhile goal. His answer is the expected answer for a Campbell-nurtured writer of the 50s, but it's still the answer I'd give, with modifications. (After all, Asimov's ideal vision, as presented in this book and elaborated in his Foundation/Empire books, is of a human-dominated galaxy. In essence, he suggests, we need to get to the stars before They -- the aliens -- do. Surely it's better that we get to the stars along with Them?)

Upon rereading The End of Eternity I'd still call it Asimov's best novel. If his picture of an all-male Eternity (admittedly given at least nominal justification in the book) seems risible from a contemporary perspective, so does much 50s SF fail in treatment of women. So too his sex scenes and love scenes are awkward (and the book does have a sex scene, albeit a very discreet one, despite Asimov's habit of joking that he didn't write about sex until he wrote about alien sex in The Gods Themselves): but 50s SF writers were rarely allowed much practice in that area. The ideas presented in the book are still compelling: the meta-society of Eternity is nicely worked out, with many cute details, and the overarching theme is well-argued, and still merits thought. And Asimov's prose, so often denigrated, is here, as ever, well-wielded in service of his goals. It's not beautiful, but it's well-constructed, and the occasional telling line (as a character's soft sentence about a spaceport wiped out in a Change: "It had been very beautiful") really works. This is the kind of book that made me an SF fan, and it's still worth reading.

Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

by Rich Horton

At an estate sale recently, whose deceased owner clearly had interesting taste, I saw a copy of The Horse Without a Head, for 50 cents (about what it cost in the first place) and it was just intriguing enough to buy. It was a Scholastic edition, so a children's book (really what we'd now call Young Adult though the primary characters are between about 10 and 13.) And the writer was French. And, as I quickly learned, the book became a Disney movie for television -- Disney's Wonderful World of Color series -- in 1963. The movie -- called The Horse Without a Head -- appears to be fairly well regarded, though it's not well known at all.

Paul Berna was the pseudonym used for his fiction by Jean-Marie-Edmond Sabran (1908-1994), a French journalist who wrote novels mostly for children. He did publish a few science fiction novels, the best known probably a diptych published in 1954 and 1955: Threshold of the Stars and Continent in the Sky. The Horse Without a Head was published in French in 1955 as Le Cheval Sans Tête, which actually does mean The Horse Without a Head. The English translation, by John Buchanan-Brown, was first titled One Hundred Million Francs in 1957, but my Scholastic edition, presumably in response to the movie, is called The Horse Without a Head. My copy is the first Scholastic edition, from 1964. It is illustrated by Jon Nielsen.

The title horse is a play horse, stretched over a sort of tricycle frame, the head of which has fallen off. A group of ten children from a grubby Paris suburb called Louvigny play with with -- riding dangerously down a steep street, heedless of traffic and pedestrians. It is shortly after the end of the Second World War, and there is evidence of the war around -- bomb craters and such. The kids are poor, but seem pretty happy, though it's clear their parents are struggling to get by. Most of the adults tolerate the kids, but the police sometimes harass them, and a couple of merchants object to the occasional upsetting of their products.

The most prominent kids are Gaby, the oldest, and the gang's leader; Fernand; and Marion, a girl of about 12 who is beloved by all the dogs in the town. Berna lightly sketches these kids in a believable way, and the portrayal of their lives and their parents is down to Earth and seems a quite honest look at working class life in postwar France. 

One day the horse crashes, and the frame is broken. Fernand's father has a friend who can fix it, and shortly after it is fixed, some suspicious characters begin to ask the children to sell it to them for a fairly exhorbitant price. But they aren't interested, and things turn more threatening. Eventually the horse is stolen. The kids complain to the police, who don't take them too seriously, and they also find another place to play -- an abandoned factory.

Meanwhile the police are complaining that they never get any action, or chance for promotion, even though there was recently a robbery of the train that runs through the town, in which 100,000,000 francs* were stolen. It seems clear that the suspicious folks hanging around are probably the criminals, and they must be looking for the the loot. Could the horse be involved somehow? And then Fernand realizes that in the junk recovered from the horse's hollow frame when it was recovered, there was a key. 

No need to detail the ending. It involves the key, of course, and some bumbling thieves, and the mildly bumbling police, and the kids' new hiding place, and Marion's dogs. It's really quite nicely done. As I said -- a believable portrayal of life in a Paris slum (for want of a nicer word), and a bunch of decent kids making their childhood special. The actual details of the crime and the way the children thwart it may not be wholly plausible, but that doesn't really matter. Worth the time.

*100,000,000 francs is stated to be worth about $200,000, which seemed awfully small to me -- but it turns out that that is about right for the exchange rate between francs and dollars around 1950.

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

by Rich Horton

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born in 1875 in London. He was illegitimate, and grew up in poverty. He left school at age 12, joined the Army at 21, and acted as a war correspondent in the second Boer War. He turned to writing in 1905, beginning with stories based on his journalistic work (among other things, he investigated Belgian atrocities in the Congo.) His writing proved very successful, and he was very prolific, writing over 150 novels, and nearly a thousand short stories, as well as plays, poetry, non-fiction and screenplays. He moved to the US in 1931 to write screen plays for RKO, and he wrote the first draft of the screenplay for King Kong, but died rather suddenly in 1932. (Perhaps he could be called the "Leigh Brackett" of King Kong!)

He is not widely read now, and I had not read anything by him. But I found a copy of The Feathered Serpent at an estate sale, and figured I'd give it a try. The novel was serialized in the Weekly Telegraph in 1926 and 1927, and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1927, with a US edition from Doubleday Doran. My copy is from Grossett and Dunlap in 1928. 

Many sources claim that the novel was later reprinted as Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent. This is not really true. There was a comic strip based (very loosely) on the stories of Wallace, some time after his death. They seem to have decided to unify the different stories by using the same name for the Inspector character in each story, so for The Feathered Serpent, the character Inspector Clarke (a somewhat minor character in the original book) became Inspector Wade. The comic strips seem to have been "renovelized" for republication as a Big Little Book. Three Inspector Wade books were published beginning in 1939. Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent came out in 1940. Based on snippets of that book I could find, the plot was radically changed from the original novel, and the book completely rewritten (in much worse style.) It seems to have been much shorter -- and after all Big Little Books were for children.

Back to the actual novel. It's fairly good fun -- no lasting masterpiece, but a nice readable novel with an interesting if implausible central mystery. The two central characters -- the "detectives" if you will -- are Peter Dewin, a reporter, and Daphne Olroyd, a young woman trying to make her way in London -- at first she is an assistant to the very wealthy Leicester Crewe, but when he decides to go overseas she gets a new job with another wealthy man, the scientist and philanthropist Geoffrey Beale. A side plot, of course, is the quickly developing relationship between Dewin and Olroyd.

The primary mystery concerns some threatening messages that some people receive featuring an illustration of a "Feathered Serpent" -- a Central American quasi-religious figure. The vulgar but popular actress Ella Creed gets one, Leicester Crewe, who seems to be perhaps her sugar daddy. And then there is a murder, of a man named Joe Farmer, who seemed to have some connection to both Creed and Crewe. There are rumors that a criminal named William Lane, thought to be dead, has been seen alive. Daphne Olroyd is briefly kidnapped at one point, while Peter Dewin keeps figuring out bits and pieces of the mystery without quite understanding it. And Geoffrey Beale's scientific knowledge -- he had been doing anthropological studies in Central America -- offers some hints. A past counterfeiting scheme, involving at least the mysterious William Lane as well as Joe Farmer, and a woman named Paula Staines, might have some bearing on things ...

The conclusion involves yet another murder, sort of an "impossible" crime, and a convoluted but reasonably interesting explanation for just what has been going on. All in all, as I said, by no means a great mystery, but not bad -- worth your time if you like classical mysteries with a soupçon of sensationalism. I don't think I'll actively seek out more of Edgar Wallace's work, but if another novel comes my way I might go ahead and read it.

Review: Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, by Ford Madox Ford

In 2022 I had a Curiosities feature in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on Ford Madox Ford's time travel novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. Curiosities is a long running feature of the magazine highlighting relatively obscure science fiction and fantasy, and I've contributed several such features to F&SF. It's been a while since that issue appeared, and F&SF's website seems to have disappeared for now, so I thought I'd post about that novel here. My process for writing a Curiosities piece is to write an extensive review and cut, cut, cut -- Curiosities are limited to about 250 words. So I have reproduced the whole initial piece I wrote, with revisions based in part on improvements that resulted from the cutting process. 

Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, by Ford Madox Ford

A review by Rich Horton

Ford Madox Ford was born Joseph Leopold Ford Herman Madox Hueffer in Surrey, England, in 1873, the son of a German immigrant. His mother was the daughter of painter Ford Madox Brown, and Hueffer styled himself Ford Madox Hueffer for much of his life, and most of his earlier books were first published under that name. He legally changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919 (partly in reaction to anti-German sentiment), and his later work, as well as reissues of the earlier work, was generally as by Ford Madox Ford, the name by which he is now remembered. (It is sometimes called a pseudonym, which is incorrect.) He died in 1939.

He is the author of one of my favorite novels, The Good Soldier (1915, first published as by Ford Madox Hueffer), a bleakly comic novel of a man with a “heart condition” (in more ways than one). It is widely featured on lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century, a laurel it surely deserves

Ford was particularly close friends (and a sometime collaborator) with Joseph Conrad (until they fell out), and was also close to the likes of Henry James, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, and Ezra Pound. He founded a key literary review of the Modernist period, the English Review. He fought in the First World War and suffered major injuries, from shellfire and poison gas. Later he was a founder of the Transatlantic Review, another major Modernist publication, supporting James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, and Ernest Hemingway among others. Besides The Good Soldier he is best known for a quartet of novels about the War, collectively called Parade's End. His earlier Fifth Queen trilogy is also well-regarded. All in all, a major career, but scandal involving his fraught relationships with a series of wives and mistresses, and perhaps just the normal shifts in literary fashion, led to a temporary eclipse of his reputation, though it has been long since restored.

He was certainly by inclination a Modernist/realist writer, so Ladies Whose Bright Eyes stands out to some extent as having a science-fictional theme. It is the story of William Sorrell, a somewhat humbuggish publisher, who has an accident on a train while returning from a trip to the United States, where he got involved with a Mrs. Lee-Egerton. She gives him a gold cross that has been in her family for centuries as security for a loan in assistance of her rackety son … and then there is a crash.

Sorrell finds himself wandering across a plain, strangely dressed, clutching the gold cross. Before long he realizes he's in some sort of medieval situation, complete with hanged men on gibbets. He tries to convince himself that it's all a play of some sort, but eventually he arrives at a castle, and is taken in by a certain Lady Blanche, mistress of the castle while her husband is away fighting in Scotland. Sorrell soon realizes that his cross is regarded as an important relic, and it is battled over between the Lady Blanche, her rival Lady Dionissia, the betrothed wife of her husband's cousin Sir Egerton of Tamville, and the local order of nuns.

As Sorrell realizes he really does seem to be in the Middle Ages (about 1326, it seems), he hatches schemes to, Connecticut Yankee-like, use modern technology to make his way in the past. But he soon realizes that he really knows nothing valuable about how to make, say, an aeroplane. But he still finds some degree of success, mostly by accident, managing for example to subdue a group of bandits, and to improve the sanitation of the nuns' chickens. But the story turns rather more on the actions of the women, especially the combative, vain, and grasping Lady Blanche, and the rather more calm Lady Dionissia. We learn a lot about their positions and attitudes, and about everyday life in that time, and the politics of the day. All comes to a head when the two women, in the absence of their husbands, decide to joust for possession of the coveted gold cross.

This leads to a somewhat striking conclusion, as Sorrell seems to waver between two worlds, the present and the past. Is Lady Dionissia his nurse, and is he a delirious patient? Or are they both truly inhabiting the bodies of ancestors (perhaps)? Or is the time travel real? It hardly matters – Sorrell for certain is a radically changed (and improved) man; and he reaches the end valuing people and things much differently than he began.

The novel has an interesting publishing history. It first appeared in 1911, as by Ford Madox Hueffer. It was extensively revised and reissued in 1935, as by Ford Madox Ford. I've read both versions (the earlier one can be found at Project Gutenberg), and on the whole I prefer the revision. It gives us a bit more of Sorrell's personal history (and projects it a couple of decades in the future), shows us a bit more of the medieval ladies' positions, and has a better ending (including more interesting speculations and images of Sorrell's cross-time situation): Ford, revising following a terrible war and just preceding another, takes a darker view of the 20th Century, and Sorrell's hopes to be a better man, though real, are not celebrated so optimistically.