The 2016 Hugos: Novelette

The 2016 Hugos: Novelette

By Rich Horton

As I wrote in my first post in this series: I am not planning to reflexively rank Rabid Puppy entries below No Award. I am of course disgusted by the Rabid Puppy antics, and I feel that many worthier stories were kept off the ballot by the Rabid choices. And if a story is bad enough, it will certainly be off my ballot, with No Award the last choice. (That’s always been my approach.) But, this year in particular, many of the nominees supported by the Rabid Puppies were either unaware of that, or aware and quite clearly not happy with that. Also, I don’t want to reduce the meaningfulness of the win for those worthy winners – if they finish first and No Award is second, to my mind it to some extent delegitimizes their wins, through no fault of their own. Better to have been chosen the best with every voting on merit than voted best simply because all the other choices were automatically rejected regardless of quality.

The 2016 Hugo nominees for Best Novelette are:

“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed, Feb 2015)

“Flashpoint: Titan” by CHEAH Kai Wai (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House)

“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu (Uncanny Magazine, Jan-Feb 2015)

“Obits” by Stephen King (The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Scribner)

“What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House)

I’ll go ahead and show my nomination longlist (I think I ended up nominating the first 5 on this list but really I don’t think there was much separation top to bottom, and I may have switched a couple):

“Twelve and Tag” by Gregory Norman Bossert (Asimov’s)

“Acres of Perhaps” by Will Ludwigsen (Asimov’s)

“The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld)

“Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathagan” by Ian McDonald (Old Venus)

“Endless Forms Most Beautiful” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Analog)

“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” by Elizabeth Bear (Old Venus)

“This Evening’s Performance” by Genevieve Valentine (The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk)

“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed)

“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang (Uncanny)

“My Last Bringback” by John Barnes (Meeting Infinity)

“The Deepwater Bride” by Tamysn Muir (F&SF)

Thus, two stories among my nomination candidates made the ballot, which is actually not unusual.

Oh well, that’s enough about my choices. It does give you a hint as what will come first on my ballot, though! Except that I’m not sure -- I could easily flip the first two spots.

1. “Folding Beijing”, by Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu) 

Here’s what I wrote about “Folding Beijing” in the March 2015 Locus: “The conceit here is that Beijing has been literally folded into three separate parts, that each get part of each day. The division is unequal, in a very explicitly class-based fashion, and the story opens in Third Space, with Lao Dao, a waste inspector, as he plans an illegal trip to First Space to deliver a love letter from a man in Second Space to a woman there. The idea itself if fascinating and nicely depicted, and the social differences between the three Spaces are well described and only too believable, and the characters, Lao Dao in particular, are also well done.” So, to my mind a very original concept (perhaps recalling Philip Jose Farmer’s Dayworld to a degree, as well as numerous stories with Dayside/Nightside divisions), used effectively to deal with class differences.

(I should add a note about the translator: Ken Liu of course is a first-rate writer (and a Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award winner), but his contributions as a translator, in introducing excellent Chinese-language SF to the English-speaking world, are also very praiseworthy. (He also translated last year’s Hugo winning novel, The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (no relation).)

2. “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead”, by Brooke Bolander 

Here’s what I wrote in the April 2015 Locus: “Rhye is an android of some sort, made to be a killer, and after leaving the army she has been rescued by another android, Rack, a gentle man who is a computer expert. The two seem a traditional team: brains and muscle, as it were, but as the story opens Rack has gotten into trouble. A mobster has killed him for not finding his son quickly enough. Said son's brain had been uploaded, and Rack had followed him there. Now Rack's body is dead, and Rhye is forced to upload after him, to look for the mobster's son with the dangled reward of at least retrieving Rack's brain. This is neat stuff in itself, and the story of Rhye's journey in the virtual world is well-executed, with a perfect twisty ending (perfect in that I saw the right answer in advance, but in a way that seemed earned, not cheap or gimmicky). Best though is the manner of telling: Rhye's voice, profane and vulnerable and very darkly funny. (By the way, Bolander swears in an author profile that she had never heard of the drink “Rack and Rye” before naming her characters – I had assumed the names were on purpose, either way, it works.)”

This is excellent action SF, with a pretty solid SFnal premise behind it.

3. “Obits”, by Stephen King 

This is about a guy who wants to be a journalist, but at the wrong time, i.e. now, with papers shedding employees (and cash) and online places paying peanuts. He ends up writing a nasty satirical obituary column for a TMZ-like website, for peanuts of course. When he asks for a raise and his boss brushes him off he gets mad and to vent, writes an obituary for her. When she suddenly dies he gets scared, then a bit tempted – what if he tries writing an obituary for someone really evil? Well, you can see where this is going, and it goes there, with no real twists (and, as King makes sure to tell us, no real resolution). This is decent stuff, and King is an engaging writer, for sure, but this isn’t really brilliant. It’s not King at his best, it’s not particularly original – I just don’t see it as Hugo material.

4. “Flashpoint Titan”, by Cheah Kai Wai 

This is set on board an experimental Japanese warship in the Saturn system. Ships start acting suspiciously, and it becomes clear that a sneak Chinese attack on the American colony on Titan is in the offing. The commander of the new Japanese ship offers to help, but he is constrained both by rules of engagement – until the Chinese are proven to act hostilely, his hands are tied – and also by a need to keep the experimental weapons on board his ship secret. What follows is bog standard mil-SF, and decent enough stuff, but nowhere surprising, nowhere a cut above any other particular story.

5. “What Price Humanity?”, by David VanDyke 

This opens with a long infodump setting up the situation: the Solar System has been engaged in a long war against the alien Meme (a really bad name choice these days), constantly throwing them back only to face another wave. Must humanity “use inhumane means” to fight this war? Then we switch to the POV of Captain Vincent Markis, in a strange situation which quickly suggests to him a virtual reality setup to keep his brain going while his body is regenerated. The VR setup gets more complex, and soon Markis meets others in it – all fellow veterans. Soon they are doing wargames … Again, it’s easy enough to see where this is going. It’s competent mil-SF – it’s not a bad story – but it doesn’t stand out either.

So – two stories that I’d be happy see win the Hugo, and three stories that, while readable enough, certainly publishable, are not at all distinguished. Not the first time that’s happened, no doubt, but still regrettable.

The 2016 Hugos: Novella

The 2016 Hugos: Novella

By Rich Horton

I’m going to write a series of posts on the short fiction categories for the 2016 Hugos, now that I’ve read them all. I’ll rank them in the order I intend to vote.

A quick word on my voting philosophy: I am not planning to reflexively rank Rabid Puppy entries below No Award. I am of course disgusted by the Rabid Puppy antics, and I feel that many more worthy stories were kept off the ballot by the Rabid choices. And if a story is bad enough, it will certainly be off my ballot, with No Award the last choice. (That’s always been my approach.) But, this year in particular, many of the nominees supported by the Rabid Puppies were either unaware of that, or aware and quite clearly not happy with that. Also, I don’t want to reduce the meaningfulness of the win for those worthy winners – if they finish first and No Award is second, to my mind it to some extent delegitimizes their wins, through no fault of their own. Better to have been chosen the best with every voting on merit than voted best simply because all the other choices were automatically rejected regardless of quality.

So, novellas first. The 2016 Hugo nominees for Best Novella are:

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)

The Builders by Daniel Polansky (Tor.com)

Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum)

Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel Entertainment)

Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon)

I’ll go ahead and show my nomination ballot:

The Two Paupers, by C. S. E. Cooney (Fairchild Press)

“Gypsy”, by Carter Scholz (Gypsy plus …, F&SF)

“The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred”, by Greg Egan (Asimov’s)

“The Bone Swans of Amandale”, by C. S. E. Cooney (Bone Swans)

“The Boatman's Cure”, by Sonya Taaffe (Ghost Signs)

With these four also contenders:

Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand (Open Road/PS Publishing)

Penric's Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Penric's Demon)

Teaching the Dog to Read, by Jonathan Carroll (Subterranean)

Sunset Mantle, by Alter S. Reiss (Tor)

So you can see that none of my personal nominations made the ballot. Three of my choices were somewhat obscurely published, so I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t make the cut (these are the Cooney stories, and the Taaffe story (which may be a long novelette anyway)). By all means seek them out to read! I was quite bothered that the Scholz and Egan stories, two of the very best hard SF stories of the last few years, and both published in top magazines, didn’t get a nod.

Oh well, that’s enough about my choices. It does give you a hint as what will come first on my ballot, though!

1. Penric's Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Here’s what I wrote in the November Locus: “It's set in her Chalion universe (or, more properly, The World of Five Gods). Penric is a pleasant young man, the younger son of a not terribly prosperous noble family, whose life is turned upside down when, while helping a woman stricken on the way, he unwittingly agrees to take on her demon. This marks him as tied to the fifth god, the Bastard, and it's also potentially a very dangerous thing. The rest of the story is about Penric learning the nature of demons, his in particular (he names her “Desdemona”, cleverly enough), and learning to navigate the dangers posed not just by his possession, but by the jealousies and fears of those around him, particularly those in his new Order. The depiction of demons (which remind me a little bit of the (science-fictional) Aspects in Gregory Benford's Galactic Center future) is pretty neat, and Desdemona is an interesting character (or characters). Nice story, though not spectacular, but I'd be glad to see more of Penric and Desdemona.”

So you can see that I liked the story, but wasn’t over the moon about it. Still, best of this list, though I will say it’s pretty close over the next couple stories.

2. Slow Bullets, by Alastair Reynolds

I also wrote about this in the November Locus: “pure SF, told by Scur, a veteran of a sectarian war that seems to have engulfed human space. After the ceasefire, and an encounter with a vicious enemy soldier who tortures her leaves her for dead, she ends up on a prison ship with a number of war criminals. But when she wakes, with the bulk her fellow passengers, and the ship's crew, they realize that something has gone terribly wrong – they seem to have reached the right planet, but centuries late, and the planet seems unrecognizable. Also, her enemy is also on board. The story blends a couple of mysteries – why is Scur on the ship? What happened to it, and what happened to human civilization? – with a tale of revenge and possible redemption. Parts of it stretched my suspension of disbelief, and at times it drags a bit, but the ending is moving and there are some neat revelations.”

Again, I wasn’t over the moon about it, but it’s got some pretty good and powerful ideas.

3. The Builders, by Daniel Polansky

I just read this story. It’s a caper story of sorts, following the usual structure: the leader of a gang assembles all the varied members, sometimes reluctantly. Then the plot is set in motion, and the caper is executed. The first twist in this story is that all the characters are animals: the leader, called the Captain, is a mouse; and there’s a rat, a badger, a snake, an owl, a stoat, an opossum, and a salamander. The plan is to try again something they had tried years ago, which we come to realize is a political coup of sorts. We also realize that they were betrayed the last time by one of their own … All these plot details aren’t so much the point, though – the story is all style, offhand black humor, anthropomorphic descriptions of the characters, cutting dialogue. And, eventually, lots of violence. This is pretty fun, I have to say. It’s not really that interesting from an SF or Fantasy point of view, and it’s really not all that deep (and doesn’t want to be). Fun, though.

4. Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor 

Binti won the Nebula for Best Novella, which may make it the frontrunner for the Hugo. But I have to say I found it disappointing. It tells of Binti, a mathematical prodigy from the Himba people (a Namibian group), who gets a scholarship to go to University on another planet in what seems a Galactic culture with multiple alien races. This first part is kind of interesting, as Binti meets a number of other, more privileged, students, starts to make friends, and we start to understand her culture. But that’s not the story Okorafor is telling – because suddenly aliens attack and kill everyone but Binti. Binti is important, perhaps, because she carries an ancient artifact that helps her communicate with the aliens (jellyfish like creatures called Meduse). The aliens, without her permission, modify her so that she can better understand and communicate with them, and they use her to help them recover a significant artifact that was stolen from them and housed at the University to which Binti is going. I was put off by the wild jumps in the story, by the implausible and too often magic tech, by the lack of apparent consequence or concern about the atrocities committed by the Meduse, and by some slack prose. Against that I should point out that it has more exotic ideas than any of the other stories, and appears to be trying to engage “deeper” issues – just not, to my mind, quite successfully.

5. Perfect State, by Brandon Sanderson

Perfect State concerns Kaironimas, who is God-Emperor of his own little domain. He has conquered his world after three hundred years, and is providing for his people pretty well, and he’s getting kind of bored. There is the problem of Melhi, ruler of another world, with robots, who wants to fight him … and then there’s the summons he has received, from the Wode – he needs to find a mate an contribute his DNA to create another “Liveborn”. And we realize that he’s really a “brain in a jar” – and he knows it. He’s been given his own virtual reality, to make of what he will, with limited contact with other domains. Everyone else in his world is a simulation. And he must go to a Border State and meet a woman and … And so he does, and she’s intriguing, and very different from him, and a bit cynical, and he starts to fall for her. Well, there’s a twist of course, and it involves his unwanted enemy, Melhi, as well as the nature of these virtual lives. And it’s really not bad, coming to a real if slightly trite resolution. None of the ideas here are terribly original, but this story is pretty well done in that context. A fine story, not a brilliant one.

So there you have it. No story I would have nominated for a Hugo myself, but also no truly bad stories. So I won’t leave any of these off my ballot. Indeed, while this isn’t a great Novella shortlist, it’s really not too different, in overall quality, from many previous shortlists. I just regret the significantly better stories – in what was a very good year at the very top of the novella list – that didn’t get nominated.

I’ll note something else: all 5 of these stories were published as standalone novellas, either slim books or ebooks. So too were many of the other stories I recommended, such as The Two Paupers, Wylding Hall, Teaching the Dog to Read, and Sunset Mantle. This seems unusual, but it does seem to reflect the state of novella publishing these days.

An Old Rex Stout Omnibus: Curtains For Three

Rex Stout Special: Curtains for Three

a review by Rich Horton

A special for Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, which is focusing on Rex Stout this week. That said, while I doubt this particular book was a bestseller, Stout's Nero Wolfe books sold very well for a long time, and afforded him a handsome income.

I have a certain tendency to read mystery writers in bunches -- that is, as a teen I binged on Agatha Christie, and since then I've done the same -- read huge swathes of their oeuvre over a period of month or a couple years -- with the likes of Charlotte MacLeod, Robert Barnard, Ellis Peters, Anne Perry, Peter Lovesey, John D. MacDonald, and Georges Simenon. And also Rex Stout, sometime in the '80s, when I read dozens of his Nero Wolfe novels, mostly in the Bantam paperbacks that were being reissued at that time.

So I figured I'd reread one of the old Nero Wolfe books I had. I chose Curtains for Three, from 1950. Like many of Stout's Nero Wolfe books it's an omnibus of three novellas, which is one reason I picked it: interest in the short fiction market for mysteries. These three novellas were published in the American Magazine, one each in 1948, 1949, and 1950. I suspected they were marketed as "Complete Novels" in the magazine issues, and I was right, as the covers here show (or would show, if the reproduction was better!). They are all of similar length, in the neighborhood of 25,000 words.





Rex Stout (1886-1975) was born in Indiana, grew up in Kansas, and joined the Navy after a brief spell at the University of Kansas. He served as a Warrant Officer on President Theodore Roosevelt's yacht. He left the Navy and went into banking, apparently inventing a school banking system that was very widely implemented. He published a variety of genre short stories in the that period. By 1927 he had made enough money to retire and turn to writing, at first producing three literary novels that were well received but didn't sell. In 1934 he published the first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance (an abridged version appeared in the American Magazine), and from then on concentrated on mysteries, introducing a couple of other detectives (such as Tecumseh Fox and Dol Bonner, who appeared in one book of her own and later in some Nero Wolfe books), but eventually sticking with Wolfe. He was active politically, mostly for leftish causes, including time spent in a leadership position for the ACLU; despite this, he was fiercely anti-Communist and late in his life supported US involvement in Vietnam.

The Nero Wolfe books are one of those long-lasting mystery series in which the detective never ages even as the novels are set at the time of writing. (Simenon's Maigret novels are like this as well.) I always thought that worked well until perhaps the '60s, when maybe the present day setting didn't seem to fit Nero Wolfe and the narrator, Wolfe's assistant Archie Goodwin, quite as well.

To the stories. The three stories in Curtains for Three are:

"The Gun With Wings" (American Magazine, December 1949)
"Bullet for One" (American Magazine, July 1948)
"Disguise for Murder" (as "The Twisted Scarf" in American Magazine, September 1950)

The book was first published by Viking in December 1950. They all share a similar structure: a murder mystery is presented, with about 6 obvious suspects, and after interviewing them all, with Archie possibly sent on an errand or two, and with Inspector Cramer of the NYPD either accepting Wolfe's help or fulminating against his involvement, Wolfe determines the solution (often turning on a tricksy minor detail). Usually he reveals it with all involved present in his office. (Wolfe famously almost never leaves his brownstone, and has very fixed hours devoted either to work, food, or his orchids.)

In "The Gun With Wings", two lovers want to hire Wolfe to prove that each of them is innocent of murder. It seems that the woman's husband, a famous tenor, has just been shot. Naturally, the wife is a suspect, and so is her lover. And though both claim to be sure the other didn't do it, they want Wolfe to prove it so there is no lingering doubt. There are other candidates, such as a rival whose daughter claimed to have been seduced by the dead man, and that daughter as well, and a couple more. Wolfe's main concern is to find out how the title gun "winged" itself from one place to another ...

In "Bullet for One", a famous industrial designer has been murdered while walking his horse in Central Park. Wolfe is hired by a group of the suspects in the murder with a commission -- to prove that another man, the victim's top salesman, is guilty. Wolfe of course, refuses, and promises only to find who is actually guilty. The other suspects are a rival designer, the victim's daughter, an investor, an employee who was just fired, and the designer's groom. Part of the intrigue here, as usual, is Archie Goodwin's preference for one of the women involved over the other, and the perhaps related decision by Wolfe to send Archie on errands he considers unimportant -- but maybe they're not?

Finally, in "Disguise for Murder", the murder is actually committed in Wolfe's office. He is showing off his orchids, unwillingly, to a Garden Club. Taking a break by hiding in the office, Archie is confronted by a young woman who admits she's a crook, and wants to get out of the business, but she's been recognized at the orchid showing, and fears she might be in danger. When, shortly later, she is found strangled in the office, Wolfe is understandably motivated to find the killer, who must be another of the guests. A complication is the high-handed way the police treat the scene of the crime. This also features some action for Archie, and some real danger. And it turns on a fairly clever trivial point.

In all of these stories, as in most of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, the characters of Goodwin and Wolfe, as well as their various assistants such as Fritz the cook, and Saul Panzer; as well as foils like Inspector Cramer; are of greater interest than the mysteries. (This is hardly uncommon in these ongoing series.) They are good fun -- in the case of these stories minor fun, though the best Wolfe novels are more involved and of greater lasting interest.

Another Ace Double: 200 Years to Christmas, by J. T. McIntosh/Rebels of the Red Planet, by Charles L. Fontenay

Ace Double Reviews, 59: 200 Years to Christmas, by J. T. McIntosh/Rebels of the Red Planet, by Charles L. Fontenay (#F-113, 1961, $0.40)

Once again, I don't have a "new" old book to write about, so I'm posting one of my older Ace Double reviews. This one is about two writers who were still alive when I first wrote the review, but who died shortly later. Neither is much remembered, but J. T. McIntosh is a name that's come up in a few contexts recently so I figured this might be worth exhuming.

Neither of these writers is that well remembered these days, though McIntosh remains something of a guilty pleasure for a lot of readers, myself included. McIntosh was a Scotsman named James MacGregor (1925-2008), who originally published as J. T. M'Intosh. His career extended from 1950 through 1980. He was quite prolific, publishing in the neighborhood of 100 short stories and 20 novels, mostly SF but some mainstream work as well. Charles L. Fontenay (1917-2007) was a journalist who published fairly regularly in the SF magazines in the 50s, then had a few more stories mostly in anthologies late in his life. He published a few novels as well. 200 Hundred Years to Christmas is about 28,000 words, and Rebels of the Red Planet about 51,000. The artist for the 200 Years to Christmas cover is Ed Valigursky, I'm not sure who the other one is by, though John O'Neill's suggestion of Ed Emshwiller seems likely.

I've called McIntosh a guilty pleasure, but that's not really fair. In fact he was quite reliably entertaining, and his stories were usually aimed at specific SFnal/societal ideas. Very often, he would advance one particular unusual idea, without necessarily thinking it the whole way through. Often, the overall milieu of his futures was a bit thinly described -- except for whatever specific change he was examining everything seemed just like the 1950s. (He said that was on purpose somewhere, I think.) His plotting was energetic and the stories were usually fun reads. He might qualify as a forgotten SF writer who deserves at least a modest rediscovery. My favorite works by him are from fairly early in his career: the novels World Out of Mind (1953) and One in Three Hundred (1954), and some shorter work (mostly novelettes) from the same period.

200 Years to Christmas originally appeared in Science Fantasy #25, in 1959, probably in the same form (i.e. I doubt the Ace Double is expanded). It's a generation ship story, focusing on the problem of societal cohesion on a generation ship, as such reminiscent of Poul Anderson's "The Troublemakers", Ursula Le Guin's "Paradises Lost", and Stephen Baxter's "Mayflower II", among many other stories.

It is set over a few years at roughly the midpoint of a 400 year journey from Earth to another star. The inhabitants of the generation ship are not sure if human society has survived outside the ship -- they left rather precipitously during a period of considerable social stress. The main character is Ted Benzil, a schoolteacher on the ship. His position is of considerable prestige. As the novel opens he is propositioned by a 15 year old girl ("startlingly nubile") named Lila, but he gently rejects her, in favor of his long term older lover, Freddy Steel. The setup soon comes clear -- the ship's society is going through a libertine phase, but this is ending, to be replaced by a strictly Puritan phase.

During the years of Puritanism, the libertine views of the likes of Freddy Steel become anathema, and Freddy faces humiliation, while others face worse punishment. Ted Benzil is supposedly representative of a knowing middle way, but in fact he comes off as wishy-washy and not terribly courageous. He does eventually lose his job though, and he manages to find enough courage to help push things in the opposite direction, towards greater rationality. And of course he moves in the direction of Lila, while Freddy is presented as excessively libertine, just as the villains are excessively Puritan.

It's not by any means outstanding work, but it does hold the interest, and I found it a fun read. I don't fully buy McIntosh's thesis -- essentially, that society, especially a small and closed society, will inevitably swing from libertinism to Puritanism to rationality and back and forth again, but I thought it at least interesting and fairly thoughtful. I suppose the characters were the weak point -- more labels to be moved as the author desired than real people.

Rebels of the Red Planet seems not to be based on any earlier stories. It is, it must be said, rather a preposterous work. That said, it's smoothly enough written and the heroes are good and the villains are really evull, so I admit I enjoyed the reading despite considerable reservations.

The story is set, no surprise, on Mars. Efforts to adapt humans to live more easily on the planet have been suppressed by evull corporate interests -- if humans could live unaided on the planet they wouldn't be forced to pay the spaceship lines that import material from Earth. But these efforts continue underground -- some focusing on genetic alteration of humans to make them better adapted to Mars, others focusing on developing psychic abilities to, for example, allow teleportation of food directly from Earth.

The story opens with the beautiful Maya Cara Nome accompanying her fiance Nuwell Eli to a suspected outpost of illegal research. Nuwell is obviously evil, and weak, because he is a prosecutor. Maya is obviously good, because beautiful, and also because she was raised by the old Martians, but she is misguided. They discover quite shocking experiments performed by an old scientist, Goat Hennessy, who has vivisected embryos in feeble attempts at genetic manipulation.

Back in a major Martian city, Maya infiltrates a rebel center. There she meets the dynamic and handsome and amusingly named Dark Kensington, who should be in his 50s but seems to be 25 -- with no memory of the past quarter century. We learn that both Maya and Dark have psychic powers. Maya is loyal enough to expose the rebel base, but many rebels escape. Maya tracks down Dark at another city, and falls in love with him. But Nuwell Eli follows her, and she is just weak enough to alert the authorities to Dark's presence. He is shot and killed, and in despair Maya agrees to marry Nuwell after all.

But -- but -- those old Martians are something special! It turns out Dark isn't really dead, and he is able to join with the remaining rebels, the Old Martians, and some other victims just in time to save Maya. Save her? Well, it seems that Nuwell is whipping her to bring her to her senses, and to cure her or her obsession with Dark Kensington. Oh, what a baddy he is!

The resolution is really rather flat, without for instance any satisfying final battle between Dark and Nuwell. And what's with the names? "Dark Kensington"? A deeply silly novel -- in particular the genetic and ESP speculation is just dumb. Its heart is all too obviously in the right place, but its execution is quite lacking.

Old Bestseller: The City of Lilies, by Anthony Pryde and R. K. Weekes

Old Bestseller: The City of Lilies, by Anthony Pryde and R. K. Weekes

a review by Rich Horton

I doubt this was actually a bestseller, but it's certainly a piece of popular fiction from the first half of the 20th Century -- so very much in this blog's original purview.

Anthony Pryde was a pseudonym for Agnes Russell Weekes (1880-1940). R. K. (Rose Kirkpatrick) Weekes (1874-1956) was her sister. Almost nothing about the two is readily findable, at least with my search skills. (Denny Lien helped track down the bare details I have.) They appear to have been English. At first Agnes seems perhaps to have been the primary author, especially if Anthony Pryde was her pseudonym alone -- some books are attributed to that name only, and at least in the case of The City of Lilies, the byline for R. K. Weekes is given in smaller print. Later in their career the Pryde name was sometimes not used, instead Agnes used the form of her name A. R. Weekes, and they often published as by "A. R. and R. K. Weekes", suggesting that the collaboration was equal by that time.

The earliest Anthony Pryde novel I can find is Marqueray's Duel, from 1920, when Agnes was 40, and the latest dates to 1931. Novels as by A. R. and R. K. Weekes continue until Alda Abducted in 1942. It appears, then, that the novels stopped when Agnes died. (To be sure, Rose was 68 in 1942 and may have been ready to retire anyway.) They published very regularly for some time, at least a couple of dozen novels with titles like The Purple Pearl, An Ordeal of Honor, The Secret Room, and The Emerald Necklace. There is an earlier novel credited to R. K. Weekes alone, Convict B14 (1920), and one dating as far back as 1904 credited to A. R. Weekes alone, Yarbrough the Premier. I also found a short story by Agnes Russell Weekes in Harper's Magazine in 1904, so it seems she was a publishing writer at that time. I'm not sure why there's an apparent gap between those publications and the novels beginning in 1920. There was also a Shakespearean scholar called A. R. Weekes in the same time period -- in this case I suspect that wasn't Agnes, though I suppose I could be wrong. The other mentions I saw were a dismissive review in Harper's, and an apparently vaguely positive note in Time, of Anthony Pryde novels. Finally, a blog that may be very much up my alley, Furrowed Middlebrow, briefly mentions the Weekes sisters among a list of Edwardian women writers and adds a couple of novels from between 1904 and 1920: Faith Unfaithful (1914) by Agnes, and The Laurensons (1917) by Rose; and implies that Rose's list of solo novels was longer than I have suggested.

The City of Lilies is from 1923, published by Robert M. McBride & Company. Handwriting on the inside front cover says "Library of Mr. and Mrs. Jerry McGowan". It may be a First Edition. There was a later printing from A. L. Burt.

The novel is quite frankly an example of a Ruritanian novel (and indeed the Time mention of it emphasized that aspect). It's set in Neuberg, which seems to be located roughly where Lichtenstein is, and to be about the same size. Neuberg's ruling Prince is Heinrich, a cruel tyrant with a tortured artistic side: apparently he's a great architect, but his upbringing, by his harsh grandfather, has made him a terrible ruler. His most trusted adviser is Rupert Hautrive, an Englishman who wandered to Neuberg partly in search of his beloved older brother, who, it turns out, died in prison, a victim of Heinrich's grandfather. Heinrich has a beautiful young wife who hates him, but who he loves to distraction. And he has an implacable enemy, the lowborn Valentin Muller, leader of the revolutionary group called The League.

The novel opens with a masked ball, at which it soon appears that Valentin is an unexpected guest. He escapes, but not before getting the attention of a beautiful dancer from Paris, Mercedes. The upshot of all this is that Heinrich decides to punish the loyal Colonel von Ritzing, who had not attended the ball and whose pass had been appropriated by Valentin. Von Ritzing is very popular, and very upright, and his execution will outrage the people. Will the League intervene? Or will Valentin sacrifice von Ritzing to the greater cause?

Other subplots intertwine -- Mercedes joining the league and falling for Valentin; the mystery of Rupert Hautrive's parentage; the true love of Margaret, Heinrich's Princess; the cynical French police chief Suchet and his machinations. It's clear from the start that Heinrich's rule is doomed, and indeed that he realizes this and at some level doesn't mind -- he's an interesting if not quite believable character, fully aware of his faults but unwilling to change, truly in love with the wife he has abused sufficiently so that she hates him; truly brilliant when he cares to be. There is another mystery, easily enough guessed by any halfway alert reader, concerning the Royal Family of Neuberg.

It all bounces along nicely enough. It's popular fiction of its time, and of its very particular subgenre, the Ruritanian novel, and its overt debt to Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda is, I think, something the authors would have cheerfully acknowledged. It's a bit brokenbacked -- the climax comes a tad too early, and is a bit of an anticlimax, actually, with a slightly overextended denouement. But really it's fun stuff, nothing all that great, sure, but enjoyable.

Another Ace Double: Mask of Chaos, by John Jakes/The Star Virus, Barrington J. Bayley

Ace Double Reviews, 8: Mask of Chaos, by John Jakes/The Star Virus, by Barrington J. Bayley (#78400, 1970, $0.75)

Mask of Chaos is about 55,000 words. The Star Virus is about 50,000 words. The total length of over 100,000 words is quite large for an Ace Double. Jakes published a few Ace Doubles. Bayley published one more, Annihilation Factor in 1972 (backed with Neal Barrett, Jr.'s Highwood). Both of Bayley's Ace Double halves were expansions of stories from 1964 issues of New Worlds.

I do really like these two covers. The one for Mask of Chaos is by Jack Gaughan, and the one for The Star Virus is by Kelly Freas -- likely the two leading SF illustrators in that time period.

Barrington Bayley (1937-2008) was one of SF's "wild men", and stayed that way until the end of his life. He's clearly in the same ballpark, concept-wise, as Charles Harness, though his general outlook is more cynical. I'd recommend almost any of his novels as worth reading for the ideas alone. The Star Virus was his first novel, and it is expanded from a story also called "The Star Virus", from the May-June 1964 New Worlds.

It's the story of a star pirate, Rodrone, who stumbles across a mysterious alien artifact, called the Lens. In this future, the only true star-travelling races are humans and the Streall. The Streall are technologically advanced, but very rigid. Humans are completely disorganized. The Streall hate humans, but for some time apparently a quasi-equilibrium state has been maintained.

The Lens was the property of the Streall, but humans had found it. Rodrone steals it from a ship returning it to the Streall, and the novel recounts both the Streall pursuit of Rodrone, and Rodrone's attempts to understand the Lens. The plot is a bit rambling, and lots of the science is totally absurd, sometimes unnecessarily so. In this, as in other things, Bayley resembles Harness. But the central notion of the novel, the true nature of the Lens, is at once wacky, original, powerful, and in the end just plain cool enough to pretty much justify some of the carelessness of the rest of the book. (I'm not saying a rewrite with a strict editor might not do this book a world of good though!)

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Bayley here, in engaging in really far out, pseudo-scientific speculations, is doing something that SF writers used to do a lot, but don't so much anymore. I think nowadays there is more emphasis on getting the science just right, or alternately on using well-established furniture which may not be scientifically plausible, but is legitimized by tradition. I don't have a problem with stories which of those types: but I think we need to make room for the wild men, who use SF as a tool for what can be really nice philosophical mind-stretching, even if in so doing they utterly abandon plausibility.

John Jakes was born in 1932 in Chicago, and he began contributing to the SF pulps in 1950. He was a regular contributor to the SF magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, and published a great deal of SF, historical fiction, and westerns in that period. He was perhaps best known in the field for his 1973 novel On Wheels, about a car-based future, and for his Conan-derived fantasy series about Brak the Barbarian, which began with stories and serials often in Cele Goldsmith's Fantastic. (I've just finished one of those serials, "When the Idols Walked".) I was never overly impressed with his SF or Fantasy -- the Brak stories, for instance, are frankly "thud and blunder", and the other short fiction I've read strikes me as competent and unambitious yard goods. But in the mid-70s, Jakes produced a bestselling series of paperbacks, The Kent Family Chronicles, set in the Revolutionary War period, and timed to appear coinciding with the Bicentennial celebration. These made his name, and he continued to write mostly historical fiction (including the North and South series, about the Civil War) after that.

Mask of Chaos is a sometimes promising, ultimately disappointing novel. It's the story of a mechanically-enhanced spaceman called Mike, short for the insulting nickname Micropig. He sold himself to a research institute allowing them to experiment with replacing much of his body with mechanical parts. In the process he seems to have forgotten his past, and to have been psychologically altered to be unrealistically accepting of whatever goes on.

As the book opens he is fired from his latest berth due to the jealousy of his fellow spacemen, who can't match his job performance. He is on the world Tome, which seems to be a near utopia -- very orderly, beautiful, with one odd feature -- everyone wears masks. After a brief time, though, he realizes he has no way of making money. A civil servant brings him in and informs him that his only option is to agree to play a mysterious Game.

Mike originally refuses, and soon encounters a beautiful "professional woman" (i.e. prostitute) who is also marooned on Tome, and who has also declined to play the Game. They hatch a plan to steal some of the masks, which are apparently (and incredibly implausibly) very valuable off-planet. This goes awry, though, and they are arrested an informed that the only way to avoid punishment is to finally agree to play the Game.

The middle section of the novel recounts their experiences in the Game, which is a strange simulation, by all evidence in the book likely fatal to any normal person, though Mike's enhancements save his life and the woman's several times. The Game is played in a simulated city and was vaguely reminiscent to me of the Game of Life (board game, not the computer game): you gain credits such as "education" by randomly hitting certain squares. But sometimes instead of credits the squares will shoot knives or poison gas or something. By the same token, the simulated cafes will sometimes serve food and sometimes poison.

At any rate, the two finally refuse to participate, causing much consternation. Before long they are involved in a cynically (and I suppose realistically) portrayed revolution, which leads to a fairly honest but very disappointing and flat ending.

The best parts of the book are the characterizations of Mike and the woman. Mike in particular seems real and different. And the story does hold the interest for a while, but then goes flat. The economic underpinnings of Tome simply don't make sense, and the ultimate revelation of what lies under the masks is silly. A novel that shows some perhaps surprising ambition, but not really a very good one.

My Best of the Year book

I thought I should mention that my new book is out, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2016 Edition. It's always fun to see the book in print, and to celebrate a whole bunch of great stories.

I dedicated this book to my late father, John Richard (Dick) Horton.

Apropos of that, I recently put together a spreadsheet detailing all the contributors to my books over the past 11 years. This series began in 2006 as two books: Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition; and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition. There were three years in that format, and in 2009 we switched to the bigger combined format, with both SF and Fantasy. (I should note that each edition -- 2006, 2016, whatever -- collects stories from the previous year.)

So here's this year's cover:

So, as I said, I put together a combined spreadsheet, of 11 years of these book. One of the things I was interested in was how many times I published new writers -- that is, writers whom I hadn't previously published in this series. I confess, I was partly motivated to investigate this because of an accusation by Eric Raymond that I kept choosing authors from the same pool. That seemed on the face of it blatantly false -- I've always prided myself in choosing a lot of unfamiliar writers. Naturally I have favorites, and there are some writers who appear over and over again (most obviously, Robert Reed, though he's not in this year's book!) But I had a feeling I always included a lot of new (to me) voices.

And I think the statistics back me up. Bottom line -- 62% of the stories in all my books combined were by writers who were appearing first in that year's book. But that's distorted, because of course for the first few years most of the writers were, by default, firsts. The numbers seem to settle in around 50% new writers each year beginning in about 2011 -- the percentages from 2011 through 2016 are 54%, 43%, 61%, 49%, 29%, 53%, 62%. The cumulative total percentage since 2011 is 48% new writers.

So, about half the writers in a typical book of mine have never before appeared in one of my Best of the Year collections. That seems pretty good! And, in fact, a quick comparison with at least one other editor suggests that my percentage of writers new to me is significantly higher. (Which isn't to say the other books aren't also excellent -- they are!)

One more set of numbers: I have published 354 stories by 219 writers over the 11 years of this series. 143 of those writers have appeared in my books only once. The writers who have appeared most are Robert Reed (10), Elizabeth Bear (6), Kelly Link (6), Theodora Goss (6), C. S. E. Cooney (5), Yoon Ha Lee (5), Holly Phillips (5), Genevieve Valentine (5), Rachel Swirsky (5), and Peter Watts (5). (Some of these totals might be slightly affected by how I treated collaborations.)

The Only Novel by a Great Playwright: Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, by Tom Stoppard

The Only Novel by a Great Playwright: Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, by Tom Stoppard

a review by Rich Horton

Something a bit different this week -- a fairly little known though probably not forgotten novel by a great great writer -- but a writer known for his plays. This is something I wrote some years ago, a rather brief review, but I like the novel, and Stoppard is such a great writer I thought it worth bringing one of his more obscure works a bit of attention while I finish my latest true "Old Bestseller". (I should perhaps add that K. A. Laity discussed this in a Friday's Forgotten Books post some half-dozen years ago.)

Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937. His Jewish family fled Czechoslovakia as the Nazis invaded, ending up in Singapore, then India. His father was killed in a Japanese attack or perhaps as a prisoner of war, and after the war, his mother remarried an Englishman, Kenneth Stoppard. He became a journalist at age 17, fortuitously becoming a theatre critic soon after, which lead to an ambition to write plays, He wrote some radio dramas in the '50s, and his first stage play was completed in 1960. He wrote the first version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with the help of a Ford Foundation grant in 1964, and it was first produced in 1966, making him a star. He has written many many plays since then, and also translated many, written some screenplays including work on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Empire of the Sun, Brazil, and Shakespeare in Love.

And one novel, very early in his career (1966): Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon.  I've read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound, and a few more plays. I've seen a television version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but never seen a Stoppard play live, which I'll have to fix sometime. I've really enjoyed every play I've read by him.

Stoppard's plays are known for virtuoso word play, and this is a feature of Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon as well.  (Add Stoppard to the list of English-language writers who grew up hearing another language (Czech, in his case) and who write flashy or otherwise special English prose. (Others: Conrad, Nabokov, Rushdie.))  The story is told mostly from the viewpoint of Mr. Moon, a rather hapless young man in London in 1965 (at the time of Churchill's funeral). He hopes to write a histoy of the world, but isn't making much progress and needs the money, so he takes a job as a professional "Boswell" to Lord Malquist, who desperately wants something to be named after him, in the manner of the Earl of Sandwich or the Duke of Wellington, or MacAdam.  Malquist wants Moon to record his bon mots, and indeed Malquist's speech is quite witty.

Mr. Moon has a rich wife, who refuses his sexual overtures, but seems to give herself to pretty much anyone else, and who seems to be running their house as a sort of brothel, for which purpose she has engaged a pretty French maid.  Into this mix are thrown Malquist's alcoholic wife, his black Jewish coachman, and an Irishman who claims to be the Risen Christ. Oh, and a lion, and a bomb. It's very funny, though very blackly so, and all is resolved quite inevitably.  I really enjoyed it. It does seem though, that with the nearly simultaneous success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard abandoned novel-writing for plays -- apparently a good decision!, though I for one would enjoy seeing more novels from him as well as the plays.

An Old Ace Double: The Ultimate Weapon/The Planeteers, by John W. Campbell

Ace Double Reviews, 97: The Ultimate Weapon, by John W. Campbell/The Planeteers, by John W. Campbell (#G-585, 1966, 50 cents)


a review by Rich Horton

Here's another Ace Double featuring an extremely significant figure in SF history. John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) was born in New Jersey, and lived there most of his life. He attended MIT (getting to know Norbert Wiener) but finished his degree (a B. S. in Physics, the same degree I hold) at Duke in 1932. (At Duke Campbell met J. B. Rhine and apparently participated as a subject in Rhine's ESP studies -- an interesting fact given Campbell's later obsession with parapsychology.) In 1930 he began publishing SF with several stories in Amazing. Early in his career he was known for stories of super-science. He also published a number of quieter and more thoughtful stories as by "Don A. Stuart", including the classics "Twilight" and "Who Goes There?". In 1937 he became the editor of Astounding Stories, and he is probably the most significant editor in the history of SF. It would be fair to say that he moved SF away from his "John W. Campbell" writing persona and toward his "Don A. Stuart" writing persona, though of course that's an oversimplification. He died in the saddle, as it were, in 1971.


After taking over Astounding Campbell essentially ceased writing fiction. His last published story as an active writer came in 1939, with perhaps the exception of "The Idealists", which appeared in the 1954 Raymond J. Healy original anthology 9 Tales of Time and Space (thanks to John Boston for alerting me to that story, which I think I'll have to seek out). There were a number of pieces written in the 30s but published later, such as The Incredible Planet (1949), and perhaps most interestingly, "All", published in 1976 in a collection called The Space Beyond -- but twice rewritten by major SF writers: as Empire by Clifford Simak, and as Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein.


I have quite enjoyed most of the Don A. Stuart stories I've read, and I've been much less impressed by the Campbell stories. This book represents my first fairly extended look at him in that mode.


The Ultimate Machine is actually a longish novella, a somewhat typical size for an Ace Double half at about 31,000 words. It was first published in the October and December 1936 issues of Amazing Stories as "Uncertainty". As it happens, I saw a copy -- may have bought a copy -- of one of Sol Cohen's horrible reprint magazines shortly after I started buying SF magazines: the July 1974 issue of Science Fiction Adventure Classics, which reprints "Uncertainty" in full.


It opens with an Earth scout ship out near Pluto, where they detect an alien ship with very powerful weapons, that easily overwhelms the mines on Pluto and destroys a couple of ships. Buck Kendall, a rich man and great scientist/engineer who has enlisted in the Space Navy, is one who escapes, and he immediately raises the alert. But his Navy bosses ignore him, brushing off what he saw as human space pirates, so he resigns, goes back to private industry, and arranges for some funding from the only smart man in the Navy, Commander McLaurin, to set up a lab on the Moon and start working on better weapons. He has deduced that the aliens are from Mira, and that they will be back at Earth in two years.


We switch to the viewpoint of the alien commander, Gresth Gkae. His race are looking for a stable system to take over, because Mira is a variable star. His ship is one of many assigned to look for new planets, and having found the Sol System he races back to Mira, to organize and then lead an invasion force.


The rest of the story is easy to figure out. Kendall and his cohorts put together some amazing new weapons and ships in an impossibly short time -- the aliens return and are surprised at the resistance they find, but they still seem likely to prevail, until Kendall figures out a way to use the Uncertainty Theory as the Ultimate Weapon. The conclusion is a slight twist, helped by a ridiculous deus ex machina.


All that said, I liked a fair amount of the story. Except for the stupidity about the Uncertainty Theory, the scientific inventions are at least on the border of plausibility (well, across the border, but at least backed by actual 1930s physics) -- Campbell mentions, for example, a weapon much like the neutron bomb. You can kind of see him working the direction he would ask his authors to take at Astounding.


The Planeteers is a collection of 5 stories about Ted Penton and Rod Blake. The stories are:

"The Brain Stealers of Mars" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1936) 8300 words

"The Double Minds" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1937) 11500 words

"The Immortality Seekers" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1937) 11700 words

"The Tenth World" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1937) 10100 words

"The Brain Pirates" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1938) 7400 words

Penton and Blake have invented atomic power, which is illegal on Earth. (Due to an accident that took out 300 square miles of Europe.) Exiled, they fly their atomic powered ship, which no on can match, all over the Solar System, looking to get rich. They keep encountering strange and intelligent aliens who always turn out to have their own interests that run counter to Penton and Blake's. Penton is the smart guy, Blake the foil.


In "Brain Stealers of Mars", they encounter creatures on Mars that can exactly mimic other creatures, and end up having to decide which of a dozen or so copies of Penton and Blake are the true ones. In "The Double Minds", a race on Callisto that has learned to use the two halves of their brain separately, increasing their mind power but reducing their coordination, has enslaved another Callistan race. Penton and Blake help out the revolution, with unexpected consequences. In "The Immortality Seekers", set on Europa, a fairly benign race turns out to need the Beryllium from which Penton and Blake's ship is made to assist what seems to be nanotech in making them immortal. Another clever creature is enlisted to help Penton and Blake. Then they head out beyond Pluto, to the Tenth World, very cold but inhabited by a very intelligent energy eater that can't control its urges to grab energy from anything hotter. Finally, on the moon of the Tenth World, surprisingly warm compared to its primary!, they encounter a creature that can eat almost anything.


These are silly and kind of annoying stories. The science -- mostly on purpose, to be sure -- is just too stupid, and the supposedly comic interactions of Penton and Blake came off pretty flat too me. Very minor work. Campbell surely made the right decision switching to the editor's seat.

Old "good" seller: Coronation Summer, by Angela Thirkell

Old Bestseller: Coronation Summer, by Angela Thirkell

a review by Rich Horton

I don't think Angela Thirkell was ever really a bestseller but her books, it appears, sold steadily over the years, in a career that last from about 1930 to her death in 1961. She still has a strong coterie of fans -- indeed, the Angela Thirkell Society will have a convention in Kansas City this year just the week before the World Science Fiction Convention.

She was born in 1890, the daughter of John Mackail and Margaret Burne-Jones, thus Rudyard Kipling's first cousin once removed, and Edward Burne-Jones' granddaughter. J. M. Barrie was her godfather. Her brother Dennis was also a novelist. Angela Mackail married James McInnes in 1911, and had three children with him befor divorcing him. (He was bisexual, and an adulterer.) She married again in 1918, to George Thirkell, a Tasmanian man, and the couple moved to Australia. But Thirkell hated it there, and left Thirkell in 1929, taking her son Lance and returning to England. Perhaps because she need the money, she began to write (she had done some journalism in Australia), and her first novel appeared in 1931. Some 40 books followed until her death (the last completed by another hand). The great majority of her books were set, curiously, in Barsetshire, the fictional county invented by the 19th Century novelist Anthony Trollope. Thirkell's books were contemporary, imagining Barsetshire as it would have been in the '30s-'50s. Many of her books, especially the later ones, were fairly conventional romances in plot structure. But as far as I can tell, her virtues were never plot, but instead a cheerfully satirical view of her characters and their milieu, and a great ear for dialogue.

The book I chose (partly simply because it was the book I encountered) is not quite characteristic of her work. Coronation Summer is an historical novel, set in 1838 when Queen Victoria was crowned. It was first published by the Oxford University Press, presumably reflecting the novel's rather educational aspect. It was reprinted in 1953 by her usual publishers, Hamish Hamilton in England and Alfred A. Knopf in the US. (My copy is the latter.)

Part of the book is sort of a travelogue and description of London life in 1838. Period illustrations are included: things like reprints of opera tickets. And there are numerous events: the Coronation, of course, but also a canoe race, a ceremony at Eton called Eton Montem, an opera, dress buying, and the occasional party.

There's a plot, too, if a fairly thin one. The story is presented as Mrs. Fan Darnley, as of 1840, writing up her memories of her summer in London the year of the Coronation, 1838. It opens with her and her soon-to-be sister-in-law, Emily Dacre, opening a book intended for Fanny's husband Henry Darnley. The book is Ingoldsby's Legends, and they wonder if the author, Thomas Ingoldsby, is the same Tom Ingoldsby whom they met in London. (Ingoldsby's Legends is a real book, once quite famous, though there was no Tom Ingoldsby -- that was a pseudonym.) Fan decides to write about her and Emily's visit to London.

In London they meet a couple of eligible men -- Mr. Vavasour, a rather pretentious author; and Henry (Hal) Darnley, a friend of Fan's brother Ned from his time at Cambridge. Hal and Ned are in London partly to prepare for a race. As we know from the beginning of the book that Fan's married name is Darnley, there's not a ton of suspense (not that there would have been -- in the way of romance novels it's pretty obvious from the start that Mr. Vavasour is not a suitable candidate). Meanwhile, Emily and Ned fall quickly in love. The two young women spend the next few weeks seeing what they can in London, while Fan's father, Mr. Harcourt, risks his family's solvency by gambling. Fan shows some interest in Mr. Vavasour, but really from the start she clearly prefers Hal Darnley. They meet a number of famous people, including the novelist Benjamin Disraeli (well, he's a politician too!) and the controversial poetess Caroline Norton, of who Fan cannot approve as she has left her husband. (This was a scandalous case in 1830s London, eventually leading, through Norton's efforts, to improvements in the rights of women in cases of divorce, especially as to custody of their children. Her husband was a bad person, abusive and financially reckless, so she was widely sympathized with.) Anyway, things come to a head at the end with Hal Darnley apparently convinced that Fan prefers Mr. Vavasour, and with Mr. Harcourt ruined (and Mrs. Harcourt, back home, on her deathbed). But all is resolved happily (largely because Hal Darnley is a very rich man).

In reality, then, the plot is of minor interest, and the sort of travelogue aspect is, while somewhat interest, not really that fascinating. But the book is still great fun -- why? The dialogue, and the portrayal of the characters. It's quite funny throughout. Mr. Harcourt (Fan and Ned's father) is very amusing: a blowhard of sorts, generous to a fault while pretending to be close with his money, a reflexive and unthinking Tory who hates Frenchmen especially. Fan is a bit of a prig and thus is always disapproving of Emily, who is slightly more relaxed, and Fan's exasperation with Emily is delightfully portrayed.

Coronation Summer is a short novel, and a slight one, but it's really rather delightful in sum. I'm not sure I'll get around to any of Thirkell's Barsetshire novels, but I'm quite sure I'd enjoy them if I tried them.