Another Ace Double: The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb/To Venus! To Venus!, by David Grinnell

Ace Double Reviews, 45: The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb/To Venus! To Venus!, by David Grinnell (#81610, 1970, $0.75)

a review by Rich Horton

E. C. Tubb would have been 99 today, so I am reposting this review of one of his Ace Double appearances in his honor.

Tubb was a British writer, born 1919, died in 2010. He published something over 100 SF novels, and about as many short stories, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. One pseudonym was the memorable "Volsted Gridban"! His best known pseudonym was probably "Gregory Kern", under which name he wrote the "Cap Kennedy" books for DAW in the early 70s. (I have not read any of that series.) But he is by far better known for his long series of novels about Earl Dumarest and his search for his lost home planet, Earth. These were published first by Ace, then by DAW, from 1967 through 1985, with a final book showing up only in 1997 from a small press (apparently having been published sometime earlier in France, and presumably having been rejected by DAW). This series runs to 32 books, of which I have read 25 or so. They constitute a rather guilty pleasure -- very formulaic, very repetitive, sometimes downright silly, certainly not particularly good. But I found them enjoyable mind candy.

The Jester at Scar is some 44,000 words long, and To Venus! To Venus! is some 45,000 words.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

The Jester at Scar is the fifth of Tubb's Dumarest of Terra novels. In these novels a tough, amazingly fast, lucky, very skilled, spacer named Earl Dumarest obsessively searches for his homeworld, Earth. Dumarest lives in a far future human-colonized galaxy in which Earth is off the beaten path and basically forgotten, and in which even the idea of a single planet as the homeworld of all humans is pooh-poohed. Most of the planets are "Mongos": i.e. they have one unique feature, and little variation (as in the old pulp cliche "It was raining on Mongo"), and most seem ruled either by Evull corporations or by either Evull or Silly and Inbred (or both) aristocracies/royalties. The two main panGalactic organizations are the Church of Universal Brotherhood (good, despite their habit of brainwashing people in exchange for food), and the red-cloaked, emotionless, Cyclan (EVULL squared), super-intelligent cybernetic people who plot to rule the Galaxy. Despite the cliche and lazy setup, the books, though uneven, were sometimes pretty enjoyable -- no classics here, but among this sort of stuff Tubb's work is better than average.

In the book just before The Jester at Scar, Kalin (one of the best and most important of the series), Earl came into possession of an incredibly valuable red ring, which gives the owner the ability to exchange minds with another person, and which the Cyclan covet. Thus he is now hunted by the Cyclan. As this book opens, Earl is staying on the spore-ridden planet Scar, with a poor woman. A couple of thugs invade her home, and after Earl is forced to kill them he notices that they have several other red rings. It seems clear that someone has hired people to try to retrieve red rings from anyone they can.

At the same time Jocelyn, the newly married ruler of the planet Jest shows up at Scar, along with his new adviser, a Cyber. Jocelyn hopes to find some profitable trade for his impoverished planet, while the Cyber of course has a deeper game -- he's figured out somehow that Dumarest is on Scar. (Tubb rather subtly plays a little game here -- Jocelyn, the "Jester" of the title, believes in the power of Chance and Fate and he thinks he has come randomly to Scar -- but it turns out that all this was planned by the Cyclan.) There's a fair amount of somewhat pointless toing and froing, and of course a knife fight, before Dumarest and a partner head out into the wilderness of Scar during the brief planetary summer to claim a cache of valuable Golden Spore. The Cyclan are after him, of course, but so too, luckily, is Jocelyn. And of course Dumarest has his own luck, skill, and fanatic determination on his side. The book is much of a piece with most of the Dumarest novels, lacking only a temporary love interest for Dumarest, and I'd place it in the middle range of Tubb's books.

Donald A. Wollheim is justifiably known as an editor, and hardly remembered as a writer. His editorial work at Ace and then at his own imprint, DAW, is significant if often controversial. On the one hand such things as his role in the pirated Ace editions of The Lord of the Rings, and his promotion of lots of low grade SF with famously crummy titles and tiny advances must be disparaged. On the other hand he was responsible for publishing early work by an astounding array of important writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and C. J. Cherryh. He also was editor (or co-editor) for two of the more significant Best of the Year collections.

He wrote a fair amount of unmemorable short fiction starting in 1934, most of it in the 40s. He also wrote quite a few juveniles in the 50s and 60s, under his own name, perhaps most notably the Mike Mars series. All his few adult novels seem to be as "David Grinnell". (The Ace Doubles under his own name were anthologies.) To Venus! To Venus! is the last, and close to his last piece of fiction.

To Venus! To Venus! is set in the fairly near future of the book's publication date, 1970 -- perhaps around 1990? A Russian unmanned probe has reached Venus and reports surprisingly balmy conditions -- nice enough for human habitation, even. The Americans are astonished -- all scientific evidence indicates that it is a hellhole, and they quickly put together a three man mission to land on Venus and settle the question once and for all. The Russians have also mounted a manned mission, and the two ships find themselves in a race.

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

The American team consists of a straight arrow commander named Chet, and two contrasting subordinated -- a gungho guy named Quincy, and a cynical guy named Carter. Much is made, unconvincingly, of Chet's leadership skills in making them a team. At any rate, they reach Venus, but have difficulty landing in what turns out to be a hellhole as the scientists predict, and they seem to be stranded. It turns out that the Russians have also landed, almost simultaneously, and they still claim it's a balmy near paradise. But they too are in trouble. The only hope for either group is for the Americans to hike across the surface of Venus, more or less by dead reckoning, fortunately only 100 miles, to where they believe the Russian ship has landed. (As presented this is basically impossible, and to be fair it seems Wollheim knows this, and gives a fair account of the likely difficulties and doesn't deny that the ultimate success is due to pure luck.)

It's not really very good. Stiff dialogue, strained science, flat characters. It's all very earnest, both in the worshipful presentation of U.S. can-do engineering spirit, and in the ultimate message of Soviet/U.S. cooperation (a bit undermined perhaps by the cartoonish presentation of the only actual Russian character).

Birthday Review: Capsule reviews of books by Thomas Burnett Swann

Thomas Burnett Swann was born 12 October 1928. He died in 1976, only 47, of cancer. He was an academic who taught at Florida Atlantic University, and wrote a significant study of the poet H. D. Beginning in the late 1950s he wrote a number of fantasy stories, and eventually a number of novels, including a glut in the last year or two of his life (some published posthumously), most set in a loosely connected alternate history/fantasy of the couple of millenia before Christ. It's often been noted that his earlier work was better than the later work (especially the last novels, presumably produced at speed after he had gotten sick, perhaps with the intent of supporting his heirs.) This is a position I endorse entirely. His novels included very noticeably gay subtexts, though only towards the end did this become explicit at all (it's most noticeable in How Are the Mighty Fallen, which tells explicitly of David and Jonathan as lovers). As such it is widely assumed that he was gay, though I'm can't find confirmation of that in a quick web search.

Fifteen or so years ago I read through the entire Swann corpus of novels, with some enjoyment and some frustration. I still consider two shorter works, both later expanded into less successful novels, as his best: "Where is the Bird of Fire?" and "The Manor of Roses". The latter in particular is remarkable, and while it's not forgotten it deserves a wider audience.

What follows is a set of very brief capsule reviews I did at the time of reading of several of Swann's books.

(Cover by Gray Morrow)

I read a short Thomas Burnett Swann novel, The Weirwoods, an historical fantasy in a rather unbelievable Etruscan setting.  I've only ever read a couple of Swann's novellas ("Where is the Bird of Fire?" is the one I recall), but I knew of his reputation.  He seems to occupy a fairly unique niche in the "Fantasy" genre.  This novel is not bad, sexy, oddly dark while also casual and gay, written beautifully, lots of fine descriptive passages, but not at all slow-moving.  An Etruscan town bordering on the Weirwoods, haunt of Water Sprites, Fauns, Centaurs and the like, has long lived in an uneasy truce with the inhabitants of the woods, but a new immigrant breaks the truce by kidnapping  and enslaving a water sprite, leading to ... well, bad things for most concerned.

(Cover by Gray Morrow)

Back to Thomas Burnett Swann.  This time I read a story collection, The Dolphin and the Deep. Included are the title story, about an Etruscan (Swann was fascinated by the Etruscan civilization) who encounters a relic of Circe and is compelled to find his way around the coast of Africa to her new home.  Along the way he meets a merboy, though this one is called something else, and a dolphin, as well as some humans.  After a variety of adventures, mostly encounters with other odd mythological creatures, he meets Circe, and she teaches him a lesson about real love.  Rather minor TBS.  The other two stories are a bit better: "The Murex" is about an Amazon who falls in love with an ant-man, and realizes the wrongness of the Amazonian vows against heterosexual love; and one of Swann's very best stories: "The Manor of Roses", about two boys and a girl in 13th Century England who come to a mysterious manor in the forest.  The mythological creatures of this story are mandrakes, and Swann treats the mandrakes with sympathy even while recognizing their inimicality (is that a word?).  The main characters are closer to believable than many of Swann's young humans, and the story strives more and mostly achieves an honest melancholy/regret, which seems the main chord Swann was after in most of his stories, but which is too often reached by strained means.  This story was incorporated into one of the quickie novels published in the last year of Swann's life, or even after his death, The Tournament of Thorns.  This short version has everything important from the novel, and I would regard it as the preferred version of the story.

The only novel I've finished since my last post here is an odd, rare, one, The Goat Without Horns, by Thomas Burnett Swann.  This first appeared in the August and September 1970 issues of F&SF, and was later published by Ballantine.  I saw those issues at a used book store the other night, and decided to pick them up.  The novel is really quite good, the story of a young Englishman in about 1890 who goes to a tiny Caribbean island to tutor a 15 year old girl. He falls for the girl's mother, the owner of the island, but the mysterious Carib who dominates the island, Curk, wants him to impregnate the 15-year old, for his won sinister reasons, which come clear at the end.  An odd twist is that the story is told from the viewpoint of a dolphin who befriends the young Englishman.  The twist at the end was original, and it surprised me.  Pretty good stuff, quite different.

Two more Thomas Burnett Swann novels: Lady of the Bees (1976) is a cobbled together novel from Swann's famous early novella "Where is the Bird of Fire?", about Romulus and Remus, and some other novelets.  It didn't measure up to my memories of the original novella, which I recall as being quite moving and powerful.  This story had POV problems, signalled by the title, which refers to a fairly minor character, who, unfortunately, narrates much of the book.  Somewhat better was The Tournament of Thorns, also from 1976, also a novel cobbled together from earlier shorts.  This is set in England in about 1213.  It's about men and "Mandrakes": plant-men who are kind of like vampires.  It shows the seams of the cobbling together a bit too much, but the individual stories do work, and are quite moving and fairly original. That said, "The Manor of Roses", the first story in this sequence, is still by far the best.

Also I read Thomas Burnett Swann's The Not-World.  This story is set in Georgian England, but in a remaining scrap of "forest primeval".  A lame Gothic novelist, Deirdre, meets a down-at-his-luck sailor, and they are thrown together when the coach he is driving and she is renting is lost in the forest.  They encounter the poet Thomas Chatterton, and after a balloon ride, and further encounters with more or less typical Swann creatures, they win through to consummate their love.  OK, but less than great.  And I don't think Swann came within light-years of capturing the mindset of people of that era.

My latest Thomas Burnett Swann book was The Minikins of Yam, one of several he published right at the end of his life.  (He died in 1976, and apparently published at least 3 novels in '76 and 2 in '77).  This one is set in Ancient Egypt, as usual with Swann an alternate ancient history in which some mythological creatures are real, including the title Minikins (small humanoids, of which the female lead is one, and which have customs such as all the females being whores, whore being a term of honor), Rocs, and others.  I think this is one of the more enjoyable of the later Swann books.  It's light-hearted, as more usual with late Swann, but the light-heartedness doesn't seem as forced as in some of his other books.  The basic story is about a child pharaoh who must undo the damage done when his father banished magic from Egypt, and at the same time must fend off a plot against his throne.

It's been a while since I read a Thomas Burnett Swann book.  Moondust is from 1968, at his typical length (43,000 words), and very much of his "type".  Perhaps it is odd only in being sympathetic to conventional religion (Judaism at the time of Joshua), and (relatedly) being more pro-human than some of his stuff.  It's also pretty good, one of his better stories.

It's set in Jericho, just as the Israelites are approaching.  The hero is a young man, named Bard, from Crete, exiled since childhood along with his mother in Jericho (Crete having fallen, I can't remember if this is coterminous with the collapse of the Minoan regime).  His family have adopted perforce a sort of changeling: a very ugly girl who was switched for their young boy.  This girl, called Rahab (a Biblical reference, hence a hint) or Moondust, becomes a dear friend to the hero, .  As the time of the main action approaches, she suddenly metamorphoses into a striking beautiful woman with wings.  Thus, one of TBS' typical "pre-human" races (though, again typically, interfertile with humans).  Bard looks on unhappily as she offers herself to different men, including an Israelite spy (check your Bible for Rahab!), then she disappears.  Bard and a friend venture underground to the strange home of Rahab's people, and their odd society: women only (hence the habit of coming to human cities and becoming whores: this is to try to get pregnant), and ruled by intelligent telepathic fennecs.  Rahab's love for the hero drives her to an heroic act of resistance to her rulers.  As I said, one of Swann's better works, though not one of his very best.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Mark Tiedemann

Today is my friend Mark Tiedemann's birthday. I've enjoyed Mark's writing for a long time (since well before we knew each other), and so here's a collection of my Locus reviews of his short work. (I have some novel reviews as well, which I will post later.) I should mention one more particularly excellent story, from before my time as a reviewer: "The Playground Door", from the May 1993 F&SF.

(Locus, April 2003)

The April F&SF opens with a strong novelette by Mark W. Tiedemann, "Scabbing". Rich is a boy growing up in a strong union family in the near future, when workers operate "surrogates", robots under their control. When Rich's father suffers a major stroke, the medical treatment includes technological augmentation of his brain, which raises concerns that his augment might lead to new capabilities, and violations of union rules. The story turns on how this affects Rich's relationships with his friends, and on the scary potential for misuse of his father's new augment. This story effectively looks at social changes resulting from new technology, and directly at how they affect people. I'd like to see more stories in the same milieu.

(Locus, January 2004)

The centerpiece of the Fall 2003 issue of Black Gate is Mark W. Tiedemann's "Miller's Wife", an impressive novella. Egan Ginter is fleeing another failed relationship in the big city: he hopes a couple of weeks at a friend's house in the Ozark town Saletcroix will heal him. But something odd is going on -- Saletcroix's valley is dying, and a bad run of luck is plaguing the townspeople. They blame Esther Miller, who has left her husband. Some believe the health of her marriage is tied to the valley's health, but Egan thinks that's rank superstition. Especially as her husband appears to be rather a thug. And when Esther shows up at Egan's door ... Well, any reader can see that Egan had better not give in to her attractions. But how can he resist? Tiedemann maintains the suspense very well, and resolves the story just that little bit unexpectedly to make it memorable.

(Locus, September 2004)

In Mark W. Tiedemann's "Rain from Another Country" (F&SF, September), Ann Myref is dead, but she has unfinished business. She handles this by making a copy of her brain state and "overlaying" it on a paid host. One such host journeys off Earth to meet Ann's old lover. But he may not be ready to accept what Ann has to offer. A nice use of a couple of SFnal tropes to tell an effective relationship story.

(Locus, November 2005)

Mark W. Tiedemann’s "Hard Time" (Electric Velocipede, Summer) is a well-done story about an actor portraying a prisoner in a sort of quasi-reality show -- all the viewers see is his time in his cell. Slowly we learn a little bit about the actor himself, about the (real) criminal he portrays, about an actress playing a woman criminal. Interesting and very honest -- a good use of SF for a character study.

(Locus, December 2014)

Mark W. Tiedemann is the author of a fine Space Opera trilogy, The Secantis Sequence, that deserves a wider audience (perhaps affected a bit by the implosion of its publisher, Meisha Merlin), as well as some strong stories in places like SF Age and F&SF. He hasn't been entirely silent the past several years, but he hasn't been as much in evidence as I'd like, so it's nice to see a new collection, Gravity Box, with a few reprints (including his outstanding early story "The Playground Door"), but mostly original stories. My favorites include one fantasy and one SF story. "Preservation" is about a gamekeeper in service to a King who commands him to poach the horn of an einhyrn, reputed to determine if a woman is a virgin. The King wants to make sure his son's intended bride is pure, but it's soon clear that dirtier politics than that are involved. Not to mention that the einhyrn are a protected species. Solid adventure, and involving characters. I liked "Forever and a Day" even more, a time dilation story, about a woman in a polyamorous marriage, who turns out to be unable to tolerate new treatments conferring immortality. Her husband and wife become immortal, while she joins the crew of a starship, gaining a sort of immortality due to time dilation. A cute idea in itself, though hardly new, but the story asks effectively how any relationship can survive centuries -- indeed, how one's relationship with ones own self can survive centuries, and whether immortality is better than the sort of continual revivification star travel might bring.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Sandra McDonald

Today is Sandra McDonald's birthday, so here is a compilation of some of my Locus reviews of her short fiction. I should note that there's a story by her that I like a lot, but did not review, because is first appeared in one my anthologys, War & Space: Recent Combat. This is "Mehra and Jiun".

(Locus, May 2009)

In "Diana Comet", by Sandra McDonald (Strange Horizons), the title character, a beautiful and resourceful journalist, come across the world to discover why her lover isn’t answering her letters. She has other objectives as well -- or she forms them when she meets some of the poorer locals -- and she has some personals secrets too. It’s all rather a romp, lots of fun.

(Locus, September 2010)

Sandra McDonald is best known for her novels, which on the face of them are fairly conventional Military SF with a romantic slant, yet those who have followed her short fiction know she’s a quirkier writer than her novels display. Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories features fourteen tales, many originals, set in a sort of alternate history that for the most part is a transparent version of our world, at times a bit too cutely. (Naming a gay Civil War era poet Whitney Waltman, for just one example, rather grates on one’s teeth.) Indeed, some of the reprints seem to have been rejiggered to fit into this alternate history, in which a Boston-like town called Massasoit is the most common setting. But I quibble -- the stories are lovely really. The title character shows up in several pieces, at various stages in her long life. My favorite appeared last year in Strange Horizons as "Diana Comet", and is here called "Diana Comet and the Disappearing Lover", and it introduces that intrepid woman. Perhaps the other highlight of the collection is "Diana Comet and the Collapsible Orchestra", in which Diana is aging, missing her late husband, and pushed against her will to visit an old friend. The title object is a delightful creation, while the action really concerns Diana witnessing the transgression of her friend’s children, a bit sadly.

Speaking of Sandra McDonald and Diana Comet, her "Diana Comet and the Lovesick Cowboy" appeared more or less simultaneously in her collection and in the fourth issue of Icarus, subtitled "The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction".  McDonald’s story, in which Diana Comet travels to the West to check on an orphan boy she had fostered out to a farm couple, and on the way chivvies an ex-soldier out of his alcoholic fog and his yearning for his estranged lover, is clearly the best in an uneven set.

(Locus, December 2012)

Also strong in the December Asimov's is "The Black Feminist's Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing", by Sandra McDonald, in which the title character, who edits classic SF films to make them less sexist, is offered a chance to to complete the unfinished '70s adaptation of Leigh Brackett's The Ginger Star. There's some playing to us geeks here -- it's hard not to think that The Ginger Star would have made a pretty cool movie -- but also some sharp characters, an interesting future, and some good ideas about movies.

(Locus, June 2014)

In Lightspeed's May issue I thought the standout story was "Selfie", by Sandra MacDonald. Susan is a teenager with a mother living on the Moon and a father who researches trips to the past. Her Dad wants to drag her again to an old resort hotel, but she wants to visit her Mom instead, so she convinces her Dad to let her send a "Selfie" -- a robot uploaded with a version of her mind -- on the trip to the past. All this is intriguing setup: an interesting future with space travel, time travel, and other neat tech -- and a well-depicted teen narrator (admittedly a familiar type -- I detected echoes of, say, Heinlein's  Podkayne and Barnes's Teri Murray). But MacDonald has a different idea, and I won't spoil it but I'll say that the story goes in a sadder direction than expected -- but just as Sfnally interesting a direction.

(Locus, September 2016)

From the August Asimov's, "President John F. Kennedy, Astronaut", by Sandra McDonald, is a moving story set in a climate change-ravaged future. Pera lives with her mother and younger brother on a boat -- an old amphibious "duck". Their current job is taking an old man to a spot in the ocean: he claims that it’s the location of the old Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy, where an alien artifact Kennedy found on the Moon has been hidden. He wants to recover it, for the alien secrets it holds, but there are problems: two different "worst daughters", for example, and a storm, and, to be sure, very plausible doubts about the old man’s wild stories about JFK’s astronaut career, not to mention his affair with Marilyn Manson, etc. Whatever the truth behind all that, the story works in evoking the wonder and the lost dreams of space travel.

(Locus, July 2018)

In the May-June Asimov's, Sandra McDonald and Stephen Covey, in "Time Enough to Say Goodbye", tell a sweet time travel story, that is also a story about asteroid exploration, as a woman repeatedly visits the past, to try to meet the two people involved in critical early experiments that will lead to asteroid mining. Her reasons -- personal reasons -- become clear as the story develops. Nothing earthshaking here, but this is nice work.

A Little Known Ace Double: Hierarchies, by John T. Phillifent/Mister Justice, by Doris Piserchia

Ace Double Reviews, 35: Hierarchies, by John T. Phillifent/Mister Justice, by Doris Piserchia (#53415, $0.95, 1973)

by Rich Horton

Today is Doris Piserchia's 90th birthday. In honor of that, I'm reposting her first novel, which I reviewed in its Ace Double form long ago. Piserchia was born in West Virginia, and was in the US Navy in the early 1950s. She began publishing SF in the mid-60s, and some of her short fiction gained considerable notice, as did some of her novels, especially the earlier ones. By 1983 thirteen novels and about as many short stories had appeared, two of the novels as by "Curt Selby", but since then she has been silent, apparently as a result of the sudden death of her daughter and her need to raise her grandchild. Here's what I wrote back in 2004:

(Covers by Kelly Freas)

Another Ace Double from the last year of the format. Hierarchies is one of 16 Ace Doubles from John T. Phillifent/"John Rackham". It is around 44,000 words long. Mister Justice, Doris Piserchia's first novel, is about 56,000 words long.

Hierarchies and Life With Lancelot, both from 1973, are the only two Ace Double halves that Phillifent published under his real name. In the case of Hierarchies, this is probably because the novel was originally serialized in Analog, and most of Phillifent's work for Analog was as Phillifent. In the case of Life With Lancelot, which is an expansion of a "Rackham" story, the best guess is offered by William Barton, who had the novel on the other side of that Ace Double. He noted that he saw some promotional material with the "Rackham" name attached, and he deduced that the eventual attribution to "Phillifent" was a foulup, perhaps caused by Hierarchies appearing at roughly the same time.

The Analog serialization of Hierarchies, in the October and November 1971 issues, is slightly shorter, at some 40,000 words. I did a quick comparison of the two versions, and the changes appear to be small cuts or additions made throughout -- a sentence or two here and there, rather than removing or adding entire scenes. Indeed, the wording changes are extensive, and often quite minor. ("Camouflage" for "hide" is one example.) Perhaps Phillifent did a full rewrite -- or perhaps the Analog editor did a rigorous line edit. (It's not entirely clear who the editor was at the time. The October issue leads with John W. Campbell's obituary. Campbell was still Editor on the masthead, for the November issue as well. More than likely he acquired the story, I would think, but someone else may have done the final editing.)

Hierarchies is a rather light, implausible, short novel. The main character is Rex Sixx (the silly name is eventually explained, and even has a very minor part in the plot), an employee of a security company. Earth has apparently developed a somewhat extensive interstellar society, and now that have contacted the Khandalar system, 6 nations on three planets, which have had a very stagnant hierarchical social order for millennia, apparently having regressed somewhat from a much more technologically advanced society. The Khands are extremely humanoid, differing mainly by being shorter and thinner on average. Rex's security company has been engaged to steal the Crown Stones of Khandalar -- with the connivance of the liberal King-Emperor of one of the nations. It seems that this King-Emperor has realized that his society will be forced to reform along more democratic avenues, and he believes that the Crown Stones, which incorporate some ancient Khandalar tech to allow the King-Emperor to psionically compel obedience, will be a hindrance -- they will be an unavoidable temptation to any King-Emperor faced with democratization.

Rex and his partner Roger are to courier the Crown Stones to Earth. However, to distract attention from the Stones themselves, they have been given an alternate mission -- to ferry a valuable pet to Earth, in the company of a trained keeper. The keeper is Elleen Stame, who turns out surprisingly to be an incredibly beautiful young woman, with a freakishly perfect memory. Rex and Roger both seem to fall for Elleen immediately, despite her ugly voice and her apparent stupidity. The three of them set off for the spaceport, only to be waylaid by brigands, who, it soon becomes clear, were hired by a disaffected member of the Royalty, who does not approve of the King-Emperor's democratic plans. But Rex and Roger have super-suits with extreme defensive ability, so they get away, only to face the rebellious royal again once in space.

The resolution is not of course in doubt, though things do get a bit tough on Rex and Roger and Elleen. The bad guy turns out to be smarter than expected. And, of course, Elleen turns out to have unexpected (even by her) resources. Phillifent also throws in a mild twist or two. It's modestly entertaining light SF adventure for the most part. (Lots of silliness, to be sure, such as the supposedly ultra-reliable security company which nearly gets taken out by bows and arrows.)

Mister Justice is altogether a more ambitious novel, though something of a mess as well. Doris Piserchia had a curious writing career. Born in 1928, she published a story in 1966, but her career began in earnest in 1972 with a couple more stories. Novels began appearing in 1973, and she published novels and stories regularly for the next decade. But (at least according to the ISFDB) nothing has appeared since 1983. She occasionally used the pseudonym "Curt Selby".

Mister Justice opens with several paired scenes, the first in each pair describing a crime that someone gets away with, the second showing, in 2033, appropriate punishment being meted out to the criminals, and photographic proof of the original crime being sent to the authorities. The packets of evidence are signed "Mister Justice". Clearly, "Mister Justice" is a dangerous vigilante -- at the same time, he IS only publishing the obviously guilty, and he seems at least for a time to really reduce crime.

The Secret Service decides to track him down and take him out, led by a mysterious triumvirate, Bailey, Turner, and Burgess. There eventual plan is to recruit a superboy. Daniel is a 12 year old who is sort of coerced by Bailey and co. to train for an eventual search for "Mister Justice" at a special informal school called "SPAC", full of eccentric geniuses. Daniel learns a lot at SPAC, and he also forms an odd relationship with an 11-year old girl called Pala. (Incidentally, I thought this section felt rather Heinleinian.)

Mean time, out in the "real world", society is going to pot. The apparent cause is one gangster who Mister Justice cannot catch -- Arthur Bingle. Bingle sets up a criminal organization that more or less ends up replacing the government, leading to nothing but societal chaos.

Daniel's eventual investigations reveal little enough -- he learns by analyzing the photographs left by Mister Justice which great photographer he is, and from that he manages to deduce that Mister Justice is using time travel to accomplish his deeds. (Something guessable anyway from the initial times of the crime scenes.) Daniel's relationship with Pala progresses, until she is kidnapped. We learn more and more about the time travel aspect of things, and about the decay of society. And we watch Bailey's group spectacularly fail to deal with either Mister Justice or Arthur Bingle.

The novel's resolution is somewhat strange -- basically involving a confrontation between Justice and Bingle. It doesn't really end up anywhere near where the start seemed to promise. There is no real look at the problem of vigilantism. Daniel is introduced as what seems to be the main character, then he sort of fades away (though we do learn what he and Pala are up to by the end). There are odd skips in the book -- at one time 6 years pass from one sentence to the next with no real indication. In many ways I found it a mess. But there is some interest to it. For myself, Daniel and Pala were the most interesting characters, and their eventual fate, a rather traditional SFnal fate, was OK. Some of the secrets of Mister Justice, revealed only obliquely, were satisfying enough. But other aspects didn't work for me. The society shown is not well-drawn, and not plausible in its breakdown either. (And it basically seems like 1970 transported to 2033.) The Bailey and Co. scenes are often pointless. All in all, some good ideas that probably needed another thorough revision to really cohere into a good novel.

Birthday Review: Short Stories by Robert Reed

Robert Reed, who was born 9 October 1956, is remarkably good, and remarkably prolific. He is the author who has appeared most often in my Best of the Year collections. And I've reviewed a whole lot of his stories. The following selection is a quite limited selection of my Locus reviews. Happy Birthday, Mr. Reed!

(Locus, May 2003)

The other Reed present (in the May F&SF) is Robert, and he too is in top form with "555", a first rate story about a meek individual who turns out to be a minor character in a computer generated entertainment, some variety of soap opera. Her show is in ratings trouble, and a writer comes to her with a tempting offer that might mean more screen time for her. But what does she really want? And want can she, a computer program, want? Reed's answer is nicely surprising.

(Locus, October 2004)

Best of all in the October-November F&SF is Robert Reed's "Opal Ball", which extrapolates the recent idea of using wagering pools for collective predictions. In this future, for many people, especially the Players who have built a reputation based on their successful wagers, many aspects of life are predicated on the results of wagering pools. The protagonist meets a woman and falls in love -- but the consensus of the betting population is that they are not right for one another. Reed's exploration of the human reaction to this is perceptive and believable.

(Locus, October 2005)

I saw two very strong stories in the September Asimov’s. Robert Reed’s "Finished" is, with much Reed, a careful reconsideration of a fairly familiar idea, but it is so well done and the characters are so well captured that it seems new. The title refers to an elective treatment to essentially upload one’s mind into an improved body. But the mind is now on a computer of sorts, and people don’t seem to change and grow anymore -- or so the critics claim. The narrator is a "Finished" man who has an affair with a younger woman who has not had the treatment, and the story of their relationship, and a slight ending twist, illuminate the questions Reed has raised.


(Locus, April 2006)

Two of the shorter pieces in the June Asimov's stand out. Robert Reed’s "Eight Episodes" is about a cult TV show that tells a rather dry scientific story, of the discovery of a tiny spaceship in a Permian era rock sample. The spaceship has a sort of message for humanity, a message which concerns, it turns out, the Fermi Paradox. And the story manages some of the same power as Ian R. MacLeod’s classic "New Light on the Drake Equation" in its evocation of lost SFnal dreams, and its reminder that there are still dreams to dream.

In the anthology One Million A. D., I also liked Robert Reed’s "Good Mountain", particularly for the odd nature of its setting: a continent made of wood, which appears to be in danger of burning. A man fleeing the destruction of his home for a potentially safe haven encounters a strange woman who is head for "Good Mountain", which she says is a very large structure of metal (very rare on this planet). All this is familiar enough in SF terms, but Reed takes the story in a surprising direction at the end.

(Locus, September 2006)

The other novella (in the October/November Asimov's), Robert Reed’s "A Billion Eves", is even better. At first the story seems perhaps an alternate history about a society oppressing women, and indeed gender issues are important. But things are not quite what they seem. Kala is a young woman on an oddly different Earth, and we follow her life for several years. Women seem in constant threat of kidnap, for reasons we slowly learn: a device called the "ripper" allows one-way travel to parallel Earths, each with slightly different geological/ecological histories. Apparently a man called the "First Father" used a ripper to kidnap an entire sorority and start a colony on an empty Earth. And over millennia new colonies have been founded: sometimes by single men kidnapping groups of women, more usually (perhaps) by voluntary groups of couples. The idea of opening new worlds is the foundation of most religions on Kala’s world, and many people hope to become colonists. Kala’s brother is a charismatic and intelligent young man, a natural "Father", but their family’s lives are changed when he rescues Kala from a kidnap attempt, and his sent to jail for his vengeful actions. Kala herself becomes a sort of forester, interested in preserving the native ecology of her world, which is at risk because of multiple imports from the sequence of Earths that preceded it. Reed develops Kala’s life, and her brother’s, in a different direction, questioning the morality of the ecological alteration of other worlds by each new colony. It’s a thoughtful and exciting story.

(Locus, April 2008)

Robert Reed is one of those writers who is a consolidator of ideas. He is continually re-examining familiar SF notions from more contemporary perspectives, or simply from different angles. "Five Thrillers" (F&SF, April) is quite explicitly a re-examination of frankly pulpish ideas. Joe Carroway is a genetically gifted young man. We meet him first during a space disaster, as he comes up with a solution to save the entire crew, except for one man -- one significantly unique man. Each "thriller" follows Carroway through a remarkable -- and morally quite ambiguous -- career. The various crises are perhaps familiar but very well narrated, with both SFnal and political savvy, leading to a quite spectacular ending.

(Locus, June 2008)

In the June F&SF Robert Reed’s "Character Flu" is a nice, very short, bit of speculation about the dangers of a certain type of brain enhancement. One of Reed’s strengths in his short fiction is to know exactly how long a story should be, and this one is perfectly sized: establishing the central idea, then closing the trap it sets just as the reader realizes what’s coming.

(Locus, December 2012)

F&SF's year-end issue also has a strong long novella, "Katabasis", by Robert Reed. This is another of his Great Ship stories. Katabasis is a tour guide on a high gravity environment in the Ship, leading tourists on a very difficult trek. She rejects the request of one man, Varid, act as his guide, then agrees to guide recurring characters Perri and Quee Lee -- and finds her party joined by Varid. Their particular journey, which turns out to be very hard, is contrasted with the long past journey of Katabasis' people across their strange planet (and then eventually to the Ship), as well as the different but tragic history of Varid. Both Sfnally fascinating and a powerful study of two damaged beings in Katabasis and Varid.

(Locus, January 2014)

The best story here (in Carbide Tipped Pens), I think because for me it does the best job of evoking the "sense of wonder" that remains crucial to SF, is "Every Hill Ends With Sky", by Robert Reed, in which a maverick scientist develops a simulation of the likely development of life in the Solar System, looking for potentialities of exotic life forms that we might have missed, and finds something unexpected. This is seen from a perspective slightly in the future, as her daughter struggles to survive in a post-Apocalyptic world, where her mother's discover may or may not offer strange hope.

(Locus, December 2016)

Another webzine I’ve needed to catch up with is Daily Science Fiction. This site features a story each weekday, and many of the stories are quite short. The quality is variable, but there is some very good work here. For instance, Robert Reed’s "How to Listen to Music", something of a morality tale, about a future much like the present, but in which, secretly, thousands of AI-linked humans control the world, looking for entertainment by finding special experiences of ordinary people -- such as a dying woman remembering a long ago pop song. Nothing really wrong there, eh? But Reed allows us to follow the implications of such entertainment in a pretty scary direction.

Birthday Review: The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien

I wrote this review way back in 1996, I think for posting at the review forum of one of the very first online bookstores, which name is escaping me now. I'm reposting it today, unchanged, on the 107th anniversary of Brian O'Nolan's birth.

TITLE: The Third Policeman
AUTHOR: Flann O`Brien

PUBLISHER: Plume

ISBN: 0-452-25912-6

This is one of the strangest novels I have ever read. It was written in about 1940, but not published until 1967, a year or two after the author`s death. O`Brien is a pseudonym for the Irish writer Brian O`Nolan, who was also a celebrated newspaper columnist using the name Myles na gCopaleen, the latter name apparently Gaelic. O`Brien`s masterpiece is At Swim-Two-Birds, which was published in 1939. A selection of his "Myles" columns is also well-regarded. However, The Third Policeman is what I saw in the bookstore when I went looking for something by O`Brien, and it wasn`t a bad choice.

This novel is quite funny, quite absurd, and, at bottom, very disturbing. The narrator is a very unpleasant man, who announces in the first sentence "Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade;" not only is he a murderer, but a very lazy man who ruins his family farm, and spends his life researching the works of a madman named De Selby, who believes that, among other things, darkness is an hallucination, the result of accretions of black air. The narrator relates his early life briefly, leading up to his association with another unsavory character, John Divney, who parasitically moves in with the narrator and helps squander his inheritance. Divney and the narrator plot to kill their neighbor, Phillip Mathers, to steal his money. After the murder they decide to leave the money for a while until the coast clears: however they distrust each other so much that they never leave each others company. Finally they go to Mathers`s house to fetch the strongbox with his money: then Divney sends the narrator ahead to the house alone, while he stands lookout, and things get very strange!

The narrator meets Phillip Mathers, acquires a sort of soul which he calls "Joe", and sets out looking for three mysterious policemen. The first two are easily found, and the narrator discusses bicycles, boxes, and other unusual subjects with these policemen. Finally they decide to hang him (for bicycle theft, I think), but he is rescued by the league of one-legged men (the narrator himself has but one leg). He returns to Mathers` house where he encounters the third policeman, and eventually is reunited with John Divney.

The above summary, obviously, does not represent the action or interest of the book at all. The book is full of off-the-wall philosophical speculations, some based on the mad works of De Selby, others original to the policeman (the latter including a theory about bicycles and their riders which has to be read to be appreciated, also a mysterious trip to an underground cavern where anything you can imagine can be created). There are a lot of footnotes discussing De Selby and the controversy surrounding his work: these make the book somewhat reminiscent of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (also reminiscent in being the first-person narrative of an insane murderer).

Old Bestseller: Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth

Old Bestseller Review: Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth

a review by Rich Horton

I don't know for sure if this was a "bestseller" -- there were no true bestseller lists in Maria Edgeworth's time. But she was very popular, for realistic contemporary novels like Belinda and Ormond, for children's works, and for satirical works like Castle Rackrent. She was very famous, made a lot of money (more, Wikipedia says, than Jane Austen), was politically influential, and was friends with the likes of Walter Scott and Kitty Pakenham (the Duke of Wellington's wife, and a collateral ancestress of Anthony Powell's wife and thus of the Longfords).

Maria Edgeworth was born in 1768, to an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. She lived in England until 5, moved to Ireland after he mother's death and her father's remarriage, and later returned to England, but spent much of her life in Ireland (apparently socially much present in both countries). In fact, her political views were much formed by the question of Union between England and Ireland, which she and her father supported, but with doubts because they were well aware how many Irishmen opposed it. Her father, Richard, was a progressive educator, and indeed Maria's first couple of publications were on the subject of education. Richard married 4 times (the second and third being sisters), and had 22 (!) children -- one wag remarked that he had plenty of subjects on whom to try his progressive education theories.

Castle Rackrent was Edgeworth's first "novel", though it is very short -- the main narrative is about 25,000 words, and there are another 7500 or so words of an introduction and a glossary. It was published in 1800. It is sometimes considered the first historical novel, and the first novel to use an unreliable narrator. My edition is the Dover edition.

It is told by one Thady Quirk, who was the steward for four generations of the Rackrent family, who inherited Castle Rackrent from a distant cousin. Thady sings the praises of each of his masters ... Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy. But we quickly gather that each of them are fairly awful people. Sir Patrick is a spendthrift, and quickly gets into disastrous debt, and then dies. Sir Murtagh is by contrast a miser, and his wife is if anything worse, and his main entertainment is lawsuits against his neighbors. Sir Kit, Murtagh's younger brother, inherits and decides to marry a rich Jewish woman to save the estate, but she won't part with her jewels, and he locks her up for several years in revenge. His gambling and foolishness gets the estate into further trouble -- though Thady's son Jason profits by buying up Rackrent property on the cheap. Finally, Sir Condy has more woman trouble -- throwing over his mistress (Thady's niece) in favor of a rich local woman, whose family hates the Rackrents and thus refuses to give her any dowry. That marriage thus quickly founders, and Condy, after a foolish venture into Parliament, ends up literally drinking himself to death on a bet. And thus ends the Rackrent line.

It's all much more elaborately told of course, in very long paragraphs in Thady's quite plausible sounding Irish voice. There are extensive humorous asides about Irish habits -- these seem at times satirical, and at other times straightforward narrations of real Irish traditions and behaviors (all this much enlarged upon in the Glossary, which is written not in Thady's voice but in that of his "Editor"). As already noted, Thady is an unreliable narrator, and he constantly proclaims his loyalty to and love for the Rackrents, while we can't help but notice that his real interest is in the main chance -- and that in the end one of the primary beneficiaries of the misfortune of the Rackrents is Thady's son.

It's often very funny, though the long paragraphs do drag a bit. And as all the characters are really quite awful people, the novel wears out its welcome fairly quickly -- but as it's very short, that's OK -- it's about as much as we can stand, and pretty entertaining for its length.

Belated Birthday Review: Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems

Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1979. So, in slightly belated recognition of his birthday, I'm resposting something I wrote for my SFF Net newsgroup a long time ago. I'll caveat by noting that I really don't discuss individual poems in any detail here; and my suggesting that some of the things I wrote are kind of questionable. (Like the bit about him being known in two separate ways.)

I've mentioned before that Wallace Stevens is my favorite poet. (It's possible that I've used qualifiers like "20th Century" and "American" but hang all that, he's my favorite bar none.) Over the past couple of months, I've been engaged in a project, at first sort of offhand, by the end obsessive, of rereading his Collected Poems. And, by the end, of reading his late long poems repeatedly and with particular care.

Stevens is known, it seems to me, in two separate ways. In the popular sense, he is known for a series of remarkable early poems, in most cases not terribly long, notable for striking images and quite beautiful prosody. Of these poems the most famous is surely "Sunday Morning" -- other examples are "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", "Peter Quince at the Clavier", "Sea Surface Full of Clouds", "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon", "The Emperor of Ice Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Of Modern Poetry". The great bulk of these come from his first collection, Harmonium, and indeed from the first edition of Harmonium, published in 1923. ("Sea Surface" is from the 1931 reissue and expansion of Harmonium, "The Idea of Order at Key West" is from Ideas of Order (1936), and "Of Modern Poetry" is from Parts of a World (1942).) These were certainly my favorite among his poems. And they remain favorites.

But his critical reputation rests strikingly on a completely different set of poems, all later than those mentioned above. (Though it must be acknowledged that at least "Sunday Morning" and "The Idea of Order at Key West" as well as two early long poems, "The Comedian as the Letter C" and "The Monocle de Mon Oncle", are in general highly regarded critically. And that most of his early work is certainly treated with respect.) The longest poem in his Collected Poems is probably the poem with the greatest critical regard, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction". [Actually, ranking Stevens' poems by "critical regard" is a fools' effort, and I don't think there is any such consensus any more.] This was published as a separate book in 1942, the same year as Parts of a World. ("Notes" isn't actually his longest poem: a controversial poem called "Owl's Clover" was published in two separate forms, both longer than "Notes", but then was basically repudiated by being excluded from the Collected Poems.)

I think it's fair to say that "late Stevens" begins with "Notes", while "early-to-middle Stevens" ends with Parts of a World. ("Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" was reprinted as part of his 1947 collection Transport to Summer.) Of course the terms "late" and "early" are odd applied to Stevens. His first successful poems appeared in 1915 (including "Sunday Morning"), when he was 36. He was 44 when the first edition of Harmonium came out. That's pretty late for "early"! And by the 1942 publication of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" he was 63. Indeed, his production from 1942 through his death in 1955 was remarkable: two major collections each with several long poems (Transport to Summer and The Auroras of Autumn), as well as at least another full collection worth of late poems, some included in the 1954 Collected Poems in a section called "The Rock", and quite a few more not collected until after his death. The other late long poems besides "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" that attract considerable praise are "Esthétique du Mal" (though this tends also to be disparaged), "Chocorua to its Neighbor", "Credences of Summer", "The Auroras of Autumn", "The Owl in the Sarcophagus", "Things of August", and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven".

I can only say that my rereading of his poems was remarkably rewarding. Really! (That last "re" was on purpose!) The early favorites remain special -- I dare say I've read "Sunday Morning" hundreds of times, and it seems new every time. "The Idea of Order at Key West" is another long-term favorite. And I was delighted to detect a prefiguring of "The Idea of Order at Key West" in one of my favorite brief poems, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon". (I knew I couldn't be the only person to have noticed that, and indeed Harold Bloom goes on at some length about the links between the two poems in his book on Stevens.) But the truly eye-opening aspect of this rediscovery was the late long poems. Well, indeed, all the long poems. The early "Comedian" and "Monocle" had never really caught fire for me in earlier readings, but this time they did. I'm still not a huge fan of the popular middle-period long poem "The Man With the Blue Guitar", but I did enjoy this reading. I have long enjoyed a fairly long poem from Parts of a World, "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas" -- and I was delighted to see that Harold Bloom also likes that poem. I had earlier approached "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" with what I can only call trepidation. But on these recent rereadings (four or five careful ones) the poem -- still difficult -- has opened up to me. So too with "The Auroras of Autumn" and the late lovely "pre-elegy" for George Santayana, "To An Old Philosopher in Rome". "Credences of Summer" and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" don't yet come clear to me, but reading them is still a pleasure. (I say "come clear" as if I fully understand "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"! Not likely, but I am sure that each future rereading will show me new things.)

[I should note that on further rereadings, "Credences of Summer" and "To an Old Philosopher in Rome", in particular, have become more important to me.]

What to say about late Stevens? The most obvious adjective is "austere". But that doesn't always apply -- he could also be quite playful. However, there is never the lushness of a "Sunday Morning" or "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" in the late works. The sentences tend to extraordinary length, but the internal rhythms are involving. The poems are all quite philosophical, much concerned with the importance of poetry, the nature of reality versus perceptions of reality, and, perhaps more simply, with growing old. (A Stevens theme, to be sure, that can be traced at least back to "The Monocle de Mon Oncle".)

I also took the time to read two book length studies of Stevens. These are Helen Hennessy Vendler's On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems, and Harold Bloom's Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Both are interesting and worthwhile, but also difficult, particularly the Bloom. I think I just don't have the vocabulary or training to always understand Bloom.

(It's interesting to consider the definition of "long poem". By my count there are 18 poems of more than 100 lines in the Collected Poems, and two more ("Owl's Clover" and "The Sail of Ulysses") in Opus Posthumous. But Vendler only explicitly covers 14 poems, including one quite short poem ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", 54 lines). She leaves out one of my favorite longer poems, "Extracts From Address to the Academy of Fine Ideas", and other perhaps less important poems like "Things of August", "The Owl in the Sarcophagus", "Chocorua to its Neighbor" and "A Primitive Like an Orb". But that is just to quibble.)

Birthday Review: A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge

Here's a review of arguably Vernor Vinge's most famous novel, and my personal favorite among his works, that I wrote when the book first appeared. Today is Vinge's 74th birthday, so I'm reposting it, in the same format I originally used when I first put it on my then new web page. (That page is now gone.)

Review Date: 28 April 1999

A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
Tor Books, New York, NY, March 1999
$27.95 (US), ISBN: 0-312-85683-0

Review Copyright 1999 by Rich Horton

This is a wonderful SF novel. It's the first novel in a while to really engage me on the sense of wonder level, and to again awaken the feelings of awe and of "I want to be there" that were so central to my early reading of SF. I was complaining earlier about books like Jablokov's Deepdrive, and wondering if the fault lay in me. I mean: that book (Deepdrive) is full of neat ideas, original ideas, and I thought they were well handled, and the story was good. But I never felt fully engaged, never felt "awe". I still suppose the fault may be in my jaded self, but A Deepness in the Sky proves that its still possible to really knock me out SFnally.

I'll briefly summarize the plot, hopefull avoiding spoilers. The book is set perhaps 8000 years in our future. Two starfaring human civilizations reach an anomalous astronomical object at the same time. One of the civilizations is the Qeng Ho, a loosely organized group of traders (reminiscent of Poul Anderson's Kith (this book is dedicated to Anderson) and of Robert A. Heinlein's Traders from Citizen of the Galaxy). The other is called the Emergent civilization (that name is one of many inspired coinages by Vinge). The astronomical object is something called the On/Off star, which shines for only 35 years then is a brown dwarf for the rest of its 250 year period. That's interesting enough, but what draws the two human groups is the presence of radio signals: an alien technological civilization has at last been discovered.

The Emergents turn out to be very authoritarian, and they double-cross the Qeng Ho after having agreed to a cooperative exploration of the planet. However the Qeng Ho fight back, and the humans end up losing interstellar capability. One narrative thread thus follows the human characters as they wait for the On/Off star to ignite, and for the aliens to (with their help) develop a sufficient tech level to rebuild the starships. This thread also shows the Qeng Ho resistance to the Emergent rule. The other main narrative thread follows the Spiders, the arachnoid intelligent natives of the On/Off star's single planet. These beings have long adapted to their sun's peculiarity, by hibernating through the "Dark". But one culture, led by an endearing genius named Sherkaner Underhill, has begun to develop ways of living awake through the Dark time. But they are opposed by suspicious neighbors. And the human watchers begin to subtly interfere. The whole story culminates in a terrifically exciting finish, one which intrigues at the level of action-filled resolution of multiple plots, and also at the level of revelations of the solutions to a number of ingenious scientific puzzles, and thirdly at the level of satisfying emotional thematic resolutions to the journeys of a number of characters. It's uplifting without being unrealistic or mawkish.

There are flaws, though to some extent the flaws are, I would say, necessary. This book is, I think, what Debra Doyle has called a "Romance", as such demanding larger than life characters and events. In this way, the main "flaws" are the somewhat pulpish nature of the plot and characters. But as I hint, I don't find these flaws serious. Indeed, they might really be necessary, indeed virtues, in the context of this sort of book. But it should be said that the plot depends on a few coincidences, and on things like the villains deciding not to kill the good guys because they're not sure the good guys are conspiring against them. (These villains are so bad, I don't see why they wouldn't just figure, "Better safe than sorry!", and kill them anyway (or, in the context of the book, do something worse).) And the characters feature some extremes: most obviously the alien scientist who is just an awesome genius, and who appears at the perfect time in their society. The human characters also include some remarkable folk. And the villains are really really really bad. Gosh, they're bad. But that works, too, because their worst feature is original and scary and believable and a neat SF idea.

Good stuff: with Vinge, I suppose I always think ideas first. He has come up with several. First, his concept of an extended human future in space with strict light-speed limits (as far as anyone in this book knows), is very well-worked out and believable and impressive and fun. It depends on basically three pieces of extrapolation: ramships that can get to about .3c, lifespans extended to about 500 years, and near-perfect suspended animation or coldsleep. The second neat idea is the On/Off star. The idea of a star that shines for 35 or so years and turns off for 210 years is neat, and then giving it a planet and a believable set of aliens is great fun. The aliens are really great fun too: they are too human in how they are presented, but Vinge neatly finesses this issue, in at least a half-convincing way, and he shows us glimpses that suggest real alienness, too. (Include some very nice cultural touches.) The third especially neat idea I won't mention because it might be too much of a spoiler, but the key "tech" of the bad guys is really scary, and a neat SFnal idea. And handled very well, and subtly.

As I said, I found the plot inspiring as well. This is a very long book, about 600 pages, but I was never bored. Moreover, as Patrick Nielsen Hayden has taken pains to point out, the prose in this book is quite effective. I believe Patrick used some such term as "full throated scientifictional roar". Without necessarily understanding exactly what he meant by that, the prose definitely works for me, and in ways which seem possibly particularly "scientifictional" in nature. One key factor here is names: names of characters, for one thing. Vinge's names of humans: Trixia Bonsol, Rixer Brughel, Tomas Nau, and so on, seem well chosen in several ways: they are recognizably human, and linked to present day languages, but just different enough to seem strange, and they (to my ears) sound good. His alien names are also fairly poetic, and both different and familiar sounding. (They are explicitly human coinages: a key point.) Thus: Sherkaner Underhill, Victory Smith, Hrunkner Unnerby. Mileage may vary, but I really liked these names. They certainly beat unpronounceable names, and names with non-alphabetic characters, and the like. The names of technological devices and future societies are also evocative. Examples from the humans include the Emergent society (a name with a double meaning), the Focus virus, and localizers; one alien example is videomancy.

This book is a "prequel" to Vinge's excellent previous novel A Fire Upon the Deep, but it is readable entirely without knowledge of the other book. However, having read A Fire Upon the Deep does allow the reader of A Deepness in the Sky some additional pleasures (and ironies): in particular, speculation about the true nature of the On/Off star, and about the evolutionary history of the Spiders. Also, a main character of this book was also a significant character in the previous book, and knowledge of this character's fate adds a certain frisson to the events depicted in A Deepness in the Sky.

In summary, this is an outstanding SF novel. It marries clever hard SF ideas, a rousing story, involving characters, and several interleaved, emotionally and intellectually compelling, themes. The themes are fine and fundamental to SF: involving the value of exploration and scientific knowledge, the value of freedom and thesacrifices of freedom, the desirability and costs of the dream of Empire, and the question "What would I give up to be smarter ... better ... more focussed?"

Birthday Review: Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

Birthday Review: Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

a review by Rich Horton

I wrote this review back in 2006 when the book came out. It won the Hugo for Best Novel the following year, though my sense is that it hasn't lasted in the public imagination the way Vinge's other novels have. Today is Vinge's 74th birthday, so I'm reposting it.

Vernor Vinge is now officially a full-time writer, having retired from his day job as a professor of Computer Science at the University of California at San Diego. So fans hoped his new novel would come more quickly, but in fact it's been 7 years. Oh well, it takes as long as it takes. Rainbows End is certainly worth the wait.

Interestingly, it is set at UCSD, and the main character is a former professor there -- though a poet, not a computer scientist. He is Robert Gu, apparently the leading poet of our time (that would be now). But as of about 20 years from now, he has been in a nursing home for years, with Alzheimer's (or some other form of dementia), and other maladies of old age. But he has been cured -- indeed he has hit the jackpot in the "heavenly minefield" of 21st Century medicine.

Robert's son and daughter-in-law, it turns out, are highly placed individuals on the U.S. side in the Great Powers' continuing war against chaos -- against the possibility of various varieties of WOMD being wielded against the whole world. One other key individual is Alfred Vaz, an Indian intelligence head. He and two of his colleagues from Europe and Japan have uncovered a plot to deliver a "YGBM" virus in a clever fashion. YGBM means "You Gotta Believe Me": that is, mind control. They recruit an helper, who they meet only in virtual space, called the Rabbit, who will assist them in infiltrating the biolabs near UCSD where they suspect the virus is under development. The kicker is that the man behind this project is Vaz himself -- but he, of course, will use this power only for good -- he sees it as the only way to control the bad guys in the world. So he needs to play his colleagues and the Rabbit very carefully. But the Rabbit's abilities in the virtual world are quite remarkable.

Inevitably, Robert Gu, his son and daughter-in-law, and his granddaughter Miri, become enmeshed, without their knowledge, in all this plotting. But the story is only partly about Alfred Vaz's machinations. It's also about Robert coming to terms with his new quasi-youth: his new abilities, such as an interest in electronics, and his terrible losses, such as his ability to write poetry. But he may have lost something else: it seems that in his prior life he was a prime jerk, driving away his wife and all his colleagues with simple nastiness. His son mostly hates him, certainly distrusts him. But has he changed?

All this is SFnally fascinating, very scary. And indeed the novel is interesting in the way that it's not quite clear who the heroes are -- well, no, it is clear: Robert Gu and Juan Orozco and Miri Gu are the heroes. But they have been coopted to work for bad guys. Maybe. Or sort of bad guys. And anyway lots of the story is not about that plotty stuff, but rather about Robert dealing with his new "youth" and his lost poetic talents, and Miri dealing with family issues, and Juan dealing with his own relative poverty and poor education ... in the end, the novel is quite satisfying as a look at pretty believable characters in a somewhat believable alternate future (I can't help but thinking that this future doesn't make sense starting from now, but maybe from 20 years ago ...). And then behind it all lurks a very scary, and only partly resolved, big story about a future balanced between terrorist chaos and even scarier order imposed by mind control. I think this is a surprisingly subtle triumph from one of the field's best pure SF writers.

A Little Known Ace Double: The Atlantic Abomination, by John Brunner/The Martian Missile, by David Grinnell

Ace Double Reviews, 65: The Atlantic Abomination, by John Brunner/The Martian Missile, by David Grinnell (#D-465, 1960, $0.35)

I'm reposting this Ace Double review on the occasion of Donald A. Wollheim's birthday: he'd have been 104. Alas, I'm not very nice to his book, but, then, it's not a very good book.

This one qualifies as a rather randomly chosen Ace Double -- on the one hand, I like Brunner, on the other hand, here's an opportunity to review Donald Wollheim (who used "David Grinnell" as a pseudonym for much of his fiction) back to back.

(Covers by Ed Emshwiller and Ed Valigursky)

Both of these novels are about 43,000 words long. As far as I know this is the first publication of The Atlantic Abomination in any form, though I may have missed a shorter magazine version under another title. The Martian Missile was first published in 1959 by Thomas Bouregy and Co. Which means some other editor evidently approved of it -- good thing! since I would have been pretty annoyed had Wollheim chosen his own piece of utter garbage! (That other editor would like have been Robert A. W. Lowndes.)

The Atlantic Abomination opens with an alien being panicking as his world seems to be falling apart. We soon gather that Earth, long ago, has been dominated by a few aliens of a species with special telepathic powers. But geological catastrophes are ruining this early human "civilization", and at least one alien escapes to a specially prepared lair.

Fast forward to the 20th Century, and an deep ocean expedition, using special technology to allow exploration of the ocean bed. The explorers happen upon a mysterious installation, which of course is the lair of the evil alien. The rest of the novel is readily enough predicted -- the alien awakes and takes over as many humans as he can. He proceeds to the East Coast of the US and enslaves thousands. An international effort attempts to stop him, with some success, but the alien seems to be figuring things out. Our hero is enslaved, but his new wife (both oceanologists from the original expedition) remains free, but he manages somehow to escape. Does humanity survive? Well of course.

I am being somewhat sarcastic, a bit unfairly. This is certainly nothing special as a novel, but in following its very predictable path, it does entertain. Brunner was just a damn good writer of, for lack of a more precise word, pulp. He always gave value for money. I enjoyed the novel, though I don't think I'll remember it or reread it.

The Martian Missile can also be described as "pulp". 30s pulp. Really BAD 30s pulp. I suppose Wollheim may have written this in 1958 or so, but it sure reads, with its scientific and astronomical stupidities, like it was written in 1931.

A small-time criminal, hiding out in the desert, happens across a crashed alien spaceship. He rescues the alien, only to have the alien implant a bomb or something that will go off in a few years if he doesn't take a special message to the alien's fellows. Naturally he figures that this "message" might mean no good for humanity, but he doesn't see an alternative.

So he sneaks aboard a Russian rocket, and manages to get to the moon. He is able to rendezvous with various planted alien ships, and he proceeds to Mars, Jupiter, and finally to Pluto. Needless to say the description of the conditions on these planets are scientifically ridiculous. Our hero becomes aware of a cosmic battle between good, bad, and indifferent aliens, and he is able to figure out a way to play them off against each other and both save Earth and save his skin.

On the whole this is pretty much SF at its worst. I've read other Wollheim/Grinnell novels, and none of them make me think Wollheim's writing career is anything to be rediscovered, this has to qualify as below his usual standard.

Birthday Review: A Princess of Roumania, by Paul Park

Birthday Review: A Princess of Roumania, by Paul Park

a review by Rich Horton

Paul Park turns 64 today, and in honor of his birthday, I'm posting this review I did back in 2005 on SFF Net. As it happens, I reviewed the second and third volumes of the series this novel starts for SF Site. Not the last, though.

Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania, from 2005, is the beginning of his tetralogy also called A Princess of Roumania. In a way this seems a departure for Park, previously the writer of an audacious SF trilogy, The Starbridge Chronicles; a difficult SF novel, Coelestis, and two very religiously-focussed historical novels, The Gospel of Corax and Three Marys. None of these books (with the arguable exception of his first trilogy) were terribly commercial. Indeed, none were fantasies, though they are hardly traditional SF, nor traditional historical fiction. By contrast A Princess of Roumania is certainly fantasy, and arguably Young Adult fantasy (the Washington Post compares it (not terribly sensibly) to Harry Potter and Oz); and on the whole I would say it has more commercial potential than his previous books. But in so saying I do not mean to say it is less ambitious than his earlier works, or less imaginative -- indeed, it is a very fine novel, and promises to open a fascinating series.

Miranda Popescu is a 15 year old girl in a college town in upstate New York in about the present day. She was adopted from Romania in the chaos following the uprising against Ceausescu. As the novel opens she befriends a lonely one-armed boy, Peter Gross. Her other special friend is a popular girl named Andromeda. Soon they meet a sinister group of teenagers who have just moved to their town, and suddenly their school is set afire, risking Miranda's special keepsakes from Romania: some coins and jewelry, and in particular a remarkable book called The Essential History, which describes world history from an unusual viewpoint.

In a completely different world we meet the Baroness Nicola Ceausescu, formerly a prostitute then a successful actress and dancer, who became the second wife of a much older man. This man was involved in an intrigue which led to the execution of Miranda's father, the exile of her mother to Germany, and the financial ruin of her Aunt, Princess Aegypta Schenk von Schenk, half-German and half a descendant of the White Tyger, Miranda Brancoveanu, who saved Roumania centuries before.

It seems to be Aegypta's hope that Miranda Popescu is the new White Tyger, who will save Roumania from her corrupt current Empress, and from the threat of German invasion. Both Aegypta and Nicola are sorceresses, and Aegypta, we soon gather, has created an artificial world, our world, in which she has hidden Miranda, as well as two loyal retainers, who have been incarnated as Peter and Andromeda.

Nicola has managed to send some people to that world, to find Miranda and bring her back -- both realize that if she is the new White Tyger, control of this teenager will be critical. Nicola, furthermore, is intriguing with a German envoy, thus betraying both her nominal political ally, the Empress, and of course her longtime enemy, the Princess Aegypta.

Nicola's schemes succeed in a limited manner, and Miranda, Peter, and Andromeda all end up in the "real world": our world, and its creating book, having been destroyed. (Apparently.) But they are marooned in the wilds of America, inhabited mainly by savage refugees from earthquake-shattered England. Nicola, however, loses control of her plans, and is forced to turn against her erstwhile German friends, though she does come into possession of a powerful gem, Kepler's Eye, a tourmaline. (It is surely significant that volume II of the series is called The Tourmaline.) She finds herself accused of a murder she didn't commit, while racked with guilt over a murder she did commit. Miranda, in dream contact with Aegypta, a woman she doesn't know, struggles to make her way with Peter, Andromeda, and an obsessed tool of Nicola's, Major Raevsky, to Albany and eventually to a ship to Roumania. Or, she hopes, perhaps back to "our" world. The German Elector of Ratisbon, an illegal sorcerer himself, is trying to find Miranda, and also the tourmaline.

It's a thoroughly interesting novel. In particular, the characters of the villains are wonderfully realized, especially Nicola Ceausescu, who is a certainly a bad person, but at the same time a person with whom we sympathize: and someone who is sometimes on the "right" side. The magical parts are very original, believable (in context), and impressive. There is no real resolution -- this is after all the first of a tetralogy. But I'll be eagerly reading on.

Birthday Review: Theodora Goss stories

Birthday Review: Short Fiction from Theodora Goss

Theodora Goss is one of my favorite SF/F writers, bar none; and especially so if you consider writers of short fiction who began publishing in this millennium. (Add Genevieve Valentine and C. S. E. Cooney to that list, and I note that those are all women without comment.) Today is her birthday, and so here is my compilation of most of the reviews I've done of her work for Locus.

(Locus, April 2002)

I reviewed her first story, "The Rose in Twelve Petals", from Realms of Fantasy, for Locus, in the third monthly column I ever wrote. I am always proud when I realize the potential of a new writer from the beginning -- though the pride belongs to them! Alas, my electronic copy of that review is corrupted, and I can't read it. But here's the excerpt from the Small Beer Press page:

One of the most impressive debuts I can recall. Fairy tale retellings are a dime a dozen, and Sleeping Beauty ones probably as common as any, so this story has to be special to stand out, and special it is.

(Locus, January 2004)

Theodora Goss's "Lily, With Clouds" (Alchemy #1) tells of a woman coming home to her sister's house to die, accompanied by her dead husband's mistress, and her husband's paintings. Mostly it's simply of picture of three woman: the conventional, prudish, sister; the once rebellious dying woman; and the rather odd mistress -- but the ending is just beautiful, an inevitable surprise.

(Locus, May 2004)

In Polyphony 4, Theodora Goss continues to impress with "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm", in which a girl takes violin lessons from a German newly arrived at her Southern town. She learns he has a strange desire -- to make a flying machine and reach the flying city of Orillion. Goss blends a heartfelt depiction of a girl growing up with a lovely portrait of a man's dream, and at the end adds darker strands to her tapestry.

(Locus, September 2005)

Theodora Goss offers "A Statement in the Case" (Realms of Fantasy, August). An old man tells a policeman of his friendship with an apothecary. The apothecary is an immigrant, and he runs an old-fashioned store: one might say "charming". All this changes when he marries. Slowly we learn the apothecary's strange secrets, his sadness, and why the policeman is interested.

(Locus, December 2005)

First, Strange Horizons -- which, however, is no longer exactly "less prominent". But they do feature one of the best stories of the month -- indeed, of the year: Theodora Goss’s "Pip and the Fairies". Philippa’s late mother wrote children’s books about a girl visiting fairyland. Philippa (Pip?) is now a successful actress, and she has bought the house her mother and she lived in, in poverty, while the books were written. These books, lately popular, were based on her childhood -- or were they? Stories she told her mother, or stories her mother made up, or real magical experiences, or some sort of fictional distillation of the problems a single mother and her child faced … Goss intertwines Philippa’s memories of her childhood, her imperfect relationship with her mother, her present day relationship with fans of the book, and passages from her mother’s books. The material is perhaps familiar but the treatment is powerfully affecting.

(Locus, April 2006)

The second issue of Fantasy Magazine has appeared. Disclaimer first -- I contribute short book reviews to this magazine. Even so, I don’t think I am wrong to praise Theodora Goss’s "Lessons With Miss Gray", in which five young women, four close friends and an outsider, take lessons in magic from the title character, who has appeared in other Goss pieces. The girls learn real magic, and they also learn (or we learn) about their characters how these (and their futures) are affected by race, class, and gender. It’s witty and involving and clearheaded -- another triumph for Goss.

(Logorrhea review, Locus, May 2007)

Theodora Goss’s "Singing of Mount Abora" plays with Coleridge instead of Tolkien -- recasting the inspiration of "Kubla Khan" in weaving together a story of an Ancient Chinese woman trying to win a dragon’s hand, a contemporary woman studying Coleridge, and Coleridge himself, in Xanadu of all places.

(Locus, June 2007)

The June Realms of Fantasy closes with a lovely Theodora Goss tale, "Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon", about a Princess who is really a baby found by a childless royal couple in the woods, and her ordinary childhood, and ambitions, and what happens when she finds her real mother. Here again is a story that captivates first -- perhaps it is not especially profound but it is great fun. I thought first of George MacDonald's The Light Princess.

(Locus, December 2007)

And to a true survivor in online SF: Strange Horizons. In October I liked best Theodora Goss’s "Catherine and the Satyr". It’s set in Regency England. Catherine is unhappily married, and has left her husband. The Earl of Aberdeen has a zoo, and the zoo has a satyr. Catherine finds the satyr surprisingly well-educated, and attractive, and so ... but Goss is a subtler writer than that, and the story, in the end, suggests that marriage in a society like Catherine’s could be a cage -- like the satyr’s cage, perhaps, or even like the servitude endured by a servant Catherine unwittingly causes harm to.

(Locus, May 2009)

Apex Online’s March issue is also strong, with a couple of thematically related original stories. ... "The Puma", by Theodora Goss, returns to the famous early exemplar of human/animal chimera stories, with a survivor of the events of Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau confronted by the beautiful puma woman who plays on his guilt to support her efforts to continue Moreau’s work, but with more control ceded to the chimeras.

(Locus, March 2010)

Last year Theodora Goss explored the aftermath of Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau in a fine story called "The Puma". Now, at Strange Horizons in January, she gives us "The Mad Scientist’s Daughter", which features six "daughters" of mad scientists, among them Moreau’s creation Catherine, as well as Rappaccini’s daughter, and a creation of Dr. Frankenstein, and a hitherto unrevealed pair of daughters of Jekyll and Hyde. The story details their lives together, their difficulties with their unique histories and characteristics, and so on, in a very witty and intelligent fashion. [Gee, wouldn't a novel on this subject be nice? :) ]

(Locus, October 2010)

Another online magazine, Apex, unveils a new editor in August, Catherynne M. Valente. Her first issue features a lovely story from Theodora Goss, "Fair Ladies", about Rudi, a rather callow young R/u/r/i/t/a/n/i/a/n Sylvanian man who is compelled by his father to take up with an older woman -- in fact, we soon gather, his father’s old mistress. The oddly alluring woman has a secret, of course, a magical and sad secret. It’s a familiar story, but given particular resonance by the slightly dissonant angle of telling, and by the ominous historical events looming the background -- the rise of the Third Reich.

(Locus, July 2011)

"Pug", by Theodora Goss (Asimov's, July), is set in the background of one of the most famous novels of all time -- readily enough recognized though I’ll not mention which it is. But the title dog (who seems perhaps to have escaped from another novel by the same author!) has a unique characteristic -- he can travel to other worlds, and eventually the heroine of this story, a rather colorless and sickly girl, can follow him. Which perhaps gives her a life otherwise denied her. The story nicely elaborates on the circumstances of its heroine, and is just fun to read for Goss’s prose, and for the pleasure of unpicking the relationship with its source material.

(Locus, September 2012)

Finally, in the August Asimov's, I really liked Theodora Goss's "Beautiful Boys", a short piece about a certain class of young man -- "bad boys" one might call them as well as beautiful, prone to brief affairs with vulnerable women followed by abandonment. It's told by a woman researcher, and she has an explanation for them -- a science fictional one, so that the story becomes both a subtle and slightly sad look at her life, and a somewhat Sturgeonesque bit of Sfnal speculation.

(Locus, January 2014)

And "Blanchefleur", by Theodora Goss (from Paula Guran's anthology Once Upon a Time), is a long and quite traditional but very satisfying tale of a young man, regarded as the village idiot, who instead is part Fairy, and who eventually is summoned to his other family's place, where there seems to be lots of talking cats... and too a variant on the traditional three tasks. This is subversive or post-modern or revisionist, really -- but it's beautifully told and often funny and original and, well, nice.

(Locus, July 2015)

The other story I really liked in the July Lightspeed was "Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology", by Theodora Goss, in which a group of post-docs and grad students write about an imaginary country, creating history, religion, culture, etc., from scratch; then somehow find that it really exists. Did they create it? One of them ends up marrying a daughter of the Khan, and that is even stranger, as she has an identical twin who is ignored by everyone (as in Cimmeria, twins have no independent souls), but who follows them everywhere. Very Borgesian, of course, and very fine.

(Locus, January 2017)

More traditional in form, from The Starlit Wood, is "The Other Thea", by Theodora Goss, which takes the central idea of Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Shadow" (that a person might become disconnected from their shadow, which is sort of an other self, an alternate version of them), and makes a new story of it, related a couple of her best earlier stories, "Miss Emily Gray" and "Lessons with Miss Gray". Thea (surely a significant name choice!) has been drifting through life in the months since graduating from Miss Lavender’s School of Witchcraft, and she ends up drifting back to the school, where she is told that she must find her shadow, which had been cut off by her grandmother when she was just a child. So she travels to the Other Country, and, of course, does find her shadow -- or it finds her -- but who says the shadow wants anything to do with her? It’s a beautifully written story, and great fun, but perhaps a bit thin next to the Samatar story, and to my other favorite in the book.

(Locus, May 2017)

The best recent story in Tor.com comes from Theodora Goss. "Come See the Living Dryad" is told by a contemporary woman, Daphne Levitt, a scientist writing about historical "freaks", like the Elephant Man. Her motivation is her great-grandmother, who was an exhibit in the 1880s as "the Living Dryad". In reality, this woman, Daphne Merwin, suffered from Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia, a real condition that can lead to branch-like growths on peoples’ skin. Dr. Levitt ends up investigated her great-grandmother’s murder, for which, she learns, a man was falsely convicted. The real story turns on a familiar tale of jealousy and abuse and charlatanage. A moving story, well-framed (and, if truth be told, not really SF or Fantasy, but very much worth reading).