Birthday Review: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

Today is Robert Charles Wilson's 65th birthday. In his honor, here is my review of his most celebrated novel, Spin, which won the 2006 Hugo for Best Novel (and, later, the Japanese translation won the Seiun Award.)

Date: 07 May 2005

Review: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson (2005)

Tor, New York, ISBN: 0765309386, 368 pp, hc, US$25.95

a review by Rich Horton

The first major SF novel from a major publisher in 2005 that I have seen is Robert Charles Wilson's Spin. Wilson is one of my favorite current writers. His recent novels have all been quite striking, and all are based on quite extravagant SF ideas, yet are markedly quiet in tone, and markedly character-based.

Beth Meacham recently complained that SF seems to consist largely of two sorts of books: very mainstream-style books with one modest SFnal idea; or very wildly SFnal books that demand from the reader an intimate knowledge of the field's tropes. Robert Sawyer vs. Charles Stross, one might suggest. Spin, I think, is a counter-example. It is based on a truly audacious central idea, and the idea is quite cleverly extrapolated -- its implications are nicely explored. Yet the heart of the book is an extended look at one man's lifelong friendship/love affair with his boyhood neighbors, a pair of twins, brother and sister; set in a near future not too terribly different from today.

The book alternates sections set, the titles tell us, very far in the future (4 billion A. D.), with near future sections. The narrator is Tyler Dupree, who is undergoing some sort of drastic medical treatment while on the run from U. S. officials. While mentally unbalanced by the treatment he compulsively writes down his memories of his life to date, beginning with the onset of what came to be called "the Spin". One night when Tyler is 12, and his twin friends Jason and Diane are 13, the stars suddenly disappear. Earth is somehow enshrouded -- satellites crash, the Moon is invisible, the Sun still shines but oddly changed. It soon becomes clear that a barrier, eventually called "the Spin", is affecting time oddly -- time outside it passes much more rapidly than on Earth. Space vehicles can be launched and pass through the barrier -- they seem to return instantly, but they observe time passing outside it, and they observe, for instance, the Solar System continuing to evolve, such that after some decades, the Sun will have changed so as to make Earth uninhabitable. Thus, people of Tyler's generation grow up in the knowledge that likely the world will soon end.

Tyler's mother works for Jason and Diane's father as a maid. E. D. Lawton is a powerful defense contractor who is smart enough to be in place to react quickly to the Spin -- for example by setting up a network of aerostats to replace the now defunct GPS satellites. His wife Carol is a former doctor, now an alcoholic. Tyler falls in love with Diane from an early age, but a combination of factors keep them apart. (Tyler's shyness, a perceived class or financial status difference, E. D.'s hostility.)

The three children react differently to the Spin. Jason, to some extent following in his father's footsteps, is desperate to understand it, and perhaps to fix it. Diane is afraid of it, and drifts into a cult which treats the Spin as an harbinger of the Christian End Times. Tyler stays close to Jason, and mostly tries to live a semblance of an ordinary life, becoming a doctor himself. Eventually Jason hires him to work at Perihelion, a corporation cum government agency working to investigate Spin-related phenomena.

The book very successfully combines an involving small-scale story (the story of Tyler's relationship with the Lawton twins, and of the entire world in the shadow of apocalypse) with a fascinating large-scale SF story (the story of the Spin, its origin and the results of some decades of dealing with it). The first story is satisfying enough, but ultimately it is the extrapolations of the effects of the temporal disconnect between Earth and the rest of the universe that are most compelling. Wilson uses this as a way to look at "deep time" through the eyes of contemporary humans. As only a few years pass on Earth while millions of years pass outside the Spin barrier, it is possible to do really long-duration experiments. Some of these have downright cool effects -- I won't detail these here -- I'll leave the surprises to the novel. But Wilson does not cheat the reader -- we do learn pretty much what's going on with the Spin, and why. And it's neat stuff -- though I suppose just mildly less overwhelming than I might have hoped.

Birthday Review: Bugs, by John Sladek

Birthday Review: Bugs, by John Sladek

This would have been John Sladek's 81st  birthday. Sadly, Sladek, one of SF's great satirists, died fairly young in 2000. Sladek was born in Iowa, and lived the last several years of his life in Minnesota, but he spent a couple of decades in England starting in 1966, and he was heavily involved in the English New Wave SF scene at the time, along with another American, his sometime collaborator Thomas M. Disch. Somehow, though I always knew Disch was American, I assumed for a long time that Sladek was British. Anyway, we briefly discussed Sladek as an underrated writer on Greg Feeley's Facebook feed the other day, so it seems appropriate that on this his birthday I repost my review of a book that I received as a gift from Greg.

Bugs, from 1989, is one of Sladek's last novels. It represents him at his most darkly satirical. It's about a British man rather bewilderedly encountering the American scene: as such it reminded me of a couple of books by Amises: Kingsley's One Fat Englishman, and much more closely, Martin's Money, which is a near contemporary to Bugs. All those books are satirical, and Money shares with Bugs a truly bitter edge, though Money is longer, dirtier, more vulgarly over the top. (And I didn't like it as much -- it's not a book I like much at all, though I gather it is regarded by some as Martin Amis's best book.)

Bugs' story opens with Manfred ("Fred") Jones, a failed English novelist, trying to find the offices of Vimnut, a Minneapolis company for whom he hopes to become a technical writer. When he finally finds it (this having been complicated by among other things the company having changed its name) he is hired, after certain mixups, as a software engineer. (I am of course a software engineer, and these aspects of the book were pretty funny and fairly true to life.) It seems that his resume was confused with that of Mansour Jones, a black man fully qualified for the job. Fred is afraid to complain that he isn't qualified, and it soon appears that that doesn't matter.

Fred's department is charged with developing a robot officer for the military. His coworkers are variously completely insane, completely idiotic, or simply burnt out. Somehow the robot still manages to get built, though in the manner of numerous Sladek robots (robots were probably his chief SFnal device) it turns out to be murderous in a very funny way.

Fred himself has more significant personal problems to deal with. His wife has left him because she can't stand America. This doesn't seem to affect his sex life much: before long he has three women on a string, without really trying: a Russian spy, the sex-mad wife of his boss (who keeps asking him to imitate different famous Englishmen), and a beautiful co-worker with whom he falls immediately and desperately in love, to her initial feminist disgust. Fred also keeps getting fired and rehired, he somehow never gets paid by the company, Mansour Jones hounds him about stealing his rightful job, his insane co-worker tries to kill him ... and of course when the robot escapes he's really in trouble.

It's a very funny, very dark book. All ends terribly -- though in a way that seems, if not pasted on, not really necessary -- the ending could have plausibly gone quite differently, and many writers (Kingsley Amis probably, but not Martin Amis) would have resolved it more happily. But that's not Sladek's way, for sure.

Old Bestseller: The Sprightly Romance of Marsac, by Molly Elliot Seawell

Old Bestsellers: The Sprightly Romance of Marsac, by Molly Elliot Seawell

a review by Rich Horton

Molly Elliot Seawell (1860-1916) came from a fairly prominent Virginia family. Her Great-Uncle was President John Tyler. She was self-educated, but quite well, and she turned to writing about when her father died, when she was still fairly young. She supported her mother and the rest of her family with her writing income -- she wrote short stories, seafaring books for boys, articles, and other novels. She was fiercely proud of her ability to support her family with her writing income, and at the same time she was very traditional in her beliefs, and made a big splash with an essay called "On the Absence of Creative Faculty in Women". Her socially conservative views, and her Virginian upbringing, contributed to a fairly racist (in the paternalist sense) view of African Americans -- happily, the novel at hand, set in France, does not feature those views. She traveled extensively, in part in search of relief from her health problems, which contributed to her death at the young age of 56.

She was quite popular in her time, perhaps especially for books for boys, but she is all but forgotten now. The Sprightly Romance of Marsac was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1897, though it is copyright 1896. A note states that it obtained the first prize of $3000 for the best novelette in an 1895 New York Herald competition. The book is something less than 30,000 words, so it's possible the prize-winning novelette was the same length, though I suspect it may have been shorter. It is illustrated, quite nicely, by Gustave Verbeek.

The novel is a very light and enjoyable piece of fluff. Marsac and his friend Fontaine are impecunious journalists. The opening shows them avoiding a series of importunations by their creditors, until Marsac is trapped by there imposing landlady, a widow named Madame Fleury. In something of a panic, Marsac, who is constitutionally opposed to marriage, deflects a proposal by the widow that he marry her in exchange for the forgivement of his back rent by instead suggesting Fontaine as the groom. So Fontaine ends up engaged to Madame Fleury -- but of course she is rather older than he, and anyway he is in love with one Claire Duval, the daughter of a wealthy tradesman.

Marsac promises to extract Fontaine from his engagement, but there is still the problem of their debts. His next scheme is to invent a rich uncle for Fontaine -- using Fontaine's real Uncle Maurice, who has emigrated to American, as the basis. They create a fake obituary for Maurice, along with the suggestion that he has left a couple million francs to Fontaine. And then they find that the mere expectation of an inheritance solves their money problems -- and also solves some other issues. Suddenly their artistic endeavors -- a play and a painting -- are in demand, as is Marsac's journalism, as long as it is signed by the presumably rich Fontaine.

And, too, M. Duval is suddenly much more accepting of Fontaine's attraction to his daughter. Marsac transforms their creditors, including a Madame Fleury, into nobility -- and all of a sudden M. Duval and Mme. Fleury are an item. Things are also going well for Fontaine and his beloved. And Claire's sister Delphine, a "New Woman" who is opposed to marriage, meets Marsac, and sparks fly -- the two are in desperate love immediately, but both are forced by their pride and their previously state views on marriage, to deny their attraction.

You can guess what comes next -- Uncle Maurice returns. Now what? If he's not dead, there can be no inheritance. And what of Fontaine's still extant "betrothal" to Mme. Fleury? And will Delphine and Marsac resolve their manufactured differences? Without their fictional inheritance and its benefits, how will Marsac and Fontaine pay their debts? Well, is their any doubt everything will work out? Of course not. Indeed, the resolution is rather too rapid, and somewhat anticlimatic. But the book as a whole, while nothing earthshattering, is for much of its length enjoyable fun, if totally implausible.

Birthday Review: Stories of C. S. E. Cooney

Today is Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney's birthday. She is one of the best, and also most sheerly enjoyable, writers working in our field today. She's also a friend of mine, so if you want to take my words with a grain of salt, do so -- but do so at your peril! Here's a compilation of most (but not all) of my reviews of her short fiction to date:

Locus, January 2008

The best story from the online Summer issue of Subterranean is also dark fantasy, this time blackly humorous: “Stone Shoes”, by C. S. E. Cooney, about Jack Yap and his brother Pudding and their Marm and a skinchanger’s egg – linguistically inventive, and slyly vicious.

Locus, June 2009

Belatedly I’ll catch up with Subterranean’s online offerings. From Winter my favorite is C. S. E. Cooney’s “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden”, which plays ecstatic games with Russian fantastical traditions – a Scarecrow, the Firebird, Koshchei the Deathless, Baba Yaga, and lots of Ivans. Cooney is always gleefully imaginative, and very fun – with rather a sinister edge.

Locus, July 2010

One of the latter is my favorite in Clockwork Phoenix 3: C. S. E. Cooney’s “Braiding the Ghosts”, in which a girl goes to her grandmother after her mother’s death, and learns from the older woman the secret of “braiding” ghosts – which is to say enslaving them. So ghosts are the servants of the older woman. But the girl is not so happy with this … especially when she falls for the ghost she is forced to braid. And the ghosts – are they happy? Read the story and find out … lovely stuff.

Locus, December 2010

C. S. E. Cooney’s The Big Bah-Ha is a novella published as an ebook by Drollerie Press. It’s a very imaginative work, at once a stark post-apocalyptic tale and a strange, sometimes quite dark, but never dour, afterlife fantasy. Beatrice is the leader of a small children’s gang in a world of only children – a disease called the “slaprash” kills everyone at about puberty (meaning, of course, that the end of the world is less than some dozen years away). Then Beatrice comes to in a rather surrealistic environment. She must negotiate her new world – “the Big Bah-Ha” – with a strange clown and menacing Gacy Boys and so on. And back in the “real world”, the rest of her gang vows to confront one of the Tall Ones, the Flabberghast, and beg for help to find Beatrice. Cooney’s imagery and invention is as fevered as always with her work, and her control of tone is perfect – this is a terribly sad future but the story is never morose, always oddly hopeful, even as the ending is uncompromising but still oddly hopeful.

Locus, May 2011

Strange Horizons for March features another strong piece from C. S. E. Cooney. “The Last Sophia”, about a girl enslaved by “the Gentry” to breed children for them – at any rate, she’s under someone’s control, if not the Gentry then her mother or an Aunt, and the story turns on her efforts to escape.

Locus, July 2013

I really like the work of C. S. E. Cooney – one of the really gifted young storytellers we have. At Giganatosaurus for May she contributes “Martyr's Gem”. Shursta Sarth is a poor fisherman, not much of a catch, living in a small village on the Last Isle with his lame sister. He is then shocked to be chosen for “meshing” by Hyrryai Blodestone, a daughter of one of the most prestigious families on the Last Isle, living in the capital city . Hyrryai's reasons are at one level predictable – her sister was murdered, and her only interest is finding the killer, but her culture's mores demand she “mesh” (to preserve the species, after the Nine Cities fell beneath the sea). Well, we can see where this is going, mostly, and indeed it goes there – but the getting there is a delight, partly in the world-  and culture-building, and mainly in the telling, and especially in the voice of Shursta's sister Sharrar.

Locus, September 2014

Strange Horizon's July stories include two frankly erotic pieces. ... “Witch, Beast, Saint: an Erotic Fairy Tale”, by C. S. E. Cooney, is considerably superior. It's kind of related to “Beauty and the Beast”, with the narrator a witch who is beguiled by a man enchanted to beasthood – sufficiently so that she doesn't want to change him back to a man. But then a (likewise beguiling) man shows up, who seems to be a saint, with the mission of changing beasts to men. What's a witch to do when her beloved beast is changed against her will? Especially when he returns to her and begs to be changed back? Cooney as ever is witty, and her thinking is very slanty indeed; and the story is both a good story and effectively erotic as well.

Locus, November 2014

The Witch's Garden series is an ongoing set of somewhat erotic tales from C. S. E. Cooney. One appeared in Strange Horizons, and another longer one  is available in electronic form at Amazon: The Witch in the Almond Tree. Mar is a very talented witch at the Conservatory of Spellbinding and the Beguiling Arts in Doornwald, with a boyfriend she likes and who is good in bed (but who also likes lots of other girls and boys), and good marks at school, but not much money. So she agrees to visit her mother, with whom she has a tense relationship, and her mother's new husband, for one summer, to save money and to help her sometimes careless mother. When she gets there she finds the new husband a nice enough man, an almond grower; and she is quite taken with his son, who is about her own age. But something is strange about her mother … not to mention that her new stepbrother is confined to the almond farm by the spirit of his dead mother, plus the local tales of a haunted juniper tree. Soon it seems that some magical expertise might be called for – but is she up to it? Cooney is a natural storyteller with an easy way with her characters, and the story is a delight to read, with plausible and interesting magic (plausible in context), and with a tense and exciting plot.

Locus, July 2015

Bone Swans is a collection of five recent novellas from C. S. E. Cooney. All the stories are very good, and one of them is new to the collection: “The Bone Swans of Amandale”. This story is one of a couple in the book that takes as its basis a familiar fairy tale (here, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, elsewhere in the book “Rumpelstilskin”), but which changes it utterly. Maurice is a Rat Person hopelessly in love with Dora Rose, a Swan Person. (Being a clever and cynical rat, he copes pretty well though.) When Dora Rose's sister is murdered as part of a complex plot by the Amandale's mayor, who wants to make an orchestra of “bone swans”, Maurice decides something has to be done, for the sake of the swans, and indeed for the city's children, who are being misused as well in the mayor's service, so he goes to his friend, a reluctant piper. The Pied Piper story is all there of course, but just as a skeleton on which to hang multiple intersecting motivations. And the key is as ever the telling, and Maurice's voice.


Locus, July 2016

I also liked a warm collaboration from C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, “The Book of May”, told in correspondence, about two old friends, one of whom is dying of cancer, and her last wish: to be planted and become a Dragon. The idea is fine, but the story works because of the voices.

Locus, January 2018

I was fortunate to hear C. S. E. Cooney tease the first half of “Though She Be But Little” at Boskone last year, but I had to wait until the September/October Uncanny to find out how it ends. This is Cooney at her strangest, set in a world suddenly and weirdly altered, with a silver sky and stuffed animals named Captious and Bumptious and a parrot named George Sand – and Emma Anne, who must confront the dangerous Loping Man. It is weirder than I can describe, really, and funny without being quite funny at the core, and quite something.

Locus, February 2019

Sword and Sonnet is an anthology devoted to “women or non-binary battle poets”, possibly a bit too specific a remit for a book, but still one that has engendered some impressive stories. Best here is “As for Peace, Call it Murder”, by C. S. E. Cooney. This is SF, not usually Cooney’s genre, but it’s strong work, about Quatromanni, a singer of protest songs against an oppressive regime. The story is told long after her death, when she is remembered as the War-Ender, even though she was captured and had her tongue cut out by the regime. But her songs lived, and how they lived is what makes the story.

Birthday Review: Stories of Tim Pratt

Today is the birthday of my Locus colleague Tim Pratt. Tim is also a very fine writer, perhaps best known for a long series of fun urban fantasy novels about a witch called Marla Mason. More recently, he has begun a cool SF series, with The Wrong Stars and The Dreaming Stars. He also continues to write strong short fiction, much of it at his Patreon. In honor of his birthday, here's a compilation of my Locus reviews of his short fiction.

Locus, August 2002

The August Realms of Fantasy features Tim Pratt's "The Witch's Bicycle", one of the longest stories I've seen there. It's a novelette about a witch meddling with three high school students: a shy boy, the athletic and pretty new girl in town, and a bully. Each of the kids must somehow break out of a certain mold to frustrate the witch.  A fine young adult fantasy.

Locus, February 2003

The February Realms of Fantasy opens with two rather long stories (for them), and both are quite good. The prize is Tim Pratt's "Fable from a Cage", a nasty story about a thief captured by a witch who needs him to help her steal something of great value to her. It will surprise no one that both characters have treachery in mind, and Pratt twistily and cynically shows serial betrayals.

Locus, August 2003

Urban Fantasy is another "borderline" subgenre with points of contact with slipstream. Realms of Fantasy publishes a fair amount of Urban Fantasy, such as Tim Pratt's "Down With the Lizards and the Bees" (August). A man still mourning his dead lover serves as a guide to the underworld for others who have lost loves. But he learns that these modern day Orpheuses pay a harsh cost for their trip. Can he make himself pay the same price?

Locus, December 2003

Tim Pratt has been consistently impressive for Realms of Fantasy, and "Romanticore" is another strong story. Ray is drifting through life, and he's just lost his latest girlfriend to his best friend. But he meets a new woman named Lily, and rebound or not this relationship seems particularly special. But she warns him from the start that it's only temporary -- her boyfriend is a traveling musician on tour in Europe, and when he comes back, it's over. And so it turns out, but it's hard for Ray to let go, particularly given the scary dreams in which he becomes a lion. Which leads him into scary territory when he encounters Lily again, and her sinister boyfriend.

Locus, November 2005

So again in October. The best of another steady group in Realms of Fantasy is probably Tim Pratt and Greg van Eekhout’s “Robots and Falling Hearts”, about a man investigating a “plague of robots”. It seems that all of a sudden robots of all sorts are appearing – apparently quite functional (if odd), but entirely unexplained. The narrator finds a woman near the epicenter of the plague, and learns from her something of her involvement in the plague – all the while falling in love. But the story has a stranger turn or two to take – quite weird and intriguing.

Locus, June 2006

Among the shorter stories in the July Asimov's I particularly liked Tim Pratt’s “Impossible Dreams”, a “mysterious shop” story. This time the shop is a video store, with treasures such as the director’s cut of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and the George Raft version of Casablanca. That’s the hook, and Pratt sets it with a sweet romance between two movie nuts: the geeky young man who discovers the shop, and the girl at the counter.

Locus, November 2006, review of Polyphony 6, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake

Tim Pratt’s “The Crawlspace of the World” is another weird one, as a young man follows an old girlfriend into the title area, a classic “bigger on the inside than the outside” space, to confront a sort of dragon.

Locus, December 2006

One of the new entries in online publishing is Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, which has published three issues in the past year or so. The October issue includes a fascinating and decidedly odd piece from Tim Pratt, “Dream Engine”. The narrator is a disembodied intelligence keeping tabs on a shapeshifter named Howlaa Moor, who is in the employ of the Regent of a city called Nexington-on-Axis. This city is at the hub of multiple dimensions, and its trade is in stuff grabbed from these other dimensions – but some of this stuff can be dangerous. Howlaa is assigned to track a serial killer who mysteriously appears and disappears in the city – an assignment which will involve Howlaa and the narrator in the Regent’s own intrigues. Neat stuff.

Locus, May 2007, review of John Klima's Logorrhea

Tim Pratt’s “From Around Here” is a strong urban fantasy. A wandering “land spirit” of sorts incorporates in a human body periodically – this time in a San Francisco neighborhood that seems unusually troubled. He must track down the source of the trouble, the while beginning a promising love affair – but his lot, it seems, is one of sacrifice.

Locus, October 2007

Strange Horizons in late July and early August features two very good stories. Tim Pratt’s “Artifice and Intelligence” is a clever and pointed – and funny – story. The Indian call centers unite to form a powerful AI. Various other organizations scramble to produce their own AI, including a crackpot scientist who summons the ghosts of historical villains to animate his creations, and a nascent witch who manages to summon a marsh spirit to her PDA. What happens when these new intelligences meet the Indian AI is not quite what we expect.

Locus, August 2009

Now to Interzone #222 (it now ties New Worlds as the UK SF publication with the most issues). Tim Pratt’s “Unexpected Outcomes” opens on 9/11, with the apparently Tim Pratt-like narrator and his girlfriend witnessing the attack on the World Trade Center – but history changes weirdly at this point, as the second plane stops in the air, and it soon becomes clear that the story is set within a simulation of the “real world”, a simulation which has been discontinued. This knowledge – of everything’s unreality – naturally causes a lot of disruption, but the narrator and some others eventually come to a realization that the simulation story has some (sometimes literal!) holes in it, and also that there “unreality” gives them a certain freedom. Thoughtful work.

Locus, September 2009

Strange Horizons recently has featured a couple of playful stories that I’ve really enjoyed. Tim Pratt’s “Another End of the Empire” is about a Dark Lord who in an attempt to undermine the traditional prophecy that a child born in a certain place will overthrow him ends up Doing Good. It’s predictable perhaps, but very cute.

Locus, November 2009

There’s more good stuff at Tor.com. “Silver Linings”, by Tim Pratt, is to begin with a pirate story plus an airship story – a combination I find irresistible. In this case the pirates aren’t true pirates so much as thieves – of the silver found in clouds. Alas, that has dire consequences for people underneath the clouds. The narrator tells of his ship’s last venture – the law, it seems, finally catches up with them. But he has his own, quite unexpected, secret. Very enjoyable.

Locus, March 2010

Also at the Fall 2009 issue of Subterranean is a sweet Tim Pratt piece, “Troublesolving”, about a man having a lot of trouble in his life and the woman he meets who promises to solve his problems: problems that end up involving time traveling plotters.

Birthday Review: Heart of Veridon (and two other stories), by Tim Akers

Today is Tim Akers' birthday. Tim has been publishing intriguing dark fantasy, with a steampunkish feel to much of it, since 2004. This includes six novels, including two Veridon novels, a standalone called The Horns of Ruin, and a trilogy called The Hallowed War, which concluded with The Winter Vow this year. I reviewed his first novel, Heart of Veridon, for Fantasy Magazine, and I've reviewed a couple of his short stories at Locus. I've reposted these reviews here, for his birthday.

Heart of Veridon, by Tim Akers (Solaris, Nottingham, UK, 978-1-84416-759-3, $7.99, mmpb, 475 pages) October 2009

A review by Rich Horton

Heart of Veridon is Tim Akers’s first novel. He’s a native of North Carolina, now resident in Chicago, but he is probably not well known to many Americans, as the bulk of his short fiction has appeared in Interzone. His work had caught my eye, though, particularly a couple of short stories set in the same steampunk fantasy world as this novel: “The Algorithm” (Interzone, 2007) and “A Soul Stitched to Iron” (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume 3, 2009). This book realized the promise of those stories very nicely – though it is unmistakably a first novel, with the sort of flaws one expects in early work.

The narrator is Jacob Burn, disgraced scion of one of the Founding Families of Veridon. We meet him on an airship about to crash, as a petty criminal he barely knows gives him a mysterious “Cog” – a piece of clockwork that, it soon becomes clear, is desperately desired by several very different factions, including at least two different sides of Veridon’s ruling class, and also including some entities from well outside the city. Burn has become a petty sort of criminal himself, working in association with a whore named Emily for whom he has perhaps unwise feelings, and working for a mostly clockwork crime boss named Valentine. When his latest assignment, to deliver a package at the country house of one of his old Founder friends, Angela Tomb, goes pear-shaped he finds himself, along with Emily and a spider-like nonhuman named Wilson, on the run from the various groups chasing the Cog.

There’s plenty of action, well enough described but often a bit unconvincing. Jacob himself is nearly unkillable, but that’s effectively explained (he has been implanted with clockwork of his own, part of a failed (for interesting reasons) attempt to become an airship Pilot.) But too often the solution to problems is to shoot his way out, through quite a few supposedly competent adversaries. (Who do win, short term, on occasion, it should be said.) Much more interesting than the action is the setting, which as I said earlier is “fantasy steampunk”, and pretty pure steampunk – airships, clockwork people, the criminal element, and plenty of attitude. This is fun reading, and it ends up nicely underpinned by a gothic history for Veridon. The story’s arc promises tragedy, and we get that, with some hope, and some cynicism. Once senses that Veridon should be on the verge of a transformation, and that doesn’t really happen, but I think the slightly muted ending, if a bit disappointing, is also honest and realistic.

In the end, Heart of Veridon is an enjoyable novel, absorbing reading with plenty of color and action. The prose is mostly fine, if on occasion a bit too contemporary/colloquial for my taste. The setting is the real star. It’s not a perfect book, but it is a very promising debut.

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Two stories by Tim Akers

Locus, June 2017

In the March-April Interzone I also enjoyed a quite thoroughly strange story by Tim Akers, “A Death in the Wayward Drift”, about a young man, an initiate of the water caste, and the death by drowning of one of his fellows while trying to repair some sort of engine of water. Charged with the proper burial of the dead man, he journeys and encounters a young woman, an initiate of wood, with her own concerns about the strangely walking trees … It is, as I said, thoroughly strange, and very usefully so.

Locus, May 2009

From The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume 3, Tim Akers’s “A Soul Stitched to Iron” is set in a fantastical city – almost perhaps a “New Weird” milieu, with something like zombies – but again perhaps there is a baroque short of SFnal rationale to it. In the story a young man who has turned away from his highborn family to a life of crime returns to his birth environment to try to understand what’s driving a newly influential family in disturbing directions.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Beth Bernobich

Beth Bernobich is exactly 1 day younger than yesterday's birthday subject, M. Rickert (which makes them both just a couple of months younger than me). Beth wrote a lot of exciting short fiction in the 2000s, then turned to novels -- a fantasy series collectively called River of Souls for Tor, and a fun YA fantasy, Fox and Phoenix. I hadn't seen anything for a few years, but just this year, under the name Claire O'Dell, she published an intriguing looking novel, A Study in Honor, the first of the Janet Watson chronicles, which (as the title of the first book and the name of the narrator suggest) puts versions of Holmes and Watson, who happen to be women and black, into a near-future dystopian US.

Here's a compilation of my reviews of her short fiction. (I also reviewed Fox and Phoenix for Black Gate.)

Locus, April 2003

Also of note is "Poison" by Beth Bernobich (posted January 20/27 at Strange Horizons), at 12,000 words perhaps the longest story yet featured at Strange Horizons. This story recalls Le Guin and Arnason, as well as Strange Horizons regular M. C. A. Hogarth, in that it depicts a human-like people with a different sexual nature. "Poison" is about a pair of tikaki, who can change their sex at will once they reach maturity. The narrator has not yet "ripened", but his/her companion, Yenny, has, and this ability makes Yenny a valuable prostitute. A new client, however, is using Yenny is some way as to make him/her ill, and the story turns on finding out what this client is plotting, which also reveals some of the story behind the tikakis' place in this alien society.

Locus, July 2003

I found the second issue of the overtly slipstream anthology Polyphony (edited by Deborah Layne with Jay Lake) even better than the first. ... Another fine story is Beth Bernobich's "Chrysalide", about a court painter whose success is based on her power to draw the "spirit", as it were, from her subjects to the painting, at a terrible cost.

Locus, April 2006

Asimov’s for June features one longish novelette and a passel of short stories. The novelette, “A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange”, is the first Asimov’s appearance for a very promising newer writer, Beth Bernobich. Simon Madoc is a mathematics student whose twin sister, Gwyn seems to have been driven mad by mathematics. We soon gather that this is in a parallel world of some sort: it feels a bit like Edwardian England but the city is called Awveline and the country Èireann, and other countries mentioned include familiar ones like Estonia and unfamiliar ones like Lîvod. Math is different, too: Simon is studying theories about the electrical properties of certain equations. And now Simon is at the center of a murder investigation, as several of his student friends have died in mysterious circumstances. This is all quite interesting, but in the end I wasn’t convinced. But I was intrigued: and I want to see more from Bernobich.

Locus, December 2007

September/October’s Interzone has a series of interesting stories … Beth Bernobich’s “A Handful of Pearls” is effectively creepy in portraying an unpleasant viewpoint character – a scientist whose girlfriend has left him – we slowly gather, because of his bad behavior – and we slowly are drawn into his abuse of a young humanoid girl they discover on an isolated island. What I wanted more of was the background – this seems to be set on an intriguingly different parallel Earth, but we don’t really learn enough about that.

Locus, September 2008

Somewhat belatedly I should mention a very fine story at Subterranean Magazine’s online edition for Spring. (I confess I have a hard time delineating the beginning and end of their issues.) “Air and Angels”, by Beth Bernobich, has an almost steampunk setup, with a young Victorian man meeting a fascinating pair of sisters, and being drawn briefly into their lives. The ladies are scientifically talented, and fascinated by astronomy – and it turns out they have a striking plan – which rather explicitly echoes a famous feminist SF story, given an intriguing alternate perspective by the Victorian setting.

Locus, October 2008

And among a host of first-rate work at Postscripts – the stories above, plus a fine Luff Imbry story from Matthew Hughes and solid work from Justina Robson, Eric Brown, and Paul DiFilippo among other, one story stands out. This is “The Golden Octopus” by Beth Bernobich (yet another writer exactly my age!). This intriguingly parallels her arresting earlier piece “A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange”. It follows the young Queen of Éirann (an alternate Ireland), as she juggles statecraft, her desire to support a researcher’s efforts to develop a form of time travel, her potential but unrealizable interest in her chief bodyguard and her politically more acceptable romance with the researcher, and finally a scary series of strange murders. The wrenching ending turns on the expectable but often unthought results of successful time travel.

Locus, December 2009

Speaking of PS Publishing and steampunk, they have put out Beth Bernobich’s first book, Ars Memoriae, a novella set in her somewhat steampunkish alternate history in which Queen Aíne rules in Éireann, a version of Ireland that occupies more or less the place of England as something like World War I looms. Commander Adrian Dee, still tortured by memories of another past, is sent by his Queen on a mission to Central Europe to uncover plots that may lead to a war involving the Prussian Empire, Austria, Montenegro … all this involving revolutionaries in Montenegro, a traitor in Éireann, and, naturally, a strong beautiful woman whose loyalties Dee cannot at first know … It’s fun stuff, but just a bit more routine than Bernobich’s previous Éireann stories. Still – there is surely more to come, perhaps even a novel, and Bernobich remains one of the most exciting newer writers we have.

Locus, September 2010

Beth Bernobich has not yet published a novel (though Passion Play is forthcoming this fall), but her short fiction has been very impressive, in particular several stories set in an alternate history dominated by a version of Ireland called Éireann. A Handful of Pearls collects much of her non- Éireann short fiction, which is also quite worth your while. The one new story, “Jump to Zion”, is fine work, if not her best, about a colony of former slaves who have escaped (where is not quite clear) only to form a new society again based on slavery. The heroine has struggled to buy herself something like freedom, but cannot guarantee the same for her daughter, and so is tempted by the violence urged by her former lover – only violence seems ever a mistake.

Birthday Review: Stories of M. Rickert

Today is the birthday of the exceptional writer Mary Rickert, who publishes as M. Rickert. Certainly her short fiction deserves celebration on this occasion -- so here's a compilation of some of my Locus reviews, plus a brief review of her collection Map of Dreams that I did for Fantasy Magazine.

Locus, August 2002

The cover story for the August F&SF is M. Rickert's "Leda", a clever modern-day retelling of the story of Leda and the swan: what if a swan really did rape a contemporary woman?  How would she, and the rest of the world, react?  It's nicely told, with an effective variety of voices and tones.

Locus, August 2003

F&SF for August ... Best this month, though, was M. Rickert's "The Chambered Fruit", a ghost story. An artist's daughter is abducted and murdered by a man she met under a false guise on the Internet. The heart of the story is the mother's battle with grief, and her involvement with an odd girl who claims to hear from the dead daughter's ghost.


Locus, September 2005

SCI FICTION for August ... Better is M. Rickert's "Anyway", about a single mother with a son ready to join the military, her dying mother and cranky father, and her memories of her beloved brother who was murdered young. Her mother has a family history about sons and going to war and saving the world and guilt – and a choice no parent should have to make.

Locus, May 2006

The May F&SF includes a couple of striking dark stories. One of the best stories of 2006 is M. Rickert’s beautiful horror story “Journey Into the Kingdom”. The story is well-framed, to begin with: a young man at an art show reads a journal/story accompanying a painting. The story tells of a girl growing up as a lighthouse keeper, whose father’s ghost returns again and again, often with other ghosts. She falls in love with one of the ghosts, who tells in turn his story, of an attempt to escape his jealous father, which leads to both father and son dying. The son reveals that he is a special ghost, who comes to life via the breath of mortals: best obtained by a kiss. And it seems that this girl – the artist, we gather – has become one such ghost. But of course this is just a story. Back in the initial frame, the gallery visitor falls for the artist, who seems resistant to his advances. Perhaps she doesn’t want to steal his breath? And then the story takes another dark turn – and another. This is lovely work, beautifully written, fascinatingly imagined, and resolved with that perfect touch of ambiguity that, done right, perfectly enhances a certain sort of contemporary fantasy.

Locus, December 2006

December’s F&SF features as usual a Christmas story – quite a different one – for one thing, it is also a Halloween story. M. Rickert’s “The Christmas Witch” is another outstanding piece from this wonderful writer. Rachel Boyle and her father have moved to a small Massachusetts town after her mother’s death. Rachel learns some stories about Wilmot Redd, famous in the town for having been executed for witchcraft. She begins to collect bones, and makes friends (of a sort) with a boy she stays with after school. But Rachel seems in contact with some variety of real witchcraft – more real than anyone else will credit. Rickert, as ever, takes the story in unexpected directions, often uncomfortable, quite spooky and convincing.

Locus, March 2007

M. Rickert’s “Memoirs of a Deer Woman” is another first rate piece, quite simply described: a woman becomes a deer, and her husband follows her as best he can. I can’t say much more – Rickert’s prose and insight make the story work.

Locus, January 2008

And finally, I find myself a bit behind in covering Subterranean magazine, after its online migration. First I should note the final print issue, #7, guest edited by Ellen Datlow, which has in particular a strong M. Rickert story, “Holiday”, about a man whose father was convicted of child abuse, and who is writing a book absolving his father – but who is haunted by a young girl who seems to be an abuse victim. The story turns darker and darker, and we aren’t sure in the end how deep the stain of child abuse has spread.

Locus, October 2009

M. Rickert’s “The President’s Book Tour” probably reads as SF to most, as it seems to be set in the future, a future in which a devastating war has caused all the children to be deformed, vegetation to be killed, etc. But the manner of telling – the tone, and the almost fable-like disconnection of the setting – reminded me very strongly of Emshwiller.

Review of Map of Dreams for Fantasy Magazine

M. Rickert is easily one of the most exciting new writers to appear in the fantasy field over the past several years. Her stories are lyrical and odd, often myth-derived, often intriguingly framed. Story collections for new writers who have not yet published a novel used to be rare but they are common these days – sometimes such collections seem too early, but for Rickert such a collection is if anything overdue. And indeed in a sense she has now published a novel: the title story, new to this collection, is novel length at about 40,000 words. (“Map of Dreams”, along with several vignettes also new here, serves as a curious sort of frame for the book – appropriate as Rickert is a contemporary master of the frame story.)  It is an absorbing and moving story of a woman overcome by grief after her daughter is murdered by a sniper. Her marriage collapsing, she follows the husband of another of the sniper’s victims to Australia, convinced that he has learned time travel. This is fine work, but the resolution is a bit too pat, and over its length it loses some focus. But this book also includes some truly outstanding shorter works, beginning with her first published story, “The Girl Who Ate Butterflies”. Other favorites of mine include “Anyway”, about the agony of a woman whose son is about to join the military, and the terrible choice she is offered; and “The Chambered Fruit”, a bit reminiscent of “Map of Dreams” as it tells of a mother battling with her grief about her murdered daughter, and the effect on her of a girl who claims to hear from the daughter’s ghost; and “Angel Face”, about a supposed image of the Virgin, and a boy taken with a skeptical girl. Rickert also takes on the story of Leda and the Nativity Story in unusual ways. This is an essential collection by a superb writer.

Birthday Review: Stories of Albert E. Cowdrey

Yesterday, December 8, was the 85th birthday of Albert E. Cowdrey, long a rival of Robert Reed for F&SF's most prolific contributor. The great bulk of his work is darkly humorous fantasy, mostly set in or near New Orleans, though his only novel, Crux, is time travel SF, and he has written other SF as well. He's a consistently entertaining writer, and in his honor, here's a compilation of some of my Locus reviews of his work:

Locus, March 2002

The final story in the trio of long novellas under consideration is Albert E. Cowdrey's "Ransom" (F&SF, April).  This is the third in Cowdrey's series of stories set in a far future under totalitarian rule, all turning around time travel.  Hastings Maks, hero of a previous story, is divorced from his first wife and married to a woman he illegally brought back from the past.  His son (by his first wife) is kidnapped, and Maks receives a ransom request – he must go back to the past and rescue a young boy who is destined to die a nuclear war.  At the same time Maks' wife is becoming dangerously involved with an unscrupulous financier who has been taken to the future to help the Empress locate precious items in the ruins of America.  As with the other stories in this series, it is fast moving and the plot involves both the complications of time travel, and the political manipulations of the Security department for which Maks works.  It is nothing more than solid adventure, but it's a good example of such, and I liked it a lot.

Locus, April 2003

Albert E. Cowdrey is back with another amusing but dark look at crime in New Orleans, "The Dog Movie". A detective investigating a series of crimes befriends an old man, a potential victim, who claims his dead wife talks to him on his old TV. Cowdrey's evocation of the voices of his characters is as ever a delight.

Locus, July 2004

Rather more serious is Albert E. Cowdrey's "A Balance of Terrors". An embittered biomedical researcher meets her long ago lover, a very politically connected man, for lunch. We quickly cotton to the researcher's distaste for humankind, and to a certain resemblance to Tiptree's brilliant "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain", but Cowdrey avoids a slavish retelling of the earlier story, instead adding a morally evocative closing twist.

Locus, August 2004

F&SF for August is also strong. The cover novella is Albert E. Cowdrey's "The Tribes of Bela", fairly traditional biological SF from a writer better known for his offbeat tales of New Orleans. A mysterious series of murders on the planet Bela brings Colonel Roger Kohn to investigate. With the help of a few of the humans at this mining colony, and despite what seems to be obstruction by many others, he slowly comes to a realization that part of the answer lies with the very strange biology of this planet, a biology resulting from its eccentric orbit. But before he can take action, things go pear-shaped, leading to an action-filled denouement.

Locus, March 2005

Albert Cowdrey has a fine novelet here as well: "The Amulet". A writer interviewing "characters" from New Orleans stumbles across a woman who claims to have been born in "1294. Or maybe five." She tells him a story about an amulet that gives the wearer good luck – for a time. But the instructions for its use are important! And besides luck it proffers another gift. The story is quite funny, historically acute (and cute), told in a well-rendered deadpan voice – and with a nice twist to close things.

Locus, March 2006

The March F&SF features a dryly amusing novella from Albert Cowdrey, something of a change of pace from the bulk of his work. For one thing, “The Revivalist” is set primarily in Baltimore, as opposed to New Orleans. The narrator wakes in a hospital in 1999. But his last memories are from shortly after the war. He tells his story. He is the son of a wealthy brewer, but from early in his life he loved to sleep, sometimes for remarkable periods. All this sleep has two major effects – it makes him a disappointment to those who expect productivity from him (primarily his father and his wife), and it seems to extend his life. His story is a combination of triumphs and letdowns, with a heavy dose of cynicism, and even a bit of philosophical meditation on the perfectibility – or not – of humanity.

Locus, March 2008

Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Overseer” is an involving horror story set primarily in the years following the civil war. At the turn of the 20th Century, Nicholas Lerner, an old man in New Orleans, writes a memoir, beginning with his life on a plantation and his friendship with a slave boy. But the War intervened – and, in a different way, the plantation’s cruel overseer’s designs on Nicholas’s sister also intervened. Nicholas arranged for his slave friend to kill the overseer to keep him from importuning his sister – but this act backfires, as the overseer, even while dead, vows revenge. A revenge which involves Nicholas in a strange way, as the overseer chooses to advise Nicholas – leading him to great but poisoned success, as he plays both post-war sides (Reconstructionists and KKK-types) against each other. Nicholas’s memoir writing is alternated with scenes of his old man’s life – attended by a half-black servant who might be his son – and who might also be a target of the overseer.

Locus, June 2009

The second of F&SF’s new bimonthly issues features a long novella by Arthur Cowdrey, “Paradiso Lost”, in which his recurring character Robert Kohn tells the story of his first assignment as a military murder investigator. He’s a newly hatched Security Forces officer, assigned to a starship which is heading to the planet Paradiso to remove the colony there, which is in territory Earth is abandoning as the result of a recent war with aliens. On the way there two significant things happen – the nasty commander of the expedition is murdered, and Kohn becomes the lover of the ship’s pilot, an older woman who is second in command to the murdered General. Kohn manages to solve the murder, but a further mystery arises when they reach the planet – the colonists seem to have disappeared. We learn why eventually, and we witness another critical event, which tests Kohn’s personal and public loyalties. It’s fine work, though perhaps a bit too long and episodic for its eventual resolution to carry.

Locus, July 2010

Speaking of zombies, there is another zombie story in this issue, and it’s pretty entertaining too: Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Mr. Sweetpants and the Living Dead”, in which a successful writer hires a security firm to protect him after his latest lover comes after him for revenge – after the breakup and also after the lover seemed to have quite conclusively died. Funny and in a number of ways oddly sweet.

Ace Double Reviews, 15: People of the Talisman, by Leigh Brackett/The Secret of Sinharat, by Leigh Brackett

Ace Double Reviews, 15: People of the Talisman, by Leigh Brackett/The Secret of Sinharat, by Leigh Brackett (#M-101, 1964, $0.45, reissued in 1971 as #75781, $0.95)

by Rich Horton

(Covers by Ed Emshwiller)

These are Leigh Brackett's two Eric John Stark stories set on Mars. She wrote one other Stark story, "Enchantress of Venus" (aka "City of the Lost Ones"), published in the Fall 1949 Planet Stories. (The alert reader will guess that it was set on Venus.) It was a bit shorter, and it's collected in The Halfling and Other Stories. In the 1970s, she wrote three Stark novels set on a planet of another star, called Skaith.

People of the Talisman is an expansion of "Black Amazon of Mars", which appeared in the March 1951 Planet Stories. (Another story in that issue is one of the all-time classic "Brackett-like" Mars stories, Poul Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis".) The original story is about 23,000 words long, the expansion about 38,000 words. The Secret of Sinharat is an expansion of "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", which appeared in the Summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories. The original is about 21,000 words, and the expansion is to some 28,000 words. I have seen it asserted, both on the web and in the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, that the 1964 expansions were actually done by Brackett's husband Edmond Hamilton. I don't know if this is true (Clute actually writes "reported expanded for book publication by Edmond Hamilton"), though Hamilton did contribute a brief biographical note on Brackett to the Ace Double edition.

I had previously read the Ace Double versions of these stories, and for this review I read the Planet Stories versions, with an eye to comparison. This was rather interesting. The Secret of Sinharat is a modest expansion, concentrated in the last couple of chapters, with some changes to incident (a character Stark kills in the original is killed by the villainess in the expansion), and with a slight alteration to the concluding message from the heroine to Stark. The changes in People of the Talisman are much more extensive, and they start earlier. Many of the basic elements of the story are the same, but there are radical changes. The nature of the aliens encountered in the closing chapters is wholly different. The ending is completely different. The motivations, and the final decision, of the heroine are radically different (and her hair color changes as well!) It's pretty much a complete rewrite from about the third chapter on. I would say that both People of the Talisman and "Black Amazon of Mars" are worth reading on their own.

(Covers by Enric)

People of the Talisman opens with Eric John Stark trying to reach the city of Kushat with a dying Martian. The Martian confesses with his last breath that he stole a powerful talisman from the city, which guards the mysterious Gates of Death. Stark promises to return it. But on the way he is apprehended by raiders of Mekh, and their masked, black-armored leader, Ciaran. Stark escapes and makes his way to Kushat, where he warns the soft and skeptical populace of the dangerous raiders. When the raiders come, the defense is desperate but it fails, though Stark manages to unmask the leader -- and what he finds is not a surprise if you know the title of the original story. Here the two stories diverge wildly. In the first, a man Stark has befriended escapes to the Gate of Death, hoping to find a secret which will free the city from its conqueror. Stark knows that only evil waits behind those gates, and he follows, only to be followed himself by the beautiful Lady Ciara, the red-haired "Black Amazon" of the title. The three find evil indeed, and Stark must take a terrible risk to use the power of the talisman to free his friends and save Mars from the evil behind the gates. In the novel version, Stark and other city-dwellers plot to escape the city to the Gates of Death, where they believe the talisman Stark possesses may be the secret of freedom. They manage to capture their conqueror, the beautiful black-haired Lady Ciaran. But behind the Gates they again find evil creatures, though portrayed rather differently than in the shorter version. Stark again must vanquish these evil creatures, but the conclusion is quite different, as Lady Ciaran's motivations turn out to be not the same as in the original story.

It's fun and deeply colorful, quite original of its kind, and as I said both the short and long versions are well worth reading.

The Secret of Sinharat opens with Stark cornered by the Solar System law. He is offered a deal: to avoid prison, he must join the war-band of a prince called Kynon, who is apparently going to rain havoc on Mars if allowed to carry out his plans. Stark joins the band, not without making a couple of enemies among the other chief assistants to Kynon. He learns that Kynon claims to have discovered the ancient secret of mind transfer, by which an old man can become young again by transferring his mind to a young body. However, all this is a fraud. Stark still accompanies the war party, meeting a beautiful maidservant, and her fiery mistress, the pampered Queen to Kynon. He and the Queen are, by treachery, isolated during a sandstorm, and manage to survive by coming to the old city of Sinharat -- and their Stark learns another secret of the beautiful Queen. When the two return to the war band, he knows enough to deflect the plans of the war leader, but he must also deal with some more sinister creatures. As I said, the two versions of the story are largely the same, with fairly minor but not insignificant differences. The ending in particular ends up with Stark paired with the same woman -- but the woman's plans for Stark and her future are quite changed in the two versions. Again, a quite worthwhile and colorful adventure story.

I should note that while both stories are about the same person, and his character is consistent between the two, otherwise they are wholly independent, and there is no reason to regard them as being in any particular order timewise (though if you insisted you would probably put The Secret of Sinharat first), and indeed they really read as stories set in two different "futures".

(I was amused, too, by the covers to the Planet Stories issues. Both are by Allen Anderson, a rather lurid regular cover illustrator for the magazine. Both are quite faithful in that they actually illustrate scenes from the story. Both feature Eric John Stark, recognizably the same person. And both feature red-haired women as the most prominent figure. Only the later cover features an armored "bra", though, complete with shaped nipples (which seems wholly unlikely for any real world armor). That, by the way, is quite unfaithful to the story, as the armor was clearly intended to hide any evidence that its wearer was a woman. Anyway, they are pretty much prototypical Planet Stories covers, matching the magazine's reputation to a T.)

Birthday Review: The Big Jump, plus other shorter stories, by Leigh Brackett

Birthday Review: Leigh Brackett's The Big Jump (plus several of her shorter works)

For Leigh Brackett's birthday I decided to do one of my short story review compilations, but in her case I had to go back to my "Retro-Reviews" of old SF magazines. So these are the stories of hers I have reviewed in the original issues of the magazines they appeared in. These include one of her novels, The Big Jump, which first appeared in a single issue of the pulp Space Stories.

Space Stories, February 1953

(Cover by Jeff Jones)

The novel in the February 1953 issue is "The Big Jump", by Leigh Brackett. This too is "officially" a novel, at some 42,000 words. (As far as I can tell from a quick glance at my Ace edition of the novel, it's the same story.) It's a curious sort of book, spending much of its length in Brackett's "hard-boiled" mode, and for that portion it's not very successful. But right toward the end it effectively switches to her high-romantic mode, and that brief portion is rather nice.

Arch Comyn is a spaceship construction worker. He hears that somebody has completed "the Big Jump" -- travelled to another star. He learns that his close friend Paul Rogers was on the crew. However, details about the expedition have been suppressed. Comyn hears a rumor that the survivors are hidden in a hospital on Mars owned by the Cochrane Company (which built the spaceship involved). Comyn makes his way to Mars and rather implausibly barges into the Cochrane complex, and finds the hospital room with the one survivor, Captain Ballantyne. Ballantyne is dying, but Comyn hears him say just a bit -- a hint about "transuranics". Then Ballantyne dies, and Comyn is in the custody of the Cochrane Company, who try to beat his secret out of him. Eventually they let him go, and he heads back to Earth, concerned that the secret of what Ballantyne found on a planet of Barnard's Star will be of altogether too much interest to several parties. And indeed, Comyn detects a tail -- but then he sees Cochrane heiress Sydna Cochrane on TV, making a toast to Ballantyne and hinting that a visit from Comyn would be welcome.

Soon Comyn is confronting Sydna, though not before shaking two separate tails, one of whom tries to kill him. Sydna, who is 100% pure Lauren Bacall (remember, this is Brackett in her "tough guy thriller" mode), convinces Comyn to follow her to the Cochrane complex on Luna. Once there, Comyn to his horror sees what's left of Ballantyne -- even though he is dead, his body somehow still lives mindlessly. Before long, Comyn is a) having an affair with Sydna, and b) pushing to join the second expedition to Barnard's Star. After some more hijinks (another assassination attempt), Comyn and a few Cochranes (and some redshirts) are on their way to Barnard's Star. One of the "Cochranes" is William Stanley, a weaselly cousin-by-marriage who lusts after Sydna despite his married state. Stanley reveals that he has stolen the lost logs of the Ballantyne expedition, and he uses this vital knowledge to negotiate controlling interest in the prospective Transuranic company.

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller)

Then they arrive at Barnard's Star, and the novel changes tone entirely, to something transcendental, much more reminiscent of the best of Brackett's planetary romances. The other members of the first expedition are found, living in a primitive state with the presumptive natives of the planet. (Natives who seem to be fully humanoid for no reason at all!) Comyn finds his friend Paul Rogers, who refuses to return to Earth. It seems that beings called the Transuranae, composed of transuranic elements, have conferred immortality and freedom from conflict and want on the inhabitants of this planet. So once again we confront the choice -- intellect, striving, knowledge vs. bliss and contentment. (Cf. countless other SF stories, such as "The Milk of Paradise" by Tiptree.) It's no surprise what Comyn chooses (or has chosen for him), but Brackett presents the alternatives in her most evocative style, and really this final section is quite effective.

It's not one of Brackett's best works, but in the end it's decent stuff. The first part, however, is full of plot holes and implausibilities. As well as plain silly stuff like the horror everyone feels at seeing the quasi-living Ballantyne -- still twitching after his death. Spooky, maybe, but not the stuff of Lovecraftian horror as Brackett would have us believe.

Planet Stories, March 1955

Recently in one of the back issues of Planet Stories I have bought (indeed, it was the very last issue of Planet Stories ever published) I read a story called "Teleportress of Alpha C" by Leigh Brackett.  It was the story of a spaceship which had escaped from a regimented, risk-averse, solar system to make it across the years and light-years to Alpha Centauri, and the difficulties they overcame to establish a colony there.  From context it was obvious that it was a sequel, and when I saw a used copy of an Ace Double with Alpha Centauri or Die! by Brackett on one side I figured that would be the whole story, and I was right.  The story I had read is the second half of Alpha Centauri or Die!, while the first half, which appeared as a novella in Planet Stories, is the story of how the spaceship was stolen, and how the band of colonists escaped from the rather Williamsonian robots controlling the Solar System.  It's not Brackett at her best, but it's decent entertainment.

Venture, March 1957

I really liked Leigh Brackett’s “The Queer Ones”, but then I tend to really like Brackett. A newspaperman in a mountain town gets hints of a story – one of the mountain girls brought her boy into the doctor, and x-rays showed he was really strange. The girl swears she’s going to marry the handsome man who knocked her up – but he seems to have run off. But then he’s back, and so is his exotic sister, who makes a connection with the protagonist … It’s clear enough what’s going on, though Brackett runs a couple of nice variations on it, and it ends with classical Brackettian regret.

Venture, November 1957

Leigh Brackett's "All the Colors of the Rainbow" is on the one hand a pretty straightforward piece about the ugliness of racial prejudice, expressed as the residents of a small town beat up and rape an alien couple. But it has a curious colonialist side to it as well. The story is told from the POV of Flin, an reprensentative of the Galactic Federation, on his first posting to a newly encountered world, Earth. He is accompanied by his new wife, Ruvi. They are very humanoid except for their pointy ears and green skin. (Yes, they are Vulcans! Almost.) The Federation is providing great benefits to Earth via their advance technology, and they are also trying to civilize humanity. But in the small town Flin and Ruvi are posted to, the locals are essentially unanimously resentful of the alien presence, and they are very hostile to Flin and Ruvi. The whole thing culminates in a horrible scene in which a group of young toughs stop their car, beat up Flin, and rape Ruvi. And then the local justice system refuses to prosecute. The resolution is that Flin and Ruvi leave Earth -- but not before Flin, a weather control expert, takes a terrible revenge against that town. And he is forced to confront the fact that his career is over -- he's no longer civilized either. It's a decent and wrenching story, though far from subtle, and a bit overprogrammed.

There's an Edmond Hamilton story ("No Earthman I") in the same issue, in which Earth colonists have been trying to improve the lot of the aliens on a planet, but the aliens resent that rise up and murder the colonists, to drive them out. The end matter to the magazine includes a note from Brackett saying that one area in which she disagreed with Hamilton was that he was pro-colonialism -- and indeed his story in this issue reads a bit like, say, Jack Vance's The Gray Prince (or like the caricatured (though not entirely wrong) view many people have of Kipling) in its insistence that the aliens are fools for not accepting the kindly guidance of Earthmen. Brackett seems to be saying that her story has the opposite message. Only -- it doesn't. It sends the exact same message -- the locals in her story are fools for resenting the benevolent guidance of the Federation. The only difference is that the locals in this case are Earthmen, and the colonialists are aliens.

Amazing, May 1963

"The Road to Sinharat" is not a Stark story, though its Sinharat is the same as the Sinharat of The Secret of Sinharat, and both stories also mention the city of Valkis, and conflict between the Martians of the city states and those of the Drylands. The hero of this story is Dr. Carey, a Terran scientist, expert on Mars, who is wanted by the United Worlds Committee because of his opposition to the UW's plans to Rehabilitate Mars (i.e., terraform it to some degree), which he believes will be an ecological disaster, particularly for those who live in the Drylands. Carey comes to an Derech, a Martian who owes him for a past deed, a Low Canal resident, and Derech hides him from his pursuers, then agrees to help him make his way to the dangerous abandoned city, Sinharat, where Carey believes there is evidence that will convince the Terrans of their mistakes. The rest of the story follows Carey and Derech and Derech's girlfriend Arrin, by canal and then by land, to Sinharat. It's great fun, pure Brackett to my mind (some have wondered if Hamilton also had a hand in this story, presumably written about when he was working on The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman, but I think this is all Brackett). It's got the Brackett romantic touches, and an ecological and anti-Colonial theme that is well argued, I think, and plenty of excitement as well. It hasn't been neglected (it was reprinted in her collection The Coming of the Terrans) but it seems less well-known than it might be.

F&SF, October 1964

Leigh Brackett is, with Bradbury, one of the SF writers most associated with the Red Planet. Her only F&SF story set on Mars is "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon", a fine story in which an anthropologist confronts real Martians, and has a hard time fitting them into his scientific worldview. Brackett's story is one of the last which could straightforwardly present the "traditional" SFnal Mars of canals and decaying ancient races.

A Forgotten SF Novel: Where I Wasn't Going (aka Challenge the Hellmaker), by Walt and Leigh Richmond

Where I Wasn't Going (aka Challenge the Hellmaker), by Walt and Leigh Richmond

A review by Rich Horton

I posted a review of Walt and Leigh Richmond's Ace Double Gallagher's Glacier/Positive Charge back in April on the anniversary of Leigh's birth. Today would have been Walt's 96th birthday, so so here's a review of the only thing else I've read by them, an Analog serial.

They were a husband and wife SF writing team, who wrote mostly for Analog in the 1960s: about a dozen short stories between 1961 and 1973, of which only one appeared in another magazine, If. They also wrote five novels for Ace. Three of these were parts of Ace Doubles.

It would be fair to say that they were "late John Campbell" writers, who really couldn't sell to anybody else (except Don Wollheim). And it would be fair to say, based on what I've read, that this was on merit -- they were pretty bad, luckily for them bad in ways that appealed to the idiosyncratic and often annoying tastes of John Campbell in the 60s. Some of the novels were republished by Ace in the 1970s as revised by Leigh after Walt's death.

There is a rather amusing story about their method of collaboration. I've seen this independently attested by several people who met them at the Milford workshops in the mid-60s. Apparently, Walt would sit in his chair and telepathically transmit story ideas to Leigh while she typed. I'll go way out on a limb and say that I personally think Leigh Richmond is the sole author of all these stories, with her husband's name attached for any of a number of possible reasons. (It may well be that the scientific (or pseudo-scientific) ideas behind the stories came out of mutual discussions, mind you.) Leigh was 11 years the elder, by the way, though Walt died in 1977, only 55 years old. (I suppose one might adduce that date as evidence that the collaboration story was true: after all, their last novel was published in 1977, with the 1979 Phase Two being an expansion of a 1969 Ace Double half called Phoenix Ship.) Leigh died in 1996, age 85.

Leigh published one other story without Walt, though that was also a collaboration: "There is a Tide", with R. C. FitzPatrick, in the January 1968 Analog, and then one much later novel, Blindsided, with Dick Richmond-Donahue, her second husband, with her name given as Leigh Richmond-Donahue, so I assume Dick was her second husband. That book came out in 1993 from the obscure publisher Interdimensional Sciences. In 1992 she also published (as by Leigh Richmond Donahue) a (pseudo-?) scientific paper called Field Effect: The Pi Phase of Physics, through the Centric Foundation, which she and Walt had founded, and which seemed devoted to very Campbellian crackpottery. (This foundation was based in Maggie Valley, NC, a town in the Appalachians which as it happens I've visited.)

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

I had bought a few of the early '60s bedsheet-sized Analogs, and I ended up with both parts of the serial "Where I Wasn't Going", from October and November 1963. This was later revised and published as Challenge the Hellmaker in the little-regarded second series of Ace Specials, in 1976.

"Where I Wasn't Going" is set on a major UN project, a space station. The station is just becoming operational. The hero is an American Indian, Mike Blackhawk. The villain is a straight-arrow American military type. The heroes allies include a Russian woman, a black woman, a Chinese man, and various other ethnic types. (And they are mostly portrayed as pure types, though the black woman is, I thought, fairly well and sympathetically described.) In that way it is somewhat non-Campbellian, but otherwise it's pretty pure Campbell.

(Cover artist uncredited, Vincent Di
Fate perhaps?)

As the station comes online, a plot is put into motion by the military types to take over. It seems that the UN has decided that a space station is too powerful not to control, and not to use to control and regiment humanity even more closely. But fortunately at the same time, and by sheer accident, the Chinese scientist invents a space drive, based on some incredibly hokey "physics". (If I read it right, and I admit I may not have, it worked by aligning all the electrons and protons so that the charges were in the same direction, and thus it would be pulled "North". In Earth orbit! So that North, in terms of a magnetic field, wouldn't seem to have much meaning.) Using the space drive, and plenty of derring do, the heroes manage to escape, and to set the stage for humanity to be free to explore new frontiers. But not before casually (though, it must be said, by accident) using a laser to burn a hole through the Greenland glacier and destroy Thule, killing hundreds. (Luckily, we later find, they were all in league with the bad guys, so that's OK.)

Needless to say, it's pretty bad. I haven't read the expanded later version, Challenge the Hellmaker, so I can't say if it's improved or changed in any way.

Birthday Review: Absolute Uncertainty, by Lucy Sussex (plus additional reviews)

 Today is Lucy Sussex' birthday, and in her honor I have posted this brief review I did of her short 2006 collection Absolute Uncertainty, followed by three short extracts from my Locus column reviewing her short fiction.

Absolute Uncertainty, by Lucy Sussex (Aqueduct Press, 1-933500-06-9, $9, 148pp tpb) April 2006.

A review by Rich Horton (from Locus, September 2006)

This collection from Australian writer Lucy Sussex is one of an intriguing series of short books from Aqueduct Press collectively called Conversation Pieces: brief books engaged in a “conversation” with feminist SF issues, including short fiction, essays, original and reprinted novellas and short novels, even a long narrative poem. Absolute Uncertainty is a collection of short stories dating as far back as 1994 and including some from 2006. The stories cover quite a range: some SF, some fantasy, some that could be called horror. “Absolute Uncertainty” is one of the better known, about a sort of virtual reality review of Werner Heisenberg’s life, particularly his controversial association with the Nazis, and his attempt to develop for Germany an atomic bomb. The new stories include “A Sentimental, Sordid, Education”, about a young man’s ambiguous sexual initiation, and an AI’s research into the wellsprings of creativity; “A Small Star of Cold”, a bittersweet ghost story about a much-loved “party facilitator”; and “Duchess”, a clever story about what seems to be the return of the notorious 17th Century woman Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, to the present day to comment (and blog) about fashion. “Kay and Phil” is a moving story imagining an encounter between Philip Dick and Kay Burdekin, a feminist novelist who wrote a spooky novel imagining the world after a Nazi victory, Swastika Night: possible source material for The Man in the High Castle. “Frozen Charlottes” concerns a couple rehabbing and old home who find some dolls that seem linked to a horrifying historical tale of a serial killer of poor children. And “Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies” is a retelling of the real history behind the Australian song “Waltzing Matilda”, from a rather different point-of-view. The collection is capped with an interview with Sussex, conducted by Maureen Kincaid Speller. Fine stuff all around.

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Here are three more short extracts from my Locus columns reviewing additional stories by Lucy Sussex:

Locus, March 2005

Some real neat stuff at Sci Fiction in February. It opens with Lucy Sussex's "Matricide", about a woman who locates and sells unusual objects. Her occasional boyfriend finds a strange doll, and two of her clients want to buy it, but he won't sell to them. She's also dealing with a difficult pregnancy – and she's unready or afraid of commitment. Then the disappointed clients take rather sinister steps to retaliate.

Locus, December 2007

More online news … Two interesting new publications originate in Australia, both under the aegis (at least in part) of Alisa Krasnostein. New Ceres is a shared world project. The planet New Ceres is artificially maintained at an 18th Century tech level. There are hints in the two issues so far that this is a controversial aspect of their society, and that changes may be coming. My favorite stories so far, however, have been a couple of mysteries about an eccentric high-society woman, La Duchesse, and her secretary, Pepin, who has a secret of his own. In Lucy Sussex’s “Mist and Murder” (from issue 2) they investigate a potential haunting at the house of a man whose wife left him some time previously. The plot is clever enough (based on an early Australian story) but it is the characters La Duchesse and Pepin who make it work and who bid fair to return for many interesting adventures.

Locus, May 2008

My favorites in the Australian anthology 2012 were “Apocalypse Rules, OK?” by Lucy Sussex, very amusing stuff about the real movers behind the various idiocies humans get up to

Birthday Review: Stories of John Crowley

Birthday Review: Stories of John Crowley

John Crowley, with Gene Wolfe my favorite living SF writer, turns 76 today. My favorite of his novels is Engine Summer (1979), and his novel from last year, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, is of similar quality. Indeed, his first novel, The Deep, which I discovered in the Doubleday hardcover edition at my local library around when it first appeared in 1975, is remarkable and original and strange. He may be best known for the atmospheric fantasy Little, Big (1981), and for the Aegypt sequence of four novels.

He has also written some of the most wonderful short fiction of the past four decades. Among my favorites are such stories as "Novelty", "Snow", "Great Work of Time", "Gone", and "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines", but really it is all wholly worth your time. As recently as this year he won an Edgar Award for "Spring Break" (which is SF, by the way, though the ISFDB doesn't know that). He has also won the World Fantasy Award thrice, for Little, Big, "Great Work of Time", and Life Achievement.

I've compiled a list of things I've written, some in Locus, others elsewhere or new to this blog, about his short fiction. It's weighted, naturally, towards more recent stuff. Let's begin with links to my earlier posts about his novels Engine Summer and Ka:

Review of Engine Summer;

Review of Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr;

Here then is my compilation of what I've written about some of John Crowley's short fiction:

Review of his 1985 story "Snow"

One of my favorite John Crowley short stories is "Snow", first published in Omni in 1985. I reread it today. It's told by a man who had married Georgie, a rich and somewhat older woman for her money, and then fallen in love with her. Her first husband (source of all that money) had bought a "Wasp", a drone of some sort that followed her everywhere, recording her life. Sounds creepy, but the intent is not surveillance, but a record, to only be accessed after death. The couple separates, but never divorces, and after Georgie's death, the narrator inherits the right to view her life history. But when he does so, he learns that the access is only random. Worse, over time it degrades -- the images have "snow" (that's not the only use of snow imagery in the story). And it degrades in other ways. It's a really moving story, and a tremendous meditation on the nature of memory -- personal memory, and historical memory -- and besides that a fine character study, and just a beautifully written piece.

SFF Net post on the best stories of 1996

I thought the best short story of the year was "Gone" (F&SF, September) by John Crowley, a fable-like story about aliens who send some people odd little helpers. The protagonist is a divorced woman who seems to need to learn trust. A strange, really moving, story. [This story went on to win the Locus Award for Best Short Story.]

Locus, February 2003

The best story in the book (Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists), perhaps the best new story I've read this year, is John Crowley's novella "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines". I should warn readers that this story is not remotely SF. But it is quite wonderful, about a boy and a girl who become friends while attending a Shakespeare festival in rural Indiana in 1959; and the curious way in which their lives remain linked. Mix some quite gorgeous prose with a mélange of such features as the Baconian heresy, photography, stagecraft, and an affecting and tragic love story – the result is simply wonderful.

Locus review of Ellen Datlow's Naked City

And John Crowley’s “And Go Like This” is a delightful fantasia on an idea of Buckminster Fuller's – that the entire population of the world could fit in New York City.

Locus, October 2017

John Crowley is the latest author featured in PM Press’s Outspoken Authors chapbook series, with Totalitopia. The original story here is “This is Our Town”, told by a girl who grew up in Timber Town, which, she tells us, can be found in a book called This is Our Town, part of the Faith and Freedom series of readers for 4th and 5th grade Catholic students. The story concerns faith, and loss of faith, and miracles, and guardian angels, and problematic family members – it’s a John Crowley story, which is really all the recommendation required.

Locus, March 2018

New Haven Noir is one of a very long series of original anthologies of crime fiction, each set in a specific place. The stories aren’t normally SF, but one is, this time: John Crowley’s “Spring Break” (which is currently on the short list for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story [it won]). It’s set a couple of decades in the future, when it seems universities are essentially virtual. As are books! The narrator goes on a “Spring Break”, to a real physical college (Yale, of course). And he encounters a real physical library, with real physical books. And a librarian, who has his own feelings about students who don’t read real books. Much of the charm in the story (which does feature a crime, but not one that is all that interestingly solved) is in the telling, in a convincing future slang – as well as the sort of behind the scenes meditation on the changing place of books in our culture.

Locus, December 2018

(This issue has just appeared. If you enjoy Locus, please consider subscribing, or visit the website and consider donating or supporting the magazine on Patreon.)

Gardner Dozois’ final (I presume) original anthology, The Book of Magic, is here, and it lives up to the high standards set by his previous work. The best work includes “Flint and Mirror”, by John Crowley, framed as notes for a novel by Fellowes Kraft (a character from his Aegypt sequence). The story concerns Hugh O’Neill, heir to the throne of Ulster, and his upbringing first in Ireland, and then in England (for political reasons), where he meets the alchemist Dr. John Dee; and find himself set between two enemies (and their magic): the “old ones” in Ireland, and the Queen of England.