Birthday Review: The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell (Random House, 978-1-4000-6567-7, $30, hc, 624 pages) September 2014

A review by Rich Horton

[On the occasion of David Mitchell's 50th birthday, here's a repost of a review I did for Locus back in 2014 of The Bone Clocks.]

David Mitchell is a writer unconcerned with genre boundaries. Many SF readers are familiar with his wonderful 2004 novel Cloud Atlas (or with the ambitious film made of it), which has sections extending into the far future. My favorite of his novels is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), an historical novel (with slight fantastical elements) set in Japan at the turn of the 19th Century. And his new novel, The Bone Clocks, is again SF/Fantasy, with sections set in the medium near future, and with a central fantastical element concerning battling immortals. Does it all work?

The book is organized as six long sections, all featuring an Englishwoman, Holly Sykes, as a significant character (and indeed as the viewpoint character of the first and last parts). We meet Holly first in 1984, when she is 15 and mad at her mother and in love with a 24 year old man (who has made her pregnant, though she doesn't know that yet). Holly also has a bit of a psychological history: as a child she heard voices. And her young brother is precocious and quite strange. She runs away from home to shack up with her boyfriend, only to find that he’s cheating on her with one of her best friends, so she runs away again, making several significant connections: with Ed Brubeck, a lonely boy in her class whom has been shunned as a newcomer; with a strange old woman who makes a curious request; and with a radical couple. She encounters shocking violence, and learns a sort of independence, before Ed finds her with the terrible news that her brother has disappeared.

That sets the stage – quite mysteriously – for the rest of the novel. The succeeding sections each leap forward a decade or so, and are told from different points of view: First comes Hugo Lamb, a charismatic but psychopathic Cambridge student who almost falls in love with Holly (one gathers she might have been his redemption) before being recruited into a group of immortals, the Anchorites. Then Ed Brubeck, now a journalist in Iraq, married to Holly and with a young daughter but unable to give up the thrill of war correspondence. Then Crispin Hershey, a successful novelist (who seems made up of 75% Martin Amis, 10% David Mitchell, and the rest invented) whose career seems in the dumps after a vicious review, after which he takes horrible revenge on a critic, while crossing paths with Holly, who has become a bestselling writer after a memoir about the voices she hears when a child (again, Holly becomes a redemptive factor in Crispin’s life). And finally a Canadian doctor who treated Holly for cancer, but who also turns out to be a member of more benevolent group of immortals, the Horologists, who are engaged in a long battle with the Anchorites. This section at last gives us a potted history of the long battle, leading a climactic battle between the warring immortal sects. The final section is set in Holly’s old age, as she is trying to raise two grandchildren (one of them chance adopted) in an Ireland descending (with the most of the rest of Western society) into chaos after a mini-Apocalypse due to global warming and accompanying superstorms.

There’s a lot going on here, obviously. At one level it’s a sort of life story of a rather remarkable woman (too remarkable, in some ways: both Holly’s near sainthood and her sudden literary success seemed implausible to me: I believed her rebellious teenaged avatar rather more than her later selves). At another level it’s an impressive travelogue, with interesting scenes in England, Ireland, Switzerland, Australia both in the near future and distant past, 19th Century Russia, Japan, Canada, the US, and Iceland. At a third level it’s an SF novel with a political subtext, showing our present day sins leading to a climate-change induced disaster, and on this level it’s pretty impressive, particularly in the final segment. Mitchell has a real SFnal imagination – he’s not at all the slumming mainstream writer lazily borrowing SF tropes that SF readers so often complain about. The novel is often comic, it is intricately and interestingly plotted, and it's impressively well-written. For regular readers of Mitchell, there are also nice but not overly intrusive links to his earlier books (including a by the by explanation for one of the stranger elements of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and mostly minor but sometimes significant characters shared with most of his previous books).

But … well, there’s a but, of course. Besides all the things I mention above, The Bone Clocks is also a fantasy novel about a centuries-long battle between two small but very powerful groups of immortals. And that part – while it is intriguing – really doesn’t quite work. It’s not so much that the fantastical elements are implausible in the extreme – though they are – I’m happy enough suspending my disbelief that far. I had two problems, though. One is the hokey magic battle at the climax, which really comes off as cliché – Harry Potter dueling with bolts from wands, that sort of thing. The other is that the battle between two small groups (one rather conveniently given the moral high ground over the other group, who come off as sneering supervillains) is elevated in importance, seems to me, above the fates of a whole world full of ordinary people. Perhaps the concluding chapter is Mitchell giving the lie to that – the victory of one group of immortals seems minor in the face of a crumbling world, all the whizbang battles seem almost silly next to Holly and her fellows' dignified work at survival – and if so that’s a fair and powerful conclusion.

I don’t want to overemphasize my issues with that aspect of things, however. The Bone Clocks remains a tremendously enjoyable novel, and a novel with enough serious heft of speculative thought, and character insight, to make it worth pondering. I’d rank it behind The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas, but it’s still worth reading, and one of the best novels, SF or otherwise, of the year.

Birthday Review: Ascending, by James Alan Gardner

Ascending, by James Alan Gardner

a review by Rich Horton

Today is James Alan Gardner's 63rd birthday. In his honor, here's a review I did for my old blog of his novel Ascending. I will add that I hadn't seen a novel from Gardner in over a decade until new novels appeared in each of the past two years: All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault and They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded. A welcome return indeed!

Ascending was James Alan Gardner's fifth novel, and his fourth about Festina Ramos, an "Explorer" with the Navy of the future Human Technocracy.  (Besides those four novels, all with one word titles (Expendable, Vigilant, and Hunted being the other three), he has written Commitment Hour, which does not seem to be about Festina.)  Festina was the protagonist of Gardner's first novel, in which we learn the general setup of his future history, to wit 1) humans (and a number of other alien species) have been given the secret of FTL travel as well as some other nice stuff such as life extension treatments by apparently benevolent aliens, 2) the more advanced aliens are the controlling races of the League of Peoples, a very loose confederation of beings that operates with one simple law: anyone who might kill another sentient being is considered non-sentient, and cannot travel outside their own Solar System: if they do, they die, instantly and mysteriously; and 3) the Human Navy's Explorer Corps is composed of disabled and disfigured people who are considered "expendable" because of their handicaps, thus handy for being sent on dangerous missions.  John Clute called this last idea the silliest idea he had ever seen in SF, or words to that effect, and I agree.

In Expendable, book 1, Festina was sent to Melaquin, an Earthlike planet from which no Explorer has returned -- it turns out that it's a parking spot for rebellious Admirals and other people the Technocracy wants to dump without killing.  It also turns out that it is inhabited by a race of glass people who look exactly like humans but who are transparent.  This race is dying out because they tend to get "Tired Brains" at the age of 50 -- and though they are very hard to kill, they just lay down and vegetate forever. Only a few are alive in this book, and Festina befriends one of them, a woman named Oar.  But at the end of Expendable, Festina has exposed the improper use of Melaquin, so the Technocracy has to abandon the planet, and she leaves Oar behind, believing her dead after an 80 story fall.

After Expendable Festina is no longer the POV character, but in each book she is an important secondary character.  Vigilant and Hunted are mostly unlinked separate stories.  Ascending, though, resumes on Melaquin, with Oar having awoken from a 4 year sleep, apparently cured of her injuries. She has been discovered by a criminal of the Divian species named Uclodd Unorr: a short orange humanoid.  He has been hired to spirit Oar away before the Technocracy council of Admirals finds her, because they wish to make sure she cannot testify against them about the crimes on Melaquin.  So Uclodd, his wife Lajoolie, and Oar are soon running away in the intelligent ship Starbiter.  But they find that not only is the Human navy after them, so is a powerful alien species called the Shaddill -- the very species which sold FTL technology to Divians and Humans, and which is believed to have created Oar's people in the distant past.  After some hair raising adventures, they encounter Festina Ramos, then another strange alien species, the Cashlings. All the while Oar is in contact with a weird alien named the Pollisand, who claims to have brought her back from the dead, and who wishes her help in ridding the universe of the evil Shaddill.

The book is quite fun to read.  It is told in Oar's inimitable voice, familiar to readers of Expendable: she is childish but charming, desperate for attention, very egotistical, profane.  The reasons for all this are explained in the book.  The voice is fun to read, and the action of the book is quite exciting as well.  At the same time, there are caveats.  The whole setup for Gardner's future is really absurd.  Moreover, the science in these books is extremely rubbery, pretty much whatever it needs to be for plot purposes at any one time.  I have seen a number of comments from readers for whom all this is too much, and they can't enjoy the books.  I find that thoroughly understandable -- I can only say that I do like the books, albeit with reservations and a certain amount of eye-rolling and eyebrow-raising.  I made a comment, in a review of one of the earlier books, that they reminded me, in some ways, of '50s SF: in the rubbery but fun science, and in the whole insouciance of the approach to things.  I will say that Gardner's imagination is active: his aliens, though very humanlike in character, are neatly designed, and his tech, wacky is it is, is also often quite clever.

Birthday Review: Early Short Stories (and one obscure novel) by Algis Budrys

Birthday Review: Early Short Stories (and one obscure novel) by Algis Budrys

by Rich Horton

Algis Budrys was just a couple of months older than my father, and he'd have turned 88 today. He was one of my favorite SF writers. His best work, in my opinion, came mostly in the 1960s -- the remarkable novel Rogue Moon, the underappreciated novel The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn, and such stories as "For Love", "Wall of Crystal Eye of Night", "Be Merry", and a non-SF story, "The Master of the Hounds". He also did excellent later work: "The Silent Eyes of Time", "A Scraping at the Bones", and the novels Michaelmas and Hard Landing. Late in his life he edited the interesting small press magaine tomorrow (which became one of the first magazines to transition online), right after a period working for Writers of the Future and, by extension, the Church of Scientology, that hasn't reflected well on his reputation.

However, this collection of reviews focuses on his stories from the '50s (with one 1960s outlier that reads to me like a '50s story), as well as his very obscure early novel Man of Earth. He did some very strong work in the '50s as well, with "The End of Summer" in particular a very memorable piece.

Space Science Fiction, November 1952

Of the short stories, I liked Budrys' the best. It appears to have been tied for his first publication with "The High Purpose", which was in the November Astounding. "Walk to the World" is a bit slight -- it's about a boy, son of an accomplished spaceship Captain. His father often goes walking, seemingly looking for some place unexplored -- the "World" as opposed to "Home". But he always comes Home, of course. Then an old friend, now an Admiral, comes calling. It seems he is needed to leave his home, on a well-settled planet, and go encounter the "World" again, in the form of newly discovered aliens. The resolution is low key, and I liked the message, but really the story doesn't surprise at all. But the telling is very assured -- it may be the best written of all the stories in this issue. (I will confess that Budrys is a long time favorite of mine, and that I consider him sadly underrated (mainly because of his relatively small output, I am sure).) I also note the byline, "A. J. Budrys", which he doesn't seem to have used very often. (Though he seems to be called "Ajay" by his friends.)

Dynamic, October 1953

Budrys's "Snail's Pace" is a somewhat labored and cynical philosophical piece, in which an aging space pilot, who has battled to advance the space program against much resistance, goes into space to begin work on a space station just as a nuclear war is starting. He and his fellows soon realize there will be no further missions, and they debate throwing in with the apparently victorious Russians or simply giving up and heading home, and eventually the old guy decides to head home -- humanity has proven that it's not ready for space yet, and technological advance will return to a snail's pace. Not convincing.

Dynamic, January 1954

The rest of the issue is actually not bad, though not great. Budrys's "Desire No More" is a somewhat bitter story about a man so obsessed with being a space pilot that his life becomes meaningless when it becomes clear that even though he might be one he won't really be one in a significant sense. Good try, I thought, but not really successful.

Cosmos, July 1954

Budrys' novella is more interesting. I trust the only reason the Anderson story was the "feature" was that he (then and ever) had a much bigger name. "We Are Here" is one of a number of SF stories with titles taken from "Dover Beach", though I always thought there ought to be more. (Others include Kuttner's "Clash by Night", Bova's As On a Darkling Plain (others have also used this title), and Blaylock's Land of Dreams. (And arguably Pangborn's "The Night Wind".) It seems to me that "Ignorant Armies" could be a very good SFnal title.) (In case anyone questions the provenance of "We Are Here", the story opens with a quotation from Arnold's poem.)

"We Are Here" is an odd, rather confused, story, that seems quite ambitious and which I thought could have been awfully good but doesn't quite work.  It opens with a scoundrel and sneak thief using his superior psychological abilities to take a car from another man. In the process he murders the man and rifles the car, which turns out to contain some intriguing items. The thief has found other such items before, and he is convinced that he is on the trail of a fantastic opportunity, if he can only arrange a meeting with the organization producing these on a favorable footing. On another thread, the murder investigation, by a smart cop, is strangely derailed by his superior. We quickly learn that the superior is a part of this mysterious organization -- which turns out to be composed of nonhumans -- beings from some other dimension, perhaps. For hard to comprehend reasons, they are working for an economic takeover of Earth -- by offering fabulous products at ridiculous prices. I never quite understood the economic footing of all this, and for this reason, and other hard to grasp motivations, the story founders. But much of it is interesting, and as often with Budrys, told a bit slant and featuring nearly psychotic but still intriguing characters.

Astounding, November 1954

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

The lead novelette, Budrys' "The End of Summer", is a well-known story, perhaps Budrys' first major work. It's just under 10,000 words. It's a fine story indeed. The viewpoint character, Kester Fay, is returning to America after a couple of centuries away. We soon gather that humanity is immortal, with a concomitant increase in concern about safety. Fay is a Dilettante, or Dilly, and the more conservative Homebodies and Workers resent that. Though there is another group, Hoppers, even less conservative than Dillies.

Fay runs over a boy's dog on the way home, and we learn more about the strangeness of this society. It seems no one remembers very well -- at first I assumed because of the weight of immortal years, but the real reason is stranger. So the disapproving conservative parents of the boy resolve to erase memories of the dog from their "tapes". And soon the "tapes" become the focus. We finally learn that Kester Fay was the man who decided to keep humanity from death -- at the cost, apparently, of memory, though humans learn artificial means (the tapes) of preserving at least SOME memory.

In the end this is a very odd story -- in one way an indictment of the danger of immortality, but a rather oddly slanted look at that old theme. I think it's a very effective story, and really rather spooky, though I thought the way in which Kester Fay is revealed to be the genius behind the whole setup was a bit of a weak point. Still, it deserves its sterling reputation, and it's a story that continues to live in my memory.

Science Fiction Stories, January 1955

The other short story is by a much better known writer, to say the least, Algis Budrys. "The Two Sharp Edges" comes early in his career, but it is serious and ambitious and real-seeming in a way these other stories just aren’t. That said, it comes just short of the real wow factor ... it’s a good story, not great one. It tells of a soldier who has been granted the right to an abandoned farm after a devastating war. He restores it to productivity, and then one night a man and his sons visit ... they’re clearly down on their luck. It turns out -- no surprise -- that they were the former owners; but were on the losing side. The story turns on the conversation between the soldier and the former owner, which turns again on this man’s particular secret. There’s no violence nor bitterness, just a sadness at what war does, and another sadness, about home and the loss of home.

If, June 1955

There are two novelettes. Algis Budrys' "The Strangers" (14,000 words) is a vaguely Sturgeonesque story that shows promise but ends weakly. Wes Spencer, a bitter 24 year old drunk, is confronted in a bar by a man who knows things about him he shouldn't, and who in particular says "Mr. Laban is dead". This prompts memories of Mr. Laban, a sort of quasi-Uncle who used to visit Spencer throughout his youth, teaching him things, giving him money and assistance, and hinting at a great future. But all this had ended 6 years before -- Wes is at college, on a football scholarship, when he is severely injured, apparently on purpose by mysterious enemies of Mr. Laban. Mr. Laban sadly abandons him -- it seems he's no use anymore to whatever mysterious purpose he has. Spencer is left with a job and the memory of a girl he was supposed to meet but never had. Then, by coincidence (it seems) he meets a girl -- the girl -- and learns that her story was similar: meetings with Mr. Laban, then abandonment when for some reason she falls short. Together, however, they are able to piece together the real story -- which turns out to be pretty disappointing, in my opinion anyway. Still, all in all an OK story. Perhaps it was hurt in my eyes because I was so reminded of Sturgeon, and because Budrys could not drive to a really Sturgeonesque revelation.

Infinity, October 1956

Algis Budrys' "Lower Than Angels" is a Campbellian gimmick story that went to Infinity instead -- an explorer assigned to contact the primitive aliens on a new planet is disillusioned by the belief that the corporation he works for will simply exploit them -- but his efforts to make real contact are doomed because the aliens insist on believing him to be a god.  All that is worked out sensibly enough -- then the last two pages give an unconvincing twist.

Astounding, February 1957

"The War is Over" is about a man of a race of beings who have obsessively worked for generations to build a spaceship.  He is the chosen pilot, and he makes his way to an Earth ship.  He gives the Captain his message: "The War is Over!" -- then collapses into gibbering idiocy.  We learn that he is a descendant of a lizard -- forcibly evolved over centuries by the communications device implanted within the original courier, who crashlanded on the lizard's planet but who was compelled to find a way to deliver the message no matter how long it took.  Reading it as a teen I just thought that so powerful -- but Budrys' delivery seemed rather clunky on this rereading.

If, May 1963

"Die, Shadow!" is sort of weirdly semi-old-fashioned for the Algis Budrys of the 60s -- reads more like an early 50s Planet Stories piece. A space pilot crashes on Venus, and saves his life by suspended animation. He is awakened millennia later by people who regard him as a god, and asked to intervene in a war between humanity and beings from another dimension, "Shadows". Both sides in the war turn out to be wrong -- only the "god" can set things right. Odd sort of thing.

Man of Earth (1958 novel based on "The Man From Earth", from the October 1956 Satellite)

(Cover by Richard Powers)

This is a 1958 novel (never reprinted -- apparently Budrys won't allow a reprint), based on a 1956 novella, "The Man From Earth". It actually opens intriguingly enough, with Allen Sibley, a corrupt stockbroker in a regimented future, contemplating a mysterious stranger's offer of a way out of his legal troubles. He learns that he can be altered completely -- in body and mind -- and indeed greatly improved, while retaining his memories.

He jumps at the chance, only to be shanghaied to the failing colony on Pluto, albeit after the alteration treatment has been given him, apparently successfully. Now calling himself John L. Sullivan, he ends up in the Army, having no marketable skills. The second section of the book is the story of his advancement in the Army, and his eventual overcoming of the malign and/or corrupt sorts about him. It is awful stuff, Heinlein-imitation at its worst, totally cliché, reading like the worst of contemporary "coming of age" Mil-SF only without much SFnal kick. It seems that the colonists on Pluto are planning a sort of revenge attack on Earth -- but then at the conclusion there is an easily predictable twist ... The twist is actually acceptable, nothing great, but I can imagine a tolerable novelette having been made of the beginning (cut), a different middle section (drastically cut) and the conclusion. I have no idea if the novella "The Man From Earth" is by any chance that "tolerable novelette", though I doubt it.

(One of the most egregious weaknesses of this novel is the way that Allen Sibley and John L. Sullivan are completely different characters, with no detectable linkage except the author saying so. I almost wonder if this isn't really two failed stories clumsily mashed together.)

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Gregory Norman Bossert

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Gregory Norman Bossert

by Rich Horton

Greg Bossert turns 57 today (hard as that may be to believe!), and in his honor I'm posting this set of the reviews I've done for Locus of his stories. All except one -- for my review of "The Empyrean Light", from the Fall 2018 Conjunctions, you'll have to wait for the next issue of Locus (February).

Locus, May 2010

Gregory Norman Bossert’s first story, “The Union of Sky and Soil”, appears in the April-May Asimov’s, and it’s an impressive debut, albeit undeniably the work of a writer with room to grow. The setup and working out are fairly familiar: an archaeological team on an alien planet is working against time to unearth the wonders of the natives’ distant past before the human colonists and a local mining company kick them out. Will any reader doubt for a second that the site will, at the last minute, yield truly amazing things? Of course not, but for all that familiar plot, and the crude cartoons of the villains, there is much to like here, particularly the quite nicely and naturally depicted characters of the archaeologists, and the lovely concept of the aliens’ art: glass/plant meldings, and the quite moving conclusion.

Locus, August 2010

In the August Asimov's I was happy to see Gregory Norman Bossert’s second story, “Slow Boat”, good work but a bit formulaic, about a woman kidnapped and sent into space inside a suspended animation box of course. The mystery is who kidnapped her and why, and the action is how she responds to this. I didn’t quite buy it, and there was too much telling, but the idea is nice, and Bossert remains an intriguing new writer.

Locus, December 2010

New writer Gregory Norman Bossert continues to impress with “Freia in the Sunlight” (Asimov's): here Freia is an AI warplane, who begins to interpret her optimal actions in unexpected ways.

Locus, February 2013

In Beneath Ceaseless Skies #109, Gregory Norman Bossert's “The Telling” is a very original story about a strange child (significantly named Mel) is a strange house whose master has just died. Mel, ambiguously some sort of heir, is drafted to do the “Telling” – to ask the bees of the household to continue to offer their favor. It is full of atmosphere, and weirdness, and disconnection … a lovely story, from a writer who has impressed with everything I've seen from him, and each story quite different to the others.

Locus, August 2013

Perhaps the best in the August Asimov's is “Lost Wax”, by Gregory Norman Bossert. This is another story of revolution, centered around two people, a young artist who sculpts “Messenger Birds” and her friend who helps engineer them to carry provocative messages around the city, whose rulers use “golethem” to control the populace. There's not much surprising in the way this all works out, and if the political ideas are a bit trite the characters are involving and the central notion is well worked out.

Locus, December 2013

Other good stories in the December Asimov's include ... Gregory Norman Bossert's “Bloom”, solid sf adventure of the “menacing alien biology” variety, with a guide and two other people trapped on a “bloom” that will consume them at the slightest move;

Locus, April 2015

Gregory Norman Bossert signaled with his first story a few years ago that he was a writer to watch, and he hasn't disappointed since, showing excellent range and a real feel for story. His latest, “Twelve and Tag”, from the March Asimov's, may be his best yet. It's a tense piece told in a bar in the Jupiter system, as a team of ice miners get to know their newest crew members, Adra and Zandt. They play a game, “Twelve and Tag”, built on quickly matching word pairs but more importantly on telling stories – one true, one false. The stories, the first by an existing crew member, the rest by the new crew, work brilliantly first to set the scene: a future in which the “Out”: space, the Outer Planets, are a frontier in the traditional sense, where fortunes can be made but where life is fairly cheap; all complicated by the expensive process of TAGing, whereby one can be backed up. But then we gather that the backups of many people were lost in a hack some years ago. The individual tales, representing the worst or the most painful or the most embarrassing things the tellers have done, work well to illuminate character – of the tellers, to be sure, and also of the listeners: variously they are mini-adventures and tales of fraught family lives and lost loves … and eventually, the real story, linking everything together, comes clear. It's a good a story as I've seen in 2015, with a neat Sfnal background, wrenching personal details, and exciting action.

Locus, February 2017

Gregory Norman Bossert is always interesting, and “Higherworks” (Asimov's, December 2016) is certainly that, though I felt it didn’t quite work. Dyer is some kind of creator of nanotechnology that seems to be used for communal rave-like events (one issue I had was that I never quite understood this particular purpose – my fault, perhaps). But she is on shaky legal ground – she is a US Economic Refugee in the UK, and moreover her former company believes she has stolen their intellectual property, and this use of nano seems to be illegal in the UK – and on this particular day she seems to be followed by a mysterious woman who keeps disappearing. The ultimate explanation is sensible, I suppose, but I found it a bit underwhelming.

Birthday Review: The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

a review by Rich Horton

Today Nicholson Baker turns 62. In his honor, I've exhumed this review from my old blog.

I should say to begin with that Nicholson Baker is a favorite novelist of mine. His first novel, The Mezzanine, remains my favorite among his works, but I've never been disappointed, except perhaps by The Fermata. (Though I have not read Human Smoke, his most recent nonfiction book, nor the novel House of Holes, and I probably won't .)

The anthologist of the title is the first-person narrator, a poet name Paul Chowder, who had some early success (including a Guggenheim), but has fallen on hard times in his career. Chowder has compiled an anthology, called Only Rhyme, a collection of rhymed poetry. However he has become blocked on writing the introduction. Partly out of frustration at his fecklessness in this effort, his long time girlfriend, Roz, has left him.

The book covers a few weeks of his life. (A long time period for a Baker novel -- The Mezzanine took about an hour, Vox however long a phone sex call takes, Room Temperature about 20 minutes.) In his personal life Chowder spends most of his time cat vacuuming -- that is, avoiding writing. He cleans out his office. He mows his lawn. He helps a neighbor put in a floor. And he moons over Roz, even visiting her a few times, especially when he suffers a minor hand injury. He gives a reading. He renews his passport. And he attends a conference in Switzerland.

Around all this he discusses his theories about poetry. Chowder is a strong advocate of rhyme (as his anthology's title suggests). He's also a strong believer that the fundamental rhythm of English poetry is the four beat line of the ballad. Metric theory (iambs and anapests and all) is a distraction. Iambic pentameter is a mistake. Free verse even more so. (Yet he constantly mentions how good some free verse poems are -- and, ironically, he admits that he himself can't rhyme very well.) It's all quite well argued, with excellent examples. Even if you disagree, it's very entertaining. (Assuming you like poetry.)

Aside from those details of plot and theme, the book is just very nicely written. Baker is a wonderful, funny, writer of prose, and a great observer of details. (For instance, he complains about something I've complained about -- the way it is so hard to tell which side is up on a USB connector.) Prose example: talking about Horace meant when he wrote "carpe diem" -- not exactly "seize the day" but pluck it: "Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant -- pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grape the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man Horace was." Not the best, nor most euphonious, passage I could have chosen, but it gives a good sense of the rhythm and light humor and knowledge of the book. Highly recommended.

[This novel appeared in 2009. Another novel about Paul Chowder, Travelling Sprinkler, appeared in 2013.]

Old Bestseller: The Booming of Acre Hill, by John Kendrick Bangs

Old Bestseller: The Booming of Acre Hill, by John Kendrick Bangs

a review by Rich Horton

John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) was a native of Yonkers, NY. He attended Columbia, and on graduation went to work for Life Magazine, and later for Harpers'. He wrote comic sketches from the beginning, and later a considerable variety of comic short stories, novels, and also poems. The term "Bangsian Fantasy", for a fantasy set in the afterlife, was coined after him, though I'm not sure it's still current -- at any rate, I always use the term "Afterlife Fantasy" for such works. He seemed to have a solid reputation as a humorist in his lifetime, but he doesn't seem all that well remember these days, and on the evidence of the book at hand, I'd suggest that much of his humor has dated a great deal by now.

The Booming of Acre Hill is a collection of short stories, all set in or very near the New York suburb Dumfries Corners, which I suspect may have been based on Bangs' longtime home, Yonkers. It is subtitled "and other reminsiscences of urban and suburban life", which seems to imply that the stories may be true, but they are unmistakably fiction. The stories first appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal, the Women's Home Companion, and "the various publications of Messrs. Harper and Brothers". My edition looks like a First. It's published by Harper and Brothers, and illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson.

The stories are:

"The Booming of Acre Hill"
"The Strange Misadventures of an Organ"
"The Plot That Failed"
"The Base Ingratitude of Barkus, M.D."
"The Utilitarian Mr. Carraway"
"The Book Sales of Mr. Peters"
"The Valor of Brinley"
"Wilkins"
"The Mayor's Lamps"
"The Balance of Power"
"Jarley's Experiment"
"Jarley's Thanksgiving"
"Harry and Maude and I -- Also James"
"An Affinitive Romance"
"Mrs. Upton's Device"

The bulk of the stories are between 2500 and 3500 words, with the last a bit longer at some 6000 or so. The first 12 are purely about suburban life. The first one is a bit uncharacteristics -- it's not about Dumfries Corners but a new development nearby, Acre Hill, and the scheme to draw buyers, which, curiously I thought, involved hiring a socially connected but impecunious man to rent a house and throw parties to which the rich and upper class denizens of the city will come -- convincing people moving to the suburbs that this was the place to be. This gives a hint as to the class of people living in these "suburbs" -- they all had a couple of servants, for instance. They seem to be professionals, lawyers and the like.

"The Mayor's Lamps" and "The Balance of Power" are both about a man who tries to run for Mayor of Dumfries Corners, mainly because he wants the lamps that are gifted to each Mayor. He loses, of course (to his wife's relief) -- the second story is an encounter with a man who represented "the balance of power" -- a working class fellow who felt snubbed by the candidate. Which means that the suburb does have an "other side of the tracks".

The two Jarley stories reminded me just a bit of Kuttner and Moore's Gallagher stories -- Jarley has a habit of making implausible and ultimately useless inventions. (For instance, in one story he devises a machine to harvest his son's energy, and doses himself -- unfortunately, he does indeed become full of energy, but he also starts to act like a ten year old.)

The last three stories are very light romances. The first is about the narrator's rivalry with Harry for the attentions of a pretty girl named Maude -- and as they debate who has the better case, James swoops in and takes her affections. The second describes two excellent young people, who have not married despite closing in on 30. They are perfect for each other. But the man lives in New York, and the woman in Boston. The story ends "But they never met. And they lived happily ever after." And the third concerns a woman who is constantly playing matchmaker. Her husband finally convinces her to stop, but then she insists on trying one more time ... and after some wrong turns, a fortunate scheme works out.

The other stories are about the misadventures of ordinary life in the suburbs, very much in the tone of, say, a 1950s sitcom. My favorite in the whole book is "The Book Sales of Mr. Peters", in which a vestryman at the local church is inveigled to arrange a book sale in order to raise money to fix the roof. The inconvenience of the sale is amusingly described, but it makes what seems a nice profit. So the next year he is importuned to repeat the sale. He agrees, then nothing seems to happen. So he shows the importuners how much the previous year's sale actually cost him (far more than the profit), and happily writes them a check for the needed amount, glad to have saved himself a lot of money.

There are, I think, two kinds of comedy -- comedy that shocks us, disturbs us, and makes us question the nature of the world or of our lives and society; and comedy that reassures us that's all is right with the world and our place in society. These stories are most definitely of the latter sort. They are reasonably amusing, but terribly dated, and I think it is their conventionalism and refusal to challenge the reader that date them, and that make them essentially forgotten.

Birthday Review: Ragamuffin, by Tobias S. Buckell

Ragamuffin, by Tobias S. Buckell

a review by Rich Horton

Tobias Buckell turns 40 today, and in his honor, I've compiled a set of my Locus reviews of his short fiction; and I've also resurrected this review that I did for my old blog back in the day, of his second novel.

Ragamuffin is Tobias S. Buckell's second novel, and it is a direct sequel to his first, Crystal Rain. However it does not seem at first a sequel, as the action begins on Pitt's Cross, as a mysterious woman named Nashara escapes the human reservation there. Indeed, we learn a lot about the larger universe of Buckell's future, stuff only hinted at in Crystal Rain. Humans are generally kept in near or literal slavery by a variety of powerful alien races, all apparently under the control of the Satraps, trilobite-like aliens who use mind control on their subjects. The Satraps (a bit like Walter Jon Williams' Shan, rulers of the Praxis) greatly restrict technological development, and humans are a particular offender in this sphere. Three human worlds, at least, are isolated behind closed wormholes: Earth, Nashara's home planet of Chimson, and New Anegada (the Nanagada of Crystal Rain). Humans in the Satrapy are controlled by a human group called Hongguo, who police tech advancement and create mind-controlled slaves using Satrapy equipment. Nashara herself is a "Ragamuffin", one of an isolated group of space pirates or independent traders, depending on point of view -- but she is also a special creation -- a clone who, along with her sisters, has had her brain (or some interface equipment to it) seeded with, in essence, a virus that might allow copies of her to take over ships controlled by agents of the Satrapy.

Nashara starts to make her difficult way towards the Ragamuffin base, or perhaps to Chimson or Nanagada. On the way, she encounters a human habitat being destroyed, and she learns that the Satraps seem to have, possibly, changed their attitude towards humans, from tolerating them in a limited fashion to planning to exterminate them. And she runs into a somewhat nontraditional member of the Hongguo, who has his own plans for the coming changes ...

Meanwhile, as they say, back on Nanagada, a brief period of peace for the heroes of Crystal Rain ends with the return of the nasty aliens called the Teotl, who are worshipped as gods by an Aztec-derived faction on the planet, complete with human sacrifice. But these Teotl want to talk to John, and to Pepper, both of them very long-lived and artificially enhanced people who were trapped on Nanagada when the wormhole closed. It seems the wormhole has been reopened, and the Teotl are fleeing other aliens -- the Satraps, basically, I think -- who also want to exterminate THEM. Perhaps humans and the Teotl can make common cause, despite complete mistrust? Perhaps they NEED to!

I really enjoyed the book. There are a couple of faults -- on occasion the prose gets a bit careless, a bit rushed. And the ending seemed to come just a bit too quickly -- though of course it's not a final ending, there are more books coming in the series! But it was great fun to read, and I find this future a really enjoyable space operatic future -- it pushes a lot of my buttons. The action is exciting -- the bad guys are bad but not quite cartoons -- the good guys are ambiguous and make mistakes -- the SFnal ideas are fun (if not for the most part all that original) -- and I'm really looking forward to upcoming books.

Birthday Review: Stories of Tobias Buckell

Today is Tobias Buckell's 40th birthday. He's one of the most consistently interesting writers to debut in this millennium, and I'm please to offer this set of my Locus reviews of his stories, that goes back as far as 2002 and includes stories from this year.

Locus, July 2002

And new John W. Campbell Award nominee for Best New Writer Tobias S. Buckell also present a neat (if not completely new) idea in "A Green Thumb" (Analog, July/August): cars are "grown" from greatly altered trees.  Buckell embeds this idea in a fairly conventional story about a boy dealing with his single father.  It's nothing earth-shattering, but nice enough.

Locus, April 2008

Baen’s Universe in April ... best this issue is Tobias R. Buckell’s “Manumission”, which gives a bit of backstory for one of the main characters in his novels. The man is a chemically enforced slave for a future company on an Earth isolated by aliens who control the secrets of star flight. His latest mission is to assassinate a woman trying to escape the company. Naturally he might like to escape as well, but the company has ways to keep him in line – including, possibly, his memories. The story is exciting adventure, and a good pendant to Buckell’s novels.

Locus, September 2011

I was saddened to hear of Martin H. Greenberg’s recent passing. He brought more new stories to print than any non-magazine editor of recent decades, and surely his efforts rivaled the likes of Schmidt and Dozois for prolificity. His DAW anthologies were uneven, but occasionally featured jewels, and I was thrilled to find such a jewel in Hot and Steamy, which is subtitled “Tales of Steampunk Romance” and coedited by Jean Rabe. The story I loved was Tobias S. Buckell’s “Love Comes to Abyssal City”, which has an intriguing setting: an underground city ruled by AIs who have decreed limits in technology to, essentially, “steampunk” levels. The heroine is one of those charged with protecting her society from the intrusion of dangerous ideas from other such cities, and she is also awaiting her arranged marriage to the man the city’s AIs deem most suitable. The broad outlines of what will happen are obvious, but Buckell lets them unwind nicely, with plenty of neat ideas about the nature of the Abyssal City holding our interest.

Locus, June 2012

And Fireside is a new magazine edited by Brian White, with the aim of publishing good stories from all genres. The first issue is pretty solid, with my favorite story being Tobias S. Buckell's “Press Enter to Execute”, about a hired killer whose jobs are, apparently, crowdsourced. His targets, he thinks, are spammers – until he is pushed to look a little closer, and realizes that he's been a little naïve. Buckell lets us guiltily revel a bit in the sort of fantasies many Internet users have doubtless had, then looks at where vigilante justice really leads – and adds an Sfnal twist.

Locus, March 2016

Tobias Buckell has published four novels and a number of short stories set in fascinating interstellar future collectively called the Xenowealth. He's been mostly concentrating on other projects lately, so the appearance of Xenowealth: A Collection, is welcome. It comprises all the Xenowealth short fiction published to date, with two new stories. I thought "Ratcatcher" particularly good, as it follows Pepper, the series' most important character, on a desperate mission through vacuum to a wormhole-traversing train, where he hopes to confront a brutal alien killer but instead must deal with a bitter veteran cop who knows something of his violent history. Cool future tech and powerful action mix very well.

Locus, April 2017

John Joseph Adams’ newest anthology, mostly originals, is called Cosmic Powers, and it comprises short Space Operatic tales. Fitting the scope of Space Opera into short stories can be hard, but these stories do it pretty well.  “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance”, by Tobias Buckell, one example. A starship maintenance robot, after a successful battle, by happenstance rescues a CEO of the enemy fleet, and finds himself inveigled/bribed/coerced into rendering assistance. The story turns on the complex intersection of intriguing speculation about AIs and identity, economics, contract law, moral law, free will and orbital mechanics. In other words, really cool stuff.

Locus, August 2017

Patreon continues to be a way for some writers to publish their short fiction, and I keep my eyes on a few writers whose work I like. One such is Tobias Buckell, whose “Shoggoths in Traffic” is a clever Lovecraftian crime story, in which a couple of people steal (repossess!) a car from a drug dealer and try to take it to Miami – but on the way run into a weird highway exit and a biker magician and – well, you’ll not think of cloverleafs and other traffic patterns in quite the same way after this!

Locus, November 2017

Overview: Stories of the Stratosphere is one of those now fairly common anthologies one might call futurological: rather pedagogically aimed at very near future technology. In this case it’s specifically aimed at one narrow technological innovation: balloons in the stratosphere, and their potential uses in such areas as surveillance. The stories (which grew out of a conference called the Stratosphere Narrative Hackathon, which associated teams of scientist, artists, and writers to discuss specific ideas) are all rather short, and sometimes a bit schematic. The best, probably because it offers the most action, is “High Awareness”, by David Brin and Tobias Buckell, in which Noriko Chen takes a dangerous trip to the central “Stratollite” in a constellation she designed, to try to figure out how it seems to have been hacked – and then to make a dramatic attempt at gathering the necessary data and then returning to Earth.

Clarkesworld, April 2018

Tobias Buckell’s “A World to Die For” is a parallel worlds tale, opening in an environmentally collapsed future, a milieu reminding me of Mad Max. The gang Che runs with is stopped by another gang that wants a trade – Che for some solar panels. That seems strange and pretty scary, but things get stranger when she meets a man who says she’s been rescued from an attempt on her life, and stranger still when she meets herself, and realizes she’s rattling through a variety of parallel worlds, in wildly varying states of environmental health. The story drives – perhaps a bit too didactically – towards a morally convicted resolution.

Birthday Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

Review Date: 08 May 1998

To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

Bantam, 1998, $23.95
ISBN: 0553099957

A review by Rich Horton

To Say Nothing of the Dog is one of Connie Willis' time travel stories, sharing a milieu with her award-winning novelette "Fire Watch" and her award-winning novel Doomsday Book. I'm very fond of both previous stories. Doomsday Book, however, was marred to some extent by a certain mismatch of tone between the farcical events of the 21st century setting from which her time travelers set out and the tragic events of the 14th century into which her protagonist travels. In addition, some major plot points of Doomsday Book were implausible in the extreme. For me, the emotional power of the 14th century story, and the character of Father Roche, were sufficient strong points to overcome my discomfort with some of the clunky bits.

This current novel almost seems a response to some criticisms of Doomsday Book. If the former book was primarily a tragic story of the Plague, this book is a screwball comedy set in the time of Jerome K. Jerome's classic (and highly recommended) late Victorian comedy, Three Men in a Boat. (Indeed, the title of this book is the subtitle of Jerome's.) (And this is the second screwball comedy about time travel in two years, after John Kessel's Corrupting Dr. Nice (1997).) And, Willis seems to be saying, if this is a screwball comedy, darn it, I can have implausible plot points, and outrageous coincidences, and my tone can be as goofy as I want. But a funny thing (so to speak) happened on the way to Coventry, and this novel turns out to have a serious and moving center to it after all, albeit in the context of a generally very funny book. What's more, Willis' point derives nicely from her story's outrageous coincidences, almost too overtly so, as if the book points at its faults and says "I meant it that way".

Which brings me to my misgivings about a novel that I ended up liking quite a bit. The whole machinery of the plot is set in motion by some generally unbelievable actions. The protagonist and narrator, Ned Henry, a 30ish "historian" in 2057, has been trying to get to Coventry Cathedral just prior to the pivotal bombing in 1940 (which destroyed the Cathedral but which may have indirectly turned the Battle of Britain against Hitler) in order to rescue the Bishop's Bird Stump, a hideous item which the historians (read time travelers) need to help convincingly furnish a rebuilt Cathedral. Willis conveniently (for plot purposes) invents a syndrome she calls "time lag", which happens when people time travel too often, and results in confusion, difficulty hearing, excess emotionalism, and such like. The only cure is rest, and Henry's superior, Mr. Dunworthy of Doomsday Book, decides the only place he can rest is in the past (out of reach of the fearsome Lady Schrapnell). Unfortunately, Dunworthy decides to have Ned complete one little tiny task for him in the past, returning an anachronistic item from 1888 to it's proper time, before resting. But Ned is so time-lagged he doesn't quite realize what it is he needs to return, and there isn't enough time to properly brief him…
All these machinations strain credibility, really even beyond the rather loose requirements of a screwball comedy. Moreover, the whole plot centers about the tendency of the structure of Time to resist alteration, which necessarily requires the reader to think about the mechanics of Willis' time travel setup. Unfortunately, in my opinion this setup doesn't really stand up well to being thought about too carefully. At least for the first few chapters, I was simultaneously entertained by the comic goings on, which are prime Connie Willis in her madcap mode, and irritated by the blatant plot manipulation. However, after a bit I calmed down and accepted the premise as given, and I quite enjoyed the story.

I won't detail the rest of the plot, which is quite complicated, though in the end nothing much is really accomplished (which becomes part of the point). We are treated to a brief river journey (an hommage to the trip which makes up the action of Jerome's novel, indeed Willis cannot resist having her characters encounter Jerome and his friends Harris and George, to say nothing of their dog, Montmorency, which I found a bit over-indulgent of her), to a thematically central and also quite funny ongoing rant by an Oxford Don on the subject of the Great Man theory of History vs. his opponent's belief in Natural Forces, to the origination of the jumble sale, several nice love stories, and lots more.

As I've said, though I have reservations, I ended up really enjoying this book. At the surface level there is the shall I say typical good fun of Connie Willis in her screwball mode. Beyond this, the book engages in some Sfnal dialogue with earlier SF such as Asimov's The End of Eternity. And, finally, it all comes together to mean something, and I was quite moved by the final metaphors, which touch on the importance of details to history, and on the worth of grand indulgences like cathedrals.

Birthday Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

Birthday Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

by Rich Horton

Junot Diaz turns 50 today. In his honor I'm reposting a review I did of his wonderful first novel.

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Fiction of 2007 with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (It's a pretty deserving winner, though I have to say I'd have given it to The Yiddish Policemen's Union myself.) Whatever the case might be, Diaz's book is very worthwhile -- energetically written, absorbing, angry, and sad. It is fundamentally the story of Dominicans in the 20th Century, as reflected in the terrible lives of the members of one family.

The title character is Oscar De Leon, a Dominican-American who grows up in Paterson, NJ. He and his older sister Lola live with their mother Belicia -- their father left when they were very young. Oscar is a smart kid and an obsessive reader, but he is not popular: partly because of the reading, more because of the kind of books he reads (SF and Fantasy) and his parallel obsession with fantasy gaming, and finally because he is very fat. Throughout his life he is bullied and made fun of. He is even more miserable because he tends to fall desperately in love with girls, girls way out of his league, and he has of course no idea how to talk to them.

The book follows his life, then briefly Lola's -- she is also intelligent, and at first obedient until she turns wild and runs away. She cannot deal with her controlling mother, and throws herself into some destructive relationships, before finding a talent as a runner, then finally doing well in college. There are also sections from the POV of another Dominican man, apparently a standin for the author (he's a writer nicknamed "Yunior") -- though it's always dangerous to read too much into descriptions of author-like characters. Anyway, Yunior is briefly Lola's lover, and then Oscar's roommate, but he serves as a sort of anti-Oscar as well: fabulously successful with women (if often rather superficially), and as a writer purely realist.

There is also a vital long section detailing Belicia's difficult life: she is orphaned early, kept for years as basically a slave, then rescued and raised by a virtuous aunt, until her post-pubescent maturing brings her to the attention of boys (and vice-versa), leading to eventually disastrous relationships with the likes of a rich boy at school, and later a henchman of the Dominican dictator Trujillo.

In the end, this story is at heart, as I said, about the terrible history of the Dominican Republic, most particularly under the grotesque rule of Trujillo. (To be sure, the US does not escape criticism in this matter.) It is also of course the story of the Fall of one once prosperous family -- and finally the story of the doom of Oscar, a good but hopelessly naive young man.

In many ways this is an almost unbearably sad book. Yet somehow the reading isn't like that -- Diaz is such an energetic writer, and he is often bitterly funny while telling his tale. Also, Oscar is (especially for, well, geeks like us) an affecting character -- a good guy, with good taste -- somebody to root for. Definitely a first rate novel.

As for the direct appeal to SF/Fantasy writers, there are two aspects. One is that the book does have a slight fantastical (or Magical Realist) dimension. The other -- in a lot of ways more interesting -- aspect is the offhand, and utterly believable, references to Oscar's obsessions and reading -- he namedrops not just Tolkien (as in Oscar wanting to be the Dominican Tolkien) but Norton, Butler, Le Guin, and many more, and in such a way as to convince me that Diaz has actually read the stuff, not just done the research.

Birthday Review: Traffics and Discoveries, by Rudyard Kipling

Traffics and Discoveries, by Rudyard Kipling

a review by Rich Horton

In honor of Kipling's birth, 153 years ago today, that is, December 30, 1865, here's a repost of something I wrote about his collection Traffics and Discoveries almost 20 years ago. My views of some of these stories have changed over time (in particular, every time I reread "Mrs. Bathurst" it seems stranger), but I've left what I wrote then unchanged.

These eleven stories were written just after the Boer War was concluded, and some of them deal directly with that war.  Kipling, of course, was virulently anti-Boer in his views. Thus, he was both in favor of the War in a general sense, and often disgusted with the actual conduct of the war. The stories that deal directly with the war show this attitude quite clearly. These are "A Sahib's War", "The Captive", and "The Comprehension of Private Copple". On the whole, these are the weakest stories in the collection. Kipling's fierce feelings force him to preach, and that's always bad for a story. Moreover, his portrayal of the Boers often goes over the edge, particularly in "Copple" and "A Sahib's War". There are well done bits in these stories, but on the whole they haven't worn well.

Four of the stories are about an intriguing Naval person named Emanuel Pyecroft. Three of these are primarily humorous in intent: "Steam Tactics" (about a steam motor car and the nasty trick Pyecroft and co. play on an unfriendly constable), "'Their Lawful Occasions'" (about Pyecroft and co. having some fun during a Naval Exercise), and "The Bonds of Discipline" (about a plot to hoodwink a French spy whom Pyecroft and co. have found on their ship). These are solid, enjoyable, stories. The fourth is much more serious, and it's one of Kipling's legendary stories, and one of his best and strangest: "Mrs. Bathurst".  This is a famously hard to figure out piece about the title woman, an Auckland widow, and a sailor who apparently took up with her, not telling her he was married. In an ambiguous fashion, Mrs. Bathurst manages to haunt the sailor to his death. Very odd, and technically brilliant, and haunting.

Another odd, haunting, story is "'Wireless'". The narrator (who would seem to be Kipling) comes to a chemist's shop to witness an experiment with the brand new wireless telegraphy.  Amid an excellent explanation of the equipment, and description of the shop, we are shown another, much stranger, sort of wireless communication, as the consumptive chemist, yearning for a silly woman, channels the spirit of John Keats to recreate some of his great poetry.

Still another odd, haunting, story is my favorite of the book, another famous one: "'They'". The narrator stumbles on an isolated country house, occupied by a blind woman and a number of elusive children. Over the course of three spooky visits, the reader and narrator together come to learn the true nature of these children. It's a remarkable, atmospheric story, and of course heavily loaded emotionally when you think it was written not long after the death of Kipling's daughter.

I haven't mentioned "'The Army of a Dream'", a depiction of a rather unpleasant (to me) vision of a future England with compulsory universal armed service (and, it would seem to me, an obvious bit of source material for Starship Troopers);, and "Below the Mill Dam", a cute but kind of slight story in which anthropomorphic depictions of a mill cat, a mill rat, and the millwheel and millrace react to the coming of electricity.

This remains, I think, one of Kipling's very best collections.

The Novels of Charles Harness

The Novels of Charles Harness

by Rich Horton

Charles Harness was born December 29, 1915, and he died in 2005. In honor of his birth I'm doing something a bit different -- I'm reposting a summary I did of all his novels, some 15 years ago.

Charles Harness is an odd bird. I like much of his work immensely: it's deeply romantic, vigorously (if not always logically) plotted, exotically imagined, quite moving. But I must also concede his flaws -- as I've hinted, the plots are not always very logical, the characters are often stiff idealizations, the romanticism can be over the top. He has a tendency to recycle his themes and imagery -- in particular, several of his novels are about cyclical universes. (He also uses quite blatantly autobiographical material in a number of his books -- besides the fascination with chemistry and patents, reflecting his career, there is often a beloved older brother to the main character who has died, and two novels (Redworld and Cybele With Bluebonnets) replicate the same series of incidents from Harness's life -- his year as a reluctant theology student before switching to chemistry, his jobs at a printing shop and as a fingerprinter for the police, as well as an affair with an older woman from Fort Worth's "red light" district that may or may not be autobiographical.) I'd say he's a writer who is not for everybody, but a fascinating one for those who acquire the taste.

Harness was born in 1915 in Texas. His main career was as a Patent Attorney. This background shows up in many of his stories: Patent Attorney heroes are featured in a couple of the novels and many stories. Indeed, he wrote some of the "Leonard Lockhard" stories in Astounding (others were by Theodore Thomas, and some may have been collaborations), all of which were about a young patent attorney dealing with the problems of patenting some whacky SFnal inventions. (According to the NESFA Harness collection An Ornament to His Profession, Harness wrote only the first Lockhard story (in 1952) and collaborated with Thomas on the second (in 1954): subsequent Lockhard pieces were by Thomas.)

Harness' writing career divides up fairly neatly into four parts. The first part came from 1948 to 1953, and featured his first novel and several shorter works, including some of his very best work. The stories from this period are very characteristic of his more romantic side. After 1953 he stopped writing to concentrate on his job. He returned to writing in 1966 with two novelettes, "The Alchemist" and "An Ornament to His Profession", each of which gained a Hugo and a Nebula nomination. This new flowering lasted only a couple of years: a few more stories followed, and one of his best novels, The Ring of Ritornel (1968). The third period of Harness's writing career began about 1977 and lasted until about 1991, though it was prefigured by a wild 1974 novella, "The Araqnid Window". This period included most of Harness' novels, 8 of them in all, and a similar number of shorter works. Harness's retirement in 1983 doubtless was one factor in his increased writing productivity. Another couple of stories appeared in 1994, then beginning in 1997 he began publishing short stories quite regularly: about a dozen more by now, as well as two novels, both from NESFA: Drunkard's Endgame (1999) and Cybele, with Bluebonnets (2002).

Herewith the novels:

The Paradox Men (1949, 1953, 1981) (64,000 words)

This book is arguably still Harness's most famous and most respected novel. It has a slightly complicated publishing history. The first version was a short novel called "Flight Into Yesterday", published in an issue of Startling Stories in 1949. (It was already a full-length novel, at some 56,000 words: Startlingand its sister publication Thrilling Wonder Stories regularly featured novels of between 40K and 60K words in single issues.) It was republished, somewhat expanded, in a 1953 hardcover also called Flight Into Yesterday. The title The Paradox Men was first applied to an Ace Double edition in 1955. There were some British reprints in the 60s, but the current definitive edition was supervised by George Zebrowski for a new American edition, part of Crown's "Classics of Modern Science Fiction" series, in 1981. This edition is slightly expanded from the previous ones, and in addition the copy-editing was much better. Some of the later changes are new additions by Harness, some may be restorations of Harness's original manuscript. Certain references to computer tech were surely added in the 80s. Zebrowski quite correctly (in my view) chose to retain the Ace title (probably coined by Don Wollheim) over Harness's original (the needlessly obscure Toynbee Twenty-Two), and over the Startling title (probably coined by Sam Merwin). The expansions from the original magazine version to the Ace Double total about 4,000 words, and consist mainly of interpolation within scenes. There is one new chapter, which is a result of splitting an expanded chapter in two. The further expansions in 1981 are similarly minor, again about 4,000 words worth, and also involve some jargon changes, such as the Microfilm Mind becoming the Meganet Mind.

The plot is complicated, but consistent, logical, and thematically sound. The characters are two-dimensional but interesting and involving. The action is well-done, and the scientific ideas are sometimes philosophical and thoughtful, and at other times wild, implausible, but still engaging. The basic story is of a Thief, Alar, who has appeared in Imperial America 5 years prior to the action of the story, with no memory of his past or identity. The Thieves work underground against the repressive society, using tech invented by their mysterious, dead, founder, Kennicot Muir. The key piece of Thief tech is armor which protects them against high velocity weapons (like projectile weapons), but not against swords and knives. Thus fencing is again a major skill. (Herbert swiped this notion for Dune, of course.) At the time of the action, various threads are converging: the plans of Imperial America to attack its Eurasian enemy, the Toynbee society's attempts to avoid the continuing historical cycle of civilizations rising and falling (they believe that the coming war will bring Toynbee Civilization 21 to an end: the next one will be Toynbee 22, hence Harness' original title), the completion of an experimental FTL starship, the relationship between the evil leaders of Imperial America and Keiris Muir, the enslaved widow of Kennicot Muir, and her attraction to Alar, the predictions of the computer enhanced human called The Meganet Mind (or the Microfilm Mind in the original). What a horrible sentence: but trying to summarize Harness can do that to you. Everything comes to a head with a trip to the surface of the Sun, and then a much stranger trip ...

I recommend it. It seems comparable in many ways to its near contemporary The Stars My Destination: Harness probably had a more original mind than Bester's, and his themes seem a bit more ambitious. But he really couldn't write with him -- and I think it is because of the writing (both prose and pace) that the manic energy of the Bester book is more successfully sustained. Still, The Paradox Men remains a powerful and interesting novel, and such scenes as the final selfless act of Keiris are unmatched in SF.

The Rose (1953) (31,000 words)

(Cover by John Richards)

This is a long novella first published in the UK magazine Authentic in 1953. It was later published in a paperback edition along with two fine early stories ("The New Reality" and "The Chessplayers".) It's reprinted in the NESFA story collection An Ornament to His Profession.

"The Rose" is Harness at his dream-logic wildest. It's the story of psychiatrist dancer Anna van Tuyl, who as the story opens is in the grip of a disease which has crippled her and made her ugly; and Ruy Jacques, an artist who has lost the power of reading, but gained ... something greater? And Martha Jacques, his wife, who is a scientist on the threshold of discovering the "Sciomnia equations", which will once and for all render science superior to art.

It's a strange concoction. Much of the action is absurd: and many of the central arguments, concerning the primacy of Art of Science, push a false dichotomy. But it's always absorbing, and the ideas, even if outwardly silly, are fascinating and compelling: and the ending is wonderful.

The Ring of Ritornel (1968) (82,000 words)

(Cover by Paul Lehr)

The only novel from Harness's late 60s return to the field. The Ring of Ritornel is actually slightly less complicated than some of the other Harness stuff I've read. It involves a far future, human-led civilization, the Twelve Galaxies, which is just coming out of a long war with the planet Terror. (Which I readily guessed was a corruption of Terra: a pun later used by E. C. Tubb, I don't know if Harness was first to use it, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was used much earlier.) The new emperor is something of a despot, but is almost killed at the beginning of the action. Clones are made of him in case he dies, and his poet-laureate is killed and has his brain placed in a music-composing computer to try to save the emperor's life. The lead character is the laureate's brother, who is ignorant of his brother's fate, and who grows up to become a highly-placed legal representative for the Palace. He falls in love with the Emperor's "daughter", and as a result is sent to argue the Emperor's case that the planet Terror should be destroyed. But ... There's lots more going on: energy-eating insects, spiders, the competing religions of Alea and Ritornel, a superintelligent Pegasus Kentaur, beings of antimatter, the end of the universe ... Pretty fun, though at times the absurdities really went too far. It does have several of Harness's recurring tropes: cyclical universes, spiders, beloved brothers, lead characters who are lawyers ...

Wolfhead (1978) (66,000 words)

This novel, serialized in two parts in F&SF in 1977 (presumably in a shorter version), represents for me the start of his "third period". It is a post-holocaust story, set 3000 years after atomic war. The protagonist, just married, sees his wife kidnapped by the Undergrounders, people who have lived underground for 3000 years. He becomes involved in a plot to invade the underground city, for his part to regain his wife, but for the part of the monks who train him, to stop the Underground people from invading the surface. It's exciting and romantic, involving lots of psi powers (done fairly neatly), and a telepathic wolf companion, and a bittersweet ending, and even a twinge of moral ambiguity. Not a bad book, though as usual with Harness there are a lot of wild ideas that don't really hold water.

The Catalyst (1980) (65,000 words)

Harness has called this his favorite among his own works. I disagree -- I really didn't like it very much, indeed it may be my least favorite. It seems to be more autobiographical than most of his books (except for Cybele, with Bluebonnets and Redworld.) It's about a patent attorney (natch!), whose beloved older brother died when he was a teen (another common Harness theme, echoing his loss of his own brother), who is working for a research lab. The lab has two rival scientists: a strict by the book idiot who has advanced by brownnosing corporate management, and a brilliant unconventional scientist who by golly resembles the patent attorney's brother to an amazing degree. The brilliant guy and his team, including the attorney, Paul, develop a catalyst which will produce a wonder substance (that among other things would have cured Paul's brother), in high yields at atmospheric pressure. The idiot scientist is backing an expensive project which will produce the stuff in low yields at high pressures, requiring a complex factory. The idiot guy forces out the brilliant guy and his proteges, then is stuck in a dilemma when the company gets in a patent battle about the new catalyst. Oh, and there's also an unconvincing love affair with a clone, and lots of guff about an unfinished opera, and some hints of time travel. Harness is always at the edge of absurdity with his plots: his best stuff carries it off with flair, but his weaker novels collapse under the weight of all the silliness, which is what happens here.

Firebird (1981) (68,000 words)

This is another book on roughly the same theme as The Ring of Ritornel, and also to a lesser extent The Paradox Men. The universe is cyclical, beginning with the Big Bang, 60 billion years later stopping expansion, and after a total of 120 billion years hitting the Big Crunch, followed by another cycle. But in this particular cycle, two intelligent telepathic computers rule the universe, enslaving all the "humans" (actually cat-creatures). The computers plot to reduce the mass of the universe just enough to allow the expansion to continue forever, thus avoiding their eventual destruction in the Big Crunch. A man and a woman, by falling in love, will join the struggle to restore the missing mass, and restore the natural cycle. Lots of silliness, some rather neatly handled time-paradoxes, all in all an OK book but not great.

The Venetian Court (1982) (56,000 words)

Expanded from a 1981 Analog novella of the same title. This is a weird novel that I rather enjoyed while not believing at all. In the near future, patent infringement has become a capital crime. Ellen Welles has invented a valuable product called fiber K, but unfortunately a megacorporation using a computer to generate inventions just beat her to it. They sue for patent infringement, and the case winds up with a literally insane judge who needs to sentence people to death to juice himself up to write opinions, and hopefully reach the Supreme Court. The story mostly follows Welles's lawyer as he tries to find a way to free her -- but all his quite reasonable defenses are foiled arbitrarily by the judge, and in the end derring-do plus a real deus ex machina is required to work things out. Fiber K is based on spider silk, and the evil judge is a spider fancier -- allowing Harness to play with his recurring arachnid theme. The general arbitrariness of the action, and the too evull villains, weaken the novel, but page by page it is goofy fun. The patent lawyer hero, Quentin Thomas, is also the hero of his later novel Lunar Justice.

Redworld (1986) (63,000 words)

This is a really curious novel. It's nominally SF, but much of it seems to be quite straightforward retelling of the youth of a character much like Harness in a city much like Fort Worth, TX. Except that the character is an alien, and the city is on a planet circling Barnard's Star. The young narrator, Pol, who lives with his mother, his father and beloved older brother having died, witnesses the electroburning of a "lamia" on the day his job at a printers starts. The lamia seems to point at him as she dies, predicting that he will be the mythical "Revenant", who will die and be reborn. And on his way to work he sees Josi, the beautiful but strange (could it be she has but five fingers?) woman who runs the main whorehouse in town.

Pol's world is riven between the Scientists and the Priests -- thirty years previously, a long war was ended by the "Treaty", in which basically the Priests agreed to let the Scientists live as long as they didn't discover any new facts. Pol's sympathy is with the Scientist, in particular as his brother had been working on an immortality serum before he died. But his only chance at education is a scholarship to study for the priesthood. So the story follows his life, in very engaging fashion -- his time at the printer's, his fascination with the mysterious and beautiful Josi, who looks to be thirty but must be at least sixty, his eventual affair with her, his later job at the police station taking fingerprints, his attempt to finish his brother's work, all leading to the climax, in which the mystery of Josi (no mystery to the reader!) is solved, and Pol's fate as the Revenant is achieved.

It's a very enjoyable, engaging read, although much of it is absurd. But Harness's telling overcomes the silliness. It is extremely interesting to compare this book with his latest novel, Cybele, With Bluebonnets -- huge swaths of the plots of each book are identical. And the mode of the telling -- the very engaging, even sweet, feel to the book, is similar to that novel. (I suspect as a result of the autobiographical aspects.)

Krono (1988) (68,000 words)

A time travel novel, again one of Harness's favorite themes. As well as time travel, Harness ropes in Edgar Allan Poe -- a combination repeated in his next novel. In Krono overpopulation problems are resolved by colonizing the past. Philip Konteau is a 50ish "krono", charged with surveying past locations to determine their suitability for colonies. The great danger is instabilities in the time stream that can cause a poorly stabilized colony to disappear. Konteau, mooning over his departed wife, finds himself involved in a project to extend the colonization to Mars' past, when it was wet. He also finds himself involved in a plot apparently hatched by the an evil "Vyr" (a politico-religious leader) who wants to be the new Overlord. And his son may be lost in a timequake. Trips to the Paleozoic, and to the 1840s (i.e. Poe's time), and a meeting with the legendary inventor of time travel, are also involved. In short -- typical Harness! Engaging, not quite logical, not one of his best books but enjoyable.

Lurid Dreams (1990) (57,000 words)

One of Harness's less outré books. He foregoes his usual plot (cyclical destruction and recreation of the universe) for a time-travel story involving Edgar Allan Poe. The time travel is by means of Out of Body Experiences, and the plot involves a graduate student studying the OB phenomenon, by means of his own ability to go OB. He is recruited by a Confederacy nut to go back in time and convince EAP to stay at school and become a CSA General, saving the Battle of Gettysburg for the CSA, instead of choosing a literary career. (Reminiscent of a story by Walter Jon Williams, and I think maybe one by Effinger too.) There is plenty of Time-Travel hugger mugger, and time, of course, doesn't quite cooperate with the wishes of the characters. Decent fun, with some nice Poe details, and lots of wild and implausible stuff, too.

Lunar Justice (1991) (58,000 words)

This is the last novel of his third period. It involves a man trying to ignite Jupiter in order to make the Jovian satellites terraformable, thus ameliorating the Earth's population problem. For economic reasons, the bad guys want to stop this, and as a result they end up arresting the head of the Jupiter project, and trying him in an absurd kangaroo court on the moon. He hires a patent lawyer as his defense lawyer, but more importantly, the patent lawyer turns out to be a super powerful psi. It's all quite cheerfully nonsense. It doesn't really work, but it's kind of fun, with fillips like patent applications in verse and a new model guillotine thrown in.

Drunkard's Endgame (1999) (65,000 words)

Drunkard's Endgame, is a fairly minor book. It was published by NESFA as part of an omnibus of his "cyclical" novels called Rings (the other novels included being The Paradox Men, The Ring of Ritornel, and Firebird.) It's set on a starship populated by robots, who rebelled against their human masters 1000 years previously, and who have been fleeing ever since. The (corrupt, natch) leader of the starship is searching for the ultimate weapon which a human had devised, and which he thinks was stored in the memory banks of one of his fellow robots. He is opposed by the aristocratic robot known as L'Ancienne, and by her nephew Rodo, who falls in love with one of the robots exiled to the surface of the starship. Once again, the book ends with a radical change to existing conditions, and the beginning of a "new world", but in this case the plot contrivances to bring this about are hard to believe, and the villain combines stupidity with malice rather excessively. It's still a breezy, fun, read.

Cybele, with Bluebonnets (2002) (70,000 words)

The bibliography in NESFA's An Ornament to His Profession cites a 1998 edition from Old Earth Books for this, but that edition never came out. The current NESFA hardcover is copyright 2002 and is marked First Edition -- possibly the book was written by 1998 but the earlier publication fell through. (As Ornament came out in 1998 itself, the compiler (Priscilla Olson) was presumably citing a forthcoming edition that did not come to be.) Cybele, with Bluebonnets is a bit of an oddity for Harness, by far the least SFnal of his books. It's mostly a fairly straightforward account of a boy growing to manhood in Texas, in the 20s, 30s and 40s. There is a fantastical element -- an object that may be the Holy Grail, a soul surviving death, and a person somehow knowing the future. But for the most part it's just the story of Joe Barnes, growing up the son of a widow living in "Fort West" (a thinly veiled version of Fort Worth, where Harness grew up), and his obsession with a beautiful older woman named Cybele.

The story is told in a series of short chapters, more or less chronologically following Joe's life. He meets Cybele in High School (or perhaps, mysteriously, earlier): she is his Chemistry teacher. He falls in love, or at least lust, with her from the beginning, and this is a spur towards his eventual ambition to become a chemist. He's rather poor, though, and after graduation he takes a couple of manual labor type jobs, apparently with the behind the scenes help of Cybele. One magical night he encounters her in a storm, and they enter into a passionate affair that last several months, until fate intervenes tragically. But somehow she still seems present, and seems to be guiding his life as he goes to school, gets a job for the government during the war, and marries a girl from his high school. These mysteries are resolved strikingly, somewhat movingly, and also a bit creepily, by the end.
It's a highly readable book, interspersed with almost folksy anecdotes of life in Texas during the 30s, of "Fort West" history, of weird chemical facts and pranks, and of the mysterious "Cup" that might be the Holy Grail. The structure is a bit slack, and the typical Harness hyper-romanticism sometimes fails to convince, but it's still a nice book, worth reading especially for Harness fans.

And, finally, the short fiction:

An Ornament to His Profession (NESFA Press, 1998)

[I should mention that there were a few later stories.]

This collects the bulk of the best of Charles Harness' stories through 1998. Included are many of his outstanding stories -- "The Rose", a 1953 short novel that may be the best thing he ever wrote; "The New Reality", one of the best Adam and Eve stories in SF history; and other neat stories like "The Chessplayers", and "Time Trap".

This book includes a number of stories I hadn't seen prior to this book. For example, his two 1966 stories that were each nominated for a Hugo: "An Ornament to His Profession" and "The Alchemist". These are linked stories, both set at Hope Chemical Corporation and featuring as POV character patent attorney Conrad Patrick. (It is not a coincidence that Charles Harness was then a patent attorney who worked for a chemical company.) I didn't really like "An Ornament to His Profession" much -- it deals with the patent crisis caused by a chemical process that depends on summoning a demon, I think, tied in with the tragic deaths of Patrick's wife and son. I admit I stayed confused about what really happened. "The Alchemist" is rather better -- another patent crisis, this caused by a scientist at Patrick's company using alchemy.

My favorites among the stories I hadn't read were "Child by Chronos", a pretty neat time loop story, from F&SF in 1953; and "O Lyric Love", which links a present day student and his beloved English teacher with Robert and Elizabeth Browning -- in an alternate history. (Some quasi-autobiographical details seem to correspond with some of the plot of Harness's novel Cybele With Bluebonnets.) There is one story new to the book, a novella called "Lethary Fair", a really odd piece (though not THAT odd in the context of Harness's work) about two-headed aliens, androids, a court case about a murder than might not have happened, an old will, etc. There are several of the fast paced novellas Harness published in his late career re-flowering: "The Araqnid Window", "The Tetrahedron", "George Washington Slept Here".

All I can really say is -- if you like Harness, which is to say if you can accept the sometimes downright silly science and logical (illogical?) leaps, then you will like most of this book. If you don't like Harness, it sure won't change your mind.