Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2019: Summary Post

Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2019

Here’s my summary of my thoughts about potential Hugo nominees. This year I’ll be a lot briefer than the past couple of years, primarily because I haven’t read as many novels as in past years. Indeed, these are mostly looks at the short fiction. I make a few remarks about other categories, but for the most part (Fan Writer, Short Form Editor, and Campbell perhaps excepted), I don't have terribly strong opinions on most of them.

First, my obligatory “Philosophy” disclaimer – though I participate with a lot of enjoyment in Hugo nomination and voting every year, I am philosophically convinced that there is no such thing as the “best” story – “best” piece of art, period. This doesn’t mean I don’t think some art is better than other art – I absolutely do think that. But I think that at the top, there is no way to draw fine distinctions, to insist on rankings. Different stories do different things, all worthwhile. I can readily change my own mind about which stories I prefer – it might depend on how important to me that “thing” they do is (and of course most stories do multiple different things!) – it might depend on my mood that day – it might depend on something new I’ve read that makes me think differently about a certain subject. And one more thing – I claim no special authority of my own. I have my own tastes, and indeed my own prejudices. So too does everyone else. I have blind spots, and I have things that affect me more profoundly than they might affect others. I’ve also read a lot of SF – and that changes my reactions to stories as well – and not in a way that need be considered privileged.

Anway, as ever, in the lists below, I’ll suggest somewhere between 3 and 8 or so items that might be on my final ballot. Those will be in no particular order. And the other stories I list will all really be about as good – and I might change my mind before my ballot goes in.

I've alread made posts about Novella, Novelette, and Short Story -- below are links to those posts.

Novella

Novella Recommendations

Novelette

Novelette Recommendations

Short Story

Short Story Recommendations

Other Categories:

Best Novel

Every year I mention that I haven’t read a lot of novels. I’m going to mention these novels as reasonable candidates, and then admit that I really truly haven’t read enough novels to make a strong recommendation. Two of these are first novels that I really like – but while certainly strong indicators of the talents of their writers, may not be quite Hugo material.

Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee

Pride and Prometheus, by John Kessel

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewomen, by Theodora Goss

The Calculating Sky, by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Robots of Gotham, by Todd McAulty

The Quantum Magician, by Derek Künsken

The Nebula nomination list includes Kowal’s novel and several I haven’t gotten to: The Poppy War, by R. F. Kuang, Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik, Blackfish City, by Sam Miller, Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse; and Witchmark, by C. L. Polk. The Novik and Miller novels at least have been on my TBR list for some time – the Kuang novel also seems impressive. I have to admit I haven’t even heard of the Polk novel (my bad, I suppose, but there are so many …), and reviews of Roanhorse’s novel seemed to suggest “Promising first novel, but not really award material”, but obviously, not having read it, I can’t say more.

Best Series

Here’s JJ’s list of eligible series posted at File 770: http://file770.com/best-series-hugo-eligible-series-from-2018/. Much props to JJ for the tireless work of maintain this list, but … I think the list itself speaks to problems with the whole concept of this award.

I was skeptical about this award from the start, and I don’t think its history helps it. I’m really bothered by the way adding one short story to a very old series, for example, makes it again eligible (as with Earthsea, objectively by far the most worthy and influential eligible series, but does “Firelight”, beautiful as it absolutely is, really mean we should give it an award now?) Also, the endless parsing of “series” vs. “sub-series”. The way an award can be for, really, semi-random assemblages of related works. I could go on and on.

Best YA Novel

This is the first official year for this new award, I believe. (Wasn’t last year a trial run, that is to say, a Special Convention Award, not part of the official process? [Martin informs me in the comments that in fact last year was the first year for the official award, but that it now has a name, the Lodestar.) It is not a Hugo, but it will be administered and awarded by the World Science Fiction Society using essentially the same process as for the Hugos (and the Campbell). I can only suggest a look at the YA category in the Locus Recommended Reading list: https://locusmag.com/2019/02/2018-locus-recommended-reading-list/. I do think this award is worthwhile, but I quite honestly have read no YA work from 2018.

Best Graphic Story

I don't read much in this category, but I thought I should mention a shorter piece I liked a great deal, "Resolution", by Clifford V. Johnson, from the MIT Press anthology Twelve Tomorrows.

Dramatic Presentation

Long Form

I don’t think there’s much suspense about what will win the Hugo this year, and I think Black Panther is a fine film that might very well be the right choice. Beyond that, I saw Annihilation, which was impressive but didn’t quite hold together for me. I’d say it’s worthy of a nomination. I saw Solo, which I enjoyed, but which I can’t call all that great. Perhaps Black Mirror: Bandersnatch? I haven’t seen enough of its permutations yet. And that’s about all I saw this year.

Short Form

As for Short Form, I watch relatively little TV. And that that I did watch was either non-SF, or not from 2018 (such as Black Mirror Season 4, which came out December 29, 2017).

Fan Categories

In the remaining categories (as, really, with all the categories except short fiction) I do want to emphasize what may be obvious – these are people and things that I personally enjoyed, but I know there’s a lot of excellent work I’ve missed. I’ll be nominating things that impressed me, but I’ll be glad to check out the stuff other people nominate.

Best Fan Writer

I’ll reiterate my admiration for John Boston and John O’Neill. John Boston’s most publicly available recent stuff is at Galactic Journey, where he reviews issues of Amazing from 55 years ago, month by month. (It will be noted, perhaps, that I also review issues of Amazing from the same period, at Black Gate.) John’s work there is linked by this tag: http://galacticjourney.org/tag/john-boston/.

As for John O’Neill, of course his central contribution is as editor of Black Gate, for which he writes a great deal of the content, often about, “vintage” books he’s found on Ebay or at conventions, and also about upcoming fantasy books.

Another Black Gate writer, and fan writer in general, who did great work last year was Steven Silver, particularly his “Birthday Reviews”.

I should also mention Charles Payseur, a very worthy Fan Writer nominee last year, whose Quick Sip reviews of short fiction should not be missed.

And as for myself, I too am a fan writer (at least my blog writing and my stuff for Black Gate qualifies, if perhaps not my work for Locus, which I guess is now officially professional). I was pretty proud of my writing last year. I would note in particular my reviews of old magazines at Black Gate, particularly Amazing and Fantastic in the Cele Goldsmith Lalli era, and my various reviews of Ace Doubles (and other SF) at my blog Strange at Ecbatan (rrhorton.blogspot.com) (and often linked from Black Gate.) The other thing I did this year at my blog was a set of “Birthday Reviews” of my own, inspired by Steven’s series, in which I tried to honor SF writers on their birthdays, either with reviews of their novels, or, particularly, with reviews of their short fiction.

Best Fanzine

As I did last year, I plan to nominate Black Gate, Galactic Journey, and Rocket Stack Rank for the Best Fanzine Hugo. I’m particularly partial in this context to Black Gate, primarily of course because I have been a contributor since the print days (issue #2 and most of the subsequent issues). Black Gate is notable for publishing a lot of content on a very wide variety of topics, from promoting new book releases to publishing occasional original and reprinted fiction to reviewing old issues of Galaxy (Matthew Wuertz) and Amazing/Fantastic/etc. (me) to intriguing posts about travel and architecture by Sean MacLachlan. Rocket Stack Rank and Galactic Journey are a bit more tightly focused: the former primarily reviews and rates short fiction, as well as assembling statistics about other reviewers (myself included) and their reactions to the stories; while the latter, as I mentioned above, is reviewing old SF magazines from 55 years past.

(Incidentally, Black Gate failed to get a Hugo nomination last year because of the new EPH algorithm for ranking nomination votes. I would suggest that possibly this was not an example of the algorithm really doing what it was designed for.)

Finally, I’ll mention the other SF-oriented site I read and enjoy regularly – File 770 (http://file770.com/ ), which is (deservedly) very well known, having been nominated for the Best Fanzine Hugo numerous times and having won some as well. 2018 was their 40^th Anniversary! 

Best Editor

For this year, I’d mainly like to suggest that Jonathan Strahan really deserves a Hugo. His work has been consistently excellent for years, and this year in particular is a significant year, as the last book in his “Infinity” series of original anthologies came out: Infinity’s End. And this book was particularly impressive, a really remarkable original anthology. He also does some editing for Tor.com, and among his many impressive acquisitions, Ian McDonald’s outstanding novella Time Was stands out. (This should not be taken as denying the excellent work of many others, such as John Joseph Adams, Neil Clarke, Sheila Williams, and C. C. Finlay, who will probably fill out the rest of my ballot – there are several more. (I am giving some precedence to editors whose magazines don’t have their own category, such as Adams, Williams, Clarke, and Finlay, or who do a lot of work in anthologies or other places (like Tor.com) which also don’t have categories. Semiprozine editors, excellent as many of them are, kind of get two bites at the apple.)

Best Related Work

I have two books to recommend. Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding is a really remarkable work, detailing the intersecting lives and careers of John W. Campbell, Jr., L. Ron Hubbard, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. Exceptionally well researched, very well written – a tremendous contribution to the field. The other book is one I have a personal stake in – but I think it’s a very worthy nominee anyway. This is Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos, which covers the history of the Hugos from 1953 through the end of the 20^th Century. Jo writes intelligently and charmingly about all the awards, particularly novel, and goes into detail about a number of the novels. She also included extended comments from the original online posts, with many contributors – but the main contributors, I say immodestly, were the late great Gardner Dozois and myself – both of us mostly discussing the short fiction. I was inordinately proud and thrilled to be a co-dedicatee with Gardner and with Kevin Standlee.

Campbell

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, also “Not a Hugo”. This is given to the best writer whose first professional publication in the SF or Fantasy field appeared in the past two years (2017 or 2018). Writertopia has a page, not guaranteed to be complete, with a list of eligible authors: http://www.writertopia.com/awards/campbell .

I went through that list and came up with the following writers who have done something that impressed me:

L. X. Beckett

R. S. Benedict

J. R. Dawson

Giovanni di Feo

Tonya Liburd

Vina Jie-Min Prasad

Cadwell Turnbull

D. A. Xiaolin Spires

Many of these were on my list last year – only Beckett and Turnbull are new to my list. Both published very impressive stories this year, as did Dawson and Benedict and Liburd. Prasad was my top choice last year, and while I thought her one story in 2018 not quite as strong as her 2017 stuff, her body of work is absolutely Campbell-worthy. As usual, I haven’t read novels by any of these – I know there are other writers with strong novels that I just haven’t read (Katherine Arden and Rivers Solomon, most obviously).

Hugo recommendations, 2019: Novella

Novella

I thought this was a strong year for novellas, but not, perhaps, quite as good as last year. I need to caution, however, that I have not yet read some significant novellas. These include Seanan McGuire’s Beneath the Sugar Sky, P. Djeli Clark’s The Black God’s Drums, and Greg Egan’s Phoresis. (Also, a couple of Nebula nominees that were not on my radar: Jonathan Brazee’s Fire Ant, and Kate Heartsfield’s Alice Payne Arrives.) I should also add one other option that I listed last year, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Prime Meridian, which may be officially eligible this year, not last year.

So, here’s my current list of candidates, which, as noted, might expand:

L. X. Beckett, “Freezing Rain, A Chance of Falling” (F&SF, 7-8/18)

Aliette de Bodard, The Tea Master and the Detective (Subterranean)

Greg Egan, “3-adica” (Asimov’s, 9-10/18)

David Gerrold and Ctein, “Bubble and Squeak” (Asimov’s, 5-6/18)             

Carolyn Ives Gilman, “Umbernight” (Clarkesworld, 2/18)

Ian McDonald, Time Was (Tor.com Publishing)

Kelly Robson, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach (Tor.Com Publishing)

Juliette Wade, “The Persistence of Blood” (Clarkesworld, 3/18)  

Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution (Tachyon)

Martha Wells, Artificial Condition (Tor.Com Publishing)

Of these stories – none of which would disappoint me if they won the Hugo – my four favorites, in no particular order, are:

1.       Ian McDonald, Time Was – A lovely timeslip piece, about a man who discovers an interesting letter inside an obscure books of poems, and in his research finds evidence of the poet and his lover turning up again and again at different sites of conflict. The frame is important – the story is effectively not just about the time-slipped lovers but about the way the man who tells the story becomes involved himself. Beautifully written.

2.       David Gerrold and Ctein, “Bubble and Squeak” – About a gay couple, hoping to get married, who have their plans interrupted by a tsunami heading to Los Angeles, and who have to find a way to get to higher ground – and, as it turns out, help a bunch of others as well. It’s simply terrifically exciting, involving a plausible mix of heroism, foolishness, brutality, luck, and intelligence, on their part and others, as they struggle to find a way to a safe place, and as various options are closed off over time.

3.       Carolyn Ives Gilman, “Umbernight” – Set within a struggling colony on a world subject to periodic bursts of radiation for its primary’s UV-emitting companion. Michiko is perhaps the only colony member interested in exploring their world, so she is forced into leading a dangerous expedition to recover the latest cargo drop from Earth, which will arrive just before the next predicted “umbernight”, when their planet will be awash in dangerous radiation. The expedition is predictably a disaster, especially when umbernight comes a bit early … and the members learn, the hardest way, that their planet changes in quite amazing ways in true umbernight. It’s pretty neat stuff really, set against its protagonist’s justly cynical attitude.

4.       Juliette Wade, “The Persistence of Blood” – This is set in a caste-driven society living in underground cities. The Lady Selemei is the wife of an influential member of the governing caste, whose women have tremendous difficulty in childbearing, and also are societally expected to bear many children, as their Race is seen to be in decline. Her loving husband has agreed to that they must abstain from sex, and has even proposed a law to make it legal for women with health issues to “retire” from childbearing (and even, perhaps to use contraceptives!)  The story turns on her husband’s sudden death, and her shocking step of assuming her husband’s seat in the Council. It comes to a powerful and moving conclusion.

The current leader for the fifth position on my is Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition, sort of as a proxy for all three Murderbot novellas that came out in 2018 – all fun and thought-provoking, certainly worth reading. Either the Beckett or Robson novellas could be chosen as well. But I have a few more stories to read before the nomination deadline, as I’ve noted.

Hugo Recommendations, 2019: Novelette

Novelette

This is my long list of novelettes I’ve considered for nomination, largely the list of those I put in the Recommended Reading section of my Locus reviews (with a few additions).

Dale Bailey, "The Donner Party", (F&SF, 1-2/18)

Bo Balder, “A Cigarette Burn in Your Memory”, (Clarkesworld, 1/18)

Gregory Benford, "A Waltz in Eternity", (Galaxy's Edge, 11/18)

Michael Cassutt, “Unter”, (Asimov’s, 7-8/18)

Tina Connolly, “The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections”, (Tor.com, 7/18)

John Crowley, “Flint and Mirror”, (The Book of Magic)

Andy Duncan, “Joe Diabo’s Farewell”, (An Agent of Utopia)

Theodora Goss, “Queen Lily”, (Lightspeed, 11/18)

Daryl Gregory, “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth”, (Tor.com, 9/18)

Kameron Hurley, “Sister Solveig and Mister Denial”, (Amazing, Fall/18)

James Patrick Kelly, "Grace’s Family", (Tor.com, 5/18)

Alex Jeffers, "The Tale of the Ive-Ojan-Akhar’s Death", (Giganotosaurus, 4/18)

Samantha Murray, “Singles’ Day”, (Interzone, 9-10/18)

Alec Nevala-Lee, "The Spires", (Analog, 3-4/18)

Julia Novakova, "The Gift", (Asimov's, 11-12/18)

Justina Robson, "Foxy and Tiggs", (Infinity's End)

Kelly Robson, "Intervention", (Infinity's End)       

Karen Russell, "Orange World", (The New Yorker, 6/4/18)

James Sallis, "Dayenu", (LCRW, Spring/18)

Jack Skillingstead, “Straconia”, (Asimov’s, 7-8/18)

Brian Trent, "Crash-Site", (F&SF, 5-6/18)

Carrie Vaughn, “The Hunstman and the Beast”, (Asimov’s, 9-10/18)

The top candidates for my ballot are:

1.       Dale Bailey, “The Donner Party” (F&SF, 1-2/18) – a savage look at an alternate version of Victorian England in which the upper classes eat the children of the lower classes. The insecure new wife of an upper class man is put to the test, as it were.

2.       James Patrick Kelly, “Grace’s Family” (Tor.com, 5/18) – Grace is a starship, and it’s her job to maintain her family – the humans – and robots – who live on board, while they grow up, and age, and explore. This is fascinating original SF, deeply concerned with the purpose of intelligence in the universe.

3.       Alex Jeffers, “The Tale of the Ive-Ojan-Akhar’s Death” (Giganotosaurus, 4/18) – A leisurely and lovely look at the career and life of a diplomat who has largely gone native at his post, the Chinese-flavored Haisn. But, with glosses hinted at by the title entertainment, he gets caught up in political turmoil, and must make a new life. It’s hard for me to describe the continual pleasures of the tale, bound up in the narrator’s self-involved (but generally pleasant) character, the sideways revelations of the nature of Haisn’s culture, the gentle realization of the fate of the narrator (and his faithful servant) after their ejection from Haisn

4.       Kelly Robson, “Intervention” (Infinity’s End) -- A very intelligent story about child rearing in a heavily inhabited future Solar System. The narrator is from Luna, where creche work is socially frowned upon, so she leaves to work on an asteroid-based creche – and then later gets a chance to work on a bid to reform Luna’s failing creche system. This is just really interesting social speculation; and the characters are also very solidly portrayed, very honest.

5.       Karen Russell, “Orange World” (The New Yorker, 6/4/18) – An older first time mother is driven to make a deal with a literal devil to save the life of her child, and only the intervention of her support group allows her to cope … Really well written, really convincing.

6.       James Sallis, “Dayenu” (LCRW, Spring/18) – Perhaps the story of the year, though I have the notion that I might be the only person saying that. Opens with the narrator doing an unspecified but apparently criminal job: so, like a crime story – and Sallis is, after all, primarily a crime novelist. But details of unfamiliarity mount, from the pervasive surveillance to a changed geography, then to the realization that the rehab stint the narrator mentioned right at the start was a rather more extensive rehab than we might have thought. Memories of wartime service are detailed. Page by page the story seems odder, and the destination less expected. The prose is a pleasure too – with desolate rhythms and striking images.

It was hard to leave out stories like Justina Robson’s “Foxy and Tiggs”, Alec Nevala-Lee’s “The Spires”, Tina Connolly’s “The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections”, Daryl Gregory’s “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth”, and Andy Duncan’s “Joe Diabo’s Farewell” – and, really, all the rest. Another great year for SF/F novelettes.

Birthday Review: Stories of David D. Levine

Today is David D. Levine's birthday. Here's a selection of my reviews for his work from Locus -- alas, there are fewer such in recent years, as David has been seduced by the lure of the novel -- and quite successfully so, with his popular series beginning with Arabella of Mars.

Locus, April 2002

The slow boat from Brighton finally brought me the final 2001 issue of Interzone.  It is an outstanding issue, too, without a single poor story.  David D. Levine's "Nucleon" is the winner of the 2001 James White Award, and it's a fine, sweet, story of an unusual junkyard – a nice variation on the traditional "curiosity shop" tale.

Locus, January 2003

Beyond the Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, concerns what might lie "beyond" the end of the universe. ... My other favorite was David D. Levine's "Written on the Wind", about an alien linguist working on translating a mysterious message discovered in the cosmic background radiation. The nature of this message is predictable enough, but Levine manages to make the revelation moving and sense-of-wonder inspiring even though we know what's coming.

Locus, June 2003

Best of all in the June F&SF is promising new writer David D. Levine's "The Tale of the Golden Eagle", about a brain encased in a spaceship which becomes a derelict, and the man who discovers and frees this brain far in the future.

Locus, September 2003

Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction is an anthology of stories written around art by Alan Clark. The fine new writer David Levine offers "Legacy", an affecting (if slightly contrived) story of sacrifice on a scientific mission to a supernova.

Locus, November 2003

Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown is a collection of stories by generally new writers. Regarded as a showcase of new writers, it's impressive, and I'll certainly look to see more work from these folks. I enjoyed most of it ... I particularly liked "Ukaliq and the Great Hunt", by David D. Levine, which cleverly recasts American Indian-style legends to tell a story that turns out to be straight SF.

Locus, June 2004

Tops in the June Realms of Fantasy is David D. Levine's "Charlie the Purple Giraffe Was Acting Strangely", a story set inside a comic strip, in which the title character becomes convinced he is fictional. There are plenty of cute touches, but the story turns oddly and effectively darker as no other character believes Charlie.

Locus, October 2004

The Summer Talebones, a generally good issue, closes strongly with David D. Levine's "Where is the Line", in which a somewhat bitter unemployed man encounters a mysterious neighbor and learns something from her via massage. It's involving and subtly erotic, and the main character rings true, though the resolution may be just a bit pat and moralistic in some ways.

Locus, April 2007

David D. Levine’s “Titanium Mike Saves the Day” (F&SF, April) tells of the history of a Paul Bunyan like space-based tall tale character, backwards through a few generations to the story’s origin. It’s perhaps a bit hokey – but successfully so.

Locus, February 2009

Realms of Fantasy’s February issue has a nice humorous story by David D. Levine, “Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven”, in which Umiel, an angel and a desk jockey (against her will) deals with such frustrations as a clueless boss,  the implementation of ISO 999, and the fact that her ideas for counteracting the Competition seem to be ignored.

Locus, April 2010

The May Analog includes a nice David Levine story, “Teaching the Pig to Sing”, told from the point of view of a future royal – genetically enhanced to be a natural ruler. He has been kidnapped by revolutionaries – a group who wants a return to democracy – and over a couple of days he finds himself unable to convincingly argue against their views. But neither do they convince him. And his people are still looking – what will happen when they find him? Levine’s resolution is a bit unexpected, and adds an edge and some poignancy to the story.

Locus, August 2011

The 100th issue of Realms of Fantasy, for June, is an extra long one, with some pretty good stuff. I particularly liked David D. Levine’s “The Tides of the Heart” – pure Urban Fantasy, in which a plumber with a specialty in magical problems runs into a special one: an undine trapped in the pipes of an historical old house marked for demolition. The plumber’s solution to the problem is personal as well as magical, and the intermixing of the two works perfectly.

Locus, January 2013

The November 15 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies includes a very nice David D. Levine story, “Liaisons Galantes: A Scientific Romance”. The conceit behind the story is that people who are truly in love manifest doglike creatures called “galanteries”. It's set in Paris, among a group of artists. Zephine is a struggling young writer, hopelessly obsessed with the group's charismatic leader, Darius. Then she meets another man, and they hit it off and become lovers – but to their concern, no galanteries appear. Are they really in love? And what does it mean that Zephine is suddenly inspired, and writing a promising play that attracts Darius' interest? The resolution becomes what we expect – not tritely, but such that we are led in the right direction so that everything seems just right. A quite enjoyable piece.

Locus, January 2014

There is a steampunkish cast to some of the better stories in Old Mars. For example, David D. Levine's “The Wreck of the Martian Adventure” features Captain Kidd recruited by the King to sail a ship to Mars – I have to admit I something of a sucker for space sailing stories. The concept is pretty much the story here, but withal it's very well done.

Birthday Review: Stories of Nick Mamatas

Today is Nick Mamatas' birthday. He's one of the most interesting, and most politically-engaged, writers working these days. Here's a collection of my reviews of his short fiction, plus a very brief capsule of his first novel, Move Under Ground, from 2004, that I wrote for my SFF Net newsgroup.

Locus, December 2005

Next a brand new electronic publication, planned to appear quarterly, available either as an e-book or (in delayed fashion) on the web: Son and Foe. The first issue, November 2005, contains a generous mix of reprints and originals. The best of the originals are surprisingly good, frankly better than I expected for a new online publication. My favorite is by Nick Mamatas, “Real People Slash”, written as if a memoir of a few years in the life of “Nick Mamatas” – and frankly pretty convincing and involving purely as memoir (true or not). But the story takes a strange, and effective, turn into Lovecraftian paranoia.

Review of Polyphony 6 (Locus, November 2006)

Also very weird is Nick Mamatas’s “The Uncanny Valley”, in which a psychiatrist tries to deal with – I think! – the dangerous unconscious of uploaded post-human intelligences, which appear to be destroying the world.

Locus, August 2007

Flytrap #7 includes, stealthily, a shocking and effective story by Nick Mamatas, “Solidarity Forever”, about a vain couple who decide that the best expression of their progressive pieties is to have sex with (i.e. rape) the most oppressed person they can find: a prisoner in Africa dying of AIDS.

Locus, November 2008

Weird Tales for July/August has a couple of striking pieces. Nick Mamatas is mordantly funny in “Mainevermontnewhampshiremass” in telling of a horror writer returning to his home town somewhere in the Northeast to battle a terrible menace – as it turns out in company with many other horror writers, and as it turns out … well, read the story.

Locus, April 2011

Nick Mamatas, in “North Shore Friday” (Asimov's, April-May), mixes a secret history of a government project to read minds with attempts in the 1960s to smuggle Greek refugees into the US and get them safely married off. The narrator, from decades in the future, remembers one sad incident, when one such operation went a bit wrong. The story nicely mixes the slightly mad idea of the mind reading operation with the interesting story of the refugees with an effective, subtly told, story of the narrator’s crush on a girl involved in the immigration activities.

Locus, September 2012

The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, edited by Sean Wallace, includes five original stories (and a large selection of good recent work). All the originals are worthy of attention. The best is “Arbeitskraft”, by Nick Mamatas, set in alternate Victorian London, and told by Friedrich Engels, who is using Difference Engine technology – advanced, in his factory, to a “Dialectical Engine” – to recreate his late friend Karl Marx. Engels dreams of using this technology to liberate the workers, with the help of the Dialectical Engine version of Marx. At the same time he encounters terribly oppressed girls from a match factory, and sees how the steampunk tech of this alternate history has affected their lives. The story is, obviously, politically engaged, and also full of interesting steampunkish notions, and some action as well.

Locus, January 2013

Bloody Fabulous is an anthology, about even mixed between new stories and reprints, on the subject of fashion. It's entertaining throughout. My favorite original piece came from Nick Mamatas: “Avant-n00b”, about a young fashion blogger who stumbles across a very strange “vintage” piece of clothing that turns out to have links to Vichy France.

Capsule Review of Move Under Ground (from my blog)

Another small press book is Nick Mamatas's Move Under Ground, the first novel by a writer who has done some pretty good shorter stuff in recent years, mostly what we used to call slipstream [though as I recall Nick rejected that term], often with a horror tinge. (In fact, Mamatas too can be linked with the New Weirdos. [grin]) Move Under Ground is from Night Shade Books.

It's got a high concept premise -- Jack Kerouac meets Lovecraft. That is, the novel is set in the early 60s, and Jack Kerouac is mysteriously enlisted to wage a battle against the denizens of R'lyeh, which has risen in the Pacific. People are turning into beetlemen, horrible cults are forming, mysterious things happening. Kerouac tracks down Neal Cassady and starts to head cross country from Big Sur and then San Francisco, destination New York. Along the way he picks up William S. Burroughs, and spends a little time in Burroughs's home town -- my place of residence, St. Louis. (I think he muffed the local geography a bit, but perhaps in 1962 or so he was right.)

I found much of the book interesting, but about as much kind of slow. Perhaps it would have helped if I was more knowledgeable about either the Beats or Lovecraft -- as it happens, I've read very little in either area. The writing is  quite nice, with plenty of exotic and original images.

Birthday Review: Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem

Today is Jonathan Lethem's birthday. And this gives me an opportunity to repost a review that is fairly important to me, not because it's a great piece of writing or anything, but because it's the first thing I wrote with some hope of professional publication. I wrote it in response to a note in, I think, Book Pages, asking for a Science Fiction reviewer. The date, according to my records, was 16 November 1995. They sent my a nice note back saying they liked it, but they weren't quite sure ... so they must have gone with someone else.

It's pretty short, which is because I was writing to their expected length.

Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem

Cassell, 1994 (TP: Tor, 1995)
$19.95 (TP: $10.95)
ISBN 0151364583 (TP: 0312858787)

Jonathan Lethem is a rather new writer whose stories have been appearing in Asimov's, Pulphouse and elsewhere over the past few years. His short fiction has shown outstanding range, and a quirky imagination. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, amply demonstrates both these qualities.The novel concerns Conrad Metcalf, a down-at-heels Private Inquisitor in mid-21sty century Oakland. He is drawn into investigating the murder of an affluent doctor with gangster ties, and becomes involved with shady cops, gangland figures, and beautiful women with questionable pasts. Thus, at the surface, this is a straight-forward pastiche of the standard hard-boiled detective novel, transposed into the next century. At this level, the novel works fine: the mystery is sufficiently absorbing and has enough twists to carry the plot, and Lethem has the first-person narrative down very well, with the "typical" hard-boiled attitude.

However, this is more than a standard SF take on Chandler. The SF elements themselves, though not terribly plausible, are interesting and thought-provoking, and well-integrated with the structure and themes of the novel. These include universal drug use for (fairly precise) control of emotional states, wildly extrapolated privacy laws, babyheads (children with vastly accelerated mental growth but normal physical growth), and intelligent, self-aware animals (the result of "evolution therapy"). Some of these tropes are use to generate jokes, but for the most part they support and reinforce the central story and the themes in which Lethem is interested. Ultimately, this is a serious, funny-sad novel, and at the heart of it are big questions about memory and the nature of personality. (These questions, and other elements of the novel such as the drug use, are very reminiscent of the work of Philip K. Dick.) Lethem handles the mixture of moods excellently, and the resolution to his story is perfect and satisfying. This is a very exciting first novel from one of the most promising new SF writers of the past few years.

Belated Birthday Review: Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks

Iain Menzies Banks would have turned 65 last Saturday (16 February 2019) -- he was only some 5 years older than me, but alas he died far too young at about my current age. He was a wonderful writer of SF, and SF-adjacent "mainstream" fiction. In his memory, here's my review of my favorite among his SF novels, posted exactly as I wrote it in 1997:

Review Date: 05 March 1997

Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks

MacDonald, 1990 (UK), 12.95 pounds
US Paperback Edition, Bantam Spectra 1992, $4.99 (ISBN: 0553292242)

Iain M. Banks is a Scottish writer, of several "mainstream" novels (albeit often with "slipstream" elements), published as by Iain Banks, and several SF novels (published with the middle initial). Banks has quite a reputation in the UK, stemming from the success of his first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984). He seems less well-known in the US, but at least his SF books eventually make it across the pond, and I have been reading the SF novels over the past year or so. (Reviews of two of those novels appear elsewhere on this site [or will, when I repost them].) Half by accident, half on purpose, I evolved a reading strategy which has led to me end up my reading of all the Banks SF novels available in the US as of last year with Use of Weapons, probably the consensus choice among Banks' readers as his best SF novel. (A new SF novel, Excession, was published last summer in the UK and is just now available in the States.)

(Cover by Paul Youll)

As implied above, I approached Use of Weapons with high expectations, not always a good attitude. However, in this case my expectations were met. Use of Weapons is one of Banks' "Culture" novels: set within our Galaxy at approximately (to within plus or minus a millennium) the present time, and concerning the interactions of the Culture, an interstellar society composed mostly of humanoids and of a variety of AI machines, the latter often "drones" of (very roughly) human size and intelligence, or ship minds: of ambiguous size and enormous intelligence. Like all the Culture novels I've read, this one takes place mostly outside the Culture proper: because that is where the stories are. (The Culture is a utopia, so at least to a first approximation, everyone is happy, and there isn't much in the way of story-generating conflict.)

Use of Weapons is the story of Cheradenine Zakalwe, a non-citizen of the Culture, who has been employed by the Special Circumstances branch of the Culture's Contact section as a mercenary, trying to influence conflicts on a variety of planets to be resolved in the direction the Culture prefers. As the main action of the story opens, Zakalwe has "retired" from SC. Diziet Sma, a Culture citizen who has been Zakalwe's "control" in the past, is rudely summoned from her latest (quite pleasurable) assignment in order to find Zakalwe and recruit him for one more emergency mission (involving a situation with which Zakalwe was previously involved).

From this point, the novel progresses in two main directions. The main branch of the story follows Sma forward in time, as she pursues and eventually finds Zakalwe, and as Sma and Zakalwe accomplish, in general terms, the mission on which the SC branch has sent them. This involves convincing a retired politician who supports the "right" side (anti-terraforming, pro-Machine Intelligence) of a conflict in an unstable star cluster to return to the arena and forestall a coming war, and then also involves some intervention in a "brushfire" which has broken out as a precursor to the war. This story is exciting and enjoyable, with plenty of Banksian action, Banksian scenery, and Banksian humor, the last as usual particularly embodied in the character of Sma's drone assistant, Skaffen-Amtiskaw. (Banks' machine characters are inveterate scene-stealers.)

The second plot thread moves steadily backward in time (complicated by a couple of even-farther backward flashbacks), following Zakalwe's career as an agent for SC, back to his recruitment by SC and his war experiences prior to that, and finally back to his formative years as an aristocrat of sorts on a planet with roughly 19th-20th century Earth technology and social structure. This thread allows us to slowly learn more of Zakalwe's character, and of the traumatic events which have made him the rather tortured individual he is at the time of the main action. Thus, the novel's structure is at first blush mildly experimental (there are actually four separate "threads" if one separates out the flashbacks as a thread, and if one considers the prologue and epilogue). However, this structure is really logical, and essential to the reader's experience. Essentially, the main action is illuminated by our growing understanding of Zakalwe's past. And the use of Sma as a viewpoint character (despite her somewhat non-centrality to most of the action sequences) is a vital strategy: in a sense, she becomes a stand-in for the reader: and part of our understanding of the novel is trying to understand Sma's feelings for Zakalwe (which are not romantic at all, by the way), and to measure her Use of the Weapon that is Cheradenine Zakalwe in the context of Zakalwe's humanness, and in a sort of parallel or contrast to Zakalwe's expert use of a variety of weapons.

The climax of the novel is a shocker (though I think it is guessable (I guessed it, anyway, though Banks kept me doubting)). However, it's not just a "surprise ending for the sake of the surprise". It's crucial to our understanding of the book: and it gives the book meaning far beyond the (very good) adventure story it has been up to that point. The climax seemed to reverberate back through the entire book, giving new meaning to almost every incident. This is a book which almost demands immediate rereading.

Ob-nitpicks: there are a couple of points where I don't think Banks plays quite fair with the reader in setting up the surprise (though this could be the result of insufficiently subtle reading on my part), also, I'm not sure I'm fully convinced by some of the changes in Zakalwe's character. These are very minor points indeed, however, and I recommend this book highly.

Birthday Review: Stories of Tina Connolly

Today is Tina Connolly's birthday. Tina has been publishing exceptional short fiction for over a decade now, and so I've assembled a set of my reviews of her work for Locus. Tina is very good at any length, but she is one of those writers who has done lots of exceptional work at the short-short length, which sometimes means short-short reviews! But they still should not be missed! Tina is also among the best recent comic-oriented writers (though, again, she is perfectly capable of being deadly serious when needed, and, besides, comic stories are often really deadly serious.) (I see, too, that this set of reviews mentions some quite obscure publication venues -- which I'm happy to see, because those tiny efforts often feature first-rate stuff that deserves all the notice it can get.)

Also, I didn't review her Tor.com story from last year, "The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections", because I'm now concentrating on print magazines for Locus, but I will add that it is excellent, and you should all read it!

Locus, June 2007

Yog's Notebook is a modest new magazine for which I had small expectations that were readily exceeded. The title promises Lovecraftian horror -- and in a sense that's true but the touch here is light -- to very good effect. I quite liked "A Memory of Seafood", by Tina Connolly, a deadpan restaurant review, its effect arising from the nature of the dish served.

Locus, February 2008

To the online (or electronically distributed) world: The second issue of the Australian YA ‘zine Shiny again features three fine stories – and again my favorite was the most light-hearted,  Tina Connolly’s “The Goats are Going Places”, something of a sendup of such YA hits as “Gossip Girl”, which is notoriously based on a real prep school in Manhattan. In Connolly’s story, her heroine is kicked out of her public high school, and is sent to live with her aunt, and to attend a high-end school. She gets in with the “in” girls, but perhaps takes things too far – except that her aunt can actually do magic, and uses some to teach her niece a lesson.

Locus, August 2008

And again we see that many writers are committing Mundane SF, whether or not they explicitly intend to. For instance, Tina Connolly’s “The Bitrunners” (Helix, July), set mostly on the Moon, among a gang of children who commit small-time crimes – in part to conceal their larger crime: “bitrunning”, sneaking confidential information from place to place. The narrator, though, has bigger things in mind: a trip back to her Martian home, with the greater risks that entails. She’s a very well presented unreliable narrator, with a bitter past – a past that poisons even her present hopes. (She is, perhaps, an unreliable narrator even to herself.)

Locus, March 2011

The old editors, Cat Rambo and Sean Wallace, bow out with some strong stories in January and February at Fantastic. From January, I liked Tina Connolly’s “As We Report to Gabriel”, an original and quite charming story about fairies, set in a house owned by a woman who has been forced to renounce any interest in fairies for political reasons. Which is a problem, as she is married to one. The telling is delightful and the depiction of the nature of fairies is original and unexpected.

Locus, October 2011

Bull Spec is a North Carolina-based magazine that has been growing in confidence. Its sixth issue includes five stories, all enjoyable. I liked Tina Connolly’s “Selling Home” best, set on a tall structure with poor people on the lower levels and rich people up higher – but the rich people have a fertility problem, which means that the struggling narrator Penny will be faced with a hard question – what to do when a chance-met rich girl wants to buy her little brother.

Locus, September 2012

In August, though, that changes – I thought the two original SF stories at Lightspeed were best. ... I really liked “Flash Bang Remember” by Tina Connolly and Caroline M. Yoachim. It's built around a frankly unbelievable central notion: on a generation ship, all the inhabitants share a single childhood, which they experience virtually while growing up in a vat. These childhood experiences were the real life of a boy who has been kept in stasis every since. The heroine is called Girl23 – she's their attempt at recording a similarly ideal female childhood experience, but as her number suggests, there have been problems. Then the original boy is waken from stasis, and they meet. As I said, I had a hard time buying the premise, but given that, things are worked out very nicely, with a well-done resolution. It's lightly told, engaging, with a YA feel, and for all that there's a thoughtful core to the piece.

Locus, February 2018

Uncanny in November-December features a very effective brief story by Tina Connolly, “Pipecleaner Sculptures and Other Necessary Work”, about an android on a generation starship who faces a transition as they reach their destination – from a preschool teacher to a more martial role. The unvoiced questions concern what work is necessary – and of course identity and agency for androids.

Old Bestseller: A Window in Thrums, by J. M. Barrie

A Window in Thrums, by J. M. Barrie

a review by Rich Horton

Everybody knows J. M. Barrie, right? But they know him almost exclusively for one work (and its offshoots): Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a play first performed in 1904. (Barrie did produce a related novel, Peter and Wendy.) Some may have heard of his first bestseller, the novel The Little Minister (1891), or perhaps his play The Admirable Crichton. And some may have read something about Barrie's unusual and a bit creepy (but probably not criminal) relationship with the children who inspired the Peter Pan stories, the Llewellyn Davies family. Anyway, that's all I knew.

Barrie was born in 1860 in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the ninth of ten children, the son of a weaver. His life was formed in part by the death of his older brother at the age of 14, and his subsequent attempts to replace his brother in his mother's affection. Barrie wanted to become a writer from early days, but went to the University of Edinburgh at his family's urging. However, he continued to write, and had success with an early trio of books based on his childhood home and church. Kirriemuir became Thrums in these books. The first was Auld Licht Idylls, the second the book at hand, A Window in Thrums (1889), and the third The Little Minister. In his later career he concentrated mostly on the theater. He married an actress, Mary Ansell, but the marriage was apparently unconsummated, and he appears to have in some way truly desired to be "the boy who wouldn't grow up". He was made a Baronet in 1913.

My copy of A Window in Thrums is an American reprint, in octavo size, probably from the 1890s, printed by the Chicago firm Donohue, Hennebery, and Co. It is inscribed, in a very nice hand, "A Merry Christmas from Santa Claus, 1899".

A Window in Thrums is told by a schoolteacher about village life in Thrums, from a perspective many years later than the action. The teacher lets a room from a poor family: Hendry McQumpha, a weaver, his wife Jess, and their daughter Leeby. Their son Jamie is a barber living in London, visiting once a year. Their other son, Joey, died in an accident very young. (There are parallels with Barrie's youth that are hard to miss.) Jess is portrayed as a nearly saintly woman -- she is crippled, and unable to move beyond the short walk from her bed to a chair by her window (the title window). She's portrayed as an intelligent woman, and a genius banker and embroiderer. Her husband is slower, but a hard working and honest man. Leeby is devoted to her mother, to the complete abnegation of her own identity.

All the above, I'm sure, is Barrie's intention, but, really, from another perspective Jess can be seen as a monster -- formed so perhaps by her disability and by the loss of her son, but still! -- she has all but enslaved her daughter, and she is all but psychopathic in her determination that Jamie shall never marry.

The book opens with a series of chapters that are really humourous sketches of life in Thrums -- the local comic is described, and theg gossip following the movements of the minister, or the appearance of any man with an eligible woman. There's an amusing account of the local "post" trying to get out of his engagement to a local woman -- unscuccessfully, of course. Much of this is amusing, somewhat sentimental, told in just enough Scots dialect (with English glosses) to give a pretty good flavor of things.

The book concludes with a long linked set of chapters detailing Jamie's relationship with his family, especially his sister, over the course of one of his visits. A key incident is Jess stealing a glove her son seems to treasure -- she's convinced it belongs to a sweetheart, and that just won't do. Jamie goes back to London, and tragedy strikes -- Leeby dies of a fever, and Hendry and Jess follow not long after, and then we see Jamie's fate -- apparently betrayed by a woman (no details are given) -- seemingly driven mad by the loss of his family and by his own guilt.

Most of the book, then, is minor work, not terribly exciting, but sometimes amusing, and sometimes interesting in its portrayal of Scots village life in the middle of the 19th Century. But I was a bit put off by the conclusion, and its absolute rejection of the idea that Jamie might meet and have a good life with a woman from outside the village. It really seems a reflection of Barrie's apparent fear of sex.

Birthday Review: Six Gates from Limbo, by J. T. McIntosh (and some of his short fiction)

Here's something a bit different for my birthday reviews -- I've extracted a bunch of short looks at the short fiction of the Scottish writer J. T. McIntosh, whose real name was James McGregor, born February 14, 1925. He died in 2008, over 30 years after he stopped writing SF. He was a sometimes interesting, often frustrating, writer, but one whose work I often enjoy, even as aspects of it annoy me.

I start with a look at one of his later novels, then the short fiction.

Six Gates From Limbo

J. T. McIntosh, real name James MacGregor, was a Scottish writer who published many short stories and novels between about 1950 and the early 70s. I have long enjoyed his stories, with reservations. McIntosh was often interested in quirky variations on social structures. He tended to set his stories in rather sketchily described futures, usually in that sort of intergalactic society where planet hopping is like taking a bus, or at most an ocean liner. Then he would introduce one unusual social variation, sometimes interesting, sometimes implausible. His style was breezy and fairly individual to him. He worked most often at the long novelette or novella length, say 13000 to 20000 words. But he also wrote quite a few novels. And with many writers of that era, he was noticeably sexist, though at times in quirky ways.

Six Gates From Limbo is a latish novel, published in the UK in 1968. It was serialized in If in two parts in January and February 1969 -- I haven't seen that version but it seems likely to be an abridged version -- the copy I read (the 1969 Avon paperback) is about 60,000 words long.

I found it rather an interesting book. A man comes to consciousness on what seems to be a deserted planet. It is apparently well-suited for human life, but abandoned. Or so it seems -- after a while he encounters a woman, and a little later, another woman. They names themselves Rex, Regina, and Venus -- names with obvious symbolism. They name their world Limbo. But soon they learn that there are matter transmitter gates from Limbo, and eventually they decide to take them. They discover a variety of societies beyond these gates, but all are seriously sick societies, each in different ways. The reasons for this, it turns out, is that they are colonial worlds, and that they cannot escape the various effects of dependency on Earth. It seems that Rex and Regina and Venus have been created as part of a project aimed at finding a solution to the problem. And so they do -- rather a shocking one.

I'm not sure I buy McIntosh's premise, nor his solution, but it's a thought-provoking story all the same. I should mention that the problem of colony worlds and their interactions with the mother world and with other colonies was one of McIntosh's recurring themes.

Planet Stories, January 1951 and July 1951

I've mentioned that J. T. McIntosh is a guilty pleasure of mine.  At this stage in his career, he was signing stories "J. T. M'Intosh", and there are two M'Intosh stories in these issues.  One shows him at his most didactic (and he was often oddly didactic): "Safety Margin" (January 1951).  This seems almost like an attempt to push Campbell's buttons, but I have a feeling M'Intosh didn't really know quite where Campbell's buttons were.  Anyway this is an odd story about a space drive (the vibrodrive) that cannot be run more than 10 seconds (or something) at a time.  A screwup happens, and it's necessary, in order to save the ship, to run the drive a bit longer.  A special government representative explains to the engineer who saw him run the drive that there is really no limit on how long it can run, but that the government is afraid that if the lack of limitation became known, the drive would be vulnerable to conversion to weapons-use.  So, they made up the story about the 10 second limit.  Everyone knows there is a "Safety Margin", see, but they don't know it's infinite.  Then the government guy kills the engineer.  To prevent the secret getting out, see?  The logic holes in this story are amazing, but perhaps justifiable as a set up.  The thing that squicks me, of course, is the cold blooded killing, and the apparent assertion that that's justifiable, an "end justifies the means" thing. 

The other M'Intosh story is much better, a straight "planetary adventure" called "Venus Mission" (July 1951).  A spaceship crashes on Venus.  One of the passengers is a hero of the recent war (since over) between the human colonists and the native Venusians.  Another is a "Plucky Girl"(tm).  Others include the usual ineffectual suspects, most notably a pretty piece of fluff.  The Hero of the war gets to know the Plucky Girl, and tell he's done with being a Hero.  The war was enough for him.  Somebody else was going to have to cross 20 miles of Venusian terrain to reach the nearest Human city and arrange a rescue, and brave the evil Venusians, who detect prey by sensing brain patterns.  (This makes sense, sort of, because Venus' atmosphere doesn't allow for much in the way of sight or sound.)  The Plucky Girl, furious at the cowardly hero, decides that she will make the trek.  She almost makes it, but at the last, the Venusians are alerted to human presence by the silliness of the Pretty Fluff, who had also decided to try to reach the human city.  Both are captured, and Pretty Fluff is subjected to horrible torture, until the Hero, who has been following them all along (for a good reason, which I can't quite recall, but which was justified in story context), rescues them.  You will not be surprised to learn that the story ends with Hero kissing Plucky Girl, marriage at 11.  It all sounds silly and pulpish, and it is, but it's also fun.  Stuff like this is what makes M'Intosh a guilty pleasure.

F&SF, April 1953

"Beggars All" actually seems written for J. W. Campbell, at least in form. Scouts from a far future human galactic culture recontact an isolated colony. They seem to be outrageously rude beggars.  In the course of resisting another aggressive civilization, at the behest of these beggars, the scouts realize that the bad manners of these "beggars" evolved for good socially adaptive reasons.  Or so M'Intosh would have us believe: I wasn't convinced.  He also tacked on a horrendously unconvincing, and unnecessary, love story.

Galaxy, October 1954

The other novelette is from J. T. McIntosh, "Spy" (15300 words). This story is oddly reminiscent of the McIntosh novelette from F&SF, October 1955, discussed below: "The Man Who Cried 'Sheep'". Both stories are about a spy from another planet who uses a cover involving statistical research to investigate the planet to which he comes. To be sure, this story is in details quite different. Ken Corvey is from the colony planet Aram, come to Earth to verify Earth's military power. His cover is as a journalist doing "survey reporting" -- using statistically significant subsets of populations to learn things. His life is complicated in two ways: he is falling in love with an Earthwoman, Sandra Reid; and he is very ill, with an illness that originated on his planet. He can't seek treatment, because the doctor will recognize his illness and deduce his real planet. So he has to put up with the symptoms, which are extremely realistic hallucinations.

The ultimate conflict involves his worries about his lover's ultimate loyalty (to Earth, of course), and his won (to Aram -- but are the colonies really right?). The resolution buries a slight twist, which is OK but not quite believable. Still, the story is good reading, and makes some interesting points. I'd rank it as one of McIntosh's better outings. I think he missed an opportunity -- which probably was not something he would have been interested in at all! -- of using the realistic hallucinations to present multiple possible endings, never telling us which was real. I.e., to write a Philip Dick story!

F&SF, May 1955

"Eleventh Commandment" is a painfully obvious political fable about a proposal for a law against miscegenation between the slightly altered races of the future (each adapted just a bit to fit their home planets' environments). This is a story that perhaps had more force in the '50s than it does now.

New Worlds, August 1955

McIntosh's "The Way Home" is the lead novelette, a long one at 19,500 words. A small group of explorers, four men and three women, find themselves trapped on an alien planet when the seemingly friendly indigenous aliens steal their spaceship. Their lifeboats remain, but they soon realize the aliens have boobytrapped them. The story is both a problem story -- how have the lifeboats been boobytrapped? -- and an examination of small group dynamics. The puzzle of the boobytrapping seemed easily enough solvable to me, and also the alien's motivations for acting as they did seemed implausible -- or nonexistent. But McIntosh's real interest anyway is in exploring the tensions -- both sexual and "leadership"-related -- between the seven humans. That works OK, and keeps the interest, but it is marred for me by the sexist (though very typical of the time) view of the women crewmembers.

F&SF, October 1955

So, to the fiction. The lead story is J. T. McIntosh's "The Man Who Cried 'Sheep'", just shy of 14,000 words. A secret agent for the planet Verna, calling himself Mr. Lees, comes to the planet Renn, with the goal of determining whether an alliance with Renn is desirable. Verna's rival planet is Kolper, and the hero is forced to kill a Kolperian agent on the spaceship just before arrival. Thus is investigation of the situation on Renn is complicated by the fact that he is quickly under investigation as a murder suspect. More to the point, the detective in charge of the case is a very beautiful woman. Lees' investigations seem to suggest that the people of Renn are "sheep" -- easily cowed, polite to a fault. Perhaps they will not be a strong ally. But on the other hand, his pursuer, the beautiful detective, besides being sexy as heck, is hardly sheeplike. And the pressure to conclude an alliance seems to be increasing ... I was entertained, on the whole, but not in a science-fictional way. And that's the main problem I had with the story -- it needn't have been SF at all, and the fact that it is presented as an other world adventure is nothing but distracting.

New Worlds, February 1957

This issue includes a novella by J. T. McIntosh: "Unit", a rather disappointing story of a group of five people (really 6 including an unmodified "unit father", as he implies but never states outright) who have been trained to work as a superintelligent unit, by having all 5 of their brains erased and retrained together. Some hints of sexual tension are underdeveloped, and the mission that the "unit" solves together is cute but doesn't really convince.

Galaxy, June 1959

The other novelet is "No Place for Crime", by J. T. McIntosh, short for McIntosh at about 11000 words. A quartet of thieves plan a series of perfect crimes on a world with a reputation as being free of crime. This world is so because, basically, the citizens have completely given up their privacy. The thieves' plan revolves around teleportation, a bit of a cheat, especially as McIntosh must rather artificially constrict his version of teleportation abilities to make it work. Of course the perfect crimes don't quite come off, and there is a bit of a twist at the end (plus an implausible love story) to add flavor. Middle range for McIntosh, I'd say.

Galaxy, August 1961

"The Gatekeepers" is a pretty well done piece from J. T. McIntosh. As he was wont to do, he uses a modest SFnal idea to carefully establish a difficult situation, then tries to work out a solution. The idea here is that two planets have a difficult to maintain matter transmitter (MT) link. They use this for trade -- actual interplanetary travel being expensive. But they have stumbled into war. Realizing that the link must be maintained mutually, or be lost and prohibitively expensive to reestablish after the war, they agree to each maintain a single gatekeeper (and a couple of spares), noncombatants who will swear not to allow the link to be used for sending soldiers or weapons. The story concerns the two gatekeepers, who, through a combination of coincidence, a bit of gentlemanly trading (technically against the law, but tolerated), and the one man's insistence on his wife's presence, end up simultaneously threatened by partisans who want to send bombs or germs through the gate to destroy the other planet. The meshing of the plot is nicely done -- the way different pressures on the two men lead to similar situations.

Analog, April 1963

The other novelette is J. T. McIntosh's "Iceberg from Earth" (12,500 words). McIntosh was a regular at Galaxy and New Worlds and other places in the 50s, rarely if ever cracking Astounding, but in the 60s he sold several stories to Campbell. This one is very much in his usual style, set in a system colonized by humans, with three planets arranged in a classic balance of power. The narrator is a spy from Marlock, which is eternally almost at war with Coran. They are the poorer two planets of the system. They are on the larger planet, Rham, as a new Marlockian warship is demonstrated. They now that Coran will try to sabotage the new ship. Earth as it turns out has an interest in foiling Coran's plans, so they have sent a spy, a beautiful but very cool woman named Nova Webb. The bulk of the story concerns the working out of the various plots, and in particularly how Nova Webb is revealed as more intelligent -- and more vicious -- than the various men from the colony worlds. It's OK but quite thin.

Amazing, September 1964

On to the shorter pieces from the September issue. We begin with the novelette, "Planet of Change", by J. T. McIntosh, real name James MacGregor (1925-2008), a Scottish writer who published 15 or so novels and something like a hundred shorter pieces in the SF field in a 30 year career beginning in 1950. I've read several of his novels, and quite a few short stories (or, mostly, in his case, novelettes), often with a fair amount of enjoyment. "Planet of Change" is the story of the court martial of the leader of a mutiny on a ship that had been ordered to explore a planet from which no previous explorer had returned. The mystery turns on the read identity of the man being court-martialed, and that of course turns on the real nature of the dangerous planet. It's an OK piece, nothing terribly special.

Birthday Reviews: Four Inspector Maigret novels, by Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon was born on this date (February 13) in 1903. He died in 1986. He's by far most famous for his novels about the Paris based Inspector Maigret, of which he wrote dozens, but he wrote a great many more crime novels, almost all heavily focussed on the psychology of the criminal. Many of the non-Maigret novels are quite highly regarded, but I confess a great fondness for the Maigrets. I've read almost all of them. Here are shortish looks at four of the Maigret novels.

The Bar on the Seine, by Georges Simenon

It has been quite a long time since I read a Maigret novel. It seemed that I had exhausted those that had been translated into English, though it was hard to be sure. I saw a new Penguin edition, curiously sized, of a book that seemed at first unfamiliar. This was called The Bar on the Seine, translated by David Watson from a 1931 book called La Guingette a Deux Sous.

Well, it turns out I had read the book. It had been translated in 1940 by Geoffrey Sainsbury, and published variously in English as Guingette by the Seine, A Spot by the Seine, and Maigret and the Tavern by the Seine. (I had a 1990 Harcourt Brace paperback under the latter title.) But no matter -- I didn't remember it, so I reread it, with only the occasional intimations of familiarity -- for the most part it felt new.

Maigret visits a gangster who is about to be executed, and the man hints that he knew of a murderer, from 6 years before, who frequented a bar called La Guingette a Deux Sous. Maigret has little luck finding this, until he stumbles across a man who mentions his plan to visit this tavern -- a man who, Maigret learns, is also arranging as assignation with his mistress. Maigret finds his way to the tavern, where he finds the man (a successful coal merchant) with his wife, and also the man's mistress and her husband, a struggling haberdasher, and a varied cast of characters, including a talkative heavy-drinking Englishman, and several more folks. It seems the mistress is a rackety woman who has had affairs with several of the regulars at this tavern -- and that her husband has used this knowledge to blackmail some of her lovers. So it is perhaps not a surprise when the sorry blackmailer is shot -- and when his wife's latest lover, the coal merchant, is found with a gun.

The man escapes, and Maigret tries to track him down. Meanwhile the Englishman strikes up a relationship of sorts with Maigret, while at the same time all but flaunting his attempts to help the escaped coal merchant. And Maigret learns some of the details of the haberdasher's arrangements, including his involvement with a moneylender who disappeared, significantly, six years before -- just when the gangster Maigret had talked to had hinted at knowledge of a murder. Maigret is very dissatisfied with the obvious shape of the case -- something is going on. Which of course he discovers. What works -- quite brilliantly -- in this book, one of the earliest Maigrets, is the eventually displayed, quite convincing, quite sad, character of the actual murderer. Some of the early Maigrets seem uncharacteristic of the series to me -- Maigret is at times almost an action hero -- but in this case the story reads very much like later Maigret, with the main interest being the psychology of the murderer and other related figures.

The Madman of Bergerac, by Georges Simenon

Penguin have been rereleasing some older Maigret novels by Georges Simenon. They are retitling them, which can be confusing  -- the last one I bought was a book I'd already read, in a different edition and translation. (Though I was still glad to reread it -- it has been a while.) But now I have found a Maigret that is completely new to me: The Madman of Bergerac. This novel dates to 1932 (as Le Fou de Bergerac), and was published in English as part of a 1952 omnibus called Maigret Goes South. But I had not yet read it.

As with much early Maigret, he engages in much more personal action than became typical. He is traveling to Bordeaux for a quasi-vacation -- there is some trivial police business to clear up but he also wants to visit a retired colleague. But in his compartment there is a mysterious man, in some distress, and when the man jumps off the train, Maigret jumps off after him. The man shoots Maigret in the shoulder, and Maigret ends up recuperating in a hotel in the town of Bergerac.

He learns that there have been a number of attacks on young women in Bergerac -- a couple have been murdered, another woman fought off her attacker. These have been attributed to a madman believed to be living in the woods -- and indeed they assume it is this madman who attacked Maigret.

The rest of the novel consists of Maigret investigating these crimes from his hotel bed -- shades of Rear Window! Maigret ruffles feathers by treating several prominent locals as suspects. And (with Madame Maigret's help) he uncovers evidence of a "white slavery" ring, and a local man engaged in an affair with his sister-in-law, and another man secretly acquiring pornography. His old friend even turns out to be fooling around with a young lady ... as ever in the Maigret novels, everyone has secrets. There really is a madman, it turns out -- but there are also more serious crimes going on. It's not a great Maigret novel, but it's pretty decent.

Maigret in Montmartre, by Georges Simenon

Several years ago I read every one of Georges Simenon's Maigret mysteries that I could track down. I'm fairly sure a few early ones may still elude me, but mostly I think I've read the complete set available in English. But I ran across a book called Inspector Maigret and the Strangled Stripper in a used book store. I didn't remember the title, so I bought it and read it. While reading it, every so often things seemed familiar, but I really couldn't remember the basic plot.

It turns out that I had read this book under a different title: Maigret in Montmartre. That title seems to be of the UK translation, by Daphne Woodward. The copy I just bought is a 1964 reprinting of a 1955 Signet edition, translated by Cornelia Schaeffer for the American market. The book itself was first published in the US in hardcover in 1954, probably first published in 1950 in France. (It was written while Maigret was living in the US in 1950.) The French title was Maigret au Picratt's (Maigret at Picratt's). That title refers to the bar in Montmartre at which the stripper of the American title worked. A cursory glance at the two translations convinced me that Woodward's was considerably superior.

The story involves a stripper with a mysterious past (she uses a false identity card) who comes to the police with a story of a planned murder of a Countess. But the next day it is the stripper who turns up strangled. Soon enough a Countess is found dead as well. The stripper was involved with a young man who, we quickly guess, is one of Maigret's young assistants. Maigret must unravel the secret of her past, and of the Countess's past, to solve the crime. The actual solution is a bit over-obvious, and also I was confused a bit by how the stripper got involved with the bad guy, and how she started on her unsavory career. Simenon seems more interested in the psychosexual aspects of the case, and in particular he lingers somewhat on the stripper's enjoyment of her job, and of sex -- in a way that I found odd and not terribly believable (and which made me think too of the stories of Simenon's own rather odd sex life).

The Methods of Maigret, by Georges Simenon

I read, as I believe, pretty much all of the Maigret novels several years ago. But not long ago I ran across a used paperback called The Methods of Maigret, which didn't seem entirely familiar. It was really cheap, so I figured what the heck. I'm still not sure if I read it before -- one aspect seems very familiar: the book features a Scotland Yard detective following Maigret in order to learn his "methods". But the setting and the crime didn't ring any bells. I have to suspect that I did indeed read it, but forgot it enough that I could read it again with the same enjoyment as the first time! Ah, the benefits of aging!

Here Maigret is summoned to Porquerolles, a small island off the French coast in the Mediterranean. A small time crook with whom Maigret had had dealings in the past has been murdered, shortly after brandishing a letter from Maigret and bragging of his relationship. One working theory is that the man was killed by a local crook who so hated Maigret that he was driven to a rage ... but that really seems silly.

Maigret spends a few days on the island, worrying about how his English colleague will perceive his rather methodless methods. This place seems to attract people who have more or less stopped worrying about life, who just want to drift. There are a couple of English people, including an older woman with a French gigolo. There is a Dutch artist with a young Belgian girl as his mistress. There is an old woman and her also fairly old son, who run a number of brothels on the coast. It turns out one of these brothels is now run by the former girlfriend of the murdered man, a woman who Maigret more or less saved ... occasioning the letter that the man had kept. Plus a few natives, including a local crook who is eager to reassure Maigret as to where he stands.

Maigret soon gathers that the murdered man had some potentially valuable information, and many of those lurking seem to hope to find out what it was to make use of it themselves. And he eventually works his way to the solution, which is reasonably sensible, a bit sordid, and which, as often in these stories, leads to a somewhat resignedly sad ending: justice is served, more or less, but the wake of these criminal acts leads to further tragedy.