Birthday Review: Stories of Esther Friesner

Today is also Esther Friesner's birthday. Friesner is best known for her comic work, and that work is very funny indeed. But she also can be very affecting, as with her two Nebula winning short stories. here's a selection of my reviews of her short fiction, most from Locus but also a review of a story collection, from 3SF.

Locus, April 2002

The April F&SF is very solid.  Several stories are comic – particularly notable being Esther Friesner's novelette "Just Another Cowboy", and Thomas M. Disch's set of brief Biblical retellings, "Torah! Torah! Torah!".  Friesner's story is set on a Texas ranch that has just been inherited by a scrawny boy who was raised in New York.  He and his shrewish aunt come to take possession, and the farmhands are naturally concerned for their futures.  But there is one very special farmhand … It's silly, quite entertaining, fun.

3SF, February 2003

By contrast Esther Friesner, it must be said, is fairly well known – at any rate, she owns two Nebula Awards for short fiction, and she has published any number of novels, many of them comic but some quite dark.  Here's a collection of recent work: Death and the Librarian and Other Stories.  It's an excellent display of her talents.  It includes her two Nebula winners: the title story, a moving piece an old woman who reads to a rather special group of children, and her encounter with death; and "A Birthday", a fierce and thoughtful story about the human costs of abortion – and of anti-abortion laws.  My other favorite here is "Chanoyu", a striking SF story interleaving a Japanese tea ceremony with slow revelations about the artificial person at the center of the story, and about its job harvesting genetic material.

This collection amply displays Friesner's range, with humourous and whimsical stories like "How to Make Unicorn Pie", fierce satire in "'White', said Fred", a highly poetic, magic realist story about the Spanish Revolution in "Love, Crystal, and Stone", an odd, clever, futuristic take on Alice in "A Pig's Tale", even one brand new story, "Ilion" (a September 11 piece).  At times the stories are over-sentimental, at times a joke is belabored, but overall, a fine collection.

Locus, July 2004

The July issue of F&SF is a special "All-American" issue, with all the stories on American themes. For example, Esther Friesner's "Johnny Beansprout" is a hilarious story of an alternative Johnny Appleseed, spreading not only bean sprouts but vegetarian dogma. The kicker is that the story is told from the POV of one of Johnny's adoptive relatives: Sawney Bean, with all that that name implies.

Locus, April 2005

At the March Asimov's, Esther M. Friesner's cover novelette, "The Fraud", features a penniless English gentleman, George Pengallen, investigating what must surely be fraudulent claims of a woman pregnant by a unicorn. But frauds abound – Pengallen himself is a deceptive man, as surely too are his lover and his new patron. Much is made of the fraudulent Mrs. Tufts, who claimed to give birth to rabbits. But somehow the woman's claims ring a but more truly. The conclusion is inevitably sad and cynical.

Locus, October 2006

I didn’t find the second issue of the new online magazine Jim Baen’s Universe quite as involving as the first. Still, it features a very generous helping of stories and articles, many quite entertaining. Esther Friesner’s “Benny Comes Home” is just very funny, about a boy in a post-WWII Jewish family who learns a lot of family secrets when a cousin finally comes home from the war, and another cousin deals with her family insisting she finally marry someone.

Locus, September 2007

Also in the August F&SF ... Esther Friesner is  entertaining, and quite clever, in “At These Prices”, in which a rather greedy hotel guest finds herself fortuitously pledged the service of a brownie. It seems the hotel has inherited the very inexpensive use of a whole group of magical creatures … and a misstep means that Ms. Franklin gets the use of the brownie. Which is unpleasant for him – but his friends are there to help.

In the online world, Helix for Summer features a strong set of stories, all by women. I preferred Esther Friesner’s sharply satirical “A Sacred Institution”, in which a slimy politician marries his dog but runs into trouble when aliens show up who demand that promises like marriage be kept – and who can enforce such demands.

Locus, August 2016

Now to some anthologies. Bryan Thomas Schmidt has a couple new books about, both a mix of reprints and originals. Galactic Games is a collection of sport stories, timed to coincide with the Rio Olympics. In this case the book is mostly originals, often dealing with attempts at interspecies sport, and (not always on purpose) managing to highlight the difficulties of fair completion between entities of a radically different physical makeup. Maybe the best take on that comes from Esther Friesner, in her wickedly funny tale of what happens when a representative of a very warlike species wants to be a cheerleader, “Pompons and Circumstance”.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley was one of the greatest SF writers of short stories, particularly funny short stories, though he was certainly capable of deeper work (even in the funny stories.) I read through basically all of his story collections a quarter century or so back, a very rewarding effort.His novels were never as good as his short fiction, but they were still reliably enjoyable.  He was born in 1928 and died in 2005, after falling ill while visiting Russia. He was named SFWA Author Emeritus in 2001, and award that was controversial in some quarters, because it was often regarded as a pat on the back for an accomplished long-time writer who "wasn't good enough for Grand Master status". Sheckley, it was felt (and I agree) was potentially a Grand Master, if perhaps not a slam dunk case, so the Emeritus designation seemed almost an insult, though Sheckley by all accounts was quite happy to be so honored.

What follows is what I've written about his short fiction, a few reviews of late stories in Locus, plus a number taken from my "retro-reviews" of 1950s magazines. Alas, none of the stories I mention are among his best, such as, say, the fairly early "Specialist" or the much later "Pas de Trois of the Chef, the Waiter, and the Customer".

Astounding, March 1953

The only short story is Robert Sheckley's "Fool's Mate" (4800 words), in which two equally matched space fleets confront each other. It seems their computers have determined that the alien fleet has a tiny positional advantage which nearly guarantees victory -- but that neither fleet can attack since the act of attacking will ruin their position and guarantee failure. The standoff is psychologically devastating, until a man comes up with an idea -- use one of the gunnery officers who has been driven insane to control attack strategy. You see, the other side's computer will never be able to figure out a madman ... Cute, I suppose, but not terribly believable.

Science Fiction Stories, 1953

Robert Sheckley's "Ask a Foolish Question" (3600 words) concerns representatives of several different races finding a machine built by an ancient race called "The Answerer". The Answerer will answer any question -- but can lesser races ask a sensible enough question and understand the answer?

Space Science Fiction, September 1953

Robert Sheckley's "The Hour of Battle" (2200 words) is another human/alien war story, with a nasty twist. Humans have encountered evil telepathic aliens, who can take over people's minds and make them do anything. They have developed a telepathy detector, and a series of ships guard the Solar System, ready to destroy the aliens at the first sign of telepathic probing. But perhaps they haven't quite thought this through ... though what hope there really could be in such a situation I can't see.

Galaxy, August 1954

The short stories are "Subsistence Level", by Finn O'Donnevan (4500 words); ... "Finn O'Donnevan" is really Robert Sheckley. I'm not sure why he used a pseudonym for "Subsistence Level", which is fairly characteristic of his work of the time, though not one of his best stories. A young couple move to the asteroids to be pioneers, and they must live difficult pioneer lives: 5 hour work days!, plain eight course meals prepared by household robots, etc. Minor but acceptable.

If, September 1954

Robert Sheckley's "The Battle" (2000 words) extrapolates today's trends toward increasing automation of warfare to the Battle of Armageddon. OK, but mostly a punchline story.

Galaxy, October 1954

The short stories include Robert Sheckley's "Ghost V" (5300 words), the first (chronologically) AAA Ace Planet Decontamination Story. This is more straightforward than most Sheckley. The AAA Ace guys must solve the mystery of a planet where two groups of explorers have each died violently, despite no evidence of dangerous creatures on the planet. The solution is OK, but not great.

Galaxy, November 1954

Robert Sheckley's "The Laxian Key" (3500 words) is a AAA Ace story. Arnold's latest get-rich-quick idea is a "Free Producer", which can make endless supplies of something for nothing. Problem is, the something isn't worth much! It's mostly a joke story, with no real resolution, but it's pretty funny.

Galaxy, July 1955

Robert Sheckley's "Deadhead" (3000 words) is about a struggling scientific outpost on Mars, inhabited only by Ph.D.'s who are forced to do all the ordinary work, too. Every so often a stowaway "deadheads" to Mars, trying to escape tiresome Earth. The "deadhead" seems a very useful person, but regulations say he must be sent directly home. But the question is -- how did he get to Mars after all? The answer is a bit cute -- worth 3000 words, I guess, but nothing special.

Locus, September 2003

Weird Tales for July-August features a story by the wonderful Robert Sheckley: "The Tales of Zanthias". Zanthias is a leader of an unusual town of misfits, a town surrounded by monsters such as zombies, calibans, witches, ghosts, all of which he tries to keep away. One morning his wife is missing, and he looks for her -- and finds that he himself has a secret.

Locus, January 2004

Mike Resnick's latest DAW anthology reverses the conceit of an earlier book: this time we have Men Writing Science Fiction as Women. As with the previous book, the results are mixed. ... Also good is Robert Sheckley's "A Tale of the Oroi", a pleasant concoction of fantasy and SF in which a fairy from Ancient Greece encounters a time traveler from the 21st Century, with slyly presented, unexpected, results.

Best SF Short Fiction of All Time

I've been asked, a few times, to produce lists of my favorite short science fiction stories. I did that once (at least) on rec.arts.sf.written, and I did it for the Locus All Centuries poll. And my answer will probably change the next time I think about it seriously. But, just for documentation's sake, I wanted to record my answers from before.

First, here's an off the top of my head answer I gave on rec.arts.sf.written (gosh how I miss that community in its Golden Age!) in December 1999. The original question was "Ten Best Novelettes" (by which the poster (Jerry Friedman) meant "long stories" -- roughly speaking, novelettes and novellas.) Naturally I added short stories too.

Here's what I posted.

__

Here's my list, which extends to 12 authors and 14 stories (so sue me!):

(I've put it in my best guess at chronological order of publication)

"... and Now the News" by Theodore Sturgeon
"The Dead Past" by Isaac Asimov
"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes
"The Sources of the Nile" by Avram Davidson
"Starfog" by Poul Anderson
"Nine Lives" and "The Stars Below" by Ursula K. Le Guin
"The Second Inquisition" by Joanna Russ
"Green Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson
"The Last of the Winnebagos" and "Fire Watch" by Connie Willis
"The Originist" by Orson Scott Card
"Wang's Carpets" by Greg Egan
"The Ziggurat" by Gene Wolfe

And a list for short stories (10 authors, 12 stories):

"Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith
"Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester
"The Man Who Came Early" by Poul Anderson
"The Man Who Lost the Sea" by "A Saucer of Loneliness" by Theodore
Sturgeon
"A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny
"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw
"The Milk of Paradise" and "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" by James
Tiptree, Jr.
"The Marvelous Brass Chess-Playing Automaton" by Gene Wolfe
"Out of All them Bright Stars" by Nancy Kress
"New Rose Hotel" by William Gibson

Oh, and a list of honorable mentions (this is so hard!): "The Star" by Clarke, "Nobody's Home" by Russ, "Rat" and "Think Like a Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly, "E for Effort" by T. L. Sherred, "The Star Pit" by Samuel R. Delany, "Imaginary Countries" and "Winter's King" by Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance, "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" by Budrys, "The Crystal Spheres" by Brin, "The Other Dead Man" and "How the Whip Came Back" and "Seven American Nights" and etc. by Wolfe, "The Only Neat Thing to Do" and "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" and etc. by Tiptree, "Why I Left Harry's All-night Hamburgers" by Watt-Evans, "Starship Day" by Ian R. MacLeod, "Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler, "All My Darling Daughters" and "At the Rialto" and "Schwarzchild Radius" by Willis, "Stairs" by Neal Barrett, Jr., "Great Work of Time" by John Crowley, "An Infinite Summer" by Christopher Priest, "Inconstant Moon" by Larry Niven.

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And for the Locus All Centuries Poll, here's my submission, from 2012 for stuff through 2010: 

The Locus All Centuries Poll -- best SF/Fantasy novels and short fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries (separately) is ending just about now. Here's my votes (note that they change over time, and the order is random, and there are stories I missed!)


20th Century Novella:
1: "Story of Your Life", Ted Chiang

2: "Great Work of Time", John Crowley

3: "Green Mars", Kim Stanley Robinson

4: "The Blabber", Vernor Vinge

5: "Seven American Nights", Gene Wolfe

6: "The Star Pit", Samuel R. Delany

7: "The Last of the Winnebagos", Connie Willis

8: "E for Effort", T. L. Sherred

9: "The Originist", Orson Scott Card

10: "The Gold at the Starbow's End", Frederik Pohl

20th Century Novelette:
1: "Wang's Carpets", Greg Egan

2: "Fondly Fahrenheit", Alfred Bester

3: "The Second Inquisition", Joanna Russ

4: "The Sources of the Nile", Avram Davidson

5: "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", Roger Zelazny

6: "Starfog", Poul Anderson

7: "An Infinite Summer", Christopher Priest

8: "Nine Lives", Ursula K. Le Guin

9: "The Stars Below", Ursula K. Le Guin

10: "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Jorge Luis Borges

20th Century Short Story:
1: "Out of All Them Bright Stars", Nancy Kress

2: "The Man Who Lost the Sea", Theodore Sturgeon

3: "The Milk of Paradise", James Tiptree, Jr.

4: "Nobody's Home", Joanna Russ

5: "Light of Other Days", Bob Shaw

6: "Day Million", Frederik Pohl

7: "New Rose Hotel", William Gibson

8: "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain", James Tiptree, Jr.

9: "The Man Who Came Early", Poul Anderson

10: "Schwartz Between the Galaxies", Robert Silverberg

21st Century SF Novel:
1: Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

2: The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon

3: The Sky So Big and Black, John Barnes

4: Spin, Robert Charles Wilson

5: Ares Express, Ian McDonald

21st Century Fantasy Novel:
1: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susannah Clarke

2: Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin

3: The Light Ages, Ian R. MacLeod

4: The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

5: The City and the City, China Mieville

21st Century Novella:
1: "New Light on the Drake Equation", Ian R. MacLeod

2: "Magic for Beginners", Kelly Link

3: "A Billion Eves", Robert Reed

4: "The Engines of Desire", William Barton

5: "The Tear", Ian McDonald

21st Century Novelette:
1: "The Voluntary State", Christopher Rowe

2: "The People of Sand and Slag", Paolo Bacigalupi

3: "Lull", Kelly Link

4: "The Path of the Transgressor", by Tom Purdom

5: "Finisterra", by David Moles

21st Century Short Story:
1: "The House Beyond Your Sky", Benjamin Rosenbaum

2: "Three Days of Rain", Holly Phillips

3: "Pip and the Fairies", Theodora Goss

4: "More Adventures on Other Planets", Michael Cassutt

5: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang

Birthday Review: Stories of Matthew Johnson

Today is Canadian writer Matthew Johnson's birthday. He has published a couple of dozen stories, mostly in the decade between 2005 and 2014. I haven't seen a story since then -- I think he's been working on a novel. I see that there is a new story in a 2019 anthology -- I hope that means more are coming. I think Matthew is outstanding -- I've used a couple of his stories in my books, and I've enjoyed many more of them.

Locus, September 2006

Fantasy Magazine in its fourth issue continues to supply strong literary-oriented fantasy and slipstream. This time around I really liked Matthew Johnson’s “Irregular Verbs”, about a people supernally skilled in language, whose language is constantly changing, so that small groups, even couples, quickly evolve individual languages. One man loses his wife, and with it their shared language: a loss he cannot bear. So, against tradition, he tries to preserve it, in an unusual way. I though the story both moving and clever: reminiscent, actually, of many of the stories in Ursula Le Guin’s Changing Planes. Johnson distinguishes himself again with “Outside Chance” in the Summer On Spec, a convoluted tale of time travelers monitoring possible futures in an attempt to avoid disasters.

Locus, December 2006

There are three more strong pieces in December at Strange Horizons. ... Matthew Johnson’s “Heroic Measures”, which depicts an old woman (clearly, though never named, Lois Lane) and a very ill old man (clearly Superman, unable to die because of his powers, but otherwise infirm). Particularly moving, in an ironic way, is an encounter with another old man, significantly bald. Part of the fun of this of course is recognizing these familiar characters – but beyond that simple fun the story gains real power in making these characters, and their senescence, wholly believable.

Locus, February 2007

the other prize story at the March Asimov’s  is “Public Safety”, by Matthew Johnson, a fascinating and original alternate history set in a Nouvelle Orleans under French control, with France evidently still ruled by a Revolutionary government (including of course the Committee of Public Safety). The government insists on perfect rationality. The narrator is a part-Black policeman, assigned to what seem to be irrational crimes. In this case a threat has been transmitted – “She dies on the thirteenth” – which may be linked to a series of random bombings. He needs to find who the threatened “she” is, to begin with – and, it turns out, to end with. Johnson’s point is ultimately political, but reached via description of a colorful setting, and an interesting plot and main character. Very nice.

Locus, May 2007

The Winter On Spec has appeared – another solid issue of this now quite venerable magazine. My favorite story was the opener, Matthew Johnson’s “Lifebuoy”, which has a pretty neat central idea: cops are issued a “lifebuoy”, which allows them to abort an operation for ten minutes after it begins and return in time to the start. Karen is a detective who is in charge of a situation in which that fails – the ten minutes expire, and then her partner is killed. She is racked with guilt, but then comes the obvious question – why only ten minutes? Which starts to raise more questions, some of which are addressed as her investigations begin to cause problems for her.

Locus, August 2008

The first story at the August Asimov’s, Matthew Johnson’s “Lagos”, fits quite squarely within the constraints of the Mundane Manifesto. Safrat is a Nigerian woman who works as a teleoperator of remote equipment, such as vacuum cleaners for rich people. But she finds out that the telepresence network is being used for less savory reasons. The SFnal backgrounding of the story, even including the way Johnson parallels it with tribal magic, didn’t really catch fire for me, but the believable portrayal of the world’s poor, yet again pawns in the wealthier world’s system, was effective – and it seems very much a concern of much so-called Mundane SF.

Locus, December 2010

The December Fantasy Magazine features a strong story from Matthew Johnson, “Holdfast”. The setting is somewhat Norse in flavor. Irrel is a farmer, with a wife, a young son, and a daughter who wants to marry the young man staying with them, and perhaps move to the city. There are dragons, and magic, and war, and Irrel knows some magic, farm magic, which some denigrate. But the story – very quietly told – gently hints that his magic may be greater than many suspect – in a quiet, homebound way.

Locus, May 2014

“Rules of Engagement”, by Matthew Johnson (Asimov's, April-May), is a contemporary war story, about a trio of young soldiers who have been rendered medically unfit for active duty. The story is told on two threads … one covering a critical event during their service in Yemen, the other dealing with their various difficulties adapting to life back in the States. The Sfnal core is the brain adaptation they underwent, which includes behaviorally reinforced restrictions on use of force, plus ways around that … and which might, the story suggests, impact their behavior even when no longer active.

Birthday Review: Bad News, plus four obscure SF stories, by Donald Westlake

Donald Westlake was born July 12, 1933, and died on the last day of 2008. He was one of the great crime writers of the last half of the 20th Century, particularly for his comic crime novels, though he was also excellent in darker works. My favorite Westlake books were his hilarious Dortmunder novels. In his memory, on what would have been his 86th birthday, here's a look at one of his later Dortmunder novels, plus reviews of four early science fiction stories. (He was a modestly prolific SF writer early in his career, though usually not a very good one, until he left the genre rather publically, via an essay in the great fanzine Xero, blaming John Campbell for his disgust with SF.)

Bad News, by Donald Westlake

A better vacation read might have been Donald Westlake's latest Dortmunder book, Bad News.  It's very fast moving, very funny, very clever, and very much a typical Dortmunder book, which is, dare I say, good news.  As those who've read previous books in the series know, the most common trope of the Dortmunder books is for Dortmunder and his gang to get involved in a crime which ends up having to be, in some sense, repeated, with different permutations, several times.  For example, in the very first one, The Hot Rock, they had to steal the same jewel several times. 

In this book, after the usual opening scene, John Dortmunder hilariously failing to get caught while failing to successfully complete a robbery, he finds himself approached by Andy Kelp with a unorthodox (for them) proposal. Andy has been hired by somebody he met on the Internet (Andy is always trying new technology, which Dortmunder hates) to help out in a certain enterprise -- they want them to dig up a grave and rebury a different body in it.  This isn't much to Dortmunder's liking, but the price seems fateful -- exactly the amount of money he had expected to realize from the stolen goods he was forced to leave behind the previous night.  After Andy and John complete the body switch, they foil the attempt by the villains Fitzroy and Irwin to cheat (permanently) their new helpers, and they get interested in a) figuring out what's really going on, and b) getting themselves a much bigger cut.  With the help of Tiny Bulcher, they are soon involved in the scheme, which I won't detail here because finding out is much of the fun. Also involved are Little Feather, an Indian from out West, formerly a Las Vegas showgirl, and their target is an Indian-operated casino in Upstate New York.  (Surprisingly many of the more recent Dortmunder books end up partly set in Upstate New York -- it looks like Westlake may have moved there, which might explain it.)  It's no surprise that the crooked casino owners have their own ideas, which involve several hilarious further iterations of the original "crime". 

It's all very funny stuff, and the various schemes are pretty much as clever as usual, though depending just a bit on sheer luck.  Wholly worth reading, as indeed is the entire series.  I'd put this particular entry somewhere in the middle range of the Dortmunder books, which means well in the upper range of books in general.

Science Fiction Stories, May 1960

"Travellers Far and Wee", by Donald Westlake, is also slight, a tolerable little thing about people apparently charged with driving around New York and New Jersey forever, with the duty of being those annoying drivers we all deal with.

Amazing, March 1961

Donald Westlake, of course, became a very famous crime writer, under his own name and his most popular pseudonym, Richard Stark. But early in his career he wrote a lot of SF, before breaking with the field, and more explicitly, John Campbell, in an essay in the fanzine Xero.

Westlake was never as good an SF writer as he was a crime writer. (Though who can say what he might have done later in his career had he stuck with SF. He did write a couple of SF/F novels later on.) “The Risk Profession” is probably my favorite Westlake SF story of those I’ve read, and likely it’s not a coincidence that it’s a crime story. Ged Stanton is a fraud investigator for an insurance company. He’s sent out to the asteroids to find a way the company can avoid paying a “retirement plan” to a asteroid prospector. The plans are issued with the intent that most of the plan members will die too soon to collect.

Stanton ends up on the rock where the claimant’s partner is preparing to stake a big claim – it seems the two of them hit it big, but the one man died in an accident before he could collect his money – but not before he could ask for a refund of his Retirement Plan, figuring he wouldn’t need it any more. Obviously, something is fishy – and Stanton indeed figures it out (hey, I figured it out too, from the start) – but there are some neat tricks in the whole setup, and a nice closing twist.

If, September 1961

The other novelette is by Donald Westlake, presumably shortly before his stormy departure from SF writing. (It is my view that Westlake's departure from the field was as much due to his not really being a very good SF writer (and a truly wonderful crime writer) than to the hidebound nature of SF and its editors, as he claimed.) "Call Him Nemesis" (10K) is amusing enough. A series of crimes are averted by mysterious means, linked by odd temperature fluctuations and the association of the word "Scorpion". Psi is involved, but the person doing it is the point of the story, and it's nicely revealed.

Amazing, November 1961

The cover story is a novelet, "Meteor Strike!", by Donald E. Westlake (12500 words). Westlake, who was born in 1933 and died in 2008, was one of the great crime fiction writers of our time. I am particularly fond of his comic capers featuring the thief John Dortmunder. Others plump for his darker novels about a criminal named Parker, written as by Richard Stark. Early in his career, Westlake published a fair amount of Science Fiction, before bidding a bitter farewell to the field in a rant published in the great fanzine Xero. Westlake complained about SF's conservatism, and particularly about John Campbell. Alas, I feel his argument -- which had some merit -- loses some force simply because, truth be told, Westlake was a pretty mediocre SF writer.

That said, I did rather enjoy the last Westlake SF story I read, "The Risk Profession" (Amazing, March 1961). But it was in part a crime caper piece, playing to his strength. "Meteor Strike!" is pretty dire. It's about a regular Earth to Moon transportation system, particularly a space station en route, and a regular delivery of something important to the lonely station orbiting the Moon. This particular flight includes three new spacemen, one of them a rather truculent young man, embittered by his flunking out of MIT. He's pushed himself to success ever since, but at the cost of being a prime jerk. This behaviour continues on this trip. So when a meteor unconvincingly hits the Earth orbiting space station (and embeds itself in its skin!), right where the precious cargo is stored, somehow this rookie is chose to assist in the repair operation. He does OK, of course, after some bad spots. And the suspense over the "cargo" is finally relieved -- it's entertainment tapes. Sigh. This is painfully earnest "hard" SF, overly complicated in a way to make it certain that many details will be embarrassingly wrong; and with a really badly strained character story behind it. You can see Westlake working hard to make his story serious -- to make the science plausible and the characters three-dimensional. But I think he missed the boat on both fronts. As I've said before, Westlake's decision to concentrate on crime fiction was definitely the right one.

Birthday review: Stories of Karen Russell

Today is Karen Russell's birthday. Russell is an exceptional writer, not associated with in-genre SF/Fantasy, but a significant amount of her work is definitely fantastika. I had hoped to use her story "Orange World" in this year's best of the year volume, but we couldn't get rights, likely because it's the title story of her new collection. She should have won the Pulitzer for her 2011 novel Swamplandia!, but instead of given it to a fantistacalish novel the committee decided to give no award that year. (The other finalists were an unfinished posthumous novel, and a novella that had first been published several years before. It was an appalling decision.) Normally I only do these Birthday reviews if I have at least five stories ... but I should have reviewed "The Bog Girl" a few years ago (I didn't because it's kind of ambiguously fantastical), and in the upcoming August issue of Locus, I do have a review of a very fine new story from the last issue of Tin House, "The Gondoliers". So, close enough for government work. Anyway, SF/F readers should be seeking out Russell's work. Here are four really good places to start:

Locus, March 2008

Zoetrope All-Story features a sure enough no-fooling vampire story, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” by Karen Russell, in the Winter 2007 issue. Two aging vampires rusticate in an Italian lemon grove. The man tells us his history, especially his lust for blood and the associated guilt, and his love for his companion – while she spends more and more time as a bat. The story is effectively literary: well-written, and character-driven, but it takes the vampire tropes seriously, and uses them in service of its character-based aims.

Locus, March 2013

The new Tin House has several stories in a fantastical vein, of which the best is a horrifying Karen Russell story, “Reeling for the Empire”, set in late 19th Century Japan, about women taken from their families to work in a silk producing factory – only to learn that their work involves producing the silk themselves, after drinking a special tea that changes them forever.

Locus, June 2014

One story that has got a lot of attention in the wider literary world (partly for its venue: its a digital only release from a new outlet called Atavist Books) is Sleep Donation, by Karen Russell. It deserves the attention on its own merits. A plague has swept the Americas – people are suddenly unable to sleep, leading inevitably to death. A treatment is discovered: those who can still sleep can donate their sleep to those who need it. Trish Edgewater is a volunteer for a “sleep bank”, using the story of her older sister, one of the first victims, to motivate new donors in to signing up. Complications arise – one of Trish's “clients”, a young baby, turns out to have particularly effective donations, which even sometimes cure insomniacs, but her father is concerned about the exploitation of his child. Another donor's sleep is infected with a terrible nightmare that drives some people to become “elective insomniacs”.  Trish herself wonders about her exploitation of her sister's story. The fundamental idea is in places preposterous, but Russell's extrapolations of the social impact are dead on, and the story examines our disaster-driven culture, perhaps our general “sleeplessness”, and the power of dreams very nicely.

Locus, August 2018

The New Yorker’s annual Fiction issue, themed Childhood, includes a striking Karen Russell story, “Orange World”. Like many stories from mainstream sources, it is using its fantastical material in service of a very contemporary story – the narrator is a woman pregnant for the first time, rather older than most first time mothers, and she is worried about her pregnancy, and her baby, and so she’ll do anything to keep him safe, including making a deal with a devil. Which is a real devil (if not THE devil), and preys on her horribly, until she finds a group for new mothers, which includes some women who have dealt with similar creatures. It’s funny and scary and dead honest – strong work from one of the best writers to regularly straddle genre borderlines.

Birthday Review: Capsules on some of Robert A. Heinlein's juveniles

Birthday Review: Capsules on some of Robert A. Heinlein's juveniles

Robert Heinlein was born 112 years ago today, in my state (Missouri.) A couple of decades ago I decided to reread (or, in many cases, read for the first time) all his so-called "juveniles". I found that effort quite rewarding -- I think they held up very well. So, here's a selection of what I wrote back then -- all very short looks -- about some of those juveniles (I didn't manage to write about all of them.) I will say, in summary sort of, that my favorite on that reread was Citizen of the Galaxy.

Let me add, while I'm here, a strong recommendation for Farah Mendlesohn's The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, a critical survey of all of his work. Farah treats his writing from the perspective of multiple different themes, so that she revisits different stories multiple times. Her views strike me as very intelligent, very provocative. She provides a necessary corrective to both his critics on the left, and his adulators on the right. For me, she was particularly useful on the late novels, acknowledging their weaknesses but sensibly highlighting both what some of them did right (fitfully), and, more importantly, illuminating how the thematic aspects of the late novels reflect his lifelong concerns. Definitely the best book about science fiction I've read in 2019.

Rocket Ship Galileo

The first, and regarded by many as the worst, of RAH's juveniles.  I can see why, but it's still pretty enjoyable.  Some far-fetched stuff, like the spaceship in a back yard business (and the estimate of what R&D for the first moon flight would cost: 1.5 million dollars), also the ancient race on the moon thing. Not to mention Nazis.  But it's still a good read.

Between Planets

A half-Venusian, half-Earthling boy gets caught up in the Venusian revolution. Enjoyable.  As with so much Heinlein (or, really SF of that time period!), the ending is seriously rushed.

Red Planet

A young man and his semi-intelligent Martian "pet" go to the "Company" school, and discover that the "Company" doesn't really have the best interests of the colonists at heart. One of many RAH depictions of Mars, this one seems more Leigh Brackett-like than the others. One of the better plotted juveniles, I think. I liked this quite a lot, really.

Space Cadet

A boy joins the Space Patrol, and his experiences as a "Cadet" are detailed.  As a novel, rather episodic. But generally fun, and with plenty of Heinleinian philosophy underlying his concept of the duties of the Space Patrol. (Is the Mars briefly mentioned in this one the same as the Mars of Red Planet? It can't be exactly the same, because the political situation seems very different.  But his (very brief) description of the Martians seemed similar.)

Tunnel in the Sky 

This features a group of students sent through a matter transmitter gate to a frontier planet for a "survival test". But the gate collapses, and they are marooned there. To an extent, it's like a response to Lord of the Flies. It's a pretty good story, structured better than many of RAH's novels.  It also features one of his black heroes, though the evidence for that is vague (probably on purpose).  The awful Darrell Sweet cover muffs it, of course.

Starman Jones

I think this one of the best in the series.  This features a teenage boy who stows away on board a starship, and works his way from stable boy to Captain.  It's episodic, like many of these books, but very enjoyable.  The depiction of the use of computers in navigation is, well, interesting (says someone who writes navigation software).  Both books share the odd feature of most of Heinlein's juveniles, the shying away from love interests.  Obvious love interest candidates are dangled before the reader, but nothing ever happens (to his protagonists, that is).  Even when his protagonists, in the juveniles, do marry, it's after oddly truncated romances: see Time for the Stars for a perfect example.

Another interesting feature of the juveniles is the range, throughout the books, of future Earth societies depicted.  Heinlein doesn't copy himself at all, I think, in this area.  The details are rarely foregrounded, but the background hints are neat.

Time for the Stars 

An odd duck, really.  Save maybe for the revised version of Podkayne of Mars, rather the saddest of the juvies (that I've read).  It's uneven, but some of what RAH is trying to pull off here is very ambitious.  The careful contrast of the characters of Tom and Pat makes this much more a novel of character than usual for Heinlein.  I don't think he quite succeeds, but still a very worthwhile effort.  (The above is probably gibberish to someone not familiar with the plot of Time for the Stars: basically, the central conceit is that some identical twins (and occasionally some other people) have telepathic links, which transmit at near infinite speed.  This makes them naturals for communication pairs, one to accompany a slower than light starship to new planets, the other to stay at home and receive transmissions.  Tom and Pat are one such pair: the further twist, of course, is time dilation, so that the twin who travels with the starship ages very little, while the other twin grows old.  That's pretty much the whole story, though RAH includes plenty of action (and tragedy), and even a non-convincing love affair at the end.)

Citizen of the Galaxy

Citizen is very enjoyable, the story of Thorby, a slave who is bought by an old beggar who turns out to be much more than it seems: after the old man’s death, Thorby spends some time with the Free Traders, a fascinatingly sketched spaceship based society, before eventually finding his true family, which naturally enough is a fabulously rich and powerful clan on Earth.  It’s a fun read, with some very interesting sociological speculation: the plot is a bit coincidence-driven, however, and things come too easily to Thorby (by which I don't mean he doesn't face much hardship and difficulty: he does, but (especially right at the end) he seems almost magically talented enough in just the right areas to succeed against significant odds.)

Have Space Suit, Will Travel

High school kid wins a derelict spacesuit in a contest, refurbishes it, and ends up kidnapped by aliens, taken to the moon and points beyond, and eventually facing a crisis which may mean the end of humanity. And good solid Heinleinish fun/instruction along the way. Also features one of his best heroines.

Birthday Review: Stories of John Langan

Today is John Langan's 50th birthday. I don't review him enough, I think, probably because he's a horror writer -- but he's probably my favorite contemporary horror writer. (The other candidate has a very similar name: Margo Lanagan!) Here are the few reviews I could find from my Locus columns.

Locus, September 2002

John Langan attracted some notice with last year's dark fantasy "On Skua Island". He's back with another dark fantasy, "Mr. Gaunt" (F&SF, September). Henry Farange is going through his dead father's effects. There he finds a tape, on which his father tells him the long story of his father's older brother and his son and his mysterious servant, Mr. Gaunt. The story is involving and creepy.

Locus, August 2003

John Langan's "Tutorial" (F&SF, August) is a mordantly amusing tale of a young Creative Writing student who wants to do horror, but whose teachers don't approve. Indeed, aside from the Rickert and Murphy stories, the whole issue is generally humorous or whimsical, to pretty good effect.

Locus review of Wastelands (March 2008)

But the more recent stories are much more interesting. The book closes with a story by John Langan from just last year, a story that made quite a splash (though I found it more affected than affecting): “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers”, which tells, in urgently run-on sentences, of a small group of people fleeing a feral “Pack” in a post-apocalyptical city.

Locus, April 2009

Ellen Datlow’s new anthology, Poe, includes stories “inspired” by Edgar Allan Poe … sometimes riffing on stories or poems, other times simply borrowing Poe’s atmospheres and themes, once or twice even featuring Poe as a character. It’s a strong book throughout. A first rate piece is John Langan’s “Technicolor”, which presents a college professor working with his students to analyze Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. It’s a smart and sly story, as the professor mixes in speculation about Poe’s life and death with exegesis of the story, leading to a perhaps predictable but still quite well-sprung conclusion.

Locus, August 2012

“Renfrew's Curse”, by John Langan (Lightspeed, June), is a genuinely disquieting horror story. For my money, Langan and, in a quite different way, the similarly named Margo Lanagan, are the two contemporary masters of the sort of horror I find most effective, built around subtle and original ideas, and aiming often more at disquiet than disgust or terror, or, worst of all, gore.   A gay couple visit Scotland, walking a trail, perhaps trying to mend their relationship, damaged by an affair one might have had with a woman. The trail leads to something called Renfrew's Keep, and it turns out Renfrew was a wizard, and one of the two begins to tell stories about Renfrew. As the walk continues, strange things seem to happen to the trail, and to time … and eventually the stories lead to one, about Renfrew offering to each someone his art. But at a price. It's an absorbing piece throughout – the characters of the two men well drawn, their relationship involving, the stories about the wizard interesting – and at the inevitable end, it's delightfully disquieting.

Two Early Spanish Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler

I wrote this pair of essentially capsule reviews of two early short "novels" by Spanish writers a dozen or so years ago. I've exhumed it for today's "Friday's Forgotten Books" post.

Two Spanish Novellas from around 1600: Lazarillo de Tormes, attributed to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza; The Swindler, by Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas

a short review by Rich Horton

Kind of on impulse, I picked up a Penguin Classics edition of "Two Spanish Picaresque Novels", a 1969 translation by Michael Alpert. These are two early novels in the picaresque tradition: that is, novels about the experiences of roguish individuals, in this case in 16th Century (or early 17th C.) Spain.

I suspect in both cases my reaction to these works is affected by the translation -- particularly in that of The Swindler, which is highly regarded in the original Spanish for its wordplay and for Quevedo's ability to capture the different modes of speech of various classes in Spain. Both novels, of course, remain in the shadow of Don Quixote, which is almost an exact contemporary to The Swindler.

Lazarillo de Tormes was published anonymously in 1554, due to its anti-clerical and other controversial themes. The translator suggests that the author was most likely Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, though that attribution is not firmly established. The novella is considered a founding text of the long tradition of picaresque literature.The rather short (20,000 words) narrative concerns a young man born of a shiftless miller and a whore. His father died young and his mother took up with a black man, but their thieving ways led to trouble. Eventually young Lazaro is sold to another man to be a sort of apprentice thief, and learns various low tricks while at the same time tricking his master. Leaving him, he falls in with a priest, and then a down at heels aristocrat, then a seller of indulgences. In each case the object is satire of the social situation in Spain at the time, along with somewhat amusing accounts of dishonest folk bilking each other. Finally Lazaro stumbles into a goodish job and a marriage, marred only by his wife's loose morals. It's somewhat amusing on the whole, and worth reading over the length of 20,000 words, but the structure is very slack, the ending abrupt. (I should note that works in the picaresque genre are often structurally very loose.)  For me, much of the interest was historical rather than literary. I don't know what kind of literary reputation this maintains in Spain.

The Swindler (La Vida del Buscon in Spanish) is rather more substantial than Lazarillo de Tormes. For one thing, it's longer, at 45,000 words. The writer, Quevedo, is quite well known, and he had a rather adventurous life, especially politically, including a couple of stretches in prison. He published a number of books. This book was published in 1626 but apparently dates as early as 1604 (though it cannot have been finished before 1608, as one incident, a duel, is based in part on a duel that Quevedo himself fought), and was circulated in manuscript form before publication. It was the only novel by Quevedo.

The hero is the son of a thieving barber and a witch. He ends up going to school as the servant of a local aristocrat's son. The school turns out to be rather low rent, and the students all starve more or less. His career continues in travels about Spain, complete with the expected encounters with swindlers, swindles he performs himself, relationships with women, including an attempt to marry a rich girl foiled by mischance, satire of poets and actors, and an eventual love affair with a similarly disreputable woman leading, it appears, to a trip to the New World. As with Lazarillo de Tormes, the structure is slack and episodic, though tighter than in that novella. It is, again, worth reading, again for me a good part of the interest was historical.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts turns 54 today. He is one of the most consistly interesting and original SF writers, and also a remarkably perceptive (and also very snarky on occasion) critic. Here, then, is a selection of my Locus reviews of his short fiction.

Locus, May 2002

Sci Fiction for April and May features several fine stories, and two outstanding ones. One of the more interesting is Adam Roberts' "Swiftly", which is an alternate history of sorts, extrapolating from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to a mid-19th Century in which the various "Pacifican" species, such as Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, are being exploited by humans. The story tells of an English agitator for Pacifican rights, and the turn in the war between England and France that occurs when the French gain the alliance of the Brobdingnagians.

Locus, February 2003

Spectrum SF #9 is finally out, dated November 2002. Adam Roberts's novella "The Imperial Army" rather cynically examines a Galactic Empire at war with an implacable, incomprehensible, alien species. The cliché ideas, and some SF in-jokes, signal that the main purpose is to send up certain SFnal assumptions.

Locus, November 2003

PS Publishing continues to release interesting long novellas in book form. Two fine entries from 2003 are Adam Roberts's Jupiter Magnified and Robert Freeman Wexler's In Springdale Town. The SFnal event at the center of Roberts's story is Jupiter suddenly looming hugely in Earth's skies. The narrator is a Swedish poet, once regarded as very promising, but who has been blocked for some time. As you might expect, this is an overtly "literary" story, complete with a selection of Stina's poems at the end. I was interested but in the end not quite captivated.

Review of Constellations (Locus, March 2005)

Another fascinating story about an unexpectedly ordered sky is Adam Roberts's "The Order of Things", in which humanity is engaged on a great project to reshape the coastlines of the world into geometrically regular forms. And it seems that the sky itself is just as orderly: the stars arranged in a regular grid. The story concerns a stodgy coastal engineer and his radical brother, along the way hinting at the dark background of this society.

Locus, April 2006

Elemental is an anthology from Tor supporting a very worthy cause: Tsunami relief. Alas the stories as a whole aren’t terribly impressive. I did like Adam Roberts’s “And Tomorrow and”, a reimagining of Macbeth assuming you take the witch’s promise to him a bit more literally. There are quite a few more decent stories here, but none that thrilled me.

Review of Forbidden Planets (Locus, October 2006)

I thought the best story was the last, Adam Roberts’s “Me-Topia”. It starts a bit slowly, but justifies all by the end. A spaceship crewed by future neanderthals lands on an impossible planet outside of the Solar System’s ecliptic. They find breathable air, and 1 g of gravity, and eventually a curiously familiar geography. And then a representative of long-gone homo sapiens, who claims to own this odd planet and who doesn’t want guests. Roberts’ gives all this weirdness an effective SFnal explanation, and brings his story to a gripping conclusion.

Locus, May 2008

Celebration is published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, and it is an excellent anthology. Two stories in particular stand out. ... Adam Roberts is extremely fond of riffing on old SF. For example his recent novels Splinter and Swiftly are respectively based on Jules Verne’s To the Sun/Off on a Comet and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. “The Man of the Strong Arm” is another example. Set in a male-dominated, oppressed future, it tells of a man who resurrects old texts – including science fiction, such as a tale by Edgar Burroughs of Rice, about a man willing himself to a red star. Or a tale about “Armstrong”, who rides the gods Saturn and Apollo to the Moon. The story turns on his rather humorous interpretations of the old texts (always attempting to make them support the leader’s ego), and then on an intervention by a free group of women.

Locus, February 2009

Adam Roberts’s “A Prison Sentence of One Thousand Years” is a quietly powerful story from the Winter Postscripts. A man just released from such a punishment tells his story, in so telling slowly revealing his disconnection from his society, and the reason for his sentence.

Locus, March 2010

“Anhedonia”, by Adam Roberts (The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF), is excellent. Aliens have come to us offering technological wonders including star travel. A group of humans on Mars is trying to learn the aliens’ secrets, and is finding the process frustrating. In particular, they have been altered so as not to feel emotion. Sense of wonder – a key root of the desire to explore – is after emotional at base – can we only travel to the stars by losing the desire to travel? Roberts goes beyond just asking that question – he comes to a legitimately mindblowing explanation.

Locus, August 2014

One of the non space-oriented stories in Reach for Infinity is “Trademark Bugs: A Legal History”, by Adam Roberts, which like Castro's “The New Provisions” is a satire on corporate rapacity, and which also perhaps overplays its hand. And which also is ghoulishly entertaining. Here pharmaceutical companies find themselves too successful for their own good: they've managed to pretty much cure everything, so there's no more need for new drugs. Their solution is to engineer new diseases, which then will require new pharmaceutical treatments. The story follows the legal challenges to aspects of this situation, and how ultimately the entire social order is changed as a result.

Locus, December 2014

Adam Roberts is at his very best in “Thing and Sick” (Solaris Rising3). This is set in the Antarctic in the 1980s. The narrator is a rather normal young scientist or technician, spending his time reading SF, drinking beer, playing the contemporary movies they have on VHS, and looking forward the the odd letter from his girlfriend. His companion is a bit odder – his only reading is philosophy (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason), he doesn't get letters, and he's convinced their job (to set up a radio telescope as part of the SETI project) is a waste – the answer to the Fermi Paradox can be found in Kant. And part of the answer is that the aliens are all around us, and we just can't perceive them. And – perhaps – they are not friendly. The result is scary, and in a way funny, and ambiguous and thought-provoking. SF about philosophy!

Locus, October 2016

The best piece in Crises and Conflicts is Adam Roberts’ “Between Nine and Eleven”, about the war between Human Space and the alien Trefoil. The humans are winning, but then the Trefoil come up with a terrifying weapon based on a rather Eganesque concept: changing the underlying mathematics of space. This story tells of the first human ship to encounter the Trefoil weapon, and their fortunate escape. It’s slyly told, perhaps not entirely serious but still managing to be scary as well as clever.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of James Van Pelt

Today was a day featuring two birthdays of very fine SF writers, who have done excellent short fiction, both of whom I consider friends. I've already discussed Daryl Gregory, so here's a selection fo my reviews of the work of James Van Pelt.

Locus, August 2002

Talebones for Spring 2002 has two very solid SF stories, both about crime and punishment.  William Barton's "Right to Life" is a satirical look at a man facing the executioner in a crowded future in which the state happily takes any excuse to exercise the death penalty.  James Van Pelt's "Its Hour Come Round" is a strong look at a vile criminal in the process of rehabilitation, this accomplished using "empathy treatments" and various drugs. 

Van Pelt also contributes the strongest story in a somewhat disappointing September Analog: "Far From the Emerald Isle" tells of a curious discovery on board an STL starship: cute, but minor.

Locus, September 2003

James Van Pelt's "The Long Way Home" (Asimov's, September) is an affecting story about a desperate attempt to launch a starship as a war destroys civilization -- and the aftermath.

Locus, December 2004

In the December Asimov's, James Van Pelt's "Echoing" intertwines three stories: a truck driver trying to get home in a Christmas snowstorm, a teenaged girl contemplating suicide during her parents' Christmas party, and a starship captain lost in the tangles of [M]-space. The stories are involving enough, but I thought the forced correspondences a bit strained.

Locus, May 2005

James Van Pelt's "The Inn at Mount Either" is the prize story this month, however. The title inn has a unique property – it is built on a sort of nexus between alternate worlds, and one can walk to different versions of the hotel. But Daniel has a problem – he can't find his wife. Then he compounds the problem by going to look for her ... It's not precisely a new idea, but Van Pelt puts a nice spin on it.

Review of The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories (Locus, July 2005)

The Last of the O-Forms & Other Stories, by James Van Pelt (Fairwood Press, 0-9746573-5-2, $17.99, 216pp, tp) August 2005.

Some writers are short story writers, some are novelists. And the plain fact is that it is novelists who gain more attention. If anything the situation is worse today than some decades ago, when writers like Robert Sheckley and Harlan Ellison could establish reputations mostly on the basis of short fiction: aided by mass market short story collections. Nowadays short story collections are mostly relegated to the small press. (Perhaps in compensation, it seems in some ways easier to get a short story collection into print – if harder to get it seen by a wide audience.) So it behooves us to take a look at what is coming from the smaller publishers.

One of the SF field's best new short fiction writers is James Van Pelt. His stories appear regularly in Analog, Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere – strong work in the tradition of what one might call "consolidators". These are writers like Robert Silverberg and Robert Reed (to name very prominent examples from different generations) who don't make names with splashy ideas or as leaders of "movements", but who write well-crafted stories based on careful insight into established SFnal ideas. Noticeable in Van Pelt's stories is the focus on the feelings of ordinary people in situations that are mostly ordinary to them – if strange to us.

Van Pelt's first collection, Strangers and Beggars, appeared two years ago from Fairwood Press (the small press responsible for the fine magazine Talebones). The Last of the O-Forms & Other Stories is his second, and a stronger book. [I should add that Van Pelt does have a couple of novels to his credit as well, by now.]

The title story is one of his best known pieces, a Nebula nominee, about a future in which nothing seems to breed true – neither animals nor humans. A man travels with a "circus" including a two-year-old advertised as "The Last of the O[riginal]-Forms". She isn't, of course, and the reactions to her are heartbreaking. Another strong story closes the book, "A Flock of Birds", a striking story about human extinction, beautifully contrasted with other extinction events.

Other intriguing stories include "Its Hour Come Round" , a look at a vile criminal being rehabilitated by "empathy treatments" and various drugs. "The Long Way Home" is an affecting story about a desperate attempt to launch a starship as a war destroys civilization -- and the aftermath. "The Pair-a-Duce Comet Casino All-Sol Poker Championships" rather belies its light-seeming title: telling of a rich man's cloned copy, a young man working for him, and a space disaster. "A Wow Finish" is a time travel story and love story, set at the opening night of Casablanca – sweet and affecting.

Regular SF readers may have missed two stories that come from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine – both are fantasy, though with sufficient mystery elements to appeal to that audience. "The Sound of One Foot Dancing" is ghost story featuring Fred Astaire and an aspiring young dancer, in the shadow of World War II. "Once They Were Monarchs" begins as a straightforward story of a lifeguard concerned about a creepy boy who may be abusing younger girls, but slowly reveals a surprising and effective secret about its protagonist and its villain.

The book is enjoyable throughout – Van Pelt is a strong writer who continues to improve. I'm still looking for the story that really stuns me – he is a writer I will always read with interest, and a writer who doesn't disappoint, but I'm still looking to be overwhelmed.

Locus, October 2005

Talebones for Summer is another decent issue. Perhaps James Van Pelt’s “One Day, in the Middle of the Night” is best, a clever recasting of a cute poem into a dark tale of sibling rivalry aboard a starship.

Locus, September 2006

Also moving but just slightly forced in the October-November Asimov's is James Van Pelt’s “The Small Astral Object Genius”, which has a pretty cool idea at its center. Dustin is a teenager who plays with a sort of fad toy that might have real scientific value. It’s a small sphere, called a “Peek-a-Boo”, which can be sent thousands of light years away, take a picture, and return. Most of the pictures will be of empty space, but every so often one can capture an image of an interesting object: a nebula or a star or even a planet. Dustin is a particularly interested in small objects like planets, and he obsessively sends his Peek-a-Boo in search of pictures. Partly, however, this is to escape the discord caused by his parents’ failing marriage. Then he makes a remarkable discovery. All this is interesting enough, but I thought the ending unconvincing, a bit manipulative.

Locus, June 2008

James Van Pelt’s “Rock House” (Talebones, Spring) is modeled on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”, and it is excellent work. The narrator visits his long lost friend and the friend’s sister, who live together, rather creepily, in a house carved out of rock. The narrator is tempted to join the siblings in their strange quest, tied to the seemingly living but not living title house.

Locus, February 2009

Talebones for Winter leads off with a fine James Van Pelt story, “Floaters”, in which a man dying of an AIDS-like disease is enlisted into a secret project to observe the future – an observation which, alas, reveals that the world will end in just a few years. Van Pelt deals with the implications both logically and emotionally effectively.

Locus, June 2009

The best story at Analog for June comes from James Van Pelt. In “Solace” he intertwines the story of a man trying to survive a bitter winter at an Old West mine with that of a woman trying to remember Earth on a starship – quiet and moving work, in Van Pelt’s most familiar mode.

Locus, January 2013

It's not fair, really, to, in contrast, suggest that James Van Pelt's “The Family Rocket” (Asimov's, January) isn't “engaged” with the future. Indeed perhaps its theme, regret at the loss of the dream of space travel, might be regarded as quite directly engaging with our present future. But that very theme is central to what I call “Where's my Flying Car” SF – SF that explicitly discusses the way we have failed to live up to old SF dreams. “The Family Rocket” is a character-centric story in which a young man brings his girlfriend to his family home – his father's junkyard – embarrassed by his father's old stories of building a rocket from the junk he has collected. And of course he is pushed to a more sympathetic view of his father's dreams – in a quite moving story. (The kicker, to be sure, is that in this particular future space travel, travel even to Mars, is a reality, if one reserved mostly to the rich.)

Locus, January 2017

Two stories in December by Analog regulars are also worth particular notice. James Van Pelt’s “The Continuing Saga of Tom Corbett: Space Cadet” is about a girl named Tomika Corbett who discovers the old Tom Corbett juvies and becomes fascinated by space. She desperately wants a career in space, and is even more motivated, in the long run, by her inevitable Space Cadet nickname, and by the resistance of teachers who disparage the old Tom Corbett book (which really were quite awful, to contemporary eyes, as I recently learned when I read one). She begins to dream of aliens coming to take her away – and she tentatively befriends another bullied kid, even smarter than her – which gives her a tough choice when – in her dreams (?) – the aliens really come. I thought this story striking for the way in which what seems old-fashioned wish-fulfillment is revealed to be a terribly sad meditation on the contemporary loss of the dream of the future we once seemed to share.

Locus, December 2018

Last month I noted the tendency of non-genre writers to use SFnal tropes in the service of fairly traditional mainstream ideas. And this month I’m looking at a classic “little magazine”, Stonecoast Review, which features a couple of very fine stories by SF writers – indeed, by writers known for writing fairly traditional SF. And, really, both writers are, in these cases, using SFnal tropes in the service of fairly traditional mainstream ideas. (Indeed, this has always been a thing – and not a bad thing either.) James Van Pelt’s “Mambo No. M51” is about Emma Sophia, whom we soon learn has been voted “sexiest pop artist of the year”, as well as (by the protagonist) potentially “nuttiest”. The story, told by a man helping with the tech for her newest video, concerns her fascination with the literal “music of the stars” (radio telescope recordings) and her desire to lose herself in a video presentation of space while listening to her interpretation of the stars’ music; and the protagonist’s increasing involvement with that obsession (obviously driven in part by his somewhat sublimated sexual attraction to her). It’s pretty effective work, both as a character study and as a presentation of scientific wonder.

Locus, April 2019

In the March-April Analog there is a good solid story from James Van Pelt, “Second Quarter and Counting”, told from the POV of a 70-year-old woman, whose long-time best friend is undergoing a treatment called “Backspin”, which revitalizes people so that they are physically – and mostly mentally – 20 again. But there is a risk that the mental changes will be more complete – perhaps personality change? Or amnesia? The protagonist, a swimmer, remains in very good shape for her age – should she consider the same treatment? Or will she lose who she is? It’s a very sober examination, and a strongly character based piece, not particularly slanted to make a point on either side of the debate.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory turns 54 today. I've been a big fan of his short fiction for a long time, though alas he writes much less of it now that he's primarily a novelist. Below I present a selection of my reviews of his shorter work for Locus. I should mention his current Hugo nominee for Best Novelette, "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth", which is an exceptional piece about a man's long life as Earth is radically changed by an alien invasion of sorts; and I should also mentione his remarkable 2017 novel Spoonbenders, a Nebula and World Fantasy Award nominee. I reviewed that on this blog here: Spoonbenders and other 2017 Novels.

Locus, July 2004

The other novelet in the July F&SF is Daryl Gregory's "The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy", in which a man named Tim returns to his home town to try to deal with the events that crippled him as a teenager – all revolving around his nerdy friend and a strange movie the two shot over several years. The other boy died while Tim was crippled by an accidental (?) explosion while shooting the movie. Upon return Tim again meets his friend's parents, and we quickly gather that Tim's friend's home life was not very good – how this affected the boys' relationship, their movie, and the climactic events slowly comes clear. It's a fine story that I felt somehow fell short of being first-rate – perhaps it is just a bit too long for its emotional content, perhaps its revelations are clear too soon so that the conclusion is a bit too flat.

Locus, October 2005

Daryl Gregory, in “Second Person, Present Tense” (Asimov's, September 2005), offers a fascinating look at the nature of our identity and consciousness. A teenaged girl overdoses on a new drug that temporarily disconnects the conscious self from decision-making (brain research suggests that the brain makes “decisions” to take actions prior to the conscious mind making the same decision). The overdose results ultimately in the formation of a new consciousness – a completely different personality in the same body with (eventually) the same memories. It’s fascinating stuff, well explored here via the girl and her parents and her doctor trying to deal with the new identity. (I was reminded a bit of Holly Phillips’s “The Other Grace” from earlier this year, which used amnesia to bring its main character to a similar place.)

Locus, April 2006

Best in the April F&SF is a solid Daryl Gregory outing, “Gardening at Night”. This concerns a project to clear landmines using a lot of fairly intelligent “mytes”: interconnected small robots. The problem is, the mytes, as with seemingly all “fairly intelligent robots” in SF history, seem to have their own ideas about what to do with their lives. It’s a thoughtful, interesting, well done story.

Locus, December 2006

The December F&SF also features another intriguing story from Daryl Gregory, “Damascus”, in which a divorced woman gets involved with a religious cult based around a kuru-like disease. The story asks, in a way, if religion is a disease – or, at any rate, can a disease mimic a religion? Gregory has been using SFnal ideas wonderfully, to ask deep questions.

Locus, October 2010

From Daryl Gregory we have become used to challenging stories about the frontiers of contemporary neurological research, so perhaps it is a bit of a surprise to see in “Unpossible” (F&SF, October-November) a fantasy about a man whose wife and son have committed suicide. He is trying to rediscover something he lost during childhood, and so he resurrects a bike that had special attachments with such markings as “unpossible”. This is a way to a fantastical universe populated by characters that will be familiar to most readers – and Gregory’s point turns nicely on that familiarity, and on how we perhaps forget too readily our love of those characters.

Eclipse Two Review (Locus, November 2008)

Finally a borderline case is also among the best stories here “The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm”, by Daryl Gregory, tells of an island ruled by Lord Grimm, who seems obsessed with opposing the United States’s superheroes. He has kidnapped another, and the inevitable result is war – again. Just as inevitably, it is ordinary people like the heroine, who works in a factory making robots to fight the superheroes, who face the brunt of the catastrophic results of war. The political overtones are obvious enough, and well expressed.

Birthday Review: Two YA novels from Charles Sheffield

Charles Sheffield was born in England on 25 June 1935, and died in 2002. He lived in the US for a long time, and was married to the excellent writer Nancy Kress. I loved Sheffield's work when I was first reading the magazines, and when he was a regular in Analog, Galaxy, and Amazing. I highly recommend novels like Cold as Ice and the later Heritage Universe series.

Alas, the only reviews I wrote of his work were of a couple of books in Tor's YA series called Jupiter, from the late '90s. I didn't find these as successful as his best work. Still, here are two shortish reviews of a couple of those books.

Putting Up Roots, by Charles Sheffield

Charles Sheffield's Putting Up Roots is a Jupiter novel from Tor. That is, one of their new series of YA SF novels.  These seem explicitly to be an attempt to recreat something at least vaguely resembling Heinlein's juveniles, but for the late '90s.

Unfortunately, many of the efforts in this line I've read have been forced. Putting Up Roots is not a terribly successful effort, though, that said, I still found it a decently enjoyable read. It concerns a teenager, Josh Kerrigan, who is basically abandoned by his actress mother. He ends up with his aunt and uncle, who are living on an isolated family farm, which is being put out of business by a big agricultural corporation. This corporation makes a deal with the older couple which ends up sending the boy and his autistic cousin, Dawn, to Solferino, a newly opened planet with agricultural prospects. They end up in a group with several other similarly abandoned kids, and with a couple of suspicious-acting adults. After a few not very convincing adventures, they learn what the mysterious goings on really are, and they also (natch!) learn to trust and value the other kids despite original hostility. They don't exactly solve the main plot problem: they have it solved for them.

That's one problem.  Another is the fundamental absurdity of the whole situation.  For one thing, the pioneer farming setup just seems silly. We're asked to believe, yet again, in faceless utterly evil corporations, who'd gladly murder several kids, without compunction, yet who also clumsily screw up the situation. (But these corporations aren't all dumb: they can manipulate local weather so that Josh's uncle's back 40 gets a drought while the neighboring corporate farms get plenty of rain.) We're asked to act as if a major plot element is a surprise: Solferino turns out to have (Gasp!) intelligent natives, even though the eeevill corporations insist they are just dumb animals. Gee, we've never seen an idea like =that= before. (And of course it's the autistic kid who breaks through to them.) And as I said, the eventual plot resolution is handed to the characters on a platter, not earned.

The Cyborg From Earth, by Charles Sheffield

I read another book in Tor's Jupiter series of YA novels, Charles Sheffield's The Cyborg from Earth. This is probably the best I've read in this line of books. It's got some silliness, and Sheffield takes some shortcuts, but a lot of it was pretty neat, and it was a fast, compelling read. Jefferson Kopal is the heir to Kopal Transportation, a major spaceship-building concern. Family tradition deems he must spend a few years in the Navy before taking his board position, but he is not terribly interested in Navy service.  His interests are in the area of science and engineering, like his disgraced uncle Drake, who disappeared taking a wormhole the wrong way many years previously.  But duty, and his ailing mother's concern over his slimy uncle (really a cousin) and the uncle's fairhaired boy of a son, and their manoeuvring to take over the company, lead him to enter the Navy, qualifying by the skin of his teeth.

He is sent to the Messina Dust Cloud, where the colonists are supposedly close to rebellion.  Worse yet, the colonists are rumoured to be cyborgs: against Earth law, they have AI's and supposedly they themselves merge with machines.  On the way he realizes that something is up: the Captain is incompetent, and seems to have no intention of negotiating with the colonists. But an encounter with a space-born life form, a Space Sounder, leaves Jeff seriously injured, and at the mercy of the Messina colonists. Their cure for him leaves him a cyborg, too, by Earth standards.  Soon his loyalty to Earth is tested, as it becomes clear that the Earth authorities are not playing fair with the colonists, that the prejudice against AI's is dangerous and for example has contributed to his mother's illness, and that he really likes some of the Messina colonists, including a girl his age and the mysterious scientist Simon Macafee, who has invented a form of artificial gravity control. The solution involves the nature of the Space Sounders, the history of Simon Macafee and his discoveries, and Jefferson's own responsibilities. I did like it, despite some predictable twists, a bit of excessive villainy on the part of Earth, and some scientific, character, and plot implausibilities.

Birthday Review: Two Short Novels from Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan turns 71 today. Last year on this date I posted my look at his most famous novel, Atonement. Today, how about some short looks at a couple of very short novels.

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam. This is a very short novel (barely over 40,000 words) about two men, a successful composer and a successful newspaper editor, close friends, who were both lovers of the same woman. The book opens with this woman's funeral, then follows the newspaper editor as the woman's husband offers some salacious pictures of a high-ranking minister for publication. The composer is working on a commission for "The Millennium Symphony". He and the editor have a row about the propriety of publishing the pictures, then, feeling morally superior, the composer heads to the Lake Country to find "inspiration" to finish his symphony. There he, in a cowardly fashion, fails to intervene when he witnesses a woman accosted by a man. The moral failings of both men lead to professional disaster, which each blames on the other ... leading finally to a clever and vicious twist ending.  This is well done, sleek, blackly funny, but all that said it's rather slight. I like what I've read by McEwan (an early story, "Solid Geometry", which appeared in Fantastic in the mid-'70s, and an early, scary, novel, The Cement Garden). [Later I came to read Atonement and other novels.] And I liked Amsterdam. But I wouldn't have thought it measured up to a Booker. I will say that his previous novel, Enduring Love, looks based on reviews to be more substantial, and I seem to recall that it was a near scandal when it didn't win: perhaps the win for Amsterdam was a make good.

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is one of the best writers of our time. I am a particular fan of his novel Atonement, a remarkable look at the destructive effect of a small, only mildly malicious, act by a teenaged girl. As I have mentioned before I discovered him in of all places Ted White's Fantastic, back in 1975 or so, with the story "Solid Geometry", a very fine creepy piece.

His new novel is very short -- novella length at something on the order of 38,000 words. It is nominally the story of one night -- the wedding night of a young British couple in 1962. (Critically, as Christopher Hitchens points out, a year before "sexual intercourse began", in the famous words of Philip Larkin.) Of course the story really extends backward -- to the childhoods of the two, and to their courtship -- and forward, to tell quickly how their lives worked out.

The trouble is, they are both virgins. Edward, the man, is terribly concerned that his inexperience will lead to an embarrassing failure to perform -- or, perhaps, rather too rapid a performance. Florence's problems are more severe -- she is terribly afraid of sex, and she really does not want to have sex at all. Ever. (There is a brief hint -- which I may be exaggerating, but Hitchens' review (in the new Atlantic) suggests he detected such a hint as well -- that she may have been abused -- or at least sexually frightened -- by her father.) It is not that Florence does not love Edward -- she does, quite sincerely. And she is not purely a mouse -- she is a very accomplished violinist, and the forceful leader of a promising string quartet. Edward quite sincerely loves Florence, and is consumed with desire for her. He took a first in History and hopes to write short popular historical books.

Their real problem, however (beyond Florence's evident psychological hangup, whatever its origin), is that they are culturally unable to talk about sex, or about their desires, fears, experiences or lack thereof -- anything at all. Mind you this is still a problem for people, but not to anything like the degree it was in 1962 (perhaps, though I am not sure, especially in England.) Class is also an issue -- Edward is of a slightly (though not terribly) lower class than Florence, and in particular his family has much less money. And so the novel turns on an eventually disastrous experience, and the small-t tragic results not just of that experience but of their dual failure to work through it by even the simplest of words.

It is very fine stuff, if quite small scale -- minor, surely, but well worth having. It was made into a movie, starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle, in 2017.