Birthday Review: The Bell at Sealey Head, by Patricia A. McKillip

Patricia McKillip's 18th birthday is today -- which of course means she has just turned 72. In her honor, I'm reposting a review I did of her 2008 novel The Bell at Sealey Head for Fantasy Magazine. I note that I compared her regularity of production back then to Van Morrison -- but since that book she's only published two more novels, in 2010 and 2016, alas.

[Coda: Patricia McKillip died on May 6, 2022. A wonderful writer! Rest in peace, and thanks for all the pleasure you gave us!]

The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia A. McKillip (Ace, 978-0-441-01756-0, $14, tpb, 279 pages) September 2009 (originally published September 2008).

A review by Rich Horton

(Cover by Kinuko Y. Craft)

I think of Patricia Mc Killip a little like I think of Van Morrison in music. Which is really not a terribly useful comparison, because I don’t mean it to apply to their mutual styles … rather, I mean to say that McKillip is one of those writers who reliably issues a novel every year or two, always enjoyable work. In the same way I look for a new Van Morrison album every year or two, and they are always enjoyable. Now it can also be said the McKillip’s novels, as with Morrison’s latter period works, are fairly small scale affairs, and while they show a certain range and a willingness to try different things, they aren’t groundbreaking masterpieces, either. (But as McKillip has the Riddle Master books early in her career, and the utterly gorgeous Winter Rose somewhat later, so Morrison has Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece. Though here the comparison rather breaks down, because fine as The Riddle Master of Hed is, it’s no Astral Weeks. Which is hardly an insult – Astral Weeks being arguably the greatest album ever to come out of the pop/rock idiom.)

But I’m getting a bit silly and off track. As I implied, the latter day McKillip novels are not earthshaking. But they are still lovely, and sweet, and involving. Sometimes there are no villains at all, and even when there is a villain (as with The Bell at Sealey Head) he’s not very much the focus (and he has at least one redeeming quality).

The Bell at Sealey Head features three viewpoint characters. Judd Cauley is the innkeeper for the Inn at Sealey Head, a place that’s seen better times. His aged father is blind, and Judd barely keeps the Inn going while caring for this father and coping with his old retainers, particular the cook, who is quite awful. Meanwhile Gwyneth Blair is the bookish daughter of Sealey Head’s leading merchant. Her mother is dead, so she keeps tabs on her younger siblings – adolescent twins and a toddler – with the not always welcome help of her Aunt, while spending what spare time she has writing stories. And Emma is a maid at Aislinn House, the seat of the dying Lady Eglantyne. Emma’s mother is a wood witch named Hester. But Emma’s real secret is Ysabo, a young woman she sees through various doors in the house. Ysabo seems to live in an alternate Aislinn House, occupied by her mother and grandmother and a crowd of knights, all obsessed by rigid ritual.

We quickly learn that Judd is sweet on Gwyneth, and that Gwyneth returns his affection, though neither really knows how the other feels. Gwyneth’s Aunt is determined to match her with Raven Sproule, the local gentry, and Raven’s sister Daria is also in favor of the match. Emma’s household awaits the arrival of Lady Eglantyne’s heir, Miranda Beryl. And Ysabo is being forced into marriage with one of the knights, whose name she doesn’t even know. Then Judd gets a rare guest – Ridley Dow, a young scholar from the big city (Landringham), who is interested in magic, and in particular in the mysterious bell that rings at Sealey Head every sunset. Legend has it the bell was on a ship that sunk off the Head, but Ridley has other ideas, ideas that involve Aislinn House. And now Miranda Beryl is finally coming to her Aunt’s house, with a pile of idle Landringham friends, many of whom will stay at the Inn, which means Judd need a real cook …

And so the real action begins. Which I don’t propose to further summarize. Of course we will learn Ysabo’s secret, and that of her version of Aislinn House. And we get to read Gwyneth’s newest story, which concerns the Bell. And the lives of Gwyneth and Judd and Raven and Daria and Emma and Ysabo and Miranda and Ridley all change, mostly for the better …

So what do we have? A very sweetly enjoyable book. A pleasure to read through and through. Not to oversell it – it’s nothing earthshaking, it’s nothing really terribly new, it won’t convince people who haven’t much cared for McKillip’s work to date to convert, any more than, say, Hymns to the Silence likely caused any huge swell of support for Van Morrison. But not to undersell it – as ever with McKillip, the prose is elegant, limpid, lovely – if not as astonishing as in for example the incomparable Winter Rose; the characters if perhaps mostly just a bit domesticated remain quite real; and there are some nice fantastical ideas, particularly the otherworldly Aislinn House and its strangled routine.

Birthday Review: Claremont Tales II (plus more short stories), by Richard A. Lupoff

Today is Dick Lupoff's 85th birthday. Lupoff is a science fiction and mystery writer of considerable accomplishment, a winner of a Hugo (with his wife Pat) for his great fanzine Xero, and an expert on such subjects as comics, pulps, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (among many more things.) I reviewed a wonderful anthology of work from Xero here: Review of The Best of Xero.

Below is a reproduction of a review I did of his short story collection Claremont Tales II (originally at SF Site), as well as a couple more reviews I did of his short stories, one in a retro review of the 1970s Cosmos, and another Locus review of Weird Tales.

Claremont Tales II, by Richard A. Lupoff

a review by Rich Horton

Add caption

Veteran SF and Mystery writer Richard A. Lupoff is back with a second retrospective collection of his best short fiction. Last year, Golden Gryphon published Claremont Tales, and now we see Claremont Tales II. This collects several fairly early stories (1969 through 1978), and some recent stories (including a brand new story for this book).

Immediately noticeable is Lupoff's versatility. Included are some straight SF, some supernatural horror (two stories, at least, fairly directly influenced by Lovecraft), and some straight mystery stories, as well as some amalgams of all of the above. Always noticeable, too, is Lupoff's assured storyteller's touch, his engaging voice, and his ability to alter that voice in service of his aims, most notably here in "The Adventure of the Boulevard Assassin", a Sherlock Holmes story written in the style of Jack Kerouac. (Back in the 70s, Lupoff attracted some notice with a series of SF stories pastiching various author's styles, all written as by "Ova Hamlet".)

The above-mentioned Holmes piece, a very sly divertissement, is one of the more impressive entries here. I also quite liked "Jubilee", an Alternate History of a Roman Empire where Julius Caesar survived his assassination attempt. And despite my general lack of sympathy for Lovecraft, I was rather taken with the two Lovecraftian pieces in Claremont Tales II, "The Devil's Hop Yard" and "The Turret". The new story in this book is "Green Ice", a sequel to an earlier story called "Black Mist". This is an SF mystery, in which Japanese-Martian detective Ino Hajime is called in to investigate the activities of a descendant cult to Aum Shinrikyo (the Japanese cult which perpetrated a poison gas attack on a subway a few years past) on the Jovian moon Europa. It's an intriguing, rather mystical, story, which perhaps leaps a bit too quickly to its conclusion, but which is a good read nonetheless. "31.12.99" is an evocative and moving story of the new millennium. "News from New Providence" is a somewhat mordant account of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor investigating a murder in the Bahamas. "Whatever Happened to Nick Neptune?" is a very enjoyable story of a very special pulp magazine. And so on -- top to bottom this is an extremely enjoyable collection.

Somewhat shamefacedly I must confess to having mostly lost track of Mr. Lupoff's career in recent years. I had been quite impressed with his novella from Again, Dangerous Visions, "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama"; and I quite enjoyed the Ova Hamlet pastiches. I also took notice of "Black Mist" and "31.12.99" in their recent appearances. But I have missed the rest of his work recently -- apparently including a linked series of mystery novels. (A related short story is included here.) This book is evidence that he remains a forceful and worthwhile writer -- check it out.

Cosmos, September 1977

Lupoff's "The Child's Story" is a far future story, about a group of very different (from each other) posthumans, returning to Earth for a visit -- with rather different motives. It's not a bad attempt at portraying posthumanity.

Locus, September 2006

My favorite from Weird Tales for August-September, however, is a moving semi-autobiographical story by Richard Lupoff, “Fourth Avenue Interlude”, about a boy in love with books who helps out in an old New York City bookstore, and the wonderful discovery he makes – but the wonderful discovery isn’t the point: or only to the extent that what he really discovers is the pleasures of all sorts of stories.

Review: Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling

James Wallace Harris writes the excellent blog Auxiliary Memory, in which he discusses many different things, including such subjects close to my heart as SF (and short SF), and also forgotten popular fiction. One of his interests is a writer named Lady Dorothy Mills, who wrote popular travel books and novels mostly in the 1920s. James has a webpage about Mills: Lady Dorothy Mills , and recently posted about her on his blog. Here's a post he wrote for the site Book Riot about Mills, as reprinted on his blog: The Resurrection of Lady Dorothy Mills, in which he mentions her 1926 SF novel Phoenix, which he compared in theme to Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire. He wondered if anyone in his circle had read the latter -- and of course I had, and I knew I'd reviewed it, and I realized I'd never reposted my review after my old webpage went away.

So here is that review, from way back in 1996, one of the earliest book reviews I posted. (And next, try to find a copy of Phoenix -- which might not be easy! Though it should be in the public domain next year.)

Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling

Bantam Spectra, October 1996, $22.95 US

ISBN: 0553099582

a review by Rich Horton

Holy Fire is a pretty impressive novel. Sterling really packs ideas onto the page! He furnishes his setting with detail after telling detail: there is a much greater sense, seems to me, that the future being depicted is really in the future, and not just now + a few changes, as in so many SF books. And the details are cleverly backgrounded: offhandedly mentioned here, revealed by a turn of phrase there, implied by a description...(Also, he does stop and lecture on occasion: but the lectures are interesting, not distracting, and important to his story.) Anyway, the way Sterling does this stuff is great fun (in his short fiction too), and he's pretty good at little jokes on the one hand, and telling aphorisms on the other hand.

Holy Fire is set 100 years in the future, and the main character is a woman born in 2001 (a symbolic date, I'm sure; as the fact that the book opens with the death of her former lover, born in 1999, is symbolic too). This woman, Mia Ziemann, after attending her lover's "funeral", and receiving a mysterious "gift" from him (the password to his questionably legal Memory Palace) (a MacGuffin if there ever was one!) undergoes a crisis of sorts and decides that it is time to cash in her chips, as it were, and undergo the radical life-extension treatment which she has been planning. She comes out of the treatment a young woman in appearance, and a different person in attitude, and with a different name (Maya). As a result, she runs off (illegally) to Europe, trying to live the life of the late-21st century young people (it seems). The rest of the book follows her somewhat rambling adventures with a variety of Europeans, young and old, as well as eventually getting around to the meaning of the MacGuff -- er, I mean, Memory Palace.

The book is very strong on the description and rationale for the culture and economics of a future dominated by medical treatment, life-extension methods, and (as a result of the previous two), old people. Sterling knows that if people live a long time, society will be very different, and he does a good job showing us one way it might be different. His views of both young (say, up to 60 or so) and old (up to 120 or more at the time of the book) people are very well done. Part of the book is an attempt to get at what the difference between a society of very-long-lived people (like up to 150 years or so), and a society of near-immortals (up to 1500 years or more) might be: and here he waves his hand at some neat ideas but kind of fails to really convince.

Throughout it is readable, interesting, and funny. The resolution is solid, though as I have suggested, he waves at a more "transcendental" ending, and doesn't really succeed there. But Maya's story is honest and convincing, though Maya as a character is a little harder to believe. She seems to be whatever the plot needs her to be at certain times: this is partly explainable by the very real physical and psychological changes she must be undergoing: but at times it seems rather arbitrary.

Birthday Review: Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M. Banks

Today would have been Iain Banks' 66th birthday. Sadly, he died 7 years ago. He was one of the most interesting and enjoyable SF writers, and also a fine writer of contemporary fiction. Here's a review I did of one of his earlier novels, a non-Culture novel, but very much SF. I wrote this way back in 1996.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks

Bantam Spectra, 1995 (originally published in 1994 in the UK)
ISBN: 0-553-37459-1

a review by Rich Horton

Iain M. Banks has been publishing SF novels for the past several years, as well as publishing mainstream novels (with horror and/or slipstream SF facets) as by Iain Banks. He has received considerable praise in both genres, but for one reason or another, I have yet to read one of his books until now.

Banks` SF has mostly been set in a far future dominated by the "Culture", a galactic scale group of races, including humans, who apparently inhabit huge starships. Feersum Endjinn, his latest book, isn't part of this future. At the time of the action (which occurs over a couple of days, or several decades, depending on how you measure it), the Earth of the very far future is inhabited by the descendants of those who stayed when most humans traveled to the stars in the "Diaspora". Earth is dominated by an aristocratic class, based in a huge castle, so large that the highest tower extends into space, and the King`s residence, a large "palace", is contained within a chandelier of the greater castle. Ordinary humans are allowed 8 normal lifespans (copies apparently made of their brains` contents at the time of death), after which they are allowed 8 additional "lives" in a sort of virtual reality maintained in the global computer net, after which their personality becomes a component of the AI complex which "is" the net (or "crypt" as Banks cleverly calls it.) At the time of the action, Earth is threatened both by the Encroachment, a dust cloud which will swallow the Sun in a few centuries, and by a virus which is infecting the Crypt. Possible solutions to these problems were left by the humans of the Diaspora, but the means of access to these solutions has been forgotten.

The story is told in four threads, following four main characters: a mysterious, nameless woman, who is soon revealed as a messenger from the Crypt; the King`s Chief Scientist, Hortis Gadfium, who is part of a conspiracy which has been trying to discover the hidden solution to the problem of the Encroachment; an aristocrat and loyal general of the King`s, Alandre Sessine, who is on the point of discovering that the King and his advisors are obstructing progress towards solving the problem of the Encroachment, apparently because such progress is a threat to the status quo, and who is assassinated multiple times, both in real life and post-death virtual reality, for his pains; and finally, Bascule, a young, innocent "teller", that is, one who communicates with the Crypt as part of his job, who is also "recruited" by the Crypt to help find the solution to the encroachment problem.

These four threads are soon seen to be quests which will converge on each other. Much time is spent exploring both the physical and virtual reality of this far future Earth. The resolution is logical and satisfying, and the last line of the book is marvelous.

The strength of this book is the colorful presentation of a truly strange future world. I also found the "Virtual Reality" of the Crypt internally convincing, in a way I often don`t (i.e. I could never really believe in William Gibson`s visions of Cyberspace.) That isn`t to say that Banks has provided rock solid scientific rationales for the elements of this future world: far from it, but he makes us happily suspend disbelief in a lot of unlikely things, partly simply by setting the story so far in the future. In addition, Banks is an excellent and audacious writer. The Bascule sections of the novel are told in a compressed prose, abbreviating words phonetically in Bascule's (I am told) south England accent (like feersum endjinn for fearsome engine), also using numbers and symbols. This is initially difficult to follow, but I picked up on it pretty quickly, and I thought it was vital to providing Bascule an individual voice.

In summary, I loved this book. It is over the top, but in a good way, and Banks makes it all work.

Birthday Review: The Pickup Artist, and short stories, by Terry Bisson

Today is Terry Bisson's birthday. In his honor, here's a review from my old SFF Net group of his novel The Pickup Artist, plus several reviews I've done of his short fiction for my Locus column.

Review of The Pickup Artist

Terry Bisson's new novel, The Pickup Artist, is an interesting, odd, novel that reminded me strongly of Jonathan Lethem, particularly, for some reason, Amnesia Moon.  At the opening it seems almost a straightforward commentary by SFnal means on a theme reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 (though at core very different), but by the end it has become a road novel through a very strange next century America. 

The title character is Hank Shapiro, who works for the government confiscating works of art which have been "deleted".  It has been determined that contemporary artists are unfairly at a disadvantage in "competition" with the weight of all the works of literature, painting, acting, etc. from the past, and each month, a randomly selected set of authors, musicians, movies, painters and so on is "deleted", and all their works are supposed to be destroyed.  Shapiro and his fellow "pickup artists" travel to people's homes who are reported to own copies of deleted videos, records, and books, and confiscated the works (while compensating the owners). 

Hank's dog is dying, and his mother is dead, and his father, who named him for the legendary country singer Hank Williams, left long ago.  The combined effects of all these lead him to a criminal act -- when he confiscates a Hank Williams record he decides to try to find a record player on which to listen to it -- just once -- before turning it in.  Before long he's involved with a long-pregnant librarian named Henry, and with a series of identical Indians named Bob, and he's breaking into a veterinary hospital to rescue his dog from euthanasia, and his Hank Williams record has been stolen, possibly by one of the Alexandrians (Library version) who apparently try to rescue deleted artwork.  So Hank and Henry and the corpse of Indian Bob and the dying dog start to chase the record across the country, through flea markets and abandoned casinos and abandoned highways to the independent city state of Vegas.

Alternating short chapters tell the history of the move for "deletion", which began with terrorist destruction of paintings at museums, and continued with the support of a mysterious figure who seems to be Bill Gates (as well as SFWA!) and an aging actress and a trial of the accidental killers of a number of people at a museum.

The telling of this story is continually interesting, and the characters are quirky and involving if not quite ever real.  The plot is discursive and really doesn't go much of anywhere, and the social background is interesting but not coherent.  Much gives off the sense of being made of as it goes along.  What seems to be the central argument, concerning the morality of this "deletion" and perhaps the "anxiety of influence" or something, is never really engaged, but the book is still about something -- about death, I think, and perhaps about art as a release from a dead life.  I don't get the sense of a completed argument, or even, really, a completed book -- but an interesting effort in both areas.

Review of SF Age, September 1998

the latest SF Age, September, is a fine issue.  It has a neat Terry Bisson story, "First Fire", which plays clever hommage to one of the most famous SF stories of all time (I won't say which, as that would be a spoiler)

Locus, October 2003

Terry Bisson's "Almost Home" tells of a boy in a small town, and his closest friends, an athletic kid named Bug, and a sickly girl named Toute. The boy discerns the outline of an aeroplane among the fencing and buildings of an abandoned racetrack, and in magical fashion the three kids bring it to life, and fly ... well, somewhere else: things in this world are stranger than at first they seem. Sweet and moving, but also quite spooky.

Terry Bisson also has a worthy novella at Sci Fiction in September. "Greetings" is the story of two 70ish men, close friends, long-time radicals, who have just received notice that they are scheduled for euthanasia. They refuse the option of a communal death and decide to commit suicide in the company of their wives, and a government observer, of course. But things don't go quite as planned ... Bisson's social future as presented is creepy, but the story doesn't seem much concerned with arguing the pros or cons of government-mandated euthanasia -- though the story does ask us to think about it. The heart of the story is in the characters, though, and in the ironic working out of events.

Locus, February 2006

With the February F&SF Terry Bisson’s long novella “Planet of Mystery” is concluded. This is a rather strange story set on a decidedly implausible Venus. (Oddly, and probably not very sensibly, I was reminded of the Ace Double To Venus! To Venus!, by “David Grinnell” (Donald A. Wollheim).) A pair of astronauts from a combined U.S./Chinese mission reach Venus, and to their shock crash land in a shallow lake. The air is breathable, and the temperature tolerable. Soon they encounter centaurs and beautiful Amazon women. The mission commander decides that he is hallucinating, and only contact with the orbiter keeps him sane – he thinks. But the strangeness multiplies – before long a flying saucer is in the picture … It’s just a very weird story, maybe in the end a bit too weird, too disconnected, to really satisfy. But I did enjoy myself.

Locus, August 2006

A few stories in the August F&SF are purely comic, and nicely so. In Terry Bisson’s “Billy and the Spacemen”, homicidal little Billy saves the world from invasion.

Locus, October 2006

Interzone for August has a fine mathematical fantasia from Rudy Rucker and Terry Bisson, “2 + 2 = 5”, in which a mathematician proves that there are holes in the number system; and another story about numbers,

Locus, October 2008

I also liked Terry Bisson’s “Private Eye”, in which a man who is a host for people who log on to look through his eyes meets a woman with a similar secret of her own. Bisson quite sweetly charts the public and private progress of their relationship.

Birthday Review: Stories of Sam J. Miller

Sam J. Miller is certainly one of the most exciting writers to appear in the field this past decade. Today is his birthday, so here's a collection of my reviews of his work from Locus.

Locus, February 2014

I was woefully neglectful of Electric Velocipede this year, and alas I must report that John Klima has decided to close the 'zine down after 27 issues, print and online. This was one of the most successful small 'zines in the field, winner of a 2009 Hugo for Best Fanzine. The final issue, Winter 2013, features “The Beasts We Want to Be”, by Sam J. Miller, a strong SF horror story set in an alternate post-Revolution Russia, told by a “Broken” soldier, who has been conditioned in a “Pavlov's Box” to serve the goals of the Revolution, as he commandeers the artwork of an aristocratic family, then finds himself drawn to save a woman of that family from reconditioning, and then to save a painting of her husband. Very dark stuff.

Locus, September 2016

Sam J. Miller’s “Things With Beards” (Clarkesworld, June) riffs on a rather scarier story about a form of alien contact, a story that has been successfully riffed on before, in both movies and an excellent recent Peter Watts tale. So the title tells you which story, right? And hints at what Miller is doing, quite ambitiously, as his protagonist, back from the Antarctic, a somewhat closeted gay man in the early ‘80s, at the onset of the AIDS crisis, also engages with a protest movement against police violence, and wonders what is happening to him when he forgets hours at a time. It’s interesting to see Miller using the metaphor of a shape-changing alien monster so bravely –  a worthwhile new take on a classic.

Locus, December 2017

Tor.com’s two October originals are both pretty strong stories. “The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter” by Sam J. Miller is told in two sections by Otto, a gay man in near future New York, who lives with his boyfriend Trevor, who rescued him from drug addiction and who keeps him (so to speak) straight. At a party Otto falls in lust with a friend’s brother, Aarav, as the guests discuss what they are doing with programmable matter. The second part is set not too long later, in a much-changed world – it seems that programmable matter has run amok and destroyed much of the world. Trevor is dead, and Otto is in a refugee camp. There he encounters Aarav again, now blinded, and he contemplates how to deal with him – after their encounter, which it turns out went horribly wrong for Otto, but does that matter now? The story is absolutely convincing in portraying Otto, and his relationship with Trevor and his abortive connection with Aarav – but the SF side, the programmable matter and the disaster it causes, seems thin and unconvincing.

Locus, July 2018

Sam J. Miller makes his first appearance in Analog with a moving story, “My Base Pair”, about Thatch, who is trying to reconnect with his long-lost childhood friend, Kenji. Kenji is a “hacksperm”: born with the stolen genes of a celebrity (Tom Cruise), and in an environment where vicious prejudice against such children is rife, he has disappeared. Thatch has become an investigator into the criminal aspects of that practice, perhaps not realizing how his work might actually increase the oppression the innocent children of stolen genetic material face. He has tracked down an illegal fight between another “cruise” and someone he hopes is Kenji, and he tries to finagle information about Kenji’s location from this other man. The story intertwines Thatch’s memories of his childhood times with his friend, and his more recent painful memories of an affair with a journalist investigation the whole issue. It’s very strong on the personal aspects of Thatch’s life, and very interesting on some of the scientific and social ramifications of the “hacksperm” tech, but perhaps doesn’t quite convince on the truly vicious legal and societal reaction to the (innocent) children.

Locus, November 2019

Sam J. Miller’s “Shucked” (F&SF, November-December) is a first-rate horror story. Adney and her boyfriend Teek are on vacation in Italy, and she’s wondering if their relationship is real besides the sex. Then a somewhat creepy older men approaches them with an offer – he’ll pay her for an hour of Teek’s time. Somehow Adney convinces herself to accept the offer – Teek apparently doesn’t mind … but this can’t end well, can it? This is an example of a writer using a fairly familiar idea (which I won’t spoil) so artfully that it becomes newly effective. Strong work.

Birthday Review: The Sweetheart Season, by Karen Joy Fowler

Today is Karen Joy Fowler's birthday. Last year I presented a summary of my reviews of her short fiction; so this year I'm resurrecting a review I did back in 1997 (I think one of the very first reviews I did for widish consumption) of her lovely second novel.

The Sweetheart Season, by Karen Joy Fowler
Henry Holt, 1996
$23.00
ISBN 0-8050-4737-9

Karen Joy Fowler's first novel, Sarah Canary, is a marvel, an amazing, original novel about aliens, of all sorts, in the 1870's American West. It is extraordinarily assured, the best first novel I've read in a long time - indeed, in my opinion, at least arguably the best SF first novel of the nineties. Obviously, I have eagerly anticipated Fowler's second novel, which has now appeared: The Sweetheart Season.

Categorization of Fowler's work in a generic sense has always been difficult: perhaps a better word would be pointless. That said, most of her stories, for me, read best as SF or fabulations, but she is clearly enough a writer who appeals to non-SF readers as well. Sarah Canary is readable as a "mainstream" novel, though I think it is best read as SF; in John Clute's words, it is a First Contact story. The Sweetheart Season, by contrast, seems clearly a "mainstream" novel to me, though one could define certain of the events of the story as fantastical if one insisted.

The story concerns a small town in northern Minnesota, Magrit, home to a grain mill and an associated cereal business. It is set in 1947. The viewpoint character is Irini Doyle, though the story is told in the "voice" of her daughter, retelling Irini's story from a present day perspective. Irini lives with her alcoholic father (her mother is dead), who is a research chemist at the cereal company. Irini works in the Research Kitchen of the cereal company. The other characters are her co-workers (all women) in the Kitchen, as well as the company founder, his wife, and his grandson, and a few other local women.

The main action of the novel revolves somewhat loosely around a promotional scheme of the founder: the girls at the company form a baseball team, which barnstorms through Minnesota and Wisconsin, purportedly demonstrating the nutritive benefits of the company's cereal by their success. Several other narrative threads are woven into the story: the writing of a continuing promotional kitchen/life advice column by the fictional Maggie Collins, a sort of Betty Crocker-type spokesperson for the cereal company; the antagonism between the former residents of Upper Magrit (submerged to make the mill) and Lower Magrit (where everyone now lives); the involvement of the mill owner's wife with Gandhi and the Indian independence movement; the efforts of the local women to find love and husbands in a town left nearly male-free by the war; and a mysterious (young, male) visitor to Magrit. All of these threads are well-integrated with the novel's theme, as I read it: essentially: the nascent "Women's Liberation" movement, though that over-simplifies: but the focus on the "Kitchen", yet in the context of women who are all working, and playing a nominally male sport, combined with the ironic voice of the present day narrator, and the ironic-in-this-context quotes from Maggie Collins' women's magazine advice column, quite nicely merge to make simple, true, statements about the position of women in 1947, and in our time.

The female characters are very well drawn, and almost invariably engaging. A couple of the male characters come off as ciphers, but the portraits of Irini's father, and of old Henry Collins, the mill owner, are very good. Fowler's prose is clean and elegant. Her narrative voice is a delight: ironic, affectionate, knowing, often very funny. One brief quote, from one of Maggie Collins' advice columns, meant to be read in the context of the decision to form a baseball team: "Polls have recently confirmed what has long been suspected; most men do not want brainy women. Stewardesses have turned out to be that occupation blessed most often with marriage. The key elements appear to be uniforms and travel."

I wouldn't rank The Sweetheart Season quite as highly as Sarah Canary. At times the usually wonderfully controlled ironic voice turns a little shrill. At times she drives home a point unnecessarily: it is sufficient to show us the evidence, or to leave an ironic statement alone for the reader to interpret. Also, I was completely unable to believe the resolution of one of the plot threads. However, the book as a whole is thoroughly enjoyable, and says a lot of worthwhile things about the place of women in our society, especially about how (and, I suppose, why) it changed in the years during and after World War II.

Forgotten SF Collection: Now Then!, by John Brunner

As I've mentioned many times before, I quite enjoy early John Brunner. So, for this "Forgotten Books" outing, I thought I'd resurrect what I wrote about a fairly early Brunner collection of novellas. On the whole, it must be said, these are minor Brunner.

(Cover by Hector Garrido)

Now Then! is a John Brunner collection from 1965. It includes three unrelated novellas: "Some Lapse of Time" (24,000 words, from Science Fantasy #57, February 1963), "Imprint of Chaos" (17,500 words, from Science Fantasy #42, August 1960), and "Thou Good and Faithful" (19,000 words in this version, originally published as by John Loxsmith in Astounding, March 1953 -- the original version was a bit shorter at about 17,000 words).

"Some Lapse of Time" is a dour anti-Nuclear War story. A doctor discovers a dying tramp. The tramp turns out to have an unusual deficiency disease, and to be unidentifiable, and to speak an unknown language that might be related to English. The doctor begins to have terrible dreams as well. It turns out that the tramp has been sent back in time from a post-Holocaust world -- but will anyone believe this?

"Imprint of Chaos" is the first to be published of the "Traveler in Black" stories. I haven't read these stories, which appear to be rather popular. [I read them later.] This story involves the Traveler, who has many names, but one nature, traveling around his world giving people what they want. In this fashion he resists chaos. This story is somewhat episodic, but the bulk of it concerns an man who wanders into the Traveler's world from our world, and who is treated by the inhabitants of a certain city as a god (you see, they hadn't any gods, and they had decided they wanted one ...). I've got to say I found this pretty minor stuff -- I hope the other Traveler stories are better. [They are.]

"Thou Good and Faithful" was Brunner's first story for a major magazine, and for some reason he published it as by "John Loxsmith". Within a year it had been anthologized as by "K. Houston Brunner", the form of his name Brunner used most often in those days. For this collection, Brunner (as was his wont) revised the story, expanding it slightly from 17,000 to 19,000 words. It is a typical Brunner revision -- no change in plot, no added scenes, just a general reworking of the prose. The story concerns an exploring ship in a crowded galaxy that comes to a potentially perfect world. Beautiful climate, and no intelligent natives. But some robots are discovered -- who made them? Over time, the mystery is solved (well, not so much solved as the robots eventually just tell them what's up). The story is overlong -- it probably should have been about 10,000 words. It does have a fairly interesting theme concerning the ultimate destiny of intelligence.

Birthday Review: Stories of Kenneth Schneyer

Yesterday was Ken Schneyer's birthday. I felt like Ken deserved a birthday review, but I confess my Locus archive missed a couple of worthwhile stories, so I added a couple of new capsule reviews.

Locus, June 2010

And Kenneth Schneyer, in “Liza’s Home” (Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Winter 2010), coils time paradoxes nicely in a story of a woman racked by guilt who invents a time machine.

Locus, August 2012

At Beneath Ceaseless Skies for May 31 I enjoyed Kenneth Schneyer's “Serkers and Sleep”. Serkers are victims of the bite of serks, which leads to paranoia and madness, and superhuman strength, such that serkers are likely to kill many of those closest to them. The only recourse is to kill them early, before the madness overtakes them. This notion is briefly sketched, and the future course of the story is clear when we meet our protagonist, an adolescent with a female friend who loves to swim in the lake, where the serks live … The resolution turns movingly on a local legend, and a magical book.

Clockword Phoenix 4, 2013

Kenneth Schneyer's "Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer" is an interesting story told via the notes to an exhibition of the title painter's work. It's set in the future -- Latimer is said to have lived from 1963-2023. The paintings and notes tell the story of much of Latimer's life -- her time in college, her up and down relationship with her lover and later wife, her fraught relationship with her parents -- as well as referencing a few dark incidents from the wider world: an industrial fire, a notorious case of child abuse. The notes try to tease out all kinds of symbolism as the reader realizes that what is being described are ghosts (and hints about the painter's personal life.) [This story made the Nebula shortlist.]

Lightspeed, November 2015

"The Plausibility of Dragons", by Kenneth Schneyer, follows the Moorish scholar Malik and the woman warrior Fara as travel through medieval Europe in search of the dragon they think killed Fara's sister. Malik isn't sure he believes in dragons, but he finds it even stranger that as they get closer to rumors of dragons they also find people who think he's a demon because of his dark skin, and that Fara is a witch, because no woman would wield a sword. The story turns intriguingly into a meditation on the nature of reality and the importance of belief in each other.

Lightspeed, July 2016

Kenneth Schneyer has a distinct interest in the stories we tell, as evidenced by his previous Lightspeed story, "The Plausibility of Dragons". "Some Pebbles in the Palm" is about the many lives of a fairly ordinary person, suggesting that he (or his choices) really didn't affect the world much. Then suggesting that maybe nobody's life affects the world much. Then reminding us that this is a story, leading to a neat stinger of an ending.

Locus, January 2018

I also liked Kenneth Schneyer’s “Keepsakes” (Analog, 11-12/17). The title refers to personality recordings, that their owners can call up and converse with, to help them remember their past. One question is – does this interaction change the keepsakes? Another question: what if a keepsake remembers something the later person doesn’t? And what if that memory hints at a crime? The protagonists are Doru and Afzal, who were lovers long ago, before Doru broke things off. He’s an expert on the Keepsake technology, and Afzal is a lawyer, and Afzal’s latest case involves a young woman whose Keepsake suggests her father may have killed her mother. There is a legal story here – can Keepsakes be witnesses? – but also an involving personal story, about Doru and Afzal and their history – and their Keepsakes.

Birthday Reviews: Bones of the Moon (plus some short stories), by Jonathan Carroll

Jonathan Carroll's birthday was a few days ago, but I didn't have a chance to post this short selection of reviews until today. Carroll is a really intriguing writer, and I have generally loved his short fiction, but struggled just a bit with the novels I've read. (I say struggled, and that's true, but I still enjoy and am fascinated by them.) I need to read some more of his novels, anyway. Here is a quick look I did for my old blog at Bones of the Moon, plus a few short things I've written for Locus about his shorter work.

Blog review of Bones of the Moon

Bones of the Moon is a novel by Jonathan Carroll.  Carroll is one of Glen Engel-Cox' favorite writers, and as it happened I had picked up a copy of this book for a song some years ago, at one of those roving remainder stores.  I have read some stories by Carroll before ("Friend's Best Man", "Uh-Oh City" and "Alone Alarm"), and I had been intrigued by his quite unusual imagination: almost whimsical, but darker and wilder.  He is a fine writer, too, but based on the sample of his work I've seen, an indifferent plotter.

The above comments apply pretty well to this book, anway.  Either that or I'm seriously missing the point. The story is the first person narration of Cullen James, a young New Yorker who lives upstairs from a serial killer. This revelation is made on the first page, and serves to imbue what otherwise seems to be a sunny novel with a sense of dread. Cullen is married to an ex-basketball player named Danny James (who, like Danny Ferry, played in Italy (coincidence, I'm sure)): she quickly narrates their long friendship/courtship, the precipitating event of which is her difficulty coping with an abortion after a loveless relationship. These early chapters are a pure and believable love story. But, pregnant with a child by Danny, she begins to have sequential dreams of an odd fantasy world, populated by toys from her childhood, and accompanied by her first child, obviously the aborted baby. Eventually they begin a quest to find the five "Bones of the Moon". At the same time she befriends another neighbor, a gay man, and through this friend she meets a strange filmmaker, who becomes obsessed with Cullen. Some of her fantasy world becomes entwined with the real world, in difficult to understand but disturbing ways. 

The resolution is shocking, and a bit ambiguous. It's not quite unearned, but it still seemed, oh, slightly forced, to me.  I freely admit that I didn't "get" all of it, though I'm not sure that it is all supposed to make coherent sense.

The strong points are the fine writing, and the wonderful, wild, imagination. As I say, I felt a bit let down by the plotting. The characters were extremely well drawn, and individual, but perhaps not quite real: or should I say, not people I quite recognize. I except Danny James here, who is extremely well-drawn and real (but who disappears to some extent towards the end). All these caveats aside, the book has some real power, and some real and effective weirdness.

Sympathy for the Devil review from Fantasy Magazine

Sympathy for the Devil also includes excellent recent work, especially Jonathan Carroll’s “The Heidelberg Cylinder”, a distinctly offbeat story about the dead returning because Hell is running low on space.

Locus, August 2011

The very big “little magazine” Conjunctions has a history of being hospitable to the fantastic, and again we see this is number 56, called “Terra Incognita: The Voyage Issue”. Names familiar to genre readers include Peter Straub, James Morrow, and Jonathan Carroll (and by all means read the stories by writers from outside the genre too!). My favorite was “East of Furious”, by Jonathan Carroll. It’s about the platonic relationship between Beatrice Oakum and her divorce lawyer, Mills. Eventually Beatrice convinces Mills to tell her the story of one of his previous cases, involving a modern alchemist and her Russian husband. The story – and its eventual intersection with that of Mills and Beatrice – is twisty and clever and witty and ultimately rather dark. Lovely work.

Locus, January 2017

There’s some nice stuff in November at Tor.com as well. “The Loud Table”, by Jonathan Carroll, opens with four older men who regularly sit and gab at a coffee shop. They’re morning the loss of their fifth, who just died of cancer. And of course they discuss their own maladies, including the one so many of us fear, Alzheimer’s. (I assume by us I mean all of us but I’m 57, so perhaps I just mean us old men!) One of the men discusses his memory loss – which makes him fear the disease, of course. For example, this one beautiful girlfriend … And the narrator makes him an offer … I’ll let Carroll reveal the sting. It’s a modest story, but enjoyable and expertly told.

Birthday Review: Stories of Yoon Ha Lee

I can't believe I haven't done a summary post on Yoon Ha Lee's short fiction. I found his shorter work intriguing from the very first story, "The Hundredth Question" in F&SF in 1999. He has a wider reputation now, after the tremendous success of his Machineries of Empiretrilogy. But as I hope this shows, he was writing striking work at shorter lengths throughout, and getting better and better. I've reprinted several of his stories in my Best of the Year volumes. Particular favorites include "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain", and the remarkable "Iseul's Lexicon", from his first story collection, Conservation of Shadows. Not included here is my review of his latest collection, Hexarchate Stories, all set in the Machineries of Empire universe, because that review appears in the current (January 2020) Locus.

Locus, June 2002

And Yoon Ha Lee's "The Black Abacus" (F&SF, June) is a fascinating attempt at describing a war conducted in quantum space through the eyes of a spaceship captain and her (traitorous?) associate and lover. I don't think the story quite works, but the attempt is intriguing indeed.

Locus, January 2009

And Yoon Ha Lee’s “Architectural Constants” (BCS, 10/23) is an evocative and original story of a constantly changing city, its changes controlled by a mysterious “spider”, and of the librarian and the sentinel whose destinies collide with the latest alterations.

Locus, March 2009

Yoon Ha Lee, in “The Unstrung Zither” (F&SF, March), seems to be trying something quite interesting. The story is apparently SF. An established planet trying to reestablish (by war) sovereignty over five colony planets. Five child assassins, one from each colony, have been captured. Xiao Ling Yun, a musician, is charged with using her musical ability to learn how to defeat them. The atmosphere is distinctively fantastical – largely I think because everything in the story is metaphor. Or perhaps not – perhaps what seems metaphor is real in this future, or alternate world? At any rate, all this is odd and interesting. And Ling Yun’s character is very well shown. That said, I felt the story didn’t quite work – but was a highly worthwhile failure – in that the plot’s dependence on quite implausible actions by the Phoenix General naggingly undermined my suspension of disbelief.

Review of Federations, Locus, May 2009

Yoon Ha Lee’s most notable feature, it seems to me (though Lee has displayed plenty of range) is the ability to imbue quite overtly space operatic stories with a nearly fantastical sort of color, and with a considerable feeling of intimacy. “Swanwatch” is another such (compare, for example, to “The Unstrung Zither”, from the March F&SF). A young woman is exiled to a distant space station for a trivial crime, and her new duty is to observe the “art form” of suicides who spiral into the nearby black hole. The story’s resolution isn’t quite what first seems offered, refreshingly.

Locus, September 2009

Yoon Ha Lee is never less than interesting – in “The Bones of Giants” (F&SF, August-September) a man searching for revenge against the evil necromancer who killed his mother allies himself with a chance-encountered young woman. On the surface a fairly conventional fantasy, but well executed, and with an effective closing revelation.

Locus, May 2010

At April’s Clarkesworld both stories are striking. Yoon Ha Lee’s “Between Two Dragons” is a war story, about a hero admiral who falls afoul of political machinations during a war, and is imprisoned, only to be released when the exigencies of war require his services. Which description of course doesn’t describe what’s really going on – this is a future war, between multiple star systems, and the admiral’s imprisonment involves also some mind alteration … but at heart it remains simple, a question of loyalty, and where loyalty belongs. Lee continues in his SF to use the language of fantasy to get at his themes: always quite interestingly.

Locus, September 2010

Yoon Ha Lee is reliably original and exotic again with “The Territoralist” (BCS, July 15). Guard Captain Jaris leads a crew to a territory that has “gone rogue” to set things right. The journey is fraught with strange omens, strange attacks, strange weapons – and in the end treachery, nicely foreshadowed. So I liked the story, though on final analysis I didn’t quite get a firm enough sense of groundedness to love it.

Locus, October 2010

Fantasy’s companion, Lightspeed, features a striking short Yoon Ha Lee story in September, “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain”, in which an assassin with a mysterious gun is approached by a potential client – but her mission and her gun are not what they once were. In its brief space the story spans great time, many universes, and we learn the assassin’s history, and the gun’s nature, both fascinating and unexpected.

Locus, December 2010

Yoon Ha Lee’s “The Winged City” (Giganotosaurus, December) is another striking and ambitious – but perhaps not quite successful – fantasy. Lee seems to try as hard as any writer to make worlds truly strange, and so with this story, about an apparently flying city, facing drought, that wages war on its neighbors for water and luxuries. This strategy seems about to fail, as one of the generals pushes for her clay man to accompany her to the next war. The sense of oddness, of dislocation, is palpable and effective, but the story qua story, in the end, slipped from my grasp. So – a worthy effort, but, for me, not a hit.

Locus, March 2011

It seems to me, thinking about Yoon Ha Lee’s increasingly impressive array of stories, that Lee's central theme is war, and that Lee treats this theme in strikingly original and varied ways. “Ghostweight” (Clarkesworld, January) is his latest war story, as striking and wrenching as any of them. Lisse is a deserter from the an interstellar Imperium’s army, and with the help of a ghost attached to her, she takes over an abandoned war kite, determined to take revenge on the people who destroyed much of her planet and killed her parents. Her cause seems just – is just – but can she truly be effective? And will her violence breed more violence, turn her into something she never wanted to be? And what of the ghost’s motivations? These are familiar questions, no doubt, but ever important ones, and well asked here, and twistily resolved, in another of Lee’s very different SFnal worlds – described with the feel of fantasy, with ghosts and origami and kites, but at core true interplanetary SF.

Locus, October 2013

Also at the August Lightspeed, Yoon Ha Lee is aggressively strange as ever in “The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars”. It concerns “the exile Niristez … in a ship of ice and iron and armageddon engines” (for me, Lee's imagery usually hovers just to the good side of overwrought). Niristez has come to “a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave” to play a game with the Warden of the tower – perhaps hoping to keep her promise to end an endless interstellar war, perhaps hoping to prolong the war. Games are central here, and cards, and strategy and tactics, and, as so often with Lee, ways of describing future war (and thus perhaps conflict in general) in new and effective ways.

Locus, February 2014

The best piece in the January Clarkesworld, however, is Yoon Ha Lee's “Wine”, one of Lee's grimmer stories, set on the planet Nasteng as it comes under attack by representatives of the wider universe, apparently interested in the secret of their “wine”. The ruling Council of Five hire mercenaries to resist the attack, and they ask a terrible price. The nature of that price, and the Council, and the wine, is the subject of the story, as learned by Loi Ruharn, a General and the lowborn lover of the one of the Councilors. Dark stuff indeed.

(Cover by Sherin Nicole)

Lee is justifiably one of the most celebrated newer writers in our field, though, even while celebrated, Lee is not as well known as deserved for a simple, common, reason: no novels. (Though I think a couple may be in the pipeline.) Indeed, Conservation of Shadows is Lee's first full-length book. (Another very creditable collection could be assembled from stories not in this one, mind you.) It's an exceptional collection, with such tremendous stories as “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” and “Ghostweight”. There's also an original novella, the longest story I think I've seen from Lee, “Iseul's Lexicon”, which I think is one of the stories of the year. Iseul is a spy for Chindalla, a nation half of which has been conquered by Yegedin, in a world where humans some centuries before freed themselves from the cruel domination of magicians called the Genial Ones. What little magic is still done is based on that of the Genial Ones, with charms written in their language. Iseul, a poet and linguist, is a natural magician of sorts, and her mission, to investigate the house of a Yegedin magician, seems a natural. When she encounters a Genial One in the house, the implication that the Yegedin have allied with a survivor of humans' old oppressors leads to an desperate race to stop the Yegedin from using this new power to conquer the rest of her country. The plot, put that way, is conventional enough, though well-handled. The power is in the telling, at times as (grimly) funny as anything I've seen from Lee, delightfully imaginative in the handling of the magic system, original, moving, realistic in its look at a middle-aged ex-poet caught up in war. Simply exceptional work.

Locus, May 2014

Yoon Ha Lee is one of the masters at merging SF and Fantasy – though to me it seems Lee often uses imagery from Fantasy to come to grips with the strangeness of the universe, and of deep time, and of intergalactic distances. “The Bonedrake's Penance” (BCS, March 2014) concerns a human girl raised by a Bonedrake, a weapon who has renounced war to curate a museum of sorts, devoted in part to the memories of past wars. As the girl grows up, she eventually comes to participate in the Bonedrake's interaction with visitors, and she must learn the reasons behind her “mother”'s devotion to absolute neutrality, even at the cost of peace.

Locus, May 2016

from the March 3 issue of BCS, Yoon Ha Lee’s “Foxfire, Foxfire” is a strong story in which the fantasy element is the main character: a fox who wants to become human – by killing 100 people, and inheriting their knowledge and characteristics. The SF part is her prospective 100th victim: the pilot of a cataphract, a huge robot being used in a battle. And the story itself finds a way to be different and moving and to invoke real sacrifice. Strong work.

Locus, August 2016

The aftermath of war – or, again, the way being a soldier changes one – also drives “Shadows Weave”, by Yoon Ha Lee. Tamalat is a warrior and Brio was an engineer who served with her. Brio has lost his shadow, perhaps as a way to escape the darkness of his fighting history, but it hasn’t turned out well, and Tamalat is acting as a shadow of sorts for him, and is trying to find a way to restore his true shadow. So they have come to a remote monastery, to learn how to sew a shadow back on … A bit of a convoluted setup, and perhaps not entirely convincing, but I liked the characters and the unexpectedly sweet ending. (“Sweet” not being a word one uses often in connection to a Yoon Ha Lee story.)

Locus, April 2017

Yoon Ha Lee’s “Extracurricular Activities”, from Tor.com in February, is perhaps more traditionally plotted, and with a more conventional tone, than much of Lee’s work. By which I mean to imply that it is perhaps less challenging – but I should say as well that it is a lot of fun. It’s set, I believe, in the same universe as his first novel, Ninefox Gambit (and as “The Chameleon’s Gloves”, mentioned below). Shuos Jedao is an undercover operative for the Heptarchate, assigned to infiltrate a space station controlled by another polity (the Gwa Reality), and to rescue the crew of a merchanter ship that had really been heptarchate spies, including Zhei Meng, a classmate of his at Shuos Academy. Jedao, posing himself as a crewman on another merchanter, executes the mission – with plenty of panache and a certain unconventional approach. It’s funny and clever, and Jedao is an engaging character, especially in his relationships – with his mother, his various commanders, flashbacks to his time at the academy and his friendship with Meng, and with a potential lover among his new crew. One of Lee’s intense and complex social and cosmological universes, presumably established in other stories, makes an effective background for a fine caper piece, with enough of a dark edge to ground it.

There’s plenty more really cool stuff in Cosmic Powers … another Kel story from Yoon Ha Lee, “The Chameleon’s Gloves”, in which an “haptic chameleon”, banished in disgrace from the Kel, is offered a chance at reinstatement if they help recover a super weapon from an apostate General;

Locus, April 2018

My favorite from the the February 1 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies was “The Starship and the Temple Cat”, by Yoon Ha Lee, which really does mix out and out fantasy with SF. (Unlike Lee’s novels, which I read as being pure SF in a milieu describable to us only in a way that seems like Fantasy.) The cat is a ghost, in its spectral sense the only survivor of a space station destroyed by a Galactic warlord’s forces. The starship is one of the fleet that destroyed the space station, and it has returned out of something like guilt after the death of its Captain. And somehow the two meet, and through poetry and music, find a way to resist the warlord’s forces.

Home, by Marilynne Robinson

Today I thought I'd repost my review, published when it first came out, of the great Marilynne Robinson's third novel, Home. Robinson is a truly remarkable writer of fiction (I find her essays less convincing, though still well-written.) All of her novels have had adoring notice, so this novel is not by any means forgotten, and it's not at all old (though it probably did sell well.) But it does deserve as much mention as it can get!

Home, by Marilynne Robinson

a review by Rich Horton

Home is Marilynne Robinson's third novel. Her first, Housekeeping, appeared in 1980, and it was to be 24 years before she produced another, Gilead (2004). She was a teacher at the University of Iowa's famous Program in Creative Writing (which has produced such famous writers as Joe Haldeman), and it would seem that she is a proponent of writing what you know. She grew up in Idaho, and Housekeeping is set in a small Idaho town that resembles her home town. And Gilead and Home are both set in a town in her current home of Iowa, and are much concerned with Protestantism, particularly Congregationalism and Presbyterianism -- and Robinson is quite notably a Congregationalist and also an admirer of John Calvin, founder of Reformed Protestantism, of which Presbyterianism is one of the most prominent contemporary US branches. [Her fourth, and to date latest, novel, Lila (2014), is also set in Gilead, just after the events of Gilead and Home.]

More to the point, those three novels are easily among my favorite three novels of the past three decades -- they are astonishing works, distinguished by quite remarkable prose (which to my ear differs quite a bit between the first novel and the much later second and third novels), and by truly acute and closely observed characterization.

Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is written from the point of view of John Ames, a Congregationalist minister in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. He has married late in life, and has a young son, and the novel is presented as a long letter to this son, written in the knowledge that the elder man's health is failing. It tells of the history of Gilead, particularly as embodied in Ames' grandfather, a vigorous abolitionist, and of Ames's life, and especially of his long friendship with fellow minister Robert Boughton, a Presbyterian. Boughton's particular trial is his "prodigal" son Jack, who at the time of Ames's writing his "letter" has come home after a 20 year absence.

Home is a direct companion to Gilead, covering exactly the same time frame, but from the point of view of the Boughton family. In particular, the book centers on three people: Robert Boughton himself, and two of his children, the just-returned Jack, and his youngest child, Glory, a pious and loyal woman of 38, who had been a teacher, but who has returned to Gilead after a terrible romantic disappointment: her long term fiance, she has finally learned, was in fact married the whole time, and was perhaps interested in Glory mainly for the money he sponged from her.

Glory is the viewpoint character. Her father is failing, her mother ten years dead, and so she must care for him. When Jack returns, she prepares to care for him as well, but he is full of a rueful pride, and insists on helping in his own way, while only slowly accepting her help, and even more slowly opening up (in a limited fashion) about the last 20 years of his life, and his particular torments. As portrayed here, Jack seems a basically good man, who throughout his life has struggled with, perhaps, a difficulty with conformity, in particular to societal norms and also to Christianity. Over the years he has clearly learned the Bible backwards and forwards, yet cannot profess belief. This perhaps is at the heart of his rift with his father. In a more worldly sense, Jack's reaction to stress seems to have been to turn to drink, and clearly for many of those 20 years away from Gilead he has been functionally alcoholic, and pushed for one reason or another to crimes sufficient that he spent some time in prison. He feels deeply that he has betrayed most of those close to him by his feelings and acts, yet he resents, I think, the obligation that that sense of betrayal seems to indicate.

Finally, Jack has apparently lived for several years with a woman named Della in St. Louis, a churchgoing woman, singer in a choir, daughter of a minister, and for much of this time he has been happy and well-behaved. But something has precipitated a rift here as well -- it's not quite clear exactly what, though we know that her father disapproves completely of the relationship.

All this is revealed in bits and pieces over several weeks of life in Gilead, Jack seeming to be improving in temperament as he repairs the family car and works on the property. Meanwhile Glory tries to make her own life in what are to her bitterly constricting circumstances. And their father is declining precipitously. Jack goes so far as to try to befriend John Ames, who is suspicious of him based on history, as well as John's wife and son.

The first two thirds or so of the novel are in a sense all careful setup, though quietly very involving throughout. Robinson builds as rigorous and intense a picture of the characters of her three central figures as I can recall in any novel, through close description, elegantly described conversation, and a window into Glory's thoughts. Then the final 100 or so pages are about as moving as any novel I've ever read. In a way very little happens -- it is remarkable how powerful such tiny events and clipped words become. There is an apparently harsh and pointed sermon by John Ames. A relapse by Jack. Bitter words from Robert Boughton -- followed by nearly complete physical collapse. A visit from Jack and Glory's older brother. A letter from Jack's lover Della. And a surprising visit -- and revelation -- to close the novel. (Though this revelation, probably guessable anyway, will be no surprise to readers of Gilead.)

It is hard for me to describe how powerful the last series of scenes are -- how Robinson arranges that words and sentences cut so deeply. It is a real example of novelistic power, in the purest naturalistic novel tradition. In a way the core of Home is no more than a long novelette -- but it would mean very little without the establishing work done in the first couple hundred pages. This is a magnificent novel. And Marilynne Robinson is a great writer -- I urge those who haven't to seek out Gilead as well, and perhaps particularly Housekeeping, which despite the virtues of the two more recent books, may remain my favorite of her works.

Birthday Review: Stories (and a book review column) of Judith Merril

Judith Merril was born Josephine Juliet Grossman on January 21, 1923; and she died in 1997. She was one of the great clutch of fans/writers born in the years around 1920. She edited fanzines in the mid-40s, published her first story, "That Only a Mother" (which ended up in the SF Hall of Fame) in 1948, and she was a fairly active writer for the next 15 years or so, publishing four novels and some 25 short stories.

But by far her most significant contributions to the field of SF were as an editor and as a critic. In 1956 she began publishing a series of Best of the Year volumes, which ran for 12 numbers total. These books got more and more eclectic as time went on. By the end she was eagerly looking for content from non-genre sources, much of it kind of minor, even silly, but the general effect was positive, encouraging readers to broaden their ideas of what SF could do. She also published a major anthology highlighting the English New Wave, England Swings SF, in 1968, and if much of the contents (not to mention the title) haven't dated well, it was a significant moment in the New Wave era. Around that time she moved to Canada, and she was a major figure promoting SF in Canada, and Canadian SF, in ways such as introducing Dr. Who episodes, and editing the first of the long running original anthology series featuring SF by Canadians, Tesseracts.

Finally, from 1965 to 1969, she was the regular book reviewer for F&SF, and I discuss one of those book reviews below. I also discuss a few of her stories, and one novel -- alas, as with many of these reviews of work by older writers, my rather random selection process means that much of what I cover was among her weaker work.

Astounding, June 1948

Judith Merril's "That Only a Mother", about a woman who doesn't accept that her new child is severely mutated due to atomic radiation, was even scarier on rereading than when I first read it, though I don't really buy the premise, in fact, I reject it out of hand. Fathers love "disabled" children as well!

Future, March 1951

One thing I do with these old magazines is check the letter column for letters from writers -- either current as of that time, or fans who would later become pros. This issue had an interesting letter from Judith Merril, signed Judith Merril Pohl. Merril was complaining about Lowndes's review of one of her books in a earlier issue. Lowndes' reply was rather testy. That didn't stop him from printing a story by her in this very issue, though! -- "Woman's Work is Never Done!", a terrible, and quite sexist, short-short about a nagging mother complaining about her daughter messing up a shopping trip.

Galaxy, June 1951

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell)

Finally, "Mars Child" is the first of two novels that Cyril Kornbluth and Judith Merril wrote together. The other is Gunner Cade, serialized in Astounding in 1952. "Mars Child" was published in book form as Outpost Mars in 1952, and later as Sin in Space in 1961. That last reprint was by Galaxy/Beacon, which published a number of mildly racy SF books (such as Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet, and Laurence Janifer and Randall Garrett's Pagan Passions) -- I assume that possibly "Mars Child"/Outpost Mars was revised to add some additional titillation for this later publication. The two novels, along with Merril's first solo novel, Shadow on the Hearth, were reprinted in an omnibus by NESFA Press, Space Out!, in 2008. (Merril published only one other novel, The Tomorrow People (1961), and in all honesty I would have to say that the fact that her excellent reputation in the field rests mostly on her editing and criticism is quite fair -- she wrote a few decent stories, a couple of which are very good indeed. [I should note again that I have not read all of Merril's work, and probably not her best work: Joachim Boaz, for example, recommends "Dead Center" (which I read long ago, age 15 or so, but don't remember), "The Shrine of Temptation", and three linked stories about a generation ship, "Survival Ship", "Wish Upon a Star", and "The Lonely".])

(Cover by Robert Stanley)

I've never read Outpost Mars (or "Mars Child") before, but I went ahead and read this second part of the serial. It's fairly standard Mars colony stuff -- there is a struggling series of colony cities on Mars, still highly dependent on Earth. Most cities are supported by industrial concerns and are in essence company cities. One city, Sun Lake, is a cooperative, focused on scientific research, especially on trying to adapt to Mars -- to make it possible to live on Mars without depending on supplies from Earth. This segment concerns an obviously trumped-up charge of stealing the addictive drug marcaine that might destroy Sun Lake, as well as the visit of a crusading journalist to Mars, and also the birth of a child on Mars who might actually survive. (Previous children have all failed to thrive.) It's really typical stuff, with politics perhaps a bit to the left of the usual ... I'm tempted to read the whole thing (actually I'm more tempted to read Sin in Space) ... but I doubt it'll be anything special.

Space Science Fiction, November 1952

Judith Merril's "Hero's Way" was a bit silly, I thought. (Should I also confess that I find most of her fiction pretty weak, and that considered as a writer (as opposed to editor or critic) I think her rather overrated?) It's about space explorers, and how being a hero might not be all it seems to be. Evidence in the story? Pretty thin. I did note that apparently Venus was explored decades before the Moon, which I find just that little bit unlikely.

The Petrified Planet (1952)

The Petrified Planet was a Twayne Triplet -- a book featuring three different stories based on the same science fictional concept. Judith Merril contributed one of her best stories to the book, "Daughters of Earth". I think this story -- an account of six generations of women central to the human colonization of extraterrestrial planets -- has been underrated from the very start. In part this may be because it was first published in an anthology that, while somewhat famous, didn't seem to sell well; and was never reprinted until Merril's 1968 collection also called Daughters of Earth. Also, it's fair to say that a significant subplot involving communication with silicon-based aliens stretched my sense of plausibility a bit (though I think this subplot may have been in part aimed at satisfying the theme of the anthology.) But the character stuff, the portrayal of the women, really works. 

Venture, March 1957

The first thing I thought when reading Rose Sharon’s “The Lady Was a Tramp” was, gee, “Rose Sharon” sure seems like a pseudonym! And sure enough it is – “Rose Sharon” was Judith Merril. I’m not sure why she used a pseudonym for this story – she collected it only three years later under her own name. According to the ISFDB, it’s the only time she used a pseudonym for a solo work. (Of course, she and Cyril Kornbluth published two novels (“Mars Child” aka Outpost Mars aka Sin in Space; and Gunner Cade) under the rather transparent pseudonym “Cyril Judd”.)

Anyway, “The Lady Was a Tramp” is about a talented graduate of the Space Academy, an IBMan (a curious term to our ears, apparently a computer programmer for the navigation system of the ship), named Terry Carnahan, who has been assigned, not to a gleaming new Space Navy Transport, but to a creaky “tramp steamer” sort of ship, the Lady Jane. He is disgusted by this, and even more disgusted to learn that of the crew of five one is a woman, the Medical Officer, who seems to freely offer her body to everyone on the ship. It turns out (not surprisingly) that this is part of her duty as Medical Officer – to keep the men on the ship psychologically in good shape. A horribly sexist idea, to my mind. Terry must either come to terms with this idea, or flush out of the service … Obviously, one thing going on here is conflating Terry’s feelings (and those of all the crewmen) for the ship (called a lady, obviously) with the Medical Officer. And both are, I guess, tramps. More sexism, I think! Maybe I missed something, maybe Merril was being satirical, but this story doesn’t work for me.

Galaxy, August 1961

And finally there is Judith Merril's "The Deep Down Dragon". A woman and her husband each replay the other's reaction to a virtual sequence in which the woman is menaced by a fierce alien beast on what seems to be Mars. Each comes off rather well -- and we learn the rationale behind it all. Not a bad story. (I note that I am often struck, in stories from the '60s and earlier, how women writers as much as men were fairly reflexively sexist.)

F&SF, January 1966

And there is a book review column by Judith Merril. She writes from London, in September of 1965, and her subject is how much better things are in England: the drinking, people's looks, the rock and roll, and the SF -- the New Wave SF (though Merril does not here use that term). She focuses on three major fairly young writers: J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, and John Brunner. Brunner is, she notes, the most "conservative in terms of literary technique". Aldiss she calls the most versatile, and Ballard "unique". I'd say she was spot on all down the line. She also predicts that had Ballard been in the US he would have left the SF field "before he entered it" -- "not one in ten of his early stories would have sold in the States". She doesn't spend much time on specific books, though she does briefly touch on Brunner's Telepathist (aka The Whole Man), Aldiss's Greybeard, and Ballard's The Drought (aka The Burning World). Merril also makes the comment I noted in my look at the December Galaxy, about Brunner: "he might have become a ... Silverberg." As I noted then, and as I see, as Silverberg said himself in his wonderful eulogy for Brunner, in fact Silverberg and Brunner did have careers of quite similar shape -- Merril simply missed that Silverberg was growing just as Brunner was, and at the same time.

Birthday Review: Stories (and a novel) by William Browning Spencer

William Browning Spencer had his 74th birthday on January 16. Slightly belatedly, then, here's a review of a few of his short stories, including a collection, plus a brief review of his novel Resume with Monsters. Spencer is a really cool writer -- alas, I've seen nothing for several years now. I've compared him to the likes of Brad Denton, Jonathan Lethem, Don Webb, and Jonathan Carroll. Comparisons can be invidious -- Spencer is his own inimitable writer -- but perhaps those writers define the sort of weird and utterly original space Spencer inhabits.

Review of F&SF, June 2000

This issue's third short story is one of the brilliant ones: "The Foster Child", by *William Browning Spencer.  (His novels Resume With Monsters and Zod Wallop are pretty darned brilliant as well.)  This is a story of a young girl who speaks only in quotes from poems, poems which she can never have encountered.  Does she somehow have direct access to the Muse, the source of poetic inspiration?  Spencer doesn't back off from his concept, but takes it to a striking conclusion.  Neat stuff.

Locus, May 2002

"The Essayist in the Wilderness", by William Browning Spencer, is a nicely offbeat story about a lottery winner who decides to become a nature writer, only to be betrayed by his lack of knowledge of such things as crayfish.

Locus, March 2007

William Browning Spencer returns with “Stone and the Librarian” (F&SF, February), a decidedly odd piece combining ingredients from Marcel Proust and Robert E. Howard, not to mention Hemingway and Burroughs.

Review of Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2 (Locus, May 2011)

Also at some level horror -- almost Lovecraftian – is William Browning Spencer’s “The Dappled Thing”, which opens in an almost Steampunk mode, with an airship crossing form England to Brazil to try to rescue a proper English girl from her seducer, but which turns darker when the girl is found near a pool feared by all the local people – a pool containing the title creature. The conclusion is strongly dark in contrast to an at times almost jaunty earlier story.

Review of The Return of Count Electric

The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories  is the first story collection from the author of such fine novels as Zod Wallop and Resume with Monsters, William Browning Spencer.  It dates to 1993 or so, though my copy is a nicely presented 1998 paperback from White Wolf's Borealis imprint.  Spencer is an off-beat writer who might be compared to Jonathan Carroll or Bradley Denton.  His stories are usually set in the present day, and feature fairly ordinary people confronted with rather weird happenings -- for example,  Resume with Monsters  concerns a failed novelist and temp who must resist the incursion of Lovecraftian monsters into our world.  The off-beat elements in this collection are usually not even fantastical -- suddenly homicidal wives, serial killers, even entomologists fighting in the backwoods of Central America may be strange and horrific, but they aren't fantasy.  Most of the stories here are quite short, and kind of humourous while also disquieting. For instance, "A Child's Christmas in Florida" concerns a very poor family whose kids think Christmas involves picking a nice family from whom to steal all their presents.  "Best Man" concerns a man's long time friend who is always screwing things up, which the man's wife finds very irritating.  The "best man" offers an extreme way of redeeming himself to the wife -- with unfortunate results.  And "Looking Out for Eleanor", the story which most directly reminded me of Brad Denton (in  Blackburn  mode), follows a loser who hooks up with a simple-minded but very beautiful woman, and becomes a serial killer in order to protect her from supposed threats to her virtue.  A straight-laced social services representative follows them from Texas to Florida, for similar reasons.  The main attraction of these stories is the strange central characters, who somehow come off as human despite being quite around the bend. 

Review of Resume With Monsters

When last I read a William Browning Spencer novel I compared him to Jonathan Carroll and Jonathan Lethem.  Later I added Brad Denton to the list.  Having read, finally, Spencer's  Resume with Monsters , and perhaps more importantly, two Don Webb novels, I am prepared to say that Spencer also has points of resemblance with Don Webb.  Well, one thing's obvious: they write weird quasi-SF novels set in Austin, TX.  But, really, reading  Resume with Monsters  I did think quite often of, especially,  Essential Saltes by Webb.  Not to the denigration of either book, mind you.   Resume  is about a failed novelist working in a series of dead-end temp jobs, who discovers that the Old Ones from Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos are using the horrible corporation he works with as points of entry to try to take over the Earth.  This discovery, and his reaction to it, cost our protagonist, Philip Kenan, his girlfriend. She runs off to Austin, and he follows her, basically stalking her.  But his luck changes a bit, as his novel finally gets published, and earns him one devoted fan, and as he meets a skeptical retired psychologist.  But his old girlfriend is still in the grip of an evil corporation, and Philip must decide whether he can ignore his knowledge about the Old Ones and live sanely like his psychologist wants him to, or whether he will risk everything to save a woman who is engaged to someone else and who he no longer loves anyway.  And will she thank him for that?  This is quite a good novel, often very funny, often moving, quite sharp about the depression caused by a broken relationship, and bitterly satirical about the way of corporations.   Definitely worth reading.

Old Children's Book: Mrs. Pickerell Goes to the Arctic. by Ellen MacGregor

Old Children's Book: Mrs. Pickerell Goes to the Arctic, by Ellen MacGregor

a review by Rich Horton

(Cover by Paul Galdone)

I thought it time to return to a subtheme of this blog -- old children's books. Well, I thought that when I found a copy of Miss Pickerell Goes to the Arctic for 50 cents (the same price it sold for from Scholastic in the 1970s!) at an estate sale last weekend. I remembered Miss Pickerell as a the heroine of a series of books that some people used to cite as early science fiction they read when they were kids. (Particularly, I suppose, the first in the series, Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars, from 1951.) I never encountered these books as a child, so I thought a look would be interesting.

Ellen MacGregor was born in 1906 in Baltimore. She seems to have lived a peripatetic life -- she got her degree in Library Science from the University of Washington in Seattle, and worked as a librarian in Hawaii, in Chicago, and in Florida among other places. She began writing in the 1940s, and her first children's book was published in 1947. Miss Pickerell first appeared in a short story in 1950, and the story was expanded into Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars. Two further Miss Pickerell books appeared before she died, only 47, in 1954. She had completed the fourth Miss Pickerell book, the one at hand, Miss Pickerell Goes to the Arctic, and that came out the same year. (These books were copiously illustrated by Paul Galdone, an artisit I remember very well from my childhood.) Several further Miss Pickerell books were written by Dora Pantell, and credited to Pantell and MacGregor for a while, though as far as I can tell, it's unlikely that Pantell was working from any material MacGregor left behind.

The Miss Pickerell books were noted at the time for their effort to emphasize accurate science, even when she was traveling to Mars. I have to say that this entry does seem mostly accurate, at least as of 1954. The pedagogic side of MacGregor's writing is quite noticeable, with fairly frequent stops to somewhat awkwardly emphasize (usually to Miss Pickerell) some scientific fact.

Miss Pickerell is a middle aged spinster, living on a farm in Square Toe City with her beloved cow and also with her adult niece and nephew, Dwight and Rosemary. The action in this book begins with Miss Pickerell at a soda fountain, discussing the encyclopedia Miss Pickerell has lent to the soda jerk, Mr. Esticott, who is also a train conductor. This opens the opportunity for some information about the migration habits of the arctic tern to be given to the reader ... and for Mr. Esticott to mention his cousin Foster, a retired Arctic bush pilot.

Miss Pickerell is looking for a present for her cow, and one thing leads to another, as she learns that Foster would desperately love to fly to the Arctic to help with a research expedition, while she also meets a salesman trying to market his new snowmobile/mobile home. So Miss Pickerell agrees to buy the mobile home for her cow ... but then there's an emergency on the Arctic expedition, and somehow Foster ends up flying his plane up there with the snowmobile in the back, accompanied by Miss Pickerell and the salesman (who is also an engineer and a pilot.)

The action concerns terrible weather in the Arctic, a crash landing, lack of fuel for the snowmobile, and a desperate mission to get fuel and then get to the original expedition to rescue them. Miss Pickerell's ends up on an ice island, and her beloved umbrella comes in handy. (Given away on the cover.) All in all there's not a ton of tension, and things all seem a bit implausible, but I can see that I might have liked this as a kid. Miss Pickerell is a reasonably fun character, anyway.