Review: Selected Short Fiction of F. L. Wallace

Selected Short Fiction of F. L. Wallace

a review by Rich Horton

Recently I reviewed F. L. Wallace's only novel, Address: Centauri, and I rather panned it. But as I noted, his short fiction is remembered somewhat fondly. He had two Hugo finalists in 1956, "The Accidental Self" and "End as a World", and such other stories as "Big Ancestor", "Delay in Transit", and "Student Body" were somewhat prominently anthologized. So I vowed to read through a set of his stories, and review them, in the hope of giving him a fairer evaluation.

Floyd L. Wallace (1915-2004) published a couple of dozen SF stories, and some crime fiction, between 1951 and 1961; and the one novel. His primary career was as a mechanical engineer. His main market was Galaxy under H. L. Gold, and it's notable that his career fairly closely parallels Gold's editorial reign, though he did sell to other magazines such as F&SF, Fantastic Universe, and Astounding. 

The stories I read are "Delay in Transit" (Galaxy, September 1952); "Student Body" (Galaxy, March 1953), "Tangle Hold" (Galaxy, June 1953); "The Impossible Voyage Home" (Galaxy, August 1954), "Big Ancestor" (Galaxy, November 1954), "End as a World" (Galaxy, September 1955); "The Assistant Self" (Fantastic Universe, March 1956); "Mezzerow Loves Company" (Galaxy, June 1956); and "Second Landing" (Amazing, January 1960). I also looked through "Accidental Flight" (Galaxy, April 1952), which is the first part of his one novel. I think "Accidental Flight" works considerably better by itself than in its expansion -- Wallace padded out the novella somewhat, and made some changes to fit into his plans for the second half of the book; and almost all of those changes were for the worse.

"Delay in Transit" is, with "Big Ancestor", his best-remembered story. The protagonist is named Cassal. He's working for a company that is trying to develop instantaneous radio, which will great improve Galactic travel and communications. Cassal has an implanted sort of AI assistant called Dimanche (French for "Sunday", not sure if that means anything for the story.) He's stuck on a remote planet, urgently needing to get to an even more remote planet, but star travel is uncertain. And things get worse when he's attacked, and his ticket is stolen. Cassal ends up visiting the Travelers' Aid Bureau for help, but not much is forthcoming -- though he does find the woman he talks to extremely intriguing. Things progress, and it's clear that there are forces that are more interest in the technology behind Dimanche than in instantaneous communication, and they don't care much how that affects Cassal. The story is fast paced, and implausible (a word I'll use a lot discussing Wallace's work,) as Cassal is forced to realize he has to take control of his own life ... I never quite believed any of it, but it was pretty entertaining, if full of wish-fulfillment.

"Student Body" is part of a small but significant SF subgenre -- dangerous planets. Colonists have landed on a new planet, that seems ideal. But very quickly they notice that something -- something hard to find -- is eating almost anything they leave accessible -- clothes, the crops they are trying to grow, etc. They do catch some of the culprits, but every attempt at exterminating or defending against the pests results in a new pest appearing almost immediately. They also notice a very curious part of the evolutionary history of the planet -- a certain ecological niche has been filled by a single unchanging creature for millions of years. The explanation is scientifically implausible, to say the least, but it's acceptable as a thought experiment. And the consequences are very scary indeed -- and aren't ducked. It's not my favorite Wallace story, but it might be the most rigorously developed.

"Tangle Hold" is about a criminal on Venus named Jadiver, whose specialty is altering people's faces, so that they can commit crimes unrecognized. As the story opens, he's been seriously injured by a malfunctioning autobath, and wakes up in a hospital, with a new skin. He proceeds to take a lucrative commission from a criminal gang, changing the faces of several people so they can visit a high society party and steal from the guests -- but it all goes wrong, and as a result, Jadiver is wanted by both the gang, and the police. He soon realizes that the police have used his new skin to implant a sort of transmitter in him that parallels his nervous system. For complicated reasons, his only way out is escape, and Earth, Mars, and Venus aren't options. The only thing in his favor is the new tech inside him -- and a robot which is intrigued by the possibilities of this tech. The whole thing is a bit too complicated to explain here, involving the robots, and the woman who implanted his new parallel nervous system, and certain unique possibilities that offers. It's another highly implausible but sometimes pretty fun story, though, I think, not really one of Wallace's better efforts.

"The Impossible Voyage Home" is a rather sentimental piece about an elderly couple on Mars who want to travel to Earth to see their new grandchild. The problem is that it's impossible for humans to travel in space for more than about 2 years total, because of the accumulated radiation effects. Combined with the travel time between planets, that's a pretty strict limit. The old couple don't care, and in the end steal a spaceship ... Their efforts are intertwined with a researcher trying to get around the travel time limit. The solution is kind of obvious -- the radiation effects are no good for young people who want children and don't want to die young -- but the old couple demonstrate that they can fly the spaceship, and as they are not going to have more children ... you see where that's going. All that is pretty good science for an F. L. Wallace story, though he throws in some silly stuff about Martian canalberries and a compulsion to drive the spaceships into the sun. Anyway -- minor work, really. 

"Big Ancestor" is one of Wallace's most famous stories. An alien spaceship is hosting a spectrum of humans, of various subspecies. Humans have spread throughout the Galaxy, evolving as they go. They have a story about their descent from a "big ancestor" -- a noble past. And now they have found a planet with potential answers. The buildings are huge and noble. But there is no trace of the people who built them. Perhaps this is the home of the "big ancestor". And, after much work, they find an account of why the planet is deserted, and they manage to translate it ... It's a cunning story, effectively portraying the various subspecies of humans on this ship and their rivalry, and setting them up for the shocking reveal at the end. It does work, though as often with Wallace the carefully constructed background is easy to see. Still, nice work, and a solid sort of anti-Campbellian effort. 

"End as a World", with the very different "Big Ancestor", is perhaps my favorite of Wallace's stories. It's the shortest one I've read, a brief piece following a few teenaged friends on the day in which "the world will end". Everybody knows this. But life goes on, pretty much as normal. The boys speculate what it will be like -- will it be bright? They watch TVs showing people all over the world waiting for the big event. They try to do the things they normally do -- but in the end, they wait and watch. And -- well, I don't want to give it away, but the story doesn't go where you expect. I think some readers will be annoyed, but -- hey, it pushed the right buttons for me. 

"The Assistant Self" is a bit of a wild ride, with absurd science, yet again. But if you are read to believe the science, it's pretty fun. Hal Talbot is a magically super empathic person -- and for that reason, he can't keep a job, because he always threatens his boss's position by knowing too well what is wanted, due to his empathy. After his latest lost job, another executive insists on hiring him -- because he knows this empathy is what he needs, to figure out who has been sabotaging their big project. (Which happens to involve making the "perfect rocket", which will enable NAFAL (nearly as fast as light -- a Le Guin coinage) travel to the stars. There's so much wrong with this concept I don't want to discuss it, but interestingly it does involve research into high temperature resistant nozzles, which actually IS a critical feature of advanced rocket motors. (Don't ask me how I know ...) This suggests to me what sort of mechanical engineer Wallace might have been.)

Anyway, just has he's being hired, a bomb of sorts is thrown into his new boss's office. The boss is killed, but Talbot survives. And, because of his super empathy -- he has absorbed the boss's identity nearly completely. So people assume the survivor is the boss, not Talbot. There follows some pages of intrigue, as well as a romance with the boss's secretary, despite that the boss was actually engaged to the CEO's daughter ... and a climax involving a confrontation with the actual villain (whose motives are at least interesting) and yet another wholly implausible empathic reaction.

This is a case of a story which makes almost no sense if you think about it, but which is really pretty fun and even, to an extent, exploring interesting ideas. I liked it, to be honest.

"Mezzerow Loves Company" is an overlong, overcomplicated, story about a man and his son coming to Earth to try to get the name of their planet changed. They are descendants of the discoverer of their planet, which was supposed to be named after their family, Mezzerow. Instead, it's listed as Messy Row, and they are convinced that is discouraging immigration. As they navigate the confusing and everchanging Earth looking for the right agency, they are kidnapped by women who want to marry them. It seems that women are in oversupply on Earth. They manage insted to get one woman and her sister to help them -- and finally find the agency they need. Only to, predictably, find that their planet is now called Misery. Bright side -- the women are fascinated by the prospect of an underpopulated planet where they can surely find a husband, and they have lots of friends ... OK, this one really didn't work for me, and the queasy sexism didn't help.

Finally, "Second Landing" is the one of Wallace's last stories. A couple of aliens come by Earth and realize it's in big trouble -- the warring factions are about to destroy themselves with nuclear war. And the aliens have to be somewhere else soon. But they decide to make one attempt to help the huamns, because humans look a lot them them, except for one feature ... And they are there at Christmas time. I won't tell what feature the aliens have that apparently helps them get their message across, but it's a pretty trite story.

So -- a quick look at ten of F. L. Wallace's stories. In then end, I'll say that he was often a pretty engaging storyteller. He had no real interest in accurate science. And he was a pedestrian writer of prose. He also pretty overtly constructed his scenarios to make a point. But at his best, he was fun to read. I might compare him to J. T. McIntosh in some ways, though McIntosh was much more prolific and a better novelist. Does Wallace need a major rediscovery? No. But he's a writer you might enjoy if you can ignore the artificiality, the absurd science, and the '50s-era sexism. 

I read most of these stories at Project Gutenberg. I missed any of his stories from F&SF or Astounding -- maybe I'll look them up to see if Campbell or Mills as editors made a difference. 

Review: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns

Review: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns

by Rich Horton

Barbara Comyns (1907-1992) was born in England, her father a wealthy brewer, maiden name Barbara Irene Veronica Bayley. She married John Pemberton in 1931, and the couple associated with the artistic set -- both were artists -- and had two children, but the marriage quickly collapsed. Barbara had another relationship with Arthur Price, but by the beginning of World War II that was over, and she was poor enough to take a position as a cook. She married Richard Strettell Comyns Carr in 1945, so that by this time her name might have been rendered "Barbara Irene Veronica Bayley [Pemberton] {Price} Comyns Carr" -- no surprise, then, that she chose Barbara Comyns as the name under which her works were published. She had earlier written some fictionalized accounts of her rural childhood, and these were published in a magazine, and soon her first two novels were accepted -- a novelization of her childhood stories (Sisters by the River) and then Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, which may still be her best known novel. She was acquainted with both Kim Philby and Graham Greene due to Richard Comyns Carr's wartime position. Greene, then, helped her writing get published, while the traitor Philby's association with Richard Comyns Carr caused her and her husband to have to move to Spain after Philby fled to the USSR (undoubtedly an unfair guilt by association effect on Richard Comyns Carr.) 

Comyns ended up publishing 11 books. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was her third novel, first published in 1954. She published regularly through 1967, but her next book was rejected. She stopped writing until the mid-80s, then published three more novels (including a revised version of the rejected book and another novel written much earlier.) She died in 1992.

My edition of Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was published in 2010 by Dorothy, a publishing project. Dorothy is based in St. Louis, only a few miles from my house. They are the project of a married couple, Martin Riker and Danielle Dutton, who are professors at Washington University. They began in 2010, in Urbana, IL -- so presumably they were then at the University of Illinois. As I went to Illinois, and live in St. Louis, and have a daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren in Urbana, I am naturally well-disposed to them. Their focus is feminist fiction, much of it in translation, some reprints and some new. They had previously worked for the Dalkey Archive, another absolutely fantastic small press with a focus on reprinting great old fiction.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is set in a village in Warwickshire, in 1911, though the book claims, oddly, that the time is "Summer about 70 years ago" -- obviously, it was about 40 years prior to the time of writing, not 70. The village, Comyns claimed, was directly based on her childhood home, Bidford-on-Avon, though the key event in the novel is based on a tragedy that happened in France in 1951.

The book opens with ducks swimming though the drawing room windows of the house where Ebin Willoweed lives, with his three children, his mother, and their servants -- two sisters named Norah and Eunice, and Old Ives, who is a sort of gardener. There has been a flood in the village. All this is described in the most deadpan terms, including all the drowned animals. And we gain a bit of a view of the characters: Ebin is a gossip columnist who was fired after his paper was sued for libel. His oldest daughter, Emma, is 17 and pretty and lonely. His younger children are Dennis and Hattie, and he's convinced that Hattie is the illegitimate daughter of his (now dead) wife and a black man, due to her dark complexion. Ebin is lazy and under the domination of his rather awful mother, who is prone to constantly revise her will. Norah is in love with a local man, Mr. Fig, who lives with his mother, while Eunice is sleeping with a married man in the village. Old Ives and Grandmother Willoweed are each obsessed with outliving the other. Other villagers are important too -- the baker and his promiscuous wife, Dr. Hatt and his sickly wife, the doctor's young assistant. 

It seems at first a comic look at a set of eccentrics -- and in many ways it remains that throughout the novel. We see Ebin and the children boating in the river, Old Ives making his wreaths for the dead, Grandmother Willoweed hosting her yearly "Whist Drive", at which the primary rule is that Grandmother must always win; Grandmother refusing to set foot on any land she does not own, Ebin's desultory tutoring of the children and his sexual misadventures, and so on. But amidst this comic stuff a horrible tragedy intrudes -- the baker tries a new recipe, and unfortunately the grain he uses in contaminated with ergot. And so many of the characters get horribly sick, and many die -- and the rest are changed. Ebin is able to write again, selling accounts of the plague to his old newspaper. Norah and Eunice both see significant developments in their love lives, as does Emma. Grandmother Willoweed changes her will a couple more times. Old Ives has a religious conversion. Some of this is still funny, and some utterly tragic -- and the tragedy is not dodged or laughed at, but life goes on and the comic tone is maintained when appropriate.

It's an involving novel, a curiously affecting novel. The people are variously awful, nice, and delightfully weird; and their fates are not distributed according to their virtue. It just seems like life -- life from a slant perspective, for sure, but real life. It's very well written. A wonderful work by a really original writer.

Review: Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen

Review: Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen

by Rich Horton

I have been a fan of Rivka Galchen's writing since I read her story "The Region of Unlikeness" in the New Yorker in 2008 (and I reprinted it in my Best of the Year Anthology.) I very much liked her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, from the same year. She continues to write regularly for the New Yorker (and many other magazines.) She was born in Canada, grew up mostly in Oklahoma, and now splits her time between Montreal and New York.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is her second adult novel, from 2021. (She has also published a story collection, and a novel for younger readers, Rat Rule 79.) I bought the book in Traverse City shortly after it was published, but only now have I gotten around to it. And indeed I read much of it via the audiobook, narrated by Natasha Soudek.

This is an historical novel, about a famous person, or perhaps more properly, about the less famous mother of a famous person. And I will confess that I did not for a while realize this, as I was listening to the novel, and the narrator rendered the main character's name as Frau Kepla, to my ears; while her (famous) son was called Hans. (Natasha Soudek throughout renders the names in what seems proper German pronunciation to me.) But eventually I realized that the main character's name is Katharina Kepler, and her son's first name is Johannes, and he is called by everyone "the astrologer", and it all clicked. I don't actually think it's necessary for the enjoyment of the book to know this, though I did take the opportunity to read more about the real history after reading the book, and to be sure Galchen's acknowledgements discuss the novel's origins, and credit many of the books she used for research.

The action of the novel takes place largely between 1615 and 1621, with some flashbacks and with an epilog set some years later. It is set mostly in Leonberg, part of present day Germany, near Stuttgart. It is presented as the account of Katharina Kepler in defense of accusations against her of witchcraft, as told to her neighbor Simon Satler. And we also get interjections from Simon, telling some of the story from his own point of view, as well as a number of reproduced depositions from her accusers (and a couple of defenders.) (I should note that the depositions themselves are fictional, though they do represent versions of actual accusations made against Frau Kepler.) 

Katharina's voice, as imagined by Galchen, is a delight. She is cranky and forthright. She is very confiding to Simon, and very honest about her life. She calls her enemies names like "the Werewolf", "the Cabbage" and "the False Unicorn." She is the very image of a certain kind of grandmother, very fond of her grandchildren but sometimes impatient with her children and their spouses. Besides her grandchildren she loves her cow Chamomile, and not much else. And she is facing a trial for witchcraft. (This period in history -- primarily in Europe but also, as we know, in America -- there was a widespread hysteria about witches, and tens of thousands of people, almost all women, were murdered as a result. And the local magistrate, Lutherus Einhorn (the "False Unicorn" in this novel), prosecuted 15 women and executed 8.) Katharina had attracted the animus of a local woman, Einhorn's cousin, who accused her of causing her illness. 

Over the course of the novel we hear of Frau Kepler's attempts to defend herself, in which she makes a couple of (potentially literally fatal) mistakes -- suing Einhorn for slander, and later trying to bribe him. And we learn about her family -- her feckless and abusive husband, who left her to join the Army and presumably died; her sons Hans and Christoph, her late son Heinrich, and her daughter Greta. We see a lot about life in her village, and her role as an herbalist (which obviously increased her vulnerability to accusation.) And the slow procession of the charges against her continues, with a whole series of mostly obviously absurd stories being told. Her family, and Simon, defend her, and Hans eventually prepares an extensive refutation of all the charges; but the corrupt nature of justice in that milieu stands against her -- particularly the way in which numerous people stand to gain financially by her imprisonment and even by her death.

The tone of the novel is successfully odd. Katharina's voice and attitude lend a sort of darkly comic cast to things, but the weight of the injustice counteracts this. In addition, there is overall a strikingly deadpan depiction of what to modern eyes is a great deal of tragedy -- children dying young, widespread illness, other natural disasters such as a flood, religious conflicts, war (the Thirty Years War began in 1618), political corruption. I won't say how things end -- though a quick Google search will answer any such questions! Ultimately, the novel succeeds on several fronts -- it's a moving tale of one woman's struggle; it's an excellent character portrayal of, in particular, both Katharina and Simon; it's an effective portrayal of everyday life in the 17th Century; and it's a powerful by implication condemnation of the treatment of women in a patriarchal society.

Double Novel Review: Address: Centauri, by F. L. Wallace/If These Be Gods, by Algis Budrys

Double Novel Review: Address: Centauri, by F. L. Wallace/If These Be Gods, by Algis Budrys

by Rich Horton

I have a particular interest in Ace Doubles. As a result, I also take an interest in other Double Books, so plan to review at least one example of, for instance, the Belmont Double series (already done), and the Tor Double series (I have some, need to review them) and so on. This book is a new example of the concept. It's an Armchair Fiction double book -- two "novels" published together, with a cover format explicitly modeled on that of Ace Doubles from the 1950s, though the trim size is that of a smallish trade paperback. It's not quite tête-bêche -- instead of the novels published so that each is upside down relative to the other, there are arranged consecutively, but the front and back cover are each a cover for one of the two "novels". (I use "novel" in quotes because, as with Ace Doubles, many of the stories included are not full-length novels. For example, in this book, the F. L. Wallace novel is a true novel, at a bit over 80,000 words, but the Algis Budrys story is a long novelette of some 16,000 words.)

Armchair Fiction itself is an interesting project. The proprietor is Gregory J. Luce, and over the past decade and more he has reprinted a great many obscure SF stories from, mostly, the 1950s and 1960s. Some are in this Double format, some are collections, some are novels published alone. His strategy is to find works that are out of copyright, and reprint them (usually with covers taken from the original magazine or book publication.) Some of his works are still in copyright, and in these cases (as with a number of works by Robert Silverberg) he has negotiated reprint rights with the author. As such he is doing a service, in many cases bringing back to print books otherwise unavailable or only available used at exorbitant prices.

The publication process appears to involve OCR, and I admit I would have preferred more attention paid to correction of OCR errors, and I'll say that my usual strategy in digging up old stories is to find the magazines or books in which stories I want to see first appeared -- but sometimes that's hard. In this case, what I really wanted was the Algis Budrys story, which had never been reprinted until this book. The issue of Amazing in which it first appeared was a special UFO issue, complete with an essay by famous UFO n/u/t witness Kenneth Arnold, and presumably for that reason, copies of it are quite expensive. 

OK, on to the stories themselves. I'll begin with the Budrys, because Budrys is a favorite writer of mine, and because his story is rather better than F. L. Wallace's novel. As I noted, "If These be Gods" first appeared in a Special Flying Saucer Issue of Amazing Stories, for October 1957.It was the cover story, and that cover, by Ed Valigursky, is reproduced (flipped left-to-right) on this book. The story was bylined "Gordon Jaylyn". This was the only time Budrys used this name (he also had some regular pseudonyms, such as "John A. Sentry", "Ivan Janvier", and "William Scarff".)

It's a flying saucer story, and I suspect Budrys wrote it for this issue at the behest of editor Paul Fairman. But -- it's OK. It's not great, and the ending is a bit of a muddle, but it's professionally done and it pulled me in. It's set in more or less the present time of the story's appearance, on an airliner heading from New York to Los Angeles. There have been a few recent airplane crashes, so the plane is all but empty: four crewmembers and five passengers. There are only two women -- the flight attendant and an elderly lady. The passengers include an actor, a salesman with a dark secret, the older woman, a journalist, and a UFO nut, who wrote a book claiming he met aliens from Venus who preached universal love. 

There is an alert of some fast moving airborne entities over Indiana, but the pilot doesn't take it seriously -- there are false alarms all the time. But this isn't a false alarm -- these are actual flying saucers, and, purely by accident, they hit the plane. And the aliens -- who turn out to be humans, to all appearances -- feel obliged to rescue everyone on the plane. Which will be a big headache for them ... Anyway, that's the setup, and it really reads like the setup to something longer. But the ending is fiercely rushed, as if Budrys checked his word count realized Fairman told him 16,000 words and he just hit 15,000 ... The message suggested is kind of interesting, really, but it probably did need another 10,000 words or so to make it work. And, I imagine, Budrys wasn't really that interested.

Now to the novel. Floyd L. Wallace (1915-2004) was a mechanical engineer who had a writing career of about a decade -- essentially the 1950s -- writing both SF and mysteries. Some of his short fiction, most notably "Delay in Transit", "The Accidental Self", and "Big Ancestor", achieved good notice. But he stopped publishing after 1961. Address: Centauri is his only novel. It was published in 1955 by Gnome Press, and reprinted as a Galaxy Science Fiction Novel in 1958. Galaxy was Wallace's primary market, and I imagine H. L. Gold's departure from the field may have contributed to Wallace leaving as well, though it should be said his last half dozen or so stories went to a variety of other markets. The cover for this Armchair edition is a reproduction of the rather terrible Galaxy Science Fiction Novel cover, by Wallace Wood. They'd have done much better to reproduce Ed Emshwiller's cover to the Gnome Press edition, and better still, to use the Richard Powers cover of the issue of Galaxy in which the first part of the novel appeared. 

Address: Centauri is an expansion of the novella "Accidental Flight" (Galaxy, April 1952.) The novel involves both some padding to the novella, and a lot of additional action after the end of the original story. I'll say up front that it's a painful mess. The science is comically awful. The characters are implausible, and the women are both important and portrayed in weirdly sexist ways. The action in general doesn't make much sense. The prose is not terribly good. But there are some wild ideas there that just about hold the interest -- or, at any rate, hint that something better could have been made of this material.

It opens on an asteroid, called the Handicap Haven. It's home to a number of severely disabled people, mostly due to horrific accidents, though in a few cases due to mutations or genetic abnormalities. I don't think the view of disabled people in this book is remotely in line with contemporary mores, but I will say that for his time, Wallace seemed to have his heart in the right place. Anyway, the main characters include a doctor, Cameron, who seems to be trying to treat his patients decently; and four principal residents: Docchi, an armless man; Anti, a dancer who had an accident such that her whole body is a sort of cancer that keeps growing so that she must live in acid; Jordan, a legless man who is a talented mechanic; and Nona, who was born unable to communicate in any way but who seems to have spectacular scientific powers, and is also very beautiful. Later (in the expanded part) we meet a woman who is also very beautiful but cannot eat normally, and another woman who has a deficiency of male hormones so that she is becoming too feminine -- i.e. a nymphomaniac. (I said the treatment of women was sexist!)

All this is in the context of an Earth society with spectacular medical tech, such that disease is conquered and everyone is good looking. This tech is enough to allow the residents of the asteroid to survive their horrendous injuries, and also to give them greatly extended lives. But there is no way they can live on Earth, so they want to leave for the Alpha Centauri system -- except star travel has so far proven impractical.

Anyway, there's a great deal of huggermugger. Nona's fantastical skills solve the star travel problem, but now Earth wants that tech. And (in the expansion) there is a long chase to Alpha Centauri -- which, to be sure, may have residents already!

I've elided a lot, and, well, most of it is absurd. There's a central love story, which is altered in easy to notice ways in the expanded version -- I mean, even not reading the original you can see where Docchi's love interest is shifted as we head to Centauri. There's all kinds of guff about the "biocompensation" that will in the end magically "cure" all the "deficients". There are unconvincing motivations for the bad guys chasing them. It's -- it's just a frustrating book to read. It seems clear to me that Wallace wanted to write a novel, but really didn't have the handle on structure to manage it.

F. L. Wallace did some pretty decent work at shorter lengths. And I feel bad just reviewing this pretty terrible novel. So, I'll be taking a look at several of his better known shorter stories in the next week or so. Stay tuned!

Old Bestseller Review: Charlotte Fairlie, by D. E. Stevenson

Review: Charlotte Fairlie, by D. E. Stevenson

by Rich Horton

This is the fourth D. E. Stevenson novel I've read. (There are at least three more on hand.) Dorothy Stevenson Peploe (1892-1973) was a Scottish writer, the first cousin once removed of Robert Louis Stevenson. She wrote over 40 novels, mostly what can be called "light romantic" novels, and others more in the domestic life genre, including her Mrs. Tim novels, which deal with the experiences of a military wife. (Stevenson herself was a military wife, and those novels draw directly from her experience.) I've summarized her bio before, but the Furrowed Middlebrow edition of this book (from Dean Street Press) includes an autobiographical afterword, apparently first written when her novel Music From the Hills was published, just before Charlotte Fairlie. And that includes some nice additional details, such as that her father was actually quite close, in childhood, to his first cousin RLS (whom the family apparently called Louis), and also that Dorothy was a first-rate golfer -- reaching the semifinals of the Scottish Ladies' Championship in her early 20s.

Charlotte Fairlie was published in 1954, and is set at the time of writing (1952-1953) with an episode centered on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. (The US edition had the title Blow the Wind Southerly, and later paperback editions were called The Enchanted Isle.) The title character is in her late 20s, and has just taken a job as the headmistress of Saint Elizabeth's, a fairly posh girls' boarding school not too far from London. Charlotte's mother died when she was young, and she was very close to her father until he remarried, after which she was raised by an uncle and sent to Saint Elizabeth's. She continued to university, and even spent some time in the US. 

The first part of the novel is to a great extent focused on her professional experience. She is a very competent headmistress, and we see her dealing with a couple of significant issues, including a senior teacher who had wanted the headmistress position and does her best to sabotage Charlotte, and a couple of student crises. One concerns Tessa MacRynne, a 13 year old new girl whose (American) mother has just left her father Rory, who is "The MacRynne" -- that is, the basically feudal leader of a Scottish island. Tessa nearly causes a scandal when she tries to run away back to her home. The other crisis concerns one of Tessa's friends, Dione Eastwood, a sweet girl who is a bad student, and who has two younger brothers who are students at the nearby boys' school, who are also reputedly bad students. Charlotte manages to learn that their issue is their verbally abusive father (the mother, once again, is absent!) Charlotte also makes friends with the headmaster of the boys' school, a pleasant young man not too much older than she. She is also shown attending a conference in Copenhagen. All of this is quietly interesting, and straightforward and honest about the challenges of that job, the loneliness of it, and the rewards, in the context of the challenges of a woman making a career. This latter part is emphasized by the ambition Charlotte had before her father's remarriage -- to become her father's partner in his business; as well as the similar ambition Tessa has -- to help her own father in his role.

The second part of the novel introduces the "light romance" element. Tessa has invited both Charlotte and the Eastwood children to visit her island home over the summer break. The bulk of this section concerns that visit. To no reader's surprise, sparks fly between Charlotte and Tessa's father. And the visit proves helpful to the Eastwood children as well, especially the younger boy, Barney, who is enchanted by the island and by the kind of life Rory models. But over the Eastwood family their father's presence still hovers, and this leads in the end to a tragic event. There is a lightly fantastical element here, in the form of an old prediction about the first red-haired MacRynne (who turns out to be Rory) and also in the appearance of a supposed magic well, at which both Tessa and Barney make wishes, that, in the way of such wishes, have ambiguous results.

The conclusion -- which is somewhat muted -- turns naturally on the resolution of Charlotte and Rory's romance. Charlotte has realized she is desperately in love with Rory, but given her own life experience with a father's remarriage, and her knowledge of Tessa's personal ambitions, she feels it necessary to refuse him. The book gives an answer, entwining Charlotte's career position, and Tessa's own feelings ... there's a bit of feeling of patness to the ending. Still, I greatly enjoyed the book. And I also read it very quickly indeed -- emphasizing something I'd already noticed about D. E. Stevenson. She had that gift -- nearly magical, I sometimes think -- of making the reader want to keep turning pages. I don't think this gift is necessary to be a good or great writer, but nor do I think it a bad thing. It's something some writers can manage, and others can't. And both types of writers can be great writers. (For the record, I think D. E. Stevenson a fine writer, even a very good one at her best, but she falls short of greatness -- which is no terrible thing, really.)

Old Bestseller Review: Hell! Said the Duchess, by Michael Arlen

Review: Hell! Said the Duchess, by Michael Arlen

by Rich Horton

The very first review on this blog -- a decade ago come next month! -- was of Michael Arlen's The Green Hat. And for that matter my first contribution to F&SF's Curiosities column concerned Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality. So, yes, he is a writer I take some interest in! Michael Arlen (1895-1956) was an Armenian-Bulgarian-British-American, though his fiction was all while he was primarily British (though living in France for much of this period), and entirely published between the wars: his first novel appeared in 1920 and his last in 1939. He was born in Bulgaria to Armenian refugees, and christened Dikran Kouyoumdjian. His family emigrated to the UK in 1901. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, but he wanted to be a writer, and indeed his family disowned him. He adopted the pen name Michael Arlen, and eventually legally changed his name. It's clear that his point of view was profoundly affected by his identity conflicts, not to mention a fair amount of ethnic prejudice directed his way. 

His primary subject matter was the smart set of the Lost Generation, and this eventually proved sort of a trap. Certainly this was the subject matter of his most famous novel, The Green Hat (which remains readable in its highly melodramatic way even now) and many of his later stories come off as less successful variations on that book. Two of his efforts to break out of that typecasting are Man's Mortality, an SF novel that suffered from appearing just a year after his rival Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and the novel at hand, Hell! Said the Duchess, which as we will see is a strange mixture of near future SF (with a very satirical cast) and gothic horror (and all set among the same privileged set as are many of his other works. Neither of these works received the respect he craved, and during his last years, in the US, he was nearly wholly blocked. There were a few short stories that Mark Valentine claims were reworkings of earlier work, and one of his stories, about a detective named Gay Stanhope Falcon, became the basis for a series of movies starring George Sanders as the Falcon (in imitation of Sanders' earlier role as Leslie Charteris' The Saint.) (Some people conflate this character with an unrelated later TV detective called The Falcon.) It's tempting to say that his only true subject was high society between the World Wars, and with the passing of that era he had nothing to write about.

Hell! Said the Duchess was published in 1934. It got good reviews -- Mark Valentine, in his fine introduction to the edition I read, calls it "his last great success." Despite that early notice, it fell out of print for decades, as did, really, all of Arlen's books save The Green Hat. But the estimable publishers Valancourt Books reprinted it in 2013, and that is the edition I bought. It's a very short novel, roughly 36,000 words by my estimate.

It is set in about 1936, and the Fascists have taken over the Conservative Party (and Oswald Mosley is Minister of War.) Arlen is cuttingly satirical about this, and about the Conservatives, and English tradition, in general. But his subject here is the Duchess of Dove, a beautiful, modest, and retiring young widow. After setting up her situation, he reveals that her reputation has taken a (surely unfair!) blow, as there have been reports that she has been seen in low bars with inappropriate people. Her friends begin to investigate, and spy on her movements, and it seems that there is a mystery ... she is almost never seen to go out at night, despite these reports. 

But just as her friends are ready to insist that all the rumors are false, a series of murders shocks London. Soon they are called the "Jane the Ripper" murders, for they seem to have been committed by a woman who seduces men, and after taking them to bed kills them. And what evidence there is points to the Duchess ... Naturally, the authorities are convinced that such a modest and beautiful and high-ranking lady is innocent, and they begin their investigation with every intention of exonerating her. Unfortunately, one of the police officials is actually competent despite being politically suspect (there is a screamingly funny chapter detailing the first steps in the investigation ....) As things continue, the evidence that the Duchess must be guilty seems overwhelming but there are still curious aspects.

And then the novel takes a strange turn, as a certain sinister Dr. Axaloe comes into focus. He seems to be a sexual predator of some sort, or perhaps just a man into free love. And there are connections to the Duchess. The chief investigators track Axaloe down, and what they find is truly unexpected and horrifying.

The tone shift, roughly halfway through the novel, is rather striking, and I'm not sure it's wholly successful. What we have, in my opinion, is a quite amusing and pointed satirical first half, making dark fun of the British aristocracy and their Fascistic drift; followed by a second half that only intermittently maintains the satirical point of view but is instead a piece of definite gothic horror. That mode is less interesting to me, though it may appeal to a lot of readers, and I think it is actually pretty well done. I think this is a novel worth attention -- and enjoyable and sometimes quite wonderful book, a bit overcooked in places but certainly fun to read.

Best (?) from this Blog, 2023, and brief Hugo Thoughts

While saying goodbye to 2023, I might as well give some links to some of my favorite posts from this past year. But first, in looking over this, I have a few Hugo thoughts. Very brief, and I must acknowledge my reading has been sadly limited. (For 2023, that is!) 

(Maybe someday I'll organize this blog better!)

Movies: Oppenheimer and Asteroid City are my two favorites

Novels: Orbital, Terrace Story, The Terraformers, and Shigidi and the Brass Head of Olafulon

Novellas: The Navigating Fox, by Christopher Rowe stands out, plus "Blade and Bone", by Paul McAuley

Novelette: "Mr. Catt", by Eleanor Arnason

Short stories: Rowe again, with "The Four Last Things", plus James Patrick Kelly's "The In-Between" and E. Lily Yu's "Alphabet of Swans"; and "The Unpastured Sea", by Gregory Feeley

Best Fan Writer: well, I'm eligible, but don't forget John Boston, and Brian Collins, and Joachim Boaz

Most of my posts are reviews, so first I'll mention my Cordwainer Smith award post and a couple of Trip Reports:

2023 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

Readercon Report

Montana Trip Report

My Black Gate Essays from 2023

Book and story reviews (mostly SF, but some Victoriana are other old novels.) These are in reverse chronological order, and I've left a lot out.

Two Early Robert Silverberg Novels

Sometime, Never

Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages

The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz

"The Cottage in Omena", by Charles Andrew Oberndorf

Neptune's Reach stories by Gregory Feeley

Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Carmen Dog, by Carol Emshwiller

Short Novels by Alex Jeffers and Brandon H. Bell

North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Granger's Crossing, by Mark Tiedemann

The Count of Monte Cristo

Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison

My Antonia, by Willa Cather

White Cat, Black Dog, by Kelly Link

The Godel Operation, by James L. Cambias

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

Waking the Moon, by Elizabeth Hand

Supernatural Tales, by Vernon Lee

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter

The Navigating Fox, by Christopher Rowe

The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford

Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty, by Avram Davidson

Sunday Morning Transport

Asimov's, November-December 2023

Flint and Mirror, by John Crowley

The Sound of His Horn, by Sarban

Take Three Tenses, by Rumer Godden

The Zanzibar Cat, by Joanna Russ

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Olafulon, by Wole Talabi

My 2023 essays at Black Gate

My 2023 essays at Black Gate

This post links to some of my best (in my opinion) pieces from Black Gate in 2023. In that sense it's sort of a Hugo eligibility post -- I'm eligible in one category, Best Fan Writer, but it's also intended as a summary, and in hopes people are interested in checking these out. (I should add that I think I've done some pretty cool fan writing elsewhere -- certainly at this blog, and at Journey Planet, and I had a piece in Bruce Gillespie's SF Commentary this year. Plus I had a short look at Rose Macaulay's What Not published in the Curiosities column in the November-December F&SF.)

But a lot of my best work, in my opinion, appears in Black Gate, John O'Neill's excellent online 'zine. Here's a list of some of these.

First, I contributed a piece on The Tolkien Reader to Bob Byrne's series of posts called Talking Tolkien. 

Talking Tolkien: On The Tolkien Reader;

Secondly, here's a summary of an ongoing series of essays I've been doing taking very close looks at some short fiction. The most recent two of these are from 2023, but I'm really proud of all of them.

"The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye", by A. S. Byatt; and Three Thousand Years of Longing;

"The Second Inquisition" (and "My Boat"), by Joanna Russ;

"Scanners Live in Vain", by Cordwainer Smith;

"The Last Flight of Dr. Ain", by James Tiptree, Jr.;

"Winter's King", by Ursula K. Le Guin;

"It Opens the Sky", by Theodore Sturgeon;

"Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", by John M. Ford;

Three Stories by Idris Seabright;

"The Star Pit", by Samuel R. Delany;

Thirdly, I have been doing a set of looks at obscure SF from the '70s and '80s:

The Shores of Kansas, by Rob Chilson;

Alien Island, by T. L. Sherred;

Murder on Usher's Planet, by Atanielle Annyn Noel;

The Song of Phaid the Gambler, by Mick Farren;

And here are some other Black Gate posts -- a couple of obituaries (Michael Bishop, D. G. Compton, Joseph Ross), some reviews, a look at Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies, and some "retro reviews" of old magazines.

Obituary: D. G. Compton;

Obituary: Michael Bishop;

Obituary: Joseph Wrzos (Joseph Ross);

Review: Being Michael Swanwick, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro;

Retro Review: F&SF, November 1958, May 1961;

The Flashing Swords! Original Anthologies, edited by Lin Carter;

Retro Review: Infinity, June 1956;

Retro Review: If, December 1957;

Retro Review: F&SF, June 1955;

Retro Review: Universe, September 1953; 

Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi

Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi

by Rich Horton

Wole Talabi is a Nigerian SF writer (and anthologist), now resident in Malaysia, who has published a number of arresting short stories over the past decade. "A Dream of Electric Mothers" was a Hugo and Nebula nominee this year. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is his first novel.

It's a curious book, in a sense. It's been marketed to some extent as a caper novel, and indeed there is a caper, or at leat a heist, as the engine of the plot, but that's a minor part of the book, really. (And as a caper qua caper it's not that interesting.) I'd say it's much more a love story, between Shigidi, a nightmare god, and Nneoma, a succubus. But it's also a satire of corporate politics, and a critique of colonialist theft of indigenous art, and even a novel offering an afterlife of sorts for Aleister Crowley!

The story is told in multiple timelines -- the main action is set in roughly the present day (2017 or so) but there are flashbacks to the 1970s, to distant African history, to Crowley in Algeria in the first decade of the 20th Century, and more. All this is well organized -- the reader never loses their way, and the themes and plot of the book are well developed by this method.

Nneoma, as a succubus, is essentially immortal, and gains her power from taking the life force from her sexual conquests as they orgasm. Shigidi, when we first encounter him (timeline-wise) is an ugly minor god, working for a "spirit corporation", which gains its profits from prayers, and from answering prayers, by such means as gods like Shigidi killing their clients by sending nightmares to their enemies. The spirit corporation is failing, however, due largely to a loss of believers, and hence their prayers. Shigidi hates his job, and on one mission he encounters Nneoma, who is dealing with the same victim from her different angle. Nneoma spots what she calls potential in Shigidi and convinces him to quite the corporation and join her as sort of an independent. And they spend a few years jointly preying on victims much as Nneoma has for her millennia of existence.

Shigidi falls desperately in love with Nneoma, but she, though happy with his company and his lovemaking, doesn't wish to commit to true love. We eventually gather that her issue goes back to the loss of her beloved sister Lilith, far in the past, due to her sister's falling in love with another being. Meanwhile, the spirit corporation is undergoing some internal dissension, and its long absent leader Olorun decides to take a more active role. He's been working on the side with Shigidi and Nneoma, but as a crisis arrives he decides he needs the two of them to retrieve something for him from the British Museum -- the titular Brass Head of Obalufon. But that is no easy job -- and this requires them to work on both the normal side of reality, and the spirit side, and to engage some special help -- which turns out to involve Nneoma calling in a long-owed debt from Aleister Crowley.

The book bounces along engagingly, as we learn about Nneoma's history with Lilith, and about Crowley's history with Nneoma and his "afterlife", and about Olorun's corporate maneuverings, and about setting up the heist. There's plenty of cool action, and some great sex, and some really neat setpieces. And the resolution takes us in an unexpected direction. I enjoyed it.

It is a first novel, though, and I have a few caveats. One seems not uncommon for first novels -- there's a LOT here, and at times I felt there was too much -- or, perhaps, that for the novel to be about as much as it is it probably should have been longer. One thing that was never dealt with is the morality of Shigidi and Nneoma's preying on their victims -- perhaps this is a logical treatment, but, well, it bothered me. I also felt the prose was uneven -- in the most important parts -- the cool setpieces, the resolutions, some of the imagery involved in that -- it's really exciting. But a bit more work throughout would have helped -- some parts came off to me as a tad unfinished, too ready to rely on cliché. Again -- this seems like a first novel issue. I have a feeling we'll eventually see this book as a promising entrée to a significant career.

Not to end on a down note -- this is a fun book, with some interesting ideas, and I definitely recommend it.

Review: The Zanzibar Cat, by Joanna Russ

Review: The Zanzibar Cat, by Joanna Russ

by Rich Horton

The Zanzibar Cat is one of four collections of short fiction that Joanna Russ published in her lifetime. Of these four, it is perhaps the most representative of the main thrust of her oeuvre. The Adventures of Alyx collects four stories and a novel about her recurring character Alyx -- oddly, the other Alyx story appears in The Zanzibar Cat. Extra(ordinary) People is focussed on five late stories, from 1982 through 1984. And The Hidden Side of the Moon is a curious miscellany of lesser known SF/F stories and some mainstream work.

Having said that, I'll note that the publication history of The Zanzibar Cat is a bit complicated. It first appeared as a hardcover from Arkham Press, in 1983. The paperback edition, from Baen, appeared a year later, and it has a somewhat different Table of Contents. The paperback does not include Marge Piercy's introduction, and it also omits three stories ("How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring", "Poor Man, Beggar Man", and "Old Thoughts, Old Presences".) But it includes two stories not in the hardcover: "Dragons and Dimwits" and "The Precious Object". (Two of the stories not included in the paperback of The Zanzibar Cat do appear in The Hidden Side of the Moon.) I'll be reviewing the Baen paperback.

This collection is excellent, but of course not all the stories are at the top level -- though all are worth reading. I'm going to foreground my favorites (five stories in all), and then discuss briefly the rest. The book does beautifully represent Russ's range, and also her wit, her imagination, and her outstanding prose.

The book opens with perhaps Russ's most famous short story, "When it Changed", which won the Nebula in 1973. It is an excellent story (though oddly it's not even my favorite Joanna Russ story from 1972!) It's about the planet Whileaway, on which a plague killed all human males, and which has thus been all-female for 600 years. And now a ship with men has arrived, and it's quickly clear that things will change. The story is particularly good in portraying a real-seeming all-female society without making it a utopia, with real characters, and real problems and virtues.

Since I hinted at it, I'll mention my favorite Joanna Russ story from 1972, also in this book: "Nobody's Home". Russ's brief comment reads: "This one began with Larry Niven's speculations about teleportation and ended as a Utopia -- for some." It's about a future society with teleportation all around the world, and apparent lack of scarcity, and group marriages, and it's fundamentally about a group marriage and what happens when a new woman enters the marriage. It's clever and witty and breakneck and fascinating and thoughtful and at its heart terribly sad -- for some. On this reading (this is a story I've read many times) I was struck in particular by the breathless first three or so pages -- truly a tour de force. One of the great SF stories of all time.

"A Game of Vlet" is the last of Russ's Alyx stories, and the only one not to appear in the somewhat definitive Alyx collections (Alyx, from the Gregg Press, and The Adventures of Alyx, from Timescape, and reprinted by The Women's Press and by Baen -- the reprint editions omit Samuel R. Delany's introduction but are otherwise identical to Alyx.) It's set in Ourdh in ancient Greece -- contemporaneous with the first Alyx stories -- and it concerns a challenge by a magician to the Governor -- a game of Vlet, on a unique "virgin" board such that the winner will defeat all his enemies. The magician is captured -- and a Lady appears, offering to substitute for the Government of Ourdh -- while the magician will play for the Revolution. The results are beautifully ambiguous. The Lady is not identified but is clearly Alyx (and so Russ confirms in the introduction.) It's a characteristically witty and clever story, great fun with some real truth behind it. 

I've written at some length recently about "My Boat" (keep checking Black Gate for that) so I'll just say here that it's one of Russ's very best stories, about a 15 year old black girl in a newly integrated high school, into drama, and her boat. The story is told by one of her high school friends -- as he ruefully admits, a typical white liberal racist who didn't realize he was racist despite his liberal aspirations. The girl and another of the narrator's friends take My Boat on a fabulous trip to glorious fictional lands, but the narrator chickens out. There is wish-fulfillment here, as Russ acknowledges, and a distinct Lovecraftian influence, and it's a beautiful and powerful story.

"The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand" has distinct correspondences with "My Boat" in that it concerns wondrous voyages by an outwardly unprepossessing woman, as described by a man who is a bit afraid to accompany her. This story is explicitly an hommage to Jules Verne -- the narrator is a middle aged Frenchman in the 1920s who describes his curious encounter with Madame Bertrand at a certain train station, at which by crossing the station in the wrong direction one can travel, randomly, almost anyhere. Madame Bertrand tells him of her voyages -- and he experiences a bit of that, but doesn't quite take the full step. Then, it seems, the train station is to be closed ... neat stuff.

Those are my top five stories, but the rest of the book is all worth reading -- some of it is light throwaway stuff, but still fun, such as "Useful Phrases for the Tourist" and "Dragons and Dimwits". There are three very strong early stories -- "My Dear Emily", "The New Men", and "There is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side", which deal expertly with classical fantasy elements -- vampires in the first two cases, a ghost in the third -- but still surprise. "The Man Who Could Not See Devils" is a well done logical working out of the title premise -- how would things work out for a man who could not see the demons that ordinary people can -- nice work but a bit slight to my mind. "The Soul of a Servant" is very strong work, with the narrator -- the title servant -- telling of his actions as the man in charge of a fortress of sorts in Tibet, when supposed revolutionaries arrive, and in the context of usual visits of privileged tourists. It's a knotty story, with effectively unresolved moral questions at its heart. A couple of stories struck me as pieces that I didn't quite "get" which I still could see were worthwhile, if not quite for me -- "Gleepsite" and "Corruption". "The Precious Object" is a fine mainstream story, in which the narrator becomes obsessed with a gay (male) friend of hers ... strong work, and, I suspect, related to her novel On Strike Against God, which I have not yet read. And the title story is a delightful work based on Hope Mirrlees' masterwork Lud-in-the-Mist, taking a slightly metafictional angle as the people of Appletap-on-Flat send an expedition to deal with the evil undead Duke Humphrey, and his demon cat, and only the miller's daughter survives the expedition to say what resulted.

Joanna Russ was indisputably one of the great SF writers of all time, and a great critic as well. It is a shame she was not named an SFWA Grand Master -- her career was cut short by severe health problems that plagued her for the last quarter century of her life, which may explain that, but the sheer quality of the work she did produce, and the great influence exerted by both her fiction and her crtical work, certainly merited that honor. The Library of America has recently published Joanna Russ: Novels and Stories, which collects three major novels, the Alyx stories, and two other award-winning stories ("When it Changed" and "Souls") -- and that is an essential book. But The Zanzibar Cat is also a necessary read -- it's really an exceptional collection on its own terms, and only two of its stories also appear in the LOA book.

Review: Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time, by Rumer Godden

Review: Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time, by Rumer Godden

by Rich Horton

Take Three Tenses is the American title of Rumer Godden's sixth novel, which is better known as A Fugue in Time, its original UK title. I have not read much by Godden, but I am familiar with her in a general sense, and I had heard of what I thought to be her major novels, including two early novels made into major films: Black Narcissus and The River. In addition, I would have cited In This House of Brede, Kingfishers Catch Fire, and A Candle for Saint Jude as her best known works. But I saw this novel at an estate sale, and I figured "Why not?" (It turns out that it too was made into a movie -- at least nine of Godden's books have been filmed! -- Enchantment (1948) with David Niven and Teresa Wright. It seems to have been well-received, and it seems pretty faithful to the book, except for an understandable but significant alteration to the ending -- an event that, to be fair, I sort of expected as I read the book.) The novel was quite successful itself -- my copy is from the seventh printing, in June 1945 -- the first US printing was in March! 

Not to hold anyone in suspense -- I was immediately, er, enchanted. It's a glorious, lovely, novel. I thought for a bit that I might have discovered a forgotten classic, but I quickly decided to investigate. Two of my favorite book reviewers, both of whom I knew to like Rumer Godden, Jo Walton and Scott Thompson, have reviewed A Fugue in Time. Jo loves it, Scott likes it with reservations -- in this case I'm with Jo. It was apparently out of print for some time, but was reprinted, by Virago, in 2013. So, instead of revealing something special to unsuspecting readers, I'll just be adding my voice to those who already know this book. 

Margaret Rumer Godden was born in England in 1907, but was largely raised in India (her father was a shipping executive.) She spent some time at school in England, but mostly lived in India until after the Second World War. She ran a ballet school in Calcutta (now Kolkata) for twenty years. She converted to Catholicism in 1968 after many years of study. Ballet, India, and Catholicism are all recurring subjects of her books. She wrote some 60 books -- novels, children's books, memoirs. Her elder sister, Winsome Ruth Key Godden, was also a novelist (writing as "Jon Godden"), and the two collaborated on some memoirs late in life. She married twice, the first time unhappily, the second time much more successfully (though she has been quoted as saying she never really loved any man but Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice!) She had two daughters. She was named an Officer of the British Empire in 1993, and died, a month short of her 91st birthday, in 1998.

The novel is divided into six sections: Inventory, Morning, Noon, Four O'Clock, Evening, and Night. It is preceded by three quotations: a passage by Lawrence Abbot describing Bach's fugues, a long quote from T. S. Eliot's "East Coker", and two bits from The Book of Common Prayer, about birth, death, and children. These all serve to comment on the themes and structure of the book. As the Abbot quote and the two titles of the book suggest, the structure is quite experimental -- quite fugal indeed. The action of the novel extends from about 1840 to about 1940, with some brief flashes forward to the future, as far as 1990. (In this sense it could be called SF, though I don't really think that's quite useful -- in another sense there are passages that might be read as fantastical (involving a ghost.)) The tenses are artfully manipulated -- past tense, present tense, future tense -- and the prose throughout is very elegant -- Godden was truly a beautiful writer.

The novel opens in a house, with the only remaining survivor of the original family who still lives there, retired General Sir Roland Dane. The General, now called Rolls (his name alters from Roly as a child to Rollo as a young man, to Rolls in his old age) is discussing with his solicitor the expiration of the 99 year lease on the house, and he realizes he will have to move out, and that the old place, number 99 Wiltshire Place, will likely be torn down. The house is described from bottom to top, and the garden, and an old plane tree, and reference is made to the family members, and the servants, who have lived there this past century. There is a key painting, labeled "Mrs. Griselda Dane, wife of John Ironmonger Dane Esq., and their children: Pelham, John Robert, Lionel, James, Selwyn, Selina, Frederick, Elizabeth, and Rollo. 1861". And we are told: "There is no Lark in the picture. There is not, anywhere in the house, a picture of Lark." Thus we know nearly all of the main characters: John, called "The Eye", is the patriarch. Of his sons, this book will mostly feature Pelham and Rollo, and his first daughter, Selina, is another key character. And Lark -- Lark is a mystery to be slowly introduced. The only other family member of importance is Grizel, Pelham's granddaughter, and it takes a while for her to come into focus. There are also many servants who also fugally appear and reappear -- many of them related to each other -- so: Mrs. Crabbe and Proutie are Rolls' servants in 1940, and Mrs. Sampson, Mrs. Crabbe's grandmother, was charwoman in the 1800s sometime, and there is the Cook, and Nurse, and Proutie's aunt Mrs. Proutie, and Agnes the maidservant. 

The novel goes on to layer in the details of all these lives -- Griselda's marriage to John in 1840 when she is 17 and he 29; his insistence on having 9 children: then Griselda dying at the birth of Rollo. The loss of Frederick and Elizabeth at age 5. Pelham's eventual emigration to the US (so that Grizel is an American.) Selina's somewhat cramped life, due both to her taking over housekeeping at her mother's death, and to her own nature. Grizel, in 1954 or so, remarking on the milkman's brilliant son going to Eton while her son, the descendant of many men who went to Eton routinely, will settle for a more ordinary school. And Rollo -- and Lark. Lark is the daughter of musicians who died in the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879 (a real historical event and also the subject of one of William McGonagall's famously awful poems.) The Eye had been visiting her parents, and she was with him when her parents died, so he took her home to be raised as his daughter. (It is strongly hinted that Lark's mother was the Eye's mistress, and thus it seems plausible that Lark is his illegitimate daughter, though this is never established -- if true, it lends an incestuous flavor to the book's central romance.) Selina hates Lark from the beginning, for no good reason, and thus Lark's childhood is rather poisoned. But both Pelham (some 30 years her senior) and Rollo (a more appropriate 8 years older) fall for her ...

All these entanglements are resolved, bit by bit, as the book progresses, especially as Grizel shows up shortly after Rolls learns that he must leave the house, and as Lark's nephew Pax also shows up. Grizel is an American volunteer ambulance driver, and Pax an airman, temporarily in London after an injury. We can guess where that leads -- and then we can see how Rolls responds, and how his memory of Lark and how their romance worked out informs things. And we keep learning of Selina's rather sad life, and of Griselda's proto-feminist feelings; and how though she seems to love her husband she also powerfully resents him, for reasons he mostly never understands. The book is less about class but that comes through too, in seeing the servants' lives, and how their positions change over decades, and in seeing how the presumably lower class Lark is treated by Selina, and even Rolls' bitterness about his military career and his ambiguous successes in that realm. And of course how he perceives the American invader, the rather "liberated" (for 1940) young woman Grizel. 

The experimental structure is, for me, profoundly successful. The seamless shifts in time -- back to the 1840s, to the 1880s, the novel's "present" of 1940, and then the slight but telling hints of the future -- are very effective. As I said, it's beautifully written. The characters come through excellently -- perhaps Griselda and Selina above all, even though Lark and Rollo are more closely the "main" characters -- though it truly is an ensemble novel, or perhaps one should say a novel in the form of a fugue played by a small chamber orchestra of characters. It is moving throughout. I loved it.

Review: Translation State, by Ann Leckie

Review: Translation State, by Ann Leckie

by Rich Horton

This is Ann Leckie's latest novel, from 2023. It is set in the Imperial Radch universe, at roughly the time of the events in the Ancillary Trilogy, and at least one character from those books appears in this one. That said, it's an oddly confined book -- the action is almost entirely on a couple of space stations, often confined to close rooms. Leckie's novels often can be called "space opera", and the larger settings are certainly operatic -- grand spaceships, enigmatic and menacing aliens, a star-spanning empire, etc. -- but much of the focus is tightly on character issues.

The title, Translation State, seems an extended -- and effective -- pun. As the story revolves around the strange Presger translators -- people bred from human DNA by the alien Presger to serve as emissaries to humanity -- "translating language" is the obvious meaning. But the story also concerns translating one's personal state (if you will) -- two main characters wish to identify as human despite some anomalous DNA, and also this Imperial Radch future features many differing expressions of gender identity depending to some extent on where people live. But beyond that she reveals some very interesting tech that involves instantaneous (it seems) spatial translation.

There are three POV characters. Enae is an middle-aged person who has cared for hir cranky Grandmaman for years, and finds hirself forced to take a job after hir Grandmaman dies. The job sie gets is presented as a sinecure of sorts -- to investigate a Presger translator who had disappeared a couple of hundred years before. Reet lives on Rurusk Station, alone, his only pleasure watching Pirates of the Death Moon, until he is contacted by the Siblings of Hikipi, who seem convinced he is a Schan -- a descendant of the former rulers of the Hikipi, an ethnic group which has been mostly eliminated from their ancestral home, and is looking for a way to deal with their oppressors, the Phen. And finally Qven is someone stranger -- we see them from early childhood as they grow to near adulthood -- and then they learn that part of adulthood for a Presger translator (which is what they are) is to "match" with another Presger translator -- a process that Qven, for reasons, is terribly afraid of.

All three POVs converge fairly quickly. Enae decides to take hir job seriously, and the (very cold) trail of the runaway translator leads to Rurusk station. Reet has gotten a new job thanks to the Siblings of Hikipi, and in that capacity he is assigned to Enae. And Qven, whose reluctance to match has gotten him in trouble with his translator clade, is taken to the Treaty Administration Facility, where the treaty between humans and the Presger -- that provides for Presger translators and keeps the Presger from killing humans -- is dealt with. There they are waiting for a new match for Qven -- which turns out to be Reet, who, as we will have guessed, is actually a Presger translator, descended (one assumes) from the escaped translator. Reet is arrested, and taken to the Treaty Administration Facility, because unmatched translator adults are very dangerous. (Plus there are politics involved!) And Enae comes along, in part because sie knows this is linked with the translator escape sie is supposed to investigate, but also out of kindness to Reet.

And the rest of the novel -- a rather big chunk of it -- involves the intrigues around the status of Reet and Qven, the question of whether they should be forced to match, and the complications caused by a threatening Hikipi spaceship. All this goes on for a while, but it really does hold the interest, despite its rather claustrophobic setting. (That said, I do think some judicious cutting wouldn't have been a bad thing.) One key thread is identity -- especially for Reet and Qven, both of whom end up insisting that their identity is human. Which is politically inconvenient for the Radch, and the Presger translator clade, and maybe even the Siblings of Hikipi. 

There's a lot to like here. The ideas central to the novel ... the nature of Presger translators, and the nature of the Presger and their tech ... are pretty darned cool. The characters are mostly nice to spend time with. The ethos presented is, well, humane. (And I've failed to mention a couple more important characters: a bio mech serving as a represent of the Geck ambassador; and an ancillary of the newly independent spaceship Sphene.) All this is neat, and it deepens the background of the Imperial Radch universe in interesting ways.

I wasn't wholly satisfied, however. I felt that some of the plot was a bit too coincidence driven. I felt the characters -- or their growth and change -- seemed a bit arbitrary at times. And I have to say that Enae -- a character I'd like to see more of -- ultimately was a bit wasted -- hir part of the book almost seemed superfluous, though it wouldn't surprise me if sie took on a more prominent role in future books.

A good novel, not a great one. A worthy addition to Ann Leckie's corpus, but in a way I feel we're still waiting for the major work that will show us something more momentous in the history of the Radch.