Birthday Review: Two Collections by Peter Dickinson (and Robin McKinley)

Peter Dickinson was born 91 years ago today, and died 3 years ago today. He was an exceptional writer of mysteries, of SF, of Fantasy, and of YA literature. I discovered him fairly young through his Inspector Pibble mysteries, beginning with The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest; and soon after was surprised to see his Changes YA SF trilogy in the bookstore. Soon I was reading SF novels such at The Green Gene and The Poison Oracle; and then his Alternate History Mystery series, starting with King and Joker.

The reviews below are of his late "Elemental" story collections, including stories both by him and by his wife, Robin McKinley. These were lovely stories, somewhat Young Adult in nature. I reviewed Fire for Fantasy Magazine, and I've appended my brief look at Earth and Air from Locus. (Alas, I never wrote about Water.)

Fire
by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
$19.99 | hc | 297 pages
ISBN: 978-0-399-25289-1
October 2009

A review by Rich Horton

Husband and wife Peter Dickinson and Robin McKinley have separately each had remarkable writing careers. This is the second book they have done together, collaborating on the book but not the individual stories. The two longer stories here are by McKinley, the three shorter ones by Dickinson. All are Young Adult fantasies, about “fire spirits” of various types, such as a salamander, a phoenix, and a dragon.

The book is very enjoyable, its varied nature enhancing the pleasure. Dickinson opens the book with “Phoenix”, in which a young girl fascinated by nature encounters a boy of a similar age in a private preserve. She soon gathers that the preserve belongs to the boy’s family, and she gains his approval and explores it with him. Eventually she learns the real story, which is quite strange, and which involves, of course, a phoenix, and rebirth, as well as an unusual and quite sweet love story. Dickinson’s other two stories aren’t quite as effective. “Fireworm” is set in a prehistoric community menaced by the title creature, which burns its way into their cave. The hero is an outcast, because of his illegitimate birth, who is gifted in a dream the strange path he must follow to vanquish the fireworm. It is all quite interesting, but never really connects. “Salamander Man” is about another outcast, a boy who is the slave of a woman selling magical objects. She is a fairly benevolent owner, but cannot resist when a magician insists on buying the boy. Magicians have a bad reputation, but this one has a different fate in mind for the boy. Again, the working out is quite interesting – the problem here is that we are told too much, not shown. It might have worked better at twice the length.

McKinley’s stories are more character-oriented, perhaps more traditional YA. “Hellhound” tells of Miri, a girl just out of high school, who loves horses and never wants to leave her parents’ farm and riding stable. She loves dogs too, but only on graduation can she persuade her mother to let her adopt one, and she ends up with a very strange dog indeed. Well, the title gives it away, but this is, we learn, a good hellhound. Which is revealed engagingly when Miri’s brother and his girlfriend run into trouble at a haunted graveyard on their property … The fantastical element here, while real, is secondary to a set of delightful characters.

And my favorite story is the longest, “First Flight”, nearly a novel. Ern is the third son of a carpenter, who wants his sons to fit traditional roles. That means the eldest will be a dragonrider, the second a spiritspeaker, and the third a wizard. The story turns on Ern’s character – he is convinced that he’s a clumsy bumbler, and he is half-ashamed that his forte seems to be healing, for some reason a disparaged art. He also loves animals, and has made a pet of a sort of dog/dragon hybrid … And then he must accompany his oldest brother to his brother’s first flight on a dragon, which exposes him (and us) to the wonders of the majestic dragons, and their curious method of flying (something like spacewarps, I thought …). The shape of the whole thing is clear from the start, but it’s so perfectly executed, and Ern is such a well portrayed first-person protagonist, that I was enthralled.

This is a wonderful blending of talents of two writers who have already given us some of the best YA fantasy of the past few decades. Recommended.

Earth and Air, by Peter Dickinson (Big Mouth Press)

Last month I mentioned Peter Dickinson's “Troll Bridge”, which appeared in F&SF and also appears in his new collection Earth and Air, subtitled Tales of Elemental Creatures. The stories are all quite enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed “Ridiki”, a version of the Eurydice story substituting a boy's beloved dog Ridiki for Eurydice, and “Wizand”, which cleverly portrays the unusual lifecycle of the wizand, which confers power on witches, including in this story a 20th century girl named Sophie. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the final story, “The Fifth Element”, which doesn't as obviously deal with an “elemental creature” as the other stories. Instead, it's an odd science fiction horror story, that reminded me of Philip K. Dick's first published story, “Beyond Lies the Wub”, and well as Robert Sheckley's “Specialist”, in telling of the multispecies crew of a sort of tramp starship, and what happens when their “ship's Cat” dies.

Birthday Review: Stories of Ted Kosmatka

Ted Kosmatka is another of the long list of SF writers born on this date. Here's a selection of my reviews of his stories.

Locus, August 2007

Another new writer, Ted Kosmatka, also impresses with a dark story: “The Prophet of Flores”, set in an alternate world in the Earth has been proven to be only 5800 years old, and in which evolutionists are crackpots. A scientist is recruited to study the dwarf people of the Indonesian island Flores – but these discoveries are politically and religiously bombshells. Even in a world where Creationism is true, the forces of orthodoxy are unwilling to accept the implications of scientific investigation. Effective stuff.

Locus, June 2008

The June F&SF opens with a tense novelette from Ted Kosmatka, who is a rising star of short SF – where he stands now reminds me of where, say, Paolo Bacigalupi stood in 2004. Like Bacigalupi on occasion, or early Greg Egan, he has a certain tendency to yoke his neat SFnal ideas to thriller plots. This works best if the plot can be made to turn, at least in part, on the idea – and that’s the case in “The Art of Alchemy”. The narrator is a specialist in memory metals, working for a steel company based in northern Indiana. He tells his story in past tense, and for him it is the story of his love affair with Veronica, a brilliant and beautiful black woman, an up and coming management star with the company, who for some reason chose him. But he comes to learn that she has multiple loyalties – to her own past, of course, but also to the company. And when she gets an offer to the specs for a miracle material that may threaten the future of the steel business those loyalties are tested. And so are the narrator’s loyalties. The story nicely balances a wrenching love story with a good near future SF idea with a crackling thriller conclusion.

Locus, August 2008

I recently in these pages brought up Greg Egan’s name in connection with Ted Kosmatka. The comparison seems even stronger with “Divining Light”. Here Kosmatka, like Egan, examines esoteric Physics and also human consciousness, as a rather damaged researcher finds a way to investigate what sort of “consciousness” is required to collapse quantum events – with scary implications of much wider import than purely Physics.

Locus, June 2009

Belatedly I’ll catch up with Subterranean’s online offerings. For Spring, Gardner Dozois is the Guest Editor, and the best story so far (Spring is not over!), is Ted Kosmatka’s “The Ascendant”, set in a very odd prison, apparently part of some sort of arcology, and telling of a child born to a woman prisoner, and his growing awareness of his world. The story ends, alas, well before the boy’s story ends – surely more work in this setting is forthcoming.

Locus, November 2009

Much darker is “Blood Dauber” (Asimov's, November), by Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore. Bell is a zookeeper, who rather loves his job despite its awfulness. But his life is a mess: his job doesn’t pay well, and his wife resents the financial stress that results. And to tell the truth Bell is a bit of a mess anyway. Things come to something of a head when he makes friends (sort of) with a criminal working off his community service time at the zoo. At the same time he discovers a very strange insect, that appears to actively adapt to local conditions. Bell begins to experiment with the insect, trying to adapt it to different environments. But crises in his personal and professional life impinge, leading to a horrifying conclusion, and dark resolution.

Locus, January 2012

At the January/February F&SF I liked “The Color Least Used in Nature”, by Ted Kosmatka, a dark and powerful story of a boat builder in a South Pacific island. The fantasy element is slim -- walking trees that make remarkable boats -- but the heart of the story is wonderful, a complex mix of an elegiac look at the effects of colonialism on the island people with the effects of love disappointed and violence on the life of the boat builder, and of the women he loves and his children.

Locus, May 2016

The April Asimov’s is one of the best magazine issues I’ve seen in some time. All three novelettes are very fine. Ted Kosmatka’s “The Bewilderness of Lions” and Dale Bailey’s “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” both seem pure examples of stories that use thinnish SF tropes quite well in service of more mundane concerns. Kosmatka’s story is Caitlin, who consults for a political candidate as a kind of data miner. She is able to predict unusual happenings that might affect the campaign, quite successfully, until someone seems to notice, and makes her an offer … So far, so typical: a shadowy conspiracy running the world (I was reminded a bit of the film version of Philip Dick’s “The Adjustment Bureau”): but Kosmatka gives Caitlin a powerful back story, concerning her brother, and ties it very effectively to her ultimate dilemma.

Birthday Review: Stories of Jeremiah Tolbert

Today is Jeremiah Tolbert's birthday. I've been enjoying his short fiction since 2005, and here's a compilation of some of my Locus reviews of his work. Alas, something weird happened to some of my files from 2016, so some stuff is gone. But here's a lot of it:

Locus, May 2005

I suppose as a Missourian I should have resented Jeremiah Tolbert's "The Kansas Jayhawk vs the Midwestern Monster Squad" (Interzone, March-April), as it tells of a battle between genetically engineered "state monsters", including the Kansas Jayhawk and the Missouri Tiger: and the Jayhawk wins! But the story is just too fun – set in a future where the "geeks shall inherit the Earth" – and where they have encouraged radical and goofy science projects like creating Godzilla-sized monster mascots.

Locus, March 2008

The latest issue of Shimmer magazine is a special Pirate issue, guest-edited by John Joseph Adams of F&SF. There were fine pieces in multiple modes, but I liked best a couple that took a SFnal tack. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Captain Blood’s B00ty” has college hackers using magic and IP-tracking software to locate a pirate treasure online.

Locus, May 2009, review of Federations

Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The Culture Archivist” is very fine, about a man illegally saving what he can of an alien culture’s ways in advance of a commercial invasion from his “federation”. The story modulates nicely from an almost Strossian romp to a serious examination of its central issue (which is not to deny that Stross’s romps have serious points, too!)

Locus, April 2011

GigaNotoSaurus opened 2011 with a couple of quite different and quite entertaining stories. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Work, With Occasional Molemen” (January) is wackily fun B-movie style SF, about a man in Topeka with a rather weird (and sometimes criminal family – in an odd way his family dynamics reminded me of those in the (much much darker) Oscar-nominated movie Winter’s Bone, which as it happens is set sorta kinda in between where Jeremy and I live) – who ends up cutting a deal with, well, molemen he finds underground.

Locus, June 2011

In June, Fantasy offers a science fiction story, with a fantasy theme, zombies: “You Have Been Turned Into a Zombie by a Friend”, by Jeremiah Tolbert. The story is set in high school, and the main character is uneasily perched between the “socialistas”, apparently a “popular” group, and some old rather geekier friends. But her (I assume) geekier instincts save her when a cellphone app starts turning everyone into mindless slaves. Her job is to help her friends escape, and in the process figure out who’s behind things. The villain has an affecting story too, and I quite enjoyed the working out.

Locus, March 2016

I really liked a fantasy by Jeremiah Tolbert in the February Lightspeed, "Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass". It seems that almost everyone in the world is escaping to fantasy worlds via "rabbit holes" -- everyone but Louisa, who desperately wants one of her own. The "real world" is decaying, as more and more people leave, reflected in Louisa's increasingly pointless temp job in a law office, and in her frayed relationship with her sister. Then fantasy creatures begin to colonize our "real world", and Louisa is finally pushed to contemplate what is a "real world" and what is a "rabbit hole" and what is the best way to live your real life?

Locus, September 2016

At the August Lightspeed, I enjoyed Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus”, set in a somewhat climate-altered near future Kansas City. The narrator is an accountant who once dreamed of being a chef, but now sublimates his ambitions to sampling food trucks. He runs into a guy he’d met at a cooking class long before, and ends up with an invitation to the Food Truck Circus, a not quite legal gathering where some truly wild food is offered (like modified tapeworms, that taste good and also consume some of the extra calories you’re ingesting). The plot is a bit slight, mainly concerning the ways the Circus discourages spies, and the resolution, if sensible, comes off a bit flat, but the story is amusing and the food ideas are fun.

I’m not really that into Lovecraftian horror but Swords v. Cthulhu seemed to offer a bit more action, maybe a bit less cosmic despair, than usual, so I looked into. It’s fair to say there’s still some cosmic despair on offer, but plenty of action, and a fair bit of fun. I particularly liked a couple of stories. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The Dreamers of Alamoi”, in which the madman Garen the Undreaming, who never sleeps and has a soul in shards as a result, is engaged by a brother and sister to go to Alamoi, where everyone who gets to close is mentally ensnared to work on a massive edifice. The best thing about this is Garen’s character, and the story is good fun as well.

Locus, October 2017

Lightspeed’s October issue includes a longer than usual original story, a novella called “The Dragon of Dread Peak” by Jeremiah Tolbert. It’s a sequel to “The Cavern of the Screaming Eye”, which appeared in Lightspeed a year ago, and introduced narrator Ivan and his friends, who have formed a team to investigate “dungeonspace”, the various fantastical realms that can be reached from their home city. Their practice runs haven’t been going well since the events of the first story, and the team is in danger of falling apart. And Ivan is still lying to his mother, who doesn’t want him to mess with d-space after his brother died there. And now there’s a new temptation: a desperate attempt to get some credit – and a chance to meet with someone who just might know something about his brother – by dealing with the Wizard Briggsby. But Briggsby wants them to steal from a dragon … This is enjoyable stuff, and it looks liked to be a pretty good YA series of stories (or indeed a novel) in the making.

Birthday Review: The Psi-Power Trilogy, by "Mark Phillips" (Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer)

Birthday Review: The Psi-Power Trilogy, by "Mark Phillips" (Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer)

a review by Rich Horton

Today would have been Randall Garrett's 91st birthday. Garrett was a prolific writer, strongly associated with John Campbell's Astounding. One reason for that was that he would write to order, more or less -- write stuff targeted to his markets. Early in his career, he worked regularly with Robert Silverberg, often in collaboration, using numerous pseudonyms, such that each would use the same pseudonym at the other for solo work, and for collaborations. That had arrangements with a couple of magazines to supply material in bulk, which would largely fill magazine issues under their various names. I recently asked Silverberg who wrote what in an issue that had four stories by Garrett and Silverberg in various combinations under various names. Silverberg couldn't even remember who wrote one of the stories.

It should be said that despite the depiction of Garrett above, as basically a hack, he was capable of pretty solid work. He was a fine comic writer, and a solid plotter. His work is minor, certainly, but much of it is quite entertaining. His best known, and best-loved, works are the Lord Darcy series, set in an alternate history in which magic works, but under strict "scientific" rules.

The end of Garrett's life, alas, was very sad. He contracted encephalitis in 1979, and fell into a coma from which he never woke. He died 8 years later. Just before his illness he had outlined a series of novels, the Gandalara Cycle, and had put together a rough draft of the first novel. That novel was finished by his wife Vicki Ann Heydron, and she wrote the remaining six novels, all of which appeared under their dual byline. I read the first couple, and found them pretty enjoyable.

For his birthday I've resurrected some brief posts I made long ago about three novels he co-wrote with Laurence M. Janifer, under the name Mark Phillips. These were all serialized in Astounding between September 1959 and February 1961. Thus, 9 of 18 issues in that timeframe ran these serials, which is, I am afraid, an indictment of the sorry state of Astounding in that time. They just aren't very good, and as their subject is Psi, one can easily see why Campbell published them. That said, the first of them (and best, I suppose) was (shockingly, to me) nominated for the 1960 Hugo for Best Novel.

(Perhaps I should add that Laurence M. Janifer's name was Larry M. Harris at the time of publication of these stories -- in 1963 he adopted his grandfather's surname.)

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

Brain Twister aka "That Sweet Little Old Lady"

"Mark Phillips" was the pseudonym used by Laurence M. Janifer and Randall Garrett for a series of novels about an FBI agent investigating telepathy related crimes. The first of these was serialized in Astounding in 1959. It seems that a telepath is spying on our atomic scientists.  How to find him?  Our hero has two inspirations: first, find other telepaths (set a thief to catch a thief, see?); second, that telepaths might end up in mental institutions. He strikes paydirt when he finds a little old lady who thinks she is the immortal Elizabeth I of England, but who also is an excellent telepath. With her help he tracks down a number of other telepaths -- most of whom have been driven quite mad by the constant interference of other minds. After a number of adventures, partly caused by "Elizabeth"'s insistence that her entourage of FBI agents and psychiatric help all dress in 16th century togs and accept knighthoods from her, the actual criminal is tracked down.

Very minor stuff, though with a reasonable solution, and OK fun.  Hard to imagine that it got a Hugo nomination, though, but it did.  It seemed clearly written to order to pander to Campbell's obsessions.  It was published in book form as Brain Twister.  The sequels are The Impossibles (which I read a while ago and didn't find even as good as "That Sweet Little Old Lady"), and Supermind.  Five'll get you twenty our hero is a full-blown supertelepath by the end of the series (actually, that's hinted at even in the first book).

The Impossibles aka "Out Like a Light"

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

I read the second in the series as a 1963 Pyramid paperback called The Impossibles, but it was first serialized in Astounding/Analog in 1960 as "Out Like a Light".  Malone is sent to New York to investigate a series of thefts of red Cadillacs, which seem to be impossible.  The cars' locks are untampered with, but the cars are hotwired.  Witnesses have seen the cars drive by themselves.  And a couple of policemen, including on page 1 Malone himself, have been sapped by an apparently invisible person.  The story is pretty routine from there: a lucky break leads FBI guy to the names of the perpetrators, and one of them a) has a beautiful sister to provide a love interest, and b) shows off his power, which is teleportation, in front of Malone.  The book turns on finding a way to keep a teleport imprisoned, since they can jump out of any cell, even leaving handcuffs and shackles behind.  The solution, natch, is unfair: turning on made-up "facts" about teleportation.  The book is breezy and readable, but it also feels very padded, and the story is only so-so.  Not worth looking for.

(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen)

Supermind aka "Occasion for Disaster"

Now, in "Occasion for Disaster", serialized in Analog in 1960/1961, published in book form as Supermind, we learn that various organizations are being harassed by a flood of errors -- accounting mistakes, translation errors, computer problems.  Nothing out of the ordinary, except that there are so many.  It also becomes clear (to the reader -- it takes forever for Malone or anyone in the book to figure this out) that these errors are all affecting bad guys -- the Mafia, corrupt politicians, etc.  While Malone's boss speculates that somebody has spiked the water coolers with hallucinatory drugs, Malone soon decides that a psi power is involved.  Queen Elizabeth soon confirms this -- she has been detecting "telepathic static" while these problems have occurred.  Apparently, some telepath or group of them is interfering with the thought processes of some people just as they do tricky work, leading to the errors.  Malone's investigations take him to a crackpot Psychic society, on the grounds that there might be some golden ideas buried in the dross of their literature.  There he meets a beautiful redheaded secretary.  Soon Malone finds that he himself is being interfered with, as is his boss.  Luckily, he can block out the static -- but he makes little enough progress in solving the problem.  Finally, as civilization basically collapses (essentially because the interference is causing corrupt politicians to resign, but that leaves nobody in charge, since so many pols are corrupt), Malone finally jumps to the right conclusions.

This is the last book in the series, so Garrett and Janifer seem to find it necessary to really up the ante.  Though the book doesn't portray this well, we seem to be left with a major disaster having occurred -- all the industrialized world in really bad shape, millions upon millions dead.  And the authors end up trying to justify this as a good thing.  (The "good" psis are in position to Take Over now, see.)  That didn't go down too well with me.  Plus the ending is a bit flat -- for instance, Malone makes a perfunctory rediscovery that Barbara Wilson is the woman for him, though she has maybe three lines in the book.  And overall, there is a lot of running around to little effect -- not a nicely constructed plot at all.  Weak stuff, motivated, it would seem, by the worst of attempts to pander to John Campbell's obsessions.

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

Ace Double Reviews, 42: Dr. Futurity, by Philip K. Dick/Slavers of Space, by John Brunner

Ace Double Reviews, 42: Dr. Futurity, by Philip K. Dick/Slavers of Space, by John Brunner (#D-421, 1960, $0.35)

by Rich Horton

On the 90th anniversary of Philip K. Dick's birth, I thought I'd repost this review I did long ago of one of his early Ace Doubles.

A pairing of two of the best writers to have been regular Ace Double contributors. John Brunner wrote more Ace Doubles than any other writer (24 halves, under his own name and as by Keith Woodcott). Philip K. Dick wrote 7 Ace Double halves, two of which were later reprinted together.* Dr. Futurity is about 50,000 words, Slavers of Space about 42,000.

(Cover by Ed Valigursky)

I think Dr. Futurity is the earliest of Dick's novels that I have read, though I have read quite a few of his early short stories. [Since writing this review in 2004 I have read two earlier novels: Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint.] It seems uncharacteristic of much of Dick's output. His primary themes, as I see it, are the untrustworthiness of memory, the mutability of reality, suburban life, and paranoia. This book really doesn't take on any of these themes, though it does involve time travel, which Dick uses in some of his other work. On the whole, it strikes me as a rather conventional book for him, though I thought it fairly good -- if by no means as good as the best of Dick's work, rather better than the run of Ace Doubles. It is an expansion of a novella, "Time Pawn", which appeared in the Summer 1954 Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Jim Parsons is a 30ish doctor in about 2012, with a pretty wife and apparently a good life, near San Francisco. Driving into the city in his automatic car one day, he is suddenly in what seems to be an accident. But when he comes to, he finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings. He is, of course, in the future. And it's a strange future -- everyone looks the same, more or less a blend of races (with perhaps an American Indian dominance), and very young. The language is a half-familiar mixture of several other languages. And the first driver he encounters tries to run him over, and appears shocked when Parsons is upset by this.

It turns out that this future society is obsessed with eugenics and physical perfection. All babies are produced from a pool of eggs and sperm saved in something called the Fountain, based on the perceived values of various "tribes". And since disease and injuries are evidence of imperfection, there is no medical treatment, and people routinely offer themselves to be killed. Parsons soon finds himself in trouble for saving the life of a young woman who has been injured. Before long, he is on a spaceship to Mars, to some sort of prison colony.

But then things get a little strange. The spaceship is intercepted, and after some travail, not to mention some time travel, Parsons is in the control of a rebel group of sorts, people of a specific genetic type, including a very beautiful woman. It turns out that these are the people who snatched him out of time, and they want him to use his rare medical knowledge to save one of their leaders. From this point the novel becomes more a time travel book, with several loops through time, and with plots to kill Francis Drake and prevent the English settlement of North America, to the benefit of the Indians. It's all a bit twisty, and reasonably well done, somewhat sweet, pretty interesting. I don't think it all quite works as a whole, and the book strikes me as two different stories uneasily married, but I did enjoy it.

I also find myself enjoying the early John Brunner stories I have encountered in Ace Doubles. The form forced Brunner, it would seem, to concentrate on telling a fast-moving story. This isn't always the best thing, but I think it's something Brunner could do very well. Slavers of Space is a pretty enjoyable short novel, though to be honest it is hampered by an overly rapid resolution. I should note that there is apparently a 1968 expansion called Into the Slave Nebula, which I am rather interested in learning more about.

The book opens with a man called Lars Talibrand (a name I kept misreading as "Taliban", rather unfortunately) being tracked down and murdered in a hotel room on Earth during the planetwide Carnival. A rich and bored young man named Derry Horn discovers his body, and also that of an android who was apparently killed with him. Derry's unexpectedly sympathetic reaction to the android's death impresses another android, the hotel secretary, who pushes him to investigate further. He learns that Talibrand was a "Citizen of the Galaxy", a title unknown on Earth but apparently well respected in the settled planets of the Galaxy. He also finds himself suddenly under attack -- a man challenges him to a duel for no obvious reason.

Derry's family makes robots, which are traded to the colony planets for the more intelligent blue skinned androids, which are made by a monopoly somewhere in the colonies. In retracing Talibrand's steps hoping to find clues to his murder he begins to learn details about the robot/android trade, and some disquieting (and I should add, easily guessed) secrets about android manufacture. He finally comes to Talibrand's home planet, where the news of Talibrand's death comes as a shock to most, who admired him, but somehow doesn't seem so displeasing to Talibrand's brother ... And Derry is suddenly in real trouble

The secret of what's really going on, as I suggested, is pretty simply figured out. And the plot resolution is just way too rapid and easy -- I think the book simply needed to be longer, which would make Derry's eventual triumph more emotionally satisfying. I wonder if such changes are part of Into the Slave Nebula. But it was a fast moving and pretty fun book.

I noted that parallel with Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, as well, including the explicit use of the phrase "Citizen of the Galaxy", as well as a hero who is the scion of a rich Earth family, and a concern with slavery. I cannot but imagine that at least some of this was on purpose.

*The two Dick novels reprinted by Ace in a later Ace Double were this book, Dr. Futurity; and the later novel The Unteleported Man. The Unteleported Man has an interesting publication history: it was originally written as a serial for Amazing or Fantastic. Don Wollheim requested an expansion, but didn't like the result, so chose to publish the shorter serial version as half an Ace Double. Dick returned to the expansion much later, apparently making further changes, and an expanded version was published in the US and UK in the early 80s. I gather that both versions are different, and neither was Dick's preferred text -- Dick had died before the books came out, and some of his changes were lost. The UK version did change the title to Lies, Inc. Only now, in 2004, have Dick's actual final changes been found (evidently misfiled in his estate's papers with the manuscript of another book), and a fairly "official" version of Lies, Inc. has just appeared.

Birthday Review: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

Today is Robert Charles Wilson's 65th birthday. In his honor, here is my review of his most celebrated novel, Spin, which won the 2006 Hugo for Best Novel (and, later, the Japanese translation won the Seiun Award.)

Date: 07 May 2005

Review: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson (2005)

Tor, New York, ISBN: 0765309386, 368 pp, hc, US$25.95

a review by Rich Horton

The first major SF novel from a major publisher in 2005 that I have seen is Robert Charles Wilson's Spin. Wilson is one of my favorite current writers. His recent novels have all been quite striking, and all are based on quite extravagant SF ideas, yet are markedly quiet in tone, and markedly character-based.

Beth Meacham recently complained that SF seems to consist largely of two sorts of books: very mainstream-style books with one modest SFnal idea; or very wildly SFnal books that demand from the reader an intimate knowledge of the field's tropes. Robert Sawyer vs. Charles Stross, one might suggest. Spin, I think, is a counter-example. It is based on a truly audacious central idea, and the idea is quite cleverly extrapolated -- its implications are nicely explored. Yet the heart of the book is an extended look at one man's lifelong friendship/love affair with his boyhood neighbors, a pair of twins, brother and sister; set in a near future not too terribly different from today.

The book alternates sections set, the titles tell us, very far in the future (4 billion A. D.), with near future sections. The narrator is Tyler Dupree, who is undergoing some sort of drastic medical treatment while on the run from U. S. officials. While mentally unbalanced by the treatment he compulsively writes down his memories of his life to date, beginning with the onset of what came to be called "the Spin". One night when Tyler is 12, and his twin friends Jason and Diane are 13, the stars suddenly disappear. Earth is somehow enshrouded -- satellites crash, the Moon is invisible, the Sun still shines but oddly changed. It soon becomes clear that a barrier, eventually called "the Spin", is affecting time oddly -- time outside it passes much more rapidly than on Earth. Space vehicles can be launched and pass through the barrier -- they seem to return instantly, but they observe time passing outside it, and they observe, for instance, the Solar System continuing to evolve, such that after some decades, the Sun will have changed so as to make Earth uninhabitable. Thus, people of Tyler's generation grow up in the knowledge that likely the world will soon end.

Tyler's mother works for Jason and Diane's father as a maid. E. D. Lawton is a powerful defense contractor who is smart enough to be in place to react quickly to the Spin -- for example by setting up a network of aerostats to replace the now defunct GPS satellites. His wife Carol is a former doctor, now an alcoholic. Tyler falls in love with Diane from an early age, but a combination of factors keep them apart. (Tyler's shyness, a perceived class or financial status difference, E. D.'s hostility.)

The three children react differently to the Spin. Jason, to some extent following in his father's footsteps, is desperate to understand it, and perhaps to fix it. Diane is afraid of it, and drifts into a cult which treats the Spin as an harbinger of the Christian End Times. Tyler stays close to Jason, and mostly tries to live a semblance of an ordinary life, becoming a doctor himself. Eventually Jason hires him to work at Perihelion, a corporation cum government agency working to investigate Spin-related phenomena.

The book very successfully combines an involving small-scale story (the story of Tyler's relationship with the Lawton twins, and of the entire world in the shadow of apocalypse) with a fascinating large-scale SF story (the story of the Spin, its origin and the results of some decades of dealing with it). The first story is satisfying enough, but ultimately it is the extrapolations of the effects of the temporal disconnect between Earth and the rest of the universe that are most compelling. Wilson uses this as a way to look at "deep time" through the eyes of contemporary humans. As only a few years pass on Earth while millions of years pass outside the Spin barrier, it is possible to do really long-duration experiments. Some of these have downright cool effects -- I won't detail these here -- I'll leave the surprises to the novel. But Wilson does not cheat the reader -- we do learn pretty much what's going on with the Spin, and why. And it's neat stuff -- though I suppose just mildly less overwhelming than I might have hoped.

Birthday Review: Bugs, by John Sladek

Birthday Review: Bugs, by John Sladek

This would have been John Sladek's 81st  birthday. Sadly, Sladek, one of SF's great satirists, died fairly young in 2000. Sladek was born in Iowa, and lived the last several years of his life in Minnesota, but he spent a couple of decades in England starting in 1966, and he was heavily involved in the English New Wave SF scene at the time, along with another American, his sometime collaborator Thomas M. Disch. Somehow, though I always knew Disch was American, I assumed for a long time that Sladek was British. Anyway, we briefly discussed Sladek as an underrated writer on Greg Feeley's Facebook feed the other day, so it seems appropriate that on this his birthday I repost my review of a book that I received as a gift from Greg.

Bugs, from 1989, is one of Sladek's last novels. It represents him at his most darkly satirical. It's about a British man rather bewilderedly encountering the American scene: as such it reminded me of a couple of books by Amises: Kingsley's One Fat Englishman, and much more closely, Martin's Money, which is a near contemporary to Bugs. All those books are satirical, and Money shares with Bugs a truly bitter edge, though Money is longer, dirtier, more vulgarly over the top. (And I didn't like it as much -- it's not a book I like much at all, though I gather it is regarded by some as Martin Amis's best book.)

Bugs' story opens with Manfred ("Fred") Jones, a failed English novelist, trying to find the offices of Vimnut, a Minneapolis company for whom he hopes to become a technical writer. When he finally finds it (this having been complicated by among other things the company having changed its name) he is hired, after certain mixups, as a software engineer. (I am of course a software engineer, and these aspects of the book were pretty funny and fairly true to life.) It seems that his resume was confused with that of Mansour Jones, a black man fully qualified for the job. Fred is afraid to complain that he isn't qualified, and it soon appears that that doesn't matter.

Fred's department is charged with developing a robot officer for the military. His coworkers are variously completely insane, completely idiotic, or simply burnt out. Somehow the robot still manages to get built, though in the manner of numerous Sladek robots (robots were probably his chief SFnal device) it turns out to be murderous in a very funny way.

Fred himself has more significant personal problems to deal with. His wife has left him because she can't stand America. This doesn't seem to affect his sex life much: before long he has three women on a string, without really trying: a Russian spy, the sex-mad wife of his boss (who keeps asking him to imitate different famous Englishmen), and a beautiful co-worker with whom he falls immediately and desperately in love, to her initial feminist disgust. Fred also keeps getting fired and rehired, he somehow never gets paid by the company, Mansour Jones hounds him about stealing his rightful job, his insane co-worker tries to kill him ... and of course when the robot escapes he's really in trouble.

It's a very funny, very dark book. All ends terribly -- though in a way that seems, if not pasted on, not really necessary -- the ending could have plausibly gone quite differently, and many writers (Kingsley Amis probably, but not Martin Amis) would have resolved it more happily. But that's not Sladek's way, for sure.

Old Bestseller: The Sprightly Romance of Marsac, by Molly Elliot Seawell

Old Bestsellers: The Sprightly Romance of Marsac, by Molly Elliot Seawell

a review by Rich Horton

Molly Elliot Seawell (1860-1916) came from a fairly prominent Virginia family. Her Great-Uncle was President John Tyler. She was self-educated, but quite well, and she turned to writing about when her father died, when she was still fairly young. She supported her mother and the rest of her family with her writing income -- she wrote short stories, seafaring books for boys, articles, and other novels. She was fiercely proud of her ability to support her family with her writing income, and at the same time she was very traditional in her beliefs, and made a big splash with an essay called "On the Absence of Creative Faculty in Women". Her socially conservative views, and her Virginian upbringing, contributed to a fairly racist (in the paternalist sense) view of African Americans -- happily, the novel at hand, set in France, does not feature those views. She traveled extensively, in part in search of relief from her health problems, which contributed to her death at the young age of 56.

She was quite popular in her time, perhaps especially for books for boys, but she is all but forgotten now. The Sprightly Romance of Marsac was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1897, though it is copyright 1896. A note states that it obtained the first prize of $3000 for the best novelette in an 1895 New York Herald competition. The book is something less than 30,000 words, so it's possible the prize-winning novelette was the same length, though I suspect it may have been shorter. It is illustrated, quite nicely, by Gustave Verbeek.

The novel is a very light and enjoyable piece of fluff. Marsac and his friend Fontaine are impecunious journalists. The opening shows them avoiding a series of importunations by their creditors, until Marsac is trapped by there imposing landlady, a widow named Madame Fleury. In something of a panic, Marsac, who is constitutionally opposed to marriage, deflects a proposal by the widow that he marry her in exchange for the forgivement of his back rent by instead suggesting Fontaine as the groom. So Fontaine ends up engaged to Madame Fleury -- but of course she is rather older than he, and anyway he is in love with one Claire Duval, the daughter of a wealthy tradesman.

Marsac promises to extract Fontaine from his engagement, but there is still the problem of their debts. His next scheme is to invent a rich uncle for Fontaine -- using Fontaine's real Uncle Maurice, who has emigrated to American, as the basis. They create a fake obituary for Maurice, along with the suggestion that he has left a couple million francs to Fontaine. And then they find that the mere expectation of an inheritance solves their money problems -- and also solves some other issues. Suddenly their artistic endeavors -- a play and a painting -- are in demand, as is Marsac's journalism, as long as it is signed by the presumably rich Fontaine.

And, too, M. Duval is suddenly much more accepting of Fontaine's attraction to his daughter. Marsac transforms their creditors, including a Madame Fleury, into nobility -- and all of a sudden M. Duval and Mme. Fleury are an item. Things are also going well for Fontaine and his beloved. And Claire's sister Delphine, a "New Woman" who is opposed to marriage, meets Marsac, and sparks fly -- the two are in desperate love immediately, but both are forced by their pride and their previously state views on marriage, to deny their attraction.

You can guess what comes next -- Uncle Maurice returns. Now what? If he's not dead, there can be no inheritance. And what of Fontaine's still extant "betrothal" to Mme. Fleury? And will Delphine and Marsac resolve their manufactured differences? Without their fictional inheritance and its benefits, how will Marsac and Fontaine pay their debts? Well, is their any doubt everything will work out? Of course not. Indeed, the resolution is rather too rapid, and somewhat anticlimatic. But the book as a whole, while nothing earthshattering, is for much of its length enjoyable fun, if totally implausible.

Birthday Review: Stories of C. S. E. Cooney

Today is Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney's birthday. She is one of the best, and also most sheerly enjoyable, writers working in our field today. She's also a friend of mine, so if you want to take my words with a grain of salt, do so -- but do so at your peril! Here's a compilation of most (but not all) of my reviews of her short fiction to date:

Locus, January 2008

The best story from the online Summer issue of Subterranean is also dark fantasy, this time blackly humorous: “Stone Shoes”, by C. S. E. Cooney, about Jack Yap and his brother Pudding and their Marm and a skinchanger’s egg – linguistically inventive, and slyly vicious.

Locus, June 2009

Belatedly I’ll catch up with Subterranean’s online offerings. From Winter my favorite is C. S. E. Cooney’s “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden”, which plays ecstatic games with Russian fantastical traditions – a Scarecrow, the Firebird, Koshchei the Deathless, Baba Yaga, and lots of Ivans. Cooney is always gleefully imaginative, and very fun – with rather a sinister edge.

Locus, July 2010

One of the latter is my favorite in Clockwork Phoenix 3: C. S. E. Cooney’s “Braiding the Ghosts”, in which a girl goes to her grandmother after her mother’s death, and learns from the older woman the secret of “braiding” ghosts – which is to say enslaving them. So ghosts are the servants of the older woman. But the girl is not so happy with this … especially when she falls for the ghost she is forced to braid. And the ghosts – are they happy? Read the story and find out … lovely stuff.

Locus, December 2010

C. S. E. Cooney’s The Big Bah-Ha is a novella published as an ebook by Drollerie Press. It’s a very imaginative work, at once a stark post-apocalyptic tale and a strange, sometimes quite dark, but never dour, afterlife fantasy. Beatrice is the leader of a small children’s gang in a world of only children – a disease called the “slaprash” kills everyone at about puberty (meaning, of course, that the end of the world is less than some dozen years away). Then Beatrice comes to in a rather surrealistic environment. She must negotiate her new world – “the Big Bah-Ha” – with a strange clown and menacing Gacy Boys and so on. And back in the “real world”, the rest of her gang vows to confront one of the Tall Ones, the Flabberghast, and beg for help to find Beatrice. Cooney’s imagery and invention is as fevered as always with her work, and her control of tone is perfect – this is a terribly sad future but the story is never morose, always oddly hopeful, even as the ending is uncompromising but still oddly hopeful.

Locus, May 2011

Strange Horizons for March features another strong piece from C. S. E. Cooney. “The Last Sophia”, about a girl enslaved by “the Gentry” to breed children for them – at any rate, she’s under someone’s control, if not the Gentry then her mother or an Aunt, and the story turns on her efforts to escape.

Locus, July 2013

I really like the work of C. S. E. Cooney – one of the really gifted young storytellers we have. At Giganatosaurus for May she contributes “Martyr's Gem”. Shursta Sarth is a poor fisherman, not much of a catch, living in a small village on the Last Isle with his lame sister. He is then shocked to be chosen for “meshing” by Hyrryai Blodestone, a daughter of one of the most prestigious families on the Last Isle, living in the capital city . Hyrryai's reasons are at one level predictable – her sister was murdered, and her only interest is finding the killer, but her culture's mores demand she “mesh” (to preserve the species, after the Nine Cities fell beneath the sea). Well, we can see where this is going, mostly, and indeed it goes there – but the getting there is a delight, partly in the world-  and culture-building, and mainly in the telling, and especially in the voice of Shursta's sister Sharrar.

Locus, September 2014

Strange Horizon's July stories include two frankly erotic pieces. ... “Witch, Beast, Saint: an Erotic Fairy Tale”, by C. S. E. Cooney, is considerably superior. It's kind of related to “Beauty and the Beast”, with the narrator a witch who is beguiled by a man enchanted to beasthood – sufficiently so that she doesn't want to change him back to a man. But then a (likewise beguiling) man shows up, who seems to be a saint, with the mission of changing beasts to men. What's a witch to do when her beloved beast is changed against her will? Especially when he returns to her and begs to be changed back? Cooney as ever is witty, and her thinking is very slanty indeed; and the story is both a good story and effectively erotic as well.

Locus, November 2014

The Witch's Garden series is an ongoing set of somewhat erotic tales from C. S. E. Cooney. One appeared in Strange Horizons, and another longer one  is available in electronic form at Amazon: The Witch in the Almond Tree. Mar is a very talented witch at the Conservatory of Spellbinding and the Beguiling Arts in Doornwald, with a boyfriend she likes and who is good in bed (but who also likes lots of other girls and boys), and good marks at school, but not much money. So she agrees to visit her mother, with whom she has a tense relationship, and her mother's new husband, for one summer, to save money and to help her sometimes careless mother. When she gets there she finds the new husband a nice enough man, an almond grower; and she is quite taken with his son, who is about her own age. But something is strange about her mother … not to mention that her new stepbrother is confined to the almond farm by the spirit of his dead mother, plus the local tales of a haunted juniper tree. Soon it seems that some magical expertise might be called for – but is she up to it? Cooney is a natural storyteller with an easy way with her characters, and the story is a delight to read, with plausible and interesting magic (plausible in context), and with a tense and exciting plot.

Locus, July 2015

Bone Swans is a collection of five recent novellas from C. S. E. Cooney. All the stories are very good, and one of them is new to the collection: “The Bone Swans of Amandale”. This story is one of a couple in the book that takes as its basis a familiar fairy tale (here, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, elsewhere in the book “Rumpelstilskin”), but which changes it utterly. Maurice is a Rat Person hopelessly in love with Dora Rose, a Swan Person. (Being a clever and cynical rat, he copes pretty well though.) When Dora Rose's sister is murdered as part of a complex plot by the Amandale's mayor, who wants to make an orchestra of “bone swans”, Maurice decides something has to be done, for the sake of the swans, and indeed for the city's children, who are being misused as well in the mayor's service, so he goes to his friend, a reluctant piper. The Pied Piper story is all there of course, but just as a skeleton on which to hang multiple intersecting motivations. And the key is as ever the telling, and Maurice's voice.


Locus, July 2016

I also liked a warm collaboration from C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, “The Book of May”, told in correspondence, about two old friends, one of whom is dying of cancer, and her last wish: to be planted and become a Dragon. The idea is fine, but the story works because of the voices.

Locus, January 2018

I was fortunate to hear C. S. E. Cooney tease the first half of “Though She Be But Little” at Boskone last year, but I had to wait until the September/October Uncanny to find out how it ends. This is Cooney at her strangest, set in a world suddenly and weirdly altered, with a silver sky and stuffed animals named Captious and Bumptious and a parrot named George Sand – and Emma Anne, who must confront the dangerous Loping Man. It is weirder than I can describe, really, and funny without being quite funny at the core, and quite something.

Locus, February 2019

Sword and Sonnet is an anthology devoted to “women or non-binary battle poets”, possibly a bit too specific a remit for a book, but still one that has engendered some impressive stories. Best here is “As for Peace, Call it Murder”, by C. S. E. Cooney. This is SF, not usually Cooney’s genre, but it’s strong work, about Quatromanni, a singer of protest songs against an oppressive regime. The story is told long after her death, when she is remembered as the War-Ender, even though she was captured and had her tongue cut out by the regime. But her songs lived, and how they lived is what makes the story.

Birthday Review: Stories of Tim Pratt

Today is the birthday of my Locus colleague Tim Pratt. Tim is also a very fine writer, perhaps best known for a long series of fun urban fantasy novels about a witch called Marla Mason. More recently, he has begun a cool SF series, with The Wrong Stars and The Dreaming Stars. He also continues to write strong short fiction, much of it at his Patreon. In honor of his birthday, here's a compilation of my Locus reviews of his short fiction.

Locus, August 2002

The August Realms of Fantasy features Tim Pratt's "The Witch's Bicycle", one of the longest stories I've seen there. It's a novelette about a witch meddling with three high school students: a shy boy, the athletic and pretty new girl in town, and a bully. Each of the kids must somehow break out of a certain mold to frustrate the witch.  A fine young adult fantasy.

Locus, February 2003

The February Realms of Fantasy opens with two rather long stories (for them), and both are quite good. The prize is Tim Pratt's "Fable from a Cage", a nasty story about a thief captured by a witch who needs him to help her steal something of great value to her. It will surprise no one that both characters have treachery in mind, and Pratt twistily and cynically shows serial betrayals.

Locus, August 2003

Urban Fantasy is another "borderline" subgenre with points of contact with slipstream. Realms of Fantasy publishes a fair amount of Urban Fantasy, such as Tim Pratt's "Down With the Lizards and the Bees" (August). A man still mourning his dead lover serves as a guide to the underworld for others who have lost loves. But he learns that these modern day Orpheuses pay a harsh cost for their trip. Can he make himself pay the same price?

Locus, December 2003

Tim Pratt has been consistently impressive for Realms of Fantasy, and "Romanticore" is another strong story. Ray is drifting through life, and he's just lost his latest girlfriend to his best friend. But he meets a new woman named Lily, and rebound or not this relationship seems particularly special. But she warns him from the start that it's only temporary -- her boyfriend is a traveling musician on tour in Europe, and when he comes back, it's over. And so it turns out, but it's hard for Ray to let go, particularly given the scary dreams in which he becomes a lion. Which leads him into scary territory when he encounters Lily again, and her sinister boyfriend.

Locus, November 2005

So again in October. The best of another steady group in Realms of Fantasy is probably Tim Pratt and Greg van Eekhout’s “Robots and Falling Hearts”, about a man investigating a “plague of robots”. It seems that all of a sudden robots of all sorts are appearing – apparently quite functional (if odd), but entirely unexplained. The narrator finds a woman near the epicenter of the plague, and learns from her something of her involvement in the plague – all the while falling in love. But the story has a stranger turn or two to take – quite weird and intriguing.

Locus, June 2006

Among the shorter stories in the July Asimov's I particularly liked Tim Pratt’s “Impossible Dreams”, a “mysterious shop” story. This time the shop is a video store, with treasures such as the director’s cut of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and the George Raft version of Casablanca. That’s the hook, and Pratt sets it with a sweet romance between two movie nuts: the geeky young man who discovers the shop, and the girl at the counter.

Locus, November 2006, review of Polyphony 6, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake

Tim Pratt’s “The Crawlspace of the World” is another weird one, as a young man follows an old girlfriend into the title area, a classic “bigger on the inside than the outside” space, to confront a sort of dragon.

Locus, December 2006

One of the new entries in online publishing is Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, which has published three issues in the past year or so. The October issue includes a fascinating and decidedly odd piece from Tim Pratt, “Dream Engine”. The narrator is a disembodied intelligence keeping tabs on a shapeshifter named Howlaa Moor, who is in the employ of the Regent of a city called Nexington-on-Axis. This city is at the hub of multiple dimensions, and its trade is in stuff grabbed from these other dimensions – but some of this stuff can be dangerous. Howlaa is assigned to track a serial killer who mysteriously appears and disappears in the city – an assignment which will involve Howlaa and the narrator in the Regent’s own intrigues. Neat stuff.

Locus, May 2007, review of John Klima's Logorrhea

Tim Pratt’s “From Around Here” is a strong urban fantasy. A wandering “land spirit” of sorts incorporates in a human body periodically – this time in a San Francisco neighborhood that seems unusually troubled. He must track down the source of the trouble, the while beginning a promising love affair – but his lot, it seems, is one of sacrifice.

Locus, October 2007

Strange Horizons in late July and early August features two very good stories. Tim Pratt’s “Artifice and Intelligence” is a clever and pointed – and funny – story. The Indian call centers unite to form a powerful AI. Various other organizations scramble to produce their own AI, including a crackpot scientist who summons the ghosts of historical villains to animate his creations, and a nascent witch who manages to summon a marsh spirit to her PDA. What happens when these new intelligences meet the Indian AI is not quite what we expect.

Locus, August 2009

Now to Interzone #222 (it now ties New Worlds as the UK SF publication with the most issues). Tim Pratt’s “Unexpected Outcomes” opens on 9/11, with the apparently Tim Pratt-like narrator and his girlfriend witnessing the attack on the World Trade Center – but history changes weirdly at this point, as the second plane stops in the air, and it soon becomes clear that the story is set within a simulation of the “real world”, a simulation which has been discontinued. This knowledge – of everything’s unreality – naturally causes a lot of disruption, but the narrator and some others eventually come to a realization that the simulation story has some (sometimes literal!) holes in it, and also that there “unreality” gives them a certain freedom. Thoughtful work.

Locus, September 2009

Strange Horizons recently has featured a couple of playful stories that I’ve really enjoyed. Tim Pratt’s “Another End of the Empire” is about a Dark Lord who in an attempt to undermine the traditional prophecy that a child born in a certain place will overthrow him ends up Doing Good. It’s predictable perhaps, but very cute.

Locus, November 2009

There’s more good stuff at Tor.com. “Silver Linings”, by Tim Pratt, is to begin with a pirate story plus an airship story – a combination I find irresistible. In this case the pirates aren’t true pirates so much as thieves – of the silver found in clouds. Alas, that has dire consequences for people underneath the clouds. The narrator tells of his ship’s last venture – the law, it seems, finally catches up with them. But he has his own, quite unexpected, secret. Very enjoyable.

Locus, March 2010

Also at the Fall 2009 issue of Subterranean is a sweet Tim Pratt piece, “Troublesolving”, about a man having a lot of trouble in his life and the woman he meets who promises to solve his problems: problems that end up involving time traveling plotters.

Birthday Review: Heart of Veridon (and two other stories), by Tim Akers

Today is Tim Akers' birthday. Tim has been publishing intriguing dark fantasy, with a steampunkish feel to much of it, since 2004. This includes six novels, including two Veridon novels, a standalone called The Horns of Ruin, and a trilogy called The Hallowed War, which concluded with The Winter Vow this year. I reviewed his first novel, Heart of Veridon, for Fantasy Magazine, and I've reviewed a couple of his short stories at Locus. I've reposted these reviews here, for his birthday.

Heart of Veridon, by Tim Akers (Solaris, Nottingham, UK, 978-1-84416-759-3, $7.99, mmpb, 475 pages) October 2009

A review by Rich Horton

Heart of Veridon is Tim Akers’s first novel. He’s a native of North Carolina, now resident in Chicago, but he is probably not well known to many Americans, as the bulk of his short fiction has appeared in Interzone. His work had caught my eye, though, particularly a couple of short stories set in the same steampunk fantasy world as this novel: “The Algorithm” (Interzone, 2007) and “A Soul Stitched to Iron” (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume 3, 2009). This book realized the promise of those stories very nicely – though it is unmistakably a first novel, with the sort of flaws one expects in early work.

The narrator is Jacob Burn, disgraced scion of one of the Founding Families of Veridon. We meet him on an airship about to crash, as a petty criminal he barely knows gives him a mysterious “Cog” – a piece of clockwork that, it soon becomes clear, is desperately desired by several very different factions, including at least two different sides of Veridon’s ruling class, and also including some entities from well outside the city. Burn has become a petty sort of criminal himself, working in association with a whore named Emily for whom he has perhaps unwise feelings, and working for a mostly clockwork crime boss named Valentine. When his latest assignment, to deliver a package at the country house of one of his old Founder friends, Angela Tomb, goes pear-shaped he finds himself, along with Emily and a spider-like nonhuman named Wilson, on the run from the various groups chasing the Cog.

There’s plenty of action, well enough described but often a bit unconvincing. Jacob himself is nearly unkillable, but that’s effectively explained (he has been implanted with clockwork of his own, part of a failed (for interesting reasons) attempt to become an airship Pilot.) But too often the solution to problems is to shoot his way out, through quite a few supposedly competent adversaries. (Who do win, short term, on occasion, it should be said.) Much more interesting than the action is the setting, which as I said earlier is “fantasy steampunk”, and pretty pure steampunk – airships, clockwork people, the criminal element, and plenty of attitude. This is fun reading, and it ends up nicely underpinned by a gothic history for Veridon. The story’s arc promises tragedy, and we get that, with some hope, and some cynicism. Once senses that Veridon should be on the verge of a transformation, and that doesn’t really happen, but I think the slightly muted ending, if a bit disappointing, is also honest and realistic.

In the end, Heart of Veridon is an enjoyable novel, absorbing reading with plenty of color and action. The prose is mostly fine, if on occasion a bit too contemporary/colloquial for my taste. The setting is the real star. It’s not a perfect book, but it is a very promising debut.

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Two stories by Tim Akers

Locus, June 2017

In the March-April Interzone I also enjoyed a quite thoroughly strange story by Tim Akers, “A Death in the Wayward Drift”, about a young man, an initiate of the water caste, and the death by drowning of one of his fellows while trying to repair some sort of engine of water. Charged with the proper burial of the dead man, he journeys and encounters a young woman, an initiate of wood, with her own concerns about the strangely walking trees … It is, as I said, thoroughly strange, and very usefully so.

Locus, May 2009

From The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume 3, Tim Akers’s “A Soul Stitched to Iron” is set in a fantastical city – almost perhaps a “New Weird” milieu, with something like zombies – but again perhaps there is a baroque short of SFnal rationale to it. In the story a young man who has turned away from his highborn family to a life of crime returns to his birth environment to try to understand what’s driving a newly influential family in disturbing directions.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Beth Bernobich

Beth Bernobich is exactly 1 day younger than yesterday's birthday subject, M. Rickert (which makes them both just a couple of months younger than me). Beth wrote a lot of exciting short fiction in the 2000s, then turned to novels -- a fantasy series collectively called River of Souls for Tor, and a fun YA fantasy, Fox and Phoenix. I hadn't seen anything for a few years, but just this year, under the name Claire O'Dell, she published an intriguing looking novel, A Study in Honor, the first of the Janet Watson chronicles, which (as the title of the first book and the name of the narrator suggest) puts versions of Holmes and Watson, who happen to be women and black, into a near-future dystopian US.

Here's a compilation of my reviews of her short fiction. (I also reviewed Fox and Phoenix for Black Gate.)

Locus, April 2003

Also of note is "Poison" by Beth Bernobich (posted January 20/27 at Strange Horizons), at 12,000 words perhaps the longest story yet featured at Strange Horizons. This story recalls Le Guin and Arnason, as well as Strange Horizons regular M. C. A. Hogarth, in that it depicts a human-like people with a different sexual nature. "Poison" is about a pair of tikaki, who can change their sex at will once they reach maturity. The narrator has not yet "ripened", but his/her companion, Yenny, has, and this ability makes Yenny a valuable prostitute. A new client, however, is using Yenny is some way as to make him/her ill, and the story turns on finding out what this client is plotting, which also reveals some of the story behind the tikakis' place in this alien society.

Locus, July 2003

I found the second issue of the overtly slipstream anthology Polyphony (edited by Deborah Layne with Jay Lake) even better than the first. ... Another fine story is Beth Bernobich's "Chrysalide", about a court painter whose success is based on her power to draw the "spirit", as it were, from her subjects to the painting, at a terrible cost.

Locus, April 2006

Asimov’s for June features one longish novelette and a passel of short stories. The novelette, “A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange”, is the first Asimov’s appearance for a very promising newer writer, Beth Bernobich. Simon Madoc is a mathematics student whose twin sister, Gwyn seems to have been driven mad by mathematics. We soon gather that this is in a parallel world of some sort: it feels a bit like Edwardian England but the city is called Awveline and the country Èireann, and other countries mentioned include familiar ones like Estonia and unfamiliar ones like Lîvod. Math is different, too: Simon is studying theories about the electrical properties of certain equations. And now Simon is at the center of a murder investigation, as several of his student friends have died in mysterious circumstances. This is all quite interesting, but in the end I wasn’t convinced. But I was intrigued: and I want to see more from Bernobich.

Locus, December 2007

September/October’s Interzone has a series of interesting stories … Beth Bernobich’s “A Handful of Pearls” is effectively creepy in portraying an unpleasant viewpoint character – a scientist whose girlfriend has left him – we slowly gather, because of his bad behavior – and we slowly are drawn into his abuse of a young humanoid girl they discover on an isolated island. What I wanted more of was the background – this seems to be set on an intriguingly different parallel Earth, but we don’t really learn enough about that.

Locus, September 2008

Somewhat belatedly I should mention a very fine story at Subterranean Magazine’s online edition for Spring. (I confess I have a hard time delineating the beginning and end of their issues.) “Air and Angels”, by Beth Bernobich, has an almost steampunk setup, with a young Victorian man meeting a fascinating pair of sisters, and being drawn briefly into their lives. The ladies are scientifically talented, and fascinated by astronomy – and it turns out they have a striking plan – which rather explicitly echoes a famous feminist SF story, given an intriguing alternate perspective by the Victorian setting.

Locus, October 2008

And among a host of first-rate work at Postscripts – the stories above, plus a fine Luff Imbry story from Matthew Hughes and solid work from Justina Robson, Eric Brown, and Paul DiFilippo among other, one story stands out. This is “The Golden Octopus” by Beth Bernobich (yet another writer exactly my age!). This intriguingly parallels her arresting earlier piece “A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange”. It follows the young Queen of Éirann (an alternate Ireland), as she juggles statecraft, her desire to support a researcher’s efforts to develop a form of time travel, her potential but unrealizable interest in her chief bodyguard and her politically more acceptable romance with the researcher, and finally a scary series of strange murders. The wrenching ending turns on the expectable but often unthought results of successful time travel.

Locus, December 2009

Speaking of PS Publishing and steampunk, they have put out Beth Bernobich’s first book, Ars Memoriae, a novella set in her somewhat steampunkish alternate history in which Queen Aíne rules in Éireann, a version of Ireland that occupies more or less the place of England as something like World War I looms. Commander Adrian Dee, still tortured by memories of another past, is sent by his Queen on a mission to Central Europe to uncover plots that may lead to a war involving the Prussian Empire, Austria, Montenegro … all this involving revolutionaries in Montenegro, a traitor in Éireann, and, naturally, a strong beautiful woman whose loyalties Dee cannot at first know … It’s fun stuff, but just a bit more routine than Bernobich’s previous Éireann stories. Still – there is surely more to come, perhaps even a novel, and Bernobich remains one of the most exciting newer writers we have.

Locus, September 2010

Beth Bernobich has not yet published a novel (though Passion Play is forthcoming this fall), but her short fiction has been very impressive, in particular several stories set in an alternate history dominated by a version of Ireland called Éireann. A Handful of Pearls collects much of her non- Éireann short fiction, which is also quite worth your while. The one new story, “Jump to Zion”, is fine work, if not her best, about a colony of former slaves who have escaped (where is not quite clear) only to form a new society again based on slavery. The heroine has struggled to buy herself something like freedom, but cannot guarantee the same for her daughter, and so is tempted by the violence urged by her former lover – only violence seems ever a mistake.

Birthday Review: Stories of M. Rickert

Today is the birthday of the exceptional writer Mary Rickert, who publishes as M. Rickert. Certainly her short fiction deserves celebration on this occasion -- so here's a compilation of some of my Locus reviews, plus a brief review of her collection Map of Dreams that I did for Fantasy Magazine.

Locus, August 2002

The cover story for the August F&SF is M. Rickert's "Leda", a clever modern-day retelling of the story of Leda and the swan: what if a swan really did rape a contemporary woman?  How would she, and the rest of the world, react?  It's nicely told, with an effective variety of voices and tones.

Locus, August 2003

F&SF for August ... Best this month, though, was M. Rickert's "The Chambered Fruit", a ghost story. An artist's daughter is abducted and murdered by a man she met under a false guise on the Internet. The heart of the story is the mother's battle with grief, and her involvement with an odd girl who claims to hear from the dead daughter's ghost.


Locus, September 2005

SCI FICTION for August ... Better is M. Rickert's "Anyway", about a single mother with a son ready to join the military, her dying mother and cranky father, and her memories of her beloved brother who was murdered young. Her mother has a family history about sons and going to war and saving the world and guilt – and a choice no parent should have to make.

Locus, May 2006

The May F&SF includes a couple of striking dark stories. One of the best stories of 2006 is M. Rickert’s beautiful horror story “Journey Into the Kingdom”. The story is well-framed, to begin with: a young man at an art show reads a journal/story accompanying a painting. The story tells of a girl growing up as a lighthouse keeper, whose father’s ghost returns again and again, often with other ghosts. She falls in love with one of the ghosts, who tells in turn his story, of an attempt to escape his jealous father, which leads to both father and son dying. The son reveals that he is a special ghost, who comes to life via the breath of mortals: best obtained by a kiss. And it seems that this girl – the artist, we gather – has become one such ghost. But of course this is just a story. Back in the initial frame, the gallery visitor falls for the artist, who seems resistant to his advances. Perhaps she doesn’t want to steal his breath? And then the story takes another dark turn – and another. This is lovely work, beautifully written, fascinatingly imagined, and resolved with that perfect touch of ambiguity that, done right, perfectly enhances a certain sort of contemporary fantasy.

Locus, December 2006

December’s F&SF features as usual a Christmas story – quite a different one – for one thing, it is also a Halloween story. M. Rickert’s “The Christmas Witch” is another outstanding piece from this wonderful writer. Rachel Boyle and her father have moved to a small Massachusetts town after her mother’s death. Rachel learns some stories about Wilmot Redd, famous in the town for having been executed for witchcraft. She begins to collect bones, and makes friends (of a sort) with a boy she stays with after school. But Rachel seems in contact with some variety of real witchcraft – more real than anyone else will credit. Rickert, as ever, takes the story in unexpected directions, often uncomfortable, quite spooky and convincing.

Locus, March 2007

M. Rickert’s “Memoirs of a Deer Woman” is another first rate piece, quite simply described: a woman becomes a deer, and her husband follows her as best he can. I can’t say much more – Rickert’s prose and insight make the story work.

Locus, January 2008

And finally, I find myself a bit behind in covering Subterranean magazine, after its online migration. First I should note the final print issue, #7, guest edited by Ellen Datlow, which has in particular a strong M. Rickert story, “Holiday”, about a man whose father was convicted of child abuse, and who is writing a book absolving his father – but who is haunted by a young girl who seems to be an abuse victim. The story turns darker and darker, and we aren’t sure in the end how deep the stain of child abuse has spread.

Locus, October 2009

M. Rickert’s “The President’s Book Tour” probably reads as SF to most, as it seems to be set in the future, a future in which a devastating war has caused all the children to be deformed, vegetation to be killed, etc. But the manner of telling – the tone, and the almost fable-like disconnection of the setting – reminded me very strongly of Emshwiller.

Review of Map of Dreams for Fantasy Magazine

M. Rickert is easily one of the most exciting new writers to appear in the fantasy field over the past several years. Her stories are lyrical and odd, often myth-derived, often intriguingly framed. Story collections for new writers who have not yet published a novel used to be rare but they are common these days – sometimes such collections seem too early, but for Rickert such a collection is if anything overdue. And indeed in a sense she has now published a novel: the title story, new to this collection, is novel length at about 40,000 words. (“Map of Dreams”, along with several vignettes also new here, serves as a curious sort of frame for the book – appropriate as Rickert is a contemporary master of the frame story.)  It is an absorbing and moving story of a woman overcome by grief after her daughter is murdered by a sniper. Her marriage collapsing, she follows the husband of another of the sniper’s victims to Australia, convinced that he has learned time travel. This is fine work, but the resolution is a bit too pat, and over its length it loses some focus. But this book also includes some truly outstanding shorter works, beginning with her first published story, “The Girl Who Ate Butterflies”. Other favorites of mine include “Anyway”, about the agony of a woman whose son is about to join the military, and the terrible choice she is offered; and “The Chambered Fruit”, a bit reminiscent of “Map of Dreams” as it tells of a mother battling with her grief about her murdered daughter, and the effect on her of a girl who claims to hear from the daughter’s ghost; and “Angel Face”, about a supposed image of the Virgin, and a boy taken with a skeptical girl. Rickert also takes on the story of Leda and the Nativity Story in unusual ways. This is an essential collection by a superb writer.

Birthday Review: Stories of Albert E. Cowdrey

Yesterday, December 8, was the 85th birthday of Albert E. Cowdrey, long a rival of Robert Reed for F&SF's most prolific contributor. The great bulk of his work is darkly humorous fantasy, mostly set in or near New Orleans, though his only novel, Crux, is time travel SF, and he has written other SF as well. He's a consistently entertaining writer, and in his honor, here's a compilation of some of my Locus reviews of his work:

Locus, March 2002

The final story in the trio of long novellas under consideration is Albert E. Cowdrey's "Ransom" (F&SF, April).  This is the third in Cowdrey's series of stories set in a far future under totalitarian rule, all turning around time travel.  Hastings Maks, hero of a previous story, is divorced from his first wife and married to a woman he illegally brought back from the past.  His son (by his first wife) is kidnapped, and Maks receives a ransom request – he must go back to the past and rescue a young boy who is destined to die a nuclear war.  At the same time Maks' wife is becoming dangerously involved with an unscrupulous financier who has been taken to the future to help the Empress locate precious items in the ruins of America.  As with the other stories in this series, it is fast moving and the plot involves both the complications of time travel, and the political manipulations of the Security department for which Maks works.  It is nothing more than solid adventure, but it's a good example of such, and I liked it a lot.

Locus, April 2003

Albert E. Cowdrey is back with another amusing but dark look at crime in New Orleans, "The Dog Movie". A detective investigating a series of crimes befriends an old man, a potential victim, who claims his dead wife talks to him on his old TV. Cowdrey's evocation of the voices of his characters is as ever a delight.

Locus, July 2004

Rather more serious is Albert E. Cowdrey's "A Balance of Terrors". An embittered biomedical researcher meets her long ago lover, a very politically connected man, for lunch. We quickly cotton to the researcher's distaste for humankind, and to a certain resemblance to Tiptree's brilliant "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain", but Cowdrey avoids a slavish retelling of the earlier story, instead adding a morally evocative closing twist.

Locus, August 2004

F&SF for August is also strong. The cover novella is Albert E. Cowdrey's "The Tribes of Bela", fairly traditional biological SF from a writer better known for his offbeat tales of New Orleans. A mysterious series of murders on the planet Bela brings Colonel Roger Kohn to investigate. With the help of a few of the humans at this mining colony, and despite what seems to be obstruction by many others, he slowly comes to a realization that part of the answer lies with the very strange biology of this planet, a biology resulting from its eccentric orbit. But before he can take action, things go pear-shaped, leading to an action-filled denouement.

Locus, March 2005

Albert Cowdrey has a fine novelet here as well: "The Amulet". A writer interviewing "characters" from New Orleans stumbles across a woman who claims to have been born in "1294. Or maybe five." She tells him a story about an amulet that gives the wearer good luck – for a time. But the instructions for its use are important! And besides luck it proffers another gift. The story is quite funny, historically acute (and cute), told in a well-rendered deadpan voice – and with a nice twist to close things.

Locus, March 2006

The March F&SF features a dryly amusing novella from Albert Cowdrey, something of a change of pace from the bulk of his work. For one thing, “The Revivalist” is set primarily in Baltimore, as opposed to New Orleans. The narrator wakes in a hospital in 1999. But his last memories are from shortly after the war. He tells his story. He is the son of a wealthy brewer, but from early in his life he loved to sleep, sometimes for remarkable periods. All this sleep has two major effects – it makes him a disappointment to those who expect productivity from him (primarily his father and his wife), and it seems to extend his life. His story is a combination of triumphs and letdowns, with a heavy dose of cynicism, and even a bit of philosophical meditation on the perfectibility – or not – of humanity.

Locus, March 2008

Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Overseer” is an involving horror story set primarily in the years following the civil war. At the turn of the 20th Century, Nicholas Lerner, an old man in New Orleans, writes a memoir, beginning with his life on a plantation and his friendship with a slave boy. But the War intervened – and, in a different way, the plantation’s cruel overseer’s designs on Nicholas’s sister also intervened. Nicholas arranged for his slave friend to kill the overseer to keep him from importuning his sister – but this act backfires, as the overseer, even while dead, vows revenge. A revenge which involves Nicholas in a strange way, as the overseer chooses to advise Nicholas – leading him to great but poisoned success, as he plays both post-war sides (Reconstructionists and KKK-types) against each other. Nicholas’s memoir writing is alternated with scenes of his old man’s life – attended by a half-black servant who might be his son – and who might also be a target of the overseer.

Locus, June 2009

The second of F&SF’s new bimonthly issues features a long novella by Arthur Cowdrey, “Paradiso Lost”, in which his recurring character Robert Kohn tells the story of his first assignment as a military murder investigator. He’s a newly hatched Security Forces officer, assigned to a starship which is heading to the planet Paradiso to remove the colony there, which is in territory Earth is abandoning as the result of a recent war with aliens. On the way there two significant things happen – the nasty commander of the expedition is murdered, and Kohn becomes the lover of the ship’s pilot, an older woman who is second in command to the murdered General. Kohn manages to solve the murder, but a further mystery arises when they reach the planet – the colonists seem to have disappeared. We learn why eventually, and we witness another critical event, which tests Kohn’s personal and public loyalties. It’s fine work, though perhaps a bit too long and episodic for its eventual resolution to carry.

Locus, July 2010

Speaking of zombies, there is another zombie story in this issue, and it’s pretty entertaining too: Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Mr. Sweetpants and the Living Dead”, in which a successful writer hires a security firm to protect him after his latest lover comes after him for revenge – after the breakup and also after the lover seemed to have quite conclusively died. Funny and in a number of ways oddly sweet.