Quiz: Science Fiction Planets

Recently I wrote a quiz for a trivia site I am a member of. The subject was Science Fiction Planets. I prepared 15 questions -- only the first 12 were used, but I'll add the other three at the end. If anyone wants to email me their guesses at the answers (no cheating please!) I'll try to compile a list of who got the most right. (I expect a fair amount of 15s, actually!), and I'll publish the answers in a day or two. (email: rrhorton@prodigy.net)

Thanks to Steven Silver, by the way, who helped with some of the questions.

1.  This image is based on a Star Wars prequel film, and portrays the capital city of the Empire, which is an "ecumenopolis," or planet-spanning city. Many people think that an inspiration for this city is the capitol city/planet of the Empire in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Name either planet/city. Click here

2.  Pierre Boulle, author of Bridge on the River Kwai, also wrote a novel set on a planet of the star Betelgeuse, and it too spawned a successful movie (and eventually many more.) Name the first movie made from that book. (Note that the movie, unlike the novel, is revealed to be actually set on Earth in its famous final scene.)

3.  Planets of this three-star system are understandably a common site for science fiction stories. Examples include Robert Silverberg's first book; the planet Rakhat in Mary Doria Russell's novel The Sparrow; as well as the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar. This star system was also the original destination of the Robinson family before they became Lost in Space (in the '60s TV series.) Name this star system.

4.  This planet with a mysterious worldwide intelligence is featured in films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Stephen Soderbergh, based on a novel by a Polish science fiction writer. Name both the planet (which has a name recalling our sun) and the author (whose name might recall our moon, or at least our lunar exploration).

5.  N. K. Jemisin made history when she won the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years running, for each volume of a trilogy. Most of the action is set on a continent called the Stillness. Per the title of the trilogy, on which planet is this continent located?

6.  The late great Ursula Le Guin set much of her science fiction in a future sometimes called "Hainish". She won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, set on the notably cold planet Gethen. What is the English name for that planet (supposedly also the translation of Gethen into English?) (That English nickname is also used in the title of a short story set on the planet.)

7.  Perhaps the most famous planet located outside our Solar System in TV is Vulcan. In which episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, written by Theodore Sturgeon, did Spock's undergoing pon farr force the Enterprise to return to Vulcan.

8.  Samuel R. Delany gave one of his novels the subtitle "an ambiguous heterotopia". The novel's protagonist, Bron Helstrom, lives on a moon of the planet Neptune, though he was born on Mars and visits Earth during the novel. Name either the original title of the novel or Delany's preferred title.

9.  A long series of novels beginning with Dune,by Frank Herbert, centers around control of which planet(also sometimes called Dune), the source of the spice mélange, which among other things is used to help navigate starships. If you don't remember the novel, you may remember David Lynch's film, or the SyFy Channel miniseries. (And, reportedly, Denis Villeneuve is working on a pair of films based on Dune.)

10.  Cixin Liu (or Liu Cixin), was the first Chinese writer to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, not to mention gaining fans including Barack Obama. The novel in question concerns invaders from the planet Trisolaris, so-called because its system has three suns. What is the title of the novel, in its English translation, based on the difficulties caused by the complex orbit of Trisolaris due to those three suns (and also representing a system in Newtonian mechanics that is not amenable to a closed-form solution?)

11.  In recent years a great many extrasolar planets have been detected by various means, and science fiction writers are beginning to use those planets in their novels. Allen Steele has written a long series of novels set on a (as yet undetected!) moon of one of those extrasolar planets, 47 Ursae Majoris b. The planet is called Bear (for obvious reasons) – what is the trickier name of the moon which Steele's characters colonize?

12.  While more famous for the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis also wrote a trilogy about a man named Elwin Ransom, with books set primarily on Malacandra, Perelandra, and Thulcandra (the Silent Planet.) Give the usual English names for these planets (in the above order.) 

13. The planet Mesklin is noted for its unusual shape, which leads to a very strange gravity gradient. The novels set there were written by a high school science teacher named Harry Stubbs, who used this name as a pseudonym.

14. On which planet is the title structure of Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel, Icehenge, found? (Well, at least it was a planet when the book was published!)

15. Leigh Brackett wrote a number of stories and novels about this recurring character. Though he is most associated with Mars, his adventures also took him to Venus, and out of the Solar System to the planet Skaith, and he was actually born on Mercury. His last name might suggest the nature of the landscapes of, at least, Mars and Mercury. Who was this character?

Birthday Review: Four Zelazny Capsules

Roger Zelazny would have been 82 today, but, dammit, he died way too young in 1995. I loved his short fiction but I haven't written a lot about it, so instead I've taken four rather short bits, capsules, really, that I did of four of his novels, for my SFF Net newsgroup a while ago, and in once case for  Black Gate retro-review of an issue of Galaxy.

I also reviewed Lord of Light for SF Site some time ago: Lord of Light review.

This Immortal

(cover by Gray Morrow)

Having just reread Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, I decided to go ahead and reread his other award-winning novel, This Immortal.  The serial version of This Immortal, "... and Call Me Conrad", won the 1966 novel Hugo, in a tie with Dune.  I have the Ace first edition paperback of This Immortal. The book version, at about 58,000 words, is perhaps 8,000 words longer than the serial, but I've compared the two, and the changes are a mix of some excisions, and some expansions, and some phrasing changes. Incidentally, the copy on my Ace edition states that the book version, due to its changes, was still eligible for a Hugo, and they suggest it might win two Hugos in a row. (Of course, it didn't, and wasn't even nominated, but, interestingly, the actual winner, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, had been nominated the previous year on the basis of its (technically not yet finished) serialization.)

This Immortal is a good read, with plenty of Zelaznyesque brio. But it's not as good as Lord of Light (many, I should note, disagree,) and actually, it seems a bit, well, slight.  The ending is a distinct anti-climax.  It's still a book you ought to read, mind you, but it's just real good, not great. The storyline concerns Conrad Nomikos, one of about 4 million people still living on Earth centuries in the future, after a Nuclear war, and after the bulk of the population has gone to the stars to work for the advanced, civilized, Vegans.  Conrad and some of his friends had years before been involved in the "Returnist" movement, urging people to return to Earth, and resisting the Vegans' moves to buy up the best Earth real estate.  Nowadays, the situation is a stalemate, with Earth's exile population preferring not to return, but with the Vegans' not buying any more of Earth either.  But Cort Mishtigo, a high status Vegan, has come to Earth to tour some of the ancient sites.  Conrad, who seems to have some mysterious past identities that go back a long way, is recruited to guide Mishtigo, and to protect him from assassins.  He is in danger because the more radical Returnists believe that his "tour" is a pretext for evaluating more real estate, in advance of a renewed Vegan buying campaign.  Conrad is unsure of Cort's motives, and anyway unhappy with the idea of murder. The novel consists, then, of Cort's tour, and a number of well-done battles between Conrad and a variety of monsters and mutants.  The fight scenes, and the descriptions of the mutants (based on Greek mythology), are really good.  It's only the eventual revelation of the Vegan motives that's a bit pat and anti-climatic.

Damnation Alley

(This review is actually of the original 31,000 word novells, which appeared in the October 1967 Galaxy.)

(Cover by Jack Gaughan)

“Damnation Alley” is of course a pretty famous story, especially so after it became a novel (in 1969) and a film (in 1977). The film is by all accounts only loosely based on the novel, and Zelazny is said to have disliked it. I had, I confess, never read the novel or novella, nor seen the film. Barry Malzberg is quoted in Wikipedia as calling the novel “a mechanical, simply transposed action-adventure story written, in my view, at the bottom of the man’s talent” – a judgement with which I am inclined to agree. It’s set in a rather ’50s-ish postapocalyptic world. Hell Tanner is a criminal living in the nation of California. He is offered a pardon in exchange for taking some medicine across the former US to Boston.

This passage is called “Damnation Alley,” and it is full of bandits, radioactive craters, storms, giant gila monsters, bats, snakes, and other menaces. Tanner starts out in a convoy of three tank-like vehicles, and over time the other drivers are killed, including Tanner’s unwilling partner. He picks up a girl (from a motorcycle gang), and seems to slowly gain something of a conscience. None of this is surprising, and much is silly, especially the square-cube law violating monsters. That said, Zelazny could write action well, and there are bits that work nicely, even some lyrical bits. It is what it is – reasonably well done but not particularly original action-adventure. The problem is, I expect a lot more from Zelazny.

Creatures of Light and Darkness

(Cover by James Starrett)

One of the Roger Zelazny novels I had never read was Creatures of Light and Darkness, from 1969.  I've had a copy for a while, and I finally got around to it.  It's a rather strange story, based, as far as I can tell, on Egyptian mythology, though set, again, as far as I can tell, in the far future in space.  A man is awakened by Anubis, and sent on a mission to find and kill the Prince Who Was a Thousand, in order to restore Anubis and Osiris to power over the Midworlds.  The story rather obliquely follows this man, called Wakim, and Thoth, who has been given the same mission by Osiris, and the magicians Vramin and Madrak, and various other Eqyptian gods.  A battle rages across many worlds, and backward and forward in time. The gods betray each other, and the reader's loyalties to the characters are forced to switch quite a bit.

I have to admit, it didn't work for me at all.  I don't know enough Egyptian mythology to follow any of the stories, if they are actually based on such stories.  Much seemed deliberately obscure.  The SFnal bits are profoundly unconvincing, and the characters are given powers which seem to be very arbitrary, and just what is needed at any given time.  Of course it is well written, in Zelazny's trademark mode -- elevating contemporary language, complete with slang, to an epic/poetic level -- that's all well enough done, and there are some nice ideas, but overall it was a mess, and rather boring. Zelazny was certainly one of the greats, but for me, at any rate, this is a disappointment, nothing to compare with Lord of Light or This Immortal or the best short stories.

Doorways in the Sand

(Cover by Ron Walotsky)

My rereading project isn't really meant to focus exclusively on Roger Zelazny, or even primarily, but Doorways in the Sand was a favorite of mine since I read it in the Analog serialization in 1976.  On this reread it was pretty much as good as I remembered.  Fred Cassidy is a permanent student, partly because he likes learning, partly because he continues to draw from his rich Uncle's trust fund as long as he is in college.  Meantime various advisors scheme to get him to graduate, while Fred, an acrophiliac, climbs all over the roofs of the college town.  But all of a sudden he has a lot more to worry about.  Various beings seem convinced he knows the whereabouts of the alien "starstone", a cultural artifact given to Earth in exchange for the British Crown Jewels and the Mona Lisa, and the maintenance of which in good condition is essential to Earth's nascent status in Galactic civilization. These folks memorably include some alien cops who like to dress up as marsupials. Follows a lot of action, all well done if sometimes a bit implausible, and a decent resolution involving a not absurd view of our place in the universe, etc. etc.  It's not a great novel, but it's really great fun.

Birthday Review: Stories of Alter S. Reiss

It's Alter S. Reiss's birthday today. He's only been publishing fiction since 2010, but I've known him much longer (online, that is) -- he was one of my favorite regular posters in the glory days of the usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written. We have met in person, at a few different conventions. I was very pleased to see him start publishing, and even more pleased to find his work so good. Here is a collection of my reviews of him from Locus.

Locus, January 2011

Another online magazine, Abyss and Apex, introduces Alter S. Reiss in its Fourth Quarter 2010 issue. Reiss’s first published story is a nice one: “Rumor of Wings”, about a mysterious woman trying to find a very important – to her – bracelet. It’s a milieu of shape changers, like gull people – and like the protagonist, whose true form we learn only at the end.

Locus, May 2011

Daily Science Fiction is a website that opened late last year. They publish a new story each weekday. Not surprisingly, many of these stories are very short, and the quality is uneven. But they do publish the occasional longer story (usually on Friday), and some nice stuff. Perhaps my favorite from the site to date is “Memory Bugs”, by Alter S. Reiss (2/8), about a man who uses a new technology to record memories of his times with his lover, and seems to lose the distinction between reveling in memory and creating new memories.

Locus, November 2012

Somewhat belatedly I got to the May issue of Australia's Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Two stories stood out for me. Alter S. Reiss, who has been consistently good with his first few published stories over the last little while, offers “Server Issues”, which is at its most basic level a story about an expert helping track down some stolen servers. A bit dry, eh – but the bite comes from a key background deal: crowd sourced bounties on people, such that someone who gets a lot of people a little bit angry might attract a big enough bonus for his murder to get in real trouble. The story neatly fills us in on the consequences and some of the details of such a system.

Locus, January 2013

In December, Strange Horizons features another good story from Alter S. Reiss, who has impressed me with both the quality and the variety of his stories this past year or two. “America Thief” is a gangster story, with characters including Bugsy Siegel and Arnold Rothstein. The narrator is a small-time hood who is also a magician, and the son of a rabbi. He is pressured by Rothstein to investigate a local boy who seems to be turning lead into gold – a job that ends up stressing his shaky morals, his belief in truth, his care for his girlfriend, and his concern for his community – a well-told and original story.

Locus, November 2015

The third novella, Sunset Mantle (Tor.com), is from a much less prominent writer, Alter S. Reiss. It comes from Tor's new series of novellas, available electronically and in paperback. Cete is a veteran soldier, unjustly dismissed from his previous service, wandering and looking for work in a place called Reach Antach, when he comes across a lovely mantle, and the intriguing blind woman, Marelle, who wove it. Against his better judgment he decides to stay and join the local army, at unattractive terms, for a chance to commission another piece from Marelle. He soon realizes the political situation is more tangled than he had realized, and is forced again to an unjust punishment, only to seek redemption in attempting to saving the Reach at impossible odds. It can't be denied that the story hits some only too familiar notes, but it does so effectively. It bears comparison, in a way, with the work of K. J. Parker – set in a non-magical fantastic world, dealing with war and politics in a medieval technology world – but with none of the cynicism. The pleasures are real, if quite different to those in Parker.

Locus, June 2016

In Beneath Ceaseless Skies I found a couple of nice if not quite brilliant stories from newish writers whom I’ve been following with interest. Alter S. Reiss’s “Sea of Dreams” (3/31) follows a deposed Emperor, Ierois, who has been exiled to an island in the Sea of Dreams. He is joined, decades later, by a boy, exiled for similar political reasons (the Empire appears to have Game of Thrones-style politics). But the boy has ambitions of returning – and he is convinced that what he finds washing up from the sea will aid him, not understanding, as Ierois has learned, that what the Sea offers are only dreams, illusions. A nice conceit – and Reiss moves the story in a slightly unexpected direction.

Birthday Review: The Ghost Brigades and The Lost Colony, by John Scalzi

Today is John Scalzi's birthday -- he reaches his half century. He doesn't write a ton of short fiction, so I've not reviewed him all that much in Locus. But I did write about the second and third volumes of his Old Man's War trilogy at my blog back when they appeared, so I figured I'd resurrect those reviews now, in his honor.

I also reviewed The Collapsing Empire here, last year as part of my series of Hugo nominee reviews.

The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi

a review by Rich Horton

John Scalzi won last year's Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and his first novel with a major publisher, Old Man's War, was on the Hugo ballot. That novel told of human colonies in a hostile galaxy, whose army consists of old people who have agreed to serve in the military in exchange for a new body. The backstory of that novel hinted at a complex political situation involving the many alien races the humans share the galaxy with. His 2006 novel, The Ghost Brigades, addresses that situation a bit more.

The title refers to the Special Forces branch of the Colonial Defense Forces. These are particularly enhanced soldiers, cloned from soldiers who didn't survive the period between agreeing to serve in the CDF and getting transferred to their new body. They have special abilities, most particularly a quasi-telepathic link with other members of their unit. But they are for the most part secret. In Old Man's War we met one Ghost Brigade soldier, Jane Sagan. (These soldiers are given names derived from famous scientists.)

In this novel a plot is uncovered: three alien races, the Rraey, the Obin, and the Enesha, have agreed to unite against humanity. And one human, Charles Boutin, a brilliant scientist, has turned traitor after the death of his daughter. Boutin's expertise is consciousness transfer. The CDF have a copy of his consciousness, and they transfer it into a clone of his body, hoping to find out what made Boutin go bad. But the transfer doesn't take (at first), and the clone, called Jared Dirac, becomes a regular Special Forces member.

He joins Jane Sagan's unit, and eventually participates in key actions, such as a mission against the Eneshans, in which his unit commits atrocities in order to convince the Eneshans to abandon their alliance against humans. This stress begins to recall his Boutin memories, and he is set on a path leading inevitably to the real Charles Boutin, and to some wrenching revelations about galactic politics, and about human interactions with aliens.

It is once again a lot of fun. There are weaknesses -- some excessive implausibilities in the plot most particularly. And I am not entirely convinced by the characterization of the Special Forces members (though Scalzi does try ...). But it's pretty good overall, and I did like the increased moral complexity of this future as described here. Not a great novel, but a nice fun novel with a bit of a deeper side. There are some nice ideas, some good thinking about such things as the importance of consciousness, and plenty of sharp and funny writing.

The Last Colony, by John Scalzi

a review by Rich Horton

The Last Colony is a nominee for the Hugo this year. It's John Scalzi's third book in his Old Man's War series -- and he intends it to close the series, and indeed it does finish the narrative arc well, answering the questions raised in the earlier books and coming to an satisfying and surprising conclusion. [I should note that he eventually added three more novels in this milieu.] And it's pretty enjoyable, though I wouldn't say it's worthy of the Hugo.

As the story opens, John Perry and Jane Sagan, now married and returned to normal human bodies, are living on a quiet colonial world, as local ombudsman and police chief respectively. But they get an offer from the Colonial Defense Forces and the Colonial Union -- to lead a new colony, an experimental colony. Unlike previous colonies, with colonists recruited entirely from Earth's poorer countries, this one will be composed of people from 10 well established human colony planets. This seems likely to be a political mess, dealing with 10 different groups with different goals. Not to mention the potential dangers on the planet (which turn out to include an unexpected intelligent species). But ... that's hardly even the least of Perry and Sagan's problems.

Revealing any of the twists -- and there are several -- might be unfair, so I won't. But Scalzi is concerned with helping to show us the real place of humanity in this very hostile universe, the real motivations of the Colonial Union (humanity's space based government), and a potential (however slim) for something like peace between the various alien species. Given the starting point, the ending point of the book is hard to see -- and to be honest I think the plot developments, while interesting and clever, are a bit farfetched. (Suffice it to say that Scalzi manages to make the extermination of humanity the most likely future.)

Anyway, it's a fun book, and a pretty thoughtful one, though there's a bit of deck stacking going on here and there. It's certainly not a humanity uber alles book. I thought the characterization a bit thin -- most everyone talks just about the same. And though Jane is a major character and is present almost throughout the book, somehow she almost doesn't seem to be there, and her relationship with John, that I thought worked well in the other books, comes off as almost an afterthought. Bottom line: good, not great, but quite well done in the sense of fairly resolving the series.

Birthday Review: Stories of Geoff Ryman

Today is Geoff Ryman's 68th birthday. He's a consistently provocative and original writer, with tremendous range. Here's a selection of my reviews of his work, for Locus and one taken from my year end Recommended Reading post, from before I was reviewing for the magazine.

2001 Recommended Reading

Three novelettes from F&SF really impressed me.  Geoff Ryman, in "Have Not Have" (April) shows us a woman in a remote Chinese village using her knowledge, her connections, and the villagers' lack of knowledge to forge a living for herself as a sort of "fashion expert". She is presented almost cynically, but we come to feel great sympathy for her. Then the idea of a universal net connection (via direct brain interface) is broached -- obviously this will completely change things for Mae in particular, and the rest of the village too. No answers are offered -- just the picture of one woman, a good if compromised woman, at the hub of a change she may not survive. This is a very fine, very quiet, effective story.

Locus, September 2003

Interzone for April leads with a strong story from Geoff Ryman, "Birth Days". The hero is a gay man born just prior to the development of a genetic screening test for homosexuality. As a result he is part of the last generation, it seems, in which gays will be a normal percentage of the population. He becomes a scientist, and one of his projects is a drug which will "cure" homosexuality even in adults. But this seems a betrayal, and he next works on something quite different -- a means by which men can bear children, without even a female ovum. Ryman takes the implication of this tech to the extreme (beyond where I could believe it, actually). But throughout it raises worthwhile questions -- even if one might disagree with the in-story answers. (For instance, it seems to imply that homosexuality is "justified" once it becomes possible for gays to bear children -- I shouldn't think that necessary!)

Locus, October 2006

The gem in the October-November F&SF is Geoff Ryman’s “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, set in very near future Cambodia. A young woman grows up isolated, and very rich: she is Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter, but she is obstinately naïve about her father’s legacy. She finally meets an interesting young man, who jumps to just the wrong conclusion about her mysterious past. She must come to terms with this man’s expectations, and with the expectations of the myriad tortured ghosts her father left behind. From an unexpected angle, the story manages to convincingly portray Cambodia, and to bring tears in its evocation of plight of Cambodia’s ghosts.

Locus, August 2008

Geoff Ryman and others stirred up a fair bit of controversy a couple of years ago with the so-called “Mundane Manifesto”, calling for a fairly rigorous sort of SF: eschewing implausible and perhaps tired tropes such as FTL and time travel, and insisting on fully imagined futures, not just the present writ large (or writ small with just a single change). Looked at that way – as a positive effort for a rededication to a certain SFnal discipline – it was a very promising effort. Looked at more negatively, as a rejection of SF that didn’t fit what the promulgators weren’t currently interested in (on grounds that seemed at times stridently moralistic), it was, as I said, controversial. That more carping tone seems to have been abandoned (was abandoned fairly early, I think), and what remains of the Mundane Manifesto is quite interesting, as shown in the June Interzone, a special issue guest-edited by Ryman, Julian Todd, and Trent Walters.

Perhaps the best story, not entirely surprisingly, is from Ryman himself. “Talk is Cheap” is set in a seemingly fairly near future, but a quite significantly changed one. The narrator is a Walker: he spends his days on his feet, gathering information about the environment. People seem to have always-on links to a future net, mediated by something they call a Turing. The narrator makes contact with someone else, named Jinny, a Doctor, and he is very interested in her, for all the old reasons. A couple of days pass, as we are introduced to other aspects of this future social system – such as the categorization of people by their social needs: the narrator, for example, is a Dog. And too we see just the beginnings a potential relationship. It’s dense throughout, always new – just what Ryman calls for in his introduction.

Locus, February 2009

The new Tor.com site is rounding very nicely into form. Two recent outstanding stories are “A Water Matter” by Jay Lake and “The Film-makers of Mars” by Geoff Ryman. ... Ryman’s story is clever fun, built around the discovery of very early, shockingly realistic, films of Burroughs’s Mars books, as a film buff tries to understand how such things could be – before encountering the even stranger truth.

Locus, October 2009

This is F&SF’s big double issue (October-November), and there’s a lot here. ... Geoff Ryman, in “Blocked”, mixes several odd ingredients intriguingly: a Cambodian casino manager trying to become a man while alien invaders drive humanity to some sort of virtual existence.

Locus, October 2011

The September-October F&SF has a very strong story from Geoff Ryman, “What We Found”. It’s set in Nigeria in the near future, and tells of a young man growing up with a more brilliant (it seems) brother and an abusive father and a beaten-down mother. In parallel threads we learn that he has become a noted biologist. His younger life goes from bad to worse, as his father loses his government job and his brother loses his mind – but his adult self is discovering links between genetics and nurture that he finds terrifying. This is a story with a real if modest scientific background that motivates a moving examination of character (in that way a bit like an earlier 2011 F&SF story, Carter Scholz’s “Signs of Life”).

Locus, November 2013

Two other stories excited me in the September-October F&SF. Geoff Ryman's “Rosary and Goldenstar” is a curious alternate look at a young Shakespeare and two of his best known minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. It's subtle, and beautifully written – able to stand without shame with the greatest of all Rosencrantz and Guildenstern retellings, Tom Stoppard's tour-de-force Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Here, Shakespeare is staying with Thomas Digges, who welcomes visitors from Denmark, and along with John Dee they discuss Tycho Brahe, Copernican astronomy, heresy, politics, even sexuality (in a hidden way) – a striking piece.

Locus, March 2016

Stories for Chip is a festschrift celebrating 2015 SFWA Grand Master Samuel R. Delany, one of the greatest SF writers of all time. It’s a suitably diverse mix of SF and fantasy, non-fiction and fiction, women and men, queer and straight, numerous nationalities, and writers from within and without the field. My favorite story is “Capitalism in the 22nd Century; or, A.I.r”, by Geoff Ryman, which tells of two sisters from Brazil, and a plan to escape on a starship … but more centrally, it’s about the two sisters’ relationship, and about their interactions with the A. I.s that, perhaps, rule this future world. Tremendously intelligent SF.

Locus, January 2019

Geoff Ryman's "This Constant Narrowing" (F&SF, October-November) is headed by a content warning, and the story does manage to be legitimately challenging, legitimately discomfiting. The narrator is an Hispanic man from Southern California, and the story opens with him being shot, then "rescued" by another man, and we realize that this is a world, reminiscent of Philip Wylie's The Disappearance, in which all the women are gone, and some men shoot others to claim them for sexual services. We learn more about his life, before the women disappeared, and his earlier friendship with a black cop. But things keep "narrowing" -- the black men gone, and Asians, and so on... There's a message here, or perhaps there's just a plea to think about the way we seem to be treating "others" -- from all sides. Ryman is consistently able to provoke thought about subjects we sometimes avoid.

Birthday Review: Stories of Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe was born May 7, 1931, just two months after my father. He would have been 88 today, but he died April 14. Back then I composed this selection of my reviews of some of his later work, mostly for Locus, but I contented myself with posting a eulogy then, and I saved that for today, his birthday.

Locus, July 2002

Notable recent offerings at The Infinite Matrix include a new short story by Gene Wolfe, "Under Hill".  This is a clever retelling of the tale of the Princess on the Hill of Glass, with an odd ending twist.  It's minor Wolfe, but definitely to be read.

Locus, March 2003

February was a strong month for Sci Ficton. Gene Wolfe's "Castaway" is one of his best recent stories, a moving tale of a man rescued from a devastated planet, and the woman he had to leave behind. I hope it doesn't give away too much to say it reminded me of James Tiptree's great story "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain".

Locus, May 2003

Gene Wolfe's "Graylord Man's Last Words" (Asimov's, May) reminded me a bit of his recent SCI FICTION story, "Castaway", in treating a fairly familiar situation at a slant. In this case an old being is telling a story from his youth -- soon we gather that he is a robot of some sort, and the story involves one of the last humans. It's fairly simple for Wolfe, but still quite effective.

Locus, December 2003

"Of Soil and Climate" (Realms of Fantasy, December) is a new Gene Wolfe story, which is recommendation enough. A psychiatrist in prison finds himself suddenly in a fantasy land, where he encounters alluring women and mortal danger, Night People, Tree People, and Sun People, and a Princess. I found it intriguing but incomplete: could it be a novel excerpt?

Locus, April 2004

Gene Wolfe is suddenly a Realms of Fantasy regular, which is good news: for one thing because it means he's writing lots of short stories. "Calamity Warps" (April) is a simple and quite short story about a man and his dog and his shadow, which implies much at the end. Like his last solo piece for Realms, "Of Soul and Climate", it seems thematically related to his new novel (The Knight) in suggesting a crossover from our world to a fantasy world.

The First Heroes is a strong collection of stories (mostly fantasy) on the subject of the Bronze Age. The book opens very well with Gene Wolfe's "The Lost Pilgrim". His hero is a time-traveler, and soon we gather that he had meant to join the Mayflower, but instead ended up thousands of years previously, on the Argo, with his memory damaged in the process. At first the story is a rather humorously skewed view of some of Jason's journey -- and quite effective as such -- but the ending is darker and more moving than the opening seems to promise.

Locus, July 2004

Peter Crowther of PS Publishing has started a magazine, Postscripts. The first issue features a whopping 13 short stories and shortish novelettes by an impressive array of authors – veterans, up-and-comers, and several writers best known outside the genre. Gene Wolfe is impressive as might be expected, with "Prize Crew", an SF horror story about an enemy warship found mysteriously abandoned, which the title crew takes back to Earth – unfortunately.

Locus, October 2004

Gene Wolfe's "The Little Stranger" (F&SF, November) is another of his simple yet thoroughly weird stories – a series of letters from an old woman to her dead cousin, telling of gypsies, witches, a gingerbread house – all quite naively told, disquieting, striking.

Locus, January 2005

Aeon is a promising new 'zine distributed in electronic form (on CD-ROM, or in versions for handheld computers). The first issue has an impressive lineup, including a long novel excerpt from Walter Jon Williams. The standout story is a reprint from Gene Wolfe – but a reprint from an obscure source. "Talk of Mandrakes" was originally scheduled for a 1987 issue of the briefly revived Worlds of If, which never appeared. It was unpublished until earlier in 2004, in a limited distribution chapbook. So this appearance is welcome. The story is a clever SF horror piece about what an expedition to an alien planet has brought back with them.

Locus, August 2005

From Postscripts I also really liked a flakily original story from Gene Wolfe, "Comber", about cities floating on huge waves, and an impending disaster when a city begins to head down a wavecrest.

Locus, February 2006

PS Publishing offers a Gene Wolfe chapbook free to Postscripts subscribers. Of course Postscripts is worth subscribing to regardless, but this is certainly a fine bonus. It’s a seasonal story, “Christmas Inn”, about a struggling rural Bed and Breakfast called the Christmas Inn. One bitter winter, as they fear foreclosure, they are visited by four (or five?) strange people. The story is told from multiple POV’s: first person narratives by the two owners and their teenaged son, as well as some third person sections. The visitors, mostly via sex, interact strongly with the residents, leading finally to a concluding séance. Here their nature is revealed – at least to one character, and perhaps to alert readers but not as of yet to this reader! But despite not quite getting the story, I enjoyed it and was moved by it. All things I can say about a lot of Wolfe!

Locus, May 2006

Online SF took a harsh blow with the loss of Sci Fiction at the end of 2005. One potential bright spot we’ve been looking forward to is a new venture from Baen Books, entitled Baen’s Universe, edited by Eric Flint. The first issue appears in June, and it’s rather promising. It’s stuffed: about 140,000 words of new short fiction, a couple of reprints, several serials and some articles. The fiction comes from a wide variety of writers: Baen stalwarts like Dave Freer and David Drake, several new writers, and some writers you wouldn’t think of in connection with Baen Books, like Charles Stross and Gene Wolfe.

Indeed Stross and Wolfe provide two of the better stories. Wolfe’s “Build-a-Bear” is set on a cruise ship. A lonely woman chances across a build-a-bear workshop, and ends up with a rather more impressive bear than she had expected.

Locus, November 2006

In October I thought two stories stood out – two that are perhaps not quite what a reader of Baen Books would expect. Gene Wolfe’s “The Old Woman in the Young Woman” is set after a holocaust, with a traveler meeting up with a young woman and her – mother? The women, of course, have a secret – not a terribly surprising one, but the story is still involving.

Capsule Review of Soldier of Sidon for Fantasy Magazine (2006)

Many years ago Gene Wolfe published two novels (Soldier in the Mist and Soldier of Arete) about Latro, a soldier in Ancient Greece (though Latro is Roman) who loses his memory each night as he sleeps. In addition, Latro can see gods, even as those around him see nothing. These are wonderful novels, but clearly Latro’s story was incomplete, and readers clamored for more. At last we have another: Soldier of Sidon. In this novel, he travels to Egypt, in hopes of finding someone who can cure him of his amnesia. Latro (or Lucius/Lewqys, as he is also called) becomes the leader of a group of soldiers on a boat heading south on the Nile, in service of the foreign King occupying Egypt. The book tells of many wonders and adventures encountered on this trip: his river wife (a prostitute hired for the journey) who may not be quite human, another woman who seems to be made of wax, numerous gods and their priests, in various forms: human, snake, panther, etc., a trip to the underworld, imprisonment in a mine, and so on. There is much intriguing detail about life in Ancient Egypt, much quite realistic and much delightfully fantastical. The characters are excellently portrayed, ever through the odd window of Latro’s intermittent consciousness. Wolfe has always been fascinated by shapeshifters, by questions of identity, by memory and its impact on character – and all these elements pervade this novel. Latro’s story is not finished – there is at least one more novel to follow, I believe [If, indeed, another was planned, it never eventuated] – and that is the only disappointment here. Taken as it is, this is both involving historical fiction and mesmerizing fantasy.


Locus, March 2007

Gene Wolfe published a two story chapbook, Strange Birds, last year. This features two good stories, the better being a rather different kind of circus story, “On a Vacant Face a Bruise”, in which a boy joins a circus – but rather a different sort of circus, with such wonders as automaton dancers and talking birds – the true nature of this circus being shown only at the end.

Locus, April 2007

The big news this month in SF magazines is the F&SF Special Gene Wolfe issue. This includes essays on Wolfe by Neil Gaiman, Michael Swanwick, and Michael Andre-Driussi, as well as a very long new novella from Wolfe, “Memorare”. This is the story of March Wildspring, a documentary producer making a feature on spec. It seems that it has become common for small asteroids to be used as memorials to the dead. Sometimes very dangerous memorials. March recruits the beautiful Kit Carlson to help him, and she brings along a friend who has just left her abusive husband. This woman, Robin Reed, turns out to be March’s ex-wife. March is now in love with Kit – and perhaps she returns his love. As they plan to explore one more asteroid, reputed to be the most dangerous of all, Robin’s new husband turns up, trying to get her back. Clearly this story is about more than the memorials to the dead – it is about marriage, and about sin, and about redemption – which may be available for some inside the mysterious asteroid/memorial March calls Number Nineteen.

Locus, April 2010

Full Moon City is an urban fantasy anthology about werewolves, which on the face of it is a pretty tired theme, these days. But it has a heck of a list of contributors, and it rises well above the average urban fantasy anthology. It’s true that a high proportion of the stories are fairly fluffy – light comic treatments of the subject, but still entertaining. And two true veterans stand out. Gene Wolfe’s “Innocent” is one of many comic stories in the book, nastily comic in this case, as a werewolf in prison tells his story to a priest … a story that involves accusations of child molesting, of which he protests innocence. Of course it becomes clear that there is innocence and innocence!

Locus, July 2010

The best of Jonathan Strahan’s recent anthologies is Swords and Dark Magic, co-edited with Lou Anders, which should be treated at more length. It’s a collection devoted to the “New Swords and Sorcery”, which is to say, more or less, the old Swords and Sorcery with extra cynicism. Granting of course that cynicism was hardly ever absent from Sword and Sorcery fiction, this book does seem more of our time. And it’s solid from beginning to end. There is plenty of nice stuff here, but I’ll content myself mostly with mentioning Gene Wolfe, whose “Bloodsport” is quite powerful, about people recruited to enact a chesslike game, much in the fashion of medieval tilts. The main character is a powerful knight, who falls in love with a pawn on the other side – but then their country is invaded, and the game players become a sort of resistance. And, of course, pawns can become queens … but Wolfe has a different question to answer.

Locus, February 2014

Shadows of the New Sun is a tribute anthology for Grand Master Gene Wolfe. Happily, it features two good new stories by Wolfe himself – “Frostfree” tells of a somewhat unpleasant man who receives an amazing new refrigerator, that not only provides food and washes dishes, but helps – we hope – with his love life as well. “The Sea of Memory” is the stranger, and stronger, piece, about a woman waking – she thinks – on an isolated island with a few other people, and slowly learning – remembering? – her true situation.

2019 Best of the Year TOC

Here's the TOC for The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2019. As ever, I'm thrilled at the wonderful set of stories these great authors have contributed.  This is in alphabetical order by place of publication, if anyone is wondering. 

• “The Spires” by Alec Nevala-Lee (Analog, 3-4/18)
• “The Unnecessary Parts of the Story” by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog, 09-10/18)
• ”A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow (Apex, 2/18)
• ”Bubble and Squeak” by David Gerrold and Ctein (Asimov’s, 5-6/18)
• “The Gift” by Julie Novakova (Asimov’s, 11/12/2018)
• “Beautiful” by Juliet Marillier (Aurum)
• ”The Starship and the Temple Cat” by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2/1/18)
• ”Carouseling” by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld, 4/18)
• ”The Persistence of Blood” by Juliette Wade (Clarkesworld, 3/18)
• ”Umbernight” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld, 2/18)
• ”The Donner Party” by Dale Bailey (F&SF, 1-2/18)
• ”How to Identify an Alien Shark” by Beth Goder (Fireside Quarterly, 7/18)
• ”The Tale of the Ive-Ojan-Akhar’s Death” by Alex Jeffers (Giganotosaurus, 4/18)
• “Foxy and Tiggs” by Justina Robson (Infinity’s End)
• “Intervention” by Kelly Robson (Infinity’s End)
• ”The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish” by Octavia Cade (Kaleidotrope, Winter/18)
• ”Dayenu” by James Sallis (LCRW, Spring/18)
• ”Lime and the One Human” by S. Woodson (LCRW, 7/18)
• ”The Court Magician” by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, 1/18)
• “Jump” by Cadwell Turnbull (Lightspeed, 10/18)
• ”Firelight” by Ursula K. Le Guin (Paris Review, Summer/18)
• “The Buried Giant” by Lavie Tidhar (Robots vs Fairies)
• ”Today is Today” by Rick Wilber (Stonecoast Review, Summer/18)
• ”The Heart of Owl Abbas” by Kathleen Jennings (Tor.com, 4/11/2018)
• ”Grace’s Family” by James Patrick Kelly (Tor.com, 5/18)
• “The House by the Sea” by P. H. Lee (Uncanny, 9/10/2018)

Birthday Review: Autonomous, plus two short stories, by Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz is primarily a science journalist, I believe, and so she hasn't written a ton of fiction. But I've liked what I've read. On the occasion of her birthday, then, here's my two reviews from Locus of her short stories, plus my review of her novel Autonomous, reposted from last year's Nebula Ballot review post.

Locus, January 2014

In the November Lightspeed my favorite story is "Drones Don't Kill People", by Annalee Newitz, which on the face of it is a bit cliche, about drones coming to self-awareness and realizing that their uses -- covert surveillance and assassination -- are immoral. But Newitz wraps this is an unexpectedly engaging and convincing tale, beginning with horror and ending with hope, with non-human characters that really hold the interest.

Locus, December 2018

In Robots vs Fairies ... I liked Annalee Newitz’ “The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto”, set in the future of her novel Autonomous, and featuring a robot calling itself the Blue Fairy setting free other robots, including in this story a robot RealBoy. Newitz’ story is particularly interesting (to me), reiterating some of the themes of Autonomous in asking what freedom really might mean for robots.

Autonomous

a review by Rich Horton

Annalee Newitz' first novel, Autonomous, is on the Nebula shortlist. I'd heard lots of buzz about it already, and I knew I liked Newitz' writing (I used her 2014 story "Drones Don't Kill People" in my Best of the Year book), so I meant to get to it -- and I finally did. I have to say, it met my expectations -- it's a really cool book, really hard SF, exciting and scary and moving.

Jack Chen is a patent pirate -- she reverse engineers patented drugs, sometimes ones critical for the health of people who can't affort corporate medicine, and sometimes just for money (a woman's got to live, after all). But her latest effort, a drug called Zacuity, which makes people love their jobs, and want to keep working, has backfired badly -- people are getting addicted to work, to the point of ignoring things like food. She desperately needs to find a cure, and her only hope might be her old lover Krish, who betrayed her a quarter century ago, when she went to jail for her anti-patent activism. She ends up freeing an indentured young man called Threezed (after the last two characters in his ID), and they make their way across Canada to Krish's lab, and to a safer place to work.

Meanwhile they are being chased by agents of the International Property Coalition, which enforces patents. The two assigned to her case are a human named Eliasz and a military bot named Paladin. Bots are nominally indentured for 10 years after their creation, after which they can become autonomous. (Similar rules apply to humans who have been indentured.) Not surprisingly, autonomy isn't quite as easy to achieve as that. And Paladin hardly knows what they -- he? she? it? -- wants -- as most of their wants are controlled by programming.

The story is on the surface about patents and drugs and so on, and about the tense chase as Eliasz and Paladin home in on Jack. And all that works really well. But that's just the surface -- an important surface, to be sure. But the title tells the truth -- the heart of the novel is "autonomy". For bots, sure -- Paladin's eventual realization that they might like to be autonomous is a major issue. But for humans, as well -- Threezed, in particular, who was indentured and sold and had his indenture extended for obscure legal reasons, wants autonomy and is pretty cynical about the whole thing.

But there's more -- what autonomy, for example, do workers who have been given a drug like Zacuity possess? How about Med, a heroic bot researcher who was created as a never-indentured bot -- is she truly autonomous or does her programming control her? And even when Paladin attains autonomy it's temporary -- and can she (as she by then identifies, sort of) trust her "feelings"? What about Eliasz? He's a fanatic about human indenture -- he hates it. And he loves bots, especially Paladin. But he's on the side of a truly evil entity -- well, mostly evil -- and in their service he -- and Paladin -- commit horrible murders. Are they autonomous in so doing?

This is a very thought-provoking book, and tremendously exciting. It's exceptional hard SF. It's not perfect -- the author's hand can be seen on the scales on occasion. And the end is fuzzed just a bit -- there's a cynical side to it, to be sure, but also some convenient resolutions. But what book is perfect? I really liked this novel, and it's pushed its way onto my Hugo nomination ballot.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Jack Sharkey

Jack Sharkey would have been 88 today. He was a pretty minor writer of SF, mostly for Cele Goldsmith Lalli's magazines, Amazing and Fantastic, between 1959 and 1965. After Lalli left those magazines he turned mostly to plays. He died in 1992.

I have to confess I don't like his work much -- I think he was one of Lalli's few weak spots. But let's take a look at some of this short stories. He also published two Ace Doubles, which I have already covered:

Ultimatum in 2050 A. D.;

The Secret Martians.

Anyway, here are several reviews of his short stories, from Amazing/Fantastic, published originally as Retro-Reviews at Black Gate:

Fantastic, November 1959

Jack Sharkey’s “Minor Detail” is, well, pretty minor. It’s about a blowhard General promoting his new superweapon, which will allow men to become strong enough to survive any fall, thus allowing them to dispense with parachutes. The idea is stupid, and the supposedly ironic reason it doesn’t work doesn’t make sense.

Fantastic, December 1959

“The Man Who Was Pale,” by Jack Sharkey, tells of a landlady welcoming a strange new tenant – he’s very pale, he’s nocturnal, he wants to live in the basement in a box full of dirt … what could he be? And what could go wrong?

No surprises here – just competent hackwork.

Amazing, March 1960

Sharkey’s “Old Friends are the Best” is a slight, mildly amusing, bit of SF horror… a plant is discovered on the Moon, and brought back to Earth as a scientific marvel – with, of course, unfortunate (and scientifically absurd) results.

Fantastic, April 1960

The cover story is “Doomsday Army,” by Jack Sharkey, an entirely too long story about a National Guard captain who ends up being the main intermediary to a bunch of (as it turns out) very small alien invaders. He’s portrayed as a fairly ordinary suburban husband, prone to taking shortcuts in solving problems his wife brings to his attention: so of course his solution to the alien problem will be a dangerous shortcut. And so it is, with an implausible solution.

There’s joke enough here for maybe 3,000 words at the outside, and this drags terribly at some 13,000 words. (I wonder if it was written to the cover, which does portray a scene from the story but in a very generic fashion.)

Fantastic, November 1963

"The Aftertime", by Goldsmith regular Jack Sharkey, begins as a very straightforward post-apocalyptic story, with a young man, Rory, waking to find his city bombed and his building mostly collapsed. He wanders the city, encountering a young woman and then a few more people, eating canned food, banding together for help, but slowly losing hope as nothing is heard on the radio, and then people start dying because of some strange energy organism. Then there's a shocking twist -- it fooled me -- and a quite strained ending concerning the less than plausible (to say the least) nature, origin, and weakness of the energy beings.

Fantastic, February 1964

Jack Sharkey was also a Goldsmith regular, and, in my view, one of her weak spots. He really wasn’t very good — though he was professional and, I suppose, reliable in his way. “The Orginorg Way”, that said, is better than usual for Sharkey, perhaps because it’s short. It’s about an unprepossessing man obsessed with a woman, who turns to manipulation of plants as a way to attract her — with, of course, unfortunate effects.

Fantastic, August 1964

Jack Sharkey's "Footnote to an Old Story" is amusing enough little piece about a 97-pound weakling who visits a Greek island and falls for a beautiful local girl. Somehow he gets the notion that letting his hair grow will make his body more attractive, and to his surprise it works -- soon he's a pretty impressive physical speciment, and the Greek girl is intrigued. So, it looks like the "Old Story" is the Samson story maybe -- but it turns out, in a slick enough conclusion, that it's another story entirely.

Fantastic, September 1964

Jack Sharkey's "Hear and Obey" is, like the Janifer story, a variation on a traditional theme, in this case the Genie in the Lamp. This Genie is a bit persnickety about how he grants the wishes, with, as one might expect, unfortunate results for his new owner. A bit strained, I thought.

Fantastic, October 1964

“The Grooves” is a brief horror story in which a young man vows to invade the troll’s cave in the mountains to claim at least some of the rumored treasure there… despite warnings that no one has ever returned, and that “you must never kill a troll, because trolls have inverted souls.” Minor work, but effective enough working out its fairly predictable premise.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Catherynne M. Valente

Today is Catherynne Valente's birthday, and so here's a selection of my Locus reviews of her short fiction, a great way to experience some of the loveliest prose in the field of recent years. She's on the Hugo Shortlist for Best Novel right now, for Space Opera.

Last year on this date I posted my review of her lovely novel The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice.)

Locus, December 2006

Slightly more strongly themed is Mythic 2, a short anthology focused mostly on fantasy (stories and poems) with a fairy tale slant. Catherynne M. Valente’s “Temnaya and the House of Books” plays bitter variations on multiple familiar tales (at least “Snow White”, “Cinderella”, and “Hansel and Gretel” that I recognized) in telling of a daughter rejected by father, mother, and stepmother.

Locus, February 2007

Electric Velocipede’s Fall issue includes “yet another Snow White” retelling, “Milk and Apples” by Catherynne M. Valente. Here the stepmother is a wet-nurse, a victim of her demanding stepdaughter, and her predicament is harshly and elegantly portrayed.

Locus, June 2007

Catherynne M. Valente's "A Dirge for Prester John" (Interfictions) is a delightfully exotic story of the legendary Prester John in the fantastical land he encountered -- complete with such creatures as the phoenix, the gryphon, and the blemmye.

Locus, July 2008

Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” (Clarkesworld, May) is a delightful story of obsessive rivalry between two Argentinian mapmakers, of a perhaps slightly alternate Antarctica – one is naturalistic, one artistic – and it’s easy to guess which mapmaker is more interesting.

Locus, August 2009

Another strong online site, Clarkesworld, has been showcasing a lot of decidedly odd SF this year, and from August comes one of the oddest and most intriguing: “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”, by Catherynne M. Valente, a difficult to describe but ever fascinating story, set in a sort of steampunk alternate Earth, and concerning the lost last film of a documentary filmmaker called Bysshe, about a mysterious city on a strange Venus.

Locus, September 2010

Lightspeed in its third issue features two original stories distinguished by the originality of their ideas, and by some distinctiveness in the telling. “How to Become a Mars Overlord”, by Catherynne M. Valente, purports to be a manual for potential rulers of the Red Planet – of any red planet of the many Mars analogs dotting the universe. The descriptions of variant overlords are well done, and the philosophical musings driving the piece are also worthwhile – so I enjoyed it, but in the end felt it a bit short of “story”.

Locus, October 2010

I’ve been keeping an eye on the various novella-length chapbooks available. Rabid Transit Press offers their second novella, Catherynne M. Valente’s Under in the Mere. This is a beautifully written (as we expect from Valente) series of pieces from the point of view of many of King Arthur’s knights, all from original angles, with a certain emphasis on California. I didn’t find it wholly successful – it has a static feel, and works more as a sort of commentary on the Matter of Britain than a complete story.

Locus, October 2011

At Tor.com for July there is a delightful story by Catherynne M. Valente, “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland – for a Little While”, set in her Girl Who Circumented Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making world, about Mallow, who answers the King’s summons to the Foul, only to learn that the King, and Politicks, are bound to ensnare her. It’s full of whimsy – the serious kind – and linguistic invention, and a light touch over sometimes dark matter – first rate.

Locus, January 2012

Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington offer The Future is Japanese, which collects a number of SF stories about, in some sense, a Japanese future, as well as a few stories by Japanese SF writers. ... “One Breath, One Stroke”, lovely fantasy from Catherynne M. Valente, about a house half in the real world and half in another place, such that the calligrapher who lives in the human half of the house is a calligraphy brush in the other place. The story follows the lives and loves of the brush's fellows in the other place, such as a skeleton woman and a catfish … Valente at her exquisite best.

Locus, June 2015

There is also the conclusion to a long novelette by Catherynne M. Valente, serialized in Clarkesworld in February and March, “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild”. This is excellent work, extravagantly written on the subject of color, partly. Violet is “just a kid with hair the color of raisins and eyes the color of grape jelly”, from the Purple country of course, with her Mummery a Clarinaut and a sometime lover of the Ordinary Emperor, and her Papo is a Nowboy, herding mauve squirrels. Violet's best friend is a boy named Orchid Harm, and when he is killed, she and her Sorrow decide to travel across the 7 countries of the world to the Red Country. The story is luscious fun to read, partly for something as simple as the color words we encounter, the imaginative playing with time and with character and action is all of a lovely piece.

Locus, August 2016

Beneath Ceaseless Skies for May 25 is their 200th issue, so a special one, with twice the stories. And it’s exceptional: four first-rate pieces. Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek; or, The Luminescence of Debauchery” is a gender-bending piece about a woman who inherits her father’s glassblowing business, and learns that her customers would rather deal with a man. So we continue, with Master Peek, who is gifted with unusually long life, acquiring several wives, a great deal of wealth, and eventually a fortuitous discovery – that the remarkable glass eyes he makes allow him to see what the wearer sees. Master Peek’s long career continues, especially when he falls for a dangerous and less than dependable woman … Valente’s prose, here pitched a bit to the humorous end of the scale, is a delight as ever, and so too is her extravagant imagination.

Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology is Drowned Worlds, a climate change anthology. Maybe because the theme is pretty depressing the two stories I liked best are somewhat desperately comic, and even almost optimistic, if sometimes in a black way. ... Less satirical is “The Future is Blue”, by Catherynne M. Valente. Tetley Abednego is a much detested woman in a city built on a massive raft of plastic garbage in the sea. The story tells of her childhood, her beloved twin brother, the boy she falls in love with in Electric Town, and the terrible but necessary thing she did that has led to her ostracism. It sounds depressing, but it’s not really, and it’s very imaginative, and, as I suggested, almost, in a black way, hopeful.

Birthday Review: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

a review by Rich Horton

Dodie Smith was born May 3, 1896, and she died aged 94 in 1990. She is one of those writers known nowadays for only a small subset of her oeuvre -- two books, the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, and the adult novel I Capture the Castle. But she wrote several other novels, about a dozen plays, and four volumes of autobiography. She was also an actor early in her life. Her other novels and her plays seem mostly forgotten nowadays, as I note, but they must have been fairly successful, in that several of them were filmed. Even I Capture the Castle was for a long time, it seems to me, eclipsed by The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but sometime in the last few decades it was enthusiastically rediscovered -- or re-emphasized. (And perhaps I am merely reflecting my experience.) Here's what I wrote about I Capture the Castle around the time the movie based on it appeared, in 2003.

I first heard of I Capture the Castle several years ago, and immediately formed the idea I might like it. I had at the time read The Hundred and One Dalmatians, Dodie Smith's most famous story -- and altogether a slier and smarter story than the Disney version. (Though at least the first Disney version, the animated one, is really a pretty darn good film.) I had no idea she had written anything else. It turns out Smith was a quite prolific and apparently rather popular playwright in England in the 30s. She moved to the US at the outbreak of war because her husband was a pacifist. I Capture the Castle appeared in 1948, The Hundred and One Dalmatians a bit later. There was a sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians called The Starlight Barking -- a terrible book.

I picked up a copy of I Capture the Castle real cheap at a used book sale, feeling pretty proud of myself for having found a not very available book. Of course, shortly thereafter it was reprinted in trade paperback -- I think more in reaction to the new live action version of The Hundred and One Dalmatians than anything. Last year a film was made of the book. Not long ago my wife was looking desperately for reading material and I dug up I Capture the Castle and suggested it to her. She read it and quite liked it, and I went ahead and read it, at long last, after she finished. Then this past weekend we rented the film and watched it.

The book is purely delightful. It opens with 17 year old Cassandra Mortmain starting a diary: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." Cassandra lives with her eccentric father, her stepmother Topaz, and her older sister Rose and younger brother Thomas in a dilapidated castle. Her father had rented the castle several years previously, after getting out of prison. (He had attacked his wife with a cake knife, perhaps not seriously, but a neighbour intervened and got hurt -- so the isolation of the castle appealed.) At that time the family was still flush, after her father's success with an odd book called Jacob Wrestling. But by the time of this book, they are living in grinding poverty. The children's mother is dead, though Mortmain has married again, and Topaz, a beautiful woman, much younger than her husband, still earns an occasional amount modeling. Very small royalties for the book sometimes come in. But Mortmain is blocked on any new book, and spends his time reading detective stories. Cassandra is out of school. The beautiful Rose is frustrated by poverty and determines either to "go on the streets" or at least marry a rich man. While Cassandra fends off the clumsy but honest advances of their strikingly handsome servant boy, Stephen, who is in the habit of presenting her poetry copied from famous poets as love poems.

The main actions starts when the new owners of the castle, and of the nearby estate Scoatney, turn up. They are two American men, Simon and Neil Cotton. Simon, the elder, has a beard, which makes him suspicious, but soon Rose determines to marry him. Neil is bound to return to America, and is very suspicious of the sisters' apparent golddigging. Further complications occur when their mother takes an interest in the elder Mortmain, much to Topaz' distress, while a cousin, Mrs. Fox-Cotton, determines to photograph Stephen, and perhaps to seduce him.

Well, as they say, much hilarity ensues, along with a certain amount of pain for all concerned. There are some twists and surprises (at least to me -- perhaps I was naive), leading to a satisfying if somewhat open ending. It's great fun, in large part because of Cassandra's voice, very bright, funny, a bit naive, sweet. It's a romantic book with a light tone, but it maintains just enough ambiguity and edge to avoid treacle. The characters are quite nicely drawn -- at least the women. I don't actually think any of the men come off (except for the Vicar, in a very small part). Simon and Neil and Mortmain are all really only sketches. and Stephen is perhaps more than that but not convincing. However, the women are much better -- Cassandra is lovely, Rose is convincingly not such a wonderful person without being horrible, and Topaz is odd but quite sympathetic.

Well -- what about the movie? Sad to say, it doesn't really come off at all. For the most part the movie is pretty faithful to the bare bones of the plot -- but that's not enough. The humor of the book is almost wholly lost. Cassandra's voice just doesn't survive. The very fine closing lines are altered, much to their diminishing. Rose's character is coarsened just a bit. Topaz is completely muffed -- she is turned into a grotesque. Stephen's role is diminished, which makes some things seem a bit confusing. Bill Nighy plays Mortmain, and he does a fine job, but doesn't quite capture the Mortmain of the book -- still, he's one of the better parts of the movie. All sorts of little things are just a bit off -- for instance, the Vicar is played by the guy who played Mr. Collins in the recent Pride and Prejudice miniseries, and he plays him (in just a bit part -- reduced from the book, understandably given time limitations) as another Mr. Collins, which isn't right AT ALL.

To some extent, this is a bit unfair -- expecting the movie to be a book adaptation. Rather, one should evaluate the movie on its own merits. I suspect it still falls short -- for instance, it's not really very funny, and I think that would have been nice -- but I admit I may not be evaluating it as independently of the book as I should. But there you go.

Birthday Review: Endless Honeymoon, by Don Webb

Birthday Review: Endless Honeymoon, by Don Webb

a review by Rich Horton

Don Webb has a birthday today. He's written a lot of neat short fantasy and horror over the years. His only novels (that I know of) are a set of Texas-based mysteries, with slight and ambiguous fantastical elements, that were published around the turn of the millennium by St. Martin's Press. I really liked those books, but alas, there have been no more. Here's what I wrote about the third of those books when it first came out:

Endless Honeymoon is the third in a recent series of Texas-based mysteries by the engagingly odd writer Don Webb.  I say series, but the books are very loosely linked, sharing mostly some Texas settings, and occasionally featuring major characters from another book as minor characters. I like all three books a lot.  This latest book, after The Double and Essential Saltes, is even more loosely linked, as the protagonists of the other two books were brothers. The lead male characters are all likeable, somewhat nerdy, and very uxorious.  The subject matter is always a bit off-center, and quite different from book to book, but computers are always central to the books.  And you can count on a mention of fireworks.  (It's not certain that this book is in exactly the same timeline as the other two: a murdered character from a previous book appears here alive, and it seems to be set later, though who knows for sure.)

This book is about a couple named Willis and Virginia Spencer. They are independently wealthy (Virginia inherited money, and Willis made a bundle as a Y2K expert), and they spend much of their time performing rather cruel pranks.  Their victims are people whom they have discovered who are "psychic vampires", or simply "shits", who delight in causing misery to those around them, and Willis and Virginia hope to teach these folks a lesson.  They choose their victims by means of a computer program Willis found during his Y2K work.  It turns out, however, that the program was written by a man who takes the whole thing a bit more seriously: he murders the "psychic vampires" instead of simply scaring them.  And one day, unluckily, Willis and Virginia choose the same victim that the "Shit Killer", as he is called, has chosen.

Before long, several people are on the track of the couple. One is the agent the FBI has assigned to the "Shit Killer" case, a young Hispanic man named William Mondragon. This case has the reputation of driving FBI agents crazy, and indeed the previous agent on the case, Abel Salazar, has quit the FBI and is working for someone else, also looking for the killer, and he tracks down both Mondragon and the Spencers.  Add the "Shit Killer" himself, who may be looking for a successor to carry on his work, and the mysterious person behind Salazar, and the Spencers are in big trouble.  Before long Virginia has been kidnapped and Willis and Mondragon are on a wild chase after both her and the real killer.  The resolution is quite scary, involving several people who are both insane and evil, and dealing with Virginia's past abuse by both her father and her first husband, with the "Shit Killer"'s wasted life, and with a strange psychiatrist.

The story is full of imaginative action, and it's fast moving and exciting. Webb does not shy away from the moral implications of all his character's actions, and from the unfortunate attractiveness of the "Shit Killer"'s agenda.  Willis and Virginia are flawed and likeable, and even the villains, mostly, are real (if very strange) people, and not wholly villainous.  (The only exception is clearly completely insane.) 

Birthday Review: Stories of Larry Niven

Today is SFWA Grand Master Larry Niven's 81st birthday. I figured I'd compile a selection of my reviews of his work -- problem is, he hasn't done all that much short fiction during my time at Locus. But I do have some reviews of some of his older work from articles I've done for Black Gate over time. So there's enough ...

Problem is, this doesn't really capture how fun his work was when I was reading it in the mid-70s. I really loved his stuff -- the short stories like "Neutron Star" and "Not Long Before the End" and "Rammer" and "The Fourth Profession" and "Inconstant Moon". The Gil the Arm stories. All the Known Space novels, like A Gift From Earth and Protector. Unfortunately, none of those are covered below -- but they're good stuff, yes they are. Here's what I do have something written about:

Galaxy, October 1968

The one truly famous piece in this issue is Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", in which a policeman puzzled by the recent wave of suicides ties them to the recent realization that there are infinite parallel worlds in which we each make slightly different decisions. The implication is that any decision we ourselves make is meaningless -- because "we" will make every possible different decision anyway, in another world. So, why not commit suicide? I remember being really blown away the first time I read the story, but somehow it didn't have the same impact on rereading, and somehow the logic that seemed inevitable on the first reading doesn't convince me now.

Vertex, August 1974

Niven's "Night on Mispek Moor" is set during another company war, this one on a planet of the Leshy circuit. The protagonist is a mercenary from another planet, trapped on the title moor and attacked by zombies. Not a bad story, nothing great.

Cosmos, May 1977

The three Niven pieces were the first three Draco Tavern stories he published. This has become a rather long series of short-shorts, continued to this day in Analog, featuring a first-person narrator named Rick Schumann, who owns a bar in Siberia which caters to a broad range of alien patrons, particularly the insect-like Chirpsithra, who claim to rule the Galaxy. These stories are "Cruel and Unusual", "The Subject is Closed", and "Grammar Lesson". All are slight as may be expected -- perhaps the best is "The Subject is Closed", in which a priest asks the Chirpsithra about life after death.

Odyssey, Summer 1976

(Cover by Boris Vallejo)

The lead story is Larry Niven's long novella, "The Magic Goes Away", about 26,000 words in this version. (It was published as an illustrated trade paperback from Ace in 1978 -- I believe that version is revised, and seems to be about 33,000 words.) The Niven novella is set in the world of his well-known story "Not Long Before the End", in which magic is real but the source of magic, mana, is running out. A swordsman named Orolandes is involved in the last burst of magical power. I remember enjoying it a fair bit as a teenager.

Tangent review of Analog, July-August 2000

The short stories are also a mixed, but decently solid, assortment.  Larry Niven's "The Wisdom of Demons" is a Draco Tavern story, the first I've seen in some years.  The tavern's owner, Dr. Rick Schumann, tells of a man who met an alien that really wanted to understand humans, and was willing to give the man whatever he wanted, in the form of one wish.  It's a fairly insubstantial story, but the result of the wish is clever enough.

Locus, August 2002

Also in the August Asimov's, a first rate issue, Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper offer a sequel to last year's "Ice and Mirrors". "Free Floaters" is set about a decade later.  Kimber and Eric are still partners and sometime lovers.  This story is told from Eric's POV, as they are given a new job, trying to make contact with a strange alien race which lives in the clouds of an isolated "free floating" Jovian world.  The story fairly entertainingly presents an unusual alien race, and perhaps less convincingly examines Kimber and Eric's relationship at a critical stage.

Locus, August 2005

Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper offer, in "Kath and Quicksilver", a fairly enjoyable far-future piece about a girl marooned on doomed Mercury as the Sun expands, and her interesting means of escape. But it fails to convince in its depiction of the far-future posthuman society. (I will say that I was amused by an apparent reference to a famous "mistake" in Niven's first published story, "The Coldest Place", in which Mercury was depicted as keeping one side always toward the Sun. This was "correct" as of time of writing, but obsolete by the time the story was published. In this story, the authors contrive to have Mercury once again orbiting the Sun with one side always facing it.)

Locus, November 2003

In the November Analog the two novelettes are probably the most interesting pieces. Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper offer "The Trellis", about a scientific station on Pluto, and the curious bio-engineered "trellis" of plants linking Pluto and Charon. An adventurous teenaged girl gets trapped on the trellis, and her father and an old man mount a rescue, hampered by the decaying equipment of the station. The twist is that the rescue is broadcast as a sort of virtual adventure entertainment, but this seemed to point an almost trivial moral.