A Significant Ace Double: The Rithian Terror/Off Center, by Damon Knight

Ace Double Reviews, 4: The Rithian Terror, by Damon Knight/Off Center, by Damon Knight (#M-113, 1965, $0.45)

by Rich Horton

Today would have been Damon Knight's 96th birthday. He was born in Oregon in 1922, and died in 2002. He was one of the most important figures in SF history, in many areas, and in fact I think his importance in other areas than writing has contributed to a certain neglect or diminishment of his accomplishments as purely a writer of science fiction. To wit -- he was one of the first significant critics of science fiction, famous in particular for his book In Search of Wonder. He was a major editor in the field, first of 1950's magazines such as Worlds Beyond (where he published Harry Harrison's first story, and the first Dying Earth tale from Jack Vance) and If, later of the absolutely seminal original anthology series Orbit, and also of numerous significant reprint anthologies. He was the founding President of Science Fiction Writers of America. He was one of the founders of the Milford Writer's Conference. He was married to the great Kate Wilhelm. (He was even, early in his career, briefly an artist.) He won a Hugo in 1956 as Best Book Reviewer. and a Retro-Hugo in 2001 for "To Serve Man". Some people have assumed that these accomplishments are the reason he was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 1995.

But that does his fiction a disservice. He wrote a great quantity of magnificent short fiction, notably at the novella length, with stories like "The Earth Quarter", "Double Meaning", "Rule Golden", "Natural State", "Mary", and "Dio"; but also at shorter lengths, with the SF Hall of Fame story "The Country of the Kind", and "The Handler", "Four in One", "Masks", "Stranger Station", "A for Anything", "I See You", "Fortyday", and many more. His earlier novels were less successful, but towards the end of his life he did some exceptional work at that length, with CV, Why Do Birds?, and Humpty Dumpty: An Oval.

In remembrance of his birthday, I am reposting one of my earliest Ace Double reviews (so it's briefer than usual), of one of the novellas mentioned above ("Double Meaning") backed with a short story collection.

(Covers by Jack Gaughan)

The Rithian Terror is a short novel (or novella), of about 36,000 words. It was originally published in Startling Stories for January 1953 -- I'm not sure if it was expanded or revised for later publication, but I will note that 36,000 words was by no means an unusual length for a story in Startling. The Rithian Terror has also been published under the title "Double Meaning" -- indeed, I believe the only time it appeared as "The Rithian Terror" was in this Ace Double.* It was later published as half of a Tor Double (under the title "Double Meaning") and backed with another Knight short novel, "Rule Golden"). As far as I can tell, the only other stories to be both Ace Double halves and Tor Double halves are two by Jack Vance: "The Last Castle" and "The Dragon Masters"; and two by Leigh Brackett: "The Sword of Rhiannon" and "The Nemesis from Terra". (Spinrad's "Riding the Torch" was both a Tor Double and a Dell Binary Star half.) Off Center is a story collection, with 5 stories, totalling about 44,000 words. It should not be confused with the UK collection Off Centre, which consists of the contents of Off Center plus "Masks", "Dulcie and Decorum", and "To Be Continued". Knight published two other Ace Double halves, Masters of Evolution and The Sun Saboteurs -- I have reviewed both of these (links below). The Sun Saboteurs is an expansion of "The Earth Quarter", and Masters of Evolution is an expansion of "Natural State".

As it happens, both The Rithian Terror and its erstwhile Tor Double companion, "Rule Golden", featured superior (both morally and physically) aliens coming to Earth. I liked The Rithian Terror a fair bit. It features a far future (said to be 2521, felt like 2050 at most) Earth-based Empire, which has a policy of crushing alien races which it encounters. The latest are the Rithians, and after some years of covert harassment by Earth, the Rithians have snuck a spy team onto Earth itself. The story is told from the point of view of the Security man who leads the effort to find the last remaining Rithian, and the points of interest are his relationship with an "uncivilized" member of a breakaway human planet which has good dealings with Rithians, and his courtship of an upper-class woman. Again, the story is fast-moving and enjoyable, with a sound moral point, and the resolution of the main action is nicely calculated, though there is an unconvincing character change pasted on.

The stories in Off Center are:

"What Rough Beast" (10,800 words, from the February 1959 F&SF) -- a man has the power to change the past (involving reaching into parallel universes), thus preventing bad things from happening. Is this a good thing?

"The Second-Class Citizen" (2800 words, from If, November 1963) -- a man who teaches dolphins tricks escapes underwater when the holocaust comes.

"By My Guest" (24,500 words, from Fantastic Universe, September 1958) -- a man drinks a mysterious vitamin and suddenly he can "hear" the ghosts that possess him. This story read to me as if it were Knight trying to do Sturgeon. I liked it, though the ending wasn't quite up to the buildup.

"God's Nose" (800 words, from the men's magazine Rogue in 1964) -- not really SF, a meditation on what God's nose would be like, with, perhaps, a cute but naughty punchline.

"Catch That Martian" (5000 words, from the March 1952 Galaxy) -- there is an epidemic of people being shifted to another dimension, and a policeman theorizes that the cause is a visiting Martian who punishes rude or annoying people in this fashion.

All in all, a very solid brief story collection. "What Rough Beast" is particularly strong, and moving.

Here is my review of The Sun Saboteurs.
And here is my review of Masters of Evolution.

Birthday Review: Faking It, by Jennifer Crusie

Birthday Review: Faking It, by Jennifer Crusie

a review by Rich Horton

Back in the day people used to recommend Jennifer Crusie as one of the best of contemporary romance writers, so I tried a couple of her early novels (which I believe were first published as category yard goods, Harlequin or a similar imprint, but which she was able to have reprinted when she became popular) without much success. But then I bought a later novel, a hardback I believe, and it was a lot better. So on the occasion of birthday I'm reposting something I wrote a long time ago about the novel of hers I liked best.

I have previously tried a couple of Jennifer Crusie novels, and while I have found them moderately enjoyable they have not really lived up to the praise she has received. Her fans have recommended other novels. But my method of picking stuff has been more contingent, not well organized at all. And that continued when I picked up her 2002 novel Faking It at a used book sale a week or two back. However, this time I think I hit the jackpot. Faking It is, it would seem, everything Jennifer Crusie's fans have claimed. Its most distinguising feature is an easy, fluent, constant flow of clever, limber, comedic prose. Line by line the book is not necessarily laugh out loud funny but entertaining and imaginative and sharp.

I should note that the book is rather longer than her genre romance novels. It was published in hardcover, and seems to have been marketed more as "chick lit" than as traditional romance. And indeed while it qualifies as a romance -- certainly it features two main characters who fall for each other from pretty much the start, plus plenty of sex -- it also qualifies as a well-done mystery/caper sort of story (at times almost recalling Donald Westlake's Dortmunder novels), and it has some reasonably acute character observations to make.

The story concerns Matilda (Tilda) Goodnight, about 35 years old, a painter of imitation impressionist murals for people's walls. Her family runs a somewhat down at heels gallery in Columbus, Ohio. This family includes her mother Gwen, her sister Eve, Eve's daughter Nadine, Nadine's father Andrew, who divorced Eve when he realized he was gay, but stayed friends, and Andrew's lover, the family lawyer, Jeff. The family is in debt, partly because of Gwen's feckless, and dead, husband Tony. One thing Tony did was to have Matilda forge a series of paintings supposedly by Scarlet Hodge, the fictional daughter of Homer Hodge, who had done some American primitive paintings that he had actually been able to sell for good money. But now there is a problem -- one of the Scarlet Hodge paintings has been sold by mistake -- a painting that could easily be identified as a fake, which would possibly lead to lawsuits involving the other Scarlets. So Matilda tries to steal the painting back from Clea Lewis, the woman who has bought it.

Clea is a rather nasty 40ish woman who is trying to reel in rich Mason Phipps as her new husband, after the previous two died in suspicious ways. Clea also stole $3,000,000 dollars from a former lover, Davy Dempsey, a con man trying to go straight. Davy wants the money back, so he has abandoned his straight ways to try to steal the money from Clea -- but he runs into Tilda in the process. Standard meet cute -- and quickly they are kissing. But Tilda has basically sworn off men. And she still needs that painting.

So the story continues. Tilda makes Davy promise to get her the painting back. Mason Phipps, meanwhile, is after the Goodnight Gallery, and Gwen. Davy is after Tilda, who is attracted but can't admit it. Davy's friend Simon is after Eve, only he doesn't know it, because he only know's Eve's fake uninhibited personality, Louise. Clea seems to have hired a hit man to kill Davy, but Gwen finds herself unaccountably attracted to the hit man. Tilda realizes she needs Davy to steal or otherwise acquire all the other Scarlet Hodge paintings. Davy has ideas for revitalizing the gallery. Davy's unreconstructed conman father shows up. And so on ... A lot goes on, all quite interesting, all cleverly told, nicely plotted, and as I said very well put together prosodically. The title is nicely reiterated thematically -- fake paintings, fake identities, fake orgasms are all central ... A very light novel, to be sure, but a consistent delight.

Birthday Review: To Crush The Moon, by Wil McCarthy

Birthday Review: To Crush The Moon, by Wil McCarthy

a review by Rich Horton

This review was first published in Locus in 2005. I'm reposting it today in honor of Wil McCarthy's birthday.

With To Crush the Moon Wil McCarthy brings one of the most satisfying recent series of Hard SF novels to a close. This series, collectively called, perhaps, The History of the Queendom of Sol, began in 2001 with The Collapsium (itself an expansion of a 1999 novella). That novel told of brilliant scientist Bruno de Towaji, who saves the Solar System three times from the dangers of super high-tech combined with a jealous rival. The Collapsium introduced the key technologies of the series: various types of programmable matter, and matter transmission. The latter technology, combined with an editing process, allowed for practical immortality. This first book was cheeky and playful and rather Tom Swift-like in ways.

The subsequent three novels are more closely linked, and quite a bit darker in tone. By the end of The Collapsium, Bruno had married the Queen of Sol. In The Wellstone (2003) his son, Bascal, was the ringleader of a group of young people frustrated by their lack of opportunity in a world of immortals. The main character is Bascal's friend Conrad Mursk. The two of them and a large group of rebellious youngsters are exiled to Barnard's Star at the end of the book, and Lost in Transmission (2004) tells of the establishment and ultimate failure of the Barnard's Star colony. Conrad chooses to return to Sol, and To Crush the Moon is the story of what happens after his return.

The Wellstone and Lost in Transmission both had sections set thousands of years in the future, with Conrad (now called Radmer) retrieving Bruno de Towaji from self-imposed exile and returning with him to an altered Moon (now called Lune), where the last significant remnants of humanity are fighting a war with emancipated robots. Earth and the other major planets have been "Murdered". To Crush the Moon tells first of the crisis in Solar System politics that led both to the alteration and terraforming of Luna into Lune, and then to the tragic missteps resulting in the "Murder" of Earth. Conrad and Bruno are central to these events, and so are their wives, Queen Tamra and Xiomary Li Weng (Xmary).  Much of this section is savvy portrayal of what seems like inevitable political problems -- particularly problems dealing with fanatics who wish to restore death to society, and with the impatient returnees from various failed star colonies. Then the conclusion continues the story of the far future war on Lune, with Radmer leading Bruno de Towaji on a desperate mission to, quite literally, save humanity.

The story is satisfying on multiple levels. The scientific (and politico-economic) speculation remains scintillating. The pure adventure aspects are thrilling. The prose is clever, sardonic, successfully darkly funny even in the shadow of the deaths of billions. Conrad and Bruno are very well realized characters, though most of the remaining characters are a bit flatter. (In particular the leading women, Tamra and Xmary, never really come to life.) Lines like "Bruno was elbow-deep in wormholes. Not literally, of course -- he'd lost more than one arm that way already --" are simply delights. The ultimate scope of the story is really impressive, in space, time, and theme. The ending is perhaps a mild disappointment -- it's logical enough, and the reader is not cheated, but it seems just a touch off tonally.

I've truly enjoyed this series of novels, and I confess to slight puzzlement that it hasn't received more notice. For my taste, this is what 21st Century SF ought to be. (Of course there are other recent SF stories that are also "what 21st Century SF ought to be", such as Charles Stross's Accelerando stories.) The latter three novels have all been mass market originals -- perhaps their failure to appear between hard covers has told against them. If so, that's a shame.  I urge readers to seek out these first rate novels.

I've also posted this review of McCarthy's The Wellstone.

Birthday Review: The Wellstone, by Wil McCarthy

Birthday Review: The Wellstone, by Wil McCarthy, Bantam Spectra, New York, NY, 2003, US$6.99, ISBN 0-553-58446-4, 353 pages

a review by Rich Horton

Today is Wil McCarthy's 52nd birthday. Thus I am rescurrecting a review I did of his novel The Wellstone, that appeared in the June 2003 issue of 3SF.

I quite enjoyed Wil McCarthy's The Collapsium a few years back, a generally light-hearted, almost Tom Swiftian, novel set a few centuries hence in the Queendom of Sol. This told of Bruno de Towaji, a great inventor who is called on repeatedly to save the Solar System from destruction, and who finally becomes the permanent consort of the Queen of Sol. There is a lot of wacky tech at the heart of the Queendom. Artificial matter such as super-dense collapsium, which allows the construction of tiny "planettes" with reasonable gravity. The Fax system, by which people and other objects can be transported as information at light speed, and reassembled at their destination. Filters applied to the information in the Fax allow bodily modifications, most especially elimination of disease and aging. Programmable matter, such as wellstone, which allows ready construction of such things as solar sails by reprogramming reflectivity easily.

The sequel is The Wellstone, set some time later. The Fax filters have led to practical immortality (or immorbidity), which is a problem for the children. What will they do when they grow up? Their parents aren't about to vacate their jobs, for the most part. Some of these kids turn delinquent as a result -- or perhaps they would have been that way in any case. A number of kids are being disciplined by confinement to Camp Friendly, a "summer camp" located on a tiny "planette". One of these kids is the POV character, a young engineer named Conrad Mursk. Another is the Crown Prince Bascal, the son of Bruno de Towaji and the Queen. Bascal is extremely talented, a noted poet and a born leader, and he is very rebellious, as well as very spoiled. He incites the boys to an act of sabotage -- they escape via fax to Denver and release a dangerous substance that turns programmable matter to junk. They are soon captured, and Bascal's furious parents return them to Camp Friendly, with even stricter confinement (no working Fax gates).

But Bascal is not to be thwarted. With Conrad's sometimes reluctant help, with the help of a semi-accidental recruit, a teenaged girl named Xmary who was arrested by mistake in the earlier incident, and with the continued help of Bascal's less intelligent henchmen, he hatches another audacious plot. They use the properties of programmable matter to create a "homemade" solar sailship from the planette, and they head for the nearest working Fax gate. But a surprise awaits them there ...

I thought this even a better book than The Collapsium. It lacks the previous book's almost insouciant inventiveness -- the "Tom Swift" nature I referred to above. But the characters are done better, in particular Conrad himself, and Bascal as seen by Conrad. Bascal is an interesting creation -- a nice mixture of admirable and dangerous characteristics. Conrad and Xmary are nicely handled positive characters -- their frustration at their lot as children in a world with no room for them as adults is well portrayed. The book remains inventive, and often funny, with a dark undertone (reinforced by a downright grim prologue and epilogue) that lends a certain (forgive me!) gravitas to the theme.

I've also posted this review of McCarthy's To Crush the Moon.

Birthday Review: The Impossible Bird, by Patrick O'Leary

Birthday Review: The Impossible Bird, by Patrick O'Leary

a review by Rich Horton

Today is Patrick O'Leary's birthday. O'Leary was one of the most promising and fascinating new writers around the turn of the millennium, but, sadly, we've seen little from him since this, his third novel. I'm taking the opportunity to repost this review I did back when it first appeared on my SFF.net newsgroup. (A shorter version appeared in the magazine 3SF.) I've revised the review a bit to reflect what we know since the book appeared.

Patrick O'Leary is an SF author from Detroit.  He's written three  novels, all much praised: Door Number Three, The Gift, and The Impossible Bird. When I read Door Number Three I labelled it magical-realist wacky science fiction, with significant Catholic content. (It's a pretty good book.) O'Leary is an extravagant admirer of that other Catholic SF writer, Gene Wolfe, and Wolfe has been known to praise O'Leary's work quite fulsomely. I was convinced O'Leary was on his way to becoming a major voice in the SF field after these novels, but since then there has only been one more book, a story collection called The Black Heart, in 2009. I don't know what happened but I suspect it may have been the usual sad story -- talented writer is just a bit too strange (in a good way!) to sell widely.

The Impossible Bird is another very strange book that might be called "magical realist science fiction".  (Other books (from the same period) I'm tempted to so classify: Signs of Life, by M. John Harrison; and Zeitgeist, by Bruce Sterling.) It is at core the story of the relationship of two brothers, Mike and Daniel Glynn, who grew up Catholic in Saginaw, MI, in the 1950s.  Now, in about 2000, Mike, the elder by two years, is a successful director of TV commercials, and Daniel is an English professor, living in Detroit.  Throughout their lives it seems Mike has been the better looking, more athletic, more aggressive; while Daniel has been the nerdier and more intellectual.  Daniel is happily married with a 9 year old son, while Mike is divorced.

And both of them are dead.  (Thus in some ways the book also resembles for example Pincher Martin.)  This isn't at all clear at the open.  Daniel seems to be in shock after the death of his wife, while Mike is returning from an ad shoot in the Amazon.  Both are contacted by men who seem to be government agents, and ordered to find each other.  In Daniel's case, the spur is the kidnapping of his son.  But soon the strangeness of their situations becomes obvious. Why are the streets so empty?  Why do people kill each other, with the victims not minding?  What are the hummingbirds that everyone seems to have? And what does the boys' old high school teacher, Dr. Kindler, have to do with all this?  To say nothing of the childhood occasion when the two boys saw a UFO.

It's not entirely clear to me that we are to read this as I read Pincher Martin -- i.e. it's all an hallucination; or if it is to be regarded as real; though on balance I think the after death scenes are to be regarded as real.  The explanation for the after death situation vaguely resembles Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia (though it is really rather different), and the philosophical working out of that situation is notable for disagreeing violently with the philosophical working out of an arguably similar situation in Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder.

The book basically is about Daniel and Mike working out their issues with each other, and it succeeds rather well on this level.  It's moving, rather sad, and it's also a rather absorbing book.  The SFnal content, however, didn't always quite work for me. And perhaps the characters of the two men, though reasonably well portrayed, are drawn a bit too obviously from stock. Nonetheless, a fine book, and I wish there had been many more from O'Leary.

Birthday Review: Short Stories by K. J. Parker

Birthday Review: Short Stories by K. J. Parker

a compilation by Rich Horton

Today is K. J. Parker's birthday, so I figured I'd do another of my compilations of Locus reviews of short stories by the birthday boy (or girl).

K. J. Parker, of course, is a pseudonym for Tom Holt, and in that context, I'm happy to point you to the review I did in December 2010, long before the name behind the pseudonym was revealed, of Parker's Blue and Gold.

Locus, October 2010

Issue #45 of Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has a very strong story by K. J. Parker, "Amor Vincit Omnia". (This story appeared more or less simultaneously in the Summer issue of Subterranean Magazine.) A young wizard is sent investigate a case where an ignorant villager is rumored to have gained the power called "Lorica" -- immunity from any attack. Such power would be very sinister, but it has also been proven impossible. Nonetheless, something awful has clearly happened ... The story very nicely sets the scene, shows the somewhat creepy methods the wizard reluctantly uses to gain power, and convincing depicts the confused local who certainly has stumbled on something scary ... then springs a neat trap to close things.

Locus, December 2010

I had more pleasure reading K J. Parker’s Blue and Gold than just about anything I've read all year. It features a beautifully constructed plot, plenty of cynical jokes and even some worthwhile commentary on man as a political beast. The story is set in what seemed to me something of an alternate Rome or Byzantium, perhaps a bit like the Rome of Avram Davidson's Vergil stories or his Peregrine stories. It concerns one Saloninus, who opens the book by telling someone "In the morning I discovered the secret of changing base metal into gold. In the afternoon, I murdered my wife." Whether either or both or neither of these claims is true is much of what the story is about, as well as what to make of his relationship with his city’s ruler, Prince Phocas. This is an extremely funny story through and through. The humor, and some of the darkness behind it, reminded me a good deal of Tom Holt's masterpiece, The Walled Orchard, which is close to as high praise as I have in me.


Locus, April 2011

Better still is "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong", by the mysterious and remarkable K. J. Parker. It is perhaps not really fantasy, except for being set in an imagined world (which much resembles ours of some centuries past). Parker manages to meld black (and very funny) cynicism with truly wrenching moral and emotional themes. Here Parker tells of a distinguished composer who had realized he is just an accomplished mediocrity, mainly by the example of one of his students, a morally damaged man who seemingly effortlessly composes works of real genius. As the story opens, the genius composer is awaiting execution for a careless murder, and he importunes his old teacher to help him escape. The teacher does, of course ... but the story doesn’t end there. It twists on us a couple more times, following the result of the curious payment the genius gave his teacher, and then the future life of both these men. I’m not sure I quite buy the theory about artistic creativity behind this story, but given that the consequences are worked out brilliantly -- and as I said, the working out is both wrenching and bitterly funny.

Locus, April 2013

Another Australian magazine is Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Issue #55 includes a new story by K. J. Parker, always a cause for celebration. "Illuminated", as with many of Parker's recent stories, looks cynically at a magic user trying to take advantage of an obscure spell. Here, an man and his younger female partner investigate an ancient watch tower and discover the remnants of the work of an ambitious mad wizard ... and, just possibly, a remarkable, if very dangerous, "form" (or spell). Just who, or what, holds the real power in dealing with this discovery is part of the question, darkly answered -- the "form" itself is a scary invention as well.

Locus, September 2013

Two stories stood out for me in Jonathan Strahan's Fearsome Journeys. K. J. Parker is a regular in Strahan's books, and appears here with "The Dragonslayer of Merebarton". This is in Parker's familiar rather deflating voice. The story is told by what seems to be a kind of small time local lord, getting on in years a bit. There are reports of a dragon killing the local livestock, and he knows it's his duty to try to kill it. So he tries to come up with a fairly sensible approach, with help from some of his friends (and retainers and villagers ...) As I said, the tone is one of deflating fantasy traditions, but this story is not quite cynical -- almost warm; also realistic; believable. Good stuff.

Locus, January 2015

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in its Sixth Anniversary Double Issue, features as usual four stories, the best being "Heaven Thunders the Truth", by K. J. Parker. (One wonders if the demise of one of Parker's primary markets, Subterranean Online, has led to an appearance in BCS.) This is the Parker we know and love, cynical and knowing, about a young wizard hired to deal with a girl who has got herself pregnant by the wrong sort of young man. It turns out worse than that for everyone involved, especially when it turns out kings (and deposed kings) are tied up in the whole mess. I liked the source of the wizard's power, and his unhappy bearing of the burden of his power, and the guessable but satisfying ultimate secret.

Locus, April 2016

No sooner had I read Interzone that I proceeded to Beneath Ceaseless Skies for February 4, and I read K. J. Parker’s latest, "Told by an Idiot", and immediately Rahul Kanakia's "Empty Planets" had a rival as my favorite 2016 story to date. This is probably his best story since "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong". For a change, this isn’t set in Parker’s infinitely useful fantasy world, but in what seems our world, Elizabethan England (with perhaps slight changes). Put simply, it’s the story of a lucky man from Wales, who, partly because he finds things, has become rich, and the owner of a playhouse. Then he finds a bottle with, it is said, a demon inside. And what if it is? Parker works out the implications effectively, and besides we get some cool local color, especially including lots of Elizabethan drama neep ... with of course plenty of subtle Shakespearean references.

Locus, October 2017

My favorite Tor.com novella this year to date is Mightier than the Sword, by K. J. Parker. This is told by the nephew of the current Empress, who is pretty much in charge of the Empire as her husband’s health fails. She sends her nephew, a surprisingly capable general, on a mission to figure out why raiders are ransacking monasteries. At the same time our protagonist is trying to save the whore he loves to distraction ... while he slowly realizes, to his horror, that he might just be the most logical heir to his uncle’s throne. It’s pure Parker, cynicism married with a certain offhand idealism -- and featuring desperate love of a perhaps unworthy woman (this theme goes back at least to Tom Holt’s incomparable diptych The Walled Orchard, one of the great unrecognized historical novels of the past few decades). Somehow amidst all the cynicism this is quite a moving novella.

Locus, June 2018

The standout this month, however, is by K. J. Parker. "The Thought That Counts" is one of Parker’s morality tales, and like so much of his work turns on the potentially ruinous effects of love. The narrator, anonymous (but, it seems, a familiar figure in a Parker’s fantastical history, a certain brilliant but unscrupulous philosopher) tells of his encounter with a woman, an artist, escaping her farming family to become a portrait painter in the big city. When a number of her subjects turn up mysteriously mindless, the narrator ends up defending her in court -- and then remembers another woman he had known long ago. It’s blackly funny, in the usual Parker mode, and mordantly reflective of the nature of evil.

Birthday Review: Sewer, Gas, & Electric, by Matt Ruff

Birthday Review: Sewer, Gas, & Electric, by Matt Ruff

Matt Ruff turns 53 today (damn kids!). He's one of the really first rate writers of our time. His works often straddles genre borders. My favorite of his novels is Set This House in Order, from 2003, but I can't find anything I wrote about it. So instead I've resurrected a rather brief review I did for the SF Reader site at about that time about his second novel. (The SF Reader post is here.)

There are plenty of wonderful older books that may not have received their due notice. I won’t venture too far into the past: Sewer, Gas, & Electric is a long, inspired, hilarious but not frivolous SF novel from 1998.

The novel is set mostly in 2023, with flashbacks as far back as the Civil War. We open with Joan Fine battling mysterious creatures in New York’s sewers. Harry Gant, her ex-husband, is erecting yet another tallest building, while fretting over the fact that his company’s androids are being called "Electric Negroes". Philo Dufresne, the blackest African still alive (a plague has killed most black people in the world) is unsuccessfully writing a novel and successfully practicing "benign eco-piracy" in his polka-dotted submarine, the Yabba-Dabba-Doo. "None of this is all that unusual", writes the author. Neither, apparently, are a surviving female Civil War vet from Canada, an AI version of Ayn Rand, a conspiracy to refile pornographic books in libraries so no one can ever find them, or talking Volkswagens that love Janis Joplin.

Obviously, this book is a bit different. The central plot is fairly straightforward, involving a plan to destroy the world. Harry Gant, Joan Fine, and Philo Dufresne end up mostly on the same side, trying to save the world. It’s hard to say much more about the plot, because identifying the villain would be a spoiler. But the book is packed with incident, and with ideas that are sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, and usually thought-provoking.

Somehow Ruff mixes up alligators in the sewers, a plague that kills all the black people in the world, boy scouts, Ayn Rand and a serious discussion of her works (including a beautiful plot summary of Atlas Shrugged), J. Edgar Hoover, Artificial Intelligence, Disney, a parti-colored submarine, and a series of "ironic murders" into an absorbing read, very funny but very serious. It’s still in print, and I recommend it highly.

A Great and Somewhat Neglected SF Novel: A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn

A Great and Somewhat Neglected SF Novel: A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn

a review by Rich Horton

Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976) was a prominent SF writer when I was young, regarded as significant if somewhat minor -- writing in a somewhat Sturgeonesque mode, but I think his star has dimmed in recent years. His sister Mary (1907-2003) was also a writer, less prolific and less successful. Edgar was apparently gay, though as far as I know he was never "out", and Mary at least denied this in later years. (To the extent one can deduce a writer's sexuality from his fiction, I would agree that Pangborn's work suggests that it was written by a closeted gay man.)

Pangborn was a writer from early days -- his first novel, a mystery called A-100, published as by "Bruce Harrison", appeared in 1930. He apparently published regularly in many genres in the pulp magazines, always pseudonymously, for the next couple of decades. Only in the 1950s did he find his true metier, science fiction, and only then did he abandon his pseudonyms. (Though two of his very best novels under his own name, The Trial of Callista Blake and A Wilderness of Spring, are not SF.)

One reason Pangborn's reputation has flagged may be that some of his later work, mostly stories set in a slowly recovering, somewhat bucolic, post-Apocalyptic future, descends into a distinctly cloying sentimentality, married with a certain unconvincing lecturing tone. But it's never fair to judge a writer by his worst work, and in Pangborn's best work the sentimentality is still present, but it does not cloy; and the lecturing is muted into warm philosophical musing. This is true of Davy, and of several of the late tales, and so I regarded Pangborn with much affection. But for one reason or another I had never read his best early SF novel, A Mirror for Observers, despite having had a copy since 1975. It's not that the book was uncelebrated -- it won the International Fantasy Award in 1955. (It certainly should have won the Hugo that year, but in one of the hard to explain stumbles of the Hugos, the award went instead to Mark Clifton and Frank Riley's They'd Rather Be Right. It's interesting to think of how different Pangborn's later reputation might have been had it won.)

At any rate, having finally read the novel, I find myself really impressed, really moved. This is not to say it's a great novel exactly -- there are missteps and occasional clunky aspects. But its great moments transcend its weaker moments -- just as we should judge Pangborn's career by his best work, A Mirror For Observers gains its impact from its peak moments.

The novel opens in an underground city underneath Canada's Northwest Territory (as it was called at that time). Namir the Abdicator is talking with Director Drozma. The two are Martians, or as they call themselves, "Salvayans". They are humanoid (enough so that with some plastic surgery and "scent reduction" they can pass as human), and very long lived. Most Salvayans abandoned Mars for Earth some 30,000 years prior to the action of the novel, because of the drying, and they have been guiding human development ever since, with the goal of "Unity" -- a hope that they will be able to reveal themselves and live in human society. The optimists among them believe that time is close -- the pessimists believe that time will never come, and such events as the accidental destruction of one Salvayan city that happened to be under the ocean near Bikini Atoll have only intensified that feeling. Namir is a pessimist (he has "abdicated" his role as a human Observer), and he is living among humans, trying to encourage the destructive impulses of certain promising people. (The hope of the Abdicators is that humans will destroy themselves, leaving Earth to the Salvayans.) At this time he is trying to influence a brilliant 12 year old boy, Angelo Petrovecchio, who lives in an exurb of Boston called Latimer.

The rest of the book is in two parts, reports from another Salvayan, the Observer Elmis, to Drozma. Elmis has been assigned to observe Angelo, and to try to extract him from Namir's influence. The first part deals with Elmis, calling himself Ben Miles, living in Latimer, in the boarding house run by Angelo's mother. Ben is much taken with Angelo, who is a very intelligent boy (with a bum leg), given to reading the classics; and also with a neighbor girl, Sharon Brand, who declares herself in love with Angelo, and who has a great imagination and a tremendous musical talent.

Ben soon recognizes Namir in the area, and also a boy named Billy Kell, who leads a local gang, and who treats Angelo nicely, hoping to lure him into the gang. It soon becomes clear that Namir is working through Billy Kell (and there is another secret there ...), and Ben and Namir begin to fence, leading to a suspicious crime, and a disastrous confrontation, which Ben, too much the pacificist, fumbles. And then Angelo, enmeshed in Billy's gang, gets involved in a gang fight with horrible consequences. And he runs away.

The second part sees Elmis, now calling himself Will Meisel, 9 years later, still trying to find Angelo. In the mean time he has provided for Sharon's musical education, setting her up with her blind piano teacher and establishing a school. The political landscape is fraught -- a nativist party, the Organic Unity Party, is planning a takeover. The leader, Joseph Max, is transparently an amalgam of Hitler and Joe McCarthy, but in today's environment it's impossible to avoid seeing parallels with our current President. Elmis realizes that Joseph Max's deputy Bill Keller is Billy Kell, and he decides to investigate, and soon learns that Namir is also involved, and then, to his shock, encounters an Abraham Brown, not a Party member but an associate, and recognizes him as Angelo.

Sharon turns up again as well -- making her American debut as a concert pianist. Elmis/Ben/Will meets her, and she knows him. She is a genius (of course) (playing among other composers Andrew Carr, a major composer as well in Pangborn's "The Music Master of Babylon", which otherwise does not seem to be in the same continuity as A Mirror for Observers). They renew their friendship, and soon they are meeting with Angelo/Abraham, and trying to extract him from the clutches of the Organic Unity Party. All this is successful, but Namir's scheming, and Billy Keller's, and the weakness of Joseph Max, leads inexorably to an apocalyptic event.

The results are truly wrenching (and inevitable in a way clear partly from the thematic course of the novel, which does seem a bit too programmed at times). The book achieves true tragedy -- and yet is also optimistic. In this, really, it reflects the Davy sequence -- again, an apocalyptic event is followed by horrible hardship, but leads to a newly pastoral future, and considerable hope.

It's really very powerful stuff, even though there are the missteps I mentioned. Part of this is the perhaps over-idealized portraits of Angelo/Abraham and Sharon. They are people we love and root for -- but perhaps we don't quite believe in them. (Angelo in particular -- Sharon is a more complete and affecting portrait.) Elmis is the character who truly lives. His intense love for specific humans (Angelo and Sharon), humans in general, and the Earth as a whole, completely informs his narrative. That's what makes it sing. Pangborn always had a tendency towards sententiousness, and that does manifest itself at times here -- but his love for people, and for the pastoral, was real, I think, and it shines through honestly in the best passages of this novel. It brought me to tears, more than once -- and it may be that sometimes those tears were jerked manipulatively, but mostly they were honest, and tears of awe and love as well as sadness.

This novel was discussed at Worldcon, at a panel run by John Hertz, who has done a series of discussions of Classic SF at various Worldcons. This con also featured discussions of Heinlein's Red Planet and Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon. (I attended the latter.) I thought the discussion of A Mirror for Observers was particularly good. John's view of the novel is acute and sensible, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (who I must credit for spurring me to finally read the book) made a number of insightful comments as well. Indeed our discussion spilled over to an impromptu additional session after the panel, with Alvaro, myself, John Hertz, and others considering this book as well as stuff as diverse as The Tale of Genji.

What conclusions did we reach? I wish I could remember everything more clearly. One thing that strikes me as important is the depiction of the Martians, who think of themselves as a superior race, as just as deeply flawed as humans. (Morally, of course, but also in such ways as having little musical ability.) The Salvayan dream of unity is just as important for their development as it is for human development.

One other thing we noticed -- I think this was Alvaro's observation -- is that central to the story is Elmis' love of humans -- individuals and the whole -- and also of Earth, and that how that was most abundantly illustrated in his descriptions of nature, of natural scenes. Pangborn's love for the pastoral is both a strength and a weakness -- he could be terribly sentimental about it -- but in this book, which is mostly set in cities, the descriptions of the country are truly effective.

Another key element of the book is the slight distancing effect of Elmis' being unhuman, but nearly human. He is just enough separate from the main characters, and from humanity itself -- and believably so -- to give his perspective an effective angle. This is a common enough SFnal device, but I thought used effectively here.

There's the question of the Mirror -- which is an actual object, a bronze mirror from the Mycenaean era. It is presented as having near magical effects (never explained): one who looks in it sees something surprising, perhaps shocking -- and we assume (we are never told) that one sees something like a true vision of one's own character. I'm not actually sure this was necessary to the book, actually.

It's a grave book and a warm one; a sweet book and a bitter one. I loved it -- I wish I had read it back 40+ years ago when I bought my copy, but perhaps it's as well that I didn't. I imagine I'd have liked it then, but I wouldn't have read the same book, so to speak, and maybe it's a better book from my older perspective. It can't be called forgotten, but is does seem neglected. I really do wonder how differently it would be regarded had it won the Hugo. I hope it gains a new audience in these later years.

Birthday Review: The Serial Garden, by Joan Aiken

The Serial Garden, by Joan Aiken (Big Mouth House (an imprint of Small Beer Press), 978-1-931520-57-7, $20, hc, 328 pages) October 2008.

A review by Rich Horton

I grew up reading all sorts of children’s (and YA) books of course, and among my favorites were Joan Aiken’s Wolves novels, set in an alternate 19th Century England. But I was not an organized reader, and I never encountered her short stories. She wrote many of them, however, and among the best-loved were the Armitage stories, sprinkled throughout several of her collections. Now these stories, with four new ones completed prior to her death in 2004, have been assembled into a single book.

The stories concern a family in a village in England, Mr. and Mrs. Armitage and their children Harriet and Mark (with baby Milo turning up rather later). A Prelude tells how the Armitages arranged, on their honeymoon, that they would never ever be bored. These tales, published over some 50 years or more, are set in sort of an eternal present – a village that in flavor never really changes, though somehow the time of the action tracks the time of writing. And it is an ordinary English village (I assume) except with magic, magic accepted rather straight-facedly by all the characters. Of course, many of them are witches! And, happily, the magic is real and had enduring consequences – so for example the unicorn Candleberry that the Armitages acquire in the first story ("Yes, but Today is Tuesday") remains with them throughout the book.

The stories are entirely charming, and yet not cloying. Importantly, the tone varies, acts have consequences, and not everything is sweetness and light. For example, the title story, and one of the best, concerns Mark’s music teacher, Mr. Johansen, and his long lost love, who has vanished into a rather unusual place. It begins charmingly with Mark collecting a cardboard garden from a somewhat unpleasant sounding breakfast cereal – and defies expectations with its ending. (Happily, it is hinted later that Mr. Johansen may have another chance to find his inamorata.)

Other favorites of mine include "The Ghostly Governess", in which Harriet and Mark end up taking lessons from a long dead lady; "Harriet’s Birthday Present", in which Mark’s search for a special present for Harriet lands him in hot – well, not water exactly (and I do wish I knew what he ended up getting her); "The Land of Trees and Heroes", in which the children visit their grandmother and then the title land, where people can be lost forever in certain special trees; "The Stolen Quince Tree", an amusingly sharp treatment of a fraudulent gardening columnist; and really all of the new stories, perhaps most notably "Don’t Go Fishing on Witches’ Day", a bit of a time travel story as Mark gets ensnarled in an ancient curse. But really, that’s the current set of favorites – were I to think again I might choose a half-dozen different stories – the book is a delight throughout.

My only recommendation would be -- at least this worked for me -- to read the stories in small chunks, two to four at a time. They are by and large of a length and of a voice, and while the tone does vary as noted above it does tend to return to the same level. So read in a rush the book might wear on one. But that’s not how they first were written, or first appeared, and read individually these are quite lovely. And in the best of senses, without, I think, any condescension, these are stories to please all ages.

Birthday Review: Signs of Life, by Cherry Wilder

Signs of Life, by Cherry Wilder

a review by Rich Horton

Cherry Wilder was the name used for her SF by Cherry Barbara Grimm (1930-2002). Grimm was born in New Zealand, and died in New Zealand, but spent much of her adult life first in Australia, then in Germany. She was a very interesting writer at her best, though she didn't ever quite get wide recognition. That said, her YA Torin series, beginning with The Luck of Brin's Five, was fairly popular. I thought her late short stories, in places like Interzone and in some of Jack Dann's Australian/New Zealand themed anthologies, as well as the short and brilliant "Aotearoa" in Asimov's just before her death, were quite impressive.

Today would have been her 88th birthday, so I am resurrecting a fairly brief review I did of Signs of Life for my SFF.net newsgroup way back then.

Signs of Life appeared in 1996. (Another novel with the same title came out in 1997 from M. John Harrison. Totally different novel, quite excellent.) Wilder's novel is a sequel to her 1982 novel Second Nature. It's pretty good.  It tells the story of a starship which crashlands on an Earthlike world.  The thing is, another starship had crashlanded there a couple of centuries earlier, and the world has been "colonized" by descendants of the original crashees.  (This is the story told in Second Nature.)

The two main strands of the story follow the efforts of the complement of one of the Capems (sort of lifeboats) to survive in the first few weeks after landing, and the crew of a sailing ship which happens to be visiting the island on which the Capem has crashed.  This allows Wilder to compare and contrast, a bit, the new society of Rhomary (the name of this planet) with the Earth/Arkady folk of the newly crashed starship.  The viewpoint characters are very likable, and very human (even the androids, or Oxpers (auxiliary persons: Wilder has a very engaging way with neologisms)).  The only villain is rather stereotypical, and a little hard to believe: Wilder postulates that the only military-style organization to survive in the future is the maintenance crews of starships, and the leader of the maintenance crew which happens to come down in Capem Five, the focus Capem, rather predictably becomes a militaristic paranoiac (I hope I'm not misusing this word) under the stress of the crash.

I really did enjoy the novel. It's involving and engaging. The plot is a little vague, little more than a narration of events for the first month or so after crash.  There is closure, it's just that the plot doesn't have much structure.  As I intimated, the villain is somewhat overdrawn.  There were a couple of implausibilities, mainly the near complete lack of language difficulty between the Rhomary colonists and the starship folk.  Wilder throws in some gratuitous (to me) telepathy, but to be fair, this seems to be part and parcel of her "future history". I recall being vaguely disappointed that it didn't come out in 1997, so that I could have added it to my Hugo Nomination ballot along with Harrison's novel (as a kind of joke, of course). (That was a year that I didn't read any of the actual Hugo nominees until much much later -- I think I had only read seven 1997 novels by the time of the nominations, and probably only Harrison's would have been a truly deserving nominee.)

Old Bestseller Review: The Four Feathers, by A. E. W. Mason

Old Bestseller Review: The Four Feathers, by A. E. W. Mason

Michael Dirda recently reviewed this book in the Washington Post and I thought "that book looks like it would be right up my alley!" So I bought a copy and read it -- and Michael was right.

Alfred Edward Woodley Mason lived from 1865 to 1948. He was at time an actor, a playwright, and even a Member of Parliament, of the Liberal Party. But his major success was as a novelist. His best known novel by far was the novel at hand, The Four Feathers, from 1902, which was filmed multiple times, most successfully in 1939 by Zoltan Korda, starring John Clements and Ralph Richardson. He was also known for several detective novels about Inspector Gabriel Hanaud of the Surete, created as a reaction to Sherlock Holmes and said to be an inspiration behind Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.

My copy of The Four Feathers is a 1905 edition from Macmillan. It is inscribed inside by Dorothy A. Kern, of Chicago, presumably the first owner. A note on the first page states that the main character first appeared in a short story published in the Illustrated London News.

Harry Feversham is a sensitive 14 year old when we first meet him, the only child of the widowed General Feversham. He is allowed to stay up with the General and a few of his army friends on their annual meeting on the anniversary of a critical battle. He hears tales of courage and cowardice, and the General's crippled friend Lieutenant Sutch (who, it is suggested, had an unrequited passion for Harry's dead mother) notes the fear that Harry shows at the tales of cowardice and the sad outcomes of the cowards. Harry, Sutch fears, is too intelligent and too imaginative, unlike his rather dull father. But there is no alternative -- all the Fevershams have been military men, and so must Harry be as well.

The action jumps forward 13 years, to 1882. Harry has been in the Army for some time, and he is having dinner with his fellow officers Trench, Willoughby, and Durrance. He announces his engagement to an Irish woman, Ethne Eustace. This caused Durrance some pain, for he is also in love with Ethne. Then Harry receives a telegram, and throws it in the fire. Soon thereafter, he resigns his commission. It becomes clear to Trench, Willoughby, and to Castleton, who sent the telegram, which indicated their regiment was to be called to active duty, that Harry has resigned his commission for fear of the danger of active duty. So they each send him a white feather, symbol of cowardice. And, shortly thereafter, Harry confesses as much to Ethne, and in a passion, she tears a feather from her fan and gives it to him as well, the fourth feather, and their engagement is broken.

Much of the rest of the story is told via Durrance. On duty in Egypt and the Sudan, he follows the careers of his fellow officers, and each encounters terrible dangers. One crisis is the loss of some letters from General Gordon that had been hidden in a town overrun by rebels. Miraculously, these letters are recovered. Durrance realizes that the strange man who effected the recovery was none other than Harry Feversham. At about that time, a strange accident striked Durrance blind, and he is forced to return to England, invalided out of the service. There he again strikes up a relationship of sorts with Ethne, while his curious friend, the widow Mrs. Adair, who it is immediately clear is hopelessly in love with Durrance, is also involved. Durrance hopes to marry Ethne -- but is it fair that she marry a blind man? Only if she truly loves him. And, of course, he is honest enough to realize eventually that she still loves Harry. Meanwhile, Harry is in North Africa -- having discovered that another man who sent him a feather is imprisoned in a hellhole, and having decided to get himself sent to the same prison, and to effect his former friend's release. It is clear that his hope is to redeem each of the four feathers -- only so that he will be worthy of Ethne's respect (not love) when again they meet in the afterlife.

And so things go -- a curious love quadrilateral of sorts between Harry, Durrance, Ethne, and the tortured Mrs. Adair. Acts of desperate heroism in North Africa. The kind intervention of Lietenant Sutch. Durrance's struggles with life as a blind man. Ethne's music. It's all highly pitched romanticism, insisting on a thorough obsession with honor -- but not revenge. It's not really quite believable, of course, but it's fun and involving. Not a great novel, but an enjoyable novel, and well written as well. Dirda was right.

Birthday Review: Jade Tiger, by Jenn Reese

Jade Tiger, by Jenn Reese (Juno, 978-0-8095-5674-8, $12.95, 239, tpb) January 2007.

A review by Rich Horton

Jenn Reese was born on this date, and so I've resurrected a brief review I wrote for Locus back in 2007 of her first novel.

Jade Tiger is Jenn Reese's first novel. (She has published a number of fine short stories in the past few years.) This is an extremely fast-paced story about a half-Chinese half-American martial artist. The fast pace is both a benefit -- it's a quick, exciting read, hard to put down -- and a shortcoming -- plot steps and character motivations are kind of glossed over, and the prose is often a bit careless as well, as if the pace of the plot was echoed by the pace of the writing.

Ian Dashell is a Professor of Archaeology at Risley University. One night he encounters an Asian man breaking into the artifacts room and destroying precious objects, apparently at random. The man seems ready to beat Ian to death, but a young woman suddenly invades, saving Ian’s life and preventing the man from stealing his actual desire – a jade crane. The woman is Shan Westfall, whose Chinese mother was part of the Jade Circle, a group of five women martial arts experts. But her mother was killed and several of the jade artifacts – objects of some power – possessed by the Circle were stolen, and Shan returned to the USA with her American father. Now she is running a small martial arts studio – and still searching for the lost artifacts.

It is clear to Shan that the man who nearly killed Ian is a key to tracking down still more artifacts – Shan already has the tiger, and now the crane. And, it turns out, Ian also knows where to find one more of the animals, the dragon. He insists on accompanying her in quest of it, and so does his colleague, Daniel Buckley. And they’re off! Just like that – a breakneck trip to France to track down the dragon. But the bad guys seem to know where they are going, and there is a scary encounter in France, followed by a different kind of scary encounter with Ian’s parents in England. (Ian and Shan, of course, quickly fall for each other.) Then off to an island near Hong Kong, owned by a rich collector with sinister plans of his own.

The action never stops – which, as I have implied, is both good and bad. There is little time for plot logic, and not much more time for character and relationship development. (Though that works OK – Ian and Shan are engaging people, and while I could have used a bit more focus on their developing attraction, it comes off well enough.) There are several scintillating martial arts fights, and some nice plot twists, and lots of danger. I had fun reading Jade Tiger. It’s not a masterpiece, but it shows plenty of promise, and its failings don’t get in the way of its exciting story.

Birthday Review: The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies

Birthday Review: The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies

Copyright: 1994 (published in 1995 in the USA)

This was one of the very first reviews I wrote for the World Wide Web -- as I recall it was posted on one of the very first online bookstore sites. I can't even remember the name of the site just now. It had an interesting discussion forum, alas all long since gone.

I'm reposting it today because Robertson Davies was born 105 years ago.

I wrote, in December of 1995:

It was already my plan to review this book here, simply because it is the last book I finished, and it is a significant book by one of my favorite authors. However, I learned some very sad news today: Robertson Davies died December 2, so this review will take on a somewhat valedictory tone.

For me personally, the news of Davies` death is quite depressing, doubly so because now two of my three favorite non-SF writers have died within a few weeks of each other. (Kingsley Amis having died in late October.) My third favorite non-SF writer, Anthony Powell, is older than either Davies or Amis (Amis was 73, Davies 82, and I believe today is Powell`s 90th birthday. [Actually, Powell was born on 21 December 1905.])

Oh well, on to the book. Robertson Davies was a Canadian author, arguably the finest Canadian writer ever, who wrote plays and novels on generally Canadian subjects. The novels fit generally into trilogies: The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy, and The Cornish Trilogy, in order of composition, represent his first nine novels. All his novels, however, can be read independently (although at least The Deptford Trilogy probably reads best in order.) To say, as I have said, that his novels are "about Canada" is a laughable understatement, however. I tried to summarize the subjects which Davies covered once for a friend, thinking it would be a tidy list, and I kept going and going: Theatre, Music, Vaudeville, Toronto, Hagiography, Jungian Psychology, Art (particularly "The Old Masters"), aging, medicine, Canadian politics, war, finance, schools (both Canadian "boarding schools" and Universities), and on and on. Suffice it to say that his novels are fascinating, hypnotic, works, usually centered on an artist of some kind. Perhaps the best place to start with Davies is his first two books: Tempest-Tost and Leaven of Malice, as these are somewhat lighter in tone than his later works (though all Davies` work is full of comedy at some level.) In my opinion, his best novels are Fifth Business, the first of The Deptford Trilogy, and What`s Bred in the Bone, second book of The Cornish Trilogy.

I am going on. Pardon me, obviously Davies is an enthusiasm of mine. Anyway, his last two novels (barring a posthumous work) are Murther and Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man, which appear to be the first two parts of another loose trilogy [now generally called the (unfinished) Toronto Trilogy), although both are capable of being read completely independently. The Cunning Man is the story of Jonathan Hullah, a Toronto doctor of somewhat unusual reputation. Hullah narrates the book, and tells his own life story beginning in about 1920 in a very isolated part of Northern Ontario, and continuing through early experiences with the local doctor, and also a Native American healing-woman, boarding school, medical school, World War II, and his postwar establishment of his own rather unusual medical practice, which is treated as a court of last resort for cases other doctors have considered hopeless. The key elements of the book are Hullah`s relationships with various people, in particular his school friends Charlie Iredale and Brocky Gilmartin (the latter the father of the narrator of Murther and Walking Spirits), his English lesbian landladies, called The Ladies, and the community surrounding the Very "High Church" Anglican church of St. Aidan`s, next door to Hullah`s practice. At the heart of the story is the mystery surrounding the death of the pastor of St. Aidan`s, Father Ninian Hobbes, and the attempts of Charlie Iredale, now an Anglican priest and Fr. Hobbes` assistant, to have Hobbes declared a saint.

As usual, the main interest of the book is in the characters, and in the curious subjects which come up as a result of the story: medieval saints tales, Anglican ritual and especially Church music, acting, a somewhat psychosomatic theory of disease, church politics, some Freudian psychology, and a great deal more.

For me, this book ranks in the middle range of Davies' work, which of course still makes it highly recommended. However, my interest flagged at times, and the book failed to completely involve me in the way that Davies' very best books do. Also, the central story is less compelling than in most of Davies` books, so the interest devolves even more to the characters and the somewhat arcane knowledge and theories that Davies discusses. These are interesting indeed, but a real gripping story would be still more interesting.

Birthday Review: House of Meetings, by Martin Amis

Birthday Review: House of Meetings, by Martin Amis

A review by Rich Horton

Martin Amis turns 69 today. I've read most of his work -- he's been a favorite of mine since I realized that the son of another of my favorite writers (Kingsley Amis) was also a writer. So I'm resurrecting this review of his 2006 novel House of Meetings.

Martin Amis's new novel is House of Meetings. Obviously making use of some of the research associated with his previous non-fiction book, Koba the Dread, which was about Stalin, he has written a novel about a "survivor" of the Gulag. But of course the novel is in great part about the ways in which this man didn't really survive the Gulag.

The narrator is a Russian born in 1919. He is telling his story, in what seems to be a long letter, to his stepdaughter, an American girl, sometime in 2004 or so. In the present he is taking a trip back to the location of the slave labor camp in which he spent ten years from about 1946 to 1956. It becomes clear he intends to die soon, and this narrative is a confessional.

The fulcrum of the story is a love triangle, involving the narrator, his ten years younger brother Lev, and a beautiful young Jewish girl named Zoya. Just after the War (in which the narrator, in his words, raped his way across East Germany -- in company, to be sure, with the rest of the Russian Army), Zoya moved into their neighborhood in Moscow, and immediately established a reputation as a woman of little character. But a very beautiful woman. The narrator, a war hero of sorts, handsome, used to having his way with women, becomes obsessed with her, but is rejected. And ends up being sent away to a labor camp. And he is astonished to learn that his rather ugly younger brother has taken up with Zoya, and indeed married her. But then Lev too is sent to the camps -- the same camp. And the two men spend several years there -- though Lev is a pacifist, and refuses to become involved in fights against the camp bullies, or the administrators. Which leads to something of a rift between the two men -- a rift exacerbated in the narrator's mind by his jealousy. But something changes horrendously when Zoya is allowed to make a conjugal visit -- in the "House of Meetings". And when soon after that, the camp is closed and the inmates freed.

The later life of the three is also described. The narrator is fairly successful, in Russian terms, eventually emigrating to the U.S., while Lev's marriage disintegrates, and he marries another woman, and has a son, destined to die in Afghanistan. But all is leading to a final confrontation between the narrator and Zoya, and to a final revelation in a long buried letter from Lev to the narrator. All this incident is skillfully unfolded, if to be honest the final letter isn't quite the explosion we have been led to expect.

Much of the interest in the novel is in the quite compelling descriptions of life in the labor camp. Besides being a portrayal of slave camp life, and a portrayal of a ruined man, it is to some extent a pained depiction of a dying country. It is very well written. A bit less "bravura" in prosody than earlier Amis books, though still often arresting. And very moving, quite believable, quite profound. One of Martin Amis's best novels, I think.

Birthday Review: A. S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale

Birthday Review: The Biographer's Tale, by A. S. Byatt

a review by Rich Horton

I wrote this review back in 2004, and I'm resurrecting it in honor of A. S. Byatt's birthday. She is a magnificent writer -- I'm a particular fan of Possession, and of the utterly brilliant short story "Sugar", as well as the novellas of Angels and Insects. Much of her work if fantasy, or borderline fantasy. This novel is one of her less well-known books.

The Biographer's Tale, from 2000, is one of those books A. S. Byatt seemed to produce as a break from her "Frederica Potter" series. (I suppose one shouldn't call The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and The Whistling Woman the "Potter" series -- might cause confusion!) It's an enjoyable novel, fairly short, fairly amusing, with a number of surface similarities to Possession, but a very different overall feel.

Phineas G. Nanson is a very small Englishman, a graduate student in postmodern literary theory. (I say very small -- his description of himself is not specific, but I don't think he is meant to be a "dwarf" or "midget" or whatever the correct clinical term is -- rather, a very short, slight, man, perhaps 4'9" or 4'10".) One day he decides to chuck that branch of study, and a professor suggests as an alternative a study of biography, or, specifically, the three volume biography of Sir Elmer Bole, by Scholes Destry-Scholes. This biography turns out to be indeed fascinating, and Bole himself an incredible person, a Victorian polymath, who among other things married two women, a somewhat typical Englishwoman and a Turkish woman. Nanson decides to try to do a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes. But he runs into trouble quickly -- Scholes is long dead, or at least disappeared, he isn't even really named "Scholes Destry-Scholes", and very little is known about him.

At this juncture the book seems ready to become a spiraling mystery built around curious small facts, and an elusive subject. Nanson discovers some papers left at his publishers by Scholes, that appear to be sections of contemplated biographies of other famous people, real people this time: Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen. But these prove problematic as well, as much of these accounts turn out to be invented. Nanson digs deeper, and at the same time gets a job, working at a curious travel agency run by a couple of gay men. The travel agency concentrates on unusual tours, thematically linked -- which corresponds fairly well to the inventions of Scholes re his subjects. Nanson's other diggings lead him to meet two intriguing but different women: a Swedish ecologist, or more specifically a bee expert, whom he meets at a museum dedicated to Linnaeus; and a radiologist, the niece and closest surviving relative of Scholes Destry-Scholes.

The rest of the book swings to "autobiography", as the subject becomes not Bole, or Scholes, or Linnaeus, Ibsen or Galton; but rather Nanson, in particular his relationship with the two women he has met, and his difficulties and successes at his new job. It's all pretty interesting, and fun, and generally unexpected. Some of it -- much of it -- has a distinct air of unreality. Byatt is always prone to fantastical writing even in her most mainstream stories, and here she is certainly brushing against the border of realistic fiction with -- what? I guess that's part of the question -- a question naturally posed when we consider a fictional biographer with an assumed name writing about a fictional person, but also writing about "real" people, though making up stuff about them. And so on -- consider the radiologist's art pictures -- X-rays presented as art -- are these bones the real people? Or Francis Galton's composite photographs ... or Henrik Ibsen's ideas about character ... or Linnaeus' classification schemes ... in many ways this is a "light" book but it is also an obsessively intellectual book (as usual with Byatt), and a fascinating read.

A Perhaps Forgotten Mystery Novel: The Flaxborough Crab, by Colin Watson

A Perhaps Forgotten Mystery Novel: The Flaxborough Crab, by Colin Watson

a review by Rich Horton

I admit I had never heard of Colin Watson when I ran across this 1969 mystery novel at an estate sale or antique shop recently, hence the "Perhaps Forgotten" label. But on research (i.e. reading his Wikipedia entry) I see he was quite popular at that time, and that the Flaxborough books even became a TV series. So very possibly he's not forgotten at all.

Colin Watson (1920-1983) wrote 12 novels in the Flaxborough series -- Flaxborough being a provincial town based on Boston, Lincolnshire (where Watson worked as a journalist). He wrote one other novel (The Puritan) as well as a study of thrillers, Snobbery With Violence, that covers such writers as Dornford Yates, whom I have reviewed on this blog. (And, yes, "snobbery with violence" fits Yates very well.) Four of the Flaxborough novels were used in the BBC TV series Murder Most English, in about 1978. (One of these was the novel at hand, The Flaxborough Crab.) There were also BBC radio adaptations of two of the books.

The detective in the books is Inspector Walter Purbright, a rather plodding but honest fellow. Another major character is Miss Lucinda Teatime, who seems rather a conwoman, but, as a recurring character, is evidently never the true villain. She's "of a certain age", but seems concerned with her appearance and sexual availability, even though she doesn't actively engage in such activities in the book at hand -- and she's quite clever and intriguing if, well, also intriguing, in another sense.

The book opens with several scenes of women being attacked by an older man, and groped. (One of the older men portrayed, by the way, is called Mr. Grope, I am sure not unintentionally, though he isn't the villain.) The curious aspect of all this is the strange scuttling crablike way the attacker runs. So Purbright sets up a patrol, trying to catch the perp, with no results, However, a senior citizens outing, organized by Alderman Winge, leads to a shocking conclusion -- Winge tries to grope one of the women, and in making his crablike escape, falls off a cliff into the river and dies.

So -- problem solved, eh? But the inquest suggests the possible involvement of an herbal product, "Samson's Salad", which is supposed to, er, increase the vitality of older men. (This is pre-Viagra days, of course.) And Samson's Salad, Purbright learns, is sold by an outfit run by Miss Lucinda Teatime. That's not all, though -- there are competing doctors testifying at the inquest, and it appears there's another potential product involved, much more respectable, produced by a German company. Could one of these drugs/herbs be causing the unsavory activities of the Flaxborough Crab? And is there more than one Crab?

You've probably guessed the solution, in broad terms. In narrower terms, there's another death (there always is -- these detectives are terribly inefficient, always at least one more person needs to die for them to solve the case), and it's suspicious enough to lead to further investigation and the revelation of a rather involved murder method.

The whole mystery aspect of this novel is really kind of minor, and the actual murder method seems implausibly involved. But the fun is the wicked satiric portrayals of all the characters, good, bad, and merely crazy. It's nothing overwhelmingly special, but it's pretty fun, all things considered. Not a great book, but I suspect the Flaxborough Novels, as a class, will all pass the time amusingly.

Birthday Review: Chimera, by Will Shetterly

Birthday Review: Chimera, by Will Shetterly

a review by Rich Horton

On the occasion of Will Shetterly's 63rd birthday, here is a repost of my long ago review of his 2000 novel Chimera.

Will Shetterly’s novel Chimera mixes together a few fairly familiar SF themes: human/animal combinations, artificial intelligences, the issue rights for both of the above, and a somewhat balkanized (or at least decentralized) future U. S. with a Libertarian edge (viewed rather darkly, given Shetterly’s politics). The plot is taken from a familiar mystery trope (not uncommon in SF): the hard-boiled detective with a heart of gold who gets mixed up in a vulnerable woman’s problems despite himself. The end result is not bad: the book is fun reading, with very sympathetic main characters, and a fast-moving if sometimes a bit unconvincing plot. I liked this novel, but I didn’t quite love it: I felt it brushed up against some profound thematic material without really fully engaging it, and I felt that the future depicted was more an assemblage of neat bits than a fully imagined, or fully plausible, future society. Perhaps I am simply guilty of wanting to read a book the author didn’t intend to write: certainly Shetterly has delivered a good read, which at least asks the reader to think about some important themes.

The narrator is Chase Maxwell, a former member of UNSEC (apparently United Nations Security: some variety of future Peacekeeping group), who left that job after an assignment went bad. He retains one useful (and really neat!) piece of tech: an Infinite Pocket, an area of warped space attached to his arm, in which he can apparently store things of nearly arbitrary size. Including his gun, which has a similar bit of tech: a sort of “Infinite Magazine”. He’s down on his luck (naturally!) when a jaguar-human hybrid named Zoe Domingo asks him to track down her “mother”‘s murderer. (Actually, I’m not quite sure whether the “critters” of this book are “enhanced” animals, a la David Brin’s “Uplift”, or genetically engineered human/animal hybrids.) Janna Gold, the human Zoe calls her mother (she bought her out of slavery), has just been killed, apparently by berserk “copbots”. But the police department is much more likely to finger Zoe for the murder, given the prejudice against “critters”. Moreover, Zoe has a mysterious earring Janna gave her, which seems to be a piece of special tech that lots of highly placed people really want.

Max is reluctant to take the case: he doesn’t work for critters. But he’s in a bit of a bind, so he agrees to help. What follows is a nearly nonstop chase, as Max and Zoe encounter first the police, then a series of people who seem to be peripherally involved: Krista Blake, a police expert who takes a sudden shine to Max; Amos Tauber, an advocate for full rights for both “critters” and Artificial Intelligences; and Oberon Chain, the head of a high-tech company who is also an AI rights crusader. When some of these people begin to get murdered as well, the frame is in, and Max and Zoe are the designated suspects. At the same time, Max is realizing that his feelings for Zoe may be a lot deeper than is prudent for a human to have with respect to a critter.

From there we encounter a number of different aspects of this future, such as the indentured service camps that have replaced jails; and the “critter” side of town, complete with riots and reverse prejudice against “skins” (ordinary humans); plus scenes of critters “werewolfing”: suddenly going berserk and killing everybody in sight; as well as a very well put argument about the ethics of downloading human brains into computers, and vice versa, and plenty more. As I said, the plot is fast moving, and I was always interested, but at times things happen a bit conveniently for the heroes.

Chimera raises some questions that I didn’t feel were fully answered. Chief among these is “Why were the “critters” created?” I honestly don’t believe that, starting from the present day, the essentially purposeful creation of a new underclass, of that particular nature, is very likely. I also thought his future U.S. a bit unlikely, politically. But both of these reservations are really quibbles, and he does portray his future society quite interestingly. But always at the back of our mind is a desire to more fully engage the submerged issues: equal rights for “critters”, and equal rights for AIs. Those questions are raised, but mostly brushed aside, in the interests of maintaining narrative pace. Certainly a longtime SF reader cannot help thinking of Cordwainer Smith’s classic “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell”, about a “catwoman” who gives all in the pursuit of rights for the “underpeople”. But though such issues are present here, they simply don’t resonate the way they did in Smith’s great story. Nonetheless, though I may (perhaps unfairly) regard Chimera as a missed opportunity to be something really special, it’s still a fun read, with its heart in the right place.

A Little-Remembered Ace Double: The Space Willies/Six Worlds Yonder, by Eric Frank Russell

Ace Double Reviews, 12: The Space Willies, by Eric Frank Russell/Six Worlds Yonder, by Eric Frank Russell (#D-315, 1958, $0.35, reissued as #77785, 1971, $0.75)

Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978) was an English writer who worked almost exclusively for John W. Campbell. He began publishing in 1937 and made his first big splash in 1939 with Sinister Barrier in the first issue of the classic fantasy magazine Unknown. (One fannish legend, probably false, has it that Campbell founded Unknown because he wanted to publish Sinister Barrier but didn't think it would fit in Astounding.) Russell was particularly prolific during the 50s, then almost completely stopped, publishing only some 5 short stories and one novel after 1959. He was most famous for novels and stories of interaction between humans and aliens, usually with a comic slant. Sometimes buffoonish humans would come into frustrating contact with unpredictable aliens (as in "The Waitabits" in this book), sometimes a clever human or two would themselves frustrate buffoonish aliens (as in "Diabologic" and The Space Willies in this book). And sometimes the interaction would be a bit more interesting.

(Cover of The Space Willies by Ed Emshwiller)

This Ace Double backs the short novel The Space Willies, about 37,000 words long, with Six Worlds Yonder, a collection of six stories totalling some 43,000 words. All the stories in Six Worlds Yonder are from Astounding, and The Space Willies is an expansion of an Astounding novelette.

The publication history of The Space Willies and its related stories is a bit complex. It was originally a novelette, "Plus X", in the June 1956 Astounding. The Space Willies was then published in 1958 at 37,000 words. The following year, it was further expanded to a 56,000 word novel, Next of Kin. (The copyright notice in the recent Gollancz SF Collectors' Edition of Next of Kin hints at an even later revision, as it gives copyright dates of 1959 and 1964.) (The Chris Moore cover shown for that edition was actually painted for Bill Johnson's Hugo-winning story "We Will Drink a Fish Together".) It must be said that the expansion seams show -- I haven't read "Plus X", but I think I can detect which parts of the novel it must have been, and I don't think the padding added much meat.

(Cover by Chris Moore)

The story concerns John Leeming, a scout pilot for the Terran space navy. Earth and her allies are engaged in a war with the Lathians and their allies. Leeming, a rather insubordinate fellow by instinct, is given the assignment to take an experimental new super-fast one-man scout ship and fly it as far as he can towards the "rear" of the Lathian empire, in order to determine the extent of the Lathian holdings. Leeming proceeds to do so, but as the capabilities of his ship are unknown, he finds himself marooned with a decaying ship on a planet well away from the front, indeed, out of range of an ordinary ship, Terran or Lathian. He's the only human being on a strange planet, and he must find some way to elude capture and find a way back home -- and he may have to do so twice, as even if he steals one ship, it won't be able to get all the way to Earth.

Leeming proceeds to have a few adventures, but inevitably gets captured by the natives of the planet, who are not Lathians but one of their allied species. He finds himself in a prison with a number of Rigellians (allies of Terrans), but no other humans. Now his problem is doubly difficult -- but then he has an inspiration. The rest of the book (which I assume to have been the original story) tells of his clever idea and the implementation of it. I found his idea cute in conception, but implausible in execution. As with several other Russell stories that I have read, it is necessary for the hero's foils to be quite remarkably stupid. It also depends on some 50s slang being essentially current far in the future -- and ... but criticism is pointless. The book is not meant to be believable, but just to be fun to read.

Six Worlds Yonder is subtitled "Stories of First Landings on Far Planets", and that is actually a pretty good description of 4 of the 6 stories. It's a decent enough collection in pretty pure Russell mode, but I ought to mention that I had read all of the stories save one before, but I only remembered one of the stories before rereading. (To be sure, that may say more about the state of my memory than anything else.) The six stories are:

"The Waitabits" (17500 words, Astounding, July 1955) -- a Terran military team lands on a world they have been warned is unconquerable. The natives do indeed turn out to be unconquerable, but for an amusing reason. Decent enough, but I think a bit long for its substance.

"Tieline" (2700 words, Astounding, July 1955, under the name Duncan H. Munro for the fairly obvious reason that it appeared in the same issues as "The Waitabits") -- men sent to an isolated "lighthouse" planet inevitably go mad. How can they be kept sane? A bad story -- the setup is strained beyond belief (they go insane on 10-year hitches -- why not try shorter hitches? Pets aren't allowed -- but that is pretty much contradicted by the eventual solution. etc. etc.).

"Top Secret" (6300 words, Astounding, August 1956) -- Terran military types send messages to a remote planet via a relay system, resulting in essentially a game of "telephone", such that a routine message ends up warning of the arrival of 42 ostriches, and repeated requests for clarification just make things worse. Silly as anything, but OK as long as you don't ask for anything but silliness.

"Nothing New" (4000 words, Astounding, January 1955) -- this was the only story I hadn't previously read, and oddly enough it might be my favorite. Humans visit a friendly alien planet for the first time -- or was it really?

"Into Your Tent I'll Creep" (Astounding, September 1957) -- this time the story is from the POV of aliens visiting Earth. The humans they like just fine, but there is another species on Earth that one alien comes to fear ...

"Diabologic" (8500 words, Astounding, March 1955) -- this seems to be a fairly popular story, for example it was Andre Norton's choice for the anthology My Favorite Science Fiction Story. I guess it's OK, but it's awfully slight, and it depends on really stupid aliens, who don't understand Zeno's Paradox or the Cretan Liar Paradox. The story features a Terran scout discovering another space-going civilization, and managing to befuddle the aliens enough that they won't pose any threat to Earth.

On the whole, this is a fairly characteristic Eric Frank Russell collection, but not really his best work. Better to seek out the stories in The Great Explosion, his Hugo winner "Allamagoosa", his novelette "Dear Devil", maybe the novel Wasp.