Ace Double Reviews, 38: Mankind Under the Leash, by Thomas M. Disch/Planet of Exile, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ace Double Reviews, 38: Mankind Under the Leash, by Thomas M. Disch/Planet of Exile, by Ursula K. Le Guin (#G-597, 1966, $0.50)

(Covers by Jerome Podwil and Kelly Freas)

This would have been (alas) Ursula Le Guin's 89th birthday. In her memory, then, I'm reposting my review of her second and last Ace Double. (I have also earlier reposted my review of her first Ace Double, Rocannon's World.)

Here we have a pairing of two writers who came to prominence in the mid-60s as two of the more literary-oriented writers in the SF field's history. Both writers earned at least a modest reputation in the mainstream (more than modest, in Le Guin's case). In Disch's case that probably comes more from his poetry and his later novels, such as The Priest and The Businessman, rather dark contemporary novels with horror aspects, that have been marketed as general fiction. On the other hand, while Le Guin has written "mainstream" novels and short fiction, as well as a little poetry, her reputation, even in the "wider world", is still founded on her SF and fantasy. The novels in this Ace Double, of course, come from very early in each writer's career. Planet of Exile, about 37,000 words long, is Le Guin's second novel (after Rocannon's World, reviewed earlier in this series). (I note by the way that Ace prints her name "LeGuin", but the space -- "Le Guin" -- is actually correct. Doubtless this is one of the least in the history of Ace flubs.) Mankind Under the Leash, about 47,000 words long, is also Disch's second novel.

Mankind Under the Leash in an expansion of a 1965 novelette from If (April) called "White Fang Goes Dingo". It has also been published under the title The Puppies of Terra, which is presumably Disch's preferred title, and which is slightly more appropriate for the book.

Much of Thomas M. Disch's work has been satirical, and so it is with this novel. An outward description of the events of the novel makes it appear quite conventional -- it is about a young man brought up under alien domination of humanity who comes to rebel against the aliens, ultimately successfully. However, the story is rather different than one might expect. The hero is named White Fang, as it was for a time fashionable to name human children after famous dogs. He is the son of a famous novelist, a man much prized among his alien owners for his art, especially as his most famous novel celebrated the rule of the aliens as a good thing for their human pets. White Fang himself makes it clear from the opening of his narrative that he loved his life as a pet of the "Masters", and that he misses the "Leash".

At the age of 7 White Fang's father is killed by "Dingos" -- that is, feral humans. He and his older brother (Pluto) are abandoned by his rather cold mother to a kennel on Earth. But three years later the two are purchased by a Master from the Asteroid Belt, and they go there to live in luxury. White Fang is mated to a lovely girl named Darling, Julie, and they have one daughter. But at the age of 20, on a visit to Earth, they are abandoned by their Master. It turns out that a Solar storm has interfered with the Masters' control over Earth and the humans on Earth -- the Masters are beings of pure energy, you see. White Fang and Julie live in the wild for a time, eventually encountering a band of Dingos, part of a revolution against the Masters' rule that has taken advantage of the situation to regain control of Earth and to free the pets. But most of them don't want to be free. White Fang is imprisoned, but manages to outwit the silly commandant of the prison camp he ends up at, and after discovering his mother and brother at this camp he works to set them free, only to be recapture himself by the leaders of the revolution. This time he is convinced that freedom is preferable to the Leash, and he turns out to be instrumental in a cute plan to drive off the Masters once and for all.

The above description gives little hint of the real flavor of the book. It's very funny, sometimes in satirical fashion, at other times more purely farcical (as in the staging of the opera Salome, called here Salami, which White Fang uses to facilitate the freeing of the pets from the prison camp). It's also somewhat thought-provoking about the question of "slavery in comfort" vs. "freedom among hardship". At the same time White Fang is an appealing character, and his relationship with Julie is quite sweetly portrayed. The plot is perhaps not exactly convincing but is interesting and there are a couple of clever twists. I recommend it, mainly for the clever and satirical aspects.

I went ahead and read "White Fang Goes Dingo" to compare. It tells the same story, in essence, as the full novel, though it's only 15,000 words or so, about a third of the length of the book. The novel is expanded throughout -- in some cases just fleshing out things that were only briefly mentioned in the story, but some long sections are entirely new: the sojourn in the prison camp (and the staging of Salami) is only in the novel, and the description of White Fang and Julie's life from age 10 to 20 in the asteroids is also only in the novel (as is their child).

I ought to mention, too, that Carol Emshwiller's 2002 novel The Mount, a Nebula nominee, is in many ways very reminiscent of Mankind Under the Leash, though The Mount is not at all satirical.

Planet of Exile is, like Ursula K. Le Guin's other early novels, set in her so-called "Hainish" universe, though as with the other earliest novels, she doesn't yet seem to have decided that it is really "Hainish" -- rather it seems to be set several hundred years in the future, after Earth has colonized a variety of planets, forming the League of All Worlds. They have visited a number of worlds with "High-Intelligent Life Forms", or hilfs, that seem basically human, to the point that interbreeding is possible, if difficult. This unlikely fact is explained in the later novels by positing the Hainish seeding program, but I'm not sure she had really figured this out at the time of Planet of Exile and Rocannon's World.

In this novel the Earth Colony on the third planet of Eltanin (Gamma Draconis) has been abandoned or forgotten. About 2000 people remain after some 600 years -- chemical incompatibilities with the local life have made survival difficult. Terrans have difficulty bearing children with themselves, and they are unable to have children with the locals, though relationships, including marriage, have occurred. The other key point is that the world is in a long, eccentric, orbit, such that each Year is about 60 Earth years, with correspondingly long and harsh seasons.

As the novel opens, Winter is coming. (Yes, I went there!) The local Tevar tribe is preparing to retreat to winter quarters. Reports of barbarians from the North coming South in greater than usual numbers have also arrived. Rolery is a young woman of this tribe, somewhat solitary because she was born "out of season", and there are no young men her age. She wanders into the city of the Terrans and meets their energetic young leader, Jakob Agat, leading eventually to a love affair and marriage. Jakob knows of the barbarian danger, which also threatens the Terran city, and he is trying to convince the tribes to unite to oppose the barbarians, but when his affair with Rolery is discovered xenophobic factions turn the tribes against him. The rest of the novel concerns the terrible results of the northerners' invasion, and the desperate, and costly defense, with a glimmer of true hope for the future at the end.

As one would expect from Le Guin, this is a beautifully written book. Aside from that, however, it's pretty minor -- I didn't like it as much as Rocannon's World, for example, though I think that's because the time dilation aspect of the latter affected me so strongly. The plot of Planet of Exile sort of just stops, and the resolution is not really convincing. The love story worked very well for me, though. Certainly a novel worth reading, but in the context of Le Guin's career, a lesser work.

Stories of Ted Chiang

Here's a selection of a number of my past reviews of Ted Chiang's work. This is a bit different than some of my previous selections -- a lot of this stuff is not from my Locus column, partly because some of it predates my writing that column. I've organized it a bit strangely -- it begins with a review I did for my SFF Net newsgroup of his seminal first collection, and follows with individual reviews of a couple of those stories, then continues with later reviews of his later work (these mostly from the Locus column).

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others collects all his fiction to date, including one new story. Again, it's an excellent collection. I reread the earlier stories for the first time in a long time -- I was particularly impressed on rereading by "Tower of Babylon", which posits a cosmology in which a Tower of Babel could actually be successfully built. I admit I didn't quite get "Division by Zero", about a woman mathematician driven to despair when she proves that arithmetic is inconsistent. "Understand" is a nice, dark, story about a man who becomes a superman when he undergoes an experimental brain treatment -- and what happens when he finds another. Of the later stories, "Story of Your Life" remains my favorite, both very very moving and mind-blowing as well, told in second person successfully (and for good reason). As I wrote in my review of Starlight 2: "It's an amazing story, about a linguist who is part of the contact team with aliens visiting Earth. She learns their language, and in Sapir-Whorfian fashion, sort of, she finds her perception of time altered by the alien perception of time. This is interweaved with her reminiscences of segments of the life of her daughter, who died in early adulthood. Chiang combines wonderful linguistic speculation with a real portrayal of truly alien aliens (alien for good reason!) with nice scientific underpinnings, with the affecting and effective story of the linguist and her daughter, and makes it all work as a thematically unified whole. It accomplishes the rare feat of combining an interesting bit of SFnal speculation, worth a story on its own merits, with a moving human story, and using the SF ideas to really drive home the human themes. While at the same time maintaining interest as pure SF. I'm fond of saying that there are two types of SF: stories about the science, and stories which use the science to be about people. This is both types in one." "Seventy-Two Letters" has a great central idea, and it does some nice things working out the implications, but the story itself is resolved with too much actiony hugger-mugger. "Hell is the Absence of God" again has a neat central conceit, and is uncompromising in working it out -- but I admit I was confused by the ending. His Nature short-short is a nice speculation on the future of science in a "post-human" world. And the new story, "Liking What You See", as Rachel Brown says quite reminiscent (both in central idea and form) of Raphael Carter's "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", again takes a neat idea, the development of a means of making people unable to perceive human beauty, and extrapolates the consequences wonderfully. (I did think he cooked his argument a bit by having all the "opponents" of the side he seemed to favor being basically evil.)

[Original comments on some of this stories follow.]

Of these I recommend the novella from Starlight 2, "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, most highly.  From where I stand just now, having finished this story just 3 hours ago, this is the clear front runner for my top Hugo vote.  It's an amazing story, about a linguist who is part of the contact team with aliens visiting Earth.  She learns their language, and in Sapir-Whorfian fashion, sort of, she finds her perception of time altered by the alien perception of time.  This is interweaved with her reminiscences of segments of the life of her daughter, who died in early adulthood.  Chiang (who's just incredible: only four stories in his career! this the first in several years) combines wonderful linguistic speculation with a real portrayal of truly alien aliens, alien for good reason!, with nice scientific underpinnings, with the affecting and effective story of the linguist and her daughter, and makes it all work as a thematically unified whole.  It's just a wow! story.

The most impressive of the new stories here is the longest, "Seventy-two Letters" by the remarkable Ted Chiang. Chiang, entirely deadpan, sets his story in what seems to be Victorian England, but what turns out to be a very different world. He tells of a man who specializes in designing automata which are controlled by seventy-two letter "names": particular, carefully designed names causing particular actions to be taken. As the story continues, we learn that this world is stranger than we had thought, as other "alchemical" scientific notions appear to be true. I won't reveal any of the story's secrets: suffice it to say that it turns out to fit the anthology's theme, and that it is continually intriguing and audacious. It does present a rather cold affect, though, failing to engage this reader on the emotional level in the way that, for example, Chiang's wonderful "Story of Your Life" did.

Ted Chiang is back, with "Hell is the Absence of God", a rather intriguing and deadpan look at a world much like our own in which the existence of Heaven and Hell are objectively proven: indeed, the souls in Hell can be seen, and in which angels occasionally come to Earth, typically causing a mixture of miraculous events and capricious disasters.  The story focuses on an unpious man whose beloved wife is killed and ascends to Heaven in one such angelic visitation, and who tries to find a way to love God and thus reach Heaven to rejoin her, against all his instincts.

One of the most ballyhooed new collections in 2002 is Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others. The ballyhoo is fully justified -- this collection, of all his published stories to date, is full of exciting stuff. There is one new story, "Liking What You See: A Documentary". Chiang postulates a brain modification called "calliagnosia", which disables one's ability to perceive beauty in human faces. He follows the debate over an initiative at one Pembleton University which would require all students to have the treatment, on the grounds that it would eliminated "lookism" among the student body. He stacks his argument somewhat by making the opponents all obvious bad guys, but the examination of the social effects we might see from such a treatment, as well as related aspects such as the use of sort of the reverse effect in advertising, in fascinating. It's a very thought-provoking piece. (Incidentally I was reminded of Raphael Carter's Tiptree Award winner "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation"). It's not Chiang's best story, but it's still a must read.

In September F&SF features a highly anticipated cover story, the first substantial Ted Chiang story in several years, "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate".  (This story is also available in book form from Subterranean Press.) It does not disappoint. It is set in Baghdad perhaps a millennium ago. A merchant tells the Caliph his strange story: how he encountered an alchemist with an unusual device: a gate to the past. (Interestingly, this gate is described in science-fictional terms, though it could as easily have been pictured fantastically: as a magical tapestry, perhaps. But I think Chiang’s choice -- purely aesthetic, it is not central to the story -- works very well.)  We hear three tales within the tale, about people who used the gate, to travel decades into the past, and how some were greatly helped, and others harmed. The stories intertwine very neatly, and of course they merchant himself will likewise use the gate, with ambiguous but moving results.

Ted Chiang is back -- we knew that already, what with last year’s spectacular Hugo winner "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate". "Exhalation" is quite as spectacular, and completely different. It depicts a quite unusual artificial world, apparently completely made of metal, whose inhabitants are likewise metal, and who breathe air supplied by replaceable lungs. It is told by one of these people, who discovers how their brains work, as it becomes clear that the supply of air is diminishing. The setup seems to imply some history that other writers might have exploited -- is this a society of robots after humans have left, perhaps? -- but Chiang’s interests are elsewhere, and the story explores deeper philosophical questions, and comes to a very moving conclusion. To make the obvious pun -- it took my breath away.

"The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", by Ted Chiang, at the Fall Subterranean, is Chiang working out the personal and social consequences of a new technology, called Remem. This works with "lifelogs" ("personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives"), to allow instant retrieval of the video of some past event you might be thinking of. The story is told by a journalist who is skeptical of the new tech, and who is particularly worried that replacing ones mediated (and perhaps "softened") memories of past disputes with loved ones might be harmful. The journalist's investigations are interleaved with accounts of an historical example of a new "memory technology" being introduced -- in this case the introduction of writing by Europeans to Tivland (now part of Nigeria). The parallels are interesting -- both stories are interesting, and the journalist's story is particularly affecting (dealing with his strained relationship with his daughter) -- this is strong and very thoughtful SF, only perhaps slightly disappointing in comparison with some of Chiang's own work in that there is no real gosh wow sense of wonder -- but that's hardly fair.

We lead off this month with three very strong novella chapbooks. First is the eagerly anticipated new Ted Chiang story, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, published in a very attractive edition by Subterranean Press, with cute and illuminating illustrations by Christian Pearce. This novella does not quite have the awesome zing of some of Chiang’s work -- the overwhelming sense of wonder he can induce. But it works very well as a rigorous examination of the ramifications of creating artificial life. The story concerns the invention of what are first intended as sort of virtual pets, with extra intelligence, in a virtual world. These software creatures -- called "digients" -- are "raised" by humans, and inevitably develop their own personalities, leading of course to questions of AI rights, autonomy, etc. There are digients who resemble animals, and some who resemble robots -- allowing the story to resonate not only with questions of AI or robot rights, but with those about animal rights as well (and for that matter questions about the rights of children to autonomy). These are traditional SF questions, which may be why the story doesn’t awe like some of Chiang’s work. But Chiang’s examination of these questions is thorough, sensitive, and thought-provoking. His main characters are two people, Ana Alvarado and Derek Brooks, who work for the first company to design these digients. These two adopt some of the digients, and become key figures in the eventual drive to provide them what we might call a good home. Such issues as what happens when the computers the digients "inhabit" become obsolete, or what does it mean for an AI to be "happy" when their happiness is an initially purely programmed behavior, or what rights does an AI have concerning suspension and restarting, or resetting to a previous state, and many more, are examined -- and not dryly, but in the context of an involving story.

Old Bestseller Review: Ice, by Anna Kavan

Old Bestseller Review: Ice, by Anna Kavan

a review by Rich Horton

OK, I don't think this novel was a bestseller, but it was a success, the biggest success of its writer's career. (She died at age 67 a year or so after it appeared.) Anna Kavan was the name adopted by the British writer born Helen Woods in 1901. She was born in Cannes (to British parents), grew up traveling constantly in Europe and the US until her father's suicide in 1911, after which she returned to England and boarding school. In 1920, unable to go to Oxford, she married Donald Ferguson, and immediately they moved to what was then Burma. She was terribly unhappy there, both with the climate and with her husband. They divorced in 1928, and Helen soon married painter Stuart Edmonds. That marriage dissolved in 1938. Helen began publishing fairly conventional (but fraught) novels in 1929 with A Charmed Circle, using her first married name, Helen Ferguson (even though by then she was married to Edmonds). Five further novels followed through 1937. A character in some of these early novels was named Anna Kavan. In 1939, after her second divorce and her first suicide attempt, she changed her name to Anna Kavan, not just as a pseudonym but legally. (Or so say several sources, including the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, however, the Science Fiction Enyclopedia, online and regularly updated, now states that she never formally changed her name. As she was constantly slippery about her identity, it is difficult to be certain, though I trust the SFE.) Some of the rest of her life was spent in and out of asylums and sanatoria, treating in part her long time heroin addiction, with at least two additional suicide attempts. (Some have suggested her death in 1968 was a suicide, though the official verdict (probably correct) was heart failure, a result in part of her heroin addiction.) She continued to write, in a generally more experimental mode. Ten further books (novels and story collections) appeared in her life, and another half-dozen after her death. She became associated with the nouvelle roman style. Ice (1967) was her last novel (not counting any of the posthumous work).

From the beginning Ice has been called science fiction, and that's not unreasonable, though Jonathan Lethem, in the introduction to my edition (a "50th Anniversary Edition" from Penguin), writes "I doubt it helps for it to be categorized as science fiction, or for it to be categorized at all." Still, it has always had champions in the SF field (I've been meaning to give it a go for decades), and the one writer I am most reminded of is J. G. Ballard. As I suggest above, it was initially a success, but it seems to me that over time it more or less disappeared from wide notice, though it was always on the edges of the conversation in the literary corridors of the SF world. But Kate Zambreno wrote in 2006 (in an essay reprinted as the Afterword to my edition) that "Kavan, every bit the equal of every writer she has been compared to [such as Jean Rhys, who likewise had a late career success, with Wide Sargasso Sea, just a year prior to Ice], has -- regretfully -- vanished." This Penguin reissue is evidence that she's back in sight.

This is really quite a remarkable novel. It is told by an unnamed narrator (all the characters are nameless), who, at the opening, is back home, in a country threatened by impending war, driving to a remote location to find a girl (as she is called throughout) whom he had once wanted to marry. She has married another man, and the narrator, a military man, just wants to see her again. This encounter reveals a marriage in trouble, and the narrator seems to want to rescue her -- and we get flashbacks to an earlier visit shortly after the marriage. So far the novel seems not unconventional, but then there are the sudden irruptions of images of ice walls rushing in, imprisoning the girl and other characters -- but are these just the narrator's madness?

Noticeable too, from the beginning, is the narrator's sexualized and somewhat violent perception of the girl. She is always described as painfully thin, extremely pale (like ice, one might say), very fragile. Often bruised. Male violence, sometimes suggested, sometimes described, seems always near. Really this is all quite uneasy-making.

The book accelerates quickly. Soon the narrator is following the girl as she sails to another country. This country is closer to open war with its neighbors. It is ruled by an autocrat called the Warden, and the narrator learns that the girl is with the Warden. He plots to meet the Warden, and to arrange to see the girl, with scary and strange results. All through this narrative there are further descriptions of the coming ice, and strange interludes that seem real as they happen but then are forgotten -- riots, violence, the girl dead on multiple occasions.

The book continues, at breakneck speed, as the narrator chases the Warden and the girl through country after country, as war and catastrophe take over the world. (It's not at all clear that the world is our Earth.) Sometimes the narrator and the girl are together, sometimes the girl is with the Warden, sometimes she is alone. What at first seems a praiseworthy attempt by the narrator to pry the girl from the clutches of the explicitly sadistic Warden becomes ambiguous, for the narrator's images of the girl are just as violence-tinged as the Warden's actions, and indeed the narrator and the Warden come to seem doubles. And throughout the ice grows closer and closer, and the end of the world, of humanity, looms.

It's not a long novel (a bit shy of 50,000 words, I'd say), and it moves, as I said, at great velocity. The writing is clipped and vicious. The rhythms are pounding. The images are striking and scary. There is from the beginning no way out but death for everyone.

One of the obvious interpretations suggested is that the images of Ice refer to heroin. That's perhaps too obvious, but it does make some sense. But at the same time the objectification of the girl as fragile and subject to violence resonates horribly with so much of what we see about the way many men treat women -- and the girl in this novel is treated as a child subject to discipline by all the men she is with (her husband, the narrator, and the Warden) -- though much of her attitude is laid at the door of her mother. (Kavan apparently had a difficult relationship with her mother.) So there's that. And, too, there is the shadow of a coming apocalypse, and of course the end of the world was an abiding concern of people in the '60s. As with almost any such novel, open to multiple readings, it seems worth it just to take the novel first on its own terms, and let it take on as many meanings as it suggests.

I'll leave with a few questions about Ice:

1. The 'girl" is described in strikingly fragile terms -- constant reference is made to her thinness, the way her bones stick out, her extremely pale skin and white hair. (And of course calling her a "girl" and not a woman is in itself an infantilization, and an emphasis on fragility.) Some of this is clearly a reference to "ice", but much of it suggests that the men in her life see her sexuality as bound up in violence -- explicit sadism in the case of the warden, slightly sublimated sadism in the case of the narrator, marital frustration that perhaps has led to physical abuse in the case of her husband. To what extent is this novel about male violence towards women, and about the male gaze infantilizing women, or subordinating women?

2. The apocalyptic event that drives the overall shape of the novel seems to be encroaching walls of ice. As first presented, the walls of ice seem hallucinations, but as things continue, it does seem that the action converges on the tropics, as ice consumes more and more of the world. Is this real? Or is this simply what the narrator perceives as his internal life is changed?

3. What world is this novel set on? The opening appeared to me to possibly be set in England, but as things continue, any Earthbound setting seems more and more unlikely, though whatever planet this is, it's extremely Earthlike. Does it even make sense to ask where the novel is set?

Birthday Review: The Praxis, by Walter Jon Williams

Birthday Review: The Praxis, by Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams was born October 15, 1953. In honor of his birthday, I thought I'd repost this review I did of the first of his Dread Empire's Fall novels back in 2003.

Review Date: 25 August 2003

The Praxis, by Walter Jon Williams
UK: Earthlight, London, October 2002, 418 pages, Paperback, UK£10.99, ISBN:0-7434-6110-X
US: HarperTorch, New York, NY, August 2003, 418 pages, Paperback, US$7.50, ISBN:038082020X

a review by Rich Horton

Walter Jon Williams's The Praxis is the first volume of a series called collectively Dread Empire's Fall. It was published last year in the UK, and is due in the US any day now, a mass market paperback from HarperTorch. The UK edition is subtitled "Book One of Dread Empire's Fall", while the US edition is labeled Dread Empire's Fall: The Praxis.

This book is unabashed Space Opera, and I found it extremely fun reading. Every so often the characterization or the plotting seems to fall back on cliché -- and after all the basic setup is pretty familiar, particularly the rehashing of Naval Fiction standard situations. The book is also clearly the first of a series, thus the story doesn't really end -- those factors hold it short of excellence. But it's very good -- neatly conceived, with plenty of gripping action, and with two main characters who are interesting, and flawed in believable ways even while also supremely gifted in fairly standard commercial fiction fashions.

The parts of the Galaxy linked by an extensive wormhole network are ruled, as the story opens, by the long-lived aliens called Shaa. They control several other spacegoing species -- the lizardlike Naxids, humans, the birdlike Lai-Own, the furry Torminel, etc. The basic philosophy of the Shaa is that everything worth knowing is already known. Their governing system, the Praxis, attempts to enforce absolute stability. Machine intelligence, genetic engineering, and certain other technology is forbidden. The ruling style is extremely hierarchical, and superiors have the right to kill inferiors for any reason whatsoever. The subordinate species seem essentially equal to each other, sharing government and military posts, though there seem to be worlds, even sectors, dominated by one or another species.

Now the very last of the Shaa has decided to die. This impacts the future of Lord Gareth Martinez, an up and coming Naval officer. His main patron has been chosen to die along with the Shaa, and Martinez, who is brilliant and rich but handicapped by his family's relatively low, provincial, standing, represented by his vulgar accent, will thus lose a key supporter. But he gains some fame when he coordinates a daring rescue attempt. And the rescue attempt is piloted by Lady Caroline Sula, the only remaining member of a formerly powerful family that has fallen into disgrace. The two are both decorated, and when they meet each other, sparks fly. But Sula has some deep personal issues which make her skittish about relationships. Her backstory is slowly revealed in flashbacks. (These flashbacks were published separately as the novella "Margaux" in the May 2003 Asimov's.)

Martinez ends up posted to a ship run by a football-mad (football = soccer) Captain. Martinez and a few others including his trusty old batman (yes, a cliché) run the ship while the Captain and his various good footballers (who are worthless as naval types) practice. The ship makes its way to a Naxid dominated system, and Martinez notices some very suspicious Naxid behaviour. He concludes correctly that they are planning to take advantage of the power vacuum left by the death of the last Shaa and try to assert their status as the first race conquered by the Shaa and take the Shaa position at the top of the heap. Martinez's perspicacity and his brilliant tactics keep the Naxid operation from being a complete success.

Back on the capitol planet, Zanshaa, the Naxid attempt to take over the ruling Convocation is also foiled, partly by luck, and the other species quickly mobilize for a war. Sula's hopes for a quick promotion are ruined when her lieutenant's exams are interrupted by the rebellion. But this leaves her in position to once again use her piloting skills and become a war hero on her own.

And so come the opening battles of what looks likely to be an extended war. The book ends pretty much on a note of "to be continued". Clearly Martinez and Sula are destined for each other one way or another, though Williams has managed to make their future ambiguous -- Sula's past could come back to haunt her, and Martinez' conceit and overweening ambition could ruin things as well. I'll be eagerly looking forward to future volumes, and I'm sure there will be plenty more space battles, alien political intrigue, and an involving personal pair of stories for our two heroes.

Another Ace Double: The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb/To Venus! To Venus!, by David Grinnell

Ace Double Reviews, 45: The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb/To Venus! To Venus!, by David Grinnell (#81610, 1970, $0.75)

a review by Rich Horton

E. C. Tubb would have been 99 today, so I am reposting this review of one of his Ace Double appearances in his honor.

Tubb was a British writer, born 1919, died in 2010. He published something over 100 SF novels, and about as many short stories, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. One pseudonym was the memorable "Volsted Gridban"! His best known pseudonym was probably "Gregory Kern", under which name he wrote the "Cap Kennedy" books for DAW in the early 70s. (I have not read any of that series.) But he is by far better known for his long series of novels about Earl Dumarest and his search for his lost home planet, Earth. These were published first by Ace, then by DAW, from 1967 through 1985, with a final book showing up only in 1997 from a small press (apparently having been published sometime earlier in France, and presumably having been rejected by DAW). This series runs to 32 books, of which I have read 25 or so. They constitute a rather guilty pleasure -- very formulaic, very repetitive, sometimes downright silly, certainly not particularly good. But I found them enjoyable mind candy.

The Jester at Scar is some 44,000 words long, and To Venus! To Venus! is some 45,000 words.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

The Jester at Scar is the fifth of Tubb's Dumarest of Terra novels. In these novels a tough, amazingly fast, lucky, very skilled, spacer named Earl Dumarest obsessively searches for his homeworld, Earth. Dumarest lives in a far future human-colonized galaxy in which Earth is off the beaten path and basically forgotten, and in which even the idea of a single planet as the homeworld of all humans is pooh-poohed. Most of the planets are "Mongos": i.e. they have one unique feature, and little variation (as in the old pulp cliche "It was raining on Mongo"), and most seem ruled either by Evull corporations or by either Evull or Silly and Inbred (or both) aristocracies/royalties. The two main panGalactic organizations are the Church of Universal Brotherhood (good, despite their habit of brainwashing people in exchange for food), and the red-cloaked, emotionless, Cyclan (EVULL squared), super-intelligent cybernetic people who plot to rule the Galaxy. Despite the cliche and lazy setup, the books, though uneven, were sometimes pretty enjoyable -- no classics here, but among this sort of stuff Tubb's work is better than average.

In the book just before The Jester at Scar, Kalin (one of the best and most important of the series), Earl came into possession of an incredibly valuable red ring, which gives the owner the ability to exchange minds with another person, and which the Cyclan covet. Thus he is now hunted by the Cyclan. As this book opens, Earl is staying on the spore-ridden planet Scar, with a poor woman. A couple of thugs invade her home, and after Earl is forced to kill them he notices that they have several other red rings. It seems clear that someone has hired people to try to retrieve red rings from anyone they can.

At the same time Jocelyn, the newly married ruler of the planet Jest shows up at Scar, along with his new adviser, a Cyber. Jocelyn hopes to find some profitable trade for his impoverished planet, while the Cyber of course has a deeper game -- he's figured out somehow that Dumarest is on Scar. (Tubb rather subtly plays a little game here -- Jocelyn, the "Jester" of the title, believes in the power of Chance and Fate and he thinks he has come randomly to Scar -- but it turns out that all this was planned by the Cyclan.) There's a fair amount of somewhat pointless toing and froing, and of course a knife fight, before Dumarest and a partner head out into the wilderness of Scar during the brief planetary summer to claim a cache of valuable Golden Spore. The Cyclan are after him, of course, but so too, luckily, is Jocelyn. And of course Dumarest has his own luck, skill, and fanatic determination on his side. The book is much of a piece with most of the Dumarest novels, lacking only a temporary love interest for Dumarest, and I'd place it in the middle range of Tubb's books.

Donald A. Wollheim is justifiably known as an editor, and hardly remembered as a writer. His editorial work at Ace and then at his own imprint, DAW, is significant if often controversial. On the one hand such things as his role in the pirated Ace editions of The Lord of the Rings, and his promotion of lots of low grade SF with famously crummy titles and tiny advances must be disparaged. On the other hand he was responsible for publishing early work by an astounding array of important writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and C. J. Cherryh. He also was editor (or co-editor) for two of the more significant Best of the Year collections.

He wrote a fair amount of unmemorable short fiction starting in 1934, most of it in the 40s. He also wrote quite a few juveniles in the 50s and 60s, under his own name, perhaps most notably the Mike Mars series. All his few adult novels seem to be as "David Grinnell". (The Ace Doubles under his own name were anthologies.) To Venus! To Venus! is the last, and close to his last piece of fiction.

To Venus! To Venus! is set in the fairly near future of the book's publication date, 1970 -- perhaps around 1990? A Russian unmanned probe has reached Venus and reports surprisingly balmy conditions -- nice enough for human habitation, even. The Americans are astonished -- all scientific evidence indicates that it is a hellhole, and they quickly put together a three man mission to land on Venus and settle the question once and for all. The Russians have also mounted a manned mission, and the two ships find themselves in a race.

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

The American team consists of a straight arrow commander named Chet, and two contrasting subordinated -- a gungho guy named Quincy, and a cynical guy named Carter. Much is made, unconvincingly, of Chet's leadership skills in making them a team. At any rate, they reach Venus, but have difficulty landing in what turns out to be a hellhole as the scientists predict, and they seem to be stranded. It turns out that the Russians have also landed, almost simultaneously, and they still claim it's a balmy near paradise. But they too are in trouble. The only hope for either group is for the Americans to hike across the surface of Venus, more or less by dead reckoning, fortunately only 100 miles, to where they believe the Russian ship has landed. (As presented this is basically impossible, and to be fair it seems Wollheim knows this, and gives a fair account of the likely difficulties and doesn't deny that the ultimate success is due to pure luck.)

It's not really very good. Stiff dialogue, strained science, flat characters. It's all very earnest, both in the worshipful presentation of U.S. can-do engineering spirit, and in the ultimate message of Soviet/U.S. cooperation (a bit undermined perhaps by the cartoonish presentation of the only actual Russian character).

Birthday Review: Capsule reviews of books by Thomas Burnett Swann

Thomas Burnett Swann was born 12 October 1928. He died in 1976, only 47, of cancer. He was an academic who taught at Florida Atlantic University, and wrote a significant study of the poet H. D. Beginning in the late 1950s he wrote a number of fantasy stories, and eventually a number of novels, including a glut in the last year or two of his life (some published posthumously), most set in a loosely connected alternate history/fantasy of the couple of millenia before Christ. It's often been noted that his earlier work was better than the later work (especially the last novels, presumably produced at speed after he had gotten sick, perhaps with the intent of supporting his heirs.) This is a position I endorse entirely. His novels included very noticeably gay subtexts, though only towards the end did this become explicit at all (it's most noticeable in How Are the Mighty Fallen, which tells explicitly of David and Jonathan as lovers). As such it is widely assumed that he was gay, though I'm can't find confirmation of that in a quick web search.

Fifteen or so years ago I read through the entire Swann corpus of novels, with some enjoyment and some frustration. I still consider two shorter works, both later expanded into less successful novels, as his best: "Where is the Bird of Fire?" and "The Manor of Roses". The latter in particular is remarkable, and while it's not forgotten it deserves a wider audience.

What follows is a set of very brief capsule reviews I did at the time of reading of several of Swann's books.

(Cover by Gray Morrow)

I read a short Thomas Burnett Swann novel, The Weirwoods, an historical fantasy in a rather unbelievable Etruscan setting.  I've only ever read a couple of Swann's novellas ("Where is the Bird of Fire?" is the one I recall), but I knew of his reputation.  He seems to occupy a fairly unique niche in the "Fantasy" genre.  This novel is not bad, sexy, oddly dark while also casual and gay, written beautifully, lots of fine descriptive passages, but not at all slow-moving.  An Etruscan town bordering on the Weirwoods, haunt of Water Sprites, Fauns, Centaurs and the like, has long lived in an uneasy truce with the inhabitants of the woods, but a new immigrant breaks the truce by kidnapping  and enslaving a water sprite, leading to ... well, bad things for most concerned.

(Cover by Gray Morrow)

Back to Thomas Burnett Swann.  This time I read a story collection, The Dolphin and the Deep. Included are the title story, about an Etruscan (Swann was fascinated by the Etruscan civilization) who encounters a relic of Circe and is compelled to find his way around the coast of Africa to her new home.  Along the way he meets a merboy, though this one is called something else, and a dolphin, as well as some humans.  After a variety of adventures, mostly encounters with other odd mythological creatures, he meets Circe, and she teaches him a lesson about real love.  Rather minor TBS.  The other two stories are a bit better: "The Murex" is about an Amazon who falls in love with an ant-man, and realizes the wrongness of the Amazonian vows against heterosexual love; and one of Swann's very best stories: "The Manor of Roses", about two boys and a girl in 13th Century England who come to a mysterious manor in the forest.  The mythological creatures of this story are mandrakes, and Swann treats the mandrakes with sympathy even while recognizing their inimicality (is that a word?).  The main characters are closer to believable than many of Swann's young humans, and the story strives more and mostly achieves an honest melancholy/regret, which seems the main chord Swann was after in most of his stories, but which is too often reached by strained means.  This story was incorporated into one of the quickie novels published in the last year of Swann's life, or even after his death, The Tournament of Thorns.  This short version has everything important from the novel, and I would regard it as the preferred version of the story.

The only novel I've finished since my last post here is an odd, rare, one, The Goat Without Horns, by Thomas Burnett Swann.  This first appeared in the August and September 1970 issues of F&SF, and was later published by Ballantine.  I saw those issues at a used book store the other night, and decided to pick them up.  The novel is really quite good, the story of a young Englishman in about 1890 who goes to a tiny Caribbean island to tutor a 15 year old girl. He falls for the girl's mother, the owner of the island, but the mysterious Carib who dominates the island, Curk, wants him to impregnate the 15-year old, for his won sinister reasons, which come clear at the end.  An odd twist is that the story is told from the viewpoint of a dolphin who befriends the young Englishman.  The twist at the end was original, and it surprised me.  Pretty good stuff, quite different.

Two more Thomas Burnett Swann novels: Lady of the Bees (1976) is a cobbled together novel from Swann's famous early novella "Where is the Bird of Fire?", about Romulus and Remus, and some other novelets.  It didn't measure up to my memories of the original novella, which I recall as being quite moving and powerful.  This story had POV problems, signalled by the title, which refers to a fairly minor character, who, unfortunately, narrates much of the book.  Somewhat better was The Tournament of Thorns, also from 1976, also a novel cobbled together from earlier shorts.  This is set in England in about 1213.  It's about men and "Mandrakes": plant-men who are kind of like vampires.  It shows the seams of the cobbling together a bit too much, but the individual stories do work, and are quite moving and fairly original. That said, "The Manor of Roses", the first story in this sequence, is still by far the best.

Also I read Thomas Burnett Swann's The Not-World.  This story is set in Georgian England, but in a remaining scrap of "forest primeval".  A lame Gothic novelist, Deirdre, meets a down-at-his-luck sailor, and they are thrown together when the coach he is driving and she is renting is lost in the forest.  They encounter the poet Thomas Chatterton, and after a balloon ride, and further encounters with more or less typical Swann creatures, they win through to consummate their love.  OK, but less than great.  And I don't think Swann came within light-years of capturing the mindset of people of that era.

My latest Thomas Burnett Swann book was The Minikins of Yam, one of several he published right at the end of his life.  (He died in 1976, and apparently published at least 3 novels in '76 and 2 in '77).  This one is set in Ancient Egypt, as usual with Swann an alternate ancient history in which some mythological creatures are real, including the title Minikins (small humanoids, of which the female lead is one, and which have customs such as all the females being whores, whore being a term of honor), Rocs, and others.  I think this is one of the more enjoyable of the later Swann books.  It's light-hearted, as more usual with late Swann, but the light-heartedness doesn't seem as forced as in some of his other books.  The basic story is about a child pharaoh who must undo the damage done when his father banished magic from Egypt, and at the same time must fend off a plot against his throne.

It's been a while since I read a Thomas Burnett Swann book.  Moondust is from 1968, at his typical length (43,000 words), and very much of his "type".  Perhaps it is odd only in being sympathetic to conventional religion (Judaism at the time of Joshua), and (relatedly) being more pro-human than some of his stuff.  It's also pretty good, one of his better stories.

It's set in Jericho, just as the Israelites are approaching.  The hero is a young man, named Bard, from Crete, exiled since childhood along with his mother in Jericho (Crete having fallen, I can't remember if this is coterminous with the collapse of the Minoan regime).  His family have adopted perforce a sort of changeling: a very ugly girl who was switched for their young boy.  This girl, called Rahab (a Biblical reference, hence a hint) or Moondust, becomes a dear friend to the hero, .  As the time of the main action approaches, she suddenly metamorphoses into a striking beautiful woman with wings.  Thus, one of TBS' typical "pre-human" races (though, again typically, interfertile with humans).  Bard looks on unhappily as she offers herself to different men, including an Israelite spy (check your Bible for Rahab!), then she disappears.  Bard and a friend venture underground to the strange home of Rahab's people, and their odd society: women only (hence the habit of coming to human cities and becoming whores: this is to try to get pregnant), and ruled by intelligent telepathic fennecs.  Rahab's love for the hero drives her to an heroic act of resistance to her rulers.  As I said, one of Swann's better works, though not one of his very best.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Mark Tiedemann

Today is my friend Mark Tiedemann's birthday. I've enjoyed Mark's writing for a long time (since well before we knew each other), and so here's a collection of my Locus reviews of his short work. (I have some novel reviews as well, which I will post later.) I should mention one more particularly excellent story, from before my time as a reviewer: "The Playground Door", from the May 1993 F&SF.

(Locus, April 2003)

The April F&SF opens with a strong novelette by Mark W. Tiedemann, "Scabbing". Rich is a boy growing up in a strong union family in the near future, when workers operate "surrogates", robots under their control. When Rich's father suffers a major stroke, the medical treatment includes technological augmentation of his brain, which raises concerns that his augment might lead to new capabilities, and violations of union rules. The story turns on how this affects Rich's relationships with his friends, and on the scary potential for misuse of his father's new augment. This story effectively looks at social changes resulting from new technology, and directly at how they affect people. I'd like to see more stories in the same milieu.

(Locus, January 2004)

The centerpiece of the Fall 2003 issue of Black Gate is Mark W. Tiedemann's "Miller's Wife", an impressive novella. Egan Ginter is fleeing another failed relationship in the big city: he hopes a couple of weeks at a friend's house in the Ozark town Saletcroix will heal him. But something odd is going on -- Saletcroix's valley is dying, and a bad run of luck is plaguing the townspeople. They blame Esther Miller, who has left her husband. Some believe the health of her marriage is tied to the valley's health, but Egan thinks that's rank superstition. Especially as her husband appears to be rather a thug. And when Esther shows up at Egan's door ... Well, any reader can see that Egan had better not give in to her attractions. But how can he resist? Tiedemann maintains the suspense very well, and resolves the story just that little bit unexpectedly to make it memorable.

(Locus, September 2004)

In Mark W. Tiedemann's "Rain from Another Country" (F&SF, September), Ann Myref is dead, but she has unfinished business. She handles this by making a copy of her brain state and "overlaying" it on a paid host. One such host journeys off Earth to meet Ann's old lover. But he may not be ready to accept what Ann has to offer. A nice use of a couple of SFnal tropes to tell an effective relationship story.

(Locus, November 2005)

Mark W. Tiedemann’s "Hard Time" (Electric Velocipede, Summer) is a well-done story about an actor portraying a prisoner in a sort of quasi-reality show -- all the viewers see is his time in his cell. Slowly we learn a little bit about the actor himself, about the (real) criminal he portrays, about an actress playing a woman criminal. Interesting and very honest -- a good use of SF for a character study.

(Locus, December 2014)

Mark W. Tiedemann is the author of a fine Space Opera trilogy, The Secantis Sequence, that deserves a wider audience (perhaps affected a bit by the implosion of its publisher, Meisha Merlin), as well as some strong stories in places like SF Age and F&SF. He hasn't been entirely silent the past several years, but he hasn't been as much in evidence as I'd like, so it's nice to see a new collection, Gravity Box, with a few reprints (including his outstanding early story "The Playground Door"), but mostly original stories. My favorites include one fantasy and one SF story. "Preservation" is about a gamekeeper in service to a King who commands him to poach the horn of an einhyrn, reputed to determine if a woman is a virgin. The King wants to make sure his son's intended bride is pure, but it's soon clear that dirtier politics than that are involved. Not to mention that the einhyrn are a protected species. Solid adventure, and involving characters. I liked "Forever and a Day" even more, a time dilation story, about a woman in a polyamorous marriage, who turns out to be unable to tolerate new treatments conferring immortality. Her husband and wife become immortal, while she joins the crew of a starship, gaining a sort of immortality due to time dilation. A cute idea in itself, though hardly new, but the story asks effectively how any relationship can survive centuries -- indeed, how one's relationship with ones own self can survive centuries, and whether immortality is better than the sort of continual revivification star travel might bring.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Sandra McDonald

Today is Sandra McDonald's birthday, so here is a compilation of some of my Locus reviews of her short fiction. I should note that there's a story by her that I like a lot, but did not review, because is first appeared in one my anthologys, War & Space: Recent Combat. This is "Mehra and Jiun".

(Locus, May 2009)

In "Diana Comet", by Sandra McDonald (Strange Horizons), the title character, a beautiful and resourceful journalist, come across the world to discover why her lover isn’t answering her letters. She has other objectives as well -- or she forms them when she meets some of the poorer locals -- and she has some personals secrets too. It’s all rather a romp, lots of fun.

(Locus, September 2010)

Sandra McDonald is best known for her novels, which on the face of them are fairly conventional Military SF with a romantic slant, yet those who have followed her short fiction know she’s a quirkier writer than her novels display. Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories features fourteen tales, many originals, set in a sort of alternate history that for the most part is a transparent version of our world, at times a bit too cutely. (Naming a gay Civil War era poet Whitney Waltman, for just one example, rather grates on one’s teeth.) Indeed, some of the reprints seem to have been rejiggered to fit into this alternate history, in which a Boston-like town called Massasoit is the most common setting. But I quibble -- the stories are lovely really. The title character shows up in several pieces, at various stages in her long life. My favorite appeared last year in Strange Horizons as "Diana Comet", and is here called "Diana Comet and the Disappearing Lover", and it introduces that intrepid woman. Perhaps the other highlight of the collection is "Diana Comet and the Collapsible Orchestra", in which Diana is aging, missing her late husband, and pushed against her will to visit an old friend. The title object is a delightful creation, while the action really concerns Diana witnessing the transgression of her friend’s children, a bit sadly.

Speaking of Sandra McDonald and Diana Comet, her "Diana Comet and the Lovesick Cowboy" appeared more or less simultaneously in her collection and in the fourth issue of Icarus, subtitled "The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction".  McDonald’s story, in which Diana Comet travels to the West to check on an orphan boy she had fostered out to a farm couple, and on the way chivvies an ex-soldier out of his alcoholic fog and his yearning for his estranged lover, is clearly the best in an uneven set.

(Locus, December 2012)

Also strong in the December Asimov's is "The Black Feminist's Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing", by Sandra McDonald, in which the title character, who edits classic SF films to make them less sexist, is offered a chance to to complete the unfinished '70s adaptation of Leigh Brackett's The Ginger Star. There's some playing to us geeks here -- it's hard not to think that The Ginger Star would have made a pretty cool movie -- but also some sharp characters, an interesting future, and some good ideas about movies.

(Locus, June 2014)

In Lightspeed's May issue I thought the standout story was "Selfie", by Sandra MacDonald. Susan is a teenager with a mother living on the Moon and a father who researches trips to the past. Her Dad wants to drag her again to an old resort hotel, but she wants to visit her Mom instead, so she convinces her Dad to let her send a "Selfie" -- a robot uploaded with a version of her mind -- on the trip to the past. All this is intriguing setup: an interesting future with space travel, time travel, and other neat tech -- and a well-depicted teen narrator (admittedly a familiar type -- I detected echoes of, say, Heinlein's  Podkayne and Barnes's Teri Murray). But MacDonald has a different idea, and I won't spoil it but I'll say that the story goes in a sadder direction than expected -- but just as Sfnally interesting a direction.

(Locus, September 2016)

From the August Asimov's, "President John F. Kennedy, Astronaut", by Sandra McDonald, is a moving story set in a climate change-ravaged future. Pera lives with her mother and younger brother on a boat -- an old amphibious "duck". Their current job is taking an old man to a spot in the ocean: he claims that it’s the location of the old Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy, where an alien artifact Kennedy found on the Moon has been hidden. He wants to recover it, for the alien secrets it holds, but there are problems: two different "worst daughters", for example, and a storm, and, to be sure, very plausible doubts about the old man’s wild stories about JFK’s astronaut career, not to mention his affair with Marilyn Manson, etc. Whatever the truth behind all that, the story works in evoking the wonder and the lost dreams of space travel.

(Locus, July 2018)

In the May-June Asimov's, Sandra McDonald and Stephen Covey, in "Time Enough to Say Goodbye", tell a sweet time travel story, that is also a story about asteroid exploration, as a woman repeatedly visits the past, to try to meet the two people involved in critical early experiments that will lead to asteroid mining. Her reasons -- personal reasons -- become clear as the story develops. Nothing earthshaking here, but this is nice work.

A Little Known Ace Double: Hierarchies, by John T. Phillifent/Mister Justice, by Doris Piserchia

Ace Double Reviews, 35: Hierarchies, by John T. Phillifent/Mister Justice, by Doris Piserchia (#53415, $0.95, 1973)

by Rich Horton

Today is Doris Piserchia's 90th birthday. In honor of that, I'm reposting her first novel, which I reviewed in its Ace Double form long ago. Piserchia was born in West Virginia, and was in the US Navy in the early 1950s. She began publishing SF in the mid-60s, and some of her short fiction gained considerable notice, as did some of her novels, especially the earlier ones. By 1983 thirteen novels and about as many short stories had appeared, two of the novels as by "Curt Selby", but since then she has been silent, apparently as a result of the sudden death of her daughter and her need to raise her grandchild. Here's what I wrote back in 2004:

(Covers by Kelly Freas)

Another Ace Double from the last year of the format. Hierarchies is one of 16 Ace Doubles from John T. Phillifent/"John Rackham". It is around 44,000 words long. Mister Justice, Doris Piserchia's first novel, is about 56,000 words long.

Hierarchies and Life With Lancelot, both from 1973, are the only two Ace Double halves that Phillifent published under his real name. In the case of Hierarchies, this is probably because the novel was originally serialized in Analog, and most of Phillifent's work for Analog was as Phillifent. In the case of Life With Lancelot, which is an expansion of a "Rackham" story, the best guess is offered by William Barton, who had the novel on the other side of that Ace Double. He noted that he saw some promotional material with the "Rackham" name attached, and he deduced that the eventual attribution to "Phillifent" was a foulup, perhaps caused by Hierarchies appearing at roughly the same time.

The Analog serialization of Hierarchies, in the October and November 1971 issues, is slightly shorter, at some 40,000 words. I did a quick comparison of the two versions, and the changes appear to be small cuts or additions made throughout -- a sentence or two here and there, rather than removing or adding entire scenes. Indeed, the wording changes are extensive, and often quite minor. ("Camouflage" for "hide" is one example.) Perhaps Phillifent did a full rewrite -- or perhaps the Analog editor did a rigorous line edit. (It's not entirely clear who the editor was at the time. The October issue leads with John W. Campbell's obituary. Campbell was still Editor on the masthead, for the November issue as well. More than likely he acquired the story, I would think, but someone else may have done the final editing.)

Hierarchies is a rather light, implausible, short novel. The main character is Rex Sixx (the silly name is eventually explained, and even has a very minor part in the plot), an employee of a security company. Earth has apparently developed a somewhat extensive interstellar society, and now that have contacted the Khandalar system, 6 nations on three planets, which have had a very stagnant hierarchical social order for millennia, apparently having regressed somewhat from a much more technologically advanced society. The Khands are extremely humanoid, differing mainly by being shorter and thinner on average. Rex's security company has been engaged to steal the Crown Stones of Khandalar -- with the connivance of the liberal King-Emperor of one of the nations. It seems that this King-Emperor has realized that his society will be forced to reform along more democratic avenues, and he believes that the Crown Stones, which incorporate some ancient Khandalar tech to allow the King-Emperor to psionically compel obedience, will be a hindrance -- they will be an unavoidable temptation to any King-Emperor faced with democratization.

Rex and his partner Roger are to courier the Crown Stones to Earth. However, to distract attention from the Stones themselves, they have been given an alternate mission -- to ferry a valuable pet to Earth, in the company of a trained keeper. The keeper is Elleen Stame, who turns out surprisingly to be an incredibly beautiful young woman, with a freakishly perfect memory. Rex and Roger both seem to fall for Elleen immediately, despite her ugly voice and her apparent stupidity. The three of them set off for the spaceport, only to be waylaid by brigands, who, it soon becomes clear, were hired by a disaffected member of the Royalty, who does not approve of the King-Emperor's democratic plans. But Rex and Roger have super-suits with extreme defensive ability, so they get away, only to face the rebellious royal again once in space.

The resolution is not of course in doubt, though things do get a bit tough on Rex and Roger and Elleen. The bad guy turns out to be smarter than expected. And, of course, Elleen turns out to have unexpected (even by her) resources. Phillifent also throws in a mild twist or two. It's modestly entertaining light SF adventure for the most part. (Lots of silliness, to be sure, such as the supposedly ultra-reliable security company which nearly gets taken out by bows and arrows.)

Mister Justice is altogether a more ambitious novel, though something of a mess as well. Doris Piserchia had a curious writing career. Born in 1928, she published a story in 1966, but her career began in earnest in 1972 with a couple more stories. Novels began appearing in 1973, and she published novels and stories regularly for the next decade. But (at least according to the ISFDB) nothing has appeared since 1983. She occasionally used the pseudonym "Curt Selby".

Mister Justice opens with several paired scenes, the first in each pair describing a crime that someone gets away with, the second showing, in 2033, appropriate punishment being meted out to the criminals, and photographic proof of the original crime being sent to the authorities. The packets of evidence are signed "Mister Justice". Clearly, "Mister Justice" is a dangerous vigilante -- at the same time, he IS only publishing the obviously guilty, and he seems at least for a time to really reduce crime.

The Secret Service decides to track him down and take him out, led by a mysterious triumvirate, Bailey, Turner, and Burgess. There eventual plan is to recruit a superboy. Daniel is a 12 year old who is sort of coerced by Bailey and co. to train for an eventual search for "Mister Justice" at a special informal school called "SPAC", full of eccentric geniuses. Daniel learns a lot at SPAC, and he also forms an odd relationship with an 11-year old girl called Pala. (Incidentally, I thought this section felt rather Heinleinian.)

Mean time, out in the "real world", society is going to pot. The apparent cause is one gangster who Mister Justice cannot catch -- Arthur Bingle. Bingle sets up a criminal organization that more or less ends up replacing the government, leading to nothing but societal chaos.

Daniel's eventual investigations reveal little enough -- he learns by analyzing the photographs left by Mister Justice which great photographer he is, and from that he manages to deduce that Mister Justice is using time travel to accomplish his deeds. (Something guessable anyway from the initial times of the crime scenes.) Daniel's relationship with Pala progresses, until she is kidnapped. We learn more and more about the time travel aspect of things, and about the decay of society. And we watch Bailey's group spectacularly fail to deal with either Mister Justice or Arthur Bingle.

The novel's resolution is somewhat strange -- basically involving a confrontation between Justice and Bingle. It doesn't really end up anywhere near where the start seemed to promise. There is no real look at the problem of vigilantism. Daniel is introduced as what seems to be the main character, then he sort of fades away (though we do learn what he and Pala are up to by the end). There are odd skips in the book -- at one time 6 years pass from one sentence to the next with no real indication. In many ways I found it a mess. But there is some interest to it. For myself, Daniel and Pala were the most interesting characters, and their eventual fate, a rather traditional SFnal fate, was OK. Some of the secrets of Mister Justice, revealed only obliquely, were satisfying enough. But other aspects didn't work for me. The society shown is not well-drawn, and not plausible in its breakdown either. (And it basically seems like 1970 transported to 2033.) The Bailey and Co. scenes are often pointless. All in all, some good ideas that probably needed another thorough revision to really cohere into a good novel.

Birthday Review: Short Stories by Robert Reed

Robert Reed, who was born 9 October 1956, is remarkably good, and remarkably prolific. He is the author who has appeared most often in my Best of the Year collections. And I've reviewed a whole lot of his stories. The following selection is a quite limited selection of my Locus reviews. Happy Birthday, Mr. Reed!

(Locus, May 2003)

The other Reed present (in the May F&SF) is Robert, and he too is in top form with "555", a first rate story about a meek individual who turns out to be a minor character in a computer generated entertainment, some variety of soap opera. Her show is in ratings trouble, and a writer comes to her with a tempting offer that might mean more screen time for her. But what does she really want? And want can she, a computer program, want? Reed's answer is nicely surprising.

(Locus, October 2004)

Best of all in the October-November F&SF is Robert Reed's "Opal Ball", which extrapolates the recent idea of using wagering pools for collective predictions. In this future, for many people, especially the Players who have built a reputation based on their successful wagers, many aspects of life are predicated on the results of wagering pools. The protagonist meets a woman and falls in love -- but the consensus of the betting population is that they are not right for one another. Reed's exploration of the human reaction to this is perceptive and believable.

(Locus, October 2005)

I saw two very strong stories in the September Asimov’s. Robert Reed’s "Finished" is, with much Reed, a careful reconsideration of a fairly familiar idea, but it is so well done and the characters are so well captured that it seems new. The title refers to an elective treatment to essentially upload one’s mind into an improved body. But the mind is now on a computer of sorts, and people don’t seem to change and grow anymore -- or so the critics claim. The narrator is a "Finished" man who has an affair with a younger woman who has not had the treatment, and the story of their relationship, and a slight ending twist, illuminate the questions Reed has raised.


(Locus, April 2006)

Two of the shorter pieces in the June Asimov's stand out. Robert Reed’s "Eight Episodes" is about a cult TV show that tells a rather dry scientific story, of the discovery of a tiny spaceship in a Permian era rock sample. The spaceship has a sort of message for humanity, a message which concerns, it turns out, the Fermi Paradox. And the story manages some of the same power as Ian R. MacLeod’s classic "New Light on the Drake Equation" in its evocation of lost SFnal dreams, and its reminder that there are still dreams to dream.

In the anthology One Million A. D., I also liked Robert Reed’s "Good Mountain", particularly for the odd nature of its setting: a continent made of wood, which appears to be in danger of burning. A man fleeing the destruction of his home for a potentially safe haven encounters a strange woman who is head for "Good Mountain", which she says is a very large structure of metal (very rare on this planet). All this is familiar enough in SF terms, but Reed takes the story in a surprising direction at the end.

(Locus, September 2006)

The other novella (in the October/November Asimov's), Robert Reed’s "A Billion Eves", is even better. At first the story seems perhaps an alternate history about a society oppressing women, and indeed gender issues are important. But things are not quite what they seem. Kala is a young woman on an oddly different Earth, and we follow her life for several years. Women seem in constant threat of kidnap, for reasons we slowly learn: a device called the "ripper" allows one-way travel to parallel Earths, each with slightly different geological/ecological histories. Apparently a man called the "First Father" used a ripper to kidnap an entire sorority and start a colony on an empty Earth. And over millennia new colonies have been founded: sometimes by single men kidnapping groups of women, more usually (perhaps) by voluntary groups of couples. The idea of opening new worlds is the foundation of most religions on Kala’s world, and many people hope to become colonists. Kala’s brother is a charismatic and intelligent young man, a natural "Father", but their family’s lives are changed when he rescues Kala from a kidnap attempt, and his sent to jail for his vengeful actions. Kala herself becomes a sort of forester, interested in preserving the native ecology of her world, which is at risk because of multiple imports from the sequence of Earths that preceded it. Reed develops Kala’s life, and her brother’s, in a different direction, questioning the morality of the ecological alteration of other worlds by each new colony. It’s a thoughtful and exciting story.

(Locus, April 2008)

Robert Reed is one of those writers who is a consolidator of ideas. He is continually re-examining familiar SF notions from more contemporary perspectives, or simply from different angles. "Five Thrillers" (F&SF, April) is quite explicitly a re-examination of frankly pulpish ideas. Joe Carroway is a genetically gifted young man. We meet him first during a space disaster, as he comes up with a solution to save the entire crew, except for one man -- one significantly unique man. Each "thriller" follows Carroway through a remarkable -- and morally quite ambiguous -- career. The various crises are perhaps familiar but very well narrated, with both SFnal and political savvy, leading to a quite spectacular ending.

(Locus, June 2008)

In the June F&SF Robert Reed’s "Character Flu" is a nice, very short, bit of speculation about the dangers of a certain type of brain enhancement. One of Reed’s strengths in his short fiction is to know exactly how long a story should be, and this one is perfectly sized: establishing the central idea, then closing the trap it sets just as the reader realizes what’s coming.

(Locus, December 2012)

F&SF's year-end issue also has a strong long novella, "Katabasis", by Robert Reed. This is another of his Great Ship stories. Katabasis is a tour guide on a high gravity environment in the Ship, leading tourists on a very difficult trek. She rejects the request of one man, Varid, act as his guide, then agrees to guide recurring characters Perri and Quee Lee -- and finds her party joined by Varid. Their particular journey, which turns out to be very hard, is contrasted with the long past journey of Katabasis' people across their strange planet (and then eventually to the Ship), as well as the different but tragic history of Varid. Both Sfnally fascinating and a powerful study of two damaged beings in Katabasis and Varid.

(Locus, January 2014)

The best story here (in Carbide Tipped Pens), I think because for me it does the best job of evoking the "sense of wonder" that remains crucial to SF, is "Every Hill Ends With Sky", by Robert Reed, in which a maverick scientist develops a simulation of the likely development of life in the Solar System, looking for potentialities of exotic life forms that we might have missed, and finds something unexpected. This is seen from a perspective slightly in the future, as her daughter struggles to survive in a post-Apocalyptic world, where her mother's discover may or may not offer strange hope.

(Locus, December 2016)

Another webzine I’ve needed to catch up with is Daily Science Fiction. This site features a story each weekday, and many of the stories are quite short. The quality is variable, but there is some very good work here. For instance, Robert Reed’s "How to Listen to Music", something of a morality tale, about a future much like the present, but in which, secretly, thousands of AI-linked humans control the world, looking for entertainment by finding special experiences of ordinary people -- such as a dying woman remembering a long ago pop song. Nothing really wrong there, eh? But Reed allows us to follow the implications of such entertainment in a pretty scary direction.

Birthday Review: The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien

I wrote this review way back in 1996, I think for posting at the review forum of one of the very first online bookstores, which name is escaping me now. I'm reposting it today, unchanged, on the 107th anniversary of Brian O'Nolan's birth.

TITLE: The Third Policeman
AUTHOR: Flann O`Brien

PUBLISHER: Plume

ISBN: 0-452-25912-6

This is one of the strangest novels I have ever read. It was written in about 1940, but not published until 1967, a year or two after the author`s death. O`Brien is a pseudonym for the Irish writer Brian O`Nolan, who was also a celebrated newspaper columnist using the name Myles na gCopaleen, the latter name apparently Gaelic. O`Brien`s masterpiece is At Swim-Two-Birds, which was published in 1939. A selection of his "Myles" columns is also well-regarded. However, The Third Policeman is what I saw in the bookstore when I went looking for something by O`Brien, and it wasn`t a bad choice.

This novel is quite funny, quite absurd, and, at bottom, very disturbing. The narrator is a very unpleasant man, who announces in the first sentence "Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade;" not only is he a murderer, but a very lazy man who ruins his family farm, and spends his life researching the works of a madman named De Selby, who believes that, among other things, darkness is an hallucination, the result of accretions of black air. The narrator relates his early life briefly, leading up to his association with another unsavory character, John Divney, who parasitically moves in with the narrator and helps squander his inheritance. Divney and the narrator plot to kill their neighbor, Phillip Mathers, to steal his money. After the murder they decide to leave the money for a while until the coast clears: however they distrust each other so much that they never leave each others company. Finally they go to Mathers`s house to fetch the strongbox with his money: then Divney sends the narrator ahead to the house alone, while he stands lookout, and things get very strange!

The narrator meets Phillip Mathers, acquires a sort of soul which he calls "Joe", and sets out looking for three mysterious policemen. The first two are easily found, and the narrator discusses bicycles, boxes, and other unusual subjects with these policemen. Finally they decide to hang him (for bicycle theft, I think), but he is rescued by the league of one-legged men (the narrator himself has but one leg). He returns to Mathers` house where he encounters the third policeman, and eventually is reunited with John Divney.

The above summary, obviously, does not represent the action or interest of the book at all. The book is full of off-the-wall philosophical speculations, some based on the mad works of De Selby, others original to the policeman (the latter including a theory about bicycles and their riders which has to be read to be appreciated, also a mysterious trip to an underground cavern where anything you can imagine can be created). There are a lot of footnotes discussing De Selby and the controversy surrounding his work: these make the book somewhat reminiscent of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (also reminiscent in being the first-person narrative of an insane murderer).

Old Bestseller: Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth

Old Bestseller Review: Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth

a review by Rich Horton

I don't know for sure if this was a "bestseller" -- there were no true bestseller lists in Maria Edgeworth's time. But she was very popular, for realistic contemporary novels like Belinda and Ormond, for children's works, and for satirical works like Castle Rackrent. She was very famous, made a lot of money (more, Wikipedia says, than Jane Austen), was politically influential, and was friends with the likes of Walter Scott and Kitty Pakenham (the Duke of Wellington's wife, and a collateral ancestress of Anthony Powell's wife and thus of the Longfords).

Maria Edgeworth was born in 1768, to an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. She lived in England until 5, moved to Ireland after he mother's death and her father's remarriage, and later returned to England, but spent much of her life in Ireland (apparently socially much present in both countries). In fact, her political views were much formed by the question of Union between England and Ireland, which she and her father supported, but with doubts because they were well aware how many Irishmen opposed it. Her father, Richard, was a progressive educator, and indeed Maria's first couple of publications were on the subject of education. Richard married 4 times (the second and third being sisters), and had 22 (!) children -- one wag remarked that he had plenty of subjects on whom to try his progressive education theories.

Castle Rackrent was Edgeworth's first "novel", though it is very short -- the main narrative is about 25,000 words, and there are another 7500 or so words of an introduction and a glossary. It was published in 1800. It is sometimes considered the first historical novel, and the first novel to use an unreliable narrator. My edition is the Dover edition.

It is told by one Thady Quirk, who was the steward for four generations of the Rackrent family, who inherited Castle Rackrent from a distant cousin. Thady sings the praises of each of his masters ... Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy. But we quickly gather that each of them are fairly awful people. Sir Patrick is a spendthrift, and quickly gets into disastrous debt, and then dies. Sir Murtagh is by contrast a miser, and his wife is if anything worse, and his main entertainment is lawsuits against his neighbors. Sir Kit, Murtagh's younger brother, inherits and decides to marry a rich Jewish woman to save the estate, but she won't part with her jewels, and he locks her up for several years in revenge. His gambling and foolishness gets the estate into further trouble -- though Thady's son Jason profits by buying up Rackrent property on the cheap. Finally, Sir Condy has more woman trouble -- throwing over his mistress (Thady's niece) in favor of a rich local woman, whose family hates the Rackrents and thus refuses to give her any dowry. That marriage thus quickly founders, and Condy, after a foolish venture into Parliament, ends up literally drinking himself to death on a bet. And thus ends the Rackrent line.

It's all much more elaborately told of course, in very long paragraphs in Thady's quite plausible sounding Irish voice. There are extensive humorous asides about Irish habits -- these seem at times satirical, and at other times straightforward narrations of real Irish traditions and behaviors (all this much enlarged upon in the Glossary, which is written not in Thady's voice but in that of his "Editor"). As already noted, Thady is an unreliable narrator, and he constantly proclaims his loyalty to and love for the Rackrents, while we can't help but notice that his real interest is in the main chance -- and that in the end one of the primary beneficiaries of the misfortune of the Rackrents is Thady's son.

It's often very funny, though the long paragraphs do drag a bit. And as all the characters are really quite awful people, the novel wears out its welcome fairly quickly -- but as it's very short, that's OK -- it's about as much as we can stand, and pretty entertaining for its length.

Belated Birthday Review: Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems

Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1979. So, in slightly belated recognition of his birthday, I'm resposting something I wrote for my SFF Net newsgroup a long time ago. I'll caveat by noting that I really don't discuss individual poems in any detail here; and my suggesting that some of the things I wrote are kind of questionable. (Like the bit about him being known in two separate ways.)

I've mentioned before that Wallace Stevens is my favorite poet. (It's possible that I've used qualifiers like "20th Century" and "American" but hang all that, he's my favorite bar none.) Over the past couple of months, I've been engaged in a project, at first sort of offhand, by the end obsessive, of rereading his Collected Poems. And, by the end, of reading his late long poems repeatedly and with particular care.

Stevens is known, it seems to me, in two separate ways. In the popular sense, he is known for a series of remarkable early poems, in most cases not terribly long, notable for striking images and quite beautiful prosody. Of these poems the most famous is surely "Sunday Morning" -- other examples are "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", "Peter Quince at the Clavier", "Sea Surface Full of Clouds", "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon", "The Emperor of Ice Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Of Modern Poetry". The great bulk of these come from his first collection, Harmonium, and indeed from the first edition of Harmonium, published in 1923. ("Sea Surface" is from the 1931 reissue and expansion of Harmonium, "The Idea of Order at Key West" is from Ideas of Order (1936), and "Of Modern Poetry" is from Parts of a World (1942).) These were certainly my favorite among his poems. And they remain favorites.

But his critical reputation rests strikingly on a completely different set of poems, all later than those mentioned above. (Though it must be acknowledged that at least "Sunday Morning" and "The Idea of Order at Key West" as well as two early long poems, "The Comedian as the Letter C" and "The Monocle de Mon Oncle", are in general highly regarded critically. And that most of his early work is certainly treated with respect.) The longest poem in his Collected Poems is probably the poem with the greatest critical regard, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction". [Actually, ranking Stevens' poems by "critical regard" is a fools' effort, and I don't think there is any such consensus any more.] This was published as a separate book in 1942, the same year as Parts of a World. ("Notes" isn't actually his longest poem: a controversial poem called "Owl's Clover" was published in two separate forms, both longer than "Notes", but then was basically repudiated by being excluded from the Collected Poems.)

I think it's fair to say that "late Stevens" begins with "Notes", while "early-to-middle Stevens" ends with Parts of a World. ("Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" was reprinted as part of his 1947 collection Transport to Summer.) Of course the terms "late" and "early" are odd applied to Stevens. His first successful poems appeared in 1915 (including "Sunday Morning"), when he was 36. He was 44 when the first edition of Harmonium came out. That's pretty late for "early"! And by the 1942 publication of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" he was 63. Indeed, his production from 1942 through his death in 1955 was remarkable: two major collections each with several long poems (Transport to Summer and The Auroras of Autumn), as well as at least another full collection worth of late poems, some included in the 1954 Collected Poems in a section called "The Rock", and quite a few more not collected until after his death. The other late long poems besides "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" that attract considerable praise are "Esthétique du Mal" (though this tends also to be disparaged), "Chocorua to its Neighbor", "Credences of Summer", "The Auroras of Autumn", "The Owl in the Sarcophagus", "Things of August", and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven".

I can only say that my rereading of his poems was remarkably rewarding. Really! (That last "re" was on purpose!) The early favorites remain special -- I dare say I've read "Sunday Morning" hundreds of times, and it seems new every time. "The Idea of Order at Key West" is another long-term favorite. And I was delighted to detect a prefiguring of "The Idea of Order at Key West" in one of my favorite brief poems, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon". (I knew I couldn't be the only person to have noticed that, and indeed Harold Bloom goes on at some length about the links between the two poems in his book on Stevens.) But the truly eye-opening aspect of this rediscovery was the late long poems. Well, indeed, all the long poems. The early "Comedian" and "Monocle" had never really caught fire for me in earlier readings, but this time they did. I'm still not a huge fan of the popular middle-period long poem "The Man With the Blue Guitar", but I did enjoy this reading. I have long enjoyed a fairly long poem from Parts of a World, "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas" -- and I was delighted to see that Harold Bloom also likes that poem. I had earlier approached "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" with what I can only call trepidation. But on these recent rereadings (four or five careful ones) the poem -- still difficult -- has opened up to me. So too with "The Auroras of Autumn" and the late lovely "pre-elegy" for George Santayana, "To An Old Philosopher in Rome". "Credences of Summer" and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" don't yet come clear to me, but reading them is still a pleasure. (I say "come clear" as if I fully understand "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"! Not likely, but I am sure that each future rereading will show me new things.)

[I should note that on further rereadings, "Credences of Summer" and "To an Old Philosopher in Rome", in particular, have become more important to me.]

What to say about late Stevens? The most obvious adjective is "austere". But that doesn't always apply -- he could also be quite playful. However, there is never the lushness of a "Sunday Morning" or "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" in the late works. The sentences tend to extraordinary length, but the internal rhythms are involving. The poems are all quite philosophical, much concerned with the importance of poetry, the nature of reality versus perceptions of reality, and, perhaps more simply, with growing old. (A Stevens theme, to be sure, that can be traced at least back to "The Monocle de Mon Oncle".)

I also took the time to read two book length studies of Stevens. These are Helen Hennessy Vendler's On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems, and Harold Bloom's Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Both are interesting and worthwhile, but also difficult, particularly the Bloom. I think I just don't have the vocabulary or training to always understand Bloom.

(It's interesting to consider the definition of "long poem". By my count there are 18 poems of more than 100 lines in the Collected Poems, and two more ("Owl's Clover" and "The Sail of Ulysses") in Opus Posthumous. But Vendler only explicitly covers 14 poems, including one quite short poem ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", 54 lines). She leaves out one of my favorite longer poems, "Extracts From Address to the Academy of Fine Ideas", and other perhaps less important poems like "Things of August", "The Owl in the Sarcophagus", "Chocorua to its Neighbor" and "A Primitive Like an Orb". But that is just to quibble.)