A Forgotten non-Bestseller: The Van Roon, by J. C. Snaith

A Forgotten Novel from the 1920s: The Van Roon, by J. C. Snaith

A review by Rich Horton

This week the book I consider does not seem to have been a bestseller, and its writer seems quite close to forgotten. At least, that is, by Wikipedia. I was able to discover another blog, Wormwoodiana, writing about an interesting-sounding early Snaith novel, William Jordan, Junior (1908) (http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2009/06/genius-of-jc-snaith.html). And there were the expected Gutenberg copies of a few of his books. And not much else.

Except, as seems to happen surprisingly often, for the wonderful Science Fiction Encyclopedia, which notes that Snaith wrote quite a lot of early SF: the novels An Affair of State (1913), The Council of Seven (1921), and Thus Far (1925) all seem real SF, and rather dark in tone. He also wrote a Ruritanian-style romance (Mrs. Fitz (1910)) and a fantasy about the Second Coming (The Coming (1917)).

J. C. Snaith was a prolific English writer. He lived from 1876 to 1936, and wrote in a wide variety of genres and modes, as far as I can tell. According to Mark Valentine at Wormwoodiana, other novels to have received some praise are The Sailor (1916) and a novel about cricket, Willow, the King (1899). According to the SFE, much of his work was more sentimental romances, and it is to that category that the novel at hand, The Van Roon, belongs.

This was published in 1922 according to the copyright notice in my copy, which I found slightly confusing. My copy is from D. Appleton & Co. of New York and London, and the copyright page first says Copyright 1922 by D. Appleton and Company, but lower on the page says “Copyright 1922 by the Curtis Publishing Co. Printed in the United States of America.” Were D. Appleton and Curtis related somehow? Was Curtis the publisher of the first edition and the Appleton edition a reprint? I don’t know. [Update: I am informed that Curtis was the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, and that The Van Roon was first serialized there.] My copy seems to have been bought as a Christmas present three years later – at any rate, it is inscribed “Geo. D. Miller, Dec 25 – 1025”.

The novel opens in a mode that seems to promise a light romantic comedy, and that is mostly what it is, though it takes a somewhat odd melodramatic turn towards the end. We begin in a small London antique shop, S. Gedge Antiques, operated by Simon Gedge, an aging and rather miserly man. He has an assistant, young William, who has become increasingly important to the business as Gedge gets older: William has a good eye for a bargain, but also an exceptional eye for art, and a lot of a ability, as well as extreme honesty (to the point of unworldliness). Yet Gedge still pays him a pittance. This day he is surprised by the arrival of his orphaned niece, June, who has no one else to turn to. Gedge is not very willing to help her, but agrees to take her in if she will take over the cleaning – it seems Gedge, who has no toleration at all for women, is on the outs with his char. And June, a sensible and hardworking girl, agrees.

William comes back with a couple nice things that S. Gedge can sell, as well as something he bought with his own money – an ugly daub of a picture. But William thinks he sees something interesting underneath the paint, and despite Gedge’s expressed opinion that he’s wasting his money and time, he begins trying to restore the painting. Meanwhile June, a pretty girl herself, and William make their acquaintance. And when William's efforts seem to bear some fruit, June, aware that her uncle will try to cheat him, begs him to give her the painting – which William innocently does. Of course, as we have all guessed, the painting is revealed as most likely a “Van Roon” – he being a painter of the Flemish school of whose works only a few survive, including one stolen sometime previously from the Louvre.

Once Gedge realizes that, he tries to buy the painting from William for a small sum … William refuses to sell it, but tries to convince June to give it to her uncle – surely the honest old man, William thinks, only wants the painting because he truly appreciates a lovely picture. Meanwhile June is becoming a bit jealous of a beautiful young rich lady who visits the shop occasionally to buy stuff she takes a fancy too. And Gedge is mad enough at June to decide to fire her … So June looks for a new job and innocently decides that a chance-met man’s offer to use her as a model is a nice opportunity – she is innocent enough not to realize what “in the altogether" means, nor that his main interest in her is her best asset, a “rather nice chest”. And Gedge finds a couple of potential buyers for the putative Van Roon …

So the plot thickens rapidly, and what had been a light romantic comedy swerves sharply in the direction of melodrama. This part of the book really didn’t work for me, and nor, to be honest, did the quite sappy conclusion that resulted. A shame, really, as I was enjoying the first half or so of the book a fair bit – June is a nicely depicted character, half innocent, but a mostly sensible person. And William, though an implausible paragon, is worth rooting for. And even S. Gedge, for all that he’s pure cliché, is a fitfully amusing character. It’s a book that suggests an author who could entertain, and probably did well enough with his career – but in itself The Van Roon is a very minor piece. 

Another Edith Wharton ghost story: "The Eyes"

Another Edith Wharton ghost story: "The Eyes"

Now to another effective ghost story. This is “The Eyes”, which first appeared in the June 1910 issue of Scribners’ Magazine. The frame has the narrator joining his friend Andrew Culwin, a “confirmed bachelor” (and yes that means exactly what you think it means), with 6 other men at Culwin’s house for dinner and conversation. The youngest of the men is Culwin’s latest “protégé”. All of them tell a ghost story except for Culwin. Finally, when the narrator and Phil Frenham, Culwin’s new young man, remain alone, they prevail upon Culwin to tell a story, and he does – a true one.

Culwin tells first of an experience many years before, when he was thrown into association with a young, plain, cousin, Alice Nowell (“She was neither beautiful nor intelligent—poor Alice Nowell!” says Culwin), and somehow Culwin, who thinks women “are necessary only because someone has to do the cooking” finds himself having offered to marry her, despite a complete lack of physical or intellectual attraction. Then one night he wakes to see a sinister pair of eyes looking at him … and he comes to the conclusion that he must flee Alice Nowell.

His next experience with the eyes is in Rome. He has taken a young man, Gilbert Noyes, under his wing (at Alice’s urging) ... Noyes wants to be a writer, and Culwin sees immediately that he has no talent, but he keeps him on for some time, continuing to encourage his efforts. He tells himself he’ doing it for the boy’s sake – but it’s fairly obvious he doesn’t want to give up the boy’s attentions – until the eyes appear again, and Culwin realizes he must disabuse Noyes of any illusions about his talent.

And that’s the end of Culwin’s story – we return to the frame, and a conveniently placed mirror allows the narrator (and Culwin) to see Culwin’s own eyes in the proper context – while young Phil Frenham, the latest protégé, is crushed, realizing, perhaps, what he is to the older man.

So what is the real meaning of the eyes? Obviously they are Culwin’s – and they seem to warn him away from doing more wrong – but always after he has done some wrong already. Looked at most simply, Culwin is something of a vampire figure, latching on to young men (of some talent, presumably, most of the time), and enjoying them while they are young (“juicy”, one character says). If this is the case, perhaps the eyes are simply warning Culwin that the likes of Alice Nowell and Gilbert Noyes are not worthy of his attention. Indeed this could be given a positive spin – one online writer tried to do so – the eyes only appear when Culwin is acting against his better nature. There is a suggestion that most of Culwin’s protégés benefit from his attentions. On the other hand, here’s how Culwin describes the eyes: “they seemed to belong to a man who had done a lot of harm in his life, but had always kept just inside the danger lines. They were not the eyes of a coward, but of someone much too clever to take risks;”. Not a good thing. And Culwin’s treatment of, say, Alice – indeed his inability to appreciate her (or any woman) – seems another wrong. 

A Somewhat Forgotten Moderate Seller: The Man Who Got Away, by Sumner Locke Elliott

The Man Who Got Away by Sumner Locke Elliott

A review by Rich Horton

Here’s a book that probably wasn’t a bestseller, but might have sold OK. Sumner Locke Elliott was reasonably well-known, prominently published, had a a couple of books made into a movie. But he doesn’t seem that well known these days. (Jo Walton introduced him to me, and she writes of him as almost a private pleasure – a writer nobody else she knows has read.) 

Elliott was born in Sydney, Australia in 1917. His mother, also a writer, Helena Sumner Locke, died from complications of his childbirth, and he was raised by his two aunts, who fought a bitter custody battle (lightly fictionalized in his first novel, Careful, He Might Hear You). He was a fairly successful playwright in Australia until after the War, when he moved to the United States, and became a prominent writer of teleplays during the “Golden Age” of live television, the ‘50s. In the ‘60s he turned to novels. He was also a closeted gay man, coming out only with the publication of his last novel, Fairyland, a year before his death in 1991.

The Man Who Got Away, from 1972, is arguably SF, which is why I chose to try it. In the end I think it qualifies as an interesting borderline case that I think I’d call not really SF, and the reasons for that might be illuminating.  As a counterexample, I’d consider Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, which has a somewhat similar premise, SF, just on the other side of that fuzzy border.  Here’s why, quickly: in The Man Who Got Away, the SF premise is entirely an enabling device, a narrative construct, used to propel the novel backwards in time.  It could have been told in a series of flashbacks, though I think that Elliott’s choice is much better.  Also, nothing is made of the SF device, either “actually” (there is no suggestion that this experience is useful or repeatable) or metaphorically.  The arguments pro-SF would say, I think, that for all that Elliott makes his SF device “real”: the narrator really =does= disappear from “present-day” life, with no other explanation possible.  And, pro-SF, there is one bit of Sfnal frisson, one place where something happens that is outside the realm of “narrative device”.  Nonetheless … In the case of Time’s Arrow, contrariwise, I would argue in favor of SF mainly because of the real metaphorical use Amis makes of his backward in time narration: mainly the Nazi Doctor bringing his “patients” back to life.  I could certainly understand an argument that suggested that all the tricks in Time’s Arrow are just as much “narrative devices” as those in The Man Who Got Away, though.

The Man Who Got Away is rather interesting, but to my mind not quite successful.  It opens with a chapter from the POV of Ruth Wood, whose husband, George, just disappears one day.  Then the novel proper starts, from George’s POV, from the time of his disappearance.  He soon realizes that he is experiencing significant events in his life backward in time.  At first he seems to be a moderately successful, moderately happy, somewhat rich, somewhat likable, guy, a television writer/producer.  As we move backward in time, we realize that most of this is outward appearance: he’s not very happy at all, he’s not all that successful, and if outwardly likable, he’s really an incredible asshole.  He’s also tormented by mysterious events in his past: his bitter relationship with his mother, his broken friendship with the actor Archer Cook, and his hatred of the poet John Citadel.  As we go back in time we get more evidence of George’s worthlessness, and failure, and more hints of the reasons.  All is finally explained in the end, but not in a way that, for me, justified George’s failings. (Which I should say may be exactly what Elliott intended.)

This is a very well written novel, and readable, and absorbing, but it didn’t quite work for me.  I had two main problems: 1) the main character is an irredeemable jerk, and it can be hard to put up with that for the length of a novel, and 2) the eventual “explanations” were a bit shallow, and anti-climactic, and unconvincing.  Also, George’s childhood seemed almost wholly disconnected, culturally and economically, from his later life, and the accompanying picture of American life in the '30s doesn't convince.  I’m tempted to suggest an Aussie not “getting” the US, in some way -- although he does better with the '50s  and '60s (when, of course, Elliott lived in the US). Still, as I say all that, from the perspective of nearly 20 years, I still remember the book, and I still think it intriguing, with a few moments of real beauty. So my first reaction may have understated its value a bit.

Edith Wharton Stories: "Autres Temps ..." and "The Long Run"

Next up is a pair of stories that seem linked in my mind: “Autres Temps …” and “The Long Run”. The stories are from nearly the same time: “Autres Temps …” appeared in Century, July 1911 (as “Other Times, Other Manners”), and “The Long Run” in the Atlantic Monthly, February 1912.

“Autres Temps …” is generally regarded, I think, as one of Wharton’s best stories, and I would tend to agree. It’s the story of Mrs. Lidcote, who scandalously left her husband and ran off with another man some 18 years before the action of the story. She has been living alone in Italy for some time, but she is finally returning to New York. It seems her daughter, Leila, has done much as Mrs. Lidcote did – divorced her husband and married her lover. Leila wants to see her mother again. On the steamer she meets again an old friend, Franklin Ide, who has suggested in the past that he wants to marry her, and whom she has refused on the grounds that she won’t be accepted in society anywhere, and that won’t be fair to Franklin. (An abiding theme again and again in Wharton’s work is how society’s rules disproportionately affected women.) Franklin seems convinced that times have changed – after all, Leila is accepted everywhere – attitudes have changed, surely Mrs. Lidcote will also be accepted. And, indeed, she allows herself to think that that may be the case.

Well, you can see where this is going. Mrs. Lidcote comes to New York, and is taken to her daughter’s new house, and she can see what a success her daughter is – she is very happy in her new marriage, her ex-husband is compliant, and she is accepted everywhere, by all the “best” people. But, in a series of devastating, and deliciously underplayed, scenes, we see that while the rules are indeed different for Leila, nothing has changed for Mrs. Lidcote – she is essentially shunned by everyone, and even those close to her: her daughter, and a sympathetic old friend, maneuver around her, shunt her to the side, make excuses that they don’t even seem to realize they are making. Finally, she decides she must return to her solitary life in Italy, and she gets one more passionate plea from Franklin Ide -- and we realize that he too, without even realizing it, treats her as someone to step carefully around in “society”. It’s just a beautiful, devastating story, and also stunningly well-written.

And in a way it’s almost like SF … because to get it, you have to understand attitudes which are quite alien to present day attitudes. There was an adaptation – a play, I think – that recast the story in 1960 … I wonder how that worked? Seems to me it might not have, really. I should mention also that it’s loosely based on a real story – a Boston woman in 1895 abandoned her family and ran off to Paris with her lover. In her case, her children shunned her completely, until finally inviting her for a visit some 40 years later – when she got the cable inviting her, apparently she fell dead on the spot. (Obviously this denouement had not eventuated when Wharton wrote "Autres Temps ...".) Lewis quotes the woman in question’s granddaughter claiming that Wharton “got it all wrong” – of course, Wharton did not, at all. Because she wasn’t telling this woman’s grandmother’s story, she was telling the story of Mrs. Lidcote, a character she invented!

So, the, what of “The Long Run”? It seems almost a purposeful response to “Autres Temps …”. The first story told of the sad fate of a woman who defied societal convention and ran off with her lover. “The Long Run” tells of the sad fates of a man and a woman who, in the end, obeyed society’s rules. (Of course, Wharton’s definitive take on this subject came a few years later in her great novel The Age of Innocence.)

“The Long Run” is told by an unnamed narrator who, at the start, having returned to the States after a dozen years away, runs into an old Harvard friend of his, Halston Merrick. Merrick, when he knew him in college and just after, was a brilliant and unconventional man, apparently destined for a great career in literature or perhaps politics. He was rich (of course), and he inherited his father’s Iron Works early after his father’s unexpected death, but he intended to sell it and get on with his real career. At the same party where the narrator meets Merrick, he sees a woman who looks vaguely familiar. He asks Merrick who she might be, and he learns that she is Mrs. Reardon, but that he must have known her as Mrs. Trant, Paulina Trant.

The narrator ends up spending some time with Halston Merrick, and he learns the whole story. Merrick and Paulina Trant fell in love – her husband was a rather awful bore. After a while, suddenly, Paulina shows up on Merrick’s door step – she is ready to run away with him. And Halston Merrick can’t bring himself to do it. He tells himself he’s saving her from herself – her foresees a fate something like that of Mrs. Lidcote in “Autres Temps …”. But by slow degrees he comes to realize that he is the coward … he is the one unable to throw off society’s rules. And, in the “long run”, what will he be? He will never sell the Iron Works – he’ll never write anything worthwhile (the narrator reads some later efforts and finds them weak and tired). And when Mr. Trant dies unexpectedly, he and Paulina meet again, and somehow he is unworthy of her – and, she, perhaps, is unworthy of him, or at least the old him. And now, years later, both Halston Merrick and the now Mrs. Reardon are sad ordinary creatures, bores, failures.

This is a decent story, but to me it has the air of constructedness – it seems didactic, formed to make its point. In a funny way I was reminded of James Hilton’s Random Harvest, whose protagonist (for rather more melodramatic reasons) ends up leaving a life with his great love to take over his family’s business. The difference in this case is that Hilton’s hero still makes something of his business (and political) career – though still missing his love, and still, perhaps, feeling that he was missing an opportunity by not pursuing a writing career.

Edith Wharton Stories: "The Lady's Maid's Bell"

“The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”, by Edith Wharton

I’ve been working my way through R. W. B. Lewis’ selection of Edith Wharton’s best short fiction over the past few weeks, and I’ve found it very enjoyable. I thought I might discuss a few of my favorites over the next little while. I probably won’t (necessarily) review the stories in detail, and there will be spoilers. Because come on! But I’ll warn before risking really messing up a story.

First (in chronological order, that is) is Wharton’s first ghost story (she wrote quite a few). This is “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1902. As I finished the story, I thought to myself, OK, what just happened? Am I too slow to understand? But a quick look at the internet revealed that that reaction is pretty much universal. And I should add that I really liked the story – I just didn’t understand the ending fully.

So what do we know happened? The story is told by a servant, a lady’s maid (though whether or not the title bell is hers is in question). Her name is Alice Hartley, and she’s just recovered from typhoid fever, and is having a hard time finding a position before ending up at Mrs. Brympton’s remote country house. Mrs. Brympton is a youngish wife, frail, with her two children having died, and with an unhappy marriage. But she’s popular with the servants, and her brutish, coarse, husband is unpopular. (Hartley is happy to realize that her lingering sickliness makes her unattractive to Mr. Brympton.) The only peculiar things are the woman Hartley sees in a hallway, who no one else admits to knowing, and the fact that Mrs. Brympton will never summon Hartley with the bell.

We soon realize that the mysterious woman Hartley sees is the ghost of Mrs. Brympton’s much loved earlier lady’s maid, Emma Saxon, who had died a few months before. And one night, while Mr. Brympton is visiting, the bell rings. Hartley responds – but sees Emma Saxon’s ghost – and an angry Mr. Brympton. On another occasion, the ghost leads Hartley to the house of Mr. Ranford, a neighbor who is Mrs. Brympton’s closest friend. (Too close? Hartley swears nothing improper happens.) It seems Emma Saxon is trying to send Alice Hartley a message, but Hartley can’t decode it.

Finally, as Mr. Brympton returns unexpectedly one night, the bell rings again, and Hartley sees Emma Saxon again, and rushes to her mistress, just as her husband comes upstairs … Mrs. Brympton faints, and soon dies, and Mr. Brympton says, strangely, “It seems that’s done for me”, and Emma Saxon’s ghost returns, reproaching him. At the funeral, Mr. Ranford seems to be limping. And that’s more or less it.

So what really happens? What was Emma Saxon’s message? What happened to Mr. Ranford?

It seems to me that the most conventional answer is roughly this: the Brymptons had an unhappy marriage. Mr. Brympton was often away. Mr. Ranford, a much more sympathetic man, began a relationship with Mrs. Brympton (sexual or not may not matter much). Mr. Brympton found out, and objected violently. (Especially perhaps as he may have been denied his “marital rights”, possibly with the help of Emma Saxon’s ghost.) Hence his statement “It seems that’s done for me [his marriage, that is]”. And why does Mrs. Brympton die? Just frailness? The stress of two perhaps difficult pregnancies? Fear? As for Mr. Ranford’s limp, perhaps Mr. Brympton had a fight with him.

We note that Alice Hartley, the narrator, insists that Mr. Ranford and Mrs. Brympton never acted inappropriately, and the reader tends to believe her, as she is the narrator, and a sympathetic character. But is she always truthful? Interestingly, she says at one point that she never lies – just exactly as she is telling a (justified) lie. I don’t think her testimony on this matter can be trusted.

I think all this makes a fairly sensible explanation, but perhaps it seems to fall just a bit flat. 

What else could be going on? One reader suggests that Mrs. Brympton’s final illness was the result of a botched abortion. And why an abortion? Could it be that the baby was Mr. Ranford’s, and that the timing means that Mr. Brympton will know this? Or could it simply be that she can’t bear to lose another child? Or that she can’t bear to have a child for Mr. Brympton (who would, surely, have raped her if he got her pregnant)?

What of Emma Saxon? Is there any suggestion that her relationship with Mrs. Brympton was more than simply that of lady and lady’s maid? I have to say I don’t really think that’s meant to be implied.

Does anyone have any other notions?

A Wonderful Lesser Known SF Novel: Ares Express, by Ian McDonald

A Wonderful Lesser Known SF Novel: Ares Express, by Ian McDonald

A review by Rich Horton

Once again, I’ve nothing new ready to write about, so I’m dipping once more into by backlist of reviews. As I am right now reading Ian McDonald’s latest novel, Luna: New Moon, I thought I would highlight one of his earlier novels, possibly my personal favorite among his books. This isn’t to be read as disparaging such novels as River of Gods and The Dervish House, which are also wonderful. But Ares Express is the novel of his that I think is most unjustly neglected. It was first published in the UK in 2001 but as far as I know it didn’t get a US edition until 2010.

Ares Express is a long, adventure-filled, extravagantly colourful, often funny, quite moving, highly imaginative, excellently written, story, set on a glorious Mars built partly of sharp-edged Kim Stanley Robinson-style extrapolation, but mostly of lush, loving, Ray Bradbury-style semi-SF, semi-Fantasy, Martian dreams. McDonald has visited this Mars before -- it's the setting of his first novel, Desolation Road, and indeed his first published story, "The Catharine Wheel", is set in a slightly different version of this setting, and even shares some characters with Ares Express. I thought this book perhaps the most delightful "read" of 2001.

The main character is an 8 year old (nearly 9) girl with the beautiful name Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. The 8 years of her age are Martian years, making her on the order of 16 Earth years old. She is the daughter of an Engineer of the huge train Catherine of Tharsis, and she wants nothing more than to inherit her father's place as Engineer. But in the strict society of the Martian trains, girls don't drive. It is time for her to marry, and soon a marriage is arranged with an eligible boy of the Stuard clan of another train -- with a stainless steel cookware set waiting for her at her new home. So, Sweetness impulsively decides to run off in the company of a despised boy of the trackbuilding Waymender clan. This will lead to her family's disgrace in train society, and as she soon learns, it may lead to her death as well.

Sweetness and Serpio Waymender strike across the desert, aiming for the haunt of a man named Devastation Harx, the leader of a mail-order religious group that has ensnared the persecuted, handicapped Serpio. Serpio can "see" Sweetness' secret companion, the spirit of her dead twin that she calls Little Pretty One. But when they find Devastation Harx on his huge airship, Sweetness learns that she has been betrayed -- Little Pretty One is something quite different than she had known, and Devastation Harx covets her twin for the power she can give him over the "angels" (AI's) which control the Martian climate, and, indeed, reality itself.

So Sweetness finds herself again on the run, trying to find Devastation Harx and reclaim her twin and save the world. At the same time her redoubtable Grandmother Taal has decided that family is more important than the rules of train society, and she has left the train to look for Sweetness. Add in a group of anarchic performance artists and comedians, a dream artist, a man who can cross the various alternate realities of Mars, and many more wonderful characters and landscapes, and you have the enchanting melange that makes up Ares Express.

McDonald plays archly with the idea that this is a "story", as Sweetness keeps telling herself, and occasionally uses this as license to provide neatly plotted but highly coincidental encounters and rescues for our heroes. And he has great fun with the idea of using some notion of quantum computing to maintain the "reality" of this glorious "manformed" Mars -- at the same time this is quite fun but somewhat subversive of the SF basis of the story -- so that it occupies a sometimes uneasy perch between all-out Fantasy and nominally plausible Science Fiction. But if, at times, this stretches the reader's willing suspension of disbelief to the point of severe strain, at other times it works to add delight, as with the beautiful trip, late in the book, through a series of alternate Marses, including of course those of Bradbury and Burroughs and others of the great SF chroniclers of the Red Planet. This may not be the most serious or the most significant of SF novels, but it is one of the the most fun. I loved it wholeheartedly.

A Lesser Known Lawrence Block Novel: No Score

A Lesser Known Lawrence Block Novel: No Score

A review by Rich Horton

This week I’m covering a novel by a well-known writer of crime fiction, Lawrence Block. Block is best known – and quite well known – for two long running series, one about alcoholic private investigator Matthew Scudder and the other about burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Books from both series have become movies. I’d been meaning to try one of his novels for a long time, but the final push came when I read a post at Black Gate by Bob Byrne (here) touting a couple of his mysteries about Chip Harrison. I figured I’d start at the beginning of the series.

So what is No Score? Well, on the face of it, it’s a grim realistic novel about the sad life of a young man orphaned by the murder-suicide of his parents. He is expelled from school, ends up homeless in Chicago with $21 in his pocket, spends months living on a couch in his boss’s apartment – and his boss is a low-rent pornographer. Leaving that situation, he spends time as part of a traveling sales team for a termite extermination firm, barely escapes arrest for fraud and statutory rape, switches to grueling migrant farm work, and finally lands in Upstate New York, working a seasonal job in a car wash, where a man shoots him in a case of mistaken identity. Oh, and the whole time he’s trying to lose his virginity, and failing. (The statutory rape, in his case, was not quite consummated.)

Pretty dark stuff, eh?

Well, as you’ve no doubt guessed, this isn’t a grim novel at all, though my description isn’t wrong – the life of the 17-year old protagonist, Chip Harrison, really is pretty desperate. But the book is very funny indeed. It was originally published as by “Chip Harrison”, and the conceit from the start is that Chip is writing the book, while nearly starving on a diet of sardines and stale bread, for what reason we don’t know. It opens with Chip in bed with a strikingly beautiful young woman, on the cusp of finally losing his cherry – when a man busts into the room, puts a gun to Chip’s head, and pulls the trigger.

Follows a flashback to a few months before, when Chip, attending a less than prestigious private school, learns that his parents are dead, just as the police were closing in on them. It seems they were con artists. There is no money, so his school cold-heartedly expels him, months from graduation. He hitchhikes to Chicago, where the only job he can find is passing out advertising slips for a street photographer. Who turns out to make most of his money shooting provocative pictures of his wife.

All along we’ve known that Chip, like many a 17-year old, is obsessed with losing his virginity. He becomes fascinated with the photographer’s beautiful wife, especially after he is recruited to serve as the male subject for some of the photo shoots … but while she is willing to do a great deal with him, she won’t go all the way. And so it continues, as Chip gravitates to the other dead-end jobs mentioned – he seems to have a great deal of success dating girls who won’t put out, and none at all with girls who are willing … until Francine – but his rendezvous with her is interrupted as we are told at the start.

Obviously the gun doesn’t kill Chip, and we do learn, as it were, the “epilogue” to his story, and why he’s writing it, and whether or not he finally scores. And in reality, while the novel is to a great extent concerned with two things – some fairly soft porn involving Chip’s various near-misses, and also a lot of comic scenes and observations – it’s also a nicely enough look at Chip growing up, just a bit, and trying to live a slightly more responsible life than his parents … of course, one thing he must learn is that such responsibility needs to apply to relationships with women as well.

Lawrence Block began publishing fiction in the ‘50s, at first soft porn as was at the time somewhat popular in the “pulp paperback” market. (He shared this market with the likes of his close friend Donald Westlake, and with Robert Silverberg, and many other writers with broader reputations in other fields.) Obviously this background influenced No Score. No Score appeared in 1970, and a sequel (Chip Harrison Scores Again) in 1971. By then the joke of Chip’s attempts at “scoring” had perhaps gone a bit stale, and the other two novels in the series, a couple of years later, are more conventional mysteries, with Chip playing Archie Goodwin to a Nero Wolfe-like character. The series ended after four novels, with one later short story. My edition is, I think, a self-published reprint.

It probably isn’t all that representative of Block’s body of work, but I enjoyed it a lot. The soft porn aspect is well enough done, but it’s not the real attraction – the attraction is the comic writing. It’s really a funny and clever short novel. I’ll definitely be finishing the series, and I’m sure I’ll graduate to some of his more prominent work soon enough.

Old Bestsellers: Enchanting and Enchanted, by Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer

Old Bestsellers: Enchanting and Enchanted, by Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer

a review by Rich Horton

OK, I don’t know that this was a bestseller – probably not. But the writer was very successful in Germany in the 19^th Century. It’s fair to say that his reputation has not survived at all, certainly not in the US, but it would seem not so much in Germany either.

Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer was born in what is now Aachen in 1816. He tried a career in the military, but it didn’t take, and he turned to writing, with little success at first, with plays and translations of Dickens. His successes, eventually, seem to have been memoirs (perhaps lightly fictionalized at times) and travel books. He also worked as a secretary for the Crown Prince of Wurttemberg, as a war correspondent, and as a civil servant.

I can’t find much about this book online. It’s a collection of fairy stories. Apparently Hackländer wrote two such books – I don’t know if this is one of them, or a compendium of stories from both. It was translated by Mrs. A. L. Wister, who seems to have worked steadily translating from the German. The copyright is 1870, presumably the date of the translation, by the publisher, J. B. Lippincott. My edition is also from Lippincott, but it must be from later – it advertises the 1887 edition of Worcester’s Unabridged Quarto Dictionary on the inside front cover.

There are five stories. I don’t recognize any of them as traditional fairy tales, though they definitely have that feel. So they might be of Hackländer’s invention, or they may be tales with which I’m not familiar.

The stories are:

“The Elfin Tree” (13,200 words)

“The Dwarfs’ Nest” (8200 words)

“The Princess Morgana” (16400 words)

“Castle Silence” (9600 words)

“The Fairy Tankard” (12400 words)

The first very vaguely recalls “The Nutcracker”. A young orphan boy has been taken into the house of a rich tradesman, and is ill-treated. One Christmas night he sneaks down to see the Christmas tree, and the gifts, including wooden dolls and soldiers. They fascinate him, and then they come to life. He particularly likes a beautiful tiny lady, who tells him that they are all under the spell of an evil sorcerer. With the help of a fierce Nutcracker, the boy finds the sorcerer figure and manages to free the dolls, who run away into the forest. The boy escapes too, but except for the lady, the wooden figures seem to resent him. He ends up adopted by a woodsmen, and grows up to be a fine young man, and more or less randomly encounters an old man who tells him how to find the Elfin Tree, which will allow him to free the beautiful wooden lady again from her enchantment … the ending is clear from that point.

“The Dwarfs’ Nest” is a more of a morality tale. A weaver finds an abandoned house, which legend has it was menaced by Dwarfs. He cleans it up nicely, and his industriousness pleases the Dwarfs, so instead of chasing him out as they did to the previous dweller, they begin to help him, on the condition that he never disturb them while they are weaving for him, once a month. This works well for a while, but then the young weaver falls into evil ways, partly because of the extra money he earns from the Dwarfs’ weaving; and eventually he betrays them. Things go badly until he learns to mend his ways.

“The Princess Morgana” is the only story not set in Central Europe. Instead, in the Bagdad of Haroun al Raschid we meet an old retainer and his charge, a tortured young man. The Caliph learns their story – the older man had been the servant of a wise scholar. They had rescued a baby from a sandstorm and raised him to adulthood. But after the scholar died, the young man foolishly opened one of the scholar’s possessions – a picture of the Princess Morgana, who lives in the “Fata Morgana” (a mirage) in the desert, and who is so beautiful that anyone who even looks at her picture will be so consumed with love (or lust) that he will die of the obsession. The Caliph helps them, and soon they are travelling across the desert, the young man still planning to search for the Fata Morgana. Eventually he sets out alone to follow it, but as it’s a mirage he never gets there, until, dying of thirst, he is rescued by the ghost of his mother – you see, ghosts of people who died in the desert visit the Fata Morgana. Once there, of course, he encounters the real Princess … and again you can see where this will lead.

“Castle Silence” is the story of an isolated valley that everyone shuns, because those who do go in never come out. We learn its secret – it was the home of a couple whose wife betrayed her husband, only to regret it. What can remove the enchantment – the help of a pure young woman who is also in love.

Finally, “The Fairy Tankard” concerns the last survivor of a brigandish noble family, a young boy who escapes his father’s castle’s destruction by the agency of the magical title object. He and his companion, another boy, wander to another isolated valley, where they encounter a castle in a lake, and two snakes who turn into girls their age every so often, and a tableau of frozen people.

These stories are all familiar in form, but not to my taste as interesting as the best of, say, Andrew Lang’s retellings (which are what I grew up on). There is a tendency to rushed and convenient endings, and a bit too pat moralizing. The writing is quite stilted, very 19^th century in not the best way. I’m not sure if that’s from Hackländer’s original prose, or if it’s a result of Wister’s translation. All in all, a fairly negligible book.

More on the Best Editor, Short Form, Hugo

I recently made a post on potential Hugo nominees in which I briefly discussed potential Best Editor nominations. I mentioned John Joseph Adams, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan, Trevor Quachri, C. C. Finlay, Sheila Williams, Andy Cox, Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, Scott H. Andrews and Brian Thomas Schmidt. And in all honesty, I think any of those people would be wholly worthy nominees. They have all done first-rate recent work.

But that said, let's be honest, I was being a bit timid. Who would I really vote for? I wanted to be a bit more forthright, and plump for a few folks I am really rooting for. Full disclosure, here -- this is a tightly linked field, and I know almost all of these people personally, and I work for several of them. I've had dinner on multiple occasions with Ellen Datlow and Bryan Thomas Schmidt. I've met most of the rest, excepting only, I think, Trevor Quachri and Andy Cox and, oddly enough, Jonathan Strahan. (But I've talked with Jonathan on the phone (or Skype) and had countless email exchanges with him, so I still consider us friends, even if we haven't met face to face -- and I trust we'll rectify that soon enough.)

So, to continue. As I said, each of these people would be good choices. But I'm rooting for two people in particular, this year, and promoting a third. The "rooting" is partly because they haven't yet won a Hugo in this category, and others on this list (not all of them, to be sure) have -- which isn't fair, no doubt, but there you are. But it's mostly because I really think they have done tremendous work -- and that's why the third person (already a multiple Hugo winner in the Editor category) is on this list.

And, of course, as already hinted, I need to disclose that I work for two of them. Jonathan Strahan is my editor at Locus. And John Joseph Adams is my editor at Lightspeed. Well, so be it. I think one way or another I am equally biased in favor of numerous other people I listed -- as I said, this is a tightly linked field -- most of us know each other, for good or ill (mostly good, if you ask me).

So, what are their credentials?

Jonathan Strahan's primary 2015 credential is as editor of likely the single best original anthology of the year, Meeting Infinity. This includes 8 stories on the Locus Recommended Reading List, two of them included in my upcoming Best of the Year anthology: "My Last Bringback" by John Barnes, and "Drones" by Simon Ings; and also "In Blue Lily's Wake", by Aliette de Bodard; "Rates of Change", by James S. A. Corey; "Emergence", by Gwyneth Jones; "The Falls", by Ian McDonald; and "Pictures From the Resurrection", by Bruce Sterling. Meeting Infinity is one of a series of pure SF original anthologies he's been doing that have been consistently excellent. Perhaps for 2015 they don't officially come into play, but consistency is important too. And of course Jonathan has edited numerous other brilliant anthologies, including the New Space Opera books (with Gardner Dozois), and the "Fearsome" set of Fantasy-oriented books, and well as the Eclipse original anthology series. Jonathan has also been editing Best of the Year anthologies since 2004, and this curatorial role is perhaps not as flashy as that of bringing us new fiction, but (not surprisingly!) I still think it's pretty important. His curatorial role also extends to bringing some outstanding single author collections to us, including Best Of''s for Bruce Sterling, Joe Haldeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, and (in 2015) Alastair Reynolds; and also a series of collections of Jack Vance's early stories (with Terry Dowling), including 2015's Grand Crusades.

In the case of John Joseph Adams, his first credential is obviously as editor of Lightspeed. I think the stories we publish are outstanding, and this year I am using four stories in my book: "The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red, Red Coal", by Chaz Brenchley; "Time Bomb Time", by C. C. Finlay; "The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club", by Nike Sulway; and "You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead", by Brooke Bolander. But John is also a prolific produce of excellent original anthologies, three of which appeared in 2015: Operation Arcana (from which I'm using "The Graphology of Hemorrhage" by Yoon Ha Lee), The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey), and Press Start to Play (with Daniel Wilson). John also does reprint anthologies, represented in 2015 by Wastelands 2 (apocalypse stories) and by Loosed Upon the World (climate change stories). And finally, he too does a Best of the Year anthology, in his case the SF entry in the "Best American" series -- the first entry appeared in 2015, guest edited by Joe Hill.

Finally, it is incumbent on me to mention Sheila Williams, simply because I believe that her magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, was the single best SF magazine of 2015. No fewer than 14 stories from Asimov's appear on the Locus list this year, and I am using three in my book: "Mutability", by Ray Nayler; "Twelve and Tag", by Gregory Norman Bossert; and "Acres of Perhaps", by Will Ludwigsen. I am abashed to confess that as I drafted this post I thought of her last -- only because she was won this award multiple times before. But that's unfair, wrong thinking -- the award should go to the Best Editor each year -- there should not be a sense of "taking turns".

So -- the three people above will be on my nomination ballot this year, along with two more from the long list of very worthy editors I mentioned in the first paragraph. And whoever wins will be very deserving.

A Not Quite Forgotten SF Novel: The Ginger Star, by Leigh Brackett

A Not Quite Forgotten SF Novel: The Ginger Star, by Leigh Brackett

A review by Rich Horton

Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) was one of the greatest pulp-era SF writers. She began in Astounding in the February 1940 issue with “Martian Quest”. Throughout the ‘40s and to the middle of the ’50s she published a great deal of SF, much of it in the planetary romance subgenre. Right about 1955 – exactly as the pulp era came to an end with the disappearance of Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Planet Stories – she slowed down. Only about a half-dozen further SF stories appeared, and no new novels – until 1974, and the book at hand.

To be sure, SF wasn’t all she did. She wrote crime novels – some quite highly regarded, though I haven’t read any. Most appeared in the ’40s, but her last, Silent Partner, came out in 1969. And she wrote screenplays, some in the ‘40s (most notably, The Big Sleep, with William Faulkner (and Jules Furthman)), but quite a few more beginning in 1959 with Rio Bravo, and continuing to such well-known movies as Rio Lobo and The Long Goodbye. Her final credit, perhaps the most famous of all, was The Empire Strikes Back (though by most accounts much of her screenplay was gone by the time the film was released). It seems likely that the screenwriting was what drew her away from SF.

Her husband was Edmond Hamilton, one of the most celebrated writers of pure Space Opera. They almost never collaborated, except on a posthumous story, “Stark and the Star Kings”, which mixes Brackett’s most famous character with some of Hamilton’s most famous; and, most think, on the 1963 Ace Double The Secret of Sinharat/People of the Talisman, which is revised and expanded versions of two of Brackett’s Stark stories for Planet Stories – the generally accepted view is that Hamilton did the revisions. Brackett died of cancer in 1978, shortly after turning in the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back to George Lucas.

So … in 1974 she had been relatively inactive in the SF field for some two decades. The Ginger Star represented a return to the field. It was serialized in two parts in If in 1974, and published in book form by Ballantine/Del Rey. Two sequels, The Hounds of Skaith and The Reavers of Skaith, followed in 1974 and 1976. (Around this time she also edited two books for Ballantine/Del Rey that emphasized her Space Opera/Planetary Romance roots: The Best of Planet Stories Volume 1 (alas, there was never a second volume) and The Best of Edmond Hamilton.)

I adore the great Brackett stories of the late ’40s and early ‘50s, particularly The Sword of Rhiannon, one of the great pure planetary romances; and other stories in the same loosely developed future (though The Sword of Rhiannon is really set in the past): “The Halfling”, “The Dancing Girl of Ganymede”, “Mars Minus Bisha”, “Shannach – the Last”, for example. Other SF was also very fine, most notably The Long Tomorrow, a post-Apocalyptic novel; but also The Big Jump and The Starmen of Llyrdis. Her slightly later story from Venture, “The Queer Ones” (aka “The Other People”) is excellent, and not terribly well known. The Eric John Stark stories fit into her Mars/Venus/etc. future – and they are quite enjoyable as well. Stark is portrayed as a nearly savage man, raised as an orphan on Mercury, and rampaging through Venus and Mars in the most prominent pieces.

The Skaith novels feature Stark as the protagonist, but they are set on a planet in another Solar System, Skaith. I had assumed that she set them there because the Mars and Venus of the earlier stories was no longer astronomically plausible, and perhaps that is the case, but it should be noted that in these books she does still portray Stark as a native of Mercury – also a highly implausible thing. Anyway, I had ignored the Skaith novels until now partly because of a feeling that they would be pale latter-day imitations of the earlier stories, weakened by the forced relocation. And to an extent I think that’s true enough, though The Ginger Star is still fairly fun.

Eric John Stark comes to Skaith as a somewhat unofficial representative of the Galactic Union. His mission is mostly personal: his mentor, sort of adopted father, Simon Ashton, has disappeared from the chief city of Skaith, and foul play is suspected. Skaith, an ancient planet turning colder as its Sun dies, is ruled by a shadowy group called the Lords Protector, via the Wandsmen, who control most of the city states, largely by a sort of bread and circuses policy whereby the shiftless “Farers”, or it might be, “welfare cheats”, leech off the productive citizens. Stark more or less randomly begins to look for Ashton, and finds hints that he may be in the harsh North, perhaps at the mysterious Citadel of the Lords Protector. He makes an enemy of the local Wandsman, and then heads to Irnan, another city where a faction is trying to get passage via the Galactics to another planet, to escape the rule of the Lords Protector. There he assists in the beginning of a rebellion, and finds himself declared the subject of a prophecy, that a “Dark Man” would come to bring people to freedom. That the prophecy is delivered by Gerrith, a beautiful and tough Wise Woman, who insists on accompanying him in his journey to the North, is only a bonus.

Stark continues north, meeting with treachery at almost every turn, and with further prophecies. But it is clearer and clearer that he is coming closer to Ashton, and to the Lords Protector, whom he (somewhat reluctantly) sees as his responsibility to unseat. And, too, the only way out seems to be through. His increasing feelings for Gerrith are a factor as well. So we get to a final confrontation with the mysterious Lords, and to a meeting with Ashton … and then … well, it’s the first book of a trilogy, and so it stops. It’s pretty clear that the story set up at the beginning will take all three books to resolve.

There’s a lot to like here. The various different peoples, all varieties of human, some more mutated than others, are pretty cool. Stark is Stark, though a bit different – more thoughtful, I suppose – than in the earlier stories. There’s the usual tough guy attitude, and when needed, action and violence, though often enough Stark is the victim and not the perpetrator. It was – I guess – OK, but as I had feared, just a bit thin, and bit less emotionally intense, than the Martian stories. And Skaith comes off as a cliché – a somewhat pale imitation of a ‘40s pulp milieu. Still, not bad – but not the true quill Brackett … for that, go to The Sword of Rhiannon!

(A note on my edition, shown above -- this is the second edition, from 1979, with a Boris Vallejo cover. The original cover from 1974 is by Jim Steranko, and to my mind it is much better, with a depiction of Stark much closer to my image of him.)

Hugo nomination possibilities, short fiction

Okay, then, let’s just get right to it. Hugo nomination recommendations in short fiction. (I haven’t read enough 2015 novels to speak sensibly on that category.) This is, indeed, mostly the contents of my Best of the Year collection, with a few added that I couldn’t use for one reason or another (length, contractual issues, etc.). And let's add the obvious -- I miss things! Even things I read. There have definitely been cases where a story I didn't pick seemed to me on further reflection to be clearly award-worthy.

Novella:

The Two Paupers, by C. S. E. Cooney (Fairchild Press)

“Gypsy”, by Carter Scholz (Gypsy plus …, F&SF)

“The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred”, by Greg Egan (Asimov’s)

“The Bone Swans of Amandale”, by C. S. E. Cooney (Bone Swans)

“The Boatman's Cure”, by Sonya Taaffe (Ghost Signs)

Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand (Open Road/PS Publishing)

Penric's Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Penric's Demon)

Teaching the Dog to Read, by Jonathan Carroll (Subterranean)

Sunset Mantle, by Alter S. Reiss (Tor)

In all these cases the order is semi-meaningless -- possibly the top couple are likely to make my nomination list, beyond that, I'm pretty torn! This list, I will say, seems highly tilted to Fantasy – only the Egan and Scholz stories are SF, but they are both brilliant SF, the hardest stuff, and highly politically charged. Indeed, politics are also central to Cooney’s “The Bone Swans of Amandale” and Reiss’s Sunset Mantle. Perhaps it’s in the air? Besides politics, wonderful prose is a key feature of several – both Cooney stories, and also Taaffe’s and Hand’s. (Which is not to say the others aren’t well written, but the prose isn’t as front and center in them.)

Novelette:

“Twelve and Tag” by Gregory Norman Bossert (Asimov’s)

“Acres of Perhaps” by Will Ludwigsen (Asimov’s)

“The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld)

“Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathagan” by Ian McDonald (Old Venus)

“Endless Forms Most Beautiful” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Analog)

“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” by Elizabeth Bear (Old Venus)

“This Evening’s Performance” by Genevieve Valentine (The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk)

“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed)

“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang (Uncanny)

“My Last Bringback” by John Barnes (Meeting Infinity)

“The Deepwater Bride” by Tamysn Muir (F&SF)

So this list has, by my definition, only three Fantasy stories as against eight SF stories. And not so much directly political work as the novellas, either, nor as much prose-besotted work. (Though Valente’s certainly qualifies, in a very, er, colorful way!) The impacts are different – as they should be – Bossert is twisty hard SF, Ludwigsen is moving contemporary fantasy, McDonald and Valentine are steam- (or diesel-) punkish, though not traditionally so. Muir evokes Lovecraft – not something you see too often in my lists of favorites! Bolander is non-stop, and pretty violent, noirish action adventure, but with pretty cool SF ideas as well.

Short Story:

“Mutability” by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s)

“Capitalism in the 22nd Century” by Geoff Ryman (Stories for Chip)

“The Game of Smash and Recovery” by Kelly Link (Strange Horizons)

“The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red, Red Coal” by Chaz Brenchley (Lightspeed)

“Hello Hello” by Seanan McGuire (Future Visions)

“Consolation” by John Kessel (Twelve Tomorrows)

“The Daughters of John Demetrius” by Joe Pitkin (Analog)

“Unearthly Landscape by a Lady” by Rebecca Campbell (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

“The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club” by Nike Sulway (Lightspeed)

“Little Sisters” by Vonda M. McIntyre (Book View Cafe)

“Asymptotic” by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld)

“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld)

“Today I Am Paul” by Martin Shoemaker (Clarkesworld)

“Drones” by Simon Ings (Meeting Infinity)

“The Graphology of Hemorrhage” by Yoon Ha Lee (Operation Arcana)

“Please Undo This Hurt” by Seth Dickinson (Tor.com)

“The King in the Cathedral” by Rich Larson (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

“Time Bomb Time” by C.C. Finlay (Lightspeed)

The one story this year that came out of nowhere to stun me was “Mutability”, for what that’s worth. Again, not as much Fantasy. Beyond that, all I can say is – these are a bunch of outstanding stories. Read them!

Some Hugo Nomination Suggestions

For the past few years I have avoided the sorts of posts I used to routinely make, listing my favorite stories of the year and making suggestions for Hugo nominations. There are several reasons – one is simply that I thought my Best of the Year Table of Contents served such a purpose by default, more or less, another is time. And a third, of course, is a feeling of skittishness about the controversy that has arisen, from several directions, on the appropriateness of nomination lists, or, Lord preserve us, “slates”.

But hang it all, almost all I’ve been about for my time writing about SF is promoting the reading of good stories. Why should I stop? Why should anyone? I don’t want people to nominate based on my recommendations – I want people to read the stories I recommend – and lots of other stories – and nominate the stories they like best. I don’t want to promote an agenda. I don’t want to nudge the field towards any set of themes or styles. (Except by accident – I don’t deny that I have conscious and unconscious preferences.) In fact, I’d rather be surprised – by new ideas, by new writers, by controversial positions, by new forms, by revitalization of old forms.

I’ll begin on a somewhat personal note, and I apologize in advance for a tiny bit of self-promotion that might result. I have, as part of the editorial team at Lightspeed Magazine, won Hugos each of the past two years, for Best Semiprozine. We’re very proud of that – I’m quite confident I can speak for my co-conspirators, John Joseph Adams (our leader), Wendy Wagner, Stefan Rudnicki, and Christie Yant, in that sense. But we’re not going to win one this year: we have graduated from the ranks of Semiprozines. I might add that in a crowded field for Best Professional Editor (Short Form), I’ll be rooting for John – I truly think his work at Lightspeed and as editor of numerous anthologies, is fully worthy of a Hugo. (It would be remiss of me not to mention the many other worthy possibilities: Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan, Trevor Quachri at Analog, C. C. Finlay at F&SF, Sheila Williams at Asimov’s, Andy Cox at Interzone and Black Static, Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld, Sean Wallace at Clarkesworld and The Dark, Scott H. Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, anthologist Brian Thomas Schmidt, ). In long form I would mention book editors like Toni Weisskopf of Baen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor, though there are many further worthy possibilities. And in a too little too late sense, the great David Hartwell, who died in January, has been worthy of a Hugo both as an acquiring book editor and as an anthologist for many years.

(For myself, I can gingerly note that I am eligible as a fanwriter, for my work at Black Gate and at this blog (Strange at Ecbatan), not to mention my Locus reviews (for which last I should add I am paid). (I’m technically eligible as an editor, but I would not mention myself, particularly as an editor of reprint anthologies only, in the company above.))

Indeed, mention of Black Gate lets me segue to a brief discussion of the Best Fanzine category. Black Gate was controversially nominated last year, largely because they were placed on the Rabid Puppies slate. Black Gate withdrew from consideration for that award in protest, as did one of their best contributors, Matthew David Surridge, who was nominated for Best Fanwriter. But the whole process highlighted something I had not even thought of – Black Gate, in its current incarnation, really is a fanzine. And in my admittedly very biased opinion, a fanzine worthy of consideration for a Hugo. Of course it’s not the only worthy site, or print ‘zine. File 770, edited by Mike Glyer, comes immediately to mind. Unfortunately Steven Silver’s excellent Argentus (to which I contribute regularly) didn’t publish a 2015 issue, so it’s not eligible this year.

From fanzine to semiprozine makes sense, eh? Previous Hugo nominees Apex and Lightspeed are no longer eligible as of this year. Who’s worthy? In all honesty, any controversy over some nominations aside, I thought all the ‘zines that made last year’s Hugo Ballot worthy, including the withdrawn Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. The others were Abyss and Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Right below the nomination borderline were The Book Smugglers, Interzone, and Pornokitsch. All are fine ‘zines. Neil Clarke maintains a fairly comprehensive list of eligible ‘zines here: http://semiprozine.org/semiprozine-directory/. Of that list, I’d particularly like to direct people’s attention to Giganotosaurus, which has been publishing intriguing longer form fiction for a few years now; Kaleidotrope, which has been consistently featuring fine stories, first in print, now online, for a while as well; and a new entry, Uncanny Stories, which has really had an impressive first year.

I have little enough to say about Dramatic Presentation. I think we all suspect that Star Wars: The Force Awakens, will win easily. I enjoyed the movie, but with severe misgivings. My choice for best SF movie of the year is The Martian, and I haven’t yet seen Deus Ex Machina or Mad Max: Fury Road (both are on the Netflix queue) – by all accounts, both are excellent.

As for the other categories (besides the fiction), I either have only a couple of longtime favorites (as with Best Artist), or I am simply ignorant (as with Best Graphic Story and Best TV Episode – er, sorry, Dramatic Presentation, Short Form).

And perhaps that’s enough for now – I’ll get into the fiction next time.

A Forgotten SF Anthology: Great Science Fiction Adventures, edited by Larry T. Shaw

A Forgotten SF Anthology: Great Science Fiction Adventures, edited by Larry T. Shaw

A review by Rich Horton

It was once common for SF magazines to occasionally put out anthologies of the best stories from their pages. There was a very long series called The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, and shorter series from Galaxy and Analog. The more obscure magazines were perhaps less likely to explicitly publish a book with their name in the title, as their brand wouldn’t necessarily sell books, but there were many examples of anthologies drawing exclusively from such magazines. This book is arguably an example, though its title does in fact reflect its source magazine.

Science Fiction Adventures was a fairly short-lived digest. It was edited by Larry T. Shaw, the first issue dated December 1956, the last June 1958. There were 12 issues in all. (At the same time Shaw was editing the fine magazine Infinity.) It was preceded by an unrelated magazine that ran between 1952 and 1954, edited by Lester Del Rey. There was also a UK incarnation, that for five issues reprinted stories from the Shaw incarnation of Science Fiction Adventures, but continued for a total of 32 issues between 1958 and 1963. This magazine was edited by John Carnell, and was a companion to New Worlds and Science Fantasy. The Shaw magazine was, naturally, specifically devoted to adventure-oriented SF, and also to longer stories, typically featuring two long novelettes or novellas (billed as “novels”) each issue. Carnell’s incarnation had a similar focus and length mix.

The anthology at hand was published by Lancer Books in 1963, with an Ed Emshwiller cover, and if it’s not necessarily a “Best of”, it is a quite representative selection. The four stories are all long, and all certainly adventure stories. All the authors are quite prominent, though three of them are represented by early work, published before they had made their names.

The TOC is:

“The Starcombers”, by Edmond Hamilton (December 1956, 17500 words)

“Hunt the Space-Witch”, by Robert Silverberg (January 1958, 18000 words)

“The Man from the Big Dark”, by John Brunner (June 1958, 19500 words)

“The World Otalmi Made”, by Harry Harrison (June 1958, 13000 words)

Edmond Hamilton was the veteran of this group, a favorite of SF readers since the 1920s. “The Starcombers” is a rather dark story in which a somewhat unsavory star travelling band, mostly a mix of a couple of families, that makes its living scavenging, finds a nearly dead planet with signs of massive ancient structures. There is a curious deep rift on the planet, and in it they find the remains of a once impressive human civilization. The few devolved survivors offer to trade their high-tech relics for food, but their real goal is betrayal. The main character is a cynical drunk, already disgusted with the way the slatternly wife of the captain is throwing herself at him. But he is forced to attempt to save the captain and others when they are taken by the nasty locals … leading to a desperate rescue attempt, and more betrayal … as I said, quite dark and cynical. Just an OK piece.

“Hunt the Space-Witch” was originally published as by “Ivar Jorgenson” – Silverberg was the most prolific contributor to Science Fiction Adventures, under his own name, as well as “Ivar Jorgenson”, “Calvin M. Knox”, "Ralph Burke", and “Alexander Blade”. Most of his contributions were novellas or even novels, and some ended up as Ace Doubles. He also did some book reviews. This story is a bit better than the Hamilton, if in the end about as dark and cynical. Barsac is a big dumb starship crewman, who comes to the planet Glaurus determined to rescue his blood brother, who missed the ship on their previous stop there. But he soon learns that his friend has joined the Cult of the Witch. Barsac blunders around trying to find him, but runs afoul of the local authorities (some of whom are also cultists), and eventually ends up captured by a circus owner, and works for him for some months. This interlude has some noticeably Vancean moments. Eventually Barsac is able to return to his quest, and eventually find his blood brother, and confront the Witch. There are some colorful passages here, though the plot is never really surprising.

The best of these stories is Brunner’s “The Man From the Big Dark”. It’s still pretty conventional, but it grabbed me. It’s one of three pieces set in the same loose galactic future, eventually collected in the book Interstellar Empire. (The other two are “The Wanton of Argus”, one of Brunner’s first stories, originally published in Two Science Fiction Adventure Books for Summer 1953 as by Killian Houstan Brunner, and later as an Ace Double under the title The Space-Time Juggler; and The Altar of Asconel, a 1965 If serial also published as an Ace Double.) This story opens with a pirate’s starship coming to the planet Klareth, just this side of the “Big Dark”. The pirate disappears before the authorities find a murdered girl on his ship. We then follow the pirate, Terak, who, we learn, is out for revenge against the man really responsible for the girl’s murder, his former boss, Aldur. He is trying to find Janlo, who has been leading the local effort to suppress a rebellion. Terak ships on a ship captained by a beautiful woman, and soon finds himself entranced by her and her world … but still wanting revenge on Aldur, who has plans to take over this world. Nowhere does this story surprise, and in the end it doesn’t make too much sense, but it’s effectively told and I like it.

Finally, the weakest story is “The World Otalmi Made”. It’s about a member of the “Profession”, who has been hired to stop a man named Otalmi from his control of his planet. Otalmi seems to be using some sort of mind control. Our hero, Brek, in the company of a beautiful doctor, accomplishes this, of course, in pure thriller fashion. The SF elements here are not really important, and the story never makes much sense.

All in all, a not inappropriate representation of Science Fiction Adventures. I might have included Thomas N. Scortia’s “Alien Night” or C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Slave” instead of the Harrison, or indeed Algis Budrys' “Yesterday’s Man” or one of a couple of Harlan Ellison novellas. But the book is what the magazine was: adventure-oriented long SF stories, not terribly great but often decent fun.