An Old Ace Double: The Paradox Men, by Charles Harness/Dome Around America, by Jack Williamson

Ace Double Reviews, 18: The Paradox Men, by Charles L. Harness/Dome Around America, by Jack Williamson (#D-118, 1955, $0.35)

by Rich Horton

This old Ace Double is a fortuitous combination -- back in 1955 Ace managed to pair two writers who, in 2003 (when I first wrote this review), were nearly the oldest living active SF writers. (Andre Norton still qualified as active, though only one of her late novels was not a collaboration. Her age was between Williamson's and Harness's. Nelson Bond was not then active, but he did have a story in Asimov's not too many years before 2003. Among truly active writers, Williamson and Harness seemed then clearly the oldest.)

The Paradox Men has become a classic in the field. Dome Around America hasn't. In both cases, for good reason. The Paradox Men was first published as "Flight Into Yesterday", in the May 1949 Startling Stories. That version was about 56,000 words long. The first book version was a 1953 hardcover, also called Flight Into Yesterday, from Bouregy and Curl. It was slightly expanded -- I haven't seen that book, but I presume the 1955 Ace Double, with the title changed to The Paradox Men, is substantially the same, and it's about 60,000 words. The Paradox Men was later reprinted, again slightly expanded to about 64,000 words, in 1981 in a Crown hardcover, as part of their Classics in Science Fiction series. As far as I know the 1999 reprint from NESFA Press, as part of the four novel omnibus called Rings, follows the 1981 text. Dome Around America was also originally published in Startling Stories, in the July 1941 issue, under the title "Gateway to Paradise". The 1955 edition is certainly a revision, though I haven't seen the earlier story. Dome Around America is about 42,000 words long.

(Cover by Richard Powers)

The Paradox Men is arguably still Harness's most famous and most respected novel. The plot is complicated, but consistent, logical, and thematically sound. The characters are two-dimensional but interesting and involving. The action is well-done, and the scientific ideas are sometimes philosophical and thoughtful, and at other times wild, implausible, but still engaging. The basic story is of a Thief, Alar, who has appeared in Imperial America 5 years prior to the action of the story, with no memory of his past or identity. The Thieves work underground against the repressive society, using tech invented by their mysterious, dead, founder, Kennicot Muir. The key piece of Thief tech is armor which protects them against high velocity weapons (like projectile weapons), but not against swords and knives. Thus fencing is again a major skill. (Herbert swiped this notion for Dune, of course.) At the time of the action, various threads are converging: the plans of Imperial America to attack its Eurasian enemy, the Toynbee society's attempts to avoid the continuing historical cycle of civilizations rising and falling (they believe that the coming war will bring Toynbee Civilization 21 to an end: the next one will be Toynbee 22, hence Harness' original title (never used on a published version): Toynbee Twenty-Two), the completion of an experimental FTL starship, the relationship between the evil leaders of Imperial America and Keiris Muir, the enslaved widow of Kennicot Muir, and her attraction to Alar, the predictions of the computer-enhanced human called The Meganet Mind (or the Microfilm Mind in the original). What a horrible sentence: but trying to summarize Harness can do that to you. Everything comes to a head with a trip to the surface of the Sun, and then a much stranger trip ...

I recommend it. It seems comparable in many ways to its near contemporary The Stars My Destination: Harness probably had a more original mind than Bester's, and his themes seem a bit more ambitious. But he really couldn't write with him -- and I think it is because of the writing (both prose and pace) that the manic energy of the Bester book is more successfully sustained. Still, The Paradox Men remains a powerful and interesting novel, and such scenes as the final selfless act of Keiris are all but unmatched in SF.

As far as I can tell from comparing the three versions of the novel I have, the first expansion involved some minor wording changes throughout, and the addition of a couple of fairly minor scenes. There is one new chapter, which is a division of one of the original chapters into two (with some additions). It might well be that the editor of Startling Stories (Sam Merwin) made the original cuts to fit the space available. The 1981 expansion involves some changes in the tech, to make it slightly (only slightly!) more plausible for 1980s sensibilities. The most obvious change is that the Microfilm Mind becomes the Meganet Mind. On balance, I think the latter-day changes sensible and not harmful to the feel of the story, and I'd recommend the NESFA edition -- but reading any of the three main editions will give you pretty much the same experience.

(Cover by Ed Valigursky)

Dome Around America is set a couple hundred years in the future. The United States is enclosed in a force field which has preserved its air and water from the disaster caused by a "dwarf star" wandering through the solar system. The US offered this technology to the rest of the world, but Cold War tensions caused the other countries to refuse it, and to disbelieve US reports of the dwarf star danger. (There was also that accident in Australia, but that was probably commie sabotage anyway!) I'm guessing that one of the changes from 1941 to 1955 was substituting Soviet villains for Nazi villains. The dwarf star sucked away the atmosphere from the rest of the Earth, and it is assumed that it is all a moon-like desolation, just as it looks.

Barry Thane is a young man, part of the "Ring Guard", the dwindling crew of men who guard the dome from sabotage. But he has come to believe that something weird -- aliens, maybe? -- live Outside. So he is mentally prepared when he notices a moving rock penetrating the dome, and what he discovers is a camouflaged spaceship/ground vehicle, sent by an organization of surviving humans who are consumed with hate for America, and who live in domes with limited water and air on the former ocean bed. Barry foils the plot of the man in the invading ship, Glenn Clayton, and he hatches a plan to impersonate Clayton and infiltrate the Outside. But Clayton has plans of his own ... And both men are vulnerable to the charms of a woman of their enemies ...

It's really silly stuff, with not much in the way of redeeming values. The science is nonsensical. The resolution is just plain wholly unbelievable. The story itself moves nicely enough -- Williamson was too much the pro to fail to tell a solid story scene by scene. But all in all it is a fairly prime example of why routine 1940s SF is so often unmemorable.

Hugo Ballot Reviews: Short Story

My ballot for the 2017 Hugo for Best Novelette

The shortlist is as follows:

"The City Born Great", by N. K. Jemisin (Tor.com, September 2016)

"A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers", by Alyssa Wong (Tor.com, March 2016)

"Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies", by Brooke Bolander (Uncanny Magazine, November 2016)

"Seasons of Glass and Iron", by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press; reprinted in Uncanny Magazine)

"That Game We Played During the War", by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, March 2016)

"An Unimaginable Light", by John C. Wright (God, Robot, Castalia House)

Again, two SF stories, one of them the Rabid pick. Yes, the Fantasy-heavy lineup is making me a bit grumpy. and as we'll see, I think the Fantasy nature of a couple of the stories is a weakness in them. Again -- Fantasy is absolutely eligible for the Hugo, and if that's what you like, I can't argue. And I do like a good Fantasy story. But it's also important to recognize good SF, and SF does some important things, different from Fantasy, that I don't think we do well to be ignoring.

All the writers save Wright are women. Four of the stories were first published online in free venues, and one more was reprinted last year in a free venue.

My ballot will look like this:

1) "That Game We Played During the War", by Carrie Vaughn

Easy pick for me. It was the only story on my nomination list to make the final ballot. (As I've noted before, that's not unusual.) And it's SF. More importantly, it's really good. From my Locus review: ""That Game We Played During the War" is a moving piece about Calla, a woman who was a nurse for Enith during their war with the telepathic Gaant people. The war is over, and Calla is visiting Gaant, trying to meet and continue a game of chess she had been playing with Major Valk, whom she had encountered both in Enith and later after she was captured, in Gaant. This version of chess is unusual -- because of the Gaantish telepathy -- and it’s not so much the point -- the point, of course, is how enemies can come to a peaceful meeting (and, too, how telepathy complicates that!)" So -- a core SF idea used very well in service of a worthwhile moral point. With good writing and good characters. Works for me.

2) "Seasons of Glass and Iron", by Amal El-Mohtar

Here's the first inflection point, for me, in this category. I think the gulf between Carrie Vaughn's story and the rest of the ballot is pretty wide. The next two or three are pretty decent stories, but not stories I'd consider quite Hugo-worthy (which doesn't mean I'll leave them off my ballot). Next on my list, then, is "Seasons of Glass and Iron", which has grown on me a bit after rereading. It's about two women, fairy-tale heroines from traditional stories. One is Tabitha, forced to wander the world until she wears out seven sets of iron boots becaue she let slip the secret that her husband was both beast and man; Amira is the princess on the glass hill, forced to wait until a suitor can make it all the way up the hill. The ending is a bit too obvious -- we can see it as far in the distance as Tabitha sees the hill. Still, it's a nice enough story, just not, to me, a great story.

3) "Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies", by Brooke Bolander

This grew on me a bit upon rereading as well. Still, it's a short-short (perhaps 1100 words), that does one thing -- tell a story of rape and murder, or, more appropriately, vengeance and finding power without ceding power to the villain -- and it does it with panache and energy. But there's little enough of true fantastical interest here. That's one thing I do want in my Hugo winners -- a core element of SFnal or Fantastical interest. Anyway, this is, again, a fine story, and it does what it wants to do quite well in its short space, but there were better stories this year.

4) "A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers", by Alyssa Wong

I reread this one too, and I'm wobbling on it a bit. It's the story of two sisters, one of whom leaves their family, and the other who stays -- and dies, in her sister's thoughts (and perhaps actually) ending the world. But there are multiple worlds, especially as the two sisters keep trying to rewind time. Lots of flash to the story -- it's well written, and agonized, and ... Well, I didn't care that much. Which to be sure could be my fault. Also, the magic seemed simply arbitrary -- which is a big reason I didn't care. Again, I want more true SFnal or fantastical zing. This is well-done, sure, but, for me, kind of meh. 

5) No Award

Sometimes you have to make a stand. I didn't think either of the two remaining stories -- wholly aside from any Rabid Puppy influence -- good enough to rank ahead of No Award.

6) "The City Born Great", by N. K. Jemisin

About a young man who becomes aware that something is coming to life in the fabric, as it were, of New York City. And he becomes, I guess, the steward of New York's new life, after meeting and befriending (?) an older (much much older) man who seems to know what's going on. Some decent prose here, and nothing much else that interested me. The idea -- that a city can attain an actualized "life" -- become a true living thing -- is very old, to the point of cliché. (Which doesn't mean it can't still be used profitably.) And the story really does nothing interesting with this idea. (And, to my mind, is totally unconvincing in suggesting that New York is only now (in story terms, which seems roughly present day, or at most a couple of decades in the past) coming to life, and no other American city is similarly alive -- this seems, in context of the story, just false to fact.) I also didn't think the main character believable. And once again -- arbitrary magic, leaving us with another story with insufficient Fantastical zing. But, hey, lots of people obviously liked it!

7) "An Unimaginable Light", by John C. Wright

This story is a talky piece, mostly dialogue between a robot -- a whorebot -- accused of violating the "general directives" governing robot behavior; and the robot's examiner. Loads the dice in the direction we expect, then pulls an unconvincing twist at the end. It is interesting in exploring deep ideas, but I think kind of fumbles this. It also depends overmuch on the context of the rest of the closely linked anthology it appeared in -- but I'm voting for "Best Short Story" here, not "best part of a linked narrative".

For what it's worth, I'll publish my nomination ballot. I actually listed a number of other stories in my post on my nomination thoughts -- most of which were on a par with the stories I nominated. I didn't have a clear winner among all my short story choices, that is; and that's emblematic of a wider, and basically unsolvable, problem with this category in particular: there are so many stories published each year that there are typically way more worthy stories than potential nominations. (This of course is the biggest reason the short story category used to have potential nominees thrown out due to the now vanished "5% rule.) It's easy to understand why some of these five didn't get noticed as much: Kanakia's story was in Interzone, which is not only a print 'zine but based in the UK, and Rich Larson may well have been competing with himself too much -- he published several nomination worthy stories last year, and it's easy to imagine they sort of split the Larson vote. I will note that three of these stories appeared first in print. It would have been nice to see Rambo get the nod, after the disappointment of her disqualified Nebula nomination. 

"Empty Planets", by Rahul Kanakia (Interzone, January/February)

"Red in Tooth and Cog", by Cat Rambo (F&SF, March/April)

"Red King", by Craig de Lancey (Lightspeed, March)

"That Game We Played During the War", by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, March)

"All That Robot Shit", by Rich Larson (Asimov’s, September)

Three SF Novels from the Scholastic Book Club (Del Rey, Key, Silverberg)

Three SF Novels from the Scholastic Book Club (Del Rey, Key, Silverberg)

a review by Rich Horton

Like many kids in my generation -- and perhaps to this day! -- I used to get paper (kind of newsprint) order forms for various arms of Scholastic Publishing at my schools. I was happy to order books through them, for 35 cents or whatever. I don't remember getting a lot of SF though -- in fact, the only SF book I remember getting from Scholastic for sure was Stranger From the Depths, by Gerry Turner (a fairly well-remembered book, reprinted by Scholastic in a sharply abridged edition in the early 70s -- the novel was first published in 1968).

I did read one such book from the library, when I was 10 or so -- Revolt on Alpha C, by Robert Silverberg, his first "novel" (very nearly his first published fiction) -- a juvenile that came out in 1955 from Thomas Crowell and was later reprinted by Scholastic.

The other day, however, at an estate sale I saw three Scholastic Books in pristine condition: the aforementioned Revolt on Alpha C, as well as The Forgotten Door, by Alexander Key, and The Runaway Robot, by Lester Del Rey. I was familiar with all these books by title, and I figured I'd snap them up and read them.

I could somewhat jokingly say that "Lester Del Rey" was a pseudonym, used by such writers as Robert Silverberg and Paul Fairman, as well as by Leonard Knapp. That's an exaggeration. But in fact Lester Del Rey was the name used by the man born Leonard Knapp. I don't know if he ever legally changed his name. He used to claim his real name was Ramon Felipe Alvarez-del Rey. He did use a variety of other pseudonymns, such as Philip St. John and Erik van Lhin. He did some major SF work early in the Campbell era, most notably the robot story "Helen O'Loy" and a tense novella about a nuclear disaster, "Nerves". Most of his later contributions -- quite major contributions! -- to the SF field were as editor, of a number of SF magazines in the 1950s, and of books most significantly in the 1970s (it was he who discovered Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara). His writing career went by fits and starts -- he apparently suffered repeatedly from writer's block, and so turned to the likes of Silverberg to write stories he had agreed to do. And, for The Runaway Robot, he apparently contributed an outline that Paul Fairman, a hack writer who had had an undistinguished (to say the most) career at the helm of Amazing in the 1950s, and who later wrote a novelization of the short-lived 1970s sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie (a show I remember with some affection), turned into the finished novel. The book first appeared in hardback from Westminster Press in 1965, and was reprinted by Scholastic in 1966. This edition is illustrated by Wayne Blickenstaff. It's the longest of these three books at just under 50,000 words -- the other two are a bit shy of 30,000 words each.

That's not an encouraging gestation -- and in some ways The Runaway Robot is a pretty bad book. The plot stretches our credulity, and the science stretches it even farther. But in the end, I thought it pretty good in one important way. It's told by a robot named Rex, who has been a companion to Paul, a boy on the Jupiter satellite Ganymede. When Paul's family is recalled to Earth, they decide they can't take the robot. He is sold to a fungus farmer, but he doesn't like his new life, and he misses Paul, so he runs away to at least see Paul one more time before he leaves. But Paul sneaks away, and convinces Rex to help him stow away on a freighter headed to Mars and then Earth. Rex manages to get the two of them onto the Terrabella. He hides Paul, and he convinces the Captain to "hire" him -- and makes a great impression with his cooking. Inevitably Paul is discovered, and the Captain is angry and turns them into the authorities on Mars, but Rex comes to the rescue once again and escapes, then sends Paul home to Earth, while rejoining the Captain as his ship heads to Earth then Ganymede. But once on Earth, more adventures happen, and in the end ...

Well, I won't spoil it. And, as I suggest, the plot is really kind of silly. But the book is redeemed by one aspect -- Rex. His character is really well handled. He's a fairly intelligent robot, but as he tells the story, robots, of course, are not really intelligent, and really don't have feelings, or imagination, etc. All along Rex is demonstrating tremendous intelligence, impressive imagination, and true emotion. (He's certainly a lot smarter, and a lot more likable, than Paul!) All this is presented pretty humorously -- I thought it really worked. I certainly rooted for Rex -- and so the inevitable ending was satisfying (though plotwise it happened entirely too quickly).

The Forgotten Door is another 1965 book originally published by Westminster, that had a reprint edition from Scholastic, apparently also in 1965. The author is Alexander Key (1904-1979), an illustrator and author, probably best known for Escape to Witch Mountain (1968), which has been filmed multiple times. My scholastic edition is illustrated by Dom Lupo.

The Forgotten Door shares themes with multiple Alexander Key books -- themes that suggest he kind of hated most people. The story opens with a boy stumbling into a pit of sorts, and coming out in an alien world -- Earth, presumably the North Carolina mountains where Key lived. The boy is schocked when the first people he meets seem hostile -- and especially shocked when they shoot at a deer he has befriended. We quickly gather that this boy -- who can't remember his own name -- can sense people's -- and animal's -- thoughts. He finally encounters a friendly family, the Beans. Over the next few days the boy gains a name -- Jon -- and becomes close to the Beans, but finds little but suspicion elsewhere. He is accused of stealing (the real villains are a couple of no good local kids from a no good local family (the adults are also persistent thieves) -- it soon seems that all the locals are no good except for a kindly judge). He is threatened with entry into the web of social services. The government hears of him and soon wants to examine him and probably make use of his telepathic talents. (And there are hints that Russian agents are also on his track.) In a desperate conclusion, his only hope -- and indeed the Beans' only hope -- is that he can find the "door" he entered Earth through and return to his home planet -- along with the Beans, who conveniently have no real ties and pretty much seems to hate everyone anyway. (Granted, the story makes it easy to see why they'd hate the people around them, but I really felt the author had his finger pretty heavily on the scales.)

It's an exciting and involving story, and there are moments that are really moving. And I think I'd have loved it if I read it age 10 or so. But I felt now that Key was having things his way with plot and character manipulation, and the sense I got of real dislike of the human race really bothered me, and struck me as essentially unfair. I didn't believe in his aliens (granting that we couldn't see them enough to really know them), and I thought the conclusion was kind of unearned, and an escape, not a resolution.

Finally, Revolt on Alpha C. This as I noted above I first read when I was about 10. It might have been the first real Science Fiction book I read (that is, if you don't count the likes of Danny Dunn). It first appeared in 1955 from Thomas Crowell. Silverberg was 20 at the time (his first two stories had appeared in magazines in 1954). Scholastic reprinted it in 1959, and it went through numerous printings subsequently: my copy is the 4th Scholastic printing, from 1963.  The illustrations are by William Meyerriecks.


As it happens, the original order form which the original buyer used to order his copy was neatly folded inside the book. I've reproduced it here. As you can see, it was sold through "Arrow books" -- Scholastic had a few different "book clubs", I think arranged by age -- one of the other ones, if I recall, was TAB.

It's the story of Larry Stark, a young man (20, just like the author) on his final cruise before graduating from the Space Patrol Academy. They are heading to the colony on Alpha Centauri IV. He has a couple of fellow Patrol soon to be graduates along with him. One of them is a rather combative young man, somewhat shorter than the average, whose name is "Harl Ellison". Sound familiar? (I asked Silverberg about this, and he said that for this book he used names of several friends for character names -- that is, he "Tuckerized" them -- a practice which he soon abandoned.)

On the way Larry realizes that his friend Harl has some odd ideas, repugnant to Larry, whose father and grandfather were in the Space Patrol. Harl is not convinced that Earth is always right -- in fact, it turns out, he was born on Jupiter, part of the failed colony there, which was crushed by Earth when they made a bid for independence. This turns out to be important when they end up at Alpha C and find that the colony there is in the throes of a revolution. Many parallels are drawn to the American revolution, but Larry is stubborn in trusting his father and the chains of authority.

He has some adventures, including a trip to one of the four colony cities as a spy for the Earth government. This involves an implausible flight in a helicopter without enough fuel, and a dash through the jungle with a Tyrannosaurus Rex on his tail. (Alpha C IV is represented as being in the equivalent of the Mesozoic Era, and apparently a whole lot of parallel evolution has occurred.) He is thrown in jail, but escapes, and returns to his commander, only to have a crisis of conscience when he realizes that the commander's plan to quash the revolution involves destroying at least one of the colony cities. He must choose between abandoning his career (and disappointing his father), or allowing an atrocity to occur.

It's a beginning writer's book, and it shows. Silverberg is one of the SF field's greats, but it doesn't really show here (not surprising for a book he wrote so early in his career.) The book still moves briskly, and reads nicely enough (though the prose is quite wobbly compared to the mature Silverberg). The science is, let's say, inconsistent -- an attempt at reasonable plausibility (by '50s scientific standards) is made, but there are still howlers. (Like the implication that when you're on Pluto you're closer to Alpha Centauri.) The economics of the colony planets don't hold together at all. The Captain's actions, and how he utilizes his personnel, strained my belief. The central conflict of the story actually could have been pretty wrenching if told with a bit more subtlety.

Hugo Ballot Reviews: Novelette

My ballot for the 2017 Hugo for Best Novelette

The shortlist is as follows:

Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex by Stix Hiscock (self-published)
"The Art of Space Travel" by Nina Allan (Tor.com, July 2016)
The Jewel and Her Lapidary by Fran Wilde (Tor.com Publishing, May 2016)
"The Tomato Thief" by Ursula Vernon (Apex, January 2016)
"Touring with the Alien" by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld, April 2016)
"You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay" by Alyssa Wong (Uncanny, May 2016)

A little better showing for SF here, with the Allan and Gilman stories. All six nominees are women.

My ballot, then, will look like this, tentatively, though the first three stories -- actually, the first four -- are real close in my mind:

1) "The Art of Space Travel", by Nina Allan

I wrote this in my Locus review: ""The Art of Space Travel", by Nina Allan, [is] a fine meditative story about Emily, who works at the hotel where the Martian astronauts are staying before they head out to space. The story isn’t about the astronauts, though, but about Emily, and about her mother, a scientist who has a sort of Alzheimer’s-like disease, perhaps because of contamination she encountered while investigating a plane crash, and about her mother’s involvement in preparation for a failed earlier Martian mission, and about Emily’s desire to learn who her father was. A good example of the effective -- not just decorative -- use of an SFnal background to tell a mundane story." Allan actually had three very strong longer stories this year: also "Ten Days" from the NewCon Press anthology Now We Are Ten, and "Maggots", a very long novella (perhaps indeed novel length) from the horror anthology Five Stories High.

2) The Jewel and Her Lapidary, by Fran Wilde

From my Locus review: "The Jewel and the Lapidary by Fran Wilde is a novella from Tor.com’s line of slim books. The central fantastical idea is pretty cool: there is a valley protected from outsiders by powerful jewels that are wielded by the ruling family ("Jewels") but contained by Lapidaries who each bond to a single Jewel. This story concerns the betrayal and fall of the valley, leaving one surviving Jewel and her Lapidary, both fairly insignificant young women. They must find a way to resist the invaders, and at least to prevent them using the valley’s mines to supply jewels to allow them to cement and extend their conquest. It’s a slim story, fairly uncompromising in its plot, nicely written: I liked it, and I suspect the world it’s set in might yield more fine stories."

3) "Touring with the Alien", by Carolyn Ives Gilman

And I wrote this in Locus: "a welcome new piece from Carolyn Ives Gilman, "Touring with the Alien", [is] a rather unusual alien invasion story. It concerns Avery, a woman working as a delivery driver, who is hired to take an alien and his human companion -- an abductee -- on a not-very well specified trip. On this trip (from Washington D. C. to St. Louis, the reverse, I believe, of Gilman’s recent move) we learn about Avery’s complex past, and about Lionel, the human companion, and a little bit about the alien, who is, well, pretty alien, and not in a clichéd way. Avery is left to make a decision with pretty broad consequences. Thoughtful work."

4) "The Tomato Thief", by Ursula Vernon

OK, here's one I missed earlier. I must have encountered it in a bad mood or something. But I just read it, and it's a delight. It's about Grandma Harken, who lives in a house with its back to the desert. She cherishes her solitude, and her tomatoes, and both are threatened when someone starts stealing the tomatoes. She manages to discover a shapechanging mockingbird as the thief, and when she realizes this woman is imprisoned in this form, she reluctantly decides she must try to free her. Which ends up leading to a visit with the Mother of Trains, an encounter with a gila dragon, and a journey to a fold in the Earth where a monster is hiding. (And a price for the help she gets, which involves the loss of solitude I mentioned, and which presumably sets up future stories.) The plot is well enough done, but the glory of the story is the storytelling voice. It's really a lot of fun.

5) "You'll Surely Drown Here if You Stay", by Alyssa Wong

OK, this is the inflection point. The first four stories on my list seem worthy award nominees, even if in my opinion none of them are as good as the stories I nominated. This story, however, frustrated me. It's very well-written on the prose level. But what it is doing neither interested me nor convinced me. It's the story of Ellis, a young man, son of the desert, who helps out in a brothel in a western town, abused by the Madame, who is his stepmother. He's mourning the murder of his father, and the deaths of many other people due to his mother's anger. He has one friend, one of the women at the brothel, Marisol. Finally executives of the mining company show up, and when they realize Ellis's power to raise the dead, they try to make use of it. This doesn't end well. I think my failure to much like this story is a case, in part, of my personal lack of interest in this sort of fantasy. Which is partly a matter of taste. But it's partly due to the arbitrariness of the action and the magic, and partly due to some, to my mind, very inconsistent characterization. Ellis, in particular, didn't seem to hold together as a person, and Marisol was just flat. This is a story that in an ordinary year I would just leave off the ballot. But this year, when I want to use No Award with purpose, I guess I feel that there is enough redeeming value here (the prose, mainly, and my sense that Wong really is a talented writer), that it doesn't deserve to be below No Award. So, fifth.

I note, by the way, that both this and "The Tomato Thief" are Weird Westerns, a category that seems quite prominent in recent years.

6) No Award

7) -- or, actually, not on the ballot at all (which is important -- a No Award vote is wasted if you put any stories on the ballot after it): Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex, by Stix Hiscock

I feel a tiny bit sorry for the author of this story, a woman writing under a rather blatant and silly pseudonym, who, as far as I know, has no connection with Vox Day, nor really any knowledge of the Rabid Puppy movement. On the other hand, she probably sold a lot more copies of this than you could expect. The story is porn, of course, and pretty stupid -- the title describes all you need to know of the action -- a green, three-breasted, voluptuous alien trying to make money as a stripper (to repair her spaceship) encounters a humanoid T Rex and they have sex after her show. There are some lame jokes about the T Rex losing his beloved mate (in a meteor strike, of course!), and such. It doesn't seem very good porn to me, and it's far worse as SF. It's really quite poorly written, to boot.

In summary -- there are four pretty good stories on this ballot. Any of them winning would be OK with me.

I'll reiterate my personal nomination ballot, just because I think the stories deserve all the notice I can give them:
"Everybody From Themis Sends Letters Home", by Genevieve Valentine (Clarkesworld, October)
"Project Empathy", by Dominica Phetteplace (Asimov’s, March)
"The Visitor From Taured", by Ian R. MacLeod (Asimov’s, September)
"The Bridge of Dreams", by Gregory Feeley (Clarkesworld, March)
"Told by an Idiot", by K. J. Parker (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 4)

In my experience, in a typical year only a couple of my nominees make any given category shortlist, and that's probably as it should be. My list does reflect a mild personal preference for Science Fiction, and I certainly don't want to say that that preference should hold sway over other preferences. But in particular I think that "Everybody From Themis Sends Letters Home" is one of the best novelettes in recent years, and the best of this year. Its neglect is a shame. My ballot includes two print magazine stories, as well, not that there should be a quota or anything, but if indeed the print magazines are getting overlooked, due to price or availability issues, it would behoove us -- or at least me, as something of an old fart partisan of print! -- to keep promoting them.

Hugo Ballot reviews: Novella

My ballot for the 2017 Hugo for Best Novella

The shortlist is as follows:

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle (Tor.com publishing)
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson (Tor.com publishing)
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)
Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum Literary Agency)
A Taste of Honey, by Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com publishing)
This Census-Taker, by China Miéville (Del Rey / Picador)

As has been and should be noted, this was an exceptional year for Tor.com. And indeed their program of slim chapbooks, mostly novellas (with the occasional long novelette such as another Hugo nomineed, Fran Wilde's The Jewel and Her Lapidary, and I suppose possibly some short novels) has been very refreshing. Novellas sometimes have a hard time finding a home, and Tor.com is doing a great job rectifying that situation.

It has also been noted that the print magazines were completely shut out of the Hugos this year. Perhaps the simplest explanation of that is that you have to pay for them, and much online fiction is free. But that doesn't really apply to the novellas -- most of Tor.com's offerings are only available for sale (there may be some exceptions posted on the website). I do think it is a shame, however. I nominated a couple of print novellas for the Hugo -- "Lazy Dog Out" by Suzanne Palmer from Asimov's, and "The Vanishing Kind" by Lavie Tidhar from F&SF. I think Tidhar's novella, at least, was clearly among the top three of the year -- I obviously liked Palmer's as well, but it isn't as clearly better than some of these, to my taste. But, as I often say -- that always happens. Chacun a son gout and all that. At any rate, this is a pretty strong category (I have more serious complaints at the shorter lengths).

One other notable point is that only one of the stories is Science Fiction, and that only ambiguously so (A Taste of Honey). I don't dispute at all that Fantasy is eligible for the Hugo (and always has been), but I will say that I think there should be SF as well. (And I'll note that the two omissions I mention above, "The Vanishing Kind" and "Lazy Dog Out", are each pure quill SF.)

My ballot, then, will look like this:

1) The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson

This has been #1 on my list ever since I read it last summer, and I see no reason to change. I think this is very clearly the best novella of 2016. It is the best written of the stories (though Kai Ashante Wilson's story is also quite beautifully done), and well-plotted, imaginative, involving. As I wrote in my Locus review: "This is evidently in dialogue with H. P. Lovecraft’s "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (which I confess I have not read), though I was more reminded of Lord Dunsany: and after all Lovecraft’s story (unpublished in his lifetime) was written quite overtly under the influence of Dunsany. Johnson, as well, writes of a Lovecraftian world with, well, actual recognizable women! Vellitt Boe is a professor at a women’s college in the Dreamlands. One of her students has run away with a dreamer -- a man from our world. This is a problem, because her father is influential -- and, as it happens, her grandfather even more so, in scary way. So Vellitt, who has experience wandering, must set off after her, through very dangerous places, and even an encounter with her old lover, Randolph Carter, in search of a way to the waking world, to persuade her student to return. This story is just beautifully written -- way more Dunsany than Lovecraft! -- and exciting, and well imagined, using the good stuff from Lovecraft and new good stuff, and honest about consequences. Unquestionably one of the stories of the year."

2) A Taste of Honey, by Kai Ashante Wilson

I missed this until it was nominated for the Nebula, and on reading it at last, I was delighted. It is a beautifully written and rather bittersweet -- with perhaps more sweet than bitter -- story of an aristocratic young man, Aqib, heir to the Master of Beasts of Olorum. He has a short, swift, forbidden romance with a soldier from the Dalucan Embassy; but when this man leaves, Aqib continues to his arranged marriage with a royal woman, a mathematical genius. The story interleaves scenes from his affair with the soldier with the story of his long and mostly fairly happy life with his wife and their daughter -- happy despite his wife living much of her life apart, as a sort of mathematical assistant to godlike beings (who seem science-fictionally rather than fantastically godlike). The conclusion is a bit of an inversion, and I'm not sure it works fully, though it's OK -- it reveals another future for Aqib, perhaps the true future. The strengths of this story lie in the prose -- Wilson is really an exceptional stylist -- and in the dizzying SFnal/Fantastical imagined world.

3) The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle

Like The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, this is a Lovecraft-influenced story, even more directly, in that it retells the events of "The Horror at Red Hook" from the point of view of a sidekick to that story's villain -- a black man, a gambler, named Black Tom, who becomes Thomas Suydam's main associate, and who proves to have different aims than his boss. The story surely needed this alternate viewpoint -- and it's quite effective. The writing is at times excellent, at other times a bit careless. I liked it, but it doesn't rate with the two stories above for me.

4) Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is my least favorite of the three Penric novellas I've read to date. I wrote in Locus: "Penric and the Shaman [is] set a few years later, with Penric much more confident in his role as a divine of the Bastard, [and] he is assigned to assist Oswyl, who is investigating a murder. Soon they are on the track of the apparent killer, Inglis, who has run away to an obscure mountain community. We see things from Penric’s viewpoint, but also [those of] Oswyl, and Inglis, and we learn that Inglis is something of a victim, of Beast magic gone wrong. Penric insists on talk, and understanding, instead of rash action -- and the story, a bit meanderingly, leads us (and Oswyl) to an understanding of what brought Inglis to his terrible situation -- at the same time helping to resolving a problem with a ghost in the mountain community they’ve come to. This is engaging work, and I’ll be glad to see more about Penric, but I wasn’t as pleased as I was with Penric’s Demon -- for one thing, there wasn’t enough Desdemona in this story, and for another, I thought Penric too idealized, too, in a word, competent. Still, it’s enjoyable.

5) This Census-Taker, by China Mieville

(For those who care, this was the Rabid Puppy choice this year.) I'm not sure I shouldn't move this up a spot or two on my ballot. The thing is, I didn't really get it. But I got the sense there was something really cool going on in the backstory, the world-building, etc., that I wasn't thinking subtly enough to understand. Or, perhaps, Mieville is just teasing us with those hints. The story is told by a man about his childhood. He was brought up by his mother and father in an isolated house on a mountainside above a remote town. One day, his father kills his mother, or so he thinks, but most people in the town don't believe him. His father says his mother just left. The boy tries running away, and spends some time with homeless kids in the town, but is brought back, and life continues, with his sometimes terrifying violent father, and his mysterious job as "keymaker", until a census taker comes -- with, it turns out, a special agenda concerning the boy's father's history in another country, during a war. It's hard to ferret out what is really going on -- perhaps the father was a war criminal? -- and it's hard too to be sure how the boy ended up where he is as a man, for some reason writing this memoir while still apparently working as a census taker himself. Strange stuff, precisely written, intriguing but for me not quite cohering.

6) Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire

I really expected to like this story -- I approached it with great anticipation. But it just did not work for me. It's about a girl, Nancy, who is sent to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, which turns out to be a home for people -- usually teenagers, more often than not girls -- who had gone through a portal to another world, and who have come back, and desperately want to return to that world, and cannot find the way. Nancy's world was the Halls of the Dead, where she could be silent and still, and emulate the dead as best she could. In the Home she meets a number of other people who went to different worlds, some rational, some nonsense, some very scary. The story turns on a series of murders, and indeed it's a sort of mystery, which comes to a plausible solution. I thought the story was too long, and it really dragged at times. The murders were shocking, and quite bothered me. (My fault, I know!) And I just couldn't find Nancy an interesting character. I feel sure that many people will feel differently, for very good reasons, but this seemed to me a story with some interesting ideas and potential that just never quite worked.

Further posts on at least novelette and short story, and probably novel, will follow in the next few weeks.

Old Bestseller: Casuals of the Sea, by William McFee

Old Bestseller: Casuals of the Sea, by William McFee

a review by Rich Horton

This 1916 novel was not a bestseller. Indeed, Christopher Morley, in his introduction to the 1925 reissue, remarked "Casuals of the Sea is a novel whose sale of ten thousand copies in America is more important as a forecast of literary weather than many a popular distribution of a quarter million". But, as Morley's introduction hints, it was a well-regarded book. It had the aforementioned 1925 reprint (which is the edition I have), and a 1931 edition from the Modern Library (which also reprints Morley's introduction). It retained something of a reputation throughout the author's life, and indeed I can find it discussed with respect as late as 1990, but it almost seems to have vanished from the literary consciousness in the past quarter century.

William McFee (1881-1966) was born to an English father and a Canadian mother on board his father's ship. He was educated in England and became an engineer, not surprisingly turning to the sea, serving as an engineer in merchant ships and, during the first World War, in the Royal Navy. He spent time before the War in the US, and moved there permanently after the War. He became a full time writer in 1924, though he had published a fair amount of fiction and nonfiction while still at sea. He was best known as a writer of sea stories (not surprisingly), though despite its title, his most famous book, the novel at hand, Casuals of the Sea, is only to a small extent set at sea.

Many of the books I have read for this series of reviews are relatively negligible -- some are downright bad, many more are enjoyable on their own terms, "of their time", as it were, but ultimately rather minor work. Casuals of the Sea is something different -- a curious and quite impressive work. It is a bit slow, though it held my attention throughout. And the closing (and most affecting) segments are driven by some significant coincidences, a fair amount of sentimentalism, and a bit of over convenient character development. I suppose, as well, that the slightly paternalistic, perhaps overknowing, attitude of the authorial voice towards things like class and gender roles is a bit old-fashioned. All that perhaps explains why the book seems perhaps forgotten.

That is as it may be. But I think Casuals of the Sea is still something quite remarkable. As I said, it moves somewhat slowly, but it remains absorbing. It is ultimately very moving, in a quiet way. It seems very realistic -- the descriptions of life in the Suburb, the City, and at Sea, as the three section titles of the novel have it, came off to me as spot on. The main characters, particularly the nominal protagonist, Hannibal Gooderich, and his half-sister Minnie, really come to life (if, as I said, towards the end they seem to grow just a bit in ways useful to the novel). The prose is very sound, and when it needs to be it's quite nice. I don't think it's a great novel, nor a classic, but it's a fine novel, and it seems worthy of the position I gather it had attained for most of the last century: a respected work, the major novel of a minor writer. So it's a shame that it's no longer -- as far as I can tell, perhaps I am wrong? -- known at all.

Casuals of the Sea is a fairly long novel (perhaps 175,000 or more words). The following summary will cover pretty much the entire plot -- so, spoilers beware, but this is not really a novel that can be spoiled.

The first section is called "The Suburb". It opens on a snowy day in North London, some time in the 1890s, with a snowball fight between the boys of a Grade Board School and those of a Catholic school. Our attention is drawn to Bert Gooderich, who leads the public boys to victory -- we realize he is a poor student but are told he will be a soldier. The impression is that the book will focus on him, but instead he has a minor role. Attention passes to his mother, Mary, some years earlier, as she comes from her farm home to the city to take up service. She gets in trouble, goes home to have the baby, and is surprised at the forbearance of her mistress. An attempt to make the father do his duty, as it were, fails utterly (he has run off to Canada), but Mary is able to marry Herbert Gooderich, a somewhat hapless fitter at a local factory. Wilhelmina (Minnie) is her first child, and she has two more by Herbert, Bert and Hannibal (named after one of the few horses his father actually won money on). The rest of the first section follows the school years of the children -- Minnie is fairly clever, Bert, as noted, quite useless, and Hanny is rather dreamy. All things change when the elder Bert Gooderich, already doing poorly at his job, manages to drown himself one drunken night. By this time Minnie has had a fairly good job in a photo shop, and has had one boyfriend, whom she throws over when he objects to her smoking. Hanny is still in school, and Bert the younger is ready to join the Army (and he will soon be killed in the Boer War).

The second section ("The City") is primarily concerned with Minnie's somewhat rackety career. She loses her job in the photo shop when it is sold to an American concern (which will replace the workers with a new machine), and gets a position with a curious woman named Mrs. Wilfley, a sort of spiritualist who writes books and runs a sort of salon, and makes her money writing advertising copy. One of Mrs. Wilfley's acquaintances is an energetic young man named Anthony Gilfillan, who is attracted to Minnie. Soon she is in love with him, and he proposes that she become his mistress. (There is no question of marriage, due to class differences and to Gilfillan's devotion to his career.) She is happy in this role, and when he moves on, she (now living in France) takes up with a series of men, the last of whom, some 5 years later (it is now about 1905), is a sea captain, George Briscoe. When that relationship ends, she returns to England in the company of a French woman, a dressmaker. And shortly thereafter, Captain Briscoe, missing her, makes the surprising decision to ask her to marry him, and she accepts.

Finally, "The Sea", the third and longest section, centers on Hannibal, the youngest Gooderich. As it opens he is getting into trouble -- he's lost his first job (for laziness, it seems) and is in with a bad crowd, doing minor pilferage and such. Mrs. Gooderich, much hating to do this, thinks of sending him off to sea -- their old neighbor, an American woman named Mrs. Gaynor who had been a great friend to Minnie, has a son who is on a ship. But first she turns reluctantly to her brother in law, a fairly well-off man named Brown. He has just inherited the lease on a tobaccanist's shop, and his energetic daughter Amelia wants to make a go of it. They decide that Hanny ought to help out Amelia with the shop, and so he does. Before long Amelia has more or less decided that she will marry Hannibal -- but he kicks up his traces (influenced in part by his friendship with a used bookstore owner, who has introduced him to sea stories), and, after a coincidental encounter with Captain Briscoe at the shop, decides to take a position that has just opened up on the Caryatid, Captain Briscoe's steamship. (Neither has any idea that they are soon to be brothers-in-law.)

There follows the story of Hannibal's journey around the world, during which he at last -- he imagines, more or less correctly -- becomes a man. He falls for a barmaid in Swansea, an intelligent and ambitious girl who is about to take over a bar of her own. He learns his trade at sea, first as steward's mate, then as a fireman in the boiler room. There are adventures of a modest sort -- Hannibal saves the ship from fire at one point, and he makes a sort of a friend of a man who he then sees die of fever, and he meets Hiram Gaynor in Japan and Hiram takes him to a geisha house (or something of that sort), and he ends up catching a bad illness on the way home. In the process he and Captain Briscoe realize their relationship, a somewhat awkward situation.

On his return, after Captain Briscoe gets in trouble for having beached the ship, Hannibal marries the girl in Swansea, and they settle happily into married life. Meanwhile Minnie has a child -- perhaps it is Briscoe's (the timing is reasonable), but her insistence on naming the boy Anthony (as in Gilfillan) raised my suspicions! -- and she turns to writing advertising copy with Mrs. Wilfley. Hanny is happy as a bar owner, wholly under his wife's domination, but she is a pleasant and sensible woman and he is a pliant young man. However, his health never quite recovers from his illness at sea, and (in a somewhat too programmatic conclusion) he begins to take a patent medicine which his wife recommends based on a advertisement written by his sister. The combined effects of a weak constitution, his illness, and the noxious "medicine" do him in, and in a, for all its contrived nature, quite moving conclusion, he dies very young, but somehow happy, just as his son is born.

That's a bald outline of the plot, but I don't think it gets very well at what I liked about the book. The characters are really a big part of it -- they do come off as real people. There are many I have not described much. Mrs. Gaynor is an intriguing and very grounded person. Hanny's various shipmates are an interesting lot. The Brown family are a nearly perfectly realized middle middle class clan -- having just come to modest prosperity, convinced of the virtue of their ways, certain of their control over their circumstances. Hanny's wife, and her Welsh name, Nellie Ffitt, are a delight. Anthony (later Sir Anthony) Gilfillan is absolutely a "man on the make", but he seems to deserve his success still. A few details didn't quite convince me -- Minnie becoming a suffragist (but not, she insists, a suffragette!) felt a little off; and as I hinted above, Hannibal's late growth from delinquent to fairly enterprising and eager seaman reeks a bit of convenience. But such cavils aside, in its whole the book really impressed me -- always enjoyable, precise and plausible in its depiction of English life at the turn of the 20th Century, and when it wants to be, quite profoundly moving.

The "casuals" of the title are people like Hannibal and his parents -- casually drifting along, taking what life has to give them, bad and good. They are contrasted to the "efficients" -- the Browns, Anthony Gilfillan, Hannibal's wife -- perhaps even Minnie has grown to be "efficient" by the end. One senses that the author's attitude towards the "casuals" is a mixture of affection and exasperation, while towards the "efficients" he is somewhat suspicious of their striving, but respects their energy and discipline. Though really he is not attempting to make any moral point so bald as that.

A Classic Ace Double: Big Planet/Slaves of the Klau, by Jack Vance

Ace Double Reviews, 73: Big Planet, by Jack Vance/Slaves of the Klau, by Jack Vance (#D-295, 1958, $0.35)

by Rich Horton

I'm dipping again into my reserve of Ace Double reviews written a long time ago, as I haven't finished my latest Old (non)-Bestseller. But this book seems important to me, as it's by one of SF's greatest writers, and it features a couple of fairly interesting early works. Also, as I have lost my web host for my home page, and haven't found a new one yet, it's nice to get some of the older posts back online.

Jack Vance (real name John Holbrook Vance) was born in 1916, and died in 2013. He was one of the most original of SF writers, and had a remarkably characteristic prose style. He has been one of my favorite writers for a long time.

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller)

Somehow right from the beginning Don Wollheim decided that Jack Vance books should be backed with Jack Vance books. Did he think Vance so individual an author, so unique in appeal, that he was best marketed as a unit? At any rate, this is the first of 7 Ace Doubles (not counting reprints and repairings) to feature Vance, and all but one of them had Vance on both sides. This book features two novels originally printed in single issues of Standard Magazines/Better Publications pulps: Big Planet in the September 1952 Startling Stories, and Slaves of the Klau, under the title "Planet of the Damned", in the December 1952 Space Stories. Both original magazine publications were full-length novels, in fact, both were longer than the subsequent book versions. Big Planet was abridged for its hard cover publication by Avalon in 1957, and this shorter version is the one reprinted in this Ace Double. It is a bit over 50,000 words long, while the magazine publication was at least 60,000 words. Slaves of the Klau is more like 42,000 words in this edition, and it was somewhat over 50,000 words in the magazine. The original versions of each were restored in the Underwood-Miller limited editions of 1978 and 1982 respectively, with Slaves of the Klau retitled Gold and Iron. (Its third title.) For the Vance Integral Edition Vance's original, darker, ending to Gold and Iron was restored (I'm not sure if that's the case with the Underwood-Miller book.) I have also read somewhere that a longer manuscript version of Big Planet, cut for first publication, was later lost -- I'm not sure if that's true, or if that's someone's garbled version of the the way it was cut for the early book editions.

Big Planet is one of Vance's best remembered early novels, and justifiably so. He had not yet quite developed his mature prose style (except for much of The Dying Earth), but traces of it definitely shine through in this book. And his delight in inventing odd societies is fully evident, as well as his usual hint of misogynism. (The latter present too in Slaves of the Klau.) Moreover, while Big Planet is to some extent a travelogue (one of Vance's most preferred modes), it also has a decently constructed plot with a satisfactory resolution.

Big Planet is a very large metal poor planet, fully inhabitable by humans. It has become a sort of repository for misfits tired of the regimented life on Earth, and a vast array of oddball groups have settled there over the centuries. The lack of long distance communications, and the sheer size of the planet, have meant that most societies have stayed fairly independent and isolated. But now it appears that one ruler, the Bajarnum of Beaujolais, has designs on conquering a large part of the planet. A new commission has been sent from Earth, led by Claude Glystra, to try to stop the Bajarnum, who is actually an Earthman named Charley Lysidder. But their ship is sabotaged, and they crashland near Beaujolais, but 40,000 miles from the Earth Enclave.

Glystra and his fellow survivors decide to try to make it to the Enclave -- but they have only local transport for their journey. Joined by a beautiful local girl, they begin the long journey. The novel, then, consists of this perilous trip, during which member after member of the group meets his death. They encounter some of the Bajarnum's soldiers amid a forest inhabited by men living in treehouses, nomadic raiders, a dangerous river crossing menaced by a plesiosaur-like monster, a town called Kirstendale with a delightful economic system that seems to allow everyone to live in luxury, an elevated sail-propelled sort of train (an idea he reused in one of his much later Anome books), and finally the Oracle of Myrtlesee. Glystra quickly realizes that one of their number must be a traitor, but who he cannot guess.

(Cover by Ed Valigursky)

Finally, at the Oracle, Glystra is able to make use of the Oracle's remarkable properties combined with a fortuitous discovery to take control of the situation. And too he encounters Charley Lysidder ... and also the traitor in their group. Things are resolved nicely enough: a very entertaining, clever, and colorful story, if not the equal of his best novels.

Slaves of the Klau is not as good, and indeed it is surely one of Vance's least-known novels. Though I still enjoyed it fairly well. As the story opens, Earth is occupied, very benignly, by a few members of the Lekthwan race, a very humanoid (to the point of being typically beautiful, if unusually colored) people who have given humans the benefits of some of their advanced tech. But Roy Barch, an employee of one of the Lekthwan administrators, is suspicious -- he believes the Lekthwan influence, even if well-intended, will stunt Earth's development. He is also somewhat hopelessly under the spell of the beautiful daughter of his employer. One night he takes her on a date -- resulting only in frustration as she makes it clear that she regards him as a hopeless primitive -- but on returning to the Lekthwan estate he finds all the residents murdered. He and Komeitk Lelianr, the Lekthwan girl, are rounded up by the attackers, the brutish Klau. It seems the Klau are evil slavers, trying to take over the galaxy, and given only token resistance by the virtuous but ineffective races such as the Lekthwan.

The course of the rest of the story is predictable -- upon arriving at the slave planet, Roy finds a way to escape with "Ellen" (as he calls Komeitk Lelianr), despite her ennui and her conviction that resistance is hopeless. After hooking up with a grubby bunch of escapees, Roy eventually hatches a desperate plan to make a spaceship from scratch and head back to Earth. Vance elaborates this rather routine plot pretty well -- Roy's efforts are far from fully successful according to his plans -- though they do end up having the desired effect; and Komeitk Lelianr doesn't immediately jump into Roy's arms. It's not a great novel at all, but it's enjoyable in the terms of early 50s pulp SF, and it prefigures later Vance pretty well, particularly in the character of Komeitk Lelianr, who is the standard late Vance aloof, superior, woman. The only departure is that at the end she comes back to Roy (admittedly somewhat hesitantly), while in later Vance she would have been more likely to meet a bitter end. (And I don't know how his preferred version, Gold and Iron, ends, but I suspect this is one aspect that changes.)

Old Bestseller: The Fortune Hunter, by Louis Joseph Vance

Old Bestseller: The Fortune Hunter, by Louis Joseph Vance

a review by Rich Horton

Here again a "novelization" of a popular play. The Fortune Hunter, by Winchell Smith, was a big Broadway hit in 1909. (Smith (1871-1933) was an actor, director, and producer, of both plays and films, as well as a writer, and ironically his most famous play might be Brewster's Millions (1906) which was first a novel (published in 1902 by George Barr McCutcheon, originally as by "Richard Greave")). Vance's novelization of The Fortune Hunter appeared from Grosset & Dunlap in 1910, with illustrations by Arthur William Brown.

Louis Joseph Vance (1879-1933) was a successful writer as well. He was best known for creating the Lone Wolf (Michael Lanyard), the protagonist of eight of his novels, who also appeared in plays, many movies, and in radio and TV adaptations. His novels The Brass Bowl (1907) and The Black Bag (1908) appeared on Publishers' Weekly's list of the bestselling novels of those years.

(cover by Arthur William Brown)

The Fortune Teller opens with the hapless Nat Duncan getting fired again. Duncan had grown up rich, and so was unable to cope when his father lost his family's fortune shortly after he (Nat) graduated from college. Only the intervention of a successful college friend, Harry Kellogg, has kept him from complete disaster -- Harry's recommendation has led to several jobs, but he's lost them all after only a few months. Now he's determined to refuse further aid from his old friend, but Kellogg insists he try one last thing -- to marry a rich woman. Kellogg's scheme is that Duncan move to a country town, and find the wealthiest marriagable woman there, and impress her by his city ways, not to mention that fact that the most ambitious young men from those towns will have headed to the big city. Kellogg will bankroll Nat -- and he insists on some rules: no drinking, no smoking, no slang or vulgar language, weekly church attendance, and wait for the woman to propose. They agree to try this for a year.

This introductory section, I suspect, is one of Vance's additions. After this point the third person narrative is dropped, and the rest of the story is told by Homer Littlejohn, an aging and somewhat cynical newspaperman in Radville, PA. The exciting news of the day is the arrival of a Mysterious Stranger from New York. This of course is Nat Duncan, who quickly takes rooms.

Nat follows Kellogg's rules carefully, and after a couple of weeks is bored stiff. He finds that he actually wants to work, and starts looking for a job. He ends up somehow offering to work for Sam Graham, a widower who runs a drugstore with the help of his daughter. Sam is a very nice man, but a completely hopeless businessman. He only wants to tinker away at his inventions. And of course he has no money to actually pay Nat.

Despite the resentment of young Betty Graham, Nat is soon effecting unexpected improvements in the store, at first simply by tidying it; then by spending some of Harry Kellogg's money to buy some much needed supplies. His person attracts some custom from the curious young ladies in town -- but before long the real improvements in the store lead to some money being made. Meanwhile Nat has become the target of the richest girl in town, Josie Lockwood, also regarded as the prettiest. Alas, she's rather annoying, and her father isn't a nice man (he is about ready to foreclose on Sam Graham when Duncan fortuitously turns the store's fortunes around). But Kellogg's rules are strict -- so Duncan plays along, getting closer and closer to the inevitable engagement.

Meanwhile Roland Barnette, the young man who thought he was Josie's intended, is very jealous of Duncan, and is looking for a way to oust his rival. And one of Sam Graham's inventions appears to actually be very valuable -- and only Nat's quick thinking prevents Sam from all but giving it away to a sharp operator. And Betty, relieved of the drudgery of trying to save her father's failing business, and given a chance to go to school, blossoms into a beautiful young woman. It's obvious where this will lead -- Duncan is forced into accepting Josie's offer of marriage (it was part of Kellogg's rules that he promised to follow, after all) -- even though he is ironically a success on his own merits now (and has more than made Harry's money back by giving him a tip about investing (on fair terms) in Graham's invention). Worse, Duncan realizes he is truly in love with Betty. But he can hardly throw over Josie! Luckily, Roland's schemes bear fruit -- and he accuses Nat Duncan of being an escaped criminal. False identification of course -- but Josie is quick to break the engagement, so all is well ... (And Nat, of course, realizes that he actually likes going to church, and doesn't like drinking or smoking any more ...)

It's obviously frothy and implausible as all get out, not to mention predictable. As with the previous play to novel I reviewed (Bayard Veiller's Within the Law) I suspect it worked better as a play. The long introduction too firmly establishes Nat as a hopeless (if pleasant and honest) loser, and so his sudden transformation into a maven of the drugstore business simply can't convince. But despite all that it's pleasantly enough presented, with some reasonably comic moments, so I enjoyed it enough to pass the time.

Another Forgotten Ace Double: The HEROD Men, by Nick Kamin/Dark Planet, by John Rackham

Ace Double Reviews, 105: Dark Planet, by John Rackham/The HEROD Men, by Nick Kamin (#13805, 1971, 75 cents)

a review by Rich Horton

Honestly I don't intend to make the Ace Double subset of these reviews into the "John Rackham Show". But here's another "John Rackham" novel. (Years ago on the much lamented Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written I did a small series of posts on the "Novels of ..." a few writers -- a couple of major ones (Gene Wolfe, Charles Harness, and Avram Davidson) and some lesser known writers (Tom Purdom and Laurence M. Janifer). I'd been meaning to cover Damon Knight as well, but haven't got to him. Now I have the insane notion of doing something like that for Rackham/Phillifent!) Anyway, as I've said before, "John Rackham", real name John T. Phillifent, was a fairly prolific SF writer under both the "Rackham" name and his real name. He was born in 1916 in England, and died in 1976; and published something North of 20 novels, fully 16 of them Ace Double halves.

The other writer this time around is one of those who published very little, though as opposed to the likes of, say, Jeremy Strike, he did publish more than one novel. Two, actually, the other being also an Ace Double (Earthrim (1969)). "Nick Kamin"'s real name was Robert John Antonick, born in Chicago in 1939. He attended the University of Dayton, and seems to have settled in the Dayton area, working in advertising. He was also an artist. He died in 2011.

(Covers by John Schoenherr and Jack Gaughan)

The HEROD Men (I give the key word of the title in all caps as that's the way it's always spelled in the text -- the cover and title page don't make it at all clear) is the longer of these two novels, at about 60,000 words. It's set in the fairly near future, in a world where overpopulation has led to the formation of an extra-governmantal organization, HEROD, devoted to controlling population by killing excess babies (and their parents). The novel's hero, Matter, is an ex-soldier who joined the organization partly because he's good at killing. His latest job is to investigate a free love commune run by his old friend and colleague Philip, up in Manitoba. The commune is suspect in itself (free love equals the potential of excess babies, right?), but they are also suspected of being in cahoots with FROG, a Fundamentalist religious organization devoted to unfettered reproduction, which is trying to build a spaceship to colonize an empty planet.

(All this detail, by the way, takes a long time to emerge. That can be a canny authorial strategy, but in this case it seems mostly just to obfuscate.)

Having escaped one attempt at his life, Matter finds his motel room invaded by a fetching young lady. He insists that she strip, the better to see her concealed weapons (not to mention the better to inspect her voluptuous body), and then, I suppose convinced that she's a plant from Philip's commune, he lets her lure him into a trap, and he's knocked out and taken to the commune.

The upshot is that Matter spends weeks in the commune, discovering that they seem mostly innocent. They do have a lot of sex, but not a lot of babies. But there are some odd things, particularly the technologically advanced barrier around it ... And then there's Matter's increased obsession with the fetching young woman, Stuckey, who had lured him there -- before long they are sleeping together -- but chastely, to his considerable frustration.

In parallel, we see the FROGs working on their spaceship project. It turns out that only 400 people will fit in the ship -- there is room for 2000, but the FROGs intend to keep procreating on the long journey, so by the end 400 people will have ballooned to enough to use up the resources needed by 2000. But wait -- a young nun, despite medical evidence that she is fertile, and despite being "serviced" by numerous priests of the order, has not got pregnant. Does she have the secret of willed contraception?

The identity of this nun is easy to untangle. And so too is what happens when she finally wilfully gives herself to a man she truly loves. And this happens as Matter, finally allowed out of the commune, starts to get closer to the secret of who is after him -- at the cost of some collateral damage. The resolution, obviously, turns on his coming to terms with his violent past, and with his love for Stuckey, etc.

It's kind of a mess, very sloppily plotted. That said, it reads engagingly enough. The (mostly implied) sex is not badly handled, if somewhat '70s-style sexist. There is a pretty broad homophobic streak as well. It's a pretty weak book, but at least a book that entertains one tolerably.

As for Rackham's Dark Planet (much shorter at about 40,000 words), well, it's kind of the same in a very different way. That is to say -- it's quite sexist, and often rather silly, but it's a good fast read (and sometimes pretty exciting), and I'm happy enough to have read it.

It does display some of Rackham's apparent obsessions, the most obvious being having his heroes fall in love with exotically-colored alien (but very humanoid) women. And it quite overtly resembles the last Rackham novel I read, and reviewed in this series, Flower of Doradil, in that it features a human trio (two men and a voluptuous woman with martial arts skills) penetrating a "dark planet", coming into contact with a "primitive" humanoid race, after which they meet a much superior also humanoid race, and a gorgeous female representative of said race. (That presentation, to be sure, exaggerates the similarities between the two novels.)

Dark Planet opens with Stephen Query on a trip outside the Earth base on the inimical planet they call Step Two. This is a jungle planet on which humans have established a small base to serve as a waystation between Earth and the front of the war they are fighting with a human colony trying to become independent. Stephen is an artistically inclined young man who has been exiled to Step Two for insubordination (i.e. telling his superiors, correctly, that they were wrong). He has discovered a fascination with the terribly dangerous natural surface of the planet, outside the human dome. And one day he sees a humanoid figure ...

But then he is suddenly promoted to work for the very General Gareth Evans who had previously punished him. Worse, Evans' daughter Christine, a Lieutenant, and an extraordinarly beautiful (and voluptuous) young woman, will be his only fellow crewman. But as they leave the planet, their ship explodes (sabotage!), and only Query's quick thinking saves them, at least to the point of parachuting to the planet's surface. There they discover that though the planet is indeed dangerous -- and all "dead" material, such as clothing, is eaten away, so that Stephen and Christine are quickly naked -- humans can survive. Soon they have encountered the same humanoids Stephen saw before, and Stephen realizes he has an empathic connection with the natives.

The natives take them in. Stephen and Christine get together briefly, but rather quickly the natives welcome a special visitor -- a Helsee, in their word. This is an ethereally beautiful woman, colored as white as a pearl. Her name is Azul, and she summons Stephen to her, and takes him flying away -- her powers are such that she can levitate. Several months follow in which she heals him and enhances them -- a process which seems to involve mostly sex. But then it is time for one important task -- to cleanse the world of the Earth base: humans are not welcome on this world, not even Stephen, because of their war. But even that ends up conflict free -- Stephen fetches the General and Christine, both much improved by their months with the natives (and lots of sex for them, too), and, voila, the war is over and the base is being abandoned anyway. Which frees Stephen -- who has finally learned to fly himself -- to rejoin his beloved Azul.

So, another fairly silly male fantasy, really. Rackham's professional ability, and some decent action sequences, make it a quick and moderately entertaining read, but not much beyond that.

Old Bestseller: Penrod, by Booth Tarkington

Old Bestseller: Penrod, by Booth Tarkington

a review by Rich Horton

Here is a true Old Bestseller, despite being to some extent a children's book: Penrod was #7 on the Publishers' Weekly list of bestselling novels of 1914. Booth Tarkington was a very successful writer, and showed up on that list a lot. He had the bestselling novel overall in 1915 (The Turmoil) and 1916 (Seventeen), and he also was in the top ten in 1902 (The Two Vanrevels), 1922 (Gentle Julia), 1924 (The Midlander), 1927 (The Plutocrat), 1928 (Claire Ambler), and 1932 (Mary's Neck). Curiously, his most famous novel (besides perhaps Penrod), Pulitzer Prize winner The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), did not make the list, and neither did his other Pulitzer Prize winner, Alice Adams (1921), though doubtless both sold well enough.

Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was born in Indianapolis, and was a lifelong partisan of Indiana (his first novel was called The Gentleman from Indiana). He was named after a Governor of California (Newton Booth). He attended both Purdue and Princeton (where he became friends with Woodrow Wilson). He served one term in the Indiana House. He was a truly major author in his time, but his reputation has, it seems to me, diminished a great deal. He is now mostly remembered for The Magnificent Ambersons (and that in great part because of the famously botched Welles film) and for Penrod, and both of those books are much less read now than they once were.

(drawing by Gordon Grant, photograph of Wendell Berry as Penrod)

My copy of Penrod is a Grosset & Dunlap reprint (the original publisher was Doubleday, Page). It includes the original Gordon Grant illustrations, and also a few photographs from the 1922 silent film version, suggesting that this reprint dates to about then.

I said above that Penrod is to some extent a childrens' book, and that is true -- to an extent. But it is definitely a book that appeals to adults -- or did at the time when adults saw nostalgic echoes of their own childhoods in Penrod's. When I was young, my mother recommended Penrod to me -- it was one of those books boys were thought likely to like -- but though I remember getting it out of the library, I didn't read it.

Penrod is a very episodic book, depicting a number of comic adventures of Penrod Schofield, "The Worst Boy in Town" (presumably the Town is Indianapolis). Much -- perhaps all -- of the book originally appeared as separate stories, or sketches, in Cosmopolitan (and perhaps elsewhere). Penrod is 11 throughout most of the book, turning 12 at the end. The other major characters are his family, especially his older sister Margaret (whose love life is much disrupted by her younger brother), his best friend Sam, his two black friends Herman and Verman, his "bow" Marjorie Jones, and a few other schoolmates. And of course his dog Duke.

The incidents depicted include Penrod's agonized and disastrous role as Childe Lancelot in "The Pageant of the Table Round"; Penrod assuming that his Aunt is visiting because she is fleeing Uncle John, whom he presumes to have fallen victim to drink; Penrod and Sam putting on a show featuring numerous attractions including Herman and Verman as Tattooed Wild Men, and (much more funnily) rich boy Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Jr., as the ONLY LIVING NEPHEW oF RENA MAGSWORTH THE FAMOS MUDERESS; Penrod getting Marjorie's younger brother terribly sick; Penrod skipping the dance; Penrod deciding to become a bully; Penrod reacting to the new minister in town, a terrible bore who seems interested in Margaret; Penrod's 12th birthday; and many more.

A lot of this -- most of it -- is really very funny. Penrod is not really terribly intelligent (and he truly is a bad student), but he does have an active imagination. (And he likes to spread paint and tar quite liberally!) Bores and phonies tend to get their due. Penrod himself gets his due, some of the time -- and at other times, such as after his embarrassment of the Bitts family, he unexpectedly gets a reward. So -- I enjoyed it, and I can easily see why it was such a big success. (There were two sequels, Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jabsher (1929).)

But -- what about the elephant in the room? Which is to say -- racism. And let's face it, the depiction of Herman and Verman, Penrod's friends, is undoubtedly condescending, steretypical, and racist. For all that, Herman and Verman come off as basically good kids, and Penrod really does treat them as friends. Worse, I think, are Tarkington's authorial comments -- his declarations about the true nature and abilities of black people -- are really offensive. I have little doubt that these observations were more or less consistent with fairly mainstream views at that time. But that doesn't excuse them, and certainly it is easy to understand why many people might prefer not to read a book like Penrod any more -- or especially not to have their children read it.