Old Bestseller: The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer

Old Bestseller: The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer

a review by Rich Horton

Old Bestseller? Well, sure! You can't get much older than the Canterbury Tales for English literature that can be read by modern English readers. And it's really "sold" well throughout its history -- it was, as far as I can see, recognized as a work of genius from the very first.

Geoffrey Chaucer, of course, is one of the best known writers of all time. And his life was quite well documented for a man of his age, so his biography is fairly familar. He was born in 1342 or 1343 to a reasonably well-off middle class family. He spent much of his life in, essentially, civil service jobs, working for the King, the King's son, the Army, and the port of London. He married Philippa de Roet in 1366, a lady of waiting to the Queen, and the sister-in-law of John of Gaunt. They had three children. He also wrote extensively, and his writing was evidently much appreciated in his time. Besides the Canterbury Tales his most famous work is probably Troilus and Criseyde. He first wrote in French, but soon began writing in English (Middle English, of course), and was a key figure in making English a respectable language for literature. He is credited with inventing iambic pentameter.

The Canterbury Tales were his last work, written between 1387 (when his wife died) and his death in 1400. (Possibly started earlier in the '80s.) Naturally the first editions were in manuscript -- the earliest extant dating to shortly after his death. Gutenberg's printing press was invented in 1439, and the first English printer was William Caxton. The popularity and importance of the Canterbury Tales is evidenced by the fact that the first book Caxton printed after he set up his press in England was the Canterbury Tales. (Ten copies of that printing survive.)

As for my edition of the book, I read a dozen or so of the tales from three separate sources. Primarily, I read a Bantam Classics selection of 8 tales, plus the prologue of course, edited by A. Kent Hieatt and Constance Hieatt. The editors presented the original Middle English text and their own Modern English translation on facing pages. This book included "The Knight's Tale", "The Miller's Tale", "The Wife of Bath's Tale", "The Merchant's Tale", "The Franklin's Tale", "The Pardoner's Tale", "The Prioress' Tale", "The Nun's Priest's Tale". Then I found a cheap copy of a Norton Critical edition, edited by V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. This edition included nine of the tales -- seven in common with the Hieatt's edition, and also "The Reeve's Tale" and "The Clerk's Tale". This edition does not include a full translation of the Middle English, but glosses the more obscure words, and also adds Modern English versions of occasional particularly difficult phrases. Finally, having been urged to also read "The Tale of Sir Thopas", I found an online site which includes the entire sequence, all 28 tales, edited by Sinan Kökbugur. (It can be found here: Canterbury Tales Online.) This edition gives the option of a side by side presentation of the Middle English and a modern translation. In this I read "Sir Thopas", and also skimmed "The Tale of Melibee", which are the two stories Chaucer presented as being told by the "Geoffrey Chaucer" figure on the pilgrimage.

For a long time -- since high school, I suppose -- I've known I ought to read at least some of the Canterbury Tales. (Of course, there are lots of books I feel guilty about not having read!) In our English literature class in high school we read a snippet of the prologue in Middle English, and then a Modern English translation of, IIRC, "The Reeve's Tale". So I'm quite glad to have finally rectified this shortfall. I'll say first that the Middle English is actually not too terribly difficult to read. Yes, every so often a phrase just eluded me. And a number of the words do need explication (though I knew a fair amount of them just from having read enough historical fiction set in England.) The thing is, there's no question that it's better to read the original -- most importantly, to be reading Chaucer's poetry. (And this is a poem, mostly -- or a number of long poems, perhaps, with one tale ("The Tale of Melibee") in prose.) I have to ay that I found the Hieatts' translation unsatisfactory -- no real attempt is made to preserve the poetic strengths of Chaucer's work, and on occasion they get a bit annoyingly fussy (as when they ruin a pun on "queynte" as in roughly "quaint" and "queynte" as in, well, in their telling: "where he shouldn't [touch]".) I wonder if a translation that kept to the word order and almost all of the Middle English word choices, but only used modern spelling and very occasional translations of completely incomprehensible words, wouldn't be sufficient.

What do I think of it? It's pretty impressive stuff, really. One of the most obviously notable things is Chaucer's way with voice. The voices of each storyteller are captured in entirely individual ways. I remember reading about a book called, I think, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom, in which, if I recall, Bloom claimed something like "Shakespeare changed our conception of human consciousness, to the point that he invented the idea that we have individual consciousness, individual characters." I haven't read the book, so I am probably misstating his argument, but it struck me as absurd on the face of it, and surely Chaucer, writing 2 centuries prior to Shakespeare, but displaying individual characters, as conceptually rich as Shakespeare's, stands as one (of many) counterarguments. The Wife of Bath is probably the most famous of Chaucer's characters, but the cynical Pardoner, and the easily offended Reeve, not to mention the Host, all strike me as nicely portrayed characters. (The characters in the actual tales, however, are often closer to types, and sometimes their motivations are obscure.) I suppose the other general point I might make is that these stories present a pretty dark view of the place of women in that society (and at least some of them are clearly criticisms of that place.) And, relatedly, they are pretty darn full of rape. And one final point, familiar enough -- the funny stories are very funny. ("The Miller's Tale" in particular.)

Short looks at the tales I read:

"The Knight's Tale" -- This is the longest one, over 100 pages in the Bantam edition, 2250 lines. It's set in Athens, when Theseus was the Duke, and his wife was the Amazon Hippolyta. Theseus makes war on Thebes, where Creon is King, and takes it, in the process taking two prisoners, the cousins Arcite and Palamoun. Both see Hippolyta's sister Emelye from the tower in which they are imprisoned, and fall hopelessly in love with her. Then Arcite's freedom is bought, though he must swear never to return to Athens. Of course he does, to be near Emelye, and under another name becomes a servant to Theseus, while Palamoun languishes in prison. Long story short, they end up fighting a battle for Emelye's hand ... Of course, all this time Emelye, a true Amazon at heart, had vowed never to marry, and prays to be released from the duty of marrying whoever wins. To no avail -- after all, she's a woman, and has no say such matters! It's an interesting if at times frustrating tale, somewhat at odds with contemporary sensibilities, not to mention not even trying to portray a plausible Ancient Greece. None of which really matters -- the poem does what it wants to do quite well.

"The Miller's Tale" -- the miller, much gone in drunkenness, insists on telling the next story. It's about a carpenter with a very pretty young wife, Alisoun. He rents a room to a young scholar, Nicholas, who takes a fancy to Alisoun, grabbing her by the "queynte" -- and convincing her to sleep with him. Another young man is fascinated with Alisoun, who has no interest in him. Nicholas arranges a very complicated scheme to get time alone with Alisoun, based on convincing the carpenter that the second Noachian flood is impending. And Alisoun fools her importunate alternate young suitor to kiss her "ers" instead of her lips ... and the result is, pretty much, embarrassment for all, involving a hot poker. This is perhaps the most out and out funny of these tales, and the most sexy too, I suppose.

"The Reeve's Tale", then, responds to "The Miller's Tale". (The reeve was originally a carpenter.) He tells of a crooked miller, who has a pretty wife and a pretty daughter. Two students try to expose his criminal ways (stealing some of the grain he's been paid to mill), but the miller is wise to them. However, the two students have their revenge, by sneaking into the beds of both the miller's wife and their daughter, and having sex with them. (Sex which sure looks a lot like rape.)

Even more explicitely a tale of rape is "The Wife of Bath's Tale". This is set in King Arthur's time, and a knight rapes an innocent virgin, and is sentenced to death. But he gets a reprieve from the Queen, who instead sets him a task to find out what women really want. His travels suggest several answers, none of which suffice, until he meets an ugly old woman, and eventually learns what women really want -- to be allowed their own choice of what they want. As his reward, he marries the old woman -- who magically changes into a beautiful young woman. I admit I was bothered by the way the knight got away with -- indeed was eventually rewarded for -- a quite vile crime. Of course, the real greatness of the Wife of Bath's tale is the prologue, in which she tells of her five husbands, and why she married them, and what she got from her marriages. This part is golden, it's very funny, very knowing, and very revealing of the position of women in England at that time, and of what a strong woman could do to claim more of her due.

"The Merchant's Tale" is another story of extramarital sex, but there's a lot more consent involved. A 60 year old knight, January, decides to marry, finally, and chooses a young girl, about 20, named May. (The names are hardly coincidental.) The story ends up concerning her desire for a young man in her husband's service, and the amusing lengths they go to to have sex. Fun stuff, for sure.

"The Franklin's Tale" was in the end one of my favorites. It tells of a knight in Brittany, Arveragus, and his lady, Dorigen, who make a love match, and who agree to a marriage with fairly equal sharing of power (for that time.) They are very happy, and then Arveragus has to go off to war. Dorigen misses him terribly, and becomes obsessed with the idea he will crash and die on the rocks off her shore. She is victimized by another man, who lusts after her, and who hires a magician to make is seem as if all the rocks off the shores of Brittany have vanished. This man has made her promise that if he can remove the danger to her husband she must allow him to have his way with her. In the end, after Arveragus returns she confesses her trouble to him, and says that her honor requires that she give up her virtue to the other man ... but her example causes this man to retract her promise -- and Arveragus has forgiven her at once, so all ends happily.

"The Pardoner's Tale" is one of the few that don't turn on sex (unlike all those mentioned above.) It's well introduced by its prologue -- the Pardoner is a cynical man, and his job is to swindle people in the name of "pardoning" their sins, so they can go to heaven. (An issue central to the Reformation.) After a discourse on his job, with a certain cynical glee displayed on how easily he makes a living, he tells of three debauched young men, who set off to kill a man they hear of, named Death, who has killed thousands. But on their way they are tempted to betray each other, so that they can claim the entire fortune of the others ... and, inevitably, it is Death who wins again. A pretty strong moral tale.

"The Prioress's Tale" is particularly problematic. As a tale, without context, it's affecting enough -- a very devout young boy is killed by the residents of his town, who are offended by his religious devotion. The problem is that the tale turns on horribly antisemitic lies about Jewish attitudes towards Christians. (Remember that the Jews had been expelled from England about a century before Chaucer wrote this story.) I found it hard to get past the vile depiction of Jews. I understand that some readings suggest that at least in part Chaucer was satirizing the Prioress' excessive assumed piety ... all possibly true, but still hard to get past.

"The Nun's Priest's Tale" is different to the other stories described here. (Though it does, in a sense, involve sex.) It's an animal fable, about Chauntecleer, a rooster, with seven wives. He has a dream that he will be eaten by a fox, and confesses his fear to his favorite wife. She poo-poos his concern, so he ventures out -- only to encounter a sly fox, who almost manages to trick Chauntecleer into getting eaten. Fortunately, Chauntecleer is able to escape, and to resist the fox's attempts to lure him back. Pretty enjoyable stuff, with, as usual for Chaucer, lots of interesting elaborations of the context, with allusions to older stories.

The two extra stories I read (besides "The Reeve's Tale", interpolated above), were "The Tale of Sir Thopas" ("Thopas" meaning Topaz), and "The Clerk's Tale". The latter was pretty interesting. It tells of a well-respected man, Walter, who has refused to marry. He is finally convinced to choose a wife in order to get an heir. He chooses a very poor woman, Griselda, and, taking advantage of her low status, makes her promise to obey him without question. They have children, a girl and then a boy, and Walter in each case tells Griselda he has decided to kill the child, but instead sends them off secretly to be raised by friends of his. Griselda is convinced they are dead, but accedes to Walter's wishes due to her vow. Finally, Walter tells Griselda he is tired of her, and will remarry. He says he has chosen a young woman, and has his daughter (accompanied by her brother) summoned home, and seems ready to marry her. Of course, all is resolved, and Walter admits his deception, and declares himself pleased with his wife's faithfulness, and they live happily ever after, reunited with their children. I have to admit, I was pretty disgusted with Walter's torture of Griselda.

Finally, "The Tale of Sir Thopas" is one of two tales supposedly told by Chaucer himself, at the host's bidding. It's essentially a parody of over the top tales of knightly valor, as Sir Thopas, in an effort to woo the elf-queen, undertakes a series of quests -- portrayed in a galumphing sort of rhythm, with sing-song rhyming. The host is soon disgusted, and insists Chaucer stop, so we never see the end of the tale. It's obviously parodic, and the use of the Chaucer figure for the teller is part of the fun.

Birthday Review: The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

Today would have been Ray Bradbury's 99th birthday. In his honor, I've uncovered something I wrote back in 2001 about Bradbury's first two collections. I had had an ambiguous relationship to Bradbury's fiction -- I really liked Fahrenheit 451, which I read in high school, 1974 or so. But we were assigned Dandelion Wine in 8th grade English, and our teacher told us that, as young boys living in northern Illinois, we should just LOVE Dandelion Wine, because it was about a young boy living in northern Illinois. That just rubbed me the wrong way, and I read about the first 20 pages, and stopped. And still got an A on the test by listening closely to class discussions. Anyway, for whatever reason I ended up adopting the attitude of Millhouse from The Simpsons to Bradbury: "I am aware of his work." Which is, of course, unfair, because his best work was really quite wonderful, as I hope this review shows.

Rereading Ray Bradbury

In my conscientious attempt to fairly nominate stories from 1950 for the Retro Hugo, I noticed that quite a few of Ray Bradbury's stories were eligible. In fact, he published some 15 stories in 1950, many of them rather good. He also published The Martian Chronicles in 1950. The following year came The Illustrated Man, which included several of the pieces from 1950. I selected a few stories from the list of 1950 stories that I vaguely remembered as being good and put them on my list. I figured I'd reread them and decide which if any to nominate for a Retro Hugo, given that my specific memories of the stories were quite vague. I believe I read both The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man back in the Golden Age, when I was 12 or 13. (I.e., about 1972-1973.) At any rate, my Bantam edition of The Illustrated Man is a 1972 printing, and I have an odd image of myself reading "The Veldt" in a junior high classroom.

So I started in, picking out the stories I'd highlighted. Then I realized I might as well read all the 1950 stories -- from which point the step to just rereading the entire books was obvious. (It also occurred to me that The Martian Chronicles is quite as eligible for "Best Novel" as, say, The Dying Earth, another collection of linked stories.)

Upon rereading The Martian Chronicles I soon appreciated that I hardly remembered the book at all. About all that survived were memories of "The Third Expedition" (which I would have reread in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame as "Mars is Heaven!"), and memories of the closing image of book, the last lines of "The Million Year Picnic", where the family looks into the waters of the canal and sees their reflections: the new Martians (an image which reminded me of the last line of Kim Stanley Robinson's great novella "Green Mars": "A new creature stands on the summit of green Mars." [Paraphrased from memory, that might not be the exact quote.])

The Martian Chronicles consists of stories published in the pulps (Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder, etc.) and a couple of slicks (Collier's, Charm and MacLean's) between 1946 and 1950, as well as a few stories original to the book, and lots of linking material, half a page to a couple of pages in between the longer stories. The last story in the book, "The Million Year Picnic", was the first published, in the Summer 1946 Planet Stories. (It's also one of the best stories.) As far as I can tell, "The Million Year Picnic" is Bradbury's first significant story, and in my opinion little he published after the early '50s was significant either. Thus, as I see it, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451 (which expands a 1951 novelette) are close to all the essential Bradbury. (I know there are advocates of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I haven't read, and I certainly concede there are some fine later stories: i.e. "All Summer in a Day" from 1954.) Five years, maybe ten, of top rate work -- but that's more than lots of folks get.

(For the record, I'm not going to worry about spoilers in the following paragraphs.) The stories in the book are supposedly a unified account of the colonization of Mars by men from Earth, but in reality there are many inconsistencies. I doubt he wrote them (to begin with) intending them all to be one narrative. The first few stories tell of the resistance of the dying race of Martians to the coming of the Earthmen. For example, in "Ylla" the title character, a Martian female, has erotic telepathic dreams of the coming Earthmen, so her husband, jealous, kills them as soon as they land. The second expedition, in "The Earth Men", is regarded as simply insane Martians who have delusions of being from Earth, and eventually the Martian psychiatrist kills them for their own good. It's a bit strained and silly -- a lesser story. "The Third Expedition", one of the most famous stories, and a very good one, has the Martians impersonating lost parents and other loved ones of the Earth crew, luring them to a sense of safety, after which they are killed. There is no consistency, really, between these stories (except for some (possibly added for the book) references in the later stories to the lost earlier expeditions). By the fourth expedition, however, chicken pox carried by the members of the first three expeditions has almost wiped out the Martian population. "- and the Moon be Still as Bright" tells movingly of the bitter response of one sensitive human to the vulgarity of his fellow explorers. The next sequence of stories deals with the human colonists who follow. The best stories here feature encounter with the remnants of the Martians: the very best of these is "The Martian", which strikingly foreshadows the shapechangers of Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus. A Martian is impelled by the yearning of a colonist couple for their dead son to take on his shape -- but when he meets other humans he shifts to the shapes of people they are looking for. I think this is one of the high points of this collection. Contrariwise, Bradbury is at his worst when he is most didactic, as in "Way In the Middle of the Air", in which all the black people in the U.S. (or at any rate the South) rather implausibly up and head for Mars (the logistics of this move are needless to say not considered). This story doesn't fit the rest of the book well at all -- I think it is better regarded as a companion to a story in The Illustrated Man, "The Other Foot", which features the white people of the Earth coming to Mars years later and begging to be allowed to work for the black Martian colonists because Earth has destroyed itself in a nuclear war.

Another story that doesn't really seem to belong in the book is "Usher II", a well-known story, indeed a pretty good one. This has Bradbury riding another of his hobbyhorses: censorship of imaginative literature. (He revisits this in "The Exiles" from The Illustrated Man, and of course in Fahrenheit 451.) In "Usher II" imaginative literature has been banned on Earth, and the Moral Climate people are coming to Mars. A couple of vengeful men who love Poe and Beirce and Lovecraft and all the rest build a replica of Poe's House of Usher and arrange a special party for a number of censorship-minded people -- with a number of treats courtesy Edgar Allan Poe's imagination. It's a neat story, but it doesn't belong in The Martian Chronicles at all.

The final set of stories deals with the postwar SFnal default assumption that a Nuclear War was inevitable. (It is really striking how absolutely that seemed to be believed, at least based on the futures depicted in stories from about 1946 to 1960.) Nuclear war breaks out on Earth, and almost the entire population of Mars returns to Earth to help with the war. (Which Bradbury seemed to find wholly obvious, and which I find ridiculous.) A couple of stories deal with people who were left behind by mistake -- "The Silent Towns" is a rather offensive story about a lonely man who finally finds the one woman who was left behind, and who is disgusted by her because she is fat and vulgar. "The Long Years" is much better, about an archaeologist and his family who were stranded on Mars for the 20 years the War went on. "There Will Come Soft Rains" is another of Bradbury's best stories: it's set on Earth, as an automated house dwindles to decay after a nuclear blast has killed its inhabitants. Finally, "The Million Year Picnic" is about a family which escapes from war-torn Earth and sets out to Mars to make a new life. It's a brilliant, moving, conclusion to the book.

I ended up pretty impressed by The Martian Chronicles as a whole. As I've said, the stories are really only tenuously linked, and rather clumsily. Regarded as a story arc, the whole thing is highly implausible, and less powerful than if regarded as simply a collection of stories that happen to deal with humans coming to Mars. (Except for "There Will Come Soft Rains", which is really purely a "Nuclear War" story and not linked to the rest of the book at all.) As with any collection, there are high and low points, but the best stories here retain their power -- "Ylla", "- and the Moon Be Still as Bright", "The Third Expedition", "Usher II", "There Will Come Soft Rains", and perhaps especially "The Martian" and "The Million Year Picnic" are really outstanding pieces. Bradbury's prose is solid, full of fine imagery, much as advertised, though while the imagery is fine the "music" of the prose, the voice, is just decent.

The Illustrated Man has an even more tenuous linking device -- the man of the title, who has "living" tattoos all over his body, tattoos which seem to predict the future. The stories collected are again pretty solid, for the most part. "The Veldt" is a famous story about a sort of virtual reality playroom which becomes too real. A couple stories are set on Mars, and could almost have been shoehorned into The Martian Chronicles. I have already mentioned "The Other Foot" as a sort of sequel to "Way in the Middle of the Air". "The Fire Balloons" is about a missionary coming to Mars and trying to minister to the strange balloonlike Martians -- but they end up ministering to him instead. "The Exiles" is another anti-censorship piece, and a fine one -- after Earth has outlawed imaginative literature, the "spirits" of the authors, people like Poe, have miraculously gathered on Mars -- but now an expedition is heading from Earth to Mars. It's a really wacky idea, but effectively handled. Another religiously oriented story is "The Man", about an expedition from Earth which arrives at an alien planet just after a very special man came. "The Fox and the Forest" is a time travel story, with a couple from the future escaping oppression by hiding in Mexico in 1938. "Marionettes, Inc." is a predictable but effective story of a man trying to cheat on his wife by fooling her with an android substitute for himself. "Kaleidoscope" is a famous and effective story about a rocket ship blowing up and the spacemen descending to the Earth's surface as meteors -- focussing on the dying thoughts of one of the men. "The City" is a nice SF horror piece about a city on an alien planet, waiting for just the right visitors. "Zero Hour" is another horror piece, about kids helping out an alien invasion. With "The Veldt" this story shares a rather dark view of children and their interaction with parents. In sum, this is a fine collection, though I'd say that The Martian Chronicles is over all the better book.

Reading over my lists of the best of Bradbury's stories, I am struck by how many of his best pieces are essentially horror stories. "The Third Expedition", "Usher II", "The Exiles", "The Veldt", "The City", "Marionettes, Inc.", "Zero Hour" -- all essentially horror, often quite spooky. A case could be made for "There Will Come Soft Rains", "No Particular Night or Morning", and "The Martian" also being called horror. I guess that isn't really a surprise, given Bradbury's reputation.

Birthday Review: Stories of Lucius Shepard

I suppose it would be fair to say my relationship with Lucius Shepard's fiction was fraught. Perhaps it was influenced by my very minimal online contacts with him, in which he was purely and simply an asshole. (Many of my friends have spoken much more kindly of him, and I dare say he was very good to a lot of people. All I can suggest is that possibly they weren't people who occasionally wrote less than adulatory reviews of his work -- and I can only add, that the testimony of those who knew him personally is more important than mine. He didn't know me, and he got mad (I assume) at my reviews. That's not precisely unusual for a writer. I could add ... but I won't.) At any rate -- Shepard was a writer who at his best was truly brilliant, and who at his worst was pretty awful. That's no crime. He tended to go on too long, and he tended to repeat himself too much from story to story. His prose was that sort that gets overpraised by SF readers -- lots of big words, some of which worked. The relationships his male characters had with women seemed seriously messed up to me -- there was a lot of "Madonna/Whore" confusion in his depiction of his women characters. And yet, when he was on, his imagination was really exciting, and when his prose was focussed, it was impressive.

Locus, February 2002

January's Sci Fiction offering is a novella in four parts, "Over Yonder" by Lucius Shepard. This new story is a bit different for him. It begins as a story about Billy Long Gone, an alcoholic hobo who disappears one night, chasing a stranger who seems to have stolen his dog. Billy ends up with the stranger on a curious, living, train, headed into a wholly different world. He is himself reborn, no longer an alcoholic, in much better health. And this world, called Yonder, is in some ways a paradise -- food and housing for a couple of hundred "escaped" hobos are readily available.  But Billy soon finds that life in Yonder is rather stagnant, even as he rekindles an old romance.  When he further learns how dangerous Yonder can be, he wonders if he ought to hop a train and go further -- over the mountains beyond Yonder, where others have gone, but none have returned.  The eventual message is rather banal, if honest enough. The prose seems a bit less indulgent than in some of Shepard's other recent novellas, which is all to the good. Shepard's inventions for Yonder are interesting enough (and a bit reminiscent of Jonathan Carroll): the predatory beardsleys, for example, which attack the living trains; or the mysterious fishing Elders; but those inventions don't necessarily seem part of a greater whole. I suppose this story either needed to be somewhat longer, elaborating the world, or somewhat shorter -- but if not completely satisfying, it's still well worth reading.

Locus, March 2003

February was a strong month for Sci Fiction. Lucius Shepard's "Senor Volto" is pretty much standard latter-day Shepard: Latin American setting, casual violence, doomed sex, strange airborned beings. The title character is an itinerant entertainer who straps himself to a battery and deals electric shocks to men interested in proving their machismo. He tells of his life as a cuckolded hotel owner, how he came to be "Senor Volto", and the strange insights he gained in the process.

The best pieces in the March Asimov's are Stephen Baxter's "The Great Game" and Lucius Shepard's "Only Partly Here". ...  Shepard's story is the best of the few SF stories I've seen to date which directly tackle 9/11. It's very subdued for Shepard, which I have become convinced is a positive sign. A young man working on a WTC cleanup crew meets a woman in a bar, and over several days they help each other deal with their different issues re the 9/11 tragedy. Of course, something else is going on, and Shepard springs his (in retrospect predictable and perhaps a bit too sentimental) surprise very nicely indeed.

Locus, July 2003

Finally, June at Sci Fiction is given over to a long Lucius Shepard novella, "Jailwise". A serial con hears of a strange jail in Northern California, and manages to be transferred there. The jail is isolated from the rest of the world, it seems, and is inhabited by various levels of inmates, and by "plushes", men who seem to be women at times, and who act as prostitutes for the rest of the jail. The narrator's artistic ability leads him to be commissioned to create a mural in commemoration of the long expected "new wing", and his growing knowledge of the place leads him to grudgingly except that this may be leading to some sort of strange transformation or redemption, while his growing love for one of the "plushes" leads him to wonder what she or he really is. I found this more interesting than many of Shepard's recent stories, but just a bit disappointing in resolution – perhaps I expected too much, but the story seemed to promise something spectacular and settle for half-measures. Still, a solid piece of work, one of the better recent Shepard stories.

Locus, September 2003

August at Sci Fiction was a decent but not spectacular month. Lucius Shepard is back, with a solid story in much his usual manner. "A Walk in the Garden" is about a soldier in near-future Iraq who investigates a strange formation unexpectedly opened by American military operations. The locals say it is Paradise, but to an American it might be rather the opposite ...

Locus, November 2003

The other novellas in the October-November Asimov's are "Ariel", by Lucius Shepard, and "Welcome to Mt. Olympus, Mr. Hearst", by Kage Baker. The first is a pretty good story of battle across dimensions that made me think of Poul Anderson's The Corridors of Time. Shepard's main character is a history professor searches for a backwoods West Virginia creature who just might be a refugee from a parallel world. Entertaining stuff, but I thought it perhaps too unbelievable, and also marred by Shepard's curiously hyperromantic and sentimental view of male/female relations.

Locus, January 2004

Sci Fiction for December features a Lucius Shepard novella plus a Christmas novelette from Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Shepard's "Liar's House" is a new Dragon Griaule story: welcome news! It tells of a rather thuggish man who has fled to the village Teocinte, close by the paralyzed dragon, after committing several murders. Near Griaule he sees another dragon, which seems to transform into a woman, and he finds himself compelled into a relationship with her, in the end chosen to father a child for Griaule.

Locus, September 2005

Sci Fiction for August features a long story by Lucius Shepard, "Abimagique",... Shepard's story is nice work, about a student who falls for a very strange woman named Abimagique. Naturally, there is lots of great sex, and a sinister secret. I must say I thought it all tosh, but entertaining tosh.

Locus, January 2006

Lucius Shepard’s “The Emperor” (Sci Fiction, 12/05) is entirely characteristic of his work, at least the science fictional half: a competent, sensitive, and damaged man in a hellish Alaskan mine tries to escape after the AIs and robots operating the place seem to go mad. In so doing he is forced to confront his inability to love, and to come to grips with potential transcendence. Shepard dangles always on the edge of self-parody – here I think he goes just slightly over the edge.

Locus, April 2007

Lucius Shepard’s “Dead Money” (Asimov's, April-May) concerns a small time criminal who brings a mysterious poker player to the attention of a more influential gangster. The poker player is a zombie, controlled by a woman for whom the criminal soon falls. The gangster has a use for the poker player, and the whole ménage ends up on a Florida estate, for a climactic poker game. It’s often quite funny – Shepard can be a very funny writer when he wants to be (not often enough) – and it has an absolutely dead perfect ending, which really makes the story work. No question the story has some of Shepard’s weakness – it’s too long, the prose is sometimes careless – but in the end Shepard brings it off very well.

Locus, October 2009

Not surprisingly, perhaps, I saw a few edge cases in the huge 60th Anniversary issue of F&SF, a magazine that declares the possibility of combining SF and Fantasy in its title. And so we have “Halloween Town” by Lucius Shepard, to my mind his best story this year. Shepard opens by writing “This is the story of Clyde Ormoloo and the willow wan, but it’s also the story of Halloween, the spindly, skinny town that lies along the bottom of the Shilkonic Gorge, …” Halloween’s geography makes it sort of two dimensional – the rooms of the houses are arranged vertically, like toy blocks, up the sides of the gorge. It has a narrow economy as well, based on steeped walnuts and on the largesse of an eccentric rock star, Pet Nylund. Clyde Ormoloo is a 40ish construction worker who gained increased intelligence and a mysterious ability to see into the minds of others in an accident, and he is driven to move to Halloween. The story itself concerns the political structure of Halloween, which at first seems a generally nice place but which turns out inevitably to have a darker side, and also Clyde’s growing and dangerous relationship with “the willow wan”, a strange girl who turns out to have been Pet Nylund’s girlfriend. Both these strands are well enough resolved, though a little anti-climactically (the end struck me as honest but something of a letdown). What I liked most, however, were the descriptions of Halloween, and the not entirely serious telling of the story – Shepard is usually better when he doesn’t take himself entirely seriously. As for the SF/Fantasy question: in many ways the story reads fantastically, and the town, ostensibly located somewhere in the contemporary US, is clearly not real (and implausible), but almost every element is explained quasi-plausibly (with the exception, to my mind, of Clyde’s mysterious new vision). I’d say it’s a story that doesn’t much care whether it’s SF or Fantasy.

Locus, November 2009

Another fine big anthology is Songs of the Dying Earth, a celebration of Jack Vance via a host of stories set in his most famous milieu. Almost every story here is entertaining, many very much so, but none quite seems brilliant to me. The best of the lot is probably Lucius Shepard’s "Sylgarmo's Proclamation", which marries Shepard’s voice and an imitation of Vance’s voice to very good effect. As for the plot, a man is approached by certain individuals desiring revenge on Cugel the Clever, and he is induced to guide them to a remote tower to confront Vance’s famous antihero – Shepard is suitably inventive as to the complications that ensue.

Locus review of Teeth (August 2011)

Lucius Shepard’s “Slice of Life” gets its Florida milieu perfect, in telling of a teenaged girl with a reputation who falls in with a vampire woman who wants her to bring her five people to consume, to restore her power, and to resist vampire killing creatures called Djadadjii.

Locus review of Ghosts by Gaslight (September 2011)

Lucius Shepard’s “Rose Street Attractors”, in which the narrator, an alienist named Prothero, is inveigled by Jeffrey Richmonda fellow club member into investigating the case of the apparent haunting, by his sister, of the whorehouse he inherited after his sister’s mysterious death. The “steampunk” aspect is a device intended to clean London’s fog, which indeed seems to attract ghosts. Other complications include a darker side to Richmond’s relationship with his sister, and Prothero’s love affair with one of the remaining prostitutes … in all, it’s quite entertaining, and rather gentler than usual for Shepard.

Another Belated Birthday Review: Stories of Greg Egan

The great Greg Egan had a recent birthday which I missed due to a trip I took. But it's not too late to catch up, with a selection of my Locus reviews of his short fiction. Alas, I wasn't writing these in the '90s, when he fully erupted on the SF scene -- some of my favorite SF short stories ever are among his '90s work, including above all "Wang's Carpets", truly on the the best SF novelettes ever. This selection also doesn't include my look at his latest Analog story, "The Slipway", from the July-August issue, which is very fine work.

Locus, June 2002

The February Interzone leads with Greg Egan's novella "Singleton". This story brings to mind predecessors like "All the Myriad Ways" by Larry Niven, and "Divided by Infinity" by Robert Charles Wilson, as its protagonist deals with the idea that the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics is true. That is, any decision we make we made all possible ways, in different universes. For Niven's protagonist, the resulting question was "Why do anything?" For Egan's hero, Ben, the problem is a feeling of guilt: he is living a fairly happy life, presumably the result of having made some fairly good decisions. How does he deserve this, while his counterparts in alternate universes are condemned to whatever misery resulted from "wrong" decisions?

Locus, April 2006

Greg Egan’s “Riding the Crocodile” (One Million A. D.) is intriguing enough, but somehow doesn’t quite have the spark of his best work. It’s about a posthuman couple trying to cap a very long life by contacting the mysterious civilization called the Aloof in the Galaxy’s core.

Locus, September 2007

Greg Egan seems to be fully back in the field after years helping people entangled in Australia’s refugee mess: last year we saw a fine novella, and this year there has been a new story in Dozois and Strahan’s The New Space Opera and now “Dark Integers” in the October-November Asimov’s. This is a sequel to his earlier story “Luminous”, in which a small group of mathematical researchers discovered that the mathematical rules of our universe aren’t constant – and that finding other “true” rules implies finding a parallel universe. Worse, the two universes don’t interact well – the imposition of “our” mathematical truth is destructive to them and vice versa. As this story opens, the three people in on this secret have been maintaining a sort of DMZ between the two universes with the help of someone in the other universe for over a decade. But now there are hints that someone else may have stumbled on this mathematical curiosity – which could be very dangerous to the other universe. And likewise very dangerous to us, if they choose to retaliate. The story concerns attempts to explain some new notions about the maths behind this idea – interesting notions but not that easy to follow. But the state of hopeless war implied between two incompatible universes is depressing as described. And while I can’t really believe in the basic idea, it is delightfully loopy and original – simply different enough that we know we’re reading Egan. The story works for its weird SFnal interest – and it also works in sadly depicting two sides who can’t trust each other.

Locus, October 2007

“Induction”, by Greg Egan (Foundation #100), about the eventual results of an unmanned probe to another star system. The story primarily follows a woman who works on the original launch, and who gets a surprising offer when the probe responds from the new system. The message is a fairly central SFnal message – certainly one expressed by many other stories – but Egan’s presentation is up to the current date and plausible.

Locus, June 2008

Interzone in April features a new Greg Egan story, sort of a modern day “Microcosmic God”. In “Crystal Nights” a brilliant rich man, Daniel Cliff, sponsors an attempt to breed intelligent beings insides a computer. The goal is simply AI, but the forced evolution he plans to use raises the question: What do we owe artificial beings we “create”, even if they are a simulation? If we create them in conditions which require their death, are we murderers? Cliff is forced to confront that idea, but his attempts to evade it have concomitant problems. The story sharply examines the basic moral issues, cleverly suggests eventual unexpected consequences, and also speculates buzzingly on computer and biological (and combined) means of evolving intelligence.

Locus, January 2016

This month we get two truly exceptional novellas – either one would be a wholly worthy Hugo winner. From the December Asimov's we get Greg Egan's “The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred”, tense political SF set in the Asteroid Belt. The politics are appropriately and believable futuristic (though as one might expect you can draw analogies to present day (and decades or centuries past!) political battles – and I suspect different people will draw different parallels, for me an indication that the story is more about real human action than in grinding any contemporary ax). We open with a woman from Vesta setting out on a trip to Ceres, hidden in a piece of rock, part of the economic link between the two asteroids: Vesta getting ice in exchange for rock. We learn the back story: a portion of the Vestan community has been ostracized by a new political movement for the supposed economic sins of their ancestors. (There is an intriguing economic and philosophical debate encapsulated there, that I'll leave for the reader to unpack, but it's Sfnally zingy all by itself.) Many of the persecuted Vestans are escaping to Ceres in the “river of rock”. Most of the rest of the story unfolds in parallel on Vesta, as Anna, the woman in charge of handling the new arrivals to Ceres, deals with them and in particular with a terrible decision she is forced to make; and in the past on Vesta, as we learn about the political changes there, and in particular the acts of a resistance group. Egan sets up an almost impossible political dilemma – with true villains but with no easy answers on how to deal with them; and with good (but not perfect) people faced with no-win situations.

Locus, August 2017

A new Greg Egan piece is always worth your time. In Tor.com for August he offers “Uncanny Valley”. This is the story of Adam, who we soon gather is a recreated version of a famous writer, based on memory uploads and the like. Adam faces opposition from his original’s family, and from the law, which doesn’t recognize his personhood, but the emotional center of the story concerns his realization that he isn’t his original – and why; as well as his encounter with his original’s husband’s family in El Salvador.

Locus, January 2018

Greg Egan is back again in the November-December Asimov’s, with “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine”. This follows a man who loses his job to an AI – and who begins to suspect the AI’s were programmed using his skills. His wife is a nurse, and supports them while he looks hopelessly for a job, and encounters others in the same boat, including a conspiracy nut who claims to have evidence that the AIs have taken over everything. That’s crazy, of course, but his wife loses her job as well, and teachers … the story quietly works its way to a subtle conclusion that resonates with today’s economy, and also reflects on what makes human lives worthwhile.

Locus, October 2018

As usual there is a certain focus on Halloween-themed stories in the September-October Asimov’s, and the cover novella comes from a writer one hardly expects to be working in that mode. But, indeed, Greg Egan’s “3-Adica” does open in a foggy Victorian London of sorts, and Sagreda and her lover Mathis do encounter dangerous vampires. But it’s quickly clear we’re in an Eganesque milieu – a simulated world, based in this case on a fairly lame fantasy novel. But Sagreda and Mathis are searching for a different world entirely – it seems they’ve learned the trick secret of hacking the operating systems of their host machines to jump to different simulations, and they are looking for a world based on the (real) math game 3-adica. Their reasons lie in their real nature, which we learn along the way, and 3-adica, when they get there, is a mathematically fascinating environment. (I was reminded a bit of “Wang’s Carpets” as described in that much earlier Egan story, one of his very best.) The story itself comes to a solid conclusion, with a slingshot – and I gather there is more coming in this milieu. Strong work.

Locus, April 2019

Asimov’s for March-April has a novella from Greg Egan, “Instantiation”, sequel to last year’s “3-adica”. The intelligent “non-playing characters” from the previous story, led by Sagreda, realize that the gaming platform on which they’ve carved out space is in trouble, and may become obsolete. They need to look for a way out to a different platform, which involves some intriguing stuff, such as impersonating Kurt Godel … even more intriguing, I think, is the new platform for which Sagreda is aiming.

Locus, June 2019

Greg Egan’s new long novella (or short novel) is Perihelion Summer. A black hole has been detected entering the Solar System. Depending on how close it comes to Earth, the effects can range from nothing much to massive floods to total destruction. Or what eventuates: a slight perturbation of Earth’s orbit, so that winters are significantly colder and summers hotter. Matt is involved in a small group experimenting with a self-sufficient floating “fish farm”, and his group decides to take their “floating island”, the Mandjet, to sea as the black hole comes, figuring that if the worst (or almost worst) happen that will be the safest place. Over three sections, we follow his efforts, and the reaction of the rest of the world to the disaster, and the ways in which the Mandjet and the people who end up there try to cope – mostly technologically but also socially – with an unexpectedly fraught future. This is neat stuff, with some intriguing sort of small-scale tech, a good bit of Kim Stanley Robinson-style technocratic problem solving (with a bit less optimism than Robinson usually manages), and it’s fascinating reading as well – the sort of book where welding becomes a suspenseful event.

Belated Birthday Review: The Dalemark Quartet, by Diana Wynne Jones

(Cover by Yvonne Gilbert)

Diana Wynne Jones was born 16 August 1934, and died in 2011. She was an exceptional writer of Fantasy, best known for her Young Adult work, but also for some very good work aimed at adults. (And it should be noted that most of her YA books are definitely "to please adults", and the best of them are as complex and challenging, perhaps more so, than most so-called "adult novels".)

In belated recognition of her birthday (hey, I was out of town!) here are four short reviews of the books in her Dalemark Quartet.









Cart and Cwidder

(Cover by Juliet Stanwell Smith)

Cart and Cwidder is the first of Diana Wynne Jones' Dalemark books, which ran to four. Dalemark is a fairly obvious version of Wales.  Indeed, the book reminded me a bit of Lloyd Alexander, though not the Prydain books (set in a version of Wales), but rather the Westmark books, as they share, very roughly, tech level, and interest in politics.

This book concerns an 11-year old boy named Moril, a musician traveling with his family. They earn their money by stopping at towns and villages and playing songs. They also pass news among the people of Dalemark, and take passengers : they and other musicians are the only people who regularly travel between the northern and southern parts of the land, which are at the point of war. The south in particular is being severely repressed by the Earls (there has been no King for some time), and a spy called the Porter is wanted. The family consists of their jolly father Clennen, their beautiful, aristocratic mother Lenina, the talented 15-year old songwriter son Dagner, and a 12-year old girl, Brid, in addition to Moril. The title refers to the cart they live and travel in, and to the main musical instruments they use, "cwidders", which seem guitar-like (is cwidder a cognate for guitar?), and one of which may have magical powers.

On the journey in question, they pick up a rather mysterious traveller, Kialan, a boy of roughly Dagner's age. He has a tendency to disappear when they pass through villages. Then, near the castle of Lenina's former fiance, some men show up and murder Clennen. Abruptly, Lenina heads to her ex-fiance's house, as he has long promised to marry her if she is ever free. But the children recognize one of the murderers as a guest at the house, and they decide to head on their own to the North.  On their way, they find more trouble, and eventually they learn that war is closer to hand than they thought. Can it be stopped?

It's very readable and involving -- I'm not sure DWJ can be other than readable and involving. But it shares with much YA fantasy a certain thinness in the background. DWJ's best work, such as Fire and Hemlock, seems much more completely imagined, more complex in characterization, theme, and morality. This book is fun, and not without real tension and characterization, but it seems minor compared to my favorites among her work. I will be buying the rest of the Dalemark books, however.

Drowned Ammet

(Cover by Geoff Taylor)

#2 is Drowned Ammet, which is set roughly contemporaneously with the first book, Cart and Cwidder. In this book we meet Alhammitt, or Mitt, a poor boy from the far southern town of Holand, who becomes somewhat radicalized when his father and mother are thrown out of their farm for capricious reasons by the tax collector for the evil Earl Hadd, and later his father's involvement with the Free Holanders goes terribly wrong, leaving Mitt and his feckless mother alone.  Mitt grows up a sailor and later a gunsmith's apprentice, and plots to gain revenge on both the Free Holanders (for betraying his father) and on Earl Hadd (for pretty much everything) by killing the Earl and implicating the Free Holanders. But this plot too goes terribly wrong, and Mitt ends up on a yacht with the two of the Earl's grandchildren, heading for the North.  I liked this book quite a bit -- Jones' puts her characters (Mitt and the two noble children) under great stress -- not just physical danger but she pushes them to see their own sever personal faults, and this works very well. The plot is nicely resolved, albeit with a bit of convenience, maybe with a bit more magical help than I like, and with a plot twist that even though I saw it coming, I could hardly believe she had the effrontery to exercise. (And I thought it just a shade unfair.)  All told, though, a very nice book, and coupled with the first clearly part of a series, but reasonably well contained too. 

The Spellcoats

(Cover by Ruth Sanderson)

The third book in Diana Wynne Jones' Dalemark Quartet is The Spellcoats. This book is set in the prehistory of Dalemark, hundreds or thousands of years prior to the action of the first two books (and, I assume, the fourth). It deals with a family of children: Robin, Gull, Hern, Mallard (or Duck), and the narrator, Tanaqui, who is presented as weaving the entire story into the title "spellcoats". The so-called "Heathens" have invaded their land, and Gull and their father are recruited to fight -- a war from which Gull returns apparently mad, and their father not at all.  At the same time, the children face hostility from their fellow villagers, because they are bright-haired like the Heathens. As an enormous flood strikes the village, they are forced to flee down the great River to the Sea. Along the way they receive mysterious advice from their dead Mother, and from a strange man, who seems to be a wizard, and who Robin falls in love with.  They learn that an evil wizard, Kankredin, awaits at the mouth of the river, and that he seems to be calling Gull to him. After encounters with both Kankredin and the young King of the Heathens, they head back upriver with their own King, and with their strangely changed "Undying" figure.  All the children must learn their own surprising destinies, and the true nature of their Undying, of their Mother, of the "wizard" Tanamil, of Kankredin and their River. 

Magic is closer to the surface in this book than in the other two, and the events closer to mythical events.  It is partly a nation-formation tale -- it becomes clear that this is the story of how Dalemark as Dalemark came to be -- as such, an important set up, I would guess, for the final volume, which presumably will concern the reunification of the sundered Kingdom. Perhaps because it's such a "mythical" book, it's also darker, and perhaps grander, than the first two book.  All in all, another very fine DWJ story.

The Crown of Dalemark

(Cover by David Wyatt)

The concluding volume is The Crown of Dalemark. Oddly, this book didn't appear until 14 years after the last of the preceding three: in 1993. Yet it's not an afterthought -- the series clearly needed a closing volume -- I wonder why DWJ waited so long.  At any rate it's a solid conclusion, much longer than the first three books, a bit darker in tone (though really all four books have dark overtones), and a logical and different than expected resolution to the events set up in the first books.

There are two main characters in this book -- Mitt, also one of the heroes of book 2 (Drowned Ammet), and Maewen, a girl from the future of Dalemark -- a time very roughly corresponding to our own time in terms of technological development. Maewen, while visiting her father (her parents are separated), meets a couple of strange individuals. One, she soon learns, is Kankredin, the evil wizard from The Spellcoats, while the other is another of the Undying. This character maneuvers her back into the past, to take the place of Noreth, a girl from Mitt's time who looks just like Maewen. Noreth was a descendant of the rightful King of Dalemark, and she had planned to find the four objects that only the King can use (a cup, a ring, a sword, and a crown) and reclaim the Crown of Dalemark and reunite the sundered kingdom.  But Noreth disappeared before she could accomplish this, and Maewen must walk the roads of Dalemark to find these objects in her place. The powers that be, naturally enough, oppose Noreth's quest, and she is stalked by assassins. One of these is Mitt, who is blackmailed by his Northern hosts into going after Noreth -- but after meeting her Mitt refuses, and soon he joins her tiny entourage, along with the hero of Book 1 (Cart and Cwidder): Moril the Singer, as well as another Singer, and the clever but perhaps not trustworthy southern nobleman who was also exiled to the North with Mitt, and the Undying who has sent Maewen here.

Maewen, Mitt, and the others wander about the countryside, often in rather magical fashion, tracking down the four objects, but also trying to elude the assassins, and eventually armies, which are trying to stop.  Maewen's only goal is to give the objects to the man she knows became king: Amil the Great, the man who more or less singlehandedly founded modern Dalemark.  But who could he be?  There is no sign of him.  The resolution is surprising and rather effective. Jones makes excellent use of the rather unusual magic "system" (though it's not really systematic, and is perhaps more effective for that) that she has established, especially the Undying, who are like gods but not by any means omnipotent or even all-knowing.  The four books represent a very solid work of YA fantasy.

Birthday Review: Stories of Rachel Pollack

Rachel Pollack's birthday was August 17th. I was out of town, so, catching up, here's a quick look at a few of her stories I've reviewed in Locus:

Locus, June 2007

In Interfictions, a new anthology devoted to interstitial writing, oddly, the stories I prefer here all have religious themes. Best is Rachel Pollack's "Burning Beard", about the Biblical Joseph looking back at his life from old age. It is interstitial in its contemporary language -- even slang -- and perhaps its irreverence, but really it is a straightforward and sympathetic look at an interesting character.

Locus, May 2008

Again at F&SF for May the longest story is the best: “Immortal Snake” by Rachel Pollack. This is a mythic story of an Empire ruled by a man chosen by lot. He chooses two companions, and they rule until the priests (or the stars) decide they must die. A new ruler, not much given to responsibility, chooses his politically engaged sister and a slave who happens to be a mesmerizing storyteller as his companions. What follows is a love story, and a story of political change – and, inevitably, a tragedy.

Locus, July 2012

I thought the best story in the July-August F&SF was “Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls”, by Rachel Pollack. Jack Shade is a Traveller, which here means a man who can go between worlds, particular to the place ghosts go. He is hired by a man who is being haunted by his late wife. Shade agrees to follow her “shade” to the Forest of Souls, to try to free her, but of course he is surprised by what he learns about the woman's life and death – surprise and put in great danger. The primary story is strong here, but Jack's own story – his current life, and the tragedy in his past, the loss of his wife and daughter – is also revealed, to moving effect.

Locus, November 2013

So to Van Gelder's primary outlet … the September-October F&SF has a novella as well, Rachel Pollack's “The Queen of Eyes”, another Jack Shade story. Jack is a Traveler, capable among other things of traveling between “worlds”, and he's also still mourning his wife's murder and his daughter's exile to the Forest of Souls. Here he is engaged by a woman to find her missing mother – who turns out to be the Queen of Eyes. The story starts slowly, even frustratingly, but about halfway through it takes flight, weaving a nice mystery story with colorful fantastic elements and an effective working out of family dynamics.

Locus, May 2017

Speaking of which, the other “investigation” story is part of an ongoing F&SF series: this is Rachel Pollack’s latest Jack Shade tale, “Homecoming”. Jack’s latest client is a modest middle aged woman who has a feeling some part of her is missing – perhaps her soul? She believes Jack can do a “soul retrieval”, and the unfortunate thing is that he can, and is compelled to by his curse. So Jack ventures into – wherever he goes – and with some difficulty retrieves what he’s been asked to. Which turns out rather badly, as instead of the poor woman’s soul, he has liberated an ancient evil being, which immediately begins a murder spree. And so Jack must try to clean up the mess, which involves asking for help from some questionable allies, including a somewhat modern djinn, and the Old Man of the Woods. Again, very entertaining – perhaps some of the magic comes off a bit ad hoc, and the innocent deaths don’t have the impact I’d hope, but it is a solid entry in a consistently interesting series.

Birthday Review: Stories of Brian W. Aldiss

Birthday Review: Stories of Brian W. Aldiss

I've written about Brian W. Aldiss each of the past two years at this time -- he died two years ago, and I posted an Ace Double review in his memory, and last year on his birthday I posted another Ace Double review. So this year here's a highly random look at a few of his very many short stories, not at all, really, his best work. But it's what I have! And Aldiss was always worth a look.

Review of New Worlds, December 1955

In "Panel Game" (4200 words) Aldiss presents an overpopulated future in which people are expected to watch "telly" constantly, particularly the channels aimed at their social stratum. The viewpoint couple are surprised to be visited by a dashing man who claims to be a rebel against the government, and they offer him some help (reluctantly, in the case of the husband, eagerly, in the case of the wife). No prizes for guessing what he really is ... A cynical story, reasonably effective if quite predictable.

Capsule look at Who Can Replace a Man?

The other Aldiss book I read was a short story collection, Who Can Replace a Man?.  This is a 1965 collection of Aldiss' best short SF to that date. Some of the stories are very good, perhaps most of all "Old Hundredth", though I also liked "Man in his Time", "A Kind of Artistry" and the title story.  A few of the others are rather dated, though "Basis for Negotiation" rather strikingly predicts SDI.

Review of F&SF, April 1967

The other overpopulation piece is "Randy's Syndrome", by Brian W. Aldiss (8800 words). A woman living in an arcology of sorts is pregnant, but her baby goes on strike -- refuses to be born. This strike spreads to other unborn babies. The child learns to communicate with his mother, and basically announces that he doesn't want to come into the terrible world the adults have left him. It's a nice concept for a satirical story, and it's quite well executed.

Review of Cosmos, September 1977

Brian W. Aldiss's "Horsemen" is a little morality piece with the basic message "Earthmen are evil", telling of an alien planet full of simple -- might one say "unfallen"? -- folk, who do not know war or, I suppose the title would hint, Death, Pestilence, or Famine. "Until the Earth ship came." A bit shrill for my taste.

Review of Galileo, March 1978

Aldiss's "Non-Isotropic" is a rather odd story, not unusual for Aldiss, in which he presents an obsessed scientist who makes a spectacular discovery about the nature of the universe and consciousness and perhaps God. His own relationship, or lack of such, with his short-term mate and son is the center of the story. Interesting, didn't quite work for me.

Locus, April 2003

The Winter issue of the elegant and atmospheric British magazine The Third Alternative features an interview with Brian Aldiss, along with an amusing and mordant short-short, "Commander Calex Killed, Fire and Fury at the Edge of the World, Scones Perfect". A man flees a hopeless war with invading aliens, striking across Central Asia with a mysterious woman, ending up at a tea shop. That's about all, but Aldiss' control of tone is perfect: a fine miniature.

Locus, November 2003

On the face of it I suppose it's not surprising that both Grand Masters in this October-November Asimov's offer rather old-fashioned, but quite effective, stories. Brian W. Aldiss's "The Hibernators" is listed as a short story but by my word count is easily a novelette. On a planet orbiting a gas giant such that it spends half a year in winter caused by eclipse, most people spend the winter hibernating. But an adolescent decides not to sleep, and is shanghaied into becoming cannon fodder in a war for control of an odd device called the Insulator. A "Conceptual Breakthrough", naturally, is on the horizon, though Aldiss resolves things just a bit unexpectedly. First rate work.

Locus, October 2005

This is in many ways an aging field, and the September Asimov’s provides some evidence of that by featuring stories by two writers in their 80s. But both are close to the top of their form. ... Also solid is Brian W. Aldiss’s “Pipeline”, which also deals with the West and Islam. The action is fairly simple – the chief engineer of a pipeline leading from Turkmenistan to Turkey decides to drive its length upon completion – which turns out to be a dangerous undertaking. The story has the odd SFnal touch (driverless cars, some hints of a changed political landscape), though the action itself, and the interactions of the morally ambiguous set of characters, could come from any spy story – not a complaint, mind you – it’s well done and exciting.

Birthday Review: The Anthony Villiers Novels, by Alexei Panshin

Today is Alexei Panshin's 79th birthday. I wanted to highlight his work with a look at my favorites among his work, the Anthony Villiers novels. This is something I wrote back in 2001, though I don't think my perspective has really changed.

Long ago I read at least one of Alexei Panshin's Anthony Villiers novels, and I remembered the book with some affection.  I ran across all three of them in a used book store a little while back, so I bought them and decided to give them a reread.  I read the three books very quickly -- they are very readable books, witty, with nice characters that you root for, and considerable narrative momentum in the absence of particularly rigorous plots. The first book has an introduction by Samuel R. Delany, in which he calls the series a roman fleuve and compares it to A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell.  That qualifies as one of the less acute comments Delany has made, IMO.  Just because a series of books is a series doesn't make it a roman fleuve, and certainly just because a series of books is vaguely comic in tone and about the doings of bohemian and upper class sorts doesn't make it much like A Dance to the Music of Time (which is one of my favorite 20th Century works.)  That said, the description I gave above, "very readable, witty, with nice characters ..., and considerable narrative momentum in the absence of particularly rigourous plots" actually does apply fairly directly to Dance.  But let that pass -- the Villiers books don't really resemble Powell's great novel all that much, but they are very enjoyable.  Indeed, I was quite surprised by how much I liked them -- more than I expected by a long shot.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

Star Well (1968) is the first.  Anthony Villiers (aka Viscount Charteris) is a 30ish man in a future Galactic Empire.  His father has despaired of him after Villiers divorced the woman he had been pushed into a quasi-political marriage with, and he has been given an allowance and apparently told to wander the less travelled parts of the Empire.  But, we immediately gather, he is a very talented man. (Indeed, though I don't really think Panshin necessarily had read Dorothy Dunnett back in 1968 when these books came out (though The Game of Kings dates to 1961, so he could have), in some ways Villiers recalls Lymond (with a bit less of an edge -- the books are comedies, after all).  Though as Sherwood Smith points out, more likely Villiers and Lymond both descend from such ancestors as the Scarlet Pimpernel and Lord Peter Wimsey.)  Villiers is slight, handsome, a great dresser, very polite, very intelligent, good with weapons, etc. etc.  He travels everywhere in the company of an alien Trog named Torve.  Torve is a philosophical being, in appearance a 6 foot tall furry frog, who composes "musical" pieces which sound like "Thurb".


Villiers finds himself on Star Well, an isolated planetoid in the middle of the Flammarion Rift, which is something of a tourist attraction -- basically an hotel/casino.  He is a bit short of cash, but partly by outfoxing the crooked casino operators, he is on his way to getting enough money to head to the planet where his father's allowance can be claimed.  On Star Well he discerns that something fishy is going on, particularly when he stumbles across a starship landing port that is not mentioned on most maps of the planetoid.  He also encounters a plucky 15 year old girl who is chafing at the thought of the four years her father (as it turns out, a friend of Villiers) means her to spend at a finishing school.  And he finds himself the target of a clumsy attempt at a scam.  Torve the Trog shows up in the company of a fat Mithraist priest named Augustus Srb, who may not be all he seems.  After some enjoyable capering about, we learn that Srb is an Inspector General, convinced that something nasty is going on behind the scenes a the casino.  Villiers, seemingly by accident, ends up helping out.  The ending involves a duel, and then a scary conclusion where Villiers' 15 year old friend stumbles into real danger and he manages to rescue her at the last minute.  It's handled with a nice very light touch, and lots of real cleverness, and dry humor.  Very enjoyable.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

The Thurb Revolution (1968) finds Villiers and Torve on Shiawassee, a planet under a somewhat strict censorship regimen.  Almost any sort of art is forbidden, so, by mysterious means, Villiers ends up heading to another planet in the system, Pewamo, which is used only for camping and very limited tourism.  He influences some idle youth from Shiawassee to follow him, and almost by accident ends up starting a new artistic movement.  Plus he encounters his old friend Fred, who is fleeing an arranged marriage of his own (remember that Villiers had trouble with his arranged marriage).  One of the cute things Panshin does is never tell us who Fred really is in The Thurb Revolution -- but an offhand reference in Star Well makes it clear that he is actually the Emperor's second son.  Throw in an intelligent cloud that thinks it is God, an assassin, a gawky young woman disguised as a man, a set of acquaintances of Villiers engaged in an unusual form of Tag, and you have another feather light but very enjoyable book.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

The third, and, sadly, probably last, of these novels is Masque World (1969).  The book closes with an announcement that the fourth, The Universal Pantograph, will be appearing soon, but it's been over 30 years now, with no sign of it. Apparently (at any I heard it on Usenet, so it must be true) Panshin was dissatisfied with his treatment at the hands of Ace, perhaps not surprisingly.  He still makes occasional noises that sound like he might eventually write it (and perhaps the up to three further books originally planned) -- but I fear that the 60ish Panshin would not write the book the 30ish Panshin would have, most likely to the detriment of the product. [Now that Panshin is nearly 80, I think all thoughts of another novel of any sort from him can likely be abandoned.]

At any rate, Masque World, which turns out to be the Villiers book I had read in my teens, is of a piece with the previous two. Light-hearted and clever, very fun to read.  The plot is hardly worth recounting -- it concerns a nobleman (and relative of Villiers) obsessed with melons, two Trogs (one real and one fake), a Christian historian, the phenomenon of peelgrunt, the Monists, the parents and sister of Louise Parini, and an incompetent bureaucrat and his alien supervisor.  Good solid fun.  And I gnash my teeth that I will never read the "real" Universal Pantograph.

All in all, these are three of the most purely enjoyable SF books I have read recently.  Not serious in plot or tone, they still allow room for meditation on serious topics.  And they are very nicely constructed with a very light but sure hand, and interlarded with funny bits -- sometimes farcically so, more often arch or subtle.  First rate -- on the evidence of these books, Panshin's near complete disappearance from the fiction writing world is just a damn shame.  (His only other novels are the Nebula-winning Rite of Passage (1968) and a fantasy co-written with his wife Cory Panshin, Earth Magic (1978).) Phoenix Pick published an omnibus edition of the three Anthony Villiers novels just this past June as New Celebrations.

Belated Birthday Review: Ward Moore

Belated Birthday Review: Ward Moore

Ward Moore (1903-1978) published five novels in the field, beginning with Greener Than You Think (1947). (He also wrote significant non-SF work, including Breathe the Air Again and Cloud by Day.) His most famous novel by far is Bring the Jubilee (1953), a very well-regarded alternate history in which the South wins the Civil War. He is also remembered for his last novel, Joyleg (1962), a collaboration with Avram Davidson, about a Revolutionary War veteran discovered to be still alive in the present time; and for a stunning post-Apolacyptic (or "during the Apocalypse") story, "Lot", along with its sequel, "Lot's Daughter". As a writer he started late and finished early, with the great bulk of his fiction appearing between 1947 and 1962 (though a few more stories appeared in the '70s). His second wife was Raylyn Moore, whom I remember for a fair amount of enjoyable SF stories from the '70s.

Here's a collection -- too short, I dare say -- of things I've written about some of Ward Moore's work. Moore's birthday was August 10, so this is a bit late. But I do want to keep emphasizing the work of these minor but interesting writers.

F&SF, May 1953

"Lot", by Ward Moore, is a quite remarkable post-Apocalyptic story. Arthur Jimmon has planned for nuclear war, and when it comes he and his family are ready to escape. But as they travel, with supplies, to Jimmon's planned refuge, his family complain and complain. Jimmon seems the true competent man, well-prepared -- and ready to coldly dispense with any interference. I won't spoil the ending, but it's truly shocking. The story is actually a bitter, horrified look at a certain kind of man -- it's something like satire, something like savage condemnation. It's a powerful story. There was a sequel, "Lot's Daughter", almost as strong. The two were the source material for the move Panic in Year Zero!, which apparently leached all the vicious power of the story from it.

F&SF, September 1955

Ward Moore's "Old Story" (6700 words) is quite good. An aging popular painter, also a philanderer, reflects on his unsatisfying life -- his failure to establish an enduring relationship with any of his three wives, and his lack of critical appreciation. If only he had chosen the right woman back then, he'd have stuck with "real" art ... Then he finds himself back in his younger self, at the critical point. And he chooses a different woman, and indeed life is very different -- he becomes a lionized artist, and a successful businessman as well. (Sort of a Wallace Stevens of the art world.) But he's the same person, which means that despite his tolerant wife, he can't stop fooling around. Still, he comes to the end of a happy life -- but then ... The twist is a good one, and quite forthrightly feminist.

Amazing, February 1960

(Cover by Ed Valigursky)

"Transient" is a short novel complete in this issue. It didn't appear in book form until a small-press "Double" edition in 2013. And I think it's fairly easy to see why. It's a really odd story, ambitious to an extent, but mostly a mess and a failure, at least in my view. It's about Almon Lampley, currently the Governor of his state, by appointment after his predecessor's death. Lampley is beginning his campaign for re-election, when he sneaks out to a small town, and enters a hotel. Then things get strange ... and the rest of the novel is a phantasmagoria of weird, often horrific, events. Lampley encounters strange guests, wanders into what seem other worlds, a weird department store, caves. He encounters a race of tiny people, kidnaps one such woman, who grows larger, whereupon he rapes her. He rapes another (normal) woman along the way. There are hints that all this is in pursuit of some personal issues Lampley has to do with his relationship with his wife, and particular to the tragic history of their son -- though none of this is ever made clear. It ends up being boring and unpleasant, even as paragraph by paragraph a pretty impressive imagination is displayed. Worst of all -- the story basically just stops. It may be that I have totally missed the point.

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller)

Fantastic, March and April 1962

Joyleg, by Avram Davidson and Ward Moore, is an enjoyable novel about a man, Isachar Joyleg, who is discovered to be collecting a Civil War pension. As the war has been over for nearly a century, surely he's a fraud. Two congresspeople, a man and a woman, go to investigate (because which district his old village is in is unclear). They learn (not much of a spoiler) that Joyleg is as old as he claims, due to a concoction of his. We get to see life in this old town, and all this is amusing, and fairly on point. The congresspeople are decent characters too. That said, the story loses momentum along the way, and while it's well worth reading through, parts of the last half are a bit tired.

Birthday Review: Stories of Alan E. Nourse

Alan E. Nourse was a really important writer to me early in my SF reading. I read a number of his YA novels when I first encountered SF, such as The Bladerunner and, most memorably to me, The Universe Between. It was a pleasant surprise to me, decades later, to encounter "High Threshold" in a 1951 issue of Astounding, and realize that this was the novelette from which The Universe Between grew. (It's a cool story of entering another dimension with a different geometry -- it truly wowed me at age 12.) He would have been 91 today, and in his memory here's a (fairly random) selection of my thoughts about his short fiction from some 1950s SF magazines.

Astounding, February 1953

Alan E. Nourse's "Nightmare Brother" (9300 words) is about a man subjected to tortures -- simulated via electrodes in his brain. It seems he must be able to resist any level of torture to survive in deep space. I wasn't convinced.

Space Science Fiction, July 1953

The novelette this time around is "Infinite Intruder" by Alan E. Nourse (9500 words). Roger Strang is working on a project to build a barrier protecting the US from further nuclear attacks (New York has already been destroyed) by the Eurasian Combine. He finds his young son being attacked -- at first as if by accident, but then more directly -- but his son miraculously survives even point blank shots. Strang's investigations lead him to strange discoveries -- he himself has no past, and his best friends and wife seem implicated in the attacks on his son. Then he learns that he is from the future, and all this is a desperate attempt to change the past -- for the evil Dictator in the future is named Farrol Strang. But the past cannot be changed. Maybe, though, if they return forward in time the future (present) can be altered! I thought the story no better than OK.

If, June 1954

Alan E. Nourse's "The Link" (5800 words) is another far future story. Humanity has divided into two groups, a pacifistic group that has learned to live together and create great communal music, and a warlike group that has chased the pacifists from planet to planet over millennia. The Hunters are back again, and one couple from the good guys volunteers to stop running away, but to greet the Hunters and try to reform them. An OK theme, but the story doesn't quite sell it.

Orbit, July-August 1954

"My Friend Bobby", by Alan E. Nourse (3800 words) -- maybe the best story here, about a young boy with telepathic powers, who loves his dog (with whom he can communicate), but who is feared by his mother -- leading to a tragic ending. Nothing special, but solid work.

Galaxy, January 1956

"Brightside Crossing" might be Alan E. Nourse's best story. It's a solid if scientifically obsolete story about trying to cross the Brightside of Mercury (of course, as Larry Niven and the rest of us found out some 45  years ago, there is no "Brightside" of Mercury) -- told by the lone survivor of an earlier attempt to cross the Brightside to a man who wants to try again. The survivor's tale, fairly convincingly from a 1955 point of view, tells of the dangers of the attempt, and the heroic efforts to make it, ending as we know from the start, in failure and an ignominious return. The last line is really neat.

If, October 1957

"RX" by Alan E. Nourse posits a galactic community in which Earth's contribution is medical services. A team of a doctor and a surgeon respond to an emergency summons to a planet which has so far refused to sign a contract with Earth. The planet's ruler is dying, and the witch-doctorish methods of the locals aren't working. Their ethics require them to try to treat him, even though they risk death if they fail. The eventual solution is a bit trivial -- somewhat on purpose -- rather a minor bit of work, I thought.

Birthday Review: Stories of David R. Bunch

Today would have been David R. Bunch's 94th birthday. He was probably the most original writer of Cele Goldsmith’s tenure at Amazing/Fantastic. He has recently been brought back to print by of all organizations The New York Review of Books, via their NYRB Press imprint, with Moderan, a collection of his stories about the half-robots/half-men of Moderan. Bunch (1925-2000) was a Missourian, a graduate of Central Missouri State (where my son got his degree) and of Washington University in St. Louis. He also attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lived in St. Louis most of his life (though I never met him). He was a controversial figure to Amazing’s readers – the letter columns I’ve read featured plenty of screeds against him. But I find his short, very satirical, pieces continually intriguing, if at times a bit difficult.

Amazing, November 1959

David R. Bunch's “The Flesh-Man from Far Wide” is one of the earlier Moderan stories, and it probably serves as a decent introduction. The narrator, a typical psychotic man of Moderan, gets a visitor, who seems possibly to have no robotic “replacements” – no metal parts. And he has other strange ideas, about happiness – he wants to find Moderan’s Happiness Machine. But what do those of Moderan need with happiness?

Fantastic, December 1959

And Bunch’s “Was She Horrid?” is one of his first stories. He’s an author much associated with Goldsmith, though his first two pieces were in If, in 1957 and 1959. His first story for Goldsmith was in the November 1959 Amazing, followed by this one, a Moderan story, about a half-metal man visited by his daughter, ever suspicious that it’s all a plot by his wife in what seems an unending war.

Strange stuff, the essence of Bunch already from the beginning.

Amazing, July 1960

“Penance Day in Moderan”, one of Bunch's earlier Moderan stories, is one of the best, I think. It is told by a vain cyborg, on Penance day, when all the citizens of Moderan march out to shed fake tears. The narrator boasts of his accomplishments, and of what he will do when next they war against each other. It’s quite funny, and quite pointed.

Fantastic, June 1962

David Bunch's "Ended" is longer than most of Bunch's stories, but otherwise wholly characteristic. If you like Bunch -- and for my money he's such an original he demands reading, even though he's neither a comfortable read nor a consistently satisfying read -- you'll find this worthwhile. If not, not.

Fantastic, February 1964

The other is David R. Bunch, the wildly strange writer the great bulk of whose work was very short stories for Goldsmith. “They Never Came Back from Whoosh!” is a satire on commercialism and conformity, about a place said to be wonderful that everyone must visit but no one returns from. It’s one of Bunch’s better pieces I think.

Amazing, August 1964

David Bunch's "The Failure" is a Bunch story, more inscrutable than many, about a forlorn quest for the Final Truth.

Amazing, September 1964

About the Bunch ("A Vision of the King") once again I have nothing much to say -- it's fairly inscrutable as usual.

And, finally, I figured Darryl R. Groupe had to be a pseudonym, and it is, a fairly obvious one for David R. Bunch. Nobody would have been fooled for a second no matter what name was used: "2064, or Thereabouts", is a clearly a Bunch story, about people who are mostly metal, and paranoid, and one who lets an artist into his stronghold. Weird as one expects.

Fantastic, October 1964

Bunch’s “Home to Zero” is not a Moderan story, but it’s certainly a Bunch story, taking on a rather cosmic subject in inimitable Bunch fashion. No point explaining it – it simply needs to be read.

Fantastic, January 1965

David R. Bunch offers “Make Mine Trees” (1,200 words), very strange horror about a man whose wife left him for another man (a Spanish dancer) and who is raising his son alone while working on a formula to save the world. What the formula really does is slowly revealed… pretty effective.

(Cover by Gray Morrow)

Amazing, June 1965

From June, the cover story, David Bunch’s "The Walking, Talking, I-Don’t-Care Man", is a pure Bunch Moderan story, with the narrator, ruling his personal castle, encountering a man/robot who just keeps walking, and refuses to stop, even as his path leads him right through the narrator’s property. It works pretty well, really, in a somewhat talky way.

Fantastic, June 1965

Finally, the inimitable David R. Bunch’s very brief “The Little Doors” is, well, pure Bunch, hard to describe, but pretty effective. It’s about a sort of performance, with weirdly named “creatures” showing up and… well, no point in description. Needs to be read. It’s worth the 600 words.

[It's interesting that Bunch appeared in the last issue of both Amazing and Fantastic to be published by Ziff-Davis and edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli. One suspects she was rushing to get him published before Sol Cohen took over -- and that the cover honor on the last issue of Amazing was a special nod to him, and perhaps an implied rebuke to the new publisher.]

Eternity, 1979

David R. Bunch's "Through a Wall and Back" is impenetrable -- he's always on the thin edge of simply being irritating, and he goes over the edge here.

Birthday Review: Song of Time, by Ian R. MacLeod

Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod (PS Publishing, 978-1-59780-094-5, $14.95, tpb, 253 pages) October 2008.

A review by Rich Horton

Ian R. MacLeod is one of the supreme SF writers of recent years, especially at novelette and novella length, and so it is something of a disappointment that his novels seem to have struggled to find an audience. His newest work is so far only out in the U. K. from the excellent but definitely small outfit PS Publishing. Yet in considering this book I am inclined to understand its failure (so far!) to attract a trade publisher. Song of Time is not a high concept book. Indeed it is difficult to capture it with a single thematic statement. (His two Ace novels, on the other hand, were distinctly about the magical substance aether and the ways in which its use paralleled the Industrial Revolution.) Thus it is, I imagine, a bit harder to “sell” the book. And I must also add that while that is not always a shortcoming, in the present case I think it is rather. About which more later. I must also add that it did win the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best SF Novel of 2008, and also the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Song of Time opens with an aging woman rescuing a drowning man from the ocean off her Cornish house. The man, whom she calls Adam, is a mysterious figure – he has no memory of himself, but he knows – or learns quickly – a great many things, some of which are quite unexpected. He is also a remarkably quick healer, and otherwise unusually constructed. Thus a puzzle is established – but really the book is not about this puzzle (though in the end it is solved, quite satisfactorily).

Instead, ostensibly as both a potential prod to Adam’s memories, and as part of a project she is undertaking before dying – or rather before “passing” to a virtual existence – the protagonist, Roushana Maitland, tells her life story to Adam. (And, in a sense, to herself.) And this is the subject of Song of Time – the life story of a woman of the 21st Century, and thus the story of that Century. And both her story and the century’s story are quite tumultuous. Her mother was born in England to Indian parents, her father is more conventionally “Anglo-Saxon”. Her beloved older brother inherits the English looks, and he is also a brilliant musical talent. But somehow his tragic early death unleashes hitherto unrevealed talent in the more Indian-looking Roushana, and she goes on to become a brilliant concert violinist. She marries one of the greatest conductors of the day, and they have a stormy but mostly loving marriage, two kids, and, too, plenty of tragedy.

The historical background is likewise eventful. We are treated to a variety of disasters – nuclear war, a supervolcano, political upheaval. Roushana’s husband is a black American who is heavily involved in French politics when they meet. Roushana’s mother becomes a central activist for the Indian poor. Roushana herself is more of a homebody in spirit – but her life gives us glimpses of ravaged India and American, and radically altered England. And her approaching death gives us glimpses of a strange future in which the dead live on in virtual space.

All of this is nicely done, but none of it is spectacular. In a way this is an unfair complaint – the imagined 21st Century is a mix of a number of not entirely new speculations – but isn’t this really in its way plausible? Yes it is, but somehow while the future we see is interesting it isn’t quite involving, or really terribly thought-provoking. For different reasons Roushana’s life, which is really the center of the novel, while it too holds the interest, doesn’t end up absorbing. I think in part the problem is one of cliché – her brilliant career just doesn’t convince, seems too easy, too old hat. The same with her stormy marriage – the sexy husband (and the great sex) plus the infidelities and the final tragedy are interesting but, alas, just that bit too melodramatic. And finally Adam’s story, only hinted at, is also interesting but too much of a side issue, and too lightly sketched in, to fully work.

Despite the caveats, I enjoyed Song of Time. It’s never boring, and it’s very nicely written. But it is, I think, in the final analysis a minor work.