Hugo Nomination Thoughts: Short Fiction: Novelette

Novelette

“Everybody From Themis Sends Letters Home”, by Genevieve Valentine (Clarkesworld, October)

“Project Empathy”, by Dominica Phetteplace (Asimov’s, March)

“The Visitor From Taured”, by Ian R. MacLeod (Asimov’s, September)

“The Bridge of Dreams”, by Gregory Feeley (Clarkesworld, March)

“Told by an Idiot”, by K. J. Parker (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 4)

“Seven Ways of Looking at the Sun-Worshipers of Yul-Katan”, by Maggie Clark (Analog, April)

“Blood Grains Speak Through Memories”, by Jason Sanford (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, July 31)

“Fifty Shades of Grays”, by Steven Barnes (Lightspeed, June)

“The Plague Givers”, by Kameron Hurley (Patreon; Uncanny, May)

“Alone, on the Wind”, by Karla Schmidt (Clarkesworld, August)

The Jewel and Her Lapidary, by Fran Wilde (Tor.com Books)

Again, the top five listed here will likely make up my ballot, though any of the others I list would be wholly worthy nominees.

Quick word count note to begin – according to my word counts a few short stories on my (upcoming) list are also eligible in novelette, and a couple of them are right at 7500 words – the boundary between short story and novelette. So those stories may well be listed as novelettes in other’s lists. (Actually, I’m planning a post on the whole notion of word count boundaries for award categories, and on the history of designating stories as “short story” vs. “novelette” vs. “novella” vs. “short novel” etc.)

Apropos to some extent of that, I’ll note that two of the novellas I had listed in my previous post on potential novella nominees technically fit in other categories, and I thank Greg Hullender (and others) for bringing this to my attention. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric’s Mission is just barely too long for the category (300 words – such a small margin that I bet a Hugo Administrator could get away with letting the nomination stand if that were to happen, not that I’m advocating that – just note that in the pre-digital era voters would very likely not know the word count to such precision), and The Jewel and Her Lapidary is technically novelette length (though close enough (16900 words) to novella that it could be listed in that category). I have also been reminded (as I had already acknowledged) that there are some pretty worthwhile novellas I hadn’t yet read – so I’m reading some more novellas, and I’ll make a revised post sometime soon.

Anyway, to the novelettes:

“Everybody From Themis Sends Letters Home” is a really moving story about a group of “beta-testers” for a new virtual reality game who think they are the first colonists on a planet of Proxima Centauri. The braids of the story encompass their experiences on this fictional planet, their experiences “back home” (especially as they have been recruited from the prison population), and the corporate ethical missteps (to put it mildly) surrounding the whole project – and, too, behind it all, is a sort of paean (or so I read it) to the love of story. (I really love Genevieve Valentine’s work, which I find consistently as emotionally engaging as that of any writer.)

Dominica Phetteplace is a fairly new writer, who has been impressive from the getgo, but “Project Empathy” is the first story from her that really wowed me. It’s the first of a series of stories (all so far in Asimov’s, all with titles beginning “Project”) that are going to be a “braided novel”. This story concerns a high school age woman from the economically depressed suburbs of San Francisco who gets a sort of commercial scholarship to a school in the city, in the process agreeing to host an AI that will make her a better worker at the coffee shop/restaurant sponsoring her scholarship. The AI, we soon learn, has its own agenda … and the agendas of various AIs turn out to be a significant narrative impetus in the larger novel.

“The Visitor From Taured” is about a man who is obsessed with proving the existence of parallel

worlds. The story is told by his college friend, a woman who becomes an expert in 20^th Century books (books not being a thing anymore in this future), enough so that (fortuitously) she ends up being able to help him finance the necessary experiment. The story is told beautifully, and resolves to a certain bittersweet melancholy but not at all despairing mood that (to me, anyway) seems characteristic of MacLeod. It’s in a way another story about the SF dream, and its failure. But that might be me imposing my personal obsessions on it. Anyway, it’s really fine work.

“The Bridge of Dreams” is very far future exotic hard SF story, intriguingly Norse-flavored, with a pair of posthumans summoned from the outer planets to the “Sunlit Realms” (the Inner Solar System, particularly Venus) to intervene in a political struggle between “kobolds” and latter day Earth people. This is SF at its weirdest, legitimately strange and convincingly not just contemporary people in funny suits.

“Told By an Idiot” is set in a perhaps slightly alternate Elizabethan England, and is stuffed with neatly turned Shakespearean allusions, in telling of a lucky man (owner of a playhouse), who happens to acquire a bottle that just might have a demon inside it. As clever and knowing as we expect from Parker, and of course as cynically funny, and bitterly logical.

I mentioned the useful weirdness of Greg Feeley’s “The Bridge of Dreams”, and in that context I ought to mention some other stories on this list that are really weird – “Blood Grains Speak Through Memories”, “The Plague Givers”, and “Alone, on the Wind”, particularly. All, to some degree or another, might be called “Science Fantasy”, in that they use both SFnal and Fantastical imagery. (Mind you, “The Bridge of Dreams” is most definitely SF, while “The Plague Givers”, I would say, falls on the Fantasy side of the divide, with the other two stories perhaps straddling the border.) I think there’s something there – perhaps a Clarke’s Law derivation – a really useful way of depicting the far future is to acknowledge that to us in its distant past the far future will probably really seem like fantasy.

A Forgotten SF Novel: The Time-Lockers, by Wallace West

A Forgotten SF Novel: The Time-Lockers, by Wallace West

a review by Rich Horton

Back to a very obscure SF novel by a pretty obscure SF writer. Wallace West (1900-1980) was a lawyer, public relations man, and apparently an expert on pollution. He wrote SF beginning in the late '20s, with his last story appearing in Fantastic in 1978 (so I surely read it, though I don't recall it). Really, West had more or less stopped writing by the late '60s. He only published a few novels, mostly expansions or fixups of earlier shorter pieces. I had seen a couple of stories from early '50s magazines, and thought them surprisingly decent work. So I picked up this book, The Time-Lockers, hoping for the fairly unpretentious entertainment West has given me in other stories. (The title, by the way, is given without the hyphen on the cover of my edition, but that's surely incorrect, as the title page and the original short story, as well as references in the text, all include the hyphen).

(cover by Ed Emshwiller)

My copy is an ex-library edition, probably a first (I doubt there was a second), from the very low-end imprint Avalon, in 1964. The cover is by Ed Emshwiller, and it's two color, no doubt one of the ways Avalon cut costs. The novel is based on a novelette that appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly for August 1956. (Emshwiller also did the cover for this version, and it's gorgeous, much better than the book!)

The novel was a grave disappointment to me, despite a promising central idea. The following review will be full of spoilers -- apologies for that, but I don't think this is a book many people will encounter. By all means skip the rest of the review if you are spoiler-phobic and think you might want to read the book. Short, spoiler-free version: it's about a lobbyist working for the government of the parallel world Tempora, which operates the "time-lockers" by which Americans can trade boring time on Earth for time in Tempora. What Tempora wants from this is one  mystery of the novel: others concern the other aliens interfering with Earth, and the Mob's nefarious plans for the USA. Add in a wacky hypnosis project, and a love affair with an unconventional woman who might just be a Temporan spy -- lots of actually somewhat promising ideas that just never really make a whole lot of sense.

SPOILERS follow.

The book opens with Arnie Davis, a public relations man (and lobbyist), heading home from work one day on the train. He passes the time on the long commute by depositing it in a "time-locker" -- what's meant by this is unclear (partly because it's a mystery to be resolved later), but at first it seems that you give up your unwanted time on Earth in exchange for time spent later on a planet called Tempora, which seems to be an alternate version of Earth, slightly out of phase with our time. What the Temporans get out of this deal is, as I mentioned above, quite unclear.

Arnie is going home to his wife Muriel, who is beautiful but frigid. He is dreading a dinner party with their new neighbors, Dr. Northrup, a clergyman, and his wife Priscilla. But things pick up when Arnie meets Priscilla: she's beautiful, a bit exotic, very intelligent, and unconventional. There seems an immediate mutual attraction, though while it's easy to see what Arnie sees in Priscilla it's hard to see what she sees in him: an overweight middle-aged man in a drone-like job.

We soon realize that one of Arnie's main accounts is with the Temporan government, to support their interest in keeping the Portals between Tempora and Earth open. Soon he is off to Washington D. C. to lobby Senator LeFevre to push for the Department of State to take over administration of the Time-Lockers from the Department of Commerce. Arnie has to act delicately -- it seems that the whole Portal system is under threat from people like Dr. Northrup, who are convinced that the Temporans are immoral, and from the Mob, who are angling to take over the U. S. government and fear Temporan technology. Another angle is from Arnie's mysterious friend Eddie, a cook at a hamburger joint in D. C., who talks as if he is a long-lived alien manipulating humanity for its own good, and who feeds Arnie (a frustrated writer) ideas for SF stories.

This is all weird and unconvincing enough, and a bit all over the map. Then Arnie, after a threat from the Mob, sets up a visit to Tempora, with himself and Muriel, the Senator and his wife, and Priscilla (Dr. Northrup is refused an entry visa by Tempora). Once on Tempora, things start happening. Arnie and Priscilla get together for good, which is fine with Muriel, who has found her repressed artist side, as well as a mysterious faux-Spanish tourist to keep her sexually satisfied. They encounter a brilliant scientist as well, and then there are the strange dreams they have, which eventually reveal the real reason the Temporans have for maintaining the Portal to Earth

There follows the expected Mob takeover, which is facilitated by an animated character nameed Wiley Pan who hypnotizes movie audiences. The Portals are closed, but the Senator manages to find a way back to Earth. Meanwhile Arnie has figured out that much of the time Earthmen spend on Tempora is spent doing hard labor to restore the Temporan society, devastated by a nuclear war. But this is good, really, because Earth people have been ruined by automation -- the honest work is good for them. Also, the hard work has helped Arnie lose a lot of weight, which makes him a better match for Priscilla.

The resolution involves some derring-do when Arnie gets back to Earth, to undo the hypnosis, and to return human society to something better. Meanwhile, Tempora needs improvement as well -- they've been stealing tech from Earth for so long they've lost their way, as well. And then there's the question of Eddie's people, and their meddling. And the question of Priscilla's real identity -- which is an implausible last second pasted-in addition.

There's really too much going on here. Some of the ideas are cute (I liked the time-locker concept, in particular), and some are just too silly. The romance between Arnie and Priscilla is almost interesting, except at the beginning it's undermotivated and implausible. Arnie's character changes as the plot needs. I thought the book showed every sign of slapdash inflation of a tighter original novelette -- so I decided to get a copy of the original magazine in which it appeared, and compare ...

(cover by Ed Emshwiller, courtesy of Galactic
Central and Phil Stephenson-Payne)

So, "The Time-Lockers" appeared in the August 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. It's about 11000 words long. And it's much tighter and more sensible than the novel. It opens much as the novel does, with Arnie on his way home to Muriel, dreading the meeting with the Northrups, only to be enchanted by Priscilla. The crisis at the office is limited to the Temporans complaining about forged time-locker receipts, and also about the lack of women coming to Tempora. Arnie's idea (also in the novel) is to open up lockers in the suburbs, and by way of introduction he arranges for Muriel and Priscilla to accompany him to Tempora. (There is no Senator LeFevre, nor any "Eddie" the alien fry cook.) On Tempora, as in the novel, Muriel takes up with a mobster pretending to be a foreigner, while Arnie and Priscilla get together, and Arnie figures out the secret of the time-lockers -- much as in the novel, they are really a way for Tempora to get labor from Earth people to help rebuild their nuclear-ravaged society. There is no Mob plot to take over the government, and no hypnotizing Wiley Pen. Instead, Arnie decides to stay on Tempora, doing honest work, with Priscilla -- who is (as seemed obvious in the novel until a pasted-in alternate history for her was added) a Temporan agent. It isn't great work, but it's clever and holds together OK.

It turns out that the Wiley Pen stuff (about taking over the government by hypnosis) is folded in from a much earlier story, "The Phantom Dictator" (Astounding, August 1935), while Eddie the alien fry cook seems to be from a story called "BEMA" (Science Fiction Quarterly, February 1957). I don't think West intended any connection between the three stories until it came time to come up with 50,000 words or so that Avalon Books would publish as a novel. A pretty clear example of the sort of mess careless "fixups" could be.

Hugo Nomination Thoughts, Short Fiction: Novellas

Hugo Nomination Thoughts, Short Fiction

It’s that time again, right?

Here’s my thoughts on my Hugo ballot for short fiction. In another post I’ll discuss – less comprehensively – the other categories. As usual, I’m better informed about short fiction than anything else.

I should mention going in that there have been some significant changes to the Hugos. There is a new Hugo Category, for Best Series. (I don’t like the idea much, but I’ll play along.) There is a new non-Hugo, for Best Young Adult Book. There are changes to the voting process: now there will be 6 nominees instead of 5 (though each nominator still just votes for 5), and the 5% rule (that each story on the final ballot must appear on 5% of the nominating ballots) has been eliminated. And the EPH process for counting the final votes has been approved. I won’t try to explain that – there are much clearer explanations than I could offer readily available.

One more note to begin with – though I participate with a lot of enjoyment in Hugo nomination and voting every year, I am philosophically convinced that there is no such thing as the “best” story – “best” piece of art, period. This doesn’t mean I don’t think some art is better than other art – I absolutely do think that. But I think that at the top, there is no way to draw fine distinctions, to insist on rankings. Different stories do different things, all worthwhile. I can readily change my own mind about which stories I prefer – it might depend on how important to me that “thing” they do is (and of course most stories do multiple different things!) – it might depend on my mood that day – it might depend on something new I’ve read that makes me think differently about a certain subject. Bottom line is, in the lists below, I’ll suggest somewhere between 5 and 8 or so stories that might be on my final ballot. Those will be in no particular order. And the other stories I list will all really be about as good – and I might change my mind before my ballot goes in.

The other obvious point to make is that the great bulk of these stories are those that I included in my yearly anthology. There are a few that didn’t make it, for reasons of length, contractual situation, balance, or even that I might have missed a story by the deadline for the book.

Novella

“The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe”, by Kij Johnson (Tor.com Books)

“The Vanishing Kind”, by Lavie Tidhar (F&SF, July/August)

“Lazy Dog Out”, by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s, April/May)

“Maggots”, by Nina Allan (Five Stories High)

Penric’s Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum Literary Agency)

Technologies of the Self, by Haris A. Durani (Brain Mill Books)

The Jewel and Her Lapidary, by Fran Wilde (Tor.com Books)

In this category, there are only two stories included in my book – that’s always the way, with novellas – they take up so much space that I can only fit a couple per year. The top five stories listed will almost certainly be on my Hugo nomination ballot. That said, there are a few significant novellas I have not yet read, so there is some room for change.  But to quickly cover my putative nominees:

“The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe” is a truly lovely story, taking its inspiration and setting from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, but more importantly, written as well as the work of the writer Lovecraft was under the influence of when he wrote his story: Lord Dunsany. The title character is a professor at a women’s college who must chase after a student who has foolishly run away with a man from our world.

“The Vanishing Kind” is dark noir set in an alternate England, under the sway of a Nazi government, having lost World War II. A German screenwriter comes to London partly in pursuit of an actress who had briefly been his lover, only to find her involved in some very scary things – drugs, sex-trafficking, murder – not to mention hidden Jews.

“Lazy Dog Out” is traditional SF adventure, and lots of fun, about a space tug pilot on a moon of a colony planet, who gets stuck in the middle of a nasty plot involving framing some unfortunates for the murder of some visiting aliens.

“Maggots” is a long story about a young man from the North of England who becomes convinced that his Aunt, after a mysterious disappearance and reappearance, has been replaced by something alien. This ends up messing up his relationship with his girlfriend, and he ends up in London, tracking down hints of other people who’ve had similar experiences as his – which leads him to a spooky house where he encounters something really scary, as well as learning a lot about his Aunt that he hadn’t known.

And finally, Penric’s Mission is my favorite so far of Bujold’s three self-published novellas set in her World of the Five Gods. Penric is a young man who in the first story became the host to a demon (that he calls “Desdemona”), which makes him a sorcerer. In this story he travels to another country to try to recruit a popular General for the Duke he’s working for, and ends up enmeshed in local politics, with the General blinded, and Penric trying to help, and falling for the General’s widowed sister in the process. Fun stuff, with some interesting magic.

Old Bestseller: By the Good Sainte Anne, by Anna Chapin Ray

Old Bestseller: By the Good Sainte Anne, by Anna Chapin Ray

a review by Rich Horton

This book was not a major bestseller, but the author seems to have been somewhat popular in her day (the turn of the 20th Century, pretty much). Some of her books were explicitly aimed at young readers, with titles like Dick: A Story for Boys and Girls, and Teddy: Her Book: A Story of Sweet Sixteen. By the Good Sainte Anne, however, is for adult readers.

Anna Chapin Ray (1865-1945) was an American author, born in Massachusetts. As an adult, she spent summers in the US and winters (!) in Quebec, and a number of her books, including the book at hand, are set in Canada. She never married (Chapin is her middle name, and her mother's maiden name.) She was one of the first women to take the entrance exam at Yale, but she attended Smith College, earning a B.A. and an M. A., after which she turned to writing. She was close to her brother, Nathaniel Chapin Ray, an engineer, and some of her books involved engineering subjects, notably The Bridge Builders, about the collapse of a bridge on the St. Lawrence, modeled after an actual 1908 disaster. She often used the pseudonym Sidney Howard (called a male pseudonym in a source I saw, but as one of her books was called Sidney: Her Summer on the St. Lawrence, it's clear that (then as now) Sidney could be a woman's name, and that Ray would use it as such).

(cover by Alice Barber Stephens(?))

The illustrator of this book (just the frontispiece (and possibly the cover)) is not explicitly credited, but I was able to decipher the signature: Alice Barber Stephens. Alice Barber was born in 1858, and was an academically trained artist, studying under two of the great 19th Century American artists, Thomas Eakins and Howard Pyle (himself a famous illustrator, of course). She married a fellow artist, Charles Stephens, in 1890. Their one son, Owen, also became an illustrator. Alice Barber Stephens was a very well known artist in her time, known for illustrating a 1903 edition of Little Women. She died in 1932.

By the Good Sainte Anne is subtitled "A Story of Modern Quebec", and between that and the fact that the author spent her winters in Canada this qualifies, I think, as another example of Canlit, one of this blog's minor subthemes. My copy appears to possibly be a first edition, from Little, Brown, in 1904. It is inscribed "Helen C. Miller 620 Stewart Rd.".

The novel opens with the heroine, 19 year old Nancy Howard, reading a letter from a friend from New York, and feeling homesick. Her father is a doctor (her mother is dead), and they are spending a few weeks in Quebec, as Dr. Howard studies the evidence of miraculous cures at the Cathedral of Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré. They are currently in the town of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, on the St. Lawrence some 20 or so miles from Quebec City. The Cathedral is in fact a real cathedral, dedicated to Sainte Anne (the mother of Mary, and the patron Saint of Quebec), and it is famous for miraculous cures, and to this day there are pilgrimages to it. (Much is made, later, of the notion that Nancy shares her name with the Saint, reminding me that in fact the given name Nancy was originally a nickname for Anne.)

(illustration by Alice Barber Stephens)

Nancy, on a whim, goes into town to see the current pilgrimage, though as a Protestant, she doesn't believe in miracles. At the same time, a young Englishman, Cecil Barth, has come from Quebec City to the cathedral, likewise as more of a tourist than a pilgrim. By mischance, on leaving the cathedral he falls and severely sprains his ankle, losing his eyeglasses in the process. Nancy jumps to help, and ends up volunteering her father's services to treat the ankle. And when no nurse can be found, Nancy spends the next week or so nursing Mr. Barth -- who proceeds to gravely insult her by tipping her! When he is well enough, he returns to the big city, where he is staying temporarily before moving to the West of Canada to become a rancher. Cecil is a shy young man, and his manners are very English and very stiff, and so he has not managed to make any friends, in particular antagonizing two other young men, an English Canadian named Reginald Brock and a French Canadian named Adolphe St. Jacques. (Much is made in the book of the contrast between the much easier manners of the three "colonials" (Nancy the American, Brock the Canadian, St. Jacques the French-Canadian), which are different to each other but somehow more mutually simpatico than the "Old Country" English ways of Cecil Barth.)

Soon Nancy and her father are in Quebec City as well, as her father's researches take him to Laval University (where both Brock and St. Jacques are studying). They stay at the same place as those two men, and while Cecil Barth is staying at a much nicer residence, he takes his meals there as well. (The place is run by a wise and kindly woman they call The Lady.) Nancy is shocked when Barth snubs her completely at dinner -- she does not realize that he doesn't recognize her at all (because he never truly saw her, due to his extreme nearsightedness and the loss of his eyeglasses. And, no, I didn't buy that either!) Soon Nancy and the other two young men are fast friends, while Cecil is enchanted by this pretty young American and puzzled when she seems very cold to him.

Well, you can see where this is going. What seems a love quadrangle becomes a triangle when it is clear that Reginald Brock wishes only to be a good friend to Nancy (he will soon be engaged to a woman from home). Nancy and St. Jacques are becoming very close, even as Nancy finally gets to know Cecil, and to understand the reasons for his prickly ways, and to forgive him for his failure to recognize her (not to mention the insult of the tip -- he had thought she was a hired nurse). In between the romance aspects of the plot we get a bit of a tourist guide to Quebec City circa 1903 or so. And it seems Nancy is really torn -- she is very fond of both Cecil and St. Jacques. St. Jacques' Catholicism is a bit of a problem for her -- and also the fact that both of them intend to stay in Canada is an issue, for Nancy is an American through and through.

After this setup, the resolution to Nancy's problem comes as rather a convenient -- if wrenching -- cheat, as a tragedy resolves the entire question. The problem of her eventual residence is too easily solved as well. But despite that disappointment, and despite the silly inital plot device involving Cecil Barth's failure to recognize a woman he has spent a week with on fairly intimate terms, I quite enjoyed this book. It's slight, of course (and fairly short), but that's OK. It's sweetly told, and the characters (all of whom are basically good people) are likable. The details of the setting are well realized, and the book bounces along breezily enough.

Old Bestseller: The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster

Old Bestseller: The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster

a review by Rich Horton

Of course it is silly to list this book as a bestseller. And indeed, even Forster's best known novels, A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924), while they likely sold well enough, do not appear on the online bestseller lists I can find. But certainly Forster remains one of the major and best remembered 20th Century novelists (in part because he has been widely adapted, and somewhat recently, to film), despite a curiously short career.

Forster was born on the first day of 1879, and died age 91 in 1970. An aunt left him a significant legacy when he was 8, enough that he would never have to work for a living. He attended Cambridge, and subsequently traveled widely, mostly with his mother, with whom he lived until her death. (Forster was, of course, homosexual, and had a long time relationship with a married policeman.) He was a conscientious objector, and worked for the Red Cross during the First World War. He published his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905, and three more novels appeared by 1910. A Passage to India, his last novel to appear in his lifetime came 14 years later, and Maurice (written before the first War) was only issued posthumously (presumably because of its homosexual theme). That means that he wrote essentially no fiction for the last half of his life. He did write criticism, and was a successful broadcaster.

The Collected Tales comprises two previously published short collections: The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928). The omnibus edition seems to date to 1947 from Knopf. My edition is a 1968 Modern Library reprint. According to Forster's 1946 introduction to the collected edition, they were all written before World War I. Presumably most were published in magazines, and I have indicated the first place of publication where I could find it. Forster writes that they "represent all I have accomplished in a particular line"; and it's fairly clear that the line he means is, basically, Fantasy. All the stories are fantastical save the title story of the second book, "The Eternal Moment". (One of them, of course, the most famous, "The Machine Stops", is Science Fiction.)

The stories are:

The Celestial Omnibus:
"The Story of a Panic" (8400 words)
"The Other Side of the Hedge" (2200 words)
"The Celestial Omnibus" (6000 words) (Albany Review, January 1908)
"Other Kingdom" (6600 words)
"The Curate's Friend" (2800 words) (The Pall Mall Magazine, October 1907)
"The Road from Colonus" (4400 words)

The Eternal Moment:
"The Machine Stops" (12,800 words) (The Oxford and Cambridge Review, November 1909)
"The Point of It" (6200 words)
"Mr. Andrews" (1700 words)
"Co-Ordination" (2600 words)
"The Story of the Siren" (3000 words) (The Atlantic Monthly, October 1923 (possibly published elsewhere earlier))
"The Eternal Moment" (11,800 words)

I'll touch on each story at least briefly. First, from The Celestial Omnibus: "The Story of a Panic" concerns a boy named Eustace, who is quite as repellent as Eustace Scrubb at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. He has an encounter with an elemental -- evidently Pan -- and is utterly changed. "The Other Side of the Hedge" is one of several quite allegorical -- or, perhaps I should say, overtly metaphorical -- stories about conventional life vs freer-thinking life, in this case cleverly portraying ordinary life as a constant walk along a path -- as oppose to life on the other side of the hedge bordering the path. "The Celestial Omnibus" is another story like that, about a boy who finds and take a curious bus that says it goes "To Heaven". He takes the trip and is enchanted -- but is not believed, especially by a rational and well-educated family friend who ends up agreeing to also take the bus -- with unfortunate results. "Other Kingdom" concerns a rich man who marries a beautiful woman of the lower classes, and proves unable to understand her more authentic responses to natural beauty. "The Curate's Friend" is an interesting case -- a young curate is on a picnic with his intended, Emily, who, we are told, eventually was an estimable wife. But on this picnic he encounters a Faun -- and somehow he can't forgot the Faun, whom only he can see, and who promises to make him happy. In the end Emily leaves him for an artistic young man, while the curate never marries, and remains "friends" with the Faun, whom he must always keep secret from his congregations. Even without knowing Forster's sexuality, what's going on here seems pretty obvious -- this is the story of a young churchman confused about his sexuality, finally released when he falls for a young man, who remains his "friend", but concealed, throughout his long career as a "lifelong bachelor". Finally, "The Road to Colonus" is about an old man visiting Greece, who suddenly finds an inn and its people who seems wonderful to him -- but his family won't let him stay, and he returns to England, to learn of the strange fate of the inn ... and to continue to regret.

The Eternal Moment opens with "The Machine Stops", the longest and by far the most famous story here. This is set in a future where people live isolated in explicitly beehive-like cells, all their needs provided by "the Machine", communicating with other people only electronically (except for distasteful meetings to procreate), almost never travelling. Vashti is a woman wholly of her time, but her son Kuno is something of a rebel. He insists that she come to visit him (very unusual), and she hears of his disturbing trip to the surface -- now, it seems, uninhabitable -- but alluring to him. The story continues as people begin to treat the Machine as a God even as it is decaying, and by the end this Machine-driven civilisation is collapsing, the only hope remaining being those "homeless" who have recolonized the surface. This is quite interesting and more fully realized than most of the rest of these stories.

"The Point of It" is another of Forster's diatribes against conventionality -- a superficially successful man dies and goes to what he hopes is Heaven only to realize that he is in Hell, a Hell reserved for those who took the easy way with every controversy. "Mr. Andrews" is yet another story about the afterlife, with the title character, a worthy and conventional Englishman, dying and going to Heaven, on the way meeting a brawling Turk -- both are saved when they beseech the guardian of Heaven to let the other in -- and their salvation, in the end, is to escape Heaven. "Co-Ordination" is a bit different -- a satire of then "Modern" education, wherein a middle-aged piano teacher is freed from her frustrating job even as, in the afterlife, both Beethoven and Napoleon try to intervene. "The Story of the Siren" is another piece about a visitor to the Mediterranean encountering a supernatural being -- though in this case it's really about the danger of actually meeting a Siren, as happened to a local man the visitor hears of. And the book closes with another long story, and the only non-fantastical piece in the whole book, "The Eternal Moment". Miss Raby, a middle-aged novelist, is visiting a town on the border of Italy and Switzerland that had been the subject of her first, very successful, novel. She finds to her horror that the fame bestowed on the town by her novel has caused it to change -- tourism has made it much richer, and coarser. Worst of all is her encounter with a local man who had propositioned her on her first visit -- now he is a corrupt -- and fat -- concierge at the largest hotel, and he has forgotten her entirely. None of this is helpful for her relationship with the respectably retired General she had been thinking of marrying. It's a pretty fine story -- unlike the other stories it reads like the germ of a Forster novel that he decided (correctly, I'm sure) only needed 12,000 or so words to tell. The themes here -- class and honesty in personal relationships -- seem more closely allied with the themes of Forster's novels.

Except for this last story, Forster seems to have regarded the short form as a vehicle for the somewhat didactic presentation of ideas, using fantastical tropes metaphorically to carry the burden of his, well, lectures. Sometimes these are intriguing, sometimes a bit forced, even a bit trite. I tend to think his real strength is realized in his novels -- even as I confess guiltily that I haven't read any of them. (Though A Room With a View, at any rate is in my TBR pile, though that pile is intimidatingly high.)

A Forgotten SF Novel: The Planet Strappers, by Raymond Z. Gallun

A Little Known SF Novel: The Planet Strappers, by Raymond Z. Gallun

a review by Rich Horton

Not long ago I read a Raymond Z. Gallun story from the early '50s, and found it better than I had expected. So when I saw this obscure 1961 paperback for cheap, I figured I might as well give it a try. Gallun (1911-1994) was one of the few Hugo Gernsback discoveries to continue to produce work after Campbell's revolution. That said, he was mostly silent after the early '40s. His most famous story is probably still "Old Faithful", from Astounding in 1934, which featured a sympathetically portrayed Martian. After 1954, only a few novels came out until the '80s, when a few short stories (possibly written much earlier) appeared. His last novel was Bioblast (1985). The Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggests The Eden Cycle (1974) may be his best -- The Planet Strappers is dismissed as "more routine". Ah well.

The book opens in purest YA hard SF mode, with a group of college-age kids trying to make their way into space. It seems that most of the trick is to acquire a space bubble, or "bubb", which is what it sounds like -- not much bigger than person-sized, a bubble based on a super-plastic, with plenty of air production capacity, in which someone can survive for a pretty significant time in empty space. The group includes a diverse(-ish) mix -- one woman, a rich kid, a handicapped kid, a couple of football star twins, a delinquent, a couple more, plus the eventual viewpoint character, Frank Nelsen, the straight-arrow honest type. This first part goes on for 50 pages or so, pretty effectively, as the "bunch" (their name) navigates such issues as making the "bubbs", learning how to use them, passing the required space fitness tests, raising the needed money, and so on. The girl member drops out, realizing the the regular Space organization is desperate for women, and another guy washes out for lack of psychological fitness, and one member has to deal with his mother who won't let him go.

Finally they head into space, and things get a bit stranger from that point. Frank ends up in a terrible situation on the Moon with a murderous fraud. One of the dropouts ends up a stowaway, causing even more trouble. Eileen, the girl member of the Bunch, becomes fairly successful, as what seems to be a Madam, though the book is too YA-oriented to go into detail about that.

The book continues, becoming something of a travelogue through the Solar System. Frank's goal ends up to be establishment of a free space-based set of habitats, based on the "bubbs", and in the end to make a home that the girl back home he's sweet on can come to. But he must deal with a lot of problems on the way there, most importantly the issue of space pirates ... a group which seems to include the one washout from the original "Bunch" who had stowed away. One of the other members becomes a legendary explorer, eventually heading to the Outer Planets solo in a bubble. There are deaths among the bunch, and failures, but by the end we see a portrait of the establishment of a new frontier.

This is a real mixed bag. To be honest, a lot of the scientific details are pretty ridiculous -- though perhaps not by the standards of 1961. The plot is kind of random, kind of disorganized, after a decent start. The characters are pure cliche. But for all that, I liked a lot of it, though parts of it were kind of boring, or too silly to follow. It's easy to see why this novel is essentially forgotten -- but it's also easy to see why Gallun, for all his shortcomings as a writer, remained able to sell his work for a pretty long time.

A little-known Ace Double: Time Thieves, by Dean R. Koontz/Against Arcturus, by Susan K. Putney

Ace Double Reviews, 101: Time Thieves, by Dean R. Koontz/Against Arcturus, by Susan K. Putney (#00990, 1972, 95 cents)

a review by Rich Horton

This is one of the latest Ace Doubles, appearing about a year before the program ended. Don Wollheim and Terry Carr had both left Ace a year earlier. Fred Pohl was editor until June 1972, about when Time Thieves/Against Arcturus appeared, so presumably he acquired these novels.

(cover by David Plourde)

This book pairs an early novel by a writer who has since built a pretty major career with the only novel by a very obscure writer. Both novels have aspects of interest but are fairly flawed. The copy-editing is noticeably poor (especially in the Koontz novel): while Ace's editing and production standard had never been great, I did feel this was worse than in preceding years, and I wonder if the company's turmoil at the time was a factor (Ace had just been acquired by Grosset and Dunlap).

(Cover by Mart?)

One other production mishap, I'm pretty certain, involves the covers. They seem to have been switched. That is, while neither cover illustration is particularly representative of a scene in either novel, the one for Time Thieves seems to fit Against Arcturus reasonably well (hot human spy, large humanoid aliens, spaceships with laser-type weapons); while the one for Against Arcturus could, at a bit of a stretch, work for Time Thieves. (The art could, I suppose, have been random stuff that was just slapped on the books.) The artists are hard to figure out: the cover for Time Thieves is signed Plourde, apparently David Plourde. The other sided is signed Mart, I suspected possibly truncated from Martin. I don't know who that could be, and for that matter I know nothing about David Plourde.

Time Thieves was a fairly early Dean Koontz novel, his first (Star Quest) having appeared in 1968. He worked steadily in a number of genres for the first decade or so of his career, under numerous pseudonyms, before hitting it big with such novels as Whispers, in 1980. Most of his work since then has been suspense thrillers, many of them bestsellers.

Time Thieves opens with Pete Mullion waking from a strange dream while sitting in his car in his garage. He assumes he has just driven home from his cabin in the woods, and he goes into the house, and realizes he doesn't remember anything for some undetermined time. And then his wife comes in and yells at him for abandoning her for 12 days.

He begins to try to tackle the mystery -- asking the police what's going on, going back to the cabin, visiting a motel he apparently stayed at. There is another period of amnesia, and sighting of mysterious people. Eventually he directly encounters one of the strange people -- who turns out to be a robot.

Pete and his wife are deep in the mystery by now. Pete begins to realize he is developing telepathic abilities. And the robots keep insisting that he give himself up -- for his own good. Also, they sinisterly promise not to hurt him. And his telepathic ability allows him to sense the minds of the robots -- and to realize they are controlled by another mind, apparently belonging to an alien.

The novel resolves with a chase scene or two, a kidnapping, and then finally a talk between Pete and the aliens, whereby their true motives are revealed. And Pete makes his own decision ...

The book is well-told at the plot level -- it moves quickly, holds the interest, has some interesting ideas. I thought the resolution -- the aliens' motivations -- a bit lame. And the prose is inconsistent at best -- there are some real howlers. (Some of this may be laid at the hands of Ace's terrible copyediting.)

Against Arcturus is a stranger book. We begin on the planet Berbidron. A couple of natives (who call themselves Sarbr) see an Earth ship landing, and when they approach, they get shot. Those two leave, and a few more aliens investigate (including one called intriguingly "Arlem the Actor (soon to be Arlem the Traitor)". They instantly learn the human language (Latin), and quickly agree with the human proposal that they become civilized. Within 5 years they have built several cities, and have become involved in a dispute over the control of their planet: the first visitors were from the Earth-New Eden Alliance, but it has been taken over by the apparently more authoritarian human colony of one of Arcturus' planets.

This first section is told in an engaging fashion, resembling to a small degree writers like Ursula Le Guin and Eleanor Arnason, using journals, giving hints of the Sarbr society. It seems we are on the route to, perhaps, an anthropological bit of SF, where the human invaders will eventually get their comeuppance as they (and we, the readers) learn the true nature of the Sarbr. And, in a way, that's what happens. But we get there in a different way. And much of the aim of the book seems somewhat satirical -- making fun of human civilization partly by having the Sarbr who happen to be interested in it playact a version of it.

Most of the rest of the story is told by Beth Goodrich, a woman from New Eden who is recruited, somewhat despite her misgivings, to come to Berbidron and try to foment a rebellion against the Arcturans, who now control the cities on Berbidron. Beth, apparently, has experience at this -- she has spent time protesting the government on New Eden. She also has a vaguely telepathic/empathic ability (which she calls sympathy) -- she can understand the thoughts and feelings of humans, and even animals (such as her pet squirrels) and, it turns out, trees. But not the Sarbr. She ends up joining the Berbidron Liberation Front, where she meets the aforementioned Arlem the Traitor (so-called because he is actually working for the Arcturans).

She ends up bouncing around the planet, noticing but mostly ignoring hints that the nature of things on Berbidron is quite different than the humans seem to think, and getting herself killed. And resurrected, with a new name. Eventually the real plans of the Arcturans are revealed, which are pretty awful, and it becomes urgent to actually stop them. (Before that it seemed like a game, which is really the way the Sarbr seem to approach it.) Finally Beth (or, that is, Natasha) and some of her Sarbr friends make a journey to a desolate part of the planet, and she finally learns the truth about the Sarbr -- and, more importantly, about humanity.

Some of all this is kind of silly, though interesting. Some is fairly funny. Some is just busy. The science, as well as the timeline, really doesn't make much sense, but maybe that doesn't matter much. I thought it on balance an intriguing but not really successful effort, and I'm surprised the writer never did much else. She did write a graphic novel about Spiderman, which was published with illustrations by Berni Wrightson. And there is at least one short story (or perhaps a novel excerpt) available online (apparently posted by the author, some time ago). And not much else seems to be generally known.

I asked for help from a group of experts on the field that I hang out with, and Art Lortie came through wonderfully. He found that Susan K. Putney was born in 1951, in Iowa, once ran for Congress in Nebraska as a Libertarian, once owned a comic book store, lived in Phoenix for a while, and now lives in my own state, Missouri.