An Old Ace Double: Masters of Evolution, by Damon Knight/Fire in the Heavens, by George O. Smith

Ace Double Reviews, 26: Masters of Evolution, by Damon Knight/Fire in the Heavens, by George O. Smith (#D-375, 1959, $0.35)

(I'm reposting this old Ace Double review on April 9 because that was George O. Smith's birthday.)

Here's an Ace Double from the '50s, featuring two pretty popular writers of that time. Damon Knight, of course, was the more important figure, and his work is lasting. Smith made an impact in the '40s with the Venus Equilateral stories, about a Solar System wide communications relay (and eventually a matter transmission system), which I frankly find unreadable today. He also wrote some more respected novels later on, including The Fourth "R". Smith was born in 1911 in Chicago, attended the University of Chicago. He was an engineer, working at IT&T from when he mostly ceased writing in 1959 until 1974. Somewhat notoriously, he had an affair with John Campbell's wife Dona (source of Campbell's pseudonym "Don A. Stuart"), and they married after each divorced their first spouse. He was given the First Fandom award at the 1980 Worldcon (amusingly, his New York Times obituary misread that detail, and credited him with getting the very first "Fandom Award").

As for Damon Knight, he was born in 1922 in Oregon and died in 2002. He was a prominent fan beginning as early as age 11, and was a member of the influential early fan group the Futurians. He was an illustrator in the '40s, writing a few short stories but becoming far more prolific by the late '40s, and beginning to produce major work in the '50s. His great stories include "The Country of the Kind", "Masks", "Fortyday", "I See You", "Four in One", and particularly a number of great novellas, first among them in my opinion "The Earth Quarter", but also "Rule Golden", "Double Meaning", and "Dio". His early novels were less successful, but he improved over time, and his last two novels, Why Do Birds (1992) and Humpty Dumpty: An Oval (1996), are quite remarkable. But that barely scratches the surface of his contributions: he was a major editor (of magazines like If and Worlds Beyond, and more importantly of the original anthology series Orbit; not to mention numerous excellent reprint anthologies), he was a significant critic, known best for In Search of Wonder, and he was the founding force behind SFWA, as well as the famous Milford  writers' workshop. He was married three times, the last time, for the last 39 years of his life, to the great writer Kate Wilhelm (who died recently).

It's always worthwhile looking at the Science Fiction Encylopedia entries for writers, here are those for George O. Smith, and for Damon Knight.

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller)

Masters of Evolution is a slight expansion (from 25,000 words to 30,000 words) of Knight's 1954 novella "Natural State", which appeared in Galaxy. It is the first of three Ace Double halves Knight produced by expanding '50s novellas. With the short story collection Off Center, these are the only four Ace Double halves (in three books) that Knight wrote. (I have reviewed all of Knight's Ace Doubles now.) George O. Smith wrote two Ace Double halves, Fire in the Heavens as well as Lost in Space (1960). (He should not be confused with George H. Smith, who wrote the Ace Double half Kar Kaballa (1969).) Fire in the Heavens is a reprint of a 1958 Thomas Bouregy hardcover, and it is about 52,000 words long. It was first published in Startling Stories in July 1949, possibly the same version though the book might be expanded.

In Masters of Evolution the world is divided into city dwellers and "muckfeet". The city dwellers rely on high technology. They are conditioned to fear and feel sick at the thought of country life, and of muckfeet food and hygiene. They have previously fought wars, which both sides claim to have won: but as there are only 22 remaining cities in the whole world, and the muckfeet control the rest of the area, and have a much higher population, the real winners seem obvious.

As the book opens, the Mayor of New York has a desperate idea. He assigns a leading actor, Alvah Gustad, to fly out to the muckfeet and offer to trade with them: the high tech city products in exchange for much needed metals -- and also in the hopes of converting the muckfeet to city ways. Alvah somewhat reluctantly and fearfully makes his way to the country. At first he is confronted with suspicion and threats, or is just ignored. But finally he is given a chance to sell his wares at a fair somewhere in the Midwest. Much to his surprise, nobody is remotely interested in his products -- and worse, after he gets into a scuffle, he finds that the muckfeet have managed to completely disable his energy sources. He is stranded.

A pretty young woman named B. J. and a wise mentor type named Doc Bither take Alvah under their arms, and over some weeks they manage to overcome his conditioning against muckfeet food and smells. We get a look at the muckfeet way of life, which is based on using spectacular products of genetic engineering in place of machines. For example, for airplanes they use "rocs" -- huge flying lizards. Plants are used to extract metals from the ground. Other animals are used as truck or as message devices or as "libraries". Alvah is still reluctant to become a muckfoot, though -- he is still loyal to New York. But he is also in love with B. J. And when the cities launch an attack on the muckfeet, Alvah realizes that many things he has long believed are false. The novel is resolved in a predictable confrontation between Alvah's new friends and his old city.

This is a decent piece of work, enjoyable enough, but lesser work than Knight's best. I would rank it third of his three Ace Doubles (not counting the story collection). Some of the plot contrivances just don't convince -- such as Alvah and the very first muckfoot girl he meets falling in love. And Knight's case for the "natural state" versus "technology" is grossly loaded -- the cities' high tech is burdened by having to comply with the laws of physics, basically, which don't really seem to affect the muckfeet genetic creations. Or put another way -- Knight imagines a utopian perfection of genetic engineering, with limited costs; but the opposing high technology is auctorially declared to be inferior -- but not proven so.

(I also looked at the differences between the original novella and the expanded Ace Double. They consist of a brief passage, about a page, in the middle of the book which explains some of the genetic engineering; and a long additional sequence right at the end, extending the final conflict and giving Alvah a chance to be an action hero of sorts. On the whole, the additions are padding, though I think the explanatory passage fits fine.)

The cover of Fire in the Heavens features a spaceship pulling a string of sailing ships through interplanetary space. I assumed that was just a piece of artistic license -- the artist fancifully depicting the theme of the book. I was wrong -- the cover is a fairly accurate representation of an actual scene! That should tell you just how hokey this novel is.

The hero of the novel is Jeff Benson, a brilliant young physicist who runs a company making scientific instruments. (I thought it significant that Benson is a physicist but is portrayed as an engineer, someone whose main job is putting stuff together.) He runs afoul of the beautiful but amoral Lucille Roman, who runs a sort of megacorporation. Jeff's acquaintance with Charles Horne, one of Lucille's rivals, is enough to convince Lucille that he is in cahoots against her. Lucille's company has developed a new atomic jet, the Roman Jet, but her chief physicist doesn't understand how it works. But Lucille is unwilling to trust Jeff to work with her company. And Jeff is too naive to realize that Charles Horne is as amoral as Lucille.

Jeff has a theory that conservation of mass/energy is not absolute -- that some energy is lost, perhaps into a different universe, whenever any energy is used. When the Roman Jet is tested on a spaceship, the sun is noticed to become unstable. The Jet is blamed for this (through the connivance of Horne), but Jeff's theory offers an alternate explanation. Either way, though, the Sun seems likely to go nova.

Horne hatches a plot to steal Lucille's spaceship and fly to Procyon. For supplies he uses the spaceship to yank a number of cargo ships into space (hence the cover!) Meanwhile Jeff has found a way to use a variation of the Roman Jet to contact other universes. And Lucille is on the run from lynch mobs who believe she has caused the impending nova ...

It's all really too too silly. Surely Smith knew this! And there also cliches such as the beautiful and amoral and sexually loose (it is implied, not shown) woman turning into mush and falling in love with the innocent and virtuous hero. And the plot is discursive and casual and just kind of dumb. Not a very good book at all.

And, finally -- the cover of the July 1949 issue of Startling Stories, by Earle Bergey, needs to be shown:

Hugo and Nebula Ballot Review: Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty

Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty (Orbit, 978-0-316-38968-6, $15.99, tpb, 364 pages) January 2017

a review by Rich Horton

(Cover design by Kirk Benshoff)

Six Wakes has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick, Nebula, and Hugo awards, a pretty impressive trifecta. Mur Lafferty has published several previous books, but I confess I had only barely heard of her before – I saw her on a panel at a convention (which? I’m not sure!) and she was impressive there, and I knew she was involved with the well-regarded fiction podcast Escape Pod. But even before the award nominations, Six Wakes was getting some good notice, and I bought it and read it after the Nebula nod. And, you know what – I liked it. It’s a good fun fast-moving read. I’m glad I read it.

But – well – you saw that coming, right? There had to be a but. The thing is, there are lots of enjoyable novels published any year, and I’m glad when I encounter those. But I can enjoy a novel and not think it worthy of an award. And, really, that’s the case with Six Wakes. It’s fun, it’s pretty darn pure hard SF (with the understanding that “hard SF” absolutely does NOT mean “SF that gets all the science right”), it’s exciting. But, it also has some annoying logic holes, and it doesn’t really engage with the central (and very worthwhile) moral issues it raises as rigorously as I wish it had, and the prose is just OK.

The book opens with Maria Arena waking in a cloning tank on board the starship Dormire. She has no memories beyond just moving into the ship. Something must have happened, to require a clone to be created … She quickly learns at all her crewmates are in the same boat – they’ve all been cloned. And their journey is 25 years on … And, it soon becomes clear, all the crew members’ originals have been viciously killed.

The remainder of the crew are the Captain, Katrina de la Cruz, her First Officer, Wolfgang, pilot/navigator Akihiro Sato, engineer Paul Seurat, and Doctor Joanna Glass. There is no good evidence as to who killed everyone else (and then, presumably, themself). And nobody knows what has happened over the last 25 years. There is one major complication, however – the Captain’s original is actually still alive, in a coma. Which according to the law (though I wondered, why in the heck would the Earth law matter in a case like this?) means she (the original) is supposed to be killed immediately. But she might be the only witness to the crimes that led to the rest of them dying.

A few things are revealed – first, all the crew are criminals. They have been offered a chance to start over, on a new world, with their crimes forgotten, in exchange for crewing the starship en route to a supposedly habitable planet orbiting Tau Ceti. There are a great many other colonists in sleep tanks on the ship. And there’s a seventh individual – the AI controlling the ship’s functions.

Complications multiply – the AI seems to be malfunctioning. So is the food synthesizer. And as the crew members’ back stories are revealed, we learn that they are (in many cases) worse criminals than we imagined, with reasons to hate and fear the other members of the crew. And that’s not the end … Indeed, the story is very busy with action and motivations and ideas, mostly in a good way. And the ultimate resolution is, well, understandable and sensible enough, if perhaps not quite fully satisfying.

Bottom line – this is a good and enjoyable novel, but not a great one. I think you’ll enjoy it if you read it, and I recommend you do. But it wouldn’t have been on my Hugo nomination ballot – which, let’s be honest, is a minor point. It might be, say, the 10^th or 15th best SF novel of the year, but in a pretty deep year, that still means it’s a nice book.

Old Bestseller Review: Avalanche, by Kay Boyle

Avalanche, by Kay Boyle

a review by Rich Horton

Kay Boyle is an interesting case. She was born in Minnesota in 1902, and died in 1992, having lived all over the place, including a lot of time in France. She was married three times, took numerous lovers, had six children (three out of wedlock). She was for a time married to Baron Franckenstein, though no mention is made of the monster. She was blacklisted in the 1950s, and was an opponent of S. I. Hayakawa when he was president of San Francisco State College, where Boyle was a professor.

Boyle was a rather highly regarded poet and short story writer, especially in the '30s, when she also published some fairly well-regarded novels. The standard narrative seems to be that she more or less lost it after that, especially in her novels. One reason for this was Edmund Wilson's vicious review of the novel at hand, Avalanche. I will confess that I think very little of Wilson (perhaps unfairly), and the notion that he hated a work has a tendency to predispose me to like it. That said, he was partly right about Avalanche -- it's clearly a work of popular fiction, with the occasional nod to cliche in the plot and characters, and with a certain wish-fulfillment aspect to things. On the other hand, it seems much better written than the run of romantic thrillers -- so, perhaps a disappointment to Wilson if he was looking for a novel of the ambition of her earlier works, but a good work of its kind.

Avalanche was published early in 1944, and it is set in late 1942. It's a war novel, about the French Resistance, and so published in an extremely timely fashion. To an extent it can be regarded -- a bit like, say, Casablanca -- as propaganda, which of course is not necessarily good for art. It wasn't really a bestseller, I should add.

Fenton Ravel is a 21-year old woman who grew up in Truex, a mountain town in the French Alps, on the border with Italy. Her father is French, but her mother is American, and she was taken to the US as the war started, for safety. Now it is 1942, the US has joined the war, and Fenton is of age, so she has come back to Vichy France to help with relief efforts in Lyon. With a week or so off, she takes the train to her home town, hoping to see the man she was in love with, one Bastineau. On the train she encounters two other men -- de Vaudoix, a sinister man who claims to be a Swiss watch merchant, but who we all gather is a German agent, and Jacqueminot, another man from Truex.

Once in Truex, Fenton hears the news that Bastineau has been killed in an avalanche, along with a Swiss tourist. De Vaudoix reveals that his task it to recover the body of the Swiss man who was killed. Fenton is subject to a certain amount of suspicion, partly because she left them to their own devices just as the war started (though she had no choice in the matter) and partly because some suspect she might be helping de Vaudoix. But the peasants still trust her, as well as the older couple called Cousin Perrin and La Cousine. Fenton begins to get hints of some Resistance activity going on, presented to her as smuggling goods. Bastineau was clearly involved, and soon there are hints that he did not in fact die. But then one of the local girls, who has been snubbing her, makes a point of telling Fenton that she and Bastineau are engaged.

Fenton has agreed to help La Cousine -- she assumes with Resistance work -- and she also is inveigled into accompanying de Vaudoix on his expedition up the ice. Further twists and turns follow -- Bastineau dies again -- de Vaudoix leaves (supposedly) -- Fenton travels up the mountain again ... The ending is exciting and quite moving and inspirational. It's also -- sure! -- somewhat implausible. There's no doubt that it's popular fiction, and as I said aimed in part at promoting the side of the good guys in the war. So be it -- it's enjoyable (and really pretty well written) popular fiction.

Another Ace Double: Mercenary From Tomorrow, by Mack Reynolds/The Key to Venudine, by Kenneth Bulmer

Ace Double Reviews, 111: Mercenary From Tomorrow, by Mack Reynolds/The Key to Venudine, by Kenneth Bulmer (#H-65, 1968, 60 cents)

a review by Rich Horton

Kenneth Bulmer again! And Mack Reynolds this time, the first time I've looked at one of his books.

Indeed Reynolds is something of a curious lacuna in my reading of SF. He was born in 1917, full name Dallas McCord Reynolds. He began publishing SF in 1950. He was a prolific short story writer through the decade, often using pseudonymns, including the fairly transparent Guy McCord and Dallas Ross. (A later pseudonym for romance novels was Maxine Reynolds.) He published a mystery novel (set an an SF convention, shades of Sharyn McCrumb!) in 1951, but did not publish another novel for a decade. He published a great many novels from then until his death in 1983. His father was twice the Socialist candidate for US president, and Mack was an ardent Socialist and longtime member of the American Socialist Party. After he became a regular contributor to the notably conservative John Campbell's Analog he had a reputation as sort of Campbell's token Commie, though Reynolds' socialism, though sincere, was cranky in just the sort of ways that, it seems to me, would appeal to Campbell. His novels were certainly available when I started buying books, but they didn't have tremendous reputations, and they never really appealed much to me. So I never read much of his work. It seemed like a good time to at least give one of his novels a try.

And as I've noted before: Henry Kenneth Bulmer, born in England in 1921, was a very prolific writer from the early '50s, under his own name and many others, most notably "Alan Burt Akers", the name under which he wrote the Dray Prescot series for DAW. He was primarily an SF writer, but also did a lot of work in other genres. He was editor of the New Writings in SF anthology series after the death of John Carnell. He died in 2005.

Both these novels are parts of series. Reynolds' Mercenary From Tomorrow (1962, 1968) is a Joe Mauser novel, the first in a series that eventually included three further novels: The Earth War (1963), Time Gladiator (1964, 1966, exp 1986 by Michael Banks as Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes (title of the original serial), and The Fracas Factor (1976). As you can see, a complex publication history, the more so if we consider that a story featuring Joe Mauser was published in Fantastic Universe in 1957: "Happy Ending" (written with Fredric Brown), and that a related story  (without Joe Mauser), "Status Quo", appeared in Analog in 1961. Mercenary From Tomorrow, as far as I can tell the most interesting of the stories, first appeared as a novella, "Mercenary", in the April 1962 Analog. That version was about 21,000 words long. The Ace Double is more than double that length, some 45,000 words.

(As ever, credit goes to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry on Mack Reynolds for lots of good information.)

(Cover by Jack Gaughan)

Joe Mauser is a soldier for hire in a near future dominated by corporations, and by a social structure (called People's Capitalism) based on a post-scarcity economy, and stratified into social classes (Lower, Middle, and Upper, with their own subdivisions) and skill categories (Military, Food Preparation, Clothing, Religion, etc.). The Military category fights wars between the corporations, wars which are televised. Successful veterans can get enough money and prestige to jump classes -- Joe himself was born a Mid-Lower and is now a Middle-Middle. I didn't find much of this convincing, but I did find it somewhat interesting. The other interesting fillip is that wars must be fought with pre-1900 technology.

Joe is about to sign up with Baron Haer's Vacuum Tube Transport, who are about to fight a war (or "fracas") with Continental Hovercraft. The problem is, Vacuum Tube Transport is an upstart company, and the much bigger Continental Hovercraft has maneuvered them into a war which they are not financially able to fight. Joe know they are a lost cause, and that only inexperienced soldiers will sign up. Indeed, the commander of Continental's army is Stonewall Cogswell, a General with whom Joe has previously served, and whom he admires. (Note the Tuckerization -- besides Cogswell, I recognized a Sturgeon and a Sohl as minor characters.) But Joe has a plan -- a gimmick -- by which he hopes to engineer a spectacular upset, and in so doing gain himself advancement to the Upper Class.

Things are complicated a bit when he meets Baron Haer's two children -- Balt Haer, the rather spoiled heir, who will be a commander in the Vacuum Tube Army, and Nadine, a stunningly beautiful woman, a Doctor, who turns out to have some revolutionary ideas of her own. But Joe manages to suppress his attraction to Nadine, and to finesse his distaste for Balt Haer, and to convince the Baron to allow him to try out his (still secret) gimmick.

The rest of the novel includes some filling in of social details, via conversations with Joe's new, young, Lower, batman, Max Mainz; and with a veteran newsman. There is also a day on the town, where Joe is seduced (almost) by a beautiful "fracas groupie". And an encounter with a representative of the Soviet bloc -- they observe American fracases to make sure post-1900 technology is not being used. This representative is clearly up to no good ... And there is an assassination plot against Joe, and a flashback to one of his previous battles.

All leads to Joe's mysterious gimmick -- which is sensible enough but not quite as dramatic as I had hoped. The actual "fracas" is a bit of an anticlimax, though that's OK in the context of the story Reynolds wants to tell. And the conclusion features a somewhat bitter, but not unrelievedly so, twist.

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

I enjoyed the novel, perhaps more than I expected. I'm tempted to seek out the rest of the Joe Mauser stories, though the SFE suggests that they are less interesting. I did find a copy of the April 1962 Analog, to compare "Mercenary" with the expanded novel version. The main thread of the story is identical (with the exception of a few small editorial changes), but the novella doesn't have the "fracas groupie, nor the assassination plot, nor the battle flashback, and also one pre-fracas aerial reconnaissance scene is new in the book. I'd say the novella has everything essential -- the additional scenes in the novel are enjoyable enough to read but really add very little.

Bulmer's novel, The Key to Venudine, is also part of a series. It's the third book of eight called collectively Keys to the Dimensions. I've read one other entry in that series -- the fourth book, The Wizard of Senchuria. The conceit is that there are sort of parallel Earths, with widely varying levels of technology, and even aliens on some of them, and certain people can sense Portals to the other worlds. As far as I can tell from two I've read, each of the books (with the possible exception of the last, The Diamond Contessa (1983)) is mostly independent, with some mostly minor references to the overarching conflict of the series, between the evil Contessa di Montevarchi and another group of good guys.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

Venudine is a world at a medieval tech level. The book opens with Fezius and his giant friend Offa heading for a tournament in honor of the upcoming marriage of the Palans Red Rodro. Fezius was born into a noble family, but some dirty dealings lost his family their position, so he is a cynical independent fighter. He and Offa are mounted on Griffs -- flying animals. As they approach the Griff Tower near Rodro's place, they notice something funny going on, and when they descend to investigate, their griffs are paralyzed by some force, and they have to crashland. And soon they encouter a trio of people trying to escape from the Palans Rodro, and they soon realize that the two women of the party are Rodro's intended, the Princess Nofret, and her sister, rumored to be a witch-woman, the Princess Lai. Nofret has no wish to marry Rodro. And the two women have some unusual powers -- or, we soon guess, technology.

Before long Fezius, having fallen head over heels in love with Princess Lai, is trying to help them escape from the thuggish Rodro. And Fezius is forced to believe in Lai's "powers", which consist really in her ability to sense the Portals to other dimensions, and in some tech she has got from those worlds. Fezius' dangerous exploits lead him to contact with the scary aliens called Slikitters, and later on lead him to Earth, where he learns of the conflict between Nofret and Lai's allies on Earth, and the evil Contessa.

There's a lot of action, nicely portrayed, and a lot of jumping between dimensions, finally leading to a final confrontation with Rodro and the Contessa. It's generally pretty enjoyable if pretty minor work, but better than some of the other Bulmer novels I've read. I was a little disappointed in the ending, specifically the resolution of the Fezius-Lai romance, in which it is anticlimactically revealed that Lai had another boyfriend on another world all along. Luckily for Fezius he's taken a shine to an Earth woman he met during his adventures ...

In sum -- this is kind of a good example of the middle range of Ace Doubles. Both novels have good points -- they're fun enough. Neither is a lasting masterwork. Mercenary From Tomorrow is a bit more serious, and the more lasting of the two.

A review of Paul di Filippo's The Big Get-Even

The Big Get-Even, a novel by Paul di Filippo

Blackstone Publishing, 2018, $26.99

a review by Rich Horton

Paul di Filippo is best known as an SF writer, with 10 or so novels published in the field, and numerous shorter works since his debut in the legendary magazine Unearth some four decades ago. I have found his short fiction (and novellas, a particular strength of his) immensely enjoyable: I'd mention in particular "The Mill", "Mairzy Doats", "Karuna, Inc.", "Wikiworld", "A Year in the Linear City", "The Jackdaw's Last Case", and the stories of The Steampunk Trilogy.

His latest novel, however, is a contemporary crime caper, The Big Get-Even. As such it might easily escape the notice of SF readers. But it's worth seeking out -- it's a lot of fun, sexy and twisty and humorous.

Glen McClinton was a crooked lawyer and a heroin addict before he got caught. Now he's out of prison, on parole, but disbarred and as such without much in the way of a means of earning his keep. He's living with his retired uncle, eking out an existence on some gold he managed to hide from the authorities. One night the car in front of him stalls at the stoplight, and he investigates and finds the driver in a drugged stupor, and uses his Narcan spray to revive him -- a fellow heroin addict, evidently.

A few months later the man he saved, Stan Hasso, visits him with a scheme -- Stan is looking for revenge on his old boss, a crooked real estate developer named Nancarrow, who let him take the fall for a series of arsons ordered by Nancarrow and executed by Stan. Stan's scheme is to convince Nancarrow that a certain plot of land upstate is the land a casino developer needs for his project. They can get Nancarrow to buy the land from them at an inflated price. Stan just needs Glen as the front man, and also Glen's lawyerly ability. He has a couple more confederates -- a woman whose parents lost everything as a result of Nancarrow's manipulations, and that woman's Aspergerish student, a computer hacker. Oh, and Glen's gold money will be useful to buy the property.

Against his best judgement, but a little desperate, Glen decides to help. They buy the property, a rundown lake resort. Glen, who has been without female companionship for a long time, finds himself distracted by Stan's lush and luscious girlfriend Sandralene, and by Vee Aptekar, the woman out for revenge, who seems to be a bit of an ice queen. But part of their scheme involves actually getting the resort up and running again -- and in so doing they hire some folks from the nearby economically depressed city, mostly immigrants from Cape Verde, led by a gorgeous young woman named Nellie Firmino.

So the plot unfolds. The resort is soon open, and operating, though at a loss. The hook is set for Nancarrow. The problem is, Glen has fallen for Nellie, with whom he is soon sleeping. And he feels like a heel for disappointing her and her Caboverdean friends, who are thrilled to have jobs again. But they're still losing money, and Stan and Vee want their revenge, and things are well in motion and impossible to stop.

The reader sees the outline of the logical conclusion well in advance, but Di Filippo negotiates the way there slickly, with a nice and believable twist, that resolves some of the implausibilities that had bothered me. There is also a final twist -- again, what we expect all along, but nicely revealed. It's a fun ride the whole way. Granted, there are remaining implausibilities, including the easy way Glen gets all the sex he wants (and more), from several stunning women. And their scheme never really made much sense to me -- but that aspect is actually made believable by the end. This is a wholly enjoyable caper novel, with antiheros we can root for, and real villains who are bad guys indeed. It's light on violence and heavy on sex and comic turns. Fun stuff.

A review of John Crowley's Ka

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, by John Crowley

a review by Rich Horton

Christie Yant opens her review of Ka in the April Lightspeed by noting, with some wonder, that the Nebula shortlist does not include this novel. That is certainly a thought that occurred to me. In the long run, or even mostly the short run, awards don't matter that much. But there are some books which confer more honor on the awards for which they are nominated than the awards confer on them. An award like the Nebula is diminished when it fails to notice a book as good, as important, as well-written, and as wise as Ka. This is not to say that any of the novels on the shortlist are bad -- in fact, it's my impression that that the list (fully seven novels deep!) is fairly strong overall. Three of its members joined Ka and John Kessel's The Moon and the Other on my Hugo nomination list. (Those were Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory; The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, by Theodora Goss; and Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz. And one that I haven't yet read, The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin, would very likely have had a chance to supplant one of those three.)

Doubtless there are reasons -- the most likely is that Ka, a long novel released late in the year, was not read by enough Nebula nominators. Be that as it may -- it is a remarkable work, and the notion that it was regarded as not one of the seven best SF/Fantasy novels of 2017 by the members of SFWA is, at least, curious. I don't want to sound so grumpy -- indeed, as I said, the novels chosen for the shortlist are pretty fine. (And, indeed, it's hard for anyone to read everything good published in a given year.) But there is pretty fine and there is remarkable.

So, what of the novel itself? Ka is told, in essence, in two voices. (And Crowley, like most great writers, is exquisitely in control of narrative voice.) The true narrator is an elderly man, some time in the fairly near future, in an environmentally collapsing world, somewhere in the Northeast of the US. His wife died some years before, and he is acutely aware that he is dying. (Perhaps the central concern of this novel is death -- the death of people, the death of crows, the death of civilizations, perhaps the death of the human world. The other central concern is story -- probably the most central concern of Crowley's entire oeuvre.)

The narrator finds a very sick crow in his yard, and nurses him back to health, and somehow learns to speak with the crow. He learns his name -- Dar Oakley -- and then learns his very long story. Dar Oakley is an unusual crow, obviously. He is the first crow to take a name, the first to learn to communicate with humans. The first human he has a relationship with is a girl named Fox Cap, in what seems a Neolithic culture somewhere in Europe. Fox Cap is close to the tribe's shaman, and indeed become shaman eventually. As a result of his association with her, and other humans, he learns of the human tendency to war, and of the benefit thereby accruing to crows -- carrion, dead humans. So indeed the novel is throughout involved with death, and more intimately as well, as Fox Cap and Dar Oakley journey to the land of the dead (or something like that) to steal "the most precious thing", the secret of immortality. Only Dar Oakley keeps it for himself.

And so he is reborn again and again, and we hear his story as he leaps forward in time -- to a monk in the middle ages; then across the ocean to the New World, and to a Native American tribe, and one man in particular, taken captive by one tribe (war again) and adopted into them. Then forward to the Civil War, and its aftermath, and a Spiritualist woman, and then her son, who learns to hate crows, and then finally to the time of the narrator, in our near future. Throughout we learn of war, and death, and what may come after death. Dar Oakley makes several journeys to various versions of the land of the dead. He also has numerous crow families, and we meet some of his fellow crows and his mates, particuarly one called Kits, who it turns out is a special crow as well.

All this is fascinating, always interesting, though the book lacks a conventional plot. The characters are involving, however: Each of these People characters is strange, obsessed, interesting; and the Crows are true Characters as well. The themes, of story and of death, grow and grow in layers as the book continues. By the end it Ka extraordinarily moving, mysterious and wise. And truly lovely. And witty and snarky (in a corvine sort of way) when needed. Crowley is one of the best writers of prose we have. One example from right at the end:

"Only the living can travel there from here, cross the river, see and speak to those they know or know of, take away its treasures. The living create the Land of Death and its inhabitants by going there, and returning with a tale. But dead People can't be there, can't go there or anywhere: they're dead."

A Perhaps Forgotten Collection: The Moon Maid, by R. Garcia y Robertson

The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures, by R. Garcia y Robertson
Golden Gryphon Press, 1998, $22.95
ISBN: 0965590186

A review by Rich Horton

Here's something I wrote a long time ago about one of my favorite writers of sheer fun colorful adventure SF and fantasy. This was his first story collection, and is still his only collection, but he kept publishing cool stories for the following decade or so, the last of which for a while, "Wife Stealing Time" (from 2009) appeared in my Best of the Year collection. He also published a few novels, the last the fixup Firebird in 2006. Three of his novels were what I call Gabaldonades -- time travel romances, about a 20th Century woman from Montana who travels back to the time of the Wars of the Roses, and falls in love with Edward, Earl of March (who later became King Edward IV, and was in fact the father of the famous Princes in the Tower, said to have been murdered by Edward's younger brother, Richard III.) I thought those novels far from Garcia y Robertson at his best, and the series was never finished. At any rate, Garcia y Robertson published nothing (that I am aware of) from 2009 until last year, when I was thrilled to see two more very enjoyable SF novellas in Asimov's.

At any rate, this hiatus led me to worry that Garcia y Robertson's career was in danger, and that his books, thus, in danger of being forgotten. So I think it makes sense to repost this review, as I wrote it back in 1998.

Sometimes I toy with the question "What academic discipline provides the best grounding for an SF writer?". The conventional answers might be Physics, or Astronomy, or even English Literature or Computer Science. But I've come to believe that History is the most valuable such discipline. A knowledge of History provides insight into other societies, into different technologies and different ways of thought, into the effect of geography on culture (very useful for "world-building"), all insights which illuminate the core of much of the best SF. And of course, History is itself a story, a grand sweeping story with a scope greater even than almost any SF story.

R. Garcia y Robertson is an historian, and the benefits of his particular training shine through in his stories. Most obviously, he loves to write historical fantasies, as with his novel The Spiral Dance (set on the Scottish-English border in the 15th Century), or with several stories in the collection at hand, set in a wide range of historical milieus. He also likes time-travel stories, most famously in The Virgin and the Dinosaur, but also in "Gypsy Trade" included here.

The title story is one of the most "Fantastic" of the historical stories included. "The Moon Maid" is an Amazon, one of an historical group of women warriors, located near the Don (or Amazon) River in what is now Russia. Her "tribe" honors lions, and when a nomad Hetman's son is killed by a lion, she must capture and destroy the animal, or risk having her whole tribe exterminated by the nomads. Her tracking of the lion is a mixture of realistic animal tracking, and rather wildly fantastic events, such as a meeting with Hercules, described in hilarious detail.

The place of women in historical societies is a recurring theme in these stories (and strong women characters occur in almost all the stories, including the futuristic ones). "The Other Magpie" features real historical figures at the Battle of Little Big Horn. The title character is a very independent Crow woman, mourning her brother's death at the hands of the Sioux. Partly as a result, she and her transvestite friend end up joining Custer's army. The Magpie and her friend are historical characters, though the specifics of the Magpie's dealings with her dead brother, and of her attempts to save Captain Reno from the coming disaster, are a bit more speculative. "Four Kings and an Ace", perhaps the best story here, features Boy Toy, a young Chinese girl, a Christian and the adopted daughter of missionaries, abandoned on the docks in San Francisco after her parents' deaths. She falls into the hands of a gang which tries to sell her into slavery as a whore, but is fortunate to encounter a clever lawyer, who sees a way to use her beauty in a battle against a crooked railroad man. The story climaxes with a suspenseful poker game, and a predictable ending which still surprises, in the best way.

The fourth "historical fantasy" is "The Wagon God's Wife", set in medieval Sweden, featuring a Norwegian Christian convert who has been banished to pagan Sweden. Saved from freezing by the title character, he finds himself in a battle with a pagan God. Colorful, sexy, and a fascinating look at a culture quite different from ours.

Robertson is also a first-rate writer of science fiction adventure. "Cast on a Distant Shore", one of his earliest stories, is set on an ocean world, where economically marginalized humans live on floating islands and earn subsistence money by diving for seastones. This setup is rather old hat, and the plot is a bit familiar as well, involving a diver in desperate straits who agrees to help an alien scientist fish for a particularly dangerous sea animal, but the story is very engagingly told, with a nice twist or two, and the main characters are interesting people.

"Gone to Glory" is also set on an alien planet, this one in the middle of terraformation. The dirty work of preparing the new planet for human colonization is being done by "retrobred" Neanderthals, and the daughter of a highly-placed human has been lost, apparently captured or killed by a tribe of escaped Neanderthals. Defoe, a skilled pilot with experience dealing with the wild Neanderthals, is called away from a cushy vacation to look for the missing woman. The setting is somewhat unconvincing (the economics of the colonization efforts, including the "retrobreeding" as well as the use of "Super-Chimps", don't seem to add up), but the story itself is very exciting, with a colorful balloon flight across the half-terraformed planet, and a serious, believable, ecological motivation behind things.

Another straight SF story in the collection (all three future-set stories seem to be fit vaguely into the same loose "Future History") is "Werewolves of Luna", a pure romp, and great fun. A Scottish tourist runs into spacesuit trouble, and is on the point of suffocating on the Moon. His rescuers cheerfully abstract his credit, and shanghai him into joining (and financing) their team for an upcoming Virtual Reality adventure game. (Fortunately, one of the rescuers is a beautiful woman.) The first part of the story is nice straight SF, and the finish, set inside the adventure environment, is more like fantasy, involving a quest for a jewel in Dracula's castle. As with some of the other stories, pulling too strongly on the plot threads might cause the whole thing to unravel, but, if you just go along for the ride, it's a wonderful ride.

Robertson writes that "Gypsy Trade" has been optioned for a movie. It's a strong story, with a plot element that movie makers understand (Nazis), and I think it could be a good movie. The story opens with Dieter, dressed in the uniform of a Waffen SS officer, entering a gypsy camp in 1591 with a plan to rescue three gypsy women from the local witch-hunting priest. The story is an interestingly different take on time travel, with a nice plot involving rescuing art treasures from the ravages of war, and incidentally rescuing some humans as well. The background gives us a look at the horrible treatment of gypsies in the 16th century, and again under the Nazis.

A very fine collection. The most compelling feature of these stories is that they are just that: stories. Indeed, as the title of this collection reads, "Fantastic Adventures". Rife with color, full of action and romance, every story included is pure fun to read. (And Robertson has a real knack of knowing when a story ends.) Indeed, if I had a gripe, it might be that serious thematic concerns are left in the dust as the action races by. (Though it should be noted, even as his protagonists strive and (usually) succeed, the background details are often darker: slavery in late-19th Century San Francisco, ecological disaster on an alien planet, the sometimes bloody history of Christianity, are all displayed here.)