A Forgotten SF Novel: The Hawks of Arcturus, by Cecil Snyder III

A Forgotten SF Novel: The Hawks of Arcturus, by Cecil Snyder III (DAW, 1974)

a review by Rich Horton

Cecil Snyder III was born 20 July 1948, and on his 70th birthday last week I thought I ought to resurrect whatever I wrote when I first read this novel a couple of decades ago. But I couldn't find that -- so, crazily, I went ahead and reread the book, and I've written up my current thoughts.

About Snyder almost nothing is known. (In fact, at first I thought he might be a pseudonym.) But his  Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry says "US author ... should not be confused with his father, Cecil K. Snyder, Jr., also an author". And that remains the sum total of my knowledge.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

I used to cite The Hawks of Arcturus as one of the worst SF novels I have ever read, to stand with Jean Mark Gawron's Algorithm, or J. D. Austin's Second Contact, or Larry Niven's Rainbow Mars. So why reread it? As I said, crazy. But, curiously enough, for about half the book I was thinking, "Hey, this isn't so bad! It's not great, but it's kind of fun with a nice mystery ..." -- and, then, in the second half Snyder snatches awfulness from the jaws of mediocrity. He doesn' so much fail to stick the landing as bang the balance beam with his head on the way down and land flat on his back. But, that said, I think the vaguely promising opening lifts it from utterly awful to merely bad.

It opens on Earth, as the Arcturian Ambassador is confronted by one of his own people, En'varid, who demands that he support their warlike new Herald, Darlan, in a rebellion by Arcturus against the Dominions. The Dominions are an association of all the human worlds, which consist of a great number of human colonies on other planets, as well as Earth, which has been restored to life by the colonials in recent centuries. No actual aliens have ever been encountered. The Ambassador resists En'varid's request, because he knows that a war will be no good for anyone, and that Darlan is a dangerous man. En'varid himself, we learn, is plotting against Darlan, for his own advancement.

Then the POV shifts, to Chen, a young man who has just bought a new prospecting ship. He is hitching a ride on the large transport taking the Arcturans back home, and he soon encounters, and is enchanted by, En'varid's personal pilot, a beautiful woman named Alsar. Alsar takes him to a party thrown by the Arcturans, where he meets Darlan. And the next morning, Chen is arrested for the murder of En'varid ... it's clear he's being railroaded, as the murder must have been committed by someone from Darlan's delegation, for political reasons.

We learn Chen's own secrets ... he, an orphan, was raised by an old prospector named Inman, who had investigated a mysterious artifact made of crystallized helium. And Chen has a shard of crystal helium himself -- but he has no idea what it all means.

When they get to Arcturus Chen is rescued by Alsar, and taken to a remote location. He needs to hide from the Arcturan authorities, while Alsar returns to Darlan. But Chen is impatient, and escapes again, only to be picked up by Dominion authorities, and expelled from the planet.

Up to this point I was pretty interested. The Arcturan rebellion, trite as it was as a plot element, still showed signs of being interesting. Alsar -- femme fatale or true ally of the good guys? The mystery of the crystallized helium. Another mystery -- memories of strange past events that come to people (En'varid and Chen included) who use another mysterious artifact (that turns out to be helium too of course) -- these events seem to involved a group of humans escaping a system destroyed by a nova, and being pursued by the warlike enemy Andere.

But apparently Snyder didn't know where to go with this. Chen ends up pursuing clues about a series of novas and finds a strange planet. But somehow Darlan ends up there too, in an unusual ship. There is a star-busting weapon. There is a curious story concerning the histories of Inman, Darlan, and even Alsar and Chen. (There are more than a couple bits reminiscent of Star Wars, which, to be sure, came out three years after this novel -- I doubt any influence occurred in either direction.) Then a return to Arcturus, and a thoroughly unconvincing and weirdly unmotivated strange conclusion. I thought the prose deteriorated in the latter half as well -- I really wonder if Snyder didn't just lose interest in the whole thing.

I think the elements of the book could have made a middling decent light space opera -- nothing great, but something OK. But in the end it's a pretty bad light space opera.

Another Forgotten Ace Double: Cradle of the Sun, by Brian M. Stableford/The Wizards of Senchuria, by Kenneth Bulmer

Ace Double Reviews, 47: Cradle of the Sun, by Brian M. Stableford/The Wizards of Senchuria, by Kenneth Bulmer (#12140, 1969, $0.75)

This review was first written in 2004. I'm reposting it today, on the occasion of Brian M. Stableford's 70th birthday.

A modest entry in the Ace Double series, pairing a very early Stableford novel -- in fact, his first novel -- with an ordinary piece from Bulmer's long career. Cradle of the Sun is about 48,000 words, The Wizards of Senchuria about 40,000. This is in some ways a perfect example of what the Ace Double format could allow: introducing a new writer to the SF audience with a somewhat unusual novel, but making the package more palatable to the nervous buyer by also including a routine, unsurprising but known quantity in the form of a veteran contributor's rather unambitious offering.

(Covers by Jack Gaughan and Kelly Freas)

Stableford was born in 1948, and his first story, a collaboration with Craig Mackintosh called "Beyond Time's Aegis", as by "Brian Craig", appeared when he was only 17, in the November 1965 issue of Science Fantasy. He has also written as Kay Stirling, John Rose, and Francis Amery, though the Stirling and Rose pseudonyms may have only been in fanzines. (The "Brian Craig" pseudonym was later used for some gaming tie-ins and at least one more collaboration with Mackintosh. The Amery pseudonym was used for a brief series of stories in Interzone a few years ago.) He first attracted attention (though not very much, I suppose) with two series for DAW in the early 70s: the Hooded Swan books about a spaceship pilot named Grainger who is host to an alien mind-creature; and the Daedalus books, about an ecological mission to a variety of troubled colony planets. Stableford published quite a few books, mostly for DAW, until the early 80s. He reappeared in the late 80s with a highly-praised group of books about an Alternate Historical Victorian England with werewolves. Throughout the 90s his reputation has only grown, with an impressive list of rather hard SF stories mostly on biological themes, many linked as part of his "Emortality" future, which culminated in 6 novels, the last being last year's The Omega Expedition.

I am very impressed by Stableford's most recent work, which I think among the best biologically-oriented SF -- thoughtful, original, extrapolatively exciting. A few years ago I made a point of reading the Hooded Swan and Daedalus books, which are solid if minor work: rather cynical, often focussing on interesting biological ideas (especially in the Daedalus books), certainly worth a look, but not as good as his mature stuff.

The above couple paragraphs were written in the early 2000s. Since then Stableford has continued to publish prolifically, often with the small press Wildside, and he as also translated a great many 19th Century French novels of the fantastic.

Cradle of the Sun is pretty ambitious, imaginative, and in many ways characteristic of Stableford's later work. (Though it's certainly not as strange (nor as ambitious) as his later Ace Double The Blind Worm.) It's set in the far future, when Man is dying out: after an era of exploration, humankind collectively seems to have lost will and ambition. The rats have in the interim evolved to full intelligence, still living in some dependency on humans. A rat philosopher and a human Librarian meet and talk, and they come to the conclusion that both peoples will soon die out, victims of some sort of "psychoparasite". The only solution is a mission to the island of Tierra Diablo, suspected base of this parasite, and only a combined rat/human mission will possibly succeed.

Thus 6 people, 3 rats and 3 humans, set out for Tierra Diablo. The leader is Kavan Lochlain, said to be that last human who feels fear. He reacts to fear but confronting it -- thus he is a good choice to venture into scary territory. There is also the sense that his fear is one of the positive emotions humans have been robbed of by the psychoparasite. He is accompanied by a beautiful aquatically adapted woman and a tiger man (humans have bioengineered themselves in many ways), and by the philosopher rat Anselmas and two more. Kavan carries a bomb which will destroy whatever they find.

Their journey takes them through some intriguing territory, and they meet some strange people -- flyers, and snake people, and so on. At the same time an invasion by mechanical hive-minded insect creatures destroys the Library and the nearby fastness of the rats. Eventually the group reaches the sea and battles their way across, encountering further hive minded creatures, flyers this time, before getting to Tierra Diablo. Inevitably they suffer great losses, until Kavan finally faces his greatest fears and discovers the creature behind the psychoparasite. The eventual revelation of this creature's nature and motives is a bit of a letdown, I will say. Still, the story is a decent read. There's plenty of adventure, some neat SFnal creatures, and an OK resolution. Kavan is a dour, anti-romantic, hero, of at least some interest, though for the most part he and the other main characters are types and not well-rounded people. Obviously Stableford has done much better -- did much better almost right away -- but this is not a first novel to be ashamed of.

Kenneth Bulmer (actual first name Henry) is an English writer, who retired in about 1988, and died in 2005. He wrote in the neighborhood of 100 novels, including the "Dray Prescot" series for DAW under the name "Alan Burt Akers". He also contributed 15 Ace Double halves. And he was the editor for the last 9 volumes of the English original anthology series New Writings in SF. I've found what little of his work I've read to be modestly enjoyable adventure fiction, perhaps a bit slapdash in construction -- I suppose entirely typical of what one would expect from a writer of such prolificity.

The Wizards of Senchuria turns out to be from the middle of an 8 book long series, which the ISFDB collectively calls "Keys to the Dimensions". I will admit I did not suspect that it was part of a series until the end, where one villain remains unvanquished. Knowing that it is part of a series explains some problems I had with the book -- basically, the rapid introduction to an overarching "war" of sorts, which main conflict is quickly abandoned, and only touched on towards the end, never resolved. That problem aside, the book stands alone tolerably, in that it does tell a central story that is finished in this novel. [I later read a couple further books in this series, and those reviews have been posted here as well.]

Scobie Redfern is looking for dinner in Manhattan when he steps into a cab with a big man who seems in a hurry. Soon they are being chased by mysterious beings, and Scobie finds himself snatched away -- as he soon learns, to another dimension, a parallel world. The big man and his friends seem to be the good guys in a war between the dimensions, the foe being the evil Contessa. But before long Scobie is captured and enslaved by the Contessa, only to join a group from yet another parallel world, who plan to escape with the help of one of their own, a beautiful girl named Val who turns out to be a Porteur. Porteurs have the ability to find and open gates between the dimensions, and Val does so, and soon the ragged remnants of their party have struggled through a world or two and seem to have found safety.

The lovely world they find is called Senchuria, but it contains much danger, too. First there are the crystals that radiate paralyzing hate. Then they are captured and cured -- even rejuvenated. But somehow all the men and women are feeling lust for each other -- in Scobie's case, lust for Val. He senses that this is unnatural and tries to resist, soon realizing that the Senchurians -- the Wizards of Senchuria -- feed on emotions, hate, love, anger, fear -- using them somehow to help resist yet ANOTHER inimical force fighting between the dimensions. For, you see, the Senchurians are actually good guys ...

And so it goes, Scobie and Val being recruited to help the Senchurians (after putting up noble resistance), going to yet another dimension, briefly encountering the Contessa, ... Oh yes, and finally falling in love with each other for real. The ending is abrupt, and as I mentioned leaves a major thread, the war with the Contessa, dangling completely. But I'm sure Bulmer gets to that in later books (the last, a 1983 DAW novel, is called The Diamond Contessa, after all). In sum, a bit of a mess of a novel, not very tightly structured at all, not very logical, but mildly amusing light fun.

A Classic Dunsany Collection

The Collected Jorkens, Volume I, by Lord Dunsany, edited by S. T. Joshi, Night Shade Books, Portland, OR, 2004, US$35, ISBN: 1-892389-56-8

A review by Rich Horton

I wrote this review for Locus back in 2004, and on this the 140th anniversary of Edward James Moreton Drax Plunkett's birth, it seems appropriate to repost it here.

Lord Dunsany's reputation is founded on his highly atmospheric, often ironic, often Romantic, fantasies: several collections of short stories from the first two decades of the past century, and novels such as The King of Elfland's Daughter. These are remarkable works, and extraordinarily influential – I would call him the second most influential fantasist of the 20th Century. But he wrote little in that vein after 1924. What was he writing later in his career? Partly, an enormous wad of tales told in a club, by an aging raconteur named Joseph Jorkens, a man who seemed to have traveled everywhere. These stories are the admitted model for Arthur C. Clarke's Tales from the White Hart; and presumably at least an indirect model for many further bar tales. (Though one should not forget P. G. Wodehouse's Mr. Mulliner.)

These stories are full of ironic humor, much coming from Jorkens' insistence that, at the very least, none of his tales can be proven false. He is quite sensitive about this, and those few club members who doubt him often get a subtle comeuppance. Fortunately, the frame narrator (ostensibly Dunsany himself) is always ready with a whiskey and a prompt to urge another story from Jorkens. Dunsany's control of both his narrative voice and of Jorkens' voice is a continuing pleasure.

The humorous aspect of the Jorkens tales seems at the forefront of their reputation, but in fact many or most of the stories have rather a different flavor taken separately from their frame. To be sure, some are downright funny – I delighted at the perfectly prepared punchline to "A Drink at a Running Stream", in which the notorious whiskey drinker one-ups the rest of the club in describing the best drink he ever had. But more often the stories have a tinge of horror, as with the stalking trees in "A Walk to Lingham"; or Jorkens' terrifying climb in "The Golden Gods". There is also often a very characteristic Dunsanian melancholy, as in "The Witch of the Willows", wherein Jorkens is offered the love of a beautiful witch but rejects her for the ordinary England of the 20th Century – and regrets his choice forever. Surely a metaphor for the loss of the unspoiled countryside in exchange for mod cons. Other tales are mainly tall tales, amusing in their exaggeration but not laugh out loud funny, as in "The Escape from the Valley", in which Jorkens carefully calculates how many ducks are required to lift him into the air.

Dunsany is naturally best known as a fantasist, and most of these stories are either fantasies or somewhat implausible adventure tales. But he does venture into Science Fiction once or twice, in particular with two tales of journeys to Mars. These are "Our Distant Cousins" and "The Slugly Beast", in which a friend of Jorkens travels to Mars by aeroplane. These are not terribly hard SF, to be sure, but they do offer the real SF frisson, and the real Jorkens snap as well.

I was thoroughly enchanted by this collection – a marriage of elegant and balanced prose, wry and ironic humor, and an always fertile imagination. Very highly recommended.

A Little-Remembered Ace Double: Gather in the Hall of the Planets/In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories, by K. M. O'Donnell (Barry N. Malzberg)

Ace Double Reviews, 39: Gather in the Hall of the Planets, by K. M. O'Donnell/In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories, by K. M. O'Donnell (#27415, 1971, $0.75)

a review by Rich Horton

Barry Malzberg was born July 24, 1939, so I have posted this old review I did of one of his Ace Doubles. (I've made some slight updates.)

This Ace Double is one of those that consists of a novel backed with a story collection by the same author. Gather in the Hall of the Planets is the novel, a short one of some 33,000 words. In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories is a collection of 15 stories, mostly quite short, totaling some 29,000 words. K. M. O'Donnell published a total of four Ace Double halves in three different books.

(Covers by Jack Gaughan and Karel Thole)

"K. M. O'Donnell" is an open pseudonym of Barry N. Malzberg's (acknowledged as such, a bit coyly, inside this book). The name K. M. O'Donnell is apparently derived, delightfully, from "Kuttner", "Moore", and the Kuttner/Moore pseudonym "Lawrence O'Donnell". Malzberg is one of the more interesting and individual figures in SF. He came to some prominence in the 70s as rather overtly a writer of the "New Wave" (if his best work came slightly after the New Wave hit the shore): his most characteristic stories and novels used SFnal tropes to explore what J. G. Ballard in his seminal 1962 New Worlds essay called "Inner Space". Many of Malzberg's heroes were neurotic men, approaching middle age, with unhappy but often quite active sex lives, with constant worries that they were failures, and with a concomitant concern that the world was a fallen place as well. Many of his heroes were SF writers, leading him rather often to write "self-referential" stories, some collected in The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg. He famously won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel for Beyond Apollo (1972), a fine book about neurotic astronauts. A number of writers associated with Analog, including Poul Anderson, protested this award on the grounds that Malzberg's fiction was actively anti-Campbellian.

Malzberg began publishing in 1967, and attracted considerable attention in 1968 with his Nebula nominated novelette "Final War". He was extremely prolific through the mid-70s. I seem to recall that he publicly retired from SF writing, as was then fashionable (see Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg for other examples). As with those other writers, he returned, though he has never been as prolific in the ensuing years. He has also done a great deal of critical writing, much of it displaying real love for SF mixed with despair for its artistic failures. Some of the best of this work is collected in The Engines of the Night (a Hugo nominee and Locus Award winner for Best Non-Fiction). Early in his career he was briefly editor of Amazing and Fantastic, after Ziff-Davis sold the magazines to Sol Cohen of Ultimate Publishing and as a consequence Cele Lalli relinquished the editorship. During this period a few people helmed the magazines, also including Harry Harrison and Cohen himself, and much of the fiction printed therein was reprints. Malzberg was also a fee reader for the notorious Scott Meredith Literary Agency, as described in his article from last year's Special Barry Malzberg edition of F&SF (June 2003). He returned to agenting in recent years, though now (as I believe) he is retired, and he has produced the occasional story continually for some time. He also has written a series of essays, first in Baen's Universe, later in Galaxy's Edge, again on the history of SF, with the same loving but often tragic view of the field as in The Engines of the Night. These have recently been collected as The Bend at the End of the Road.

When I first began buying SF books on my own, in 1974, I bought a lot of Malzberg's books. One reason is that they were slim and comparatively cheap: he really did publish a lot of novels. In fact his publishers (mainly Pocket Books) used to trumpet his sales on the back of his books: "Over 5 Million Copies in Print" or something like that. What I didn't realize for a while was that that number wasn't quite as impressive when divided by the many novels Malzberg had put out (and also it was somewhat inflated by one movie tie-in: Phase IV.) All that said, I really did enjoy his books. They were clever and thoughtful and effectively dour and often quite mordantly funny. (They were also somewhat repetitive.) What I liked best was the voice, a very noticeable and characteristic voice, detectable in his non-fiction as well, wry, marked by long sentences and asides and a particular rhythm.

Gather in the Hall of the Planets is about a Science Fiction writer named Sanford Kvass. He is approached by aliens who tell him that Earth is being tested: an alien will appear in disguise at the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention, and unless Kvass can unmask the alien Earth will be destroyed. Kvass is already suffering from writer's block and he owes his agent $800, so this hardly improves his mood.

The bulk of the action takes place at the Worldcon. Naturally a big part of the joke is that SF fans and writers are strange enough that there is no way you can tell if one of them is an alien. That said, I'm proud that I figured out who the actual alien was pretty quickly. (Assuming there really were any aliens -- it's possible to read things as Kvass having gone insane.) Besides Kvass's search for the alien, there are passages describing rather cynically a typical convention, with annoying fans, sex-mad quasi-groupies, and drunk pros. There are what seem to be portrayals of a few well-known SF figures: A. E. van Vogt, Sam Moskowitz, Fred Pohl, Damon Knight, John Campbell, and probably others I missed. There is also some discursion on the frustrating life of the writer. All in all, it's pretty fun, not a great book to be sure (and with signs of carelessness, such as a character born in 1945 being 25 years old -- reflecting perhaps the time of writing of the book, but not the time of the action), but enjoyable.

The stories in In the Pocket are, as mentioned, mostly pretty short. Again, they are generally enjoyable but I don't think they represent the best of Malzberg's early work (which I think ended up mostly in an earlier Ace Double half, Final War and Other Fantasies). Five of the stories are original to the collection, the others appeared in F&SF, Venture, Galaxy, If, Amazing, Fantastic, and the anthologies Nova and Infinity.

I particularly liked "The New Rappacini", about a man resurrecting his dead wife; "Gehenna", about three characters crossing paths at a party in New York City; "The Falcon and the Falconeer", about a Nativity play presented on an alien planet; "A Question of Slant", about an SF writer turning to porn; and a couple of cute time travel stories, "July 24, 1970" and "What Time was That?". In general, a lesser collection but still not bad reading.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois would have been 71 today (23 June 2018). As I have done for a few other people, I thought a Birthday Review composed of stories I've reviewed of his for Locus would be nice. The problem is, Gardner's best work as a writer came before I started reviewing.

(Cover by Paul Alexander)

So, I grabbed my copy of his first collection (The Visible Man, 1977), and reread three of my absolute favorite Dozois stories. I also reread Robert Silverberg's introduction, in which he seemed convinced that Gardner was a woman -- no, wait! That was another book! Silverberg, instead, notes Dozois' exceptional prose skills, and places him as a writer working on the edges of Science Fiction -- he writes "much of what he has written is only marginally science fiction by my own fairly restrictive definitions". (For all that, Silverberg published Dozois repeatedly in New Dimensions.) The interesting point is that Gardner, over time, evolved a similarly restrictive definition of SF.

Anyway, I'll cover these three stories much as I might have had I been reviewing for Locus in the '70s.

"Horse of Air" (Orbit 8, 1970)

"Horse of Air" is one of Gardner Dozois' very bleakest stories, which is saying something. It is told in three voices, two of them the same middle-aged man living in a huge Apartment Tower in a much-decayed future city, one of them some sort of observer, perhaps simply the omniscient narrator. The man observes the outside world from his balcony, which we soon gather is a sort of prison; and his dueling internal voices soon make it clear that his main thoughts are vicious and revengeful. He dreams of some apocalyptic event he can set in motion, and of the aliens who will be the agency of that event. We slowly realize his true position -- why he is where he is, why he can't escape; and the portrait is of a rather ugly person in a very ugly future. And the prose reflects this ugliness -- and still somehow reaches for a mad transcendence by the end. [This seems like one of the stories that Silverberg respected but didn't quite consider SF.]

"A Special Kind of Morning" (New Dimensions 1, 1971)

[I loved this story on first reading it in High School, in a copy of New Dimensions 1 that I borrowed from my school library. It absolutely holds up. It was probably the first story by Dozois to attract major attention.] This story is told by a very old man, one-legged, to a much younger man. They are on the planet Kos, part of the Commonwealth. The frame device is beautifully handled, and very effective. The prose is Dozois at his very best. And it's pure SF -- set on another world, and quite cunningly introducing a rather horrifying and very science-fictional background. The old man tells the story of when he lost his leg. He was a soldier, in the old war on a different planet -- World -- in which the Quaestors overthrew the Combine, leading to World's entry into the Commonwealth. He's fighting for the Quaestors, and the first scene has him observing the utterly terrible destruction of the Combine's second city, D'Kotta. Dozois's extended description of this destruction is magnificent. Here's a short extract: "Did y'ever watch the sea lashed by high winds. The storm boils the water into froth, whips it white, until it becomes an ocean of ragged lace to the horizon, whirlpools of milk, not a fleck of blue left alive. The land looked like this at D'Kotta." D'Kotta destroyed, his team's mission is to lure down a ship carrying reinforcements for the Combine, and destroy it. So far, so simple, but all along we have hints of strangeness -- clones, and nulls, and zombies, and hereditary executive clones, and disembodied brains in the Cerebrum. And all this becomes slowly more personal, and more central to the old man's story -- leading to a powerful resolution.

"The Visible Man" (Analog, December 1975)

[I remember being surprised and excited to see a Dozois story in Analog, and very impressed by the result. I believe I nominated for a Novelette Hugo in what was my first nomination ballot.] George Rowan is a criminal, being transported to Boston for punishment. He has already been treated in an important way: he cannot see any living animal or human. The car appears an empty self-driving car to him, for example. But he gets a fortuitous chance to escape when the car has a blowout, and he runs, still unable to see anyone. Someone he gets to a town (not without running into some people) and then to a shopping center, where he can disguise himself as a blind man. And he is helped by some mysterious people, who tell him how to get to the sea, to escape to Canada and South America, and join the resistance. This is action filled, fascinating writing, and the terror of Rowan's curious semi-blindness is excellently portrayed, leading to a dramatic conclusion. There is a bit of a gimmick ending -- clever enough, and I think I liked it more at age 16 than I do now -- it might have been better if it stopped a paragraph or two earlier. Still, a strong story.

And now the reviews I did for Locus of some of Gardner's later stories -- which were always well done and interesting, but lacked the drive and passion of his best early work.

Locus, April 2002

Another light-toned contribution from the April 2002 F&SF is Gardner Dozois' "The Hanging Curve", the magazine's annual April issue baseball story -- this one about the last pitch in a World Series Game 7, a pitch that literally hangs in the air, unmoving and immovable.  Nice if quite minor.

Locus, June 2006

Best this time around at F&SF was Gardner Dozois’s "Counterfactual", an interestingly different take on alternate histories of the Civil War. This is set in an alternate world, in which the South still lost the war but in which Lee never surrendered but escaped to fight a long guerrilla war, still ongoing in the 1930s. A journalist named Cliff from the Minneapolis Star, also a writer of Counterfactuals, is traveling to Montgomery, Alabama, to report on the ceremony welcoming Alabama back into the Union. He speculates on a possible alternate history, in which Lee decided to surrender. The depiction of Cliff’s real world -- rather a depressing one -- is of course the main point of the story. For veteran SF readers of course further interest comes from recognizing the main character -- and one other character, less obviously a well-known writer.

Locus, January 2017

F&SF for November/December features a rare and welcome appearance from Gardner Dozois, whose fame as an editor should not cause us to forget how good his fiction is. "The Place of Bones" is a short stylish dark fantasy told by the tutor of a younger son of a French nobleman. The young man becomes a prodigious scholar, and discovers a way into the mysterious Dragonlands, somewhere not quite in Southeastern Europe. The tutor tells of their desperate trip into these lands, from whence no one returns, and what they find -- or hope to find -- there.

Locus, February 2018

There is other strong work here (F&SF, January/February 2018) -- for example a sharp-edged story, "Neanderthals", from Gardner Dozois, pitting an enhanced time traveler against a recreated Neanderthal bodyguard, leading to a cynical resolution.

Birthday Review: Kelly Link

Birthday Review: The Short Fiction of Kelly Link

Recently I mentioned how much I like Genevieve Valentine's short fiction, and I noted that she might be my favorite contemporary short fiction writer. And then I immediately noted that at last she's "in the conversation". By which I mean I have several favorites, and the one I'd pick on any given day can change. And one of my other absolute favorites is Kelly Link, who was born July 19, 1969. Which is almost a REALLY REALLY significant day in world history, I might add -- and in a very science fictional (and scientific) way!

Anway, here's a selection of my reviews of Kelly Link's short fiction, from Locus between 2004 and 2008. That leaves out a lot -- I covered her work in other venues earlier, and in Locus later, and I've liked it from the beginning. (I remain quite proud of noticing her first story, in Asimov's, and recommending it for a Hugo nomination.)

Locus, December 2004

And the real standout, one of my favorite stories of the year, is "The Faery Handbag", by Kelly Link. Genevieve is a girl in love with a boy named Jake. Genevieve also has an eccentric Grandmother, Sofia, who comes from Baldeziwurlekistan, which makes her hard to beat in Scrabble. Sofia has a special handbag, which, she says, holds her home village, placed there to escape the War. I shouldn't say more -- it's a neat story in itself, neater still because of Link's storytelling voice -- and I'm looking forward to more stories about Genevieve.

Locus, July 2005

Finally, the title story, "Magic for Beginners", is one of my favorite stories of this year. I was grabbed from the beginning lines: "Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. But she will be, soon. She's a character on a show called The Library. You've never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had." Indeed I do! But the story isn't really about Fox -- it's about Jeremy Mars, a 15-year-old boy with a writer father and a librarian mother and a four close friends and, it turns out, an interest in a Las Vegas wedding chapel and a phone booth. Delight is the best word -- I was delighted every second to be reading this story.

(My feelings haven't changed! What a story, what a great great story.)


Locus, April 2006

Naturally one of the stories I most looked forward to was Kelly Link’s "The Wizards of Perfil", and this is indeed a very enjoyable piece, though not as good as her best work. A boy named Onion and his disagreeable cousin Halsa, as well as Halsa’s mother and brothers, are fleeing a war that has already their other parents’ lives. Money is short, so when a reprensative of the reclusive Wizards of Perfil offers to buy a child, one of them must go. Onion, who may be telepathic, seems a natural candidate to sell to the representative of the reclusive wizards, but somehow Halsa is sold instead. As we expect with Link, the story goes in unexpected directions, telling of both Onion and Halsa and the very reclusive wizards -- though I must say the resolution was exactly what I expected. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing.)

Locus, November 2007

Kelly Link’s "The Constable of Abal" is perhaps the best here. Zilla and Ozma are a mother and daughter who can see ghosts. They have had to flee Abal after Zilla killed a constable who was investigating some lucrative blackmail she was getting up to. But the ghost of the constable accompanies them, and eventually they fetch up in another town, at the house of the mysterious Lady Fralix. Who, in good time, will teach Ozma what she needs to know about her mother and herself. It is another delight from Link, charmingly told, original, fun and wise.

Locus, January 2008

And it will probably surprise few that my favorite story here is from Kelly Link. "Secret Identity" is about a superhero convention -- apparently with real superheroes, making this the one fantastical piece in the book -- and a girl who pretended to be her older sister and is now hoping for a rendezvous with an older man she "met" online. Which is as awkward as you might expect, and handled perfectly by Link: and not quite as you expect either.

Locus, January 2008

Kelly Link offers a truly remarkable story, "Light", which as with many Link stories is best read, not read about. But, briefly, it concerns Lindsey, who lives in a Florida a lot like the Florida we know. But not exactly -- for example, there are the "sleepers". Lindsey’s job is to manage a warehouse used by the government to house people found sleeping, unwakeable. And there are pocket universes, which can be explored, and toured, and even retired to, as with Lindsey’s parents. Lindsey also has an ex-husband, and a fairly crazy brother … and I don’t want to say much more but that it is wonderful as ever with Kelly Link, and that it is resolved perfectly.

Locus, May 2008

Kelly Link’s "The Surfer" is set in the near future. A Balkanized U.S. is descending to economic and political chaos. Its health care system is helpless in the face of a series of new flus -- and so Dorn’s father, a Doctor, grabs Dorn from soccer practice and whisks him down to Costa Rica. There they spend a short while in quarantine, waiting for a chance to join a colony centered around a surfer who was verifiably abducted by aliens and is waiting for their return. The SFnal furniture here is interesting -- the plausible and depressing near future, the potential aliens, Costa Rica’s dreams of a space program. But the story is about Dorn, his dreams of being a star soccer goalie, his immaturity, his interactions with a couple of girls also in quarantine. And, yes, his growth, in classic YA fashion -- but his growth seems earned, and isn’t implausible or excessive. And anyway it’s Kelly Link, which means the telling is enchanting.

Old Bestseller Review: Lady Merton, Colonist (aka Canadian Born), by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Old Bestseller Review: Lady Merton, Colonist, by Mrs. Humphry Ward

a review by Rich Horton

Mary Augusta Ward is considered an English writer, and she spent the great bulk of her life in England, but she was born in Tasmania in 1850. Her father was Tom Arnold, a school inspector in Tasmania and later a Professor of Literature at the University of Dublin, then a lecturer in History at Oxford. Her grandfather was Thomas Arnold, the legendary Headmaster of Rugby College, and her uncle was the great poet ("Dover Beach") and critic Matthew Arnold. Her brother-in-law was Thomas Huxley, and so her nephews were Julian and Aldous Huxley. (Aldous was named after a character in one of her novels.) Mary Augusta married Humphry Ward, a lecturer at Oxford, later a journalist. Their son, Arnold (natch!) became a Member of Parliament. She began publishing with a children's book (Milly and Olly) in 1881. She published her books as by Mrs Humphry Ward. Later in her life she became a leading opponent of women's suffrage, and the head of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League. That stance seems uncharacteric today, for she was otherwise very active in liberal causes of the day: she was a campaigner for better education for the poor (she founded a school now called the Mary Ward Centre), she set up a sort of day care center to allow poor women to work more easily, and she promoted University education for women, initially starting the "Lectures for Women" program at Oxford. .

Her first major success, and still probably her best-known novel, was Robert Elsmere (1888). There were no bestseller lists at the time, but I suspect it would have ranked very highly on any such list. It's the story of a churchman and the problems in his marriage caused by his theological differences with his much stricter wife. I saw a copy once and passed -- it looked rather dry. Two of her novels, Lady Rose's Daughter (1903) and The Marriage of William Ashe (1905), were each the bestselling novel of their year in the US, according to Publishers' Weekly.

The novel at hand was serialized in 1909 and came out in book form in 1910. It was published in England as Canadian Born, but retitled Lady Merton, Colonist, in the US. I bought it in part because it looked like a good read, but also because of another feature of the physical book. It has a broad piece of tape over the lower part of the cover, labeled Famous Circulating Library, "Books One Cent a Day". Commercial circulating libraries were once a major means of book distribution, but by about the middle of the 20th century they disappeared, rendered unnecessary by the spread of public libraries, and the introduction of relatively cheap paperback editions.

My edition, possibly the American first, was published by Doubleday, Page. There is a frontispiece by Albert Sterner. (His version of Lady Merton does not match my image of her.) It is signed by, I assume, the first owner, Bee V. McBride, who lived on 9107 Virginia Ave. (There are probably many Virginia Avenues, but I assume this is the one I am fairly familiar with, on the South Side of St. Louis.)



The book opens with 28 year old widow Elizabeth, Lady Merton, on a train in the middle of Canada, accompanying her brother Philip in a private car on a trip from Quebec to Vancouver. (Her late father was a major investor in the railroad.) Lady Merton's husband died in the Boer War, very shortly after their marriage.

She finds herself enchanted by the Canadian landscape, to the point of boring her brother, who is much younger, and in doubtful health (not helped by his drinking). Then, somewhere in Manitoba, the train is halted because a sinkhole has made the track unusable. While repairs are made, she meets an energetic mining engineer now working for the railroad, who arranges for their comfort while supervising repairs to the track. She takes an immediate interest in this man, George Anderson, a native of Manitoba, and she is fascinated by his advocacy for Canada and its future. Anderson, it soon becomes clear, is a man going places -- soon he will stand for the Canadian Parliament. He soon begins to have an influence on Philip, as well.

So, you can see where THAT is headed. But there are complications. For one, Elizabeth's birth and wealth and the fact that her home is in England seem to make a relationship with a Canadian inappropriate. Add to that the fact that she already has a courter -- Arthur Delaine, a 40 year old Englishman who feels the need to marry, and who thinks Elizabeth appreciates his fascination with the classics. And Delaine happens to show up in Winnipeg, with the evident intention of fixing his position with Lady Merton.

The more severe complication, however, is George Anderson's family history. His father was an alcoholic, who caused his house to burn down, killing Anderson's mother and sisters, while he was drinking. Anderson thinks his father dead, but a mysterious man is following him to Vancouver ... and at a stop in the mountains, this man approaches Delaine -- telling him, of course, that he is Anderson's father.

Much ensues -- an attempt by Anderson to rehabilitate his father, an attempt by his father to rope Anderson in on a dicey mining venture, Anderson rescuing Philip from drowning, and then his father escaping and getting involved in a criminal venture, with fatal results.

It's all pretty enjoyable stuff, though by the end it wears out its welcome just a bit, as Elizabeth returns to England, and Philip's health becomes a determining factor. I thought that something of an unnecessary complication, to be sure, and in the end, things resolve more or less as we have expected all along, with a curious epitaph recording an episode of the happy couple's life in Canada.

So, as I said, I did enjoy this book. It's not as didactic as the reputation of some of Mrs Ward's other novels, though to be sure she is quite clear on the proper place of a woman as her husband's support in a marriage. (That said, she is also quite clear on a woman's right to choose her own life within those constraints, and a woman's value and versatility and also her right to an education.) More than anything, the novel is a paean to Canada, especially to the dream of Canada as it was becoming its own nation, as it was experiencing its own version of Manifest Destiny. I wonder -- is it remembered at all in Canada?