Old Bestseller: The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley

Old Bestseller Review: The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley

a review by Rich Horton

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was a clergyman in the Church of England and a novelist. He was a Christian Socialist, prominent in his opposition to, for example, child labor, but terribly inconsistent, in particular as he was quite noticeably racist, particularly as concerns Jews, Catholics, and the Irish, but also lots of other people. These general attitudes of course were not uncommon in those days, but Kingsley appears to me to have held them a bit more virulently than some. He was an early supporter of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, but to my eye (based on The Water-Babies alone), his ideas about evolution seem a bit simple-minded. Besides The Water-Babies his most famous novel is Westward Ho!, which I passed on as it seemed terribly sad on a quick skim. Shallow of me, I guess.

I'd been meaning to try The Water-Babies for quite a while. It was once an extremely popular children's book, but it has largely faded from notice in recent decades. I found a copy recently at an estate sale, and figured now was the time. My edition probably dates to the 1930s. The book was first serialized in Macmillan's in 1962/1863, and published in book form in 1863. My edition is inscribed "A Happy Birthday to Betty and much love from Benjamin Edwards. May 16-1934. Baghdad." It was published by Thomas Nelson, now well known as an American publisher of most religious material, but back then a more generally focussed English publisher. It is copiously illustrated by Anne Anderson. Anderson (1874-1952) was a Scottish illustrator, mostly of children's books.

The Water-Babies concerns the lives of Tom, who when we first meet him is a chimney sweep in the North Country of England. His master, Grimes, is a cruel man and a drunkard, and Tom can think of little but when he will become a master sweep and be able to treat his apprentices as cruelly as Grimes has treated him. One day Grimes gets as assignment to clean the chimneys of Sir John Harthover, an honorable and highly respected local judge. On the way they meet a mysterious Irishwoman, who objects to Grimes' treatment of Tom, and who tells them "Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be."

At Harthover Place, Tom manages to get lost in the maze on chimneys, and he ends up coming down into the fireplace of the daughter of the house, Ellie, who is about his age. He is supposed to be a thief, and he is chased out the window and runs away in a panic, making his way across the moors ot a secluded village, where he is treated kindly by a local schoolmarm, but ends up falling in the river and being transformed into a tiny "water baby". Soon after Sir John, having realized that Tom was innocent, organizes a search, and finds the husk of his body, so that he is presumed dead. (Not too long after that, Ellie also dies in a fall, and is herself transformed to a water baby.)

Tom's career as a water baby proceeds -- at first he makes friends with fish and water insects and so on, though he is also often cruel. All along, without his realizing it, fairies are helping him. Eventually he proceeds down river to the sea, and has further adventures and travels, making his way at last to St. Brandan's Isle, where the fairies Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Bedonebyasyoudid try to show him a way to be a better person. He meets Ellie there as well, and learns that she goes to someplace special on Sundays. Eventually he is set a task -- to do something he doesn't want to do, and help someone he doesn't like -- and another quest ensues, ending up with him becoming worthy of Ellie, and both becoming human again, and (it seems, though the book denies this in a joking fashion (only princes and princesses get married in fairy tales)) getting married, while Tom becomes an engineer. It's not clear what their identities are in this new incarnation.

I've skipped over the bulk of the book, really, which is amusing descriptions of the lives of various water creatures and birds and so on, along with a number of, essentially, Just So stories. These are often fun, but they are also moralizing to a fault, and twee rather beyond a fault. This isn't a bad book, and I can see the appeal it must have had, but it didn't really work for me, and I can see why it has become largely forgotten.

Birthday Review: Cosmonaut Keep, by Ken MacLeod

Cosmonaut Keep, by Ken MacLeod

A review by Rich Horton

Today is Ken MacLeod's 64th birthday, so in his honor I'm reposting this review I did for my SFF Net newsgroup way back in 2000, when Cosmonaut Keep first appeared. (Some of the references are out of date, no doubt.)

(Cover by Stephen Martiniere)

Now as to Cosmonaut Keep.  I've rapidly become a huge fan of Ken MacLeod's.  His first four novels are all inter-related, representing two alternate branches of a future history which diverged in the middle of the 21st century. They are heavily political in content, and the politics is interesting stuff: a mix of somewhat utopian socialism, somewhat utopian libertarianism, and grittily realpolitik views of a decidedly non-utopian near future with a chaotic mix of extrapolations of all sorts of political trends.  The other major thread in those novels was the development of Artificial Intelligence, and in particular its potential dangers for ordinary humans.  Indeed, each of MacLeod's first four novels features what could be called a genocide of AI's. 

Those are good stuff, but MacLeod was pretty much mining the same vein with them.  So it's nice to seem him branching out somewhat with Cosmonaut Keep.  This book is set in an entirely different future.  Instead of AI's, there are several different species of aliens.  And while there is a near future depicted as a realpolitik drenched chaotic mix of extrapolations of political trends (mainly a revitalized Communism versus a reasonable extrapolation of U. S. Capitalism), the political stuff is in more in the background, more of a plot driver than a major focus of discussion.  The author who seems most present as an influence on Cosmonaut Keep is Poul Anderson: there are several direct echoes of Andersonian themes, and one or two passages that seem almost stylistic hommages to Anderson.

Like all of MacLeod's books up to this point (except his first), it's told in two timelines.  After a mysterious prologue, which only makes sense at the end of the book, we are introduced to Gregor Cairns, a student on the planet Mingulay, and his fellow researchers Elizabeth Harkness and Salasso.  Salasso is a saur: an intelligent dinosaur-like being.  Elizabeth and Gregor are of different social classes: Elizabeth, it seems, is a "native", while Gregor is a descendant of the "cosmonauts", who arrived at Mingulay some centuries earlier from Earth, in a starship which is now unusable.  Soon another starship arrives: this one bearing human traders from Nova Babylonia, traders who in some ways resemble Anderson's Kith (and Heinlein's Traders from Citizen of the Galaxy, and Vinge's Qeng Ho), though their starship is actually controlled by aliens called Krakens, who naturally enough are huge beasts that live in water.  Details about this future interstellar civilization, called the "Second Sphere", are slow to be revealed, and I won't reveal much here, but they are neat and clever and intriguing details.  At any rate, Gregor soon meets a beautiful trader girl and falls in love: but all this is complicated by questions as to what the traders really want from the people of Mingulay, and what Gregor's family and fellow "cosmonauts" wish to do: the Great Work, and on a personal level, by Elizabeth's concealed love for Gregor.

The second timeline follows a Scotsman named Matt back in the middle of the 21st century.  He's a manager of programmers: the actual programmers are either AI's or aging geeks who remember legacy code like DOS and Unix. He's got a thing for an American named Jadey who is involved with the Resistance movement in England: and before long she's giving him a disk with some very interesting information on it.  At the same time, an announcement stuns the world: the (Communist) European Union has been contacted by aliens in an asteroid they've been studying.  Soon Jadey is under arrest, and Matt is fleeing to Area 51, then to the asteroid, where they learn that the information Jadey had Matt smuggle out is plans for a spaceship and a space drive.  All this is highly destabilizing to the world political situation, which teeters on the brink of chaos while the scientists on the asteroid try to talk to the aliens and build the spaceship.  It's easy to see where this is going, given that it has to mesh with the other story, but it's still clever and suspenseful.

This is a very good novel, one of the best I've read in 2000.  It's got a nice, well-contained story, involving mainly Gregor and Matt's personal lives mixed with the Great Work (for Gregor) and with Matt's obvious destiny. At the same time this story is clearly a setup for potentially fascinating future books in its series.  (The title page says this is Book One of Engines of Light.)  It's full of nifty SFnal ideas.  Behind the scenes, just barely hinted at, are some really scary implications, and some really well-done half-evocations of deep time.  (Such as: what has happened on Earth since the starship left for Mingulay?)  Much is just sketched in, especially about the multiple-alien interstellar society of the Second Sphere, which will be expanded on, I assume, in future books.  MacLeod's prose continues toimprove: he has a habit of mostly just writing sound, clever, workable stuff, then every so often winding up to an emotional and even quasi-poetic peak. The characters are decently drawn, though not especially deep, and there is a certain sense that their romantic lives are resolved rather conveniently. (Which isn't to say necessarily happily.)   Mostly, this is just good solid Science Fiction, with plenty of sense of wonder inducing ideas.

Birthday Review: I Dare, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

I Dare, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Meisha Merlin, Decatur, GA, 2002, ISBN 1-892065-03-7, US$18.00, 472 pages

A review by Rich Horton

Steve Miller was born on July 31, 1950, and so I decided to resurrect this review I did for 3SF back in 2002. It's a fairly brief review, conforming to the format I used for 3SF.

[I should note that my favorite Liaden novels are a pair of books set a generation before the main plot line which was started in the first book (Agent of Change) and concluded in the book reviewed here, I Dare. Those books are Local Custom and Scout's Progress, books written in the early '90s but not published until 2001 by Meisha Merlin, and 2002 by Ace. Both have significant romance plots (unlike most of the Liaden books, which are more adventure oriented), and I really enjoyed them. I reviewed them for Dave Felts' small 'zine Maelstrom, but I've lost my copies of those reviews. (I have the Maelstrom issues somewhere, and maybe I'll retype them from the paper copies whenever I find them.)]

I will also add that Lee and Miller now publish with Baen, and I Dare and its immediate predecessor, Plan B, have been republished by Baen as Korval's Game.

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller published their first Liaden books in 1989. The series was picked up by Meisha Merlin and continued in 1999. I Dare is the seventh novel, and it ends the long plot arc begun in the first book, though there is plenty of room for further books in the same universe.

This book follows Plan B, in which the powerful but controversial Clan Korval was forced by the machinations of the sinister Department of the Interior to abandon the Liaden main world, Liad. The current novel follows several threads. On the planet Erob, many of the main Korval Clan members are gathering to muster a force that can resist the Department, while back on Liad the wizard Anthora tries to maintain the home front. But Anthora may be getting help from an unexpected source … And the somewhat raffish gambler, Pat Rin, has been isolated from the rest of the Clan, and he gathers a beautiful gangster and some more friends and tries to set up another power base on an isolated, rather anarchic, world.

As the above summary might suggest, the book is rather busy, probably too much so. I think it could have benefited from judicious cutting, perhaps the complete excision of at least one thread. The authors also give the good guys such power (essentially magical powers) that too much suspense is leached from the conflict – they cannot lose. It's still exciting. I liked the sections with Pat Rin particularly. As usual, there is a heavy dose of romance to go along with plenty of action. It's by no means the best of the Liaden novels, and it's not a good place to start, but I Dare does resolve longstanding questions, and is should satisfy long time fans.

Birthday Review: Kalpa Imperial (and Trafalgar), by Angélica Gorodischer

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Angélica Gorodischer, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer Press, 2003)

A review by Rich Horton

[Angélica Gorodischer turns 90 today, and in honor of her birthday, I'm posting this review I did for Locus Online back in 2003, and I've added the snippet I wrote about her book Trafalgar for Locus (the print version) in 2013. The original Locus Online review of Kalpa Imperial is here.]

Here before me is a delightful book, Kalpa Imperial, by Angélica Gorodischer. It is a fantasy about "The Greatest Empire That Never Was", as the subtitle has it. Gorodischer is Argentine, and the translation from the Spanish is by Ursula K. Le Guin -- a recommendation in itself! A portion of this book was published in Starlight 2 a few years ago. The voice seems very reminiscent of Le Guin: hard to say if that's reflective of the original work or of her translation.

The book is a compendium of several separate stories, mostly told by a professional storyteller (who also has an important additional role in one story), concerning the history of "The Greatest Empire That Never Was". Most of the stories tell of Emperors and Empresses, some good, some bad, some mad -- how they came to power, how they fell from power, how they ruled. The stories are often romantic, but the romanticism is tinged by a sort of earthiness, and a realism that does not quite become cynical. The stories are nicely imagined, sometimes funny, sometimes brutal. The whole is billed as a novel, but the stories work fine separately, and are really linked only by geography and the voice of the storyteller, so it's more a linked collection of short fiction, in my view.

There are eleven stories, or chapters, arranged in two books. The opening piece, "Portrait of the Emperor", tells us that a good man now sits on the throne of the Empire, and then goes on to tell of the founding of the empire, by a weakling boy who learned a different kind of strength. "The Two Hands" is a fable-like story of an usurper who ended up spending twenty years confined in his bedroom. "The End of a Dynasty, or The Natural History of Ferrets" tells of a young Crown Prince, son of a cruel Empress and a deposed Emperor, who grows up torn between the evil influence of his mother and the countervailing touch of a couple of kindly workmen. "Siege, Battle, and Victory of Selimmagud" is an ironic tale of a thief and deserter and his encounter with the General besieging the title city. "Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities" is a lovely long description of the varying history of a Northern city, sometimes the capitol, sometimes ignored, sometimes something quite else.

Book two opens with "Portrait of the Empress", in which the storyteller who has been narrating these tales is recruited by the Great Empress to tell her of her Empire's history. She in turn tells him of the woman who rose from poverty to become the Great Empress. "And the Streets Empty" is a dark story of the vengeful destruction of a city by a jealous Empress. "The Pool" concerns a mysterious physician, and his encounters with those plotting to overturn the current dynasty. "Basic Weapons" is a colorful and macabre piece about a dealer in people, and a rich man, and obsession. "'Down There in the South'" is a long story of an aristocrat with a dark secret who is forced to flee from the ruling North to the rural South, and who is fated to change history when the North comes to invade. And "The Old Incense Road" tells of a mysterious orphan, a mysterious merchant, a caravan, and some "stories within the story", all eventually concerning another change of rulers.

The stories are full of humor and tragedy, of cynicism and romanticism, of secret identities, of wisdom and folly, of blood, of nobility. The fantastical elements are slim: this is perhaps what is called sometimes "Ruritanian" fantasy -- set in a different world that much resembles ours. At the same time the landscapes and characters and events are heightened in color, so that if there may not be overt magic, the ordinary seems magic enough. The feel is certainly fantastical.

It is often remarked that Americans (indeed, English language readers in general) tend not to read a lot of fiction in translation. This does seem true of SF readers -- we are happy enough to read books by Englishmen and Australians and even those wacky Canadians, but it tends to be hard to find books from other languages. I'm not sure this is entirely, or even largely, because Americans (or Englishmen or Australians or whomever) are particularly xenophobic. Rather, there isn't that much available in translation, for several reasons. Acquiring a foreign language book means the publisher (or author) must pay extra for a translator. Once translated the book is different from the original -- most likely not as good. (And a bad translation can do long-term harm, in part by making it harder still to obtain a good translation. (I have heard that the English publishers of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris have refused to contract for a new translation, even of such an important novel, even though the existing one is notoriously poor (apparently a two step job, Polish to French to English).)) Finally, the English language book market is pretty full of books in English -- perhaps publishers simply feel there are already enough books. (Perhaps in smaller countries there might be more pressure to find books published in other languages -- assuming the readers have the same appetite for fiction, but fewer writers to provide it.)

But even if our failure to read much SF in translation is understandable, it is nothing to be happy about. Thus I'm delighted to have a chance to praise a book from an Argentine writer. And I'm delighted that the translation reads wonderfully -- though to be sure I cannot speak directly to its accuracy. Kalpa Imperial is a lovely book -- praise is due Le Guin and to the folks at Small Beer Press for bringing it to our attention; and much praise is due Angélica Gorodischer for writing it.

[Added in 2018]

Happily, the amounted of translated SF available in the US has expanded tremendously, most notably evidence by Hugos for China's Cixin Liu and Hao Jingfang and for Dutch writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt. Indeed, short fiction in translation is a regular feature in magazines like Clarkesworld. As for Gorodischer, at least one more of her books has been translated into English, also SF: Trafalgar, back in 2013. Here's what I wrote about that book in the May 2013 Locus:

A few years ago Small Beer Press published the Argentine writer Angélica Gorodischer's lovely mosaic novel (or linked story collection) Kalpa Imperial (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin). Now they give us another linked collection from Gorodischer, Trafalgar. (This time Amalia Gladhart does the translation.) The stories are all about a merchant named Trafalgar Medrano, who has a spaceship he calls the Clunker, and who travels all around the Galaxy buying and selling things, and more importantly, encountering strange planets and stranger societies. There is a sort of club story feeling to the tales -- almost a resemblance to Dunsany's Jorkens -- and there is also a hint of Le Guin in the ethnography. The book is enjoyable throughout -- Trafalgar's voice is absorbing, and so is that of the narrator (who may or may not be the same person throughout) -- and the societies Trafalgar encounters are interesting and wittily presented. My favorite was "Trafalgar and Josefina", a tale told to the narrator through her somewhat eccentric old Aunt Josefina, very very funny in its framing (that is, in Josefina's comments on the story) and turning darker as we learn of Trafalgar's visit to a planet with a very strict caste system, ruled by a randomly chosen person of a lower caste, who makes the mistake of falling for a married woman.

Birthday Review: A Young Man Without Magic, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

A Young Man Without Magic, by Lawrence Watt-Evans (Tor, 2009)

a review by Rich Horton

Today is Lawrence Watt Evans' 64th birthday, so it seems appropriate to repost this review of a novel I really enjoyed a few years ago. Alas, the series this book started was canceled after the second volume.

Lawrence Watt-Evans' 2009 novel is A Young Man Without Magic. It is the first of a pair* -- not that Tor tells us that, as is too often their habit. It does end dramatically, and at a logical stopping point, but the story certainly isn't over. (And I really wanted to have the next book right then to continue reading!)

(*Actually, I believe seven novels were originally planned, but the publisher dropped the series after the second book.)

(cover by Scott Fischer)

Anrel Murau is the title character. Both his parents were sorcerers, who died in a magical accident. He was raised by his uncle, also a sorcerer, and the Burgrave of Alzur, a town in the province of Aulix, in the Empire of Walasia. In Walasia one becomes an aristocrat by displaying a talent for sorcery, and those of sufficient ability can become Burgraves (in control of a town) or Landgraves (in control of a province) or Margraves (in control of a border area). So Anrel is in an ambiguous state: he has grown up in an aristocratic milieu, but he is not one himself, and as the novel opens, after four years as a student in the capitol city, Lume, he is returning home and wondering what to do with himself. His best friend is his uncle's foster son, a child of commoners who showed sorcerous ability, Lord Valin. Lord Valin is a political firebrand who advocates more power for the common people, and as the current Emperor is apparently a fool, and has bankrupted the realm, his ideas have some currency, though Anrel thinks him foolish. At any rate, a Great Council is being called by the Emperor, and Valin hopes that real political change will result.

The local Landgrave, Lord Allutar, is a powerful sorcerer but, we are told, a rather nasty man. And soon we see him planning to execute a local commoner for a minor crime, thievery, in order to perform some black magic. Valin is furious, Anrel pragmatic, and Anrel's cousin, Lady Saria, oddly unmoved -- it seems she is scheming to marry Lord Allutar. Anrel finds himself trying to stop Valin from making an enemy of the much more powerful Allutar, with no success, all of which leads to a shocking event that drives Anrel to a curious action -- a political speech of his own, followed by a forced exile from his home province and a period of wandering with a group of witches (illegal sorcerers) until his path crosses Lord Allutar again, and the novel ends with an even more shocking event.

After a slightly slow beginning, in which we are perhaps told too much instead of shown. (For example, we are told that Lord Allutar is a bad man, but what we are shown at first is much more ambiguous.) But once Anrel is forced to take action of his own, the story picks up, and I ended up enjoying it quite a lot. And as I said, by the end I was fully absorbed and I really wanted to start the next book right away.

I've glossed over most of the plot to avoid spoilers, as there are some interesting revelations that I think should be left for the reader to discover, but that make it hard to discuss details. It is much of a piece with Watt-Evans's typical work -- a hero who is determinedly "ordinary" and forced, mostly against his will, to take a larger role in events; a generally commonsensical approach to all aspects of the world: magic is quite rule-based, and controlled; politics is treated rather pragmatically and almost cynically but not quite; love affairs even are sort of backgrounded. Good solid work from a writer who never disappoints.

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.