A Major SF Story Collection: Voyages by Starlight, by Ian R. MacLeod

Voyages by Starlight, by Ian R. MacLeod
Arkham House, 1996, $21.95
ISBN: 0870541714

A review by Rich Horton

This review first appeared in Tangent, issue 20/21, in 1998. I'm reposting it mainly because it was not available online any more, but prompted by MacLeod's birthday, August 7.

Ian MacLeod seemed to emerge into the SF field almost fully-formed, as it were, with the publication in the Fall 1990 Weird Tales of his second story, "1/72 Scale", which was nominated for a Nebula. His first novel, The Great Wheel, has just been published; and Voyages by Starlight is his first collection.

His stories are very well-constructed, and characteristically rather quiet in tone. In this, in some of his themes, and in his ability to plant a subtle bombshell and explode it in the reader's face at a story's close, he reminds me of the excellent mainstream writer William Trevor. SF writers he reminds me of include Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, and perhaps his fellow Ian, McDonald. MacLeod uses SFnal tropes, sometimes quite original ones, primarily as metaphors enhancing the story's themes, or as enabling devices to place his characters in revealing situations.

I've read all these stories in their original magazine publications, and MacLeod has established himself with me as a "must-read" writer. But rereading them in bulk in this collection enhances my sense of his virtues. His prose style is balanced and elegant. He is wonderful at evoking landscapes, either beautiful as in "The Perfect Stranger" and "Starship Day", or grotesque, as in "The Giving Mouth". His characters are closely described, and truly alive.

My favorite stories here are "The Perfect Stranger" and "Starship Day", which resemble each other a bit in setting (sun-drenched island), and in following a man in early middle age whose marriage is failing, in both cases partly because of guilt about a child. Otherwise the stories are wholly different. "The Perfect Stranger" opens with the protagonist meeting his wife at a lovely vacation island. The catch is, everyone's memories are erased at the start of the vacation, so they don't know each other. Idyllic scenes of the couple in love on the island are alternated with scenes of their harried life prior to the vacation, and our knowledge that their marriage was on the rocks prior to the vacation fills us with foreboding for their future once their memories return. Is it possible to start over again, and not make the same mistakes? (A question MacLeod considers elsewhere as well.) And at what cost came this vacation?

"The news was everywhere. It was in our dreams, it was on TV. Tonight the travelers on the first starship from Earth would awaken." So opens "Starship Day", as the lovely island town of Danous awaits the news from the starship. Owen, the narrator, is a psychiatrist, and rather cynical in his view of the news. He's more concerned with his failing marriage, and his failing relationship with his mistress, and his failure to cure a despondent patient. We follow him through a gorgeous day, and a sumptuous "starship party", until the transmission from the ship is revealed. A final twist gives the whole setting and story a sharply drawn meaning. A wonderful story.

Most of the rest of the stories are nearly as good. "Grownups", last in the book and longest, is set in what appears at a glance to be contemporary England. But soon odd differences are revealed: humans are of three sexes: men, women, and "Uncles", who live apart, and who appear to be the childbearers. In addition, adolescents "grow up" by a sudden, painful, physical transformation: thus there is a very sharp demarcation between "grownups" and children. MacLeod examines gender roles (more by exaggerating present-day gender roles) and also, more tellingly, examines the nature of childhood versus adulthood. Bobby, the protagonist, watches his brother "grow up" and get married, later he is pushed by his friend May to try to postpone or avoid "growing up". This is an excellent example of using an overtly SFnal idea to illuminate the mundane human character.

One of the more unusual pieces is "The Giving Mouth". This takes a couple of familiar fantasy storylines (noble son meets peasant girl, Queen orders hopeless quest against invading danger) and plays them out in an inverted, "industrial" fantasy world, full of slagheaps, oil slicks, mechanical but living horses, and a well-depicted atmosphere of brutality and degradation. The resolution is unexpected, and a nice twist on what had seemed a cynical take on "fairy tales".

I'll touch more briefly on the other stories. "Marnie" uses an idea Tiptree used a couple of times, time travel back along one's own thread of consciousness, to explore a man trying to set right his relationship with his lover. It's nice but predictable. "Green" is a very good "alternate fantasy", featuring a gardener for the King in a world where gardens are infested by brownies and fairies as well as ordinary pests. "1/72 Scale" tells of a young boy, whose older brother is dead, who tries to make a complicated airplane model to somehow prove to his parents that he is as worthy of their love as his brother. "Tirkiluk" features a British weather officer on Greenland during World War II. He befriends an outcast Eskimo, then undergoes a mysterious transformation after disaster strikes the weather station. "Papa", set in another of MacLeod's beautiful seaside locations, is a gentle exploration of a very old man, somewhat lost in the suddenly utopian future, missing his long dead wife, unable to connect with his son, and loving but not understanding his grandchildren. Finally, "Ellen O'Hara" (non-SF, as far as I can tell, though it appeared in Asimov's), is a strong story of a Catholic girl in Northern Ireland, who spends her life trying to come to terms with the murder of her pacific father, and finally meets her father's killer, giving her (and us) a bitter and ironic look at her life choices.

This is truly an outstanding collection of stories. If I had a complaint, it would be that they are all familiar to me: I like a collection to feature something new or obscure. (Perhaps one or two of MacLeod's Interzone stories (e.g. "The Family Football") would have been good choices.) But this is mere quibbling: and furthermore, these are stories that reward rereading.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Ian R. MacLeod

Short Fiction of Ian R. MacLeod

Ian R. MacLeod was born August 6, 1956. In honor of his birthday, I'm reposting a few of the reviews I've done of his stories over the year, including a somewhat longer piece I did on "New Light on the Drake Equation", which I still rank as the best novella of the new millennium.  Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the files for some of my more recent reviews, such as what I wrote about his wonderful 2016 novelette "A Visitor from Taured".

Tangent Online SF By Starlight Feature, June 2001

"New Light on the Drake Equation", by Ian R. MacLeod (SCI FICTION, May 2001)

One of the usually fatal story gimmicks in SF is to make the story be about SF itself. There is little more annoying than an SF story whose point is that SF is good to read. And even when the theme of the story is something more substantive, references to other SF often seem twee or in-groupish. But Ian R. MacLeod, in "New Light on the Drake Equation", his lovely new novella posted at SCI FICTION, manages to make his story be, in part, about SF, and to make that work. It works partly because that is only a small part of what the story is about -- partly because the way it is about "SF" is reflective of the other themes of the story -- and mostly because the central concern of the story, the Drake Equation, is so central to the yearnings of 20th Century science fiction.

The Drake Equation is described here: http://www.seti-inst.edu/science/drake-bg.html . Briefly, it attempts to estimate the number of civilizations in our galaxy that we might communicate with, or at least detect. It combines terms representing the rate of formation of suitable stars, the proportion of such stars with planets, the proportion of such planets that will be habitable, the proportion of habitable planets on which life will actually develop, the proportion of life-bearing planets on which intelligent life evolves, and the period of time for which intelligent life might emit detectable signals. Not surprisingly, the values of most of these terms are not known, and indeed are rather controversial. It is one of the central dreams of SF that enough of those terms are of high enough value that there might be thousands, or thousand of thousands of species in our galaxy with whom we might communicate.

Many evaluations of the Drake Equation have been pretty optimistic. It really does seem plausible that there ought to be other intelligent life in the galaxy -- if nothing else, the Principle of Mediocrity suggests that we ought not to be all that special. But set against the Drake Equation is the Fermi Paradox: if all that life is out there: then where are they? Why haven't we heard from them?

The protagonist of MacLeod's story is Tom Kelly, a scientist who, by 2058, is pretty much the only scientist remaining who has any interest in communicating with aliens, or at any rate in searching for signs of alien radio signals. He lives a lonely, squalid life in a remote area of France. His life's work is trying to communicate with aliens, but he hardly communicates at all with other people -- this is nicely portrayed right at the opening as he struggles to get his mail from the elderly Frenchwoman who runs the post office, and it’s further emphasized, in a different way, by his impatience with the odd electronic postcards that are his actual mail. The squalor of his personal life is accentuated by his drunkenness. And to make things worse, medical science has adapted to the point that these conditions can easily be alleviated by what appears to be nanotech -- you can learn a foreign language by drinking a vial of the right stuff, and you can cure alcoholism. But Kelly, living in what appears to be a near utopian future, himself once an SF fan, presumably one who read about just such miracles, refuses such measures for himself.

The heart of the story occurs when Kelly returns from the post office to his mountainside home. In the village he thought he might have seen his former lover, Terr (short for "Terrestrial"?). Later in the night she comes walking up the mountain. Their long conversation is interspersed with flashbacks of their relationship. Terr and Tom were both students at the University of Aston in Birmingham, England. Terr never settled on a consistent field of study, while Tom became involved at this early time in his life work. So in many ways they weren’t compatible, yet the relationship is presented as fairly idyllic, but as inevitably ending. In the background we see hints of the developing future -- little things like hydrogen-powered cars, bigger things like a manned landing on Mars (no life!), and most importantly, the biological advances that lead to medical improvements like cures for alcoholism, and personal improvements like language learning, radical cosmetic alterations, and even, eventually, functional wings.

In a way, humans are becoming aliens themselves. And Tom Kelly drifts away from all that. Terr becomes a dedicated flyer, which seems to precipitate their breakup. Tom becomes more and more of a hermit, going from academic job to academic job, cadging what little grant money he can, eventually becoming regarded as a crank for still believing that there might be aliens out there -- indeed, for still even caring that there might be aliens out there.

The mood of the story becomes positively elegiac. Humanity, it seems, is doomed to loneliness. We are as alone as Tom Kelly, perhaps living in as squalid a place. I was reminded of two other significant stories on the same theme, "One" by George Alec Effinger, and David Brin’s Hugo-winner "The Crystal Spheres". And MacLeod ups the ante for SF readers by paralleling this idea of the death of hope for meeting aliens with the death of science fiction itself. SF, which Tom Kelly so loved when a child, is apparently no longer written. Its themes are 20th Century themes -- there is no place for it in the future. For me, at least, this resonated powerfully.

But MacLeod doesn’t leave us there. In part we are shown the contrast of Terr’s peripatetic life -- always looking for more and better flying. It’s not clear whether her life, her two failed (but not unhappy) marriages, her career in public relations, are to be seen as in any way better than Tom’s lonely obsessiveness. But they do represent a different way to live -- as do the happy, colorful young people all around Tom -- as do the flyers, physically different, almost aliens themselves. Is humankind itself enough? Do we really need to meet the aliens? The story ends calmly, with Terr’s visit to Tom rendered ambiguous (was it all a dream), but with Tom apparently changing his ways. But still listening.

This is a lovely story -- quiet and beautiful, thoughtful, elegiac and hopeful.

From Locus, May 2002:

Ian R. MacLeod is probably my current favorite writer of short SF, and it is a treat to see his huge novella in the May Asimov's, "Breathmoss". This is in the same milieu as his fine novelette, "Isabel of the Fall", the Ten Thousand and One Worlds, a future dominated by a much altered Islam, and in which there are very few men.

"Breathmoss" is a coming of age story about Jalila, a young woman on a planet with a rather long year. We meet her in spring as she moves with her three mothers from the mountains, where the air is so thin that breathing is assisted by "breathmoss" growing in the lungs, to a small seaside town. Her growing up takes us to winter. Jalila makes three significant friends. One, inevitably, is Kalal, the only boy in the town, perhaps on the whole planet. Another is a beautiful girl named Nayra with whom she falls in love. The third is an ancient "tariqua", a starship pilot, who lives alone near the town. As she comes to adulthood, she is forced almost willy-nilly to choose between conventional life with Nayra, an unconventional relationship with Kalal, and a completely different life as a tariqua -- but her choice seems inevitable, and precipitates a violent act, which leads Jalila towards even more self-discovery.

This story is lovely and fascinating, not least for such offhand details as the curious semi-mechanical hayawans. The thematic heart of the story, issues of identity, and time, and the "Pain of Distance" experienced by people who leave home for a nomadic life, is compelling. Still, I was a bit less satisfied than I might have been. The climactic violence seemed forced and almost a cliché. And the final revelation, if philosophically interesting, also seemed a bit old hat. Nonetheless, this is a fine novella.

From Locus, May 2007

The May F&SF features intriguing stuff throughout. The cover story is "The Master Miller’s Tale", by Ian R. MacLeod, set in the alternate fantastical history of his novels The Light Ages and House of Storms. Nathan Westover, we are told from the start, will be the last of the master millers on Burlish Hill. The story is then a recapitulation of the Industrial Revolution, though this time the new "industry" is magic -- using "aether", as we have seen in the novels. To be sure, the millers use magic as well, in particular to control the unpredictable winds. Nathan’s story is of an abortive fascination with an aristocratic girl, and then rivalry with her as she leads the movement to bring in aether-controlled factories, then involvement with the Luddite-analogues of this alternate world, then a very moving closure, in which both central figures figure sadly. In a way this story is too programmatic -- the Industrial Revolution parallels too crude -- but all is redeemed by the way the personal stories of the main characters work out.

From Locus, May 2008:

The June Asimov’s features another powerful novella from Ian R. MacLeod. "The Hob Carpet" is set in an alternate world in which humans share Earth with close relatives they call hobs, who lack the power of speech and who are enslaved. The religion of this culture is built on extravagant cruelty towards the hobs -- sacrifice, and sacrifice accompanied by horrendous torture, is central. But the narrator is no believer in the gods, and moreover he comes to believe that the hobs do much better work if treated well. But he is not quite a hero: he is curious and cold (both words having double meanings). His love life is quite stunted, and his beautiful wife leaves him. His treatment of the hobs runs him afoul of the authorities, especially amidst drastic climate change, blamed naturally on his apostasy. The resolution is familiar to SF readers: the world turned upside down, martyrdom, scientific heroism (including, in a bit of a misstep, MacLeod’s second recent use of an "alternate Darwin"), cool secrets revealed: but for all its familiarity it is moving and it works.

From Locus, June 2010:

All F&SF’s issues these days are "big double issues". For July-August I thought the best story was from Ian R. MacLeod. "Recrossing the Styx" is set on a grand cruise ship, that caters to the very rich, and particularly to one subset of the very rich: the dead. That is, the dead but revived -- zombies, in a science-fictional sense. The narrator is a crew member, who falls for the wife of one of those revived rich -- a beautiful young woman who has, it seems, traded her youth for wealth -- with a nasty twist revealed when any attempt at intimacy is made. But perhaps there is a way out for her? With the narrator’s help, of course. MacLeod, of course, has more surprises for us -- and it’s nice stuff, if not by any means MacLeod at his best. Speaking of zombies, there is another zombie story in this issue, and it’s pretty entertaining too: Albert E. Cowdrey’s "Mr. Sweetpants and the Living Dead", in which a successful writer hires a security firm to protect him after his latest lover comes after him for revenge -- after the breakup and also after the lover seemed to have quite conclusively died. Funny and in a number of ways oddly sweet.

A Classic Early Ace Double: Ring Around the Sun, by Clifford D. Simak/Cosmic Manhunt, by L. Sprague de Camp

Ace Double Reviews, 62: Ring Around the Sun, by Clifford D. Simak/Cosmic Manhunt, by L. Sprague de Camp (#D-61, 1954, $0.35)

a review by Rich Horton

This early Ace Double stands as one of the better pairings in the series' history. Both authors are SFWA Grand Masters. Both books are fine work, and very characteristic of the author. Neither story is quite a classic, and as such the book stands just shy of the very best Doubles (a couple of suggestions for the best: Conan the Conqueror/The Sword of Rhiannon; and, if one allows a "recombination", the late repackaging of The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle).

Ring Around the Sun is a Complete and Unabridged reprint of a 1953 Simon and Schuster hardcover, which was serialized beginning in December 1952 in Galaxy. It is about 75,000 words (one of the longest Ace Double halves). Cosmic Manhunt is called an "Ace Original", but it is a very lightly revised reprinting if De Camp's 1949 Astounding serial "The Queen of Zamba". It is about 50,000 words long.

Clifford Simak's first SF stories were more or less standard (but well regarded) pre-Campbell pulp adventures -- Isaac Asimov liked his first, "World of the Red Sun", enough to retell it aloud to his elementary school friends. (Asimov later wrote a harshly critical letter to Astounding about one of Simak's first stories for John Campbell, and Simak replied asking for advice on how to improve. Asimov abashedly reread the story and decided he was wrong and Simak was right.) He stopped writing for several years in the 30s, only to be lured back by John Campbell. Simak, with Williamson, Leinster, and a few others, was able to make the transition from 30s pulp to the more serious science fiction Campbell wanted. Simak made his biggest impression over the next decade with the series of stories that became his fixup novel City, which won the International Fantasy Award in 1953. He published two of the earlier Galaxy serials: "Time Quarry" (book title: Time and Again), which appeared in the first three issues of Galaxy (October through November 1950) and Ring Around the Sun. (He also had a novel published as a "Galaxy Novel" in 1951: Empire, a very little known book, by all accounts little known for good reason.)

Ring Around the Sun is an intriguing effort that I don't think quite comes off. The hero is Jay Vickers, a writer living in upstate New York. He lives alone, with apparently just one friend, a tastefully named old man named Horton Flanders. His agent is a lovely woman named Ann Carter, but her evident interest in him is hopeless: Jay can't forget his love for Kathleen Preston, a rich neighbor girl in his home town (presumably located in Southwestern Wisconsin, where Simak routinely set stories) who was sent away by her parents to keep her from poverty-stricken Jay's attention. Jay feels different in other ways: there is the memory of an enchanted valley he visited with Kathleen, and of a strange place he went to as a boy, by the agency of an old top.

Jay is called to New York to meet with a man who wants him to write an exposé of some new products that have been showing up. These are things like a razor blade that never wears out, a light bulb that never burns out, and, most radically, a car that will run forever: the Forever car. George Crawford represents an industry group that is afraid of the effect of these products on the world's economy, and he wants Jay to write articles about the danger. But Jay distrusts Crawford and refuses. Then his friend Horton Flanders disappears, and suddenly people seem suspicious of Jay himself. And of anyone involved with the Forever car and the other new products. It seems that there are "supermen" among us, and that Jay may be one of those who doesn't recognize his talents. Jay escapes a potential lynching and heads for his hometown to try to unravel the mysteries of his birth and upbringing, and of the enchanted valley he once visited.

The story gets a little stranger from there. It seems that there are not just supermen but androids involved. And parallel worlds -- possibly available for colonization. And messages from the stars. And multiple copies of the same individual. Horton Flanders is in on the whole thing. George Crawford's industry group is engaged in fomenting a war if that's what it takes to stop the incursion of these miracle products and to stop the subjugation of "normal" people by supermen. Ann Carter may be a superwoman herself. And, indeed, the destinies of Flanders, Vickers, Carter, and Crawford seem all to be most curiously intertwined.

This is a very imaginative and pretty thoughtful and ambitious story. Still, I don't think Simak quite brings off what he's trying. Vickers is a thinnish character, and his relationship with Ann Carter is thinner still. Simak's ideas, and his moral, are interesting, but not quite developed as well as I'd have liked. The conclusion is just a bit rapid. (Interestingly, he reused some of these ideas (not all!) in a later novelette, "Carbon Copy" (Galaxy, December 1957).)

Finally, I note that the novel is blurbed "Easily the best Science Fiction novel so far in 1953" -- New York Herald Tribune. I don't know when it appeared in 1953 (in book form), but that's a striking comment given that books published that year included The Demolished Man, Fahrenheit 451, Childhood's End, More Than Human, The Paradox Men, The Sword of Rhiannon, Second Foundation, and The Space Merchants. (This doesn't include serials from 1953 such as "The Caves of Steel" and "Mission of Gravity" that became books a year later.) 1953 was truly an annus mirabilis for the SF field, and Ring Around the Sun is a worthy supporting player among the long list of great work from that year.

Cosmic Manhunt, as I mentioned, is a slight revision of L. Sprague de Camp's 1949 serial "The Queen of Zamba". According to de Camp's foreword to a later reprint, the only change was in the name of the hero's sidekick. The Chinese name Chuen from the serial became Yano (Japanese, or more specifically Okinawan) in the Ace edition, due to Don Wollheim's concern that Chinese people were unpopular as a result of the Korean War. Otherwise the stories are identical as far as I can tell. The book was reprinted by itself by Ace in 1966, the title changed again, to A Planet Called Krishna. And it was reprinted in 1977, restored to the original text and title, in an Asimov's Choice paperback (from Davis Publications), with the Krishna novelette "Perpetual Motion" appended.

I believe this is the first of de Camp's Krishna novels. Quite a few followed, all with a Z place name in the title: The Hand of Zei (1951), The Virgin of Zesh (1953), The Tower of Zanid (1958), The Hostage of Zir (1977), The Bones of Zora (1983) and The Swords of Zinjaban (1991). These last two were co-written with his wife, Catherine Crook de Camp. (There is also a book called The Search for Zei which I assume is a retitling of The Hand of Zei. (It turns out that some editions split The Hand of Zei into two parts, with The Search for Zei being the other part.) The Krishna novels are the main part of his Viagens Interplanetarias series, which includes a number of other stories and the novel Rogue Queen (1951). The most recognizable gimmicks of the series are that the future Earth is dominated by Brazil, hence the lingua franca is Portuguese, and that space travel is restricted to light speed. De Camp claimed this was to keep the books SF: to violate relativity would make them fantasy. Maybe so, but the silly biology of the Krishna books seems equally fantastical.

In The Queen of Zamba (a title much to be preferred to Cosmic Manhunt in my view), private investigator Victor Hasselborg is hired by a rich man to track down his daughter, who has run off with an ineligible rogue. Hasselborg agrees to the job, then finds himself obligated to travel to Krishna, where the couple has apparently decamped (pun intended). Worse, he falls in love with the bad guy's abandoned wife, but she'll have to wait 9 years or so for him to return. (Krishna appears to be at Alpha Centauri or perhaps Barnard's Star, based on travel time.)

On Krishna, Hasselborg disguises himself as a Krishnan portrait painter. He follows the trail of the two lovers to one kingdom, where he meets the King (or Dour) and is rapidly slapped in jail. Before long he is fighting a duel for his life with the Dour. He escapes to another town, and falls in with the local high priest, also arranging to paint the Emperor's portrait. Unfortunately, the nubile (and oviparous) niece of the high priest takes a liking to him, and when he needs help the price is marriage. Meanwhile he runs into K. Yano (or Chuen), a ship companion who seems to be an Earth agent. They realize they are after the same people -- in Yano's case, because the bad guy is suspected of running guns to Krishna, with the object of making himself the planetary ruler. He has already taken over the island kingdom of Zamba (at last, the title becomes clear!). It is up to Hasselborg and Yano to foil the plot, and then resolve their conflicting requirements re the villains. (And in Hasselborg's case, worry about whether if he brings her husband to justice, his beloved will stay married to him, or ...)

It's certainly a pleasant adventure romp, with plenty of color and light-hearted humor. As SF, it's not really all that inspiring -- it could easily enough have been recast as historical fiction. Victor Hasselborg is enjoyable to follow, though his mixture of competence and what seems at times pasted on foibles and diffidence is not quite convincing. His romance is not too exciting -- the girl behind offstage for almost the entire book. Fun, worth your time, not an enduring classic.

A Little Known Ace Double: So Bright the Vision, by Clifford D. Simak/The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, by Jeff Sutton

Ace Double Reviews, 70: So Bright the Vision, by Clifford D. Simak/The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, by Jeff Sutton (#H-95, 1968, $0.60)

The Simak half is a collection of not terribly well-known longer stories, from the late 50s basically. The Sutton half is a novel by a very little-known writer. The Simak collection totals 63,000 words, the Sutton novel is about 50,000, making this a fairly long Ace Double.

(Covers by Jack Gaughan and Gray Morrow)

The four stories collected in So Bright the Vision are "The Golden Bugs" (F&SF, June 1960, 16400 words); "Leg. Forst." (Infinity, April 1958, 17100 words); "So Bright the Vision" (Fantastic Universe, August 1956, 18900 words); and "Galactic Chest" (Science Fiction Stories, September 1956, 10600 words). They are all enjoyable, none really ranks among Simak's best work.

In "The Golden Bugs" a man discovers a strange sort of rock in his back yard, and soon also some very odd insects in his house. Insects that for a short time appear quite helpful ... In "Leg. Forst." an aging con man and stamp collector discovers a remarkable property of a curious stamp he receives from another planet, when said stamp is accidentally mixed with beef broth. The result is marketable as an efficiency enhancer, but it does so in somewhat surprising ways. The conclusion is a little bit unexpected in a sly way. "So Bright the Vision" is probably the best of these stories. It's set in a future in which Earth's only contribution to Galactic society is fiction -- it seems only humans among intelligent races can lie. The necessity to turn out product has led to automation of writing: actually thinking up plots and writing prose by yourself is taboo. A struggling hack gets in trouble with an alien race -- a couple of alien races, in the end. That the resolution will involve the possibility of actual writing, not just programming a writing machine, is predictable from the start, but Simak gets to that point in unexpected ways: and where he ends up isn't quite exactly the cliche ending we might have expected. Finally, "Galactic Chest", as with a number of Simak's stories, involves a newspaperman as protagonist. (Simak of course was a newspaperman himself.) This man is stuck writing the Community Chest column for a local newspaper when he runs a story about "brownies" causing runs of good luck and then realizes to his surprise that the story might actually be true. The solution, again, is mostly what we expect but just slightly different -- I'd say that in three of these four stories ("The Golden Bugs", my least favorite, excepted) the stories are distinguished by a slightly new resolution to a fairly familiar situation.

Jeff Sutton (full name Jefferson Howard Sutton) isn't a terribly well-known writer, but he did publish something in the neighborhood of 20 SF novels between 1959 and his death at the age of 66 in 1979. He also published a few short stories, one of which I read recently in an issue of the very obscure 1950s magazine Spaceways. A number of Sutton's novels were YA books, these written in collaboration with his wife Jean.

The Man Who Saw Tomorrow concerns an mysterious man who appears and suddenly becomes a financial tycoon, based on his uncanny knowledge of the future of the stock market. His vast fortune allows him to wield outsize influence politically, and he soon appears to be trying to control certain foreign countries by means of bribes. This naturally attracts the interest of the US government, which assigns an agent to him. Indeed the book opens with two curious scenes: one is of a mild-mannered mathematician waiting to assassinate a shiftless laborer, the other is of an agent waiting to assassinate the tycoon.

Then the book shifts back in time, following two threads. One concerns the tycoon, his appearance, and his early success, and his curious interest in a certain obscure branch of mathematics. The other concerns the mathematician we met at the opening. He is one of about 6 worldwide experts in the theory of multidimensional space. He is dating a beautiful arts professor, but then he loses her to the tycoon. He also notices that his expert colleagues are dying in mysterious fashion. And soon he seems to be under attack, as well as his friends ...

Well, we can all guess what's going on, I think. But it's resolved reasonably well. It's a surprisingly dark book, actually. It's no better than OK as a whole, and it doesn't really convince in its examination of time paradoxes, but there are some nice bits, and it's competently executed.

Some of Clifford Simak's Short Fiction

Eternity Lost: The Collected Stories of Clifford D. Simak, Volume I, by Clifford D. Simak (Darkside Press, 0-9740589-4-7, $40, 3302pp, hc) 2005.

Clifford D. Simak was the third person named a Grand Master by SFWA, in 1976. He won Hugos for "The Big Front Yard" (1958), Way Station (1963), and "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" (1980) as well as a Nebula for "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" and an International Fantasy Award for City. So his credentials as a revered writer in the field are unchallengeable, and it can't be said that he was not acknowledged during his lifetime. But it seems to me that, as with some other writers of his generation, he is in danger of slowly drifting out of the consciousness of SF readers, especially newer readers. In particular his short fiction is difficult to find – the current marketplace being so strongly biased towards novels, in contrast to the situation for the first couple of decades of Simak's career.

Thus Darkside Press's project to bring Simak's short fiction into print is particularly welcome. (It should be noted that the same house has published or is planning collections of work by other, generally less prominent, writers of roughly the same generation: Cleve Cartmill, John Wyndham, and Daniel F. Galouye among others.) The Simak books are edited by SF bibliographer extraordinaire Phil Stephenson-Payne, with introductions by John Pelan and brief story notes by Stephenson-Payne. These books are limited edition hardcovers, nicely produced with black and white artwork by Allen Koszowski – a bit pricy, perhaps, but fine products. (Alas, the Simak project stopped after the second volume.)

Unusually, the Simak volumes do not present the stories in chronological order, nor in any particular thematic organization. Rather, each volume will apparently be a representative selection of his short stories from throughout his career. In Eternity Lost the earliest story is "Sunspot Purge" from 1940, while the latest is "The Observer" from 1972. There is even a Western, "Way for the Hangtown Rebel!", from 1945. That said, the bulk of the collection is from the 50s (7 of 12 stories) and from one magazine, Galaxy (6 stories).

Simak is known most of all as SF's leading pastoralist – he loved the countryside, and many of his best known works (including the award winners City, Way Station, and "The Big Front Yard") were to a considerable extent set in the country, at the same time unequivocally SF. In this collection only a few stories really fit that template – including the first three. "How-2" is a satirical piece about a future overtaken by the "do-it-yourself" spirit, which is then undermined when a "do-it-yourselfer" builds an experimental robot. "Founding Father" is a spooky story of an immortal's long journey to another star system, and the surprise awaiting him after his arrival. The setup is powerful and evocative, and the creepy ending is truly effective. In "Kindergarten", a man who has retired to a farm waiting his death from cancer finds a strange device on his land that seems to give everyone exactly what they want. Surely this is an alien device – but what do the aliens want in return? The answer is gently humanistic in the purest Simakian sense.

But there are some strikingly different stories. "Way for the Hangtown Rebel!" is one, of course, being a Western – not terribly interesting to my mind, though, as it seemed routine pulp Western work. "Sunspot Purge", the earliest story, is rather dated too in style of telling – a wisecracking journalist being the narrator. (To be sure, Simak was a newspaperman.) The story is distinguished mainly be the unexpectedly dark ending – it opens simply enough with a rash of suicides, possibly linked to the sunspot cycle, but it takes a different turn when the newspaperman is sent forward in time. "The Call From Beyond" is another very pulpy story, with the protagonist coming to an implausible Pluto, where he finds the remants of a research team thought dead, and the dangerous discovery they have made.

The most recent stories are "Buckets of Diamonds" (1969) and "The Observer" (1972). The first is another story told in a somewhat folksy idiom, with a small-town lawyer defending his wife's raffish Uncle after he is found with a pail of diamonds and an unaccountably valuable painting on his person. Of course these treasures are a hint to something SFnal going on – and again Simak's resolution is a bit unexpected. "The Observer" is a quiet story of the very far future – not particulary original but effective in its Simakian tone.

The other stories are a mixed bag. "The Answers" is another far future story, with an mixed species expedition encountering a long lost remnant of humanity that seems perhaps to have found "the answers" to the hard questions of existence. I admit I found the ending banal. "Jackpot" seems almost an inversion of "Kindergarten", as a ship of explorers looking for a big find on an alien planet comes across something quite remarkable – an alien installation, library or school. Can they make a profit on this? And is it good for humanity? "Carbon Copy" is another satiric piece, with an interesting central idea: a real estate agent is approached to lease houses at absurdly low prices. The gimmick is really pretty clever, though the resolution doesn't quite realize the idea's potential. And finally the title story, possibly the best story here (unless that is "Founding Father"), is a sharp tale of a Senator who has had his life extended for centuries. Life extension is sharply restricted, and he faces the loss of this privilege as his Party seems to have decided he is no longer electable. His reaction is a curious combination of desperation and unexpected moral courage – with a rather ironic result. I found the story quite thought-provoking, if not always believable.

Simak's Grand Master status was thoroughly deserved. This collection is a bit unexpected for an opening collection, however – it doesn't really feature any of his very best stories. It does display a strong writer working mostly at the middle of his range – the stories are quite enjoyable, thoughtful, often taking unexpected turns. Thus – a book much worth reading, and in a way it's refreshing to think that even better stories await.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Marc Laidlaw

Marc Laidlaw was born on 3 August 1960. Another damn kid -- almost a year younger than me! He published a number of novels in the '80s and '90s, such as Neon Lotus and Kalifornia. He spent a lot of time in the gaming industry, before retiring a couple of years ago. He's continued to publish short fiction all this time, including a number of collaborations with Rudy Rucker, and a long and satisfying series about a bard with a stone hand named Gorlen and his companion, a gargoyle with a flesh hand named Spar.

For his birthday I decided to, as I've done for some other writers, compile a set of my Locus reviews of his short fiction. So, here goes:

Locus, February 2005

Finally, Marc Laidlaw's "Jane" (Sci Fiction, February 2005) is truly powerful, disturbing, an mysterious. Jane is a girl living in nearly complete isolation with her parents, her two older brothers, and her perpetually hooded younger sister. Then travelers stumble on their house -- and Jane's father takes shocking action, which leads to terrible repercussions. Nothing is fully explained, but the story hints at a momentous back story and an equally momentous future. The characters are darkly driven -- here there is power and tragedy. All in less than 4000 words. (I reprinted this story in one of my very first anthologies, Fantasy, the Best of the Year: 2006 Edition.)

Locus, August 2008

Contrastingly, Marc Laidlaw’s "Childrun" (F&SF, August 2008) is set in a fairly typical fantasy world, and it features his recurring character Gorlen Vizenfirthe, a bard with a stone hand. Here he comes to a remote town where, mysteriously, all the children save one seem to have vanished. And they each seemed to disappear when a visitor came -- which makes his arrival one regarded with suspicion. The resolution is interesting, and the story is engaging.

Locus, March 2009

In F&SF for March 2009 Marc Laidlaw continues his entertaining series about Gorlen, the bard with a stone hand, as Gorlen reaches a city which carved gargoyles -- and which has been much altered as the gargoyles have rebelled. And if Gorlen is human with a stone hand, what sort of gargoyle might he meet?

Locus, November 2013

And "Bemused", by Marc Laidlaw (F&SF, September-October 2013), is another story in his series about the bard Gorlen and the gargoyle Spar, forever linked because Gorlen has a stone hand (Spar's) and Spar a corresponding hand of flesh. Here they visit an eccentric music loving Lord, Ardentine Wollox, where they discover (to Spar's terrible loss) the menacing secret behind (or underneath) the Wollox fortune. These stories are consistently entertaining traditional fantasy, as we see again ...

in the September Lightspeed, with "Bellweather", another fine entry in the series, this time about an encounter in the mountains with an isolated farmer who saves Gorlen's life, only to incur the wrath of the bell-wielding monk from who he fled as a boy. Spar -- increasingly the moral center of the series -- insists that Gorlen and he help the farmer save his child from the vengeful monk. Again -- entertaining and imaginative work.

Locus, July 2014

I guess I'd consider Marc Laidlaw's adventures of the bard Gorlen and the gargoyle Spar not so much a stealth serialization than a true series of stories (admittedly with something of a narrative arc uniting them). In the latest, "Rooksnight" (F&SF, May-June 2014), they deal with a group of "knights" who are attempting to reclaim all of the vast treasure stolen from their mysterious Lord. The fantastical concepts, such as the intelligent rooks and what they are protecting, are pretty neat -- another good adventure fantasy.

Locus, May 2017

In the January-February 2017 F&SF I also quite enjoyed a couple of stories fitting in different ways into the "crime investigation" category. "Wetherfell’s Reef Runics", by Marc Laidlaw, follows used bookstore owner (I was sold already!) Ambrose Salala, as he gets entangled in the mysterious drowning of a man diving near his store in Hawaii.  Ambrose had meant to help an old friend of his by selling some books she had come across, but most of them are tat, except for a strange privately produced book called Reef Runics, by W. S. Wetherfell, the man who had drowned. His friend’s no-good son is involved somehow, as he had been the dead man’s guide; and the book itself is dangerously weird, involving Wetherfell’s conviction that he has discovered a powerful "geognostic network" underwater. It’s told in a leisurely and engaging fashion, with convincing (to me) local color, and a plausible sort of shambolic resolution. Fun stuff, and I hope this becomes a series.

Locus, January 2018

F&SF’s November/December 2018 issue features "Stillborne", a significant and as always enjoyable entry in Marc Laidlaw’s Spar/Gorlen series. The two join a caravan to a town where the Philosopher Moths are scheduled for there every seven years mating swarm. There they encounter Gorlen’s long-past lover, Plenth, whom Gorlen taught to play the eduldamer. Their reunion occasions some flashbacks that throw light on Gorlen’s history -- and that of the gargoyle Spar. In the present day they unravel a mystery entangling the Moths and the very popular local drink, as well as dealing with the complications of Plenth’s strange pregnancy. It’s good solid work, illuminating much, and, I suspect, laying the groundwork for a fuller resolution to this fine series.

Locus, May 2018

Marc Laidlaw’s "A Swim and a Crawl" (F&SF, March-April 2018) is about a man who has decided to swim out to sea off Hawaii to commit suicide, and who then decides not to, and makes it back to a curiously changed shore -- good existential, meditative, horror (if that’s what it should be called).


(I admit it was not until compiling this set of reviews that I realized all the Gorlen/Spar stories have single word titles! I believe Marc is working on a novel about the two -- I look forward eagerly to it!)

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.