Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Sandra McDonald

Today is Sandra McDonald's birthday, so here is a compilation of some of my Locus reviews of her short fiction. I should note that there's a story by her that I like a lot, but did not review, because is first appeared in one my anthologys, War & Space: Recent Combat. This is "Mehra and Jiun".

(Locus, May 2009)

In "Diana Comet", by Sandra McDonald (Strange Horizons), the title character, a beautiful and resourceful journalist, come across the world to discover why her lover isn’t answering her letters. She has other objectives as well -- or she forms them when she meets some of the poorer locals -- and she has some personals secrets too. It’s all rather a romp, lots of fun.

(Locus, September 2010)

Sandra McDonald is best known for her novels, which on the face of them are fairly conventional Military SF with a romantic slant, yet those who have followed her short fiction know she’s a quirkier writer than her novels display. Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories features fourteen tales, many originals, set in a sort of alternate history that for the most part is a transparent version of our world, at times a bit too cutely. (Naming a gay Civil War era poet Whitney Waltman, for just one example, rather grates on one’s teeth.) Indeed, some of the reprints seem to have been rejiggered to fit into this alternate history, in which a Boston-like town called Massasoit is the most common setting. But I quibble -- the stories are lovely really. The title character shows up in several pieces, at various stages in her long life. My favorite appeared last year in Strange Horizons as "Diana Comet", and is here called "Diana Comet and the Disappearing Lover", and it introduces that intrepid woman. Perhaps the other highlight of the collection is "Diana Comet and the Collapsible Orchestra", in which Diana is aging, missing her late husband, and pushed against her will to visit an old friend. The title object is a delightful creation, while the action really concerns Diana witnessing the transgression of her friend’s children, a bit sadly.

Speaking of Sandra McDonald and Diana Comet, her "Diana Comet and the Lovesick Cowboy" appeared more or less simultaneously in her collection and in the fourth issue of Icarus, subtitled "The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction".  McDonald’s story, in which Diana Comet travels to the West to check on an orphan boy she had fostered out to a farm couple, and on the way chivvies an ex-soldier out of his alcoholic fog and his yearning for his estranged lover, is clearly the best in an uneven set.

(Locus, December 2012)

Also strong in the December Asimov's is "The Black Feminist's Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing", by Sandra McDonald, in which the title character, who edits classic SF films to make them less sexist, is offered a chance to to complete the unfinished '70s adaptation of Leigh Brackett's The Ginger Star. There's some playing to us geeks here -- it's hard not to think that The Ginger Star would have made a pretty cool movie -- but also some sharp characters, an interesting future, and some good ideas about movies.

(Locus, June 2014)

In Lightspeed's May issue I thought the standout story was "Selfie", by Sandra MacDonald. Susan is a teenager with a mother living on the Moon and a father who researches trips to the past. Her Dad wants to drag her again to an old resort hotel, but she wants to visit her Mom instead, so she convinces her Dad to let her send a "Selfie" -- a robot uploaded with a version of her mind -- on the trip to the past. All this is intriguing setup: an interesting future with space travel, time travel, and other neat tech -- and a well-depicted teen narrator (admittedly a familiar type -- I detected echoes of, say, Heinlein's  Podkayne and Barnes's Teri Murray). But MacDonald has a different idea, and I won't spoil it but I'll say that the story goes in a sadder direction than expected -- but just as Sfnally interesting a direction.

(Locus, September 2016)

From the August Asimov's, "President John F. Kennedy, Astronaut", by Sandra McDonald, is a moving story set in a climate change-ravaged future. Pera lives with her mother and younger brother on a boat -- an old amphibious "duck". Their current job is taking an old man to a spot in the ocean: he claims that it’s the location of the old Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy, where an alien artifact Kennedy found on the Moon has been hidden. He wants to recover it, for the alien secrets it holds, but there are problems: two different "worst daughters", for example, and a storm, and, to be sure, very plausible doubts about the old man’s wild stories about JFK’s astronaut career, not to mention his affair with Marilyn Manson, etc. Whatever the truth behind all that, the story works in evoking the wonder and the lost dreams of space travel.

(Locus, July 2018)

In the May-June Asimov's, Sandra McDonald and Stephen Covey, in "Time Enough to Say Goodbye", tell a sweet time travel story, that is also a story about asteroid exploration, as a woman repeatedly visits the past, to try to meet the two people involved in critical early experiments that will lead to asteroid mining. Her reasons -- personal reasons -- become clear as the story develops. Nothing earthshaking here, but this is nice work.

A Little Known Ace Double: Hierarchies, by John T. Phillifent/Mister Justice, by Doris Piserchia

Ace Double Reviews, 35: Hierarchies, by John T. Phillifent/Mister Justice, by Doris Piserchia (#53415, $0.95, 1973)

by Rich Horton

Today is Doris Piserchia's 90th birthday. In honor of that, I'm reposting her first novel, which I reviewed in its Ace Double form long ago. Piserchia was born in West Virginia, and was in the US Navy in the early 1950s. She began publishing SF in the mid-60s, and some of her short fiction gained considerable notice, as did some of her novels, especially the earlier ones. By 1983 thirteen novels and about as many short stories had appeared, two of the novels as by "Curt Selby", but since then she has been silent, apparently as a result of the sudden death of her daughter and her need to raise her grandchild. Here's what I wrote back in 2004:

(Covers by Kelly Freas)

Another Ace Double from the last year of the format. Hierarchies is one of 16 Ace Doubles from John T. Phillifent/"John Rackham". It is around 44,000 words long. Mister Justice, Doris Piserchia's first novel, is about 56,000 words long.

Hierarchies and Life With Lancelot, both from 1973, are the only two Ace Double halves that Phillifent published under his real name. In the case of Hierarchies, this is probably because the novel was originally serialized in Analog, and most of Phillifent's work for Analog was as Phillifent. In the case of Life With Lancelot, which is an expansion of a "Rackham" story, the best guess is offered by William Barton, who had the novel on the other side of that Ace Double. He noted that he saw some promotional material with the "Rackham" name attached, and he deduced that the eventual attribution to "Phillifent" was a foulup, perhaps caused by Hierarchies appearing at roughly the same time.

The Analog serialization of Hierarchies, in the October and November 1971 issues, is slightly shorter, at some 40,000 words. I did a quick comparison of the two versions, and the changes appear to be small cuts or additions made throughout -- a sentence or two here and there, rather than removing or adding entire scenes. Indeed, the wording changes are extensive, and often quite minor. ("Camouflage" for "hide" is one example.) Perhaps Phillifent did a full rewrite -- or perhaps the Analog editor did a rigorous line edit. (It's not entirely clear who the editor was at the time. The October issue leads with John W. Campbell's obituary. Campbell was still Editor on the masthead, for the November issue as well. More than likely he acquired the story, I would think, but someone else may have done the final editing.)

Hierarchies is a rather light, implausible, short novel. The main character is Rex Sixx (the silly name is eventually explained, and even has a very minor part in the plot), an employee of a security company. Earth has apparently developed a somewhat extensive interstellar society, and now that have contacted the Khandalar system, 6 nations on three planets, which have had a very stagnant hierarchical social order for millennia, apparently having regressed somewhat from a much more technologically advanced society. The Khands are extremely humanoid, differing mainly by being shorter and thinner on average. Rex's security company has been engaged to steal the Crown Stones of Khandalar -- with the connivance of the liberal King-Emperor of one of the nations. It seems that this King-Emperor has realized that his society will be forced to reform along more democratic avenues, and he believes that the Crown Stones, which incorporate some ancient Khandalar tech to allow the King-Emperor to psionically compel obedience, will be a hindrance -- they will be an unavoidable temptation to any King-Emperor faced with democratization.

Rex and his partner Roger are to courier the Crown Stones to Earth. However, to distract attention from the Stones themselves, they have been given an alternate mission -- to ferry a valuable pet to Earth, in the company of a trained keeper. The keeper is Elleen Stame, who turns out surprisingly to be an incredibly beautiful young woman, with a freakishly perfect memory. Rex and Roger both seem to fall for Elleen immediately, despite her ugly voice and her apparent stupidity. The three of them set off for the spaceport, only to be waylaid by brigands, who, it soon becomes clear, were hired by a disaffected member of the Royalty, who does not approve of the King-Emperor's democratic plans. But Rex and Roger have super-suits with extreme defensive ability, so they get away, only to face the rebellious royal again once in space.

The resolution is not of course in doubt, though things do get a bit tough on Rex and Roger and Elleen. The bad guy turns out to be smarter than expected. And, of course, Elleen turns out to have unexpected (even by her) resources. Phillifent also throws in a mild twist or two. It's modestly entertaining light SF adventure for the most part. (Lots of silliness, to be sure, such as the supposedly ultra-reliable security company which nearly gets taken out by bows and arrows.)

Mister Justice is altogether a more ambitious novel, though something of a mess as well. Doris Piserchia had a curious writing career. Born in 1928, she published a story in 1966, but her career began in earnest in 1972 with a couple more stories. Novels began appearing in 1973, and she published novels and stories regularly for the next decade. But (at least according to the ISFDB) nothing has appeared since 1983. She occasionally used the pseudonym "Curt Selby".

Mister Justice opens with several paired scenes, the first in each pair describing a crime that someone gets away with, the second showing, in 2033, appropriate punishment being meted out to the criminals, and photographic proof of the original crime being sent to the authorities. The packets of evidence are signed "Mister Justice". Clearly, "Mister Justice" is a dangerous vigilante -- at the same time, he IS only publishing the obviously guilty, and he seems at least for a time to really reduce crime.

The Secret Service decides to track him down and take him out, led by a mysterious triumvirate, Bailey, Turner, and Burgess. There eventual plan is to recruit a superboy. Daniel is a 12 year old who is sort of coerced by Bailey and co. to train for an eventual search for "Mister Justice" at a special informal school called "SPAC", full of eccentric geniuses. Daniel learns a lot at SPAC, and he also forms an odd relationship with an 11-year old girl called Pala. (Incidentally, I thought this section felt rather Heinleinian.)

Mean time, out in the "real world", society is going to pot. The apparent cause is one gangster who Mister Justice cannot catch -- Arthur Bingle. Bingle sets up a criminal organization that more or less ends up replacing the government, leading to nothing but societal chaos.

Daniel's eventual investigations reveal little enough -- he learns by analyzing the photographs left by Mister Justice which great photographer he is, and from that he manages to deduce that Mister Justice is using time travel to accomplish his deeds. (Something guessable anyway from the initial times of the crime scenes.) Daniel's relationship with Pala progresses, until she is kidnapped. We learn more and more about the time travel aspect of things, and about the decay of society. And we watch Bailey's group spectacularly fail to deal with either Mister Justice or Arthur Bingle.

The novel's resolution is somewhat strange -- basically involving a confrontation between Justice and Bingle. It doesn't really end up anywhere near where the start seemed to promise. There is no real look at the problem of vigilantism. Daniel is introduced as what seems to be the main character, then he sort of fades away (though we do learn what he and Pala are up to by the end). There are odd skips in the book -- at one time 6 years pass from one sentence to the next with no real indication. In many ways I found it a mess. But there is some interest to it. For myself, Daniel and Pala were the most interesting characters, and their eventual fate, a rather traditional SFnal fate, was OK. Some of the secrets of Mister Justice, revealed only obliquely, were satisfying enough. But other aspects didn't work for me. The society shown is not well-drawn, and not plausible in its breakdown either. (And it basically seems like 1970 transported to 2033.) The Bailey and Co. scenes are often pointless. All in all, some good ideas that probably needed another thorough revision to really cohere into a good novel.

Birthday Review: Short Stories by Robert Reed

Robert Reed, who was born 9 October 1956, is remarkably good, and remarkably prolific. He is the author who has appeared most often in my Best of the Year collections. And I've reviewed a whole lot of his stories. The following selection is a quite limited selection of my Locus reviews. Happy Birthday, Mr. Reed!

(Locus, May 2003)

The other Reed present (in the May F&SF) is Robert, and he too is in top form with "555", a first rate story about a meek individual who turns out to be a minor character in a computer generated entertainment, some variety of soap opera. Her show is in ratings trouble, and a writer comes to her with a tempting offer that might mean more screen time for her. But what does she really want? And want can she, a computer program, want? Reed's answer is nicely surprising.

(Locus, October 2004)

Best of all in the October-November F&SF is Robert Reed's "Opal Ball", which extrapolates the recent idea of using wagering pools for collective predictions. In this future, for many people, especially the Players who have built a reputation based on their successful wagers, many aspects of life are predicated on the results of wagering pools. The protagonist meets a woman and falls in love -- but the consensus of the betting population is that they are not right for one another. Reed's exploration of the human reaction to this is perceptive and believable.

(Locus, October 2005)

I saw two very strong stories in the September Asimov’s. Robert Reed’s "Finished" is, with much Reed, a careful reconsideration of a fairly familiar idea, but it is so well done and the characters are so well captured that it seems new. The title refers to an elective treatment to essentially upload one’s mind into an improved body. But the mind is now on a computer of sorts, and people don’t seem to change and grow anymore -- or so the critics claim. The narrator is a "Finished" man who has an affair with a younger woman who has not had the treatment, and the story of their relationship, and a slight ending twist, illuminate the questions Reed has raised.


(Locus, April 2006)

Two of the shorter pieces in the June Asimov's stand out. Robert Reed’s "Eight Episodes" is about a cult TV show that tells a rather dry scientific story, of the discovery of a tiny spaceship in a Permian era rock sample. The spaceship has a sort of message for humanity, a message which concerns, it turns out, the Fermi Paradox. And the story manages some of the same power as Ian R. MacLeod’s classic "New Light on the Drake Equation" in its evocation of lost SFnal dreams, and its reminder that there are still dreams to dream.

In the anthology One Million A. D., I also liked Robert Reed’s "Good Mountain", particularly for the odd nature of its setting: a continent made of wood, which appears to be in danger of burning. A man fleeing the destruction of his home for a potentially safe haven encounters a strange woman who is head for "Good Mountain", which she says is a very large structure of metal (very rare on this planet). All this is familiar enough in SF terms, but Reed takes the story in a surprising direction at the end.

(Locus, September 2006)

The other novella (in the October/November Asimov's), Robert Reed’s "A Billion Eves", is even better. At first the story seems perhaps an alternate history about a society oppressing women, and indeed gender issues are important. But things are not quite what they seem. Kala is a young woman on an oddly different Earth, and we follow her life for several years. Women seem in constant threat of kidnap, for reasons we slowly learn: a device called the "ripper" allows one-way travel to parallel Earths, each with slightly different geological/ecological histories. Apparently a man called the "First Father" used a ripper to kidnap an entire sorority and start a colony on an empty Earth. And over millennia new colonies have been founded: sometimes by single men kidnapping groups of women, more usually (perhaps) by voluntary groups of couples. The idea of opening new worlds is the foundation of most religions on Kala’s world, and many people hope to become colonists. Kala’s brother is a charismatic and intelligent young man, a natural "Father", but their family’s lives are changed when he rescues Kala from a kidnap attempt, and his sent to jail for his vengeful actions. Kala herself becomes a sort of forester, interested in preserving the native ecology of her world, which is at risk because of multiple imports from the sequence of Earths that preceded it. Reed develops Kala’s life, and her brother’s, in a different direction, questioning the morality of the ecological alteration of other worlds by each new colony. It’s a thoughtful and exciting story.

(Locus, April 2008)

Robert Reed is one of those writers who is a consolidator of ideas. He is continually re-examining familiar SF notions from more contemporary perspectives, or simply from different angles. "Five Thrillers" (F&SF, April) is quite explicitly a re-examination of frankly pulpish ideas. Joe Carroway is a genetically gifted young man. We meet him first during a space disaster, as he comes up with a solution to save the entire crew, except for one man -- one significantly unique man. Each "thriller" follows Carroway through a remarkable -- and morally quite ambiguous -- career. The various crises are perhaps familiar but very well narrated, with both SFnal and political savvy, leading to a quite spectacular ending.

(Locus, June 2008)

In the June F&SF Robert Reed’s "Character Flu" is a nice, very short, bit of speculation about the dangers of a certain type of brain enhancement. One of Reed’s strengths in his short fiction is to know exactly how long a story should be, and this one is perfectly sized: establishing the central idea, then closing the trap it sets just as the reader realizes what’s coming.

(Locus, December 2012)

F&SF's year-end issue also has a strong long novella, "Katabasis", by Robert Reed. This is another of his Great Ship stories. Katabasis is a tour guide on a high gravity environment in the Ship, leading tourists on a very difficult trek. She rejects the request of one man, Varid, act as his guide, then agrees to guide recurring characters Perri and Quee Lee -- and finds her party joined by Varid. Their particular journey, which turns out to be very hard, is contrasted with the long past journey of Katabasis' people across their strange planet (and then eventually to the Ship), as well as the different but tragic history of Varid. Both Sfnally fascinating and a powerful study of two damaged beings in Katabasis and Varid.

(Locus, January 2014)

The best story here (in Carbide Tipped Pens), I think because for me it does the best job of evoking the "sense of wonder" that remains crucial to SF, is "Every Hill Ends With Sky", by Robert Reed, in which a maverick scientist develops a simulation of the likely development of life in the Solar System, looking for potentialities of exotic life forms that we might have missed, and finds something unexpected. This is seen from a perspective slightly in the future, as her daughter struggles to survive in a post-Apocalyptic world, where her mother's discover may or may not offer strange hope.

(Locus, December 2016)

Another webzine I’ve needed to catch up with is Daily Science Fiction. This site features a story each weekday, and many of the stories are quite short. The quality is variable, but there is some very good work here. For instance, Robert Reed’s "How to Listen to Music", something of a morality tale, about a future much like the present, but in which, secretly, thousands of AI-linked humans control the world, looking for entertainment by finding special experiences of ordinary people -- such as a dying woman remembering a long ago pop song. Nothing really wrong there, eh? But Reed allows us to follow the implications of such entertainment in a pretty scary direction.

Birthday Review: The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien

I wrote this review way back in 1996, I think for posting at the review forum of one of the very first online bookstores, which name is escaping me now. I'm reposting it today, unchanged, on the 107th anniversary of Brian O'Nolan's birth.

TITLE: The Third Policeman
AUTHOR: Flann O`Brien

PUBLISHER: Plume

ISBN: 0-452-25912-6

This is one of the strangest novels I have ever read. It was written in about 1940, but not published until 1967, a year or two after the author`s death. O`Brien is a pseudonym for the Irish writer Brian O`Nolan, who was also a celebrated newspaper columnist using the name Myles na gCopaleen, the latter name apparently Gaelic. O`Brien`s masterpiece is At Swim-Two-Birds, which was published in 1939. A selection of his "Myles" columns is also well-regarded. However, The Third Policeman is what I saw in the bookstore when I went looking for something by O`Brien, and it wasn`t a bad choice.

This novel is quite funny, quite absurd, and, at bottom, very disturbing. The narrator is a very unpleasant man, who announces in the first sentence "Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade;" not only is he a murderer, but a very lazy man who ruins his family farm, and spends his life researching the works of a madman named De Selby, who believes that, among other things, darkness is an hallucination, the result of accretions of black air. The narrator relates his early life briefly, leading up to his association with another unsavory character, John Divney, who parasitically moves in with the narrator and helps squander his inheritance. Divney and the narrator plot to kill their neighbor, Phillip Mathers, to steal his money. After the murder they decide to leave the money for a while until the coast clears: however they distrust each other so much that they never leave each others company. Finally they go to Mathers`s house to fetch the strongbox with his money: then Divney sends the narrator ahead to the house alone, while he stands lookout, and things get very strange!

The narrator meets Phillip Mathers, acquires a sort of soul which he calls "Joe", and sets out looking for three mysterious policemen. The first two are easily found, and the narrator discusses bicycles, boxes, and other unusual subjects with these policemen. Finally they decide to hang him (for bicycle theft, I think), but he is rescued by the league of one-legged men (the narrator himself has but one leg). He returns to Mathers` house where he encounters the third policeman, and eventually is reunited with John Divney.

The above summary, obviously, does not represent the action or interest of the book at all. The book is full of off-the-wall philosophical speculations, some based on the mad works of De Selby, others original to the policeman (the latter including a theory about bicycles and their riders which has to be read to be appreciated, also a mysterious trip to an underground cavern where anything you can imagine can be created). There are a lot of footnotes discussing De Selby and the controversy surrounding his work: these make the book somewhat reminiscent of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (also reminiscent in being the first-person narrative of an insane murderer).

Old Bestseller: Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth

Old Bestseller Review: Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth

a review by Rich Horton

I don't know for sure if this was a "bestseller" -- there were no true bestseller lists in Maria Edgeworth's time. But she was very popular, for realistic contemporary novels like Belinda and Ormond, for children's works, and for satirical works like Castle Rackrent. She was very famous, made a lot of money (more, Wikipedia says, than Jane Austen), was politically influential, and was friends with the likes of Walter Scott and Kitty Pakenham (the Duke of Wellington's wife, and a collateral ancestress of Anthony Powell's wife and thus of the Longfords).

Maria Edgeworth was born in 1768, to an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. She lived in England until 5, moved to Ireland after he mother's death and her father's remarriage, and later returned to England, but spent much of her life in Ireland (apparently socially much present in both countries). In fact, her political views were much formed by the question of Union between England and Ireland, which she and her father supported, but with doubts because they were well aware how many Irishmen opposed it. Her father, Richard, was a progressive educator, and indeed Maria's first couple of publications were on the subject of education. Richard married 4 times (the second and third being sisters), and had 22 (!) children -- one wag remarked that he had plenty of subjects on whom to try his progressive education theories.

Castle Rackrent was Edgeworth's first "novel", though it is very short -- the main narrative is about 25,000 words, and there are another 7500 or so words of an introduction and a glossary. It was published in 1800. It is sometimes considered the first historical novel, and the first novel to use an unreliable narrator. My edition is the Dover edition.

It is told by one Thady Quirk, who was the steward for four generations of the Rackrent family, who inherited Castle Rackrent from a distant cousin. Thady sings the praises of each of his masters ... Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy. But we quickly gather that each of them are fairly awful people. Sir Patrick is a spendthrift, and quickly gets into disastrous debt, and then dies. Sir Murtagh is by contrast a miser, and his wife is if anything worse, and his main entertainment is lawsuits against his neighbors. Sir Kit, Murtagh's younger brother, inherits and decides to marry a rich Jewish woman to save the estate, but she won't part with her jewels, and he locks her up for several years in revenge. His gambling and foolishness gets the estate into further trouble -- though Thady's son Jason profits by buying up Rackrent property on the cheap. Finally, Sir Condy has more woman trouble -- throwing over his mistress (Thady's niece) in favor of a rich local woman, whose family hates the Rackrents and thus refuses to give her any dowry. That marriage thus quickly founders, and Condy, after a foolish venture into Parliament, ends up literally drinking himself to death on a bet. And thus ends the Rackrent line.

It's all much more elaborately told of course, in very long paragraphs in Thady's quite plausible sounding Irish voice. There are extensive humorous asides about Irish habits -- these seem at times satirical, and at other times straightforward narrations of real Irish traditions and behaviors (all this much enlarged upon in the Glossary, which is written not in Thady's voice but in that of his "Editor"). As already noted, Thady is an unreliable narrator, and he constantly proclaims his loyalty to and love for the Rackrents, while we can't help but notice that his real interest is in the main chance -- and that in the end one of the primary beneficiaries of the misfortune of the Rackrents is Thady's son.

It's often very funny, though the long paragraphs do drag a bit. And as all the characters are really quite awful people, the novel wears out its welcome fairly quickly -- but as it's very short, that's OK -- it's about as much as we can stand, and pretty entertaining for its length.

Belated Birthday Review: Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems

Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1979. So, in slightly belated recognition of his birthday, I'm resposting something I wrote for my SFF Net newsgroup a long time ago. I'll caveat by noting that I really don't discuss individual poems in any detail here; and my suggesting that some of the things I wrote are kind of questionable. (Like the bit about him being known in two separate ways.)

I've mentioned before that Wallace Stevens is my favorite poet. (It's possible that I've used qualifiers like "20th Century" and "American" but hang all that, he's my favorite bar none.) Over the past couple of months, I've been engaged in a project, at first sort of offhand, by the end obsessive, of rereading his Collected Poems. And, by the end, of reading his late long poems repeatedly and with particular care.

Stevens is known, it seems to me, in two separate ways. In the popular sense, he is known for a series of remarkable early poems, in most cases not terribly long, notable for striking images and quite beautiful prosody. Of these poems the most famous is surely "Sunday Morning" -- other examples are "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", "Peter Quince at the Clavier", "Sea Surface Full of Clouds", "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon", "The Emperor of Ice Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Of Modern Poetry". The great bulk of these come from his first collection, Harmonium, and indeed from the first edition of Harmonium, published in 1923. ("Sea Surface" is from the 1931 reissue and expansion of Harmonium, "The Idea of Order at Key West" is from Ideas of Order (1936), and "Of Modern Poetry" is from Parts of a World (1942).) These were certainly my favorite among his poems. And they remain favorites.

But his critical reputation rests strikingly on a completely different set of poems, all later than those mentioned above. (Though it must be acknowledged that at least "Sunday Morning" and "The Idea of Order at Key West" as well as two early long poems, "The Comedian as the Letter C" and "The Monocle de Mon Oncle", are in general highly regarded critically. And that most of his early work is certainly treated with respect.) The longest poem in his Collected Poems is probably the poem with the greatest critical regard, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction". [Actually, ranking Stevens' poems by "critical regard" is a fools' effort, and I don't think there is any such consensus any more.] This was published as a separate book in 1942, the same year as Parts of a World. ("Notes" isn't actually his longest poem: a controversial poem called "Owl's Clover" was published in two separate forms, both longer than "Notes", but then was basically repudiated by being excluded from the Collected Poems.)

I think it's fair to say that "late Stevens" begins with "Notes", while "early-to-middle Stevens" ends with Parts of a World. ("Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" was reprinted as part of his 1947 collection Transport to Summer.) Of course the terms "late" and "early" are odd applied to Stevens. His first successful poems appeared in 1915 (including "Sunday Morning"), when he was 36. He was 44 when the first edition of Harmonium came out. That's pretty late for "early"! And by the 1942 publication of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" he was 63. Indeed, his production from 1942 through his death in 1955 was remarkable: two major collections each with several long poems (Transport to Summer and The Auroras of Autumn), as well as at least another full collection worth of late poems, some included in the 1954 Collected Poems in a section called "The Rock", and quite a few more not collected until after his death. The other late long poems besides "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" that attract considerable praise are "Esthétique du Mal" (though this tends also to be disparaged), "Chocorua to its Neighbor", "Credences of Summer", "The Auroras of Autumn", "The Owl in the Sarcophagus", "Things of August", and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven".

I can only say that my rereading of his poems was remarkably rewarding. Really! (That last "re" was on purpose!) The early favorites remain special -- I dare say I've read "Sunday Morning" hundreds of times, and it seems new every time. "The Idea of Order at Key West" is another long-term favorite. And I was delighted to detect a prefiguring of "The Idea of Order at Key West" in one of my favorite brief poems, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon". (I knew I couldn't be the only person to have noticed that, and indeed Harold Bloom goes on at some length about the links between the two poems in his book on Stevens.) But the truly eye-opening aspect of this rediscovery was the late long poems. Well, indeed, all the long poems. The early "Comedian" and "Monocle" had never really caught fire for me in earlier readings, but this time they did. I'm still not a huge fan of the popular middle-period long poem "The Man With the Blue Guitar", but I did enjoy this reading. I have long enjoyed a fairly long poem from Parts of a World, "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas" -- and I was delighted to see that Harold Bloom also likes that poem. I had earlier approached "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" with what I can only call trepidation. But on these recent rereadings (four or five careful ones) the poem -- still difficult -- has opened up to me. So too with "The Auroras of Autumn" and the late lovely "pre-elegy" for George Santayana, "To An Old Philosopher in Rome". "Credences of Summer" and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" don't yet come clear to me, but reading them is still a pleasure. (I say "come clear" as if I fully understand "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"! Not likely, but I am sure that each future rereading will show me new things.)

[I should note that on further rereadings, "Credences of Summer" and "To an Old Philosopher in Rome", in particular, have become more important to me.]

What to say about late Stevens? The most obvious adjective is "austere". But that doesn't always apply -- he could also be quite playful. However, there is never the lushness of a "Sunday Morning" or "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" in the late works. The sentences tend to extraordinary length, but the internal rhythms are involving. The poems are all quite philosophical, much concerned with the importance of poetry, the nature of reality versus perceptions of reality, and, perhaps more simply, with growing old. (A Stevens theme, to be sure, that can be traced at least back to "The Monocle de Mon Oncle".)

I also took the time to read two book length studies of Stevens. These are Helen Hennessy Vendler's On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems, and Harold Bloom's Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Both are interesting and worthwhile, but also difficult, particularly the Bloom. I think I just don't have the vocabulary or training to always understand Bloom.

(It's interesting to consider the definition of "long poem". By my count there are 18 poems of more than 100 lines in the Collected Poems, and two more ("Owl's Clover" and "The Sail of Ulysses") in Opus Posthumous. But Vendler only explicitly covers 14 poems, including one quite short poem ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", 54 lines). She leaves out one of my favorite longer poems, "Extracts From Address to the Academy of Fine Ideas", and other perhaps less important poems like "Things of August", "The Owl in the Sarcophagus", "Chocorua to its Neighbor" and "A Primitive Like an Orb". But that is just to quibble.)

Birthday Review: A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge

Here's a review of arguably Vernor Vinge's most famous novel, and my personal favorite among his works, that I wrote when the book first appeared. Today is Vinge's 74th birthday, so I'm reposting it, in the same format I originally used when I first put it on my then new web page. (That page is now gone.)

Review Date: 28 April 1999

A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
Tor Books, New York, NY, March 1999
$27.95 (US), ISBN: 0-312-85683-0

Review Copyright 1999 by Rich Horton

This is a wonderful SF novel. It's the first novel in a while to really engage me on the sense of wonder level, and to again awaken the feelings of awe and of "I want to be there" that were so central to my early reading of SF. I was complaining earlier about books like Jablokov's Deepdrive, and wondering if the fault lay in me. I mean: that book (Deepdrive) is full of neat ideas, original ideas, and I thought they were well handled, and the story was good. But I never felt fully engaged, never felt "awe". I still suppose the fault may be in my jaded self, but A Deepness in the Sky proves that its still possible to really knock me out SFnally.

I'll briefly summarize the plot, hopefull avoiding spoilers. The book is set perhaps 8000 years in our future. Two starfaring human civilizations reach an anomalous astronomical object at the same time. One of the civilizations is the Qeng Ho, a loosely organized group of traders (reminiscent of Poul Anderson's Kith (this book is dedicated to Anderson) and of Robert A. Heinlein's Traders from Citizen of the Galaxy). The other is called the Emergent civilization (that name is one of many inspired coinages by Vinge). The astronomical object is something called the On/Off star, which shines for only 35 years then is a brown dwarf for the rest of its 250 year period. That's interesting enough, but what draws the two human groups is the presence of radio signals: an alien technological civilization has at last been discovered.

The Emergents turn out to be very authoritarian, and they double-cross the Qeng Ho after having agreed to a cooperative exploration of the planet. However the Qeng Ho fight back, and the humans end up losing interstellar capability. One narrative thread thus follows the human characters as they wait for the On/Off star to ignite, and for the aliens to (with their help) develop a sufficient tech level to rebuild the starships. This thread also shows the Qeng Ho resistance to the Emergent rule. The other main narrative thread follows the Spiders, the arachnoid intelligent natives of the On/Off star's single planet. These beings have long adapted to their sun's peculiarity, by hibernating through the "Dark". But one culture, led by an endearing genius named Sherkaner Underhill, has begun to develop ways of living awake through the Dark time. But they are opposed by suspicious neighbors. And the human watchers begin to subtly interfere. The whole story culminates in a terrifically exciting finish, one which intrigues at the level of action-filled resolution of multiple plots, and also at the level of revelations of the solutions to a number of ingenious scientific puzzles, and thirdly at the level of satisfying emotional thematic resolutions to the journeys of a number of characters. It's uplifting without being unrealistic or mawkish.

There are flaws, though to some extent the flaws are, I would say, necessary. This book is, I think, what Debra Doyle has called a "Romance", as such demanding larger than life characters and events. In this way, the main "flaws" are the somewhat pulpish nature of the plot and characters. But as I hint, I don't find these flaws serious. Indeed, they might really be necessary, indeed virtues, in the context of this sort of book. But it should be said that the plot depends on a few coincidences, and on things like the villains deciding not to kill the good guys because they're not sure the good guys are conspiring against them. (These villains are so bad, I don't see why they wouldn't just figure, "Better safe than sorry!", and kill them anyway (or, in the context of the book, do something worse).) And the characters feature some extremes: most obviously the alien scientist who is just an awesome genius, and who appears at the perfect time in their society. The human characters also include some remarkable folk. And the villains are really really really bad. Gosh, they're bad. But that works, too, because their worst feature is original and scary and believable and a neat SF idea.

Good stuff: with Vinge, I suppose I always think ideas first. He has come up with several. First, his concept of an extended human future in space with strict light-speed limits (as far as anyone in this book knows), is very well-worked out and believable and impressive and fun. It depends on basically three pieces of extrapolation: ramships that can get to about .3c, lifespans extended to about 500 years, and near-perfect suspended animation or coldsleep. The second neat idea is the On/Off star. The idea of a star that shines for 35 or so years and turns off for 210 years is neat, and then giving it a planet and a believable set of aliens is great fun. The aliens are really great fun too: they are too human in how they are presented, but Vinge neatly finesses this issue, in at least a half-convincing way, and he shows us glimpses that suggest real alienness, too. (Include some very nice cultural touches.) The third especially neat idea I won't mention because it might be too much of a spoiler, but the key "tech" of the bad guys is really scary, and a neat SFnal idea. And handled very well, and subtly.

As I said, I found the plot inspiring as well. This is a very long book, about 600 pages, but I was never bored. Moreover, as Patrick Nielsen Hayden has taken pains to point out, the prose in this book is quite effective. I believe Patrick used some such term as "full throated scientifictional roar". Without necessarily understanding exactly what he meant by that, the prose definitely works for me, and in ways which seem possibly particularly "scientifictional" in nature. One key factor here is names: names of characters, for one thing. Vinge's names of humans: Trixia Bonsol, Rixer Brughel, Tomas Nau, and so on, seem well chosen in several ways: they are recognizably human, and linked to present day languages, but just different enough to seem strange, and they (to my ears) sound good. His alien names are also fairly poetic, and both different and familiar sounding. (They are explicitly human coinages: a key point.) Thus: Sherkaner Underhill, Victory Smith, Hrunkner Unnerby. Mileage may vary, but I really liked these names. They certainly beat unpronounceable names, and names with non-alphabetic characters, and the like. The names of technological devices and future societies are also evocative. Examples from the humans include the Emergent society (a name with a double meaning), the Focus virus, and localizers; one alien example is videomancy.

This book is a "prequel" to Vinge's excellent previous novel A Fire Upon the Deep, but it is readable entirely without knowledge of the other book. However, having read A Fire Upon the Deep does allow the reader of A Deepness in the Sky some additional pleasures (and ironies): in particular, speculation about the true nature of the On/Off star, and about the evolutionary history of the Spiders. Also, a main character of this book was also a significant character in the previous book, and knowledge of this character's fate adds a certain frisson to the events depicted in A Deepness in the Sky.

In summary, this is an outstanding SF novel. It marries clever hard SF ideas, a rousing story, involving characters, and several interleaved, emotionally and intellectually compelling, themes. The themes are fine and fundamental to SF: involving the value of exploration and scientific knowledge, the value of freedom and thesacrifices of freedom, the desirability and costs of the dream of Empire, and the question "What would I give up to be smarter ... better ... more focussed?"