Birthday Review: Stories of Jeffrey Ford

Today is the birthday of Jeffrey Ford, and in his honor, here is a compilation of many (not all) of my reviews of his short fiction, mostly from Locus.

Locus, May 2002

And "The Weight of Words" (Leviathan 3), by Jeffrey Ford, suggests that the placement and appearance of words can affect their meaning in such mundane ways as subliminal advertising, or such more profound ways as causing death, love, or the appreciation of beauty.  Told by a man who has lost his wife and hopes to regain her, but gains something else, it's a lovely story.

Locus, April 2003

The February 26th story at Sci Fiction, "The Empire of Ice Cream", by Jeffrey Ford, is excellent. My interest was immediately engaged by the Wallace Stevens reference, but the story itself fully rewards reading. It's about a man with synesthaesia. He is brought up quite sheltered by older parents, never really making friends with other children, due to his synesthetic hallucinations. He becomes an accomplished piano player and composer, even as he perceives the notes he plays or composes as sights or smells or tastes. As a teenager, a chance encounter with coffee ice cream changes his life -- the hallucination this flavor brings forth is different than any other: a young woman. As he grows older, he finds that pure coffee allows real contact with this woman, and he learns that she, too, is an artist and a synesthaesiac. The story climaxes as he tries to complete a major musical composition -- coming to a predictable but still quite satisfying and moving conclusion.

Locus, April 2004

One very intriguing debut publication is Argosy, a magazine launched at least somewhat in the tradition of the early 20th Century magazine of that name, in that it will feature a "catholic" array of stories -- stories from all genres.  Jeffrey Ford's "A Night at the Tropics", is about a cursed chess set and the bully who stumbles into possession of it. The story is framed in a very Kiplingesque manner: the narrator, named Ford, tells of his return to his childhood house, and a visit to a bar his father frequented, "The Tropics". It is there that he again encounters the bully, and hears the tale of the chess set. And, much as Kipling so often and so brilliantly managed, the frame ends up blending with and enhancing the central story.

Locus, February 2005

Jeffrey Ford's "A Man of Light" (Sci Fiction, January 26) is a rather gothic story about a young reporter interviewing a man who has made a fortune creating spectacular illusions by manipulating light in implausible ways. But he reveals to his interviewer other obsessions -- a desire to actually communicate with light, and a fear of light's opposite, "the creature of night". The story spirals into strange dreams, murders, and an inevitable, phantasmagoric, ending.

Locus, December 2005 (review of The Cosmology of the Wider World)

Jeffrey Ford is among the most original of contemporary fantasists. A consistent delight. His recent novels (The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque and The Girl in the Glass) have been urban fantasies set in the relatively recent past. His earlier novels -- the Physiognomist Cley trilogy and his little-known first novel Vanitas -- featured decidedly odder settings. Now we see The Cosmology of the Wider World, a PS Publishing "novella" (though it is actually of novel length): something of a return to the style of those earlier books. (Indeed I detected an explicit reference to Vanitas.)

Belius is a minotaur. He lives in a "crenellated tower of his own construction", and he is writing a book called "The Cosmology of the Wider World". His closest friend is a philandering sea turtle named Pezimote. And Belius is depressed -- he feels he has been poisoned. His book is worthless. So his friends decide to look for a cure.

At first blush this seems almost a traditional "talking animals" book. We learn of Belius’s birth, to a human couple, and of his lonely upbringing and his eventual realization that the human world was not for him. (Particularly after terrible disappointment in love.) Thus he makes his way to the fabled "Wider World", where the animals talk, and he builds his tower and works on his "Cosmology". In a more conventional book, we might hope that he will eventually return to the human world and rediscover his love, or perhaps find love in the Wider World. But Ford’s imagination is simply too strange for this.

Indeed his friends see hope for a cure in finding him a lover. But their attempts in this direction are both comic and sad. Meanwhile Shebeb the healer ape has his own ideas as to how best to cure Belius, including a Fantastic Voyage-like journey by a talking flea. The final direction of the book is quite unexpected.

The book is a great deal of fun, and at the same time quite moving. Belius is a convincing and sad character. The prose is typical of Ford at his more extravagant -- always interesting, though at times not quite precise. (For example, in the opening sentence he writes "fizzing like quinine", but it is not quinine that fizzes, rather quinine-flavored tonic water.) Still, Ford’s prosodic leaps are more often delights than missteps. And this book as a whole is fabulous in multiple senses of the word.

Review of the collection The Empire of Ice Cream (I'm not sure where this appeared)

Jeffrey Ford is one of the most original and fascinating writers in contemporary fantasy. The Empire of Ice Cream is his second story collection. His novels have attracted considerable well-deserved interest, including a World Fantasy Award, but for my money his short fiction is better still. The title story is one of my favorite stories by anyone from the last few years. The story is about a man, a composer, with synesthesia. Coffee ice cream causes him to conjure a young woman who is also an artist and a synesthesiac. The story comes to a predictable but still quite satisfying and moving conclusion. "The Weight of Words" suggests that the placement and appearance of words can affect their meaning in such mundane ways as subliminal advertising, or such more profound ways as causing death, love, or the appreciation of beauty. Inevitably, but not at all in the ordinary way, these techniques are used in love letters. There is one new story in the book, a very long novella (nearly novel length): "Botch Town". This is a sad and precise evocation of childhood in a lower middle class suburb. The title refers to a model town that the narrator's brother constructs in their basement. Their sister, who is in some way brilliant but not very comprehensible, seems to use this town to follow real happenings in their own town, including the whereabouts of a mysterious visitor who may be connected with the disappearance of a neighborhood boy.  "Giant Land" may be less well known but it too is wonderful, about a woman and a boat and giants ... too hard to describe in brief! There are many other jewels here -- the stories are a varied and intriguing lot. Ford's brief introductions are a definite plus as well. This is surely one of the best story collections of 2006.

Locus, November 2007

Jeffrey Ford’s "The Dreaming Wind" (The Coyote Road) is an offbeat and lyrical tale of a town where, towards the end of summer each year, a wind blows through, leading to bizarre changes in people who are caught out in it. But one year the wind doesn’t come at all. As a result, apparently, the townspeople lose their ability to dream, and this is a sad thing. There is a solution, and an explanation, quite sweetly and originally unveiled.

Locus, April 2008

One story truly stands out in Ellen Datlow's The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction: Jeffrey Ford’s "Daltharee", a dizzying fantasia about a "bottled city" created by a mad scientist: a tiny creation (resembling a large snow globe perhaps?) inhabited by living people. Ford makes the city and its people real, and also the rather disturbed creator, and takes everything in a nicely dark direction.

Locus, August 2008

In the Datlow/Windling anthology Salon Fantastique, Jeffrey Ford’s "The Night Whiskey" is spookily offbeat, about a small town where one night a year a few people are privileged to drink the title draft, a distillation of the "deathberry", which allows communication with the dead. The story begins as just odd -- almost goofy -- but modulates to darkness when one man tries to bring back his lost wife via the whiskey.

Locus, March 2013

Finally, John Joseph Adams' The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination closes with a series of darker stories, of which the best is Jeffrey Ford's "The Pittsburgh Technology", in which a nebbish, after meeting a suddenly successful man he used to torment, tries the title process under the promise that it will transform his life, only to learn that some losers are destined to remain losers.

Ace Double Reviews, 22: Space Chantey, by R. A. Lafferty/Pity About Earth, by Ernest Hill

Ace Double Reviews, 22: Space Chantey, by R. A. Lafferty/Pity About Earth, by Ernest Hill (#H-56, 1968, $0.60)

a review by Rich Horton

Both these novels are discursive, essentially humorous, stories set in a totally unrealistic far-future Galaxy, with spaceships flitting from star to star, outre happenings pretty much made up as the author goes along, and plenty of winking at the reader.

The Ernest Hill novel is almost unknown. The author is from the U. K., and was born in 1915, and died in 2003 -- as it happens, only a few months before I originally wrote this review. Hill published a dozen or so stories and three novels between 1964 and 1976. The stories appeared in New Worlds, Science Fantasy, New Writings in SF, Galaxy and If. As far as I can find out, this Ace Double edition was the only publication of Pity About Earth. It is about 57,000 words long, and it was his only Ace Double, and as far as I can find out his only U. S.-published novel.

R. A. Lafferty, on the other hand, was one of the SF field's originals, a true master with a very distinctive individual voice. He was born a year before Hill, in 1914, and died in 2002, after spending his last decade or more in terrible health. He started publishing short fiction in 1959 in New Mexico Quarterly, and by 1960 was publishing his offbeat stories in SF magazines Galaxy, If and Future. His reputation grew through the decade, but it wasn't until 1968 that he published his first three novels, almost simultaneously: Past Master, The Reefs of Earth, and Space Chantey. Space Chantey, which was Lafferty's only Ace Double, is about 50,000 words long. It is probably the least known of Lafferty's early run of novels, the seven that appeared through 1973, the other three being Fourth Mansions, The Devil is Dead, Arrive at Easterwine, and Okla Hannali. (A number of other novels were published starting in the early 80s, mostly from small presses.) Space Chantey, to my knowledge, has only been reprinted once, by the English publisher Dobson in 1976.

(Cover by Vaughn Bode)

I enjoy much of Lafferty's short fiction, but I have found his novels harder to get into. The structure seems slack, and the narrative style and tall-tale humor get tiresome at length. Much of this applies to Space Chantey, though I found it reasonably enjoyable. Though its structure is episodic, it is fairly coherent, partly because it is explicitly based on the Odyssey.

The Odysseus figure is Captain Roadstrum, who heads back to his home on World (i.e. Earth -- indeed, Tulsa, Lafferty's own home) after 10 years of war. He and another Captain and their motley crews take a couple of ships, and decide to take a brief stop at the planet Lotophage, where it is always afternoon. Well -- you can see where that's going. This is of course the planet of the Lotus Eaters. They continue to various other planets loosely modelled on places Odysseus visited, most of the crewmen dying multiple times, only to mysteriously return to life. Roadstrum battles giants, a witch, androphages, Atlas, and so on. Lafferty mixes in offhand semi-SFnal details, and bits of Norse myth and other stories, and leads his hero eventually back to World, only to give a slight, and effective, twist to the ending. The story is throughout told in Lafferty's familiar, over the top, voice, and it is augmented with lots of bouncing doggerel representing some future Homer's goofy retelling of Roadstrum's story. I didn't love it, but it was fun and original and fairly effective.

Hill's Pity About Earth is a bit more overtly satirical. Shale, the Advertising Manager for a Galactic newspaper publisher, heads for the planet Gromworld to deliver some papers along with his trusty super-intelligent, naturally servile, alien servant Phrix. It is some 30,000 years after Earth was destroyed -- pity about Earth -- but humans represent the "Ruling Races" of the Galaxy.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

He diverts to the planet Shorne to visit his mistress Metita, one of a thoroughly amoral race that lives only on Shorne. But she is plotting with a man from a rival newspaper to kill Shale and allow the other man to take over his position. Shale escapes to the laboratories where Metita's father controls various gruesome experiments on humans and modified humans. Soon he is in a three-way power struggle between himself, his would-be murderer, and his servant, who has been appointed the new Advertisement Manager on the assumption that Shale must be dead. Shale must gain the assistance of various experimental subjects, particularly an ape-woman who just wants to be loved, to have a chance to make his escape. And when he does, he and Phrix both make a trip to the mysterious planet Asgard to confront the never seen Publisher and resolve the future of the Galaxy and the fate of human and alien life.

That description makes it sound almost serious, but it's not at all. It's a very cynical and satirical look at an advertising dominated future of idleness and waste. I was reminded a bit of John Sladek, but Sladek is far the better, funnier, more original writer. Pity About Earth isn't awful, and there are some OK ideas, and some gasp-inducing cynically funny bits, but on the whole it's a pretty minor and rather forgettable novel.

Birthday Review: Stories by Linda Nagata

Today is Linda Nagata's birthday, and so herewith a selection of my reviews of her short fiction, mostly from Locus but first an extract from my year-end summary of stories from Sci Fiction back in 2000.

Summary post about Sci Fiction, 2000

My favorite of the three Sci Fiction novellas this year was Linda Nagata's "Goddesses", set in the moderately near future, about a corporation trying to introduce new technology to a poor area of India in a way that won't excessively upset the social order, but which will benefit not only the corporation, but the local people, and the ecology.  The conflict arises when a young wife is rejected by a traditionalist Hindu family, and ends up on the doorstep of the idealistic corporate manager.  His attempts to walk the tightrope between helping the young woman, and not offending the more traditional villagers, leads him to realize that sometimes you just can't please everybody.  It's engagingly told, and full of nicely portrayed new technology, in the best near future hard SF tradition.  Indeed, it's very much an Analog-style story, both in terms of its "hardness" and its optimism, (and Nagata has published in Analog, if memory serves), and I suspect only its length (about 30000 words) kept it out of Analog (well, or higher pay at Sci Fiction, or a perception of greater prestige -- I don't know).

Locus, June 2012

The May Lightspeed features a strong SF adventure story from Linda Nagata, "Nightside on Callisto", in which four elderly women are trying to establish a base on Jupiter's moon, a minor outpost in a war against "the Red", an AI menace that reminded me of John Barnes's "One True". Their mining mechs suddenly attack them -- clearly infected by "the Red", and the story concerns this small battle. It's pure, small-scale, adventure, with a nicely hinted back story -- in itself a minor work but very good.

Locus, September 2012

The October Analog is one of the best issues of the magazine in a while, with a variety of generally interesting stories. Best are the final two, both novelettes. "Nahiku West", by Linda Nagata, is set in a space habitat. The main character, Zeke Choy, has been drafted into the Commonwealth Police, charged with enforcing their rather draconian laws about the purity of the human genome. When a man survives a depressurization incident, he seems likely to have a genetic "quirk" enabling short-term tolerance of vacuum. Zeke tries to find a way to save him, but his boss intervenes. Soon Zeke suspects the man was a victim of a murder attempt to begin with, and things get more complicated when his lover is also accused on having a "quirk", and worse still when his lover's son is attacked. So we have a twisty mystery plot, well resolved, with dark overtones. Even better is the world and society building, lightly sketched but continually surprising -- an interesting future solar system.

Locus, July 2013

Analog in June features an outstanding story by Linda Nagata, "Out in the Dark". It's a fairly direct sequel to last year's excellent "Nahiku West". It features the same detective, Zeke Choy, as the earlier story, again addressing a "crime" defined by the somewhat draconian rules of his spacefaring society, rules that enforce original identity (particularly in the case of  regenerated bodies) and genetic purity to a quite distinct fault. Here he is investigating the suspicious appearance of of a woman in the Outer Solar System who may be the same woman who was marooned and frozen long before. If she is, her later copy forfeits any right to their identity, and must be killed. So it sets up a wrenching problem … mitigated in a sense (for readers) by what seems outrageous injustice in this society's laws. Choy, who was forced in the previous story to a disturbing decision, has a similar dilemma here. I thought the resolution veered a bit in a conventional direction, but it's still a strong piece.

Locus, April 2017

Linda Nagata’s "Diamond and the World Breaker" (Cosmic Powers), is again about a super weapon (they are rather a major feature of Space Opera, eh?) -- in this case aimed at the AI controlling the transportation and communications between the Nine Thousand --the intricate array of space stations etc. in the Solar System. Violetta is a hunter (sort of a policewoman) and finds herself coerced to deliver the weapon to the AI because for complicated political reasons her daughter will lose her identity if she doesn’t -- all this is interesting future cultural stuff that is better learned in story space: suffice it to say it works nicely, and the story is exciting and convincing.

Locus, October 2017

In Tor.com’s July set of stories I thought "The Martian Obelisk", by Linda Nagata, the best. It’s set in a future in which a series of disasters, with causes in human nature, in environmental collapse, and in technological missteps, has led to a realization that humanity is doomed. One old architect, in a gesture of, perhaps, memorialization of the species, has taken over the remaining machines of an abortive Mars colony to create a huge obelisk that might end up the last surviving great human structure after we are gone. But her project is threatened when a vehicle from one of the other Martian colonies (all of which failed) approaches. Is the vehicle’s AI haywire? Has it been hijacked by someone else on Earth? The real answer is more inspiring -- and if perhaps just a bit pat, the conclusion is profoundly moving.

Birthday Review: The Caltraps of Time, by David I. Masson

Birthday Review: The Caltraps of Time, by David I. Masson

The Scottish writer David I. Masson was born November 6, 1915, and died in 2007. (The ISFDB gives his birth year as 1917, but Wikipedia as well as obituaries I've found suggest 1915 instead.) He was one of a distinguished academic family, and he himself became a distinguished librarian (mostly in Leeds). (Shades of the great poet Philip Larkin, only slightly younger than Masson and for a long time a librarian in the English city of Hull.) He published only a few short stories, the great bulk in the mid-60s in New Worlds, with three more following in anthologies in the early '70s. The New Worlds stories were collected in an anthology, The Caltraps of Time, in 1968. This book was reissued in 2003 with the other stories also included, and it can be bought through David Langford.

We reprinted his most famous story, "Traveller's Rest", at Lightspeed in 1914. I wrote a short piece about Masson for that issue, linked here. What follows is a review I wrote in 2007.

I bought The Caltraps of Time mainly for one story, his first: "Traveller's Rest", which appeared in New Worlds, September 1965. It has been anthologized very often, including in both the Merril and Carr/Wollheim Best of the Year anthologies that year. I must have read the story -- I know I read that Carr/Wollheim Best of -- but I was but a callow teenager and I don't recall it. But it is often mentioned as a particularly powerful and striking story by a rather litte known writer.

And indeed, "Traveller's Rest" does not disappoint. It is the story of a soldier fighting in a curious war. The opponent is not seen, not known. Apparently, the two sides fight across an impassable timelike barrier -- for their world is curiously constructed as to time flow. Near the barrier, time flows slower and slower, so much so that communication is impossible except over short distances. The change in rate of time is a feature throughout the world, but at greater distances from the barrier the time rate delta per linear distance flattens -- the overall curve seems a hyperbola. The soldier is relieved, and returns to the most inhabited areas, of relatively flat time gradients -- but of course it is long past the time he left. So he makes a new life, marries, has children -- and all these decades only minutes have passed at the front. Which hints at the inevitable conclusion. Masson's story has multiple lovely features -- some cute linguistic inventions, some nice explorations of the effects of even small time gradients, and a moving personal story. It provides real SFnal sense of wonder -- complete with a bitter and logical twist right at the conclusion. Outstanding.

The rest of the collection is not quite as good, but it is still well worth reading. Masson's abiding SFnal interests seemed to be time (and parallel worlds); and linguistic invention (including linguistic change over time). In some ways I am reminded of Ted Chiang, actually, particularly in a story like "Mouth of Hell" but also in "Traveller's Rest" and a few others. Indeed, in a lot of ways. (Noting, of course, that Masson was mining this territory before Chiang.)

My favorite among the other stories was "Lost Ground". Somewhat like "Traveller's Rest", Masson combines a couple of ideas. The first is a future in which weather is dominated by emotion-causing "fronts" -- a "bitter spell" might be in the forecast, or a "panic attack" -- the latter of which causes the death of the son of the two main characters. Then, oddly, but successfully, he introduces another notion -- time displacements -- places where you might suddenly walk to another time. (Reminiscent of Gordon Dickson's novel Time Storm, but again Masson was there first.) The wife vanishes in one, and the husband determines to follow her in, but these time displacements are not so predictable. The conclusion is quite moving.

Probably his other best known story is "A Two-Timer", in which a man from the 17th Century happens upon a time machine and accidentally makes his way to our time. Masson has a great deal of fun with the linguistic differences, and of course also the differences in attitudes. "Psychosmosis" is another highlight. It's set in a curiously different place, where mentioning the name of a dead person results in immediate disappearance. Thus any namesakes of a newly died person must change their names. But accidents still happen. The story examines the consequences of a few such accidents -- somewhat surprising results. This is one of those just plain weird ideas that may not make much sense but simply impress the reader with the writer's imagination.

In "The Transfinite Choice" a far future overpopulated Earth happens upon a means of reducing population pressure after the discovery of alternate worlds, separate from ours by an infinitesimal time interval. Of course, there is a (guessable) problem with this solution. Masson's most conventional SF story might be "Not So Certain", which is set on another planet, and deals with the problems caused by slightly imprecise translations of an alien language. Plausible, but really not terribly interesting. "Mouth of Hell" concerns a dangerous expedition to an apparently infinitely deep valley in the surface of the world. The title suggests what that valley might be, but Hell as such is not really dealt with in the story.

Finally, the three new stories are all somewhat weaker. Moreover, they are terribly bitter, indeed dyspeptic. Sometime between 1967 and 1970 Masson seems to have given up on the future of the human race. "The Show Must Go On" is not a story so much as a parade of descriptions of murder and violence -- mostly ignored -- in a decayed future. "Doctor Fausta" is the best of these late stories. A man meets a duplicate of himself and learns that it is possible to go to a parallel world, slightly different. It turns out his duplicate has a reason for convincing the man to switch universes, to do with a petty crime ring. Much of the story, however, has fun with the somewhat goofy linguistic differences between the two similar but not identical universes. Finally, "Take It or Leave It" contrasts two differing futures -- a not exactly utopian but livable, if busy, future and a bitter post-apocalypse future. The main point seemed again to be simply displaying a dyspeptic view of humanity -- there was little story (though some decent imagination).

Masson's best stories are profoundly worth continued attention, and this collection, though uneven, is absolutely worth reading.

Birthday Review: The Last Hawk, by Catherine Asaro

Today is Catherine Asaro's birthday, and so I have resurrected this review I did when it first came out of The Last Hawk.

Review Date: 06 May 1998

The Last Hawk, by Catherine Asaro
Tor, 1997, $25.95
ISBN: 0-312-86044-7

Catherine Asaro's latest Skolian novel is The Last Hawk. This takes place roughly at the same time as the action of her first novel, Primary Inversion, but on a completely isolated planet. The Skolian connection is that the protagonist, Kelric, is a member of the Ruby Dynasty, ruling family of the Skolian empire. He crash-lands on an isolated, restricted, planet, Coba, and becomes a pawn in an extended power struggle.

The novel is really concerned with the social and political setup on this planet. The society of this planet is female dominated, and a powerful male like Kelric is a threat, both to the societal structure, and to the political independence: this last because if he is found by the Skolians, the restricted label is likely to vanish, and Coba will be absorbed into the Empire.

There are other key aspects to the social structure: Coba is dominated by a number of Houses, each with a female head. The planet has replaced war with a game called Quis. Each House has some first rate Quis players: the Head of the house, and members of her household, especially including her "husbands" (or "akasi"s). Information is transmitted by Quis playing, and very good players can influence "public opinion" by innovative playing. I found this concept fascinating, though in the end quite unconvincing. An important aspect of this is that a Calani (male Quis player) from one household is very valuable to another household, because of his "inside knowledge", as it were, and a certain flexibility he seems to gain from being exposed to different styles of Quis. Thus these Calani become, essentially, prize commodities, tradable for money or political favors.

[Some of the following may include spoilers, though I don't think they are too bad. The spoilerphobic, however, may disagree. I'll mention briefly, then, that I liked the book, and I recommend it.]

After his crash, Kelric is rescued by a team from the leading allied house to the "ruling" house. Kelric, damaged and also unable to tolerate some of the local chemistry, barely survives. Soon, however, he has "married" the head of Dahl house (the house which found him), and he has met the heir apparent to the ruling House. Despite his emotional ties, he eventually tries to escape, and accidentally kills someone, as a result ending up in prison. However, he has two important things on his side: he is a natural genius at Quis (helped somewhat by his Skolian biomechanical enhancements); and he is very sexy, and the powerful women of the Houses tend to fall in love with him. The story follows him through a variety of Houses, as for political and other reasons he becomes a very rare Calani of six houses. However, the disruptions his presence causes begin to threaten the structure of Coban society.

This is an interesting novel, with much to recommend it, and very readable. I had problems with couple of things: the ultimate improbability of Quis is one, including the improbably sudden scientific advances supposedly resulting from Kelric transmitting ideas from Skolian culture to the Cobans via Quis. Also, a couple of villains who were almost too bad (though Asaro really tries hard to make them plausible and close to sympathetic), and I had a certain difficulty in staying emotionally involved with Kelric's many romances and quasi-romances. Kelric's amazing Quis ability was a bit of a cliché (though to be fair, Asaro provides at least some justification for it, in the form of his bio-mechanical enhancements), and the actions of some of the characters at times seemed to be designed to advance the plot rather than to arise from their own characteristics. The female-dominated society was quite well handled, I thought. Sometimes Asaro was too clearly engaging in allegory though, having the Coban women, generally good people, casually treat their men in blatantly sexist ways: all this seemed obviously a reversal of male sexism in our society: a fairly effective device for the most part, but a bit too pat and obvious in places. The novel's structure, in six parts corresponding to the six Houses of which Kelric becomes a member, allows Asaro to explore Coban society from many angles: some of the Houses are traditional, some modern, some strong, some weak: so we get a fairly varied look at the planet and society. That said, I didn't get a strong sense of a "complete" planet: rather, the society seemed to consist of smallish, isolated, enclaves.

Asaro has become known as a sort of hybrid SF/Romance writer. Her books are published by an SF imprint, and certainly widely read by SF readers, but she also gets reviewed in Romance-oriented publications, and as I recall she has won an award from a Romance organization. Her first two novels seemed on occasion to suffer from this dichotomy, as SF expectations were not necessarily satisfied, and possibly vice-versa. (I'm thinking in particular of Primary Inversion, which ends when the romance plot has been more or less resolved, but well before the SF/Adventure plot has been resolved. (I understand a direct sequel is forthcoming.)) The Last Hawk works very well as an SF novel, but might disappoint romance readers. Read as a romance, certain expectations are set up, and then (perhaps deliberately?) subverted. In fact, Asaro seems almost to be playing with Romance novel conventions: she has several romantic entanglements to work with, and they seem almost to be comments on typical relationship-types.

When I originally finished this book, I thought "Fast, fun, read. Some nice ideas. Not quite successful." Over the weeks since I've read it, it has improved in memory. Even if I found the basic idea of Quis unbelievable, it is a clever idea, and moreover one which works very well thematically. Also, I believe some of my original mild disappointment was related to a what I mention above: the failure of the novel to conform to typical Romance plot expectations. But on reflection, this is a strength, and not a weakness. I feel sure, too, that this novel plants a charge waiting to be detonated later in the Skolian series, whenever Coba confronts the Universe at large.

Birthday Review: The Prophecy Machine, by Neal Barrett, Jr.

I've already posted a review for Neal Barrett's birthday, but I had another one in my archives. This review appeared in Black Gate, I think, one of the early print issues. I figure I'd resurrect it as well.

The Prophecy Machine
by Neal Barrett Jr.
Bantam Spectra, New York, 2000, 342 pages, $6.50
ISBN: 0-553-58195-3

A review by Rich Horton

Sometimes an idea seems to suddenly become fashionable, and it pops up in several places almost simultaneously. In an earlier issue of Black Gate I reviewed Will Shetterly's Chimera, which is largely about animal/human genetic hybrids. Richard Calder's 1998 novel, Frenzetta is also about animal/human hybrids. In Chimera the main hybrid character is a jaguar person, while in Frenzetta it's a rat person. Here now is The Prophecy Machine by Neal Barrett Jr., again featuring animal/human hybrids, in this case with a "Mycer" (uplifted mouse) as the main female character. (One might speculate on what it means that in each of these novels the viewpoint character is (more or less, in the case of Frenzetta) a fully human male, while the animal/human hybrid is a female who is or becomes the viewpoint character's lover. Perhaps it means no more than "all of the authors mentioned are male".) (In this context I might also mention the distant sequel to Frenzetta, Malignos, which features a human male/goblin female relationship, a relationship which for some reason reminded me strongly of the relationship at the center of The Prophecy Machine.)

The Prophecy Machine opens with a Master Lizard Maker named Finn on a ship, taking a vacation with his wife, the "Mycer" Letitia Louise, and with an intelligent mechanical lizard named Julia Jessica Slag, an illegal creation of Finn's . Things have already gone bad, as the ship is crewed by "Yowlies" (uplifted cats), and Letitia Louise can't stand them, for obvious reasons. Things take several turns for the worse when Finn arouses the enmity of a fellow passenger who is abusing a Foxer servant, and then when Finn, Letitia Louise, and Julia are marooned in the strange country of Makasar, unfortunately also the home of Sabatino Nucci, the strange man whose enmity Finn had aroused on the ship.

Makasar is a strange place indeed. The inhabitants have a strict taboo against hospitality of any sort, which makes it hard for our heroes to find a place to stay. They also practice two strange, violent religions: the Hatters rule the day, and the Hooters rule the night. Both sects act in unusual ways, and seem to make a habit of burning and killing, for ritual or other reasons. When Finn comes to the rescue of a person the Hatters seem ready to kill, he finds that this is Sabatino Nucci's father, and despite their mutual antipathy, Finn ends up staying at the Nuccis' strange house, as he has no alternative.

Despite an almost light-hearted and playful tone, the book is full of grotesque and terrifying incidents and features: the Nuccis' bat-derived servant and their horrible food (such as turnip wine); the mad old man who seems to also be staying with the Nuccis; the constant threat of attack from almost any corner: if one of the Nuccis isn't threatening Finn and his companions, then the prejudiced citizens of Makasar, or bands of Foxers, or Sabatino's uncle Dr. Nicoretti are after him. Not to mention the ghosts he meets, nor the stress caused by Letitia Louise's oscillating moods, nor the acerbic banter with Julia Jessica Slagg. But the worst thing of all is the strange, almost living, machine in the bowels of the Nucci's house: a machine Nucci's father calls "The Prophecy Machine". This machine makes anyone who comes near it ill, and it seems to distort time, and it seems to be growing and growing, taking over the house.

This is a colourful story, full of unusual and imaginative bits. Though much of the story has a rather claustrophobic feel, it remains a good read, with a rousing conclusion, and the main characters are quite engaging. For all that, it's not as ambitious or as satisfying as the best of Neal Barrett's short work, such as "Stairs" and "Cush" and "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus". It presents the idea of "enhanced animals", and shows the prejudice of "regular" humans against them, but that's just background. (Though Finn's character and feelings are very well-portrayed, particularly with regard to his love for Letitia Louise.) The strange society in Makasar is likewise presented and wondered at, but never explained or really explored. The central story is fun, but just a story. The Prophecy Machine is an enjoyable novel, but it's Neal Barrett Jr. at no more than half-throttle.

Ace Double Reviews, 17: Annihilation Factor, by Barrington J. Bayley/Highwood, by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Ace Double Reviews, 17: Annihilation Factor, by Barrington J. Bayley/Highwood, by Neal Barrett, Jr. (#33710, 1972, $0.95)

a review by Rich Horton

(Covers by Enric Torres-Prat and Peter Lloyd)

This Ace Double looked particularly interesting to me, as Bayley and Barrett have both published outstanding stuff, and both are at their best quite notably quirky writers. However it must be said that neither of these novels represents its author at his best -- both are quite disappointing, really. Annihilation Factor is the longer story, at about 51,000 words, and it is an expansion of a 1964 New Worlds piece called "The Patch". (Bayley's other Ace Double half, The Star Virus, reviewed previously in this series, was also an expansion of an earlier New Worlds story,). Highwood is about 46,000 words long. Barrett also appeared in one other Ace Double, with his 1970 novel The Gates of Time.

I have compared Barrington J. Bayley to Charles Harness before, and I think the comparison holds up insofar as concerns the wackiness and imaginativeness of the concepts they build their books around. But they differ greatly in general attitude -- essentially, Bayley is extremely cynical, often dour (though on occasion almost whimsical); while Harness is very romantic. (Incidentally, I see from an interview on Juha Lindroos's excellent (though not updated since 2002) website The Astounding Worlds of Barrington J. Bayley that Bayley acknowledges the influence of Harness on his work.) Bayley remains an interesting author, though not a great one -- his prose is pedestrian, and (like Harness) his ideas sometimes seem simply too weird, too disconnected from any sort of consistent logic -- and the same goes for his plots. Bayley began publishing SF as a teen in the mid 50s, but his first novel was 1970's The Star Virus. He is probably best known for some novels published by DAW and sometimes Doubleday later in the 70s, into the 80s: Collision Course (1973), The Fall of Chronopolis (1974), The Soul of the Robot (1974), The Garments of Caean (1976), The Zen Gun (1982). After about 1985 he had difficulty placing further novels, and from then until last year his only novel to appear was the Warhammer tie-in Eye of Terror (1999). 2002 saw the publication by Wildside of two new novels (apparently dating to the late 90s): The Sinners of Erspia and The Great Hydration. He continued to publish short fiction, some quite good, almost all of it decidedly offbeat. "A Crab Must Try" won the BSFA short fiction award in 1996. Bayley died in 2008.

Annihilation Factor is set in a far future human empire riven by economic divisions and dynastic upheaval. It opens with a "young" (only 90) aristocrat visiting the "Pretender Prince" whose father was deposed by the current King. The aristocrat, Jundrak Sann, offers the Prince amnesty in return for aid against a mysterious quasi-living being, called "the Patch", that lives in space and has been devouring entire solar systems, leaving all inhabitants dead. But the Prince, fearing a trick, refuses. On Jundrak's return we are introduced to the corrupt nature of the Empire's society, in which aristocrats can live to be 600 or so while the poor live only as long as we do today. Jundrak himself is something of a mild iconoclast, as he has a lower class lover. But he is also a schemer, and in his role as the head of the Empire's research project into a new faster class of starships he has made arrangements to take control of the new improved fleet himself.

Into this society comes the only man ever to survive the Patch, a basically psychotic anarchist called Castor Krakhno. Krakhno preaches, basically, socialist anarchism, a virtuous position in this corrupt monarchy, but his true goal is the annihilation of all life, which is repugnant to him. His encounter with the Patch has given him superior mental powers that have led to his having considerable success fomenting rebellion. Also, the Pretender has had some military success against the King. But the Patch is on its way to the Pretender's system. And Jundrak is maneuvered by the Machiavellian chief of the King's security into trying to infiltrate Krakhno's organization.

It's all rather busy, and extremely cynical. Everyone is basically bad, though they have good points. Jundrak is the closest we have to a hero, but his character as presented is chaotic -- he's quite cynically evil when the plot demands it, but almost innocent and naive when the plot demands THAT. The resolution involves a few more twists, some of them just plain silly -- though the final fate of the revolutionaries is very well presented, surprising and logical. The story reads a bit slow as well -- I suspect the original version (which I have not seen) might have been the right length to support the basic ideas. It's not a terrible book, but it's not very good, certainly one of the least of Bayley's works.

Neal Barrett, Jr., started publishing short SF with stories in Galaxy and Amazing in 1960, and continued publishing regularly for about a decade, at which time he began selling novels, including the two Ace Double halves mentioned above, and the Aldair series for DAW. I'm not terribly familiar with his early work, but by all accounts it's fairly routine stuff. Then, someone once said, Barrett stood too long next to fellow Texan Howard Waldrop and just mutated. Beginning in the mid 80s he published a few novels and a number of short stories that are gloriously weird, poetic, loopily imagined -- just real neat stuff. Most notable probably are the novel Through Darkest America (1986), and the short stories "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus" (1987, Nebula and Hugo nominee), "Stairs" (1988, one of my personal favorite stories ever), and "Cush" (1993). By the early 90s, however, he was concentrating on mystery novels, such as Pink Vodka Blues (1992), a scary mystery about a couple of alcoholics; and Skinny Annie Blues (1996), one of a series about the somewhat antiheroic Wiley Moss. Later he published a couple further unusual science fantasies beginning with The Prophecy Machine (2000). He died in 2014, at age 84.

Highwood is set on a planet, called Sequoia by humans, that is dominated by trees a few miles high. There is an intelligent humanoid race living in the trees, the Lemmits, who have an unusual social structure: the males and females live in separate groups, hating each other, only getting together irregularly for "Motherings". Hamby Flagg is the human representative on Sequoia, but he has issues -- he's a drunk who is down to his last couple of bottles of whiskey, and he's accompanied by an AI companion, a "psych-Bear", which uses sarcasm to try to keep him sane. New on the planet is the beautiful sociologist Kearney Wynn, who is determined to figure out the mysteries behind the unusual Lemmit culture, and who is also disgusted by Hamby Flagg, both his person and his sketchy reports.

Soon after Kearney's arrival, strange things begin happening. A Mothering is in the offing, but so is something stranger still -- a mutilated Lemmit delivers an ominous message that sends both the male and female groups from the tree occupied by Hamby and Kearney on a trek to another tree. Various disasters occur, including Kearney's near rape by the females who have adopted her, Ham's psych-Bear's apparent malfunctioning, Kearney's imprisonment, and the death of a tree. Eventually the two are forced to the deadly surface of the planet, where they make a very unexpected discovery.

I don't think the book works very well at all. It sets up an intriguing mystery concerning Lemmit society, but the eventual solution is unconvincing and very disappointing. Much of the action is disjoint, with lots of confusing jumps in the telling -- I wonder if the novel might not have been rather arbitrarily cut to fit the Ace Double format. And the main characters are not convincing. Kearney's sexual attitudes in particular are cringe-inducing, from her revulsion at the Lemmit's Lesbianism to her own personal ambitions, as shown in this passage from late in the book, a passage that I really would have thought unbelievable by 1972: "I didn't climb all over this damn planet for my health -- or for science, either, for that matter. I was looking for a man, Flagg. I didn't know that, of course, and I sure as hell wouldn't have admitted it to myself, but it's true, nevertheless. And now that I've found one, motheaten and grimy as you are, I kind of like what I've got." (To be fair, after first deciding that she must abandon her career on the grounds that she must give all her attention to Hamby, she later tentatively decides that since Hamby will allow it, she might continue to do science along with him.)

By all means people should search out latter-day Barrett -- the late 80s work in particular. But this early novel is not nearly as good, and not even a harbinger of the better things that he eventually did.