Birthday Review: Stories of Steven Utley

Birthday Review: Stories of Steven Utley

I really enjoyed the work of Steven Utley, particularly his long series of stories about an expedition to the Silurian Era, and I never felt he got the recognition he deserved. He was born November 10, 1948, and he left us too soon in 2013. So I wasn't going to miss posting a compilation of my Locus reviews of his work.

Locus, February 2002

F&SF also features a new Silurian tale from Steven Utley, "Foodstuff".  Utley's Silurian stories, about time travel via a single wormhole connection to the Silurian era, have impressed me increasingly over time. Many of the stories taken by themselves are rather modest in effect, basically using the isolated Silurian era as a backdrop for nicely modulated quiet stories about ordinary people. But the cumulative effect, for me, has been quite powerful. "Foodstuff" is another of these modest stories -- as three people taking a boat upriver encounter some minor technical problems. During the delay for repairs, they are subjected to the attempts of one of them to experiment with "native" Silurian era food. And that's about it -- but it's well told and satisfying.

Locus, July 2005

Steven Utley's "Promised Land" (F&SF, June) is another of his Silurian tales, about the researchers who go back through a wormhole to the Silurian era. As with most of these stories, Utley's main concern is the characters, not the SFnal ideas. Here he tells of dying man, an irascible scientist born just a little too late to make use of the wormhole. A younger colleague and his wife meet at his deathbed, and the interaction of the three (along with other scenes set after the man's death) rings true both in its depictions of scientists and its depictions of men and women in the oldest dance.

Locus, April 2008

And Steven Utley’s “The 400-Million-Year Itch” (F&SF) is another of his excellent Silurian stories, this one as with most of them using the time travel as merely a backdrop for a grounded character story, here concerning the woman who sacrificed her academic career to be an assistant to the famous scientist who discovered the “anomaly” leading to a version of Silurian Earth.

Locus, December 2008

Steven Utley as ever concentrates on the personal human reaction to science fictional milieus – in “Perfect Everything” (Asimov’s, December) a man is returning from an interstellar expedition that failed to find aliens, occupying his time with simulations of his lover. But what they find on getting home is in multiple ways a terrible inversion – the aliens have arrived, and his lover is not really his lover.

Locus, March 2012

Other interesting stories in the March-April F&SF include the first Silurian story in a while from Steven Utley, “The Tortoise Grows Elate”, as usual with this series more about the human misadventure of his time-traveling scientists, here looking at the fraught love affair of a couple of older scientists from the point of view of a younger researcher, with wit and warmth;

Locus, March 2013

“The Boy Who Drank from Lovely Women”, by the late Steven Utley (March-April F&SF), tells of a mysterious ancient man, and eventually of his long ago participation in the French force sent to put down the Haitian slave rebellion. The evils of slavery aren't the focus here (though they are not forgotten) – rather, the fairly predictable but still interesting revelation of the reason for the main character's great age, and also its effects on him.

Birthday Review: Skin Hunger and Sacred Scars, by Kathleen Duey

Today is Kathleen Duey's birthday. In recognition of that, I've posted this pair of reviews I did at time of publication of the two novels in her Resurrection of Magic series. I really like these books -- alas, the series was never completed, for the sad reason that Kathleen Duey has had problems with some form of early-onset dementia. Skin Hunger, by the way, was a finalist for the Newbery Medal. [Note: Kathleen Duey died on June 26, 2020.]

The review of Skin Hunger first appeared in the print Black Gate, later posted on the website here, and the review of Sacred Scars first appeared in Fantasy Magazine here.

Skin Hunger, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum, ISBN: 978-0-689-84093-7, $17.99, 357 pages, hc) 2007

A review by Rich Horton

Skin Hunger is the first book in a new Young Adult fantasy series by Kathleen Duey, collectively called The Resurrection of Magic. It is first in a series, and as such nothing is really resolved. Indeed, the ending is quite abrupt, and the book can’t be said to stand alone. But it is very fine work, quite explicitly demythologizing such fantasy clichés and schools of wizardry, with characters who we want to like but who are not necessarily unambiguously good. I was involved throughout, and I eagerly await succeeding books.

It is told on two separate tracks, apparently decades apart. (The question of how apart the events on the two tracks are in time, and exactly how they will be joined, is not answered here -- it’s certainly a key mystery to be revealed.)

The book opens with a young boy fetching a witch to help his mother through childbirth. But the mother dies anyway, and the witch absconds with the family’s valuables. The boy and his father, thus, have reason to abundantly hate witches, and we eventually gather that sorcery is not particularly respected in this land in any case. So when his sister, the baby his mother died bearing, seems to have unusual powers with animals, he refuses to believe her. The girl, Sadima, grows up loved but lonely, her isolation enforced by her grieving father’s withdrawal from society. In time she decides to leave for the city, especially after meeting a man named Franklin who takes her powers seriously and asks her to meet him if she can come to the city.  And in the city she does meet Franklin, and Franklin’s friend Somiss (though Somiss’s true relationship to Franklin is only slowly unveiled). Somiss is a scion of a family related to the King, but he as run away to try to gather the long outlawed knowledge of sorcery. Franklin and Sadima try to help him, by copying old songs and books, and by keeping house for him, despite his selfishness and secretiveness.

The other narrative track is told by a boy named Hahp, younger son of a wealthy man in the same city Sadima comes to. But evidently Hahp lives some time later, for he is sent by his father (who he hates) to a mysterious school of wizardry. This school is apparently run by Somiss, with Franklin a leading teacher. The small group of mostly aristocratic boys endures exceedingly harsh treatment to try to develop their powers, most notably starvation and a deliberate strategy of pitting each boy against his fellows. Over the course of something like a year Hahp finds, to his surprise, that he does have some magical ability, but he also learns to hate the wizards, and he slowly begins to resist their rules, and to try to forge alliances with his fellow boys.

All this -- the whole book, really -- is mainly scene-setting. Just at the end some things happen that seem to promise great changes, on both narrative threads. But we must wait for future books to learn what happens, and to learn how Franklin and Somiss advanced from their position hiding out with Sadima to being leaders of an apparently approved magical school. And what of Sadima herself, unquestionably the most likable and virtuous character in the book, but ominously absent from Hahp’s thread? All these questions are intriguing indeed -- good reason to anticipate book 2 of The Resurrection of Magic.

Sacred Scars, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum, New York, 978-0-689-84095-1, $17.99, hc, 554 pages) 2009

A review by Rich Horton

This is the second in a series of YA novels collectively called A Resurrection of Magic. I was very impressed a couple of years ago with the first book in the series, Skin Hunger. I should mention immediately that this is definitely a series you want to read in order -- the second book won’t make nearly as much sense without having read the first.

Sacred Scars, as with Skin Hunger, is told in alternating chapters, from different points of view. One track follows Sadima, a young woman from a farming community who, in the first book, comes to the city of Limori and ends up staying with two young men: the aristocratic and cruel Somiss; and the much nicer Franklin, Somiss’s servant, with whom Sadima falls in love. Somiss is trying to learn as much about magic as he can, though it is illegal; and Sadima helps him at Franklin’s behest, mostly by copying the old "songs" that Somiss thinks may be spells. By the end of the first book, the three are driven from the city and hole up in a cave, along with several homeless boy Somiss has kidnapped, hoping to recruit them (by whatever means) to further helping him.

The second track, we realize, is set much later in time, though how much later is unclear. Hahp is a young boy from a rich family who has been sent to the Limori Academy of Magic. It seems that magic, while still mysterious, is in regular use, at least among the rich, and one dangerous route to prestige for younger sons is to become a wizard. But it becomes clear that the method of instruction is sadistic and that many, perhaps all but one, of the boys in Hahp’s class will die. Hahp has a certain magical talent, and he forms an uneasy alliance with his roommate, Gerrard, who has different talents. The leader of the Academy is Somiss, and the other teachers include Franklin and (we learn) at least some of the boys Somiss had kidnapped, now grown, of course.

Sacred Scars takes a long time to get going, and I do feel that the first half of the book would have benefited from some cutting. (Sacred Scars is considerably longer than Skin Hunger.) For much of the book very little happens. In Sadima’s track, she continues to urge Franklin to break with Somiss, and to help her free the kidnapped boys and flee. At the same time, Sadima learns more and more of Somiss’s cruel nature, which encompasses among other things a history of rape; and she begins to wonder how much Somiss is lying to Franklin about the magic he is learning -- especially as it seems that in their different ways Franklin and Sadima may be more talented than Somiss. And on Hahp’s track, there are repeated examples of magical lessons, which are mostly of the "throw him in the water and hope he swims" variety. But Hahp does learn some magic, some of it remarkable. Nonetheless, his hatred for the wizards and their sadistic system of instruction remains fixed, and he urges Gerrard to support him in forming an alliance with all the surviving boys to try to counter the wizards.

Things speed up midway through the book, roughly, when Sadima at last gets up the courage to escape; and when Hahp starts to form further ties with his fellow students. There are some surprising and quite wrenching developments. The book ends, however, very much as a middle book: much has changed, but nothing is resolved.

After the slow start, I enjoyed the book immensely. Sadima in particular is a very involving character, and her fate is surprising and yet quite logical. Some of what I thought about the timeline of events as revealed in Skin Hunger turns out to have been wrong, and it’s clear that the next book will have some very interesting political developments to follow, as well as some doubtless wrenching personal changes.

This is a well-written book, full of well-depicted characters. Duey is tackling the right questions -- the proper use of power, the question "can the genie be kept in the bottle?", responsibility for others, even enemies. That said, it is as I have implied very much a middle book. It is enjoyable to read, but its ultimate success will only be clear after the series is concluded. At any rate, I continue to recommend Duey’s books -- I’m eagerly anticipating Book Three.

[And, as noted above, Book Three has never appeared, alas.]

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.