Two Short Novels by Don DeLillo: The Body Artist and Cosmopolis

Two Short Novels by Don DeLillo: The Body Artist and Cosmopolis

a review by Rich Horton

These reviews are taken from blog posts I did at the time of reading, and I'm posting them today on Don DeLillo's 82nd birthday. They are the only books I've read by DeLillo. Both are fairly short, and both have slight elements of the fantastic or SFnal.

The Body Artist (2001)

Don DeLillo's new novel (or novella, it's a bit over 25,000 words) is The Body Artist.  I haven't read DeLillo before, though I have a copy of White Noise buried in the "Ought to Read" pile.  This book, by all accounts, is not typical of DeLillo.  It certainly doesn't seem like the other books based on descriptions of them I've read.

Lauren Hartke is the "Body Artist" of the title (basically, a performance artist).  Her husband, a 64 year old Spanish film director, commits suicide one day, and she stays in their remote rural rented house for a few months, alone.  But soon she realizes she is not alone: a very strange, apparently brain-damaged, man is in the house -- possibly has been in the house since before she and her husband rented it.  Hartke can't bring herself to report this man to the authorities, and she spends some weeks trying to talk to him.  The man can hardly speak, and when he does, it's in incomplete sentences -- sentences which sometimes, eerily, sound like something her husband or she herself said in previous months.  Or even like something she will say in the future.  Was the man spying on them for months, and does his damaged brain recall fragments of conversations?  Is he somehow possessed by the spirit of her husband?  Is he a creature from a different dimension?  Is she making too much of this -- could these utterances just be random words to which her faulty memory assigns shape?

The book is more interested (as we might expect) in asking those questions than answering them.  Though clearly it's about identity -- certainly the questions about the suicided husband's identity are important -- and Hartke's "art" involves trying to reshape her body -- to remove all traces of her "self" and use her body as a template to take on other "identities" -- and of course the question of what "identity" the mysterious stranger has is important, too.  (I found myself, also, thinking of Sarah Canary.)

It's really very well-written.  I wasn't wholly excited by it -- I guess I wanted DeLillo to come closer to answers.  But the book is spooky and memorable, and the prose is excellent. It has been made into a 2016 film by Benoit Jacquot, called À jamais.

Cosmopolis (2003)

Don DeLillo is the author of such novels as White Noise and Underworld, a huge literary star, certainly one of a few names usually mentioned as possibly our leading American novelist. I've only read his two most recent novels, both very short: The Body Artist (2001), and now Cosmopolis, new this year. Cosmopolis is about 50,000 words long, about twice the length of The Body Artist, but still pretty short in comparison to DeLillo's more famous novels. So, if you are thinking I am lazy and/or intimidated by the other stuff, you're probably right. At any rate, I had read a few reviews of Cosmopolis, mostly quite dismissive, and I was going to skip it until I saw a positive mention of rec.arts.sf.written and almost the same time saw it at the library. What the heck, I figured, it's short.

The "hero" (quotes definitely necessary) of this book is Eric Packer, an obscenely rich New Yorker who makes his money in the currency markets. He wakes up one morning in 2000 and decides to drive across town in his limousine and get a haircut. The novel follows his long trip, as the president is in town, and other complications ensue, making it a very slow progress indeed.

Packer does considerable work in his limousine, which is fully net-connected. Most of his work (that we are shown) involves tracking the value of the yen, which is inexplicably rising even though all indicators say it is grossly overvalued. Packer has bet that the yen will fall, and as it rises he loses more and more money, a process exacerbated by what seems his hubris, his refusal to cut his losses. He is also worried, or his security chief is worried, by what is called a "credible threat" to his life. Even so, Packer stops the limousine several times and gets out. He eats three different meals with his old-money wife of about a month, Swiss-born poet Elise Shifrin, each time trying to convince her to finally consummate their marriage. The sincerity of his feelings for her is undercut by his additional stops for a variety of sexual encounters -- with an old mistress, with an employee, with one of his security detail who catches his eye. But though she complains about his evident infidelity, their relationship seems more complicated than that.

Packer also has different encounters -- the funeral of a rap star he had admired, a pickup basketball game, a trip to a rave. And he meditates rather fatuously (to my mind) on the state of the world, of technology, the meaning of money and poetry, and the deaths of some of his rivals. Alternate sections present the "confession" of a former employee of Packer's, who, we soon gather, will murder him by the end of the book. And Packer keeps losing money, and slowly sheds his security detail, sometimes in shocking fashion, as the seedier part of the city is reached.

Obviously DeLillo is interested in, oh, the relationship between technology-mad "new money" America and the "old-money", perhaps more artistic, Europe (represented by his poet wife). But that seems only a side issue. Packer himself is a strange creation, wholly unbelievable really, as indeed his whole entourage and his obsessions seem huge exaggerations to me. In a way that makes the novel very cold, and Packer's fate not terribly affecting. He's a) not a nice guy, and b) not a real person. Still, I was rather absorbed by the book, and I found it interesting if not exactly gripping. It is perhaps best read as satire, and Packer best seen as nearly a comic grotesque -- an exaggeration.

(There are, incidentally, very minor SFnal aspects -- mainly a camera that seems to see the near future. And the general feel of the book is at least very slipstreamish -- I am sure Bruce Sterling would happily have included it in his list of candidate slipstream novels if it had appeared before Sterling's 1989 article that introduced the term.)

Cosmopolis was made into a film by David Cronenberg that was released in 2012.

Birthday Review: Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

This is a review I did a long time ago for my old website, now defunct. So it seemed worthwhile to repost it on the occasion of Michael Swanwick's birthday.

Bones of the Earth
by Michael Swanwick
Tor, New York, 2002, 335 pages, $25.95
ISBN: 0-312-87238-0

A review by Rich Horton

I've read some solid SF novels in 2002 so far -- The Years of Rice and Salt, Permanence, Schild's Ladder. It hasn't been a bad year. But nothing that really threw me until this one. Bones of the Earth is, about halfway through the year, clearly my favorite SF novel of 2002. It combines several well-integrated (and rather original) SFnal ideas with some neat scientific speculation, interesting characters, a compelling plot, and a powerfully argued theme about the nature of science and the human urge to do science.

The novel concerns a program to send paleontologists back to the Mesozoic Era to study dinosaurs in their natural environment. As such it is both a dinosaur novel and a time travel novel. Perhaps unexpectedly, the thematic heart of the book is in the time travel aspect, though the dinosaur speculations are worthwhile and fun in themselves.

The story opens in 2012 when Richard Leyster, a young paleontologist, is approached by a mysterious man named Griffin,offering him a mysterious job. He can tell him nothing about the job, but he can show him something -- a fresh Triceratops head. And he seems oddly certain that Leyster will accept the job. Leyster does, of course, and several months later he finds himself at a strange scientific conference, attending presentations about field work in the Mesozoic, and being accosted by a mysterious older woman (though she was born later than he) named Gertrude Salley, who implies a past relationship. Thus we have met the three main characters -- Leyster, the brilliant and studious scientist; Salley, brilliant herself but manipulative and unbound by law or rules; and Griffin, the tormented administrator of the entire program.

One key plot thread concerns a scheme by Christian fundamentalists to sabotage the time travel efforts, which ends up marooning a number of paleontologists in the Late Cretaceous. Griffin and his assistants try to loop back and forth through time to forestall this sabotage, but they are frustrated by the insistence of the sponsors of the time travel program that no paradoxes be created: thus anything they know to have "already happened" they cannot stop from happening. The other key thread involves Salley's attempts to subvert that law -- right at the beginning we see hints that she is trying to cause paradoxes, and her attempts continue, though her motive remains unclear to the reader for some time.

The scenes in the Cretaceous involve some well-handled "primitive survival" scenes, and some fascinating speculation about dinosaur social life and about the real causes of their extinction. The other thread involves some very clever handling of time loops and paradox, and an eventual trip far into the future to meet the Unchanging -- the mysterious beings who have offered the boon of time travel to humans. The resolution is surprising, logical, and achingly sad, or at least bittersweet. Swanwick is convincing treating human curiosity, our love of science. He is convincing treating human reactions to the possibility of fixing our past mistakes. There are some lovely set pieces involving encounters with prehistoric beasts, and one involving a young girl fascinated by Mesozoic sea life. The characters are well-drawn, particularly Griffin and his boss, the Old Man. Leyster and Salley are well done as well but a bit less fully realized -- or pass too clearly idealized to fit their parts. The minor characters are interesting, too. I loved the book, and I was quite moved by it. I think it is one of the best time travel novels in all of SF.

Birthday Review: Stories of Michael Swanwick

On the occasion of his 68th birthday, here's a set of my Locus reviews of Michael Swanwick's short fiction:

Locus, May 2002

"A Great Day for Brontosaurs" by Michael Swanwick (Asimov's, May) is a light-hearted jape about a man who has invented dinosaurs – which manages to play nicely with the hoariest of SF clichés.

Locus, November 2002

The October/November issue of Asimov's is another impressive one. There is one story that both by its quality, and its controversial nature, will dominate discussion -- let's hold off on that one. More lighthearted is Michael Swanwick's "The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Fun", a sequel to his Hugo winner "The Dog Said Bow-Wow". Darger and the enhanced dog are in Paris now, working on another scam: they claim to have found the remains of the Eiffel Tower. Their victim is a dying (indeed, already dead) man named M. d'Etranger. Of more interest (to Darger) is his beautiful young wife, but Surplus is unimpressed, realizing she is an enhanced cat. It's as fluffy as its predecessor, and as much fun.

Locus, December 2002

Michael Swanwick's work is always worth a look, though I don't think "Slow Life", Analog's December cover story, is among his best. It is interesting: about finding life on Titan, and the way such life might think differently from us. (Unfortunately for my tastes, not quite differently enough – the communications barrier is far too easily surmounted.)

Locus, September 2003

I'd also like to mention Michael Swanwick's series of short-shorts at Sci Fiction, The Periodic Table of Science Fiction, which has been reliably cynical and funny. It's nearing conclusion, and a high point was reached with the entry for Einsteinium, "The Dark Lady of the Equations" (June 20), a lovely (and not cynical!) fantasia about an inspiration for Albert Einstein.

Locus, October 2004

Also in the October-November Asimov's is Michael Swanwick's "The Word That Sings the Scythe". This is a direct sequel to last year's "King Dragon". The fey Will has been thrown out of his home village and finds himself a refugee of war. He hooks up, against his will, with an abandoned young girl named Esme, who seems to remember nothing. She seems particularly lucky, but there is a law of conservation of luck – so her luck doesn't mean those around her are lucky. Will learns a bit more about her when in the refugee camp he meets a woman who claimed to have been her mother – of sorts – long before, for it turns out Esme's history is strange indeed. This is all set in a strange fantastical world, with an array of apparently traditional fantasy creatures – unicorns, ghasts, feys, lubins, and others – and a weird admixture of technology, perhaps most strikingly indicated by the intelligent mechanical dragons, that seem to resemble AI-controlled fighter planes more than anything. This is a fine story by itself, and presages a potentially very interesting novel to come.

Locus, July 2005

The cover story for the July Asimov's is a Darger/Surplus novelette from Michael Swanwick: "Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play". Swanwick's scoundrelly heroes, a man and an enhanced dog in a sort of post-posthuman world, are now in "Arcadia": that is, Greece. They are looking for the Evangelos bronzes, in a rather low-tech setting inhabited by fairly ordinary humans and sex-mad satyrs. But some powerful African scientists have taken up residence nearby, and they claim to building gods. Perhaps they are: for a very convincing manifestation of Pan, complete with orgy, soon follows. Darger and Surplus, acting rather more like heroes than scoundrels for a change, discover that the scientists have some sinister goals: there are darker gods than Pan that they hope to create. With the help of some very friendly locals, the two save the day.

Locus, November 2005

“Triceratops Summer”, by Michael Swanwick, a lovely sweet story about an accident at a physics institution that brings a herd of Triceratops into the Vermont countryside. Of course the story isn’t really about dinosaurs, but rather about how to enjoy life and about what lasts or doesn’t last and what matters.

Locus, December 2005

Also in January I liked Michael Swanwick’s “An Episode of Stardust”, a cute scam story set in Faery. It really isn’t anything but “yet another con man story”, but Swanwick uses the Faery setting quite effectively.

Locus, July 2006

From the August Asimov's, a strong adventure tale, set on Venus, from Michael Swanwick: “Tin Marsh”, in which two prospectors learn to hate each other after several months of enforced company. One of them snaps, and starts to chase the other with intent to kill – ironically leading to a valuable strike. Which rather complicates an already complicated situation.

Locus, October 2006

In Michael Swanwick’s “Lord Weary’s Empire” (Asimov’s, December) his continuing character Will is chased into the underground of Babel Tower. In this dark realm he encounters Lord Weary, the leader of a gang of the dispossessed and unfortunate: fey creatures such as haints and wodewoses. Lord Weary plans a revolution, and Will quickly becomes his lieutenant. But their ragtag army has little chance against organized opposition. More important to the story is the nature of Lord Weary himself, a cast down high elf, whose motives are difficult to understand. It’s a cynical but sad story, set in a sad but interesting world.

Locus, January 2007

The Autumn 2006 Postscripts opens with a very fine, and very bawdy, story from Michael Swanwick, “The Bordello in Faerie”, in which a young man in a mining town on the border of Faerie is attracted by the title bordello, only to be very surprised indeed at the nature of the whores there. Inevitably, he becomes addicted …

Locus, February 2008

Michael Swanwick’s “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled …” (Asimov's, February) is fascinating SF (not related to his fine new novel The Dragons of Babel) about a human embassy to an alien city. The city is attacked, and everyone killed but one human – who escapes in the company of one of the aliens, wearing a spacesuit whose intelligence is based on his now-dead lover. The story deals with economics, with the biology and culture (and economics) of the aliens, and with the dangers of crossing an unfamiliar planet … it is intelligent, full of adventure, original, wry.

Locus, December 2010

In the December Asimov's I also liked Michael Swanwick’s “Libertarian Russia”, another stark look at the future, here one in which Russia’s descent into anarchy is regarded as a libertarian opportunity by the somewhat clueless protagonist – and by some meaner folks;

Locus, August 2011

Best in the August Asimov’s is “For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Get Up Again” may be the longest title yet from Michael Swanwick, who has had a few pretty long titles before. It’s about an American of Irish descent visiting the Old Sod, in a future in which aliens have brought prosperity and peace to Earth – at a cost, no doubt. He’s about to head to the stars when he visits Ireland, and there he falls for a beautiful singer. He’s almost ready to toss his future away and stay with her – and he learns that she’s a member of a terrorist group aimed at pushing the aliens off Earth. And she asks him to help … He’s left with a harsh choice, not to mention the question of whether her love is real or aimed at manipulating him. The resolution makes sense, and the story really does work.

Locus, September 2011

And finally the best recent story at Tor.com is Michael Swanwick’s “The Dala Horse”, in which a little girl from Sweden must travel alone (but with her toy (?) horse) over the mountains. On her trip she encounters a dangerous man, and other forces are compelled to intervene. The story begins with a purposefully fairy tale aura, but to no one’s particular surprise (I trust) it is SF all along, post-Singularity SF, about the choices people – or polities – might make in the context of the classical Vingean Singularity’s arrival. As such, this is by now almost an old story, but Swanwick makes it new again.

Locus, May 2014

As for the novelettes, they are better still. Michael Swanwick's “Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown” is a stylish deal with the devil variant – an innocent young woman goes to Hell to try to rescue her father. The Devil, in the form of an alluring Madam, makes a unique deal with her … Over the next year , her innocence is tested and (in the way of things) vanishes, which may or may not serve as a win for the Devil. The depiction of Hell is imaginative and rings true, and the resolution is very nice.

Locus, June 2015

My favorite story this issue comes from Michael Swanwick and Gregory Frost. “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters – H’ard and Andy are Come to Town” is about a couple of con men visiting rural Paradise Lake, Texas, in a drought-ridden future. They plan to con the townspeople into thinking they can banish the drought … naturally counting on the unwitting help of the local crooked sheriff. What they don’t expect is the sheriff’s all too precocious daughter roping herself in … The story is very funny, very clever, told perfectly.

Locus, November 2017

Michael Swanwick’s “Starlight Express” (F&SF, September-October) is really good far-future SF, set in Rome. Flaminio is a water carrier, and one day he sees a woman on the platform of the “starlight express”, which seems to be a way to travel to the stars, no longer understood by humans. People sometimes travel through it, but it’s assumed that’s a way to suicide. No one comes back – except here is someone. Flaminio and this woman, Szette, spend much time together, and he learns her strange, sad story, and of course that time must end. An elegant and bittersweet and wise piece.

Locus, December 2017

Michael Swanwick’s “Universe Box” (which was actually published last year, in an edition of 13!) is also fairly breathless fun, in which a thief steals a box with everything anyone could desire in it, and under pressure, has a rather colorless young man named Howard hide it, as the Adversary pursues. Howard has been planning to ask his girlfriend Mimi to marry him, while Mimi has been planning to break up with boring Howard, but the box, and the adventures the thief leads them into, change both their lives. It’s stuffed with wit, with imagination, and with audacity.

Birthday Review: Sagramanda, by Alan Dean Foster

Sagramanda, by Alan Dean Foster (Pyr, 1-59102-488-9, $25, 287pp, hc) October 2006.

A review by Rich Horton

Today is Alan Dean Foster's 72nd birthday. In his honor, then, I'm reposting this rather brief review I did for Locus of his novel Sagramanda back when the book came out.

Sagramanda is a novel set in near future India, following several different viewpoint characters in an eventually interlocking narrative. As such it superficially resembles Ian McDonald’s brilliant River of Gods. Foster’s novel is not so brilliant as McDonald’s, and really it makes no attempt to be brilliant at that level. Rather, it is an enjoyable and fast-moving thriller – and quite successful as such.

Taneer Buthlahee is a scientist who has taken a spectacularly valuable piece of new technology from his company. He wishes to offer it to a rival company – for enough money to make he and his fiancée, the beautiful Depahli De, secure for life – away from India. For Depahli is an Untouchable, and a former prostitute, and thus their relationship is unacceptable to many in their home country. Taneer, thus, is a target – his company has sent a specialist to retrieve him, dead or alive. And his father is after him, to prevent the stain on their family’s honor of a link with an Untouchable. Taneer also involves a middleman to help him make a deal, a poor merchant, Sanjay Ghosh, who likewise is trying to make a secure life for he and his beautiful wife. At the same time their city of Sagramanda (transparently a fictionalized Calcutta) is threatened by two very different beasts: a man-eating tiger, and a Frenchwoman who has become a serial killer in worship of Kali. The novel follows, in short segments, all these characters – Taneer, Depahli, Taneer’s father, Sanjay, the tiger, the serial killer, the policeman investigating the murders, and more. And, as the reader knows from the start, all these threads will converge, some naturally, some by coincidence.

It’s quite an exciting read. The plot moves sharply, and quite believably. The characters are engaging enough, though rather two-dimensional. The portrait of fairly near-future India is fairly well-done, though here the book truly does suffer by comparison with McDonald’s altogether more complex and deeper portrait. Sagramanda is no masterpiece, but it is fun and not without deeper shadings.

Ace Double Reviews, 83: The Communipaths, by Suzette Haden Elgin/The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy, by Louis Trimble

Ace Double Reviews, 83: The Communipaths, by Suzette Haden Elgin/The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy, by Louis Trimble (#11560, 1970, 75 cents)

Today would have been Suzette Haden Elgin's 82nd birthday, so here is a repost of my review of her first "novel" -- a novella, really, like many Ace Doubles.

(Covers by Josh Kirby and Jack Gaughan)

As with many Ace Doubles, this backs a very forgettable (and mostly forgotten) novel with an early, minor, work by a writer who became much better. Which highlights one of the benefits of the format -- it was a way for young writers to publish novel length or near novel length work that showed promise but wasn't always quite ready for prime time. The forgotten work is Louis Trimble's The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy, about 38,000 words long. The more remembered writer is Suzette Haden Elgin (1936-2015), and her first novel is here: The Communipaths, about 28,000 words.

Elgin's first story was "For the Sake of Grace", which appeared in F&SF in 1969, when she was 33 and a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at San Diego State. (Linguistics were a major theme of her SF, and her "Native Tongue" trilogy is built around an invented language.) That story featured a character named Coyote Jones, and it was fairly well received, being reprinted in the Wollheim/Carr World's Best SF. The Communipaths also features Jones, and so do four later novels, including Furthest, the only other Elgin novel I've read so far.

The Communipaths is set in the Three Galaxies, about a millennium in the future. The faster than light communication system in the Galaxies is run by powerful telepaths (called communipaths), who are genetically identified as very young babies, taken away to a creche and raised to live a life of luxury, while also being conditioned to service. And then they die, very young. On the planet Iris, in one of the most remote corners of the Three Galaxies, a powerful potential communipath is born to a young woman, a member of the Maklunites, a communal group of people the depiction of whom made me think of Le Guin (perhaps particularly The Dispossessed). Coyote Jones is sent to Iris to take the baby from his mother, but the mother, already distressed over the loss of her lover (the baby's father), resists.

The baby is taken away to the communipath training planet, but the mother is still distraught, going so far as to use her own considerable mental powers, combined with the baby's, to attempt to teleport the baby to her. It is decided that she is a traitor to humanity, and Coyote, along with his sometime lover Tzana Kai, is recruited to arrest her. He does not take kindly to the assignment, though there is a rationale: the baby's considerable mental powers, uncontrolled and unshielded, are a threat to people's lives.

The novel runs on a couple of threads -- one following Coyote, who is interesting enough in a slapdash early '70s sort of way; and the other the Maklunites, also interesting enough in a very '70s way (as my comparison to Le Guin of that era is intended to suggest), before coming to a dramatic if rather too abrupt conclusion (with a very easy to guess resolution, or one might even say, copout). It's OK work, but weak mainly in being too short -- those characters of some interest aren't really given time to develop, the Maklunite society is only sketched, the plot is, as I said, resolved too abruptly. So: not unpromising, but a minor piece of work

Louis Trimble (1917-1988) wrote a number of books in the SF, mystery, and western genres. In SF, he wrote mainly for Don Wollheim, whom he followed from Ace to DAW. His last novel appears to be The Bodelan Way (DAW, 1974), which I recall seeing, probably because of the Freas cover. He wrote one book in collaboration with Jacquelyn Trimble, presumably his wife.

The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy is a light adventure that is not quite light (or frothy) enough, or alternately not serious and well thought out enough. It seems a consortium of industries objects to the onerous rule of the "Federation", a future Galactic society. So they plan to take over, with the help of some treasonous "GalMil" agents, and with some forbidden military technology.

For some hard to understand reason, a key to their plan is a planet on which they establish an artificial society resembling 19th Century England, only better. (No Satanic mills.) The Federation sends a spy to infiltrate this society, as does the one planet (or some group of planets) independent of the Federation, Jondee. The representative from Jondee is a sprightly woman, that from the Federation an intelligent but slightly stodgy man. You can see where this is heading! (Though in the end Trimble disappoints a little here ...) At any rate, the two successfully -- though with some difficulty -- unmask the real plot, while tripping through some not very convincing scenes set in a version of a 19th Century British village.

The issue here, really, is that none of the setup makes much sense. And that for something making so little sense to actually work, a lot more wit would have to be in evidence, and a lot more sex, too, if you ask me, and some more action. The makes nods in the direction of all three, but doesn't execute very well in any area.

From what I can gather from the brief mentions of Trimble I've seen, he's fairly well regarded as an unpretentious provider of decent entertainment in all the genres he worked in -- and that's the sort of book The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy seems to want to be -- unpretentious decent entertainment -- but for me it fell short.

Birthday Review: Stories of Raymond F. Jones

Birthday Review: Stories of Raymond F. Jones

Raymond F. Jones would have been 103 today. He's not much remembered these days, but he was an interesting writer of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. His career continued into the 1970s -- his last story appeared in Ted White's Fantastic in 1978.  In his memory I've compiled this set of reviews of his stories, that I wrote based on reading several old magazines in my collection.

Astounding, December 1952

"Noise Level", by Raymond F. Jones (15500 words)

This is the first and best known of three stories Jones wrote featuring physicist Martin Nagle. In this story Nagle is recruited to join a project to investigate the claims of a young engineering graduate, Leon Dunning, that he has discovered anti-gravity. The discoverer was apparently universally regarded as an unpleasant crackpot. He finagles a demonstration with a government scientist, however, and the demonstration -- a film of which is shown to the members of the project -- shows him wearing his anti-grav belt and clearly levitating. Unfortunately, on a repeat of the demo, something malfunctions, and Dunning crashes and dies. Nagle and the others on his project are tasked with examining the limited remaining data Dunning left behind -- his library, a noisy videotape, his laboratory. One of the older scientists immediately proves that anti-gravity is impossible, according to established science, but the younger ones, Nagle in particular, are convinced by the demo that something must have happened, and somehow they manage to produce a crude reproduction of anti-gravity -- nothing like what Dunning had done, but still revolutionary.

Then comes the kicker -- and I won't reveal it, though you might guess. But it's pure, unadulterated, John W. Campbell wish-fulfillment. So I wasn't surprised to learn, via a post by Alec Nevala-Lee, author of the exceptional new book Astounding, a biography of Campbell as well as his top writers Heinlein, Asimov, and Hubbard, that the idea came from Campbell, and he pitched it first to Heinlein. Heinlein passed, and so Jones was the man who turned Campbell's idea into a story.

And you know what? Yes, the story is based on pure bunkum. But it works. And the ending -- even in its absurdity -- is really kind of inspiring. This is the essence, I think, of Campbell's force -- and of Raymond F. Jones's force, because, while Jones was never a great writer, he was an effective writer, and his stories, the best of them at least, are still worth a look. As the SF Encyclopedia puts it: "He was one of the carriers of the voice of sf."

By the way, the cover of that issue of Astounding, called "The First Martian" -- doesn't it look like it should have illustrated Theodore Sturgeon's great story "The Man Who Lost the Sea"?

If, June 1954

"The Colonists", by Raymond F. Jones (16000 words)

John Boston tabbed Jones as a writer worth some attention, and I think this story, though it doesn't quite work, is indeed worth attention. Earth is setting up a star colonization program. We are first introduced to the military leader of an attempt to set up a beachhead colony, which has failed utterly. He is about to commit suicide in shame. We quickly cut to the head of the recruitment effort, who has yet to find a single colonist. It turns out he is running virtual reality simulations (or semi-VR, with staff members acting certain roles), and so far every colony has failed. The military insists that they should start colonies -- but the sim just run has proved that wrong. (The leader was stopped before his suicide and his memory of the test was wiped.) The recruiter has otherwise focussed on screening rebels and people with a reason to get away from Earth, similarly failing. Finally a man comes, a man with a good job and a secure life, who insists that he wants to be a colonist. The recruiter finally agrees to test him, though he's sure he'll fail. The test is difficult -- he faces sabotage, bad fellow colonists, the death of a child, and the resistance of his (acting) wife. But he persists. The point is that the best colonists won't necessarily be rebels -- doing so for "negative" reasons, or military personnel, doing so for "duty", but rather people of strong character, people who still care for Earth, but who have "positive" reasons to be colonists.

Some of the setup is hard to believe -- I couldn't really buy the practicality of simulating several years on an alien planet is what seems to be a few weeks. And as with other Jones stories, it's a bit didactic, and he tells rather than shows much of his point. And the point is a bit more obvious than he seems to think. But -- the story is still quite powerful, quite moving, and the odd love story concerning the psychologist who acts as the colonist's wife in the simulation is quite affecting.

Astounding, December 1954

Raymond F. Jones's "The School" has an interesting setup, and one of some interest to me as it deals with my own industry. It opens with the demonstration of a new superbomber by Firestone Aviation (apparently meant to be Boeing -- my own company -- at least based on its Seattle location). The bomber seems to be a success, but the chief engineer abruptly gives his notice. He's disgusted with himself -- planes are just getting bigger and more complicated -- not smarter. (Shades of Clarke's "Superiority".) He declares that he is heading off to a radical new school -- to unlearn all the things he was taught in school. The protagonist is the Air Force liaison, who is tasked to try to get into the same school -- to find out why so many of the top engineers (at other companies too) are quitting. Once he is there we get some lectures about how schools are instruments of enforcing cultural conformity, and of putting the brakes on real originality. It doesn't really work as a story -- too many lectures, things go too easily. The ideas are -- well, they're exactly up Campbell's alley, it seems to me. And they are not entirely absurd -- to some extent schools do enforce cultural standards. But at the same time they are presented too dogmatically, and too many assumptions ("all math teachers are bores who suck the interest out of the subject", etc. etc.) are taken as given.

Science Fiction Stories, January 1955

The opening novelet is by Raymond F. Jones, who had a long career in the field (first story published in 1941, last in 1978), but who never really became prominent. He did publish some stories that garnered attention, perhaps these days most notably the novel This Island Earth, which became a movie. "The Gift of the Gods" is a noticeably dark story -- an alien spaceship crashes in the Atlantic, and the US recovers it, but is pressured to allow equal access to the Russians and to other countries. Physicist Clark Jackson is recruited to be part of the US scientific team, partly because one of his college classmates is the General in charge. Problem is, Jackson hates the General, because he blames him for stealing the only girl he ever got up the courage to ask out. And Jackson also hates the General’s views: he wants the alien tech for weapons development, and he also wants to keep all that knowledge from the other nations. Jackson soon realizes that this attitude is held by all the other investigators, and finds himself eventually allied with the horrified alien representative. The conclusion is cynical and dark. It’s to some extent an interesting effort, but it doesn’t really work: it’s a bit overblown and unconvincing -- in particular, the characters come off as cardboard types.

Amazing, December 1961

Finally there is Raymond F. Jones' "The Memory of Mars". Mel Hastings is a journalist, and his wife is dying. She insists, however, that they once went on a trip to Mars. But Mel has no such memory -- and he also has a desperate fear of spaceflight. But he regrets not being able to indulge her desire for a "return" trip -- then, after he dies, he learns to his shock that she doesn't seem to be human. I admit, as a regular SF reader, I immediately assumed she'd turn out to have been Martian, somehow having replaced his real wife during the trip to Mars, during which Mel would have been treated to forget. That's not quite what's going on, though -- the resolution is far more complicated, and a bit strange, involving Mel getting treatment to deal with his space fright, which leads to him recalling his and Alice's trip, and realizing something very odd indeed happened. I think in the end the story is overly complicated, wrapped around a familiar idea, but I did want to know what was going on all along. Not great at all, but intriguing in its way.

Brithday Review: Stories of Lavie Tidhar

Today is the birthday of the excellent (and very prolific, as you can see below) Lavie Tidhar. In his honor I present this compilation of many of my Locus reviews of his short fiction.

Locus, August 2013

All that said, what about “The Oracle” (Analog, July-August) itself? It's one of Tidhar's excellent long sequence of “Central Station” stories, set in an around a spaceport straddling Tel Aviv and Jaffa. This piece is in a sense an origin story, telling in one thread of Matt Cohen, on the run from protesters of his “imprisonment” of potential nascent AIs in servers kept isolated from the net; and in another thread of Ruth Cohen, who became The Oracle, “Joined” with the AIs (“the Others”). There's a nice mix of Sfnal speculation – about AIs, mostly – and depiction of character (especially Ruth's life), and even action. Like many of Tidhar's stories in this series, it depends to an extent on its links with the rest of the series – so this is very strong work by itself, but perhaps even more as part of a greater whole.

Locus, December 2006

Lavie Tidhar’s “High Windows” gets points from me for the reference to one of my favorite poets (the brilliant grump Philip Larkin), and more points for its gritty depiction of a young person escaping from an oppressive habitat orbiting Saturn to an ambiguous life in a grungy future Solar System.

Locus, March 2007

And Lavie Tidhar’s “The Burial of the Dead” (Chiaroscure, January-March) concerns a man coming to play a high-stakes game who is evidently on some sort of assassination mission – strangeness suffuses the story, from the Eliot-derived character names (and title, of course) to the combined science fiction/horror motivating background.

Locus, September 2007

The tenth issue of Apex Digest may be its best yet. The best piece here is by Lavie Tidhar, “Daydreams”, in which people’s dreams can change the world to fit what they dream of. This can obviously be dangerous, and the hero seems to be trying to prevent or reverse the effects of a dangerous dreamers – though how much of this story is really just his dream?

Locus, December 2007

Fantasy Magazine has gone online. Perhaps the best story from the first online month (October) is “Elsbeth Rose” by Lavie Tidhar, which tells of two elderly people in what seems to be an infinite apartment building. Elsbeth Rose is a painter, who on the one hand has traveled no more than thirty floors from her apartment, but on the other hand seems to have come to the building from something like our world (though her husband was a character from a Wodehouse novel). Traveler Yud, as his name suggests, has gone a lot farther than 30 floors – but he claims to have been born “inside”. Their story – stories – are quiet, imaginative, sweet, romantic, a bit arch – very enjoyable.

Locus, April 2008

Other strong pieces in the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction include Lavie Tidhar’s “Shira”, about a Syrian university student coming to Haifa in a future Middle East which seems to have been shocked into peace by something called the Small Holocaust. She is studying an obscure Israeli poet – and she learns rather more, and more strangely, than she could have expected.

Locus, March 2009

And by contrast Strange Horizons has a reputation, at least, of being slipstream-oriented – but of course they publish lots of straight fantasy and straight science-fiction. In January my favorite story is SF: “The Shangri-La Affair” by Lavie Tidhar. Sometime in the near future a man comes to Laos on a mysterious mission, as war continues to sweep through Asia. The familiar routines are enacted – the flight in on Nuevo Air Amerika, the rendezvous with an enchanting woman, the journey to a hidden city. And slowly we learn the man’s mission – he is trying to find and destroy the only samples of a dangerous plague. But is it dangerous? That turns out to be a good question, one Tidhar lets the reader try to answer. Making this a fine thought-provoking story.

Locus, June 2010

Lavie Tidhar's "The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String" (Fantasy, June) (an SF story, rare but not unheard of at Fantasy) is a nice brief examination of the effects of a memory erasure technique from the point of a view of an old woman who sells the memory erasure on the street - ostensibly the subject is the reason her latest customer buys her wares, but of course at heart the subject is the seller herself.

Locus, October 2010

Lavie Tidhar’s Cloud Permutations (PS Publishing) is an impressive science fiction tale set on a planet colonized by Pacific Islanders, appropriate as the planet is mostly water. The inhabitants live fairly traditional lives, though they are apparently aware of some of their history. The lives of two boys are intertwined by prophesies concerning a mysterious tower … and eventually of course they go searching. The secret behind the tower will surprise no experienced SF reader – indeed, the outline of the story is fundamentally familiar. It is Tidhar’s refreshing telling that makes it special: certainly in particular the Pacific Islander culture (enhanced by much use of the Pacific creole Bislama, just enough based on English to make it mostly comprehensible to this reader); but also the very well realized characters, and the complex shadings of the conclusion.

Another Tidhar SF story with Pacific Island roots appears in the October Fantasy Magazine: “Monsters”, a fine short piece about human space travel in the context of an alien ocean-based species’ experience with same.

Locus, December 2010

Let’s look at a few anthologies. The Immersion Book of SF, edited by Carmelo Rafala, comes from a small UK press (Immersion). And this is a nice collection. In particular I liked Lavie Tidhar’s “Lode Stars”, a strange SF story set in a society around a group of black holes. Michaela is a starship captain whose father has just died exploring the event horizon of one of the black holes. She is pushed to learn unexpected things about her society’s history, about the black holes, and the intelligences they may harbor, about alien Martian bioware that some people meddle with – a lot goes on in a short space, that seems potentially part of something much bigger.

Locus, August 2011

And my favorite story in Ellen Datlow's Naked City is “The Projected Girl”, by Lavie Tidhar. Danny is a ten year old boy, being raised by his widowed father. He’s intrigued by magic and by detective novels, and stumbles across a magician’s journal from the ‘40s, and thus into a mystery about a magician, and his assistant, who really disappeared one day, and about a strange image of a young woman on a wall – all tied up with the complexities of Palestine in the Second World War.

Locus, January 2013

Eclipse Online in December features another strong Lavie Tidhar story set what I'll call his “Central Station” future, though this piece, “The Memcordist”, is set all over the Solar System, at several times in the life of a man who grew up “on stage”, in a sense, implanted with some tech such that his every experience is broadcast for anyone who wants to to share. His life, shaped mostly by two women, his “stage-mother” and the one woman (another memcordist) he truly loved, is well portrayed, and we also get a neat look at the extent of this future. To me, Tidhar is one writer who is consistently engaged in fresh speculation on a Sfnally rigorous (and diverse) future, especially in these Central Station stories.

Locus, August 2013

All that said, what about “The Oracle” (Analog, July-August) itself? It's one of Tidhar's excellent long sequence of “Central Station” stories, set in an around a spaceport straddling Tel Aviv and Jaffa. This piece is in a sense an origin story, telling in one thread of Matt Cohen, on the run from protesters of his “imprisonment” of potential nascent AIs in servers kept isolated from the net; and in another thread of Ruth Cohen, who became The Oracle, “Joined” with the AIs (“the Others”). There's a nice mix of Sfnal speculation – about AIs, mostly – and depiction of character (especially Ruth's life), and even action. Like many of Tidhar's stories in this series, it depends to an extent on its links with the rest of the series – so this is very strong work by itself, but perhaps even more as part of a greater whole.

Locus, June 2016

Lavie Tidhar’s “Terminal” (Tor.com) is a moving piece about the people who take the desperate one-way trip to Mars on what are called “jalopies”, single person spaceships that take months to get there. The people have numerous motives, all valid in their own way. The story is told mostly through the conversations the travelers have with each other on the way, and especially on Mei, who is dying, and on Haziq, who has raised a family and now just wants to go to space. Then ending is quite powerful.

Locus, September 2016

Lavie Tidhar offers perhaps the best novella of the year in the July/August F&SF. “The Vanishing Kind” is set in London in the 1950s, but an alternate London: the Nazis won World War II, and they are in control in England. The narrative strategy is perfect: the tale is told by a shady figure in the British Nazi government, whose department keeps an eye on the protagonist, Gunther Sloam, a German screenwriter, who has come to London looking for Ulla, an actress who used to be his lover. He finds her trail hard and depressing to follow: she seems implicated in prostitution and drug-dealing, and along the way Gunther finds himself suspected of murder, and dealing with lowlifes and criminals and even Jews, who are supposed to have been eradicated. The twists mount, and his quest leads him to a very dark place … This is beautifully executed, capturing the noir style in pitch perfect fashion, telling an exciting story while revealing pointed details of occupied British life, and resolving with the perfect cynical note.

Locus, July 2017

Among an absolute hoard of short stories in the May-June Analog, pieces by Gord Sellar and Lavie Tidhar stand out. ... Tidhar’s “The Banffs” is a variant on the classic notion of the mysterious clique that has all the best stuff (think Bob Shaw’s “A Full Member of the Club”, or, in a different way, Avram Davidson’s “The Sources of the Nile”); and at the same time it’s variant of another old theme. A struggling novelist is introduced to a set of strange rich people, and somehow ends up housesitting in some of their fabulous remote houses – until they leave. We guess what they are from the start, of course, and the story isn’t earth-shakingly original, but it’s slickly and slyly told.

Locus, September 2017

Extrasolar is a new anthology from PS Publishing on the theme of extrasolar planets, concentrating mostly on planets discovered via our current (or near future) telescopes. One interesting story that doesn’t hew that closely to that theme is Lavie Tidhar’s “The Planet Woman by M. V. Crawford”, which presents three linked short-short stories supposedly written in the ‘70s by Crawford, a very obscure writer. Tidhar nails the period pretty well (the stories, for example, are said to be from The Alien Condition (a book I remember well!), the July 1974 Analog (last issue before I started buying it – that must be why I missed Crawford’s story!), and The Last Dangerous Visions). The pieces themselves are pretty effectively reminiscent of, say, Tiptree – set in a future where all men are forcibly given sex changes, then proceeding to a transcendent and somewhat mystical conclusion.

Locus, October 2017

The rest of The Book of Swords is also strong, of course. One more particular standout is “Waterfalling”, by Lavie Tidhar, in which the drug-addicted gunslinger Gorel of Gorilis has been engaged to “send a message”, i.e. to kill a man who stole something from Gorel’s client. Alas, what he stole was the Black Kiss, Gorel’s weakness, and the end result has Gorel visiting the title town, in which the local god sometimes “calls” its residents to climb a cliff to the top of a waterfall and dive to their death. The action is effective and brutal, the scheming interesting, the characters nicely hard-boiled, and the fantastical imagination -- the various races, the gods, the deep history – is absorbing.

Locus, July 2018

Lavie Tidhar’s “Yiwu” (Tor.com) is also about magic, in a way – Eshamuddin is a lottery ticket seller in a future Chinese city (in Tidhar’s ongoing Central Station future). The kick is that the lottery gives winners their true heart’s desire – which can be pretty magical, and pretty unexpected. But one day a woman who has been a regular at Eshamuddin’s shop wins – and nothing happens. Which brings trouble to him … this is fine, quiet, strange and subtle work.