Birthday Review: Stories of Jeremiah Tolbert

Today is Jeremiah Tolbert's birthday. I've been enjoying his short fiction since 2005, and here's a compilation of some of my Locus reviews of his work. Alas, something weird happened to some of my files from 2016, so some stuff is gone. But here's a lot of it:

Locus, May 2005

I suppose as a Missourian I should have resented Jeremiah Tolbert's "The Kansas Jayhawk vs the Midwestern Monster Squad" (Interzone, March-April), as it tells of a battle between genetically engineered "state monsters", including the Kansas Jayhawk and the Missouri Tiger: and the Jayhawk wins! But the story is just too fun – set in a future where the "geeks shall inherit the Earth" – and where they have encouraged radical and goofy science projects like creating Godzilla-sized monster mascots.

Locus, March 2008

The latest issue of Shimmer magazine is a special Pirate issue, guest-edited by John Joseph Adams of F&SF. There were fine pieces in multiple modes, but I liked best a couple that took a SFnal tack. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Captain Blood’s B00ty” has college hackers using magic and IP-tracking software to locate a pirate treasure online.

Locus, May 2009, review of Federations

Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The Culture Archivist” is very fine, about a man illegally saving what he can of an alien culture’s ways in advance of a commercial invasion from his “federation”. The story modulates nicely from an almost Strossian romp to a serious examination of its central issue (which is not to deny that Stross’s romps have serious points, too!)

Locus, April 2011

GigaNotoSaurus opened 2011 with a couple of quite different and quite entertaining stories. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Work, With Occasional Molemen” (January) is wackily fun B-movie style SF, about a man in Topeka with a rather weird (and sometimes criminal family – in an odd way his family dynamics reminded me of those in the (much much darker) Oscar-nominated movie Winter’s Bone, which as it happens is set sorta kinda in between where Jeremy and I live) – who ends up cutting a deal with, well, molemen he finds underground.

Locus, June 2011

In June, Fantasy offers a science fiction story, with a fantasy theme, zombies: “You Have Been Turned Into a Zombie by a Friend”, by Jeremiah Tolbert. The story is set in high school, and the main character is uneasily perched between the “socialistas”, apparently a “popular” group, and some old rather geekier friends. But her (I assume) geekier instincts save her when a cellphone app starts turning everyone into mindless slaves. Her job is to help her friends escape, and in the process figure out who’s behind things. The villain has an affecting story too, and I quite enjoyed the working out.

Locus, March 2016

I really liked a fantasy by Jeremiah Tolbert in the February Lightspeed, "Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass". It seems that almost everyone in the world is escaping to fantasy worlds via "rabbit holes" -- everyone but Louisa, who desperately wants one of her own. The "real world" is decaying, as more and more people leave, reflected in Louisa's increasingly pointless temp job in a law office, and in her frayed relationship with her sister. Then fantasy creatures begin to colonize our "real world", and Louisa is finally pushed to contemplate what is a "real world" and what is a "rabbit hole" and what is the best way to live your real life?

Locus, September 2016

At the August Lightspeed, I enjoyed Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus”, set in a somewhat climate-altered near future Kansas City. The narrator is an accountant who once dreamed of being a chef, but now sublimates his ambitions to sampling food trucks. He runs into a guy he’d met at a cooking class long before, and ends up with an invitation to the Food Truck Circus, a not quite legal gathering where some truly wild food is offered (like modified tapeworms, that taste good and also consume some of the extra calories you’re ingesting). The plot is a bit slight, mainly concerning the ways the Circus discourages spies, and the resolution, if sensible, comes off a bit flat, but the story is amusing and the food ideas are fun.

I’m not really that into Lovecraftian horror but Swords v. Cthulhu seemed to offer a bit more action, maybe a bit less cosmic despair, than usual, so I looked into. It’s fair to say there’s still some cosmic despair on offer, but plenty of action, and a fair bit of fun. I particularly liked a couple of stories. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The Dreamers of Alamoi”, in which the madman Garen the Undreaming, who never sleeps and has a soul in shards as a result, is engaged by a brother and sister to go to Alamoi, where everyone who gets to close is mentally ensnared to work on a massive edifice. The best thing about this is Garen’s character, and the story is good fun as well.

Locus, October 2017

Lightspeed’s October issue includes a longer than usual original story, a novella called “The Dragon of Dread Peak” by Jeremiah Tolbert. It’s a sequel to “The Cavern of the Screaming Eye”, which appeared in Lightspeed a year ago, and introduced narrator Ivan and his friends, who have formed a team to investigate “dungeonspace”, the various fantastical realms that can be reached from their home city. Their practice runs haven’t been going well since the events of the first story, and the team is in danger of falling apart. And Ivan is still lying to his mother, who doesn’t want him to mess with d-space after his brother died there. And now there’s a new temptation: a desperate attempt to get some credit – and a chance to meet with someone who just might know something about his brother – by dealing with the Wizard Briggsby. But Briggsby wants them to steal from a dragon … This is enjoyable stuff, and it looks liked to be a pretty good YA series of stories (or indeed a novel) in the making.

Birthday Review: The Psi-Power Trilogy, by "Mark Phillips" (Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer)

Birthday Review: The Psi-Power Trilogy, by "Mark Phillips" (Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer)

a review by Rich Horton

Today would have been Randall Garrett's 91st birthday. Garrett was a prolific writer, strongly associated with John Campbell's Astounding. One reason for that was that he would write to order, more or less -- write stuff targeted to his markets. Early in his career, he worked regularly with Robert Silverberg, often in collaboration, using numerous pseudonyms, such that each would use the same pseudonym at the other for solo work, and for collaborations. That had arrangements with a couple of magazines to supply material in bulk, which would largely fill magazine issues under their various names. I recently asked Silverberg who wrote what in an issue that had four stories by Garrett and Silverberg in various combinations under various names. Silverberg couldn't even remember who wrote one of the stories.

It should be said that despite the depiction of Garrett above, as basically a hack, he was capable of pretty solid work. He was a fine comic writer, and a solid plotter. His work is minor, certainly, but much of it is quite entertaining. His best known, and best-loved, works are the Lord Darcy series, set in an alternate history in which magic works, but under strict "scientific" rules.

The end of Garrett's life, alas, was very sad. He contracted encephalitis in 1979, and fell into a coma from which he never woke. He died 8 years later. Just before his illness he had outlined a series of novels, the Gandalara Cycle, and had put together a rough draft of the first novel. That novel was finished by his wife Vicki Ann Heydron, and she wrote the remaining six novels, all of which appeared under their dual byline. I read the first couple, and found them pretty enjoyable.

For his birthday I've resurrected some brief posts I made long ago about three novels he co-wrote with Laurence M. Janifer, under the name Mark Phillips. These were all serialized in Astounding between September 1959 and February 1961. Thus, 9 of 18 issues in that timeframe ran these serials, which is, I am afraid, an indictment of the sorry state of Astounding in that time. They just aren't very good, and as their subject is Psi, one can easily see why Campbell published them. That said, the first of them (and best, I suppose) was (shockingly, to me) nominated for the 1960 Hugo for Best Novel.

(Perhaps I should add that Laurence M. Janifer's name was Larry M. Harris at the time of publication of these stories -- in 1963 he adopted his grandfather's surname.)

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

Brain Twister aka "That Sweet Little Old Lady"

"Mark Phillips" was the pseudonym used by Laurence M. Janifer and Randall Garrett for a series of novels about an FBI agent investigating telepathy related crimes. The first of these was serialized in Astounding in 1959. It seems that a telepath is spying on our atomic scientists.  How to find him?  Our hero has two inspirations: first, find other telepaths (set a thief to catch a thief, see?); second, that telepaths might end up in mental institutions. He strikes paydirt when he finds a little old lady who thinks she is the immortal Elizabeth I of England, but who also is an excellent telepath. With her help he tracks down a number of other telepaths -- most of whom have been driven quite mad by the constant interference of other minds. After a number of adventures, partly caused by "Elizabeth"'s insistence that her entourage of FBI agents and psychiatric help all dress in 16th century togs and accept knighthoods from her, the actual criminal is tracked down.

Very minor stuff, though with a reasonable solution, and OK fun.  Hard to imagine that it got a Hugo nomination, though, but it did.  It seemed clearly written to order to pander to Campbell's obsessions.  It was published in book form as Brain Twister.  The sequels are The Impossibles (which I read a while ago and didn't find even as good as "That Sweet Little Old Lady"), and Supermind.  Five'll get you twenty our hero is a full-blown supertelepath by the end of the series (actually, that's hinted at even in the first book).

The Impossibles aka "Out Like a Light"

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

I read the second in the series as a 1963 Pyramid paperback called The Impossibles, but it was first serialized in Astounding/Analog in 1960 as "Out Like a Light".  Malone is sent to New York to investigate a series of thefts of red Cadillacs, which seem to be impossible.  The cars' locks are untampered with, but the cars are hotwired.  Witnesses have seen the cars drive by themselves.  And a couple of policemen, including on page 1 Malone himself, have been sapped by an apparently invisible person.  The story is pretty routine from there: a lucky break leads FBI guy to the names of the perpetrators, and one of them a) has a beautiful sister to provide a love interest, and b) shows off his power, which is teleportation, in front of Malone.  The book turns on finding a way to keep a teleport imprisoned, since they can jump out of any cell, even leaving handcuffs and shackles behind.  The solution, natch, is unfair: turning on made-up "facts" about teleportation.  The book is breezy and readable, but it also feels very padded, and the story is only so-so.  Not worth looking for.

(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen)

Supermind aka "Occasion for Disaster"

Now, in "Occasion for Disaster", serialized in Analog in 1960/1961, published in book form as Supermind, we learn that various organizations are being harassed by a flood of errors -- accounting mistakes, translation errors, computer problems.  Nothing out of the ordinary, except that there are so many.  It also becomes clear (to the reader -- it takes forever for Malone or anyone in the book to figure this out) that these errors are all affecting bad guys -- the Mafia, corrupt politicians, etc.  While Malone's boss speculates that somebody has spiked the water coolers with hallucinatory drugs, Malone soon decides that a psi power is involved.  Queen Elizabeth soon confirms this -- she has been detecting "telepathic static" while these problems have occurred.  Apparently, some telepath or group of them is interfering with the thought processes of some people just as they do tricky work, leading to the errors.  Malone's investigations take him to a crackpot Psychic society, on the grounds that there might be some golden ideas buried in the dross of their literature.  There he meets a beautiful redheaded secretary.  Soon Malone finds that he himself is being interfered with, as is his boss.  Luckily, he can block out the static -- but he makes little enough progress in solving the problem.  Finally, as civilization basically collapses (essentially because the interference is causing corrupt politicians to resign, but that leaves nobody in charge, since so many pols are corrupt), Malone finally jumps to the right conclusions.

This is the last book in the series, so Garrett and Janifer seem to find it necessary to really up the ante.  Though the book doesn't portray this well, we seem to be left with a major disaster having occurred -- all the industrialized world in really bad shape, millions upon millions dead.  And the authors end up trying to justify this as a good thing.  (The "good" psis are in position to Take Over now, see.)  That didn't go down too well with me.  Plus the ending is a bit flat -- for instance, Malone makes a perfunctory rediscovery that Barbara Wilson is the woman for him, though she has maybe three lines in the book.  And overall, there is a lot of running around to little effect -- not a nicely constructed plot at all.  Weak stuff, motivated, it would seem, by the worst of attempts to pander to John Campbell's obsessions.

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

Ace Double Reviews, 42: Dr. Futurity, by Philip K. Dick/Slavers of Space, by John Brunner

Ace Double Reviews, 42: Dr. Futurity, by Philip K. Dick/Slavers of Space, by John Brunner (#D-421, 1960, $0.35)

by Rich Horton

On the 90th anniversary of Philip K. Dick's birth, I thought I'd repost this review I did long ago of one of his early Ace Doubles.

A pairing of two of the best writers to have been regular Ace Double contributors. John Brunner wrote more Ace Doubles than any other writer (24 halves, under his own name and as by Keith Woodcott). Philip K. Dick wrote 7 Ace Double halves, two of which were later reprinted together.* Dr. Futurity is about 50,000 words, Slavers of Space about 42,000.

(Cover by Ed Valigursky)

I think Dr. Futurity is the earliest of Dick's novels that I have read, though I have read quite a few of his early short stories. [Since writing this review in 2004 I have read two earlier novels: Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint.] It seems uncharacteristic of much of Dick's output. His primary themes, as I see it, are the untrustworthiness of memory, the mutability of reality, suburban life, and paranoia. This book really doesn't take on any of these themes, though it does involve time travel, which Dick uses in some of his other work. On the whole, it strikes me as a rather conventional book for him, though I thought it fairly good -- if by no means as good as the best of Dick's work, rather better than the run of Ace Doubles. It is an expansion of a novella, "Time Pawn", which appeared in the Summer 1954 Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Jim Parsons is a 30ish doctor in about 2012, with a pretty wife and apparently a good life, near San Francisco. Driving into the city in his automatic car one day, he is suddenly in what seems to be an accident. But when he comes to, he finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings. He is, of course, in the future. And it's a strange future -- everyone looks the same, more or less a blend of races (with perhaps an American Indian dominance), and very young. The language is a half-familiar mixture of several other languages. And the first driver he encounters tries to run him over, and appears shocked when Parsons is upset by this.

It turns out that this future society is obsessed with eugenics and physical perfection. All babies are produced from a pool of eggs and sperm saved in something called the Fountain, based on the perceived values of various "tribes". And since disease and injuries are evidence of imperfection, there is no medical treatment, and people routinely offer themselves to be killed. Parsons soon finds himself in trouble for saving the life of a young woman who has been injured. Before long, he is on a spaceship to Mars, to some sort of prison colony.

But then things get a little strange. The spaceship is intercepted, and after some travail, not to mention some time travel, Parsons is in the control of a rebel group of sorts, people of a specific genetic type, including a very beautiful woman. It turns out that these are the people who snatched him out of time, and they want him to use his rare medical knowledge to save one of their leaders. From this point the novel becomes more a time travel book, with several loops through time, and with plots to kill Francis Drake and prevent the English settlement of North America, to the benefit of the Indians. It's all a bit twisty, and reasonably well done, somewhat sweet, pretty interesting. I don't think it all quite works as a whole, and the book strikes me as two different stories uneasily married, but I did enjoy it.

I also find myself enjoying the early John Brunner stories I have encountered in Ace Doubles. The form forced Brunner, it would seem, to concentrate on telling a fast-moving story. This isn't always the best thing, but I think it's something Brunner could do very well. Slavers of Space is a pretty enjoyable short novel, though to be honest it is hampered by an overly rapid resolution. I should note that there is apparently a 1968 expansion called Into the Slave Nebula, which I am rather interested in learning more about.

The book opens with a man called Lars Talibrand (a name I kept misreading as "Taliban", rather unfortunately) being tracked down and murdered in a hotel room on Earth during the planetwide Carnival. A rich and bored young man named Derry Horn discovers his body, and also that of an android who was apparently killed with him. Derry's unexpectedly sympathetic reaction to the android's death impresses another android, the hotel secretary, who pushes him to investigate further. He learns that Talibrand was a "Citizen of the Galaxy", a title unknown on Earth but apparently well respected in the settled planets of the Galaxy. He also finds himself suddenly under attack -- a man challenges him to a duel for no obvious reason.

Derry's family makes robots, which are traded to the colony planets for the more intelligent blue skinned androids, which are made by a monopoly somewhere in the colonies. In retracing Talibrand's steps hoping to find clues to his murder he begins to learn details about the robot/android trade, and some disquieting (and I should add, easily guessed) secrets about android manufacture. He finally comes to Talibrand's home planet, where the news of Talibrand's death comes as a shock to most, who admired him, but somehow doesn't seem so displeasing to Talibrand's brother ... And Derry is suddenly in real trouble

The secret of what's really going on, as I suggested, is pretty simply figured out. And the plot resolution is just way too rapid and easy -- I think the book simply needed to be longer, which would make Derry's eventual triumph more emotionally satisfying. I wonder if such changes are part of Into the Slave Nebula. But it was a fast moving and pretty fun book.

I noted that parallel with Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, as well, including the explicit use of the phrase "Citizen of the Galaxy", as well as a hero who is the scion of a rich Earth family, and a concern with slavery. I cannot but imagine that at least some of this was on purpose.

*The two Dick novels reprinted by Ace in a later Ace Double were this book, Dr. Futurity; and the later novel The Unteleported Man. The Unteleported Man has an interesting publication history: it was originally written as a serial for Amazing or Fantastic. Don Wollheim requested an expansion, but didn't like the result, so chose to publish the shorter serial version as half an Ace Double. Dick returned to the expansion much later, apparently making further changes, and an expanded version was published in the US and UK in the early 80s. I gather that both versions are different, and neither was Dick's preferred text -- Dick had died before the books came out, and some of his changes were lost. The UK version did change the title to Lies, Inc. Only now, in 2004, have Dick's actual final changes been found (evidently misfiled in his estate's papers with the manuscript of another book), and a fairly "official" version of Lies, Inc. has just appeared.

Birthday Review: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

Today is Robert Charles Wilson's 65th birthday. In his honor, here is my review of his most celebrated novel, Spin, which won the 2006 Hugo for Best Novel (and, later, the Japanese translation won the Seiun Award.)

Date: 07 May 2005

Review: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson (2005)

Tor, New York, ISBN: 0765309386, 368 pp, hc, US$25.95

a review by Rich Horton

The first major SF novel from a major publisher in 2005 that I have seen is Robert Charles Wilson's Spin. Wilson is one of my favorite current writers. His recent novels have all been quite striking, and all are based on quite extravagant SF ideas, yet are markedly quiet in tone, and markedly character-based.

Beth Meacham recently complained that SF seems to consist largely of two sorts of books: very mainstream-style books with one modest SFnal idea; or very wildly SFnal books that demand from the reader an intimate knowledge of the field's tropes. Robert Sawyer vs. Charles Stross, one might suggest. Spin, I think, is a counter-example. It is based on a truly audacious central idea, and the idea is quite cleverly extrapolated -- its implications are nicely explored. Yet the heart of the book is an extended look at one man's lifelong friendship/love affair with his boyhood neighbors, a pair of twins, brother and sister; set in a near future not too terribly different from today.

The book alternates sections set, the titles tell us, very far in the future (4 billion A. D.), with near future sections. The narrator is Tyler Dupree, who is undergoing some sort of drastic medical treatment while on the run from U. S. officials. While mentally unbalanced by the treatment he compulsively writes down his memories of his life to date, beginning with the onset of what came to be called "the Spin". One night when Tyler is 12, and his twin friends Jason and Diane are 13, the stars suddenly disappear. Earth is somehow enshrouded -- satellites crash, the Moon is invisible, the Sun still shines but oddly changed. It soon becomes clear that a barrier, eventually called "the Spin", is affecting time oddly -- time outside it passes much more rapidly than on Earth. Space vehicles can be launched and pass through the barrier -- they seem to return instantly, but they observe time passing outside it, and they observe, for instance, the Solar System continuing to evolve, such that after some decades, the Sun will have changed so as to make Earth uninhabitable. Thus, people of Tyler's generation grow up in the knowledge that likely the world will soon end.

Tyler's mother works for Jason and Diane's father as a maid. E. D. Lawton is a powerful defense contractor who is smart enough to be in place to react quickly to the Spin -- for example by setting up a network of aerostats to replace the now defunct GPS satellites. His wife Carol is a former doctor, now an alcoholic. Tyler falls in love with Diane from an early age, but a combination of factors keep them apart. (Tyler's shyness, a perceived class or financial status difference, E. D.'s hostility.)

The three children react differently to the Spin. Jason, to some extent following in his father's footsteps, is desperate to understand it, and perhaps to fix it. Diane is afraid of it, and drifts into a cult which treats the Spin as an harbinger of the Christian End Times. Tyler stays close to Jason, and mostly tries to live a semblance of an ordinary life, becoming a doctor himself. Eventually Jason hires him to work at Perihelion, a corporation cum government agency working to investigate Spin-related phenomena.

The book very successfully combines an involving small-scale story (the story of Tyler's relationship with the Lawton twins, and of the entire world in the shadow of apocalypse) with a fascinating large-scale SF story (the story of the Spin, its origin and the results of some decades of dealing with it). The first story is satisfying enough, but ultimately it is the extrapolations of the effects of the temporal disconnect between Earth and the rest of the universe that are most compelling. Wilson uses this as a way to look at "deep time" through the eyes of contemporary humans. As only a few years pass on Earth while millions of years pass outside the Spin barrier, it is possible to do really long-duration experiments. Some of these have downright cool effects -- I won't detail these here -- I'll leave the surprises to the novel. But Wilson does not cheat the reader -- we do learn pretty much what's going on with the Spin, and why. And it's neat stuff -- though I suppose just mildly less overwhelming than I might have hoped.

Birthday Review: Bugs, by John Sladek

Birthday Review: Bugs, by John Sladek

This would have been John Sladek's 81st  birthday. Sadly, Sladek, one of SF's great satirists, died fairly young in 2000. Sladek was born in Iowa, and lived the last several years of his life in Minnesota, but he spent a couple of decades in England starting in 1966, and he was heavily involved in the English New Wave SF scene at the time, along with another American, his sometime collaborator Thomas M. Disch. Somehow, though I always knew Disch was American, I assumed for a long time that Sladek was British. Anyway, we briefly discussed Sladek as an underrated writer on Greg Feeley's Facebook feed the other day, so it seems appropriate that on this his birthday I repost my review of a book that I received as a gift from Greg.

Bugs, from 1989, is one of Sladek's last novels. It represents him at his most darkly satirical. It's about a British man rather bewilderedly encountering the American scene: as such it reminded me of a couple of books by Amises: Kingsley's One Fat Englishman, and much more closely, Martin's Money, which is a near contemporary to Bugs. All those books are satirical, and Money shares with Bugs a truly bitter edge, though Money is longer, dirtier, more vulgarly over the top. (And I didn't like it as much -- it's not a book I like much at all, though I gather it is regarded by some as Martin Amis's best book.)

Bugs' story opens with Manfred ("Fred") Jones, a failed English novelist, trying to find the offices of Vimnut, a Minneapolis company for whom he hopes to become a technical writer. When he finally finds it (this having been complicated by among other things the company having changed its name) he is hired, after certain mixups, as a software engineer. (I am of course a software engineer, and these aspects of the book were pretty funny and fairly true to life.) It seems that his resume was confused with that of Mansour Jones, a black man fully qualified for the job. Fred is afraid to complain that he isn't qualified, and it soon appears that that doesn't matter.

Fred's department is charged with developing a robot officer for the military. His coworkers are variously completely insane, completely idiotic, or simply burnt out. Somehow the robot still manages to get built, though in the manner of numerous Sladek robots (robots were probably his chief SFnal device) it turns out to be murderous in a very funny way.

Fred himself has more significant personal problems to deal with. His wife has left him because she can't stand America. This doesn't seem to affect his sex life much: before long he has three women on a string, without really trying: a Russian spy, the sex-mad wife of his boss (who keeps asking him to imitate different famous Englishmen), and a beautiful co-worker with whom he falls immediately and desperately in love, to her initial feminist disgust. Fred also keeps getting fired and rehired, he somehow never gets paid by the company, Mansour Jones hounds him about stealing his rightful job, his insane co-worker tries to kill him ... and of course when the robot escapes he's really in trouble.

It's a very funny, very dark book. All ends terribly -- though in a way that seems, if not pasted on, not really necessary -- the ending could have plausibly gone quite differently, and many writers (Kingsley Amis probably, but not Martin Amis) would have resolved it more happily. But that's not Sladek's way, for sure.

Old Bestseller: The Sprightly Romance of Marsac, by Molly Elliot Seawell

Old Bestsellers: The Sprightly Romance of Marsac, by Molly Elliot Seawell

a review by Rich Horton

Molly Elliot Seawell (1860-1916) came from a fairly prominent Virginia family. Her Great-Uncle was President John Tyler. She was self-educated, but quite well, and she turned to writing about when her father died, when she was still fairly young. She supported her mother and the rest of her family with her writing income -- she wrote short stories, seafaring books for boys, articles, and other novels. She was fiercely proud of her ability to support her family with her writing income, and at the same time she was very traditional in her beliefs, and made a big splash with an essay called "On the Absence of Creative Faculty in Women". Her socially conservative views, and her Virginian upbringing, contributed to a fairly racist (in the paternalist sense) view of African Americans -- happily, the novel at hand, set in France, does not feature those views. She traveled extensively, in part in search of relief from her health problems, which contributed to her death at the young age of 56.

She was quite popular in her time, perhaps especially for books for boys, but she is all but forgotten now. The Sprightly Romance of Marsac was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1897, though it is copyright 1896. A note states that it obtained the first prize of $3000 for the best novelette in an 1895 New York Herald competition. The book is something less than 30,000 words, so it's possible the prize-winning novelette was the same length, though I suspect it may have been shorter. It is illustrated, quite nicely, by Gustave Verbeek.

The novel is a very light and enjoyable piece of fluff. Marsac and his friend Fontaine are impecunious journalists. The opening shows them avoiding a series of importunations by their creditors, until Marsac is trapped by there imposing landlady, a widow named Madame Fleury. In something of a panic, Marsac, who is constitutionally opposed to marriage, deflects a proposal by the widow that he marry her in exchange for the forgivement of his back rent by instead suggesting Fontaine as the groom. So Fontaine ends up engaged to Madame Fleury -- but of course she is rather older than he, and anyway he is in love with one Claire Duval, the daughter of a wealthy tradesman.

Marsac promises to extract Fontaine from his engagement, but there is still the problem of their debts. His next scheme is to invent a rich uncle for Fontaine -- using Fontaine's real Uncle Maurice, who has emigrated to American, as the basis. They create a fake obituary for Maurice, along with the suggestion that he has left a couple million francs to Fontaine. And then they find that the mere expectation of an inheritance solves their money problems -- and also solves some other issues. Suddenly their artistic endeavors -- a play and a painting -- are in demand, as is Marsac's journalism, as long as it is signed by the presumably rich Fontaine.

And, too, M. Duval is suddenly much more accepting of Fontaine's attraction to his daughter. Marsac transforms their creditors, including a Madame Fleury, into nobility -- and all of a sudden M. Duval and Mme. Fleury are an item. Things are also going well for Fontaine and his beloved. And Claire's sister Delphine, a "New Woman" who is opposed to marriage, meets Marsac, and sparks fly -- the two are in desperate love immediately, but both are forced by their pride and their previously state views on marriage, to deny their attraction.

You can guess what comes next -- Uncle Maurice returns. Now what? If he's not dead, there can be no inheritance. And what of Fontaine's still extant "betrothal" to Mme. Fleury? And will Delphine and Marsac resolve their manufactured differences? Without their fictional inheritance and its benefits, how will Marsac and Fontaine pay their debts? Well, is their any doubt everything will work out? Of course not. Indeed, the resolution is rather too rapid, and somewhat anticlimatic. But the book as a whole, while nothing earthshattering, is for much of its length enjoyable fun, if totally implausible.

Birthday Review: Stories of C. S. E. Cooney

Today is Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney's birthday. She is one of the best, and also most sheerly enjoyable, writers working in our field today. She's also a friend of mine, so if you want to take my words with a grain of salt, do so -- but do so at your peril! Here's a compilation of most (but not all) of my reviews of her short fiction to date:

Locus, January 2008

The best story from the online Summer issue of Subterranean is also dark fantasy, this time blackly humorous: “Stone Shoes”, by C. S. E. Cooney, about Jack Yap and his brother Pudding and their Marm and a skinchanger’s egg – linguistically inventive, and slyly vicious.

Locus, June 2009

Belatedly I’ll catch up with Subterranean’s online offerings. From Winter my favorite is C. S. E. Cooney’s “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden”, which plays ecstatic games with Russian fantastical traditions – a Scarecrow, the Firebird, Koshchei the Deathless, Baba Yaga, and lots of Ivans. Cooney is always gleefully imaginative, and very fun – with rather a sinister edge.

Locus, July 2010

One of the latter is my favorite in Clockwork Phoenix 3: C. S. E. Cooney’s “Braiding the Ghosts”, in which a girl goes to her grandmother after her mother’s death, and learns from the older woman the secret of “braiding” ghosts – which is to say enslaving them. So ghosts are the servants of the older woman. But the girl is not so happy with this … especially when she falls for the ghost she is forced to braid. And the ghosts – are they happy? Read the story and find out … lovely stuff.

Locus, December 2010

C. S. E. Cooney’s The Big Bah-Ha is a novella published as an ebook by Drollerie Press. It’s a very imaginative work, at once a stark post-apocalyptic tale and a strange, sometimes quite dark, but never dour, afterlife fantasy. Beatrice is the leader of a small children’s gang in a world of only children – a disease called the “slaprash” kills everyone at about puberty (meaning, of course, that the end of the world is less than some dozen years away). Then Beatrice comes to in a rather surrealistic environment. She must negotiate her new world – “the Big Bah-Ha” – with a strange clown and menacing Gacy Boys and so on. And back in the “real world”, the rest of her gang vows to confront one of the Tall Ones, the Flabberghast, and beg for help to find Beatrice. Cooney’s imagery and invention is as fevered as always with her work, and her control of tone is perfect – this is a terribly sad future but the story is never morose, always oddly hopeful, even as the ending is uncompromising but still oddly hopeful.

Locus, May 2011

Strange Horizons for March features another strong piece from C. S. E. Cooney. “The Last Sophia”, about a girl enslaved by “the Gentry” to breed children for them – at any rate, she’s under someone’s control, if not the Gentry then her mother or an Aunt, and the story turns on her efforts to escape.

Locus, July 2013

I really like the work of C. S. E. Cooney – one of the really gifted young storytellers we have. At Giganatosaurus for May she contributes “Martyr's Gem”. Shursta Sarth is a poor fisherman, not much of a catch, living in a small village on the Last Isle with his lame sister. He is then shocked to be chosen for “meshing” by Hyrryai Blodestone, a daughter of one of the most prestigious families on the Last Isle, living in the capital city . Hyrryai's reasons are at one level predictable – her sister was murdered, and her only interest is finding the killer, but her culture's mores demand she “mesh” (to preserve the species, after the Nine Cities fell beneath the sea). Well, we can see where this is going, mostly, and indeed it goes there – but the getting there is a delight, partly in the world-  and culture-building, and mainly in the telling, and especially in the voice of Shursta's sister Sharrar.

Locus, September 2014

Strange Horizon's July stories include two frankly erotic pieces. ... “Witch, Beast, Saint: an Erotic Fairy Tale”, by C. S. E. Cooney, is considerably superior. It's kind of related to “Beauty and the Beast”, with the narrator a witch who is beguiled by a man enchanted to beasthood – sufficiently so that she doesn't want to change him back to a man. But then a (likewise beguiling) man shows up, who seems to be a saint, with the mission of changing beasts to men. What's a witch to do when her beloved beast is changed against her will? Especially when he returns to her and begs to be changed back? Cooney as ever is witty, and her thinking is very slanty indeed; and the story is both a good story and effectively erotic as well.

Locus, November 2014

The Witch's Garden series is an ongoing set of somewhat erotic tales from C. S. E. Cooney. One appeared in Strange Horizons, and another longer one  is available in electronic form at Amazon: The Witch in the Almond Tree. Mar is a very talented witch at the Conservatory of Spellbinding and the Beguiling Arts in Doornwald, with a boyfriend she likes and who is good in bed (but who also likes lots of other girls and boys), and good marks at school, but not much money. So she agrees to visit her mother, with whom she has a tense relationship, and her mother's new husband, for one summer, to save money and to help her sometimes careless mother. When she gets there she finds the new husband a nice enough man, an almond grower; and she is quite taken with his son, who is about her own age. But something is strange about her mother … not to mention that her new stepbrother is confined to the almond farm by the spirit of his dead mother, plus the local tales of a haunted juniper tree. Soon it seems that some magical expertise might be called for – but is she up to it? Cooney is a natural storyteller with an easy way with her characters, and the story is a delight to read, with plausible and interesting magic (plausible in context), and with a tense and exciting plot.

Locus, July 2015

Bone Swans is a collection of five recent novellas from C. S. E. Cooney. All the stories are very good, and one of them is new to the collection: “The Bone Swans of Amandale”. This story is one of a couple in the book that takes as its basis a familiar fairy tale (here, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, elsewhere in the book “Rumpelstilskin”), but which changes it utterly. Maurice is a Rat Person hopelessly in love with Dora Rose, a Swan Person. (Being a clever and cynical rat, he copes pretty well though.) When Dora Rose's sister is murdered as part of a complex plot by the Amandale's mayor, who wants to make an orchestra of “bone swans”, Maurice decides something has to be done, for the sake of the swans, and indeed for the city's children, who are being misused as well in the mayor's service, so he goes to his friend, a reluctant piper. The Pied Piper story is all there of course, but just as a skeleton on which to hang multiple intersecting motivations. And the key is as ever the telling, and Maurice's voice.


Locus, July 2016

I also liked a warm collaboration from C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, “The Book of May”, told in correspondence, about two old friends, one of whom is dying of cancer, and her last wish: to be planted and become a Dragon. The idea is fine, but the story works because of the voices.

Locus, January 2018

I was fortunate to hear C. S. E. Cooney tease the first half of “Though She Be But Little” at Boskone last year, but I had to wait until the September/October Uncanny to find out how it ends. This is Cooney at her strangest, set in a world suddenly and weirdly altered, with a silver sky and stuffed animals named Captious and Bumptious and a parrot named George Sand – and Emma Anne, who must confront the dangerous Loping Man. It is weirder than I can describe, really, and funny without being quite funny at the core, and quite something.

Locus, February 2019

Sword and Sonnet is an anthology devoted to “women or non-binary battle poets”, possibly a bit too specific a remit for a book, but still one that has engendered some impressive stories. Best here is “As for Peace, Call it Murder”, by C. S. E. Cooney. This is SF, not usually Cooney’s genre, but it’s strong work, about Quatromanni, a singer of protest songs against an oppressive regime. The story is told long after her death, when she is remembered as the War-Ender, even though she was captured and had her tongue cut out by the regime. But her songs lived, and how they lived is what makes the story.