Birthday Review: Ragamuffin, by Tobias S. Buckell

Ragamuffin, by Tobias S. Buckell

a review by Rich Horton

Tobias Buckell turns 40 today, and in his honor, I've compiled a set of my Locus reviews of his short fiction; and I've also resurrected this review that I did for my old blog back in the day, of his second novel.

Ragamuffin is Tobias S. Buckell's second novel, and it is a direct sequel to his first, Crystal Rain. However it does not seem at first a sequel, as the action begins on Pitt's Cross, as a mysterious woman named Nashara escapes the human reservation there. Indeed, we learn a lot about the larger universe of Buckell's future, stuff only hinted at in Crystal Rain. Humans are generally kept in near or literal slavery by a variety of powerful alien races, all apparently under the control of the Satraps, trilobite-like aliens who use mind control on their subjects. The Satraps (a bit like Walter Jon Williams' Shan, rulers of the Praxis) greatly restrict technological development, and humans are a particular offender in this sphere. Three human worlds, at least, are isolated behind closed wormholes: Earth, Nashara's home planet of Chimson, and New Anegada (the Nanagada of Crystal Rain). Humans in the Satrapy are controlled by a human group called Hongguo, who police tech advancement and create mind-controlled slaves using Satrapy equipment. Nashara herself is a "Ragamuffin", one of an isolated group of space pirates or independent traders, depending on point of view -- but she is also a special creation -- a clone who, along with her sisters, has had her brain (or some interface equipment to it) seeded with, in essence, a virus that might allow copies of her to take over ships controlled by agents of the Satrapy.

Nashara starts to make her difficult way towards the Ragamuffin base, or perhaps to Chimson or Nanagada. On the way, she encounters a human habitat being destroyed, and she learns that the Satraps seem to have, possibly, changed their attitude towards humans, from tolerating them in a limited fashion to planning to exterminate them. And she runs into a somewhat nontraditional member of the Hongguo, who has his own plans for the coming changes ...

Meanwhile, as they say, back on Nanagada, a brief period of peace for the heroes of Crystal Rain ends with the return of the nasty aliens called the Teotl, who are worshipped as gods by an Aztec-derived faction on the planet, complete with human sacrifice. But these Teotl want to talk to John, and to Pepper, both of them very long-lived and artificially enhanced people who were trapped on Nanagada when the wormhole closed. It seems the wormhole has been reopened, and the Teotl are fleeing other aliens -- the Satraps, basically, I think -- who also want to exterminate THEM. Perhaps humans and the Teotl can make common cause, despite complete mistrust? Perhaps they NEED to!

I really enjoyed the book. There are a couple of faults -- on occasion the prose gets a bit careless, a bit rushed. And the ending seemed to come just a bit too quickly -- though of course it's not a final ending, there are more books coming in the series! But it was great fun to read, and I find this future a really enjoyable space operatic future -- it pushes a lot of my buttons. The action is exciting -- the bad guys are bad but not quite cartoons -- the good guys are ambiguous and make mistakes -- the SFnal ideas are fun (if not for the most part all that original) -- and I'm really looking forward to upcoming books.

Birthday Review: Stories of Tobias Buckell

Today is Tobias Buckell's 40th birthday. He's one of the most consistently interesting writers to debut in this millennium, and I'm please to offer this set of my Locus reviews of his stories, that goes back as far as 2002 and includes stories from this year.

Locus, July 2002

And new John W. Campbell Award nominee for Best New Writer Tobias S. Buckell also present a neat (if not completely new) idea in "A Green Thumb" (Analog, July/August): cars are "grown" from greatly altered trees.  Buckell embeds this idea in a fairly conventional story about a boy dealing with his single father.  It's nothing earth-shattering, but nice enough.

Locus, April 2008

Baen’s Universe in April ... best this issue is Tobias R. Buckell’s “Manumission”, which gives a bit of backstory for one of the main characters in his novels. The man is a chemically enforced slave for a future company on an Earth isolated by aliens who control the secrets of star flight. His latest mission is to assassinate a woman trying to escape the company. Naturally he might like to escape as well, but the company has ways to keep him in line – including, possibly, his memories. The story is exciting adventure, and a good pendant to Buckell’s novels.

Locus, September 2011

I was saddened to hear of Martin H. Greenberg’s recent passing. He brought more new stories to print than any non-magazine editor of recent decades, and surely his efforts rivaled the likes of Schmidt and Dozois for prolificity. His DAW anthologies were uneven, but occasionally featured jewels, and I was thrilled to find such a jewel in Hot and Steamy, which is subtitled “Tales of Steampunk Romance” and coedited by Jean Rabe. The story I loved was Tobias S. Buckell’s “Love Comes to Abyssal City”, which has an intriguing setting: an underground city ruled by AIs who have decreed limits in technology to, essentially, “steampunk” levels. The heroine is one of those charged with protecting her society from the intrusion of dangerous ideas from other such cities, and she is also awaiting her arranged marriage to the man the city’s AIs deem most suitable. The broad outlines of what will happen are obvious, but Buckell lets them unwind nicely, with plenty of neat ideas about the nature of the Abyssal City holding our interest.

Locus, June 2012

And Fireside is a new magazine edited by Brian White, with the aim of publishing good stories from all genres. The first issue is pretty solid, with my favorite story being Tobias S. Buckell's “Press Enter to Execute”, about a hired killer whose jobs are, apparently, crowdsourced. His targets, he thinks, are spammers – until he is pushed to look a little closer, and realizes that he's been a little naïve. Buckell lets us guiltily revel a bit in the sort of fantasies many Internet users have doubtless had, then looks at where vigilante justice really leads – and adds an Sfnal twist.

Locus, March 2016

Tobias Buckell has published four novels and a number of short stories set in fascinating interstellar future collectively called the Xenowealth. He's been mostly concentrating on other projects lately, so the appearance of Xenowealth: A Collection, is welcome. It comprises all the Xenowealth short fiction published to date, with two new stories. I thought "Ratcatcher" particularly good, as it follows Pepper, the series' most important character, on a desperate mission through vacuum to a wormhole-traversing train, where he hopes to confront a brutal alien killer but instead must deal with a bitter veteran cop who knows something of his violent history. Cool future tech and powerful action mix very well.

Locus, April 2017

John Joseph Adams’ newest anthology, mostly originals, is called Cosmic Powers, and it comprises short Space Operatic tales. Fitting the scope of Space Opera into short stories can be hard, but these stories do it pretty well.  “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance”, by Tobias Buckell, one example. A starship maintenance robot, after a successful battle, by happenstance rescues a CEO of the enemy fleet, and finds himself inveigled/bribed/coerced into rendering assistance. The story turns on the complex intersection of intriguing speculation about AIs and identity, economics, contract law, moral law, free will and orbital mechanics. In other words, really cool stuff.

Locus, August 2017

Patreon continues to be a way for some writers to publish their short fiction, and I keep my eyes on a few writers whose work I like. One such is Tobias Buckell, whose “Shoggoths in Traffic” is a clever Lovecraftian crime story, in which a couple of people steal (repossess!) a car from a drug dealer and try to take it to Miami – but on the way run into a weird highway exit and a biker magician and – well, you’ll not think of cloverleafs and other traffic patterns in quite the same way after this!

Locus, November 2017

Overview: Stories of the Stratosphere is one of those now fairly common anthologies one might call futurological: rather pedagogically aimed at very near future technology. In this case it’s specifically aimed at one narrow technological innovation: balloons in the stratosphere, and their potential uses in such areas as surveillance. The stories (which grew out of a conference called the Stratosphere Narrative Hackathon, which associated teams of scientist, artists, and writers to discuss specific ideas) are all rather short, and sometimes a bit schematic. The best, probably because it offers the most action, is “High Awareness”, by David Brin and Tobias Buckell, in which Noriko Chen takes a dangerous trip to the central “Stratollite” in a constellation she designed, to try to figure out how it seems to have been hacked – and then to make a dramatic attempt at gathering the necessary data and then returning to Earth.

Clarkesworld, April 2018

Tobias Buckell’s “A World to Die For” is a parallel worlds tale, opening in an environmentally collapsed future, a milieu reminding me of Mad Max. The gang Che runs with is stopped by another gang that wants a trade – Che for some solar panels. That seems strange and pretty scary, but things get stranger when she meets a man who says she’s been rescued from an attempt on her life, and stranger still when she meets herself, and realizes she’s rattling through a variety of parallel worlds, in wildly varying states of environmental health. The story drives – perhaps a bit too didactically – towards a morally convicted resolution.

Birthday Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

Review Date: 08 May 1998

To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

Bantam, 1998, $23.95
ISBN: 0553099957

A review by Rich Horton

To Say Nothing of the Dog is one of Connie Willis' time travel stories, sharing a milieu with her award-winning novelette "Fire Watch" and her award-winning novel Doomsday Book. I'm very fond of both previous stories. Doomsday Book, however, was marred to some extent by a certain mismatch of tone between the farcical events of the 21st century setting from which her time travelers set out and the tragic events of the 14th century into which her protagonist travels. In addition, some major plot points of Doomsday Book were implausible in the extreme. For me, the emotional power of the 14th century story, and the character of Father Roche, were sufficient strong points to overcome my discomfort with some of the clunky bits.

This current novel almost seems a response to some criticisms of Doomsday Book. If the former book was primarily a tragic story of the Plague, this book is a screwball comedy set in the time of Jerome K. Jerome's classic (and highly recommended) late Victorian comedy, Three Men in a Boat. (Indeed, the title of this book is the subtitle of Jerome's.) (And this is the second screwball comedy about time travel in two years, after John Kessel's Corrupting Dr. Nice (1997).) And, Willis seems to be saying, if this is a screwball comedy, darn it, I can have implausible plot points, and outrageous coincidences, and my tone can be as goofy as I want. But a funny thing (so to speak) happened on the way to Coventry, and this novel turns out to have a serious and moving center to it after all, albeit in the context of a generally very funny book. What's more, Willis' point derives nicely from her story's outrageous coincidences, almost too overtly so, as if the book points at its faults and says "I meant it that way".

Which brings me to my misgivings about a novel that I ended up liking quite a bit. The whole machinery of the plot is set in motion by some generally unbelievable actions. The protagonist and narrator, Ned Henry, a 30ish "historian" in 2057, has been trying to get to Coventry Cathedral just prior to the pivotal bombing in 1940 (which destroyed the Cathedral but which may have indirectly turned the Battle of Britain against Hitler) in order to rescue the Bishop's Bird Stump, a hideous item which the historians (read time travelers) need to help convincingly furnish a rebuilt Cathedral. Willis conveniently (for plot purposes) invents a syndrome she calls "time lag", which happens when people time travel too often, and results in confusion, difficulty hearing, excess emotionalism, and such like. The only cure is rest, and Henry's superior, Mr. Dunworthy of Doomsday Book, decides the only place he can rest is in the past (out of reach of the fearsome Lady Schrapnell). Unfortunately, Dunworthy decides to have Ned complete one little tiny task for him in the past, returning an anachronistic item from 1888 to it's proper time, before resting. But Ned is so time-lagged he doesn't quite realize what it is he needs to return, and there isn't enough time to properly brief him…
All these machinations strain credibility, really even beyond the rather loose requirements of a screwball comedy. Moreover, the whole plot centers about the tendency of the structure of Time to resist alteration, which necessarily requires the reader to think about the mechanics of Willis' time travel setup. Unfortunately, in my opinion this setup doesn't really stand up well to being thought about too carefully. At least for the first few chapters, I was simultaneously entertained by the comic goings on, which are prime Connie Willis in her madcap mode, and irritated by the blatant plot manipulation. However, after a bit I calmed down and accepted the premise as given, and I quite enjoyed the story.

I won't detail the rest of the plot, which is quite complicated, though in the end nothing much is really accomplished (which becomes part of the point). We are treated to a brief river journey (an hommage to the trip which makes up the action of Jerome's novel, indeed Willis cannot resist having her characters encounter Jerome and his friends Harris and George, to say nothing of their dog, Montmorency, which I found a bit over-indulgent of her), to a thematically central and also quite funny ongoing rant by an Oxford Don on the subject of the Great Man theory of History vs. his opponent's belief in Natural Forces, to the origination of the jumble sale, several nice love stories, and lots more.

As I've said, though I have reservations, I ended up really enjoying this book. At the surface level there is the shall I say typical good fun of Connie Willis in her screwball mode. Beyond this, the book engages in some Sfnal dialogue with earlier SF such as Asimov's The End of Eternity. And, finally, it all comes together to mean something, and I was quite moved by the final metaphors, which touch on the importance of details to history, and on the worth of grand indulgences like cathedrals.

Birthday Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

Birthday Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

by Rich Horton

Junot Diaz turns 50 today. In his honor I'm reposting a review I did of his wonderful first novel.

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Fiction of 2007 with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (It's a pretty deserving winner, though I have to say I'd have given it to The Yiddish Policemen's Union myself.) Whatever the case might be, Diaz's book is very worthwhile -- energetically written, absorbing, angry, and sad. It is fundamentally the story of Dominicans in the 20th Century, as reflected in the terrible lives of the members of one family.

The title character is Oscar De Leon, a Dominican-American who grows up in Paterson, NJ. He and his older sister Lola live with their mother Belicia -- their father left when they were very young. Oscar is a smart kid and an obsessive reader, but he is not popular: partly because of the reading, more because of the kind of books he reads (SF and Fantasy) and his parallel obsession with fantasy gaming, and finally because he is very fat. Throughout his life he is bullied and made fun of. He is even more miserable because he tends to fall desperately in love with girls, girls way out of his league, and he has of course no idea how to talk to them.

The book follows his life, then briefly Lola's -- she is also intelligent, and at first obedient until she turns wild and runs away. She cannot deal with her controlling mother, and throws herself into some destructive relationships, before finding a talent as a runner, then finally doing well in college. There are also sections from the POV of another Dominican man, apparently a standin for the author (he's a writer nicknamed "Yunior") -- though it's always dangerous to read too much into descriptions of author-like characters. Anyway, Yunior is briefly Lola's lover, and then Oscar's roommate, but he serves as a sort of anti-Oscar as well: fabulously successful with women (if often rather superficially), and as a writer purely realist.

There is also a vital long section detailing Belicia's difficult life: she is orphaned early, kept for years as basically a slave, then rescued and raised by a virtuous aunt, until her post-pubescent maturing brings her to the attention of boys (and vice-versa), leading to eventually disastrous relationships with the likes of a rich boy at school, and later a henchman of the Dominican dictator Trujillo.

In the end, this story is at heart, as I said, about the terrible history of the Dominican Republic, most particularly under the grotesque rule of Trujillo. (To be sure, the US does not escape criticism in this matter.) It is also of course the story of the Fall of one once prosperous family -- and finally the story of the doom of Oscar, a good but hopelessly naive young man.

In many ways this is an almost unbearably sad book. Yet somehow the reading isn't like that -- Diaz is such an energetic writer, and he is often bitterly funny while telling his tale. Also, Oscar is (especially for, well, geeks like us) an affecting character -- a good guy, with good taste -- somebody to root for. Definitely a first rate novel.

As for the direct appeal to SF/Fantasy writers, there are two aspects. One is that the book does have a slight fantastical (or Magical Realist) dimension. The other -- in a lot of ways more interesting -- aspect is the offhand, and utterly believable, references to Oscar's obsessions and reading -- he namedrops not just Tolkien (as in Oscar wanting to be the Dominican Tolkien) but Norton, Butler, Le Guin, and many more, and in such a way as to convince me that Diaz has actually read the stuff, not just done the research.

Birthday Review: Traffics and Discoveries, by Rudyard Kipling

Traffics and Discoveries, by Rudyard Kipling

a review by Rich Horton

In honor of Kipling's birth, 153 years ago today, that is, December 30, 1865, here's a repost of something I wrote about his collection Traffics and Discoveries almost 20 years ago. My views of some of these stories have changed over time (in particular, every time I reread "Mrs. Bathurst" it seems stranger), but I've left what I wrote then unchanged.

These eleven stories were written just after the Boer War was concluded, and some of them deal directly with that war.  Kipling, of course, was virulently anti-Boer in his views. Thus, he was both in favor of the War in a general sense, and often disgusted with the actual conduct of the war. The stories that deal directly with the war show this attitude quite clearly. These are "A Sahib's War", "The Captive", and "The Comprehension of Private Copple". On the whole, these are the weakest stories in the collection. Kipling's fierce feelings force him to preach, and that's always bad for a story. Moreover, his portrayal of the Boers often goes over the edge, particularly in "Copple" and "A Sahib's War". There are well done bits in these stories, but on the whole they haven't worn well.

Four of the stories are about an intriguing Naval person named Emanuel Pyecroft. Three of these are primarily humorous in intent: "Steam Tactics" (about a steam motor car and the nasty trick Pyecroft and co. play on an unfriendly constable), "'Their Lawful Occasions'" (about Pyecroft and co. having some fun during a Naval Exercise), and "The Bonds of Discipline" (about a plot to hoodwink a French spy whom Pyecroft and co. have found on their ship). These are solid, enjoyable, stories. The fourth is much more serious, and it's one of Kipling's legendary stories, and one of his best and strangest: "Mrs. Bathurst".  This is a famously hard to figure out piece about the title woman, an Auckland widow, and a sailor who apparently took up with her, not telling her he was married. In an ambiguous fashion, Mrs. Bathurst manages to haunt the sailor to his death. Very odd, and technically brilliant, and haunting.

Another odd, haunting, story is "'Wireless'". The narrator (who would seem to be Kipling) comes to a chemist's shop to witness an experiment with the brand new wireless telegraphy.  Amid an excellent explanation of the equipment, and description of the shop, we are shown another, much stranger, sort of wireless communication, as the consumptive chemist, yearning for a silly woman, channels the spirit of John Keats to recreate some of his great poetry.

Still another odd, haunting, story is my favorite of the book, another famous one: "'They'". The narrator stumbles on an isolated country house, occupied by a blind woman and a number of elusive children. Over the course of three spooky visits, the reader and narrator together come to learn the true nature of these children. It's a remarkable, atmospheric story, and of course heavily loaded emotionally when you think it was written not long after the death of Kipling's daughter.

I haven't mentioned "'The Army of a Dream'", a depiction of a rather unpleasant (to me) vision of a future England with compulsory universal armed service (and, it would seem to me, an obvious bit of source material for Starship Troopers);, and "Below the Mill Dam", a cute but kind of slight story in which anthropomorphic depictions of a mill cat, a mill rat, and the millwheel and millrace react to the coming of electricity.

This remains, I think, one of Kipling's very best collections.

The Novels of Charles Harness

The Novels of Charles Harness

by Rich Horton

Charles Harness was born December 29, 1915, and he died in 2005. In honor of his birth I'm doing something a bit different -- I'm reposting a summary I did of all his novels, some 15 years ago.

Charles Harness is an odd bird. I like much of his work immensely: it's deeply romantic, vigorously (if not always logically) plotted, exotically imagined, quite moving. But I must also concede his flaws -- as I've hinted, the plots are not always very logical, the characters are often stiff idealizations, the romanticism can be over the top. He has a tendency to recycle his themes and imagery -- in particular, several of his novels are about cyclical universes. (He also uses quite blatantly autobiographical material in a number of his books -- besides the fascination with chemistry and patents, reflecting his career, there is often a beloved older brother to the main character who has died, and two novels (Redworld and Cybele With Bluebonnets) replicate the same series of incidents from Harness's life -- his year as a reluctant theology student before switching to chemistry, his jobs at a printing shop and as a fingerprinter for the police, as well as an affair with an older woman from Fort Worth's "red light" district that may or may not be autobiographical.) I'd say he's a writer who is not for everybody, but a fascinating one for those who acquire the taste.

Harness was born in 1915 in Texas. His main career was as a Patent Attorney. This background shows up in many of his stories: Patent Attorney heroes are featured in a couple of the novels and many stories. Indeed, he wrote some of the "Leonard Lockhard" stories in Astounding (others were by Theodore Thomas, and some may have been collaborations), all of which were about a young patent attorney dealing with the problems of patenting some whacky SFnal inventions. (According to the NESFA Harness collection An Ornament to His Profession, Harness wrote only the first Lockhard story (in 1952) and collaborated with Thomas on the second (in 1954): subsequent Lockhard pieces were by Thomas.)

Harness' writing career divides up fairly neatly into four parts. The first part came from 1948 to 1953, and featured his first novel and several shorter works, including some of his very best work. The stories from this period are very characteristic of his more romantic side. After 1953 he stopped writing to concentrate on his job. He returned to writing in 1966 with two novelettes, "The Alchemist" and "An Ornament to His Profession", each of which gained a Hugo and a Nebula nomination. This new flowering lasted only a couple of years: a few more stories followed, and one of his best novels, The Ring of Ritornel (1968). The third period of Harness's writing career began about 1977 and lasted until about 1991, though it was prefigured by a wild 1974 novella, "The Araqnid Window". This period included most of Harness' novels, 8 of them in all, and a similar number of shorter works. Harness's retirement in 1983 doubtless was one factor in his increased writing productivity. Another couple of stories appeared in 1994, then beginning in 1997 he began publishing short stories quite regularly: about a dozen more by now, as well as two novels, both from NESFA: Drunkard's Endgame (1999) and Cybele, with Bluebonnets (2002).

Herewith the novels:

The Paradox Men (1949, 1953, 1981) (64,000 words)

This book is arguably still Harness's most famous and most respected novel. It has a slightly complicated publishing history. The first version was a short novel called "Flight Into Yesterday", published in an issue of Startling Stories in 1949. (It was already a full-length novel, at some 56,000 words: Startlingand its sister publication Thrilling Wonder Stories regularly featured novels of between 40K and 60K words in single issues.) It was republished, somewhat expanded, in a 1953 hardcover also called Flight Into Yesterday. The title The Paradox Men was first applied to an Ace Double edition in 1955. There were some British reprints in the 60s, but the current definitive edition was supervised by George Zebrowski for a new American edition, part of Crown's "Classics of Modern Science Fiction" series, in 1981. This edition is slightly expanded from the previous ones, and in addition the copy-editing was much better. Some of the later changes are new additions by Harness, some may be restorations of Harness's original manuscript. Certain references to computer tech were surely added in the 80s. Zebrowski quite correctly (in my view) chose to retain the Ace title (probably coined by Don Wollheim) over Harness's original (the needlessly obscure Toynbee Twenty-Two), and over the Startling title (probably coined by Sam Merwin). The expansions from the original magazine version to the Ace Double total about 4,000 words, and consist mainly of interpolation within scenes. There is one new chapter, which is a result of splitting an expanded chapter in two. The further expansions in 1981 are similarly minor, again about 4,000 words worth, and also involve some jargon changes, such as the Microfilm Mind becoming the Meganet Mind.

The plot is complicated, but consistent, logical, and thematically sound. The characters are two-dimensional but interesting and involving. The action is well-done, and the scientific ideas are sometimes philosophical and thoughtful, and at other times wild, implausible, but still engaging. The basic story is of a Thief, Alar, who has appeared in Imperial America 5 years prior to the action of the story, with no memory of his past or identity. The Thieves work underground against the repressive society, using tech invented by their mysterious, dead, founder, Kennicot Muir. The key piece of Thief tech is armor which protects them against high velocity weapons (like projectile weapons), but not against swords and knives. Thus fencing is again a major skill. (Herbert swiped this notion for Dune, of course.) At the time of the action, various threads are converging: the plans of Imperial America to attack its Eurasian enemy, the Toynbee society's attempts to avoid the continuing historical cycle of civilizations rising and falling (they believe that the coming war will bring Toynbee Civilization 21 to an end: the next one will be Toynbee 22, hence Harness' original title), the completion of an experimental FTL starship, the relationship between the evil leaders of Imperial America and Keiris Muir, the enslaved widow of Kennicot Muir, and her attraction to Alar, the predictions of the computer enhanced human called The Meganet Mind (or the Microfilm Mind in the original). What a horrible sentence: but trying to summarize Harness can do that to you. Everything comes to a head with a trip to the surface of the Sun, and then a much stranger trip ...

I recommend it. It seems comparable in many ways to its near contemporary The Stars My Destination: Harness probably had a more original mind than Bester's, and his themes seem a bit more ambitious. But he really couldn't write with him -- and I think it is because of the writing (both prose and pace) that the manic energy of the Bester book is more successfully sustained. Still, The Paradox Men remains a powerful and interesting novel, and such scenes as the final selfless act of Keiris are unmatched in SF.

The Rose (1953) (31,000 words)

(Cover by John Richards)

This is a long novella first published in the UK magazine Authentic in 1953. It was later published in a paperback edition along with two fine early stories ("The New Reality" and "The Chessplayers".) It's reprinted in the NESFA story collection An Ornament to His Profession.

"The Rose" is Harness at his dream-logic wildest. It's the story of psychiatrist dancer Anna van Tuyl, who as the story opens is in the grip of a disease which has crippled her and made her ugly; and Ruy Jacques, an artist who has lost the power of reading, but gained ... something greater? And Martha Jacques, his wife, who is a scientist on the threshold of discovering the "Sciomnia equations", which will once and for all render science superior to art.

It's a strange concoction. Much of the action is absurd: and many of the central arguments, concerning the primacy of Art of Science, push a false dichotomy. But it's always absorbing, and the ideas, even if outwardly silly, are fascinating and compelling: and the ending is wonderful.

The Ring of Ritornel (1968) (82,000 words)

(Cover by Paul Lehr)

The only novel from Harness's late 60s return to the field. The Ring of Ritornel is actually slightly less complicated than some of the other Harness stuff I've read. It involves a far future, human-led civilization, the Twelve Galaxies, which is just coming out of a long war with the planet Terror. (Which I readily guessed was a corruption of Terra: a pun later used by E. C. Tubb, I don't know if Harness was first to use it, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was used much earlier.) The new emperor is something of a despot, but is almost killed at the beginning of the action. Clones are made of him in case he dies, and his poet-laureate is killed and has his brain placed in a music-composing computer to try to save the emperor's life. The lead character is the laureate's brother, who is ignorant of his brother's fate, and who grows up to become a highly-placed legal representative for the Palace. He falls in love with the Emperor's "daughter", and as a result is sent to argue the Emperor's case that the planet Terror should be destroyed. But ... There's lots more going on: energy-eating insects, spiders, the competing religions of Alea and Ritornel, a superintelligent Pegasus Kentaur, beings of antimatter, the end of the universe ... Pretty fun, though at times the absurdities really went too far. It does have several of Harness's recurring tropes: cyclical universes, spiders, beloved brothers, lead characters who are lawyers ...

Wolfhead (1978) (66,000 words)

This novel, serialized in two parts in F&SF in 1977 (presumably in a shorter version), represents for me the start of his "third period". It is a post-holocaust story, set 3000 years after atomic war. The protagonist, just married, sees his wife kidnapped by the Undergrounders, people who have lived underground for 3000 years. He becomes involved in a plot to invade the underground city, for his part to regain his wife, but for the part of the monks who train him, to stop the Underground people from invading the surface. It's exciting and romantic, involving lots of psi powers (done fairly neatly), and a telepathic wolf companion, and a bittersweet ending, and even a twinge of moral ambiguity. Not a bad book, though as usual with Harness there are a lot of wild ideas that don't really hold water.

The Catalyst (1980) (65,000 words)

Harness has called this his favorite among his own works. I disagree -- I really didn't like it very much, indeed it may be my least favorite. It seems to be more autobiographical than most of his books (except for Cybele, with Bluebonnets and Redworld.) It's about a patent attorney (natch!), whose beloved older brother died when he was a teen (another common Harness theme, echoing his loss of his own brother), who is working for a research lab. The lab has two rival scientists: a strict by the book idiot who has advanced by brownnosing corporate management, and a brilliant unconventional scientist who by golly resembles the patent attorney's brother to an amazing degree. The brilliant guy and his team, including the attorney, Paul, develop a catalyst which will produce a wonder substance (that among other things would have cured Paul's brother), in high yields at atmospheric pressure. The idiot scientist is backing an expensive project which will produce the stuff in low yields at high pressures, requiring a complex factory. The idiot guy forces out the brilliant guy and his proteges, then is stuck in a dilemma when the company gets in a patent battle about the new catalyst. Oh, and there's also an unconvincing love affair with a clone, and lots of guff about an unfinished opera, and some hints of time travel. Harness is always at the edge of absurdity with his plots: his best stuff carries it off with flair, but his weaker novels collapse under the weight of all the silliness, which is what happens here.

Firebird (1981) (68,000 words)

This is another book on roughly the same theme as The Ring of Ritornel, and also to a lesser extent The Paradox Men. The universe is cyclical, beginning with the Big Bang, 60 billion years later stopping expansion, and after a total of 120 billion years hitting the Big Crunch, followed by another cycle. But in this particular cycle, two intelligent telepathic computers rule the universe, enslaving all the "humans" (actually cat-creatures). The computers plot to reduce the mass of the universe just enough to allow the expansion to continue forever, thus avoiding their eventual destruction in the Big Crunch. A man and a woman, by falling in love, will join the struggle to restore the missing mass, and restore the natural cycle. Lots of silliness, some rather neatly handled time-paradoxes, all in all an OK book but not great.

The Venetian Court (1982) (56,000 words)

Expanded from a 1981 Analog novella of the same title. This is a weird novel that I rather enjoyed while not believing at all. In the near future, patent infringement has become a capital crime. Ellen Welles has invented a valuable product called fiber K, but unfortunately a megacorporation using a computer to generate inventions just beat her to it. They sue for patent infringement, and the case winds up with a literally insane judge who needs to sentence people to death to juice himself up to write opinions, and hopefully reach the Supreme Court. The story mostly follows Welles's lawyer as he tries to find a way to free her -- but all his quite reasonable defenses are foiled arbitrarily by the judge, and in the end derring-do plus a real deus ex machina is required to work things out. Fiber K is based on spider silk, and the evil judge is a spider fancier -- allowing Harness to play with his recurring arachnid theme. The general arbitrariness of the action, and the too evull villains, weaken the novel, but page by page it is goofy fun. The patent lawyer hero, Quentin Thomas, is also the hero of his later novel Lunar Justice.

Redworld (1986) (63,000 words)

This is a really curious novel. It's nominally SF, but much of it seems to be quite straightforward retelling of the youth of a character much like Harness in a city much like Fort Worth, TX. Except that the character is an alien, and the city is on a planet circling Barnard's Star. The young narrator, Pol, who lives with his mother, his father and beloved older brother having died, witnesses the electroburning of a "lamia" on the day his job at a printers starts. The lamia seems to point at him as she dies, predicting that he will be the mythical "Revenant", who will die and be reborn. And on his way to work he sees Josi, the beautiful but strange (could it be she has but five fingers?) woman who runs the main whorehouse in town.

Pol's world is riven between the Scientists and the Priests -- thirty years previously, a long war was ended by the "Treaty", in which basically the Priests agreed to let the Scientists live as long as they didn't discover any new facts. Pol's sympathy is with the Scientist, in particular as his brother had been working on an immortality serum before he died. But his only chance at education is a scholarship to study for the priesthood. So the story follows his life, in very engaging fashion -- his time at the printer's, his fascination with the mysterious and beautiful Josi, who looks to be thirty but must be at least sixty, his eventual affair with her, his later job at the police station taking fingerprints, his attempt to finish his brother's work, all leading to the climax, in which the mystery of Josi (no mystery to the reader!) is solved, and Pol's fate as the Revenant is achieved.

It's a very enjoyable, engaging read, although much of it is absurd. But Harness's telling overcomes the silliness. It is extremely interesting to compare this book with his latest novel, Cybele, With Bluebonnets -- huge swaths of the plots of each book are identical. And the mode of the telling -- the very engaging, even sweet, feel to the book, is similar to that novel. (I suspect as a result of the autobiographical aspects.)

Krono (1988) (68,000 words)

A time travel novel, again one of Harness's favorite themes. As well as time travel, Harness ropes in Edgar Allan Poe -- a combination repeated in his next novel. In Krono overpopulation problems are resolved by colonizing the past. Philip Konteau is a 50ish "krono", charged with surveying past locations to determine their suitability for colonies. The great danger is instabilities in the time stream that can cause a poorly stabilized colony to disappear. Konteau, mooning over his departed wife, finds himself involved in a project to extend the colonization to Mars' past, when it was wet. He also finds himself involved in a plot apparently hatched by the an evil "Vyr" (a politico-religious leader) who wants to be the new Overlord. And his son may be lost in a timequake. Trips to the Paleozoic, and to the 1840s (i.e. Poe's time), and a meeting with the legendary inventor of time travel, are also involved. In short -- typical Harness! Engaging, not quite logical, not one of his best books but enjoyable.

Lurid Dreams (1990) (57,000 words)

One of Harness's less outré books. He foregoes his usual plot (cyclical destruction and recreation of the universe) for a time-travel story involving Edgar Allan Poe. The time travel is by means of Out of Body Experiences, and the plot involves a graduate student studying the OB phenomenon, by means of his own ability to go OB. He is recruited by a Confederacy nut to go back in time and convince EAP to stay at school and become a CSA General, saving the Battle of Gettysburg for the CSA, instead of choosing a literary career. (Reminiscent of a story by Walter Jon Williams, and I think maybe one by Effinger too.) There is plenty of Time-Travel hugger mugger, and time, of course, doesn't quite cooperate with the wishes of the characters. Decent fun, with some nice Poe details, and lots of wild and implausible stuff, too.

Lunar Justice (1991) (58,000 words)

This is the last novel of his third period. It involves a man trying to ignite Jupiter in order to make the Jovian satellites terraformable, thus ameliorating the Earth's population problem. For economic reasons, the bad guys want to stop this, and as a result they end up arresting the head of the Jupiter project, and trying him in an absurd kangaroo court on the moon. He hires a patent lawyer as his defense lawyer, but more importantly, the patent lawyer turns out to be a super powerful psi. It's all quite cheerfully nonsense. It doesn't really work, but it's kind of fun, with fillips like patent applications in verse and a new model guillotine thrown in.

Drunkard's Endgame (1999) (65,000 words)

Drunkard's Endgame, is a fairly minor book. It was published by NESFA as part of an omnibus of his "cyclical" novels called Rings (the other novels included being The Paradox Men, The Ring of Ritornel, and Firebird.) It's set on a starship populated by robots, who rebelled against their human masters 1000 years previously, and who have been fleeing ever since. The (corrupt, natch) leader of the starship is searching for the ultimate weapon which a human had devised, and which he thinks was stored in the memory banks of one of his fellow robots. He is opposed by the aristocratic robot known as L'Ancienne, and by her nephew Rodo, who falls in love with one of the robots exiled to the surface of the starship. Once again, the book ends with a radical change to existing conditions, and the beginning of a "new world", but in this case the plot contrivances to bring this about are hard to believe, and the villain combines stupidity with malice rather excessively. It's still a breezy, fun, read.

Cybele, with Bluebonnets (2002) (70,000 words)

The bibliography in NESFA's An Ornament to His Profession cites a 1998 edition from Old Earth Books for this, but that edition never came out. The current NESFA hardcover is copyright 2002 and is marked First Edition -- possibly the book was written by 1998 but the earlier publication fell through. (As Ornament came out in 1998 itself, the compiler (Priscilla Olson) was presumably citing a forthcoming edition that did not come to be.) Cybele, with Bluebonnets is a bit of an oddity for Harness, by far the least SFnal of his books. It's mostly a fairly straightforward account of a boy growing to manhood in Texas, in the 20s, 30s and 40s. There is a fantastical element -- an object that may be the Holy Grail, a soul surviving death, and a person somehow knowing the future. But for the most part it's just the story of Joe Barnes, growing up the son of a widow living in "Fort West" (a thinly veiled version of Fort Worth, where Harness grew up), and his obsession with a beautiful older woman named Cybele.

The story is told in a series of short chapters, more or less chronologically following Joe's life. He meets Cybele in High School (or perhaps, mysteriously, earlier): she is his Chemistry teacher. He falls in love, or at least lust, with her from the beginning, and this is a spur towards his eventual ambition to become a chemist. He's rather poor, though, and after graduation he takes a couple of manual labor type jobs, apparently with the behind the scenes help of Cybele. One magical night he encounters her in a storm, and they enter into a passionate affair that last several months, until fate intervenes tragically. But somehow she still seems present, and seems to be guiding his life as he goes to school, gets a job for the government during the war, and marries a girl from his high school. These mysteries are resolved strikingly, somewhat movingly, and also a bit creepily, by the end.
It's a highly readable book, interspersed with almost folksy anecdotes of life in Texas during the 30s, of "Fort West" history, of weird chemical facts and pranks, and of the mysterious "Cup" that might be the Holy Grail. The structure is a bit slack, and the typical Harness hyper-romanticism sometimes fails to convince, but it's still a nice book, worth reading especially for Harness fans.

And, finally, the short fiction:

An Ornament to His Profession (NESFA Press, 1998)

[I should mention that there were a few later stories.]

This collects the bulk of the best of Charles Harness' stories through 1998. Included are many of his outstanding stories -- "The Rose", a 1953 short novel that may be the best thing he ever wrote; "The New Reality", one of the best Adam and Eve stories in SF history; and other neat stories like "The Chessplayers", and "Time Trap".

This book includes a number of stories I hadn't seen prior to this book. For example, his two 1966 stories that were each nominated for a Hugo: "An Ornament to His Profession" and "The Alchemist". These are linked stories, both set at Hope Chemical Corporation and featuring as POV character patent attorney Conrad Patrick. (It is not a coincidence that Charles Harness was then a patent attorney who worked for a chemical company.) I didn't really like "An Ornament to His Profession" much -- it deals with the patent crisis caused by a chemical process that depends on summoning a demon, I think, tied in with the tragic deaths of Patrick's wife and son. I admit I stayed confused about what really happened. "The Alchemist" is rather better -- another patent crisis, this caused by a scientist at Patrick's company using alchemy.

My favorites among the stories I hadn't read were "Child by Chronos", a pretty neat time loop story, from F&SF in 1953; and "O Lyric Love", which links a present day student and his beloved English teacher with Robert and Elizabeth Browning -- in an alternate history. (Some quasi-autobiographical details seem to correspond with some of the plot of Harness's novel Cybele With Bluebonnets.) There is one story new to the book, a novella called "Lethary Fair", a really odd piece (though not THAT odd in the context of Harness's work) about two-headed aliens, androids, a court case about a murder than might not have happened, an old will, etc. There are several of the fast paced novellas Harness published in his late career re-flowering: "The Araqnid Window", "The Tetrahedron", "George Washington Slept Here".

All I can really say is -- if you like Harness, which is to say if you can accept the sometimes downright silly science and logical (illogical?) leaps, then you will like most of this book. If you don't like Harness, it sure won't change your mind.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Eleanor Arnason

Today is Eleanor Arnason's birthday. Arnason is one of my very favorite SF writers, and to my mind a sadly under-appreciated writer. Which is not to say that she's ignored, but simply to say that she deserves far more attention, recognition, awards, and sales than what she has gotten!

For her birthday I've posted a selection of my Locus reviews of her short fiction. Some of her very best stories -- "Dapple", "The Actors", and "Stellar Harvest" in particular, all three of them from a single year, 1999, and all three among the very best SF of the 1990s -- appeared before my time at Locus, so I don't have close looks at them here, but they are magnificent indeed.

(One of her editors mentioned below, George Zebrowski, also has a birthday today!)

Locus, May 2002

The best of the other stories is Eleanor Arnason's "Knapsack Poems". The "goxhat" consist of several different units, all independently mobile and intelligent, but all part of the same "person. Ideally, a "goxhat" has units of all three sexes, male, female, and neuter. The narrator stumbles across a baby unit who is the only survivor of her litter, and against convention decides to raise it to adulthood. As the story continues, the narrator encounters examples of various malformed goxhats, all-female groups, all-male groups, etc., and we get a nice story intertwined with some nice commentary on this curious alien race and, of course, on gender roles.

Locus, October 2002

Gardner Dozois has long made publishing novellas a priority at Asimov's, and he has published some very fine ones this year. Both September novellas are outstanding. Eleanor Arnason contributes another Hwarhath tale, "The Potter of Bones", related to her excellent earlier stories "Dapple" and "The Actors". The story opens with a young Hwarhath girl, Tulwar Haik, growing up largely alone after a disaster wiped out much of her extended family, exploring the fossils in a nearby cliff. She grows up to be a somewhat eccentric potter, but retains her interest in fossils. We soon learn what's going on – this is one of those SF stories that recapitulate the life of a famous scientist in an alternate culture. In this case the scientist is Darwin. Arnason is careful to be true to her imagined culture, and Haik's life (even her version of the Voyage of the Beagle) is very much a Hwarhath life, and her discoveries are made within a Hwarhath cultural paradigm. It is as much a story about the Hwarhath as it is about evolution. It is quiet, gently humorous, moving, absorbing, thoughtful. Arnason is one of the best SF writers we have, and to my mind she is sadly underappreciated.

Locus, October 2004

George Zebrowski has revived his Synergy series of original anthologies with a fine new book called simply Synergy SF. Best here is Eleanor Arnason's "The Garden", which purports to be a translation of a piece of hwarhath science fiction. A young male, Akuin, is rather eccentrically an avid gardener. His compulsory military service in the war against hostile aliens (i.e. humans) is tending a space station's garden. The space station is for research: studying a very unusual wormhole-riddled stellar formation, as Akuin learns due to his affair with a leading physicist. Akuin, however, is not much interested in science, and eventually his love of gardens pushes him to violate hwarhath law. I found it an involving story on its own, with added interest in the way Arnason attempts to portray the thinking of a different race by the way they might write SF.

Review of Ordinary People, by Eleanor Arnason, from the August 2005 Locus

We are told that Ordinary People (Aqueduct Press) is Eleanor Arnason's first story collection – true enough, but almost astonishing. Arnason is for me one of the most important writers of short SF over the past decade plus. Her stories are intelligent, incisive, often very funny, science-fictionally intriguing, warm – and also just plain good reads. Her most obvious and recurring theme is gender roles, most often explored in her Hwarhath stories, set among an alien species for whom heterosexual relationships are abnormal. The Hwarhath society has been developed in numerous novelettes and novellas, as well as two novels, and it is more than just a simple case of exploring "what if homosexuality was the usual orientation", but rather a complexly realized culture, with many interesting aspects.

Ordinary People includes one long Hwarhath story as well as two briefer pieces that depict myths. The longer story is "The Lovers", about Eyes-of-crystal, a woman who is to be bred to an unusual though high-status male, the brother of a respected warrior. This story is perhaps most overtly among the Hwarhath pieces a simple inversion of expectations story, as Eyes-of-crystal and Eh Shawin, her breeding partner, fall in love against their society's mores. Is there any way for them to stay together?  But that's only one part of the story – we learn much more of Hwarhath culture and history. It's all quite levelly told, but very involving, very absorbing.  The two mythlike pieces, "Origin Story" and "The Small Black Box of Morality", are amusing enough though fairly slight.

The book also reprints "The Grammarian's Five Daughters", a popular and cleverly executed sort-of-fairy-tale. It's the story of a very poor Grammarian who has nothing to give her five daughters but various parts of speech.  The evocation of the usefulness of nouns, and verbs, and so on, is very nicely done, as each of the five daughters finds her own way to a successful future. I thought it perhaps a minor piece, at least in the context of my favorite Arnason stories, but a fine enjoyable story. "A Ceremony of Discontent" is a somewhat anthropologically inclined story, about a woman potter in a society where marriages are of three people: a man, a mother, and an independent woman. The heroine is an independent woman who finds herself discontented with her family or her life or something – the title ceremony is amusingly portrayed but the real meat is the offhand depiction of another family organization. The other story here is actually Arnason's second publication, something of a minor classic in the field: "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons", which first appeared in New Worlds back in 1974. It tells of a writer of rather goofy pulp SF and her struggles with her new story and with her real life in dreary Detroit. I liked it.

There is also a poem, "The Land of Ordinary People", and a very political piece, "Writing Science Fiction during the Third World War", her 2004 WisCon Guest of Honor speech (with some recent additions).

An Eleanor Arnason story collection is way overdue, and this is a very welcome book. I recommend it highly – and I look forward to more books from her, collecting marvelous stories such as "Dapple", "The Actors", "Stellar Harvest", "Knapsack Poems", etc.

Locus, August 2010

Aqueduct Press has issued a new chapbook from Eleanor Arnason, a Lydia Duluth short novel. Lydia Duluth is a favorite character of mine, and this is a fine story, if not quite as excellent as, say, “Stellar Harvest”. In Tomb of the Fathers, Lydia, her AI companion, and a mixed crew of humans and aliens, explore a fortuitously rediscovered home planet of another alien race. The story explores all too human conflicts among different races of the same alien species, along with some gender issues, and even some aspects of AI history. I found it interesting and quite fun.

Locus, December 2012

In November Eclipse features a very welcome Hwarhath story from Eleanor Arnason, “Holmes Sherlock”, about a Hwarhath woman named Amadi Kla, who is a translator of human stories, and who particularly loves the “stories about a human male named Holmes Sherlock”. This gives her a reputation as a potential detective, and so her family's matriarch asks her to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a young woman of their lineage. What she finds is scandalous, in Hwarhath terms – which makes it interesting as a way of illuminating that society to us humans, and thus of course illuminating our society as well by contrast. And besides, as usual with Arnason, it's very dryly humorous.

Locus, July 2013

Eleanor Arnason's “Kormak the Lucky” is an outstanding novella about an Irishman taken into slavery by Norwegian raiders. He ends up in Iceland, eventually in the household of the “Marsh Men”, until the crazy grandfather of the family, scheming against his son, forces him to flee to an underground land of “light elves”. This doesn't save him from slavery, but eventually he agrees to help a beautiful elf-woman escape – first to the dark elves, then to the Irish fey. Arnason blends Scandinavian and Irish traditions with her own imagination – the technological nature of some of the elves is particularly well thought out. The elves are unsympathetically and realistically presented, and the people much the same. The telling is deadpan, with Arnason's wit simmering underneath. Just an absorbing and original story.

Locus, April 2016

My usual remit here is new stories, but I felt I should mention an upcoming collection from Aqueduct Press: Eleanor Arnason’s Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens. This includes, as far as I know, all of her shorter work about the Hwarhath, organized into “Historical Romances” (long stories of the Hwarhath set prior to contact with humans), Fantastic and Religious Romances (mostly shortish pieces presented as Hwarhath fairy tales), Scientific Romances (Science Fiction written by the Hwarhath, set post-Contact), and even a delightful mystery story, “Holmes Sherlock”, about a Hwarhath woman who becomes intrigued by the Sherlock Holmes stories. These are magnificent stories, wise, witty, science-fictionally fascinating, moving – this may well end up being the story collection of the year.

Locus, May 2017

Add “Daisy”, by Eleanor Arnason (F&SF, March-April 2017), a similarly amusing if not quite serious short story, about a private eye hired to investigate the disappearance of the title character, who turns out to be a very intelligent octopus. In each of these stories we are in the hands of an experienced writer who simply knows how to tell a story.