Birthday Review: Early Short Stories (and one obscure novel) by Algis Budrys

Birthday Review: Early Short Stories (and one obscure novel) by Algis Budrys

by Rich Horton

Algis Budrys was just a couple of months older than my father, and he'd have turned 88 today. He was one of my favorite SF writers. His best work, in my opinion, came mostly in the 1960s -- the remarkable novel Rogue Moon, the underappreciated novel The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn, and such stories as "For Love", "Wall of Crystal Eye of Night", "Be Merry", and a non-SF story, "The Master of the Hounds". He also did excellent later work: "The Silent Eyes of Time", "A Scraping at the Bones", and the novels Michaelmas and Hard Landing. Late in his life he edited the interesting small press magaine tomorrow (which became one of the first magazines to transition online), right after a period working for Writers of the Future and, by extension, the Church of Scientology, that hasn't reflected well on his reputation.

However, this collection of reviews focuses on his stories from the '50s (with one 1960s outlier that reads to me like a '50s story), as well as his very obscure early novel Man of Earth. He did some very strong work in the '50s as well, with "The End of Summer" in particular a very memorable piece.

Space Science Fiction, November 1952

Of the short stories, I liked Budrys' the best. It appears to have been tied for his first publication with "The High Purpose", which was in the November Astounding. "Walk to the World" is a bit slight -- it's about a boy, son of an accomplished spaceship Captain. His father often goes walking, seemingly looking for some place unexplored -- the "World" as opposed to "Home". But he always comes Home, of course. Then an old friend, now an Admiral, comes calling. It seems he is needed to leave his home, on a well-settled planet, and go encounter the "World" again, in the form of newly discovered aliens. The resolution is low key, and I liked the message, but really the story doesn't surprise at all. But the telling is very assured -- it may be the best written of all the stories in this issue. (I will confess that Budrys is a long time favorite of mine, and that I consider him sadly underrated (mainly because of his relatively small output, I am sure).) I also note the byline, "A. J. Budrys", which he doesn't seem to have used very often. (Though he seems to be called "Ajay" by his friends.)

Dynamic, October 1953

Budrys's "Snail's Pace" is a somewhat labored and cynical philosophical piece, in which an aging space pilot, who has battled to advance the space program against much resistance, goes into space to begin work on a space station just as a nuclear war is starting. He and his fellows soon realize there will be no further missions, and they debate throwing in with the apparently victorious Russians or simply giving up and heading home, and eventually the old guy decides to head home -- humanity has proven that it's not ready for space yet, and technological advance will return to a snail's pace. Not convincing.

Dynamic, January 1954

The rest of the issue is actually not bad, though not great. Budrys's "Desire No More" is a somewhat bitter story about a man so obsessed with being a space pilot that his life becomes meaningless when it becomes clear that even though he might be one he won't really be one in a significant sense. Good try, I thought, but not really successful.

Cosmos, July 1954

Budrys' novella is more interesting. I trust the only reason the Anderson story was the "feature" was that he (then and ever) had a much bigger name. "We Are Here" is one of a number of SF stories with titles taken from "Dover Beach", though I always thought there ought to be more. (Others include Kuttner's "Clash by Night", Bova's As On a Darkling Plain (others have also used this title), and Blaylock's Land of Dreams. (And arguably Pangborn's "The Night Wind".) It seems to me that "Ignorant Armies" could be a very good SFnal title.) (In case anyone questions the provenance of "We Are Here", the story opens with a quotation from Arnold's poem.)

"We Are Here" is an odd, rather confused, story, that seems quite ambitious and which I thought could have been awfully good but doesn't quite work.  It opens with a scoundrel and sneak thief using his superior psychological abilities to take a car from another man. In the process he murders the man and rifles the car, which turns out to contain some intriguing items. The thief has found other such items before, and he is convinced that he is on the trail of a fantastic opportunity, if he can only arrange a meeting with the organization producing these on a favorable footing. On another thread, the murder investigation, by a smart cop, is strangely derailed by his superior. We quickly learn that the superior is a part of this mysterious organization -- which turns out to be composed of nonhumans -- beings from some other dimension, perhaps. For hard to comprehend reasons, they are working for an economic takeover of Earth -- by offering fabulous products at ridiculous prices. I never quite understood the economic footing of all this, and for this reason, and other hard to grasp motivations, the story founders. But much of it is interesting, and as often with Budrys, told a bit slant and featuring nearly psychotic but still intriguing characters.

Astounding, November 1954

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

The lead novelette, Budrys' "The End of Summer", is a well-known story, perhaps Budrys' first major work. It's just under 10,000 words. It's a fine story indeed. The viewpoint character, Kester Fay, is returning to America after a couple of centuries away. We soon gather that humanity is immortal, with a concomitant increase in concern about safety. Fay is a Dilettante, or Dilly, and the more conservative Homebodies and Workers resent that. Though there is another group, Hoppers, even less conservative than Dillies.

Fay runs over a boy's dog on the way home, and we learn more about the strangeness of this society. It seems no one remembers very well -- at first I assumed because of the weight of immortal years, but the real reason is stranger. So the disapproving conservative parents of the boy resolve to erase memories of the dog from their "tapes". And soon the "tapes" become the focus. We finally learn that Kester Fay was the man who decided to keep humanity from death -- at the cost, apparently, of memory, though humans learn artificial means (the tapes) of preserving at least SOME memory.

In the end this is a very odd story -- in one way an indictment of the danger of immortality, but a rather oddly slanted look at that old theme. I think it's a very effective story, and really rather spooky, though I thought the way in which Kester Fay is revealed to be the genius behind the whole setup was a bit of a weak point. Still, it deserves its sterling reputation, and it's a story that continues to live in my memory.

Science Fiction Stories, January 1955

The other short story is by a much better known writer, to say the least, Algis Budrys. "The Two Sharp Edges" comes early in his career, but it is serious and ambitious and real-seeming in a way these other stories just aren’t. That said, it comes just short of the real wow factor ... it’s a good story, not great one. It tells of a soldier who has been granted the right to an abandoned farm after a devastating war. He restores it to productivity, and then one night a man and his sons visit ... they’re clearly down on their luck. It turns out -- no surprise -- that they were the former owners; but were on the losing side. The story turns on the conversation between the soldier and the former owner, which turns again on this man’s particular secret. There’s no violence nor bitterness, just a sadness at what war does, and another sadness, about home and the loss of home.

If, June 1955

There are two novelettes. Algis Budrys' "The Strangers" (14,000 words) is a vaguely Sturgeonesque story that shows promise but ends weakly. Wes Spencer, a bitter 24 year old drunk, is confronted in a bar by a man who knows things about him he shouldn't, and who in particular says "Mr. Laban is dead". This prompts memories of Mr. Laban, a sort of quasi-Uncle who used to visit Spencer throughout his youth, teaching him things, giving him money and assistance, and hinting at a great future. But all this had ended 6 years before -- Wes is at college, on a football scholarship, when he is severely injured, apparently on purpose by mysterious enemies of Mr. Laban. Mr. Laban sadly abandons him -- it seems he's no use anymore to whatever mysterious purpose he has. Spencer is left with a job and the memory of a girl he was supposed to meet but never had. Then, by coincidence (it seems) he meets a girl -- the girl -- and learns that her story was similar: meetings with Mr. Laban, then abandonment when for some reason she falls short. Together, however, they are able to piece together the real story -- which turns out to be pretty disappointing, in my opinion anyway. Still, all in all an OK story. Perhaps it was hurt in my eyes because I was so reminded of Sturgeon, and because Budrys could not drive to a really Sturgeonesque revelation.

Infinity, October 1956

Algis Budrys' "Lower Than Angels" is a Campbellian gimmick story that went to Infinity instead -- an explorer assigned to contact the primitive aliens on a new planet is disillusioned by the belief that the corporation he works for will simply exploit them -- but his efforts to make real contact are doomed because the aliens insist on believing him to be a god.  All that is worked out sensibly enough -- then the last two pages give an unconvincing twist.

Astounding, February 1957

"The War is Over" is about a man of a race of beings who have obsessively worked for generations to build a spaceship.  He is the chosen pilot, and he makes his way to an Earth ship.  He gives the Captain his message: "The War is Over!" -- then collapses into gibbering idiocy.  We learn that he is a descendant of a lizard -- forcibly evolved over centuries by the communications device implanted within the original courier, who crashlanded on the lizard's planet but who was compelled to find a way to deliver the message no matter how long it took.  Reading it as a teen I just thought that so powerful -- but Budrys' delivery seemed rather clunky on this rereading.

If, May 1963

"Die, Shadow!" is sort of weirdly semi-old-fashioned for the Algis Budrys of the 60s -- reads more like an early 50s Planet Stories piece. A space pilot crashes on Venus, and saves his life by suspended animation. He is awakened millennia later by people who regard him as a god, and asked to intervene in a war between humanity and beings from another dimension, "Shadows". Both sides in the war turn out to be wrong -- only the "god" can set things right. Odd sort of thing.

Man of Earth (1958 novel based on "The Man From Earth", from the October 1956 Satellite)

(Cover by Richard Powers)

This is a 1958 novel (never reprinted -- apparently Budrys won't allow a reprint), based on a 1956 novella, "The Man From Earth". It actually opens intriguingly enough, with Allen Sibley, a corrupt stockbroker in a regimented future, contemplating a mysterious stranger's offer of a way out of his legal troubles. He learns that he can be altered completely -- in body and mind -- and indeed greatly improved, while retaining his memories.

He jumps at the chance, only to be shanghaied to the failing colony on Pluto, albeit after the alteration treatment has been given him, apparently successfully. Now calling himself John L. Sullivan, he ends up in the Army, having no marketable skills. The second section of the book is the story of his advancement in the Army, and his eventual overcoming of the malign and/or corrupt sorts about him. It is awful stuff, Heinlein-imitation at its worst, totally cliché, reading like the worst of contemporary "coming of age" Mil-SF only without much SFnal kick. It seems that the colonists on Pluto are planning a sort of revenge attack on Earth -- but then at the conclusion there is an easily predictable twist ... The twist is actually acceptable, nothing great, but I can imagine a tolerable novelette having been made of the beginning (cut), a different middle section (drastically cut) and the conclusion. I have no idea if the novella "The Man From Earth" is by any chance that "tolerable novelette", though I doubt it.

(One of the most egregious weaknesses of this novel is the way that Allen Sibley and John L. Sullivan are completely different characters, with no detectable linkage except the author saying so. I almost wonder if this isn't really two failed stories clumsily mashed together.)

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Gregory Norman Bossert

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Gregory Norman Bossert

by Rich Horton

Greg Bossert turns 57 today (hard as that may be to believe!), and in his honor I'm posting this set of the reviews I've done for Locus of his stories. All except one -- for my review of "The Empyrean Light", from the Fall 2018 Conjunctions, you'll have to wait for the next issue of Locus (February).

Locus, May 2010

Gregory Norman Bossert’s first story, “The Union of Sky and Soil”, appears in the April-May Asimov’s, and it’s an impressive debut, albeit undeniably the work of a writer with room to grow. The setup and working out are fairly familiar: an archaeological team on an alien planet is working against time to unearth the wonders of the natives’ distant past before the human colonists and a local mining company kick them out. Will any reader doubt for a second that the site will, at the last minute, yield truly amazing things? Of course not, but for all that familiar plot, and the crude cartoons of the villains, there is much to like here, particularly the quite nicely and naturally depicted characters of the archaeologists, and the lovely concept of the aliens’ art: glass/plant meldings, and the quite moving conclusion.

Locus, August 2010

In the August Asimov's I was happy to see Gregory Norman Bossert’s second story, “Slow Boat”, good work but a bit formulaic, about a woman kidnapped and sent into space inside a suspended animation box of course. The mystery is who kidnapped her and why, and the action is how she responds to this. I didn’t quite buy it, and there was too much telling, but the idea is nice, and Bossert remains an intriguing new writer.

Locus, December 2010

New writer Gregory Norman Bossert continues to impress with “Freia in the Sunlight” (Asimov's): here Freia is an AI warplane, who begins to interpret her optimal actions in unexpected ways.

Locus, February 2013

In Beneath Ceaseless Skies #109, Gregory Norman Bossert's “The Telling” is a very original story about a strange child (significantly named Mel) is a strange house whose master has just died. Mel, ambiguously some sort of heir, is drafted to do the “Telling” – to ask the bees of the household to continue to offer their favor. It is full of atmosphere, and weirdness, and disconnection … a lovely story, from a writer who has impressed with everything I've seen from him, and each story quite different to the others.

Locus, August 2013

Perhaps the best in the August Asimov's is “Lost Wax”, by Gregory Norman Bossert. This is another story of revolution, centered around two people, a young artist who sculpts “Messenger Birds” and her friend who helps engineer them to carry provocative messages around the city, whose rulers use “golethem” to control the populace. There's not much surprising in the way this all works out, and if the political ideas are a bit trite the characters are involving and the central notion is well worked out.

Locus, December 2013

Other good stories in the December Asimov's include ... Gregory Norman Bossert's “Bloom”, solid sf adventure of the “menacing alien biology” variety, with a guide and two other people trapped on a “bloom” that will consume them at the slightest move;

Locus, April 2015

Gregory Norman Bossert signaled with his first story a few years ago that he was a writer to watch, and he hasn't disappointed since, showing excellent range and a real feel for story. His latest, “Twelve and Tag”, from the March Asimov's, may be his best yet. It's a tense piece told in a bar in the Jupiter system, as a team of ice miners get to know their newest crew members, Adra and Zandt. They play a game, “Twelve and Tag”, built on quickly matching word pairs but more importantly on telling stories – one true, one false. The stories, the first by an existing crew member, the rest by the new crew, work brilliantly first to set the scene: a future in which the “Out”: space, the Outer Planets, are a frontier in the traditional sense, where fortunes can be made but where life is fairly cheap; all complicated by the expensive process of TAGing, whereby one can be backed up. But then we gather that the backups of many people were lost in a hack some years ago. The individual tales, representing the worst or the most painful or the most embarrassing things the tellers have done, work well to illuminate character – of the tellers, to be sure, and also of the listeners: variously they are mini-adventures and tales of fraught family lives and lost loves … and eventually, the real story, linking everything together, comes clear. It's a good a story as I've seen in 2015, with a neat Sfnal background, wrenching personal details, and exciting action.

Locus, February 2017

Gregory Norman Bossert is always interesting, and “Higherworks” (Asimov's, December 2016) is certainly that, though I felt it didn’t quite work. Dyer is some kind of creator of nanotechnology that seems to be used for communal rave-like events (one issue I had was that I never quite understood this particular purpose – my fault, perhaps). But she is on shaky legal ground – she is a US Economic Refugee in the UK, and moreover her former company believes she has stolen their intellectual property, and this use of nano seems to be illegal in the UK – and on this particular day she seems to be followed by a mysterious woman who keeps disappearing. The ultimate explanation is sensible, I suppose, but I found it a bit underwhelming.

Birthday Review: The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

a review by Rich Horton

Today Nicholson Baker turns 62. In his honor, I've exhumed this review from my old blog.

I should say to begin with that Nicholson Baker is a favorite novelist of mine. His first novel, The Mezzanine, remains my favorite among his works, but I've never been disappointed, except perhaps by The Fermata. (Though I have not read Human Smoke, his most recent nonfiction book, nor the novel House of Holes, and I probably won't .)

The anthologist of the title is the first-person narrator, a poet name Paul Chowder, who had some early success (including a Guggenheim), but has fallen on hard times in his career. Chowder has compiled an anthology, called Only Rhyme, a collection of rhymed poetry. However he has become blocked on writing the introduction. Partly out of frustration at his fecklessness in this effort, his long time girlfriend, Roz, has left him.

The book covers a few weeks of his life. (A long time period for a Baker novel -- The Mezzanine took about an hour, Vox however long a phone sex call takes, Room Temperature about 20 minutes.) In his personal life Chowder spends most of his time cat vacuuming -- that is, avoiding writing. He cleans out his office. He mows his lawn. He helps a neighbor put in a floor. And he moons over Roz, even visiting her a few times, especially when he suffers a minor hand injury. He gives a reading. He renews his passport. And he attends a conference in Switzerland.

Around all this he discusses his theories about poetry. Chowder is a strong advocate of rhyme (as his anthology's title suggests). He's also a strong believer that the fundamental rhythm of English poetry is the four beat line of the ballad. Metric theory (iambs and anapests and all) is a distraction. Iambic pentameter is a mistake. Free verse even more so. (Yet he constantly mentions how good some free verse poems are -- and, ironically, he admits that he himself can't rhyme very well.) It's all quite well argued, with excellent examples. Even if you disagree, it's very entertaining. (Assuming you like poetry.)

Aside from those details of plot and theme, the book is just very nicely written. Baker is a wonderful, funny, writer of prose, and a great observer of details. (For instance, he complains about something I've complained about -- the way it is so hard to tell which side is up on a USB connector.) Prose example: talking about Horace meant when he wrote "carpe diem" -- not exactly "seize the day" but pluck it: "Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant -- pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grape the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man Horace was." Not the best, nor most euphonious, passage I could have chosen, but it gives a good sense of the rhythm and light humor and knowledge of the book. Highly recommended.

[This novel appeared in 2009. Another novel about Paul Chowder, Travelling Sprinkler, appeared in 2013.]

Old Bestseller: The Booming of Acre Hill, by John Kendrick Bangs

Old Bestseller: The Booming of Acre Hill, by John Kendrick Bangs

a review by Rich Horton

John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) was a native of Yonkers, NY. He attended Columbia, and on graduation went to work for Life Magazine, and later for Harpers'. He wrote comic sketches from the beginning, and later a considerable variety of comic short stories, novels, and also poems. The term "Bangsian Fantasy", for a fantasy set in the afterlife, was coined after him, though I'm not sure it's still current -- at any rate, I always use the term "Afterlife Fantasy" for such works. He seemed to have a solid reputation as a humorist in his lifetime, but he doesn't seem all that well remember these days, and on the evidence of the book at hand, I'd suggest that much of his humor has dated a great deal by now.

The Booming of Acre Hill is a collection of short stories, all set in or very near the New York suburb Dumfries Corners, which I suspect may have been based on Bangs' longtime home, Yonkers. It is subtitled "and other reminsiscences of urban and suburban life", which seems to imply that the stories may be true, but they are unmistakably fiction. The stories first appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal, the Women's Home Companion, and "the various publications of Messrs. Harper and Brothers". My edition looks like a First. It's published by Harper and Brothers, and illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson.

The stories are:

"The Booming of Acre Hill"
"The Strange Misadventures of an Organ"
"The Plot That Failed"
"The Base Ingratitude of Barkus, M.D."
"The Utilitarian Mr. Carraway"
"The Book Sales of Mr. Peters"
"The Valor of Brinley"
"Wilkins"
"The Mayor's Lamps"
"The Balance of Power"
"Jarley's Experiment"
"Jarley's Thanksgiving"
"Harry and Maude and I -- Also James"
"An Affinitive Romance"
"Mrs. Upton's Device"

The bulk of the stories are between 2500 and 3500 words, with the last a bit longer at some 6000 or so. The first 12 are purely about suburban life. The first one is a bit uncharacteristics -- it's not about Dumfries Corners but a new development nearby, Acre Hill, and the scheme to draw buyers, which, curiously I thought, involved hiring a socially connected but impecunious man to rent a house and throw parties to which the rich and upper class denizens of the city will come -- convincing people moving to the suburbs that this was the place to be. This gives a hint as to the class of people living in these "suburbs" -- they all had a couple of servants, for instance. They seem to be professionals, lawyers and the like.

"The Mayor's Lamps" and "The Balance of Power" are both about a man who tries to run for Mayor of Dumfries Corners, mainly because he wants the lamps that are gifted to each Mayor. He loses, of course (to his wife's relief) -- the second story is an encounter with a man who represented "the balance of power" -- a working class fellow who felt snubbed by the candidate. Which means that the suburb does have an "other side of the tracks".

The two Jarley stories reminded me just a bit of Kuttner and Moore's Gallagher stories -- Jarley has a habit of making implausible and ultimately useless inventions. (For instance, in one story he devises a machine to harvest his son's energy, and doses himself -- unfortunately, he does indeed become full of energy, but he also starts to act like a ten year old.)

The last three stories are very light romances. The first is about the narrator's rivalry with Harry for the attentions of a pretty girl named Maude -- and as they debate who has the better case, James swoops in and takes her affections. The second describes two excellent young people, who have not married despite closing in on 30. They are perfect for each other. But the man lives in New York, and the woman in Boston. The story ends "But they never met. And they lived happily ever after." And the third concerns a woman who is constantly playing matchmaker. Her husband finally convinces her to stop, but then she insists on trying one more time ... and after some wrong turns, a fortunate scheme works out.

The other stories are about the misadventures of ordinary life in the suburbs, very much in the tone of, say, a 1950s sitcom. My favorite in the whole book is "The Book Sales of Mr. Peters", in which a vestryman at the local church is inveigled to arrange a book sale in order to raise money to fix the roof. The inconvenience of the sale is amusingly described, but it makes what seems a nice profit. So the next year he is importuned to repeat the sale. He agrees, then nothing seems to happen. So he shows the importuners how much the previous year's sale actually cost him (far more than the profit), and happily writes them a check for the needed amount, glad to have saved himself a lot of money.

There are, I think, two kinds of comedy -- comedy that shocks us, disturbs us, and makes us question the nature of the world or of our lives and society; and comedy that reassures us that's all is right with the world and our place in society. These stories are most definitely of the latter sort. They are reasonably amusing, but terribly dated, and I think it is their conventionalism and refusal to challenge the reader that date them, and that make them essentially forgotten.

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.