Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Gregory Benford

Gregory Benford turns 78 today. It shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose, that the writers who were coming into prominence when I started reading in the field are getting on a bit now -- I'm getting on a bit myself! But somehow it still surprises me a bit. I still remember being particularly impressed with stories like "Doing Lennon" and "White Creatures" and "Cambridge, 1:58 AM" and "If the Stars Are Gods" (with Gordon Eklund), and "Time Shards" back in the '70s. So I'm happy to still be able to put together a selection of reviews of his short fiction from my time at Locus (with one look back at his second published story). Most of these review are from early in my time at Locus, but I should note that the current (January 2019) issue includes a review of "A Waltz in Eternity", a new Greg Benford story that I really liked, from the November Galaxy's Edge.

Retro Review of F&SF, January 1966

And finally Greg Benford's "Representative from Earth" is another humans vs. aliens sort of thing, in which a spaceman is subjected to a series of trials, which he assumes are to evaluate humanity's worthiness for membership in the local interstellar empire -- but it turns out the local ruler has something else in mind for him. This was Benford's second sale -- his first had been the winner of an F&SF contest the year before.

Locus, July 2002

A fairly common theme in an Analog story is the stupidity of technophobes.  I confess this message appeals to me – I basically agree.  So in some ways I was eagerly cheering along with Gregory Benford and Kevin J. Anderson, authors of "Mammoth Dawn", as their hero, a plucky entrepreneur who has over decades managed to recreate several extinct species (dodoes, passenger pigeons, and mammoths, among others) deals with evil ecoterrorists intent on slaughtering the "unnatural" new creatures.  But at another level I cringed from the strident and one-dimensional characterization of the story's villains, and with the way the authors use the trick of having the main bad guy be a clear cut idiot and failure to reinforce their message.  I applaud the basic thrust of the story, but I think the story suffers from the unsubtle deck-stacking characterization.

Locus, September 2003

The Janis Ian/Mike Resnick anthology Stars features a topnotch list of writers riffing on Ian's songs. There's some fine work here -- though maybe a couple too many obvious and earnest takes on "Society's Child". ... Gregory Benford's "On the Edge", a mild revision of his 2001 Sci Fiction story "Brink", is a fine near future fantasia featuring Emma Goldman, Lenin, Jefferson, Franklin, and other founding fathers both Soviet and American as they yearn for a revolution in the soulless consumerist 21st Century world.

Locus, November 2003

In Gregory Benford's "The Hydrogen Wall" (Asimov's, October-November) an impending encounter with a denser region of the Galaxy threatens Earth. A trainee Librarian deals with a frustrating alien AI which, it turns out, may be able to help protect the Solar System from this disaster. But there is a price -- one that rather raised my eyebrows! Some really nice SFnal ideas,

Locus, January 2004

Interzone is now officially bimonthly, leaving the field with no magazines that actually publish 12 issues per year. September leads off with a fine far-future story by Gregory Benford, "Naturals". Dawn is a child of an enclave of "Naturals", humans unconnected to external intelligences, in a world of mostly very enhanced humans, or Supras. We follow her early life, and especially her love affair with a Supra, then a life-changing disaster that leads to a new understanding of her position in this new world.

Locus, April 2005

It was a pleasant surprise to find Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Far Futures so enjoyable. The book includes six stories of substantial length: three novelettes and three novellas. The stories are all adventure-oriented, and all but one set in other solar systems. Sometimes the protagonists have things a bit too easy, sometimes the plot doesn't quite hold together, but each story qualifies – put simply – fun. The most SFnally intriguing is Gregory Benford's "Beyond Pluto", in which human explorers encounter energy beings at the edge of the Solar System.

Locus, May 2006

I thought the best stories in the first issue of Jim Baen's Universe were two longer novelettes. ...Gregory Benford’s “Bow Shock” is in his “realistic depiction of science” mode, concerning a young astrophysicist struggling for tenure, dealing with an ambitious rival, problems getting observation time, an impatient girlfriend, and, of course, a controversial discovery. The story follows a fairly predictable path, but it’s still enjoyable and SFnally interesting.

Locus, June 2013

April at Tor is pretty impressive, with a wide range of mode and tone. First we get a fine pure hard SF piece from Gregory Benford, “Backscatter”. No surprises here, but solid deployment of a traditional set of tropes and plot elements: the asteroid explorer crashed and needing an imaginative way to be rescued, her snarky AI companion, and the cool and scientifically plausible discovery.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Carrie Vaughn

Today is Carrie Vaughn's birthday. Vaughn is probably best known for her long series of novels about Kitty, a radio DJ who gets turned into a werewolf. Her more recent post-Apocalyptic series, with several short stories and the novels Bannerless and The Wild Dead, is very fine. And, as this selection of my reviews of her short fiction should show, she's written a lot of exceptional short stories.

Locus, January 2007

The October/November Weird Tales includes Carrie Vaughn’s “For Fear of Dragons”, a story with a familiar setup: a virgin who is to be sacrificed to a dragon bravely decides to kill the beast – but she learns that the real menace to her land might not be the dragon. The resolution is thematically perfect.

Locus, May 2007

Baen’s Universe features both fantasy and SF, but has expressed a slight editorial bias towards the latter. In June, however, I thought the fantasy stories rather better. Best of the SF is Carrie Vaughn’s “Swing Time”, a nice mixture of time travel and dancing, in which a woman cavorts between eras, always dancing, always encountering the same fascinating man, until the equivalent of the Time Patrol catches up with her.

Locus, June 2010

probably my favorite in Lightspeed's first issue (June 2010) comes from Carrie Vaughn. “Amaryllis” tells of a rather nice seeming future, but constricted, for ecological reasons. The protagonist is a fisher ship captain, and the story concerns her problems with a corrupt local official, and with a young crewwoman who wants a baby – but permits for children are hard to come by. It’s a quiet story, never spectacular, but strongly realized, well-characterized, effective.

Locus, September 2012

“Astrophilia”, by Carrie Vaughn (Clarkesworld, July), is set in the same future as her fine story “Amaryllis”, in which humanity has responded to environmental disaster by strictly limiting childbirth, and also by adopting generally anti-science attitudes This one is fine as well, and quite similar in tone to the previous one, Stella's household is dissolved during a drought, because their pastures have dried up. She is a skilled weaver, and so is taken in by another, richer, holding. They have a daughter about Stella's age, who is an amateur astronomer, using a salvaged telescope. She and Stella become lovers, and Stella is pushed to defend her against her conservative father's resentment – of the time spent doing observations, and of the very fact of the telescope's existence. It's a quiet story, sweet, hopeful, and well-grounded in presenting a future way of life.

Review of Fast Ships and Black Sails (Locus, December 2012)

Carrie Vaughn’s “The Nymph’s Child” is similarly romantic, opening with Grace Lark in prison, as her lover and Captain reveals her true sex to the Marshal who had assumed with everyone else that the notorious First Mate Gregory Lark was a man. The pregnant Grace is spared to bear her child, while the rest of the crew is hanged, and now, years later, her daughter might be thinking of becoming a sailor, and Grace doesn’t know how to react.

Locus, March 2013

At Lightspeed in February I also liked “Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris”, the “origin story” for Carrie Vaughn's ongoing steampunk series about a (dare I say) spunky Princess of England and her engineer friend, in a 19th century altered by alien “aetherian” technology.

Locus, July 2013

Carrie Vaughn's “Fishwife”, from the June Nightmare, is of course horror. It's set in a downtrodden village, where the men struggle to bring home any catch, and the women, the fishwives, are humiliated by the meager return they get for selling it. Then a strange man washes up on their shore … and he offers them riches – at the cost of a little sacrifice. A moral tale (as with so much horror) that resolves strangely.

Unfettered is a new anthology benefiting editor Shawn Speakman, a cancer survivor. Best here is Carrie Vaughn's “Game of Chance”. As noted above, Vaughn has a perfectly well established series to work in, but instead this is a standalone SF story about alternate timelines, and a group of people who try to alter history for the better, usually, it seems with ambiguous or worse results. The protagonist is a young woman who went off with this group partly as an escape from her affluent but stultifying life, and partly for love. But her ideas for alternations are mostly ignored, suggesting a similar stultification, until tragedy forces her in a different direction.

And finally to Asimov's, where Vaughn gives us “The Art of Homecoming”, Military SF (though not much concerned with military action) set in a widely populated interstellar milieu.  It's a warm story about a Major with the Diplomatic Corps, ordered to take some time off after she was held responsible for damaging trade relations with an alien species. She wonders if her career might be over, and considers other paths while visiting her sister and her sister's wife and their partner at a boutique farm on a colony planet. The particulars of Major Daring's military career and the incident that may have ended it aren't important here – the nature of home, and the different kinds of home, are what matters.

Locus, May 2016

In Lightspeed I liked, well, all the stories in April. Carrie Vaughn’s “Origin Story” is a good superhero (or supervillain) story, in which the heroine recognizes the villain robbing the bank she’s at … he was her boyfriend in high school. It goes kind of where you expect from there, quite nicely.

Locus, June 2016

Carrie Vaughn’s “That Game We Played During the War” (Tor.com, March) is a moving piece about Calla, a woman who was a nurse for Enith during their war with the telepathic Gaant people. The war is over, and Calla is visiting Gaant, trying to meet and continue a game of chess she had been playing with Major Valk, whom she had encountered both in Enith and later after she was captured, in Gaant. This version of chess is unusual – because of the Gaantish telepathy – and it’s not so much the point – the point, of course, is how enemies can come to a peaceful meeting (and, too, how telepathy complicates that!)

Locus, June 2017

I quite enjoyed stories in the two April issues of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. From April 13 Carrie Vaughn offers “I Have Been Drowned in Rain”, a fairly conventional and modest quest story about the usual ragtag group trying to bring the rightful Queen back to her country to overthrow the Tyrant. Somehow they have made it almost there – what treachery can await? The story turns on the most suspect member of their group, a farmer woman they rescued from rape, who has cooked and cleaned for them, and who sings sad songs – but whom they don’t know. The story doesn’t really ever surprise, but it is well done and effective and makes its simple point just rightly.

Locus, October 2018

Carrie Vaughn’s “The Huntsman and the Beast” (Asimov's, September-October) is a fine gender-switched “Beauty and the Beast” variant, with Jack, the huntsman for a decent if slightly thick Prince, leading his lord and their party to a seemingly deserted castle. But it’s still inhabited – by a Beast, of course – and the Beast subdues them, and Jack offers himself as hostage for his Prince. The story can be guessed fairly well from that point – the Beast’s true nature, her backstory, and the crisis when the Prince returns, determined to rescue a loyal retainer who no longer wishes to be rescued. This is nicely done, and nicely handles the simple fact that the basic outline of the story is fairly clear from step 1 – there is enough new and honest here to take us happily to the expected (but not overdetermined) close.

Birthday Review: Black on Black, by K. D. Wentworth

Birthday Review: Black on Black, by K. D. Wentworth

Today would have been Kathy Wentworth's 68th birthday, but, alas, a promising career was cut short by illness in 2012. Kathy was one of the first authors I remember meeting, at ConQuesT in Kansas City some time in the late '90s, and we also interacted in SFF.net. One of the things it seems reviews of this sort can do is bring back to mind writers who may be forgotten for terribly unfair reasons.

I was really impressed by a number of her short stories, including "Exit Strategy", "Born-Again", and "The Orangery". I didn't read much of her work at novel length, but I did read her first novel for Baen, under the circumstances I describe below, in a brief review I did on my SFF Net newsgroup.

---

(Cover by Patrick Turner)

I received a postcard from someone in Oklahoma, presumably K. D. Wentworth herself, consisting of a cover flat for her Baen novel Black on Black. I admit it had been on my mind as a book I might like to try, but I hadn't got around to buying it.  Next time I was in a bookstore, the book just happened to leap out at me (crazy things, books), so I bought it.  I guess that means the postcard was a successful promotional tool.  I will say however that the cover rather misrepresents the nature of the book.  It focuses on the title character/protagonist's partner, who is actually a middling minor character.  However, she's a woman, and as drawn by Baen's selected artist, she's showing plenty of cleavage.  Sigh.

The book is really about Heyoka Blackeagle, a lion- or cat-like alien called a hrinn.  (Half of Heyoka's head shows up on the cover.)  Heyoka was rescued from the flek slave markets by an Indian (Oglala Sioux, I think) named Ben Blackeagle when he was very young.  Hence his name.  He was raised basically as a human, though he always knew he didn't fully fit.  When Ben died he joined the army, which is engaged in a long war against the flek, who like to "flekform" (my word) planets so that native life (including humans, if any) is wholly destroyed.  After an injury, Heyoka may be on the point of being invalided out, so he takes leave with his friend and partner, Mitsu, at the small human outpost on Anktan, his home planet.  He hopes to meet the primitive Hrinn who live there and discover something about this history. However, he finds both unusual resistance from the outpost director (named Eldrich (!)), and hostility from those hrinn he meets.  One hrinn male, however, recognizes him as having the legendary "Black/on/Black" coloring, which may mean he has special powers.  Soon Heyoka finds himself entangled in hrinn politics, which is more complicated than he may have expected, and, worse, he finds that Mitsu has gotten herself captured by a hrinn clan while trying to help him.

Soon the reader realizes that much more is going on: there is a mystery surrounding Heyoka's birth clan, which was destroyed about the time Heyoka ended up in the slave market; and there are behind the scenes manipulations both among the female hrinn and the males (females and males live apart); and in general something very odd is going on.  Mixed in is his growing realization that he does have unusual abilities ...  It's a fun book, full of adventure, and with a pretty neat and complicated plot.  It does sort of unravel too quickly and conveniently at the end.  And as usual, the hero turns out to have pretty much the powers he needs to save the world.  Though to be fair, these powers aren't as overwhelming as they might have been, and on many occasions Wentworth shows real limits to Heyoka's ability. I liked the book.

Ace Double Reviews, 53: Cache from Outer Space/The Celestial Blueprint, by Philip José Farmer

Ace Double Reviews, 53: Cache from Outer Space, by Philip José Farmer/The Celestial Blueprint and Other Stories, by Philip José Farmer (#F-165, 1962, $0.40)

by Rich Horton

Today would have been Philip José Farmer's 101st birthday, so here's a repost of my review of his only Ace Double appearance.

Philip José Farmer (1918-2009) was born in Terre Haute, IN, and raised in Peoria, IL. He went to Bradley University (in Peoria) while working at a steel mill, and didn't really turn to writing until graduating at the age of 32. He was noticed very quickly, however, and won an early Hugo as "Most Promising New Writer", largely on the strength of his famous early story "The Lovers", which controversially depicted sex with an alien. (He is also one of those writers who worked for my company in one of its iterations -- in his case, McDonnell Douglas in Southern California in the late '60s as a technical writer.) His most famous works include "The Lovers", the Hugo-winning novella "Riders of the Purple Wage" from Dangerous Visions, and the Riverworld novels, especially the first, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. My favorite Farmer story is probably "The Sliced-Crosswise Only On Tuesday World", which was expanded to a novel, Dayworld.

(Covers by Ed Emshwiller)

According to a brief biographical note in the book, Cache From Outer Space/The Celestial Blueprint and Other Stories was Farmer's first book for Ace. Cache From Outer Space is a novel of about 50,000 words. The Celestial Blueprint and Other Stories collects four stories, all originally published in 1954. The stories total some 38,000 words.

Cache From Outer Space is a really bad title: I suspect Don Wollheim is to blame. It's not strictly speaking inaccurate, but it's not a very good representation of the book -- for one thing, the "cache from outer space" isn't all that important an aspect of the plot, and for another thing the title serves to tip the reader to something I suspect the writer wished to be at least to a small degree a surprise. Besides the title's misleading aspects, it's just boring.

The novel itself, however, is pretty fun. It's set some centuries after an event -- one assumes a nuclear war (we later learn a bit more detail) -- has caused civilization to crash. Benoni (Ben) Rider is a young man from Fiiniks (Farmer takes great delight in a whole series of silly phonetic corruptions of current place names). He is on his First Warpath -- an initiation journey in which young men of the Fiiniks tribe are expected to raid the nearby Navaho and return with a scalp. But, prompted by his father, he extends his journey far to the East in search of a fabled great river, and of newer and more fertile land. (Besides water problems, Fiiniks is troubled by some geologically unlikely (it seems to me) events: earthquakes and a huge series of new volcanoes.) He is also prompted by a desire for revenge against his the oafish Joel Vahndert, his rival for the affections of Debra Awvrez. Joel turns out to be a crude and slimy traitor, who betrays Ben and leaves him for dead after Ben rescues him from Navahos.

Ben makes his way through the desert and finally reaches the river, called the Msibi. In the process he captures a young black man, Zhem, and the two become blood brothers. They make their way to the territory of Kaywo (= Cairo, Illinois), a warlike state ruled by a beautiful Pwez (= President). Kaywo has just conquered Senglwi (obviously my city, St. Louis), and is facing war with Skego (again, obviously my home city, Chicago). Ben and Zhem join the equivalent of the Foreign Legion, but then Ben meets Joel again, who has made the same journey, more or less. They start a brawl, and that brings them to the attention of the authorities, who plan to send them back home to offer the Fiiniks a new home in exchange for assistance against Skego. But all these plans go up in smoke when news comes of a spectacular discovery in Pwawwaw (!), which Kaywo must control before Skego. This discovery, and Ben's alert reaction to it, changes his position relative to the Kaywo authorities dramatically, leading to an open-ended conclusion. (I wonder if there was a sequel -- one certainly isn't necessary, but there is room for one.)

Cache from Outer Space is a decent adventure novel, reminiscent to some extent of much of Andre Norton's work. Farmer has a good touch with fight scenes, and moves his story along quickly. He also does a good job of portraying his people as part of their culture -- the heroes do not have convenient contemporary attitudes. As such, Ben, though obviously a decent man of his time, is hard for the reader to approve of often. Not a lasting work by any means -- but good work of its kind.

I'll treat the four stories in The Celestial Blueprint separately:

"Rastignac the Devil" (20400 words) Fantastic Universe, May 1954

This story has some interesting ideas but is rather a mess. It's set on a French-colonized planet a few hundred years in the future. The human colonists live in harmony (of sorts) with two other species: the reptilian Ssassaror and the amphibian Amphibs. This harmony is enforced by the "Skins" everyone wears, which condition people to submission, vegetarianism, non-violence, etc. There is also a sanctioned custom of stealing babies of other species and raising them as changelings. Rastignac is a human who wishes to go into space, and who realizes that the Skins are inhibiting people from independent thought and ambition. He also recognizes that the Amphibs have altered their Skins and are plotting to take over the other two species. He is imprisoned for his beliefs, but escapes with the help of some other outcast friends, and in the company of a beautiful and vicious human girl who was raised by the Amphibs. He plans revolution, first, then to rescue an Earthman who has landed a spaceship on the planet. But things don't go quite as he hopes ... The main problem here is a disjointed plot, which shows signs of having been made up as the story was being written. A rigorous rewrite and a careful investigation of the central conflict might have been interesting.

"The Celestial Blueprint" (8500 words) Fantastic Universe, Jul 1954

This is a purely satirical story in which two rival men, both very powerful, contend. The one man asks the other to help him revenge himself on his home town -- by setting things up so that the town will witness the religious signs that portend the end times. The other man does so, but he plans also to take down his rival -- who has his own plans. None of it was really very interesting or believable.

"They Twinkled Like Stars" (6700 words) Fantastic Universe, Jan 1954

This is better. SF horror, in which a plague of lethargy leading eventually to catatonia is inflicting people. The protagonist is a hobo, due to the early stages of this plague. He is taken to a reeducation camp, but it turns out to have a different purpose. What's going on comes clear, via a flashback to the man's youth, and also via some significant names. Not bad at all.

"Totem and Taboo" (2600 words) F&SF, Dec 1954

Another decent story. More playing with names. The hero is named Jay Martin, and his fiancée, Kitty Phelan, wants him to quit drinking. He goes to a strange psychologist to treat his drinking problem, and the doctor leads him to get in touch with his totem animal. The names make it clear what sort of animal his totem is, and also his fiancée's animal -- and the likelihood they stay together. Cute.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Peter Watts

I've already posted a look at Peter Watt's tremendous novel Blindsight on this, his birthday. But I thought a selection of my Locus reviews of his short fiction was also worth doing. So here goes:

Locus, February 2008 (Review of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2)

The standout story is Peter Watts’s “The Eyes of God”, a classical simple extrapolation story, positing a means of both detecting and fixing mental abnormalities, such as (in the case of the protagonist) sexual attraction towards children. One question that arises is “Do you want to change who you are?”, especially if you have never acted on whatever dark impulses your brain might hold. Other questions are variously hinted by the story, which also (perhaps a bit heavy-handedly, though effectively I thought) slowly reveals the protagonist’s rather apposite personal backstory.

Locus, November 2009

Peter Watts's "The Island” (The New Space Opera 2) is less pure Space Opera than a piece of very far future hard SF. A slower than light ship which has spent millennia upon millennia placing "stargates" encounters a weird alien society that their newest gate will put at risk. The characters must decide – in the context of their own conflicts – whether to move the gate. The story has plenty of SFnal cool -- the far reaches of time, the strange alien society, the weirdness of the more or less contemporary humans who construct the gates -- and it closes with a bitter twist.

Locus, January 2010

And finally in Clarkesworld for January, Peter Watts offers “The Things”, an immediately significant title, opening with a significant list of characters: Blair, Copper, Childs. The narrator is “being” each of these. It is, in fact, a “Thing” as in the movie, or, more importantly, John W. Campbell’s classic novella “Who Goes There?” Watts’s story is honest and thought-provoking and chilling in presenting a version of this familiar story from the alien POV.

Locus, January 2014

And my favorite piece (in Twelve Tomorrows) is the closing story, “Firebrand”, by Peter Watts. The hook is spontaneous human combustion, and the catch is a woman working for a company that wants to be sure they are not connected with the apparent increase in that phenomenon. Of course that can't last – or can it? And what about the next thing? This is funny stuff, and behind it is some cute Sfnal speculation.

Locus, October 2014

And I thought the best story in Upgraded was “Collateral”, by Peter Watts, as uncompromising as ever for him. A soldier kills a bunch of harmless fishermen on a Pacific island when her “enhancement” deal with the perceived threat before her consciousness can intervene. This causes a PR problem for her (Canadian) government, which they deal with in part by treating her so that she makes emotionless, rigorously “ethical”, decisions … which has chilling, unexpected (and coldly logical) results. (I read this more or less as the terrible shooting of Michael Brown occurred just a few miles from my home, and the ideas resonated all the more with me as a result.)

Locus, January 2018

As ever, the latest of Jonathan Strahan’s Infinity series of original anthologies is essential reading. Infinity Wars concerns future war, obviously enough, with a noticeable focus on what might be called the “grunt” point of view. The two best stories, I though, came from Dominica Phetteplace and from Peter Watts. ... Watts, in “ZeroS”, posits a technology that turns soldiers into non-conscious actors – for it turns out the unconscious has spooky abilities. Which are pretty scary for the humans who end up sort of “riding” their unconscious – especially when they learn what their “zombie” selves are capable of. For an extra fillip of spookiness, the story is told from the POV of a soldier who actually died, and who has been resurrected by this particular technology – at an increasingly horrible price.

Locus, November 2018

Peter Watts’ “Kindred” (Infinity's End) is told in monologue, addressed from an entity -- I’ll leave it to the reader to learn what entity – to an intelligence it just created, a reconstructed human. It seems this is in the far future, and our monologist wants to discuss what it means to be Human, and why Humans war. For a good reason, that we learn in time. It’s another very philosophical story, and to excellent effect. And I must say I love the title, which has of course multiple reasons, one very cute.

Birthday Review: Blindsight, by Peter Watts

Blindsight, by Peter Watts

a review by Rich Horton

Today is Peter Watts' birthday. He's one of the most interesting and challenging SF writers of our time. I thought this novel Blindsight truly remarkable. I'm reposting what I wrote about that novel for my blog back when it came out.

Now to Blindsight, by Peter Watts. This new novel is told by Siri Keeton, member of an expedition to investigate an anomaly in the far Oort cloud. It seems that Earth was -- attacked? surveilled? -- by what people call "Fireflies", a rain of probes that appeared one night. Several waves of probes are sent from Earth to investigate, and Siri's ship, the Theseus, is the first manned investigator. Five members awake when nearing a brown dwarf that is apparently orbited by possibly alien devices.

The team members are a linguist, Susan James, who has (on purpose) multiple personalities; Isaac Szpindel, a cybernetically enhanced instrumentation specialist; Amanda Bates, a military specialist; and the leader, Jukka Sarasti, a vampire; as well as Keeton, who is an observer or intermediary -- there to translate the findings of the variously enhanced team members to terms "normal" humans can understand, and transmit them to Earth.

(Back a bit -- vampire? And this is hard SF? Yes -- Sarasti is a genetically reconstructed member of an offshoot species of predators from the dawn of humanity. Watts even works in the usefulness of crosses against vampires.)

Their mission is to figure out what the alien "invaders" are up to. And they do so by investigating a "big dumb object" they encounter orbiting a brown subdwarf in the Oort. But this investigation is not easy. On the one hand the "aliens", whoever or whatever they are, seem to communicate readily. But on the other hand they don't say much of real substance, and what they say isn't very welcoming. And direct investigation of the object is difficult: the environment is radiation drenched and otherwise terribly inhospitable, even when they aren't getting attacked. But they persist -- and what they eventually learn is very scary indeed.

The story also is concerned with the various natures of the main characters. A lot of time is devoted to Siri Keeton's backstory: he was an epileptic cured by having half his brain removed; his beloved father was often absent on important spook business, while his less-beloved mother was messing up his life and eventually retreating to "Heaven", a virtual space for uploaded consciousnesses. Siri himself, essentially sort of autistic, also has a difficult relationship with a childhood friend and with his only ever girlfriend. The point of all this, as with the shorter expositions of what makes the other expedition members tick, leads eventually to the real heart of the novel: examination of the nature and utility of consciousness. And that is what makes the novel ultimately fascinating -- the speculation, the ideas. In other words, it's "real SF", if "real SF" is supposed to be about ideas. The characters, indeed, are all fairly unpleasant. The action is interesting but not really rousing. The prose is fine but not by itself any reason to read the book. It's certainly not uplifting. But it is fascinating and full of sense of wonder.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of David Gerrold

Today is David Gerrold's 75th birthday. He certainly is worthy of a birthday compilation of short story reviews -- so here goes:

Locus, September 2005

David Gerrold offers a pair of linked stories, "A Quantum Bit Exists in Two States Simultaneously", the first one "On", the second one "Off". Each story is built around a conversation between the narrator (who much resembles Gerrold), and Dan Goodman, Pope Daniel the First of the Church of the Chocolate Bunny. In the first, the Pope declares the narrator to be a saint, and the two debate the characteristics of sainthood. In the second, the two men discuss evil people, and how to deal morally with them – say, if you were a time traveler with a chance to kill Hitler before he did anything truly evil. The second story worked better for me, the ending in particular being clever and thought-provoking. (And for all that they are linked, each story can be read independently.)

Locus, April 2007

Also from the April F&SF, David Gerrold’s “The Equally Strange Reappearance of David Gerrold” follows from his January story, in which Gerrold encountered a curious alien – perhaps. Here he returns with a few others to the place in California where he found the alien, hoping to find out more. Which he does – perhaps, or perhaps not. It’s quite amusing – though oddly varied in tone – a tonal variance which actually rather works.

Locus, February 2013

F&SF's first 2013 issue is a solid one. ... David Gerrold offers a fine little horror story in “Night Train to Paris”, in which a writer on said train encounters a man who tells him a story about how people seem to go missing from this train fairly often.

Locus, July 2015

David Gerrold is a thoroughgoing professional storyteller, and “Entanglements”, from the May-June
F&SF, is a great example. It's engaging from the go, telling of a writer named David Gerrold and his 70th birthday and how Pesky Dan Goodman (“Peskydang”) ruined it, between the rented giraffe and his unique gift. This is very funny stuff, and then comes the gift, which is, it turns out, a way to learn about yourself in parallel universes. And, without forgetting to entertain, the story takes on some gravitas, as Gerrold learns (predictably enough, I suppose, but believably as well) that all choices come with consequences, good, bad, and just different.

Locus, November 2016

This month at F&SF we have the first of their Special Author issues in almost a decade, this one honoring David Gerrold. His contributions include two novellas and a short memoir, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch adds a nice essay. The novellas are both enjoyable, and quite different from each other, though neither is as good as Gerrold's best recent work. “The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello” continues the story of the eponymous “hero” of Theodore Sturgeon's “Mr. Costello, Hero”. Mr. Costello comes to Haven, a beautiful and not very crowded colony planet. He has a plan to get rich – and, he says, make a lot of other people rich – by herding the dangerous horgs into a place where they can be economically butchered. The narrator is newly married into a large family, with a couple of husbands and four wives, and a good business harvesting glitter bushes. But somehow they get inveigled into Costello's schemes. Costello's charisma and dangerous manipulativeness are well-depicted, and the science-fictional touches – the social organization of Haven, the ecological details – are nicely done as well; and there's a nice resolution. “The Dunsmuir Horror” is the continuing adventures of our author himself, in the form of a letter to Gordon van Gelder. This story is about a city in California that doesn't exist, due to a terrible history involving the massacre of Native Americans – or does it exist? It's amusingly told, as we expect, but it rambles a bit too much.

Locus, July 2018

Even better – one of the best novellas of the year to date – is “Bubble and Squeak” (Asimov's, May-June), by David Gerrold and Ctein. Bubble and Squeak are James Liddle and Hu Son, who are planning to get married this day, then head to Hawaii on their honeymoon. But they hear that there has been a major earthquake in Hawaii – so no honeymoon – and then they realize that the earthquake means a tsunami is heading to their home in Los Angeles. Which means they need to get to higher ground pronto. Fortunately, James is a SCUBA instructor, and they head out quickly on their bikes, and with what they can carry, including some SCUBA equipment. Of course, everyone else is heading for higher ground as well … The story is simply terrifically exciting, involving a plausible mix of heroism, foolishness, brutality, luck, and intelligence, on their part and others, as they struggle to find a way to a safe place, and as various options are closed off over time. Really exciting work.