Birthday Review: The Finishing School, by Muriel Spark

Birthday Review: The Finishing School, by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark was born Muriel Camberg on February 1, 1918, and died at the age of 88 in 2006. She was born in Edinburgh, lived in Rhodesia after her marriage to Sidney Spark in 1937, and left him and their infant son after realizing that her husband was prone to violence. She returned to England in 1944. She began writing poetry and literary criticism after the War, and her first novel appeared in 1957. She may still be best known for her 1961 short novel (most of her novels were quite short) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Besides that novel, my favorites among her books are Memento Mori and Loitering With Intent.

Muriel Spark wrote strong novels up to the end of her life. Her last novel appeared when she was 86. This is The Finishing School. Like most of her novels, it is very short (in the neighborhood of 30,000 words), and sardonic in tone. It invites comparison with her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in being about a school and about the relationship of a teacher to the students. Indeed, the review I read in the Atlantic Monthly at the time it first appeared continued from its discussion of The Finishing School into a long reconsideration of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The Finishing School is set at College Sunrise, a school run by Rowland Mahler, a 29 year old who had a long ago success with a play and is now frustratedly trying to write a novel, and his wife Nina Parker. The school moves each term -- in part, it is suggested, to escape bill collectors. It is in Switzerland this term. There are nine students, apparently all around 17 years old, presumably having finished high school or the European equivalent, and now being "finished" -- either to head on to University or to other pursuits. One of the students, Chris, is writing an historical novel about Mary Queen of Scots.

The fulcrum of the novel is Rowland's jealousy of Chris. It becomes clear that this jealousy, ostensibly of the likely smashing success of his novel, has a homoerotic component. (Even though both parties are apparently heterosexual -- Rowland is married, though his wife is having an affair and plans to leave him, while Chris seduces several women during the course of the book.) Rowland spends much of his time fantasizing about killing Chris. Chris, meanwhile, ignores his classes, writes his novel in secret, and entertains visits from publishers and film producers.

Flitting around this central conflict are the problems of the other students and staff. One girl plans to become a minister (shades of the nun-to-be in Prime), another's father is suspected of smuggling, a couple are trying to arrange to get married to one or another of the boy students. The staff are involved as well, sleeping with the students on occasion, and planning their own futures. And the neighbors, a young woman and her somewhat older nephew, are also drawn into the intrigue.

It is told, as ever with Spark, in a very spare fashion. Several months pass quickly, odd people are described doing odd things in the most deadpan of fashions, and by the end we know them fairly well and we know their fates. It is dryly funny, enjoyable to read and archly believable despite all the unusual characters. It is not, I think, nearly as good as Spark's best work -- in part it is not really about as much, I don't think -- but it is a fine piece of fiction.

The Translator, by John Crowley

The Translator, by John Crowley

a review by Rich Horton

John Crowley is one of my favorite authors, but I am familiar primarily with his Science Fiction and Fantasy. He has also written impressive realistic (or near-realistic) fiction. I finally rectified a major omission in my reading by getting to The Translator, from 2002. (I still haven't read Four Freedoms.)

The Translator is set primarily in 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Christa (Kit) Malone is a new student at a Midwestern college (it could almost have been my school, the University of Illinois, though it could have been Illinois State, or somewhere else, or purposely unspecified). She is an aspiring poet -- indeed, the book opens with a prologue in which she meets JFK at a ceremony recognizing high school poets.

But I should say first that the story is framed from three decades in the future, in the newly non-Soviet Russia, where Kit is visiting St. Petersburg, for a conference on a poet named Falin. Falin had been exiled to the US, and had taught briefly at Kit's college -- and Kit's first book of poems included a section of translations of Falin's poems. At this conference, then, she tells the story of her involvement with Falin to her hosts. We also know, because of this future viewpoint, that Falin disappeared shortly after the main events of the book -- he drove away from the college, and his car was found in a river -- he was presumed killed accidentally, perhaps a suicide, though of course some people assume murder, or even that he escaped to a new life.

Back in the past -- Kit's life is more tangled than just being a college freshman. She's  late to enroll, because she became pregnant in high school, and had to delay matriculation while at a Catholic institution having her (eventually stillborn) child. And her much loved brother Ben has joined the Army, and gone to Vietnam, in the "advisors" period before it became a real war (as if!) -- and Ben is killed, in what the Army calls an accident. All this is essentially prologue to the heart of story -- but powerful and very affecting prologue.

At school Kit decides, partly at random, to take the class in Poetry that Falin is teaching. This leads to her getting closely involved with him (inappropriately so, one might say). One thing they do together, of course, is work on translating some of his poems. Kit also learns a good deal about Falin's early life in Russia -- a rather horrifying time as basically a feral child, lost or abandoned by his parents and "adopted" by a group of similarly situated children. And something, too, of some of Falin's major work, particularly a series of poems about a sort of alternate, or parallel, Russia.At the same time Kit gets involved with a group of radicalized students (their main cause is Fair Play for Cuba.)

That's the first part of the book -- part II brings events to a climax, centered around the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book foregrounds the feeling people apparently had at the time -- that a nuclear war, and even the end of the world, might really be imminent. All along, as well, Kit's feelings for Falin, and his for her, are intensifying. It's never entirely clear whether they actually have sex -- it is clear that Falin is concerned that his feelings for Kit are wrong, though the real source of the danger he feels she's in is also a bit ambiguous. For Kit has been approached by a man who is apparently a US agent of some kind -- it seems that some people are wondering if Falin is really as anti-Soviet as he appears -- could his exile be a front, and could he be a spy?

All this could be pretty mundane -- and still effective -- but in this novel it is heightened -- by Crowley's amazing prose, for one thing, but also by the themes behind the themes -- the nature of translation, for one; and the responsibility of poets -- and everyone -- to intervene, to be the better angels of their nations, as opposed to the darker ruling angels. In the end this novel is quite beautiful, quite profound, powerful and moving and a plea, above all, for peace, and for what understanding is possible between people who can only speak through translations.

To finish, perhaps a couple of quotes. Here's Falin, in class, speaking about Housman's poem usually called "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now": "do you see: the only other figure in the poem is very last word, and it compares white blossoms to tree in winter, covered with snow. With snow, when all blossoms and leaves will be gone. In the very moment of his delight the poem reminds him, and us, that time will pass, blossoms will fall. ... And it may well be that it was not Housman's thought but the poem itself that produced this meaning, that the poet reached next-to-last line and this rhyme arose of its own accord, with all these meanings. Yes I am sure, sure it did. A gift that came because of rhyme, came because rhyme exists. Because poetry is what it is. And because this poet was faithful." That's pretty significant, of course, because in translating rhymed poetry the poem may give you a different rhyme -- with a different meaning. And what is most faithful? To accept the new meaning in the new language? Or to force what you can of the original meaning in the original language, even if that betrays poetry in the new language?

And another quote from Falin, in a letter to Kit: "Well we have kissed at that frontier, my love, haven't we? We ourselves. I have come into a world where West is away, where freedom does not rhyme with fate, and where alone you can be found. So it is enough, and must be; for unlike Alice I know no way back."

There's much more of course, bravery and sadness and love, and a whole lot of seamlessly fresh and lovely prose. A wonderful novel.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Will McIntosh

Today is Will McIntosh's birthday. Starting not long after I started at Locus, he produced an impressive spate of really fine short stories, including "Bridesicle", which won the Hugo. He turned to novels (of course! -- though he still publishes fine shorter work) in 2011, both YA and adult. Here's a selection of my Locus reviews of his work:

Locus, March 2005

Will McIntosh, in "Totems" (Interzone, February-March), offers a fine human/alien love story, concentrating on a human woman desperately trying to recover the hundreds of carvings made by her alien lover – for a rather strange reason.

Locus, November 2005

Interzone continues to refine its design, in particular its artwork. The October issue, #200 in the magazine’s impressive history, is really spiffy-looking. There is more fiction than usual as well, and the quality is very high. Will McIntosh’s “Soft Apocalypses” is set in the near future. The narrator has broken up with his girlfriend and is going to a VR speed-date – meeting a bunch of women virtually for brief interviews. McIntosh sharply portrays his character – basically decent if a bit shallow – his past, his old girlfriend, and a few of the women he meets; and at the same time sharply portrays the decaying future. Very well done.

Locus, November 2006

Aeon is an electronically distributed magazine with a provocative personality of its own. They publish a mix of poetry, features including science articles by Rob Furey and essays by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and a wide variety of generally exotic fiction. I thought the best story in issue eight was Will McIntosh’s “Oxy”, set in a far future where environmental change and human change result in people with distinctly separate personalities coexisting.

Locus, November 2007

On Spec has now reached its 69th number. In this issue I really enjoyed Will McIntosh’s “Perfect Violet”, one of a few recent stories dealing with the idea of selling and buying memories. Kiko is an impoverished young woman barely scraping by by selling her memories – but the losses are terrible, including a romance that was quashed by her father. Hope comes when her former lover finds her again … and when she can come to term with her memories (or lack thereof) of her father.

Locus, December 2007

Somewhat depressingly, I note that a newish online magazine, Darker Matter, is closing up shop after 5 issues. Number five was their best, with in particular a good far future story by Jason Stoddard, “True History”, about manipulation of history and identity by posthumans, and a fine Will McIntosh piece, “Young Love on the Drowned Side of the City”, set after a plague has mostly wiped out the adults and the surviving children have reached their teens. The protagonist is shown playing irresponsible teenaged games with his cohort, but his relationship with the girl he’d like to be his girlfriend shows perhaps a bit more to his character.

And to a true survivor in online SF: Strange Horizons. In October Will McIntosh contributes a lovely sweet romantic fantasia, “One Paper Airplane Graffito Love Note”, about a sailmaker in a timeless sort of town who falls in love with a sculptor. But the sculptor has two issues – she believes her life story is being repeated stolen for fiction, and … well, let the story reveal that. The central love story is not anything new – but nicely told – what makes the story special is the grace notes, such as the sudden fashion of graffiti confessions that takes over this town.

Locus, January 2008

From Asimov’s for January, There is also nice work from Will McIntosh: “Unlikely”, a sweet story about a odd statistical coincidence: if the two main characters spend time together, it seems that their city’s accident rate decreases. Or so the statistics say. Which means that Joseph and Tuesday are thrown together in the name of science – “Not that this was a date”, though. Oh yeah?

Locus, May 2008

Will McIntosh’s “The Fantasy Jumper” (Black Static, February) has a striking and rather horrifying central idea – at a sort of fair or carnival one booth allows you to create an artificial person, who can look like just about anyone – yourself, your girlfriend, a tailored creation, even a celebrity (if the license is available). This “person”, then, jumps to its death. The story follows a few customers – a rather creepy guy who takes all too much pleasure in the deaths; a guy who just wants to talk to the women he “creates”, and a girl whose girlfriend has broken up with her, and who finds a way to use the booth as a sort of revenge. Short, very imaginative, and powerful.

Locus, June 2008

Will McIntosh’s “Linkworlds”, published in two parts in March at Strange Horizons is a quite intriguing story representing a somewhat fashionable new sort of SF: stories told in a straightforwardly science fictional manner, set in quite artificial universes. This story is told from the POV of an autistic (it seemed to me) young man (named Tweel, oddly enough, though I could not detect any other link to “A Martian Odyssey”) living on a world inside a bubble. Various worlds, of differing natures, float through this bubble, occasionally coming close enough to another world to “link” and to allow trade and travel between the worlds. But trade and travel, alas, also imply the potential of war – a potential unexpectedly enhanced when Tweel is able to help improve the navigation of the “linkworlds”. He and his adopted world must find a peaceful response to the threat of conquest. Nice, clever, work, if somehow so artificial that the ending seems not quite meaningful.

Locus, September 2008

Will McIntosh continues to impress with stories showing an impressive imagination. In “Midnight Blue” (Asimov's, September) finding curious spheres in the right comination confers special powers on people. These spheres, once common, have become very rare, leading to a market for them – with, again, the rich generally getting richer. Jeff is a highschool kid, not one of the rich or popular ones, but when he finds a particularly rare sphere, his life changes. What works best is the tricky resolution McIntosh engineers. Like Rosenblum, this story is more about economics at its heart than about its fantastical idea.

Locus, January 2009

At the January Asimov’s “Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh is a rather cynical examination of the prospects for resurrection of cryonically preserved people. It seems the expensive process must be sponsored, and one way is to agree to marry whoever revives you … which is a bit of a problem for the lesbian heroine, who rather hopes that her preserved lover can also be revived. Nothing brilliant here, but a clever look at a potential downside of this speculative tech.

Locus, January 2013

This whole issue of Asimov's is quite strong. “Over There”, by Will McIntosh, is first rate SF horror, told effectively in parallel point of view, as a physics researcher runs an experiment which seems to split the universe into parallel streams – though people can experience what their other universe counterpart is experiencing. But one universe is menaced by unexplained “dragons”, which freeze anyone they touch – leading to terrible agony for the counterparts in the other universe. The researcher and his wife end up on the run in both places, as people look for revenge on the people responsible for this disaster – and things are complicated further because the wife is pregnant. In the end, the Sfnal aspect is simply an enabling strategy for a wrenching personal drama – and a very effective one.

Locus, March 2016

Lightspeed's January issue features "The Liar's Tour", by Will McIntosh, which posits the means of visiting the souls of the dead via cryogenic sleep. Ben has been obsessively revisiting his dead girlfriend ... which is a problem for his relationship with his live wife. Things proceed to an affecting and believable conclusion. The title concept (about a tour that Ben's girlfriend conducts through Savannah) is pretty cool, and it's one of those stories with no villains -- just earned sadness.

Locus, April 2017

Even better, in the March-April Asimovs – one of the stories of the year so far – is “Soulmates, Inc.”, by Will McIntosh. Daniel is recovering from a breakup with Emily, and so he starts using Soulmates, and he gets a really intriguing contact from Winnie, whose profile seems absolutely perfect for him. They start talking online, and things are going wonderfully, but somehow Winnie is never available for a face-to-face meetup. We can figure what’s going on quickly – and with Emily’s help, so can Daniel. He realizes “Winnie” is artificial, only an online construct, and he assumes at first that she was created by Soulmates to lure him to sign up, but after a while he realizes she’s an independent AI. He reacts in anger, and takes steps to get her erased. But what if “Winnie” can take revenge as well? The story is scary, and morally provocative, and resolved with honesty. Daniel in particularly is a wholly believable character, really well captured.

Locus, May 2018

In Lightspeed for April Will McIntosh’s “What is Eve?” is an enjoyable YA-flavored story of a group of smart students sent off to a strange isolated school, where they encounter their new classmate, Eve, a very odd – and scary – creature indeed. Readers immediately will gather that she’s an alien – but what sort of alien and why is the question. The answer is clever and interesting – and Eve is given a meaningful voice: nice work, if the viewpoint character’s actions seem a bit predictable.

Birthday Review: The Kestrel, by Lloyd Alexander

Birthday Review: The Kestrel, by Lloyd Alexander

Lloyd Alexander was born January 30, 1924. He died in 2007. He is best known for his Chronicles of Prydain, a five book series beginning with The Book of Three. (A not very successful movie from Disney's dark period, The Black Cauldron, was based on these books.)

These were absolutely foundational YA books for me -- I adored them, read them multiple times. Taran Wanderer was my favorite. They are based (a bit loosely) on the Mabinogion cycle, in a sense the Matter of Wales. I didn't know any of that when I was young, mind you. And, curiously, I didn't read anything else by Alexander. I haven't reread the Prydain books -- I should, and I suspect they hold up just fine.

Anyway, I finally got to his next most famous (I think) series a couple of decades back. These are the Westmark books. In honor of his birthday, here's what I posted about the second book of that series on my SFF Net newsgroup back then.

A while back I read Westmark, by Lloyd Alexander. That was a YA book et in an imaginary kingdom, at a time roughly corresponding to, oh, the 17th Century? [The following paragraphs will contain spoilers for Westmark.] A young man from a provincial town ends up in trouble with the evil minister of the distracted King: the minister is suppressing freedom of the press, and the young man is a printer's devil.  When his boss gets arrested, he barely escapes, and wanders throughout the country (called Westmark), learning much.  He makes friends with a fiery revolutionary, and with a beggar girl. (The reason the King is distracted, by the way, is that his daughter has disappeared long since. Bells should ring in any reader's head at the encounter with the beggar girl.) By the end, the King is dead, the minister exiled, and the beggar girl is installed in her rightful spot as Queen, and the hero, Theo, is her fiance. I felt Westmark was interesting, but that the resolution was a bit too easy and convenient.

A fairly short time after the events of Westmark, the action of the sequel, The Kestrel, commences. The Barons are mad at the new Queens' reforms, the fiery revolutionaries are convinced she isn't going far enough, and Theo is restless. He heads into the back provinces, and finds himself nearly killed, as an invasion, fostered by a traitorous Baron, a traitorous General, and the evil minister from Book 1, has begun. The neighbouring country, Regia, with the promise of an easy victory over the General's forces, has crossed the border. But the Queen, who has implausibly snuck out of the palace to try to find Theo, ends up rallying her army after the General's surrender to Regia. Meantime Theo ends up with Florian, the previous book's revolutionary, and he decides to join a newly formed guerilla army, intended at first to harry the Regian army, but eventually to force the Queen to further concessions.

This book pushes its characters a bit harder than Westmark: carefully selected minor characters (whose red shirts are easily detectable) are killed, and the major characters, especially Theo, are made to see the evils of war, and their own potential for violence, fairly effectively. But still, the resolution is too easy, too convenient, too brisk. And certain implausibilities (mainly the Queen blithely sneaking around in costume, just about anywhere) did rather annoy me.  It's not a bad book, but it is flawed.

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.

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(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.