Birthday Review: Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury

Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury (2001)

A Review by Rich Horton

(Cover by Donato Giancola)

Back in 1995 Donald Kingsbury published a novella, "Historical Crisis", in Gregory Benford's anthology Far Futures, a pretty good collection of 5 stories about the very far future of humans.  This is the third to become a novel (Charles Sheffield's "At the Eschaton" became Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Poul Anderson's "Genesis" became the novel of the same name.  I don't remember Greg Bear's "Judgement Engine" very well, maybe it became a novel, too.  I'm fairly sure Haldeman won't turn "For White Hill" into a novel, though it's an impressive novelette, based on a Shakespeare sonnet.)

I quite enjoyed "Historical Crisis", though I found it a bit melodramatic, and a bit too rapid.  I also noticed immediately that it was based in an odd way on Asimov's Foundation universe.  As I recall, no mention of that was made in the anthology, and I wondered if Kingsbury had gotten permission -- the similarities are so close as to require that, I would have thought.  Psychohistorical Crisis, at any rate, is advertised by Tor as being based on the Foundation stories, so there is no question of concealment.  It's also much slower than "Historical Crisis" -- so the "too rapid" problem is solved, possibly too well.  (I found the novel always enjoyable to read, but also easy to put down -- it does take quite a while to get where it's going, though the journey is fun, and it's long -- about 230,000 words.)

The book is set from 14790 GE to 14810 GE.  This is about 2700 years after the death of the "Founder" and the near simultaneous establishment of the equivalent of the "First Foundation" on a planet called Faraway.  It's about 1600 years after the formal establishment of the Pax Pscholaris, the "Second Empire" under the rule of the Psychohistorians called Pscholars, the equivalent to Asimov's Second Foundation.  Thankfully, Kingsbury's universe does not include the equivalent of (ack, ptui!) Asimov's evil hive mind, Gaia, nor does it include a robot like R. Daneel Olivaw pulling the strings (except for a cute reference, in which a silly robot character is named Danny-boy).  Also thankfully, Kingsbury recognizes that the rule of the Pscholars is stifling.  Indeed, he is very interested in treating Psychohistory with some seriousness, and in asking how well the secret society of Pscholars can really keep psychohistory secret, and how ultimately stable their rule will be.

The key variation Kingsbury plays on Asimov's idea is to replace the Second Foundation's (ack, ptui!) psychic powers with a technological means of providing them with similar power.  In Kingsbury's future, Asimov's Mule is replaced by a fellow called Cloun the Stubborn, who gets ahold of a device which can be used to control a person (by direct neural input): the tuned psychic probe.  It's still pretty squishy science, but not ridiculous.  The scientists of Faraway (and elsewhere) develop the psychic probe into something called the "familiar", or "fam" -- sort of a PDA with extra memory and processing which links directly to the brain.  You adjust to it from the age of 3, and your personal adjustment theoretically makes it impossible for anyone else to exercise control over you through it.  Pretty much everybody in rich societies has one, and indeed it is all but impossible to get around Splendid Wisdom (Kingsbury's version of Trantor) without it.

The story begins with the trial of a young psychohistorian named Eron Osa.  He is condemned to death, and summarily executed -- by having his fam destroyed.  His body, with its near useless "wet" brain, is allowed to live.  He cannot even understand his crime -- all the data about it was in his fam.
Soon he is desperately trying to relearn normal living skills, as he also begins to receive strange messages.

The story soon is following four points of view, 20 years in the past.  We follow Eron Osa as a 12 year old boy on the planet Agander, as he yearns to become a psychohistorian.  We follow Eron's tutor, Murek Kapor, who is in secret Hiranimus Scogil, the member of a secret group trying to develop psychohistory independently and to counteract the Pscholars' efforts.  We follow Admiral Hahukum Konn, the second most powerful Pscholar, and an enthusiast for ancient weapons systems, as he searches for a worthy student to learn his eccentric interpretation of Psychohistory.  And we follow the elderly Hyperlord Kikaju Jama, an antiques dealer who is interested in upsetting the static social order, especially after he discovers a strange device that shows the stars of the Galaxy, and that hints at a secret planet hidden by the Pscholars.  We also follow a fifth thread, as events in the "present" lead toward a climax.

Eron is soon led by Scogil to Faraway, to learn proper Physics, from where Hahukum Konn recruits him.  Scogil also runs into Kikaju Jama, and they jointly find the secret planet, which hides a greater secret: a trove of ancient psychohistorical lore.  So Scogil and his society join tentatively with Jama's group, and begin to use their new knowledge of Psychohistory to try to slowly destabilize the Second Empire.  All this time Konn is teaching Eron Osa, including a trip to Rith (i.e. Earth) where they reconstruct a B-17 for fun and psychohistorical exercise. And Osa begins to develop a theory which will be unpopular both with Konn and with the more hidebound Pscholars.

All is eventually in place for the action of the climax, which is exciting, even though full of math, and which reveals Kingsbury doing some interesting thinking.  It's really quite fun, and the world Kingsbury creates is fascinating.  There is a lot of somewhat strange sex -- Kikaju Jama, in his 60s, likes to seduce teenage girls (as in about 13), while Eron Osa at age 13 or so has affairs with girls his age and women twice his age.  It should be said that in this society pubescent boys and girls both appear to be considered eligible for consenting sexual activity, and there is no hint that any of the sex in the book is nonconsenting (with perhaps a tiny, plot important, wiggle).  I quite liked Kingsbury's names: the Frightfulperson Otaria of the Calmer Sea being a particular example.  Fun stuff, and in many ways an improvement on its model.

Birthday Review: Simulacron-3 and various short stories, by Daniel F. Galouye

Daniel F. Galouye was born on this date in 1920. He was reasonably prolific in the magazines from 1952 until the mid 60s. He wrote only 5 novels, at least two of which are very well worth reading (Hugo nominee Dark Universe, and Simulacron-3 (aka Counterfeit World), which was the basis of the rather good movie The Thirteenth Floor.) He had war injuries (he was a test pilot) that curtailed his production and probably contributed to his early death in 1976. I find his work often original and enjoyable, if decidedly uneven. Much of it was published in what were considered second tier magazines -- particularly Imagination in the '50s, and Amazing/Fantastic in the '60s; and he is one of the reasons I have a considerable fondness for those two magazines.

I should note re the term "second tier" -- this was the perception of Amazing/Fantastic, behind that so-called "Big 3" of Astounding/Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF. This reflected in part the historical reputation of Amazing -- especially after Ray Palmer's fascination with the Shaver Mystery (and the circulation that that generated) imploded the magazine's reputation (which did not improve through Paul Fairman's fairly indifferent editorial stretch); and in part  generally lower pay rates. But Cele Goldsmith managed through her energy, and her encouragement of new writers, and her taste, to bring the 'zines to a competitive level with the top three. (Especially as Analog was still in the long slide of the late Campbell era.)

These are a number of reviews I did of his short stories for my "Retro-Reviews" of old magazines, along with my blog post about my favorite of his novels, Simulacron-3.

Galaxy, October 1954

Finally, Daniel F. Galouye's "Jebbaburba" (5000 words) is about an alien diplomat's son, who has the ability to teleport anywhere, much to the disconcertment of the neighborhood women. The story goes on about efforts to make him stop -- with a slightly unexpected result when he is finally stopped. Pretty minor stuff, not Galouye anywhere near his more interesting peak.

Galaxy, June 1959

Daniel F. Galouye's "Soft Touch" (6000 words) is about a beneficial mutation that produces "Quids", exceptionally moral people who cannot stop themselves from helping others when asked. The hero, despite being poor, is victimized by a co-worker who cadges loans from him, and eventually is manipulated into confessing the other guy's embezzlement. "Quids" are hated by normals, and he is at risk of being beat up and driven out of town, along with his non-prejudiced normal wife, but then a (rather deus-ex-machina like) solution is offered. Minor work.

If, September 1960

Galouye's "Kangaroo Court" is a decent look at the problem of crime in a fully telepathic society. A space miner wakes up from a drunk and finds his partner dead, obviously murdered, in their locked spaceship. Logically, he should be guilty but he has no memory of killing the man, a good friend. There is a plausible motive: they've just made a huge strike. The telepathic society immediately "hears" his thoughts and "convicts" him of murder, and is ready to force him to kill himself, but a sort of ruling body intervenes and insists that there is no absolute proof. The man's brother, a successful psychiatrist, with whom he's had a rocky relationship, offers to help ... Of course, he's not really guilty -- but if anyone else had done it, they would be telepathically "admitting" guilt. (It is presumed that the intoxicated state of the protagonist led him to forget.) Galouye's way around this problem is a bit strained, but it has its interesting aspects. An OK story, not a great one.

If, September 1961

"Mirror Image" reminds me of the Borges bit about creatures that live in mirrors (the source material for Mieville's "The Tain"). A scientist becomes convinced that mirrors are a link to another dimension, similar but not identical to ours, and he proves it by creating a device to amplify the differences. But of course he is regarded as insane. The whole thing just seemed strained to me.

Fantastic, February 1962

"A Silence of Wings" is a somewhat more typical story, and, like much that appeared in Fantastic in those days, it's Science Fiction, though with a central idea that is kind of on the Fantasy side. Humans have come to a new world that they want to bring into their interstellar confederation, to be a productive culture. The problem is, the intelligent species on this world, the Soarers, has no interest in productivity. They just fly, and they have enough to eat, and are same from the local predators mostly. The story is told through a Soarer's POV, and a human's. The human is depressed at the notion that the peaceful Soarers will have their society disturbed, through this boss's action. The story turns on the fact that it's physically impossible for the Soarers to fly -- they are humanoid, of fairly normal size, and their wings are fairy-like, gossamer. They fly only because they believe they can, but they are intelligent, so if they are told its impossible, they'll stop. Which is what happens. (I found that an interesting but multiply imlausible notion.) This leads to disaster, for the Soarers but also the humans, and our human hero must come up with a ploy to restore the Soarers' belief in their powers. I tend to enjoy Galouye's work, but this is a mixed bag, with elements of interest but not really working.

Amazing, July 1964

"Mindmate" is the story of a crusading congressman, Ronald Winston, who is kidnapped and killed, after having his mind impressed on that of Warren Sharp, a lookalike criminal who will do the bidding of Leonard Infeld, the head of the so-called "Fun Houses", where a process called cortical stimulation provides a sort of virtual entertainment. Winston is convinced the process is dangerous and addictive, and he's leading a congressional investigation. Meanwhile, his wife has been secretely visiting funhouses, and his hostility to them has messed up their marriage. Sharp as Winston is supposed to stop the investigation, but he finds himself somehow having unexpected thoughts -- apparently those of Winston. (He also forces himself on Winston's wife, or so it is implied.) The story turns on that process (the way the impressed mind can take over the host mind), as well as on a couple of twists, concerning Winston's wife and her unexpected pregnancy, and concerning some truly sinister potential uses of the cortical stimulation process. It doesn't make a ton of sense if examined too closely, but it's still an effective and enjoyable piece.

Simulacron-3

Daniel F. Galouye's Simulacron-3 gained some notoriety a few years ago when a movie was made based on it -- The Thirteenth Floor. I haven't seen the movie, though it got some modestly approving reviews. [I did later see it, and liked it quite a bit.] It came out at roughly the same time as The Matrix and as a movie I liked much more, Dark City, and it shared some of the same themes.

The story opens with Doug Hall attending a party given by his boss, Walter Siskin. Hall has just been promoted to replace his dead friend and mentor at Reactions, Inc., which is developing a new simulation to evaluate consumer reactions. The simulation is populated by virtual people who are exposed to advertisements and such, their reactions analyzed. Siskin sinisterly wishes to use this simulation for political purposes -- he believes that he will be able to control the country if he can predict voter response to various approaches. Siskin is opposed by the Reaction Monitors group -- a seemingly ubiquitous group of pollsters, who will be put out of business by the new sim. Hall is made uneasy by Siskin's political ambitions, himself.

Then Hall starts to notice some strange things. His mentor's notes contained what appeared to be a cryptic message to him, which disappeared. He remembers some other colleagues that nobody else can recall in any way. A psychiatrist friend thinks he's mad. His mentor's beautiful daughter seems to run hot and cold with him -- and to be very concerned about his crazy ideas. And what about the time they drove out of the city and all of a sudden the road just stopped with nothing beyond?

It's no big surprise what's going on, even if the back of the edition I have didn't give it away, and even without the references I've given to Dark City and The Matrix. Hall and all the people he knows are themselves virtual creations in a simulated world. Much of the resistance to his simulation efforts is orchestrated from the "real world" (or is it?), which doesn't want to lose its Reaction Monitors, the real reason for the simulation. Hall finds himself traveling "down" to his simulated world, and encountering (sometimes sadistic) evidence of someone from the "real" world taking over his brain. It's mostly pretty well handled, and the questions raised are interesting. The resolution is perhaps just a bit too convenient, too much fulfilling of wishes. The characters are mostly fairly stock. Still, a fine story.

Hugo Recommendations, 2019: Short Story

Time for my yearly Hugo recommendations. I'm beginning with Short Story:

Short Story

A long list of candidates:

Octavia Cade, "The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish" (Kaleidotrope, Winter/18)

Siobhan Carroll, “The War of Light and Shadow, in Five Dishes”, (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 3/15/18)

Adam-Troy Castro, "The Unnecessary Parts of the Story" (Analog, 9-10/18)

Phenderson Djèlí Clark, "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" (Fireside, 2/18)

Beth Goder, "How to Identify an Alien Shark" (Fireside Quarterly, 7/18)

Alix E. Harrow, " A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies" (Apex, 2/17)

Kathleen Jennings, "The Heart of Owl Abbas" (Tor.com, 4/11/18)

Rahul Kanakia, “Weft”, (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 4/12/18)

Rich Larson, "Carouseling" (Clarkesworld, 4/18)

Rich Larson, “Meat and Salt and Sparks”, (Tor.com, 6/6/18)

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Firelight”, (Paris Review, 9/28/17)
P. H. Lee, "A House by the Sea", (Uncanny, 9-10/18)

Yoon Ha Lee, "The Starship and the Temple Cat”, (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2/1/18)

Marissa Lingen, "Finding Their Footing”, (Analog, 5-6/18)

S. Quioyi Lu, “Mother Tongues”, (Asimov’s, 1-2/18)

Arkady Martine, “The Hydraulic Emperor”, (Uncanny, 1-2/18)

Heather Morris, “A Slip in the Slice”, (Kaleidotrope, Winter/18)

Mari Ness, “The Ceremony”, (Fireside Quarterly, 7/18)

Annalee Newitz, “The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto”, (Robots vs. Fairies)

Paul Park, “Creative Nonfiction”, (Asimov’s, 5-6/18)

Sarah Pinsker, "The Court Magician" (Lightspeed, 1/18)

Josh Pearce, “Such Were the Faces of the Living Creatures”, (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2/15/18)

Hannu Rajaniemi, “A Portrait of Salai”, (Infinity’s End)

Robert Reed, “Love Songs for the Very Awful”, (Asimov’s, 3-4/18)

Alexandra Renwick, "Because Reasons" (Asimov’s, 3-4/18)

Ryan Row, "Superbright" (Interzone, 7-8/18)

Lavie Tidhar, “The Buried Giant” (Robots vs. Fairies)

Cadwell Turnbull, "Jump" (Lightspeed, 9/18)

Peter Watts, “Kindred” (Infinity’s End)

Rick Wilber, "Today is Today" (Stonecoast Review, Summer/18)

S. Woodson, “Lime and the one Human” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, 7/18)

As ever, a lot of good choices. Here’s the set from which I’ll choose my nominees:

Octavia Cade, "The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish" (Kaleidotrope, Winter/18) – About a shop where you can get turned into a goldfish for a pretty fair price – if you need to escape the world for a time. And the narrator, having picked the pocket of the wrong man, does need to get away. The story lets us learn as we go along the way this magic works, and how and when one becomes human again, and also, incidentally, reveals a little twist about the relationship of the narrator, her girlfriend, and the girlfriend’s grandmother.

Alix E. Harrow, " A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies" (Apex, 2/17) -- Told by a librarian (“There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches” – no prizes for guessing which category our narrator fits), as she encounters a teenaged boy who becomes obsessed with a particular pretty bad fantasy novel – perhaps because he needs escape – any escape. Witches know ways to escape … but that’s against the rules, and librarians are rule followers. Grounded and quite moving.

Kathleen Jennings, "The Heart of Owl Abbas" (Tor.com, 4/11/18) -- About a songwriter and a mechanical singer and the Little Emperor in Palace Aster of Owl Abbas. Which audiences are really most important for the singer? Or for her city, or her muse? It’s a lovely bittersweet story, and beautifully written.

Rich Larson, "Carouseling" (Clarkesworld, 4/18) – About an artist and a physicist who, when they’re apart, use a virtual reality sort of system to interact. Then the physicist’s current experiment goes disastrously long, and the virtual reality connection is all the artist has of his lover. Larson handles things beautifully and steers the story to a proper and touching ending.

Arkady Martine, “The Hydraulic Emperor”, (Uncanny, 1-2/18) – Like several strong pieces this year, it’s about future art, and (in this case), about art aliens like -- neat stuff, with nice descriptions of the future art, and well-turned interactions between its protagonist and a rival.

Hannu Rajaniemi, “A Portrait of Salai”, (Infinity’s End) -- a rather philosophical piece, set in a much altered far future system where it seems all of humanity’s Great Projects have failed, and the few who remain (having resisted the Great Temptation of Upload) fight the anomie of the apparent realization that there is nothing new under the (damaged) Sun. But perhaps there can be? That’s the question the story asks. Very cool stuff!

Lavie Tidhar, “The Buried Giant” (Robots vs. Fairies) – a human boy runs away, wanting to become a “real boy”, i. e., a robot. He has dangerous adventures, meeting for example a robot cat and a robot fox, and a dead girl and a manshonyagger (I always like the odd Cordwainer Smith reference!) … It’s lovely and moving and perfectly framed.

Peter Watts, “Kindred” (Infinity’s End) – a very philosophical story, and to excellent effect, told as a monlogue from a far future AI to a reconstructed human from our time (we recognize him!), wondering why humans war.

Birthday Review: Stories of Mary Robinette Kowal

Today is Mary Robinette Kowal's birthday ... I just read her enjoyable novel The Calculating Stars, but here's a set of my Locus reviews of her short fiction, a varied and quite impressive lot:

Locus, February 2006

Strange Horizons opens 2006 with a series of solid shorter pieces. Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Portrait of Ari” is a bittersweet tale of a couple, one of whom is perhaps not quite human, and how that fact alters their happy relationship.

Locus, February 2008

The Australian popular science magazine Cosmos publishes SF stories each issue, and also occasionally features stories on their website (sometimes reprints from the magazine, sometimes exclusively online). In February/March 2007,  they featured an excellent piece by Mary Robinette Kowal, “For Solo Cello, Op. 12”, about a cellist who has lost his hand, but is given a chance to restore it – except that the cost is very high indeed.

Locus, November 2007

Two further Summer issues from the small press: both from magazines distinguished both by longevity and attractiveness. Talebones’ 35th issue has perhaps slightly more of a horror focus than usual – at any rate, my favorite story is a clever horror piece, Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Death Comes But Twice”, in which a man finds a way to be revived from death, hopefully to live forever – but there is a terrible catch.

Locus, August 2009

At Asimov’s for August...A strong issue also includes Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Consciousness Problem”, an effective look at the identity problem as applied to clones with memories matching their originator’s: here dealing with two married scientists, and the feelings of the clone of the husband.

Locus, November 2009

There’s more good stuff at Tor.com. Mary Robinette Kowal’s “First Flight” is a time travel story, with the gimmick being that people can only travel to events in their own lifetime (an idea I think Philip K. Dick used once … otherwise it’s new to me). Eleanor Louise Jackson, at well over 100 years old, is chosen to go back and witness the Wright brothers’ first flight, but in so doing she runs afoul of guidelines concerning interacting with historical people. But Eleanor has her own ideas of her duty to history and to people – which Kowal unspools cutely.

Locus, January 2010

Another subscription-based online magazine is Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. The November issue includes a nice enough, but not quite convincing, near future SF story from Mary Robinette Kowal, “Body Language”, in which a puppeteer is enlisted to control a robot dog she had helped create deliver the ransom for a kidnapped boy. I enjoyed it, but with reservations, particularly about the somewhat ordinary kidnap plot, complete with ordinary twists.

Locus, September 2010

The other two stories in the September Asimov's are also strong in a very nice issue. Mary Robinette Kowal’s “For Want of a Nail” links with Crowell’s story in being set in a long-term space habitat, here controlled by an AI that, it slowly appears, may be going mad – but the cure feels a lot like murder.

Locus, June 2011

The cover story at Asimov’s for June is “Kiss Me Twice”, by Mary Robinette Kowal, a long novella and a murder mystery. Scott Huang is a detective in near future Portland, Oregon. He is at the scene of a murder – a somewhat shady real estate developer has been killed. The police department uses an AI assistant, who manifests to Scott as Mae West. This AI suddenly “freezes”, and soon it seems that there is a threat to the AI as well as a murder case to worry about. The story turns, then, on the issue of AI rights, and it’s a pretty enjoyable work, with some thoughtful consideration of that subject.

Locus, September 2017

“The Worshipful Society of Glovers”, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Uncanny, July-August) is an uncompromising story set in a milieu recalling Elizabethan London. Vaughn is an apprentice glover, caring for his seriously ill sister. Gloves in this world can be magically altered with the help of brownies, and such gloves can cast a glamor, or give strength – or cure people like Vaughn’s sister. But dealing with Faerie creatures is dangerous, and carefully regulated, but when Vaughn is all but ruined after he is robbed, and rather mistreated by his master, he is tempted to deal with a rogue brownie. Kowal doesn’t shy from the consequences of his decisions. It’s a moving and honest story.

Locus, September 2018

I also enjoyed the opening and closing stories in the July-August F&SF, each set on a moon of Mars. “The Phobos Experience”, by Mary Robinette Kowal, is about Darlene, a lieutenant working at a Martian colony who has a vertigo problem – and who is called upon to investigate the discovery that Phobos is hollow – and gets into a serious scrape.

Birthday Review: Stories of Karen Joy Fowler, plus The Jane Austen Book Club

Today is Karen Joy Fowler's birthday. She is another particular favorite of mine -- and, too, a favorite of my wife's! Somwhat curiously, perhaps, her output is divided between her short fiction, which is mostly SF or Fantasy; and her novels, which are mostly not obviously fantastical (though quite often there is an ambiguous aspect to them.) Here's a selection of my reviews of her short fiction from Locus -- not a long list as I wasn't writing reviews when she wrote such earlier masterpieces as "Game Night at the Fox and Goose" -- augmented with my blog post about The Jane Austen Book Club, perhaps her best-known novel thanks to the film.

Locus, August 2002

There are some very strong stories in Sci Fiction for July.  "What I Didn't See" is the first short piece I've seen by Karen Joy Fowler in some time.  Like her novels, it perches on genre boundaries, only SF if the reader insists: why bother?  Enjoy the excellent story: about a 1928 trip to Africa in 1928 to hunt gorillas.  What results is a tangle of human missteps: sexual competition, gender stereotyping, racial tension, the quest for personal aggrandizement, misplaced revenge motives, all leading to an ambiguous ending with a hint of an echo of Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See" (said echo surely reinforced by the title).

Locus, February 2003

In the Conjunctions New Wave Fabulists issue, Karen Joy Fowler's "The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man" (again, not SF) is a delightful story of a boy growing up with his single mother, and games, baseball, and bullies – but best of all is Fowler's always absorbing wry voice.

Locus, April 2007

April-May is also time for the Asimov’s Double Issue, this one particularly special as celebrating the magazine’s 30th anniversary. The TOC is chock full of familiar names who briefly comment on their history with the magazine. They all do fine work, but the standout is a very welcome return by an author who has been concentrating on novels – mainstream novels, yet! – in recent years, the wonderful Karen Joy Fowler. “Always”, like her Nebula winner “What I Didn’t See”, might annoy SF purists because it’s not necessarily SF (though it MIGHT be) – no matter to me, it’s an excellent story. A young woman and her new husband, in 1930s California, are seduced by a cult that promises immortality. We know it’s a cult because, as her mother says, “a cult is just a set of rules that lets certain men get laid”. In this case, the cult’s leader, who is the only man the women can sleep with. Not surprisingly, the narrator’s husband leaves. But she is consoled a little by the fact that the leader is pretty good in bed – and more by the carrot of immortality, which she somehow never can reject. It is witty and intelligent and honest and believable and not quite sad somehow.

Locus, August 2007

The most influential of these, and the longest lived – the model for new millennium SF ‘zines in many ways, is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. The current issue is #20,'''... Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Last Worders” is brilliant work from one of my favorite writers. Twin women are on vacation in Europe, in an odd place called San Margais, built on a deep, empty chasm. The story concerns the women’s search for The Last Word Café (“Poetry Slam. To the Death”.). But they are also working out an apparent lifelong sibling rivalry. And they are tracking down a boy they both had a crush on at school, a boy who may be about to perform at the Café.  Arch, mysterious – dealing with poetry and sisterhood and politics in a subtle ways.

Locus, July 2011

Subterranean’s Summer issue is a special YA issue, guest edited by Gwenda Bond. It is chock full of first rate work. Karen Joy Fowler’s “Younger Women” is a sharp look at the lure of vampires, elegantly refracted through the lens of a mother’s exasperation with her besotted teenaged daughter – exasperation given an edge by her husband having recently decamped with a younger woman.

Locus, June 2017

There’s a whole lot of tasty stuff in the May-June Asimov’s. Let’s begin with a new story from Karen Joy Fowler. “Persephone of the Crows” is just wrenchingly brilliant, in a specific mode that reminds me of a few stories I talked about last week – it’s a story that uses apparently true (in story terms) fantastical elements in service of character examination, and in so doing resolves itself without really resolving any of the questions the fantastical elements might inspire. Which, to a devoted reader of the fantastic, like, say me, can be in a way disappointing. But on its own terms I think this story delivers. Polly is a 10-year old girl at a littler girl’s house, and the little girl claims to have seen a real fairy. Polly is envious of the other girl for lots of reasons – money is one, parents are another, and Polly’s wishes for something better in her life only intensify that night – until the drive home, when her drunken father loses control of the car – and things get strange. Be careful what you wish for, perhaps? Though that sounds a bit facile – the story doesn’t quite go where you expect it to, and in the end we have a sharp portrayal of its main character and a sad look at her perception of her family.

Blog post on The Jane Austen Book Club

I suppose I am one of the last folks in these parts to have read Karen Joy Fowler's new novel. The Jane Austen Book Club, indeed, is proving a surprising success in the wider literary world -- it has receive approving reviews just about everywhere, and it was #7 on the last New York Times Book Review bestseller list. I myself have had success in proselytizing for Fowler -- I made my wife read Sarah Canary several years ago and she has happily read all of Fowler's novels since. (My wife is not an SF reader.) In the case of this book my wife read it first, hence the delay in me getting to it. And having finished it we passed it along to a friend of ours, who had just finished the last book we gave her: The Time-Traveler's Wife.

Just yesterday, right underneath their adoring review of Spiderman 2, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured an article about Karen Joy Fowler and The Jane Austen Book Club. Fowler had just signed the book at my local Border's -- alas, this article was the first I heard of this! I'd have gone (it's even possible Fowler would recognize my name, either from Locus or from my occasional emails regarding the Tiptree Award). The writer of the article mentions Fowler's science fiction roots, a bit bemusedly but not condescendingly, though she (the article writer) does seem surprised at the connection between Austen and SF readers. [Having missed that chance of meeting Fowler, Mary Ann and I finally met her at the 2017 World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio.]

I thoroughly enjoyed The Jane Austen Book Club, I will say. The story is about the six members of a book club devoted to Austen, and the book has chapters loosely linked to each book. Five of the members are women. Bernadette is a woman in her 60s, several times married, who was once a dancer in a low-level sort of off-vaudeville group. Jocelyn is a 50ish woman, a dog breeder, never married herself but an inveterate matchmaker. Sylvia is Jocelyn's long-time friend, whose husband has just left her for a younger woman. Allegra is Sylvia's lesbian daughter, her relationship also just breaking up (her girlfriend having mined her life for stories). Prudie is a 30ish schoolteacher. The one man is Grigg, a computer tech and a science fiction fan, who seems only just now to be reading Austen for the first time.

The story is witty, both sweet and tart. The characters are perfectly captured. The writing is full of allusions to Austen, big and small. There is some discussion of the books, but much more of each character's personal history and how their own personal lives play out over the time of the novel -- with incipient romances, breakups, reunitings, disasters, and unexpected reversals. It echoes Austen in being quiet and somewhat domestic in tone, and of course in its irony and above all wit. Though irony and wit have been characteristics of Fowler from the first!

In Memoriam, Carol Emshwiller -- a look at her late short fiction

The remarkable Carol Emshwiller died, age 97, on February 2. She was one of the most individual voices in SF over a career of nearly six decades, beginning in the mid 1950s.  She also wrote contemporary novels set in the American West. 

I never had a chance to meet her -- and based on the voice in her fiction, and on the testimony of those who knew her, I dearly wish I could have. But I did have a chance, over the first several years of my time at Locus, to witness and review the truly impressive spate of short stories she produced in her 80s. And so, in her memory, it seems appropriate to post this selection of what I wrote about her work in Locus, with one bonus piece I wrote about her very first story.

Retro-Review of Future #28

On to the short stories, and finally something of real note. This issue includes the great Carol Emshwiller's first publication, "This Thing Called Love", a clever 2300 word story. Robert. A. W. Lowndes was central to Emshwiller's early career, with many of her first stories appearing in Future and in Science Fiction Stories. This story is slight but well done, and definitely shows Emswhiller's "voice", which I think one of the more characteristic individual voices in the field. The POV narrator is a woman of the future, who, like every other self-respecting person in the future, has a crush on an android actor. Her husband has the gall to suggest that the two of them emigrate to Mars as colonists -- but if she went, she'd be away from TV, and who would she love? Her husband? As if! No masterpiece, but a fine clever story.

Locus, March 2002

Two fine stories appear in the first half of February at Sci Fiction.  Carol Emshwiller has made a welcome return to the field in the past couple of years, mostly at F&SF.  "Water Master" is her first story for Sci Fiction.  The story is told from the point of view of a solitary woman at an isolated village. The village's water supply is regulated by the Water Master. The villagers distrust him, assuming he takes advantage of his position.  After a time of drought, unrest grows, and when the narrator learns that the villagers will send a delegation to force the Water Master to increase the water allocation, she goes to visit him in advance, to learn his secrets.  She learns some rather surprising things.  The end is nicely turned, and rather sweet.

Review of Leviathan 3, Locus, May 2002

Carol Emshwiller's "The Prince of Mules" reminded me just a bit of her recent Sci Fiction story "Water Master", in telling of a older single woman living in a dry rural place, who becomes intrigued by an isolated man who has something to do with water distribution. This is quite a different story, though, and it's a neat piece, telling in Emshwiller's characteristic deadpan voice of the woman's rather excessive obsession with Jake Blackthorn, who at least loves his mule.

Locus, June 2002

And of course Carol Emshwiller is always readable, and "Josephine" (Sci Fiction, May) is a sweet, odd, story about two residents of an old age home who try to escape. It works mainly because of the somewhat fuddled view of things we get from the POV character, the man of the couple who is fascinated by the title character but never understands her.

Locus, June 2003

The best story from the "in-genre" writers in McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales is Carol Emshwiller's "The General", an affecting look at a man raised by his people's oppressors, who becomes the unsuccessful leader of a revolution, and then finds peace hard to attain. 

Locus, July 2003

"Repository" (F&SF, July), from the reliably brilliant Carol Emshwiller. A nameless, wounded, man, perhaps a soldier or a medic, finds himself in some sort of refuge from a war. "Who is the enemy. And more important, who are we?" He learns to hope to escape the war (what war?) … but is there any escape?

Locus, August 2003

Carol Emshwiller's "Gods and Three Wishes" (Trampoline) is a whimsical fable, about a young woman sent by her tribe to visit the gods and demand better treatment from them, who learns instead about luck and fate – and about making your own luck.

Locus, December 2003

Carol Emshwiller is a wonder, as productive now in her 80s as she has ever been. "Boys", from the January Sci Fiction, is a sad fable in which men and women live apart, the women maintaining cities while the men fight wars with men from other places. When the women make a stand against this way of things, an older man is tempted to stay with the woman he has come to love – but what of the pull of tradition, of what is thought to be "nature"? 

Locus, August 2004

Carol Emshwiller (it becomes clear) has been doing a series of stories about war. Two more have just appeared. In F&SF we see "The Library", about a man leading a band to his enemies' beautiful library, planning to blow it up. But his plans go awry and he falls for one of the librarians – with ambiguous results. Another Emshwiller war story is "My General" from the second issue of the new Argosy, in which a woman takes custody of a POW, a general, for the purpose of field labor. But she falls in love (or something similar). His response seems honest, but the result is sad – he ends up trying to stop the war with more fighting. Taken together these and others of Emshwiller's stories brim with compassion for their protagonists, and a sad and weary view of people who seem trapped into fighting for no discernible reason.

Locus, January 2004

Alchemy is a new fantasy magazine, nicely put together, and featuring an impressive table of contents for the first issue. Carol Emshwiller's "Lightning" is an utterly "Emshwiller" story, told in her unmistakable voice. An older woman is struck by lightning, and comes to with no knowledge of her identity. The story simply and wryly tells of her confused reaction to what we must assume are her own house and family -- little really happens, the story isn't really fantastical, but it's witty and a bit disturbing and just well done. 

Locus, July 2004

Sci Fiction for June has another of Carol Emshwiller's affecting stories about other intelligences, "Gliders Though They Be". In this case two species are involved, both apparently roughly humanoid. One species has wings sufficient for gliding, the other only nubs. A male from the wingless species disguises himself and infiltrates the others, charged with mutilating them, but he falls in love, and finds himself forced to compete in a gliding contest for his beloved's favor. 

Locus, December 2004

Sci Fiction in November features another strong "bird people" story by Carol Emshwiller. "All of Us Can Almost ..." reminds us that her intelligent, large, bird creatures are flightless. But they can almost fly, and small creatures of other species sometimes ask for a flight. The story concerns a female who foolishly promises to give a young boy a flight, with interesting results. Emshwiller gets inside her mostly alien characters' heads beautifully.

Locus, March 2005

Carol Emshwiller has another remarkable story in the March F&SF. "I Live With You" is a spooky piece about a person who moves into someone's house and sort of haunts them – to the point of eventually impersonating them and even starting a new relationship. The story is at once humourous and scary, creepy and almost sweet – and also a very effective character study.

Locus, December 2005

As of 2005, Carol Emshwiller has been a published SF writer for a half-century, but her January 2006 story “World of No Return” is her first Asimov’s appearance. And it’s fine work, about an alien long marooned on Earth, raised to keep himself separate from humans and to remember his heritage. But over the course of a long life, he forgets his parents’ stories of their home world, and he subtly (without knowing himself, perhaps) begins to miss contact with humans. All this comes to a head when he finds himself caring for a lonely old woman.

Locus, November 2006

The short stories are all fine work ... Carol Emshwiller’s “Killers” (F&SF, October-November) is a mordant story of our country ravaged by war, to the point that the protagonist’s town is almost wholly inhabited by women – leading to unexpected results when she finds a man, perhaps an enemy.

Locus, February 2008

Carol Emshwiller is another writer who began in the ‘50s and is still going strong – as with “Master of the Road to Nowhere” (Asimov's, March), a delightful and affecting story about a group of humans who live in animal-like packs, with only one adult male and a “harem” of females, along with the children. The males fight for domination, the losers going off to live alone in the wild. The story concerns one male, a leader of his pack but under challenge, who has fallen in love, strictly forbidden, with one of the women in his pack. 

Locus, October 2009

How do you define Fantasy, anyway? The simplest definition, to me, is “stories with magic”. (Defining magic perhaps a bit broadly: events unexplainable by science.) But as often noted there are some stories that are readily identified as part of the Fantasy genre but which have no magic. (Canonical example: Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner, though one ought to note that its sequel The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman) reveals that magic is part of that world.) These stories tend to be set in secondary worlds, either fairly detailed ones like the quasi-English setting of Swordspoint, or in lightly sketched unidentified geographies. The latter is the case with any number of short stories by Carol Emshwiller, particularly a long series examining war from the point of view of various people caught up in it. The latest of these stories (all unlinked, I should say) is “Logicist” (which actually seems possibly set in Ancient Greece). A teacher and his students are overrun when the enemy wins a battle they are witnessing. He ends up behind enemy lines, and is nursed to health by a woman with whom he begins to fall in love. But she is of the enemy! Where does his duty lie? 

Locus, February 2010

I’ll conclude with one online site, Fantasy Magazine. The selections for January include a couple about flying, or the dream of flying, that intrigued. Carol Emshwiller’s “Above it All” is about a woman who adopts an abandoned baby girl, a girl who can fly. She keeps the girl weighted down as long as she can, but of course eventually realizes she can’t stand in the way of her adopted daughter’s true nature. As with so much recent Emshwiller, its wry and warm at the same time.

Locus, July 2010

Now to the online magazines. Lightspeed, the new SF companion to Fantasy Magazine, has a wonderful Carol Emshwiller piece in July, “No Time Like the Present”. A group of wealthy people move into the narrator’s town, causing plenty of suspicion and resentment. The narrator, a teenaged girl, befriends one of the young girls among the newcomers, even while the rest of the town grows increasingly hostile. We realize quickly enough from whence the new folks come – it’s an old enough SF idea. And in the end that’s pretty much the story – but it resonates particularly well as told by Emshwiller, through her narrator, and the well-pointed slang, and the implications of this particular “invasion”. Emshwiller remains simply remarkable.

Ace Double Reviews, 113: Android Avenger, by Ted White/The Altar On Asconel, by John Brunner

Ace Double Reviews, 113: Android Avenger, by Ted White/The Altar On Asconel, by John Brunner (#M-123, 1965, 45 cents)

a review by Rich Horton

The occasion for this Ace Double review is Ted White's 81st birthday today, February 4, 2019. Ted White is a true SMOF. He published a fanzine beginning at age 15. He won the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 1968. He was co-Chair of the 1967 Worldcon, and his fannish credits could likely go on for pages.

He is probably best known to the casual SF fan (at least, fan of my age) as an editor -- an assistant at F&SF from 1963 to 1968, then for the next decade editor of Amazing and Fantastic, where he affected an improvement from the depths of the years right after Sol Cohen took over the magazines, to something at times approaching the Cele Goldsmith Lalli levels. (These were the years -- 1974-1978 at least -- that I subscribed to those magazines, and I appreciated Ted's rather pugnacious approach to them.) He then became an editor at the American magazine Heavy Metal (based on the French graphic magazine Metal Hurlant.)He was also a disk jockey for a time, and he is an accomplished musician.

(Covers by Ed Valigursky and Gray Morrow)

And he is an SF writer, producing more than a dozen novels and a couple of dozen short stories (the most recent in 2017, so he's still at it.) One collaborative story got a Nebula nomination, but I'll confess that I've not really been overly impressed with the occasional story I've seen. But I hadn't read a novel, and I ran across this Ace Double, with Android Avenger, so I figured it was worth a try. (I admit I really bought the book for the Brunner novel.)

So, what is Android Avenger about? Well, it's about 40,000 words or a bit more! Sorry ... It's set in New York in the relatively near future of 2017 -- oh, wait a minute, that's the past now! Life is calm in this near future, apparently, mostly because anyone who shows unruly attitudes -- Deviants, that is -- is detected by automatic scanners, and executed. The narrator, Bob Tanner, is serving his periodic (every couple of years) duty as Executioner -- a thousand people gather in an arena, and press a button, one of which randomly activated the electric charge to kill the Deviant. This time, however, Bob is oddly affected by the execution, and he ends up going into sort of a fugue, which causes him to be picked up and scanned. The scanner finds nothing, but an X-ray determines that his bones are metal. Surely this will brand him a Deviant, so he escapes, using violence, which is certainly Deviant.

Soon he encounters a beautiful redhead, who warns him to be careful. Then he's attempting to return home -- but his home is too dangerous. And suddenly he finds himself gripped by a compulsion he can't control -- and he runs without volition (and at implausible speed) to a building wherein he finds and kills a man. Before long he's confronted by the sister of the dead man (another beautiful redhead!), and he learns that the original redhead is named, oddly enough, Hoyden. And then he is possessed by the mysterious force again and kills the sister.

By now you can see who the android avenger of the title is, though not why he's "avenging". The story continues at some pace, through some sudden changes of tone and scenery. He meets up again with Hoyden. They have sex. They fight. Then he runs away to another borough, takes on a new identity, and starts to live with the poor people there, who are outside the controlled system of the main part of New York. And things get stranger, and Bob, trying to understand his nature and purpose, finally comes to a confrontation with the being behind his problems ... Plus he gets his reunion with the lovely Hoyden.

It's all a bit -- maybe a lot -- silly, and disjointed. There are occasional nice bits of speculation, as for example about the moving roads in future (past, now) Manhattan. There's a certain ambition behind some of it, lost in the end by the need for action and by the hard to take ending. So -- not a particularly memorable book. There was a sequel, called Spawn of the Death Machine -- I almost wonder if White wrote it just so he could use that gloriously pulpish title.

(Cover by McKenna (not for The Altar at Asconel)

I've written a lot about John Brunner before, so I won't reiterate that. He is a favorite of mine, and I generally really like his early, shorter, less serious novels. The Altar On Asconel is in that category, but it's a bit late -- 1965, after he had begun producing work of more obvious ambition, such as The Whole Man from 1964. This novel is part of his so-called Interstellar Empire series, which also includes an early novella, "The Wanton of Argus", which became the very short Ace Double half The Space-Time Juggler; and another novella, "The Man from the Big Dark". The ISFDB also claims that his first novel, Galactic Storm (written when he was 16 or 17, and published as by "Gill Hunt") is part of that series. (I've not read that book, and I gather it's not easy to find.) It's about 55,000 words long. It was serialized in If, April and May 1965, as "The Altar at Asconel", in a cut version, about 42,000 words. I have the serial as well, and the cuts seem to be pervasive but rather minor -- a few sentences here and there, spread throughout the book. I don't know if Brunner or Frederik Pohl made the cuts.

The main character of The Altar on Asconel is Spartak, an academic on Annanworld, which was the university planet of the old interstellar empire. The empire has mostly collapsed, after 10,000 years, with many planets having reverted to barbarism, but a few, such as Annanworld, still retaining a decent tech level. Spartak's specialty is the history of the empire -- he knows, for example, that the starships humans use were all made by a previous, now disappeared, race -- and especially the history of one prominent world, his home, Asconel, which also has retained some technological underpinnings.

Spartak, along with his half-brothers Vix and Tiorin, agreed to leave Asconel on the ascension of their older brother Hodak to the position of Warden -- in order to avoid the possibility of clashes over the succession. But now, 10 years later, Vix has shown up on Annanworld with terrible news -- their brother Hodak has been assassinated, and a strange man named Bucyon has taken over as Warden. And he, with the beautiful Lydis and the misshappen Shry, rule the planet in the name of a god -- Belizuek, who demands human sacrifices. And it seems that nearly the whole population of Asconel has been conditioned, so that they accept their oppression happily.

Vix, along with his latest woman, Vineta, head to Delcadoré, near the heart of the old empire, to look for Tiorin. And they find him, but they also are shanghaied into transporting a mutant girl, rumored to have mental powers, into exile on the Galactic rim. This is accomplished by a crude conditioning, so they cannot even think about going to Asconel to try to free their planet from Bucyon and Belizuek. But the mutant girl's powers come in handy -- she is able to undo their conditioning, and after some struggle, she agrees to help them get to Asconel.

Once there they find the world in even worse shape than they thought. And then they encounter Belizuek, who seems a megalomaniac telepathic being. Vix and Tiorin are read to attack, but Spartak, with the help of the mutant girl, comes up with a more sneaky plan ... And, well, you know more or less how it ends. There is, of course, a revelation as to what or who Belizuek really is, and there's a final, fairly logical, fate for Spartak and the mutant girl (who is quite young -- there's no suggestion that Spartak fancies her).

All in all, this isn't one of Brunner's best efforts. I wonder if he really didn't have much interest in the project. There is less speculative interest, less original thinking, than in most of Brunner's early books. The plot is not very tightly constructed, and things are really too easy for Spartak and company. The end is rushed a bit, and also comes off rather flat.