Birthday Review: Stories of David D. Levine

Today is David D. Levine's birthday. Here's a selection of my reviews for his work from Locus -- alas, there are fewer such in recent years, as David has been seduced by the lure of the novel -- and quite successfully so, with his popular series beginning with Arabella of Mars.

Locus, April 2002

The slow boat from Brighton finally brought me the final 2001 issue of Interzone.  It is an outstanding issue, too, without a single poor story.  David D. Levine's "Nucleon" is the winner of the 2001 James White Award, and it's a fine, sweet, story of an unusual junkyard – a nice variation on the traditional "curiosity shop" tale.

Locus, January 2003

Beyond the Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, concerns what might lie "beyond" the end of the universe. ... My other favorite was David D. Levine's "Written on the Wind", about an alien linguist working on translating a mysterious message discovered in the cosmic background radiation. The nature of this message is predictable enough, but Levine manages to make the revelation moving and sense-of-wonder inspiring even though we know what's coming.

Locus, June 2003

Best of all in the June F&SF is promising new writer David D. Levine's "The Tale of the Golden Eagle", about a brain encased in a spaceship which becomes a derelict, and the man who discovers and frees this brain far in the future.

Locus, September 2003

Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction is an anthology of stories written around art by Alan Clark. The fine new writer David Levine offers "Legacy", an affecting (if slightly contrived) story of sacrifice on a scientific mission to a supernova.

Locus, November 2003

Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown is a collection of stories by generally new writers. Regarded as a showcase of new writers, it's impressive, and I'll certainly look to see more work from these folks. I enjoyed most of it ... I particularly liked "Ukaliq and the Great Hunt", by David D. Levine, which cleverly recasts American Indian-style legends to tell a story that turns out to be straight SF.

Locus, June 2004

Tops in the June Realms of Fantasy is David D. Levine's "Charlie the Purple Giraffe Was Acting Strangely", a story set inside a comic strip, in which the title character becomes convinced he is fictional. There are plenty of cute touches, but the story turns oddly and effectively darker as no other character believes Charlie.

Locus, October 2004

The Summer Talebones, a generally good issue, closes strongly with David D. Levine's "Where is the Line", in which a somewhat bitter unemployed man encounters a mysterious neighbor and learns something from her via massage. It's involving and subtly erotic, and the main character rings true, though the resolution may be just a bit pat and moralistic in some ways.

Locus, April 2007

David D. Levine’s “Titanium Mike Saves the Day” (F&SF, April) tells of the history of a Paul Bunyan like space-based tall tale character, backwards through a few generations to the story’s origin. It’s perhaps a bit hokey – but successfully so.

Locus, February 2009

Realms of Fantasy’s February issue has a nice humorous story by David D. Levine, “Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven”, in which Umiel, an angel and a desk jockey (against her will) deals with such frustrations as a clueless boss,  the implementation of ISO 999, and the fact that her ideas for counteracting the Competition seem to be ignored.

Locus, April 2010

The May Analog includes a nice David Levine story, “Teaching the Pig to Sing”, told from the point of view of a future royal – genetically enhanced to be a natural ruler. He has been kidnapped by revolutionaries – a group who wants a return to democracy – and over a couple of days he finds himself unable to convincingly argue against their views. But neither do they convince him. And his people are still looking – what will happen when they find him? Levine’s resolution is a bit unexpected, and adds an edge and some poignancy to the story.

Locus, August 2011

The 100th issue of Realms of Fantasy, for June, is an extra long one, with some pretty good stuff. I particularly liked David D. Levine’s “The Tides of the Heart” – pure Urban Fantasy, in which a plumber with a specialty in magical problems runs into a special one: an undine trapped in the pipes of an historical old house marked for demolition. The plumber’s solution to the problem is personal as well as magical, and the intermixing of the two works perfectly.

Locus, January 2013

The November 15 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies includes a very nice David D. Levine story, “Liaisons Galantes: A Scientific Romance”. The conceit behind the story is that people who are truly in love manifest doglike creatures called “galanteries”. It's set in Paris, among a group of artists. Zephine is a struggling young writer, hopelessly obsessed with the group's charismatic leader, Darius. Then she meets another man, and they hit it off and become lovers – but to their concern, no galanteries appear. Are they really in love? And what does it mean that Zephine is suddenly inspired, and writing a promising play that attracts Darius' interest? The resolution becomes what we expect – not tritely, but such that we are led in the right direction so that everything seems just right. A quite enjoyable piece.

Locus, January 2014

There is a steampunkish cast to some of the better stories in Old Mars. For example, David D. Levine's “The Wreck of the Martian Adventure” features Captain Kidd recruited by the King to sail a ship to Mars – I have to admit I something of a sucker for space sailing stories. The concept is pretty much the story here, but withal it's very well done.

Birthday Review: Stories of Nick Mamatas

Today is Nick Mamatas' birthday. He's one of the most interesting, and most politically-engaged, writers working these days. Here's a collection of my reviews of his short fiction, plus a very brief capsule of his first novel, Move Under Ground, from 2004, that I wrote for my SFF Net newsgroup.

Locus, December 2005

Next a brand new electronic publication, planned to appear quarterly, available either as an e-book or (in delayed fashion) on the web: Son and Foe. The first issue, November 2005, contains a generous mix of reprints and originals. The best of the originals are surprisingly good, frankly better than I expected for a new online publication. My favorite is by Nick Mamatas, “Real People Slash”, written as if a memoir of a few years in the life of “Nick Mamatas” – and frankly pretty convincing and involving purely as memoir (true or not). But the story takes a strange, and effective, turn into Lovecraftian paranoia.

Review of Polyphony 6 (Locus, November 2006)

Also very weird is Nick Mamatas’s “The Uncanny Valley”, in which a psychiatrist tries to deal with – I think! – the dangerous unconscious of uploaded post-human intelligences, which appear to be destroying the world.

Locus, August 2007

Flytrap #7 includes, stealthily, a shocking and effective story by Nick Mamatas, “Solidarity Forever”, about a vain couple who decide that the best expression of their progressive pieties is to have sex with (i.e. rape) the most oppressed person they can find: a prisoner in Africa dying of AIDS.

Locus, November 2008

Weird Tales for July/August has a couple of striking pieces. Nick Mamatas is mordantly funny in “Mainevermontnewhampshiremass” in telling of a horror writer returning to his home town somewhere in the Northeast to battle a terrible menace – as it turns out in company with many other horror writers, and as it turns out … well, read the story.

Locus, April 2011

Nick Mamatas, in “North Shore Friday” (Asimov's, April-May), mixes a secret history of a government project to read minds with attempts in the 1960s to smuggle Greek refugees into the US and get them safely married off. The narrator, from decades in the future, remembers one sad incident, when one such operation went a bit wrong. The story nicely mixes the slightly mad idea of the mind reading operation with the interesting story of the refugees with an effective, subtly told, story of the narrator’s crush on a girl involved in the immigration activities.

Locus, September 2012

The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, edited by Sean Wallace, includes five original stories (and a large selection of good recent work). All the originals are worthy of attention. The best is “Arbeitskraft”, by Nick Mamatas, set in alternate Victorian London, and told by Friedrich Engels, who is using Difference Engine technology – advanced, in his factory, to a “Dialectical Engine” – to recreate his late friend Karl Marx. Engels dreams of using this technology to liberate the workers, with the help of the Dialectical Engine version of Marx. At the same time he encounters terribly oppressed girls from a match factory, and sees how the steampunk tech of this alternate history has affected their lives. The story is, obviously, politically engaged, and also full of interesting steampunkish notions, and some action as well.

Locus, January 2013

Bloody Fabulous is an anthology, about even mixed between new stories and reprints, on the subject of fashion. It's entertaining throughout. My favorite original piece came from Nick Mamatas: “Avant-n00b”, about a young fashion blogger who stumbles across a very strange “vintage” piece of clothing that turns out to have links to Vichy France.

Capsule Review of Move Under Ground (from my blog)

Another small press book is Nick Mamatas's Move Under Ground, the first novel by a writer who has done some pretty good shorter stuff in recent years, mostly what we used to call slipstream [though as I recall Nick rejected that term], often with a horror tinge. (In fact, Mamatas too can be linked with the New Weirdos. [grin]) Move Under Ground is from Night Shade Books.

It's got a high concept premise -- Jack Kerouac meets Lovecraft. That is, the novel is set in the early 60s, and Jack Kerouac is mysteriously enlisted to wage a battle against the denizens of R'lyeh, which has risen in the Pacific. People are turning into beetlemen, horrible cults are forming, mysterious things happening. Kerouac tracks down Neal Cassady and starts to head cross country from Big Sur and then San Francisco, destination New York. Along the way he picks up William S. Burroughs, and spends a little time in Burroughs's home town -- my place of residence, St. Louis. (I think he muffed the local geography a bit, but perhaps in 1962 or so he was right.)

I found much of the book interesting, but about as much kind of slow. Perhaps it would have helped if I was more knowledgeable about either the Beats or Lovecraft -- as it happens, I've read very little in either area. The writing is  quite nice, with plenty of exotic and original images.

Birthday Review: Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem

Today is Jonathan Lethem's birthday. And this gives me an opportunity to repost a review that is fairly important to me, not because it's a great piece of writing or anything, but because it's the first thing I wrote with some hope of professional publication. I wrote it in response to a note in, I think, Book Pages, asking for a Science Fiction reviewer. The date, according to my records, was 16 November 1995. They sent my a nice note back saying they liked it, but they weren't quite sure ... so they must have gone with someone else.

It's pretty short, which is because I was writing to their expected length.

Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem

Cassell, 1994 (TP: Tor, 1995)
$19.95 (TP: $10.95)
ISBN 0151364583 (TP: 0312858787)

Jonathan Lethem is a rather new writer whose stories have been appearing in Asimov's, Pulphouse and elsewhere over the past few years. His short fiction has shown outstanding range, and a quirky imagination. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, amply demonstrates both these qualities.The novel concerns Conrad Metcalf, a down-at-heels Private Inquisitor in mid-21sty century Oakland. He is drawn into investigating the murder of an affluent doctor with gangster ties, and becomes involved with shady cops, gangland figures, and beautiful women with questionable pasts. Thus, at the surface, this is a straight-forward pastiche of the standard hard-boiled detective novel, transposed into the next century. At this level, the novel works fine: the mystery is sufficiently absorbing and has enough twists to carry the plot, and Lethem has the first-person narrative down very well, with the "typical" hard-boiled attitude.

However, this is more than a standard SF take on Chandler. The SF elements themselves, though not terribly plausible, are interesting and thought-provoking, and well-integrated with the structure and themes of the novel. These include universal drug use for (fairly precise) control of emotional states, wildly extrapolated privacy laws, babyheads (children with vastly accelerated mental growth but normal physical growth), and intelligent, self-aware animals (the result of "evolution therapy"). Some of these tropes are use to generate jokes, but for the most part they support and reinforce the central story and the themes in which Lethem is interested. Ultimately, this is a serious, funny-sad novel, and at the heart of it are big questions about memory and the nature of personality. (These questions, and other elements of the novel such as the drug use, are very reminiscent of the work of Philip K. Dick.) Lethem handles the mixture of moods excellently, and the resolution to his story is perfect and satisfying. This is a very exciting first novel from one of the most promising new SF writers of the past few years.

Belated Birthday Review: Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks

Iain Menzies Banks would have turned 65 last Saturday (16 February 2019) -- he was only some 5 years older than me, but alas he died far too young at about my current age. He was a wonderful writer of SF, and SF-adjacent "mainstream" fiction. In his memory, here's my review of my favorite among his SF novels, posted exactly as I wrote it in 1997:

Review Date: 05 March 1997

Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks

MacDonald, 1990 (UK), 12.95 pounds
US Paperback Edition, Bantam Spectra 1992, $4.99 (ISBN: 0553292242)

Iain M. Banks is a Scottish writer, of several "mainstream" novels (albeit often with "slipstream" elements), published as by Iain Banks, and several SF novels (published with the middle initial). Banks has quite a reputation in the UK, stemming from the success of his first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984). He seems less well-known in the US, but at least his SF books eventually make it across the pond, and I have been reading the SF novels over the past year or so. (Reviews of two of those novels appear elsewhere on this site [or will, when I repost them].) Half by accident, half on purpose, I evolved a reading strategy which has led to me end up my reading of all the Banks SF novels available in the US as of last year with Use of Weapons, probably the consensus choice among Banks' readers as his best SF novel. (A new SF novel, Excession, was published last summer in the UK and is just now available in the States.)

(Cover by Paul Youll)

As implied above, I approached Use of Weapons with high expectations, not always a good attitude. However, in this case my expectations were met. Use of Weapons is one of Banks' "Culture" novels: set within our Galaxy at approximately (to within plus or minus a millennium) the present time, and concerning the interactions of the Culture, an interstellar society composed mostly of humanoids and of a variety of AI machines, the latter often "drones" of (very roughly) human size and intelligence, or ship minds: of ambiguous size and enormous intelligence. Like all the Culture novels I've read, this one takes place mostly outside the Culture proper: because that is where the stories are. (The Culture is a utopia, so at least to a first approximation, everyone is happy, and there isn't much in the way of story-generating conflict.)

Use of Weapons is the story of Cheradenine Zakalwe, a non-citizen of the Culture, who has been employed by the Special Circumstances branch of the Culture's Contact section as a mercenary, trying to influence conflicts on a variety of planets to be resolved in the direction the Culture prefers. As the main action of the story opens, Zakalwe has "retired" from SC. Diziet Sma, a Culture citizen who has been Zakalwe's "control" in the past, is rudely summoned from her latest (quite pleasurable) assignment in order to find Zakalwe and recruit him for one more emergency mission (involving a situation with which Zakalwe was previously involved).

From this point, the novel progresses in two main directions. The main branch of the story follows Sma forward in time, as she pursues and eventually finds Zakalwe, and as Sma and Zakalwe accomplish, in general terms, the mission on which the SC branch has sent them. This involves convincing a retired politician who supports the "right" side (anti-terraforming, pro-Machine Intelligence) of a conflict in an unstable star cluster to return to the arena and forestall a coming war, and then also involves some intervention in a "brushfire" which has broken out as a precursor to the war. This story is exciting and enjoyable, with plenty of Banksian action, Banksian scenery, and Banksian humor, the last as usual particularly embodied in the character of Sma's drone assistant, Skaffen-Amtiskaw. (Banks' machine characters are inveterate scene-stealers.)

The second plot thread moves steadily backward in time (complicated by a couple of even-farther backward flashbacks), following Zakalwe's career as an agent for SC, back to his recruitment by SC and his war experiences prior to that, and finally back to his formative years as an aristocrat of sorts on a planet with roughly 19th-20th century Earth technology and social structure. This thread allows us to slowly learn more of Zakalwe's character, and of the traumatic events which have made him the rather tortured individual he is at the time of the main action. Thus, the novel's structure is at first blush mildly experimental (there are actually four separate "threads" if one separates out the flashbacks as a thread, and if one considers the prologue and epilogue). However, this structure is really logical, and essential to the reader's experience. Essentially, the main action is illuminated by our growing understanding of Zakalwe's past. And the use of Sma as a viewpoint character (despite her somewhat non-centrality to most of the action sequences) is a vital strategy: in a sense, she becomes a stand-in for the reader: and part of our understanding of the novel is trying to understand Sma's feelings for Zakalwe (which are not romantic at all, by the way), and to measure her Use of the Weapon that is Cheradenine Zakalwe in the context of Zakalwe's humanness, and in a sort of parallel or contrast to Zakalwe's expert use of a variety of weapons.

The climax of the novel is a shocker (though I think it is guessable (I guessed it, anyway, though Banks kept me doubting)). However, it's not just a "surprise ending for the sake of the surprise". It's crucial to our understanding of the book: and it gives the book meaning far beyond the (very good) adventure story it has been up to that point. The climax seemed to reverberate back through the entire book, giving new meaning to almost every incident. This is a book which almost demands immediate rereading.

Ob-nitpicks: there are a couple of points where I don't think Banks plays quite fair with the reader in setting up the surprise (though this could be the result of insufficiently subtle reading on my part), also, I'm not sure I'm fully convinced by some of the changes in Zakalwe's character. These are very minor points indeed, however, and I recommend this book highly.

Birthday Review: Stories of Tina Connolly

Today is Tina Connolly's birthday. Tina has been publishing exceptional short fiction for over a decade now, and so I've assembled a set of my reviews of her work for Locus. Tina is very good at any length, but she is one of those writers who has done lots of exceptional work at the short-short length, which sometimes means short-short reviews! But they still should not be missed! Tina is also among the best recent comic-oriented writers (though, again, she is perfectly capable of being deadly serious when needed, and, besides, comic stories are often really deadly serious.) (I see, too, that this set of reviews mentions some quite obscure publication venues -- which I'm happy to see, because those tiny efforts often feature first-rate stuff that deserves all the notice it can get.)

Also, I didn't review her Tor.com story from last year, "The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections", because I'm now concentrating on print magazines for Locus, but I will add that it is excellent, and you should all read it!

Locus, June 2007

Yog's Notebook is a modest new magazine for which I had small expectations that were readily exceeded. The title promises Lovecraftian horror -- and in a sense that's true but the touch here is light -- to very good effect. I quite liked "A Memory of Seafood", by Tina Connolly, a deadpan restaurant review, its effect arising from the nature of the dish served.

Locus, February 2008

To the online (or electronically distributed) world: The second issue of the Australian YA ‘zine Shiny again features three fine stories – and again my favorite was the most light-hearted,  Tina Connolly’s “The Goats are Going Places”, something of a sendup of such YA hits as “Gossip Girl”, which is notoriously based on a real prep school in Manhattan. In Connolly’s story, her heroine is kicked out of her public high school, and is sent to live with her aunt, and to attend a high-end school. She gets in with the “in” girls, but perhaps takes things too far – except that her aunt can actually do magic, and uses some to teach her niece a lesson.

Locus, August 2008

And again we see that many writers are committing Mundane SF, whether or not they explicitly intend to. For instance, Tina Connolly’s “The Bitrunners” (Helix, July), set mostly on the Moon, among a gang of children who commit small-time crimes – in part to conceal their larger crime: “bitrunning”, sneaking confidential information from place to place. The narrator, though, has bigger things in mind: a trip back to her Martian home, with the greater risks that entails. She’s a very well presented unreliable narrator, with a bitter past – a past that poisons even her present hopes. (She is, perhaps, an unreliable narrator even to herself.)

Locus, March 2011

The old editors, Cat Rambo and Sean Wallace, bow out with some strong stories in January and February at Fantastic. From January, I liked Tina Connolly’s “As We Report to Gabriel”, an original and quite charming story about fairies, set in a house owned by a woman who has been forced to renounce any interest in fairies for political reasons. Which is a problem, as she is married to one. The telling is delightful and the depiction of the nature of fairies is original and unexpected.

Locus, October 2011

Bull Spec is a North Carolina-based magazine that has been growing in confidence. Its sixth issue includes five stories, all enjoyable. I liked Tina Connolly’s “Selling Home” best, set on a tall structure with poor people on the lower levels and rich people up higher – but the rich people have a fertility problem, which means that the struggling narrator Penny will be faced with a hard question – what to do when a chance-met rich girl wants to buy her little brother.

Locus, September 2012

In August, though, that changes – I thought the two original SF stories at Lightspeed were best. ... I really liked “Flash Bang Remember” by Tina Connolly and Caroline M. Yoachim. It's built around a frankly unbelievable central notion: on a generation ship, all the inhabitants share a single childhood, which they experience virtually while growing up in a vat. These childhood experiences were the real life of a boy who has been kept in stasis every since. The heroine is called Girl23 – she's their attempt at recording a similarly ideal female childhood experience, but as her number suggests, there have been problems. Then the original boy is waken from stasis, and they meet. As I said, I had a hard time buying the premise, but given that, things are worked out very nicely, with a well-done resolution. It's lightly told, engaging, with a YA feel, and for all that there's a thoughtful core to the piece.

Locus, February 2018

Uncanny in November-December features a very effective brief story by Tina Connolly, “Pipecleaner Sculptures and Other Necessary Work”, about an android on a generation starship who faces a transition as they reach their destination – from a preschool teacher to a more martial role. The unvoiced questions concern what work is necessary – and of course identity and agency for androids.

Old Bestseller: A Window in Thrums, by J. M. Barrie

A Window in Thrums, by J. M. Barrie

a review by Rich Horton

Everybody knows J. M. Barrie, right? But they know him almost exclusively for one work (and its offshoots): Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a play first performed in 1904. (Barrie did produce a related novel, Peter and Wendy.) Some may have heard of his first bestseller, the novel The Little Minister (1891), or perhaps his play The Admirable Crichton. And some may have read something about Barrie's unusual and a bit creepy (but probably not criminal) relationship with the children who inspired the Peter Pan stories, the Llewellyn Davies family. Anyway, that's all I knew.

Barrie was born in 1860 in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the ninth of ten children, the son of a weaver. His life was formed in part by the death of his older brother at the age of 14, and his subsequent attempts to replace his brother in his mother's affection. Barrie wanted to become a writer from early days, but went to the University of Edinburgh at his family's urging. However, he continued to write, and had success with an early trio of books based on his childhood home and church. Kirriemuir became Thrums in these books. The first was Auld Licht Idylls, the second the book at hand, A Window in Thrums (1889), and the third The Little Minister. In his later career he concentrated mostly on the theater. He married an actress, Mary Ansell, but the marriage was apparently unconsummated, and he appears to have in some way truly desired to be "the boy who wouldn't grow up". He was made a Baronet in 1913.

My copy of A Window in Thrums is an American reprint, in octavo size, probably from the 1890s, printed by the Chicago firm Donohue, Hennebery, and Co. It is inscribed, in a very nice hand, "A Merry Christmas from Santa Claus, 1899".

A Window in Thrums is told by a schoolteacher about village life in Thrums, from a perspective many years later than the action. The teacher lets a room from a poor family: Hendry McQumpha, a weaver, his wife Jess, and their daughter Leeby. Their son Jamie is a barber living in London, visiting once a year. Their other son, Joey, died in an accident very young. (There are parallels with Barrie's youth that are hard to miss.) Jess is portrayed as a nearly saintly woman -- she is crippled, and unable to move beyond the short walk from her bed to a chair by her window (the title window). She's portrayed as an intelligent woman, and a genius banker and embroiderer. Her husband is slower, but a hard working and honest man. Leeby is devoted to her mother, to the complete abnegation of her own identity.

All the above, I'm sure, is Barrie's intention, but, really, from another perspective Jess can be seen as a monster -- formed so perhaps by her disability and by the loss of her son, but still! -- she has all but enslaved her daughter, and she is all but psychopathic in her determination that Jamie shall never marry.

The book opens with a series of chapters that are really humourous sketches of life in Thrums -- the local comic is described, and theg gossip following the movements of the minister, or the appearance of any man with an eligible woman. There's an amusing account of the local "post" trying to get out of his engagement to a local woman -- unscuccessfully, of course. Much of this is amusing, somewhat sentimental, told in just enough Scots dialect (with English glosses) to give a pretty good flavor of things.

The book concludes with a long linked set of chapters detailing Jamie's relationship with his family, especially his sister, over the course of one of his visits. A key incident is Jess stealing a glove her son seems to treasure -- she's convinced it belongs to a sweetheart, and that just won't do. Jamie goes back to London, and tragedy strikes -- Leeby dies of a fever, and Hendry and Jess follow not long after, and then we see Jamie's fate -- apparently betrayed by a woman (no details are given) -- seemingly driven mad by the loss of his family and by his own guilt.

Most of the book, then, is minor work, not terribly exciting, but sometimes amusing, and sometimes interesting in its portrayal of Scots village life in the middle of the 19th Century. But I was a bit put off by the conclusion, and its absolute rejection of the idea that Jamie might meet and have a good life with a woman from outside the village. It really seems a reflection of Barrie's apparent fear of sex.

Birthday Review: Six Gates from Limbo, by J. T. McIntosh (and some of his short fiction)

Here's something a bit different for my birthday reviews -- I've extracted a bunch of short looks at the short fiction of the Scottish writer J. T. McIntosh, whose real name was James McGregor, born February 14, 1925. He died in 2008, over 30 years after he stopped writing SF. He was a sometimes interesting, often frustrating, writer, but one whose work I often enjoy, even as aspects of it annoy me.

I start with a look at one of his later novels, then the short fiction.

Six Gates From Limbo

J. T. McIntosh, real name James MacGregor, was a Scottish writer who published many short stories and novels between about 1950 and the early 70s. I have long enjoyed his stories, with reservations. McIntosh was often interested in quirky variations on social structures. He tended to set his stories in rather sketchily described futures, usually in that sort of intergalactic society where planet hopping is like taking a bus, or at most an ocean liner. Then he would introduce one unusual social variation, sometimes interesting, sometimes implausible. His style was breezy and fairly individual to him. He worked most often at the long novelette or novella length, say 13000 to 20000 words. But he also wrote quite a few novels. And with many writers of that era, he was noticeably sexist, though at times in quirky ways.

Six Gates From Limbo is a latish novel, published in the UK in 1968. It was serialized in If in two parts in January and February 1969 -- I haven't seen that version but it seems likely to be an abridged version -- the copy I read (the 1969 Avon paperback) is about 60,000 words long.

I found it rather an interesting book. A man comes to consciousness on what seems to be a deserted planet. It is apparently well-suited for human life, but abandoned. Or so it seems -- after a while he encounters a woman, and a little later, another woman. They names themselves Rex, Regina, and Venus -- names with obvious symbolism. They name their world Limbo. But soon they learn that there are matter transmitter gates from Limbo, and eventually they decide to take them. They discover a variety of societies beyond these gates, but all are seriously sick societies, each in different ways. The reasons for this, it turns out, is that they are colonial worlds, and that they cannot escape the various effects of dependency on Earth. It seems that Rex and Regina and Venus have been created as part of a project aimed at finding a solution to the problem. And so they do -- rather a shocking one.

I'm not sure I buy McIntosh's premise, nor his solution, but it's a thought-provoking story all the same. I should mention that the problem of colony worlds and their interactions with the mother world and with other colonies was one of McIntosh's recurring themes.

Planet Stories, January 1951 and July 1951

I've mentioned that J. T. McIntosh is a guilty pleasure of mine.  At this stage in his career, he was signing stories "J. T. M'Intosh", and there are two M'Intosh stories in these issues.  One shows him at his most didactic (and he was often oddly didactic): "Safety Margin" (January 1951).  This seems almost like an attempt to push Campbell's buttons, but I have a feeling M'Intosh didn't really know quite where Campbell's buttons were.  Anyway this is an odd story about a space drive (the vibrodrive) that cannot be run more than 10 seconds (or something) at a time.  A screwup happens, and it's necessary, in order to save the ship, to run the drive a bit longer.  A special government representative explains to the engineer who saw him run the drive that there is really no limit on how long it can run, but that the government is afraid that if the lack of limitation became known, the drive would be vulnerable to conversion to weapons-use.  So, they made up the story about the 10 second limit.  Everyone knows there is a "Safety Margin", see, but they don't know it's infinite.  Then the government guy kills the engineer.  To prevent the secret getting out, see?  The logic holes in this story are amazing, but perhaps justifiable as a set up.  The thing that squicks me, of course, is the cold blooded killing, and the apparent assertion that that's justifiable, an "end justifies the means" thing. 

The other M'Intosh story is much better, a straight "planetary adventure" called "Venus Mission" (July 1951).  A spaceship crashes on Venus.  One of the passengers is a hero of the recent war (since over) between the human colonists and the native Venusians.  Another is a "Plucky Girl"(tm).  Others include the usual ineffectual suspects, most notably a pretty piece of fluff.  The Hero of the war gets to know the Plucky Girl, and tell he's done with being a Hero.  The war was enough for him.  Somebody else was going to have to cross 20 miles of Venusian terrain to reach the nearest Human city and arrange a rescue, and brave the evil Venusians, who detect prey by sensing brain patterns.  (This makes sense, sort of, because Venus' atmosphere doesn't allow for much in the way of sight or sound.)  The Plucky Girl, furious at the cowardly hero, decides that she will make the trek.  She almost makes it, but at the last, the Venusians are alerted to human presence by the silliness of the Pretty Fluff, who had also decided to try to reach the human city.  Both are captured, and Pretty Fluff is subjected to horrible torture, until the Hero, who has been following them all along (for a good reason, which I can't quite recall, but which was justified in story context), rescues them.  You will not be surprised to learn that the story ends with Hero kissing Plucky Girl, marriage at 11.  It all sounds silly and pulpish, and it is, but it's also fun.  Stuff like this is what makes M'Intosh a guilty pleasure.

F&SF, April 1953

"Beggars All" actually seems written for J. W. Campbell, at least in form. Scouts from a far future human galactic culture recontact an isolated colony. They seem to be outrageously rude beggars.  In the course of resisting another aggressive civilization, at the behest of these beggars, the scouts realize that the bad manners of these "beggars" evolved for good socially adaptive reasons.  Or so M'Intosh would have us believe: I wasn't convinced.  He also tacked on a horrendously unconvincing, and unnecessary, love story.

Galaxy, October 1954

The other novelette is from J. T. McIntosh, "Spy" (15300 words). This story is oddly reminiscent of the McIntosh novelette from F&SF, October 1955, discussed below: "The Man Who Cried 'Sheep'". Both stories are about a spy from another planet who uses a cover involving statistical research to investigate the planet to which he comes. To be sure, this story is in details quite different. Ken Corvey is from the colony planet Aram, come to Earth to verify Earth's military power. His cover is as a journalist doing "survey reporting" -- using statistically significant subsets of populations to learn things. His life is complicated in two ways: he is falling in love with an Earthwoman, Sandra Reid; and he is very ill, with an illness that originated on his planet. He can't seek treatment, because the doctor will recognize his illness and deduce his real planet. So he has to put up with the symptoms, which are extremely realistic hallucinations.

The ultimate conflict involves his worries about his lover's ultimate loyalty (to Earth, of course), and his won (to Aram -- but are the colonies really right?). The resolution buries a slight twist, which is OK but not quite believable. Still, the story is good reading, and makes some interesting points. I'd rank it as one of McIntosh's better outings. I think he missed an opportunity -- which probably was not something he would have been interested in at all! -- of using the realistic hallucinations to present multiple possible endings, never telling us which was real. I.e., to write a Philip Dick story!

F&SF, May 1955

"Eleventh Commandment" is a painfully obvious political fable about a proposal for a law against miscegenation between the slightly altered races of the future (each adapted just a bit to fit their home planets' environments). This is a story that perhaps had more force in the '50s than it does now.

New Worlds, August 1955

McIntosh's "The Way Home" is the lead novelette, a long one at 19,500 words. A small group of explorers, four men and three women, find themselves trapped on an alien planet when the seemingly friendly indigenous aliens steal their spaceship. Their lifeboats remain, but they soon realize the aliens have boobytrapped them. The story is both a problem story -- how have the lifeboats been boobytrapped? -- and an examination of small group dynamics. The puzzle of the boobytrapping seemed easily enough solvable to me, and also the alien's motivations for acting as they did seemed implausible -- or nonexistent. But McIntosh's real interest anyway is in exploring the tensions -- both sexual and "leadership"-related -- between the seven humans. That works OK, and keeps the interest, but it is marred for me by the sexist (though very typical of the time) view of the women crewmembers.

F&SF, October 1955

So, to the fiction. The lead story is J. T. McIntosh's "The Man Who Cried 'Sheep'", just shy of 14,000 words. A secret agent for the planet Verna, calling himself Mr. Lees, comes to the planet Renn, with the goal of determining whether an alliance with Renn is desirable. Verna's rival planet is Kolper, and the hero is forced to kill a Kolperian agent on the spaceship just before arrival. Thus is investigation of the situation on Renn is complicated by the fact that he is quickly under investigation as a murder suspect. More to the point, the detective in charge of the case is a very beautiful woman. Lees' investigations seem to suggest that the people of Renn are "sheep" -- easily cowed, polite to a fault. Perhaps they will not be a strong ally. But on the other hand, his pursuer, the beautiful detective, besides being sexy as heck, is hardly sheeplike. And the pressure to conclude an alliance seems to be increasing ... I was entertained, on the whole, but not in a science-fictional way. And that's the main problem I had with the story -- it needn't have been SF at all, and the fact that it is presented as an other world adventure is nothing but distracting.

New Worlds, February 1957

This issue includes a novella by J. T. McIntosh: "Unit", a rather disappointing story of a group of five people (really 6 including an unmodified "unit father", as he implies but never states outright) who have been trained to work as a superintelligent unit, by having all 5 of their brains erased and retrained together. Some hints of sexual tension are underdeveloped, and the mission that the "unit" solves together is cute but doesn't really convince.

Galaxy, June 1959

The other novelet is "No Place for Crime", by J. T. McIntosh, short for McIntosh at about 11000 words. A quartet of thieves plan a series of perfect crimes on a world with a reputation as being free of crime. This world is so because, basically, the citizens have completely given up their privacy. The thieves' plan revolves around teleportation, a bit of a cheat, especially as McIntosh must rather artificially constrict his version of teleportation abilities to make it work. Of course the perfect crimes don't quite come off, and there is a bit of a twist at the end (plus an implausible love story) to add flavor. Middle range for McIntosh, I'd say.

Galaxy, August 1961

"The Gatekeepers" is a pretty well done piece from J. T. McIntosh. As he was wont to do, he uses a modest SFnal idea to carefully establish a difficult situation, then tries to work out a solution. The idea here is that two planets have a difficult to maintain matter transmitter (MT) link. They use this for trade -- actual interplanetary travel being expensive. But they have stumbled into war. Realizing that the link must be maintained mutually, or be lost and prohibitively expensive to reestablish after the war, they agree to each maintain a single gatekeeper (and a couple of spares), noncombatants who will swear not to allow the link to be used for sending soldiers or weapons. The story concerns the two gatekeepers, who, through a combination of coincidence, a bit of gentlemanly trading (technically against the law, but tolerated), and the one man's insistence on his wife's presence, end up simultaneously threatened by partisans who want to send bombs or germs through the gate to destroy the other planet. The meshing of the plot is nicely done -- the way different pressures on the two men lead to similar situations.

Analog, April 1963

The other novelette is J. T. McIntosh's "Iceberg from Earth" (12,500 words). McIntosh was a regular at Galaxy and New Worlds and other places in the 50s, rarely if ever cracking Astounding, but in the 60s he sold several stories to Campbell. This one is very much in his usual style, set in a system colonized by humans, with three planets arranged in a classic balance of power. The narrator is a spy from Marlock, which is eternally almost at war with Coran. They are the poorer two planets of the system. They are on the larger planet, Rham, as a new Marlockian warship is demonstrated. They now that Coran will try to sabotage the new ship. Earth as it turns out has an interest in foiling Coran's plans, so they have sent a spy, a beautiful but very cool woman named Nova Webb. The bulk of the story concerns the working out of the various plots, and in particularly how Nova Webb is revealed as more intelligent -- and more vicious -- than the various men from the colony worlds. It's OK but quite thin.

Amazing, September 1964

On to the shorter pieces from the September issue. We begin with the novelette, "Planet of Change", by J. T. McIntosh, real name James MacGregor (1925-2008), a Scottish writer who published 15 or so novels and something like a hundred shorter pieces in the SF field in a 30 year career beginning in 1950. I've read several of his novels, and quite a few short stories (or, mostly, in his case, novelettes), often with a fair amount of enjoyment. "Planet of Change" is the story of the court martial of the leader of a mutiny on a ship that had been ordered to explore a planet from which no previous explorer had returned. The mystery turns on the read identity of the man being court-martialed, and that of course turns on the real nature of the dangerous planet. It's an OK piece, nothing terribly special.