Birthday Review: Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon

Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon

a review by Rich Horton

Today is Elizabeth Moon's birthday, so I've resurrected a review I wrote a long time ago of the first of her Kylara Vatta novels. I'm a big fan of both of Moon's long Military SF series -- the earlier series, sometimes called the Heris Serrano books, but more amusingly, in James Nicoll's coinage, the "Aunts in Space" books; and the later Kylara Vatta series. Both series are bifurcated, with an initial sequence of a few novels, followed fairly directly by a new but related sequence. I'm posting this review because it's of the first novel, but I should add that this wasn't my favorite novel in the Vatta's War sequence -- it got better as it went along.

Trading in Danger was Elizabeth Moon's second novel for Del Rey after leaving Baen. The Speed of Dark came first. It was a near future look at an autistic man and a potential treatment for autism. Trading in Danger was a return to military SF, with an overtly "commercial" aspect, as it is about a commercial shipping company.

This was the first volume of a new series called Vatta's War. As such it may be regarded as primarily an introduction to a character and setting, and looked at that way it works OK. But it's a bit disappointing on its own. (After the Vatta's War books, Moon recently began a new "subseries" called Vatta's Peace.)

Kylara Vatta is a 21 year old nearly read to graduate from her planet's Space Academy, when she is summarily dismissed for having helped a fellow cadet who ended up embarrassing the Academy. Fortunately she is the daughter of the CFO of a very respected family-owned space transport company, Vatta Transport, Ltd, and she has a position to return to. Despite her youth, she is immediately assigned a Captaincy in Vatta organization, and she is given an old ship, with orders to take it on one last shipment and then to bring it to a salvage yard and scrap it. This is seen as a presumably routine first assignment.

But on the way she sees an opportunity to make some money for the company -- possibly enough to refurbish the ship and keep it for herself. She agrees to pick up a shipment of agricultural equipment and take it to a fairly new colony planet. Unfortunately, the place she goes to get the equipment turns out to be on the brink of civil war, and on top of that her old ship finally breaks down and she is stranded without FTL capability. And then one side in the war takes the almost unprecedented step of destroying the ansibles, leaving her (and the entire system) out of contact with the rest of the Galaxy. Her ship is unarmed, so she is forced to cooperate with mercenaries who demand that she intern some personnel from other ships the mercenaries have captured. Before long she is facing mutiny, a further damaged ship, starvation, and eventually the humiliating presence of a senior Vatta captain.

As I said, I like Moon's military SF, and I tend to fall for her female heroes, and this book is no exception that way. I liked Ky and will keep reading her series. But this book itself is unsatisfying in several ways. Some of it is not convincing -- for instance her convenient ouster from the Academy just didn't make much sense to me. (And the reaction of her boyfriend ... well, I won't say, but I didn't believe it, either. Though it's a very minor point.) Furthermore, there are annoying loose ends, such as what is really going on in the war she gets embroiled in, and particularly, why did a certain group blow up the ansibles?: they are never given a plausible reason to have done so (it is stated to always backfire, and it certainly seems to do so in this case). The overall action is just a bit flat. I've often criticized Moon's tendency to have overly sneering, evull, villains: that's mostly not the case here, which on the face of it is good, but which also reflects a certain lack of a coherent conflict in the book.

[I add again, the the series gained a perfectly coherent conflict in subsequent books, and I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.]

Brief Birthday Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Today would have been Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 91st birthday. (He died in 2014.) In his honor then, here's what I wrote shortly after I read his most famous novel, probably about 20 years ago. What I wrote was quite brief, basically a capsule.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Nobel-Prize Winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is, I dare say, one of the most famous books of, well, the past One Hundred Years. I've read some shorter stuff by Marquez in the past, and only liked it indifferently. But this is his magnum opus, by most accounts his finest work, and I was looking for something "big" to read.

It's quite a remarkable book. It took me a while to let the comic spirit of the book take over: it's really is a comic novel, and I originally approached it too solemnly. On the other hand, once I thought it was purely comic, the atrocities started to occur. The book is full of outsize characters, and outsize events. Much of the book tells of an extended Civil War, and also there are many murders, a horrifying massacre, absurd accidents, women dying in childbirth, incest, ...  The scope of imagination is enormous, and quite original. The book is about one family, the Buendias, and the town, Macondo, that their patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, founds. The entire history of the town is detailed, and this is also the history of this family. As I said, it is at one important level very comic, but, even aside from the atrocities, its quite sad as well.

Fantastical events occur throughout, which result in the book being called "Magical Realism".  There is a lot of debate over whether MR is just fantasy by someone who doesn't want to be lumped in with genre writers, or something separate. I would argue strongly for the latter: MR, as represented by this book, has a strongly different "feel" from fantasy. One explanation is that the use of the fantastic is something of a political strategy -- an argument that I think might be convincing as to the motivations of the writers, but which doesn't seem helpful is explaining the effect of the strategy on the reader. That is, the Magical Realist aspects transcend any political (especially locally or historically political) aspect.

The main problem I had with One Hundred Years of Solitude was a certain difficulty in becoming absorbed with the characters.  They are so unusual, so obsessed with things I have little sympathy for, that, while I stayed interested in them, I was never fully involved. Despite that, though, this is a fascinating, and thought-provoking novel, and one which I think will stick with me, and grow in memory. I should add that the much praised translation, by Gregory Rabassa, seems to me (not a Spanish reader) to be very successful. [And I can only say that, yes, the novel has stuck with and grown in my memory, in such a way that I consider it a very great novel now.]

Birthday Review: Stories of Gregory Feeley

Greg Feeley turns 64 today. He is one of the best and most intelligent SF writers working today, though alas not as prolific as some of us might hope. He is also an incisive and unsparing critic. I say "SF writer", and that is surely true (and Greg strongly identifies as part of the SF community), but, as you will see me say in the reviews I've published below, much of his work is not really SF, or ambiguously so. This is not in the least a problem -- an SFnal imagination surely informs the historical works I've discussed, and, in any case, for me and many other readers, what matters most is the work, and the work should be in the best form or genre for itself. I read widely outside SF, though SF is the core of my reading, and SF is what lights me up even when it's bad, but Greg's writing (critical as well as fictional) is a demonstration that the field of literature is wide, and that we should not be building walls but welcoming great work from wherever it comes, genre-wise or culture-wise.

Some of my favorite Feeley stories date to before I was reviewing for Locus. I think I may have reviewed some of these for Tangent, but it looks like I've lost my original electronic copies of everything I wrote for Tangent, which at this remove seems a terrible loss to me. (It didn't even occur to me, decades ago, that I would want to keep them.) Anyway, as for Greg's stories, the likes of "The Drowning Cell", "The Weighing of Ayre", and "Animae Celestes" (among others) are not to be missed.

Locus Online, 12 April 2001

[This is extracted from a longer piece I did for Locus Online called Two Fine Novellas From Less Travelled Places, which also reviewed Paul di Filippo's "Karuna, Inc.", and in which is discussed the market for novellas -- a discussion which is terribly out of date by now.]

"Spirit of the Place", by Gregory Feeley, is an impressive fantasy novella based on an historical incident, indeed, an incident which is still generating controversy and political maneuvering to this day. The story is set in Greece in 1802, as the ship Mentor, owned by the Scottish Lord Elgin, takes on a number of crates containing marble friezes and metopes removed from the Parthenon. These are the so-called "Elgin marbles," which after much debate were sold to the British Museum by Elgin, and which remain there today, despite many appeals that they be returned to Greece.

This story is told through Elgin's personal secretary, William Richard Hamilton. He is to accompany the marbles to England on the Mentor. Once the ship is underway, there are murmurs among the crew of whispers and strange noises from the hold. Hamilton ventures down, and encounters something very strange indeed, a "spirit" resident somehow in the ash planks which were just used to repair the Mentor. The rest of the story recounts Hamilton's relationship with this spirit.

The story is well-told, bolstered with careful historical details, and with careful references to the literary and mythological history of nymphs and dryads. Hamilton's relationship with this "person", as he is compelled to call her, is ambiguous and somewhat painful. His character and the spirit's character are well-depicted, and the resolution takes part of the Mentor's actual history and portrays it in a new light. The story itself is only indirectly about the Elgin marbles, but its depiction of the pain of the nymph of the ash tree at her uprooting is a fine metaphorical version of the cruel removal of the great sculptures in the Parthenon from their rightful home. As with much of Feeley's work, the action of his story becomes a sort of metaphor for the thematic matter of the piece. This is excellent work, and I hope it comes to the attention of SF readers.

Locus, January 2003

Beyond the Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, concerns what might lie "beyond" the end of the universe. All in all it's a pretty decent book, though the repetitive nature of many of the stories does pall a bit. Gregory Feeley opens the book very strongly, with possibly the best story, "False Vacuum", initially, and intriguingly enough, about a far future Muslim Earth, in which non-Muslims have all left as machine intelligences. A young woman encounters some of these intelligences, and learns a bit of their nature -- and then the story shifts gears, to put a different focus on things.

Locus, April 2004

Perhaps the best story in The First Heroes is Gregory Feeley's "Giliad", a very good post-9/11 reflection. It is barely SF or not SF at all, nor even historical fiction, but it still occupies the same imaginative space, it seems to me. The narrative intertwines several points-of-view, mainly that of Leslie, a contemporary woman in the fall of 2001. Her husband is beta-testing a new computer game, Ziggurat, a sort of Civilization variant set in Bronze Age Sumer. Leslie studies Sumer, and dreams of a Sumerian girl faced with war at the beginning of history. Meanwhile, at the time Francis Fukuyama fatuously called "the end of history", history advances quite brutally -- at the World Trade Center, in Afghanistan, and of course in Iraq, collocated with Sumer. There is a brief interval showing an SF writer (unnamed but recognizable as James Blish) worrying about another possible "end of history" in the Bomb-haunted 50s. An absorbing and thoughtful novella.

Locus, May 2004

Gregory Feeley seems determined to make things hard on SF award nominators: "Arabian Wine" (Asimov's, April-May) is his second outstanding novella to appear in an SF venue this year, but like "Giliad" (from The First Heroes) it is not really SF. "Arabian Wine" is a long novella (cut from a short novel) concerning Matteo, younger son of a Venetian merchant family in the early 17th Century. He has encountered the invigorating properties of a drink called "caofa", and he hopes to make it popular in Europe, and thereby make a fortune for his family, and perhaps also to revivify Venice itself. He is also involved with a young man working on a steam engine. And his mistress is engaging in small-time witchcraft on the side. Any or all of these activities might engage the unwelcome attention of various Venetian authorities. This is an absorbing tale set in an unfamiliar milieu, and dealing with the introduction of new technology -- SFnal enough, eh? In the end though it is mainly, and movingly, about a man ground in the gears of the apparatus of an autocratic state, about the impact of Islam on the West, and about coffee.

Review of Arabian Wine, from the March 2005 Locus

Gregory Feeley's "Arabian Wine", published in Asimov's last April-May, was one of the most celebrated stories of the year. I thought it perhaps the best novella of 2004 (with only another Feeley story, "Giliad", to challenge it). It is on the preliminary Nebula ballot as I write. And now a longer version appears in a lovely edition from the small press Temporary Culture.

The novella was, in fact, cut by Feeley to fit the length restrictions of the magazine. Thus the new version is really the original version of the story, and indeed the preferred version. It is nearly half again as long, at roughly 40,000 words on the borderline between novella and novel. The novella is an excellent work, but the novel is better, a fuller and richer story, recounting for the most part the same events but with elaborations both at the micro level (a line here and there) and the macro level (not so much new scenes as expanded scenes). There are significant additions – considerably more detail of the protagonist's time in Alexandria, an instructive encounter with a young boy in the Arsenal, more interactions with his not always fully supportive family. But perhaps more importantly there are lines and paragraphs which make the narrative richer, more detailed, throughout. Pace is not an issue – the story unfolds just as it should at the greater length.

The central character is Matteo Benveneto, a younger son of a Venetian trading family. He is unable to travel for the family because he is subject to severe seasickness. But on his only journey he was introduced to coffee – kahveh, caofa, "Arabian Wine". Back in Venice he pursues two projects. He hopes to introduce coffee to the European palate and establish his family as a leading distributor. And he is assisting his friend, Gaspare Treviso, in developing a steam engine for the potential use of the Venetian state. This is all against the backdrop of a stagnating Venice, in about the year 1600.

These projects are promising. The steam engine, designed to pump water out of the basements of buildings (certainly an issue in Venice!), is technically challenging but appears to work. And coffee is a hit with most of the people who try it. But there are political and cultural issues. Matteo deals with much of Venetian society, one way or another: a Senator; a representative of the Jewish ghetto; the deeply conservative artisans of the shipbuilding sector, the Arsenal; his own skeptical family; even his fortune-telling mistress. In the end he is ground, like his coffee beans, in the machinery of the authoritarian state: suspicious of change, riven by factions, unwilling to confront the reality of an altered political and cultural landscape. Matteo's fate is almost random, contingent upon the whims of those in power and the whims of simple fate.

This is not unambiguously SF. There are elements that may be speculative – most notably the fairly early efforts to build a steam engine – but nothing that violates what I know of history (unless an early scene amusingly hinting at the invention of espresso qualifies!). Nonetheless, the novel (as to be sure with much historical fiction) satisfies in an SFnal fashion. It is in part about the introduction of new technology to a society – surely a deeply science-fictional theme. It is also a depiction of an unfamiliar culture – again an SFnal theme. It is also of course relevant to contemporary concerns – for one thing it deals with the clash of Islam and the West; for another it deals with the wielding of autocratic power, all but uncaringly, against insignificant individuals. No matter the genre – "Arabian Wine" was one of the best novellas of 2004, and Arabian Wine will surely stand as one of the best novels of 2005.

Locus, February 2006

Jay Lake’s anthology TEL: Stories consists of 29 stories of an “experimental” nature. Many of these are interesting but not quite successful, but the best are quite good, particularly the opening story, Greer Gilman’s “Jack Daw’s Pack” (a reprint), and the closing story, Gregory Feeley’s “Fancy Bread”, is which the long life of Jack (of Beanstalk fame, it seems), and his ongoing struggle for bread, is a means of depicting, of all things, economic history – from a rather slant perspective.

Locus, November 2008

Otherworldly Maine is a fine collection of fantastical stories set in Maine, mixing reprints with originals. The reprints come from such storied writers as Mark Twain, Edgar Pangborn, and Stephen King, as well as some less well known people, and they are a fine diverse selection. The new stories are also good – the best is “Awskonomuk”, by Gregory Feeley (a writer we haven’t seen enough from lately). It’s not really SF or Fantasy, though its concerns are SFnal – a hobbyist archaeologist, interested in the possibility that Leif Ericson’s people got as far south as Maine, inquires into the history of an Abenaki woman whose DNA suggests a snippet of European ancestry. The fulcrum, in this villainless story, is the question of where the interests of First Nations people really lie – this woman, at least, cares much more about the future than a perhaps ambiguous past.

Locus, February 2011

Finally, I was glad to see new fiction from Gregory Feeley, though Kentauros is more than just fiction: it’s a beautifully written linked set of three essays and two short stories (one of them in two parts), all on the subject of Kentauros, the unfortunate son of a human king who dared to lust after the goddess Hera, and who was tricked into sleeping with a cloud simulacrum of her instead, engendering Kentauros, who in time would rape some horses, engendering the race of centaurs. The essays discuss that rather obscure bit of Greek mythology. One story tells of Kentauros’ difficult life, and the other is about Mary Shelley, and her relationship with Lord Byron and with Leigh Hunt, as she raises her son after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death. The Kentauros story comes up, but more central is Mary’s own life, her own genius, and her recollections of her husband, and a supposed poetic version of the Kentauros myth that Hunt suggest Shelley may have written. The book is fascinating in a scholarly sense, and also in a literary sense, and it is simply lovely as well.

Locus, November 2016

Even better, I thought, was Gregory Feeley’s “The Bridge of Dreams” (Clarkesworld, April), set in the very far future with a Norse-derived theme (I was reminded, a bit, of Roger Zelazny’s “For a Breath I Tarry”, not necessarily because of any direct similarities.) Heimdallr is a being living alone and maintaining an ice bridge between Plouton and Charon that he calls Bifröst, when a visitor, Garðrofa arrives with a summons from the Sheltered Gardens in the “Sunlit Realms” – the Inner Solar System – where the two, become one, will encounter the remnants of humanity, and people called kobolds, and a task that may involve treachery … It’s a mysterious story, redolent with convincingly weird posthuman details, effectively stranged by such devices as naming the planets recognizably but unusually. There is wildly high technology, and a certain elegiac tone, an elegant and careful prose, and some just cool ideas.

Birthday Review: Stories of Ann Leckie

Today is Ann Leckie's birthday. I was delighted to find her first SF story in Subterranean Magazine way back in 2006, and to reprint it in my Best of the Year collection. I was even more delighted when I later learned that we live in neighboring suburbs, and indeed that our children attended the same high school. And I was most delighted of all when she continued to grow as a writer, producing a whole series of excellent short stories, both fantasy and SF, and then winning a Hugo for her first novel, Ancillary Justice. She has written three more SF novels in the same universe, but her new novel, The Raven Tower, is Fantasy, in the mode (and, I believe, sharing a world) with many of her fantasy short stories, which are very interested in questioning the nature of the relationship between gods and humans. (The only downside of her success as a novelist, is, as with many short fiction writers turned novelists, she has published much less short fiction since her novels began appearing.)

Locus, September 2006

I have just recently discovered the new magazine Subterranean, and I have been quite impressed. Issue #4, guest-edited by John Scalzi, concerns SF clichés. Scalzi assembles a nice set of short stories, some of which are essentially japes, as one might expect, but most of which are quite serious attempts at breathing new life into some rather hoary ideas. And most are pretty successful. Scalzi features several very new writers, who acquit themselves admirably, particularly Ann Leckie, whose “Hesperia and Glory” inverts the John Carter template by having a Prince of Mars mysteriously transported to Earth.

Locus, December 2007

Speaking of online publications, “The Snake’s Wife”, by Ann Leckie (Helix, October) is a story of dynastic struggles between two regions in a fantastical world, and as such is somewhat traditional. But there are several legitimately shocking acts at the heart of it, and all is resolved starkly and honestly. The narrator is the third son of an ambitious king of an area devoted to a serpent god. His father, based on prophecies of his god, has decided to refuse the offer for his daughter’s hand of the prince of another land, this one devoted to a sky god, but under the curse of the serpent god. This land’s king is also acting based on his god’s promises. What follows is a story of war, forced marriage, mutilation, and revenge: ultimately suggesting that the promises of gods may come true but ought to regarded with great suspicion.

Locus, August 2008

And while discussing Helix I should mention a particularly strong story from the previous issue (April): Ann Leckie’s “The God of Au”, an original fantasy about the dangers – and benefits – of making bargains with gods, as a group of refugees comes to a remote island and agrees to the demands of the local god; with a variety of consequences.

Locus, December 2008

In the fine online ‘zine Lone Star Stories ... I also enjoyed Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky’s “Needle and Thread”, about a dressmaker charged to make a gown to turn a princess beautiful – but such magic is illegal. And, perhaps, wasted – the prince is not so interested in beauty. The characters are well done, the idea clever –, but it flattens into a somewhat conventional morality fairy tale, not quite what I’ve come to expect from either of these excellent new writers. Still, it does what it aims to do quite well.

Locus, July 2009

Clockwork Phoenix is the most experimental and often the most interesting of the impressive stable of four anthologies published by Norilana. My favorite story is Ann Leckie’s “The Endangered Camp”, which she says resulted from a sort of challenge to combine dinosaurs, post-apocalyptic fiction, and Mars – and does so beautifully as the crew of the first spaceship to Mars witnesses the asteroid striking Earth and wonders what to do.

Locus, February 2010

The February Realms of Fantasy I also like Ann Leckie’s “The Unknown God”, in which the god Aworo, in human form, returns to the city where he tragically misused his power, condemning a woman he loved to, he though, death. He learns she still lives, but in constrained circumstances due to his curse. And naturally she (and her own god) are not too happy with him. Leckie is as ever inventive and logical and grounded about the power and responsibility of godhood.

Locus, December 2012

I thought the Summer issue of Electric Velocipede one of its stronger outings. Ann Leckie's “Night's Slow Poison” is an enjoyable if somewhat old-fashioned story about a man from an isolated planet charged with protecting its main secret – how to navigate there – from its enemies. It's set on a spaceship heading to this planet, though the real interest comes as we learn the back story of the main character – his disappointment in love – or his family's financial distress – either of which, perhaps, might motivate him to treachery?

Locus, January 2015

Strange Horizons completed its annual fund drive in November successfully, and so published a bonus story by Ann Leckie, “She Commands Me and I Obey”. It's good  work, set on a space station, and told by a young novice at a monastery. It seems the rulers of the Precinct are determined by the results of games, and this year the longstanding ruler's champion is to be challenged by a particularly promising upstart. Leckie mixes in some familiar ingredients: the novice with a hidden past, the harsh fate of the games' losers, the hidden motives of the monks, and plenty of political corruption. So the story doesn't really surprise but it's involving and quite fun.

Old Bestseller Review: Snowdrift and other stories, by Georgette Heyer

Snowdrift and other stories, by Georgette Heyer

a review by Rich Horton

When I was a teenager I read every one of Georgette Heyer's Regency romances, and her other romances and historicals (except for My Lord John), and her mysteries, as well. I also read 1 1/2 of her early contemporary novels, but I gave up on them, finding them truly dire. I've reread some of my favorites among the romances on occasion since that time. (My favorites are, I suppose, Sylvester, Sprig Muslin, Frederica, Arabella, and These Old Shades. Probably a couple more could be fit in there.)

So I was surprised to see, at Sally Kobee's booth at Boskone a couple of weeks ago, a Heyer book I didn't recognize: Snowdrift and other stories. It turns out, however, that this is a slight expansion of her only story collection, which I read back in the day under the title Pistols for Two. This book adds three "recently discovered" stories to the 11 that appeared in the first collection. Apparently she wrote nearly two dozen short stories all told -- I suspect the stories not reprinted have contemporary settings. The book seems to have been assembled by Jennifer Kloester, who has written two books about Heyer, including a biography. She also provides an introduction.

Heyer was a novelist, and these short stories don't show her at her best. But they are by and large cute and enjoyable, if implausible and often vaguely unsatisfying. She just doesn't have time to unspool the sort of plot she could do at greater length, and, more importantly, she couldn't really make the inevitable end of story realizations that the two main characters are destined to be together very convincing. Falling in love at first sight is a romance convention, but the fun of many of Heyer's books is that even if the characters do fall in love at first sight (and they usually do not) it takes them a few hundred pages to realize it. Herein they mostly have to be ready to get married within 20 pages.

The stories are:

"Snowdrift" (5700 words)
"Full Moon" (6600 words)
"Pistols for Two" (5500 words)
"A Clandestine Affair" (8700 words)
"Bath Miss" (5400 words)
"Pink Domino" (5500 words)
"A Husband for Fanny" (5300 words)
"To Have the Honour" (6000 words)
"Night at the Inn" (6200 words)
"The Duel" (5000 words)
"Hazard" (5800 words)
"Pursuit" (5200 words)
"Runaway Match" (4900 words)
"Incident on the Bath Road" (5100 words)

(The last three stories on that list are the "recent discoveries".)

There are a couple of duels, several elopements (though nobody actually reaches Gretna Green), and lots of 30-something men falling in love with and quickly claiming girls of 19 or so. There are also a couple of cases of older men and older women getting together (that is, men in their late 30s or 40s, women in the mid to late 20s -- in one case, a widow well into her 30s, though!) -- I have always liked those better in principle, in her novels as well as these stories -- the women are more mature, more even matches for the men. The cases where men almost twice the age of the girl heroines marry them seem problematic -- and it's worse in these short stories, where there is really no established relationship -- the characters don't know much about each other except that they like the other's looks, and maybe that they are decent to talk to for a few minutes. But there you are -- that's the nature of the genre, I suppose.

As I said, though I found these stories less satisfying than Heyer's novels, they were still enjoyable. The conversation is often amusing. The plots are simple, but in at least a couple of cases there are cute twists. It is amusing as a reader to guess from the beginning what's going to happen -- amusing but generally fairly easy. Certainly a minor part of Heyer's oeuvre, and likely only for completists, but if you are a fan, these are worth your time.

Birthday Review: Stories of John Barnes (and one novel, A Princess of the Aerie)

Today is John Barnes's birthday. I think he's one of the best pure SF writers of our time. In particular, The Sky So Big and Black is one of the best SF novels of this millennium -- and one of the scariest. Here's a selection of my reviews of his work in Locus, plus a review of his novel A Princess of the Aerie that appeared in the UK magazine 3SF.

Locus, November 2005

The November Analog features a novella by John Barnes, the latest in his Thousand Cultures series, which opened with a beautiful Analog novelette, “Canso de Fis de Jovent”. “The Diversification of His Fancy” reads like a bridge to a new novel. That said, it stands pretty well alone, though it may be a bit too long. Giraut Leones, the series’ hero, is now a celebrated musician (as well as a spy) – and he has also been a target of assassination attempts. His latest concert seems likely to be the venue for another attempt – and so we witness his “entourage” as they try to protect him. His entourage includes (among others) his ex-wife; his once dead friend; his father, who is now younger than him; and his lover. We learn little enough about the assassination plot (I presume that’s left for the novel?), but we learn a lot about the background of the Thousand Cultures, and especially about their somewhat imperfect immortality technology, which is based on recorded minds being downloaded into new bodies. (Hence the once dead friend and the younger father.) This story turns movingly on one of the central imperfections of this technology: not everyone can be saved and downloaded.

Locus, January 2006

The January-February Analog is also strong, indeed, one of the best issues in some time. There is good work in particular from Rajnar Vajra, Mark W. Tiedemann, and Richard A. Lovett, and an intriguing far future reverse take on today’s environmental controversies by Julian Flood, “Change”. But the best story is the longest: John Barnes’s “’The Night is Fine’, the Walrus Said”, a direct sequel to “The Diversification of its Fancy” (November 2005), and due to be followed by its own sequel in March. Indeed, it would appear that Barnes’s latest Thousand Cultures novel is perhaps being stealthily serialized in Analog, at least in part. I have no complaints! The stories work well enough on their own, though they are very clearly parts of a larger whole.  In this story Giraut Leones is again the subject of multiple assassination attempts as he tries to get his latest musical project finished. He seems to be the target of some faction of a group of illegal human colonies on distant planets. Things are further complicated when he begins to fall for a woman from his past – who seems to be connected to a representative of those colonies, and who is also a passionate Ixist. (The Ixist religion (introduced in an earlier book) being the subject of Giraut’s latest work.) The ending reveals some secrets, and sets the stage for much more to be revealed soon – involving AIs, aliens, the curious life-extension tech on this future, and of course the illegal colonies.

Locus, February 2006

John Barnes’s latest Thousand Cultures story continues in the March Analog with “The Little White Nerves Went Last”. A recording of Giraut Leones’s old boss Shan has been hosted in Giraut, and both are in the custody of rogue “aintellects”. Shan in particular had been a fierce opponent of AI rights, and this story consists mostly of his account of his childhood on a distant planet. The story reveals some important secrets of Barnes’s future – the source of his enabling “springer” (matter transmitter) technology, and the nature and motivations of a threatening alien civilization. This story is interesting and moving, if at times just a bit pat. The stage seems well and truly set for a pretty spectacular finish.

Locus, May 2006

I thought the best stories in the first issue of Baen's Universe were two longer novelettes. “Poga” by John Barnes, is a fantasy about a woman, Plain Old Goddamn Amy (or “Poga”), whose father was a struggling fantasy writer who suddenly made it big. In this world, Elfland is roughly Wyoming, and she lives in Colorado, near the border. She is struggling with a lonely life, and her dead father’s ambiguous legacy, and her uneasy relationship with the fantastical promise of Elfland.

Locus, November 2006

In October at Baen's Universe I thought two stories stood out – perhaps not quite what a reader of Baen Books would expect. ... Even better is John Barnes’s “Every Hole is Outlined”, set very far in the future, and essentially the life story of a girl sold from slavery into service on a starship. The small starship crew lives at a different rate, in essence, from planetbound people, and in a very different way as well. And there are mysteries – in particular the ghosts … Barnes’s heroine goes from a young girl more or less manipulated into marriage with an old man to the ship’s captain, and as we read of her life we learn fascinating snippets of the culture she inhabits. It’s quite a moving story, and it hints at a very interesting future.

Locus, February 2007

The new online magazine Helix offers a very good third issue. Among several strong stories I’ll mention particularly John Barnes’s “Rod Rapid and His Electric Chair” is a very mordantly funny send up of a Tom Swift-like series of books and more to the point the racist and fascist views expressed therein – which lead to the end of the world.

Locus, September 2007

The August Baen’s Universe includes another strong story from John Barnes, who had two of the best stories there last year. “An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away” is about a couple of documentary makers on Mars to record the impact of a comet as part of the terraforming effort. They have sort of a Red Mars/Green Mars conflict: Léoa’s point of view is to mourn the loss of the old Mars, while Thorby (a significant name in SF terms, but I admit I can’t figure out the reason for the nod to Citizen of the Galaxy) wants to celebrate the coming of a new Mars, and also wants to document Big Energy Release Events – that is to say, things blowing up. The story turns, however, on their more personal characters – Thorby’s lonely life, Léoa’s ambition – as plotwise it pivots on an accident on the surface of Mars.

Locus, January 2010

However, they (Jim Baen's Universe) do close 2009 with perhaps the best story they’ve published yet, and one of the great stories of the year: John Barnes’s “Things Undone”. Rastigevat is a highborn member of a rather darkly formed society. His partner is of lower class, but we learn quickly that they are in love, for which the lower born individual is liable to be executed. Their job is curious – they track down time travelers and try to minimize the damage they can cause. The story turns on several things – the feelings of the main characters (Rastigevat in particular, as he seems to be borderline autistic), eventual revelations about the true nature of this world – an alternate history – and why it’s different to our world, the rather subtle delineation of the extent of the differences (accompanied by some of the typical alternate history namedropping, but here employed to much better effect than usual), and of course a conspiracy … In the end it’s very moving, very involving – I was reminded of one of my favorite time travel stories of all time, John Brunner’s “The Fullness of Time”.

Locus, March 2011

Jonathan Strahan serves notice that 2011 may be as strong a year as the past few in original anthologies with Engineering Infinity. ... John Barnes closes the book with “The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees”. Stephanie and her husband Lars are part of an expedition to the Southern Ocean to investigate a curious feature: a mat of huge upside down “trees”. The nature of the trees and the reason for them is pretty neat, in an SFnal way. The story also has a fine character-based conflict, as Lars’s ex-wife, a humaniform android built for space exploration is also along on the trip; and Stephanie is fiercely jealous of her, a jealousy only complicated by her being as nice as she is physically and mentally superior. Fine work from a first-rate but I feel underrated writer.

Life on Mars Review (Locus, May 2011)

Finally the best two stories come from Ian McDonald and John Barnes. ...Barnes’s “Martian Heart” posits a condition that affects a significant subset of Martian colonists, whereby their heart fails due to the conditions on the planet. The “colonists” here are essentially indentured. For example, the narrator, Cap, and his wife Sam are homeless people on Earth, shipped to Mars in lieu of time in the army, hoping to earn their way back to Earth by prospecting. But the odds of a prospector hitting it big are minuscule – so they’re likely stuck on Mars. And things get worse when Sam’s heart begins to fail. The story is in a sense about how Cap – who is telling it decades later – finally hits it big – and why Sam is the reason he did. Sentimental stuff, I suppose, but in the best way, and it hit me right in the gut.

Locus, December 2012

Strahan also gives us a new anthology of stories set in the relatively near future Solar System, Edge of Infinity, which has a plethora of neat pieces. ... John Barnes's “Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh”, about an AI who gets involved (it's his job) with the relationship issues of a man and a woman – which ends up impacting the relationship of humans and  AIs quite profoundly.

Review of A Princess of the Aerie for 3SF, April 2003

Last year I was quite taken with John Barnes's novel The Duke of Uranium, a romp set in a well-inhabited 36th Century Solar System over That novel introduced Jak Jinnaka, a charismatic young man who, it is hinted, will achieve great (and perhaps sinister) power later in his life. Barnes seemed to deliberately sprinkle that book with references to Heinlein, and in many ways it read like a present-day Heinlein juvenile. But Barnes evidently has different things in mind, and the sequel, A Princess of the Aerie, is certainly not a Young Adult book. It is, however, an interesting and very enjoyable read, set in a politically and technologically fascinating future.

Jak's former girlfriend, Shyf, was revealed in the first book to be a princess of a nation in the Aerie, a cluster of space habitats located at the Earth-Sun L4 point. Jak lives in the Hive, at the L5 point, and he's studying at the Public Service Academy, with his friend Dujuv, a young man with panther-derived genes. Jak is looking for a class project, and at the same time he gets a message from Shyf, asking him for help and hinting at a resumption of their relationship. So Jak, Dujuv, and Dujuv's ex-girlfriend Myxenna, head for the Aerie. Once there, however, they find that Shyf claims not to have sent any such message. They also learn that Shyf is not the person they thought she was, instead she is a sex-mad, power-mad, spoiled brat. But Jak and his friends, partly because of what seems to be unusual luck on Jak's part, foil an attempt on the Princess's father's life. As a reward, they are sent to the hellish mines of Mercury, where they get involved with a revolution against a group angling to take control of Mercury's resources.

The story is exciting in itself, and furthermore it is fascinating in its cynical view of realpolitik as it applies to the 36th Century. Our view of Jak is complicated enormously in this second of his adventures: it's clear that he's not quite what he seems, but it's also clear that his friends (and former friends) don't understand him well either. I'm looking forward to further stories detailing the career of Jak Jinnaka -- and I do want to see what he makes of his life and times.

Review: The Improbable Theory of Ana and Zak, by Brian Katcher

The Improbable Theory of Ana and Zak, by Brian Katcher

Katherine Tegen Books, 2015, Trade Paperback $9.99

a review by Rich Horton

At Archon in 2018 I shared an autographing table with Brian Katcher. Since neither of us had signing lines to rival George R. R. Martin, we had got to talk to each other a fair bit, and we exchanged copies of each other’s book. I came out ahead in that deal, with The Improbable Theory of Ana and Zak, no doubt.

Brian is local, from the St. Louis area, now living in outstate Missouri. We already had a mutual friend, Kristin Darden, who is part of the book group (run by Mark Tiedemann) that I participate in. I believe Kristin went to college with Brian. And, indeed, she showed up at our signing …

This isn’t a science fiction book, but it’s SF-adjacent, in that all the action takes place at an SF convention. (Based, to some extent, on Brian’s experiences at Archon when he was much younger – though I doubt he ever got up to the more hair-raising things Ana and Zak get up to in this book!) As such, the atmosphere, and the characters, are readily recognizable to those of us who attend cons regularly.

Ana is a smart kid in her senior year of High School in Tacoma, WA. She’s obsessed with her grades, and with her outside activities – in part because her parents insist on this, in part because she wants to be able to go to college somewhere besides the University of Washington at Tacoma, and in part because her parents won’t let her do anything else, for initially mysterious reasons having to do with her sister Nichole, and with the fact that she doesn’t have a sister anymore. One of her activities is Quiz Bowl.

Zak is also fairly smart, but he’s a slacker. His father died of cancer not too long ago, and his mother has remarried, and Zak can’t stand his stepfather. Though, it should be said, the stepfather doesn’t seem like a bad guy – maybe just a bit clueless. Zak’s career plan is Tacoma Community College, followed by some kind of tech service job maybe – just enough to keep him in gaming equipment and allow him to attend the occasional con. Oh, and he has a bit of a crush on Ana, who has no idea he even exists (and whose self image is skewed enough that she can’t believe anyone could have a crush on her.)

Then Zak’s academic advisor, who is also the Quiz Bowl sponsor, shanghais him onto the Quiz Bowl team – because she’s caught him cheating on a paper, and because she thinks he’s better than that. Zak agrees in order to be able to graduate – and then realizes the Quiz Bowl tournament is the same weekend as his favorite con! All is lost!

The Quiz Bowl star, however, is Ana’s kid brother Clayton, who is just as hemmed in by his parents as Ana. But he’s a bit more rebellious, and when Zak mentions to Clayton that the convention he’s missing is in Seattle, not too far from the Quiz Bowl hotel, Clayton sneaks out and goes to the con. Which is a disaster on several levels – for the Quiz Bowl team, and more importantly for Ana, who is convinced her parents will blame her. So the only thing to do is for Ana to go to the con and retrieve Clayton – and Ana needs a native guide, i.e. Zak.

So they go, Ana naturally contemptuous of Zak, and of all his nerdy friends. And Clayton proves to be hard to track down … meaning we get a tour of various convention traditions – the gaming room, a filk session, an SCA tournament, etc.. At each of which Ana or Zak or both cause chaos, either because they don’t know what’s up (Ana), or they’re trying to catch up with Clayton (both). And then something really scary happens …

The reader knows where this is going. This genre of YA novel is as well-defined as any romance novel – the mismatched kids are going to realize that they have more in common than they knew. They are going to (with the help of the other person) come to some place of, if not resolution, at least improvement or better understanding of their own family situation. They are going to become at least close friends, probably bf/gf – and, yes, all this eventuates. And that’s cool, because what matters is the journey. Do we believe in these kids, and care for them? Yes. And are their adventures, no matter how small-scale or large-scale, enjoyable? Yes. Will their experiences at least set them on the path to a better future? Yes.

I really liked this book, and I’m glad I had the good fortune to semi-randomly encounter it. (Kristin tells me that Brian’s Almost Perfect is even better.) I don’t think you need to be an SF fan, or a con-goer, to like the book – not at all. But if you are, there’s a bit extra in there for you.