Old Bestseller: Antic Hay, by Aldous Huxley

Old Bestseller: Antic Hay, by Aldous Huxley

(I note to begin with that Antic Hay was likely not really a bestseller, but it was a novel that gained considerable notice in its time.)

Aldous Huxley was born in 1894 and died in 1963 -- famously on the same day in November as C. S. Lewis and as a certain American President. He was the grandson of the famous zoologist T. H. Huxley, best remembered now as an early defender of Charles Darwin's views. Aldous wrote a dozen novels, two of which at least can be considered Science Fiction -- his most famous, Brave New World, and his last, Island. Huxley also wrote short stories, poetry, many many essays, and screenplays. He was co-scenarist on several very successful movies -- the Garson/Olivier Pride and Prejudice, Madame Curie, and Jane Eyre. Late in his life he gained some notoriety for using the drugs mescaline and LSD, and for a book, The Doors of Perception, about his experience with mescaline.

Antic Hay (1923) was Aldous Huxley's second novel.  It seems to have been the novel that established his reputation.  I had not previously read any Huxley save Brave New World and Island, both quite some time ago.  Antic Hay is rather a different beast than those books.  It's very much an early '20s book -- recalling quite directly, for instance, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. I was also reminded strongly of Anthony Powell, particularly Powell's pre-War novels, indeed most notably his first novel, Afternoon Men.  (Though echoes of Antic Hay seem to be present also in From a View to a Death and Agents and Patients.) I think the Powell novels are better, but that is, I suppose, a matter of personal preference only -- certainly Huxley (of this period) was a direct influence on Powell.

The novel concerns several youngish men and women in London, in 1922.  The main character is Theodore Gumbril, a thirtyish man who at the opening resigns his job as a schoolteacher to try to develop an idea for "Gumbril's Patent Small Clothes": an inflatable bladder to be inserted in the seat of one's pants, so that one could sit more comfortably on hard benches. He returns to London, and we meet his circle: a failed artist named Lypiatt, a precious and supercilious newspaper writer named Mercaptan, a physiologist named Shearwater, and a strange man named Coleman. Soon the various characters are engaged in the typical empty machinations of such novels: Gumbril's former lover, Myra Liveash, puts off Lypiatt's advances while dallying with Shearwater, and eventually, perhaps, ending up with Gumbril again.  At the same time Gumbril, in disguise, seduces the foolish and naive Mrs. Shearwater, who ends up by mistake seeking out Gumbril at Mercaptan's rooms, then Coleman's, whereupon the latter rapes her (an act presented as hardly anything out of the ordinary). Gumbril finds himself in love with an innocent and virginal married woman -- but he cannot bring himself to believe in being in love ...  and so on.

It's quite wittily written, though the tone seems wobbly, at times serious and romantic and idealistic, at other times utterly cynical. The characters are very sharply presented, to the point of caricature in some cases (Mercaptan, for example). The whole attitude is pure early '20s disgust with the "civilization" that led the West to the first World War. Powell's Afternoon Men (1931) has a broadly similar scheme (as do many other novels, of course), but Powell maintains a more consistent, more cynical tone, that I think works better.

Birthday Review: Stories of Derek Künsken

Today is Derek Künsken's birthday. He's one of the smartest new writers we have, and he intrigued me with his very first sale. His first novel, The Quantum Magician, is good stuff as well! Here's what I've written about his short fiction in Locus:

Locus, February 2007

I also liked a very traditional SF story from last Fall's On Spec, “Tidal Maneuvers” by Derek Künsken, in the classical mode of depicting a very alien being in a very alien environment: in this case a metal creature on a planet orbiting a pulsar.

Locus, March 2012

“The Way of the Needle” by Derek Künsken (Asimov's, March) is quite intriguingly strange but perhaps for the same reason I didn't quite think it worked. It's set on a planet circling a pulsar, and its inhabitants are nourished by the effects of the star's magnetic field. The hero, Mok, has been ordered to assassinate one of his master's rivals, and to accomplish this he must abase himself and associate with “swarmers” (commoners, I suppose). This plot somehow doesn't seem alien enough to support the odd initial setting.

Locus, September 2012

Quite different is Derek Künsken's “Long Leap” (On Spec, Spring). Künsken seems interested in extreme Sfnal environments. Here, a generation starship is trapped by an encounter with a supernova remnant, a pulsar, and the main character, a psychopath but also the ship's only astronomer, finds a chance for redemption in an expedition to the highly magnetic planet they find orbiting the pulsar. It's a hard SF problem story, and as often with those pieces, it seems somewhat contrived, but it delivers an interesting problem and solution.

Locus, February 2014

The lead novelette in the February Asimov's is “Schools of Clay”, by Derek Künsken, who has written several really striking hard SF stories about intelligent creatures in extreme environments. This one is set in an asteroid belt around a pulsar, with a race of creatures made of clays, sometimes “ensouled” with independently thinking radioactive chunks, with an ecology based on the radioactive material, energy from the pulsar, and volatiles mined on the asteroids. The social structure is hivelike, and for this story the “worker” caste is ready to rebel, as a periodic migration, driven by time dilation induced by passage near a black hole, is about to start. Anyway you look at it, that's pretty cool stuff, and really nicely worked out here. The story qua story, and the characters, are well-enough handled if not surprisingly of lesser interest than the setting. Which is to say, I suppose, classic sense of wonder SF.

Locus, November 2014

Derek Künsken has made his mark so far with a number of stories set in decidedly exotic environments. His first story for Analog fits the mark, if the environment isn't quite as exotic as in some earlier stories. “Persephone Descending” opens with Marie-Claude Duvieusart on a routine maintenance job on a floating factory on Venus when her plane explodes and she is ejected into the harsh atmosphere. She soon realizes that her plane was sabotaged, and that she is being pursued by a drone, even as she ought to be dead at any rate. The bulk of the story is taken up with her remarkable efforts at surviving long enough to be rescued, with the unwitting help of some Venusian life. Intertwined are faux-non-fiction excerpts filling us in on the political background and on the aftermath of the attack on Marie-Claude: it seems Venus has been colonized by newly independent Quebec. The colony is struggling, and there is a (somewhat ironic) séparatiste movement. Marie-Claude, an influential union leader, is caught in the middle, and the question is, what does this attack have to with the political issues? Both aspects of the story – the SF adventure and the political intrigue – are interesting, but for me the political aspect didn't really work as well as the truly exciting battle for survival. Still,  Künsken remains a writer to watch.

Locus, March 2015

I also liked “Ghost Colors”, by Derek Künsken (Asimov's, February), mostly for its neat science-fantasy idea: ghosts that haunt people with a genetic predilection for it, and sometimes their relatives. Brian is haunted by the ghost of his rackety aunt's long-time unrequited admirer, Pablo. (His aunt had a disreputable profession.) The deeper story is the value of remembering the past, hinted at by Pablo's profession (paleontology) and Brian's slightly pack-rattish nature, in contrast to his girlfriend's neatnikness. Well-done characters and a nice idea, if a bit of of a listless story (about the girlfriend's desire that Brian have gene therapy to cure him of his ghost.)

Locus, September 2015

The July Asimov's features a novella by Derek Künsken, related to both of his major stories from 2014, “Schools of Clay” and “Persephone Descending”. Like the former it features an alien race with time travel built into their life cycle, and like the latter it is a politically oriented story (with lots of the politics on the dirty side) set in a future in which an independent Quebec has become a power in space after colonizing Venus. “Pollen from a Future Harvest” is set on a planet where a unit of the Sub-Saharan Union has stumbled across a pair of time gates, as well as some vegetable intelligences that send themselves messages via pollen from 11 years in the future using the gates. They have decided to take possession of this potentially extremely valuable discovery themselves and thus rebel against their rulers, the Venusian Congregate. That's a pretty rich setup already, and there's more: arranged tripartite marriages, a murder mystery, Congregate spies, and the question of why the pollen has suddenly stopped flowing through the gates. All this is neat stuff, and the main character, Major Okonkwo, an auditor pressed into leading an investigation after her senior husband's suspicious death, is well-presented. Somehow the story doesn't quite live up to its promise though – I think for my taste there was a bit too much following the ultimately slightly banal stories of corruption in the maneuvering for military leadership, and not quite enough focus on the really cool Sfnal elements – though it should be said that the conclusion uses time travel and its implications nicely – and I should add that my disappointment is really only relative to quite high expectations.

Locus, June 2016

Derek Künsken’s “Flight From the Ages” (Asimov's, April-May) is another story about AIs, and also a story set in the very far future. A couple of advanced AIs, bankers, are tasked to investigate the sudden interruption of the tachyon flow from a certain star system, and what they find is dangerous and disturbing … The story leaps farther and farther into the future, as the consequences of the original discovery broaden, and as the intelligences of the universe continue to evolve. The end is pretty much what we expect, and the story, like many very far future stories, ends up a bit abstract … but there’s no denying the interest of the radical hard SF ideas.

Birthday Review: Stories of Alastair Reynolds

Today is Alastair Reynolds' 53rd birthday. He's clearly as good a pure Hard SF writer as we have these days. Here's a selection of my reviews of his short fiction, mostly from Locus (the first is from my SFF Net newsgroup.)

Spectrum SF summary, 2001

The novella is Alastair Reynolds' "Glacial", a sequel to his earlier Spectrum SF story "Great Wall of Mars", and with that story part of his common future history which he also uses in his novels Revelation Space and Chasm City.  "Glacial" is from a viewpoint allied to the "Conjoiners", who have created a sort of human hive mind technologically, and it is very sympathetic to that viewpoint, unusual for "hive mind" stories.  It's also a neat SFnal mystery -- a fine story all around.

Locus, April 2002

The latest array of original novellas from Peter Crowther’s PS imprint is rather impressive. Diamond Dogs, a sidebar to Alastair Reynolds’s ongoing future history sequence—in particular, to the events in Revelation Space (2000)—is a Gothic-mathematical fable of high allusive verve. From Chasm City, the Athens of the planet Yellowstone and the entire human universe, a group of ill-assorted adventurers sets out to probe yet another of the sinister alien artifacts that dot their galactic environs. On a barren world, they must penetrate an inscrutable levitating tower, which poses them a succession of ever more treacherous logical puzzles as they advance through its chambers, and punishes excruciatingly any misstep. The humans are at obvious and subtle cross-purposes; their very physical natures must alter to keep up with the challenges they face; and, prior to a denouement of deep Gothic dye, their every weakness is exposed and exploited. Rather like the resonantly lugubrious space operas George R. R. Martin produced in the Seventies, but even gloomier, Diamond Dogs suggests that we are rats in the cosmic maze, our aspirations masks for base desires, our behaviors puffed-up Pavlovian reflexes. But there is humor in the gore, slapstick in the pratfalls; at least we get to laugh at ourselves as we tread the testing passageways…

Locus, November 2002

By and large Peter Crowther's Mars Probes is an impressive original anthology. It stands head and shoulders, at any rate, above the run of mass market paperback anthologies we see these days. I really enjoyed Paul Di Filippo's "A Martian Theodicy", a hilarious revisionist take on the classic Stanley Weinbaum story; and Alastair Reynolds' "The Real Story", in which a journalist finds the crew of the original manned expedition to Mars and finds some rather different views on both "what really happened", and on what has happened to Mars since then.

Review of Constellations (Locus, March 2005)

Another of the standouts is Alastair Reynolds's "Beyond the Aquila Rift", closer to a traditional SF space story, with an unexpected and spooky twist. A starship captain finds himself marooned in a very distant star system due to a mishap navigating what seems to be a wormhole network. There is no way to get home in a human lifetime, so it is perhaps fortunate that he encounters an old lover also stuck in this system. But his efforts to revive a crewmate lead him to a disturbing new revelation.

Locus, November 2005

The cover story for the Summer issue of Postscripts is “Zima Blue”, by Alastair Reynolds, a future art story that actually works. The narrator is a reporter covering the unveiling of the last and greatest – or so it is advertised – piece of art by Zima, a sort of Christo-like character, famous for increasingly huge pieces – wrapping moons and suchlike – mostly consisting of the single color now dubbed “Zima Blue”. The reporter is privileged to learn Zima’s back story, which is surprising and in the end quite moving – and which actually convincingly explains his art.

Locus, April 2006

More spectacular in scale is Alastair Reynolds’s “Thousandth Night”, about the periodic Reunion of a group of altered clones who spend 200,000 years traveling the Galaxy then come together to share their experiences. The conflict here is a mystery concerning one of their number who has evidently fabricated some experiences, leading the protagonist and his lover to suspect something nefarious, perhaps concerning the obscure Great Work that certain cultures are proposing. The nature of the Great Work is indeed fairly interesting, and the crime revealed is pretty dastardly.

Review of Galactic Empires (Locus, June 2006)

Alastair Reynolds’s “The Six Directions of Space” is set in an alternate history where the Mongol Empire rules the world, and much of the galaxy – but they learn that space is leaky, and accidental travel into parallel universes is possible. Two somewhat damaged people from quite different universes find themselves looking for something like a haven, or perhaps even peace.

Review of Forbidden Planets (Locus, October 2006)

Another offbeat version of the story is Alastair Reynolds’s “Tiger, Burning”, which considers the idea of multiple parallel universes in “branes”, each slightly different. Humans have explored across many of these until the differences become dangerous. An investigator with the interesting name Fernando visits a very distant brane featuring a character named Meranda, whose husband just died in what may have been an accident. Reynolds plays with the idea of echoes of stories transmitting information across the branes, so that both The Tempest and Forbidden Planet are really about this current situation – the story never really convinces, but it is interesting.

Review of Eclipse Two (Locus, November 2008)

Alastair Reynolds’s “Fury” shares tropes with both Scholes’s story – a near-immortal Emperor – and Baxter’s – sibling rivalry with effects extending very far to the future – as an Interstellar Emperor’s bodyguard investigates an attempt on his ruler’s life. Here I felt that the familiar tropes were in the end a bit too familiar, though the story remains enjoyable.

Review of Solaris 3 (Locus, May 2009)

So Alastair Reynolds’s “The Fixation” two parallel universes are shown, each different from ours, partly because of the different history of the Antikythera Mechanism, an early device that may have been a mechanical computer – the story centers on women in each universe who are working in very different ways on restoring the Mechanism, and the spooky way their efforts overlap.

Review of Life on Mars (Locus, May 2011)

A couple of stories feature plucky kids getting in trouble by impulsive acts, a traditional YA theme. “The Old Man and the Martian Sea”, by Alastair Reynolds, concerns a girl who misses her older sister, and who ends up stowing away on a delivery balloon, and ending up on a remote and obsolete “Scaper”, on which an old man has spent his last years, and has a story he wants someone to remember.

Locus, March 2017

One of the better novellas of the year showed up in December: The Iron Tactician, by Alastair Reynolds. This is another of his stories about Merlin, who is engaged in a long search for a weapon to use against the Berserker-like Huskers, who seem determined to exterminate humanity. He comes across a swallowship destroyed by the Huskers, with one survivor, Teal, who leads him eventually to a war-torn system where he can hope to find a syrinx to replace his damaged one. It turns out Teal has an interesting history in that system – more interesting than even she knows. And the story really turns on that system’s history, and on the title entity, an AI used to prosecute the ongoing war between two factions. The Iron Tactician has been stolen by a third agent – pirates who may really want to end the ware entirely. The resolution is moving and effective, as we learn what or who the Iron Tactician really is.

Review of Infinite Stars (Locus, October 2017)

And the best of all the new stories is Alastair Reynolds’ “Night Passage”, a dark story about what goes wrong when a spaceship carrying both the hivemind-like Conjoiners and the more conventionally “human” Demarchists breaks down in mid-journey to the planet Yellowstone, coincidentally close to a significant alien artefact. The Conjoiners are suspected of sabotage or mutiny, and war threatens. The Captain is also forced to make a morally fraught decision affecting the fate of the entire set of crew and passengers, if there is going to be any continuance of the mission. It’s unsettling and effective work.

Birthday Review: Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart

Today is Barry Hughart's 85th birthday. Here's a review of his most famous novel (of only three), Bridge of Birds, a lovely book.

I reprint it at I first wrote it, so I'll explain the reference to Alexandria Digital Literature briefly. It was an attempt at a book recommendation system (eventually combined with an early e-publishing venture). It worked very well, but it never caught on widely, I think for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being that it didn't get lucky. But the other reason was that it worked well but it depended on a fairly devoted group of earnest users, because the ranking scale had 7 gradations (as I recall!), and the system worked best when you and others like you ranked lots of stories. (Compare Pandora's three gradations.) That said, it provide ME a bunch of great book recommendations.

Review Date: 22 April 1997

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart
Del Rey, 1984, $5.99
ISBN: 0345321383

(Cover by Mary Meitzelfeld)

I have enjoyed playing around with Alexlit (Alexandria Digital Literature, which is here) quite a lot, but until now I have mainly just rated and entered stories, doing little with the recommendations beyond looking with interest at the list. For some little time now the top- recommended book for me has been Bridge of Birds. As it was published in 1984, I was somewhat skeptical of my ability to find it: however it is still in print from Del Rey, and I was able to find a copy at Book Stacks. [Alas, Book Stacks, later Books.com, is no longer. There is an omnibus of the three Hughart novels, available from the Chicago SF bookstore The Stars Our Destination. {Double alas, The Stars Our Destination, a wonderful store, is also long gone!}] I placed it at the top of my TBR pile, and having read it, I can report a definite success for Alexlit. This is a very fine novel, charming, amusing, moving, often strikingly beautiful, often rather horrifyingly bloody. [The book and its two sequels seem to be out of print, but I believe it is readily findable used, and I believe there is a Kindle edition.]

The story is a fantasy set in Ancient China, at a time roughly corresponding to the 7th century AD, best I can tell. The narrator is Lu Yu (not to be confused with the author of The Classic of Tea), who is usually called Number Ten Ox. The story opens with the yearly silkworm spinning at Number Ten Ox' home village: but instead of the bounteous harvest of silk the villagers expect, all the silkworms have died: much worse, soon the children of the village are afflicted with a terrible plague. The locals can do nothing for the children, so they send Number Ten Ox to Peking to find an expert. But they have miscalculated the expense of expert help, and the only expert they can afford is Li Kao, Master Li, who has a slight flaw in his character.

Master Li and Number Ten Ox are soon off on a series of searches, from end to end of China, trying to find the Great Root of Power, which may be the key to a cure for the children. Along the way they encounter gods and goddesses, monsters and ghosts, wise men and terrible tyrants. At first the book seems to be a fairly unstructured, though continually entertaining, collection of escapades. However, an underlying structure emerges, in the form of an old legend, and a children's rhyme and game. By the end, Master Li and Number Ten Ox find that much more is at stake than the fate of the children of the village. In particular, Number Ten Ox' attitude is well- depicted: throughout his adventures, he thinks always of the children, in a true-feeling and very affecting way.

(Cover by Kaja Foglio)

The resolution to the story is very satisfying, and also beautifully depicted. Puzzles are solved, emotional knots untangled, ghosts set free, tyrants deposed, and all is neatly unified. At the simplest level the book is an always amusing, often very funny, light fantasy: at another level it achieves real emotional power. It is also an astonishingly bloody book, but somehow we care and even mourn for the many victims even while the tone remains light. In passages the prose achieves real beauty, in particular a prayer which Hughart adapted from a Chinese source, and also the description of the bridge of birds. I recommend this lovely fantasy very highly.

(Needless to add, I hope, is that this is a Western man's fantasy China, not resembling, very much, the real place, its real history, nor even how contemporary folks of Chinese descent likely few the elements Hughart has assembled.)

Birthday Review: PITFCS, by Theodore R. Cogswell

PITFCS, edited by Theodore R. Cogswell

a review by Rich Horton

Theodore R. Cogswell was born March 10, 1918, so he'd have been 101 years old today. (His hometown, Coatesville, PA, was also the home of the great writer W. M. Spackman, who was 13 years older than Cogswell.) Cogswell died in 1987. He was primarily an academic, at Ball State in the 1950s, and by the end an English teacher at a junior college. (Algis Budrys claimed he "couldn't be bothered to publish, and couldn't be bothered to get his Ph.D", which hampered his career.) He wrote some 40 SF stories between 1952 and 1981 (though the largest part by far appeared through 1962), plus one novel, a Star Trek tie-in, Spock, Messiah!, written with Charles Spano. He is still by far best remembered for one story, his first, "The Specter General", from Astounding for June 1952, and later reprinted in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume IIB. One more story is even better, I think -- "The Wall Around the World", from Beyond in 1953.

His writing career, then, never really took off, though as noted he did publish at least a couple really lasting stories, which is more than a lot of folks have done. But he did something else of real significance for the SF field. This was his editing of the "fanzine for pros" called Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies, usually abbreviated PITFCS. This ran for 17 issues between 1958 and 1962, with one last issue published in 1979 but mainly printing stuff left over from 1962. He prepared this book, a collection of most of the material from PITFCS, in 1985, but Advent didn't publish it until 1993 (though it is dated 1992.) It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book.

As I said, this book is primarily the contents of PITFCS, though it includes one issue of another Cogswell fanzine, Digit, comprising mostly humorous poems by a number of SF writers riffing on the ambiguous pronunciations of names like Leiber, Boucher, and Poul (Anderson). Not all of PITFCS is included -- the Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggests that what is missing is discussion of a "particularly ugly controversy involving Walter M. Miller". (I have no idea what that controversy was -- I wouldn't be human if I wasn't curious about it, but I assume it was not included in the book for good and proper reasons.)

The book is huge -- 375 close packed 8 1/2 by 11 pages. (Something in me wishes the format was 7 by 10 in homage to the pulps!) Each issue after the first consists of a short editorial note and a series of letters from the subscribers (often, of course, in response to material from the previous issue.) The list of contributors is huge -- prominent names from within the field include Judith Merril, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Algis Budrys, Rosel George Brown, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett, Kate Wilhelm, Avram Davidson, Damon Knight, Miriam Allen de Ford, Lloyd Biggle, Donald A. Wollheim, Sam Youd ("John Christopher"), John Brunner, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, etc. etc. There were several contributors known primarily for work outside the genre: Richard McKenna, Kurt Vonnegut, John Ciardi, Michael Frayn, and Kingsley Amis most obviously.

What was discussed? Some shop talk, for sure -- there was an exchange about the value of editors, some happy to do rewrites on request, others against it. There was discussion about controversial works of the time, notably for example Starship Troopers -- and, indeed, James Blish vowed to write a response to it in novel form. (This became Mission to the Heart Stars, one of Blish's worst books.) There was a fascinating exchange about Budrys' Rogue Moon, and how he cut it for the magazine publication, and possible alternate titles. There were political discussions -- for example, a bit about Chan Davis' encounter with McCarthyism (which is why his career as a Math professor took him to Canada.) There were versions of the age-old debate "Is Science Fiction Literature?" There were discussion of John W. Cambpell's enthusiasms, such as the Dean Drive. Perhaps most significant, there was extended discussion of the possibility of forming an SF Writers' Union -- discussions that were critical in leading eventually to the formation of the Science Fiction Writers of America. And of course there was gossip.

I'm not sure how wide the true audience for this book is -- I know I'm not the usual case. But I absolutely loved it. It's probably my favorite book "about" Science Fiction, and the Science Fiction community, of all time. And it's still available, from Advent Publishers (via NESFA.) So -- if you are part of the SF community, if gossip and elevated gossip about issues dating back 50 years is of interest to you, this is a wonderfully fun book to have. That said, these issues hanker back to ancient times, sort of, and for many people likely this won't mean much of anything, which is fine too, of course.

A Forgotten Ace Double: The Blind Worm, by Brian M. Stableford/Seed of the Dreamers, by Emil Petaja

Ace Double Reviews, 28: The Blind Worm, by Brian M. Stableford/Seed of the Dreamers, by Emil Petaja (#06707, 1970, $0.75)

(Covers by Jack Gaughan and Gray Morrow)

The Blind Worm is Brian Stableford's second novel. (His first, Cradle of the Sun (1969) is Stableford's only other Ace Double.) It is about 56,000 words long. Stableford was born in 1948, and his first story, a collaboration with Craig Mackintosh called "Beyond Time's Aegis", as by "Brian Craig", appeared when he was only 17, in the November 1965 issue of Science Fantasy. He has also written as Kay Stirling, John Rose, and Francis Amery, though the Stirling and Rose pseudonyms may have only been in fanzines. (The "Brian Craig" pseudonym was later used for some gaming tie-ins and at least one more collaboration with Mackintosh. The Amery pseudonym was used for a brief series of stories in Interzone a few years ago.) He first attracted attention (though not very much, I suppose) with two series for DAW in the early 70s: the Hooded Swan books about a spaceship pilot named Grainger who is host to an alien mind-creature; and the Daedalus books, about an ecological mission to a variety of troubled colony planets. Stableford published quite a few books, mostly for DAW, until the early 80s. He reappeared in the late 80s with a highly-praised group of books about an Alternate Historical Victorian England with werewolves. Throughout the 90s his reputation has only grown, with an impressive list of rather hard SF stories mostly on biological themes, many linked as part of his "Emortality" future, which culminated in 6 novels, the last being 2002's The Omega Expedition.

I was very impressed by Stableford's work of that era, which I think among the best biologically-oriented SF -- thoughtful, original, extrapolatively exciting. At that time I made a point of reading the Hooded Swan and Daedalus books, which are solid if minor work: rather cynical, often focussing on interesting biological ideas (especially in the Daedalus books), certainly worth a look, but not as good as his mature stuff. Much of Stableford's energy in recent years has been focussed on translations from the French.

The Blind Worm is a fairly ambitious novel that didn't really work for me. It's very much a novel of its time -- strongly influenced by the New Wave. There are three parts, each of similar length. It might almost have been originally published as three stories, though I can't find any evidence of that. In the first, "The Quadrilateral", we are introduced to Earth in the far future. The seas are dry, and the land is dominated by the Wildland, a hive mind of plants. A few humans still live, tolerated by Sum, the controlling mind of the Wildland. One human King, John Tamerlane, wishes to reestablish human presence in a deserted city in the dry Great Gulf. He and his motley fellows, the hero Vanice Concuma, the woman Zea, the wild man Silver Reander, and the boy Swallow, offer Sum a bargain: if he will cede them this city, Swallow will use his telepathic powers to link Sum with the other three components of the Quadrilateral -- hive minds in three other universes. Accompanied by the Blind Worm, a construct serving Sum, and by the ancient man Jose Dragon, creator of the Blind Worm, they journey to the other universes to try to complete the Quadrilateral, with ambiguous results that mostly involve everybody dying. In the second part, "Blind God", the Blind Worm has been granted Godlike powers, and he uses them to resurrect the dead humans, and recruits them to a struggle against his creator, Dragon. In the third part, "The Army of the Dead", all the dead humans in the abandoned City in the Great Gulf have reanimated as zombies, and are attacking the Wildland. The Blind Worm, in another guise, again recruits the Black King Tamerlane and the hero Vanice Concuma to try to battle this army, and to enter the City and vanquish whatever being is behind the army of the dead.

I was bothered throughout by a feeling that much of this was arbitrary -- that Stableford was making it up as he went along. Some of the ideas and imagery are impressive -- but not, to my taste, terribly interesting. And the characters themselves are not very involving, and also seem arbitrarily motivated. It seems that Stableford was trying for a philosophically challenging novel, but he really didn't have the skills to dress it in interesting enough plot/prose/characterization.

Emil Petaja (pronounced Puh-TIE-uh, apparently -- I had always thought it Puh-TAH-huh) was a Montana-born writer of Finnish descent. He was born in 1915 and died in 2000. He became a friend of the near-legendary SF artist Hannes Bok at an early age, and lived with Bok for a time. Petaja wrote stories and poems, some Lovecraftian, and began to sell to the pulps in 1942. He wrote SF and also mysteries for about a decade, then stopped writing and worked as a photographer in San Francisco. He was lured back to the field in 1965 or so -- possibly by Fred Pohl, who bought stories by a number of old pulpsters (such as Robert Moore Williams, A. E. Van Vogt, Bryce Walton, and Jerome Bixby) for Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow in the mid-60s. His first novel was published in 1965, his last in 1970. He may be best known for his cycle of four novels (a fifth remains unpublished) based on the Finnish legend cycle the Kalevala. He was the first SFWA Author Emeritus, in 1995. 8 of his novels were Ace Double halves, including of course Seed of the Dreamers, his last published novel. It is about 37,000 words long.

Seed of the Dreamers opens with a "starcop", Brad Mantee, fetching a scientist who has gone insane and killed several people. The scientist's long-lost daughter, the beautiful Harriet Lloyd, intervenes and the scientist escapes in Brad's spaceship. Brad scoops up the daughter and takes her spaceship -- with her help (she can sense her father's location via psi) he tracks him to an uncharted planet.

To this point I was disgusted. The story so far is sexist, and silly, and implausible, and not very interesting. Things seemed to get worse when nearly the first thing they encounter on the planet is a group of naked black savages who seem straight from the pages of H. Rider Haggard. Luckily, before I could throw the book across the room, it is revealed that these people actually ARE straight from the pages of Haggard! It seems that an alien race from across the universe is trying to understand humans. The only material they have is some illicit fiction, coincidentally almost all from the 19th and 20th Century in the English language, that Brad had hidden on his spaceship. (Fiction of any sort is illegal in this future galactic society.) So they have created constructs based on the various stories and populated this world with them.

The rest of the story concerns Brad and Harriet dealing with people who think they are in stories from Haggard, Baum, Shakespeare, Hilton, and Burroughs. They must find a way to convince these people that they aren't really inside these stories, and that they can throw off the dominion of the alien race and chase the aliens from the galaxy. Or something. It didn't really make much sense to me.

It's a very very very silly book. And it's mostly not fun silly -- just stupid silly. There is some unintentional humour -- for example, apparently Petaja couldn't use Tarzan because the books were under copyright (or the character is trademarked or something). So he introduces a character named Zartan the Stupendous, Lord Staygroke. I don't think I was really supposed to break into guffaws at this point, but I couldn't help it.

I suspect Petaja could do a little better than this -- on the face of it this seems possibly an uncharacteristic work. But it certainly isn't very good.

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.]