Birthday Review: Two Novels by Tom Purdom

Today is Tom Purdom's 83rd birthday. Purdom is one of my favorite lesser-known SF writers, mostly for his really impressive late short fiction, an outpouring of stories, mostly in Asimov's, that began in 1990 and has continued with little abatement for three decades. And I plan a review compilation (from Locus) later today. Before that, Purdom published some intriguing short fiction, beginning in 1957) and five shortish novels. He has written entertainingly about his career on his website.

I've already posted reviews of the three of his novels that appeared in Ace Doubles, including a post one year ago today! Here are reviews of his other two novels (not counting the fixup Romance on Four Worlds from 2005, which is essentially a collection of  his four "Casanova" stories from Asimov's.) These books appeared in 1971 and 1972.

Reduction in Arms, by Tom Purdom

a review by Rich Horton

Reduction in Arms is Tom Purdom's fourth novel, published in 1971. Its subject matter is rather interesting, somewhat dated in many ways -- very 70s, though with some resonance with today's "current events".

The story is told mainly from the viewpoint of Jerry Weinberg, a US weapons inspector working in the Soviet Union. It appears to be set in the mid-80s, at a guess. A strict arms-limitation treaty has just been signed, such that both countries (and China, Britain, France, and other nuclear powers) have agreed to allow regular and sometimes random inspections of any facility that may house weapons building or research. The problem is that "weapons research" might be done is a very small area, when you consider that weapons might include tailored viruses. And indeed, Weinberg is suddenly summoned to inspect a Russian psychiatric hospital, because the Americans have learned that a distinguished microbiologist has been undergoing "treatment" there for some time. The US has information that the man has been seen in a bar -- entirely inconsistent with his supposed mental illness.

When they get to the hospital, they are denied entry to certain floors, including the microbiologist's floor, on the grounds that experimental treatments on those floors are so rigorous that any disturbance will completely ruin things. Naturally the inspectors are suspicious, but protocol requires that they go through channels. Things are further complicated by factions in both the US and Russia which oppose the disarmament treaty, and which are itching for a "incident" which will make it politically necessary that it be abrogated. So Weinberg must balance several possibilities -- that this might be staged by the Russians to embarrass the US; that this might be staged by US hardliners -- or if not staged, that a minor infraction will be fanned into something more serious for political reasons by said hardliners; that the Russians really are trying to get away with something; that everything is innocent and the US will come out with egg on its face; or some combination of the above.

The ideas here are interesting and worth thinking about, but a lot ends up not very convincing. Purdom's ideas about the future of psychiatry, in this and even more in other novels (particularly The Barons of Behavior) are downright scary but also, I think, a bit unlikely. I also found the likelihood of such an arms control treaty as described rather low -- and the danger that it could be readily circumvented by an even better hidden remote lab higher than described. Also, the book rather drags -- it's very talky for about the first half, though the second half moves much more rapidly, with plenty of action. Still, not in my opinion one of Purdom's best efforts.

The Barons of Behavior, by Tom Purdom

a review by Rich Horton

The Barons of Behavior is an interesting book on several grounds. Purdom, as I have mentioned before, is an interesting author with an interesting career shape: he began selling SF in the late 50s, and published a dozen or so stories, and 5 novels, through the early 70s.

The Barons of Behevior, from 1972, was and remains his last novel. He published two more stories at long intervals until the 90s, when he returned to the field with a vengeance -- he has published dozens of stories since 1990, most in Asimov's, many absolutely first rate.

The first thing that strikes me about The Barons of Behavior is that it is very uncommercial. Its hero is hardly admirable -- or, if admirable in many ways, he is also not very likeable, and he is shown doing many bad things. The plot is resolved ambiguously, and long before the natural end of the action. The general theme is very scary, and the "good guys" are forced to use the tactics of the bad guys, and not in very nice ways.

The "hero" is Ralph Nicholson, a psychiatrist based in Philadelphia (I believe). The book is set in either 2001 or 2003. Nicholson is concerned about the tactics of Martin Boyd, the Congressman representing Windham County in New Jersey. Boyd is using psychological profiles of every resident of his district to control their reactions and voting. He has even arranged for neighborhoods to be adjusted so that only people of a given profile live in them.

Nicholson, and his boss, another politician, believe that the only way to stop Boyd is to get him out of Congress, and the only way that can happen is to arrange for someone else to get elected. But the only way they can counteract Boyd's psych work is to do the same -- choose a candidate and slant his message in a way that matches the psych profiles of voters.

But Boyd plays dirty -- he kidnaps Nicholson, using his bought-and-paid-for police force, and threatens to use a profile of Nicholson's wife to suborn her. Will Nicholson stay the course? Will Nicholson's chosen politician go along with the not precisely ethical actions urged on him, including staged incidents designed to make voters support a "citizens' patrol", organized by the candidate? Will Nicholson's wife stay faithful? Will all this effort even be enough?

Along the way we get something of a picture of Nicholson's character and history, and of the civic background of his time. Perhaps all this is a bit sketchy, but it's of some interest. Notably the sexual mores are loose and a bit weird seeming -- in particularly Nicholson's pursuit of his wife is very calculated, including carefully planned affairs with other women. All this ties into the psychological themes of the novel, of course.

For all the interesting ideas and considerable ambition, however, the book isn't quite successful. It really doesn't overcome its odd (presumably purposefully so) truncated structure and its unlikable characters. But I think the ambition and honest of the effort deserves admiration.

Old Bestseller Review: The Story of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting

Old Bestsellers: The Story of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting

a review by Rich Horton

The first chapter book I ever owned was The Story of Doctor Dolittle, which my mother bought for me from some sort of children's book club in the late 1960s -- I assume I was 8 or 9. I loved it, and went straight to the library (Nichols Library (the REAL Nichols Library, not the bloodless replacement that you'll find there now) in Naperville, IL) to find the others. I read each of the books at least a dozen times, to the point that it was a (gentle) joke of my mother's, when I'd come back from the library with another Doctor Dolittle book (plus others, of course -- Danny Dunn, or Narnia, or Cowboy Sam, or whatever.) There were about a dozen books in all, the last three or so posthumous compilations of shorter pieces.

Hugh Lofting was born in 1886. The genesis of the Doctor Dolittle books was letters he wrote to his children from the trenches of World War I. He was injured in the War, and after it was over he and his family moved to Connecticut. The first book, the one at hand, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, was published in the US in 1920 -- it didn't appear in the UK until 1924. I never knew this -- I always assumed Lofting was purely English -- the books are so very English in tone. The second book in publication order (though I read them in internal chronology) was The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, published in 1922. It won the Newbery Medal. It is, in my opinion (as of 1970 or so!) by far the best of the books. Lofting died in 1947.

There have been two prominent movies based on Doctor Dolittle -- the 1967 Rex Harrison feature, and the 1998 Eddie Murphy feature. The latter spawned three sequels (of which the last couple were direct-to-video.) Another movie, unrelated to these, is planned for release in 2020. None of the movies are terribly faithful to the books, though the Harrison movie does use some incidents from a few of the books, notably The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle and Doctor Dolittle in the Moon.

There is, of course, an elephant in the room regarding the Doctor Dolittle books, and that is their racist elements. And let's not paper that over -- they are real, and worst are pretty shocking. The most racist stuff is in fact in the first book, in particular a scene in which a black prince asks Doctor Dolittle to turn him white so he will be attractive to the woman he's entranced by (in fact, Sleeping Beauty.) The interesting thing is that that scene was completely (and somewhat clumsily) deleted from the edition I first read. I didn't know that until a couple years later when I checked the book out of the library in order to look at the original illustrations. 10 or 12 year old Rich Horton was, I assure you, no particular paragon of wokeness (I was a typical child of an affluent suburb in which opposition to racism was a given, but actual knowledge of real black people was pretty slim -- there was one black kid in my high school, for instance.) Even so, I was shocked even then reading those scenes, and for one of the very few times in my life I found myself approving censorship. The later books are much better to my eyes (others may disagree) -- the black characters are portrayed somewhat stereotypically (as are pretty much all the characters, if we're honest), but they are given more agency and are regarded sympathetically. Since the late 1980s, editions of the Doctor Dolittle books have been revised, alas sometimes clumsily, to attempt to remove the questionable elements. I still think the books are enjoyable, but I'd have to say tread carefully.

My impetus to reread the book was a book sale in my town, given by the owner of a fine local used
book store which I have patronized for decades, The Book House. They just lost the lease on half their shop, so they need to reduce stock a lot. The owner lives in my town (her daughter was in grade school with my kids), and she had a sale out of (I assume) her house -- and I found a rather battered copy of the 49th impression (from, I'd guess, the 1950s.) It includes the same Hugh Walpole introduction, originally for the Tenth Edition, that was also in the book club edition I had as a child. The illustrations are by Lofting himself.

So what happens in The Story of Doctor Dolittle? John Dolittle is a physician in a small English village, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. He lives with his sister, but over time his financial incompetence, and his love of animals (so that many live in his house) cause his practice to founder. But he learns how to speak to the animals, and soon is a renowned veterinarian (renowned among animals, at least.) Before long his household consists primarily of a monkey, Chee-Chee; a dog, Jip; an owl, Too-Too; a duck, Dab-Dab; and a pig, Gub-Gub. Plus of course the sarcastic parrot Polynesia. Chee-Chee reports that his relatives in Africa have reported a terrible plague among the African monkeys, so Doctor Dolittle proposes to sail to Africa to try to cure them.

In Africa they encounter the King of the Jolliginki (whose son is the Prince mentioned above.) He distrusts white men because they have stolen his gold (he had a point, I thought), so he imprisons the Doctor, but Polynesia schemes to get him out. He escaped Jolliginki and reaches the land of the monkeys, and effects a cure. And then it's time to return to England.

The journey home is mainly menaced by the Barbary Pirates. But the help of a bunch of birds, plus the cleverness of Jip, allows them to escape and indeed rescue a boy and his uncle, who had been taken by the pirates. And then -- back home.

This story shows its origin -- as a series of letters -- and its author's inexperience. It's episodic, illogical, often silly. But of course it has its charming aspects. Still, reading it at 59 I didn't recapture the magic of 50 years ago. But I'm not the audience any more. That said, The Story of Doctor Dolittle was never my favorite of the books -- I have some hope that the later books retain the charm I so loved back then. But I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to read them.

Birthday Review: Take a Girl Like You, by Kingsley Amis

Birthday Review: Take a Girl Like You, by Kingsley Amis

a review by Rich Horton

Kingsley Amis was born 16 April 1922. He was one of the great comic novelists of the 20th Century, and also a long-time proponent of SF (and a writer of a number of SF novels and short stories.) In his memory, here's a review I wrote some time ago of one of his best novels.

Kingsley Amis opened his career with the novel that remained his most famous work to the end of his life: Lucky Jim. His next two novels were generally regarded as disappointments, at least relative to Lucky Jim. It is with his fourth novel, Take a Girl Like You, that Amis again hit his stride. This is as with almost all of Amis's works a comic novel, but much darker than Lucky Jim, with a cad for a leading man and a rather sad (morally) ending. (Spoilers will follow, but none that I think would interfere with a reader's enjoyment.)

The protagonist is Jenny Bunn, a 20 year old girl from the North of England who has come to a middle class town near London to be a schoolteacher. Jenny is an extremely beautiful woman, a bit naive, and brought up with fairly conventional notions of sexual morality. Which have been a bit of a burden to her since about the age of 14, when she noticed that all of a sudden she was constantly the object of not always welcome male attention.

Soon enough at her somewhat depressing boarding house she meets a very charming and handsome man named Patrick Standish. Patrick is breaking up with her fellow boarder, a somewhat ramshackle Frenchwoman named Anna Le Page. Patrick immediately notices Jenny, the way all men seem to, and not long after he has asked her on a date. Which is quite a lot of fun, until Patrick closes the evening by rather insistently trying to seduce her.

Patrick is a schoolteacher himself, at a private school for boys, and apparently rather good at his job. He has the same problems with his bosses that every Amis leading man seems to have: his headmaster is pleasant enough but ineffectual, and another teacher is a very nasty piece of work. But we slowly gather that Patrick is far from blameless: most egregiously, he is not trying very hard to resist the head's 16-year-old daughter's pathetic attempts to sleep with him. He also cruelly torments the clumsier and stupider people around him.

The novel portrays Patrick's courtship of Jenny, over roughly a year's period. This includes attempts to persuade her that her moral views are outdated, a long period of trying to be "not a bastard", failed attempts to resist having sex with other women he encounters while away from Jenny (the dates are a good thing, see, to prove to himself he really loves Jenny ... but he still has sex with the women) ... and finally an ultimatum to Jenny to sleep with him or end the relationship. When Jenny wavers, he breaks it off, then rapes her after she gets drunk. (It's what we now call date rape -- possibly at the time it would not have been regarded as rape, quite, though in no way does Amis seem to approve.) At the end Jenny is resigned that she will stick with Patrick -- she likes him too much, and she has no virginity left to protect. This is all rather dispiriting, though quite true to her character I think. As it happens, this is the only novel to which Amis wrote a sequel: Difficulties With Girls, a couple of decades later, in which Jenny and Patrick are married, but Patrick is still philandering. That book ends a bit happier, with Jenny gaining the ultimate upper hand in their relationship.

I think this is an excellent novel. The various characters are thoroughly believable to me, and a varied and odd lot. Amis's comic eye for dialogue, and internal dialogue, is sharp as ever. The novel is funny when it needs to be, and honest and sad when it needs to be.

In Memoriam, Gene Wolfe (1931-2019)

In Memoriam, Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe died yesterday, April 14, 2019 (Palm Sunday!) His loss strikes me hard, as hard as the death last year of Ursula K. Le Guin. Some while I ago I wrote that Gene Wolfe was the best writer the SF field has ever produced. Keeping in mind that comparisons of the very best writers are pointless -- each is brilliant in their own way -- I'd say that now I'd add Le Guin and John Crowley and make a trinity of great SF writers, but the point stands -- Wolfe's work was tremendous, deep, moving, intellectually and emotionally involving, ambiguous in the best of ways, such that rereading him is ever rewarding, always resolving previous questions while opening up new ones.

It must be said that for me Wolfe lived primarily through his fiction -- I can't really say I knew him, though I did meet him a few times, and I think (unless my memory betrays me) we shared a panel once at an SF convention. But we never spoke at length. I'll tell a couple of personal stories, though -- one of which isn't really mine.

This first story concerns his magnificent early novel The Fifth Head of Cerberus (curiously, originally published as "Three Novellas by Gene Wolfe".) I worked at Waldenbooks in 1976-1977, and I ran the SF section. My manager loved SF too, and she insisted we stock The Fifth Head of Cerberus, even though it was well past its sell-by date (it first appeared in 1972.) I certainly didn't complain -- but she told me a story. At her previous store, at the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL, she had kept the book on the shelves past when it would normally have been stripped and returned. And one day she saw a somewhat chubby middle-aged man looking at the book, with an expression of gratitude. This was Gene Wolfe, who then lived in Barrington, not far from Woodfield Mall.

My slightly more personal story concerns the first time I met Wolfe -- at an autograph table at Archon, the St. Louis area SF convention. I asked him to sign a copy of one of my first anthologies, Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2006 Edition, which included his story "Comber". He happily complied, then asked, with a certain sharpness (feigned, I think!) "Why didn't you put my story "Memorare" in the new book?" I didn't have an answer (though, really, "Memorare" is pretty long, and it wasn't easy for me to fit novellas in those first, slimmer, books.) I did reprint his story "Bloodsport" in my 2011 book.

The stories, though. The stories. He's best known, I suppose, for his novels, specifically the four volume Book of the New Sun, which completely wowed me when it appeared between 1980 and 1983. I remember voting book one, The Shadow of the Torturer, first in a poll run by the Champaign Urbana Science Fiction Association for Best SF Novel of all time, presumably in 1981 (after all, that's when I graduated from the University of Illinois.) The rest of his so-called "Solar Cycle" is also exceptional -- The Urth of the New Sun, and two more series, the tetralogy The Book of the Long Sun and the trilogy The Book of the Short Sun. There were a few short stories in that series as well, and one of them, "Empires of Foliage and Flower", is truly remarkable.

Other novels are unmissable as well. My personal favorites include the very early Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus of course, and the fairly late novel The Sorcerer's House.

Likewise he was wonderful at shorter lengths. Among the short stories I truly loved "La Befana", "The Other Dead Man", "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", "How the Whip Came Back", "How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion", "When I Was Ming the Merciless", "Straw", "The Rubber Bend", "The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton", "Suzanne Delage", "The War Beneath the Tree", and "All the Hues of Hell".

But, then -- there are the novellas. SF is home to many fantastic writers of novellas -- Ursula K. Le Guin, Damon Knight, and Kim Stanley Robinson come immediately to mind. But nobody matches Gene Wolfe. I'll just list them -- the three from The Fifth Head of Cerberus first ("The Fifth Head of Cerberus", "'A Story', by John V. Marsch", and "V.R.T."). Plus "Forlesen", "Seven Americen Nights", "The Eyeflash Miracles", "Silhouette", "Tracking Song", "The Death of Doctor Island", "The Ziggurat", "Golden City Far", "Memorare". I mean -- what a list, what an incredible list of fabulous stories.

I feel that I'm not getting to the heart of what made Gene Wolfe so great. For some of that, you just need to read him. But -- what was he about? Part of it was playfulness. Simple things, like his collection The Castle of the Otter, named after a Locus misunderstanding of the title of the fourth Book of the New Sun novel (The Citadel of the Autarch.) Or like his "Island Doctor" stories: "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", "The Death of Doctor Island", "The Doctor of Death Island", "Death of the Island Doctor". Or the secret of the name of the family in The Fifth Head of Cerberus (and the cute nod to Vernor Vinge in that passage.) All that is fun -- sometimes serious fun, but fun. But what was he really after? Virtue. Identity. Truth. The slippery nature of truth. So -- the shapechangers in The Fifth Head of Cerberus. The various Silks in the Long Sun and Short Sun books. The secret of the life of Alden Weer in Peace. The quest of Able in The Wizard Knight.

I'll leave with a quote -- thanks to John Kessel for this -- from the end of "Forlesen", one of Wolfe's greatest, and least appreciated, novellas: The main character, having died, asks:

"I want to know if it's meant anything . . . if what I suffered -- if it's been worth it."

"No," the little man said. "Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe."

Birthday Review: The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim C. Hines

Birthday Review: The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim C. Hines

Today is Jim C. Hines' birthday. And in his honor, here's a short review I did for my previous blog some time ago, of his novel The Stepsister Scheme. (I reviewed its sequel, The Mermaid's Madness, at Fantasy Magazine, as well.)

Jim C. Hines's The Stepsister Scheme is the first in his new series concerning the adventures of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. The lead character is Cinderella -- Danielle Whiteshore -- who is adjusting to her new "happily-ever-after". She really is in love with her Prince (which turns out not to be the case for Snow White or Sleeping Beauty), and is pretty content, when all of a sudden one of her stepsisters shows up and tries to assassinate her. Her stepsister, the prettier and stupider of the pair, has learned some magic, but with the help of a handmaid who turns out to be Talia, also known as Sleeping Beauty, and also with the help of Danielle's animal friends, the assassination attempt fails. But her stepsister gets away.

Danielle quickly learns that her mother-in-law has secretly taken in Snow White and Talia (aka Sleeping Beauty) after the two fled intolerable home situations. (Snow White is wanted for the murder (in self-defense of course) of her evil stepmother -- her "Prince" turned out to be no help, and her true lover was the huntsman who saved her life. Talia, on the other hand, resents the fairies who gave her the gifts -- and the curse -- and she hates the "Prince" who wakened her by raping her while she slept and making her pregnant -- she only woke because of the pain of childbirth.) The two young women act as spies for the Queen. Snow White is magical adept, and Talia a martial arts adept. Now, it seems, Danielle's husband, the Prince, has been kidnapped by Cinderella's stepsisters and taken to Faerytown. The three young women go on a mission, where their three complementary talents (Snow's magic, Talia's weapons skills, and Danielle's ability to talk to animals, plus her innate niceness) all combine to, after much difficulty, uncover the nature of the stepsisters' plot, and the nature of their allies.

On the surface it seems it might be a romp. And there are aspects of the romp to it -- a fair amount of light jokes, some fun playing with the details of the "true stories" behind the fairy tales. But there's a lot of serious intent, and dark details, behind everything, as the details I mention above about the true stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty might indicate. The characters of the three princesses are well-portrayed, and each is quite different to the others. The plot involves real pain, some moral ambiguity, and a less than easy resolution. But it's never dreary -- it's a fun and adventure-filled story to read. Good work. I'm reading the second one, The Mermaid's Madness, now -- which adds the Little Mermaid to the mix. (Presumably the third book, Red Hood's Revenge, will bring in Little Red Riding Hood.)

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Rachel Swirsky

Today is Rachel Swirsky's birthday. In the last decade or so, Rachel has produced some of the most exciting, thoughtful, and original fiction in our field. Here's a selection of my Locus reviews of her short fiction:

Locus, August 2007

The June Interzone features an original feminist parable from Rachel Swirsky, “Heartstrung”. The arresting central idea has girls removing their hearts and sewing them to their sleeves as they pass to adulthood – and in the process (differently than the figure of speech “heart on one's sleeve” implies) become distanced from their emotions.

Locus, February 2008

At Electric Velocipede for Fall  ... Rachel Swirsky has really made a splash with her first few stories, and “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth” is another strong outing. It is a story of the far future, when the trees unite to eliminate humanity – though humans change in unexpected ways.

Locus, June 2008

Rachel Swirsky is a very exciting new writer, and at the March-April Weird Tales she offers another of her short, intense, stories – and each I’ve seen from her has been unique. “Detours on the Way to Nothing” is a very odd account of a strange sort of creature arranging an encounter with a man. Everything about her is odd: feathered hair, voluntarily removed tongue, mysterious sudden appearance – but “her” story, or lack thereof, is the philosophical center of this piece. One of those stories I’m not sure I understood at all, but that still fascinated. Which is a specific kind of “weird”, and one that seems definitely a goal of new editor Ann VanderMeer.

Locus, September 2008

In June’s Fantasy Magazine ... Rachel Swirsky is as ever interesting, and as ever original, and as ever trying a different tone, as she too looks at a human woman marrying a god. But “Marrying the Sun” is not dark, but an amusing and deadpan look at the problems of a relationship with the Sun – things like your wedding dress going up in flames.

Locus, June 2009

At Tor.com in April one oustanding piece is Rachel Swirsky’s “Eros, Philia, Agape” (March), which retells an old tale: an intelligent robot (here created to be a lover for a rich woman) yearns to be free. Where the story shines is the sort of freedom he craves – Swirsky depicts the protagonist magnificently, convincingly a created intelligence, and yet his own person, and yet not a human, exactly.

Locus, January 2010

If Baen’s Universe is closing, another publisher-associated site, though with a quite different structure and business model, seems to be doing quite well. Tor.com continues to feature excellent work, including in November an atmospherically sad Rachel Swirsky story, “A Memory of Wind”, which tells the story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia from her point of view.

Swirsky is also impressive at much shorter length at Beneath Ceaseless Skies for October 22. “Great Golden Wings” is a lovely little story, very simply told – a “cinematographist” trying to get financing for his invention against the resistance of people like magicians – who think movies might be competition for their illusions – is showing his early film (of dragons) at court. One court lady is enchanted – others merely hope to gain social points. I liked the introduction of a technologist into a fairly standard-seeming fantasy world, and I liked the depiction of the wonder felt by Lady Percivalia, and her trapped characterization.

Locus, September 2010

Rachel Swirsky has also not published a novel, and I don’t know of any forthcoming. But her short fiction continues to excite readers, and indeed two separate novelettes from 2009 ended up on award ballots (“The Memory of Wind” for the Nebula, and “Eros, Philia, Agape” for the Hugo). Through the Drowsy Dark is a strong mix of fiction and poetry. Several of the stories are new to this volume, and are well-done – but not SF or Fantasy. The story unfamiliar to me that most impressed me may be unfamiliar to many readers: “The Debt of the Innocents” first appeared in the 2007 UK anthology Glorifying Terrorism. It’s strong SF, positing a future in which energy shortages doom many poor babies to unnecessary deaths because of lack of incubators. The viewpoint character is a nurse who joins a terrorist movement to resist this. The story doesn’t really insist on taking a side, though it presents its arguments in a curiously asymmetric fashion. The effect in the end is quite powerful.

Locus, November 2010

Rachel Swirsky contributes a novella to Subterranean Magazine’s Summer Issue, their “Special Novella Issue”. “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” is, as far as I can recall, her longest published story (and longest title!). It does show signs of structural strain: it has a decidedly episodic structure, a common solution, I think, used by writers extending to greater lengths than they are used to. But it still works. The title character, Naeva, is a loyal servant (and lover) to her Queen, but she is killed in the Queen’s service. However she is preserved as a spirit, to be brought back magically to give advice, at first to her Queen, but eventually to future – even very far future – generations. This is a bitter pill for Naeva to swallow, not least because of what she learns about her Queen. It becomes still bitterer as the future changes, and as her culture is forgotten, and she must put up with such abominations as cultures in which men have status, and indeed in which women love men. The story slingshots farther and farther into the future, lightly touching on a variety of fantastical (and even rather SFnal) cultures, and touches at transcendence by the end. Excellent work.

Locus, May 2011

In Eclipse 4, I really liked Rachel Swirsky’s “Fields of Gold”, about a young man who finds himself in a strange afterlife, complete with famous people, and a few people he knows. He quickly gathers that one of the people there is his estranged wife, who may have murdered him, but perhaps more important to him is his cousin and childhood best friend. The story is part about why and how he died, and why and how he more or less wasted his life; but it’s also about what really made him happy, and the ending is quite moving and ambiguously hopeful.

Review of Life on Mars (Locus, May 2011)

Rachel Swirsky’s “The Taste of Promises” is a again about a kid putting himself in extreme danger. Tiro runs away from his Martian city with his brother – who we quickly learn has been uploaded due to a disease – and ends up at another city. He hopes to find a way to get his brother a body, but he must learn to understand what his brother might really want. And deal with pirates, too.

Locus, November 2013

Finally, there's a new horror magazine out, The Dark, edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace. The first issue features four well-written stories, all by women, the best and strangest of which is Rachel Swirsky's “What Lies at the Edge of a Petal is Love”, which is more “weird” than “horror”, about a man who finds his wife (and children) becoming plants.

Locus, October 2014

In the Summer Subterranean, Rachel Swirsky's “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)” is perhaps her longest story yet, and very good, about Mara, a girl dying of cancer, and her reactions (and her father's, and her replacement, called Ruth) to her father's making an android version of her, into which her personality is downloaded. Seems creepy, but by the end the story – and the characters – come to terms with this. It's a powerful story of character, interleaving Jewish themes (the golem, Jewish festivals and prayers, the Holocaust) with the ballet (Mara's mother was a ballet dancer, and the story alludes strongly to Coppélia), and with science fiction and AI and identity.

Locus, February 2016

The best fantasy in the December Lightspeed is a playful take on Alice in Wonderland by Rachel Swirsky, “Tea Time”, about the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, lovers in a time-stopped Wonderland. The main interest in this case is the extended and effective prosodic whimsy.

Locus, April 2016

Also interesting in the February Clarkesworld is “Between Dragons and Their Wrath” by An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky, told by Domei, a 14-year-old in a war-torn land, gathering dragon scales despite the danger of uncontrolled changes. Change – forced and unforced, and otherness, and of course the detritus of war is central to this moving story.

Birthday Review: Mister Boots, by Carol Emshwiller

Mister Boots, by Carol Emshwiller

a review by Rich Horton

Carol Emshwiller died two months ago, just short of her 98th birthday, which would have come today. She is one of the key, yet underrated, figures in SF over the last several decades. (Underrated because she was not terribly prolific, and because so much of her work was short fiction, as well as because she had a very individual voice.) I wrote about her short fiction at the time of her death, here: In Memoriam, Carol Emshwiller. So, today, on her birthday, here's my rather brief review from back in 2006 or so of her novel Mister Boots.

Mister Boots is a YA novel from Carol Emshwiller, published in 2005. Emshwiller's late in life flowering continues to be one of the remarkable stories of recent SF. (Not that she hasn't been a brilliant writer from the late 50s -- but she has never been so prolific as in the last few years, and she is as good or better a writer as she has ever been, even in her 80s.)

This book is about a girl named Bobby Lassiter, who has just turned 10 as we meet her. She is living in the California desert with her mother and her 20 year old sister. The depression is just around the corner, but this family knows poverty just fine -- they barely scrape by on the proceeds of the older women's knitting. The father, who was evidently terribly abusive (physically -- whippings of all three -- not sexually) left them when Bobby was very young. Bobby (full name Roberta) is apparently called Bobby because the father wanted a boy -- and, indeed, no one but her sister and mother knows she's a girl.

She meets a man on their property one night, who tells her he is really a horse, named Mister Boots. He too has been abused by his human owners. Bobby feeds and clothes him, and eventually takes him home. Events follow quickly from their. The mother dies. Mister Boots and the older girl, Jocelyn, fall in love. Their father, Robert Lassiter, returns and the abuse begins again. He wants Bobby to become a magician, just like him -- and she finds she is good at that, and wants to do it. They head to LA (Bobby dressed as a boy -- which her father still thinks she is), and become a successful magic act, despite Mister Boots's refusal to turn into a horse onstage. Bobby makes her first ever friendship with a girl her age: a similarly bereft Mexican girl named Rosie whom she meets in a sort of hobo camp. They meet their father's long time mistress -- or is she really his wife, and are they illegitimate? But then the Depression hits, and the money dries up, and things get worse and worse, until a final revelation and a final horrible act.

It's a charming and hopeful story in one sense, with a delightful narrator in Bobby. (Yet a real seeming narrator -- not a prodigy, for instance, and far from a perfect person.) Yet it is also quite dark -- the depression, the abuse, and a somewhat tragic denouement. Which I think means it's really pretty much like real life. A very fine little novel.