Birthday Review: The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

Peter S. Beagle, SFWA Grand Master, turns 80 today. He became a favorite writer of mine much later than he should have -- about 15 years ago I realized what I'd been missing. Here's my review from back then of perhaps his most famous novel, The Last Unicorn. (It was originally posted at my newsgroup on SFF.Net.)

The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

a review by Rich Horton

One of my longterm guilty non-reads has been Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn. I've owned the book for a long time -- indeed, since June of 1977, about when I graduated from high school. (At that time I was sufficiently anal to write my name and the date and the sequential number of the book (among those I had bought -- this was the 279th SF novel!) on the inside.) Somehow I never found time to read it, and I'm not at all sure why. Probably it was reading "Two Hearts", a sequel, last year in F&SF that finally prompted me to dig up my copy.

And my gosh, I'm glad I did. It's a remarkable, beautiful, book. The prose is lovely, the story very moving, the characters involving -- the plot, well, probably just OK but that's not at all the point.

The story is about, no surprise, the last unicorn in the world. As the story opens she is brought to a vague realization that there are no other unicorns anymore, as far as anyone knows. She ends up deciding to search for her fellows, and soon gathers that they were taken away by the agency of the nasty King Haggard, and his mysterious creature the Red Bull. She is captured by a witch running a traveling animal exhibit, but she escapes with the help of a rather incompetent magician named Schmendrick. Schmendrick is tormented by his inability to control his magic in any way, and usually his inability to do any real magic. The two begin to follow Haggard's trail, but Shmendrick is captured by the outlaw Captain Cully, who imagines himself Robin Hood but doesn't quite manage it. Shmendrick escapes, of course, accompanied now also by Molly Grue, a rather faded and beaten down version of Maid Marian who had been cooking for Cully's band for years. And the three make their way to Haggard's strange castle, and to the neighboring town, cursed by prosperity.

At the castle the unicorn encounters the Red Bull, and is unable to deal with it -- and Shmendrick saves her, but by the terrible means of making her a human woman. Admitted to Haggard's haggard castle, they meet his amiable son, and of course the son falls for the unicorn in her womanly form. And eventually she begins to fall for him, once he understands that what she wants is not heroic quests and the heads of dragons and ogres. The shape of the story is clear, and the only resolution -- for Haggard to be deposed and the unicorns freed the Red Bull must be vanquished, and that vanquishing will require a certain sacrifice.

As I said, it's quite wonderful. In particular the first few chapters are astonishingly beautiful: some of the most intense prose I've ever read -- yet always undercut by odd humor and something akin to cynicism but not quite that. These abrupt shifts in tone work startlingly well. Beagle can't really maintain that level, though he reaches such heights again when needed, particularly at the climax. It's one of the field's treasures, no doubt, and I'm glad I finally read it.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Tom Purdom

Today is Tom Purdom's 83rd birthday, and what better time for a compilation of my reviews of stories from his exceptional late career outpouring.

Locus, June 2003

The two longest stories in the June Asimov's, Tom Purdom's "The Path of the Transgressor" and John Varley's "The Bellman", both feature riveting chase scenes, with their respective protagonists coming within a whisker of death. And they embed these chase scenes in unambiguously SFnal settings, and they use the SFnal nature of the settings to drive the stories, rather than as simply window-dressing or local color. I would hope these stories would satisfy most any adventure-starved reader. ... Even better is "The Path of the Transgressor". Davin Sam is a researcher on another planet, studying the habits of some unusual alien social animals. His wife Lizera is a former "geisha" -- genetically engineered to be predisposed toward pleasing her customers -- and now Davin is her "customer". They face considerable prejudice, which comes to a head when some of the alien animals alter their habits and attack the couple. When Lizera is injured it becomes clear that Davin could save himself by abandoning her. Shockingly, this is exactly what the bigots expect. The action sequences, as the two struggle for survival, are very well done, but the meat of the story is the exploration of the nature of their relationship, and the social context of it, which leads to a surprising and thought-provoking conclusion. This is one of the best stories to date in 2003.

Locus, February 2004

DAW's "monthly magazine" of themed anthologies offers a reliable if seldom exciting source of new SF and Fantasy. 2003 closes with Mike Resnick's New Voices in Science Fiction: 20 short stories by new writers (variably defined: from complete unknowns like Paul Crilley to well-established writers like Kage Baker and Susan R. Mathews). For the most part the stories seem more promising than outstanding. My favorite story here is "Palace Resolution" by Tom Purdom, about a civil war between rival factions in an asteroid habitat over the way to deal with an alien probe.

Locus, March 2004

Tom Purdom's latest story of a future Casanova (prosaically named Joe) is "Romance for Augmented Trio" (Asimov's, February). The protagonist, as in several previous stories, is engaged in an affair with a younger and thus (due to improvements in the human genome) much more intelligent woman, this time named Ganmei. They are journeying to the Kuiper Belt where they are attacked by a mentally unbalanced man, and Joe and Ganmei must use their different talents to try to outwit this psychotic individual, and his AI augmentations.

Guest Review of October-November 2005 Asimov's for Tangent Online

Tom Purdom’s “Bank Run” is my favorite story of this double issue. It appears to be set in the same future as his excellent story “The Path of the Transgressor”. Like that story it features a man on another planet with a genetically-engineered female companion – a woman tailored not only to delight him but also to be loyal to him. The protagonist, Sabor, is one of the leading bankers on the planet Fernheim. This planet has a rather anarchistic social setup, with a few bankers, a number of “Possessors” (major landowners, I suppose), some providers of such services as mercenaries, and presumably a large underclass of genetically-engineered servants: guards, concubines, and everything in between, one assumes. And no particular laws, just social pressure and financial pressure.

Sabor has just refused a loan to Possessor Kenzan Khan, partly on the grounds of the man’s irresponsibility. Khan responds by engaging a mercenary force to try to kidnap Sabor. Sabor’s defense strategy is a combination of flight, physical resistance, and financial negotiations with other banks, with Khan’s rivals, and with the mercenaries. The financial and small-scale political negotiations may sound dry – but I didn’t find them so at all. The story examines the ways in which financial pressure, and self-interest based both on financial opportunity and concern for one’s reputation, might substitute for laws. But this is no libertarian tract – the entire setup raises questions about its feasibility and stability, and does not insist on answers. Behind everything there are lurking questions about Sabor’s own character, and particularly the rather unpleasant implied economy of this future, with what seems to be essentially slavery a main aspect. Finally, much of the emotional center of the story (as with “The Path of the Transgressor”) concerns the question of relationships with people engineered to love you, and engineered for you to desire – how “real” are the feelings on either side of such a relationship?

Locus, October 2005

Best from the Asimov’s Double Issue is “Bank Run”, by Tom Purdom. This story appears to be set in the same future as his excellent story “The Path of the Transgressor”, and like that story it features a man on another planet with a genetically-engineered female companion – a woman tailored not only to delight him but also to be loyal to him. This is a disquieting background note in a story that in the foreground is a clever adventure story, featuring both futuristic technology and futuristic financial manipulation. Sabor is one of the leading bankers on the planet Fernheim. He has just refused a loan to Possessor Kenzan Khan, partly on the grounds of the man’s irresponsibility. Khan’s response is to engage a mercenary force and attack Sabor. The defense strategy is a combination of flight, physical resistance, and financial negotiations with other banks, with Khan’s rivals, and with the mercenaries. It’s not dry in the least – rather, I was in the edge of my seat. And behind everything lurk questions about Sabor’s character, about the rather unpleasant implied economy of this future, with what seems to be essentially slavery a main aspect, and about the emotional aspects of relationships with people engineered to love you, and engineered for you to desire.

Locus, February 2008

Tom Purdom is one of my favorites, and he does not disappoint with “Sepoy Fidelities” (Asimov's, March), about two people who have been given beautiful and strong new bodies by the Earth’s alien rulers. They fall in love, but their new bodies come at a price – their first loyalty is to their job.

Locus, July 2010

In the July Asimov’s Tom Purdom, is in fine form in “Haggle Chips”, which once again examines the collision of economic manipulation and emotional manipulation. A man selling valuable eyes to a powerful woman is kidnapped by an opponent of the woman – he becomes, straightforwardly, a pawn in a power game. Then he falls in love with an associate of his kidnapper – but was she mentally altered to fall for him? And does that matter?

Locus, December 2010

Also in the December Asimov's, I enjoyed  Tom Purdom’s “Warfriends”, a sequel to his mid-60s Ace Double The Tree Lord of Imeten, concerning the balky attempts of a couple of very different species to cooperate.

Locus, April 2011

Tom Purdom’s “A Response from EST17” (Asimov's, April-May) is intelligent science fiction about rival expeditions to a distant planet, and particularly the response of the intelligent natives to the human explorers. It turns out such expeditions are common in interstellar history, and there is a way to deal with them. Purdom offers an interesting explanation for the Fermi Paradox, and a nice way out of it.


Locus, March 2012

In the March Asimov’s I quite enjoyed the cover story, “Golva’s Ascent”, by Tom Purdom. This is another of his Imeten stories (the first of which was the 1966 Ace Double The Tree Lord of Imeten, the second of which was the 2010 Asimov’s story “Warfriends”), set on a heavily forested planet occupied by two species: a tree-dwelling and tool-using people, and a ground dwelling species with considerable linguistic facility but no hands so no tools. This story concerns Golva, a highly intelligent itiji (one of the ground-dwellers), if a bit of a social misfit in his milieu (he is portrayed almost as if he has Asperger’s), who daringly sets out on a journey up the plateau where the small group of humans live. Once there he is captured and studied by a sympathetic researcher – but it turns out the humans are dominated by a rather sadistic leader, and Golva finds himself needing to escape with the help of the researcher. The action is exciting, and the depiction of an alien species is well done.

Locus, September 2013

Tom Purdom's “A Stranger from a Foreign Ship” (Asimov's, September) makes nice use of a familiar central idea: a character who can temporarily switch minds with other people. He uses it for somewhat small time crime – identity theft, basically. And then he wonders how this might affect one particular victim, a young woman … Things resolve, not quite cynically, but realistically, as no great romance is involved, and indeed the characters are not unlikeable exactly but no heroes either. Solid work.

Locus, September 2014

In the September Asimov's Tom Purdom brings to a close (it would seems) his latest sequence of stories, these set on Imeten, a planet he first visited in a 1966 Ace Double, The Tree Lord of Imeten. In this story, “Bogdavi's Dream”, an alliance between some members of the tree people of Imeten, others of the ground dwelling itiji, and a few humans exiled from the human colony mount an attack on the colony, hoping to depose the brutal usurper leading the colony and free the rest of the humans. It doesn't have quite the Sfnal zip of the previous entries – as fairly often with later stories in a series, the inventions and revelations are in the past, and what's left is resolution. That said it's an enjoyable adventure story, with nice battle scenes, and well-drawn characters from all three species, and making good use of the situation already established, particularly the characteristics of the two native intelligent species, in coming to a satisfying conclusion.

Birthday Review: Wondrous Beginnings, edited by Steven H. Silver and Martin Harry Greenberg

Today is Steven Silver's birthday. Last year I did a special Birthday Review at Black Gate of his most recent story; so this year I'll turn to an anthology he edited. My review originally appeared in my column in the UK magazine 3SF.

Wondrous Beginnings, edited by Steven H. Silver and Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, New York, NY, 2003, $6.99, 0-7564-0098-8, 316 pages

a review by Rich Horton

Wondrous Beginnings is the first of a set of three anthologies edited by Steven H. Silver* and Martin H. Greenberg. Each book includes the first story from a well-known writer in our field. This book focuses on Science Fiction, while Magical Beginnings focuses on Fantasy, and Horrible Beginnings on Horror. An especially nice feature is the introductions, often quite long, contributed by the authors, usually giving interesting details of their early career.

Silver and Greenberg have chosen an impressive temporal range of authors for the Science Fiction volume. The earliest is Murray Leinster, whose first SF story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", appeared in 1919. The latest is Julie E. Czerneda, whose "First Contact, Inc." appeared in 1997. Writers who debuted in each decade from the 1930s through 1980s are also included.

The stories are of varying quality, as you might expect. Not often is a writer's first sale an enduring classic. Probably only Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" (the short version of his famous novel) would qualify from this book. That isn't to say that the stories are bad, however. Most of these pieces are at least enjoyable. The stories as a group make for a decent anthology, but the added value of the introductions makes this a truly worthwhile purchase. It's also interesting to see for which writers the first story is characteristic of their work. Hal Clement's "Proof", with its exotic aliens and its pro-scientific attitude, and Catherine Asaro's romantic "Dance in Blue" both clearly presage, in theme and in style, their authors' future work. But Barry N. Malzberg's gimmicky though amusing "We're Coming Through the Window", and Howard Waldrop's "Lunchbox", a tale of Martians meeting the Viking lander that sold to Analog of all places, are decidedly off those authors' usual track.

The other authors featured are L. Sprague de Camp, Arthur C. Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, Gene Wolfe, George R. R. Martin, Jack McDevitt, Jerry Oltion, Lois McMaster Bujold, Stephen Baxter, and Michael A. Burstein. The Fantasy volume includes the likes of Andre Norton, Peter Beagle, and Ursula K. Le Guin; the Horror volume features Henry Kuttner, Tanith Lee, Kim Newman and others. Any of these books will be intriguing for anyone interested in the history of the SF field.


*The H is actually not an initial, it's Steven's full middle name, but DAW apparently didn't know that and added the period. (My grandfather used to say that his middle name was just V, but actually he had a true middle name, Velt (after Theodore Roosevelt, who was President when he was born, but he hated that name.))

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."