2019 Best of the Year TOC

Here's the TOC for The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2019. As ever, I'm thrilled at the wonderful set of stories these great authors have contributed.  This is in alphabetical order by place of publication, if anyone is wondering. 

• “The Spires” by Alec Nevala-Lee (Analog, 3-4/18)
• “The Unnecessary Parts of the Story” by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog, 09-10/18)
• ”A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow (Apex, 2/18)
• ”Bubble and Squeak” by David Gerrold and Ctein (Asimov’s, 5-6/18)
• “The Gift” by Julie Novakova (Asimov’s, 11/12/2018)
• “Beautiful” by Juliet Marillier (Aurum)
• ”The Starship and the Temple Cat” by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2/1/18)
• ”Carouseling” by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld, 4/18)
• ”The Persistence of Blood” by Juliette Wade (Clarkesworld, 3/18)
• ”Umbernight” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld, 2/18)
• ”The Donner Party” by Dale Bailey (F&SF, 1-2/18)
• ”How to Identify an Alien Shark” by Beth Goder (Fireside Quarterly, 7/18)
• ”The Tale of the Ive-Ojan-Akhar’s Death” by Alex Jeffers (Giganotosaurus, 4/18)
• “Foxy and Tiggs” by Justina Robson (Infinity’s End)
• “Intervention” by Kelly Robson (Infinity’s End)
• ”The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish” by Octavia Cade (Kaleidotrope, Winter/18)
• ”Dayenu” by James Sallis (LCRW, Spring/18)
• ”Lime and the One Human” by S. Woodson (LCRW, 7/18)
• ”The Court Magician” by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, 1/18)
• “Jump” by Cadwell Turnbull (Lightspeed, 10/18)
• ”Firelight” by Ursula K. Le Guin (Paris Review, Summer/18)
• “The Buried Giant” by Lavie Tidhar (Robots vs Fairies)
• ”Today is Today” by Rick Wilber (Stonecoast Review, Summer/18)
• ”The Heart of Owl Abbas” by Kathleen Jennings (Tor.com, 4/11/2018)
• ”Grace’s Family” by James Patrick Kelly (Tor.com, 5/18)
• “The House by the Sea” by P. H. Lee (Uncanny, 9/10/2018)

Birthday Review: Autonomous, plus two short stories, by Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz is primarily a science journalist, I believe, and so she hasn't written a ton of fiction. But I've liked what I've read. On the occasion of her birthday, then, here's my two reviews from Locus of her short stories, plus my review of her novel Autonomous, reposted from last year's Nebula Ballot review post.

Locus, January 2014

In the November Lightspeed my favorite story is "Drones Don't Kill People", by Annalee Newitz, which on the face of it is a bit cliche, about drones coming to self-awareness and realizing that their uses -- covert surveillance and assassination -- are immoral. But Newitz wraps this is an unexpectedly engaging and convincing tale, beginning with horror and ending with hope, with non-human characters that really hold the interest.

Locus, December 2018

In Robots vs Fairies ... I liked Annalee Newitz’ “The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto”, set in the future of her novel Autonomous, and featuring a robot calling itself the Blue Fairy setting free other robots, including in this story a robot RealBoy. Newitz’ story is particularly interesting (to me), reiterating some of the themes of Autonomous in asking what freedom really might mean for robots.

Autonomous

a review by Rich Horton

Annalee Newitz' first novel, Autonomous, is on the Nebula shortlist. I'd heard lots of buzz about it already, and I knew I liked Newitz' writing (I used her 2014 story "Drones Don't Kill People" in my Best of the Year book), so I meant to get to it -- and I finally did. I have to say, it met my expectations -- it's a really cool book, really hard SF, exciting and scary and moving.

Jack Chen is a patent pirate -- she reverse engineers patented drugs, sometimes ones critical for the health of people who can't affort corporate medicine, and sometimes just for money (a woman's got to live, after all). But her latest effort, a drug called Zacuity, which makes people love their jobs, and want to keep working, has backfired badly -- people are getting addicted to work, to the point of ignoring things like food. She desperately needs to find a cure, and her only hope might be her old lover Krish, who betrayed her a quarter century ago, when she went to jail for her anti-patent activism. She ends up freeing an indentured young man called Threezed (after the last two characters in his ID), and they make their way across Canada to Krish's lab, and to a safer place to work.

Meanwhile they are being chased by agents of the International Property Coalition, which enforces patents. The two assigned to her case are a human named Eliasz and a military bot named Paladin. Bots are nominally indentured for 10 years after their creation, after which they can become autonomous. (Similar rules apply to humans who have been indentured.) Not surprisingly, autonomy isn't quite as easy to achieve as that. And Paladin hardly knows what they -- he? she? it? -- wants -- as most of their wants are controlled by programming.

The story is on the surface about patents and drugs and so on, and about the tense chase as Eliasz and Paladin home in on Jack. And all that works really well. But that's just the surface -- an important surface, to be sure. But the title tells the truth -- the heart of the novel is "autonomy". For bots, sure -- Paladin's eventual realization that they might like to be autonomous is a major issue. But for humans, as well -- Threezed, in particular, who was indentured and sold and had his indenture extended for obscure legal reasons, wants autonomy and is pretty cynical about the whole thing.

But there's more -- what autonomy, for example, do workers who have been given a drug like Zacuity possess? How about Med, a heroic bot researcher who was created as a never-indentured bot -- is she truly autonomous or does her programming control her? And even when Paladin attains autonomy it's temporary -- and can she (as she by then identifies, sort of) trust her "feelings"? What about Eliasz? He's a fanatic about human indenture -- he hates it. And he loves bots, especially Paladin. But he's on the side of a truly evil entity -- well, mostly evil -- and in their service he -- and Paladin -- commit horrible murders. Are they autonomous in so doing?

This is a very thought-provoking book, and tremendously exciting. It's exceptional hard SF. It's not perfect -- the author's hand can be seen on the scales on occasion. And the end is fuzzed just a bit -- there's a cynical side to it, to be sure, but also some convenient resolutions. But what book is perfect? I really liked this novel, and it's pushed its way onto my Hugo nomination ballot.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Jack Sharkey

Jack Sharkey would have been 88 today. He was a pretty minor writer of SF, mostly for Cele Goldsmith Lalli's magazines, Amazing and Fantastic, between 1959 and 1965. After Lalli left those magazines he turned mostly to plays. He died in 1992.

I have to confess I don't like his work much -- I think he was one of Lalli's few weak spots. But let's take a look at some of this short stories. He also published two Ace Doubles, which I have already covered:

Ultimatum in 2050 A. D.;

The Secret Martians.

Anyway, here are several reviews of his short stories, from Amazing/Fantastic, published originally as Retro-Reviews at Black Gate:

Fantastic, November 1959

Jack Sharkey’s “Minor Detail” is, well, pretty minor. It’s about a blowhard General promoting his new superweapon, which will allow men to become strong enough to survive any fall, thus allowing them to dispense with parachutes. The idea is stupid, and the supposedly ironic reason it doesn’t work doesn’t make sense.

Fantastic, December 1959

“The Man Who Was Pale,” by Jack Sharkey, tells of a landlady welcoming a strange new tenant – he’s very pale, he’s nocturnal, he wants to live in the basement in a box full of dirt … what could he be? And what could go wrong?

No surprises here – just competent hackwork.

Amazing, March 1960

Sharkey’s “Old Friends are the Best” is a slight, mildly amusing, bit of SF horror… a plant is discovered on the Moon, and brought back to Earth as a scientific marvel – with, of course, unfortunate (and scientifically absurd) results.

Fantastic, April 1960

The cover story is “Doomsday Army,” by Jack Sharkey, an entirely too long story about a National Guard captain who ends up being the main intermediary to a bunch of (as it turns out) very small alien invaders. He’s portrayed as a fairly ordinary suburban husband, prone to taking shortcuts in solving problems his wife brings to his attention: so of course his solution to the alien problem will be a dangerous shortcut. And so it is, with an implausible solution.

There’s joke enough here for maybe 3,000 words at the outside, and this drags terribly at some 13,000 words. (I wonder if it was written to the cover, which does portray a scene from the story but in a very generic fashion.)

Fantastic, November 1963

"The Aftertime", by Goldsmith regular Jack Sharkey, begins as a very straightforward post-apocalyptic story, with a young man, Rory, waking to find his city bombed and his building mostly collapsed. He wanders the city, encountering a young woman and then a few more people, eating canned food, banding together for help, but slowly losing hope as nothing is heard on the radio, and then people start dying because of some strange energy organism. Then there's a shocking twist -- it fooled me -- and a quite strained ending concerning the less than plausible (to say the least) nature, origin, and weakness of the energy beings.

Fantastic, February 1964

Jack Sharkey was also a Goldsmith regular, and, in my view, one of her weak spots. He really wasn’t very good — though he was professional and, I suppose, reliable in his way. “The Orginorg Way”, that said, is better than usual for Sharkey, perhaps because it’s short. It’s about an unprepossessing man obsessed with a woman, who turns to manipulation of plants as a way to attract her — with, of course, unfortunate effects.

Fantastic, August 1964

Jack Sharkey's "Footnote to an Old Story" is amusing enough little piece about a 97-pound weakling who visits a Greek island and falls for a beautiful local girl. Somehow he gets the notion that letting his hair grow will make his body more attractive, and to his surprise it works -- soon he's a pretty impressive physical speciment, and the Greek girl is intrigued. So, it looks like the "Old Story" is the Samson story maybe -- but it turns out, in a slick enough conclusion, that it's another story entirely.

Fantastic, September 1964

Jack Sharkey's "Hear and Obey" is, like the Janifer story, a variation on a traditional theme, in this case the Genie in the Lamp. This Genie is a bit persnickety about how he grants the wishes, with, as one might expect, unfortunate results for his new owner. A bit strained, I thought.

Fantastic, October 1964

“The Grooves” is a brief horror story in which a young man vows to invade the troll’s cave in the mountains to claim at least some of the rumored treasure there… despite warnings that no one has ever returned, and that “you must never kill a troll, because trolls have inverted souls.” Minor work, but effective enough working out its fairly predictable premise.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Catherynne M. Valente

Today is Catherynne Valente's birthday, and so here's a selection of my Locus reviews of her short fiction, a great way to experience some of the loveliest prose in the field of recent years. She's on the Hugo Shortlist for Best Novel right now, for Space Opera.

Last year on this date I posted my review of her lovely novel The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice.)

Locus, December 2006

Slightly more strongly themed is Mythic 2, a short anthology focused mostly on fantasy (stories and poems) with a fairy tale slant. Catherynne M. Valente’s “Temnaya and the House of Books” plays bitter variations on multiple familiar tales (at least “Snow White”, “Cinderella”, and “Hansel and Gretel” that I recognized) in telling of a daughter rejected by father, mother, and stepmother.

Locus, February 2007

Electric Velocipede’s Fall issue includes “yet another Snow White” retelling, “Milk and Apples” by Catherynne M. Valente. Here the stepmother is a wet-nurse, a victim of her demanding stepdaughter, and her predicament is harshly and elegantly portrayed.

Locus, June 2007

Catherynne M. Valente's "A Dirge for Prester John" (Interfictions) is a delightfully exotic story of the legendary Prester John in the fantastical land he encountered -- complete with such creatures as the phoenix, the gryphon, and the blemmye.

Locus, July 2008

Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” (Clarkesworld, May) is a delightful story of obsessive rivalry between two Argentinian mapmakers, of a perhaps slightly alternate Antarctica – one is naturalistic, one artistic – and it’s easy to guess which mapmaker is more interesting.

Locus, August 2009

Another strong online site, Clarkesworld, has been showcasing a lot of decidedly odd SF this year, and from August comes one of the oddest and most intriguing: “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”, by Catherynne M. Valente, a difficult to describe but ever fascinating story, set in a sort of steampunk alternate Earth, and concerning the lost last film of a documentary filmmaker called Bysshe, about a mysterious city on a strange Venus.

Locus, September 2010

Lightspeed in its third issue features two original stories distinguished by the originality of their ideas, and by some distinctiveness in the telling. “How to Become a Mars Overlord”, by Catherynne M. Valente, purports to be a manual for potential rulers of the Red Planet – of any red planet of the many Mars analogs dotting the universe. The descriptions of variant overlords are well done, and the philosophical musings driving the piece are also worthwhile – so I enjoyed it, but in the end felt it a bit short of “story”.

Locus, October 2010

I’ve been keeping an eye on the various novella-length chapbooks available. Rabid Transit Press offers their second novella, Catherynne M. Valente’s Under in the Mere. This is a beautifully written (as we expect from Valente) series of pieces from the point of view of many of King Arthur’s knights, all from original angles, with a certain emphasis on California. I didn’t find it wholly successful – it has a static feel, and works more as a sort of commentary on the Matter of Britain than a complete story.

Locus, October 2011

At Tor.com for July there is a delightful story by Catherynne M. Valente, “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland – for a Little While”, set in her Girl Who Circumented Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making world, about Mallow, who answers the King’s summons to the Foul, only to learn that the King, and Politicks, are bound to ensnare her. It’s full of whimsy – the serious kind – and linguistic invention, and a light touch over sometimes dark matter – first rate.

Locus, January 2012

Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington offer The Future is Japanese, which collects a number of SF stories about, in some sense, a Japanese future, as well as a few stories by Japanese SF writers. ... “One Breath, One Stroke”, lovely fantasy from Catherynne M. Valente, about a house half in the real world and half in another place, such that the calligrapher who lives in the human half of the house is a calligraphy brush in the other place. The story follows the lives and loves of the brush's fellows in the other place, such as a skeleton woman and a catfish … Valente at her exquisite best.

Locus, June 2015

There is also the conclusion to a long novelette by Catherynne M. Valente, serialized in Clarkesworld in February and March, “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild”. This is excellent work, extravagantly written on the subject of color, partly. Violet is “just a kid with hair the color of raisins and eyes the color of grape jelly”, from the Purple country of course, with her Mummery a Clarinaut and a sometime lover of the Ordinary Emperor, and her Papo is a Nowboy, herding mauve squirrels. Violet's best friend is a boy named Orchid Harm, and when he is killed, she and her Sorrow decide to travel across the 7 countries of the world to the Red Country. The story is luscious fun to read, partly for something as simple as the color words we encounter, the imaginative playing with time and with character and action is all of a lovely piece.

Locus, August 2016

Beneath Ceaseless Skies for May 25 is their 200th issue, so a special one, with twice the stories. And it’s exceptional: four first-rate pieces. Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek; or, The Luminescence of Debauchery” is a gender-bending piece about a woman who inherits her father’s glassblowing business, and learns that her customers would rather deal with a man. So we continue, with Master Peek, who is gifted with unusually long life, acquiring several wives, a great deal of wealth, and eventually a fortuitous discovery – that the remarkable glass eyes he makes allow him to see what the wearer sees. Master Peek’s long career continues, especially when he falls for a dangerous and less than dependable woman … Valente’s prose, here pitched a bit to the humorous end of the scale, is a delight as ever, and so too is her extravagant imagination.

Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology is Drowned Worlds, a climate change anthology. Maybe because the theme is pretty depressing the two stories I liked best are somewhat desperately comic, and even almost optimistic, if sometimes in a black way. ... Less satirical is “The Future is Blue”, by Catherynne M. Valente. Tetley Abednego is a much detested woman in a city built on a massive raft of plastic garbage in the sea. The story tells of her childhood, her beloved twin brother, the boy she falls in love with in Electric Town, and the terrible but necessary thing she did that has led to her ostracism. It sounds depressing, but it’s not really, and it’s very imaginative, and, as I suggested, almost, in a black way, hopeful.

Birthday Review: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

a review by Rich Horton

Dodie Smith was born May 3, 1896, and she died aged 94 in 1990. She is one of those writers known nowadays for only a small subset of her oeuvre -- two books, the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, and the adult novel I Capture the Castle. But she wrote several other novels, about a dozen plays, and four volumes of autobiography. She was also an actor early in her life. Her other novels and her plays seem mostly forgotten nowadays, as I note, but they must have been fairly successful, in that several of them were filmed. Even I Capture the Castle was for a long time, it seems to me, eclipsed by The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but sometime in the last few decades it was enthusiastically rediscovered -- or re-emphasized. (And perhaps I am merely reflecting my experience.) Here's what I wrote about I Capture the Castle around the time the movie based on it appeared, in 2003.

I first heard of I Capture the Castle several years ago, and immediately formed the idea I might like it. I had at the time read The Hundred and One Dalmatians, Dodie Smith's most famous story -- and altogether a slier and smarter story than the Disney version. (Though at least the first Disney version, the animated one, is really a pretty darn good film.) I had no idea she had written anything else. It turns out Smith was a quite prolific and apparently rather popular playwright in England in the 30s. She moved to the US at the outbreak of war because her husband was a pacifist. I Capture the Castle appeared in 1948, The Hundred and One Dalmatians a bit later. There was a sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians called The Starlight Barking -- a terrible book.

I picked up a copy of I Capture the Castle real cheap at a used book sale, feeling pretty proud of myself for having found a not very available book. Of course, shortly thereafter it was reprinted in trade paperback -- I think more in reaction to the new live action version of The Hundred and One Dalmatians than anything. Last year a film was made of the book. Not long ago my wife was looking desperately for reading material and I dug up I Capture the Castle and suggested it to her. She read it and quite liked it, and I went ahead and read it, at long last, after she finished. Then this past weekend we rented the film and watched it.

The book is purely delightful. It opens with 17 year old Cassandra Mortmain starting a diary: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." Cassandra lives with her eccentric father, her stepmother Topaz, and her older sister Rose and younger brother Thomas in a dilapidated castle. Her father had rented the castle several years previously, after getting out of prison. (He had attacked his wife with a cake knife, perhaps not seriously, but a neighbour intervened and got hurt -- so the isolation of the castle appealed.) At that time the family was still flush, after her father's success with an odd book called Jacob Wrestling. But by the time of this book, they are living in grinding poverty. The children's mother is dead, though Mortmain has married again, and Topaz, a beautiful woman, much younger than her husband, still earns an occasional amount modeling. Very small royalties for the book sometimes come in. But Mortmain is blocked on any new book, and spends his time reading detective stories. Cassandra is out of school. The beautiful Rose is frustrated by poverty and determines either to "go on the streets" or at least marry a rich man. While Cassandra fends off the clumsy but honest advances of their strikingly handsome servant boy, Stephen, who is in the habit of presenting her poetry copied from famous poets as love poems.

The main actions starts when the new owners of the castle, and of the nearby estate Scoatney, turn up. They are two American men, Simon and Neil Cotton. Simon, the elder, has a beard, which makes him suspicious, but soon Rose determines to marry him. Neil is bound to return to America, and is very suspicious of the sisters' apparent golddigging. Further complications occur when their mother takes an interest in the elder Mortmain, much to Topaz' distress, while a cousin, Mrs. Fox-Cotton, determines to photograph Stephen, and perhaps to seduce him.

Well, as they say, much hilarity ensues, along with a certain amount of pain for all concerned. There are some twists and surprises (at least to me -- perhaps I was naive), leading to a satisfying if somewhat open ending. It's great fun, in large part because of Cassandra's voice, very bright, funny, a bit naive, sweet. It's a romantic book with a light tone, but it maintains just enough ambiguity and edge to avoid treacle. The characters are quite nicely drawn -- at least the women. I don't actually think any of the men come off (except for the Vicar, in a very small part). Simon and Neil and Mortmain are all really only sketches. and Stephen is perhaps more than that but not convincing. However, the women are much better -- Cassandra is lovely, Rose is convincingly not such a wonderful person without being horrible, and Topaz is odd but quite sympathetic.

Well -- what about the movie? Sad to say, it doesn't really come off at all. For the most part the movie is pretty faithful to the bare bones of the plot -- but that's not enough. The humor of the book is almost wholly lost. Cassandra's voice just doesn't survive. The very fine closing lines are altered, much to their diminishing. Rose's character is coarsened just a bit. Topaz is completely muffed -- she is turned into a grotesque. Stephen's role is diminished, which makes some things seem a bit confusing. Bill Nighy plays Mortmain, and he does a fine job, but doesn't quite capture the Mortmain of the book -- still, he's one of the better parts of the movie. All sorts of little things are just a bit off -- for instance, the Vicar is played by the guy who played Mr. Collins in the recent Pride and Prejudice miniseries, and he plays him (in just a bit part -- reduced from the book, understandably given time limitations) as another Mr. Collins, which isn't right AT ALL.

To some extent, this is a bit unfair -- expecting the movie to be a book adaptation. Rather, one should evaluate the movie on its own merits. I suspect it still falls short -- for instance, it's not really very funny, and I think that would have been nice -- but I admit I may not be evaluating it as independently of the book as I should. But there you go.

Birthday Review: Endless Honeymoon, by Don Webb

Birthday Review: Endless Honeymoon, by Don Webb

a review by Rich Horton

Don Webb has a birthday today. He's written a lot of neat short fantasy and horror over the years. His only novels (that I know of) are a set of Texas-based mysteries, with slight and ambiguous fantastical elements, that were published around the turn of the millennium by St. Martin's Press. I really liked those books, but alas, there have been no more. Here's what I wrote about the third of those books when it first came out:

Endless Honeymoon is the third in a recent series of Texas-based mysteries by the engagingly odd writer Don Webb.  I say series, but the books are very loosely linked, sharing mostly some Texas settings, and occasionally featuring major characters from another book as minor characters. I like all three books a lot.  This latest book, after The Double and Essential Saltes, is even more loosely linked, as the protagonists of the other two books were brothers. The lead male characters are all likeable, somewhat nerdy, and very uxorious.  The subject matter is always a bit off-center, and quite different from book to book, but computers are always central to the books.  And you can count on a mention of fireworks.  (It's not certain that this book is in exactly the same timeline as the other two: a murdered character from a previous book appears here alive, and it seems to be set later, though who knows for sure.)

This book is about a couple named Willis and Virginia Spencer. They are independently wealthy (Virginia inherited money, and Willis made a bundle as a Y2K expert), and they spend much of their time performing rather cruel pranks.  Their victims are people whom they have discovered who are "psychic vampires", or simply "shits", who delight in causing misery to those around them, and Willis and Virginia hope to teach these folks a lesson.  They choose their victims by means of a computer program Willis found during his Y2K work.  It turns out, however, that the program was written by a man who takes the whole thing a bit more seriously: he murders the "psychic vampires" instead of simply scaring them.  And one day, unluckily, Willis and Virginia choose the same victim that the "Shit Killer", as he is called, has chosen.

Before long, several people are on the track of the couple. One is the agent the FBI has assigned to the "Shit Killer" case, a young Hispanic man named William Mondragon. This case has the reputation of driving FBI agents crazy, and indeed the previous agent on the case, Abel Salazar, has quit the FBI and is working for someone else, also looking for the killer, and he tracks down both Mondragon and the Spencers.  Add the "Shit Killer" himself, who may be looking for a successor to carry on his work, and the mysterious person behind Salazar, and the Spencers are in big trouble.  Before long Virginia has been kidnapped and Willis and Mondragon are on a wild chase after both her and the real killer.  The resolution is quite scary, involving several people who are both insane and evil, and dealing with Virginia's past abuse by both her father and her first husband, with the "Shit Killer"'s wasted life, and with a strange psychiatrist.

The story is full of imaginative action, and it's fast moving and exciting. Webb does not shy away from the moral implications of all his character's actions, and from the unfortunate attractiveness of the "Shit Killer"'s agenda.  Willis and Virginia are flawed and likeable, and even the villains, mostly, are real (if very strange) people, and not wholly villainous.  (The only exception is clearly completely insane.) 

Birthday Review: Stories of Larry Niven

Today is SFWA Grand Master Larry Niven's 81st birthday. I figured I'd compile a selection of my reviews of his work -- problem is, he hasn't done all that much short fiction during my time at Locus. But I do have some reviews of some of his older work from articles I've done for Black Gate over time. So there's enough ...

Problem is, this doesn't really capture how fun his work was when I was reading it in the mid-70s. I really loved his stuff -- the short stories like "Neutron Star" and "Not Long Before the End" and "Rammer" and "The Fourth Profession" and "Inconstant Moon". The Gil the Arm stories. All the Known Space novels, like A Gift From Earth and Protector. Unfortunately, none of those are covered below -- but they're good stuff, yes they are. Here's what I do have something written about:

Galaxy, October 1968

The one truly famous piece in this issue is Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", in which a policeman puzzled by the recent wave of suicides ties them to the recent realization that there are infinite parallel worlds in which we each make slightly different decisions. The implication is that any decision we ourselves make is meaningless -- because "we" will make every possible different decision anyway, in another world. So, why not commit suicide? I remember being really blown away the first time I read the story, but somehow it didn't have the same impact on rereading, and somehow the logic that seemed inevitable on the first reading doesn't convince me now.

Vertex, August 1974

Niven's "Night on Mispek Moor" is set during another company war, this one on a planet of the Leshy circuit. The protagonist is a mercenary from another planet, trapped on the title moor and attacked by zombies. Not a bad story, nothing great.

Cosmos, May 1977

The three Niven pieces were the first three Draco Tavern stories he published. This has become a rather long series of short-shorts, continued to this day in Analog, featuring a first-person narrator named Rick Schumann, who owns a bar in Siberia which caters to a broad range of alien patrons, particularly the insect-like Chirpsithra, who claim to rule the Galaxy. These stories are "Cruel and Unusual", "The Subject is Closed", and "Grammar Lesson". All are slight as may be expected -- perhaps the best is "The Subject is Closed", in which a priest asks the Chirpsithra about life after death.

Odyssey, Summer 1976

(Cover by Boris Vallejo)

The lead story is Larry Niven's long novella, "The Magic Goes Away", about 26,000 words in this version. (It was published as an illustrated trade paperback from Ace in 1978 -- I believe that version is revised, and seems to be about 33,000 words.) The Niven novella is set in the world of his well-known story "Not Long Before the End", in which magic is real but the source of magic, mana, is running out. A swordsman named Orolandes is involved in the last burst of magical power. I remember enjoying it a fair bit as a teenager.

Tangent review of Analog, July-August 2000

The short stories are also a mixed, but decently solid, assortment.  Larry Niven's "The Wisdom of Demons" is a Draco Tavern story, the first I've seen in some years.  The tavern's owner, Dr. Rick Schumann, tells of a man who met an alien that really wanted to understand humans, and was willing to give the man whatever he wanted, in the form of one wish.  It's a fairly insubstantial story, but the result of the wish is clever enough.

Locus, August 2002

Also in the August Asimov's, a first rate issue, Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper offer a sequel to last year's "Ice and Mirrors". "Free Floaters" is set about a decade later.  Kimber and Eric are still partners and sometime lovers.  This story is told from Eric's POV, as they are given a new job, trying to make contact with a strange alien race which lives in the clouds of an isolated "free floating" Jovian world.  The story fairly entertainingly presents an unusual alien race, and perhaps less convincingly examines Kimber and Eric's relationship at a critical stage.

Locus, August 2005

Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper offer, in "Kath and Quicksilver", a fairly enjoyable far-future piece about a girl marooned on doomed Mercury as the Sun expands, and her interesting means of escape. But it fails to convince in its depiction of the far-future posthuman society. (I will say that I was amused by an apparent reference to a famous "mistake" in Niven's first published story, "The Coldest Place", in which Mercury was depicted as keeping one side always toward the Sun. This was "correct" as of time of writing, but obsolete by the time the story was published. In this story, the authors contrive to have Mercury once again orbiting the Sun with one side always facing it.)

Locus, November 2003

In the November Analog the two novelettes are probably the most interesting pieces. Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper offer "The Trellis", about a scientific station on Pluto, and the curious bio-engineered "trellis" of plants linking Pluto and Charon. An adventurous teenaged girl gets trapped on the trellis, and her father and an old man mount a rescue, hampered by the decaying equipment of the station. The twist is that the rescue is broadcast as a sort of virtual adventure entertainment, but this seemed to point an almost trivial moral.