Old Besteller: The Rose and the Ring, by William Makepeace Thackeray

Old Besteller: The Rose and the Ring, by William Makepeace Thackeray

a review by Rich Horton

I've previously written about Thackeray, in the context of his great novel Henry Esmond -- in my opinion one of the very best novels of the 19th Century. This time around I'm covering something much lighter -- the last of several "Christmas books" he wrote under the name M. A. Titmarsh, and generally the best regarded of those. These were more in the vein of entertainments appropriate for reading at the Christmas season than, necessarily, books that directly concerned Christmas. At any rate, I'll begin with the biographical snippet I wrote before.

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in India in 1811 -- his father was a secretary for the British East India company. William came to England in 1815 after his father's death. He was educated at Charterhouse School and at Cambridge, but did not take a degree. He spent the next several years more or less wasting his time -- some travel, some apparently desultory studies of law and art, failed attempts at starting two newspapers. His family had money, but Thackeray lost some of it by his own efforts and more after a couple of Indian banks failed. So upon his marriage in 1836 he had to support his family, and he turned to writing. He wrote for various magazines (Fraser's and Punch among them), doing reviews, satirical sketches, and some travel writing. He published a couple of novels (Catherine and Barry Lyndon) before becoming famous with the publication of Vanity Fair in 1848. He and his wife had three daughter. One died in infancy. The eldest, Anna Isabella, became a well known novelist in her own right. The youngest married the famous critic Leslie Stephen. After the birth of their third child, Thackeray's wife succumbed to depression, and eventually had to be committed to an asylum. Thackeray died quite young, in 1863. (Indeed his wife, still mentally ill, outlived him by over 30 years.)

The Rose and the Ring is the last of his "Christmas novels", published at Christmas, 1854. (The previous set, totalling five, I believe, dated to the 1840s.) It's a very short novel, something less than 40,000 words by my estimate. It's copiously illustrated, by Thackeray himself. My copy is the Wordsworth Classics edition.

It's a wholly satirical story, concerning the countries Paflagonia and Crim Tartary. The two countries have been at war often, but now are expecting a marriage between Angelica, the only daughter of the King of Paflagonia, and Bulbo, the son of the King of Crim Tartary. The complication is that both Kings are recent usurpers. In Paflagonia, the new King took over when his nephew Giglio was only an infant; while in Crim Tartary Duke Padella rebelled against the rightful (but not very good) King, and the toddler Princess Rosalba was thrown into the woods and eaten by lions. All this, it turns out, was the doing of the Fairy Blackstick, who, in the way of fairies, was offended by the royal families. But, we are told, Blackstick, who has noticed how bad all these royal people turn out, has decided that a bit of misfortune in the lives of the young children will be good for them.

So you can see what's going on -- the Princess Rosalba was not actually eaten by lions, but managed to wander into Paflagonia, where she became the much put upon maid to Princess Angelica. As for Prince Giglio, he has grown up, still rather spoiled, in the Palace, with the expectation of marrying his cousin and becoming King in the end anyway. But now that Angelica will marry Bulbo, his hopes are dashed. Which, in reality, after a bunch of events, means he'll notice the virtuous maid (now called Betsinda) of Angelica ...

The plot is driven to a great extent by more mischief from the Fairy Blackstick, in the form of a rose and a ring, each of which renders the bearer attractive to all who see them. Those work well enough that when Angelica and Bulbo have them, they are happy to be engaged to each other ... but as the objects move on to other people, complications ensue.

But no more about the plot. Suffice it to say that all works out well at the end (except for the people who end up killed!) But in the mean time there are amusing issues such as the King's Butler being turned into a doorknob, and his unpleasant wife, now the Countess Gruffanuff (Thackeray has lots of fun with names -- there's also a General Hedzoff) plots to marry Giglio. And Betsinda/Rosalba is thrust out of the palace again. Giglio himself end up in exile. There are orders to execute Giglio and (by mistake) Bulbo as well. And in the end inevitably war.

So, a fairly conventional fairy tale plot. The pleasure -- and there's a good deal of pleasure -- is in Thackeray's exaggeratedly satirical view of everything. The writing is very funny throughout. I noted the fun with names, but also the characters are depicted with a nasty joy. Certainly the pretensions of aristocracy are mocked, and indeed the foolishness of almost everyone. But it's mostly somewhat gentle under the surface (the story is nominally for children, after all). The drawings -- also by Thackeray as I note, are fun as well. This is a slight book, of course, but a fun one.

Quiz: Science Fiction Planets

Recently I wrote a quiz for a trivia site I am a member of. The subject was Science Fiction Planets. I prepared 15 questions -- only the first 12 were used, but I'll add the other three at the end. If anyone wants to email me their guesses at the answers (no cheating please!) I'll try to compile a list of who got the most right. (I expect a fair amount of 15s, actually!), and I'll publish the answers in a day or two. (email: rrhorton@prodigy.net)

Thanks to Steven Silver, by the way, who helped with some of the questions.

1.  This image is based on a Star Wars prequel film, and portrays the capital city of the Empire, which is an "ecumenopolis," or planet-spanning city. Many people think that an inspiration for this city is the capitol city/planet of the Empire in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Name either planet/city. Click here

2.  Pierre Boulle, author of Bridge on the River Kwai, also wrote a novel set on a planet of the star Betelgeuse, and it too spawned a successful movie (and eventually many more.) Name the first movie made from that book. (Note that the movie, unlike the novel, is revealed to be actually set on Earth in its famous final scene.)

3.  Planets of this three-star system are understandably a common site for science fiction stories. Examples include Robert Silverberg's first book; the planet Rakhat in Mary Doria Russell's novel The Sparrow; as well as the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar. This star system was also the original destination of the Robinson family before they became Lost in Space (in the '60s TV series.) Name this star system.

4.  This planet with a mysterious worldwide intelligence is featured in films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Stephen Soderbergh, based on a novel by a Polish science fiction writer. Name both the planet (which has a name recalling our sun) and the author (whose name might recall our moon, or at least our lunar exploration).

5.  N. K. Jemisin made history when she won the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years running, for each volume of a trilogy. Most of the action is set on a continent called the Stillness. Per the title of the trilogy, on which planet is this continent located?

6.  The late great Ursula Le Guin set much of her science fiction in a future sometimes called "Hainish". She won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, set on the notably cold planet Gethen. What is the English name for that planet (supposedly also the translation of Gethen into English?) (That English nickname is also used in the title of a short story set on the planet.)

7.  Perhaps the most famous planet located outside our Solar System in TV is Vulcan. In which episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, written by Theodore Sturgeon, did Spock's undergoing pon farr force the Enterprise to return to Vulcan.

8.  Samuel R. Delany gave one of his novels the subtitle "an ambiguous heterotopia". The novel's protagonist, Bron Helstrom, lives on a moon of the planet Neptune, though he was born on Mars and visits Earth during the novel. Name either the original title of the novel or Delany's preferred title.

9.  A long series of novels beginning with Dune,by Frank Herbert, centers around control of which planet(also sometimes called Dune), the source of the spice mélange, which among other things is used to help navigate starships. If you don't remember the novel, you may remember David Lynch's film, or the SyFy Channel miniseries. (And, reportedly, Denis Villeneuve is working on a pair of films based on Dune.)

10.  Cixin Liu (or Liu Cixin), was the first Chinese writer to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, not to mention gaining fans including Barack Obama. The novel in question concerns invaders from the planet Trisolaris, so-called because its system has three suns. What is the title of the novel, in its English translation, based on the difficulties caused by the complex orbit of Trisolaris due to those three suns (and also representing a system in Newtonian mechanics that is not amenable to a closed-form solution?)

11.  In recent years a great many extrasolar planets have been detected by various means, and science fiction writers are beginning to use those planets in their novels. Allen Steele has written a long series of novels set on a (as yet undetected!) moon of one of those extrasolar planets, 47 Ursae Majoris b. The planet is called Bear (for obvious reasons) – what is the trickier name of the moon which Steele's characters colonize?

12.  While more famous for the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis also wrote a trilogy about a man named Elwin Ransom, with books set primarily on Malacandra, Perelandra, and Thulcandra (the Silent Planet.) Give the usual English names for these planets (in the above order.) 

13. The planet Mesklin is noted for its unusual shape, which leads to a very strange gravity gradient. The novels set there were written by a high school science teacher named Harry Stubbs, who used this name as a pseudonym.

14. On which planet is the title structure of Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel, Icehenge, found? (Well, at least it was a planet when the book was published!)

15. Leigh Brackett wrote a number of stories and novels about this recurring character. Though he is most associated with Mars, his adventures also took him to Venus, and out of the Solar System to the planet Skaith, and he was actually born on Mercury. His last name might suggest the nature of the landscapes of, at least, Mars and Mercury. Who was this character?

Birthday Review: Four Zelazny Capsules

Roger Zelazny would have been 82 today, but, dammit, he died way too young in 1995. I loved his short fiction but I haven't written a lot about it, so instead I've taken four rather short bits, capsules, really, that I did of four of his novels, for my SFF Net newsgroup a while ago, and in once case for  Black Gate retro-review of an issue of Galaxy.

I also reviewed Lord of Light for SF Site some time ago: Lord of Light review.

This Immortal

(cover by Gray Morrow)

Having just reread Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, I decided to go ahead and reread his other award-winning novel, This Immortal.  The serial version of This Immortal, "... and Call Me Conrad", won the 1966 novel Hugo, in a tie with Dune.  I have the Ace first edition paperback of This Immortal. The book version, at about 58,000 words, is perhaps 8,000 words longer than the serial, but I've compared the two, and the changes are a mix of some excisions, and some expansions, and some phrasing changes. Incidentally, the copy on my Ace edition states that the book version, due to its changes, was still eligible for a Hugo, and they suggest it might win two Hugos in a row. (Of course, it didn't, and wasn't even nominated, but, interestingly, the actual winner, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, had been nominated the previous year on the basis of its (technically not yet finished) serialization.)

This Immortal is a good read, with plenty of Zelaznyesque brio. But it's not as good as Lord of Light (many, I should note, disagree,) and actually, it seems a bit, well, slight.  The ending is a distinct anti-climax.  It's still a book you ought to read, mind you, but it's just real good, not great. The storyline concerns Conrad Nomikos, one of about 4 million people still living on Earth centuries in the future, after a Nuclear war, and after the bulk of the population has gone to the stars to work for the advanced, civilized, Vegans.  Conrad and some of his friends had years before been involved in the "Returnist" movement, urging people to return to Earth, and resisting the Vegans' moves to buy up the best Earth real estate.  Nowadays, the situation is a stalemate, with Earth's exile population preferring not to return, but with the Vegans' not buying any more of Earth either.  But Cort Mishtigo, a high status Vegan, has come to Earth to tour some of the ancient sites.  Conrad, who seems to have some mysterious past identities that go back a long way, is recruited to guide Mishtigo, and to protect him from assassins.  He is in danger because the more radical Returnists believe that his "tour" is a pretext for evaluating more real estate, in advance of a renewed Vegan buying campaign.  Conrad is unsure of Cort's motives, and anyway unhappy with the idea of murder. The novel consists, then, of Cort's tour, and a number of well-done battles between Conrad and a variety of monsters and mutants.  The fight scenes, and the descriptions of the mutants (based on Greek mythology), are really good.  It's only the eventual revelation of the Vegan motives that's a bit pat and anti-climatic.

Damnation Alley

(This review is actually of the original 31,000 word novells, which appeared in the October 1967 Galaxy.)

(Cover by Jack Gaughan)

“Damnation Alley” is of course a pretty famous story, especially so after it became a novel (in 1969) and a film (in 1977). The film is by all accounts only loosely based on the novel, and Zelazny is said to have disliked it. I had, I confess, never read the novel or novella, nor seen the film. Barry Malzberg is quoted in Wikipedia as calling the novel “a mechanical, simply transposed action-adventure story written, in my view, at the bottom of the man’s talent” – a judgement with which I am inclined to agree. It’s set in a rather ’50s-ish postapocalyptic world. Hell Tanner is a criminal living in the nation of California. He is offered a pardon in exchange for taking some medicine across the former US to Boston.

This passage is called “Damnation Alley,” and it is full of bandits, radioactive craters, storms, giant gila monsters, bats, snakes, and other menaces. Tanner starts out in a convoy of three tank-like vehicles, and over time the other drivers are killed, including Tanner’s unwilling partner. He picks up a girl (from a motorcycle gang), and seems to slowly gain something of a conscience. None of this is surprising, and much is silly, especially the square-cube law violating monsters. That said, Zelazny could write action well, and there are bits that work nicely, even some lyrical bits. It is what it is – reasonably well done but not particularly original action-adventure. The problem is, I expect a lot more from Zelazny.

Creatures of Light and Darkness

(Cover by James Starrett)

One of the Roger Zelazny novels I had never read was Creatures of Light and Darkness, from 1969.  I've had a copy for a while, and I finally got around to it.  It's a rather strange story, based, as far as I can tell, on Egyptian mythology, though set, again, as far as I can tell, in the far future in space.  A man is awakened by Anubis, and sent on a mission to find and kill the Prince Who Was a Thousand, in order to restore Anubis and Osiris to power over the Midworlds.  The story rather obliquely follows this man, called Wakim, and Thoth, who has been given the same mission by Osiris, and the magicians Vramin and Madrak, and various other Eqyptian gods.  A battle rages across many worlds, and backward and forward in time. The gods betray each other, and the reader's loyalties to the characters are forced to switch quite a bit.

I have to admit, it didn't work for me at all.  I don't know enough Egyptian mythology to follow any of the stories, if they are actually based on such stories.  Much seemed deliberately obscure.  The SFnal bits are profoundly unconvincing, and the characters are given powers which seem to be very arbitrary, and just what is needed at any given time.  Of course it is well written, in Zelazny's trademark mode -- elevating contemporary language, complete with slang, to an epic/poetic level -- that's all well enough done, and there are some nice ideas, but overall it was a mess, and rather boring. Zelazny was certainly one of the greats, but for me, at any rate, this is a disappointment, nothing to compare with Lord of Light or This Immortal or the best short stories.

Doorways in the Sand

(Cover by Ron Walotsky)

My rereading project isn't really meant to focus exclusively on Roger Zelazny, or even primarily, but Doorways in the Sand was a favorite of mine since I read it in the Analog serialization in 1976.  On this reread it was pretty much as good as I remembered.  Fred Cassidy is a permanent student, partly because he likes learning, partly because he continues to draw from his rich Uncle's trust fund as long as he is in college.  Meantime various advisors scheme to get him to graduate, while Fred, an acrophiliac, climbs all over the roofs of the college town.  But all of a sudden he has a lot more to worry about.  Various beings seem convinced he knows the whereabouts of the alien "starstone", a cultural artifact given to Earth in exchange for the British Crown Jewels and the Mona Lisa, and the maintenance of which in good condition is essential to Earth's nascent status in Galactic civilization. These folks memorably include some alien cops who like to dress up as marsupials. Follows a lot of action, all well done if sometimes a bit implausible, and a decent resolution involving a not absurd view of our place in the universe, etc. etc.  It's not a great novel, but it's really great fun.

Birthday Review: Stories of Alter S. Reiss

It's Alter S. Reiss's birthday today. He's only been publishing fiction since 2010, but I've known him much longer (online, that is) -- he was one of my favorite regular posters in the glory days of the usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written. We have met in person, at a few different conventions. I was very pleased to see him start publishing, and even more pleased to find his work so good. Here is a collection of my reviews of him from Locus.

Locus, January 2011

Another online magazine, Abyss and Apex, introduces Alter S. Reiss in its Fourth Quarter 2010 issue. Reiss’s first published story is a nice one: “Rumor of Wings”, about a mysterious woman trying to find a very important – to her – bracelet. It’s a milieu of shape changers, like gull people – and like the protagonist, whose true form we learn only at the end.

Locus, May 2011

Daily Science Fiction is a website that opened late last year. They publish a new story each weekday. Not surprisingly, many of these stories are very short, and the quality is uneven. But they do publish the occasional longer story (usually on Friday), and some nice stuff. Perhaps my favorite from the site to date is “Memory Bugs”, by Alter S. Reiss (2/8), about a man who uses a new technology to record memories of his times with his lover, and seems to lose the distinction between reveling in memory and creating new memories.

Locus, November 2012

Somewhat belatedly I got to the May issue of Australia's Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Two stories stood out for me. Alter S. Reiss, who has been consistently good with his first few published stories over the last little while, offers “Server Issues”, which is at its most basic level a story about an expert helping track down some stolen servers. A bit dry, eh – but the bite comes from a key background deal: crowd sourced bounties on people, such that someone who gets a lot of people a little bit angry might attract a big enough bonus for his murder to get in real trouble. The story neatly fills us in on the consequences and some of the details of such a system.

Locus, January 2013

In December, Strange Horizons features another good story from Alter S. Reiss, who has impressed me with both the quality and the variety of his stories this past year or two. “America Thief” is a gangster story, with characters including Bugsy Siegel and Arnold Rothstein. The narrator is a small-time hood who is also a magician, and the son of a rabbi. He is pressured by Rothstein to investigate a local boy who seems to be turning lead into gold – a job that ends up stressing his shaky morals, his belief in truth, his care for his girlfriend, and his concern for his community – a well-told and original story.

Locus, November 2015

The third novella, Sunset Mantle (Tor.com), is from a much less prominent writer, Alter S. Reiss. It comes from Tor's new series of novellas, available electronically and in paperback. Cete is a veteran soldier, unjustly dismissed from his previous service, wandering and looking for work in a place called Reach Antach, when he comes across a lovely mantle, and the intriguing blind woman, Marelle, who wove it. Against his better judgment he decides to stay and join the local army, at unattractive terms, for a chance to commission another piece from Marelle. He soon realizes the political situation is more tangled than he had realized, and is forced again to an unjust punishment, only to seek redemption in attempting to saving the Reach at impossible odds. It can't be denied that the story hits some only too familiar notes, but it does so effectively. It bears comparison, in a way, with the work of K. J. Parker – set in a non-magical fantastic world, dealing with war and politics in a medieval technology world – but with none of the cynicism. The pleasures are real, if quite different to those in Parker.

Locus, June 2016

In Beneath Ceaseless Skies I found a couple of nice if not quite brilliant stories from newish writers whom I’ve been following with interest. Alter S. Reiss’s “Sea of Dreams” (3/31) follows a deposed Emperor, Ierois, who has been exiled to an island in the Sea of Dreams. He is joined, decades later, by a boy, exiled for similar political reasons (the Empire appears to have Game of Thrones-style politics). But the boy has ambitions of returning – and he is convinced that what he finds washing up from the sea will aid him, not understanding, as Ierois has learned, that what the Sea offers are only dreams, illusions. A nice conceit – and Reiss moves the story in a slightly unexpected direction.

Birthday Review: The Ghost Brigades and The Lost Colony, by John Scalzi

Today is John Scalzi's birthday -- he reaches his half century. He doesn't write a ton of short fiction, so I've not reviewed him all that much in Locus. But I did write about the second and third volumes of his Old Man's War trilogy at my blog back when they appeared, so I figured I'd resurrect those reviews now, in his honor.

I also reviewed The Collapsing Empire here, last year as part of my series of Hugo nominee reviews.

The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi

a review by Rich Horton

John Scalzi won last year's Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and his first novel with a major publisher, Old Man's War, was on the Hugo ballot. That novel told of human colonies in a hostile galaxy, whose army consists of old people who have agreed to serve in the military in exchange for a new body. The backstory of that novel hinted at a complex political situation involving the many alien races the humans share the galaxy with. His 2006 novel, The Ghost Brigades, addresses that situation a bit more.

The title refers to the Special Forces branch of the Colonial Defense Forces. These are particularly enhanced soldiers, cloned from soldiers who didn't survive the period between agreeing to serve in the CDF and getting transferred to their new body. They have special abilities, most particularly a quasi-telepathic link with other members of their unit. But they are for the most part secret. In Old Man's War we met one Ghost Brigade soldier, Jane Sagan. (These soldiers are given names derived from famous scientists.)

In this novel a plot is uncovered: three alien races, the Rraey, the Obin, and the Enesha, have agreed to unite against humanity. And one human, Charles Boutin, a brilliant scientist, has turned traitor after the death of his daughter. Boutin's expertise is consciousness transfer. The CDF have a copy of his consciousness, and they transfer it into a clone of his body, hoping to find out what made Boutin go bad. But the transfer doesn't take (at first), and the clone, called Jared Dirac, becomes a regular Special Forces member.

He joins Jane Sagan's unit, and eventually participates in key actions, such as a mission against the Eneshans, in which his unit commits atrocities in order to convince the Eneshans to abandon their alliance against humans. This stress begins to recall his Boutin memories, and he is set on a path leading inevitably to the real Charles Boutin, and to some wrenching revelations about galactic politics, and about human interactions with aliens.

It is once again a lot of fun. There are weaknesses -- some excessive implausibilities in the plot most particularly. And I am not entirely convinced by the characterization of the Special Forces members (though Scalzi does try ...). But it's pretty good overall, and I did like the increased moral complexity of this future as described here. Not a great novel, but a nice fun novel with a bit of a deeper side. There are some nice ideas, some good thinking about such things as the importance of consciousness, and plenty of sharp and funny writing.

The Last Colony, by John Scalzi

a review by Rich Horton

The Last Colony is a nominee for the Hugo this year. It's John Scalzi's third book in his Old Man's War series -- and he intends it to close the series, and indeed it does finish the narrative arc well, answering the questions raised in the earlier books and coming to an satisfying and surprising conclusion. [I should note that he eventually added three more novels in this milieu.] And it's pretty enjoyable, though I wouldn't say it's worthy of the Hugo.

As the story opens, John Perry and Jane Sagan, now married and returned to normal human bodies, are living on a quiet colonial world, as local ombudsman and police chief respectively. But they get an offer from the Colonial Defense Forces and the Colonial Union -- to lead a new colony, an experimental colony. Unlike previous colonies, with colonists recruited entirely from Earth's poorer countries, this one will be composed of people from 10 well established human colony planets. This seems likely to be a political mess, dealing with 10 different groups with different goals. Not to mention the potential dangers on the planet (which turn out to include an unexpected intelligent species). But ... that's hardly even the least of Perry and Sagan's problems.

Revealing any of the twists -- and there are several -- might be unfair, so I won't. But Scalzi is concerned with helping to show us the real place of humanity in this very hostile universe, the real motivations of the Colonial Union (humanity's space based government), and a potential (however slim) for something like peace between the various alien species. Given the starting point, the ending point of the book is hard to see -- and to be honest I think the plot developments, while interesting and clever, are a bit farfetched. (Suffice it to say that Scalzi manages to make the extermination of humanity the most likely future.)

Anyway, it's a fun book, and a pretty thoughtful one, though there's a bit of deck stacking going on here and there. It's certainly not a humanity uber alles book. I thought the characterization a bit thin -- most everyone talks just about the same. And though Jane is a major character and is present almost throughout the book, somehow she almost doesn't seem to be there, and her relationship with John, that I thought worked well in the other books, comes off as almost an afterthought. Bottom line: good, not great, but quite well done in the sense of fairly resolving the series.

Birthday Review: Stories of Geoff Ryman

Today is Geoff Ryman's 68th birthday. He's a consistently provocative and original writer, with tremendous range. Here's a selection of my reviews of his work, for Locus and one taken from my year end Recommended Reading post, from before I was reviewing for the magazine.

2001 Recommended Reading

Three novelettes from F&SF really impressed me.  Geoff Ryman, in "Have Not Have" (April) shows us a woman in a remote Chinese village using her knowledge, her connections, and the villagers' lack of knowledge to forge a living for herself as a sort of "fashion expert". She is presented almost cynically, but we come to feel great sympathy for her. Then the idea of a universal net connection (via direct brain interface) is broached -- obviously this will completely change things for Mae in particular, and the rest of the village too. No answers are offered -- just the picture of one woman, a good if compromised woman, at the hub of a change she may not survive. This is a very fine, very quiet, effective story.

Locus, September 2003

Interzone for April leads with a strong story from Geoff Ryman, "Birth Days". The hero is a gay man born just prior to the development of a genetic screening test for homosexuality. As a result he is part of the last generation, it seems, in which gays will be a normal percentage of the population. He becomes a scientist, and one of his projects is a drug which will "cure" homosexuality even in adults. But this seems a betrayal, and he next works on something quite different -- a means by which men can bear children, without even a female ovum. Ryman takes the implication of this tech to the extreme (beyond where I could believe it, actually). But throughout it raises worthwhile questions -- even if one might disagree with the in-story answers. (For instance, it seems to imply that homosexuality is "justified" once it becomes possible for gays to bear children -- I shouldn't think that necessary!)

Locus, October 2006

The gem in the October-November F&SF is Geoff Ryman’s “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, set in very near future Cambodia. A young woman grows up isolated, and very rich: she is Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter, but she is obstinately naïve about her father’s legacy. She finally meets an interesting young man, who jumps to just the wrong conclusion about her mysterious past. She must come to terms with this man’s expectations, and with the expectations of the myriad tortured ghosts her father left behind. From an unexpected angle, the story manages to convincingly portray Cambodia, and to bring tears in its evocation of plight of Cambodia’s ghosts.

Locus, August 2008

Geoff Ryman and others stirred up a fair bit of controversy a couple of years ago with the so-called “Mundane Manifesto”, calling for a fairly rigorous sort of SF: eschewing implausible and perhaps tired tropes such as FTL and time travel, and insisting on fully imagined futures, not just the present writ large (or writ small with just a single change). Looked at that way – as a positive effort for a rededication to a certain SFnal discipline – it was a very promising effort. Looked at more negatively, as a rejection of SF that didn’t fit what the promulgators weren’t currently interested in (on grounds that seemed at times stridently moralistic), it was, as I said, controversial. That more carping tone seems to have been abandoned (was abandoned fairly early, I think), and what remains of the Mundane Manifesto is quite interesting, as shown in the June Interzone, a special issue guest-edited by Ryman, Julian Todd, and Trent Walters.

Perhaps the best story, not entirely surprisingly, is from Ryman himself. “Talk is Cheap” is set in a seemingly fairly near future, but a quite significantly changed one. The narrator is a Walker: he spends his days on his feet, gathering information about the environment. People seem to have always-on links to a future net, mediated by something they call a Turing. The narrator makes contact with someone else, named Jinny, a Doctor, and he is very interested in her, for all the old reasons. A couple of days pass, as we are introduced to other aspects of this future social system – such as the categorization of people by their social needs: the narrator, for example, is a Dog. And too we see just the beginnings a potential relationship. It’s dense throughout, always new – just what Ryman calls for in his introduction.

Locus, February 2009

The new Tor.com site is rounding very nicely into form. Two recent outstanding stories are “A Water Matter” by Jay Lake and “The Film-makers of Mars” by Geoff Ryman. ... Ryman’s story is clever fun, built around the discovery of very early, shockingly realistic, films of Burroughs’s Mars books, as a film buff tries to understand how such things could be – before encountering the even stranger truth.

Locus, October 2009

This is F&SF’s big double issue (October-November), and there’s a lot here. ... Geoff Ryman, in “Blocked”, mixes several odd ingredients intriguingly: a Cambodian casino manager trying to become a man while alien invaders drive humanity to some sort of virtual existence.

Locus, October 2011

The September-October F&SF has a very strong story from Geoff Ryman, “What We Found”. It’s set in Nigeria in the near future, and tells of a young man growing up with a more brilliant (it seems) brother and an abusive father and a beaten-down mother. In parallel threads we learn that he has become a noted biologist. His younger life goes from bad to worse, as his father loses his government job and his brother loses his mind – but his adult self is discovering links between genetics and nurture that he finds terrifying. This is a story with a real if modest scientific background that motivates a moving examination of character (in that way a bit like an earlier 2011 F&SF story, Carter Scholz’s “Signs of Life”).

Locus, November 2013

Two other stories excited me in the September-October F&SF. Geoff Ryman's “Rosary and Goldenstar” is a curious alternate look at a young Shakespeare and two of his best known minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. It's subtle, and beautifully written – able to stand without shame with the greatest of all Rosencrantz and Guildenstern retellings, Tom Stoppard's tour-de-force Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Here, Shakespeare is staying with Thomas Digges, who welcomes visitors from Denmark, and along with John Dee they discuss Tycho Brahe, Copernican astronomy, heresy, politics, even sexuality (in a hidden way) – a striking piece.

Locus, March 2016

Stories for Chip is a festschrift celebrating 2015 SFWA Grand Master Samuel R. Delany, one of the greatest SF writers of all time. It’s a suitably diverse mix of SF and fantasy, non-fiction and fiction, women and men, queer and straight, numerous nationalities, and writers from within and without the field. My favorite story is “Capitalism in the 22nd Century; or, A.I.r”, by Geoff Ryman, which tells of two sisters from Brazil, and a plan to escape on a starship … but more centrally, it’s about the two sisters’ relationship, and about their interactions with the A. I.s that, perhaps, rule this future world. Tremendously intelligent SF.

Locus, January 2019

Geoff Ryman's "This Constant Narrowing" (F&SF, October-November) is headed by a content warning, and the story does manage to be legitimately challenging, legitimately discomfiting. The narrator is an Hispanic man from Southern California, and the story opens with him being shot, then "rescued" by another man, and we realize that this is a world, reminiscent of Philip Wylie's The Disappearance, in which all the women are gone, and some men shoot others to claim them for sexual services. We learn more about his life, before the women disappeared, and his earlier friendship with a black cop. But things keep "narrowing" -- the black men gone, and Asians, and so on... There's a message here, or perhaps there's just a plea to think about the way we seem to be treating "others" -- from all sides. Ryman is consistently able to provoke thought about subjects we sometimes avoid.

Birthday Review: Stories of Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe was born May 7, 1931, just two months after my father. He would have been 88 today, but he died April 14. Back then I composed this selection of my reviews of some of his later work, mostly for Locus, but I contented myself with posting a eulogy then, and I saved that for today, his birthday.

Locus, July 2002

Notable recent offerings at The Infinite Matrix include a new short story by Gene Wolfe, "Under Hill".  This is a clever retelling of the tale of the Princess on the Hill of Glass, with an odd ending twist.  It's minor Wolfe, but definitely to be read.

Locus, March 2003

February was a strong month for Sci Ficton. Gene Wolfe's "Castaway" is one of his best recent stories, a moving tale of a man rescued from a devastated planet, and the woman he had to leave behind. I hope it doesn't give away too much to say it reminded me of James Tiptree's great story "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain".

Locus, May 2003

Gene Wolfe's "Graylord Man's Last Words" (Asimov's, May) reminded me a bit of his recent SCI FICTION story, "Castaway", in treating a fairly familiar situation at a slant. In this case an old being is telling a story from his youth -- soon we gather that he is a robot of some sort, and the story involves one of the last humans. It's fairly simple for Wolfe, but still quite effective.

Locus, December 2003

"Of Soil and Climate" (Realms of Fantasy, December) is a new Gene Wolfe story, which is recommendation enough. A psychiatrist in prison finds himself suddenly in a fantasy land, where he encounters alluring women and mortal danger, Night People, Tree People, and Sun People, and a Princess. I found it intriguing but incomplete: could it be a novel excerpt?

Locus, April 2004

Gene Wolfe is suddenly a Realms of Fantasy regular, which is good news: for one thing because it means he's writing lots of short stories. "Calamity Warps" (April) is a simple and quite short story about a man and his dog and his shadow, which implies much at the end. Like his last solo piece for Realms, "Of Soul and Climate", it seems thematically related to his new novel (The Knight) in suggesting a crossover from our world to a fantasy world.

The First Heroes is a strong collection of stories (mostly fantasy) on the subject of the Bronze Age. The book opens very well with Gene Wolfe's "The Lost Pilgrim". His hero is a time-traveler, and soon we gather that he had meant to join the Mayflower, but instead ended up thousands of years previously, on the Argo, with his memory damaged in the process. At first the story is a rather humorously skewed view of some of Jason's journey -- and quite effective as such -- but the ending is darker and more moving than the opening seems to promise.

Locus, July 2004

Peter Crowther of PS Publishing has started a magazine, Postscripts. The first issue features a whopping 13 short stories and shortish novelettes by an impressive array of authors – veterans, up-and-comers, and several writers best known outside the genre. Gene Wolfe is impressive as might be expected, with "Prize Crew", an SF horror story about an enemy warship found mysteriously abandoned, which the title crew takes back to Earth – unfortunately.

Locus, October 2004

Gene Wolfe's "The Little Stranger" (F&SF, November) is another of his simple yet thoroughly weird stories – a series of letters from an old woman to her dead cousin, telling of gypsies, witches, a gingerbread house – all quite naively told, disquieting, striking.

Locus, January 2005

Aeon is a promising new 'zine distributed in electronic form (on CD-ROM, or in versions for handheld computers). The first issue has an impressive lineup, including a long novel excerpt from Walter Jon Williams. The standout story is a reprint from Gene Wolfe – but a reprint from an obscure source. "Talk of Mandrakes" was originally scheduled for a 1987 issue of the briefly revived Worlds of If, which never appeared. It was unpublished until earlier in 2004, in a limited distribution chapbook. So this appearance is welcome. The story is a clever SF horror piece about what an expedition to an alien planet has brought back with them.

Locus, August 2005

From Postscripts I also really liked a flakily original story from Gene Wolfe, "Comber", about cities floating on huge waves, and an impending disaster when a city begins to head down a wavecrest.

Locus, February 2006

PS Publishing offers a Gene Wolfe chapbook free to Postscripts subscribers. Of course Postscripts is worth subscribing to regardless, but this is certainly a fine bonus. It’s a seasonal story, “Christmas Inn”, about a struggling rural Bed and Breakfast called the Christmas Inn. One bitter winter, as they fear foreclosure, they are visited by four (or five?) strange people. The story is told from multiple POV’s: first person narratives by the two owners and their teenaged son, as well as some third person sections. The visitors, mostly via sex, interact strongly with the residents, leading finally to a concluding séance. Here their nature is revealed – at least to one character, and perhaps to alert readers but not as of yet to this reader! But despite not quite getting the story, I enjoyed it and was moved by it. All things I can say about a lot of Wolfe!

Locus, May 2006

Online SF took a harsh blow with the loss of Sci Fiction at the end of 2005. One potential bright spot we’ve been looking forward to is a new venture from Baen Books, entitled Baen’s Universe, edited by Eric Flint. The first issue appears in June, and it’s rather promising. It’s stuffed: about 140,000 words of new short fiction, a couple of reprints, several serials and some articles. The fiction comes from a wide variety of writers: Baen stalwarts like Dave Freer and David Drake, several new writers, and some writers you wouldn’t think of in connection with Baen Books, like Charles Stross and Gene Wolfe.

Indeed Stross and Wolfe provide two of the better stories. Wolfe’s “Build-a-Bear” is set on a cruise ship. A lonely woman chances across a build-a-bear workshop, and ends up with a rather more impressive bear than she had expected.

Locus, November 2006

In October I thought two stories stood out – two that are perhaps not quite what a reader of Baen Books would expect. Gene Wolfe’s “The Old Woman in the Young Woman” is set after a holocaust, with a traveler meeting up with a young woman and her – mother? The women, of course, have a secret – not a terribly surprising one, but the story is still involving.

Capsule Review of Soldier of Sidon for Fantasy Magazine (2006)

Many years ago Gene Wolfe published two novels (Soldier in the Mist and Soldier of Arete) about Latro, a soldier in Ancient Greece (though Latro is Roman) who loses his memory each night as he sleeps. In addition, Latro can see gods, even as those around him see nothing. These are wonderful novels, but clearly Latro’s story was incomplete, and readers clamored for more. At last we have another: Soldier of Sidon. In this novel, he travels to Egypt, in hopes of finding someone who can cure him of his amnesia. Latro (or Lucius/Lewqys, as he is also called) becomes the leader of a group of soldiers on a boat heading south on the Nile, in service of the foreign King occupying Egypt. The book tells of many wonders and adventures encountered on this trip: his river wife (a prostitute hired for the journey) who may not be quite human, another woman who seems to be made of wax, numerous gods and their priests, in various forms: human, snake, panther, etc., a trip to the underworld, imprisonment in a mine, and so on. There is much intriguing detail about life in Ancient Egypt, much quite realistic and much delightfully fantastical. The characters are excellently portrayed, ever through the odd window of Latro’s intermittent consciousness. Wolfe has always been fascinated by shapeshifters, by questions of identity, by memory and its impact on character – and all these elements pervade this novel. Latro’s story is not finished – there is at least one more novel to follow, I believe [If, indeed, another was planned, it never eventuated] – and that is the only disappointment here. Taken as it is, this is both involving historical fiction and mesmerizing fantasy.


Locus, March 2007

Gene Wolfe published a two story chapbook, Strange Birds, last year. This features two good stories, the better being a rather different kind of circus story, “On a Vacant Face a Bruise”, in which a boy joins a circus – but rather a different sort of circus, with such wonders as automaton dancers and talking birds – the true nature of this circus being shown only at the end.

Locus, April 2007

The big news this month in SF magazines is the F&SF Special Gene Wolfe issue. This includes essays on Wolfe by Neil Gaiman, Michael Swanwick, and Michael Andre-Driussi, as well as a very long new novella from Wolfe, “Memorare”. This is the story of March Wildspring, a documentary producer making a feature on spec. It seems that it has become common for small asteroids to be used as memorials to the dead. Sometimes very dangerous memorials. March recruits the beautiful Kit Carlson to help him, and she brings along a friend who has just left her abusive husband. This woman, Robin Reed, turns out to be March’s ex-wife. March is now in love with Kit – and perhaps she returns his love. As they plan to explore one more asteroid, reputed to be the most dangerous of all, Robin’s new husband turns up, trying to get her back. Clearly this story is about more than the memorials to the dead – it is about marriage, and about sin, and about redemption – which may be available for some inside the mysterious asteroid/memorial March calls Number Nineteen.

Locus, April 2010

Full Moon City is an urban fantasy anthology about werewolves, which on the face of it is a pretty tired theme, these days. But it has a heck of a list of contributors, and it rises well above the average urban fantasy anthology. It’s true that a high proportion of the stories are fairly fluffy – light comic treatments of the subject, but still entertaining. And two true veterans stand out. Gene Wolfe’s “Innocent” is one of many comic stories in the book, nastily comic in this case, as a werewolf in prison tells his story to a priest … a story that involves accusations of child molesting, of which he protests innocence. Of course it becomes clear that there is innocence and innocence!

Locus, July 2010

The best of Jonathan Strahan’s recent anthologies is Swords and Dark Magic, co-edited with Lou Anders, which should be treated at more length. It’s a collection devoted to the “New Swords and Sorcery”, which is to say, more or less, the old Swords and Sorcery with extra cynicism. Granting of course that cynicism was hardly ever absent from Sword and Sorcery fiction, this book does seem more of our time. And it’s solid from beginning to end. There is plenty of nice stuff here, but I’ll content myself mostly with mentioning Gene Wolfe, whose “Bloodsport” is quite powerful, about people recruited to enact a chesslike game, much in the fashion of medieval tilts. The main character is a powerful knight, who falls in love with a pawn on the other side – but then their country is invaded, and the game players become a sort of resistance. And, of course, pawns can become queens … but Wolfe has a different question to answer.

Locus, February 2014

Shadows of the New Sun is a tribute anthology for Grand Master Gene Wolfe. Happily, it features two good new stories by Wolfe himself – “Frostfree” tells of a somewhat unpleasant man who receives an amazing new refrigerator, that not only provides food and washes dishes, but helps – we hope – with his love life as well. “The Sea of Memory” is the stranger, and stronger, piece, about a woman waking – she thinks – on an isolated island with a few other people, and slowly learning – remembering? – her true situation.