Birthday Review: Stories of John Langan

Today is John Langan's 50th birthday. I don't review him enough, I think, probably because he's a horror writer -- but he's probably my favorite contemporary horror writer. (The other candidate has a very similar name: Margo Lanagan!) Here are the few reviews I could find from my Locus columns.

Locus, September 2002

John Langan attracted some notice with last year's dark fantasy "On Skua Island". He's back with another dark fantasy, "Mr. Gaunt" (F&SF, September). Henry Farange is going through his dead father's effects. There he finds a tape, on which his father tells him the long story of his father's older brother and his son and his mysterious servant, Mr. Gaunt. The story is involving and creepy.

Locus, August 2003

John Langan's "Tutorial" (F&SF, August) is a mordantly amusing tale of a young Creative Writing student who wants to do horror, but whose teachers don't approve. Indeed, aside from the Rickert and Murphy stories, the whole issue is generally humorous or whimsical, to pretty good effect.

Locus review of Wastelands (March 2008)

But the more recent stories are much more interesting. The book closes with a story by John Langan from just last year, a story that made quite a splash (though I found it more affected than affecting): “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers”, which tells, in urgently run-on sentences, of a small group of people fleeing a feral “Pack” in a post-apocalyptical city.

Locus, April 2009

Ellen Datlow’s new anthology, Poe, includes stories “inspired” by Edgar Allan Poe … sometimes riffing on stories or poems, other times simply borrowing Poe’s atmospheres and themes, once or twice even featuring Poe as a character. It’s a strong book throughout. A first rate piece is John Langan’s “Technicolor”, which presents a college professor working with his students to analyze Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. It’s a smart and sly story, as the professor mixes in speculation about Poe’s life and death with exegesis of the story, leading to a perhaps predictable but still quite well-sprung conclusion.

Locus, August 2012

“Renfrew's Curse”, by John Langan (Lightspeed, June), is a genuinely disquieting horror story. For my money, Langan and, in a quite different way, the similarly named Margo Lanagan, are the two contemporary masters of the sort of horror I find most effective, built around subtle and original ideas, and aiming often more at disquiet than disgust or terror, or, worst of all, gore.   A gay couple visit Scotland, walking a trail, perhaps trying to mend their relationship, damaged by an affair one might have had with a woman. The trail leads to something called Renfrew's Keep, and it turns out Renfrew was a wizard, and one of the two begins to tell stories about Renfrew. As the walk continues, strange things seem to happen to the trail, and to time … and eventually the stories lead to one, about Renfrew offering to each someone his art. But at a price. It's an absorbing piece throughout – the characters of the two men well drawn, their relationship involving, the stories about the wizard interesting – and at the inevitable end, it's delightfully disquieting.

Two Early Spanish Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler

I wrote this pair of essentially capsule reviews of two early short "novels" by Spanish writers a dozen or so years ago. I've exhumed it for today's "Friday's Forgotten Books" post.

Two Spanish Novellas from around 1600: Lazarillo de Tormes, attributed to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza; The Swindler, by Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas

a short review by Rich Horton

Kind of on impulse, I picked up a Penguin Classics edition of "Two Spanish Picaresque Novels", a 1969 translation by Michael Alpert. These are two early novels in the picaresque tradition: that is, novels about the experiences of roguish individuals, in this case in 16th Century (or early 17th C.) Spain.

I suspect in both cases my reaction to these works is affected by the translation -- particularly in that of The Swindler, which is highly regarded in the original Spanish for its wordplay and for Quevedo's ability to capture the different modes of speech of various classes in Spain. Both novels, of course, remain in the shadow of Don Quixote, which is almost an exact contemporary to The Swindler.

Lazarillo de Tormes was published anonymously in 1554, due to its anti-clerical and other controversial themes. The translator suggests that the author was most likely Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, though that attribution is not firmly established. The novella is considered a founding text of the long tradition of picaresque literature.The rather short (20,000 words) narrative concerns a young man born of a shiftless miller and a whore. His father died young and his mother took up with a black man, but their thieving ways led to trouble. Eventually young Lazaro is sold to another man to be a sort of apprentice thief, and learns various low tricks while at the same time tricking his master. Leaving him, he falls in with a priest, and then a down at heels aristocrat, then a seller of indulgences. In each case the object is satire of the social situation in Spain at the time, along with somewhat amusing accounts of dishonest folk bilking each other. Finally Lazaro stumbles into a goodish job and a marriage, marred only by his wife's loose morals. It's somewhat amusing on the whole, and worth reading over the length of 20,000 words, but the structure is very slack, the ending abrupt. (I should note that works in the picaresque genre are often structurally very loose.)  For me, much of the interest was historical rather than literary. I don't know what kind of literary reputation this maintains in Spain.

The Swindler (La Vida del Buscon in Spanish) is rather more substantial than Lazarillo de Tormes. For one thing, it's longer, at 45,000 words. The writer, Quevedo, is quite well known, and he had a rather adventurous life, especially politically, including a couple of stretches in prison. He published a number of books. This book was published in 1626 but apparently dates as early as 1604 (though it cannot have been finished before 1608, as one incident, a duel, is based in part on a duel that Quevedo himself fought), and was circulated in manuscript form before publication. It was the only novel by Quevedo.

The hero is the son of a thieving barber and a witch. He ends up going to school as the servant of a local aristocrat's son. The school turns out to be rather low rent, and the students all starve more or less. His career continues in travels about Spain, complete with the expected encounters with swindlers, swindles he performs himself, relationships with women, including an attempt to marry a rich girl foiled by mischance, satire of poets and actors, and an eventual love affair with a similarly disreputable woman leading, it appears, to a trip to the New World. As with Lazarillo de Tormes, the structure is slack and episodic, though tighter than in that novella. It is, again, worth reading, again for me a good part of the interest was historical.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts turns 54 today. He is one of the most consistly interesting and original SF writers, and also a remarkably perceptive (and also very snarky on occasion) critic. Here, then, is a selection of my Locus reviews of his short fiction.

Locus, May 2002

Sci Fiction for April and May features several fine stories, and two outstanding ones. One of the more interesting is Adam Roberts' "Swiftly", which is an alternate history of sorts, extrapolating from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to a mid-19th Century in which the various "Pacifican" species, such as Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, are being exploited by humans. The story tells of an English agitator for Pacifican rights, and the turn in the war between England and France that occurs when the French gain the alliance of the Brobdingnagians.

Locus, February 2003

Spectrum SF #9 is finally out, dated November 2002. Adam Roberts's novella "The Imperial Army" rather cynically examines a Galactic Empire at war with an implacable, incomprehensible, alien species. The cliché ideas, and some SF in-jokes, signal that the main purpose is to send up certain SFnal assumptions.

Locus, November 2003

PS Publishing continues to release interesting long novellas in book form. Two fine entries from 2003 are Adam Roberts's Jupiter Magnified and Robert Freeman Wexler's In Springdale Town. The SFnal event at the center of Roberts's story is Jupiter suddenly looming hugely in Earth's skies. The narrator is a Swedish poet, once regarded as very promising, but who has been blocked for some time. As you might expect, this is an overtly "literary" story, complete with a selection of Stina's poems at the end. I was interested but in the end not quite captivated.

Review of Constellations (Locus, March 2005)

Another fascinating story about an unexpectedly ordered sky is Adam Roberts's "The Order of Things", in which humanity is engaged on a great project to reshape the coastlines of the world into geometrically regular forms. And it seems that the sky itself is just as orderly: the stars arranged in a regular grid. The story concerns a stodgy coastal engineer and his radical brother, along the way hinting at the dark background of this society.

Locus, April 2006

Elemental is an anthology from Tor supporting a very worthy cause: Tsunami relief. Alas the stories as a whole aren’t terribly impressive. I did like Adam Roberts’s “And Tomorrow and”, a reimagining of Macbeth assuming you take the witch’s promise to him a bit more literally. There are quite a few more decent stories here, but none that thrilled me.

Review of Forbidden Planets (Locus, October 2006)

I thought the best story was the last, Adam Roberts’s “Me-Topia”. It starts a bit slowly, but justifies all by the end. A spaceship crewed by future neanderthals lands on an impossible planet outside of the Solar System’s ecliptic. They find breathable air, and 1 g of gravity, and eventually a curiously familiar geography. And then a representative of long-gone homo sapiens, who claims to own this odd planet and who doesn’t want guests. Roberts’ gives all this weirdness an effective SFnal explanation, and brings his story to a gripping conclusion.

Locus, May 2008

Celebration is published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, and it is an excellent anthology. Two stories in particular stand out. ... Adam Roberts is extremely fond of riffing on old SF. For example his recent novels Splinter and Swiftly are respectively based on Jules Verne’s To the Sun/Off on a Comet and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. “The Man of the Strong Arm” is another example. Set in a male-dominated, oppressed future, it tells of a man who resurrects old texts – including science fiction, such as a tale by Edgar Burroughs of Rice, about a man willing himself to a red star. Or a tale about “Armstrong”, who rides the gods Saturn and Apollo to the Moon. The story turns on his rather humorous interpretations of the old texts (always attempting to make them support the leader’s ego), and then on an intervention by a free group of women.

Locus, February 2009

Adam Roberts’s “A Prison Sentence of One Thousand Years” is a quietly powerful story from the Winter Postscripts. A man just released from such a punishment tells his story, in so telling slowly revealing his disconnection from his society, and the reason for his sentence.

Locus, March 2010

“Anhedonia”, by Adam Roberts (The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF), is excellent. Aliens have come to us offering technological wonders including star travel. A group of humans on Mars is trying to learn the aliens’ secrets, and is finding the process frustrating. In particular, they have been altered so as not to feel emotion. Sense of wonder – a key root of the desire to explore – is after emotional at base – can we only travel to the stars by losing the desire to travel? Roberts goes beyond just asking that question – he comes to a legitimately mindblowing explanation.

Locus, August 2014

One of the non space-oriented stories in Reach for Infinity is “Trademark Bugs: A Legal History”, by Adam Roberts, which like Castro's “The New Provisions” is a satire on corporate rapacity, and which also perhaps overplays its hand. And which also is ghoulishly entertaining. Here pharmaceutical companies find themselves too successful for their own good: they've managed to pretty much cure everything, so there's no more need for new drugs. Their solution is to engineer new diseases, which then will require new pharmaceutical treatments. The story follows the legal challenges to aspects of this situation, and how ultimately the entire social order is changed as a result.

Locus, December 2014

Adam Roberts is at his very best in “Thing and Sick” (Solaris Rising3). This is set in the Antarctic in the 1980s. The narrator is a rather normal young scientist or technician, spending his time reading SF, drinking beer, playing the contemporary movies they have on VHS, and looking forward the the odd letter from his girlfriend. His companion is a bit odder – his only reading is philosophy (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason), he doesn't get letters, and he's convinced their job (to set up a radio telescope as part of the SETI project) is a waste – the answer to the Fermi Paradox can be found in Kant. And part of the answer is that the aliens are all around us, and we just can't perceive them. And – perhaps – they are not friendly. The result is scary, and in a way funny, and ambiguous and thought-provoking. SF about philosophy!

Locus, October 2016

The best piece in Crises and Conflicts is Adam Roberts’ “Between Nine and Eleven”, about the war between Human Space and the alien Trefoil. The humans are winning, but then the Trefoil come up with a terrifying weapon based on a rather Eganesque concept: changing the underlying mathematics of space. This story tells of the first human ship to encounter the Trefoil weapon, and their fortunate escape. It’s slyly told, perhaps not entirely serious but still managing to be scary as well as clever.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of James Van Pelt

Today was a day featuring two birthdays of very fine SF writers, who have done excellent short fiction, both of whom I consider friends. I've already discussed Daryl Gregory, so here's a selection fo my reviews of the work of James Van Pelt.

Locus, August 2002

Talebones for Spring 2002 has two very solid SF stories, both about crime and punishment.  William Barton's "Right to Life" is a satirical look at a man facing the executioner in a crowded future in which the state happily takes any excuse to exercise the death penalty.  James Van Pelt's "Its Hour Come Round" is a strong look at a vile criminal in the process of rehabilitation, this accomplished using "empathy treatments" and various drugs. 

Van Pelt also contributes the strongest story in a somewhat disappointing September Analog: "Far From the Emerald Isle" tells of a curious discovery on board an STL starship: cute, but minor.

Locus, September 2003

James Van Pelt's "The Long Way Home" (Asimov's, September) is an affecting story about a desperate attempt to launch a starship as a war destroys civilization -- and the aftermath.

Locus, December 2004

In the December Asimov's, James Van Pelt's "Echoing" intertwines three stories: a truck driver trying to get home in a Christmas snowstorm, a teenaged girl contemplating suicide during her parents' Christmas party, and a starship captain lost in the tangles of [M]-space. The stories are involving enough, but I thought the forced correspondences a bit strained.

Locus, May 2005

James Van Pelt's "The Inn at Mount Either" is the prize story this month, however. The title inn has a unique property – it is built on a sort of nexus between alternate worlds, and one can walk to different versions of the hotel. But Daniel has a problem – he can't find his wife. Then he compounds the problem by going to look for her ... It's not precisely a new idea, but Van Pelt puts a nice spin on it.

Review of The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories (Locus, July 2005)

The Last of the O-Forms & Other Stories, by James Van Pelt (Fairwood Press, 0-9746573-5-2, $17.99, 216pp, tp) August 2005.

Some writers are short story writers, some are novelists. And the plain fact is that it is novelists who gain more attention. If anything the situation is worse today than some decades ago, when writers like Robert Sheckley and Harlan Ellison could establish reputations mostly on the basis of short fiction: aided by mass market short story collections. Nowadays short story collections are mostly relegated to the small press. (Perhaps in compensation, it seems in some ways easier to get a short story collection into print – if harder to get it seen by a wide audience.) So it behooves us to take a look at what is coming from the smaller publishers.

One of the SF field's best new short fiction writers is James Van Pelt. His stories appear regularly in Analog, Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere – strong work in the tradition of what one might call "consolidators". These are writers like Robert Silverberg and Robert Reed (to name very prominent examples from different generations) who don't make names with splashy ideas or as leaders of "movements", but who write well-crafted stories based on careful insight into established SFnal ideas. Noticeable in Van Pelt's stories is the focus on the feelings of ordinary people in situations that are mostly ordinary to them – if strange to us.

Van Pelt's first collection, Strangers and Beggars, appeared two years ago from Fairwood Press (the small press responsible for the fine magazine Talebones). The Last of the O-Forms & Other Stories is his second, and a stronger book. [I should add that Van Pelt does have a couple of novels to his credit as well, by now.]

The title story is one of his best known pieces, a Nebula nominee, about a future in which nothing seems to breed true – neither animals nor humans. A man travels with a "circus" including a two-year-old advertised as "The Last of the O[riginal]-Forms". She isn't, of course, and the reactions to her are heartbreaking. Another strong story closes the book, "A Flock of Birds", a striking story about human extinction, beautifully contrasted with other extinction events.

Other intriguing stories include "Its Hour Come Round" , a look at a vile criminal being rehabilitated by "empathy treatments" and various drugs. "The Long Way Home" is an affecting story about a desperate attempt to launch a starship as a war destroys civilization -- and the aftermath. "The Pair-a-Duce Comet Casino All-Sol Poker Championships" rather belies its light-seeming title: telling of a rich man's cloned copy, a young man working for him, and a space disaster. "A Wow Finish" is a time travel story and love story, set at the opening night of Casablanca – sweet and affecting.

Regular SF readers may have missed two stories that come from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine – both are fantasy, though with sufficient mystery elements to appeal to that audience. "The Sound of One Foot Dancing" is ghost story featuring Fred Astaire and an aspiring young dancer, in the shadow of World War II. "Once They Were Monarchs" begins as a straightforward story of a lifeguard concerned about a creepy boy who may be abusing younger girls, but slowly reveals a surprising and effective secret about its protagonist and its villain.

The book is enjoyable throughout – Van Pelt is a strong writer who continues to improve. I'm still looking for the story that really stuns me – he is a writer I will always read with interest, and a writer who doesn't disappoint, but I'm still looking to be overwhelmed.

Locus, October 2005

Talebones for Summer is another decent issue. Perhaps James Van Pelt’s “One Day, in the Middle of the Night” is best, a clever recasting of a cute poem into a dark tale of sibling rivalry aboard a starship.

Locus, September 2006

Also moving but just slightly forced in the October-November Asimov's is James Van Pelt’s “The Small Astral Object Genius”, which has a pretty cool idea at its center. Dustin is a teenager who plays with a sort of fad toy that might have real scientific value. It’s a small sphere, called a “Peek-a-Boo”, which can be sent thousands of light years away, take a picture, and return. Most of the pictures will be of empty space, but every so often one can capture an image of an interesting object: a nebula or a star or even a planet. Dustin is a particularly interested in small objects like planets, and he obsessively sends his Peek-a-Boo in search of pictures. Partly, however, this is to escape the discord caused by his parents’ failing marriage. Then he makes a remarkable discovery. All this is interesting enough, but I thought the ending unconvincing, a bit manipulative.

Locus, June 2008

James Van Pelt’s “Rock House” (Talebones, Spring) is modeled on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”, and it is excellent work. The narrator visits his long lost friend and the friend’s sister, who live together, rather creepily, in a house carved out of rock. The narrator is tempted to join the siblings in their strange quest, tied to the seemingly living but not living title house.

Locus, February 2009

Talebones for Winter leads off with a fine James Van Pelt story, “Floaters”, in which a man dying of an AIDS-like disease is enlisted into a secret project to observe the future – an observation which, alas, reveals that the world will end in just a few years. Van Pelt deals with the implications both logically and emotionally effectively.

Locus, June 2009

The best story at Analog for June comes from James Van Pelt. In “Solace” he intertwines the story of a man trying to survive a bitter winter at an Old West mine with that of a woman trying to remember Earth on a starship – quiet and moving work, in Van Pelt’s most familiar mode.

Locus, January 2013

It's not fair, really, to, in contrast, suggest that James Van Pelt's “The Family Rocket” (Asimov's, January) isn't “engaged” with the future. Indeed perhaps its theme, regret at the loss of the dream of space travel, might be regarded as quite directly engaging with our present future. But that very theme is central to what I call “Where's my Flying Car” SF – SF that explicitly discusses the way we have failed to live up to old SF dreams. “The Family Rocket” is a character-centric story in which a young man brings his girlfriend to his family home – his father's junkyard – embarrassed by his father's old stories of building a rocket from the junk he has collected. And of course he is pushed to a more sympathetic view of his father's dreams – in a quite moving story. (The kicker, to be sure, is that in this particular future space travel, travel even to Mars, is a reality, if one reserved mostly to the rich.)

Locus, January 2017

Two stories in December by Analog regulars are also worth particular notice. James Van Pelt’s “The Continuing Saga of Tom Corbett: Space Cadet” is about a girl named Tomika Corbett who discovers the old Tom Corbett juvies and becomes fascinated by space. She desperately wants a career in space, and is even more motivated, in the long run, by her inevitable Space Cadet nickname, and by the resistance of teachers who disparage the old Tom Corbett book (which really were quite awful, to contemporary eyes, as I recently learned when I read one). She begins to dream of aliens coming to take her away – and she tentatively befriends another bullied kid, even smarter than her – which gives her a tough choice when – in her dreams (?) – the aliens really come. I thought this story striking for the way in which what seems old-fashioned wish-fulfillment is revealed to be a terribly sad meditation on the contemporary loss of the dream of the future we once seemed to share.

Locus, December 2018

Last month I noted the tendency of non-genre writers to use SFnal tropes in the service of fairly traditional mainstream ideas. And this month I’m looking at a classic “little magazine”, Stonecoast Review, which features a couple of very fine stories by SF writers – indeed, by writers known for writing fairly traditional SF. And, really, both writers are, in these cases, using SFnal tropes in the service of fairly traditional mainstream ideas. (Indeed, this has always been a thing – and not a bad thing either.) James Van Pelt’s “Mambo No. M51” is about Emma Sophia, whom we soon learn has been voted “sexiest pop artist of the year”, as well as (by the protagonist) potentially “nuttiest”. The story, told by a man helping with the tech for her newest video, concerns her fascination with the literal “music of the stars” (radio telescope recordings) and her desire to lose herself in a video presentation of space while listening to her interpretation of the stars’ music; and the protagonist’s increasing involvement with that obsession (obviously driven in part by his somewhat sublimated sexual attraction to her). It’s pretty effective work, both as a character study and as a presentation of scientific wonder.

Locus, April 2019

In the March-April Analog there is a good solid story from James Van Pelt, “Second Quarter and Counting”, told from the POV of a 70-year-old woman, whose long-time best friend is undergoing a treatment called “Backspin”, which revitalizes people so that they are physically – and mostly mentally – 20 again. But there is a risk that the mental changes will be more complete – perhaps personality change? Or amnesia? The protagonist, a swimmer, remains in very good shape for her age – should she consider the same treatment? Or will she lose who she is? It’s a very sober examination, and a strongly character based piece, not particularly slanted to make a point on either side of the debate.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory turns 54 today. I've been a big fan of his short fiction for a long time, though alas he writes much less of it now that he's primarily a novelist. Below I present a selection of my reviews of his shorter work for Locus. I should mention his current Hugo nominee for Best Novelette, "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth", which is an exceptional piece about a man's long life as Earth is radically changed by an alien invasion of sorts; and I should also mentione his remarkable 2017 novel Spoonbenders, a Nebula and World Fantasy Award nominee. I reviewed that on this blog here: Spoonbenders and other 2017 Novels.

Locus, July 2004

The other novelet in the July F&SF is Daryl Gregory's "The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy", in which a man named Tim returns to his home town to try to deal with the events that crippled him as a teenager – all revolving around his nerdy friend and a strange movie the two shot over several years. The other boy died while Tim was crippled by an accidental (?) explosion while shooting the movie. Upon return Tim again meets his friend's parents, and we quickly gather that Tim's friend's home life was not very good – how this affected the boys' relationship, their movie, and the climactic events slowly comes clear. It's a fine story that I felt somehow fell short of being first-rate – perhaps it is just a bit too long for its emotional content, perhaps its revelations are clear too soon so that the conclusion is a bit too flat.

Locus, October 2005

Daryl Gregory, in “Second Person, Present Tense” (Asimov's, September 2005), offers a fascinating look at the nature of our identity and consciousness. A teenaged girl overdoses on a new drug that temporarily disconnects the conscious self from decision-making (brain research suggests that the brain makes “decisions” to take actions prior to the conscious mind making the same decision). The overdose results ultimately in the formation of a new consciousness – a completely different personality in the same body with (eventually) the same memories. It’s fascinating stuff, well explored here via the girl and her parents and her doctor trying to deal with the new identity. (I was reminded a bit of Holly Phillips’s “The Other Grace” from earlier this year, which used amnesia to bring its main character to a similar place.)

Locus, April 2006

Best in the April F&SF is a solid Daryl Gregory outing, “Gardening at Night”. This concerns a project to clear landmines using a lot of fairly intelligent “mytes”: interconnected small robots. The problem is, the mytes, as with seemingly all “fairly intelligent robots” in SF history, seem to have their own ideas about what to do with their lives. It’s a thoughtful, interesting, well done story.

Locus, December 2006

The December F&SF also features another intriguing story from Daryl Gregory, “Damascus”, in which a divorced woman gets involved with a religious cult based around a kuru-like disease. The story asks, in a way, if religion is a disease – or, at any rate, can a disease mimic a religion? Gregory has been using SFnal ideas wonderfully, to ask deep questions.

Locus, October 2010

From Daryl Gregory we have become used to challenging stories about the frontiers of contemporary neurological research, so perhaps it is a bit of a surprise to see in “Unpossible” (F&SF, October-November) a fantasy about a man whose wife and son have committed suicide. He is trying to rediscover something he lost during childhood, and so he resurrects a bike that had special attachments with such markings as “unpossible”. This is a way to a fantastical universe populated by characters that will be familiar to most readers – and Gregory’s point turns nicely on that familiarity, and on how we perhaps forget too readily our love of those characters.

Eclipse Two Review (Locus, November 2008)

Finally a borderline case is also among the best stories here “The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm”, by Daryl Gregory, tells of an island ruled by Lord Grimm, who seems obsessed with opposing the United States’s superheroes. He has kidnapped another, and the inevitable result is war – again. Just as inevitably, it is ordinary people like the heroine, who works in a factory making robots to fight the superheroes, who face the brunt of the catastrophic results of war. The political overtones are obvious enough, and well expressed.

Birthday Review: Two YA novels from Charles Sheffield

Charles Sheffield was born in England on 25 June 1935, and died in 2002. He lived in the US for a long time, and was married to the excellent writer Nancy Kress. I loved Sheffield's work when I was first reading the magazines, and when he was a regular in Analog, Galaxy, and Amazing. I highly recommend novels like Cold as Ice and the later Heritage Universe series.

Alas, the only reviews I wrote of his work were of a couple of books in Tor's YA series called Jupiter, from the late '90s. I didn't find these as successful as his best work. Still, here are two shortish reviews of a couple of those books.

Putting Up Roots, by Charles Sheffield

Charles Sheffield's Putting Up Roots is a Jupiter novel from Tor. That is, one of their new series of YA SF novels.  These seem explicitly to be an attempt to recreat something at least vaguely resembling Heinlein's juveniles, but for the late '90s.

Unfortunately, many of the efforts in this line I've read have been forced. Putting Up Roots is not a terribly successful effort, though, that said, I still found it a decently enjoyable read. It concerns a teenager, Josh Kerrigan, who is basically abandoned by his actress mother. He ends up with his aunt and uncle, who are living on an isolated family farm, which is being put out of business by a big agricultural corporation. This corporation makes a deal with the older couple which ends up sending the boy and his autistic cousin, Dawn, to Solferino, a newly opened planet with agricultural prospects. They end up in a group with several other similarly abandoned kids, and with a couple of suspicious-acting adults. After a few not very convincing adventures, they learn what the mysterious goings on really are, and they also (natch!) learn to trust and value the other kids despite original hostility. They don't exactly solve the main plot problem: they have it solved for them.

That's one problem.  Another is the fundamental absurdity of the whole situation.  For one thing, the pioneer farming setup just seems silly. We're asked to believe, yet again, in faceless utterly evil corporations, who'd gladly murder several kids, without compunction, yet who also clumsily screw up the situation. (But these corporations aren't all dumb: they can manipulate local weather so that Josh's uncle's back 40 gets a drought while the neighboring corporate farms get plenty of rain.) We're asked to act as if a major plot element is a surprise: Solferino turns out to have (Gasp!) intelligent natives, even though the eeevill corporations insist they are just dumb animals. Gee, we've never seen an idea like =that= before. (And of course it's the autistic kid who breaks through to them.) And as I said, the eventual plot resolution is handed to the characters on a platter, not earned.

The Cyborg From Earth, by Charles Sheffield

I read another book in Tor's Jupiter series of YA novels, Charles Sheffield's The Cyborg from Earth. This is probably the best I've read in this line of books. It's got some silliness, and Sheffield takes some shortcuts, but a lot of it was pretty neat, and it was a fast, compelling read. Jefferson Kopal is the heir to Kopal Transportation, a major spaceship-building concern. Family tradition deems he must spend a few years in the Navy before taking his board position, but he is not terribly interested in Navy service.  His interests are in the area of science and engineering, like his disgraced uncle Drake, who disappeared taking a wormhole the wrong way many years previously.  But duty, and his ailing mother's concern over his slimy uncle (really a cousin) and the uncle's fairhaired boy of a son, and their manoeuvring to take over the company, lead him to enter the Navy, qualifying by the skin of his teeth.

He is sent to the Messina Dust Cloud, where the colonists are supposedly close to rebellion.  Worse yet, the colonists are rumoured to be cyborgs: against Earth law, they have AI's and supposedly they themselves merge with machines.  On the way he realizes that something is up: the Captain is incompetent, and seems to have no intention of negotiating with the colonists. But an encounter with a space-born life form, a Space Sounder, leaves Jeff seriously injured, and at the mercy of the Messina colonists. Their cure for him leaves him a cyborg, too, by Earth standards.  Soon his loyalty to Earth is tested, as it becomes clear that the Earth authorities are not playing fair with the colonists, that the prejudice against AI's is dangerous and for example has contributed to his mother's illness, and that he really likes some of the Messina colonists, including a girl his age and the mysterious scientist Simon Macafee, who has invented a form of artificial gravity control. The solution involves the nature of the Space Sounders, the history of Simon Macafee and his discoveries, and Jefferson's own responsibilities. I did like it, despite some predictable twists, a bit of excessive villainy on the part of Earth, and some scientific, character, and plot implausibilities.

Birthday Review: Two Short Novels from Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan turns 71 today. Last year on this date I posted my look at his most famous novel, Atonement. Today, how about some short looks at a couple of very short novels.

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam. This is a very short novel (barely over 40,000 words) about two men, a successful composer and a successful newspaper editor, close friends, who were both lovers of the same woman. The book opens with this woman's funeral, then follows the newspaper editor as the woman's husband offers some salacious pictures of a high-ranking minister for publication. The composer is working on a commission for "The Millennium Symphony". He and the editor have a row about the propriety of publishing the pictures, then, feeling morally superior, the composer heads to the Lake Country to find "inspiration" to finish his symphony. There he, in a cowardly fashion, fails to intervene when he witnesses a woman accosted by a man. The moral failings of both men lead to professional disaster, which each blames on the other ... leading finally to a clever and vicious twist ending.  This is well done, sleek, blackly funny, but all that said it's rather slight. I like what I've read by McEwan (an early story, "Solid Geometry", which appeared in Fantastic in the mid-'70s, and an early, scary, novel, The Cement Garden). [Later I came to read Atonement and other novels.] And I liked Amsterdam. But I wouldn't have thought it measured up to a Booker. I will say that his previous novel, Enduring Love, looks based on reviews to be more substantial, and I seem to recall that it was a near scandal when it didn't win: perhaps the win for Amsterdam was a make good.

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is one of the best writers of our time. I am a particular fan of his novel Atonement, a remarkable look at the destructive effect of a small, only mildly malicious, act by a teenaged girl. As I have mentioned before I discovered him in of all places Ted White's Fantastic, back in 1975 or so, with the story "Solid Geometry", a very fine creepy piece.

His new novel is very short -- novella length at something on the order of 38,000 words. It is nominally the story of one night -- the wedding night of a young British couple in 1962. (Critically, as Christopher Hitchens points out, a year before "sexual intercourse began", in the famous words of Philip Larkin.) Of course the story really extends backward -- to the childhoods of the two, and to their courtship -- and forward, to tell quickly how their lives worked out.

The trouble is, they are both virgins. Edward, the man, is terribly concerned that his inexperience will lead to an embarrassing failure to perform -- or, perhaps, rather too rapid a performance. Florence's problems are more severe -- she is terribly afraid of sex, and she really does not want to have sex at all. Ever. (There is a brief hint -- which I may be exaggerating, but Hitchens' review (in the new Atlantic) suggests he detected such a hint as well -- that she may have been abused -- or at least sexually frightened -- by her father.) It is not that Florence does not love Edward -- she does, quite sincerely. And she is not purely a mouse -- she is a very accomplished violinist, and the forceful leader of a promising string quartet. Edward quite sincerely loves Florence, and is consumed with desire for her. He took a first in History and hopes to write short popular historical books.

Their real problem, however (beyond Florence's evident psychological hangup, whatever its origin), is that they are culturally unable to talk about sex, or about their desires, fears, experiences or lack thereof -- anything at all. Mind you this is still a problem for people, but not to anything like the degree it was in 1962 (perhaps, though I am not sure, especially in England.) Class is also an issue -- Edward is of a slightly (though not terribly) lower class than Florence, and in particular his family has much less money. And so the novel turns on an eventually disastrous experience, and the small-t tragic results not just of that experience but of their dual failure to work through it by even the simplest of words.

It is very fine stuff, if quite small scale -- minor, surely, but well worth having. It was made into a movie, starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle, in 2017.