Birthday Review: Bad News, plus four obscure SF stories, by Donald Westlake

Donald Westlake was born July 12, 1933, and died on the last day of 2008. He was one of the great crime writers of the last half of the 20th Century, particularly for his comic crime novels, though he was also excellent in darker works. My favorite Westlake books were his hilarious Dortmunder novels. In his memory, on what would have been his 86th birthday, here's a look at one of his later Dortmunder novels, plus reviews of four early science fiction stories. (He was a modestly prolific SF writer early in his career, though usually not a very good one, until he left the genre rather publically, via an essay in the great fanzine Xero, blaming John Campbell for his disgust with SF.)

Bad News, by Donald Westlake

A better vacation read might have been Donald Westlake's latest Dortmunder book, Bad News.  It's very fast moving, very funny, very clever, and very much a typical Dortmunder book, which is, dare I say, good news.  As those who've read previous books in the series know, the most common trope of the Dortmunder books is for Dortmunder and his gang to get involved in a crime which ends up having to be, in some sense, repeated, with different permutations, several times.  For example, in the very first one, The Hot Rock, they had to steal the same jewel several times. 

In this book, after the usual opening scene, John Dortmunder hilariously failing to get caught while failing to successfully complete a robbery, he finds himself approached by Andy Kelp with a unorthodox (for them) proposal. Andy has been hired by somebody he met on the Internet (Andy is always trying new technology, which Dortmunder hates) to help out in a certain enterprise -- they want them to dig up a grave and rebury a different body in it.  This isn't much to Dortmunder's liking, but the price seems fateful -- exactly the amount of money he had expected to realize from the stolen goods he was forced to leave behind the previous night.  After Andy and John complete the body switch, they foil the attempt by the villains Fitzroy and Irwin to cheat (permanently) their new helpers, and they get interested in a) figuring out what's really going on, and b) getting themselves a much bigger cut.  With the help of Tiny Bulcher, they are soon involved in the scheme, which I won't detail here because finding out is much of the fun. Also involved are Little Feather, an Indian from out West, formerly a Las Vegas showgirl, and their target is an Indian-operated casino in Upstate New York.  (Surprisingly many of the more recent Dortmunder books end up partly set in Upstate New York -- it looks like Westlake may have moved there, which might explain it.)  It's no surprise that the crooked casino owners have their own ideas, which involve several hilarious further iterations of the original "crime". 

It's all very funny stuff, and the various schemes are pretty much as clever as usual, though depending just a bit on sheer luck.  Wholly worth reading, as indeed is the entire series.  I'd put this particular entry somewhere in the middle range of the Dortmunder books, which means well in the upper range of books in general.

Science Fiction Stories, May 1960

"Travellers Far and Wee", by Donald Westlake, is also slight, a tolerable little thing about people apparently charged with driving around New York and New Jersey forever, with the duty of being those annoying drivers we all deal with.

Amazing, March 1961

Donald Westlake, of course, became a very famous crime writer, under his own name and his most popular pseudonym, Richard Stark. But early in his career he wrote a lot of SF, before breaking with the field, and more explicitly, John Campbell, in an essay in the fanzine Xero.

Westlake was never as good an SF writer as he was a crime writer. (Though who can say what he might have done later in his career had he stuck with SF. He did write a couple of SF/F novels later on.) “The Risk Profession” is probably my favorite Westlake SF story of those I’ve read, and likely it’s not a coincidence that it’s a crime story. Ged Stanton is a fraud investigator for an insurance company. He’s sent out to the asteroids to find a way the company can avoid paying a “retirement plan” to a asteroid prospector. The plans are issued with the intent that most of the plan members will die too soon to collect.

Stanton ends up on the rock where the claimant’s partner is preparing to stake a big claim – it seems the two of them hit it big, but the one man died in an accident before he could collect his money – but not before he could ask for a refund of his Retirement Plan, figuring he wouldn’t need it any more. Obviously, something is fishy – and Stanton indeed figures it out (hey, I figured it out too, from the start) – but there are some neat tricks in the whole setup, and a nice closing twist.

If, September 1961

The other novelette is by Donald Westlake, presumably shortly before his stormy departure from SF writing. (It is my view that Westlake's departure from the field was as much due to his not really being a very good SF writer (and a truly wonderful crime writer) than to the hidebound nature of SF and its editors, as he claimed.) "Call Him Nemesis" (10K) is amusing enough. A series of crimes are averted by mysterious means, linked by odd temperature fluctuations and the association of the word "Scorpion". Psi is involved, but the person doing it is the point of the story, and it's nicely revealed.

Amazing, November 1961

The cover story is a novelet, "Meteor Strike!", by Donald E. Westlake (12500 words). Westlake, who was born in 1933 and died in 2008, was one of the great crime fiction writers of our time. I am particularly fond of his comic capers featuring the thief John Dortmunder. Others plump for his darker novels about a criminal named Parker, written as by Richard Stark. Early in his career, Westlake published a fair amount of Science Fiction, before bidding a bitter farewell to the field in a rant published in the great fanzine Xero. Westlake complained about SF's conservatism, and particularly about John Campbell. Alas, I feel his argument -- which had some merit -- loses some force simply because, truth be told, Westlake was a pretty mediocre SF writer.

That said, I did rather enjoy the last Westlake SF story I read, "The Risk Profession" (Amazing, March 1961). But it was in part a crime caper piece, playing to his strength. "Meteor Strike!" is pretty dire. It's about a regular Earth to Moon transportation system, particularly a space station en route, and a regular delivery of something important to the lonely station orbiting the Moon. This particular flight includes three new spacemen, one of them a rather truculent young man, embittered by his flunking out of MIT. He's pushed himself to success ever since, but at the cost of being a prime jerk. This behaviour continues on this trip. So when a meteor unconvincingly hits the Earth orbiting space station (and embeds itself in its skin!), right where the precious cargo is stored, somehow this rookie is chose to assist in the repair operation. He does OK, of course, after some bad spots. And the suspense over the "cargo" is finally relieved -- it's entertainment tapes. Sigh. This is painfully earnest "hard" SF, overly complicated in a way to make it certain that many details will be embarrassingly wrong; and with a really badly strained character story behind it. You can see Westlake working hard to make his story serious -- to make the science plausible and the characters three-dimensional. But I think he missed the boat on both fronts. As I've said before, Westlake's decision to concentrate on crime fiction was definitely the right one.

Birthday review: Stories of Karen Russell

Today is Karen Russell's birthday. Russell is an exceptional writer, not associated with in-genre SF/Fantasy, but a significant amount of her work is definitely fantastika. I had hoped to use her story "Orange World" in this year's best of the year volume, but we couldn't get rights, likely because it's the title story of her new collection. She should have won the Pulitzer for her 2011 novel Swamplandia!, but instead of given it to a fantistacalish novel the committee decided to give no award that year. (The other finalists were an unfinished posthumous novel, and a novella that had first been published several years before. It was an appalling decision.) Normally I only do these Birthday reviews if I have at least five stories ... but I should have reviewed "The Bog Girl" a few years ago (I didn't because it's kind of ambiguously fantastical), and in the upcoming August issue of Locus, I do have a review of a very fine new story from the last issue of Tin House, "The Gondoliers". So, close enough for government work. Anyway, SF/F readers should be seeking out Russell's work. Here are four really good places to start:

Locus, March 2008

Zoetrope All-Story features a sure enough no-fooling vampire story, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” by Karen Russell, in the Winter 2007 issue. Two aging vampires rusticate in an Italian lemon grove. The man tells us his history, especially his lust for blood and the associated guilt, and his love for his companion – while she spends more and more time as a bat. The story is effectively literary: well-written, and character-driven, but it takes the vampire tropes seriously, and uses them in service of its character-based aims.

Locus, March 2013

The new Tin House has several stories in a fantastical vein, of which the best is a horrifying Karen Russell story, “Reeling for the Empire”, set in late 19th Century Japan, about women taken from their families to work in a silk producing factory – only to learn that their work involves producing the silk themselves, after drinking a special tea that changes them forever.

Locus, June 2014

One story that has got a lot of attention in the wider literary world (partly for its venue: its a digital only release from a new outlet called Atavist Books) is Sleep Donation, by Karen Russell. It deserves the attention on its own merits. A plague has swept the Americas – people are suddenly unable to sleep, leading inevitably to death. A treatment is discovered: those who can still sleep can donate their sleep to those who need it. Trish Edgewater is a volunteer for a “sleep bank”, using the story of her older sister, one of the first victims, to motivate new donors in to signing up. Complications arise – one of Trish's “clients”, a young baby, turns out to have particularly effective donations, which even sometimes cure insomniacs, but her father is concerned about the exploitation of his child. Another donor's sleep is infected with a terrible nightmare that drives some people to become “elective insomniacs”.  Trish herself wonders about her exploitation of her sister's story. The fundamental idea is in places preposterous, but Russell's extrapolations of the social impact are dead on, and the story examines our disaster-driven culture, perhaps our general “sleeplessness”, and the power of dreams very nicely.

Locus, August 2018

The New Yorker’s annual Fiction issue, themed Childhood, includes a striking Karen Russell story, “Orange World”. Like many stories from mainstream sources, it is using its fantastical material in service of a very contemporary story – the narrator is a woman pregnant for the first time, rather older than most first time mothers, and she is worried about her pregnancy, and her baby, and so she’ll do anything to keep him safe, including making a deal with a devil. Which is a real devil (if not THE devil), and preys on her horribly, until she finds a group for new mothers, which includes some women who have dealt with similar creatures. It’s funny and scary and dead honest – strong work from one of the best writers to regularly straddle genre borderlines.

Birthday Review: Capsules on some of Robert A. Heinlein's juveniles

Birthday Review: Capsules on some of Robert A. Heinlein's juveniles

Robert Heinlein was born 112 years ago today, in my state (Missouri.) A couple of decades ago I decided to reread (or, in many cases, read for the first time) all his so-called "juveniles". I found that effort quite rewarding -- I think they held up very well. So, here's a selection of what I wrote back then -- all very short looks -- about some of those juveniles (I didn't manage to write about all of them.) I will say, in summary sort of, that my favorite on that reread was Citizen of the Galaxy.

Let me add, while I'm here, a strong recommendation for Farah Mendlesohn's The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, a critical survey of all of his work. Farah treats his writing from the perspective of multiple different themes, so that she revisits different stories multiple times. Her views strike me as very intelligent, very provocative. She provides a necessary corrective to both his critics on the left, and his adulators on the right. For me, she was particularly useful on the late novels, acknowledging their weaknesses but sensibly highlighting both what some of them did right (fitfully), and, more importantly, illuminating how the thematic aspects of the late novels reflect his lifelong concerns. Definitely the best book about science fiction I've read in 2019.

Rocket Ship Galileo

The first, and regarded by many as the worst, of RAH's juveniles.  I can see why, but it's still pretty enjoyable.  Some far-fetched stuff, like the spaceship in a back yard business (and the estimate of what R&D for the first moon flight would cost: 1.5 million dollars), also the ancient race on the moon thing. Not to mention Nazis.  But it's still a good read.

Between Planets

A half-Venusian, half-Earthling boy gets caught up in the Venusian revolution. Enjoyable.  As with so much Heinlein (or, really SF of that time period!), the ending is seriously rushed.

Red Planet

A young man and his semi-intelligent Martian "pet" go to the "Company" school, and discover that the "Company" doesn't really have the best interests of the colonists at heart. One of many RAH depictions of Mars, this one seems more Leigh Brackett-like than the others. One of the better plotted juveniles, I think. I liked this quite a lot, really.

Space Cadet

A boy joins the Space Patrol, and his experiences as a "Cadet" are detailed.  As a novel, rather episodic. But generally fun, and with plenty of Heinleinian philosophy underlying his concept of the duties of the Space Patrol. (Is the Mars briefly mentioned in this one the same as the Mars of Red Planet? It can't be exactly the same, because the political situation seems very different.  But his (very brief) description of the Martians seemed similar.)

Tunnel in the Sky 

This features a group of students sent through a matter transmitter gate to a frontier planet for a "survival test". But the gate collapses, and they are marooned there. To an extent, it's like a response to Lord of the Flies. It's a pretty good story, structured better than many of RAH's novels.  It also features one of his black heroes, though the evidence for that is vague (probably on purpose).  The awful Darrell Sweet cover muffs it, of course.

Starman Jones

I think this one of the best in the series.  This features a teenage boy who stows away on board a starship, and works his way from stable boy to Captain.  It's episodic, like many of these books, but very enjoyable.  The depiction of the use of computers in navigation is, well, interesting (says someone who writes navigation software).  Both books share the odd feature of most of Heinlein's juveniles, the shying away from love interests.  Obvious love interest candidates are dangled before the reader, but nothing ever happens (to his protagonists, that is).  Even when his protagonists, in the juveniles, do marry, it's after oddly truncated romances: see Time for the Stars for a perfect example.

Another interesting feature of the juveniles is the range, throughout the books, of future Earth societies depicted.  Heinlein doesn't copy himself at all, I think, in this area.  The details are rarely foregrounded, but the background hints are neat.

Time for the Stars 

An odd duck, really.  Save maybe for the revised version of Podkayne of Mars, rather the saddest of the juvies (that I've read).  It's uneven, but some of what RAH is trying to pull off here is very ambitious.  The careful contrast of the characters of Tom and Pat makes this much more a novel of character than usual for Heinlein.  I don't think he quite succeeds, but still a very worthwhile effort.  (The above is probably gibberish to someone not familiar with the plot of Time for the Stars: basically, the central conceit is that some identical twins (and occasionally some other people) have telepathic links, which transmit at near infinite speed.  This makes them naturals for communication pairs, one to accompany a slower than light starship to new planets, the other to stay at home and receive transmissions.  Tom and Pat are one such pair: the further twist, of course, is time dilation, so that the twin who travels with the starship ages very little, while the other twin grows old.  That's pretty much the whole story, though RAH includes plenty of action (and tragedy), and even a non-convincing love affair at the end.)

Citizen of the Galaxy

Citizen is very enjoyable, the story of Thorby, a slave who is bought by an old beggar who turns out to be much more than it seems: after the old man’s death, Thorby spends some time with the Free Traders, a fascinatingly sketched spaceship based society, before eventually finding his true family, which naturally enough is a fabulously rich and powerful clan on Earth.  It’s a fun read, with some very interesting sociological speculation: the plot is a bit coincidence-driven, however, and things come too easily to Thorby (by which I don't mean he doesn't face much hardship and difficulty: he does, but (especially right at the end) he seems almost magically talented enough in just the right areas to succeed against significant odds.)

Have Space Suit, Will Travel

High school kid wins a derelict spacesuit in a contest, refurbishes it, and ends up kidnapped by aliens, taken to the moon and points beyond, and eventually facing a crisis which may mean the end of humanity. And good solid Heinleinish fun/instruction along the way. Also features one of his best heroines.

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.