Birthday Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

 Charles Yu turns 45 today. His second novel, Interior Chinatown, just won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Much of his earlier work, including many short stories and his first novel, is SF, or SF-adjacent. (I reprinted one of those stories, "Standard Loneliness Package", in my 2011 Best of the Year volume.)

For his birthday, here's a review I did for SF Site of his first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

Charles Yu is a young writer whose first book, the story collection Third Class Superhero, gained a lot of praise in literary circles. But he's one also a guy who grew up reading Isaac Asimov. He has professed admiration for the likes of Richard Powers, who writes literary novels -- but also sometimes SF, and almost always scientifically-engaged work. So, what is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe? Actually, that's an interesting question.

On the face of it, why doubt the SFnality of the book? The story concerns a 30ish guy named Charles Yu, who is a "certified network technician" working as an "approved independent affiliate for Time Warner Time". This means he fixes time machines. The story also concerns time loops and paradoxes and parallel universes. Pure SF, right? And indeed, so it is, at that level. But what is the novel really about? It's about a somewhat drifting young man, who misses the father who left years ago, and who occasionally visits his lonely mother, and who has never met the right woman to marry, and who is stuck in a dead-end job. Pure mainstream, right?

At bottom, such definitional questions don't matter very much. What Yu is doing, simply enough, is using some SFnal tropes in support of purely mainstream aims. That does affect the audience, of course. The novel isn't really interested in the mechanics of time travel, nor in a fully plausible future. Nor should it be. It's interested in the main character, and in his mother, and in his time machine's operating system (look, SFnal tropes again!) who has the personality of a sweet woman he's never really noticed while mooning over the girl he never married. And most of all, it's interested in Charles Yu's relationship with his father, an immigrant to the US, who struggled for years in his garage to invent a time machine and make something of himself. And who disappeared after his invention failed and someone else beat him to it.

But all that said, the novel isn't just another boring mainstream book about a guy trying to understand his father*. The SFnal furniture really does make things work. We know from the start that everything turns on a time loop engendered by Charles Yu killing his future self, and on the paradox that the book we are reading is a book he could only write by reading the book his dying future self gave him. Charles' mother is stuck in a time loop herself, reliving one of her few happy moments, or so Charles believes. And the entire "Minor Universe" in which the action takes place is a satirically altered version of our world -- or perhaps it is somehow our world? -- a minor universe slightly damaged in construction. The SFnal tropes, then, are not interesting as Science Fiction, per se. We don't care that this novel isn't in any serious way about the possibility of time travel. But the tropes work to help tell the story, and to make serious points about the central characters, and satirical points about the "real world." And that's as good a use as any.

I haven't said a whole lot about the plot of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and I don't think I have to. The book works not because of plot but because of voice, character, and a humorous but bittersweet attitude. It's not an earthshakingly brilliant book, but it's a very enjoyable first novel, from a writer with real chops.

(*Let's take it as read, shall we, that there are plenty of wonderful, not boring, mainstream books about a guy trying to understand his father.)

Birthday Review: Stories of James Sallis

James Sallis was born December 21, 1944. His day job was as a respiratory therapist, but he's better known as a writer. His novels have been almost all crime novels -- the Lew Griffin books in particular, as well as Drive, which became a movie starring Ryan Gosling. He got his start writing SF, however, and early on was particularly associated with the New Wave -- he published regularly in Orbit, and served for a time as co-editor of New Worlds. His short -- often very short -- fiction has been compared -- sensibly, it seems to me -- with another "New Wave", the French Nouvelle Vague cinema. He has continued to publish short work in SF magazines over the years, some of it truly excellent -- notably, to me, "Dayenu", from Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet in 2018, which I think one of the best (and most overlooked) novelettes of the past decade. Here's a look at some of his fiction -- recent work I've reviewed for Locus, and older work I wrote about less formally.

Orbit 6

"The Creation of Bennie Good" is James Sallis in a somewhat surrealistic mode, with the title character at dinner with a woman, trying to please her with an offer of his foot. There's more going on in this very short piece, but there's little I can say that will make much sense -- best just to read it.

Orbit 7

James Sallis' "Jim and Mary G" is a wrenching and somewhat mysterious story about a family, a mother and father (presumably the title characters) and their young son, it what seems a strangely empty city. I couldn't figure out what was going on for sure -- some kind of post-Apocalyptic environment -- but the mother and father have come to a decision about the child. Chilling, very sad.

Orbit 9

This volume of Orbit includes two very odd stories by James Sallis. I can't say I'm sure I understood either of them, but both are intriguing, well-written, experimental pieces. "Binaries" tells in several sections of the relationship of a man and a woman, or multiple men and multiple women, across years, across continents. "Only the Words are Different" is also about men and women. It's also very strange, and somewhat more comic, and vaguely science-fictional. It's hard to say much about these stories that makes sense, but they were worth reading.

F&SF, June 1971

"They Fly at Ciron", by Samuel R. Delany and James Sallis, is one of a rare set of stories -- collaborations that were later expanded to novels by only one of the collaborators. Other examples include "The Weakness of RVOG", by James Blish and Damon Knight, a 1949 novelette that became Blish's solo novel from 1958, VOR; and "Tomorrow's Children", Poul Anderson's first published story from 1947, a collaboration with F. N. Waldrop, which became Anderson's novel Twilight World in 1961. (Less certain is the novel The Sky is Falling, by Lester del Rey, which is an expansion of the novella "No More Stars", by the pseudonymous "Charles Satterfield", often attributed to del Rey with Frederik Pohl.) Delany expanded this novelette to the novel They Fly at Çiron in 1993, in an edition which includes two additional stories, "Ruins" and "Return to Çiron". 

"They Fly at Ciron" is in a way a standard sort of fantasy adventure. Ciron is a peaceful land, suddenly subject to invasion by the warmongers of Myetra. The military leader of the invasion is Handman Kire, himself a victim of Myetra's expansionism. On the way to the invasion, Kire, revolted by the cruelty of his Myetran prince, Nactor, goes off by himself to cool down, and encounters Rahm, a Cironian, and happens to save Rahm from a threat from a Winged One. Rahm returns to Ciron, and though warned of the danger of the Myetrans, cannot believe they would attack his peaceful people. Of course they do, and Rahm flees, ending up with the Winged Ones, saving one of their princes from a spider creature -- but returns to Ciron, determined to resist the Myetrans -- a resistance only made possible by the help of people from outside peaceful Ciron -- a visiting bard, a Winged One, and, eventually, Kire. There's nothing much really new her, but it's very well done, and I liked it a lot.

Orbit 11

Orbit regular James Sallis' contribution this time is "Doucement, S'il Vous Plait", a quite delightfully wistful, even mournful, story told from the point of view of a letter, which is forwarded and returned and remailed all over the world ... by the end we sense that this is a sort of metaphorical treatment of a failed relationship. I think it may be my favorite early Sallis story.

Orbit 13

James Sallis contributes "My Friend Zarathustra", an intriguing short-short about a man who has lost his wife to his friend Zarathustra ... of course there is more going on, and like Sallis' other Orbit pieces, I'm not sure I fully followed it but it was fun and intriguing.

Review of Leviathan 3

"Up", by James Sallis, another curious and intriguing story, about a man in a world much like ours, where people are beginning suddenly to go "up" – to vanish literally into ashes. This man is dealing with the death of his wife, and his life seems more and more lonely and constrained. Perhaps the story is about his plight only – or perhaps the story is about the plight of all of us. 

Locus, July 2018

Even better is a remarkable long story by James Sallis, “Dayenu” (Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Spring). It opens with the narrator doing an unspecified but apparently criminal job, and then fleeing the house he was squatting in, and meeting an old contact for a new identity. Seems like a crime story – and Sallis is, after all, primarily a crime novelist. But details of unfamiliarity mount, from the pervasive surveillance to a changed geography, then to the realization that the rehab stint the narrator mentioned right at the start was a rather more extensive rehab than we might have thought. Memories of wartime service are detailed, and two partners in particular – a woman named Fran or Molly, a man named Merrit Li. Page by page the story seems odder, and the destination less expected. The prose is a pleasure too – with desolate rhythms and striking images. Quite a work, and not like anything I’ve recently read. 

Locus, May 2020

Interzone features a novelette by the great James Sallis in the March-April issue. As common for Sallis, “Carriers” begins in a strange place and ends up somewhere completely different (though still plenty strange.) The opening describes a brief skirmish in a decaying or collapsing near future US, followed by a few encounters between a doctor desperately trying to save the people he can, even (or especially?) those on the wrong side of what now counts as law, and in this case specifically including the very young man who was hurt in the first section. Then we move decades in the future, to another odd encounter between the doctor and the man he had saved long ago, with a mysterious sort of ghost present as well. It’s simply differently powerful – but very powerful – in a way I’m coming to associate with Sallis.

Locus, July 2020

Analog continues to morph into a new Analog – true to its tradition, still full of near-future stories of planetary exploration and colonization, for example – but open to writers I’d not have expected to see. For example, the May-June issue includes a story by James Sallis (Sallis in the Analog mafia! Will wonders never cease?): “Net Loss”, a sneakily very dark short-short about a man who is arrested due to evidence from his “smart” TV.

Birthday Review: The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford

a brief review by Rich Horton

The English novelist Ford Madox Ford was born with the rather enormous string of names Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer on December 17, 1873, so this is the 147th anniversary of his birth. I assume all the extra names were a family tradition of some sort, and apparently he was always called Ford. Early novels were published under the name H. Ford Hueffer, later Ford M. Hueffer or Ford Madox Hueffer. After World War I he changed his name to Ford Madox Ford because Hueffer sounded too German. His first novel was published in 1892. He published three novels written with Joseph Conrad. His most famous works by far are The Good Soldier and the Parade's End series of four books. He is also remembered for an historical trilogy about Catherine Howard (the Fifth Queen trilogy) and for an SF book (of sorts), Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, about a man who goes back to Medieval times. He died in 1939.

I wrote this piece about The Good Soldier a couple of decades ago upon reading it. It's brief, really not very substantial, but the novel has only grown in my memory, so I figured I'd go ahead and repost it. The only other novel of his I've read is Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (in both versions, the original from 1911 and the 1935 revision), and I do plan to write about that book as well.

I had waited to read the book partly because I thought it would be a heavy-going tragedy.  I took the famous first sentence ("This is the saddest story I have ever heard.") literally.  (Indeed, Ford's original title for the book was The Saddest Story, but as I understand it his publisher felt that The Good Soldier would be a better title for a book published in wartime (it appeared in 1915.))

It turns out, of course, that, while The Good Soldier can hardly be called a happy book, it is a comedy.  A dark, rather bitter, rather sarcastic, comedy, and hardly funny ha-ha, but a comedy nonetheless.  It gives one pause to think how much of the major English and Irish fiction of the 20th century is comedy.  Ulysses.  All of Flann O'Brien.  A Dance to the Music of Time.  Kingsley Amis (and of course Martin Amis.)  Muriel Spark.  Evelyn Waugh.  Henry Green.  Even Orwell, sometimes.  Penelope Fitzgerald. I suppose perhaps I am picking and choosing examples to support my point.  And I'm not so sure this applies to American novels.  But I do think a point can be made that the major mode of the English novel in the 20th Century is comic.

Anyway, The Good Soldier tells the story of two rich couples in the years leading up to World War I, an American couple, John Dowell (the narrator) and his wife Florence, and a British couple, Edward Ashburnham ("The Good Soldier") and his wife Leonora.  Both spend the years 1902-1914 or so on the Continent, because allegedly Edward and Florence have "hearts": that is, they are of questionable health and need to stay at various Continental spas, and need not to travel by sea.  The joke, of course, is that their heart problems actually have to do with their sexual appetites.  Both Edward and Florence are serial adulterers, and inevitably strike up a relationship, of which Leonora is aware but John Dowell, in many ways a foolish and pathetic figure, is unaware.  The two couples seem fast friends, and live utterly empty and pointless lives.

The novel is extremely well and complexly constructed, as Dowell tells and retells their history, from the point of view of each of the characters, and going back and forth in time.  We realize from the beginning that as Dowell tells his story Edward and Florence are dead, and he slowly gets around to telling about the precipitating events, involving "the girl", as she is called, Nancy Rufford, a quasi-niece of the Ashburnhams, which result in the destruction of the carefully maintained arrangements the four have lived in.  It's indeed a striking and remarkable book, and a very well done portrayal of a pointless way of life, and four quite unpleasant characters.  The humor is mostly sarcastic and understated, though there are a few horrifying set-pieces. The impact by the end is quite profound. I consider it one of the great novels of the 20th Century.

Birthday Review: Territory, by Emma Bull

Birthday Review: Territory, by Emma Bull

a review by Rich Horton

I wrote this review for Fantasy Magazine when Emma Bull's (to date) last novel, Territory, was published, in 2007. Bull made -- and deserved -- a big splash when her first few novels (War for the Oaks, Falcon, Bone Dance, and Finder) came out, in the late '80s and early '90s. Since then she has written fairly little -- a collaboration with Steven Brust, one with her husband Will Shetterly, and contributions to the intriguing "web serial" Shadow Unit; plus this novel. I've enjoyed all her work, particularly Falcon, which is imperfectly constructed by which pushes all my buttons. 

Emma Bull is one of those writers about whom my main complaint is that they don’t write enough. Her last novel, Freedom and Necessity (with Stephen Brust) appeared fully a decade ago. So I was delighted to see Territory on bookstore shelves this summer.

This is a fantasy set in the Old West, indeed, in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1880, in the months leading up to the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Bull focuses on three characters. Mildred Benjamin is a young widow making an independent life for herself as a newspaperwoman and as a writer of early “pulp” Western stories. Jesse Fox is a horse trainer, previously from San Francisco, who has wandered into Tombstone on the way to Mexico – or so he thinks. And Doc Holliday – well, we know who Doc Holliday is: a dentist, a card player, a Southerner, and a friend of the controversial Wyatt Earp.

Through the eyes of these characters we learn the dicey political situation in Tombstone. Much of the trouble is centered on Wyatt Earp and his brothers. Wyatt wants to be Sheriff, but has no formal position. Virgil is City Marshal. And there no account brother Morgan is on the other side, more or less, and as the novel opens he has just participated in an attempted stagecoach robbery that left two people dead. Doc Holliday manages to create an alibi for Morgan, but in the process becomes a suspect himself. Over the next few months tensions rise between the townspeople, the Earps, and the cowboys, some of them rustlers, who live outside of town – people like the McLaury brothers, John Ringo (supposedly an ancestor of the SF writer of that name), and the Clantons. And the truth about the stage robbery becomes fuzzy as the main suspects all meet violent deaths before they can be arrested.

All this is for the most part historical record. What makes this story a story is the personal experience of the main characters. Mildred is the most engaging, the best depicted. As a woman, she has a different view of the conflict, especially once she befriends the Earps’ wives. And her budding career as a reporter gives her a still different angle. Jesse Fox, meanwhile, has his own secret, one he is loath to admit to himself. He can do magic. His friend Chow Lung, a Chinese doctor, urges him to accept his abilities. And in so doing, he realizes that there are other magic users in Tombstone – including very likely both Wyatt Earp and at least one of Earp’s enemies. Finally, Doc Holliday is probably the least well realized main character – perhaps because he is historical. His viewpoint serves mostly as an inside look at Wyatt Earp’s “camp”.

At this level the book follows Jesse’s arrival, his investigation, with Chow Lung, of the murder of a Chinese prostitute, and his subsequent realization that the girl was a victim of the political eddies in Tombstone. Meanwhile Mildred moves from typesetter to reporter at the Nugget as she gets interested in the nasty doings of a mining company. At the same time she is romantically drawn to both Tom McLaury and Jesse Fox. And her knowledge of the situation of the Earp women puts her squarely in the anti-Earp camp. Meanwhile Doc Holliday is trying to escape Earp’s orbit, urged by his common law wife Kate. But Earp’s hold – magical, perhaps? – seems to prove too strong.

The book is quite a delightful read. Mildred and Jesse are engaging protagonists, if, as I mentioned, Doc Holliday is a bit thinner. The fantastical element is modest but well-integrated and well portrayed. I had just one major issue: as the end approached, I realized that the remaining pages were not possibly enough to contain the actual gunfight. And, indeed, the book rather suddenly stops – at a not unreasonable point, with certain crucial information just revealed, but not, it turns out, at the end of the story. Yes – once again we have a book that is only Part 1 of a series (of only two books, I believe) – with absolutely no indication of this fact in the book, or on the cover, or anywhere unless you poke around the author’s web page. I will certainly be happy to read the conclusion to this story – but it would have been nice to know going in that Territory is only the first half. [That's what I wrote in 2007, but no sequel has eventuated -- perhaps none was ever planned.]

Old Non-Bestseller Review: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding/An Integrated Man, by Julia Strachey

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding/An Integrated Man, by Julia Strachey

a review by Rich Horton

Julia Strachey was born in India in 1901, the daughter of Oliver Strachey -- and Oliver Strachey, a civil servant, was also Lytton Strachey's older brother. They moved back to England 6 years later, and Strachey's young life was further ruffled by her parents' divorce a few years later. She became sort of multiply a kind of second generation Bloomsburyite -- not only was she Lytton Strachey's niece, but her father's second wife, Ray Costelloe (a mathematician/engineer and a major figure in the suffrage movement) was Virginia Woolf's sister-in-law (extended). She began writing occasional short stories, and in 1932 published a short novel, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, that was very well-received at the time and has retained its reputation, having been reprinted as recently as 2009 by Persephone Books, and having been adapted (not terribly successfully, it would seem) into a film in 2012. She never did write regularly, it seems, and her only other novel appeared in 1951 as The Man on the Pier. It was reprinted along with Cheerful Weather For the Wedding in 1978, under Strachey's preferred title, An Integrated Man. Strachey died a year later; and a few years after that her lifelong friend Frances Partridge assembled the fragments of autobiography she had left behind with additional material by Partridge as Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey by Herself and Frances Partridge. (Frances Partridge, sometimes called "The Last of the Bloomsbury Set", was an interesting figure herself, living to just a few weeks short of her 104th birthday in 2004.)

So, a curiously sparse bibliography. Her stories (and some poetry) don't seem well-regarded, but her novels (especially the first) and the strange memoir are still remembered. I had not heard of her until recently, but the novels looked interesting, and writers of the first half of the 20th Century are always worth a look (for me), so I found a used copy of the 1978 Penguin omnibus of the two novels.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is really only novella length, perhaps 23,000 words. It takes place over just a few hours, on the day of the wedding of Dolly Thatcham to Owen Bigham. They are being married from the Thatchams' country house near Malton, which is a town that also features in An Integrated Man. (I suspect this Malton is not the real Malton in North Yorkshire, because this town seems close to the sea, while the real Malton is about 20 miles away from it.) There is not much in the way of plot (though over time some secrets do surface) -- the story is confined to the house, and to the actions of various family members, servants, and an ex-boyfriend of the bride. 

It's a satirical piece of writing, though in a more affectionate than cutting way. The various characters each get a look-in, enough that we know them a bit. Dolly seems perhaps a bit unsure of her coming nuptials, or perhaps just nervous ... she takes forever to get ready, and gets drunk in the process. Her sister Kitty is worried about being thought provincial and perhaps rather overcomplicated. Young Tom is furious at his younger brother Robert for insisting on wearing hideous socks, mostly because he's convinced a schoolmate will see them and the ridicule will be visited on Tom. Mrs. Thatcham is vague and rambling and insistent on the "cheerful weather" they are having for the wedding even though the day is windy and cold. And then there's Joseph, a former admirer of Dolly, who is pining and hiding from everyone else, hoping for an audience with Dolly. 

It's nicely done, funny, very well-observed. There is a secret lurking in the background, that is subtly hinted at, never stated but clear enough to the reader. It's a portrait of a certain pre-War English class, not necessarily obvious to Americans, I think ... I mean, they have servants! But they're not upper class.

An Integrated Man is a different sort of book. Much longer, for one thing -- 60,000 words or so. It also displays Strachey's close observation, a real gift for interesting description of largely mundane things. It's set in the country, at Flitchcombe Manor, the home of Ned Moon's friend Reamur. Ned is the viewpoint character, the "integrated man" of the title, for so he declares himself at the open, a man of about 40, fully satisfied with his life, happy, and eagerly approaching his next challenge, a school he is opening with his friend Aron. He and Aron are spending a few weeks with Reamur and Reamur's wife Gwen; using the the time to finish preparations for the schoole, whilst Ned also tutors Reamur and Gwen's son Co-Co. The house party is soon to be expanded when Aron's wife Marina and their daughter Violet arrive. And for the first third of so of the book nothing in particular happens -- we just see Ned going about his normal days, and we get a sense of Ned's character, and a look at the environs of Flitchcombe Manor and the nearby villages. This works oddly well, mostly because of Strachey's excellent eye for detailed descriptons of small things.

The other shoe drops when Marina shows up. For, somewhat mysteriously, Ned decides that he is in lust with her. Indeed, that he must "have" her. And so while similar things happen to what happened for the first 60 pages -- walks across the countryside, group conversations, shopping at the village -- these things are all filtered through Ned's haze of lust. All this time Ned is trying to avoid detection, and often avoiding the rest of the party entirely. A bit to the reader's surprise, after some time Marina makes some little hints that she is interested in Ned as well.

So the conclusion comes -- the end of summer is near, school ready to start, and the house party will be breaking up. Ned and Marina awkwardly make an arrangement for him to come up to London for a couple of days, while Aron is setting things up at school. All Ned's desires are ready to be satisfied ...

The resolution, then, is (as we perhaps expect) painful and embarrassing. Ned comes to realize that it is his friend and business partner, Aron, whom he will betray -- and for a woman that he lusts after but doesn't seem to much like. Ned is forced to hurt Marina terribly, and to leave himself frustrated. And to realize that he is perhaps really not such an "integrated man". 

I'm not sure how much I really liked this. I thought it was in many ways well done. I did believe in Ned -- of Marina and the others we get a much less full picture. And Ned's actions are, well, in the end proper (now as much as they were in 1936 when the book is set) though of course he should have acted (or not acted!) much earlier. As I've said, Strachey's paragraph by paragraph writing is strong, and her powers of description impressive. This book has moments of comedy, but it's not generally comic in the way Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is; and I suppose I felt that in the end the book was just a bit thin. But I'm not sorry to have read it; and I do think Strachey, though of course a very minor writer, still a writer worth continued attention.

Birthday Review: The Gifts of the Child Christ and other stories, by George MacDonald

I realized that it has been over a month since I posted on this blog. There are Reasons, of course (mostly 2020 reasons), but that's too long. So I figured I would post a birthday review today -- this one is something rather short I wrote about 20 years ago. (I hope to have "non-bestseller review" of a 20th Century woman writer, Julia Strachey, in a day or two.)

George MacDonald was one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, 19th Century fantasist, a mentor to Samuel Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and a key influence on C. S. Lewis. He was born on 10 December 1824, and died in 1905. He grew up in the Congregationalist church and become a minister, but eventually lost his job partly because of his somewhat unconventional theological views. I had thought he was a Unitarian (inside joke: from the period before Unitarians became lovers of Mary Oliver's poetry), but now I can't find that he ever officially left the Congregationalist denomination -- that said, his theology seems to me more in tune with 19th century Unitarian/Universalist thinking. (It should be noted that the formal Unitarian church (at least in the US) was founded as a result of schism with the Congregationalists.) He moved to the Italian Riviera in the 1870s and did much of his writing there. Much of McDonald's fiction was essentially religious. I am particularly fond of his children's novels, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie. He also wrote adult novels, most importantly Phantastes and Lilith.

He also wrote a lot of shorter fiction. The Gifts of the Child Christ and Other Stories, a collection of much of the best of his shorter works (selected by Glenn Edward Sadler). These include a couple of stories I have read before in solo editions: The Light Princess a very funny story about a princess with no gravity, either of spirit or physically; and The Golden Key, a lovely symbolic story about a boy and a girl and their long journey together. (My reviews of those two books can be found here.) Other highlights are The Wise Woman, or The Lost Princess, a long story (35,000 words or so) about a spoiled princess and a spoiled shepherd's child and the efforts of an old wise woman to reform them; the title story, about how the daughter of a too serious man and his neglected young wife brings them together after their younger child is stillborn; "The Carasoyn" (or "The Fairy Fleet"), about a young man and his less than enjoyable involvement with a group of fairies and their queen; "The History of Photogen and Nycteris" (or "The Day Boy and the Night Girl"), about two babies kidnapped by an evil fairy, the boy brought up only in daylight, the girl only in darkness; and "The Cruel Painter" is a fine story about a painter who insisted on distorting his scenes to bring out the worst in their subjects, and the young man who falls in love with his daughter and comes to work as his apprentice.

There are quite a few more stories, most quite interesting, roughly evenly divided between fairy tales or fantasies and contemporary tales. Only very rarely does MacDonald moralize to the detriment of his stories, though his stories do quite often make moral points. (And quite explicitly Christian points.) Sadler has also selected quite a few period illustrations, many by Arthur Hughes, many from the original publications of the stories. 

Birthday Review: Stories (and capsule novel reviews) of R. A. Lafferty

 R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) was one of the most individual of SF writers. He began publishing in his mid 40s, with much of his early work appearing in Pohl’s magazines (Galaxy and If). His primary mode was the “tall tale”, and he attracted attention with the stories that appeared in his first collection, Nine Hundred Grandmothers, and then with his early novels, such as Past Master, Fourth Mansions, and The Devil is Dead. He appeared regularly in magazine and anthologies for a couple of decades, after which his work, which had either outworn its popular welcome or become too individual for a wide audience, mostly appeared in small press publications. I enjoyed a great many of his short stories, though I tended to find his novels a bit uneven, or a lot uneven.

Below are reviews of a few Lafferty stories I've reread recently in old magazine or anthologies, plus very short capsule reviews of two early novels.

If, September 1960

And finally, far and away the best story in this issue is Lafferty's "The Six Fingers of Time". I didn't recall the story though I've surely read it before: it was in Nine Hundred Grandfathers as well as a couple more anthologies. I would venture to say that it is the first really significant story Lafferty published. I liked it a great deal.

It opens with Charles Vincent waking up and discovering that time has nearly stopped for him. At first this is a source of puzzlement, then concern. But he does get caught up at work! Later he uses his advantage to pull silly tricks like undoing women's clothes (reminding me of Nicholson Baker's novel The Fermata). Eventually he learns a modicum of control over his power, and is approached by a shady man who seems to have much greater abilities in this area, and who talks of a link to extradigitalism (Vincent has a partial extra thumb). The end of the story is strong and mysterious, with references to the "smell of the pit", and a chance at much greater power -- but at what cost? And, of course, an eventual inevitable ending. Quite a fine piece of work.

Galaxy, April 1961

“All the People” is a very early Lafferty story. The voice is familiar, if not fully developed. The story is pretty good, if a bit more traditional than usual for Lafferty. It's about a person cruelly called “Tony the Tin Man”, he thinks because his father was a junk dealer. But in reality he's a “restricted person”, a cyborg attached to a computer, able to sense the feelings of all the people in the world, and so to detect if any are unexpected – perhaps invading aliens. And how would a “restricted person” react to an invasion?

Galaxy, August 1961

"Aloys" is a shortish Lafferty piece, decent and fairly characteristic work. The hero is a spectacular scientist, but naïve and poor and obscure, and when he is given an award he is subverted by a typically Laffertian secret society. It's best for its portrayal of Aloys himself. 

The Reefs of Earth

(Cover by Richard Powers)

The Reefs of Earth is an early R. A. Lafferty novel.  This is the first Lafferty I've read since reading Flann O'Brian, and I was struck by a certain resemblance.  I don't know if this is just some value of common Irish storytelling tradition, or if there is some direct influence.  This story tells of an extended family of alien "Pucas", marooned on the "Reefs of Earth", and how the children plot to avenge their parents.  Madly readable, but it doesn't really come off.  For one thing, almost all the characters are really quite unpleasant (by design, for sure).  And the cockeyed narrative logic, interesting by fits and starts, is just annoying on occasion.

Fourth Mansions

(Cover by Leo and Diane Dillon)

For all I'm reading lots of 1999 books, I'm trying not to neglect the past. I'd never read R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions before, one of his best known novels.  It's a wild book, which shouldn't surprise anyone who has read Lafferty.  It's about a young newspaperman who stumbles on a multi-faceted plot to rule the world, involving "people" who live for many centuries, occasionally emerging to foil the hopes of normal humans, and another group of people who have learned how to psychically merge into a new sort of being, but who don't know how to use this power for good, and further people like the "patricks", who are vaguely supposed to be on the good side, I think. The newspaperman is pursued and hounded by several of these forces, and put in the madhouse, and so on.  Another young man gains certain powers and tries to overturn civilization for apparently good reasons.  It's all unstructured as heck, and sometimes boring, but sometimes weirdly fascinating, very original, quite ambitious in theme; and in the end just barely a success on its unique terms.  

New Dimensions II

“Eurema’s Dam” is in the “tall tale” dimension. Eurema is a Greek word that means, roughly, “invention”, so the title means, “mother of invention”, and the theme is, more or less, “stupidity is the mother of invention”. The hero is Albert, “the last of the dolts”. Because he isn’t smart enough to do anything himself, he keeps inventing machines to do things for him. Of course, it turns out that those machines are useful for lots of other people as well. So Albert gets rich. But he doesn’t really care about that. And what really ends up bothering him is that the machines he creates think he’s a dolt, too, and when they take over … well, you see where it’s going. It’s a fun enough story, but it doesn’t have the true inspiration, the magic, that I find in his best stories.

Odyssey, Summer 1976

And Lafferty's story, "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs", is pretty characteristic of him, about a man who loves springs and their "pegeids" (analogous to naiads). They are all imperfect, and the pegeid at the center of this story turns out to be imperfect in a scary way. Plenty of linguistic invention and verve, but probably a bit too long, too rambling. Minor Lafferty, really.