Review: Sally-Ann, by "Susan Scarlett" (Noel Streatfeild)

Review: Sally-Ann, by "Susan Scarlett" (Noel Streatfeild)

by Rich Horton

Based on recommendations from both Scott Thompson of Furrowed Middlebrow and Jo Walton, I decided a while back that I ought to try Noel Streatfeild, and perhaps particularly her light romance novels written as by "Susan Scarlett". These latter comprise a dozen books published between 1939 and 1951, books which Streatfeild seemed to all but disown, regarding them, I suppose, as less serious than her adult fiction under her own name.

Streatfeild was born in 1895, the daughter of a Vicar who eventually became a Bishop. Her family name is quite old in England (perhaps signaled by the unconventional spelling of "field"?) but they were not well off (at least, I suppose, not until her father became a Bishop.) She became an actress and model, and in the 1930s turned to writing fiction. She published sixteen adult novels (plus the 12 "Susan Scarlett" books), and quite a few books for children, beginning in 1936 with the still popular Ballet Shoes. Her children's books retain enough popularity that they were mentioned in the film You've Got Mail. Her adult books seem to have been a varied lot, some quite dark, some comic, some mixed in tone, and were quite well respected and still have admirers. She was named to the Order of the British Empire in 1983 and died in 1986, aged 90.

Sally-Ann (1939) was the second "Susan Scarlett" novel. The main character is Ann Lane, an 18 year old girl working in a beauty shop. Her father trained to be a doctor but had to drop out and take a job as a chemist (pharmacist, in US terms) and then had to sell his shop after a block of flats were built nearby with their own chemist shop. The family struggles to make ends meet by taking in boarders. Ann's 11 year old brother has significant health issues.

Ann's job is fairly high status, it seems -- she's the junior of two makeup specialists. The shop seems to attract a high-end clientele, and the plot is set in motion when the senior makeup specialist falls ill on the wedding day of a Marquis's daughter. Ann is sent as her replacement. And after making up the bride, a crisis arrives -- one of the bridesmaids has also fallen ill. For vaguely implausible reasons there must be a replacement -- and the Marchioness realizes that Ann is just the same size as the missing bridesmaid, who is from South Africa and unknown to any of the wedding guests. Ann is drafted into being the replacement -- and to calling herself, for just this day, Sally.

OK, that didn't make much sense! And, inevitably, Ann and one of the groomsmen, Sir Timothy Munster (heir to the Munster soap fortune) fall head over heels in love. Sir Timothy pursues Ann, who has to pretend to be Sally just a bit longer, and after a couple of meetings they are wholly committed to each other -- even as Timothy still thinks Ann is Sally. The problem is, Timothy's cousin, Cora Bolt, is in love with him too -- and she makes plans to find out who Ann really is and put a spoke in Timothy's romance. Cora manages to do so (after another outrageous coincidence) and while Timothy is unfazed by Ann's circumstances, and in fact makes friends quickly with Ann's brother, Timothy's father is infuriated, and threatens to disinherit him. So Ann nobly decides she must break off with Timothy, and go hide in the country -- because she will not be the woman to ruin Timothy's life.

Does all work out well in the end? Do you really need to ask? Is this a bit of implausible fluff? Well, yes it is. But is it still lots of fun? That too! For one thing, though Ann and Timothy are both a tad idealized (Ann especially) they are still nice characters to read about. (Cora Bolt is portrayed as rather mean and selfish -- I felt this was a bit of a weakness and it seemed to me she deserved to be pitied more than despised. And we never do learn her fate.) Some of the best parts of the book revolve around Ann's job -- her working environment, and her rapport with her co-workers, seem very well portrayed to me, very realistic. Streatfeild was a working woman herself for some time, and had to make her own way financially, and I think she knew her way around all this. 

Is this a great novel? No. But it's fun and I'm glad I read it. My copy is one of Dean Street Press's Furrowed Middlebrow books -- books chosen by Scott Thompson for reprinting. Over the past few years Scott has been able to reprint in the neighborhood of 100 books under this imprint. Alas, the sudden and untimely death some months ago of his publisher, Rupert Heath, has put an end to this project. But by all means check out these books, by writers you may have heard of (Stella Gibbons, E. Nesbit, Margery Sharp) and some much less well known.

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, November/December 2023

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, November/December 2023

Here's a look at the fiction in the latest issue of one of the greatest SF magazines of all time.

Novellas:

"The Ghosts of Mars", by Dominica Phetteplace

"The Death of the Hind", by Kevin J. Anderson and Rick Wilber

"Blade and Bone", by Paul McAuley

Novelette: 

"The Open Road Leads to the Used Car Lot", by John Alfred Taylor

Short Stories:

"Embot's Lament", by James Patrick Kelly

"Berb by Berb", by Ray Nayler

"Neptune Acres", by Robert R. Chase

"Meet-Your-Hero", by Prashanth Srivatsa

"The Four Last Things", by Christopher Rowe

"The Disgrace of the Commodore", by Marguerite Sheffer

"In the Days After ...", by Frank Ward

Novellas first ... I will say upfront that "The Ghosts of Mars" and "The Death of The Hind" were mild disappointments. Worth reading, but not special. Both are sequels to earlier stories. "The Ghosts of Mars" follows "Candida Eve", a strong story about a woman who is the only survivor of a trip to Mars -- her fellows, as well as many people on Earth, died in a plague. (The story was indeed -- though I am sure accidentally -- rather topical when it appeared in the May-June 2020 Analog.) This new story is set many years later, after a subsequent attempt to colonize Mars also failed, leaving, again, one person behind -- the Martian-born daughter of the heroine of "Candida Eve". She stayed on Mars because she had genetic alterations which made returning to Earth impossible. Now that Mars has been abandoned to her and the robots, the story follows her dealings with the robots, her conversations with people (including her mother) on the ship returning to Earth, and with a social network friend on Earth, and eventually with a visiting alien ship ... There's a lot going on, and it's pretty interesting, but some of it just didn't convince me, and also I felt the story overlong. "The Death of the Hind" is the sequel to "The Hind", a pretty good story about a crisis on a generation ship, escaping a ruined Earth and traveling to a "Goldilocks" planet. That crisis involved damage to the ship's AI, which necessitated a harsh regimen including forced euthanasia, until (in the story) the AI is partially repaired. This story is set a few decades later, as the Hind approaches its destination, and the conflict is between the Captain's daughter Dothan, a pilot who is eager to get to the planet, and her estranged father, who thinks they should stay on the ship, especially after it's revealed that the planet, though habitable, isn't quite the paradise some had expected. Other characters are the decaying AI, Dothan's Down Syndrome son, and the Captain herself. I thought the story a bit over-determined -- everything that happened seemed like stuff I've read in many previous generation ship stories, and I was also nitpickingly bothered by what seemed clichés such as naming the planet Goldilocks, and the first settlement First Landing. 

Paul McAuley's novella, "Blade and Bone", on the other hand, is outstanding. It's set on Mars, some centuries after the end of the Quiet War, which McAuley chronicled in a series of exceptional stories and novels. This Mars is only partly terraformed, and life is difficult. Groups of "Trues", who had established a harsh empire earlier, predicated on maintaining the "true" human genome despite advances that allow people to live in the outer Solar System and other harsh environments, raid farms and small cities, murdering indiscriminately. The protagonist, Lev, is a middle-aged mercenary, who had hoped to retire until his previous mission ended terribly. He's hired on with a group that has a contract with an ancient uploaded brain, who wishes for them to recover some relics from one of his descendants -- one of her fingerbones and her vorpal blade. The group is chasing the Trues who apparently stole these relics. Lev makes friends -- of a sort -- with the "agent" of their client, as well as a trigger-happy young recruit -- and when things go profoundly pear-shaped, Lev is nearly the only survivor, and is forced to chase after the blade and the bone -- which seem to be unlucky things to possess. It's a dark story, but not quite a hopeless one. It's exciting, and thoughtful, and mildly twisty. 

The only novelette is John Alfred Taylor's "The Open Road Leads to the Used Car Lot". Taylor died on October 7, just about as this issue was published -- he had turned 92 in September. (I learned from his obituary -- thanks to Jim Harris and Piet Nel for the alert -- that he was born in my city, St. Louis, and that he went to Southeast Missouri State university.) This leaves 95 year old Allen Kim Lang as possibly the oldest still active SF writer, with D. G. Compton having just died at age 93, and Donald Kingsbury (not quite 94 years old) as far as I know not still writing. Taylor had published occasional short fiction for over 50 years, both SF and Horror, and some was very impressive. This story is pretty good, about Isaac, who in 1964 is offered a chance to meet a woman he'd spent a day with in 1939 at the World's Fair. It's immediately clear to the reader that she's a time traveler -- and soon that's clear when Isaac meets her and realizes she's the same age she was in 1939 -- and so some very strange things Isaac saw back then are explained. The story really revolves around technological change -- from the Victorian Era to 1939 to 1964 and to the time traveler's future. 

I'll go through the short stories in TOC order. James Patrick Kelly writes a column for Asimov's, and for a long time was a very regular contributor -- with stories almost every June. But as there aren't June issues any more "Embot's Lament" comes in November-December. It's a good story -- Embot is a "timecaster" -- a sort of AI that records a person's life experiences and transmits them to the future. Its job this time is Jane, who is stuck in a terribly abusive marriage. She is finally trying to get out -- and Embot is tempted to help, even though that's against the rules. The results lead to significant consequences for Jane -- and also for Embot.

"Berb by Berb" is set in the same future as other Ray Nayler stories like "The Disintegration Loops" -- one in which the US recovered a crashed flying saucer in 1938, and tech derived from that radically altered World War II and after. This story is set in an area of the US near a lab at which there was an accident with the alien tech. The result is that assemblages of -- junk, I suppose -- coalesce and become sort of robots. The protagonist had worked at the lab, and now lives in the area, dealing with the occasional "visiting" berb. What are berbs really? What do they do? Who knows? Maybe even they don't. And the story -- resonating a bit with the ideas about intelligence in Nayler's excellent first novel The Mountain in the Sea -- lets us ask the questions too.

"Neptune Acres", by Robert R. Chase, is a look at an attempt to profit from climate change and rising sea levels by selling submersible housing, from the point of a view of a man recruited to attend the sales party who ends up in grave danger after a storm arises. Decent back of the book work, mild topical extrapolation. 

Prashant Srivatsa's "Meet-Your-Hero" posits a near future technology that allows one to virtually visit a "hero" -- like a movie star. Junaid is a poor young man who enters the lottery each week to try to win a ticket to meet his favorite star -- and then he does. With perhaps predictably disillusioning results. The best part of the story is the believable and grounded portrayal of Junaid's life, his mother's financial stress, etc.

"The Four Last Things" is the prize story in this issue (along with "Blade and Bone".) Christopher Rowe, over the past year or more, enthusiastically discovered the great Cordwainer Smith, and of course there was influence. Influence transmuted, naturally, through Rowe's own striking imagination. The Four Last Things, in Catholic theology, are Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. Here we have the crew of a "mule ship", arriving at the planet Ouest'Mer, which is the home of strange sea-living worms, who make noises that may or may not have meaning as they "drum" in the ocean. Each of the four crew members reacts differently, interprets differently, based on their nature, their history -- and each are stressed by disaster. It's a weird story, an evocative story, a mysterious story. The Smith influence is at once evident, and indirect. The weirdness evokes Smith, the feeling that this is an organic future, not a version of the present day. But the imagination is all Rowe's. (I will suggest another writer whose (rare) fiction I thought of while reading this story -- John Clute, especially his novel Appleseed.)

Marguerite Sheffer's "The Disgrace of the Commodore" is a curious brief piece about a ship's commander who lost his ship to the British in 1807, and in the story is in what he thinks is Purgatory -- he's in a ghost ship as his real ship is disassembled. It's nicely written, but it didn't quite work for me. 

Finally, Frank Ward offers "In the Days After ...", as a woman comes to Louisville to adopt a child, for reasons that slowly become clear -- a strange disaster that conferred a sort of immortality on a subset of people. And the effect of that immortality is, for some at least, quite terrible. The general idea is familiar, but the particular effects on some characters in the story are nicely portrayed. 

One last comment -- I was amused to note that this issue features four writers in their 70s or older -- all who were contributing to Asimov's in the 1980s or 1990s and still are today. (Taylor, Chase, Kelly, and Ward.)

Review: Sunday Morning Transport, October 1, 2023 -- November 19, 2023

Review: Sunday Morning Transport, October 1, 2023 -- November 19, 2023

Sunday Morning Transport is an excellent online magazine of SF and Fantasy, that began publishing in January, 2022. The Editor-in-Chief is Julian Yap, and the Managing Editor is Fran Wilde. They publish one story per week, on Sunday morning of course. It is a subscription site, part of the Substack empire, but one story each month is free. I will say that I recommend you subscribe! (For one thing, I really think we should be paying for our short fiction -- in the long run, that's how we can pay the authors. For another thing, it's good value for the money!)

I've decided to begin reviewing occasional "issues" of magazines -- print issues of print magazines, and however issues might be defined for online 'zines. Sunday Morning Transport doesn't define "issues" per se, however -- so I just went back to October 1st and I'll cover all of those stories until Thanksgiving -- mostly briefly. Just to give a flavor. 

October 1, "Halfway Between Albany and West Point", by John Chu

This is an interior monologue by a TA at a university that seems to blend teaching of music with teaching of assassination. The narrator tells of his reaction to an attempt by one of his students in the Harmony and Counterpoint class to kill him. It's very cleverly told, and interesting throughout, but I confess I wanted an explanation of why the university has a required "practicum" which involves each student killing a teacher. The math doesn't seem to work. Perhaps I missed something obvious. But it was a fun read.

October 8, "The Inventor We May Learn Is More of a Conceptual Artist in Part Seven", by Leslie What

Opens as series of descriptions of amusing weird inventions, but moves darkly and effectively to something quite different. It's quite short, and it works, and I don't want to give anything away.

October 15, "Redemption Weather", by Christopher Rowe

Sana is a flyer for the Katabatic League in what seems a post climate catastrophe world, racked by terrible stories. The League works -- or claims to work -- to temper the storms. As the story opens, she notices a struggling aircraft, barely making it to shore, and she helps rescue it. And the passenger makes a strange claim -- he knows "the Secret of Bait". Which results in Sana and this man yoked together, in a fashion. Rowe has the ability -- the Tiptree-like ability -- to tell us almost nothing, show us intriguing stuff, and never explain yet fascinate. (As Tiptree put it: "Start from the end and preferably 5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then DON’T TELL THEM." We don't know exactly the details of this world, nor the end result of the actions shown -- but it's intriguing indeed. So it works.

October 22, "We Will Witness", by Martin Cahill

A well written story of a man dying in a war, and a time traveler appearing to "witness" his death, to offer comfort. Moving, but, to my mind, a bit slight. But effectively empathetic.

October 29, "Mother Tongue", by Zoe Bellerive

Bellerive's first sale, I think, and it's really nicely written, in dialect, about Cassie, whose mother is a witch, and who runs away from home when her mother cuts out her tongue and sews in her own (the mother's) in its place. Cassie catches a frog, and plays card with it, and, well -- like a few of these stories, I felt like it wanted to show setting, and character, and language -- and worked on all those levels. But didn't quite have a finish. Still, I'd read more about Cassie.

November 5, "Mid-Earth Removals Limited", by R. S. A. Garcia

This is a pretty amusing story about a woman dealing with waste cleanup after magical creatures invade Mid-Earth from another realm -- which means leaving lots of messes, but, well, making life more interesting. And our heroine confronts a soldier who realizes that now he's in Mid-Earth, his Immortal Lord, His Evilness, no longer has power over him. So he joins with the protagonist to help with the title operation. Fun stuff, again, a tad slight.

November 12, "The Corruption of Malik the Unsmiling", by Naseem Jamnia

Reminded me a bit of "Mid-Earth Removals Limited" -- a light-hearted story about setting up a small business in a magical place. This time, it's a gas station/coffee shop in Hell, run by a jinn. Who, against his nature, insist on ethically sourced products -- and who also makes friends with Mister M., the title character, who -- well, never smiles, among other duties. Enjoyable.

November 19, "By Throat and Void", by Tobias S. Buckell

A pure adventure story, in which a ship full of refugees, fleeing a war, tries to escape through the "Throat" to their sister planet. Cool SF ideas, exciting action, and a rather cynical but believable resolution. And, like many of the stories, well done, but seeming to be the part of something bigger. Though this story does resolve itself.

In sum, then -- this is a 'zine wholly worth reading. All of the stories are well-written, all of the voices are intriguing. Of course, they are not all completely successful. And perhaps there's a habit of leaving the reading want a bit more -- which isn't always a bad thing. From this tranche, I especially recommend the stories by Christopher Rowe and Leslie What. (From earlier in the year, I will mention particularly "Alphabet of Swans", by E. Lily Yu; and "The In-Between", by James Patrick Kelly.

Old Bestseller Review: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

Old Bestseller Review: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

a review by Rich Horton

This is perhaps Wilkie Collins' best known novel (the other candidate being The Moonstone.) It was serialized in 1859-1860 in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round; and then in three volumes by Sampson Low in August 1860. It was also published nearly simultaneously in the US -- serialized in Harper's Weekly, then in book form by Harper and Brothers about two weeks after the English first. It is considered  the first "sensation novel".

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was the son of a painter, William Collins. He spent some time as an adolescent in France and Italy and became fluent in both French and Italian. His father wished him to become a clergyman but Wilkie would have none of it. He did study law, and indeed passed the bar but never practiced. He worked for several years as a clerk for a tea merchant. His first story appeared in 1843 and his first novel, Antonina, in 1850. (In the interim, he published a biography of his father.) Charles Dickens took an interest in his work, and many of Collins' stories and novels appeared in Dickens' two magazines, the aforementioned All the Year Round and also Household Words. Collins and Dickens also collaborated on some stories and a play. (Dickens' contributions to literature as an editor and mentor to other writers are pretty significant -- see Elizabeth Gaskell as well.) Collins became well off after The Woman in White's success. He ended up publishing a couple of dozen novels, a number of short stories, and several plays (including a well-regarded adaptation of The Woman in White.) He suffered severely from gout, and took laudanum for the pain, becoming an opium addict.

His personal life was a bit controversial. He never married (he disapproved of the institution), but enjoyed long-term liaisons with two women (often simultaneously): Caroline Graves, and Martha Rudd. He had three children with Rudd, and also raised Graves' daughter as his own. I might add that some details of his autobiography make their way into The Woman in White to some degree -- the main male character is an artist, like Collins' father; legal machinations are critical to the novel, using his knowledge of the law (though he made one enormous mistake); and I would argue that his main character's relationship with the two main women characters strikes me as essentially bigamous, though it is not really presented quite that way.

The novel is told primarily by Walter Hartright, a young drawing teacher, in about 1850. Hartright presents it a faithful record of the events concerning the mysterious "woman in white" and Laura Fairlie, a young woman whom he tutors in drawing, and who has a striking resemblance to the woman in white. Hartright makes it clear he is writing all this after the novel's resolution, and he add that he will include the testimony of other characters in the narrative when necessary. Thus, much of the novel is presented as diary entries of Laura Fairlie's half-sister Marian Halcombe, and there are other shorter entries -- depositions from witnesses to some events, a confession of sorts by the chief villain, etc. It's a nice device, and Collins uses it effectively.

The novel is divided into three parts, or "epochs". In the first we see Walter Hartright accept the commission from Frederick Fairlie, the incredibly lazy and selfish uncle of Laura Fairlie, to teach his two wards drawing. (Laura's parents are both dead, as are Marian Halcombe's (she was the daughter of Laura's mother and her first husband.)) Walter also meets the mysterious "woman in white", whom he learns is an escapee from an asylum. Walter and Laura soon fall in love, and Marian advises Walter that he must resign his position and leave, for Laura is already engaged. The engagement is briefly endangered by an anonymous letter denouncing Laura's fiancé, Sir Percival Glyde -- which Walter learns was sent by the woman in white, who also closely resembles Laura, and who knew Laura's mother. After Walter leaves, Marian takes over the narrative, and we learn of the unfair marriage contract Sir Percival forces on Laura -- which will give him her fortune if she predeceases him.

The next epoch shows Laura and Sir Percival's trouble marriage -- it is clear that all Sir Percival wants from Laura is her money. Marian attempts to protect Laura, but there is a new character, the flamboyant and corpulent Italian Count Fosco, who also has financial reasons for harming Laura ... for his wife is Laura's aunt, who would receive a portion of her inheritance were she to die. After a lot of maneuvering, and an inconvenient illness for Marian, the Count is able to set some schemes in motion, with the object of removing the obstruction Laura offers, and also to deal with Anne Catherick, who may know an inconvenient Secret about Sir Percival Glyde.

The third epoch follows the efforts of Walter Hartright, after his return from Central America, where he fled to nurse his sorrows after having to leave Laura, to unravel the dastardly schemes of Count Fosco, to learn what really happened to both Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick, and to find out Sir Percival's Secret. I won't say more -- this is a very plotty novel, very satisfyingly so, and I don't wish to spoil it.

In the end it's an extremely fun read. There are two great characters -- the villainous but impressive Count Fosco, and the redoubtable Marian Halcombe. It must be said that Laura Fairlie and Walter Hartright are both a bit dull. Though Laura is described as far more beautiful than Marian, and also as the more accomplished at drawing and music, it is Marian who is intelligent and brave and unconventional, and it's not a surprise that Collins received letters from men who wanted to know who was her original, so they could find her and marry her. I don't rank this novel with such novels as Middlemarch, David Copperfield, and North and South ... it really is a bit too melodramatic. As I said, it is considered the first "sensation novel" -- novels that showed lurid happenings in apparently normal English families. (Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, from just two years after The Woman in White, is another sensation novel.) I don't think Collins' prose is quite on the level of Eliot or Dickens, though it's fine. His characters are not as acutely drawn. But his plot is intricate and fascinating. There are some delicious comic moments, mostly involving either Count Fosco or Frederick Fairlie. Most assuredly a novel worth reading, worth its fairly steady reputation. And I will be reading at least The Moonstone, Collins' second most famous novel, in the coming several months.

Clock Star Rose Spine, by Fran Wilde

Clock Star Rose Spine, by Fran Wilde

a review by Rich Horton

I have been enjoying Fran Wilde's fiction for quite a while now, but I wasn't really aware of her poetry. (Likely I should have been, given that a story like "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" could be seen as a long prose poem.) But I ran across a copy of her collection of poems, Clock Star Rose Spine at a convention a while ago, and snapped it up. I had sampled it from time to time, but I didn't remember to read it all through until seeing Fran at the World Fantasy Convention recently (and having her sign the book.)

Forgive me for my vocabulary for reviewing poetry isn't at the level as I think it is for fiction. But I'll do what I can! I'll start by mentioning that we sometimes think that our genre fiction writers will write genre poetry -- but that doesn't need to be the case at all! For one thing, in the classic sense, poetry is a genre all its own. But for another thing -- the conventions of genre, what makes a genre writer a genre writer (and remembering that many writers can't be pigeonholed as "genre" writers anyway) is usually plot, or setting, or speculation. What makes poetry poetry is (mostly!) language. And language is important to any writer. (Or I should hope it is -- insert snide Dan Brown remark here if you wish!)

Clock Star Rose Spine was published in 2021 by Lanternfish Press. It is illustrated by the author, very nicely. (I had no idea Fran was an artist as well!) There are four sections, one for each word of the title. The poems are sometimes intensely personal (including eight "Self Portraits") ... actually, they are all intensely personal, but some more obviously so than others. There are some poems that do fit in the SF/F genre, such as "Self Portrait as a Selkie" and "You are Two Point Three Meters from Your Destination". There are poems about family, poems about place, poems about art, poems about people, poems about ideas. So it should be for every collection! There are poems that ache, poems that smile, lines that land perfectly.

A few favorite poems: "Clock Star Rose Spine", "You are Two Point Three Meters from Your Destination", "A Catalog of Lost Negatives", "Comet Garment", "Wish Boat", "Theft", "Orrery", "Self Portrait as Event Horizon". (My mother would scold me for calling eight "a few" -- "that's several," she would say, when I took "a few" cookies!)

A few favorite lines: "A series of gates -- too small to pass through.", "the ink bleeding tendrils of blue throught the bright",  "No one knows we're standing still, even when we're not dancing", "Your words float on the wind.", "Even the word does what it says, each "r" spun around the big "O".

Review: Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty, by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis

Review: Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty, by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis

a review by Rich Horton

Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (1988) was the last novel Avram Davidson (1923-1993) published in his lifetime. As with his posthumous novella, The Boss in the Wall, it was a collaboration with his ex-wife Grania Davis. Davidson and Davis divorced amicably and remained close, and, in fact, Davidson was godfather to Seth Davis, Grania's son with her second husband, and Seth has been doing excellent work as Davidson's literary executor, bringing much of his work back to print, and publishing some unsold novels and memoirs as well. Grania Davis (1943-2017) was a significant author in her own right. She published a couple of dozen short stories, and several solo novels, most notably, perhaps, Moonbird (1986), a fantastical tale set in Bali.

This novel primarily concerns the mission of Marco Polo, along with his father Niccolo, and his uncle Maffeo, to seek out the rumored castle of the Sleeping Beauty. They have been in China (Cathay) for some years, working for the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, and the aging Kublai is interested in the Sleeping Beauty's apparent immortality, not to mention her beauty, and also is interested in any hope of a cure for his favorite son, Prince Chenghin. 

That's the basic setup, but the real point of the book is to present a humorous (and slightly satirical), romantic, colorful and adventurous travelogue through the wonders and perils of Asia in the 13th Century. In the manner we expect from an Avram Davidson novel (see: the Vergil books and the Peregrine books, not to mention Adventures in Unhistory), this particular 13th Century is based more on the legends and fancies prevalent at the time than it is on our history, though it hews at least in the basics to the biographies of the Polos and Kublai Khan.

Pretending to be collectors of the Khan's salt tax, the three Polos, along with Marco's slave Peter the Tartar, the scholar Yen Lung-chuan (who believes all is illusion, even fierce animals attacking them), and a party of the Khan's soldiers, attempt to follow the ambiguous directions on a map which purports to show the location of the Sleeping Beauty's castle. Along the way they gain and lose allies, such as the mighty Norseman Olavr; the beautiful acrobat Su-Shen, with whom Marco falls in love; a clever miniature sphinx, who is always riddling (of course); the herbalist Hua T'o; and a strange traveling knight, who goes by many names, but mostly (in this narrative) Hou-Ying. They encounter dragons, griffins, huge snow leopards, frogs, a trickster monkey, cannibals, dog-headed pirates, sea-dragons, ghosts, warrior nuns, a giant talking carp, and many further marvels. They visit much of the Khan's empire, plus Bur-Mien, the Pleasure Island, Tebet, and other places. They are menaced repeatedly by Cumanian rebels allied with Kublai's rebellious cousin Kaidu Khan. And we are treated to some of Marco's earlier dealings with Kublai Khan, including witnessing his disastrous attempts to invade Japangu.

This is all a bit discursive, but never boring. (Though I imagined at times that Grania Davis was grabbing the reins from Davidson, and insisting the narrative move forward.) But the depictions of the wondrous and fearful creatures and locales is enjoyable. The tone is usually light, but some darker, and some sweeter, scenes convince, particularly Marco's romance with Su-Shen. The resolution of the plot is logical -- consistent with the outlines of the Sleeping Beauty story but sensible in the context of Kublai Khan's desires. It is not a great novel, but a fun one.

Resurrected Review: Cavalcade, by Alison Sinclair

Here's a review I wrote back in 2000 of Alison Sinclair's novel Cavalcade.

Cavalcade

by Alison Sinclair

Millennium, London, 1999, (originally published 1998), £5.99;

ISBN: 1-85798-564-8

A review by Rich Horton

This interesting novel is set entirely on an alien spaceship. The book opens just as hundreds of thousands of humans have woken up from being transported from Earth to the ship. This was entirely voluntary: the aliens came and announced that they'd take anyone who wanted to go. People are segregated by language, it seems, and we follow the viewpoints of a few people in the English language area: Stan Morgan, a NASA scientist attached to a U. S. Army squad which hopes to learn enough about the spaceship to be able to return to Earth with the data; his niece Hathaway, a pregnant teen who just wants a new life away from her stressful home; Stephen Cooper, a disaffected young man who was afraid he would be wanted for murder and who found the ship a convenient way to run really far away; and Sophie Hemmingway, an upper class American research M. D. who fears a genetic disease will give her Alzheimer's by the time she's fifty, and who hopes to learn from the aliens.

The story starts somewhat slowly, but the characters are interesting enough to hold our attention. Almost everyone is surprised by the way the ship works. No electrical device will work, shattering Sophie's hopes of research, and frustrating many people's belief that they will be able to communicate with Earth. Food supplies seem to be a problem, but in time the ship itself starts to make food. Shelter is a problem, but the ship can be altered to provide this as well. A variety of societies quickly form: an all-women society (complete with explicit allusions to Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See"), an anarchic group, and the main group, an attempt at a cooperative society run by an expert in refugee camps.

The novel follows to some extent the stresses involved in setting up these groups, and in their interaction, but the more important problem is understanding the ship and the aliens, who don't seem to want to communicate. Morgan and his army squad attack the problem somewhat analytically, including a dangerous expedition into a dark core area which might be the control room. Stephen Cooper, always a loner, explores the ship on his own and also finds the control room. Hathaway is an artist, and she finds that her attempts at painting on the ships walls provoke a response that may be communication.

Then a series of crises bring things to a head: first a plague which kills many of the humans, followed by Stephen's past catching up with him, then conflict between the different societies, and finally an emergency as the ship seems to begin to break down. The final parts of the book are very exciting, and the resolution is quite original, and also very moving. The central mysteries are resolved fairly and in an interesting manner, the plot is resolved excitingly and without cheating, and the book's theme is strong and saisfying, and deeply science-fictional. In some ways it is reminiscent of Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, or perhaps one might say it is almost a response to that work.

All in all, this is a very satisfying novel, highly recommended. It is well-deserving of its position on the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist for its year of publication. One might quibble over a few details. Some of the plot is set into motion by odd coincidences. One gets very little sense that the ship is populated by any humans but the English speaking ones, though Sinclair is careful to mention that their are enclaves for every culture and (major) language. And as I said, the opening is a bit slow. But these are minor points, and on balance I was very pleased. (Also, while I admit to being predisposed to this statement by knowing that Sinclair is Canadian, this seemed a very Canadian book, even though none of the major characters is Canadian.)