Double Novel Review: Address: Centauri, by F. L. Wallace/If These Be Gods, by Algis Budrys

Double Novel Review: Address: Centauri, by F. L. Wallace/If These Be Gods, by Algis Budrys

by Rich Horton

I have a particular interest in Ace Doubles. As a result, I also take an interest in other Double Books, so plan to review at least one example of, for instance, the Belmont Double series (already done), and the Tor Double series (I have some, need to review them) and so on. This book is a new example of the concept. It's an Armchair Fiction double book -- two "novels" published together, with a cover format explicitly modeled on that of Ace Doubles from the 1950s, though the trim size is that of a smallish trade paperback. It's not quite tête-bêche -- instead of the novels published so that each is upside down relative to the other, there are arranged consecutively, but the front and back cover are each a cover for one of the two "novels". (I use "novel" in quotes because, as with Ace Doubles, many of the stories included are not full-length novels. For example, in this book, the F. L. Wallace novel is a true novel, at a bit over 80,000 words, but the Algis Budrys story is a long novelette of some 16,000 words.)

Armchair Fiction itself is an interesting project. The proprietor is Gregory J. Luce, and over the past decade and more he has reprinted a great many obscure SF stories from, mostly, the 1950s and 1960s. Some are in this Double format, some are collections, some are novels published alone. His strategy is to find works that are out of copyright, and reprint them (usually with covers taken from the original magazine or book publication.) Some of his works are still in copyright, and in these cases (as with a number of works by Robert Silverberg) he has negotiated reprint rights with the author. As such he is doing a service, in many cases bringing back to print books otherwise unavailable or only available used at exorbitant prices.

The publication process appears to involve OCR, and I admit I would have preferred more attention paid to correction of OCR errors, and I'll say that my usual strategy in digging up old stories is to find the magazines or books in which stories I want to see first appeared -- but sometimes that's hard. In this case, what I really wanted was the Algis Budrys story, which had never been reprinted until this book. The issue of Amazing in which it first appeared was a special UFO issue, complete with an essay by famous UFO n/u/t witness Kenneth Arnold, and presumably for that reason, copies of it are quite expensive. 

OK, on to the stories themselves. I'll begin with the Budrys, because Budrys is a favorite writer of mine, and because his story is rather better than F. L. Wallace's novel. As I noted, "If These be Gods" first appeared in a Special Flying Saucer Issue of Amazing Stories, for October 1957.It was the cover story, and that cover, by Ed Valigursky, is reproduced (flipped left-to-right) on this book. The story was bylined "Gordon Jaylyn". This was the only time Budrys used this name (he also had some regular pseudonyms, such as "John A. Sentry", "Ivan Janvier", and "William Scarff".)

It's a flying saucer story, and I suspect Budrys wrote it for this issue at the behest of editor Paul Fairman. But -- it's OK. It's not great, and the ending is a bit of a muddle, but it's professionally done and it pulled me in. It's set in more or less the present time of the story's appearance, on an airliner heading from New York to Los Angeles. There have been a few recent airplane crashes, so the plane is all but empty: four crewmembers and five passengers. There are only two women -- the flight attendant and an elderly lady. The passengers include an actor, a salesman with a dark secret, the older woman, a journalist, and a UFO nut, who wrote a book claiming he met aliens from Venus who preached universal love. 

There is an alert of some fast moving airborne entities over Indiana, but the pilot doesn't take it seriously -- there are false alarms all the time. But this isn't a false alarm -- these are actual flying saucers, and, purely by accident, they hit the plane. And the aliens -- who turn out to be humans, to all appearances -- feel obliged to rescue everyone on the plane. Which will be a big headache for them ... Anyway, that's the setup, and it really reads like the setup to something longer. But the ending is fiercely rushed, as if Budrys checked his word count realized Fairman told him 16,000 words and he just hit 15,000 ... The message suggested is kind of interesting, really, but it probably did need another 10,000 words or so to make it work. And, I imagine, Budrys wasn't really that interested.

Now to the novel. Floyd L. Wallace (1915-2004) was a mechanical engineer who had a writing career of about a decade -- essentially the 1950s -- writing both SF and mysteries. Some of his short fiction, most notably "Delay in Transit", "The Accidental Self", and "Big Ancestor", achieved good notice. But he stopped publishing after 1961. Address: Centauri is his only novel. It was published in 1955 by Gnome Press, and reprinted as a Galaxy Science Fiction Novel in 1958. Galaxy was Wallace's primary market, and I imagine H. L. Gold's departure from the field may have contributed to Wallace leaving as well, though it should be said his last half dozen or so stories went to a variety of other markets. The cover for this Armchair edition is a reproduction of the rather terrible Galaxy Science Fiction Novel cover, by Wallace Wood. They'd have done much better to reproduce Ed Emshwiller's cover to the Gnome Press edition, and better still, to use the Richard Powers cover of the issue of Galaxy in which the first part of the novel appeared. 

Address: Centauri is an expansion of the novella "Accidental Flight" (Galaxy, April 1952.) The novel involves both some padding to the novella, and a lot of additional action after the end of the original story. I'll say up front that it's a painful mess. The science is comically awful. The characters are implausible, and the women are both important and portrayed in weirdly sexist ways. The action in general doesn't make much sense. The prose is not terribly good. But there are some wild ideas there that just about hold the interest -- or, at any rate, hint that something better could have been made of this material.

It opens on an asteroid, called the Handicap Haven. It's home to a number of severely disabled people, mostly due to horrific accidents, though in a few cases due to mutations or genetic abnormalities. I don't think the view of disabled people in this book is remotely in line with contemporary mores, but I will say that for his time, Wallace seemed to have his heart in the right place. Anyway, the main characters include a doctor, Cameron, who seems to be trying to treat his patients decently; and four principal residents: Docchi, an armless man; Anti, a dancer who had an accident such that her whole body is a sort of cancer that keeps growing so that she must live in acid; Jordan, a legless man who is a talented mechanic; and Nona, who was born unable to communicate in any way but who seems to have spectacular scientific powers, and is also very beautiful. Later (in the expanded part) we meet a woman who is also very beautiful but cannot eat normally, and another woman who has a deficiency of male hormones so that she is becoming too feminine -- i.e. a nymphomaniac. (I said the treatment of women was sexist!)

All this is in the context of an Earth society with spectacular medical tech, such that disease is conquered and everyone is good looking. This tech is enough to allow the residents of the asteroid to survive their horrendous injuries, and also to give them greatly extended lives. But there is no way they can live on Earth, so they want to leave for the Alpha Centauri system -- except star travel has so far proven impractical.

Anyway, there's a great deal of huggermugger. Nona's fantastical skills solve the star travel problem, but now Earth wants that tech. And (in the expansion) there is a long chase to Alpha Centauri -- which, to be sure, may have residents already!

I've elided a lot, and, well, most of it is absurd. There's a central love story, which is altered in easy to notice ways in the expanded version -- I mean, even not reading the original you can see where Docchi's love interest is shifted as we head to Centauri. There's all kinds of guff about the "biocompensation" that will in the end magically "cure" all the "deficients". There are unconvincing motivations for the bad guys chasing them. It's -- it's just a frustrating book to read. It seems clear to me that Wallace wanted to write a novel, but really didn't have the handle on structure to manage it.

F. L. Wallace did some pretty decent work at shorter lengths. And I feel bad just reviewing this pretty terrible novel. So, I'll be taking a look at several of his better known shorter stories in the next week or so. Stay tuned!

Old Bestseller Review: Charlotte Fairlie, by D. E. Stevenson

Review: Charlotte Fairlie, by D. E. Stevenson

by Rich Horton

This is the fourth D. E. Stevenson novel I've read. (There are at least three more on hand.) Dorothy Stevenson Peploe (1892-1973) was a Scottish writer, the first cousin once removed of Robert Louis Stevenson. She wrote over 40 novels, mostly what can be called "light romantic" novels, and others more in the domestic life genre, including her Mrs. Tim novels, which deal with the experiences of a military wife. (Stevenson herself was a military wife, and those novels draw directly from her experience.) I've summarized her bio before, but the Furrowed Middlebrow edition of this book (from Dean Street Press) includes an autobiographical afterword, apparently first written when her novel Music From the Hills was published, just before Charlotte Fairlie. And that includes some nice additional details, such as that her father was actually quite close, in childhood, to his first cousin RLS (whom the family apparently called Louis), and also that Dorothy was a first-rate golfer -- reaching the semifinals of the Scottish Ladies' Championship in her early 20s.

Charlotte Fairlie was published in 1954, and is set at the time of writing (1952-1953) with an episode centered on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. (The US edition had the title Blow the Wind Southerly, and later paperback editions were called The Enchanted Isle.) The title character is in her late 20s, and has just taken a job as the headmistress of Saint Elizabeth's, a fairly posh girls' boarding school not too far from London. Charlotte's mother died when she was young, and she was very close to her father until he remarried, after which she was raised by an uncle and sent to Saint Elizabeth's. She continued to university, and even spent some time in the US. 

The first part of the novel is to a great extent focused on her professional experience. She is a very competent headmistress, and we see her dealing with a couple of significant issues, including a senior teacher who had wanted the headmistress position and does her best to sabotage Charlotte, and a couple of student crises. One concerns Tessa MacRynne, a 13 year old new girl whose (American) mother has just left her father Rory, who is "The MacRynne" -- that is, the basically feudal leader of a Scottish island. Tessa nearly causes a scandal when she tries to run away back to her home. The other crisis concerns one of Tessa's friends, Dione Eastwood, a sweet girl who is a bad student, and who has two younger brothers who are students at the nearby boys' school, who are also reputedly bad students. Charlotte manages to learn that their issue is their verbally abusive father (the mother, once again, is absent!) Charlotte also makes friends with the headmaster of the boys' school, a pleasant young man not too much older than she. She is also shown attending a conference in Copenhagen. All of this is quietly interesting, and straightforward and honest about the challenges of that job, the loneliness of it, and the rewards, in the context of the challenges of a woman making a career. This latter part is emphasized by the ambition Charlotte had before her father's remarriage -- to become her father's partner in his business; as well as the similar ambition Tessa has -- to help her own father in his role.

The second part of the novel introduces the "light romance" element. Tessa has invited both Charlotte and the Eastwood children to visit her island home over the summer break. The bulk of this section concerns that visit. To no reader's surprise, sparks fly between Charlotte and Tessa's father. And the visit proves helpful to the Eastwood children as well, especially the younger boy, Barney, who is enchanted by the island and by the kind of life Rory models. But over the Eastwood family their father's presence still hovers, and this leads in the end to a tragic event. There is a lightly fantastical element here, in the form of an old prediction about the first red-haired MacRynne (who turns out to be Rory) and also in the appearance of a supposed magic well, at which both Tessa and Barney make wishes, that, in the way of such wishes, have ambiguous results.

The conclusion -- which is somewhat muted -- turns naturally on the resolution of Charlotte and Rory's romance. Charlotte has realized she is desperately in love with Rory, but given her own life experience with a father's remarriage, and her knowledge of Tessa's personal ambitions, she feels it necessary to refuse him. The book gives an answer, entwining Charlotte's career position, and Tessa's own feelings ... there's a bit of feeling of patness to the ending. Still, I greatly enjoyed the book. And I also read it very quickly indeed -- emphasizing something I'd already noticed about D. E. Stevenson. She had that gift -- nearly magical, I sometimes think -- of making the reader want to keep turning pages. I don't think this gift is necessary to be a good or great writer, but nor do I think it a bad thing. It's something some writers can manage, and others can't. And both types of writers can be great writers. (For the record, I think D. E. Stevenson a fine writer, even a very good one at her best, but she falls short of greatness -- which is no terrible thing, really.)

Old Bestseller Review: Hell! Said the Duchess, by Michael Arlen

Review: Hell! Said the Duchess, by Michael Arlen

by Rich Horton

The very first review on this blog -- a decade ago come next month! -- was of Michael Arlen's The Green Hat. And for that matter my first contribution to F&SF's Curiosities column concerned Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality. So, yes, he is a writer I take some interest in! Michael Arlen (1895-1956) was an Armenian-Bulgarian-British-American, though his fiction was all while he was primarily British (though living in France for much of this period), and entirely published between the wars: his first novel appeared in 1920 and his last in 1939. He was born in Bulgaria to Armenian refugees, and christened Dikran Kouyoumdjian. His family emigrated to the UK in 1901. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, but he wanted to be a writer, and indeed his family disowned him. He adopted the pen name Michael Arlen, and eventually legally changed his name. It's clear that his point of view was profoundly affected by his identity conflicts, not to mention a fair amount of ethnic prejudice directed his way. 

His primary subject matter was the smart set of the Lost Generation, and this eventually proved sort of a trap. Certainly this was the subject matter of his most famous novel, The Green Hat (which remains readable in its highly melodramatic way even now) and many of his later stories come off as less successful variations on that book. Two of his efforts to break out of that typecasting are Man's Mortality, an SF novel that suffered from appearing just a year after his rival Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and the novel at hand, Hell! Said the Duchess, which as we will see is a strange mixture of near future SF (with a very satirical cast) and gothic horror (and all set among the same privileged set as are many of his other works. Neither of these works received the respect he craved, and during his last years, in the US, he was nearly wholly blocked. There were a few short stories that Mark Valentine claims were reworkings of earlier work, and one of his stories, about a detective named Gay Stanhope Falcon, became the basis for a series of movies starring George Sanders as the Falcon (in imitation of Sanders' earlier role as Leslie Charteris' The Saint.) (Some people conflate this character with an unrelated later TV detective called The Falcon.) It's tempting to say that his only true subject was high society between the World Wars, and with the passing of that era he had nothing to write about.

Hell! Said the Duchess was published in 1934. It got good reviews -- Mark Valentine, in his fine introduction to the edition I read, calls it "his last great success." Despite that early notice, it fell out of print for decades, as did, really, all of Arlen's books save The Green Hat. But the estimable publishers Valancourt Books reprinted it in 2013, and that is the edition I bought. It's a very short novel, roughly 36,000 words by my estimate.

It is set in about 1936, and the Fascists have taken over the Conservative Party (and Oswald Mosley is Minister of War.) Arlen is cuttingly satirical about this, and about the Conservatives, and English tradition, in general. But his subject here is the Duchess of Dove, a beautiful, modest, and retiring young widow. After setting up her situation, he reveals that her reputation has taken a (surely unfair!) blow, as there have been reports that she has been seen in low bars with inappropriate people. Her friends begin to investigate, and spy on her movements, and it seems that there is a mystery ... she is almost never seen to go out at night, despite these reports. 

But just as her friends are ready to insist that all the rumors are false, a series of murders shocks London. Soon they are called the "Jane the Ripper" murders, for they seem to have been committed by a woman who seduces men, and after taking them to bed kills them. And what evidence there is points to the Duchess ... Naturally, the authorities are convinced that such a modest and beautiful and high-ranking lady is innocent, and they begin their investigation with every intention of exonerating her. Unfortunately, one of the police officials is actually competent despite being politically suspect (there is a screamingly funny chapter detailing the first steps in the investigation ....) As things continue, the evidence that the Duchess must be guilty seems overwhelming but there are still curious aspects.

And then the novel takes a strange turn, as a certain sinister Dr. Axaloe comes into focus. He seems to be a sexual predator of some sort, or perhaps just a man into free love. And there are connections to the Duchess. The chief investigators track Axaloe down, and what they find is truly unexpected and horrifying.

The tone shift, roughly halfway through the novel, is rather striking, and I'm not sure it's wholly successful. What we have, in my opinion, is a quite amusing and pointed satirical first half, making dark fun of the British aristocracy and their Fascistic drift; followed by a second half that only intermittently maintains the satirical point of view but is instead a piece of definite gothic horror. That mode is less interesting to me, though it may appeal to a lot of readers, and I think it is actually pretty well done. I think this is a novel worth attention -- and enjoyable and sometimes quite wonderful book, a bit overcooked in places but certainly fun to read.

Best (?) from this Blog, 2023, and brief Hugo Thoughts

While saying goodbye to 2023, I might as well give some links to some of my favorite posts from this past year. But first, in looking over this, I have a few Hugo thoughts. Very brief, and I must acknowledge my reading has been sadly limited. (For 2023, that is!) 

(Maybe someday I'll organize this blog better!)

Movies: Oppenheimer and Asteroid City are my two favorites

Novels: Orbital, Terrace Story, The Terraformers, and Shigidi and the Brass Head of Olafulon

Novellas: The Navigating Fox, by Christopher Rowe stands out, plus "Blade and Bone", by Paul McAuley

Novelette: "Mr. Catt", by Eleanor Arnason

Short stories: Rowe again, with "The Four Last Things", plus James Patrick Kelly's "The In-Between" and E. Lily Yu's "Alphabet of Swans"; and "The Unpastured Sea", by Gregory Feeley

Best Fan Writer: well, I'm eligible, but don't forget John Boston, and Brian Collins, and Joachim Boaz

Most of my posts are reviews, so first I'll mention my Cordwainer Smith award post and a couple of Trip Reports:

2023 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

Readercon Report

Montana Trip Report

My Black Gate Essays from 2023

Book and story reviews (mostly SF, but some Victoriana are other old novels.) These are in reverse chronological order, and I've left a lot out.

Two Early Robert Silverberg Novels

Sometime, Never

Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages

The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz

"The Cottage in Omena", by Charles Andrew Oberndorf

Neptune's Reach stories by Gregory Feeley

Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Carmen Dog, by Carol Emshwiller

Short Novels by Alex Jeffers and Brandon H. Bell

North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Granger's Crossing, by Mark Tiedemann

The Count of Monte Cristo

Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison

My Antonia, by Willa Cather

White Cat, Black Dog, by Kelly Link

The Godel Operation, by James L. Cambias

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

Waking the Moon, by Elizabeth Hand

Supernatural Tales, by Vernon Lee

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter

The Navigating Fox, by Christopher Rowe

The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford

Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty, by Avram Davidson

Sunday Morning Transport

Asimov's, November-December 2023

Flint and Mirror, by John Crowley

The Sound of His Horn, by Sarban

Take Three Tenses, by Rumer Godden

The Zanzibar Cat, by Joanna Russ

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Olafulon, by Wole Talabi

My 2023 essays at Black Gate

My 2023 essays at Black Gate

This post links to some of my best (in my opinion) pieces from Black Gate in 2023. In that sense it's sort of a Hugo eligibility post -- I'm eligible in one category, Best Fan Writer, but it's also intended as a summary, and in hopes people are interested in checking these out. (I should add that I think I've done some pretty cool fan writing elsewhere -- certainly at this blog, and at Journey Planet, and I had a piece in Bruce Gillespie's SF Commentary this year. Plus I had a short look at Rose Macaulay's What Not published in the Curiosities column in the November-December F&SF.)

But a lot of my best work, in my opinion, appears in Black Gate, John O'Neill's excellent online 'zine. Here's a list of some of these.

First, I contributed a piece on The Tolkien Reader to Bob Byrne's series of posts called Talking Tolkien. 

Talking Tolkien: On The Tolkien Reader;

Secondly, here's a summary of an ongoing series of essays I've been doing taking very close looks at some short fiction. The most recent two of these are from 2023, but I'm really proud of all of them.

"The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye", by A. S. Byatt; and Three Thousand Years of Longing;

"The Second Inquisition" (and "My Boat"), by Joanna Russ;

"Scanners Live in Vain", by Cordwainer Smith;

"The Last Flight of Dr. Ain", by James Tiptree, Jr.;

"Winter's King", by Ursula K. Le Guin;

"It Opens the Sky", by Theodore Sturgeon;

"Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", by John M. Ford;

Three Stories by Idris Seabright;

"The Star Pit", by Samuel R. Delany;

Thirdly, I have been doing a set of looks at obscure SF from the '70s and '80s:

The Shores of Kansas, by Rob Chilson;

Alien Island, by T. L. Sherred;

Murder on Usher's Planet, by Atanielle Annyn Noel;

The Song of Phaid the Gambler, by Mick Farren;

And here are some other Black Gate posts -- a couple of obituaries (Michael Bishop, D. G. Compton, Joseph Ross), some reviews, a look at Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies, and some "retro reviews" of old magazines.

Obituary: D. G. Compton;

Obituary: Michael Bishop;

Obituary: Joseph Wrzos (Joseph Ross);

Review: Being Michael Swanwick, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro;

Retro Review: F&SF, November 1958, May 1961;

The Flashing Swords! Original Anthologies, edited by Lin Carter;

Retro Review: Infinity, June 1956;

Retro Review: If, December 1957;

Retro Review: F&SF, June 1955;

Retro Review: Universe, September 1953; 

Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi

Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi

by Rich Horton

Wole Talabi is a Nigerian SF writer (and anthologist), now resident in Malaysia, who has published a number of arresting short stories over the past decade. "A Dream of Electric Mothers" was a Hugo and Nebula nominee this year. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is his first novel.

It's a curious book, in a sense. It's been marketed to some extent as a caper novel, and indeed there is a caper, or at leat a heist, as the engine of the plot, but that's a minor part of the book, really. (And as a caper qua caper it's not that interesting.) I'd say it's much more a love story, between Shigidi, a nightmare god, and Nneoma, a succubus. But it's also a satire of corporate politics, and a critique of colonialist theft of indigenous art, and even a novel offering an afterlife of sorts for Aleister Crowley!

The story is told in multiple timelines -- the main action is set in roughly the present day (2017 or so) but there are flashbacks to the 1970s, to distant African history, to Crowley in Algeria in the first decade of the 20th Century, and more. All this is well organized -- the reader never loses their way, and the themes and plot of the book are well developed by this method.

Nneoma, as a succubus, is essentially immortal, and gains her power from taking the life force from her sexual conquests as they orgasm. Shigidi, when we first encounter him (timeline-wise) is an ugly minor god, working for a "spirit corporation", which gains its profits from prayers, and from answering prayers, by such means as gods like Shigidi killing their clients by sending nightmares to their enemies. The spirit corporation is failing, however, due largely to a loss of believers, and hence their prayers. Shigidi hates his job, and on one mission he encounters Nneoma, who is dealing with the same victim from her different angle. Nneoma spots what she calls potential in Shigidi and convinces him to quite the corporation and join her as sort of an independent. And they spend a few years jointly preying on victims much as Nneoma has for her millennia of existence.

Shigidi falls desperately in love with Nneoma, but she, though happy with his company and his lovemaking, doesn't wish to commit to true love. We eventually gather that her issue goes back to the loss of her beloved sister Lilith, far in the past, due to her sister's falling in love with another being. Meanwhile, the spirit corporation is undergoing some internal dissension, and its long absent leader Olorun decides to take a more active role. He's been working on the side with Shigidi and Nneoma, but as a crisis arrives he decides he needs the two of them to retrieve something for him from the British Museum -- the titular Brass Head of Obalufon. But that is no easy job -- and this requires them to work on both the normal side of reality, and the spirit side, and to engage some special help -- which turns out to involve Nneoma calling in a long-owed debt from Aleister Crowley.

The book bounces along engagingly, as we learn about Nneoma's history with Lilith, and about Crowley's history with Nneoma and his "afterlife", and about Olorun's corporate maneuverings, and about setting up the heist. There's plenty of cool action, and some great sex, and some really neat setpieces. And the resolution takes us in an unexpected direction. I enjoyed it.

It is a first novel, though, and I have a few caveats. One seems not uncommon for first novels -- there's a LOT here, and at times I felt there was too much -- or, perhaps, that for the novel to be about as much as it is it probably should have been longer. One thing that was never dealt with is the morality of Shigidi and Nneoma's preying on their victims -- perhaps this is a logical treatment, but, well, it bothered me. I also felt the prose was uneven -- in the most important parts -- the cool setpieces, the resolutions, some of the imagery involved in that -- it's really exciting. But a bit more work throughout would have helped -- some parts came off to me as a tad unfinished, too ready to rely on cliché. Again -- this seems like a first novel issue. I have a feeling we'll eventually see this book as a promising entrée to a significant career.

Not to end on a down note -- this is a fun book, with some interesting ideas, and I definitely recommend it.

Review: The Zanzibar Cat, by Joanna Russ

Review: The Zanzibar Cat, by Joanna Russ

by Rich Horton

The Zanzibar Cat is one of four collections of short fiction that Joanna Russ published in her lifetime. Of these four, it is perhaps the most representative of the main thrust of her oeuvre. The Adventures of Alyx collects four stories and a novel about her recurring character Alyx -- oddly, the other Alyx story appears in The Zanzibar Cat. Extra(ordinary) People is focussed on five late stories, from 1982 through 1984. And The Hidden Side of the Moon is a curious miscellany of lesser known SF/F stories and some mainstream work.

Having said that, I'll note that the publication history of The Zanzibar Cat is a bit complicated. It first appeared as a hardcover from Arkham Press, in 1983. The paperback edition, from Baen, appeared a year later, and it has a somewhat different Table of Contents. The paperback does not include Marge Piercy's introduction, and it also omits three stories ("How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring", "Poor Man, Beggar Man", and "Old Thoughts, Old Presences".) But it includes two stories not in the hardcover: "Dragons and Dimwits" and "The Precious Object". (Two of the stories not included in the paperback of The Zanzibar Cat do appear in The Hidden Side of the Moon.) I'll be reviewing the Baen paperback.

This collection is excellent, but of course not all the stories are at the top level -- though all are worth reading. I'm going to foreground my favorites (five stories in all), and then discuss briefly the rest. The book does beautifully represent Russ's range, and also her wit, her imagination, and her outstanding prose.

The book opens with perhaps Russ's most famous short story, "When it Changed", which won the Nebula in 1973. It is an excellent story (though oddly it's not even my favorite Joanna Russ story from 1972!) It's about the planet Whileaway, on which a plague killed all human males, and which has thus been all-female for 600 years. And now a ship with men has arrived, and it's quickly clear that things will change. The story is particularly good in portraying a real-seeming all-female society without making it a utopia, with real characters, and real problems and virtues.

Since I hinted at it, I'll mention my favorite Joanna Russ story from 1972, also in this book: "Nobody's Home". Russ's brief comment reads: "This one began with Larry Niven's speculations about teleportation and ended as a Utopia -- for some." It's about a future society with teleportation all around the world, and apparent lack of scarcity, and group marriages, and it's fundamentally about a group marriage and what happens when a new woman enters the marriage. It's clever and witty and breakneck and fascinating and thoughtful and at its heart terribly sad -- for some. On this reading (this is a story I've read many times) I was struck in particular by the breathless first three or so pages -- truly a tour de force. One of the great SF stories of all time.

"A Game of Vlet" is the last of Russ's Alyx stories, and the only one not to appear in the somewhat definitive Alyx collections (Alyx, from the Gregg Press, and The Adventures of Alyx, from Timescape, and reprinted by The Women's Press and by Baen -- the reprint editions omit Samuel R. Delany's introduction but are otherwise identical to Alyx.) It's set in Ourdh in ancient Greece -- contemporaneous with the first Alyx stories -- and it concerns a challenge by a magician to the Governor -- a game of Vlet, on a unique "virgin" board such that the winner will defeat all his enemies. The magician is captured -- and a Lady appears, offering to substitute for the Government of Ourdh -- while the magician will play for the Revolution. The results are beautifully ambiguous. The Lady is not identified but is clearly Alyx (and so Russ confirms in the introduction.) It's a characteristically witty and clever story, great fun with some real truth behind it. 

I've written at some length recently about "My Boat" (keep checking Black Gate for that) so I'll just say here that it's one of Russ's very best stories, about a 15 year old black girl in a newly integrated high school, into drama, and her boat. The story is told by one of her high school friends -- as he ruefully admits, a typical white liberal racist who didn't realize he was racist despite his liberal aspirations. The girl and another of the narrator's friends take My Boat on a fabulous trip to glorious fictional lands, but the narrator chickens out. There is wish-fulfillment here, as Russ acknowledges, and a distinct Lovecraftian influence, and it's a beautiful and powerful story.

"The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand" has distinct correspondences with "My Boat" in that it concerns wondrous voyages by an outwardly unprepossessing woman, as described by a man who is a bit afraid to accompany her. This story is explicitly an hommage to Jules Verne -- the narrator is a middle aged Frenchman in the 1920s who describes his curious encounter with Madame Bertrand at a certain train station, at which by crossing the station in the wrong direction one can travel, randomly, almost anyhere. Madame Bertrand tells him of her voyages -- and he experiences a bit of that, but doesn't quite take the full step. Then, it seems, the train station is to be closed ... neat stuff.

Those are my top five stories, but the rest of the book is all worth reading -- some of it is light throwaway stuff, but still fun, such as "Useful Phrases for the Tourist" and "Dragons and Dimwits". There are three very strong early stories -- "My Dear Emily", "The New Men", and "There is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side", which deal expertly with classical fantasy elements -- vampires in the first two cases, a ghost in the third -- but still surprise. "The Man Who Could Not See Devils" is a well done logical working out of the title premise -- how would things work out for a man who could not see the demons that ordinary people can -- nice work but a bit slight to my mind. "The Soul of a Servant" is very strong work, with the narrator -- the title servant -- telling of his actions as the man in charge of a fortress of sorts in Tibet, when supposed revolutionaries arrive, and in the context of usual visits of privileged tourists. It's a knotty story, with effectively unresolved moral questions at its heart. A couple of stories struck me as pieces that I didn't quite "get" which I still could see were worthwhile, if not quite for me -- "Gleepsite" and "Corruption". "The Precious Object" is a fine mainstream story, in which the narrator becomes obsessed with a gay (male) friend of hers ... strong work, and, I suspect, related to her novel On Strike Against God, which I have not yet read. And the title story is a delightful work based on Hope Mirrlees' masterwork Lud-in-the-Mist, taking a slightly metafictional angle as the people of Appletap-on-Flat send an expedition to deal with the evil undead Duke Humphrey, and his demon cat, and only the miller's daughter survives the expedition to say what resulted.

Joanna Russ was indisputably one of the great SF writers of all time, and a great critic as well. It is a shame she was not named an SFWA Grand Master -- her career was cut short by severe health problems that plagued her for the last quarter century of her life, which may explain that, but the sheer quality of the work she did produce, and the great influence exerted by both her fiction and her crtical work, certainly merited that honor. The Library of America has recently published Joanna Russ: Novels and Stories, which collects three major novels, the Alyx stories, and two other award-winning stories ("When it Changed" and "Souls") -- and that is an essential book. But The Zanzibar Cat is also a necessary read -- it's really an exceptional collection on its own terms, and only two of its stories also appear in the LOA book.