Resurrected Review: Against the Odds, by Elizabeth Moon

I wrote this for my SFF Net newsgroup back in, I think, 2001. It serves, actually, as a sort of summary review for all seven Familias Regnant novels -- called Serrano and Suiza at ISFDB, though to be honest I think the best name was coined by James Davis Nicoll: Aunts in Space. I don't think there are terrible specific spoilers for the book, though certainly some idea of the overall shape of the series hints at the results of the first few books.

Review: Against the Odds, by Elizabeth Moon

by Rich Horton

Against the Odds is the seventh and apparently final book in Elizabeth Moon's series about the Familias Regnant. The Familias Regnant is the term for a large area of colonized worlds in a future galaxy in which humans seem to be the only intelligent species. There are several other confederations of worlds. Familias space is ruled by a number of aristocratic families, fairly but not entirely benignly. The novels cover a period of perhaps a decade, or a bit less, in which radical changes occur in the Familias government, moves in the direction of greater democracy.

The two main characters in the novels are women in the Familias space Navy, Heris Serrano and Esmay Suiza. Heris is somewhat older than Esmay: the series starts with her having been cashiered from her position as a Captain.

As the series continues, she is restored to her position, and begins to advance as expected for members of her family, a powerful traditional Navy family. Esmay is a minor character in the third novel who becomes the focus of the last four novels: she is from an isolated planet, one of the first people from her planet to join the Navy, and she is unaware of her potential to be a ship commander until Heris takes her as sort of a protege. The threads in the novels that follow Heris, Esmay, and other Navy people with smaller roles (Heris' nephew Barin Serrano, Ensign Margiu Pardalt, various crewmembers) focus heavily on military action and military values. However, to call Heris and Esmay the main characters, while true, is somewhat deceiving, because a number of other characters have very prominent roles. Most notable perhaps is Lady Cecelia Marktos, a rather apolitical member of one of the ruling families. She begins as a horse-mad old lady in the first (least serious) novel, Hunting Party, and develops into a very formidable character throughout the series. (Lady Cecelia, and perhaps the fact that Heris is also an aunt, and something about the tone of at least the first couple of books, caused James Nicoll to dub this series "Aunts in Space", a very cute, if not wholly precise, collective title.) Other important characters are a number of relatives and connections of Lady Cecelia, especially Brun Meager, a young woman who develops from a society airhead into a political power. These characters allow Moon to focus on political issues as well as military issues. There are also some minor characters from outside the Familias: the occasional villain, as well as for example (in the last couple books) Goonar Terakian, a free trader.

The series ends up following an overall story arc that covers the political changes mentioned above, many of which are driven by a series of crises involving the use of rejuvenation drugs, which allow people with sufficient money or connections to live very extended lives. Moon makes a good effort, throughout the series, of presenting some of the social problems this might cause, and suggesting at least a couple of possible solutions (particularly in the last book). The other story elements, which tend to dominate one or two books at a time, are unrest in the Navy, especially the mutiny which drives the action in the last two books, and external threats, from the sinister Benignity of the Compassionate Hand, from the pirate worlds of the Bloodhorde, and from an independent planet settled by some Texan right wing nuts.

On the whole, I found the series very good reading. There are weaknesses: Moon tends to paint her villains too blackly, for one thing; and her plots seem to be driven a bit much by coincidence. But the stories are very exciting, the action is well described, and the main characters are very engaging, we really care about them. Bad things happen, usually with real costs, as well. The first book (Hunting Party) is nice but a bit light. I felt that the series hit its stride with the second book (Sporting Chance), and maintained a high level through the following three books (Winning Colors, Once a Hero, Rules of Engagement). The sixth book, Change of Command, was a serious disappointment. By this time Moon had several significant plot threads from previous books that she wanted to track, all involving different characters. Plus she added an important new thread, a mutiny with the Fleet by disaffected officers of extreme villainy. Change of Command is a very disjointed book, jumping from thread to thread, sometimes with essentially no sense of connection. This final book, Against the Odds, is something of a return to form. It's still not as good, in my opinion, as the four central books, but the thread gathering in Change of Command has by Against the Odds at least resulted in the major threads all being sufficiently well associated so that even though this book also jumps all over the place, the various plot threads are all pretty much linked. 

The basic action of this book is the attempt to suppress the mutiny that began in Change of Command. In addition, some political assassinations which happened in that book have left an unsettled political situation, which needs to be resolved. And finally, Esmay has been discharged from the Navy for basically silly reasons, and she wishes to get reinstated and join the fight against the mutineers. There are still some structural hiccups: the Free Trader plot sort of peters out halfway through the book, while the closing segment of the book is really a separate, late-introduced subplot, which at least serves to unite Esmay and Heris for the final action, but which otherwise seems a bit of an arbitrary addition. And there are quite a number of, I thought, unlikely coincidences. But all that said, the book is a solid and fun read, and it does a good job of closing off the main series threads, while not wrapping everything up too tidily.

I certainly recommend the entire series for anyone who likes colorful space opera, with engaging characters and neat action.

Review: The Travails of Jane Saint and Other Stories, by Josephine Saxton

Review: The Travails of Jane Saint and Other Stories, by Josephine Saxton

by Rich Horton

Josephine Saxton was the winner of the 2023 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The award is given at Readercon every year, and the following year there is a panel discussing the winner's stories. I am part of the award jury, and I represented the jury (the other members are Steven H Silver and Ann VenderMeer.) I also participated in this year's panel on Saxton's work, along with Gregory Feeley and Rob Kilheffer. Saxton was a first rate writer, and a very original one, and I strongly recommend seeking out her work, particularly novels such as The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, Vector for Seven, and Queen of the States, and stories like "The Wall", "Nature Boy", and "The Power of Time". 

I had read a good deal of Saxton's work as part of the process of awarding her the Cordwainer Smith award last year, but I hadn't read the Jane Saint stories. These are two short novels (or long novellas), published in 1980 and 1989. The latter story, "Jane Saint and the Backlash", was one of the last stories Saxton published ... her fiction career ended in 1992. Jane Saint was introduced in 1979, when the first chapter of the first Jane Saint novella was published in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's significant original anthology Amazons!, which contained stories about woman warriors, nearly all by women. The full novella, The Travails of Jane Saint, appeared as a slim volume from Virgin Books in 1980, and then was collected in the Women's Press paperback The Travails of Jane Saint and Other Stories in 1986. That volume is available as an ebook from Gateway/Orion.

The stories in the book are:

"The Travails of Jane Saint" (34,000 words)

"Woe, Blight, and, in Heaven, Laughs" (4600 words) (first appeared in Pulsar 1 in 1978)

"Gordon’s Women" (3800 words) (first appeared in a French anthology, Femmes au futur, in 1976)

"The Message" (16100 words) (first published in this book)

"Heads Africa, Tails America" (5300 words) (first appeared in Orbit 9 in 1971)

"The Pollyanna Enzyme" (4600 words) (first published in this book)

"The Travails of Jane Saint" is introduced as "ten parts of the history of Jane Saint, Heroine of the Revolution, who journeyed in strange places and had adventures on her Quest. This is the true record of the beings she met on her travels along the way, and of what she endeavoured to accomplish for this world." Which is pretty accurate. Jane Saint is a revolutionary against a misogynistic and authoritarian near future regime, and is being brainwashed by the authorities, but mentally escapes to another world. There she searches for her three daughters, and for a "kodebook", and also she wants to learn how to make life better for women in her world. In a series of episodes, she meets a flying monster named Zilp, a talking dog named Merleau Ponty, a man named Hugh who claims to be her husband, an old couple trying to summon an Anthroparion, a Nazi airship pilot, and more, and indeed has a variety of adventures. The story bounces along nicely, and is very funny on occasion, and also full of on point sarcastic observations about the place of women in the world. It's a good piece, fun and trenchant by turns, though I don't think it's at the level of her best work.

"Woe, Blight, and, in Heaven, Laughs" is set in a depressing future in which a dying young woman named Lucille lives with her evil stepmother, Queenie, who is obsessed with being the most beautiful woman around. And Lucille escapes, with the help of a man named Hunter, and ends up with a team of seven mutants ... yes, it's a somewhat goofy Snow White variation. Amusing but not much more.

"Gordon's Women" is one of the most purely science-fictional stories I've seen from Saxton. Gordon is one of four men sharing a new planet that is apparently being terraformed. He is served by a great many beautiful women, who do whatever he bids, on pain of immediate death if they displease him. So far, so very creepy ... and then there's a sharp switcheroo. It's a nice short SF piece, not a major work but just fine.

"The Message" concerns a middle-aged woman, who lives alone in what seems to be London, hardly every going out because the modern world distresses her. She is in the hospital at the start of the story, for minor surgery, but checks herself out, only to have a "message" foisted on her by a another patient who is dying. As she wanders the neighborhood, trying to find a place to deliver the message, she encounters a variety of the people she's been avoiding -- young people, men, black people, Indisns, etc. ... all the while looking to deliver the message. By the end, it's clear the message is really for her, and it's really a way of fixing her lonely and crabbed existence (or so I took it). The story goes on a bit too long for my taste -- otherwise it sort of resembles some of her novels, partly by an obsession with food, and more because of the notion of a mysterious journey to personal growth.

"Heads Africa, Tails America" is the most experimental of these stories, with the main character -- named "Josephine" -- thinking about visiting Africa, remembering a visit to America, obsessing about the weather in England, recalling scenes with a variety of men she knows -- it's a strange piece, very much almost a cliché of the worst notions people back in 1971 had about Orbit fiction. 

"The Pollyanna Enzyme" is forthrightly an end of the world story -- in a somewhat depressing nearish future, the Earth is infected with the title compound (?) which will lead to the death of everyone in a matter of a couple of weeks, but which also makes everyone unnaturally happy and peaceful. Not bad stuff, again.This collection isn't really major Saxton, but it's solid work, and worth reading. 

Review: The Gold at the Starbow's End, by Frederik Pohl

Review: The Gold at the Starbow's End, by Frederik Pohl

by Rich Horton

The Gold at the Starbow's End is a collection of stories, despite not having "and Other Stories" tacked on to the title. Perhaps that's because you could take the title as a metaphor for the story gold it purports to offer (and mostly delivers.) It was published by Ballantine in August 1972, rather quickly on the heels of the magazine publication of most of the stories. It had a UK edition from Gollancz in 1973, a Ballantine reprint in 1974, and a UK paperback from Panther in 1975, as well as a Canadian edition and a UK book club edition. All in all, not bad going for a collection.

My copy is the 1975 Panther edition. It has a Peter Jones cover, which makes it look pretty 1970s British, especially as this cover, to my eyes, vaguely resembles Chris Foss's work. (Other Peter Jones covers don't necessarily look as Foss-like.) The book has more than the usual amount of typos -- I don't know if that's Panther's fault or that of one of the other publishers.

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) was truly one of the giants of the SF field, and he contributed in multiple ways: as an editor of magazines and of books, as an anthologist, as an agent, and as a writer. As an editor, he was essential to the careers of major writers like Cordwainer Smith, Robert Silverberg, and James Tiptree, Jr. He convinced Bantam to publish Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren. He more or less invented the SF original anthology series with Star Science Fiction in the 1950s. His fiction writing career lasted for some seven decades, and he won multiple Hugos, and also a National Book Award, and even won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer late in his life. I met him myself once, not long before he died -- we shared a panel at the Chicago convention Windycon. Pohl was physically very frail by then but mentally remarkably acute.

At the time of publication of this collection, Pohl had fairly recently left the editor's chair at Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow, where he had had an exceptional run. He was still editing books -- he was at Ace around this time, succeeding Don Wollheim, and he would soon move to Bantam. But at the same time he was re-energizing his writing career, and entering his most productive period, which I would argue extended from 1972 throughout the '70s -- or from "The Gold at the Starbow's End" through JEM. This isn't to say his earlier writing wasn't good -- he published some outstanding work, such as The Space Merchants (1952, with C. M. Kornbluth), "The Midas Plague", and "Day Million", but for everyone except Kingsley Amis, he tended to be overshadowed a bit by his collaborator Kornbluth. (Amis, of course, called him "The most consistently able writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced" in his 1960 book New Maps of Hell, an evaluation that greatly surprised American SF readers.) Likewise Pohl did some very fine work after the '70s, including the Hugo winning story "Fermi and Frost". But his work in the '70s represents his peak -- the two pieces I've mentioned plus the novels Man Plus and The Cool War, and stories like "The Merchants of Venus" and "The Meeting" (with Kornbluth, and a Hugo winner.)

Here are the stories:

"The Gold at the Starbow's End" (Analog, March 1972) 20,500 words

"Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam" (F&SF, June 1972) 5300 words

"Call Me Million" (Worlds of Fantasy #2, 1970) 1800 words

"Shaffery Among the Immortals" (F&SF, July 1972) 5700 words

"The Merchants of Venus" (Worlds of If, July-August 1972) 25,500 words

I'll treat them in order. "The Gold at the Starbow's End" got the most attention at the time, and remains the most famous of these stories. Interestingly, Pohl himself used it in his anthology Best Science Fiction for 1972, which was essentially a continuation of the World's Best Science Fiction series that Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr had edited for Ace since 1965. Wollheim and Carr had left the company, with Pohl taking over, and thus Pohl also took over the Year's Best anthology. Nominally the book was supposed to include stories from 1971, but Pohl used three from 1972, including this story, and in fact the anthology was published a month after the collection. Pohl claimed that he used one of his stories because he had blown his budget (I got the sense, perhaps unfairly, that the extra money went to Harlan Ellison for his two(!) stories, "At the Mouse Circus" and "Silent in Gehenna", but also possibly he was paying a translator for the one Japanese story he used.) Pohl claimed he was the only writer he was comfortable in paying below market rates to; but also conceded that he was extremely proud of "The Gold at the Starbow's End" and felt it deserved this honor. The story was also reprinted in Donald Wollheim's new Year's Best for DAW, and in the Ben Bova anthology Analog 9, the last of the original series of "Best of Analog" collections. It won the Locus Award for Best Novella, and was shortlisted for each of the Hugo and Nebula awards. The March 1972 issue of Analog appeared quite early in Ben Bova's editorship, so in theory it could have been purchased by John W. Campbell, Jr., but I am pretty sure this was a Bova purchase. Pohl expanded the story into a much weaker novel called Starburst in 1982.

It's about an expedition from Earth to Alpha Centauri, theoretically with the goal of colonizing a planet found orbiting Alpha Centauri A. The starship Constitution hosts 8 crewmembers -- four married couples. They were selected by the director of this project, Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen, specifically for high intelligence. Knefhausen has lofty (and largely secret) goals -- he believes that by having the crew concentrate on certain scientific "games" he has assigned them that they will make spectacular discoveries, which they will transmit back to Earth and allow the US at least to turn around its decaying fortunes. For this future (which seems to be around the turn of the millennium) is pretty dire, with riots everywhere, economic and environmental unrest, etc. And -- not really a spoiler -- the crew do indeed become essentially superhumanly intelligent, and make amazing advances. But they also develop their own opinions about what do with what they've learned. Especially after they realize the unpleasant surprise awaiting them at Alpha Centauri. 

The story is told on two tracks -- one consisting of various increasingly incomprehensible reports from the crew back to Earth, and the other following Knefhausen's fortunes -- or misfortunes -- as his plans disintegrate in parallel with the world situation disintegrating. It's a very satirical piece -- savagely so -- and its message is quite dark. Unless you believe in the fantasy of what the crew of the Constitution achieves -- which I admit I kind of bought at age 14 but don't buy at all now. (The superhuman powers are developed simply by studying the right concepts -- sort of a mental "grammar" -- to be honest a sort of situation like that in Poul Anderson's Brain Wave or Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought books makes more sense to me now!) But really, that magic isn't the point of the story -- that lies in the satirical and somewhat despairing depiction of this near future (now past, I suppose) which is established by Knefhausen's portion of the narrative and reinforced by the crew's reports, which serve as a sort of crirical outsider viewpoint. It's a very good story, though not now and not back when I first read it was it my favorite of this book. 

"Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam" features aliens monitoring Earth for its worthiness to survive. If Earth fails, the planet will be scoured of life completely, in the hope that in a few billion years something better will emerge. (Oh, and Mars and all the other potential life-bearing planets/moons get the same treatment.) The evaluation process involves picking a single representative and deciding if he's a decent person. In this case, the choice is Sam Harcourt, a struggling screenwriter whose latest idea is to adapt A Princess of Mars for the screen in honor of the actual Martians who are about to visit Earth. Of course, Sam fails. (Though there is a twist in the tail of the tale.) The story is amusing enough to read, but it's REALLY REALLY STUPID on multiple levels. For one thing, though Sam is kind of a loser, he's really not that bad a guy. In the end, I get that Pohl is just being sardonic, but this story is just not convincing.

"Call Me Million" is a brief piece about a sort of vampire who sucks the life essence (or something) out of other people, and what happens when he realizes he isn't the only one. First, this is a terribly familiar idea, and second, it doesn't do anything new. This is minor magazine back of the book filler, slightly elevated by Pohl's slick storytelling ability.

"Shaffery Among the Immortals" is about a sad sack astronomer, whose rather stupid attempts to make his name via an Einstein level discovery have come to nothing. He is head of a small observatory in the Lesser Antilles, whiling away his life with more silly experiments such as irradiating mushrooms, hating his wife, struggling with his two assistants who would rather aim the telescope at the windows of a nearby hotel; but still desperately hoping to make his name immortal. Pohl's dark conclusion (and a somewhat timely one here in the 2020s) does reveal his name becoming, ironically, world famous. It's another pretty minor piece, really, again enlivened mainly by Pohl's mordant descriptions of Shaffery's life.

And, finally, to my favorite story of this book, which was indeed my favorite back when I first read it decades ago. This is "The Merchants of Venus". This is the first Heechee story, followed by the very fine novel Gateway and a host of increasingly weaker novels and stories. It's not at all clear how much he knew about the Heechee when he wrote this particular story, and it doesn't really matter -- the story works on its own. It's told by Audee Walthers, who grew up in Amarillo, the son of the Deputy Governor of Texas. That seems privileged, but it's not really -- the story makes clear that economic conditions on Earth are horrendous, and even a Deputy Governor of a big state isn't much -- indeed, only the super rich are in any sense comfortable. Audee is now on Venus, scraping by as the owner of an airbody, with which he can transport rich tourists to interesting sites on Venus. He's also deeply in debt, and very sick -- if he can't keep up payments on the medicines he needs for his decaying liver -- or, preferably, buy a new liver -- he'll be dead in three months.

And what do tourists in Venus want to see? Heechee sites. The Heechee were aliens who visited the Solar System a long while ago. They made a bunch of tunnels on Venus (even they couldn't tolerate the surface conditions) and then they left. They left behind a fair amount of stuff, most of it basically garbage, but some of it, accidentally perhaps, very valuable, potentially offering insights to revolutionary tech. The humans on Venus who make a living mostly sell souvenirs or cater to the people who try to make a bigger score, like Audee. Audee is desperately hoping to finally make a really big find, and he does have some interesting knowledge, that just might give him a chance. But he needs to attract a really wealthy tourist to bankroll this effort -- and that tourist will keep most of the rewards if it works -- but Audee might get a new liver out of the deal. And finally he has a chance -- Boyce Couchenor, a hyper rich tourist, 90 years old but with the medical treatment to make him look 40, shows up. He's got a much younger girlfriend (or so Audee thinks -- Pohl plants hints that made me think that this woman, Dorotha Keefer, is actually Couchenor's granddaughter, though Audee never seems to realize this) and he is really interested in investigating unexplored Heechee tunnels. So, he does end up hiring Audee, and the expedition of Audee's dream goes forward ... And there are a couple of well set up twists, and lots of dangerous reversals and crises. It's a well told story, and an exciting one, with an partly expected, partly surprising conclusion. I like the story a lot. It's not at all inconsistent with the rest of the Heechee stories, but it's also not dependent on them -- it's quite independent. And it's the most optimistic story in the book -- admittedly a low bar to clear.

On the whole, this is an excellent collection, though mostly due to the bookend novellas. The three short stories are minor works, though all are worth a read. Still, this stands as a herald to the most productive decade of writing for a very worthy SFWA Grand Master. 

Review: Cranford, and Cousin Phillis, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Review: Cranford, and Cousin Phillis, by Elizabeth Gaskell

by Rich Horton

These days I get a bit itchy when I haven't read a Victorian novel in a couple of months, so I decided to read Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853) in amongst my Readercon reading over the last couple of weeks. My copy of the novel, a 1976 Penguin edition, also includes Mrs. Gaskell's short novel (or nouvelle) Cousin Phillis, plus a short story sort of sequel to Cranford called "The Cage at Cranford", Gaskell's essay "The Last Generation in England", and an excellent introduction by editor Peter Keating.

I will preface my review with an embarrassing admission. I searched through my SFF Net notes for any mention of Gaskell prior to writing this, and I found that I had actually read Cranford previously, in 2001! I wrote a couple of paragraphs back then, paragraphs that are accurate and appreciative but don't capture my feelings about the novel as of now. I'm not sure if the difference is my age, or my more recent reading of another Gaskell novel (one of her greatest, North and South), or my generally fuller involvement with Victorian literature. I will add that at the time I noted that Sherwood Smith recommended Wives and Daughters as her best work, and that Gregory Feeley has in later years also made that suggestion. I do have a copy of Wives and Daughters and I promise I'll get to it. I just needed something shorter and lighter for now!

Here's the potted bio I wrote for my review of North and South: Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in 1810. Her father was William Stevenson, a Unitarian minister and writer on economic subjects. (Stevenson, by the way, resigned his position as minister on conscientious grounds: remember this in view of events in North and South!) Elizabeth married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell, in 1832. They eventually settled in Manchester. She wrote and published poems (with her husband) and some non-fiction beginning in the 1830s. Her first short story was published in 1847, and her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848, which made her name as a writer. Other important works are Cranford, Sylvia's Lovers, Cousin Phillis, and her last novel, unfinished at her sudden death in 1865, Wives and Daughters; as well as the first biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë. 

So, to Cranford. It seems to me that, very crudely, her books might be divided into two groups. One is her "industrial" novels, dealing with the social problems resulting from the industrialization of England in the 1840s and beyond. These would include Mary Barton, Ruth, and North and South. The other group are perhaps "social" novels, detailing life in England, especially the rural areas, in the decades preceding the '50s. Cranford and Cousin Phillis surely fit in this category. Such a division is very rough, and I should note that a novel like North and South is certainly "social", and indeed in some part deals closely with rural life in the South of England; and much of the tension in Cranford is between the disappearing social order that hangs on in the village of Cranford (a stand in for Knutsford, where Gaskell grew up) and the more vigorous society of nearby Drumble (a stand in for Manchester, where Gaskell lived as an adult.) Likewise the plot of Cousin Phillis is driven in part by the impending arrival of the railroad in a rural area. One aspect of this division is that the tone of the more rural books is sweeter, and, particularly in Cranford, much more comedic.

Cranford grew out of a shortish story, or sketch, published in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words in 1851, called "Our Society at Cranford". This piece proved popular, and (with Dickens' eager approval) Gaskell produced seven more sketches, published in 1852 and 1853. The book version was published in 1853, and Gaskell revised it somewhat for that edition, making it a bit more consistent among other changes. Cranford was fairly popular in Gaskell's lifetime, and she called it the only one of her books she could reread. It became her most popular book in the decades after her death, and I admit it was the only one of her novels I was aware of, when I first read it back in 2001. Gaskell's reputation, as with many Victorian writers not named Bronte, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, or Hardy, declined precipitously by the early 20th Century, but it has since recovered -- as it should have because she was a wonderful writer -- and the latter day ranking of her novels seems to put North and South and Wives and Daughters at the top. And likely that is fair (though I haven't read enough of her work to make a personal ranking) but Cranford is really quite wonderful in its way.

The novel is narrated by a young woman named Mary Smith, who grew up in Cranford but now lives with her wealthy father in Drumble. Mary (and I should note we don't learn her name until towards the end of the novel) frequently visits her friends in Cranford, who are mostly a generation older than she. She notes in the first sketch that Cranford society is ruled by its "Amazons" -- a group of old maids and widows. As such, men are regarded with suspicion, and if not excluded from society, are at least not seen as important to it. The society is extremely class conscious, and quite conscious of financial matters, in a somewhat paradoxical manner -- some of these women are understandably not well off at all, and thus it is important nobody flaunt their comparative wealth -- instead, practice "elegant economy". (But it is very clear that they are still quite aware of who has money, even as the richest of them is the most parsimonious in her entertainments.) All this is detailed in Mary Smith's affectionate but gently sardonic voice. The novel is, throughout, extremely funny in a lightly amusing way. By which I mean, sometimes laugh out loud funny and always cute.

Having said that -- which is more or less all I saw on first reading -- it is also acutely observant: of why this social order exists, of why and how it is changing, of how it is maintained outwardly while often flouted, and of what it means to the people of Cranford, especially the women. Some of this is told via a series of romantic stories that run through the eight sketches. There is at the beginning Miss Jessie Brown's wedding to an old admirer, a certain Major Gordon, which follows upon the deaths of her father and elder sister. There is the impoverished widow of a Scottish lord, Lady Glenmire, marrying the lower class Mr. Hoggins, the town doctor, who is looked down on despite his evident accomplishments. And most of all there is the story of Mary Smith's closest friend, Matilda Jenkyns. Matilda, called Matty, is the daughter of Cranford's previous rector. Her parents are long dead, and their brother is assumed dead after he ran away to join the Navy. Matty and her hidebound elder sister Miss Jenkyns have lived alone for decades on a reduced income. Miss Jenkyns has ruled over Matty, who is perhaps "simpler" but far more sympathetic, for years, in particular thwarting her romance with a (lower class) farmer. Even after Miss Jenkyns dies, her influence shapes Matty, though she does manage to allow her maid to have a "follower". But Matty's sweetness is real, and at the close, when a disastrous investment of Miss Jenkyns goes bad, that sweetness and honesty is what saves her, in an ending that is perhaps a tad over-sentimental, and perhaps a tad reliant on a deus ex machina, but which is for all that powerful.

The latter day story, "The Cage at Cranford", is more or less trivial. The humor is okay, but seems a bit forced. It concerns Mary Smith trying to buy a gift for Miss Pole, one of the old maids of Cranford, who would like a nice new cap, but not anything so fashionable as Mary might end up with. It's a pendant, and changes nothing about the novel.

Cousin Phillis was published in the Cornhill Magazine in four parts between November 1963 and February 1864. It is told by Paul Manning, a young man who has taken a job working for a railroad company in the early 1840s. His father is a mechanically minded man, an inventor indeed, and Paul is a worthy fellow but without his father's brilliance. He learns that a cousin of his, a Mrs. Holman, lives near one of the towns the railroad is being extended towards, and his boss, an intelligent young man named Mr. Holdsworth, allows him to visit. 

His cousin Mrs. Holman lives at Hope Farm, and her husband is a nonconformist minister who also runs the farm, very capably. Their daughter is Phillis, who is tall and beautiful and intellectually brilliant. Paul is fascinated by her, but quickly realizes she's quite out of his league. (Not only is she much smarter than he, she is taller!) They become good friends. Paul becomes close to the Holmans, in part out of great respect to Minister Holman, who is not only a committed and deeply moral dissenting minister, but a profoundly intelligent and mechanically inclined man, who over time becomes good friends with Paul's father.

Here I will say that I immediately guessed nearly the exact course of the story ... and I was right. Paul greatly admires his boss Mr. Holdsworth, who is, like Phillis, quite brilliant. In the course of things, Phillis and Mr. Holdsworth are introduced. Mr. Holdsworth charms both of Phillis' parents, and Phillis quite falls for him. It is clear that Mr. Holdsworth is enchanted with Phillis as well -- but then he is called away to a railway project in Canada. And ... well, Phillis doesn't take this well. Aspects of this seemed just a bit overwrought to me, but perhaps that is my 20th/21st Century perspective. The nouvelle resolves itself not as melodramatically as I suppose I feared. It becomes a moving meditation on the place of intelligent women in mid 19th Century English society, and also on how even a well intended man like Minister Holman can completely misunderstand his daughter. It's a very fine story, perhaps not quite a great story, but certainly worth reading.

Review: Icarus Descending, by Elizabeth Hand

 Icarus Descending, by Elizabeth Hand

 a review by Rich Horton

Icarus Descending concludes Elizabeth Hand's Winterlong trilogy, which comprises her first three novels. Winterlong was published in 1990, Æstival Tide followed in 1992 and Icarus Descending in 1993. The second and third novels have never been reprinted except in Open Road ebooks, and Icarus Descending did not even get a UK edition, while Winterlong got a very nice Harper Prism edition in the late '90s. I must say I do think that represents the relative quality of the books -- the second and third books are good, but Winterlong is special. And, I confess, I do wonder if the events in the latter two novels were part of the original conception -- in some ways they seem second thoughts, and it's almost as if a trilogy consisting of Æstival Tide, Icarus Descending, and a third novel might have worked better. Winterlong, I believe, stands powerfully on its own.

That said, I did enjoy the second and third novels in the series. And to be fair, the action in those novels is clearly set in the same future (possibly with mild adjustments) as Winterlong, and there are shared characters. Icarus Descending opens, however, with a brand new character, Kalamat, an "energumen", one of many genetically modified clones of the daughter of a great scientist, Luther Burdock. Burdock died a couple centuries earlier, but his daughter's clones, modified to be giants (roughly 9 feet tall), to be very intelligent and very strong, and to have three year lifespans, have been slave labor for the Ascendant class. (Yes, I did think of Blade Runner.) Kalamat lives on one of the Ascendant space stations, and recently all the humans ("masters") on her station died of a plague -- purposely spread by a revolutionary hoping to free all the various "geneslaves" in this dark future. Kalamat quickly learns that her fellow energumens on other stations are trying to unite, and to return to the "Element" (Earth) to join the effort of freeing the geneslaves on the Earth, and also to meet their now resurrected father.

This seems at base an honorable project -- and indeed it is. But it's soon clear that it's being led by Metatron, the military AI we learned about in the previous novel. Metatron is insane, and his goal is to kill all humanity, and to rule over the survivors (mostly the geneslaves.) He also is aware of Icarus, an asteroid which will soon crash into Earth -- so he plans to take over the never fully used starships of the Ascendants and escape. Kalamat is skeptical -- and she also has but a few weeks to live.

The other two strands of the novel follow familiar characters. In one, we again meet Wendy Wanders (from Winterlong) as she and her zookeeper friend Jane and the intelligent chimpanzee Scarlet Pan flee the ruins of the City. They happen upon an old old house, now a hostel of sorts, run by a gay couple -- a centuries old man and a much younger one. This couple is supporting the revolution of the geneslaves, and before long they send Wendy and Jane on to the city in the Appalachians that is the center of the revolution -- Cassandra. (I was also reminded of the "Long Long Time" episode of The Last of Us.)

The third thread follows the cyborged "rasa" Margalis Tast'annin as he, along with another AI, Nefertity, and the boy Hobe escape the ruins of the arcology Araboth. They are trying to find Metatron, a quest which leads them to fly to Kalamat's station. But Metatron is a step ahead of them, even though Nefertity, a much more virtuous creature, is hoping to stop him. So they too return to Earth, to Cassandra, as Icarus descends. The fate of Nefertity, of Tast'annin, of Jane, and indeed of humanity itself (and really the geneslaves too) hangs in the balance ...

There is lots to like here. Some compelling characters. Strong writing. Some additional fascinating imaginative constructs. A morally challenging situation. And for all those things it is worth reading. But, alas, the ending fizzles out. Some confrontations that seemed set up never happened. Some characters were essentially just dropped. As a conclusion to the Winterlong trilogy, it's a disappointment. As a book on its own -- or a sequel to Æstival Tide -- it's just fine, but I think it needed at least a couple more chapters, and possibly another book.

Review: The Gradual, by Christopher Priest

Review: The Gradual, by Christopher Priest

by Rich Horton

Readercon for 2024 was this past weekend (July 11-14.) I was on a panel about the fiction of Christopher Priest. In preparation, I read or reread several novels and short stories. Here is one of them, The Gradual, from 2016, one of a run of 7 novels in the last dozen or so years of his life. Three of these books, including The Gradual, are set in his enigmatic recurring location, the Dream Archipelago.

I'll repeat a quick potted bio I've used before: Christopher Priest was born in 1943 and died earlier this year, at the age of 80. His first sale was "The Run", to Impulse in 1965. His first novel, Indoctrinaire, appeared in 1970, and he began to get wide recognition for his reality-bending fiction with novels like Inverted World (1974) and The Dream of Wessex (1977). His best known novel is probably The Prestige (1995) which was made into a successful movie by Christopher Nolan. A large portion of his work concerns the Dream Archipelago, a world-spanning belt of islands on another planet, which is featured in a number of short stories and five novels.

The Gradual is narrated by Alesandro Sussken. Alesandro, or Sandro, is a very successful composer from Glaund, one of two warring polities on the northern continent of his world. These two countries -- Glaund and Faiandland -- have been at war for centuries. Over time they have moved their hostilities to the mostly unoccupied southern continent. The Dream Archipelago, the islands in between the northern and southern continents of this world, is determinedly neutral, though as this novel will show, it is not unaffected by the war. By this time the main impact on Glaund is not direct damage to their land, but the economic burden of the war, and the threat of conscription for their young men. Glaund, at this junction, is an autocratic police state.

Sandro and his older brother Jacj are both musically talented, and both grow up opposed to the government of Glaund, and to the war. But when Jacj is conscripted, he does not resist, and enlists in the army right away. Meanwhile Sandro grows to maturity, waiting futilely for his brother's return -- the battalions return from their service roughly in the order they were drafted, but there is some randomness, and the time anyone will be away is hard to predict. Sandro becomes a promising modernist composer, and avoids conscription. His fame grows, he marries another talented musician, his recordings are widely distributed. All along he feels inspired by his visions of the Dream Archipelago islands nearest to his home. He is even surprised to learn that a rock musician in the Archipelago, with the curious pseudonym And Ante, has plagiarized his work. And when the opportunity arises to go on a tour of the Archipelago, he agrees, even though it means being away from his wife for several weeks. He still remembers his brother, but it has been decades since Jacj was conscripted by now -- he must have died.

The tour is a success, though Sandro is puzzled by the difficulty he has keeping his watch on time. They visit a number of different islands over the 9 weeks of the tour, and Sandro's music is well received. He has a one night stand with a pianist on one island, and he comes close to the place his plagiarist lived. And then he returns home. And finds, shockingly, that he has been gone not 9 weeks, but almost 2 years. His wife has left him. His finances are in a mess. He works to restore things, and also realizes his brother's battalion is scheduled to return soon. And then he is tapped by the government to write a symphony celebrating the regime -- something he can hardly refuse, despite his hatred for them. Instead, he escapes to the Dream Archipelago, and over time (time?) begins to understand the nature of time in the Archipelago, the concept of the "gradual", and also reunites with his lover from the previous trip, and makes a couple more surprising meetings with people from his past. But all along his destiny is set  ...

I was not bored by this novel, but I wasn't enthralled, either. In the end I don't think the treatment of time at the center of the book really works. And even though I guessed the key "surprises" towards the end of the book, I found them a bit disappointing. It's an interesting book, but not quite successful, and sort of meaningless (to me) in the final analysis. Priest was a great and individual writer, and his best works are remarkable, but this one is just, er, marking time in his oeuvre.

Resurrected Review: The Pyrates, by George MacDonald Fraser

Resurrected Review: The Pyrates, by George MacDonald Fraser

by Rich Horton

George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008) was a British journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He is by far most famous for his comic historical novels about Harry Flashman, in which he made the cowardly character from the 19th Century novel Tom Brown's Schooldays into a hero (or antihero). I read the bulk of these with enjoyment as a teen. I plan to read his very long novel Mr. American sometime (it is peripherally related to the Flashman books.) But some years ago I read his comic novel The Pyrates, and I've resurrected what I wrote about that book.

According to Fraser, a man named Manders set him a painting of the deck of a pirate ship, packed with colourful piratical (or pyratical) characters. He decided the painting was too good to waste, and wrote this novel around it. When he was done, he wanted to use the painting as the book's cover, but he could not locate the mysterious Mr. Manders. They used the painting for the cover anyway. That story seems to good to be true in a way -- I wonder if he wasn't having us on.

The novel is a loving and over-the-top parody of pirate adventures, both cinematic (i.e. Errol Flynn) and literary (i.e. Rafael Sabatini and Jeffery Farnol) -- indeed, Fraser includes a long list of "influences" at the end of the book. It's told in a postmodern fashion, with plenty of deliberate anachronisms and direct addresses to the reader, reminding us of what is sure to happen, the book being fiction and all. It's very funny, in a way that is at times almost distracting, or perhaps tiring. Which seems an odd complaint -- that a purposely funny book might be too funny -- but at times I put it down simply because I was tired of the constant jokes.

The story concerns a valuable crown, with six jeweled sections, entrusted (by Samuel Pepys) to Our Hero, Captain Ben Avery, for safe delivery to the King of Madagascar. But unfortunately Avery's ship, in the charge of one Admiral Rooke, is secretly manned by a crew of pirates, who wish to free their comradess, the beautiful and bloodthirsty black woman pirate Sheba, who is being transported to prison (or a slave camp or something) on the same ship. They free Sheba, and also steal the crown, which conveniently splits six ways. In the mean time they also kidnap the beautiful daughter of Admiral Rooke, Vanity, who has fallen in love with Ben. And Ben is accused of the theft of the crown. So he must attempt to recover the six pieces of the crown, as well as rescuing Vanity, and also restoring his good name. And his only help is in the dubious person of the rascally Captain Thomas Blood, who ended up on the same ship, and who also has his eye on Vanity's virtue.

Naturally Ben will ultimately be successful, but not before facing the attentions of numerous women who fall in love with him, such as Sheba, Anne Bonney, and a lovely young Spanish woman; and also dealing with the evil and sadistic designs of the Spanish governor in the New World; and also dealing with Captain Blood's various betrayals, most of which actually end up helping things, if only by accident; and also dealing with cannibals and religiously zealous natives and his own agent. And so on. It's intricately but of course not plausibly plotted, wickedly funny, all in all a good read if as I implied somehow less that a true masterwork.