Review: The Lonely Girl (aka Girl with Green Eyes), by Edna O'Brien

The Lonely Girl aka Girl with Green Eyes, by Edna O'Brien

a review by Rich Horton

Edna O'Brien was born December 15, 1930 in Ireland, and died just a couple of weeks ago, July 27, 2024, at the age of 93. She was one of Ireland's most important 20th Century novelists, and was particularly important in bringing a frankness about the sexual life of young women into Irish literature -- an achievement that caused her early work to be fiercely criticized and sometimes banned in her home country. She trained to be a pharmacist and worked at that job in Dublin, but moved to London with her husband in 1959, and never again lived in Ireland. She wrote some 16 novels, four children's books, several plays, and countless short stories, as well as criticism, biographies of Joyce and Byron, and a memoir. After hearing of her death, I decided I ought to finally read her, and I took up the only book of hers I have, a 1981 paperback edition, "in Penguins" as the publisher likes to say, of Girl with Green Eyes. This was Penguin's 1964 retitling of her second novel, The Lonely Girl (1962), presumably to coincide with the release of the movie based on the novel and also called Girl with Green Eyes, starring Rita Tushingham, Lynn Redgrave, and Peter Finch. Kingsley Amis, I note, was an early promoter of her work, which isn't in any way surprising, but it amuses me mildly as both Amis and O'Brien had at least four novels with the word "Girl" in the title (arguably for different reasons!)

The Lonely Girl is narrated by Caithleen (Kate) Brady, who grew up in rural Ireland, as apparently related in The Country Girls (1960), O'Brien's first novel. She and her best friend Barbara (Baba) Brennan have moved to Dublin, and share a room in the house of Joanna, who seems to be a somewhat recent immigrant. The novel appears to be set in the 1950s, approximately the time of writing. Kate works at a small shop, and makes just enough money to get by, though she's been promised a "rise" in the new year. She and Baba have as an active a social life as they can manage, cadging tickets to dances and such when they can, or pulling tricks like posing as reporters for Women's Night. Baba seems the more adventurous, and knows several young men, and seems likely to be sleeping with a married man. Kate is a reader, and quieter than Baba, and somewhat sensitive about her weight.

The novel is primarily built around Kate's affair with an older man, Eugene Gaillard, a documentary filmmaker in his mid-30s. (Kate turns 21 during the novel.) This is her second serious boyfriend -- apparently she had a boyfriend she called Mr. Gentleman in The Country Girls. They go on several dates, and before long Eugene invites her to his house, out in the country a bit. It's a beautiful location, and the house is -- quaint. Kate is very attracted to Eugene, and he to her, and eventually she agrees to sleep with him, indeed to move in with him, but panics when he attempts to have sex. He is tolerant of this, and tolerant of her relative ignorance, and they get along pretty well, even though Kate learns that Eugene has an American wife, and a daughter, though the wife has left him and taken their daughter with her back to the US.

But gossip gets to the ears of Kate's father (her mother drowned when she was 14.) Her father is a terrible man, constantly drunk, but the whole community collaborates as he essentially kidnaps her and takes her back home. She tries to escape and can't, and is lectured by the local priest, but finally manages to get back to Eugene's house. Leading to a terrible confrontation when a posse from Kate's village comes by the next day and is only chased away by the housekeeper brandishing a gun, after Eugene is beaten up. Kate does begin to have sex and enjoy it, but it's clear to the reader that this relationship can't last, between the uneven ages of the two people, and Eugene's marriage (and apparent remaining feelings for his wife), and Eugene's growing impatience with Kate's youth. So the novel moves to its inevitable conclusion.

The plot isn't really what drives the story, though. The characters are extremely well depicted. The book is very funny at times -- Baba is a hoot -- and the portrayal of Kate's young love and developing sexuality is convincing, as is the portrayal of life in general in Ireland. And the prose is wonderful. It's a beautiful novel, and Edna O'Brien certainly deserves her reputation.

Review: The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl

Review: The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

by Rich Horton

I recently had occasion to reexamine some of Frederik Pohl's most significant work, in support of an essay about Pohl's consideration of the future or work and working people. This was quite rewarding -- I've enjoyed Pohl's contributions ever since encountering him in my early teens, but I'd lost touch with his major works. And arguably chief among those is The Space Merchants -- which of course he wrote in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth.

The Space Merchants is a widely accepted classic of science fiction. I read it with considerable enjoyment in my teens, but as I worked on that essay I realized that I didn't remember it very well at all, so I reread it. And in the process I bought the revised version, from 2011. In this version Pohl said he fixed a few "logical and scientific errors" -- I suppose I'm OK with changes like that. But he also did things like remove references to the year in which the events occurred -- a few decades after 2039 in the original book, so I suppose Pohl thought that seemed uncomfortably close to 2011. And he altered the names of some of the corporations mentioned, which to me is pointless and something of a cheat. (At first I thought, wait a minute, Pohl and Kornbluth predicted FedEx?!) Pohl also added a preface describing the origins of the novel, and of his collaboration with Kornbluth, which was pretty enjoyable and worthwhile.

The novel first appeared as a serial called "Gravy Planet" in Galaxy in June, July, and August of 1952. The book version came out in 1953 from Ballantine, which at that time often issued simultaneous hardcover and paperback first edtions, and did so in this case. It has been reprinted many times since then (indeed, Pohl somewhat ironically discusses that status of latter day reprints in the preface to this edition.) Pohl did write a sequel, The Merchants' War, published in 1984. I have not read that book.

Mitch Courtenay is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. He is a high-ranking copywriter for Fowler-Schocken, one of the leading advertising agencies in the crowded near future Earth. And it turns out that that's an even more important position than we might think, as in this future the advertising agencies essentially hold all the power. The society is basically corporatist, and the battle to increase sales is fundamental. And the best tool corporations have to improve sales is advertising -- so by now the ad agencies pull all the strings. As the novel opens, Mitch gets a plum new assignment, which comes with a promotion -- he is going to lead the advertising effort for the Venus Project -- a plan to colonize (and terraform) Venus. From the perspective of the corporations, this is mainly a way to open up space for new consumers, as Earth is getting terribly crowded. The challenge, for Fowler Schocken and by extension Mitch, is to make the idea of colonizing a hellish place like Venus attractive. But Mitch takes it on, with the help of the first man to land on Venus, Jack O'Shea, a midget, and a cynical man to boot. As Jack says, when asked what he would do to attract colonists to Venus: "I'd tell them a lot of damn lies!" Which is right up an ad man's alley. 

Mitch has another problem, a personal problem: his wife Kathy. He's still desperately in love with her, but the end of their one year marriage contract is approaching and she isn't showing signs of wanting to renew. He hopes his promotion will make her readier to renew, but she's still resistant. And when the Venus Project gets going, she does show some interest in helping him out -- but she also shows perhaps a bit too much interest in Jack O'Shea.

Then a major complication arises -- Mitch's biggest rival in Fowler Schocken seems to be obstructing his work, and when Mitch tries to arrange a confrontation, he is betrayed, and finds himself declared dead, and with a new identity, sent to work in the Chlorella plantations, with the synthetic food processing. This is a typically abusive work environment for this future. It's a company shop, in that food and housing are supplied by the corporation, and the system is set up so that it's almost impossible to avoid falling into debt. Work contracts theoretically expire, but as one adds debt the contract can be extended. The work is difficult and dangerous. This is the look we get in this novel at blue collar working conditions, and of life in general at that economic level. It's pretty horrifying, and the sense is that much of the crowded world lives in similar straits. The reform movement in the book is, however, mostly environmental -- the "Consies" (Conservationists) are the main resistance movement, and while they certainly have adherents among the lower classes, they do seem dominated by better off people. And, inevitably, Mitch gets involved with that movement -- though his plan is to betray the Consies to his superiors, to allow himself to be reinstated to his rightful position.

All this is pretty effective stuff -- sharply satirical, with a sympathetic protagonist who we realize is on the wrong side. The criticism of advertising, and thus of corporate domination, is biting and hits home. Having said that, upon this reread, I found the resolution disappointing -- Mitch's inevitable change of heart seems forced, and the hugger mugger to get to a (mostly) happy ending doesn't convince. The final state of things is ... fair, I suppose? -- but also just what an SF fan wants. In the end, this is a good novel, that did an awful lot of original things, and truly did influence the future of the field -- but it's also a bit of a sellout, and so it remains good but not great.

Review: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, by Winifred Watson

Review: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, by Winifred Watson

a review by Rich Horton

This book has been on my radar for a while. It fits in a category I take considerable interest in: popular fiction of the first half of the 20th Century, for one thing. It's quite highly regarded by those who have read it. And I have had numerous recommendations from people I trust: first and foremost, Hyson Concepcion, but also Scott Thompson of the Furrowed Middlebrow blog. Several other people have echoed these recommendations in comments. So I bought a copy of the book, and put it right on top of my TBR pile, and there it stayed for a few weeks while I read a few other books due to various obligations. And just this past weekend, at the science fiction convention Confluence, I had a nice long talk with the writer Timons Esaias, and we realized we both have an interest in -- women writers of the first half of the 20th Century. And Timons asked -- "Have you read Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day?" I mean, I was going to read it promptly anyway, but that was a delightful serendipitous confirmation.

My edition is the Persephone Books paperback from 2000, with an introduction by Henrietta Twycross-Martin. This edition has an elegant cover in all grey except for the title/author block, though Persephone reissued it in 2008 with the illustrated cover shown above. (I have a couple of those all grey Persephone editions and I find that presentation quite nice.) The novel, Watson's third, was first published in 1938 by Methuen. The Persephone edition's text seems to have reproduced the pages from the first edition, which was illustrated nicely by Mary Thompson. Though Watson was apparently a somewhat sucessful writer in her day, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was evidently her most popular book, I could not find a copy of the earlier editions. I'll go into detail about Watson's life and career after touching on the novel.

Miss Pettigrew is a woman of 40 or so, quite poor, and taking jobs as a governess to make ends meet. As the story opens, at 9:15 AM, she is just entering the employment office, for she needs a new position. She doesn't think she's a very good governess, and she certainly doesn't enjoy her work, but the only alternative is the workhouse. The agency gives her the address of a Miss LaFosse, who is looking for a nursery governess, and Miss Pettigrew makes her way to Miss LaFosse's apartment.

On arriving, she finds a very pretty young woman, rather startled to see her, and apparently afraid she was someone else. And before long a young man emerges from the bedroom. Miss Pettigrew is rather taken aback -- and there is no sign of a nursery or a child -- but soon Miss LaFosse -- Delysia -- is asking for her help in shooing away this young man, Phil, because Miss LaFosse's other lover, Nick, is about to come over, and he is a dangerous man. Before long Miss Pettigrew has been enlisted by Delysia for more help with her somewhat disorganized social life. It turns out that Delysia has another lover, Michael, who doesn't have Phil's advantages (being willing to bankroll a show with Delysia as the star) or Nick's advantages (being devastatingly handsome and also paying Delysia's rent.) But Michael is willing to marry Miss La Fosse, and seems a better person anyway, except for the part about just getting out of jail.

So the novel continues, over the course of a day, as Miss Pettigrew also meets Delysia's hairdresser, Edythe Dubarry, and continues to help both women out of scrapes while herself being introduced to bohemian life, getting a makeover and wearing a nice dress, drinking, going to a night club, etc. It's a very light-hearted novel, and very funny, and if it's totally implausible who cares? Miss Pettigrew, all the while worrying about where Miss LaFosse's children might be and what will happen when she realizes Miss Pettigrew is just a governess, has the time of her life, and it would be fair to say that she and Delysia each learn (not in any heavy-handed way) some useful lessons from the other. The book is a thoroughgoing delight.

Winifred Watson (married name Pickering) was born in 1906 near Newcastle, and lived there most of her life. She published her first novel in 1935, Fell Top, and published five more through 1943, then stopped writing. She married in 1936, and her husband was apparently very supportive of her writing, but in 1943, the top floor of the house they were living in was hit by a bomb. She had by sheer luck taken her fussy baby downstairs just before. The house being unlivable, she had to move in with her mother-in-law, and conditions were simply not conducive to writing, and even after the War she never returned to it, despite encouragement from her husband and son.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was her third written novel, but, curiously, it was the fourth published, as Methuen originally rejected it. Her first two novels were good sellers, and both were romantic dramas set in rural areas near Newcastle, and her publishers wanted more of the same. She felt strongly about Miss Pettigrew, and made a deal -- she'd write another book like the one they wanted, but after that came out they would publish Miss Pettigrew -- and Watson's instincts about the book proved correct.

Before long all her books were out of print, and by the 1990s were all but forgotten. But Persephone -- one of a few imprints devoted to rescuing worthy books by forgetten women writers -- had asked for reader suggestions for books to reprint; and Henriette Twycross-Martin suggested Miss Pettigrew -- her mother's favorite novel, and a novel she too loved. Persephone's editors loved the book too, and they suggested that Twycross-Martin write the introduction -- and then they found that Winifred Watson was still living in Newcastle, then some 93 years old. All these details, I should add, are gleaned from Twycross-Martin's excellent introduction. Watson was able to see her novel reprinted, and widely praised, before her death at age 95 in 2002. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was made into an apparently pretty good movie in 2008, starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams (who seem excellent choices to play Miss Pettigrew and Delysia LaFosse, respectively.)

Review: An Infinite Summer, by Christopher Priest

Review: An Infinite Summer, by Christopher Priest

by Rich Horton

To repeat myself: The late Christopher Priest (1943-2024) was one of the greatest SF writers of his generation. He made an early splash with novels like Inverted World and A Dream of Wessex (aka The Perfect Lover), followed by The Prestige, which was made into a successful movie by Christopher Nolan, and then by any number of stories and novels in his Dream Archipelago sequence. I wrote an obituary of him for Black Gate here. 

This is the last, for now, of my reviews of Christopher Priest's work, sparked by being on a panel about his fiction at Readercon this year. (Though I hope to get around to reading The Affirmation, and rereading A Dream of Wessex, Inverted World, and The Islanders, some time in the next few months.)

An Infinite Summer (1979) was Priest's second story collection, but his first significant one. It includes five stories:

"An Infinite Summer" (Andromeda 1 (1976), 8500 words)

"Whores" (New Dimensions 8 (1978), 5200 words)

"Palely Loitering", (F&SF, January 1979, 17800 words)

"The Negation" (Anticipations (1978), 11900 words)

"The Watched" (F&SF, April 1978, 20500 words)

Of these stories, three are definitely part of his extended Dream Archipelago sequence -- "Whores", "The Negation", and "The Watched". "An Infinite Summer" is often listed as a Dream Archipelago story as well, though I frankly don't see it. The stories are mostly longer, as you can see. 

"An Infinite Summer" was written for Harlan Ellison's Last Dangerous Visions anthology. As Priest told it in his brilliant long essay on that non-book, The Last Deadloss Visions, Ellison asked him more than once for a submission. and finally Priest obliged. He sent the story to Ellison, and after several months, had not received a response. So he withdrew it -- which is a good thing. I will say that I don't think it's precisely a "dangerous" story, at least no more so than any outstanding piece. But it is outstanding, and the thought of it having potentially stayed in limbo for nearly 50 years is depressing. 

"An Infinite Summer" tells of Thomas James Lloyd, who, when we meet him, is in London, the "town" of Richmond, during the Blitz. He lives alone, and does odd jobs, and we quickly learn that he can see invisible things -- strange people he calls "freezers", and what he calls "tableaux" -- three dimensional images of people suspended in a pose. Then back to 1903 -- Thomas is 21, of a wealthy family, and he is supposed to marry Charlotte Carrington -- but he is instead in love with her younger sister Sarah. And he arranges to spend a little time alone with Sarah one day, and learns that she too wishes to marry him, and then -- strange people approach and "freeze" them, as they are about to embrace. The upshot is: for unknown reasons Thomas became unfrozen some time in the '30s, but Sarah is still in the tableau, and he has stayed nearby, decades out of sync with his own time, in the hopes that she too might be unfrozen soon. The climax comes when a German bomber crashes in the area, attracting the attention of the "freezers" ... with a powerfully bittersweet ending for Thomas and Sarah. I have always found this story particularly affecting, and effectively weird. We never do learn the motives or origin of the "freexers", but of course the story isn't about them.

"Whores" is set in the Dream Archipelago. A soldier from the endless war between countries on the Northern Continent has been invalided out of the army, as an enemy weapon has given him sometimes crippling synaesthesia, and comes to an island where he had come before, for "recreation". He's obsessed with finding one particular girl he'd gone to before -- but the war has surged back and forth over this island (in later stories, the Archipelago maintains strict neutrality, but this one, one of the first to be written, speaks of a front having been opened in the Dream Archipelago.) The woman he wanted to find has been killed, but he ends up with another woman, and their encounters are weirdly altered by his synaesthesia, and perhaps by something else that the soldiers had been warned about -- and the story ends in psychological horror. It's short and quite dark, and strange in a distinctly Priestian way.

"Palely Loitering" is not a Dream Archipelago story. It is set in a far future in which Earth has voluntarily reverted to what seems 19th Century tech and social customs. Mykle is telling of events in his past, beginning in his childhood with a visit to Flux Channel Park, which had been built to aid the launch of a starship -- the only starship ever -- and as a result, has some strange spatio-temporal qualities. To wit, there three bridges over the Flux Channel -- the ordinary Today Bridge, plus the Tomorrow Bridge and the Yesterday Bridge, one of which takes you a year into the future, the other into the past. Each year his family goes on an excursion there, and they can go either into the future or into the past (naturally, returning to their time by going back over the opposite bridge.) This time, Mykle impulsively jumps off the Tomorrow bridge at an angle -- which it turns out takes him years farther into the future. At first he is panicked, but a young man comes to help him, and shows him how he can return to his time by jumping back at just the right place. But before Mykle returns, he sees, on the far side of the channel, a pretty girl -- a girl who the young man who has helped him seems to be obsessed with. 

A few years later, the now teenaged Mykle yields to temptation and jumps to the future again -- and again sees the girl on the other side. Now he too becomes obsessed with Estyll (as she is named). One day he meets a young boy on the future side -- himself, of course, as the reader has already guessed. He begins to imagine himself and the girl as lovers ... but sees no way to make it happen. Then his father dies suddenly, and his life changes -- he must learn to take over his father's responsibilities (which are related to the flux channel), and he must make an appropriate marriage, which he does -- a happy one. And he mostly forgets about the girl. Until, decades in the future, the starship is returning, which will mean the Flux Channel Park must be cleared -- and Mykle remembers his youthful obsession, and wonders if he can learn any more about the mysterious Estyll ... It's a sweetly and ambiguously romantic story, with an oddly nostalgic atmosphere, and a somewhat open ending. One of Priest's better stories, I think, and more sentimental than he usually was.

"The Negation" is set on the world of the Dream Archipelago, but on a continent. Dik is a young man, who has been conscripted into his country's Border Patrol, and has been sent to a border town, to patrol the wall on the border between his nation and their rival. He had been an aspiring poet, and was obsessed with a novel called The Affirmation, by Moylita Caine. And Caine is visiting this town. (Caine has been assigned a project by the authoritarian rulers of the country, to write a play.) Dik manages to get a pass to go and visit her, and they strike up a tentative sort of friendship -- Caine is pleased that he read her novel closely, and is happy to discuss it with him at length. But there are issues -- the leading "burgher" of this town, Clerk Tradayn, seems to want to coerce Caine into sex, and it's clear that Caine is an opponent of the regime. Eventually she is arrested -- and a short story she had written for Dik, called "The Negation", is taken as evidence. Dik comes to realize the short story must have been intended as a message to him -- but to do what? It's an involving story with a possibly hopeful, if ambiguous, ending. It's also, of course, interesting that Caine's novel was called The Affirmation, which became the title of Priest's well-regarded 1981 novel, his first Dream Archipelago novel. I haven't read the book, though I plan to soon -- I don't know if "The Negation", and Moylita Caine's novel, are directly related to Priest's novel (of course it's highly possible that Priest was already working on it in 1978 when "The Negation" was written.) 

"The Watched" is set on the island of Tumo. Yvann Ordier is a man who has emigrated to the Dream Archipelago from the northern continent, after he made a fortune selling the miniature surveillance devices called scintillae. He has made himself a comfortable home, and has a beautiful lover. His home is very near the area on Tumo reserved for the Qataari, refugees who were forced to leave the southern continent when the warring countries from the north decided to move their active fighting to that continent. Ordier's lover Jenessa is an anthropologist who studies the Qataari, a very secretive people, who simply freeze when any outsider comes near them. The early chapters establish Ordier as something of a voyeur, obsessed with watching -- he watches his beautiful lover with lust, he obsessively tries to detect the scintillae that end up in his house (scintillae are so small they get everywhere.) And, importantly, he has found an odd old structure on his property with a difficult to reach vantage from which he can peer through a small fault in a stone wall at a sort of theater in the Qataari area. And here he watches a beautiful Qataari woman who seems to be practicing for a sort of ritual dance the Qataari do.

The story's evolutions involve a plot by one of Jenessa's fellow anthropologists to spy on the Qataari from the air, and the anthropologist's visit to Ordier's house, where he might find Ordier's secret vantage point, but mostly it concerns Ordier's growing obsession with the Qataari dance, and the young woman who is its centerpiece, and the clear sexual implications of the dance. As well as the supposedly narcotic Qataari roses ... The climax borders on horror, as Ordier feels he is being invited to participate in some sense in the Qataari ritual -- there are very creepy overtones throughout, and the result is disturbing and powerful.

This is a major collection. The bulk of the rest of Priest's career was devoted to novels, though he did continue to write some short fiction, much of it also set in the Dream Archipelago, but it would be fair to say, I think, that this is the Priest story collection to read first.  

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.