2018 Hugo Recommendations: Novella

Novella

I thought this was a strong year for novellas, and the following is my long list of potential nominees:

Peter Beagle, In Calabria (Tachyon)

Damien Broderick, “Tao Zero”, (Asimov’s, 3-4/17)

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Prisoner of Limnos (Spectrum)

Jaime Fenn, The Martian Job (NewCon Press)    

Michael F. Flynn, “Nexus” (Analog, 3-4/17)          

Kathleen Ann Goonan, “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse”, (Extrasolar)

Karen Heuler, In Search of Lost Time (Aqueduct)

Dave Hutchinson, Acadie (Tor.com Publishing)

Alexander Jablokov, “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry” (Asimov’s, 7-8/17)

Marc Laidlaw, “Stillborne”, (F&SF, 11-12/17)       

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Prime Meridian (Innsmouth Free Press)

David Erik Nelson, “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House”, (F&SF, 7-8/17)         

Alec Nevala-Lee , “The Proving Ground” (Analog, 1-2/17)

K. J. Parker, Mightier Than the Sword (Subterranean)    

Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were N – One”, (Uncanny, 3-4/17)          

Rachel Pollack, “Homecoming”, (F&SF, 1-2/17)

R. Garcia y Robertson, “The Girl Who Stole Herself”, (Asimov’s, 7-8/17)

Christopher Rowe, “The Border State” (Telling the Map)

Sofia Samatar, “Fallow" (Tender)

Jeremiah Tolbert, “The Dragon of Dread Peak”, (Lightspeed, 10/17)          

Cynthia Ward, ”The Adventure of the Incognita Countess” (Aqueduct)

Martha Wells, All Systems Red (Tor.com Publishing)

Of these stories – none of which would disappoint me if they won the Hugo – my four favorites, in no particular order, are:

1.       Sofia Samatar, “Fallow” – Samatar’s debut collection, Tender (Small Beer Press), is absolutely essential.  There are two new stories, this novella, and a short story, “An Account of the Land of Witches”, and both are outstanding. "Fallow" is the story of three different sort of rebels on a struggling colony, apparently inhabited by an Amish-like sect, trying to maintain their identity while hoping for a return to an ecologically ruined Earth when it becomes potentially re-inhabitable. But that doesn't get at what's so cool about it -- beautiful writing, haunting characters, and a real sense of mystery and strangeness.

2.       Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were (N – One)” – A story about a convention of alternate Sarah Pinskers, complete with a murder. It is warmly told – funny at time, certainly the milieu is familiar to any SF con-goer. But it’s dark as well – after, there’s a murder – and it intelligently deals with issue of identity and contingency.

3.       Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Prime Meridian – This story came kind of out of left field – not exactly so, as Moreno-Garcia has certainly done some first-rate writing, but this was published to begin with as an ebook available to supporters of an Indiegogo campaign. It will be more generally available in 2018 (including in at least one Best of the Year volume). And it’s tremendous work, mixing a convincing portrayal of near future Mexico City with dreams of trips to Mars – both the protagonist’s hopes to be an actual colonist, and a fading movie star’s memories of a movie she made about Mars.

4.       Kathleen Ann Goonan – “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse” – just to prove you don’t have to be a woman whose first name starts with S! This is an ambitious and moving story of the first starship, which ends up crewed by a group of super-intelligent children and an older woman.

The current leaders for the fifth position on my ballot are Broderick’s “Tao Zero”, a rather crazy sort of superscientific tale, lots of fun; Hutchinson’s Acadie, a twisty story of the true nature of an utopian seeming space habitat; Tolbert’s “The Dragon of Dread Peak”, also lots of fun, about a group of teens exploring a dangerous magical rift in their city; and Wells’ All Systems Red, an often funny, and quite action-filled, story of an AI security android who really doesn’t like humans all that much.

My Recommendation Posts:
Best Novel, Series, YA
Best Editor, Campbell Award

Short Story
Novelette

Novella

Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine
Other Hugos

First Hugo Recommendations: Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine

Dramatic Presentation

I think this was a pretty strong year for SF movies – at any rate, there are five movies I can nominate without feeling bad. And, I should add, I don’t watch enough movies to say that there aren’t some even better ones out there. Ask Matthew Foster! (But don’t ask him about Logan – he’s just wrong about that! <g>)

My five nominees:

1.       The Shape of Water – clearly, of those I’ve seen, the best SF/Fantasy movie of the year. (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is the best movie of the year, if you’re asking.) This is a delicious hommage to – and improvement on – The Creature From the Black Lagoon and its sequels. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, and starring Sally Hawkins as a janitor who encounters the creature in a military installation, and falls in love with him. It’s a visually impressive film, and a very moving film. Some of the plot machinations are a bit creaky, sure, but the whole thing hangs together and comes to a powerful conclusion. Also features strong performances from Richard Jenkins, Olivia Spencer, and Michael Shannon.

2.       Logan – Possibly my favorite superhero movie ever, but I’ll concede that’s not my favorite genre. Kind of a passing the torch movie, from the “original” X-Men to a new and different generation, and with a really powerful ending. Stars Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen and more …

3.       Blade Runner 2049 – I thought this movie was a really strong sequel to a truly great original. The future seemed a plausible future to Blade Runner, and the story was – with a couple of bumps – exciting and affecting. Harrison Ford, Robin Wright, Ryan Gosling, etc.

4.       Wonder Woman – Hey, I liked this movie. It was fun. It was cool to have a female superhero as the lead, and Gal Gadot did a good job. But it also had the things that annoy me about superhero movies – the abilities that always seem to scale to just what the plot requires at a given time – the exaggerated plot with exaggerated sneering villains (and, yes, Michael Shannon’s character was a bit of an exaggerated sneering villain in The Shape of Water, but his performance, and the way his character was written, transcended that) … So, fun, fine, but it’s really getting overpraised. Also starred Robin Wright (again), Chris Pine, etc …

5.       The Last Jedi – Fun as well, but, well, I recommend Adam Roberts’ review in Strange Horizons, which details pretty convincingly the overly silly aspects that make it just a bit too stupid. I did like Kelly Marie Tran as Rose, and Laura Dern as Admiral Holdo – it also features, of course, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, etc. etc. – and some cute aliens.

I think The Shape of Water very clearly the best of these. There’s a gulf after that, and then Logan and Blade Runner 2049, then another gulf, and Wonder Woman and The Last Jedi. I saw a few more that weren’t as good (Guardians of the Galaxy 2, for example, was disappointing though not awful), but I’m certain I missed some interesting stuff.

As for Short Form, I watch relatively little TV. I did see the Black Mirror episode “U. S. S. Callister”, and I think it is definitely worthy of a Hugo nomination. I'm still on Season 1 of Stranger Things, so I don't yet have a 2017 nominee.

Best Fan Writer

The two fan writers I want to promote the most this year are a couple I mentioned last year as well: John Boston and John O’Neill. John Boston’s most publicly available recent stuff is at Galactic Journey, where he reviews issues of Amazing from 55 years ago, month by month. (It will be noted, perhaps, that I also review issues of Amazing from the same period, at Black Gate.) John’s work there is linked by this tag: http://galacticjourney.org/tag/john-boston/.

As for John O’Neill, of course his central contribution is as editor of Black Gate, for which he writes a great deal of the content, often about “vintage” books he’s found on Ebay or at conventions, and also about upcoming fantasy books.

Time for just a bit of obligatory self-promotion. I am a fan writer (at least my blog writing and my stuff for Black Gate qualifies, if perhaps not my work for Locus, which I guess is now officially professional). I would note in particular my reviews of old magazines at Black Gate, particularly Amazing and Fantastic in the Cele Goldsmith Lalli era, and my various reviews of Ace Doubles (and other SF) at my blog Strange at Ecbatan (rrhorton.blogspot.com) (and often linked from Black Gate.) My blog also includes the occasional Convention Report (I did a long one on this year’s World Fantasy), and other newsy things such this exact article!  I also contributed a piece to the special Journey Planet Programmatic (http://journeyplanet.weebly.com/journey-planet/issue-35-programatic) issue guest-edited by Steven Silver. I would be greatly honored if anyone thought my work worthy of a Best Fan Writer nomination.

Best Fanzine

As I did last year, I plan to nominate Black Gate, Galactic Journey, and Rocket Stack Rank for the Best Fanzine Hugo. I’m particularly partial in this context to Black Gate, primarily of course because I have been a contributor since the print days (issue #2 and most of the subsequent issues). Black Gate is notable for publishing a lot of content on a very wide variety of topics, from promoting new book releases to publishing occasional original and reprinted fiction to reviewing old issues of Galaxy (Matthew Wuertz) and Amazing/Fantastic/etc. (me) to intriguing posts about travel and architecture by Sean MacLachlan. Rocket Stack Rank and Galactic Journey are a bit more tightly focused: the former primarily reviews and rates short fiction, as well as assembling statistics about other reviewers (myself included) and their reactions to the stories; while the latter, as I mentioned above, is reviewing old SF magazines from 55 years past.

Finally, I’ll mention the other SF-oriented site I read and enjoy regularly – File 770 (http://file770.com/ ), which is (deservedly) very well known, having been nominated for the Best Fanzine Hugo numerous times and having won some as well. 2018 is their 40^th Anniversary! Happy Birthday!

It's worth noting that there are a ton of other fanzines/blogs out there, and I know a lot of them are excellent. I just don't have time to check them out regularly.

My Recommendation Posts:

Best Novel, Series, YA
Best Editor, Campbell Award

Short Story
Novelette

Novella

Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine
Other Hugos

The Last Novel by a Master: Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Last Novel by a Master: Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin

A review by Rich Horton

Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the greatest SF/Fantasy writers of all time (arguably the greatest), indeed one of the greatest American writers of her generation, died this week, aged 88. Le Guin was a favorite of mine since I first encountered her work in the early 1970s. She was best known for her SF novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, and for her fantasy trilogy for young adults, The Earthsea Trilogy (later extended with two more books). I loved those books, but also her first written novel, Malafrena, and her last novel, Lavinia, and most everything she published in between, including any number of remarkable short stories. (My favorite is "The Stars Below".) I wrote an appreciation here. 

This review of Lavinia was published in Fantasy Magazine in 2009. I reprint it here in her memory. I am planning another review next week, of one of her lesser known novels, The Beginning Place, from 1980.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s newest novel, now out in a handsome trade paperback edition, is quite simply described as a retelling of the last six books of the Aeneid. In a sense, Le Guin shows her age there: the Aeneid was once quite central to a classical education. Virgil’s poem is the great Latin epic, to compare with Homer’s Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. At one time almost any educated person would have learned Greek and Latin, and in the process read these poems. More recently, familiarity with at least translations of these works was common. But nowadays the best we can hope for is that most people know of these works, and probably know the basic outline of the story.

I’m as guilty as anyone here. I’ve read a prose translation (much abridged, I believe) of the Odyssey, but I know of the Iliad and the Aeneid only in summary, and by having read derivative works. I do know the basic story—the three poems are closely related, telling first (in the Iliad) of the Trojan War, in which an assembly of Greek city-states besieged Troy for ten years in an attempt to reclaim Helen, the wife of Menelaus who had been kidnapped by the Trojan prince Paris. The other two poems both tell of long journeys: the Odyssey of the Greek strategist Odysseus’s ten year journey home to Ithaca, and the Aeneid of the Trojan hero Aeneas’s similarly long journey to what would become Rome, to found a new nation. (Aeneas is regarded as an ancestor of Romulus and Remus.)

The Aeneid differs from Homer’s poems in being a self-conscious work of literature, indisputably by a single man, Publius Vergilius Maro, who lived in the first century BCE. By contrast, it is not at all clear that a poet named Homer existed – at any rate the two Greek epics attributed to him are surely at least in part the product of a considerable oral tradition. Virgil, writing centuries later, was in a sense writing historical fiction, and also explicitly writing in support of his people’s sense of their own roots. He also famously left the Aeneid unfinished, and only the intervention of the Emperor, Augustus, saved the poem from burning.

What does all this have to do with Lavinia? The novel is, as I said, a retelling of the final books of Virgil’s epic. Lavinia is the name of the Latin woman that Aeneas married, and the conclusion to Vergil’s story turns on this: Lavinia, daughter of the king of Latium, had been promised to another local king, Turnus, and when instead she is betrothed to the foreigner Aeneas, Turnus makes war on Latium, leading to a climactic battle with Aeneas. Lavinia has a very small part in Virgil’s poem. Le Guin’s goal here is to flesh out her life.

Lavinia tells her own story, beginning in her youth. Her father is a wise king named Latinus. Her mother, Amata, is from a nearby kingdom, and has been driven mad after Lavinia’s two brothers both died. This sets up a dynamic that drives some of the later action: her mother resents, even hates, Lavinia, and wants nothing to do with Latinus, but both of them are too dutiful to put Amata in her place. As Lavinia grows older she grows spiritually—she communes with the local gods much as her father does—and of course physically, and, as with any royal woman, the question of her marriage becomes politically charged. Many prominent local men are interested, but, naturally, it is the kings and kings’ sons who are most eligible. The clear leader is Turnus, who is handsome and charismatic, and who is also Amata’s nephew. (Thus he and Lavinia are first cousins, but of course in royal marriages such consanguinity was often no bar.) Unfortunately, Turnus’s character is in question—and, indeed, Lavinia cannot respect or love him.

This sets her up against her mother’s wishes. Things are complicated when an oracle declares that Lavinia must not marry a local man. And then the Trojans arrive, wishing merely to settle peacefully in the area. Alas, with fault on both sides, war results, leading to the climax of the Aeneid, Aeneas’s defeat and killing of Turnus. And Lavinia, who truly loves Aeneas, marries him and bears him a son. The novel continues with an interesting account of Lavinia’s life after Aeneas’s death, particularly her struggle to raise her son free from the influence of Aeneas’s elder son (child of his dead Trojan wife Creusa), who in Le Guin’s telling has grievous character faults of his own.

All this is quite a fascinating tale. It is a cliché to say it, but it is fair also—this is a woman’s tale, told from a woman’s point of view, and thus we see much of the effects of war on noncombatants, of the importance of family life in forming character, of the labor of maintaining a household. And all this is greatly involving, much deepening the “male” story Virgil told. (To be sure, Le Guin’s modern viewpoint in and of itself deepens the story, at least for contemporary readers.) And the quotidian details of life in Italy in the 12th Century BCE are very nicely presented—though Le Guin is careful to remind us in an afterword that her version of that life is rather idealized. In addition, as we surely expect, the prose is lovely—graceful and firm, musical, clear—Le Guin is ever a joy to read.

Lavinia is, by any measure, one of the best fantastical novels of 2008. Yet it has to some extent been slighted on awards lists. (It did win the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel, and appeared on the Tiptree honor list, but otherwise is appeared on none of the major shortlists. [Though Le Guin did actually win the Nebula for Best Novel, with Powers, from 2007.]) I suspect this is in part because at first glance it may not appear like a fantasy. The novel is suffused with fantastical elements: the gods are real and present, the future is foretold, oracles are consulted and answer. But nonetheless, the status of the Aeneid as a form of Roman history—and as an established “classic” basis of the novel—gives the impression that this is historical fiction. Le Guin’s novel is fantastical in another, rather metafictional sense. Lavinia, in telling the story, is aware that she is a fictional character, and she continues in a sort of “bardo”, not able to die because she did not die in the poem. (She even has conversations with Virgil, and is vouchsafed visions of Rome’s future.) But even this, though clearly fantastical, does not necessarily “feel” like genre fantasy. (Indeed it is a device not dissimilar to ones used in many mainstream novels.) Be all that as it may, for me this is the best fantasy novel of 2008—a lovely novel that stands as yet another landmark in a remarkable career.

Old Bestseller: Rainbow's End, by Vivian Radcliffe

Old Bestseller: Rainbow's End, by Vivian Radcliffe

a review by Rich Horton

This was not, to be sure, a bestseller. But it represents a genre I take an interest in -- popular romance. Romance novels as a separate genre seem to have started around 1920. Some cite E. M. Hull's The Sheik. Right around the same time Georgette Heyer began to publish. Really, the "genrefication" of fiction was just beginning at that time -- that is, the establishment of magazines and publishing lines devoted to a specific category. Famously, of course, the first Science Fiction magazine appeared in 1926. Other magazine categories were established at around that time as well. Juvenile fiction as a category appeared a bit later -- in the '30s. Mills and Boon began concentrating on category romance in the 1930s. (Harlequin, which now owns Mills and Boon, was founded in Canada in 1949.)

This novel, Rainbow's End, was published in 1936 by Phoenix Press. They seem to have been a firm that specialized in rather lurid fiction in several categories. They've been called "Depression Era Pulp". By all accounts they didn't pay well -- and they got what they paid for, if this book is any indication. I can't find any information about the author, Vivian Radcliffe (which certainly might be a pseudonym, though I don't know that for sure).

As for the book itself, it's rather absurd. Marianne Cutting is a young woman working in New York. Her parents died a year or two before -- her father was a Professor at an upstate university. She is just getting by financially, while carrying on a secret relationship with Avery Pratt, a prat (we learn eventually) studying at West Point. He's a rich prat, though. then one day someone slips her a package. It has a ticket on a round the world cruise, and a couple of thousand dollars for expenses, and a passport in the name "Ann Lewell". She tries to find "Ann Lewell" but can't find any evidence she exists. Desperate for adventure, she decides to take a chance and take the cruise.

Once on board she meets a woman who darkly hints that she knows what's going on, and who insists that Marianne give her any cables they receive addressed to Ann Lewell. She also meets a handsome lawyer named Garth Cameron -- and before long they are in love. But will Marianne confess to Garth her real name?

More to the point, we learn, will Garth confess his role in this whole thing? For he it was who arranged for Marianne's trip. His law firm was engaged by Avery Pratt's mother to bribe Marianne to drop Avery -- she is totally unsuitable, at least in Mrs. Pratt's eyes. But Garth, on seeing Marianne dancing with Avery, fell immediately in love with her. He wants to pry her away from Avery, so uses the Pratt bribe to buy her this ticket ...

Well, some problems intervene. There is the mysterious girl who wants all "Ann Lewell's" cables, for example. And there's another guy who falls for Ann Lewell -- and a woman who loves that guy and who befriends "Ann". And there's discord between Garth and Marianne when each learns just a portion of the other's real story ...

Well, it's all really stupid. And it's dreadfully written. And there's no chemistry between the main characters, and ... well, I could go on. The book is what it is -- a bad example of a genre that is indeed much disparaged, but which can be quite enjoyable at its best. However, books like Rainbow's End are the reason the genre is so much disparaged.

(This week I also review the late Ursula K. Le Guin's last novel, Lavinia.)

True Journey is Return: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)

True Journey is Return: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)

Like all of us, I think, I’m stunned and saddened to hear of Ursula Le Guin’s death. She was one of the greatest writers in the world. A writer central to my reading from my teens.

I say stunned and the news is stunning, but we must remember that Ursula Le Guin was 88, and had a remarkably full life, active in the mind until the end. (It does appear she had been in failing health for some months.) So I hope this can be seen as more a celebration of a great life – from the only point of view I can take myself, that of a lover of her writing.

I can still easily call up in my mind the cover of The Dispossessed, in front of me on the cafeteria table at Naperville Central High School some time in 1975, as I read it during lunch hour. Malafrena was a gift from a friend – I read it eagerly, and loved it – it’s a young person’s book, I think, an ardent book – I understand it was her earliest written novel to see publication, and that shows, but it is still one of my favorites. And her last novel, Lavinia, from 2008, is also one of my favorites, a beautifully written and moving and involving story of the wife of Aeneas. I read the Earthsea books in high school as well, and wrote a term paper on them, despite my teacher’s skepticism about Fantasy. Her prose was truly elegant, truly lovely. Her speculation was rigorous and honest and fruitful in itself. Even from the earliest she was striking – the story “Semley’s Necklace” (the opening segment of Rocannon's World, her first published novel) is heartbreaking and powerful. And her first story in an SF magazine, “April in Paris”, is sweet and lovely and romantic … I don’t know how it was received at the time but to me it must have seemed an announcement: “This is special. This is a Writer.”

So many of her short stories are special to me … “Winter’s King”, “Nine Lives”, “The Stars Below”, “Another Story”, “Imaginary Countries”, the Yeowe/Werel stories, all the fables of Changing Planes. Some 20 years ago an online discussion group asked what was the greatest single author story collection in SF (not counting Collected Stories books or Best Of books), and my choice was then, and remains now, without question, The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

I never met Le Guin. I reprinted one of her stories, “Elementals”, in the 2013 edition of my Best of the Year book. And I feel particularly fortunate to have written her towards the middle of 2017, asking her about Cele Goldsmith. I didn’t expect a response, but she sent one, absolutely helpful and gracious. I had mentioned I was working on a long piece about Goldsmith – I still am! – and she said she hoped she would be able to read it. I promised to send it to her and I feel particularly sad that she will not see it – though the loss is mine, not hers.

I am an emotional reader at times, and one thing Le Guin could do, repeatedly, was bring me to tears – tears of awe and wonder, tears of sadness, tears of love. I leave with some of my favorite quotes:

“Kaph looked at him and saw the thing he had never seen before, saw him: Owen Pugh, the other, the stranger who held his hand out in the dark.” (I tear up just typing this.)

“Stars and gatherings of stars, depth below depth without end, the light.”

“But all this happened a long time ago, nearly forty years ago; I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries.”

And, of course, as Le Guin’s journey on this Earth has ended, we remember, from The Dispossessed: “True journey is return”.

Three Philip K. Dick Award nominees

Three Philip K. Dick Award nominees

The nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award for Best SF Novel first published in paperback were announced the other day. They are:

The Book of Etta by Meg Elison (47North)
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)
After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun (The Unnamed Press)
The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt (Angry Robot)
Revenger by Alastair Reynolds (Orbit)
Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Tor.com)

I confess I had had heard of neither The Book of Etta nor After the Flare before this nomination – which is, to be sure, one of the good things about awards! I had heard of both Six Wakes and Revenger – both look interesting, in fact – but I haven’t read either of them. I have, however, read the other three, all of which are good books, so I’ll review them in brief here.

Bannerless, by Carrie Vaughn (Mariner, 978-0-544-94730-6, $14.99, tpb, 275 pages) July 2017

This is the first novel set in Carrie Vaughn’s post-Apocalyptic sequence. That sequence already includes some excellent short stories (“Amaryllis”, “Astrophilia”, and “Bannerless” (a sort of beta version of the novel). One did wonder if she was going to do an alphabetic tour …) Technological civilization has collapsed, and, decades later, on what seems the California coast, a loose society has formed, built around essentially green principles, most notably an insistence on families earning the right to have children. This right is indicated by banners. So a “bannerless” child invites punishment for the parents, and often social ostracism for the (obviously blameless) children.

The novel is a mystery in form. The protagonist is Enid, an investigator, someone who travels among the local towns when something suspicious occurs. She is new at her job, and when a suspicious death is reported in Pasadan, her mentor, Tomas, suggests that she lead this investigation, with Tomas’ support. So, the main thread follows Enid and Tomas through their investigation, which concerns the death of a man. This man lived alone, perhaps due to his nature, but perhaps because he was a bannerless child. There is considerable political pressure to have the death considered an accident – and indeed, it seems, perhaps it was – but there are curious elements. And complicating factors – a connection to a prosperous local family, the general dislike of the victim – and, even, the presence of Enid’s former lover, Dak. (Not the Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback!)

The second thread begins in Enid’s childhood, and follows her life up to the novel’s present. This thread allows us to see even more of the structure of this future society – including the families, which are extended in nature, and only partly based on genetic ties. We also see some hints of the time of the collapse – Enid has an “aunt” who is one of the few people still alive who remember the world before. And we follow Enid’s romance with Dak, a particularly talented musician (who ends up acting like a certain common depiction of contemporary rock stars).

It’s very fine work – building an interesting society, and at least suggesting some flaws in what at first glance seems a near-Utopian adaptation to post-Collapse conditions. (“Astrophilia”, in particular, is even better at poking at the complacent beliefs of that society in its virtue. It is an abiding fault of post-Apocalyptic writings (I’m looking at you, Edgar Pangborn!) to take a certain glee in the collapse of civilization, allowing its replacement by the author’s preferred social forms.) The murder mystery is solved plausibly (if not terrible surprisingly, but that isn’t necessarily a fault), and its solution also shows stresses in the society’s underpinnings. I liked the book a lot. A sequel, The Wild Roads, is due in 2018.

All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com, 978-0765397539, $14.99, tpb, 160 pages) May 2017

I’m going to be a tad coy here, as my capsule review of this will be in the February Locus. So all I’ll say here is that I recommend this highly. I think it’s a long novella, by Nebula/Hugo rules, but perhaps it’s a short novel instead. (Either way, it’s definitely eligible for the Philip K. Dick Award.) This is great fun, about an android employed as security for a scientific team investigation an alien planet. The android, which calls itself murderbot, for reasons tied to its past, really just wants to watch old television, but it finds itself forced to deal with a real threat to its clients. Funny, thoughtful about AI rights, and good solid adventure. Tremendous fun, really. Two further stories in what is being called collectively The Murderbot Diaries are due in 2018.

The Wrong Stars, by Tim Pratt (Angry Robot, 978-0-85766-709-0, $7.99, mmpb, 396 pages) September 2017

This is really cool Space Opera, again lots of fun. As with most Space Opera, some of the science bits are a whole lot handwavy – and maybe that’s just fine, because, really, is present day science the be all and end all of reality? In some ways this reminded me of Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and I thought maybe some more stories as well, which makes me think I ought to examine further and decide if there is now a popular subgenre of Space Opera concerning the almost soap-operatic interactions of a small varied spaceship crew.

One viewpoint character of The Wrong Stars is Callie, Captain of a spaceship, the White Raven, that does solo work and also occasionally works for the Trans-Neptunian Authority, in a future in which humanity has just stepped back from the brink of species disaster, having nearly ruined the Earth. Partly or perhaps mostly because of tech bartered from aliens called the Liars, Earth has been restored to a gardenlike state, and humans have occupied most of the Solar System. They have also colonized 29 planets, via wormhole bridges sold them by the Liars.

The other viewpoint character is Elena Oh. She was a crewmember on a Goldilocks ship – one of a number of starships sent to likely looking star systems in a Hail Mary attempt to save human civilization before the Liars appeared. These ships were slower than light, with the crew in suspended animation. Elena’s ship, the Anjou, has been found by the White Raven in Trans-Neptunian space, and it has been weirdly altered. Elena is the only person on board. And her memories are fractured, but they suggest that something very strange occurred in the system they finally reached … leading to Elena being sent back to the Solar System alone.

There is immediate sexual attraction between Elena and Callie (who are both recovering from relationships or crushes with men). This complicates their future interactions. But things are complicated anyway, with Callie’s crew consisting of a motley arrangement of folks, including an AI whom we soon gather is based on the personality of Callie’s ex. Elena’s memories of what happened on the system her ship had reached are critical as well – they seem to have encountered aliens unrelated to the Liars. Aliens who seem ready to forcefully modify the humans they encounter. Elena insists on trying to rescue her fellow crewmembers. And the tech Callie recovers on Elena’s ships seems gamechanging, and very scary – especially to the Liars.

The resolution turns on spectacular revelations about the nature of the Liars, and their true motivations, and about what Elena and her fellow crewmembers encountered as well. And the resolution is quite satisfying, and sets up some really interesting subsequent volumes. This will be at least a trilogy, I believe, with the next volume, The Dreaming Stars, due in 2018.

In summary, I have to say, I don’t have a strong preference for a winner of this award. I’d be happy with any of the three books I’ve read winning, and I trust that the other nominees are similarly good. All I can say is – do read these books! There are all both fund and intriguing.

An Obscure Ace Double: The Winds of Gath, by E. C. Tubb/Crisis on Cheiron, by Juanita Coulson

Ace Double Reviews, 25: The Winds of Gath, by E. C. Tubb/Crisis on Cheiron, by Juanita Coulson (#H-27, 1967, $0.60)

One of my goals in this series of reviews is to cover at least one book by all the more prolific Ace Double Contributors. E. C. Tubb was one of these, with 12 "halves", that appeared in 11 separate books (one Ace Double consisted of a Tubb novel backed with a story collection), as well as 1 Ace Double reprint recombining two Tubb halves that were originally published separately. The Winds of Gath is about 50,000 words long. The other half, Juanita Coulson's Crisis on Cheiron, is perhaps 52,000 words.

(covers by Jerome Podwill (left) and Kelly Freas (right))

Tubb is a British writer, born 1919, died in 2010. He published something over 100 SF novels, and about as many short stories, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. One pseudonym was the memorable "Volsted Gridban"! His best known pseudonym was probably "Gregory Kern", under which name he wrote the "Cap Kennedy" books for DAW in the early 70s. (I have not read any of that series.) But he is by far better known for his long series of novels about Earl Dumarest and his search for his lost home planet, Earth. These were published first by Ace, then by DAW, from 1967 through 1985, with a final book showing up only in 1997 from a small press (apparently having been published sometime earlier in France, and presumably having been rejected by DAW). This series runs to 32 books, of which I have read 25 or so. They constitute a rather guilty pleasure -- very formulaic, very repetitive, sometimes downright silly -- but I found them enjoyable mind candy.

The novel at hand, The Winds of Gath, is the first of the Dumarest novels. It opens with Earl Dumarest, a tough loner, probably about 40 years old. (His age is never specified, and doesn't seem to change. A rigorous timeline of the books and implied travel times and mentions of his past would, I'm guessing, imply an age of well over a century, but I don't think Tubb cared much about that sort of internal consistency.) Dumarest is revived from traveling "low" (i.e. in suspended animation, with a 15% risk of death -- something Dumarest defies countless times in the series) only to find that instead of the planet he intended to reach his ship was diverted to Gath at the whim of the powerful Matriarch of Kund. This is bad news for Dumarest, because he is out of money and Gath offers no good prospect of making enough money for passage to another world.

The Matriarch of Kund has come to Gath to listen to the famous winds blowing through a rock formation during a periodic storm: supposedly the rock formation allows hearers to hear almost anything they desire. She is accompanied by her ward, the lush and beautiful Seena Thoth, whom she may designate her successor, as well as by the Cyber Dyne, one of the red-cloaked Cyclan, castrated cybers with enormous analytical abilities.

Dumarest, after some death-defying adventures, stumbles into a staged fight with another nobleman's trained killer, and due to his incredible reflexes and his superior tactics, he wins, gaining the notice of the Matriarch. He and Seena establish a doomed relationship, as once Seena becomes Matriarch, she must forgo all lovers and the chance of children. Dumarest fends off an attempt on Seena's life, presumably by a jealous rival for the Matriarch's position, and he accompanies them to the rock formation to wait out the storm. And during the storm various plots and counterplots come to life, and Dumarest is fortuitously in a position to thwart the secret goals of the Cyber, and also to fend off certain other people with less than good intentions.

The novel introduces a number of ongoing themes and tropes of the series. There is an example passage describing the Cyber going into rapport with the greater Cybernetic mind, via the implanted "Homochon elements": a passage that Tubb pretty much cut-and-pasted into each of the Dumarest novels. There is Dumarest making money by fighting -- something that happens in at least half of the books. There is only a hint of the quest that will dominated much of the series: Dumarest's search for his lost home, though there is also a blatant hint of something important about Earth that I only figured out after reading several of the later books (I read those books I read in pretty much random order). The Cyclan, in this book, are not yet alerted to search for Dumarest, something that happens, as I recall, because of a discovery Dumarest makes in book 4, Kalin, so that subplot is not present.

It's not really one of the best of the Dumarest novels, in my opinion, turning on some really grossly silly pseudo-science -- not that Tubb ever bothered much with plausibility in that area. And the plot is a bit incoherent -- the ISFDB labels the British edition, entitled simply Gath, as a revision. I wonder if it's actually a restoration of the original text, and if this version is cut. Anybody know? Still and all, it's fast moving and has plenty of action -- on OK way to spend a couple of hours.

Juanita Coulson is a fannish legend. She and her husband, the late Robert "Buck" Coulson, edited the fanzine Yandro, which was nominated for a Hugo 10 years in a row, from 1958 through 1967, winning in 1965. (This made her one of the first women to win a Hugo, as far as I can tell: the only previous winners being Elinor Busby and Pat Lupoff, both also for fanzines co-edited with their husbands (I presume).) Juanita Coulson is also a very well-known filker. And she had published more than a dozen novels, and a number of short stories, beginning with "Another Rib", a collaboration with Marion Zimmer Bradley in which she used the pseudonym "John Jay Wells", which appeared in F&SF in 1963. (Robert Coulson himself published several novels and a few short stories, often in collaboration with Gene DeWeese.) Juanita Coulson's best-known novels are probably the Children of the Stars series, which as I recall was a family saga, published by Del Rey in the 1980s.

Crisis on Cheiron was Coulson's first novel, one of two Ace Doubles she wrote. Her other Ace Double, The Singing Stones, was also paired with an E. C. Tubb novel, Derai, the second Dumarest novel.

Crisis on Cheiron opens with Carl Race, a young ecologist for the Terran Survey, arriving at Cheiron, a planet newly opened to trade with Earth. The corporation controlling that trade, Consolidated Enterprises, has called in Carl and his boss, Donovan Petry, to investigate the sudden crop failures on Cheiron.

The natives of Cheiron are mostly friendly centaur-like people. But it soon becomes clear that there is a faction which may be under the influence of Consolidated's rival, the sneeringly evil Trans Galactic. And if things don't go better, the Ethnic Protection organization may shut down Cheiron altogether.

Race and Petry, with some help from a beautiful schoolteacher named Marcy de Laurent, and a precocious adolescent Cheironian named Nubi, quickly realize that the problem is that bees and butterflies have been disappearing, making pollinization impossible. But what could be causing that? Complicating matters is an 8 day deadline imposed by one of the Matriarchs of the Cheironians. (I note that both halves of this Double feature "Matriarchs".) There follows an attack of bees, nearly killing off all three humans, and a fire at Marcy's schoolhouse, and then Petry is murdered. Obviously, the villains, whoever they are, mean business.

Rather inexplicably, the authorities immediately decide that Race is guilty of murdering his boss. So he is forced to escape, with Marcy's help. Fortunately, he has a brilliant idea as to what the problem is, helped by Nubi's non-humans range of senses. The three are able to make their way to the lair of the villains ...

Well, you knew it would all work out well. It's fast-moving and kind of exciting, but at bottom it's a touch too silly. The central scientific notion is ludicrous. The villains are just too evull for words -- way over the top. And the plot is driven by implausibilities such as the authorities jumping to conclusions about Carl's guilt in killing his boss. Also, the budding romance between Carl and Marcy is hinted at but never developed, and at the end just sort of allowed to slide. I was happy to have read it, but it's pretty forgettable stuff.