Stories of Ted Chiang

Here's a selection of a number of my past reviews of Ted Chiang's work. This is a bit different than some of my previous selections -- a lot of this stuff is not from my Locus column, partly because some of it predates my writing that column. I've organized it a bit strangely -- it begins with a review I did for my SFF Net newsgroup of his seminal first collection, and follows with individual reviews of a couple of those stories, then continues with later reviews of his later work (these mostly from the Locus column).

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others collects all his fiction to date, including one new story. Again, it's an excellent collection. I reread the earlier stories for the first time in a long time -- I was particularly impressed on rereading by "Tower of Babylon", which posits a cosmology in which a Tower of Babel could actually be successfully built. I admit I didn't quite get "Division by Zero", about a woman mathematician driven to despair when she proves that arithmetic is inconsistent. "Understand" is a nice, dark, story about a man who becomes a superman when he undergoes an experimental brain treatment -- and what happens when he finds another. Of the later stories, "Story of Your Life" remains my favorite, both very very moving and mind-blowing as well, told in second person successfully (and for good reason). As I wrote in my review of Starlight 2: "It's an amazing story, about a linguist who is part of the contact team with aliens visiting Earth. She learns their language, and in Sapir-Whorfian fashion, sort of, she finds her perception of time altered by the alien perception of time. This is interweaved with her reminiscences of segments of the life of her daughter, who died in early adulthood. Chiang combines wonderful linguistic speculation with a real portrayal of truly alien aliens (alien for good reason!) with nice scientific underpinnings, with the affecting and effective story of the linguist and her daughter, and makes it all work as a thematically unified whole. It accomplishes the rare feat of combining an interesting bit of SFnal speculation, worth a story on its own merits, with a moving human story, and using the SF ideas to really drive home the human themes. While at the same time maintaining interest as pure SF. I'm fond of saying that there are two types of SF: stories about the science, and stories which use the science to be about people. This is both types in one." "Seventy-Two Letters" has a great central idea, and it does some nice things working out the implications, but the story itself is resolved with too much actiony hugger-mugger. "Hell is the Absence of God" again has a neat central conceit, and is uncompromising in working it out -- but I admit I was confused by the ending. His Nature short-short is a nice speculation on the future of science in a "post-human" world. And the new story, "Liking What You See", as Rachel Brown says quite reminiscent (both in central idea and form) of Raphael Carter's "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", again takes a neat idea, the development of a means of making people unable to perceive human beauty, and extrapolates the consequences wonderfully. (I did think he cooked his argument a bit by having all the "opponents" of the side he seemed to favor being basically evil.)

[Original comments on some of this stories follow.]

Of these I recommend the novella from Starlight 2, "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, most highly.  From where I stand just now, having finished this story just 3 hours ago, this is the clear front runner for my top Hugo vote.  It's an amazing story, about a linguist who is part of the contact team with aliens visiting Earth.  She learns their language, and in Sapir-Whorfian fashion, sort of, she finds her perception of time altered by the alien perception of time.  This is interweaved with her reminiscences of segments of the life of her daughter, who died in early adulthood.  Chiang (who's just incredible: only four stories in his career! this the first in several years) combines wonderful linguistic speculation with a real portrayal of truly alien aliens, alien for good reason!, with nice scientific underpinnings, with the affecting and effective story of the linguist and her daughter, and makes it all work as a thematically unified whole.  It's just a wow! story.

The most impressive of the new stories here is the longest, "Seventy-two Letters" by the remarkable Ted Chiang. Chiang, entirely deadpan, sets his story in what seems to be Victorian England, but what turns out to be a very different world. He tells of a man who specializes in designing automata which are controlled by seventy-two letter "names": particular, carefully designed names causing particular actions to be taken. As the story continues, we learn that this world is stranger than we had thought, as other "alchemical" scientific notions appear to be true. I won't reveal any of the story's secrets: suffice it to say that it turns out to fit the anthology's theme, and that it is continually intriguing and audacious. It does present a rather cold affect, though, failing to engage this reader on the emotional level in the way that, for example, Chiang's wonderful "Story of Your Life" did.

Ted Chiang is back, with "Hell is the Absence of God", a rather intriguing and deadpan look at a world much like our own in which the existence of Heaven and Hell are objectively proven: indeed, the souls in Hell can be seen, and in which angels occasionally come to Earth, typically causing a mixture of miraculous events and capricious disasters.  The story focuses on an unpious man whose beloved wife is killed and ascends to Heaven in one such angelic visitation, and who tries to find a way to love God and thus reach Heaven to rejoin her, against all his instincts.

One of the most ballyhooed new collections in 2002 is Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others. The ballyhoo is fully justified -- this collection, of all his published stories to date, is full of exciting stuff. There is one new story, "Liking What You See: A Documentary". Chiang postulates a brain modification called "calliagnosia", which disables one's ability to perceive beauty in human faces. He follows the debate over an initiative at one Pembleton University which would require all students to have the treatment, on the grounds that it would eliminated "lookism" among the student body. He stacks his argument somewhat by making the opponents all obvious bad guys, but the examination of the social effects we might see from such a treatment, as well as related aspects such as the use of sort of the reverse effect in advertising, in fascinating. It's a very thought-provoking piece. (Incidentally I was reminded of Raphael Carter's Tiptree Award winner "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation"). It's not Chiang's best story, but it's still a must read.

In September F&SF features a highly anticipated cover story, the first substantial Ted Chiang story in several years, "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate".  (This story is also available in book form from Subterranean Press.) It does not disappoint. It is set in Baghdad perhaps a millennium ago. A merchant tells the Caliph his strange story: how he encountered an alchemist with an unusual device: a gate to the past. (Interestingly, this gate is described in science-fictional terms, though it could as easily have been pictured fantastically: as a magical tapestry, perhaps. But I think Chiang’s choice -- purely aesthetic, it is not central to the story -- works very well.)  We hear three tales within the tale, about people who used the gate, to travel decades into the past, and how some were greatly helped, and others harmed. The stories intertwine very neatly, and of course they merchant himself will likewise use the gate, with ambiguous but moving results.

Ted Chiang is back -- we knew that already, what with last year’s spectacular Hugo winner "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate". "Exhalation" is quite as spectacular, and completely different. It depicts a quite unusual artificial world, apparently completely made of metal, whose inhabitants are likewise metal, and who breathe air supplied by replaceable lungs. It is told by one of these people, who discovers how their brains work, as it becomes clear that the supply of air is diminishing. The setup seems to imply some history that other writers might have exploited -- is this a society of robots after humans have left, perhaps? -- but Chiang’s interests are elsewhere, and the story explores deeper philosophical questions, and comes to a very moving conclusion. To make the obvious pun -- it took my breath away.

"The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", by Ted Chiang, at the Fall Subterranean, is Chiang working out the personal and social consequences of a new technology, called Remem. This works with "lifelogs" ("personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives"), to allow instant retrieval of the video of some past event you might be thinking of. The story is told by a journalist who is skeptical of the new tech, and who is particularly worried that replacing ones mediated (and perhaps "softened") memories of past disputes with loved ones might be harmful. The journalist's investigations are interleaved with accounts of an historical example of a new "memory technology" being introduced -- in this case the introduction of writing by Europeans to Tivland (now part of Nigeria). The parallels are interesting -- both stories are interesting, and the journalist's story is particularly affecting (dealing with his strained relationship with his daughter) -- this is strong and very thoughtful SF, only perhaps slightly disappointing in comparison with some of Chiang's own work in that there is no real gosh wow sense of wonder -- but that's hardly fair.

We lead off this month with three very strong novella chapbooks. First is the eagerly anticipated new Ted Chiang story, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, published in a very attractive edition by Subterranean Press, with cute and illuminating illustrations by Christian Pearce. This novella does not quite have the awesome zing of some of Chiang’s work -- the overwhelming sense of wonder he can induce. But it works very well as a rigorous examination of the ramifications of creating artificial life. The story concerns the invention of what are first intended as sort of virtual pets, with extra intelligence, in a virtual world. These software creatures -- called "digients" -- are "raised" by humans, and inevitably develop their own personalities, leading of course to questions of AI rights, autonomy, etc. There are digients who resemble animals, and some who resemble robots -- allowing the story to resonate not only with questions of AI or robot rights, but with those about animal rights as well (and for that matter questions about the rights of children to autonomy). These are traditional SF questions, which may be why the story doesn’t awe like some of Chiang’s work. But Chiang’s examination of these questions is thorough, sensitive, and thought-provoking. His main characters are two people, Ana Alvarado and Derek Brooks, who work for the first company to design these digients. These two adopt some of the digients, and become key figures in the eventual drive to provide them what we might call a good home. Such issues as what happens when the computers the digients "inhabit" become obsolete, or what does it mean for an AI to be "happy" when their happiness is an initially purely programmed behavior, or what rights does an AI have concerning suspension and restarting, or resetting to a previous state, and many more, are examined -- and not dryly, but in the context of an involving story.

Old Bestseller Review: Ice, by Anna Kavan

Old Bestseller Review: Ice, by Anna Kavan

a review by Rich Horton

OK, I don't think this novel was a bestseller, but it was a success, the biggest success of its writer's career. (She died at age 67 a year or so after it appeared.) Anna Kavan was the name adopted by the British writer born Helen Woods in 1901. She was born in Cannes (to British parents), grew up traveling constantly in Europe and the US until her father's suicide in 1911, after which she returned to England and boarding school. In 1920, unable to go to Oxford, she married Donald Ferguson, and immediately they moved to what was then Burma. She was terribly unhappy there, both with the climate and with her husband. They divorced in 1928, and Helen soon married painter Stuart Edmonds. That marriage dissolved in 1938. Helen began publishing fairly conventional (but fraught) novels in 1929 with A Charmed Circle, using her first married name, Helen Ferguson (even though by then she was married to Edmonds). Five further novels followed through 1937. A character in some of these early novels was named Anna Kavan. In 1939, after her second divorce and her first suicide attempt, she changed her name to Anna Kavan, not just as a pseudonym but legally. (Or so say several sources, including the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, however, the Science Fiction Enyclopedia, online and regularly updated, now states that she never formally changed her name. As she was constantly slippery about her identity, it is difficult to be certain, though I trust the SFE.) Some of the rest of her life was spent in and out of asylums and sanatoria, treating in part her long time heroin addiction, with at least two additional suicide attempts. (Some have suggested her death in 1968 was a suicide, though the official verdict (probably correct) was heart failure, a result in part of her heroin addiction.) She continued to write, in a generally more experimental mode. Ten further books (novels and story collections) appeared in her life, and another half-dozen after her death. She became associated with the nouvelle roman style. Ice (1967) was her last novel (not counting any of the posthumous work).

From the beginning Ice has been called science fiction, and that's not unreasonable, though Jonathan Lethem, in the introduction to my edition (a "50th Anniversary Edition" from Penguin), writes "I doubt it helps for it to be categorized as science fiction, or for it to be categorized at all." Still, it has always had champions in the SF field (I've been meaning to give it a go for decades), and the one writer I am most reminded of is J. G. Ballard. As I suggest above, it was initially a success, but it seems to me that over time it more or less disappeared from wide notice, though it was always on the edges of the conversation in the literary corridors of the SF world. But Kate Zambreno wrote in 2006 (in an essay reprinted as the Afterword to my edition) that "Kavan, every bit the equal of every writer she has been compared to [such as Jean Rhys, who likewise had a late career success, with Wide Sargasso Sea, just a year prior to Ice], has -- regretfully -- vanished." This Penguin reissue is evidence that she's back in sight.

This is really quite a remarkable novel. It is told by an unnamed narrator (all the characters are nameless), who, at the opening, is back home, in a country threatened by impending war, driving to a remote location to find a girl (as she is called throughout) whom he had once wanted to marry. She has married another man, and the narrator, a military man, just wants to see her again. This encounter reveals a marriage in trouble, and the narrator seems to want to rescue her -- and we get flashbacks to an earlier visit shortly after the marriage. So far the novel seems not unconventional, but then there are the sudden irruptions of images of ice walls rushing in, imprisoning the girl and other characters -- but are these just the narrator's madness?

Noticeable too, from the beginning, is the narrator's sexualized and somewhat violent perception of the girl. She is always described as painfully thin, extremely pale (like ice, one might say), very fragile. Often bruised. Male violence, sometimes suggested, sometimes described, seems always near. Really this is all quite uneasy-making.

The book accelerates quickly. Soon the narrator is following the girl as she sails to another country. This country is closer to open war with its neighbors. It is ruled by an autocrat called the Warden, and the narrator learns that the girl is with the Warden. He plots to meet the Warden, and to arrange to see the girl, with scary and strange results. All through this narrative there are further descriptions of the coming ice, and strange interludes that seem real as they happen but then are forgotten -- riots, violence, the girl dead on multiple occasions.

The book continues, at breakneck speed, as the narrator chases the Warden and the girl through country after country, as war and catastrophe take over the world. (It's not at all clear that the world is our Earth.) Sometimes the narrator and the girl are together, sometimes the girl is with the Warden, sometimes she is alone. What at first seems a praiseworthy attempt by the narrator to pry the girl from the clutches of the explicitly sadistic Warden becomes ambiguous, for the narrator's images of the girl are just as violence-tinged as the Warden's actions, and indeed the narrator and the Warden come to seem doubles. And throughout the ice grows closer and closer, and the end of the world, of humanity, looms.

It's not a long novel (a bit shy of 50,000 words, I'd say), and it moves, as I said, at great velocity. The writing is clipped and vicious. The rhythms are pounding. The images are striking and scary. There is from the beginning no way out but death for everyone.

One of the obvious interpretations suggested is that the images of Ice refer to heroin. That's perhaps too obvious, but it does make some sense. But at the same time the objectification of the girl as fragile and subject to violence resonates horribly with so much of what we see about the way many men treat women -- and the girl in this novel is treated as a child subject to discipline by all the men she is with (her husband, the narrator, and the Warden) -- though much of her attitude is laid at the door of her mother. (Kavan apparently had a difficult relationship with her mother.) So there's that. And, too, there is the shadow of a coming apocalypse, and of course the end of the world was an abiding concern of people in the '60s. As with almost any such novel, open to multiple readings, it seems worth it just to take the novel first on its own terms, and let it take on as many meanings as it suggests.

I'll leave with a few questions about Ice:

1. The 'girl" is described in strikingly fragile terms -- constant reference is made to her thinness, the way her bones stick out, her extremely pale skin and white hair. (And of course calling her a "girl" and not a woman is in itself an infantilization, and an emphasis on fragility.) Some of this is clearly a reference to "ice", but much of it suggests that the men in her life see her sexuality as bound up in violence -- explicit sadism in the case of the warden, slightly sublimated sadism in the case of the narrator, marital frustration that perhaps has led to physical abuse in the case of her husband. To what extent is this novel about male violence towards women, and about the male gaze infantilizing women, or subordinating women?

2. The apocalyptic event that drives the overall shape of the novel seems to be encroaching walls of ice. As first presented, the walls of ice seem hallucinations, but as things continue, it does seem that the action converges on the tropics, as ice consumes more and more of the world. Is this real? Or is this simply what the narrator perceives as his internal life is changed?

3. What world is this novel set on? The opening appeared to me to possibly be set in England, but as things continue, any Earthbound setting seems more and more unlikely, though whatever planet this is, it's extremely Earthlike. Does it even make sense to ask where the novel is set?

Birthday Review: The Praxis, by Walter Jon Williams

Birthday Review: The Praxis, by Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams was born October 15, 1953. In honor of his birthday, I thought I'd repost this review I did of the first of his Dread Empire's Fall novels back in 2003.

Review Date: 25 August 2003

The Praxis, by Walter Jon Williams
UK: Earthlight, London, October 2002, 418 pages, Paperback, UK£10.99, ISBN:0-7434-6110-X
US: HarperTorch, New York, NY, August 2003, 418 pages, Paperback, US$7.50, ISBN:038082020X

a review by Rich Horton

Walter Jon Williams's The Praxis is the first volume of a series called collectively Dread Empire's Fall. It was published last year in the UK, and is due in the US any day now, a mass market paperback from HarperTorch. The UK edition is subtitled "Book One of Dread Empire's Fall", while the US edition is labeled Dread Empire's Fall: The Praxis.

This book is unabashed Space Opera, and I found it extremely fun reading. Every so often the characterization or the plotting seems to fall back on cliché -- and after all the basic setup is pretty familiar, particularly the rehashing of Naval Fiction standard situations. The book is also clearly the first of a series, thus the story doesn't really end -- those factors hold it short of excellence. But it's very good -- neatly conceived, with plenty of gripping action, and with two main characters who are interesting, and flawed in believable ways even while also supremely gifted in fairly standard commercial fiction fashions.

The parts of the Galaxy linked by an extensive wormhole network are ruled, as the story opens, by the long-lived aliens called Shaa. They control several other spacegoing species -- the lizardlike Naxids, humans, the birdlike Lai-Own, the furry Torminel, etc. The basic philosophy of the Shaa is that everything worth knowing is already known. Their governing system, the Praxis, attempts to enforce absolute stability. Machine intelligence, genetic engineering, and certain other technology is forbidden. The ruling style is extremely hierarchical, and superiors have the right to kill inferiors for any reason whatsoever. The subordinate species seem essentially equal to each other, sharing government and military posts, though there seem to be worlds, even sectors, dominated by one or another species.

Now the very last of the Shaa has decided to die. This impacts the future of Lord Gareth Martinez, an up and coming Naval officer. His main patron has been chosen to die along with the Shaa, and Martinez, who is brilliant and rich but handicapped by his family's relatively low, provincial, standing, represented by his vulgar accent, will thus lose a key supporter. But he gains some fame when he coordinates a daring rescue attempt. And the rescue attempt is piloted by Lady Caroline Sula, the only remaining member of a formerly powerful family that has fallen into disgrace. The two are both decorated, and when they meet each other, sparks fly. But Sula has some deep personal issues which make her skittish about relationships. Her backstory is slowly revealed in flashbacks. (These flashbacks were published separately as the novella "Margaux" in the May 2003 Asimov's.)

Martinez ends up posted to a ship run by a football-mad (football = soccer) Captain. Martinez and a few others including his trusty old batman (yes, a cliché) run the ship while the Captain and his various good footballers (who are worthless as naval types) practice. The ship makes its way to a Naxid dominated system, and Martinez notices some very suspicious Naxid behaviour. He concludes correctly that they are planning to take advantage of the power vacuum left by the death of the last Shaa and try to assert their status as the first race conquered by the Shaa and take the Shaa position at the top of the heap. Martinez's perspicacity and his brilliant tactics keep the Naxid operation from being a complete success.

Back on the capitol planet, Zanshaa, the Naxid attempt to take over the ruling Convocation is also foiled, partly by luck, and the other species quickly mobilize for a war. Sula's hopes for a quick promotion are ruined when her lieutenant's exams are interrupted by the rebellion. But this leaves her in position to once again use her piloting skills and become a war hero on her own.

And so come the opening battles of what looks likely to be an extended war. The book ends pretty much on a note of "to be continued". Clearly Martinez and Sula are destined for each other one way or another, though Williams has managed to make their future ambiguous -- Sula's past could come back to haunt her, and Martinez' conceit and overweening ambition could ruin things as well. I'll be eagerly looking forward to future volumes, and I'm sure there will be plenty more space battles, alien political intrigue, and an involving personal pair of stories for our two heroes.

Another Ace Double: The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb/To Venus! To Venus!, by David Grinnell

Ace Double Reviews, 45: The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb/To Venus! To Venus!, by David Grinnell (#81610, 1970, $0.75)

a review by Rich Horton

E. C. Tubb would have been 99 today, so I am reposting this review of one of his Ace Double appearances in his honor.

Tubb was 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, certainly not particularly good. But I found them enjoyable mind candy.

The Jester at Scar is some 44,000 words long, and To Venus! To Venus! is some 45,000 words.

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

The Jester at Scar is the fifth of Tubb's Dumarest of Terra novels. In these novels a tough, amazingly fast, lucky, very skilled, spacer named Earl Dumarest obsessively searches for his homeworld, Earth. Dumarest lives in a far future human-colonized galaxy in which Earth is off the beaten path and basically forgotten, and in which even the idea of a single planet as the homeworld of all humans is pooh-poohed. Most of the planets are "Mongos": i.e. they have one unique feature, and little variation (as in the old pulp cliche "It was raining on Mongo"), and most seem ruled either by Evull corporations or by either Evull or Silly and Inbred (or both) aristocracies/royalties. The two main panGalactic organizations are the Church of Universal Brotherhood (good, despite their habit of brainwashing people in exchange for food), and the red-cloaked, emotionless, Cyclan (EVULL squared), super-intelligent cybernetic people who plot to rule the Galaxy. Despite the cliche and lazy setup, the books, though uneven, were sometimes pretty enjoyable -- no classics here, but among this sort of stuff Tubb's work is better than average.

In the book just before The Jester at Scar, Kalin (one of the best and most important of the series), Earl came into possession of an incredibly valuable red ring, which gives the owner the ability to exchange minds with another person, and which the Cyclan covet. Thus he is now hunted by the Cyclan. As this book opens, Earl is staying on the spore-ridden planet Scar, with a poor woman. A couple of thugs invade her home, and after Earl is forced to kill them he notices that they have several other red rings. It seems clear that someone has hired people to try to retrieve red rings from anyone they can.

At the same time Jocelyn, the newly married ruler of the planet Jest shows up at Scar, along with his new adviser, a Cyber. Jocelyn hopes to find some profitable trade for his impoverished planet, while the Cyber of course has a deeper game -- he's figured out somehow that Dumarest is on Scar. (Tubb rather subtly plays a little game here -- Jocelyn, the "Jester" of the title, believes in the power of Chance and Fate and he thinks he has come randomly to Scar -- but it turns out that all this was planned by the Cyclan.) There's a fair amount of somewhat pointless toing and froing, and of course a knife fight, before Dumarest and a partner head out into the wilderness of Scar during the brief planetary summer to claim a cache of valuable Golden Spore. The Cyclan are after him, of course, but so too, luckily, is Jocelyn. And of course Dumarest has his own luck, skill, and fanatic determination on his side. The book is much of a piece with most of the Dumarest novels, lacking only a temporary love interest for Dumarest, and I'd place it in the middle range of Tubb's books.

Donald A. Wollheim is justifiably known as an editor, and hardly remembered as a writer. His editorial work at Ace and then at his own imprint, DAW, is significant if often controversial. On the one hand such things as his role in the pirated Ace editions of The Lord of the Rings, and his promotion of lots of low grade SF with famously crummy titles and tiny advances must be disparaged. On the other hand he was responsible for publishing early work by an astounding array of important writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and C. J. Cherryh. He also was editor (or co-editor) for two of the more significant Best of the Year collections.

He wrote a fair amount of unmemorable short fiction starting in 1934, most of it in the 40s. He also wrote quite a few juveniles in the 50s and 60s, under his own name, perhaps most notably the Mike Mars series. All his few adult novels seem to be as "David Grinnell". (The Ace Doubles under his own name were anthologies.) To Venus! To Venus! is the last, and close to his last piece of fiction.

To Venus! To Venus! is set in the fairly near future of the book's publication date, 1970 -- perhaps around 1990? A Russian unmanned probe has reached Venus and reports surprisingly balmy conditions -- nice enough for human habitation, even. The Americans are astonished -- all scientific evidence indicates that it is a hellhole, and they quickly put together a three man mission to land on Venus and settle the question once and for all. The Russians have also mounted a manned mission, and the two ships find themselves in a race.

(Cover by John Schoenherr)

The American team consists of a straight arrow commander named Chet, and two contrasting subordinated -- a gungho guy named Quincy, and a cynical guy named Carter. Much is made, unconvincingly, of Chet's leadership skills in making them a team. At any rate, they reach Venus, but have difficulty landing in what turns out to be a hellhole as the scientists predict, and they seem to be stranded. It turns out that the Russians have also landed, almost simultaneously, and they still claim it's a balmy near paradise. But they too are in trouble. The only hope for either group is for the Americans to hike across the surface of Venus, more or less by dead reckoning, fortunately only 100 miles, to where they believe the Russian ship has landed. (As presented this is basically impossible, and to be fair it seems Wollheim knows this, and gives a fair account of the likely difficulties and doesn't deny that the ultimate success is due to pure luck.)

It's not really very good. Stiff dialogue, strained science, flat characters. It's all very earnest, both in the worshipful presentation of U.S. can-do engineering spirit, and in the ultimate message of Soviet/U.S. cooperation (a bit undermined perhaps by the cartoonish presentation of the only actual Russian character).

Birthday Review: Capsule reviews of books by Thomas Burnett Swann

Thomas Burnett Swann was born 12 October 1928. He died in 1976, only 47, of cancer. He was an academic who taught at Florida Atlantic University, and wrote a significant study of the poet H. D. Beginning in the late 1950s he wrote a number of fantasy stories, and eventually a number of novels, including a glut in the last year or two of his life (some published posthumously), most set in a loosely connected alternate history/fantasy of the couple of millenia before Christ. It's often been noted that his earlier work was better than the later work (especially the last novels, presumably produced at speed after he had gotten sick, perhaps with the intent of supporting his heirs.) This is a position I endorse entirely. His novels included very noticeably gay subtexts, though only towards the end did this become explicit at all (it's most noticeable in How Are the Mighty Fallen, which tells explicitly of David and Jonathan as lovers). As such it is widely assumed that he was gay, though I'm can't find confirmation of that in a quick web search.

Fifteen or so years ago I read through the entire Swann corpus of novels, with some enjoyment and some frustration. I still consider two shorter works, both later expanded into less successful novels, as his best: "Where is the Bird of Fire?" and "The Manor of Roses". The latter in particular is remarkable, and while it's not forgotten it deserves a wider audience.

What follows is a set of very brief capsule reviews I did at the time of reading of several of Swann's books.

(Cover by Gray Morrow)

I read a short Thomas Burnett Swann novel, The Weirwoods, an historical fantasy in a rather unbelievable Etruscan setting.  I've only ever read a couple of Swann's novellas ("Where is the Bird of Fire?" is the one I recall), but I knew of his reputation.  He seems to occupy a fairly unique niche in the "Fantasy" genre.  This novel is not bad, sexy, oddly dark while also casual and gay, written beautifully, lots of fine descriptive passages, but not at all slow-moving.  An Etruscan town bordering on the Weirwoods, haunt of Water Sprites, Fauns, Centaurs and the like, has long lived in an uneasy truce with the inhabitants of the woods, but a new immigrant breaks the truce by kidnapping  and enslaving a water sprite, leading to ... well, bad things for most concerned.

(Cover by Gray Morrow)

Back to Thomas Burnett Swann.  This time I read a story collection, The Dolphin and the Deep. Included are the title story, about an Etruscan (Swann was fascinated by the Etruscan civilization) who encounters a relic of Circe and is compelled to find his way around the coast of Africa to her new home.  Along the way he meets a merboy, though this one is called something else, and a dolphin, as well as some humans.  After a variety of adventures, mostly encounters with other odd mythological creatures, he meets Circe, and she teaches him a lesson about real love.  Rather minor TBS.  The other two stories are a bit better: "The Murex" is about an Amazon who falls in love with an ant-man, and realizes the wrongness of the Amazonian vows against heterosexual love; and one of Swann's very best stories: "The Manor of Roses", about two boys and a girl in 13th Century England who come to a mysterious manor in the forest.  The mythological creatures of this story are mandrakes, and Swann treats the mandrakes with sympathy even while recognizing their inimicality (is that a word?).  The main characters are closer to believable than many of Swann's young humans, and the story strives more and mostly achieves an honest melancholy/regret, which seems the main chord Swann was after in most of his stories, but which is too often reached by strained means.  This story was incorporated into one of the quickie novels published in the last year of Swann's life, or even after his death, The Tournament of Thorns.  This short version has everything important from the novel, and I would regard it as the preferred version of the story.

The only novel I've finished since my last post here is an odd, rare, one, The Goat Without Horns, by Thomas Burnett Swann.  This first appeared in the August and September 1970 issues of F&SF, and was later published by Ballantine.  I saw those issues at a used book store the other night, and decided to pick them up.  The novel is really quite good, the story of a young Englishman in about 1890 who goes to a tiny Caribbean island to tutor a 15 year old girl. He falls for the girl's mother, the owner of the island, but the mysterious Carib who dominates the island, Curk, wants him to impregnate the 15-year old, for his won sinister reasons, which come clear at the end.  An odd twist is that the story is told from the viewpoint of a dolphin who befriends the young Englishman.  The twist at the end was original, and it surprised me.  Pretty good stuff, quite different.

Two more Thomas Burnett Swann novels: Lady of the Bees (1976) is a cobbled together novel from Swann's famous early novella "Where is the Bird of Fire?", about Romulus and Remus, and some other novelets.  It didn't measure up to my memories of the original novella, which I recall as being quite moving and powerful.  This story had POV problems, signalled by the title, which refers to a fairly minor character, who, unfortunately, narrates much of the book.  Somewhat better was The Tournament of Thorns, also from 1976, also a novel cobbled together from earlier shorts.  This is set in England in about 1213.  It's about men and "Mandrakes": plant-men who are kind of like vampires.  It shows the seams of the cobbling together a bit too much, but the individual stories do work, and are quite moving and fairly original. That said, "The Manor of Roses", the first story in this sequence, is still by far the best.

Also I read Thomas Burnett Swann's The Not-World.  This story is set in Georgian England, but in a remaining scrap of "forest primeval".  A lame Gothic novelist, Deirdre, meets a down-at-his-luck sailor, and they are thrown together when the coach he is driving and she is renting is lost in the forest.  They encounter the poet Thomas Chatterton, and after a balloon ride, and further encounters with more or less typical Swann creatures, they win through to consummate their love.  OK, but less than great.  And I don't think Swann came within light-years of capturing the mindset of people of that era.

My latest Thomas Burnett Swann book was The Minikins of Yam, one of several he published right at the end of his life.  (He died in 1976, and apparently published at least 3 novels in '76 and 2 in '77).  This one is set in Ancient Egypt, as usual with Swann an alternate ancient history in which some mythological creatures are real, including the title Minikins (small humanoids, of which the female lead is one, and which have customs such as all the females being whores, whore being a term of honor), Rocs, and others.  I think this is one of the more enjoyable of the later Swann books.  It's light-hearted, as more usual with late Swann, but the light-heartedness doesn't seem as forced as in some of his other books.  The basic story is about a child pharaoh who must undo the damage done when his father banished magic from Egypt, and at the same time must fend off a plot against his throne.

It's been a while since I read a Thomas Burnett Swann book.  Moondust is from 1968, at his typical length (43,000 words), and very much of his "type".  Perhaps it is odd only in being sympathetic to conventional religion (Judaism at the time of Joshua), and (relatedly) being more pro-human than some of his stuff.  It's also pretty good, one of his better stories.

It's set in Jericho, just as the Israelites are approaching.  The hero is a young man, named Bard, from Crete, exiled since childhood along with his mother in Jericho (Crete having fallen, I can't remember if this is coterminous with the collapse of the Minoan regime).  His family have adopted perforce a sort of changeling: a very ugly girl who was switched for their young boy.  This girl, called Rahab (a Biblical reference, hence a hint) or Moondust, becomes a dear friend to the hero, .  As the time of the main action approaches, she suddenly metamorphoses into a striking beautiful woman with wings.  Thus, one of TBS' typical "pre-human" races (though, again typically, interfertile with humans).  Bard looks on unhappily as she offers herself to different men, including an Israelite spy (check your Bible for Rahab!), then she disappears.  Bard and a friend venture underground to the strange home of Rahab's people, and their odd society: women only (hence the habit of coming to human cities and becoming whores: this is to try to get pregnant), and ruled by intelligent telepathic fennecs.  Rahab's love for the hero drives her to an heroic act of resistance to her rulers.  As I said, one of Swann's better works, though not one of his very best.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Mark Tiedemann

Today is my friend Mark Tiedemann's birthday. I've enjoyed Mark's writing for a long time (since well before we knew each other), and so here's a collection of my Locus reviews of his short work. (I have some novel reviews as well, which I will post later.) I should mention one more particularly excellent story, from before my time as a reviewer: "The Playground Door", from the May 1993 F&SF.

(Locus, April 2003)

The April F&SF opens with a strong novelette by Mark W. Tiedemann, "Scabbing". Rich is a boy growing up in a strong union family in the near future, when workers operate "surrogates", robots under their control. When Rich's father suffers a major stroke, the medical treatment includes technological augmentation of his brain, which raises concerns that his augment might lead to new capabilities, and violations of union rules. The story turns on how this affects Rich's relationships with his friends, and on the scary potential for misuse of his father's new augment. This story effectively looks at social changes resulting from new technology, and directly at how they affect people. I'd like to see more stories in the same milieu.

(Locus, January 2004)

The centerpiece of the Fall 2003 issue of Black Gate is Mark W. Tiedemann's "Miller's Wife", an impressive novella. Egan Ginter is fleeing another failed relationship in the big city: he hopes a couple of weeks at a friend's house in the Ozark town Saletcroix will heal him. But something odd is going on -- Saletcroix's valley is dying, and a bad run of luck is plaguing the townspeople. They blame Esther Miller, who has left her husband. Some believe the health of her marriage is tied to the valley's health, but Egan thinks that's rank superstition. Especially as her husband appears to be rather a thug. And when Esther shows up at Egan's door ... Well, any reader can see that Egan had better not give in to her attractions. But how can he resist? Tiedemann maintains the suspense very well, and resolves the story just that little bit unexpectedly to make it memorable.

(Locus, September 2004)

In Mark W. Tiedemann's "Rain from Another Country" (F&SF, September), Ann Myref is dead, but she has unfinished business. She handles this by making a copy of her brain state and "overlaying" it on a paid host. One such host journeys off Earth to meet Ann's old lover. But he may not be ready to accept what Ann has to offer. A nice use of a couple of SFnal tropes to tell an effective relationship story.

(Locus, November 2005)

Mark W. Tiedemann’s "Hard Time" (Electric Velocipede, Summer) is a well-done story about an actor portraying a prisoner in a sort of quasi-reality show -- all the viewers see is his time in his cell. Slowly we learn a little bit about the actor himself, about the (real) criminal he portrays, about an actress playing a woman criminal. Interesting and very honest -- a good use of SF for a character study.

(Locus, December 2014)

Mark W. Tiedemann is the author of a fine Space Opera trilogy, The Secantis Sequence, that deserves a wider audience (perhaps affected a bit by the implosion of its publisher, Meisha Merlin), as well as some strong stories in places like SF Age and F&SF. He hasn't been entirely silent the past several years, but he hasn't been as much in evidence as I'd like, so it's nice to see a new collection, Gravity Box, with a few reprints (including his outstanding early story "The Playground Door"), but mostly original stories. My favorites include one fantasy and one SF story. "Preservation" is about a gamekeeper in service to a King who commands him to poach the horn of an einhyrn, reputed to determine if a woman is a virgin. The King wants to make sure his son's intended bride is pure, but it's soon clear that dirtier politics than that are involved. Not to mention that the einhyrn are a protected species. Solid adventure, and involving characters. I liked "Forever and a Day" even more, a time dilation story, about a woman in a polyamorous marriage, who turns out to be unable to tolerate new treatments conferring immortality. Her husband and wife become immortal, while she joins the crew of a starship, gaining a sort of immortality due to time dilation. A cute idea in itself, though hardly new, but the story asks effectively how any relationship can survive centuries -- indeed, how one's relationship with ones own self can survive centuries, and whether immortality is better than the sort of continual revivification star travel might bring.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Sandra McDonald

Today is Sandra McDonald's birthday, so here is a compilation of some of my Locus reviews of her short fiction. I should note that there's a story by her that I like a lot, but did not review, because is first appeared in one my anthologys, War & Space: Recent Combat. This is "Mehra and Jiun".

(Locus, May 2009)

In "Diana Comet", by Sandra McDonald (Strange Horizons), the title character, a beautiful and resourceful journalist, come across the world to discover why her lover isn’t answering her letters. She has other objectives as well -- or she forms them when she meets some of the poorer locals -- and she has some personals secrets too. It’s all rather a romp, lots of fun.

(Locus, September 2010)

Sandra McDonald is best known for her novels, which on the face of them are fairly conventional Military SF with a romantic slant, yet those who have followed her short fiction know she’s a quirkier writer than her novels display. Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories features fourteen tales, many originals, set in a sort of alternate history that for the most part is a transparent version of our world, at times a bit too cutely. (Naming a gay Civil War era poet Whitney Waltman, for just one example, rather grates on one’s teeth.) Indeed, some of the reprints seem to have been rejiggered to fit into this alternate history, in which a Boston-like town called Massasoit is the most common setting. But I quibble -- the stories are lovely really. The title character shows up in several pieces, at various stages in her long life. My favorite appeared last year in Strange Horizons as "Diana Comet", and is here called "Diana Comet and the Disappearing Lover", and it introduces that intrepid woman. Perhaps the other highlight of the collection is "Diana Comet and the Collapsible Orchestra", in which Diana is aging, missing her late husband, and pushed against her will to visit an old friend. The title object is a delightful creation, while the action really concerns Diana witnessing the transgression of her friend’s children, a bit sadly.

Speaking of Sandra McDonald and Diana Comet, her "Diana Comet and the Lovesick Cowboy" appeared more or less simultaneously in her collection and in the fourth issue of Icarus, subtitled "The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction".  McDonald’s story, in which Diana Comet travels to the West to check on an orphan boy she had fostered out to a farm couple, and on the way chivvies an ex-soldier out of his alcoholic fog and his yearning for his estranged lover, is clearly the best in an uneven set.

(Locus, December 2012)

Also strong in the December Asimov's is "The Black Feminist's Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing", by Sandra McDonald, in which the title character, who edits classic SF films to make them less sexist, is offered a chance to to complete the unfinished '70s adaptation of Leigh Brackett's The Ginger Star. There's some playing to us geeks here -- it's hard not to think that The Ginger Star would have made a pretty cool movie -- but also some sharp characters, an interesting future, and some good ideas about movies.

(Locus, June 2014)

In Lightspeed's May issue I thought the standout story was "Selfie", by Sandra MacDonald. Susan is a teenager with a mother living on the Moon and a father who researches trips to the past. Her Dad wants to drag her again to an old resort hotel, but she wants to visit her Mom instead, so she convinces her Dad to let her send a "Selfie" -- a robot uploaded with a version of her mind -- on the trip to the past. All this is intriguing setup: an interesting future with space travel, time travel, and other neat tech -- and a well-depicted teen narrator (admittedly a familiar type -- I detected echoes of, say, Heinlein's  Podkayne and Barnes's Teri Murray). But MacDonald has a different idea, and I won't spoil it but I'll say that the story goes in a sadder direction than expected -- but just as Sfnally interesting a direction.

(Locus, September 2016)

From the August Asimov's, "President John F. Kennedy, Astronaut", by Sandra McDonald, is a moving story set in a climate change-ravaged future. Pera lives with her mother and younger brother on a boat -- an old amphibious "duck". Their current job is taking an old man to a spot in the ocean: he claims that it’s the location of the old Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy, where an alien artifact Kennedy found on the Moon has been hidden. He wants to recover it, for the alien secrets it holds, but there are problems: two different "worst daughters", for example, and a storm, and, to be sure, very plausible doubts about the old man’s wild stories about JFK’s astronaut career, not to mention his affair with Marilyn Manson, etc. Whatever the truth behind all that, the story works in evoking the wonder and the lost dreams of space travel.

(Locus, July 2018)

In the May-June Asimov's, Sandra McDonald and Stephen Covey, in "Time Enough to Say Goodbye", tell a sweet time travel story, that is also a story about asteroid exploration, as a woman repeatedly visits the past, to try to meet the two people involved in critical early experiments that will lead to asteroid mining. Her reasons -- personal reasons -- become clear as the story develops. Nothing earthshaking here, but this is nice work.