Review: The Ante-Room, by Kate O'Brien

Review: The Ante-Room, by Kate O'Brien

by Rich Horton

Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) was an Irish writer, of plays, novels, travel writing, criticism and biography. She was born in Limerick, but moved to England in 1919 after graduating from college. She spent much of the rest of her life in England, and some time in Spain, but most of her fiction is set in Ireland. She was a Lesbian (though briefly married), and had relationships with E. M. Delafield and Mary O'Neill. Her fiction apparently often has sympathetic portrayals of gay people (though there are none (that we know of) in The Ante-Room), and is definitely feminist. At least two of her novels were banned in Ireland. Throughout much of her career she was quite successful -- sufficiently enough that the heroine of the movie Brief Encounter mentions reserving "the new Kate O'Brien" from the library. But by the end of her life she was somewhat forgotten -- but has been restored to her place as a major Irish writer in recent decades.

My edition of The Ante-Room was published in 1984 as part of the Virago Modern Classics series. The novel first appeared in 1934. The Virago edition of the book includes an Afterword by Diana Madden, which I have to confess I didn't much like. The novel itself is excellent, however.

It's set in 1880, at the estate of a wealthy family in Mellick (O'Brien's stand in for Limerick.) The central character is Agnes Mulqueen, the second daughter of the family. The mother, Teresa, is dying of cancer, and her husband, Danny, is fairly ineffectual. The only son still in the house is Reggie, his mother's favorite, a syphilitic mess at the age of 36. Agnes is 25, a very beautiful woman, but somewhat stuck for a few reasons -- she needs to run the house as her mother dies; she is a woman and doesn't have the opportunities men have for independence; and, perhaps most importantly, she is desperately in love with her older sister Marie-Rose's husband Vincent, and he with her. But Agnes is a devout Catholic, and also loves Marie-Rose very much -- they had been inseparable as children -- so any physical relationship is impossible.

The action takes place over three days -- The Eve of All Saints, The Feast of All Saints, and The Feast of All Souls. (Or, as we'd say these days in the US, Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day.) Teresa Mulqueen's illness seems to have come to a crisis. The local doctor, William Curran, has somewhat reluctantly agreed to consult with her cancer specialist, Dr. Coyle, and a specialist from London, Sir Godfrey Bartlett-Crowe. Meanwhile Marie-Rose, who has had another of many fights with Vincent, is coming to visit and spend time with her sister; and Vincent will accompany her, ostensibly for the shooting but primarily to see Agnes. Teresa is ready to die except that she can't bear to leave the feckless Reggie without emotional support. Canon Considine, Teresa's brother, is coming to give her a special Mass. Add to the mix the new day nurse, Miss Cunningham, who may have designs on Reggie despite his illness. 

The opening of the novel is a bit programmatic, as O'Brien sets the scene in a slightly forced way. But once things are in place, the novel is beautiful. It's mostly tiny crises. Agnes hasn't been to confession because she believes her passion for Vincent is a sin, but she feels that she must take Communion at the Canon's Mass. Dr. Curran, a very fine man, is himself very much in love with Agnes, who likes him a good deal but can't forget Vincent. Marie-Rose, sort of an opposite to Agnes, is likewise beautiful, but short where Agnes is tall, blond while her sister is dark, and rather less intelligent -- but she's a nice if flighty woman. Vincent and she torture each other -- they have realized they are wholly incompatible but are trapped. Vincent himself is arguably the least likeable person, clearly spoiled by his good looks, and perhaps feeling himself stuck not just in a bad marriage but in a staid upper class position. Sir Godfrey is immediately taken with Marie-Rose and begins a flirtation -- apparently something normal for him. Miss Cunningham, gently maneuvering for Reggie's affection, is held in contempt by the Mulqueen sisters -- but she herself, having been poor her whole life, and having learned that the doctors she works with will fool around with a pretty young woman in her circumstances, but won't marry one, is sensibly proposing a fair bargain -- a lifetime of caring for an ill and dissipated man in exchange for a security. 

The writing is lovely, and the characterization intense. (Perhaps only Vincent comes off a bit unconvincingly.) The reader truly cares for Agnes, and Marie-Rose, and Dr. Curran and even Nurse Cunningham, even Reggie and poor despairing Danny Mulqueen. The novel moves swiftly through a sequence of heavily weighted scenes: Mass and Confession, dinner, encounters and kisses, songs, fights, and an agonizing extended conversation between Agnes and Vincent. It leads to a perhaps a bit too melodramatic final scene -- but for all that it's a powerful and effective novel. The pain and loss the characters feel is real, and behind that there's a tiny hint of hope. Kate O'Brien was not a believing Catholic, but was certainly raised in the Catholic tradition, and this strikes me as a profoundly Catholic novel, in some ways reminding me just a bit of my favorite Graham Greene novel, The End of the Affair. First-rate work, and I'm very glad I stumbled across this book. 

Review: The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman

Review: The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman

by Rich Horton

I mentioned recently that in looking to see if this particular book -- recommended by Tim Walters -- was available in audio form, and instead I stumbled across the Campbell Memorial Award winner Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman (no relation.) For The Book of the Night I had to read a physical copy! Which I have now done. (I should note that I read physical books at about a 10-1 ratio over audiobooks, and also that yes I do consider listening to an audiobook "reading" it.)

Not to bury the lede -- The Book of the Night (1984) is an astonishingly weird novel. It is set at a monastery on the island of Iona, in distant history, about 900 A.D. But from the beginning, with the monks rescuing an enormous (some 200 feet tall) woman being rescued (temporarily) from the ocean, which also yields a World War I soldier and Coca-Cola caps, it's clear that very strange things are going on. The woman warns of war in heaven before dying. And then the narrative shifts to a young girl, Celeste, who lives as a boy (women being forbidden in the monastery) with her insane hermit father; and it's no more "normal" from there forward. Besides the unstuck in time narrative, the prose is fascinating, playing linguistic games throughout. 

Rhoda Lerman (1936-2015) published six novels in her lifetime, with a posthumous work appearing in 2023. She was quite successful: her first novel, Call Me Ishtar, from 1973, which has the goddess in contemporary times wreaking havoc for feminist purposes, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer; and her later novels seem to have gotten consistently good notices. Most of her other novels seem to have been antically and often bitterly comic, such as The Girl That He Marries (1976), about a woman who figures out the tricks of getting a man to do her bidding -- and perhaps regrets it; and Jewish themes seem important, as with God's Ear (1989), also apparently a comic novel about a dead rabbi. Her most successful novel seems to have been Eleanor (1979), which also became a one-woman play -- it's about Eleanor Roosevelt and to me it seems by a long stretch her least interesting work. Later in her life she wrote a couple of memoirish books about her dogs.

Back to The Book of the Night. The main thread concerns Celeste's life on Iona. Her father, Manuel, left her mother (whom Celeste misses even as she still loves her rather dreadful father) and game to the monastery, presenting Celeste as a boy named CuRoi. The Abbot -- who turns out to be her grandfather -- is a mystical sort of Irish Christian, and there is a rival who wishes to hew closely to the leadership of Rome. So at one thematical level the book is about the clash between an older, more mystical Irish religion, with significant syncretic elements, and Roman Catholicism. (All of this arguably a strange choice for a seemingly very Jewish writer.) But the book is much weirder than that seems -- Rome has an army made up of Carthaginians, plus modern weapons like submachine guns, and seeminly airships as well. There are Ethiopian Catholics as well. 

Manuel's religion (or lack thereof) is even stranger. And he teaches Celeste strictly but oddly, and here again we see the timelessness of the book, for "non-linear thermodynamics" and "the uncertainty principle" are among the subjects; and too the strangeness: "What is the effect of the uncertainty principle on the fugue?" One of his methods -- repeated to great effect throughout the book -- is to string together eccentrically related words and phrases: "Zeus, Deus, juice, Jews, Yid, Druid, druse." "Methuselah, Medea, Medua, Medusa, Madonna." As Celeste grows, Manuel becomes more obsessed. A female Cook is hired, with consequences, and the Abbot's sister (armed with a submachine gun) visits as well. Celeste, or CuRoi, takes up duties in the monastery, mostly copying. And then some shocking events: a fire, killings, a transformation into a cow, a flying man, a new Abbot, too much more to mention, leading to a wild and transcendent conclusion.

It's a really remarkable effort. The linguistic inventions, the mystical speculations, the sex and death (I wonder if Alice Sheldon read this book -- at times it seems in sympathy with her work), the sheer wildness, the gods. It's unexpected everywhere -- not like any other novel I've read, not, unless I miss my guess, very much like anything else Lerman wrote. It can be a bit hard going at times, to be sure, but we shouldn't regret the work, for there are rewards. 

Review: This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

Review: This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

by Rich Horton

A little while back John Kessel mentioned this slim book, which was published in 2001 by McSweeney's Books. I had completely missed the book when it appeared. I greatly enjoyed Lethem's early short fiction and his first few novels, which were science fiction but with a distinctly different voice, and different objectives than most genre SF writers. (Indeed, I wrote a review of his first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, and sent it to a free distribution newspaper sort of thing -- perhaps it was BookPage? I'm not sure anymore. They didn't take it though their response hinted that they came really close. That's the first attempt at (semi)professional reviewing/criticism I ever made.) It wasn't, then, precisely a surprise that he moved out of the genre pretty much at the turn of the millennium, and, not really for that reason, the last of his books that I read was his 1999 detective novel Motherless Brooklyn. His next novel, The Fortress of Solitude, was still ambiguously genre (and got savaged in the New Yorker by James Wood, who is an excellent critic when he is in sympathy with a book, but has a completely blind eye, it seems to me, for genre.) But that book was long and about Superman, and I didn't get around to it, after which I was actively reviewing for Locus and my time for novels was much diminished.

This Shape We're In is a very short book -- about 13,000 words long by my estimate. It's narrated by Henry F., a middle-aged man whom we meet at a backyard barbecue, when the neighbors' son Balkan tells Henry F. and his wife Marianne that he's been in the eye and seen their son Dennis, who has been away for a while. And soon we realize that this refers to a real eye -- maybe -- as it seems that everyone lives in what they call the Shape. The Shape seems to be an enormous body of some sort, with eyes and a neck and bowels and liver and so on. While Mr. F is skeptical about Balkan's testimony, his wife insists that he and Balkan try to find Dennis.

And so Henry and Balkan begin their journey, up the spine towards the eye. There are problems, of course -- which eye was it? Could it have been the theorized "third eye"? Or was it a fraudulent creation? Things get stranger and stranger, confrontations with paramilitary groups, and religious groups, along with a visit to a clearly false eye, and references to Central Command, which can be contacted by red phones except that those phones always seem connected to a phone sex channel. This is all transmitted through Henry's voice -- that of a disappointed, heavy drinking, middle aged man, who seems to have had a military past but now is merely a "garbage hider". The science fiction reader will come up with hypotheses -- at first this seems perhaps a generation starship, for example -- and other readers will probably take everything as satirical surrealism. I'll just say that Lethem doesn't really disappoint either reader -- the story is certainly satirical and much of it can be read as sort of surrealistic, but in the story world the "Shape" is real, and its nature is, to an extent, eventually revealed. In the end, I think, it is truly a case of using SFnal imagery and allusions (though there are allusions to many other fictions) in the service of a commentary on present day life

It's quite effective. Much of this is propelled by Lethem's writing, which is very clever, imaginative and quite funny. John Kessel compares it to Kafka, and I can see that, though Lethem's prose and tone are not precisely Kafkaesque. I wish I'd seen it back in 2001. I'm not saying it would have got a Hugo nomination (it wouldn't have, but not for any reason having to do with its worth) but I think it would have been on my list. (Though looking at that year I'm reminded that Ian MacLeod wrote arguably the two best stories at novella and novelette length, both pure SF, and neither nominated: "New Light on the Drake Equation" and "Isabel of the Fall", neither of which ended up on the Hugo ballot either!)

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

by Rich Horton

Lawrence Block was born in 1938, and began publishing in the late '50s. He's written some SF, some romance, a fair amount of erotica, and other things, but he's been primarily a crime writer. He's probably best known for his Bernie Rhodenbarr and his Matthew Scudder series, as well as four novels about Chip Harrison, the first two comic soft porn, the other two crime novels. But his first series character to gain traction was Evan Tanner. Tanner appeared in seven novels between 1966 and 1970, with an eighth coming out in 1998. These novels are not crime novels, but lightly comic spy thrillers. (Based on the one book I have, they were packaged as titillatingly as possible, despite content that never really reaches event the softest porn (though there are mild sex scenes.))

I say "lightly comic", but I don't think that gets the tone quite right, based at least on Tanner's Twelve Swingers, which was the third in the series, coming out in 1967. There are definite comic bits, mind you, and in some ways it's kind of a sendup -- the action is implausible, and we're not supposed to believe in it, and the CIA, as well as political and other authorities in any number of countries, come in for plenty of mockery, but it's not really a funny novel. The character interactions feel real (if idealized, especially as to the way beautiful and good women keep wanting to sleep with Tanner), and the political commentary is often quite pointed. (Tanner is cynical about the US, the Soviet Union, China, and dictators everywhere -- his ideal is, really, a world of many more independent polities. It's striking to see him advocating strongly for the dissolution of the Yugoslavia into at least five different nations -- which of course happened (not without a terrible war) about a quarter century later.)

Evan Tanner fought in the Korean War, and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head, and destroyed his sleep center. He has a disability pension, and has used his extra 8 hours of wakefulness to learn a lot of stuff -- different languages, lots of science and other knowledge, memberships in all sorts of organizations from various revolutionary groups to the Flat Earth Society.) He writes term papers and even Ph. D. theses to make extra money. And, he does a bit of work on the side for a government organization without a name, which seems to allow him lots of latitude in his assignments.

In this book he has promised a Latvian friend to rescue his lost love from the USSR. (Yes, another thing Tanner advocates is the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent states. (Also, he's intrigued by the idea of 50 independent American states,)) Alas, he thinks the job is impossible. But when the organization he works for wants him to go to Colombia for what he thinks is a bad reason, he uses his mission to Latvia as an excuse to decline. He begins in Macedonia though, where it turns out he has a young son (presumably conceived in a previous book?) So he sees his son, and on the way out of Yugoslavia finds himself further burdened with a Montenegrin who has written a book calling for the splitting of Yugoslavia. The two proceed through Hungary and Poland to Lithuania and Latvia -- and somehow by the end he's picked up a 7 year old girl who is the rightful Queen of Lithuania, 12 extremely beautiful Latvian gymnasts (a package deal including his friend's lover) and eventually even a jazz-playing Russian pilot. All this of course further complicates his mission.

Does he succeed? Well, there are sequels to come! The means he uses to cross borders and foil the police and so on are, as the book goes on, increasingly absurd. He sleeps with a few women -- most of whom would be happy if he'd settle down with them, though in the end he has the one son, the prospects of perhaps another child but who knows?, and an adopted daughter. We don't have to believe in much of this -- but it's entertaining throughout, a truly professional but affecting performance.

Review: Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

Review: Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

by Rich Horton

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) was without question one of the greatest SF writers of all time. And he was notably excellent at pretty much any length -- he wrote great short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, novel series -- and even an extended series of series of novels. And he kept writing short fiction even after he had great success with his novels. By my count he ended up with eight "primary" story collections, and about as many that variously shuffled the stories, or included only a few shorter pieces, or were otherwise offbeat. The consensus view might be that his first collection, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), is his best -- and I probably would agree, but all the collections are worthwhile. I had occasion to reread his 1989 collection Endangered Species, I was delighted throughout.

The collection, not surprisingly, focuses on stories published in the '80s, but extends back to stories from very early in Wolfe's career, in the late '60s, and has some '70s pieces as well. Wolfe was a master at the novella length, but only one of these stories is a novella -- "Silhouette", which closes the book. There are several novelettes, but this book is really dominated by short stories. In a way, this was a revelation -- I've so long adored Wolfe's novellas and long novelettes that this made me realize that his best short stories are quite as brilliant.

Speaking generally, all the stories here show off the elegance of Wolfe's prose. Most of them are mysterious in some way or another -- the very property captured by the adjective "Wolfean". They display Kipling's influence in the way Wolfe tells you just enough to make the story comprehensible -- but no more. They are sometimes impish, sometimes romantic, sometimes just plain cool. A surprising number of the stories can be called horror -- this is a very important part of Wolfe's repertoire, but I don't know that it's emphasized much.

The longest story here is the novella "Silhouette", a dark story about a starship reaching a potentially colonizable planet, and the internal battle over what to do. Other longish stories include "The Rose and the Nightingale (and What Came of It)", an Arabic-flavored story about a beggar boy who agrees to help a storyteller retrieve a treasure from inside a Pasha's garden -- it's nicely told, with the expected twists, and a romantic flavor, but it's more conventional than I expect from Wolfe. "The Other Dead Man" is one of his better, and creepier, stories, in which a spaceship is severely damaged and the Captain is fatally injured, but the medical bay is programmed to resuscitate him at all costs. This moves slickly to the inevitable horrific conclusion. "The Detective of Dreams" is about a Frenchman hired to investigate who might be sending some people in a German city terrifying dreams -- the reader might recognize the content of the dreams the victims describe, from which the detective can deduce the surprising identity of the haunter.

Most of the stories are rather shorter. There a few instance of linked stories. "The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus" and "The Woman the Unicorn Loved" are about a professor who is part of a group devoted to protecting genetically engineered creatures who have been abandoned by their makers (in this future DNA alterations can be done with a home kit.) Many of these creatures are based on myth, and in these two stories the professor befriends women who form, let's say, closer relationships to the title creatures -- increasing the need to save them from the usual fate discarded beings receive. There is a set of four linked stories that were published in one of Roger Elwood's more interesting projects, Continuum, a set of four anthologies each containing installments of a longer project that continued through the books. Wolfe's stories are "The Dark of the June", "The Death of Hyle", "From the Notebooks of Dr. Stein", and "Thag". They tell of a future in which people can choose to be uploaded into a virtual existence, and the first one is about a man whose wife has died and whose daughter is contemplated upload. As the stories continue, things get stranger, with what seems like time travel, and a malevolent creature called Thag. Interesting work. 

Three stories are related to Wolfe's Solar Cycle. "The Map" and "The Cat" are set in Severian's time. "The Map" is one of the best stories in the book, as a man hires a boat to travel down the river Gyoll to a deserted part of the city, near the Old Citadel familiar from The Book of the New Sun. The boat's captain Eata (one of Severian's fellow apprentices, though by this time Severian is the Autarch) lets the man out but waits to pick him up -- and when he does we learn a little lesson about the map the man carries, and an ironic bit more about what Eata knows of maps. "The Cat" is a story told during Severian's reign about events decades prior, about an exultant girl and the strange cat she had, and what happened to her when she got in trouble with an older man. The other Solar Cycle story is "The God and His Man", a short fable apparently from the Brown Book that Severian encounters. In this story, the God of a certain world summons a Man whom he sets a task -- to live among the different people on his world and learn how they differ from each other and in what ways they are cruel. What the Man learns, in the end, may not be precisely to the God's benefit.

Of the other short stories, I'll mention a few particular favorites. "The Cabin on the Coast" opens the book, and it's a lovely dark story of a man and a woman in love -- but the man is the son of a prominent politician, who is not happy that his son wants to marry this woman. Then the woman disappears -- and the man is convinced a mysterious boat he sees off the coast has something to do with it. Can he go there and get her back? The ending is perhaps what readers expect -- but still very nicely turned. "Our Neighbour by David Copperhead" purports to be a story told by the title character during his period as a journalist, in which he observes a man lurking about his neighbour's house, and learns the man's story -- he's investigating what the neighbour does in the house, at the request of a woman who feels that her daughter may have been somehow mistreated there. And the man ends up learning about the neighnour, who is a scientist involved with phrenology and mesmerism -- and whose investigations lead him to a mordant moral discovery. "The War Beneath the Tree" is a long-time favorite of mine, about a group of a young boy's toys who come to "life" on Christmas Eve. And they stage a battle -- for a reason, which the boy learns. And in that reason is buried a delightful stinger. "The HORARS of War" is an affecting story of a journalist "embedded" in a group of robot soldiers fighting a Vietnam like war against an unnamed Enemy. The journalist must impersonate the robot soldiers, which means sharing their battles -- and perhaps their fate? The story twists a little on its way to a moving conclusion. "Suzanne Delage" is another longtime favorite -- a simple story in a sense, in which the narrator tells of the title woman, with whom he went to high school but never really knew, and had lost track with. Until a commonplace but odd encounter brings her to mind. 

I could go on. Not all of the stories are masterworks -- a few are clever but trivial, and a couple don't quite work. But there is always something intriguing there. And, really -- instead of the stories I discuss above perhaps I should have mentioned "Lukora", or "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story", or "Kevin Malone", or "In the House of Gingerbread", or "All the Hues of Hell". And each reader will have their own favorites anyway -- so just read them!

Review: Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

Review: Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

by Rich Horton

Sometimes I have plans in advance to read a certain book, and sometimes it's all but random. Looking for my next audiobook last week I thought, hey, someone recommended Rhoda Lerman to me a while ago, maybe I'll see about her? A search on Audiobook turned up nothing by Rhoda Lerman. But they did have Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman. And I remembered that it had won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel several years ago, somewhat surprisingly. The year was 2016, actually, and other finalists included work by the likes of Nnedi Okorafor, Kim Stanley Robinson, Linda Nagata, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Neal Stephenson. I was in the audience for the presentation, and the presenter more or less begged the us to give this unexpected jewal a try. (Or so I remember things.) And I did put the novel on my "try sometime" list, but that was all -- so seeing it show up last week was enough for me to go ahead and read it (or listen to it.) 

Eleanor Lerman was born in New York in 1952, and was raised in the Bronx and in Far Rockaway -- which turns out to be imporant to this novel! (And in a strange coincidence I just discovered, the writer whose work I was looking for, Rhoda Lerman, was born in Far Rockaway! Lerman was Rhoda's married name, and I don't think Rhoda and Eleanor were related at all. Rhoda Lerman was born in 1936 and died in 2015, and her most SFnal novel is called The Book of the Night.) Eleanor Lerman published a book of poetry, Armed Love, in 1973 that got a lot of attention -- good and bad -- and a National Book Award nomination. (A poet and novelist I recently wrote about for Black Gate, X. J. Kennedy, reviewed Armed Love harshly in the New York Times, giving it an XX rating because he found the subject matter (drug use, Lesbianism, etc.) offensive.) The attention turned Lerman away from writing for a quarter century, but since the turn of the millennium she has published regularly, both poetry and fiction. One other novel, The Stargazer's Embassy (2017) was a Campbell finalist.

Laurie Perzin is a woman in her 40s, in 2002, very shortly after 9/11. She's working night shifts as a bartender in the JFK Airport. One night she calls in to a late night radio show while a psychic, Ravenette, is the guest, and to her shock the psychic narrates an incident from Laurie's childhood, when she was with her Uncle Avi, and saw a mysterious sort of shadow man. Laurie ends up need to figure out how this could have happened, and she gets in touch with the radio host, a man named Jack Shepherd, who is both a skeptic about woo-woo stuff, and fascinated by it. He gets her in touch with Ravenette, who turns out to be a member of a cult called Blue Awareness, which is transparently based on Scientology. 

It turns out that without quite realizing it Laurie has been somewhat entangle with Blue Awareness her whole life. As a child, Avi took care of her fairly often. Avi was into ham radio, and to other radio based activities such as listening the signals from satellites. The childhood incident the psychic had sensed was when Laurie and Avi were at an apartment building on the Rockaway peninsula, where he did some maintenance, and also listening to signals from Sputnik 10. Not long after, Laurie's mother died, and Laurie fell out of touch with Avi, who died fairly young. Laurie had wild teenage years. But she had encountered Blue Awareness, partly because while in the Navy during WWII Avi had worked with the founder of Blue Awareness, and had heard his story of an encounter somewhat similar to Laurie's. The founder begins by publishing pulp SF, then starts his cult, which by the time of the novel is run by his son, Raymond Gilmartin. And Raymond, along with Ravenette, are very interested in both the radio Avi used and another device Avi made which is similar to the "blue boxes" Blue Awareness uses in treating its members.

The plot follows Laurie as she tries to stay away from any involvement, but is forced to deal with Blue Awareness and the Radiomen in various ways: a burglary in which Avi's equipment is taken from Laurie's house, a "Dogon dog" Laurie is given thank to her Malian neighbor, a kidnap attempt on Laurie, foiled by her new dog, Jack Shepherd's increasing interest, and finally another encounter with what she realizes must be her Radioman. The novel is rather discursive -- in some ways it's a New York (or perhaps Queens) novel, going into plenty of detail about Laurie's everyday life and her wanderings between her apartment, her job at the airport, Jack's office, and Rockaway. It takes its time getting to the climax, but doesn't bore us along the way, and the ending is, almost surprisingly, quite powerful, quite moving. It is definitely a science fiction novel -- it doesn't cheat or play literary games with its content -- but it may not be the sort of SF that appeals to lots of SF readers. (An SF story on the same subject would have been half the length or less, and would have had a more transcendent and yet less moving ending.) I really enjoyed the novel, and it strikes me as a novel that it's good to see an award committee bring to wider attention.

Resurrected Review: Horizons, by Mary Rosenblum

Resurrected Review: Horizons, by Mary Rosenblum

by Rich Horton

Mary Rosenblum (1952-2018) was a fine writer of both SF and mysteries. I greatly enjoyed her short fiction, and I reprinted her story "Search Engine" in my first Best of the Year volume. Alas, she died far too soon in an airplane crash. (She was a pilot.)

I wrote this review back in 2007 when this novel, which turned out to be her last SF novel, appeared. I'm resurrecting it now.

Mary Rosenblum's Horizons is a near future SF novel with a somewhat old-fashioned shape and set of concerns. And I liked it for that -- it's very exciting, fast-moving, with some nice speculative elements. And with an engaging heroine. And really nasty bad guys. (Who espouse a philosophy I personally find repellent -- but which many might have at least some sympathy for.)

The heroine is Ahni Huang, daughter of the head of an influential Taiwanese commercial family. The opening sequence was originally a story in Asimov's ("Green Shift"), and in it she goes up to the North American Alliance's orbital platform, NYUp, to avenge her brother Xai's murder. But there she learns that Xai is actually alive, and acting against her family. She also discovers a secret on NYUp: a group of apparently illegally modified humans are living in microgravity, under the leadership of Dane Nilsson, the still "normal" chief "gardener" for the orbital.

After a confrontation with her father and mother, who are acting at mysterious cross-purposes, she returns to NYUp. The platform is under increasing tension. There is an independence movement, lead by Dane, but it is spiralling out of control, moving too rapidly, apparently as a result of external agitators. Possibly these are controlled by Xai, who may be working with Li Zhen, son of the Chinese leader, and the man in charge of the Chinese orbital platform.

All this moves very rapidly to a confrontation -- the World Council military is pushed to act against the people of NYUp, particularly Dane. So Ahni must figure out who is really behind all these problems, and how or if she can get sufficient cooperation between Dane's allies on NYUp, between an asteroid-based pilot/smuggler, and between Li Zhen to prevent a true disaster from destroying everybody's hopes for the future.

I quite enjoyed the novel. At the same time it shows some of the weaknesses of the genre ... some due to commercial considerations, and some more specifically SFnal. The commercial weaknesses lie in such aspects as the convenient brilliance of the heroine and hero and their associated, and in their routinely exalted social positions. Also, the resolution of the plot is quite convenient -- it is exactly what we as readers want, but it comes too rapidly, too easily, but also after (I felt) somewhat implausible raising of the stakes, increasing of the danger to the characters we care about. By which I mean that I think the end state could have been plausibly arrived at, but somewhat more slowly, and without the life-or-death confrontation towards the end, complete with dramatic courtroom intervention. But that would have been hard to make work novelistically. In the end it is lots of fun, good solid SF -- not a lasting masterpiece but nice work.