Here are some recent reviews I've done on my Substack.
Human Voices, by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers
Cumberworld & Farther, by Gregory Feeley
Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow
The Rainseekers, by Matthew Kressel
Mr American, by George Macdonald Fraser
Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov
by Rich Horton
[I wrote this back in 1998, when the novel came out. I haven't revised it at all (save for a few bracketed additions] so what I say about the author is very out of date. It turns out that Jablokov took an hiatus from writing (or at least publishing) for nearly a decade after this novel appeared, Since he retunred, in 2006, he has published one more novel (Brain Thief (2010)) and quite a few shorter stories, which have continued to be very interesting.]
Deepdrive is his latest. It's an Avon EOS hardcover, and I'd like to praise Avon for their practice of publishing lower-priced books. Their pbs have been $3.99, and now I've seen a couple of hc's, in smaller packages, for about $15. I think this is a good approach. [That comment didn't age well!]
Deepdrive itself is set in a busy, well-imagined future. The solar system is occupied (mostly benignly) by several different species of aliens: the Bgarth are burrowing on Venus, assisting with its terraformation; the Gunners are on Mercury, shooting at the Sun; the Ulanyi are on Earth, living in symbiotic relationships with nomadic human tribes. And there are plenty more. But none of the aliens will give humans the secret of the "deepdrive", which allows faster than light travel. An alien from another species, the Vronnans, has showed up, apparently a refugee from his own people, and he is holed up on Venus. Rumor says he wants to be rescued, and he might have something important, even a deepdrive, to trade. Sophonisba Trust assembles a team, somewhat ad hoc, to go after the Vronnan. The novel follows her and the members of her team, as well as the Vronnan, as a series of disasters propels them willy nilly towards learning more than they might want to know about Vronnans, the lost Martian slowship interstellar expedition, their own motivations, and how Ulanyi, Gunners, and other aliens tie into this. And also, maybe, the secrets of the deepdrive.
It's all pretty cool, and well-imagined, distinctly "Sterlingesque" (particularly reminiscent of some Shaper-Mechanist stuff, like "Swarm"), and certainly exciting, and yet ... It never quite won me over. I dunno why. Maybe it was too hard to follow all the threads. Maybe I didn't quite believe in most of the characters (Soph was well done, also her ex-husband Lightfoot, but I was never convinced by the beautiful lesbian Ambryn Chretien or the big bodyguard Elward Bakst, both of whose motivations and abilities seemed to change to whatever the plot required). But, I'm sort of worried, is my "Sense of Wonder" dulling? What I mean is, I think maybe 20 years ago all the cool stuff, the aliens, the biotech, the plots within plots, would have overwhelmed me and carried me along. And it didn't do that for me now.
On balance, I'd still recommend Deepdrive. But I can't give it full marks. [Which may have been more my fault than Jablokov's!]
Reclaimed Review: Declare, by Tim Powers
I'm reading Tim Powers' The Mills of the Gods just now, and I thought maybe I should repost something I wrote about him. Alas, I didn't write a full review of The Anubis Gates, by far my favorite of his books, when I read it long ago. Indeed, I find I haven't written much about him! But I did write this review, way back in 2001. (Indeed, I posted it on SFF Net on August 30, 2011 -- a terribly innocent time, in retrospect, with an event pending that could probably prompt a Powers-like book, far enough in the future -- it's still too soon now.)
From there the story proceeds on multiple timelines. We learn in flashbacks of Hale's past -- his mysterious birth in Palestine, his Catholic upbringing by a single mother in the English countryside, his recruitment into a curious side branch of British Intelligence and his first assignment -- to let himself be recruited as a Soviet agent, to work in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941. In Paris his partner agent is a beautiful young Spaniard named Elena Ceniza-Bendiga, and she and Andrew fall in love, but she makes clear that her first allegiance is to international communism. So when the Nazi's find them out, and they escape and are ordered to Moscow, presumably to be killed as blown agents, he ducks out on her and returns to England, where he learns, more or less, what's really going on.
There follow episodes in Berlin in 1945, where Hale meets Elena again, as well as Kim Philby, the highly placed spy who Hale has always disliked and mistrusted. The three meet again on Ararat in 1948, when Hale learns conclusively that Philby is a traitor, and also becomes convinced that Elena has learned to hate him.
A parallel path follows Hale's adventures in the Middle East in 1963, as he manages to get recruited by the Soviets for there new attempt at -- I won't say what -- on Mr. Ararat. This involves trips to mysterious cities in the desert, meetings with curious entities, and another meeting with Elena and with Kim Philby, who has finally been exposed publically as a spy, and who is looking for escape -- either to France or Russia. Finally, as we have known, the strange operation called Declare will be resolved, one way or another, on the slopes of Mt. Ararat, near a curious long buried wooden object -- perhaps a ship.
The book is always intriguing, and full of clever supernatural ideas. The central supernatural entities here are djinni -- which Powers links to fallen angels. He ties this in with the true stories of Kim Philby and his father, and with T. E. Lawrence, and with some mysterious cities in the Arabian Desert, and with meteorites, and spies, and Catholicism. I found this all well-imagined, and consistent and comprehensible in a way that, for example, the ghosts in Expiration Date never managed to be for me. There is also the love story between Elena and Andrew, which is well-told and very well resolved, but which didn't fully work for me, as the emotional element of it never quite came to life for me. I think the other slight weakness in the novel is a certain implausibility in some of the spy stuff -- basically, it seemed to me that Hale's cover would never have held up as well as it did -- the Russians would have got just a bit skittish, and shot him out of hand. Not that I'd know. Powers also manages to work in some of his other recurring themes -- poker, and the injured hero, for two. It's a very solid effort, just a whisker short of being exceptional, and it takes a place in my pantheon of Powers' books at the second level -- below my favorite, The Anubis Gates, but ranged somewhere with The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides as among the next best.
I resurrect another review of a rather nice original anthology from a small press, back in 2008. This review originally appeared in Locus, as a Divers Hand review.
Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah J. Ross (Leda (an imprint of
Norilana Books,
A review by Rich Horton
A particular highlight is Sherwood Smith’s novella “The Rule of Engagement”,
in which a woman is kidnapped by a man who hopes to marry her, and must find a
way to engineer her escape without causing political issues, or harm to the
man’s retainers. The story is satisfying in its scope, and hints at a
fascinating backstory … all part of a grand fantastical history that Smith has
been elaborating since childhood, and which is the source of her excellent Inda novels for DAW.
Tanith Lee’s “Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker, Priest” is also great
fun – on a ship journey, a couple of swordsmen take a sudden inexplicable
dislike to each other, to the point of proposing a duel. But a shipwreck
intervenes, and the real story is eventually made clear on the (mostly
swordless) island at which they end up. Most readers will see quickly the shape
of the story, and the twist, but it remains a delight getting there.
Two stories very nicely use Spanish settings. Robin Wayne Bailey’s “Touch of
Moonlight” has a Lady encountering an outlaw – rumored to actually be a ghost –
while on a journey to ransom her younger brother. By the end, supernatural
beings have been encountered – as well as, of course, more naturally beastly
humans. In Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind”, a young man is being pushed to a
marriage he fears will be loveless, in order to save his family’s fading fortunes.
But the mysterious rider called the Night Wind may change his ideas … again,
the reader will recognize immediately what’s going on, but the story still
satisfies.
Dave Smeds, in “The Beheaded Queen”, features the most interesting main
character, as indicated by the title. And her fate is treated uncompromisingly
– her interest is seeing to the future of her son. Madeleine E. Robins’s
“Virtue and the Archangel” reminded me just a bit of her wonderful Sarah
Tolerance novels (how I wish a publisher would pick them up so she could write
more), in telling of a woman led by circumstance to a not very respectable job
as a private investigator – here she helps an old school friend to recover a
lost jewel.
The other stories come from Diana L. Paxson – an effective tale set in
Brazil; Chaz Brenchley – sort of a pendant to his novel Bridge of Dreams, involving enough but perhaps just a bit too much
a side trip and not its own journey; and Catherine Asaro, whose story was the
only one here to really disappoint me.
[I thought Fantasy Magazine was defunct -- but perhaps not, as I see there are issues as recently as late 2025 at the Psychopomp site (including some of the reviews I did for them back in the day): Fantasy Magazine.]
A review by Rich Horton
Instead, the single element that marks many of these stories as “urban”
fantasy is the way that their fantastical cities are central to the interest of
the narrative. That is, they are not just a backdrop, or a convenient setting,
but integral to the story. Indeed, these are “stories about cities” more than
“stories about living in a city”, if you see what I mean. So Cat Rambo’s “The Bumblety’s Marble” is believably set in
a fantastical city and redolent of that city’s atmosphere, as it tells of a
girl happening onto the title marble, then feeling obligated to return to a boy
she meets from the underworld who says it is his mother’s heart. And with
Other fine stories turn on striking central images, as with Vylar Kaftan’s
“Godivy”, a very odd very short piece about an ambitious office worker and his
unusual office, complete with living photocopier. Or Kaaron Warren’s “Down to
the Silver Spirits”, in which a couple find a highly unusual way to have a
baby. Or Greg van Eekhout’s “Ghost Market”, about buying ghosts, of course, but
more sharply about the worst consequences of such a market. And Barth
Anderson’s “The Last Escape” is a oddball little piece about an oddball escape
artist making trouble for the rulers of a curiously isolated island city in
time of plague – central here is not so much an odd image as an odd character.
One story I both enjoyed and found frustrating was Cat Sparks’s “Sammarynda
Deep”, which tells a moving and original story of a woman coming to her lover’s
home city after the war they fought in is over, trying to find him and learning
why he left. I thought the point-of-view choices were a bit off, and the setup
a bit too labored, but the story I detected behind all that is lovely.
There are other strong stories here, by the likes of Anna Tambour, David
Schwartz, and Jenn Reese; and only a couple real disappointments, most notably
Hal Duncan’s piece, which is, as ever with him, very strikingly written, but,
as too often with him, doesn’t tell a coherent story. The book on a whole is a
strong, original, selection; giving a useful reinvigoration to the idea of
Urban Fantasy.
These reviews were done for SF Site in 1999, using the 1999 Millennium editions of the first and third volumes of the five books of Dick's collected short fiction. At the time I didn't know the history of those books -- they actually were first published in 1987 by the oustanding small press Underwood-Miller. And they have been reprinted by a number of publishers since then, often with the titles changed and with some shuffling of contents. Not surprisingly, some of the title changes were attempts to capitalize on movies. More recently, Gollancz/Orion has produced a four volume edition of Collected Stories. My advice to any buyer is to carefully study the tables of contents to try to get consistent editions.
Renamed SF Site Review: Beyond Lies the Wub and The Father-Thing, by Philip K. Dick
Dick is best known for his novels, notable among them his Hugo winner The Man
in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, and his strange late "trilogy" consisting of VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
It is, then, not much of a surprise that the stories collected in these two books are on the whole lesser creations than his great novels. In many cases, Dick appeared to be writing to market, and his main markets were the lesser pulps of the early '50s. He did make some sales to Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy; and his favourite early market appears to have been If, which throughout most of its 20 some years was a quirky and valuable second tier magazine.
These early stories, as a group, do not really reflect much of Dick's later obsessions with the nature of reality and memory, though there definite few hints to that effect. The biggest obsessions in these stories, however, are the threat of nuclear war and the subsequent danger of mutation. Another major theme (often an offshoot of the mutation theme) is psi powers. And, finally, the stories reflect the '50s concerns with advertising and the growth of the suburbs. Of course some of these ideas are present in some of Dick's novels. There is the occasional story in these books that directly prefigures later work: for example, "Shell Game" presents a world of paranoids escaped from a hospital ship, much like the more developed situation in Clans of the Alphane Moon.
For all that many of these stories are minor, there are some jewels. From Volume 1 there is "Beyond Lies the Wub," Dick's first published story (though not his first sale), which builds to a cute conclusion. "The Preserving Machine" takes an utterly strange idea -- turning music into animals -- and makes it work in an odd, haunting, fashion. "Meddler" is a legitimately scary look at time travel, and "Colony" is a scary look at a planet in which everything is a predator. Definitely a prefiguration of some later Dick themes. And "Nanny" takes on suburban life, planned obsolescence, and the fight to "keep up with the Joneses" effectively.
From Volume 3, "The Father-Thing" is scary and psychologically effective SF horror. "The Golden Man" is a brilliant and honest look at what an "advanced" human race might really be like, and how it might regard us "primitives." "Misadjustment" is one of several stories (including "The Golden Man") in which mutations are regarded with fear and strictly controlled, and in this case the paranoia thus induced is beautifully observed. "A World of Talent" and "Psi Man Heal My Child!" take quite different looks at a curious variant of time travel which I really haven't seen treated much: a person with this time travel ability can change places with his own self at different times on his worldline, but can't go back before his birth or after his death.
I don't think anyone would necessarilyconclude from the contents of these volumes of short fiction alone that Philip K. Dick was destined to become one of the field's greats, though I think one could conclude that he had the potential to be one of the field's true originals. Neither collection is by itself a landmark, but all these collections are worth the attention of anyone interested in the work of Philip K. Dick or in the history of the SF field. And in their own right they provide a lot of interesting reading, if relatively few moments of brilliance. Moreover, the story notes at the end provide interesting details about date of composition, original publication, and in some cases, Dick's own views on the story or its origin.
I reviewed Wil McCarthy's The Collapsium at SF Site in 2000 when it first appeared. I thought it lots of fun. A trilogy which somewhat more darkly explored the implications of the ideas introduced in this novel followed: The Wellstone (2003), Lost in Transmission (2004) and To Crush the Moon (2005). A couple further stories showed up later in Analog: "The Policeman's Daughter" and "Wyatt Earp 2.0", along with another story in an anthology: "Doc Holliday 2.0". I think the entire set of stories -- collectively called, I suppose, The Queendom of Sol -- are excellent radical speculation, and deserve a wider audience.
Recreated SF Site Review: The Collapsium, by Wil McCarthy
The book is set several centuries in the future, or, as the opening line declares, "in the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol." The social setting for McCarthy's baroque scientific speculations is thus appropriately baroque. The Solar System is united under a monarchy, and the ruler is the heir to the only monarchy that has survived to this time: the Queen of Tonga, Tamra Lutui. The central character is Bruno de Towangi, a brilliant scientist from Catalonia, now living a hermit's life in the Kuiper Belt, on an artificial planet, playing with miniature black holes arranged to form the "element" collapsium, in an attempt to create an arc de fin, which will allow him to see the end of time. Bruno is a Declarant-Philander, a title which reflects both his high scientific achievements, and his status as former official lover of the "Virgin" Queen, Tamra.
The first section, "Once Upon a Matter Crushed," was originally published as a novella in SF Age, in 1999. In this section Bruno is summoned by his Queen back to the inner Solar System to solve a problem with the Ring Collapsiter, a ring of collapsium which his rival Marlon Sykes is building around the Sun. This ring will allow faster than light travel and communications, improving on the current system of "faxes," by which people travel at light speed anywhere there is a receiving station, making copies of themselves, copies which retain their memories, and which also can be "edited" to correct internal problems. Thus, humans may have also become immortal.
This first section sets up the conflict that will be repeated in all three of the book's sections. Bruno is called in-system to solve a problem with the Ring Collapsiter that endangers the Sun, and hence all humanity. He needs to deal with Marlon Sykes' jealousy, with the technical problem causing the danger to the Sun, and with the human problem motivating someone to so endanger the Ring Collapsiter and the Sun. Thus, to some extent the three sections are a bit repetitive. In addition, McCarthy keeps on multiplying his weird scientific speculations, adding in such ideas as "true vacuum," elimination of inertia, electromagnetic grapples, and so on. All this is, on the one hand, pretty fun, but on the other hand not wholly believable. It's not so much the science itself that is unbelievable -- sure, it's all speculative, and probably mostly not very likely to be true, but that's all part of the game, and all the weird stuff is pretty well explained in a series of appendices. Rather, Bruno's Tom Swift-like ability to whip up new gadgets based on the new science in quick time becomes somewhat implausible.
That said, given the rather light tone of the whole book (albeit a tone which is at odds with any thought for the millions of innocents who die), it all ends up being quite entertaining. The science is larger-than-life, and so are the characters. Neither is quite believable in a realistic fashion, but both are acceptable within the conventions of this book. It's baroque, super-scientific, stuff: kind of like bad 30s pulp SF rewritten to be a pretty good new millennium take on those old tropes. It's not great SF, but it's good fun, and full of neat and wild ideas
