Some notes on rereading The Two Towers.

I participated in a slow read, over the last 15 months or so, of The Lord of the Rings, led by Madeleine Dombrowski at her Substack, Love of Literature. What I've written below is just notes, not well organized, based on comments I made during the read. I should note that this was my third time reading The Lord of the Rings. Slightly more detailed comments are linked below this post, centered on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King. 

I do think the differences between The Two Towers and The Fellowship of the Ring are stark, and to me they boil down to something like "Now it's really happening." The War -- the shooting war, if you will -- is well and truly started. This book has more action, put most simply, than The Fellowship of the Ring.

The theme of The Two Towers? Hmmm -- that even in the darkest times (and places!), and under the direst threat, it is still important to fight, to resist, and not to lose hope. For there is always hope. And a partial victory is not to be disdained.

The following notes, mostly about character, are just that: notes, prompted in part by questions asked during our slow read. I have note organized then into anything more. (And in a sense The Two Towers, as a middle book, is harder to treat by itself. I have said some more about The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King in the pieces linked below.)

1. Boromir 

The question came up in our reading group: is he redeemed at the end of his life? I think he is, in nearly a Christian sense, in that he has confessed his sins and accepted the consequences. But it in a way he did not grow -- didn't have time to be sure -- he chose (not that there was much choice) to die as he (apparently) lived -- violently. Heroically too -- yes -- but the Heroism he wanted. Not, for example, the heroism Sam embodies. It's interesting that Aragorn is Boromir's true King? Aragorn hearing his confession is in a sense his first overt act as King.

2. Treebeard

On this rereading I found myself appreciating Treebeard -- both the Ent himself and the chapter of that name -- more than I did in previous readings. I find him a fascinating character. I am also rather delighted by the bit in the letter to Auden in which Tolkien confesses to disgust at the scene in Macbeth where "Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane" -- I think Macbeth is a very great play but that scene has always struck me as almost a cheap, trivializing, joke.

I see Treebeard as very effectively a portrayal of something truly ancient. I did wonder though, at his claim to be the oldest creature in Middle Earth. Isn't Tom Bombadil of similar or even greater age? Or am I misremembering. I suppose I regard Old Willow as a sort of Ent, or a variety of Ent, perhaps a half-woken Ent?

3. Saruman

It seems to me that Saruman's desire for control is to a great extent self-centered. Even when (if) his control might be seen as in the service of good, what he wants to a personal reward -- at the very least, acknowedgement of his power, of his (self-perceived) goodness.

Of course in the end his "control", his "power", is false -- as he is unable to resist the lures of Sauron. And part of the reason for this is his desire for reward -- for Sauron (and even the likes of Wormtongue) can offer the "reward" of at least flattery. (I will refrain from making any comment on contemporary politics! -- though I should say this weakness, it seems to me, has beset political leaders at all times, as surely Tolkien knew.)

The question came up in our book group: how is Saruman "creating" Orcs different from Elves "wakening" Ents: As for Saruman's "creation" of Orcs and the Elves wakening of the Ents, I see two differences. One is that the elves merely awakened them -- they did not attempt to "create", they just activated a latent character, or so I see it. Saruman wanted to instill his "creations" with specific characteristics in service to him. It was a selfish act, and motivated by evil intent.

4. Gollum

Was Frodo's pity for Gollum appropriate? Of course! As to whether Frodo would have been justified in killing him -- I believe killing is only justified in true self-defense. And while it's a cheat, we do know if this is a reread that killing Gollum would have been a terrible mistake in the end.

I see Smeagol and Gollum as very much the same person. Two instincts in conflict. Tolkien here is literalizing a conflict many of us have between our better and worse natures -- though Smeagol's "betterness" is, I suppose, only relative.

Perhaps the most obvious way Frodo and Gollum are similar is that both are to some degree slaves of the Ring. Frodo is resisting it to the best of his ability, but if he'd had the Ring as long as Gollum, could he have resisted?

Frodo's choices are all bad, but this reflects the state of all of Middle Earth at this time. War is terrible, but war against Sauron must be waged.

It's an interesting question how differently things might have turned out had Sam been more generous to Gollum. I think Sam's attitude is fully understandable, and in essence was earned by Gollum/Smeagol. The point is, I believe, that no one is beyond repenting, and turning to God. And that the Christlike response is to believe them and accept them ... But Sam as always is the most "human" of the characters ...

5. Faramir

It is interesting that we meet Faramir only after Boromir's death. Seeing them interact may have been intriguing. Boromir is very brave, very strong, and outwardly virtuous, it seems to me. I think his greatest weakness is a longing for power, along with a longing for praise. His bravery seemed in part a bid for approval -- he is brave because if he wasn't he fears he'd be held in contempt. Faramir is very much not looking for power, and his bravery, as evidenced in his treatment of Frodo, is not necessarily physical but moral -- indeed, he spares the hobbits even knowing that many of his fellows will feel he has done wrong.

6. A note on Tolkien's poetry:

I find his poetry a mixed bag. Some simply doesn't work for me. But some is beautiful, including many of the poetic passages in The Lord of the Rings. (I also love "The Last Ship", from his poems included in The Tolkien Reader.)

But in The Two Towers specifically, I'll just mention how much I like the poem Aragorn sings -- "Where now the horse and the rider". It is partly inspired by the great Old English poem "The Wanderer", and it truly captures the Old English style and mood -- no surprise from a scholar like Tolkien of course. But it is truly beautiful, and in many ways the mood of regret, of great things passing away, applies to the entire novel.

The line "They have passed like rain on the mountain" seems also to be echoed (maybe consciously?) in Roy Batty's famous speech at the end of of Blade Runner: "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

Comments on the other books:

The Fellowship of the Ring

The Return of the King

Answers to Early Women Science Fiction Writers Quiz

Here are the answers to the quiz I posted a couple of days ago. (Here's the original quiz.)

1.  One of the earliest women to hold major creative roles in television science fiction, D. C. Fontana followed the producer of The Lieutenant to a new franchise where she became a writer, story editor, and later associate producer, helping shape much of its early mythology. Name this franchise.

STAR TREK

2.  The very first woman to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America began writing historical fiction for young readers in the 1930s, adopting a male pseudonym as was common in that era. She turned to science fiction with the short story "People of the Crater" in 1947, and published her first science fiction novel, Star Man's Son, 2250 A. D., in 1952. Dozens of novels followed until (and beyond!) her death in 2005. Her most famous series is probably Witch World. Name this writer (either her given name or the male-coded pseudonym (which she later took as her legal name.))

ALICE MARY NORTON/ANDRE NORTON

3.  Any quiz about pioneering women science fiction writers could hardly omit mentioning Mary Shelley, whom Brian W. Aldiss championed as the first SF writer, thanks to her first novel, Frankenstein (1818). But Shelley was no one-hit wonder -- she published six further novels as well as short fiction, poetry, travel narratives, and biographies. Name the 1826 post-apocalyptic novel that was her final venture into science fiction.

THE LAST MAN

4.  While Mary Shelley is now widely cited as the first "true" science fiction writer, there were earlier works involving science-fictional tropes, such as Lucian of Samosata's True History (late 2nd Century CE), Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1634), and The Blazing World (1666). Name the Englishwoman, a prominent natural philosopher in her time, who wrote the latter novel.

MARGARET CAVENDISH nee LUCAS/DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE

5.  Possibly no science fiction/fantasy magazine has been so closely associated with a single artist as Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, when 66 covers, for almost half the magazine's issues, were painted by which woman? The most iconic of these covers is shown in the image below.

MARGARET BRUNDAGE (I really didn't mean to have two Margarets back to back!)

6.  One of the very best SF writers of all time had a career in the field that lasted from 1933 to 1958, after which she mostly wrote for television. She was known for her early series about Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith, and for later masterworks including "No Woman Born" and "Vintage Season", and while much of her work was in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, the best of it (in my opinion) was her work alone. Name this woman -- but don't use her married name(s) nor any of her pseudonyms, which included Lawrence O'Donnell, Lewis Padgett, and C. H. Liddell among others.

CATHERINE L. MOORE

7.  Women editors were rare in science fiction magazines before the 1970s -- Dorothy McIlwraith at the aforementioned Weird Tales in the 1940s, and Bea Mahaffey, at Other Worlds, Universe and others in the early 1950s, were the most notable before the great Cele Goldsmith Lalli, who took over two companion magazines in 1958 and edited them until 1965, publishing major early work by such writers as Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Disch. Name either of these two magazines, one of which still survives today, and which is famed as the first magazine devoted primarily to science fiction. 

AMAZING or FANTASTIC 

8.  Begum Rokeya Hossain, a Bengali Muslim woman, published which remarkable story in The Indian Ladies' Magazine in 1905? The story is a reverie about a future utopia, characterized by women in power, solar energy, world peace, and even flying cars (but not grapes or raisins).

"SULTANA'S DREAM"

9.  Name the writer, editor, critic, and anthologist whose first sale, "That Only a Mother" (1948) ended up in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I. Her most significant contributions to SF include an early and eclectic series of anthologies collecting the best short SF of the year. After moving to Canada in the late 1960s she had a profound effect on that country's SF scene, initiating the Tesseracts series of anthologies of Canadian SF, and donating her collection of SF-related material to the Toronto Public Library to establish a research library now named for her.

JUDITH MERRIL

10.  Margaret St. Clair, who also wrote as Idris Seabright, is in my opinion an underrated early master of modern science fiction. She began selling science fiction and detective fiction in 1946, and her work includes brilliant short fiction like "Short in the Chest", "An Egg a Month from All Over", and "The Sacred Martian Pig", as well as novels including Sign of the Labrys. She was a relatively early convert to which modern religion? Her beliefs are reflected in much of her later work. This religion was recently removed from the US Department of Defense list of accepted faiths.

WICCA

11.  Now for a fictional character, who qualifies as a pioneering woman as she was one of the first female superheroes in the comics, debuting in 1941. The character was created by psychiatrist William Marston, and was influenced, he sometimes suggested, by his two polyamorous wives*, Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, and perhaps also by Olive's aunt, the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. (*Holloway was Marston's legal wife, but it seems that all three regarded themselves as part of the marriage.) Who was this superhero?

WONDER WOMAN

12.  Leigh Brackett sold her first story in 1940, and went on to have a brilliant multi-faceted career, including science fiction novels like The Sword of Rhiannon and The Long Tomorrow (first novel by a woman to be shortlisted for the Hugo Award), crime fiction such as No Good From a Corpse, and writing for films (she collaborated with William Faulkner on the screenplay for The Big Sleep.) Shortly before her death in 1978 she turned in the first draft of the screenplay for which blockbuster science fiction movie?

STAR WARS EPISODE V: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

13. Some important science fiction was produced by women outside the science fiction genre. What Not is a satirical novel published just as the first World War was ending, about a future in which war is outlawed and breeding is controlled on strictly eugenic grounds (by a Ministry of Brains!). Who was this author, a committed pacifist who published many other novels, gaining greatest success with her last, The Towers of Trebizond (1956).

ROSE MACAULAY

14. The first woman writer to publish original fiction under her own name in the science fiction magazines was Clare Winger Harris, who placed a dozen stories in magazines such as Science Wonder Stories between 1926 and 1933, including "The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily". She was posthumously given which award in 2024, given annually to an unfairly neglected science fiction writer.

CORDWAINER SMITH REDISCOVERY AWARD

15. Thea von Harbou wrote the novel and co-wrote the screenplay for which classic 1927 science fiction film, directed by her husband Fritz Lang. Von Harbou pulled the same trick for another Lang-directed science fiction film, Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon (1928)). Alas, her marriage and collaboration with Lang collapsed in part because of mutual infidelity but also due to von Harbou's involvement with the Nazi party.

METROPOLIS

When the quiz was played on Learned League, the hardest question was Margaret Brundage, and the second hardest was "Sultana's Dream". If it had been a live question, I imagine Rose Macaulay would have been hard as well. (What Not is available from my publisher (of my upcoming anthology of philosophical science fiction, that will include "Sultana's Dream" as well as an excerpt from Frankenstein): MIT Presss, as part of their "Radium Era SF" series -- the cover is shown at the top of this post.) The easiest questions were Star Trek and The Empire Strikes Back.

Quiz: Early Women Science Fiction Writers (etc.)

As I do many years, I created a quiz for the online trivia league I play in (Learned League.) This year the subject was "Early Women Science Fiction Writers" -- generally focussing on writers who started before 1950, but with a couple questions about editors, TV writers, and even fictional characters, and with a couple questions leaking into the 1950s and even 1960s.

The format of the quiz is 12 questions. But I always create alternative questions, to give me a choice, especially if the people who playtest the quiz uncover issues, or if something else happens, such as, for one question this year, a very similar question happening to be asked on the Learned League site shortly before my quiz appeared. The first 12 questions below are the ones that were part of the official quiz, and the last 3 are alternates. 

I usually try to make these quizzes of middling difficulty for the general player, but in this case the quiz played very hard (for the most part) -- and I regarded this as a virtue of sorts, because the whole aim of the quiz was to bring oft-neglected writers to broader notice. That said, while it was very hard for the general reader, it will play quite a bit easier for science fiction fans, as I imagine many of my readers here are.

I will post the answers in a few days. Put your guesses in the comments if you wish.

1.  One of the earliest women to hold major creative roles in television science fiction, D. C. Fontana followed the producer of The Lieutenant to a new franchise where she became a writer, story editor, and later associate producer, helping shape much of its early mythology. Name this franchise.

2.  The very first woman to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America began writing historical fiction for young readers in the 1930s, adopting a male pseudonym as was common in that era. She turned to science fiction with the short story "People of the Crater" in 1947, and published her first science fiction novel, Star Man's Son, 2250 A. D., in 1952. Dozens of novels followed until (and beyond!) her death in 2005. Her most famous series is probably Witch World. Name this writer (either her given name or the male-coded pseudonym (which she later took as her legal name.))

3.  Any quiz about pioneering women science fiction writers could hardly omit mentioning Mary Shelley, whom Brian W. Aldiss championed as the first SF writer, thanks to her first novel, Frankenstein (1818). But Shelley was no one-hit wonder -- she published six further novels as well as short fiction, poetry, travel narratives, and biographies. Name the 1826 post-apocalyptic novel that was her final venture into science fiction.

4.  While Mary Shelley is now widely cited as the first "true" science fiction writer, there were earlier works involving science-fictional tropes, such as Lucian of Samosata's True History (late 2nd Century CE), Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1634), and The Blazing World (1666). Name the Englishwoman, a prominent natural philosopher in her time, who wrote the latter novel.

5.  Possibly no science fiction/fantasy magazine has been so closely associated with a single artist as Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, when 66 covers, for almost half the magazine's issues, were painted by which woman? The most iconic of these covers is shown in the image below.

6.  One of the very best SF writers of all time had a career in the field that lasted from 1933 to 1958, after which she mostly wrote for television. She was known for her early series about Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith, and for later masterworks including "No Woman Born" and "Vintage Season", and while much of her work was in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, the best of it (in my opinion) was her work alone. Name this woman -- but don't use her married name(s) nor any of her pseudonyms, which included Lawrence O'Donnell, Lewis Padgett, and C. H. Liddell among others.

7.  Women editors were rare in science fiction magazines before the 1970s -- Dorothy McIlwraith at the aforementioned Weird Tales in the 1940s, and Bea Mahaffey, at Other Worlds, Universe and others in the early 1950s, were the most notable before the great Cele Goldsmith Lalli, who took over two companion magazines in 1958 and edited them until 1965, publishing major early work by such writers as Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Disch. Name either of these two magazines, one of which still survives today, and which is famed as the first magazine devoted primarily to science fiction. 

8.  Begum Rokeya Hossain, a Bengali Muslim woman, published which remarkable story in The Indian Ladies' Magazine in 1905? The story is a reverie about a future utopia, characterized by women in power, solar energy, world peace, and even flying cars (but not grapes or raisins).

9.  Name the writer, editor, critic, and anthologist whose first sale, "That Only a Mother" (1948) ended up in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I. Her most significant contributions to SF include an early and eclectic series of anthologies collecting the best short SF of the year. After moving to Canada in the late 1960s she had a profound effect on that country's SF scene, initiating the Tesseracts series of anthologies of Canadian SF, and donating her collection of SF-related material to the Toronto Public Library to establish a research library now named for her.

10.  Margaret St. Clair, who also wrote as Idris Seabright, is in my opinion an underrated early master of modern science fiction. She began selling science fiction and detective fiction in 1946, and her work includes brilliant short fiction like "Short in the Chest", "An Egg a Month from All Over", and "The Sacred Martian Pig", as well as novels including Sign of the Labrys. She was a relatively early convert to which modern religion? Her beliefs are reflected in much of her later work. This religion was recently removed from the US Department of Defense list of accepted faiths.

11.  Now for a fictional character, who qualifies as a pioneering woman as she was one of the first female superheroes in the comics, debuting in 1941. The character was created by psychiatrist William Marston, and was influenced, he sometimes suggested, by his two polyamorous wives*, Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, and perhaps also by Olive's aunt, the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. (*Holloway was Marston's legal wife, but it seems that all three regarded themselves as part of the marriage.) Who was this superhero?

12.  Leigh Brackett sold her first story in 1940, and went on to have a brilliant multi-faceted career, including science fiction novels like The Sword of Rhiannon and The Long Tomorrow (first novel by a woman to be shortlisted for the Hugo Award), crime fiction such as No Good From a Corpse, and writing for films (she collaborated with William Faulkner on the screenplay for The Big Sleep.) Shortly before her death in 1978 she turned in the first draft of the screenplay for which blockbuster science fiction movie?

13. Some important science fiction was produced by women outside the science fiction genre. What Not is a satirical novel published just as the first World War was ending, about a future in which war is outlawed and breeding is controlled on strictly eugenic grounds (by a Ministry of Brains!). Who was this author, a committed pacifist who published many other novels, gaining greatest success with her last, The Towers of Trebizond (1956).

14. The first woman writer to publish original fiction under her own name in the science fiction magazines was Clare Winger Harris, who placed a dozen stories in magazines such as Science Wonder Stories between 1926 and 1933, including "The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily". She was posthumously given which award in 2024, given annually to an unfairly neglected science fiction writer.

15. Thea von Harbou wrote the novel and co-wrote the screenplay for which classic 1927 science fiction film, directed by her husband Fritz Lang. Von Harbou pulled the same trick for another Lang-directed science fiction film, Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon (1928)). Alas, her marriage and collaboration with Lang collapsed in part because of mutual infidelity but also due to von Harbou's involvement with the Nazi party.

A recent novella: Making History, by K. J. Parker

Making History, by K. J. Parker

a review by Rich Horton

K. J. Parker's latest novella is Making History, from 2025. Parker is a very enjoyable writer, either under his real name (Tom Holt) or Parker pseudonym. His work is almost always comic, but the tone varies, with the Tom Holt stories being rather lighter, even daffier; while the Parker stories are profoundly cynical, and often verge on tragedy. (Holt's greatest work, in my admittedly unconventional opinion, is a diptych (latterly republished in a single volume) called Goat Song/The Walled Orchard, a bleakly funny and ultimately truly tragic historical novel about the Athenian invasion of Syracuse. Holt published a few more historical novels set in Ancient Greece, some loosely connected to this book.) 

Most of Parker's work is set in a sort of secondary world that roughly resembles, maybe, our world at something like the time of the Byzantine Emperor. These stories occasionally contain explicit fantastical elements, but usually do not. The geography of that "world" is somewhat consistent, the history, not so much -- it serves primarily as a ready-made setting for these stories, giving him a stage with a reusable set of props -- a religion, a few perpetually rival countries, a consistent technological level, some cultural figures to reference. Parker's interests as a novelist are a cynical view of of political actions, a despairing view of human relationships (particularly those between men and women), and a fascinated view of the ins and outs of technology, art, and language. 

Making History is told by a linguist in the country of Aelia. Aelia has somewhat recently been taken over by a man called Gyges, who is seeking to pick a fight with a neighboring country. To do so, he needs to establish that this country was responsible for wiping out Aelia's Golden Age ancestors. So he recruits a team of the best academics in the country, and orders them to create a convincing archaeological dig that will prove this. The narrator has to invent a convincing proto-Aelian language, and his fellows have to design art, and buildings, and tools and such. This gives Parker the latitude to interestingly describe how such an enterprise would work ... which is right up Parker's alley.

The rub comes when somehow some of these artifacts start appearing, even though they haven't really been created yet. Eventually, even the whole city is unearthed. What could be happening? Is it possible that they did their job so well that they perfectly mimicked real history that no one had known about? Or is someone on their team leaking information to the enemy. Or is it something more sinister?

The narrator knows only one thing -- he has to escape. So he asks his mistress -- a prostitute who has plenty of connections among the criminal class -- to arrange this. Now, this being a Parker novel, you know that if a woman, especially a woman the protagonist cares about but who is probably out of his league, gets involved, well, things won't turn out so well... 

Bottom line for me, alas, is that while I enjoyed this story well enough, it ultimately seemed too much of a same with many previous Parker stories. The cynicism seemed overdetermined, and the plot really didn't convince. In the end, this is not one of K. J. Parker's best efforts.

Hugo Ballot Thoughts, Best Novella (and links to the rest)

Here are links to my reviews of all the Hugo nominated novellas. In what I think is not a terribly strong shortlist, I have a clear first place vote, a clear last place vote, and four stories in the middle. The list below is my current planned ballot. Each title is linked to my review.

The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar

Cinder House, by Freya Marske

What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher

Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz

The Summer War, by Naomi Novik

Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite

Here are links to my other ballot summaries for this year:

Best Novel

Best Novelette

Best Short Story

Reviewing the Hugo Nominees for Best Novel: 2026

Here are the my looks at the six novels on the shortlist for the 2026 Hugo for Best Novel. They are listed in my order of preference, and I will say that I consider the first on the list to be by far the best book on the shortlist. The others are all good novels, and to be honest my ordering of them is my best thoughts today -- but they are all close. The Everlasting, however, is on another level.

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow

A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor

The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

Retold Review: Travel Arrangements, by M. John Harrison

Here's another review taken from SF Site. I wrote it in 2000.

Retold Review: Travel Arrangements, by M. John Harrison

by Rich Horton

M. John Harrison recently won the Richard Evans Award (named after the near-legendary figure of UK publishing who died a couple of years ago), given to the author who has contributed significantly to the SF genre without concomitant commercial success. In other words, one might say, for the best underrated author. Immediately upon hearing about the award to Harrison, I thought "How entirely appropriate!" Granted that he made a mild splash with his second novel, The Pastel City (1971), and with its loose sequels about the city of Viriconium, he has for the most part stayed below the radar of SF readers. This goes extra in the United States. [It should be noted that right about this time, and especially after the publication of his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, beginning with Light in 2002, Harrison's profile was raised significantly, and there is no question that he is now considered -- as he should always have been -- one of the most important contemporary SF writers, or indeed writers period.]

I was lucky enough to find The Pastel City not too long after its publication, and I followed Harrison's work for a while, but after the later Viriconium books in the early 80s his stuff became very hard to find. But in 1997, he published a wonderful sort of "Magic Realist Science Fiction" novel called Signs of Life, and, at around the same time, I also noticed such fine short stories as "Seven Guesses of the Heart" and "Suicide Coast" (the latter my personal pick for best SF short story of 1999).

Travel Arrangements is a new collection of short stories, his fourth collection. (Earlier he published The Machine in Shaft Ten, Viriconium Nights, and The Ice Monkey.) For all the title refers to travel, this book is almost obsessively about contemporary England. One story, "Seven Guesses of the Heart," is set on a fantastical isle. All the others are primarily set in England. (Travel, however, is often an explicit theme: "The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It," for example, is about a series of train journeys inspired by the Tarot; while "Gifco" is partly about a vacation in Morocco.)

Speaking in some ignorance, as an American who has never been across the Atlantic, I still get a very strong sense of place from these stories. The England they depict is closely observed, and very real -- very much the post-Thatcherite land, trying to simultaneously shuck off and preserve the images and the myth of "Albion."

It might seem from those words that the stories here are rather "mainstream" in tone and aim, and indeed this is the case. Many of the stories here are mainstream stories, and several more use SFnal or fantastical tropes to illuminate concerns of character and contemporary life that are exactly those concerns that dominate contemporary realistic fiction. None of this is at all bad: the stories are beautifully written, evocative, moving and strange. The tone is usually very low key, very quiet, even as wrenching emotional events are depicted. All in all, I think this is an outstanding collection.

As with many writers' collections, hints and references to his most recent novel turn up. In particular, "Anima" is a fine story which later became part of Signs of Life: concentrating here on the wild character Choe Ashton, and on a strange sexual experience he had when an adolescent. Signs of Life turns up again as a novel that the narrator of "Science and the Arts," the collection's final story, inscribes to the woman he is involved with.

This woman, Mona, is one of many mysterious women to appear in these pages. Indeed, a common theme of these stories is mysterious women, strong enough to cause the male characters to become obsessed with them, but flighty or odd or just difficult to understand. Take, for example, Elaine in "Black Houses," of whom the narrator writes "I've met people before, but not you. Not you." and later, inevitably: "I'd do anything to get you back." Or the late middle-aged, vegetarian, rather nutty Elizabeth, from "Old Women."

My favourite two stories here are among my favourite SF stories of the 90s. "Seven Guesses of the Heart" first appeared in Katherine Kerr's original fantasy anthology The Shimmering Door (called Sorceries in the UK). An aging magician, whose specialty is gardens, confronts the loss of his daughter, apparently to a misapplied spell, and the loss of his own powers. The story is a good example of what I was mentioning earlier: a fantasy story with a theme straight from the mainstream -- the relationship of a man, his wife, and his daughter, and the man's mid-life crisis. The story is not about the fantastic elements at all. However, the story is immensely enriched by the fantastic elements: they are used wonderfully to illuminate and bring out the central themes. That is, it's essential to the story that it be fantasy, even though one could treat the same theme without the fantastical elements.

On the other hand, my other favourite, "Suicide Coast," is the most overtly SF of all the stories at hand, and its theme is overtly SFnal as well. The narrator, Mick, is a journalist who writes about adventure sports: rock climbing, BASE jumping, hang gliding, and so on. He also does his own rock climbing, and drives fast cars. He tells of his relationship with an even more committed daredevil, Ed Johnson. Soon we see Ed's current life: wheelchair bound, living with Mick's ex-girlfriend, obsessively playing Virtual Reality games, still trying to recapture the experiences he can't have in "reality" any more. The story is tensely written, in Harrison's familiar very quiet prose style. He reminds us again and again of Mick's beliefs about what makes life worth living: "Nobody drives themselves anymore" says Mick, as he takes his Mercedes on the empty highways. "A life without consequences isn't worth living at all," he writes. We learn about Mick's rock climbing, and his driving, and about Ed's dangerous work, and how he became paralyzed. Then comes the ending, sudden, and perhaps half-expected, and throwing the whole story in a new light. We realize that real life, life with "consequences," doesn't just mean risking your life on a mountain, or in a fast car, but also risking your "feelings," your "self," if you will, by connecting with other people. And "nobody drives themselves anymore."

M. John Harrison is one of the best SF writers of the present day. This collection shows off Harrison's current style and his thematic concerns quite excellently. "Quiet" might be the most appropriate description of the affect of these stories, although the effect is anything but quiet.