Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

by Rich Horton

Helen DeWitt's first novel was published in 2000, and became something of a sensation, at least in the haut-literary world. I think it sold OK, but for publishing company reasons, it went out of print, and was only republished in 2016 by New Directions. I will confess I had not heard of this book, and I need to thank Naomi Kanakia for bringing it to my attention. It has been named the Best Novel of the 21st Century, which I admit that annoys me, because it was published in the 20th Century, admittedly in its last year. 

And you know what? Maybe it is the best novel of the period 2000-2024! Or, at least it's in the conversation. (I'd offer Piranesi as another candidate.) The Last Samurai is a very funny novel built on a rather desperate, and at time tragic, substrate. It is profoundly clever without sacrificing depth. It's well written, unconventionally punctuated in an effective fashion, constantly readable and engaging, and when it wants to be, profoundly moving.

The novel is told by two characters. Sybilla Newman is an American who came to Oxford for college, got her degree and went on to postgraduate studies, and realized that her research subject is worthless. She needs a job to stay in England -- the thought of return to her family is insupportable -- her father is a motel magnate and her mother a permanently frustrated musician. She manages to get a job at a publishing company, and at a reception for one of their authors she ends up in bed with him, and has a child. And now she's telling us about her efforts to teach her precocious son, who is named Ludovic or Steven or David. Sybilla's experiences with education have convinced her that schools are all terrible, and she is teaching her son in between a job retyping old magazines, and more or less simultaneously watching Kurosawa's classic film Seven Samurai over and over again.

Essentially the book follows Ludo's learning process from the age of 3 or so to about 12. Sybilla's strategy is mostly to teach him languages and let him read anything he wants, and this more or less works except he is always asking questions, which makes it hard for her to do her job. But he is -- or seems to be -- utterly brilliant. By the time he reaches school age he is quite unsuited for conventional instruction and soon drops out ... and then decides he wants to know his father. But Sybilla refuses to tell him anything about the man -- who was a one night stand, after all, and who doesn't know that he has a son. And the rest of the book follows Ludo's search for his father, which morphs after a while to a search for any suitable father. 

But of course that doesn't really say much about the novel. The key is the telling, of course. The voice. Both Sibylla and Ludovic have recognizable and plausible voices. There are typographical tricks, but really not terribly exotic ones. There are many languages, none of which besides English and a tiny amount of French I know -- and that doesn't matter. The day by day events are eccentric to some extent -- constantly riding the Circle Line, sitting in museums to do homework, tracking down potential fathers and spying on them -- but they are also mundane in a sense, and confined to London. There are running jokes -- the chicken places named after a state that is never Kentucky, for example. The depictions of the potential fathers' lives are strange and intriguing -- they are travel writers and crusading journalists, diplomats and avant garde composers, Nobel Prize winnters, fantasists and honest men. 

What is the novel about? Education, of course. Motherhood and fatherhood. Art. Music. Writing. Marriage. What it is to be a good man, or a bad man. Suicide. Language. Boredom. Seven Samurai. There is art criticism: Sybilla has severe tastes. (Lord Leighton (whose Flaming June graces the cover of one of my books) comes in for a lot of derision, as does the man who got her pregnant, and Seven Samurai imitations like The Magnificent Seven.) It all works -- it's laugh out loud funny at times, wry at times, wrenching at times. It's a novel of and about the 20th Century, that still feels ragingly original, and yet in a curious way, despite its experiments, despite its postmodernity, seems as ambitious and comprehensive as the great Victorian novels.

Review: Bird Isle, by Jack Vance

Review: Bird Isle (aka Isle of Peril, aka Bird Island), by Jack Vance

by Rich Horton

Bird Isle is one of the least known of all Jack Vance books. One reason is that it's not science fiction -- it's a crime novel, one of the first two he ever published (in 1957), both under different one-off pseudonyms. Bird Isle was published as Isle of Peril, by "Alan Wade", and the other 1957 crime novel was Take My Face, published  as by "Peter Held". Mystery House, at that time, was an imprint of Thomas Bouregy and Company, formerly Bouregy and Curl. As far as I can tell, Bouregy and Curl was a rather low end house, best known in SF for publishing the first book edition of Charles Harness's The Paradox Men (as Flight Into Yesterday.) (Samuel Curl got his start in publishing working with Alan Hillman, who published Vance's first book, The Dying Earth.) Mystery House had been an imprint of Arcadia House, Samuel Curl's earlier publishing venture, which Curl retained when he joined with Bouregy, and which Bouregy retained when Curl sold out to him in 1956. At any rate, I doubt Isle of Peril earned Vance much money, nor did it likely sell well. Copies of that edition are rare and go for quite high prices.

Bird Isle was reprinted under that name in an Underwood Miller edition in 1988, and then again, along with Take My Face and the 1985 crime novel Strange Notions in the Vance Integral Edition in 2002 -- this time retitled Bird Island. (Take My Face was retitled The Flesh Mask, and Strange Notions was called Strange People, Queer Notions. The VIE was prepared with Jack Vance's approval, and his preferred titles were used throughout. More recently, Spatterlight Press, run by Vance's son, has reprinted most or all of Vance's oeuvre, generally using the VIE titles (and texts) but for some reason reverting to Bird Isle in this case. (I do think Bird Isle is a better title than either of the other two.)

Well, that's a lot about the publication history. (I am generally intrigued by such details, and in this case I was very happy to discover the Spatterlight Press editions, which look nice and often have contemporary introductions (though the introductions don't seem to appear in the ebook editions.) But what about the novel? I have to say that Bird Isle is somewhat disappointing -- it's very definitely one of the weaker Vance novels. I will say that Vance's later crime novels, often published as by "John Holbrook Vance", are viewed as considerably better, and I personally am very fond of the two Sheriff Joe Bain mysteries, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Valley Murders (1967).

The novel is set on the title island, which is a short way off the coast near Monterey. There is a rather ramshackle hotel there, and a girls' finishing school, and nothing else. (The choice of the name "Bird Isle" seems partly a nod at the "birds" in the finishing school.) The owner of the hotel, realizing he needs more money to make his hotel more attractive to guests, decides to sell off the real estate he owns on the island, which is everything but the part where the school is. And quite quickly he manages to dispose of the several parcels he subdivides the island into. The buyers include Mortimer Archer, a retiree who dabbles in photography; the Ottenbrights, a lawyer and his wife; Ike McCarthy, a rough-edged Alaskan fisherman, with a plan to farm whales; and Milo Green, a young man who makes his living writing light poetry for newspapers; and Miss Pickett, headmistress of the finishing school, who buys a packet to keep the new neighbors away from her girls.

Things seem to go swimmingly for a bit, as the hotel's business picks up nicely, Milo starts building a house, and also meets Miss Pickett's very lovely niece. One of Miss Pickett's new students kicks up her traces a bit, and looking for for excitement, finds a way to make some money -- a way involving Mortimer Archer's photograpy skills, which not surprisingly are more aimed at women au naturel than at nature per se. There's an Eskimo love potion, too. And there's a rumor that the island was used by the Mob in Prohibition days, so there might be a hidden treasure ...

Much of this is potentially pretty fun. Alas, only some of it actually is. Things like the love potion are both implausible and bit distasteful. The humor is played rather too broadly, and much falls flat. The major crime aspect is a bit too obvious, and resolved a bit too easily. I think were Vance to have addressed this set of ideas a decade later, and with more time to develop the story, and more experience as well, it could have been nice enough. But as it is -- and presumably with Vance not at full motivation, given the pseudonymous nature of the book, and the presumably tiny payment -- the end result doesn't stand anywhere close to prime Jack Vance.

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

by Rich Horton

Haruki Murakami is one of the most celebrated contempory Japanese writers, and a large portion of his work is SF or Fantasy or just weird. As such I have been meaning to read him for a long time, but only now have I got around to it. I will note that The City and Its Uncertain Walls may not be the best place to start with him -- or, rather, my reaction to it may be different that that of readers who have read a lot of his work. One reason is that the book reworks some material first published as a novella with which Murakami was unsatisfied, and then revised to form one thread of his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I am also told that the protagonist is a somewhat typical Murakami male lead -- lonely, a love a books and music, and somewhat obsessive in his love affairs. Indeed, one book club friend of mine immediately asked if the book features a nerdy solitary man (almost an incel, she suggested, though not really) who at one point falls into a deep hole. And, yes, this novel does!

Outlining the plot of this novel really tells one very little about how it works. So I'll be brief. A nameless narrator tells the story in three parts. The first is written in second person, addressing the girl he fell in love with as a teenage. When he was 17 and she 16, they spent a lot of time together, walking and talking, occasionally kissing, writing long letters to each other, but nothing more. Much of what they talked and wrote about was a strange walled city. The people in the city have no shadows. The girl seems to believe that she is actually the shadow of a girl who lives in the city. Over time it seems that the city is actually an invention of the two -- but an invention that is oddly real. The two are desperatly in love -- then the girl disappears -- or, at least, becomes completely unresponsive to the boy's letters. He goes to college, gets his degree, has brief relationsship with other women, but never forgets the girl. Then, in his mid-40s, he finds himself mysteriously transported to a city -- a walled city. He gains entry at the cost of his shadow, and gets a job as a dream reader at the library -- and the librarian is the girl he had loved as a teenager, still seeming only 16 or so. Over some time he learns to read dreams, and becomes friends with the girl (in a nonsexual way -- and she does not recognize him at all) -- but when he realizes his shadow -- forced to remain outside the city -- is dying, he faces a choice: reunite with his shadow so that it can survive, and then return to the "real" world, or stay in the city.

The next and longest part follows the narrator's life back in the real world. He remembers his time in the city, but not really how it ended. No time sseems to have passed in the "real" world while he was in the city. He has become dicontented with his rather mundane job, and he has enough money (having lived a somewhat spare single life since college) that he can take some time off, and, inspired by some strange dreams, he decides to look for a job in a library. He finds one in a mountain village some distance from Tokyo, and somewhat to his surprise, is hired as head librarian. The situation there is a bit strnage, especially the previous head librarian, who continues to give him advice. But the narrator adjusts, and eventrually forms a tentative relationship with a woman, and then gets involved with a teenaged boy who seems to be on the spectrum, and comes to the library to obsessively read, and eventually tells the narrator that he wants to escape to the walled city -- somehow he learned of the city despite the narrator telling no one but the mysterious former head librarian. Which leads to the events of the third part -- which I'll leave untold.

All this is indeed mysterious, but by itself perhaps thin gruel for a 500 page novel. (And in all honesty the middle part could probably have been cut a bit.) But for me it really worked. The novel casts a real spell. The narrator’s teenage love affair is affecting. The city itself is convincingly strange, with unicorns, clocks without hands, the everchanging walls, the gatekeeper, the old dreams the narrator reads. The mountain town he moves to seems in its isolation to somewhat mirror the otherworldly city. The narrator’s adult relationship with a woman who owns a coffee shop is affecting as well, and more mature than the narrator’s earlier affair. His friendship with his predecessor, Mr. Koyasu, is amusing and involving and at another level, rather sad. Most of all, there is everywhere an air of mystery. There is also a sense of emptiness, and a concomitant loneliness. There are really very few characters of any significance, and one senses that all the characters that matter to us – the narrator, his teenaged girlfriend, Mr. Koyasu, the perhaps autistic boy he meets late in the book, the woman in the coffee shop – are ultimately very lonely, very isolated, and so the importance of the connections we do see them form is enhanced.

As for the prose -- I am of two minds about it. Murakami has an exceptional may with striking and original images. And I was not ever bored, despite his habit of almost obsessive description of mundane things like clothes, and with his almost pedantic rendering of dialogue. All this, in the end, really works. But I did have trouble with some aspects of the writing, that just possibly lie more at the feet of the translator. Occasional phrases in English are outright clichés, and I don’t know if these are direct translations from the original or an example of the translator using an English cliché in place of a perhaps less trite Japanese expression. Some of the phrasing is stilted in a way that suggests possibly a too literal rendering of the structure of the sentences in the Japanese, when a slight reformulation would have read more smoothly. And there are curiously annoying bit such as rendering dimensions in English units in a slightly unnatural way -- something is described as "about 6 and a half feet tall" when the original probably read "two meters", for example, or a square room is described as about 13 feet by 13 when, again, the original likely said 4 meters on a side.

The above quibbles are minor, though. I was enchanted by the novel, at times transported. There are passages of unexpected beauty, of pathos, and of deep mystery. Perhaps  it is not a great novel, but it's a very good one.

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

by Rich Horton

Sharon Shinn's new novel, Alibi, features, as it says right on the cover, "Romance. Teleportation. Murder."  I confess I had thought of Shinn as mostly a fantasy writer. (I've read her novel General Winston's Daughter, which I quite enjoyed, and I have a couple of her Elemental Blessings novels on my TBR pile, and those are all fantasy.) But this book is nearish future science fiction, and quite effectively so. The words above suggests it's at once a romance novel, a murder mystery, and SF -- and that's fair enough, but I think the SF part dominates. (Well, and the character interactions -- not just the love story but an extensive network of family, friends, students, etc.) 

The novel was published in November 2024, by Fairwood Press. I bought my copy at World Fantasy this year, and was able to have Sharon Shinn sign it for me. (Sharon and I both live in St. Louis, and we have known each other for some time, and indeed we both did a writing workshop for philosophers at Saint Louis University a couple of years ago.)

The book is set some decades in the future. The main novum is teleportation -- the whole world seems connected by an enormous network of teleportation booths. Air travel is as far as I can tell nonexistent (perhaps there are cargo flight?) and the airports have become hubs for longer distance teleportation, but the cities are webbed with booths as well, and sufficiently wealthy people might even have booths in their homes. And, very skillfully presented in the background, there is a good deal of subtle speculation about just how this technology changes people's lives.

The first person narrator is Taylor Kendall, a thirty-something native of Chicago who now teaches at a private school in Houston. She lives in Houston and teaches in person there, but because of the teleportation, she can keep in constant touch with her best friend in Atlanta, and her family in Chicago. After a brief prologue establishing that there will be a murder, and that Taylor will be a suspect, we go back a few months, when Taylor is offered a job as a private tutor to the 19 year old son of Duncan Phillips, an extremely rich man who lives in Chicago. Taylor takes the job, and begins to teach Quentin Phillips, and quickly comes to like him. The kicker is that he suffers from a degenerative disease, and isn't expected to live much more than five more years. But he's an eager and engaging boy, and Taylor becomes very invested in his life.

Quentin's father is mostly absent, and so Taylor's interactions are with his staff -- Francis, the steward, Bram, the head of security, and Dennis, Quentin's physical therapist. It is quickly clear that all three men love Quentin and hate his father. Soon Taylor becomes part of sort of a circle of protectors of Quentin -- and when she meets Duncan Phillips, she realizes why the others hate him -- and also realizes that he is particularly dangerous, and creepy, to women. 

The novel then follows Taylor's tutoring of Quentin, her interactions with the three men on Duncan's staff (especially Bram, as sparks quickly fly between he and Taylor -- different people but both wary of relationships after unsuccessful marriages); her professional life as an English teacher (with some crises involving her students,) and her social life, centered on her friend Marika, her brother Jason, and his friend Domenic. All this is in a way mundane, but it's very enjoyable, and all along we get glimpses both of the teleportation-affected society, and of Quentin's prospects and how they are affected by his distant father. There are romances for a few of the characters, and hints of hope for Quentin's future.

And then, surprisingly late in the novel for a murder mystery, the murder happens. And from there things rush towards a conclusion. There is some nice misdirection about the killer, with of course teleportation involved in providing -- or removing -- alibis for the characters; and an exciting (if just slightly convenient) resolution, with a surprising (but not unfair) solution to the mystery.

I really enjoyed Alibi. It's fair to say that the opening is a bit of a slow burn -- but appropriately so -- and before long, even while in a curious way little happens but ordinary (future) life, the novel becomes quite absorbing. We root for the characters, we care about them, and we believe their interactions. And the conclusion is quite satisfying.

My picks for the most iconic SF/F novels of the 21st Century so far

My picks for the most iconic SF/F novels of the 21st Century so far

by Rich Horton

A few weeks ago Reactor published a list, or several lists, called "The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century", based on a survey they did of their "favorite writers" and their staff. These were in numerous categories -- anthologies, collections, translated work, comics/manga, and then one list for books period. A bit later, Jo Walton (who I assume qualifies as both one of Reactor's favorite writers and part of their staff!) did an essay on her process in selecting her choices, "On Selecting the Top Ten Genre Books of the First Quarter of the Century", also dividing them into categories, in her case Fantasy, SF, Series, YA, and novellas. And I added a brief comment to her post, and she said, well, my don't I just make my own list. So I have.

I must note that I have missed a lot of novels in the past quarter century, partly because I was concentrating so heavily on short fiction. And I'd love to hear from people about novels they think belong there that I missed. I'll add another comment -- a couple of novels on the list are there more for their "iconic" status than their success as novels (though none are bad!) So -- The Ministry for the Future is in my opinion really important -- but it's not fully successful as a novel (though it is always interesting, and brimming with ideas.) Likewise, The Three-Body Problem is interesting and original, though it has diminished in my mind since first reading it, but its status as sort of introducing Chinese SF to the Western world seemed to merit its inclusion. Also, with one exception (Susanna Clarke's two novels, because they are both so very good and quite different from each other) I limited selections to one book per author.

I'm just going to list Sf novels, Fantasy novels, and a few additional outliers and "just missed" books. I already did a very roughly comparable list of short fiction, so I won't touch that. The adjective Reactor used was "Iconic", which I take to mean not exactly the same thing as "Best" -- to, in my interpretation lean a bit towards the most influential, memorable, or important books, however you define that. I'll lean a bit that way, but mostly my list will be the books I thought the best. I'm looking for ten of each, but I couldn't help myself and there are eleven. I'm putting them in chronological order.

Fantasy

2003: Kalpa Imperial, by Angelica Gorodischer

2004: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

2008: Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2009: The City and the City, by China Miéville

2013: A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar

2014: The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison

2015: The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin

2017: Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory

2017: Ka, by John Crowley

2020: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

2022: Babel, by R. F. Kuang

Science Fiction

2004: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

2005: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

2006: Blindsight, by Peter Watts

2006: The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu

2007: The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon

2014: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

2016: Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee

2016: Everfair, by Nisi Shawl

2020: The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

2022: The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler

2023: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

Others:

I left two of the best novels out because I couldn't quite argue that they were SF or Fantasy. These are Nicola Griffith's Hild, an utterly absorbing historical novel which is surely Fantasy-adjacent; and Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a searing contemporary novel which is profoundly SF-adjacent. . 

For sheer influence, you can argue for any of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire volumes -- perhaps the most recent, A Dance With Dragons (2011), would be a good exemplar. These have had the greatest penetration into the conciousness of the general public, which in itself makes them influential. On the SF side, Andy Weir's The Martian and James S. A. Covey's Expanse series have had similar exposure. In all three cases, of course, TV or Movie adaptations were very important, though the books in all cases had been very successful too. 

I will note that several of the novels I mention were published in the mainstream, whether by writers from within the genre to some extent (Clarke, Gregory, Crowley, Miéville, Fowler) or by writers who sometimes don't know they're doing SF (Harvey) or who do know that very well even though they made their bones writing contemporary fiction (Chabon, Mitchell.) And, really, the border is ever thinner, as evidenced by a writer like R. F. Kuang making a big splash this year with her contemporary novel Yellowface.

Here are some that just missed:

Among Others, by Jo Walton

Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer

The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod

Embassytown and Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville

Brasyl and The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald

Accelerando, by Charles Stross

The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell (the second of those is actually my favorite Mitchell novel, but it's just barely genre)

Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

The Peripheral, by William Gibson

The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer

Review: Strange Stars, by Jason Heller

Review: Strange Stars, by Jason Heller

by Rich Horton

Strange Stars is a history of science fiction themed rock music throughout the 1970s. It is Jason Heller's thesis that, with a few outliers in the previous couple of decades, popular music (in this case specifically rock music) with themes and injury began in 1970. To be more specific, he ties it to the landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, and to the nearly simultaneous release of David Bowie's song "Space Oddity". To some extent this choice seems personal to Heller -- he admits to being a major fan of David Bowie's work -- but I think it holds up pretty well anyway. The book then goes year by year through the decade, highlighting major and obscure bands and records with songs based in some sense on science fiction. (Heller largely excludes fantasy from his remit.

There are a few bands and artists that he follows in depth -- considering them prolific, influential, and effective in using science fiction-inspired tropes, characters, and musical styles in their music. David Bowie is one, of course -- and certainly he qualifies in spades, with such albums as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Diamond Dogs. Paul Kantner specifically, and his bands Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship as well, are important contributors -- most notably with Kantner's Blows Against the Empire, which was for many years the only musical work to receive a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation. Hawkwind, of course, is treated extensively -- their entire corpus is SF-influenced, from an early album like In Search of Space forward. Their association with Michael Moorcock is highlighted, and, later in the decade, Moorcock's association with Blue Öyster Cult is also treated at length. 

The great jazz musician Sun Ra is given a lot of play, even though most of his work was instrumental, and Heller also emphasizes his influence on Afrofuturism. George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and their interlinked bands Parliament and Funkadelic are a huge part of Heller's narrative, and their music is certainly explicitly SFnal and very influential. Kraftwerk and the entire "Krautrock" scene are an important thread, including discussion of one of my wife's favorite records, Nektar's Remember the Future. Prog Rock, of course, is featured prominently. Obviously Yes gets a lot of discussion, as well as ELP and Pink Floyd. Alan Parsons Project is briefly mentioned for I Robot. Queen is discussed -- with a lot of emphasis on Brian May's Astrophysics study. Rush, and especially 2112, is part of the story. Devo is given a major place, slightly to my surprise, but Heller demonstrated that it makes a lot of sense. About the time Star Wars comes out, Heller discusses disco -- there was more SF in disco than I, at least, ever thought. His focus is Domenico Monardo, who, as Meco, made the album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk. Towards the end of the decade there is a discussion of Joy Division -- a band I greatly admire -- though eventually their SFnal contribution seems minor to me, perhaps because of Ian Curtis' tragically early suicide.

There are also, of course, references to a lot of less obvious figures: Mark Bolan and T-Rex, X-Ray Spex, Magma, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, Alex Harvey, Amon Düül, Splendor. Major artists who did only a bit of SF-influenced work include Jimi Hendrix (a known SF fan) is mentioned in the prelude about the 1960s. Elton John; Blondie; Earth, Wind and Fire; Marvin Gaye; the MC5; the Jackson Five; Brian Eno; King Crimson; Steve Miller; Neil Young; and many more get a nod. 

Heller also interleaves the way science fiction was permeating pop culture in other ways, most obviously movies, with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind getting the most attention, plus the Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth. The science fictional imagery on album art is discussed, include the "guitar spaceships" on the covers of Boston albums, which otherwise didn't really have SF content. Heller also namedrops a great many authors who were influences on these musical artists -- often explicitly acknowledged by the artists, sometimes assumed so by Heller: George Orwell, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip José Farmer, Isaac Asimov, and more. (I had not realized that Delany's Fall of the Towers was part of the genesis of 2112!) The book includes a number of footnotes and a useful discography.

I would just have a few quibbles. Some are personal (I still have a hard time with the term Sci Fi), some are trivial (Philip José Farmer's Night of Light, a novel that Hendrix was reading around the time of composing "Purple Haze", is from 1966, not 1957, though one of the stories that became part of the novel, "The Night of Light", was published in that earlier year), some are matters of interpretation -- I think Heller occasionally reaches a bit in labeling songs science fictional. I admit I did wish that after crediting Paul Kantner for his giving credit to some of his inspirations, he'd have mentioned his failure to credit Mark Clifton after he swiped the "Hide Hide Witch" lyrics for his song "Mau Mau (Amerikon)". His knowledge of the music of the '70 is amazing and deep -- far deeper than mine -- and about the only plausible omission that comes to mind if Jackson Browne's "Before the Deluge". But none of these quibbles are at all fatal, and Strange Stars is a convincing portrayal of the growth of rock music featuring science fiction themes in the 1970s -- and I learned a lot about many artists I had no knowledge of. 

Old Bestseller Review: The Belovéd Vagabond, by William J. Locke

Old Bestseller Review: The Belovéd Vagabond, by William J. Locke

by Rich Horton

William J. Locke (1863-1930) was a quite popular writer of the early 20th Century. His first novel appeared in 1894, but his best known novels are all from the 20th Century, and he continued publishing until his death. He was born in British Guiana (now Guyana), moved to Trinidad shortly later, and was sent to England for his education at a very young age. His best known novels are the two I've read: this one, and The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (reviewed here). (I should add that at least five on his novels were among the top ten bestsellers of the year, according to Publishers' Weekly -- but not those two!)  Many of his stories have been filmed, notably including Stella Maris, a 1918 silent starring Mary Pickford, and Ladies in Lavender, a 2004 movie starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. The Belovéd Vagabond itself was filmed at least twice, a silent verison in 1923, and a musical in 1936, a somewhat faithful adaptation (but perhaps not very good) starring Maurice Chevalier (Cary Grant having turned down the role) and Margaret Lockwood (proof that one aspect of one character's appearance was entirely altered!)

My copy of this novel is an A. L. Burt edition -- Burt was a reprint publisher, sort of the mass market paperback equivalent of its time. The book was originally published in 1906 by John Lane. (A. L. Burt often used the original plates, acquired from the original publisher. I'm not sure if that's the case here.)

The Belovéd Vagabond is narrated by Asticot Pradel, who was born Augustus Smith to a London washerwoman, but adopted and renamed at the age of 10 or so by a man he calls Paragot. Paragot -- the vagabond of the title -- is a strange man, given to philosophical expostulation, to heavy drinking, and to lots of reading. As the novel opens he is the main attraction at a London drinking establishment, but when that changes hands, he and Asticot head to France, and wander for a while. Asticot has learned that there is a secret tragedy in Paragot's past, involving a beautiful woman named Joanna. 

Eventually Paragot finds himself replacing the suddenly deceased violinist in a duet who played at weddings and suchlike. One of Paragot's hidden talents is for the violin, and as a result, his little group is a success, and he more or less adopts the zither player, a young woman named Blanquette, and along the way also a mongrel dog, while he makes Asticot play the tambourine, though the boy's only real talent is art. But this leads to an engagement in Aix Le Bains, and an unexpected encounter with Joanna, who is now the Comtesse de Verneuil, married to a repulsive French nobleman. Paragot wants no contact with the couple, but Asticot makes Joanna's acquaintance, and in an adolescent way becomes infatuated.

Soon Paragot's ménage proceeds to Paris, with Blanquette acting as housekeeper, Paragot taking up again a position as philosopher-in-residence at a drinking establishment, and Asticot getting some formal training as an artist, and beginning to make a bit of a name for himself. (This is later established as roughly the time of the emergence of Impressionism, the mid-1870s, though Asticot is not an Impressionist. And there was an earlier reference to La Bohème, from the mid-1890s, and also to the 1880 popular song "Funiculì, Funiculà",so perhaps Locke just didn't care about the precise time frame.) And all are fairly happy -- until Asticot encounters Joanna again, and she begs him to have Paragot meet her. There are, of course, secrets about Joanna and Paragot (or Gaston de Nérac, as she knew him) which come clear, and revelations about her husband, and the lives of everyone are again upended. But -- what is really best for all the people involved? The conclusion is honest as to admitting to the real nature of the characters, and what would work for them.

It's an enjoyable novel. For me, after reading this book, and The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne, I'd class Locke as one of those writers of whom one can say one sees why they were popular, and admires them for that, without necessarily believing they need, nor will ever get, a revival of any sort. Locke wrote pretty well, and told engaging stories. Having said that -- the stories are a bit implausible, and the characters are not exactly wholly believable -- they are not two-dimensional, exactly, but more 2.5 dimensional than three. The plot is likewise a tad implausible. But if you see a William J. Locke novel in an antique store or something, and if you like old books -- his books will probably work for you.

Review: Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope

Review: Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope

by Rich Horton

By mistake I read Framley Parsonage, the fourth of Anthony Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire, before reading the third, Doctor Thorne. This isn't really a big deal, though Doctor Thorne, as well as his niece Mary, and Frank Gresham, the main characters in Doctor Thorne, do have small roles in Framley Parsonage, so I knew how the earlier novel would end. But, really that doesn't matter in a Trollope novel. At the end of this review I'll discuss some of Trollope's schemes, and why they both make him so fun to read, but also are the reason that, great as he is, he's not quite at the level of Dickens or Eliot. As with Framley Parsonage, I listed to this book via Audible, and with the same narrator, Timothy West, who does a fine job.

Class of course was a major aspect of Victorian novels -- always present if not necessarily centered. In Doctor Thorne is it absolutely -- and overtly -- central. The other Barsetshire novels I've read were a bit more about church politics (The Warden and Barchester Towers) and about financial maneuvering and electoral politics (Framley Parsonage.) Can You Forgive Her, the only Palliser (or Parliamentary) novel I've read is about electoral politics but also about romance. The latter subject is of course a thread in all these novels, but not quite as central. And indeed, in Doctor Thorne, while the romance between the two main younger characters is key, it is never questioned really. That is to say, in Can You Forgive Her the main character (the Her of the title) is truly torn between two quite different men, but in Doctor Thorne the only question is whether or not Frank Gresham can marry Mary Thorne -- but never whether or not he loves her and she him.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Which is okay, because Trollope does too -- at any rate, he tells us early on that he is too kindhearted a writer, so that the reader can trust that our young hero won't die of a broken heart. So -- as mentioned the chief young characters are Frank Gresham and Mary Thorne. Frank is the son of the squire of Greshamsbury, Frank Gresham Sr. He is considered to be the highest ranked commoner in the county, and his wife, Lady Arabella, is a daughter of the Earl of Courcy -- the second highest ranked noble in the county, after the Duke of Omnium. Which is to say that the Greshams are a very good family -- but, unfortunately, Frank Sr. has gotten into serious financial difficulties, caused in part by his unwise attempts to regain a seat in Parliament, and also the expenses inherent in his role as Master of the local hunt, but also due to his wife's extravagance. The upshot of this financial peril is that his son must marry money. 

Mary Thorne, on the other hand, is the niece of the title character, Doctor Thorne. The Thornes are also a good family, but Doctor Thorne is only a second cousin of the head of the Thornes, Mr. Thorne of Ullathorne (whom many readers will have met as he and his sister were (somewhat comic) characters in Barchester Towers.) Doctor Thorne is not on good terms with his cousins, which only lowers his prestige. And his only income is from his profession -- but he is a very good doctor. Alas, that too is a problem of sorts, for his advanced ideas about the profession have offended the older Doctor Fillgrave (Trollope loved to give his minor characters punny names of that sort.) Doctor Fillgrave is clearly not a particularly good doctor, at least not compared to Doctor Thorne, but he does have a prestigious practice, and many powerful clients. At any rate, Doctor Thorne is a man of particular integrity, but a sometimes prickly character, and he is at the same time convinced that anyone's virtue is based on their own character, a rather republican view, while also extremely proud of his "good blood". And his niece, Mary Thorne, has "good blood", as she is the daughter of Doctor Thorne's brother Henry; but also "bad blood", as she is illegitimate, the result of her father seducing a local girl, daughter of a working man. It's made very clear that the girl is innocent, and Henry Thorne's character is terrible, but still, somehow in class-obsessed England, it is her "blood" that is base.

Doctor Thorne had arranged to adopt his niece after his brother was killed by the girl's brother, a certain Roger Scatcherd, a tremendously talented stonemason but also an alcoholic. Miss Scatcherd was married off to a man who had been sweet on her, but who won't tolerate raising a bastard child, and the couple emigrated to America. Mary Thorne, then, is brought up by the Doctor, who does not reveal the secret of her birth. He is a good parent to her, and she gets a good education, and is a frequent and (mostly) treasured guest at the Gresham's house. Meanwhile, Roger Scatcherd, Mary's other uncle, rises greatly in the world, becoming a very wealthly construction magnate, and even a Baronet. Alas, he is still an alcoholic, with one son who is also dissolute, and only one friend -- Doctor Thorne, who had forgiven him for the (apparently somewhat accidental) murder of Henry Thorne, and who had helped him re-establish his place after a short spell in prison.

Then comes the main action of the novel. Frank Jr. is coming of age. Frank Sr.'s money problems worsen, and his primary creditor is Sir Roger Scatcherd. Sir Roger runs for Parliament. Frank has realized he is in love with Mary Thorne, but his mother of course opposes any such match (because "Frank must marry money!" -- and indeed Mary, conscious of their difference in social standing, and of the financial issues, has refused to listen to Frank's suit. Frank is sent off to Courcy Castle with instructions to court a rich if somewhat older woman, the delightful Miss Dunstable (whom I already knew from her somewhat important role in Framley Parsonage.) Frank out of loyalty does pay court to Miss Dunstable, but she gently lets him down, and the two become great friends. Sir Roger is forced out of Parliament due to an election scandal, and his alcoholism worsens. He persuades Doctor Thorne to be executor of his will, and also to be a guardian for Roger's wild son -- Sir Roger hopes that Doctor Thorne can reform the young man.  And Doctor Thorne learns of a surprising clause in Sir Roger's will -- 

I won't detail the rest of the plot -- most readers can probably figure out where it's going. But the plot isn't what matters, it's the telling. As ever, Trollope's voice is delightfully engaging. There are some very funny passages, some satirical ones, some quite moving ones. And as I said, the book turns on questions of class. Money is important of course -- and money is the only thing that overcomes class questions. And always hypocritically. Characters like Lady Arabella, and the whole de Courcy family, are profoundly hypocritical. There are several examples of decidely low born individuals who are eagerly promoted as potential mates only due to money -- one of Frank's sisters has a narrow escape early on from what would have been a bad marriage that her mother promoted; and later on she rejects an eligible man because he works for his money -- and the most supercilious of the Courcys, having urged her to tell the man no, proceeds to marry him herself. But the hypocrisy, if less pronounced, extends even to Doctor Thorne. Thorne's pride in his family connections always rubs against his general republican sympathies; and even in his niece's case, while he defends her as having a better character than anyone else in the book (which is true in the author's eyes, I'd say) he still cannot quite see his way to her marrying a Gresham for a long time. There are reasons that class differences could have made marriages founder -- primarily differences in expectation due to how people have been brought up. But of course Mary does not have that problem, having been brought up almost in the Gresham family.

I found the novel immensely enjoyable. Trollope has yet to fail me. But I must say that the ending is a bit of a cheat. It is set up by a somewhat outlandish set of circumstances, maintained by even more outlandish circumstances -- and in the end I rather felt that Doctor Thorne acted in a slightly less than upright manner. But so be it -- we know what we are getting, and we accept that -- and enjoy the journey the whole way. This is what Trollope does -- which can be comforting, but which as I said above puts him, in my eyes, just a step below the true greats of his time -- the likes of Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot. Trollope arranges his plots just so -- often with implausibly convenient resolutions to nearly intractable problems. At the same time his plots are set up to help illustrate his social points -- and similarly his characters are devised in served of the points he wants to make. And this is fine, because his commentary on, and his novels' illustrations of, social and political conditions are fascinating. He remains utterly readable and enjoyable, and he's a writer one ought to read. Even if he never produced a Middlemarch!

Review: Doting, by Henry Green

Review: Doting, by Henry Green

by Rich Horton

I discovered Henry Green a couple of decades ago largely because he was a friend of Anthony Powell, one of my favorite writers. I tried his best-known novel, Loving, and liked it a good deal, but it took me a while to continue. A few years ago I read Party Going, and found it astonishing. I have been planning to continue with him for a while, and indeed I started in on Doting, his last novel from 1952, some time back, but then the book somehow disappeared. So this past weekend I made a disciplined search for it, and it turned up in one of the many crates I'd filled with books while we were remodeling during COVID. And I've finally read it. I'm linking to my review of Party Going, which includes much more detail about Henry Green, whose real name was Henry Yorke (1905-1972).

The novel, as with his second to last novel, Nothing (1950), is told almost entirely in dialogue. It opens with Arthur Middleton, his wife Diana, his son Peter, and Annabel Paynter, the daughter of friends, attending a dinner theater, sometime shortly after the war. Arthur and Diana are about 40, Annabel is 19 or so, and Peter about to turn 17, and just about to return to boarding school. The conversation covers the entertainment, the food and drinks, and such things as Annabel, to Peter's displeasure, visiting one the prefects at his school. We also notice Arthur leering a bit at Annabel (getting a glimpse of her breasts when she leans over, for example) ... and it's fairly clear Annabel doesn't mind.

And thus the whirl of the characters begin. Soon Arthur is asking Ann out for "friendly" lunches, and even dinners, and their conversations move in the direction of seduction. Arthur has a confidante -- his and Diana's longtime friend Charles, a widower. And Ann confides with her coworker Claire. Diana gets wind of Arthur's attentions to Annabel, and tries to put a stop to them, at the same time beginning to meet with Charles. It's hinted that the Middletons' marriage is sort of semi-open, but Diana has her limits of toleration -- and so does Arthur, once he senses that something might be going on between his wife and his good friend. Claire joins the carousel -- lunching with Arthur and then with Charles, and happily going to bed with Charles. Annabel and Claire both claim to be atracted to older men. Arthur and Diana maintain that they love each other still, and over time Arthur, a busy civil servant, seems more willing to put aside his work to spend time -- in bed and out -- with Diana. Claire is perhaps just looking for a good time, but Annabel seems to be angling for something more. Charles remains traumatizzed by his wife's death (in childbirth) and his raising his son alone, and seems unwilling to think of marriage. Peter, a minor character really, is clearly a bit too young to be part of all this ... and the novel comes to its conclusion after perhaps a year, with another dinner party as Peter prepares to go to school again the following yeaer.

Described that way the book seems almost a sex comedy, even farce -- but there is no actual adultery -- it seems that Claire and Charles sleep together, and Arthur and Diana, but that's all. There are teases throughout, and plenty of talk of sex, and marriage. There's also the implied background of the recent war. There's the shadow of postwar rationing, and of death. There's the question as to what a single woman should be looking to do with herself. There's a good deal of ambiguous dialogue -- of outright lies and lots of evasions, and coy flirting. We do learn some of the background of the characters. It's at one level a light-seeming novel -- amusing and fast-moving, natural but arch conversation, an erotic frisson (though no real sex scenes.) At another level it's -- not exactly sad but almost desperate. There is some happiness for the characters, but it seems thin, parlous. The war is over but the characters are not over it, is some of it; but, too, the men and women are, as ever, trying to learn how to be together. And, as Arthur tells Annabel: "Love must include adoration of course, but if you just dote on a girl you don’t necessarily go so far as to love her. Loving goes deeper." It's not entirely clear that anyone in this novel quite manages the deeper part.

SF Hall of Fame 1989-2018

Christopher Rowe wondered what might be in an "SF Hall of Fame" anthology going back a similar period that the original SF Hall of Fame covered in 1970 -- about 30 years, from a few years prior to that. And I decide to make my own list of stories that fits that specification. I posted it in a comment at Christopher's FB wall, but here's the same list, with some additional "just misses" added, for preservation at my own blog!

Best stories 1989-2018

Here's a list I put together today. I have lists of "short stories" (up to approximately 10,000 words) for a rough analog to the SF HOF Volume I, and novellas (10,000 to 40,000 or so) as a rough analog to Volumes IIA and IIB. I purposely slanted the list heavily to SF and not fantasy -- much as the first books were -- but there is some fantasy on these lists. I stuck to the 1989-2018 timeframe. I chose 30 short stories and 22 novellas -- just a bit more than the original books had. (So sue me!) If I did this tomorrow, the list might change by 1/3! ??

It was great fun putting this together, and especially choosing some somewhat forgotten stories that I think deserve more attention ("The Spade of Reason", "Sailing the Painted Ocean", "Three Days of Rain", "Sadness", "Milo and Sylvie" ...)

Short Stories

"Game Night at the Fox and Goose", by Karen Joy Fowler (1989)

"Bears Discover Fire", by Terry Bisson (1990)

"Buffalo", by John Kessel (1991)

"Another Story; or, The Fisherman of the Inland Sea", by Ursula K. Le Guin (1994)

"Think Like a Dinosaur", by James Patrick Kelly (1995)

"Wang's Carpets", by Greg Egan (1995)

"Starship Day", by Ian R. MacLeod (1995)

"The Lincoln Train", by Maureen McHugh (1995)

"The Spade of Reason", by Jim Cowan (1996)

"Gone", by John Crowley (1996)

"Get a Grip", by Paul Park (1997)

"Suicide Coast", by M. John Harrison (1999)

"Stellar Harvest", by Eleanor Arnason (1999)

"Scherzo With Tyrannosaur", by Michael Swanwick (1999)

"Sailing the Painted Ocean" by Denise Lee (1999)

"Lull" by Kelly Link (2002)

"The House Beyond Your Sky" by Benjamin Rosenbaum (2006)

"Eight Episodes", by Robert Reed (2006)

"Three Days of Rain" by Holly Phillips (2007)

"Exhalation" by Ted Chiang (2008)

"26 Monkeys, also the Abyss", by Kij Johnson (2008)

"Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" by Yoon Ha Lee (2010)

"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees", by E. Lily Yu (2011)

"Sadness" by Timons Esaias (2014)

"Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology", by Theodora Goss (2014)

"Mutability" by Ray Nayler (2015)

"Red in Tooth and Cog" by Cat Rambo (2016)

"Everyone From Themis Sends Letters Home" by Genevieve Valentine (2016)

"Empty Planets" by Naomi Kanakia (2016)

"An Account of the Land of Witches" by Sofia Samatar (2017)

Novellas:

"Great Work of Time", by John Crowley (1989)

"Forgiveness Day", by Ursula K. Le Guin (1994)

"The Ziggurat", by Gene Wolfe (1995)

"The Flowers of Aulit Prison" by Nancy Kress (1996)

"Animae Celestes", by Gregory Feeley (1998)

"Story of Your Life", by Ted Chiang (1998)

"Dapple", by Eleanor Arnason (1999)

"New Light on the Drake Equation", by Ian R. MacLeod (2000)

"Milo and Sylvie", by Eliot Fintushel (2000)

"The Path of the Transgressor" by Tom Purdom (2003)

"The Voluntary State" by Christopher Rowe (2004)

"Magic for Beginners", by Kelly Link (2005)

"A Billion Eves", by Robert Reed (2006)

"Tenbrook of Mars" by Dean McLaughlin (2008)

"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky (2009)

"The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand (2010)

"In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns" by Elizabeth Bear (2012)

"A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i" by Alaya Dawn Johnson (2014)

"Fifty Shades of Greys" by Steven Barnes (2016)

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson (2016)

"And Then There Were (N-One)" by Sarah Pinsker (2017)

"Dayenu" by James Sallis (2018)

Stories that just missed, were too many by the same writer, or more fantastical than I wanted

"The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link

"The Sandal-Bride" by Genevieve Valentine

"Pip and the Fairies" by Theodora Goss

"A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong" by K.J. Parker

"Isabel of the Fall" by Ian R. MacLeod

"Journey Into the Kingdom" by M. Rickert

"Salt Wine" by Peter S. Beagle

"Another Word for Map is Faith" by Christopher Rowe

"The Small Door" by Holly Phillips

"The Tear" by Ian McDonald

"The Island" by Peter Watts

"A Letter from the Emperor" by Steve Rasnic Tem

"Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of her Glory" by Paul M. Berger

"Walking Stick Fires" by Anya Johanna de Niro

"The Bridge of Dreams" by Gregory Feeley

"Martyr's Gem" by C. S. E. Cooney

"Three Twilight Tales" by Jo Walton

"Aberration" by Genevieve Valentine

"Project Empathy" by Dominica Phetteplace

"Grace's Family" by James Patrick Kelly

"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" by Fran Wilde

"Exclusion" by Daniel Abraham 

"More Adventures on Other Planets" by Michael Cassutt

"Stories for Men" by John Kessel

"Ten Bears; or, A Journey to the Weterings" by Henry Wessells

"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford

"Seven Guesses of the Heart" by M. John Harrison

"The Price of Oranges" by Nancy Kress

"Buddha Nostril Bird" by John Kessel

"Steelcollar Worker" by Vonda McIntyre

"Stairs" by Neal Barrett, Jr.

"Exogamy" by John Crowley

"Erase, Record, Play" by John M. Ford

A Few Stories from 2019 or later ...

"Green Glass: A Love Story" by E. Lily Yu

"Laws of Impermanence" by Ken Schneyer

"Crazy Beautiful" by Cat Rambo

"If the Martians Have Magic" by P. Djèlí Clark

"The White Road" by Kelly Link

Review: The Book of Gems, by Fran Wilde

Review: The Book of Gems, by Fran Wilde

by Rich Horton

This is the third in a series of novellas from Tor.com set in Fran Wilde's Gem continuity. The three books are widely separated in time -- The Jewel and Her Lapidary (2016) concerns the fall of a kingdom controlled by royals who manage the power of magical jewels, and their "lapidaries", who protect their linked royals from falling prey to the danger of the jewels. The Fire Opal Mechanism (2019) is set much later, when the jewels and their powers are myths, and a couple of people are battling to save independent knowledge from a sort of press that devours and summarizes books, creating a sort of mishmash of all the knowledge. 

The Book of Gems (2023) is set a while later. Dev Brunai studies the stories about jewels, and the fragments of The Book of Gems that survive, and works on making synthetic jewels that can do some minor things, but have nothing like the power of natural gems. Dev aspires to be admitted to the Society that controls gem research. But now she has realized that her mentor, Dr. Netherby, has stolen her very promising research and gone away to the valley located where the old jewel kingdom had been. There is an archaeological dig there, and they have unearthed the old Palace. But Netherby has disappeared. Without the Society's approval, Dev -- who is actually descended from people living in this valley -- heads out to try to track down Netherby, with the hopes of finding out anything he has learned, and advancing her own research as well.

Once there, she realizes that Lurai, the woman running the inn she stays at, is actually her cousin. And, with some reluctance, Dev and Lurai sneak out to the location of the dig, finding a hidden way into the Palace. This is fraught for both of them, because their goals are not quite the same, and their perceptions of the reality behind the jewels are different -- Dev with a more scientific view, Lurai with a more magical view (to a gross approximation.) But both are severely affected by the latent power of the buried gems. And what they find in this Palace points to a dangerous but important new understanding of the jewels, of the mysterious Prince of Gems, and what direction their world must go to accommodate the jewels' power but control it.

This is a nicely written book, and in many ways it is doing what I hoped to see after The Jewel and her Lapidary. I had found The Fire Opal Mechanism an unanticipated sidestep into an oddly more science fictional world. The Books of Gems seems on the road to resolving this conflict -- to creating a wholly understood sort of Science Fantasy milieu. I was involved in Dev and Lurai's story, and I found the questions (stated and implied) to by worthwhile. Having said that, I feel like the three novellas are incomplete in a sense, and what I really want is more -- more backstory, and more filling in of the real way the gems operate, and of how they (and such tools as the tem-powered escritoire they use for communication) are seen "scientifically", as it were. In a way perhaps this threatens the mystery some fantasy generates, I admit. I don't know if Wilde plans more stories in this sequence (there are already a couple of related short stories), or if she plans to write a full-length novel -- and I don't want to set her any assignments! But I imagine a rather grand novel, incorporating and expanding on what we already have, might really be something. In the interim -- or perhaps forever! -- these are some fine novellas set in a quite original universe.

Review: Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov

Review: Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov

by Rich Horton

Laughter in the Dark was originally published in Russian in serialized form in 1932-1933, and in book form in 1933, as Kamera Obskura. The first English translation, by Winifred Roy, was published in England in 1936, under the title Camera Obscura. Nabokov was disappointed with the translation, and he revised it himself, as Laughter in the Dark. This version appeared in 1938. It was radically revised from the original translation, but also from the original Russian version. The original translation did not sell well, and the remaining copies were lost when the warehouse in which they were stored was bombed in WWII, so it is an extremely rare book. But John Colapinto in the New Yorker compared the two versions -- using a copy which was apparently Nabokov's own, which he used to prepare his own translation. It's clear that many of the changes are more due to Nabokov reconsidering his earlier Russian version, rather than simply improving Roy's translation (and it seems fairly clear that the eventual English Laughter in the Dark owes a fair amount to Roy's Camera Obscura.) Nabokov changed character names, removed scenes that didn't work, and altered the ending, in addition to changes at the line/paragraph level.

In this sense Laughter in the Dark is in some ways a new novel, written in English (though to be sure similar in overall shape to the original Russian version.) I don't know if another Russian version, translated from the English, has ever been made, but I do know that there was a 1930s French translation of Kamera Obskura, and a much later French translation of Laughter in the Dark. At the same time, more or less, Nabokov translated his last Russian novel, Despair, into English. Those two efforts, it seems to me, serve as a sort of practice for his subsequent novels, which were all written in English.

Laughter in the Dark has a somewhat famous opening passage (as famous as a not all that well known novel could have): "Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster." Albinus is middle-aged, with a wife and young daughter. He's an expert in art, and not an expert in love -- he had a couple of unsatisfying relationships before his marriage, and he seems to love his wife well enough but find her a bit -- boring, I suppose, or insipid. One day he stops in a cinema to waste an extra hour, and he conceives an obsession with the girl who is serving as usher.

This girl, Margot Peters, is about 17 or 18. A year or two earlier she had left her unhappy and somewhat abusive parents, had become a nude model for painters, and, without quite realizing it, had fallen into the hands of a procuress, who arranges eventually for her to go off with a young man, which pleases Margot enough -- she finds she enjoys sex. But that comes to an end, and Margot can't conceive of any future except to continue to be kept by different men, or to become a movie star. And by the time Albinus encounters her, the closest she's got to the movie business is her job as an usher.

As Albinus clumsily begins to pursue Margot, hoping for a short fling and some excitement and sex, she maneuvers to get more than that out of him. She knows he's well off, and she finds him a tolerable companion. And Albinus, to some extent against his will, is manipulated into a situation where his wife leaves him, and he and Margot live together. This is a scandal, of course, though in Weimar Germany perhaps less than it might have been, and as Margot pushes him to get a divorce he resists -- until a terrible crisis involving his daughter forces events. And Albinus' fate is sealed, in the Greek tragedy sense, especially when Margot decides she likes another man's attentions more, though Albinus' money remains necessary. And so things go to the eventual conclusion -- told us in the first lines of the book, foreshadowed too by the movie Albinus was watching when he first saw Margot, alluded to by such things as a cunning reference to Anna Karenina.

It's a striking novel, blackly comic but legitimately tragic. I haven't mentioned the chief villain, Margot's other lover, an artist of some talent but no morals named Axel Rex, whom Albinus already knew (due to his art connections) but hardly understood. Margot's cupidity, Rex's outright capricious cruelty, and Albinus' weakness collide dreadfully. The prose is excellent, if not quite at the sumptuous levels of Nabokov's great later novels in English. The characters are well depicted. Nabokov's way with the surprising but perfect image is on display. There are no overt sex scenes but there are erotic passages of considerable effect, due to his depiction of character -- and of bodies. It is impossible not to see distorted pre-echoes of Lolita here -- the middle-aged man with a teenaged girl, though in this case the girl is in control and the man the victim. The construction is intricate and effective, the foreshadowing, as I've hinted, remarkable, and not really apparent until the end. It's a slim novel (perhaps 55,000 words) and something of a genre novel, and perhaps a bit slight. (Though slimness doesn't need to imply slightness -- Pnin is very slim but not slight at all.)

I've only read a few of Nabokov's Russian novels, though most of his Russian short stories. I think very highly of Invitation to a Beheading, and I enjoyed King, Queen, Knave and The Defense. I have not read The Gift, nor Despair -- each considered among the best of his Russian books. I'd place Laughter in the Dark below Invitation to a Beheading, but just ahead of The Defense. 

Review: Booth, by Karen Joy Fowler

Review: Booth, by Karen Joy Fowler

by Rich Horton

Recently someone told me that Karen Joy Fowler has a novel coming out soon, perhaps next year. I can't remember who told me that, or where, and so I cannot be sure that it's true -- but I hope it is! At any rate, that seemed a spur for me to finally read her latest novel, Booth, from 2022. Fowler is perhaps the only novelist that both my wife and I read regularly. And, of late, it works out that when a new Fowler novel appears, my wife gets the first crack at it. So she read Booth when it came out -- and it has lingered on my TBR pile until just now!

Fowler has been one of my favorite writers at least since her first novel, Sarah Canary (1991). Probably before then -- earlier stories like "The Lake was Full of Artificial Things", "The Faithful Companion at Forty", and "Game Night at the Fox and Goose" had already make a big impact on me -- and on enough people that her first collection, Artificial Things, appeared in 1986, the year following her first published story. It is notable that her short fiction is largely (though not entirely) fantastika, to use John Clute's preferred term, while her novels are largely, if often ambiguously, realistic. (This is one reason my wife reads her!)

Booth is an historical novel -- the third of her novels to be set in the US in the 19th Century, though the other two (Sarah Canary and Sister Noon) are only loosely based on historical events, while Booth is to an extent about arguably the most traumatic event in our history -- the Civil War, and especially the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The Booth of the title is not strictly speaking John Wilkes Booth -- the novel concerns his entire family -- his father, Junius, one of the greatest American actors of his generation; his brother, Edwin, pretty much indisputably the greatest American actor of HIS generation; his mother Mary Ann, his sisters Rosalie and Asia, and his brothers June and Joe. (There were four other children who died in childhood. There were other actors in the family, as well -- John Wilkes Booth himself, Asia's husband Sleeper Clarke and their sons Creston and Wilfred, June's third wife Agnes and their son Sydney Barton Booth, who acted in silent films, and Edwin's wives, Mary Devlin and Mary McVicker.)

The novel is told primarily via the points of view of Rosalie, Asia, and Edwin, with brief interludes about Lincoln. It opens in 1838 in rural Maryland. Mary Ann lives there with her several children by Junius Booth, but Junius spends most of his time touring. Nonetheless, they end up with 10 children, the last born in 1841. Rosalie, who turns 15 in 1838, narrates this section, which describes a somewhat pleasant country upbringing, though punctuated with the deaths of four siblings, and the stress surrounding her father's careless handling of money, and his eccentricities, which include alcoholism, a somewhat inconsistent vegetarianism, and a strong abolitionist viewpoint. Rosalie herself is much put upon -- acting as a second mother to her brothers and sisters, feeling herself less attractive than her generally beautiful siblings, and suffering from scoliosis. They are brought up with black servants -- freed slaves -- and while this novel is closely centered on the Booth family we do not miss the terrible condition of black people, even freedmen, and neither do we miss the way the nominally abolitionist Booth family members don't really see how their servants live.

We continue from then until, of course, April 1865. The Booths move to Baltimore, and the surviving children grow up. Rosalie has one love affair (perhaps just in her head) but her family squash it, and she is resigned to spinsterhood. Asia grows up a beauty. Edwin, bullied as a child, eventually turns to the stage against his father's will. June does the same, and moves to California where he marries. John is popular with his fellow boys, but an indifferent student, and for a time returns to the Booth farm, which he hates, then he too becomes an actor. In the mean time he is increasingly pro-South, and his repulsive racism is readily on display. The whole family is upended when a woman claiming (correctly) to be Junius Booth's actual wife, along with her son, turns up, and relatives all but force the Booths from their farm. Edwin eventually follows his father on a somewhat disastrous tour to California, partly in order to see June, and Edwin stays behind when his father returns home -- or, as it happens, does not. Edwin, upon his own return, establishes his reputation, and is soon regarded as one of the country's greatest actors -- and so he also becomes the family's means of support. And he marries a young actress, and has a daughter. Then comes the war. The Booths, by now in New York, mostly sit out the fighting, though they witness such events as the Draft Riots. Asia tells much of this story, and as John is her favorite brother, we see a bit of him, and his increasing radicalization, including threats to kidnap Lincoln. And so comes the inevitable climax.

There is much more going on of course, much based on the historical record, but many personal details of course invented. And the book beautifully and convincingly depicts all the main characters: John's charisma mixed with violence, Rosalie's disappointment, Edwin's depressive nature, acting brilliance, and distrust of his brother, Asia's sometimes unpleasant fierceness. The black characters -- mostly the servants at the Booth property -- are naturally less prominent, but as I said their condition is clearly portrayed, with such details as the adult couple who work for the Booths desperately saving money to buy their children out of slavery. The way John Wilkes Booth's faults distort the entire family is clear, and of course his final act falls heavily on them as well. (Edwin is jilted by a woman he wanted to marry, Asia's husband, as well as June, are imprisoned as suspects in the conspiracy, though they are eventually released. Edwin nearly quits the stage, and does stay off it for months.)

It's a strong novel, involving, honest, and -- like some but not all historical fiction -- informative. We really do learn about this period in American history -- a familiar period to most Americans at least superficially, but reading about it this way does deepen our understanding. The characters are real as well, though (as Fowler certainly admits in her Afterword) much of this aspect is due to the novelist's imagination. Still, seeing this time through the eyes of people of that time -- when those people are faithfully reconstructed as I trust Fowler to do -- is a way of learning more about how they lived. It was a fraught time -- aren't they all -- and that comes through powerfully. Definitely a worthy novel, though I will confess, I don't place it at the top of my lists of Fowler's books. (I have, I think, four tiers -- at the top, Sarah Canary, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and the collection Black Glass; second level, The Sweetheart Season, The Jane Austen Book Club, Booth, and the collection What I Didn't See; third tier: Sister Noon and the collection Artificial Things; and then Wit's End at the bottom. I should probably reread both Sister Noon and Wit's End, and I should emphasize that her lowest tier would be top tier for most writers.) 

Review: The Last Emperox, by John Scalzi

Review: The Last Emperox, by John Scalzi

by Rich Horton

This novel, from 2020, is the final entry in John Scalzi's Interdependency series, after The Collapsing Empire (2017) and The Consuming Fire (2018). I had enjoyed the first two novels, and always intended to finish the series, and in fact bought the book long ago, but just never got around to it. I finally have, and I'm glad I did.

The setup, in a few sentences. The Interdependency is an interstellar empire comprising a number of star systems, all linked by the Flow, a kind of traditional set of something like wormhole links. They're not really wormholes, but they act kind of like them, and they allow much faster than light travel between systems, though those trips still take, typically, weeks or months. The Interdependency was formed about a millennium before the action of these novels, and it was designed specifically to have the various systems depend on each other -- so each system only makes a few necessary products, and must trade with all the others to survive. Especially since almost all the planets are uninhabitable, and the people either live underground or in space habitats.

However, the Flow is collapsing -- and within a number of years, all the systems will be isolated again. The rather young, rather new, Emperox, Grayland II, is working as hard as she can to save as many of her subjects as possible, by moving them to the one human-habitable planet, End. She has the help of the scientist who knows more about the Flow than anyone, Marce Claremont. (And she and Marce have become lovers.) But Grayland is opposed by many of the other noble houses, who are more interested in saving themselves than the common people, and who also are more interested in their political power games than in actually working on solving the collapsing Flow problem. And the most evil of these -- a real mustache-twirler had she a mustache -- is Nadashe Nohamapetan. The Nohamapetans have already tried to assassinate Grayland a couple of times, and Nadashe is plotting to have another go at it, and to make herself Emperox.

So, the novel becomes a sort of race against time -- can Grayland use her position to set in place a plan to save most of the Interdependency before Nadashe finally manages to kill her? Grayland has the help of her lover Marce, who has some theoretical ideas that may help at least delay the full collapse of the Flow, and might also help move more people to End -- if he only had the time. Grayland also has the help of simulations of all the previous Emperox's, to give her advice, and of the wily and profane Lady Kiva Lagos. And of course Nadashe has her own fellow schemers, though they do have the usual problem of those sorts -- none of them trust the other.

It's really a very enjoyable novel. It's told in Scalzi's typical snarky voice. To be honest, this voice can get wearing at times, especially as many of the characters sound pretty much the same. Still, Scalzi does snark very well. The love story is really pretty sweet. The political manipulations are interesting -- over the top evil, yes, but interesting. The science is all obviously made up, but it's cleverly done, and it's in the service of a well-constructed story with some pretty worthwhile discussion of morals, of how to govern, of the effect of travel on society, and such. The good guy characters are pretty delightful. The bad guys -- well, it's fun to read about their plotting and such, but maybe the mustache-twirling I mentioned is a tad over the top. And there is too clear a divide between the good guys and the bad guys -- the good guys are all nice, the bad guys are all super-evil. The plot logic is kind of inexorable, and after a while I was able to see how it would have to resolve -- which while it does in a sense (literal sense, really) involve a deus ex machina, gets there sensibly, and doesn't cheat on its internal logic. Having said that, the ending does come off a bit rushed. I would say, in fact, that the Interdependency novels are my personal favorites of Scalzi's books.

Review: The Presidential Papers, plus ..., by John Kessel

Review: The Presidential Papers, plus ..., by John Kessel

by Rich Horton

John Kessel's new collection is the latest in the PM Press Outspoken Authors series of slim volumes by, in their words, "today's edgiest, most entertaining, and uncompromising writers". These books are all by writers of speculative fiction, and the originating editor was the late Terry Bisson. This book was presumably one of the last books Bisson edited, but the series will continue, under the aegis of Nick Mamatas.

In the interests of full disclosure, and because it has a mild effect on my response to the book, I'll note that I bought this at the most recent World Fantasy Convention, at which I had the opportunity for multiple enjoyable conversations with John Kessel, over breakfast, and over drinks. And of course John signed my copy. My response is also affected, however, by some of the more biographical material here -- addressed in a reprinted speech, and in the interview conducted by Bisson that's included in the book. In those, Kessel discusses his ambition, on entering college, to become an astrophysicist, and his realization that his talent really lay elsewhere -- in his case, on encountering tensor calculus. I had nearly the same experience at college -- I entered as a physics major with an astronomy minor, and on encountering complex analysis, and advanced quantum mechanics, I realized that a Ph.D. in Physics wasn't likely. Unlike John, I didn't get an English degree, but I did load up my electives with multiple classes in poetry and contemporary fiction (and science fiction!) which were profoundly rewarding. In addition, I share with John a Catholic upbringing, since lapsed, but still informing a certain part of my worldview.

I knew none of this, mind you, when I first read John's work back in the early '80s -- stories like "Not Responsible! Park it and Lock it!" (1981) and the remarkable "Another Orphan" (1982); and searing later stories like "The Pure Product" (1986) and "Mrs. Shummel Exits a Winner" (1988), which last became part of his first solo novel, the underrated Good News from Outer Space (1989). I've been following his work ever since -- three more strong novels (Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Moon and the Other, and Pride and Prometheus) and a lot of excellent short fiction.

The Presidential Papers, plus ... includes a range of stories from early in his career to now, as well as a transcript of a 2001 speech, and the above-mentioned interview. The stories are chosen to fit the title -- but that doesn't mean quality was in any sense sacrificed to theme. "A Clean Escape" is built around sessions between a military psychologist and her patient, but as we learn about the situation they are in, and the identity of the patient -- and his disease -- the title truly resonates and the story is profoundly chillling. "The Franchise" is somewhat famous for an odd reason -- it's an alternate history and part of its premise is that Fidel Castro becomes a Major League pitcher, and the same issue of Asimov's in which it appeared also featured "The Southpaw", a Bruce McAllister story with the same premise. Kessel's story follows an alternate 1959 World Series in which Castro, a great pitcher for the Giants, faces George H. W. Bush, a minor league callup for the Senators (of course!) I don't want to reveal the guts of the story, though in the end it's more interested (properly, I think) in US politics than Cuban politics.

"The President's Channel" (1998) appeared first in the Raleigh News and Observer, but I saw it in Science Fiction Age. It's an amusing story, but it doesn't have the impact of the rest of this book -- the idea is that the President is constantly on a sort of reality TV channel, and we see an ordinary man watching this channel as we also see his own life. "The Last American" is another searing story, told from the point of view of posthumans looking back at the 21st Century, via the reconstructed life of the last US President. It mixes in actually kind of cool (if frightening, it its way) speculation about future tech and humanity, with even more frightening -- and only too plausible -- speculation about 21st Century political trends. The last fictional piece, new to this volume, is "A Brief History of the War with Venus", in play form, as the President of the Solar Federation confronts the Ambassador from Venus from a decidedly losing position. It's a dark jape, and the resonances with a certain current politician are only too obvious. (I was also curiously reminded of Andre Maurois' "The War Against the Moon".)

The nonfiction is really fascinating to me. The speech, entitled "Imagining the Human Future: Up, Down, or Sideways", looks at novels by Olaf Stapledon, Vernor Vinge, and Bruce Sterling, all of them imagining a posthuman future. Kessel's point it to look at these futures, and the people in them, from a moral or ethical standpoint. Essentially, he asks, if we become posthuman, are our ethics different? And that's a crucial question to ask. The interview is delightful -- basically a look at John's life from his own perspective, and these are interesting (to me) in general, and the more so reading his thoughts a week or so after we were talking across a breakfast table.

I've made this a more personal review than normal, and I don't want to overstate that. I see John Kessel at various conventions, and we have good conversations. But we're not bosom buddies or anything. I can say, I think without prejudice, that that is a first rate book. It is what it is -- it's slim, it's thematically focused. But the stories here are strong work -- particularly, for me, "A Clean Escape" and "The Last American". The nonfiction is really nice. Highly recommended.

Review: Drive, by James Sallis

Review: Drive, by James Sallis

by Rich Horton

James Sallis, who will turn 80 in December, began publishing with stories in New Worlds and in Orbit in the late '60s. He was strongly associated with the New Wave (and was for a time a co-editor of New Worlds), and it would be fair to say that when Darrell Schweitzer complained about "non-functional word patterns", he likely would have placed some of Sallis' early stories in that category. I would have to admit that whatever of his stories I had read by 1976 or so didn't make an impression on me. But I have returned to his work over the past couple of decades, and many of these Orbit stories are striking and intriguing, and always well written, though, yes, sometimes difficult to comprehend. And there is nothing wrong with trying hard to do something truly new and sometimes failing! (And the Sallis stories from that era that I did understand (to a sufficient degree) are wonderful -- I review some of them here.)

Sallis never really stopped writing SF, and he published worthwhile stories in Asimov's and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet through the '90, and more recently has placed work in Clarkesworld, Interzone, and even Analog! And these stories are first rate -- in particular I recommend a long novelette, "Dayenu", from LCRW, that I had the honor to reprint in The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2019 Edition. He also has written an on and off again book review column for F&SF since the turn of the millenium.

But I haven't mentioned any novels. And that's because when Sallis turned to longer fiction, he concentrated primarily on crime fiction. He developed quite a reputation in that field, particularly for his Lew Griffin series, though he published a number of standalone novels and one other trilogy. Some of this work was more experimental, mainstream or liminal, but the bulk was in the the crime field.

Drive (2005) is certainly a crime novel. It is sheer noir -- in no sense a mystery. There was eventually a sequel, Driven, from 2012, though I rather imagine Drive was conceived as a standalone. Drive was made into a fine movie in 2011, starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan. The movie takes the main "heist gone bad" plotline from the novel, but leaves out the rest. Quite possibly that was the correct artistic choice for a film, but the novel is deeper for having additional threads.

Drive, the novel, is told in a non-linear fashion. The main character is just called "Driver", and it's not entirely clear whether that is actually his last name or just a reference to his job. (In the movie he's called The Driver, removing any ambiguity.) He works as a stuntman for low budget movies, and he is a remarkable driver. This leads eventually to a side gig as a getaway driver, though he cautions anyone who hires him that he doesn't do anything but drive -- no direct involvement in the actual crime.

The short, sharp, chapters go forward and backward in time. We see Driver's childhood, including an abusive father, and a mentally ill mother who ends up killing her husband in front of her son. We learn of his brief time with step-parents, then his move from Phoenix to LA, and his getting work as a stunt driver, then, his descent into the world of crime. He hooks up in a curious relationship with Irene, a woman living next door to him in one of the cheap apartments he rents, and when her husband, Standard, gets out of jail the relationship continues with Standard's consent. (I should say that there are no sex scenes in the book, and it's not entirely clear that Driver and Irene ever sleep together (though that's the way I'd bet.) It is clear that they are close, and that Driver also loves her son, Benicio.)

This is noir, so we kind of know what's going to happen -- but we know anyway because the first chapter in this non-linear narrative is set shortly after a heist that he and Standard were inveigled into goes south -- and as the book opens Driver is in a hotel room with three dead people -- another member of the heist team, a woman, who has been killed by the two dead men, who were supposed to retrieve the large bag of money that the woman had made off with. Driver, of course, killed the two hitmen, but he knows that he'll remain a marked man, as the two mobsters who set up the heist won't rest until they get their money back, and also kill anyone who knows about it. This narrative runs through the whole book, with, as I said, sections set in Driver's past, and also during the earlier days in New York of the two mobsters.

It's a perfectly executed piece of breakneck noir action. The novel is short (just over 30,000 words, I'd say). It's as violent as the reader expects. It's twisty and clever. The several men who have significant roles (the mobsters, a down on his luck doctor who treats Driver when he's injured, his mentor in the stunt business, and a younger driver who works with him, a friend he knows from the movie business, a couple more criminals with whom Driver is involved, and of course Driver himself) are economically and convincingly portrayed. (I should say that the only woman who comes into much focus at all is Driver's mother.) Driver is one of those criminals we root for -- because of his traumatic upbringing, because the other criminals all seem worse than him, because many of his actions seem forced on him.) He's also curiously complicated internally -- presenting an only partly true façade of an empty and emotionless man, but a devoted if eccentric reader, someone who likes good wine, and someone who is good to women and children.) It's a wickedly fast read, very entertaining.