Review: Lies and Weddings, by Kevin Kwan

Review: Lies and Weddings, by Kevin Kwan

by Rich Horton

Kevin Kwan is likely best known for his first novel, Crazy Rich Asians (2013), which became a successful film in 2018. I haven't read that novel, but I did see and quite enjoy the movie, though I will say I thought another rom com featuring Chinese-American characters, Always Be My Maybe (2019), rather better. Kwan followed up his first novel with two more in the same milieu, and has published two unrelated novels since then: Sex and Vanity (2020) and the novel at hand, Lies and Weddings, from 2024. Besides the vaguely similar titles, these more recent books share another feature that I will not reveal until later.

Kevin Kwan was born in Singapore, to a family of Chinese descent. (I had a friend in college from Singapore, who was of Thai descent, and who was rather resentful of the Chinese Singaporeans, who apparently were dismissive of other ethnicities.) Kwan's family was pretty prominent, and so he surely had connections to the very wealthy people he writes about in his novels -- I don't know that his family was all that well off, though they seem to have been comfortable. His family moved to the US, to Texas, when he was 11. Aspects of his autobiography show up in Crazy Rich Asians, and also in Lies and Weddings, and I suspect in his other novels as well -- which is not to say that they are truly autobiographical novels.

(I mostly read this novel as an audiobook, and I'll note that I wasn't entirely happy with the narration, by Jing Lusi. The main issue is a matter of taste -- some of the voices the narrator adopted for the characters were downright annoying, and not the ones that were supposed to be annoying. (That is to say, the main antagonist, Lady Arabella, has an annoying voice that I thought worked very well.))

Lies and Weddings opens in the 1990s in Hong Kong, at a wild party. A young man, flush with money after a gambling trip to Macau, proposes to the beautiful Gabrielle Soong -- only to be confronted by one of his friends, Reggie Gao -- resulting in the accidental death of the first man in the ensuing scuffle. It's soon clear that Reggie was defending the honor of his sister, who had been the first man's girlfriend and who was pregnant by him.

Focus shifts a couple of decades into the future, to England. Eden Tong is a young doctor, of Chinese descent, living with her father in a small house on the estate of her father's friend Francis Gresham, the Earl of Greshamsbury. Eden is close friends with the Earl's three children, Rufus, Augusta, and Beatrice. But for some reason she has not been invited to Augusta's upcoming wedding in Hawaii. Eden doesn't much mind -- her medical schedule is demanding, and a trip to Hawaii would be expensive. But we soon realize that she hasn't been invited because the Countess of Greshamsbury, Lady Arabella, who is also of Chinese descent, doesn't quite approve of Eden, for snobbish reasons: in essence, she isn't good enough to be real friends with the children of an Earl.

But Augusta and Bea conspire to get Eden and her father, Dr. Thomas Tong, invited anyway. And we get to witness an absurdly extravagant wedding -- for the ambitious Lady Arabella, a former model and now a hotel entrepreneur, wants to outshine all her super wealthy friends, and has planned a fabulous party at a resort she owns on the Big Island. But amidst all the glorious meals and remarkable spectacles, Mother Nature has her way with things: a fissure opens up complete with lava and the wedding party is ruined, along with Arabella's resort. Beyond that, the time Eden has spent with Rufus on this trip makes it clear the two, friends since childhood, are truly in love -- and what's worse, Rufus's declaration of love is accidentally broadcast -- and Arabella hears it. Much worse still, the loss of her resort, which it turns out is uninsured, lays bare the fact that the Greshamsbury fortune has been entirely wasted. The Earl's indulgence of Arabella's dreams has caused him to take out numerous loans -- to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds -- many of which are held by the rapacious Filipino billionaire Rene Tan.

The novel continues rather giddily on what seems almost a world tour. Eden, who has convinced herself that she has no future with Rufus anyway, is slandered by the furious Lady Arabella, and as a result loses her job and basically also her home. Lady Arabella plots to marry Rufus -- an aspiring artist -- off to a successful artist who is also, of course, an aristocrat. The financial issues of the Greshams, however, lead to the quick end of Augusta's marriage, and to, in Arabella's mind, the need for Rufus to marry someone fabulously rich, and it so happens that her aunt knows just the woman, a Hong Kong tycoon named Martha Dung. Eden, meanwhile, heads to Los Angeles at the behest of a pleasant but rather silly young Persian-American who is infatuated with her -- and there she encounters Rene Tan's profoundly dissolute son Luis Felipe. Eden's father, it turns out, is Rene Tan's personal physician -- he's been working heroically to keep Tan alive, but his efforts may soon fail. There are trips to Paris, Marrakech, Houston, Venice, and elsewhere, in every case accompanied by lush descriptions of fabulous meals, extravagant houses, expensive cars (and boats, and aircraft), and a great deal of appalling waste. And there are mysteries -- in particular about Thomas Tong's obligations to Rene Tan and about Eden's own history. 

All of this is resolved in satisfying (if somewhat predictable and perhaps a bit hasty) fashion. The novel is slickly written, fun to read. Kevin Kwan is overtly aware of the enormous privilege, and accompanying grotesque unfairness, that all of his characters enjoy. The book comes off a bit uneasy about this -- the descriptions of luxury are often quite alluring, and the way the approved characters (mostly Eden, Rufus, and Martha) portray their moral goodness frankly comes off almost perfunctory, and sometimes a bit oblivious, as when Eden refuses to wear the spectacularly expensive gown Bea gives her at Augusta's wedding and instead hurries to buy something off the rack which of course is amazingly perfect, and by a famous designer, and probably not exactly cheap, and fits her perfectly so she can throw it on just in time for the wedding. All the characters are extremely beautiful -- for example Eden, the hardworking comparatively poor NHS doctor, reveals that she had been approached to be a model, but refused because she knew Arabella would be mad if she outshone Augusta or Beatrice (or even Arabella herself), and Rufus is presented as having had more or less every woman in the world (including Eden and Martha) have a crush on him due to a shirtless photo taken when he was 16.

By which I mean, really, that this is a confection -- a work of popular fiction that is there mostly to entertain, and that does so quite nicely -- with a side serving of satire of the idle rich -- and by rich I don't just mean comfortable, I mean obscenely so. Kwan also deals with anti-Asian racism, as might be expected. But -- I've left out a key aspect of the novel, an aspect that was probably missed by a good many readers, but which is quite obvious -- and overtly signaled -- to a certain set of readers. For Lies and Weddings is a contemporary retelling of Anthony Trollope's novel Doctor Thorne. (And I understand that his previous novel, Sex and Vanity, is a retelling of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View.)

Contemporary retellings can sometimes be tedious, sometimes lame, sometimes tendentious. But sometimes they can work, and I think Lies and Weddings works. It's not that Kwan is as good a writer as Trollope, nor that Lies and Weddings is as good as Doctor Thorne. But Lies and Weddings is a fun read, and it's also fun for an admirer of Doctor Thorne to read. It's interesting to follow the ways in which Kwan uses the trellis provided by Doctor Thorne -- the ways he maps Trollope's characters to contemporary people, the tweaks he makes to the plot, even the structural changes he makes. 

The reader of Doctor Thorne will immediately unravel a key mystery in Lies and Weddings, though the funny thing is that this mystery really isn't a mystery at all in the original novel. (Kwan's restructuring of the novel's timeline is aimed at hiding this secret -- I do wonder, though, if non-Trollopean readers of Kwan's novel will still figure things out -- I suspect they may. (My wife might read the book and I'll ask her.)) Trollope's readers will also notice the similar names -- all the Greshams except Rufus have the same name they had in Doctor Thorne. There are other namedrops that aren't terribly important but work as gracenotes -- there's a Palliser mention, and a minor character named Courcy, and even a Doctor Fillgrave. 

Status in Doctor Thorne was more closely tied to family position than to money, though money certainly counted. (Money always counts in Trollope.) But no one in that novel is so absurdly rich as the people in Lies and Weddings (except perhaps the Duke of Omnium.) Money counts first by far in Kwan's novel, and ethnicity counts next -- in England, Asians face distinct obstacles, which goes a good way towards explaining Lady Arabella's awfulness. Dr. Thomas Thorne in Doctor Thorne comes from a minor family in what might be called the Squirearchy, and as such is "below" the Greshams and far below the de Courcys. So Dr. Thomas Tong in Lies and Marriages is disrespected not just because he's not as rich as the Greshams, but because he's Chinese in origin. The novel is pretty clear that while Thomas and Eden and Arabella all encounter racism, it has a somewhat minor effect on them, given that they are pretty well off. The novel does show one or two examples of poorer people (hotel maids, one aspiring artist) who are more directly impacted.

The specific plot turns are also fun to follow for a reader of Doctor Thorne. The stain of illegitimacy is less important in Kwan's novel, but he finds a way to make it make sense. There is a particular character in Doctor Thorne who is a favorite with many readers, and looking for that character-equivalent is also fun. (She's quite amusing in Lies and Marriage, though I'll confess not as satisfying for me as in Trollope's novel.) Lady Arabella in Trollope is awful in a different way to Lady Arabella in Kwan, but Kwan makes her machinations work in the present day. One way in which Kwan's novel may be superior is in the two main characters. Mary Thorne is a lovely and virtuous young woman, but Eden Tong is given more agency than Mary, and I really liked her -- lots of this is of course due to social change. Likewise Rufus is far more active and determined than the rather dithering Frank Gresham Jr. Kwan is not as engaging a writer as Trollope, and not a master like the Victorian was in control of the omniscient point of view, but he does some nice stuff, notably with sardonic footnotes, which seem like a clever way to do something similar to the way Trollope as narrator talks to his readers. (Even if the one footnote in which he sort of mansplains to us how Spam became popular in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific due to World War II struck me as unnecessary.)

Bottom line -- Lies and Weddings is good fun, and it's not necessary to know its antecedent to enjoy it, but knowing Doctor Thorne may make it even better. I don't know how well Sex and Vanity does in echoing A Room with a View, but I am fine with Kevin Kwan using this strategy. 

Old Bestseller Review: The Love of Monsieur, by George Gibbs

Old Bestseller Review: The Love of Monsieur, by George Gibbs

by Rich Horton

My original focus on this blog was popular fiction of the first half of the 20th Century -- at best, obscure popular fiction that yet was successful in its time. I've definitely broadened my scope a good deal, but I still have an abiding interest in that sort of fiction -- rarely truly excellent but often interesting.

George Fort Gibbs (1870-1942) was an American novelist, screenwriter and illustrator. His father was a Naval surgeon, and a veteran of the Civil War. The father took suddenly ill in 1882, in Europe, and soon died. George's mother, despondent at her husband's death, committed suicide a year later (in the Anna Karenina manner.) George Gibbs was 13. He entered the Naval Academy, but soon left -- he doesn't seem to have been a good student. He turned to art, and also eventually to real estate, and had some success in both fields. He also began to write for magazines. In 1898 he moved to Philadelphia to work for Curtis Publishing, whose magazines included the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal. Gibbs did cover and interior illustrations for the magazines, and published fiction. He married a Philadelphia Main Line woman in 1901, about the same time he started publishing novels. His novels were generally quite popular, and about a dozen of them became movies (all silents.) He and his wife had three children, all successful to one degree or another. Their eldest son, George F. Gibbs, Jr., was a playwright and amateur musician, but best known as a real estate developer. Their second son, Theodore Harrison Gibbs (called by his middle name) was a sculptor of some note, and he died in the Battle of the Bulge. His daughter, Sally Gibbs McClure, was a dancer, singer, songwriter, and a writer of poetry, novels, and a memoir.

The Love of Monsieur, from 1903, was Gibbs' second novel. I found a copy in an antique store, several years ago, and misplaced it in my garage, where my wife found it looking for something else the other day. I figured I might as well read it -- it's quite short (about 45,000 words) and it promised to be enjoyable romance/adventure fiction -- which turned out to be the case. My copy is possibly a first edition, published in May 1903 by Harper and Brothers. The copyright is shared by J. B. Lippincott -- so I assume the novel first appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. My edition has a frontispiece by Gibbs himself, signed with his mirrored GG. The book is dedicated to M. H. G. -- surely his wife, Maud Stovell Harrison Gibbs.

I've reproduced the cover of my edition (there is no dust jacket, and I don't know if there ever was one) as well as the frontispiece and title page. And I have to say, I do wish we could have novels these days presented as nicely.

There's really not too much to say about the novel. The Monsieur of the title is Monsieur Mornay, a Frenchman of low (illegitimate) birth who is close to King Charles II, and is as the novel opens spending his time in London, gaming and flirting and fighting. He encounters a noble Englishwoman, Barbara Clerke, a wealthy orphan, whom he saves from crashing her carriage. He is intrigued, but she is disgusted, not so much by his ignoble birth as by his dissipated ways. When he manages to gain the favor of a dance and conversation with her, she expresses her disdain.

But -- no surprise! -- she finds herself a bit puzzled that she is having second thoughts. And when her guardian provokes a duel with Monsieur Mornay, she is even angrier ... and then a revelation is made. It turns out that Monsieur Mornay is not in fact illegitimate -- his mother had actually married his father -- who was actually Barbara Clerke's uncle. And her guardian had papers proving that Mornay was actually the rightful heir to the properties he has been holding in trust for Barbara. But Mornay is now wanted for murder -- and is also out of favor with the French King -- so he must flee to America.

The rest of the novel concerns Mornay's time as a "pirato" -- or, officially, a privateer. He never plans to return to England or France, but Barbara Clerke, once she realizes that her claim for her riches is false, and all her wealth is owed to M. Mornay, decides she must renounce it, and attempt somehow to find him and convince him to claim his inheritance. She, of course still hates him as a libertine, but is willing to live in poverty instead of falsely claiming his rightful inheritance. 

The resolution is never in doubt, though the book does offer some piratical adventures, some implausible coincidences, a mutiny and a marooning. (But no worries about the marriage of first cousins!) What can I say? It's popular fiction of its era, and not badly executed. Nothing that really deserves revival -- but I was able to enjoy the book, which amuses and occasionally excites -- and does not outstay its welcome.

Two Classic Movies: My Man Godfrey and The River

Two Classic Movies: My Man Godfrey and The River

by Rich Horton

Here's an informal look at two movies I watched recently, both classics. These are My Man Godfrey, from 1936, and The River, from 1951. Both are very highly regarded films -- for example, both are featured on Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" list. 

My Man Godfrey is based on a 1935 novel by Eric Hatch, 1101 Park Avenue. The timeline from book publication to movie release was awfully quick in those days! In fact, the novel was quickly rereleased under the movie title. (Alas, copies of the novel run from $475 to $3000 on Abebooks! There was a 1950s paperback release but I couldn't find a copy of that online.) There was a color remake of the movie in 1957, starring David Niven and June Allyson.

The movie is directed by Gregory LaCava and stars William Powell and Carole Lombard -- and I'll always watch a William Powell movie. (I'm less familiar with Lombard, who died tragically early in a plane crash flying home from a War benefit event in 1942.) Both leads were nominated for Oscars, and they are both good, but I also really liked Gail Patrick, who played the nasty sister of Carole Lombard's character. (Patrick apparently became typecast as the mean rival to the top-billed women -- she said she was so afraid on the set that it came out as haughtiness or meanness. (Her sister in this movie is named Irene, mildly ironic in that she played a rival to another Irene (Dunne) in My Favorite Wife.) She also became a significant television producer (notably for Perry Mason) after retiring from acting.) 

My Man Godfrey is very explicitly a Depression film. We meet Powell's character, Godfrey Smith, while he's living in the city dump. Both Cornelia Bullock (Patrick) and her sister Irene (Lombard) try to hire him to help them win a Scavenger Hunt. He picks Irene, who is immediately intrigued by him, and who hires him as a butler for her family -- herself, Cornelia, her mother Angelica, and her father Alexander are each in their very different ways extremely hard to deal with so servants are leaving all the time. 

The plot is predictable -- it's obvious that Godfrey knows too much about how to act in a fashionable home to be of the social class they think, so he's actually wholly eligible (except for his age) for Irene, and she doesn't care anyway. (Though he does.) He puts up with the family's eccentricities, helps the much put upon maid/housekeeper, tries to help Alexander with his business (which is in serious jeopardy), and is fiercely opposed by Cornelia, who both wants to mess with her sister's life and (I believe) is also very attracted to Godfrey.

Godfrey quits once he realizes that Irene is getting too attached to him, at the same time as Mr. Bullock's business finally collapses. The resolution is economically a fairy tale, with Godfrey not only saving the Bullock family but lifting dozens of destitute men from poverty. But it's a screwball comedy, not a serious movie of social criticism, and the screwball and comedy aspects really work. It's a true ensemble -- all the lead characters are funny in very different ways. It's really a delight, one of the great comedies of the 1930s.

I saw one other classic movie recently -- The River, Jean Renoir's 1951 movie based on Rumer Godden's lovely novella of the same title, from 1946. I liked the movie a good deal -- it's visually beautiful and the characters are involving and convincing. 

It was something of a lesson for me in watching an adaptation, however. Having just read Godden's novel a couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a pretty straight adaptation. But there are really significant differences, which distracted me for a while. I finally had to accept the obvious -- both pieces need to be appreciated on their own.

Both the movie and novel are about a young woman, Harriet, on the cusp of adolescence. Harriet is the son of an English man who runs a jute factory on the shores of a very large river in what is now Bangladesh. (I'm pretty sure the river is the Padma -- which is called the Ganges in India. Bangladesh was part of India at the time of the action in both the novel and movie, though in 1948 it became East Pakistan.) In both book and film Harriet has sisters and a brother, and her mother is pregnant. She has a frenemy named Valerie, from another slightly richer English family. The action takes place over a few months, and key aspects are one shocking death, and Harriet's attraction to a wounded soldier, Captain John, complicated by a feeling of rivalry with two slightly older girls.

But the film does make significant changes. Harriet is the second child in the novel, and her older sister Bea is a rival (along with Valerie) for Captain John's attention. In the movie, Harriet is the eldest, and the "Bea" character is sort of replaced by Melanie, the biracial daughter of their neighbor Mr. John (another new character, presented as the much older cousin of Captain John, who had married a local woman, since deceased.) Melanie is a fascinating character, and to be honest I think the movie could have done a bit more with her. Along with this, the whole plot surrounding Captain John is a greater focus in the movie, and the romance of sorts that he has with all three girls (Harriet, Valerie, and Melanie) is more significant, and more serious. (Harriet is clearly too young for him -- and he acts appropriately in both book and movie -- and my sense was that both Valerie (in book and movie) and Bea (in book) were a bit on the young side -- 16 maybe? -- but Melanie in the movie is probably of age (maybe 20?) for a man in his mid 20s (I assume?) to be with.) Captain John is also an American in the movie -- I'm honestly not sure why -- while he seemed likely to be English in the book. And the movie seems to be set during World War II, while the time frame of the novella is more ambiguous -- possibly purposely so, though I myself lean towards WWI.

Having said all that, both the book and movie really work. They are lovely and honest portrays of a near-adolescent girl coming of age. India is (to my ignorant eyes) honestly portrayed. The lovely prose of the book is parallelled in a sense by the beautiful color portrayal of the setting of the movie. (The color palette is remarkable, very bright, very striking.) It's not a plot-centric story, in either version, but that's OK with me. Both are recommended -- though, perhaps not surprisingly, I prefer the novella. (I review it here.)

(I should note that Rumer Godden collaborated on the movie's screenplay with Renoir, so it should be assumed she approved of the changes to her story. And apparently she did like this movie -- she famously hated the adaptation of her novel Black Narcissus, though that movie too is considered a classic.)

Resurrected Review: The Dramaturges of Yan, by John Brunner

Here's another review of John Brunner, who is really one of my favorite SF writers of his era, but oddly more due to his less well-known works. These books, typically fairly short, clearly written somewhat quickly, are not nearly as serious or powerful as his most famous novels, but they are, well, more fun. At least the ones that work! -- he wrote some really weak stuff too.

This is a short review I did for my SFF Net newsgroup back in 2001. It's about a late Brunner novel, from 1972 (though it was serialized in Fantastic in 1971 -- I'm not sure if the book version is longer or not. The magazine cover, by Vaughn Bodé and Larry Todd, is much better than Chris Foss's book cover though!) I haven't made any changes to what I wrote then.

The Dramaturges of Yan, by John Brunner

a review by Rich Horton

Just this past week [back in April of 2001], I read a short John Brunner book I've had sitting around, The Dramaturges of Yan, from 1972.  Ace bills it, rather sillily, as a "worthy successor to Stand on Zanzibar".  Stand on Zanzibar does have worthy successors, but they are The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit, and The Shockwave Rider.  This book seems a bit tossed-off, maybe for relaxation.  Still, it's not too bad -- much better, for instance, than the other short Brunner book I read a few months ago: The Infinitive of Go, which I thought quite poor.

The Dramaturges of Yan is a very Jack Vance-like book.  It's set on the planet Yan, inhabited by the Yanfolk, who once had a high civilization, which crashed when some disaster, of their own doing, caused their moon to explode and become a ring.  The ensuing (somewhat implausible) rain of meteors made much of the planet uninhabitable. Some 10,000 years later, a small contingent of Earthfolk live in a city on Yan.  Earthmen have a significant interstellar society, built around a matter transmission device called the go-board.  The Yanfolk are the most intelligent aliens they have encountered.  More significantly, they are humanoid and sexually compatible with humans -- it is said that almost every human has tried sex with a Yanfolk, and two long-term relationships are ongoing, particularly that of the poet Marc Simon, translator into humanish of the Yan Mutine epics, and Shyalee.

The story revolves around the arrival of the artist Gregory Chart, whose art consists of, somehow, hypnotizing a whole society into acting out his visions for a few months, perhaps leading to a permanent change.  The conflict is between the humans who desire to welcome Chart, believing that this will enhance the position of Yan in the human galaxy, and those who fear the changes that will result.  It turns out, though, that the major players are the Yan, who have their own purposes with Chart -- they hope to rediscover the ancient powers of their "dramaturges" via Chart's efforts.

It all works out a bit unexpectedly, rather refreshingly so.  This isn't really all that good a book, but it's a nice entertainment, and rather original in some ways, despite the overt debt to Vance.

Review: A Royal Pain, by Rhys Bowen

A Royal Pain, by Rhys Bowen

a review by Rich Horton

I came across this book in an antique store near Rolla, MO, a few weeks ago. It looked like a book my daughter might enjoy -- it's an historical mystery set in England in the 1930s, and my daughter regularly reads English-set historical mysteries. I suppose it was a good choice in a sense -- as my daughter told me when I tried to give it to her that she'd already read it! So my wife read it, and then I figured I'd read it, as sort of a palate cleanser after several more serious novels. 

Rhys Bowen is a pseudonym for Janet Quin-Harkin, who was born in 1941 in Bath, England, but has been in the US for some decades now. She was educated at London University, worked for the BBC and as a dance teacher, and wrote children's books, YA books, and category romances under her own name. As Rhys Bowen, she has written three long series, set in Wales, England, and the US: respectively the Constable Evan Evans series, the Her Royal Spyness series, and the Mollie Murphy series.

A Royal Pain, from 2008, is the second book, following Her Royal Spyness, in that series. The first-person protagonist is Lady Georgiana Rannoch, thirty-fourth in line to the English throne. Alas, she is quite poor -- her late father was a spendthrift Scottish peer, her mother an actress. Lady Georgiana, or Georgie, is living in London, secretly working as a house cleaner, while remaining fairly chummy with the Queen. It's 1932, and Queen Mary's primary concern is that the Crown Prince is having an affair with a married American, Wallis Simpson. The Queen wants Georgie to host a Bavarian princess, Hannelore, and to take her to society parties at which the Crown Prince will be -- in the hopes that the very beautiful princess will attract his attention.

Georgie isn't happy about this -- for one thing, due to her poverty, she's really not that much a part of society. But you can't say no to the Queen. So she takes in Hannelore, who turns out to be very pretty indeed, and also very interested in boys -- it seems she feels deprived of sexual experience after a convent education. Hanni, as she is called, also speaks English in an exaggerated American gangster accent. But Georgie agrees to try, getting help from her actress mother's father, an ex-cop, who agrees to act as butler while his lady friend will cook. 

Hanni is a problem indeed, with a habit of shoplifting, and of flirting with anyone male. Worse, one of the males who interests her is Sidney Roberts, a young firebrand of a Communist, and another is Darcy O'Mara, who was a character in Her Royal Spyness, and on whom the virginal Georgie has a major crush. Alas, the Crown Prince isn't interested in Hanni -- Mrs. Simpson has her claws in him for sure. And there are other problems -- at a wild party, complete with cocaine, an acquaintance of Georgie's falls to his death.

Not long after, Sidney Roberts is murdered -- and Hannelore is an obvious suspect, as she found the body and the murder weapon. Georgie must deal with the police, while trying to avoid a scandal or an international incident -- how would it look if a prominent German royal was arrested for murder? And would that play into a certain rising politician named Hitler's hands? The Queen wants Georgie to investigate the murder to allow her to stay ahead of the police. But Georgie doesn't really have those skills. And why does Darcy keep turning up? And when two more people end up dead ...

The reader will not really be fooled as to the identities of the baddies, though their specific motivations do take a while to come clear. The novel really takes a while to get around to resolving things -- I'd say the mystery is worth perhaps 20,000 words of story. Granted, there is a lot of time taken up with Georgie and her friends and her slow-burning not quite a romance, and Hanni's intrigues, and those of Georgie's eagerly bedhopping friend Belinda.

It's really not a very good novel. But Bowen writes engagingly enough, though not elegantly. Her characters seem transplanted from perhaps the 1990s to the 1930s, and it's pretty clear that historical verisimilitude is by no means a goal. I'll just say that I'm not tempted to read any more of her books, but I can see how they could be popular with readers looking for very light entertainment with a less than convincing veneer of a historical setting. 

Resurrected Review: The Armies of Memory, by John Barnes

Here's something I wrote back in 2006 about the concluding novel in John Barnes' Thousand Cultures series. Barnes' work has never, it seems to me, got quite the attention it deserves -- he's a fascinating pure science fiction writer, and some of his stories are among my favorites of the past few decades. Alas, he has fallen somewhat silent of late: no novels since 2012, no short fiction since 2019.

Review: The Armies of Memory, by John Barnes

by Rich Horton

In The Armies of Memory John Barnes concludes his Thousand Cultures series that began with a lovely novelette, "Canso de Fis de Jovent", in Analog in 1991. This story, which tells of the experience of a group of friends including the narrator, Giraut Leones, when their world, Wilson, and their culture, Nou Occitan, a synthetic recreation of Occitan, an historical area of France (in the Provence, and associated with the Cathars) at the time of the troubadors, is perturbed by the arrival of Springer technology: instantaneous jump gates, that serve to relink the "Thousand Cultures" that Earth has planted on a number of worlds. The other key technologies are powerful Artificial Intelligence (restricted in human space by Human Supremacy laws) and a means of reincarnation by installing recorded brain states ("pyspyxes") into cloned bodies. That story became the first section of A Million Open Doors, which was followed by Earth Made of Glass and The Merchants of Souls. In these novels Giraut became an agent for humanity's OSP, which tries to keep the various cultures from becoming overly oppressive and from bothering their neighbour cultures. He married a woman named Margaret, then underwent a painful divorce. He discovered remains of mysteriously vanished aliens, the Predecessors. He was present at the founding of a new religion, Ixism, and simultaneously at the mutual destruction of two cultures. And he dealt with the crisis on Earth, where a majority of the population has chosen to "go into the box": permanent VR life.

As this novel opens, Margaret is now Giraut's boss, and Giraut is the head of a small team of agents including his new lover, his reincarnated 8-year old (physically) father and his reincarnated friend, Raimbault, from his youth back on Wilson. Giraut is also a spectacularly successful musician, playing Nou Occitan trobador-tradition music. Now he is premiering a new song cycle based on the life and beliefs of Ix, the founder of an important new religion. But this has made him a target, perhaps of Occitan traditionalists, or perhaps of enemies of Ixism -- or who knows?: at any rate, he is the subject of repeated assassination attempts. After a while it becomes clear that the assassination attempts are a curious mixture of brilliance and incompetence. And finally, more scarily, that they are being carried out by force grown clone bodies implanted with "chimera" brains: that is, the combination of two or more recorded human brains, an obscenity in Council culture.

All signs lead to planets of the "Union", a little-understood group of illegally colonized planets outside of Council space, in particular Aurenga, the planet colonized by the "Lost Legion", a group of Nou Occitan war criminals. This is interesting because there are indications that the lost psypyx of Margaret's predecessor Shan is also there. What's more, they learn that not only are human "chimeras" involved, but some chimera's might have AI components.

The novel quite intriguingly spirals from an important but smallish mystery to bigger and more important mysteries. Eventually it is in great part about the meaning of intelligence, and of humanity, and the place and rights of AIs. And this is in the context of extremely scary revelations about the fate of the Predecessors, and a threat of alien invasion. Barnes treats these issues very intelligently, and the novel is always interesting: full of action, full of neat science-fictional ideas that have interesting philosophical ramifications, and full of fine and engaging characters. A weakness is that the closing sections seem rushed, and are full of long (and still fairly interesting) passages in which we and the main characters are baldly told the situation, rather than having the situation organically revealed. And the unwinding of things towards the end has an air of patness, convenience, about it, even as it leads to a dramatic setpiece of a series conclusion. But even with this shortcoming, this remains one of the must-read SF novels of 2006.

Resurrected Review: Fool Me Twice, by Matthew Hughes

I wrote the review below back in 2004. I should add some detail -- Matthew Hughes (born in England but in Canada from age 5) has continued to write a variety of stories in roughly the same milieu -- an acknowledged variation of Jack Vance's Dying Earth setting, featuring a wide variety of differing heroes and antiheroes. As with many writers of his age (a decade older than me) he has lately turned to small presses and self-publishing for his books, though his stories can still be found in places like Lightspeed. The stories remain reliably entertaining and I recommend them. He has also written crime fiction (as Matt Hughes) and other work as by Hugh Matthews.

Review: Fool Me Twice, by Matthew Hughes

by Rich Horton

Canadian writer Matthew Hughes published Fools Errant, his first SF novel, in 1994. His second, Fool Me Twice, followed in 2001. Beginning last year he began to publish (mostly in F&SF) a number of short stories set in the same milieu. Another novel, Black Brillion, followed in 2004. All these works are set in the far future of Earth, just prior to the era of Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Hughes captured Vance's style pretty well, and did a pretty good job of imagining odd societies in the Vancean manner as well. His first novel, however, while quite enjoyable, was probably a bit too overtly a Vance pastiche. However his own voice has become increasingly developed in his more recent stories.

Fool Me Twice is a direct sequel to Fools Errant. In the first novel, the hero, Filidor Vesh, nephew to the Archon of Old Earth, was brought to some understanding of his potential responsibilities, and his capabilities. In this novel, he has become the Archon's apprentice, but despite some additional duties, he does not really seem to have fully taken up his role. Indeed, he seems all to willing to let his aide direct his actions, saving all the more time for his favored pursuits: eating, drinking, chasing women. 

As the novel opens, he more or less simultaneously makes a careless decision to allow exploitation of a remote rural area by some local nobles (named, transparently, Maguffyne); and falls in love with a girl he sees out his window. Not at all surprisingly, upon tracking down the girl he learns that she had come to petition him to protect her land from exploitation by the very nobles he has just supported. Soon he find himself stripped of his seal of office and effectively without an identity. 

He ends up chasing the girl in an attempt to make amends (and recover his sigil). He falls in with a travelling acting troupe, and later ends up thrown off a ship in the middle of an ocean. Luckily -- to an extent -- he is rescued by a sea creature -- unluckily the creature tows him to slavery on a remote island. Filidor is once again forced to take real responsibility for his life, and for the good of others as well ...

The end is never in real doubt, but the journey is very enjoyable. The influence of Vance is very much in view -- fortunately Vance is an author well worth being influenced by. Fool Me Twice isn't a great book, but it's a very diverting read.

Resurrected Review: Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark

Review: Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark

by Rich Horton

The recent publication of a biography of the great British novelist Muriel Spark, Electric Spark, by Frances Wilson, has led to some welcome attention to the writer. And it reminds me that I should return to her -- I read about a dozen of her novel some decades ago, and I found them remarkable. My favorites are mostly among her earlier novels, such as Memento Mori (1959), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and of course The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961); but she was writing first rate novels nearly until her death in 2006. Some of the sheer viciousness of her early novels was a bit dulled in her later works, perhaps, but they remained intriguing and ambiguously dark. Here's something very brief I wrote in 2001 (lightly revised here) about her second to last novel, which appeared in 2000.

Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting is another very short novel, at about 36,000 words.  This story is based on the true story of Lord Lucan, a dissolute English Earl who killed his children's nanny by mistake (thinking she was his wife) and then beat his wife, though she escaped.  Lucan fled prosecution, and was never found.  Many people think he is dead, but there were rumours and "Lucan sightings" for decades. Spark did take some liberties with the real life facts of the case in this book. (The crime occurred in 1974 and Lucan was not declared legally dead until 1999, just prior to the publication of Spark's novel.)

Spark creates an unusual psychiatrist named Hildegard Wolf, who has a criminal past of her own (also based on a true story, apparently). Dr. Wolf has a practice in Paris, and she gets two new clients, both of whom claim to be Lord Lucan.  Eventually they use their knowledge of her past as a guard against her exposing them to the police. She is disturbed by this: also she isn't sure which or either of the men may be Lord Lucan. Soon Wolf's lover is also involved in the search for the missing Lord, as are an old acquaintance of Lord Lucan and the daughter of another old friend of his.

These people end up on a merry chase, leading to a very satisfying resolution. The book is written in Spark's usual, very enjoyable, ironic/satiric voice. It is sharply but subtly moralistic about the attitudes of Lucan's class, and about the nature and persistence of guilt.  It is also a thoroughly enjoyable book to read.  Spark was a marvel, and this book, publishe in her early 80s, stands respectably in the company of her best work.

Old Bestseller Review: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Thoughts on Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

by Rich Horton

What to say about Great Expectations, one of the most famous English novels of all time? I don’t really have an awful lot to add to the voluminous critical views. I am still in a sense quite new to Charles Dickens. I’ve read five of his novels (if we call A Christmas Carol a novel): Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol in my teens, and David Copperfield, Martin Chuzzlewit, and now Great Expectations within the last couple of years. In that list I would rank Great Expectations second behind David Copperfield.

Great Expectations was serialized in Dickens’ own magazine All the Year Round in 1860 and 1861, and published in book form (three volumes) by Chapman and Hall in 1861. It is a long book by most measures -- about 500 pages in my edition, nearly 200,000 words. I say long by most measures -- it’s not nearly as long as some other Dickens novels -- David Copperfield is 800 pages or about 370,000 words, and Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House are both nearly as long as David Copperfield.

I’ll summarize the familiar story very quickly. There are some spoilers, though not for the very end, so skip this if you want, especially the third paragraph, which corresponds to the third volume of the novel. The hero is Philip Pirrip, called Pip for obvious reasons. He is an orphan who is raised by his rather abusive older sister and her very kind husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. As a young boy he meets an escaped convict who forces him to steal some tools from Joe so that he can free himself from his shackles, and he also gives the man some food. When Pip gets a bit older he is hired to regularly visit a strange woman, Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster (in her 40s or early 50s though she is often portrayed as elderly) and Miss Havisham’s beautiful but very cruel adopted daughter Estella, and Pip conceives an unrequited love for Estella.

When Pip grows near adulthood, he is given a mysterious gift that will allow him to go to London and learn to be a gentleman. He is assured that there are "great expectations" for his future. He is sure that Miss Havisham is his sponsor, and that she intends for him to eventually marry Estella. In London he makes friends with a couple of men -- Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor Matthew, who is also a relative of Miss Havisham; and John Wemmick, the clerk to the lawyer Mr. Jaggers who handles Pip’s "expectations", as well as Miss Havisham’s business. Pip learns gentlemanly ways but doesn’t really learn to be a man -- he runs into debt, spurns his old friends such as Joe as well as Biddy, a sweet and honest country woman who had seemed to love Pip when they were younger. 

And then one night he is surprised by a strange visitor -- Abel Magwitch, the escaped convict he had helped as a young child. Magwitch had been transported for life to Australia, and had become rich there. He had vowed to help his young benefactor -- to see him become a gentleman. Pip is astonished, and at first repulsed, and vows not to accept any more money from Magwitch. But over time he realizes that for all Magwitch’s coarse ways, and his truly criminal past, he is a loyal and fundamentally honest man. Pip comes to appreciate his friend Herbert more as well, and is given examples in behavior by people like Wemmick as well; and his character begins to take a turn, even as his expectations dwindle. I won’t detail the climax, or the various revelations that tie the intricate plot together, but the novel comes to a powerful (and slightly ambiguous) conclusion.

I was delighted as the novel closed to find myself having guessed right about how much of it would work out -- from such small things as John Wemmick’s marriage to Miss Skiffins to larger things like the eventual fate of Biddy. In certain novels this is a source of satisfaction -- these revelations should be on the one hand surprises but surprises that arise properly from what came before, so that eventually they are not surprises. If you see what I mean. And of course there is Pip’s fate -- which is honestly worked out, and which, as I hint, ends a bit ambiguously. (And, apparently, somewhat differently than Dickens originally planned.)

It’s a wonderful novel, it really is. I have said that I prefer David Copperfield, and I do. That novel is bigger and baggier, fuller, messier. As I put it, if a novel is a prose work of some length with a flaw, David Copperfield is a prose work of great length with great flaws -- and amazing virtues as well, and a great heart. There is just more there, and more that I love. 

But it must be said that Great Expectations is more unified, more tightly plotted, better structured. And there are the joys of Dickens’ eccentrics: John Wemmick and his father, "the Aged"; the expert lawyer Mr Jaggers; the hypocritical Uncle Pumblechook, a slightly less evil version of Mr. Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit; the obsessed Miss Havisham herself; loyal and exceedingly honest Joe Gargery; Miss Havisham’s relatives and their "expectations"; Trabb's boy, Pip's tormentor but also a key helper at one point; the aspiring actor Mr. Wopsle; and the villainous Orlick.

My final question, for anyone who has gotten this far, is -- what to read next by Dickens? Bleak House is an obvious answer, and I’ll certainly get there. I also want to read some more of the Christmas novellas -- "The Cricket on the Hearth", perhaps? But what other novels? Dombey and Son? Oliver Twist? Little Dorrit? What do people suggest?

Recent Substack posts from me

Here are some links to recent posts on my Substack:

A look at a 1956 issue of Fantastic. Not a great issue, but it does have four stories by a very young Robert Silverberg. https://open.substack.com/pub/richhorton314252/p/the-bad-old-stuff?r=arrxg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

A parallel review of a science fiction magazine (Analog) and a mainstream little magazine (Zyzzyva): https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/from-a-to-z-in-short-fiction-magazines

A review of Elizabeth Taylor's great novel Angel: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/satire-and-sympathy

A review of The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/innocence-and-emptiness

Rich Larson's excellent new short story collection Changelog: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/review-rich-larsons-changelog

Resurrected Review: Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

Another Resurrected Review, this one of Michael Swanwick's 2002 novel Bones of the Earth, which, it seems to me, isn't remembered as well as it ought to be.

Resurrected Review: Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

A review by Rich Horton

I've read some solid SF novels in 2002 so far -- The Years of Rice and Salt, Permanence, Schild's Ladder. It hasn't been a bad year. But nothing that really threw me until this one. Bones of the Earth is, about halfway through the year, clearly my favorite SF novel of 2002. It combines several well-integrated (and rather original) SFnal ideas with some neat scientific speculation, interesting characters, a compelling plot, and a powerfully argued theme about the nature of science and the human urge to do science.

The novel concerns a program to send paleontologists back to the Mesozoic Era to study dinosaurs in their natural environment. As such it is both a dinosaur novel and a time travel novel. Perhaps unexpectedly, the thematic heart of the book is in the time travel aspect, though the dinosaur speculations are worthwhile and fun in themselves.

The story opens in 2012 when Richard Leyster, a young paleontologist, is approached by a mysterious man named Griffin,offering him a mysterious job. He can tell him nothing about the job, but he can show him something -- a fresh Triceratops head. And he seems oddly certain that Leyster will accept the job. Leyster does, of course, and several months later he finds himself at a strange scientific conference, attending presentations about field work in the Mesozoic, and being accosted by a mysterious older woman (though she was born later than he) named Gertrude Salley, who implies a past relationship. Thus we have met the three main characters -- Leyster, the brilliant and studious scientist; Salley, brilliant herself but manipulative and unbound by law or rules; and Griffin, the tormented administrator of the entire program.

One key plot thread concerns a scheme by Christian fundamentalists to sabotage the time travel efforts, which ends up marooning a number of paleontologists in the Late Cretaceous. Griffin and his assistants try to loop back and forth through time to forestall this sabotage, but they are frustrated by the insistence of the sponsors of the time travel program that no paradoxes be created: thus anything they know to have "already happened" they cannot stop from happening. The other key thread involves Salley's attempts to subvert that law -- right at the beginning we see hints that she is trying to cause paradoxes, and her attempts continue, though her motive remains unclear to the reader for some time.

The scenes in the Cretaceous involve some well-handled "primitive survival" scenes, and some fascinating speculation about dinosaur social life and about the real causes of their extinction. The other thread involves some very clever handling of time loops and paradox, and an eventual trip far into the future to meet the Unchanging -- the mysterious beings who have offered the boon of time travel to humans. The resolution is surprising, logical, and achingly sad, or at least bittersweet. Swanwick is convincing treating human curiosity, our love of science. He is convincing treating human reactions to the possibility of fixing our past mistakes. There are some lovely set pieces involving encounters with prehistoric beasts, and one involving a young girl fascinated by Mesozoic sea life. The characters are well-drawn, particularly Griffin and his boss, the Old Man. Leyster and Salley are well done as well but a bit less fully realized -- or pass too clearly idealized to fit their parts. The minor characters are interesting, too. I loved the book, and I was quite moved by it. I think it is one of the best time travel novels in all of SF.

Resurrected Review: The Blood of a Dragon, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Resurrected Review: The Blood of a Dragon, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

by Rich Horton

Lawrence Watt-Evans's Ethshar novels are uniformly enjoyable commonsensical light fantasy, somewhat in the mode of L. Sprague De Camp, set in a fantasy world distinguished by having multiple, mostly quite different, magical systems. I read through a number of them a few decades ago -- the first several appeared from Del Rey in the '80s and and '90s, a couple more came out from Tor, and Lawrence has continued them in the years since for Wildside Press -- about 15 novels have appeared to date. I ran into Lawrence for the first time in a while at Worldcon this year, and it seems a good time to resurrect this review of a novel from 1991.

Dumery of Shiphaven is a 12 year old boy, the son of a wealthy shipowner. It is time for him to choose a trade. He has no interest in the shipping business, and anyway his oldest brother will get the business. Dumery, at any rate, is interested in something else -- he wants to be a wizard. His father agrees to let him try -- but every wizard Dumery meets agrees that he has not a shred of magical talent. Dumery is frustrated and offended -- but then he happens to see a wizard negotiating with a seller of dragon's blood, which is an important ingredient is many spells. He realizes that if he can't be a wizard, he might get a measure of revenge by becoming a dragon's blood seller.

So Dumery tracks down the dragon hunter. Who, it turns out, has no interest in hiring an apprentice. Dumery decides not to give up. He decides to follow the dragon hunter to his home, and to insist on an apprenticeship. Thus, he ends up paying his way on a boat up the river, shoveling cow dung. His parents miss him, of course, and they hire a witch's apprentice to track him.

Both Dumery and the young witch end up following the dragon hunter to his home. The witch learns some secrets about witches and warlocks which (no pun intended!) seem a setup for a further book. Dumery, meanwhile, learns that the dragon hunter isn't quite what he seems. Also, that he still hasn't any wish for an apprentice. Dumery remains stubborn, and almost despite himself -- certainly not through any particular virtue of his own -- stumbles on a secret involving dragons, one in particular, that might just make his fortune.

It's an odd, interesting, book. There aren't exactly any heroes, nor really any villains. Dumery is certainly the central character, and he is in many ways quite an unpleasant young man. He is a thief, he's irresponsible, he's spoiled -- he's not by any means evil, but he's not good. The witch's apprentice is fairly appealing, but in the end a pretty minor character. The other characters are ordinary people, some of whom do pretty bad things -- but mostly through ignorance. The book is enjoyable reading throughout -- Watt-Evans is a very engaging writer. And the eventual solution is both logical (indeed, I thought of it much earlier ...) and in a way heroic.

Lawrence Watt-Evans is one of those writers who never fails to entertain. He's a Hugo winner (for the short story "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers"), and a writer who easily moves between Fantasy and Science Fiction. I've enjoyed pretty much everything I've read by him, and this book is a good example of what he does best: tell of pretty ordinary people, in an intelligently constructed fantastical world, dealing with problems in believable and sensible -- if not always successful -- fashions.

Review: Victims of the Nova, by John Brunner

Review: Victims of the Nova, by John Brunner (1962, 1963, 1965, revised 1969, 1974, 1981, omnibus edition 1989)

by Rich Horton

Early John Brunner novels, I have learned, are a wonderful source of thoroughly competent SF adventure. My experience with Brunner in my younger years was probably not atypical. I first read Stand on Zanzibar, because it was a Hugo winner, and I liked it a fair amount, respected it even more. I read another novel from his "late" period, Total Eclipse, and liked it also. I shied away from other "mature" Brunner novels, like The Shockwave Rider and The Sheep Look Up, mostly out of fear that they would be downers. 

I did read a couple shorter Brunner novels from the middle or late part of his career, The Dramaturges of Yan and The Infinitive of Go. Neither seemed all that ambitious, and I thought The Dramaturges of Yan decent and The Infinitive of Go thoroughly awful.

Then, as part of my Ace Double reading project, I encountered several early Brunner novels. I knew that he had been very prolific, and that his early work was regarded as hackwork. And so I suppose it is -- but it's extremely good hackwork. The early Brunner novels I have read have one characteristic in common -- they are fun. They do not entirely lack ambition, either -- usually they treat at least reasonably interesting issues, though often somewhat rapidly -- one might say superficially. One of these Ace Doubles included The Repairmen of Cyclops. This book is one of three novels about the aftermath of a nova which destroyed a colony planet called Zarathustra. A number of ships escaped, but with limited supplies and no well-defined destination. Some of these ships reached habitable planets, but the survivors tended to lapse into barbarism.

In this space I have previously posted reviews of Castaways' World and The Repairmen of Cyclops. I figured it was time to post a review of Secret Agent of Terra -- and why not just assemble all three into a review of the omnibus. So here we are!

The other two novels were Castaway's World and Secret Agent of Terra. Brunner later revised them both, retitling the first Polymath and the second The Avengers of Carrig. An omnibus of all three novels (The Repairmen of Cyclops very lightly revised) was published in the UK in 1989 as Victims of the Nova.

Polymath was first published in 1963 as Castaways' World (half of an Ace Double), and the revised version under the new title in 1974 by DAW. It is set in the immediate aftermath of two ships from Zarathustra crashlanding on a planet. The viewpoint character is Lex, who turns out to have been in training to be a polymath. A polymath is an enhanced individual who serves at the point man for colonizing a new planet. Lex has many but not all of the skills a polymath would have -- what he mostly lacks is specific knowledge of this particular randomly arrived at planet. His starship crashed on the seashore. After a long winter his group has survived, outside the ship, and indeed their ship has foundered in the ocean. It is clear that they will have to make a permanent life on the planet, with limited resources. 

The other group crashed inland, and they holed up in the ship over the winter. But as spring arrives it seems they have all died. The seaside group begins to set up the rudiments of a colony. There are stresses, many centered about a promiscuous young woman named Delvia. In particular, a teenaged girl has formed a lesbian attraction to Delvia, only to be rejected when the older woman finds men available. 

Then an expedition is sent to the site of the inland starship. It turns out this group has survived, but under terrible conditions. They continue to believe that they will be able to refurbish their ship and head for another, more hospitable, world. The Captain has basically enslaved the passengers. Naturally they resent the comparative success of Lex's group -- setting up a dramatic resolution. The novel is very enjoyable, often thought-provoking though at times a bit forced -- good stuff if short of great.

The Avengers of Carrig was first published in 1962 as Secret Agent of Terra. It was also an Ace Double half. Its revision came out in 1969 from Dell (there was also a later DAW edition).

This book is set several hundred years after the Zarathustra disaster. Carrig is a major trade center on one of the Zarathustra Refugee Planets. By this time the Corps Galactia has monitors on each of the ZRPs, trying to prevent ugly incidents like a planet being enslaved by its neighbors, but otherwise letting them develop at their own pace. 

One Trader Heron comes to Carrig in time for the yearly kinghunt, in which the leading young men of Carrig hunt a dragonlike local creature, the parradile. The one who kills the parradile king becomes the ruler of the city. This year a promising young man is favored to become the first new ruler in 18 years. But a mysterious visitor has come to town with Heron. First he kills the Trader (who is of course a Corps Galactia agent), then he uses his blaster (Galactic tech) to kill the parradile and take over. 

The death of Heron leads the Corps to investigate. Young probationer Maddalena Santos, whose unpleasant attitude has nearly led to her expulsion from the Corps, gets the job, but her ship is shot down. Luckily she lands near the northern sanctuary, which turns out to be the remnants of the original Zarathustra spaceship. There she meets the young man who had been expected to kill the parradile king -- he has had to flee the new rulers of Carrig, who have forced the population to labor in uranium mines. The two eventually hatch a plot to oust the new ruler of Carrig -- in the process, of course, achieving Santos's goal of hunting down the Galactic renegades. They also learn an important secret about the parradiles that will change Carrig forever.

The ending is a bit odd and abrupt -- overdetermined would be the word I'd use. Still, it's a fun novel. Probably the least of the three ZRP novels, but still a good read.

The Repairmen of Cyclops is the third ZRP novel. It was serialized in Fantastic, January and February 1965, and published as half an Ace Double a couple of months later. DAW's reprint appeared in 1981.

The novel is set about 20 years after The Avengers of Carrig. By this time 21 ZRP planets have been discovered by the human Galactic society. Interactions with those planets are kept to a minimum, however -- it is felt that allowing them to develop on their own is preferable from the point of view of encouraging vibrant new cultures and ideas. The flipside of course is that many people, especially on the more primitive of these worlds, live perhaps unnecessary lives of poverty and misery.

Cyclops is not a ZRP, but a citizen of Cyclops was involved in the scheme to harvest nuclear material using the people of Carrig. The government of Cyclops, led by the authoritarian woman Alura Quisp, now favors a policy of encouraging Galactic intervention in the ZRPs, ostensibly to uplift their inhabitants to Galactic civilization. This novel opens with Quisp's lover hunting a wolfshark, and losing a leg in the process. He is rescued by a local fisherman, and taken to the nearest hospital, which happens to be run by the Galactic Patrol, or Corps, instead of Cyclops. The Patrol has much better facilities, and they discover that the leg the wolfshark chewed off wasn't the man's own leg.

Maddalena Santos returns, now visiting her old boss (who also appeared in The Avengers of Carrig) at the base on Cyclops. She is bored after spending 20 years not interfering on a primitive planet. So she gladly gets involved in the mystery of the anomalous leg. Also involved are her boss, and the fisherman, really a boy, who rescued the shark hunter. We quickly gather what's really going on -- lacking regeneration tech, a doctor on Cyclops has instead been repairing patients with parts taken from people kidnapped from yet another ZRP. It is up to Maddalena and the others to stop these people -- a job complicated by the aging Alura Quisp's desire for a new young body, and by her willingness to take extreme political steps to interfere with the Corps.

As with so many novels from this period (Brunner's and others), it sets up the situation rather nicely, then rushes way too swiftly to a conclusion. And like The Avengers of Carrig, the ending is perhaps "overdetermined" -- by which I mean that the good guys win very easily, and as it were in multiple ways. I still quite liked it.

I continue to find "early Brunner" great fun. I don't really want to oversell his early work -- it's often rushed, the worldbuilding is not terribly impressive, there are plenty of implausibilities. We're not talking lost classics here, nor novels that were unfairly deprived of Hugos. But almost without exception, the several pre-Stand on Zanzibar Brunner novels that I have read in the past year or so have been unpretentious, somewhat original, thoughtful, and purely enjoyable. 

Review: The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe

Review: The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe

by Rich Horton

My latest read for the book club I'm a member of was Megan O'Keefe's 2023 novel The Blighted Stars, the first in a trilogy (collectively called The Devoured Worlds) which was completed rapidly with The Fractured Dark (2023) and The Bound Worlds (2024). The entire trilogy was written during the pandemic, and there is certainly an infectious agent driving much of the plot -- but O'Keefe says she doesn't think of it as a "pandemic novel" and I think in many ways she may be right. At any rate, I read the book quickly, with a fair amount of enjoyment and also lots of reservations. I will say however that encountering books like this is one of the benefits of being in a book club, because I doubt I'd have read it otherwise, and while I can't call it great I can say I was happy enough to read it. (I should add that I did a sort of hybrid reading -- the audiobook on my daily commute, but the print version at home. The audiobook is read, quite well, by Ciaran Saward.)

O'Keefe published her first novel, Steal the Sky, in 2016, part of a fantasy trilogy, The Scorched Continent. A space opera trilogy, The Protectorate, followed. So one might say she's a "trilogist"! (She's also published a couple of short stories, a couple of novellas (one set in the Scorched Continent universe), and, just this year, a standalone space opera, The Two Lies of Faven Sythe.)

The Blighted Stars opens with two starships, the Amaranth and the Einkorn, orbiting a world called "Sixth Cradle" -- as it is the sixth known Earthlike world that may serve as a "cradle" for humanity -- which, we soon realize, lives mostly in space after Earth and the other "cradles" have been overrun by "the shroud". Tarquin Mercator is the son of Acaelus Mercator, the leader of the Mercator corporation, one of the five MERIT companies that rule humanity. Tarquin is a geologist, a good scientist but painfully aware that he doesn't have the ruthlessness required to lead Mercator. He is on this mission planning to prove once and for all that the "shroud" that has blighted Earth and the other cradles was not caused by Mercator -- for Mercator's power is derived from their monopoly on the mining of relkatite, a substance critical for the warp drives of their starships, and for many other aspects of the technology that humanity uses.

There are some other key aspects of this future. One of the most important is the use of brain scans which can be download into "printed" bodies, achieving extended life spans in more or less young and healthy bodies -- though this process is limited because one must have died before being reprinted, and the repeated experience of death stresses the brain states enough that eventually one "cracks" -- goes insane. On the political side, this is a seriously class-based society, with family members of the corporations at the top, employees of the corporation at the next level, and so on -- and access to the reprinting options among other privileges is controlled by the corporations. 

Finally, there is a political opposition: Unionists and Conservators, respectively the more political and more revolutionary and violent branches of the people who want to overthrow the corporate ruling structure. And the Conservators, at least, are convinced that it is Mercator's mining of relkatite that has brought the "shroud" to all the cradle worlds. One of the Conservator leaders, Naira Sharp, had been Acaelus Mercator's "exemplar" -- essentially, a bodyguard -- until she had defected. She and her fellows have been blowing up starships and the like in the hopes of stopping the mining of relkatite. But Naira had been captured and put on trial, and Tarquin Mercator's testimony about the impossibility of the mining operations causing the shroud had led to her conviction.

So -- I've gone on for a while, but all of the above is backstory. At the opening there is a sudden crisis. The drones used to explore Sixth Cradle don't seem to be functioning. And then the Einkorn opens fire on the Amaranth. This is presumed to be a Conservator plot, and as the Amaranth is about to explode, the only options are to escape to the surface of Sixth Cradle, or to cast one's brain scan back home via ansible. Acaelus announces that he and Tarquin are going to cast home, while his new exemplar, Lockhart, will manage the rest of the crew. But Tarquin disobeys, seeing that Acaelus' plan is to abandon the entire crew. Instead, he helps as many people as possible onto a shuttle, and they desperately descend to the planet, with the help of Ex Lockhart. And we learn immediately that Lockhart is actually Naira Sharp, who has somehow managed to get her brain scan downloaded to the print meant for Lockhart.

(Most readers will realize immediately that among other things this is an "enemies-to-lovers" romance. This isn't a criticism -- that can be, often is, a very tired trope, but O'Keefe handles it quite well here, and there is a nice twist at the end.)

I've gone on longer setting up the novel -- and to some extent I'm trying to hint that the world O'Keefe has built for the trilogy is pretty complex -- and mostly interestingly so. And there are surprising realizations that arise during the story that alter our original expectations. (I did have a hard time making sense of the economics (a problem with lots of SF!) and I thought some of the science rather dodgy.) The bulk of the story, then, is set on the planet's surface. The survivors establish a camp, and Tarquin must navigate their natural suspicion of him as a Mercator heir, while trying to establish a rapport. The hope is to find a way to get to the Einkorn, but the Einkorn isn't communicating. Tarquin and Naira (who he still thinks is Lockhart) begin to reluctantly grow close. Tarquin makes some increasingly shocking discoveries about the planet, beginning with the fact that it too is infected by the shroud, and is thus dying. But there are other mysteries -- the tiny boreholes in the ground, the ore they find that is related to relkatite but not the same, the presence of other creatures that should not have any way of living there, and a realization that there was already a Mercator presence on the planet. Both Tarquin's and Naira's preconceptions about the nature of the shroud and the effects of Mercator mining are shattered. In addition, there are brief interludes from the point of view of the Einkorn itself, and from the point of view of Acaelus, in a new body back in the Solar system. There is the mystery of what happened to Tarquin's mother. And there is an extended (but not unduly so) resolution back home -- obviously a slingshot to the rest of the trilogy.

I am of two minds about this novel. On the good side, the world it is set in is intriguing, with some familiar ideas, yes, but well-handled ones. The central romance is pretty involving -- it kept my interest and I was willing to believe in it. And I would like to see how the political and personal issues are resolved by the end of the trilogy. On the other hand, it's a bit too long -- some judicious editing could probably have cut 20% without harming the novel. Part of this is excessive telling of the characters' thoughts -- this too seems an abiding problem with contemporary SF. (Tell not show isn't an absolute rule, but I think it is important in dealing with interiority, especially as many people don't really understand their motivations and feelings well enough to plausibly relate them the way they are done here.) The prose is solid but also probably needed one more cleanup pass. The characters outside of Tarquin and Naira don't come to life. In the end -- this is decent work but not brilliant. 

Review: Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky

Review: Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky

by Rich Horton

In 1977, the Berkeley, CA, community radio station KPFA began broadcasting a program called Probabilities Unlimited, aimed at interviewing science fiction personalities. Lawrence Davidson was the host, Richard Wolinsky the (accidental) engineer, and the guests were SF writers Richard A. Lupoff and Michael Kurland. Wolinsky quickly became a co-host, and Lupoff joined shortly later. That program still exists today, though after a couple of name changes, and a broadening of focus beyond science fiction and even beyond literature it is now called Bookwaves/Artwaves.

Davidson and Lupoff had a particular interest in veterans of the pulp era of science fiction (say, from the 1920s to the 1950s) and many of their subjects were writer, editors, and fans from that time. But many writers whose careers started much later were also included. The three original hosts (Davidson, Wolinsky, and Lupoff) had all left the show by 2001, but they discussed turning the interviews they had done into a book, which eventually became the book at hand. The book had a long and not entirely smooth road to publication, and in the interim Davidson died (in 2016) and Lupoff died (in 2020, after writing a few versions of his introduction to this volume.)

The book is not strictly speaking transcripts of the interviews that the program featured. Instead, at the suggestion of Bay Area science fiction writer Frank M. Robinson, it is organized by chronology, theme, and author, roughly, so that it ends up being a casual sort of oral history of the genre, from the point of view of writers, editors, and fans. The various entries reproduce excerpts from different interviews -- so that the interviewees can seem to respond to each other, and even contradict each other. This format works very well, really, and we get a fun, gossipy, look behind the scenes of (mostly) the SF magazines, but also books, and even some TV, up through roughly the 1960s. There is a very heavy focus on the pulp era. Lots of interesting anecdotes, at least some of which are true! (For example, Harlan Ellison claims he was at the gathering when L. Ron Hubbard decided to start a religion, which is a bit hard to believe as Ellison only moved to New York after 1953 when he got kicked out of Ohio State.)

There truly is a sort of three perspective view, though the perspectives intersect. All of the interviewees had some professional role in the science fiction (save perhaps Annette McComas and Phyllis White, who were married to J. Francis McComas and "Anthony Boucher" (William Anthony Parker White), the founding editors of F&SF.) But many of these people were fans first, and so the likes of Charles Hornig, Alva Rogers, Robert Bloch, Ted White, and Forrest J. Ackerman among others discuss that aspect. A significant thread follows the notorious fan group the Futurians.

Some of the interesting contributors were important editors as well as writers: H. L. Gold, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, and Larry Shaw. John Campbell died before these interviews started, but he does get a lot of mention -- much very respectful, and some a bit more negative. One publisher was interviewed: Ian Ballantine, the co-founder of Ballantine Books. There are several writers best known for work out of the SF field: Louis L'Amour, William Campbell Gault, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, and Walter Tevis (plus the likes of Alfred Coppel and Kurt Vonnegut, who are famous outside the field but definitely wrote a great deal of SF.)

Besides all those mentioned there are many expected names: Isaac Asimov, A. E. Van Vogt, Ray Bradbury, Jack Williamson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, and Anne McCaffrey for example. And also a lot of now obscure writers, such as Ed Earl Repp, Stuart Byrne, Stanton Coblentz, W. Ryerson Johnson, Frank K. Kelly, Frank Belknap Long, Jane Roberts, Richard Tooker, and Basil Wells.

I've read a lot about the history of SF, and many of the stories retold here were familiar, such as Ellison's tale of the origin of Scientology, or the story behind Mickey Spillane's only SF piece, or how Philip José Farmer wrote a novel supposedly by Kurt Vonnegut's pulp writer character Kilgore Trout -- but even in this case the slant on the episodes, and the details, are new. And there were things I'd never heard of, as with Ellison's story about collecting money he was owed by stealing a typewriter, or E. Hoffman Price visiting H. P. Lovecraft in New Orleans, or Ray Bradbury forging Edgar Wallace's signature on a copy of King Kong in order to get enough money to take a girl on a nice date.

I can't say how big an audience there is for this book these days, though I think there's enough interesting stuff here that most people who care about SF would enjoy it. And for those of us -- of a certain age, perhaps -- who already knew a bit about the writers featured here, and the eras discussed -- this book is gold.

Old Bestseller Review: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

Review: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (with Auguste Maquet)

by Rich Horton

The Three Musketeers is Alexandre Dumas's most famous novel, and for many readers it is their favorite. I read it over 50 years ago, in my teens, and all I really remembered is the part at the beginning where D'Artagnan agrees to duel each of Athos, Porthos, and Aramais; and a general sense that I liked it. I have just reread it -- a combination of listening to a (free) Librivox recording and reading the 1950 translation, by Jacques Le Clercq, in the Modern Library edition. (I actually suspect that the book I read as a teen was the Grosset & Dunlap Junior Illustrated Library version, which was the Le Clercq translation, but abridged to about half the length of the original.)

My quick reaction? It's a very enjoyable novel. But it's not nearly as good as The Count of Monte Cristo, which is one of the most purely fun novels I have ever read. 

The novel was first serialized in a newspaper in 1844. I doubt it has ever been out of print since. It's a long novel, about 600 pages in my edition, though even at that length it's only about half the length of The Count of Monte Cristo. As I said, much of my reading was in the Librivox recording, which was done using an older (so public domain) translation, and which was read by a wide variety of volunteers. All of the readers were acceptable, but to be sure they varied -- some, I thought, got a bit too dramatic in rendering different voices, others read perhaps a bit too quickly -- but on the whole it was a fine production. The Le Clercq translation was better than public domain one used for the audiobook, but not radically so. The Modern Library edition includes a brief bio of Dumas, and an introdcution by Alan Furst, plus some commentary by Margaret Oliphant, Brander Matthews, and G. K. Chesterton. The commentary -- dating to the late 19th and early 20th century -- is interesting, and discusses things like the authorship question, which even by then had been pretty conclusively resolved in favor of Auguste Maquet's significant contributions to the major Dumas novels.

I'll skip biographical information and instead link to my review of The Count of Monte Cristo, which does include a potted biography.

So, to the novel, fairly briefly. And there will be spoilers, as I assume the book is very familiar to many readers, but I'll put some space before the real spoilers.

At the opening, the 17 year old D'Artagnan, in 1825, leaves his native Gascony and heads to Paris, hoping to join the musketeers, who are commanded by one M. Treville, who had known D'Artagnan's father. On the way, he runs into a man at an inn, accompanied by a beautiful woman. The man casually insults him, and also steals the letter of introduction his father had addressed to Treville. D'Artagnan is ready to fight the man immediately, but is given no chance, and he is very intrigued by the woman.

In Paris he meets the three musketeers, as I noted, and manages to be introduced to Treville, who has him assigned to a lesser unit. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, who are already "The Inseperables", invited D'Artagnan into their circle after their scheduled series of duels was interrupted by Cardinal Richelieu's henchmen, allowing D'Artagnan and company fight the Cardinal's men instead, which gave D'Artagnan the chance to impress the others.

For the next while, the book is really involved in setting in motion the main plot. A lot of it deals with the financial precarity of the four men, and also with their "lackeys". This section -- indeed about the first third of the novel -- drags a bit. Still, these eight characters -- the four musketeers and the four lackeys, are nicely differentiated. There is some additional intrigue: D'Artagnan falls in love with his landlord's wife, Madame Bonacieux, who is in the service of the Queen, Anne of Austria. The Queen is in love with one of Charles I of England's main ministers, the Duke of Buckingham. (Buckingham is an historical figure, and it treated somewhat more kindly in this book than his real life story suggests. In real life he was a bisexual libertine, likely James I's lover, and a really bad minister who had a big role in making Charles' reign the disaster it was. While he did possibly dally with Anne of Austria, it was not the desperate affair depicted here.) Anyway, D'Artagnan ends up deputized to recover a gift of diamonds the Queen had made to Buckingham, because the Cardinal had discovered this and planned to embarrass the Queen, his enemy, by revealing that she did not have the diamonds, originally a gift from her husband, Louis XIII.) This is a fine adventure sequence, with the side effect is that D'Artagnan engenders the hatred of Milady Clark, a Frenchwoman who had married an English noble, but who spied for Cardinal Richelieu. And one result of this -- combined with Richelieu's suspicion of all four musketeers -- is that Madame Bonacieux is kidnapped. 

By roughly this time, it is 1628, and the musketeers will be part of the army that the King and Cardinal are sending to La Rochelle, a city held by the Huguenots. The Cardinal is done tolerating the presence of Protestants in France, which had been allowed openly since Henry IV (a Protestant who converted to Catholicism in order to become King ("the throne is worth a Mass")) had issued the Edict of Nantes. So La Rochelle is besieged, and the the English are ready to send ships to support the Huguenots, under Buckingham's command. The Cardinal schemes to stop this ... and our heroes are involved for a complicated variety of reasons, including Athos's personal history, D'Artagnan's multiple intrigues with women (at least three are involved to some degree) and their fortuitous overhearing of the Cardinal and Milady scheming ... All this is resolved in very exciting fashion, with some comic episodes, some breakneck chases, some surprising revelations, and some tragedy. 

I would add that while The Three Musketeers is not exactly punctilious in hewing to true history, some of the critical events in the book are taken directly from historical happenings, so I recommend not boning up in the history of the siege of La Rochelle and such until you finish the novel. (I waited, and I'm glad.)

Spoilers will follow ....

Things I found interesting, and maybe a bit disappointing. One is the way the chief villain morphs from Richelieu to Milady about halfway through the book. Richelieu is just a schemer, who is often sincerely working for the good of France, if in shady ways. But Milady is an out and out psychopath. That can be fascinating, but also a bit overdone. Secondly, you can't help but noticing that by the end, the musketeers for the most part completely fail. They are trying to save Buckingham. He is killed (an historical fact, to be sure.) They are trying to rescue Madame Bonacieux. She is killed. They are trying to foil Richelieu. He succeeds, and by the end realizes that even the execution of Milady is probably to his benefit. 

Indeed this is an oddly nonromantic novel. Athos' only attachment is to his wife -- Milady, who of course he hates. Aramis' love affair is essentially completely offstage. Porthos is involved with a not very attractive somewhat older woman, and his main interest is in her money. D'Artagnan falls for at least three women: Madame Bonacieux, Milady, and Milady's servant Kitty. Now mind you this probably consistent with his character. But he doesn't end up with any of them (and indeed we don't really know what happens to Kitty.)

And finally, the ending is kind of morose. There are two sequels to the novel, sometimes published in as many as five additional volumes. The only famous one of those is the section of the third novel that is sometimes published separately as The Man in the Iron Mask. But even though the story was continued, The Three Musketeers ends as if no sequel was planned or needed, and the four friends are separated. 

None of this means the novel was a failure. It's lots of fun. It's often funny, often exciting. It's a very good adventure novel. But I'll repeat -- The Count of Monte Cristo is peak Dumas. But I know many readers I trust rank them in the opposite order!