Answers to Early Women Science Fiction Writers Quiz

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

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

STAR TREK

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

ALICE MARY NORTON/ANDRE NORTON

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

THE LAST MAN

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

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

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

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

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

CATHERINE L. MOORE

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

AMAZING or FANTASTIC 

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

"SULTANA'S DREAM"

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

JUDITH MERRIL

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

WICCA

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

WONDER WOMAN

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

STAR WARS EPISODE V: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

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

ROSE MACAULAY

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

CORDWAINER SMITH REDISCOVERY AWARD

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

METROPOLIS

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

Quiz: Early Women Science Fiction Writers (etc.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making History, by K. J. Parker

a review by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar

Cinder House, by Freya Marske

What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher

Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz

The Summer War, by Naomi Novik

Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite

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

Best Novel

Best Novelette

Best Short Story

Reviewing the Hugo Nominees for Best Novel: 2026

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

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow

A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor

The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

Retold Review: Travel Arrangements, by M. John Harrison

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

Retold Review: Travel Arrangements, by M. John Harrison

by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remediated Review: Malignos, by Richard Calder

Here's another review that had been lost in the ether since SF Site disappeared. This one is from 2000. 

Remediated Review: Malignos, by Richard Calder

Malignos is an entertaining and baroque work, with a wonderfully imagined "journey to the centre of the Earth" as its centrepiece. It is full of action, full of weird landscapes, full of unusual characters, and it is fast-moving to boot. Definitely an enjoyable and different read.

Richard Calder is the author of such previous novels as Dead Girls and Frenzetta: ostentatiously colourful work, dark-tinged and motivated by a hyperactive imagination. Malignos is set several millennia in the future of Frenzetta. (The main characters of the earlier story are given a nod as characters in a brief tale told by the narrator). Malignos is again very colourful, though Calder's prose style seems perhaps a bit less extravagant than previously. Frenzetta was set relatively shortly after an event called "The Abortion," when "particles" from an alternate universe leaked into our universe, infecting a number of humans so that they became "perverse," and eventually leading to the failure of technology. At the time of Frenzetta the "perverse" have adopted body shapes to fit their conception of themselves: some are rat people, some cat people, and so on. Some time later, the unaltered humans win a war against the "perverse," who are driven underground -- literally.

Thousands of years later, the altered humans seem to have settled on a more or less standard body type, a rather "demonic" form: scales, horns, bat wings, and a tail. They are called demons or goblins or malignos (a word which is both singular and plural). In recent times, the malignos have invaded from their underground strongholds and, after centuries of war, an unstable truce has been declared. Ritchie Pike, the narrator of Malignos, was a noted soldier in that war. But Pike has been exiled from his home, the Darkling Isle (what was Great Britain), to the Pilipinas, because his lover, Gala, is herself a malignos, though a traitor to her kind. Pike and Gala eke out a living. Pike is a sort of private investigator, often heading into the underground strongholds of the malignos with Gala's guidance. Gala is a whore, and Pike is serially unfaithful.

One of Pike's investigations goes bad and Gala is captured by her former family and "simplified" (given a drug which removes her intelligence). Guilt-stricken, Pike decides to travel under the Earth to the legendary malignos capitol, Pandemonium, located at the very centre of the Earth. This journey occupies the great bulk of the novel. It's very well described, as Pike encounters a variety of differing underground environments and features, as well as any number of grotesque characters. Naturally, he finds his way to Pandemonium eventually and discovers that he himself is not quite what he thought.

As I've said, the story is fast-moving and it's a very enjoyable read. On the negative side, a certain amount of the plot is driven by coincidence. Also, the characteristics of the altered future landscape, especially the rationale for it all, seem a bit arbitrary at times and quite a bit strained. Pike himself is something of a cliché as a character: only too world-weary, only too cynical, and generally such an unlikable individual that it's hard to understand what Gala sees in him. But these criticisms aside, the originality of the scenery and Calder's always fecund imagination make the story well worth the reading. This is by no means a masterpiece but it is a sound, different entertainment.

Revived Review: Future on Ice, edited by Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card's reputation has taken a rather well-deserved hit over the past few decades in great part because of his repellent views about homosexuality, but also because the quality of his writing has not quite held up in recent years. As for the first, well, his views are truly repellent. As for the latter -- all I can say is that has happened to many writers over the years, and it should not cause us to denigrate the earlier, greater, work -- and for Card, I would hope readers don't ignore his brilliant Foundation novella "The Originist", nor the "good parts" of his Ender novel Xenocide (mostly included in the Analog story "Gloriously Bright".) 

He also did some fine work as anthologist with the pair of anthologies discussed her (in a review I did for SF Site in 1999), and as a publisher with the nice online magazine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, which ran from 2005 to 2019.

Indeed, looking back on these anthologies -- the one I review here (Future on Ice) as well as its companion (Future on Fire) I have to say there truly represent an excellent portrait of the best SF of the 1980s.

Revived Review: Future on Ice, edited by Orson Scott Card

This anthology was planned as a companion to Card's Future on Fire (1991), and together the two were meant to showcase the best short science fiction of the 1980s. However, for one reason or another, some eight years have elapsed before publication of Future on Ice. Immediacy is thus lost, but a certain perspective is gained: it's valuable to reread these pieces more than a decade after the latest of them was first published. Apparently Card made the selections in 1989 (and, in fact, the stories are all from 1983-1987, with fully half of the 18 first appearing in 1985 alone), but for the most part, his choices stand up brilliantly. This is quite legitimately an anthology which can stand on its own as a "Best of the 80s" (even though Card intended it to stand not on its own, but rather to be paired with Future on Fire): no doubt these aren't the very best 18 stories from that decade, but on any given day, they'll do.

It's not clear to me whether Card meant the titles of the anthologies to reflect the nature of the stories within, but these 18 may, perhaps, have a cooler effect than the "hotter" stories in the earlier anthology. And, perhaps, it's no coincidence that this book includes a story called "Snow," while Future on Fire included "Fire Zone Emerald" and "I Am the Burning Bush."

My favourite story here, and in my opinion one of the best SF stories of all time, is Nancy Kress' "Out of All Them Bright Stars" (winner of the 1985 Nebula for Best Short Story). This quiet, quiet, story, about a waitress in a diner and her encounter with an alien, illustrates as clearly as I can imagine the use of SF to examine human nature. It's a story that simply wouldn't work without being SF, without aliens, or without the implication of star travel, but its theme is all about what's within us. Lovely writing, perfect characters: it's one of those stories that just stops me dead and makes me think for some time after I finish it.

Several other stories included won major SF awards. Among them, I think Greg Bear's "Blood Music" (winner of both Hugo and Nebula for Best Novelette), a truly terrifying story about the consequences of engineering bacteria-sized microchips and using them to maintain the body's health, holds up best. In this story, Bear took his idea and ran with it to the fullest extent, facing every implication. A story that is similarly chilling in implication, John Varley's novella "Press Enter []" (also winner of both the Hugo and Nebula), doesn't seem to hold up quite as well. His central notion of computers linking up and taking over really isn't very new (cf. Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" for just one example), and his mechanism, while well-depicted and creepy, doesn't convince. (The idea is still being used, in one form or another, and a much newer example which convinced me a lot more is in Ken MacLeod's novel The Star Fraction (1995).) Nor does the (well-depicted and engaging but also rather creepy) love story quite convince. But, the story is still a great read.

Also among my personal favourite 80s stories are "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler, "Snow" by John Crowley, and "The Pure Product" by John Kessel. The first is a moving story of life in near-future Los Angeles, after a plague has destroyed the speech centers of everyone. The horror of the loss of communication with other people is very well portrayed. "Snow" is a beautiful fable about memory and love. A woman of the jet set records incidents from her life over many years, and her one-time gigolo/lover/husband plays them back after her death. But the technology only allows random access to these "memories", and the memories degrade over time. The effect is quiet and profound. "The Pure Product" is quite another thing. A man (apparently from the future) goes on a rampage through 80s North America. The story is fast moving and scary. At one level, it's a harder-edged take on the same theme as C.L. Moore's classic "Vintage Season," but at another level, we worry that the empathy-deficient people from the future are us.

Any anthology which aims to be "definitive" will surely include prominent stories like those mentioned above, and like George R.R. Martin's Nebula winner "Portraits of His Children" and Isaac Asimov's well-known late story, "Robot Dreams". But I like an anthology to include some surprises, as well. S.C. Sykes has only published a couple of stories and one novel (Red Genesis (1991)) to my knowledge. "Rockabye Baby" is included here, and it's a fine story about a man who becomes paralyzed in an accident. He adjusts to his condition, and develops some unexpected facets. Then he has a chance to regain the use of his limbs, but at a surprising (and logical) cost. The story worked very well for me right until the end, where I thought there were a few missteps, but the central dilemma is brilliantly presented.

Another writer who hasn't published a whole lot (only one novel, (Station Gehenna (1982)), is Canadian Andrew Weiner. His quirky short stories, however, appeared with some regularity throughout the 80s, and Card has chosen the intriguing "Klein's Machine" for this book. It's about a science fiction fan who becomes obsessed with the idea of time travel, finally convincing himself that he has travelled far into the future. Upon his return, a psychiatrist cures him, and he becomes "normal." Ultimately, it's a meta-fiction meditation on what makes SF readers dream.

Card also chooses stories by Lisa Goldstein, Gregory Benford, David Zindell, C. J. Cherryh, Walter Jon Williams, Karen Joy Fowler, Lewis Shiner, and himself. Probably the only story in the book which doesn't quite seem to me to belong is Asimov's slight, gimmicky, "Robot Dreams." Of course, one could quibble about some other choices: likely, I'd have taken Fowler's "The Faithful Companion at Forty" or "Game Night at the Fox and Goose" over Card's pick of "Face Value," and I'd have taken Card's own utterly wonderful Foundation story "The Originist" over "The Fringe," but in neither case has he chosen a bad story. This anthology eminently succeeds in presenting a selection which represents the short SF of the 1980s at its best, and at its widest variety.

Reinstituted Review: The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford

This is another review I did for SF Site, and thus am recovering after that wonderful pioneering website went dark. As ever, I note that it's about a quarter century old, and I haven't updated the references within the review -- so I note for example that the "new English small press" Big Engine has, alas, long been defunct -- it was a brave effort (led by Ben Jeapes) but it's cruel world out there for small publishers.

Reinstituted Review: The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford

a review by Rich Horton

David Langford is justly famous in the SF world for his critical writing and his fan writing, much of the latter done for his fanzine Ansible. Both Ansible and Langford have won multiple Hugos in the fan categories. But an odd side-effect of Langford's many fan writing awards is that people often seem unaware that he is a very accomplished "pro" writer. He has published several novels and quite a number of short stories, many of them very good, like his wonderful G. K. Chesterton pastiche of a few years ago, "The Spear of the Sun". But we can't say any more that Langford's pro writing goes unnoticed, for he won the 2001 Hugo for Best Short Story for "Different Kinds of Darkness".

Some time ago I decided to rectify my own failings in appreciating Mr. Langford's fiction-writing side by searching out one of his novels, and the first one I chose was The Leaky Establishment. This novel intrigued me because I've worked my whole life in places which have points of resemblance with the nuclear research center where the novel is set. (Especially over college summers, when I worked at both Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory.) At the time it was out of print, and in fact I got my copy directly from the author, but happily it has been made available in a nice new edition from Big Engine, a new English small press which has begun a rather intriguing line of SF, some reprints and some new novels and story collections. [The novel was first published by Frederick Muller in the UK in 1984, and reprinted in 1985 by Sphere (that's the copy I have), and after Big Engine went under in 2003 it was reprinted again by Cosmos Books.]

This novel, it should be mentioned, is not strictly speaking SF, though it is fiction about science. It is more generally in the comic tradition of Kingsley Amis, to name just one writer. The novel features Roy Tappen, a cynical scientist at NUTC, a fictional British nuclear center. By mistake, he manages to smuggle a warhead out of the place, and takes it home. When he finds it he realizes he needs to take it back, but security has been tightened, and he can't just waltz back in with it.

The story follows his constantly foiled attempts to sneak it back in, unwillingly abetted by his computer programmer friend, annoyed by his wife walking out (not too pleased at sleeping in the same house with a nuclear warhead), by a suspicious but stupid security officer, by his nutty neighbor, an active anti-Nuclear campaigner and alternative energy enthusiast, by a moronic newsman who keeps swallowing his hoax stories whole, and of course by a parade of silly bosses. Page by page the book is hilarious: almost too densely so, in that as a novel it loses momentum. Still, it's neatly plotted, with a particularly nice resolution. And the bureaucratic tics of a government facility, exacerbated by nuclear security requirements, ring very true indeed.

Langford's writing is very fine in general, and this particular novel is a delightful example of his abilities with fiction. Definitely recommended.

Repaired SF Site Review: Strange Trades, by Paul Di Filippo

Here's another review risen from the ashes of SF Site. The review itself didn't really need "repair" -- but I'm posting it in part to comfort (?) the author of Strange Trades, who will soon be in possession of a brand new hip. Get well quick, Paul!

Repaired SF Site Review: Strange Trades, by Paul Di Filippo

a review by Rich Horton

Strange Trades, Paul Di Filippo's fifth collection of short fiction, is one of the most satisfying SF single-author collections I have read in some time. As the title announces, the stories are concerned with people at work. Di Filippo explores a variety of science-fictional jobs, some strange due to technological advances, others due to marginal or experimental economics, others because they're set in unusual milieus.

One of Di Filippo's favourite themes is people living on the edges of society, or in the cracks. In several stories in this book, he depicts, with sympathy, a cooperative economy built in those "cracks." One story, "Harlem Nova," mentions Levi-Strauss' term bricoleurs, for "a class of people who live as scavengers, living on the odds and ends the rest of society discards." And the heroes of "Harlem Nova," "Spondulix," "Karuna, Inc." and maybe even "Conspiracy of Noise," four of the best stories in the book, are to one extent or another bricoleurs. "Harlem Nova" looks straightforwardly at the clash between the utopian impulse and the wishes of people who really don't function well in society, as the project leader of an urban renewal effort in what appears to be a very positive future encounters some people he will be forced to evict. "Conspiracy of Noise" is a bit odder, featuring a shiftless young man who gets a job working for a mysterious company. The secret is in what the company is working towards, hinted at nicely by a series of misreadings of simple messages as the story proceeds. Ultimately, the message here is that a truly healthy economy must have a chaotic, or at least noisy, element, though in this story the message is rather ambiguous in nature. "Spondulix" is a rather sunny story of a 40ish man, the owner of a small sandwich shop, who gets involved in an extended scheme to create an economy based on scrip. And "Karuna, Inc.", one of my favourite stories of the year 2001, is, as Di Filippo says, a "dark cousin" to "Spondulix": dark because of some real tragedy, and because it features some truly (even cartoonishly) evil villains. But it's also an optimistic story, in its view of basic human nature, and in the depiction of the title corporation, with its mission:

"the creation of environmentally responsible, non-exploitive, domestic-based, maximally creative jobs... the primary goal of the subsidiaries shall always be the full employment of all workers... it is to be hoped that the delivery of high-quality goods and services will be a byproduct..."

Di Filippo also indulges in some classical SFnal extrapolation. "Agents" looks at computer-based personality simulations which handle interactions in the "net," and at what might happen if one such "agent" became autonomous. "Skintwister" and "Fleshflowers" follow the career of Dr. Strode, a very talented "peeker": a man who uses psychokinetic powers to heal people by manipulating them at the cellular level. The first story deals with a crisis in his career as, basically, a plastic surgeon; the second with his subsequent time on Mars dealing with an alien infestation. "SUITs" is a mordant and effective fable about robotic security personnel.

The other stories are perhaps less easy to fit into categories. "Kid Charlemagne," as the author acknowledges, is a story strongly influenced by J.G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands stories: it's set in an isolated lush resort, and features the inevitably doomed romance of a mysterious musician and a spoiled rich girl. "The Boredom Factory" is a cynical fable that is pretty well described by its title. And "The Mill" -- well, for one thing, "The Mill" is my favourite story in this book: I read it and loved it in Amazing Stories back in 1991, and I loved it as much on rereading it just now. It's a long story that in some ways seems reminiscent of Jack Vance. It follows, sometimes indirectly, the life of a man named Charlie Cairncross, as he grows up in the valley of the Mill. The Mill is a series of factory buildings devoted to producing "luxcloth," which is bought by the immortal Factor for interstellar distribution. In the background are such nice SFnal ideas as the interstellar milieu into which this colony planet obscurely fits, the true nature of the Factor, the "luxcloth," and so on. But the centre of the story is the close depiction of the circumscribed society of the factory villages. This society seems real, and its eventual fate is well-portrayed, the characters are sympathetic and worth reading about, and the concluding scene is truly moving. You couldn't call this story ignored -- it did for example make the Locus Reader's Poll list of Best Novellas of 1991, but it does seem under-appreciated (perhaps because of its publication in Amazing: at that time a beautiful large-format magazine which published some striking material, but which never really achieved much success as far as circulation is concerned).

I recommend this collection of stories very highly. Di Filippo is a compulsively engaging writer -- witty and imaginative, and fond of his characters, so that they are fun to spend time with, and fun to root for (mostly!). This book delivers on its implicit thematic promise, offering a nice distribution of SFnal explorations of people at work, even while collecting stories from all phases of the author's career. Excellent stuff.

Revivified Review: Crown Duel and Court Duel, by Sherwood Smith

This review was written originally in 1999 for SF Site, about two YA novels by Sherwood Smith, one called Crown Duel (1997), the second Court Duel (1998). At the time I rather grumpily concluded my review with a plea to buy the books quickly as they might go out of print soon. The publisher's representative politely but a bit peevedly responded that they actually were pleased with the novels and would be keeping them in print. And they were true to their word -- in 2002 the two novels were rereleased in a single combined volume, simply called Crown Duel. (Apparently, Sherwood originally wrote the novels as one unified story -- though it's fair to say that original two parts are divided sensibly, and really do work has halves of a diptych.) As far as I can tell, the books remain in print -- at least, they are available at Amazon -- and they are considered among Sherwood Smith's most popular novels. (For me, they rank that the top of her work, along with Inda. They really are immensely pleasurable reads.)

I've made mild revisions to the text below, mainly to avoid really out-of-date remarks.

Revivified Review: Crown Duel and Court Duel, by Sherwood Smith

by Rich Horton

Many longtime readers of SF and fantasy cut their teeth on young adult or juvenile novels: for SF, perhaps Robert A. Heinlein, or Andre Norton, or Sylvia Louise Engdahl; for fantasy, The Hobbit, or Norton again, or perhaps Lloyd Alexander.

I remember with fondness the days of the so-called "Juvenile to Please Adults" books, and I still read with pleasure Heinlein's juveniles, for instance. I celebrate all attempts to publish full-fledged SF/fantasy for young adults which will still be good reading for, say, me. [To this end, Tor's Jupiter series of YA Science Fiction deserves praise, and Jane Yolen's now defunct series of YA Fantasy, published by Harcourt Brace, deserves praise, and lamentations at its end. -- The Jupiter series is also long gone, and really didn't last very long, alas!]

Sherwood Smith, co-author (with Dave Trowbridge) of the much prized, hard to find, space opera series collectively titled Exordium, and of a few novels with Andre Norton, wrote five YA fantasies for Jane Yolen Books. The Wren Trilogy is an engaging series of books about 12-year old Wren, and her discovery of her magical abilities amidst threats of war. Better still are The Crown and Court Duet [now simply the one book Crown Duel (with one pendant short story)]: two books set apparently in Wren's world [actually the Wren books are set in a different universe] featuring 16-year old Countess Meliara Astiar, and her bumbling but passionate entrance into the worlds of politics and war.

The first book is Crown Duel. Meliara, who narrates the books, and her brother Bran are struggling to make ends meet after the death of their father. They are now Count and Countess of Tlanth, a remote hilly portion of the Kingdom of Remalna. The corrupt King is raising taxes, and, worse, appears to be ready to violate the Covenant humans have with the mysterious hill folk. Humans have agreed to leave the forests undisturbed, especially the beautiful colourwood trees, and in exchange the Hill Folk supply the humans with magical firewood.

Meliara and Bran are very poor, partly from trying to deflect the burden of taxation from their people--thus, they live more like peasants than peers. The two are just reaching the age at which they will start to pair, and eventually marry. But Meliara, at least, evinces no interest in such things.

As the book opens, the political situation comes to a head, and Meliara, Bran and their people rise in revolt. Smith entertainingly describes an ill-run war, which after some early success leads to humiliating defeat for the undermanned Tlanth people. Meliara is captured, and taken to the Remalna capital city. She encounters the Marquis of Shevraeth, proud commander of the King's forces, whose skill had turned the tide against Tlanth, and takes a sudden fierce dislike to him. The book continues with harrowing escapes, nicely described wandering through the backroads of the country, and a final confrontation with the King's forces.

Court Duel takes up after the war. The bad King has been vanquished, and the Marquis of Shevraeth is the leading candidate for the throne. The court is full of political wiles, however, and some people think Meliara or her brother should either push their own claims or support another.

Meliara at last consents to spend some time in court and we are treated to some entertaining descriptions of artificial court life and manners, including details resulting from things like not being able to use wood for furniture. She is a fish out of water, and finally finds a secret friend, with whom she exchanges a series of letters in which she is able to express her concerns about the false nature of court life, even as she begins to understand the reasoning behind the rules.

Meliara remains confused about who her real friends are, and about whether the Marquis -- who is clearly capable but whom she still distrusts -- or some other claimant, should be King. The matter is pushed to a head by a very interesting, slightly underused (I thought) character, a man named Flauvic who also has a claim to the throne, and who has spent some time learning powerful magic in a foreign kingdom. The general shape of the ending is easy to see in advance, but the details are nicely revealed.

Both these books are, first of all, great reads. Very few books keep me up at night to finish them, but Crown Duel did, and I took an unplanned extended lunch break to finish Court Duel. They are nice formal contrasts: the first almost all action and war, the second more magic and formal court life. If I had a mild complaint, it would be that in both books the Hill Folk serve as sort of dei ex machinae. But this is minor, and does little to detract from the pleasures of reading these two books.

I'm not quite ready to rule on how these would appeal to the supposed target age group (teens, I would think), though I'm sure I'd have loved them then, just as I did now. Among other things, they feature a well-done, very understated, sexual tension, never vulgar, that greatly enhances our interest in the main characters. The world they inhabit isn't quite fully-furnished; I don't think books these short can do that, but the odd details are telling and nice. Highly recommended. [I do believe these have proved popular with younger readers as well as adults -- and the details of the world they are set in are very much filled in in a long series of novels Smith has published, set in various places in this world, and set over a long time. There is one prequel to Crown Duel: A Stranger to Command (2008).]

Repurposed Review: To the Stars (aka Return to Tomorrow), by L. Ron Hubbard

This an extended review I wrote back in 2001, on the occasion of the nomination of L. Ron Hubbard's short novel "To the Stars" for a Retro Hugo. I go into some detail at the end to explain why I found the novel both better written than anything else I've read by him, and also morally vile.

It appeared, interestingly, in the February and March 1950 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. The April issue featured another  Hubbard story ("Greed"), and then the May issue featured "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science". A few more stories appeared in other SF magazines in 1950, but, essentially, the Dianetics essay marked a very sharp divide in Hubbard's career: he wrote no more science fiction after than (until Battlefield Earth.) His only later appearances in Astounding were Dianetics-related articles. "To the Stars" itself was published in book from by Ace in 1954 as Return to Tomorrow. I've only read the Astounding serial, so I don't know if the book version differed. In 2004 it was reprinted under the original title and subsequent editions have retained that title.

To the Stars (aka Return to Tomorrow), by L. Ron Hubbard

by Rich Horton

As I've been reading late '40s and 1950 issues of Astounding, I've come across several Hubbard stories. They are bad -- that's all I can say. Very carelessly written, very silly in plotting and very stupid as far as the SFnal content. The worst of the bunch are the putrid "Ole Doc Methusaleh" stories -- an unsympathetic and uninteresting lead character, with a servile alien slave (who just loves being a slave -- hates it when Doc tries freeing him), and with an insipid beautiful girl per story, plus just idiotic "medical" mysteries for plot material.  Gaah!  

Basically, I expected the same of "To The Stars". I have to admit, I didn't get that. "To the Stars" is much more tightly written than the rest of the Hubbard I've read. The characters are implausible and stereotypical, but still more deeply felt, more lived in. The story is actually gripping, and Hubbard takes on some intriguing philosophical ideas, with some interesting twists on them. And at times it's genuinely moving.

So, is it good?  Here I have to depart somewhat from the purely fictional values. Though I will say that the above paragraph may overstate things a bit -- to some extent the above is a reaction to my low expectations, which were exceeded, and while the story is what I've said, don't forget the caveats -- stereotypical characters, in particular.  And while the prose is better than Hubbard's average, it's not great stuff. And the ideas -- well, it's perhaps necessary to discuss the story, and spoil it, to deal with those. For those who don't wish to have the story spoiled (though why would most people care about this one?), I'll say briefly that in the end I found some of the ideas presented sufficiently repugnant that even if the story were wholly successful on craft terms I wouldn't recommend it.

I'll describe the story in more detail, then, below, after some spoiler space.

--------

Spoilers follow.

--------

The story opens with a bit of infodump. Humanity has more or less spread to the stars, but light-speed restrictions apply. As a result, colonies are formed, but mostly abandoned. Only a few ships make what is called "The Long Passage". The main drawback is that the crewmen of the long passage find themselves isolated from their home cultures -- by the time they've made a loop around a few planets and returned to Earth, though they may be only a few months older, decades will have passed on Earth. For that reason, while insystem spaceship jobs are somewhat prized, very few people sign up for interstellar jobs.

This setup is not unfamiliar -- it's just a step away from implying Anderson's Kith, or Heinlein's Free Traders, or, much later, Vinge's Qeng Ho. But Hubbard doesn't go quite that far -- his long passage folk seem on the verge of creating such a society -- a society of space-based nomadic folk -- but they don't quite do that.

Anyway, the main character of "To The Stars" is Alan Corday, described as an Engineer Tenth Class. Apparently, Engineering is a hereditary position, and an Engineer Tenth is high status, but Alan's father has blown the family fortune, so he's kind of stuck -- he has a certain position to maintain, which he can't afford. He wants to marry his girl, but her family won't let him as long as he's broke. So he tells her he's going to work his way to Mars, and make his fortune there, then return in 5 years and they'll get married. We meet Alan at the spaceship yard -- every ship turns him down, as an Engineer Tenth Class is overqualified.  Finally he meets and down and out bunch, led by a charismatic captain, and before you know it, he's been drugged and shanghaied onto the Hound of Heaven. It's no surprise when we find that the Hound is on the Long Passage.

Alan finds himself designated something like Third Mate in Training. The captain treats him viciously, while Alan becomes motivated to repair the beatup ship, believing he'll turn it around in time to get back to Earth. He also gets involved in a mutiny attempt -- only to see it fail and one of the leaders be spaced. Eventually they return to Earth. Alan hasn't been paying attention to objective time -- he imagines only a few years have passed, but actually 60 or so years have passed. Alan's world is completely different -- two political upheavals have occurred, and now engineers are detested as former oppressors. Somehow he finds his fiancee -- she's completely nuts, apparently having constructed a fantasy in which Alan returned as promised and married her.

Bitter, Alan returns to the ship, as there is no place for him on Earth. The rest of the story follows his hardening into a potential ship captain, as the ship's crew exterminates an alien race on another planet, then returns to Earth, only to find Earth radically changed again -- and this time, the Earthmen try to steal the ship's cargo. After a bitter battle, the old Captain dies, but Alan manages to save the ship and vanquish the Earthmen. He finds himself promoted to Captain, and he finds a letter from the old Captain, telling him his mission. Oh, and then he tricks an engineer from Earth to get on the ship, knocks him out and kidnaps him to be a replacement engineer, despite the fact that this man is married.

Here's the deal -- the Long Passage is essential for humanity. So all this stuff is justified. The Captain's coldness and cruelty are necessary to create a new leader. The genocide of aliens is necessary to keep them from doing the same to humans. (Shoot first, try to make friends never.) And of course kidnapping is justified because new people are essential on the Long Passage.  It's all played perfectly straight -- I considered the idea that it was a satire -- after all, humanity is portrayed as pretty much thoroughly bad throughout -- maybe Hubbard was saying "All these evil acts are justified in order to save this evil species" -- if so, that didn't come through well.

The story itself, though broadly implausible in many places, is a pretty decent read, but the message is vile.

Reviews of Fitzgerald, Feeley, Kressel, Morrison, Fraser, etc.

Recent Substack Posts

Here are some recent reviews I've done on my Substack.

Human Voices, by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers

Cumberworld & Farther, by Gregory Feeley

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford

Moth, by James Sallis

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow

The Rainseekers, by Matthew Kressel

Mr American, by George Macdonald Fraser

Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov

Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov

by Rich Horton

[I wrote this back in 1998, when the novel came out. I haven't revised it at all (save for a few bracketed additions] so what I say about the author is very out of date. It turns out that Jablokov took an hiatus from writing (or at least publishing) for nearly a decade after this novel appeared, Since he retunred, in 2006, he has published one more novel (Brain Thief (2010)) and quite a few shorter stories, which have continued to be very interesting.]

Alexander Jablokov's new novel [as of 1998] is Deepdrive.  I've been a fan of Jablokov's ever since reading his first short stories in Asimov's a few years ago.  I really liked his first novel, Carve the Sky, which was "baroque" and artsy, and his third novel, Nimbus, a kind of post-cyberpunk story.  And I've liked a lot of his short stories.

Deepdrive is his latest.  It's an Avon EOS hardcover, and I'd like to praise Avon for their practice of publishing lower-priced books.  Their pbs have been $3.99, and now I've seen a couple of hc's, in smaller packages, for about $15.  I think this is a good approach. [That comment didn't age well!]

Deepdrive itself is set in a busy, well-imagined future.  The solar system is occupied (mostly benignly) by several different species of aliens: the Bgarth are burrowing on Venus, assisting with its terraformation; the Gunners are on Mercury, shooting at the Sun; the Ulanyi are on Earth, living in symbiotic relationships with nomadic human tribes.  And there are plenty more.  But none of the aliens will give humans the secret of the "deepdrive", which allows faster than light travel.  An alien from another species, the Vronnans, has showed up, apparently a refugee from his own people, and he is holed up on Venus.  Rumor says he wants to be rescued, and he might have something important, even a deepdrive, to trade.  Sophonisba Trust assembles a team, somewhat ad hoc, to go after the Vronnan.  The novel follows her and the members of her team, as well as the Vronnan, as a series of disasters propels them willy nilly towards learning more than they might want to know about Vronnans, the lost Martian slowship interstellar expedition, their own motivations, and how Ulanyi, Gunners, and other aliens tie into this.  And also, maybe, the secrets of the deepdrive.

It's all pretty cool, and well-imagined, distinctly "Sterlingesque" (particularly reminiscent of some Shaper-Mechanist stuff, like "Swarm"), and certainly exciting, and yet ...  It never quite won me over.  I dunno why.  Maybe it was too hard to follow all the threads.  Maybe I didn't quite believe in most of the characters (Soph was well done, also her ex-husband Lightfoot, but I was never convinced by the beautiful lesbian Ambryn Chretien or the big bodyguard Elward Bakst, both of whose motivations and abilities seemed to change to whatever the plot required).  But, I'm sort of worried, is my "Sense of Wonder" dulling?  What I mean is, I think maybe 20 years ago all the cool stuff, the aliens, the biotech, the plots within plots, would have overwhelmed me and carried me along.  And it didn't do that for me now.

On balance, I'd still recommend Deepdrive.  But I can't give it full marks. [Which may have been more my fault than Jablokov's!]

Reclaimed Review: Declare, by Tim Powers

Reclaimed Review: Declare, by Tim Powers

I'm reading Tim Powers' The Mills of the Gods just now, and I thought maybe I should repost something I wrote about him. Alas, I didn't write a full review of The Anubis Gates, by far my favorite of his books, when I read it long ago. Indeed, I find I haven't written much about him! But I did write this review, way back in 2001. (Indeed, I posted it on SFF Net on August 30, 2011 -- a terribly innocent time, in retrospect, with an event pending that could probably prompt a Powers-like book, far enough in the future -- it's still too soon now.)

Declare opens with a brief scene featuring a British Intelligence Captain driving a Jeep down Mt. Ararat in 1948, fleeing the deaths of several of his comrades. Then we switch to 1963, and we meet Andrew Hale, who, we learn soon enough, was that Captain in 1948.  He's a lecturer in  English at a University, but his past in Intelligence has caught up with him.  He's told by secret means to meet with his mysterious supervisor/recruiter at the shady, unofficial, branch of the British Intelligence that he has been a member of, and he learns that he is being provided with a rather uncomfortably cover -- he's being charged with treason and murder, which will make his flight to Kuwait and subsequent offer of his services to the Soviets more credible.  The real reason for all this is that in 1948 his mission was to foil whatever the Soviets were trying on Mt. Ararat -- but while he managed to foul up their plans, they also fouled up his plans, in part due to the treachery of Kim Philby, so that the potential for the Soviets to achieve what they want remains -- and now, in 1963, they are ready to try again.

From there the story proceeds on multiple timelines.  We learn in flashbacks of Hale's past -- his mysterious birth in Palestine, his Catholic upbringing by a single mother in the English countryside, his recruitment into a curious side branch of British Intelligence and his first assignment -- to let himself be recruited as a Soviet agent, to work in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941. In Paris his partner agent is a beautiful young Spaniard named Elena Ceniza-Bendiga, and she and Andrew fall in love, but she makes clear that her first allegiance is to international communism.  So when the Nazi's find them out, and they escape and are ordered to Moscow, presumably to be killed as blown agents, he ducks out on her and returns to England, where he learns, more or less, what's really going on.  

There follow episodes in Berlin in 1945, where Hale meets Elena again, as well as Kim Philby, the highly placed spy who Hale has always disliked and mistrusted.  The three meet again on Ararat in 1948, when Hale learns conclusively that Philby is a traitor, and also becomes convinced that Elena has learned to hate him.

A parallel path follows Hale's adventures in the Middle East in 1963, as he manages to get recruited by the Soviets for there new attempt at -- I won't say what -- on Mr. Ararat.  This involves trips to mysterious cities in the desert, meetings with curious entities, and another meeting with Elena and with Kim Philby, who has finally been exposed publically as a spy, and who is looking for escape -- either to France or Russia.  Finally, as we have known, the strange operation called Declare will be resolved, one way or another, on the slopes of Mt. Ararat, near a curious long buried wooden object -- perhaps a ship.

The book is always intriguing, and full of clever supernatural ideas.  The central supernatural entities here are djinni -- which Powers links to fallen angels.  He ties this in with the true stories of Kim Philby and his father, and with T. E. Lawrence, and with some mysterious cities in the Arabian Desert, and with meteorites, and spies, and Catholicism.  I found this all well-imagined, and consistent and comprehensible in a way that, for example, the ghosts in Expiration Date never managed to be for me.  There is also the love story between Elena and Andrew, which is well-told and very well resolved, but which didn't fully work for me, as the emotional element of it never quite came to life for me.  I think the other slight weakness in the novel is a certain implausibility in some of the spy stuff -- basically, it seemed to me that Hale's cover would never have held up as well as it did -- the Russians would have got just a bit skittish, and shot him out of hand.  Not that I'd know.  Powers also manages to work in some of his other recurring themes -- poker, and the injured hero, for two.  It's a very solid effort, just a whisker short of being exceptional, and it takes a place in my pantheon of Powers' books at the second level -- below my favorite, The Anubis Gates, but ranged somewhere with The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides as among the next best.

Rediscovered Review: Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah Ross

I resurrect another review of a rather nice original anthology from a small press, back in 2008. This review originally appeared in Locus, as a Divers Hand review.

Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah J. Ross (Leda (an imprint of Norilana Books, Winnetka, CA), ISBN: 978-1-934169-91-9, $11.95, 307 pages, tpb) February 2008

A review by Rich Horton

“Lace and Blade” is a term coined by Norilana publisher Vera Nazarian, for a sort of romantic subset of Sword and Sorcery: stories where the duels are as likely to be with wits as swords, and where women are as likely as men to wield swords (not to mention wits!). And here is a book composed entirely of such stories. Stories resembling older novels like The Scarlet Pimpernel – or newer novels like Swordspoint. I have to say first that this subgenre fits my tastes: I read more Georgette Heyer and Baroness Orczy than Conan in my formative years. And I add, then, that Lace and Blade delivers exactly what it promises; almost every story satisfies, with plenty of color and passion and wit and magic. I’m not sure any story transcends its mold: and so nothing here pierced me like Richard St. Vier’s rapier, but I really had fun.

A particular highlight is Sherwood Smith’s novella “The Rule of Engagement”, in which a woman is kidnapped by a man who hopes to marry her, and must find a way to engineer her escape without causing political issues, or harm to the man’s retainers. The story is satisfying in its scope, and hints at a fascinating backstory … all part of a grand fantastical history that Smith has been elaborating since childhood, and which is the source of her excellent Inda novels for DAW.

Tanith Lee’s “Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker, Priest” is also great fun – on a ship journey, a couple of swordsmen take a sudden inexplicable dislike to each other, to the point of proposing a duel. But a shipwreck intervenes, and the real story is eventually made clear on the (mostly swordless) island at which they end up. Most readers will see quickly the shape of the story, and the twist, but it remains a delight getting there.

Two stories very nicely use Spanish settings. Robin Wayne Bailey’s “Touch of Moonlight” has a Lady encountering an outlaw – rumored to actually be a ghost – while on a journey to ransom her younger brother. By the end, supernatural beings have been encountered – as well as, of course, more naturally beastly humans. In Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind”, a young man is being pushed to a marriage he fears will be loveless, in order to save his family’s fading fortunes. But the mysterious rider called the Night Wind may change his ideas … again, the reader will recognize immediately what’s going on, but the story still satisfies.

Dave Smeds, in “The Beheaded Queen”, features the most interesting main character, as indicated by the title. And her fate is treated uncompromisingly – her interest is seeing to the future of her son. Madeleine E. Robins’s “Virtue and the Archangel” reminded me just a bit of her wonderful Sarah Tolerance novels (how I wish a publisher would pick them up so she could write more), in telling of a woman led by circumstance to a not very respectable job as a private investigator – here she helps an old school friend to recover a lost jewel.

The other stories come from Diana L. Paxson – an effective tale set in Brazil; Chaz Brenchley – sort of a pendant to his novel Bridge of Dreams, involving enough but perhaps just a bit too much a side trip and not its own journey; and Catherine Asaro, whose story was the only one here to really disappoint me.