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.

Remastered Fantasy Magazine Review: Paper Cities, edited by Ekaterina Sedia

SF Site isn't the only place I reviewed for that has gone defunct. (Not by a long shot, alas!) I also did a number of reviews for Fantasy Magazine. Here's one, of a really fine original anthology, from 2008, that won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology -- but that, alas, seems hardly remembered at all now.

[I thought Fantasy Magazine was defunct -- but perhaps not, as I see there are issues as recently as late 2025 at the Psychopomp site (including some of the reviews I did for them back in the day): Fantasy Magazine.]

Remastered Fantasy Magazine Review: Paper Cities, edited by Ekaterina Sedia (Senses Five Press), ISBN: 978-0-9796246-0-5, $14.95, 288 pages, tpb) April 2008

A review by Rich Horton

Paper Cities is subtitled “An Anthology of Urban Fantasy”. “Ahhh!”, I thought, “A bunch of stories about irruptions of magic in a contemporary city. (Probably either Minneapolis or Seattle, or somewhere in Canada.)” Not sure how many of those I could have stomached all in a row, fine as they can be on occasion. But this book defines “Urban Fantasy” rather more expansively. Indeed, the great bulk of the stories are set in secondary worlds, albeit indeed in cities in those worlds.  There is no question that makes the book more interesting to me. In many cases the “urbanness” of the stories is sort of a side issue, at least in that many of the stories are not in any real sense about the experience of living in an urban environment. Which doesn’t mean they don’t work!

Instead, the single element that marks many of these stories as “urban” fantasy is the way that their fantastical cities are central to the interest of the narrative. That is, they are not just a backdrop, or a convenient setting, but integral to the story. Indeed, these are “stories about cities” more than “stories about living in a city”, if you see what I mean. So Cat Rambo’s  “The Bumblety’s Marble” is believably set in a fantastical city and redolent of that city’s atmosphere, as it tells of a girl happening onto the title marble, then feeling obligated to return to a boy she meets from the underworld who says it is his mother’s heart. And with Jay Lake’s “Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable”, a dark story of the initiation of a girl into an order of “Sisters” in the title city. And “The Title of this Story”, by Stephanie Campisi, about a man whose job is to assign names to things, and his difficulty titling an obscure religious book from a distant village. And Ben Peek’s “The Funeral, Ruined”, about a city of cremation ovens and Morticians, and a woman mourning her lover, whom she calls dead – but he, perhaps, disagrees. Richard Parks’s “Courting the Lady Scythe” tells of a lower class man’s infatuation with the Lady who serves as the executioner in his town. The results of his scheme to meet her are predictable, but well told. The story is at one level fairly traditional fantasy, but it does tell – sort of behind its ostensible central story – the story of a city.

Other fine stories turn on striking central images, as with Vylar Kaftan’s “Godivy”, a very odd very short piece about an ambitious office worker and his unusual office, complete with living photocopier. Or Kaaron Warren’s “Down to the Silver Spirits”, in which a couple find a highly unusual way to have a baby. Or Greg van Eekhout’s “Ghost Market”, about buying ghosts, of course, but more sharply about the worst consequences of such a market. And Barth Anderson’s “The Last Escape” is a oddball little piece about an oddball escape artist making trouble for the rulers of a curiously isolated island city in time of plague – central here is not so much an odd image as an odd character. One story I both enjoyed and found frustrating was Cat Sparks’s “Sammarynda Deep”, which tells a moving and original story of a woman coming to her lover’s home city after the war they fought in is over, trying to find him and learning why he left. I thought the point-of-view choices were a bit off, and the setup a bit too labored, but the story I detected behind all that is lovely.

There are other strong stories here, by the likes of Anna Tambour, David Schwartz, and Jenn Reese; and only a couple real disappointments, most notably Hal Duncan’s piece, which is, as ever with him, very strikingly written, but, as too often with him, doesn’t tell a coherent story. The book on a whole is a strong, original, selection; giving a useful reinvigoration to the idea of Urban Fantasy.

Renamed SF Site Review: Beyond Lies the Wub and The Father-Thing, by Philip K. Dick

These reviews were done for SF Site in 1999, using the 1999 Millennium editions of the first and third volumes of the five books of Dick's collected short fiction. At the time I didn't know the history of those books -- they actually were first published in 1987 by the oustanding small press Underwood-Miller. And they have been reprinted by a number of publishers since then, often with the titles changed and with some shuffling of contents. Not surprisingly, some of the title changes were attempts to capitalize on movies. More recently, Gollancz/Orion has produced a four volume edition of Collected Stories. My advice to any buyer is to carefully study the tables of contents to try to get consistent editions.

Renamed SF Site Review: Beyond Lies the Wub and The Father-Thing, by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick died in 1982, just on the cusp of achieving great popularity, fueled in good part by the outstanding movie Blade Runner (based on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), released just months after his death. That led to several other movies based on his work, none as good as Blade Runner, but still sufficient to make him well-known. Now, almost 20 years after his death, many of his novels are still in print, available in very nice large sized paperback editions. And, perhaps even more surprising, his Collected Stories are in print, in 5 volumes, available in large-sized paper from the UK publisher Millennium.

Dick is best known for his novels, notable among them his Hugo winner The Man
in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, and his strange late "trilogy" consisting of VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

. I have to say this is correct: he was at his best as a novelist. A significant reason for this is that his career followed a common path: a period of apprenticeship writing short fiction, leading to novel sales. After he started selling his novels, he wrote much less short fiction, presumably because novels pay better. I have on hand for review the First and Third volumes of his Collected Stories, which are arranged chronologically by order of composition. These books include stories written from 1951 to 1954. Thus, in the first four years of a 30-year career, Dick produced approximately 60% of his short fiction.

It is, then, not much of a surprise that the stories collected in these two books are on the whole lesser creations than his great novels. In many cases, Dick appeared to be writing to market, and his main markets were the lesser pulps of the early '50s. He did make some sales to Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy; and his favourite early market appears to have been If, which throughout most of its 20 some years was a quirky and valuable second tier magazine.

These early stories, as a group, do not really reflect much of Dick's later obsessions with the nature of reality and memory, though there definite few hints to that effect. The biggest obsessions in these stories, however, are the threat of nuclear war and the subsequent danger of mutation. Another major theme (often an offshoot of the mutation theme) is psi powers. And, finally, the stories reflect the '50s concerns with advertising and the growth of the suburbs. Of course some of these ideas are present in some of Dick's novels. There is the occasional story in these books that directly prefigures later work: for example, "Shell Game" presents a world of paranoids escaped from a hospital ship, much like the more developed situation in Clans of the Alphane Moon.

For all that many of these stories are minor, there are some jewels. From Volume 1 there is "Beyond Lies the Wub," Dick's first published story (though not his first sale), which builds to a cute conclusion. "The Preserving Machine" takes an utterly strange idea -- turning music into animals -- and makes it work in an odd, haunting, fashion. "Meddler" is a legitimately scary look at time travel, and "Colony" is a scary look at a planet in which everything is a predator. Definitely a prefiguration of some later Dick themes. And "Nanny" takes on suburban life, planned obsolescence, and the fight to "keep up with the Joneses" effectively.

From Volume 3, "The Father-Thing" is scary and psychologically effective SF horror. "The Golden Man" is a brilliant and honest look at what an "advanced" human race might really be like, and how it might regard us "primitives."  "Misadjustment" is one of several stories (including "The Golden Man") in which mutations are regarded with fear and strictly controlled, and in this case the paranoia thus induced is beautifully observed. "A World of Talent" and "Psi Man Heal My Child!" take quite different looks at a curious variant of time travel which I really haven't seen treated much: a person with this time travel ability can change places with his own self at different times on his worldline, but can't go back before his birth or after his death.

I don't think anyone would necessarilyconclude from the contents of these volumes of short fiction alone that Philip K. Dick was destined to become one of the field's greats, though I think one could conclude that he had the potential to be one of the field's true originals. Neither collection is by itself a landmark, but all these collections are worth the attention of anyone interested in the work of Philip K. Dick or in the history of the SF field. And in their own right they provide a lot of interesting reading, if relatively few moments of brilliance. Moreover, the story notes at the end provide interesting details about date of composition, original publication, and in some cases, Dick's own views on the story or its origin.

Recreated SF Site Review: The Collapsium, by Wil McCarthy

I reviewed Wil McCarthy's The Collapsium at SF Site in 2000 when it first appeared. I thought it lots of fun. A trilogy which somewhat more darkly explored the implications of the ideas introduced in this novel followed: The Wellstone (2003), Lost in Transmission (2004) and To Crush the Moon (2005). A couple further stories showed up later in Analog: "The Policeman's Daughter" and "Wyatt Earp 2.0", along with another story in an anthology: "Doc Holliday 2.0". I think the entire set of stories -- collectively called, I suppose, The Queendom of Sol -- are excellent radical speculation, and deserve a wider audience.

Recreated SF Site Review: The Collapsium, by Wil McCarthy

One of the time-honoured SF themes is the exploration of what we might call "edge science": ideas that are current in the scientific world, but far from established, often very speculative, sometimes even close to kooky. Wil McCarthy's novel, The Collapsium, is built wholly around such wacky scientific speculations.

The book is set several centuries in the future, or, as the opening line declares, "in the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol." The social setting for McCarthy's baroque scientific speculations is thus appropriately baroque. The Solar System is united under a monarchy, and the ruler is the heir to the only monarchy that has survived to this time: the Queen of Tonga, Tamra Lutui. The central character is Bruno de Towangi, a brilliant scientist from Catalonia, now living a hermit's life in the Kuiper Belt, on an artificial planet, playing with miniature black holes arranged to form the "element" collapsium, in an attempt to create an arc de fin, which will allow him to see the end of time. Bruno is a Declarant-Philander, a title which reflects both his high scientific achievements, and his status as former official lover of the "Virgin" Queen, Tamra.

The first section, "Once Upon a Matter Crushed," was originally published as a novella in SF Age, in 1999. In this section Bruno is summoned by his Queen back to the inner Solar System to solve a problem with the Ring Collapsiter, a ring of collapsium which his rival Marlon Sykes is building around the Sun. This ring will allow faster than light travel and communications, improving on the current system of "faxes," by which people travel at light speed anywhere there is a receiving station, making copies of themselves, copies which retain their memories, and which also can be "edited" to correct internal problems. Thus, humans may have also become immortal.

This first section sets up the conflict that will be repeated in all three of the book's sections. Bruno is called in-system to solve a problem with the Ring Collapsiter that endangers the Sun, and hence all humanity. He needs to deal with Marlon Sykes' jealousy, with the technical problem causing the danger to the Sun, and with the human problem motivating someone to so endanger the Ring Collapsiter and the Sun. Thus, to some extent the three sections are a bit repetitive. In addition, McCarthy keeps on multiplying his weird scientific speculations, adding in such ideas as "true vacuum," elimination of inertia, electromagnetic grapples, and so on. All this is, on the one hand, pretty fun, but on the other hand not wholly believable. It's not so much the science itself that is unbelievable -- sure, it's all speculative, and probably mostly not very likely to be true, but that's all part of the game, and all the weird stuff is pretty well explained in a series of appendices. Rather, Bruno's Tom Swift-like ability to whip up new gadgets based on the new science in quick time becomes somewhat implausible.

That said, given the rather light tone of the whole book (albeit a tone which is at odds with any thought for the millions of innocents who die), it all ends up being quite entertaining. The science is larger-than-life, and so are the characters. Neither is quite believable in a realistic fashion, but both are acceptable within the conventions of this book. It's baroque, super-scientific, stuff: kind of like bad 30s pulp SF rewritten to be a pretty good new millennium take on those old tropes. It's not great SF, but it's good fun, and full of neat and wild ideas

Remastered SF Site Review: Embassytown, by China Miéville

Here's a review from 2011 at SF Site. As ever, my comments about the writer's career have dated badly!

Review: Embassytown, by China Miéville

by Rich Horton

China Miéville's first few novels made a great splash in the SF/Fantasy field, particularly the Bas Lag "trilogy": Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. After these books he seemed to fit neatly in a pigeonhole. He was a leading light of the briefly fashionable non-movement "The New Weird." His novels were long, baroque, "weird" (yes, in a new way!). They were admixtures of Fantasy, SF, and Horror, with a splash of leftish politics for flavor. He was pretty good, but you knew what you were getting: intriguing but not quite believable grotesqueries, a bit of overwriting, often enough redeemed by really striking stuff buried within, and a plot full of action and passion but not always logic. There was MORE in Miéville than in most writers, but the MORE was only half good.

But what is exciting is that Miéville was not content. On the evidence of his subsequent work, he clearly wanted to expand his range. I don't mean to suggest he would endorse my readings or criticism of his work, rather that he recognized that he wanted to tell a variety of stories, and realized that to to do so he needed to adopt a variety of voices, styles, modes. And he has done so, with an accomplished YA novel (Un Lun Dun), and then a truly brilliant police procedural/philosophical thriller, The City and the City. The latter novel nearly swept the major SF awards, winning the Hugo, Clarke, and World Fantasy Awards (but only reaching the Nebula shortlist). At the same time it received respectful attention in the mainstream.

Embassytown, then, is another expansion of his range. It is Miéville's first out and out SF novel, though to be sure much of his earlier work can be squinted at and called SF. Like The City and the City it is built around an idea that is not quite plausible, but that is philosophically very rich, and that is worked out quite rigorously in the book. In Embassytown the central idea is Language, which is the language of the Ariekei, the native intelligent species of the remote planet (remote as defined by its accessibility through human FTL travel, which is based on something like wormholes) of which Embassytown is the single colony city. Language is unique, in that it is spoken by two voices simultaneously, in that it will not support a lie, and in that it is unintelligible to the natives if not spoken by an intelligence. (Recordings are OK, but not synthesized speech, and not even AI speech.) The intelligences speaking the two voices must be synchronized closely, so humans have had to construct Ambassadors by cloning individuals, and then linking the clones' brains.

The novel is told by Avice Benner Cho, a native of Embassytown who is locally famous because she became a "simile." That is, because native Language speakers cannot lie, they sometimes have people act out behaviour which can be referred to in Language to represent truthfully a comparison. Avice is "the girl who was hurt and ate what was given her." She is also unusual in that she left Embassytown and returned. She had the rare ability to "Immerse" -- to remain functional throughout FTL travel, and so she became a starship crewmember. But one of her marriages was to a linguist, and partly because of his interest in Language, she returned.

The main action of the novel comes some time after her return. A new kind of artificially created Ambassador has been tried -- two unrelated humans with unusual empathy have been linked in the same way as the more traditional clones. But it turns out that their speech, while comprehensible to the Ariekei, is horribly addicting as well. Ariekei society collapses, and threatens to bring Embassytown down with it. Avice becomes part of a faction trying to save Embassytown, and eventually the Ariekei, with the help of a curious faction of the alien society: aliens who are trying to learn to lie.

This whole idea is inherently fascinating to me. The novel joins the shortish list of significant SF novels about linguistics. (Obvious predecessors: Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao, Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17, Ian Watson's The Embedding.) Ultimately Miéville here is considering the importance of language in constructing "story," and perhaps the importance of story in establishing individual consciousness. Some of the Ariekei seem, by the end, to be desperately trying to wake -- to become individuals, to become truly conscious. And some humans desperately regret the loss of innocence, in a sense, of this people who could not lie. Miéville doesn't insist on answers here -- he asks intriguing questions about language, about sentience, and we are urged to think about them.

On this level the novel is an exuberant success. It is also well written, in as has become normal for Miéville -- a different voice than he has used previously -- a voice consistent to Avice's character. The characters are well-portrayed, though they are not on the whole terribly admirable (terribly human, though), and Avice is a bit cold and distant -- in particular, her love affairs don't ever emotionally convince. The novel isn't wholly successful, primarily because the action, as oppposed to the speculation, is often not very absorbing. I still enjoyed it a great deal, and it's very well worth reading, but there are longeurs. It's not Miéville's best novel -- that is still The City and the City -- but it is very good, very thought-provoking, and a true Science Fiction novel in the pure sense. And: more evidence that China Miéville is a writer whose every novel we must await with great anticipation.

Review: The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison

 Review: The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison

By Rich Horton

A few years ago I read Katherine Addison’s novel The Goblin Emperor, and I just lapped it up – it’s a captivating read, and among other things it is about a noticeably good protagonist – someone who tries to see the best in other people and do the best he can for all around him. I came late to that book, and now I come late to a book set in the same world. This is The Witness for the Dead, which is the job title of the protagonist, Thara Celehar, who was an important character in The Goblin Emperor. And while Celehar is in outward appearance and attitude rather different to the Emperor, he shares with him a virtuous character, and a sense of duty. The Witness of the Dead is the first of a trilogy about Celehar and the city of Amalo.

Thara has moved to Amalo and taken up his duties there. As a Witness, he can sense the perceptions of very recently deceased people, allowing for understanding of why and how they died, and perhaps some ability to help their spirit rest. Besides the religious aspects of his job -- and he is also a Prelate of the god Ulis -- this knowledge can help in investigating suspicious deaths. Thara also has the ability to "quiet" ghouls -- reanimated corpses that can escape a poorly constructed grave. Thara, partly for his somewhat prickly nature, partly for his connections to the royal family (and his relationship with the Emperor -- addressed in The Goblin Emperor, and partly simply out of jealousy, is regarded with hostility by the other priests in Amalo.

The novel works as sort of an introduction to Amalo, and to Thara Celehar's life there and his job. Thus we see him investigating a variety of cases. Mostly this arises from a request to Witness for a recently dead person -- requests he takes as sort of a civil servant. As the novel opens, he is trying to find a woman who was disappeared, and who her relatives believe was killed by her husband -- an unlikeable man they barely knew whom she had very suddenly married and who had died while pregnant -- supposedly due to enteric fever. Soon he is also enlisted to witness the last perceptions of a drowned woman just recovered from the river -- and he learns quickly that she was murdered, and that she was a roundly hated opera singer. Even as these investigations continue, he is hired to witness for a man who left two separate wills, in the hope that the dead man's memories will reveal which was the true will. A distant mountain village reports an infestation of ghouls, and Thara must travel there to find and quiet them. Other duties include tending to the victims of an airship explosion, and helping an old man, long exiled to Amalo for political reasons, to reconcile with a granddaughter he never met.

This perhaps sounds like a bit of a tangle, or an episodic fixup perhaps, but really the novel works very nicely as a unified work. The point is not the solution to the mysteries, but to portray Thara Celehar himself, and his milieu. The various stories to link up to a degree, and he is successful in doing what he can to resolve each situation, though such resolution can be complicated. The matter of the will, for example, leads him to legal trouble, as the politically connected man who loses out on the inheritance brings an action for fraud against Celehar. The airship explosion is in the end a wrenching tragedy, as is the case of the missing woman. The primary thread is about the murdered opera singer, and this leads Thara to meet some interesting people and to uncover some very unhappy secrets. Throughout, we are with Thara, and his stubborn virtuousness, his devotion to his duty, his refusal to play political games, and his deep pain over the loss of a lover (this another event covered in The Goblin Emperor.)

Much as with the first novel, I was enchanted. Thara Celehar is a character we root for, and one we admire. The events of the book -- the various mysteries -- are interesting in themselves. (I was reminded just a bit of Sarah Monette's long series of tales about one Kyle Murchison Booth, who, a bit like Thara Celehar, investigates various necromantic mysteries -- these stories are well worth looking for as well. Sarah Monette, of course, is Katherine Addison's real name.) One aspect I also appreciated was the novel's respect for religion -- for religious believers (like Thara himself), for the value of religious rites and observance, and for the inherent mysteries to sacred beliefs -- all while depicting the completely invented religions and gods of this fantasy world.

Recovered SF Site Review: The Game Players of Titan, by Philip K. Dick

Here's an old SF site review I did of one of Philip K. Dick's lesser known novels. 

Review: The Game Players of Titan, by Philip K. Dick

British SF classic re-release series seem to be proliferating -- a nice thing. The latest example I have seen is called Voyager Classics, and the sample in front of me is a new large-sized paperback edition of Philip K. Dick's 1963 novel The Game-Players of Titan. The book is attractively packaged, with a simple dark blue cover, complete with flaps, though internally the paper quality and typography are rather indifferent. But it remains nice to see worthwhile SF books back in print, at a decent price to boot. This is part of a series of 36 reprints -- the entire list is printed inside the book. To my taste, the collection, taken as a whole, is a bit odd. There is a mix of unquestioned SF and Fantasy classics such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy; with more recent books that deserve consideration such as William Gibson's Neuromancer; with still more recent books that, good as they may be, hardly seem ready just yet for "classic" reprint status, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward. Not to mention a few choices at which my eyebrows were raised.

But my duty is merely to review the book at hand. The GamePlayers of Titan is not one of Dick's better-known works. It comes from a somewhat transitional period for him, when he was just beginning to produce his most impressive novels. This novel follows the brilliant Hugo winner The Man in the High Castle, and precedes the excellent The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, but the novel it most reminded me of is a third novel from the early to mid 60s, Clans of the Alphane Moon. Like that novel it is awash in concerns with marriage, mental health, and drug use; and like that novel it features overtly science-fictional elements such as silicon-based alien life forms to tell a story that, at its base, seems mostly about suburban life in the 60s.

The main character of this book is Pete Garden. Pete is part of a circle of California residents in a depopulated future world who own large swathes of property, and who regularly play a board game called simply the Game, at which they stake their property, and their marriages, and even their status as eligible game players. (Property owners are called Bindmen, and if you lose all your property, you are no longer a Bindman, and cannot play.) The Game is administered in part by the amorphous aliens from Titan, the vugs, who apparently put much stock in gambling. In addition, the wife-swapping encouraged by the game is intended to promote what is called luck: actually, interfertility. The human race is dwindling because a weapon developed during the last war made people largely sterile.

The book opens with Pete stumbling home after a binge -- it seems that he has lost his favourite property, Berkeley, and in so doing has also lost his wife Freya. But his personal concerns seem less important after he discovers that the man who won Berkeley from him sold it to a front for a notorious Bindman from the East Coast. Pete is also worried because he liked Freya, and he fears that his prospective new wife, on loan from another Game-playing group, will be less congenial. Moreover, he finds himself greatly attracted to a mysteriously fertile woman living in his remaining property, and also to her 18-year-old daughter.

Dick continues to throw idea upon idea, and to alter the direction the book seems to be taking. Some of the characters are PSIs (telepathy, precognition, and telekinesis figure prominently), and they resent the fact that they are not allowed in the Game (because they could use their powers to cheat). Then a murder happens, and Pete is implicated, along with several other members of his Game-playing group. And Pete becomes convinced that vugs have infiltrated the Earth. Then it turns out that there are multiple factions among the vugs... As you can see, there is a sense of kitchen-sinkery to this book, a sense that the author may have made it all up as he went along. Similar problems underlie the character relationships, which alter chapter by chapter. (I may have missed something, but I'm pretty sure one character is a vug some of the time, and a human at other times, not on purpose.) I don't think things really cohere.

Despite those problems, the book is readable and interesting. There are a number of nice minor touches, such as the artificially intelligent cars with attitude. And the character of Pete Garden, a fairly typical Dick protagonist, neurotic to the point of suicide attempts but basically decent, is nicely enough portrayed. It is by no means among Dick's best novels, but Dick is a sufficiently interesting writer that even his minor works are worth reading.

Reconstituted SF SIte Review: Dark Integers, by Greg Egan

This is a review I did for SF Site in 2008. So the opening sentence is much dated -- Egan has been publishing regularly for the last couple of decades after a bit of an hiatus. But still worth remembering his efforts!

SF Site Review: Dark Integers, by Greg Egan

Greg Egan had been missing in action, as it were, for several years, devoting his energies to a very worthy cause, the refugee problem in Australia. (A story that seems derived at least in part from that experience is "Lost Continents" in the new anthology The Starry Rift.) But beginning a couple of years ago he has returned with a bevy of first-rate stories. Dark Integers collects three of these new stories, along with two older stories: his Hugo winner, "Oceanic," as well as "Luminous," the prequel to this collection's title piece. There is plenty of other new Egan out there, but this book serves as a good sampling, and as a sort of link between the old Egan and the new. (The two writers are, it turns out, pretty similar!)

Egan's reputation, first and foremost, is as one of today's preeminent "idea men" of SF. His fiction is built around scientific or sociological ideas -- that is to say, on speculation. Particular areas of interest seem to be mathematics, physics, and the workings of the brain (and indeed all of these ideas are often interconnected). Egan eagerly uses concepts from the cutting edges of these fields, and speculates beyond the cutting edge -- sometimes, as he has admitted, a bit implausibly. (And there is nothing wrong with some of that in SF!) As such his fiction has an aspect of didactisim in the pure sense -- didact as teacher -- so that reading his stories can be quite literally an education in whatever notion he is exploring. (Sometimes he even offers help with essays (even in one case an online game) further explicating his ideas.) Now this is all very well, but pure didacticism is rarely sufficient to motivate a story, and one of Egan's problems throughout his career has been to match plots and characters to his ideas. Mind you, Egan has often solved this problem -- sometimes by telling stories in which the ideas really do carry the whole thing off without elaboration; and in other cases by finding a plot which enhances the central idea.

In this vein it is interesting to contrast the paired stories "Luminous" (1995) and "Dark Integers" (2007). The earlier story opens with the narrator, Bruno, in a fleapit in Shanghai, with a woman wielding a scalpel and cutting open his arm. It's a thriller-style opening -- Bruno and his friend Alison are on the run from an outfit called Industrial Algebra, which wants a secret that Bruno has hidden in a chip in his arm. But the heart of the story is of course the nature of that secret, which concerns an almost unbelievable discovery he and Alison have made: that elsewhere in the "universe" (if that's the right word) mathematical axioms are different from ours. Worse, understanding the different axioms can be dangerous -- both to "our universe" and "theirs" -- the imposition of "our" mathematical truth is destructive to them and vice versa. "Luminous" is fascinating for that reason, but for me it didn't quite sell this idea, and the thrillerish material wasn't convincingly integrated. In "Dark Integers," set years later, Bruno and Alison and the Chinese mathematician Yuen, the only people in on the secret, have been maintaining a sort of DMZ between the two universes with the help of someone in the other universe. But now there are hints that someone else may have stumbled on this mathematical curiosity -- which could be very dangerous to the other universe. And likewise very dangerous to us, if they choose to retaliate. The story concerns attempts to explain some new notions about the maths behind this idea -- interesting notions but not that easy to follow. But the state of hopeless war implied between two incompatible universes is depressing as described, and in the end that's what ultimately drives things: not so much the idea, though that remains fascinatingly loopy, but the sad political reality that Egan derives from the underlying state of affairs.

The other older story in the book is "Oceanic," which won the Hugo for Best Novella of 1998. Here I think Egan succeeds again in marrying character with idea -- perhaps in part because the central idea is more sociological than mathematical. It is set on another world -- apparently one colonized by humans millennia before -- and it concerns a young man who believes in God -- as does everyone (nearly) on the planet. The arc of the story brings him to question this belief -- a traditional enough arc -- but his questioning is driven eventually by a realization that his religious experiences -- very real in themselves -- can be proven to be biochemically induced. All this is very involving in the context of the story, though I have long felt that the implication -- that the same applies to religious experiences on present-day Earth -- while intriguing is not in any sense proven by this story, so that the whole thing seems not quite relevant to religious dispute (in the way, I confess, that much SF is often called irrelevant).

The other new stories don't seem quite as successful to me as "Dark Integers" (or for that matter "Oceanic" on its own terms). And I think one reason is that in neither case is there that much of an attempt to construct plot and/or characters to carry the burden of the central idea. In a sense this is understandable -- when done poorly it can backfire as I've suggested with "Luminous" -- but still the stories come off just that bit uninvolving as a result. Even so, there is enough sparkle and imagination in the SFnal core to make the stories well worth your time. "Riding the Crocodile" is about a posthuman couple trying to cap a very long life by contacting the mysterious civilization called the Aloof in the Galaxy's core. The portrayal of the far future posthuman culture is intriguing, and the notion of the Aloof comes off pretty well, but never did I quite care. Finally, "Glory" opens with a spectacular hard SF coup in describing a pair of researchers being sent to a distant star. In the body of the story they serve as archaeologists of mathematics, trying to discover a long-lost theorem discovered by a vanished alien culture. All interesting enough, and well executed, but again it didn't quite ignite my imagination.

This is an interesting and fairly logical choice of stories for a book that represents a sort of "reintroduction" to the field. It makes sense to include both older and newer stories, and in particular from the older stories choose a previously uncollected award winner and the predecessor to one of the new stories. (Even though that story, "Luminous," has not only been previously collected but is in fact the title story of its collection!) And the new stories range from solid to excellent. If I were quibbling -- and I guess I am -- I'd have wished for the inclusion of my favorite Egan short, and in fact one of my favorite SF stories of the 90s, "Wang's Carpets," which is I think unfortunately sort of hidden in the Egan corpus as a chapter of his novel Diaspora. But be that as it may, the book at hand is strong work, and very welcome. And it only further whets the appetite for Egan's new novel, Incandescence.

Revisited Locus Review: Blue and Gold, by K. J. Parker

This review was written in 2010, when Blue and Gold came out, and I honestly can't recall where it was published. Possibly nowhere! But a much briefer review appeared from Locus. 

There is an interview with "K. J. Parker" -- that is to say, Tom Holt -- in the most recent Locus. It's very interesting. Holt discusses the origin of his Parker pseudonym, and also mentions when the pseudonym became "open". That was some time after this review appeared. (When I sent the shorter version to Locus, Jonathan Strahan told me he had to ask Holt if he was OK with a certain comparison I made here -- Holt was fine with it, and I think my speculation and that of a number of other people contributed to his decision to reveal the secret identity of "K. J. Parker".) 

I'll also note that this was one of the earlier Parker stories I read, and I had no idea of the ubiquity and variety of his stories set in the world -- or some version of it -- mentioned here. The Davidson comparison doesn't hold up in that context. 

Revisited Review: Blue and Gold, by K. J. Parker

I'll start by saying quite simply that I had more pleasure reading Blue and Gold than just about anything I've read all year. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing I've read all year -- this novella is, after all, first and foremost about fun, and while fun is great (and we need more of it), sometimes one wants some meat as well. Yet to say that Blue and Gold is purely an entertainment is unfair as well -- in among the beautifully constructed plot and the cynical jokes there is some worthwhile commentary on man as a political beast.

The story is set in what seemed to me something of an alternate Rome or Byzantium, perhaps a bit like the Rome of Avram Davidson's Vergil Magus stories or his Peregrine stories. (I base this in part on the names of the main characters: the narrator, Saloninus, shares his name with a Roman emperor, and the other main character, Phocas, has the name of a Byzantine emperor.) More properly, I suppose, we could say that this is set in an unspecified fantastical history that bears some resemblance to late Roman empire times or to Byzantine times. Saloninus, our narrator, tells us he is the greatest living alchemist. Apparently that's true, though as he also tells us, he doesn't always tell the truth. Indeed, he opens the book by telling someone "In the morning, I discovered the secret of changing base metal into gold. In the afternoon, I murdered my wife." Whether either or both or neither of these claims is true is much of what the story is about.

Saloninus was a fairly prominent member of his society, and a promising student of the local university, when his Uncle died and the family fortune was revealed to consist mostly of debts. Since then he has led a checkered career, alternating between criminal acts and some fairly impressive scholarship. One thing that's kept him out of prison is his old friend Phocas, who was an obscure member of the Royal family when they met, but who improbably advanced to become the Prince. Saloninus is also married to Prince Phocas's sister. And he's been working on two alchemical projects for them: the secret of changing base metal into gold, and the secret of eternal youth. But when his wife dies, apparently after testing one of Saloninus's latest formulas, he becomes a wanted man. And so most of the story consists of his repeated attempts to escape, alternating with negotiations with Phocas, who still wants that secret of changing base metal into gold, and who perhaps isn't as broken up about his sister's death as you might expect.

All this is recounted very entertainingly. Blue and Gold is an extremely funny book through and through. The humor, and some of the darkness behind it, reminded me a good deal of Tom Holt's masterpiece, The Walled Orchard -- in all honesty, just about as high praise as I can give.As the story continues we learn, in a cunning and very well structured way, more and more of Saloninus's past as well as that of Phocas, and of the political situation in which they exist. It's really a beautifully constructed plot, which snaps home elegantly at the close. Where it is also revealed exactly why the book is called Blue and Gold: gold seems obvious enough, but why blue? The reason is the last delight in a book full of them.

Retro Magazine Review: Astounding, July 1955

Retro Magazine Review: Astounding, July 1955

Astounding Science Fiction, under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr., was the central magazine of the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction", which is typically considered to have lasted from 1938 through the 1940s. Campbell's influence was both good and bad, though I believe on balance the good outweighed the bad. He insisted on better prose from his writers than had been typical in the pulp magazines of the 1930s. He encouraged a greater focus on plausible scientific rationales for the speculations in the stories he published (which is not to deny that a certain amount of scientifically absurd tropes were still acceptable, nor that Campbell himself had an attraction to some very doubtful scientific ideas.) He was very supportive of new writers. His politics were certainly of the Right, but he was tolerant of stories by writers who disagreed with him. That said, he was also tolerant of profoundly imperialist attitudes, and sometimes racist attitudes; and his support of crank science led him to midwife the birth of Scientology by publishing L. Ron Hubbard's first Dianetics essay. In his latter years, Campbell's taste seemed to ossify, and his 1960s Analog (Astounding after a rename) was often boring, often obsessed with "psionics", though not worthless -- Poul Anderson's contributions remained interesting, and towards the end he published a few very interesting new writers, notably James Tiptree, Jr., and Stephen Chapman.

The Golden Age, in the common narrative, ended with the founding of two key competitors to Astounding -- The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1949, and Galaxy in 1950. The real story is muddier, as most stories are: the sister pulp magazines Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories had greatly improved by the late 1940s, and other magazines such as Planet Stories and Amazing Stories were mixing in some excellent fiction -- though to be sure often benefiting from the writers Campbell had nurtured. In my view, though, by 1950 the focus of the field had certainly broadened, due not only to these new magazines, and the improvement of older magazines, but also due to the emergence of books as a market for science fiction writers. Ultimately I think the science fiction of the 1950s was better than that of the 1940s -- standing on the shoulders of that decade's advancements, no doubt, but still superior, better written, and featuring a broader range of views. But Astounding soldiered on. And here is a look at an issue from right in the middle of that decade.

The cover for this issue is by Kelly Freas, who had just recently become a regular artist for Astounding, a role which he maintained nearly until his death in 2005 (his last new work for Analog appeared in 2003.) Interiors are by Freas, H. R. van Dongen (another long-time ASF artist) and by "Riley". I couldn't find out anything about "Riley" -- he illustrated five stories for Astounding in 1954/1955, and that seems to be it. (The ISFDB credits him for some illustrations (in other places) in the 21st Century, but I doubt those are the same person.)

The stories then, beginning with two by Eric Frank Russell, a Campbell regular.

"The Waitabits"

A Terran military team lands on a world they have been warned is unconquerable. The natives do indeed turn out to be unconquerable, but for an amusing reason. Decent enough, but I think a bit long for its substance.

"Tieline" (under the name Duncan H. Munro, presumably for the fairly obvious reason that it appeared in the same issues as "The Waitabits")

Men sent to an isolated "lighthouse" planet inevitably go mad. How can they be kept sane? A bad story -- the setup is strained beyond belief (they go insane on 10-year hitches -- why not try shorter hitches? Pets aren't allowed -- but that is pretty much contradicted by the eventual solution.).

"In Clouds of Glory", by Algis Budrys

I mentioned above Campbell's imperialist sympathies. It's not fair to evaluate anyone on a single story, but "In Clouds of Glory" is certainly a prominent exhibit supporting that description of his tendencies. It's a fairly early story in the career of Algis Budrys -- an author I greatly admire for his best work. This is early stuff, however, and Budrys was still developing his skills. On the other hand, by the time this story appeared, Budrys had published some 40 stories and a novel, including such outstanding work as "The End of Summer" and "Nobody Bothers Gus". In that company "In Clouds of Glory" reads to me as something written to order to satisfy Campbell. (And it has only been reprinted once, in an anthology co-edited by Jerry Pournelle and called Imperial Stars, Volume I: The Stars at War.)

The story concerns one Bill Demaris, who works for a shady organization called the Agency. His job is to go in disguise to alien planets, and foment wars, or manipulate wars, so that the Earth's favored side "wins". Demaris himself is bitter that Man's ambitions seem to stop at Pluto, however -- there are all those planets out there to conquer, so why aren't we? His newest mission has him undergoing a special treatment so that he looks like and smells like whichever alien race he's infiltrating, and worming his way into a place of trust, from which he can arrange that the local King for whom he "works" wins his war in the most damaging way possible. The trick ending is that the other guys in the war are also "helped" by a disguised Earthman, with the ultimate object being to pretty much leave the various planets involved ripe for the picking when Earth decides to conquer them. There's also some guff about the pampered rich people back on Earth being too soft for the job of conquering new planets, so that this secret Agency recruits only the toughest, who will of course eventually be the colonizers. Oh -- and one way they manage to get themselves hired as advisers everywhere is to poison the most influential of the aliens so they are too stupid to effectively operate. 

It's really profoundly offensive. There's a lot of pretty overt cynicism among the members of the "Agency" -- but no real regrets. After all, they're reasonably well paid, and Humanity Uber Alles, eh?  It occurred to me that Budrys might have intended the story to be satirical, but I don't think so, and if he did, the satire doesn't come through well.

"Rat Race", by Frank Herbert

Another fairly early story from a writer who would become very prominent about a decade later. "Rat Race" is a somewhat convoluted, but not uninteresting story. An investigator, visiting a mortuary to check up on a dead woman, sees some strange things -- a weird passageway, and disappearing tanks of -- something -- that don't seem to belong in a mortuary. He keeps following up, and the rather odd mortician shows signs of stress -- until he shoots the investigator and commits suicide. It's a science fiction story, so we can kind of guess what's going on -- the mortician is an alien. But why are aliens doing strange things with human bodies? The answer is a bit of a twist. I didn't quite buy all the steps it took to get there, but at least the story is after something interesting. 

"Earth, Air, Fire and Water", by Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley  and Algis Budrys started selling SF stories in the same year -- 1952 -- and were similarly prolific at the start of their career. (One could, through the 1950s but not really after that point, make a living selling short stories to magazines.)  Sheckley, at this point in his career, was better than Budrys, partly because he was often funny, partly because he was a clever writer in a way Budrys wasn't. Unfortunately, "Earth, Air, Fire and Water" isn't him at his best, not even close. A space pilot is on a mission to Venus, with two objectives -- recover some recording devices from an unmanned probe, and test a brand new spacesuit model. Upon landing, he puts on the suit and starts walking to the probe -- but there's a snowstorm and, for unconvincing reasons, the spacesuit is a problem and he has to take it off ... It's really just not a good story. It's filler.

"The Long Way Home", part 4 of 4, by Poul Anderson

This serial was Anderson's fourth novel, only his second science fiction novel for adults, after Brain Wave (1954). (A juvenile, Vault of the Ages (1952), and a Norse-based fantasy, The Broken Sword (1954), were the other two predecessors.) I read this long ago and I don't remember it well. It's about a spaceship testing a hyperspace drive that returns to Earth to find that the drive doesn't really work like they thought, so they are 5000 years in the future. It was published in book form as No World of Their Own, part of an Ace Double backed with The 1000 Year Plan, by Isaac Asimov -- which of course was Foundation after application of the Don Wollheim title-generation algorithm. I have that Ace Double, and I'll read it soon and report on it! Later reprints restored Anderson's original title, and apparently also restored some cuts Campbell had made (I'm not sure if the Ace Double also had those cuts restored.)

"Brass Tacks" and also Campbell's editorial

"Brass Tacks" was the letter column at Astounding, and it was noticeable for tending to be focussed less on the quality of the stories the magazine published than it was on nitpicking -- or seriously disputing -- scientific or other ideas -- not just from the stories but from the science articles and also Campbell's editorials. In this issue all three letters take issue with a very controversial essay by Donald Kingsbury from the April issue, "The Right to Breed". Essentially (as I recall) Kingsbury was advocating draconian eugenics policies -- only allowing "worthy" parents to have children, in order to prevent overpopulation. A torrent of letters came in, almost all (apparently) vociferously rejecting Kingsbury's ideas. Campbell's editorial this issue, "The Fanatic", claims that Kingsbury's objective was to show that one could write something stringing together facts with logical deductions from them to come to an awful conclusion -- and that the readers were supposed to see that the point was that the essay demonstrated how fanatics took things too far and made seemingly logical steps lead one to a terrible place. Kingsbury later confirmed this, and said that he had to revise the piece multiple times at Campbell's insistence to get it just right. The letters reprinted in this issue give three responses -- two by readers who missed the point and one by a reader who basically got it.

"The Reference Library"

This is Astounding's Book Review column, which was written by P. Schuyler Miller from October 1951 through January 1975 (shortly after I started reading Analog). (Miller had died in October of 1974.) In this column he covers a couple of nonfiction books about Mars, plus the novels Earthman, Come Home, by James Blish; The Mouse That Roared, by Leonard Wibberley; False Night, by Algis Budrys; and The Chaos Fighters, by Robert Moore Williams. He ranks them pretty much in that order. He also discusses two anthologies: Stories for Tomorrow, edited by William Sloane; and Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time, edited by Judith Merril. He has very high praise for both anthologies, especially Merril's. A couple more nonfiction books are covered: The Sun and the Earth as a Planet, edited by Gerard Kuiper; and Sun, Sea and Sky, by Irving P. Krick and Roscoe Fleming. And Miller finishes by mentioning a couple of (gasp!) fantasies, which he describes as "charming". These books are by a certain Professor Tolkien -- The Hobbit, and The Fellowship of the Ring. Miller does praise them, but doesn't quite seem to get them -- though he had not yet seen The Two Towers nor The Return of the King. (He also misidentifies a character he is sure the readers will be fascinated by: Tom Bombadillo.)

"Is Bode's Law a Coincidence?", by Roy Malcolm

This is a short science article, discussing the still well-known suggestion that planetary orbits follow a predictable pattern, that works for the Solar System if you consider the asteroid belt to be where a planet should have been. It works, to one degree or another, with the major moons of some of the planets. But ever since its discovery (co-credited to Johann Ebert Bode and to Johann Daniel Titius, both German astronomers of the 18th Century) people have questioned whether the pattern represents something real or is, well, a coincidence. This article sensibly discusses the state of things as of 1955 -- and I was surprised to learn that the question is still somewhat open in 2026. (I have generally believed that it was most likely just a coincidence.)

The bottom line, I think, is that this is a pretty mediocre issue of Astounding, redeemed to some extent by the Herbert story and perhaps by the Anderson serial. The magazine, even in the 1950s, was usually a bit better than this, I'd say -- but this does show signs of the decline that, really, continued until Ben Bova took over after Campbell's death. 

Reclaimed SF Site Review: Emphyrio, by Jack Vance

Here's another SF Site review I'm posting on this blog after the demise of that wonderful site. This review was written in 2000.

The UK imprint Millennium is reprinting a number of classic SF novels as SF Masterworks. This is an effort for which they deserve much praise. I have at hand number 19 of this series of reprints, a 1969 novel by Jack Vance, Emphyrio. [I should note that more recently this novel was reprinted by the Library of America as part of Gary K. Wolfe's selections of some of the best American SF novels of the 1950s and 1960s -- the volume with Emphyrio is American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968-1969.]

This is one of Vance's best novels, and in many ways a good introduction to this author. On display are many of the hallmarks of his mature style: his elegant writing, his wonderful depiction of local colour, his unusual social systems. Emphyrio lacks only the humour that is so often present in Vance: this is one of his more melancholy books. It's also better plotted than many of his novels, and it's a stand-alone.

The story concerns a young man in the city of Ambroy (on the planet Halma) named Ghyl Tarvoke. Ghyl is the son of Amiante Tarvoke, a rather unconventional inhabitant of Ambroy. Amiante is a master carver of wooden screens, one of the handmade products that Ambroy exports to the rest of the Galaxy, but he is rather solitary, and does not produce especially many screens, and does not participate in the religious rituals of Ambroy, which involve intricate leaping (saltation).

Ghyl's childhood is wonderfully presented. It's rather lonely, but happy, as Amiante's rearing of Ghyl bids fair to make him as unconventional as his father. Ghyl explores much of his city, which is ruled by a very few "Lords" or "Remedials," who control the utilities and services of the city, and provide a guaranteed minimum support lifestyle to the common people who co-operate, in exchange for control of the market for Ambroy's artwork. Various regulations are enforced, most notably an absolute rule against duplication of any kind, ostensibly to ensure the maintenance of Ambroy's reputation for completely original handmade art.

Ghyl makes a few friends, some who end up "noncups," or people living outside the welfare system. He also learns eventually that his father's unconventionality extends to illegal duplication: his father has a collection of historical documents, which he duplicates. He also teaches Ghyl the writing systems used in these old documents. One old document is an unfinished version of the legend of Emphyrio, a hero of the past on the planet Aume who helped humans throw off the domination of aliens from the mood Sigil. As Ghyl grows older, he remains isolated from most of his fellows, an isolation only enhanced by his brief affair with a Lord's daughter, and further exacerbated by his father's eventual punishment and death for his duplicating.

Finally Ghyl is pushed to a desperate act, kidnapping a Lord's spaceship. This leads to a journey offworld, where he eventually learns much about the true story of Emphyrio and the true nature of his own planet, of the Lords who rule it and the mysterious puppet makers of the moon Damar. The resolution is satisfying if a bit odd, with a nice twist. However, although the plot of this novel is satisfactory, the real pleasures, as with all Vance, lie elsewhere.

This book features, for one thing, a very satisfying depiction of an odd, lonely but happy, childhood. For a second thing, there is the culture of Ambroy, which is perhaps not so odd as some of Vance's social structures, but still fascinating, with its welfare system, prohibition of duplication, mysterious Lords, and unusual and mordantly amusing punishments. Thirdly there is Vance's always elegant prose, with his glorious touch for names of people (Amiante Tarvoke), alien races (the Garrion), and places (Daillie); and his knack for coining words (noncups, skeel, Remedials). And finally, his plots, even when unsatisfactorily resolved, often seem to be following conventional paths before suddenly taking unusual but believable turns. Vance's main weakness, besides his occasional trouble with endings, is his cavalier approach towards scientific realism. With some writers this bothers me, but I think it's best with Vance simply to ignore this. So what if his spaceships seem but cars that can be driven at FTL? That's not the point with Vance.

I might make a minor quibble about the production values of this book. It appears to use the plates from the 1979 DAW edition, slightly enlarged, and complete with typos. This is not as attractive as it might be. But I'm only quibbling: if the money thereby saved makes this project feasible, I'm happy. Besides, there is a nice new cover painting.

Repatriated SF Site Review: My Favorite Science Fiction Story, edited by Martin H. Greenberg

I was a bit surprised to realize that I haven't posted here in half a month -- but I have a good reason: my new grandson, Sylvester Took Whitman, was born, and my wife and I have been at Sylvester's home, babysitting his older siblings while my daughter was in the hospital, and welcoming Sylvester when he came home.

Here's another review that I wrote for the great but now sadly defunct website SF Site. This one is from 1999.

Review: My Favorite Science Fiction Story, edited by Martin H. Greenberg

In this new anthology, Martin H. Greenberg uses a gimmick that I've seen before, but one which still has legs. He has selected several prominent SF writers of the present day, and asked them to choose one favorite SF story. Their choices form this anthology.

Ideally, an anthology of this nature should have two aims: 1) simply to present a collection of outstanding stories, to participate, if you will, in the process of SF canon-forming; and 2) to throw light on the influences on the selecting writers. It might suggest what stories appeal to writers, as possibly opposed to readers (something in the way that the Nebula Awards do), and it might illustrate the development process of the field. It doesn't really appear that Greenberg had any special intent to reinforce this secondary aim, however.

For one thing, the authors chosen to select stories are not a particularly homogeneous group, either in age or in being members of any identifiable "school" or "movement." In addition, the stories chosen seem for the most part to be chosen as favorite reads, not so much as influences. This is not really a complaint, just an observation: what we are left with, thus, is mostly an anthology of the first type, a canon-building anthology.

The authors selecting stories are Arthur C. Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, Joe Haldeman, Frederik Pohl, Mike Resnick, Andre Norton, Alan Dean Foster, Poul Anderson, Harry Turtledove, Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and David Drake. A varied lot, including writers who emerged during Campbell's "Golden Age," such as de Camp and Pohl, some who emerged slightly later, as with Clarke and Anderson, and continuing to such comparatively recent stars as Bear, Willis and Bujold.

I've been reading SF for quite some time now, and I've always liked short fiction, so the bulk of these stories are familiar to me. I was pleased to reread Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea" for the umpteenth time: this story, Clarke's selection, may well have been mine if I were eligible to choose a story for a similar anthology. This is one of the most moving of all SF stories, and its theme lies at the heart of SF: the desire to keep exploring, the value of exploration for its own sake.

Other prominent selections include Frederik Pohl's brilliant story of what humans might become in the very far future, "Day Million" (chosen by Haldeman); C.M. Kornbluth's mordant SF Hall of Fame tale, "The Little Black Bag" (Pohl's choice), about a present day doctor discovering medical tools from the future, and the bitter misuse to which they are put; and Howard Waldrop's Nebula-winning tale of the fate of the last dodos, "The Ugly Chickens" (chosen by Turtledove). Also from the SF Hall of Fame are Lester del Rey's "Nerves," "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley Weinbaum, and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" by Cordwainer Smith. Each of these stories is famous, thus familiar. But at the same time each is famous for good reason, and I was happy to reread them. Certainly there is no harm in reprinting them again.

But any anthology will hopefully also include some surprises. I had never before read Ward Moore's "Lot, " for example. This is a story of the first day of a Nuclear Holocaust, and as such it has a bit of a dated feel. But it's really a depiction of a character, the markedly unpleasant man who is, he believes, fully prepared for this disaster. We follow his actions, filtered through his self-satisfaction, as he brings his family towards "safety" in the back country. The protagonist bears a striking resemblance, in more than one way, to another unpleasant SF survivor of a Nuclear War, Hugh Farnham of Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold. "Lot" in itself is chilling enough, though no real plot resolution is reached. I don't think the story requires one, thought there was a sequel, and there was also a somewhat well-regarded movie based on the two stories: a Roger Corman production, directed by Ray Milland (who also played the lead):  Panic in Year Zero!, from 1962 . At any rate, thanks to Connie Willis for selecting it (and, I wonder, meditating upon influence, how much this story affected her "A Letter From the Clearys").

Another story that I hadn't encountered before, and which I really enjoyed, was Poul Anderson's choice, "Black Charlie" by Gordon R. Dickson. This is a story about the nature of art, a difficult but worthwhile subject. Dickson's protagonist is an experienced art buyer, and he is approached by a man on a backwoods planet, who has some sculptures by a member of that planet's indigenous alien race. The sculptures are worthless, in objective terms, but at long last the art buyer is pushed into understanding the history behind the sculptures, and the character of the alien who produced them. Does this knowledge in the viewer make them art? I don't know, but the story is indeed art.

The other selections are by and large fine stories as well. I felt that the second Kornbluth story ("The Only Thing We Learn," chosen by David Drake) was a bit obvious, and nowhere near the quality of his best work, and the pieces by Eric Frank Russell ("Diabologic") and Robert Sheckley ("Untouched by Human Hands") were also somewhat slight, to my taste. Again, both writers have certainly produced stories that belong in anthologies like this. And Norman Kagan's "The Mathenauts" (Greg Bear's choice), while full of fascinating ideas, doesn't really work as a story. But four merely minor stories out of a collection like this is no great weakness, especially as I'm sure the next reader will feel differently than I do.

One other quibble concerns the book's production values, in particular the copyediting. The book is riddled with typographical errors, most of the sort where the correct word is replaced by another word, such that a simple spellcheck won't catch the error. This is becoming sadly common these days, but even so there were far too many in this book.

These quibbles aside, any collection that includes the stories I've mentioned -- as well as "Common Time" by James Blish, Keith Laumer's early Bolo story "The Last Command," Barry Malzberg's meta-fictional "A Galaxy Called Rome," and Roger Zelazny's moving "The Engine at Heartspring's Center" -- is well worth the price.

SF Site Resurrection: The Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones

Howard Andrew Jones died a year ago, on January 16, 2025. He was only 56 (and could have passed for 36!) He was one of the undersung stars of the modern day sword and sorcery field -- a fantastic writer, a first-rate editor, an exceptional critic with tremendous knowledge of the fantasy field in general as well as key related genres -- adventure fiction and historical fiction in particular. He was also, hands down, one of the purely nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and I was honored by his friendship for the past couple of decades.

He wrote three primary series of sword and sorcery novels and stories -- the tales of Dabir and Asim, the Ring Sword Trilogy, and his series, ongoing at the time of his death, about Hanuvar, a fantasy analog to Hannibal. All of these are very entertaining, and his career, a bit of a slow burn commercially (he deserved much better) seemed to be taking off when he was taken from us. I haven't written enough about his work yet, but I did review his first novel for SF Site, and so it is my latest SF Site resurrection. (If only we could resurrect Howard!)

(As ever, I print the review essentially unchanged, so the comments about Howard date to 2011.)

SF Site Review: The Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones

a review by Rich Horton

Howard Andrew Jones has been publishing stories about the scholar Dabir and the soldier Asim -- sort of an 8th Century Arabian version of Holmes and Watson -- for several years now, in places like Black Gate and Jim Baen's Universe. These have been consistently very enjoyable. Jones is an expert on Sword and Sorcery and Adventure fiction -- he has edited books of Harold Lamb's stories, he was the founding editor of Flashing Swords magazine, and the longtime Managing Editor at Black Gate. And he proved early on that he could translate his knowledge of fantasy adventure stories into the real thing. The Desert of Souls is his first published novel. (I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, that Howard is an associate of mine, and a friend, because of our shared experience at Black Gate.)

As with all the Dabir and Asim stories, The Desert of Souls is told by Asim. It is not really an "origin story" for the duo, though it comes early in their career, before they truly became close associates. (The actual origin story, previously published in Black Gate as "Whispers from the Stone" is incorporated in the book as a tale told by Asim to a traveling company.) This story also serves as something of an explanation for Asim's later career as a chronicler -- as the book opens he is shown being rather dismissive of a poet in his Master's service, but for a variety of reasons, including a prophesy that he will take up the pen, he changes his attitude.

But what of the story, you say, the story! It's quite as good as any of us fans of Dabir and Asim might have hoped. The two are both members of the household of Jaffar, a prominent judge in Baghdad and an associate of the caliph. Asim is the Captain of Jaffar's guards, and Asim is the tutor to Jaffar's beautiful -- and very intelligent -- young niece, Sabirah. Attempting to raise Jaffar's spirits after the death of his beloved parrot, Dabir and Asim happen upon an escaping thief, and recover a valuable ancient door pull. Dabir soon realizes that the door pull is connected with the disappeared ancient city of Ubar, and that it might be put to terrible uses. And when it is stolen by a Greek visitor associated with Firouz, a fire wizard from a group with a (rather justified) grudge against the caliph, Dabir and Asim are sent on a journey to recover the door pull before Firouz can get to Ubar and put it to whatever fell purpose he has in mind.

Things are complicated when they find that Sabirah has stowed away on the ship in which they follow Firouz. Not only is this bad because Sabirah will be in harm's way, but because her student/teacher relationship with Dabir has already set tongues wagging, and this will only increase suspicions of impropriety. (Which in this culture means one is risking one's head.) But the mission to stop Firouz seems more urgent. Their journey is full of mundane problems like seasickness, traditional adventure problems like sea battles and sword fights, and imaginative magical concerns. (I particularly liked the worm they encounter in the title Desert of Souls.) Jones manages two climaxes without making the second seem an anticlimax, as there is first an encounter in Ubar, and then a final resolution in Baghdad.

Dabir's approach is unrelentingly rational -- which is not to say he denies the reality of magic. Asim's is plainer, reflecting his soldierly background, which can get him in trouble when he fails to perceive Dabir's intentions. Both characters are excellently realized. The story is primarily about the adventure plot: the need to catch Firouz and stop him. But there is also an effective ongoing thread about the personal lives of the two protagonists. Jones also manages to interweave triumph and failure -- the characters do not succeed completely, and there are real costs to their falling short. This is a very satisfying first novel, and I will certainly be looking for the promised sequel. In the meantime, I suggest that any readers who haven't yet encountered this duo by all means buy The Desert of Souls, and also seek out their appearances at shorter lengths.

Resuscitated Review: The Wooden Sea, by Jonathan Carroll

Here's another review I'm reposting after the demise of the outstanding old SF/F review site, SF Site. Note that for the most part I'm leaving these reviews unchanged. This was first published in 2001, when The Wooden Sea came out. My comments are from back then, and I've read more of Carroll's work since then, and the writer comparisons I make might seem out of date. So be it!

Review: The Wooden Sea, by Jonathan Carroll

by Rich Horton

The Wooden Sea is a fine new novel from a very interesting writer. I'm only slightly acquainted with the work of Jonathan Carroll: I've read one early novel (Bones of the Moon) and several short stories that have appeared in genre sources, such as "Uh-Oh City." Still, I had an idea what to expect: a contemporary setting, veering off into very strange territory at some time; an ordinary person, deeply in love, faced with an unexpected and unexplainable threat to those he loves; and fine writing with a mixture of almost goofy humour and wrenching tragedy. And that's what we get here. (Writers who come to mind as comparison points are William Browning Spencer, Jonathan Lethem, and Bradley Denton.)

The Wooden Sea is narrated by Frannie McCabe, the 47-year old police chief of a small town, Crane's View, New York. Frannie is on his second marriage, and he has a teenage stepdaughter. He is sometimes plagued by the town's collective memory: he was rather a juvenile delinquent as a youth, and, in high school, he dated the girl who is now the mayor; but by and large he seems respected and happy. One day he adopts, almost perforce, a sickly three-legged dog named Old Vertue -- within a few days the dog is dead, and Frannie's attempts to bury the dog seem to set in motion a series of increasingly surrealistic events.

The strangeness starts out small, as it were: the buried dog disappears, and needs to be reburied. The dog turns up again, sort of, in an Old Master painting. And a high school girl dies of an overdose, leaving behind a notebook with tantalizing hints that she too was involved in these strange events.

From this point things become very odd indeed. The novel involves trips both forward and backward in time. Frannie's 17-year old self becomes a major character, as does a sinister businessman from decades in the future. Frannie finds himself presented with an ultimatum -- figure out what he needs to do in a week, or else -- with almost no idea of what he is to figure out, or what the "else" is. And this is to say nothing of the gods and/or aliens.

In a way, this book might be called "Science Fiction Magical Realism": it uses Science Fictional imagery in ways reminiscent of how more usual "Magical Realism" uses Fantastical imagery. (This is a term I've also been tempted to apply to Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist and M. John Harrison's Signs of Life, though I ought to emphasize that in most ways, these three novels are very different from each other.) On first reading, I had some difficulty with this: there's a temptation to make the book be about the Science Fictional events, and it really doesn't work that way. They don't end up making outward sense, and they aren't really properly resolved. But reading the book more as a mainstream (or, dare I say, slipstream) novel -- that is, as a story about the life of Francis McCabe -- works much better. We get a portrait of a believable man, a good man, and a happy man, facing a crisis from out of nowhere. The characters are very nicely done: Frannie, his younger self, his wife Magda and stepdaughter Pauline, his strange neighbour George Dalemwood. The action, for all its weirdness, is always interesting, though at times I felt a bit disconnected from things: at times things simply got too weird. The resolution is moving and bittersweet.