Review: Victims of the Nova, by John Brunner

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

by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe

Review: The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe

by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Bestseller Review: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

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

by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spoilers will follow ....

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

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

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

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

Review: Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason

Review: Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason

by Rich Horton

Eleanor Arnason is one of my favorite writers. She's been publishing excellent short fiction for over 50 years, including early highlights such as "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons", brilliant middle period work like "The Lovers", "Dapple", and "Stellar Harvest", and wonderful late stories like "Mr. Catt". She has published six novels as well, including two in her Hwarhath series, A Woman of the Iron People and Ring of Swords.

Arnason is of Icelandic descent, and a number of recent stories draw on her ancestry. Hidden Folk, a 2014 collection from Many Worlds Press, collects five of these, along with an absorbing introduction telling a bit about Iceland and its history, and also about Arnason's own ancestry. There is also an afterword giving "Notes on the Stories". Hidden Folk is available now (as of August 2025) for only $14 here. 

The five stories are all good reading, set at multiple times in the last millennium or so. They are characterized by a forthright presentation, with humorous undertones, taking the weird events and strange creatures completely at face value. They are variously clever, sweet, scary, violent, and simply odd. I'll quite briefly describe the stories:

"Kormak the Lucky" is an outstanding novella about an Irishman taken into slavery by Norwegian raiders. He ends up in Iceland, eventually in the household of the "Marsh Men", until the crazy grandfather of the family, scheming against his son, forces him to flee to an underground land of "light elves". This doesn't save him from slavery, but eventually he agrees to help a beautiful elf-woman escape --  first to the dark elves, then to the Irish fey. Arnason blends Scandinavian and Irish traditions with her own imagination -- the technological nature of some of the elves is particularly well thought out. The elves are unsympathetically and realistically presented, and the people much the same. The telling is deadpan, with Arnason's wit simmering underneath. Just an absorbing and original story. 

"Glam's Story" is essentially a reimagination of an episode from the sagas about a violent outlaw and great fighter called Grettir Asmundarson. Here he is engaged to battle the ghost of Glam, a slave owned by Thorhall Grimson. Grimson had murdered him, perhaps because he (Grimson) was a worthless husband and his wife seemed to like Glam a bit. The story is narrated by the wife in a very matter of fact tone, and in the end it's a much about her unhappy marriage and how that works out as it is about the somewhat epic battle of hero and ghost.

"The Black School" is about Saemundur Siguffson, a young man from Iceland, and his two companions, who go to Paris to attend the university there, in the 11th Century. Alas, they speak no French, and instead of the university they find themselves at the title school, and underground (literally) institution run by a sinisiter figure whom they learn is the devil. The school does offer instruction, which takes at least three years ... and at the graduation ceremony, the slowest graduate to leave is taken by the devil. The others seem likely to become black magicians. But Saemundur holds on to his faith and his principles, and works out a way to escape.

The first three stories, based on sagas and folktales, are set early in the second millennium, but the last two are set in the 20th Century. "The Puffin Hunter" concerns Harold, a divorced man living in rural Iceland, who hunts puffins and gathers their eggs. One day a puffin speaks to him, asking him not to wring its neck, but Harold wrings it anyway. And then is haunted by the puffin's ghost. It turns out the ghost puffin was an elf woman, who had changed into a puffin and now was stuck. The elves have found Gudrun, a human folklorist, who is helping them recover their lost one, and who works with Harold to that end. The story proceeds nicely on more or less the expected path. Their are comic bits such as the effects of a ghost puffin haunting you -- lots of guano -- and I also like the deadpan descriptions of elves in Iceland in more or less the present day.

"My Husband Stein" is a bit of a romance, about a Finnish journalist who takes a house in the remote East Fjords of Iceland, and finds herself the object of unwanted advances from a troll. Arnason's wrily humorous, poker-faced telling makes the story go -- but it's not just whimsy, there's an ecological subplot, and strong believable characters.

All in all, this is a first-rate collection. Arnason's stories are a treasure, wherever you find them, and not nearly as many of them have been collected in book form as should be. Snap this book up!

Resurrected Review: Humpty Dumpty: An Oval, by Damon Knight

[I'm getting ready to head to Seattle for the 2025 Worldcon, so I've resurrected a review I did in 2004 of a really fine novel by one of SF's true greats.]

Resurrected Review: Humpty Dumpty: An Oval, by Damon Knight

by Rich Horton

Humpty Dumpty: An Oval, was Damon Knight's last novel, published in 1996. It is a very strange book, reminding me somewhat of Gene Wolfe, and of Patrick O'Leary's The Impossible Bird, and of other afterlife fantasies like William Golding's Pincher Martin, or even Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Which is a hint that I regarded the book as an afterlife fantasy, though that interpretation is not entirely clear.

The book opens with the narrator, Wellington Stout, in an Italian hospital, recovering from a shot to the head. He had come to Italy for his beloved stepdaughter's wedding, but had agreed to ferry a mysterious package for his less than beloved older brother -- and in trying to deliver the package he seems to have been shot.

Stout is a salesman for a firm dealing in ladies' underwear. (A running joke -- or rather a detail of characterization -- is his obsession with women's breasts and with their bras.) He is 64 years old, an American long resident in England. We learn a bit about his past life -- a couple of marriages, one failed, one seemingly happy but ending with his wife's untimely death. Lots of affairs are implied. His relationship with his stepdaughter (actually his first wife's daughter by her second husband, whom Wellington raised after her mother fell apart) is loving but perhaps on the edge of impropriety. He seems a nice guy but far from perfect. 

However, after his injury, he appears to lose his grip on reality. Or perhaps reality has lost its grip on the world. There seem to be competing groups of aliens, and of powerful secret humans, vying for control of the world. Stout finds himself willy-nilly on a journey westward, from Italy back to England to his childhood homes in Pennsylvania and Oregon. At first it seems that an explanation for all the strange goings on may be forthcoming -- what is the message Stout was carrying? Are the aliens from the planet Mongo real? what do the strange voices Stout keeps hearing, muttering almost intelligible phrases, mean? etc. etc. But as Stout's travels continue, things get weirder and weirder. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, but I remain puzzled by it -- which is not necessarily a bad thing! We do get a pretty comprehensive portrayal of Wellington Stout, and of his life, in an odd fashion. (In a way it recalls a little known but quite remarkable timeslip novel, The Man Who Got Away, by Sumner Locke Elliott.) The weird events are continually interesting. But what it all means? I don't really know. It's easy enough to say that it could be an afterlife fantasy -- Stout hallucinating as he dies from the bullet in his head -- but even if that's true that's not much of a stab at what the novel really means ... Still, it keeps me thinking. A reread is in order -- and it's a reminder that Damon Knight was a magnificent writer at every length short of novel until late in his life -- and then in his last two novels he figure out that length, so Why Do Birds? and Humpty Dumpty: An Oval are true capstones to a great career.

Review: On Strike Against God, by Joanna Russ

Review: On Strike Against God, by Joanna Russ

by Rich Horton

I don't usually publish reviews of books by the same author back to back, but after finishing The Female Man I proceeded straight to On Strike Against God. My review of The Female Man is here. 

Joanna Russ wrote what she called her "coming out" novel, On Strike Against God, beginning in 1973. A first draft was complete by 1974, making it her first novel after The Female Man, though the final manuscript wasn't complete until 1977, by which time she had finished two other novels, We Who Are About To ..., and The Two of Them. On Strike Against God was placed with a Lesbian press, Out and Out Books, and publication was delayed until 1980 largely due to financial issues at the publisher. It was thus her last novel to see print.

It's a short novel, a bit over 40,000 words. Russ's novels are fairly short -- each of Picnic on Paradise, We Who Are About Too ..., and On Strike Against God are in the 40,000 to 45,000 word range; while her other three novels are roughly twice as long, between about 75,000 and 80,000 words. This is in no way an issue -- they are all the right length. On Strike Against God is also Russ's only non-SF novel, though she wrote a number of mainstream short stories.

This novel is told by Esther, a teacher at a college in upstate New York. Esther is in her late 30s, and divorced. She is beginning to realize that she doesn't like men much (she liked her husband OK, but didn't like sex), and she is falling in love with a younger woman at the school named Jean. At first she struggles -- society has told her for so long that heterosexual relationships are the only proper ones that she's not sure what to do about Jean. But she's also coming to her feminist consciousness, and is fiercely resisting the sexism that affects every other aspect of her life.

So ... she makes a tentative move on Jean, and Jean responds, and ... well, I won't tell the rest of the plotty stuff, but the relationships has ups and downs, but mostly, I'd say, ups. The sex scenes are simply beautiful -- not in any sense pornographic, but sweet, character-based, revelatory, emotionally honest. There are also reminiscences of earlier female friendships, scenes of men, good-intentioned or hostile, simply failing to comprehend her (or any women), and "coming out" scenes to friends -- a gay male friend, an older couple in the neighborhood, other women -- that painfully illustrate how hard it was to buck society's rules back then even with the most supposedly liberal people.

The book is profoundly feminist, with some passages quite similar to passages in The Female Man. And this is all powerful -- but much more powerful is the love story at the heart of the novel. It is real, it is emotionally convincing, and it's just -- good. This is a novel that a lot of SF readers have missed, I think. At any rate, I certainly had! It has had several editions: the Out and Out Books printing, a 1985 edition from The Crossing Press, and a 1987 edition from The Women's Press (a UK imprint.) I read it in the 2023 Library of America volume Joanna Russ: Novels and Stories. And the Feminist Press put out another edition in 2024. So, after a quarter century or so in which it was hard to find, On Strike Against God is again quite readily available, and I strongly recommend it.