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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reinstituted Review: The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford

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

Reinstituted Review: The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford

a review by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a review by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

--------

Spoilers follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Substack Posts

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

Human Voices, by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers

Cumberworld & Farther, by Gregory Feeley

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford

Moth, by James Sallis

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow

The Rainseekers, by Matthew Kressel

Mr American, by George Macdonald Fraser

Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov

Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov

by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reclaimed Review: Declare, by Tim Powers

Reclaimed Review: Declare, by Tim Powers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rediscovered Review: Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah Ross

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

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

A review by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.