Monday, April 17, 2023

Review: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Review: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

by Rich Horton

Adrian Tchaikovsky* made his name with a long fantasy series, Shadow of the Apt, then began writing SF with this novel, published in 2015. Along the way he's published a fair amount of short fiction, and I reprinted one of those, "Dress Rehearsal", in my 2017 Best of the Year volume. So Tchaikovsky was on my radar -- and when Children of Time won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, I knew I needed to read it. But -- I sometimes have a hard time getting to novels! I recently bought the third book in the trilogy, however (it was at a convention, and they didn't have the first two!) -- so I finally got the audio version of this first book and read it. (By lucky coincidence it turns out that the book is even my book club selection for next month -- something I didn't realize until after I started it!)

The audiobook is read by Mel Hudson, very capably. I always enjoy hearing an English accent (especially for a book written by an English person) -- kind of emphasizes the whole "separated by a common language" thing. With an English reader, I usually find words pronounced differently from the American way, sometimes almost comically -- there really is NOT a second "i" in the word "specialty"! Except -- apparently in England "speciality" is an accepted alternate spelling! 

Children of Time opens in a star system 20 light years from Earth. Dr. Avrana Kern has been leading a terraforming effort, and now she is ready to release her crowning achievement -- a set of monkeys to inhabit the planet, and a virus engineered to accelerate the monkeys' evolution into an intelligent species. But at the last moment, the effort is sabotaged, and Kern ends up marooned in orbit, the rest of the terraforming station destroyed, her monkeys having burned up in atmosphere. But we soon learn that the virus did make it to the planet's surface, and, having no monkeys to infect, instead it finds some other species -- particularly a variety of spider. Kern uploads herself into a computer, and her physical body goes into suspension. And down on the planet, the spiders begin the process of what we might has well call uplift.

Some two millennia in the future, civilization on Earth is all but finished. War destroyed the Old Empire -- driven by the same political rift that motivated the saboteur of Kern's project. The few survivors of the succeeding ice age have managed to patch together a few "Ark Ships", sending the crews (in suspension along with the "Cargo" -- the potential colonists) to the worlds they believe the Old Empire terraformed. The Gilgamesh has arrived at "Kern's World" -- but Avrana Kern awakens to meet them -- and warn them off, for she wants her world preserved for what she thinks are "her" uplifted monkeys. By this time her physical self is insane, and her uploaded copy more or less constrained to obey the insane part. Holsten Mason is the "classicist" assigned to the Gilgamesh's crew -- an expert on the old Imperial languages they expect to find at the terraformed sites. So it is Holsten who learns to understand Kern. His best friend becomes the head of Engineering, Isa Lain, whose job it is to understand the Imperial tech they encounter (and to maintain the the Gilgamesh.) Antagonists (of a sort) are the Captain, Guyen, who has a barely sane Messianic streak of his own, and the head of security, Karst.

Down on the planet, the spiders have achieve a fairly high level of intelligence, and are beginning to build societies. Tchaikovsky uses an interesting device to maintain continuity with the spiders over their many generations -- he calls three main characters the same names generation after generation: Portia, the adventurer/explorer; Bianca (or "Bee-anker" in Britspeak!), the scientist; and Fabian, the revolutionary male. (In spider society, females are larger and dominant -- and they often eat their mates -- one of the crusades of one of the Fabians is to make that practice illegal.) 

We follow the growth of spider society -- increasing use of technology (especially biotech); increasing social cooperation and organization; a battle with ants for territory followed by harnessing the ant colonies for various technological uses, such as a biogical computer; and, crucially, contact with Avran Kern, whom they call the "Messenger", a god who for centuries has been transmitting mathematical equations, hoping to hear the correct solutions from what she believes will be at last "uplifted" monkeys. More or less in parallel we see the struggles of the Gilgamesh -- an attempt to evade Kern's quarantine of "her" world, an attempt to travel to the next terraformed world down the line, which fails terribly; and a return to Kern's world for a last ditch effort of take possession of the world now owned by the spiders. All this leads to a desperate final battle, as the human history of ecological disaster and genocide threatens everything the spiders have built, with only Mason dimly realizing how wrong this is. And it leads to a striking and quite moving conclusion.

The novel is really cool old-fashioned SF. There is effective use of some traditional SF ideas -- the Gilgamesh becomes in essence a generation ship, and some familiar generation ship tropes are nicely deployed. Even better is the speculation about spider society, and the really neat ideas about how they think and use tech, etc. They do come off, perhaps inevitably, as a bit too human in some ways, though Tchaikovsky tries to avoid that. (The wonderful revelation of what the character is Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky are really like doesn't happen in this case.) But that isn't a big problem, and in a way is key to the resolution (and, I presume, to the sequels.) It's a lot of fun, and I'd say it deserved its Clarke Award.

*(I love the story of Adrian Tchaikovsky's penname -- he's English, of Polish descent, real name Czajkowski, but his publishers wanted a name English people could pronounce -- so they suggested Tchaikovsky, pronounced the same (I assume) as his real name, but easy for English readers to recognize because of the composer.)

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

An M-Brane SF Double: The New People, by Alex Jeffers/Elegant Threat, by Brandon H. Bell

An M-Brane SF Double: The New People, by Alex Jeffers/Elegant Threat, by Brandon H. Bell

by Rich Horton

My fellow St. Louisan Christopher Fletcher published 30 issues of M-Brane SF in the three year period from February 2009 through January 2012 -- in print! A staggering achievement, really. And the fiction he published was of impressive quality. He had other publishing ambitions -- Brandon H. Bell edited three issues of Fantastique Unfettered for him, and Rick Novy edited an anthology, Ergosphere. (Fletcher and Bell also edited an anthology for Eric Reynolds' Hadley Rille Press, The Aether Age: Helios, sort of a steampunk revisiting of Ancient Greece.) Christopher also entertained the idea of publishing a set of double novels, in the Ace Double format (i.e. tête bèche, each side oriented at 180 degrees to the other, with either potentially the "front.") In the end, he only published one such book -- the one I'm covering now, which backs a pair of long novellas (30,000 words or so apiece) by M-Brane regulars. Christopher was kind enough to send me a copy a few years ago, and it took me an unconscionably long time to get to it, especially given that Alex Jeffers is a writer I particularly admire. But I have finally read it!

[Cover by Jeff Lund]

Both pieces are pretty self-contained stories from planned novels that have not, alas, yet eventuated. Alex Jeffers' The New People is, according to Fletcher's introduction, part of a book to be called A Boy's History of the World. The setting is  Rahab, an ocean planet somewhat isolated from what we presume is a larger galactic society. Humans live on only a few small archipelagoes, but life seems generally quite comfortable, with fairly high technology used in a what seem environmentally friendly ways. There is one unusual feature -- the population is entirely male. It is a purposeful inversion of the societies depicted in stories as varied as Joanna Russ's "When it Changed" and Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet: those are all female societies, this of Rahab is all male. (The other prominent such example is Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos. One more, less pleasant, example occurs in Cordwainer Smith's "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal.") "Jannicke's Cat" depicted the title woman (not the cat!) as the last surviving female of whatever disaster wiped out all females on Rahab. The New People is set centuries later. Genetic engineering allows male children to be born to male couples. Life is calm, almost idyllic.

The story opens with Jafet desperately running out of a building ... we soon learn the building has been bombed. Jafet is one of a few survivors. And one of the suspects in the bombing is a group called the "New People" -- and Jafet has read their manifesto approvingly. As soon as he recovers, a policeman -- a very attractive man -- is questioning him. But it's fairly clear he had no involvement ... Then, 13 years before, we return to Jafet, still living with his fathers. Jafet has realized he is profoundly attracted to other boys, and he learns, or internalizes, that while his fathers love each other well enough, they are, at heart, heterosexual -- and of course there are no women. That, then, is the central paradox of Rahab, a world of all men, apparently a mostly happy world, but a world in which most relationships are more platonic than fully sexual. (The question really isn't asked, and perhaps would be unfair: but could this in some ways account for the apparent, well, pleasantness of life in this world?) 

Things continue on those two alternating timelines: the earlier one following Jafet's early adult life, as he does his global service, a few six month assignments, at various places around the world. More importantly, he meets a man, Evren, a remarkably talented singer. They fall head over heels for each other, as Jafet tries to work around his service requirements to follow Evren on tour, and as Evren makes a place of Jafet in his life, and is clearly ready for much more. But we know all along that didn't work out, for in the present Jafet is still unmarried, and indeed is emotionally a wreck, blaming himself constantly for breaking off with his past love. Moreoever, as the investigation into the bombing continues, we learn that it was an attack on one of the main nurseries in Rahab -- a place where the new babies are decanted, and their fathers first meet them. And one of those new fathers was Evren, and Evren's husband and child are among the dead.

The two strands move closer and closer, as in the one we see Jafet and Evren's love affair, and then the crushing way it ended. And in the present we follow (at a distance) the investigation into the bombing, as Jafet becomes intrigued with the policeman until he realizes that won't work, and as he learns eventually something of the motivation behind the bombing, and also something of the history of The New People movement and its goals (which intrigue Jafet.) And of course Jafet realizes that as Evren has survived he must face his pain and resolve their relationship. And behind all these strands lies the central problem at the heart of life on Rahab -- the only possible sexual relationships are between men, but most men are born essentially heterosexual. (This last presents a distinct contrast to the stories mentioned above -- the Russ and Anderson and Bujold.) Beyond that this is a story about a lovely sunny world (truly a near utopia) with some honest darkness dogging it. It's a really well-done story, that I think will benefit from the additional context of other planned episodes set in the same world.

[Cover by Jeff Lund]

Elegant Threat is subtitled ... on the Demise of Captain Fantomas Patton-Guerrero and Loss of La Amenaza Elegente. This tells us right away that the story won't end happily. La Amenaza Elegente is a ship that descends to the surface of the moon Shanama, in the Alpha Centauri (or Rigil Kentaurus) system, to harvest some of the local life, which is DNA-based, as opposed to the more alien life on Oasis, the planet the humans in this system seem to have colonized. There is a background, only dimly perceived here, of a conflict between Post-humans and still (fairly) normal humans. But this story really focuses on one fraught expedition to the surface of Shanama, and the effect this has on the ship's Captain, his wife Pristina, their two daughters, 16 year old Cancer and 8 year old Toro; as well as the first mate, Khalid, and his son Amr. Khalid and Amr are "slicks" -- the working class -- and Amr has a bit of a crush on Cancer, who seems a vain brat.

The story shows a bit of the normal operation of the ship, and shows Amr and Cancer serving (to different degrees) as apprentices -- intended to learn the ropes. But the ship has been sabotaged (betrayed by one of the crew ) and by happenstance the three children are the only ones on the ship when it goes out of control, and the main action, then, follows a desperate rescue attempt across the surface of the moon, with danger including the weather, and ghost sharks, and a megalodon. Amr grows up a bit -- or a lot -- and Toro has her own variety of heroism, while Cancer shows a different side -- not always pleasant. And Khalid and Fantomas and Pristina and their crew risk their lives try to save the children ...

It's exciting enough, and the setting is fascinating. But I did come away feeling I needed to know more about the back story, and more details about the slick position in society, and indeed the society as a whole, and perhaps especially about the conflict with the Posthumans. It's likely the finished novel would fill in a lot of these details (and at least two other stories in this milieu have appeared) but as it is this novella, though worth reading, doesn't fully succeed.


Sunday, April 9, 2023

Review: Carmen Dog, by Carol Emshwiller

Review: Carmen Dog, by Carol Emshwiller

by Rich Horton

Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019) began selling SF in the mid-1950s, and it was quickly evident that she was a major talent. But while her early work got admiring notice, it was just offbeat enough not to make her famous -- and in the early '60s she wrote little, presumably while raising her children.* (Her husband was Ed Emshwiller, the great SF artist and also an important experimental filmmaker.) In the late '60s she resumed writing, and continued to produce original and challenging short fiction for most of the rest of her life (her last story appeared in 2012 -- health problems (most related to her eyesight, I believe) caused her to stop.) But like many SF writers, she was best at shorter lengths, and she didn't publish a novel until 1988. In the end, she published only six novels -- two of them Westerns set in the 20th Century, and four SF novels. By the end of her life, people such as me were suggesting that she should be an SFWA Grand Master, but I suspect that the shape of her career, and her relatively small output of novels, kept her just enough under the radar that she never received that award -- though she was named winner of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2019, and she also won a couple of World Fantasy Awards (including one for Life Achievement), a couple of Nebulas, and a Philip K. Dick Award for Best Novel for The Mount

That first novel, published in 1988, was Carmen Dog, the novel at hand. It was published by The Women's Press, an English publishing house which published books by and about women, some reprints and some new, between 1979 and 2002. They had an SF line, which featured reprints by the likes of Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler among many others, and original fiction by Josephine Saxton, Melanie Tem, and Emshwiller, again among others. (I will say for myself that I applaud the words they published, but the books were often poorly bound and the covers were terrible.) Carmen Dog was reprinted by Mercury House in the US in 1990, and again reprinted in 2004 by Small Beer Press in their Peapod Classics line. I have the latter edition, a really nice trade paperback, with an unusual trim size (5.5" by 7") and a fine cover by Kevin Huizenga.

The book is a delight. As it opens, we learn that all over the world, women are transforming into animals (of all kinds) and animals are transforming into women. The main character is a dog named Pooch, who is becoming a woman. Pooch is devoted to her master and the baby, and when her master's wife, who is changing to some sort of water creature, bites the baby, she decides she must take the baby away. Pooch has also discovered a talent for opera singing, and loves Carmen above all. 

But Pooch's opera dreams, as well as her hopes for reunification with her former master, are disrupted, first by arrest (and a trip to the pound) and then by a "rescue" by an experimental psychologist, who has "plans" to understand what is happening to the females of both the animal and human species. In both places Pooch makes friends with other females, both going "up" to humanness, or "down" to animal species. (While Pooch's sympathies are with those "ascending", like her, the question of which is better or if either is "better" is deliberately ambiguous.) The psychologist's treatments are truly horrifying, and Pooch loses her ability to speak -- and to sing. But she keeps on struggling, and keeps protecting the baby. Her adventures continue -- to a daring escape, a visit to the opera, a sexual escapade with another female and her opera singer lover, and eventually contact with a revolutionary group led by the psychologist's also altered wife.

This novel manages to be both very funny, very moving, and quite pointed. It's a deeply feminist novel, and through Pooch's naive ears we hear pointed observations about how men perceive women -- both those animals who have been "uplifted" and those humans whose nature is tending towards the animalistic. The revolution is most assuredly aimed at allowing women to be free of male expectations -- but at the same time is not anti men -- just desiring a future for men and women in which both flourish cooperatively. As the revolution's manifesto goes: "Neither Conqueror nor Conquered, Neither Victory nor Defeat." It is simply a very fun novel, and a very thought-provoking one. It's beautifully imagined, sly, sweet, witty, and inspiring. Emshwiller was one of the great treasures of the SF field, under-recognized in her lifetime but never ignored, and we should be rediscovering all her work now, ready to place her in her deserved spot in the SF pantheon.

*It's worth noting that Carol Emshwiller's daughter Susan is a fine writer on her own, mostly of plays and screenplays, but also short fiction, including a story in F&SF. Her first novel, Thar She Blows, has just been released. Thar She Blows.

Monday, April 3, 2023

Old Bestseller Review: Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Review: Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon 

a review by Rich Horton

This is a somewhat famous mid-19th Century novel that, I gather, was somewhat (though never entirely) neglected for some time for the usual reasons, in some mix or another -- it's a noticeably "popular" novel in conception and ambition, it was a tremendous financial success (and indeed its author, over a long career, became quite wealthy), its plot is very melodramatic, and the author was a woman (and a woman with a faintly scandalous reputation, at least at the outset.) In more recent times these prejudices have lessened in importance, and it is now reasonably well established in what might be called the secondary canon of Victorian fiction. Braddon's reputation might track, to some extent, with that of her friend and sort of mentor, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or with her contemporary and fellow writer of "sensation novels", Wilkie Collins; both of whom faced the same prejudices as Braddon with the exception of their sex.

I have had this novel in the back of my mind for a while, and when it popped up recently as a free audiobook, I figured, why not? And I was grabbed from the beginning. It is a great deal of sheer fun. And besides that -- it is really well-written. And there is a lot going on besides the sensational plot that only adds to the interest. Look -- it's not Middlemarch. But hardly anything is! It's a fine novel, with an admittedly implausible plot that is nonetheless fascinating, and with plenty of trenchant observation, well-described situations, and nicely turned lines and paragraphs. 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in 1835 (a day (and 124 years) before my birthday), to a nominally middle-class family, but her mother left her father, who was unfaithful and a failure at his business, when Mary was five. She grew up in straitened circumstances, and became an actress at age 17 to help support her mother, but turned to writing a few years later. She fell in love with her publisher, John Maxwell, who was about a decade older, and still married. (His wife is often said to have been confined to an asylum, while other sources say she lived in her family's home. I suspect the latter is true, and the asylum rumor derived from Braddon's fiction.) Lady Audley's Secret was her first major success, though about her sixth novel (her first appeared in 1860 -- she wrote quickly.) It began serialization in Maxwell's magazine Robin Goodfellow in 1861, but after the magazine failed, it moved to Sixpenny Magazine in 1862, and was also published in book form that year. It was sufficiently popular that it was serialized again in 1863.

Braddon continued to write for most of the rest of her long life. She became friends quite early with Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose work she admired, and they corresponded regularly. She died in 1915, at the age of 79. Her writing made her rich, and she was also an editor and publisher (notably of Belgravia Magazine.) None of her other novels achieved the same fame as her first, though Aurora Floyd (1863) still has readers. She had six children with John Maxwell. (Maxwell and Braddon had married in 1874, after the death of Maxwell's first wife.) One of them, William Babington Maxwell, became a successful novelist as well (though his books do seem forgotten now). William was also a friend of King Edward VII (Victoria's immediate successor), suggesting that Braddon and Maxwell had achieved respectability. Mary's brother Edward moved to India and then Australia while she was still young, and eventually became Premier of Tasmania, and remains a somewhat significant figure in Australian history -- so he too seems to have been a success. 

I confess I find Mary Elizabeth Braddon's life fascinating and indeed rather inspiring. But what about the novel at hand?

We open at Audley Court, the home of Sir Michael Audley, and his daughter Alicia. We learn quickly that Sir Michael has just remarried -- a very young woman, 21 or 22 years old, named Lucy Graham. Lucy had been the governess to Dr. Dawson's three girls, a very accomplished artist and pianist, of a very sweet disposition, much liked by the local people, and very pretty. Sir Michael is very happy with his new wife, but his daughter does not get along with her at all.

Next we meet Edward Talboys, sailing from Australia back to England. After over three years in Australia, he has made his fortune, and is ready to reunite with his wife and young son. There is a fascinating conversation with a fellow traveller, a Miss Morley, who has been in Australia for 15 years and hopes at last to be able to marry her fiancé. The two share their hopes, and their fears -- will their loves be waiting still for them? (We never do find out what happened to Miss Morley -- I admit I'd like to know the rest of her story.)

And then we encounter Robert Audley, Sir Michael's nephew. He is an idle man about town -- trained to be a barrister, and so licensed, but he has not taken up that profession, preferring to read French novels and smoke cigars and take care of his birds and dogs. By chance he runs into a man while heading to his bank -- and recognizes his old friend George Talboys. George asks him for help depositing the money he's made in Australia, and then mentions that he looking for his wife Helen Talboys. And then they see a notice in the Times, announcing the death of one Helen Talboys, aged only 22. 

So the main action is set in motion. George is in despair, but Robert convinces him to join him on a visit to Audley Court. Somehow Lady Audley is never available to meet Robert ... indeed, she makes a sudden journey to London. Robert and Alicia cross swords a bit -- it's clear to the reader that Alicia is in love with her cousin, but Robert, though he likes her well enough, is unaware of her feelings. She does let them up to her father's rooms, including a newly painted portrait of his new wife -- and George is struck dumb.

The reader knows what's going on by now, of course. On another visit George is at last able to maneuver a meeting with Lady Audley ... and then he disappears. It seems he has returned to Australia. Robert becomes obsessed with finding what really happened to him, especially after his visits to the offices of the ships to Australia, and his advertisements in Australian papers, prove fruitless. So he starts tracking, as best he can, the history of George Talboy's life, and his marriage, and his father-in-law and son. And then he looks into the life of Helen Talboys before she met George; and into the history of Lucy Graham before her time with Dr. Dawson. He is convinced that something quite terrible has happened to George, but proof is hard to find. He is ready to throw it all up, especially after a visit to George's father reveals that his father cares little for George's fate ... but then George's sister accosts Robert -- and between her passion to find out what really happened to her beloved brother, and her beautiful brown eyes, Robert realizes he is quite lost -- he has at last fallen for a woman, and he is bound to carry his search for the secret of Robert's fate to the bitter end.

I've failed to mention another key thread -- the story of Lady Audley's maid, Phoebe Marks, and her brutish cousin, later husband, Luke Marks. They have happened on Lady Audley's secret, and Luke blackmails Lady Audley to set him up as proprietor of a public house. But a blackmailer never stops, of course, so -- well, I'll say no more for now, except to note that bits of Braddon's life story show up in this book: the bigamy aspect, a woman confined to an asylum, a man who goes to Australia to make his fortune. 

So -- it's a wildly plotty (and well plotted) melodramatic novel. That's fine, but weren't those a ha'pence a dozen in the Victorian Era? Couldn't (and didn't) Charlotte Brame have done much the same? Well, yes, but ... Braddon could really write. And she was doing -- cleverly -- much more than telling the melodramatic surface story. For one thing, the book is really funny when it wants to be, especially in describing Robert Audley's character, and allowing him the occasional exaggerated rant about women (before he falls in love) -- these read to me like Braddon getting some frustration off her chest about some of the things she'd heard from men over the years. There are other comic delights, too, for example her aside about Lucy Graham's teacher, Mrs. Vincent, and her parsimony: "Mrs. Vincent might have hesitated to pay [Miss Tonks] from very contempt for the pitiful nature of the stipend as compared with the merits of the teacher." (This in the midst of a beautifully observed passage about Mrs. Vincent's poverty and her living quarters.) The depiction of George Talboy's absurdly strict father is also a comic -- or tragicomic -- delight.

Also: Robert Audley on women: "What a wonderful solution to life's enigma there is in petticoat government. A man might lie in the sunshine and eat lotuses and fancy it 'always afternoon,' if his wife would let him. But she won't, bless her impulsive heart and active mind. She knows better than that. ... She drives her husband on to the woolsack, or pushes him into Parliament. ... That's why incompetent men sometimes sit in high places, and interpose their poor, muddled intellects between the things to be done and the people that can do them, making universal confusion in the helpless innocence of well-placed incapacity. The square men in the round holes are pushed into them by their wives. The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. ... They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators -- anything they like -- but let them be quiet -- if they can."

There's also some subtle thematic play underneath the surface. Characters have doubles, characters wear masks, play parts. Inevitably, some contemporary readers see a homoerotic element to the friendship between Robert Audley and George Talboys. I think you can try to read it that way if you like, but -- frankly, not every male friendship is queer, and sometimes the automatic assumptions some readers bring to such friendships can get a bit tiresome. The novel, also, is concerned with class and financial status, and how poverty -- or any change in financial situations -- can drive people. Certainly this is central to Lady Audley's life and actions, but also to those of Lucy and Phoebe Marks, of Mrs. Vincent, even of George Talboys. 

The novel is surely not perfect. For all Braddon's awareness of class, she retains class prejudices, particularly in the treatment of Phoebe and Luke. And she is keenly aware of women's place and society, and she acknowledges its unfairness -- but she also is quite Victorian in her perceptions of gender roles. The characters -- with the exceptions, to some extent, of Lady Audley and Robert -- are not precisely deeply observed, and only Robert really grows (and I'm not sure I bought all of his growth.) There is also a degree of "characterization by looks" and of hinting at character by things like noticing that Alicia Audley's dogs hate Lady Audley. The last portion of the novel -- apparently finished at great speed after the opportunity for a new serialization arose -- is rushed a bit, with key revelations left to a long confessional monologue, and with what should be a major romance plot rather scanted.

But those reservations aside, I found this novel a pure delight to read. It's longish, at some 150,000 words, but reads rapidly. Truly gripping, quite well-written, with some real depth beneath the lurid surface. Highly recommended.


Friday, March 31, 2023

Belmont Double Review: Father of Lies, by John Brunner/Mirror Image, by Bruce Duncan

Belmont Double Review: Father of Lies, by John Brunner/Mirror Image, by Bruce Duncan (Belmont, 1968, $0.60)

A review by Rich Horton

This is slightly embarrassing -- a couple of years ago I happened across this Belmont Double and bought it -- it was very cheap, and I have an interest in "Double books" and in John Brunner. I started in on it once or twice but didn't keep going. Then, after reviewing the sort of proto-Belmont Double A Pair From Space (Robert Silverberg's We, The Marauders paired with James Blish's Giants in the Earth) I decided I ought to get down to it and read this "real" Belmont Double to review it. Then I did a Google search -- and found the review below, that I did nearly two decades ago on rec.arts.sf.written. I had completely forgot that I already had the book and had read and reviewed it! Though in my defense my review suggests that it was pretty darn forgettable! So -- here's my old review, with some modest revisions.

I thought it might be interesting to look at another Double Book from a different publisher, to contrast with my Ace Double reviews. Belmont was a rather low end paperback publisher in the 50s and 60s. They did a number of Double Books, called simply enough Belmont Doubles, in the 60s. In general, these books seem to have been much less good than Ace Doubles. Indeed, I believe that Harlan Ellison thought so little of his Belmont Double (Doomsman, backed with Lee Hoffman's Telepower) that he was known to buy copies from fans for the purpose of destroying them. (Hoffman, I understand, was less than pleased with this stunt.)

The book to hand pairs a John Brunner story with a story by an author completely unknown to me, Bruce Duncan. The first difference to notice from the Ace Doubles is that the stories are not upside down relative to each other like Ace Doubles -- Brunner's Father of Lies comes first, and then Duncan's Mirror Image. (The Ace Double organization is properly called tête-bêche, though many people, myself included, have mistakenly called it dos-à-dos.) The price is actually the same as Ace Doubles of that period, 60 cents. However, the length is very different: Father of Lies is about 21,000 words, and Mirror Image about 22,000. Both stories, then, are shorter than almost every single Ace Double half. At 43,000 words, this book is very short for even single novels of that period. Most Ace Doubles were at least about 65,000 words combined, and usually longer. One of the shortest Ace Double is the late reprinting of two Jack Vance stories that had earlier been paired with different, longer, halves: The Dragon Masters/The Last Castle, which are about 57,000 words combined. (To be sure, that particular Ace Double may be the shortest, but it is also one of the very best!) (I have since realized that Belmont's practice was to pair two novellas -- never novel length stories -- and that these novellas were often (though not always) reprints.)

Brunner's Father of Lies was previously published in the British magazine Science Fantasy, #52, from 1962. (A significant issue, as it also included Thomas Burnett Swann's classic "Where is the Bird of Fire?".) It's actually a decent piece of work, though nothing special. It begins quite a bit better than it ends. A group of young people are investigating a mysterious spot on the map, where time seems to have gone backwards. When they blunder in there, modern technology stops working. And they discover an ogre, and later a dragon. Finally, one man discovers that another modern has wandered in by mistake -- a beautiful young woman whom he finds naked and tied to a stake, meant as a sacrifice to the dragon. In rescuing her he ends up captured himself, but fortunately his quick wits help maneuver them out. They (and his friends who come in after him) discover that the whole area is somehow reflecting Arthurian legends, if rather clumsily. The explanation is rather pathetic as it turns out, and as I implied above, though it's logical enough in its way I found it disappointing.

"Bruce Duncan's" Mirror Image, on the other hand, is utter garbage, definitely fit to stand with the worst "novels", or novellas more accurately, that I have ever read. I should note that "Bruce Duncan" is a pseudonym for Irving Greenfield (1928-2020) a prolific author of low-end paperbacks: soft porn, historical fantasy, and SF. I haven't read his other work, and it may well be better than this, though I doubt it's all that good. He may be best known for the Depth Force series, which seems to be techno-thrillers of a nautical nature. 

Mirror Image opens with a sailor on leave from an advanced submarine. He's received a Dear John letter, so he is ripe for seduction by the stripper at the bar he's visiting. But she turns out to be an android, operated by aliens. Soon the sailor is replaced by another android, and planted on the submarine. The idea is that the aliens will take over the Earth using the advanced weapons on the sub. And what do they want Earth for? Real Estate? No. Slaves? No. Natural resources? Not really -- instead, somehow they plan to suck energy (of unspecified form) from it, leaving it a ruined husk. Eh???

The android sailor clumsily takes over the ship, only to be foiled by the plucky humans, and luck, and auctorial convenience. There is also a subplot with a New York detective investigating the dead bodies of the real stripper and the real sailor when they turn up, but that goes nowhere -- just a way to fill up enough pages that the book could be published, I think. Ick -- a horrid effort.

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Ace Double Reviews, 76: The World of Null-A, by A. E. Van Vogt/The Universe Maker, by A. E. Van Vogt

Time for another resurrected Ace Double Review from almost two decades ago. This one is a pretty significant Ace Double in SF history.

Ace Double Reviews, 76: The World of Null-A, by A. E. Van Vogt/The Universe Maker, by A. E. Van Vogt (#D-31, 1953, $0.35)

a review by Rich Horton

This is an early Ace Double that qualifies as a particularly important one in that it reprints one of the most famous of 1940s SF novels, backed with another apparently new (though based on a shorter novella) novel by the A. E. Van Vogt. The World of Null-A, in this edition, first published in 1948 by Simon and Schuster, is about 67,000 words long -- apparently this is slightly shorter than, and in other ways considerably revised from, the original 1945 Astounding serial. The Universe Maker is about 50,000 words long. It is an expansion of a novella published in the January 1950 issue of Startling Stories: "The Shadow Men". (I will note that the title of The Universe Maker is given as simply Universe Maker on the cover and spine of the Ace Double, but The Universe Maker on the title page, and also on later editions.)

Oh, wow. I'm in Damon Knight territory now. The World of Null-A is one of those SF classics that I had never read. I suspect, as with many such, I missed my time -- I might have loved it at 14. But having read it first at age 46 I must confess to being more bothered by the preposterousness than thrilled by the audacity. For all that it must be said that there is considerable audacity to the telling -- it is an exciting story, and based on interesting but to my mind mostly silly ideas. Quite often I simply snorted to myself: "That's ridiculous!" -- had I approached the novel earlier I might instead have whistled to myself "Wow, that's cool!".

The novel opens with Gilbert Gosseyn in a hotel room in the City of the Machine. He is planning to participate in the Games the Machine runs every year. These games determine how well integrated one's brain is according to Non-Aristotelian principles -- or Null-A (or A with a bar over the top). The top winners get to go to Venus to join the colony built on Null-A principles established there. Gosseyn's wife Patricia Hardie has just died ... or so he thinks. Then another man accuses him of lying about his identity -- in particular, everyone knows that Patricia Hardie, the beautiful daughter of the President, is alive.

Before long Gosseyn is on the run. His allies seem to include the Machine, and a mysterious girl he meets while hiding out. But this girl turns out to be Patricia Hardie ... and the Machine is suspect. It seems some Game winners have cheated. Then Gosseyn is killed.

And ends up on Venus -- how, neither he nor the reader knows. He is still in peril on Venus, a target of, it now seems, aliens who feel threatened by humanity's potential power if Null-A really becomes generally accepted. They have infiltrated Earth's government, and are ready to attack Venus. It seems there are some resistors, possibly including Patricia and her boyfriend Crang. But the most important man of all is -- of course -- Gosseyn. Not only is there the mystery of his reincarnation, there is the anomalous structure in his brain ...

And so it goes -- Gosseyn returns to Earth -- people are assassinated and Gosseyn is blamed -- Patricia Hardie either is or isn't an ally -- the Games Machine is destroyed -- Gosseyn learns more of the aliens and of the way Earth society has been undermined -- and Gosseyn gets closer to learning who has been pulling his strings all along.

People sometime accuse Van Vogt of just making stuff up as he goes along. I don't think that's really true, and indeed by the end some of the sillier early stuff almost (but not quite) makes sense. Certainly the story is ambitious -- it's just that its ambition is in the service of kind of silly stuff. Gosseyn, notably, is nearly powerless throughout (as even he notes): he never knows what he's doing or why, which makes the final revelation a bit cute. This revelation, to be sure, is echoed at the end of the other novel in this set.

The Universe Maker is accompanied by a brief introduction from Forrest J. Ackerman, in which Ackerman, ever clumsy with words, notes that in this book Van Vogt "fictionizes some of the startling concepts of Scientology". It seems likely that the Scientology bits were added in the revision, as Hubbard's first Dianetics article appeared a couple of months after "The Shadow Men", but I haven't seen the earlier version, so I can't say for sure. (Van Vogt was a fairly early adopter of Scientology.)

In The Universe Maker, Morton Cargill, driving while drunk, causes the death of a young woman he picked up in a bar. Suddenly he finds himself centuries in the future. Apparently he has been sentenced to be killed, as part of the psychiatric treatment of the woman he killed, or perhaps a descendant.

He manages to escape, with the help of another young woman. But he doesn't trust her either, and escapes again, only to be enslaved by a rather trailer-trash couple of people, a man and his daughter who are "Planiacs" or "Floaters": they live nomadic lives in airships. He gains the upper hand soon enough, partly be an implicit promise to marry the daughter, and he learns that there is a conflict between three elements of this future society: the Planiacs, the Tweeners, who live in cities, and the Shadow Men, who can take on other forms and who seem sinisterly to be in control. He begins to work to foment a revolution, when he is snatched back in time again, to the day before his scheduled murder.

Escaping again, he this time stays with the woman who helps him, who turns out to be a Tweener involved with their war against the Shadows. He is also visited by what seem dreams of the future, in which he is urged to save the world by helping the Tweeners beat the Shadows. And indeed he helps them plan an attack on the Shadow city, but he has misgiving. And when at last he reaches the Shadow City, he is in for a surprise ... not to mention a revelation about the real person in charge of all this gadding about in time ... who is -- revelation after spoiler space at the end.

This novel has ideas pretty much as wild as those in The World of Null-A, but not quite as interesting. Nor are there quite as many new developments. I'm sure that's why The World of Null-A is more famous -- and indeed, I liked it a lot more than The Universe Maker. But there is no mistaking that the two novels are by the same author!

Now, the revelation at the end of both novels ...





SPOILER ...





The unseen hand pulling all the strings, in each case, is the protagonist himself (without his point-of-view self knowing, to be sure!)

Thursday, March 23, 2023

Ace Double Reviews, 57: The Million Year Hunt, by Kenneth Bulmer/Ships to the Stars, by Fritz Leiber

After a long hiatus, I've decide to resurrect another of my old Ace Double reviews. 

Ace Double Reviews, 57: The Million Year Hunt, by Kenneth Bulmer/Ships to the Stars, by Fritz Leiber (#F-285, 1964, $0.40)

by Rich Horton

[covers by Ed Emshwiller and Jack Gaughan]
This Ace Double backs a fixup novel by Kenneth Bulmer with a story collection by the great Fritz Leiber. The Million Year Hunt is about 47,000 words long. The stories in Ships to the Stars come to just over 40,000 words.

Some years back I read a number of issues of the British magazine Science Fiction Adventures. In one of them (#26, from 1962) I read a story by "Nelson Sherwood" called "Scarlet Denial". It was quite clear that that story must have had a sequel, and possibly a prequel. It turns out that it did have a sequel, which appeared in #28, called "Scarlet Dawn". "Nelson Sherwood" was a pseudonym for Kenneth Bulmer, a very prolific British author whom I have discussed previously in these reviews. When I asked, elsewhere, if a book version of the two Scarlet stories existed, the late Ian Covell answered (eventually ) that they had become the Ace Double The Million Year Hunt. I decided to look up that book, and I didn't have to look far! It turns out I had it already -- doubtless I bought it with the Leiber collection on the reverse side in mind.

As far as I can tell, the book The Million Year Hunt includes "Scarlet Denial" unchanged. I don't have a copy of "Scarlet Dawn", but I assume it too is unchanged, and that the novel is a simple concatenation of the two stories.

I'll quote my review of "Scarlet Denial": This particular story is set in a colonized galaxy. The colony planets are garrisoned by Galactic Guardsmen, or Gee-Gees, much resented. The story opens with a young man named Arthur Ross Carson playing a practical joke (a hotfoot) on a Guardsman. Unfortunately, at about the same time the local governor is assassinated, and even more unfortunately, it is not Carson but his girlfriend who is suspected of playing the joke as a diversion in aid of the assassin. Carson confesses to try to get his girlfriend off, but before the administrative wheels grind sufficiently, she has been tortured to death by another organization, the Statque, which is charged with maintaining the "Status Quo" in the Galaxy. Understandably enough, Carson goes a bit crazy, and runs away, in the process stumbling at random through a matter transmitter to another planet.

That's kind of a dark beginning, eh? On the other planet, which turns out to be unsuitable for human life, Carson manages to become host to an ancient alien intelligence. With this intelligence's help, he is able to escape. The alien, named for some reason Sandoz, wishes Carson to help him find his lover, lost for thousands of years. Carson wishes to find and kill the Statque agent who killed HIS girlfriend. These wishes, by sheer luck, turn out to be fairly consistent with each other -- and Carson/Sandoz end up on an important planet -- where they learn that Carson has a rather different, implausible, destiny. The story ends with a certain amount of growing up by Carson, and the suggestion of a possible sequel.

I have no idea what the title means, by the way. At any rate, this is a fairly minor effort. The best part by far is the character of Sandoz, who is pretty funny at times.

"Scarlet Dawn" continues the Carson/Sandoz story. Carson follows the human who has ended up hosting Sandoz's lover to another planet. Sadly, it turns out that this host is a brain-damaged, and dying, child. It is Sandoz's wish, not surprisingly, that Carson marry his lover's host -- but the current host is unacceptable.

Carson is still in love with his murdered girlfriend. But on this new planet, he finds himself pursued by a woman who reminds him unaccountably of that girlfriend -- only better. But he is also still pursued by the evil Statque. It turns out, natch, that there is a reason he fell in love with his original girlfriend, and an even better reason he prefers this new girl. All tied into his ultimate destiny, hinted at in "Scarlet Denial". But before that can be resolved, he must deal with the Statque ...

The sequel is a lesser work, a more or less competent and by-the-numbers resolution of the plot elements left hanging from the first half, but not really as interesting.

Ships to the Stars collects six Leiber stories, dating from 1950 through 1962. None of them qualify as major Leiber, but they are decent work, as one would certainly expect. I'll treat them one by one.

"Dr. Kometevsky's Day" (Galaxy, February 1952) 7200 words

This is a Velikovskian story (the Dr. Kometevsky of the title is transparently Velikovsky). At some time in the future, the members of a group marriage are among those who realize, against their will, that the planets are of a sudden acting like "Dr. Kometevsky" predicted -- beginning with the disappearance of Phobos and Deimos. The explanation is not quite what Velikovsky might have predicted (and the story as a whole is profoundly skeptical of Velikovsky). It's interesting enough, but not special -- more interesting, perhaps, is the look at the dynamics of a group marriage.

"The Big Trek" (F&SF, October 1957) 1700 words

A curious little piece, almost a precursor of the New Wave. The viewpoint character becomes part of a multi-species "trek" across what seems to be a devastated Earth -- the moral being the value of continued exploration of space as opposed to stagnation on Earth and the concomitant destruction of Earth.

"The Enchanted Forest" (Astounding, October 1950) 7400 words

A curious story about a far future man who conceives of himself as a "Wild One" in a regimented society. He has escaped, carrying the "seed" of his fellow Wild Ones, and he ends up on a mysterious planet, encountering what seem to be the same people again and again, in a sort of medieval milieu. The explanation is satisfactorily SFnal, but not terribly interesting.

"Deadly Moon" (Fantastic, November 1960) 10300 words 

Perhaps this story could be described as "Fortean". A psychiatrist is treating the daughter of an astronomer. She has been dreaming of a "spider" in the Moon, while her husband, an astronaut, flies one of the first ships around the moon. Natch, her supposedly mad fears turn out to be real ...

"The Snowbank Orbit" (If, September 1962) 5900 words

The Solar System is under attack by inscrutable aliens, and a ship that was intended by be a Sun explorer is suddenly an unlikely warship, drifting near Uranus. The captain's desperate maneuver around the big cold planet ends up revealing something of the true and somewhat surprising nature of the aliens. A Leiber attempt at something of a hard SF story that didn't come off for me.

"The Ship Sails at Midnight" (Fantastic Adventures, September 1950) 8200 words

This story struck me as almost a Sturgeon pastiche, but if written in 1950 it predated most of the stories one would describe as characteristically "Sturgeonesque". A group of four somewhat Bohemian young people encounter a mysterious and beautiful woman, shortly after some UFO reports. She inspires them to think differently than they have, to become truly original rather than tiredly retreading fashionable ideas. The narrator falls in love with her and she with him. But is she really human? And what happens when her fellows finally return? And can humans really free themselves from their natures?

I think this easily the best story in this book, and as I said, very Sturgeonesque.