Column: Reflections, Autographs, by Robert Silverberg

Silverberg spent the summer of ’99 signing copies of Dying Inside. 7,000 autographs — a novella in and of itself. He muses on autographs and people who collect them.

• His future wife signed in ‘81
• Silverberg quit the writing game in disgust in the 70’s. In ’75 at a con he asked near-immortal Jack Williamson for his autograph. “For Bob Silverberg, who used to write great SF — trusting he’ll do it again — with a vast admiration.” Just when you get out, they pull you back in!
• Asimov who dedicated The Gods Themselves so exuberantly dedicated to Robert Silverberg that he asked him to remove it from future editions.
• His favorite — a non-writing friend who playfully wrote in a paperback coy of Moby Dick. “Jerry had playfully added one little touch of improvement on the inside front cover, an inscription that read: To Bob with respect and admiration—Herman.”

Guest Editorial: “Contemplations on a Lifetime in Science Fiction” by Jack Williamson

The well-nigh immortal Williamson sold his first story in 1928, and his latest (as of 11/99) novel came out in April ’99.

Though science fiction comes in many shapes to fit all its expanding schools of readers, fans, and scholars, I like to see it first as a response to the progress of science and the resulting avalanche of technological innovation and social change.

He follows broad contours of SF and his own life, from Campbell’s rise and fall to the rise of Galaxy and Fantasy and Science-Fiction, both magazines so sharp he worried he’d never get into them, which he easily did.

He also joined forces with artist Lee Elias and from 1952-1955 produced the weekly comic strip Beyond Mars.

He had a long teaching career and collaborations with Fred Pohl and James Gunn kept in the SF game.

 

For myself, these essays are the hardest to summarize, and an essay like this, which summarizes a life and a genre of fiction, and the overlap between those two is nearly impossible. Some great insights just have to be cut. I bring you some of the gems that were too good to leave behind.

The stories that did not work came out of the moment, the idea came out of the moment, the idea and the feeling and the urge to share it, something that happens only when it happens.

I don’t know hot to make it happen. A story comes in a moment when it does — in moments rather rare to me — not complete but already something whole, shaped with some initial sense of a character in action and a problem to be solved, a sense of time and place and voice, driven by the urgent sense of something to be said the sense of an audience to hear it.

I grew up dazzled by marvels that are old hat now. Born to a world without plumbing, without electricity, without cars or telephones, in a cosmos where our galaxy was the whole universe, I was plunged into an age of change. The first car I saw was exciting, the first radio I heard, my first airplane ride.

Williamson bemoans all the readers lost to television, and offers a grim warning about the internet and changes that peck away the financial side of the SF business, endangering both the publishers and the writers. Remember, this is 25 years ago.

It doesn’t fit into an easy quote, but he talks about the science-fiction community, both locally and globally, that he has found, as a teacher and a writer. It ends with a bit of a sobering prophecy.

With no dread of death or expectation of any hereafter, I try to keep my affairs in order. Reluctant as I am to leave all the dramas of the world in headlong transition, I’m pretty confident that I’ll be gone in time to escape bad times if bad times come. I can’t help listening for the bell, but I try to live as if it will never toll.

Fiction: “A Martian Romance” by Kim Stanley Robinson, art by Alan Giana

Ah, Kim Stanley Robinson! A brief aside: In my early days of going to WisCon, I would stay at the Madison Youth Hostel, and they had a magnificent library in the common room, and a second respectable collection of books in the bedroom that I was in. I had just finished Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game on the way to the convention, and had no intention of keeping it but, oh lucky fate! KSR’s three Mars books were at the hostel and I could snag the first one — but I passed it over for Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man. No KSR for me until Shaman (2013) and now this story.

 

Dropping us right in, it seems that the terraforming of the previous Mars books is still cooling the planet, perhaps too much, as it is experiencing an Ice Age. The characters make the best of a bad situation.

Roger, a self-defined “Canyon Hermit” has procured an iceboat and spearheads a trip across the face of this freezing world. Most of the crew meet in the city of Elysium, Roger, Eileen Monday, Hans and Arnold (both Mars-born and large due to the lower gravity), Frances and Stephen.

They start off crossing the Amazonian Sea, stop near the township of Altamira — which, like all the other townships, is merely an island of a town sticking up out of the ice. Picking up Freya Ahmet and Jean-Claude Bayer. These people are all friends, or at least friends of friends. Plus, since life-extension is common, some of them have been friends for decades, maybe centuries.

There isn’t a tremendous amount of story to this one… no big bad, no sticking it to The Man. The conditions leading to the Ice Age are too complex to unravel, so the story is really a travelogue.

It was good for someone who knew nothing about the history of the Mars trilogy, so I’m sure if you were in the know, it would work better.

Fiction: “The Winds of Marble Arch,” by Connie Willis, art by Laurie Harden

Another tale centered around the idea of old friends getting back together.

Tom and Cathey are in London for an academic conference. They are looking forward to it, although they differ on their recollections of their trip there over a decade earlier, with Tom looking at their previous poverty and penny-pinching as charming and Cathy looking on it all with embarrassment.

In spite of the obvious conflict, Tom does want to find their old haunts and snag tickets to a play, and he wants to take the Tube (Cathey much prefers to take a cab). He’s solo and runs into an alarming thing — a sudden change in the atmosphere within the tunnels.

The wind hit me like the blast from an explosion. I reeled back, nearly losing my balance. My head snapped back sharply like I’d been punched in the jaw. I groped wildly for the tiled wall… But there was no sound accompanying the sudden blast of searing air, only a dank and horrible smell.

Nobody else seems to notice it. Doubly alarming! Checking into the conference, the first rumblings of the social guardrails start — who is separated from their spouse, whose rumored to be having an affair, whose recovering from cancer. Tom tries to tell people about the wind and the smell and is met with a general ‘yeah, the tube sucks these days, I avoid it.”

Reminiscing takes more time than he expects, and Tom is up against a time-limit trying to get play tickets, and back in the tube the same violent blast and smell happen again — the blast is the same, but not the smell.

The story follows Tom’s growing obsession to piece together the occurrences in the tunnel and a mini side-story about who Sara may be having an affair with. While this flavor is not entirely of ‘academics is not hell’, it is a kind of annoying purgatory — nothing like the get-togethers of the past.

He lights on the idea that maybe it has something to do with the bombings during WWII, that somehow the smells are trapped down there — but why does nobody notice? That isn’t 100% true, as he see some oldsters who seem to react to it, but he can’t catch up to them in the crowd.

Willis spends waaay to much time on the tube schedules and cross-referencing where bombing and other disasters took place — like ¼ of the words are just tube names and schedules. There is also Cathey, who, for purposes of plot, just “knows things” except she swings and misses on her belief that it is Tom having an affair with Sara.

The winds are the memories of war, but also the inevitable blows of old-age, of 2:00 am calls with bad news, an ache that turns into a sharp pain, and it’s too late and colleagues you like but cannot stand for another minute.

This remarkably bleak revelation is somewhat diluted with a bit at the end, of the winds of young loves and excited tourists and old wine are there also, if you know where to look.

Fiction: “Hothouse Flowers” by Mike Resnick

Another grim end-of-life tale, this time centering on the pitiless way the elderly are treated in the near-future — which is that they are simply kept alive no matter what.

More specifically, it’s the MC’s job to keep them alive. He’s just a medical orderly in a geriatric ward, and all is fine and why shouldn’t it be? His charges are well past dementia and into non-response. Changing diapers and cleaning feeding tubes is, honestly, not that hard. Until he gets a new patient who is awake, aware, horrified, and whose only outlet is to make the MC as miserable as possible. And can you blame him?

“All I have left is my rage. I won’t let you take it away; it’s all that separates me from the vegetables here.”

I look at him and shake my head sadly. “I don’t know what made you like this.”

“One hundred and fifty-three years made me like this,” he says.

Mr. Goldmeir’s hatred really harshes the narrator’s vibe and it affects his work and his relationship with his wife, Felicia, whose job is to take are of various genetically engineered flowers (thus the double-meaning of the title) and finally the narrator hatches a plan to weed his own garden.

Poem: “Down in Your Bones Only You Alone Know,” by Bruce Boston

A poem that pairs quite well with “Hothouse Flowers”

Down go the days and the years of your life,
A whirlwind of passion and boredom ands strife.
The clocks are all melting like late winter snow.
If the time is worth living, only you alone know.

 

Fiction: “A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows,” by Gardner Dozois, art by Mark Evans

In the future things are getting crazy. Charles Czudak, 80 years old, had once led a movement based on his words in his book The Meat Manifesto, urging people to resist the Rapture of the Geeks and not upload their minds, or get cyborg bodies, or any other number of insane options now open to them.

But that was a long time ago, before his wife left him to ‘go-up’. Oh, there also seem to be time travelers, odd spectral visitors who watch him — they have been for years, but today there are a lot more of them.

Charles concludes it is because he’s going to die today — and he hasn’t finished The Big Book, the book that will vindicate him and revitalize the Meat Movement. Or not… he’s somewhat ambivalent about it. But it is the anniversary of the Meat Movement, and there are a few demonstrations going on that he could get in on…

There is also a “mechanical” — a piece of (or an) AI come down from low earth orbit and is in a vaguely humanoid body. The mechanical tries to talk with him and failing the first time, brings Czudak’s ex-wife, Ellen, down for round two.

The mechanical, for reasons of its own, wants Czudak to recant his views. Ellen is there to articulate its inarticulatable needs and show Czudak how good being ‘taken up’ can be — and the strongest argument is that she hasn’t aged at all. (I’m not sure if she hasn’t aged, so much as they generated her a younger body… it isn’t 100% clear).

Also, the mechanical “Bucky Bug” finds humans fascinating and, as they are eventually going to branch out to the stars, we can hitch a ride — not that that’s the mechanicals’ intention or if they’ll even be very away of us.

And like rats or cockroaches, once humans get into an environment, it’s hard to get rid of them. Whatever motivates the Ais have for doing what they’re doing, they’ll help spread humanity throughout the stars, whether they realize they’re doing it or not.

But the nearer argument is that Czudak is falling apart and he doesn’t have to be — which is a very convincing argument for a guy who is actually falling part — the story has an ambiguous ending, but odds are he was going to give in and recant.

I have a bit of an issue with this tale. On the one hand, I liked the idea that there are such powerful forces, the AIs, the New Men, and that among all this power is the threat that they many not even be able to separate reality from virtual space anymore and might destroy a city, or the world, as part of a weird game. But mostly it grates my nerves that the majority of the story hinges on a guy being miserable and bitter for 40 solid goddam years. Like forever frozen and focusing on the worst day of his life. No change at all since his wife left? No flings to light up his dark days? No hobbies? No advances in medicine (not even a little sweet, sweet, legal weed) that relieves his back/knee pain?

Fiction: “In From the Commons” by Tony Daniel, art by Alan Giana

A group of good friends (again!) — Gene Aller, Fya and Tan (the MC) — are trout fishing in the mountains when ‘the call” comes.

They are far into the nameless continent, into the commons and because of this they actually have the option not to answer ‘the call.’

Gene decides he’s not going back. As the story progresses, the odd not-real world drops some information. Gene is an empiricist, Tan is “the pilot” so he’s gotta go back. Gene gives them a parting gift, a lure that he’s made for each of them

It was an exquisite thing of feather and bone. And in the center was a moonstone. Well, a moon-pebble, actually, hardly bigger than a grain of sand.. So that was what he’d been panning for.

A month later, they come to the Port city-empty and drown themselves in the sea, then awaken in their holding caskets in a starship. At least Tan does — his the pilot of the ship and been pulled out of the virtual reality dream to review a potential world—potential for what is not stated — he’s been out for 11,000 years, the others are simply parts of his own mind to help him re-integrate the holding casket made little replicas of the lure sin his palm, made of his own tissue.

Tony Daniel is a pretty successful writer, with publications beginning in the early ‘90s — including “A Dry, Quiet War,” and “Life on the Moon” and editorial duties at Baen’s and Regnery Publishing, although it looks like his output has slowed down since 2017.

 

Fiction: “Green Tea,” by Richard Wadholdm, art by David Beck

Revenge! Swee, sweet, revenge is a dished served hot as scalding tea.

A strange rambling tale. Baltran Seynoso had a specific isotope loaded into the starboard Van of the space freighter Hierophant and…

Honestly, I couldn’t follow all of this one — the backfilling of the cargo going critical (maybe) and tapping into fundamental cosmic powers used to destroy a star. The whole thing was a bit of mobster vs mobster setup. A lot goes on, and a lot of it seems to be so much tech/physics jargon, and I didn’t really buy that the unleashing of such primal forces would not obliterate you and your ship instantly.

The nameless narrator outlines the slow destruction of the ship and the horrible loss of life, and explains why he’s going to murder Baltran Synoso the same way.

Wadholdm hit the scene in the late ‘90s and seems to have published a number of stories and then fell off in the early 2000s.

Fiction: “Proof of the Pudding,” by Nelson Bond, art by Shirly Chan

A bit of pre-story trivia: Bond is about the same age as Jack Williamson.

George Townsend, rich and quite mad (and because he’s rich he’s ‘eccentric’), believes the world to be a hollow sphere and we live within it. To prove this to the many doubters, he uses his fortune to build a drilling machine/vehicle — the atomic powered ‘Earthworm’ and into the ground he goes! Keeping in touch with the world by television, as regular science predicts, he passes into a region of heat the five miles, but at 30, the temperature drops and the rock becomes soil again, before he bursts out to the real surface of the earth.

Townsend rotated his camera. As its lens panned the horizon astonished viewers gazed upon a world of awesome beauty. A world of skies ablaze with countless suns; a world of vegetation wild and strange, amongst the towering fronds of which the Earthworm was no mighty mechanism, but a tiny wriggling mote.

…and then a giant bird eats the worm. Wah Wah Waaaah.

Bond is one of those writers whose career and output follows the technology of the 20^th Century: starting off very active in the early days of the pulps, then found a home writing radio play scripts, then into television.

Fiction: “Riding the Giganotosaur” by Micheal Swanwick, art by Daryl Elliot

Rich asshole George Weskowski has his brain transplanted into a Giganotosaurus ‘cause he’s donated generously to time-travel paleontological research. Being a giant carnivore he reneges on his research agreements and runs wild murdering most things smaller than himself. Ends up with 3 female giganotosaurs and lives the life of hunting and sex. Because he is too rich to have bothered with any of that egghead science stuff, he gets a rude awakening when the three females turn on him after they get pregnant.

Fleeing them, he gets trapped in a tangle of broken limbs along the riverbank. Fortunately for him, the eggheads have GPS tracker embedded in his hide and they rescue him.

The experience mellows him somewhat and while he’s helpless he gets a good talkin’ to by one of the scientists.

He looked up again, a serious expression on his narrow intellectual face.

“You tried to declare independence from humanity, and for several reasons it didn’t work. Some of those reasons are pragmatic — access to decent medical care being one of them. Others, though are matters of the soul. You never were a giganotosaur, you know. Only a man riding on top of one.”

Rich-asshole damn-near dies and discovers the value of human connection is a trope that I’m honestly a little tired of. A thing science has demonstrated, and SF has been slow to pick up, is that around 4% of the population are sociopaths and, barring drugs or implants or Stainless Steel Rat artificial conscience tech, they will never NOT BE SOCIOPATHS.

With that in mind, I felt the story would have been 100% improved if it was a clandestine psyche experiment on him.

Swanwick has been a prolific writer since the early 80s, with a lot of fiction and non-fiction (mostly about science-fiction). Dinosaurs seem to be a recurring subject (and honestly, who can blame him?) and he had two stories made into episodes of Love Death + Robots, “Ice Age” and “The Very Pulse of the Machine.”

One last thing re: Giganotosaurus. There is an online speculative fiction venue called Giganotosaurus, which specializes in those inconveniently sized novellas and novelettes, including my own work “The Wait Is Longer Than You Think.” Ahem.

Fiction: “Argonautica,” by Walter Jon Williams, art by Darryl Elliott

Walter Jon Williams is back with another civil war alternat history “(No Spot of Ground” in Asimov’s SF ’89), only this time a re-telling of Jason and the Argonauts. At 62 pages, by far the longest story in this issue.

Jase Miller, captain of the CSN General Bee has his eyes on claiming the captured Union ironside Arcola and riding it to glory at the impending battle of Vicksburg. The Union fleet has handed out defeat after defeat to the rebels, Jase ran his armored tugboat out for New Orleans before it was taken. Now his next order of business is to get Arcola away from Senator/General Pendergas — but not before Pendergas can get the Arcola fully repaired and armored — a job his Engineer, Argus, is about to finish up.

The story hits the major beats of the legend with Jase outsmarting Pendergas to get the Arcola and relying on the fact that the Confederate navy pays in silver and gold instead of paper money to get all the army guys under Pendergas off the boat, too. Luck and chance give him his taste of river battle, with Arcola under his command and General Bee under his first mate, Harry Klee’s. Playing a game of chicken with Union Ironside Clasher.

“Helm to starboard! Helm to starboard!” Jase shouted. Castor flung the wheel the other way throwing his weight on the spokes. The blunt Yankee prow creamed closer. Arcola shuddered as the rudder bit and slewed to the left.

“Brace for collision!” Jase yelled. He’d mistimed, damn it.

There was an impact, then a sound of rending timbers as Arcola’s port bow struck the port bow of Clasher. Jase clung to the bars of the pilot house as the collision tried to take him off his feet. Timbers shrieked as Arcola scraped along Clasher’s port side, the huge Eads boat shouldering the ram aside as if were a piece of driftwood.

Jase’ search for military glory is actually second tier to his true-goal — recovering the golden fleece (a huge chunk of the Confederate treasury, and all the treasury of Memphis), hidden along the river by blind Governor Phineas Proffitt Thackeray and whose location is only known by his daughter, ex-medical student and amateur poisoner, ‘Melia. If there are several hundred pounds of gold and silver missing from the tons of the treasury, at this late stage of the war, the CSA will look the other way.

An issue I have is that re-telling, is well, you know how things are going to go. It is interesting to read Williams’ take on it, but it suffers a bit (through not fault of his) in that I had recently read Howard Waldrop’s A Dozen Tough Jobs — a 1930s re-telling of Hercules (Houlka Lee), so I had already been down a very similar road.

I like that Jase is an absolute bastard — some authors might have been tempted to give him some moral compass, but Jase Miller has a goal and will steal, fight, risk a lot of lives, hammer on racial animosity, and have people murder for him to get it. The downside to that is that it is hard to root for him.

Another problem, perhaps only an issue to me, is that I find ship language and ship battles, while exciting, very confusing. I couldn’t get a handle on how long some of the maneuvering seemed to take — understandable since Williams didn’t want to slow things down, but some indication would have helped.

 

The story is a very good one, and Jase and his gang manage to pull off stealing a portion of the treasury and get away with it and survive the war. Williams leans into the idea that his readers know the contours of the legend and he ends it at just about the perfect place, with Jase disavowing himself from ‘Melina and leaving her on her own, glad that he’s rid of her. Which, spoiler alert, that’s not where the story ends.

Because we live in the future, and because I briefly met Mr. Williams at the World Fantasy Convention in 2022, I was able to contact him and get the inside scoop on this story.

AS: I’ve stumbled on two of your alternate histories from the Civil War period, is that where most of your tales are set, or do they hit other time periods?

WJW: “Not Spot of Ground” and “Argonautica” are my only two Civil War stories, though I wrote an unsold Civil War novel at the very beginning of my writing career.

AS: Can you tell me a bit more of the passion behind “No Spot of Ground”?

WJW: “No Spot of Ground” is one of a series of alternate histories featuring writers. Others would be “The Boolean Gate,” with Mark Twain, and “Wall, Stone, Craft” with Mary Shelley. “Red Elvis” isn’t about a writer exactly, but a creative [Elvis’ brother].

AS: On “Argonautica,” was there a particular set of threads that came together to get the idea going?

WJW: “Argonautica” was a kind of meditation on epic, sending Jason and Medea to the Civil War, along with mock-heroic subtitles. Most of the incidents in “Argonautica” are taken from the Golden fleece story, along with the names of argonauts (sort of).

Column: On Books, by Norman Spinrad (again!)

Spinrad frames his reviews around a discussion of a good ending, and a good ending requires closure.

Closure… remains a literarily useful term, distinguishing the mere ending or denouement of a story from the ending that satisfies on a multiplicity of levels.

This is among many other things he discusses. He fires off ideas and observations like he’s met you at the bar and now, now he’s just going. Re: closure, he points out that a great ending for a novel “Leaves the main character psychologically altered, maybe even dead.“ But this is anathema to editors.

All of which are anathema to editors or producers enforcing the strictures of a series bible.

And this tends to percolate upward into more seriously intended science fiction, in terms of both lowering readers’ expectation of true closure to convention endings in which the good guys win and the bad guys lose…

Among the discussions he has some reviews.

The Best of Interzone, edited by David Pringle

This is an anthology full of good to excellent and possibly great stories, as good or better as a whole than any of the annual “Year’s Best” books.

In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker

What we have here is a very well written and very well researched time travel novel set mostly in pre-Elizabethan England, with a couple of sections in the Spain of the Inquisition.

The Alien Years, by Robert Silverberg

And at the end, his own characters complain that the manner in which The Alien Years ended was an unsatisfying historical and psychological closure for them, the Entities and their motivations never understood, the bad guys not being driven off by the galactic resistance but departing of their own mysterious free will, leaving those who should have seen themselves as heroes somehow cheated by a non-victorious “victory.”

Mission Child, by Maureen F. McHugh

What held my interest, at least, what made me like the novel more and more as it went on, was its unusual realism, the growing conviction that, yes, this is what a forgotten colony world would really be like, this what would really happen when the First Worlders took a modestly renewed interest.

Cosm by Gregory Benford

Cosm he’s not so fond of…

Action on the part of Alicia that seem out of place in a realistically described scientific world in which she operates, and a certain amount of, well, idiot plotting in which intelligent people do stupid things to create plot complications.

…although worse is that he thinks they chickened out at the end by including an epilogue indicating it would work out okay.

Frenzetta by Richard Calder (no, not Frazetta)

Nor is it giving too much away to say that the apotheosis they find there has little to do with the hearts and flowers of a romantic ending — not unless you are a ratgirl and a re-animated corpse — and everything to do what the thematic, sexual, psychic, and metaphysical logic that has led up to this closure.

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Previous entries the Quatro-Decadal Reviews include:

November 1969

Amazing Stories
Galaxy Science Fiction,
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Worlds of If
Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact
Venture Science Fiction
A Decadal Review of Science Fiction from November 1969: Wrap-up

November 1979

Quatro-Decadal Review, November 1979: A Brief Look Back
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Galileo Magazine of Science & Fiction
Analog Science Fiction Science Fact
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction
Amazing Stories
Omni
A Decadal Review of Science Fiction from 1979: Wrap-up

November 1989

Jump Back! Quatro-Decadal Review, Looking Ahead to November, 1989
Amazing Stories
Analog
Asimov’s
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Weird Tales

November 1999

Booyah! Quatro-Decadal Review, an Introduction to the World as it was in November 1999
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

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Adrian Simmons is an editor for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, check out their Best-of Volume 4 Anthology, or support them on Patreon!