Tor Double #3 was originally published in December 1988.  The two stories included are Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with Les Edwards providing the cover art for The Saliva Tree and Ron Walotsky painting the cover for Born of the Dead.

The Saliva Tree was originally published in F&SF in September, 1965. It won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Seiun Award.

Set in the mid-1890s, The Saliva tree is the story of Geoffrey Rolles, a young gentleman of leisure in the East Anglian village of Cottersall. His head filled with socialism, he has embarked upon a correspondent with H.G. Wells, one of England’s preeminent socialists of the time. He has also taken an interest in local farmer Joseph Grendon, who has demonstrated his forward thinking ways by installing an electric generator on his farm.

The specific events of the story are sparked when Rolles and a friend see a meteor streaking through the sky, possibly striking the earth on Grendon’s property. Although Grendon welcome’s Rolles’s presence, his farmhand, Bert Neckland, sees Rolles as a rival for the affections of Grendon’s daughter, Nancy. Although Rolles claims not to be interested in her, his relationship with her will grow throughout the several months it takes for the story to unroll.

There is an interesting dichotomy to The Saliva Tree, which Aldiss handles well. The average reader, even if they don’t read a lot of science fiction, lives in a world in which the tropes of science fiction have existed since the 1890s and have seeped into the mainstream. For Aldiss’s characters, the concepts are not even new, they are non-existent. Rolles has read The Time Machine, but the ideas of alien invasion or invisible creatures are not part of his world view. Even faced with the evidence, it takes him a long time to begin to understand what is happening, and longer to convince Nancy, Grendon, and others of that truth. And that delay has terrifying consequences for both the human and animal inhabitants of Grendon’s farm.

In many cases where the reader figures out what is happening before the characters, the reader can get annoyed with the characters, but Aldiss manages to avoid this trap, partly by focusing on the characters’ relationships, but also because he has clearly defined Rolles as intelligent and forward thinking (if aimless), and it is clear that he is steps ahead of everyone in putting together the pieces with which he is presented.

Rolles maintains a correspondence with H.G. Wells, who has, by this time, published The Time Machine, but publication of The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds is still in his future (which places the story in 1896). The implication of Rolles’s letters is that Wells based those two stories on the events that took place on Grendon’s farm, with the creatures’ invisibility inspiring the first novel and their extraterrestrial origin leading to the latter book.

While Wells is the primary and most obvious influence on The Saliva Tree, the isolated setting, the horrors occurring there, and the one person who comes to understand what is occurring despite every bit of human experience, indicates the story also owes a debt to the eldritch horror written by H.P. Lovecraft and his followers. The Aurigans, as Rolles refers to them, remain something of a mystery, but they serve their purpose of being an otherworldly presence that threatens the characters’ understanding of the world and limit their ability to respond, even as they realize what is happening on Grendon’s farm.

Born with the Dead was originally published in F&SF in April, 1974. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter as well as the Locus poll. It is also the first of five stories Robert Silverberg had published as part of the series.

Silverberg follows Jorge Klein, who is trying to come to terms with the death of his wife, Sybille. Klein has travelled to the island of Zanzibar, a place his wife had studied and never managed to visit before her death. Klein’s visit to Zanzibar, however, is not just an homage to his dead wife. Upon her death, Sybille went through a process called “rekindling,” which made her a “dead,” a sort of zombie, but one who can continue their life, although the dead cut off all their ties to their previous life and live in “Cold Town” communities. Klein, therefore, is grieving for a wife he knows is still pursuing her interests, just without him.

Sybille is traveling with companions, including dead anthropologist Kent Zacharias, who specializes in the Ohio Mound Builder cultures. Although Silverberg hints that Zacharias and Sybille have become a couple, he doesn’t fully explore their relationship and it may be a more platonic relationship built on shared interests. When Klein indicates he wants to meet with Sybille Zacharias informs him that she has no interest in meeting with Klein.

Despite the rebuff, Klein continues in his attempt to talk to Sybille, going so far as to work with a friend to impersonate one of the dead and travel to a Cold Town to try to meet with Sybille, breaking all rules of propriety that govern the relationships between the living and the dead. In the process, Silverberg is able to show the biggest different between the living and the dead. The rekindled have left their emotions behind. Sybille (and her companions) may not want to meet with Klein, but they seem incapable to getting angry at him for his attempts to talk to his one-time wife.

Klein, for his part, can’t accept that he is living in a world where his wife walks among the living, but is no longer interested in him, unable to get past her death, which in many ways is more reflective of a divorce. He seems positive that if he can only talk to her she would be willing to take him back into her “life,” despite what everyone tells him.

Eventually, Klein’s intrusiveness eventually becomes too much for Sybille and her companions and they have to come up with a way to help Klein get over his sense of loss since Sybille’s death and his inability to understand that even though she still exists, he is no longer part of his life.

Silverberg sets up an interesting problem, and his way of flipping the narrative between Klein and Sybille almost makes it difficult to tell whose story he is telling. In death, Sybille has a group of friends and seems to have a full life, while in life, Klein is alone, using his acquaintances to achieve the goal he is fixated on to the detriment of his job and life. Born with the Dead is an interesting and well-crafted look at a pervasive love that turns into something worse with the death of one of the partners, placing it against a fantasy background, since the method of rekindling is described in scientific terms, but without a scientific rationale.

Ann interesting note. While the concept of the Tor Doubles is that neither side is the A-side, the placement of the ISBN on one side makes it feel like the B-side. With the publication of the third Tor Double, there is a further distinguishing feature. For the first two volumes, the titles on both sides of the book were embossed. Beginning with this volume, only one of the titles is embossed.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.