The Pride of Chanur (DAW Books, January 1982). Cover by Michael Whelan

C.J. Cherryh has just lately announced the end of her writing career: For medical reasons, she can no longer manage a writing project. Sad news! This seems like a time to look back at what I consider one of her most memorable novels: The Pride of Chanur.

One of the common themes of science fiction is alien races; and a particularly interesting version of this theme is stories about first contact with aliens. By far the majority of such stories have human viewpoint characters, and show the nonhumans as alien and hard to figure out. This has been the case from H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon to memorable recent novels such as Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, or films such as Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life”). But some stories turn this around, giving the reader a nonhuman viewpoint character. And that’s what The Pride of Chanur does, and does ingeniously.

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I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a ten-year old. The center of my books is always the childhood of which I seem to have a nearly total recall.

John Bellairs

It’s perhaps fitting I follow up a years worth of writing about JRR Tolkien with something about John Bellairs‘ young adult stories. In response to reading Tolkien’s books, he wrote The Face in the Frost (1969). It’s a comic tale of two wizards, Prospero (not the one you’re thinking of) and Francis Bacon fighting to save the world from the machinations of the evil Melchius. When he wrote his next book, The House With a Clock in Its Walls (1973) as an adult supernatural thriller, he was encouraged to rewrite it for children. His publisher didn’t see enough of a market for the sort of adult fiction he had created.

Over the remaining eighteen years of his life, Bellairs created three similar series of stories and completed fourteen additional novels. House was the first of three tales about Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan who comes to live with his uncle in the small Michigan town of New Zebedee. The town is modelled on Bellair’s own hometown, Marshall, Michigan. The second series is four books featuring Anthony Monday and his friend, the elderly librarian Myra Eells. The first book, The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn is a straightforward mystery, but the later books introduce supernatural elements. I suspect both Bellairs and his publisher understood what his audience wanted. Finally, there is the eight book long Johnny Dixon and the Professor series, starting with The Curse of the Blue Figurine. Set in 1951, Johnny has been, following the death of his mother and his father being sent to Korea as a fighter pilot, to live with his grandparents in Massachusetts. As you can see, each series features a young boy, displaced from his home or isolated and befriended by a older adult who is willing to help him face whatever adventures come his way. Despite a similar framework, there’s a very different feel to each of the books.

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Jack of Shadows (Signet, August 1972). Cover by Bob Pepper

A decade ago this summer, Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny was reissued in print, after many years languishing in obscurity even among the author’s most devoted fans. The novel is vintage Zelazny. For many who just read those words, that will be enough. They can stop reading now and go and buy a copy and enjoy — even if, like me, they read it before, quite a while ago, in an earlier release from a different publisher. You guys, go have fun. We’ll chat later. The rest of you, continue on with me to the next paragraph, if you would.

If you’re still with me here, then two things must be true: One, you are intrigued enough to want to know more — and I applaud you for it! — but two, simply saying “a classic Zelazny book is back in print” is not enough to send you racing to the bookstore. You demand more. Very well.

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Tam Lin (Tor Books paperback reprint edition, April 1992). Cover by Thomas Canty

There’s been a lot of genre fiction set at schools. Hogwarts is an obvious example, but such settings were around long before Harry Potter; Heinlein’s Space Cadet, The Uncanny X-Men, and Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea were all there first. Tam Lin is another early example, published six years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone made scholastic fantasy a best-selling subgenre.

But it has an important difference: Its setting, the fictional Blackstock College, doesn’t teach magic, or superheroic combat, or spaceflight, or anything else fantastic. It’s a fairly typical small liberal arts college (based on the real college where Pamela Dean did her undergraduate work) where the supernatural elements are hidden beneath the surface.

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The Dark of the Soul (Tower Books, 1970)

Here’s another anthology I picked up because it had a Robert E. Howard story in it.

The Dark of the Soul, edited by Don Ward, A Tower book, 1970. Cover artist unknown. It contains a short story by Robert E. Howard called “The Horror from the Mound.” It’s a good story, although not one of Howard’s best.

This collection is more horror and gothic, magic and witchcraft, and not Sword & Sorcery (S&S). The stories are atmospheric but maybe slow for modern audiences. Here are my thoughts.

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