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Author: Steven H Silver

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Titan Cover Art, by Paul Lehr

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Titan Cover Art, by Paul Lehr

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Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr

Peter Graham is often quoted as saying that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12. I was reminded of this quote last year while reading Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards (Tor Books) when Rich Horton commented that based on Graham’s statement, for him, the Golden Age of Science Fiction was 1972. It got me thinking about what science fiction (and fantasy) looked like the year I turned twelve and so this year, I’ll be looking at the year 1979 through a lens of the works and people who won science fiction awards in 1980, ostensibly for works that were published in 1979. I’ve also invited Rich to join me on the journey and he’ll be posting articles looking at the 1973 award year.

The Analog Award was launched in 1979 for works published in the magazine in the preceding year. The Best Cover category was added in 1980, so this was the first year the award was presented. The award has been given every year since then with the exception of the year covering works published in the magazine in 2002, when the award was replaced, for one year only, with a cover artist award, when it was won by David A. Hardy, who painted two covers for the magazine (May and December issues).

Paul Lehr painted the cover for the first installment of John Varley’s four-part serial for the novel Titan, which ran from the January to the April issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact.

The artwork from the January 1979 issue of Analog seems to depict the spindle that runs up the center of the torus moon discovered in orbit around Saturn. The tower looks like a mixture of organic parts, wires, and high tech platforms growing out of a small globe and inside a massive dome. The night sky with other moons of Saturn can be seen through windows and a rainbow-like arc stretches behind the tower.

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Stephen Fabian

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Stephen Fabian

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Cover by Stephen E. Fabian
Cover by Stephen E. Fabian

Cover by Stephen E. Fabian
Cover by Stephen E. Fabian

Cover by Stephen E. Fabian
Cover by Stephen E. Fabian

Peter Graham is often quoted as saying that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12. I was reminded of this quote last year while reading Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards (Tor Books) when Rich Horton commented that based on Graham’s statement, for him, the Golden Age of Science Fiction was 1972. It got me thinking about what science fiction (and fantasy) looked like the year I turned twelve and so this year, I’ll be looking at the year 1979 through a lens of the works and people who won science fiction awards in 1980, ostensibly for works that were published in 1979. I’ve also invited Rich to join me on the journey and he’ll be posting articles looking at the 1973 award year.

In 1972, the British Fantasy Society began giving out the August Derleth Fantasy Awards for best novel as voted on by their members. In 1976. The name of the awards was changed to the British Fantasy Award, although the August Derleth Award was still the name for the Best Novel Award. A category for Best Artwork was created in 1977 and ran for three years until 1979. Stephen Fabian won the award in its second year. In 1980, the Artwork Award was replaced by an award for Best Artist and Fabian won the inaugural award. The category has remained part of the awards to the present day, although a re-alignment in 2012 means the awards are now selected by a jury rather than the full membership of the British Fantasy Society. In 1980, the awards were presented at Fantasycon VI in Birmingham.

Fabian was born on January 3, 1930 in Garfield, New Jersey. Fabian was self-taught and heavily influenced by Edd Cartier, Hannes Bok, and Virgil Finlay. He began creating sketches for fanzines in the mid-1960s, but it wasn’t until he was laid off from a job due to the oil embargo of the 1970s that he turned his skills towards professional artwork. On the day that he received word of the layoffs, he also received invitations from Sol Cohen and Jim Baen to submit work for their consideration for inclusion in Amazing Stories (Cohen) and Galaxy (Baen). His first paid work was a cover for Robert E. Howard’s Western The Vultures.

His work was also championed by book collector and publisher Gerry de la Ree, who published several portfolios of Fabian’s work, bringing him to the attention of both fans and publishers who were able to give him work.

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Birthday Profile: Violet Van der Elst

Birthday Profile: Violet Van der Elst

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Violet Van der Elst

Violet Van der Elst on the west stairs at Harlaxton Manor

A look at a minor horror author.

Violet Van der Elst was born on January 4, 1882. Her parents were a coal porter and a washerwoman and she worked as a scullery maid. In 1903, she married a civil engineer and eventually she developed the first brush-less shaving cream, which made her fortune. Following her first husband’s death, she married Jean Julien Van der Elst, a Belgian painter.

Her shaving and cosmetics business allowed her to focus, if such is the word, on other activities. Her primary activity was fighting against the death penalty in England. Another activity was running for office and she failed to be elected to Parliament three times, each in a different borough.

In 1937, she bought Harlaxton Manor, a hundred year old mansion that the previous owner had tried to sell and couldn’t. She saved the building from being town down. It was this connection through which I learned of her, since I attended college at Harlaxton. Van der Elst was convinced that she could contact her dead husband and used a private seance room for that purpose.

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

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The-Fountains-of-Paradise-Terry-Oakes-1 The-Fountains-of-Paradise-Paul-Bacon-small The-Fountains-of-Paradise-Chris-Moore-1-small
Cover by Terry Oakes Cover by Paul Bacon Cover by Chris Moore

Peter Graham is often quoted as saying that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12. I was reminded of this last year while reading Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards (Tor Books) when Rich Horton commented that based on Graham’s statement, for him, the Golden Age of Science Fiction was 1972. It got me thinking about what science fiction (and fantasy) looked like the year I turned twelve and so this year, I’ll be looking at the year 1979 through a lens of the works and people who won science fiction awards in 1980, ostensibly for works published in 1979. I’ve also invited Rich to join me on the journey and he’ll be posting articles looking at the 1973 award year.

The Hugo Award was first presented at the 11th World Science Fiction Convention (sometimes called Philcon II), held in Philadelphia from September 5-7, 1953. That year the award for Best Novel, not yet known as a Hugo Award, was given to Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. The awards were not perceived as an annual event at that time and, in fact, no awards were presented the following year. They were presented again in 1955 and have been presented annually since, although in 1957, the Best Novel category was not included. The Best Novel Awardhas been referred to, with some tongue in cheek, as “the Big One” and is generally the last one announced at the ceremony. The Hugo Awards are nominated and voted on by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention. Clarke won the Hugo Award for Best Novel twice, for Rendezvous with Rama in 1974, and for The Fountains of Paradise in 1980. In 1980 the Hugo Award was presented at Noreascon Two in Boston, Massachusetts on August 31.

The Nebula Award was created by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) and first presented in 1966, when the award for Best Novel was won by Frank Herbert for Dune. It has been presented annually since then, with a tie in 1967 when it was won by Samuel Delany for Babel-17 and Daniel Keyes for Flowers for Algernon. Clarke won the Nebula Award for Best Novel twice, for Rendezvous with Rama in 1974 and for The Fountains of Paradise in 1980.

It has been several decades since I read The Fountains of Paradise, and re-reading it I realized that I had no real memories of it at all. I remembered that the central point of the book was to build a space elevator from a peak in Sri Lanka (repositioned and renamed Taprobane in the novel), but absolutely nothing else.

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Birthday Reviews: December Index

Birthday Reviews: December Index

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Cover by Rudolph Belarski
Cover by Rudolph Belarski

Cover by John Picacio
Cove by John Picacio

Cover by Duncan Eagleson
Cover by Duncan Eagleson

The final Birthday Review Index.

And so the journey begun on January 1 with a review of E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” has come to an end, 367 reviews and approximately 166,183 words later, plus a few extra guest reviews and words by Rich Horton and Bob Byrne. There was one date I couldn’t find someone to review (we need authors born on March 8) and I goofed on a couple of authors and wound up writing replacement reviews. Edward Page Mitchell holds the joint distinction of the earliest birth among the reviewed authors, on March 24, 1852, and the earliest published work, with his “The Clock That Went Backward” published in 1881. Rachel Swirsky in the most recently born author reviewed with Steve Perry’s “A Few Minutes in the Plantation Bar and Grill Outside Woodville, Mississippi” published in January 2018 being the most recently published story. I reviewed two stories entitled “Cat” and two stories entitled “Little Red in the Hood.”

January index
February index
March index
April index
May index
June index
July index
August index
September index
October index
November index

December 1, Jo Walton: “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction”
December 2, Jerry Sohl: “Death in Transit”
December 3, John Dalmas: “In the Bosom of His Family”
December 4, Kurt R.A. Giambasitani: “Intaglio”
December 5, John Decles: “The Power of Kings”
December 6, Roger Dees: “Worlds Within WorldsEchoes of Pride”

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Birthday Reviews: Connie Willis’s “D.A.”

Birthday Reviews: Connie Willis’s “D.A.”

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Cover by James Gurney
Cover by James Gurney

Connie Willis was born on December 31, 1945.

Willis has won the Hugo Award eleven times and the Nebula Award seven times. Her joint winners include the short story “Even the Queen,” the novelette “Fire Watch,” the novella “The Last of the Winnebagos,” and the novel Doomsday Book and the two-part novel Blackout/All Clear. Her Nebula only wins were the short story “A Letter from the Clearys” and the novelette “At the Rialto.” Her Hugo wins were for the short stories “Death on the Nile” and “The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective,” the novellas “The Winds of Marble Arch,” “Inside Job,” and “All Seated on the Ground,” and the novel To Say Nothing of the Dog. Her novel Lincoln’s Dreams won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. To Say Nothing of the Dog also won the Prix Ozone, Kurd Lasswitz Preis, and Ignotus Award. Doomsday Book also won the Ignotus and Kurd Lasswitz. Willis won additional Ignotus Awards for the stories “Even the Queen,” “Why the World Didn’t End Last Tuesday,” and in 2000, her stories “Nonstop to Portales” and “Chance” tied each other.

Willis won the Forry Award from LASFS in 1999 and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009. In 2011 she received the Robert A. Heinlein Award from the Heinlein Society. She was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 2012. Willis was the guest of honor at LACon IV, the 64th Worldcon, held in Los Angeles in 2006 and served as Toastmaster at the 2011 World Fantasy Con in San Diego.

“D.A.” was written for the anthology Space Cadets, published in coordination with LACon IV, the Worldcon, in 2006 where Willis was guest of honor and edited by Mike Resnick. It was selected by Jonathan Strahan for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One and was also reprinted as a chapbook by Subterranean Press in 2007. In 2018 it was included in the Connie Willis collection Terra Incognita, published by Del Rey.

In the distant future, Theodora is a high school student whose goal is to get into UCLA, unlike most of the students in her class who hope to get an appointment to become a cadet at the Academy to go into space. Unfortunately for her classmates, only 300 people are selected for the Academy each year, so when one of the students at Theodora’s school is selected, it is a major event and a mandatory assembly is held. To everyone’s surprise, Theodora is announced as the lucky appointee, despite the fact that she never applied and didn’t go through the interview process.

The strongest points of the story are when Willis looks at Theodora’s attempts to figure out how she managed to get into the Academy and get acclimatized, or fight against getting acclimatized, to life in outer space. Her only lifeline and support is her friend Kimkim, back on Earth and using her prodigious hacking skills to open a line of communication with Theodora and try to help her work her way through the Academy.

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Birthday Reviews: Somtow Sucharitkul’s “Dr. Rumpole”

Birthday Reviews: Somtow Sucharitkul’s “Dr. Rumpole”

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Realms of Fantasy, 8/98
Realms of Fantasy, 8/98

Somtow Sucharitkul was born on December 30, 1952. He also writes using the pseudonym S.P. Somtow. In addition to writing science fiction, Sucharitkul is a successful composer and conductor, including the opera The Snow Dragon, which debuted in Milwaukee in 2015, and five symphonies.

In 1981 Sucharitkul won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has published as both Somtow Sucharitkul and S.P. Somtow and won the World Fantasy Award for his novella “The Bird Catcher” in 2002. His short story “Brimstone and Salt” won the International Horror Guild Award in 1997. He has also been nominated for the Hugo Award twice, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He also won the Silpathorn Kittikhun Award, presented by the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture of Thailand’s Ministry of Culture. Sucharitkul was guest of honor at the 15th World Fantasy Con, held in Seattle in 1989.

The story “Dr. Rumpole” was published for the first time when Shawna McCarthy printed the story in the August 1998 issue of Realms of Fantasy. Sucharitkul included the story in his 2000 collection Tagging the Moon: Fairy Tales from L.A..

Sucharitkul takes a new spin on the story of Rumpelstiltskin in “Dr. Rumpole,” casting the princess with the impossible task as Adam Villacin, a wannabe screenwriter stuck in the mailroom at Stupendous Entertainment. When he happens to meet the studio head in an elevator, his friend’s fast-talking gets him an assignment as a script doctor. If he can’t turn a turkey of a script into a hit overnight, he’ll lose his job. Into this scenario comes Dr. Rumple, a mythic script doctor who can fix any script. However, he takes everything Villacin is paid for his scripts.

Just as Sucharitkul and the reader are aware that the story is a re-telling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, the characters also compare their situation to the fairy tale. Knowing how the fairy ends, they also know what they need to do in order to avoid the threat that Dr. Rumpole could conceivably pose for Villacin and his friend/agent, Bobby Detweiler. The story works because Sucharitkul doesn’t follow the formula slavishly. Rumpole’s name doesn’t matter, but it is when Villacin and Detweiler uncover his past that they figure out a way to get out from under his thumb.

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Birthday Reviews: Charles L. Harness’s “Child by Chronos”

Birthday Reviews: Charles L. Harness’s “Child by Chronos”

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Cover by George Gibbons
Cover by George Gibbons

Charles L. Harness was born on December 29, 1915 and died on September 20, 2005.

Harness’s novelettes “An Ornament to His Profession” and “The Alchemist” were both nominated for the Nebula and Hugo Awards. His novella “Probably Cause” was nominated for a Nebula and the novella “Summer Solstice” was nominated for a Hugo. He was also nominated for a retro-Hugo for the novella “The Rose.” Harness’s novel The Ring of Ritornel was nominated for the Ditmar Award in 1969.

“Child by Chronos” was first published by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas in the June 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The following year, they included it in the anthology The Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Third Series. It was translated into French for the magazine Fiction #26 in 1956, in 1966 for the anthology Historiques fantastiques de demain, and again for Planète #33 in March 1967, the last translation being done by Alain Dorémieux. Jacques Sadoul would also include it in his Anthologie de la littérature de Science-Fiction in 1981. It was published in German in 1969 in 9 Science Fiction-Stories, translated by Brigit Ress-Bohusch and in Italian in 1977 in Il future alla sbarra, translated by Roberta Rambelli. Charles Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg included it in 1980’s anthology Love 3000 and it was reprinted in 1998 in the NESFA Press Charles L. Harness collection An Ornament to His Profession.

In the film Somewhere in Time, based on Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return, Elise McKenna (Susan French) gives Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) a pocket watch in 1972 which he carries back with him to 1912 and gives to a much younger Elise (Jane Seymour). At no time in its existence is the watch out of Elise’s or Richard’s possession, so there is no way for the watch to have been made or purchased, it just is. Charles Harness published “Child by Chronos” 18 years before Matheson’s novel and 23 years before the film, but has a similar paradox at the heart of his story.

Harness’s story focuses on a woman who hates her mother, whom she is amazingly like, and who notes that all the men she has ever loved were also involved with her mother, an unhealthy psychological situation. Her life isn’t made easier by the strange educational regimen her mother instituted. Rather than allow her to attend school, she was made to memorize all the headlines published from the time of her birth. Her mother, who made her living as a highly successful prognosticator, never gives her an explanation for this strange education.

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Birthday Reviews: George Zebrowski’s “Lords of Imagination”

Birthday Reviews: George Zebrowski’s “Lords of Imagination”

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Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts

Cover by Bob Eggleton

George Zebrowski was born in Austria on December 28, 1945. He is married to author Pamela Sargent.

In 1999 Zebrowski’s novel Brute Orbits won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. In 2000 he and Sargent were presented with the Service to SFWA Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He has also been nominated for the Nebula Award for Short Story three times, for “Heathen God,” “The Eichmann Variations,” and for “Wound the Wind.” Zebrowski has collaborated on fiction with Sargent, Charles Pellegrino, Jack Dann, Gerald Hull, and Grant Carrington. He has co-edited anthologies with Thomas N. Scortia, Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, Dann, and Gregory Benford.

Zebrowski first published  “Lords of Information” in the Spring 1990 issue of Science Fiction Review, edited by Elton Elliott. He substantially reworked the story and retitled it “Lords of Imagination” for its reprinting in his collection Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts in 2006.

“Lords of Imagination” is not just a rumination on the role of science fiction in the world of the future once aliens discover Earth and make it a protectorate, but is also a look at the role science fiction plays in our own time, partly, according to Zebrowski’s character, as a means of preparing mankind for the eventual discovery of alien species, and, by extension, technological and cultural advancement as well.

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Birthday Reviews: Fred Lerner’s “Rosetta Stone”

Birthday Reviews: Fred Lerner’s “Rosetta Stone”

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Cover by Alan Bean
Cover by Alan Bean

Fred Lerner was born on December 27, 1945.

Most of Lerner’s writing is non-fiction. In fact, “Rosetta Stone” seems to be his only fictional credit. He has published the fanzine Lofgeornost since 1979 and many of his articles have been collected in the A Bookman’s Fantasy. His scholarly work includes The Story of Libraries, A Silverlock Companion, and Modern Science Fiction and the American Literary Community.

“Rosetta Stone” appeared as the first story in the debut issue of Artemis: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Age in Spring 2000, edited by Ian Randal Strock. The story has never been reprinted.

One of the stranger books in my collection is a brief treatise written by Terry Belanger in 1985 called Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books, which discusses a variety of ways private collectors have arranged their libraries to allow them to find the books they want, which may seem to make sense to that individual collection but can look random to anyone else.

The main character of Lerner’s “Rosetta Stone” is, like the author, an information scientist who has an interest in books. Dan is called by his old college roommate, Jack Hawkins, who invites him to the lunar base for some consulting on a confidential matter. When Dan arrives, he learns that a base has been discovered on the moon which looks a lot like the ones built by Lunar Labs, but which was not built by anyone known. Furthermore, the base has a library of human books from a variety of countries. Lunar Labs is hoping that Dan might be able to figure out something about the aliens who are believed to have built the base by the way they organize their books.

There are several points raised in the story, but dropped: Who the aliens are, why they chose the books they did, how they got the books up to the moon. Other questions are actually dealt with, although not always successfully. Jack explains why they decided to call on Dan rather than archaeologists or librarians or other people who might have seemed like a better match for the conundrum. In addition to Dan’s ability as an information scientists, he was also chosen because of late night musings he had shared with Jack when they were in college, a weak reason, perhaps, but it manages to fit into the story and Dan does, eventually, begin to provide results.

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