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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Keith Taylor’s “Sepulchres of the Undead”

Birthday Reviews: Keith Taylor’s “Sepulchres of the Undead”

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The Secret History of Vampires
The Secret History of Vampires

Keith Taylor was born on December 26, 1946 in Tasmania.

Taylor has won the Ditmar Award twice. His first win was in 1982 for his short story “Where Silence Rules.” He won a second time in 1987 for his novel Bard III: The Wild Sea. He has been nominated for four additional Ditmar Awards as well as an Aurealis Award.

“Sepulchres of the Undead” appeared in the anthology The Secret History of Vampires, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, in 2007. The story has never been reprinted.

The great pyramids of Egypt have held a fascination for people for millennia. In “Sepulchres of the Undead,” Taylor explains that they are not simply vast monuments to the egos of the early Pharaohs, but actually served an important purpose. After Menkhaf kills a large bat on one of the pyramids, he learns that the pharaohs and their families are actually a separate race from most Egyptians. They are all, to some extent, vampires, and the great tombs are designed to ensure that their corpses are protected from humans and nature, for as long as their corpses remain, the vampires will retain the ability to change shapes and terrorize the population.

Menkhaf is warned that having killed a vampire, and specifically Pharaoh Khufu’s mother, he is a marked man. He joins the Brotherhood of Ra, a group dedicated to destroying the vampires among them. At the same time Prince Hemiunu, the pharaoh’s nephew and a partial vampire, is also out to destroy the vampires. The two vampire killers allow Taylor to play with different tactics, but they also muddy the waters of the story since he never really knits their plans, attacks, or stories, together. In fact, Menkhaf seems to be forgotten by the author as Hemiunu’s plans come to fruition. The resulting story has some interesting ideas regarding both vampires and Egyptian history, but doesn’t quite pull them together.

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Birthday Reviews: Holly Phillips’s “No Such Thing as an Ex-Con”

Birthday Reviews: Holly Phillips’s “No Such Thing as an Ex-Con”

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Cover by Adrian Kleinbergen
Cover by Adrian Kleinbergen

Holly Phillips was born on December 25, 1969.

Phillips won the Sunburst Award in 2006 for her collection In the Palace of Repose, which was also nominated for the William L. Crafword – IAFA Award and the World Fantasy Award. The title story had also been an International Horror Guild nominee the year before, while “The Other Grace,” which first appeared in the collection, was also a World Fantasy nominee. Along with Cory Doctorow, she was nominated for an Aurora Award in 2008. Phillips co-edited Tesseracts Eleven: Amazing Canadian Speculative Fiction with Cory Doctorow in 2007.

“No Such Thing as an Ex-Con” was Phillips’s first published story, appearing in the Summer 2000 issue of On Spec, edited by Jena Snyder. The story also appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of Weird Tales. In 2014, it was selected for inclusion in Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories: An On Spec 25th Anniversary Retrospective.

Emily Lake has served three and a half years for a series of murders she did not commit and upon her release from prison is taking work wherever she can find it, notably on a crew that is doing landscaping work for the city. Lake is always cognizant that once a convict, there are some people who will also see her as a convict, so she has to work harder and keep her head down to avoid drawing attention, knowing that any job is worth preserving since she won’t be able to find another one easily.

Unfortunately for Lake, the area in which she is working brings her into contact with Detective Bailor, who was one of the people responsible for putting her in prison for the murders. Lake had seen, or actually experienced, the murders in her dreams and went to the police to give them the lead that would put the perpetrator behind bars. Unfortunately, nobody believed she was not an accomplice, despite the claims of the murderer that he acted alone. Now, several years later, Bailor has a case of multiple kidnappings that have stymied him and he turns to Lake on the off chance that she was telling the truth and can help him find the lost boys.

Phillips offers a sympathetic view of an ex-con, even before the fact that she was innocent is known to the reader. Lake doesn’t show bitterness about the hand she has been dealt, and is trying her hardest to work within a system that is stacked against her. While Phillips builds the expectation that she’s going to be railroaded or fired, both concerns that Lake has, the reality of the situation turns out to be quite different. Lake’s abilities are described, but never explained, which seems to be more likely than having someone provide an explanation for her dreams.

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Birthday Reviews: Fritz Leiber’s “The Cloud of Hate”

Birthday Reviews: Fritz Leiber’s “The Cloud of Hate”

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Cover by Vernon Kramer
Cover by Vernon Kramer

Fritz Leiber was born on December 24, 1910 and died on September 5, 1992.

Fritz Leiber won six Hugo Awards for his novels The Big Time and The Wanderer as well as the novelette “Gonna Roll the Bones,” the novellas “Ship of Shadows” and “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” and the short story “Catch That Zeppelin.” “Gonna Roll the Bones,” “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” and “Catch That Zeppelin” also received the Nebula Award. He won the World Fantasy Award for the short story “Belsen Express” and the novel Our Lady of Darkness. He won his first British Fantasy Award for The Second Book of Fritz Leiber and his second for “The Button Molder.” He won the Geffen Award in 1999 for the Hebrew translation of Swords and Deviltry. The 1962 Worldcon presented him with a Special Convention Award in 1962 for his collaboration with the Hoffman Electronic Corporation for their use of science fiction in advertising.

In 1967 LASFS presented him with a Forry Award. He won a Gandalf Award in 1975 as a Grand Master of Fantasy and the next years received a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. In 1981 SFWA named him a Grand Master and he received a Special Balrog Award. He received a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988, and in 2001 he was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Leiber is one of the few people who was a guest of honor at multiple Worldcons, having the honor in 1951 at NOLACon I, the 9th Worldcon, held in New Orleans in 1951 and again in 1979 when he was a guest of honor at Seacon ’79 in Brighton, UK. He was the Guest of Honor at the 4th World Fantasy Con in Fort Worth, Texas in 1978. Leiber has most famously collaborated with Harry Fischer on the concept for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser for the story “Lords of Quarmall.” He has also collaborated with Judith Merril and Fredric Brown.

Leiber first published “The Cloud of Hate” in the May 1963 issue of Fantastic Stories of Imagination, edited by Cele Goldsmith. He included it as the lead-off story in the Lankhmar collection Swords in the Mist and in 1975 it showed up in Sword & Sorcery Annual. When Donald M. Grant published a collection of three Lankhmar stories in Bazaar of the Bizarre, “The Cloud of Hate” was one of the those chosen. It showed up in the Lankhmar omnibus volumes The Three of Swords and Lean Times in Lankhmar as well as Thieves’ House: Tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Volume 2 and The First Book of Lankhmar. The story has been translated into Dutch, German, and twice into French, usually for collections of Leiber’s Lankhmar stories.

“The Cloud of Hate” is one of Leiber’s many stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The two are serving as watchmen on the evening of a gala celebration of the betrothal of the Lankhmar Overlord’s daughter to the Prince of Ilthmar. They are stationed far from the festivities on a cold, foggy street. The action, however, starts below the streets of Lankhmar, with a mob of five thousand summoning the physical manifestation of hate to flood the streets and, one assumes, attack the Overlord’s party.

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Birthday Reviews: Wynne Whiteford’s “Night of the Wandjina”

Birthday Reviews: Wynne Whiteford’s “Night of the Wandjina”

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Cover by Nick Stathopoulos
Cover by Nick Stathopoulos

Wynne Whiteford was born on December 23, 1915 in Melbourne, Australia. He died on September 30, 2002.

In 1987, Whiteford received a short story award from the Epicurean and Cultural Society. Whiteford’s novel The Specialist was nominated for the Ditmar Award in 1991. In 1995 he was presented with the Chandler Award, presented for Outstanding Achievement in Australian Science Fiction.

“Night of the Wandjina” was Whiteford’s final published work and appeared in the 1998 anthology Dreaming Down Under, edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb. When the anthology was split into two volumes for a paperback printing, the story appeared in volume one. It has not, otherwise been reprinted.

When a company is preparing to drill for oil, one of their employees, Kel, warns them that he is uncomfortable that they plan to drill near an aboriginal site. Asked whether he believes they might disturb the spirits, Kel proceeds to tell a story about one of his earlier forays in oil exploration.

Kel tells his Director that he once went into the Outback with a team of four. When they found some aboriginal symbols looked like aliens, their aboriginal teammate, Djerri, commented that it represented a Wandjina, which he explained was a sort of wind spirit. When they decided to dig anyway, Djerri took one of their motorbikes and headed back to their camp, unwilling to be a part of the drilling team. They found a glass cylinder which they carefully unearthed, but when it broke it released a small whirlwind which seemed to take control of one of them and caused him to run until his body gave out.

The story treats the aboriginal culture and beliefs with respect, but at the same time carries a certain amount of “there are somethings man is not meant to know” and “don’t disturb the ancient spirits.” Kel and his mates approach the area knowing that they have a job to do and although Djerri can’t convince them not to, they are try to do the least amount of damage they can, although they also give into their natural curiosity, with dire consequences.

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Birthday Reviews: P.D. Cacek’s “A Book, by Its Cover”

Birthday Reviews: P.D. Cacek’s “A Book, by Its Cover”

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Cover by John Picacio
Cove by John Picacio

P.D. (Patricia Diana Joy Anne) Cacek was born on December 22, 1951.

Cacek won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 1996 for her story “Metalica” and the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1998 for the story “Dust Motes.” She has been nominated for the Stoker five additional times as well as for the International Horror Guild Award.

“A Book, By Its Cover” was published in Greg Ketter’s anthology Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores in 2002. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn G. Cramer selected it for inclusion in their collection Year’s Best Fantasy 3 the following year. It has not, otherwise, been reprinted.

Cacek has set “A Book, By Its Cover” in February 1939, three months after November 9 when Nazi Sturmabteilungen moved through Jewish areas to destroy buildings and arrest men, a night that became known as Kristallnacht. On that night, young Yavin Landauer watched his grandfather’s tailor shop burn after the Nazis killed him and saw one of his former friends, now a member of the SA, burning the books that they used to read together in Reb Shendelman’s shop. The Nazis spared Shendelman because they were amused that the old man would be more concerned over the burning of books than the deaths of his neighbors.

When the story opens, Yavin is disgusted with Shendelman for the very reason the Germans let him live. Living in the remains of his grandfather’s shop and scrounging food where he can, he notices a man visiting Shendelman each day. On each visit, the man brings a child to Shendelman’s shop and leaves the child there, walking away with a package traded for the child. Yavin decides to confront Shendelman for his disgusting crimes of trafficking in children.

The confrontation doesn’t go as Yavin expects, with Shendelman welcoming the young boy into his empty shop and feeding him soup, the first time Yavin has felt full since before Kristallnacht. Shendelman tells him a fairy tale about his own activities, one that Yavin can’t believe until he receives some proof, but even then he is skeptical. Their discussion takes a darker turn when Yavin’s friend, Karl, who is now with the SA, decides to pay a visit and finish the job started in November.

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Birthday Reviews: Sean McMullen’s “Electrica”

Birthday Reviews: Sean McMullen’s “Electrica”

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Cover by David G. Hardy
Cover by David G. Hardy

Sean McMullen was born on December 21, 1948 in Victoria, Australia.

McMullen has won the Ditmar Award 8 times, including five William Atheling, Jr. Awards for Criticism or Review, for short fiction (“While the Gate Is Open” and “Alone In His Chariot”) and for long fiction for Mirrorsun Rising. His novels The Centurion’s Empire and The Miocene Arrow as well as his short story “Walk to the Full Moon” have won the Aurealis Award. He has been nominated one time each for the Hugo Award, the British SF Association Award, the Sidewise Award, and the WSFA Small Press Award. McMullen has published under the pseudonym Roger Wilcox and has collaborated with Paul Collins, Steven Paulsen, Van Ikin, and Russell Blackford.

“Electrica” was first published in the March-April 2012 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gordon van Gelder. The next year McMullen included it in his short story collection Ghosts of Engines Past and David G. Hartwell selected the story for inclusion in Year’s Best SF 18.

McMullen offers a secret history of the Napoleonic Wars by looking at the career of Lieutenant Michael Fletcher, whose work in intelligence has gotten him transferred back to England to investigate the claims of Sir Charles Calder, who claims that he has used electricity to create a device that can send signals over vast distances, somewhat akin to the later telegraph, but without wires. Calder has even created a form of Morse code to use with the messages.

Fletcher arrives at Sir Charles’s manor to discover a contingent of soldiers guarding it, Sir Charles’s experiments, and Lady Monica, whose voracious sexual appetite appears to focus on any male who isn’t her husband, who she finds boring. As far as Fletcher can tell, Sir Charles feels the same way about Lady Monica. Allowing himself to be seduced by Monica in order to gain access to Sir Charles’s locked laboratory leads to a duel with one of the soldiers and sidelines Fletcher for several weeks while Monica is supposed to be in London. Upon his return to the manor, he learned that Lady Monica never made it to London and Sir Charles’s experiments have taken a dark turn.

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Birthday Reviews: Nalo Hopkinson’s “Whose Upward Flight I Love”

Birthday Reviews: Nalo Hopkinson’s “Whose Upward Flight I Love”

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Cover by Mark Harrison
Cover by Mark Harrison

Nalo Hopkinson was born on December 20, 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica.

Hopkinson’s first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the first Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 1997 and led to its publication. In 1999 Hopkinson won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She won the World Fantasy Award for her collection Skin Folk and she shared the British Fantasy Award for co-editing the anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction with Krisitne Ong Muslim. Hopkinson’s novel Sister Mine won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. She shared the Aurora Award for co-editing the anthology Tesseracts Nine with Geoff Ryman and won her own Aurora Award for the novel The New Moon’s Arms. Her novel The Chaos won a Copper Cylinder Award and she won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for The Salt Roads. She has won the Sunburst Award twice, for the collection Skin Folk and the novel The New Moon’s Arms. She has collaborated on fiction with Nisi Shawl and his co-edited anthologies and magazines with Kristine Ong Muslim, Geoff Ryman, and Uppinder Mehan.

“Whose Upward Flight I Love” was originally published in Dark Planet Webzine in 2000, edited by Lucy A. Snyder. Hopkinson included it in her collection Skin Folk the following year as well as her late collection Falling in Love with Hominids in 2015. It was reprinted in the magazine Cicada in March of 2017.

Hopkinson writes about a crew whose job it is to secure trees planted in a public park against a wind storm. Their task seems prosaic enough and they work even as the wind threatens to uproot the trees, to the extent that one of the women has to catch an uprooted tree before it flies away. Despite her efforts, all she winds up with is a root, which she tosses to the ground.

As the crew members work, they call to each other, continuing conversations about their lives. The woman has a long-time relationship with Derek, which has its ups and downs and she is sharing the latest information about their lives with her crewmate to pass the time while they do their work to protect the trees. Everything is completely normal and there is nothing that sets this particularly day’s work apart from any other day.

Decisions, and actions, have consequences, even if they can’t be foreseen. Consequences also often can’t be traced back to the decision that caused them. The crewmember catching the tree and then dropping the root on the ground is one of those. While she and her crewmates are finishing their task, the dropped root begins to move on its own.

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Birthday Reviews: Dave Hutchinson’s “The Trauma Jockey”

Birthday Reviews: Dave Hutchinson’s “The Trauma Jockey”

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Cover by Shaun Tan
Cover by Shaun Tan

Dave Hutchinson was born on December 19, 1960.

Hutchinson’s novel Europe in Autumn was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British SF Association Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, as was its sequel, Europe at Midnight. The volume Europe in Winter was the only one of the three nominated for the British SF Association Award, which it won in 2017. His short story “The Push” had been nominated for the award in 2010. Hutchinson co-edited the anthology Strange Pleasures 2 with John Grant.

“The Trauma Jockey” first appeared in issue 117 of Interzone in March 1997, edited by David Pringle. In 2000 Thomas Haufschild translated the story into German for inclusion in Wolfgang Jeschke’s anthology Das Wägen von Luft. Hutchinson included it in his 2004 collection As the Crow Flies.

Hutchinson’s main character is a “Trauma Jockey,” someone whose job is to connect to a patient through a series of electrodes to take their emotional trauma away. Hutchinson opens the story by demonstrating how the process is supposed to work, with the trauma jockey siphoning the emotional pain away from Lucy Smith and then eventually downloading it into someone who has been so beaten down by the system that extra trauma doesn’t impact him.

Once Hutchinson has established the normal methodology, his character is visited by a Mr. Jones, who wants to hire his services. It turns out that Jones is a sociopath and the process doesn’t work the same way on him. Instead of downloading his emotions, he downloads images of people he has murdered. When the Trauma Jockey decides to go to the police, Jones threatens not only him, but his extended family, including his young nieces. Unable to turn to anyone for help, he must accept Jones’s continued visits and the horrific images he shares, which gives Jones as much of a rush as the actual murders and sexual crimes.

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Birthday Reviews: Michael Moorcock’s “The Frozen Cardinal”

Birthday Reviews: Michael Moorcock’s “The Frozen Cardinal”

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Cover by Jim Burns
Cover by Jim Burns

Michael Moorcock was born on December 18, 1939.

Moorcock’s novella “Behold the Man” won the Nebula Award in 1968. He has won the British Fantasy Award six times, for the novels The Knight of the Swords, The King of the Swords, The Sword and the Stallion, and The Hollow Lands, as well as for the short story “The Jade Man’s Eyes.” He won a special committee award from them in 1993. In 1979 he won the World Fantasy Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Gloriana. His Elric saga won the Seiun Award in 1986. Moorcock received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the World Fantasy Con in 2000, the Prix Utopia in 2004, and the Bram Stoker Awards in 2005. In 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 2008. Moorcock was guest of honor at the 2nd World Fantasy Con, held in New York in 1976 and at LoneStarCon 2, the 55th Worldcon, held in San Antonio, Texas in 1997.

“The Frozen Cardinal” originally appeared in the anthology Other Edens, edited by Robert Holdstock and Christopher Evans, in 1987.  Moorcock included it in his collection Casablanca in 1989 and in 1993, it was included in the Moorcock collection Earl Aubec and Other Stories. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer selected the story for The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection in 2016. In 1990 the story was translated into French to appear in the anthology Universe 1990, edited by Pierre K. Rey.

While Moorcock may be best known for his epic fantasy about the Eternal Champion or his Jerry Cornelius novels, he has also written a significant amount of straight science fiction. “The Frozen Cardinal” is set in the polar regions of the distant planet Moldavia and takes the form of several private communiques sent back to Earth by a member of the first exploration team to the area of the planet, which is just beginning to come out of an ice age.

Moorcock manages to present his trip to a distant world as a tedious expedition. His narrator, as well as the entire crew, is just focused on the next tasks they must accomplish, most of which are the repetitive crossing of vast chasms, a dangerous activity, but one that has become routine as they use the same process at each crevice. Their monotony is broken when they discover a figure embedded in the ice on the side of one of the crevices and determine that it is a Roman Catholic Cardinal.

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Birthday Reviews: Jack L. Chalker’s “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night”

Birthday Reviews: Jack L. Chalker’s “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night”

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Cover by Barclay Shaw
Cover by Barclay Shaw

Jack L. Chalker was born on December 17, 1944 and died on February 11, 2005.

Although Chalker may be best known for his Well of Souls series of novels, his only Hugo Award nominations were for his amateur magazine, Mirage, in 1963 and his non-fiction book The Science Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History: Third Edition, co-written with Mark Owings. The book also won the Readercon Award in 1992. Chalker was a two-time nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 1980 he received the Skylark Award from NESFA, and in 2005 he posthumously received the Phoenix Award from DeepSouthCon.

Chalker wrote “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night” for Mike Resnick’s 1992 anthology Alternate Presidents. The story has never been reprinted. It was his last published piece of short fiction, although Chalker continued to publish novels and non-fiction.

Set in a rooming house in Albany, New York, “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night” takes place in a world in which following James Buchanan’s death during the election of 1856, Millard Fillmore is able to capture a second term on the Know-Nothing ticket. Fully embracing his anti-immigration stance, Fillmore is in thrall to the Southerners who helped elect him and promotes pro-slavery policies, including the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act passed during his first term in 1850. His policies have caused unrest in New England, resulting in a second Boston Massacre when troops opened fire on citizens trying to stop a runaway slave from being taken back to the South.

The rooming house is a collection of men who have business with the New York state legislature, although one of them, Mr. Green, keeps to himself, leading another, Mr. Morgan, to question his purpose. The two play a cat and mouse game revealing that they actually have been aware of each other for quite some time. While both claim, like all the men in the rooming house, to oppose Fillmore’s agenda, they have very different methods of fighting for what they believe is right.

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