Browsed by
Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Irene Radford’s “Little Red in the ‘Hood”

Birthday Reviews: Irene Radford’s “Little Red in the ‘Hood”

Comments 2 comments
Little Red Riding Hood in the Big Bad City
Little Red Riding Hood in the Big Bad City

Irene Radford was born on September 17, 1950. She has published works under a variety of pseudonyms, including Phyllis Ames, C.F. Bentley, P.R. Frost, Phyllis Irene Radford, and Julia Verne St. John.

Radford has published numerous series, many of them through DAW Books, including the Dragon Nimbus, Stargods, Tess Noncoiré, and Merlin’s Descendants. She is one of the founders of Book View Café, a cooperative publisher. She has also collaborated with Bob Brown and as an editor with Deborah J. Ross, Laura Ann Gilman, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, and Brenda Clough.

“Little Red in the ‘Hood” appeared in the anthology Little Red Riding Hood in the Big Bad City, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers in 2004. M.H. Bonham reprinted the story in 2011 in WolfSongs: Volume 2. When Radford and Deborah J. Ross edited the anthology Beyond Grimm in 2012, they selected the story to be reprinted again.

Radford’s “Little Red in the ‘Hood” is much more substantial than Linda D. Addison’s vignette of practically the same name, reviewed on September 8. In Radford’s story, Little Red is the nickname for a woman who is “volunteering” to help deliver food for Mobile Meals, a service to provide food for shut-ins, although her volunteer work is ordered by the courts after she was caught shop-lifting. The assignment she pulls has her taking food to a notorious lecher who has often been banned from food delivery due to his treatment of the women bringing his food. Although the coordinator offers to postpone the delivery until they can send an escort with Little Red, she refuses.

There are hints early on that Little Red is more than she seems, as she accepts the task of bringing food to Jason Hanstable, who has the reputation of a wolf. With Radford focusing on the lengthening of Red’s fingernails as much as her decision to only wear red, it seems clear that she is a different kind of wolf than Jason, but a wolf all the same. Despite telegraphing Red’s transformation, Radford includes a twist which only becomes clear when she introduces it, allowing the non-reveal that Red is a wolf to take second place and still subvert the reader’s expectations.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Lisa Tuttle’s “Tir Nan Og”

Birthday Reviews: Lisa Tuttle’s “Tir Nan Og”

Comments 0 Comment
Cover by Gary A. Lippincott
Cover by Gary A. Lippincott

Lisa Tuttle was born on September 16, 1952.

Lisa Tuttle won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1974. In 1982, she was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “The Bone Flute.” Unhappy with what she saw as an orchestrated campaign to sway the voters by one of the other nominees, Tuttle announced that she was pulling the story from consideration. Nevertheless, “The Bone Flute” was announced as the winner of the Nebula Award and Tuttle refused to accept it. She went on to win the BSFA Award in 1989 for her short story “In Translation.” In 2007, she won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Intermediate Form for “Closet Dreams” and in 2012 sue won the 2012 Imaginaire award for best translated story.

Tuttle published “Tir Nan Og” in the January 1999 issue of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Gordon van Gelder. Stephen Jones included the story in the anthology The Mammoth Book of New Terror in 2004.

“Tir Nan Og” is the story of a woman “of a certain age” who has noticed that her close friends have become cat people, each of them has adopted a feline companion and has given up on male companionship. Concerned about her own situation, she is having an affair with a married man and thinks that if he leaves her she may not be able to interest another man in a relationship. She goes to speak to her friends about their own apparent acceptance of celibacy.

Although her friends are less than forthcoming, which will eventually be her downfall, it is clear to the reader what they are trying to tell her. All she gets out of it is that if she takes her boyfriend to the mountains, she should make him drink from a specific spring. Naturally, without understanding why her friends are suggesting this, things go horrendously wrong for her, although she has a sort of closure that resolves her issue.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Howard Waldrop’s “Kindermarchen”

Birthday Reviews: Howard Waldrop’s “Kindermarchen”

Comments 0 Comment
Cover by Brian Lei
Cover by Brian Lei

Howard Waldrop was born on September 15, 1946.

Waldrop won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction for his story “The Ugly Chicken” in 1981. His chapbook A Dozen Tough Jobs won the Readercon Award for Short Work in 1990. Waldrop’s work has also been recognized with nominations for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, British SF Association Award, Philip K. Dick Award, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Sidewise Award, the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award, and the coveted Balrog Award.

Waldrop first published “Kindermarchen” on Lou Antonelli’s website, Sentinel Science Fiction in January 2007. Later that year, Waldrop reprinted the story in his collection Horse of a Different Color: Stories.

“Kindermarchen” is a brief story that is based on the German term for a fairy tale, Märchen. It is also a retelling of the story of Hansel and Gretel. In Waldrop’s version, Hansel and Gretel’s woodchopper father and their stepmother live in a small village in a kingdom ruled by ogres. With a war raging between their kingdom and the neighboring ogrish kingdom, a decision has been made to evacuate children when the war comes too close. The stepmother is on the committee to decide which local children should be evacuated when the time comes.

The explanation for the stepmother’s committee doesn’t quite add up, although the father accepts it and explains it to his children. When his children are selected to evacuate, although it is clear that the decision originated from afar, there is nothing the father or stepmother can do to stop the evacuation. Hansel suggests that they leave a trail of breadcrumbs to follow back to the village without considering what might happen when they return.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Cubs”

Birthday Reviews: Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Cubs”

Comments 1 comment
Cover by Chris Nurse
Cover by Chris Nurse

Steve Rasnic Tem was born Steve Rasnic on September 14, 1950. He often collaborated with his wife, Melanie, and the two took on the joint surname Tem. Melanie Tem died in 2015.

The Tems jointly won the World Fantasy Award in 2001 for the novella The Man on the Ceiling, which also earned them a Bram Stoker Award and an International Horror Guild Award. They won a second joint Stoker Award for “Imagination Box” and Tem won solo Stokers for In These Final Days of Sales and Blood Kin. His Short Story “Leaks” won the 1988 British Fantasy Award. Tem also won an International Horror Guild Award for his collection City Fishing in 2001.

“Cubs” made its original appearance in the anthology Hideous Progeny, edited by Brian Willis in 2000. The stories in the book were all based on the Frankenstein story. Tem included the story in his 2013 collection Twember.

Prior to the beginning of “Cubs” Billy suffered a mortal accident, yet his parents were able to bring him back using an undiscussed technique that requires him to wear an energy pack that needs to retain a charge. One of the side effects of Billy’s mechanical resurrection is that occasionally he sees normal things break apart, which isn’t necessarily happening. His semi-undead state also means that he is treated differently by people, including his mother, although she tries to hide the fact from him.

Because these kids are seen as outcasts, there are group outings of scouts specifically for them, but Billy clearly understands that even among the scouts, there is a pecking order and he isn’t at the top. Nevertheless, there is a camaraderie among them based on their status as outcasts. Of course, someone had to be at the bottom of the pecking order and it was the boy they referred to as “the dead kid” because the process wasn’t completely successful with him and he didn’t appear even as lifelike as the rest of the boys.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Tom Holt’s “Touched by a Salesman”

Birthday Reviews: Tom Holt’s “Touched by a Salesman”

Comments 1 comment
Cover by Julek Heller
Cover by Julek Heller

Tom Holt was born on September 13, 1961.

Holt received a nomination for the William L. Crawford IAFA Fantasy Award in 1991 for his humorous novel Expecting Someone Taller. His more recent, more series work under the name K.J. Parker has earned him additional award nominations for the Kitschies and the World Fantasy Awards. He has won back-to-back World Fantasy Awards for his novellas “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong” in 2012 and “Let Maps to Others” in 2013. It wasn’t until after Holt won his second World Fantasy Award that he revealed his pseudonym in April 2015, seventeen years after he began using it with his novel Colours in the Steel in 1998.

“Touched by a Salesman” appeared in Mike Ashley’s anthology The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy in 2001. As with many of Holt’s humorous stories, it takes its title from pop culture, in this case the television show Touched by an Angel, and twists it to the purposes of the story. “Touched by a Salesman” has not been reprinted.

Paul was having the sort of day nobody should have. Car problems, a girlfriend breaking up with him, and sudden unemployment. As he walked home, having missed the bus, of course, he sees a meteorite fall into a nearby construction site and decides to see if he can retrieve it, bumping into another meteorite seeker in the dark. It is at this point that his luck begins to change. It isn’t another meteorite seeker he has bumped into, but rather 6340097/227/3, whom Paul first takes to be an angel.

It isn’t an angel, but rather an extraterrestrial salesman who knows just enough to figure out that he is on Earth sometime in the twentieth or twenty-first century, although his knowledge of Earth culture and technology is completely lacking. Paul befriends him and learns a little about the alien’s job while at the same time amazing the alien with human’s complete lack of technology, but the ability to create a mug with a handle. It is easy for Paul to convince himself after 6340097/227/3 that he’ll wake up from a dream to find his car is fine, his girlfriend wants him back, and he still has a job, none of which occur, although the alien does provide him with a thank you for their time together.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Stanisław Lem’s “Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth”

Birthday Reviews: Stanisław Lem’s “Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth”

Comments 3 comments
Cover by Dominic Emile Harman
Cover by Dominic Emile Harman

Stanisław Lem was born on September 12, 1921 and died on March 27, 2006.

Polish author Stanisław Lem won the Seiun Award in 1977 for his short story “Rozprawa” and the Geffen Award for the novel Solaris, which was thrice adapted for film, first in 1968 for Soviet television by Lidiya Ishimbaeva and Boris Nirenburg, second by Andrei Tarkovsky in the Soviet Union in 1972, and finally by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. Lem has also received the City of Krakow’s Prize in Literature, several prizes from the Polish government during the Communist period, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the Franz Kafka Prize, and was made a member of the Order of the White Eagle. In 1973 Lem was given an honorary membership in SFWA, but once he was eligible for a regular membership, the bylaws of the organization required the honorary membership to be rescinded, which caused an uproar among some members.

“Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth,” which was written as Ostatnia Podroz Ijona Tichego, was published in English in August 1999 in Altair #4, without a previous Polish publication. It was translated by a team comprised of Kurt von Trojan, Robert N. Stephenson, and Ela Wroaebel. The magazine was edited by Andrew Collings, Jim Deed, and Robert N. Stephenson. The story was later translated into German as “Ijon Tichys letzte Reise” and published by Wolfgang Jeschke in the anthology Reptilienliebe.

Stanisław Lem’s Ijon Tichy stories are not hard science fiction, but rather social satire, usually showing the title character traveling to distant planets and observing and commenting on their customs, which are often strangely reminiscent of human custom. Most of the stories have been collected in Lem’s book The Star Diaries. “Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth” has a recursive component in that Tichy refers to his own book The Star Diaries as a narrative of his travels and implies that the story he is currently relating will appear in a future edition of the book.

Tichy’s set up for the story is that he has been exploring the Cassiopeia constellation for the past six years (although his references to “Cassiopeia’s eight supermoon” indicates that Lem isn’t aware of, or care about, the difference between a constellation and a planetary system) and is returning to Earth for the first time in several years. Upon his arrival, he notices that men and women seem to have swapped traditional attire, with men wearing skirts and women wearing pants. Furthermore, it seems to him that people are being chased through the streets by people wielding butterfly nets. He seeks out someone to explain the cultural changes to him.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Ray Vukcevich’s “Ornamental Animals”

Birthday Reviews: Ray Vukcevich’s “Ornamental Animals”

Comments 1 comment
Cover by Timothy Caldwell and Rick Lieder
Cover by Timothy Caldwell and Rick Lieder

Ray Vukcevich was born on September 11, 1946.

Vukcevich was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 2002 for his collection Meet Me in the Moon Room. His novelette “The Wages of Syntax” was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2004. Vukcevich has published two collections of his own short stories, the novel The Man of Maybe Half-A-Dozen Faces, and a short anthology that collected one of his short stories and one of Kelly Link’s short stories that was given away at a World Horror Convention.

“Ornamental Animals” was published in the fifteenth issue of Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine sometime early in 1993. By the time this issue was published, Pulphouse had backed away from the weekly schedule it had initially set for itself (and never achieved) and claimed to be a monthly magazine, although only two issues appeared in 1993. The story has never been reprinted.

In “Ornamental Animals,” Amy Grindle is an aspiring model who has a habit of going through catalogs and magazines she appears in and clipping photos of herself from the pages, although her face has yet to be shown in any of them. On a whim, as she went through the catalog, Amy decided to purchase a set of two genetically modified cats, although she really knew very little about them or the company that makes them. Because of that, she was quite surprised when she eventually received her pair of “Fire Cats.”

Although Fire Cats look more or less like non-genetically engineered cats, they do have some differences, which Amy learns about quite quickly, partly due to the cats’ response to her and partly because once she received them she realized she should read the manual on their care and feeding. She quickly learns that although the cats are alive, they don’t offer any of the traditional benefits of pets. They are born without joints, except in their jaws, and therefore can’t move and must be fed manually. Even more intriguing is the talent that gives them their name. When certain conditions are met, the cat’s heads explode in flame, although the cats themselves are all right.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Pat Cadigan’s “New Life for Old”

Birthday Reviews: Pat Cadigan’s “New Life for Old”

Comments 2 comments
Cover by Maren
Cover by Maren

Pat Cadigan was born on September 10, 1953.

Cadigan won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013 for “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” which has also won a Seiun Award. She previously won a World Fantasy Award in the Non-Professional category for co-editing the fanzine Shayol with Arnie Fenner. She won two Arthur C. Clarke Awards for her novels Synners and Fools. In 1979 her story “Death from Exposure” won the coveted Balrog Award. In 2006 Cadigan received the third (and most recent) Richard Evans Memorial Prize, given to genre authors who were considered insufficiently recognized for their excellence. Cadidgan served as the Toastmaster for MidAmericon II, the 2016 Worldcon in Kansas City.

Disney’s animated film Aladdin was released in 1992 and to take advantage of the popularity of the film, Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg edited the 1992 anthology Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, with stories based on genies, djinni, and the 1001 nights. Pat Cadigan’s story “New Life for Old” made its debut in the anthology. The following year, Cadigan included the story in her collection Dirty Work and in 1996 it was translated into French for Cadigan’s anthology Les garçons sous la pluie.

Cadigan’s djinn appears to 70-year-old Millie as she is polishing a family heirloom, a lamp that dates back to the family’s origins in the Middle East. Millie greets the djinn’s appearance with skepticism, based on her life experience and the drink she took that afternoon, although she doubts it is enough to get her that tipsy. The djinn does, however, make her an offer of one day of youth. If she turns it down, he’ll remove all memory of their meeting. Naturally, she takes him up on the offer and lives out a life of her youth.

Millie and the djinn reconnect after her day and she tells him all about it, reveling in what she was able to do and how she felt. However the experience wasn’t all she had hoped for and she realizes that a better, and more useful experience would have been to live a day as an old woman when she was younger. That way, she would better enjoy what she had rather than just one day that was wistful and nostalgic even as she was enjoying herself. Cadigan’s story is a quick tale that presents not only the good feelings that nostalgia can bring, but also a sense of the regrets and the difference in the view of someone young and someone older.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Homer Eon Flint’s “The Nth Man”

Birthday Reviews: Homer Eon Flint’s “The Nth Man”

Comments 2 comments
Cover by Frank R. Paul
Cover by Frank R. Paul

Homer Eon Flint was born Homer Eon Flindt on September 9, 1889 and died on March 27, 1924 under suspicious circumstances.

Flint’s career as a speculative fiction author ran from 1918 until his death in 1924, during which time he collaborated with Austin Hall. The majority of his work appeared in All Story and Argosy All Story, which were published by Munsey. Flint’s death is a mystery that remains unsolved. He was killed when a car he was driving in ran over a cliff. Although there have been claims that Flint stole the car at gunpoint with the intent to commit a bank robbery, that charge was put forward by a gangster, E.L. Handley, several years later. There is no evidence that Flint was involved with anything illegal, and may have found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although “The Nth Man” was originally sold to the Munsey Corporation in 1920, it didn’t appear until after Flint’s death when the rights had been re-sold to Hugo Gernsback and it was published in the April 1928 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly. It disappeared and wasn’t reprinted until 2015 when it was included in the Wildside Press e-anthology The 26th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack.

Flint opens the story with six lengthy vignettes describing miracles that occurred between 1920 and 1933, promising that they were linked in some way, but not offering any explanation for how they occurred. These instances range from the rescue of a nine-year old girl drowning after falling off a cliff to the transportation of a freighter from the middle of a typhoon to the Australian desert, to the disappearance of a bank in Hamburg.

Once he relates all of these miracles, which takes about half of the story, he begins to refocus his tale on the specifics, which tie the various vignettes together. The key vignette to our understanding is the one set in 1920, in which a young Bert Forsburgh meets a young Florence Neil. Fosburgh is the son of a wealthy businessman, Daly Fosburgh, who by the time the main story is set is prepared to economically take over the United States with his son, now a young adult, set to be his figurehead governmental leader.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Linda D. Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood”

Birthday Reviews: Linda D. Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood”

Comments 0 Comment
Cover by Kandis Eliot
Cover by Kandis Eliot

Linda D. Addison was born on September 8, 1952.

Addison has won the Bram Stoker Award four times for her poetry collections, becoming the first African-American to win. She won her first Stoker for Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes in 2002. In 2008 she won for Being Full of Light, Insubstantial. Her collection How to Recognize the Demon Has Become Your Friend won in 2012, and her final award in 2014 came for her collaborative collection Four Elements, with Marge Simon, Rain Graves, and Charlee Jacob. She has also collaborated with Beecher Smith and Stephen M. Wilson.

“Little Red in the Hood” appeared in issue 23 of Tomorrow Speculative Fiction in November 1996, edited by Algis Budrys. The following year Addison included it in her collection Animated Objects, which included six stories and several poems. Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg also selected the story for the anthology 100 Hilarious Little Howlers. Its most recent publication was in the e-book anthology Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention, edited by Peggy Rae Sapienza, Jean Marie Ward, Bill Campbell, and Sam Lubell for the 2014 World Fantasy Con in Washington, DC.

Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood” is barely more than a vignette. It tells the story of fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters when they aren’t on duty. Little Red is relaxing at the end of the day in a bar, throwing back a double vodka. The Big Bad Wolf is sitting on the other side of the bar. When Red complains about having to be eaten daily, the wolf points out that he has to essentially have a Caesarian section each day when they retrieve Red after the story ends.

Other characters chime in with their concerns. As traditional characters they worry that the advent of the Power Rangers will knock them out of their roles, although the Red points out that the coming of the Purple People Eater didn’t impact them. The story ends in media res when Red and the Wolf are summoned because someone is reading their story to their child.

…

Read More Read More