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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Walter Jon Williams’s “The Fate Line”

Birthday Reviews: Walter Jon Williams’s “The Fate Line”

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Cover by Bob Eggleton
Cover by Bob Eggleton

Walter Jon Williams was born on October 215, 1953

Williams received the Nebula Award for best novelette in 2001 for “Daddy’s World” and for novella in 2005 for “The Green Leopard Plague.” In 1997 he won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his story “Foreign Devils.” His works have also been nominated for the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

“The Fate Line” was published in the Fred Saberhagen festschrift Golden Reflections in 2011, edited by Robert E. Vardeman and Joan Spicci Saberhagen. The story is set in the same universe as Saberhagen’s 1979 novel The Mask of the Sun and has not been reprinted.

Williams take on the setting is one of constantly shifting expectations. It opens with Perseus, the illegitimate son of one of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, plundering a tomb at the orders of his half-brother, the Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes, in order to find the wealth needed to fight the rebels and foreigners who threatened the dynasty. Perseus worries that both success or failure would bring about his own death, but when he found the immeasurable wealth of Ahmose, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, he began to see a way out of his dilemma.

Williams quickly shifts the focus to Demetrios, a disentimed soldier who is working for the Quechuans of The Mask of the Sun in their time-war against the Tenocha. In one of the timelines, Cuzco-81, there is an Egyptian empire that threatens the Quechuans and Demetrios and a team are sent back in time to stop the Ptolemaic dynasty from establishing a foothold that lasts thousands of years. The team suffers almost instant failure when Demetrios meets Elpidos, a man who has knowledge about Demetrios, but who can’t share too much. Demetrios does realize that if he intends any harm to Ptolemy, the pharaoh will learn of it and Demetrios will fail.

Unable to return to his own time and knowing that his mission is stymied, Demetrios tries to figure out how to best establish himself in ancient Alexandria. Taking inspiration from his aunt, he sets himself up as a cheiromancer. When his predictions come true, he draws the attention of those close to the court and is eventually able to learn the secret of Ptolemy’s great luck, which ties in to Saberhagen’s novel, and come up with a way to siderail the timeline’s history without doing anything to harm the king.

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Birthday Reviews: Donald A. Wollheim’s “Blueprint”

Birthday Reviews: Donald A. Wollheim’s “Blueprint”

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Cover by Hannes Bok
Cover by Hannes Bok

Donald A. Wollheim was born on October 1, 1914 and died on November 2, 1990.

Wollheim entered science fiction fandom at its birth and was responsible for a meeting in Philadelphia between New York and Philadelphia science fiction fans which is considered by some to be the first science fiction convention. He was a member of the Science Fiction League, founded the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA), and the Futurians. He was one of the Futurians not allowed into the first Worldcon as part of the “Exclusion Act.” In the 1940s, he began working as an editor as well as a writer, editing for Avon Books and later Ace before starting up his own line, DAW Books. From 1965 through his death, Wollheim edited an annual World’s Best SF anthology series.

In 1975, Aussiecon One, the 33rd Worldcon, presented Wollheim with a Special Award for being the “Fan Who Has Done Everything.” Wollheim was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 1975 Wollheim won a World Fantasy Special Professional Award in 1981 for DAW Books and a Special Convention Award in 1986. He also won the Milford Lifetime Achievement Award in 1980, the I-Con Award and Forry Award in 1987. He and his wife, Elsie, earned a British Fantasy Special Award in 1984. In 2002, he was inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and in 2010, SFWA awarded him the Solstice Award, which was accepted by his daughter, Betsy. Wollheim was the Guest of Honor at Nolacon II, the 46th Worldcon in 1988.

Wollheim used a variety of pseudonyms, including Martin Borrow, Graham Conway, Millard Verne Gordon, David Grinnell, Martin Pearson, Allan Warland, W. Malcolm White, and Lawrence Woods. He collaborated, as author and editor, with George Ernsberger, Forrest J Ackerman, Terry Carr, Arthur W. Saha, C.M. Kornbluth, Robert A. W. Lowndes, John Michel, and Lin Carter.

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Birthday Reviews: September Index

Birthday Reviews: September Index

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Sword-and-Sorceress-II-smaller Tomorrow Speculative Fiction 23 November 1996-small Doughnuts Blaylock-small

January index
February index
March index
April index
May index
June index
July index
August index

September 1, C.J. Cherryh: “The Unshadowed Land”
September 2, Roland J. Green: “Strings”
September 3, Jack Wodhams: “Freeway”
September 4, Rick Wilber: “Greggie’s Cup”
September 5, James McKimmey, Jr.: “Planet of Dreams”
September 6, China Miéville: “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia”

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Birthday Reviews: Theodora Goss’s “Singing of Mount Abora”

Birthday Reviews: Theodora Goss’s “Singing of Mount Abora”

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Logorrhea
Logorrhea

Theodora Goss was born on September 30, 1968.

Goss has won two Rhysling Awards for Long Poem. The first was in 2004 for “Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks” and the second for “Rose Child” in 2017. She has also twice been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Mythopoeic, the Seiun, and the World Fantasy Award, winning the last once. She has additionally been nominated for the William L. Crawford/IAFA Fantasy Award, the SLF Foundation Award, and the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award.

Goss wrote “Singing of Mount Abora” for John Klima’s anthology Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories in 2007. The story was picked up by Rich Horton for Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition and by Jonathan Strahan for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two. It was late reprinted in Lightspeed by John Joseph Adams in the July 2012 issue. The story won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 2008.

“Singing of Mount Abora” was written for an anthology in which all the stories are inspired by words that were the winning entries in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, so it is appropriate that Goss’s language is a feature in the story, which was based on the word “Dulcimer,” which won the contest for Kim Calvin in 1949. The story is also based on lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” notably “ A damsel with a dulcimer/In a vision once I saw:/It was an Abyssinian maid/And on her dulcimer she played,/Singing of Mount Abora.”

Goss weaves together two tales set in three different times. The first is the story of Kamora, a woman in ancient China who has fallen in love with the Cloud Dragon, but cannot marry him until she convinces the Empress to let her leave. The second story tells of Sabra, a literature student who is beginning to fall in love with another student, Michael, much to her distant mother’s disdain. Both Kamora and Sabra must overcome obstacles set by the Empress or Sabra’s mother in order to have the chance to be with their loves.

The story of Kamora and the Cloud Dragon reads like a fable. Kamora is in service to the Empress who won’t let her leave until she can find someone who will entertain her as much as Kamora has. Kamora goes on a quest, starting with her uncle, the man who made her dulcimer. Known for his cleverness, he sends her to a distant mountaintop where she can meet the Stone Woman who may be able to help her, for the right price.

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Birthday Reviews: S.N. Lewitt’s “Festival”

Birthday Reviews: S.N. Lewitt’s “Festival”

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Cover by Nicholas Jainschigg
Cover by Nicholas Jainschigg

S.N. (Shariann) Lewitt was born on September 29, 1954. She has also published as Rick North and Gordon Kendall, the latter in collaboration with Susan Shwartz.

Lewis has published under her full name as well as her initials. Her novels include original works such as Angels at Apogee, Rebel Sutra, and Memento Mori, as well as the Star Trek novel Cybersong. She collaborated with Shwartz on the novel White Wing and has written two books in The Young Astronauts series as Rick North.

“Festival” appeared in the Summer 1994 issue of Pirate Writings, edited by Edward J. McFadden. It was reprinted in The Best of Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, also edited by McFadden.

Lewitt has set “Festival” on an alien world settled by humans. The early settlers found the world to be an inhospitable place with a jungle that seemed practically sentient and intent on destroying the colony. Eventually, technological means were invented to keep the jungle from encroaching on the colony and at the same time a raucous annual festival emerged, which invariably resulted in the deaths of some of the revelers. Secret Societies sprung up to find those who died in the revels and take their bodies outside as a tribute to the jungle.

Sandro is preparing not only for the festival, donning a costume like all the other revelers, but also for his induction into the Red Men’s Society. The story talks about his preparations and then goes into a lengthy flashback to give the reader the history, intentionally vague, of the planet and the festival, before connecting Sandro to his sponsor for membership in the Red Men’s Society, his co-worker Chema. The two men go out on patrol, looking for the bodies of the dead to drag out into the jungle while wearing full environmental suits so they won’t have to worry about their own exposure.

The short length of the story combined with its flashback nature gives it a disjointed feel. Lewitt is not able to give sufficient coverage to either the origins of the colony’s culture nor to Sandro and his desire to become part of the Red Men’s Society or his reaction to the secrets he is exposed to. While his reaction to those secrets is one which seems completely human and normal, it doesn’t seem to take the colony’s values into consideration.

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Birthday Reviews: Michael G. Coney’s “The Byrds”

Birthday Reviews: Michael G. Coney’s “The Byrds”

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Changes
Changes

Michael G. Coney was born on September 28, 1932 and died on November 4, 2005.

Coney won the 1977 British SF Association Award for his novel Brontomek! and was also nominated in 1984 for his novel Cat Karina. In 1996, his story “Tea and Hamsters” made the ballot for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and two of his stories, “Die, Lorelei” and “The Sharks of Pentreath” were nominated for Seiun Awards.

“The Byrds” first appeared in the 1983 anthology Changes, edited by Michael Bishop and Ian Watson. In 1985 Judith Merril selected it for inclusion in the inaugural volume of the Tesseracts anthology series of Canadian science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery also included the story in The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990. The story appeared the following year in David G. Hartwell and Glenn Grant’s Northern Stars: The Anthology of Canadian Science Fiction. It made its most recent appearance in Mike Ashley’s The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy.

Michael Coney takes a look at mass hysteria in “The Byrds,” in which a Canada which is struggling with population problems sends out questionnaires to the elderly which encourage them to choose euthanasia. In one family, as Gran gets on in years, she refuses to kill herself and instead strips naked, paints herself like a bird, and straps on an anti-gravity belt before taking to the trees to the mortification of her family.

The family calls in a psychiatrist, Dr. Pratt, who seems more intent on writing papers, appearing on television, and generally making a name for himself than helping the family. As the word spreads about what Gran did, others begin doing the same and Gran becomes an unwilling and uncooperative guru for the movement following her lead.

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Birthday Reviews: Willard E. Hawkins’s “The Dwindling Sphere”

Birthday Reviews: Willard E. Hawkins’s “The Dwindling Sphere”

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Cover by Gilmore
Cover by Gilmore

Willard E. Hawkins was born on September 27, 1887 and died on April 17, 1970.

Hawkins only published eleven short stories of genre interest over a span of nearly thirty years, although he published his first story as early as 1912. In addition to writing various genres, he established World Press, for which he was the publisher and editor of mostly non-fiction books about the West. He also worked as a newspaper editor for various Colorado papers, including Denver Times and the Rocky Mountain News. His first genre story, “The Dead Man’s Tale,” appeared in the debut issue of Weird Tales.

“The Dwindling Sphere” was originally published in the March 1940 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. Laurence Janiver reprinted it in his 1966 anthology Masters’ Choice (a.k.a. 18 Greatest Science Fiction Stories). The story was picked up by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg for their anthology The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 2: 1940 (a.k.a. Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction), which caused it to be translated into German in 1980. In 2017, Hank Davis used the story in his anthology If This Goes Wrong…

Hawkins explores several generations of a single family in “The Dwindling Sphere.” The first section, set in 1945, discusses how Frank Baxter accidentally created the Plastocene process while attempting to find a way to create atomic energy. He was partially successful in creating a reaction, but the energy he was seeking completely dissipated, leaving behind a product which would revolutionize manufacturing. Subsequent sections focus on his descendants who discover Baxter’s journals and add on to them as they deal with the long-term repercussions of his discovery.

Hawkins deals with a society in which the working class has been turned into a luxury class since only a small number of people are needed to supply the world with plastocene, and therefore everything it needs, although food production hasn’t (yet) been switched to plastocene. In this period, the new luxury class is discovering that work provides them with a raison d’etre. Several hundred years later, society has evolved more and the early Baxters have been all but forgotten until a distant relation finds their diary, which corrects many historical misconceptions. By that time, plastocene production is beginning to threaten the livability of Earth, leading to the final sections of the story in which the Baxters’ descendants are forced off Earth by the long-term success of plastocene.

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Birthday Reviews: Tanya Huff’s “Finding Marcus”

Birthday Reviews: Tanya Huff’s “Finding Marcus”

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Sirius
Sirius

Tanya Huff was born on September 26, 1957.

Huff has won the Aurora Award twice. Her first Aurora was in 1988 for her short story “And Who Is Joah?.” She won the second in 2013 for the novel The Silvered. Huff has also been nominated for several Gaylactic Spectrum Awards as well as the William L. Crawford – IAFA Fantasy Award, the Sapphire Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award.

“Finding Marcus” was written for the anthology Sirius: The Dog Star, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Alexander Potter in 2004. The story was reprinted in 2007 in Huff’s collection Finding Magic and again in 2013 in the collection He Said, Sidhe Said & Other Tales.

Reuben is a dog in in “Finding Marcus.” As the title implies, he is attempted to find his master, Marcus, from whom he has become separated. Their separation is not a normal one, for several reasons. Marcus had been working on a project to find Gates between dimensions and when he was eventually successful, he brought Reuben with him. Unfortunately,  Marcus learned that the Gates are only one way and they would have to find and pass through several Gates before returning to their own world.

In their passage through the Gates, Reuben managed to acquire the ability to understand human speech, and speak as well, although whether he can speak to Marcus is left ambiguous. The worlds they pass through are a mixture of hi-tech, low-tech, and mid-tech, with our own timeline apparently considered mid-tech. The two became separated when they appeared in a low-tech marketplace and Marcus was accused of being a demon. In trying to escape, Marcus and Reuben learned that in order for a Gate to deposit them in the same location, the two had to be touching, leading to Reuben’s quest.

As Reuben focuses his quest on finding each Gate to take him to the next world and eventually Marcus, which Reuben knows will be the eventual outcome, Huff explores the pitfalls of being a dog alone in the world. The danger posed by people, either well-meaning or not, the hunt for food, the avoidance of traffic, and the seeming ever-presence of cats. Although Reuben is happy to be searching alone, he winds up connecting with a crow, Dark Dawn With Thunder, who can also speak and wants to hear Reuben’s story. Even as Reuben tries to push Dawn away, the crow insists on helping him find the next Gate, offering him advice and warnings from her position in the sky and forging a bond with Reuben that he refuses to acknowledge, just as he refuses to accept Dawn’s pessimistic view of the ultimate success of his quest.

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Birthday Reviews: Hideyuki Kikuchi’s “Mountain People, Ocean People”

Birthday Reviews: Hideyuki Kikuchi’s “Mountain People, Ocean People”

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The Future is Japanese-small The Future is Japanese-back-small

Cover by Yuko Shimizu

Hideyuki Kikuchi was born on September 25, 1949.

Kikuchi published his first novel, Demon City Shinjuku in 1982 and his novel Black Guard was adapted into the film Wicked City in 1987. In addition to writing horror novels, Kikuchi has also published several manga. In addition to the series listed above, he also created Vampire Hunter D.

In 2012 Kikuchi’s short story “Sankaimin” appeared under the title “Mountain People, Ocean People,” in the 2012 anthology The Future is Japanese, edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.

Set in the far future, “Mountain People, Ocean People,” as the title suggests, shows a world in which humanity has divided into two groups, one living in the mountains, the other under the sea.  Kikuchi’s main focus is on the mountain dwellers, who have developed the ability to fly, with hunters among them looking out for wind spiders and sky sharks. Among those is third-generation hunter Kanaan who is trying to surpass the reputations of his ancestors, although his father ultimately disappeared under a cloud of suspicion that Kanaan knows is unwarranted.

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Birthday Reviews: John Kessel’s “The Franchise”

Birthday Reviews: John Kessel’s “The Franchise”

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Fields of Fantasies
Fields of Fantasies

John Kessel was born on September 24, 1950

Kessel won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1983 for “Another Orphan” and a second Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 2009 for “Pride and Prometheus,” both of which were also nominated for the Hugo Award. “Pride and Prometheus” also earned the Shirley Jackson Award. Kessel’s “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1992 and his “Stories for Men” won the James Tiptree Jr Award in 2003. He also won the Ignotus Award for a translation of “The Invisible Empire” in 2010. In 2006, Kessel was presented with the Phoenix Award for his Achievements by DeepSouthCon.

“The Franchise” was originally published in the August 1993 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, edted by Gardner Dozois, alongside Bruce McAllister’s baseball story “Southpaw” and Robert Frazier’s poem “Night Baseball.” Both Kessel and McAllister’s stories were alternate histories of baseball featuring Fidel Castro. “The Franchise” was reprinted in Nebula Awards 29, edited by Pamela Sargent and in Kessel’s collections The Pure Product and The Collected Kessel. The story was also included in W.P. Kinsella’s baseball anthology Baseball Fantastic in 2000. In 2014, Rick Wilber reunited “The Franchise” and “Southpaw,” which were both reprinted in his anthology Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural. “The Franchise” was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1994.

“The Franchise” is an alternate history in which George Herbert Walker Bush decides to parlay his college baseball experience into a baseball career. After floating around in the minors for several years without making a mark, he suddenly finds himself called up to play for the Washington Senators in the World Series when their first baseman is injured. Bush finds himself facing the ace pitcher for the New York Giants in several games, a phenom known as the Franchise named Fidel Castro.

The story is designed as a face-off between Bush and Castro, but it becomes clear very early that Bush is well out of his league and Castro is just playing with him. Castro’s ability to completely own Bush whenever he comes up to the plate, whether by striking him out or allowing him a moment of glory to reach base, is the Cuban ballplayer’s way of showing his contempt for Bush’s father, US Senator Prescott Bush. However, the struggle between George Bush and Castro is only the surface. The real struggle is between Prescott Bush and his son, a struggle which is just as lopsided as the one playing out on the baseball diamond.

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