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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Nancy Holder’s “Prayer of the Knight of the Sword”

Birthday Reviews: Nancy Holder’s “Prayer of the Knight of the Sword”

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Cover by Paul Youll
Cover by Paul Youll

Nancy Holder was born on August 29, 1953.

Holder has won the Bram Stoker Award five times. She won the Best Short Story award for “Lady Madonna,” “I Hear the Mermaids Singing,” and “Café Endless: Spring Rain.” She won for Best Novel for Dead in the Water and for Best Young-Adult Novel for The Screaming Season.

Her story “”Prayer of the Knight of the Sword” was published in the 1995 anthology Excalibur, edited by Edward E. Kramer, Richard Gilliam, and Martin H. Greenberg. The story has never been reprinted.

The story opens with Joseph of Arimathea climbing to the top of Glastonbury Tor, surrounded by four pagan spirits, although he has no idea of their presence. When Joseph dies during his climb, the spirits plant his staff on the tor and eventually use it to create Excalibur.

The sword is next seen in the possession of Geoffrey de Troyes, a young knight fighting in Jerusalem during the Crusades. While all around him the crusaders are raping, pillage, and killing the Muslims and Jews who live in the city, Geoffrey cannot participate, only seeing the cruelty of their actions and how they seem to fly in the face of Christian virtue. When a young Muslim woman winds up in his path, he shows her mercy and tries to help her, realizing that at the same time he’s rescuing her he needs to rescue himself. His mercy caught the attention of Joseph’s spirits, who appear to him and tell him to return to England with the sword, where he will wield it until one who was destined to appear. In the process, Geoffrey brought Igraine to Glastonbury and pushed the sword into the stone.

While at first the timeline of the story doesn’t seem to make sense, with Geoffrey de Troyes fighting in the crusades, when the tradition of Merlin living his life backwards is taken into account, along with the idea that time may be malleable, the strangeness of the order of events actually becomes something of a strength for the story.

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Birthday Reviews: Jack Vance’s “Liane the Wayfarer”

Birthday Reviews: Jack Vance’s “Liane the Wayfarer”

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Cover by Paul Callé
Cover by Paul Callé

Jack Vance was born on August 28, 1916 and died on May 23, 2013.

Jack Vance won his first Hugo Award in 1963 for the novella “The Dragon Masters.” He won his second in 1967 for the novelette “The Last Castle,” which also earned him a Nebula Award. In 2010 he won a Hugo for Best Related Work for his autobiography This Is Me, Jack Vance (Or, More Properly, This is “I”). His novel Lyonesse: Maduoc won the 1990 World Fantasy Award. In 1975 his novelette “The Seventeen Virgins” won the Jupiter Award and in 1977, a translation of The Dragon Masters won the Seiun Award. He also won the Emperor Norton Award in 2005 for Lurulu. Vane received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984 and was the Guest of Honor at MagiCon, the 50th Worldcon, in Orlando, Florida in 1992. In 1997 he was named a Grand Master by the SFWA and received the Forry Award from LASFS. The next year he received a Lifetime Achievement Prix Utopia. Vance was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2001.

“Liane the Wayfarer” was first published as “The Loom of Darkness” in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond, edited by Damon Knight. The same year it appeared in a small press run of Vance’s collection The Dying Earth. In 1976 Lin Carter selected the story for his anthology Realms of Wizardry. Vance included it in his 1979 collection Green Magic. It was reprinted in A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Terry Carr (also known as Masters of Fantasy). Tom Shippey used the story in The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories. Silverberg used it in The Fantasy Hall of Fame and Vance included it in Tales of the Dying Earth. When Martin H. Greenberg invited authors to select a work they enjoyed reading for his anthology My Favorite Fantasy Story, George R.R. Martin selected “Liane the Wayfarer.” It showed up again in the Vance collection Mazirian the Magician. Eric Flint, David Drake, and Jim Baen used it in their anthology The World Turned Upside Down. The story appeared up again in The Jack Vance Treasury and was read on the Drabblecast #282. Paula Guran used it in her 2017 anthology Swords Against Darkness. The story has been translated into German three times, Italian and Dutch twice each, and once into Esperanto.

The title character in “Liane the Wayfarer” is a sociopath, willing to kill anyone on a whim or the vaguest belief that they might do him harm at some point in the future. He revels in the good fortune of finding a magical diadem while burying his latest victim and learns that the crown will render him invisible. When he finds out that there is a beautiful witch living in a nearby clearing, he goes to find her with the intent of making her his true love.

Liane’ misogyny is struck down, however, by the witch, Lith, who refuses to even consider Liane’s protestations of love or ownership of her affections. She informs him that unless he can perform a service for her, she would not be his. Not seeing this trap, Liane agrees to retrieve a portion of tapestry for her from Chun the Unavoidable.

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Birthday Reviews: Edward Bryant’s “Saurus Wrecks”

Birthday Reviews: Edward Bryant’s “Saurus Wrecks”

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Cover by Peter Stallard
Cover by Peter Stallard

Edward Bryant was born on August 27, 1945 and died on February 10, 2017.

Bryant won back to back Nebulas for Best Short Story in 1979 and 1980 for “Stone” and “giANTS,” both of which were also nominated for the Hugo Award. His work was also nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award. In 1997, the International Horror Guild named Bryant a Living Legend. Bryant was the Toastmaster for Denvention II, the 1981 Worldcon and also emceed the masquerade at Denvention III. He also served as Toastmaster for World Fantasy Con, ArmadilloCon, TusCon, and Death Equinox. He collaborated with Harlan Ellison, James Sutherland, Jody Harper, Trey R. Barker, Connie Willis, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Dan Simmons.

“‘Saurus Wrecks” is a testament to the power of dreams, as well as the idea of taking a bad situation and turning it to the general benefit of the community. The town of Goshen, Wyoming was in for a surprise when a coal plant was built in nearby Stubbleford. The winds meant that the enormous plume of steam the plant generated was falling on Goshen, changing the town’s climate. The only person who saw this as beneficial was Rexford Allyn Pugnell, the town drunk.

Pugnell pointed out to the town council that the new climate was perfect for growing ferns and recommended that the city ban the growth of flowering plants to turn it into a fern Mecca. Of course, being the town drunk and suggesting such a thing gained him absolutely no traction. Rather than give up on his idea, Pugnell approached one of the school’s teachers, Miss Devereaux with the simple request that he be allowed to use some extra chicken wire she had and build something on the side lot of her house. Without asking questions, she agreed and Pugnell set about building an enormous metal Tyrannosaurus rex.

Although the town attacked the sculpture, especially when he began to incorporate manure into it, its eventual sprouting of ferns, supporting Pugnell’s initial suggestion, causes a make-over to the economically depressed town. Although Bryant doesn’t go into detail about the specifics of how the town builds on Pugnell’s legacy, or that of Devereaux, who fights to allow him to do what he needs to, it is clear that Pugnell has won his argument and found a way to take the steam from the coal plant and turn it to the town’s benefit.

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Birthday Reviews: Nick Pollotta’s “The Collar”

Birthday Reviews: Nick Pollotta’s “The Collar”

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Cover by David Monette
Cover by David Monette

Nick Pollotta was born on August 26, 1954 and died on April 13, 2013.

Although Pollotta published the novel Illegal Aliens with Phil Foglio and his own Bureau 13 novels, the vast majority of Pollotta’s work appeared using the house names James Axler and Don Pendleton for Gold Eagle Books’s line of adventure novels. He also wrote the Satellite Night News series using the pen name Jack Hopkins. He also wrote That Darn Squid God in collaboration with James Clay.

Pollotta published “The Collar” in the Summer 2002 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, edited by Edward J. McFadden. Fantastic was a continuation of the magazine Pirate Writings, which had changed its name in 2000. The story has not been reprinted.

“The Collar” is the story of a professional hitman who has been hired to kill an old man. Although he generally doesn’t care who he kills as long as he gets paid, when he sees that the old man, who lives alone, has an enormous arsenal of weapons as well as religious artifacts, his curiosity is piqued. An interview/interrogation of the bagman sent to pay him by his unseen employer makes him even more suspicious and he realizes that he was hired by a vampire to kill a vampire hunter.

Pollotta is known for his humorous science fiction stories, and when his hit man goes to confront the vampire only to realize that the supernatural creature is not a vampire, but a full-fledged demon, Pollotta could have had plenty of room for humor. However, he chose to take a more serious tack with the story, following the competent hitman’s confrontation with the demon and the aftermath.

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Birthday Reviews: Chris Roberson’s “Death on the Crosstime Express”

Birthday Reviews: Chris Roberson’s “Death on the Crosstime Express”

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Cover by Bob Eggleton
Cover by Bob Eggleton

Chris Roberson was born on August 25, 1970.

Roberson has won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his short story “O One” and his novel The Dragon’s Nine Sons and has been nominated for it three additional times. He was a two-time nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a four time nominee for the World Fantasy Award.

Roberson’s comic series iZombie has been turned into a television series which will start its fifth season next year. He has also written the Serenity comic series No Power in the Verse and the Fables series Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love. Along with his wife, Roberson runs MonkeyBrain Books.

Roberson published “Death on the Crosstime Express” in Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders in 2008. The story is one of many works by Roberson that take place in his Myriad universes, but it has not been reprinted.

“Death on the Crosstime Express” is a multiple reality story taking place on an airship. At its core, it is a murder mystery in which the ship’s navigator, who is essential for guiding the craft through the different levels of reality, is brutally murdered. The murder plot and solution, however, take a backseat to Roberson setting up the world for the purposes of the story.

The beginning introduces an enormous cast of characters, each one from a different universe, which allows Roberson to also talk about how those worlds differ from our own and to show the vastness of the realms through which the Crosstime Express can travel. He also explains a little of the way the Myriad works as well as the functioning of the airship. There are enough characters introduced at this point that they are difficult to keep straight, especially since so few are given names, but they provide a large number of potential suspects once the navigator is murdered.

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Birthday Reviews: James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine”

Birthday Reviews: James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine”

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Cover by Mark Zug
Cover by Mark Zug

Alice B. Sheldon was born on August 24, 1915 and died on May 19, 1987.  She published science fiction under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. and when speculation began that Tiptree might be a woman, Robert Silverberg famously stated that such a theory was absurd, since he found “something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” Shortly after Sheldon’s mother’s death, the truth came out about her identity, which she had hidden in part because of her position in academia. Sheldon also used the pen names Alice Hastings Bradley, Major Alice Davey, Alli B. Sheldon, and Raccona Sheldon, the last being her most famous pseudonym aside from Tiptree.

Tiptree won the Nebula Award in 1974 for the short story “Love Is the Plan, the Plan is Death” and won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” the same year.  Both stories were nominated for both awards. In 1977, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” won both awards in the Novella category as well as the Jupiter Award. In 1978, “The Screwfly Solution” won the Nebula for Best Novelette, but lost the Hugo Award. Her 1987 collection The Tales of the Quintana Roo earned Tiptree a World Fantasy Award. Tiptree has won the Seiun Award four times, for “The Only Neat Thing You Do,” “Out of the Everywhere,” Brightness Falls from the Air, and “Backward, Turn Backward.” She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012. In 1991, Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler created the James Tiptree Jr. Award for speculative fiction that explores or expands the understanding of gender.

Although initially written in the 1950s, well before Tiptree began writing for publication, “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine” wasn’t published until 1998, when Kim Mohan purchased it to appear in the Fall issue of Amazing Stories, although it had previously sold in 1971 to a project that never saw print.  The story was reprinted with the variant title “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine, or, I Screwed 15,924 Back Issues of Astounding for the F.B.I.” in Meet Me at Infinity. The story was also translated for the German James Tiptree collection Doktor Ain.

Despite the title of “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine, or, I Screwed 15,924 Back Issues of Astounding for the F.B.I.,” the story is not specifically a time travel story, but rather a send up of bad writing in science fiction, made more effective, given its 1950s writing date, by the fact that numerous works of the type it is skewering were still being published in 1998 when the story eventually saw print.  The story within a story tells of spaceship Captain Herring, who, believing he was alone on his ship, finds a strange stowaway in a sequence which is reminiscent of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” which was published shortly before Tiptree wrote this story.

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Birthday Review’s: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Nine Alternate Alternate Histories”

Birthday Review’s: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Nine Alternate Alternate Histories”

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Other Earths
Other Earths

Benjamin Rosenbaum was born on August 23, 1969.

Rosenbaum has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award three times each and the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and British SF Association Award once each. Rosenabum’s short stories have been collected in Other Cities and The Ant King and Other Stories. He has written collaborations with Paul Melko, David Ackert, and Cory Doctorow.

Benjamin Rosenbaum published “Nine Alternate Alternate Histories” in the anthology Other Earths, edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake in 2009. The piece has not been reprinted.

Rosenbaum’s “Nine Alternate Alternate Histories” really is neither an alternate history or even a story. Rather it takes a look at the idea that there might be a multiverse in which history can continuously branch off to form different alternatives and seeks to categorize the types of branch points which might be possible.

The story is a conjectural on the different ways people view history and on the decision making process. Rosenbaum looks at convergence, divergence, and provisional history along with his view of different types of choice. While the tale doesn’t work well from a narrative point of view, it does provide a background for the sorts of alternate history stories which are published (and were published earlier in the particular anthology).

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Birthday Reviews: Ray Bradbury’s “Downwind from Gettysburg”

Birthday Reviews: Ray Bradbury’s “Downwind from Gettysburg”

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Cover by Peter Bramley
Cover by Peter Bramley

Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 and died on June 5, 2012.

Bradbury never received the Hugo Award, although he received four Retro Hugo Awards for his novel Fahrenheit 451, his fanzine Futuria Fantasia, and twice for Best Fan Writer. He was nominated for a single Hugo. He was never nominated for a Nebula Award. He won the Bram Stoker Award for his collection One More for the Road. Fahrenheit 451 also won a Prometheus Award and a Geffen Award. Bradbury won three Seiun Awards for Best Foreign Short Story. He won the coveted Balrog Award for Poetry in 1979. In 1966, he was awarded a Forry Award by LASFS. He received a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1977 and was named a Grand Master of Fantasy with a Gandalf Award in 1980, the final year the award was in existence. Bradbury was the Guest of Honor at ConFederation, the 44th Worldcon, held in Atlanta in 1986. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bram Stoker Awards in 1989, the same year he was named a Grand Master by SFWA. World Horror Con named him a Grandmaster in 2001 and the Rhysling Awards did so in 2008.  He was given an Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.  Bradbury was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2012.

“Downwind from Gettysburg” was originally published in Bradbury’s collection I Sing the Body Electric in 1969 and was reprinted in 2003 in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. When the latter was reprinted in two volumes, the story appeared in Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Although it hasn’t often been reprinted in English, the story has been translated, usually as part of I Sing the Body Electric, into French, Portuguese, German, and Italian.

In 1964, Walt Disney created an animatronic version of Abraham Lincoln to appear at the Illinois Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. The following year the exhibit moved to Disneyland, where the Lincoln show continued to run, on and off through the present, although another version, featuring versions of all the Presidents, runs at the Magic Kingdom in Florida. In 1969 Ray Bradbury published “Downwind from Gettysburg,” which featured a similar animatronic version of Abraham Lincoln.

Bradbury’s version, however, sits in a replica of Ford’s Theatre and the story opens with someone coming into the theatre and shooting the animatronic figure in the head. Although Bayes, the proprietor of the exhibit, knows that he must call the designer, Phipps, to have the robot fixed, he doesn’t want to make the call, instead tracking down the “assassin” who shot the robot. The man, who is unemployed and whose life seems to be a shambles, explains that his name is Norman Llewellyn Booth. Booth has the feeling that fate has conspired to make him recreate the heinous crime committed by his namesake, although there is no direct connection between the two Booths. Instead, Booth figured the nature of his crime would bring him a notoriety he was otherwise lacking.

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Birthday Reviews: Miriam Allen deFord’s “Pres Conference”

Birthday Reviews: Miriam Allen deFord’s “Pres Conference”

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Cover by Richard Powers
Cover by Richard Powers

Miriam Allen deFord was born on August 21, 1888 and died on February 22, 1975.

Although deFord had some fiction published as early 1928, she really turned to writing science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s and 60s. Her non-SF book The Overbury Affair earned her an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book and she helped develop and sign the Humanist Manifesto in 1973. Much of her science fiction appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning under the editorship of Anthony Boucher.

DeFord’s “Press Conference” appeared in the sixth and final volume of Frederik Pohl’s Star Science Fiction anthology series in 1959. The story has not been reprinted since.

“Press Conference” is essentially a transcription of the press conference given upon the occasion of the return of the first human to travel outside the galaxy. It is told, mostly, in the voices of Mr. Rasmussen, the press secretary for the United Nations whose job is to introduce her and make sure she givens approved questions, and Miss X, or Dor-je Lhor-kang, the woman who made the journey.

The press conference opens up by listing the specifications used to find someone to go into space. A woman is the preferred candidate, and she should be acclimatized to higher elevations, so someone from Peru or Chile. She should have a Ph.D. in physics and, because there is limited space in the spacecraft, she should be a dwarf. This is all by way of introduction of deFord’s somewhat atypical protagonist.

The press conference goes well as long as Lhor-kang is speaking. She knows the limitations Rasmussen has placed on her and has no real desire to break away from him. As soon as she opens the floor to questions, however, the press conference goes off the rails as the reporters want to ask questions with real substance. Although Rasmussen attempts to retain control over her, Lhor-kang eventually lets slip the truth about the aliens that she has seen and their desires with regard to the Earth. When Lhor-kang exhibits admiration for the aliens’ goals, she is branded by some of the reporters as a traitor or brainwashed.

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Birthday Reviews: Greg Bear’s “Schrödinger’s Plague”

Birthday Reviews: Greg Bear’s “Schrödinger’s Plague”

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Cover by Vincent di Fate
Cover by Vincent di Fate

Greg Bear, considered one of the “Killer B’s” with Gregory Benford and David Brin, was born on August 20, 1951 and is married to Astrid, daughter of Poul and Karen Anderson.

Bear won the Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette “Blood Music” and his short story “Tangents.” He also won the Nebula Award for the novella “Hardfought” and the novels Moving Mars and Darwin’s Radio. Moving Mars also won the Ignotus Award and Darwin’s Radio earned him his second Endeavour Award, the first was for Dinosaur Summer. He won the Prix Apollo for Blood Music and the Prix Ozone for /Slant. He won the Seiun Award for his story “Tangents” and “Heads.” In 2006, he received the Robert A. Heinlein Award and he was the Worldcon Guest of Honor for Millennium Philcon in Philadelphia in 2001.

“Schrödinger’s Plague” first appeared in the March 29, 1982 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, edited by Stanley Schmidt. Bear included it in his short story collected Tangents in 1989 and in 1992, the story was translated into Dutch and into German in 1997. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery included the story in The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction: 1960-1990. Bear against included it in a collection with The Collected Stories of Greg Bear and when that volume was divided into three smaller books, it was invluded in Just Over the Horizon: The Collected Stories of Greg Bear Volume I.

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