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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Gary Gygax’s “At Midnight Blackcat Comes”

Birthday Reviews: Gary Gygax’s “At Midnight Blackcat Comes”

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Cover by Dennis Kauth
Cover by Dennis Kauth

Gary Gygax was born Ernest Gary Gygax on July 28, 1938. He died on March 4, 2008. Although Gygax tried his hand writing fiction, he was best known as one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons.

Gygax was inducted into the Origins Award Hall of Fame in 1980. In addition to Dungeons and Dragons (and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons) and various modules and accessories, Gygax also had a hand in creating the role playing games Boot Hill, Cyborg Commando, Dangerous Journeys, and Lejendary Adventure.

Gygax wrote “At Moonset Blackcat Comes” as an introduction to the character Gord the Rogue, about whom he had already written the novel Saga of the Old City, which would be published later. The story appeared first in the 100th issue of Dragon, edited by Kim Mohan. Accompanying the story were the rules to the game Dragonchess, described in the story. Although Gygax published a series of five Gord the Rogue novels, plus the short story collection Night Arrant, “At Moonset Blackcat Comes” was not included in the collection and has not been reprinted elsewhere.

The story introduces the main character and his barbarian companion while also trying to give the reader a feel for the way the City of Greyhawk, alluded to in many of Gygax’s AD&D articles and modules, is set up. Rather than exploring the city, however, Gygax quickly separates Gord from his companion and the city, setting the action, such as it is, in a sporting house, with Chert the barbarian going off to find female companionship while Gord settles in with Rexfelis to learn to play a chess alternative.

While Gygax is clearly trying to make Gord a likable character who is extremely competent and sure of himself, he comes across as arrogant, placing his own amusement and desires above those, like Chert, with whom he has surrounded himself. Although Gord is on guard against being taken in the game of Dragonchess, it is clear that Rexfelis had been playing Gord throughout the evening with the eventual end of using Gord to rob Rigello the arch-mage, a task Gord readily accepts.

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Birthday Reviews: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s “The Man for the Job”

Birthday Reviews: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s “The Man for the Job”

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Cover by Michael Whelan
Cover by Michael Whelan

Lawrence Watt-Evans was born on July 26, 1954.

Watt-Evans’s short story “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” was nominated for the Nebula and Hugo Awards in 1988 and won the Hugo Award. Watt-Evans was nominated for a second Hugo Award for best semi-prozine, as the co-editor, along with William Sanders, of Helix SF in 2008. Watt-Evans has published under the names Nathan Archer and Walter Vance Awsten. He has collaborated with Brenda Clough, Kurt Busiek, Christina Briley, Julie Evans, Esther Friesner, and Carl Parlagreco, and Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

“The Man for the Job” was published in the December 2000 issue of Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy. The story has not been reprinted has also appeared in The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy MegaPack.

Watt-Evans takes on several fantasy standard tropes in “The Man for the Job.” The story opens with five siblings meeting with a wizard to get help in ridding themselves of an evil dragon. The group includes four brothers and their sister, who is insistent that they include her since her livelihood is at stake as well as theirs. The wizard, Gallopius, talks about magic items with them, noting that in days of yore, wizards hid magic items in strange, exotic, and stupid places where the wizards wouldn’t be able to retrieve them when needed. While Gallopius can lay hands on all his own enchanted items, they will need to complete a quest to find the Helmet of Balanced Justice to defeat the dragon.

The quest also subverts the typical quest story. The helmet is located relatively near to Gallopius’s home, and was hidden three hundred years earlier, protected by three guardians. Although Gallipius is able to tell them the nature of the guardians, they are not ready for the state they are in. Watt-Evans takes the idea of a centuries old protection to its logical conclusion, as all three guardians have failed to withstand the ravages of time and they manage to retrieve the helmet with some ease.

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Birthday Reviews: Brian M. Stableford’s “The Growth of the House of Usher”

Birthday Reviews: Brian M. Stableford’s “The Growth of the House of Usher”

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Cover by Pete Lyon
Cover by Pete Lyon

Brian M. Stableford was born on July 25, 1948.

Stableford received the British SF Association Award for his short story “The House of Mourning.” His anthology Tales of the Wandering Jew won the Readercon Award for Best Anthology and his novel The Empire of Fear won the Lord Ruthven Award. He has also won several scholarship awards, including the Eaton Award for his book Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890-1950, the Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award from the Science Fiction Research Associastion, the IAFA Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the SF&F Translation Award. Stableford has published under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Francis Amery and Brian Craig.

“The Growth of the House of Usher,” the first of Stableford’s loosely connected tales of the Biotech Revolution, first appeared in the Summer 1988 issue of Interzone, issue #24, edited by Simon Ounsley and David Pringle. Gardner Dozois recognized it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection the following year. It was also reprinted in David Memmott’s fanzine Ice River, issue 4 in June of 1989. John Clute, Pringle, and Ounsley selected the story for Interzone: The 4th Anthology. Stableford included it in two of his collections of stories about the Biotech Revolution with the similar titles Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution and Sexual Chemistry and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution.

Stableford acknowledges early in the story that the title of “The Growth of the House of Usher” is a call back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In Stableford’s story, set in the 23rd century, Rowland Usher has secluded himself away from his fellow man, living in a massive house of his own design in the delta of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. He has summed an own college friend to see the house and to let him know that Usher has chosen his friend to be his executor, for Usher suffers, as his father and sister suffered before him, from a deadly disease.

Despite being a science fiction story, focusing on using biotech to create buildings and improving biotech for even greater things, the story clearly belongs to the Gothic tradition, although while a lot of Gothic fiction is wary of technology (see Frankenstein), Stableford’s story embraces the possibilities. This is most obvious in the description of the massive home Usher has built, made of replicating biomatter which will continue to grow and improve long after he, and his friend, are dead. At the same time, even if technology and science can’t save Usher’s life, he still views it favorably, seeing the sacrifice of his own life to the disease as a means of helping science learn what ravaged his family in the hopes of preventing it in the future should it reappear.

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Birthday Reviews: Barry N. Malzberg’s “Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life”

Birthday Reviews: Barry N. Malzberg’s “Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life”

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Cover by Ron Walotsky
Cover by Ron Walotsky

Barry N. Malzberg was born on July 24, 1939.

Malzberg received the inaugural John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Beyond Apollo. His novel Herovit’s War was nominated for the Jupiter Award and he’s had nominations for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the British SF Association Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award five times and the Nebula Award six times.

“Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life” was originally published by Edward L. Ferman in the July 1986 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Although it wasn’t reprinted in English until appearing in The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg in 2013, it was published in French, Italian, and German translations within seven months of its original publication.

It would appear that Cecil’s big mistake in “Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life” was robbing someone who not only knew who he was, but also knew his parents. As his victim holds back money, calls him out, and points out how disappointed Cecil’s parents will be to hear about his poor life choices, Cecil decides that the best way out of the situation is to shoot his victim in the head. Malzberg is not telling Cecil’s story, however, he is telling the story of the intended robbery victim.

Cecil’s victim is brought back to life, or possibly awoken from a virtual reality scenario, Malzberg is never really clear on the mechanism. What is clear is that the victim is supposed to react to the robbery in a specific way and is not doing what he is supposed to, notably, giving Cecil the money and following his instructions in order to live another day. His unnamed handlers give him multiple opportunities to correct the situation and he keeps finding himself facing an armed Cecil with a gun, eventually deciding that he can’t live as a complacent victim in the world his handlers are trying to shoe-horn him into.

Malzberg’s story takes on darker tones when the reader considers who the victim’s handlers are and what their motives could be. They could simply be preparing people to live and survive in a more violent world, accepting what they can’t change in order to live another day. On the other hand, they could be conditioning people to being victims, making it easier on the criminal and violent classes to prey on the innocents.

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Birthday Reviews: C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Remorseful”

Birthday Reviews: C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Remorseful”

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Cover by Richard Powers
Cover by Richard Powers

C.M. (Cyril M.) Kornbluth was born on July 23, 1923 and died on March 21, 1958.

Kornbluth died relatively young, but his work and memory have been kept alive. His short story “The Meeting,” finished by his frequent collaborator Frederik Pohl, earned them a Hugo Award in 1973 and he was nominated for four solo Hugo Awards prior to his death. His novelette “The Little Black Bag” won a Retro Hugo in 2001. In 1986, his novel The Syndic was inducted into the Prometheus Award Hall of Fame. His 1951 short story “The Marching Morons” is still considered a touchstone of science fiction

Frederik Pohl bought “The Remorseful” for Star Science Fiction No. 2, which was published in December 1953. The story also appeared in New Worlds Science Fiction #29 in November 1954. The story was included in Kornbluth’s posthumous collection The Marching Morons and Other Famous Science Fiction Stories. In 1976, it was translated into German for publication in Titan 1, edited by Pohl and Wolfgang Jeschke. The story showed up again in The Best of C.M. Kornbluth, and Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg included it in 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories. It was finally included in the NESFA Press collection His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by Timothy Szczesuil.

Kornbluth relates two stories in “The Remorseful.” The first tells of a man who walks across a barren Earth after an apocalypse has depopulated the planet. The other tells about an alien invasion of the solar system, focusing less on their activities and more on their alien nature as a sort of hive organism which can drop portions of itself off to explore/invade the outer planets and learn about the outposts mankind has set up.

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Birthday Reviews: Dean McLaughlin’s “The Permanent Implosion”

Birthday Reviews: Dean McLaughlin’s “The Permanent Implosion”

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Cover by John Schoenherr
Cover by John Schoenherr

Dean McLaughlin was born on July 22, 1931.

McLaughlin’s career began in 1951 and his most recent story, “Tenbrook of Mars,” appeared in Analog in 2008 and won the next year’s Analog Readers Poll. His 1968 novella “Hawk Among the Sparrows” was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Award, losing to Robert Silverberg’s “Nightwings” and Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonrider,” respectively.

“The Permanent Implosion” originally appeared in the February 1964 issue of Analog Science Fact & Science Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. It was reprinted in 1966 in the anthology Analog 4 and was the cover story of the 1970 anthology The Permanent Explosion: Science Fiction Edited by John W. Campbell. McLaughlin included the story in his only collection, Hawk Among the Sparrows: Three Science Fiction Novellas, published in 1976. Stanley Schmidt chose the story for Analog: The Best of Science Fiction in 1985.

“The Permanent Implosion” is a puzzle story in which Mick Candido must try to resolve a problem that has been dropped in his lap. Candido runs a successful well capping company, called in to extinguish oil fires and make sure the wells are covered. He is drawn into a different sort of situation when the government calls upon him for help in capping a different sort of well, one for which Candido’s team doesn’t have any experience, but neither does anyone else.

Outside of Denver, a hole had opened between our world and the vacuum of space. The hole is sucking our atmosphere in an attempt to equalize the pressure on both sides; the eventual result will be an Earth with an atmosphere so tenuous that life is impossible. Candido and his team, with the government’s guidance; get to work.

The story is an exploration of patience and failure. The initial solution for which Candido’s team was called in fails to stop the leak, but he remains with the team, helping them implement other potential solutions, all of which fail. As the team becomes more and more despondent of ever finding a solution, Candido begins to look at the problem from a different point of view, eventually coming up with a solution which will also serve to make his fortune.

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Birthday Reviews: Valerie J. Freireich’s “Vashti and God”

Birthday Reviews: Valerie J. Freireich’s “Vashti and God”

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Cover by Mel Odom
Cover by Mel Odom

Valerie J. Freireich was born on July 21, 1952.

Freireich has written four novels in her Harmony of Worlds series, beginning with the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award-nominated Becoming Human. Her short story “Sensations of the Mind” was a quarterly winner of the Writers of the Future Award in 1991.

She wrote “Vashti and God” for Susan Shwartz and Martin H. Greenberg for the anthology Sisters in Fantasy 2. Published in 1996, the story has never been reprinted.

In the Biblical book of Esther, Queen Vashti only appears in seven verses of the first chapter and is mentioned in two verses of the second chapter. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, her character is something of a tabula rasa. Vashti’s refusal to appear before King Ahasuerus has led to her being adopted by some as a feminist icon. In “Vashti and God,” Valerie J. Freireich fleshes out Vashti’s story and motivations in support of a more feminist interpretation.

The story is told mostly in flashback after Vashti has been removed as the queen and made a maid in the Great King’s household, where Esther now sits in her place. The flashbacks detail the seven days of feasting that lead up to Vashti’s demotion. During that time, as Vashti realizes more and more that the woman are segregated and unimportant to their husbands, she also begins to hear a voice spurring her to take action and she demands that her husband invite the women to join their husbands on the last day of the feast. When he commands her attendance, and only her attendance, she refuses to come, leading to her punishment and replacement.

However, the voice, which she attributed to the Persian god Ahuramazda, wasn’t done with her and begins to tell her to support Esther’s own dealings with the Great King. Although Vashti complies with the god’s request, she also comes to realize that the commands weren’t coming from Ahuramazda, nor were they for the benefit of women, Vashti, or the Great King, but rather they were the commands of Esther’s god and all she could do was warn her ex-husband that he should not try to interfere with Esther’s god’s plans if he wanted to thrive.

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Birthday Reviews: Martha Soukup’s “Sweet Bells Jangled”

Birthday Reviews: Martha Soukup’s “Sweet Bells Jangled”

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Cover by George H. Krauter
Cover by George H. Krauter

Martha Soukup was born on July 20, 1959.

Martha Soukup received the Nebula Award in 1995 for her short story “A Defense of the Social Contracts.” She had been nominated for the Nebula Award four previous times. Soukup has also been nominated for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, The James Tiptree Memorial Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In 1988, she was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

“Sweet Bells Jangled” was published in the September 1995 issue of Science Fiction Age, edited by Scott Edelman. It has never been reprinted.

One of the most famous science fiction novels of all time is built around the concept of an earworm. In Martha Soukup’s “Sweet Bells Jangled,” earworms are paired with the concept of memes (which have evolved in meaning considerably since the story was published) in Laurie’s mind after a shoot-the-breeze conversation with her friend Chuck, who suggests without evidence that the unintentional ability to remember song lyrics could eventually fill up a person’s memory.

Although Chuck is making a joke, Laurie took the idea to heart and throughout the story, filled with random lines of song lyrics she hears each day, Laurie’s ability to hear anything other than the music or, indeed, to function on any level, becomes stunted. Because she isn’t able to articulate what is happening to her, and Chuck shrugs it off as part of a harmless joke, nobody is able to help her when the eventual shutdown of her brain occurs.

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Birthday Reviews: Kelly Link’s “The Constable of Abal”

Birthday Reviews: Kelly Link’s “The Constable of Abal”

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Cover by Charles Vess
Cover by Charles Vess

Kelly Link was born on July 19, 1969.

Link won the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award for the story “Travels with the Snow Queen” in 1998. She won her first World Fantasy Award in 1999 for “The Specialist’s Hat” and received a Special Award for her work, with Gavin J. Grant, on Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House in 2009. Link and Grant also won a World Fantasy Award for the anthology Monstrous Affections in 2015. Link won a Nebula Award for Novelette for “Louise’s Ghost” in 2002 and in 2006 won two Nebulas, for the novella “Magic for Beginners” and the novelette “The Faery Handbag,” the latter of which had won the Hugo Award the year before. In 2005, she, along with Ellen Datlow and Grant, won the Bram Stoker Award of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection in the first year she and Grant took over editorial duties from Terri Windling. “Magic for Beginners” was also the recipient of the British SF Association Award. Link received the Shirley Jackson Award for “The Summer People” in 2012 and her story “The Game of Smash and Recovery” received the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2016.

“The Constable of Abal” was first published in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales in 2007. Jonathan Strahan picked the story for inclusion in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two and Link selected it for her story collection Pretty Monsters. In 2013, the story was reprinted in the July issue of Apex Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas.

Ozma’s mother, Zilla, is a con woman, a blackmailer, and someone who can see and bind ghosts, abilities which Ozma is learning from her. They lead a comfortable life in the city of Abal until Zilla kills a constable and they have to flee, although Ozma brings the constable’s ghost with her as they make their way home.

Although Zilla claims they are returning to a home Ozma can’t quite remember, she brings her daughter to the village of Brid instead, a lazy backwater filled with churches. Zilla takes a job as a cook to Lady Frelix and has Ozma masquerade as a boy. While in Brid, a town Ozma quickly learns to hate, her mother not only becomes more distant, but also begins to develop a completely different personality, hiding who she had been in Abal, much to Ozma’s consternation. Given their new situation, Ozma’s only companion is the ghost of constable she has bound to her.

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Birthday Reviews: Paul Cornell’s “Michael Laurits Is: Drowning”

Birthday Reviews: Paul Cornell’s “Michael Laurits Is: Drowning”

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Cover by Donato Giancola
Cover by Donato Giancola

Paul Cornell was born on July 18, 1967.

Cornell’s short story “The Copenhagen Interpretation” was nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and won the British SF Association Award. His novella Witches of Lychford was also nominated for the British SF Association Award as well as the British Fantasy Award. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award nine times for Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form, Graphic Stories, Novelettes, and Fancasts, winning for both of his Fancast nominations as part of the SF Squeecast, with Lynne M. Thomas, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Bear, and Catherynne M. Valente. He won the 2007 Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for his work on the series Doctor Who.

“Michael Laurits Is: Drowning” was originally published in Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Jonathan Strahan. In 2015, Cornell included the story in his collection A Better Way to Die: The Collected Short Stories.

When Michael Laurits’s friends are notified that the Nobel laureate is drowning via Lief, they mostly exhibit concern and shock, but other friends decide to try to do something about it. Laurits drowned when his research vessel in Japan’s Inland Sea came under attack as a casualty between Ground State Sanity and Obvious Caution Sanity, two rival atheist groups operating in Japan. Their dispute hinged on whether or not atheists should believe in a God who offered incontrovertible proof of existence.

Lief is a next generation of social media, however, and one of Laurits’s friends, David Savident, came up with the solution of having the drowning Laurits transfer his sensory processes into Lief’s computer array. The result is a virtual immortality for Laurits, living in the social media engine through which he previously had been connected to so much of the world. In his new form, Laurits is easily able to pass a Turing test and his wife vouches for his authenticity as a person.

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