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Author: Steven H Silver

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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Birthday Reviews: Cory Doctorow’s “Chicken Little”

Birthday Reviews: Cory Doctorow’s “Chicken Little”

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Cover by Pablo Defendini
Cover by Pablo Defendini

Cory Doctorow was born on July 17, 1971.

Doctorow won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. He has won the Prometheus Award three times, for his novels Little Bother, Pirate Cinema, and Homeland. Little Brother also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Golden Duck Award, the Emperor Norton Award, and the Sunburst Award. Doctorow had previously won the Sunburst Award for his collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. He received the Copper Cylinder Award for the novel Homeland. His story “The Man Who Sold the Moon” received the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2015. Doctorow is also one of the editors of the website Boing Boing.

Doctorow originally self-published “Chicken Little” in his collection With a Little Help through CorDoc-Co, Ltd., the company’s only project, in 2009. The next year it was included in Gateways, a Festschrift anthology celebrating the life and work of Frederik Pohl, edited by Pohl’s wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull. On April 6, 2011, the story appeared on Tor.com, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Liz Gorinsky. Gardner Dozois included the story in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eight Annual Collection. Nielsen Hayden and David G. Hartwell chose the story for their anthology Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, published in 2013.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from and you me.” Cory Doctorow takes this statement to the extreme in “Chicken Little.” Leon works for an ad company whose sole purpose it to figure out what product can be sold to one of the super-rich quadrillionnaires who live in vats, having shuffled off their human bodies, but not their mortal coils.

When it becomes clear to Leon that he issn’t doing anything useful at the company, he began delving into what everyone else at the agency is working on, trying to build up a complete picture and unable to come up with any leads. This approach, however, brings him to the attention of Ria, a representative for Buhle, one of the super-rich. Ria gives Leon insight into the levels of mechanization the super-rich employ.

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Birthday Reviews: Esther M. Friesner’s “Miranda’s Muse”

Birthday Reviews: Esther M. Friesner’s “Miranda’s Muse”

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Treachery and Treason
Treachery and Treason

Esther M. Friesner was born on July 16, 1951.

Friesner has won the Nebula Award for her short stories “Death and the Librarian” and “A Birthday,” the latter of which was also nominated for the Hugo Award. She has also received nominations for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. In 1994, she was the recipient of the Skylark Award, presented by NESFA.

“Miranda’s Muse” was written for Laura Anne Gilman and Jennifer Heddle’s anthology Treachery and Treason. The story has not been reprinted.

Miranda Ford is a highly successful romance author who seemed to lead a perfect life with her husband, Alan. After Alan’s death, however, Miranda finds herself suffering from writer’s block and, more importantly, is confronted by her new agent, Billy Samson, about the extremely overdue manuscript her publisher is clamoring for. Billy quickly learns that Alan was very definitely Miranda’s muse. His poor and boorish behavior provided her with all the villains in her novels, with barely any modifications. Billy offers Miranda a solution that she can’t believe. He explains that he is a necromancer and can bring Alan back from the dead.

Although Miranda doesn’t believe Billy will be successful, she accompanies him to the graveyard and watches as he brings her husband back to life, or at least unlife, using an incantation analogous to a high school football cheer. While Alan’s partial resurrection is potentially good for her career, Miranda didn’t question Billy too closely about the specifics, and Billy didn’t offer the information, so everything that happens next –Billy’s binding of Alan and Miranda, the rules that govern their new relationship, and the fact that Alan is no longer jealous of Miranda’s success — all come as a surprise.

Feeling betrayed by Billy, Miranda’s vengeance on him also backfires, but in the end, she and Billy are able to work out a new, amicable working relationship and, perhaps, even a level of mutual respect. Although Alan was a horrific human, and likely to remain that way as a revenant, Miranda isn’t a whole lot better herself, but she is also Billy’s meal ticket if he wants to be a successful agent.

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Birthday Reviews: T.E.D. Klein’s “The Events at Poroth Farm”

Birthday Reviews: T.E.D. Klein’s “The Events at Poroth Farm”

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Cover by Oscar Grand
Cover by Oscar Grand

T.E.D. (Theodore Eibon Donald) Klein was born on July 15, 1947.

In 1986, Klein won the World Fantasy Award for his Novella “Nadelman’s God” and also won the August Derleth Fantasy Award for his novel The Ceremonies. In 2012, World Horror Con named Klein a Grand Master. He was a two-time nominee for the coveted Balrog Award and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award seven times.

Klein’s first story was “The Events at Poroth Farm,” originally published in the fanzine From Beyond the Dark, edited by Edward P. Berglund in December 1972. Despite its fannish origins, the story was picked up by Richard Davis for The Year’s Best Horror Stories No. 3 and was translated into German for publication in that anthology. The story was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award and Gahan Wilson included it in First World Fantasy Awards. In 1984, Klein expanded the story to novel length and published it as The Ceremonies. The novella was published as a chap book in 1990. David Drake and Martin H. Greenberg reprinted it in A Century of Horror: 1970-1979 and Scott David Aniolowski included it in Return to Lovecraft Country. The story was also included in Eternal Lovecraft : The Persistence of H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture, edited by Jim Turner. Klein used it in his collection Reassuring Tales and S.T. Joshi used it in the anthology American Supernatural Tales. Peter Straub used it in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now. Klein revised the story in 2012 for inclusion in the e-book The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack.

“The Events at Poroth Farm” is a Lovecraftian tale told as a series of diary entries bookended by a prologue and epilogue by the diary’s author, who has managed to survive the horror on the isolated farm where he rented a room for three months.

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Birthday Reviews: Edo van Belkom’s “The October Crisis”

Birthday Reviews: Edo van Belkom’s “The October Crisis”

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Cover by Barclay Shaw
Cover by Barclay Shaw

Edo van Belkom was born on July 14, 1962.

Van Belkom won the Bram Stoker Award for his short story “Rat Food,” co-written with David Nickle. He has won the Aurora Award three times, for the short story “Hockey’s Night in Canada,” for editing Be VERY Afraid!, and for his novel Wolf Pack. He has written erotica under the pseudonym Evan Hollander and has written at least two Deathlands novels using the James Axler house name.

In the 1990s Mike Resnick published several alternate history anthologies, including Alternate Tyrants, which took various world leaders and put them in a situation which allowed them to exercise their dictatorial desires. Edo van Belkom’s submission was “The October Crisis,” a Canadian alternate history which has never been reprinted.

“The October Crisis” of the title of Edo van Belkom’s alternate history was a period that lasted for most of October in 1970 when members of the Front de libération du Québec took hostages in Quebec in an attempt to forward their separatist movement. While Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau implemented the War Measures Act, permitting himself a wide range of powers, the measures expired in November in our own timeline. In the world of van Belkom’s story, Trudeau continued to use the powers to suppress any dissent, political or journalistic.

The story follows our own timeline pretty closely until Trudeau decides to use the acts powers against the kidnappers directly, and also orders the secretive murder of the released kidnapping victim in order to drum up further support for his policies. At this point in the story, van Belkom switches point of view to have the leader of the opposition, Robert Stanfield, describing Trudeau’s excessive actions to Richard Nixon to attempt to get the US to intervene in the growing tyranny in Canada. Van Belkom introduces some ambiguity at this point, leaving the question open as to whether Nixon will respond to Stanfield’s pleas to help, or give into his own tyrannical tendencies to model his own manner of leading the US after the policies instituted by Trudeau.

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Birthday Reviews: Stephen Robinett’s “A Penny’s Worth”

Birthday Reviews: Stephen Robinett’s “A Penny’s Worth”

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Cover by Vincent di Fate
Cover by Vincent di Fate

Stephen Robinett was born on July 13, 1941 and died on February 16, 2004.

Until 1975, Robinette published using the name Tak Hallus. Although he has mostly used his own name since then, in 1976, he published the novel Mindwipe! using the pseudonym Steve Hahn.

“A Penny’s Worth” appeared in the March 1976 issue of Analog, edited by Ben Bova. It was the story’s only appearance.

Robinett created the lawyer Harry Penny for the story “A Penny’s Worth,” and Penny finds himself hired by a graduate student, Marshal Pierce, to defend Pierce against assault and battery charges. Although Pierce claims no recollection of assaulting Dr. Charles Morrow, there are two witnesses, Morrow’s wife and a neighbor, who saw the attack. The story follows Penny as he interviews witnesses and others with ties to Pierce and Morrow, to figure out what happened. The story is engaging, although the solution is telegraphed rather early on.

While Morrow and Pierce don’t know each other, there are several links between the two. Pierce worked as a graduate student for Ray Winslow, Morrow’s former, and now dead, partner. At one time Harry dated Nora, who went on to marry Winslow before leaving him for Morrow. Vernon Vernon, Pierce’s boss who fired him for stealing something after Winslow died, although Pierce claims he had Winslow’s permission to take it, also has ties to Morrow. What is clear to the reader from early on is that the medication Winslow had Pierce take somehow makes Pierce seek out Morrow to get vengeance for what Morrow did to Winslow.

Sometimes, however, plot isn’t the most important thing and so knowing the solution, rather than spoiling the story, provides a sense of foreshadowing. What caused the attack in this case is less important than Penny’s way of finding out what the reader has already figured out. His interviews with Nora, Morrow, and Vernon and his instructions to Pierce to help the boy avoid prison time for assault or worse, are the keys to the story and make it a very entertaining piece of fiction. Penny and his world seem as if they were developed to be an ongoing series, and Robinett would return to the character the following year in the novella “The Man Responsible.”

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Birthday Reviews: James Gunn’s “The Day the Magic Came Back”

Birthday Reviews: James Gunn’s “The Day the Magic Came Back”

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Cover by Chris Moore
Cover by Chris Moore

James E. Gunn was born on July 12, 1923.

In 1976, Gunn received a Worldcon Special Convention Award at MidAmeriCon for his book Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. The same year the Science Fiction Research Association presented him with the Pilgrim Award. He was recognized with an Eaton Award in 1982. In 1983, his book Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction won the Hugo Award for Best Nonfiction Book. He received the Clareson Award from the SFRA in 1997. He received the Moskowitz Award in 2000 and was named a SFWA Grand Master in 2007. In 2009, he was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame. Gunn was one of the Guests of Honor at LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention held in San Antonio, Texas in 2013. Two years later, Gunn was inducted into the Science Fiction Fall of Fame in Seattle.

“The Day the Magic Came Back” was purchased by Scott Edelman for Science Fiction Age and appeared in the January 1996 issue. Gunn later included the story in his collection Human Voices, originally published in 2002.

When world class physician Dr. Knowland is unable to cure 9-year-old Linda Constant’s disease, her family brought in their preacher, Mr. Alma, to the hospital to pray for her. As she slowly became better, Knowland had to admit that she was cured more by Alma’s prayer than by Knowland’s medicine, and Knowland went in search of the faith healer to learn his methods.

Although what Knowland learned was a conflict between belief and science, he approached Alma’s technique with an open mind, coming to the conclusion that Alma was influencing people’s health through an unknown, and not provable or necessarily reproducible, means. The realization produces a fear in Knowland not because he frets for his job, he admits that science needs something to fall back on, but rather because it destroys his understanding of the fundamental way the universe works. Even if his science and medicine continue to work, his universe has suddenly become too unpredictable for his tastes.

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