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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Cordwainer Smith’s “No, No, Not Rogov!”

Birthday Reviews: Cordwainer Smith’s “No, No, Not Rogov!”

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Cover by Kelly Freas
Cover by Kelly Freas

Cordwainer Smith was born Paul Linebarger on July 11, 1913 and died on August 6, 1966. As Linebarger, his most famous work was Psychological Warfare. Frederik Pohl revealed that Smith was really Linebarger in an editorial that ran in the December 1966 issue of Galaxy

Smith was nominated for two Hugo Awards, first for the short story “The Game of Rat and Dragon” in 1955 and later for the novel The Planet Buyer in 1965. His novella “On the Storm Planet” was also nominated for the first Nebula Award. He posthumously won the Seiun Award three times, for his short fiction “Think Blue, Count Two” and “A Planet Named Shayol.” His third win was for the novel Norstilia, which was also a nominee for the Jupiter Award.

“No, No, Not Rogov!,” was originally purchased by Damon Knight and published in the February, 1959 issue of If. Judith Merril included the story in The 5th Annual of the Year’s Best S.-F. and Smith used it in his collection You Will Never Be the Same. Knight reprinted the story in the anthology Science Fiction Inventions and it was one of Smith’s stories in his collection The Instrumentality of Mankind. When Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg were selecting stories of The Great SF Stories 21 (1959), “No, No, Not Rogov!” made their cut. Jim Mann opened the NESFA Press collection The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith with the story. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer used it in The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF. It most recently appeared in the Baen Books collection of Smith’s work, When the People Fell. “No, No, Not Rogov!” has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

“No, No, Not Rogov!” is an indictment of the Soviet system. Smith tells about Soviet scientists N. Rogov and Anastasia Cherpas, whose professional competitiveness turns into respect and eventually a scientifically collaborative marriage. Whether or not they actually have any affection for each other can’t be determined from the story, although Cherpas does resent the crush that the scientist Gausgofer, who was sent to spy on them, develops on Rogov.

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Birthday Reviews: Fran Wilde’s “How to Walk through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age”

Birthday Reviews: Fran Wilde’s “How to Walk through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age”

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Cover by Gary Freeman
Cover by Gary Freeman

Fran Wilde was born on July 10, 1972.

Wilde won the Andre Norton Award in 2016 for her debut novel, Updraft, which was also a Nebula Nominee and a winner of the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award. She has also been nominated for the Nebula for her novella The Jewel and Her Lapidary and the short story “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand,” both of which were also nominated for the Hugo Award. Her story “Only Their Shining Beauty Was Left” was a nominee for the WSFA Small Press Award.

Wilde published “How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age” in the April 2015 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, edited by Sheila Williams. The story has not been reprinted.

Eleanor Reed is an embedded journalist, covering a war using implants which allowed her to submit her reports directly and her viewers to see what she saw, although the feed is censored in realtime by the army. Unfortunately, she is caught in an attack and injured. While recuperating at home, she spends time walking in St. Paul’s Kent Churchyard cemetery near her home in Chestertown, Maryland, with her rig seems to have developed a glitch. In addition to seeing what is there, she can apparently also see ghosts, particularly the ghost of the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who is buried in the cemetery.

However, the glitch in Eleanor’s implants began long before she arrived at the cemetery. When she was in country, she saw several of the members of the company she was embedded in when they died, and saw them leave their bodies. Although she is aware of the issue and trying to figure out exactly what is happening, using the ghost of Tallulah Bankhead as a test subject, she is also concerned that her handler, Ben, will learn about the images and try to use them for his own purposes, which she never really trusts.

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Birthday Reviews: Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin”

Birthday Reviews: Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin”

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Cover by Stephen Gervais
Cover by Stephen Gervais

Thomas Ligotti was born on July 9, 1953.

Ligotti’s collection The Nightmare Factory won the British Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. He won additional Bram Stoker Awards for his novelette “The Red Tower” and his story “My Work Is Not Yet Done.” The latter work also earned Ligotti his first International Horror Guild Award. He won a second IHG for The Nightmare Factory. A translation of his collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works won the Italia Award for International Novel.

“The Last Feast of Harlequin” was originally published in the April 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ferman. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow picked it up for the fourth annual edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell picked it for Best New Horror 2. Ligotti included the story in his collections Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. The Nightmare Factory, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, and Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. Ferman and Kristine Kathryn Rusch used the story in The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology. Jim Turner selected it for Cthulhu 2000: A Lovecraftian Anthology and Scott David Aniolowski selected it for Return to Lovecraft Country. Joyce Carol Oates used it in American Gothic Tales and Peter Straub included it in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now. S.T. Joshi used the story in the anthology A Mountain Walked. The story has been translated into German twice as well as Italian and Finnish. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story.

Ligotti presents the research of an anthropologist into clowns in folk culture in “The Last Feast of Harlequin.” An anonymous source sends the professor a note about a strange festival in the town of Mirocaw that features people dressing as clowns. Unable to learn anything about the festival through normal sources, including exchanging letters with the state’s Department of Tourism, the professor forgets about the festival until chance brings him to the town and he learns that the festival is held during the Winter solstice, bringing it in conflict with the more traditional Christmas celebrations.

Returning for the actual festival, with very little knowledge of what to expect, the anthropologist tries to learn from the townfolk why they do what they do, only to find that every avenue of inquiry is a dead end. The villagers don’t know why they have the traditions, they just know that they follow them. In the process, he does realize that one of his old professors is living there, apparently a derelict in a part of the town, which at first doesn’t appear to participate in the festival, but later he learns does with different rules.

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Birthday Reviews: José Antonio Cotrina’s “Between the Lines”

Birthday Reviews: José Antonio Cotrina’s “Between the Lines”

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Cover by Tarzo
Cover by Tarzo

José Antonio Cotrina was born on July 8, 1972.

Contrina’s novella “Salir de Fase” tied for the UPC Award for unpublished novella with Javier Negrete’s “Buscador de Sombras” in 2000. Contrina was also nominated to the Premio Ignotus for “Entre lineas.”

“Entre lineas” was published in Gigamesh, 25 in May 2000, edited by Julián Díez. In 2007, it was translated into English by James Stevens-Arce as “Between the Lines” and included in The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent, edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow.

Alejandro is studying advertising at university when he happens to walk into the wrong professor’s office in “Between the Lines” and is informed that by doing so, he has enrolled himself in the course Advanced Reading Techniques, a class he has absolutely no interest in. Since he hasn’t filled out any paperwork, he ignores the professor and continues on with his life, studies, and job, forgetting about the strange incident until he receives a letter from the university informing him that he has an incomplete in the class.

When he goes to protest, the professor insists that he is in the class and is required to do the coursework in order not to fail. He is given a copy of The Little Prince and goes off to read it, closely, and make notes about the book’s text, the author, and anything else he can think of. When he returns to the professor to discuss the book, the professor throws aside his work, telling him that he hasn’t read between the lines. Alejandro attempts to re-read the book and suddenly realizes that if he ignores the actual text, but looks at the negative space between the words, he can read a different book. Once he comes to this epiphany, he can’t help but see the alternative text everywhere he looks. Cotrina opens up a whole new realm of literature, on par with Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” with this version of reality.

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Birthday Reviews: Robert A. Heinlein’s “Sky Lift”

Birthday Reviews: Robert A. Heinlein’s “Sky Lift”

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Cover by W.E. Terry
Cover by W.E. Terry

Robert A. Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907 and died on May 8, 1988.

Heinlein won his first Hugo Award in 1956 for his novel Double Star. He subsequently won three more Hugo Awards for Best Novel for Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Although he has never won a Nebula Award, despite four nominations, Heinlein was the first person designated a Grand Master by the SFWA, in 1975. In 1980 he received the Forry Award from LASFS. He has won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award seven times, for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, Red Planet, Methusaleh’s Children, Time Enough for Love, “Requiem,” and “Coventry.” In 1978, I Will Fear No Evil won the Seiun Award. Heinlein has also won the Retro Hugo Award four times, for “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” Farmer in the Sky, “The Roads Must Roll,” and “If This Goes On…” Heinlein was Guest of Honor at three separate Worldcons, Denvention 1 in 1941, Seacon in Seattle in 1961, and MidAmeriCon in Kansas City in 1976. The only other person to be a Guest of Honor at three Worldcons was John W. Campbell, Jr. In 1998, he was a Posthumous Inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

“Sky Lift” was first published by William L. Hamling in the November 1953 issue of Imagination. Heinlein included it in his collection The Menace from Earth in 1959. The story was selected by Damon Knight for A Century of Science Fiction and was included in Off the Main Sequence: The Other Science Fiction Stories of Robert A. Heinlein. Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski chose to include it in Sentinels: In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke in 2010 and it was also reprinted in New Worlds to Conquer, part of the Virginia Edition, which reprinted all of Heinlein’s works. In addition to its English language publications, it has been translated into Italian twice, first by Hilja Pini for Urania #306 and a new translation, also by Pini using the name Hilia Brinis, for Gamma #14. Fritz Steinberg translated it into German for Unternehman Alptraum. It has also been translated into French twice.

“Sky Lift” is a strangely titled story about a medical supply run to the planet Pluto which has to be conducted under extreme conditions due to the urgency to get supplies to the distant planet (the title used in its first Italian translation, “Accelerazione ‘3g’” is a much better title). Like Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” which would be published in Astounding nine months later, Heinlein achieves emotional impact by creating a situation heavily stacked against the protagonists, Joe Appleby and Lieutenant Klueger.

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Birthday Reviews: John Langan’s “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons”

Birthday Reviews: John Langan’s “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons”

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Cover by Alamy.com
Cover by Alamy.com

John Langan was born on July 6, 1969.

Langan’s novel The Fisherman received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. His earlier collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters was also nominated for the award. The story version of “Mr. Gaunt” as well as his story “On Skua Island,” were both nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. Langan serves on the Board of Directors for the Shirley Jackson Award.

He wrote “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons” for Jack Dann and Nick Gevers for the anthology Ghosts by Gaslight. Published in 2011, the story has never been reprinted.

“The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons” is the story of Mark Stephen Chapman, an author who has arranged to spend the summer at the home of Parrish Dunn, a spiritualist whose home, and especially the strange balloons he decorates it with, are intriguing to Chapman. On his way up to Dunn’s estate, Chapman meets Cal and Isabelle Earnshaw, who are also on their way to spend time with Dunn. Cal is dying and has hopes that Dunn can ease his passage.

The majority of the story is told as a series of conversations between Isabelle and Chapman, although occasionally Langan includes a page from Chapman’s journals, as Chapman shared much about his past with Isabelle. Chapman also talks about his life with Cal, who regrets not having lived the full life he sees Chapman as having had. The most enigmatic of the characters is Dunn, who appears occasionally, but rarely interacts with Chapman until the story’s denouement.

Until the end of the story, there is little fantastic that occurs. Dunn’s treatment of Cal and Cal’s response are all physical in nature, whether or not Dunn is an actual spiritualist or a charlatan. Chapman never really develops a relationship with Dunn and finds himself uncomfortable around the paper balloons. Eventually, when Isabelle decides she wants to take Cal away from Dunn, Chapman serves to distract him and learns the truth about Dunn’s balloons and why they are so disturbing, although Langan does not indicate why others have not felt the same concern about them.

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Birthday Reviews: Jody Lynn Nye’s “Theory of Relativity”

Birthday Reviews: Jody Lynn Nye’s “Theory of Relativity”

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Cover by Bob Warner
Cover by Bob Warner

Jody Lynn Nye was born on July 5, 1957.

Nye began her career writing technical articles and gaming related fiction, including several choose-your-path adventures in the Crossroads Adventures series for Anne McCaffrey’s Pern and Piers Anthony’s Xanth. She followed those ups with The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern and Magic of Xanth before beginning to publish her own works as well as collaborative novels. Many of her novels and short stories are humorous and she has also written military science fiction. Nye was good friends with Robert Lynn Asprin and collaborated with him on the later books in his Myth series before continuing the series after his death. Her own series includes the Mythology 101 series, the Imperium trilogy, the Dreamland series, and others.

She wrote “Theory of Relativity” for Larry Segriff and Martin H. Greenberg for the anthology Past Imperfect. Published in 2001, the story has never been reprinted.

“Theory of Relativity” is an epistolary story, although the framing device seems superfluous. It does immediately tell readers that they are in a slightly different world since Nye refers to both the book packager, TeknoBooks, and one of the books editors, Larry Segriff, disguised as Barry Seacliff, although it is questionable how many people would catch the two references since the book was published by DAW. This framing device does recur at the end, when Seacliff’s partner, Dr. Gruneberg (Martin H. Greenberg) is referenced.

The story opens with some techno babble about the time travel, or dimensional travel, device created by Dr. Rachel Fenstone. Once that information is out of the way, the story can really begin, with Rachel writing about her trip to another timeline, which appears to be closer to our own, to discover her doppelganger, June Fennell. The two women connect and once June is informed about Rachel’s experiment, they work together to figure out when their two worlds branched from each other, determining it happened shortly after their great grandfather came to the United States. Their next stop is to travel back to see him and figure out which of their timelines is “real,” although they each know it is their own.

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Birthday Reviews: Peter Crowther’s “Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage”

Birthday Reviews: Peter Crowther’s “Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage”

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The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures
The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures

Peter Crowther was born on July 4, 1949.

Crowther, who runs PS Publishing, has received two World Fantasy Special Professional Awards for the press, one in 2004 and one in 2008. The press has also received seven British Fantasy Awards for Small Press, and Postscripts Magazine, edited by Crowther and Nick Gevers, has also won a BFA for Best Magazine. Crowther’s short story collection Lonesome Roads was his first BFA Award in 2000.

The story “Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage” was published in Mike Ashley and Eric Brown’s 2005 anthology The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures. It is one of the stories set in Crowther’s bar The Land at the End of the Working Day and was collected with three other stories set there in the collection The Land at the End of the Working Day in 2008.

“Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage” offers up a bar story, or rather, several bar stories. The drinkers gathered in The Land at the End of the Working Day begin sharing strange stories, some mundane, such as Edgar’s rides back and forth to work on a bus with a strange child, to the supernatural, with Jim describing how he helped free a ghost haunting the bars on his usual pub crawl. Cliff Rhodes, who has been listening, postulates that what all the stories have in common is that they involve journeys of some sort.

The story actually kicks off with two men entering the bar and asking if there was a back room. Horatio Fortesque and Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat have a reason for asking their strange question, but Crowther is very content to allow the question, and answer, linger in the background as his barflies tell their stories, joke back and forth, and draw out the tale. Their question, however, leads to the focus of the story, tying the various tales to the popularity of Jules Verne, who is mentioned repeatedly throughout “Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage” as Crowther obliquely looks at the attraction Verne has maintained on the literary world since the 1860s.

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Birthday Reviews: Michael Shea’s “Fast Food”

Birthday Reviews: Michael Shea’s “Fast Food”

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Cover by David Christiana
Cover by David Christiana

Michael Shea was born on July 3, 1946 and died on February 16, 2014.

Shea won the World Fantasy Award twice, in 1983 for the novel Nifft the Lean and in 2005 for the novella “The Growlimb,” the latter of which was also nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. His story “Autopsy” was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the Nebula Award for Best Novella. He previously had been nominated for a Nebula for his novelette “The Angel of Death.” His novel A Quest for Simbilis was nominated for the August Derleth Award.

Shea sold “Fast Food” to Robert K.J. Killheffer and it appeared in the third issue of Century in September/October, 1995. Shea subsequently included the story in his 2008 collection The Autopsy and Other Tales, published by Centipede Press.

“Fast Food” is a revenge story with a difference. Jivaro in native to a part of the Amazonian rain forest which is being bulldozed to make way for grazing land for Mighty Burger, an American fast food chain. Befriended by Henry, one of the bulldozer drivers, Jivaro swaps bodies with another driver, Vic, sending Vic to live in the rainforest as Jivaro while the original Jivaro destroys the two bulldozers and gets himself and Henry sent back to the states. Applying for a job at the fast food chain, Jivaro continues to body swap while at the same time causing the chain’s food to infect its diners with strange bumps and rashes.

Jivaro had a long term plan to not only get vengeance on Mighty Burger, but also to attempt to repopulate the Amazon rain forest. Shea’s story points out that just as the forces behind Mighty Burger don’t care what happens when they pillage the rain forest, dooming animals and the indigenous population, Jivaro also doesn’t care what happens to the innocent people whose only connection to Mighty Burger may be that they eat there, or to the animals that he summons up far from their natural habitat.

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Birthday Reviews: Kay Kenyon’s “The Executioner’s Apprentice”

Birthday Reviews: Kay Kenyon’s “The Executioner’s Apprentice”

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Cover by Kenn Brown and Chris Wren
Cover by Kenn Brown and Chris Wren

Kay Kenyon was born on July 2, 1956.

Kenyon has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award for her novel Maximum Ice. Her novel The Braided World was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. She was nominated for the Endeavour Award three years in a row for the novels Bright of the Sky, A World Too Near, and City Without End.

She wrote “The Executioner’s Apprentice” for Julie Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel’s anthology ReVisions, which focused on scientific achievements as the catalyst for alternate history. Published in 2004, the story has never been reprinted.

“The Executioner’s Apprentice” takes a place in an Aztec empire which is advanced enough to make use of genetic testing in determining who has violent tendencies and likely criminal behavior to determine the appropriate victims of execution. Pacal is the titular apprentice who is preparing for his first execution and has completely bought into the traditional system. When his friends arrange for him to lose his virginity prior to his first execution, Kina, the woman he is with, tries to make him understand that there are better ways than executions.

On the eve of his induction into the ranks of Executioners, Pacal learns that the methodology he has been taught by the priests to find victims is a lie, and that his first victim will be Kina. Rather than culling the Aztecs of their most violent citizens, the priests are working to remove those who abhor violence, building a society which is ready to defend themselves not only against their traditional enemies but also the mysterious Eastern Army, which is implied to be made up of European conquistadors.

The discovery that genetic testing was not used for what Pacal believed is only the first twist that Kenyon introduces. When Kina and Pacal flee so he doesn’t have to kill her, Kenyon reveals more about the Eastern religion Kina follows and the holy book she reveres and tries to get Pacal to understand. This last twist is a nice touch, although it doesn’t help place the time period or the evolution of society to the story, if anything confusing it even more.

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