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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Mary A. Turzillo’s “Thumbkin, Caesar, Princess, and Troll”

Birthday Reviews: Mary A. Turzillo’s “Thumbkin, Caesar, Princess, and Troll”

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Cover by Randy Asplund
Cover by Randy Asplund

Mary A. Turzillo was born on June 12, 1940. She is married to fellow science fiction author Geoffrey A. Landis.

Turzillo won the Nebula Award for her novelette “Mars Is No Place for Children,” which also topped the readers poll for Science Fiction Age, the magazine in which it appeared. She won two Elgin Awards for poetry chapbooks for her collection Lovers & Killers and for the collection Sweet Poison, written in collaboration with Marge Simon, both of which were nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, as was the poetry collection Satan’s Sweetheart, written by Turzillo and Simon. Turzillo’s poetry has also been nominated for both the Dwarf Star Award and the Rhysling Award. She has also been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

Turzillo sold “Thumbkin, Caesar, Princess, and Troll” to Stanley Schmidt and the story was published in the October 2002 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It has not been reprinted.

“Thumbkin, Caesar, Princess, and Troll” has a title reminiscent of a fairy tale , and despite its setting in a future Ohio focusing on nanotechnology, it has the trappings of a fairy tale to go along with the title. Thumbkin is a genetically modified genius who was bred to be only twelve centimeters tall by parents who though it would improve his chances to become an astronaut before an anti-science wave swept the country and destroyed the space program.

At Thumbkin’s graduation, Harry P. Caesar promised his company and his daughter’s hand to anyone who could solve three seemingly impossible problems. Naturally Thumbkin, as the hero of the story, was able to come up with solutions. Of course, Princess Caesar didn’t necessarily want to marry a twelve centimeter tall genius, especially when she was already dating a drug lord, Dick Troll.

The idea of a father giving his daughter in marriage to the winner of a contest is pervasive in fairy tales and despite his offer, Caesar, Thumbkin, and Princess are all well aware of how misogynistic the arrangement is. When Thumbkin goes to Caesar to seek his prize, Caesar explains that the decision must be Princess’s, something Thumbkin acknowledges, even as he works to “win” her from Troll.

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Birthday Reviews: Basil Wells’s “The Laws of Juss”

Birthday Reviews: Basil Wells’s “The Laws of Juss”

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Cover by David A. Hardy
Cover by David A. Hardy

Basil Wells was born on June 11, 1912 and died on December 23, 2003. In addition to publishing under his own name, he occasionally published using the name Gene Ellerman. The majority of Wells’s stories appeared between 1940 and 1960, although throughout the 60s and 70s he occasionally had stories appearing in the magazines. After disappearing in the 1980s, he again began to publish in the 1990s. He published four collections of his work between 1949 and 1976.

“The Laws of Juss” appeared in the third and final issue of Expanse, a magazine published between 1993 and 1994 and edited by Steven E, Fick. The story has not been reprinted.

In just a few pages, Wells plays games with the reader’s expectations in “The Laws of Juss.” At first, it appears that Grayson Brand is a captive of Dudley Feeber. Wells quickly reveals that the two men have a long-standing friendship, which adds an element of betrayal to Brand’s captivity.

In a datadump, Feebler explains two important things to Brand. The first is that a wealthy woman, Lynne Holmes, has set her sights on making Brand her sixth husband. The second is a description of the legal system on Juss, which Brand is relatively unfamiliar with since he is not a native to the planet.

As the title of the story implies, it is the legal system of Juss that is of interest, and although Feeber spells it out for Brand in a way that telegraphs the story’s ending, it feels like Wells has created an interesting enough punishment that it could stand to be more fully explored than within the confines of the story. According to Feeber, murder is punishable by essentially taking the murderer’s body and reforming it to resemble the victim’s body. The victim’s memories are then downloaded into the re-formed body, supplanting the memories of the murderer.

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Birthday Reviews: Kage Baker’s “Calimari Curls”

Birthday Reviews: Kage Baker’s “Calimari Curls”

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Cover by Mike Dringenberg
Cover by Mike Dringenberg

Kage Baker was born on June 10, 1952 and died on January 31, 2010.

In 1999, Baker was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Baker won the Emperor Norton Award in 2003 for her story “A Night on the Barbary Coast.” The next year she won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for “The Empress of Mars.”  She received two nominations for the Mythopoeic Award, three nominations for the World Fantasy Award, and three nominations for the Hugo Award.  In 2010, she received for her second Nebula nomination and an Andre Norton nomination.  She won the Nebula posthumously that year for the novella The Women of Nell Gwynne’s.

“Calamari Curls” was first published in Baker’s collection Dark Mondays in 2006. In 2011, Ross E. Lockhart reprinted it in the anthology The Book of Cthulhu. Both of its first two appearances were published by Night Shade Books. In 2012, it was included in the Subterranean Press retrospective The Best of Kage Baker.

The small California oceanside community of Nunas Beach is a town that time had forgotten. Founded as a resort town in 1906, it grew with refugees from the San Francisco Earthquake, but quickly shrank again as people left to return to the rebuilt metropolis. The locals lived a quiet, unassuming life based around the ocean. Pegasus Bright, who had lost both legs in the war, ran the town’s only restaurant, the Chowder Palace.

The town is limping along, figuratively (and literally, most of the townspeople seem to be missing at least one limb) when outsiders come in to turn the delapidated shell of a restaurant across the street from the Chowder Palace into a happening dining spot, the Calamari Curls. Business at the new restaurant not only draws the townspeople away from the Chowder Palace, but brings more outsiders into town, where all the businesses except the Chowder Palace are able to take advantage of the newfound tourist trade.

Bright makes common cause with “Betty Step-in-Time,” a street performer and shaman, to do whatever they can to destroy the Calamari Curls. Betty researches the town and learns that the previous occupants of the building had all come to a bad end. Readers will readily identify the Lovecraftian influences at that point, if the name of the new restaurant isn’t already a clue. Although no elder gods are directly summoned, their influence does bring about Bright’s desired ends.

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Birthday Reviews: Joe Haldeman’s “Blood Brothers”

Birthday Reviews: Joe Haldeman’s “Blood Brothers”

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Thieves' World-Walter-Velez-small Thieves' World-Walter-Velez-back-small

Cover by Walter Velez

Joe Haldeman was born on June 9, 1943.

Haldeman received his first Hugo and Nebula Award for his debut novel, The Forever War. He won both awards again for his novella “The Hemingway Hoax” and his novel Forever Peace. Haldeman received the Nebula Award on two other occasions for his short story “Graves,” which also won a World Fantasy Award, and his novel Camouflage. He also has two additional Hugo Awards for the short stories “Tricentennial” and “None So Blind.” Forever Peace also was honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and Camouflage tied for a James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award and won the Southeastern SF Achievement Award. He was won three Rhysling Awards, the Ignotus Award, and the Ditmar Award as well.

DeepSouthCon presented Haldeman with a Phoenix Award in 1983. He was one of the pro Guests of Honor at ConFiction, the 1990 Worldcon in The Hague. Along with his wife, Gay, he was awarded a Skylark Award by NESFA in 1996. In 2004, he was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Southeastern SF Achievement Award. Haldeman received a Robert A. Heinlein Award from the Heinlein Society in 2009 and in 2010 he was recognized as a Damon Knight Grand Master by SFWA. In 2012, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

“Blood Brothers” was Joe Haldeman’s only contribution to Robert Lynn Asprin’s shared world anthology series Thieves’ World, appearing in the debut volume in 1979. Written for the project, its reprint life has been limited, appearing in Sanctuary, an omnibus of the first three volumes of the Thieves’ World anthologies in 1982, and again in the omnibus Thieves’ World: First Blood in 2003, which reprinted the first two volumes of the series. Haldeman also included the story in his own collection, Dealing in Futures, originally published in 1985.

One Thumb was a major character in the early Thieves’ World shared world anthologies, created by Joe Haldeman for his story “Blood Brothers.” Shown by other authors in the series as powerful and mysterious, Haldeman’s own depiction of the owner of the Vulgar Unicorn was of a nearly amoral man, given to theft, murder, and rape. In the course of Haldeman’s short story, One Thumb, also known as Lastel, commits an assassination, a murder, deals in drugs, and considers his need to rape women.

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Birthday Reviews: Kate Wilhelm’s “State of Grace”

Birthday Reviews: Kate Wilhelm’s “State of Grace”

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Orbit 19
Orbit 19

Kate Wilhelm was born on June 8, 1928 and died on March 8, 2018.

She won the Hugo Award twice, for her novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and the book Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. She won the Nebula three times for the short stories “The Planners” and “Forever Yours, Anna,” and the novelette “The Girl Who Fell into the Sky.” She helped establish the SFWA and Clarion Workshop, and helped run the early Milford Writers Workshops. Along with husband Damon Knight, she was a Pro Guest of Honor at Noreascon Two and received the Gallun Award for contributions to science fiction. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2003. She received an inaugural Solstice Award in 2009 and in 2016, the awards was renamed the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award in her honor.

Wilhelm sold “State of Grace” to Damon Knight for inclusion in Orbit 19 in 1977. It appeared in her collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions in 1978 and in the collection State of Grace, part of Pulphouse Publishing’s Author’s Choice Monthly series in 1991. In 1980, the story was translated into French for the publication of Quand somerset rêvait, a translation of Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions.

“State of Grace” is the story of a deteriorating marriage in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky. The narrator believes she has seen small creatures living in the oak tree in her backyard and she begins to work to protect the unseen creatures and take care of them, providing them with food, water and other essentials. Her husband, on the other hand, gets the inkling that there may be something in the tree that could be worth quite a bit of money and he decides he needs to capture them.

The argument over the tree escalates as she tries to help the creatures and he gets more and more anxious about their presence and his attempts to remove them, including a brief try to cut down the tree. When he goes into the tree, something causes him to change his mind and he accepts the creatures’ presence.

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Birthday Reviews: Kit Reed’s “The Shop of Little Horrors”

Birthday Reviews: Kit Reed’s “The Shop of Little Horrors”

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Dogs of Truth-small Dogs of Truth-back-small

Cover by Henry Sene Yee

Kit Reed was born Lillian Craig on June 7, 1932 and died on September 24, 2017.

Reed’s collection What Wolves Know and The Story Until Now were both nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her novel Where was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her books Little Sisters of the Apocalypse and Weird Women, Wired Women were short listed for the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the story “Bride of Bigfoot,” which appeared in Weird Women, Wired Women also made the short list. Her short story “The Singing Marine” was a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. In 1958, she was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best New Author of 1958, a forerunner of the John W. Campbell Award.

“The Shop of Little Horrors” was original to Kit Reed’s 2005 collection Dogs of Truth. The story has never been reprinted.

In “The Shop of Little Horrors,” Kit Reed explores the life of Lynn and Martin Larkin, a couple of New Yorkers who have made the decision not to have children. Ten years into their marriage, they are free to live the life they want to, travel as they desire, and mock those around them who have decided to have children. “The Shop of Little Horrors” specifically looks at one Saturday when they are relaxing at a coffeeshop watching the harried parents with their children on a beautiful day.

Their calm is destroyed, however, when one particular child invades their space. Stanley bumps their table, causing their cappuccinos to spill all over them and, when they are distracted mopping up the mess, the juvenile delinquent grabs and eats Lynn’s doughnut while Stanley’s mother is oblivious to the destruction he has caused.

The perfect days turns into abject terror as they try to make their way home in a city crawling with children. A lunch in the Tavern on the Green helps reestablish their equilibrium until they find themselves face-to-face on their walk home with a woman pushing an enormous stroller that contains six children.

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Birthday Reviews: Jay Lake’s “The Water Castle”

Birthday Reviews: Jay Lake’s “The Water Castle”

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Realms of Fantasy, 8/04
Realms of Fantasy, 8/04

Jay Lake was born on June 6, 1964 and died from cancer on June 1, 2014. He openly blogged about his battle with cancer and about a year before his death hosted a wake for himself. His fight with cancer was also the subject of the documentary Lakeside—A Year with Jay Lake.

From 2002-2006 Lake, along with Deborah Layne, edited the six volume anthology series Polyphony. Lake went on to edit several additional anthologies, including All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, Other Earths, with Nick Gevers, and TEL: Stories.

Lake won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004 and decided the award needed some paraphernalia. He arranged to have pins made up for future nominees. Later winners added to the collection by creating a tiara and scepter to go along with the prize, both of which are passed along from winner to winner. Although he was nominated for a Nebula Award, two Hugo Awards, and three World Fantasy Awards, he didn’t win any of them. He did receive a posthumous Worldcon Special Convention Award in 2015, presented at Sasquan, a well as the Endeavour Award for his collection Last Plane to Heaven.

“The Water Castle” appeared in the August 2004 issue of Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy. The issue contained a second Lake story, “The Angel’s Daughter,” as well. While “The Angel’s Daughter” was reprinted the following year in Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber’s Fantasy: The Best of 2004, “The Water Castle” has never been reprinted.

Lake’s story of Arcadia follows the girl from her father’s death by drowning through a dangerous, tribal world trying to set itself right after an unnamed cataclysm in “The Water Castle.” Told with a series of time jumps, Arcadia finds herself in a market where, shortly after a man accosts Arcadia to try to sell her into slavery downcountry, she becomes involved in an incident in which a woman is accused of belonging to the “Poison People.” Arcadia’s involvement in this case, and her quick-witted thinking to resolve the issue, thrusts her into the spotlight and makes her the leader of a movement.

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Birthday Reviews: Margo Lanagan’s “The Proving of Smollett Standforth”

Birthday Reviews: Margo Lanagan’s “The Proving of Smollett Standforth”

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Cover by Alamy.com
Cover by Alamy.com

Margo Lanagan was born on June 5, 1960.

Lanagan has won the World Fantasy Award in four separate categories. She won her first awards for her collection Black Juice, which included “Singing My Sister Down,” which won for Best Short Fiction. Her novel Tender Morsels tied with Jeffrey Ford’s The Shadow Year, and she won her most recent World Fantasy Award for the novella “Sea Hearts.” Black Juice and “Singing My Sister Down” also won the Ditmar Award, and the story earned the Aurealis Award and Golden Aurealis Award. Lanagan’s other Ditmar’s were for the short story “The Goosle” and the novels Tender Morsels and Sea Hearts. Lanagan has also received the Aurealis Award for her short stories “The Queen’s Notice,” “A Fine Magic,” “A Thousand Flowers,” “Bajazzle,” and “Significant Dust.” Her novel Sea Hearts won the Aurealis for Best Young Adult Novel and for Best Fantasy Novel.

Lanagan originally sold “The Proving of Smollett Standforth” to Jack Dann and Nick Gevers for their anthology Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense, which was published in 2011. It was was a finalist for the Aurealis Award for Best Fantrasy Short story and was reprinted the following year in Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, an anthology edited by Paula Guran.

“The Proving of Smollett Standforth” is the story of a timid young domestic servant, whose job in the house where he lives is to clean and polish shoes and boots. When he is not performing these duties, Smollett sleeps alone in a small attic room. Although the room only has a single door, Smollett is visited nightly by the spirit of a long-dead woman who comes in through a door which has been blocked off. Each night, she presses a beaded necklace on Smollett, which burns his chest when he puts it on, but he in unable, or unwilling, to fend her off.

His shyness means that he doesn’t feel he can confide about his nocturnal visitor to anyone else in the house and he just comes to live with it, although when the cook discovered the marks on his chest, she treats him with a greasy balm and is worried that he suffers from some disease. Smollett’s concerns come to a head when he receives a letter requesting that he get permission for his brother, Dravitt, to spend the night at Smollett’s master’s house while Dravitt is on his way through London for his own posting. Rather than seek help, Smollett decides it is time to take action against the apparition himself, rather than let Dravitt experience it.

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Birthday Reviews: Nictzin Dyalhis’s “Heart of Atlantan”

Birthday Reviews: Nictzin Dyalhis’s “Heart of Atlantan”

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Cover by Ray Quigley
Cover by Ray Quigley

Nictzin Dyalhis was born on June 4, 1873 and died on May 8, 1942.

Dyalhis’s writing career began with the story “Who Keep the Desert Law” in 1922 and saw the publication of fewer than 20 stories over the next 18 years. His first story in Weird Tales, “When the Green Star Waned,” may have been the first use of the word “blaster” for a ray gun. Although L. Sprague de Camp has stated that Nictzin Dyalhis was his birthname and appears on his draft card, people have suggested that he changed the spelling of his last name from Dallas. Dyalhis also appears to have changed the date of his birth as suited him. One of the few members of the science fiction community to have actually met him was Willis Conover, Jr.

“Heart of Atlantan” first appeared in the September 1940 issue of Weird Tales, edited by D. McIlwraith. It remained out of print for 30 years before Lin Carter selected it for his anthology The Magic of Atlantis. In 1976, Peter Haining published a retrospective of Weird Tales and chose the story to represent Dyalhis’s contributions to the magazine. Wildside Press issued several of Dyalhis’s stories, including “Heart of Atlantan” in their e-book The Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack: Volume 4 in 2015. The story most recently appears in The Sapphire Goddess, published in 2018 by DMR Books and edited by Dave Ritzlin. “Heart of Atlantan was Dyalhis’s final published story.

Framing techniques in weird fiction were a common device in the early pulp era, an attempt to give some sort of credence to the tale. The events didn’t often happen to the narrator, but to a friend, or were found in a book. In “Heart of Atlantan,” Henri d’Armond describes how he was having a conversation with his friend, Leonard Carman, about the possibility of lost ancient civilizations. Carman is convinced they exist and to prove his point calls a woman, Otilie, to join them. Bent, broken, ugly, and illiterate, Otilie has the ability to serve as a medium, writing messages from a lost race.

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Birthday Reviews: Tony Richards’s “Discards”

Birthday Reviews: Tony Richards’s “Discards”

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Cover by R.J. Krupowicz
Cover by R.J. Krupowicz

Tony Richards was born on June 3, 1956.

Richards was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for his first novel, The Harvest Bride in 1988.  His collection Going Back received a British Fantasy Award nomination in 2008.

“Discards” originally appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where editor Edward L. Ferman published it in the September 1983 issue. The next year it was translated into Italian for inclusion in Urania #964. The British Fantasy Society included the story in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue of Dark Horizons. Richard used the story in two collections of his work that were published in 2008: Passport to Purgatory and Shadows and Other Tales. The following year it appeared in the anthology The 4th Book of Terror Tales, edited by John B. Ford and Paul Kane.

Richards breaks free from several of the expected norms of a speculative fiction short story, which sets it apart from most of what appears in the magazine. Robin Brookard was born into a middle class family, married, and had children, but what sets him apart is that he lost everything due to his addiction to alcohol. The story opens with him walking the streets of London trying to figure out where he is going to spend the night and realizing he’ll either have to sleep outdoors or find his way to a hostel. His pride doesn’t allow for the latter choice since it seems a more “official” acknowledgement of his state.

Brookard eventually finds a group of tramps gathered around a fire and he approaches them in hopes of keeping warm and finding some companionship. Something about the group doesn’t strike him as quite right, however, and he is torn between joining them and keeping his distance, partly because of the sense of wrongness and partly because being accepted into their group means admitting that he can no longer find his way back to the life he once had.

The group’s leader, known as Padre, explains to Brookard that gods are created and gain power when they have believers and indicates that the homeless of London, and in fact, the homeless around the world, have brought their own god into existence. The god he describes is a vengeful one, however, and their goal is to eventually overthrow the current world order. The introduction of the god of the homeless has an undertone of Lovecraftianism, but it doesn’t quite lead down that path.

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