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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: James Morrow’s “The Fate of Nations”

Birthday Reviews: James Morrow’s “The Fate of Nations”

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Cover by John Picacio
Cover by John Picacio

James Morrow was born on March 17, 1947. In addition to the novels in his Godhead trilogy, beginning with Towing Jehovah, Morrow has written several other books, including Galápagos Regained and The Last Witchfinder.  Many of his works deal with the role of religion in a rational society.  He has also edited three volumes of Nebula Award anthologies as well as the SFWA European Hall of Fame, the last with his wife, Kathryn Morrow.

James Morrow won the Nebula in 1989 for his Short Story “Bible Stories for Adults No. 17: The Deluge” and again in 1993 for the novella City of Truth. His novel Towing Jehovah and novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima were nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula.  Towing Jehovah and Only Begotten Daughter both received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and Shambling Towards Hiroshima won a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. A translation of Towing Jehovah received the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.

“The Fate of Nations” was originally published in Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction on May 14, 2003.  Morrow included it in his 2004 collection The Cat’s Pajamas & Other Stories and it was also reprinted by Paula Guran in Future Games.

Morrow produces a short, clever conspiracy story in “The Fate of Nations.” It’s written as a diary entry by Carlotta, who explains something she’s just learned that has surprised her.  Her husband has developed an avid interest in sports, cheering on all sorts of teams and watching games to the detriment of their relationship. When she asks him to attend a marriage counselor, she learns the truth about a conspiracy of all men with interstellar ramifications.

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Birthday Reviews: P.C. Hodgell’s “Knot and the Dragon”

Birthday Reviews: P.C. Hodgell’s “Knot and the Dragon”

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Cover by Tom Wood
Cover by Tom Wood

P.C. (Patricia Christine) Hodgell was born on March 16, 1951. She has written the eight volume Chronicles of the Kencyrath, which began with God Stalk and continued most recently with The Gates of Tagmeth in 2017. God Stalk was nominated for the Mythopoeic Award as was its follow-up, Dark of the Moon.

“Knot and the Dragon” was originally published in Esther Friesner’s Chicks and Balances, the most recent addition to her long-running Chicks in Chainmail series. The story has not been reprinted.

One of the common tropes in fairy tales is the step-daughter whose father has died, leaving her with an unloving mother. Hodgell uses this set up for “Knot and the Dragon,” with Knot living with her step-mother, Marta, and her two step-sisters. Everyone in town makes it clear to Knot that she doesn’t fit in with them.

Knot’s character comes across as a mixture of a Cinderella-type mixed with Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, for Knot is constantly striving to learn more about the world in which she finds herself, lamenting the death of her father, with whom she had things in common, but also accepting her current life.

Reports of nearby dragon attacks further bring out the town’s character, with the villagers firm in their belief that since they haven’t done anything wrong, there is no reason the dragon would punish them. Naturally enough, this conviction is enough (narratively) to bring a dragon down on their village, and they decide that Knot should essentially be a sacrifice to the dragon.

Rather than do as she was instructed, Knot seeks out the witch who lives nearby ever since she was forced from her home by the dragon. Although the witch’s first inclination is to flee with her son, who was accidentally turned into a pig during her last encounter with the dragon, the witch agrees to offer (dubious) help to Knot.

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Birthday Reviews: Rosel George Brown’s “David’s Daddy”

Birthday Reviews: Rosel George Brown’s “David’s Daddy”

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Fantastic Science Fiction Stories June 1960 Fantastic Science Fiction Stories June 1960-contents 2-small

Cover by Burt Shonberg

Rosel George Brown was born on March 15, 1926 and died on November 26, 1967. She participated in the Milford Writers Workshop and in 1959 was nominated for a Hugo for Best New Author (losing to No Award; Brian W. Aldiss and Kit Reed were also nominated that year!)

Brown wrote the novel Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue and a sequel that was published posthumously. She also collaborated with Keith Laumer on Earthblood. Many of her short stories were collected in A Handful of Time.

“David’s Daddy” was originally published in Fantastic Science Fiction Stories in the June 1960 issued, edited by Cele Goldsmith. Judith Merril included the story in The 6th Annual of the Year’s Best SF and Ellen Datlow reprinted it in Sci Fiction on July 2, 2003.

In many ways “David’s Daddy” is a sadly prescient story. It is set in an elementary school where Lillian is a new teacher, learning the ropes from Miss Fremen, who has been there for twenty years. In the process of sharing tips, Miss Fremen also mentions that one of her students, Jerome, seems to have a strange sort of mental telepathy.

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Birthday Reviews: Tad Williams’s “Go Ask Elric”

Birthday Reviews: Tad Williams’s “Go Ask Elric”

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Elric Tales of the White Wolf-small Elric Tales of the White Wolf-back-small

Cover by Brom

Tad Williams was born on March 14, 1957. He published the Memory, Sorry & Thorn fantasy series beginning in 1988 and followed up with the Otherland series in 1996 and Shadowmarch in 2004. Williams has also published a handful of stand alone novels, including Tailchaser’s Song and Caliban’s Hour. He collaborated with Nina Kiriki Hoffman on Child of an Ancient City.

Williams was a nominee for the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award in 1986 and the next year Tailchaser’s Song was a nominee for the William L. Crawford Award. Two of his novels have been nominated for Germany’s Phantastik Preis.

“Go Ask Elric” was published in 1994 in Elric: Tales of the White Wolf, a Michael Moorcock Festschrift which allowed other authors to play with Moorcock’s settings, characters, and themes. The story was translated into French for inclusion in an abridged version of the anthology as a whole. Williams later included it in his collection Rite: Short Work, which also included an essay Williams wrote as an introduction to Moorcock’s novel Gloriana.

Williams manages a successful homage to Michael Moorcock in “Go Ask Elric,” pulling in elements from Moorcock’s stories “Elric at the End of Time” as well as “the Vanishing Tower” and “Sailing to the Future.” Rather than focusing on Elric, William’s main character is Pogo Chapman, a young kid who worships Jimi Hendrix in the mid-1970s. During an acid trip, Pogo is sucked into the multiverse where he meets up with an imprisoned Elric and helps him escape. As Moorcock did in “Elric at the End of Time,” Williams switches between Elric’s point of view and Pogo’s, allowing the reader to see just how much Elric misreads the situations he is in.

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Birthday Reviews: Alastair Reynolds’s “A Spy in Europa”

Birthday Reviews: Alastair Reynolds’s “A Spy in Europa”

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Cover by SMS
Cover by SMS

Alastair Reynolds was born on March 13, 1966.

Reynolds has won the British SF Association Award for his novel Chasm City, the Seiun Award for a translation of his short story “Weather” and the Sidewise Award for his short story “The Fixation.” His various works have been nominated for the Italia Award, addition Seiun and BSFA nominations, the Philip K. Dick Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Hugo Award. His novella Diamond Dogs was adapted as a play by Althos Low at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago.

“A Spy in Europa” was originally published in issue #120 of Interzone, edited by David Pringle, in June 1997. Gardner Dozois reprinted the story the next year in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection and Reynolds included it in his 2006 collection Galactic North. Part of the Revelation Space series, the story was translated into Japanese in 1997.

Marius Vargovic is the titular agent in “A Spy in Europa.” With the four Galilean moons divided between two political entities, the Demarchy on Europa and Io and Gilgamesh Isis on Ganymede and Callisto, Vargovic is being sent to Callisto because a sleeper agent, Cholok, has become active and has information that he needs to retrieve.

Vargovic’s exact mission is never fully laid out, but it involves getting information from Cholok about a method of undermining the floating cities of Europa, and undergoing surgery to alter his body to allow him to breathe underwater, part of the cover he has given to the local authorities.

Europa is a world of bioengineering, and one of the subspecies are the Denizens, created for slave labor and now banished to portions of the Europan sea near heated vents. Little is known about the Denizens and Vargovic tries to supplement his mission by finding out about them, a goal made easier when his rendezvous point is changed and he finds himself chased by Europan agents until he is rescued by the Denizens.

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Birthday Reviews: Harry Harrison’s “The Mothballed Spaceship”

Birthday Reviews: Harry Harrison’s “The Mothballed Spaceship”

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Cover by John Sposato
Cover by John Sposato

Harry Harrison was born on March 12, 1925 and died on August 15, 2012.

He is perhaps best known for his Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero series. Other series include The Hammer and the Cross, Deathworld, Stars and Stripes, and Eden. Before publishing science fiction Harrison worked as a comic book artist, often collaborating with Wallt Wood. In 1950, he left comic art to begin writing and editing, although he occasionally did return, and wrote the Flash Gordon newspaper strip in the 50s and 60s.

Harrison wrote the novel Make Room, Make Room, which served as the basis for the Nebula Award winning film Soylent Green. In collaboration with John Holt, he won the Italia Award for The Hammer and the Cross and the entire trilogy was nominated for a Sidewise Award. He was the Guest of Honor at ConFiction, the 1990 Worldcon. Harrison was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004 and was named a SFWA Grand Master in 2009. In addition to Holt, he has also collaborated with Robert Sheckley, David Bischoff, Jack C. Haldeman II, Marvin Minsky, and others.

With Brian W. Aldiss, Harrison edited several anthologies and published SF Horizons, the first serious journal of science fiction criticism. Harrison often made use of Esperanto in his fiction.

“The Mothballed Spaceship” was written for Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, which Harry Harrison edited. It was later reprinted in Harrison’s collections The Best of Harry Harrison and Stainless Steel Visions. Set in the same universe as Harrison’s Deathworld trilogy, the story was included in an omnibus edition of that series published by BenBella Books in 2005 (earlier omnibus editions of the trilogy do not include this story). In 1985, it was translated into Croatian for publication in the magazine Sirius.

Harrison provides a puzzle story with “The Mothballed Spaceship.” A derelict space battleship has been found five millennia after it was abandoned, however its automatic defense systems are still active. Jason dinAlt, Kerk, and Meta have been hired to figure out how to get on board and take control of the ship, which has destroyed all other attempts to approach it, and are given thirty days to solve the problem.

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Birthday Reviews: F.M. Busby’s “Tundra Moss”

Birthday Reviews: F.M. Busby’s “Tundra Moss”

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Cover by Paul Swendsen
Cover by Paul Swendsen

F.M. (Francis Marion) Busby was born on March 11, 1921 and died on February 17, 2005. In 1960, Busby, along with his wife Elinor, Burnett Toskey, and Wally Weber, won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine for Cry of the Nameless, which was nominated a total of three times. In 1943, he joined the US Army and was assigned to work on the Alaska Communication System, which forms the background for his alternate history “Tundra Moss.” Busby served as the Vice President of SFWA from 1974-6. His novels include the Demu trilogy, the Rebel Dynasty books, and the Rissa Kerguelen series.

“Tundra Moss” appeared in the third volume of Gregory Benford’s What Might Have Been series of alternate history anthologies with the theme Alternate Wars. Its only reprints have been in subsequent editions of that book.

Set during World War II, the Alaska Communication System (ACS) outpost on Amchtika Island is an integral part of the United States war efforts in the Pacific theatre, made more important by the fact that in this timeline, the US is concentrating its power on the Japanese. They figure they can worry about the European theatre later, with the exception of a small force there led by Dwight Eisenhower.

While the story focuses on Buster Morgan’s activities in Amchitka, Busby also allows peeks into the actions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a band of Japanese saboteurs operating on Amchitka, and scouts in the area as the Japanese attempt to destroy the communications lines and the Americans are trying to relay orders which will support a major offensive far to the south.

Alternate history stories often teach the reader something about a relatively unknown and seemingly minor part of history, and the ACS certainly qualifies in the regard. The fact that Busby was stationed on Amchitka brings a level of detail and realism to the story which would have been difficult to match with just research. The disjointed nature of the story, jumping back and forth between the different characters, tends to work against it. It would have been stronger with fewer viewpoint characters and a more singular focus.

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Birthday Reviews: Theodore Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World”

Birthday Reviews: Theodore Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World”

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Cover by Richard Powers
Cover by Richard Powers

Theodore R. Cogswell was born on March 10, 1918 and died on February 3, 1987.

Cogswell received a Hugo nomination for his book PITFCS: The Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies, which has been described as a “fanzine for pros.” His story “The Wall Around the World” was nominated for a Retro Hugo Award for Best Novelette. In 2000, he was posthumously inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame.

“The Wall Around the World” first appeared in Beyond Fantasy Fiction, edited by Horace L. Gold, in the September 1953 issue.  It was included in the British version of the magazine the following year and Judith Merril included it in the anthology Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time. The story was included in, and provided the name for, Cogswell’s collection The Wall Around the World in 1962.  Subsequent reprintings occurred in Brian W. Aldiss’s Yet More Penguin Science Fiction and The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, in Harry Harrison’s Worlds of Wonder (a.k.a. Blast Off), and in Wizards, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. Asimov and Greenberg also included the story in The Great SF Stories #15 (1953) and Susan Morris titled the 1990 Cambridge University Press anthology after the story, The Wall Around the World and Other Science Fiction Stories.  Mike Ashley reprinted it in The Mammoth Book of Fantasy. The story was translation into German in 1963, Dutch in 1978, and Italian in 1987.

Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World” has some strong similarities to another story set in a world of magic.  Porgie is at a school for wizards and lives with his abusive aunt, uncle, and cousin because his aunt’s sibling was killed due to magic. Unfortunately, his teachers are not much more supportive than his family.

Porgie’s “problem” is that he has questions. Their world is surrounded by an insurmountable wall and Porgie wants to know what’s on the other side.  Unfortunately, the state of magic isn’t enough to allow him to fly over the wall and when he tries to figure out how, he only hears that essentially, magic is the only way, he shouldn’t ask questions, and their knowledge of magic gets stronger all the time as they focus on the approved texts. There is also the ominous hints that when Porgie’s father questioned the status quo, a supernatural being known as the Black Man did something to him.

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Birthday Reviews: Pat Murphy’s “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away”

Birthday Reviews: Pat Murphy’s “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away”

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Cover by J.K. Potter
Cover by J.K. Potter

Pat Murphy was born on March 9, 1955.

In 1988, Murphy won a Nebula Award for her story “Rachel in Love” and her novel The Falling Woman.  “Rachel in Love” was also nominated for a Hugo Award and won the Theodore Sturrgeon Memorial Award.  She won a World Fantasy Award for her novella “Bones,” and a Philip K. Dick Award for Points of Departure. Murphy’s There and Back Again, by Max Merriwell, a science fictional retelling of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, received the Seiun Award in 2002.

“On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away” was first published by Shawny McCarthy in the May 1985 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It was included by Murphy’s collection Points of Departure. The Women’s Press included the story in the anthology Letters from Home, which reprinted six stories each by Murphy, Karen Joy Fowler, and Pat Cadigan. The story appeared in Mike Resnick’s Future Earths: Under South American Skies.  It was translated for the German edition of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Murphy’s story “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away” is set Merida, Mexico where Gregorio sells hammocks to the tourists. He lives there because after his divorce, his wife remarried and he no longer feels welcome in his home village.  When a strange looking American tourist rejects both his advances and his sales pitch, he determines that he will both sell her a hammock and find his way into her bed.

He is only marginally successful, selling her an hammock, but only managing to talk to her. He learns that just as he is living in exile from his home village, having made a home for himself in Merida, but without roots, so, too, she is living in exile, looking forward to the day she is able to return to her home, which she claims is among the stars.  Although she makes him forget the details of the conversation, Gregorio manages to bring her some relief from her homesickness as she waits to be returned to the stars.

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Birthday Reviews: Paul Preuss’s “Rhea’s Time”

Birthday Reviews: Paul Preuss’s “Rhea’s Time”

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The Ultimate Dinosaur-small The Ultimate Dinosaur-back-small

Cover by Wayne D. Barlowe

Paul Preuss was born on March 7, 1942. Mostly a novelist, he has published the Venus Prime series and stand-alone novels Human Error, The Gates of Heaven, and Core. His short fiction output is more scarce, consisting of three short stories and a published excerpt from his novel Starfire. His novel Secret Passages was a nominee for the 1998 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

“Rhea’s Time” originally appeared in The Ultimate Dinosaur, edited by Robert Silverberg and Byron Priess, which was heavily illustrated by Wayne D. Barlowe and included a mixture of science fiction and factual articles about dinosaurs. The story has not been reprinted outside The Ultimate Dinosaur, but the anthology has seen two editions following its first publication.

Although originally published in a collection about dinosaurs, there are no saurians in “Rhea’s Time.” Preuss relates, with almost clinical precision, the story of a woman who has been in a coma for nearly a year, since shortly after a skiing accident. He tells the story from the point of view of Doctor Rowan, who has inherited her case after her original doctor gave up on her.

Despite his patient being completely unresponsive, Roan discovers that she actually is moving, albeit extremely slowly. Rowan begins employing unorthodox methods to establish contact with the woman, who he calls “Rhea.” Talking about her career as a biostratigrapher with her husband, Rowan is eventually able to come up with a rather intriguing explanation for what she’s going through.

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