Bewilderment by Richard Powers (W. W. Norton, November 1, 2022); Orbital by Samantha Harvey
(Grove Press, October 29, 2024), and Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber, April 4, 2024)
I just finished Richard Powers’ Bewilderment, from 2021. It’s a really intriguing and powerful novel, that I argued with at times, but still loved. It’s got a great ending, tremendously moving.
And it is absolutely science fiction. Way more so than most SF books these days, even hard SF. But, somehow, it didn’t even get a sniff at either the Nebula or Hugo shortlist.
Mind you, I didn’t read it until now, so I’m part of the problem. And, to be fair, both Ian Mond and Paul di Filippo reviewed it for Locus, so it wasn’t ignored.
An Earthman on Venus (Avon, 1950). Cover by Raymond Johnson
Ralph Milne Farley (1887 – 1963) was a pseudonym for Roger Sherman Hoar. Hoar was a Massachusetts senator and an attorney general, so I can understand his use of a pseudonym to write his SF stories under, but I can’t imagine why he’d choose one just as long and awkward as his real name, and even less memorable.
At any rate, Farley was friends with Edgar Rice Burroughs and wrote his own series of Sword & Planet adventures sometimes called the Radioseries, since most of the books featured the term radio in their titles.
Tau Zero (Millennium/Gollancz SF Masterworks, February 2006). Cover by Dominic Harman
Science fiction — what is it, really? What elements place a story firmly in the genre? For any requirement that you can think of, there is probably a great sf story that violates it, and rather than cobble together some dictionary-ready definition, it’s easier to just think of particular books that you would hand to someone unacquainted with the genre with the words, “Here — read this; this is science fiction!”
Everyone would have their own choices for such a list, of course, and those choices would amount to your de facto definition. For me, some of those books would be Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, and Man Plus by Frederik Pohl, but the very first book on my list would be Poul Anderson’s 1970 novel Tau Zero. Why? What does this book have that makes it a quintessential work of science fiction?
Maybe it’s this — it’s a grand voyage, a brave excursion into the great out there, and it also has a grand perspective shift, like a camera pulling back in a movie, a maneuver that radically alters everything that you had previously thought about the story, something that’s not a minor adjustment, but a move that completely explodes the frame. You think the story is this, but it’s really that, you think you’re here, but you’re really there; the here where you thought you were turns out to be the tiniest corner of there, a there that is larger and stranger and more dizzying than you ever could have originally imagined. (In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Peter Nicholls calls this kind of maneuver a “conceptual breakthrough.”)
Tau Zero begins as a straightforward story of an interstellar voyage, but it ends as far away from that prosaic beginning (prosaic by the standards of science fiction, I mean) as it is possible to imagine. Farther than that, really, and I think that’s the whole point.
Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and the FoundationTrilogy. Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column. Arthur C. Clarke’s first three novels. The entire Conan saga from Robert E. Howard. The International Fantasy Award winner City by Clifford D. Simak. The Hugo Best Novel winner They’d Rather Be Right from Mack Clifton and Frank Riley. Books by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, A. E. van Vogt, C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl, Jack Williamson, Andre Norton, and James Gunn.
Those would be a solid core of any collection of vintage f&sf. Yet those books and dozens of others appeared in a few years from just one small publisher: Gnome Press.
Jason Waltz kicked off season two of his 24? in 42 podcast interviews with your very own Monday morning columnist. The prior installment was with Malazan’s Ian C. Esslemont, so I’m in pretty good company here.
It should not surprise you that I was all over the place, covering Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Columbo, books on writing and screenwriting, Encyclopedia Brown, the Civil War, Tolkien, The Constitutional Convention of 1787, Lawrence Block, Steven Hockensmith, Norbert Davis, and much more.
State of Paradise (Picador paperback reprint, July 8, 2025). Cover art: detail from Tiger in a Tropical Storm by Henri Rousseau, 1891
When I was a kid there was a public service announcement on TV that went something like “Attention: Aliens. You are required by law to report by January 31st.” This was because of the Alien Act of 1940, otherwise known as the Smith Act. Basically, the legislation made it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and provided for a tracking system of non-citizens who, in the context of Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe and its then alliance with the Soviet Union, were potential suspects of espionage and sabotage. (Fun fact: prosecutions for advocating overthrow of the government have been ruled as unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment, in case you were wondering how any nitwit on social media can mouth off about doing just that.)
But as I didn’t know anything about this, the announcement always conjured an image of big headed, bug-eyed tentacled Martians registering at the local post office. Which I thought pretty funny. One thing I’ve learned over the years, and particularly these days, is that much of what adults say in all seriousness is often funny, but not in a “ha ha” way. More in a Jean Paul Sartre absurdist kind of way.
Of Men and Monsters, by William Tenn
(Ballantine Books, December 1975). Cover by Boris Vallejo
After posting about The Borrowers by British author Mary Norton (1903 -1992) last week, several people mentioned other books and movies with similar kinds of themes — little people living in the houses of big people. I thought I might take another post to discuss a few other examples from my own book collection.
First up is series by American author John Peterson (1924 – 2002). The first one was just called The Littles and was published in 1967, 15 years after The Borrowers (1952). The Littles live much like the “borrowers. They look human except for having tails. (In films they apparently look very mouselike but that’s not the case in the books.)
Dilvish, the Damned (Del Rey, November 1982). Cover by Michael Herring
Roger Zelazny was unquestionably one of the great American fantasists of the 20th century. That’s not to say he was perfect. His woman characters were often 2-dimensional, and he paired an unwillingness to work with an outline (“Trust your demon” was his motto) with a fondness for projects that really needed an outline.
But perfection is boring. Zelazny rarely is. Much of Zelazny’s work is on my always-reread list, anyway. He had a nifty way of putting things, and in describing the Amberseries he brilliantly expressed the kind of fiction I love best and have often tried to write: “philosophic romance, shot through with elements of horror and morbidity.” Philoromhorrmorbpunk. That’s my genre. Or you could just say sword-and-sorcery.
Some people doubt whether Zelazny counts as a sword-and-sorcery writer, but he didn’t doubt it. He described not only the Corwin novels but also big chunks of Lord of Light as sword-and-sorcery. Some people think that a story only counts as S&S if it has a Clonan at its center, but as far as I’m concerned, if you’ve got an outsider hero on a personal mission in a landscape of magical adventure, and there are swords or other edged weapons, you’ve got sword-and-sorcery.
The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield, by Mary Norton
(Odyssey/Harcourt, January 1998). Covers by Marla Frazee
I’ve done four posts in a row on Edgar Rice Burroughs, with more to come. But right now it’s time for a change of pace.
It’s going to be a big change for this particular post. It’s about The Borrowers. In my late teens, after I learned Andre Norton was a woman, someone told me she’d written books under her own name of Mary Norton, and that one was called The Borrowers. Turns out this wasn’t true; her original name was Alice Mary Norton, although she changed it legally to Andre Alice Norton in 1934. This was in the late 1970s, pre-internet, and I believed Andre Norton wrote The Borrowers for several years. It added to her charm for a while because I’d read The Borrowers when I was 11 or 12 and adored it.
The Borrowers may seem pretty far afield from Sword & Planet fiction, but the story of little people living in human houses and borrowing things from them, which would explain why things got “lost,” inspired my imagination and I invented many stories of myself shrunk down to that size and adventuring. After I wrote Swords of Talera, my first S&P novel, I toyed with the idea of writing an S&P story with borrower size characters but never did. Many many years later I discovered a graphic novel from DC called Sword of the Atom, which somewhat scratched that itch for me. (More on that later.)
Robert E. Howard in a photo sent to H.P. Lovecraft in 1931,
and Bran Mak Morn: The Last King (Del Rey, May 31, 2005)
January 22, 2025 was the 119th birthday of Robert E. Howard, my favorite author. The works of this great author resonate with countless fans to this day.
“Worms of the Earth” is my favorite story by Robert E. Howard. It features Bran Mak Morn, the last king of the Picts.
Howard was fascinated with Picts, his conception of whom was largely mythological, with splashes of real world history. The Picts in his stories span Kull, Conan, Bran, James Allison, and more.
