Black Gate

When I began reading science fiction in the early 70’s, a handful of writers stood taller than any others, at least judging by the bookshelves at the thrift store around the corner from my middle school, where I spent my lunch money every day on used sf paperbacks. In those days the Kings of the Hill were Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury… and Arthur C. Clarke.

I read very little Clarke in those years, though; for me, Heinlein stood higher than anyone else, with Bradbury and Asimov right behind. Clarke was far in the rear; aside from a few short stories, the only thing of his that I read back in the day was Childhood’s End.

For the past decade or so, though, I’ve been correcting that failure by reading the Clarke novels that I neglected all those years ago, and I’ve greatly enjoyed them. Most recently I read one of his later works, Imperial Earth. I found it a problematic book, and it left me with more mixed feelings than I usually have after finishing a Clarke opus.

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The Pride of Chanur (DAW Books, January 1982). Cover by Michael Whelan

C.J. Cherryh has just lately announced the end of her writing career: For medical reasons, she can no longer manage a writing project. Sad news! This seems like a time to look back at what I consider one of her most memorable novels: The Pride of Chanur.

One of the common themes of science fiction is alien races; and a particularly interesting version of this theme is stories about first contact with aliens. By far the majority of such stories have human viewpoint characters, and show the nonhumans as alien and hard to figure out. This has been the case from H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon to memorable recent novels such as Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, or films such as Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life”). But some stories turn this around, giving the reader a nonhuman viewpoint character. And that’s what The Pride of Chanur does, and does ingeniously.

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I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a ten-year old. The center of my books is always the childhood of which I seem to have a nearly total recall.

John Bellairs

It’s perhaps fitting I follow up a years worth of writing about JRR Tolkien with something about John Bellairs‘ young adult stories. In response to reading Tolkien’s books, he wrote The Face in the Frost (1969). It’s a comic tale of two wizards, Prospero (not the one you’re thinking of) and Francis Bacon fighting to save the world from the machinations of the evil Melchius. When he wrote his next book, The House With a Clock in Its Walls (1973) as an adult supernatural thriller, he was encouraged to rewrite it for children. His publisher didn’t see enough of a market for the sort of adult fiction he had created.

Over the remaining eighteen years of his life, Bellairs created three similar series of stories and completed fourteen additional novels. House was the first of three tales about Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan who comes to live with his uncle in the small Michigan town of New Zebedee. The town is modelled on Bellair’s own hometown, Marshall, Michigan. The second series is four books featuring Anthony Monday and his friend, the elderly librarian Myra Eells. The first book, The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn is a straightforward mystery, but the later books introduce supernatural elements. I suspect both Bellairs and his publisher understood what his audience wanted. Finally, there is the eight book long Johnny Dixon and the Professor series, starting with The Curse of the Blue Figurine. Set in 1951, Johnny has been, following the death of his mother and his father being sent to Korea as a fighter pilot, to live with his grandparents in Massachusetts. As you can see, each series features a young boy, displaced from his home or isolated and befriended by a older adult who is willing to help him face whatever adventures come his way. Despite a similar framework, there’s a very different feel to each of the books.

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