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Birthday Reviews: Lynn Abbey’s “In the Bleak Midwinter”

Birthday Reviews: Lynn Abbey’s “In the Bleak Midwinter”

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Cover by Tony DiTerlizzi
Cover by Tony DiTerlizzi

Lynn Abbey was born on September 18, 1948.

Abbey was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1980 following the publication of her first novel, Daughter of the Bright Moon, and a story in the first Thieves’ World anthology. Abbey was married to Robert Lynn Asprin, the creator and editor of Thieves’ World from 1982 until 1993, during which time she became his co-editor on the series. Abbey attempted to revive the series with the novel Sanctuary in 2002, following up with two additional anthologies. In addition to her own original novels, Abbey also wrote several novels in TSR’s Forgotten Realms and Dark Sun settings.

“In the Bleak Midwinter” was originally published in issue 242 of Dragon in December 1997, when the magazine was being edited by David Gross. It has not been reprinted, but is connected to Abbey’s novel The Simbul’s Gift.

“In the Bleak Midwinter” is set in TSR’s Forgotten Realms milieu, although not intrusively so. Ignoring a few minor references to locations, it could as easily have been set anywhere. In the beginning the story seems to focus on Caddo and Burr, an innkeeper and a dwarf who works for him. The two are staffing the bustling tavern during a raging blizzard, but Burr is well aware that once the blizzard hits is height he will feel a compulsion to leave the safety of the building and go in search of an ice cave that only forms under certain conditions. When a stranger enters the tavern, Burr learns that she is in search of the same cavern and he offers to help her, in return for which he only wants one item that is in the cave.

Abbey subverts the standards of this type of story by having Rekka decline the dwarf’s offer, leaving him behind to explore the cave on her own. Through the course of the story, Abbey not only explores a little of Rekka’s past, noting that she has acquired eternal life and is using her time to track down magical items for her personal collection, although little else interests her, as well as the ancient history of the magician Ffellsil, who has been buried in the cave for the past two millennia, and the lost civilization of Netheril to which he belonged.

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Birthday Reviews: Lisa Tuttle’s “Tir Nan Og”

Birthday Reviews: Lisa Tuttle’s “Tir Nan Og”

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Cover by Gary A. Lippincott
Cover by Gary A. Lippincott

Lisa Tuttle was born on September 16, 1952.

Lisa Tuttle won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1974. In 1982, she was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “The Bone Flute.” Unhappy with what she saw as an orchestrated campaign to sway the voters by one of the other nominees, Tuttle announced that she was pulling the story from consideration. Nevertheless, “The Bone Flute” was announced as the winner of the Nebula Award and Tuttle refused to accept it. She went on to win the BSFA Award in 1989 for her short story “In Translation.” In 2007, she won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Intermediate Form for “Closet Dreams” and in 2012 sue won the 2012 Imaginaire award for best translated story.

Tuttle published “Tir Nan Og” in the January 1999 issue of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Gordon van Gelder. Stephen Jones included the story in the anthology The Mammoth Book of New Terror in 2004.

“Tir Nan Og” is the story of a woman “of a certain age” who has noticed that her close friends have become cat people, each of them has adopted a feline companion and has given up on male companionship. Concerned about her own situation, she is having an affair with a married man and thinks that if he leaves her she may not be able to interest another man in a relationship. She goes to speak to her friends about their own apparent acceptance of celibacy.

Although her friends are less than forthcoming, which will eventually be her downfall, it is clear to the reader what they are trying to tell her. All she gets out of it is that if she takes her boyfriend to the mountains, she should make him drink from a specific spring. Naturally, without understanding why her friends are suggesting this, things go horrendously wrong for her, although she has a sort of closure that resolves her issue.

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Birthday Reviews: Howard Waldrop’s “Kindermarchen”

Birthday Reviews: Howard Waldrop’s “Kindermarchen”

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Cover by Brian Lei
Cover by Brian Lei

Howard Waldrop was born on September 15, 1946.

Waldrop won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction for his story “The Ugly Chicken” in 1981. His chapbook A Dozen Tough Jobs won the Readercon Award for Short Work in 1990. Waldrop’s work has also been recognized with nominations for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, British SF Association Award, Philip K. Dick Award, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Sidewise Award, the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award, and the coveted Balrog Award.

Waldrop first published “Kindermarchen” on Lou Antonelli’s website, Sentinel Science Fiction in January 2007. Later that year, Waldrop reprinted the story in his collection Horse of a Different Color: Stories.

“Kindermarchen” is a brief story that is based on the German term for a fairy tale, Märchen. It is also a retelling of the story of Hansel and Gretel. In Waldrop’s version, Hansel and Gretel’s woodchopper father and their stepmother live in a small village in a kingdom ruled by ogres. With a war raging between their kingdom and the neighboring ogrish kingdom, a decision has been made to evacuate children when the war comes too close. The stepmother is on the committee to decide which local children should be evacuated when the time comes.

The explanation for the stepmother’s committee doesn’t quite add up, although the father accepts it and explains it to his children. When his children are selected to evacuate, although it is clear that the decision originated from afar, there is nothing the father or stepmother can do to stop the evacuation. Hansel suggests that they leave a trail of breadcrumbs to follow back to the village without considering what might happen when they return.

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Birthday Reviews: Stanisław Lem’s “Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth”

Birthday Reviews: Stanisław Lem’s “Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth”

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Cover by Dominic Emile Harman
Cover by Dominic Emile Harman

Stanisław Lem was born on September 12, 1921 and died on March 27, 2006.

Polish author Stanisław Lem won the Seiun Award in 1977 for his short story “Rozprawa” and the Geffen Award for the novel Solaris, which was thrice adapted for film, first in 1968 for Soviet television by Lidiya Ishimbaeva and Boris Nirenburg, second by Andrei Tarkovsky in the Soviet Union in 1972, and finally by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. Lem has also received the City of Krakow’s Prize in Literature, several prizes from the Polish government during the Communist period, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the Franz Kafka Prize, and was made a member of the Order of the White Eagle. In 1973 Lem was given an honorary membership in SFWA, but once he was eligible for a regular membership, the bylaws of the organization required the honorary membership to be rescinded, which caused an uproar among some members.

“Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth,” which was written as Ostatnia Podroz Ijona Tichego, was published in English in August 1999 in Altair #4, without a previous Polish publication. It was translated by a team comprised of Kurt von Trojan, Robert N. Stephenson, and Ela Wroaebel. The magazine was edited by Andrew Collings, Jim Deed, and Robert N. Stephenson. The story was later translated into German as “Ijon Tichys letzte Reise” and published by Wolfgang Jeschke in the anthology Reptilienliebe.

Stanisław Lem’s Ijon Tichy stories are not hard science fiction, but rather social satire, usually showing the title character traveling to distant planets and observing and commenting on their customs, which are often strangely reminiscent of human custom. Most of the stories have been collected in Lem’s book The Star Diaries. “Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth” has a recursive component in that Tichy refers to his own book The Star Diaries as a narrative of his travels and implies that the story he is currently relating will appear in a future edition of the book.

Tichy’s set up for the story is that he has been exploring the Cassiopeia constellation for the past six years (although his references to “Cassiopeia’s eight supermoon” indicates that Lem isn’t aware of, or care about, the difference between a constellation and a planetary system) and is returning to Earth for the first time in several years. Upon his arrival, he notices that men and women seem to have swapped traditional attire, with men wearing skirts and women wearing pants. Furthermore, it seems to him that people are being chased through the streets by people wielding butterfly nets. He seeks out someone to explain the cultural changes to him.

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Birthday Reviews: Ray Vukcevich’s “Ornamental Animals”

Birthday Reviews: Ray Vukcevich’s “Ornamental Animals”

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Cover by Timothy Caldwell and Rick Lieder
Cover by Timothy Caldwell and Rick Lieder

Ray Vukcevich was born on September 11, 1946.

Vukcevich was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 2002 for his collection Meet Me in the Moon Room. His novelette “The Wages of Syntax” was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2004. Vukcevich has published two collections of his own short stories, the novel The Man of Maybe Half-A-Dozen Faces, and a short anthology that collected one of his short stories and one of Kelly Link’s short stories that was given away at a World Horror Convention.

“Ornamental Animals” was published in the fifteenth issue of Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine sometime early in 1993. By the time this issue was published, Pulphouse had backed away from the weekly schedule it had initially set for itself (and never achieved) and claimed to be a monthly magazine, although only two issues appeared in 1993. The story has never been reprinted.

In “Ornamental Animals,” Amy Grindle is an aspiring model who has a habit of going through catalogs and magazines she appears in and clipping photos of herself from the pages, although her face has yet to be shown in any of them. On a whim, as she went through the catalog, Amy decided to purchase a set of two genetically modified cats, although she really knew very little about them or the company that makes them. Because of that, she was quite surprised when she eventually received her pair of “Fire Cats.”

Although Fire Cats look more or less like non-genetically engineered cats, they do have some differences, which Amy learns about quite quickly, partly due to the cats’ response to her and partly because once she received them she realized she should read the manual on their care and feeding. She quickly learns that although the cats are alive, they don’t offer any of the traditional benefits of pets. They are born without joints, except in their jaws, and therefore can’t move and must be fed manually. Even more intriguing is the talent that gives them their name. When certain conditions are met, the cat’s heads explode in flame, although the cats themselves are all right.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Erle Stanley Gardner’s “The Shrieking Skeleton”

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Erle Stanley Gardner’s “The Shrieking Skeleton”

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Gat_GardnerSkeletonEven the best-selling Erle Stanley Gardner struggled to break into the better markets early in his career. Of these early days, Gardner said, “I wrote the worst stories that ever hit New York City. I have the word of an editor for that, and he hadn’t seen the worst stories because the worst ones I wrote under a pen name.”

Gardner sold his first two stories to Breezy Stories and they were published in 1921. Then we have this bit of fun…

In 1923, under the name of Charles M. Green, he submitted a novelette, “The Shrieking Skeleton” to The Black Mask (‘The’ was dropped for the May, 1927 issue). Gardner said that “It was a major opus as far as I was concerned, and looking back on it, I guess it must have been a dilly.” George Sutton was the editor at this time. While Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw is given credit for making Black Mask the leading institution of the hardboiled school, Sutton published the first detective stories of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett and was at the helm when Race Williams and The Continental Op debuted. He played a big part in the development of the genre.

Upon receipt of the story, somebody thought it was so bad, they sent it on to circulation editor Phil Cody (who would succeed Sutton as editor). They told him it was to be the lead story and they wanted a publicity campaign to promote it. Oh, those scamps!

Cody blew his top and sent it back to the editorial department. He wrote that the story gave him a pain in his neck and it was pretty near the last word in childishness. The characters talked like dictionaries and the so-called plot had whiskers on it like unto Spanish moss hanging from a live oak in a Louisiana bayou (???). He foresaw the end from the beginning and the story was puerile, trite, obvious and unnatural. He begged that the story not be used.

The joke having succeeded, the story was sent back to Gardner with the usual rejection slip (which Gardner was receiving by the dozens). The slip stated that just because the story was returned, it did not necessarily imply that there was any lack of literary merit, it simply did not fit in the schedule. Gardner (who later became good friends with Cody) knows this because Cody’s note was inadvertently included with the returned manuscript.

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Birthday Reviews: Homer Eon Flint’s “The Nth Man”

Birthday Reviews: Homer Eon Flint’s “The Nth Man”

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Cover by Frank R. Paul
Cover by Frank R. Paul

Homer Eon Flint was born Homer Eon Flindt on September 9, 1889 and died on March 27, 1924 under suspicious circumstances.

Flint’s career as a speculative fiction author ran from 1918 until his death in 1924, during which time he collaborated with Austin Hall. The majority of his work appeared in All Story and Argosy All Story, which were published by Munsey. Flint’s death is a mystery that remains unsolved. He was killed when a car he was driving in ran over a cliff. Although there have been claims that Flint stole the car at gunpoint with the intent to commit a bank robbery, that charge was put forward by a gangster, E.L. Handley, several years later. There is no evidence that Flint was involved with anything illegal, and may have found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although “The Nth Man” was originally sold to the Munsey Corporation in 1920, it didn’t appear until after Flint’s death when the rights had been re-sold to Hugo Gernsback and it was published in the April 1928 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly. It disappeared and wasn’t reprinted until 2015 when it was included in the Wildside Press e-anthology The 26th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack.

Flint opens the story with six lengthy vignettes describing miracles that occurred between 1920 and 1933, promising that they were linked in some way, but not offering any explanation for how they occurred. These instances range from the rescue of a nine-year old girl drowning after falling off a cliff to the transportation of a freighter from the middle of a typhoon to the Australian desert, to the disappearance of a bank in Hamburg.

Once he relates all of these miracles, which takes about half of the story, he begins to refocus his tale on the specifics, which tie the various vignettes together. The key vignette to our understanding is the one set in 1920, in which a young Bert Forsburgh meets a young Florence Neil. Fosburgh is the son of a wealthy businessman, Daly Fosburgh, who by the time the main story is set is prepared to economically take over the United States with his son, now a young adult, set to be his figurehead governmental leader.

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Birthday Reviews: Linda D. Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood”

Birthday Reviews: Linda D. Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood”

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Cover by Kandis Eliot
Cover by Kandis Eliot

Linda D. Addison was born on September 8, 1952.

Addison has won the Bram Stoker Award four times for her poetry collections, becoming the first African-American to win. She won her first Stoker for Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes in 2002. In 2008 she won for Being Full of Light, Insubstantial. Her collection How to Recognize the Demon Has Become Your Friend won in 2012, and her final award in 2014 came for her collaborative collection Four Elements, with Marge Simon, Rain Graves, and Charlee Jacob. She has also collaborated with Beecher Smith and Stephen M. Wilson.

“Little Red in the Hood” appeared in issue 23 of Tomorrow Speculative Fiction in November 1996, edited by Algis Budrys. The following year Addison included it in her collection Animated Objects, which included six stories and several poems. Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg also selected the story for the anthology 100 Hilarious Little Howlers. Its most recent publication was in the e-book anthology Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention, edited by Peggy Rae Sapienza, Jean Marie Ward, Bill Campbell, and Sam Lubell for the 2014 World Fantasy Con in Washington, DC.

Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood” is barely more than a vignette. It tells the story of fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters when they aren’t on duty. Little Red is relaxing at the end of the day in a bar, throwing back a double vodka. The Big Bad Wolf is sitting on the other side of the bar. When Red complains about having to be eaten daily, the wolf points out that he has to essentially have a Caesarian section each day when they retrieve Red after the story ends.

Other characters chime in with their concerns. As traditional characters they worry that the advent of the Power Rangers will knock them out of their roles, although the Red points out that the coming of the Purple People Eater didn’t impact them. The story ends in media res when Red and the Wolf are summoned because someone is reading their story to their child.

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Birthday Reviews: Ralph Robin’s “Inefficiency Expert”

Birthday Reviews: Ralph Robin’s “Inefficiency Expert”

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Cover by Chesley Bonestell

Cover by Chesley Bonestell

Ralph Robin was born on September 7, 1914 and died in December 1983.

Robin worked as a chemist for the National Bureau of Standards as well as working as a Professor of English at American University in Washington. In 1976 he received the Christopher Morley Award from the Poetry Society of America. His career as a science fiction author spanned 1936 to 1953, during which time he published a dozen stories in a variety of magazines.

“Inefficiency Expert” was originally published in the March 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas. Two years later it was translated into Italian as “Esperto di inefficienza” for publication in Fantascienza #5, edited by Livio Garzanti. It has never been reprinted in English.

Robin has created a society in which people have inhabited two planets, Leu and Tagr. Tagr is the more structured, authoritarian planet while Leu is more easy going, but at the same time introverted. The only citizens of Leu who will generally talk to foreigners are those who hold the title politeman, such as Vorasel. When Tagrian Transportation Executive Dalet-Fraygo-Tapandri-Mil finds himself stranded on Leu while his spaceship is being repaired, politeman Vorasel is assigned to communicate with him, which also results in Vorasel taking Dalet on a tour of some cultural points in Leu.

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