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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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June Short Story Roundup

June Short Story Roundup

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oie_534842mahYRSEFIt’s a short roundup this month, with only Swords and Sorcery Magazine from the pack of usual suspects. There is a special treat, though, making up for the lack of magazine stories. Multi-talented Robert Zoltan has created another wonderful audio adventure with his series duo, Dareon Vin and Blue.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #76 has the publications’s usual two stories. One I don’t like, one I sort of like. I’m sorry, but I just can’t like everything.

The opening story, “Remnants” by Lynn Rushlau, is the one I don’t like. Returning from a night of revelry at the Festival of Liberation, Callery hears a voice in her home and runs screaming. Over the next week, she begins to see ghosts, lots of ghosts.

These aren’t human ghosts, but those of the Fairies who once ruled over all humankind. The best single part of the story is the description of that era.

Her hand lingered over the rebel costume. She could use some of the courage of her ancestors. They’d risen up three centuries ago and destroyed the fairies who’d kept humankind enslaved for untold millennia. Literally untold. Human history survived as rumor and tall tales. Nothing written went back before the Rising.

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With a (Black) Gat: Frederick Nebel’s Donahue

With a (Black) Gat: Frederick Nebel’s Donahue

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BlackMask_August1931(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Carroll John Daly’s action-packed adventures of Race Williams sold more copies of Black Mask than any other author’s stories. But editor Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw, who was willing to hold his nose and put Williams on the cover, considered the far more literate Dashiell Hammett to be the magazine’s cornerstone.

In January of 1930, the final installment of The Maltese Falcon appeared in Black Mask. A Continental Op story followed in February, then the next three months saw the stories that would become The Glass Key. But at the peak of his pulp abilities, Hammett left the genre. He was interested in the easy money of Hollywood and the better paying ‘slick’ magazines. He bid adieu to Black Mask in November of 1930.

Shaw had lost his best writer. The irreplaceable Hammett had to be replaced. He turned to Frederick Nebel, whose MacBride and Kennedy stories had appeared over a dozen times. That November issue of Black Mask included the thirty-sixth and final Continental Op story, “Death and Company.” It also featured “Rough Justice,” the first tale of Donahue of the Inter-State agency.

After the phenomenal success of The Maltese Falcon, Shaw had urged Hammett to write more stories featuring Sam Spade. Dash wasn’t interested and not only refused, but he shortly thereafter left the magazine forever. Though, he did write three more Spade stories in 1932 for the slicks. Shaw tagged the reliable Nebel to provide Black Mask readers with a tough private eye to replace the immensely popular Continental Op. The writer most certainly did that.

In “Rough Justice,” the Irish New York City PI, a former cop bounced from the force for being too honest, finds himself in sweltering St. Louis. In August of 1931 Donahue would return to the Arch City in “Spare the Rod.” In between, Nebel wrote a three-story serial of connected adventures that appeared in consecutive issues.

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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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Birthday Reviews: James P. Killus’s “Flower of the Void”

Birthday Reviews: James P. Killus’s “Flower of the Void”

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Cover by H. Ed Cox
Cover by H. Ed Cox

James P. Killus was born on June 1, 1950 and died on September 23, 2008.

Killus is a chemist who began publishing science fiction in 1981 with “Son of ETAOIN SHRDLU,” written with Sharon N. Farber, Susanna Jacobson, and Dave Stout. He went on to write nearly two dozen stories, most of them hard science fiction, and published the novels Book of Shadows and Sunsmoke in the mid 1980s.

Killus sold “Flower of the Void” to Ian Randal Strock for publication in issue 7 of Artemis, which appeared in Summer of 2002. The story has not been reprinted.

“Flower of the Void” pushes the definition of a story. It has no real plot or characters, instead focusing on the process by which a space probe that starts out as nanomachines is launched and completes its mission to Eridani Epsilon.

The story is entirely devoid of any emotion, presenting an analytical view of millions of nanoprobes which are launched from the moon and try to make their way through the solar system, with fewer and fewer succeeding even as the probes use atoms they encounter in their travels to expand upon themselves and permit themselves to continue to carry on their mission.

One of the things the story does make clear is that space exploration is a long, slow process, often ending with a very brief period of productivity. Killus’s flowers travel for more than a century, only to spend two months in the star system that was its target. This can be compared to the current New Horizons mission, which spent a decade traveling from Earth to Pluto, only to spend a few hours traversing that system (and will similarly have a limited time during its flyby of 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019). However, limited time in system doesn’t equate to inability to provide massive amounts of data.

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Birthday Reviews: Neil R. Jones’s “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings”

Birthday Reviews: Neil R. Jones’s “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings”

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Cover by A. Drake
Cover by A. Drake

Neil R. Jones was born on May 29, 1909 and died on February 15, 1988.

Jones was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 1988 at Nolacon II. Jones published more than twenty story in his long-running Professor Jameson series, which were eventually collected in five volumes. A second series, the Durna Rangue stories, were published concurrently with the Jameson tales. Jones may have been the first author to use the word “astronaut” in fiction in his debut story, “The Death’s Head Meteor.”

Malcolm Reiss purchased “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings” for publication in the Fall 1940 issue of Planet Stories. A decade later, Donald A. Wollheim included it in his anthology Flight Into Space. It was selected for inclusion in American Science Fiction #6 in 1952. In 1975, Michael Ashley chose “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings” to represent Neil R. Jones’s career in The History of the Science Fiction Magazine: Volume 2: 1936-1945. It was also translated into German and published in 1957 in Utopia Science Fiction Magazin #6 and again in 1973 in Science-Fiction Stories 21, edited by Walter Spiegl.

The protagonist of Jones’s “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings” is atypical in science fiction. Among the first things Jones reveals about Jasper Jezzan is that he was on the first expedition to Mars, had traveled throughout the explored system, and was now on the first expedition to Saturn. The thing that sets Jezzan apart from so many other characters in science fiction is that when the story begins, he is more than 70 years old.

Shortly after beginning to traverse Saturn’s rings, the ship Jezzan is on finds itself facing a strange white cloud. Jezzan is separated from the rest of the crew and when he rejoins them, he discovers that the white cloud has killed everyone it could get to. Jezzan must learn how to avoid the strange creature that lives in Saturn’s rings and live as a futuristic Robinson Crusoe, making a home for himself first aboard his ship and later inside a hollow rock in Saturn’s rings.

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The Late May Fantasy Magazine Rack

The Late May Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Analog Science Fiction Science Fact May June 2018-small Apex May 2018-small The Dark magazine May 2018-small Lightspeed May 2018-small
Asimov's Science Fiction May June 2018-small Clarkesworld May 2018-small The Digest Enthusiast 8-small Nightmare May 2018-small

The back half of May is filled with great print magazines, including the latest Analog, with the concluding installment of our very own Derek Künsken’s debut novel The Quantum Magician. Asimov’s SF has new novellas from two sets of collaborators, Rick Wilber & Alan Smale, and David Gerrold & Ctein, plus lots of shorter fiction. And last but not least, just before we went to press I received a copy of the June issue of The Digest Enthusiast, a handsome magazine with plenty of reviews, articles and artwork of interest to anyone who collects vintage fiction magazines from the mid-20th Century and later.

All told it’s a star-studded crop of fresh reading, and no mistake. The magazines above include brand new stories from Nancy Kress, Paul Park, Jane Lindskold (twice!), Nalo Hopkinson, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Wil McCarthy, Mary Soon Lee, William Ledbetter, Stephen L. Burns, Sam J. Miller, Robert Reed, Marissa Lingen, Cherie Priest, Rich Larson, Sue Burke, Marc Laidlaw, Bo Balder, A Que, Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty, Michael F. Flynn, Michael Wehunt, and plenty more.

Here’s the complete list of magazines that won my attention in late May (links will bring you to magazine websites).

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Birthday Reviews: Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Impact Parameter”

Birthday Reviews: Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Impact Parameter”

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Cover by E.T. Steadman
Cover by E.T. Steadman

Geoffrey A. Landis was born on May 28, 1955.

Landis won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1990 for “Ripples in the Dirac Sea,” which was also nominated for a Hugo Award. He went on two win Hugo Awards for his short stories “A Walk in the Sun” and “Falling onto Mars.” His story “The Sultan of the Clouds” received the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 2011. Landis has also won the Rhysling Award for his poems “Christmas (after we got time machines)” and “Search” as well as a Dwarf Star Award for his poem “Fireflies.” In 2014, Landis received the Robert A. Heinlein Award from the Heinlein Society.

In addition to writing science fiction, Landis works as a scientist for NASA, specifically working on ways to improve solar cells and photovoltaics. In this capacity Landis was part of the Mars Pathfinder team, working to make sure that planetary dust was kept off the solar arrays.

“Impact Parameter” was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, edited by Gardner Dozois, in the August 1992 issue. It was translated into German for an appearance in the magazine’s German language edition in 1994. Landis included it as the title story in his collection Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities published by Golden Gryphon in 2001.

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, has got to be one of the most disheartening investigations for a scientist. In the decades the search has been occurring, nothing conclusive has been discovered. Landis alludes to this in “Impact Parameter” when Ben notes how many of his fellow astronomers have turned their attention to other fields. A strange anomaly he notices when trying to calibrate a telescope leads him to the discovery of an Einstein lens and comparing notes with other astronomers leads them to realize that a black hole is on target to strike Earth within only a few days.

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Birthday Reviews: Harlan Ellison’s “Pennies, Off a Dead Man’s Eyes”

Birthday Reviews: Harlan Ellison’s “Pennies, Off a Dead Man’s Eyes”

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Galaxy Science Fiction November 1969-small Galaxy Science Fiction November 1969 back cover-small

Cover by Jack Gaughan

Harlan Ellison was born on May 27, 1934.

Ellison has received 8 Hugo Awards, beginning with his short story “’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” His other Hugo Award winners include the short stories “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” “The Deathbird,” “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W,” “Jeffty is Five,” and “Paladin of the Lost Hour.” His screenplay for the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever” also earned him a Hugo. Ellison has also won four Nebula Awards for his stories “’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” “A Boy and His Dog,” “Jeffty is Five,” and “How Interesting: A Tiny Man.” SFWA has also given him the Bradbury Award for 2000x, in collaboration with Yuri Rasovsky and Warren Dewey. He has also won the World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award (5 times), British Fantasy Award, British SF Association Award, the Jupiter Award (twice), the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, and has three Worldcon Special Convention Awards.

LASFS presented Ellison with the Forry Award in 1970. He received a Milford Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1986, a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, an International Horror Guild Living Legend Award in 1995 and he received a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award the following year. He won the Gallun Award from I-Con in 1997. Ellison was named a World Horror Grandmaster in 2000. SFWA named him a Grand Master in 2006. In 2011, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and received the Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was a Worldcon Guest of Honor at IguanaCon II in 1978 and a World Horror Con Guest of Honor in 2005.

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