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Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

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Cover for Born with the Dead by Ron Walotsky
Cover for The Saliva Tree by Lee Edwards

Tor Double #3 was originally published in December 1988.  The two stories included are Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with Les Edwards providing the cover art for The Saliva Tree and Ron Walotsky painting the cover for Born of the Dead.

The Saliva Tree was originally published in F&SF in September, 1965. It won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Seiun Award.

Set in the mid-1890s, The Saliva tree is the story of Geoffrey Rolles, a young gentleman of leisure in the East Anglian village of Cottersall. His head filled with socialism, he has embarked upon a correspondent with H.G. Wells, one of England’s preeminent socialists of the time. He has also taken an interest in local farmer Joseph Grendon, who has demonstrated his forward thinking ways by installing an electric generator on his farm.

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Tor Doubles: #2 Greg Bear’s Hardfought and Timothy Zahn’s Cascade Point

Tor Doubles: #2 Greg Bear’s Hardfought and Timothy Zahn’s Cascade Point

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Hardfought cover by Tony Roberts
Cascade Point cover by Tim White

This Tor Double has the distinction of containing two stories which were both nominated for the Hugo for Best Novella in 1984. Zahn beat out Bear for the rocket, as well as works by Hilbert Schenk, Joseph H. Delaney, and David R. Palmer. Bear wouldn’t go away empty-handed, however, since his story “Blood Music” won the Hugo for Best Novelette that same year (beating out works by Kim Stanley Robinson, George R.R. Martin, Connie Willis, and Ian Watson). Published in November of 1988, the cover for Hardfought was painted by Tony Roberts. The cover for Cascade Point was painted by Tim White.

Cascade Point was originally published in Analog in December, 1983. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella. The story placed second in the Locus poll and the Analog Readers Poll.

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Neverwhens: War “On Earth, As it Is in Heaven” — Rebecca Roanhorse’s Mirrored Heavens

Neverwhens: War “On Earth, As it Is in Heaven” — Rebecca Roanhorse’s Mirrored Heavens

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Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press, June 4, 2024)

Between Earth & Sky has always been about doing something fresh.

Rebecca Roanhorse set out to create an epic fantasy set in a world based on the pre-contact Americas. It has its Maya, Cahokia, Ancestral Puebloan and Woodlands analog cultures; it has a seafaring matriarchy that is a bit Polynesian, a bit Caribbean, a bit “this would be cool.” But the world of The Meridian is its own thing. At times the technology is greater than what existed in our world, it has giant crows, eagles, insects and winged serpents tamed as mounts and its gods are very real, and not particularly benevolent.

But if the world the author sets her fantasy is drawing from cultures underused in fantasy, the story-structure is unique as well. This is not a story of a rising dark lord and the plucky heroes that rise against him. Its villains are all-too-human, motivate by sometimes petty desires, sometimes misplaced love, and if there is a “Dark Lord”, well he is one of the most sympathetic characters in the entire tale.

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Tor Doubles #1: Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars

Tor Doubles #1: Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars

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Meeting with Medusa cover by Vincent di Fate
Green Mars cover by Vincent di Fate

Tor Double #1 was originally published in October 1988.  This volume marked the beginning of the official Tor Double series. The two stories included, Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s novella Green Mars complement each other, although by doing so, Green Mars also points out a weakness of Meeting with Medusa. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with both covers were painted by Vincent di Fate.

Meeting with Medusa was originally published in Playboy in December, 1971. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award, winning the latter, as well as the Seiun Award.

The novella opens with Captain Howard Falcon commanding a massive airship, the Queen Elizabeth IV, over the Grand Canyon. A collision with a drone camera causes the ship to crash, killing nearly everyone on-board, including the uplifted chimpanzees who served as part of their crew. Although horribly injured in the crash, Falcon survived and spends years regaining his ability to function, eventually returning to his job as a pilot with an audacious plan.

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A Metaphysical Nightmare: Brian Moore’s Cold Heaven

A Metaphysical Nightmare: Brian Moore’s Cold Heaven

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The Irish writer Brian Moore, who died in 1999 (he pronounced his first name in the Irish fashion — Bree-an) was one of the most interesting novelists of his time, at least based on the four books of his that I’ve read, all of which deal with areas where the supernatural, the philosophical, and the theological intersect and blur into each other.

Catholics (1972) is set in the near future after a hypothetical Fourth Vatican Council has banned private confession, clerical garb, and the Latin mass, while the fictitious Pope of the novel is engaged in negotiating a formal merger of Roman Catholicism and Buddhism, radical changes that are resisted by a handful of monks living on a small island off the coast of Ireland. In The Great Victorian Collection (1975), a scholar dreams of a fabulous collection of Victorian artifacts, and when he wakes up, it has actually appeared in the parking lot outside his California motel room. Who will believe such a thing? Can he believe it himself? Black Robe (1985) is a painstakingly detailed — and bracingly unsentimental — historical novel about the material and spiritual struggles of a Jesuit missionary to the Hurons in seventeenth century Canada.

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Tor Doubles: #0: Keith Laumer’s The Other Sky and The House in November

Tor Doubles: #0: Keith Laumer’s The Other Sky and The House in November

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The Other Sky cover by Thomas Kidd
The House in November cover by Mike Embden

Between October and December of 1969, Keith Laumer’s novella The Seeds of Gonyl were published as a serial in the magazine Worlds of If. The story was published the following year in a hardcover by G.P. Putnam & Sons under the title The House in November, and in 1971 as a paperback by Berkley Medallion.

In 1981, Tor reprinted the novel as part of its “Jim Baen Presents” series, but, apparently deeming the novel too short, it paired it with Laumer’s story “The Further Sky,” which had originally be published in the December 1964 issue of Amazing Stories. That story had also undergone a name change and appeared as “The Other Sky” in various reprints, including its appearance with The House in November.

When Tor Books reprinted the volume in 1985, they included a shield on the cover identifying the book as a “Tor Double.” This book may possibly have been created as a dry run or proof of concept for the eventual Tor Double line.  The cover for The Other Sky was provided by Thomas Kidd and the cover for The House in November was provided by Mike Embden, although their credits are reversed on the copyright pages.

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A Lot of Camelot: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

A Lot of Camelot: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

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The Bright Sword (Viking, July 16, 2024)

With no disrespect to J.R.R Tolkien, the King Arthur legend is arguably the  inspiration of much post World War II medieval-based fantasy. You’ve got your out-of-nowhere claimant to the throne, a magic sword, court intrigue, some side stories, romance, sorcery, betrayal but yet a kind of redemption. All the key ingredients.

Sure, Game of Thrones was based on the very real English Wars of the Roses, particularly the also very real violence and death of key personages. But let’s look at the long literary tradition of Arthurian stories: sourced from Welsh mythology and grafted into 12th century British histories more based on fancy than fact, eventually becoming the  Chrétien de Troyes romances and subsequently Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. From multiple sources and variations we wind our way through Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot which in turn inspires various associated fictions, not the least of which includes Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. 

Fast forward to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and its adaption by Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot (“If ever I would leave you, it wouldn’t be in summer…”).  With the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Camelot became a metaphor for “a shining moment” intervened by fate to extinguish, that nonetheless, like the Christ-like resurrection grafted on to the Arthurian mythos, may inspire future generations. (Only a cynic would make comparisons between Guenevere’s infidelity and Kennedy’s.)

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Tor Doubles: An Overview

Tor Doubles: An Overview

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Tor Doubles

In October of 1988, Tor Books released the first Tor Double, a volume that reprinted Arthur C. Clarke’s 1971 novella Meeting with Medusa with Kim Stanley Robinson’s novella Green Mars. Over the next thirty-five months, they would publish a total of thirty-six books in the series.

In general, there was little to link the two short stories that were published in each volume, although in 1990, Tor experimented with the publication of four Tor Doubles that included a classic story, by authors including C.L. Moore, L. Sprague de Camp, Leigh Brackett, and Roger Zelazny, with original stories that were set in the same world. The following year would see addition original stories published in the series.

Similarly, most of the volumes contained stories by two different authors, however four of the books published in 1991 were single author collections, with two stories each by Gordon R. Dickson, Mike Resnick, Damon Knight, and Fritz Leiber.

Modeled after the Ace Doubles series, the books were initially published in a dos-a-dos format, with each story getting its own cover and bound upside down in relation to the other book, so neither story was first (although the presence of an ISBN code on one side had a tendency to make it feel like the “back” of the book). The four volumes that included sequels were published with a single cover and beginning with volume 27, which included Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith, all the volumes were published in the more traditional format.

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The Beating Heart of Science Fiction: Poul Anderson and Tau Zero

The Beating Heart of Science Fiction: Poul Anderson and Tau Zero

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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.

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We No Longer Need Aliens to Feel Alienated: State of Paradise by Laura Van Den Berg

We No Longer Need Aliens to Feel Alienated: State of Paradise by Laura Van Den Berg

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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.

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