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Birthday Reviews: Mack Reynolds’s “Doctor’s Orders”

Birthday Reviews: Mack Reynolds’s “Doctor’s Orders”

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Fantastic Story Magazine
Fantastic Story Magazine

Mack Reynolds was born on November 11, 1917 and died on January 30, 1983.

He was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1962 for his short story “Status Quo” and in 1966 was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “A Leader for Yesteryear” and for Best Novelette for “The Adventure of the Extraterrestrial.” Reynolds, whose birth name was Dallas McCord Reynolds, published under the pseudonyms Bob Belmont, Clark Collins, Mark Mallory, Guy McCord, Maxine Reynolds, and Dallas Ross. He collaborated with Fredric Brown on the anthology Science-Fiction Carnival. He collaborated on fiction with August Derleth, Brown, Theodore Cogswell, and Gary Jennings. Following his death Dean Ing completed several of his novels and Michael Banks completed one.

Originally published as “Four-Legged Hotfoot” in the Winter 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Magazine, edited by Samuel Mines, the story was reprinted in the NESFA Press collection Compounded Interest using the title “Doctor’s Orders.” It was included by Wildside Press in The 12th Science Fiction Megapack e-book collection in 2016.

Reynolds offers a starship story in “Doctor’s Orders,” setting up an interstellar journey with a crew that is filled with redundancy. As the navigator, Dick Roland, complains to Doc Thorndon, nobody really has anything to do. They are all back-ups for the computers, which fail so rarely that each person might have something to do once every several trips. If that weren’t enough, the crew was sent out with insufficient leave between missions, so they were already starting to suffer from cafard, a debilitating mental illness caused by spending too much time on board ship.

The story does an excellent job demonstrating the boredom inherent in any long journey and the ship’s crew try, and fail, to stave off boredom by playing a variety of games. What finally pulls them from their ennui is the discovery of an animal on board, which Doc Thorndon identifies as a rat, long extinct on Earth, but thriving on the Venusian colonies, where the ship may have picked up its stowaway. Catching the rat, named Arthur, goes from being a game to something more important when Doc Thorndon notes that the rat may be carrying the Bubonic Plague and could prevent them from docking when they return to Earth.

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The Complete Carpenter: Ghosts of Mars (2001)

The Complete Carpenter: Ghosts of Mars (2001)

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Ghosts-of-Mars-One-SheetLast month, John Carpenter made his return to the big screen after an eight-year absence. Not as director, but as executive producer and (more importantly) composer for the new Halloween. It was great having him back, the film’s pretty darn good considering this franchise’s track record, and the score is fantastic.

Now I have to come in and get all negative because look what film is next on my (almost finished) John Carpenter career retrospective.

Carpenter has experienced many financial disappointments with his movies, but none was more catastrophic than the reception for Ghosts of Mars in 2001. Costing $28 million to make at Sony’s Screen Gems division (the folks responsible for the Resident Evil and Underworld movies), John Carpenter’s semi-remake of Assault on Precinct 13 set on Mars only grossed $14 during its theatrical run. That’s not the domestic gross — that’s the worldwide gross. In the aftermath of this flop, Carpenter took a near decade-long hiatus from moviemaking and has only directed one film since. (“I was burned out. Absolutely wiped out. I had to stop,” he said in a 2011 interview.)

I’ve examined Ghosts of Mars before. At that time, it was my first viewing since the movie was in theaters. Now that I’ve gotten to grips with analyzing those initial reactions, how does the film hold up? Is it Carpenter’s worst movie, as many people have pegged it?

The Story

The year: 2176. The place: Mars, now colonized by 640,000 humans under a matriarchal organization, the Matronage. Lt. Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge), an officer in the Martian Police Force, is part of a team sent by train to pick up notorious outlaw James “Desolation” Williams (Ice Cube) from lock-up at the Shining Canyon mining camp. When the MFP arrives at Shining Canyon, they initially find the camp deserted except for a few prisoners locked in cells and numerous mutilated bodies. Soon, they find out what happened: Mars’s long-dormant native population has microscopically turned all the miners at the station into ravening brutes looking to wipe out the human invaders. The MFP teams up with Desolation Williams and the prisoners to survive the onslaught of the Martian host bodies and make it back to the train when it returns.

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Birthday Reviews: Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples”

Birthday Reviews: Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples”

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Cover by Charles Vess

Cover by Charles Vess

Neil Gaiman was born on November 10, 1960.

Gaiman has received Hugo Awards for his novels American Gods and The Graveyard Book, his novella Coraline, his short story “A Study in Emerald,” and his Graphic Story The Sandman: Overture. Both American Gods and Coraline won the Nebula Award and Gaiman has also won the Bradbury Award from SFWA for his screenplay for the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife.” His short story “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” part of his Sandman graphic novel, won the World Fantasy Award for Gaiman and collaborator artist Charles Vess. Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano won the Bram Stoker Award for The Sandman: Dream Hunters and Gaiman has also won the award for American Gods, Coraline, and The Sandman: Endless Nights. He won the British SF Association Award for Coraline and The Wolves in the Wall, the latter in collaboration with Dave McKean. His novelette “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” earned him a Shirley Jackson Award in 2011 and the anthology Stories: All New Tales earned him and collaborator Al Sarrantonio a second Shirley Jackson Award that same year. Gaiman’s work in both prose and comic has won him several other awards as well. He was the guest of Honor at Anticipation, the 67th Worldcon in Montreal in 2009. Gaiman has collaborated with numerous authors and artists for his work in comics and collaborated with Terry Pratchett on the novel Good Omens. Other prose fiction collaborators include Dave McKean, Kim Newman, Eugene Byrne, Gene Wolfe, Toby Litt, Alisa Kwitney, Jaime Delano, and Bryan Talbot.

Snow, Glass, Apples was originally published as a chapbook in 1995 by DreamHaven Press to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow selected the story to appear in their anthology The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighth Annual Collection and Poppy Z. Brite included the story in her anthology Love in Vein II: Eighteen More Tales of Vampiric Erotica. The story was translated into Spanish in 1997 for inclusion in the July issue of the fanzine Artifex. Gaiman included it in his collection Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, which was translated into French. The story has also been translated into Dutch. In 2007, Martin H. Greenberg included it in the anthology Women of the Night and John Joseph Adams used the story in his 2009 anthology By Blood We Live. The next year, it appeared in Peter S. Beagle’s anthology The Secret History of Fantasy. Gaiman adapted the story into a play in 2002 and that same year, he recorded the play along with another for HarperAudio. The story was also adapted into a play by the Edinburgh University Theatre Societty in 2012.

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Birthday Reviews: Alfred Coppel’s “Mars Is Ours”

Birthday Reviews: Alfred Coppel’s “Mars Is Ours”

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Cover by Chesley Bonestell
Cover by Chesley Bonestell

Alfred Coppel was born on November 9, 1921 and died on May 30, 2004.

Coppel published under a variety of pseudonyms, including Sol Galaxan, Robert Cham Gilman, Derfla Leppoc, A.C. Marin, G.H. Rains, and sometimes attaching a Jr. to the end of his own name. In addition to writing science fiction, he wrote for the pulps in a variety of genres, including thrillers and military stories. His best selling book may have been the 1974 thriller Thirty-Four East about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“Mars Is Ours” was first printed in the October 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher. It was translated into French in 1955 for publication in Fiction #19 and was reprinted in France in 1985 in the anthology Histoires de Guerres Futures, edited by Demètre Ioakimidis, Jacques Goimard, and Gérard Klein. Its only English language reprint was in Fourth Planet from the Sun, edited by Gordon van Gelder, which collected stories about Mars originally published in F&SF.

Unfortunately, writing a tale too closely tied to a political situation can completely date the story, which is why so many authors create analogs for political forces. Coppel did not do this in “Mars Is Ours,” which tells about a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union being fought on the red planet.

Marrane is in charge of a group of American soldiers on Mars who are intent on wiping out the Soviet base. He knows, as must the Soviets know, that their war is coming to an end. There is little in the story to require it be set on Mars rather than a distant outpost on Earth, although near the end of the story, the distance to Earth and the non-terrestrial environment do come into play enough that the story would have been different had it been set in Mali or Colombia rather than on Mars.

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Birthday Reviews: Ben Bova’s “The Café Coup”

Birthday Reviews: Ben Bova’s “The Café Coup”

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Cover by Michael Garland
Cover by Michael Garland

Ben Bova was born on November 8, 1932.

Bova won the Hugo Award for Best Editor six times, including a solid run from 1973 to 1977 as well as a Balrog Award for editing in 1983. In 2007, his novel Titan won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He received the Skylark Award from NESFA in 1974 and the Gallun Award from I-CON in 2005. In 2008, the Heinlein Society recognized his space exploration advocacy with the Robert A. Heinlein Award and in 2016 he was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame.

He took over the editorship of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in 1972 upon the death of John W. Campbell, Jr. and edited the magazine until 1978, when he left to help start up Omni Magazine, which he edited until 1982. Bova has collaborated on fiction with Rick Wilber, A.J. Austin, Gordon Dickson, Bill Pogue, and Les Johnson. He has also collaborated with numerous other editors on a variety of anthologies. Bova was the author Guest of Honor at Chicon 2000, the 58th World Science Fiction Convention held in Chicago. Bova has also published as by Oxford Williams.

“The Café Coup” was first published in the September 1997 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gordon van Gelder. The next year, it was reprinted in Bova’s collection Twice Seven and was translated into German by Michael K. Iwoleit, Cecilia Palinkas, Horst Pukallus, Chris Weber, Manfred Weinland for inclusion in Der Tod im Land der Blumen. Van Gelder included the story in One Lamp: Alternate History Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2003 and in 2017, the story was included in The Best of Bova, Volume III.

One of the primary focuses of alternate history fiction is a way to change the outcome of World War II or prevent the war from happening. Bova takes the latter route in “Café Coup,” in which a time traveler from a future in which pockets of technologically advanced societies are beset by barbarians at their gates who are intent on destroying the last vestiges of civilization, decides that the root of his world’s problems is World War II and the best way to change the world is by making sure the Germans win World War I.

Bova’s narrator has thought through his plan to the extent that he realizes he would never be able to return to the world he has helped create. He convinces his wife of the importance of the project and the two travel back together, effecting the change and living their lives in a German occupied Paris in 1922.

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Birthday Reviews: R.A. Lafferty’s “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas”

Birthday Reviews: R.A. Lafferty’s “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas”

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Cover by Sol Dember
Cover by Sol Dember

R.A. (Raphael Aloysius) Lafferty was born on November 7, 1914 and died on March 18, 2002.

Lafferty won a Hugo Award for his short story “Eurema’s Dam” in 1973, which tied with Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Meeting.” Lafferty’s story also won the Seiun Award in 1975 and he won a second Seiun in 1993 for the story “Groaning Hinges.” In 1971 Lafferty received a Phoenix Award from DeepSouthCon and in 1990 he was recognized with a Life Achievement World Fantasy Award. He was the second recipient of the Cordwainder Smith Award for authors whose work deserves rediscovery.

“Sodom and Gomorroah, Texas” was first published in the December 1962 issue of Galaxy Magazine, edited by Frederik Pohl. It was translated by Ferruccio Alessandri for the Italian version of the magazine in 1964. Lafferty included it in his 1972 collection Strange Doings. A. Kindt-van Ewijck and G. Suurmeijer translated the story for the Dutch version of Strange Doings, called Niet Pluis in 1975 and the same year it was translated for the French edition of Galaxie. The story saw a German translation in 1982 in the anthology Science-Fiction-Stories 92. The story was posted to Project Gutenberg in 2007 and was included in the LibriVox anthology Short Science Fiction Collection Vol. 004. In 2011, it was published as a chapbook. Its most recent publication occurred in 2015 when it was included in Feast of Laughter, Volume 2, an anthology edited by Kevin Cheek as an appreciation of R. A. Lafferty on the occasion of the centennial of his birth.

“Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is actually a story about expectations and the understanding of reality. Manuel has been hired to work a s a census taker in the Santa Magdalena region of Texas by Mr. Marshal. When Manuel asks if he should count the little people, Marshall instructs him to count all people, not just adults, although Marshal also has to specify not to count animals or spirits. While Marshal and Manuel see no difficulty with the instructions, the reader sees them readily, only wondering what form Lafferty will chose to show the hijinks sure to take place.

The little people living in the remote Texas region where Manuel is sent to count the nine human inhabitants are aliens who firmly believe they have a deed to the Earth. They allow Manuel and his mula, Mula, to count them, but at great cost. When Manuel turns in his figures, which are highly inflated, Marshal turns them in, resulting in problems with the little people who don’t want to be known.

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In Which Severian Becomes Human: The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

In Which Severian Becomes Human: The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

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oie_622120n9dhjJAUSeverian has finally arrived in the fortress town Thrax and taken up his duties as lictor, or “he who binds”, and jailor. More importantly, he serves in his trained capacity as torturer and executioner. It is his latter duties that lead to a rift between Severian and Dorcas. No matter how rationally he makes his case for legal torture and execution, she is more and more disturbed by his work. Eventually she leaves him and takes up residence in a tavern.

His refusal to employ his guild talents for the personal desire of Thrax’s ruler leads him to flee northward — that and the fiery salamander sent to kill him by an agent of his old nemesis, Agia. Severian hopes to return the life-restoring gem, the Claw of the Conciliator, to the traveling sisterhood from which Agia stole it back in the first book, The Shadow of the Torturer. With the revealing of several dire secrets, Dorcas leaves Severian to return to Nessus and uncover the truth of her past.

1980’s The Shadow of the Torturer is a coming-of-age tale of Severian’s passage into young adulthood and out of the safe confines of his guild’s tower. While Severian’s constant withholding of information makes his narration unreliable, the book still flows in a generally normal fashion — Severian has adventures during which he journeys from point A to point B.

1981’s The Claw of the Conciliator reads like little more than a series of someone else’s dreams and nightmares. There are powerful passages, but like dreams, their potency comes not from basic storytelling, but strange imagery and psychologically dislocating events. I’m still not sure how much of Wolfe’s story eluded me, even thinking back on it now, but there are sequences that I will not forget any time soon.

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Birthday Reviews: Catherine Asaro’s “Echoes of Pride”

Birthday Reviews: Catherine Asaro’s “Echoes of Pride”

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Cover by James Gurney
Cover by James Gurney

Catherine Asaro was born on November 6, 1955.

Asaro has won the Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Quantum Rose and the Nebula Award for Best Novella for “The Spacetime Pool.” She has also won three Sapphire Awards, presented by the SF Romance Newsletter, for the novel Catch the Lightning and the stories “Aurora in Four Voices” and “Moonglow.” Asaro served as President of SFWA from 2003-2005.

“Echoes of Pride” was originally published in the anthology Space Cadets, edited by Mike Resnick and published by SCIFI to coincide with Loscon IV, the 2006 Worldcon. The story is based on a scene from Asaro’s 2004 novel Schism. The story was reprinted in the fifth issue of Galaxy’s Edge in November 2013.

Sauscony Valdoria, Soz, is a cadet in the Dieshan Military Academy, although she harbors a secret which even her closest bunkmates don’t know. When the Imperator, Kurj comes to inspect the troops, he seems to single Soz out for special treatment, ordering her to run an advanced obstacle course which is generally reserved for more advanced cadets.

Even as Soz follows her orders, she tries to figure out why the Imperator, her half-brother, is so focused on humiliating her. Is he trying to get her to wash out, picking on a half-sibling, or making her prove her mettle? Perhaps even more importantly to Soz, she is figuring out how to maintain her secret from her bunkmates, or even wondering if they will recognize how out of the ordinary Kurj’s interest in her is.

As a reworking of a chapter (13) from the 2004 novel Schism, the story clearly ties into a more complex work, yet at the same time, Asaro has managed to let it stand on its own. Without the surrounding novel, “Echoes of Pride” could almost be set in any military training milieu, the intricacies of Asaro’s universe only impinging on it in parts. The story as is offers up sibling rivalry as well as a warrior out to prove who she is and what she is capable of. Being part of a novel, the story can provide an introduction not only to Schism, but to Asaro’s wider works.

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Birthday Reviews: Janet Pack’s “A Coin for Charon”

Birthday Reviews: Janet Pack’s “A Coin for Charon”

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Sol's Children
Sol’s Children

Janet Pack was born on November 5, 1952.

Pack has collaborated with Kevin Stein on several poems and has co-edited anthologies with Margaret Weis, Robin Crew, and Martin H. Greenberg. She has occasionally published as Janet Deaver-Pack.

“A Coin for Charon” was published in Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology Sol’s Children in 2002. It has never been reprinted.

Pack’s story demonstrates one of the problems with writing about near future events, although in a slightly atypical way. Pack published the story, set on a space station in orbit around Pluto, in 2002 and in 2006, NASA launched the New Horizons mission to fly through the Plutonian system. When Pack wrote the story, little was known about Pluto and only one moon, Charon, had been discovered. By 2005, two additional moons had been found, Nix and Hydra. By the time New Horizons had reached Pluto and upended what we thought we knew about the planet, two additional moons, Kerberos and Styx, had been discovered. We have also learned that Pluto was not the frozen ball of rock and “methane-ethane-nitrogen-carbon-monoxide frost” that Pack described.

However, the focus of the story is less on Pluto and more on the dysfunctional relationship between two of the scientists on the space station, Velerie Heyer and Konrad Gregorius, whose relationship starts badly and only worsens as they get to know each other and are forced to work together, with the discovery of a magnetic element that Pack describes as forcing the tidal lock between Pluto and Charon, only cementing their enmity.

There are many historical stories about scientific relationships which go wrong and Pack takes the worst of all of those and transplants them to a remote space station with very tight living quarters, sure to exacerbate the problem. Although she mentions the rest of the station’s inhabitants, Heyer and Gregorius are really the only ones shown in any depth, although Heyer also interacts with Tobias Wellett. Without more input from the secondary characters, Heyer’s view of the situation is, of necessity, skewed and the reader is left wondering if the other characters have really kept to themselves as much as Heyer indicates rather than trying to alleviate the tension before the state of affairs could reach the point it does in the story.

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Birthday Reviews: Kara Dalkey’s “Bouncing Babies”

Birthday Reviews: Kara Dalkey’s “Bouncing Babies”

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Not of Woman Born
Not of Woman Born

Kara Dalkey was born on November 4, 1953.

Dalkey was nominated for the Mythopoeic Award in 1989 for her novel The Nightingale, a retelling of one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales in a Japanese setting. Ten years later her novel Heavenward Path was also nominated for the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Literature. She was also nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2004 for her short story “Lady of the Ice Gardens.”

“Bouncing Babies” was published in the anthology Not of Woman Born, edited by Constance Ash in 1999. The story has never been reprinted.

Although the people who live in the world of “Bouncing Babies” may see it as a utopia in which people don’t have to worry about giving birth unless they want to and the need to work is obviated, it is also a world in which a person’s worth is based solely on their ability to provide reproductive material. Teenage girls are genetically tested and if they prove to fit societal requirements are paid ten million dollars to have their eggs harvested, their genotype then used to determine their ability to fit into society.

Ms. Goodwin has long since had her eggs harvested and is living a life of luxury when she receives a notification to visit the Reprotec Bank. Not having any clue what they want to talk to her about, she goes in and discovers that her eggs are no longer genetically desirable. In fact, a child born from them was returned as defective by its parents. The bank has seized her assets to regain their investments and Goodwin realizes that she has nothing to fall back on.

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