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Birthday Reviews: Pat Cadigan’s “New Life for Old”

Birthday Reviews: Pat Cadigan’s “New Life for Old”

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Cover by Maren
Cover by Maren

Pat Cadigan was born on September 10, 1953.

Cadigan won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013 for “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” which has also won a Seiun Award. She previously won a World Fantasy Award in the Non-Professional category for co-editing the fanzine Shayol with Arnie Fenner. She won two Arthur C. Clarke Awards for her novels Synners and Fools. In 1979 her story “Death from Exposure” won the coveted Balrog Award. In 2006 Cadigan received the third (and most recent) Richard Evans Memorial Prize, given to genre authors who were considered insufficiently recognized for their excellence. Cadidgan served as the Toastmaster for MidAmericon II, the 2016 Worldcon in Kansas City.

Disney’s animated film Aladdin was released in 1992 and to take advantage of the popularity of the film, Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg edited the 1992 anthology Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, with stories based on genies, djinni, and the 1001 nights. Pat Cadigan’s story “New Life for Old” made its debut in the anthology. The following year, Cadigan included the story in her collection Dirty Work and in 1996 it was translated into French for Cadigan’s anthology Les garçons sous la pluie.

Cadigan’s djinn appears to 70-year-old Millie as she is polishing a family heirloom, a lamp that dates back to the family’s origins in the Middle East. Millie greets the djinn’s appearance with skepticism, based on her life experience and the drink she took that afternoon, although she doubts it is enough to get her that tipsy. The djinn does, however, make her an offer of one day of youth. If she turns it down, he’ll remove all memory of their meeting. Naturally, she takes him up on the offer and lives out a life of her youth.

Millie and the djinn reconnect after her day and she tells him all about it, reveling in what she was able to do and how she felt. However the experience wasn’t all she had hoped for and she realizes that a better, and more useful experience would have been to live a day as an old woman when she was younger. That way, she would better enjoy what she had rather than just one day that was wistful and nostalgic even as she was enjoying herself. Cadigan’s story is a quick tale that presents not only the good feelings that nostalgia can bring, but also a sense of the regrets and the difference in the view of someone young and someone older.

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A Celebration of the Wonder of the Universe Itself: Vast by Linda Nagata

A Celebration of the Wonder of the Universe Itself: Vast by Linda Nagata

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Vast Linda Nagata Gollancz-small Vast Linda Nagata Gollancz-back-small

Gollancz edition (1990); cover by Bob Eggleton

I’ll get right to it: Linda Nagata’s Vast is everything you want epic sci-fi to be: a huge scope in time and space, a compelling look at the horizons of human and technological evolution, and a celebration of the wonder of the universe itself. Vast provides all this, with some truly beautiful descriptions of stellar evolution thrown in for good measure. On top of all this, this scale and big ideas are woven alongside excellent character formation and a plot that builds tension so effectively that long years of pursuit between vessels with slow relative velocities still feels sharp and urgent.

I liked this book. A lot.

Vast is set in the far future, after multiple waves of colonization have moved out from Earth (which has since itself been destroyed). Humanities’ settlements along the frontier have been ravaged by twin threats from an ancient lost race called the Chenzeme: automated, partially biological warships and an engineered virus that turns its hosts into carriers of a cult that enslaves entire populations. Humanity, it seems, is being squeezed between these two prongs of an incredibly ancient civil war with weapons lingering on even after the civilization that wages it is long gone.

But there’s a whole lot going on against this epic background. Vast is actually the concluding book in a series that includes three others (one of which is the Locus Award-winning Deception Well) but I didn’t realize this when I picked up the paperback edition this summer in a used bookstore when my vacation reading supply tanked. The plot picks up with four characters — Nikko, Lot, Urban, and Clementine, all human — on a starship called the Null Boundary heading into Chenzeme space. Starting with the final book means I missed all the details of how these characters originally met, how they learned Lot was a carrier of the cult virus, and how they ended up on the Null Boundary, but it didn’t decrease my enjoyment of the book. Sometimes it’s nice to be dropped in the middle of an unfamiliar universe to figure things out as you go. (I remember starting Gene Wolfe’s Long Sun quartet for the first time with the third book and being simultaneously confused and enthralled.)

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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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In 500 Words or Less: Tales of the Captain Duke by Rebecca Diem

In 500 Words or Less: Tales of the Captain Duke by Rebecca Diem

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oie_71323z2d6LGpYTales of the Captain Duke
By Rebecca Diem
Woolf Like Me (paperback/ebook editions, price varies, Aug 2014 – May 2018)

For anyone who reads this column even semi-regularly, this next review is probably gonna seem out of place. But indulge me for a few minutes to talk about Tales of the Captain Duke, a four-part series of indie novellas by Toronto author Rebecca Diem.

First thing to make clear: these novellas are equal parts steampunk adventure and romance, which is obviously not my usual cup of tea, so the fact that I’m reviewing it here should tell you something. Because honestly, I got swept up in this series. Why? Besides the fact that airships and pirates and steampunky technology are really cool, these novellas focus on character, which is always the number one thing I look for in a series.

Though the title is Tales of the Captain Duke, the focus is really on Clara, a debutante who leaves her life of wealth by sneaking away on an airship and falls in with “pirates” standing up to economic tyranny and corruption, under the leadership of the legendary Captain Duke. Okay, maybe that sounds like an obvious romantic setup – especially as the attraction between Clara and her new Captain is made clear – but Clara is far from your stereotypical female character.

She’s a badass, and quickly becomes an important part of the Captain Duke’s crew, joining a group of nuanced characters who go through a series of arcs from the first novella to the last. For example, you have first mate Trick, who becomes a vehicle for exploring physical disability when he relearns how to make music with a prosthetic arm, and youths Cat and Mouse, who desperately want to be adults and contribute more to their captain’s operations but have a lot to learn before they can.

This character work is tied into detailed, thought-out worldbuilding beyond the usual Victorian steampunk. Remember that this is an adventure story, too, complete with plenty of action and danger. Admittedly, this isn’t a story about elaborate twists and turns or huge surprises; when things from Clara’s past get mentioned off hand, you know they’re going to play a greater role later on, and when the Captain Duke’s people get betrayed, the culprit is pretty clear. That isn’t a bad thing, by any means. I love what Patrick Rothfuss calls “big fat fantasy books,” but sometimes I need a story that’s straightforward and fun, too, which Diem delivers in this series.

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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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Birthday Reviews: China Miéville’s “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia”

Birthday Reviews: China Miéville’s “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia”

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The Thackery T. Lambhead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases-small

Cover by John Coulthart

China Miéville was born on September 6, 1972.

Miéville won the World Fantasy Award, the Kitschie, the British SF Association Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Novel for The City & the City in 2010. The book also earned him his third Arthur C. Clarke Award, following one for Perdido Street Station in 2001 and Iron Council in 2005. He has won the British Fantasy Award for Perdido Street Station and The Scar. All four of the previously named novels have also won the Kurd Lasswitz Preis. He has won the Ignotus Award for Perdido Street Station and Embassytown and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for Perdido Street Station and The City & the City.

China Miéville wrote “Buscard’s Murrain” for Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts’ anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases in 2003. When he included the story in his 2005 collection, Looking for Jack, Miéville changed the title to “Entry Taken from a Medical Encylopedia,” which was more descriptive, especially with the work taken out of the context for which it was created. The story was translated into German to appear in the collection Andere Himmel, with the title based on the new title of the work. He has collaborated on non-fiction with Mark Bould and on fiction with Max Schäfer, Emma Bircham, and Maria Dahvana Headley.

“Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia” is a short work presented to offer the history and symptoms of the fictional Buscard’s Murrain, also known as the Gibbering Fever. The entry is filled with humor, discussions of quackery, filial defenses, fraud, and footnotes.

Miéville begins with a history of the disease, explaining that it was first contracted by Primoz Jansa, when he read a word aloud, causing his brain to experience an alteration that possible caused some sort of worm to start tunneling through his brain. The disease was believed to have been spread by the repeating of that word, known as a wormword. Jansa traveled to London where his gibbering preaching caused several outbreaks of the disease, first described by Samuel Buscard, who may have become associated with the patient through the revenge of another surgeon Buscard was blackmailing.

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Birthday Reviews: James McKimmey, Jr.’s “Planet of Dreams”

Birthday Reviews: James McKimmey, Jr.’s “Planet of Dreams”

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Cover by Ken Fagg
Cover by Ken Fagg

James McKimmey, Jr. was born on September 5, 1923 and died on January 19, 2011.

Although McKimmey wrote several science fiction short stories between 1952, when “Tergiversation” appeared in The Avalonian and 1968 when “The Inspector” was published in The Farthest Reaches, the majority of his fiction, including all seventeen of his novels, were in the crime fiction genre. In addition for his writing, he is known for an eleven year correspondence he conducted with Philip K. Dick between 1953 and 1964.

“Planet of Dreams” first appeared in the September 1953 issue of If, edited by James L. Quinn. LibriVox included the story in their 2010 audio anthology Short Science Fiction Collection 042.

Daniel Loveral’s ideal utopian society is to live on a planet in which nobody has to work, their every need from food and water to clothing and tools provided for by machines and their world. To achieve this, Loveral has led a group of immigrants to Dream Planet and instituted the society of his promise. Ironically, Loveral is required to work constantly to ensure that his followers can live in the world he promised them.

When word reaches Loveral that one of his followers, George Atkinson, is working, Loveral goes to discuss the situation with him. If anyone (other than Loveral) works in their utopian world, Loveral sees it as an admission of failure. Furthermore, if Atkinson makes something that only he has, Loveral is afraid that jealousy will also rears its head and cause the society to fail.

Unfortunately, Atkinson has very different views. While Loveral is busy with a project to make sure the society as a whole is what he pictured, he isn’t paying attention to their actual current wants and needs. Atkinson, like so many of the other inhabitants of the planet, are finding that the utopian world which they signed on is a boring place that doesn’t challenge them or give them any real raison e’dtre. Rather than being able to enjoy themselves, they can only focus on how bored they are.

It becomes apparent that although Altkinson appears to be acting alone, he is a representative for all of the citizens. McKimmey portrays Atkinson’s solution as one that is supported by everyone and the only real solution to the problem, however both McKimmey and, apparently, Atkinson seem to have ignored other potential paths towards the goal of revisiting the utopia’s charter and providing the sense of purpose people need, which ultimately weakens the story.

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And in the End: Soldiers Live by Glen Cook, Part 2

And in the End: Soldiers Live by Glen Cook, Part 2

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SLDRSLVCKG2000So that’s that. Last night I closed the cover of Soldiers Live (2000), the final volume of Glen Cook’s Black Company series. (Yes, yes, I know there’s a new book, Port of Shadows, coming out this month, but it’s set in the past, before Shadows Linger.) All the Company’s enemies and most of its veterans are laid to rest, mostly in their graves. In the last few pages the Black Company, Last of the Free Companies of Khatovar, leaves one universe for another. Only a single veteran from the pre-Taglian days remains and, after two devastating battles, most of the Taglian recruits are gone as well. And still…the Company remains the Company.

From this point on: Spoilers!

Sleepy leads the Company north from the Plain of Glittering Stone. Her plan is to defeat Soulcatcher’s army, then march on the great city of Taglios and force Mogaba and his fellow commanders to surrender. Outnumbered, Sleepy hopes that the magical advantages afforded by the wizard Tobo will give her the intelligence edge needed to overcome the larger, if less competent, opposing armies.

There are few happy endings in Soldiers Live. Willow Swan, Blade, Murgen, and many of their brethren fall in battle or succumb to their wounds afterwards. Shara is presumably killed in the final great fight near Taglios but her body is never found. We see Sleepy and her command staff caught in a magical trap and later learn they were all burned too severely to be identified. Goblin comes back but he’s been possessed by a demon of Kina. Mogaba, in a new found state of reflection, abandons Taglios in order to prevent its destruction only to be tortured and killed by Tobo. Just as he’s about to resume rule of Taglios, the Prahbrindrah Drah is killed by a stray bolt of magic. Much of the book’s second half is a roll call of the dead, punctuated by vicious battles.

At the heart of Soldiers Live is the fate of Croaker. It is through him that we first meet the Black Company, and through his eyes we leave it. His plan to rebuild the Company would have them traverse the worlds connected by the Plain of Glittering Stone, so Croaker makes a deal with the golem that maintains it. Shivetya is ancient and exhausted, desiring death but trapped in an immortal body. In the end the two swap bodies, allowing the golem to die and Croaker to become a near-divine being, able to access all the ancient history of the sixteen worlds and maintain the gates between them.

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Birthday Reviews: Rick Wilber’s “Greggie’s Cup”

Birthday Reviews: Rick Wilber’s “Greggie’s Cup”

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Cover by Thomas Canty
Cover by Thomas Canty

Rick Wilber was born on September 4, 1948.

Rick Wilber won the Stephen R. Donaldson Award for scholarship at the IAFA in 2006 and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2013 for his story about catcher/spy Moe Berg. He has also been nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. In 1997, along with Sheila Williams, Wilber founded the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing that is presented annually to students at the IAFA. In 2005, Asimov’s name was replaced in the award title with Dell Magazines.

“Greggie’s Cup” was written for the 1992 anthology Grails: Quests, Visitations and Other Occurences, edited by Richard Gilliams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer. The only place it has been reprinted is in one of the two trade paperbacks which were issued to split that massive collection into a more manageable size for reprinting, Grails: Quests of the Dawn, in 1994.

Greg is a back-up quarterback at the end of an uninspiring career, dealing with the aftermath of his second divorce, who takes Greggie, his twelve year old son with Down’s syndrome, with him to visit his sister in Scotland to try to figure out the next steps of his life. While Greg is talking to his sisters and brother-in-law, striking up a conversation with a woman who is interested in him for who he is rather than because he’s a football player, and talking to a team owner about a possible coaching job in the Scottish league, Greggie is off exploring the ruins of a Roman fort and pretending to be a knight.

The fort is more than just a playground for Greggie. Having heard his uncle Tam talking about how everything in Scotland has a tie to King Arthur, Greggie plays that he is fighting with a knight, who slips through time to actually befriend the boy. Sir Lancelot is supposed to be questing for the Holy Grail, but has doubts about his ability to find it since he knows he isn’t pure enough to hold the Grail. Greggie, of course, only sees the good in Lancelot, the fact that he befriended the boy. That is enough for Greggie and knowing that Lancelot is looking for a cup, he gives him the small plastic trophy that he won at a basketball game.

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