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Birthday Reviews: Stephen Gallagher’s “God’s Bright Little Engine”

Birthday Reviews: Stephen Gallagher’s “God’s Bright Little Engine”

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Cover by Michelle Prahler
Cover by Michelle Prahler

Stephen Gallagher was born on October 13, 1954.

Gallagher received the British Fantasy Award for his 2004 collection Out of His Mind and in 2007, he earned the International Horror Guild Award for Short Fiction for his story “The Box.” He has also been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and twice for the World Fantasy Award. In addition to his fiction, Gallagher is also a writer for television, developing the series Eleventh Hour and Crusoe. He wrote the Doctor Who serials “Warrior’s Gate,” starring Tom Baker, and “Terminus,” during Peter Davison’s tenure.

Gallagher originally published “God’s Bright Little Engine” in Peter Crowther and Edward E. Kramer’s 1995 anthology Tombs. Gallagher also included the story in his 2004 British Fantasy Award-winning collection Out of His Mind.

In “God’s Bright Little Engine,” Helen is an elder-care nurse whose life is focused entirely, and not entirely by her desire, on her patients. In her run-down apartment she has built one of her few relationships with Big Andy, the slow-witted handyman who lives below her. Their relationship, such as it is, appears to be based on his infatuation with Helen and Helen’s need to have someone fix things around her apartment.

The story revolves around the emptiness in Helen’s life. She doesn’t particularly like her job, although she is apparently good at it, she doesn’t like her run-down apartment, and she sees Big Andy solely in terms of someone she can exploit because he likes her. The status quo takes a turn for the worse when Helen returns home to find some repairs had been done to her apartment while she was at work. Following a confrontation with Big Andy, who clearly had found her spare key, she also discovers that he has been spying on her through the floorboards of her apartment.

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Birthday Reviews: Sandra McDonald’s “Fir Na Tine”

Birthday Reviews: Sandra McDonald’s “Fir Na Tine”

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Cover by Matt Stewart
Cover by Matt Stewart

Sandra McDonald was born on October 12, 1966.

McDonald won the Lambda Award and the Rainbow Award for her collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories. Her novel The Outback Stars was nominated for the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award and she has been nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award four times. She has won the Silver Moonbeam Award for her children’s mystery novel Mystery of the Tempest.

“Fir Na Tine” was originally published in the February 2005 issue of Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy. The story was also selected by Paula Guran for inclusion in her Best New Paranormal Romance published in 2006.

As a young girl visiting Florida with her family, Lucy was kissed by a strange boy who sent heat through her entire body. As Lucy grows older and goes off to college, she finds that none of the boys she dates or kisses come close to the fire she remembered from that first kiss. Eventually, she finds Steven, who is everything she wanted, and they begin a passionate affair.

When she catches him cheating, he explains that he was doing so for her own good, so that the fire inside him wouldn’t destroy her, which in this case may actually have been true, but it doesn’t help the situation. Lucy and Steven work out an arrangement that they both feel they can live with, even if it doesn’t give either of them entirely what they want or need. Eventually, Steven goes off to become a fireman and Lucy forges her own life, again looking for someone who could literally enflame her.

Lucy’s hopes of reconciling with Steven are dashed when he drowns while trying to rescue someone. At his funeral, however, she learns that his fire captain is also a Fir Na Tine, a man of fire, although he is engaged to someone else. Even as Lucy begins to date normal men, she now tries to learn what she can about the Fir Na Tine, until an encounter with one who she is trying to help nearly kills her. Despite thinking she knows what she is doing, Lucy is clearly in danger. McDonald has withheld an important piece of information from both Lucy and the reader that explain what the Fir Na Tine are actually looking for, and what Lucy can’t give them, despite her desires.

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Birthday Reviews: William R. Forstchen’s “The Truthsayer”

Birthday Reviews: William R. Forstchen’s “The Truthsayer”

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Cover by James Warhola
Cover by James Warhola

William R. Forstchen was born on October 11, 1950.

Forstchen is a professor of American History, specializing in military history, the Civil War, and the history of technology. He may be best known in science fiction circles for his The Lost Regiment series and for a series of alternate history novels co-written with Newt Gingrich. Forstchen has also collaborated on fiction with Larry Segriff, Raymond E. Feist, Jaki Demarest, Greg Morrison, Andrew Keith, Ben Ohlander, Christopher Stasheff, and John Mina. He has collaborated with Bill Fawcett, Jennie Ethell Chancey, and Donald V. Bennett on non-fiction.

“Truthsayer” originally appeared in Susan Shwartz’s anthology Arabesques: More Tales of the Arabian Nights, in 1988. In 2007, it was translated into French as “Le diseur de vérité” for publication in the anthology Fantasy 2007, published by Bragelonne.

Forstchen retells the story of the fall of the empire of Khwarazm and the flight of Muhammad Shah from his empire in “Truthsayer.” Historically, Ala ad-Din Muhammad incurred the wrath of Chinggis Khan by murdering a Mongol ambassador who sought to establish trade between the Mongol and Khwarezmian empires. Chinggis led armies into Khwarezm to exact vengeance and the Mongol armies, led by the Mongol general Subutai, destroyed the empire, murdering millions while Muhammad fled, eventually to die of disease on an island in the Caspian Sea.

In Forstchen’s version, Muhammad is accompanied by Ali, a Truthsayer. In this world, Truthsayers, of whom Ali is the last of a long line, have the ability to tell if someone is telling the truth, and the inability to lie. At the same time, they have a magic to evoke the truth from people. Muhammad makes rare use of Ali’s ability, but includes him on his flight from the Mongols. In the end, Muhammad abandons his entourage and Ali learns from the Khwarazm general Maluk that Muhammad feared and hated Ali for the truth the man had forced the shah to confront.

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Birthday Reviews: Robert J. Howe’s “The Little American Man: A True Pelvic Story”

Birthday Reviews: Robert J. Howe’s “The Little American Man: A True Pelvic Story”

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Cover photo by Beth Gwinn
Cover photo by Beth Gwinn

Robert J. Howe was born on October 10, 1957.

Howe’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Black Gate 14 (with “The Natural History of Calamity”). He co-edited the anthology Coney Island Wonder Stories with John Ordover. Howe served as Secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of American from 2010-2012. He is married to SF editor Eleanor Lang.

“The Little American Man: A True Pelvic Story” is a surreal tale set in Latin America. Pilar is a prostitute who notes that she likes the American client she has recently had who pays, doesn’t try to romance her, and doesn’t take up too much of time. A pregnancy scare forces her to visit her physician, Doctor Escobar, and his examination reveals that while not pregnant, a tiny version of the American man is living inside her. Although Escobar offers to remove the squatter, Pilar refuses.

Over the next several weeks, Pilar changes her business model from turning tricks to allowing people to view the little American man inside her. As time progresses, the man begins decorating his surroundings and adding furnishings, although neither Pilar nor Howe seem particularly curious about the method he has for obtaining his décor. Although Pilar does ask him about his plans and his name, he refuses to answer any of her questions and she allows them to pass.

In the course of the story, Doctor Escobar give his diagnoses of the little American man’s presence as “uterocolonialism,” which seems a reasonable interpretation of his actions, even if his presence seems benign. However, no matter how little direct impact he seems to have on Pilar, his very presence appears to make changes to her as she is unable to conduct her traditional business and she realizes that she is aging more rapidly than she should. By the time Pilar asks Doctor Escobar to remove the little man, it is too late.

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Under a Blood-Red Sun: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

Under a Blood-Red Sun: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

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Of those values that Master Malrubius (who had been master of apprentices when I was a boy) had tried to teach me, and that Master Palaemon still tried to impart, I accepted only one: loyalty to the guild. In that I was quite correct — it was, as I sensed, perfectly feasible for me to serve Vodalus and remain a torturer. It was in this fashion that I began the long journey by which I have backed into the throne.

oie_91580lF5ljN9QBased solely on Don Maitz’s now classic cover art, I grabbed Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) from the library shelf as soon as I laid eyes on it. I cracked it open and dropped it almost at once. It was too dense and too alien for my teenaged brain to appreciate. To this day, Gene Wolfe, considered one of the most accomplished scifi/fantasy writers (see “Sci-fi’s Difficult Genius” by Peter Bebergal), remains a serious blind spot for me, even if I do have a large selection of his most important works gathering dust on the shelf.

I did finally revisit Shadow some years ago, but while I liked it and the next book in the sequence, The Claw of the Conciliator, I didn’t go on to read the remaining three volumes, The Sword of the Lictor, The Citadel of the Autarch, and The Urth of the New Sun. Well, it finally seems like the right time to give the series another go.

Urth is a dull, rusted-out world orbiting a fading, red sun. Within the Matachin Tower, in the citadel of the great capital city of Nessus, the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, or the Torturers, service the clients sent them by the Autarch, absolute ruler of the Commonwealth. Once among their members was a young apprentice named Severian. From some future vantage point Severian has set out to narrate the great story that seems to end with him upon a throne, presumably the Autarch’s.

From William Hope Hodgson to Clark Ashton Smith to Jack Vance, worn-out Earth with fading-ember sun has been explored many times. For Hodgson it was a stage on which to tell a story of romantic heroism, for Smith, to spin tales of decadence and terror, and for Vance, cynically comic tales of adventure. With only the first book read, it’s not clear where Wolfe is going with this series. The myths and legends that are told by various characters throughout The Shadow of the Torturer are filled with angels and demons and premonitions of impending apocalypse. While there are elements similar to those in the works of the illustrious earlier sojourners to Earth’s dying days, Wolfe seems to be aiming for something deeper and more complex than his forebears.

Severian’s Urth is decrepit and weather-beaten. More knowledge seems to have been forgotten than is still remembered and the world staggers along, propped up more by tradition than by any real understanding or philosophy. While we learn man has traveled to the stars, that seems to be long in the past. The tower used by the Torturers, as well as those of several other guilds, are clearly long-immobilized rocket ships. The sand favored by many artists for their creations is atomized glass of long-vanished cities. What appears to Severian as a painting of a warrior in a barren land, to the reader it is obviously Neil Armstrong on the moon.

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Birthday Reviews: Robert Reed’s “Night of Time”

Birthday Reviews: Robert Reed’s “Night of Time”

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The Silver Gryphon-small

Cover by Thomas Canty

Robert Reed was born on October 9, 1956.

In 1986, Reed’s story “Mudpuppies” won the Writers of the Future 2nd Quarter Contest as well as that year’s Grand Prize. In 1995, his novel Down the Bright Way won the Grand Prix d’Imaginaire for its French translation. Reed won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2007 for “A Billion Eves.” He has been nominated for the Hugo Award 8 times, the Nebula Award twice, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award 9 times, and the World Fantasy Award once.

“Night of Time” was initially published by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern in The Silver Gryphon, the twenty-fifth book published by Golden Gryphon Press in 2003. David G. Hartwell selected it for his Year’s Best SF 9 in 2004 and it was translated into Italian by Piero Anselmi for the Millimondi edition of the Hartwell anthology. Gardner Dozois also selected the story for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection. In 2005, Reed included the story in his second collection from Golden Gryphon, The Cuckoo’s Boys. He also used the story in his 2013 collection, The Greatship. “Night of Time” is tied to a specific memory. I attended the Worldcon in Boston in 2004 and I was reading Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 9 on the plane. I finished reading “Night of Time” and realized that the person sitting next to me was Robert Reed’s wife and Robert was sitting on the other side of her.

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Birthday Reviews: Frank Herbert’s “By the Book”

Birthday Reviews: Frank Herbert’s “By the Book”

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Cover by John Schoenherr
Cover by John Schoenherr

Frank Herbert was born on October 8, 1920 and died on February 11, 1986.

Herbert won the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966 for Dune, which also tied for the Hugo Award that same year. Dune would eventually also win the Seiun Award in 1974. Herbert’s novel Hellstrom’s Hive won the Prix Apollo in 1978. In 2006, Herbert was a posthumous inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Herbert’s masterpiece, Dune, spawned five sequels written by Herbert and several additional novels written by his son, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson. Dune has been filmed twice, once for theatrical release while Herbert was still alive and later as a miniseries.

Originally published by John W. Campbell, Jr. in the October 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction Science Fact, “By the Book” was reprinted in 1971 in The Worlds of Frank Herbert and again in The Best of Frank Herbert. It was also included in the Herbert collections Eye and The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert. The story was translated into Croatian in 1978 for inclusion in the Yugoslavian magazine Sirius and into French in 1987 for the Hebert collection Champ Mental.

Despite being well past the age when he should be retired, Ivar Norris Gump has been summoned to the moon by his friend Poss Washington to help troubleshoot a problem. The story follows Ing, as Gump is known, as he tries to figure out what has gone wrong with the tubes and beams which propel interstellar travel. Ing and Washington are in constant communication, with Washington trying to balance the need to diagnose and fix the problem with the corporate bottom line.

Ing knows he was one of the best troubleshooters the company has and he has trained most of the troubleshooters who came after him. His mantra is to follow the rules laid out in the company manual and do everything “by the book.” Ing needs to work fast because the first colony ship is approaching its target planet and the beam is designed to provide the infrastructure needed to ensure the colony is successful. Ing demonstrates that working within the confines of the book does not necessarily mean thinking linearly or traditionally and as he tackles the issues he faces, he comes up with not only potential solutions but also a manner of interpreting the rules to allow him to try them out.

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Birthday Reviews: Steven Erikson’s “Goats of Glory”

Birthday Reviews: Steven Erikson’s “Goats of Glory”

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Cover by Brian Carré
Cover by Brian Carré

Steven Erikson was born on October 7, 1959. Trained as an anthropologist and archeologist, Erikson’s real name is Steve Lundin.

Erikson was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for his novel Gardens of the Moon in 2000 and in 2017, the ten book series begun with that novel, Malazan Book of the Fallen, was nominated for the Aurora Award for Best of the Decade. The Malazan books are set in a world which Erikson and his friend, Ian Cameron Esslemont, created in 1982 for their role-playing games. In addition to the novels Erikson has written, Esslemont has also written books set in the same world.

Originally published in Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders in 2010, Paula Guran selected “Goats of Glory” for inclusion in her 2017 anthology Swords Against Darkness.

“Goats of Glory” tells the story of a band of five warriors who are escaping a huge defeat. Originally known as Rams for the pins they wear, they have re-dubbed themselves goats following the loss and have stumbled across the tiny and remote village of Glory. As soon as their arrival is made known, one of the villagers begins digging graves for them, expecting that they will visit the ancient ruins of the castle on the hill and be killed by the demonic inhabitants.

Erikson splits his narrative between the points of view of Swillsman, Glory’s innkeeper, Graves, the gravedigger, and the five goats. By shifting viewpoints, Erikson successfully manages to build suspense as to which of his characters will succeed and which will die, although once the Goats go up against the demonic hordes, the suspense quickly evaporates. The battle sequences between the five goats and the demons are, perhaps, the weakest part of the story, although Erikson does break them up by revisiting the other characters to show them making plans for the heroes’ eventual defeat and deaths, clearly showing that the heroes aren’t the first to brave the abandoned fortress.

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October Is Hammer Country: The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

October Is Hammer Country: The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

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phantom-of-opera-hammer-1962-one-sheetAh, October. That means nothing but Hammer Films. All Hammer Horror, All the Time! So let’s start off with one that’s … not so great. (Gotta build up the suspense.)

Once Britain’s Hammer Film Productions received full permission from Universal Pictures to raid their box of monster goodies, a Phantom of the Opera movie was a certainty. Universal had twice adapted the 1910 Gaston Leroux novel. The first is the most famous version, the 1925 silent classic starring Lon Chaney Sr. in his signature role. Its unmasking scene is one of the first iconic horror movie images. Universal mounted a lavish color remake in 1943 with Claude Rains as the phantom, but the musical production numbers were pushed to the front, making for incredibly anemic horror.

Almost twenty years later, the time was right for a new version, and Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera was perfect material for Hammer’s luxurious Gothic style, its seasoned horror director Terence Fisher, and an ideally cast Herbert Lom as the Phantom. But even with this talent involved, The Phantom of the Opera was poorly received in 1962 when it was released on a double bill with Captain Clegg, a period adventure picture about smugglers. The film still maintains a lower profile than other cinematic Phantom adaptations, both literal and loose, of the story of a tortured and murderous composer beneath the Paris opera house. Or, in this case, a London opera house.

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In 500 Words or Less: The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken

In 500 Words or Less: The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken

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The Quantum Magician-smallThe Quantum Magician
by Derek Künsken
Solaris (480 pages, $11.99 paperback, $6.99 eBook, October 2, 2018)

When I reviewed Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit last year, I joked that there’s a reason why I teach in the humanities, which is the same reason I don’t read a lot of hard science fiction. For me to enjoy a hard SF novel enough to discuss it here is a big deal – and I really enjoyed Derek Künsken’s The Quantum Magician, even though I’m sure that like Ninefox, I didn’t get as much out of it as someone else might have.

To be clear, the worldbuilding here is intricate, compelling and absolutely fascinating. From the moment concepts were introduced I wanted to know more, especially the different subsets of humanity that Künsken presents, each the product of generations of genetic manipulation. I mean, an entire population of neo-humans nicknamed Puppets because of their diminutive size, who double as religious zealots worshipping their divine beings’ cruelty? Or an intergalactic political hierarchy based on the economics of patrons and clients, complete with the inequalities and social issues you might expect? These demand further unpacking, which Künsken does with deliberate skill, slowly revealing more and more about humanity’s divergent offshoots and the galaxy they inhabit.

But I can’t say that I walked away from The Quantum Magician with a crystal clear sense of what I read. The core plot is a con game perpetrated by a team of ragtag scoundrels, trying to sneak a flotilla of warships through a wormhole controlled by another government… but don’t ask me to explain more than that. Künsken does an amazing job of presenting a bunch of quirky protagonists who play off each other well, but the characters that stand out do so powerfully; between that and the rich worldbuilding of things like the Puppets, I forgot about that flotilla and the original aim of the con for a good third of the novel, until they came back into focus.

Much as I rooted for protagonist Belisarius (who would be the Danny Ocean of these scoundrels) and his partner/love interest Cassandra (who I suppose is Tess and Rusty from Ocean’s Eleven combined), the secondary characters stole the spotlight for me, particularly AI-on-a-religious-mission Saint Matthew and the creepily dangerous Scarecrow hunting these scoundrels down.

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