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A to Z Reviews: “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” by Jonathan Sean Lyster

A to Z Reviews: “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” by Jonathan Sean Lyster

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A to Z Reviews

Jonathan Sean Lyster only has two published stories, the first appeared in 2020 and the second, “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” appeared in the  October 2022 issue of Analog. There is a strong resonance between “The Butcher of Darkside Hover” and the classic story “The Cold Equations,”  by Tom Godwin.

The story is set on a base located on the farside of the moon, although as the story progresses, it becomes clear that it is actually in orbit over the farside of the moon, which is one of the issues with the story. Lyster slowly provides details of his world, but never fully and in a manner that means the reader is putting together the pieces to get an idea of what his world looks like. The process means that the reader’s perception is constantly changing regarding the setting when it should be more focused on the problem presented for the characters and their solution.

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The Wit and Wisdom of Connie Willis

The Wit and Wisdom of Connie Willis

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Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2011, containing “All About Emily,” and the Subterranean
Press hardcover edition (January 31, 2012). Covers by Duncan Long and J.K. Potter

Far too often, the best among us are roundly ignored. This can hardly be said of Connie Willis, who has collected an astonishing array of Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards, yet her name somehow doesn’t seem to ring from the battlements. Perhaps I’m simply attending to the wrong battlements, but when I hear discussions of the great women of science fiction, I tend to catch the names LeGuin, L’Engle, Butler, and, now, Jemisin. Willis seems to come up less frequently.

Better yet, let’s just leave gender entirely out of the equation.

Willis’s name deserves to come up front and center in any discussion of top-tier sci-fi, first and foremost because she is very funny.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Adventure of You,” by Paul La Farge

A to Z Reviews: “The Adventure of You,” by Paul La Farge

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A to Z ReviewsPaul LaFarge wrote five novels before his death in January 2023 from cancer. His essays and fiction appeared in a variety of magazines. Only a small portion of his work was within the genre, but the story “The Adventure of You,” which appeared in Gordon van Gelder’s original anthology Welcome to Dystopia in 2019 is one of those genre stories.

In an unspecified time and place in the future, John Arnold Arnold is working as a debris removal specialist for a company. The story is told through a memo from the company’s HR department, ostensibly to help Arnold’s mental health, but it quickly becomes clear that the program being offered is more for the company’s benefit than Arnold’s. The memos offer an explanation of the situation in the company town for the reader while providing indoctrination for the workers.

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Lord of a Shattered Land and The Doom of Odin: Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden Deliver High-octane, Euro-Mediterranean Adventure

Lord of a Shattered Land and The Doom of Odin: Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden Deliver High-octane, Euro-Mediterranean Adventure

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I just finished two Euro-Mediterranean-inspired fantasy novels, and, by chance, both feature dragons on their beautiful covers. This post showcases both. Scott Oden’s The Doom of Oden wraps up a trilogy (Grimnir Series) and Howard Andrew Jones’ Lord of a Shattered Land begins a five-book series (Hanuvar Chronicles). Each offers anti-Roman myths/legends, Oden’s Grimnir overtly calls out Rome (and then introduces loads of Nordic fantasy) and HAJ’s Hanuvar’s primary antagonist is the Dervan Empire (obviously inspired by the Roman Empire). In the spirit of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, who roamed the Euro-Mediterranean continue of Hyboria, these both continue a tradition with a unique flair. These series are not to be missed!

Both are veteran authors with respect for history and historical fiction (HAJ is known for his Harold Lamb series editing and Oden for his bibliography that includes The White Lion, The Lion of Cairo, Men of Bronze, and Memnon). Here they write sagas about veteran protagonists. Don’t expect coming-of-age stories or epic fantasy, five-character parties either. These provide the classic Sword & Sorcery approach: the protagonists may have sidekicks, but they operate primarily on their own, and they are already equipped with experience/skills/power from page one. So the pace is fast and focused.

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A to Z Reviews: Sync, by K.P. Kyle

A to Z Reviews: Sync, by K.P. Kyle

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A to Z Reviews

K.P. Kyle’s debut novel Sync is the first of three novel-length works that I’ll be looking at in this series. Published by Allium Press, in 2019, Kyle offers the story of Brigid, who picks up a hitchhiker on a cold, rainy night in New England and she drives home to Boston. Although Jason doesn’t smell very good and seems to be suffering from paranoia, Brigid invites him to spend the night at her apartment so he can get cleaned up and get a good night’s sleep before getting on a train for somewhere.

When a burglar breaks into Brigid’s home that evening, she and Jason go on the lam, trying to avoid the men who apparently actually are after Jason. Jason also reveals his secret to Brigid. He was part of an experiment that allows him to temporarily jump from one reality to another, although the process leaves him naked.

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A to Z Reviews: “Tag,” by David Kablack

A to Z Reviews: “Tag,” by David Kablack

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A to Z Reviews

David Kablack’s “Tag” appeared in the 18th issue of the magazine Pirate Writings, which would change its name to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination with the next issue. One of the features of Pirate Writings was the inclusion of a short-short story section.  The first story in the section in this particular issue is set in a small town. Charlie, the O’Reilley twins, Wally, and Black Tom O’Faolin, all teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, are spending time playing a game of tag on one of the rare days off the working members of the group have.

Their game is interrupted by one of the village’s outcasts, a hunchback whose father is unknown and whose mother has died, hobbles past them on his way home from the market. Being young boys faced with someone who is an outsider, they stop their game to watch him go by.  As Charlie starts the game up again by tagging Tom, Tom gets an idea and tags the hunchback with enough force that he sends his purchases scattering across the ground.

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A 1970s Future: The Man Responsible by Stephen Robinett

A 1970s Future: The Man Responsible by Stephen Robinett

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The Man Responsible (Ace Books, April 1978). Cover art by Vincent DiFate

This latest in my loose series of essays about fairly obscure 1970s/1980s SF books is about a writer who looked to be establishing a potentially significant career as what might be called a “Ben Bova” writer. Alas, Stephen Robinett contracted Hodgkin’s Disease as a young man, and died at only age 62 in 2004. His final two novels, Final Option and the sadly ironically titled Unfinished Business, were published in 1990, and are only borderline SF if at all, crime stories about a financial journalist investigating fraud. Robinett himself was a lawyer and a business journalist, and this background certainly informs his work, including the novel I’m discussing here.

I have called Robinett a Ben Bova writer, in the sense that the bulk of his stories were published in Ben Bova’s Analog, and his one collection, Projections, was part of a short-lived series of books from Ace labeled “Analog Books,” and edited by Bova. Robinett followed Bova to Omni, and his final short story appeared there in 1983. But Robinett also sold to Vertex, to Jim Baen’s Galaxy, and to Damon Knight’s Orbit, while his first sales were to John W. Campbell at Analog, beginning with “Minitalent” in March 1969. This makes him, along with Rob Chilson, Stepan Chapman and James Tiptree, Jr., one of Campbell’s latest discoveries.

The other interesting thing about Robinett’s first stories — all the way through a couple Galaxy pieces in 1975 — is that they were published as by “Tak Hallus.” And takhallus is a Persian word (derived from Arabic) meaning… pseudonym.

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A to Z Reviews: “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer,” by S. Ivan Jurisevic

A to Z Reviews: “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer,” by S. Ivan Jurisevic

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A to Z Reviews

An interesting coincidence occurred when I hit the Js. The first author in my collection was Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, whose story “The Haunted House on Rocketworks Street” appeared in an anthology put together in honor of Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland. The final author in my collection in S. Ivan Jurisevic, whose story “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer” appeared in Interzone issue 146, which proclaims that it is the “Special Australian WorldCon issue.”

Although this is Jurisevic’s only story listed in the Internet Science Fiction Database, the about an author blurb at the end notes that he previously published a story about Captain Starlight in the magazine Omega. In any event, this story is a typical tall tale about a folkloric character. It reads as if Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill had relocated to the Australian outback and helped form the landscape.

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Besties: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by R.F. Kuang

Besties: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by R.F. Kuang

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023
(Mariner Books, October 17, 2023)

Perhaps the most overused title for short story anthologies beings with “Best of.” In genre fiction, the heavyweight (in terms of both size and breadth of coverage) was the Gardner Dozois-edited The Year’s Best Science Fiction Stories that ran for 35 years until his death in 2018. And there are a whole slew of similar “Best of’s” for horror, dark fantasy, speculative fiction, you name a subgenre and there’s a “Best of” collection.

If “Best of” is overused for survey anthologies of a year and/or genre, and recognizing that someone’s “best” is someone else’s “meh,” it is probably because a more accurate title of This is Kinda What the Editor Liked More than Others For Whatever Subjective Reasons doesn’t go over well with publisher marketing teams.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Haunted House on Rocketworks Street,” by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

A to Z Reviews: “The Haunted House on Rocketworks Street,” by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

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A to Z Reviews

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen captures the nostalgic, carefree summer days of childhood in “The Haunted House on Rocketworks Street,” which also demonstrates the universality of human experience.  The story does have a frame which becomes important, but the meat of the story follows for kids on a summer day, who have the freedom of movement on Rocketworks Street, free from responsibility or parental controls.

The four kids, leader Albin, Max, Henry, and Henry’s sister Henrietta, spend their summer running up and down the street, staying out of sight of their parents, and working up tests of their courage. The fact that all of the parents who live on Rocketworks Street have been pulled into the fireworks factory from which the street took its name, just makes their freedom easy to maintain and enjoy.

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