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Birthday Reviews: Edward Bryant’s “Saurus Wrecks”

Birthday Reviews: Edward Bryant’s “Saurus Wrecks”

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Cover by Peter Stallard
Cover by Peter Stallard

Edward Bryant was born on August 27, 1945 and died on February 10, 2017.

Bryant won back to back Nebulas for Best Short Story in 1979 and 1980 for “Stone” and “giANTS,” both of which were also nominated for the Hugo Award. His work was also nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award. In 1997, the International Horror Guild named Bryant a Living Legend. Bryant was the Toastmaster for Denvention II, the 1981 Worldcon and also emceed the masquerade at Denvention III. He also served as Toastmaster for World Fantasy Con, ArmadilloCon, TusCon, and Death Equinox. He collaborated with Harlan Ellison, James Sutherland, Jody Harper, Trey R. Barker, Connie Willis, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Dan Simmons.

“‘Saurus Wrecks” is a testament to the power of dreams, as well as the idea of taking a bad situation and turning it to the general benefit of the community. The town of Goshen, Wyoming was in for a surprise when a coal plant was built in nearby Stubbleford. The winds meant that the enormous plume of steam the plant generated was falling on Goshen, changing the town’s climate. The only person who saw this as beneficial was Rexford Allyn Pugnell, the town drunk.

Pugnell pointed out to the town council that the new climate was perfect for growing ferns and recommended that the city ban the growth of flowering plants to turn it into a fern Mecca. Of course, being the town drunk and suggesting such a thing gained him absolutely no traction. Rather than give up on his idea, Pugnell approached one of the school’s teachers, Miss Devereaux with the simple request that he be allowed to use some extra chicken wire she had and build something on the side lot of her house. Without asking questions, she agreed and Pugnell set about building an enormous metal Tyrannosaurus rex.

Although the town attacked the sculpture, especially when he began to incorporate manure into it, its eventual sprouting of ferns, supporting Pugnell’s initial suggestion, causes a make-over to the economically depressed town. Although Bryant doesn’t go into detail about the specifics of how the town builds on Pugnell’s legacy, or that of Devereaux, who fights to allow him to do what he needs to, it is clear that Pugnell has won his argument and found a way to take the steam from the coal plant and turn it to the town’s benefit.

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Birthday Reviews: Nick Pollotta’s “The Collar”

Birthday Reviews: Nick Pollotta’s “The Collar”

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Cover by David Monette
Cover by David Monette

Nick Pollotta was born on August 26, 1954 and died on April 13, 2013.

Although Pollotta published the novel Illegal Aliens with Phil Foglio and his own Bureau 13 novels, the vast majority of Pollotta’s work appeared using the house names James Axler and Don Pendleton for Gold Eagle Books’s line of adventure novels. He also wrote the Satellite Night News series using the pen name Jack Hopkins. He also wrote That Darn Squid God in collaboration with James Clay.

Pollotta published “The Collar” in the Summer 2002 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, edited by Edward J. McFadden. Fantastic was a continuation of the magazine Pirate Writings, which had changed its name in 2000. The story has not been reprinted.

“The Collar” is the story of a professional hitman who has been hired to kill an old man. Although he generally doesn’t care who he kills as long as he gets paid, when he sees that the old man, who lives alone, has an enormous arsenal of weapons as well as religious artifacts, his curiosity is piqued. An interview/interrogation of the bagman sent to pay him by his unseen employer makes him even more suspicious and he realizes that he was hired by a vampire to kill a vampire hunter.

Pollotta is known for his humorous science fiction stories, and when his hit man goes to confront the vampire only to realize that the supernatural creature is not a vampire, but a full-fledged demon, Pollotta could have had plenty of room for humor. However, he chose to take a more serious tack with the story, following the competent hitman’s confrontation with the demon and the aftermath.

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The Darwin Variant by Kenneth Johnson Is a Thrilling and Frightening No-Empathy Apocalypse

The Darwin Variant by Kenneth Johnson Is a Thrilling and Frightening No-Empathy Apocalypse

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darwin-variant-coverLast year I had the opportunity to interview Kenneth Johnson, the famed television writer-producer-director responsible for The Incredible Hulk, V: The Original Miniseries, The Bionic Woman, and Alien Nation, about his upcoming novel, The Man of Legends. Mr. Johnson, or “Kenny” as he prefers to be called, is the interview subject most writers dream about: warm, humorous, intelligent, and overflowing with anecdotes showing the amount of thought he infuses into his work. This depth of thinking shows in The Man of Legends, a multi-character epic about an immortal man and the people he encounters in his long past and the urgent crisis of his present. It was, without a doubt, my favorite new novel of 2017.

Plenty of readers agreed with my opinion and made The Man of Legends a bestseller. Amazon’s 47North imprint immediately asked the author for a sequel. Although there was room for a follow-up, Johnson had shifted onto an idea that could use the same multi-narrator structure of The Man of Legends to tell a different type of epic — a viral outbreak tale with a twist that goes into territory similar to V: The Original Miniseries.

When Kenny called me to ask if I wanted to read the new book, The Darwin Variant, and talk to him about it, I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough. This time I had the good fortune to interview him in person at his Sherman Oaks office, where photos covering the walls recount his own “Man of Legends” history with everyone from Bill Bixby and Vincent Price to George Burns and Nikita Khrushchev. (Actually a taxi driver from NY who posed as Kruschev for The Mike Douglas Show, which Kenny was producing at the time.)

The Darwin Variant explores what occurs when members of humanity make a sudden evolutionary surge. Their intelligence rises rapidly, but something else fails: their empathy. These superior humans are aggressive, dominant, compassionless, and they’re threatening to remake the world. In the chilling words of a leader of the evolutionarily elevated group calling themselves The Friends of America (or just “The Friends”), “We’ll do good — exactly as we want it.”

It’s a timely and terrifying concept. Johnson weaves it into a tight science fiction thriller offering hope among the horror, and a fascinating duel between the ethos of the Survival of the Fittest and the evolution of humanity toward a better humanity, not merely a smarter one. “More intelligent? Yes, you are,” a character challenges one of the infected Friends. “But more educated? Not at all.” Reaching that education is the journey the book takes readers on.

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Birthday Reviews: Chris Roberson’s “Death on the Crosstime Express”

Birthday Reviews: Chris Roberson’s “Death on the Crosstime Express”

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Cover by Bob Eggleton
Cover by Bob Eggleton

Chris Roberson was born on August 25, 1970.

Roberson has won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his short story “O One” and his novel The Dragon’s Nine Sons and has been nominated for it three additional times. He was a two-time nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a four time nominee for the World Fantasy Award.

Roberson’s comic series iZombie has been turned into a television series which will start its fifth season next year. He has also written the Serenity comic series No Power in the Verse and the Fables series Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love. Along with his wife, Roberson runs MonkeyBrain Books.

Roberson published “Death on the Crosstime Express” in Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders in 2008. The story is one of many works by Roberson that take place in his Myriad universes, but it has not been reprinted.

“Death on the Crosstime Express” is a multiple reality story taking place on an airship. At its core, it is a murder mystery in which the ship’s navigator, who is essential for guiding the craft through the different levels of reality, is brutally murdered. The murder plot and solution, however, take a backseat to Roberson setting up the world for the purposes of the story.

The beginning introduces an enormous cast of characters, each one from a different universe, which allows Roberson to also talk about how those worlds differ from our own and to show the vastness of the realms through which the Crosstime Express can travel. He also explains a little of the way the Myriad works as well as the functioning of the airship. There are enough characters introduced at this point that they are difficult to keep straight, especially since so few are given names, but they provide a large number of potential suspects once the navigator is murdered.

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In 500 Words or Less: Antilia: Sword and Song by Kate Story

In 500 Words or Less: Antilia: Sword and Song by Kate Story

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Antilia Sword and Song-smallAntilia: Sword and Song
by Kate Story
ChiZine Publications (280 pages, $14.99 paperback and eBook, June 19 2018)

I firmly believe we need less grimdark and more hopepunk these days, but I still like novels that explore a darker near-future, since they remind us we aren’t out of the woods yet. That’s the specific focus of Antilia: Sword and Song by Kate Story, which straddles two worlds: a near-future North American Union governed by a populist, militant government, and a strange fantasy realm protagonists Ophelia and Rowan independently use as their escape from the “real world.”

The typical “boy meets girl” motif in Sword and Song takes interesting turns, not just as Ophelia and Rowan realize someone else knows about their made-up world. Their dysfunctional family dynamics are unique and compelling and explain why they both so desperately need an escape. The slow reveal about Antilia is effective, too, since for the first half our protagonists only jump there for brief stints, giving the bizarre island an air of mystery. Things aren’t good there, either, between an erupting volcano and a political fracture between the island’s two cities, but apparently Ophelia and Rowan are destined to fix things. That probably sounds familiar, but strangely the more we learn about Antilia, the more it all feels familiar: the architecture, inhabitants, cultural tentpoles, etc, feel like a cross between Wonderland and Narnia, almost like Antilia was created by accident based on someone’s favorite stories as a kid. There’s even a sword-in-the-stone, which Rowan remarks is bizarrely similar to Excalibur.

Unfortunately, Ophelia and Rowan ending up stuck in Antilia in the book’s second half lost my interest the further I got, specifically because the island didn’t feel very fresh. Their parents and friends in the “real world” jumped off the page, but the people and creatures of Antilia seemed more cookie-cutter. If there was a point to the hodgepodge of familiar elements, I missed it, or maybe didn’t appreciate it. The North American Union is way more compelling, and I kept wanting to go back.

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Birthday Reviews: James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine”

Birthday Reviews: James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine”

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Cover by Mark Zug
Cover by Mark Zug

Alice B. Sheldon was born on August 24, 1915 and died on May 19, 1987.  She published science fiction under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. and when speculation began that Tiptree might be a woman, Robert Silverberg famously stated that such a theory was absurd, since he found “something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” Shortly after Sheldon’s mother’s death, the truth came out about her identity, which she had hidden in part because of her position in academia. Sheldon also used the pen names Alice Hastings Bradley, Major Alice Davey, Alli B. Sheldon, and Raccona Sheldon, the last being her most famous pseudonym aside from Tiptree.

Tiptree won the Nebula Award in 1974 for the short story “Love Is the Plan, the Plan is Death” and won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” the same year.  Both stories were nominated for both awards. In 1977, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” won both awards in the Novella category as well as the Jupiter Award. In 1978, “The Screwfly Solution” won the Nebula for Best Novelette, but lost the Hugo Award. Her 1987 collection The Tales of the Quintana Roo earned Tiptree a World Fantasy Award. Tiptree has won the Seiun Award four times, for “The Only Neat Thing You Do,” “Out of the Everywhere,” Brightness Falls from the Air, and “Backward, Turn Backward.” She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012. In 1991, Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler created the James Tiptree Jr. Award for speculative fiction that explores or expands the understanding of gender.

Although initially written in the 1950s, well before Tiptree began writing for publication, “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine” wasn’t published until 1998, when Kim Mohan purchased it to appear in the Fall issue of Amazing Stories, although it had previously sold in 1971 to a project that never saw print.  The story was reprinted with the variant title “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine, or, I Screwed 15,924 Back Issues of Astounding for the F.B.I.” in Meet Me at Infinity. The story was also translated for the German James Tiptree collection Doktor Ain.

Despite the title of “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine, or, I Screwed 15,924 Back Issues of Astounding for the F.B.I.,” the story is not specifically a time travel story, but rather a send up of bad writing in science fiction, made more effective, given its 1950s writing date, by the fact that numerous works of the type it is skewering were still being published in 1998 when the story eventually saw print.  The story within a story tells of spaceship Captain Herring, who, believing he was alone on his ship, finds a strange stowaway in a sequence which is reminiscent of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” which was published shortly before Tiptree wrote this story.

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A Cyberpunk Cinderella Story: Warcross by Marie Lu

A Cyberpunk Cinderella Story: Warcross by Marie Lu

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Warcross Marie Lu-small Wildcard Marie Lu-small

Emika Chen needs to raise $3,450 in the next 72 hours, or she’ll be evicted from her apartment. What with her wicked hacking skillz, she ought to be acing computer science classes in college, but she dropped out of school when her dad died. Saddled by his debts and her own criminal record, she can’t get a job with a corporation, so she works as a bounty hunter. Her specialty lies in capturing players in the world’s most famous video game, Warcross, who have large gambling debts. The prodigy who created the game, Hideo Tanaka, is her celebrity crush.

When the police announce a $5,000 bounty on a drug dealer, Emika’s determined to nab him. Sure enough, she tracks him downtown on her electric skateboard, alerts the cops to his location, chases him down, and stuns him. She’s got her knee pressed into his back while he cries into the ground when the police arrive.

But they don’t give her the bounty. On a technicality, it goes to someone who had messaged them sooner than she did.

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Birthday Review’s: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Nine Alternate Alternate Histories”

Birthday Review’s: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Nine Alternate Alternate Histories”

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Other Earths
Other Earths

Benjamin Rosenbaum was born on August 23, 1969.

Rosenbaum has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award three times each and the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and British SF Association Award once each. Rosenabum’s short stories have been collected in Other Cities and The Ant King and Other Stories. He has written collaborations with Paul Melko, David Ackert, and Cory Doctorow.

Benjamin Rosenbaum published “Nine Alternate Alternate Histories” in the anthology Other Earths, edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake in 2009. The piece has not been reprinted.

Rosenbaum’s “Nine Alternate Alternate Histories” really is neither an alternate history or even a story. Rather it takes a look at the idea that there might be a multiverse in which history can continuously branch off to form different alternatives and seeks to categorize the types of branch points which might be possible.

The story is a conjectural on the different ways people view history and on the decision making process. Rosenbaum looks at convergence, divergence, and provisional history along with his view of different types of choice. While the tale doesn’t work well from a narrative point of view, it does provide a background for the sorts of alternate history stories which are published (and were published earlier in the particular anthology).

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Birthday Reviews: Ray Bradbury’s “Downwind from Gettysburg”

Birthday Reviews: Ray Bradbury’s “Downwind from Gettysburg”

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Cover by Peter Bramley
Cover by Peter Bramley

Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 and died on June 5, 2012.

Bradbury never received the Hugo Award, although he received four Retro Hugo Awards for his novel Fahrenheit 451, his fanzine Futuria Fantasia, and twice for Best Fan Writer. He was nominated for a single Hugo. He was never nominated for a Nebula Award. He won the Bram Stoker Award for his collection One More for the Road. Fahrenheit 451 also won a Prometheus Award and a Geffen Award. Bradbury won three Seiun Awards for Best Foreign Short Story. He won the coveted Balrog Award for Poetry in 1979. In 1966, he was awarded a Forry Award by LASFS. He received a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1977 and was named a Grand Master of Fantasy with a Gandalf Award in 1980, the final year the award was in existence. Bradbury was the Guest of Honor at ConFederation, the 44th Worldcon, held in Atlanta in 1986. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bram Stoker Awards in 1989, the same year he was named a Grand Master by SFWA. World Horror Con named him a Grandmaster in 2001 and the Rhysling Awards did so in 2008.  He was given an Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.  Bradbury was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2012.

“Downwind from Gettysburg” was originally published in Bradbury’s collection I Sing the Body Electric in 1969 and was reprinted in 2003 in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. When the latter was reprinted in two volumes, the story appeared in Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Although it hasn’t often been reprinted in English, the story has been translated, usually as part of I Sing the Body Electric, into French, Portuguese, German, and Italian.

In 1964, Walt Disney created an animatronic version of Abraham Lincoln to appear at the Illinois Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. The following year the exhibit moved to Disneyland, where the Lincoln show continued to run, on and off through the present, although another version, featuring versions of all the Presidents, runs at the Magic Kingdom in Florida. In 1969 Ray Bradbury published “Downwind from Gettysburg,” which featured a similar animatronic version of Abraham Lincoln.

Bradbury’s version, however, sits in a replica of Ford’s Theatre and the story opens with someone coming into the theatre and shooting the animatronic figure in the head. Although Bayes, the proprietor of the exhibit, knows that he must call the designer, Phipps, to have the robot fixed, he doesn’t want to make the call, instead tracking down the “assassin” who shot the robot. The man, who is unemployed and whose life seems to be a shambles, explains that his name is Norman Llewellyn Booth. Booth has the feeling that fate has conspired to make him recreate the heinous crime committed by his namesake, although there is no direct connection between the two Booths. Instead, Booth figured the nature of his crime would bring him a notoriety he was otherwise lacking.

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Birthday Reviews: Miriam Allen deFord’s “Pres Conference”

Birthday Reviews: Miriam Allen deFord’s “Pres Conference”

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Cover by Richard Powers
Cover by Richard Powers

Miriam Allen deFord was born on August 21, 1888 and died on February 22, 1975.

Although deFord had some fiction published as early 1928, she really turned to writing science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s and 60s. Her non-SF book The Overbury Affair earned her an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book and she helped develop and sign the Humanist Manifesto in 1973. Much of her science fiction appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning under the editorship of Anthony Boucher.

DeFord’s “Press Conference” appeared in the sixth and final volume of Frederik Pohl’s Star Science Fiction anthology series in 1959. The story has not been reprinted since.

“Press Conference” is essentially a transcription of the press conference given upon the occasion of the return of the first human to travel outside the galaxy. It is told, mostly, in the voices of Mr. Rasmussen, the press secretary for the United Nations whose job is to introduce her and make sure she givens approved questions, and Miss X, or Dor-je Lhor-kang, the woman who made the journey.

The press conference opens up by listing the specifications used to find someone to go into space. A woman is the preferred candidate, and she should be acclimatized to higher elevations, so someone from Peru or Chile. She should have a Ph.D. in physics and, because there is limited space in the spacecraft, she should be a dwarf. This is all by way of introduction of deFord’s somewhat atypical protagonist.

The press conference goes well as long as Lhor-kang is speaking. She knows the limitations Rasmussen has placed on her and has no real desire to break away from him. As soon as she opens the floor to questions, however, the press conference goes off the rails as the reporters want to ask questions with real substance. Although Rasmussen attempts to retain control over her, Lhor-kang eventually lets slip the truth about the aliens that she has seen and their desires with regard to the Earth. When Lhor-kang exhibits admiration for the aliens’ goals, she is branded by some of the reporters as a traitor or brainwashed.

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