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In 500 Words or Less: Graveyard Mind by Chadwick Ginther

In 500 Words or Less: Graveyard Mind by Chadwick Ginther

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oie_9232935aM029I3CGraveyard Mind
By Chadwick Ginther
ChiZine Publications (300 pages, $17.99 paperback, $10.99 eBook, July 2018)

I love a book set in a Canadian city… other than Toronto. Sorry, T-dot; you get a lot of attention in the mainstream, but we have a big-ass country for SFF authors to play with, and as Bobby Singer once said to the Winchesters, “You ain’t the center of the universe.”

Sorry, that probably seemed aggressive. But it’s justified, since one of the things worth celebrating about Chadwick Ginther’s newest novel, Graveyard Mind, is that once again he brings us back to Winnipeg, painting it in a much different light than his Thunder Road novels by focusing on the underworld: ghosts, vampires, monsters, and more. There’s a similar feel here in the way Chadwick weaves interesting story elements together, presenting a unified world that makes total sense while being freaky and entertaining. You’ve got Frank, a golem stitched-together from dead soldiers who grapples with wanting to die; an underworld “territory” divided between an aging, pot-bellied vampire and an aristocratic animated skeleton; and protagonist Winter Murray, the necromancer charged with protecting Winnipeg while she deals with her never-born twin sister whispering in the back of her head. There’s even hell hounds and cultists and whatnot!

The freaky moments are superb, like where Winter’s frenemy vampire Christophe shows up at an art sale and brings the entire room under his thrall just to throw his weight around. These are so gripping because of Chadwick’s excellent character work; even minor characters make you care about them because, apologies for the cliché, they jump off the page. Graveyard Mind is a lot like The Dresden Files in that the interpersonal is just as important (and handled as well) as the excitement and terror of the supernatural. Winter tries to support her best friend Lyssa, who’s lost her mother, while at the same time keeping a local cult from taking over the funeral; she has a tenuous relationship with the lingering spirit of her mentor, Grannie Annie, who abducted her and brutally trained her in necromancy, keeping her from ever seeing her parents again; and so on. The consequences of Winter’s decisions on these relationships are more important than the consequences for her city or the supernatural world, because that’s what matters more to her.

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Birthday Reviews: Ward Moore’s “Rebel”

Birthday Reviews: Ward Moore’s “Rebel”

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Cover by Ed Emshwiller
Cover by Ed Emshwiller

Joseph Ward Moore was born on August 10, 1903 and published fiction using the name Ward Moore. Moore died on January 29, 1978.

Moore’s most famous work was the novel Bring the Jubilee, an alternate history about the Civil War. His stories “Lot” and “Lot’s Daughter,” form a post-apocalyptic future which was collected and expanded into the novel Lot, which formed the basis for the film Panic in Year Zero! He collaborated with Avram Davidson on the novel Joyleg and with Robert Bradford on Caduceus Wild.

“Rebel” originally appeared in the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Robert P. Mills. It was reprinted in the June issue of the British edition of the magazine the same year and a month later was translated into French for its appearance in Fiction #104. Ida Purnell Stone included the story in her anthology Never in This World while Demètre Ioakimidis, Gérard Klein, and Jacques Goimard reprinted the French translation in their anthology Histoires de demain.

Moore takes a very simple idea in “Rebel” and runs with it. Bach and Smith and his wife only want what’s best for their son, Caludo, just as parents throughout history. Unfortunately, just like children throughout history, Caludo is rebelling against his parents’ values and insists that he isn’t going through a phase and his desires are just as legitimate as theirs. What sets the story apart is that in the Smiths’ world, the norm is based in artistic endeavor and Caludo wants to go into business.

The Smiths consider Caludo’s attire, jacket and trousers, to be a bizarre affectation, although Caludo, who also insists on sitting up in a straight backed chair, informs them he wears the constricting clothing rather than robes and togas because he finds it comfortable. Moore pulls out every argument a parent has made in favor of capitalism and fitting in and restructured it to fit into the milieu of a world in which capitalism is seen as a quaint historical artifact. It was good enough for the Grand Masters like Rockefeller and Carnegie, but it surely has no place in the modern world.

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Birthday Reviews: John Varley’s “Just Another Perfect Day”

Birthday Reviews: John Varley’s “Just Another Perfect Day”

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Cover by Gottfried Helnweinn
Cover by Gottfried Helnweinn

John Varley was born on August 9, 1947.

Varley has won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his novellas “The Persistence of Vision” and “Press Enter [].” He won an additional Hugo Award for the short story “The Pusher.” His novel Red Thunder won the Endeavour Award. The novel version of The Persistence of Vision won the Prix Apollo. His novella “In the Halls of the Martian Kings” won the Jupiter Award. He won the Prometheus Award for The Golden Globe. “Press Enter []” and “Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo” both won the Seiun Award. In 2009, Varley won the Robert A. Heinlein Award. One of Varley’s most famous stories, “Air Raid,” which formed the basis of the novel and film Millennium, was originally published with the pseudonym “Herb Boehm.”

“Just Another Perfect Day” was originally published in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine in June of 1989 by editor Tappan King. Gardner Dozois picked the story up for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection. When Dozois’s volume was translated into Italian in 1995, Varley’s story was translated by Massimo Patti and included in the volume Millemondi Inverno 1995. In 1996 it appeared in translation in the German magazine Galaxies #3 and was translated into Japanese in 1998. Varley included the story in The John Varley Reader and John Joseph Adams reprinted it in the April 2011 issue of Lightspeed, as well as a performance of the book in the Lightspeed Podcast for the same year.

One of the cliché’s of science fiction is the character who awakens to a blank slate, in an empty room, with no idea who they are, where they are, or even what year they are in. It is a way for authors to provide necessary information not only to the character, but to the reader. In “Just Another Perfect Day,” John Varley bases his entire story on that cliché, providing a letter to his amnesiac, written by a previous version of the amnesiac, to explain the important parts of what has happened in the twenty-two years since his last actual memory.

The majority of the letter explains to the reader what the day has in store for him, what happened to him in 1989 that caused him not to remember anything since 1986, and eventually the salient features of what has changed in the world that he doesn’t remember, notably that the Earth has been invaded by aliens, called Martians, although they don’t come from there, and each day they are interested in visiting with him for an hour to talk. The subjects of these discussions, both historically, and in the context of the day the story is set, is left up to the reader to conjecture.

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The Games of Gen Con 2018

The Games of Gen Con 2018

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PathfinderPlaytest

As you walk through the convention hall at Gen Con, moving from demo to demo and panel to panel, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the advertisements everywhere, trying to catch your attention for the latest big game. Usually, there are one or two big new games that just seem to overwhelm the convention, often tied into big properties.

This year, the big new game at Gen Con wasn’t new. Not really. Pathfinder has long had a strong, even overwhelming, presence at Gen Con, so the promotion of the release of the Pathfinder Playtest this year felt pretty natural. Next year, we can anticipate the big release to be the Pathfinder Second Edition RPG, but for now the playtesting has begun.

I’ll cover the details of the Pathfinder Playtest in more depth in the upcoming weeks and months. I played two Pathfinder Society sessions of the playtest, at levels 1 and 5, so got a fair idea of how the bones of the new system operates. Fortunately, you don’t have to, because the Pathfinder Playtest Rulebook along with all other materials needed for play are available for free download at the Paizo website.

These downloads include the Doomsday Dawn campaign, a series of 7 adventures ranging from levels 1 to 17. These adventures aren’t all played with the same group of characters, although the core group of characters created for the level 1 adventure are re-used every couple of adventures at higher levels, so they’re really the “heroes” of the campaign. There are also three Pathfinder Society scenarios built for the playtest, to teach and test various elements of the game. And, of course, the Rulebook contains everything that a Gamemaster needs to create an original homebrew adventure or campaign for their group, to test out the rules in ways of their own devising.

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Birthday Reviews: F. Anstey’s “The Adventure of the Snowing Globe”

Birthday Reviews: F. Anstey’s “The Adventure of the Snowing Globe”

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The Strand
The Strand

F. Anstey was born Thomas Anstey Guthrie on August 8, 1856. He began using the pseudonym F. Anstey after an editor included a typo in his byline, replacing his first initial with an F. He published under both the F. Anstey name and his own name. He died on March 10, 1934.

Trained as a lawyer, Anstey frequently used his legal background in his books and novels, most of which were humorous. He was a frequent contributor to Punch. In addition to fiction, he also produced plays. Over the years, many of his stories have been turned into films, most recently the 1988 film Vice Versa, starring Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage, based on his 1882 book of the same title.

“The Adventure of the Snowing Globe” was originally published in the December 1905 issue of The Strand Magazine, edited by George Newnes. The following year, Anstey included the story in his collection Salted Almonds. In 1996, Peter Haining chose the story for his anthology The Wizards of Odd: Comic Tales of Fantasy, which has been translated, along with the story, into German. Mike Ashley used the story in his 2012 anthology Dreams and Wonders: Stories from the Dawn of Modern Fantasy. In 2013, the story was translated into Russian for inclusion in an anthology.

Anstey’s “The Adventure of the Snowing Globe” is almost a proof of the adage that to a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Anstey’s narrator is, like Anstey, a lawyer. When he is magically transported into a snowglobe where a princess is held captive in a castle by her evil uncle, who has set a dragon to guard her, Anstey’s character resorts to legal means to free her, thinking of what motions he can file with the court, down to the level of naming the laws that he would bring to bear.

The princess, of course, understands the situation better than the attorney, but she can only conceive of a knight rescuing her and is tied into the paradigm as much as the narrator is tied to his legalistic one. The big difference, of course, being that the princess understands life within the snowglobe kingdom much better than the narrator does.

Anstey builds a divide between the princess and the lawyer by providing them with very different speech patterns. Both speak formally, but the princess and her seneschal speak in an archaic manner, while the lawyer speaks in an Edwardian manner, as if he were addressing a judge.

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Mage: The Hero Denied 10

Mage: The Hero Denied 10

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Mage 10So I might have sold Isis short last issue.

For those of you who are new to the Mage series … honestly, this is a terrible place to jump on. We’re two thirds of the way through the final volume of the trilogy. Stop reading and go pick up Mage: The Hero Discovered. You’ll be a better person for it.

Anyway, during my critique of last issue, I was a bit harsh towards Isis, Magda’s sister. Basically, Kevin informed her that Magda had been kidnapped and that he needed someone to watch his daughter, Miranda, while he went to rescue her. At the time, not only doesn’t Isis offer to help Kevin rescue her sister, but she can’t even be bothered to watch Miranda, meaning that she’d rather have her niece face off against a pack of demons than take time from her spell transcription work to babysit.

However, in issue #10, we see that Kevin has stopped leaving Miranda in the car while he goes adventuring. Instead, he’s bringing her along to help him suss out magical threats. Sure, he’s still the one doing the fighting, but Miranda is definitely helping out. So I’m wondering if Isis deliberately turned Miranda away, knowing that she would be able to help Kevin. As we’ve seen in past volumes, Kevin isn’t always that good at teamwork. I guess when you’re nigh-invulnerable, you might see other people as little more than targets that need protecting. And we’ve already seen how much Kevin is surprised by his daughter’s resourcefulness, so there’s probably an issue of him not believing that she could help him. So Kevin would never choose to take his daughter with him on an adventure, but if he had no choice …

This issue opens with Magda trying and failing to contact help from outside her penthouse prison. Meanwhile, Hugo is staring into a bottomless pit that lies beyond the door to that prison. We’ve actually seen this same setup in the Styx Casino way back in Hero Discovered. But unlike Kevin, Hugo has no fear of heights, so he spends a lot more time staring into the abyss, eventually noticing that there are vague creatures flittering around in it.

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Birthday Reviews: David R. Bunch’s “The From-Far-Up-There-Missile Worry”

Birthday Reviews: David R. Bunch’s “The From-Far-Up-There-Missile Worry”

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Crank! #4
Crank! #4

David R. Bunch was born on August 7, 1925 and died on May 29, 2000.

His second collection of short stories, Bunch! Was a Philip K. Dick Award nominee in 1994. Bunch also was the only author to have two stories included in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions, which featured his stories “Incident in Moderan” and “The Escaping.” Many of Bunch’s stories are set in his world of Moderan

Bunch’s penultimate professional sale was “The From-Far-Up-There-Missile Worry,” which appeared in the fourth issue of Crank!, edited by Bryan Cholfin and published in 1994. As with most of Bunch’s work, this story has never been reprinted and is currently out of print.

“The From-Far-Up-There Missile Worry” is a strange stream-of-conscience tale clearly is set in a world in which some sort of annihilation is imminent, with the narrator living in dread of the end of his world and trying to come up with his reactions when the end, which he predicts will fall from the sky, comes.  His fear is clearly demonstrated by his constantly shifting his thoughts from one area to another as well as his use of randomly capitalized words scattered throughout the story.

As the relatively short work progresses, Bunch builds more on the atmosphere of despair than providing any real indication of a story or even what is happening to the reader.  The narrator’s internal dialogue about his concern for himself and his future is really the driving force, although by the end of the work, it becomes clear that humans, or partial humans, are in danger of being wiped out by the complete cyborgs that mankind created and which have gotten away from their control. Despite this, the story does not come across as anti-technological or a warning about mankind building its own replacements.  “The From-Far-Up-There Missile Worry” is a study in an all-encompassing anxiety that cripples from the inability to take any meaningful action to either protect oneself or effect a change to the world.

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Birthday Reviews: Ian R. MacLeod’s “Starship Day”

Birthday Reviews: Ian R. MacLeod’s “Starship Day”

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Cover by Bob Eggleton
Cover by Bob Eggleton

Ian R. MacLeod was born on August 6, 1956.

MacLeod’s novella Song of Time won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2009. His novella “The Summer Isles” won the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award in 1999 and the novel length version also won the Sidewise Award in 2006. He won a third Sidewise Award for Wake Up and Dream in 2012 and a second World Fantasy Award for “The Chop Girl.” He has collaborated with Martin Sketchley on one story.

“Starship Day” first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction in the July 1995 issue, edited by Gardner Dozois. The following year, it was translated for the German edition of the magazine and also appeared in MacLeod’s collection Voyages by Starlight and was selected by Dozois for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection. In 1997, it was translated into French for inclusion in Cyberdreams 11: Illusions technologiques, edited by Sylvie Denis. John Joseph Adams most recently reprinted the story in the February 2017 issue of Lightspeed.

Stories about generation ships or interstellar voyages usually focus on those who are traveling on the ships. If they deal with the people left behind, it is generally as an afterthought. In MacLeod’s “Starship Day,” people living on a ravaged Earth a generation after a starship left are waiting to hear what the voyagers will find when the finally come out of cryosleep in orbit around a distant planet. In the village of Danous, everyone is sitting on pins and needles waiting to see the transmission with the exception of Owen, the village doctor, who is adamant that it is just another day.

Owen goes out of his way to make the day normal, seeing patients in the morning, having lunch with the latest in a long line of mistresses, who uses the opportunity to break up with him, going home to listen to his wife play her cello before the two go to a viewing party, where Owen considers starting an affair with his wife’s sister, and eventually going to check up on Sal Mohammed, a friend and patient he had seen that morning who failed to attend the party.

When Owen discovers that Sal has committed suicide, possibly in part because of Owen’s own dismissive attitude during their morning appointment, the situation begins to unravel. The message comes in from the starship that there is no planet for them to land on. While everyone else seems to take this in stride, it brings up a variety of emotions for Owen regarding his own lost daughter.

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Birthday Reviews: Élisabeth Vonarburg’s “Cogito”

Birthday Reviews: Élisabeth Vonarburg’s “Cogito”

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Cover by Ron Lightburn
Cover by Ron Lightburn

Élisabeth Vonarburg was born on August 5, 1947.

She has twice been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and once for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. Her greatest recognition came from the Canadian Casper/Aurora Awards, which she has won ten times. Vonarburg won the French language award in 1987 for her story “La Carte du Tendre” (“Readers of the Lost Art”). That same year, she received a second Aurora for her fannish contributions to Solaris. She won three additional short story Auroras for “Cogito” (1990), “Ici, des tigres” (1991), and “La Course de Kathryn” (2004) and five Auroras for Best book for Histoire de la Princesse et du Dragon (1991), Ailleurs et au Japon (1992), Chroniques de Pays des Mères (1993), Les Voyageurs malgré eux (1996), and Reine de Mémoire 4. La Princesse de Vengeance (2007). She won the Prix Rosny-Ainé and the Prix Boreal in 1982 for her novel Le Silence de la Cité. She also won the Boreal for Chroniques de Pays des Mères (1993), Les Rêves de la mer (1997), Reine de Mémoire 1. La Maisson d’oubli (2006) and Reine de Mémoire 4. La Princesse de Vengeance (2007). Prior to 1990, the Aurora Award was known as the Casper Award and in 2011, the Prix Aurora and Prix Boreal combined.

Vonarburg originally published “Cogito” in French in Imagine #46 in December 1988, and it was translated into English with the same title for Tesseracts 3, edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott in 1990. The next year, it was published in French in Vonarburg’s collection Ailleurs et au Japon. Algis Budrys reprinted the story in English in issue 21 of Tomorrow SF in 1996 and Vonarburg again included the French version in her 2013 collection La Musique du Soleil. The story received the 1990 Aurora Award for Meilleur nouvelle en français (Best Short-Form Work in French).

“Cogito” is a strangely chatty story about a young girl, Nathany, who is growing up on Cybland, a planet settled by humans who left Earth in search of a life made better through cybernetic implants. The narrator begins by describing Nathany’s life in her communal school, originally EdBlock 6 until her teachers determined that she was precocious and moved into SpecBlock D. As the story continues, the narrator takes breaks from the action, such as it is, to address the reader directly, providing the background for the world necessary to understand upcoming events.

Through the course of the story, Vonarburg reveals that people on Cybland have all five of their senses removed at a very young age and are implanted by “cybes,” which allow them not only to have heightened senses, but also to present themselves in any way they want while they can also switch around the way their senses interact with the world, creating their own personal synesthesia.

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Birthday Reviews: Rick Norwood’s “Portal”

Birthday Reviews: Rick Norwood’s “Portal”

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Cover by Todd Lockwood
Cover by Todd Lockwood

Rick Norwood was born on August 4, 1942.

Norwood published his first piece of fiction in 1972, following up with several stories in 1982, and then began publishing fiction again in 2003 with “Portal.” He was active in the nderground comic scene, editing God Comics and writing essays and articles for various comic magazines and websites. He also earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics and has taught since the early 1980s.

“Portal” appeared in the sixth issue of Black Gate magazine, released in Fall 2003 and edited by John O’Neill. The story has not been reprinted.

Ostensibly, “Portal” is the story of Ian, an escaped serf who is eluding capture and working temporarily at a fair for Stolnesserene, who runs a Blade Maze, a chance for people to try to reach into a box containing a series of razors and blades to retrieve a sword. However, rather than focus solely on Ian, the stories jumps between him, his boss, Ian’s friend Tod, and Carver, an art dealer who is also on the fair circuit and is intent on retrieving the blade from the maze.

Norwood follows each of these characters to some extent, but in a manner that indicates there is more to the story than he is sharing, not necessarily in background, although that clearly has depth, but in the future. As such, “Portal” almost comes across as a vignette rather than a full story. The title takes its name from an ability that Ian has to create portals that open to other worlds. These portals are not fully understood by the inhabitants of Ian’s world and when he first opens one accidentally, his father berates him. In the course of “Portal,” Ian enters one of the doorways he creates, which may be the first time someone has gone through and come back, further pushing the idea that this story is part of a larger whole.

“Portal” has the feel of the opening chapter of a much longer work, whether a series of short stories set in the same world or a novel. Norwood introduces several characters as well as their situations and includes prediction about Ian and Tod without showing how their fate will play out or even if they will live up to the expectation laid before them. Ian’s backstory opens “Portal,” and although his concern at being captured runs through much of the story, it isn’t picked up again, further providing the feel that Norwood is positioning this story as the opening of a novel.

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