Browsed by
Category: Reviews

Birthday Reviews: Hal Clement’s “Critical Factor”

Birthday Reviews: Hal Clement’s “Critical Factor”

Comments 1 comment
Cover by Richard Powers
Cover by Richard Powers

Hal Clement was born Harry Stubbs on May 30, 1922 and died on October 29, 2003. In addition to being an author, Clement was an artist, using the name George Richard for his artwork.

Clement received the Ignotus Award for the translation of his novel Mission of Gravity and a Retro-Hugo Award for his short story “Uncommon Sense.” He received the Skylark Award from NESFA twice, in 1969 and in 1997. In 1989 I-Con presented him with the Gallun Award, and in 2001 they presented him with the Moskowitz Award. He received the Forry Award from LASFS in 1992 and was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1998. In 1999, the SFWA named him a Grand Master. He was the Guest of Honor at Chicon V, the 1991 Worldcon in Chicago.

“Critical Factor” was purchased by Frederik Pohl for the second volume of Star Science Fiction Stories, published in 1953. It was translated into German in 1977 for an appearance in Titan 4, edited by Pohl and Wolfgang Jeschke. James E. Gunn selected the story as representative of Clement’s work and hard science fiction for his historical anthology series The Road to Science Fiction: Volume 3: From Heinlein to Here.

Clement was one of the masters of rigorous hard science fiction, often exploring the extremes of physical science, as he did in Mission of Gravity, and once he introduces the oddity allows scientific plausibility to dictate the course of his story. In “Critical Factor,” he posits a race of amorphous beings who live within the layers of the earth, eating seams of rock, and to whom the atmosphere is deadly. Pentong has gone on a lengthy journey of discovery and found that there is a distant continent covered in a mile-thick sheet of frozen water. He postulates that melting that water would cause the ocean levels to rise, thereby increasing the area in which they can live since they can only live in earth that is covered by water (not exposed directly to air).

…

Read More Read More

The Final Battle Comes: The White Rose by Glen Cook

The Final Battle Comes: The White Rose by Glen Cook

Comments 2 comments

oie_2935357GGMS7DGhWith The White Rose (1985), Glen Cook brought the original Black Company trilogy to an end. Taking place six years after the escape of the Black Company’s survivors in Shadows Linger, TWR contains three distinct stories. The foremost is Croaker’s account of the final days of the rebellion led by the White Rose against the Empire of the Lady. The second concerns the mysterious Corbie’s efforts to uncover what is happening in the Barrowlands where the Dominator, the North’s erstwhile Dark Lord and husband of the Lady, remains trapped. Finally, jumping back in time nearly a century, Cook presents the story of Bomanz, the wizard who released the Lady and her servitors from their shackles in the first place.

Under the leadership of Darling — revealed at the end of The Black Company to be the foretold champion, the White Rose — the rebellion consists mostly of spies scattered across the empire and a few dozen veterans holed up in caves in the middle of the Plain of Fear. The plain is an exotically magic-infused region where menhirs talk and move on their own and giant manta-like beasts fly from their roosts on the backs of thousand-foot-long windwhales. Those and lots of other strange things all bow down to the voiceless direction of Old Father Tree.

Sagey scents trickled across my nostrils. Air chuckled and whispered and murmured and whistled in the coral. From farther away came the wind-chimes tinkle of Old Father Tree.

He is unique. First or last of his kind, I do not know. There he stands, twenty feet tall and ten thick, brooding beside the creek, radiating something akin to dread, his roots planted on the geographical center of the Plain. Silent, Goblin, and One-Eye have all tried to unravel his significance. They have gotten nowhere. The scarce wild human tribesmen of the Plain worship him. They say he has been here since the dawn. He does have that timeless feel.

With the protection of the denizens of the Plain, the rebellion has survived. Now, though, even there its survival is in doubt. After two years of neglect, the Lady has ordered a massive assault on the Plain, surrounding it with five armies under the leadership of the Company’s greatest enemy, Limper. The only surviving member of the original Taken, victim of several plots led by the Company, and left for dead at the end of Shadows Linger, his hatred for them is boundless.

The only hope for the Company lies in discovering the Lady’s true name. Equipped with it, even the relatively minor wizards of the Black Company would be able to strip her of her powers. Long ago the Company captured — and lost — a cache of papers that might have contained that secret. Soon a race to recover those papers becomes central to any hope for the Company’s and the rebellion’s survival.

The account of Corbie’s detective work serves as the connector between the past and the present. Endeavoring to find out how the Dominator is attempting to free himself, Corbie must uncover the true nature of Bomanz’s own explorations. Secretly, he begins sending his findings to Croaker to help the Company.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Neil R. Jones’s “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings”

Birthday Reviews: Neil R. Jones’s “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings”

Comments 1 comment
Cover by A. Drake
Cover by A. Drake

Neil R. Jones was born on May 29, 1909 and died on February 15, 1988.

Jones was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 1988 at Nolacon II. Jones published more than twenty story in his long-running Professor Jameson series, which were eventually collected in five volumes. A second series, the Durna Rangue stories, were published concurrently with the Jameson tales. Jones may have been the first author to use the word “astronaut” in fiction in his debut story, “The Death’s Head Meteor.”

Malcolm Reiss purchased “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings” for publication in the Fall 1940 issue of Planet Stories. A decade later, Donald A. Wollheim included it in his anthology Flight Into Space. It was selected for inclusion in American Science Fiction #6 in 1952. In 1975, Michael Ashley chose “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings” to represent Neil R. Jones’s career in The History of the Science Fiction Magazine: Volume 2: 1936-1945. It was also translated into German and published in 1957 in Utopia Science Fiction Magazin #6 and again in 1973 in Science-Fiction Stories 21, edited by Walter Spiegl.

The protagonist of Jones’s “Hermit of Saturn’s Rings” is atypical in science fiction. Among the first things Jones reveals about Jasper Jezzan is that he was on the first expedition to Mars, had traveled throughout the explored system, and was now on the first expedition to Saturn. The thing that sets Jezzan apart from so many other characters in science fiction is that when the story begins, he is more than 70 years old.

Shortly after beginning to traverse Saturn’s rings, the ship Jezzan is on finds itself facing a strange white cloud. Jezzan is separated from the rest of the crew and when he rejoins them, he discovers that the white cloud has killed everyone it could get to. Jezzan must learn how to avoid the strange creature that lives in Saturn’s rings and live as a futuristic Robinson Crusoe, making a home for himself first aboard his ship and later inside a hollow rock in Saturn’s rings.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Impact Parameter”

Birthday Reviews: Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Impact Parameter”

Comments 2 comments
Cover by E.T. Steadman
Cover by E.T. Steadman

Geoffrey A. Landis was born on May 28, 1955.

Landis won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1990 for “Ripples in the Dirac Sea,” which was also nominated for a Hugo Award. He went on two win Hugo Awards for his short stories “A Walk in the Sun” and “Falling onto Mars.” His story “The Sultan of the Clouds” received the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 2011. Landis has also won the Rhysling Award for his poems “Christmas (after we got time machines)” and “Search” as well as a Dwarf Star Award for his poem “Fireflies.” In 2014, Landis received the Robert A. Heinlein Award from the Heinlein Society.

In addition to writing science fiction, Landis works as a scientist for NASA, specifically working on ways to improve solar cells and photovoltaics. In this capacity Landis was part of the Mars Pathfinder team, working to make sure that planetary dust was kept off the solar arrays.

“Impact Parameter” was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, edited by Gardner Dozois, in the August 1992 issue. It was translated into German for an appearance in the magazine’s German language edition in 1994. Landis included it as the title story in his collection Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities published by Golden Gryphon in 2001.

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, has got to be one of the most disheartening investigations for a scientist. In the decades the search has been occurring, nothing conclusive has been discovered. Landis alludes to this in “Impact Parameter” when Ben notes how many of his fellow astronomers have turned their attention to other fields. A strange anomaly he notices when trying to calibrate a telescope leads him to the discovery of an Einstein lens and comparing notes with other astronomers leads them to realize that a black hole is on target to strike Earth within only a few days.

…

Read More Read More

A Classic Without the Quotation Marks: Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

A Classic Without the Quotation Marks: Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

Comments 2 comments
Rogue Moon Gold Medal-small Rogue Moon Gold Medal-back-small

Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, November 1960. Art by Richard Powers

There are just too many books out there to read, too many still to get to, (too many that you’ll never get to!) and sometimes when you finally do read one of those older “classics,” the inevitable allowances you have to make for the style, the ideas, and the attitudes of an earlier era can make you come away feeling dissatisfied. You feel guilty even asking the question, but really, what was all the fuss about? What the hell was so “classic” about The Moon Pool anyway? So many vintage books seem to require the qualifying quotation marks.

There’s probably no genre as vulnerable to this sort of thing as science fiction. SF was always supposed to be the cutting edge, but let’s be honest; some of its most famous books — through no fault of anyone but Father Time — feel old. When the “door to tomorrow” starts to creak so loudly that you can hear the sound all the way across the parking lot, it can be pretty embarrassing. This is why it’s such a great pleasure to come across a “classic” (especially a neglected one) that lives up to and even exceeds its reputation, an older book that still has a dangerous edge that time has yet to dull.

Algis Budrys’ 1960 story of exploration, mortality, and the mystery of identity, Rogue Moon, is, I think, one of the most brilliant science fiction novels ever written, employing as it does some dusty old “gosh-wow!” pulp science fiction props with a new ambition and a deeper, more serious purpose.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Harlan Ellison’s “Pennies, Off a Dead Man’s Eyes”

Birthday Reviews: Harlan Ellison’s “Pennies, Off a Dead Man’s Eyes”

Comments 4 comments
Galaxy Science Fiction November 1969-small Galaxy Science Fiction November 1969 back cover-small

Cover by Jack Gaughan

Harlan Ellison was born on May 27, 1934.

Ellison has received 8 Hugo Awards, beginning with his short story “’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” His other Hugo Award winners include the short stories “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” “The Deathbird,” “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W,” “Jeffty is Five,” and “Paladin of the Lost Hour.” His screenplay for the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever” also earned him a Hugo. Ellison has also won four Nebula Awards for his stories “’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” “A Boy and His Dog,” “Jeffty is Five,” and “How Interesting: A Tiny Man.” SFWA has also given him the Bradbury Award for 2000x, in collaboration with Yuri Rasovsky and Warren Dewey. He has also won the World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award (5 times), British Fantasy Award, British SF Association Award, the Jupiter Award (twice), the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, and has three Worldcon Special Convention Awards.

LASFS presented Ellison with the Forry Award in 1970. He received a Milford Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1986, a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, an International Horror Guild Living Legend Award in 1995 and he received a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award the following year. He won the Gallun Award from I-Con in 1997. Ellison was named a World Horror Grandmaster in 2000. SFWA named him a Grand Master in 2006. In 2011, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and received the Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was a Worldcon Guest of Honor at IguanaCon II in 1978 and a World Horror Con Guest of Honor in 2005.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “Glass Coffin”

Birthday Reviews: Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “Glass Coffin”

Comments 1 comment
Silver Bird Blood Moon-small Silver Bird Blood Moon-back-small

Cover by Tom Canty

Caitlín R. Kiernan was born on May 26, 1964.

Kiernan novel The Drowning Girl was nominated for the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the Shirly Jackson Award and the Mythopoeic Award. It received the Tiptree and Stoker Awards. Kiernan also won a Stoker Award for the graphic novel Alabaster: Wolves. She won two World Fantasy Awards in 2014 for her collection The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories and the short story “The Prayer of Ninety Cats.” Kiernan has won four International Horror Guild Awards for her novels Silk and Threshold and for her short fiction “Onion” and “Le Peau Verte.”

“Glass Coffin” was originally published in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s 1999 fairy tale anthology Silver Birch, Blood Moon. It is part of her Salmagundi Desvernine series of short stories. It was reprinted, along with the other three stories in the sequence, in Kiernan’s 2000 collection Tales of Pain and Wonder, along with several other short stories.

Although part of a series of stories featuring Salmagundi Desvernine and Jimmy DeSade, “Glass Coffin” can be read and understood on its own, although that understanding may be quite different for readers familiar with Kiernan’s other stories. “Glass Coffin” itself is a retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Replacing the woodland cottage of the more familiar setting is a salvage yard that was formerly Salmagundi’s family’s shipyard. The Dwarfs are replaced by the foster children Salmagundi has taken in. Each of the six children described have their own personality and abilities, with the seventh off stage. While they all await Jimmy DeSade’s return, Salmagundi cuts herself and dies for all intents and purposes.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Vera Nazarian’s “Salmon in the Drain Pipe”

Birthday Reviews: Vera Nazarian’s “Salmon in the Drain Pipe”

Comments 3 comments

Vera Nazarian After the Sundial-small

Vera Nazarian was born on May 25, 1966.

Nazarian was nominated for a WSFA Small Press Award for her short story “Port Custodial Blues” in 2007. The following year she received a nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “The Story of Love.” She also received a Nebula nomination in 2009 for her novella The Duke in His Castle. In addition to writing, Nazarian has worked as the editor and publisher of Norilana Books since the company’s founding in 2006.

“Salmon in the Drain Pipe” was published as an original story in Nazarian’s collection After the Sundial, in 2010. The story has not been reprinted.

Nazarian’s “Salmon in the Drain Pipe” is a relatively short piece that has her protagonist looking at the wonders of nature in an unspecified future. As he looks more closely, however, he discovers that rather than being flora or fauna, what he is really seeing is the detritus of civilization filling lakes and grasslands. Fish moving through algae have been replaced by collections of bottlecaps.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Irving E. Cox, Jr.’s “Too Many Worlds”

Birthday Reviews: Irving E. Cox, Jr.’s “Too Many Worlds”

Comments 3 comments
Cover by Walter Popp
Cover by Walter Popp

Irving E. Cox, Jr. was born on May 24, 1917 and died on February 13, 2001.

Cox began publishing in 1951 with “Hell’s Pavement,” which appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. He published most of his work during that decade, and only his final two stories, “Impact” and “Way Station,” appeared during the 1960s. During that time, however, his stories appeared in several different magazines as well as in original anthologies.

“Too Many Worlds” was originally purchased by Howard Browne for Amazing Stories, where it appeared in the November 1952 issue. It was reprinted in May of the following year in the British edition of the magazine. In 1973, the story appeared in the May issue of Science Fiction Adventures. More recently it appeared in Science Fiction Gems, Volume Twelve, edited by Gregory Luce.

Science fiction authors have long had their characters travel from one version of the world to another, which is how Cox begins “Too Many Worlds.” He dumps Albert Hammond into a world that resembles his own. In the new world, however, Hammond’s shipping company is much more successful than the one he knows. Where Cox tries something different is by making Hammond very aware of who he is, but unable to respond to things the way he wants to. Instead, no matter how hard he tries, the words and tone that come out of his mouth belong to the new world’s Albert Hammond, who is a much harder man.

A psychiatrist, naturally, tells Hammond that the world he sees is the way the world is ,and his view of himself as less rigid, having a smaller company, and two children who don’t exist is a delusion he has built up for some reason. The new world’s Hammond indulges in business practices that the original Hammond feels are poor choices and bad for business, yet invariably turn out to work to his benefit.

His situation takes a turn for the worse, although more interesting for the reader, when in addition to his memories of his reasonably successful life, he begins to experience a life in which he didn’t even achieve the level of success he had in his original life. The constants in the different versions of his reality are the company he works for, his wife, and, he comes to realize, an old high school friend, Willie Tuttle. Once Tuttle comes into the picture, the cause of the different worlds becomes obvious, but Hammond must still try to figure out how to break the cycle.

…

Read More Read More

A Pair of Gonzo Mysteries from a Fantasy Master: Rich Horton on Pink Vodka Blues and Skinny Annie Blues by Neal Barrett, Jr.

A Pair of Gonzo Mysteries from a Fantasy Master: Rich Horton on Pink Vodka Blues and Skinny Annie Blues by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Comments 2 comments
Pink Vodka Blues-small Skinny Annie Blues-small

Neal Barrett, Jr. received a Hugo and Nebula Award nomination for his 1988 story “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus,” and in 2010 he was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. A discussion of his four Aldair novels — which Fletcher Vredenburgh called “a blast of strangeness and adventure” — broke out in the comments section of my 2013 post about Mark Frost’s The List of 7. And in his 2014 review of The Prophecy Machine, Fletcher wrote:

The late Neal Barrett Jr. wrote around thirty novels and seventy short stories. I’ve only read a little bit from his works, which include sci-fi and fantasy as well as crime fiction and magic realism. He seems to have slipped under the radar of most genre readers. On the other hand, everything I’ve read about the man marks him as one of those special authors held in high esteem by other writers.

As usual, Fletcher is bang on in his assessment. I haven’t read any of Barrett’s crime fiction either, and I’ve always been very curious about it.

But that’s why we have Rich Horton. Over at his website Strange at Ecbatan Rich reviews two of Barrett’s mid-90s mystery novels, Pink Vodka Blues (1992) and Skinny Annie Blues (1996), calling them ‘funny’ and ‘wild.’ That qualifies them for a closer look in my book.

…

Read More Read More