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Birthday Reviews: Hayford Peirce’s “Mail Supremacy”

Birthday Reviews: Hayford Peirce’s “Mail Supremacy”

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Cover by Jack Gaughan
Cover by Jack Gaughan

Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.

Hayford Peirce was born on January 7, 1942. He began publishing short fiction in 1974 with the story “Unlimited Warfare.” He published his first novel, Napoleon Disentimed in 1987. “Mail Supremacy” was first published in Analog in March, 1975 and grew out of a joke letter that Peirce sent to editor Ben Bova, who encouraged him to develop the letter into a story.

The oddly named protagonist is an anagram for Peirce’s own name. The story has been reprinted in Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Fifth Annual Collection, 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Joseph Olander, Martin H. Greenberg, and Isaac Asimov, Analog’s Lighter Side, edited by Stanley Schmidt, Imperial Stars 1: The Stars at War, edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowic, and Martin H. Greenberg. In 2001, Peirce collected the story, along with five other stories featuring Chap Foey Rider into the collection Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars, published by Wildside Press. In 1979, the story was translated into Dutch and Italian.

Hayford Peirce’s “Mail Supremacy” is a short, light-hearted story in which Chap Foey Rider begins to wonder about the mail system and how it works. Rider, who runs an import company in New York, laments the loss of multiple deliveries a day and further notes that it seems that something mailed from a shorter distance takes longer to reach its destination than something mailed from a longer distance. He is more likely to receive a letter from his office in Los Angeles first than a letter mailed from nearby Boston.

He begins to test this by having his office managers mail letters and tracking their time in transit. Once he is sure that letters mailed far distances are being delivered quickly, he takes it to the illogical extreme and tries to mail letters to Alpha Centauri. “Mail Supremacy” doesn’t take itself seriously at all and in some ways is a satire on the idea of a Galactic Federation, even as it served Peirce as a starting point for his own series of stories about a Galactic Federation.

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Peplum Populist: The Last Days of Pompeii (1959)

Peplum Populist: The Last Days of Pompeii (1959)

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last-days-of-pompeii-1959-posterIn August of the first year of the reign of Emperor Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, the volcano Vesuvius erupted in the south of Italy and destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Thousands of lives were lost. Out of the fire, ashes, and pyroclastic flows, an Italian film subgenre was born.

The 1959 film The Last Days of Pompeii (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei) is the most famous of the many journeys Italian cinema has taken into the story of Vesuvius’s first-century eruption. Ostensibly based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s bestselling 1834 novel, the movie is a sword-and-sandal (peplum) riff that departs freely from its source so it can work as a vehicle for new megastar Steve “Hercules” Reeves. Reeves was at the height of his stardom and the peplum genre was also approaching the summit of its commercial success. There were loopier and cheesier days ahead for sword-and-sandal movies — I would argue more fun days — but for class and cash, The Last Days of Pompeii is a pinnacle. It lumbers sometimes under the weight of trying to appear like a serious prestige picture, but the lust for action entertainment carries it along. If you want to watch a dead serious epic from the same year, you have Ben-Hur. If you want to watch masses of polystyrene walls and pillars rain down on the cast and a hero slay lions and crocodiles, stay here.

Mario Bonnard is credited with directing The Last Days of Pompeii, but he fell sick on the first day of production. The man who took over the job was the assistant director, Sergio Leone. Yes, that Sergio Leone. Leone already had extensive experience working on Hollywood epics shot in Rome, including Quo Vadis. He proved he could helm a big feature with The Last Days of Pompeii, and soon after landed his first credited director job on another peplum, the fantastic romp The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), which I humbly submit is the pest peplum of all time. Two years later, Leone jump-started the genre that would surpass sword-and-sandal movies as the Next Big Thing in Italy with his Western, A Fistful of Dollars.

Although the eruption of Vesuvius is the reason the film was made, its story works as an ancient Roman drama even without the volcano. This isn’t a modern disaster film where the volcano is a constant subject of speculation with the actual on-screen disaster consuming the entire last third. Vesuvius appears in a few matte paintings and receives almost no mention again until the last ten minutes, when it interrupts the finale in the amphitheater to become the big curtain-closer. Forget the former plot, everybody run away!

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Birthday Reviews: Eric Frank Russell’s “A Great Deal of Power”

Birthday Reviews: Eric Frank Russell’s “A Great Deal of Power”

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Fantastic Universe August 1953-small Fantastic Universe August 1953-contents-small

Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author. 

Cover by Alex Schomberg

Eric Frank Russell was born on January 6, 1905 and died on February 28, 1978. His story “Allamagoosa” was awarded the second Hugo Award for Short Story and in 2000, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His story “A Great Deal of Power” was originally published in Fantastic Universe in August/September, 1953, edited by Sam Merwin, Jr. It has been reprinted several times, occasionally under the title “Boomerang.”

Russell sets “A Great Deal of Power” in a twenty-first century in which Germany is governed by a Sixth Reich, three scientists have determined that the way to avoid bloody wars is to create a way of causing the death of powerful men who refuse to give up power. They have successfully done so, building their technique, which they don’t actually understand, into a humanoid robot named William Smith. They dispatch Smith to kill a short list of powerful men by simply asking them to give up power. If the men refuse, Smith’s mystical ability will automatically cause the men to die, apparently from natural causes, in a short time.

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Birthday Reviews: Tananarive Due’s “Suffer the Little Children”

Birthday Reviews: Tananarive Due’s “Suffer the Little Children”

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Cover by Jason Vita
Cover by Jason Vita

Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author. 

Tananarive Due was born on January 5, 1966. Her Ghost Summer: Stories received the British Fantasy Award for Best collection in 2016 and the title story previously won the Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society. Due received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in 2013. Due is married to fellow author Steven Barnes.

“Suffer the Little Children” was originally published in The Touch, a shared world anthology of short stories by various author set in a world suffering from Depriver Syndrome and created by Steven-Eliot Altman. It has never been reprinted.

Steven-Eliot Altman created the idea of Depriver Syndrome and introduced it in the anthology The Touch: Epidemic of the Millennium published in 2000, inviting several authors to write stories set in a world in which a person’s touch could deprive someone of one of their senses. Altman went on to publisher a novel, Deprivers, set in the same world.

Tananarive Due’s contribution to the anthology is the short story “Suffer the Children,” in which Laurel returns home from a shopping trip to discover that her house has been taken over by a group of children. As she tries to figure out what is happening, one of the children touches her and Laurel loses her sight. The children lock her into a room with her granddaughter, Gwen, who was blinded by the Deprivers before Laurel arrived home.

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Birthday Reviews: Ramsey Campbell’s “No End of Fun”

Birthday Reviews: Ramsey Campbell’s “No End of Fun”

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Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author. 

Cover by J.K. Potter
Cover by J.K. Potter

Ramsey Campbell was born on January 4, 1946 in Liverpool. His story “The Chimney” won a World Fantasy Award in 1978 and two years later he won again with his story “Mackintosh Willy.” Additional World Fantasy Awards came for Best New Horror, which he edited with Stephen Jones, and the collection Alone with the Horrors, which also won a Bram Stoker Award. His essay collection Ramsey Campbell: Probably also won a Bram Stoker Award. He has won the British Fantasy Award twelve times, more than anyone other than Stephen Jones.

Campbell’s first published story was “The Church in High Street” (1962), which I included in my 2003 anthology Horrible Beginnings, which reprinted the first stories by various horror authors. His story “No End of Fun” was originally published in J. K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation, edited by William Schafer and Bill Sheehan and published by Subterranean Press in 2002. Campbell also included it in his collection Told by the Dead the next year and it was selected by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling to appear in their annual The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

Ramsey Campbell’s “No End of Fun” probably had a dated feel, at least to American readers, when it was first published. It tells the story of Lionel, who is visiting the boarding house run by his cousin Dorothy’s daughter, Carol, for the first time since Dorothy’s funeral. The story follows Lionel’s attempts to connect to Carol’s thirteen year old daughter, Helen, who sees his visit as a chance to escape the drudgery of helping her single mother run the boarding house as well as a chance to spend time with the boyfriend her mother has forbidden her to be with. Lionel attempts to take her to a carnival, only to watch her run off to go on rides with her boyfriend while he tries to win her a prize. The next night, he winds up going to the theatre alone, giving her instructions to meet him when the show is over so they can return to the boarding house together.

Although his cousin Dorothy is not the focus of his attention during the trip, her presence is never far from his mind. He is staying in her room and occasionally sees her image in an old mirror located in the room. Lionel notes that Helen resembles Dorothy in ways Carol never did.

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Birthday Reviews: Patricia Anthony’s “Lunch with Daddy”

Birthday Reviews: Patricia Anthony’s “Lunch with Daddy”

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Cover by Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk
Cover by Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk

Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.

Patricia Anthony was born on January 3, 1947 and died on August 2, 2013. Her debut novel, Cold Allies, won the 1994 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Booksellers often tell stories about customers who come in looking for a book with a basic description like “It’s blue.” When I was working for a bookstore in the mid-1990s, I had a customer come in looking for “A science fiction book with a blue cover and red print.” Based on that, I was able to correctly identify the book as the paperback edition of Cold Allies.

Her story “Lunch with Daddy” was originally published in Pulphouse Hardcover Magazine issue 8 in Summer 1990, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It was reprinted in Anthony’s collection Eating Memories in 1997.

“Lunch with Daddy” tells the story of a woman who is visiting her abusive father five years after the last time she has seen him. During that time, she has managed to come to terms with her hatred of both her father and her mother, although she has put it aside rather than confronting either of her parents. Her father has summoned her to his mansion to give her a gift just before he is set to take a four year posting to Geneva, Switzerland at the request of the new President.

At first, he merely seems distant and oblivious to any harm he caused his daughter when she was younger, however, as the story unfolds it becomes clear that the technology which is preserving his life and making him an asset for the government has also impacted his ability to have emotions or relate to those around him. His former inability to feel empathy has been technologically augmented, making him even more monstrous than the wife and child beater he was.

An attempt to make amends to his estranged daughter take the monster that he is and adds a pitiable veneer to him. The story is well written and draws the reader into its world in a short space, leaving a more emotional impact than either of the characters is able to show.

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Grimmer Than Grim: The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien

Grimmer Than Grim: The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien

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…since you are my son and the days are grim, I will not speak softly: you may die on that road.

Morwen to her son Húrin

41lJZHCn54L._SX315_BO1,204,203,200_One of the most significant elements of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — and missing from Peter Jackson’s misdirected films — is the almost suffocating atmosphere of great melancholy over a lost, better world; lost due to pride and jealousy. Even in the The Hobbit, a book aimed more at children than adults, it pervades the story, one that depicts the actions of pitiably small individuals against a world that, outside the green confines of Bilbo’s Shire, is dangerous and long bereft of the comforts and protections of civilization and order. It rises in The Lord of the Rings from a mournful undercurrent to a major theme. The characters cross a landscape littered with the ruins and remnants, such as the remains of Amon Sul and the titanic Argonath, of a nearly forgotten past. The once mighty elf realms, even Lothlorien, are reduced to dying shadows of what they were. The towering city of Minas Tirith is crumbling and half-empty.

It’s in the under-read The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s complex sequence of Middle-earth myths and legends, that he fully explores the litany of misbegotten oaths, pride-blinded decisions, betrayals, murders, rapes, and invasions that led to the downfall and destruction of the old world. And between two tales, those of the war of the house of Fëanor and Morgoth and the sinking of Númenor, we learn of the ruination directly underlying the events chronicled in The Lord of the Rings.

One of the worst tragedies told in The Silmarillion is that of doom laid on the family of Húrin Thalion, and specifically the fate of his son Túrin Turambar and daughter Niënor Níniel. Inspired by the Finnish story of Kullervo (a story Tolkien turned his own hand to, released in 2015 and discussed here), Túrin’s fate mimics his but is tied to a greater story that concerns not just his own family but all Middle-earth.

The Children of Húrin (2007) is a standalone expansion of that story, and takes place in the final stages of Morgoth’s (essentially Satan’s) war on the Elves and their human allies. Following their great defeat in the battle of the Dagor Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Fire, the elves and their allies have spent twenty years rebuilding their forces in order to launch a direct attack on Morgoth’s great fortress, Angband. It is during these preparations that the book opens.

As he readies himself for a battle he has doubts about, Húrin tells his wife, Morwen, that should the Enemy prevail, their son Túrin should be sent to safety in the elven kingdom of Doriath. Húrin’s worries prove well-grounded, and even more disastrously than in the previous battle, the Elves and their allied forces are destroyed. This second great battle is called the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Most of the generals are killed, and the few survivors are driven into hiding as their lands are overrun by orcs and men allied to Morgoth.

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Birthday Reviews: Isaac Asimov’s “Buy Jupiter”

Birthday Reviews: Isaac Asimov’s “Buy Jupiter”

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Cover by M.S. Dollens
Cover by M.S. Dollens

Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author. Continuing the series, let’s wish a happy 98th birthday to a Grand Master of the field, Isaac Asimov.

Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi, Russia and died on April 6, 1992. His received a special Hugo Award in 1963 for his science articles in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 1966, he won the Hugo for Best All-Time Series for the Foundation series. He later won the Nebula Award for novel The Gods Themselves and the novelette “The Bicentennial Man,” which also won a Hugo. He received additional Hugos for the novel Foundation’s Edge, his novelette “Gold,” and his posthumous memoir I. Asimov. In 1987, he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In 1997, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

While the Foundation series is known for its lack of aliens, Asimov did write about aliens in other novels and short stories, including “Buy Jupiter.” “Buy Jupiter” was originally published in Venture Science Fiction Magazine in May, 1958, edited by Robert P. Mills. It has been reprinted several times, including as the title story of Asimov’s 1975 collection Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. While Asimov was known for shaggy dog stories, and the title “Buy Jupiter” would imply exactly that, in this case the the punning title doesn’t carry over into the tale itself, although it is descriptive.

Although Asimov’s famous Foundation series does not include aliens (with the exception of the story “Blind Alley”), in “Buy Jupiter,” he focuses on negotiations between a representative of Earth and the alien Mizzarett, with a second alien race, the Lamberj, mentioned by name and other alien races implied. The Mizzarett are negotiating with the humans over the purchase of Jupiter, explaining that they could take it by force, but they would prefer to negotiate a fair deal. The human negotiator is concerned that selling or leasing the planet to the Mizzarett will either stymie human plans for expansion to the Jovian moons or be seen by the Lamberj as taking sides in a potential war between the alien races, a war which the Mizzarett ambassador swears doesn’t exist.

The Mizzarett eventually convinces the human Secretary of Science of its race’s intentions, but the explanation occurs off stage, only to be revealed when the Secretary of Science presents the explanation to the President. The explanation is simple, and allows the humans to come out ahead in the negotiation, although it does raise the question of the Mizzarett’s truthfulness and the naïveté of the humans who believed the aliens and agreed to their conditions.

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Birthday Reviews: E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”

Birthday Reviews: E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”

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Oxford and Cambridge Review
Originally published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review

Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.  To kick off the series, let’s wish a happy 139th birthday to an author not known specifically for his science fiction: E.M. Forster.

E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster was born on January 1, 1879 and died on June 7, 1970. Not generally thought of as a science fiction author, he was active writing before science fiction was codified as a genre and some of his writing can be classified as falling under the genre’s rubric. Best known for novels that explore the class differences in British society such as A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India, Forster also wrote the future satire “The Machine Stops” published in November, 1909 in the Oxford and Cambridge Review. Forster included the story in his short story collection The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928, and James Gunn included it in the second volume of his history of science fiction, The Road to Science Fiction: From Wells to Heinlein. The story has been adapted for television, stage, radio, and graphic novel. The story also inspired a concept album of the same name for the band Hawkwind. In 2012, “The Machine Stops” was inducted into the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame.

From the very beginning, “The Machine Stops” has a very contemporary feel. A woman is sitting in an almost empty room which could have been designed by Apple. Everything is white with light and music coming from invisible sources, but both of which respond to her voice commands. Her son calls her on a tablet in order to convince her to come visit him, while she doesn’t see the point in leaving her home since she has everything she needs, either virtually or in reality, within easy reach. The lecture series described could easily be a series of TED Talks.

Vashti is perfectly happy in her self-contained world, not needing to interact with anybody or experience anything directly, and that is the way most people feel. She is jostled from her bliss by her son, Kuno, who insists that she visit him, not virtually, as a normal person would, but physically. She eventually makes the arduous journey via air-ship, forcing herself to breath unfiltered air, interact with rude stewards who don’t have the decency to avoid speaking to her, and eventually visits her son. He tells her that he expects to be made homeless, evicted from the self-contained world and forced to live on the surface. Even more unsettling to Vashti is that Kuno doesn’t necessarily consider this punishment the end of the world.

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In 500 Words or Less: Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan

In 500 Words or Less: Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan

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Sins of Empire-smallSins of Empire
By Brian McClellan
Orbit (640 pages, $18.99 hardcover/$15.99 paperback, November 2017 reprint)

Have you ever taken a look at your pile of unread books and thought, “I feel like reading about __________,” and realized that type of book is nowhere in the ten (or maybe thirty) you have waiting? Apparently having an ongoing stack of books you intend to get to is a sign of creative intelligence (yay me!) but it doesn’t help when you have a craving for, say, an epic fantasy with great worldbuilding and even better characters, and you have nothing like that on hand.

It was that desperate hour of need that led me to my local bookstore and a copy of Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan, whom I admit to having never heard of before that day. I picked up his book on a whim because the cover art and back cover description caught my eye, and to my amazement I think it’s one of my favorite books this year.

First and foremost, I’m a sucker for dynamic and flawed characters who I want to root for, and McClellan delivers a ton of them. There’s Michel Bravis, the ambitious member of the secret police who argues with himself when he’s nervous, or Lady Vlora Flint, the mercenary commander who’s hard as steel but whose heart bleeds for the underprivileged, or Mad Ben Styke, betrayed former lancer who’s spent ten years of good behavior behind bars to protect the people who served beneath him. The best part of what McClellan does is put these characters into situation after situation that pushes them in different directions and keeps the action moving — which isn’t easy in a 640-page book. In almost every epic fantasy book I’ve read there are moments where the story slows, but Sins of Empire doesn’t have that — there’s constant movement, but consistent character development and intrigue at the same time.

Connected to that is the rich history of the world. Characters make reference to past events and histories that motivate all the action in Empire, giving the world a level of detail that amazed me. Of course, I didn’t realize that this isn’t the first time McClellan used this setting , and that there’s a separate trilogy that takes place prior to Empire, featuring some of the same characters. Oops. But that doesn’t minimize the importance of the world’s history and how McClellan filters it through the narrative.

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