Black Gate

Cat’s Pawn and Cat’s Gambit (Del Rey, 1987 and 1990). Covers by Barclay Shaw

Canadian writer Leslie Gadallah isn’t well known today. She produced a handful of novels in the late 80s for Del Rey, including two books in a highly regarded space opera, Cat’s Pawn and its sequel Cat’s Gambit, the first volumes in what’s now called the Empire of Kaz trilogy. Here’s an excerpt from Delia Sherman’s enthusiastic coverage in the May 1987 issue of Fantasy Review.

Cat’s Pawn is a first novel in the aliens-befriends-human mode. The plotting is masterful. The novel is made up of three complexly interrelated stories, and Gadallah moves easily among them, revealing what we need to know just when we need to know it. Bill Anderson, a linguist. suffers a heart-attack after the starship he is on is captured by pirates. Taran, a cat-like Orian diplomat, keeps him alive, rescues him, heals him, and generally takes a disconcerting interest in his health and welfare. When Bill moves to the port city of Space Central, he is taken up by its villainous boss Steven Black, who blackmails him into agreeing to assassinate Taran. Woven into all this is a plot to take over the galaxy by a race of murderous bugs…

Cat’s Pawn is always exciting. It is smoothly written and deals forthrightly with the question of how basic xenophobia is to human nature. And toward the end there are a coupe of scenes in the deserts of Orion which are truly strange and wonderful

Gadallah, now in her 80s, is — according to recent interviews at least — still writing.

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Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (Ace, 1977) and Paratime (Ace Books, 1981). Covers by Michael Whelan

H. Beam Piper was one of my favorite science fiction writers in my formative years. I adored his Fuzzy novels — Little Fuzzy (1962), Fuzzy Sapiens (1964), and the “long lost” novel Fuzzies and Other People (1984), published twenty years after Piper died by suicide in 1964 — and they were one of the first science fiction novels I passed along to my children when they were old enough to read (they were a huge hit). Piper was also well known for his Federation/Empire future history stories, chiefly published in Astounding.

Piper was also a pioneering writer in the field we now call Alternate History, with his entertaining tales of the Paratime police, who patrol alternate timelines to both keep their existence secret and protect them from those who’d exploit or destroy them. They were collected in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, a fix-up novel composed of the long novella “Gunpowder God” and novelette “Down Styphon!”, and Paratime, which gathers five tales published in Astounding between 1948 and 1955.

The opening story “He Walked Around the Horses, originally published in 1948, offers an SF explanation for the centuries-old mystery surrounding the true-life disappearance of British diplomatic envoy Benjamin Bathurst during the Napoleonic Wars. Many of the tales are considered some of the finest to appear in Astounding, and have been anthologized numerous times, in The Best of Astounding (1978), Analog: The Best of Science Fiction (1985), Damon Knight’s Science Fiction Argosy (1972), and many other places. The 1950 novella “Last Enemy” was nominated for a retro-Hugo in 2001. (It lost out to “The Man Who Sold the Moon” by Robert Heinlein.)

Writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute claims, “Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen remains the most successful and enjoyable of all these tales.” It was published in 1965, just after Piper died. As Clute notes, “He died in his prime.”

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The Space Barbarians, by Tom Godwin (Pyramid, 1964). Cover by John Schoenherr

Tom Godwin is something of a tragic figure in SF. He’s remembered today for a single short story which remains hugely influential. Here’s the third and fourth sentence of his Wikipedia entry:

He is best known for his short story, “The Cold Equations.” Published in 1954… [its] controversial dark ending helped redefine the genre.

That’s not an exaggeration. “The Cold Equations” is still sparking conversations today, nearly 70 years after it was written. (I noticed Mark Kelly kicked off a lively discussion in Facebook’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction group just last week by asking “Can anyone recall specific fictional responses to Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”?” Last time I looked there were 35 responses from Rich Horton, Sheila Williams, Piet Niel, and many others).

Godwin wrote three novels, beginning with Space Prison (1958) and its sequel The Space Barbarians (1964). The former has a much better reputation with modern readers, although it’s the second book which interests me today.  Here’s another tidbit of history from Wikipedia:

Godwin had a spinal disorder known as Kyphosis, which results in a curvature of the spine, making him appear hunchbacked… In the early 1960s, Godwin was living in a remote area of northwestern Arizona with his father writing and making his own drywashers to sell. It was in the summer of 1961 that he met his future wife, Laureola Godwin, and then twelve-year-old step-daughter who he later adopted, Diane Godwin Sullivan, through the sale of one of his drywashers. He went on to base two of the main characters in his second novel, The Space Barbarians, after them.

After Laureola Godwin died, Tom Godwin lost his lifelong battle with alcohol. He died in a Las Vegas hospital in 1980 without any identification; Diane Godwin Sullivan eventually had to identify his body after it was held at a funeral home for a long period.

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