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Category: Vintage Treasures

Vintage Treasures: Dreamships by Melissa Scott

Vintage Treasures: Dreamships by Melissa Scott

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Dreamships (Tor paperback reprint, July 1993). Cover by Tony Roberts

Melissa Scott burst onto the scene with The Game Beyond in 1984 (a nominee for the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel), and followed that quickly with the first two novels in the Silence Leigh trilogy (Five-Twelfths of Heaven and Silence in Solitude, featuring the first polyamorous triad I can remember encountering in SF) and A Choice of Destinies. In 1986 she capped off that impressive run by winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (now known as The Astounding Award, so it’s no longer associated with a racist loon.)

But Scott didn’t really grab my attention until her 1992 novel Dreamships, her hardcover debut and a thoughtful examination of FTL and A.I. in a far-future setting. She followed it with a single sequel Dreaming Metal five years later; that one made the long list for the Locus Award for Best Novel. Dreamships is set in a universe in which the FTL drive that rockets travelers across impossible distances relies on a dreamspace navigated using a virtual reality landscape created by the pilot. Scientists in this future are on the brink of achieving true artificial intelligence, and these two advances drive the plot.
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Random Reviews: “Why Do You Think They Call It Middle Earth?” by Susan Casper

Random Reviews: “Why Do You Think They Call It Middle Earth?” by Susan Casper

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Cover by Larry Elmore
Cover by Larry Elmore

Because I’ve been asked about the process by which I’ve been selecting stories for the Random Review series, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how the stories are selected.

I have a database of approximately 42,000 short stories that I own sorted by story title. When it comes time for me to select a story to review as part of this series, I role several dice (mostly ten sided) to determine which story should be read. I cross reference the numbers that come up on the die with the database to see what story I’ll be reviewing.  This week I rolled 40,278, which turned out to be Susan Casper’s short story “Why Do You Think They Call It Middle Earth?”

One of the things I hoped to get out of this series, from a personal point of view, was to discover authors and short stories that I’ve owned and have never read. Of course, I also hoped to share those discoveries, good or bad, with the readers of Black Gate.

Casper’s story is told from Emily Prentiss’s point of view, a thoroughly unlikable, self-absorbed woman who prides herself on her no-holds-barred attitude in the boardroom. While berating a homeless man one day, she falls through a crack in the earth and finds herself in a fantastic realm, intent on finding someone who will pay for her misfortune.

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Vintage Treasures: Faster Than Light edited by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski

Vintage Treasures: Faster Than Light edited by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski

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Faster Than Light (Ace Books, March 1982). Cover art by Attila Hejja

Recently I’ve been on a steady diet of anthologies from the most respected SF editors of the 20th Century, including Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr, Mike Ashley, Lin Carter, and Karl Edward Wagner. And I cannot lie, it’s been a blast. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying classic tales by some of the best storytellers in the business, from A.E. van Vogt to Lucius Shepard.

But it’s time to branch out! I dunno, be intrepid. Try some new editors, maybe. Like Jack Dann, who’s produced over 50 SF anthologies in the past four decades. I recently picked up a copy of his very first, Faster Than Light, co-edited with George Zebrowski in the distant year of 1976, and it piqued my curiosity immediately.

It purports to be  a serious study of the problems and possibilities of FTL travel, with five highly-regarded essays on the topic by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Keith Laumer, Ben Bova, and Poul Anderson, plus the first appearance of Harlan Ellison’s original teleplay for the TV show The Starlost, Phoenix Without Ashes, and original stories by Poul Anderson, Ian Watson, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Gregory Benford, Hal Clement, A. A. Jackson and Howard Waldrop — and two long stories by George R. R. Martin.

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Vintage Treasures: Hiero’s Journey by Sterling E. Lanier

Vintage Treasures: Hiero’s Journey by Sterling E. Lanier

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Hiero’s Journey and sequel The Unforsaken Hiero (Del Rey, 1983 and 1984). Covers by Darrell K. Sweet

Sterling Lanier occupies a unique and honored place in science fiction history. While he’s fondly remembered for his fiction, his greatest contribution came as a result of his keen eye, and his editorial daring.

In 1961 Lanier was hired as an editor at Chilton, a Boston publisher specializing in business magazines and automobile repair books. In 1965 he convinced Chilton to publish their first novel, an oversized science fiction epic that had been rejected by nearly twenty publishers due to its prodigious length. That novel, Frank Herbert’s Dune, eventually became a bestseller, launching one of the most respected literary franchises of the 20th Century, and completely remaking SF publishing.

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Random Reviews: “In the Company of Heroes” by Diane Duane

Random Reviews: “In the Company of Heroes” by Diane Duane

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Cover by Bob Warner
Cover by Bob Warner

Diane Duane’s short story “In the Company of Heroes” appeared in Past Perfect, one of the numerous anthologies Martin H. Greenberg co-edited for DAW Books, this time with Larry Segriff. Originally published in 2001, Duane’s story is one of a dozen time travel stories in the book, and she reprinted it a decade later as the lead story in her collection Uptown Local and Other Interventions.

Robert Willingden is an incredibly wealthy and powerful man who has a hole in his life. Much like Charles Foster Kane, he lost the one thing he cared about as a child.  Unlike Kane, he knew exactly what happened to it. His parents had always denigrated his love of comics and he hid them in the attic, carefully retrieving them one at a time to read and then smuggle back to their safe spot until the night there was a fire in the attic. Although the comics made it through the fire, they were lost to a thief who used the hole in the attic caused by the flames to steal his treasure.

He hatched his plan when a priceless clock he owned was damaged. Taking it to a renowned clockmaker in Lucerne, Switzerland, the clockmaker, Uli, indicated the he did more than simply repair clocks and might be able to help Willingden stop the thief from ever having the chance to steal the long missing comics.

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Vintage Treasures: The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard

Vintage Treasures: The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard

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The Crystal World (Berkley Medallion, March 1967). Cover artist unknown

I was intrigued by my buddy Jeffrey Ford’s brief but enticing description of J.G. Ballard’s novel The Crystal World on Facebook yesterday:

I read it years ago, but I still remember it very vividly. It had this dual sensibility of being really pulpy and yet wonderfully deep. The slow and then quickening crystalization of the world is freaky. And the description of the narrator finally outmaneuvered by it and overtaken is both frightening and beautiful.

When it comes to the beautiful and the weird, Jeff knows what he’s talking about. His marvelous short story “Exo-Skeleton Town” appeared in the very first issue of Black Gate (way back in 2001), and won the Imaginaire Award in France a few years later. Jeff’s novels include The Well-Built City Trilogy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (2002), The Shadow Year (2008), and Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage (2018).

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James Nicoll on Five Classic SFF Collections Too Good to Be Forgotten

James Nicoll on Five Classic SFF Collections Too Good to Be Forgotten

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A Pride of Monsters (Collier Books, 1973), Eyes of Amber (Signet, 1983) and Neutron Star
(Ballantine, 1976). Covers by Richard Jones, Tom Kidd, and Rick Sternbach

Over at Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll looks at a fine set of vintage SF collections, including Eyes of Amber and Other Stories by Joan D. Vinge.

Vinge began her publishing career with memorable novellas and novelettes. It’s therefore quite frustrating that, to my knowledge, there are only three collections of her work, all out of print. Of the three, Eyes of Amber and Other Stories is by far the best. In addition to the title story, a tale of aristocratic ambition and rock & roll set on Titan, the collection provides tales that range from straight-up adventure to puzzle stories, from classic hard SF to a deep space murder thriller, all skillfully written.

In addition to Vinge, James looks back at some very fine books by Tanith Lee, Katherine MacLean, Larry Niven, and James H. Schmitz.

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Random Reviews: “In the Bookshadow” by Marianne de Pierres

Random Reviews: “In the Bookshadow” by Marianne de Pierres

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Cover by John Picacio

In 2002, Greg Ketter, the owner of Minneapolis’ DreamHaven Books, published the original anthology Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores. The anthology includes one of my favorite stories, P.D. Cacek’s “A Book, By Its Cover.” It also included sixteen other stories, and, while I have re-read Cacek’s story over the years, I haven’t necessarily re-read many of the other stories since the book was originally published. While the book includes work by major names such as Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and Harlan Ellison, it also contains stories by less well-known names, including Marianne de Pierres, who had only published a handful of stories when Shelf Life came out, although she has proven to be more prolific in the years since.

Her contribution of Shelf Life is the story “In the Bookshadow,” which explores some of the more marginal customers at a bookstore. Anyone who has worked in retail knows that there are a variety of customer types.  Most come and, make their purchases, and leave, the presence only noted by the brief exchange at the cash register. Others are star customers. The staff knows them and looks forward to their visits. They are personable, spend a lot of money, and make the employees feel as if they are doing a real service. De Pierres’ protagonist is the employee who takes care of the marginal customers who give everyone else the willies.

When she begins to start seeing things out of the corner of her eye in the bookstore, she points them out to the customers, who don’t confirm her visions, but also appear to be doing something to protect her from the strange entities that seem to appear when nobody else is around.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 edited by Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 edited by Terry Carr

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The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 (Timescape, July 1982)

I’ve realized I enjoy these old Terry Carr anthologies much more now than when they first appeared 40 years ago.

I wasn’t a sophisticated reader in those days (not that I’m particularly sophisticated today, but at least I’m more patient). I was still discovering science fiction, and purely on the hunt for tales of wonder and adventure. I’d read Carr’s Best Science Fiction volumes with a skeptical eye, not at all convinced I was actually enjoying the finest stories of the year, and skip anything that didn’t grab me in the first few pages.

Nowadays it’s a different story. When I plucked The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 off my shelves last week, I was delighted to find it contained David R. Palmer’s Hugo-nominated novella “Emergence,” the tale of an 11-year-old girl traveling through a post-apocalyptic US; “The Thermals of August,” Edward Bryant’s Hugo and Nebula-nominated tale of wingsuit-wearing daredevils on a wonderfully realized alien world; Gene Wolfe’s Hugo-nominated classic “The Woman the Unicorn Loved,” about a genetically engineered unicorn that escapes onto a college campus; and Poul Anderson’s famous novella “The Saturn Game,” which swept all the major awards, about an immersive role playing game played by a crew exploring Saturn’s moons that turns unexpectedly deadly.

Opening these books now is a journey of discovery of a different sort. I’m not on the hunt for new authors, and not simply for entertainment, either. It’s more a journey into the past, a chance to explore some of the most innovative and exciting SF of 1981, and see what authors whom I’ve come to love were up to early in their careers — and, especially, find an overlooked fictional gem or two.

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Vintage Treasures: A Second Chance at Eden by Peter F. Hamilton

Vintage Treasures: A Second Chance at Eden by Peter F. Hamilton

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“Sonnie’s Edge” by Peter F. Hamilton (adapted for Love, Death & Robots, 2019)

Peter F. Hamilton made a name for himself in the early 90s with a popular SF series featuring Greg Mandel, a veteran of a tactical psychic unit in the British army who becomes a psychic detective in a near-future Britain where the messy collapse of a communist government has left the country in ruins (Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, and The Nano Flower).

By 1998 he had a bestselling space opera series on his hands, the Night’s Dawn trilogy. Set in a sprawling far-future timeline known as the Confederation Universe, it was a huge departure from his early gritty SF noir. Hamilton first explored the Confederation Universe and the Affinity tech in a series of short pieces published in 1991 and 1992, and when the first books in Night’s Dawn, The Reality Dysfunction and The Neutronium Alchemist, started hitting bestseller lists in Britain he released his first collection.

A Second Chance at Eden gathered all the early tales plus two new novellas (“A Second Chance at Eden” and “The Lives and Loves of Tiarella Rosa”) and a new short story, “New Days Old Times.” The first piece in the series, “Sonnie’s Edge,” was adapted as an episode of Tim Miller’s Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots in 2019.

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