Birthday Reviews: Roland J. Green’s “Strings”
Roland J. Green was born on September 2, 1944.
Green’s only award nomination was for the Sidewise Award in 1998 for his story “The King of Poland’s Foot Cavalry.” He has used the pen name Jeffrey Lord for his work on the Richard Blade novels. In addition to his own Wandor series, he has written Conan and Dragonlance novels. Green collaborated with Jerry Pournelle on three books in the Janissary series, with Gordon R. Dickson on the novel Jamie the Red, Andrew J. Offutt, John Carr, and with his wife, Frieda A. Murray. Along with Harry Turtledove, he co-edited two volumes in the Alternate Generals anthology series and co-edited Women at War with Lois McMaster Bujold.
Green wrote “Strings” for the anthology Oceans of Space, edited by Brian M. Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg in 2002. The story has never been reprinted.
In “Strings,” Green creates a complex interspecies political system in a short amount of space, presenting humans, Baernoi, and K’thressh in the same system. The humans and the Baernoi are attempting to navigate the possibility of open warfare between them while the telepathic K’thressh monitor, and possibly influence, the system.
Green’s entry into the story is through the eyes of Brigitte Tachin, a newly minted lieutenant aboard the FSS Trollstep. As the situation escalates with the realization that the Baernoi may have established an illegal colony on the nearby planet, Tachin’s commander begins to give orders that heighten the risk of war and Tachin must decide whether she will follow the orders and possibly die, or refuse them and jeopardize her fledgling career. The realization that the K’thressh are watching telepathically and might be influencing the decisions on both sides for their own gain only raises the stakes.
The situation is interesting, but Green’s focus on the military details of the human’s attack on the Baernoi forces tends to detract from the ethical considerations that Tachin raises in her decision to follow or ignore her commander’s orders. Green manages to lessen the impact of the situation he has set up by moving the story into the realm of standard military science fiction.
I had three films on my schedule for Monday, July 30. First, an animated science-fictional retelling of Cinderella for adults, called Cinderella the Cat. Then I’d hurry from the J.A. De Sève Theatre to the Centre Cinéma Impérial, where Fantasia was presenting a documentary from the early 80s about bandes dessinées: Pourquoi l’étrange Monsieur Zolock s’intéressait-il tant à la bande dessinée? Then I’d run back to the Hall Theatre for a presentation of Sion Sono’s Tokyo Vampire Hotel, a kinetic horror-action film with campy apocalyptic overtones. Even for Fantasia, it was going to be a strange day.
Before writing about the movies I saw during the last weekdays of the Fantasia festival, I’m going to skip back to the beginning to write about some films I watched before attending my first screening this year with a general audience. At a festival with 130 movies, most of which are shown in a theatre once or maybe twice, one has to make some hard choices about which to see. Fortunately, Fantasia’s screening room gives harried film critics the chance to catch some of the movies they have to miss in theatres due to one scheduling exigency or another. I passed by on the first day of the festival, and found that this year the screening room offered curtained cubicles and a healthy selection of films. Among them was an Indonesian western named Buffalo Boys, an experimental German horror film called Luz, and a transgressive French animated webseries titled Crisis Jung. 
By Eva and Matthew Surridge