Drawing Out What it Truly Means to be Human: The Best of Philip K. Dick

Drawing Out What it Truly Means to be Human: The Best of Philip K. Dick

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The Best of Philip K Dick-small The Best of Philip K Dick-back-small

The late Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), oftentimes lovingly called PKD, still fascinates many today. As evidence I point to the popularity of two current series on Amazon: The Man in High Castle, based upon Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name, and now Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, an anthology show based upon various PKD short stories. And of course we just had the recent movie Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the 80s Ridley Scott classic Blade Runner, based upon Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). It doesn’t seem that PKD’s influence is going away anytime soon.

In this spirit I’m excited to discuss The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977), the ninth installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. Science fiction writer John Brunner (1934–1995) wrote the highly appreciative introduction and the cover sports a new artist for the series, Vincent Di Fate (1945–), whose art style fits very well with the earlier classic covers of Dean Ellis and Darrell Sweet. Since this volume returned to a living (at the time) author, the afterword was by PKD himself.

PKD has always had something of a cult following. He is often associated with everything from classic science fiction, to cyberpunk and realistic futurism, to the drug culture of the 60s and 70s (thanks to a famous Rolling Stone article in 1975), and even with religious mysticism. There are countless books about Dick’s life and work, plus a multitude of documentaries, many of which are available online.

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The Galaxy in Scale: James Blish’s Cities in Flight

The Galaxy in Scale: James Blish’s Cities in Flight

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Cities in Flight James Blish

There’s more windup than pitch in Thomas Xavier Ferenczi’s Tor.com column about Blish’s Okie series. But it’s someone writing about James Blish — not often seen these days.

I can’t exactly agree that these books are overlooked classics. They have a lot of the weaknesses and strengths of magazine sf at midcentury. They’re most interesting for their corrosive pessimism regarding democracy (as it is generally called), and their big-dumb-object sense of wild-eyed adventure. But the different parts of the fixups don’t work very well together; the world-building has inexplicable gaps; one gets tired of the characters out-wiling each other.

And gradually, in spite of all the repetition and confusion, the packrat crowding of irrelevant information, a symmetrical and moving story appears. Out of all the details in the book, some will be for you — not the same ones that hit me, very likely, but they will build up much the same impressive picture. Blish’s scale is the whole galaxy, a view that has to be awe-inspiring if he can only make you see it: and he does, I think, more successfully than any previous writer.

That’s from Damon Knight’s review of the core book in the group, Earthman Come Home. It was probably truer in the 1950s than it is now but, to the extent that it is still true, Cities in Flight is still worth reading.

Vintage Treasures: Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany

Vintage Treasures: Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany

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Driftglass-small Driftglass-back-small

Driftglass was Samuel R. Delany’s first short story collection, and it was like a bomb dropped on science fiction.

Delany’s first work of short fiction, “The Star Pit,” appeared in the February 1967 issue Worlds of Tomorrow, and was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella. That same year his groundbreaking “Aye, and Gomorrah” appeared in Dangerous Visions, and was nominated for a Hugo and won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Over the next two years Delany would receive an extraordinary eight Hugo and Nebula Award nominations for a string of brilliant stories, including “Driftglass,” the novella “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line,” and the Nebula and Hugo-winning “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.”

All those stories, and five others, were gathered in Diftglass. It was the top-ranked collection of the year in the annual Locus Awards poll in 1972, beating Theodore Sturgeon’s Sturgeon Is Alive and Well…, Harlan Ellison’s Partners in Wonder, and Larry Niven’s All the Myriad Ways (and even placing above The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One on the overall list).

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Birthday Reviews: Mike Resnick’s “The Evening Line”

Birthday Reviews: Mike Resnick’s “The Evening Line”

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Mash Up
Mash Up

Mike Resnick was born on March 5, 1942. He has won five Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, the Seiun Award, a Xatafi-Cyberdark Award, two Prix Ozones, a Mechanical Peach, and three Ignotus Awards. In 2012 ISFiC Press published Win Some, Lose Some, a collection of his 29 Hugo nominated stories. That same year, Resnick was the Guest of Honor at Chicon 2000, that year’s Worldcon. He was awarded a Skylark Award by NESFA in 1995.

Resnick has published numerous novels in his loose Birthright Universe, including Ivory, Santiago, and the Oracle trilogy. In both his novels and his short stories he makes use of characters who are larger than life and his writing is often influenced by the pulps, adventure stories, and westerns. His Kirinyaga cycle, made up of ten short stories, is one of the most nominated short story series in science fiction.

In addition to his own fiction, Resnick has served as the executive editor of Jim Baen’s Universe and as editor for Galaxy’s Edge magazine. Resnick has edited numerous anthologies and helped dozens of beginning authors with early sales and he has collaborated with authors ranging from Lezli Robyn to Jack McDevitt to Susan Shwartz to Nicholas A. DiChario. Many of his collaborations have been collected in With a Little Help from My Friends and With a Little More Help from My Friends.

The story “The Evening Line” was written for Gardner Dozois’s audio anthology Rip-Off!, which asked various authors to write a story which took the first line from a famous work of fiction. Resnick adapted “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must by in want of a wife,” from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The story was eventually reprinted in Mash Up, a retitling of the anthology when it saw print a couple years after the audio version. I would lay book that the story will eventually appear in a collection of all of Resnick’s Harry the Book stories, of which there are currently ten.

“The Evening Line” is a one of a series of stories Resnick has written about Harry the Book, a pastiche of Damon Runyon set in a world where magic is at play. In this particular story, Plug Malone has hit it big at the races and when word gets out about his good fortune, he finds himself facing a huge number of fortune-hunting women looking for a husband. The story, both stylistically and in its depiction of men and women, is very much a throwback to the period in which Runyon was writing his Broadway stories.

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Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2018

Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2018

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Shiny Hugo Awards

Time for my annual post on what I’m thinking about for Hugo nominations. As ever, I’ll caution that I have read a lot of short fiction, but that I am less up on the other categories. I have seen a fair quantity of movies, too, however.

Let me reiterate something I said last year – though I participate with a lot of enjoyment in Hugo nomination and voting every year, I am philosophically convinced that there is no such thing as the “best” story – “best” piece of art, period. This doesn’t mean I don’t think some art is better than other art – I absolutely do think that. But I think that at the top, there is no way to draw fine distinctions, to insist on rankings. Different stories do different things, all worthwhile. I can readily change my own mind about which stories I prefer – it might depend on how important to me that “thing” they do is (and of course most stories do multiple different things!) – it might depend on my mood that day – it might depend on something new I’ve read that makes me think differently about a certain subject. And one more thing – I claim no special authority of my own. I have my own tastes, and indeed my own prejudices. So too does everyone else. I have blind spots, and I have things that affect me more profoundly than they might affect others. I’ve also read a lot of SF – and that changes my reactions to stories as well – and not in a way that need be considered privileged.

Anyway, as ever, in the lists below, I’ll suggest somewhere between 3 and 8 or so items that might be on my final ballot. Those will be in no particular order. And the other stories I list will all really be about as good – and I might change my mind before my ballot goes in.

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Boskone 55: Con Report

Boskone 55: Con Report

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They set off together with a blithe sense of wrongdoing

This year, Boskone 55 was our third Boskone ever, and we had a frikkin MARVELOUS time.

No, I’m not using the Royal We — although  that is still a (perhaps unfortunate) habit of mine. At present, I am talking about myself and writer Carlos Hernandez (AKA “Doctor Husbandpants”), in whose august company I now traipse to most conventions. Kind of like our fridge magnet says (above).

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Birthday Reviews: Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s “The Last Voyage”

Birthday Reviews: Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s “The Last Voyage”

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Cover by Greg Call
Cover by Greg Call

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison was born on March 4, 1946. Kennealy got her start as a music journalist, serving as the editor-in-chief of Jazz &Pop and becoming one of the first female rock critics. In 1970 she participated in a handfasting ceremony with Jim Morrison of The Doors, although the couple never filed paperwork with the state to register their marriage.

In the 1980s, Kennealy-Morrison began publishing an epic space opera series, The Keltiad, which followed a group of Celts who left the British islands around the year 450, although the books were set in the 35th century. The series was comprised of two trilogies, and a stand-alone novel, as well as the short story “The Last Voyage,” and Kennealy-Morrison has indicated she plans to write more in the milieu. When her publisher cancelled further books in the 1990s, she turned her attention to mysteries and eventually set up her own press.

“The Last Voyage” was the first short story Kennealy-Morrison published, although she had several novels in the Keltiad series by that point. It was included in her 2014 collection Tales of Spiral Castle: Stories of the Keltiad, published by her own Lizard Queen Press, and which included three original Keltiad stories.

“The Last Voyage” tells the story of Jamie Douglas, a Scottish knight in the service of King Robert the Bruce. Douglas is serving his king in Paris at the time that the destruction of the Knights Templar is about to occur and he works with the Knights to spirit hundreds of them away for a life in Scotland, far from the reach of the French king bent on their destruction. En route to Scotland, their fleet is intercepted by a spaceship carrying the descendants of Celts who fled earth centuries earlier who offer the Templars a new life among the stars. Many of them accept, although a vestige of the Templars, including Douglas, continue on to serve King Robert.

Kennealy-Morrison combines the plight of the Knights Templar with her existing series of novels, The Keltiad, which provides the background for her space-faring Celts. Set in 1312, the story is reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s earlier The High Crusade, set in 1345. Unfortunately, while the aliens in Anderson’s novel provide the impetus for the novel, the Kelts of Kennealy-Morrison’s story serve more as a deus ex machina. In addition, her prose tends towards the over-written and florid, reminiscent of a more Victorian style in both description and dialogue. Kennealy-Morrison presents an interesting secret history, but her link in to her series of novels doesn’t integrate well into the historical context she presents.

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New Treasures: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

New Treasures: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

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Her Body and Other Parties-smallCarmen Maria Machado’s short stories have appeared in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The Long List Anthology, The New Voices of Fantasy, Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, and magazines like The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and others.

But it was Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe’s excellent Coode Street Podcast that alerted to me the existence of her debut collection. Jonathan writes:

When… Her Body and Other Parties was shortlisted for the National Book Award it went to the top of everybody’s “to read” piles. A smart, sensitive and thoughtful look at issues to do with sex, gender, violence and horror, it proved to be one of the very best books of 2017.

That’s a pretty strong endorsement. I don’t know about other folks, but the book sure shot to the top of my to read pile. Here’s the description.

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf Press October 3, 2017. It is 248 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Kimberly Glyder Design.

Peplum Populist: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961)

Peplum Populist: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961)

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Colossus_Rhodes_1961_French_poster

The Colossus of Rhodes may be my personal favorite Italian sword-and-sandal (peplum) film. This one has everything: epic scope, gigantic ornate sets, devious espionage fun, bizarre gizmos, numerous brawls and sword fights, amphitheater challenges, secret passages, a sadistic torture chamber, a dungeon with lions, ceremonial dances, an evil temple, a femme fatale, an earthquake, a slave uprising, copious practical special effects, a gratuitous ape costume, and the insane super-weapon statue at its center. The only thing it doesn’t have is a muscleman hero. But it has the best possible substitute: one of the all-time great directors of world cinema, Sergio Leone. A guy with director muscles to rival Steve Reeves’s actual muscles.

Before you get too excited, I must explain that The Colossus of Rhodes (Il Colosso di Rhodi) is the seventh best of the seven movies with Leone as the credited director. However, the other six are A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker!, and Once Upon a Time in America. No shame coming in seventh to that bunch. The Colossus of Rhodes isn’t a baroque masterpiece, but it’s a solid neo-classical success.

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