Browsed by
Tag: Birthday Reviews

Birthday Reviews: James McKimmey, Jr.’s “Planet of Dreams”

Birthday Reviews: James McKimmey, Jr.’s “Planet of Dreams”

Comments 3 comments
Cover by Ken Fagg
Cover by Ken Fagg

James McKimmey, Jr. was born on September 5, 1923 and died on January 19, 2011.

Although McKimmey wrote several science fiction short stories between 1952, when “Tergiversation” appeared in The Avalonian and 1968 when “The Inspector” was published in The Farthest Reaches, the majority of his fiction, including all seventeen of his novels, were in the crime fiction genre. In addition for his writing, he is known for an eleven year correspondence he conducted with Philip K. Dick between 1953 and 1964.

“Planet of Dreams” first appeared in the September 1953 issue of If, edited by James L. Quinn. LibriVox included the story in their 2010 audio anthology Short Science Fiction Collection 042.

Daniel Loveral’s ideal utopian society is to live on a planet in which nobody has to work, their every need from food and water to clothing and tools provided for by machines and their world. To achieve this, Loveral has led a group of immigrants to Dream Planet and instituted the society of his promise. Ironically, Loveral is required to work constantly to ensure that his followers can live in the world he promised them.

When word reaches Loveral that one of his followers, George Atkinson, is working, Loveral goes to discuss the situation with him. If anyone (other than Loveral) works in their utopian world, Loveral sees it as an admission of failure. Furthermore, if Atkinson makes something that only he has, Loveral is afraid that jealousy will also rears its head and cause the society to fail.

Unfortunately, Atkinson has very different views. While Loveral is busy with a project to make sure the society as a whole is what he pictured, he isn’t paying attention to their actual current wants and needs. Atkinson, like so many of the other inhabitants of the planet, are finding that the utopian world which they signed on is a boring place that doesn’t challenge them or give them any real raison e’dtre. Rather than being able to enjoy themselves, they can only focus on how bored they are.

It becomes apparent that although Altkinson appears to be acting alone, he is a representative for all of the citizens. McKimmey portrays Atkinson’s solution as one that is supported by everyone and the only real solution to the problem, however both McKimmey and, apparently, Atkinson seem to have ignored other potential paths towards the goal of revisiting the utopia’s charter and providing the sense of purpose people need, which ultimately weakens the story.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Rick Wilber’s “Greggie’s Cup”

Birthday Reviews: Rick Wilber’s “Greggie’s Cup”

Comments 1 comment
Cover by Thomas Canty
Cover by Thomas Canty

Rick Wilber was born on September 4, 1948.

Rick Wilber won the Stephen R. Donaldson Award for scholarship at the IAFA in 2006 and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2013 for his story about catcher/spy Moe Berg. He has also been nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. In 1997, along with Sheila Williams, Wilber founded the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing that is presented annually to students at the IAFA. In 2005, Asimov’s name was replaced in the award title with Dell Magazines.

“Greggie’s Cup” was written for the 1992 anthology Grails: Quests, Visitations and Other Occurences, edited by Richard Gilliams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer. The only place it has been reprinted is in one of the two trade paperbacks which were issued to split that massive collection into a more manageable size for reprinting, Grails: Quests of the Dawn, in 1994.

Greg is a back-up quarterback at the end of an uninspiring career, dealing with the aftermath of his second divorce, who takes Greggie, his twelve year old son with Down’s syndrome, with him to visit his sister in Scotland to try to figure out the next steps of his life. While Greg is talking to his sisters and brother-in-law, striking up a conversation with a woman who is interested in him for who he is rather than because he’s a football player, and talking to a team owner about a possible coaching job in the Scottish league, Greggie is off exploring the ruins of a Roman fort and pretending to be a knight.

The fort is more than just a playground for Greggie. Having heard his uncle Tam talking about how everything in Scotland has a tie to King Arthur, Greggie plays that he is fighting with a knight, who slips through time to actually befriend the boy. Sir Lancelot is supposed to be questing for the Holy Grail, but has doubts about his ability to find it since he knows he isn’t pure enough to hold the Grail. Greggie, of course, only sees the good in Lancelot, the fact that he befriended the boy. That is enough for Greggie and knowing that Lancelot is looking for a cup, he gives him the small plastic trophy that he won at a basketball game.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Jack Wodhams’s “Freeway”

Birthday Reviews: Jack Wodhams’s “Freeway”

Comments 0 Comment
Cover by Rowena Morrill
Cover by Rowena Morrill

Jack Wodhams was born on September 3, 1931 he died on August 3, 2017.

Wodhams has been nominated for the Ditmar Award eight times, twice for short fiction and six times for novels, however he has not won the award.

The story “Freeway” has only been published once, when Elinor Mavor printed it in the November 1981 issue of Amazing Stories Combined with Fantastic.

The narrator in “Freeway” learns that he has an amazing power when he is driving in his native Australia and finds himself daydreaming about England. As he drives he suddenly realizes that he and his car have inexplicable transported to England, and he is driving along British highways towards London. He immediately heads to Fleet Street to tell his story to the newspapers, selling the Daily Express exclusive rights. Unfortunately for him, while he counted on the money, he didn’t count on the scrutiny he would be placed under. When the newspaper decided to recreate his time from his arrival in England, he allows himself to daydream and suddenly is driving through France.

As the narrator moves from country to country, Wodhams shows different reactions to his abilities, which are never explained or even fully tested. In France he is treated like someone who may be insane until he takes his captors with him when he transports to San Francisco, sure of his ability even if he doesn’t understand why. In the US, he finds himself on a publicity tour culminating in a planned attempt to transfer himself, resulting in both himself and the television van tailing him appearing back in Sydney. Life isn’t just easy and he finds himself in physical danger when a murderer decides he would be a ticket away from the police.

For the most part, Wodhams plays the story as a lighthearted jaunt, as his narrator goes from place to place, trying to regain his anonymity, and accidentally bringing others with him, despite his best intentions. There is an underlying humor to the story, although no overt jokes. In fact, from the vantage of 2018, perhaps the most unintentionally funny line in the story, in reference to America is “They’d even heard of Rupert Murdoch,” four years before Murdoch would acquire US citizenship and Twentieth Century Fox.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Roland J. Green’s “Strings”

Birthday Reviews: Roland J. Green’s “Strings”

Comments 0 Comment
Oceans of Space
Oceans of Space

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.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: C.J. Cherryh’s “The Unshadowed Land”

Birthday Reviews: C.J. Cherryh’s “The Unshadowed Land”

Comments 1 comment
Sword and Sorceress II-small Sword and Sorceress II-back-small

Cover by Ilene Meyer

C.J. (Carolyn Janice) Cherry was born on September 1, 1942. When she sold her first work, editor Donald A. Wollheim suggested adding the final “h,” making her byline C.J. Cherryh. Her brother is artist David Cherry, who did not add a final “h.”

Cherryh won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977. In 1982, she won the coveted Balrog Award for her short story “A Thief in Korianth.” She has won three Hugo Awards, first for her short story “Cassandra” in 1979, for her novel Downbelow Station in 1982, and for her novel Cyteen in 1989. In 1988 NESFA presented her with the Skylark Award. She named a Damon Knight Grand Master by SFWA in 2016. Cherryh was the guest of honor at Buccaneer, the 1998 Worldcon in Baltimore.

“The Unshadowed Land” first appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress II: An Anthology of Heroic Fiction in 1985 and was translated into Italian as part of the anthology in 1988 and again in 1994. It was reprinted in English in The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh in 2004.

Cherryh slowly creates her world in “The Unshadowed Land,” subverting the reader’s expectations as she goes along. It opens with a description of God (or a god) callously creating and changing the world by looking at it in different ways or flapping wings. This setting seems to indicate an alien world, mostly desert, at least the part Cherryh is interested in. A woman, whose name might be Akhet, is introduced to the world, giving the reader a viewpoint character, but also, like the reader, unsure of the situation she is in.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: August Index

Birthday Reviews: August Index

Comments 0 Comment

Cover by Todd Lockwood
Cover by Todd Lockwood

Fields of Fantasies
Fields of Fantasies

Cover by Edward Miller
Cover by Edward Miller

January index
February index
March index
April index
May index
June index
July index

August 1, Raymond A. Palmer: “Diagnosis”
August 2, Robert Holdstock: “Magic Man”
August 3, Clifford D. Simak: “Observer”
August 4, Rick Norwood: “Portal”
August 5, Elisabeth Vonarburg: “Cogito”
August 6, Ian R. MacLeod: “Starship Day”

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Steve Perry’s “A Few Minutes in the Plantation Bar and Grill Outside Woodville, Mississippi”

Birthday Reviews: Steve Perry’s “A Few Minutes in the Plantation Bar and Grill Outside Woodville, Mississippi”

Comments 1 comment
Cover by Kiosea39-Dreamstine
Cover by Kiosea39-Dreamstine

Steve Perry was born on August 31, 1947.

He has written novels in his Matador series and several stand-alone novels as well as the novelizations of Titan A.E. and Men in Black. He has also written books set in the Star Wars and Aliens universes and has collaborated with J. Michael Reaves, Gary A. Braunbeck, Dal Perry, Larry Segriff, and S.D. Perry, his daughter. Steve Perry is not the same Steve Perry who wrote for Thundercats.

Perry’s “A Few Minutes in the Plantation Bar and Grill Outside Woodville” was published in January 2018 in the first issue of the revamped Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, edited by Dean Wesley Smith. Only published earlier this year, the story has not, of course, been reprinted elsewhere.

Deals with the Devil stories are common in science fiction and fantasy to the extent that in 1994, Mike Resnick, Loren D. Estleman, and Martin H. Greenberg edited an anthology entitled Deals with the Devil. One of the things they all seem to have in common is an urbane Lucifer who is trying to trick someone into selling their soul, often without knowing it, in return for dreams coming true. Sometimes people accept the offer, other times, they don’t. Perry’s “A Few Minutes in the Plantation Bar and Grill Outside Woodville” follows the standard offer model.

This is Perry’s fourth story in his “A Few Minutes” series of stories, three of which appeared in Pulphouse (The off-one out appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction). This story has the Devil approach an aging blues guitarist who is playing in small rooms around the south. He makes his standard offers, but each are rejected. The musician is old and points out that George Harrison left money behind when he died, his career is successful enough for him and at more than seventy he doesn’t have a lot of time left. The Devil becomes more and more insistent in his offers, but is ultimately rejected when Perry provides an interesting twist to the standard story.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Judith Moffett’s “Chickasaw Slave”

Birthday Reviews: Judith Moffett’s “Chickasaw Slave”

Comments 0 Comment
Cover by Broeck Steadman
Cover by Broeck Steadman

Judith Moffett was born on August 30, 1942.

Moffett’s story “Surviving” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1987. The following year, she won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer. She has been nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award and the Hugo Award one time each and has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times. In addition to writing science fiction, Moffett has also published poetry.

Although written for the anthology Alternate Presidents, “Chickasaw Slave” was first published in the September 1991 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, edited by Gardner Dozois. The story appeared in Alternate Presidents, edited by Mike Resnick, the following February. It has not been reprinted since.

“Chickasaw Slave” is set in a world in which Andrew Jackson was not nominated to run for President in 1928. The nomination and Presidency instead went to then-first term Congressman Davy Crockett. In this timeline, the Civil War erupted more than a decade earlier and in 1852, on the eve of the final battle of the war that led to Confederate independence, Levi Colbert, wrote a letter to his fiancée in case he died in which he told a story of his own interaction with President Crockett years earlier.

Because Crockett is sharing information about his own family with his fiancée, it gives Moffett the perfect chance to provide the reader with some of the information needed about this alternative timeline. Unfortunately, a lot of the information given by Levi to Rachel concerns issues that she would have known about, making the first half of the story a datadump, although at the same time, nowhere does Moffett explain how Crockett’s election caused an earlier Civil War, information that is not particularly relevant to her story.

Her story does detail how a thirteen year old Levi helped a similarly aged slave, Watty, escape. Watty, who, like Levi, was part Chicaksaw, was treated as a member of the family and there was absolutely no thought of him as a slave until Levi’s father accidentally lost Watty in a card game to another citizen. Given permission to go fishing on their last day together, Levi decides the two should plead Watty’s case to President Crockett, who is visiting his Tennessee home nearby.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Nancy Holder’s “Prayer of the Knight of the Sword”

Birthday Reviews: Nancy Holder’s “Prayer of the Knight of the Sword”

Comments 1 comment
Cover by Paul Youll
Cover by Paul Youll

Nancy Holder was born on August 29, 1953.

Holder has won the Bram Stoker Award five times. She won the Best Short Story award for “Lady Madonna,” “I Hear the Mermaids Singing,” and “Café Endless: Spring Rain.” She won for Best Novel for Dead in the Water and for Best Young-Adult Novel for The Screaming Season.

Her story “”Prayer of the Knight of the Sword” was published in the 1995 anthology Excalibur, edited by Edward E. Kramer, Richard Gilliam, and Martin H. Greenberg. The story has never been reprinted.

The story opens with Joseph of Arimathea climbing to the top of Glastonbury Tor, surrounded by four pagan spirits, although he has no idea of their presence. When Joseph dies during his climb, the spirits plant his staff on the tor and eventually use it to create Excalibur.

The sword is next seen in the possession of Geoffrey de Troyes, a young knight fighting in Jerusalem during the Crusades. While all around him the crusaders are raping, pillage, and killing the Muslims and Jews who live in the city, Geoffrey cannot participate, only seeing the cruelty of their actions and how they seem to fly in the face of Christian virtue. When a young Muslim woman winds up in his path, he shows her mercy and tries to help her, realizing that at the same time he’s rescuing her he needs to rescue himself. His mercy caught the attention of Joseph’s spirits, who appear to him and tell him to return to England with the sword, where he will wield it until one who was destined to appear. In the process, Geoffrey brought Igraine to Glastonbury and pushed the sword into the stone.

While at first the timeline of the story doesn’t seem to make sense, with Geoffrey de Troyes fighting in the crusades, when the tradition of Merlin living his life backwards is taken into account, along with the idea that time may be malleable, the strangeness of the order of events actually becomes something of a strength for the story.

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Jack Vance’s “Liane the Wayfarer”

Birthday Reviews: Jack Vance’s “Liane the Wayfarer”

Comments 4 comments
Cover by Paul Callé
Cover by Paul Callé

Jack Vance was born on August 28, 1916 and died on May 23, 2013.

Jack Vance won his first Hugo Award in 1963 for the novella “The Dragon Masters.” He won his second in 1967 for the novelette “The Last Castle,” which also earned him a Nebula Award. In 2010 he won a Hugo for Best Related Work for his autobiography This Is Me, Jack Vance (Or, More Properly, This is “I”). His novel Lyonesse: Maduoc won the 1990 World Fantasy Award. In 1975 his novelette “The Seventeen Virgins” won the Jupiter Award and in 1977, a translation of The Dragon Masters won the Seiun Award. He also won the Emperor Norton Award in 2005 for Lurulu. Vane received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984 and was the Guest of Honor at MagiCon, the 50th Worldcon, in Orlando, Florida in 1992. In 1997 he was named a Grand Master by the SFWA and received the Forry Award from LASFS. The next year he received a Lifetime Achievement Prix Utopia. Vance was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2001.

“Liane the Wayfarer” was first published as “The Loom of Darkness” in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond, edited by Damon Knight. The same year it appeared in a small press run of Vance’s collection The Dying Earth. In 1976 Lin Carter selected the story for his anthology Realms of Wizardry. Vance included it in his 1979 collection Green Magic. It was reprinted in A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Terry Carr (also known as Masters of Fantasy). Tom Shippey used the story in The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories. Silverberg used it in The Fantasy Hall of Fame and Vance included it in Tales of the Dying Earth. When Martin H. Greenberg invited authors to select a work they enjoyed reading for his anthology My Favorite Fantasy Story, George R.R. Martin selected “Liane the Wayfarer.” It showed up again in the Vance collection Mazirian the Magician. Eric Flint, David Drake, and Jim Baen used it in their anthology The World Turned Upside Down. The story appeared up again in The Jack Vance Treasury and was read on the Drabblecast #282. Paula Guran used it in her 2017 anthology Swords Against Darkness. The story has been translated into German three times, Italian and Dutch twice each, and once into Esperanto.

The title character in “Liane the Wayfarer” is a sociopath, willing to kill anyone on a whim or the vaguest belief that they might do him harm at some point in the future. He revels in the good fortune of finding a magical diadem while burying his latest victim and learns that the crown will render him invisible. When he finds out that there is a beautiful witch living in a nearby clearing, he goes to find her with the intent of making her his true love.

Liane’ misogyny is struck down, however, by the witch, Lith, who refuses to even consider Liane’s protestations of love or ownership of her affections. She informs him that unless he can perform a service for her, she would not be his. Not seeing this trap, Liane agrees to retrieve a portion of tapestry for her from Chun the Unavoidable.

…

Read More Read More