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Birthday Reviews: P.D. Cacek’s “A Book, by Its Cover”

Birthday Reviews: P.D. Cacek’s “A Book, by Its Cover”

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Cover by John Picacio
Cove by John Picacio

P.D. (Patricia Diana Joy Anne) Cacek was born on December 22, 1951.

Cacek won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 1996 for her story “Metalica” and the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1998 for the story “Dust Motes.” She has been nominated for the Stoker five additional times as well as for the International Horror Guild Award.

“A Book, By Its Cover” was published in Greg Ketter’s anthology Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores in 2002. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn G. Cramer selected it for inclusion in their collection Year’s Best Fantasy 3 the following year. It has not, otherwise, been reprinted.

Cacek has set “A Book, By Its Cover” in February 1939, three months after November 9 when Nazi Sturmabteilungen moved through Jewish areas to destroy buildings and arrest men, a night that became known as Kristallnacht. On that night, young Yavin Landauer watched his grandfather’s tailor shop burn after the Nazis killed him and saw one of his former friends, now a member of the SA, burning the books that they used to read together in Reb Shendelman’s shop. The Nazis spared Shendelman because they were amused that the old man would be more concerned over the burning of books than the deaths of his neighbors.

When the story opens, Yavin is disgusted with Shendelman for the very reason the Germans let him live. Living in the remains of his grandfather’s shop and scrounging food where he can, he notices a man visiting Shendelman each day. On each visit, the man brings a child to Shendelman’s shop and leaves the child there, walking away with a package traded for the child. Yavin decides to confront Shendelman for his disgusting crimes of trafficking in children.

The confrontation doesn’t go as Yavin expects, with Shendelman welcoming the young boy into his empty shop and feeding him soup, the first time Yavin has felt full since before Kristallnacht. Shendelman tells him a fairy tale about his own activities, one that Yavin can’t believe until he receives some proof, but even then he is skeptical. Their discussion takes a darker turn when Yavin’s friend, Karl, who is now with the SA, decides to pay a visit and finish the job started in November.

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Birthday Reviews: Sean McMullen’s “Electrica”

Birthday Reviews: Sean McMullen’s “Electrica”

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Cover by David G. Hardy
Cover by David G. Hardy

Sean McMullen was born on December 21, 1948 in Victoria, Australia.

McMullen has won the Ditmar Award 8 times, including five William Atheling, Jr. Awards for Criticism or Review, for short fiction (“While the Gate Is Open” and “Alone In His Chariot”) and for long fiction for Mirrorsun Rising. His novels The Centurion’s Empire and The Miocene Arrow as well as his short story “Walk to the Full Moon” have won the Aurealis Award. He has been nominated one time each for the Hugo Award, the British SF Association Award, the Sidewise Award, and the WSFA Small Press Award. McMullen has published under the pseudonym Roger Wilcox and has collaborated with Paul Collins, Steven Paulsen, Van Ikin, and Russell Blackford.

“Electrica” was first published in the March-April 2012 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gordon van Gelder. The next year McMullen included it in his short story collection Ghosts of Engines Past and David G. Hartwell selected the story for inclusion in Year’s Best SF 18.

McMullen offers a secret history of the Napoleonic Wars by looking at the career of Lieutenant Michael Fletcher, whose work in intelligence has gotten him transferred back to England to investigate the claims of Sir Charles Calder, who claims that he has used electricity to create a device that can send signals over vast distances, somewhat akin to the later telegraph, but without wires. Calder has even created a form of Morse code to use with the messages.

Fletcher arrives at Sir Charles’s manor to discover a contingent of soldiers guarding it, Sir Charles’s experiments, and Lady Monica, whose voracious sexual appetite appears to focus on any male who isn’t her husband, who she finds boring. As far as Fletcher can tell, Sir Charles feels the same way about Lady Monica. Allowing himself to be seduced by Monica in order to gain access to Sir Charles’s locked laboratory leads to a duel with one of the soldiers and sidelines Fletcher for several weeks while Monica is supposed to be in London. Upon his return to the manor, he learned that Lady Monica never made it to London and Sir Charles’s experiments have taken a dark turn.

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Birthday Reviews: Nalo Hopkinson’s “Whose Upward Flight I Love”

Birthday Reviews: Nalo Hopkinson’s “Whose Upward Flight I Love”

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Cover by Mark Harrison
Cover by Mark Harrison

Nalo Hopkinson was born on December 20, 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica.

Hopkinson’s first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the first Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 1997 and led to its publication. In 1999 Hopkinson won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She won the World Fantasy Award for her collection Skin Folk and she shared the British Fantasy Award for co-editing the anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction with Krisitne Ong Muslim. Hopkinson’s novel Sister Mine won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. She shared the Aurora Award for co-editing the anthology Tesseracts Nine with Geoff Ryman and won her own Aurora Award for the novel The New Moon’s Arms. Her novel The Chaos won a Copper Cylinder Award and she won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for The Salt Roads. She has won the Sunburst Award twice, for the collection Skin Folk and the novel The New Moon’s Arms. She has collaborated on fiction with Nisi Shawl and his co-edited anthologies and magazines with Kristine Ong Muslim, Geoff Ryman, and Uppinder Mehan.

“Whose Upward Flight I Love” was originally published in Dark Planet Webzine in 2000, edited by Lucy A. Snyder. Hopkinson included it in her collection Skin Folk the following year as well as her late collection Falling in Love with Hominids in 2015. It was reprinted in the magazine Cicada in March of 2017.

Hopkinson writes about a crew whose job it is to secure trees planted in a public park against a wind storm. Their task seems prosaic enough and they work even as the wind threatens to uproot the trees, to the extent that one of the women has to catch an uprooted tree before it flies away. Despite her efforts, all she winds up with is a root, which she tosses to the ground.

As the crew members work, they call to each other, continuing conversations about their lives. The woman has a long-time relationship with Derek, which has its ups and downs and she is sharing the latest information about their lives with her crewmate to pass the time while they do their work to protect the trees. Everything is completely normal and there is nothing that sets this particularly day’s work apart from any other day.

Decisions, and actions, have consequences, even if they can’t be foreseen. Consequences also often can’t be traced back to the decision that caused them. The crewmember catching the tree and then dropping the root on the ground is one of those. While she and her crewmates are finishing their task, the dropped root begins to move on its own.

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Birthday Reviews: Dave Hutchinson’s “The Trauma Jockey”

Birthday Reviews: Dave Hutchinson’s “The Trauma Jockey”

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Cover by Shaun Tan
Cover by Shaun Tan

Dave Hutchinson was born on December 19, 1960.

Hutchinson’s novel Europe in Autumn was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British SF Association Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, as was its sequel, Europe at Midnight. The volume Europe in Winter was the only one of the three nominated for the British SF Association Award, which it won in 2017. His short story “The Push” had been nominated for the award in 2010. Hutchinson co-edited the anthology Strange Pleasures 2 with John Grant.

“The Trauma Jockey” first appeared in issue 117 of Interzone in March 1997, edited by David Pringle. In 2000 Thomas Haufschild translated the story into German for inclusion in Wolfgang Jeschke’s anthology Das Wägen von Luft. Hutchinson included it in his 2004 collection As the Crow Flies.

Hutchinson’s main character is a “Trauma Jockey,” someone whose job is to connect to a patient through a series of electrodes to take their emotional trauma away. Hutchinson opens the story by demonstrating how the process is supposed to work, with the trauma jockey siphoning the emotional pain away from Lucy Smith and then eventually downloading it into someone who has been so beaten down by the system that extra trauma doesn’t impact him.

Once Hutchinson has established the normal methodology, his character is visited by a Mr. Jones, who wants to hire his services. It turns out that Jones is a sociopath and the process doesn’t work the same way on him. Instead of downloading his emotions, he downloads images of people he has murdered. When the Trauma Jockey decides to go to the police, Jones threatens not only him, but his extended family, including his young nieces. Unable to turn to anyone for help, he must accept Jones’s continued visits and the horrific images he shares, which gives Jones as much of a rush as the actual murders and sexual crimes.

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Birthday Reviews: Michael Moorcock’s “The Frozen Cardinal”

Birthday Reviews: Michael Moorcock’s “The Frozen Cardinal”

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Cover by Jim Burns
Cover by Jim Burns

Michael Moorcock was born on December 18, 1939.

Moorcock’s novella “Behold the Man” won the Nebula Award in 1968. He has won the British Fantasy Award six times, for the novels The Knight of the Swords, The King of the Swords, The Sword and the Stallion, and The Hollow Lands, as well as for the short story “The Jade Man’s Eyes.” He won a special committee award from them in 1993. In 1979 he won the World Fantasy Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Gloriana. His Elric saga won the Seiun Award in 1986. Moorcock received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the World Fantasy Con in 2000, the Prix Utopia in 2004, and the Bram Stoker Awards in 2005. In 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 2008. Moorcock was guest of honor at the 2nd World Fantasy Con, held in New York in 1976 and at LoneStarCon 2, the 55th Worldcon, held in San Antonio, Texas in 1997.

“The Frozen Cardinal” originally appeared in the anthology Other Edens, edited by Robert Holdstock and Christopher Evans, in 1987.  Moorcock included it in his collection Casablanca in 1989 and in 1993, it was included in the Moorcock collection Earl Aubec and Other Stories. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer selected the story for The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection in 2016. In 1990 the story was translated into French to appear in the anthology Universe 1990, edited by Pierre K. Rey.

While Moorcock may be best known for his epic fantasy about the Eternal Champion or his Jerry Cornelius novels, he has also written a significant amount of straight science fiction. “The Frozen Cardinal” is set in the polar regions of the distant planet Moldavia and takes the form of several private communiques sent back to Earth by a member of the first exploration team to the area of the planet, which is just beginning to come out of an ice age.

Moorcock manages to present his trip to a distant world as a tedious expedition. His narrator, as well as the entire crew, is just focused on the next tasks they must accomplish, most of which are the repetitive crossing of vast chasms, a dangerous activity, but one that has become routine as they use the same process at each crevice. Their monotony is broken when they discover a figure embedded in the ice on the side of one of the crevices and determine that it is a Roman Catholic Cardinal.

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Birthday Reviews: Jack L. Chalker’s “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night”

Birthday Reviews: Jack L. Chalker’s “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night”

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Cover by Barclay Shaw
Cover by Barclay Shaw

Jack L. Chalker was born on December 17, 1944 and died on February 11, 2005.

Although Chalker may be best known for his Well of Souls series of novels, his only Hugo Award nominations were for his amateur magazine, Mirage, in 1963 and his non-fiction book The Science Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History: Third Edition, co-written with Mark Owings. The book also won the Readercon Award in 1992. Chalker was a two-time nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 1980 he received the Skylark Award from NESFA, and in 2005 he posthumously received the Phoenix Award from DeepSouthCon.

Chalker wrote “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night” for Mike Resnick’s 1992 anthology Alternate Presidents. The story has never been reprinted. It was his last published piece of short fiction, although Chalker continued to publish novels and non-fiction.

Set in a rooming house in Albany, New York, “Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night” takes place in a world in which following James Buchanan’s death during the election of 1856, Millard Fillmore is able to capture a second term on the Know-Nothing ticket. Fully embracing his anti-immigration stance, Fillmore is in thrall to the Southerners who helped elect him and promotes pro-slavery policies, including the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act passed during his first term in 1850. His policies have caused unrest in New England, resulting in a second Boston Massacre when troops opened fire on citizens trying to stop a runaway slave from being taken back to the South.

The rooming house is a collection of men who have business with the New York state legislature, although one of them, Mr. Green, keeps to himself, leading another, Mr. Morgan, to question his purpose. The two play a cat and mouse game revealing that they actually have been aware of each other for quite some time. While both claim, like all the men in the rooming house, to oppose Fillmore’s agenda, they have very different methods of fighting for what they believe is right.

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Birthday Reviews: Arthur C. Clarke’s “Let There Be Light”

Birthday Reviews: Arthur C. Clarke’s “Let There Be Light”

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Playboy, February 1958
Playboy, February 1958

Arthur C. Clarke was born on December 16, 1917 in Minehead, England and died on March 19, 2008 in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Clarke won the Hugo and Nebula Awards three times each. Rendezvous with Rama and The Fountains of Paradise both won for best novel (and also both won the British SF Association Award). His novella “A Meeting with Medusa” won the Nebula in 1973 and the short story “The Star” won the Hugo in 1956. He also won the Retro Hugo for his short stories “The Nine Billion Names of God” and “How We Went to Mars.” Both “A Meeting with Medusa” and Rendezvous with Rama won the Seiun Award and Rama also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and Jupiter Award. Clarke won the Geffen Award for Childhood’s End. His novel Imperial Earth was inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame in 2001. He received the International Fantasy Award for his non-fiction book The Exploration of Space.

Clarke was the guest of honor at NYCon II, the 14th Worldcon, held in New York in 1956. He received a Forry Award from LASFS in 1982 and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1986. In 1997 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He won a Gallun Award in 2001, was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2002 and in 2004 received the Robert A. Heinlein Award. The Arthur C. Clarke Award, sponsored by the BSFA, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the SCI-FI LONDON Film Festival, was established in 1987 to honor science fiction published in the UK.

Clarke collaborated on fiction with Gregory Benford, Gentry Lee, Stephen Baxter, Mike McQuay, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, and Frederik Pohl. His story “The Sentinel” formed the basis for his novel and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the sequel of which, 2010, was also turned into a film. His novel Childhood’s End was adapted into a television mini-series.

“Let There Be Light” was initially published on September 5, 1957 in the Dundee Sunday Telegraph. It was first reprinted in February 1958 in Playboy magazine. It would eventually be reprinted in the Playboy Press science fiction anthology Transit of Earth in 1971. Clarke included it in his collection Tales of Ten Worlds in 1962 and it also appeared in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke in 2000. The story appeared in German in the 1963 collection Unter den Wolken der Venus. In 1980 it was translated into Croatian for the March issue of Sirius #45. A French translation of the story appeared in the Arthur C. Clarke collection Le Livre d’or de la science-fiction: Arthur C. Clarke (a.k.a. Et la lumière), in 1981. Guido Zurlino and Beata Della Frattina translated the story into Italian for inclusion in the January 1987 issue of Urania #1039. It appeared in French again in 2013 as part of the collection Odyssées: l’integrale des nouvelles. Although the story fits into Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart series, it was not included in that collection, which was first published eight months before the story first appeared.

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Birthday Reviews: John Sladek’s “Stop Evolution in Its Tracks!”

Birthday Reviews: John Sladek’s “Stop Evolution in Its Tracks!”

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Cover by Josh Kirby
Cover by Josh Kirby

John T. Sladek was born on December 15, 1937 and died on March 10, 2000.

John Sladek won the British SF Association Award in 1984 for his novel Tik-Tok, which was also nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Ditmar Award. His novel Roderick was nominated for the Seiun Award, the Ditmar Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. His essay “Four Reasons for Reading Thomas M. Disch” was nominated for the William Atheling, Jr. Award for Criticism or Review. Sladek also collaborated with Disch on several short stories. Sladek has also written several parodies of famous science fiction authors using pseudonyms which either replace all the vowels of the parodied author’s names with asterisks or with pseudonyms that are acronyms of the authors’ names (for instance, R*y Br*db*ry or Barry DuBray).

Sladek published “Stop Evolution in Its Tracks!” in issue 24 of Interzone in December, 1988, edited by David Pringle & Simon Ounsley. Pringle, Ounsley, and John Clute selected the story to appear in Interzone: The 4th Anthology the next year and in 1994, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer included the story in The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF. The story was also collected in the posthumous Sladek collection Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek, published in 2002.

“Stop Evolution in Its Tracks!” is a satire on the creationist belief, told through the eyes of a science reporter who has been sent to observe and write an article about Professor Abner Z. Gurns, a creationist who claims a background in science and runs a school whose sole mission is to denigrate evolution in favor of creationism. Sladek provides Gurns with all the traditional claims made by creationists in their attempts to refute evolution without offering an overt defense of evolution.

The humor, such as it is, comes from how ridiculous the claims of the creationists are when piled one on top of the other. In order to drive the point home, Sladek offers up even more ridiculous claims when he has exhausted the usual ones. The story takes on a reductio ad absurdum tone which allows the reader to dismiss everything which precedes it. However, because Sladek doesn’t provide a counterargument to the satirical, an understanding of evolution is necessary to fully appreciate the story and see the fallacies for what they are, aside from the lack of logic they present.

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Birthday Reviews: Sarah Zettel’s “The Temptation of Harringay”

Birthday Reviews: Sarah Zettel’s “The Temptation of Harringay”

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Cover by Vincent di Fate
Cover by Vincent di Fate

Sarah Zettel was born on December 14, 1966.

Sarah Zettel’s novel Reclamation was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1997 and two years later her novel Playing God was nominated for the James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award. In 2010 her story “The Persistence of Souls” was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

Zettel sold “The Temptation of Harringay” to E.J. Gold for publication in the January 1995 issue of Galaxy, the penultimate issue of the most recent incarnation of the magazine. The story has never been reprinted.

Harringay owns a small art gallery in New York and is visited by a stranger from Ann Arbor who has brought a portrait by a friend of theirs who only recently finished art school. When looking at the painting, the stranger relates the background of the story to Harringay in an attempt to get him interested in displaying and selling it.

According to the stranger, who went to art school with the artist, the painting was created when the artist wasn’t able to get into the massive, juried Ann Arbor Art Show. Taking a photograph of a homeless man looking on at the art show, she turned the photo into a painting, although she wasn’t happy with it. As she wrestled with the painting, it came to life, arguing with her, giving her advice, and eventually offering her a career in art in exchange for her soul.

The story is clearly a deal with the Devil tale, but Zettel introduces the idea that the story is being told by a third party rather than the person whose soul is being bartered. Although it seems clear that the artist’s friend is telling the story to drive up Harringay’s interest in the piece and potentially other pieces by the artist, Zettel is actually doing something a little more subtle, in line with the title of the story. The twists to the standard deal with the devil are what make “The Temptation of Harringay” interesting because none of the characters, the artist, her friend, or Harringay, really show any personality. The major interaction, aside from the friend telling the story to Harringay, is the image in the artist’s painting coming to life to argue with her about what the painting should capture and the fact that she isn’t talented enough or have enough experience, yet, to paint what she is striving for.

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Birthday Reviews: Emma Bull’s “A Bird That Whistles”

Birthday Reviews: Emma Bull’s “A Bird That Whistles”

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Cover by Anthony Branch
Cover by Anthony Branch

Emma Bull was born on December 13, 1954.

Bull’s novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Philip K. Dick Awards. Her novel War for the Oaks was nominated for the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial, the Geffen, the Mythopoeic, and the William L. Crawford – IAFA Fantasy Awards. She received a second Nebula nomination for the story “Silver of Gold,” a second Mythopoeic nomination for The Princess and the Lord of Night and additional World Fantasy nominations for Liavek: The Players of Luck and Territory. She is married to Will Shetterly, with whom she has collaborated on fiction and as an editor. She has also collaborated with Steven Brust, Elizabeth Bear, and Leah Bobet.

“A Bird That Whistles” appeared in the anthology Hidden Turnings, edited by Diana Wynne Jones in 1989. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling selected it for inclusion in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection. The story was reprinted in the Shetterly/Bull collection Double Feature, published by NESFA in 1994. In 2004 Patrick Nielsen Hayden included the story in his anthology New Magics: An Anthology of Today’s Fantasy.  The story also appeared in the 2011 book The Urban Fantasy Anthology, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale.  In 1994, Alice Bellagamba translated it into Italian for the anthology Miti fiabe & guerrieri and the story was also translated for the French anthology Traverses in 2002.

John Deacon is a 17 year old banjo player who is starting to appear at open mic nights at Chicago’s Orpheus Coffeeshop. Deacon is not a very strong performer and lacks confidence, yet he is willing to get on stage. At the same time, he has developed a crush on Orpheus waitress Lisa Amundsen. One day, while waiting for his name to be called up, he strikes up a conversation with Willy Silver, a dulcimer player. Silver proves not only to be willing to mentor Deacon and teach him new methods of playing his banjo, but also a rival for Lisa’s affection, although Lisa has never shown more than a friendly inclination toward Deacon and he’s too shy to act on his infatuation.

Set in the 1970s, the story has a background of the unrest against the Vietnam War and comes to head during a march against the war when Deacon is attacked in the Orpheus’ parking lot. Knocked down and bleeding, he is waiting for a continued attack that never comes. Looking up, he finds Silver looking fearsome with red lights in his eyes and his attackers fleeing. After giving Deacon advice, Silver disappears, having protected and nurtured the young musician. In return Deacon gave Silver some questions to think over.

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