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Birthday Reviews: Josepha Sherman’s “River’s Friend”

Birthday Reviews: Josepha Sherman’s “River’s Friend”

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Cover by Jim Holloway
Cover by Jim Holloway

Josepha Sherman was born on December 12, 1946 and died on August 23, 2012.

Sherman’s debut novel The Shining Falcon won the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award in 1990. Sherman collaborated with Mercedes Lackey, Laura Anne Gilman, Susan Shwartz,and Mike Resnick. She  co-edited the non-fiction folklore collection Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts with Toni Weisskopf.

“River’s Friend” saw print in issue #178 of Dragon under editor Roger E. Moore and fiction editor Barbara G. Young in February 1992. As with so many of the stories which appeared in Dragon, this one was never reprinted.

Sherman sets her story in an alternative Russia during the reign of Vladimir the Great. Souchmant has the unique position at Vladimir’s court of a peasant who has managed, through the prince’s good graces, to become one of the bogatyrs. Souchmant knows that he is part of the nobility only at the sufferance of his lord. He also has a secret that, if found out, would force him from Vladimir’s court. Vladimir is known in this world for his distaste for anything that smells of the supernatural, the Other, and ever since he was a young boy, Souchmant has been in communication with the Other, specifically the spirit of the River Niedpra.

It isn’t his communication with the River Spirit that gets Souchmant in trouble with his lord, but rather his frustration at the lack of understanding the bogatyrs have about the way the common people live. Souchmant erupts complaining that they don’t know how to do anything useful or complete a task without violence. He offers that he can capture a live swan without the use of any weapons or even a net. Once the words are out of his mouth, Vladimir banishes him to complete the task.

Rather than do as he was instructed, Souchmant, with some help from the spirit of the Niedpra, saves the river from having a group of Tatars build a bridge over it, which would also serve to stanch its flow. Having defeated the Tatars with supernatural aid, Souchmant can’t admit what exactly he has done when he reports on the attempted Tatar invasion to Vladimir. Thrown in jail, he is eventually rescued by an unlikely ally.

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Birthday Reviews: M. Rickert’s “The Super Hero Saves the World”

Birthday Reviews: M. Rickert’s “The Super Hero Saves the World”

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Cover by Walter Velez
Cover by Walter Velez

M. (Mary) Rickert was born on December 11, 1959.

In 2007, Rickert won two World Fantasy Awards,  for her collection Map of Dreams and for the short story “Journey Into the Kingdom.” She won the 2012 Shirley Jackson Award for “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece.” Map of Dreams also received the William L. Crawford – IAFA Fantasy Award for best first fantasy novel. Rickert has also published using her full name.

Rickert originally published “The Super Hero Saves the World” in the June 2003 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. She also included it in her first collection, Map of Dreams. It has not otherwise been reprinted.

“The Super Hero Saves the World” is a story of magic realism about a young girl, Marcado, who as a young child managed to survive an attack by a python that killed her mother. Rickert follows the relationships between Marcado and her sister, Elsine, and their relationship with their father, who was with Mercardo when the snake swallowed her, although Marcado was cut from the snake’s belly. Perhaps because of her experience, Marcado grows up distant from the rest of her family and sees the world in a different way.

While Elsine has a life filled with boys and fun, Marcado keeps to herself, focusing on dancing whenever she can, finding a freedom and safety in movement, although she understands that it exasperates both her sister and father, so she avoids it when they are around. Her father especially is distant from Marcado, perhaps blaming her for his wife’s death when his daughter survived the same attack. He not only ignores her dancing, but when a teacher praises a poem Marcado wrote about being a super hero, his only response is annoyance at being called from work for something as minor as his daughter’s creativity.

Marcado eventually comes to an understanding with her sister, as well as coming to terms with the death of her mother and her own strange experience, though she never manages to overcome the barrier between herself and her father. The super hero she sees in herself, with the strange origin story, is working to make her world a better place, giving her peace, and eventually building up a friendship with Elsine and her husband. She must, however, continue to strive to save the world until she makes contact with her father.

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Birthday Reviews: Janny Wurts’s “The Snare”

Birthday Reviews: Janny Wurts’s “The Snare”

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Cover by Janny Wurts
Cover by Janny Wurts

Janny Wurts was born on December 10, 1953 and is married to speculative fiction artist Don Maitz.

Wurts is both an author and artist, publishing her own fiction and novels as well as three novels in collaboration with Raymond E. Feist. Her collection That Way Lies Camelot was nominated for the British Fantasy Award in 1995. She also won three Chesley Awards for her artwork. In 1993, she won in the color art, unpublished category for The Wizard of Owls. She won the hardcover illustration award in 1995 for the cover to her own novel, The Curse of the Mistwraith, and in 1998, she received a special award for her contributions to ASFA. Wurts was guest of honor at the World Horror Con in 1996 in Eugene, Oregon, and a the World Fantasy Con, held in Tempe, Arizona in 2004.

“The Snare” was originally published in Wurts’s 1994 collection That Way Lies Camelot. It has never been reprinted. The story is based on a painting by Don Maitz entitled “The Wizard,” which originally appeared on the cover of the January 1983 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Wurts’s story is one of vengeance. The Wizard Iveldane has been imprisoned by his mentor, the Great Wizard of Trevior, for countless centuries, first bound by air, then water, then earth, and finally by fire. Through the ages, Iveldane has gone through all the emotions possible, wondering what his master was trying to teach him, cursing his master with hatred, and eventually vowing to exact a terrible price from him, which is how the story opens.

Iveldane’s meeting with the Great Wizard, as well as his eventual imprisonment when his master felt his tutelage was over, are shown in flashback. Although the Great Wizard eventually must explain why he did what he did to Iveldane, most of the Great Wizard’s motives are known to the reader long before Iveldane needs to be told. The fact that the Great Wizard does have to tell Iveldane implies that Iveldane was not ready either for his punishment or, ultimately, the role that he takes on after defeating his former master, although it is quite likely that Iveldane will grow into the position once he attains it.

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Birthday Reviews: Sarah Smith’s “And Every Pebble a Soldier”

Birthday Reviews: Sarah Smith’s “And Every Pebble a Soldier”

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Cover by Duncan Eagleson
Cover by Duncan Eagleson

Sarah Smith was born on December 9, 1947.

Although Smith is best known for writing historical mysteries set in Boston, she has also dabbled in speculative fiction, writing the hypertext novel King of Space and more traditional SF novels The Knowledge of Water and The Other Side of the Dark. She won the Agatha Award and the Massachusetts Book Award for The Other Side of the Dark.

Smith wrote “And Every Pebble a Soldier” for the 2015 anthology Deco Punk: The Spirit of the Age, edited by Thomas A. Easton and Judith K. Dial, based on a comment by Dial that linked Art Deco to Nazism. The story has not been reprinted.

Set in the aftermath of a truly destructive war, the protagonist of “And Every Pebble a Soldier,” a builder’s apprentice, is one of the only men to come back from war. Determined to build something useful, he begins to make a clockwork man that will help him clean up the debris that litters his town. When he finds a paving brick used to mark the grave of a friend, he chips away a bit of the rock and incorporates it into the wind-up man, eventually repopulating the village’s lost youth by creating an automaton with a piece of each one’s gravestone.

While some in the town take an interest in his hobby, others mock him or are down-right hostile.  The village priest sees him as someone performing the Devil’s work, as well as a threat to his own power in the Church. The apprentice persists, however, and slowly wins the town over as they begin to see his clockwork men as a way not only to repopulate the town, but to, in some way, bring their lost brothers and sons back to life.

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Birthday Reviews: Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Immortal Forms”

Birthday Reviews: Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Immortal Forms”

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Cover by Cory and Catska Ench
Cover by Cory and Catska Ench

Albert E. Cowdrey was born on December 8, 1933.

In 2002, Cowdrey’s short story “Queen for a Day” won the World Fantasy Award. His novella “The Overseer” was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award. He received a Nebula Nomination in 2006 for the novella “The Tribes of Bella” and in 2009 his story “Poison Victory” was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. He has on occasion published using the pseudonym Chet Arthur.

Cowdrey sold “Immortal Forms” to Gordon van Gelder for publication in the August 2006 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The story has never been reprinted.

Shortly after Tommy Salvati inherits the house in which Hannah Loewe died, he begins to question the circumstance of her death. Salvati inherited the house because when he was younger, Loewe took care of him while his mother worked following his father’s death and, years later, he was the only person she felt close to, as well as being her lawyer.

His discovery that Loewe may have died after being prescribed a series of drugs by a doctor who was more interested in separating her from her money than treating disease makes him decide that he needs to investigate her death. When that leads to a dead end, he decides to do whatever he can to avenge her by destroying the doctor’s life and practice. As a lawyer, he does so by writing letters urging an official investigation into the doctor’s life.

One he starts his plan, the house, or a spirit in the house, becomes more active, not only haunting Salvati’s workroom, which had been the bedroom in which Loewe had died, but also moving events towards an outcome of revenge against the doctor and those who helped him. Salvati learns to work with the house to avoid the haunted room during the daytime when the spirit is active, and stay out of the way when the spirit seeks revenge.

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Birthday Reviews: Leigh Brackett’s “Interplanetary Reporter”

Birthday Reviews: Leigh Brackett’s “Interplanetary Reporter”

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Cover by Rudolph Belarski
Cover by Rudolph Belarski

Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 and died on March 18, 1978.

Leigh Brackett was the first woman ever to appear on a Hugo ballot when she was nominated for her novel The Long Tomorrow in 1956, and was nominated for two Retro Hugo Awards in 2016. Her collection Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories was nominated for a British Fantasy Award. In 1978 she received a Forry Award from LASFS, and she was named the recipient of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2005. In 2014 Brackett was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Brackett and her husband, Edmond Hamilton, were guests of honor at Pacificon II, the 22nd Worldcon, held in Oakland, California in 1964. She worked in Hollywood and is one of the credited co-writers of The Empire Strikes Back as well as The Big Sleep, on which she shared a writers credit with William Faulkner. She collaborated on fiction with Ray Bradbury and her husband. She published one of her non-genre novels using the pseudonym George Sanders. The Empire Strikes Back was dedicated to her memory.

“Interplanetary Reporter” was first published in the May 1941 issue of Startling Stories, edited by Mort Weisinger. It wasn’t reprinted until 2002, when Steve Haffner included it in the Brackett collection Martian Quest: The Early Brackett. In 2008 the story was included in an e-collection issued by Baen Books, Swamps of Venus. In 2009 Adventure House reprinted the original issue of Startling Stories that contained this tale.

Brackett was known for her planetary adventures and in “Interplanetary Reporter,” she places IP reporter Chris Barton in the Venusian city of Vhia. A grizzled war reporter, Barton has decided he is done with working as a reporter and is planning on telling IP editor John Sanger of his decision. On the way into Sanger’s office he spots the beautiful Kei Volhan, who is engaged to cub reporter Bobby Lance. Just as Barton announces his decision, Vhia comes under attack by a Jovian military force.

Partly to keep from saving face in front of Volhan, Barton allows himself to be convinced that he need to go into space to report on the Jovian attack. The two reporters and Volham manage to make their escape in an IP news spaceship and once they achieve orbit, they quickly learn that the surprise attack is not Jovian, but rather Martian in origin as Mars is trying to start a war between the Jovians and Venusians in order to gain a better deal on water rights.

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Birthday Reviews: Roger Dee’s “Worlds Within Worlds”

Birthday Reviews: Roger Dee’s “Worlds Within Worlds”

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Science Fiction Plus September 1955-medium Science Fiction Plus September 1955-back-small Science Fiction Plus September 1955 contents-small

Front and back covers by Frank R. Paul

Roger Dee Aycock was born on December 6, 1914 and died on April 5, 2004. He wrote mostly using the pseudonym Roger Dee, although he also published one story as John Starr when he had two stories appear in the November 1951 issue of Planet Stories.

Dee’s story “Worlds within World” initially appeared in the October 1953 issue of Science Fiction +, the final science fiction publishing project of Hugo Gernsback. It was the penultimate issue of the magazine. The story was reprinted in Science Fiction Monthly issue one, in September 1955, an Australian magazine edited by Michael Cannon.

“Worlds within Worlds” may not have been a cliché when it was first published, but in many ways it reads like one now, not just for its central idea that modern readers will see coming, but for the techniques Dee uses to tell his tale. From the earliest part of the narrative, he uses undefined terms and technobabble to give it a futuristic feel and it is only well into the story that the reader fully begins to understand the situation that the main character, Racon, is in, although Racon is fully cognizant of where he is and what is going on. Mostly. He is wondering why he isn’t being allowed on an interstellar research ship that is about to launch.

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Birthday Reviews: Jon DeCles’s “The Power of Kings”

Birthday Reviews: Jon DeCles’s “The Power of Kings”

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Cover by Gary Ruddell
Cover by Gary Ruddell

Jon DeCles was born as Donald Studebaker on December 5, 1941.

In addition to writing, DeCles is also a Mark Twain interpreter, performing as Twain and giving lectures about the man’s life and career. He collaborated with Paul Edwin Zimmer on the novel Blood of the Colyn Muir. Studebaker married author Diana L. Paxson.

“The Power of Kings” was written for the eleventh Thieves’ World anthology, Uneasy Alliances, edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey and published in 1988. He would write a follow-up story for the next, and final, volume of the original series as well.

A troupe of actors led by Feltheryn has arrived in Sanctuary, where High Priest Molin Torchholder is building them a new theatre and has commissioned them to perform a play. Once a major actor in the capital of Ranke, Feltheryn and his crew are hoping to reestablish themselves in Sanctuary, unaware that Torchholder has specifically chosen a play that couldn’t help be political in nature and set to offend Prince Kadakithis and his lover, the Beysa. The story is clearly part of the woven tapestry of Thieves World and would not work well standing on its own.

The story deals with Feltheryn’s need to get the theatre in order, rehearse himself and his troupe, and keep tabs on his troupe, from his partner/lover Gisselrand, who is as focused as he is, to Rounsnouf, the comedian given a key dramatic role who is spending all his time at the infamous Vulgar Unicorn tavern. Into this schedule are thrown random groups of street toughs who want to avenge themselves on Feltheryn for not being able to rob him, as well as meetings, chance or otherwise, with various denizens of Sanctuary.

For someone who thrived in the capital, Feltheryn seems to have a poor sense for when he is being used a as pawn. Not only is Torchholder using him and the troupe for his own purposes, but many others who he or Rounsnouf come into contact with see the theatrical troupe as a means of advancing their own agenda. Even without the troupe being aware that anything is happening, they are moved in a political agenda which could (and should) be disastrous until Feltheryn’s quick thinking allows him to cast the situation in a more positive light.

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Birthday Reviews: Kurt R.A. Giambastiani’s “Intaglio”

Birthday Reviews: Kurt R.A. Giambastiani’s “Intaglio”

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Cover by Gary Davis
Cover by Gary Davis

Kurt R.A. Giambastiani was born on December 4, 1958.

Giambiastini’s debut novel The Year of the Cloud was a finalist for the 2002 Endeavour Award. In addition to writing fiction, Giambastiani has performed as a violist in regional orchestras and works as a software developer.

“Intaglio” was published by Algis Budrys in the October 1995 issue of Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, issue #17. The story has never been reprinted.

Giambastiani’s story is set several years after a rebellion was put down on the planet Thessalon. The people of Thessalon and the city of Pellion, where the rebellion was centered, have mostly been ignored by the Central Military Forces, apart from a series of economic sanctions. The Commander of the forces that crushed the revolt, Gavin Price-George, however, takes a series of intaglios, three dimensional photographs which allow the viewer to see depth and perspective, following the revolt and has published them in the years since. To celebrate an anniversary, he returns to Pellion with a showing of his intaglios.

Price-George comes with a full military contingent and announces that he is not only throwing a party for the people of Pellion, but that trade restrictions will also be relaxed. Giambastiani’s story focuses on the differences between the way Price-George is greeted by the younger generation, which doesn’t have a memory of the war and the deaths, and the older generation, for whom the wounds are still fresh and the memories of their killed friends and families shade their dealings with Price-George. The art display drives that home as the younger generation is seeing old images, but the older generation is seeing pictures of their younger selves, often at moments of great anguish.

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Birthday Reviews: John Dalmas’s “In the Bosom of His Family”

Birthday Reviews: John Dalmas’s “In the Bosom of His Family”

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Cover by C.A. Beal
Cover by C.A. Beal

John Dalmas was born John Jones on December 3, 1926 and died on June 15, 2017.

Dalmas first book The Yngling was serialized in Analog in 1969 and published in book form in 1971. Dalmas began publishing regularly in the 1980s, producing the Fanglith books and The Regiment series, as well as many short stories. In addition to his career as an author Dalmas worked for the US Forest Service.

Dalmas originally published “In the Bosom of His Family” in the October 1989 issue of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, Volume 5: Horror, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The story has never been reprinted.

Although “In the Bosom of His Family” is an horror story, the true horror of the tale doesn’t become apparent until near the end. It focuses on Charley Greer, part of a family of ranchers who have been settled in the valley for generations. Everything is done the “Greer Way,” including procreation. The eldest sons are expected to marry and have children while the younger sons are expected to remain single and stay on to help the family ranch. Charley is the second son and is helping out, but he is also dying of cancer and realizes his time is near.

Dalmas focuses on the familial ties and the sense of filial obligation, but Charley also sees his sister-in-law pregnant with a child who will follow in Charley’s role. Charley also reflects on his own uncle Charley, a younger brother who he never met, but whose life he is emulating and who he heard stories about from his grandfather and did his best to evoke his grandfather’s memories of him.

Seeing the life around him and the life expected for his potential nephew, Charley decides that rather than die on the ranch, as is the Greer way, he would head to the hospital, even if it meant an arduous trek overland since he didn’t want to have to ask for a ride. As Charley makes his way, it becomes evident that the Greer way is more than just tradition and Charley wasn’t just channeling his uncle, but rather there is an element of reincarnation at play and Charley’s life as a second son was a continuation of his uncle’s life, just as Charley’s nephew will be a reincarnation of him. Charley’s hope is that by dying far away from the ranch, he might be able to spare his nephew that fate.

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