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Love Exotic Science Fiction on Desert Planets? Try Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite

Love Exotic Science Fiction on Desert Planets? Try Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite

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Courtship Rite (Timescape Books, July 1982). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Noe took her strange Liethe in a comforting embrace. “Some of us make our Contribution to the Race through Death, and others of us make our Contribution to the Race through Life. That’s the way it has always been.”

One of the distinctive pleasures of science fiction is the heterotopia — a story set not in a good place (a utopia) or an evil place (a dystopia) but in an interestingly different place. Geta, the setting of Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite, has long been my favorite heterotopia.

The society Kingsbury portrays is shaped in important ways by its physical setting. Geta is a desert world, a science fictional trope that goes back to Percival Lowell’s Mars and the many stories set there, from Burroughs on. It’s not as harsh as Herbert’s Arrakis, but certainly harsher than Le Guin’s Anarras. For one thing, its native life is biochemically incompatible with its human inhabitants; eating it, without careful detoxification, is lethal. The only things truly safe to eat are a limited number of introduced Earth lifeforms: bees, eight species of plants (not all named) — and other human beings, because Geta’s most visibly distinctive cultural trait is institutionalized cannibalism. Kingsbury calls this out on the first page of the novel, where the children of a famous man, Tae ran-Kaiel, attend a funeral feast where his roasted body is the main course.

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Immaculate Scoundrels: That Tarantino-style Wuxia-80’s Heist-Fantasy Film… with Lizard People… you never knew you needed

Immaculate Scoundrels: That Tarantino-style Wuxia-80’s Heist-Fantasy Film… with Lizard People… you never knew you needed

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Immaculate Scoundrels (Flying Wizard Press, March 5, 2024). Cover by Brian Leblanc

There are lots of jokes associated with being GenX; so many, in fact, that arguably, the best joke is being GenX, period. I mean, multiple discussions of various generations literally provided lists and manage to forget that there actually is a group of people born between 1965 and 1980 at all!

But thanks to the odd 80s nostalgia of Stranger Things, Maverick, and the never-ending exploitat… er… expansion of the Star Wars franchise… the rather odd era of Big Hair, Nuclear Escalation, the birth of the Summer Blockbuster and a lot of pretty bitchin’ music is in vogue. It was an interesting, weird and contradictory time to grow up, with a lot of contradictory media and mixed messages (I’ll never forget seeing a literal “Say No to Drugs” commercial attached to the trailer for Porkys).

The end result was a generation marked for having a certain feral cynicism born of constant reminder from about age 13 that we were the “baby bust” and had zero political or economic influence and likely never would so just “go do you.” And any inclination otherwise probably ended with the dot.com crash, 9/11 etc. all hitting as most of us were 25 – 33, with 1/2 the generation still on a Clintonian hangover and the other half still believing Reaganomics had been a thing.

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A Really Impressive First Novel: The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland

A Really Impressive First Novel: The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland

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The God of Endings (Flatiron Books, March 7, 2023)

At this year’s Capricon I shared an autograph session with Jacqueline Holland. In the way of things, especially with customers sparse, I ended up signing a couple of my books for her and she signed a copy of her first novel, The God of Endings, for me. The novel was published in March 2023 by Flatiron Books, a fairly new imprint.

Jacqueline Holland got her MFA from the University of Kansas, studying with the wonderful Kij Johnson. She has published work in some impressive literary journals, like Big Fiction. This novel is fantasy, and she told me her next two novels will be science fiction. It’s a vampire novel, which is normally not my thing, but Jacqueline’s description made it sound intriguing, and not your standard vampire novel (certainly these are not sparkly vampires!) and it lived up to that.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Good Food,” by Michael Ezell

A to Z Reviews: “The Good Food,” by Michael Ezell

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A to Z Reviews

“The Good Food,” by Michael Ezell originally appeared in the 2016 anthology Beyond the Stars: At Galaxy’s Edge. The story feels like a classic science fiction story, placing a single human, his enhanced animal companion, and a computerized ship on an alien planet which has been seeded with plant life and insects in the first stage of a terraforming project.

The planet on which Jensen lands has demonstrated an anomaly. The vegetation around the landing base established by humans has died off, leaving a straight edge not too far from the landing plate in a pattern which could not be natural. However, there is no indication the planet has intelligent life on it.

Although Jensen, as the human, appears to be the commander of the mission, the actual situation isn’t quite as straight forward. Jensen, a former soldier, and Roy, his enhanced dog, are sent out of the ship to explore the region, while the ship’s computer, called Moira, stands ready to analyze any samples they might find that may be related to the anomaly. Their mission goes sideways when they discover a small creature ready to attack both Roy and Jensen, potentially at the head of a larger attack.

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The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

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The Strange (Saga Press, March 21, 2023). Cover uncredited

I wish I could take credit for the headline of The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit for Nathan Ballingrud’s terrific novel, but according to the author, Karen Jay Fowler came up with it. I hope she won’t mine me stealing it because it is as spot on as any description I could come up with.

The more prosaic version is that The Strange is a Western riff on Ray Bradbury’s vision of Mars, but without the canals. A Mars in an alternate 1930s timeline when interplanetary space travel first began during the Civil War, an oblique reference (among a slew of oblique references to classic SF tropes and personages) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, an ex-Confederate Barsoom warlord. Just as Bradbury had no interest in explaining how humans could actually exist on Mars sans space suits in a sort of off-world version of 1950s Illinois, or Burroughs how you can get astrally projected from an Arizona cave to Mars, Ballingrud just wants you to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.

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A to Z Reviews: “A Brief History of Death Switches,” by David Eagleman

A to Z Reviews: “A Brief History of Death Switches,” by David Eagleman

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A to Z Reviews

David Eagleman’s “A Brief History of Death Switches” is a perfect example of a story whose meaning changes over time, but is just as valid now than it was when it was originally published in 2006.

Around the time Eagleman wrote his story, there were many web services which were set up designed to prolong a person’s internet presence beyond death. These services would send out emails purportedly from the dead person on anniversaries or notifications of death. They didn’t last long, but Eagleman took the idea and expanded upon it.

In the context of his story, death switches begin as a means of protecting information. If a person doesn’t log into an account in a set period of time, the system assumes they are dead and sends the appropriate log-in information to a designated successor. This is meant to ensure that businesses can continue to function and heirs can access confidential financial information following the death of an employee or loved one.

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Emancipation: April by Mackey Chandler

Emancipation: April by Mackey Chandler

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April, Mackey Chandler (self published, May 4, 2019). Cover uncredited

Back in 2020, one of the blogs I follow had a paragraph about a newly released self-published novel, Who Can Own the Stars? by Mackey Chandler. The title sounded interesting, so I tracked it down on Amazon. It turned out to be volume 12 of a series; having enjoyed it, I went back to the first volume, April, and then read through the entire series, one volume at a time.

Like many science fiction writers of an earlier era, Chandler has a background that’s technological rather than literary. The April series is self-published, and has the rough spots that often go with that: It could benefit from a professional line edit, both to catch errors of language and to avoid minor inconsistencies such as changing a character’s name. As a copy editor, I’m sensitive to such things, and often they put me off a book. However, I just finished rereading April, and still found it both enjoyable and interesting.

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Immaculate Scoundrels by John R. Fultz

Immaculate Scoundrels by John R. Fultz

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Every job needed a crew.

from Immaculate Scoundrels

I keep revisiting the earliest days of writing about contemporary swords & sorcery lately. Last month I read and reviewed Rogue Blade’s fantastic new anthology, Neither Beg Nor Yield. Now, I’ve just finished John R. Fultz’s return to bash and thrash of the genre with Immaculate Scoundrels (2024).

Fultz was one of the first authors I encountered back in 2011/2012 when I started blogging about S&S. He was one of the writers I discovered through the electronic pages of Black Gate, along with James Enge, Howard Andrew Jones, and Ted Rypel in particular.

Between his collection The Revelations of Zang (2013 – I read it after winning a free copy in a giveaway here at Blackgate!) and The Books of the Shaper series, Fultz staked out a claim to being one of the best new voices in S&S.  These works were heavily inspired by Clark Ashton Smith’ and Lord Dunsany’s strange and often psychedelic fiction ladled over with more blood and thunder. If you think I’m maligning him, rest assured I am not. Anybody daring enough to take Smith as an inspiration and make it more violent, well, that’s not a bad thing.

Instead of more S&S, Fultz followed up with a Native American-themed sword & planet duology. I reviewed both The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015) and Son of Tall Eagle (2017) here. I might have been a little disappointed he hadn’t written more stories like his previous ones, but these are good books and Fultz isn’t one to sit around spinning the same tales again and again.

In the intervening years, he’s written enough short fiction to fill two collections. The first, World Beyond Worlds (2021) brings together his fantasy stories from the period. The second, Darker Than Weird (2023) contains fourteen straight-up horror stories. Now, with Immaculate Scoundrels, it’s back to swords & sorcery, but not like in any of his previous books.

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A to Z Reviews: “Virtually Correct,” by Marianne Dyson

A to Z Reviews: “Virtually Correct,” by Marianne Dyson

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A to Z Reviews

Marianne J. Dyson’s “Virtually Correct” was originally published in the May 1995 issue of Analog under the “Probability Zero” rubric. Stories published as part of the Probability Zero series are stories that use the science fiction tropes, but in a way that allows the author to write a story which could never happen.

Dyson tackles the concept of racial profiling in “Virtually Correct.” Maxwell Bishop runs a security firm known as Security Unlimited. The firm uses virtual reality simulations of actual crime scenes to train their security guards. Unfortunately, following a lawsuit in which a security guard from another firm shot a man who was determined to be innocent, a new law was passed regarding the use of virtual reality.

Mr. Compton has arrived to inform Bishop of the new stipulations, which mean that in order to avoid training his security guards with an unconscious racial bias, all of the individuals in the simulations must be recoded to be color-neutralized. Even as Bishop argues against the need and asks for an exemption, he questions whether he would respond the same way if Compton were caucasian instead of Black.

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A to Z Reviews: “Permission,” by Mark Dachuk

A to Z Reviews: “Permission,” by Mark Dachuk

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A to Z Reviews

Tesseracts is a Canadian anthology series that published 23 issues between 1985 and 2019. First edited by Judith Merril, each subsequent volume was edited by different authors and featuring new science fiction by various Canadian authors. One volume, Tesseracts Q, edited by Jane Brierley and Elisabeth Vonarburg, featured English reprints of stories originally published in French. Mark Dachuk’s “Permission” appeared in Tesseracts Ten in 2006, edited by Edo van Belkom and Robert Charles Wilson.

Dachuk has created a world in which everyone’s goal appears to be to leave the planet earth. Luana lives alone in a small house with an attached garden. When rockets launch from a nearby facility, she looks at them longingly, wanting to leave the world behind, but she doesn’t have the wherewithal to purchase her own tickets to leave the earth. Her hopes rest in the possibility that one of the plants growing on her property, the permission, will one day flower. She surmises that the house’s previous owner was lucky enough to get a blossom, which led to his departure.

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