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Author: Steven H Silver

Tor Doubles #13: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis

Tor Doubles #13: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis

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Cover for The New Atlantis by Michael Böhme
Cover for The Blind Geometer by Peter Gudynas

The New Atlantis was originally published in The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Hawthorn Books in May, 1975.  It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award and won the Locus poll.

The story opens with Le Guin’s narrator, Belle, returning home from a Wilderness Week aboard a bus where another passenger attempts to engage her in conversation, noting that a new continent is rising in the ocean, either the Atlantic or Pacific, but scientists have little information about it to go on. This exchange allows Le Guin to provide the reader with information about the climate change that is affecting her world. Manhattan underwater and parts of San Francisco are flooded.

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Tor Doubles #12: Roger Zelazny’s He Who Shapes and Kate Wilhelm’s The Infinity Box

Tor Doubles #12: Roger Zelazny’s He Who Shapes and Kate Wilhelm’s The Infinity Box

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Cover for He Who Shapes by Wayne Barlowe
Cover for The Infinity Box by Royo

He Who Shapes was originally serialized in Amazing Stories between January and February, 1965. It won the Nebula Award, tying with Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree, which appeared as half of Tor Double #3. He Who Shapes is the first of three Zelazny stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. Zelazny’s original title for the story was The Ides of Octember, which was changed before its initial publication. He eventually expanded the novella to the novel length The Dream Master and the original title was used on the story when it was reprinted in 2018 in the collection The Magic.

The story focuses on Charles Render, a neuroparticipant therapist, and drops the reader into a session, in which Render is creating a reality for his patient, in which the patient is Julius Caesar in a world in which the assassins kill Marcus Antonius while Caesar/the patient longs for martyrdom. Following the session, Zelazny introduces Render and his techniques to the reader in a manner which leaves no room to doubt that Render may be adept and the technical part of what he does. But his bedside manner leaves much to be desired.

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Tor Double #11: James Tiptree, Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? and Joanna Russ’s Souls

Tor Double #11: James Tiptree, Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? and Joanna Russ’s Souls

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Cover for Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by Ron Walotsky
Cover for Souls by Dieter Rottermund

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? was originally published in Aurora: Beyond Equality, edited by Susan Janice Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre and published by Fawcett Gold Medal in May, 1976. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Houston, Houston, Do You Read? is the second of three Tiptree stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series, with only three female authors previously published in the series (four, if you include Joanna Russ in this volume), Tiptree is the first woman to have a second story included.

Major Norman “Dave” Davis, Captain Bernhard “Bud” Geirr, and “Doc” Orrin Lorimer are completing a year-long mission to orbit the sun in a spacecraft, the Sunbird. Upon nearing Earth, they are surprised, and annoyed, to hear women’s voices on the channels normally reserved for Mission Control in Houston. It becomes clear to the readers, if not the characters, that they have entered a Buck Rogers situation. Their orbit around the sun has resulted in their spaceship being catapulted into the far future.

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Tor Double #10: Robert Silverberg’s Sailing to Byzantium and Gene Wolfe’s Seven American Nights

Tor Double #10: Robert Silverberg’s Sailing to Byzantium and Gene Wolfe’s Seven American Nights

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Cover for Sailing to Byzantium by Brian Waugh
Cover for Seven American Nights by Bryn Barnard

Seven American Nights was originally published in Orbit 20, edited by Damon Knight and published by Harper & Row in March, 1978. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Seven American Nights is the first of two Wolfe stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

Sailing to Byzantium was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in February, 1985. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter.  Sailing to Byzantium is the second of five Silverberg stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series and aside from the proto-series Laumer novel, it is the first time an author has been repeated.

Wolfe’s story opens with a short note from Hassan Kerbelai indicating that he is sending the travelogue of Nadan Jaffarzadeh back to his family, noting that Jaffarzadeh seems to have gone missing. The final paragraphs of the story are focused on Jaffarzadeh’s mother’s reaction to the travelogue. The majority of the story is Jaffarzadeh’s description of his first week visiting America.

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Tor Double #9: Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly LIttle Boy and Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff

Tor Double #9: Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly LIttle Boy and Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff

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Cover for The Ugly Little Boy by Alan Gutierrez
Cover for The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff by Carol Russo
The ninth Tor Double collects novellas by Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, the only entries by either author. The Asimov’s story is The Ugly Little Boy and Sturgeon offers the oddly titled The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff. This volume is the first to include two stories that did not win, or even receive a nomination, for any awards. Leigh Brackett’s story in the previous volume wound up winning the 2020 Retro Hugo Award.

Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff was originally published in F&SF in November, 1955. The strange title is entirely fitting for the strange story Sturgeon has to tell. Just as two of the words in the title are framed by brackets, the story has a science fictional device framing it, in the form of a report by two aliens visiting Earth. In their report, which partly looks at whether or not “Synapse Beta sub Sixteen” exists in humans (and whether the species can survive without it), but also serves as an indictment of one of aliens by the other, the aliens set words in brackets when there is no exact English equivalent for what they are attempting to say.

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Tor Doubles #8: Leigh Brackett’s The Nemesis from Terra and Edmond Hamilton’s Battle for the Stars

Tor Doubles #8: Leigh Brackett’s The Nemesis from Terra and Edmond Hamilton’s Battle for the Stars

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Cover for The Nemesis from Terra by Tony Roberts
Cover for Battle for the Stars by Bryn Barnard

This volume includes the story Nemesis from Terra by Leigh Brackett and Battle for the Stars, byt Edmond Hamilton. There are two significant distinctions for this volumes. The two authors represented  were married to each other and one of the stories was previously included in the Ace Double series. The Tor Double was originally published in May 1989.

The Nemesis from Terra was originally published as “Shadow Over Mars” in Startling Stories in Fall, 1944. It was previously published as part of an Ace Double (F-123, with Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course) in 1961.  The Nemesis from Terra is the first of three Brackett stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

Although set on Mars in the far future, as with many of Brackett’s Martian stories, The Nemesis from Terra feels more like a fantasy novel than a science fiction novel. It is a descendant of the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs and could easily be classified with the stories of Robert E. Howard, neither of which is a surprise.

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Tor Doubles #7: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Vonda N. McIntyre’s Screwtop

Tor Doubles #7: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Vonda N. McIntyre’s Screwtop

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Cover for Screwtop by Maren
Cover for The Girl Who Was Plugged In by Peter Gudynas

 

The seventh official volume of the Tor Doubles series offers two stories by women. Although the previous volume offered an excerpt from Gwyneth Jones’ novel Divine Endurance is addition to the selections from Barry B. Longyear and John Kessel, this is the first time women have provided the headlining stories in the series. James Tiptree, Jr.’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Vonda McIntyre’s Screwtop, both stories about women whose freedom was curtailed, are collected in this volume. As with the previous novel, this volume also includes an excerpt, in this case a three chapter piece from Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint.

The Girl Who Was Plugged In was originally published in New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Nelson Doubleday in October, 1973. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the former.

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Tor Doubles #6: Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine and John Kessel’s Another Orphan

Tor Doubles #6: Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine and John Kessel’s Another Orphan

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Cover for Enemy Mine by Maren
Cover for Another Orphan by Tom Kidd

 

The sixth Tor Double not only includes the two title stories, Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine and John Kessel’s Another Orphan, but also includes an excerpt from Gwyneth Jones’s novel Divine Endurance.  Divine Endurance was originally published in Britain in 1984 and in the U.S. as a hardcover by Arbor House in 1987. Tor was scheduled to publish a paperback edition of the novel in May of 1989, two months after this Tor Double hit the shelves. With the two title stories totaling only 158 pages, the decision was made to add a twenty page excerpt of the forthcoming novel.

Enemy Mine was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in September, 1979. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, as well as the Locus poll. Enemy Mine kicked off Longyear’s “Dracon” series and was the basis for the 1985 film Enemy Mine, starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr.

The year after the initial publication and success of Enemy Mine, Longyear published an extended version of the story, which has generally superseded the version that won the Hugo and Nebula Award. It is this revised version that is included in this volume.

Enemy Mine is set during a war between humans and the lizard-like Drac, both of whom see the other race as trying to impinge on their own nascent interstellar hegemonies. It is clear from the beginning that there is little communication between the races and the war has been taking place for quite some time and there is no end in sight. …

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Tor Doubles #5: Poul Anderson’s No Truce with Kings and Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows

Tor Doubles #5: Poul Anderson’s No Truce with Kings and Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows

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Cover for No Truce with Kings by Royo
Cover for Ship of Shadows by Robin Wood

 

Both Poul Anderson’s No Truce for Kings and Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows originally appeared in issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Not only did their initial publication occur in the same periodical, but both of those original issues sported covers painted by Ed Emshwiller.

No Truce for Kings was originally published in F&SF in June, 1963. It won the Hugo Award and received a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2010. No Truce for Kings In is the first of three Anderson stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

Colonel James Mackenzie is the commander of Fort Nakamura in a post-apocalyptic California who receives a message that Judge Brodsky has been deposed and replaced by Judge Fallon. This message is the indication to Mackenzie that a civil war has broken out. Although Mackenzie and his troops are loyal to the old regime, the letter makes it clear that Mackenzie’s son-in-law, Thomas Danielis, is aligned with the rebels, as well as serving as a hostage for the troops who are coming to relieve Mackenzie of his command.

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Tor Doubles #4: Samuel R. Delany’s The Star Pit and John Varley’s Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo

Tor Doubles #4: Samuel R. Delany’s The Star Pit and John Varley’s Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo

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Cover for The Star Pit by Tony Roberts
Cover for Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo by David Lee Anderson

Originally published in January 1989, the fourth Tor Double included John Varley’s Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo and Samuel R. Delany’s The Star Pit. Printed in the a tête-bêche format, David Lee Anderson provided the cover by Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo and Tony Roberts was the artist for The Star Pit.

The Star Pit was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow in February, 1967. It was nominated for the Hugo Award. It lost to Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” and Anne McCaffrey’s “Weyr Search,” which tied each other. Coincidentally, McCaffrey and Delany share a birthday.

Vyme, a mechanic at the titular Star Pit, serves as Delany’s narrator. Rather than start with the present day action, however, Vyme opens his narration with memories of his own childhood and his life from several years earlier. Born on the backwater Earth in New York, he talks about his childhood and the ant farm he had as a child, which would eventually break.

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