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Author: Steven H Silver

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initial publication and success of Enemy Mine, Longyear published an extended version of the story, which has generally superseded the version that won the Hugo and Nebula Award.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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Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

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Cover for Born with the Dead by Ron Walotsky
Cover for The Saliva Tree by Lee Edwards

Tor Double #3 was originally published in December 1988.  The two stories included are Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with Les Edwards providing the cover art for The Saliva Tree and Ron Walotsky painting the cover for Born of the Dead.

The Saliva Tree was originally published in F&SF in September, 1965. It won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Seiun Award.

Set in the mid-1890s, The Saliva tree is the story of Geoffrey Rolles, a young gentleman of leisure in the East Anglian village of Cottersall. His head filled with socialism, he has embarked upon a correspondent with H.G. Wells, one of England’s preeminent socialists of the time. He has also taken an interest in local farmer Joseph Grendon, who has demonstrated his forward thinking ways by installing an electric generator on his farm.

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Tor Doubles: #2 Greg Bear’s Hardfought and Timothy Zahn’s Cascade Point

Tor Doubles: #2 Greg Bear’s Hardfought and Timothy Zahn’s Cascade Point

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Hardfought cover by Tony Roberts
Cascade Point cover by Tim White

This Tor Double has the distinction of containing two stories which were both nominated for the Hugo for Best Novella in 1984. Zahn beat out Bear for the rocket, as well as works by Hilbert Schenk, Joseph H. Delaney, and David R. Palmer. Bear wouldn’t go away empty-handed, however, since his story “Blood Music” won the Hugo for Best Novelette that same year (beating out works by Kim Stanley Robinson, George R.R. Martin, Connie Willis, and Ian Watson). Published in November of 1988, the cover for Hardfought was painted by Tony Roberts. The cover for Cascade Point was painted by Tim White.

Cascade Point was originally published in Analog in December, 1983. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella. The story placed second in the Locus poll and the Analog Readers Poll.

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Tor Doubles #1: Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars

Tor Doubles #1: Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars

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Meeting with Medusa cover by Vincent di Fate
Green Mars cover by Vincent di Fate

Tor Double #1 was originally published in October 1988.  This volume marked the beginning of the official Tor Double series. The two stories included, Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s novella Green Mars complement each other, although by doing so, Green Mars also points out a weakness of Meeting with Medusa. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with both covers were painted by Vincent di Fate.

Meeting with Medusa was originally published in Playboy in December, 1971. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award, winning the latter, as well as the Seiun Award.

The novella opens with Captain Howard Falcon commanding a massive airship, the Queen Elizabeth IV, over the Grand Canyon. A collision with a drone camera causes the ship to crash, killing nearly everyone on-board, including the uplifted chimpanzees who served as part of their crew. Although horribly injured in the crash, Falcon survived and spends years regaining his ability to function, eventually returning to his job as a pilot with an audacious plan.

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Tor Doubles: #0: Keith Laumer’s The Other Sky and The House in November

Tor Doubles: #0: Keith Laumer’s The Other Sky and The House in November

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The Other Sky cover by Thomas Kidd
The House in November cover by Mike Embden

Between October and December of 1969, Keith Laumer’s novella The Seeds of Gonyl were published as a serial in the magazine Worlds of If. The story was published the following year in a hardcover by G.P. Putnam & Sons under the title The House in November, and in 1971 as a paperback by Berkley Medallion.

In 1981, Tor reprinted the novel as part of its “Jim Baen Presents” series, but, apparently deeming the novel too short, it paired it with Laumer’s story “The Further Sky,” which had originally be published in the December 1964 issue of Amazing Stories. That story had also undergone a name change and appeared as “The Other Sky” in various reprints, including its appearance with The House in November.

When Tor Books reprinted the volume in 1985, they included a shield on the cover identifying the book as a “Tor Double.” This book may possibly have been created as a dry run or proof of concept for the eventual Tor Double line.  The cover for The Other Sky was provided by Thomas Kidd and the cover for The House in November was provided by Mike Embden, although their credits are reversed on the copyright pages.

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Tor Doubles: An Overview

Tor Doubles: An Overview

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Tor Doubles

In October of 1988, Tor Books released the first Tor Double, a volume that reprinted Arthur C. Clarke’s 1971 novella Meeting with Medusa with Kim Stanley Robinson’s novella Green Mars. Over the next thirty-five months, they would publish a total of thirty-six books in the series.

In general, there was little to link the two short stories that were published in each volume, although in 1990, Tor experimented with the publication of four Tor Doubles that included a classic story, by authors including C.L. Moore, L. Sprague de Camp, Leigh Brackett, and Roger Zelazny, with original stories that were set in the same world. The following year would see addition original stories published in the series.

Similarly, most of the volumes contained stories by two different authors, however four of the books published in 1991 were single author collections, with two stories each by Gordon R. Dickson, Mike Resnick, Damon Knight, and Fritz Leiber.

Modeled after the Ace Doubles series, the books were initially published in a dos-a-dos format, with each story getting its own cover and bound upside down in relation to the other book, so neither story was first (although the presence of an ISBN code on one side had a tendency to make it feel like the “back” of the book). The four volumes that included sequels were published with a single cover and beginning with volume 27, which included Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith, all the volumes were published in the more traditional format.

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A to Z Reviews: “Wasted Potential,” by David Lee Zweifler

A to Z Reviews: “Wasted Potential,” by David Lee Zweifler

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A to Z ReviewsOver the past several years, I’ve embarked on a series of year-long review cycles at Black Gate. In 2018, I reviewed a story-a-day to coincide with an author whose birthday it was. In 2022, I selected stories completely at random from my collection to review. In both of those cases, the projects served to find forgotten and minor works of science fiction that spanned a range of years. They also served to make me read stories and authors who I haven’t read before, even if they were in my collection.

For this year’s project, I’ve compiled a list of all the stories and novels in my collection. I then identified the first and last works for each letter of the alphabet and over the next twelve months, I’ll be looking at those works of fiction, starting with Vance Aandahl’s “Bad Luck” and ending with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential.” Looking at the 52 works (two for each letter), I find that I’ve only reviewed one of the works previously. Interestingly, given the random nature of the works, only three novels made the list, while four anthologies have multiple stories on the list. The works range in publication date from 1911’s “The Hump,” by Fernan Caballero to Zweifler’s story from 2023.

After a year, we finally come to the end of the alphabet, with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential,” which was published in the November/December 2023 issue of Analog.

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A to Z Review: Once There Was a Way, by Bryce Zabel

A to Z Review: Once There Was a Way, by Bryce Zabel

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A to Z Reviews

The Beatles were one of the most important bands of the twentieth century, but at the same time, and despite the massive Beatlemania the accompanied them, they only really existed in the public consciousness for eight years and 12 albums. Their breakup in 1970 when they apparently had so much to offer has meant that fans have long wondered what would have happened if they had remained together, had a reunion, anything.

Among those fans are several authors who have written alternative histories in which the Beatles’ story had played out differently. Stephen Baxter tackled the topic in the short story “The Twelfth Album,” Ian R. MacLeod explored a John Lennon who quit the Beatles before they made it in “Snodgrass,” the Beatles went their separate ways during the “Please, Please Me” sessions in Larry Kirwan’s Liverpool Fantasy, and Michael A. Ventrella and Randee Dawn edited an entire anthology of alternate Beatles stories in Across the Universe.  Films, such as Yesterday have also tackled the idea of the Beatles not existing.

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