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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Steven Erikson’s “Goats of Glory”

Birthday Reviews: Steven Erikson’s “Goats of Glory”

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Cover by Brian Carré
Cover by Brian Carré

Steven Erikson was born on October 7, 1959. Trained as an anthropologist and archeologist, Erikson’s real name is Steve Lundin.

Erikson was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for his novel Gardens of the Moon in 2000 and in 2017, the ten book series begun with that novel, Malazan Book of the Fallen, was nominated for the Aurora Award for Best of the Decade. The Malazan books are set in a world which Erikson and his friend, Ian Cameron Esslemont, created in 1982 for their role-playing games. In addition to the novels Erikson has written, Esslemont has also written books set in the same world.

Originally published in Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders in 2010, Paula Guran selected “Goats of Glory” for inclusion in her 2017 anthology Swords Against Darkness.

“Goats of Glory” tells the story of a band of five warriors who are escaping a huge defeat. Originally known as Rams for the pins they wear, they have re-dubbed themselves goats following the loss and have stumbled across the tiny and remote village of Glory. As soon as their arrival is made known, one of the villagers begins digging graves for them, expecting that they will visit the ancient ruins of the castle on the hill and be killed by the demonic inhabitants.

Erikson splits his narrative between the points of view of Swillsman, Glory’s innkeeper, Graves, the gravedigger, and the five goats. By shifting viewpoints, Erikson successfully manages to build suspense as to which of his characters will succeed and which will die, although once the Goats go up against the demonic hordes, the suspense quickly evaporates. The battle sequences between the five goats and the demons are, perhaps, the weakest part of the story, although Erikson does break them up by revisiting the other characters to show them making plans for the heroes’ eventual defeat and deaths, clearly showing that the heroes aren’t the first to brave the abandoned fortress.

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Birthday Reviews: David Brin’s “Just a Hint”

Birthday Reviews: David Brin’s “Just a Hint”

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Cover by George Angelini
Cover by George Angelini

David Brin was born on October 6, 1950.

Brin won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award in 1984 for his novel Startide Rising. He subsequently won Hugo Awards in 1985 for his short story “The Crystal Spheres” and in 1988 for his novel The Uplift War. His novel The Postman won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1986 and was turned into a film starring Kevin Costner. He won a coveted Balrog Award for The Practice Effect and the Hal Clement Award for Sky Horizon: Colony High, Book One. Infinity’s Shore received an Italia Award. He has won the Seiun Award for translations of The Uplift War and Heaven’s Reach. In 1998, LASFS recognized him with a Forry Award. Brin was an Author Guest of Honor at Nippon 2007, the 65th Worldcon in Yokohama, Japan.

“Just a Hint” was Brin’s first published short story, appearing shortly after his debut novel, Sundiver. “Just a Hint” initially appeared in the April 27, 1981 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, edited by Stanley Schmidt. The next year it was translated into German to appear in Analog 5, a collection of stories previously published in the American edition of Analog. Brin included it in his first collection Rivers of Time, originally published by Dark Harvest in 1986. It was translated into German a second time in 1989 to appear in the anthology An der Grenze, edited by Wolfgang Jeschke. In 2010 James L. Sutter included the story in Before They Were Giants: First Works from Science Fiction Greats.

Brin tells the story of two races, the human race and a race he calls sophonts. There is little action in the story, which is mostly talking between characters on the separate planets. On Earth, Liz Browning is a graduate assistant to Sam Federman. Sam is searching for intelligent life in the universe, but his real specialty is finding and maintain funding for his project while all around him money is drying up. On a distant planet, Fetham is decrying his loss of funding to bureaucrat Gathu. As with Federman, Fetham is also trying to reach alien races.

Each society has its own problems. Federman lives in a world in which the weather report is accompanied by statistics of the chance that the world will end in a nuclear conflagration before the year is out. Knowing that pollution was solved once the obvious steps were figured out, Federman hopes that an alien race might be able to share knowledge of what those steps would be for war.

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Birthday Reviews: Zoran Živković’s “The Whisper”

Birthday Reviews: Zoran Živković’s “The Whisper”

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Cover by Dominic Harman
Cover by Dominic Harman

Zoran Živković was born on October 5, 1948.

Živković is a Serbian author whose works have been translated into English. His story “The Library” won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 2003 and his 2008 novella Twelve Collections & the Teashop was a nominee for the Shirley Jackson Award. In addition to his own writing, Živković has translated science fiction from English into Serbian, published the Polaris imprint, and has won the Miloš Crnjanski Award, the Isidora Sekulić Award, the Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša Award, the Art-Anima Award, the Stanislaw Lem Award, and the Golden Dragon Award.

Živković’s story “The Whisper” first appeared in English in issue #170 of Interzone, edited by David Pringle and published in August 2001, followed by the subsequent stories in the same sequence over the following six months. The story as included in Živković’s 2006 collection Impossible Stories as well as his fix-up novel in the same year, Seven Touches of Music, which had been published in Serbian in 2001 as Sedam dodira muzike.

“The Whisper” is a short story that opens Zoran Živković’s fix-up novel Seven Touches of Music. It is set in Dr. Martin’s classroom for children on the autistic spectrum, where Martin tries to find ways to engage his students. Martin feels like he is fighting a losing battle since the students are all non-communicative to various extents. One of the ways Martin tries to teach the students is by having them draw, but their responses range from drawings which they destroy before he can see them to intricate patterns to random scribbles.

When Martin introduces music to the drawing sessions, it seems to influence one of the boys in the class. Martin begins to experiment with types of music to see if other music will repeat the influence or cause other outcomes. His experiments are inconclusive, but lead him to think he may be on the right track if he can just figure out how and why the music is having the impact he sees.

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Birthday Reviews: Gary Couzens’s “Half-Life”

Birthday Reviews: Gary Couzens’s “Half-Life”

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Cover by Cathleen Thole
Cover by Cathleen Thole

Gary Couzens was born on October 4, 1964.

His fiction has been collected into two volumes and he has edited four anthologies, one of which, Extended Play: The Elastic Book of Music won the 2007 British Fantasy Award. He co-edited Deep Ten with Sara Jayne Townsend and co-edited Mind Seed with David Gullen. In 2017, five of his editorials for the magazine Black Static were also nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He has collaborated with D.F. Lewis, Miriam Robertson, and Martin Owton on various short stories.

“Half-Life” was first published in the August 1996 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Couzens included the story in his first collection of short stories, Second Contact and Other Stories, in 2003.

Gary Couzens made the decision to write “Half-Life” in the second person, which is not a common choice, but in this case manages to given an immediacy to the story that would otherwise have been lacking. His unnamed protagonist (“you”) has died and his spirit is hanging around the house, spying on his wife as she moves through the days following his death, and witnessing his daughter and son come home for the funeral.

While the second person POV pulls the reader into the story, the fact of death separates the reader from the action. The death causes a dissociative sense regarding what is happening as “you” learn how you were viewed by your daughter, who couldn’t reveal that she was a lesbian to you, although she told your wife five years earlier and has brought her lover for the funeral. You also realize that you won’t see the child your son and his wife are pregnant with.

You and the reader are both left up in the air as to any purpose you have for sticking around in your old house, but it is clear that you are locked to the location, with your strongest presence in the hallway where you died. When your wife leaves the house, you realize that you aren’t tied to her and will continue to exist in your half-state for an indeterminate period of time, but will eventually disappear.

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Birthday Reviews: Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians”

Birthday Reviews: Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians”

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Cover by Ed Emshwiller
Cover by Ed Emshwiller

Radell Faraday Nelson was born on October 3, 1931. Nelson has published under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ray Nelson, R. Faraday Nelson, and Jeffrey Lord. Nelson is also an artist.

Nelson’s novel The Prometheus Man received a special citation Philip K. Dick Award in 1983. In 2001 he was nominated for a Retro-Hugo in the Best Fan Artist category.

“Time Travel for Pedestrians” was published in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, and has been reprinted in the various versions of that anthology, but has not been published outside of that work.

While the framing device in Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians” may have been transgressive in 1972, when it was first published, the combination of rumination on masturbation and drug trips seems self-indulgent at a forty year distance.

Going beyond the framing device, as least as much as possible, the story offers numerous past life regressions for Nelson’s narrator, each one set earlier than the one before, each focusing on the conflict between the spread of Christianity and its competing belief systems, and each ending with the death of Nelson’s protagonist.

Intriguingly, the further back in time the narrator finds himself, the more receptive he is of Christianity, starting with a new age paganism, eventually becoming a priest in the Inquisition, and finally taking dictation from Mary Magdalen. While Nelson’s reflections on each of these vignettes offers different views on religion and belief, the framing mechanism intrudes, raising the question of whether the narrator is actually reliving past lives or if everything is part of the drug trip he has initiated, and which undermines Nelson’s story.

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Birthday Reviews: Edward Wellen’s “Barbarossa”

Birthday Reviews: Edward Wellen’s “Barbarossa”

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Since I realize I jumped the gun and moved Walter Jon Williams’s birthday up a couple of weeks with my Birthday Review published earlier today, here is someone who was actually born on October 2.

Cover by Kevin Davidson
Cover by Kevin Davidson

Edward Wellen was born on October 2, 1919 and died on January 15, 2011.

Most of Wellen’s publications were short stories and he was more active in the mystery field than in science fiction, although he began publishing in the genre in 1952 with the non-fact article “Origins of Galactic Slang” in Galaxy. In 1971 he published his only science fiction novel.

“Barbarossa” was initially published in the June 1973 issue of Vertex: The Magazine of Science Fiction, edited by Donald J. Pfell. It was reprinted in the anthology Fantastic World War II in 1990, edited by Frank McSherry, Jr.

Wellen briefly explores the fate of a Nazi U-boat commander who refused to surrender to the Allies when Admiral Doenitz gave the order following Hitler’s death at the end of World War II. Using every trick he could think of, Helmut Niemans managed to escape the Allies, jettisoning enough flotsam from the ship that it was believed to be lost. Instead, he spent the next twenty-odd years as a pirate, picking up crew as he could to replace the Germans who died, tried to escape, or mutiny.

Less a story than a vignette showing how Niemens manages to continue adding to his crew, with a flashback to explain his history, Wellen fails to show how the ship manages to remain functional, although ever-decreasingly, through the years. He also doesn’t discuss how Niemens is able to avoid any sort of detection. Instead, the Commander is shown as a sad Captain Nemo, awaiting the revival of the Nazi ideology while he crews his boat with a rag-tag collection of slaves who don’t believe in his vision. Wellen also ignores the fourteen crewmen who were aboard the boat during World War II, and doesn’t clarify where their loyalties lie — whether to Niemens, the Reich, or simply remaining alive in their tight and smelly quarters.

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Birthday Reviews: Walter Jon Williams’s “The Fate Line”

Birthday Reviews: Walter Jon Williams’s “The Fate Line”

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Cover by Bob Eggleton
Cover by Bob Eggleton

Walter Jon Williams was born on October 215, 1953

Williams received the Nebula Award for best novelette in 2001 for “Daddy’s World” and for novella in 2005 for “The Green Leopard Plague.” In 1997 he won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his story “Foreign Devils.” His works have also been nominated for the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

“The Fate Line” was published in the Fred Saberhagen festschrift Golden Reflections in 2011, edited by Robert E. Vardeman and Joan Spicci Saberhagen. The story is set in the same universe as Saberhagen’s 1979 novel The Mask of the Sun and has not been reprinted.

Williams take on the setting is one of constantly shifting expectations. It opens with Perseus, the illegitimate son of one of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, plundering a tomb at the orders of his half-brother, the Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes, in order to find the wealth needed to fight the rebels and foreigners who threatened the dynasty. Perseus worries that both success or failure would bring about his own death, but when he found the immeasurable wealth of Ahmose, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, he began to see a way out of his dilemma.

Williams quickly shifts the focus to Demetrios, a disentimed soldier who is working for the Quechuans of The Mask of the Sun in their time-war against the Tenocha. In one of the timelines, Cuzco-81, there is an Egyptian empire that threatens the Quechuans and Demetrios and a team are sent back in time to stop the Ptolemaic dynasty from establishing a foothold that lasts thousands of years. The team suffers almost instant failure when Demetrios meets Elpidos, a man who has knowledge about Demetrios, but who can’t share too much. Demetrios does realize that if he intends any harm to Ptolemy, the pharaoh will learn of it and Demetrios will fail.

Unable to return to his own time and knowing that his mission is stymied, Demetrios tries to figure out how to best establish himself in ancient Alexandria. Taking inspiration from his aunt, he sets himself up as a cheiromancer. When his predictions come true, he draws the attention of those close to the court and is eventually able to learn the secret of Ptolemy’s great luck, which ties in to Saberhagen’s novel, and come up with a way to siderail the timeline’s history without doing anything to harm the king.

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Birthday Reviews: Donald A. Wollheim’s “Blueprint”

Birthday Reviews: Donald A. Wollheim’s “Blueprint”

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Cover by Hannes Bok
Cover by Hannes Bok

Donald A. Wollheim was born on October 1, 1914 and died on November 2, 1990.

Wollheim entered science fiction fandom at its birth and was responsible for a meeting in Philadelphia between New York and Philadelphia science fiction fans which is considered by some to be the first science fiction convention. He was a member of the Science Fiction League, founded the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA), and the Futurians. He was one of the Futurians not allowed into the first Worldcon as part of the “Exclusion Act.” In the 1940s, he began working as an editor as well as a writer, editing for Avon Books and later Ace before starting up his own line, DAW Books. From 1965 through his death, Wollheim edited an annual World’s Best SF anthology series.

In 1975, Aussiecon One, the 33rd Worldcon, presented Wollheim with a Special Award for being the “Fan Who Has Done Everything.” Wollheim was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 1975 Wollheim won a World Fantasy Special Professional Award in 1981 for DAW Books and a Special Convention Award in 1986. He also won the Milford Lifetime Achievement Award in 1980, the I-Con Award and Forry Award in 1987. He and his wife, Elsie, earned a British Fantasy Special Award in 1984. In 2002, he was inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and in 2010, SFWA awarded him the Solstice Award, which was accepted by his daughter, Betsy. Wollheim was the Guest of Honor at Nolacon II, the 46th Worldcon in 1988.

Wollheim used a variety of pseudonyms, including Martin Borrow, Graham Conway, Millard Verne Gordon, David Grinnell, Martin Pearson, Allan Warland, W. Malcolm White, and Lawrence Woods. He collaborated, as author and editor, with George Ernsberger, Forrest J Ackerman, Terry Carr, Arthur W. Saha, C.M. Kornbluth, Robert A. W. Lowndes, John Michel, and Lin Carter.

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Birthday Reviews: September Index

Birthday Reviews: September Index

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Sword-and-Sorceress-II-smaller Tomorrow Speculative Fiction 23 November 1996-small Doughnuts Blaylock-small

January index
February index
March index
April index
May index
June index
July index
August index

September 1, C.J. Cherryh: “The Unshadowed Land”
September 2, Roland J. Green: “Strings”
September 3, Jack Wodhams: “Freeway”
September 4, Rick Wilber: “Greggie’s Cup”
September 5, James McKimmey, Jr.: “Planet of Dreams”
September 6, China Miéville: “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia”

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Birthday Reviews: Theodora Goss’s “Singing of Mount Abora”

Birthday Reviews: Theodora Goss’s “Singing of Mount Abora”

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Logorrhea
Logorrhea

Theodora Goss was born on September 30, 1968.

Goss has won two Rhysling Awards for Long Poem. The first was in 2004 for “Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks” and the second for “Rose Child” in 2017. She has also twice been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Mythopoeic, the Seiun, and the World Fantasy Award, winning the last once. She has additionally been nominated for the William L. Crawford/IAFA Fantasy Award, the SLF Foundation Award, and the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award.

Goss wrote “Singing of Mount Abora” for John Klima’s anthology Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories in 2007. The story was picked up by Rich Horton for Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition and by Jonathan Strahan for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two. It was late reprinted in Lightspeed by John Joseph Adams in the July 2012 issue. The story won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 2008.

“Singing of Mount Abora” was written for an anthology in which all the stories are inspired by words that were the winning entries in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, so it is appropriate that Goss’s language is a feature in the story, which was based on the word “Dulcimer,” which won the contest for Kim Calvin in 1949. The story is also based on lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” notably “ A damsel with a dulcimer/In a vision once I saw:/It was an Abyssinian maid/And on her dulcimer she played,/Singing of Mount Abora.”

Goss weaves together two tales set in three different times. The first is the story of Kamora, a woman in ancient China who has fallen in love with the Cloud Dragon, but cannot marry him until she convinces the Empress to let her leave. The second story tells of Sabra, a literature student who is beginning to fall in love with another student, Michael, much to her distant mother’s disdain. Both Kamora and Sabra must overcome obstacles set by the Empress or Sabra’s mother in order to have the chance to be with their loves.

The story of Kamora and the Cloud Dragon reads like a fable. Kamora is in service to the Empress who won’t let her leave until she can find someone who will entertain her as much as Kamora has. Kamora goes on a quest, starting with her uncle, the man who made her dulcimer. Known for his cleverness, he sends her to a distant mountaintop where she can meet the Stone Woman who may be able to help her, for the right price.

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