Steven H Silver – Page 35

Birthday Reviews: Homer Eon Flint’s “The Nth Man”

Sunday, September 9, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

Homer Eon Flint was born Homer Eon Flindt on September 9, 1889 and died on March 27, 1924 under suspicious circumstances.

Flint’s career as a speculative fiction author ran from 1918 until his death in 1924, during which time he collaborated with Austin Hall. The majority of his work appeared in All Story and Argosy All Story, which were published by Munsey. Flint’s death is a mystery that remains unsolved. He was killed when a car he was driving in ran over a cliff. Although there have been claims that Flint stole the car at gunpoint with the intent to commit a bank robbery, that charge was put forward by a gangster, E.L. Handley, several years later. There is no evidence that Flint was involved with anything illegal, and may have found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although “The Nth Man” was originally sold to the Munsey Corporation in 1920, it didn’t appear until after Flint’s death when the rights had been re-sold to Hugo Gernsback and it was published in the April 1928 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly. It disappeared and wasn’t reprinted until 2015 when it was included in the Wildside Press e-anthology The 26^th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack.

Flint opens the story with six lengthy vignettes describing miracles that occurred between 1920 and 1933, promising that they were linked in some way, but not offering any explanation for how they occurred. These instances range from the rescue of a nine-year old girl drowning after falling off a cliff to the transportation of a freighter from the middle of a typhoon to the Australian desert, to the disappearance of a bank in Hamburg.

Once he relates all of these miracles, which takes about half of the story, he begins to refocus his tale on the specifics, which tie the various vignettes together. The key vignette to our understanding is the one set in 1920, in which a young Bert Forsburgh meets a young Florence Neil. Fosburgh is the son of a wealthy businessman, Daly Fosburgh, who by the time the main story is set is prepared to economically take over the United States with his son, now a young adult, set to be his figurehead governmental leader.

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Birthday Reviews: Linda D. Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood”

Saturday, September 8, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Linda D. Addison was born on September 8, 1952.

Addison has won the Bram Stoker Award four times for her poetry collections, becoming the first African-American to win. She won her first Stoker for Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes in 2002. In 2008 she won for Being Full of Light, Insubstantial. Her collection How to Recognize the Demon Has Become Your Friend won in 2012, and her final award in 2014 came for her collaborative collection Four Elements, with Marge Simon, Rain Graves, and Charlee Jacob. She has also collaborated with Beecher Smith and Stephen M. Wilson.

“Little Red in the Hood” appeared in issue 23 of Tomorrow Speculative Fiction in November 1996, edited by Algis Budrys. The following year Addison included it in her collection Animated Objects, which included six stories and several poems. Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg also selected the story for the anthology 100 Hilarious Little Howlers. Its most recent publication was in the e-book anthology Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention, edited by Peggy Rae Sapienza, Jean Marie Ward, Bill Campbell, and Sam Lubell for the 2014 World Fantasy Con in Washington, DC.

Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood” is barely more than a vignette. It tells the story of fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters when they aren’t on duty. Little Red is relaxing at the end of the day in a bar, throwing back a double vodka. The Big Bad Wolf is sitting on the other side of the bar. When Red complains about having to be eaten daily, the wolf points out that he has to essentially have a Caesarian section each day when they retrieve Red after the story ends.

Other characters chime in with their concerns. As traditional characters they worry that the advent of the Power Rangers will knock them out of their roles, although the Red points out that the coming of the Purple People Eater didn’t impact them. The story ends in media res when Red and the Wolf are summoned because someone is reading their story to their child.

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Birthday Reviews: Ralph Robin’s “Inefficiency Expert”

Friday, September 7, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Cover by Chesley Bonestell

Ralph Robin was born on September 7, 1914 and died in December 1983.

Robin worked as a chemist for the National Bureau of Standards as well as working as a Professor of English at American University in Washington. In 1976 he received the Christopher Morley Award from the Poetry Society of America. His career as a science fiction author spanned 1936 to 1953, during which time he published a dozen stories in a variety of magazines.

“Inefficiency Expert” was originally published in the March 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas. Two years later it was translated into Italian as “Esperto di inefficienza” for publication in Fantascienza #5, edited by Livio Garzanti. It has never been reprinted in English.

Robin has created a society in which people have inhabited two planets, Leu and Tagr. Tagr is the more structured, authoritarian planet while Leu is more easy going, but at the same time introverted. The only citizens of Leu who will generally talk to foreigners are those who hold the title politeman, such as Vorasel. When Tagrian Transportation Executive Dalet-Fraygo-Tapandri-Mil finds himself stranded on Leu while his spaceship is being repaired, politeman Vorasel is assigned to communicate with him, which also results in Vorasel taking Dalet on a tour of some cultural points in Leu.

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Birthday Reviews: China Miéville’s “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia”

Thursday, September 6, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Cover by John Coulthart

China Miéville was born on September 6, 1972.

Miéville won the World Fantasy Award, the Kitschie, the British SF Association Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Novel for The City & the City in 2010. The book also earned him his third Arthur C. Clarke Award, following one for Perdido Street Station in 2001 and Iron Council in 2005. He has won the British Fantasy Award for Perdido Street Station and The Scar. All four of the previously named novels have also won the Kurd Lasswitz Preis. He has won the Ignotus Award for Perdido Street Station and Embassytown and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for Perdido Street Station and The City & the City.

China Miéville wrote “Buscard’s Murrain” for Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts’ anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases in 2003. When he included the story in his 2005 collection, Looking for Jack, Miéville changed the title to “Entry Taken from a Medical Encylopedia,” which was more descriptive, especially with the work taken out of the context for which it was created. The story was translated into German to appear in the collection Andere Himmel, with the title based on the new title of the work. He has collaborated on non-fiction with Mark Bould and on fiction with Max Schäfer, Emma Bircham, and Maria Dahvana Headley.

“Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia” is a short work presented to offer the history and symptoms of the fictional Buscard’s Murrain, also known as the Gibbering Fever. The entry is filled with humor, discussions of quackery, filial defenses, fraud, and footnotes.

Miéville begins with a history of the disease, explaining that it was first contracted by Primoz Jansa, when he read a word aloud, causing his brain to experience an alteration that possible caused some sort of worm to start tunneling through his brain. The disease was believed to have been spread by the repeating of that word, known as a wormword. Jansa traveled to London where his gibbering preaching caused several outbreaks of the disease, first described by Samuel Buscard, who may have become associated with the patient through the revenge of another surgeon Buscard was blackmailing.

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Birthday Reviews: James McKimmey, Jr.’s “Planet of Dreams”

Wednesday, September 5, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 3 comments

James McKimmey, Jr. was born on September 5, 1923 and died on January 19, 2011.

Although McKimmey wrote several science fiction short stories between 1952, when “Tergiversation” appeared in The Avalonian and 1968 when “The Inspector” was published in The Farthest Reaches, the majority of his fiction, including all seventeen of his novels, were in the crime fiction genre. In addition for his writing, he is known for an eleven year correspondence he conducted with Philip K. Dick between 1953 and 1964.

“Planet of Dreams” first appeared in the September 1953 issue of If, edited by James L. Quinn. LibriVox included the story in their 2010 audio anthology Short Science Fiction Collection 042.

Daniel Loveral’s ideal utopian society is to live on a planet in which nobody has to work, their every need from food and water to clothing and tools provided for by machines and their world. To achieve this, Loveral has led a group of immigrants to Dream Planet and instituted the society of his promise. Ironically, Loveral is required to work constantly to ensure that his followers can live in the world he promised them.

When word reaches Loveral that one of his followers, George Atkinson, is working, Loveral goes to discuss the situation with him. If anyone (other than Loveral) works in their utopian world, Loveral sees it as an admission of failure. Furthermore, if Atkinson makes something that only he has, Loveral is afraid that jealousy will also rears its head and cause the society to fail.

Unfortunately, Atkinson has very different views. While Loveral is busy with a project to make sure the society as a whole is what he pictured, he isn’t paying attention to their actual current wants and needs. Atkinson, like so many of the other inhabitants of the planet, are finding that the utopian world which they signed on is a boring place that doesn’t challenge them or give them any real raison e’dtre. Rather than being able to enjoy themselves, they can only focus on how bored they are.

It becomes apparent that although Altkinson appears to be acting alone, he is a representative for all of the citizens. McKimmey portrays Atkinson’s solution as one that is supported by everyone and the only real solution to the problem, however both McKimmey and, apparently, Atkinson seem to have ignored other potential paths towards the goal of revisiting the utopia’s charter and providing the sense of purpose people need, which ultimately weakens the story.

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Birthday Reviews: Rick Wilber’s “Greggie’s Cup”

Tuesday, September 4, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Rick Wilber was born on September 4, 1948.

Rick Wilber won the Stephen R. Donaldson Award for scholarship at the IAFA in 2006 and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2013 for his story about catcher/spy Moe Berg. He has also been nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. In 1997, along with Sheila Williams, Wilber founded the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing that is presented annually to students at the IAFA. In 2005, Asimov’s name was replaced in the award title with Dell Magazines.

“Greggie’s Cup” was written for the 1992 anthology Grails: Quests, Visitations and Other Occurences, edited by Richard Gilliams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer. The only place it has been reprinted is in one of the two trade paperbacks which were issued to split that massive collection into a more manageable size for reprinting, Grails: Quests of the Dawn, in 1994.

Greg is a back-up quarterback at the end of an uninspiring career, dealing with the aftermath of his second divorce, who takes Greggie, his twelve year old son with Down’s syndrome, with him to visit his sister in Scotland to try to figure out the next steps of his life. While Greg is talking to his sisters and brother-in-law, striking up a conversation with a woman who is interested in him for who he is rather than because he’s a football player, and talking to a team owner about a possible coaching job in the Scottish league, Greggie is off exploring the ruins of a Roman fort and pretending to be a knight.

The fort is more than just a playground for Greggie. Having heard his uncle Tam talking about how everything in Scotland has a tie to King Arthur, Greggie plays that he is fighting with a knight, who slips through time to actually befriend the boy. Sir Lancelot is supposed to be questing for the Holy Grail, but has doubts about his ability to find it since he knows he isn’t pure enough to hold the Grail. Greggie, of course, only sees the good in Lancelot, the fact that he befriended the boy. That is enough for Greggie and knowing that Lancelot is looking for a cup, he gives him the small plastic trophy that he won at a basketball game.

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Birthday Reviews: Jack Wodhams’s “Freeway”

Monday, September 3, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Jack Wodhams was born on September 3, 1931 he died on August 3, 2017.

Wodhams has been nominated for the Ditmar Award eight times, twice for short fiction and six times for novels, however he has not won the award.

The story “Freeway” has only been published once, when Elinor Mavor printed it in the November 1981 issue of Amazing Stories Combined with Fantastic.

The narrator in “Freeway” learns that he has an amazing power when he is driving in his native Australia and finds himself daydreaming about England. As he drives he suddenly realizes that he and his car have inexplicable transported to England, and he is driving along British highways towards London. He immediately heads to Fleet Street to tell his story to the newspapers, selling the Daily Express exclusive rights. Unfortunately for him, while he counted on the money, he didn’t count on the scrutiny he would be placed under. When the newspaper decided to recreate his time from his arrival in England, he allows himself to daydream and suddenly is driving through France.

As the narrator moves from country to country, Wodhams shows different reactions to his abilities, which are never explained or even fully tested. In France he is treated like someone who may be insane until he takes his captors with him when he transports to San Francisco, sure of his ability even if he doesn’t understand why. In the US, he finds himself on a publicity tour culminating in a planned attempt to transfer himself, resulting in both himself and the television van tailing him appearing back in Sydney. Life isn’t just easy and he finds himself in physical danger when a murderer decides he would be a ticket away from the police.

For the most part, Wodhams plays the story as a lighthearted jaunt, as his narrator goes from place to place, trying to regain his anonymity, and accidentally bringing others with him, despite his best intentions. There is an underlying humor to the story, although no overt jokes. In fact, from the vantage of 2018, perhaps the most unintentionally funny line in the story, in reference to America is “They’d even heard of Rupert Murdoch,” four years before Murdoch would acquire US citizenship and Twentieth Century Fox.

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Birthday Reviews: Roland J. Green’s “Strings”

Sunday, September 2, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Roland J. Green was born on September 2, 1944.

Green’s only award nomination was for the Sidewise Award in 1998 for his story “The King of Poland’s Foot Cavalry.” He has used the pen name Jeffrey Lord for his work on the Richard Blade novels. In addition to his own Wandor series, he has written Conan and Dragonlance novels. Green collaborated with Jerry Pournelle on three books in the Janissary series, with Gordon R. Dickson on the novel Jamie the Red, Andrew J. Offutt, John Carr, and with his wife, Frieda A. Murray. Along with Harry Turtledove, he co-edited two volumes in the Alternate Generals anthology series and co-edited Women at War with Lois McMaster Bujold.

Green wrote “Strings” for the anthology Oceans of Space, edited by Brian M. Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg in 2002. The story has never been reprinted.

In “Strings,” Green creates a complex interspecies political system in a short amount of space, presenting humans, Baernoi, and K’thressh in the same system. The humans and the Baernoi are attempting to navigate the possibility of open warfare between them while the telepathic K’thressh monitor, and possibly influence, the system.

Green’s entry into the story is through the eyes of Brigitte Tachin, a newly minted lieutenant aboard the FSS Trollstep. As the situation escalates with the realization that the Baernoi may have established an illegal colony on the nearby planet, Tachin’s commander begins to give orders that heighten the risk of war and Tachin must decide whether she will follow the orders and possibly die, or refuse them and jeopardize her fledgling career. The realization that the K’thressh are watching telepathically and might be influencing the decisions on both sides for their own gain only raises the stakes.

The situation is interesting, but Green’s focus on the military details of the human’s attack on the Baernoi forces tends to detract from the ethical considerations that Tachin raises in her decision to follow or ignore her commander’s orders. Green manages to lessen the impact of the situation he has set up by moving the story into the realm of standard military science fiction.

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Birthday Reviews: C.J. Cherryh’s “The Unshadowed Land”

Saturday, September 1, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Cover by Ilene Meyer

C.J. (Carolyn Janice) Cherry was born on September 1, 1942. When she sold her first work, editor Donald A. Wollheim suggested adding the final “h,” making her byline C.J. Cherryh. Her brother is artist David Cherry, who did not add a final “h.”

Cherryh won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977. In 1982, she won the coveted Balrog Award for her short story “A Thief in Korianth.” She has won three Hugo Awards, first for her short story “Cassandra” in 1979, for her novel Downbelow Station in 1982, and for her novel Cyteen in 1989. In 1988 NESFA presented her with the Skylark Award. She named a Damon Knight Grand Master by SFWA in 2016. Cherryh was the guest of honor at Buccaneer, the 1998 Worldcon in Baltimore.

“The Unshadowed Land” first appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress II: An Anthology of Heroic Fiction in 1985 and was translated into Italian as part of the anthology in 1988 and again in 1994. It was reprinted in English in The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh in 2004.

Cherryh slowly creates her world in “The Unshadowed Land,” subverting the reader’s expectations as she goes along. It opens with a description of God (or a god) callously creating and changing the world by looking at it in different ways or flapping wings. This setting seems to indicate an alien world, mostly desert, at least the part Cherryh is interested in. A woman, whose name might be Akhet, is introduced to the world, giving the reader a viewpoint character, but also, like the reader, unsure of the situation she is in.

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Birthday Reviews: August Index

Saturday, September 1, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

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

August 1, Raymond A. Palmer: “Diagnosis”
August 2, Robert Holdstock: “Magic Man”
August 3, Clifford D. Simak: “Observer”
August 4, Rick Norwood: “Portal”
August 5, Elisabeth Vonarburg: “Cogito”
August 6, Ian R. MacLeod: “Starship Day”

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Black Gate

Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Browsed by
Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Homer Eon Flint’s “The Nth Man”

Sunday, September 9, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

Birthday Reviews: Linda D. Addison’s “Little Red in the Hood”

Saturday, September 8, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Birthday Reviews: Ralph Robin’s “Inefficiency Expert”

Friday, September 7, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Birthday Reviews: China Miéville’s “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia”

Thursday, September 6, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Birthday Reviews: James McKimmey, Jr.’s “Planet of Dreams”

Wednesday, September 5, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 3 comments

Birthday Reviews: Rick Wilber’s “Greggie’s Cup”

Tuesday, September 4, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Birthday Reviews: Jack Wodhams’s “Freeway”

Monday, September 3, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Birthday Reviews: Roland J. Green’s “Strings”

Sunday, September 2, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Birthday Reviews: C.J. Cherryh’s “The Unshadowed Land”

Saturday, September 1, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Birthday Reviews: August Index

Saturday, September 1, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment