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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica”

Birthday Reviews: Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica”

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Clarkesworld
Clarkesworld

Catherynne M. Valente was born on May 5, 1979.

She began publishing poetry and fiction in 2004 with the appearance of the poem “The Oracle Alone” and the novel The Labyrinth. She has won the Hugo Award twice for her work on SF Squeecast and won the Andre Norton Award for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which had only appeared on her website at the time.

Her novel The Orphan’s Tale: In the Night Garden received the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award and, along with its sequel Orphan’s Tale: In the Cities of Coin and Space, the Mythopoeic Award. Her short story “The Future Is Blue” earned Valente a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She won the Lambda Award for her novel Palimpsest and her poem “The Seven Devils of Central California” was recognized with the Rhysling Award. Valente has also won five Locus Awards, two each in the novella and young adult book category and one in the novelette category.

“A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” was originally purchased by Neil Clarke and Nick Mamatas for Clarkesworld issue 20, published in May 2008. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer selected the story for Year’s Best Fantasy 9 and Rich Horton reprinted it in Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 2008 Download. The story was also used in Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine and Valente reprinted it in her collection Ventriloquism. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

Maps are cool, and although Valente doesn’t include any actual maps in “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” she does provide detailed descriptions of six fictional maps of Antarctica and the South Orkney Islands. Her descriptions, written as if they appeared in an auction house catalog, go far beyond simply providing details of the map.

Valente’s catalog entries paint a picture of two very different cartographers whose lives and interests intertwined. Nahuel Acuña is a serious cartographer who does his best, often under trying conditions, to accurately map the edges of the world. His quest is aided by his ability to garner funding from a variety of sources. On the other hand, Villalba Maldonado, who was on the same initial voyage as Acuña, and scrambles for any money in pursuit his interests, seems to relish depicting the world as he would like it to be, as well as trolling his rival with his creations.

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Birthday Reviews: Shaenon K. Garrity’s “To Whatever”

Birthday Reviews: Shaenon K. Garrity’s “To Whatever”

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The Cackle of Cthulhu-small
Cover by Dave Seeley

Shaenon K. Garrity was born on May 4, 1978.

Garrity is best known for creating the on-line comic Narbonic in 2000. She has also worked as an editor for Viz Media and has had a hand in numerous cartoons, comics, and manga. Garrity’s first prose short story “Prison Knife Fight” appeared in Machine of Death in 2010, and she has published additional short fiction over the years. In 2005 she received the Outstanding Writers Award from the Web Cartoonist’s Choice Awards. The same year she was named co-Lulu of the Year by the friends of Lulu.

Her story “To Whatever” originally appeared on episode #335 of The Drabblecast, edited by Norm Sherman, on August 17, 2014. It received its first print appearance in Alex Shvartsman’s collection The Cackle of Cthulhu, published by Baen Books in 2018.

The stories of the Cthulhu mythos are generally designed to touch on the horror of the unknown. Although this concept plays into Garrity’s epistolary story “To Whatever,” she also takes a look at the other side of the coin. Ethan is aware that there is something strange living in the walls of his apartment, but rather than allowing it to scare him away or drive him crazy, as so often happens in stories of the Cthulhu cycle, he befriends the creature, feeding it, playing games with it, and watching television with it, although he never looks at it.

Ethan’s roommate, however, becomes jealous when Ethan starts spending time with Willem, a new tenant in the building. Although Willem does begin to exhibit the signs of going through a more traditional Lovecraftian response to the proximity of an ancient one, because the story is told from Ethan’s point of view, the horror is sublimated.

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Birthday Reviews: Michael Cadnum’s “The Elf Trap”

Birthday Reviews: Michael Cadnum’s “The Elf Trap”

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Cover by Michael Garland
Cover by Michael Garland

Michael Cadnum was born on May 3, 1949.

His first novel Nightlight was published in 1990, and he published three more novels the next year. His other works include Ghostwright, The Judas Glass, and Nightsong: The Legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. In addition to novels and short fiction Cadnum also writes poetry, and he received a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship for his poetry. His short fiction has been collected in Can’t Catch Me and Other Twice-Told Tales, Earthquake Murder, and other collections. In novels Starfall and Nightsong deal with mythical themes, while In a Dark Wood and Forbidden Forest explore the Robin Hood mythos.

Cadnum’s story “Elf Trap” was originally published in the April 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gordon van Gelder. In 2006 Cadnum included the story in his collection Can’t Catch Me and Other Twice-Told Tales, published by Tachyon Publications.

“Elf Trap” is the story of Tina and Norman, a couple who are having some major problems with a rat infestation of their property, although it focuses on rats stealing food from their bird feeders. While Tina works on quilts, Norman’s occupation is to provide the voice for Wise Elf in a series produced by Disney.

Although Tina is worried about the rat problem, her more important concern is that it isn’t clear that Norman is able to discern between reality and the Wise Elf character who has endeared him to a generation of children. When they set a rat trap on their property, Norman becomes convinced that rather than catching a rat, they’ve accidentally caught and killed an elf, a possible delusion which Tina does not dissuade.

Although some aspects of their lives and relationship improve, Norman’s career and reputation take a powerful hit as he can’t deal with the thought that he caused the death of an elf, even inadvertently. Tina, in her own mind, takes credit for breaking Norman from his delusions that the elves are real, however she begins to question whether she or Norman had the more realistic view of the situation.

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Birthday Reviews: Anne Harris’s “The House”

Birthday Reviews: Anne Harris’s “The House”

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Cover by Don Maitz
Cover by Don Maitz

Anne Harris was born on May 2, 1964.

Harris’s first novel was The Nature of Smoke. In 1999, Harris received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for her novel Accidental Creatures and her book Inventing Memory appeared on the 2005 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Long List. Her short story “Still Life with Boobs” was on the 2006 Nebula Award ballot for Best Short Story. More recently, she published the novels Amaranth and Ash and All the Colors of Love using the pseudonym Jessica Freely, and the novels of the Libyrinth sequence using the name Pearl North.

In “The House,” Harris creates a self-contained society that has arisen after some sort of undefined event which changed the nature of those who inhabited the house. Harris is never quite clear about what is happening in the titular house, or at least now who it is happening to. The house is apparently abandoned except for some sort of feral creatures living in it, possibly human, possibly animal. Some of them seem catlike, others snakelike, but their memories indicate some level of sentience and possibly humanity in their background.

The house’s inhabitant live in a strange game of King of the Mountain, which each of them attempting to gain access to the attic space and the windows onto the world which exist up there, a position held at the opening of the story by Azazel. In the story the main rivalry is between Harris’s narrator and Gustov, who seems to think he knows how to reach the attic and overthrow Azazel.

Because the concept of the House and its inhabitants is never really described to the reader, although the characters do seem to have a reasonably complete understanding of their situation, the story doesn’t entirely work if the reader tries to understand exactly what the situation is or what the inhabitants are. If the reader just accepts the house as a location for a quest and challenge between the narrator, Gustov, and Azazel, or even as a metaphor, the story works much better.

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Birthday Reviews: Joel Rosenberg’s “The Blink of a Wizard’s Eye”

Birthday Reviews: Joel Rosenberg’s “The Blink of a Wizard’s Eye”

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Dragon magazine March 1983-small Dragon magazine March 1983-back-small

Cover by Clyde Caldwell

Joel Rosenberg was born on May 1, 1954 and died on June 4, 2011.

Rosenberg published the Guardians of the Flame series, beginning with The Sleeping Dragon in 1983, about a group of role playing gamers magically transported to a fantasy world where they must deal with the stereotypical magical world, bringing along their modern points of view and knowledge. The series ran for ten volumes through 2003.

Rosenberg also published the four volumes set in his Thousand Worlds science fiction milieu and his other fantasy series: Keepers of the Hidden Ways, D’Shai, and Mordred’s Heirs. Along with Raymond Feist, he wrote Murder in Lamut, a novel set in Feist’s Riftwar setting. His short story “The Last Time” was set in Robert Adams’s Horseclans universe.

In addition to his speculative fiction, Rosenberg also worked as a gun rights advocate, running gun training classes and writing handbooks on gun ownership specific to Minnesota and Wisconsin. Rosenberg also wrote two volumes about Sparky Hemingway, a mystery series featuring a main character who is a copy-editor. Rosenberg also invited me to my first science fiction convention, which is how I got involved in all of this.

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Birthday Reviews: April Index

Birthday Reviews: April Index

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Cover by Richard Powers
Cover by Richard Powers

by Johnathan Sung
by Johnathan Sung

Cover by Douglas Chaffee
Cover by Douglas Chaffee

January index
February index
March index

April 1, Samuel R. Delany: “High Weir”
April 2, Joan D. Vinge: “Eyes of Amber”
April 3, Colin Kapp: “Ambaddasor to Verdammt”
April 4, Stanley G. Weinbaum: “The Worlds of If”
April 5, Robert Bloch: “The Fane of the Black Pharoah”
April 6, Sonya Dorman: “When I Was Miss Dow”

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Birthday Reviews: Larry Niven’s “Convergent Series”

Birthday Reviews: Larry Niven’s “Convergent Series”

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction March 1967-small The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction March 1967-back-small

Cover by Jack Gaughan

Larry Niven was born on April 30, 1938.

Niven won his first Hugo for the short story “Neutron Star.” His novel Ringworld received the Hugo and Nebula Award as well as a Seiun Award and Ditmar Award. He went on to win three additional Hugo Awards for the short stories “Inconstant Moon,” and “The Hole Man” and for his novelette “The Borerland of Sol.” Niven won a second Ditmar Award for Protector and additional Seiun Awards for his short stories “Inconstant Moon” and “A Relic of Empire.” Footfall, written in collaboration with Jerry Pournelle, received a Seiun Award and Fallen Angels, written with Pournelle and Michael Flynn, received both a Seiun and a Prometheus Award.

Niven has received the Forry Award from LASFS and the Skylark Award from Boskone. Niven was the Author Guest of Honor at ConFrancisco, the 1993 Worldcon. In 2005 he received the Robert A. Heinlein Award from the Heinlein Society and the following year received a Writers and Illustrators of the Future Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015, SFWA inducted Niven as a Grand Master.

In addition to his frequent collaborator Jerry Pournelle, Niven has worked with Steven Barnes, Michael Flynn, Edward Lerner, Gregory Benford, Dian Girard, David Gerrold, Brenda Cooper, and Matthew Joseph Harrington. He has also allowed other authors to write in the Known Universe series in the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies.

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Birthday Reviews: Jack Williamson’s “The Cold Green Eye”

Birthday Reviews: Jack Williamson’s “The Cold Green Eye”

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Fantastic March April 1953

Cover by Richard Powers

Jack Williamson was born on April 29, 1908 and died on November 11, 2006.

Williamson famously traveled from Arizona to New Mexico in a covered wagon when he was 7 years old. He went on to publish science fiction, beginning when he was twenty. Over the years, he frequently collaborated with Frederik Pohl and occasionally with James Gunn, Edmond Hamilton, and Miles Breuer.

Williamson received the Hugo Award for his autobiography Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction. He won a second Hugo, as well as his only Nebula Award, for his story “The Ultimate Earth.” His novel Terraforming Earth received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Williamson is also the recipient of numerous lifetime achievement awards. He has received them from the Writers and Illustrators of the Future, the Pilgrim Award, the Forry Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He received the Skylark Award from Boskone and the Robert A. Heinlein Award from the Heinlein Society. In 1968, he was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame and into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1996. In 1976, he was named the second SFWA Grand Master. Worldcon recognized him with the Big Heart Award in 1994.

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Birthday Reviews: William Sanders’s “When This World Is All on Fire”

Birthday Reviews: William Sanders’s “When This World Is All on Fire”

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Cover by Fred Gambino
Cover by Fred Gambino

William Sanders was born on April 28, 1942 and died on June 29, 2017.

Sanders wrote under his own name as well as the pseudonym Will Sundown. His novels included Journey to Fusang, The Wild Blue and the Gray, The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, J., and, under the Sundown name, Pockets of Resistance and The Hellbound Train. Sanders has also written mysteries and the non-fiction Conquest: Hernando de Soto and the Indians, 1539-1543. From 2006 to 2008, he edited the online magazine Helix.

In 1989 Sanders was a nominee for the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award for Best New Writer. He won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his stories “The Undiscovered” and “Empire.” “The Undiscovered” was also nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His story “Dry Bones” was also nominated for the Nebula and Sturgeon and Sanders was also nominated for the Sturgeon Award for “Jennifer, Just Before Midnight.” In 2008, he and Lawrence Watt-Evans were nominated for the Hugo Award for editing the Semiprozine Helix.

“When This World Is All on Fire” was originally published by Gardner Dozois in Asimov’s Science Fiction in the October-November 2001 issue. Dozois included it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection and Sanders used it in his two short story collections: Are We Having Fun Yet? American Indian Fantasy Stories and East of the Sun and West of Fort Smith. Grace L. Dillon reprinted the story in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction.

The world of “When This World Is All on Fire” has been ravaged by climate change, which has caused a rise in sea levels and temperatures making coastal areas and parts of the American south uninhabitable. For the Indians on the reservation in North Carolina, this means having to deal with a constant stream of white squatters who feel they should have access to the Indians’ open lands, a solution that the Indians and their police force disagree with.

Although climate change has caused the refugee problem, the story is more about the interaction between one of the Indian deputies, Davis Blackbear, and a family of squatters he had to chase off the reservation. The encounter should have been brief and Blackbear did his best to de-escalate it, but he found himself enamored by the squatters’ young daughter’s singing voice. When he sees her in a nearby town a couple weeks later, he steps in to stop her from being arrested.

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Birthday Reviews: Frank Belknap Long’s “Willie”

Birthday Reviews: Frank Belknap Long’s “Willie”

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Cover by William Timmins
Cover by William Timmins

Frank Belknap Long was born on April 27, 1901 and died on January 3, 1994.

In 1976, Long was nominated for three World Fantasy Award for his study Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside, his collection The Early Long, and received his second Lifetime Achievement nomination. He would eventually receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Award in 1978 and form the Bram Stoker Awards in 1988. In 1977, he was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame.

“Willie” first appeared in the October 1943 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. It was reprinted in 1979 in Night Fear, a collection of stories by Long. In 1999, August Derleth included it as an example of a time travel story in New Horizons: Yesterday’s Portraits of Tomorrow. It was also reprinted in 2010 in the Centipede Press volume Frank Belknap Long, part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series.

Although the story is called “Willie,” the central character begins by thinking of himself as simply “Twenty-ninth Century Man.” He eventually learns that he is known as Agar, although he also has the identity of Monitor 236, a position of responsibility and dignity. Despite all of these identities, he is never quite clear who he is or how he fits into the primitive society in which he finds himself in. He does know that it is his responsibility to protect the people of the city.

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