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Author: Steven H Silver

Birthday Reviews: Wendy Rathbone’s “The Beautiful People”

Birthday Reviews: Wendy Rathbone’s “The Beautiful People”

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Cover by J.K. Potter
Cover by J.K. Potter

Wendy Rathbone was born on May 19, 1960.

Although Rathbone has published several short stories and some novels, she may be best known for her poetry, which has been collected in Moon Canoes: The Selected Poetry of Wendy Rathbone, Autumn Phantom, Turn Left at November, Dead Starships, and Unearthly: The Collected Poetry of Wendy Rathbone. Rathbone’s poetry has been on the Rhysling ballot three times.

The only publication of “The Beautiful People” was in the 1998 anthology Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel.

Rathbone’s story looks at the relationship between Noah, a plain bartender, and Tam, the talented and attractive singer in a band. Both characters are outliers in a world in which people can undergo treatment to improve their looks and gain the appearance of perpetual youth. Noah refrains because he blames the treatments for his sister’s suicide and Tam avoids the treatment because he feels he doesn’t need them to look good.

As their relationship progresses, including marriage, Noah remains steadfast in his belief that the treatment is wrong and takes something out of people, while Tam seems to be increasingly concerned about his own imperfections, which Noah describes as extremely minor. However, Tam is a performer and feels the need to keep up with his competition and his bandmates, all of whom have undergone the treatment and are “naturally” impeccable, while he needs to groom himself to achieve even a semblance of a perfection he doesn’t feel.

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Birthday Reviews: Jonathan Maberry’s “Red Dreams”

Birthday Reviews: Jonathan Maberry’s “Red Dreams”

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Dead Man's Hand
Dead Man’s Hand

Jonathan Maberry was born on May 18, 1958.

Maberry won the 2007 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel for Ghost Road Blues, which was also nominated for Best Novel. The next year he won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Nonfiction with David F. Kramer for their book The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange & Downright Bizarre. In 2012, he won the Bram Stoker for Best Young Adult Novel for Dust & Decay, and again the following year for Flesh & Bone. In 2015, he shared a Bram Stoker Award for Best Graphic Novel with Tyler Crook for Bad Blood.

“Red Dreams” original appeared in Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West, edited by John Joseph Adams in 2014. In 2017, Maberry included it in his collection Wind Through the Fence and Other Stories.

Set in the American West of 1876, the story follows Jonah McCall, who has been leading a band of mercenaries against a Cheyenne tribe led by Walking Bear, in hopes of earning the bounty placed on the head of each member of the tribe. When the “Red Dreams” opens, McCall has wiped out the Cheyenne and won the bounty, but at the cost of all of his own men. He and his horse, Bob, are the only survivors on the empty Wyoming desert where they watch a meteorite fall through the atmosphere.

Alone on the desert, McCall begins to reflect on his history with the Cheyenne, dating back to an enormous raid that massacred women, children, and the elderly, to the recent destruction of Walking Bear’s war party. Although McCall only sees himself doing his job and what is right for the local white settlers, his thoughts show him as an antihero. Maberry doesn’t indicate that Walking Bear was any less damaged than McCall, but Walking Bear’s thoughts and deeds aren’t being presented in the story, at least not by a reliable narrator. What is clear is that McCall has no personal animosity towards Walking Bear, but rather does hold him in a grudging respect.

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Birthday Reviews: F. Paul Wilson’s “When He Was Fab”

Birthday Reviews: F. Paul Wilson’s “When He Was Fab”

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Cover by Bob Eggleton
Cover by Bob Eggleton

F. Paul Wilson was born on May 17, 1946.

Wilson won the Bram Stoker Award for his short story “Aftershocks” in 1999. He has been nominated for the award seven more times, and in 2009 he received a Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Horror Writer’s Association. Wilson was named a Grand Master by World Horror Con in 2005. He received his first Prometheus Award in 1979 for the novel Wheels Within Wheels and in 2004 he won the award for the novel Sims. His Healer and An Enemy of the State won back-to-back Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards in 1990 and 1991. He was one of the Guests of Honor at the 2009 World Horror Convention in Winnipeg, Canada.

Although originally written with Thomas F. Monteleone’s Borderlands 2 in mind, “When We Was Fab” was purchased by Darrell Schweitzer for a special F. Paul Wilson issue of Weird Tales, which appeared in Winter of 1992/1993. Wilson reprinted the story in his 2009 collection Aftershocks and Others: 19 Oddities. It has not otherwise been reprinted.

“When He Was Fab” starts out like many stories about an alien symbiote that takes over a hapless human, in this case, Doug, who works as a super for an apartment in Brooklyn. The symbiote attaches itself to him one day when he’s cleaning out a clogged drain in the building’s basement. The story is also about Marc, a New Yorker who has suddenly found himself part of the cream of New York night life, able to get into all the bars and the person the stars all want to be seen with. Despite the shallowness off Marc’s live, he has found something that makes him happy and he tries to share what he has found with other people.

Wilson eventually brings Marc and Doug’s stories together. In doing so, he takes the symbiote, which would normally be the villain or monster of this type of story and actually makes the creature, which appears as a thick goo, to be a more sympathetic character than either of the humans whose activities Wilson has been describing. When the symbiote appears to take ill, both Doug and the reader care about what happens to the creature.

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Birthday Reviews: Bruce Coville’s “The Passing of the Pack”

Birthday Reviews: Bruce Coville’s “The Passing of the Pack”

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Cover by Gary Lippincott
Cover by Gary Lippincott

Bruce Coville was born on May 16, 1950.

Best known as a YA author, Coville won the Golden Duck Award in 1992 for his novel My Teacher Glows in the Dark, won it again in 2000 for I Was a 6th Grade Alien, and in 2006 won a Golden Duck for an audio production of Robert Heinlein’s novel Rolling Stones. His novels have twice been nominated for Mythopoeic Awards and in 2000, he received a Skylark Award from NESFA. He received the Empire State Award for Excellence in Literature for Young People from the New York Library Association in 2012.

“The Passing of the Pack” was originally written for the young adult anthology Werewolves: A Collection of Original Stories, edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenberg in 1988. Coville included the story in his collection Oddly Enough in 1994 and when that volume and its successor were collected in the omnibus Odds Are Good: An Oddly Enough and Odder Than Ever Omnibus, the story saw print again. In 2011, Coville issued the story as an e-book.

Throughout most of history, wolves have been seen as an enemy. They threaten the livestock on small villages and, when particularly hungry can also threaten humans. Bruce Coville channels that fear of wolves in the opening of “The Passing of the Pack,” which describes a wolf attack on a sixteen year old boy and then flashes back to the first time wolves attacked his village when he was five years old.

The story looks at the character’s life as a fatherless boy in a small village, specifically how he was treated almost as an outsider by the rest of the villagers. When he came to the defense of a girl he had befriended, the accusation of witchcraft against her was applied to him as well. By this time, Coville has shown an affinity for him by the wolves and his rescue by the animals is not really a surprise.

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Birthday Reviews: Dave Wolverton’s “We Blazed”

Birthday Reviews: Dave Wolverton’s “We Blazed”

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Cover by Michael Sabanosh
Cover by Michael Sabanosh

Dave Wolverton was born on May 15, 1957. He also writes using the pseudonym David Farland.

Wolverton won the Grand Prize from the Writers of the Future in 1987 to start off his career with his story “On My Way to Paradise,” which he expanded to book length. The novel version received a special citation from the Philip K. Dick Awards. His novelette “After a Lean Winter” was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1997. After his wins and nominations, Wolverton served as a judge for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the Writers and Illustrators of the Future. His historical novel In the Company of Angels received the Whitney Award and he won the International Book Award for Best Young Adult Novel for Nightingale.

“We Blazed” was written for the anthology Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn, edited by Beagle with Janet Berliner, and Martin H. Greenberg. It was reprinted in the June 2011 issue of Leading Edge, whole number 61, edited by Chris Baxter. Later that year Wolverton re-issued the story as an e-book under his David Farland pseudonym.

Wolverton’s “We Blazed” is a wonder of misdirection. Seemingly the story of an immortal man on a quest to find his equally immortal lover, Wolverton provides some wonderful twists. No reason is given for Alexander Dane’s longevity, nor that of Kaitlyn, whom he is trying to find, but he walks through an Earth impossibly in the future, almost completely amnesiac except knowing that he is looking for Kaitlyn.

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Birthday Reviews: Joyce Thompson’s “Boat People”

Birthday Reviews: Joyce Thompson’s “Boat People”

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Cover by Allen Koszowski
Cover by Allen Koszowski

Joyce Thompson was born on May 14, 1948.

Thompson has published several short stories, collected many of her early ones in East Is West of Here. She has published four novels, including the novelization of the film Harry and the Hendersons.

“Boat People” first appeared 1990 in Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine: Horror, the seventh issue, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Rusch also included the story in the anthology The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1991.

Thompson has produced an oddly confessional story in “Boat People,” albeit one with little fantastic element. Her narrator lives in Montana and is dealing with a mother who was once liberal, but is now older and averse to all the change brought into her life by a more diverse population. A generation behind her mother, the narrator sees the influx of Asian people as part of the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a war she opposed, but which left an indelible mark not only on her friends who served in Vietnam, but also on those who remained behind.

The narrator has survivor guilt for not having served overseas, and to assuage her guilt, she has taken on the task of working with veterans who are trying to capture their experiences on paper, offering her services as a published author to former soldiers who need the catharsis of writing about their experiences, no matter how bad the experiences or their prose. As she reads more and more of their memoirs, she takes on more and more of their memories, expressing regret that she wasn’t able to take a more active role in the war or the protests, and never fully understanding what they went through, but taking on their traumas.

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Birthday Reviews: Gregory Frost’s “Farewell, My Rocketeer”

Birthday Reviews: Gregory Frost’s “Farewell, My Rocketeer”

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Cover by Jay Bone
Cover by Jay Bone

Gregory Frost was born on May 13, 1951.

Gregory Frost’s novelette “Madonna of the Maquiladora” was nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Frost has also been nominated for the International Horror Guild Award and World Fantasy Award for his novel Fitcher’s Brides. His Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet jointly were nominated for the Tiptree, and “How Meersh the Bedeviler Lost His Toes” was nominated for the Sturgeon. He also received a Bram Stoker nomination for the story “No Others Are Genuine.” Several of his stories have been collected in Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories, published by Golden Gryphon in 2011.

Cliff Secord’s career as the Rocketeer, a 1930s style pulp hero who is a pilot in his daily life, but secretly has access to a jet pack, has been chronicled in a series of comics and one film. In 2014 several authors were invited to add to his legend with prose stories, one of whom, Gregory Frost, contributed “Farewell, My Rocketeer,” a lost treasure story set in the American Southwest. The shared world anthology The Rocketeer Jet-Pack Adventures was edited by Jeff Conner and Tom Waltz. “Farewell, My Rocketeer” story has not been reprinted.

Secord gets involved in the treasure hunt when he lands at a small airstrip and diner which has been taken over by a disparate group of villains who are seeking gold based on an old treasure map. To save himself and the staff of the diner, who have been taken hostage, Secord agrees to pilot the group’s plane to help them find the treasure after their pilot dies, even though he realizes his own usefulness to the villains will end as soon as he lands them back at the diner, theoretically with the gold.

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Birthday Reviews: Barry B. Longyear’s “Collector’s Item”

Birthday Reviews: Barry B. Longyear’s “Collector’s Item”

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Analog April 1981-small2 Analog April 1981-back-small

Cover by George Angelini

Barry B. Longyear was born on May 12, 1942.

Longyear received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1980, the year he won the Hugo and Nebula Award for his novella “Enemy Mine,” which was turned into a film starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. That same year his novelette “Homecoming” also appeared on the Hugo ballot, as did his novelette “Savage Planet” the following year. His stories have twice topped the Analog Reader’s Poll and he has been nominated for the Prometheus Award three times and the Sidewise Award once.

“Collector’s Item” was first published by Stanley Schmidt in the April 27, 1981 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. The following year it was translated into German to be reprinted in Analog 2, a German language version of the magazine. Longyear also included the story as the lead off to his collection It Came from Schenectady.

Longyear examines the unenviable task of cleaning out a parent’s belongings after their death. For Jay Hall, who barely knew his father and had little to discuss with him, the natural inclination is to just take everything and sweep it into the garbage. A call with his father’s attorney, however, causes him to look through some of the papers his father has collected over the years. Among those papers are essays written by five of his father’s students in 1955.

The essays were assigned on prosaic topics, “What I Did Last Summer,” “My Favorite Dream,” “Things I Think About.” As Jay begins to read them, however, he finds that these five students all had things in common… notable, references to someone known as the Major. Furthermore, their essays all seemed to indicate that they were being fed knowledge of America’s future involvement in Viet Nam.

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Birthday Reviews: Elizabeth Engstrom’s “Seasoned Enthusiast”

Birthday Reviews: Elizabeth Engstrom’s “Seasoned Enthusiast”

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Cover by Allen Koszowski
Cover by Allen Koszowski

Elizabeth Engstrom was born on May 11, 1951. She occasionally writes using the name Liz Cratty as well.

Engstrom’s collection Nightmare Flower was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and she co-edited the anthology Imagination Fully Dilated with Alan M. Clark, which earned them an International Horror Guild Award nomination.

“Seasoned Enthusiast” first appeared 1990 in Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine: Horror, the seventh issue, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Engstrom later reprinted the story in her 1992 collection Nightmare Flower.

The short work “Seasoned Enthusiast” tells two parallel tales, one about a dancer performing in front of an audience, the other the story of a divorced woman who is considering her own self-worth in light of her husband’s new life.

The more interesting story looks at Lillian, whose life has fallen apart after her divorce and she’s living in squalor while her husband and his new wife start their life together in an upscale house, a symbol of the success which eluded the couple while they were married. Unable to separate her life from his, and seeing herself as a failure because she lost him, Lillian drives over to her ex-husband’s house without a firm plan in mind, feeding her obsession with him without any plan of action.

In the other story, a crowd gathers around to watch a woman dance in an apparently primitive setting. As the dance sequences are interwoven with Lillian’s story, it becomes clear that things aren’t quite as they seem. There is an element of danger in the woman’s dance and she has suffered for her craft as she has perfected it.

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Birthday Reviews: John Scalzi’s “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis”

Birthday Reviews: John Scalzi’s “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis”

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Cover by Edward Miller
Cover by Edward Miller

John Scalzi was born on May 10, 1969.

John Scalzi won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2006. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2008, breaking David Langford’s nineteen year winning streak. He won a second Hugo in 2009 for Best Related Work for Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008. In 2013, he won a fiction Hugo Award for his novel Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas. His novel The Collapsing Empire is currently a Hugo Finalist. Redshirts earned Scalzi his second Geffen Award, which he previously won for the novel Old Man’s War. His novel The Android’s Dream received the Kurd Lasswitz Preis and the Seiun Award. Scalzi served two terms as the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Scalzi wrote “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis” for an audio anthology he edited, METAtropolis, produced for Audible Frontiers in 2008. The following year, the anthology was published in print form for the first time by Subterranean Press. Brilliance Audio issued the original audio anthology on CD and as an mp3 in 2009. In 2010, Tor reprinted the anthology and in the same year, it was translated into German. The story has not appeared outside its original anthology, whether in audio or printed form.

Benjamin Washington is living in the fully self-sustaining city of New St. Louis. Despite, or perhaps because of, a high-powered mother, Benjy is something of a slacker, putting off tackling his required aptitude test until the last possible moment. His poor scores, and lack of time to retake before the deadline of this twentieth birthday, coupled with his mother’s refusal to expend her political capital on nepotism, mean that he must take a job as a pig farmer working with genetically modified swine.

Suffering through life as a pig farmer, Benjy’s realizes how much he has screwed up, especially when he sees the girl he cares about together with a boy who is constantly needling him. Even as Benjy deals with the repercussions of his laziness, his learning experiences are presented in a manner that is designed to get a laugh, although Scalzi uses those same lessons to great effect later in the story.

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