Black Gate

Over the past few years, I’ve started tracking down books I read as a child and still remember, to see what I think of them now. Some of them I’ve had to buy; but I live close to a university library, which still has others on its shelves. I just reread Barbara Sleigh’s Carbonel, the King of the Cats (illustrated by V.H. Drummond), originally published 1955, and enjoyed it enough to think it deserves a review.

Sleigh was clearly an aelurophile; this book is dedicated to one cat and to the shades of four others. I’m pleased that its feline hero, Carbonel, is a black cat (as his name suggests!) — a breed that doesn’t get as much love as it deserves. He has very convincing catlike manners, mixing condescension, sarcasm, and occasional affection. At the same time, he fits one of the classic story formulas, being a lost heir of royal birth, with a title that he hopes to reclaim.

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Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson (Ace Books, February 1980). Cover by Jordi Penalva

In 1959, Robert A. Heinlein published Starship Troopers, one of the founding works of military science fiction as a genre. But that same year saw the serialization of Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai! in Astounding Science Fiction, a work that may have been equally influential, though it seems now to be less remembered. In fact, both were nominated for the Hugo Award in 1960, though Starship Troopers won.

Dorsai! is set in an interstellar future, with some sixty billion human beings inhabiting 16 planets of eight solar systems. Several of the stars are named in the novel, and as was common at that time, many of them are astrophysically implausible candidates to have biospheres, being of spectral types with relatively short lifespans: Altair (type A7), Fomalhaut (type A4), and Sirius (type A0). Fomalhaut and Sirius are also multiple stars, which limits the possible planetary orbits around them. At least Ceta, orbiting Tau Ceti, is a plausible Earthlike planet! It’s also noteworthy that several of these solar systems have multiple habitable planets — though that’s also true of our own, where Dickson has Mars and Venus humanly colonized, a project that seemed far more daunting only a few years later!

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There’s a backstory to my reviewing Singularity Sky. Its 2003 publication date made it chronologically eligible for the 2004 Prometheus Award for Best Novel. But it was Stross’s first book publication, and none of the Libertarian Futurist Society’s members happened to read it until that year’s finalists had already been chosen.

However, there was a campaign to write it in, and in fact it received a substantial number of votes, though not quite enough to win; had it been nominated, it might well have won. Now, much later, it’s eligible for the Hall of Fame Award, which can go to works at least twenty years old — and it’s been nominated for that award. As the chair of the committee that chooses Hall of Fame finalists, I’ve just finished rereading it.

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The Demon Breed (Ace Books, September 1979). Cover by Bob Adragna

Earlier this year, I visited my city library during a book sale. One of the things I spotted on their shelves was a novel by James H. Schmitz that I wasn’t familiar with. I’ve liked Schmitz since I discovered his story “Novice” in the collection Analog 2 — so I bought this one.

The Demon Breed came out in 1968, fairly late in Schmitz’s career, which lasted from 1943 to 1974. Like a large part of his work, it first appeared in Analog, where it was serialized as The Tuvela. Most of what he wrote was short fiction, including his best known story, “The Witches of Karres,” expanded into a novel with the same title in 1966; The Demon Breed is one of only four novels, and by today’s standards, a fairly short one.

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Courtship Rite (Timescape Books, July 1982). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Noe took her strange Liethe in a comforting embrace. “Some of us make our Contribution to the Race through Death, and others of us make our Contribution to the Race through Life. That’s the way it has always been.”

One of the distinctive pleasures of science fiction is the heterotopia — a story set not in a good place (a utopia) or an evil place (a dystopia) but in an interestingly different place. Geta, the setting of Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite, has long been my favorite heterotopia.

The society Kingsbury portrays is shaped in important ways by its physical setting. Geta is a desert world, a science fictional trope that goes back to Percival Lowell’s Mars and the many stories set there, from Burroughs on. It’s not as harsh as Herbert’s Arrakis, but certainly harsher than Le Guin’s Anarras. For one thing, its native life is biochemically incompatible with its human inhabitants; eating it, without careful detoxification, is lethal. The only things truly safe to eat are a limited number of introduced Earth lifeforms: bees, eight species of plants (not all named) — and other human beings, because Geta’s most visibly distinctive cultural trait is institutionalized cannibalism. Kingsbury calls this out on the first page of the novel, where the children of a famous man, Tae ran-Kaiel, attend a funeral feast where his roasted body is the main course.

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