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Birthday Reviews: Pat Cadigan’s “New Life for Old”

Birthday Reviews: Pat Cadigan’s “New Life for Old”

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Cover by Maren
Cover by Maren

Pat Cadigan was born on September 10, 1953.

Cadigan won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013 for “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” which has also won a Seiun Award. She previously won a World Fantasy Award in the Non-Professional category for co-editing the fanzine Shayol with Arnie Fenner. She won two Arthur C. Clarke Awards for her novels Synners and Fools. In 1979 her story “Death from Exposure” won the coveted Balrog Award. In 2006 Cadigan received the third (and most recent) Richard Evans Memorial Prize, given to genre authors who were considered insufficiently recognized for their excellence. Cadidgan served as the Toastmaster for MidAmericon II, the 2016 Worldcon in Kansas City.

Disney’s animated film Aladdin was released in 1992 and to take advantage of the popularity of the film, Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg edited the 1992 anthology Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, with stories based on genies, djinni, and the 1001 nights. Pat Cadigan’s story “New Life for Old” made its debut in the anthology. The following year, Cadigan included the story in her collection Dirty Work and in 1996 it was translated into French for Cadigan’s anthology Les garçons sous la pluie.

Cadigan’s djinn appears to 70-year-old Millie as she is polishing a family heirloom, a lamp that dates back to the family’s origins in the Middle East. Millie greets the djinn’s appearance with skepticism, based on her life experience and the drink she took that afternoon, although she doubts it is enough to get her that tipsy. The djinn does, however, make her an offer of one day of youth. If she turns it down, he’ll remove all memory of their meeting. Naturally, she takes him up on the offer and lives out a life of her youth.

Millie and the djinn reconnect after her day and she tells him all about it, reveling in what she was able to do and how she felt. However the experience wasn’t all she had hoped for and she realizes that a better, and more useful experience would have been to live a day as an old woman when she was younger. That way, she would better enjoy what she had rather than just one day that was wistful and nostalgic even as she was enjoying herself. Cadigan’s story is a quick tale that presents not only the good feelings that nostalgia can bring, but also a sense of the regrets and the difference in the view of someone young and someone older.

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A Celebration of the Wonder of the Universe Itself: Vast by Linda Nagata

A Celebration of the Wonder of the Universe Itself: Vast by Linda Nagata

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Vast Linda Nagata Gollancz-small Vast Linda Nagata Gollancz-back-small

Gollancz edition (1990); cover by Bob Eggleton

I’ll get right to it: Linda Nagata’s Vast is everything you want epic sci-fi to be: a huge scope in time and space, a compelling look at the horizons of human and technological evolution, and a celebration of the wonder of the universe itself. Vast provides all this, with some truly beautiful descriptions of stellar evolution thrown in for good measure. On top of all this, this scale and big ideas are woven alongside excellent character formation and a plot that builds tension so effectively that long years of pursuit between vessels with slow relative velocities still feels sharp and urgent.

I liked this book. A lot.

Vast is set in the far future, after multiple waves of colonization have moved out from Earth (which has since itself been destroyed). Humanities’ settlements along the frontier have been ravaged by twin threats from an ancient lost race called the Chenzeme: automated, partially biological warships and an engineered virus that turns its hosts into carriers of a cult that enslaves entire populations. Humanity, it seems, is being squeezed between these two prongs of an incredibly ancient civil war with weapons lingering on even after the civilization that wages it is long gone.

But there’s a whole lot going on against this epic background. Vast is actually the concluding book in a series that includes three others (one of which is the Locus Award-winning Deception Well) but I didn’t realize this when I picked up the paperback edition this summer in a used bookstore when my vacation reading supply tanked. The plot picks up with four characters — Nikko, Lot, Urban, and Clementine, all human — on a starship called the Null Boundary heading into Chenzeme space. Starting with the final book means I missed all the details of how these characters originally met, how they learned Lot was a carrier of the cult virus, and how they ended up on the Null Boundary, but it didn’t decrease my enjoyment of the book. Sometimes it’s nice to be dropped in the middle of an unfamiliar universe to figure things out as you go. (I remember starting Gene Wolfe’s Long Sun quartet for the first time with the third book and being simultaneously confused and enthralled.)

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New Treasures: Halls of Law, Book 2 of Faraman Prophecy by V.M. Escalada

New Treasures: Halls of Law, Book 2 of Faraman Prophecy by V.M. Escalada

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Halls of Law-small Gift of Griffins-small

Halls of Law, the first book in the Faraman Prophecy series, introduced a world of military might and magical Talents on the brink of destruction. It’s especially interesting to me because “V.M. Escalada” is also Black Gate‘s long-time Friday blogger Violette Malan, who took on a pen name for this switch to epic fantasy. Rob H. Bedford at SFFWorld had some fine things to say about the novel.

In Halls of Law, V.M. Escalada brings together familiar fantasy elements of a nation being invaded, a rigid military, people with supernatural mental abilities, a race of lost creatures returning, and of course, prophecy. Familiar elements when handled well, make for an entertaining, enjoyable story… Escalada is no stranger to fantasy, she’s published several enjoyable Sword and Sorcery novels as Violette Malan. This novel and series is a slight switch to a more large scale story of Epic Fantasy from those intimate Sword and Sorcery tales and launches a promising series…

There’s a sense of fun to the novel… There’s a lot of myth in the background of the worldbuilding, as well as just wanting to know what happens next for Kerida, that I’m greatly looking forward to the second book in the series. Sometimes a book lands in your lap at exactly the right time, and Halls of Law was precisely the kind of book I didn’t realize I needed when I opened the first few pages. I was drawn in by the comforting prose and stayed fully invested because of the characters and world. Halls of Law is a fun, optimistic Epic Fantasy that proved a welcome change of pace from some of the more grimdark fantasy I’d been reading.

The second novel, Gift of Griffins, was released in hardcover by DAW last month. Here’s the description.

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The Devil’s Left Hand in the Weird West: The Devil’s West Trilogy by Laura Anne Gilman

The Devil’s Left Hand in the Weird West: The Devil’s West Trilogy by Laura Anne Gilman

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Silver on the Road Gilman-small The Cold Eye Gilman-small Red Waters Rising-small

Laura Anne Gilman’s The Devil’s West trilogy is a Weird Western that follows Isobel, a sixteenth year-old who chooses to work for the devil in his territory west of the Mississippi. The opening novel Silver on the Road was a Locus hardcover bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Pick for Fall 2015, and SF Signal said it “marks a major landmark in the burgeoning subgenre of Weird West Fantasy.” In his NPR review Jason Sheehan wrote:

Gilman… [has] chosen a fertile place to begin her new series (the broad plains, red rock and looming mountains of the American West), and amped up the oddity of it all by planting the Devil there as a card dealer, fancy-pants and owner of a saloon in a town called Flood.

And the Devil, he runs the Territory. Owns it in a way. Wards it against things meaner than he is, because Gilman’s Devil isn’t exactly the church-y version. He’s dapper in a fine suit and starched shirt. He’s power incarnate — a man (no horns, no forked tail, just a hint of brimstone now and then) who gets things done; who offers bargains to any who come asking and always keeps to the terms because, as everyone in the territory knows, “The Devil runs an honest house.” He never asks for anything you’re not prepared to give, never gives anything that doesn’t have a price.

So when Isobel, who has worked since childhood as an indenture in the Devil’s house, comes of age and has the chance to cut her own deal with Old Scratch, she gives the only thing she owns — herself — into the employ of the Boss and becomes the Devil’s Left Hand.

The sequel The Cold Eye arrived last year to similar acclaim; Library Journal called it “a fabulous coming-of-age tale of magic and power, set in a conflict-ridden alternative Wild West,” and NPR said “It’s like the Oregon Trail of magical voodoo western novels.”

The third and final volume, Red Waters Rising, finally arrived in June, and our friend John DeNardo at Kirkus Reviews called it “a gripping conclusion.” It’s been too long since I’ve had a great Weird Western to dig into, and finally having all three books on my shelf has proven irresistible. They will be my pleasure reading this weekend.

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In 500 Words or Less: Tales of the Captain Duke by Rebecca Diem

In 500 Words or Less: Tales of the Captain Duke by Rebecca Diem

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oie_71323z2d6LGpYTales of the Captain Duke
By Rebecca Diem
Woolf Like Me (paperback/ebook editions, price varies, Aug 2014 – May 2018)

For anyone who reads this column even semi-regularly, this next review is probably gonna seem out of place. But indulge me for a few minutes to talk about Tales of the Captain Duke, a four-part series of indie novellas by Toronto author Rebecca Diem.

First thing to make clear: these novellas are equal parts steampunk adventure and romance, which is obviously not my usual cup of tea, so the fact that I’m reviewing it here should tell you something. Because honestly, I got swept up in this series. Why? Besides the fact that airships and pirates and steampunky technology are really cool, these novellas focus on character, which is always the number one thing I look for in a series.

Though the title is Tales of the Captain Duke, the focus is really on Clara, a debutante who leaves her life of wealth by sneaking away on an airship and falls in with “pirates” standing up to economic tyranny and corruption, under the leadership of the legendary Captain Duke. Okay, maybe that sounds like an obvious romantic setup – especially as the attraction between Clara and her new Captain is made clear – but Clara is far from your stereotypical female character.

She’s a badass, and quickly becomes an important part of the Captain Duke’s crew, joining a group of nuanced characters who go through a series of arcs from the first novella to the last. For example, you have first mate Trick, who becomes a vehicle for exploring physical disability when he relearns how to make music with a prosthetic arm, and youths Cat and Mouse, who desperately want to be adults and contribute more to their captain’s operations but have a lot to learn before they can.

This character work is tied into detailed, thought-out worldbuilding beyond the usual Victorian steampunk. Remember that this is an adventure story, too, complete with plenty of action and danger. Admittedly, this isn’t a story about elaborate twists and turns or huge surprises; when things from Clara’s past get mentioned off hand, you know they’re going to play a greater role later on, and when the Captain Duke’s people get betrayed, the culprit is pretty clear. That isn’t a bad thing, by any means. I love what Patrick Rothfuss calls “big fat fantasy books,” but sometimes I need a story that’s straightforward and fun, too, which Diem delivers in this series.

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Caffeine, Snacks, and a Thousand Notecards: How the Story Summit was the Key to Tremontaine‘s Success

Caffeine, Snacks, and a Thousand Notecards: How the Story Summit was the Key to Tremontaine‘s Success

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Tremontaine Season 1-small Tremontaine Season 2-small Tremontaine Season 3-small

For my whole life I’ve considered myself, in my heart-of-hearts, to be not a writer, but a novelist. Despite writing dozens of short stories, a handful of novellas, and even having serialized my own long-form story on my (defunct) blog in 2008, the novel has always had my devotion as a writer and reader. I’m both comforted and challenged by the boundaries of a novel’s of length and depth, the pacing and potential of the form. Not to mention the simple pleasure of a mass market paperback in my hands.

This is all to say that writing with a team for Serial Box’s Tremontaine is not my natural state. But it’s been a wild, fulfilling ride, and that seems accurate to describing the experience our readers have had.

Before joining Serial Box, I knew nothing about TV writing except that I loved watching the results. When Ellen Kushner invited me to write for Season Two of Tremontaine, I dove in head first with barely an understanding of the form from which we would be stealing.

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

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

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The Thackery T. Lambhead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases-small

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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Future Treasures: Vengeful, Book 2 of Villains by V. E. Schwab

Future Treasures: Vengeful, Book 2 of Villains by V. E. Schwab

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Vicious V E Schwab-small Vicious V E Schwab-back-small Vengeful V E Schwab-small

V. E. Schwab (who also writes YA fantasy under the name Victoria Schwab) is one of the few — indeed, perhaps the only — author with a bestselling superhero fiction saga that doesn’t belong to Disney or Warner Bros. Her Shades of Magic trilogy, the epic tale of an ambassador and smuggler who travels between parallel Londons, was a New York Times bestseller, and This Savage Song, the opening volume of her Monsters of Verity series, set in a divided city overrun with monsters, was both a #1 New York Times bestseller and an Amazon Best Book of the Year.

Matthew Surridge was the first person to bring her to my attention, with his 2014 Black Gate review of Vicious, the opening novel inVillains. Here’s Matthew:

Ten years ago, Victor Vale and Eli Cardale (later Eli Ever) are brilliant pre-med students who discover that near-death experiences can, under certain circumstances, grant survivors strange powers. They experiment, things go wrong, and while they both get powers, they end up as enemies. Now, in the present, Victor’s gotten out of prison, recruited some assistants, and is seeking out Eli — who himself has been up to some surprising things in the previous years, having come to hate the extraordinary people (or EOs) gifted with powers…

I think Vicious is interesting precisely because it straddles genres. It attenuates some of the signifiers of the super-hero genre (costumes, code-names, and so on) while maintaining others. And the result, I feel, moves the story in the direction of another genre. It moves it toward the gothic… It comes to feel a little like some of the early Vertigo comics, the Morrison and Pollack Doom Patrol, perhaps Nocenti’s Kid Eternity or Peter Milligan’s Shade: clear super-heroic elements mixed with a greyer world and some elements of horror. It’s not as complex as the best of the Vertigo books, but has a narrative drive many of them lacked… It’s fascinating to see the gothic emerging from under the skin of the super-hero genre. And as a character study, it succeeds, integrating flashbacks while maintaining narrative momentum. It reads smoothly, swiftly, and well.

Vengeful, the long-awaited second novel, arrives in hardcover from Tor on September 25. Here’s the description.

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And in the End: Soldiers Live by Glen Cook, Part 2

And in the End: Soldiers Live by Glen Cook, Part 2

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SLDRSLVCKG2000So that’s that. Last night I closed the cover of Soldiers Live (2000), the final volume of Glen Cook’s Black Company series. (Yes, yes, I know there’s a new book, Port of Shadows, coming out this month, but it’s set in the past, before Shadows Linger.) All the Company’s enemies and most of its veterans are laid to rest, mostly in their graves. In the last few pages the Black Company, Last of the Free Companies of Khatovar, leaves one universe for another. Only a single veteran from the pre-Taglian days remains and, after two devastating battles, most of the Taglian recruits are gone as well. And still…the Company remains the Company.

From this point on: Spoilers!

Sleepy leads the Company north from the Plain of Glittering Stone. Her plan is to defeat Soulcatcher’s army, then march on the great city of Taglios and force Mogaba and his fellow commanders to surrender. Outnumbered, Sleepy hopes that the magical advantages afforded by the wizard Tobo will give her the intelligence edge needed to overcome the larger, if less competent, opposing armies.

There are few happy endings in Soldiers Live. Willow Swan, Blade, Murgen, and many of their brethren fall in battle or succumb to their wounds afterwards. Shara is presumably killed in the final great fight near Taglios but her body is never found. We see Sleepy and her command staff caught in a magical trap and later learn they were all burned too severely to be identified. Goblin comes back but he’s been possessed by a demon of Kina. Mogaba, in a new found state of reflection, abandons Taglios in order to prevent its destruction only to be tortured and killed by Tobo. Just as he’s about to resume rule of Taglios, the Prahbrindrah Drah is killed by a stray bolt of magic. Much of the book’s second half is a roll call of the dead, punctuated by vicious battles.

At the heart of Soldiers Live is the fate of Croaker. It is through him that we first meet the Black Company, and through his eyes we leave it. His plan to rebuild the Company would have them traverse the worlds connected by the Plain of Glittering Stone, so Croaker makes a deal with the golem that maintains it. Shivetya is ancient and exhausted, desiring death but trapped in an immortal body. In the end the two swap bodies, allowing the golem to die and Croaker to become a near-divine being, able to access all the ancient history of the sixteen worlds and maintain the gates between them.

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

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

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Cover by Thomas Canty
Cover by Thomas Canty

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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