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Birthday Reviews: Hideyuki Kikuchi’s “Mountain People, Ocean People”

Birthday Reviews: Hideyuki Kikuchi’s “Mountain People, Ocean People”

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The Future is Japanese-small The Future is Japanese-back-small

Cover by Yuko Shimizu

Hideyuki Kikuchi was born on September 25, 1949.

Kikuchi published his first novel, Demon City Shinjuku in 1982 and his novel Black Guard was adapted into the film Wicked City in 1987. In addition to writing horror novels, Kikuchi has also published several manga. In addition to the series listed above, he also created Vampire Hunter D.

In 2012 Kikuchi’s short story “Sankaimin” appeared under the title “Mountain People, Ocean People,” in the 2012 anthology The Future is Japanese, edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.

Set in the far future, “Mountain People, Ocean People,” as the title suggests, shows a world in which humanity has divided into two groups, one living in the mountains, the other under the sea.  Kikuchi’s main focus is on the mountain dwellers, who have developed the ability to fly, with hunters among them looking out for wind spiders and sky sharks. Among those is third-generation hunter Kanaan who is trying to surpass the reputations of his ancestors, although his father ultimately disappeared under a cloud of suspicion that Kanaan knows is unwarranted.

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Vintage Treasures: 5 Galaxy Short Novels, edited by H.L. Gold

Vintage Treasures: 5 Galaxy Short Novels, edited by H.L. Gold

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5 Galaxy Short Novels-small 5 Galaxy Short Novels-back-small

Cover by Edward Valigursky

I love novellas. They’re the perfect length for idling away those long fall evenings. I miss them in the online magazines I read today, virtually all of which have a submission cap somewhere around 10,000 words (the exception is Neil Clarke’s Clarkesworld, which recently began accepting stories up to 16,000 words. Way to go, Neil!)

It was Matthew Wuertz’s Saturday review of the April 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, including Fred Pohl’s classic “The Midas Plague,” that reminded me just how many great novellas appeared in those old print magazines. Matt’s piece made me want to read the story all over again. In fact, it made me wish there was an easy way to sample Galaxy’s  novellas. Galaxy editor H.L. Gold had an appetite for meaty SF epics, and his authors took ready advantage of that market. Gold showcased dozens of top-notch writers at novella length in the early days of the magazine, and it would be great to have easy access to those hard-to-find tales.

Yeah, that was dumb. As I was sorting paperbacks this morning it finally occurred to me that what I was wishing for already existed. Gold produced nearly a dozen mass market anthologies during his eleven years as Galaxy‘s editor, including six volumes of the Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction. He knew what his readers wanted, and he paid special attention to longer fiction, with Galaxy Science Fiction Omnibus (1955), The World That Couldn’t Be and 8 Other Novelets From Galaxy (1959), Bodyguard and Four Other Short Novels from Galaxy (1960), Mind Partner and 8 Other Novelets from Galaxy (1961), and especially 5 Galaxy Short Novels, which appeared in 1958.

5 Galaxy Short Novels reprints stories by Theodore Sturgeon, Damon Knight, James E. Gunn, J. T. McIntosh, and F. L. Wallace. Even today, it makes a great introduction to the magazine.

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Birthday Reviews: John Kessel’s “The Franchise”

Birthday Reviews: John Kessel’s “The Franchise”

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Fields of Fantasies
Fields of Fantasies

John Kessel was born on September 24, 1950

Kessel won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1983 for “Another Orphan” and a second Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 2009 for “Pride and Prometheus,” both of which were also nominated for the Hugo Award. “Pride and Prometheus” also earned the Shirley Jackson Award. Kessel’s “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1992 and his “Stories for Men” won the James Tiptree Jr Award in 2003. He also won the Ignotus Award for a translation of “The Invisible Empire” in 2010. In 2006, Kessel was presented with the Phoenix Award for his Achievements by DeepSouthCon.

“The Franchise” was originally published in the August 1993 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, edted by Gardner Dozois, alongside Bruce McAllister’s baseball story “Southpaw” and Robert Frazier’s poem “Night Baseball.” Both Kessel and McAllister’s stories were alternate histories of baseball featuring Fidel Castro. “The Franchise” was reprinted in Nebula Awards 29, edited by Pamela Sargent and in Kessel’s collections The Pure Product and The Collected Kessel. The story was also included in W.P. Kinsella’s baseball anthology Baseball Fantastic in 2000. In 2014, Rick Wilber reunited “The Franchise” and “Southpaw,” which were both reprinted in his anthology Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural. “The Franchise” was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1994.

“The Franchise” is an alternate history in which George Herbert Walker Bush decides to parlay his college baseball experience into a baseball career. After floating around in the minors for several years without making a mark, he suddenly finds himself called up to play for the Washington Senators in the World Series when their first baseman is injured. Bush finds himself facing the ace pitcher for the New York Giants in several games, a phenom known as the Franchise named Fidel Castro.

The story is designed as a face-off between Bush and Castro, but it becomes clear very early that Bush is well out of his league and Castro is just playing with him. Castro’s ability to completely own Bush whenever he comes up to the plate, whether by striking him out or allowing him a moment of glory to reach base, is the Cuban ballplayer’s way of showing his contempt for Bush’s father, US Senator Prescott Bush. However, the struggle between George Bush and Castro is only the surface. The real struggle is between Prescott Bush and his son, a struggle which is just as lopsided as the one playing out on the baseball diamond.

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Romance in the Afterlife, Part 1: A Look at the Latest Volume in the Heroes in Hell™ Shared Universe, Lovers in Hell

Romance in the Afterlife, Part 1: A Look at the Latest Volume in the Heroes in Hell™ Shared Universe, Lovers in Hell

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1 Lovers in Hell book cover-small

In Lovers in Hell, the overall story continues with the primary arc of Erra, the Babylonian God of Mayhem and Pestilence, and his Seven Sibitti warriors punishing the innocent and guilty alike, not to mention Satan’s obliteration scheme, designed to destroy all hope. Since love fosters hope, this book-length arc is about lost loves, lost hope, lost opportunity, and the plight of those whose lovers have been obliterated or want obliteration. The fear and temptation of obliteration spreads throughout hell, calling the Undertaker and all he stands for into question and putting more stress on those in Satan’s domains, while the Mortuary becomes dysfunctional and botches many resurrections. Some hope to avoid the purge by fleeing to the nether hells, where Judges reside who might save them. Others are wracked by fear of loss and go into hiding. This sounds pretty dark, but it does have a humorous note, primarily in the screw-ups plaguing all the infrastructure of infernity as people disappear and what they know, and what they knew, goes with them.

The plagues are evolving, the floods have left a new coastline to explore, and many displaced souls wander about, lost, confused and frightened. Lovers may have been separated in the disasters or shunted to a part of hell where they know no one, and lovers may have been torn apart by plagues or purges or human error. Oblivion is transitory, but Obliteration is forever: obliteration erases not only who you are but who you ever were, and yet … should obliteration be only partially successful, then those persons may not remember who they are or why they were sent to hell in the first place — or they may simply be gone, disappeared, leaving only physical clues behind that he or she had ever been. Obliteration is meant to show those Above (ie: Heaven) that Satan is on the case, making hell more hellish.

So let’s take a quick look at the stories in Lovers in Hell, in the order in which they appear.

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Dead Cities, Space Outlaws, and Planet Gods: The Best of Leigh Brackett

Dead Cities, Space Outlaws, and Planet Gods: The Best of Leigh Brackett

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The Best of Leigh Brackett 1977-smll

Although Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) wrote planetary adventures during the Golden Age of Science Fiction and was married to Edmond Hamilton, one of the Golden Age’s most praised masters, she seems to, well, bracket the era rather than belong to it. Her stories set on fantastical versions of Mars and Venus are indebted to Edgar Rice Burroughs, while her dark emotional intensity looked forward to New Wave SF of the ‘60s. In his introduction to Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, Michael Moorcock wrote that “It’s readily arguable that without her you would not have gotten anything like the same New Wave … echoes of Leigh can be heard in Delany, Zelazny and that whole school of writers who expanded sf’s limits and left us with some visionary extravaganzas.”

The cocktail of Leigh Brackett’s style — mixing ERB and Robert E. Howard (Brackett could’ve written fantastic straight sword-and-sorcery) with the influences that shaped authors like Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance — is what makes her explode off the page in a way many of her Golden Age contemporaries no longer do. She feels startlingly fresh even when her stories occur in an impossible solar system. All the data NASA has brought back from the other planets cannot dampen Leigh Brackett’s power.

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In 500 Words or Less: It’s Not the End and Other Lies by Matt Moore

In 500 Words or Less: It’s Not the End and Other Lies by Matt Moore

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oie_2002521f3K3WVh7It’s Not the End and Other Lies
by Matt Moore
ChiZine Publications (300 pages, $17.99 paperback, $10.99 eBook, July 2018)

When I was newly-arrived in Ottawa, starting my first year as a high school teacher and still struggling to “break in” as a writer, I subscribed to On Spec, Canada’s premier magazine for short speculative fiction. One of the first issues I received was On Spec #92 in spring 2013, containing an op-ed titled “Next Stop: Suburban Fantasy” that discussed the popularity of urban fantasy and how the subgenre might evolve. It’s sitting on my office bookshelf right now, and rereading it this week I’m just as impressed as I was over five years ago.

That first read was long before I became friends with Matt Moore, whose recent story collection It’s Not the End and Other Lies proves several of the points he made in his op-ed, including that the urban sprawl we find ourselves in today can be just as bizarre and terrifying as the wilderness humanity has left behind. What I’ve loved about Matt’s work for a long time is his ability to combine an everyday suburban setting and make it the perfect place for something uncanny. The core of “Only at the End Do You See What Follows,” for example, is really a widower struggling over what to do with his house – except that his dead wife somehow predicted every person who would come to see it. The supernatural element isn’t really the hook, though; instead, it’s the protagonist’s relationship with his wife, a malicious cheater who’s borderline emotionally abusive, and the question of whether he’s hearing her from beyond the grave at all.

Like the best science fiction or horror writers out there, Moore’s talent doesn’t stop at combining the everyday with the speculative – the real magic is his character work. The supernatural force killing townspeople in “The Leaving” is just the vehicle; the real intrigue is waitress Georgina, desperate to atone for sending an ex-lover out into the night to die. Whether “Of the Endangered” is alternate history, slipstream or far-future SF is a mystery right to the end, but so is Noah, the Gunslinger-esque hunter chasing a backwoods demon. The fallen sky in “Touch the Sky, They Say” is a beautiful concept, but only because of the people wanting to press their hands against the stratosphere. But my personal favorite (I think) is “Brief Candles,” focusing on a couple desperate to have children in a post-Vietnam suburb, but forced to wait until they get a candle holding a soul that can be given new life through reincarnation. Whether the Cycle in this world is fact or fiction is never established; the important thing is what these characters believe, and what they’re willing to do because of it.

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Birthday Reviews: Andy Duncan’s “Santa Cruz”

Birthday Reviews: Andy Duncan’s “Santa Cruz”

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Cover by Shawn T. King
Cover by Shawn T. King

Andy Duncan was born on September 21, 1961.

In 1998, he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Duncan has won the World Fantasy Award twice, for his collection Beluthahatchie and Other Stories in 2001 and for his novella “Wakulla Springs,” co-written with Ellen Klages, in 2014. “Wakulla Springs” was also nominated for the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Duncan did win a Nebula Award in 2013 for his Novelette “Close Encounter” and he has a total of 8 nominations for the Nebula Award and three for the Hugo Award. He also won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his Novella “The Chief Designer,” which was also up for the Hugo and Nebula. Duncan has won the Southeastern SF Achievement Award twice, for “The Chief Designer” and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” He is currently on the Board of SFWA.

“Santa Cruz: A True Story” was published in Jaym Gates’s anthology Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place in 2016. The original publication received poor distribution and there are currently plans in the works to re-release the volume through another publisher with better distribution. The story has not yet been reprinted.

Duncan relates “Santa Cruz: A True Story” as if it had happened to him. The fictionalized version of Duncan is on a trip through California and stops in Santa Cruz, just south of San Jose, to visit with an old friend, Rob, who wound up settling in the city because there was something magical about the place that spoke to him, even if he couldn’t quite explain what it was.

For the most part, the story is completely mundane. Andy and Rob finish a night of reminiscing and while walking across an empty parking lot come across a drunk woman who has been abandoned in the lot. Andy offers her a lift home with Rob following her. Even when the story gets weird, it doesn’t get particularly weird. Andy makes a turn that causes him to lose Rob. The woman gives him drunk directions to a random cul-de-sac and eventually to her home. He manages to extricate himself from her neighborhood in about a tenth of the time it took to get there, and he reconnects with Rob.

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The Underwater Ballroom Society: A Review

The Underwater Ballroom Society: A Review

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The-Underwater-Ballroom-Society

In The Underwater Ballroom Society, an anthology sprung what-if-ily from a Twitter discussion, Tiffany Trent and Stephanie Burgis have edited a book targeted most righteously to the naiads, nāgas, and merfolk among us. Eleven stories of splendiferous sub-lacunar spectacle await the invited… and we’re all invited! Put on your best fishing net dress, string yourself with drowned doubloons and deep-water pearls, and dive in!

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New Treasures: The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories edited by Stephen Jones

New Treasures: The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories edited by Stephen Jones

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The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories-smallI love these Mammoth anthologies. Because they’re mammoth! You can curl up with them for an entire weekend. Or use them as a stepladder to get to those dishes in the top cupboard. They have countless uses around the house.

Stephen Jones’ latest, The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories, arrived earlier this month, and it looks like an essential fall purchase. It’s 528 pages of new and reprint stories from Ramsey Campbell, Steve Rasnic Tem, Joe R. Lansdale, Helen Marshall, Angela Slatter, Neil Gaiman, Storm Constantine, Alison Littlewood, Robert Silverberg, Michael Marshall Smith, Adrian Cole, Christopher Fowler, Scott Bradfield, Robert Shearman, and a dozen more — plus a spooky new poem by Jane Yolen.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

“Introduction: When Churchyards Yawn”
“October in the Chair” – Neil Gaiman (Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists, 2002)
“Reflections in Black” – Steve Rasnic Tem
“The Halloween Monster” – Alison Littlewood
“The Phénakisticope of Decay” – James Ebersole
“Memories of Día de los Muertos” – Nancy Kilpatrick (Dead of Night #8, Fall/Winter 1993)
“Fragile Masks” – Richard Gavin
“Bone Fire” – Storm Constantine
“Queen of the Hunt” – Adrian Cole
“The October Widow” – Angela Slatter (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, September 2014)
“Before the Parade Passes By” – Marie O’Regan

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Birthday Reviews: James P. Blaylock’s “Doughnuts”

Birthday Reviews: James P. Blaylock’s “Doughnuts”

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Cover by Phil Parks
Cover by Phil Parks

James P. Blaylock was born on September 20, 1950.

Blaylock won the 1987 Philip K. Dick Award for his novel Homonculus. He won the 1986 World Fantasy Award for the short story “Paper Dragons” and again in 1997 for “Thirteen Phantasms.” Blaylock has also been nominated for the Mythopoeic Award three times, the Nebula Award once, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award once. Blaylock’s most frequent collaborator is Tim Powers and the two have also used the name William Ashbless, which can be used jointly or individually. Ashbless has also been featured as a character in each of their works. Blaylock has also collaborated with Adriana Campoy, Alex Haniford, and Brittany Cox.

“Doughnuts” was originally published as a chapbook by Blaylock through Airtight Seels Allied Productions in 1994, a publishing house set up by James T. Seels in 1992 to publish Seels’s bibliography of Blaylock. The story was reprinted by Subterranean Press as a chapbook in 1997. Blaylock included it in his collections 13 Phantasms (2000) and The Shadow on the Doorstep (2009).

There is really nothing fantastic or science fictional about Blaylock’s “Doughnuts,” although the story, which deals with addiction, does have an horrific element to it as Walt and Amanda each deal with their own addictions and turn on each other when their problems are pointed out. Walt’s wife has informed him that his diet is no longer going to include doughnuts. Although he has been playing along with her ultimatum, he sneaks out of the house before she wakes to go to his local shop, Lew’s Doughnuts, only to discover that Lew has changed his hours. The shop is no longer open twenty-four hours, and Walt will need to wait until 8:00 to get his fix. Eventually, he returns home with a box of doughnuts.

Amanda’s own addiction is shoes. Just as Walt sneaks out early to buy doughnuts, littering the floor of his car with bags from Lew’s, Amanda buys multiple pairs of shoes and hides them in the trunk of her car until she can sneak them into the house. When Walt goes into the trunk to retrieve her car jack and discovers two pairs of the same shoes, he confronts Amanda, setting of a brief but intense fight that roils both of their emotions throughout the day, leading Walt to binge on nearly all the doughnuts he bought that morning. A later discovery of shoes in the trunk that his neighbor identifies as $1,000 Ferragamo’s exacerbates the situation.

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