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Birthday Reviews: John Langan’s “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons”

Birthday Reviews: John Langan’s “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons”

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Cover by Alamy.com
Cover by Alamy.com

John Langan was born on July 6, 1969.

Langan’s novel The Fisherman received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. His earlier collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters was also nominated for the award. The story version of “Mr. Gaunt” as well as his story “On Skua Island,” were both nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. Langan serves on the Board of Directors for the Shirley Jackson Award.

He wrote “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons” for Jack Dann and Nick Gevers for the anthology Ghosts by Gaslight. Published in 2011, the story has never been reprinted.

“The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons” is the story of Mark Stephen Chapman, an author who has arranged to spend the summer at the home of Parrish Dunn, a spiritualist whose home, and especially the strange balloons he decorates it with, are intriguing to Chapman. On his way up to Dunn’s estate, Chapman meets Cal and Isabelle Earnshaw, who are also on their way to spend time with Dunn. Cal is dying and has hopes that Dunn can ease his passage.

The majority of the story is told as a series of conversations between Isabelle and Chapman, although occasionally Langan includes a page from Chapman’s journals, as Chapman shared much about his past with Isabelle. Chapman also talks about his life with Cal, who regrets not having lived the full life he sees Chapman as having had. The most enigmatic of the characters is Dunn, who appears occasionally, but rarely interacts with Chapman until the story’s denouement.

Until the end of the story, there is little fantastic that occurs. Dunn’s treatment of Cal and Cal’s response are all physical in nature, whether or not Dunn is an actual spiritualist or a charlatan. Chapman never really develops a relationship with Dunn and finds himself uncomfortable around the paper balloons. Eventually, when Isabelle decides she wants to take Cal away from Dunn, Chapman serves to distract him and learns the truth about Dunn’s balloons and why they are so disturbing, although Langan does not indicate why others have not felt the same concern about them.

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Vintage Treasures: Nebula Winners Fourteen, edited by Frederik Pohl

Vintage Treasures: Nebula Winners Fourteen, edited by Frederik Pohl

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Nebula Winners Fourteen-small Nebula Winners Fourteen-back-small

Back in May, more or less on a whim, I paid $6.59 for a copy of the British paperback edition of Nebula Winners Fourteen, edited by Frederik Pohl. I already had the Bantam version (see below) but the gorgeously moody cover by the great Bruce Pennington hypnotized me, and what could I do?

I’m glad I did it, anyway. In this hot Illinois summer, a book I can dip into while relaxing on the porch is a perfect antidote, and having Nebula Winners Fourteen conveniently on hand has reminded me just how outstanding the Nebula anthologies were, and are, year after year. This one, for example, includes the three 1978 Nebula short fiction award winners, plus a 30-page excerpt from the winning novel:

“The Persistence of Vision,” by John Varley (Best Novella)
“A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye,” by Charles L. Grant (Best Novelette)
“Stone,” by Edward Bryant (Best Short Story)
An Excerpt from Dreamsnake, by Vonda N. McIntyre

But it also includes some superb nominees, as selected by Pohl, including C. J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning short story “Cassandra,” and Gene Wolfe’s massive 60-page novella “Seven American Nights.” I imagine Pohl got a lot of grief for cramming two long novellas into a slender paperback, displacing a lot of award-nominated short fiction in the process, but the years have proven the astuteness of his choice. “Seven American Nights” is one of the most acclaimed stories of the 70s, still discussed and enjoyed today, whereas the winner in the novella category, Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision,” is considered by many to be overrated (including by me.)

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Birthday Reviews: Jody Lynn Nye’s “Theory of Relativity”

Birthday Reviews: Jody Lynn Nye’s “Theory of Relativity”

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Cover by Bob Warner
Cover by Bob Warner

Jody Lynn Nye was born on July 5, 1957.

Nye began her career writing technical articles and gaming related fiction, including several choose-your-path adventures in the Crossroads Adventures series for Anne McCaffrey’s Pern and Piers Anthony’s Xanth. She followed those ups with The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern and Magic of Xanth before beginning to publish her own works as well as collaborative novels. Many of her novels and short stories are humorous and she has also written military science fiction. Nye was good friends with Robert Lynn Asprin and collaborated with him on the later books in his Myth series before continuing the series after his death. Her own series includes the Mythology 101 series, the Imperium trilogy, the Dreamland series, and others.

She wrote “Theory of Relativity” for Larry Segriff and Martin H. Greenberg for the anthology Past Imperfect. Published in 2001, the story has never been reprinted.

“Theory of Relativity” is an epistolary story, although the framing device seems superfluous. It does immediately tell readers that they are in a slightly different world since Nye refers to both the book packager, TeknoBooks, and one of the books editors, Larry Segriff, disguised as Barry Seacliff, although it is questionable how many people would catch the two references since the book was published by DAW. This framing device does recur at the end, when Seacliff’s partner, Dr. Gruneberg (Martin H. Greenberg) is referenced.

The story opens with some techno babble about the time travel, or dimensional travel, device created by Dr. Rachel Fenstone. Once that information is out of the way, the story can really begin, with Rachel writing about her trip to another timeline, which appears to be closer to our own, to discover her doppelganger, June Fennell. The two women connect and once June is informed about Rachel’s experiment, they work together to figure out when their two worlds branched from each other, determining it happened shortly after their great grandfather came to the United States. Their next stop is to travel back to see him and figure out which of their timelines is “real,” although they each know it is their own.

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Black Gate Book Club, Downbelow Station, Final Discussion

Black Gate Book Club, Downbelow Station, Final Discussion

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BdS1Welcome to the final round of the Black Gate Book Club, where we hash out or feelings and impressions on C.J. Cherryh’s 1981 classic Downbelow Station (DbS).  We also give DbS our final score– and things get contentious!

Need to catch up on the discussion?  Easily done with these convenient links to the first, second, third, and fourth rounds.

Adrian S.

I finished DbS last week. Third time was on the money!  Since I appeared to be the slow elephant I assume that everyone else was probably finished before I was.  In our set-up for the Black Gate Book Club we said that we’d give a final 1 to 10 rating on the books and this is our opportunity for that, as well as for final thoughts/quibbles/arguments.

Me? I’m going to give DbS a 6 out of 10.

I acknowledge the vastness of the story and the world(s) that Cherryh constructed. It is intricate, it is dynamic, it is chaotic; she has two generations of station masters vs. two generations of saboteurs, vs. a rag-tag Company Fleet, vs. an unknown foe of the Union forces, and throws in the Downers and the Merchanters and all that.

That said, did we really have to spend 300 pages setting the board so that some things could start happening? Yes, I get it, a slow burn, small disasters leading to bigger disasters.  But 300 pages of it?

300 pages of characters that seem completely interchangeable. Is there much of a difference between Angelo Konstantin and his sons Emilio and Damon.  Is there much of a difference between Emilio and Damon?   Ditto Jon Lucas and his two sons?   Double ditto between Conrad Mazian and Seb Azov.  Double damn ditto the women in the story,  Miliko (Emilio’s wife) and Elene (Damon’s).

I’m going to expand on something that Chris Hocking said about Cherryh’s lack of a sense of wonder. Not only is there no real sense of wonder, but Cherryh seems to be able to only write one real emotional state—a crippling sense of dread (CSoD).  And that’s why each of those characters comes across pretty much the exact same way—they all have intricately explored, elaborated, and expanded CSoD.  There seems to be no character that she doesn’t put into a claustrophobic environment to stew in their own cold terror.

That’s why Jon Lukas, Jessad, Ambassador Ayers and even Satin stand out in this story like giants—they are the only characters who take an active hand in their own fate.  Even Bran Hale and the goon from Q , secondary characters at best, bestride Downbelow Station like colossi because they do something. The rest just bounce around like terrified pinballs until they are finally forced to take some action.

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How Science Fiction Was Saved by Solaris and Jonathan Strahan

How Science Fiction Was Saved by Solaris and Jonathan Strahan

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Infinity's End edited by Jonathan Strahan-smallA few years ago Black Gate asked “Is the Original SF and Fantasy Paperback Anthology Series Dead?” Those were dark, dark days, and I don’t like to think of them.

They’re over now. Science fiction was rescued from a barren wasteland of paperback sameness by the one publisher who had a decent shot: Solaris. They did it by taking a chance on a paperback anthology series that has become one of the most acclaimed and celebrated of the past few decades: Jonathan Strahan’s Infinity Project, which comes to a triumphant end this month with Infinity’s End, certain to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.

You see, years ago original anthology series like Damon Knight’s Orbit, Terry Carr’s Universe and Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions were the very centre of science fiction, providing a prestigious and high-paying market for short fiction. They showcased the top names as well as up-and-coming talent. I could plunk down my three bucks at W.H. Smith in Halifax, Nova Scotia, knowing that the slender paperbacks I excitedly carried home would introduce me to half a dozen new writers.

Those books sold well, but publishers were savvy enough to know that it wasn’t just about the bottom line. When I read stories like Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (from New Dimensions 3, 1974), Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens” (Universe 10, 1981), or Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” (Stellar 2, 1977), I immediately began haunting book store stacks for books by Le Guin, Waldrop, and Asimov. There’s no reader as observant or loyal as a science fiction fan, and paperback anthologies, cheap and plentiful, were the perfect way to get authors in front of hungry new readers.

The economics of publishing gradually changed over the decades, of course, and those changes eventually wiped out the original paperback series. DAW’s long-running “paperback magazine,” the monthly anthology edited by Martin Greenberg and his associates at Tekno Books, was the last of them, and when Marty passed away in 2011, DAW killed it, too. Old timers like me shook their heads, muttering “No one reads short stories any more.” True or false, that grumpy sentiment became conventional wisdom in American publishing. No one would take a chance on something as provably dead as anthologies. That meant fewer readers finding new writers, and fewer sales for those writers. The field slowly withered without a prestige anthology series, and it looked like it would do so forever.

Until Solaris, and Strahan.

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Birthday Reviews: Peter Crowther’s “Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage”

Birthday Reviews: Peter Crowther’s “Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage”

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The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures
The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures

Peter Crowther was born on July 4, 1949.

Crowther, who runs PS Publishing, has received two World Fantasy Special Professional Awards for the press, one in 2004 and one in 2008. The press has also received seven British Fantasy Awards for Small Press, and Postscripts Magazine, edited by Crowther and Nick Gevers, has also won a BFA for Best Magazine. Crowther’s short story collection Lonesome Roads was his first BFA Award in 2000.

The story “Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage” was published in Mike Ashley and Eric Brown’s 2005 anthology The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures. It is one of the stories set in Crowther’s bar The Land at the End of the Working Day and was collected with three other stories set there in the collection The Land at the End of the Working Day in 2008.

“Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage” offers up a bar story, or rather, several bar stories. The drinkers gathered in The Land at the End of the Working Day begin sharing strange stories, some mundane, such as Edgar’s rides back and forth to work on a bus with a strange child, to the supernatural, with Jim describing how he helped free a ghost haunting the bars on his usual pub crawl. Cliff Rhodes, who has been listening, postulates that what all the stories have in common is that they involve journeys of some sort.

The story actually kicks off with two men entering the bar and asking if there was a back room. Horatio Fortesque and Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat have a reason for asking their strange question, but Crowther is very content to allow the question, and answer, linger in the background as his barflies tell their stories, joke back and forth, and draw out the tale. Their question, however, leads to the focus of the story, tying the various tales to the popularity of Jules Verne, who is mentioned repeatedly throughout “Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Voyage” as Crowther obliquely looks at the attraction Verne has maintained on the literary world since the 1860s.

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On Rivers of Blood: Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin

On Rivers of Blood: Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin

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Fevre Dream Subterranean-small

For many of his fans, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (aka A Game of Thrones, the title of the first book in the series) is considered to be his masterpiece. Undoubtedly GOT is his magnum opus, but for me his masterpiece is 1982’s Fevre Dream, which is one of my favorite vampire novels. Everything about this novel — setting, characters, prose, theme — reads as if Martin had channeled Mark Twain and Bram Stoker, had conjured them from beyond the veil to look over his shoulders while he penned this wonderful tale.

Fevre Dream is set in the antebellum south of the United States between the years 1857 to 1870, along the Illinois, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers. The main characters are a riverboat captain named Abner Marsh, a big, ugly, gruff but honest and honorable man, and Joshua York, a heroic and noble vampire who many of his kind eventually come to think of as their savior, the Pale King. The main thread deals with Marsh’s partnership and eventual friendship with York. And it’s this unlikely friendship that is at the heart and soul of this incredibly thoughtful and well-written novel. It begins when York approaches Marsh one night and offers him a grand business opportunity — to build the largest, fastest and most glorious riverboat ever seen, a riverboat painted all sparkling white, to which they give the name Fevre Dream.

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The Book of Lady: Dreams of Steel by Glen Cook

The Book of Lady: Dreams of Steel by Glen Cook

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Many months have passed. Much has happened and much has slipped from my memory. Insignificant details have stuck with me while important things have gotten away. Some things I know only from third parties and more I can only guess. How often have my witnesses perjured themselves?

It did not occur to me, till this time of enforced inactivity befell me, that an important tradition was being overlooked, that no one was recording the deeds of the Company. I dithered then. It seemed a presumption for me to take up the pen. I have no training. I am no historian nor even much of a writer. Certainly I don’t have Croaker’s eye or ear or wit.

So I shall confine myself to reporting facts as I recall them. I hope the tale is not too much colored by my own presence within it, nor by what it has done to me.

With that apologia, herewith, this addition to the Annals of the Black Company, in the tradition of Annalists before me, the Book of Lady.

-Lady, Annalist, Captain

Dreams of Steel (1990) picks up right after the end of the previous book, Shadow Games — which means it picks up in the middle of utter disaster. Under the command of Captain Croaker, the invigorated Black Company had marched south to contend with the armies of the Shadowmasters. In a stunning series of victories they crushed the Shadowmasters’ forces and by coup de main took the fortified city, Dejagore. The unexpected arrival of massive reinforcements under the Shadowmaster Moonshadow proved too much. Both Lady and Croaker appeared to be killed in the battle that followed. Under Lieutenant Mogaba the survivors retreated into the city and were besieged.

In the last pages it was revealed Croaker wasn’t dead. He had been taken prisoner by Lady’s sister, Soulcatcher. This is very bad. She was Lady’s and the Company’s great nemesis and she had, or so everyone thought, been killed nearly twenty years before, at the end of the first book, The Black Company. And when I say killed I mean killed, complete with her head chopped off. Now she’s back with plans for vengeance against her sister, primarily by separating her from Croaker, the only man Lady’s ever loved.

Lady awakens on the battlefield outside Dejagore surrounded by the dead and the dying. Fortune seems to shine on her and she escapes being discovered by looters. Later she meets some more looters, a pair of men from two different religious groups, an unlikely alliance in the region around Taglios. The first is Ram, a huge young man; the second, a tattered, wizened little man called Narayan Singh. She overhears them speaking of “the Year of Skulls” and “the Daughter of Night.” When she asks them who they are, they claim to be only deserters from the Taglian army. Despite her suspicions, Lady takes them along with her as she sets off to find any survivors of the Black Company not besieged in Dejagore. With Croaker apparently dead, she is set to declare herself Captain.

Gradually, Lady discovers that her new companions are Deceivers, members of a cult dedicated to the worship and freeing of Kina, the goddess of death. By killing enough people, supposedly freeing them from the wheel of reincarnation, they will usher in the Year of Skulls and free their divine mistress. In Lady, they seem to see their prophesied messiah, the Daughter of Night. Lady, a firm unbeliever in any and all deities, sees a point of leverage with them. She begins to consolidate her power in the face of uncertain loyalty from her soldiers, uncertain motives from her employer, the Prahbrindrah Drah of Taglios, and the misogyny of the powerful priests of Taglios’ three major religions, using the Deceivers as a hidden and a not so hidden hand.

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Experience an Alternate History Space Program with Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut Series

Experience an Alternate History Space Program with Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut Series

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The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky

Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2014 (after some shenanigans that caused it to be weirdly disqualified in 2013). All that — not to mention her other accolades, including multiple Nebula nominations for her popular Glamourist Histories fantasy series — helped make it one of the most talked-about SF stories of the last decade. Read the complete text at Tor.com.

“The Lady Astronaut of Mars” is the tale of Elma York, who led the expedition that paved the way to life on Mars, and the impossible decision she faces when she’s given the opportunity to return to space years later. Mary returns to the world of “Lady Astronaut” with her debut science fiction novel The Calculating Stars, available tomorrow from Tor Books. Fast on its heels is the sequel The Fated Sky, shipping in August. Tor.com offered us the following teaser back in September.

The novels will be prequels, greatly expanding upon the world that was first revealed in “Lady Astronaut.” The first novel, The Calculating Stars will present one perspective of the prequel story, followed closely by the second novel The Fated Sky, which will present an opposite perspective — one tightly woven into the first novel. Kowal elaborates: “The first novel begins on March 3, 1952 about five minutes before a meteorite slams into the Chesapeake Bay and wipes out D.C. I’ve been doing historical fantasy and I keep saying that this is historical science fiction, even though I know full well that ‘alternate history’ is already a genre. It’s so much fun to play in.”

Omnivoracious selected The Calculating Stars as one of 15 Highly Anticipated SFF Reads for Summer 2018, and just today the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog picked it as one of the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of July

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Birthday Reviews: Kay Kenyon’s “The Executioner’s Apprentice”

Birthday Reviews: Kay Kenyon’s “The Executioner’s Apprentice”

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Cover by Kenn Brown and Chris Wren
Cover by Kenn Brown and Chris Wren

Kay Kenyon was born on July 2, 1956.

Kenyon has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award for her novel Maximum Ice. Her novel The Braided World was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. She was nominated for the Endeavour Award three years in a row for the novels Bright of the Sky, A World Too Near, and City Without End.

She wrote “The Executioner’s Apprentice” for Julie Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel’s anthology ReVisions, which focused on scientific achievements as the catalyst for alternate history. Published in 2004, the story has never been reprinted.

“The Executioner’s Apprentice” takes a place in an Aztec empire which is advanced enough to make use of genetic testing in determining who has violent tendencies and likely criminal behavior to determine the appropriate victims of execution. Pacal is the titular apprentice who is preparing for his first execution and has completely bought into the traditional system. When his friends arrange for him to lose his virginity prior to his first execution, Kina, the woman he is with, tries to make him understand that there are better ways than executions.

On the eve of his induction into the ranks of Executioners, Pacal learns that the methodology he has been taught by the priests to find victims is a lie, and that his first victim will be Kina. Rather than culling the Aztecs of their most violent citizens, the priests are working to remove those who abhor violence, building a society which is ready to defend themselves not only against their traditional enemies but also the mysterious Eastern Army, which is implied to be made up of European conquistadors.

The discovery that genetic testing was not used for what Pacal believed is only the first twist that Kenyon introduces. When Kina and Pacal flee so he doesn’t have to kill her, Kenyon reveals more about the Eastern religion Kina follows and the holy book she reveres and tries to get Pacal to understand. This last twist is a nice touch, although it doesn’t help place the time period or the evolution of society to the story, if anything confusing it even more.

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