I was on ISFDB and noticed that today marks the 20th anniversary of Mike Weaver’s death.
Michael D. Weaver broke into the SF field with Mercedes Nights in 1987 and looked like he was going to be The Next Big Thing (or one of them, anyway). He published seven novels in nine years before dying at the age of 37.
At St. Martin’s Press, I worked on his first two novels, particularly his second one, My Father Immortal. In those pre-email days, he would call almost every day about this or that. He came to New York for the SFWA Authors and Editors party with his girlfriend, whose name was Angel (if my memory serves) and whose dress and looks led some people to think she had been hired from an escort service. (She hadn’t.) I got drunk at the party and made the mistake of telling Mike how I thought his novel was ideal for teens — how the book worked as a great metaphor for adolescence. He didn’t call for several days after that.
If memory serves, he died in a freakish accident — something like falling in the yard and having his head land in a bucket or puddle, where he drowned.
Kate Wilhelm was born on June 8, 1928 and died on March 8, 2018.
She won the Hugo Award twice, for her novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and the book Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. She won the Nebula three times for the short stories “The Planners” and “Forever Yours, Anna,” and the novelette “The Girl Who Fell into the Sky.” She helped establish the SFWA and Clarion Workshop, and helped run the early Milford Writers Workshops. Along with husband Damon Knight, she was a Pro Guest of Honor at Noreascon Two and received the Gallun Award for contributions to science fiction. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2003. She received an inaugural Solstice Award in 2009 and in 2016, the awards was renamed the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award in her honor.
Wilhelm sold “State of Grace” to Damon Knight for inclusion in Orbit 19 in 1977. It appeared in her collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions in 1978 and in the collection State of Grace, part of Pulphouse Publishing’s Author’s Choice Monthly series in 1991. In 1980, the story was translated into French for the publication of Quand somerset rêvait, a translation of Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions.
“State of Grace” is the story of a deteriorating marriage in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky. The narrator believes she has seen small creatures living in the oak tree in her backyard and she begins to work to protect the unseen creatures and take care of them, providing them with food, water and other essentials. Her husband, on the other hand, gets the inkling that there may be something in the tree that could be worth quite a bit of money and he decides he needs to capture them.
The argument over the tree escalates as she tries to help the creatures and he gets more and more anxious about their presence and his attempts to remove them, including a brief try to cut down the tree. When he goes into the tree, something causes him to change his mind and he accepts the creatures’ presence.
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough has had a long and fruitful career that stretches back to her first novel, Song of Sorcery, in 1982. Over the next 34 years she produced a virtually book every year, writing over 40 novels and 4 collections, including The Songkiller Saga trilogy, the Godmother trilogy, Nothing Sacred and Last Refuge, and over a dozen novels co-authored with Anne McCaffrey, many in the Acorna series.
Scarborough earned a reputation for dependable and often playful light fantasy, with such novels as The Harem of Aman Akbar (1984), The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas (1986), and her cats-in-space series Tales of the Barque Cats. But she was capable of more than that. Scarborough spent five years as an nurse with the US Army, including one year in Da Nang, Vietnam during the war, and in 1988 she turned that experience into The Healer’s War, which became her most acclaimed and celebrated novel. It won the Nebula Award the following year. Kirkus Reviewswrote “Scarborough writes powerfully and convincingly of the war,” and Publisher’s Weeklysaid,
Army nurse Kathleen McCulley’s… tour of duty at China Beach puts the young woman from Kansas through the usual mixture of empathy for the Vietnamese and anger at the indifference or outright racism of army personnel. The unanticipated twist is a hallucinatory journey through the jungle with a one-legged Vietnamese boy, a battle-seasoned but crazy soldier and a magic amulet given her by a dying holy man. Although its moralizing invites comparison with TV’s MASH and Twilight Zone, Scarborough’s light, fluid storytelling and the authentic, pungent background keep this novel interesting.
The Healer’s War was published in hardcover by Doubleday Foundation in November 1988, and reprinted in paperback by Bantam Spectra 12 months later. It is 313 pages, priced at $4.99 in paperback. The cover is by Braldt Bralds. It is currently available in print and digital formats from Open Road Media. See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.
Birthday Reviews: Kit Reed’s “The Shop of Little Horrors”
Kit Reed was born Lillian Craig on June 7, 1932 and died on September 24, 2017.
Reed’s collection What Wolves Know and The Story Until Now were both nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her novel Where was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her books Little Sisters of the Apocalypse and Weird Women, Wired Women were short listed for the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the story “Bride of Bigfoot,” which appeared in Weird Women, Wired Women also made the short list. Her short story “The Singing Marine” was a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. In 1958, she was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best New Author of 1958, a forerunner of the John W. Campbell Award.
“The Shop of Little Horrors” was original to Kit Reed’s 2005 collection Dogs of Truth. The story has never been reprinted.
In “The Shop of Little Horrors,” Kit Reed explores the life of Lynn and Martin Larkin, a couple of New Yorkers who have made the decision not to have children. Ten years into their marriage, they are free to live the life they want to, travel as they desire, and mock those around them who have decided to have children. “The Shop of Little Horrors” specifically looks at one Saturday when they are relaxing at a coffeeshop watching the harried parents with their children on a beautiful day.
Their calm is destroyed, however, when one particular child invades their space. Stanley bumps their table, causing their cappuccinos to spill all over them and, when they are distracted mopping up the mess, the juvenile delinquent grabs and eats Lynn’s doughnut while Stanley’s mother is oblivious to the destruction he has caused.
The perfect days turns into abject terror as they try to make their way home in a city crawling with children. A lunch in the Tavern on the Green helps reestablish their equilibrium until they find themselves face-to-face on their walk home with a woman pushing an enormous stroller that contains six children.
It’s been too long since we’ve checked in with Hank Davis, the mad genius editor at Baen behind the anthologies Things From Outer Space and In Space No One Can Hear You Scream. I figured he had to have something interesting cooking and, sure enough, when I asked him to comment, here’s what he told me.
Coming in December this year, looking for stockings to stuff, is Space Pioneers, a rough of whose cover is now on Baen.com, though the author lineup thereon may be modified…
After that, still in the works is Overruled!, an anthology of stories about courtrooms, lawyers, and other low-lifes. In the future beyond that will be an anthology of military sf stories involving time travel, whose working title is Time Troopers, but that may change. I was going to handle the Psychotechnic League stories by Poul Anderson, but was felled by health problems at a crucial juncture, so it’s in other hands. (The timing of those problems is also why the first volume of The Best of Gordon R. Dickson came out without my usual tedious introductions and notes, but I’ll try to give better value in the next volume).
I do hope that Space Pioneers does well, since I could do a *series* of anthologies on this theme without breaking sweat. My hat’s off (dangerous move for a bald geezer) to my co-ed, Christopher Ruocchio, who did much of the busy work (contracts, nudging agents, etc.) while I was still recovering, and who also talked me into using two Poul Anderson yarns, a suggestion I had absolutely no problem with (and I have a third in mind if there’s a Volume II). And that’s the current state of the pipeline. I should remind everyone that these will all be mass market paperbacks.
Sounds like a great line-up! Space Pioneers in particular looks like a terrific book, and a splendid addition to Hank’s catalog of top-notch anthologies. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for it, and making some more noise about it here as we get closer to the release date.
Welcome to the very first post of the Black Gate Book Club! What are we up to? As Fletcher Vredenburgh said in his introduction to the Book Club:
The plan is to read Downbelow Station over the month of June and post a discussion of it each Monday afternoon. This time around, the Book Club participants will include Adrian Simmons, Charlene Brusso, Chris Hocking, and me. We’d love it if you’d read along with us and join in the conversation.
Of course, it is now Wednesday, not Monday, and Charlene had to bow out of this round because life intrudes. Never the less, Vredenburgh, Hocking and I soldiered on! Below is our exchange:
H. Beam Piper was one of my earliest discoveries, and he quickly became one of my favorite SF writers. I snapped up every book with his name on it in the mid-70s, all Ace paperback editions with gorgeous Michael Whelan covers.
Piper committed suicide a few months after I was born, in November 1964. But his work has endured, and as recently as 2011 John Scalzi published Fuzzy Nation, a retelling of Piper’s most famous novel Little Fuzzy. Last year editor John F. Carr assembled an anthology of a handful of Piper’s Federationand Paratime Police tales, and invited Wolfgang Diehr, David Johnson, and Jonathan Crocker to contribute fiction set in Piper’s universe. He added a pair of essays by John A. Anderson, The Early History of the Terran Federation and Chartered Companies of the Terran Federation, and his own preface, The Terro-human Future History, and the result was The Rise of the Terran Federation, published in hardcover by Pequod Press. Here’s the description.
The Rise of the Terran Federation is new collection of new and old stories chronicling the rise of H. Beam Piper’s Terran Federation. With story introductions and essays on the establishment of the Federation, this book is the ultimate overview of the beginning of Piper’s crowning creation, the Terro-Human Future History. This collection will include some of Piper’s early Federation stories, like “Edge of the Knife” and Omnilingual.”
This collection also contains new stories about the aftermath of the Third and Fourth World Wars, the Thorans and life on Baldur. The Rise of the Terran Federation is an essential work for fans of Piper’s future history and his unique view of what lies ahead for mankind.
There are precious few SF writers whose work has endured five decades. Piper didn’t live long enough to see it, but his stories have entertained three generations of SF fans, and I expect them to still be in print 50 years from today.
Lanagan has won the World Fantasy Award in four separate categories. She won her first awards for her collection Black Juice, which included “Singing My Sister Down,” which won for Best Short Fiction. Her novel Tender Morsels tied with Jeffrey Ford’s The Shadow Year, and she won her most recent World Fantasy Award for the novella “Sea Hearts.” Black Juice and “Singing My Sister Down” also won the Ditmar Award, and the story earned the Aurealis Award and Golden Aurealis Award. Lanagan’s other Ditmar’s were for the short story “The Goosle” and the novels Tender Morsels and Sea Hearts. Lanagan has also received the Aurealis Award for her short stories “The Queen’s Notice,” “A Fine Magic,” “A Thousand Flowers,” “Bajazzle,” and “Significant Dust.” Her novel Sea Hearts won the Aurealis for Best Young Adult Novel and for Best Fantasy Novel.
Lanagan originally sold “The Proving of Smollett Standforth” to Jack Dann and Nick Gevers for their anthology Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense, which was published in 2011. It was was a finalist for the Aurealis Award for Best Fantrasy Short story and was reprinted the following year in Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, an anthology edited by Paula Guran.
“The Proving of Smollett Standforth” is the story of a timid young domestic servant, whose job in the house where he lives is to clean and polish shoes and boots. When he is not performing these duties, Smollett sleeps alone in a small attic room. Although the room only has a single door, Smollett is visited nightly by the spirit of a long-dead woman who comes in through a door which has been blocked off. Each night, she presses a beaded necklace on Smollett, which burns his chest when he puts it on, but he in unable, or unwilling, to fend her off.
His shyness means that he doesn’t feel he can confide about his nocturnal visitor to anyone else in the house and he just comes to live with it, although when the cook discovered the marks on his chest, she treats him with a greasy balm and is worried that he suffers from some disease. Smollett’s concerns come to a head when he receives a letter requesting that he get permission for his brother, Dravitt, to spend the night at Smollett’s master’s house while Dravitt is on his way through London for his own posting. Rather than seek help, Smollett decides it is time to take action against the apparition himself, rather than let Dravitt experience it.
I use a lot of resources — blogs, reviews, online bookstores, and more — to help me identify the books I should pay attention to every month. Most of them focus on novels though, and more and more often I’m finding that podcasts are the most reliable way to discover everything else. Case in point: last week, while re-listening the Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan’s 2017 end-of-the-year wrap-up for the Coode Street Podcast, I learned I’ve somehow overlooked Christopher Rowe’s Telling the Map, which both Gary and Jonathan selected as the best collection of the year. I ordered a copy immediately, and I hope to dig into it this week. Here’s what they said.
Gary Wolfe: These are terrific stories. It’s a kind of southern, post-apocalyptic south, a part of the country that we don’t see often represented often in fiction at all. They’re very interesting, subtle fictions, and there was a major new long story… I discovered things in it that I didn’t know about.
Jonathan Strahan: I think there were two great collections this year, absolute stone cold classics… My favorite collection of the year as well, because it seems like we are clones, is Telling the Map: Stories by Christoper Rowe from Small Beer. Rowe has a wonderful writing voice, this sort of southern Kentuckian kind of writing voice that he brings to his stories, and he has a very localized, community kind of storytelling. His stories are very intimate, and they deal with average-seeming people dealing with average-seeming experiences in extraordinary circumstances… The major new novella that’s in the book, “The Border State,” which is the sequel to “The Voluntary State,” is without a doubt one of the finest novellas of the year… I loved that book very much.
“The Voluntary State,” which appeared in Sci Fiction in May 2004, was nominated for the Sturgeon, Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards for Best Novelette. Listen to the complete podcast — which is crammed with tons of great recs for best novel, novella, anthology, and non-fiction book of 2017 — here.
The Dread Lurking Beneath the Surface: The Planetfall Trilogy by Emma Newman
I read Emma Newman’s Tor.com novella Brother’s Ruin (March 2017) on a plane last year, and quite enjoyed it. It’s the tale of a young woman who uses her hidden — and considerable — powers to help her brother masquerade as a mage, in an alternate Victorian era Britain where the all-powerful Royal Society of the Esoteric Arts snaps up anyone with magical gifts. The setting was nicely thought-out and deserved a follow-up, and indeed there is at least one more novella (Weaver’s Lament, October 2017) in what’s now being called the Industrial Magic series.
All that has made me keenly interested in her science fiction trilogy, which began with Planetfall in 2015. The first book was nominated for the Locus Award for Best SF Novel, and The New York Times called it “Transcendent.” After Atlas (2016) was a Publishers Weekly Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Clarke Award. The third book, Before Mars, was published in April; the LA Times calls it “A psychological thriller wearing the cloak of a gripping sci-fi story.”
But what are they about? Mystery, murder, the power of myth, and more. Over at Tor.com Robert H. Bedford reviewed the first book, saying:
Planetfall is at once a fascinating character study through Ren’s first person narrative and a novel that examines how secrets, no matter how deeply buried they are, can be extremely damaging things… especially in a small colony in a seeming utopia. Ren spends much of her day as the colony’s printer, responsible for overseeing an advanced 3-D printer which is used to repair damaged items or create new items when necessary. Any items. Ren’s obsession with repairing things is a mask for trying to repair the damages left in the wake of Lee’s disappearance, and an attempt to bury her own guilt in the tragic events which transpired nearly two decades ago…
I was very much reminded of C.J. Cherryh, especially her first Foreignernovel… In other ways, I was reminded of Mary Doria Russell’s powerful novel The Sparrow, and its sequel Children of God, in the way that science and religion are at odds with each other and how they work together to drive parts of the plot.
Newman’s prose has a haunting effect that hints at dread lurking beneath the surface, waiting to rear its disturbing head. When this prose is conveyed through Ren’s voice it makes for a compulsive, powerful read that is difficult to set aside… Beautifully and heartbreakingly wrought, Planetfall is a genius novel that is far more than its exterior belies; a distressing, harrowing novel that left a deep mark on me. It isn’t an easy, cheerful read, but it is a captivating story that can be very aptly be described as a must read.
All three novels are still in print from Ace. Read Chapter One of Planetfall at Tor.com.
