He produced a string of well-regarded novels a few decades ago: Freedom Beach (1985, with James Patrick Kelly), Good News from Outer Space (1989) and Corrupting Dr. Nice (1997). Then he pretty much gave up on novels, switching to short fiction and producing five fiction collections between 1992 and 2012.
He returned in style last year with The Moon and the Other, his first novel in 20 years. Library Journal called it “Speculative fiction at its finest… impossible to put down,” and the Chicago Tribune labeled it “One of the year’s most intelligent and provocative novels.”
His fifth novel Pride & Prometheus, arriving in hardcover next month, blends Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein as Mary Bennet falls for the enigmatic Victor Frankenstein and befriends his monstrous Creature.
Black Gate has some very prolific reviewers. Ryan Harvey has produced 290 articles for us, Matthew David Surridge 330, and Sue Granqust has written exactly 400. But the most prolific reviewer in our small community is doubtless Rich Horton who, in addition to his duties here, writes a regular monthly column for Locus, contributes short fiction reviews to places like Tangent Online, and maintains his own blog, Strange at Ecbatan. Not long ago Rich posted his 100th Ace Double Review at his blog, covering the forgotten novels Alien Sea by John Rackham and C.O.D. Mars by E. C. Tubb, published in 1968.
I started these on the wonderful old Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written back in the early 2000s. I retain an interest in Ace Doubles for an intersection of reasons… the feeling that they give room for an awkward story length (25,000 to 45,000 words, say); the fact that they provided space for new writers to get published; the sometimes goofy subject matter; the fact that they could be a home for unpretentious adventure SF; and their uncommon format. But it must also be said that a lot of the stories published as Ace Doubles were downright crappy. And indeed this review, the 100th, perhaps appropriately features a couple of awfully weak short novels.
Even though the novels sucked, Rich gives it his all, as always. Here’s his thoughts on two bad science fiction novels by John Rackham and E.C. Tubb.
K.D. (Kathy Diane) Wentworth was born on January 27, 1951 and died on April 18, 2012. Wentworth was nominated for the Nebula Award four times, for the short stories “Burning Bright,” “Tall One,” and “Born Again” and for the novelette “Kaleidoscope.” Wentworth published two novels in the Heyoka Blackeagle series and two novels in the House of Moons Chronicles. She also co-wrote two of the novels in the Jao Empire series in collaboration with Eric Flint and two stand-alone novels.
“Her Fair and Unpolluted Flesh” was published in Treachery and Treason, edited by Laura Anne Gilman for Roc in 2000. It has never been reprinted.
K.D. Wentworth creates a religion which based on the holy scripture of the play Hamlet in “Her Fair and Unpolluted Flesh.” Based on what Father Benedicto and Father Frederick say, the religion is extremely misogynistic, claiming that women are soulless and have no reason to learn to read or do anything useful.
Set in a nunnery of ophelias, the women are trained to follow in her tragic footsteps to honor the glory that was the character of Hamlet. One of the sisters is to be selected to participate in a ritualistic drowning and is placed into the care of the young, and unsure Father Frederick.
Rod Duncan is the author of The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire trilogy, a supernatural mystery series featuring Elizabeth Barnabus, who lives a double life as herself and as her brother, a private detective. The first volume, The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter (2014) was a finalist for the 2014 Phillip K. Dick Award. We covered The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughterhere, and the entire series here.
His newest, The Queen of All Crows, is the start of a brand new series, The Map of Unknown Things. Only Elizabeth Barnabus can stop the world from descending into endless war in this new saga set in the world of the Gas-Lit Empire. It seems an odd mix of steampunk, supernatural mystery, and intellectual property thriller, but I like it.
The Queen of All Crows was published by Angry Robot on January 2, 2018. It is 348 pages, priced at $9.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Will Staehle. Get more details at the Angry Robot website.
In 500 Words or Less: From a Certain Point of View (Del Rey Books)
From a Certain Point of View
By Various Authors
Del Rey (400 pages, $35.00 hardcover, $14.99 eBook, October 2017)
I’m a massive Star Warsfan and grew up loving the Expanded Universe novels. My first exposures to writing greatness were people like Timothy Zahn, Christie Golden, and Kevin J. Anderson. When Disney announced that the Expanded Universe wasn’t canon anymore, I was pissed like a lot of people, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the new films, I couldn’t bring myself to read any of the new fiction.
Is that petty and stupid? Probably, especially when you consider the caliber of writers who are being brought on to write the new EU. And that if I’m ever at a career level to be offered a spot in that canon, I’ll probably take the deal.
So I finally shook off my old-timey stubbornness and bought a copy of the new anthology From a Certain Point of View. Big surprise: I have mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand, there are some amazing stories here. “Master and Apprentice” by Claudia Gray shows the ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn visiting Obi-Wan Kenobi before he takes Luke to Mos Eisley, and it’s touching and tragic because Qui-Gon knows what’s about to happen to his former apprentice. Wil Wheaton reminds us about the sacrifices of the average rebel in “Laina,” and Nnedi Okorafor brings us into the mind of the Death Star’s dianoga in “The Baptist.” There’s a great combination of writers, including a few Star Wars veterans (Christie Golden among them) and the likes of Ben Blacker, Mur Lafferty, Chuck Wendig, and more.
Philip José Farmer was born on January 26, 1918 (Happy Centennial, Phil!) and died on February 25, 2009. In 1953, he received one of the inaugural Hugo Awards for Best New Author or Artist (a forerunner to the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award). He would win the Hugo again in 1968 for his novella “Riders of the Purple Wage” and in 1972 for his novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Farmer was the Guest of Honor at Baycon, the 1968 Worldcon in Oakland.
His lifetime achievement awards include the World Fantasy Award and the SFWA Grand Master Award, both awarded in 2001. In 2003, he received the Forry Award and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award. Farmer was known for expanding the science fiction field to include frank portrayals of sex with his novel The Lovers (Ballantine, 1961, expanded from the 1952 novella of the same title).
His story “The Rise Gotten” was written for an anthology Robert Bloch planned, but never published. The story saws its first publication in 2006 in the collection Pearls from Peoria, which collected previously published and unpublished works by Farmer.
“The Rise Gotten” is the story of a long-married couple who have fallen out of love, and merely survive in each other’s presence. Roger Baird’s impotence is a major sticking point for his wife, Rey, who either ignores him or denigrates him. Roger is just as happy ignoring his wife, whose alcoholic stupors make her less attractive to him even if he weren’t suffering impotence.
Their relationship, while sad, is completely mundane. Roger retreats to his study to get away from his wife and her sister’s drinking binge and turns his attention to the newspapers, which he reads and finds just as much horror as in the magazines, like Weird Tales, which form his pleasure reading. After his sister-in-law leaves and his wife suggests a cure for his impotence that worked for her brother-in-law, the story takes a decidedly dark turn. While part of the power of Farmer’s story comes from its ending, most of it comes from the sudden switch from a very mundane tale to Roger’s reaction to his years of humiliation by his wife.
Viriconium is a city of the distant future, surrounded by the polluted wastelands left by previous civilisations. It is fundamentally decadent, filled with killers, artists, street gangs, and peculiar customs. It is divided into different neighbourhoods along class lines. And it is frequently under threat, though what precise consequences these threats can bring is often nebulous. The first book, The Pastel City, is clearly the most conventional. At first blush, it strongly resembles the pulp work of Michael Moorcock; the better points of the Hawkmoon books, for example, though Pastel City is much better written.
But it was Fletcher Vredenburgh, with this 4-part examination of the Viriconium books, that really sent me chasing after Harrison’s novels.
Greg van Eekhout was born on January 25. His first story appeared in the anthology Starlight 3 and his first novel, Norse Code, in 2009. Van Eekhout was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 2005 for “In the Late December,” and received a Golden Duck nomination in 2011 for Kid Vs. Squid. In 2012, his novel The Boy at the End of the World was nominated for the Andre Norton Award.
“Native Aliens” was originally published in 2004 in the anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Van Eekhout included it in his collection Show and Tell and Other Stories two years later and it was reprinted again in 2013 in Aliens: Recent Encounters, edited by Alex Daily MacFarlane.
“Native Aliens” tells two stories in parallel. One focuses on a Dutch colonial family living in Indonesia in the 1940s. Although the family has been there for generations and has intermarried with the Indonesians, they still consider themselves Dutch even though Indonesia is the only home they’ve ever known. As a result the father is forced to run a gauntlet after the Indonesian Revolution in the second half of the 1940s.
The other story looks at a group of humans who have colonized the world of Breva and who are about to be sent back to Earth. While the Dutch family looks like Indonesians and only know life there, the humans on Breva have been genetically modified to resemble the Brevans, making their return to their native world that much more problematic.
While van Eekhout explores the Brevan-Terran plans to repatriate themselves to the planet of the ancestors, he simultaneously shows us the Dutch family’s attempts to assimilate into Dutch, and later American, culture. Van Eekhout offers an intriguing view of colonization and its effects by focusing on those who are native to the land but still identify with, or are identified as, the colonizing power, without having any experience with the land from which their ancestors came.
Perhaps most poignant is the tale of the son of the character who experienced upheaval in Indonesia and the Netherlands, whose attitude directly leads to the issue facing the Brevan-Terrans centuries later. Fourteen years after its initial publication, when the US government is discussing, or refusing to discuss, the plight of the “Dreamers,” the van Eekhout’s story seems more pertinent than ever.
As Steven Silver has already noted, today is C.L. Moore’s birthday. To celebrate Steven reviewed “Lost Paradise,” from the July 1936 Weird Tales, “one of her stories featuring her space-faring rogue Northwest Smith… essentially a bar story with a twist.”
Northwest Smith is one of the enduring serial characters C.L. Moore created for Weird Tales (the other was Jirel of Jorey) — and I do mean enduring. The tales of this “space-faring rogue” have been collected multiple times, and over 80 years later they are still in print. It’s pretty clear that George Lucas, a noted fan of Planet Stories and other SF pulps, drew on Smith as his inspiration for Han Solo, as the two characters are cut from the same cloth.
Over at Tor.com, Alan Brown has a more detailed look at C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith tales, which have been reprinted in a number of highly collectible volumes over the years. Here’s my favorite quote.
If you’ve at any point heard some rumors, some whispers, some strange buzz about this book by William Hope Hodgson called The Night Land… maybe you’ve heard it is one of the greatest works of horror or dystopian dark fantasy…but you’ve also heard that it’s practically unreadable because of Hodgson’s choice to write it in a very weird prose style…”Penned in 1912, The Night Land is considered by many to be a work of genius, but one written in a difficult, archaic style that readers often find impenetrable.”
In 2010, James Stoddard (a fantastic fantasy author in his own right) wrote a “translation” into a more modern, readable vernacular. If you’re thinking of maybe reading Stoddard’s version, I must tell you this:
DO IT. Sooner rather than later. The fact is, one of the all-time great masterworks of sustained horror and imaginative vision, was, unfortunately, self-hampered by its author with his choice of writing it in a clunky, pseudo-archaic language. Stoddard did a supreme service to all of us by simply adapting the work into accessible modern English. I read Stoddard’s version, and via that gateway discovered what all the fuss was about. Yes, it really is that great an achievement: If Hodgson had written it in more accessible language, it would be as well known and celebrated today as any of the other seminal works of horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
