Driftglass was Samuel R. Delany’s first short story collection, and it was like a bomb dropped on science fiction.
Delany’s first work of short fiction, “The Star Pit,” appeared in the February 1967 issue Worlds of Tomorrow, and was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella. That same year his groundbreaking “Aye, and Gomorrah” appeared in Dangerous Visions, and was nominated for a Hugo and won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Over the next two years Delany would receive an extraordinary eight Hugo and Nebula Award nominations for a string of brilliant stories, including “Driftglass,” the novella “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line,” and the Nebula and Hugo-winning “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.”
All those stories, and five others, were gathered in Diftglass. It was the top-ranked collection of the year in the annual Locus Awards poll in 1972, beating Theodore Sturgeon’s Sturgeon Is Alive and Well…, Harlan Ellison’s Partners in Wonder, and Larry Niven’s All the Myriad Ways (and even placing above The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One on the overall list).
Mike Resnick was born on March 5, 1942. He has won five Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, the Seiun Award, a Xatafi-Cyberdark Award, two Prix Ozones, a Mechanical Peach, and three Ignotus Awards. In 2012 ISFiC Press published Win Some, Lose Some, a collection of his 29 Hugo nominated stories. That same year, Resnick was the Guest of Honor at Chicon 2000, that year’s Worldcon. He was awarded a Skylark Award by NESFA in 1995.
Resnick has published numerous novels in his loose Birthright Universe, including Ivory, Santiago, and the Oracletrilogy. In both his novels and his short stories he makes use of characters who are larger than life and his writing is often influenced by the pulps, adventure stories, and westerns. His Kirinyagacycle, made up of ten short stories, is one of the most nominated short story series in science fiction.
In addition to his own fiction, Resnick has served as the executive editor of Jim Baen’s Universe and as editor for Galaxy’s Edge magazine. Resnick has edited numerous anthologies and helped dozens of beginning authors with early sales and he has collaborated with authors ranging from Lezli Robyn to Jack McDevitt to Susan Shwartz to Nicholas A. DiChario. Many of his collaborations have been collected in With a Little Help from My Friends and With a Little More Help from My Friends.
The story “The Evening Line” was written for Gardner Dozois’s audio anthology Rip-Off!, which asked various authors to write a story which took the first line from a famous work of fiction. Resnick adapted “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must by in want of a wife,” from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The story was eventually reprinted in Mash Up, a retitling of the anthology when it saw print a couple years after the audio version. I would lay book that the story will eventually appear in a collection of all of Resnick’s Harry the Book stories, of which there are currently ten.
“The Evening Line” is a one of a series of stories Resnick has written about Harry the Book, a pastiche of Damon Runyon set in a world where magic is at play. In this particular story, Plug Malone has hit it big at the races and when word gets out about his good fortune, he finds himself facing a huge number of fortune-hunting women looking for a husband. The story, both stylistically and in its depiction of men and women, is very much a throwback to the period in which Runyon was writing his Broadway stories.
Time for my annual post on what I’m thinking about for Hugo nominations. As ever, I’ll caution that I have read a lot of short fiction, but that I am less up on the other categories. I have seen a fair quantity of movies, too, however.
Let me reiterate something I said last year – though I participate with a lot of enjoyment in Hugo nomination and voting every year, I am philosophically convinced that there is no such thing as the “best” story – “best” piece of art, period. This doesn’t mean I don’t think some art is better than other art – I absolutely do think that. But I think that at the top, there is no way to draw fine distinctions, to insist on rankings. Different stories do different things, all worthwhile. I can readily change my own mind about which stories I prefer – it might depend on how important to me that “thing” they do is (and of course most stories do multiple different things!) – it might depend on my mood that day – it might depend on something new I’ve read that makes me think differently about a certain subject. And one more thing – I claim no special authority of my own. I have my own tastes, and indeed my own prejudices. So too does everyone else. I have blind spots, and I have things that affect me more profoundly than they might affect others. I’ve also read a lot of SF – and that changes my reactions to stories as well – and not in a way that need be considered privileged.
Anyway, as ever, in the lists below, I’ll suggest somewhere between 3 and 8 or so items that might be on my final ballot. Those will be in no particular order. And the other stories I list will all really be about as good – and I might change my mind before my ballot goes in.
Patricia Kennealy-Morrison was born on March 4, 1946. Kennealy got her start as a music journalist, serving as the editor-in-chief of Jazz &Pop and becoming one of the first female rock critics. In 1970 she participated in a handfasting ceremony with Jim Morrison of The Doors, although the couple never filed paperwork with the state to register their marriage.
In the 1980s, Kennealy-Morrison began publishing an epic space opera series, The Keltiad, which followed a group of Celts who left the British islands around the year 450, although the books were set in the 35th century. The series was comprised of two trilogies, and a stand-alone novel, as well as the short story “The Last Voyage,” and Kennealy-Morrison has indicated she plans to write more in the milieu. When her publisher cancelled further books in the 1990s, she turned her attention to mysteries and eventually set up her own press.
“The Last Voyage” was the first short story Kennealy-Morrison published, although she had several novels in the Keltiadseries by that point. It was included in her 2014 collection Tales of Spiral Castle: Stories of the Keltiad, published by her own Lizard Queen Press, and which included three original Keltiadstories.
“The Last Voyage” tells the story of Jamie Douglas, a Scottish knight in the service of King Robert the Bruce. Douglas is serving his king in Paris at the time that the destruction of the Knights Templar is about to occur and he works with the Knights to spirit hundreds of them away for a life in Scotland, far from the reach of the French king bent on their destruction. En route to Scotland, their fleet is intercepted by a spaceship carrying the descendants of Celts who fled earth centuries earlier who offer the Templars a new life among the stars. Many of them accept, although a vestige of the Templars, including Douglas, continue on to serve King Robert.
Kennealy-Morrison combines the plight of the Knights Templar with her existing series of novels, The Keltiad, which provides the background for her space-faring Celts. Set in 1312, the story is reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s earlier The High Crusade, set in 1345. Unfortunately, while the aliens in Anderson’s novel provide the impetus for the novel, the Kelts of Kennealy-Morrison’s story serve more as a deus ex machina. In addition, her prose tends towards the over-written and florid, reminiscent of a more Victorian style in both description and dialogue. Kennealy-Morrison presents an interesting secret history, but her link in to her series of novels doesn’t integrate well into the historical context she presents.
Carmen Maria Machado’s short stories have appeared in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The Long List Anthology, The New Voices of Fantasy, Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, and magazines like The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and others.
But it was Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe’s excellent Coode Street Podcast that alerted to me the existence of her debut collection. Jonathan writes:
When… Her Body and Other Parties was shortlisted for the National Book Award it went to the top of everybody’s “to read” piles. A smart, sensitive and thoughtful look at issues to do with sex, gender, violence and horror, it proved to be one of the very best books of 2017.
That’s a pretty strong endorsement. I don’t know about other folks, but the book sure shot to the top of my to read pile. Here’s the description.
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf Press October 3, 2017. It is 248 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Kimberly Glyder Design.
Experience a Darkly Gripping Vision of the Future with the San Angeles Trilogy by Gerald Brandt
Every time a trilogy completes, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.
Today’s cake is in honor of Gerald Brandt’s San Angeles series. It opened with The Courier, which the B&N Sci-fi Fantasy Blog called “a darkly gripping vision of the future.” It was published in hardcover by DAW in March 2016. Here’s the description.
The first installment in the San Angeles trilogy, a thrilling near-future cyberpunk sci-fi series
Kris Ballard is a motorcycle courier. A nobody. Level 2 trash in a multi-level city that stretches from San Francisco to the Mexican border — a land where corporations make all the rules. A runaway since the age of fourteen, Kris struggled to set up her life, barely scraping by, working hard to make it without anyone’s help.
But a late day delivery changes everything when she walks in on the murder of one of her clients. Now she’s stuck with a mysterious package that everyone wants. It looks like the corporations want Kris gone, and are willing to go to almost any length to make it happen.
Hunted, scared, and alone, she retreats to the only place she knows she can hide: the Level 1 streets. Fleeing from people that seem to know her every move, she is rescued by Miller — a member of an underground resistance group — only to be pulled deeper into a world she doesn’t understand.
Together Kris and Miller barely manage to stay one step ahead of the corporate killers, but it’s only a matter of time until Miller’s resources and their luck run out….
The Rebel, the third and final volume, arrived in hardcover November 14.
Tristan Palmgren is a Missouri writer; his ambitious debut novel Quietus arrives from Angry Robot next week. Una McCormack calls it “A truly outstanding debut… Palmgren takes the staples of science fiction – post-apocalypse, first contact, interventionism – and integrates them seamlessly, breathing new life into familiar forms.” Here’s the description.
A transdimensional anthropologist can’t keep herself from interfering with Earth’s darkest period of history in this brilliant science fiction debut
Niccolucio, a young Florentine Carthusian monk, leads a devout life until the Black Death kills all of his brothers, leaving him alone and filled with doubt. Habidah, an anthropologist from another universe racked by plague, is overwhelmed by the suffering. Unable to maintain her observer neutrality, she saves Niccolucio from the brink of death.
Habidah discovers that neither her home’s plague nor her assignment on Niccolucio’s world are as she’s been led to believe. Suddenly the pair are drawn into a worlds-spanning conspiracy to topple an empire larger than the human imagination can contain.
As interesting as all that is, I’m more fascinated by this snippet from an interview with Palmgren at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:
Every time we read history, we change it. We bring our biases and myopias. If we’re honest, we can be aware of them. (And if we’re naive, we can convince ourselves that we’ve found all of them, or that being aware means we escaped them.)
Quietus embraces the observer. It’s about the paradox of being an observer – the biases we bring to history, the urge to touch…. Every time we read history, we bring ourselves to it like we bring ourselves to everything else we read. Our perspective lurks between the lines. Quietus, as does other science fiction and fantasy about history, takes the observer out of the hidden space and into the text. We confront ourselves as observers, and see what we bring without intending to. And by using the freedom of fantasy to play with the facts of the past, I want to make that past feel like the present.
Quietus will be published by Angry Robot on March 6, 2018. It is 464 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Dominic Harman. A sequel, Terminus, is already scheduled for November 6, 2018.
Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”
While 2018 isn’t a leap year, that doesn’t stop us from celebrating authors with that very particular birthday.
Tim Powers was born on February 29, 1952. Other authors who were born on leap day include Patricia McKillip, Howard Tayler, and Sharon Webb. Powers has frequently collaborated with James P. Blaylock, occasionally using the joint pseudonym William Ashbless, which is not only a pseudonym, but a poet both authors have referred to in their works.
Powers has won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novels The Anubis Gates and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace. His novels Last Call and Declare have won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and he won the Collection award for The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. Anubis Gates also won the Prix Apollo and Geffen Award, Declare earned Powers an International Horror Guild Award, and The Stress of Her Regard won a Mythopoeic Award and Ignotus Award. A translation of the story “A Soul in a Bottle” won the Xatafi-Cyberdark Award. In 2014, LASFS recognized Powers with the Forry Award.
In 2003, Subterranean Press published an anthology by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock called The Devils in the Details, which contained a story by each author and a collaborative effort. Powers contributed “Through and Through.” The story was included in his collection Strange Itineraries and again in Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.
“Through and Through” tells the tale of a priest doing a stint in the Confessional shortly after a woman committed suicide in his church. He had received her confession, but was unable to give her absolution. A week after her funeral, she returns to receive the penance he refused her the first time.
In other hands, the priest might have suffered from a crisis of faith, however Powers priest is grounded in the secular world, while easily accepting that the woman’s ghost can be in the confession. At the same time, he is trying to balance the changes that have been introduced to the traditional priesthood and sacraments he embraces, and those the Church is currently promoting.
Andrew Liptak’s February book selections give you a nice opportunity to be an armchair tourist in some pretty exotic locales (“Visit distant planets, conspiracies, and galactic conflicts!”)
Just as important for diligent book fans, Andrew catches us up with some of the more intriguing ongoing fantasy series. So without further ado, let’s see what he has for us this month.
Tarnished City by Vic James ( Del Rey, 416 pages, $25 in hardcover/$10.99 digital, February 6, 2018)
Vic James began her career last year with The Gilded Cage, in which the world belongs to a class of gifted magical aristocrats. In the next installment of her Dark Gifts trilogy, an uprising has been crushed, and protagonist Abi Hadley’s brother Luke has been framed for the murder of Parliament’s Chancellor Zelston. She goes into hiding, and after her brother is condemned to a remote estate, she hatches a plan to save him. Publisher’s Weekly says that readers will “appreciate the multifaceted complexity of James’s world and its lively, determined characters.”
We covered the opening volume, Gilded Cage, back in April.
The first Philip Jose Farmer book I ever read was To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), the Hugo-Award winning first novel in his famous Riverworld series. Today he’s just as well known for his World of Tiers, Dayworld, and Tarzan novels, among many other other popular series. Farmer was famously prolific, and he kept at it right until the very end, when he died in 2009 at the age of 91.
I have more than a few Philip Jose Farmer books in my to-be-read pile. But the oldest, way down in the stratified layers near the floor, I bought back in 1980 . Dark is the Sun, one of his lesser known novels, is a far-future science fiction tale that reads like epic fantasy, and the classic Darrell K. Sweet cover certainly reinforced that. There are witches, thieves, gigantic walking skeletons, mobile plants, magic eggs, haunted jungles, and the threat of a collapsing universe… if you wanted to market a novel to a million young D&D players in the early 80s, you could have done a lot worse.
Dark is the Sun reminds me of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, with its fifteen-billion-years hence setting; the 1982 British paperback edition from Panther, to my mind, rather resembled Brian Aldiss’ far-future classic Hothouse (see below).
