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Birthday Reviews: Philip José Farmer’s “The Rise Gotten”

Birthday Reviews: Philip José Farmer’s “The Rise Gotten”

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Cover by Keith Howell and Charles Berlin
Cover by Keith Howell and Charles Berlin

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story saws its first publication in 2006 in the collection Pearls from Peoria, which collected previously published and unpublished works by Farmer.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.

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Vintage Treasures: The Machine in Shaft Ten by M. John Harrison

Vintage Treasures: The Machine in Shaft Ten by M. John Harrison

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The-Machine-in-Shaft-Ten-small The-Machine-in-Shaft-Ten-back-small

Howard Andrew Jones was the first to pique my interest in M. John Harrison, in his very first blog post for Black Gate back in 2007. Matthew David Surridge significantly heightened that interest with his thoughtful 2013 post To Unbuild the Unreal City: M. John Harrison’s Viriconium:

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.

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Birthday Reviews: Greg van Eekhout’s “Native Aliens”

Birthday Reviews: Greg van Eekhout’s “Native Aliens”

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Cover by Ho Che Anderson
Cover by Ho Che Anderson

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.

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Horrors, Marvels, Gods and Demons: C.L. Moore’s Tales of Northwest Smith

Horrors, Marvels, Gods and Demons: C.L. Moore’s Tales of Northwest Smith

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Northwest of Earth-small Northwest Smith Ace-small Northwest of Earth Planet Stories-small

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.

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Winter Reading: The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson with an Assist from James Stoddard

Winter Reading: The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson with an Assist from James Stoddard

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night land

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.

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Son of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

Son of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

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Son of Tall Eagle-small

The tree was a god with a thousand arms.

Crawling on its skin I was less than an ant.

I had come to the khaba forest to hunt the Ghost Serpent. For six days I tracked it across the high realm of branch and leaf. I followed it past the ruined wrecks of Opyd nests and skeletal remnants of its former victims. I watched it stalk and devour a wounded jaguar, swallowing the carcass whole. Eventually I followed the great snake to one particular Tree God among the leafy millions. The one that was its home.

So begins John R. Fultz’s new book, Son of Tall Eagle (2017), sequel to The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015). The tale, a model of .swords & sorcery precision, picks up the story of the People, a tribe of Native Americans, 22 years after they were transported by the alien Myktu to their world in order to avoid their mutual destruction. This new home is a land of crystalline mountains, titanic trees, and other, non-human, races.

Once known for his great prowess as a warrior, Tall Eagle has become a passionate student of the Myktus’ advanced civilization, and endeavors to help lead the People into a new age of peace and growth away from the continuous all-consuming Circle of War. The Circle of War is Tall Eagle’s name for the cycle of raiding that occurred between the People and their enemies in the Old World. Now, the People are farmers and some have even given their children Myktu names. Others have taken Myktu spouses, creating a hybrid people. (Aside: technically, this might really be a sword & planet story, but there’s enough magic for me count it as S&S.)

To a great extent, Tall Eagle’s efforts have been successful. Instead of gaining a reputation for audacity in battle, his son, Kai, is known for his skill as a hunter and one of the rare non-Myktu able to ride their giant birds, the Opyds. The birds allow themselves to be ridden only by those they choose, and Kai is one of those few. He is the embodiment of his father’s aspirations for the People: brave but undesirous of being a warrior; instead, a man of peace with a foot in the Myktu world as well as the People’s.

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The Mountain, the Count, and the Air War: Brendan Detzner’s The Orphan Fleet

The Mountain, the Count, and the Air War: Brendan Detzner’s The Orphan Fleet

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The Orphan Fleet-small The Hidden Lands-small City of the Forgotten Brendan Detzner-small

I’m a fan of Brendan Detzner’s Orphan Fleet series, the tale of a community of free children on a wind-swept mountain that comes under attack from a vengeful air admiral. Eighteen months ago I invited him to be a guest blogger at Black Gate, and he spoke about the classic science fiction that helped inspire his tale.

I grew up in a house where bookshelves were the most important pieces of furniture, and I was happy to take advantage, but in a hidden corner of the basement was a particularly important shelf, the one where my dad kept his old 70’s science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks. Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe. Not a bad haul. In one of those books, a short story collection from Gene Wolfe, was a story called “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories,” which is about a child reading a story featuring a villain who he later imagines (or maybe not, it’s a Gene Wolfe story) breaking the fourth wall and discussing his role as a bad guy. He talks about how he and the hero seem to hate each other, but that backstage they actually get along and understood their interdependence.

I was enormously impressed by the opening volume in the series, The Orphan Fleet, a fast-paced tale of action set in a community of abandoned children. It’s a fascinating and beautifully realized setting that’s unlike any you’ve encountered before. Here’s what I said in my original review.

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Future Treasures: Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

Future Treasures: Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

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Embers of War-small Embers of War-back-small

Gareth Powell is best known around these parts as the author of Moving Forward, a thoughtful manifesto on escaping the legacy of science fiction’s pulp roots. It generated quite a bit of discussion when it appeared at SF Signal back in 2013.

In the wider world he’s better known as the author of Ack-Ack Macaque (2012), a trilogy of SF adventure tales featuring a cigar-chomping monkey, nuclear-powered Zeppelins, and German ninjas, as well as the novel The Recollection (2011) and numerous short stories that have appeared in places like Space Opera, Solaris Rising, and Interzone. His newest novel is one of the most intriguing titles of 2018, the tale of a sentient warship stripped of her weapons and assigned to rescue operations at the end of the war. Caught up in a mysterious struggle that threatens to engulf the entire galaxy, the sentient warship Trouble Dog discovers she has to remember how to fight again, and fast. BG author Jonathan L. Howard (the Kyth the Taker series) says it “Mashes together solid space opera with big concepts, real people, and a freewheeling rock’n’roll vibe.”

Embers of War will be published by Titan Books on February 20, 2018. It is 409 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $8.99 for the digital edition. It is the first novel in a new space opera trilogy.

Vintage Treasures: Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home by James Tiptree, Jr.

Vintage Treasures: Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home by James Tiptree, Jr.

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Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home-small Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home-back-small

James Tiptree, Jr — aka Alice Sheldon — was one of the finest science fiction writers of the 20th Century. As Thomas Parker put it in his review of her Hugo Award-winning biography The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips:

Alice Hastings Bradley Davey Sheldon was a remarkable person — world traveler, painter, sportswoman, CIA analyst, Ph.D. in experimental psychology… and one of the greatest of all science fiction writers. If you don’t recognize her name, that’s partly by her own design.

Born in 1915, from an early age Alice was a lover of this new genre that was in those days still called “scientifiction,” devouring every copy of Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and Amazing Stories that she could find, but it wasn’t until the mid 60’s that she tried her hand at writing any SF herself. After some false starts, she completed a few stories and in 1967, when she was 51, she sent them off to John Campbell at Analog, not really expecting anything to come of it. As she considered the whole thing something of a lark, she submitted the manuscripts under a goofy pseudonym that she and her husband, Huntington (Ting) Sheldon, cooked up one day while they were grocery shopping — James Tiptree Jr. The Tiptree came from a jar of Tiptree jam; Ting added the junior.

To Alice’s professed surprise, Campbell bought one of the stories, “Birth of a Salesman.” A new science fiction writer was born, one who would, in the space of just a few years, make a tremendous impact on the genre (as two Hugos, three Nebulas, and a World Fantasy Award attest, to say nothing of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which is given to works which expand or explore our understandings of gender).

Tiptree wrote two novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985), but it’s her short fiction for which she is remembered. Virtually all of her short stories have been gathered in important collections such as Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Arkham House, 1990) and Meet Me at Infinity (Tor, 2000). But I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise to anyone that I prefer to read Tiptree in her original paperbacks, including her very first collection, Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home, released by Ace in 1973.

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Dune: Warts and All

Dune: Warts and All

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Dune Frank Herbert-smallI read Frank Herbert’s Dune for the first time during university and loved it. It was pretty obvious why it had won the 1965 Hugo and Nebula awards. When I was in my late 30s, I went back to it, and couldn’t get through even a few chapters before the crash-and-burn. What happened?

Bad writing to start with, mostly bad dialogue. The first bunch of chapters intercuts a lot between interesting things, like the Bene Gesserit and prescient memories, and Paul’s adventures, and cartoony super-villainy spouting Republic Serial Villain dialogue.

“Fools!”

“Those fools!”

“I’m going to get you!”

This execrable dialogue doesn’t even contain itself to the quotation marks. In-narrative close-third person dips into character’s thoughts spread the pain into the narrative and make George Lucas look like Hemingway.

We spend so much time with the villains in their self-congratulatory soliloquies at the beginning that I just stopped, scratching my head at how I could have enjoyed this.

Was I just a naive reading at 20, or had the style of writing changed so much between 1990 and 2010s that I’d gotten accustomed to different styles and aesthetics? I think probably it’s a bit of both.

But finally, in 2018, I finally tried again and pressed through and it turns out that after Paul and his mother are in the desert, the villains take a back seat. Then we get into the good stuff like the Fremen culture, some of the implications of the Bene Gesserit missionary work, the prescient memories as perceptions through time, and the sand worms.

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