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Birthday Reviews: Judith Moffett’s “Chickasaw Slave”

Birthday Reviews: Judith Moffett’s “Chickasaw Slave”

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Cover by Broeck Steadman
Cover by Broeck Steadman

Judith Moffett was born on August 30, 1942.

Moffett’s story “Surviving” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1987. The following year, she won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer. She has been nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award and the Hugo Award one time each and has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times. In addition to writing science fiction, Moffett has also published poetry.

Although written for the anthology Alternate Presidents, “Chickasaw Slave” was first published in the September 1991 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, edited by Gardner Dozois. The story appeared in Alternate Presidents, edited by Mike Resnick, the following February. It has not been reprinted since.

“Chickasaw Slave” is set in a world in which Andrew Jackson was not nominated to run for President in 1928. The nomination and Presidency instead went to then-first term Congressman Davy Crockett. In this timeline, the Civil War erupted more than a decade earlier and in 1852, on the eve of the final battle of the war that led to Confederate independence, Levi Colbert, wrote a letter to his fiancée in case he died in which he told a story of his own interaction with President Crockett years earlier.

Because Crockett is sharing information about his own family with his fiancée, it gives Moffett the perfect chance to provide the reader with some of the information needed about this alternative timeline. Unfortunately, a lot of the information given by Levi to Rachel concerns issues that she would have known about, making the first half of the story a datadump, although at the same time, nowhere does Moffett explain how Crockett’s election caused an earlier Civil War, information that is not particularly relevant to her story.

Her story does detail how a thirteen year old Levi helped a similarly aged slave, Watty, escape. Watty, who, like Levi, was part Chicaksaw, was treated as a member of the family and there was absolutely no thought of him as a slave until Levi’s father accidentally lost Watty in a card game to another citizen. Given permission to go fishing on their last day together, Levi decides the two should plead Watty’s case to President Crockett, who is visiting his Tennessee home nearby.

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Birthday Reviews: Jack Vance’s “Liane the Wayfarer”

Birthday Reviews: Jack Vance’s “Liane the Wayfarer”

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Cover by Paul Callé
Cover by Paul Callé

Jack Vance was born on August 28, 1916 and died on May 23, 2013.

Jack Vance won his first Hugo Award in 1963 for the novella “The Dragon Masters.” He won his second in 1967 for the novelette “The Last Castle,” which also earned him a Nebula Award. In 2010 he won a Hugo for Best Related Work for his autobiography This Is Me, Jack Vance (Or, More Properly, This is “I”). His novel Lyonesse: Maduoc won the 1990 World Fantasy Award. In 1975 his novelette “The Seventeen Virgins” won the Jupiter Award and in 1977, a translation of The Dragon Masters won the Seiun Award. He also won the Emperor Norton Award in 2005 for Lurulu. Vane received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984 and was the Guest of Honor at MagiCon, the 50th Worldcon, in Orlando, Florida in 1992. In 1997 he was named a Grand Master by the SFWA and received the Forry Award from LASFS. The next year he received a Lifetime Achievement Prix Utopia. Vance was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2001.

“Liane the Wayfarer” was first published as “The Loom of Darkness” in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond, edited by Damon Knight. The same year it appeared in a small press run of Vance’s collection The Dying Earth. In 1976 Lin Carter selected the story for his anthology Realms of Wizardry. Vance included it in his 1979 collection Green Magic. It was reprinted in A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Terry Carr (also known as Masters of Fantasy). Tom Shippey used the story in The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories. Silverberg used it in The Fantasy Hall of Fame and Vance included it in Tales of the Dying Earth. When Martin H. Greenberg invited authors to select a work they enjoyed reading for his anthology My Favorite Fantasy Story, George R.R. Martin selected “Liane the Wayfarer.” It showed up again in the Vance collection Mazirian the Magician. Eric Flint, David Drake, and Jim Baen used it in their anthology The World Turned Upside Down. The story appeared up again in The Jack Vance Treasury and was read on the Drabblecast #282. Paula Guran used it in her 2017 anthology Swords Against Darkness. The story has been translated into German three times, Italian and Dutch twice each, and once into Esperanto.

The title character in “Liane the Wayfarer” is a sociopath, willing to kill anyone on a whim or the vaguest belief that they might do him harm at some point in the future. He revels in the good fortune of finding a magical diadem while burying his latest victim and learns that the crown will render him invisible. When he finds out that there is a beautiful witch living in a nearby clearing, he goes to find her with the intent of making her his true love.

Liane’ misogyny is struck down, however, by the witch, Lith, who refuses to even consider Liane’s protestations of love or ownership of her affections. She informs him that unless he can perform a service for her, she would not be his. Not seeing this trap, Liane agrees to retrieve a portion of tapestry for her from Chun the Unavoidable.

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September/October 2018 Asimov’s Science Fiction Now on Sale

September/October 2018 Asimov’s Science Fiction Now on Sale

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Asimov's Science Fiction September October 2018-smallI think the annual “slightly spooky” issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, traditionally their September/October issue, is my favorite every year. And this year’s does not disappoint, with an endless graveyard, witches, secret cities, sinister aliens, and a vampire novella by Greg Egan!

This issue contains fiction by Carrie Vaughn, Suzanne Palmer, Sheila Finch, Leah Cypess, Robert Reed, and many others. Here’s editor Sheila Williams’ description.

Our annual slightly spooky September/October 2018 issue is rising out of the gloaming. It’s filled with chills and thrills! In our terrifying cover story, “3-adica,” you’ll find vampires and other evil monsters as well as all the math you might expect from Greg Egan. There are many secrets to decode in this frightening novella. Don’t miss it!

You’ll rendezvous with more alarming creatures in Carrie Vaughn’s tale of “The Huntsman and the Beast”; discover what it’s like to be under the control of a rigid democracy with alien influences in Robert Reed’s “Denali”; walk through an endless graveyard with Sheila Finch to meet some eerie “Survivors”; see the lighter side of humanity’s eventual doom in Suzanne Palmer’s “R.U.R.-8?”; and observe true bravery in Doug C. Souza’s “Callisto Stakes.” In her first Asimov’s tale, Stephanie Feldman reveals why it’s a good idea to beware “The Witch of Osborne Park”; new author Erin Roberts paints a perfect picture of horror in “The Grays of Cestus V”; Rick Wilber’s taut new novella about Moe Berg divulges the location of “The Secret City”; David Erik Nelson encounters excruciating horror “In the Sharing Place”; Leah Cypess tells a haunting tale about why Revenge is “Best Served Slow”; and in her unsettling first story for Asimov’s Jean Marie Ward invites us to jump into “The Wrong Refrigerator.”

“I Invent the Compact Disc in 1961,” says Robert Silverberg in his Reflections column, and he’s delighted to have done so; James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net considers the “X O”; Norman Spinrad’s On Books goes “Outside the Envelope” to review works by Jeff Noon, Michael Houellebecq, and Boualem Sansal; plus we’ll have an array of poetry and other features you’re sure to enjoy.

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Birthday Reviews: Nick Pollotta’s “The Collar”

Birthday Reviews: Nick Pollotta’s “The Collar”

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Cover by David Monette
Cover by David Monette

Nick Pollotta was born on August 26, 1954 and died on April 13, 2013.

Although Pollotta published the novel Illegal Aliens with Phil Foglio and his own Bureau 13 novels, the vast majority of Pollotta’s work appeared using the house names James Axler and Don Pendleton for Gold Eagle Books’s line of adventure novels. He also wrote the Satellite Night News series using the pen name Jack Hopkins. He also wrote That Darn Squid God in collaboration with James Clay.

Pollotta published “The Collar” in the Summer 2002 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, edited by Edward J. McFadden. Fantastic was a continuation of the magazine Pirate Writings, which had changed its name in 2000. The story has not been reprinted.

“The Collar” is the story of a professional hitman who has been hired to kill an old man. Although he generally doesn’t care who he kills as long as he gets paid, when he sees that the old man, who lives alone, has an enormous arsenal of weapons as well as religious artifacts, his curiosity is piqued. An interview/interrogation of the bagman sent to pay him by his unseen employer makes him even more suspicious and he realizes that he was hired by a vampire to kill a vampire hunter.

Pollotta is known for his humorous science fiction stories, and when his hit man goes to confront the vampire only to realize that the supernatural creature is not a vampire, but a full-fledged demon, Pollotta could have had plenty of room for humor. However, he chose to take a more serious tack with the story, following the competent hitman’s confrontation with the demon and the aftermath.

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Sign up to Support Heroic Fantasy Quarterly through Patreon!

Sign up to Support Heroic Fantasy Quarterly through Patreon!

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HFQ Patreon-small

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is one of the most reliable outlets for top quality adventure fantasy on the market. In his review of Volume One of The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Fletcher Vredenburgh wrote:

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is… the most consistent forum for the best in contemporary swords & sorcery. Some may think I’m laying it on a little thick, but The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly: Volume 1, 2009-2011, a distillation of the mag’s first three years, should prove that I’m not.

HFQ‘s reputation doesn’t just rest on quality. They’ve published four issues a year like clockwork for nearly a decade — and all of it available free online. Fans have been asking for a way to support the magazine for years, and the editors have finally created a Patreon where those who love quality fantasy can make meaningful contributions. Here’s HFQ editor and Black Gate blogger Adrian Simmons:

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly has brought new voices in sword and sorcery, adventure fiction, and historical fiction to the people since 2009. On our shoestring budget we have hit our goal of publishing three stories and two poems every three months AND started working in artwork, AND starting working in audio; and with more funds we could do much more.

Even just a few dollars a month can have a huge impact. Make a much-needed contribution to HFQ here, to help ensure one of the best modern fantasy magazine can continue for years to come. And check out their latest issue here.

Birthday Reviews: James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine”

Birthday Reviews: James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine”

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Cover by Mark Zug
Cover by Mark Zug

Alice B. Sheldon was born on August 24, 1915 and died on May 19, 1987.  She published science fiction under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. and when speculation began that Tiptree might be a woman, Robert Silverberg famously stated that such a theory was absurd, since he found “something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” Shortly after Sheldon’s mother’s death, the truth came out about her identity, which she had hidden in part because of her position in academia. Sheldon also used the pen names Alice Hastings Bradley, Major Alice Davey, Alli B. Sheldon, and Raccona Sheldon, the last being her most famous pseudonym aside from Tiptree.

Tiptree won the Nebula Award in 1974 for the short story “Love Is the Plan, the Plan is Death” and won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” the same year.  Both stories were nominated for both awards. In 1977, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” won both awards in the Novella category as well as the Jupiter Award. In 1978, “The Screwfly Solution” won the Nebula for Best Novelette, but lost the Hugo Award. Her 1987 collection The Tales of the Quintana Roo earned Tiptree a World Fantasy Award. Tiptree has won the Seiun Award four times, for “The Only Neat Thing You Do,” “Out of the Everywhere,” Brightness Falls from the Air, and “Backward, Turn Backward.” She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012. In 1991, Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler created the James Tiptree Jr. Award for speculative fiction that explores or expands the understanding of gender.

Although initially written in the 1950s, well before Tiptree began writing for publication, “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine” wasn’t published until 1998, when Kim Mohan purchased it to appear in the Fall issue of Amazing Stories, although it had previously sold in 1971 to a project that never saw print.  The story was reprinted with the variant title “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine, or, I Screwed 15,924 Back Issues of Astounding for the F.B.I.” in Meet Me at Infinity. The story was also translated for the German James Tiptree collection Doktor Ain.

Despite the title of “Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine, or, I Screwed 15,924 Back Issues of Astounding for the F.B.I.,” the story is not specifically a time travel story, but rather a send up of bad writing in science fiction, made more effective, given its 1950s writing date, by the fact that numerous works of the type it is skewering were still being published in 1998 when the story eventually saw print.  The story within a story tells of spaceship Captain Herring, who, believing he was alone on his ship, finds a strange stowaway in a sequence which is reminiscent of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” which was published shortly before Tiptree wrote this story.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask — October, 1933

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask — October, 1933

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BlackMask_October1933

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

October of 1933 featured yet another solid issue of Black Mask under Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw’s direction. The cover art was by J.W. Schlaiker, who had about fifty covers from 1929 to 1934. I don’t know why he abruptly stopped drawing for Black Mask. He served in France during World War I and was the War Department artist during World War II. He did portraits of Eisenhower, MacArthur and Patton.

With “Murder in the Open,” Race Williams made his forty-second appearance in Black Mask, dating back to June 1, 1923. For several years, Williams on the cover had guaranteed increased sales, but Carroll John Daly would be gone from Black Mask in just over a year and he was already regularly appearing in Dime Detective.

Daly was the first author to write in what became the hardboiled style with “Three Gun Terry” (which, of course, you read about here…) in the May 15, 1923 issue of Black Mask. Williams would follow in “Knights of the Open Palm in June, with Dashiell Hammett introducing his famous Continental Op in “Arson Plus” in October of that year. Daly’s writing style was far less polished and developed than Hammett’s, though I feel that it did improve over the years.

W(illiam) T(odhunter) Ballard was Nero Wolfe creator Rex Stout’s first cousin (which would explain why they shared such an unusual middle name). Ballard, who went on to become a very successful western author, wrote extensively for the detective pulps in the thirties and forties. He explained that he was struggling to sell to the lesser pulps when he saw The Maltese Falcon starring Ricardo Cortez. Hammett’s terse prose spoke to him and he bought an issue of Black Mask. He stayed up all night, wrote a story and sold it to the magazine. He would go on to a long career in the pulps and as a novelist.

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Birthday Reviews: Brian W. Aldiss’s “Tarzan of the Alps”

Birthday Reviews: Brian W. Aldiss’s “Tarzan of the Alps”

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Cover by Edward Miller
Cover by Edward Miller

Brian W. Aldiss was born on August 18, 1925 and died on August 19, 2017, the day after his 92nd birthday.

Aldiss won a Hugo Award in 1962 for his short story “Hothouse” and a non-fiction Hugo in 1987 for his history of the science fiction field, Trillion Year Spree, written with David Wingrove, in which they continued to popularize Aldiss’s contention that science fiction began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In 1966 his novella “The Saliva Tree” received the Nebula Award. He has won the British SF Association Award five times and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award once. His novel Helliconia Spring won both of those awards as well as the Kurd Lasswitz Preis. Trillion Year Spree also won the Eaton Award. Aldiss has won a Ditmar Award for Contemporary Author and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Prix Utopia, Pilgrim Award, IAFA Award, and World Fantasy Award. He was inducted into both the First Fandom Hall of Fame and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004. Aldiss was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 2000. In 2005, Aldiss was awarded the title Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth as part of the Birthday Honors list for his service to literature.

Aldiss first published “Tarzan of the Alps” in the first issue of the magazine Postscripts, edited by Peter Crowther in 2004. The following year, the story was used by Aldiss to lead off his collection Cultural Breaks. The story has not appeared anywhere else.

Aldiss sets “Tarzan of the Alps” in Patagonia, about as far from Africa or Switzerland as one could get. It tells the story of José Pareda, whose truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere and Alejo and Maria Galdos, who just happen to live in the middle of nowhere and come to his aid, along with their son who works in the nearest town as a mechanic. In the days that Pareda stays with the Galdoses while his truck is being repaired, they bond over their shared life experiences, being of a similar age, and Pareda thanks his hosts with his stock in trade, a traveling movie that he projects from his van.

The Galdoses live so far from anything that this is the first film they have ever seen, a version of Tarzan of the Apes, which they misunderstand as Tarzan of the Alps. Being the first film they saw, the movie made a huge impression on the Galdoses and they decide that they wanted to visit the jungles of the Alps before they die. Unfortunately, Alejo dies before they have enough money for the trip and the story ends with Maria preparing their son for his journey to see the Alps as they imagine they existed in Tarzan.

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Mel Hunter and Hal Clement’s Needle

Mel Hunter and Hal Clement’s Needle

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hunter clement needle unpublished-small

The Monday before this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I drove up to LA to visit a longtime SF fan and art collector. Among the two dozen pieces of art I picked up from him is this painting by artist Mel Hunter. Hunter was active in the SF field, contributing cover art to paperbacks and digests, as well as digest interiors, primarily from the early 1950’s until the early 1960’s, though he was still contributing an occasional cover into the early 1970’s. From December 1955 through December 1957, he also was the art director of If (the sister magazine to Galaxy). Over time, the painting has suffered some damage along the edges, so this image is a bit cropped.

Written on the back of the illustration board is a note stating that this painting is an unpublished illustration for Needle by Hal Clement, and that Hunter gave this painting to Edward Everett Evans and Thelma Evans. Another note below that mentions that the collector I bought it from purchased this from the estate of E.E. Evans (who passed away on December 2, 1958) for $25. Not surprisingly, I paid significantly more for it!

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Birthday Reviews: Andrew J. Offutt’s “Gone with the Gods”

Birthday Reviews: Andrew J. Offutt’s “Gone with the Gods”

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Cover by Rick Sternbach
Cover by Rick Sternbach

Andrew J. Offutt was born on August 16, 1934 and died on April 30, 2013. Offutt also published science fiction and fantasy using the pseudonyms John Cleve, Jeff Douglas, and J.X. Williams. He occasionally collaborated with Richard K. Lyon and Keith Taylor, while many of the stories published under the John Cleve house name were collaborations with a wide variety of authors including Victor Koman, Roland J. Green, G.C. Edmonson, and Jack C. Haldeman II, among others. In addition to his career in speculative fiction, which included a stint as President of SFWA, Offutt has a very successful career writing pornographic novels.

Offut was nominated for the Balrog Award for his short story “Conan and the Sorcerer” and for editing the anthologies Swords Against Darkness IV and Swords Against Darkness V, as well as for the entire anthology series. His My Lord Barbarian was nominated for the August Derleth Award and in 1986 he received the Phoenix Award at DeepSouthCon.

“Gone with the Gods” was originally published in the October 1974 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, edited by Ben Bova. When Stanley Schmidt decided to issue the anthology Analog’s Lighter Side in 1982, he included Offutt’s story.

The main character of “Gone with the Gods” would seem to be a thinly disguised Offutt, a writer who turns out a prodigious number of novels at the back and call of his editor, writing in whatever genre is hot at the moment to fulfill the needs of an insatiable audience. When his editor calls him to look into the possibility that a former fraternity brother of the editor’s has invented a time machine, and asks him to check out the possibility that the device is real so the editor can invest in it, the authors finds himself looking into the far-fetched claim.

Of course the time machine, disguised as a VW microbus, eventually works and Harvey Moss, the author, Mark Ventnor, the publisher, and Ben Corrick, the inventor, all take their turns traveling in the bus, only to learn its limitations. It can only go one day into the future, but anywhen in the past. Although it remains tied to Earth, so they don’t have to worry about showing up in outer space, they do figure out how to take it to different places on Earth. Eventually, in order to make some money, Moss travels back in time to spur human development and plant evidence that he can use to write a best selling book that Ventnor can publish and sell.

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