Browsed by
Category: Reviews

Random Reviews: “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs

Random Reviews: “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs

Comments 0 Comment
Galaxy, 8/51, Cover by Emsh
Galaxy, 8/51, Cover by Emsh

Sylvia Jacobs has a career in science fiction spanning eighteen years, from the publication of “A Stitch in Time” in the April 1951 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and running through the April 1969 issue of Galaxy Magazine, when her story “Slave to Man” appeared. Her body of work, however, is not entirely reflective of that longevity, consisting of eight short stories and two essays, all except one of which were published within a decade of her first appearance.

Her second story, “The Pilot and the Bushman,” appeared in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Magazine and would eventually be reprinted in Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction the following year. It belongs to the same category of science fiction as Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (originally published in Galaxy as Gravy Planet), using an advertising executive to look at consumerism and aliens, although Jacobs’ work has a very different feel than the more famous story.

Jacobs tells the tale of Jerry Jergens, a New York advertising executive, and the Ambassador from Outer Space.  Following an accidental statement by the Ambassador that aliens had a Matter Repositor which made trade and manufacturing unnecessary, Earth began to suffer from a buyer’s strike. The Ambassador admits that discussing the Repositor was a mistake, but he refuses to deny its existence and interstellar law forbids him from sharing the technology with humans. Jerry, however has an offer to help get the Ambassador out of the fix he’s in. In return for which, Jerry wants to be able to market Earth to aliens, a proposition that the Ambassador does not see as something that can be successful.

…

Read More Read More

Still Not Telling Us: “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” by James Tiptree, Jr.

Still Not Telling Us: “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” by James Tiptree, Jr.

Comments 3 comments

Galaxy, March 1969, containing “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” by James Tiptree, Jr. Cover by Chaffee

“. . . Take ‘The Last Flight of Dr. Ain.’ That whole damn story is told backward. . .. It’s a perfect example of Tiptree’s basic narrative instinct. Start from the end and preferably 5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then DON’T TELL THEM.”

This is James Tiptree, Jr., on his story “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain.” Or, this is Alice Sheldon, referring to “Tiptree” in the third person — and, still, NOT TELLING US.

“Tiptree”/Sheldon was a little dismissive of “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” at times. I disagree. It was certainly the first of her stories to gain wide notice (and a Nebula nomination.) And it’s the earliest of her publications to really light me up. Thus I’d like to take a very close look at it here, in my latest piece trying to figure out how stories, particularly good stories, really work. (I note with some amusement that this essay is roughly the same length as the original story. I also add that of necessity I have “spoiled” the story, but I add that this story in particular is unspoilable, partly because it demands and rewards rereading. That said, if you haven’t read the story and you can find a copy, do go ahead and read it first!)

…

Read More Read More

Random Reviews: “Dead Men on TV” by Pat Murphy

Random Reviews: “Dead Men on TV” by Pat Murphy

Comments 0 Comment
Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy, Cover by Peter Stallard
Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy, Cover by Peter Stallard

Pat Murphy is best known for her 1986 Nebula Award winning novel The Falling Woman or her 1987 Nebula Award winning novelette “Rachel in Love.” The following year, she published the short story “Dead Men on TV” in the debut volume of Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy.

The unnamed narrator of “Dead Men on TV” spends her nights watching old movies on television, specifically films in which her late father appeared. Through the story, she reveals that her family life had not been great. Her mother was not prepared for the lifestyle that being married to a Hollywood actor entailed and committed suicide when the narrator was young. Her father, who had ignored her mother before she killed herself, shifted his efforts to ignoring his daughter after he was widowed, focusing on his career and living the lifestyle of a star.

Watching television, therefore, is her way of attempting to reconnect with her father’s memory and build an ersatz relationship with him. Her need, however, to watch his films when they are on, no matter the time of day, is clearly unhealthy. Although she has videotaped many of his movies, she feels closer to him when watching them at a time that other people could be watching them as well, leading to many late nights in front of the screen.

…

Read More Read More

Richard L. Tierney’s Sorcery Against Caeser; Review and Tour Guide of Simon of Gitta’s Sica & Sorcery!

Richard L. Tierney’s Sorcery Against Caeser; Review and Tour Guide of Simon of Gitta’s Sica & Sorcery!

Comments 3 comments
Sorcery Against Caesar: The Complete Simon of Gitta Short Stories (cover art by Steven Gilberts) Pickman’s Press, 2020, 405pages.

Greg Mele recently paid tribute to Richard L. Tierney at Black Gate. That memorial post covers the author’s life and bibliography very well, so check that out; Tierney co-authored books with David C. Smith will be echoed here. The Goodreads S&S group is hosting a two-month group read of his work presently (March-April 2022), which spurred me to read Scroll of Thoth; Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones.

That book lingered way too long on my shelf. It was packaged as horror influenced by history, with a mage protagonist; however, having read it now, I argue that it is more Fantasy than Horror or Historical Fiction. If assigning genre categories floats your boat, then Sword & Sorcery is more accurate.

…

Read More Read More

Invasion! The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Invasion! The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Comments 7 comments

Across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

One hundred and twenty-five years after its first publication, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (serialized 1897, published 1898) remains a brutally effective tale of alien invasion and a critique of imperialism. I can’t remember how young I was when I read it for the first time, but I totally missed the anti-imperialism angle, even though it’s spelled out quite explicitly. Instead, like most readers I’ll bet, what got me were the Martians landing meteor-like in Surrey, the heat ray, and, above all else, the Martian war machines; the great metal tripods. In fact, when I first saw George Pal’s 1953 movie version, I was outraged (and I still am) that he cheaped out and turned Wells’ tripods into legless, floating discs.

Along with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells is responsible for turning science fiction into a popular genre. While Verne seemed more concerned with cool technology, Wells’s literary imagination turned to the big ideas of his age: evolution, class, imperialism, among others. His early run of novels — The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds — are some of the most iconic and influential novels, let alone science fiction novels, of all time. They’ve been filmed numerous times and inspired hundreds of other books. Each one of them is absolutely worth your time (and, hey, they’re all free on Project Gutenberg).

…

Read More Read More

Random Reviews: “The Passing of the Beacon Star” by Chuck Rothman

Random Reviews: “The Passing of the Beacon Star” by Chuck Rothman

Comments 0 Comment
Tomorrow, 4/94, Cover by Jacek Yerka
Tomorrow, 4/94, Cover by Jacek Yerka

Chuck Rothman’s story “The Passing of the Beacon Star” appeared in the eighth issue of Tomorrow Speculative Fiction in April of 1994.  Although it has a strong fantasy feel, the story is a science fiction tale, set on another planet in which the human settlers carry around insect-like jerritch on their shoulders.

The jerritch act as retainers of the human’s memories, so individuals have no long term memory. If they need to access details of something that has happened in the past, whether to them or to the world at large, their jerritch plugs its antenna into a port on the human’s neck and allows the person to access the memories they need. This allows each individual to essentially live a variety of lives without reference to their earlier existence and in the process they take on new names and identities.

The story is set in the city of Amak during a festival known as “Choosing Day.” On this date, the citizens of Amak not only choose their new identities, but also choose which House of Guidance, essentially a sect, will guide the city for the next year.

Rothman focuses on a woman who is using the name “Weaver of Colors.”  Wandering through the crowded city aimlessly, she connects with her jerritch looking for a place to get away from the crowds. The jerritch leads her to the Cult of the Beacon Star, which is the current Guiding House for Amak. Unlikely to be selected again, the house is empty except for one of its Holies, the priest who oversees the sanctuary.  Weaver and the priest learn, through their jerritches, that they were once lovers, and although their recollections are limited, they reconnect with each other until the votes are cast and the Cult of the Beacon Star is not longer the guiding light, at which time, Weaver learns more about herself from her jerritch.

…

Read More Read More

Neverwhens, Where Fantasy and History Collide: Tanith Lee’s Cyrion

Neverwhens, Where Fantasy and History Collide: Tanith Lee’s Cyrion

Comments 9 comments


Cyrion (DAW, 1982, cover by Ken W. Kelly)

The Empress of Dreams

I hardly need to sing the praises of the late Tanith Lee (1947 – 2015).  A two-time World Fantasy winner, Horror Grandmaster, Hugo nominee, yadda yadda yadda, she rose out of nowhere writing sword & sorcery (generally a male-dominated field) with the Nebula-nominated The Birthgrave, and went on to pen 70 novels, 300 short stories and create a style of lush, dark fantasy perhaps best represented by her two best-known series: The Tales of the Flat Earth and The Books of Paradys.

Lee was goth before goths, and alternative before we knew that was a thing. Her style, which was lush and baroque, but not always straightforward for the reader, prose designed to read aloud. Her settings and atmospheres were strongly in the tradition of “the Weird,” owing much to the influence of writers such as Lord Dunsany and Jack Vance.

…

Read More Read More

Random Reviews: “Slaves of the Magic Lamp” by Anthony R. Lewis

Random Reviews: “Slaves of the Magic Lamp” by Anthony R. Lewis

Comments 2 comments
Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, DAW 1992, Cover by Maren
Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, DAW 1992, Cover by Maren

In November 1992, Disney released the animated film Aladdin, with Scott Weinger providing the title character’s voice, Linda Larkin portraying his love, Jasmine, and the late and lamented Robin Williams voicing the Genie. About the same time, Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg edited an original anthology designed to take advantage of Disney’s new film. DAW Books published Aladdin: Master of the Lamp in December 1992, containing more than forty original stories by authors ranging from Janet Kagan and George Alex Effinger to Kate Daniel and Mark Aronson.

Atypical of most original anthologies, Aladdin: Master of the Lamp contains two stories each by Jack C. Haldeman II, Anthony R. Lewis, and Barry N. Malzberg. Lewis, who is best known as the Chair of twenty-ninth Worldcon, Noreascon, in 1970, and for the work he has done with NESFA Press, has also written several short stories, including “Fair Exchange,” which opens Resnick’s anthology, and “Slaves of the Magic Lamp,” which appears about half-way through.

Lewis elects to structure his story as a tale within a tale, although it isn’t clear that such a conceit is necessary, aside from playing homage to the version of the Aladdin story told in One Thousand and One Nights. In this case, the narrator is Lady Vashti, a cat/shapeshifter who exists outside the bounds of the physical world.

…

Read More Read More

Random Reviews: “Rocketship Red” by Michael R. Colangelo

Random Reviews: “Rocketship Red” by Michael R. Colangelo

Comments 0 Comment
Tesseracts 14, Edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, Cover by Erik Mohr
Tesseracts 14, Edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, Cover by Erik Mohr

Michael R. Colangelo’s “Rocketship Red” was published in the fourteenth installment of the long-running Canadian anthology series Tesseracts, a volume edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory in 2010.  In addition to writing short fiction, Colangelo has served as a reviewer for FearZone and the fiction editor for The Harrow, an on-line zine that ran from 1998 until 2009.

“Rocketship Red” feels a bit like a throwback piece, the sort of story aimed at juveniles in the 1950s, which gives it an almost instantaneous feeling of nostalgia. It opens with Eagan running through the Canadian wheatfields near his father’s soy farm, flying a bright red kite and pretending the kite is a rocket and he’s its intrepid pilot. Although Eagan hated working the soy farm, he knew it would be his life, however a visit from two American air force captains who were coming to buy soy, would change the trajectory of his life.

Eagan’s interest in rockets and space, however, causes him to forge a bond with Captain Sampson, who tells Eagan to reach out to him when he turns seventeen and is able to attend “rocket flying school,” a phrase that reinforces the nostalgic element of the story. The rest of the story briefly outlines Eagan’s conflict with his father over leaving the soy farm, his attendance at the Flight Academy, and his career as a pilot, all covered in less than three pages.

If that seems like a lot to fit into a few short pages, it is. In many ways Colangelo’s story feels more like an outline for a longer story, or even a novel, that could follow Eagan’s journey from soy farmer’s son to cadet at the academy to his career flying rockets for the air force with explorations of Sampson’s mentorship of him.  Furthermore, Colangelo introduces various throw-away concepts in the story, such as antimatter farming projects, dark zones in space, and the rift.  None of these are given any detail, but they do serve to provide broad strokes for Eagan’s career.

…

Read More Read More

Forty Years of Horror: After Dark: The Best Horror Fiction of Tony Richards

Forty Years of Horror: After Dark: The Best Horror Fiction of Tony Richards

Comments 0 Comment


After Dark: The Best Horror Fiction of Tony Richards (Weird House Press, November 17, 2021). Cover by K.L. Turner

Tony Richards is a British horror writer, author of eight collections of short stories and several novels of dark fiction. Although for some reason he may be unfairly less celebrated than some of his countrymen, he’s certainly one of the very best producing horror fiction today.

Praise to small American imprint Weird House Press for assembling twenty-five tales and a novella covering forty years of Richards’ career in After Dark: The Best Horror Fiction of Tony Richards, released in paperback and digital formats this past November.

Although I’m familiar with some of Richards’ previous (and excellent) collections, regretfully I had missed a few, and this one offered me the chance to savor some of his stories for the very first time.

…

Read More Read More