Welcome to the very first post of the Black Gate Book Club! What are we up to? As Fletcher Vredenburgh said in his introduction to the Book Club:
The plan is to read Downbelow Station over the month of June and post a discussion of it each Monday afternoon. This time around, the Book Club participants will include Adrian Simmons, Charlene Brusso, Chris Hocking, and me. We’d love it if you’d read along with us and join in the conversation.
Of course, it is now Wednesday, not Monday, and Charlene had to bow out of this round because life intrudes. Never the less, Vredenburgh, Hocking and I soldiered on! Below is our exchange:
Jay Lake was born on June 6, 1964 and died from cancer on June 1, 2014. He openly blogged about his battle with cancer and about a year before his death hosted a wake for himself. His fight with cancer was also the subject of the documentary Lakeside—A Year with Jay Lake.
From 2002-2006 Lake, along with Deborah Layne, edited the six volume anthology series Polyphony. Lake went on to edit several additional anthologies, including All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, Other Earths, with Nick Gevers, and TEL: Stories.
Lake won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004 and decided the award needed some paraphernalia. He arranged to have pins made up for future nominees. Later winners added to the collection by creating a tiara and scepter to go along with the prize, both of which are passed along from winner to winner. Although he was nominated for a Nebula Award, two Hugo Awards, and three World Fantasy Awards, he didn’t win any of them. He did receive a posthumous Worldcon Special Convention Award in 2015, presented at Sasquan, a well as the Endeavour Award for his collection Last Plane to Heaven.
“The Water Castle” appeared in the August 2004 issue of Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy. The issue contained a second Lake story, “The Angel’s Daughter,” as well. While “The Angel’s Daughter” was reprinted the following year in Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber’s Fantasy: The Best of 2004, “The Water Castle” has never been reprinted.
Lake’s story of Arcadia follows the girl from her father’s death by drowning through a dangerous, tribal world trying to set itself right after an unnamed cataclysm in “The Water Castle.” Told with a series of time jumps, Arcadia finds herself in a market where, shortly after a man accosts Arcadia to try to sell her into slavery downcountry, she becomes involved in an incident in which a woman is accused of belonging to the “Poison People.” Arcadia’s involvement in this case, and her quick-witted thinking to resolve the issue, thrusts her into the spotlight and makes her the leader of a movement.
It’s a short roundup this month, with only Swords and Sorcery Magazine from the pack of usual suspects. There is a special treat, though, making up for the lack of magazine stories. Multi-talented Robert Zoltan has created another wonderful audio adventure with his series duo, Dareon Vin and Blue.
Swords and Sorcery Magazine #76 has the publications’s usual two stories. One I don’t like, one I sort of like. I’m sorry, but I just can’t like everything.
The opening story, “Remnants” by Lynn Rushlau, is the one I don’t like. Returning from a night of revelry at the Festival of Liberation, Callery hears a voice in her home and runs screaming. Over the next week, she begins to see ghosts, lots of ghosts.
These aren’t human ghosts, but those of the Fairies who once ruled over all humankind. The best single part of the story is the description of that era.
Her hand lingered over the rebel costume. She could use some of the courage of her ancestors. They’d risen up three centuries ago and destroyed the fairies who’d kept humankind enslaved for untold millennia. Literally untold. Human history survived as rumor and tall tales. Nothing written went back before the Rising.
Lanagan has won the World Fantasy Award in four separate categories. She won her first awards for her collection Black Juice, which included “Singing My Sister Down,” which won for Best Short Fiction. Her novel Tender Morsels tied with Jeffrey Ford’s The Shadow Year, and she won her most recent World Fantasy Award for the novella “Sea Hearts.” Black Juice and “Singing My Sister Down” also won the Ditmar Award, and the story earned the Aurealis Award and Golden Aurealis Award. Lanagan’s other Ditmar’s were for the short story “The Goosle” and the novels Tender Morsels and Sea Hearts. Lanagan has also received the Aurealis Award for her short stories “The Queen’s Notice,” “A Fine Magic,” “A Thousand Flowers,” “Bajazzle,” and “Significant Dust.” Her novel Sea Hearts won the Aurealis for Best Young Adult Novel and for Best Fantasy Novel.
Lanagan originally sold “The Proving of Smollett Standforth” to Jack Dann and Nick Gevers for their anthology Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense, which was published in 2011. It was was a finalist for the Aurealis Award for Best Fantrasy Short story and was reprinted the following year in Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, an anthology edited by Paula Guran.
“The Proving of Smollett Standforth” is the story of a timid young domestic servant, whose job in the house where he lives is to clean and polish shoes and boots. When he is not performing these duties, Smollett sleeps alone in a small attic room. Although the room only has a single door, Smollett is visited nightly by the spirit of a long-dead woman who comes in through a door which has been blocked off. Each night, she presses a beaded necklace on Smollett, which burns his chest when he puts it on, but he in unable, or unwilling, to fend her off.
His shyness means that he doesn’t feel he can confide about his nocturnal visitor to anyone else in the house and he just comes to live with it, although when the cook discovered the marks on his chest, she treats him with a greasy balm and is worried that he suffers from some disease. Smollett’s concerns come to a head when he receives a letter requesting that he get permission for his brother, Dravitt, to spend the night at Smollett’s master’s house while Dravitt is on his way through London for his own posting. Rather than seek help, Smollett decides it is time to take action against the apparition himself, rather than let Dravitt experience it.
Nictzin Dyalhis was born on June 4, 1873 and died on May 8, 1942.
Dyalhis’s writing career began with the story “Who Keep the Desert Law” in 1922 and saw the publication of fewer than 20 stories over the next 18 years. His first story in Weird Tales, “When the Green Star Waned,” may have been the first use of the word “blaster” for a ray gun. Although L. Sprague de Camp has stated that Nictzin Dyalhis was his birthname and appears on his draft card, people have suggested that he changed the spelling of his last name from Dallas. Dyalhis also appears to have changed the date of his birth as suited him. One of the few members of the science fiction community to have actually met him was Willis Conover, Jr.
“Heart of Atlantan” first appeared in the September 1940 issue of Weird Tales, edited by D. McIlwraith. It remained out of print for 30 years before Lin Carter selected it for his anthology The Magic of Atlantis. In 1976, Peter Haining published a retrospective of Weird Tales and chose the story to represent Dyalhis’s contributions to the magazine. Wildside Press issued several of Dyalhis’s stories, including “Heart of Atlantan” in their e-book The Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack: Volume 4 in 2015. The story most recently appears in The Sapphire Goddess, published in 2018 by DMR Books and edited by Dave Ritzlin. “Heart of Atlantan was Dyalhis’s final published story.
Framing techniques in weird fiction were a common device in the early pulp era, an attempt to give some sort of credence to the tale. The events didn’t often happen to the narrator, but to a friend, or were found in a book. In “Heart of Atlantan,” Henri d’Armond describes how he was having a conversation with his friend, Leonard Carman, about the possibility of lost ancient civilizations. Carman is convinced they exist and to prove his point calls a woman, Otilie, to join them. Bent, broken, ugly, and illiterate, Otilie has the ability to serve as a medium, writing messages from a lost race.
More than anything, teenager Zara Cole wants to be free. That’s why she lives on the streets, snatching purses and thieving, rather than immigrating to Mars with her mother and sister. She can’t stand the thought of being trapped in a dome. When a rich girl waltzes through Zara’s seedy neighborhood without taking the most basic precautions, she can’t resist a slash and grab.
But the rich girl isn’t the easy mark Zara thought it she’d be. Sure, the girl herself does nothing but scream. But it turns out her daddy’s the cruel and ruthless crime boss Deluca, who sends a goon to kill Zara and recover his goods. It’s probably quite the surprise for the goon when he’s the one who ends up dead, instead.
Zara’s got blood on her hands, but she doesn’t feel guilty. Still, it’s not obvious how she’s going to hide from Deluca, now that she not only has what he wants, but also dispatched one of his men. The safest place she can think of is a jail-like rehabilitation facility called Camp Kuna. To get herself sent there, she sneaks back into her juvenile group home, where her official guardian helps her create the necessary scene of violence.
But even donning her orange jumpsuit and getting locked in a cell doesn’t keep Zara out of Deluca’s reach. The crime boss bribes a fellow inmate – the closest thing Zara has to a friend in Camp Kuna – to murder her. When Zara survives the strangulation attempt, she realizes nowhere is safe.
Rescue comes in the strange form of the alien species called Leviathan, who are living spaceships that look like whales. In exchange for reversing the effects of global warming, the aliens require humanity to offer a hundred volunteers to travel inside them every year. Called the “Honors” program, the chosen humans become celebrities, feted worldwide as the best and the brightest. Nobody knows what the Honors do during their year of service, but the aliens usually pick eminent scientists and musicians. Until recently, when they picked two military strategists.
Richards was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for his first novel, The Harvest Bride in 1988. His collection Going Back received a British Fantasy Award nomination in 2008.
“Discards” originally appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where editor Edward L. Ferman published it in the September 1983 issue. The next year it was translated into Italian for inclusion in Urania #964. The British Fantasy Society included the story in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue of Dark Horizons. Richard used the story in two collections of his work that were published in 2008: Passport to Purgatory and Shadows and Other Tales. The following year it appeared in the anthology The 4th Book of Terror Tales, edited by John B. Ford and Paul Kane.
Richards breaks free from several of the expected norms of a speculative fiction short story, which sets it apart from most of what appears in the magazine. Robin Brookard was born into a middle class family, married, and had children, but what sets him apart is that he lost everything due to his addiction to alcohol. The story opens with him walking the streets of London trying to figure out where he is going to spend the night and realizing he’ll either have to sleep outdoors or find his way to a hostel. His pride doesn’t allow for the latter choice since it seems a more “official” acknowledgement of his state.
Brookard eventually finds a group of tramps gathered around a fire and he approaches them in hopes of keeping warm and finding some companionship. Something about the group doesn’t strike him as quite right, however, and he is torn between joining them and keeping his distance, partly because of the sense of wrongness and partly because being accepted into their group means admitting that he can no longer find his way back to the life he once had.
The group’s leader, known as Padre, explains to Brookard that gods are created and gain power when they have believers and indicates that the homeless of London, and in fact, the homeless around the world, have brought their own god into existence. The god he describes is a vengeful one, however, and their goal is to eventually overthrow the current world order. The introduction of the god of the homeless has an undertone of Lovecraftianism, but it doesn’t quite lead down that path.
Lester del Rey was born on June 2, 1915 and died on May 10, 1993.
In 1972, he received the Skylark Award from NESFA. He and wife Judy-Lynn del Rey won the Milford Award in 1982 and del Rey won the coveted Balrog Award in 1985. He was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 1991. Along with his wife, del Rey ran Del Rey Books, for which he was nominated for a Special World Fantasy Award four times. Four of his stories, “Into They Hands,” “Helen O’Loy,” “The Faithful,” and “Nerves” have been nominated for Retro-Hugos.
“Fade-Out” was originally published in Harry Warner’s fanzine Spaceways. When del Rey published The Early del Rey in 1975, he claimed that he remembered an early story that appeared in Spaceways, but could not remember the title. He relegated the story, which he no longer had, to the dust bin of history. When I was editing the two volume Selected Stories of Lester del Rey for NESFA Press, I came across the reference to “Fade-Out” and decided that, although the collections were not meant to be complete (about 1/3 of his short fiction was not included), I wouldn’t feel successful until I had tracked down the story and at least considered it for inclusion. It was reprinted in 2010 in Robots and Magic: Volume 2 of Selected Short Stories of Lester del Rey.
Jack Kirbey is an inventor who takes the Tibetan concoctions of his partner, Tse-Shan, and packages them for western consumption. Unfortunately, the two men have had only limited success, partly because they sold the rights to their first tonic, Tibetan Hair Invigorator, to an unscrupulous businessman, Burroughs. On the verge of being thrown out of their apartment and penniless, Kirbey begin experimenting with an invisibility potion that Tse-Shan told him about.
Invisible, Kirbey decides to play ghost and visit the businessman who took advantage of them, trying to set things right and make sure they will have all the money they need. Del Rey describes his trip from their apartment to the reseller and back. Unfortunately, the effects of the potion on Kirbey seem to follow the needs of the plot at any given moment. Generally, Kirbey is unable to touch anything. He can’t call for an elevator, open a door, are signal for a trolley to stop. At the same time, he needs to be careful he doesn’t bump anyone and has to avoid people sitting on him, so while his invisibility is intact, the commensurate incorporeality seems to come and go.
Any fans of Deadwood out there? I’m still pissed at HBO for canceling it (and really hoping these rumors of a movie pan out) because I’m a sucker for stories about “the frontier.” I fully accept that the American frontier in the Old West or the Age of Exploration or basically anytime one culture expanded into a new part of the globe, it was far from some Golden Age. But those time periods are interesting. Take people away from what they know and stick them somewhere totally alien, and the way they adapt and survive and either come together or kill each other has so much potential for great storytelling.
This is the part where I say “And this next book is no exception,” since I had a blast reading Outpost, the start of W. Michael Gear’s Donovantrilogy (and the first novel of his I’ve read). The setting is very Deadwood meets Avatar, set on a frontier colony that hasn’t been resupplied in almost a decade, on a planet filled with bizarre creatures and plants ready to kill the careless or unfortunate. Add in a bunch of new arrivals when the next resupply ship finally shows up, and what you get is an immediate clash of cultures between the freedom-loving colonists and the representatives of the Corporation, which basically runs Earth back home (maybe there’s some Firefly in here, too). Overall, the running idea with a lot of the main characters is the possibility of either losing yourself or remaking yourself in the frontier, with arcs that are diverse and often surprising.
One thing that Outpost also has going for it is the number of female protagonists, which is great in a subgenre that’s traditionally male-dominated (I feel like we’re saying that a lot these days, but it’s true and it’s awesome). But I also noticed immediately that a lot of these female characters are quickly and frequently sexualized and/or objectified by the male characters around them. That threw me out of the story a bit, since at the same time characters like Talina Perez and Supervisor Aguila are nuanced, badass and/or self-sufficient; I’d be very interested in the opinion of a female reviewer here*, to see if I’m being overly cautious (since this is something I try to be very careful with in my own writing) or there is anything problematic.
James P. Killus was born on June 1, 1950 and died on September 23, 2008.
Killus is a chemist who began publishing science fiction in 1981 with “Son of ETAOIN SHRDLU,” written with Sharon N. Farber, Susanna Jacobson, and Dave Stout. He went on to write nearly two dozen stories, most of them hard science fiction, and published the novels Book of Shadows and Sunsmoke in the mid 1980s.
Killus sold “Flower of the Void” to Ian Randal Strock for publication in issue 7 of Artemis, which appeared in Summer of 2002. The story has not been reprinted.
“Flower of the Void” pushes the definition of a story. It has no real plot or characters, instead focusing on the process by which a space probe that starts out as nanomachines is launched and completes its mission to Eridani Epsilon.
The story is entirely devoid of any emotion, presenting an analytical view of millions of nanoprobes which are launched from the moon and try to make their way through the solar system, with fewer and fewer succeeding even as the probes use atoms they encounter in their travels to expand upon themselves and permit themselves to continue to carry on their mission.
One of the things the story does make clear is that space exploration is a long, slow process, often ending with a very brief period of productivity. Killus’s flowers travel for more than a century, only to spend two months in the star system that was its target. This can be compared to the current New Horizons mission, which spent a decade traveling from Earth to Pluto, only to spend a few hours traversing that system (and will similarly have a limited time during its flyby of 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019). However, limited time in system doesn’t equate to inability to provide massive amounts of data.
