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Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

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Cover by Phil Parks
Cover by Phil Parks

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.

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Birthday Reviews: February Index

Birthday Reviews: February Index

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January index

At the one sixth mark in our journey through the year, here’s a look back at the birthday reviews that appeared at Black Gate in February.

February 1, Yevgeny Zamyatin: “The Cave”
February 2, Selina Rosen: “Food Quart”
February 3, Alex Bledsoe: “Shall We Gather ”
February 4, Neal Asher: “Owner Space”
February 5, Joseph H. Delaney: “Survival Course”
February 6, Eric Flint: “Portraits”
February 7, Karen Joy Fowler: “Always”
February 8, Mary Robinette Kowal: “Just Right”

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Birthday Reviews: Stephen Goldin’s “The Last Ghost”

Birthday Reviews: Stephen Goldin’s “The Last Ghost”

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Protostars-small Protostars-back-small

Cover by Gene Szafran

Stephen Goldin was born on February 28, 1947. Prior to becoming a science fiction author, Goldin earned a degree in astronomy and worked as a civilian space scientist for the US Navy.

Beginning in 1976, Goldin wrote the Family d’Alembert novels, based on a novella by E.E. “Doc” Smith. He followed that series up with the Parsina Saga and wrote the two volume Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series in collaboration with his second wife, Mary Mason.

He co-edited the anthology Protostars with David Gerrold and edited the anthology The Alien Condition solo. Goldin also collaborated with his first wife, Kathleen Sky, on both fiction and non-fiction. He received a Nebula nomination for his short story “The Last Ghost” in 1972.

“The Last Ghost” originally appeared in the 1971 anthology Protostars, edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin. Lloyd Biggle, Jr. reprinted it in Nebula Award Stories Seven. Goldin included it in two of his collections, The Last Ghost and Other Stories and Ghosts, Girls, & Other Phantasms. It has been translated into French twice and German twice.

Goldin looks at a distant future in which immorality of a sort has been achieved by downloading people’s consciousness into machines. His two characters, which he arbitrarily designates as male and female, have both been downloaded into a computer for several thousand years.

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A Demanding Work that Sings all the Stronger in 2018: The Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White

A Demanding Work that Sings all the Stronger in 2018: The Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White

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The Witch in the Wood-small The Witch in the Wood-back-small

In my early teens, I discovered and devoured T.H. White’s omnibus quartet of novels, The Once and Future King. The first and most child-like remains the best known: The Sword in the Stone. After this, and unjustly neglected (by Disney and the world in general), come The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle In the Wind.

In my later teen years, I concluded that The Once and Future King, taken as a whole, was the single best novel I had ever read. Having reached the ripe old age of fifty, it’s time to re-evaluate. Is White’s work still worth its weight in gold?

Perhaps you recall Book One, in which the young King Arthur, known affectionately as the Wart, meets Merlyn, gambols through a lifetime’s worth of transformational adventures, and draws a certain sword from a stone. Hysterically funny, dreamy and given to long flights of fancy about hawks and birds, The Once and Future King still works genuine magic, even when its digressions and mood swings threaten to topple the whole everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink mess into a stew of narrative anarchy.

In short, it’s a full meal and then some, and I, along with fantasy lovers the world over, adore it still. (Ursula K. LeGuin, R.I.P., lent her opinion to one edition’s jacket copy, saying, “I have laughed at White’s great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life.”) Yet, many seem unaware that the cycle, tracing Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, continues.

Book Two began life as The Witch in the Wood, and arrived in print in 1939, just as the world fell off a precipice it hadn’t seen coming, and descended into a darkness from which it is still fighting to recover. Revised and expanded, The Witch in the Wood became The Queen of Air and Darkness, and no book better upholds the argument for valuing a work as the sum of its discordant parts.

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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

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A Wrinkle in Time-smallGiven to me by the same friend who told me about A Wizard of Earthsea, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) is another of the books that introduced me to fantasy and science fiction. The novel is a mix of science fiction, fantasy, and good dose of Christianity, and is completely unbound by any rules or expectations about genre. A children’s book, it is also an artifact of a time when fantasy wasn’t primarily a commercial designation. There’s a freshness to the book all these years later, and rereading it was an absolute joy.

Meg Murry is the fourteen-year-old daughter of scientists, and sister to twins Sandy and Denys and the strange, brilliant five-year-old Charles Wallace. Her father, employed by the government, has been missing for some time before the book’s opening, and there has been no word about what happened to him.

In her own eyes Meg is gawky and ugly, made so by her “mouse-brown” hair, glasses, and “teeth covered with braces.” Her self-impression and her worry over her father’s disappearance have caused her to become a poor student. Her principal, a man unsympathetic to her worry to the point of telling her she needs to “face the facts” about her father (implying he’s never returning), warns her she’s in danger of having to repeat ninth grade.

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Birthday Reviews: Michael A. Burstein’s “Reality Check”

Birthday Reviews: Michael A. Burstein’s “Reality Check”

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Cover by Kim Poor
Cover by Kim Poor

Michael A. Burstein was born on February 27, 1970. Burstein is an Orthodox Jew and many of his stories are informed by this background, from the main character of “Reality Check” to the entire story “Kaddish for the Last Survivor.”

Much of his short fiction is gathered in the collection I Remember the Future: The Award-Nominated Stories of Michael A. Burstein. His debut story “TeleAbsence” won the Analog Readers Poll and the Science Fiction Chronicle Readers Poll. His later novella “Sanctuary,” also won the Anlab poll. Burstein won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1997.

“Reality Check” was first published in Analog’s November 1999 issue, purchased by Stanley Schmidt. It was reprinted in Burstein’s collection I Remember the Future and was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella and shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Michael Burstein’s four linked stories, “Broken Symmetry,” “Absent Friends,” “Reality Check,” and “Empty Spaces,” deal with parallel universes linked together through a Superconducting Supercollider. Although “Reality Check” is the third in the sequence and refers to the subject of “Absent Friends,” it requires no knowledge of the previous story to enjoy it (although the four appear sequentially in I Remember the Future).

David Strock is a theoretical physicist specializing in low energy research. When one of his papers gains the attention of a government facility in Texas, he is invited to see the classified work they are doing. Despite his better judgment, and the desires of his wife, he visits them and decides to take a temporary appointment to work on the secret project, offering him the chance to collaborate with another universe. Strock tries to balance his research and time in Texas with his home life in Boston, although the strife in Boston seems to be worse than Burstein shows.

When Strock meets a woman who reveals that he has a near doppelganger on the other side, his interest is further piqued in the project, although he tries to point out to her that he is not the person she has heard about from the other universe. In the end, Burstein successfully ties together disparate scenes of Strock’s home-life, his lunches at MIT with a graduate student, his doppelganger, and the research he was conducting.

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Birthday Reviews: Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Girl Had Guts”

Birthday Reviews: Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Girl Had Guts”

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Venture Science Fiction January 1957-small Venture Science Fiction January 1957-back-small

Cover by Ed Emshwiller

Theodore Sturgeon was born on February 26, 1918 (Happy Centennial Theodore!) and died on May 8, 1985. Sturgeon won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his story “Slow Sculpture,” possibly the only time a story has won the Novelette Nebula and the Short Story Hugo.

His novel More Than Human received the International Fantasy Award. A translation of “And Now the News…” received a Seiun Award while “The World Well Lost” received a Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame Award. Sturgeon himself received the Forry Award from LASFS in 1971 and a Life Achievement World Fantasy Award shortly after his death. In 2000 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He’s remembered today mostly for his short stories, including “Killdozer,” “A Saucer of Loneliness,” and “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister,” but he also wrote the novels More Than Human, Venus Plus X, and The Dreaming Jewels. Kurt Vonnegut’s recurring character Kilgore Trout is believed to have been named for him.

Sturgeon wrote the classic Star Trek episode “Amok Time,” which introduced the Vulcan salute and the phrase “Live long and prosper.” His short fiction has been collected into a thirteen volume set by North Atlantic Press. The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, presented annually for short stories by the Gunn Center at the University of Kansas, is named in his honor.

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Birthday Reviews: A.M. Dellamonica’s “A Key to the Illuminated Heretic”

Birthday Reviews: A.M. Dellamonica’s “A Key to the Illuminated Heretic”

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Cover by Jeff Easley
Cover by Jeff Easley

A.M. (Alyxandra Margaret) Dellamonica was born on February 25, 1968. She began publishing short fiction in 1994 and published her first novel, Indigo Springs, the first novel in a duology, in 2009.

From 2014-2016, she published the Hidden Sea trilogy, beginning with Child of a Hidden Sea and continuing with A Daughter of No Nation and The Nature of a Pirate. With Steve Berman, Dellamonica edited Heiress of Russ 2016: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction.

Dellamonica won the Sunburst Award for Indigo Springs and the Aurora Award for A Daughter of No Nation. She has one other Aurora nomination and has also received nominations for the Lambda Award for novel and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for short fiction.

“A Key to the Illuminated Heretic” was original published in Alternate Generals III, edited by Harry Turtledove in 2005. It was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Dellamonica later published the story in an e-chapbook.

A.M. Dellamonica creates a world in which Joan of Arc is not burned at the stake on May 30, 1431, instead surviving to continue to be a thorn in the side of not only King Henry VI on England and King Charles VI of France, but also of Pope Eugene IV, continuing her battle not only for the secular realm of France, but also in support of her own heretical sect of Christianity, the Listeners, who follow Joan and believe in her visions.

While much of the story describes her military escapes in France, the focus is really on her relationship with a young artist, Dulice Aulon, and the paintings she created of important moments in Joan’s life. Descriptions of these paintings are found throughout, as if written for an exhibit catalog, and the paintings described help illuminate the action that immediately follows.

Dellamonica notes that Joan was illiterate, which serves to heighten the importance of Aulon’s paintings. They are the way Joan’s story is spread to the masses, gaining Joan adherents who are willing to fight for Joan’s visions and vision for France and support her, particularly the city of Orleans, which Joan had rescued from siege prior to Dellamonica’s point of divergence.

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Beowulf: A New Telling — Almost Forgotten Childhood Classic

Beowulf: A New Telling — Almost Forgotten Childhood Classic

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beowulf-new-telling-robert-nye-coverMy formative reading years in late elementary school, that Golden Age of preparation to become an adult reader, contains a row of perennial favorites to which I’ve frequently returned. Madeleine L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, John Christopher, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, John Bellairs, Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and that’s only getting started. But for mysterious reasons, one book often slips through the cracks of memory, even though it had an enormous influence on my later interests in history, literature, and myth: Beowulf: A New Telling by Robert Nye. When I do recall it from the marshland of childhood memory, its prose and images are as vivid as any other juvenile book I embraced in fourth and fifth grade. The pictures it conjured in my mind are the ones I still see when reading the original poem. There’s no denying the quality of a work that had such a powerful effect on my conception of Beowulf.

When I recently picked up a copy of Nye’s book, I discovered it retains its potency as both a great story and a reflection of the magic of the actual poem. Some of Nye’ sentence structures are simplified for middle-grade readers, and his prose retelling can’t match the authenticity or allure of an Anglo-Saxon epic poem composed over twelve hundred years ago. But its achievement as a short novel version of Beowulf impressed me enough on this re-read that I want to buy cartons of it and ship them to elementary schools. Hey, you kids who like Harry Potter! Here’s a short fantasy book with three great monsters in it, and it’s super violent and gory, but that’s totally okay because it’s a version of the first classic of English poetry. It’s educational: your parents can’t stop you! (Okay, I won’t guarantee that last part …)

Beowulf: A New Telling was published in 1968, although it felt new when I first read it around 1982. A teacher had recommended the book to our class for extra credit and gave us a short summary of its background: a modern re-telling of a poem by an unknown author. The original was written in the foundling days of English, possibly the eighth century. I bought a copy at a school book fair, and my blood thrilled at the haunting cover: the hero astride a horse, riding into a damp fen aflutter with bats, the monster Grendel (or perhaps Grendel’s Mother) lurking in the corner waiting for him.

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Birthday Reviews: August Derleth’s “The Return of Hastur”

Birthday Reviews: August Derleth’s “The Return of Hastur”

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Weird Tales March 1939-small Weird Tales March 1939-back-small

Cover by Virgil Finlay

August Derleth was born on February 24, 1909 and died on July 4, 1971. It was Derleth who coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” for H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, although Derleth had earlier suggested the “Hastur Mythology,” which Lovecraft rejected.

In 1939, Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House, a small press dedicated to preserving the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and eventually those who were influenced by Lovecraft.

Although best known as a proponent of Lovecraft and for his own stories which expand on Lovecraft’s work, Derleth also wrote children’s books and biographies aimed at kids and detective fiction, most notable the Solar Pons series. He felt his Sac Prairie saga, which was based on Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he lived, was his most important work.

“The Return of Hastur” was purchased by Farnsworth Wright and appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales, which also included a story by Lovecraft. Derleth reprinted the story in his collection Someone in the Dark in 1941 and again in The Mask of Cthulhu in 1958. Lin Carter selected the story for The Spawn of Cthulhu and it was eventually included in Robert M. Price’s The Hastur Cycle. It was included in the Barnes and Noble collection of Derleth stories The Cthulhu Mythos and in In Lovecraft’s Shadows: The Cthulhu Mythos Stories of August Derleth, issued by Arkham House in 1998. The story has been translated into French, Italian, and German. Lovecraft is known to have read and commented on an early version.

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