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August 1, Raymond A. Palmer: “Diagnosis”
August 2, Robert Holdstock: “Magic Man”
August 3, Clifford D. Simak: “Observer”
August 4, Rick Norwood: “Portal”
August 5, Elisabeth Vonarburg: “Cogito”
August 6, Ian R. MacLeod: “Starship Day”
Nancy Holder was born on August 29, 1953.
Holder has won the Bram Stoker Award five times. She won the Best Short Story award for “Lady Madonna,” “I Hear the Mermaids Singing,” and “Café Endless: Spring Rain.” She won for Best Novel for Dead in the Water and for Best Young-Adult Novel for The Screaming Season.
Her story “”Prayer of the Knight of the Sword” was published in the 1995 anthology Excalibur, edited by Edward E. Kramer, Richard Gilliam, and Martin H. Greenberg. The story has never been reprinted.
The story opens with Joseph of Arimathea climbing to the top of Glastonbury Tor, surrounded by four pagan spirits, although he has no idea of their presence. When Joseph dies during his climb, the spirits plant his staff on the tor and eventually use it to create Excalibur.
The sword is next seen in the possession of Geoffrey de Troyes, a young knight fighting in Jerusalem during the Crusades. While all around him the crusaders are raping, pillage, and killing the Muslims and Jews who live in the city, Geoffrey cannot participate, only seeing the cruelty of their actions and how they seem to fly in the face of Christian virtue. When a young Muslim woman winds up in his path, he shows her mercy and tries to help her, realizing that at the same time he’s rescuing her he needs to rescue himself. His mercy caught the attention of Joseph’s spirits, who appear to him and tell him to return to England with the sword, where he will wield it until one who was destined to appear. In the process, Geoffrey brought Igraine to Glastonbury and pushed the sword into the stone.
While at first the timeline of the story doesn’t seem to make sense, with Geoffrey de Troyes fighting in the crusades, when the tradition of Merlin living his life backwards is taken into account, along with the idea that time may be malleable, the strangeness of the order of events actually becomes something of a strength for the story.
And so we near the end of our months-long march through the ten books of Glen Cook’s groundbreaking Black Company series. While best remembered as one of the first military fantasy series, one important takeaway is that it’s not that at all. Yes, the Black Company, the last Free Company of Khatovar, is the main “character” of the books, but the tale told is filled with so much more than just war. War is always on the horizon, just a chapter or two away, but Cook’s 3,500-page saga gives us the Company in times of peace and times of flight. He shows how it grows, evolves, and mutates into something different but still the same, bound by four-and-a-half centuries of tradition. Its soldiers possess an intense fealty to the Company as the thing that sets them apart from the world in which they can find no other place.
The title for Soldiers Live (2000) comes from a cryptic statement made to Sleepy in Water Sleeps by the stroke-incapacitated One-Eye: “Soldiers live. And wonder why.” Sleepy interprets it as the question every soldier asks each time they survive a battle but comrades are laid low by swords and arrows. It became her mantra, taking the place of the larger question she asked of herself in the last pages of Water Sleeps.
For now, I just rest. And indulge myself in writing, in remembering the fallen, in considering the strange twists life takes, in considering what plan God must have if the good are condemned to die young while the wicked prosper, if righteous men can commit deep evil while bad men demonstrate unexpected streaks of humanity.
Soldiers live. And wonder why.
Four years have passed, and the Company is safer than it has ever been. Using one of the Shadowgates on the Plain of Glittering Stone, Sleepy led the Company beyond the reach of Soulcatcher and Mogaba and into another world. Despite the sanctuary it’s found, the Company is a changed thing. Goblin died fighting Kina, One-Eye is increasingly weakened by a series of strokes, and Croaker, Lady, and Murgen haven’t fully recovered from the effects of being trapped in stasis for fifteen years. Willow Swan is balding and the remains of his flowing blond locks are gray. Still, there is peace and, in a nice touch, Croaker has again taken up the Annalist’s pen. It’s through his jaundiced vision the final chapter of this epic will be seen.
Edward Bryant was born on August 27, 1945 and died on February 10, 2017.
Bryant won back to back Nebulas for Best Short Story in 1979 and 1980 for “Stone” and “giANTS,” both of which were also nominated for the Hugo Award. His work was also nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award. In 1997, the International Horror Guild named Bryant a Living Legend. Bryant was the Toastmaster for Denvention II, the 1981 Worldcon and also emceed the masquerade at Denvention III. He also served as Toastmaster for World Fantasy Con, ArmadilloCon, TusCon, and Death Equinox. He collaborated with Harlan Ellison, James Sutherland, Jody Harper, Trey R. Barker, Connie Willis, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Dan Simmons.
“‘Saurus Wrecks” is a testament to the power of dreams, as well as the idea of taking a bad situation and turning it to the general benefit of the community. The town of Goshen, Wyoming was in for a surprise when a coal plant was built in nearby Stubbleford. The winds meant that the enormous plume of steam the plant generated was falling on Goshen, changing the town’s climate. The only person who saw this as beneficial was Rexford Allyn Pugnell, the town drunk.
Pugnell pointed out to the town council that the new climate was perfect for growing ferns and recommended that the city ban the growth of flowering plants to turn it into a fern Mecca. Of course, being the town drunk and suggesting such a thing gained him absolutely no traction. Rather than give up on his idea, Pugnell approached one of the school’s teachers, Miss Devereaux with the simple request that he be allowed to use some extra chicken wire she had and build something on the side lot of her house. Without asking questions, she agreed and Pugnell set about building an enormous metal Tyrannosaurus rex.
Although the town attacked the sculpture, especially when he began to incorporate manure into it, its eventual sprouting of ferns, supporting Pugnell’s initial suggestion, causes a make-over to the economically depressed town. Although Bryant doesn’t go into detail about the specifics of how the town builds on Pugnell’s legacy, or that of Devereaux, who fights to allow him to do what he needs to, it is clear that Pugnell has won his argument and found a way to take the steam from the coal plant and turn it to the town’s benefit.
Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 and died on June 5, 2012.
Bradbury never received the Hugo Award, although he received four Retro Hugo Awards for his novel Fahrenheit 451, his fanzine Futuria Fantasia, and twice for Best Fan Writer. He was nominated for a single Hugo. He was never nominated for a Nebula Award. He won the Bram Stoker Award for his collection One More for the Road. Fahrenheit 451 also won a Prometheus Award and a Geffen Award. Bradbury won three Seiun Awards for Best Foreign Short Story. He won the coveted Balrog Award for Poetry in 1979. In 1966, he was awarded a Forry Award by LASFS. He received a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1977 and was named a Grand Master of Fantasy with a Gandalf Award in 1980, the final year the award was in existence. Bradbury was the Guest of Honor at ConFederation, the 44th Worldcon, held in Atlanta in 1986. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bram Stoker Awards in 1989, the same year he was named a Grand Master by SFWA. World Horror Con named him a Grandmaster in 2001 and the Rhysling Awards did so in 2008. He was given an Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008. Bradbury was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2012.
“Downwind from Gettysburg” was originally published in Bradbury’s collection I Sing the Body Electric in 1969 and was reprinted in 2003 in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. When the latter was reprinted in two volumes, the story appeared in Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Although it hasn’t often been reprinted in English, the story has been translated, usually as part of I Sing the Body Electric, into French, Portuguese, German, and Italian.
In 1964, Walt Disney created an animatronic version of Abraham Lincoln to appear at the Illinois Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. The following year the exhibit moved to Disneyland, where the Lincoln show continued to run, on and off through the present, although another version, featuring versions of all the Presidents, runs at the Magic Kingdom in Florida. In 1969 Ray Bradbury published “Downwind from Gettysburg,” which featured a similar animatronic version of Abraham Lincoln.
Bradbury’s version, however, sits in a replica of Ford’s Theatre and the story opens with someone coming into the theatre and shooting the animatronic figure in the head. Although Bayes, the proprietor of the exhibit, knows that he must call the designer, Phipps, to have the robot fixed, he doesn’t want to make the call, instead tracking down the “assassin” who shot the robot. The man, who is unemployed and whose life seems to be a shambles, explains that his name is Norman Llewellyn Booth. Booth has the feeling that fate has conspired to make him recreate the heinous crime committed by his namesake, although there is no direct connection between the two Booths. Instead, Booth figured the nature of his crime would bring him a notoriety he was otherwise lacking.
I just finished Water Sleeps (1999), the ninth and penultimate volume in Glen Cook’s Black Company series. Instead of the gigantic battles where legions of soldiers clash under the evil glow cast by demonic sorceries we’re used to from him, Cook focuses here on subtler subjects. Yes, as last week’s review made clear, it’s chock-a-block with nasty twists, kidnappings, and assassinations, but there’s a quieter aspect to this book than to any of the others. For all the craziness that arises, particularly in the second half, this book really starts presenting the Black Company as family. There’s been lots of lip service to that effect over the course of the previous eight books, but we haven’t much seen it borne out. For that reason all the deaths and farewells in Water Sleeps — and there are plenty — have a greater poignancy and impact than ever before.
At the end of the first part of Water Sleeps, the Black Company had left Taglios. With the sort of misdirection and duplicity that is at its heart, the Company split into several groups, adopted secret identities, and lit out separately for the uttermost end of the known world: the Plain of Glittering Stone. Croaker, Lady, Murgen — in fact, most of the major members of the company — had been trapped inside a maze of caverns beneath the Plain by their oldest remaining enemy: Soulcatcher. It had taken fifteen years for the Company’s captain, Sleepy, to come up with a plan to free them and the means to carry it out.
Sleepy and her comrades arrive at the edge of the Plain and quickly outmaneuver the Taglian regional commander, Suvrin. A clever, doughy man who has risen to his position based more on family connections than military competence, he is unable to escape manipulation by Sleepy and ends up willingly signing on with the Company. I mention this bit here because it will become very important in the series’ finale, Soldiers Live. It also reinforces how the Company prefers to operate. From long experience as a spy and urban guerilla, Sleepy has become adept at quickly assessing someone’s real nature and playing to it.
Gradually the rest of the Company, their dependents, and their animals and baggage train make it to the entrance to the Plain, and just in time. Once again, Murgen’s ability to spy via astral projection saves the Company. He sees Soulcatcher, having figured out Sleepy’s plan, in hot pursuit. Barely forewarned of her imminent arrival, the Company rushes its people to the safety of the Plain — where instant death awaits any who enter without the protection of the Nyueng Bao key — while preparing a deadly reception for Soulcather at its entrance. It doesn’t succeed in killing Soulcatcher, and she ends up with the the Kina-possessed Daughter of Night and Naryan Singh as her prisoners, but the Company escapes. Soon they are on the brink of recovering their lost comrades.
It as this point the truth of the vast, circular Plain of Glittering Stone is finally revealed. It is a gigantic artifact created by a vanished race and connects sixteen worlds. Whether they are different realities, the same world at different times, no one knows. What is known is that humans, being the greedy, vicious things they are, turned to conquest across the sixteen worlds. At some point, the greatest villains of the universe — now remembered as gods in the Gunni pantheon, though their origin is unclear — pooled their resources and elevated one of their own to even greater heights of power and wickedness: Kina the Destroyer. Eventually she was cast down and imprisoned far beneath the giant fortress and someone — or possibly the Plain itself — created a giant golem, Shivetya, to protect the the gates and oversee traffic between the worlds.
Miriam Allen deFord was born on August 21, 1888 and died on February 22, 1975.
Although deFord had some fiction published as early 1928, she really turned to writing science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s and 60s. Her non-SF book The Overbury Affair earned her an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book and she helped develop and sign the Humanist Manifesto in 1973. Much of her science fiction appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning under the editorship of Anthony Boucher.
DeFord’s “Press Conference” appeared in the sixth and final volume of Frederik Pohl’s Star Science Fiction anthology series in 1959. The story has not been reprinted since.
“Press Conference” is essentially a transcription of the press conference given upon the occasion of the return of the first human to travel outside the galaxy. It is told, mostly, in the voices of Mr. Rasmussen, the press secretary for the United Nations whose job is to introduce her and make sure she givens approved questions, and Miss X, or Dor-je Lhor-kang, the woman who made the journey.
The press conference opens up by listing the specifications used to find someone to go into space. A woman is the preferred candidate, and she should be acclimatized to higher elevations, so someone from Peru or Chile. She should have a Ph.D. in physics and, because there is limited space in the spacecraft, she should be a dwarf. This is all by way of introduction of deFord’s somewhat atypical protagonist.
The press conference goes well as long as Lhor-kang is speaking. She knows the limitations Rasmussen has placed on her and has no real desire to break away from him. As soon as she opens the floor to questions, however, the press conference goes off the rails as the reporters want to ask questions with real substance. Although Rasmussen attempts to retain control over her, Lhor-kang eventually lets slip the truth about the aliens that she has seen and their desires with regard to the Earth. When Lhor-kang exhibits admiration for the aliens’ goals, she is branded by some of the reporters as a traitor or brainwashed.
Greg Bear, considered one of the “Killer B’s” with Gregory Benford and David Brin, was born on August 20, 1951 and is married to Astrid, daughter of Poul and Karen Anderson.
Bear won the Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette “Blood Music” and his short story “Tangents.” He also won the Nebula Award for the novella “Hardfought” and the novels Moving Mars and Darwin’s Radio. Moving Mars also won the Ignotus Award and Darwin’s Radio earned him his second Endeavour Award, the first was for Dinosaur Summer. He won the Prix Apollo for Blood Music and the Prix Ozone for /Slant. He won the Seiun Award for his story “Tangents” and “Heads.” In 2006, he received the Robert A. Heinlein Award and he was the Worldcon Guest of Honor for Millennium Philcon in Philadelphia in 2001.
“Schrödinger’s Plague” first appeared in the March 29, 1982 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, edited by Stanley Schmidt. Bear included it in his short story collected Tangents in 1989 and in 1992, the story was translated into Dutch and into German in 1997. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery included the story in The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction: 1960-1990. Bear against included it in a collection with The Collected Stories of Greg Bear and when that volume was divided into three smaller books, it was invluded in Just Over the Horizon: The Collected Stories of Greg Bear Volume I.
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The Moon and Mars have fascinated science fiction writers for generations, although I thought the era of classic Mars and Moon anthologies was over. But it turns out that’s not the case. At least not while editor Mike Ashley is on the job, anyway.
Lost Mars: The Golden Age of the Red Planet, which collects pulp-era tales (and pre pulp-era tales) from Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, Astounding, and Worlds of If, was published in April 2018. Its sister anthology Moonrise: The Golden Era of Lunar Adventures, with stories from F&SF, Amazing, Tales of Wonder, Astounding, New Worlds, and Fantastic, arrives in September. Both are part of the British Library Science Fiction Classics, which I’ve never heard of, but for which I immediately have a deep and passionate love. Near as I can figure out, it’s a relatively new imprint devoted to early 20th Century SF. Or maybe just stories of Mars and the Moon, I dunno. But either way, love love love.
These are very welcome books. They include tales of adventure and exploration from the pre-spaceflight era (the most recent stories are from 1963, only two years after the start of the Apollo space program), which means they’re not particularly concerned with getting the science right. Scientific verisimilitude was the province of late 20th Century SF; these stories concern themselves chiefly with imagination and adventure.
And when it comes to the Moon and Mars, human imagination has been pretty darn fertile. These books contain some of the greatest SF ever written, including Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant tale “The Sentinel,” which inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Stanley G. Weinbaum’s groundbreaking “A Martian Odyssey,” which Isaac Asimov said, “had the effect on the field of an exploding grenade. With this single story, Weinbaum was instantly recognized as the world’s best living science fiction writer.” There’s also a Martian Chronicles tale by Ray Bradbury, an excerpt from H.G. Wells’ classic First Men in the Moon, and stories by Walter M. Miller Jr, J. G. Ballard, Gordon R. Dickson, Edmond Hamilton, John Wyndham, E. C. Tubb, and many others.
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!
