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Birthday Reviews: Tad Williams’s “Go Ask Elric”

Birthday Reviews: Tad Williams’s “Go Ask Elric”

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Elric Tales of the White Wolf-small Elric Tales of the White Wolf-back-small

Cover by Brom

Tad Williams was born on March 14, 1957. He published the Memory, Sorry & Thorn fantasy series beginning in 1988 and followed up with the Otherland series in 1996 and Shadowmarch in 2004. Williams has also published a handful of stand alone novels, including Tailchaser’s Song and Caliban’s Hour. He collaborated with Nina Kiriki Hoffman on Child of an Ancient City.

Williams was a nominee for the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award in 1986 and the next year Tailchaser’s Song was a nominee for the William L. Crawford Award. Two of his novels have been nominated for Germany’s Phantastik Preis.

“Go Ask Elric” was published in 1994 in Elric: Tales of the White Wolf, a Michael Moorcock Festschrift which allowed other authors to play with Moorcock’s settings, characters, and themes. The story was translated into French for inclusion in an abridged version of the anthology as a whole. Williams later included it in his collection Rite: Short Work, which also included an essay Williams wrote as an introduction to Moorcock’s novel Gloriana.

Williams manages a successful homage to Michael Moorcock in “Go Ask Elric,” pulling in elements from Moorcock’s stories “Elric at the End of Time” as well as “the Vanishing Tower” and “Sailing to the Future.” Rather than focusing on Elric, William’s main character is Pogo Chapman, a young kid who worships Jimi Hendrix in the mid-1970s. During an acid trip, Pogo is sucked into the multiverse where he meets up with an imprisoned Elric and helps him escape. As Moorcock did in “Elric at the End of Time,” Williams switches between Elric’s point of view and Pogo’s, allowing the reader to see just how much Elric misreads the situations he is in.

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Birthday Reviews: Alastair Reynolds’s “A Spy in Europa”

Birthday Reviews: Alastair Reynolds’s “A Spy in Europa”

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Cover by SMS
Cover by SMS

Alastair Reynolds was born on March 13, 1966.

Reynolds has won the British SF Association Award for his novel Chasm City, the Seiun Award for a translation of his short story “Weather” and the Sidewise Award for his short story “The Fixation.” His various works have been nominated for the Italia Award, addition Seiun and BSFA nominations, the Philip K. Dick Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Hugo Award. His novella Diamond Dogs was adapted as a play by Althos Low at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago.

“A Spy in Europa” was originally published in issue #120 of Interzone, edited by David Pringle, in June 1997. Gardner Dozois reprinted the story the next year in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection and Reynolds included it in his 2006 collection Galactic North. Part of the Revelation Space series, the story was translated into Japanese in 1997.

Marius Vargovic is the titular agent in “A Spy in Europa.” With the four Galilean moons divided between two political entities, the Demarchy on Europa and Io and Gilgamesh Isis on Ganymede and Callisto, Vargovic is being sent to Callisto because a sleeper agent, Cholok, has become active and has information that he needs to retrieve.

Vargovic’s exact mission is never fully laid out, but it involves getting information from Cholok about a method of undermining the floating cities of Europa, and undergoing surgery to alter his body to allow him to breathe underwater, part of the cover he has given to the local authorities.

Europa is a world of bioengineering, and one of the subspecies are the Denizens, created for slave labor and now banished to portions of the Europan sea near heated vents. Little is known about the Denizens and Vargovic tries to supplement his mission by finding out about them, a goal made easier when his rendezvous point is changed and he finds himself chased by Europan agents until he is rescued by the Denizens.

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Birthday Reviews: Harry Harrison’s “The Mothballed Spaceship”

Birthday Reviews: Harry Harrison’s “The Mothballed Spaceship”

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Cover by John Sposato
Cover by John Sposato

Harry Harrison was born on March 12, 1925 and died on August 15, 2012.

He is perhaps best known for his Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero series. Other series include The Hammer and the Cross, Deathworld, Stars and Stripes, and Eden. Before publishing science fiction Harrison worked as a comic book artist, often collaborating with Wallt Wood. In 1950, he left comic art to begin writing and editing, although he occasionally did return, and wrote the Flash Gordon newspaper strip in the 50s and 60s.

Harrison wrote the novel Make Room, Make Room, which served as the basis for the Nebula Award winning film Soylent Green. In collaboration with John Holt, he won the Italia Award for The Hammer and the Cross and the entire trilogy was nominated for a Sidewise Award. He was the Guest of Honor at ConFiction, the 1990 Worldcon. Harrison was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004 and was named a SFWA Grand Master in 2009. In addition to Holt, he has also collaborated with Robert Sheckley, David Bischoff, Jack C. Haldeman II, Marvin Minsky, and others.

With Brian W. Aldiss, Harrison edited several anthologies and published SF Horizons, the first serious journal of science fiction criticism. Harrison often made use of Esperanto in his fiction.

“The Mothballed Spaceship” was written for Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, which Harry Harrison edited. It was later reprinted in Harrison’s collections The Best of Harry Harrison and Stainless Steel Visions. Set in the same universe as Harrison’s Deathworld trilogy, the story was included in an omnibus edition of that series published by BenBella Books in 2005 (earlier omnibus editions of the trilogy do not include this story). In 1985, it was translated into Croatian for publication in the magazine Sirius.

Harrison provides a puzzle story with “The Mothballed Spaceship.” A derelict space battleship has been found five millennia after it was abandoned, however its automatic defense systems are still active. Jason dinAlt, Kerk, and Meta have been hired to figure out how to get on board and take control of the ship, which has destroyed all other attempts to approach it, and are given thirty days to solve the problem.

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Birthday Reviews: F.M. Busby’s “Tundra Moss”

Birthday Reviews: F.M. Busby’s “Tundra Moss”

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Cover by Paul Swendsen
Cover by Paul Swendsen

F.M. (Francis Marion) Busby was born on March 11, 1921 and died on February 17, 2005. In 1960, Busby, along with his wife Elinor, Burnett Toskey, and Wally Weber, won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine for Cry of the Nameless, which was nominated a total of three times. In 1943, he joined the US Army and was assigned to work on the Alaska Communication System, which forms the background for his alternate history “Tundra Moss.” Busby served as the Vice President of SFWA from 1974-6. His novels include the Demu trilogy, the Rebel Dynasty books, and the Rissa Kerguelen series.

“Tundra Moss” appeared in the third volume of Gregory Benford’s What Might Have Been series of alternate history anthologies with the theme Alternate Wars. Its only reprints have been in subsequent editions of that book.

Set during World War II, the Alaska Communication System (ACS) outpost on Amchtika Island is an integral part of the United States war efforts in the Pacific theatre, made more important by the fact that in this timeline, the US is concentrating its power on the Japanese. They figure they can worry about the European theatre later, with the exception of a small force there led by Dwight Eisenhower.

While the story focuses on Buster Morgan’s activities in Amchitka, Busby also allows peeks into the actions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a band of Japanese saboteurs operating on Amchitka, and scouts in the area as the Japanese attempt to destroy the communications lines and the Americans are trying to relay orders which will support a major offensive far to the south.

Alternate history stories often teach the reader something about a relatively unknown and seemingly minor part of history, and the ACS certainly qualifies in the regard. The fact that Busby was stationed on Amchitka brings a level of detail and realism to the story which would have been difficult to match with just research. The disjointed nature of the story, jumping back and forth between the different characters, tends to work against it. It would have been stronger with fewer viewpoint characters and a more singular focus.

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Birthday Reviews: Theodore Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World”

Birthday Reviews: Theodore Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World”

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Cover by Richard Powers
Cover by Richard Powers

Theodore R. Cogswell was born on March 10, 1918 and died on February 3, 1987.

Cogswell received a Hugo nomination for his book PITFCS: The Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies, which has been described as a “fanzine for pros.” His story “The Wall Around the World” was nominated for a Retro Hugo Award for Best Novelette. In 2000, he was posthumously inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame.

“The Wall Around the World” first appeared in Beyond Fantasy Fiction, edited by Horace L. Gold, in the September 1953 issue.  It was included in the British version of the magazine the following year and Judith Merril included it in the anthology Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time. The story was included in, and provided the name for, Cogswell’s collection The Wall Around the World in 1962.  Subsequent reprintings occurred in Brian W. Aldiss’s Yet More Penguin Science Fiction and The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, in Harry Harrison’s Worlds of Wonder (a.k.a. Blast Off), and in Wizards, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. Asimov and Greenberg also included the story in The Great SF Stories #15 (1953) and Susan Morris titled the 1990 Cambridge University Press anthology after the story, The Wall Around the World and Other Science Fiction Stories.  Mike Ashley reprinted it in The Mammoth Book of Fantasy. The story was translation into German in 1963, Dutch in 1978, and Italian in 1987.

Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World” has some strong similarities to another story set in a world of magic.  Porgie is at a school for wizards and lives with his abusive aunt, uncle, and cousin because his aunt’s sibling was killed due to magic. Unfortunately, his teachers are not much more supportive than his family.

Porgie’s “problem” is that he has questions. Their world is surrounded by an insurmountable wall and Porgie wants to know what’s on the other side.  Unfortunately, the state of magic isn’t enough to allow him to fly over the wall and when he tries to figure out how, he only hears that essentially, magic is the only way, he shouldn’t ask questions, and their knowledge of magic gets stronger all the time as they focus on the approved texts. There is also the ominous hints that when Porgie’s father questioned the status quo, a supernatural being known as the Black Man did something to him.

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Birthday Reviews: Pat Murphy’s “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away”

Birthday Reviews: Pat Murphy’s “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away”

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Cover by J.K. Potter
Cover by J.K. Potter

Pat Murphy was born on March 9, 1955.

In 1988, Murphy won a Nebula Award for her story “Rachel in Love” and her novel The Falling Woman.  “Rachel in Love” was also nominated for a Hugo Award and won the Theodore Sturrgeon Memorial Award.  She won a World Fantasy Award for her novella “Bones,” and a Philip K. Dick Award for Points of Departure. Murphy’s There and Back Again, by Max Merriwell, a science fictional retelling of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, received the Seiun Award in 2002.

“On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away” was first published by Shawny McCarthy in the May 1985 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It was included by Murphy’s collection Points of Departure. The Women’s Press included the story in the anthology Letters from Home, which reprinted six stories each by Murphy, Karen Joy Fowler, and Pat Cadigan. The story appeared in Mike Resnick’s Future Earths: Under South American Skies.  It was translated for the German edition of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Murphy’s story “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away” is set Merida, Mexico where Gregorio sells hammocks to the tourists. He lives there because after his divorce, his wife remarried and he no longer feels welcome in his home village.  When a strange looking American tourist rejects both his advances and his sales pitch, he determines that he will both sell her a hammock and find his way into her bed.

He is only marginally successful, selling her an hammock, but only managing to talk to her. He learns that just as he is living in exile from his home village, having made a home for himself in Merida, but without roots, so, too, she is living in exile, looking forward to the day she is able to return to her home, which she claims is among the stars.  Although she makes him forget the details of the conversation, Gregorio manages to bring her some relief from her homesickness as she waits to be returned to the stars.

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Birthday Reviews: Paul Preuss’s “Rhea’s Time”

Birthday Reviews: Paul Preuss’s “Rhea’s Time”

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The Ultimate Dinosaur-small The Ultimate Dinosaur-back-small

Cover by Wayne D. Barlowe

Paul Preuss was born on March 7, 1942. Mostly a novelist, he has published the Venus Prime series and stand-alone novels Human Error, The Gates of Heaven, and Core. His short fiction output is more scarce, consisting of three short stories and a published excerpt from his novel Starfire. His novel Secret Passages was a nominee for the 1998 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

“Rhea’s Time” originally appeared in The Ultimate Dinosaur, edited by Robert Silverberg and Byron Priess, which was heavily illustrated by Wayne D. Barlowe and included a mixture of science fiction and factual articles about dinosaurs. The story has not been reprinted outside The Ultimate Dinosaur, but the anthology has seen two editions following its first publication.

Although originally published in a collection about dinosaurs, there are no saurians in “Rhea’s Time.” Preuss relates, with almost clinical precision, the story of a woman who has been in a coma for nearly a year, since shortly after a skiing accident. He tells the story from the point of view of Doctor Rowan, who has inherited her case after her original doctor gave up on her.

Despite his patient being completely unresponsive, Roan discovers that she actually is moving, albeit extremely slowly. Rowan begins employing unorthodox methods to establish contact with the woman, who he calls “Rhea.” Talking about her career as a biostratigrapher with her husband, Rowan is eventually able to come up with a rather intriguing explanation for what she’s going through.

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Birthday Reviews: William F. Nolan’s “Starblood”

Birthday Reviews: William F. Nolan’s “Starblood”

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Cover by Ron Walotsky
Cover by Ron Walotsky

William F. Nolan was born on March 6, 1928. He is best known for his novel Logan’s Run, which was turned into an Academy Award winning (and Hugo nominated) movie, as well as a television series that ran for one season. Nolan also wrote three sequels to the original novel, the most recent of which, Logan’s Mission, appeared in 2017.

Nolan has received the Bram Stoker Award for his non-fiction book Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award. He has received a Living Legend Award from the International Horror Guild, a Grandmaster Award from the World Horror Convention, a Special Convention Award from the World Fantasy Awards, and in 2006 he was named an Author Emeritus by SFWA.

“Starblood” first appeared in the anthology Infinity Four, edited by Robert Hoskins in 1972. It was also picked up by Forrest J. Ackerman and Pat LoBrutto for Perry Rhodan #102: Spoor of the Ants. Nolan has also included the story in several of his own collections, including Alien Horizons, Wonderworlds, Things Beyond Midnight, Dark Universe Stories: 1951-2001, Nightworlds, and Wild Galaxy.

The majority of “Starblood” presents the lives of six individuals in six short chapters. In each case, the main character dies suddenly and violently, through assassination, accident, or murder. In the course of these vignettes, Nolan does not attempt to tie them together in any way. He does offer a few lines of dialogue at both the beginning and the end of the story which offers a frame that explains what is happening, although it is not entirely satisfying.

Bobby is an infant whose crying annoys his parents so much his mother drops him from an air car without remorse. Tris is a woman who joined a cult in which she was sexually assaulted; when the cult throws her out and won’t allow her back in, she begs them to kill her. Morgan is killed in an ambush at night while he is fleeing his pursuers. David is a child who gets hit by a random car. Bax is killed at dinner by his dining companion and Lynda’s father, a paid assassin, accepts a hit on his own daughter.

Nolan’s world is bleak and unsympathetic, although he does toss out some interesting ideas about the future, notably the bookstore David is brought to (although given the selection of books recommended to the eleven year old, it is no surprise that he doesn’t like books). The closing frame offers a small link for the different stories, but it does nothing to alleviate the darkness of those stories.

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Birthday Reviews: Mike Resnick’s “The Evening Line”

Birthday Reviews: Mike Resnick’s “The Evening Line”

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Mash Up
Mash Up

Mike Resnick was born on March 5, 1942. He has won five Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, the Seiun Award, a Xatafi-Cyberdark Award, two Prix Ozones, a Mechanical Peach, and three Ignotus Awards. In 2012 ISFiC Press published Win Some, Lose Some, a collection of his 29 Hugo nominated stories. That same year, Resnick was the Guest of Honor at Chicon 2000, that year’s Worldcon. He was awarded a Skylark Award by NESFA in 1995.

Resnick has published numerous novels in his loose Birthright Universe, including Ivory, Santiago, and the Oracle trilogy. In both his novels and his short stories he makes use of characters who are larger than life and his writing is often influenced by the pulps, adventure stories, and westerns. His Kirinyaga cycle, made up of ten short stories, is one of the most nominated short story series in science fiction.

In addition to his own fiction, Resnick has served as the executive editor of Jim Baen’s Universe and as editor for Galaxy’s Edge magazine. Resnick has edited numerous anthologies and helped dozens of beginning authors with early sales and he has collaborated with authors ranging from Lezli Robyn to Jack McDevitt to Susan Shwartz to Nicholas A. DiChario. Many of his collaborations have been collected in With a Little Help from My Friends and With a Little More Help from My Friends.

The story “The Evening Line” was written for Gardner Dozois’s audio anthology Rip-Off!, which asked various authors to write a story which took the first line from a famous work of fiction. Resnick adapted “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must by in want of a wife,” from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The story was eventually reprinted in Mash Up, a retitling of the anthology when it saw print a couple years after the audio version. I would lay book that the story will eventually appear in a collection of all of Resnick’s Harry the Book stories, of which there are currently ten.

“The Evening Line” is a one of a series of stories Resnick has written about Harry the Book, a pastiche of Damon Runyon set in a world where magic is at play. In this particular story, Plug Malone has hit it big at the races and when word gets out about his good fortune, he finds himself facing a huge number of fortune-hunting women looking for a husband. The story, both stylistically and in its depiction of men and women, is very much a throwback to the period in which Runyon was writing his Broadway stories.

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Birthday Reviews: Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s “The Last Voyage”

Birthday Reviews: Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s “The Last Voyage”

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Cover by Greg Call
Cover by Greg Call

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison was born on March 4, 1946. Kennealy got her start as a music journalist, serving as the editor-in-chief of Jazz &Pop and becoming one of the first female rock critics. In 1970 she participated in a handfasting ceremony with Jim Morrison of The Doors, although the couple never filed paperwork with the state to register their marriage.

In the 1980s, Kennealy-Morrison began publishing an epic space opera series, The Keltiad, which followed a group of Celts who left the British islands around the year 450, although the books were set in the 35th century. The series was comprised of two trilogies, and a stand-alone novel, as well as the short story “The Last Voyage,” and Kennealy-Morrison has indicated she plans to write more in the milieu. When her publisher cancelled further books in the 1990s, she turned her attention to mysteries and eventually set up her own press.

“The Last Voyage” was the first short story Kennealy-Morrison published, although she had several novels in the Keltiad series by that point. It was included in her 2014 collection Tales of Spiral Castle: Stories of the Keltiad, published by her own Lizard Queen Press, and which included three original Keltiad stories.

“The Last Voyage” tells the story of Jamie Douglas, a Scottish knight in the service of King Robert the Bruce. Douglas is serving his king in Paris at the time that the destruction of the Knights Templar is about to occur and he works with the Knights to spirit hundreds of them away for a life in Scotland, far from the reach of the French king bent on their destruction. En route to Scotland, their fleet is intercepted by a spaceship carrying the descendants of Celts who fled earth centuries earlier who offer the Templars a new life among the stars. Many of them accept, although a vestige of the Templars, including Douglas, continue on to serve King Robert.

Kennealy-Morrison combines the plight of the Knights Templar with her existing series of novels, The Keltiad, which provides the background for her space-faring Celts. Set in 1312, the story is reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s earlier The High Crusade, set in 1345. Unfortunately, while the aliens in Anderson’s novel provide the impetus for the novel, the Kelts of Kennealy-Morrison’s story serve more as a deus ex machina. In addition, her prose tends towards the over-written and florid, reminiscent of a more Victorian style in both description and dialogue. Kennealy-Morrison presents an interesting secret history, but her link in to her series of novels doesn’t integrate well into the historical context she presents.

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