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Tor Doubles #37: Esther Friesner’s Yesterday We Saw Mermaids and Lawrence Watt-Evans’ The Final Folly of Captain Dancy

Tor Doubles #37: Esther Friesner’s Yesterday We Saw Mermaids and Lawrence Watt-Evans’ The Final Folly of Captain Dancy

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Cover for The Final Folly of Captain Dancy and Yesterday We Saw Mermaids by Pat Morressey

This volumes  was originally scheduled for September 1991, but the series was cancelled before it would see print. Both stories were eventually published by Tor in different formats. Had this volume been printed, it would have been the first volume in the series to include two original stories. Although published separately, both were coincidentally first published in the same month.

Yesterday We Saw Mermaids was eventually published as a stand-alone novel by Tor Books in October, 1992. Set in 1492, Friesner tells the story of a magical ship that seems to be racing Christopher Columbus’ expedition to the new world. The ship is mostly crewed by a group of nuns from Porto in Spain, but there is also a monk, Brother Garcilaso, a woman named Rasha, and two unnamed women, one called La Zagala and one called the Jewess. The story is told from the point of view of a young nun, Sister Ana, who has been appointed the scribe for the voyage.

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Birthday Reviews: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s “The Man for the Job”

Birthday Reviews: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s “The Man for the Job”

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Cover by Michael Whelan
Cover by Michael Whelan

Lawrence Watt-Evans was born on July 26, 1954.

Watt-Evans’s short story “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” was nominated for the Nebula and Hugo Awards in 1988 and won the Hugo Award. Watt-Evans was nominated for a second Hugo Award for best semi-prozine, as the co-editor, along with William Sanders, of Helix SF in 2008. Watt-Evans has published under the names Nathan Archer and Walter Vance Awsten. He has collaborated with Brenda Clough, Kurt Busiek, Christina Briley, Julie Evans, Esther Friesner, and Carl Parlagreco, and Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

“The Man for the Job” was published in the December 2000 issue of Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy. The story has not been reprinted has also appeared in The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy MegaPack.

Watt-Evans takes on several fantasy standard tropes in “The Man for the Job.” The story opens with five siblings meeting with a wizard to get help in ridding themselves of an evil dragon. The group includes four brothers and their sister, who is insistent that they include her since her livelihood is at stake as well as theirs. The wizard, Gallopius, talks about magic items with them, noting that in days of yore, wizards hid magic items in strange, exotic, and stupid places where the wizards wouldn’t be able to retrieve them when needed. While Gallopius can lay hands on all his own enchanted items, they will need to complete a quest to find the Helmet of Balanced Justice to defeat the dragon.

The quest also subverts the typical quest story. The helmet is located relatively near to Gallopius’s home, and was hidden three hundred years earlier, protected by three guardians. Although Gallipius is able to tell them the nature of the guardians, they are not ready for the state they are in. Watt-Evans takes the idea of a centuries old protection to its logical conclusion, as all three guardians have failed to withstand the ravages of time and they manage to retrieve the helmet with some ease.

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