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Tor Doubles #33: Mike Resnick’s Bwana and Bully!

Tor Doubles #33: Mike Resnick’s Bwana and Bully!

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Cover for Bwana and Bully!

As we move into the final month of reviews, there is a significant change in the format of the Tor Doubles. The series began with the proto-Tor Double of Keith Laumer’s The House in November and The Other Sky, but every volume since then has contained stories by two different authors.  However, three of the four final published volumes are single author books. This week looks at a volume with two stories by Mike Resnick, next week will be two stories by Damon Knight, and in three weeks, the final published volume contained two stories by Fritz Leiber. This volume was originally published in June 1991, which sharp eyed readers will note skips a month from last week’s volume. That is because Tor Doubles #33 and 34 were published in reverse numerical order, with this one published after the next one.

Bwana was an originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in January 1990. Between 1988 and 1996, Resnick wrote ten connected stories about the utopian planetoid Kirinyaga, eight of which earned him Hugo nominations, including two winners. Describing the entire series as a “Fable of Utopia,” each story followed a similar pattern.

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Tor Doubles #32: Harlan Ellison’s Run for the Stars and Jack Dann and Jack Haldeman II’s Echoes of Thunder

Tor Doubles #32: Harlan Ellison’s Run for the Stars and Jack Dann and Jack Haldeman II’s Echoes of Thunder

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Cover for Run for the Stars and Echoes of Thunder by Barclay Shaw

Tor Double number #32 was originally published in April 1991 and includes Echoes of Thunder, an original story, in this form, for the Tor Double line, which, as with the Popkes story a couple volumes earlier, has not been reprinted in this form. This is Dann and Haldeman’s only appearance in the series. It also includes Harlan Ellison’s only appearance in the series.

Run for the Stars was originally published in Science Fiction Adventures in June 1957. Ellison has noted this as the author’s preferred edition of the story.

Benno Tallant is a drug addict on war torn Deald’s World. While ransacking the corpse of a grocer for money with which to buy drugs, he is taken prisoner by three men who need his assistance in their attempt to keep Earth safe from invasion of the alien Kyban, whose fleet is preparing to destroy the human outpost on Deald’s World.

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Tor Doubles #31: Gordon R. Dickson’s The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars

Tor Doubles #31: Gordon R. Dickson’s The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars

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Cover for The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars by Brian Waugh

Tor Double #31 was originally published in April 1991. The proto-Tor Double, which included two stories by Keith Laumer, was the only volume up to this point to include content from a single author. This volume, with two stories by Gordon R. Dickson, is the first official Tor Double to include content from only one author. However, of the remaining five Tor Doubles, four of them would prove to be single author collections.

Naked to the Stars was an originally serialized in F&SF in October and November 1961. Although the story begins as a fairly typical piece of military science fiction, Dickson takes it into a different direction, which makes the story stand out.

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Tor Doubles #30: Poul Anderson’s The Longest Voyage and Steven Popkes’ Slow Lightning

Tor Doubles #30: Poul Anderson’s The Longest Voyage and Steven Popkes’ Slow Lightning

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Cover for The Longest Voyage and Slow Lightning by Wayne Barlowe

 

Tor Double #30 contains Poul Anderson’s third and final appearance and was originally published in February 1991. He is joined by Steve Popkes with a story original to this volume and which has not been reprinted.

“The Longest Voyage” was originally published in Analog in December 1960. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, which makes it a strange choice for the Tor Doubles series, which generally published novellas, but the second story in the volume may be the longest story published in the series.

There are many science fiction stories that take historical characters and use them as the basis for a different take on the world. Robert J. Sawyer notably published his trilogy of novels Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner whose characters were based on Galileo, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. In “The Longest Voyage,” Captain Rovic appears to be based on Ferdinand Magellan, leading the Golden Leaper (shades of Francis Drake’s Golden Hind) on a circumnavigation of the moon on which they live in search of the fables Aureate Cities.

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Tor Doubles #29: Ian Watson’s Nanoware Time and John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision

Tor Doubles #29: Ian Watson’s Nanoware Time and John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

John Varley makes his third and final appearance in the Tor Double series in volume #29, which was originally published in January 1991. Ian Watson makes his only appearance in this volume.

The Persistence of Vision was originally published in F&SF in March 1978. It won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award as well as the Locus poll.  It was also nominated for the Ditmar Award.

Varley offers a United States which has gone through a series of boom and bust cycles. During one of the bust cycles, Varley’s narrator decides to travel from his native Chicago to Japan, but with the economy being the way it is, he isn’t able to take any form of public transportation, instead walking and relying on the occasional ride. Rather than heading straight west, he takes a more southerly route to avoid the radioactive wastes of Kansas and other Great Plains states.

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Tor Doubles #28: Kim Stanley Robinson’s A Short, Sharp Shock and Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters

Tor Doubles #28: Kim Stanley Robinson’s A Short, Sharp Shock and Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

Originally published in December 1990, Tor Double #28 contains the fourth story (but third headlining story) by Kim Stanley Robinson, who first appeared in Tor Double #1, and the second, and final story by Jack Vance.

The Dragon Masters was originally published in Galaxy in August 1962. It was previously published as part of an Ace Double (with Vance’s The Five Gold Bands) by Ace Books in 1963. It won the Hugo Award and the Seiun Award.

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Tor Doubles #27: Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith

Tor Doubles #27: Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

Originally published in November 1990. In addition to the stories, Orson Scott Card provided two essays entitled “Foreword: How Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Changed My Life, Part I (The Tunesmith)” and “Afterword: How Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Changed My Life, Part II (The Tunesmith),” both original to this volume.

The Tunesmith was originally published in Worlds of If in August 1957. Erlin Bacue is a composer in a world which has turned a deaf ear to traditional music. The only music that is composed are Coms, short for commercials. What sets Baque apart from his fellow composers is that, while he makes use of the multichord for his compositions, he does all his composing himself, unlike most other composers who make heavy use of what we would now recognize as artificial intelligence. This hive his Coms a depth that others don’t have, but it also means that he takes longer to compose his Coms than other composers do.

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Tor Doubles #26: John Varley’s Press Enter and Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station

Tor Doubles #26: John Varley’s Press Enter and Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station

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Cover for Fugue State by Wayne Barlowe
Cover for The Death of Doctor Island by Ron Walotsky

Tor Double #26, originally published in October 1990, contains the fifth and final story by Robert Silverberg. It also contains the second of three stories by John Varley.

Hawksbill Station was originally published in Galaxy in August, 1967. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Set in the Cambrian period, before land animals or plants have evolved, it focuses on the titular prison, sent back in time from the twenty-first century to house political dissidents.

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Tor Doubles #25: Gene Wolfe’s The Death of Doctor Island and John M. Ford’s Fugue State

Tor Doubles #25: Gene Wolfe’s The Death of Doctor Island and John M. Ford’s Fugue State

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Cover for Fugue State by Wayne Barlowe
Cover for The Death of Doctor Island by Ron Walotsky

Tor Double #25 was originally published in September 1990 and collects Gene Wolfe’s The Death of Doctor Island and an expanded version of John M. Ford’s Fugue State. Both stories have settings which question the nature of reality, although in very different ways.

The Death of Doctor Island was originally published in Universe 3, edited by Terry Carr and published by Random House in October, 1973. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter. It also won the Locus poll.

Wolfe’s story focuses on Nicholas de Vore, who rescues himself from a sandy pit to discover he is living on a nearly deserted island. He eventually learns that there are two other people living on the island, Ignacio, an older man who attacks Nick upon first meeting him, and Diana Phillips, a young woman who provides him with advice and assistance in surviving on the island. The most important “person” he meets, however, is the disembodied voice of “Doctor Island,” who is Nicky’s primary source of communication on the island.

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Tor Doubles #24: Roger Zelazny’s The Graveyard Heart and Walter Jon Williams’ Elegy for Angels and Dogs

Tor Doubles #24: Roger Zelazny’s The Graveyard Heart and Walter Jon Williams’ Elegy for Angels and Dogs

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

Tor Double #24 was originally published in August 1990 and is the final volume in the series which compiled a classic story along with a sequel (or prequel) written by another author. Walter Jon Williams used the world Zelazny created with an overlap of only a few characters to expand Zelazny’s story. Not original to the Tor Doubles series, Elegy for Angels and Dogs was originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 26 years after The Graveyard Heart appeared.

The Graveyard Heart was originally published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination in March, 1964. Opening at New Year’s Eve 2000, Zelazny offers a decadent society of the Set, who live to attend flamboyant parties and be seen, going into cryosleep between the parties to prolong their lives. Alvin Moore has managed to get an invitation to the “Party of Parties,” where he promptly falls in love with Leota, one of the Set.

Since the Set only come out of hibernation every few years to attend elaborate parties, there can be no relationship between Moore and Leota. Unable to accept this, Moore decides he must be admitted to the Set and goes about figuring out how to improve his chances of achieving his goal.

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