bibliogramma | Recent Entries

I’ve already done posts about the novellas and novelettes I read in looking for potential nominations for the 1943 Retro Hugos. Now, it’t time for the short stories.

Leigh Brackett was a master of the planetary romance, stories about strange beings and ancient civilisations on other planets, and the adventurers, some heroic, some cynical and world-weary, who explored them. In the short story “Child of the Sun,” her hero, Eric Falken, a rebel fighting for the survival of free men against a tyrant who enforces Happiness on humanity and rules a docile populace, discovers a hidden planet inside the orbit of Mercury, and a vastly ancient energy being who wants amusement - human toys to play with. Falken must outwit the creature to gain the planet as a hiding place for the rebels.

“Child of the Green Light” is another of Leigh Brackett’s short stories, this one about Son, the only survivor of a space ship crew trapped by a mysterious green light, which is the manifestation of a part of another universe penetrating our own. Under the influence of this light, he has changed, his atoms altering frequency. Eventually, he will be able to cross over to the other universe, where a woman is waiting for him. But then another ship of humans arrives, and he learns that the light is affecting all life in the solar system, slowly killing the human race, and he must choose between the woman he loves or the survival of a human civilisation he barely remembers.

Lester del Rey’s “The Wings of Night” is a haunting and emotionally powerful story about the last member of a once advanced civilisation living in a refuge created when the moon began to lose its atmosphere. As the soil is depleted over time of an element necessary for reproduction, it seems inevitable that Lhin, the last of his species, will die alone. Until a distressed space freighter carrying two humans makes an emergency landing on the uninhabited moon and, by accident, triggers the landing doors to Lhin’s underground world. The story examines - and condemns - issues of prejudice, colonialism, exploitation and slavery, and ends with hope for both Lhin and the hearts of men.

It may be pushing the boundaries somewhat, but Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes, His Memory” - also known as “Funes the Memorious” - is certainly a tale of the fantastic, a story about a boy named Funes who suffers an accident which leaves him crippled, but with a memory so intense, detailed and complete that he amuses himself by inventing a number system in which every number up to 70,000 has its own name. Borges turns the simple recollections of a man who met Funes a few times into a meditation on the varieties and purposes of memory and forgetting.

Heinlein’s short story “Pied Piper” is a slight piece of work but nonetheless entertaining. There’s a war, and as always, one side is losing. The leaders of the losing side turn to their greatest scientist for a weapon to help them win the war. Instead, he proposes a way to end the war, forever.

Isaac Asimov’s “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” is one if the Robotics Corporation stories, this time about a robot programmed for construction work on the moon that somehow ends up in rural Virginia, where a general purpose repairman finds him and tries to make a few quick bucks off his discovery. It’s a comedic story, light in tone and mostly just for fun.

Malcolm Jameson, writing as Colin Keith, produced a charming little capitalist comedy called “If You’re So Smart—“ about a scientist frustrated by a greedy robber baron who controls pretty much every major business on Titan and is trying to close down his research so he can a quire it cheaply. Determined to resist, the scientist figures out how to use his new machine to take over all the industrialists holdings, destabilising the solar system economy in the process. Humorous and well-written.

Jameson’s “The Goddess’ Legacy” is a rather different work. Set in Nazi-occupied Greece, the story’s narrator, an American businessman, encounters a remnant of the cult of Pallas Athene, and is witness to her continued legacy of protection for her city and people.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Strain is a truly gut-wrenching story about what a person will endure in war for the sake of his country, his fellows, his mission, but it’s the ironic turn at the end that turns the whole thing inside out and makes you think about the ethos and the military culture. Psychologically adept, well-written, painfully graphic treatment of a difficult subject.

The Embassy, written by Donald Wohlheim under the pen name Martin Pearson, is a twisty little story about what might happen if someone decided that Martians had set up an observing mission somewhere in New York City, and hired some not too imaginative private eyes to track it down.

And, from a writer I don’t remember hearing about at all, F. Anton Reeds, with a bittersweet story called “Forever Is Not So Long,” about an English scientist in 1931 working on time travel. He decides to run the first trial, to travel forward a decade - and learns things that change his priorities fir the rest of his life.

“Deadlock,” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, writing under the name Lewis Padgett, is an interesting variant on the mad robot story. The Company has been working on developing robots for some time. The ultimate goal - an intelligent, indestructible robot capable of solving any problem. The problem they keep running into is that the robots keep going mad, and being indestructible, end up being encased in tombs of concrete. Finally, they develop a robot who remains sane - but as it turns out, that’s even worse.

Moore and Kuttner - writing again as Lewis Padgett - produced another robot story in 1942, “The Twonky,” a very unsettling story about a temporarily temporally displaced mechanical technician from the future who, while suffering from amnesia, spends an afternoon working in a radio factory until he recovers, realises his situation and goes back to wherever he came from. He’s not otherwise important to the story. The problem is, that where he comes from, he makes Twonkies - robots programmed not only to do household tasks, but to censor the cultural exposures, and manipulate the impulses of their “owners” - removing individuality, creativity, initiative, and terminating those who persist in their wayward ways. The story leaves the reader hanging, having shown us what Twonkies can do, with a Twonky loose in the 20th century and waiting for the next unsuspecting customer. Sf horror at its finest.

“Later Than You Think,” written under Kuttner’s name alone, is one of those stories about a person who, in some fashion, finds a way to learn tomorrow’s news today. In this story, it’s a sales clerk in a record store whose hobby is tinkering with radio equipment, who accidentally builds a radio that plays tomorrow’s news. Unfortunately, he and his radio fall into the hands of a gangster, who forces him to use it to make money for the gangster by various nefarious means. All ends well, however, and the boy gets the girl and finds a way to use his radio without causing too much mayhem.

Kuttner’s “False Dawn” is an interesting tale of unintended consequences. An egotistic and immoral scientist has developed a process that regresses life forms through the stages of evolution, and decides to use his discovery to get rid of his financial backer by regressing him to amoeba status. The plan backfires when it turns out that human evolution has a rather longer history than anyone realised. Kuttner builds some nice ironic turns into the story.

Writing under the name Kelvin Kent, Henry Kuttner penned a series of light-hearted time travel adventures featuring a roguish chap named Pete Manx. “Dames is Poison” sees Manx in renaissance Milan, getting mixed up with Cesare and Lucretia Borgia.

“Kilgallen’s Lunar Legacy” by Norman L. Knight is a Bunyanesque story about an Irishman, his will, a dozen replicas in spaceborne coffins and a buried legacy of unique proportions. Tongue in cheek humour.

Fredric Brown’s “Etaoin Shrdlu” is an updated version of the sorcerer’s apprentice - this time the enchanted machine is a sentient linotype machine that can set anything in a fraction of the tine that the process normally takes, and that demands to be kept working. The solution - teach it Buddhism, so that instead of running its operator ragged, it meditates and achieves nirvana. Yes, it’s Orientalist as fuck.

In “The Shoes”, Robert Bloch plays with the old idea of bargaining with the devil for eternal life. Everyone who tries it thinks he can outwit Satan, and the little man who calls himself Dr. Faust is no exception. But everyone leaves out something that trips him up in the end, and here too, Dr. Faust is no exception.

Fritz Leiber’s “The Sunken Land” is a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, which means classic sword and sorcery adventure. This time the two soldiers of fortune are out fishing when Fafhrd finds a relic of a long lost sunken country in one of the fish as he cleans it. The relic leads to a dreamlike experience for Fafhrd as he seems to relive a voyage of his ancestors to the doomed island before it sank.

Jane Rice’s “Idol of the Flies” is a disquieting portrait of Pruitt, a child without empathy or conscience, the sort of child we now understand to have a profound psychological disorder. A child of some wealth and privilege, he hates the people around him, using his position to torment, ridicule and abuse the servants in the household. And he tortures small creatures. Pruitt has a particular fascination for flies. Indeed, he has created a ritual in which he commands the help of a supernatural being he calls the Idol of the Flies in his schemes to harm others. It’s unfortunate - for him, at any rate - that Pruitt doesn’t know all the names of the Lord of the Flies, nor his true nature, until much too late.

Hannes Bok is primarily known as an illustrator, but he also produced some speculative fiction. In “Letter to an Invisible Woman” Bok’s protagonist addresses a woman he has fallen in love with, a woman who has a secret that makes her different, who has abandoned him because he has discovered it. He pleads with her to return, but the story does not give us her answer. Or perhaps, it does.

More novelettes from 1942 pulp magazines.

Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” is one of the Mike Donovan Robot stories, in which a robot acts strangely and Donovan has to figure out why, and how to fix the problem. Both error and solution usually involve some bizarre circumstances that impacts on the way the robot resolves the tensions between the famous Three Laws of Robotics, and this story falls perfectly into the pattern. A robot with a deliberately heightened sense of self preservation is given a casually worded order to do something that would endanger him. In this case, the two a mathematically balanced, causing the robot to run in circles around the location he was ordered to, while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Kind of amusing, standard Asimov robot story.

1942 was the year in which Isaac Asimov published the first of the stories that would eventually become his iconic Foundation series. “Foundation” is the origin story, which gives us the basic background to the series, and covers the first “Seldon crisis” - how will Terminus, the remote and relatively isolated home of the First Foundation and the Encyclopedists, hold into its independence as the Empire crumbles? It really was one of the most ambitious concepts of its time, even granting that lots of writers were creating lengthy and complex histories for their fictional universes, from Heinlein to “Doc” Smith. Just one month after “Foundation” appeared in print, the second story dealing with the next Seldon crisis, was published as “Bridle and Saddle.”

1942 also saw the publication of Asimov’s “Friar of the Black Flame,” in which an Earth ruled by the reptilian Llhasinu from Vega are driven from Earth and destroyed by a battle force drawn from all the human worlds. It’s fairly standard milsf, but what makes the story interesting is that it mentions Trantor as one of the human worlds, establishing it as part of the backhistory of the Foundation series.

Alfred Bester’s “The Push of a Finger” is a story of the sort we now associate with the “butterfly effect” - the idea that a butterfly’s wings flapping could a tornado on the other side of the world - though of course it predates that formulation. In a future society where the prime principle is stability, a machine is developed capable of calculating the future - and it predicts the end of the universe in a catastrophic scientific experiment in only a thousand years. The pronosticators use the machine to track back to the one moment that, if changed, can prevent the disaster. There’s a surprise plot twist, of course, which the modern reader will immediately deduce because we’ve seen it too many times, but the story is well told and, I expect, was fairly new and original back in 1942.

Lester del Rey’s novelette “My Name Is Legion” is an example of the “time loop” story, in which the subject is caught in the same sequence of time, looping through the same events. In this story, it’s a defeated Hitler trapped in the loop by a scientist bent on revenge for the deaths if his Jewish wife and children, and it is a particularly nasty loop with an all-too-appropriate end built into it. Quite an effective story.

“Though Poppies Grow,” also by del Rey, is the most powerful of all the war-themed anti-fascism stories I’ve read in the past few weeks, and there have been quite a few of those, what with the US being at war in 1942. In this story, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier from WWI is called forth from his tomb, acting out the promise from the famous poem - “If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” The writing in this novelette is so evocative, so well-honed, as del Rey follows the young soldier, confused, knowing only that he has a mission, wandering through the streets of Washington, touching people as he passes in various ways. At first he does not know he is dead, a ghost, but slowly as it dawns on him, he is overwhelmed, until at last, he is led to understand his role is to remind these who waver, or are complacent, that there can be no compromise with fascism, with tyranny, with hatred. The story is exquisitely told, the character made so real you can feel his struggle to understand, the message as important today as it was in 1942.

A story in a completely different vein, del Rey’s Lunar Landing s about a mission to the moon, sent in the (faint) hope of rescuing three men from the first lunar voyage. The crew of the Moth - five men and two women - encounter serious problems in landing themselves, and their search for the first ship becomes even more important because they hope to cannibalise it for parts they’ll need to get home themselves. But very little goes as planned in this mission, beginning with the first surprise, plant and animal life adapted for survival on the moon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, del Rey’s style, like Heinlein’s, has aged well. His characters are quite fully and realistically developed, and the two women in the story are intelligent, brave and have lived lives of their own - they have relationships with men, but are not defined solely by them.

Ross Rocklynne’s “Jackdaw” portrays the bewilderment of an alien species on discovering a world where only one living being remains, alone on a planet whose cities, roads and farms have been destroyed by massive bombardment. When the lone survivor dies in a suicide attack on their craft, they are bewildered, but despite their best attempts, the end of the species and the actions of its last member remain incomprehensible to a species that cannot envision war.

“QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you put a businessman whose only focus, and area of expertise, is cost-cutting, in charge of a facility that depends on scientific and engineering excellence to function. QRM, we are told, is the shortwave code for man-made interference in radio transmission. The story takes place in a communications relay station on an asteroid whose orbit is positioned such as to ensure radio transmission between Earth and Mars at all points of both planets’ orbits. The man-made interference is a new Director who knows nothing about either the technical aspects of communication, nor the intricacies of life in an artificially sustained environment. The consequences of his policies, while humorously described, are disastrous. Eventually, the proper order is restored, but not before his decisions come close to killing everyone on the station.

1942 was the date of E. Mayne Hull’s first published work, a haunting novelette called “The Flight That Failed.” Set during the war, it’s the story of a time traveller who tries to avert the destruction of a plane crossing the Atlantic with a secret cargo that will change the course of the history he knows if it gets through.

Fredric Brown’s “The Star Mouse” is a rather poignant tale about a mouse who is shot into space in a small experimental rocket built by your standard eccentric tinkering scientist. Mitkey, as he’s been called by the professor, and his rocket come to the attention of a civilisation of very small people living on an asteroid that happens to be passing near earth. Concerned about potential threats from humans, they explore Mitkey’s memories to find our what they can about human civilisation - but doing this involves giving Mitkey intelligence equal to that of humans. Mitkey goes home again, but alas, the boost in IQ doesn’t last. Still, he survives, is reunited with his mate, and the professor provides him with lots of cheese.

In Jane Rice’ “Pobby” a writer of horror starts a new story - his idea is to tell a gruesome tale of a poor farmer named Pobby who finds a strange seed, plants and waters it, hoping that it might grow into a rare flower that will make him some money, only to be eaten by it once it flowers. As he starts to write his installments for magazine publication, however, someone named Pobby, who looks and talks like the character he’s writing about, appears to various of his friends, saying he needs to find the writer and get him to stop making him grow the flower, because he doesn’t want to die. Finally, Pobby and the writer meet face to face, but the writer persists in following his story - until he finds himself in a writers block just before the final scene. Frustrated, he travels to the lace where he has set Pobby’s farm, finding the town much as he’s written it, with characters he’s mentioned, and Pobby’s farm, where he discovers the cause of his block - Pobby, out of desperation, has written his own ending to the story. An interesting exploration of the conceit that characters can take on a life of their own.

“The Magicians’ Dinner,” also by Jane Rice, is a comic ghost story about a young bride, married to a magician, who tries to handle a dinner for forty in their first home, when she’s never cooked before. Fortunately for her, her family’s long-dead cook decides to return from the other side to save her firmer employers’ daughter’s bacon, so to speak. The tale is told in first person, the narrator is rather self-depreciating and quite engaging and likable, so that the story comes across as light-hearted and sweet. We will pass over the class issues and the trope of the help who care more for the families of their employers than they can for their own, and some if the annoyingly sexist assumptions about how marriages between men and women should work.

In Rice’s “The Elixir,” the narrative voice is again a somewhat unconventional woman, a out-spoken, accident-prone, unmarried writer of mystery novels. In this light-hearted time travel yarn, Amy Parrish’s equally unconventional neighbour, Clare Holloway, throws a Halloween party and Amy decides to attend as a witch. While waiting for the party to get started, Amy mixes up a batch of punch, tossing in liquor, ice cream, and halloween candy, while reciting some off-the-cuff doggerel, and ends up in Salem during the witch hunts. Much strangeness ensues, but all ends well, with Amy back in her own time, wondering if everything happened as she recalls it, or if she was just drunk silly and hallucinating. Having read several of Rice’s stories now, I must say that I am quite delighted with her descriptive style, which is both unique and very apt, and her mastery of tone. It’s a pity that her work is not remembered nearly as well as that of other writers of this era.

Reading potential nominations for the shorter fiction categories for the 1943 Retro Hugos is no easy task. Unless you have a vast collection of golden age short story anthologies or access to a collection of the original pulp magazines, you are not going to be able to read much of the relevant material, even if you restrict yourself to looking for stories other people have already recommended. But I did make some efforts to read some of the more readily accessible stories and novelettes, in order to do what justice I could to the nominations. I managed to acquire, through the auspices of my friendly internet faeries, a variety of magazines from 1942 that I’d flagged mostly because they contained at least one piece of short fiction from an author I’m generally a fan of, or a story I’d seen recommended. Couldn’t find everything I would have liked to, but did find enough to keep me busy for a while. Looking in this post at eligible novelettes...

First up, Robert Heinlein’s novelette “Goldfish Bowl,” which is an unsettling story about unexplained phenomena, including fireballs that kill some humans but cause others to vanish, and two huge waterspouts that stretch mikes into the stratosphere. The story follows two men who try to find out what’s at the top of the strange spouts, and who succeed, to their own ruin. The net result is to bring a large dose of humility into the standard American sf narrative of mastery of science, the world and outer space.

Leigh Brackett’s “Out of the Sea,” is a novelette set on contemporary Earth, in California. Recently jilted newspaperman Webb Fallon is drowning his sorrows by the sea when suddenly a wave of giant, mutated sea creatures boils out of the surf onto the land, and some even into the air. Fallon and the blonde he’d been flirting with survive, Fallon with minor wounds. Imperial Japan claims responsibility and demands surrender from the Pacific allies in the war. But Fallon, working from his memories of an interview with an undersea geologist, has other ideas and sets out to find the truth. The story is fast paced and engaging, but what caught my interest in particular was the way it deals with the changes in Fallon’s character and his relationships with women. He starts out being somewhat of an angry and entitled ass, selfish, a very reluctant hero. But under pressure, and stung by the scorn of his new companion Joan, and the scientist Bjarnsson, he makes the heroic choices.

Yet another of Leigh Brackett’s tales published in 1942 is “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon.” Set on a Mars of ancient, lost civilisations and dried out seas, it features adventurer, rxplorer, and tomb robber Max Brandon, who, lost in a deadly sand storm, stumbles across an untouched relic, a Martian ship hundreds of thousands of years old. Within is an ancient consciousness that has survived long past the death of its body, ready to awaken old enmities. Brackett also gives us a competent, interesting woman as Brandon’s partner and love interest - Sylvia Eustace - who saves Brandon and is as instrumental in bringing about the eventual successful conclusion to the story as he is.

E. E. Smith’s novelette “Storm Cloud on Deka” is set in the Lensman universe, part of the “Vortex Blaster” series, and deals with illegal drug manufacturing and production, which was one of Smith’s go-to careers for nasty people. Drug smugglers operating under the cover if being a legitimate business sometimes need to kill people, even their own employees, and they need to do so in a way that no one will investigate. The druglords of Dekanore III have been blaming ‘excess’ deaths on an atomic vortex - but now mathematical genius and vortex buster Neal “Storm” Cloud has sensed something is not quite right with the way this vortex is reportedly behaving, and he moves the rogue vortex to the too of his schedule. Naturally, Cloud figures out what’s going on, saves the day and the Lensmen arrive to finish up. A fairly standard “Doc” Smith adventure.

A. E. Van Vogt’s “Co-operate - Or Else!” is an interesting survival story in which a human and a large, intelligent alien crash land on an extremely dangerous planet with many large and nasty life forms, and must co-operate, despite their differences, in order to reach safety. This is one of Van Vogt’s Rull series, where a multi-species interstellar civilisation including human is fighting an alien species bent on total destruction of all other intelligent life. In this story, not only must out intrepid human convince his alien companion to cooperate in the short term to escape the planet and a patrol of Rull, he must persuade him urge his people to join humanity’s fight against the Rull. Not nearly as overwrought in literary style as some other Van Vogt pieces, and rather fun to read.

One of van Vogt’s best stories, I think, was also published in 1942 - “The Weapon Shop.” Setting aside the underlying pro-gun philosophy, which I don’t agree with, it’s a narrative of collective resistance and support for social justice. When an illegal weapon shop first appears in the village of Glay, Fara Clark, a loyal citizen of the Empire is appalled and leads the fight to get it closed down. But when misfortune strikes, thanks to a vicious son and a grasping corporation, and suicide seems his only option, Fara discovers what the weapon shops are really doing in the Empire, and his entire way of looking at the world around him is changed.

Van Vogt’s “The Ghost” is one of those neatly plotted time paradox attempts to change a predicted future stories, about an old man who has been a ghost for at least five years, but continues to act just as he did in life - including walking through gates, and getting mixed up in time and talking about things that haven’t happened yet. It’s very well crafted, engages the reader, and keeps one guessing about what’s going to happen right to the very end.

C. L. Moore’s “There Shall Be Darkness” is an end of empire narrative, modelled on the end of the Roman Empire. Earth’s troops are being called home, to fight the barbarians at the gates. On Venus, a young and impetuous people - as colonial subjects naturally portrayed as too uncivilised to take up the reins of effective self-government - may be the next home if civilisation, if they have enough time to mature before the barbarians come for them, too. So, yeah, it’s a hot mess of colonialist tropes and the white man’s burden, but it’s also a compelling story about a woman - the Venusian Quanna - who wants out of a patriarchal society and is willing to do it by any means necessary.

Moore, writing with Henry Kuttner under the name Lewis Padgett, also published the deeply ironic “Piggy Bank,” about Bob Ballard, a robber baron type who has built his fortune on the sale of diamonds - artificially created thanks to a secret process known only to his partner in crime, who naturally has set up a deadman scheme to have the secret released if he ever dies. Ballard has another problem - people keep stealing his diamonds. He can always have his partner make more, but the more there are on the market, the less value they have. So he comes up with the perfect solution - he has a robot built that’s specislised to do one thing only - escape from anyone who doesn’t know the password. Ballard takes care of his first problem, too, but his partner had been prepared for that eventuality too, and the story of how his revenge from beyond the grave plays out is actually rather satisfying.

Irony seems to have been one of Kuttner and Moore’s favourite devices. In “Compliments of the Author,” originally credited to Kuttner alone but now considered to be written by both, Tarbell, a corrupt newspaperman tries to blackmail a magician, but ends up killing him instead. He inherits two things - a book that can be used ten times to answer any question that involves danger, threat or great need, and the magician’s familiar, who swears revenge. Tarbell uses several of the book’s uses to escape attempts by the familiar to kill him, and then tries to use the book to get rid of the familiar. He succeeds, but at the end, he learns that sometimes the answer to finding an escape is “No.”

Henry Kuttner’s “The Crystal Circe” is a standard planetary romance, with three human adventurers finding an asteroid with a seductive, fatally beautiful, ancient and very alien being on it. One survives, forever changed by his experiences, to tell the harrowing tale, the others go on to their fate, neither life nor death as we know it. Competently written, as one would expect from Kuttner, and quite engaging, but a fairly ordinary example of its kind.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “Medusa” tells a story about a trip to hell in a ship full of madmen. Eight military spacemen, all but one of whom has had his mind carefully taken apart and put back together with “schizoid” personalities - one paranoic, one manic-depressive - are sent on a mission to discover the source of a mental field emanating from a strange planet, a field that drives men mad if they come too close. The reasoning is that a certain kind of mental illness might actually protect humans against the effects of the field. The final man has been given powerful hypnotic conditioning, to destroy the generator of the field, no matter what it is. It’s a fascinating look at interpersonal dynamics when paranoia goes wild, with a rather ingenious explanation at the end for what caused the killer mental field in the first place.

A few more novellas from 1942 for consideration for the 1943 Retro Hugos, culled from magazines I was able to download from here and there on the internets.

A. E. Van Vogt’s The Time Masters, first published as Recruiting Station, is the story of two humans from contemporary America who are caught up in a war taking place in the future. One side, the Glorious, have set up recruiting stations across time, and are essentially kidnapping hundreds of thousands of men from their past to become cannon fodder - literally, as each recruit, once conditioned, or ‘depersonalised’ is placed into a war machine and ordered to hurl his machine against the enemy forces, known as the Planetarians, until he is destroyed. Norma Matheson, a bitter and depressed woman, is ‘hired’ to run a recruiting centre by Dr. Lell, one if the Glorious, who overcomes her free will with advanced mental powers and advanced technology. A former lover, Jack Garson, is drawn into the schemes of the Glorious. As they struggle to free themselves, each in different times, that learn more about the thoroughly unpleasant politics of the future, in the hope that somehow they can end the destruction and find each other again. Lots of interesting plot twists and a woman with a fair degree of agency and rekevance to the story as more than some man’s sidekick. In fact, it could be argued that Garson ends up being her sidekick.

Anthony Boucher’s Barrier is another dystopic time travel story, featuring a man who goes forward in tine by 500 years, only to discover that the society he has arrived in, which worships stasis and order above all things, has created a barrier against time travel, preventing his return, and also preventing any travelers from the future from travelling back into his new present. From regularised language to regularised thought, the world he finds himself in is a bland place, ruled by thought police, devoid of freedom and limited in both individuality and creativity. By chance, his earliest encounters are with rebels trying to change the system, and the remainder of the novella follows their attempts to defeat the fascist state and remove the barrier. Assorted time paradoxes, plots, sacrifices, victories and defeats ensue. It’s an open-ended narrative, with no clear victories, but hope, at the end. A complex and entertaining story.

L. Sprague de Camp’s The Undesired Princess is a tongue-in-cheek portal fantasy set in a world of binary logic - things either are something or they are not, there are no transitional states - everything is exactly as it seems, and all fairytale tropes are true. The sun does circle the earth, only primary colours exist, and the princess falls in love with her champion. Engineer Rollin Hobart is unwillingly transported to this world, where he saves the princess from the monster and is then supposed to marry her and rule half the kingdom. The only problem is, Hobart just wants to go home again. But before that can happen, he has to save the king from a behemoth, foil a barbarian invasion, rescue the princess again, and hardest if all, get a handle on how things work in the land of Logaea. De Camp was a seriously funny writer.

In Sprague de Camp’s Solomon’s Stone, a planned prank involving a demon-summoning ritual goes seriously awry when a demon actually appears, and, unhampered by the improperly drawn magical protections, takes possession of the body of one of the participants, sending his soul into the astral plane. There, John Prosper Nash finds himself in an astral body with the identity of a French chevalier, surrounded by people who seem to be living out fantasies in exotic identities - wild west gunmen, knights, Egyptian princesses, samurai, and so on. It’s all very confusing, but Nash has to figure things out quickly, because according to the demon, if he acquires the Stone of Solomon within ten days, the demon will have to return him to his own body. It’s a wild romp, involving kidnappings, duels, lecherous sultans, armies of Amazons, wars between Romans, Leninists, Aryans and other factions, and various and sundry other adventures, some of which involve the fine art of advanced accounting.

Aqueduct Press has released a collection of reviews and essays by Liz Bourke. This fascinating collection, Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, is must reading for anyone interested how intersectional feminist analysis of media products should be done. Bourke’s readings of science fiction and fantasy novels, and her essays on such things as how literary canons are created, are both fun to read - Bourke has an engaging, easy style - and important to understanding where the genre, which I love dearly, has been and where it needs to go.

I have a certain fondness for reading collections of book reviews. Even reviews about books I haven’t read. There are two fundamentally wonderful things about reading good essays about books. The first is that, if one has read the book in question, it often gives you a deeper understanding of what you’ve read, which adds greatly to one’s enjoyment. The second is, that, if one has not read the book, it can lead you to a new friend, a new reading experience. Both pleasures were to be had in the essays of this volume, and considering the breadth of texts Bourke explores, I think most people will be able to say the same.

Bourke’s essays have reminded me of the brilliance of writers like Barbara Hambly and Kate Elliott, Nicola Griffith and Melissa Scott, reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read the books by authors like Jaqueline Koyanagi, Stina Licht, and Kameron Hurley that have been sitting in my TBR pile for far too long, and introduced me to authors whose work I’ve somehow missed entirely, like Violette Malan, Nicole Kornher-Stace and Susan Matthews. As I read, I found myself making notes to look online for a certain volume to acquire, or to move another one to a higher position on my TBR list, and if you decide to indulge yourself with this book, I think you will find yourself doing much the same.

Up Ghost River: a chief’s journey through the turbulent waters of Native history, Edmund Metatawabin’s memoir, is at once a survivor’s recollection of violence and oppression, and an activist’s declaration of Indigenous resistance and power.

Chief Metatawabin writes with courage and brutal honesty about his life, about the abuse he experienced as a student at a residential school, about the cultural genocide experienced by the Indigenous peoples, about the ways these things affected him, and came close to destroying him and his family. He offers his earliest recollections, before going away to school, about the damage done by oppressive laws that made the exercise of traditional ways a crime, the divisions created by Christian priests and ministers persuading Indigenous people that their culture was sinful and evil, abut the ways that Indigenous people were kept poor, hungry and in debt.

He writes about the almost unthinkable tortures, humiliations, abuses forced on him and others at residential schools, and the psychological damage from years of mistreatment and trauma, the way that pain led him to addiction.

He writes about his struggles to overcome alcoholism, to hel from trauma, finally learning that white men’s treatments in white institutions only perpetuated the damage. He became part of the indigenous healing movement, and began to rediscover self knowledge, and Indigenous pride.

As a chief and activist, he spearheaded court cases against residential schools, began to demand more autonomy for his nation, and supported the recovery of the almost lost traditions of indigenous people, working closely with the Idle No More movement.

These courageous personal accounts are important, both in exposing the history of white abuse, oppression and genocide, and in restoring the hope and the power of indigenous people, through making the truth known. I thank Chief Metatawabin for sharing his story with the world, and I honor him.

“What was accomplished by Idle No More? With Stephen Harper’s parliamentary majority, it was hard for us to stop the Acts from becoming law. And yet, it soon became apparent that the movement was bigger than the original legislation that sparked it. We organized and demonstrated politically and spiritually, championing those aspects of our culture that the residential schools had tried to destroy. At the protests worldwide, we raised our voices and sang to the four directions to show that we are still here. We banged the moosehide drum because it symbolizes the union between the heartbeat of Mother Earth and our people, still beating strong after centuries of oppression. We rose up, strong and united, to return to the Red Road. We took to the streets and retraced the ancient trails. We found our spirits and our voices, and told our stories of renewed pride and strength in powerful traditions. We took a healing journey, as I have been doing ever since I left St. Anne’s. We honoured the memories of our living ghosts.”

Fonda Lee’s young adult novel Exo is set in a future society where humans are subordinate to an alien race, the zhree. The fortunate humans are “marked,” tattooed to indicate that they are loyal to a zhree patron. Most other humans struggle to find work, hoping to be marked themselves. And some humans resist, even after a century of zhree presence on earth.

Donovan Reyes is 17, and marked, a soldier-in-erze. He’s an exo, surgically modified with alien technology that protects him for projectile weapons, heals his wounds, gives him advantages over unmodified humans. But it still doesn’t prevent him from being captured by the resistance, known as Sapience, during a routine check of a civilian tip. What keeps the resistance from killing him at first is the fact that he’s the son of the Prime Liaison, the human representative of the zhree.

Lee’s vision of conquerors and resistance is a nuanced one. The alien zhree take good care of their human associates, especialy those accepted into the zhree social network, those “in erze.” They are patronised, they have no political autonomy, they have been colonised, but they are not slaves. It’s very much a rcapitulation of the “white man’s burden” style of colonial rule, with the zhree as benevolent rulers and compliant humans as junior partners.

And the resistance is not necessarily the ‘good guys’ - they are engaged in guerilla warfare, and that includes all the tools, including bombings, assassinations, hostage-takings and provocations intended to make the aliens deal more harshly with humans, to generate more support for the cause. They torture captured exos to death and release films of these executions. They don’t protect innocent civilians caught up in violent interactions with zhree or human exos. They are fighting by any means necessary and there is little that’s noble about their methods - it’s a realistic picture of resistance fighters justifying the means by the ends.

As an exo, Donovan is “other” to both non-modified humans, and zhree. He is only really comfortable with other exos. Though his father sees him and other exos as a bridge between the two peoples, he is in reality neither fully part of either group. As if to underscore the way his identity is caught between worlds, once he is taken to a secret resistance, he learns that the mother who left him as a child is one of the resistance leaders. Part human, part zhree, he is also caught between the humans who comply, and the humans who resist, bound by ties of family to both factions.

Lee crafts a tightly woven story, combining YA themes of coming to terms with the influence of one’s parents and finding one’s own moral code with standard science fiction themes of alien invasion and colonisation and the use of advanced technology. All of the factions - rebels, marked humans, exos and zhree - are drawn with complexity; there are no clear heroes or villains, and no monolithic blocks where everyone shares the same opinions. There are just sentient beings doing what they think is best for their people, however they may define that. I thought that Donovan’s situation at the end of the book was a little far-fetched, but so did several of the characters, which made it a bit more believable. This the first book in a series, and I am curious to see where it leads.

Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee’s sequel to last year’s stunning Ninefox Gambit, begins with an assassination attempt.

General Kel Khiruev, newly appointed commander of one of the Hexarchate’s most powerful vessels, has her orders - to deal with the Hafn invasion of the Severed March region as soon as Captain Kel Charis joins her fleet. However, when Charis arrives, it is, by all appearances, the revenant General Shuos Jedao in Charis’ body.

Kels - the hexarchate military - are psychologically programmed to obey orders from a superior. It’s called formation instinct, and Jedao relies on it to make his takeover work. But Khiruev is resilient and resourceful, and just barely manages to resist long enough to build a jury-rigged drone and set it to kill Jedao. Her plan fails, and two of her own crew are killed. Possibly worse, Jedao knows she did it, and doesn’t care.

What follows is a complicated game of cat, cat, and mouse, as Jedao chases the Hafn, and the Hexarchate chases Jedao, with the Kel and Charis’ people, the Mwennin, caught in between. Alliances shift and mutate. The stakes are higher than anything the hexarchate has imagined. They think Jedao wants power. Revenge. Perhaps even redemption. But they’re wrong. What Jedao wants is freedom.

If Ninefox Gambit was strange and wonderful, Raven Stratagem is both, and more.

Matt, the protagonist of Sam J. Miller’s YA novel The Art of Starving, is not having a good life. He’s an intelligent, gay high school student who endures daily bullying from the popular jocks. His family is poor, and Jewish. He has suicidal impulses, fantasises about running away, or maybe getting his mother’s mother’s gun and taking it to school, and he struggles with anorexia and body dysphoria, which of course boys supposedly do not get. His sister has run away, and Matt thinks it has something to do with Tariq, one of the boys who torments him. His mother, a single parent who is always exhausted from her work at the slaughterhouse, is in perpetual denial about her children’s problems.

Matt doesn’t acknowledge his anorexia. Instead, he justifies not eating by saying that it makes him more alert and aware of danger, heightens his abilities to defend himself. He practices the Art of Starving, and throughout the book, he formulates the rules that govern his art.

The first person narrative is centred around two main issues. The first is Matt’s perceptions of how his body and senses change when he eats, or doesn’t eat; his belief that starvation heightens awareness, and his war with his body over hunger. The second is his obsession with Tariq, to whom he is attracted, but who he believes has somehow injured his sister so that she had to run away; he doesn’t say it directly, but it’s clear he believes his sister was sexually assaulted by Tariq, and possibly also by Tariq’s bullying friends.

It’s a scorchingly funny, bitterly heartbreaking story. Matt’s pain and desire come alive on every page, couched in trenchant observations about life, wrapped up in the grief of an adolescent who just does not see where he fits in the world. It’s a great novel - but since I’m reading it as a book that’s been heavily recommended as a potential Hugo nominee, I have to ask myself, is it speculative fiction?

The only genre element in the novel is Matt’s belief that he has powers granted to him by the art of starving. Several things happen that may be external validations of his belief. Or they may be delusions. Matt has starved himself to the point where his brain doesn’t work properly, so he is not a reliable narrator.

So... a good novel, an important novel, one that really gives an insider view of what it’s like to be a queer person growing up in a damaged home, struggling with an eating disorder, feeling like an outsider. And yes, I’ve been there. Even to the point of tripping on the sense of power that not eating gives a person who perceives themselves as otherwise powerless. The euphoria of wilful starvation.

But not necessarily a science fiction or fantasy novel. That’s a decision you’ll have to make yourself.

In the dystopic world of Cindy Pon’s YA novel Want, the earth is irretrievably polluted. A tiny percentage of people, the ones whose families run the Corporations, receive the benefits of wealth - genetic engineering, safe neighbourhoods, clean food, water and air. They live normal life spans, insulated from the poverty and disease which mark the short lives of the others. When they leave their clean homes, they wear designer environmental suits to protect the. From the poisoned world everyone else inhabits. In Taipei, they are known as “you” people; the poor who do the work and die from hunger and the toxic waste that surrounds them are called “mei” people.

The protagonist, Jason Zhou, is a member of an ecological activist group, mostly teenagers from a variety of class backgrounds, led by a respected scientist, Dr. Nataraj. They’ve been supporting her quest to launch legislation that might begin to reduce the pollution that chokes the island, but nothing they do has made any headway against the influence of the powerful corporations.

And then, Dr. Nataraj is murdered, her office found ransacked. The group’s hacker, Lingyi, uncovers evidence suggesting the hit was ordered by Jin Feiming, “the richest and most powerful man in Taiwan” and head of the Jin Corporation, the organisation that builds and provides the power sources for the suits that protect the wealthy from the environment around them.

A desperate plan evolves, to infiltrate Jin Corp, destroy its production facility, disabling the environmental suits and forcing the “yous” to live in the same poisoned world that everyone else does.

Pon’s dystopic thriller is a tightly plotted narrative, with a memorable setting and strongly realised characters. The non-Western setting and the multi-ethnic cast - the main characters are Chinese, Indian and Filipino - make this a welcome addition to the growing list of diverse YA literature. There’s some very kickass female characters (two of whom are queer), a romance that grows across class lines, plenty of action and suspense, and a strong message about environmental issues and corporate callousness and greed. Entertaining and thought-provoking fiction like this is something we can always use more of.

Ijeoma Oluo is a writer and journalist who has focused on writing about misogynoir, intersectionality, online harassment, the Black Lives Matter movement, race, economics, parenting, feminism and social justice. Now she has written a book, So You Want To Talk about Race, which brings together her thinking on these topics in an accessible introduction to the basic concepts of the discourse, for the person who wants to enter the conversation on racism in a useful way.

She tackles the hard questions head-on, with clear examples and plenty of practical metaphors to get the important ideas across. In each chapter, she addresses a different, common area of discussion around race, and provides specific ideas about how to tackle the issues, what things to keep in mind, even, where relevant, key facts for engaging in argument. The topics she covers are wide.ranging, and important. The intersectionality of race and class that pushes back against the idea that policies aimed at reducing poverty are also going to resolve race-based poverty. The definition of racism as a structural phenomenon, not an individual one, and how that affects the discourse. The effect of micro-agressions. What privilege is, and why you need to check it. The depth of misogynoir (google it) in our society, and why it hurts black women so badly. The politics of cultural appropriation. Social issues such as affirmative action and the school-to-prison pipeline.

This is more than just an introduction to concepts. It is also a training manual, in a sense, that addresses the issue of how to have a productive conversation about race. It’s an important book for anyone, and particularly anyone white who genuinely wants to talk about issues of racism without harming the people of colour you’re talking to. And for those who want to engage with those who seem ignorant about racism, but teachable.

Ann Leckie’s latest book, Provenance, is a most engaging science fictional political thriller cum murder mystery. Set in the Radchaii universe, but not in the Radch itself, it’s a smorgasbord of plots, conspiracies, political infighting, diplomatic maneuverings, hidden identities, thefts, attempted invasions, and murder, where every major character and most minor ones have at least one hidden agenda and no one’s motives can be assumed. And that is why it’s so much fun.

I’m not even going to try to explain the details of the plot, because before we’re through the first chapter, it’s gotten hopelessly complicated by circumstances. The protagonist is Ingray, the daughter of a powerful politician in the Hwae government. Overshadowed by her sibling Danach, who is favoured to become the heir to her mother’s power and position, Ingray has come up with a very risky scene she hopes will improve her house’s fortunes and her own position in her mother’s eyes. That scheme involves the dishonored and exiled child of another powerful house, and some very valuable historical documents, known as vestiges, purporting to show the origins of that house. But things get complicated, and then they get more complicated, and then... well, that’s why I’m not trying to give any plot details. You’ll have to read it for yourself. But one thing that’s very important to the success of this novel is that Ingray, despite her attempts to scheme and plot, is basically a nice person. That’s part of why things get so complicated for her. But it’s why you want to keep reading, because you really want everything to work out well for her.

A lot of the action, the scheming, the secrets and mysteries, centre around vestiges. The Hwae have a deep regard for the histories of things - houses, events, people. And what other peoples might treat as souvenirs, or interesting historical artefacts, are matters of great seriousness in their culture. A signed menu from an important dinner. The original draft of an important law. A floor tile from a building where something significant happened once. These are vestiges. For the Hwae, vestiges have almost the status of sacred artefacts. They connect them to their past, tell them who they are by declaring where they come from, what they have done, and who they have been.

As one might gather from the title, history, documentation of history, and the legitimacy of such documentary evidence is at the heart of much of the plots and conflicts in the novel, from the ownership of a space ship, to the foundations of a house, to the origins of an entire people. The social and philosophical questions that underlie the narrative are very much about how we construct history and self, and the value we place on how things came to be, in comparison to how things are. As one of the characters says: “Who are we if our vestiges aren’t real?”

Lesley Nneka Arimah Is one hell of a writer.

I first encountered her work through the short story “Who Will Greet You At Home” which was such a powerful piece of speculative fiction that I nominated it for a Hugo. It is included in her collection of short fiction, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, and it was irrefutably representative of the quality and power of Arimah’s work.

Arimah is a British-born Nigerian writer, and her work, which draws on both her experiences as a woman in modern Nigeria and an immigrant in colour in a white-centred country, is imbued with a deep consciousness of the realities of women’s lives in a world which can be violent and corrupt, in which they are rarely seen as they are and accorded their worth.

Her stories are primarily about people in relationships - how we are embedded in long chains of impact from the ways people interact, how they shape our lives. She writes with clarity and honesty about the ways people need, use, love and hurt each other. About the balance of desire and need, love and violence, sex and possession, in relationships between men and women. About the power and pain of the mother-daughter bond. About anger and grief and love and fear.

Arimah writes both realistic and speculation fiction, story and fable. Some of her stories have strong elements of the fantastic and the supernatural, others tell of events that are perfectly ordinary. Her themes are what remains constant, the elements varying to suit the specific story she wants to tell, the kind of experience she chooses to illuminate.

This is an amazing collection, full of depth, of truth, of inspiration, of pain, of hope, of life.

The Tiger’s Daughter is K. Arsenault Rivera’s first novel, and it is both lovely and problematical. Which leaves me conflicted in talking about it.

It’s a love story between two warrior women who are destined to inherit the rulerships of their respective peoples. That’s what’s lovely about it. The childhood friendship that grows into love, the fact that we have two ‘chosen ones’ both with warrior mothers who pass on their skills, both with special abilities, both with extraordinary abilities and courage. Two women who will grow up to fight demons and to love each other, parted for a time by fate but never forgetting one another. That’s the wonderful part.

What is not so wonderful is that this is a secondary world which is based on actual Asian cultures, uncomfortably exoticised.

Shizuka is the daughter of a warrior and a poet, the niece of the childless Emperor, the Son of Heaven. Her homeland is Hokkaro, and there is a lot of talk about calligraphy and chrysanthemums and jade, and how important it is to use the correct honorific with a person’s name, and these are the things that define Hokkaran culture.

Shefali is the daughter of a Kharsa of the Qorin, a nomadic people who are masters at horsemanship and archery, live in felt tents called gers, and drink fermented sheep’s milk. These are the things that define Quorin culture.

Other than these blatant borrowings from Sino-Japanese and Mongolian traditions, we really don’t learn much more about either culture. Only the Gods of the Hokkaro seem to have ben developed originally, rather than taken from an existing Asian culture. And the gender equality.

And of course there is racism between these peoples, and colourism - Shefali and her brother are the children of a political marriage between their mother and a Hokkaran noble, of mixed race, taunted by other Qorin for their colour and their “rice-eater” ways. It can be argued that racism exists, colourism exists, they are things that humans do, and Rivera is only being realistic when she includes such behaviour in her story. And I would not dispute this if these were wholly invented cultures. But this is racism as the white people of this world have directed against the real peoples the Rivera has imported into her fantasy. And the relationship between Hokkaro and its client states replicate some of the most difficult parts of the history of relationships between Asian nations. This is neither a true secondary world fantasy, nor a historical fantasy. And that’s what makes this a problem.

There are other problems, too, structural ones. This is an epistolary novel in the extreme. The entire scope of the novel occurs within one extended scene, in which Shizuka, now the Empress Yui, receives a thick packet from Shefali, a letter in which Shefali recounts the entire history of their early lives together, their meetings and adventures as children, and her own adventures while they were apart. Shizuka, reading, occasionally pauses to recollect events that Shefali was not present for, to eat and drink and sleep before continuing to read Shefali’s letter.

It’s a very distancing device, although it does allow for some poetic language intended to underline the intensity of their ever-deepening relationship. But the implausibility of it all detracts more than it adds. Does Shefali really believe she has to rehearse every aspect of their past lives together, as if Shizuka will have forgotten these precious experiences?

So, there it lies. I loved the love story, the characters, their long struggle to be together, the twists of fate that kept them apart, the wonderful, heartwarming ending, the underlying story that still remains, of two strong warriors, wife and wife, who have a destiny to battle the demons that still infest their lans. But the worldbuilding is deeply flawed and appropriative. And that is not something that can be ignored.

Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal is a complex, fast-paced novel that explores issues of race and the movement of refugees across borders, wrapped up in the form of a thriller, set in two imagined countries that stand in for the third world of the oppressed and disadvantaged people of colour who become refugees, and the privileged Western countries where white people accumulate wealth off the oppression of other nations.

“Keita had studied maps, and he knew that Zantoroland—only one hundred kilometres long and eighty wide—was but a speck in the Ortiz Sea in the Indian Ocean. Africa to the west and Australia to the east were far too distant to be seen, but Keita knew they were there. Looking down Blossom Street, Keita could see the port and the waters of the Ortiz Sea. There were fifteen hundred kilometres of open water stretching north to the nation of Freedom State. Like all schoolchildren, Keita knew that Freedom State had enslaved Zantorolanders for some two centuries but, after abolishing slavery, had deported most black people back to Zantoroland. Ever since that time, adventurous Zantorolanders had braved the Ortiz Sea in fishing boats, taking their lives into their hands as they tried to slip back into Freedom State, one of the richest nations in the world.”

Hill’s protagonist, Keita Ali, is a black man from Zontoroland, a brutal dictatorship, rife with intertribal power struggles, violence and corruption. From his childhood, he has wanted to be a distance runner. He has trained himself for it, through the violence he witnesses as a child, through the military coup, through the death of his mother, through the detainment and torture of his dissident journalist father, through the departure of his brilliant sister to be educated safely in a foreign country. He gains the attention of a second-rate sports agent from Freedom State.

When his father is killed, he uses the agent’s interest in him to get to Freedom State, and then he runs. Without passport or papers, he is an Illegal in a country that has a policy of hunting down and deporting all undocumented residents, Keita is alone, and hunted.

When he enters a marathon and wins it, not only does he draw unwanted attention to himself, he becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a young Freedom State citizen secretly deported to Zantoroland and murdered there, a mystery that also connects him to Viola, a black, disabled reporter, John Falconer, young man of mixed race who wants to become a journalist, and a number of other people from the Minister of Immigration to the woman who runs the black shantytown known as AfricTown. Worse, his sister Charity has been lured back to Zonotoroland and the government, having located him through the news stories about his race victory, are demanding money for her safe release from detention. And the agent he ran out on is threatening to have him deported unless he buys out his contract.

Every contact he makes places him in jeopardy because of his status as an illegal. The pretty runner he beds once and tries to avoid because she’s a cop. The elderly woman with the vindictive grasping son who offers him a place to stay in return for some housekeeping chores. The banker who cannot open an account for him without identification he does not have. Everything is a risk.

Hill captures the fear of the refugee, the fear of the undocumented resident in a foreign country, with precision. Through Keita, we understand why some people are so desperate to leave their homelands that they will risk everything, live in the shadows in a country not their own, where they may never gain the right to be called ‘legal.’

Gwyneth Jones’s novella Proof of Concept is a densely packed narrative, weaving multiple thematic threads together into a single coherent story. The protagonist, a young woman named Kir, was chosen from a life of brutal poverty to be the host to an AI called Altair - serving as the biological platform for a software too complex to run solely on inanimate hardware. That brutal life was the result of being an outsider, a ‘scav,’ in a world ruined by ecological collapse leading to a severe population crisis. This post-climate-change earth has dead oceans and limited agricultural land, vast areas of the planet’s are unlivable and most of humanity survives - just barely - in crowded cities known as hives. The dream is The Great Escape - a way out of the solar system, to inhabit a new, fresh world.

Dan Orsted is known as the Great Popularizer. He creates Very Long Duration Training Missions in which groups of potential space explorers simulate interstellar travel conditions - while the world watches, the newest version of reality television. Margarethe Patel is a physicist working on the theory of instantaneous travel.

The Needle is an experimental space travel device built in a deep chasm. Here a group of Patel’s scientists and Orsted’s LDM reality star colonists will spend a year in isolation while Patel’s team works on the problem of directing instantaneous travel. They already know they can send the Needle out, and bring it back - now they need to find out how to find out where it goes, and eventually make it go where they want.

At first, it seems to be working well. There’s some interpersonal discomfort - friction is a bad word in the intensely social society of the hives - between the mostly driven an introverted scientists and the determinedly gregarious media stars, but nothing serious.

Then one of the scientists dies. A few months later, another. And shortly after that, another. All older, with known health issues, but still it doesn’t feel right to Kir. Meanwhile, Kir has suddenly started to ‘hear’ Altair speaking to her. The first thing he does is ask her to check certain offline data, data which, if she understands correctly, means that solving the instantaneous travel problem is much closer than she believed it to be, that they have ‘proof of concept’ - but Patel hasn’t told anyone yet. And then her casual lover, oe of the LDM personnel, is brutally murdered.

Proof of Concept is a heavily layered mystery, tightly plotted, with deceptions and evasions on almost all sides, as Kir struggles to find out what is really going inside the Needle Project. By the time she finds out, it is too late for the characters to do anything except accept the challenge to survive. What’s left for the reader is to consider the morality of certain acts in the face of extinction of not just humanity, but all things on the Earth.

Jones never gives easy answers in her fiction. Proof of Concept is no exception.

Danielle L. McGuire’s book At The Dark End of the Street, subtitled Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, looks at the role of black women’s resistance to sexual violence at the hands of white men in the history of the civil rights movement. As she notes in her Introduction:

“And yet analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement, which present it as a struggle between black and white men—the heroic leadership of Martin Luther King confronting intransigent white supremacists like “Bull” Connor. The real story—that the civil rights movement is also rooted in African-American women’s long struggle against sexual violence—has never before been written. The stories of black women who fought for bodily integrity and personal dignity hold profound truths about the sexualized violence that marked racial politics and African American lives during the modern civil rights movement. If we understand the role rape and sexual violence played in African Americans’ daily lives and within the larger freedom struggle, we have to reinterpret, if not rewrite, the history of the civil rights movement.”

In her landmark book, McGuire focuses on the history of black women and sexual violence in Montgomery, Alabama - the home of icon and activist Rosa Parks and in some ways the birthplace of the civil rights movement in the South - where in 1944, Recy Taylor’s speaking out about her rape made headlines and brought Parks, then a NAACP worker, to nearby Abbeville to investigate the case. Using Montgomery as a case study for her thesis, McGuire follows the stories of sexual violence and the response of the black community, particularly black women - but she makes it clear that Montgomery is hardly an anomaly, that such race-based sexual violence was and is endemic in America.

“Montgomery, Alabama, was not the only place in which attacks on black women fueled protests against white supremacy. Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and many other places had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood.”

While her focus in examining black activism in response to sexual violence is on the harassment and rape of black women, uncounted numbers of whom were victims of white men who were never punished, McGuire does not ignore the way that accusations of gendered violence were used against black men, thousands of whom were falsely accused of offenses against white women and, if they escaped lynching, found it nearly impossible to convince the courts of their innocence.

However, her central narrative is clear in connecting the growing outrage at the numerous incidents of black women abducted and raped by white men with the impetus to activism. Years before the assault on Recy Taylor, the cause of the Scottsboro nine - nine black youths convicted of raping two white women - brought together black civil rights activists and white progressives to fight for justice; Taylor’s case galvanised protest and resulted in the formation of organisations whose activities would expand and persist.

Despite their best efforts, it proved impossible to win convictions against Taylor’s rapists, who either denied their involvement, or alleged that she was a known prostitute whom they had paid. But the movement went on to take up the cases of other black women, and to broadcast information about these assaults across the country.

Aside from entrenched racism and the belief that the rape of black women was not really a crime, the progressives and activists involved in fighting for equal justice faced serious opposition from another direction: the cold war fear of Communist ‘infiltrtion’ and McCarthyism. Many of those, white and black, who took up the cause of equal justice for blacks were, or had t one time been, involved in groups that the government had identified as communist. In some cases, so many members of civil rights organisations were also linked to socialist or communist groups, that the FBI considered them as Communist fronts. This led to their civil rights positions and actions being discounted as Russian propaganda intended to destabilise and discredit the U.S.

Yet on the other hand, the post-war era had seen many black veterans returning from the theatres in Europe and the Pacific, changed by their participation in the war against fascism. These former soldiers “...returned home with a new sense of pride and purpose and often led campaigns for citizenship rights, legal equality, and bodily integrity. In small towns and cities across the South, black veterans became the “shock troops” of an emerging civil rights movement.”

In the mythology of the civil rights movement, the spark is Rosa Park’s refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus. Parks is often portrayed as a woman who simply was too tired, and snapped one day. In reality, the organising had begun years before, around the far more complex issue of violence against blacks, and particularly sexual violence against black women. McGuire draws the connections between this focus and the bus protests. Most working black women could not afford cars; to get to their places of work - many were domestic workers who lived far from the homes of their employers - they had to ride the buses. But the indignities did not end at having to sit at the back of the bus. Black people were often subjected to verbal and physical assault for the slightest indication of disrespect. They could be required to pay at the front, then get off and board at the rear doors - unless the bus driver decided to drive off without them. Bus drivers sometimes beat black riders who sat in the wrong seats, or refused to get up and move further back, or get off if a seat was needed for a white person. The buses were a site of white violence toward blacks.

McGuire’s narrative of the Montgomery bus boycott, and other actions undertaken during the civil rights era to bring public pressure to bear on the rampant discrimination and racism of the Southern US, restore to its place the forgotten role of black women. Parks was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat or defend herself in court; she was just the first woman with a sufficiently impeccable reputation to risk a national news event on. Much of the organising and fundraising during the boycott was done by women. Women organised car pools and drove cars. And in the thousands, women walked, or shared rides, rather than break the boycott, in the face of daiky threats and abuse. Women were charged and arrested for their roles in the boycott, but the media narrative focused on the male ministers, and above all, on the charismatic young Martin Luther King Jr. in making him the hero of the movement, the work of black women was pushed into shadows.

Women were active, organising, marching, working on voter registration, desegregating lunch counters and schools, their work and courage the backbone of the civil rights movement. Women like Jo Ann Robinson and Fannie Lou Hamer gave tirelessly of their energy and time in the movement. Like the men, they risked harassment, loss of employment, beatings, jail, destructions of property snd homes through vandalism and arson, and death. They also risked sexual intimidation, humiliation and rape.

McGuire spares the reader none of the details of the brutal acts that shored up white supremacy, the beatings, rapes, torturings, deliberate mutilations, and murders of black men, women and children for the slightest of imagined offences against the “proper order” of society, for being “uppity” or indeed for no reason at all other than the fear, insecurity and rage of white people. McGuire writes about the civil rights era, the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, but the reader cannot forget, as the horrifying images emerge from the page, that the violence continues.

Bogi Takács, “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus”; Clarkesworld, April 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/takacs_04_17/

This is a story within a story, with one sentient being - a genetically enhanced octopus - telling another sentient being - a human - what is remembered in the group memory of the octopi about a great wrong committed by humans. The details unfold slowly, through filters of memory, time and difference, but the issues are familiar, the arrogance and assumption of human exceptionalism, the unthinking use of other living beings, the carelessness of the species. It’s not dramatic in its accusation, but it lingers nonetheless.

“Sun, Moon, Dust,” Ursula Vernon; Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/sun-moon-dust/

A sweet story of the “swords into ploughshares” variety; a farmer inherits a magical sword from his grandmother, a famous warrior in her day, but has no need or desire for war.

“Goddess, Worm,” by Cassandra Khaw; Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/goddess-worm/

Khaw deconstructs a Chinese legend about the discovery of silk weaving, revealing the acceptance of gendered violence that underlie it.

“Monster Girls Don’t Cry,” A. Merc Rustad; Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/monster-girls-dont-cry/

A powerful story about making room for difference. A young girl grows up hating and trying to erase the things that make her a monster in the eyes of the world finally learns to accept herself and demand acceptance from those around her.

“Carnival Nine,” Caroline Yoachim; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 11, 2017
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/carnival-nine/

Yoachim’s short story places us inside a world of conscious wind-up dolls, living in miniature cities around a model train layout. Each day the maker winds up the dolls, and they live their lives, ever watchful of the number of turns they have - a figure that varies with the conditions of their mainspring and possibly the whim, or degree of attention, of the maker. It’s an extended metaphor for human life, with not a great deal to add to the conversation about life, death, and fate, but does get points for including a situation that parallels the way family dynamics can change with the addition of a disabled child. A touching story.

“The Last Novelist (Or a Dead Lizard in the Yard),” Matthew Kressel; Tor.com, March 15, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/03/15/the-last-novelist-or-a-dead-lizard-in-the-yard/

Reuth Bryan Diaso is perhaps the last novelist in a galaxy in which no one reads books anymore. He has come to the planet Ardabaab to finish his last novel before he dies, but he has lost his inspiration. A chance encounter with a young girl whose enthusiasm for knowledge and raw artistic talent gives him the energy to renew his writing, and to share with her his love of books, of the physicality of reading, of the crafts of creating not just the sequence if words that make up a novel, but the actual process of printing a book. This is a story about loss and creation, endings and perhaps beginnings, death and renewal. I found it quite compelling.

“Utopia, LOL?,” Jamie Wahls; Strange Horizons, June 5, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/utopia-lol/

It’s millions of years in the future, and human beings exist solely as uploaded intelligences in a vast artificial environment controlled by an AI known as Allocator. Almost all the usable mass of the solar system has been converted into the physical substrate that supports the set of virtual realities in which the human race spends its time, playing with simulations of millions of scenarios. But Allocator has limitations. It cannot interfere with human choices, which means that even as virtual beings, they continue to reproduce, requiring ever more substrate material. Allocator cannot extend its influence beyond the solar system - another programmed limitation - but humans can. Allocator’s dilemma - where can it find humans willing to inhabit space probes that will take them to other solar systems and find more space for the multitude of human minds? It’s a very well thought-out story, which touches on a number of issues related to artificial intelligence and informed consent.

“You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych,” Kathleen Kayembe; Nightmare Magazine, March, 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/will-always-family-triptych/

Kayembe’s novelette is powerful, terrifying, triumphant, laying bare the worst and best of the binds between family. In the midst of grief over the loss of his wife, a man does the unthinkable, destroys the son he believes caused her death, takes the other son away with him to America. Years later, he is truly haunted by his actions, and pays the price. Yet in the midst of a tale about supernatural revenge, there is also fierce love of brother for brother, mother for child and finally the discovery of self-love for the young woman who survives the toll exacted by the dead.

“Mother of Invention,” Nnedi Okorafor; Slate.com, February 21, 2018
https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/mother-of-invention-a-new-short-story-by-nnedi-okorafor.html

Anwuli is pregnant, almost ready to give birth. She is alone, deserted by her lover, a married man who deceived her about his status, then left her when she got pregnant. Shunned by her family and friends. All she has left is the smart house her lover built for her, an intelligent, self-repairing, self-improving home. But Anwuli has an even mire serious problem - she’s become severely allergic to the pollen of the genetically modified flowers that grow everywhere in New Delta City, and there’s a massive pollen storm brewing, one severe enough to put her into anaphylactic shock. When she goes into labour just as the pollen storm hits, help comes from a most unexpected source.

I acquired Anthony Boucher’s collection, The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories because I was reading novellas recommended by various folks about the Internet as possible nominations for the 1943 Retro Hugos, and The Compleat Werewolf was one of them. I don’t remember reading much of Boucher’s work back in my early years of sf reading, but I enjoyed The Compleat Werewolf enough to go on and read the other stories in the collection.

Boucher tends to write with a light, even comical touch, incorporating elements of the ridiculous into his fiction, but in such a way as to make them seem quite appropriate at the time. Not that all of his stories are comedies. Several of the ones in this collection deal with very serious matters, from German spy rings in WWII, to murder. But Boucher unfolds even these dark plots with wit and just the right amount of detachment.

In the title novella, The Compleat Werewolf, a man rejected by the woman he loves because he isn’t someone special like an actor or a G-man discovers he’s a werewolf. He gets a gig as a dog in a major motion picture, and is then hired by the FBI when he exposes a major spy ring. He also discovers that the girl of his dreams isn’t worth it. But he makes friends with a talking cat.

The Pink Caterpillar, Mr. Lupescu and They Bite are all about the lengths someone will go to, to get rid of someone in their way. And how their actions carry the seeds of their own destruction.

Boucher tried his hand at some stories about a company that made robots, much as Asimov did. Two of them, Q.U.R and Robinc, are included in the collection. I actually found them more interesting and funnier than Asimov’ early robot stories. And Dugg Quimby is much more intriguing a character than Susan Calvin.

The novelette We Print the Truth is a thoughtful modern-day variation on the fairy tale of the fateful wish - the wish granted by a magical being that ultimately dies far more harm than good - that examines issues of free will, consent, a d the value of something earned over something taken.

Many of the stories in this collection depend on the unexpected plot twist - The Ghost of Me being one if the clearest examples. A steady diet of Boucher might make this structural preference feel a bit overused, but it’s generally well handled.

One thing I quite enjoyed about these stories was the way that Boucher works philosophical considerations into so many of them. Fate, karma, the meaning of free will the theological problem of the existence of evil - there’s generally something to reflect on after reading.

Boucher also tends to toss in casual notes of social criticism. In one story, he has a character comment that once it would have been unthinkable for the head of the government to be a black person. In another, during a discussion of horror tales about ogres from around the world in reference to an abandoned pioneer home in the Arizona desert, a character mentions an Indian tribe that vanished after the pioneers arrived, and adds “That’s not so surprising. The white race is a sort of super-ogre, anyway.”

I’ve been doing a lot of reading of classic sf recently, and I must report that finding Boucher’s works has been an unexpected plus.

Now that there is a not-a-Hugo award for YA fiction, I will likely be reading more of it. I am not, you must understand, opposed to YA fiction or particularly disinclined to read it. It’s more that, having no actual young adults in my life, I don’t hear much about new YA fiction unless it gets a huge buzz and they sound interesting, as the Hunger Games novels did (and the Twilight novels most emphatically did not), or it’s written by an author whose work I enjoy under any circumstances, like Diane Duane or Nnedi Okorafor.

But I figure one place to begin this year is with the Nebula awards short list. And the first book from that list I picked to read is Kari Maaren’s Weave a Circle Round.

I found it very difficult to get into at first. Oh, it’s very well written. In fact, it’s the quality of the prose that kept me going, because initially the protagonist, a very self-centred and self-pitying teenager named Freddie, kept getting on my nerves. She still resents her parents for getting divorced, after four years. Her mother’s new partner has moved into the household with his deaf son, Roland, and not only is she obnoxious about it, she steadfastly refuses to learn sign language and snipes at him constantly. She is constantly angry with her younger sister, Mel, who seems to have adapted somewhat more gracefully to the changes in circumstances.

Admittedly, she has some valid reasons to be unhappy. Her mother seems quite feckless, and, along with her new husband, is almost never home - all three kids suffer from benign neglect in this sense, their physical needs taken care of, but no parental care or presence worth mentioning. Mel and Roland have bonded over a shared love of RPGs, leaving Freddie out. Her only friends at school have matured over the summer in ways she has not, and seem more interested in boys and being attractive than anything else. She’s quite alone. And she wants nothing more than to fit in, to be average and normal.

Then there are the new neighbours, Cuerva Lachance, a woman apparently in her mid-to-late 30s who says she’s a private investigator, and Josiah, apparently a teenaged boy, who is, he insists vehemently, not Cuerva’s son. Indeed, their relationship seems more collegial than familial, and both are decidedly strange in many ways.

Adding to Freddie’s woes, Josiah, who seems compelled to loudly and insultingly criticise everyone and everything around him, is in all of Freddie’s classes at school, and because he talks to her, all the others begin to associate her with him, adding to her inability to just quietly blend in and draw no attention. Between Josiah’s strangeness and Roland’s disability, Freddie feels tainted beyond saving within the social order of her school. We are treated to many examples of how viciously and violently children can treat those who are different, and how completely ineffective adults are at seeing and stopping the bullying. This wasn’t much fun to read if you were a victim of this sort of thing as a kid yourself.

It’s the growing mystery surrounding Josiah and Cuerva that finally engaged me. Who - or what - are they, why are they so very strange indeed, and why are they interested in Freddie and her family?

And then Freddie and Josiah start slipping through time. And Josiah begins to reveal parts of the mystery. This is when the story gets interesting and Freddie begins to become a character I felt more strongly about. By the end, I was quite completely involved with the mystery and the roles that all three teenagers - Freddie, Mel, and Roland - play in making things right again.

Profile

bibliogramma

May 2019

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Dreamer for Dusty Foot by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Mar. 11th, 2026 01:45 am

My life in books

Books in my life

Recent Entries

Reading for the Retro Hugos: Short Stories

Reading for the Retro Hugos: Novelettes Part II

Reading for the Retro Hugos: Novelettes Part I

Reading for the Retro Hugos: More Novellas

Liz Bourke

Edmund Metatawabin: Up Ghost River

Fonda Lee: Exo

Yoon Ha Lee: Raven Stratagem

Sam J. Miller: The Art of Starving

Cindy Pon: Want

Ijeoma Oluo: So You Want To Talk about Race

Ann Leckie: Provenance

Lesley Nneka Arimah: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

K. Arsenault Rivera: The Tiger’s Daughter

Lawrence Hill: The Illegal

Gwyneth Jones: Proof of Concept

Danielle L. McGuire: At the Dark End of the Street

Short Fiction: February 23, 2018

Anthony Boucher: The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories

Kari Maaren: Weave a Circle Round