My life in books

As has been made clear, I love the secondary world of Valdemar created by Mercedes Lackey. I also, one may have noticed, love the writing of Tanya Huff. So you can imagine my delight when Tanya Huff released a collection of her Valdemarian stories featuring Herald Jors and his Companion Gervais, in The Demon’s Den and Other Tales of Valdemar.

The stories are told in a linear fashion, and begin with Jors as a young Herald, not long into his career, unsure of himself, his judgement, his abilities, but still, like any Herald, giving all that he can, the best that he can, relying on the unearthly wisdom of his Companion to find the best way. As his adventures continue, he becomes more comfortable with himself, his duties, and his place in the world. He makes mistakes. He learns about himself. He experiences successes, and failures to achieve everything he’d hoped to. He learns about love and heartbreak. And finally, he comes into his own, a Herald in his prime, confident and assured but aware of his limits and his needs.

I’d read these before, of course - they were all originally published in Lackey’s Valdemar anthologies - and enjoyed them, but there’s a deeper enjoyment to be found in seeing Jors growing and maturing as one reads these stories one after the other. I’m glad Huff had the idea to put them into a single collection, and that Lackey granted permission for her to publish a Valdemarian collection.

Malaysian author Zen Cho made an impressive debut with her fantasy novel The Sorcerer and the Crown, which I found delightful and engaging, and hope will have a sequel one of these days. In the meantime, I have widened my experience of Cho’s writing with her short fiction collection, Spirits Abroad.

These stories are rich with the history and traditions of Cho’s homeland, but make enough reference to Western sensibilities to be wholly relevant and meaningful to the ignorant reader such as myself, in large part because the themes, though they may be clothed in different cultural realities, are universal human experiences - love, family, a need to belong.

As the title suggests, the stories in this collection are mostly what one might class as fantasy, with some more sciencefictional settings, drawing on Malaysian traditions of supernatural beings and forces - but they are often situated in what seems to be perfectly normal situations. The collection is divided into four sections, titled Here, meaning Malaysia, There, meaning the West, Elsewhere, and Going Back.

The first story of the collection, “The First Witch of Damansara,” is a darkly humorous story about a family preparing for the funeral of their matriarch, fondly referred to as Nai Nai - who is continuing to communicate with one of her granddaughters through dreams. Nai Nai does not want to be buried where her daughters now lives, but next to her long dead husband - not because she loved him, but because it’s the proper thing to do. The task of persuading Nai Nai to be happily buried where her family lives falls to the Americanised Vivian, who is more concerned with finding the right wedding dress - traditional Malaysian, or Western white? It’s funny, and it’s heart-warming, and it’s about family and traditions and legacies that go beyond material things.

“First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia” begins as an account of an NGO organising and opening a conference, and in the process gives the reader unfamiliar with Malaysia a sense of the diversity of peoples and religions in the country, but then it morphs into a recollection of a bittersweet interspecies love story, as the two lovers meet again for a last farewell.

“The House of Aunts” features a young girl who is also a pontianak, an undead woman similar to the western vampire. Having become a pontianak while still an adolescent, Ah Lee lives much like other young girls - she goes to school, has crushes on handsome boys, and struggles over her homework. She lives in a house of women, all pontianak, all her relatives - her grandmother, great-grandmother, and several aunts - who watch over her, give her endless advice on staying in school, going to university, maybe becoming a doctor. And they distinctly disapprove when she falls in love with a boy from school - but are ready to stand by her when she reveals her secret to him, and is rejected. This is another story that centres on the primacy and importance of family, and particularly the love and support that women can give each other. I also suspect that Cho is telling us something about what it means to be a woman of reproductive age in Malaysian society, as traditionally pontianak are created when a woman dies while pregnant or in childbirth - for one family over the course of several generations to produce so many pontianak suggests a social issue with maternal morbidity.

“One-day Travelcard for Fairyland” takes place in England, at a private college prep school in the countryside that caters to international, largely Asian, students. Hui An wanders outside the school gates one day, and accidentally stumbles, stepping into a hole in the ground and killing a sleeping fairy. The next day, the fairies arrive in full force, angry and violent, and the teachers have vanished, leaving the students with only a few words of advice on dealing with fairies.

In “Rising Lion — The Lion Bows” we meet a troupe of lion dancers living in Britain who offer a special sideline to their regular performances - they also exterminate ghosts. But on this particular occasion, they just can’t bring themselves to terminate the ghost in question - a young African boy brought to England a century or more ago to be a servant. “Seven Star Drum” is also set among the members if this lion dance troupe, and tells the story of Boris, the troupe’s founder, who was born with the ability to see ghosts and other supernatural creatures.

“The Mystery of the Suet Swain” features Sham, a tall, hawk-nosed, brilliant but socially awkward lesbian, and her only friend Belinda, both university students. Belinda has a problem - she attracts stalkers, men who mistake her friendliness for something more. But there’s something different, scary, even dangerous about her latest mystery stalker, and Sham sets out to find out who - or what - he is. And to protect Belinda from him. And yes, Sham and Belinda remind me very much of another famous literary duo, and I hope to see more stories about them.

In “Prudence and the Dragon,” medical student Prudence Ong has to deal with a besotted dragon named Zheng Yi, who wants nothing more than to take her back with him to his own dimension to be his consort. Prudence, however, isn’t really interested, especially not now, while she’s still in med school. And not when his attentions seem to be casing trouble between Prudence snd her best friend Angela. Although even when the friends become reconciled, Zheng Yi’s presence is a problem for Angela as we read in “The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life.” But, as Angela says, “Angela wasn't going to stop hanging out with her best friend just because doing so literally split her in two.” Friendship between women means something in Cho’s stories, which is a wonderful thing to see.

“The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote” is a charming little story about the beginning of a rather unusual partnership between an earth spirit and a forest spirit - funny, but with Cho’s familiar focus on the importance of relationships, and on understanding tradition, when to observe it, and when to break it.

“Liyana” is a tragic story, one in which a great evil is done for the good of others. I suppose in a way, it reminds me of Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” - a child, in this case non-human, but precious and loved, sacrificed because there is no other way to honor a previous, willing sacrifice, or keep a family alive.

“The Four Generations of Chang E” is a story about change, about leaving the past behind and moving forward, but still being tied to what has been before, at least for a time. In this story, the first Chang E flees a desolate future, escaping to the Moon, only to find herself out of place among the Moonites. Her daughter and granddaughter are, like her, between two worlds, still tainted by their immigrant past, nit quite a part of the future. But when the fourth Chang E fulfils her mother’s dying request to be buried on Earth, she discovers that she, the fourth generation, is finally of the Moon.

“The Many Deaths of Hang Jebat” is just what it says... a series of vignettes, each of which involves a character named Hang Jebat, being killed, blocked on social media, fired... experiencing some form of physical or social annihilation. Each vignette also involves his childhood friend, Tuah - who sometimes is killed by him, and sometimes kills him. In the background, a shadowy authority figure, Mansur. The permutations of events and settings, though, show some kind of connection, and some kind of slow change in the relationship of Tuah and Hang Jebat. It’s a story to contemplate.

“The Fish Bowl” is a dark story, about a girl living in a culture of achievement, expected to do well in so many things, to be excellent, until the pressure if it drives her to erase herself to escape. It hit me very hard, partly because a friend of mine, back in school, was in the same place, and erased herself completely, finally, irrevocably. But it’s an excellent story, and at the same time a caution about demanding more of a person than they have the resources to give.

In Malaysia, they hold a festival of the Hungry Ghost. Ghosts who have died violently, or with unfulfilled longings, or otherwise still hungry for life, can return to the earth for this one month, experience old things, or new ones. In “Balik Kampung,” Lydia is a newly deceased ghost, who does not remember how she died. But she is a hungry ghost - she thinks it is because her parents were always quarreling, more focused on their own pain than her happiness. She want to go back to the place where she lived with her husband, the only time she believes she was truly happy. But even the dead must face the truth in order to move on.

There’s not one weak story in the collection, in my opinion, and Cho provides notes for each story at the end of the book to provide context and help readers with some of the more specific cultural references. The ebook version contains an excerpt from the author’s novella, “The Dangerous Life of Jade Yeo,” which quite caught my interest and is now on my “must get very soon” list.

And the great Heinlein reread continues. This post finishes off the primary (first reprint) collections of Heinlein’s shorter fiction that have been in print recently enough for me to acquire them. I’m not bothering with secondary collections, or modern omnibuses, and there’s one collection, Off the Main Sequence, which contains some stories not collected anywhere else, which I have been unable to acquire


Rereading the collection of Heinlein stories containing the novella “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” which has been published both under the title of that novella, and as 6 X H, served double duty, as part if this reread project, and as part of my reading for the 1943 Retro Hugo nominations.

The novella is quite a neat, if occasionally terrifying, piece of prose. I enjoyed the combination of mystery and horror, the sense of discovering a secret, occult history of the world, the image of the world as art, compete with Critics who assess its virtues - though given their ability to decide on changes to the work, perhaps they are better viewed as editors (either way, labelling Jonathan Hoag’s profession as an unpleasant one is a delightful writerly in-joke). As usual, Heinlein’s gift for character and dialogue is strong, and his ability to pull off a complex and baffling plot yields considerable entertainment.

Heinein could write stories that make you cry as easily as he could change his shoes. The Man Who Travelled in Elephants is a n unsurpassed love story. Not just the story of Johnny, who travelled in elephants and his beloved Martha, lost and then found, but the story of an America that was passing, an America of spectacle and circus and county fairs and amusement parks. The small, intimate details of Johnny and Martha’s life together as they travelled the country, first fir work, later for their own joy, are delightful, bittersweet, familiar to any family that creates its own secret shared mythology. The growing anticipation of the reader once the truth of the tale becomes clear and you know that somewhere in the vast carnival crowd, Martha is waiting for her Johnny, that’s what starts the tears, slowly brimming, finally flowing at the end. It’s a beautiful love story.

—All You Zombies— is a tale that, oddly enough, treats intersex/transgender realities very sympathetically but can’t seem to imagine a role for women in space that doesn’t involve sexually servicing men. It’s the story of a temporal agent who is his own father and mother... or his own son and daughter, depending on what part of his timeline you’re looking at. Heinlein seemed to enjoy the time paradox theme, he wrote several of them. This is perhaps the best one.

They is an interesting piece of psychological fiction. Wr’ve all felt, at times, that we are alone in the world, different, that no one understands us. We know that in some people, at some times, this feeling intensifies, slides into a kind of delusion in which all the world is united in some strange kind of manipulative conspiracy. We call this madness. But what if it were the truth?

Political satire is a tricky thing to write well. Heinlein’s satire was usually well-disguised, but in Our Fair City, he gives us a very funny look at corrupt municipal politics, thanks to an unlikely alliance between a newspaperman, a parking lot attendant, and a playful sentient whirlwind named Kitten with a penchant for collecting pretty bits of paper and string and other sorts of things.

The final story, —And He Built a Crooked House—, is just plain fun. An architect tries to build a house modelled after an unfolded tesseract... but then an earthquake causes the house to fold up through a fourth spacial dimension and the architect and his clients are trapped inside. The set-up requires a certain degree of spacial perception to begin to visualise it, but the story itself is mostly an interesting but throw-away idea.


The Man Who Sold the Moon is a collection of short stories from Heinlein’s Future History sequence, most of them strongly focused on technological advances that form the background to the later, space-faring novels. Included here is Heinlein’s first published short story, “Life Line,” about Dr. Pinero, a man who develops a scientific method of determining the date of a person’s death. The apparatus is destroyed when Pinero is murdered by the insurance companies,and the only reason it’s part of the Future History sequence is that Lazarus Long will later mention meeting Pinero. What is of interest is Heinlein’s dark perspective on the ethics of corporations, a theme continued in “Let There Be Light,” in which a pair of scientists discover a means of generating cheap energy, heat and light, and encounter interference and threats from representatives of the power industry - a problem they decide to sidestep by giving away their methods for a minimal licensing fee to anyone who wants access. This story also introduces the classic Heinlein woman, beautiful, sexy, intelligent, with multiple degrees in science and engineering, and more than ready to be the male protagonist’s wife.

The theme of emergent technologies continues in “The Roads Must Roll” and “Blowups Happen” - both stories about adapting society to new technology, and adapting the technology to the needs of human society. In “The Roads Must Roll,” reliance on the automobile as the means of transportation has become untenable, due to rationing of oil and massive traffic congestion in cities. The technological fix is to build ‘rolling roads’ - giant conveyer belts large enough to transport not only millions of people, but also service establishments, across the countryside. In response, cities spread out, building both factories, homes and amenities along the roadways. A person can wake up, head to the nearest roadway, have breakfast in a restaurant on the road itself, get off at his place of work, and return home the same way, possibly having that afterwork drink, or picking up some necessities for the household, while the road carries him along. In the story, the dependance of the new social and economic structure on the roads leads to a revolt among a small group of roadway technicians who believe that those who control the means of transportation should also control the government. At its heart, it’s a critique of the idea that those who can cut off access to a service that society depends on should wield power simply because of that fact.
“Blowups Happen” addresses dual, linked issues - how to balance need against risk in a society, and the shortsightedness of corporations who willingly ignore long-term risk for short-term gain. It also plays on fears of atomic reactions we now know to be overstated, which dates the specifics of the story. In this story, the need for energy has finally exceeded the ability of the process introduced in “Let There Be Light” to provide it, and atomic power has been brought into the energy mix. However, the potential dangers of a nuclear plant exploding are sufficient to slowly drive anyone working on the plants into states of profound anxiety - the stress of knowing one slip could destroy a whole city, or more, becomes unbearable. And then, a close examination of atomic theory reveals that one slip could destroy, not just a city, but half the planet. The ultimate solution - move the plants into space - reduces the risk enough that people can now stand the stress, and everyone is happy. One interesting theme that underlies both stories, and can be found in a number of other instances of Heinlein’s work, is the idea that psychological testing can determine who is stable enough to work in certain professions, and who is not. There’s a naive faith in the ability of psychology to accurately determine who is capable of what.

The last two stories in the collection, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem” tell the life story of a Moses figure, D. D. Harriman, financial genius who all his life wants only to go to the moon, builds a massive corporate empire to get the money and connections to do ir, then risks it all - only to be shut out of the trip himself, until, in the short story “Requiem” he is dying and all his money can’t legally buy him a waiver to risk his life to do the only thing he’s ever wanted. Frankly, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” has to be the most boring thing Heinlein ever wrote - it’s financial wheeling and dealing from start to finish, with a few engineering hitches thrown in here and there. “Requiem” is by far the better piece, and it really tells you everything you needed to know about Harriman. And it takes the Future History to where it really begins to take off, to the point where man begins to explore space.


In 1966 The Worlds of Robert Heinlein was published. By this tine, Heinlein was no longer writing short stories, he’d moved on to sprawling novels and there he would stay. This was the last collection of Heinlein’s work that included short stories not previously collected elsewhere. In 1980, Heinlein took the stories from this collection, added a massive number of essays, rants, and contextual pieces, and released it as Expanded Universe. Some of the stories can also be found in previous collections - “Life-Line,” “Blowups Happen” - but most pieces, fiction and non-fiction, are not collected elsewhere.

Of the stories not collected in other volumes, it’s sometimes easy to see why. “Successful Operation” is a message story, and it quite lacks any of the qualities that distinguish Heinlein’s writing. In the forward to this story, he notes that he wrote the story because he had not yet learned to say ‘no,’ and it shows. It is an anti-racist, anti-fascist, revenge fantasy, but the merits of the theme do not hide the wooden characterisation, the simplistic plot, or the lackluster writing. “Solution Unsatisfactory” on the other hand, is vintage Heinlein at his best. This is the story that is essentially a parallel universe story about the Manhatten Project, the development and first use of a radioactive weapon of mass destruction, and the conceptualisation of the Cold War and the MAD culture - although Heinlein’s unsatisfactory solution of a global military dictatorship sidesteps the reality of the latter two events. It is interesting to note that even then, Heinlein doubted that America would be able to refrain from turning the world into its own private empire if it had the opportunity. “Free Men” revisits the concept behind Sixth Column, depicting a single incident in the struggle of an underground resistance fighting an unnamed conquering nation. “On the Slopes of Vesuvius” returns to Heinlein’s deep fear of an impending nuclear war. “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon” is a Boy Scout themed story about a young Eagle Scout from Earth on his first scouting trip on the moon. “Searchlight” is a tech-heavy short short about searching for a blind child with perfect pitch lost on the surface of the moon.

And there are a fair number of non-sf stories - “They Do It with Mirrors,” a murder mystery set in a strip joint run on the lines of the famous Windmill Theatre - full nudity allowed if no one moves a muscle; “No Bands Playing, No Flags Waving,” an exploration of the nature of bravery; “A Bathroom of Her Own,” a quite realistic story about the nitty gritty of politics and dirty tricks and fighting a corrupt electoral machine; “Cliff and the Calories,” a rather typical Heinlein writing female viewpoint story which is notable for its appreciation of women who have good appetites and are not emaciated;

The essays included in Expanded Universe reflect some of Heinlein’s basic concerns. “The Last Days of the United States” and “Pie From the Sky” argue that the only way to prevent and eventual global atomic war is through the creation of a legitimate world government, while “How To Be a Survivor” is a fear-based guide to living through a nuclear attack on the US (or any other country, for that matter) - the underlying message being that it’s better to do what’s necessary to prevent an atomic war than be forced to survive after it’s over.

One article struck me as particularly worthy of comment. “Where To?” was originally written in 1950 and was a speculative article that attempted to look forward and see the shape of society in 2000. And so much of it is so very very wrong. He gets some little bits of technology fairly close - mostly personal telecommunications devices. But his middle class family lives in a ‘smart’ house well beyond anything that’s available to the ultra rich early adopter, and cities have been decentralised, with commutes if an hour or longer by personal helicopter. And there are colonies on the moon, where older folks can retire in peace and low gravity. One area where he was very close - and later edits brought him even closer - was the revolution in family structures and the development of non-traditional families of choice. He was close on medical research, far off on investment in space travel, and in general thought that science would achieve more to improve global conditions than it has. But prediction is hard, and not really the role of a science fiction author. “The Third Millennium Opens,” while framed as a fictional piece about a person writing in 2001, looking back at the past century and forward to the next, is far more daring, suggesting the scientific development of telepathy and the technology of FTL travel is waiting in the wings.

Many of the essays, and the forwards for the various pieces, make clear Heinlein’s ever growing concern with nuclear war, and Russian domination. He becomes almost fanatical in his opposition to communism - which includes anything that involves socialising any sphere of public life, or anything resembling that American shibboleth, the ‘welfare state.’ Like many Americans, Heinlein confused communism with Russian imperialism - and now that Russia is the worst kind of capitalist state in all but name, we know that it was never about an International Communist Revolution, and always about Russia’s desire to be a world dictatorship. Heinlein visited the USSR, and wrote several scathing essays about how Intourist deals with foreign visitors, managing what they see, who they talk to, where they go. These are also included here.

Heinlein also gives much attention to matters such as the decline in education and the rising interest in astrology, witchcraft, religious cults and other things that detract from what he values above all else - science and engineering, with a side order of history. There’s a lot of material in the essays to make a modern social justice advocate like myself boil with anger, though it’s clear that he wants a society in which people don’t face discrimination, he would shudder at the idea of identity politics or critical race theory.

Essentially. Expanded Universe is Heinlein’s statement of principles, and there’s a lot that’s interesting, and sadly, a lot that just doesn’t hold up well.

Mary Russell’s War and Other Stories of Suspense is a collection of short fiction by Laurie R. King. The title story, Mary Russell’s War, is a novella that I’ve previously read as a stand-alone ebook, but the other pieces, all part of the Mary Russell saga, were new to me.

“Mary Russell’s Christmas“ is a delightful story about Mary’s childhood, her charming rogue of an uncle, Jake, and her introduction into the fine arts of card sharking and con jobs. And how she got her throwing knife.

“Beekeeping for Beginners” retells the story of Mary Russell’s first meeting with Holmes, and the early days of her “apprenticeship,” from the perspective of the retired consulting detective.

“Mary Russell’s Marriage,” which is set just after the events of A Monstrous Regiment of Women, is exactly what the title suggests, an account of the wedding of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. Naturally, these two can’t just have a simple wedding, either in church or registry office - there has to be a mystery, a scheme, a unique circumstance, an adventure.

“Mrs. Hudson’s Case” features Holmes’s intrepid housekeeper in a case that both she and Mary Russell suspect that Holmes would not deal with appropriately - so they do what must be done, making certain that the great detective never knows the truth.

“A Venomous Death” is a short story indeed, merely a few pages in which Holmes almost immediately deduces the murderer. It’s mostly about bees.

“Birth of a Green Man” deals with the backstory of Robert Goodman, one of the characters of The God of the Hive.

“My Story” is a piece of metafiction, in which Mary Russells discusses how it came to be that she chose one Laurie R. King the editor of her volumes of memoirs, and the madcap adventures surrounding the timing of her decision. Its sequel, “A Case in Correspondence” is told entirely in postcards, letters and newspapers articles, and deals with the mysterious disappearance of Holmes and the political repercussions of the volume of Russell’s memoirs published as “The God of the Hive.”

In “Stately Holmes,” Russell and Holmes return to Justice Hall to deal with a singularly material ghost.

With the exception of the novella, Mary Russell’s War, which I have spoken about elsewhere these are for the most part slight pieces, enjoyable largely for the small glimpses into the characters lives when they are not in the throes of a full-blown adventure. I found the ones set earlier in Russell’s life the most interesting, with “Mary Russell’s Marriage” being perhaps the most moving, as it gives us a glimpse into the emotional lives of two people singularly notable for keeping their emotions quite firmly to themselves. The collection as a whole is best seen as something fun to read for Mary Russell fans awaiting the next novel.

I’ve always intended to read something by John Crowley, but somehow until now I’d never got around to it. But when PM Press decided to include him in their Outspoken Authors series, it finally seemed the right time to make a start. Said volume, titled Totalitopia, is a collection of short fiction and essays by Crowley, augmented with an interview and bibliography.

The first story in the collection, This Is Our Town, was in itself enough to make me happy I’d decided to read it. It is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of childhood, faith and memory, set in a small American mining town that has seen disasters and, possibly, miracles. The narrator is a young girl from a relatively poor Catholic family, who converses with her guardian angel and believes that prayer, free will, and God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience can be reconciled in such a way that, somehow, good will prevail - and who, in looking back as an adult, longs for that childhood certainty of faith.

What if, when the aliens come, they offer to do your chores? Why might they do such a thing? What would be their ulterior motive - for as everyone knows, aliens always have an ulterior motive. The short story Gone suggests one possibility.

And Go Like This is a story inspired by a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.” Crowley writes this as if it happened, all the people in the world painstaking transported to NYC, assigned spaces, and then, when all are accounted fir, the music starts on a hundred thousand records players and the world twists. But the twist is also a psychological one, for what would it mean, that for a brief point in time, the whole of the world were neighbours?

The title piece, Totalitopia, is an essay - serious in intent for all its lightness of tone - on the predictive tendencies of science fiction. Crowley advances various approaches to predictive SF, notes that many futuristic utopias and dystopias are actually commentaries n present conditions rather than serious attempt to forecast the future, and discusses a few of the classic texts, even advancing his own ‘prediction’ - which bears certain resemblances to my own ideas of utopia, something which disposes me to think I may enjoy more of this author’s works - before concluding:

“It will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature. Of course holding the mirror up to nature is what Hamlet insisted all playing, or pretending, must do; but—as Lewis Carroll knew—the image in a mirror, however scary or amusing or enlightening, is always reversed.”

In the essay “Everything that Rises,” Crowley gently critiques the transhumanist movement - which he links to a strain of primarily Russian scientifically-inspired mysticism known as cosmism. Immortality, the transference of mind to mechanical rather than biological substrates, the transmission of the human data stream at the speed of light, the development of the superintelligent AI - all these speculations on the future of mind are part of this movement, and come under Crowley’s eye.

The concluding essay is a review of the works of another author I’ve never read, Paul Parks. Here Crowley does the work of a reviewer well, for in Paul Park’ Hidden Worlds he makes me think quite seriously about looking into some of the books he discusses.

The volume ends, as all of the books in this series do, with an interview conducted by Terry Bisson. Between the sentiments expressed in the interview, and my feeling of profound delight with both fiction and essays collected in this volume, I have the distinct sense that I have missed out on something I would have enjoyed very much in not reading Crowley earlier, and despite the clamourings of thousands of other books demanding to be read, I really must find space for more of his work in the never-ending queue.

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.

PM Press’ latest offering in its Outspoken Authors series features work from the undeniably, gloriously outspoken author Samuel R. Delany. In addition to the title novella, The Atheist in the Attic includes Delany’s classic critique of racism in science fiction, and an interview with the author. Delany being one of my literary heroes from a very early age - I fell in love with his writing when I read Babel-17 and never wavered afterward - I had to get the book.

Delany is an author of ideas, which he wraps in polished, precise, gorgeous prose. “The Atheist in the Attic” is a perfect example of the master at work, examining and interrogating the intellectual underpinnings of the Enlightenment. The publisher’s blurb says:

“The title novella, "The Atheist in the Attic," appearing here in book form for the first time, is a suspenseful and vivid historical narrative, recreating the top-secret meeting between the mathematical genius Leibniz and the philosopher Spinoza caught between the horrors of the cannibalistic Dutch Rampjaar and the brilliant "big bang" of the Enlightenment.”

Delany’s Leibnitz is an old man recollecting, and commenting on, a trip to Amsterdam he made when much younger, part if his purpose being to visit the old and reclusive Spinoza. The visits are secretive, because Leibnitz is a young man with a noble patron and a career still to be made among the the intelligentsia of Europe, and Spinoza is an outcast and a pariah, both Jew and alleged atheist, a man whose work caused riots in the street and the brutal deaths of some of those who championed his work.

Leibnitz and Spinoza talk. About their work, and their thoughts about each other’s work. About that terrible and violent reaction of the people to his anti-clerical, anti-theistic treatise. About the great Greek philosophers. About the relation of language and thought. About the meaning, the essence of what Spinoza calls Deus sive Natura - God, or otherwise Nature.

Leibnitz, as he recounts his visit to Spinoza, also contemplates issues of race - specifically anti-Semitism - and class antipathy, the latter brought on by the eagerness of a young manservant at the home he is staying in to do him personal services, and the stories of cannibalism among the peasants during a recent famine that he has heard, most recently from Spinoza.

As always, Delany leaves one thinking, wondering, speculating.

I had read the other work collected here, Delany’s essay on racism in science fiction, before, but it was worthwhile to read it again. So much has happened since it was first written in 1998. There are now many more visible writers of colour in the genre, and, as Delany predicted, there has been pushback.

In his essay, he said “As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number 13, 15, 20 percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.”

And lo and behold now that there are more than a handful of sff writers of colour, along comes RaceFail (Google it) and the Sadly Rabid Puppies and ComicGate and all the whiney (mostly) white boys of all ages who want stories with white boy heroes doing white boy hero things like conquering other planets and winning space battles against bug-eyed monsters.

Sadly, Delany knew whereof he spoke.

The volume closes with a pleasant interview by Terry Bisson, the editor of the series, which does not illuminate the author so much as give a hint at how vey much there is to learn about him and his work.

Sarah Tolmie's latest book, Two Travelers, is a collection, just barely - it contains two separate works, a novelette, "The Dancer on the Stairs," and a novella, "The Burning Furrow." Both are stories of travellers, people caught between worlds, coming to terms with being out of place in the the place they find themselves.

"The Dancer on the Stairs" is about a woman, possibly from a world much like ours, who finds herself transported to a palace so vast and complex it is a world in itself. Confined at first by her lack of knowledge and status to the vast staircase that connects the various levels of the palace - where she finds many others, all exiles without the status or means to influence the doorkeeper stationed at each level to let them return - she slowly learns enough about the intricate and protocol-driven society beyond the stairs to gain entrance and place, though she is never truly one of them.

In "The Burning Furrow", a man called Eyo't finds himself moving between worlds - our own, modern world, and the world of his birth, where his people are oppressed and he is part of a resistance movement. He can bring other people with him, and so he has taken his family - wife, son and daughter - from his world to ours, where they own a restaurant and have access to education and medical care. Yet he continues to cross back and forth, bringing his family home with him at regular intervals for the rite that binds his people together. Events and new relationships formed in both worlds eventually force him, and the members of his family, to make choices about which world is theirs. At the same time, through her connection with Eyo't, the countess Ienne, a member of the ruling class on Eyo't's world, crosses the lines between class and culture.

Both stories are excellent, thoughtful pieces about making the best of changes one cannot control, adapting to new realities, learning to be at home despite being always the outsider.

Hero Is a Four-Letter Word is a short collection of short stories on the themes of heroes, villains and superpowers, good and evil, written by J. M. Frey, previously published in other anthologies and now available via Tapas.

These are not your typical hero stories. Each of the five stories collected here is an unusual take on the themes, looking at extraordinary people and our reactions to them in unexpected ways.

Tackling the subject in a humorous vein, Once and Now-ish King features the second coming of Arthur and his knights - but there's some way to go before they are ready to save Albion once more.

Another Four Letter Word, my favourite story in this collection, is a modern re-working of the Tam Lin ballads. Will Jennet of Carterhaugh save Tam Lin once more, or will the Faerie Queen's curse descend on the world?

Maddening Science is a look at what comes after the hero and villain stories are over, when a former supervillain, out of prison and retired, is forced to confront his history in the person of a young woman only he can save.

Two, Three, Four, Five tells the story of a woman worried about her super-powered lover, with a bit of a twist.

On His Bday isn't about superheroes so much as about someone born with a strange and deadly ability, and how he comes to make use of it. Is this the banality of evil, or simply an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift surviving as best he can?

All in all, a delightful group of visions.

Peter Termayne is, as I understand, best known for his series of historical mysteries featuring Irish nun Sister Fidelma, which I have recently begun reading. However, he has written mysteries set in other eras, including the more-or-less modern one, and some of his shorter offerings are collected in Ensuing Evil and Others: Fourteen Historical Mysteries.

It's quite an interesting range, from a murder mystery set in the castle of the historical MacBeth and his lady Gruoch, to a modern locked-room mystery set in an airplane in flight. In between we visit the theatre district of Shakespeare's England, the well-known occupants of 221B Baker Street, a battleship during the Napoleonic Wars, the London of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and India under the British Raj, plus a bonus Sister Fidelma story. An enjoyable read.