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The first volume of the comics featuring Black Bolt, Black Bolt Volume 1: Hard Time, written by Saladin Ahmed and illustrated by Christian Ward, is up for a Hugo award, so naturally I read it. And, although the quality of both the writing and the illustrations are solid, I bounced right off it.

Perhaps it’s just that, way back when I was a comics reader, in my youth, I was always more into the DC comics than I was their rival, Marvel. And there are some stylistic differences, though I’m not sure I can pinpoint them. But I just found no point of connection with Black Bolt, and that made reading the comic a rather intellectual exercise, rather than one of identification and enjoyment.

I did not find the story particularly compelling, which is odd, because usually, one way to get me emotionally invested in a character is yo have them treated unjustly, which one assumes is the background to the opening set-up. Black Bolt, King of the Inhumans (whom I gather are some sort of mutant or possibly a human/alien hybid), wakes up in a prison, with his power, which is to destroy with the sound of his voice, gone. He escapes, his initial confinement, only to find himself in a large prison with other not particularly human inhabitants, who want to fight him. So he fights some people, and then he allies with them, and they go on to fight more creatures, go after the jailer, and despite some success, end up imprisoned again. Then they escape again, and go after their jailer again. In between, there’s a lot of dying and being reborn, and some dark brooding on his former life, which apparently involved getting imprisoned on a variety of other occasions. If anything, I found myself more engaged with one of his enemy-turned-allies, Crusher Creel, also known as the Absorbing Man, because we get a coherent backstory on him, and it is the sort of ‘young boy with horrible family life gets no breaks’ story that does create some empathy.

It looks as though it’s going to be a redemption story. It’s pretty clear that Black Bolt, intentionally or not, has done a lot of unpleasant things, and has a lot to seek redemption for, and the whole prison experience of this first volume has been about underlining that for him, but... in the end, I just don’t care quite enough to find out more. Others who are more into this line of the Marvel universe may differ.
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I read Bitch Planet Volume 1: Extraordinary Machine (which collects issues 1 - 5 of the original graphic series), created by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro, because Bitch Planet Volume 2 was nominated for a Hugo, and I figured I needed to start from the beginning to get the full impact. Reading Bitch Planet was a very odd experience. As a graphic narrative, it’s really, really good, and it’s also intensely painful. It’s a very dystopic graphic narrative, one that is extremely well-written and drawn, with excellent characters and a very powerful story. It’s also a story that I didn’t really want to engage with, largely because I’ve read too many novels in which the society is blatantly patriarchal and authoritarian (in Bitch Planet, the leaders are called Fathers) and women are reduced to the role of things, commodities, objects to be used for the pleasure, satisfaction or comfort of men, and those who don’t comply, or aren’t pleasing, satisfying, comforting enough, are punished, discarded, or erased.

And that’s the state of things in the universe of Bitch Planet. Women who don’t please men, who are non-compliant, inconvenient, or in some way unsuitable, are seized and sent to a prison planet known officially as the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost - also known as Bitch Planet, because all women who don’t serve men are bitches, right?

There are of course two ways to present this scenario. There are people, mostly men, who would consider this a utopia, a paradise. It’s very clear that the creators of this comic are presenting this as a nightmare, but one with roots in reality - rather like Atwood’s intentions in The Handmaid’s Tale, a classic dystopic nightmare of this particular genre. The creators are also trying to do some educating along with the storytelling, for each issue of the comic contains real world, here-and-now essays about sexism and feminism (unfortunately, these essays are not included in the trade volumes, which is a pity). There’s also some very powerful reflections on the whole American carceral state here that the reader can easily unpack, plus the parodies of the old-style ads younused to find in comic books and pulp magazines are perfect, and perfectly deconstruct the ways that consumerism enforces compliance. It’s an admirable project, just... not one I really wanted to see yet again, when the real thing is happening in the daily newspapers.

So. The narrative is centred on the Bitch Planet prison system, and in particular on Kamau Kogu, a black professional athlete with a strong will and a distinctly revolutionary attitude. She’s being framed for the murder of another inmate in order to pressure her into participating in a brutal sports event known as Megatron that is compulsory viewing for all citizens (bread and circuses, anyone?) - and a money-making scheme to help fund the prison system. Another key character is Penny Rolle, a black woman of considerable size sent to Bitch Planet for, among other things, “... repeated citations for aesthetic offenses, capillary disfigurement and wanton obesity.”

Meiko, another inmate, convinces Kamua to go along with the prison administration and put together a team - with her advice - in order to gain access to a gathering of the fathers in a location that she has intimate knowledge of, because she designed it. Kamua agrees, but as we learn later, she does so in part because she hopes that the process of assembling this team will help her locate her sister, also incarcerated on Bitch Planet.

Meanwhile, in scenes set on earth, we gain a glimpse into the way this society works and the position of the sport Megatron in the culture. We also see, in the background of panels depicting news shows, hints of some kind of women’s movement gathering around the slogan “Eleanor Lives.”

This is not an easy story to read. In today’s world, where perceived non-compliance can get you killed in the blink of an eye if you are racially marginalised person, where refugees, men and women, are imprisoned and separated from their children fir the ‘crime’ of running from a home that’s become a deathtrap - largely because of imperialistic interference and exploitation by ‘developed’ countries - and where the rights if marginalised peoples are being eroded daily, this hits far too close to home.
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Two of the Hugo nominees for best series - Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives and Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities - are by authors I’d never read before and had not had and particular desire to read. But in the interests of due diligence, I embarked on the first novel in each series.

Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, the first book in the Hugo-nominated Stormlight Archives series, is... impressive. The writing is finely honed, smooth, consistently solid in narration, description and dialogue. The characters are interesting, complex, well developed. The worldbuilding is a tour de force of imaginative, carefully integrated detail.

And it bored me. It’s too fond of itself, too precious. And it is very, very long. Someone really needed to take a dispassionate pen and slice about a third of the elegant prose away, leaving a tighter storyline, a more compact narrative in which things happen before you start longing for some action, some new twist to rekindle excitement. It meanders. Beautifully, to be sure, with each scene a set piece in itself, but beauty is not everything. I found that, most unusually for me, whenever I paused in my reading to do something else, I felt no impatience to get back to the book, or curiosity about what would happen next to any of the characters. If I had not been reading this as a Hugo finalist for best series, I likely would not have bothered to finish reading it.

The Way of Kings takes place in a violent and inhospitable world, where energy storms make life difficult, and have strange aftereffects, leaving behind them energy sparks that can be used, harnessed for many things. There are strange creatures, and there is war. The novel winds itself around three main characters: Kaladin, former soldier, son of a physician, natural leader, now a slave leading a crew of ‘bridgemen’ - slaves who carry the wooden bridges needed by the armies of the Alethi to cross the chasm-riddled battlegrounds where they engage their enemy, the Parshendi; Dalinar, highprince, warrior, seer of storm-induced visions and guilt-ridden brother of the former king of the Alethi, who has never forgiven himself for being in a drunken stupour when his brother was assassinated, and now devotes himself to protecting the life of his nephew, the current king, and training his sons to do the same, and trying to fix the problems at his nephew’s court the way his brother’s legacies and his visions tell him to; and Shallan, aspiring scholar, and artist, tenacious and insistent in her quest to earn a place as apprentice to the noble born, and controversial, master scholar Jasnah, though her intent is not to learn, but to steal a powerful artefact in the hopes of rejuvenating the fortunes of her family. They are, of course, connected. Kaladin serves in the warband of Sadeas, a highprince of the Alethi and rival, possibly enemy, of Dalinor, while Jasnah is the sister of the Alethi king, and Dalinar’s niece.

And it only took about one third of the book to show, in great detail, just how talented a natural leader Kaladin is, how guilt-ridden and obsessed with his brother’s legacy Dalinar is, and how very persistent and determined Shallan is to reverse the fortunes of her family. And it only takes just shy of half the book for things to start moving. And even though, finally, Kaladin led his work crew to do something, and Shallan did what she came to do, and Dalinor tried to do something with the situation around him, and they all had consequences to deal with, it really took dedication to read through to the end. And while I did develop some affection for the characters, and once the story started to move, there were some interesting bits, I find I have little inclination to read on in the series. I might look for a synopsis somewhere to see what happens, but I’ve no desire to wade through nine more volumes as slow-moving and over-written as this one.


Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs was considerably more engaging. Also well written, with interesting characters and situations, it is much better paced and much less indulgent. The setting is the city of Bulikov, once one of the largest cities in the world, still a major urban centre of the former colonial power referred to only as The Continent. Some seventy-five years ago, one of the countries colonised by The Continent, Saypur, staged a successful revolt, followed by its own imperialist drive. Saypur is now the coloniser, The Continent the oppressed colony.

Part of the response of Saypur to its new status has been to completely outlaw all shrines, relics, symbols, and references, written or spoken, to the deities of The Continent - with some justification, as supplication and invocation of these deities can produce miracles, or magic, and it is largely this ability to call on the Divine that gave the Continent its edge in conquering other nations. Ironically, the Continent, despite its imperial history, appears to have been very backward both socially and scientifically, depending almost wholly on the powers of its deities. In fact, it was the death of the Divines at the instigation of revolutionary leader Kaj Avshakta si Komayd that resulted in the collapse of The Continent and the resurgence of Saypur. Since the things created by the Divines ceased to be on their deaths, and much of the greatness of the Continental cities was built through the power of the Divines, much of the physical presence of the Continental culture, from household artefacts to entire cities, vanished when they died, and with them, hundreds of thousands of people living in them.

I feel some sort of commentary on Western colonial imperialism and the role that religion conversion and indoctrination played in subduing and assimilating colonised peoples may be going on here, but it’s not a direct one by any means. Particularly since the Saypuri, now that they are the dominent nation, are quite intent on keeping the residents of the Continent as subjects. There is a real anger among the Saypuri, not just due to centuries of exploitation and slavery, but an existential sense of injustice - why was it just the Continent that benefitted from the power of real divinities? If gods existed, where were the gods who could have protected Saypur?

The novel begins in Saypur-controlled Bulikov, where people resent being forbidden their divinities, and a Saypuri academic (and possible intelligence operative) named Efram Pangyui, who was studying the religious artefacts seized during the conquest of Bulikov and niw forbidden to the native citizens of the Continent, has been murdered.

Shaya Komayd, a Saypuri intelligence operative, has wrangled consent from the Ministry head (who happens to be her aunt; both are descendants of Kaj Komayd) to investigate the murder, at least on a preliminary basis despite her personal bias - Pangyui was a friend of Shaya’s.

As Shaya investigates, she becomes more and more aware that Pangyui’s death was just a small part of a conspiracy among those adherents of one of the Divinities - Kolkan, the most repressive, legalistic, and punitive of the six gods of the Continent - to restore the old ways. And it is possible that Kolkan is still alive.

Shaya is presented as a complex, evolving character with a relevant backstory. She’s both cynical and idealistic, practical and imaginative, highly intelligent and motivated. The other significant characters are equally interesting. Turyin Mulaghesh, the Saypuri military governor of Bulikov - jaded, frustrated, yet courageous and committed to doing the best she can for the people under her authority, Saypuri and Continental alike. Vohannes Votrev, wealthy heir to a Continental family once high in the favour of Kolkan, shaya’s former lover, a gay man in a culture that is fanatically conservative on sexuality, twisted by his family’s religious beliefs but still struggling to bring modern values, and economic stability, to his people. And Sigurd, Shaya’s secretary, bodyguard and covert operative extraordinaire, a lost and deeply wounded man with a dark past, painful secrets, and a devotion to Shaya that is the only thing that keeps him alive.

City of Stairs is a complex and thoughtful story, with many things to say about truth, history, belief, revenge and forgiveness. I enjoyed reading it and look forward to the nexr book in the series.
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Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series has been nominated for a Hugo award, and so, I checked out the first book in the series, Discount Armageddon. So far, the best thing about it is the Aeslin mice, but I’ll get to them a few paragraphs down the line.

So, this is a fairly standard urban fantasy, of the “not all monsters are really monsters” variety. The protagonist, Verity Price, is a member of a family with a mission. Once they were part of the Covenant, a secret society devoted to killing anything that isn’t human, or found within the pages if a standard zoology textbook. Though, being religious zealots of a Christian flavor, they put it as “anything that was not on the Ark.” A couple of centuries back, Verity’s ancestors turned heretic - the Covenant is big on terms like blasphemy and heresy - and instead of killing monsters, which they call cryptids, indiscriminately, they study them, try to protect, or at least stay on good terms with, the ones who are not actively harming people, and try to reason with, relocate, or otherwise neutralise the harmful ones, killing as a last resort.

Verity Price, like the rest of her family, calls herself a cryptozoologist more often than a monster hunter, although it’s true that she’s trained in all sorts of armed and unarmed combat and able to take out a nasty critter aimed on destruction if need be. But what Verity really wants to do is be a professional competitive ballroom dancer. So she moved from the family stronghold in the northwest to New York, where she waits tables at a strip club run by a bogeyman, studies the local cryptid population, patrols for nasties, and tries to get established in the local competitive dance scene under a stage name.

The plot, which given the set-up isn’t all that unexpected, involves Verity and a hot young Covenanter lad, who views her as a heretic to be killed with just as much fervour as he woukd any other blasphemous creature, having to team up to deal with something bigger than both of them. I’m probably not really spoiling anything by saying that sex occurs, and Verity manages to do some deprogramming on said hot Covenanter lad.



Right, now for the mice. Actually, the plot introduces us to a fair number of interesting non-human species, but really, the mice, as it were, take the cake. Aeslin mice are sapient mice-like cryptids, who live in social units called colonies. They are very religious and very enthusiastic about their objects of worship. Verity shares her tiny flat with a branch colony of Aeslin mice, who are part of a larger family of mice who have worshipped the founders of Price family for seven human generations. Verity is their Priestess, and they spend most of their time celebrating one of the endless religious observances in their mousey calendar, such as sixth day of the Month of Do Not Put That in Your Mouth!, and the Festival of Come On, Enid, We’re Getting Out Of Here Before These Bastards Make Us Kill Another Innocent Creature. They also become filled with the holy spirit whenever Verity mutters things to herself, or talks to them, which means that her homelife is filled with mousey choruses of “Hail the buying of new socks” and “Hail the shower!” Most of the novel is pretty standard sardonic somewhat unwilling heroine-centred first-person narrative urban fantasy, with some solid development of legends and speculations about various sorts of imaginary beings from cultures around the world. Fun but not what I’d call spectacularly good. But the Aeslin mice are brilliant.
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Philip Pullman’s YA novel La Belle Sauvage is the first volume in a new trilogy set in the same universe as his earlier His Dark Materials novels. This volume is a prequel to The Golden Compass, and Lyra appears as a six-month-old infant.

The protagonist is 11 year-old Malcolm Polstead who, along with his daemon Asta, lives with his parents in Gostow, a village not far upriver from Oxford. Malcolm has a busy life - he attends school, works as in his parent’s inn, The Trout, does odd jobs at the Priory of St. Rosamund just across the river, and spends his free time on the river in his canoe, La Belle Sauvage. And he’s a spy, although that’s a rather new thing, and something that he rather fell into by accident through being a bright, observant and compassionate young lad.

Malcolm lives in a time when conservative, religious forces are taking power. Scholars are finding their researches examined fir the taint of heresy. The Church has a thought police division who can make questioners disappear. Children are being encouraged to watch their families and report any suspicions of disbelief. And Malcolm, after witnessing such a disappearance, and accidentally intercepting a secret message intended for scholar Hannah Relf, has been drawn into the fight for intellectual freedom.

Malcolm quickly learns that there is a great deal of mystery surrounding an infant being cared for at the Priory, a baby who is apparently the consequence of a rather scandalous relationship between the influential and wealthy Mrs. Coulter, and the adventurer Lord Asriel. This baby is, of course, Lyra. In the course of helping out around the Priory, Malcolm becomes both charmed by and devoted to Lyra, and is soon swept up in a desperate struggle to save the infant from threats, both human and natural. When a catastrophic flood damages the Priory just as a threatening and dangerous individual, Gerald Bonneville, makes his move to seize the infant from the care of the nuns, Malcolm and a local girl, Alice, must flee with Lyra in La Belle Sauvage, seeking sanctuary for the little girl.

The novel portrays the well-chronicled descent into fascist social control through the eyes of a bright child who instinctively feels that ruling through fear and throttling free thought are distinctly wrong. Malcolm’s instinctive commitment both to freedom from oppression, and to saving the infant Lyra, make him a very sympathetic character. His intelligence, loyalty and resourcefulness are on display from the beginning of the novel, but the most interesting character development lies with Alice, who begins the story as a sullen and rather unpleasant teenager, but is transformed through her choice to help Malcolm save Lyra.

While I wouldn’t call it a favourite work, I enjoyed Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and I found myself feeling much the same way toward La Belle Sauvage - it’s an interesting and enjoyable novel, and certainly worth reading.
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More Hugo reading. This time, it’s a finalist in the Best Young Adult Novel category (which is, technically, not a Hugo just as the Campbell award is not a Hugo) - Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher (who is also known as Ursula Vernon). And it is a charmingly original portal fantasy, a work of whimsical imagination, calling back to earlier, even Victorian-era children’s fantasies with talking animals and curious landscapes. There’s more than a touch of Narnia, and a fair bit of Alice’s Wonderland, here, and it’s all held together by a truly delightful heroine, 11 year-old Summer.

Summer is a human girl, and lives with her mother in a world much like ours. Her mother works hard, but is more than a little defeated by the stresses of single parenthood and an ungenerous working environment. She is far too protective of Summer, who isn’t allowed to do much of anything except go to school and play in her own yard. And in some ways she’s come to rely on Summer for emotional support when the world has gotten too much.

And then one day, when Summer is playing alone in her back yard, Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut comes wandering down the alleyway and settles down just behind Summer’s house. Baba Yaga, being in a good mood, offers to give Summer her heart’s desire - but Summer doesn’t know what that is, although she does think becoming a shapeshifter might be fun. Baba Yaga, however, seems to have her own notion of what Summer needs, or knowledge of a place that needs a girl like Summer, and suddenly Summer is in the very strange land of Orcus, with nothing but the clothes she’s wearing, the lock that was on the back gate of her yard, a talking weasel given to her by the crone, and three pieces of advice she’s read in a stained glass window.

Almost immediately, Summer meets three shape-changing women, and a tree whose leaves turn into frogs. But the tree is dying, and the shapechangers tell her that there is a cancer at the heart of this world. Summer doesn’t think of herself as a hero, and she certainly doesn’t think of herself as someone who can save a world, but she does want to try and make things better for just one tree, which has used up all its remaining energy to produce an acorn, which Summer carries with her along with the lock and the weasel as she follows the advice of the shapechangers to find the Waystation, where perhaps she can learn her Way.

As Summer travels through Orcus, looking for something that will save the frog-tree, she encounters many unusual beings, some who help her, some who want to stop her, and some who decide to come with her. There’s Glorious, a wolf who turns into a house when the sun sets, and is being hunted by real estate procurers. There’s Reginald Almondsgrove, a somewhat foppish hoopoe, and his flock of valet birds. And there’s the Imperial Geese Ounk and Anhk, sisters and warriors.

Summer’s adventures are at times whimsical and at times truly frightening, and while she does discover what is wrong at the heart of this world, and makes it a little better for a while, it comes at a cost, and part of that cost is Summer’s innocence. But when Summer finally returns to her own world, one does have the feeling that yes, she has gained her heart’s desire, and it will be with her always.

There are a lot of wonderful things about this book, but one of the best is that, while there is a battle between agents of good and evil, it’s not the climax of book and it doesn’t really solve anything. It’s the skills that Summer brings with her to Orcus, and the steadfast loyalty of her companions, that makes it possible for things to be better.
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The 1942 novel - another Retro Hugo finalist - Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak, is a complex exploration of obsession and consequence. The protagonist, Dr. Patrick Cory, is a brilliant medical researcher, deeply fascinated with the idea of understanding brain function. In the tradition of the obsessed “mad” scientist, he works virtually alone out of his basement lab in a remote rural area, with his wife Janice, a nurse, as lab assistant when necessary and the local county doctor and coroner, the aging and alcoholic Dr. Schratt, as a sounding board.

Cory has allowed his research to take over the whole of his life. He barely has any relationship remaining with his wife, whise support - domestic and financial - he takes for granted. He sees Schratt only in terms of his usefulness to his own goals, he has no other human relationships - in fact he seems emotionally dead, interested only in his research.

When Cory is called to the scene of a plane crash - Schratt is incapacitated and the locals know him to be a doctor, albeit a non-practicing one - he finds one of the two survivors is severely injured and near death. Emergency surgery on location does little to improve the man’s condition, and it becomes obvious that the man - whom Cory has identified as millionaire Warren Horace Donovan - will not survive the journey to the nearest hospital. Instead, Cory has Donovan taken to his lab, where, as he is dying, Cory harvests his brain and, using the equipment he has developed through animal experimentation, preserves the brain, alive.

Cory’s obsession to understand what the brain is capable of leads him to discover a means of augmenting the brain’s power to the point where Donovan can communicate with him telepathically, at first through automatic writing, later directly. In fact, Donovan’s vastly increased will eventually overpowers Cory’s autonomy, forcing him to carry out Donovan’s own obsession, allowing nothing to stand in his way.

In their different ways, both men are obsessed with their goals and will stop at nothing, even murder, to achieve them. Siodmak explores the impact of obsession on relationships, first through the empty shell of Cory’s marriage, then through observation of the effects Donovan in life had on his family and close associates.

As the novel is presented as a series of entries in Cory’s journal, there is an element of the unreliable narrator here, but this is offset by that narrator’s devotion to a scientific worldview - he records his events, thoughts, actions, emotions, with a certain level of detachment and self-honesty. And it is through the changes in his entries that we see him slowly regaining his humanity as he experiences what it is to be sacrificed to another’s obsession. It’s a stripped-down narrative, creating a fast-paced story that generates both mystery and suspense - why is Donovan forcing Cory to do these things, and whose will will prevail in the end.

At its core, Donovan’s Brain is a case study of the damage done by closing out one’s humanity to focus on a single goal, be it scientific truth, or the accumulation of wealth, or any of the other obsessions humans are prone to pursuing.
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More Retro Hugo reading - this time, it’s Best Novel finalist The Uninvited, by Irish novelist, playwright, journalist and historian Dorothy MacArdle. MacArdle herself was an Irish nationalist, feminist, labour organiser, and revolutionary colleague of Eamon de Valera.

The novel was originally published in Ireland in 1941 under the title Uneasy Freehold, and was released a year later in the United States as The Uninvited; in 1944 it was made into a Hollywood movie.

The Uninvited is a ghost story somewhat in the Gothic style, but its messages are modern - the silencing of women’s voices, women’s stories, and the ways in which women are turned into symbols to be revered - or despised - while being ignored as real, autonomous beings with both virtues and flaws. There is considerable psychological depth in MacArdle’s telling of the story, and much that delights even as it creates a slow mounting unease.

MacArdle takes her time in introducing her characters, setting the scene, suggesting the outlines of the secrets that must be brought into the open. The immediate action of the story begins with half-Irish siblings, Pamela and Roderick Fitzgerald. Roddy, the older sibling, is an established London journalist focusing on cultural issues, particularly drama. He’s dealing with the end of a difficult relationship, and writing a book on the history of English censorship (it’s worth noting that his career todate revolves around symbolism and silence). Pamela is recovering from the loneliness and isolation of several years spent caring fir their dying father (again, note the situation of a woman trapped in a position of idealised self-sacrifice).

They decide to buy a house in the country, where Pamela can restore her energy and Roddy can have quiet for writing. The place they settle on has been vacant for most of the past 15 years. The owner, Stella, a young woman of 18 living with her grandfather, has not set foot in the house since she was taken from it as a child, shortly after the death of her mother. The grandfather, with whom the Fitzgeralds negotiate, warns them that the house was sold before, to a couple who deserted it due to “disturbances.”

Warned but not concerned, Roddy and Pamela move in, begin renovating and making the house their own. And there are indeed disturbances - starting with lonely sighs in the night and developing slowly into a full haunting. Rooms in which one becomes unaccountably depressed, strange lights, a recurring scent of mimosa, sudden sensations of extreme cold, and eventually apparitions of a pale, blonde woman who resembles Stella’s dead mother.

Pamela convinces Roddy that they must try to discover the secrets of the house and the haunting, convinced that there must be a way to free whatever spirits are trapped there. They begin asking questions of neighbours, people who knew the family before tragedy struck. Slowly, the story emerges, but only in outline. The house was at the end home to three people - Meredith Llewellyn, Stella’s father, an artist, much disliked by most who recalled him; Mary, remembered by sll as a saintly, gentle woman with enormous patience and generosity toward her husband; and Carmel, a Spanish girl brought into the household by Meredith, his model and, most believed, his lover. Mary died in a fall from a cliff on a stormy night, with Carmel near and suspected of possibly causing her death; Carmel died not long after from pneumonia caught on that night, exacerbated by exposure after she fled the house. Pamela and Roddy, hearing these accounts, begin to think there are two spirits in the house, Carmel, filled with hatred, seeking revenge, and Mary, trying to protect her daughter Stella from Carmel’s rage.

Meanwhile, Stella and Roddy have fallen in love, but Stella’s sense of self - already damaged by her grandfather, who idolised his daughter and has tried to mould his granddaughter into her image, is collapsing under the pressure of the haunting. All too soon she seems to be racing toward madness, in a way which only further convinces Pamela and Roddy that the two dead women are somehow battling for Stella’s soul - the doctor treating her describes her condition as bordering on schizophrenia, saying “she has been a stained-glass saint and a crazy little gypsy in turns,” evoking the images that have been forming of Mary and Carmel in their minds, the archetypal contrast between virgin and whore.

In addition to exploring the consequences of this classic idealisation/demonisation trope, MacArdle also looks at, though less markedly, the ways in which race and class intersect with gender, and uses the vehicle of the ghost story as a way of suggesting the intergenerational trauma resulting from the silencing of marginalised voices.

MacArdle tells the tale with great skill, moving slowly at first, giving us a Roshomon-like perspective of the central events that led to the haunting, each observer giving a slightly different tale, each tale carrying its own weight of preconceptions and bias. As the intensity of the ghostly manifestations, and the severity of Stella’s mental anguish, increase, so does the pace of the narrative, and the urgency of the siblings to discover the truth and save Stella, until the final events, and the long-concealed truths, come rushing out. A deeply moving story, well-told.
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The finalists for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer are Rivers Solomon, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Vina Jie-Min Prasad - whose work I’ve read, and who were on my nominations list - and Katherine Arden, Sarah Kuhn, and Jeannette Ng, whose work I have not read. So, I’ve gone looking for work by the latter three.

Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightengale

I have a confession to make. I have to work a bit to engage with novels that are strongly flavoured with a Russian or Eastern European influence. I’m not sure why, but it’s a thing I have. So Arden’s debut fantasy, set in feudal Russia, took a little time to grow on me. It is a story about bloodlines and magic. The central character, Vasilisa Petrovna, called Vasya, is the youngest child of wealthy boyar Pyotr Vladimirovitch and his now-dead wife Marina, the daughter of a mysterious and beautiful woman who appeared out of the forest, enchanted Moscow, and claimed the heart of Ivan I, .grand Prince of Muscovy. Like her grandmother, Vasilisa has a kind of magic - she sees spirits and other strange creatures of the field and forest.

It was the sense of family and a simple, daily life with its trials and joys that Arden conveys in the early part of the book that won me over, that and the fierce and joyful wildness that is Vasya. Pyotr Vlaidimirovitch loved his wife, loves his children, and hopes, within the bounds of the society he lives in, to see them happy. His children have their flaws - one is perhaps a bit too proud, another a touch too pious, but they care for one another. Sadly, this happy family starts to unravel when Pyotr is pressured into agreeing to two dynastic marriages - his own, to Anna, the daughter of his dead wife’s half-brother, the new Grand Prince of Muscovy, and his daughter Olga’s, to the Grand Prince’s nephew. Anna is deeply unhappy at the bargain, and longs only for the comfort of a convent life, for she, like Vasilisa, sees spirits, but to her, they are devils to be feared.

Meanwhile, the threads of destiny are beginning to weave a web around Vasya. She becomes lost in the forest and encounters a strange man who seems vaguely threatening. And while Pyotr is in Moscow, he has an unpleasant experience with a man who gives him a gift for Vasya, forcing him to swear that he will tell no living soul about this exchange, on penalty of losing his oldest son.

Fairy tales are of course filled with these things, by definition - is it, after all, in fairy tales that they began. That’s why retelling such tales is tricky - to be successful, the writer must keep enough of the tale for it to be recognisable, but make it new enough not to be overladen with too-familiar tropes. The weakness in this book is that it does perhaps rely too much on well-used staples of fairy tale lore.

But what kept me reading was Vasya herself, vibrant, bold, adventurous, different. Her love of wild things, her compassion, her resilience, her stubbornness, and her utterly solid moral compass. This was the first book in a trilogy, and I do think I shall read on, just for the joy of Vasya.


Sarah Kuhn, Heroine Complex

Ok, there is something to be said about a novel that begins with a livestreamed fight between demons in the form of pastries and a narcissistic superhero. So... I’ll start by saying this is a fun book, an interesting blend of satire, chick lit and superhero fiction.The superhero in question is Aveda Jupiter, otherwise known as Annie Chang, who has serious kickass fight moves (her own personal icon is Michelle Yeoh) and a slight tekekinetic ability gained during the first, massive incursion of demons in San Francisco, some years earlier. Fir some unknown reason, the appearance of demons triggered superpowers, mist of them relatively minor and not particularly useful, in a small percentage of the population! Although subsequent demon appearances have not repeated the effect. The narrator, Evie Tanaka, is Aveda’s childhood friend and personal assistant, the person who keeps the whole superhero business functioning, a combination of Batman’s Alfred and Superman’s Jimmy Olsen. Until Annie suffers an injury fighting demons and insists that Evie take her place so that no one discovers that superheroes are vulnerable. The problem is that Evie also has a superpower, one of very few powerful and dangerous ones, and it’s triggered by strong feelings. She works very hard to control her emotions so that she doesn’t hurt anyone, having once allowed anger at a cheating boyfriend to get out of hand, resulting in the destruction of an entire building. But when she appears as Aveda (thanks to a minor glamour cast by a friend who developed magical abilities as a result of the demon appearance), things get out of hand and she manifests her power, which is of course attributed to Aveda.

Being at the centre of the stage instead of behind the scenes, and having to learn new ways of dealing with her power, results in many changes for Evie, her sense of herself and her goals, and her relationships with Annie and the other members of the Aveda Jupiter Inc demon-fighting team.

I like the way that Kuhn uses the superhero genre to create a delicious satire on celebrity divaism. Between the portrayal of Aveda herself, the inclusion of gossip columns from a local celebrity news reporter, and Evie’s observations on the various benefits and social engagements that she has to attend while pretending to be Aveda, we get some very fine puncturing of pretentiousness that I think rings true for any form of social celebrity. Kuhn also takes on internet fannishness, showing how anyone, but particularly women, in the media spotlight can be showered with adulation one moment snd with disgust the next as some fake news story, or almost imperceptible physical imperfection (such as a zit) causes fans to suddenly turn on a firmer hero. The shallowness of public assessments of celebrities in both traditional and social media is a major point in Kuhn’s satire. Add to this some serious examination of the strengths and stresses of relationships between women (there are only two significant male characters, both playing supporting/sidekick roles), and the absurd nature of many of the demonic interactions, and you have an entertaining story with rewarding depths.


Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun

Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeanette Ng’s debut novel, is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of faith and the nature of reality. Written in the style of a Gothic romance (which has little to do with romantic goings-on as we use the term today), it is much concerned with the nature of the soul, the limits of faith, the relation of sin and redemption, and the ransom theology of the sacrifice of Christ.

Set in an alternate Victorian era, it follows the journey of Cathering Helstone to the land of Arcadia - the otherworldly home of the fae, a place of magic, mystery, shadows and dangers. Her brother Laon, a Christian missionary to Arcadia, has seemed both troubled and remote in his letters, and Catherine has gained permission from the missionary society to join him - and to carry out a quest for them, to unravel what went wrong with Laon’s predecessor, the Reverend Roche. She is conveyed to Laon’s residence, a true gothic mansion called .Gethsemane, by Miss Davenport, a changeling who grew up in human lands and describes herself as Laon’s companion. Laon himself is away on business, and Miss Davenport warns Catherine that she must remain within the walls surrounding Gethsemane until Laon returns, for her own safety. Waiting for Laon’s return, she debates points of thelogy with the only fae to have been converted, the gardener Mr. Benjamin, and pores through Reverend Riche’s papers and journals.

At first the novel moves slowly, but with an exquisite blend of suspense and strangeness. These are the fickle, treacherous, sometimes benevolent, sometimes dangerous fae of legend, and their land, like them, is full of both strange beauty and ominous shadow. Ng excels at worldbuilding, and her examination of theology and philosophy, wrapt around with a rich set of subtle literary references from Bronte to Milton, and a host of Biblical allusions, is rather delicious - if you enjoy such things, which I do.

Both pace and tone however, change once Laon returns, with Queen Mab and her court following on his arrival. Catherine is disturbed by the changes she sees in Laon, and unnerved by Mab and the inhuman creatures of her court. The visit of Mab forces to the surface the darkest secrets in both Catherine and Laon. Mab and the other high fae delight in cruelty, and in wielding both truth and deceptions as weapons of chais and destruction. The effects of her toying with Catherine and Laon leads to some difficult revelations, and some may find their actions cross lines that are uncomfortable to contemplate. But while Catherine and Laon can be broken, as were the missionaries who came before them, they find a way through the pain to become more than they were. Even when the truth is a weapon, facing it can set one free.

Ng develops an entire theological cosmogony to make room in the Christian concept of the universe for the fae, one that draws on biblical and other legends, and it’s one that I find intriguing. It’s Catherine who searches it out - echoes of the tree of knowledge and other aspects of the story of Eden reverberate throughout the novel even as Ng rewrites the story as we know it. An ambitious and, in my opinion, successful, debut.
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The Hugo finalists are out, and while quite a few of the short fiction pieces were ones I’d nominated, there are a few I hadn’t read. So, I’ve gotten my hands on those (much thanks to Sarah Pinsker for making a pdf of her novelette available on her website) and corrected those gaps in my reading.

Short Story

“The Martian Obelisk,” Linda Nagata; tor.com, July 19, 2017.
https://www.tor.com/2017/07/19/the-martian-obelisk/

The Earth is dying. Slowly, from ecological breakdown and climate change and loss of infrastructure and antibiotic resistant diseases and natural disasters and sporadic violence and all the things we’ve been fearing in recent years. A series of slow apocalypses. Susannah is an architect, and with the backing of one of the world’s remaining millionaires, she has spent the last 17 years building a soaring monument to the memory of humanity - on Mars, remotely accessing the technology of a Mars colony that was prepped but never settled. And then the unthinkable happens. A message from a survivor of the last functioning Mars colony, previously thought lost, is received. A woman and her children, the only ones left alive on Mars, have battled halfway across Mars and are asking for the resources of the monument to build a place where they can survive just a little longer. Susannah must decide, what will be the final shape of the Martian monument - the obelisk she’s spent years building, or a few more years of life for a doomed family. Powerful story, both in its depiction of the end of the world - not with a bang, but a long slow series of whimpers - and in its examination of the irrational, irrepressible, persistence of hope.


Novelettes

“Wind Will Rove,” Sarah Pinsker
(Originally published in Asimov’s September/October 2017, available for download as pdf on Pinsker’s website: http://sarahpinsker.com/wind_will_rove)

In this novelette, Pinsker explores the tension between preservation of the past and creation of the future through the situation of a generation ship that, through an act of sabotage, has lost its cultural and historical databases. This results in a concerted decision by the passengers to restore and preserve as much of the lost material as possible, not just through the creation of new databases, but through continued repetition and accurate reproduction of the restored material - music, plays, art, and Earth’s history. The narrator, Rosie Clay, is a history teacher and traditional fiddle player, challenged by one of her students who rejects the emphasis on the history and creations of the past, of an Earth that means nothing to them. Forced to look beyond the truism that those who forget history are destined to repeat it - questionable in a world that is entirely different from the Earth where that history took place - Rosie finds herself examining her own assumptions. Quiet but very thought-provoking.


“Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” Aliette de Bodard; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/children-thorns-children-water/

This novelette is set in the world of de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, and requires some familiarity with that world to be fully understood. It’s a world where Fallen angels wield magic and rule Houses, life for the houseless is bleak and often violent. The novels are set in an alternate late 19th century Paris and deal largely with relationships, politics and power - within houses, between houses, and in the larger postcolonial society. In this story, Thuan, a dragon in human form and member of the Dragon kingdom based in the waters of the Seine - the dragons, being drawn from Annamese (Vietnamese) tradition, are water beings) seeks to enter one of the Houses, House Hawthorn, as a spy, to gain information on what the tensions between houses might mean for the dragon kingdom. The day of testing, when new house dependents are chosen, is interrupted by a magical assault by creatures made of thorns, manifestations of House Hawthorne itself. Thuan proves useful to the Fallen in charge of the the tests in dealing with the crisis, and thus wins his place in the House. It’s a well-written piece, but I’m not all that fond of this secondary world. I read and enjoyed the first novel in the series and found it interesting - but not compelling enough to have pushed me to read the second volume. Good story, not quite my cup of tea.


Novellas

River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey

In her foreword, Gailey says: “In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They’d go home eaten.” It was this unfulfilled notion that spurred Gailey to imagine the alternate history of this novella, though she places the introduction of hippos into the American ecology and economy some decades earlier. In Gailey’s version of the American South, marshes have been encouraged to allow for the development of hippo farming. Hippos serve instead of horses for cartage and personal transport, and there are canals and pools for the animals to use as rest stops, and instead of stables. Part of the Mississippi has been dammed up, forming a marshy lake area called the Harriet where feral hippos range, interfering with water trade along the river. This lake region is controlled by a shady - and very wealthy - man named Travers, who operated gambling riverboats on the lake, and is known to feed people he dislikes to the feral hippos. The story begins when adventurer Winslow Remington Houndstooth is hired by a government agency to clean out the feral hippos. The general plan is to get them through the barrier at the downstream end of the Harriet by any means necessary, and encourage them to migrate south into the gulf, freeing the river for trade, and not quite incidentally interfering with Travers’ business. In addition to the large payment offered to him and any members if the tram he pits together, Houndstooth has a strong personal motivation for injuring Travers, who burned out his hippo farm sone years ago, leaving him penniless.

The first part of the novella is devoted to assembling the team, which could not be comprised of a more diverse group of characters: Regina “Archie” Archambault, a cross-dressing conwoman; Hero Shackleby, a nonbinary demolitions expert; Cal Hotchkiss, fast gun, card shark, and former employee if Houndstooth who may or may not have betrayed him to Travers; Adelia Reyes, a pregnant lesbian assassin; and Houndstooth himself, a mixed race Immigrant from England whose dream and passion is to rebuild his hippo farm. Gailey also spends time letting us get to know, not only the characters, but their hippos, their personalities and distinguishing traits. It’s clear in this society that people form bonds with their hippos not unlike those with other working or companion animals like dogs, cats or horses. As for the plot - everything goes wrong, of course, and there are double-crosses and hidden motivations and a tangle of cross purposes, and this is not a light-hearted caper, not everyone survives. But it is very entertaining, and I hear there’s a sequel.


Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Seanan McGuire

McGuire uses a delightfully arch and ironic tone in beginning this story - the backstory of Jaqueline and Jillian, Jack and Jill, two of the distinctly different children from the first of the Wayward Children series, Every Heart a Doorway - by introducing Chester and Serena Wolcott, two self-absorbed people who chose to have children to complete the image of their perfect nuclear family. Things go wrong, of course, from the beginning. As soon as they knew they were having twins, they assumed they would have a boy and a girl, thus efficiently creating the ideal family in one swoop. They never considered the possibility of two girls.

Parenthood does not suit the Wolcotts, being too disorderly and entirely too loud and messy. Chester’s mother is almost immediately recruited to actually raise the girls. At least until it becomes inconvenient to have her around, so at age five the twins lose the only person in their lives who saw them as people to be encouraged to grow, rather than accessories to be programmed for the benefit of their parents.

Those who have read Every Heart a Doorway already know a little of what happens to Jack and Jill. One day, they find a doorway where no doorway should have been and it takes them to a strange land where nightmares are real, but at least here they have some choice over which nightmare they will live in, where their parents gave them no choices at all. It is a strange place, a cruel place, and each child is changed in ways that do not bear much thinking about.

This is part of why, while I appreciate McGuire’s skill and invention in writing these stories, I don’t like them. I am not good with reading about abused children who don’t get to really escape their abuse - because we know that while Jack and Jill will someday find their way home, they will be damaged, perhaps permanently, perhaps beyond any hope of being ... normal, happy, able to function in a world of ordinary people. Of course, you can say that of many traumatised children, because the scars of some hurts never heal. So there is a fundamental truth underneath the fantasy here. As it happens, it’s a truth I live with, and reading about it requires accommodations that McGuire doesn’t offer, like the possibility of grace and hope.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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Nominating short fiction for the Retro Hugos is difficult. It’s easier with novels, as there were far sff fewer novels published then, and the ones that were, are mostly still in print. But this was in the heyday of the pulps, there was a lot of short fiction published, and most of it is unavailable, unless you collect the classics pulp magazines. While most of the stories that were considered really good have been anthologised, you have to go through a lot of anthologies to read them all, and that’s not easy to do, especially if you’re reading ebooks only.

So, I do what I can. This post contains my thoughts on the eligible novellas I managed to find and read.


In A. E. Van Vogt’s Asylum, a pair of space vampires, aliens who live off both blood and the vital “life force” of their victims, land on an Earth which has developed interplanetary space flight and learned to live without interpersonal violence - rape, murder, even war are considered “social perversions,”

Merla and Jeel are advance scouts for their people, the Dreegh, who violate the laws of Galactic society to raid relatively primitive human planets, harvesting as much blood and life energy as they can before their activities are noticed and thwarted by the Galactic Observers. But this time, Merla and Jeel decide to attack and destroy the system’s Observer before they are noticed, so that the Dreegh can drain Earth of all its life. To do this, they kidnap and interrogate a reporter named William Leigh to help them find the hidden Observer.

The novella is written in a rather florid style, and suffers from too many descriptions of the extreme magnetism and vast intelligence of the nonhuman characters. As well, Van Vogt has some very odd ideas about psychology and how to write internal conflict. I’ve read a fair bit of his work over the years, and I would not rank this among his best, despite the interesting storyline and the foreshadowed but still surprising last minute plot twist. Some pulp sf ages well; this unfortunately did not.


Lester del Ray’s novella Nerves, on the other hand, reads almost like modern fiction, albeit with some quirks in dialogue that mark it as being from an earlier area, and a very bad excuse for a Japanese accent. The novella begins with a team of medical personnel dealing with the aftermath of a serious accident - thirty-odd injured and 17 fatalities - in an industrial facility where an assortment of radioactive products are constructed. The lead physician, Dr. Ferrel, is a former ‘star’ surgeon, who has lost his confidence ever since he had to perform on his dying pregnant wife, and was unable to save her. He has been working in obscurity ever since. His assistant, Dr. Jenkins, a young doctor who once dreamed of being an atomic scientist, is in his own way unsure of his limits, and still longing for the career he could not have.

As the action unfolds, we learn that the plant where everything went drastically wrong was being used to test an experimental process, and that if the still ongoing, but dangerously malfunctioning process isn’t shut down properly, the plabt will explode in a matter of hours, taking the whole facility, and possibly a large region of the populated area nearby, with it. When it turns out that the only man who has the knowledge and experience to safely shut down the process is severely injured and suffering from serious radiation exposure, Drs Ferrel and Jenkins will need every but of their combined experience and background to save the dying atomic engineer. Nerves is a story about damaged people facing an extreme crisis and finding ways to overcome their limitations under pressure. In that sense, it is a very timeless story.


Alfred Bester’s novella Hell is Forever is a rather dull and dreary recapitulation of the rather common idea that hell is of out own making. Of the top of my head, I can think of several plays that have gotten the idea across much better, including Sartre’ No Exit. In Bester’s version, six annoying people accidentally summon something rather like a devil who offers each of them their own reality - which of course turns out to be an eternity of experiencing their own worst nightmares. I really couldn’t get excited about it, it was far too repetitious and once the point is made with the first of the obnoxious protagonists, the fate of the others is of little interest. They are simply not sympathetic enough as characters for us to care about the specifics of each individual hell.


I’ve also reread Heinlein’s novella Waldo. This time around, I feel a strong connection to the title character that is new, and connected to the severe degeneration of my own physical state since my last reading; now, I perceive Waldo as “crip lit” and a fairly sensitive example, for something written by a man who likely perceived himself as able bodied. I was struck by the unifying metaphor of the waldo, the device that allows Waldo to manipulate objects on scales that would be impossible, not just for his crippled self, dealing with severe myasthenia gravis, but in some cases, for any human. This concept is recapitulated in the concept of the Other World which Waldo learns from a traditional hex doctor, the other dimension in which mind resides, and from which mind extends to influence, direct, manipulate the material world through its connections with brain and body.

There are other interesting and very modern ideas in Waldo - including the concern about untested long-term consequences of exposure to new technologies. All in all, a fine example if Heinlein’s early work.


Anthony Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf is a nicely comedic novella about a university professor named Wolfe Wolf who has fallen in love with one of his former students, the actress Gloria Garton. When she declines his marriage proposal, he goes out drinking, meets a magician who calls himself Ozymandias, and learns that he is a werewolf. But that’s only the beginning of the tale, which also involves satanic temples, a German spy ring, and a taking cat.

The tone is light and just a bit on the frivolous side, the story pure entertainment.


Robert Heinlein’s novella The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag takes a fascinating conceit - the world as a work of art - and turns it into a baffling and rather frightening story of supernatural mystery. (And also, in its description of Hoag’s profession as unpleasant, an in-joke for writers.) Jonathan Hoag is an amnesiac. Not only has he no memory of his live before a time five years ago. He has no idea what he does during the day. Distressed by the sudden realisation that he doesn’t really know who he is, he turns to a private detective to discover the things about himself that he doesn’t know.

Their investigation leads to a series of strange events, terrifying nightmares, unnatural threats, and unbelievable encounters, a sense that either they or the world is gong mad. As it turns out, it’s the world that is subtly wrong, and Hoag’s unknown profession carries with it the potential to make things right.

It’s like one of those secret history stories, in a way. It is so very unbelievable, and yet it could be true, and one would never know. Both the story and the concept stay with the reader after the process of reading is over - surely one of the qualities of good art.

Of the novellas I found and read, I thought both of Heinlein’s pieces, plus the Boucher and del Ray offerings, worth nomination. It will be interesting to see what works others found and decided to nominate.

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In 1942, Vita Sackville-West published Grand Canyon, a speculative novel - a future history with a strong element of the fantastic - in which Germany has overrun all of Europe, and established a sort of truce with America. The time period is vague; it’s far enough in the future for a means if extracting electricity from the air to have been discovered, for new dance crazes to have developed. European emigres wander through the American landscape, detached and lost, while life goes on around them.

The novel is set in a tourist hotel by the Grand Canyon. Among its guests are the serene and enigmatic Englishwoman, Helen Temple, the cynical Lester Dale, the exotic and emotional Madame de Retz, the blind Czech refugee with his silent German attendant, the deaf Englishman who carries a skate around his neck to enable communication, and a gaggle of young American college students, co-eds, on holiday, one of whom, Lorraine Driscoll, is worried about something. Most of the staff are nameless, save for the consumptive maid Sadie. A band of black musicians perform “whizz music” on the dance patio. Next to the hotel is a village of deliberately picturesque Hopi, who sell overpriced souvenirs and perform “Indian dances” as part of the evening entertainment.

Nearby is a camp of military personal preparing for “manoeuvres,” not much further as the crow flies is an airbase; some of the soldiers and airmen frequent the hotel for dinner and evening entertainment.

Living secretly in a long-abandoned cave dwelling is an English author and professor, his presence apparently known only to Mrs. Temple and the local Hopi people, who is referred to only as the hermt.

And finally there is Mr. Royer, the Hotel Manager, an obnoxious man who also happens to be a German agent, waiting for orders to set fire to the hotel.

All these things we learn in the first few pages, as Sackville-West slides the perspective from one character to another as they interact in the course of an early evening, preparing for dinner at the hotel, setting the scene and characters.

At the core of the novel is the developing relationship between Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale. Too detached, in their own ways, to be actively romantic, nonetheless a kind of intimacy develops between them, contrasted against the flirtatious social lives of the young college students and energetic servicemen who fill the dining room and dance floor of the Grand Canyon Hotel. This unfolding takes place in the midst of the up-to-now unthinkable - a blackout order in the vicinity of the canyon, intended to protect the nearby airbases and army camps from anticipated bombing runs by long-range German planes based in Hawaii, Mexico, and perhaps Brazil. Both Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale know war, know the nature if the enemy; in their conversations over the course of the novel’s action is the larger debate over the great irony of having to meet the violence of evil with violence for good.

Sackville-West wrote of her choices in writing this novel:

“In Grand Canyon I have invented a cautionary tale. In it I have contemplated the dangers of a world in which Germany, by the use of an unspecified method of attack, is assumed to have defeated Great Britain in the present war. […] The terrible consequences of an incomplete conclusion or indeed of any peace signed by the Allies with an undefeated Germany are shown.”

Written in the midst of the war, and the daily bombing of England, it’s not difficult to see this novel as a warning to an isolationist America that there can be no peace with Nazi Germany, that they must engage before Britain falls, or risk eventually fighting a more powerful enemy on their own soil. But it’s a timely message today as well, as the hateful rhetoric of Hitler’s Nazi Party spreads across Europe and North America, and white supremacists take to the streets and to the parliaments of the West. It reminds us that some things must not be tolerated, cannot be politely contained, and have no place whatsoever in a civil and just society. And it contains a plea, that someday, humans will learn to exercise “the one faculty that mattered, the faculty of being able to arrange his life in accordance with his fellows” - the ability to live in harmony and peace.

I read this in part because it will please and amuse me to nominate it for a 1942 Retro Hugo award; I’m glad I did, because it speaks to some things that, it seems, we must learn over and over again. War and violence are not glorious, but they may be a part of the price of eternal vigilance.
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What with the Hugo nomination period for 1943 Retro Hugo being open, I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone by reading the collections of Heinlein’s shorter fiction that contain anything published in 1942.

I begin my Heinlein Hugo reading with the odd little volume that packages his 1942 sf novella, Waldo, with his slightly earlier contemporary fantasy, Magic, Inc. The edition I have contains an introduction by the self-proclaimed Heinlein expert William H. Patterson, Jr., who tells us that Heinlein did not see why these two novellas were published in one volume: “...he considered these stories so mismatched, he told his agent, that, “[i]t seems to me that they go together about as well as mustard and watermelon.” It was a headache to come up with a title for the book. He ran through several lackluster possibilities and gave up: the book was published in 1950 with just the titles of the two stories joined together.”

Patterson argues that they are in fact thematically linked: “...for what “Magic, Inc.” and “Waldo” have in common is that they are both explorations of cognitive boundaries, of the mental cages we erect for ourselves, whose limits we pace out and self-reinforce.” I think he’s reaching a bit here, not because this isn’t true, but because it is true of most things Heinlein wrote, and indeed most of the best that any writer of speculative fiction has written.

Anyway, on to Waldo. It is, of course, the story that gave remotely operated robotic instruments their nickname, “waldoes,” because it is the story of an isolated and eccentric genius, Waldo F. Jones, with severe myasthenia gravis who invents and relies on such instruments to do the things he cannot. The set-up of the novella: 15 years after the transition to the use of radiant power, and the elimination of all physical means of power transmission, something is going wrong with the system. Unexplained failures, breakdowns in equipment that should not break down, findings that go against all the science that resulted in radiant power being adopted in the first place. No one can explain the problem, let alone solve it. The last option is to seek the help, if it can be obtained, of Waldo, the crippled, misanthropic genius who lives in a self-contained orbital satellite and generally refuses to interact with anyone unless it serves his interests and is on his terms.

The last time I read Waldo, which was many years ago, I did not see myself as disabled. I was overweight, and limited in certain ways, and frustrated that no matter what medical advice I followed, I could not lose weight, but just kept getting heavier. I had some respiratory issues, but the environmental illness that would eventually force me into seclusion had not yet become obvious. I could understand Waldo, the character, intellectually, but I could not feel as he might feel. Now, imprisoned by gravity and my extreme susceptibility to environmental toxins, I identify with Waldo. I long for a Freehold where I could move freely. I want to dance again. So that’s a big part of my response to the novella.

I’m also, as always, delighted by Heinlein’s premise in this story, that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, and that some of those might in fact involve a basis for some kinds of manipulation of reality, something that looks like magic. This time around, in reading Waldo’s unravelling of the science of the science of the Other World, I was struck by an image of the mind, resident in the Other World, reaching into the continuum of physical reality to make the body function, like an organic simulation of the mechanical waldoes created by the protagonist.

Magic, Inc. is a contemporary fantasy, a forerunner to the modern and burgeoning genre of urban fantasy. It takes place in a world where magic works according to recognised laws and principles, and is fully a part of everyday life. Our protagonists flag down a flying carpet, not a taxi. Restaurants offer “vanishing meals” - you experience all the sensation of eating, but the food magically dematerialises once it reaches the stomach. Most industries run on a combination of technology and magic.

The protagonist, Archie Fraser, runs a building supplies and construction business. He employs licenced, professional magicians on a contract basis, just as he does any other tradespersn or specialist needed to do any given job. But his freedom to hire whom he wishes is being threatened, first by an organisation that purports to be a professional standards body, that wants to regulate contracts and fees, then by a gangster who threatens serious damage to his business unless he only hires magicians they recommend, and pay protection bribes on top of that.

Being a rugged individualist, Fraser refuses, and soon there are consequences. The situation escalates, with curses, hexes, and depredations by gnomes and salamanders on his business properties, and the emergence of a heavily funded lobby that seeks to enact regulation that will put all practising magicians under control of an organisation called Magic, Inc, and compel every business using magic to negotiate only with them. Fortunately, Fraser has a friend, who is a bit of a witch himself, and who knows some very powerful allies who are willing to help Fraser fight this massive attempt to take over the practice of magic.

It’s an engaging story, well-plotted, with some truly memorable characters, including a South African anthropologist who is also a traditional “witch smeller” - a black character portrayed with an uncomfortable mix of respect and racist stereotyping. Heinlein actually manages to show some awareness of the impacts of colonialism on Africa in his handling of the character, and to treat African magical traditions with as much respect as the European ones he draws on - and this is one magical Negro who does not sacrifice himself for anyone.

All in all, it’s a fun romp that shows why Heinlein was a force to be reckoned with in science fiction, right from the very early days of his writing career.

Heinlein only published three short stories in 1942: “Goldfish Bowl,” under his own name, and two others, “Pied Piper” and “My Object All Sublime” under his Lyle Monroe pen name. The Lyle Monroe stories have apparently only been anthologised once, in Off the Main Sequence, and it was never made into an ebook. That makes it difficult to try to read those. “Goldfish Bowl” is in The Menace from Earth, which I have in an omnibus edition with The Green Hills of Earth, so I’m reading both collections.

The Green Hills of Earth, ironically enough, contains a great many stories about working and living in space, or on the Moon. Read in order, these stories - all of them part of the Luna City cycle, which may or may not be part of Heinlein’s Future History - tell, or at least suggest, the ‘history’ of humanity’s movement into space. There’s “Delilah and the Space Rigger” which tells two stories - one about the construction of the space station that makes travel from Earth to the Moon feasible, and one about the psychological shift from space as frontier and space as living environment. “The Space Jockey” continues both themes, the establishment of regular transport to the Moon and the establishment of family life on the Moon. “The Long Watch,” one of Heinlein’s most moving stories, references politics on Earth, but is about the courage of the average man called on to do extraordinary things, and the role of the Moon in making those green hills of Earth safe from war. “Gentlemen Be Seated” is set during the construction of Luna City, and, like three of the following stories, “The Black Pits of Luna,” “It’s Great to Be Back,” and “Ordeal in Space,” highlights what it take, psychologically, to live in space, away from the relative comfort and safety of Earth.

“We Also Walk Dogs” takes place entirely on Earth, but deals peripherally with the preliminary steps toward the establishment of a solar system government that integrates multiple cultures, human and otherwise. It’s in “The Green Hills of Earth” that Heinlein, in another classic and emotional tale, bridges the contradictions between the drive outward, into the far corners of space, and the memory of Earth that the spacemen carry with them - a memory as idealised as all the other things that the blind poet remembers but can not see. “Logic of Empire” ends the collection on a sombre note, an oppositional piece to the optimistic story of human progress to the stats. It is the dark underbelly of the romance of exploration - the tragedy of exploitation - and brings the reader, shockingly, down to earth with the fear that the errors of earth’s past will all be replayed in space’s future.


The stories collected in The Menace from Earth are less thematically linked, and can be divided loosely into two groups. Some of the stories are part of the Luna City cycle, including the story that gives the collection its name. In these stories, one sees the same focus on the spirit of exploration as in the other stories set in this particular timeline and frequently set in, or referencing, Luna City, most of which are collected in The Green Hills of Earth. Some of the stories - “ Columbus Was a Dope,” “The Menace from Earth,” - show Luna City as a well established habitat, with its own full culture, serving as a cradle for further exploration, while “Skylift” focuses on the downsides and the dangers of a space-faring society.

In addition to the Luna City cycle stories, the collection contains several stand-alone stories, including some of Heinlein’s best known short fiction - “The Year of the Jackpot,” “By His Bootstraps,” and “Goldfish Bowl.” These stories, and the two lesser known tales “Water is for Washing” and “Project Nightmare,” interestingly enough, do share a common theme of menace - from the sun, from the waters, from the skies, from the future, from other humans.

Rereading these short stories reminds me of Heinlein’s great versatility, and of how very good a writer he was, and how modern his work still feels today, despite his being in many ways a man of his time. So many sf short stories of the period lack in characterisation, or use language in ways that feel forced, overwrought, or insufficiently nuanced upon rereading. Heinlein ages well in many ways, even when the inevitable casual sexism and racism of the times is too much a part of the story to be set aside - though even then, it is important to note that Heinlein seems to have thought more about the social status and roles of women and people of colour than many other writers of his time, and he does his best to make them fully realised characters, and not just stereotypes, when he includes them in his writing.

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