My life in books

The Rolling Stones seems to be a natural break between the novels that set up Heinlein’s ideas about the growth of man as a moral being and humanity as explorer and coloniser, growing throughout the galaxy, and those that highlight situations where those ideas are tested.

The remaining juveniles are mostly stories of one kind or another, showing some of the consequences of space exploration and colonisation. One fairly constant element of Heinlein’s Future Earths is massive overpopulation that drives extreme means of identifying and developing colonies. The development process, meanwhile, almost always seems to involve a stage almost exactly like the early colonisation of Western North America, complete with wagon trains.

His one look into the far future, Citizen of the Galaxy, where humanity is part of a mature, multi-system galactic community, shows that a developed civilisation will always have deep moral flaws - slavery, in this case - and that the same ethical commitment to the whole of the social system is always needed.


Starman Jones, 1954

Heinlein’s post-Rolling Stones juveniles don’t really follow any king a chronological or thematic development, but are mostly about individuals placed in difficult situations they must solve. From a loose narrative of man’s journey into space, we turn to a series of individual adventures in that space. Although in this novel Earth has again declined - people no longer have the right to choose their careers, but must be fostered into guilds, do the same work as their parents, or join a general work pool without prospects.

In Starman Jones, we see Max, a naive but essentially good young man, cheated by fate and by the circumstances of his life of a future in space. His uncle was to have nominated him to the Astrogater’s Guild. Instead, the early deaths of both father and uncle and the selfish thoughtlessness of a stepmother have taken even the proceeds of his father’s farm. He has nothing but his uncle’s astrogation tables - and when he goes to see whether his uncle ever registered his nomination, the Guild takes those too.

He falls in with a paternal conman, who uses Max’s last funds - a deposit for the returned books - to forge papers that will get the both of them onto an interplanetary spaceliner as crew - then warns him that they’ll be discovered after one run, and his only real choice is to jump ship at an attractive colony and settle down on a new planet. But Max still wants the stars he was promised.

This story works with the ‘moral rightness’ that is one of Heinlein’s themes - Max is in a moral trap at the outset of the book. To become an astrogator - which should, in all fairness, be something he has the right ti try for - he must lie and cheat. Later, as his fraud actually seems to bring his goal closer, he has the option to be honest, even if he loses his chance - and discovers that he has been found out already, and only his natural abilities have persuaded his boss to give him a chance, if he does own up to the truth.

What Max learns is that in an ethical bind, the truly moral man will make his own decisions regardless - but be fully prepared to face the consequences.

The Star Beast, 1954

This one is just plain fun, so I’m not going to say much about it. You’ll love Lummox, the most endearing alien you’ve ever met. And the twist of perspective is delightful. The diplomats are funny too, especially Mr. Kiku, so keep an eye out for him. Unfortunately, the human protagonists are boring, but you can’t have everything.

Tunnel in the Sky 1955

This is actually a well-written, exciting adventure story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and some good characters. In this variation on the colonisation of outer space, a system of interstellar gates connects Earth to all the colonised and open-for-colonising planets, and trained survival and colonial development experts are hired by parties of settlers to lead their groups, to improve their chances of establishing successful colonies. These professionals are trained, among other ways, by being set down in a survivable region of an open planet for, in early training, a few days. This is the story of a group of high school and college students who were lost on their first survival run for several years due to technical issues, and had to really fend for themselves without any assistance from home base. So real life and death adventure, and not everyone makes it.

Time for the Stars 1956

Time for the Stars is the first appearance of Heinlein’s most disturbing (to me) literary tic - the marriage of a a man to a (usually red-haired) young girl, often a relative, that he’s somehow groomed and watched as a child and then gone through some time dilation process that has them end up of similar, and marriageable age. In this case, Tom and Pat are identical mirror twins who are telepathic with each other. Tom takes ship on a torch ship that’s just fast enough (it can reach just shy of light speed) to make exploration for colony planets possible - given the presence of these telepath pairs who can communicate instantaneously between the ship and Earth no matter how far apart they are.

Tom goes to the stars, Pat stays on Earth and receives and transmits messages to him. It turns out, as the relativistic slippage increases, that some of the pairs can pass their telepathic connection to the next generation, and that Tom and Pat are among them. So while Tom travels in space, he is able to make connections first with Pat’s daughter Molly, then his granddaughter Kathleen, and finally his great granddaughter Vicky. Tom’s ship is called home, thanks to the invention of the irrelevant drive, when Vicky’s bio age is just a few yews less than Tom’s. Heinlein is careful to insert a phrase reminding us that the genetic convergence is minimal. She proposes, he accepts, end of story. Oh, there are adventures of sorts along the way, but that’s basically it.


Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)

Heinlein had vey strong feelings about slavery; he even wrote two books intended to show how awful it is. Citizen of the Galaxy is the one that sort of worked. Thorby is an enslaved orphan, starved, in poor condition, being sold at the local slave market on Sargon, the capital planet of the Nine Planets, but no one wants to buy him. He’s finally purchased by Baslim the beggar for what amounts to pennies.

As it turns out, Baslim is a very unusual beggar - he is also a spy for the Galactic Hegemony - which Earth is a part of - and his mission is to track down links between large Hegemonic corporations and the slave trade operation beyond the Hegemony’s reach.

Eventually Baslim is discovered and executed, but not before having made arrangements to get Thorby away from Sargon and into the Hegemony where his identity can be traced and his real family found.

It’s a well-developed story, and the adventures Thorby face in finding his real home and purpose in life are fascinating.

Have Spacesuit - Will Travel (1958)

In a sense, Have Spacesuit - Will Travel is the culmination of Heinlein’s message in these novels, that the moral development of the human race is vitally important, and must be achieved before we go too far into space. In this novel, a young girl, Peewee, and a teenage boy, Kip, become involved in the schemes of a group of violent and domineering aliens whose modus operandi is to take whatever they want from the weak. Knowing only that these are not nice people, they assist a member of yet another alien species, who they identify only as the Mother-thing, who seem to be the local branch of the galactic peacemakers.

As things turn out, there is a vast society which includes peoples from all three galaxies in the Magellanic cluster, and they survive by weeding out potentially destructive species when they meet them. Both humans and the aliens who captured the Mother-thing are tried, with Peewee and
Kip speaking for Earth. The aliens, who espouse a master race philosophy, are essentially removed from the galaxy, and the case against the humans looks grim:

“By their own testimony, these are a savage and brutal people, given to all manner of atrocities. They eat each other, they starve each other, they kill each other. They have no art and only the most primitive of science, yet such is their violent nature that even with so little knowledge they are now energetically using it to exterminate each other, tribe against tribe. Their driving will is such that they may succeed. But if by some unlucky chance they fail, they will inevitably, in time, reach other stars. It is this possibility which must be calculated: how soon they will reach us, if they live, and what their potentialities will be then.”

Kip and Peewee win the humans a reprieve - time to prove they can grow into a civilised society - by showing the there has already been growth, and by being willing, even though they personally had been promised amnesty for their actions in helping the Mother-thing, to share the consequences of being human, even to death.

It’s the biggest and most highly symbolic of all of the ways Heinlein’s juveniles have demonstrated the idea that the human race must grow and become fully ethically responsible.

These are far from being the only themes in Heinlein’s juveniles, which also focus on self-reliance, a commitment to life-long learning and the importance of a basic science background for an informed citizenry.

Take Us to Your Chief is a collection of science fiction short stories by Ojibwe novelist and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor. While I don’t see any reason why the thought of an indigenous writer working in the science fiction genre should raise any eyebrows, Taylor felt his choice deserved some explanation, because he says in his Introduction: “Part of my journey in this life both as a First Nations individual and as a writer is to expand the boundaries of what is considered Native literature. I have always believed that literature should reflect all the different aspects and facets of life. There is more to the Indigenous existence than negative social issues and victim narratives. Thomas King has a collection of Aboriginal murder mysteries. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm has published an assortment of Indigenous erotica, and Daniel Heath Justice has written a trilogy of adventure novels featuring elves and other fantastic characters. Out of sheer interest and a growing sense of excitement, I wanted to go where no other (well, very few) Native writers had gone before. Collectively, we have such broad experiences and diverse interests. Let’s explore that in our literature. Driving home my point, we have many fabulous and incredibly talented writers in our community, but some critics might argue our literary perspective is a little too predictable—of a certain limited perspective. For example, a lot of Indigenous novels and plays tend to walk a narrow path specifically restricted to stories of bygone days. Or angry/dysfunctional aspects of contemporary First Nations life. Or the hangover problems resulting from centuries of colonization. All worthwhile and necessary reflections of Aboriginal life for sure. But I wonder why it can’t be more?”

Whether these story push the envelop of Indigenous writing is not for me to say. What I will say is that I’m very happy Taylor decided to write them, because they are good reading, and provide a different, and welcome, perspective to the sometimes unbearable whiteness of science fiction.

These stories run the gamut of moods, from uplifting to terrifying, as science fiction does. In “A Culturally Inappropriate Apocalypse,” a community radio station on a Kanienké’hà:ka reserve plays a found-by-chance collection of recordings of traditional songs, some so old no one remembers what their purpose was - such as the strange and eerie “Calling Song,” which calls something that was best left forgotten. In “I Am” an artificial intelligence comes to identify with indigenous peoples around the world - and their fates at the hands of white colonialists. In “Dreams of Doom,” a young Ojibway reporter accidentally stumbles on a government plot far worse than assimilation or title extinction. “Petropaths” is a fascinating cautionary tale about exploring powers you do not understand. “Superdisillusioned” tells the story of an Ojibway man mutated by the environmental conditions in his home on the reserve.

But not all is sorrow and loss, although the theme of the traumas of Indigenous people are woven into all of these stories to some degree - as indeed they are inevitably a part of Indigenous life. In “Lost in Space” a part Anishinaabe astronaut finds a way to reconnect with his people despite his being far from Turtle Island. “Mr. Gizmo” addresses the epidemic of suicides among Indigenous youth with a miraculous - and incongruous - spirit intervention. “Stars” links a chain of young men who have looked up at the skies in wonder. In “Take Us to Your Chief,” aliens land on a reserve, only to meet three older men who are known for doing little other than sitting in the porch and enjoying beer in the sunlight - but the encounter works out surprisingly well.

Many of these stories are set in the fictional Ojibway community of Otter Lake, where Taylor has set many of his works of varied genres. For those familiar with his other writings, that will give these stories an extra sense of coming back to someplace familiar, yet altered by the subject matter. I heartily recommend this collection - it’s good science fiction with a strong and much needed injection of Indigenous experience.

I was paging idly through my collection of ebooks looking for something to read, when my eye was caught by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Falcons of Narabedla, which I had never actually read but have sometimes heard mentioned as loosely connected to the Darkover books.

Setting aside all considerations of Bradley’s quite reprehensible personal actions, which I’ve discussed here before, I’m not al that fond of her early writing at a technical level. It contained too many of what I find to be the least interesting elements of the “pulp” style - overblown writing, limited background and characterisation, and the sense of getting thrown into situations without any context or incluing, such that, if the character is confused or taken by surprise, the reader is not just equally so, but not given much information about what is happening to the character right now, from which some notions of what’s happening can be drawn.

The Falcons of Narabedla is like that. The lead character, Mike Kenscott, is a man of the mid-twentieth century, a scientist what has been somehow strangely affected by a lab accident. He disrupts energy flows, shorts out electrical devices, things like that. He goes to spend some time in the wilderness with his brother, and his consciousness is somehow transported across time to what may be a far future.

He finds himself in the body of a man named Adric, Lord of the Crimson Tower, with only the faintest and most fragmentary access to Adric’s conscious memories, although he seems to function well enough in matters if habitual action, such as dressing in unusual clothing or getting around the Tower. He tries to tell those around him - a Dreamer named Rhys, a veiled woman named Gamine, Adric’s brother Evarin - that he’s not Adric, that he doesn’t known anything about where he is, or about Adric’s life, no one gives him any really useful information and so he’s left to figure things out on his own. Among the few things he does learn is that he has a controversial relationship with a powerful and not particularly liked woman named Kameny, and that unlike the others of his class, who each have properly bound and exploited the telepathic abilities of one of a group of people known as the Dreamers, his Dreamer is unbound and free to move.

Kenscott comes to understand what’s happened to him in this passage, which I quote rather than try to paraphrase:

“Once before, for a little while, Adric and I had touched lives on—what had Gamine called it? The Time Ellipse. That day they thought the lab was struck by lightning. For eighteen hours, while I lay crushed under a laboratory beam, and later under drugs in the hospital) he and I had shared a fragment of life somehow. But the escape had not been complete. Something had driven him, or drawn him, back to his own world.

And he had tried again, or had been sent back And this time he seemed to have succeeded. Was he in my hunting cabin in the mountains, cleaning fish for supper, curiously rummaging through my electrical equipment? Viciously I hoped he'd give himself some damned good shocks on it.”

But it seems that more than Adric’s memories remain, or perhaps Kameny’s “magic” is affecting him, for he finds himself taking actions that he doesn’t understand, that he, Mike Kenscott, would never do. At times Kenscott gains ascendancy, but the Adric personality seems to be more in control, a circumstance that becomes potentially disastrous as Kenscott/Adric finds himself caught up in a rebellion of commoners and Dreamers, hoping to end the rule of the Tower dwellers. Kenscott himself is in sympathy with the aims of their leader, Narayan - the Dreamer he is incompletely bound to - but Adric seeks to use Narayan’s power to avenge himself on Kameny, who challenged his power as leader of the Rainbow Towers.

And then, somehow, Adric returns, in Kenscott’s body, and forces Kenscott back, retaking his own body - now both Adric and Kenscott are in the same time and place, in their own bodies. Can Kenscott warn Narayan in time, and be believed?

It’s a decent pulp portal fantasy, but having read it, I have no idea why it’s sometimes associated with the Darkover books. Oh, there are telepaths and towers, but those are common tropes. The only actual textual link is that the characters sometimes swear by Zandru, but that’s hardly enough to build a link on. So, now I’ve read it, and need no longer wonder about it.

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.

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.

Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person"; The New Yorker, December 11, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

An all-too-familiar story about a woman meeting and becoming involved with a man, despite all the tiny warning signals that suggest she should be mire cautious. The scary thing is that it ended in a better way than I'd feared, although 'better' is perhaps not the right word.


Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch"; Granta, October 28, 2014
https://granta.com/the-husband-stitch/

One reviewer of this short story has said "It’s a horror story in which the monster is heterosexual relationship", which seems to me as accurate as anything else I could say. It's a powerful story about being a woman in a world made by men, about how we fit ourselves into the spaces in their lives and try to hold onto some small thing that is our own. Until they want that too, and we give it freely because we love them, and we have nothing left.


Maureen McHugh, "Sidewalks"; Omni, November 28, 2017
http://omnimagazine.com/sidewalks/

Ros Gupta is a speech pathologist called in to examine a "Jane Doe" of indeterminate racial identity who speaks only 'gibberish' and is currently being held in an institution because the police feared she might be a danger to self or others. She manages to communicate with the woman, whose name is Malni, and what she discovers changes her entire way of relating to the world she lives in. There are some profound messages here, about the fragility of the things we know and love, about connectedness and change, about actions and consequences, and about living as a woman in the world.


Charlie Jane Anders, "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue"; Boston Review, October 30, 2017
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/charlie-jane-anders-dont-press-charges-and-i-wont-sue

A brutal story about a woman struggling to hold on to her identity in a world determined to eliminate it. The real horror is that this world is only a few existential tweaks away from our own, and there are people who would not read this as a terrifying and cautionary dystopic narrative. Powerful, painful.


Kelly Barnhill, "Probably Still the Chosen One"; Lightspeed, February 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/probably-still-chosen-one/

A rather different take on the portal fantasy and the whole 'chosen child hero' trope. Eleven-year-old Corrina finds a portal to a land at war and is identified as the Chosen One by the Priesthood. Her destiny - to lead the people of Nibiru to victory against the evil Zonners. But it doesn't turn out quite the way Corrina dreams it will, or the Priests expect it too. Fun.


C. S. E. Cooney, "Though She Be But Little"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/though-she-be-but-little/

Something strange has happened - the Argentum, the sky turning silver - and strange things have happened - people turning into mythical pirates, floating alligators and parrots that can act like cellphones - and things have arrived from somewhere else, many of them monstrous. Emily Anne was a widow in her sixties before the Argentum; now she's an eight-year-old child and a nightmare creature, The Loping Man, is coming to kill her. Where the story focuses on Emily Anne's resourcefulness, courage, and ability to adapt to this new world, it was enjoyable, but I felt as though I'd been dropped into something complex with no explanation and that aspect was not as pleasing. I'd have enjoyed it more if it were presented as straight absurdist fantasy, but presenting it as something that's happened to a real world not unlike our own makes me want at least some clues toward answers to 'how' and 'why.'


Fran Wilde, "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/clearly-lettered-mostly-steady-hand/

This one cut me deeply. It's a horror story about the way society and the medical profession deal with "freaks" - those of us who are visibly different - and how those freaks feel and think. The story is told as a monologue by a tour guide through a freak show, but the tone drips with rage at the 'normal' person, the voyeur come to see the horrifying strangeness of the 'different.' Intense.


N. K. Jemisin, "Henosis"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/henosis/

A short story about fame, fans, and legacy. An aging author nominated for a prize that it quite literally intended as the culmination of a stellar career is kidnapped by a fan. Interesting and somewhat savage commentary on what it's like to become famous and to be seen as possessing an artistic legacy.

One might not think that a trilogy of science fiction books about the various ways one might go about creating a society based on Plato's Republic, and what the outcomes of those societies might look like, is going to be engaging, at times exciting, and hard to put down. And maybe it isn't, if you have little interest about such ideas as justice, the good life, excellence, the nature of conscious self-awareness and the soul, the origin of the universe and the meaning of time.

But since I have a strong interest in these things, and since Jo Walton has, in her Thessaly trilogy, written an amazing set of characters you can't help caring about who take part in explorations of these ideas through debate, daily living, and various travels and adventures, it was probably inevitable that I would fall in love with these somewhat unusual novels.

I've already talked about the first two novels in the trilogy, The Just City and The Philosopher Kings. In the third novel, Necessity, Walton continues her explorations of the deep philosophical questions that have troubled humanity for millennia.

Necessity begins 40 years after Zeus, in order to save Athene's experiment in building a true Platonic society and continue its isolation from human history, has moved all the existing cities to a distant planet and to a time in the 26th century. Survival on Plato, as its new inhabitants have named it, is not as easy as it was on the island of Thera - the climate is colder, and the planet has no indigenous land-based animal life (though it has fish in abundance). But the people of Pluto have prospered, and their cities occupy the planet in peace. Living with them and taking part in Plato's society are two sentient Worker robots that were transported with them, and some members of an alien space-faring race, the Saeli, who find their Platonic ideals appealing.

The narrative that drives the further philosophical explorations Walton engages us in involves the disappearance of the goddess Athene from not only time and space, but the dimensions out of time. When Apollo, returned to his divinity by the death of his human incarnation, Pythias, discovers that he cannot sense Athene anywhere, his decision to search for her becomes a quest to understand the underpinnings of existence and the meaning of life.

This quest is interwoven with the lives of several inhabitants of Plato, key among them: Jason, who operates a fishing boat; Marsilia, one of the consuls of the City - the first Platonic community settled by Athene on Earth - who also works with Jason; Thetis, her sister, who works with the City's children; Hilfa, a young Saeli who is also part of Jason's crew; and Crocus, the first sentient Worker.

The death of Pythias and Apollo's discovery that Athene is lost take place place against the backdrop of an event the Platonians have long anticipated - the arrival of the first spaceship from another planet of humans. The planet's inhabitants must decide whether to follow the advice of Zeus, and present the story of their arrival on Plato as a kind of origin myth, all the while leading the space-faring humans to believe Plato was settled just as any other human colony - or just to tell the truth and let the other humans make of it what they will.

Rounding out this mix of events, Sokrates is returned to the Platonic cities, having been found by Apollo on his quest to find Athene. Not at all changed by having spent time in the Jurassic period, living as the gadfly Athene transformed him into, Sokrates becomes an essential part of the continuing philosophical dialogue that is Plato, and of the lives of the Platonians involved in Apollo's quest.

In Necessity, Walton proposes some possible answers to the questions being asked in these three novels, but also leaves much still to be considered by the reader, just as she gives her characters some degree of closure in their daily lives, while leaving the future open-ended.

The entire trilogy is a kind of experiment, the success of which the reader must judge for themselves. For me, it succeeds gloriously.

I've just finished another two volumes in Kage Baker's Company series, The Life of the World to Come and The Children of the Company.

Complexities and possibilities are building, the plots are thickening, new revelation are flying fast and I'm still no closer to even guessing how it all will end.

The Life of the World to Come brings us back to Mendoza, waiting in exile for the unimaginable - which naturally happens, against all odds and expectations. but most of the novel is about three men living in three very different time periods - two of whom, both Mendoza's lovers, we have already met - and the mysterious links between them, as illuminated in the life of the third of them.

The Children of the Company is told by a new voice, Labienus, who we have so far seen only in glimpses and off-hand references in the stories of others. Now we see the actions of other, all throughout time, through his eyes and those of his associates, subordinates and spies. So many little things thant seemd simple are made significant, so many loose threads are knotted up, and yet the coming mysteries loom greater than ever.

More, I want more.

In the Garden of Iden, Kage Baker

I've been reading all sorts of recommendations of Kage Baker's The Company series for some time now, and I must say, having read the first book of the series, that the recommendations were right.

It's an interesting set-up - a time travel corps recruited among abandoned children across the millennia with the purpose of saving things - from artwork to biological specimens - that would otherwise have perished and "hiding" them in time so they can be discovered later. Later being when the 24th century corporation running the show unearths them for profit.

Because these recruits really don't have much of a choice - or rather, their choice is, esentially, join or die - this is not a bunch of happy and idealistic self-selelcted folks, but rather a collection of real people drafted into work that is sometimes dangerous, some of whom like the job they're doing, some of whom don't, many of whom are perhaps not the best suited for the task but they're all there is.

The protagonist of the first book is Mendoza, who was snatched from certain death at the hands of the spanish Inquisition when she was only five (under suspicion of secretly being a Jew), raised in the australian outback of several million years ago, given extensive modification that end up making her, like other members of the Comapny, virtually immortal, and sent out at 18 on her first mission, to salvage what will become rare plants from the estate of a 16th century gentleman gardener/collector/botanist.

And yes, the book is about a loss of innocence, on many levels.

And it's a very good read. Baker at times uses a tone that is breezy, almost flippant, but this only serves to underline some the the very serious issues she is exploring in between the plot points of a time travel adventure. I expect to be returning very soon to the universo of The Company.