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Heritage of Cyador

Heritage of Cyador - L.E. Modesitt Jr. Heritage Of Cyador’ is the latest volume in L.E. Modesitt, Jr.‘s best selling ‘The Saga Of Recluce’. This now runs to eighteen volumes but they are generally separate stories covering different regions or time periods of the world imagined and most can be read individually or as pairs. It would be wise to read ‘Cyador’s Heirs’ before this one as it introduces our hero, Lerial, second son of Duke Kiedron of Cigoerne.

In that book, he became a soldier and is proficient enough to slaughter an entire battalion of opposition by himself, using his mastery of Order and Chaos. The energy Chaos is kept in line by Order and Lerial can separate the two, virtually on the sub-atomic level, it seems. Substantial damage ensues. That happens in the prologue, so I’m not giving much away. A while later, he is dispatched with a small force to help the neighbouring land of Afrit fight off an attack by the other neighbouring land of Heldya. As the battalion Lerial killed was from Afrit, he is not sure of a warm welcome there, even though he’s come to help. It is in Cigoerne’s interests to stop Heldya conquering Afrit for the same reason it was in France’s interest to stop Germany conquering Poland. They would be next.

Duke Atroyan rules Afrit, not well, but fortunately, his competent brother, Rhamuel, is in charge of the armed forces and that is the man with whom Lerial must deal with, at first. Following a small battle, there is a lull in the fighting and the story turns to more courtly proceedings, balls and dinners and the like. In the hands of another writer, this might have become dull but Modesitt manages to make the personalities intriguing and the conversations interesting. Then the Heldyans attack again and there are several other developments before this long book draws near its conclusion.

As I’ve mentioned before, Modesitt shows great respect for soldiers and responsible leaders and also speaks highly of decent artisans and farmers but he has a very un-American attitude to business people or Merchanters as they are called in this one. For some reason, possibly based in real life today, the author seems to think that ‘Merchanters’ are only interested in gold and care little about anything or anyone else. He makes them seem almost selfish; even greedy. Our hero Lerial gets quite incensed about the fact that Afrit, more wealthy than Cigoerne and with a greater population, has been allowed to fall into a highly fragile and vulnerable state because its weak ruler, Duke Atroyan, listens only to one vested interest: Merchanters! The concentration of wealth into the hands of a few who thereby seek to control the government and make it serve their interests is perhaps relevant to the real world today. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Uncle Geoff did a review on SFcrowsnest last month of ‘The Politics Of Big Fantasy’, an interesting idea for a book but it focused on ‘Star Wars’ (fair enough: republic versus empire is a political issue), ‘The Matrix’ and, rather weirdly, ‘The Avengers’ of Marvel Comics fame. The politics of the Avengers? It sounds like the subject of a dissertation by a particularly desperate sociology student. However, a sensible and interesting work could be made out of analysing the politics of Modesitt’s fantasy for politics, in the broader sense of how a society works, is often a rich theme in his work.

In conclusion, I would like to say that this is the best volume I’ve read so far by Modesitt and I’ve read quite a few. His prose is always lucid and he has the knack of creating likeable heroes and dastardly villains while still being perfectly realistic. He never really hooks you on the first page but, after about a hundred pages, you are beset by a strong urge to keep reading. I have some criticisms of his moral position at times with regard to ruthlessness and ends justifying means, but I’m not at all sure he’s wrong in a hard, cruel world, especially lately. You really do have to read ‘Cyador’s Heirs’ before tackling this sequel but it’s good and this one is terrific. Recommended.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

In the Days of the Mob

In the Days of the Mob - Jack Kirby When I was young, over forty years ago, we grew up watching old black and white Warner Brothers gangster films on black and white televisions, thrilling to the rise and demise of various villains played by James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. When Fantastic Four # 91 came out, we were deeply impressed by Kirby’s gangsters. Their narrow, mean eyes and sagging jowls oozed menace from every inkblot. Having grown up mostly seeing Kirby’s super-villains it was interesting to see how well he did scary civilians, though they were actually Skrulls who had chosen to copy the mob style. When ‘In The Days Of The Mob’ came out, I thought it was terrific, like Fantastic Four # 91 to the power of ten with page after page of mobsters but even more grim and gritty as they were not inhibited by the comics code. ‘In The Days Of The Mob’ was put out as a magazine rather than a comic book. According to John Morrow’s introduction, Kirby wanted it full colour – he never liked black and white – but to cut costs, DC issued it in monotone. Personally, I think it works better that way, more reminiscent of those classic Warner Brothers movies.

This edition combines the first issue, which was what we bought way back then and the second issue which was never published. The book is an anthology of short stories and, in the style of many horror comics of that era, there is a narrator to link the tales. In this case, the storyteller is Warden Fry, who is in charge of Hell. He takes the reader on a tour and introduces several of the ‘inmates’ and then tells their tales. In the first issue, inked by Vince Colletta, we get Ma Barker and her lovely children then Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd and Country Boy. There’s also a wanted poster of John Dillinger and a text feature by Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman about the Chicago gangs.

The second issue is inked by Mike Royer, which is better though Colletta did a good job on issue one. The format is pretty much the same. First up is ‘Murder Inc.’, who took over the Brooklyn underworld in the thirties. This is followed by a gangland story in which pinball machines are the racket. There’s an interesting history of pinball as part of John Morrow’s excellent introduction to the book which links in nicely. ‘Ladies Of The Gang’ is not really a story but rather a string of panels telling how various females were involved with the mob. I found the story of the decent kid very sad but it certainly dispelled any lingering idea that these men were in any way admirable. The last yarn ‘A Room For Kid Twist’ ties in with the first about ‘Murder Inc.’ It is emphasised throughout that these villains always came to a bad end and that crime doesn’t pay. Kirby is not out to glamorise the bad guys, though he inevitably does so to some extent with his gorgeous, powerful depictions of them.

Some think this late flourishing at DC in the seventies was Jack’s best period because there were few editorial restraints and the reader got undiluted Kirby. For me, his greatest work was done in the sixties but this still has plenty of that old Jack magic and even a little of it goes a long way. I hesitated a while before buying this, afraid that it an older man would not find it as wonderful as did that twelve-year-old kid I once was. Obviously, it wasn’t quite that great but it’s still pretty darn good and I don’t regret the expense. I paid £14.00 and I think it was worth it for this collector’s item.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Cyador's Heirs

Cyador's Heirs - L.E. Modesitt Jr. The setting is Cigoerne, a small country of decent people in the continent of Hamor. When their homeland of Cyador was destroyed, they fled to this location and were allowed to set up a small country, albeit surrounded by enemies, the sort of treacherous types who ill-treat their women. Fortunately, the leaders of Afrit, Merowey and Heldya don’t trust each other so it’s hard for them to coordinate an attack on Cigoerne. Does this situation remind anyone else of Israel?

Our teenage hero is Lerial, son of Cigoerne’s ruler Duke Kiedron but not the heir, which honour falls to his elder brother, Lephi, who is not especially nice. Like all wise young fantasy heroes, Lerial has a mentor. In this case, it’s Altyrn-Majer (stipended) – former commander of Mirror Lancers. A hard-nosed mentor who says, ‘…moral worth in itself does not win battles. What wins battles and wars is the ability to prevail and the willingness to do whatever is necessary, however distasteful that may be’ or the end justifies the means as they say in the CIA.

The war in question develops in the forest region of Verdyn which lies between Cigoerne and Merowey. Technically, it’s part of Merowey but they haven’t bothered with it much. Now they are planning to invade. When the forest people make it plain that they would like to join Cigoerne and place themselves under the protection of Duke Kiedron, he sends his son Lerial as an envoy, accompanied by a couple of squadrons of lancers. As you would expect from a world-builder of Modesitt’s talent, the ecology and economy of the forest people’s society are well realised. Anyway, the stage is set, the actors are in place, let battle commence! It does and the details of a hard-fought campaign are realistically conveyed as usual by this talented writer.

A recent discussion on BBC Radio 4 on Romanticism made me realise what makes Modesitt’s fantasy unusual. Fantasy grew out of the Romantic tradition which stretches from Arthurian legends to gothic novels but Modesitt’s fantasy is not Romantic. There is nothing dreamy, impractical, unrealistic or emotional about his heroes who all work hard and do the right thing, to borrow a catchphrase from our beloved Prime Minister. They are constantly learning new skills and have a positively Victorian approach to self-improvement. They view the world with eminent common-sense. Good stories ensue but I’m not sure if this makes for great fiction. The most interesting characters have some sort of flaw but not Modesitt’s. There are no doomed princes yearning for lost loves trapped in other dimensions and fits of melancholy, lassitude or ennui are not done. Nor do they fly into barbarian rages. His settings, too, are unique in fantasy. The trappings are mediaeval, certainly, but the ‘magic’ is really just a different set of physical laws which are followed with Newtonian rigour. Demons are not invoked, nor Gods, spirits, elves or Munchkins. The heroes are human beings coping with a different set of circumstances but their values are those of white Anglo-Saxon protestants in 1950s America. Hard work and clean living should see them through.

This may be a backhanded compliment but Modesitt’s fantasies are superb bedtime reading. When my brain is too tired to focus on something difficult, the short chapters, clear writing, steady progress, familiar characters and general lack of anything too complicated make them ideal. When your eyelids start to droop, it’s only a couple of pages to the end of the chapter and the whole story is so plainly etched in the grey matter that there’s no worry about losing track. The books are easy to pick up again. In fact, they’re quite addictive and I have read many of them, despite my reservations about some of the values therein. The good guys are good but there’s a certain self-righteous certainty about them that makes me uncomfortable.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed ‘Cyador’s Heirs’, as usual, and have the sequel to hand. Recommended for Modesitt fans, worth a look for anyone else. If you like Heinlein juveniles and John Wayne films, you will probably like the ‘Saga Of Recluce’.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Showcase Presents: Batgirl

Showcase Presents: Batgirl - John Broome, Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane Beautiful actress Yvonne Craig passed away in August 2015. She played the slave girl Marta in classic ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘Whom Gods Destroy’ (1969) but was best known for playing Batgirl in the third and final season of the camp/pop-art 1960s ‘Batman’ television series. That being so, I thought a review of the ‘DC Showcase’ edition of Batgirl would be an apt tribute. Rumour has it that she cared enough about the character to protest to DC when Alan Moore had her brutalised in ‘The Killing Joke’.

The stories in ‘DC Showcase Presents: Batgirl’ are lighter in tone than that, certainly at first. She didn’t get her own strip to start with but featured in those of other heroes, usually ‘Batman’. Her first appearance was Detective Comics # 359 in a tale entitled ‘The Million Dollar Debut Of Batgirl’. Barbara Gordon, daughter of the esteemed Commissioner of Gotham City, is a quiet librarian. For a costume party, she makes herself a Batgirl outfit but, en route to the do, she happens across Bruce Wayne being attacked by Killer Moth and his gang. They are running a protection racket where they beat up millionaires. The ‘masked maiden’ saves Bruce. Later the ‘dominoed dare-doll’ gets more involved in the case and acquits herself well enough to earn Batman’s respect and approval. Gardner Fox wrote the script and the assorted soubriquets for the heroine. Carmine Infantino drew her shapely form.

Her ‘shapely form’ was useful in issue Detective Comics # 371 ‘Batgirl’s Costume Cut-ups’ when she used her legs to distract a criminal fighting Batman. The overall tone of this story is not one likely to win approval from modern feminists. Batgirl fails to catch bad guys because she is distracted by mud on her uniform or her mask slipping or some other ’womanly’ concern The splash page for it makes the cover of this ‘Showcase’ edition. It’s probably worth mentioning that Neal Adams did the art for World’s Finest # 176, a four-way team-up with Superman, Supergirl, Batman and Batgirl.

Batgirl featured in Justice League of America # 60’s story ‘Winged Warriors Of The Immortal Queen’. It’s the usual Gardner Fox routine of splitting the JLA into sub-teams to perform individual missions but I thought Mike Sekowsky’s art was a bit influenced by Gil Kane, some of the figure poses being similar. Gil Kane was the first artist when Batgirl got her own strip in Detective Comics # 384 (Feb. 1969) and did his usual stylish job, beautifully inked by Murphy Anderson. This was a fairly regular 8-page back-up strip with one story normally spread over two parts. Most of the scripts are by Frank Robbins but Mike Friedrich started it off and Denny O’Neil contributed a few. These pages by Kane and Anderson are definitely the artistic highlight of the book as they do beautiful work. Kane is also inked by Vince Colletta, who does a good job in his own restrained manner. Frank Giacoia does a couple of issues but his heavy style doesn’t really suit Kane‘s pencils, though he’s an excellent inker for many and my favourite on Kirby. Don Heck took over the pencils from Detective Comics #408 (Feb. 1971), initially inked by Dick Giordano but later doing it himself, as he preferred. Heck isn’t on anyone’s list of all-time greats but he was a pro and turned in a competent job.

The stories are the usual crime and detective stuff, small-time gangsters rather than big-time super-villains. They are dated in the sense that the concerns of the time are reflected. A big-time gangster from a bygone age is fictionalised in a film called ‘The Stepfather’ in 1970. It took me 0.0001 seconds to get that reference. There are also a couple of yarns which feature rebels who want to bring down ‘The Establishment’. Denny O’Neil is sympathetic to the revolting students in Detective Comics # 400-401, while Frank Robbins is not to the gun-happy cop-haters in # 416-417. The former adventure closes with hints that Batgirl might want to get to know Robin better but nothing comes of it, at least, not in this book. The other contemporary concerns that get an airing are drug smuggling and corrupt politicians. The Batgirl back-up strip concludes with her leaving Gotham City to become a member of the U.S. Congress.

The last three stories are from ‘Superman’ and ‘The Superman Family’ with art by Curt Swan, who was getting pretty good by this stage in his career and scripts by a fan turned pro Elliot S! Maggin. Batgirl teams up with Superman, Batman and Supergirl in various adventures. They were okay.

Sometimes you hear a film is rubbish, watch it and are pleasantly surprised. That was my experience with ‘DC Showcase: Batgirl’. I read it with low expectations but they were exceeded. Not something to rush out and buy but if you like Silver Age DC and happen across a copy, it’s worth considering.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Dark Spires

Dark Spires - Joanne   Hall, Gareth L. Powell, Christina Lake, Adam Colston ‘Dark Spires’ is a place themed anthology and the place themed is Wessex in the south-west of England. Despite having the Queen’s third son as its Earl, Wessex is not an actual political entity but a region largely made famous by the novels of Thomas Hardy. There was a Kingdom of Wessex back in the days of King Alfred.

‘The Preacher’ by Sarah Singleton is a haunting tale about a seaside village that falls under the spell of Obadiah, a preacher who works miracles. He wants them to cast out the beautiful Sarah-Rose, illegitimate child of a wealthy local man. Our hero is Thomas Moreton, a young man who turns up for the hiring fair and gets taken on by John Rowe, a well-off farmer with a yen for Sarah-Rose. Singleton’s poetic turn of phrase evokes a strong atmosphere of menace and this Thomas Hardy with a hint of Lovecraft story makes a strong opener for the anthology.

‘Pump House Farm’ by John Hawkes-Reed is set in a near-future where an extremist small party have taken power in England after the electorate were terrified by a freak tidal wave. The Radical Greens are anti-technology and especially opposed to nuclear power. Our hero, Dave Bryce, is a reporter for his own website and frankly a bit of a fool. He’s tracking down some outlaws who are attempting to drain the Somerset levels. I found the story a bit confusing but agree with the general theme of pragmatism. Hawkes-Reed does a good job of portraying the reality of country life: bags of artificial fertilizer, concrete block farm buildings, smelly old diesel tractors and so on. This doesn’t fit in with the wildly unrealistic bucolic dream of the Radical Greens. Urban fools should not meddle in things they know nothing about.

The next two tales are by Adam Colston and Joanne Hall who, if they got married, could have an apt double-barrelled surname, for Bristol. I very much enjoyed Colston’s ‘Cobalt Blue’. Christian is a long-lived life energy vampire. He drains bits of energy from people on contact but at the same time is privy to their thoughts and memories. When he shakes the hand of Smith, after a job interview in Exeter, he finds that this seemingly boring suit has a kidnapped woman holed up in his basement and is torturing her. A decent sort of leech, Christian decides to get her rescued but has to get involved personally. Recollections of his previous life dovetail nicely with the current events and lead to a gripping finale. Colston is a well-known surname in Bristol. I don’t know if this author is related to the old merchant.

‘Corpse Flight’ by Joanne Hall is about King Alfred and his men under siege in a Mott and Bailey castle near Athelney, in the swamps of the Somerset levels. The Danes are at the gates and food has run out. Alfred and Fluke, named for his luck, set out on a mission that might save them. The good thing about the Dark Ages is that so little is known there’s a lot of leeway for invention. This was an agreeable fantasy and shows that Alf could do more than burn cakes.

‘Spunkies’ by Eugene Byrne is also set on the Somerset levels but in the modern-day. The entities of the rude title word are apparitions from the past which are appearing all over the place and terrifying people. The hero works for a secret government agency and has some talent for dealing with this kind of thing. As a homage to John Le Carré, I assume one of his contacts is an eccentric old lady with a near-perfect memory who used to work for the agency. Spooks and spooks might have been a good title. Byrne writes pleasingly and there is sufficient drama and suspense to keep you reading.

‘Spindizzy’ is by Colin Harvey who edited the book. I read it with a critical eye as an editor who publishes himself should be watched carefully but it was great. In a near future, Wessex is given over to floods, tourism, terrorism and a crazy religious cult called Spindizzies. Richard Henchard is an innocent government worker trying to get to work on the fast train but being harassed by various types. He seeks refuge in his entertainment, earplugs through which he listens to a story from the ‘Cities In Flight’ franchise. If only there was such a thing! A very plausible future I hope I won’t live to see and a fine tribute to the late author James Blish.

‘The Sleeper Stone’ by Christina Lake has H.G. Wells travelling into the future or perhaps bought there by the Suneaters, people who have upgraded to absorb energy from sunlight directly so they no longer need food and shelter. Other people have opted to stay in our old-fashioned fleshy form and live a low technology lifestyle, not unlike that of Wells’ own time. The future Wessex was interesting and there were good characters to illuminate it.

When a large particle accelerator was used, it opened a gateway to another universe and the hagfish fell from the sky. ‘Outside’ by Guy Haley is set inside, where a small-town journalist has barricaded himself in to save himself from the monsters. Initially, I was put off by the present tense narration but it works here. A nice slice of Science Fiction horror with a certain amount of ambiguity in the ending, another thing I don’t usually like but, again, it’s apt in this case.

Polly Aulder is a geneticist with a plan to save some of humanity from global warming as things fall apart. There is some opposition to her ideas. ‘Last Flight To West Bay’ by Roz Clarke has a long Afterword, justifying its placement in a book about Wessex. It could have been set anywhere I guess but the author’s knowledge of the area lent atmosphere and colour to her lead character’s background and the problems of ordinary family life were a neat contrast to that of the end of the world as we know it. This was more slice-of-life than plot but was very satisfying. It was something of a homage to Thomas Hardy, too. Regrettably, environmental catastrophe is getting to be more a subject for journalism than Science Fiction as good old El Nino plays up again. Time to stock up on the canned food, folks.

‘Milk’ by Liz Williams is a Dark Ages fable set in the Somerset levels which used to be called Summerland because they were underwater in winter. In truth, I thought it dull, to begin with, but the quiet cadence of the telling grew on me and was perfectly suited to the tale. The author’s Afterword was almost as long as the story but quite interesting.

An Angel lands on the village wind turbine and it stops. Shortly, all the others around it stop, too, and the villagers are faced with a cold future: powerless! Then lean, mean Kenya Vick shows up on his motorcycle and offers to kill it. ‘Entropic Angel’ by Gareth L. Powell is a bit like those religion vs. science stories that used to be popular in the early days of the genre when the crazy preacher always got zapped by the Martians. It’s followed by interesting notes on the contributors.

Overall, this is an interesting collection with a very professional level of writing throughout and available electronically for a bargain price.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine

The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine - Robert Silverberg Another Robert Silverberg collection of stories from Subterranean Press and the aged author states in his introduction that this will probably be the last. So, shall we begin with beauty?

Although ‘Beauty In The Night’ doesn’t begin with beauty as a woman gives birth to her illegitimate son on the dirty floor of a restaurant storeroom in Salisbury, England. There is even less beauty as the chronicle continues and the boy’s dear old dad turns up to make his life Hell. The backdrop is an alien invasion of Earth by entities who treat us with complete disdain. Silverberg accurately captures the worst aspects of the English underclass which is probably why I found it all a bit depressing. However, it’s very good.

It may be a flaw in this series that Silverberg’s introductions are so interesting that it’s hard to get round to reading the actual stories. In the forewords to ‘Diana Of The Hundred Breasts’ and ‘The Church At Monte Saturno’, he tells us that these were submitted to Alice Turner at ‘Playboy’ magazine and she rejected them both as ‘IRS stories’. Her contention was that Silverberg likes travelling and wrote a tale set somewhere afterwards so he could claim back the expenses off his tax. He denied this because he can claim expenses anyway. She still rejected them because a man going somewhere and seeing something odd wasn’t enough in her book for a strong story. They’re both well-written with interesting characters because Silverberg can do that in his sleep but I kind of agree with her. It’s not his best stuff. The first one, ‘Diana Of The Hundred Breasts’, might have been called ‘The Thing In The Tomb’ as an archaeologist opens an old hole in Ephesus and something emerges, brushing past him invisibly. The second, ‘The Church At Monte Saturno’, is about mosaics in an old Sicilian church that appear and disappear and change. It passes the time and there are nice touches but it won’t blow your mind.

Travel is something of a theme in this book. The author has mentioned in previous volumes that, in his semi-retirement, he only works half a year and spends a lot of time touring. Perhaps that’s why so many of his characters are journeying, too. ‘Travelers’ is about a group of four in the far flung future who can regenerate for longer life and have the means to zip around the galaxy by transmitter beams. On the whim of a young dandy, they go to a dangerous, miserable planet that is seldom visited. The narrator is a world-weary chap of serious mien who finds the fool charming but annoying at times. There’s not a lot of drama in this one but there are many fine descriptions of alien worlds for the reader to enjoy.

The same applies to ‘The Colonel Returns To The Stars’ in which a retired loyal servant of the galaxy-wide Imperium is recruited for one more job, a confrontation with a man who betrayed him long ago. It’s a great read but builds your expectations for a dramatic climax which doesn’t happen.

There’s more journeying in ‘Hanosz Prime Goes To Old Earth’ which was written as part of an unfinished novel and extracted to make a sort of short story. There is some pleasure in the omniscient narration and inventiveness of the background but it’s short on plot.

Another tale set on an ancient version of our homeworld is ‘The True Vintage Of Erzuine Thale’ which was produced for an anthology of stories set on Jack Vance’s ‘Dying Earth’. Silverberg reverts to avid fan mode in the introduction to this one. In the story, he shows his usual command of language and fantastical themes when Puillayne of Ghiusz, owner of vast estates and great treasures is visited by thieves. Puillayne is morose at the prospect of Earth dying and gets through each day by drinking five bottles of wine, which also helps him write great poetry. I presume his magic staves off the hangovers and liver cirrhosis that prevent me from doing this. His greatest treasure is the vintage of the title which he is saving for the last days of mankind when it will inspire him to write his greatest epic. This one had plenty of invention and a neat ending.

Also set in a far-flung future is ‘A Piece Of The Great World’, which uses the background of an unfinished Silverberg trilogy that started with ‘At Winter‘s End‘. Mankind has long since departed Earth but they left behind them six races, secured in cocoons underground against a long ice age. There were machines, insects, sea creatures, reptiles, plants and an ape derived species who called themselves the People. This novella takes place even further into that future when, it seems, only the People and the insect race, hjjks, still survive. Like the Majipoor books, this is a great example of complex world-building but the story was overlong and a bit boring in the middle.

When he is playful with his writing as in ‘Call Me Titan’, Silverberg is very amusing. Typhoeus, son of Gaea and Tartarus, rises from his imprisonment in Mount Etna and goes to Greece to look for those upstart gods who usurped the Titans – Zeus, Apollo and that crowd. He doesn’t find the hated Zeus but learns about the modern world instead. Told in the first person, this is an entertaining romp and a fine tribute to the late Roger Zelazny.

The title story ‘The Millennium Express’ is another yarn where Silverberg has fun with historical characters, real ones in this case. Here Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway celebrating the end of the year 2999 by blowing things up.

‘The Tree That Grew From The Sky’ is actually a comet whose long straight tail looks like a trunk, hence the tree image for primitive types. Kell, though, is a wise man, a Renaissance man. He paints, writes, is an architect and builder and an advisor to the king. He has plotted the course of the comet and knows it will pass his world by. The Alien from another world who sulks in his maze agrees but has a daring plan that will involve the use of his rocketship. Silverberg often says that he aims for an ending that is inevitable but unexpected. You get that here. One of the stronger yarns in this collection.

‘Defenders Of The Frontier’ is a military tale written for an anthology titled ‘Warriors’. Rather than battle, about which the author admits he doesn’t know much, it focuses on other aspects of military life. Cleverly done with a neat conclusion.

‘Smithers And The Ghosts Of Thar’ is a sort of ghost story set in Kipling’s India and written somewhat in the Kipling style, with exclamation marks here and there! It was another enjoyable read but the dreadful secret revealed at the end was old hat stuff.

These are minor works in the author’s long and magnificent career for old men do not have the dynamism and originality of the young. In general, they were written in response to requests from editors to fill up an anthology and get the name of a venerable elder statesman of the genre on the cover. Yet Silverberg’s flawless technique and mastery of language makes reading even the slightest yarn a pleasure and a lesson, too, for anyone interested in writing. I suspect he’s more interested in fine writing than in storytelling, unlike, say, Stephen King who puts story values first. Each to his own. I found parts of this anthology a bit disappointing but that may be because my expectations of Silverberg are set too high.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Twenty-First Century Science Fiction

Twenty-First Century Science Fiction - David G. Hartwell, Patrick Nielsen Hayden This is a collection of Science Fiction short stories from the 21st century. The brief preface explains that many of the writers were writing and publishing before the millennium but have come to prominence since. The editors have a broad church view of Science Fiction, which lends itself to great variety in the contents but the usual suspects are here: androids and robots, aliens and AIs. I’ll start with the Earthbound stuff and move outwards into the galaxy and the far future.

The first story, ‘Infinities’, is by Vandana Singh, a physics teacher who, as an Indian living in Boston has some claim to being a stranger in a strange land. Abdul Karim is a little old mathematics teacher with a great love for his subject and a particular interest in infinity. He is a Muslim and his best friend, Gangadhar, is a Hindu in a city often driven by strife between these faiths. Abdul’s life story is described in a telling manner, not shown. This is contrary to all the best advice on writing modern commercial fiction but I like it. Usually, you have to read old stories by the likes of Somerset Maugham to get this straightforward, sedate type of narrative. The tale is interspersed with quotations from poets, philosophers and mathematicians and turns fantastic quite near the end, which is also where the real world, beastly as usual, intrudes on Abdul’s quiet life. Imbued as it is with composed contemplation of God and the infinite, I found this story perfect reading on a quiet Sunday morning. It’s also a nice change from western, materialist, technology orientated Science Fiction and a useful reminder that there are civilisations older than ours to the east.

Back home, country life will be very different later this century if ‘Rogue Farm’ is anything to go by. The establishment in the title is a tank-sized organism which contains six people and wants to go to Jupiter. Blast off will burn a hundred hectares around, including Joe’s farm so he is determined to stop it. The population shrinkage and consequent housing surplus in future Britain would be great but the rest of this vision from Charles Stross does not appeal to me, not even the talking dog who likes to smoke a joint with his master. I like the countryside the way it is, thanks. It’s a good story, though.

In ‘Bread And Bombs’, Mary Rickert starts off with a small-town setting and evokes a bucolic air with long, slow sentences that talk of picnics and crab-apple trees and the little local schoolhouse. Slowly, a darker history is revealed. The first person narration is by an adult remembering stuff that happened when she was a kid, like Scout in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ and the setting is similar. A well-wrought yarn that should make us appreciate our lives today.

Paolo Bacigalupi writes stories set in the near future. ‘The Gambler’ was first published in 2008 and is almost true already. Ong was born in Laos. He fled when it became a dictatorship and now works on a news outlet in Los Angeles where he writes serious stories about political corruption, government incompetence and global warming. His colleague, Marty Mackley, writes about Double DP, a Russian mafia cowboy rapper who has had an affair with a fourteen-year-old. Live news feeds follow Double as he tries to flee to Mexico. The story goes viral instantly, advertising revenue floods in, the company’s stock goes up and Mackley’s star continues to rise. Ong’s is falling. His content pulls in hardly any readers and he will soon be sacked. He has two hopes: a celebrity from his own country or Henry David Thoreau and the flowers of Walden pond. This is even more depressing than ‘Rogue Farm’ because it seems truer as celebrity pap ‘content’ buries real news every day. Again, it’s a great story but stop the world, please, I want to get off.

Staying with marketing, ‘The Calculus Plague’ has people on a university campus being infected with false memories. The connection with advertising is not obvious at first but is soon made. Author Marissa Lingen was one of my favourite contributors to ‘On Spec’ with her Carter Hall yarns and this short story doesn’t disappoint either.

Gennady Malianov, a private investigator, gets looking for some stolen plutonium in ‘To Hie From Far Cilenia’ by Karl Shroeder. Set in a near future, where virtual reality games and worlds are more developed and developing, it has a good plot that keeps revealing more about the setting as it goes on. Gennady is a sympathetic character and despite the fact that this sort of thing is alien to me – I don’t even Game – it was enjoyable and interesting.

Would you like to get in touch with the versions of you that exist in parallel universes? Such is the ambition of Professor Elsa Hill, a genius physicist and she is ably assisted in the work by Adam Giles – who narrates the story – and a very smart computer. Artificial intelligences may also have twins in the other worlds. ‘Savant Songs’ by Brenda Cooper is a moving, almost frightening exploration of a common SF theme.

In ‘Chicken Little’ by Cory Doctorow, the super-rich are becoming immortal, their failing bodies wired into complex machines, some as big as small towns, that keep them alive. They are quadrillionaires and some are sovereign states. They control the world. Ate is a company that exists to please them or, rather, to attempt to invent some new way to please them as they can have anything they want. Our hero is Leon, a smart man working for Ate and trying to come up with something new for their clients. The story takes unexpected turns and ends up having a pleasing philosophical bent concerning what humans really want and what’s really good for them.

‘Eros, Philia, Agape’ is by Rachel Swirsky. Robots are an old standby of the genre and I think humans may have fallen in love with them before. That’s what the author’s story title is about but, as the couple have an adopted child, it’s more complicated. A fine example to show that ‘adult themes’ doesn’t just mean gratuitous sex and violence but an exploration of the multi-faceted relationships that might result between us and our advanced technologies.

In similar territory is ‘The Nearest Thing’, Genevieve Valentine’s tale about the development of nearly humanoid androids. Inevitably, the experienced SF fan is reminded of ‘Blade Runner’ but it’s a good story on its own merits.

I was mildly put off ‘The Algorithms For Love’ by the title but, as it’s by Ken Liu, decided to give it a go because he’s written some very good short Science Fiction over the last few years. This may be the best of them but it’s downright scary. The protagonist designs humanoid dolls that are very life-like but her work has driven her mad. By the time you get the ideas behind this yarn, near the end, you may decide that it doesn’t bear thinking about too much or you might join her in the asylum.

In Ian Creasey’s ‘Erosion’, Winston is about to set off on a new adventure, just as his Jamaican grandfather did when he came to England. Augmented by technology he and others are to board a starship and colonise a rugged new planet. On his last day on an Earth, imperilled by global warming, he walks along the coastal path near Scarborough. There’s some good writing on the scenery but his actions seem a bit irrational at times. We would probably send more stable people to new planets.

Aliens have featured in science fiction ever since H.G. Wells’ Martians attacked us on Horsell Common. They were not all nasty. Neil Asher’s aliens in ‘Strood’ treat us like a third world country, setting up clinics to treat us for conditions beyond our resources. There are many different species, all of them far in advance of man. Our hero has cancer and his story nicely illustrates the setting, which is really the star. The beginning might have ‘one’s discombobulation requiring pellucidity’ but that’s just a sign of how well it’s written.

I have always disliked them but it is surely awful to actually be a salesman with the soul-destroying fawning and mendacity and the quiet desperation. In the excellent ‘Tk,Tk,Tk’, David E. Levine shows how bad it is to be a salesman on a planet full of alien insects with a strange culture and terrible food. To butter up clients, Walker has to quaff drinks ‘indistinguishable from warm piss’ and then things get worse. This story won the Hugo in 2006. SF fans love a good alien.

Really good ones can be so odd they seem outside the genre. When a strong, handsome man rides a talking deer to a confrontation with a shape-changing demon of the scorched desert who has a two-dimensional child you are led to believe it’s a fantasy. Not so. ‘Third Day Lights’ by Alaya Dawn Johnson is Science Fiction set in a far distant future where anything is possible, somewhat like Michael Moorcock’s ‘Dancers At The End of Time’ stories. The classical fantasy aspect is kept when the hero has to face three challenges but the sensual story is narrated by the demon, not the man. There’s lots of invention and a good array of unusual characters in this far out flight of fancy.

John Scalzi is trending in the last few years so I was glad to get to read something by him at last. ‘The Tale Of The Wicked’ is about a space battle between two enemy ships that goes awry. To describe the plot is to spoil it but suffice to say it was clever, amusing and thought-provoking. I shall keep an eye out for more Scalzi.

Nerdy ‘plotters’ calculate the trajectories of asteroids that may strike an inhabited planet Mars and the ‘shooters‘, a rough crowd, blast them out of the sky. These incompatible groups share an orbiting gunship and the life of a nerd involves flackeying to the jocks, rather as junior boys used to serve seniors in our English public schools. Then a newbie arrives with a different take on things. ‘Plotters And Shooters’ by Kage Baker is a strong story that would translate well to television in some anthology program.

Far in the future, a human lady and her son crew a ship supervising the building of artificial wormholes for interstellar travel. They are bossed by an AI she calls the Chimp. Earth is long gone and the species that come through the gates have evolved far beyond her but the work continues. Then they encounter a red dwarf star that seems to be signalling them. ‘The Island’ by Peter Watts is hard going at first but presently makes sense, enough that it won the Hugo for best novelette in 2010.

The also-rans here would-be stars in many another collection and only the limitations of a review prevent me from raving about them at length. ‘Ikirhyoh’ by Liz Williams is an original take on genetic specialisation in a future oriental civilisation. ‘The Prophet Of Flores’ by Ted Kosmatka’ is an archaeological dig story set in a world where Darwin was wrong.

‘How To Become A Mars Overlord’ by Catherynne M. Valente didn’t suit my tastes but a lot of lexical dexterity went into this exuberant piece.

Not dissimilar is ‘A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel‘ by Yoon Ha Lee. It also breaks the bounds of traditional storytelling but the plain, almost academic language works better.

‘Escape to Other Worlds With Science Fiction’ by Jo Walton is a frightening look at an alternative history in which Britain didn’t oppose Nazi Germany but it’s set in America. It’s frightening because our much loved USA often seems to be on the brink of going this route.

The main thing that struck me about 21st-century writing is how literary it is compared to the Golden Age stuff. SF was mainly rooted in pulp fiction but slowly it has evolved out of that and is now comfortably grown-up. Reading these stories is like reading a Science Fiction story by Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham. The authors take their time to set the mood and there is no need for melodrama. Character is as important as plot and background. There was a bit of a crisis about this a few decades ago and writers as diverse as Kingsley Amis and Isaac Asimov wondered if Science Fiction could be recognised as literature and still preserve the all-important sense of wonder. I should add that for most of us preserving the sense of wonder was far more important than being recognised by high falutin’ critics. Anyway, the crisis is past and ‘21st Century Science Fiction’ proves beyond doubt that our flexible genre can do both, in spades. This is probably the best and most intelligent anthology of Science Fiction stories I have ever read and I’ve read a few.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Showcase Presents: Batman, Vol. 5

Showcase Presents: Batman, Vol. 5 - Frank Robbins, Dennis O'Neil, Mike Friedrich, Irv Novick, Neal Adams, Bob  Brown At last, the DC Showcase volumes have reached the point where Batman is getting good. I recently looked up the old Alley Awards on-line and the ‘Batman’ titles twice won the same award: strip most in need of improvement, even in 1962 when regular penciller Carmine Infantino scooped the best artist award. ‘Showcase Batman Volumes 1-4’ are interesting historical documents but reading them does not give great pleasure, though looking at the art gives some.

It does here, too. This fifth volume features a few issues pencilled by Neal Adams and a lot of covers by him. As Adams aficionados abound, I will do you the favour of listing which issues he drew so you can decide if the quantity warrants purchasing this book. It does. Adams pencilled: Detective Comics # 395 (16 pages); Batman # 219 (8 pages); Detective Comics # 397 (15 pages); Detective Comics # 400 (16 pages); Detective Comics # 402 (16 pages); Detective Comics # 404 (15 pages); Detective Comics # 407 (15 pages). The Man-Bat features in three of these. All of them are inked by Dick Giordano and look great. Adams also did most of the covers shown in this volume.

In paying proper respect to that maestro, I do not wish to belittle the art contributions of his colleagues. Irv Novick turned in very clean, elegant pencils with interesting layouts and dynamic figures. His work was also graced with Giordano’s inks, the quality of which are especially visible in these black and white reprints. While the pencils of Bob Brown, inked by Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia, are not quite as pleasing to the eye as those of his fellows he still did a competent, professional job.

The stories are mostly by Frank Robbins with a few by Dennis O’Neil and Mike Friedrich. Robbins does fairly decent detective yarns. DC Comics improved in the seventies but did not follow Stan Lee down the soap opera route. Variety being the spice of life, this was a good thing. Frank Robbins writer is the same Frank Robbins artist who did some work for Marvel later on ‘Captain America’. I’m not a big fan of his art but as a writer, he’s pretty good and apparently played a key part making the character more serious and restoring the creature of the night scenario. I was always under the impression that Dennis O’Neil led the way in that.

There are still some hangovers from the more childish age of DC Comics so Batman will wear a rubber mask, pretending to be someone else and get away with it, as do some of his opponents. Rubber masks look like rubber masks in real life. Ridiculously, he carries a bat-dummy of himself under his cape in ‘This Murder Has Been Pre-Recorded’ in Batman # 220 so that the misleading cover can show him being blown up in a phone booth. Again, this is not realistic.

Alas, DC still had a bit of a thing for misleading covers. Robin going off to university is milked for two: Detective Comics # 393 shows a tearful Boy Wonders saying, ‘The case is over, the team-up is finished! This is goodbye for Batman and Robin!’ Batman # 393 shows Batman storming off saying, ‘Take a last look Alfred then seal up the Batcave forever!’ In fact, these events ushered in a solo Batman fighting crime without bat-gadgets and led to the Dark Knight image he still has today. It was a conscious decision by the editors to strip the strip back to its roots. The television series was finished by this time and to keep that image would have been…well, batty.

Some of the stories by Dennis O’Neill are quite sophisticated. ‘Ghost Of The Killer Skies’ (Detective Comics # 404) is a biplane battle classic while ‘The Secret Of The Waiting Graves’ (Detective Comics # 395) and ‘Paint A Picture Of Peril’ (Detective Comics # 397) have dark romantic themes unusual for comics of the period. These three were drawn by Adams. The team of O’Neill and Adams was the talk of the town at the time and also revolutionised ‘Green Lantern’.

Probably the most notable thing about this collection is that it gets better and better as you read your way through it. These stories mark the turnaround from strip most in need of improvement to strip destined to be taken up by Hollywood and turned into a series of blockbuster movies, albeit some years later. Great stuff and soon to be released – July 2015 – is ‘DC Showcase Presents Batman Volume 6’ which will be even better if Ra’s al Ghul has anything to do with it and I think he does.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Siege

Siege - Karen Miller Following the events of ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars Gambit: Stealth’, Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker are in a groundcar fleeing enemy forces on the hostile enemy planet Lanteeb which has been taken by Separatist forces. The bad guys are using the mineral damotite, common on Lanteeb, to develop a nasty bioweapon. Our heroes attempt to rescue the imprisoned scientist working on this horror failed because evil Lok Durd set a trap for them and they barely escaped with their lives. They still have to save the galaxy from the deadly virus the Separatists have developed but first they must save themselves.

Their groundcar runs out of power near Torbel, a mining village. The locals are suspicious of strangers but short on their quota of damotite and willing to take on the two newcomers as miners. Of course, Lok Durd is searching desperately for the Jedi and has plenty of droid power for the job, as well as a psychic seeker. How long can they stay hidden? Will they be rescued? Is there an antidote for the deadly virus? Has it been used yet? Stuck in the middle of nowhere with no communications equipment, Skywalker and Kenobi are pretty helpless. Then things get worse.

It isn’t all Anakin and Obi-Wan. Their Jedi chums are busy as well, trying to mount a fleet large enough to besiege Lanteeb but frustrated by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine who insists that the ships are needed elsewhere. Whose side is he on? Meanwhile, Ahsoka, Rex and Torrent company have mended their wounds from the last battle and are keen for some action.

Anakin and Obi-Wan were barely able to stand at the start of the book, starved and exhausted. As the book goes on, they are still mostly starved and have to work hard, face various dangers and use the Force a lot. The extent of their exhaustion becomes unrealistic, even for a fantasy, especially as Obi-Wan started this adventure totally exhausted from the previous one. Obviously, the heroes have to face trials and struggle in the name of drama but there’s such a thing as over-egging the pudding.

There is also, as in ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars Gambit: Stealth’, a bit of a slow spell in the middle of this adventure. Both books could have been shorter and tauter and I wonder if the publishers insist on a minimum word count to make their novels thicker. I have noticed that although the SFWA definition of a novel is anything over 40,000 words many publishers won’t take less than 70,000. When I was a young thing, I read early books in that other starry franchise that were about 120 pages long and could be scanned in an evening. It was better. Lightweight fiction should be brief and to the point, not padded to add pages.

However, these are minor quibbles and, all in all, Karen Miller has delivered another solid adventure story. I got through the middle bit painlessly and the conclusion was sufficiently gripping. In the overall story arc, this one seems to have a bit more about Anakin, secretly married, of course, harbouring bitter thoughts about Jedi attitudes to love, emotion and so forth, even resenting Obi-Wan. I don’t think that’s going to end well.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Stealth

Stealth - Karen Miller The Republic may be losing the war. General Grievous is taking his ‘clanky butt’ and his war fleet into the fray and, planet by planet, spreading darkness across the galaxy. Now he has attacked Kothlis, strategically located in the Mid Rim area and with a valuable spynet facility. It must not fall. Fortunately, Obi-Wan, Anakin, his Togruta Padawan Ahsoka, Rex and Torrent Company are on hand to stop him. The odds are overwhelming. Somehow, Grievous has sabotaged their comms. The droids they fight are ‘as cunning as Onderonian blood-beasts’ and casualties are heavy. But even though Obi-Wan plays sabacc ‘like a lame bantha’, he has ‘more lives than a Sullustan moonbat’ and lives to fight another day. Author Karen Miller sprinkles the early chapters of ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Stealth’ with alien similes though they die off later, which is a shame.

The battle for Kothlis is action-packed but merely a prelude. This book is really about the planet Lanteeb. It’s a world of no particular importance, far removed from main trade lanes and not strategically positioned but the Separatist forces have taken it. Why? Kenobe’s old friend, Senator Bail Organa, is worried enough to send Obi-Wan and Anakin on an undercover mission to the planet. That’s giving away less plot than the back cover of the book but it’s enough for now. Suffice to say that the adventure rolls along with sufficient drama to keep you reading though it does perhaps flag a bit in the middle. Be warned that the end is not the conclusion so you have to get the next book ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars Gambit: Siege’. Fortunately, I have it to hand.

The difficulty with ‘Star Wars’ is that we have all seen the films and know how it turns out. This makes it very hard for the writers to get real drama into the proceedings, yet somehow they manage. The books, as is so often the case, are better than the films. A talented novelist is able to dig a bit deeper into the characters and engage with subtler thoughts and feelings than an actor can convey with words. So even though we’re aware that Anakin will eventually go over to the dark side, it is interesting to see the process and the flaws which make him susceptible. Reading this book, I was tempted to watch the films about the Clone Wars again. Maybe that’s the idea

This space opera makes enjoyable light reading. Fans of the franchise may buy it anyway but snobs, more sniffy about this kind of fiction, could do worse than give it a try. Those big corporations that own the copyrights hire good writers to keep the quality high and Karen Miller is a proven master of this particular sub-genre. With a great cast of characters and a solid well-wrought background, ‘Star Wars’ is a fun world to visit. There’s even a nice tinge of mysticism. So, if I get this review in on time, May the Fourth be with you.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Lovecraft's Monsters

Lovecraft's Monsters - John  Langan, Ellen Datlow, Fred Chappell, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Howard Waldrop, Karl Edward Wagner, Thomas Ligotti, Steve Rasnic Tem, Elizabeth Bear, Gemma Files, Steven Utley, William Browning Spencer, Nick Mamatas, Nadia Bulkin, Jo ‘Lovecraft‘s Monsters’ is a big anthology and this much gloom is probably best taken in small doses unless you‘re from Innsmouth. The very famous Neil Gaiman opens the billing but I’m heading up the review with ‘Remnants’, a short story by Fred Chappell. Fred Chappell! I mean no disrespect to the other great talents on display here but for me, a Fred Chappell story is a thing of glory. He writes beautifully, perhaps even more beautifully than Peter S. Beagle. He is a poet and has a poet’s ear for language and the rhythm of a sentence. I was mad for his ‘Shadow’ stories in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science-Fiction’ and intrigued to know what he would do with Lovecraft’s monsters. He doesn’t disappoint.

In the near future, Lovecraft’s Old Ones have invaded Earth, destroying most of the population with contemptuous ease, reshaping the Moon and setting about building monstrous machines for unknown cosmic purposes of their own. Remnants of humanity, small groups, hide out here and there. Vern, his mother and his autistic sister, Echo, scrape a bare living as hunter-gatherers in a wilderness area. Then Echo gets a telepathic message from somewhere but making sense of it with her limitations is difficult. She thinks in pictures, not words.

The best thing in this was the language used by the aliens, other remnants discarded by the Old Ones, who have picked up English from the libraries of relic human spaceships and don’t quite have it right. The first person narration by the alien captain, which alternates with a third person one from Vern, shows a masterful twisting of the lingo. You know what he means but he doesn’t say it how we would. Chappell is also proficient as describing the disorientating effect of the Old Ones’ machines on human senses. It’s a 45-page tale that deserves to be read in one sitting, as recommended by Poe. Wonderful.

‘That of Which We Speak When We Speak Of The Unspeakable’ by Nick Mamatas could be a prequel to Fred Chappell’s ‘Remnants’. Two men and a woman wait in a cave as the Elder Gods take over our Earth. China is already gone. I think it was Neil Gaiman who said that if Cthulhu showed up today we would nuke the bastard. Well, they tried that and it just made him glow. (Men and horses sweat, women and Cthulhu glow.) The conversation of the doomed is interesting, them being an odd trio.

Speaking of Neil Gaiman, his contribution is ‘Only The End Of The World Again’, set in Innsmouth, as are a few in this book. It seems to be a favourite venue for Lovecraft homages. Lawrence Talbot is an Adjustor and a werewolf who is trying to prevent the end of the world. The fishy folk of Innsmouth are determined to bring it on, Elder Gods swallowing the Moon and that type of thing. Gaiman writes beautifully and the atmosphere of dark menace is nicely undercut with a bit of wry humour from the protagonist.

Quite similar in style is ‘The Bleeding Shadow’ by Joe R. Lansdale, another good piece with a pervading atmosphere of menace and dark deeds that Lovecraft would have liked. Lansdale is much better at snappy dialogue and smart similes than the old master and, as with so many stories from the man who gave us ‘Bubba Ho-Tep’, there’s a strong sense of place – Texas! Both these tales could have been written by H.P. Chandler or Raymond Lovecraft. Not as far out an idea as it seems because Chandler would have preferred to write fantasy stories but thought they wouldn’t make a ’thin worn dime.’

The purest homage to Lovecraft, with not a taint of any other author detectable, is delivered by Thomas Ligotti. The first person narrator of ‘The Sect Of The Idiot’ won’t give his name or the name of the old town in which he sits in a high room looking through diamond-paned windows at its seemingly unending strangeness. Solitary, he enters into fantastic states of mind and has dreams that may be more than dreams. This is the most Lovecraftian piece in prose, tone and mood in the book and could have been written by the old master himself as part of his dream cycle. A masterpiece of homage and quite different from the other stories herein.

In ‘The Same Deep Waters As You’, Kerry Larimer, an animal whisperer, is recruited by Homeland Security and taken to a remote island prison. There are sixty-three prisoners who have been held there since 1928, a fact unknown to most of the last fifteen presidents, she is told, because ‘There are security levels above the office of President. Politicians come and go. Career military and intelligence, we stick around.’ That certainly has the ring of truth. Larimer’s task is to communicate with the prisoners, a fishy bunch who like it damp. This is one of the best stories in the book thanks to Brian Hodge’s clear writing and a good plot with a great ending.

‘The Dappled Thing’ by William Browning Spencer has a team of adventurers searching the African jungles for Lord Addison’s missing daughter in Her Glory of Empire, a spherical kind of steampunk tank with tentacles. The author pastiches Victorian prose beautifully and the Lovecraftian theme comes in near the end. I was a bit dubious about this at first but liked it a lot by the time the last page was reached.

A similar Victorian style adventure is ‘Black As The Pit, From Pole To Pole’ by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley, a long story about Frankenstein’s monster journeying to the centre of the Earth. It opens with information about John Cleves Symmes and his hollow Earth theories and is interspersed with paragraphs about Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein. So its metafiction, playing with the fact that we know this is a story. Usually, this kind of thing is not to my liking and, in the beginning, I thought it was a bit boring. By the end, I was fond of the piece. It’s well written and, as far as I can tell, the authors have a good knowledge of the background material. I read ‘Frankenstein’ once because a friend told me it was impossible. It wasn’t easy, but neither is Lovecraft.

‘Bulldozer’ by Laird Barron is about a Pinkerton man on the trail of a bad guy called Hicks who was a circus strongman. I would like to quote a whole chapter: ‘Chapter 19. Maggots.’ ’Bulldozer’ is not quite ruined by having twenty-six chapters in twenty-eight pages because it’s a good yarn. To be fair, short stories are the place for stylistic experiments but this one didn’t really work for me. On the other hand, what’s good for an author might work for a reviewer, too.

The following brief paragraphs cover the shorter stories in Lovecraft’s Monsters.

‘I’ve Come To Talk With You Again’ by Karl Edward Wagner features a horror writer meeting some fans in an English pub. All is not what it seems.

‘Red Goat, Black Goat’ is that rare thing, a horror story about goats. Aided by the exotic setting, Nadia Bulkin manages to make it scary.

‘Inelastic Collisions’ by Elizabeth Bear is about creatures from a different plane trapped in human form. Bear writes stylishly but often leaves me puzzled, as here. I don’t know what actually happened at the end but getting there was okay, I guess.

‘A Quarter To Three’ by Kim Newman is just one scene really, about a young man working the graveyard shift at a 24-hour diner in Innsmouth when a heavily pregnant woman comes in. No real surprises but an excellent sense of atmosphere, lively writing (It’s H.P. Chandler again) and a jukebox that’s almost a character in itself. Very good.

‘Love Is Forbidden, We Croak And Howl’ by Caitlín R. Kiernan is an amusing tale about a ghoul who falls for one of the fishy daughters of Innsmouth. Not quite ‘Romeo And Juliet’ but the narrator admits that. Nice descriptions of the daily life of monsters and enjoyable dark humour.

‘Waiting At The Crossroads Motel’ by Steve Rasnic Tem has Walker doing what it says in the title. His wife and two kids are waiting with him but he doesn’t have the usual feelings about them. In fact, he’s a very unusual man. An air of real menace makes this uncomfortable reading, which is the point, I guess.

‘Jar Of Salts’ And ‘Haruspicy’ are poems by Gemma Files that are successfully Lovecraftian in mood.

The last tale in the book is a novelette, ‘Children Of The Fang’ by John Langan about Rachel and Josh and their family. Grandad lives on the top floor of the house and keeps something locked in a freezer in the basement. Rachel and Josh find tape recordings of Grandad telling their Uncle Jim, now vanished, about a lost cave city in the deserts of the Middle East with strange writings on the walls. This has all the classic ingredients of pulp horror fiction (The thing in the basement! The lost city!) so a brief description makes it sound like corny old rubbish. It certainly is not. The family saga is rich with realistic details and there’s a neat twist at the end. A fitting conclusion to a quality collection.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Mage-Guard of Hamor

Mage-Guard of Hamor - L.E. Modesitt Jr. ‘Mage-Guard Of Hamor’ is the fifteenth novel in ‘The Recluce Saga’ and a follow up to ‘Natural Ordermage’ which was the fourteenth. Although the saga is multi-volume, many of them can be read independently or in pairs, like these two, as they feature different time periods in the history of this fantasy world. It would be best to read ‘Natural Ordermage’ before this one.

In ‘The Recluce Saga’, order and chaos are not the two states of a teenager’s bedroom but balanced magical forces. In ‘Natural Ordermage’, young Rahl was exiled from Recluce because his talent as a powerful natural ordermage was deemed unsuitable for that orderly isle. He was given a job at a trading post in Hamor. After some trials, he rose to the rank of Mage-Guard in Hamor, a sort of policeman keeping order and apprehending lawbreakers.

As this book starts, he is on a trip to Recluce with his mentor, Taryl, a mage of great ability, to report to the authorities there on recent events in Hamor. While back home, Rahl has dinner with the healer Deybri with whom he may be in love. Unlike some other fantasies, Modesitt’s books are very old-fashioned about love and marriage with the hero liking one girl and chasing her until they get respectably married. In this, they are suitable for young readers. In general, they promote old-fashioned values with right and wrong clearly defined. The author’s moral certainty seems to be based on ‘Starship Troopers’: hard-headed and practical but perhaps a little ruthless to those with softer hearts or weaker heads. At one point, Rahl kills a man for lying to him.

On returning to Hamor, Taryl and Rahl become involved in crushing a rebellion against the emperor by his evil brother, Golyat, who is assisted by powerful chaos mages. Rahl has no military experience, so he’s put with a company of soldiers and a competent commander to scout ahead of the main army for any trouble. They encounter a lot. Rahl’s trials in learning to ride a horse, learning to fight battles, cope with the death of comrades and so forth were very reminiscent of Quaeryt’s similar experiences in the author’s ‘Imager Portfolio’ stories. Modesitt seems to have some expertise on military matters – strategy, tactics, supply chains and other practicalities – but also shows the camaraderie of men in war and the pain of seeing your fellow soldiers killed and wounded.

The world-building is meticulous. Vulcrows and pearapples are neat touches to let you know it isn’t Earth. Also on Recluce, you really can have nothing but love babe eight days a week because there are eight days in a week. They are called Oneday, Twoday and so on. This is useful because Modesitt follows the hero’s actions day by day and as well as a strong sense of place – aided by maps at the front and back of the book, there is a real sense of time passing. All this contributes to that aura of reality that the best fantasy needs.

Whenever I pick up a Modesitt book, I find it hard to put down. He has a way of making you want to know what happens next, a sure sign of a good storyteller. I enjoyed this one, too, but, when you’ve read quite a few as I have now, there is a sense that he’s treading the same ground. He isn’t because his vast output includes Science Fiction novels as well as other fantasy series. In any case, I suspect that many fantasy fans want more of the same from their multi-volume chronicles and I confess to a warm, comfortable feeling when immersed in the familiar world of Recluce. As long as a reader peruses other stuff, too, and doesn’t stick to an exclusive diet of the cosily familiar, it’s not the worst indulgence in life and you don’t get a hangover. Recommended to fans and worth a look by new readers who want a change from all that sex and gore currently doing the rounds.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Brass Sun: The Wheel of Worlds

Brass Sun: The Wheel of Worlds - Ian Edginton The Brass Sun’ graphic novel collects several issues of the on-going series into a hardback format with good paper and high-quality printing. I have reviewed the first few issues previously and don’t want to give away the plot of the later issues so this is an easy one.

The setting is certainly original. The Orrery is a huge clockwork solar system where planets rotate on gigantic metal arms and the sun of cogs is worshipped as a god. Unfortunately, the sun is dying, the planets are freezing one by one and cults on one world burn as heretics those who warn of the danger.

The story opens with Speaker Eusabius and Lord Arcimandrite worried about the increase in cases of heresy as the weather grows ever cooler on their world, Hind Leg. Winters are longer, summers shorter and the dissenters say that the power of the cog is diminishing and the wheel of worlds is slowing. Maybe burning heretics will warm things up.

Meanwhile, the astronomer Cadwallader has been carefully observing the heavens and knows the heretics are right. He has seen the lights go out on Back Of Beyond and Afterthought, two other worlds, as ice consumed them. He allows himself to be captured by the priests of the Orthodoxy so that his granddaughter Wren can escape with his journal which contains all he knows about the Wheel Of Worlds and the legend of the Blind Watchmaker. She also has a Quaycard and a mission. He hints that she may be able to save the world. First, she has to escape from Hind Leg and Speaker Eusebius.

As ever with these things, the inevitable model for the blinkered, stupid, oppressive religion is the Roman Catholic Church. With its hierarchy, robes, ceremonies and long history, it provides a template for fictional faiths to fit and can be safely caricatured without risk to one‘s life. In a way, the fictional copies are a kind of homage to its success, as well as a useful reminder of mistakes it has made.

Wren’s quest takes her from world to world and, along the way, she meets many weird and wonderful characters, the kind you get in 2000AD where the series was originally published. There is biting satire of the British aristocracy and a number of pleasing plot twists along the way. Wren and her companions learn much more about the origins of the Wheel Of Worlds but – be warned! – this book does not conclude the story. There is more to come. You will have to buy a second great big volume if you get hooked and maybe even a third.

The big question for me is: does this work deserve an expensive hardback format and high-quality print and the answer for me is…no. It’s quite good. It’s alright. It’s not bad. The script by Ian Edginton is clever and if it had been drawn by a really great artist the big book approach might be justified. The trouble is that I’m not a fan of the flat artwork by I.N.J. Culbard. At its best, it has a certain charm. He’s good at architecture and backgrounds and his storytelling is fluent but the figures and faces are odd. It’s not classically correct in the manner of John Buscema or Neal Adams. As my favourite comic artist is the classically incorrect Jack Kirby, I can forgive that. Unfortunately, some panels look as if they were drawn by a six-year-old and the art seems to get worse as the series progresses. Deadlines, perhaps, are a factor here.

If you are a fan of the art of I.N.J. Culbard then you will almost certainly like ‘Brass Sun’: The Wheel Of Worlds’ because the script is good. In fairness, there are a number of rave reviews out there and the series is well regarded. I’d say have a look before you fork out the cash to see if the pictures are pleasing to your eye. Tastes, after all, differ.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

The Book of Silverberg

The Book of Silverberg - William Schafer, Gardner Dozois The Book Of Silverberg’ opens with ‘A Tribute’ by Greg Bear and ‘An Appreciation’ by Barry Malzberg to the man honoured by this collection, Robert Silverberg. In the stories that follow, individual writers have generally chosen one particular Silverberg setting or story and done a tale of their own in a similar mode. The results are quite interesting.

Kage Baker was a fan of ‘Lord Valentine’s Castle’ and so gives us a yarn set ‘In Old Pidruid’ and so titled. There is an annual festival of self-propulsion in the great city of Pidruid and competition is keen for the top prize. The Pidruid Harbour District Phantasists have won it for the past three years but the Falkynkip Gate District Players Guild are anxious to win now. So anxious, they cheat, just so you know who the bad guys are. Despite the light subject matter, this is an entertaining piece and Kage Baker nicely captures the atmosphere of Majipoor.

‘Voyeuristic Tendencies’ by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a follow up to ‘Dying Inside’, Silverberg’s novel about a miserable mind-reader which I have read but did not much enjoy. Too downbeat for my taste though, as with anything by that author, it was masterfully done. This episode, more cheerful in tone features a lady telepath who meets with David Selig, the protagonist of ‘Dying Inside’. Unlike him, Maggie enjoys her talent and makes use of it to amass money by blackmailing adulterers. (Rusch has a fondness for brackets that would get her a scolding from the editor of SFCrowsnest but the story was easy to read and I enjoyed it.)

How can you follow ‘Good News From The Vatican‘, Silverberg‘s classic short story about the first robot pope? Mike Resnick does so with ‘Bad News From The Vatican’. Cardinal Richard Moore is the first-person narrator who tells us about the career of Pope Sisto Settimo, known as Cardinal Mechanismo before he became Pope. The robot Pope has a brilliant mind and is an expert in Catholic doctrine. There is conflict when he falls out with the President of the United States of America, a stubborn man. This story is almost like a Greek tragedy in that the central conflict is inevitable due to the character of the opponents. Silverberg studied Greek tragedy as part of learning to write Science Fiction so he might like it. I loved it and am also grateful that like Melville, Resnick gave us the narrator’s name early. Often with first-person stories, it’s hardly mentioned and the poor reviewer has to scan the text again to find out what the ‘hero’ is called.

‘The Jetsam Of Disremembered Mechanics’ by Caitlín R. Kiernan is a ‘Nightwings’ tribute in which a flier makes a discovery. It’s set in that distant future Silverberg designed for the original story where humanity has been designed into sub-species for different tasks and the higher ranks are organised into guilds. Watchers, scanning the skies for an alien invasion, are generally regarded as fools. I found it a bit verbose and the plot was disappointing but the same is true of some later Silverberg stories. They are still very good but simply appeal to a different sensibility than mine.

Connie Willis, a writer who may have won even more awards than the man himself, does a story about a story with ‘Silverberg, Satan, And Me Or Where I Got The Idea For My Silverberg Story For This Anthology’. It’s an entertaining insider look at the Science Fiction writing community and features conversations between Connie and our hero as well as perceptive comments on writing and writers. A pleasant mid-book break from the traditional tales.

‘The Hand Is Quicker’ by Elizabeth Bear is not based on any particular Silverberg story but simply on the general idea of reality being something of ‘unparsable complexity which we humans try to filter down into something small and tame enough to compass’. It’s set in a future where by a process called ‘skinning’ taxpayers can alter their perceptions so that everything seems rosy. Beer is tasty, pizza delicious, the environment scented and wonderful. They can also wear a ‘skin’ that looks better than that granted them by nature so the protagonist, Charlie, looks a bit taller and a bit fitter than in real life. Things change when Charlie gets into financial trouble and loses her taxpayer status. To say more would be to give away the best bits. A clever tale with a few twists along the way and an ending that fits Silverberg’s own ideal of being surprising yet also inevitable.

‘Eaters’ by Nancy Kress is a follow up to ‘Sundance’ but don’t worry if you haven’t read the original or can’t quite remember it. As with all these yarns, the writer gives a good summary of the essential details you need and then proceeds to take the plot forward. Ellen and Josie Two Ribbons set off to find Josie’s father, Tom, who has vanished somewhere in the bush on Janus 4, a planet they are terraforming for human colonisation. They had been exterminating the local wildlife, herds of grazing herbivores until Tom proved they were sentient. This is another clever and logical follow up to Silverberg’s original.

Sadly, there are very few writers who can build a career on short stories these days – they just don‘t pay as well as three-volume fantasy novels – but James Patrick Kelly is one of that band. For this volume, he has donated ‘The Chimp Of The Popes’ as a follow up to ‘The Pope Of The Chimps’ by you-know-who. That story was about chimps with boosted intelligence who seemed to be getting religion. Kelly’s story is set in a future when most of humanity has uploaded to the Cognisphere but left some behind, those who did not want to upload. Most of them are either eccentric or crazy. The intelligent chimps, aided and supervised by bots, have been charged with the care of the humans left behind and take their duties seriously. When a new arrival claims he is the Pope, things get interesting. This starts out as a cross between ‘Planet Of The Apes’ and ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ but develops in an interesting way.

‘Ambassador To The Dinosaurs’ by Tobias S. Buckell is a follow-up to ‘Our Lady Of The Sauropods’ in which dinosaurs had been recreated from found DNA. I think Silverberg was the first with that idea. Our first-person narrator is a Neanderthal woman, for now they, too, have been recreated. She is something of a rebel, works in construction and gets in trouble when she beats up the foreman. Offered a job as bodyguard for a lawyer with the Distributed Organisation for the Advancement of Neanderthals, she ends up mixing it with rebellious dinosaurs. Buckell’s slangy narration reminded me of Harlan Ellison’s work. A lively and entertaining conclusion to the book.

This is a truly wonderful anthology and I can think of no better tribute to the world’s greatest Science Fiction writer. The only thing that could improve it is a few words on each story by the man himself, an afterword or an introduction, perhaps. Maybe they can do that in the second edition. I certainly hope he reads this one.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio

The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio - Mark Evanier, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Jim Simon Firstly, I should mention that my copy of this book, ‘The Art Of The Simon And Kirby Studio’ by Mark Evanier, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby is a pdf file sent by the publisher, which is great and I’m grateful but I suspect the whole darn thing will look even better as the real big hardback copy.

An art book is a tricky thing for a reviewer. If one picture is worth a thousand words, how do you describe several hundred of them? How does anyone describe the bold vitality of the art of Jack Kirby? There are thick lines, of course. There are heroes in spectacular poses with arms and legs spread wide leaping off the page at you. There are ugly monsters, terrible aliens and ordinary people with expressive faces. Yet it’s not easy to sum up how all this fits together to make such a distinctive, dynamic style. Fortunately, most people thinking of buying this book will already be familiar with Kirby’s powerful pencils, so perhaps the best thing to do is describe what you’ll get for your money.

At the beginning, there is a long essay by Kirby biographer Mark Evanier on the background of the work. It tells how Joe Simon met Jack Kirby, how they teamed up and worked together in harmony for many years producing some of the best comic books available at the time. This text is interspersed with illustrations, mostly comic covers and photos of the dynamic duo and their team, for Simon and Kirby ran a studio and had a little gang of helpers. As you would expect from the title, the art of other chaps in the studio is also included here.

After the essay, there is a long section of comic pages. Regrettably, the contents information does not list credits for these, so the reader has to take his best guess as to who did what. As well as covers and splash pages by the headline act, this section contains many stories but they are generally very short. Tell the plot and you spoil them, so I won’t. In the text, Evanier reveals that Joe Simon generally drafted the covers and splash pages because he had a good sense of design, having worked for a while in the newspaper industry. Evanier has remarked elsewhere that Jack wanted to tell stories and had little interest in covers. Odd really because he was an excellent cover artist and certainly did most of them for Marvel Comics in the early sixties. In any case, they swapped roles freely but in general, Jack did the pencils and Joe or someone else did the inks.

Preceding Evanier’s essay is a ‘Boy’s Ranch’ splash page featuring the lads at sea in a boat. The style is distinctly Kirby with heavy blacks and looks similar to his early seventies work at DC. This page could easily have been slotted into New Gods # 6. After the essay, there are some ‘Stuntman’ covers and several double-page spreads featuring that hero. When I was eleven, I thought Jim Steranko invented the double-page spread in Captain America # 110 for in 1971 there were very few books about comics and no Internet to find out everything. Steranko, a great Kirby fan, would have been the first to disabuse me of my faulty notion. The two pagers are not all great. The figures look wonky on ‘The Evil Sons of M. Le Blanc’ but the one for ‘Terror Island’ is a masterpiece of giant insects, collapsing buildings and falling figures.

Next, there are a couple of pages of Kirby pencil art with a man being tied down by little people, like Gulliver. The pencils are clean, not sketchy, but with no black areas. I guess the inker was depended on to do that for this particular item. In general, as Gil Kane said, Kirby did ‘the most beautifully complete pencils you ever saw in your life.’ The rest of the pages in the book are inked so don’t buy this volume if you’re after original Kirby pencils. Worth noting here that all the art except for one double-page splash is in black and white, which helps the appreciation of the pencil/ink work. Apart from their cheapness, this is one reason I like the ‘Marvel Essential’ and ‘DC Showcase’ series. Bigger pages and no colour gives a better view of the original art. However, Evanier has also stated elsewhere that Kirby loved colour. He never drew anything with the intention that it be published black and white, not even ‘In The Days Of The Mob’.

There’s an eight-page story of ‘Calamity Jane’, a lady detective, in ‘The Case Of The Hapless Hackie’. It doesn’t look like Kirby. ‘A ‘Vagabond Prince’ story, ‘The Madness Of Dr Altu’, might be early Kirby or Simon. Hard to tell. ‘The Furnished Room’ doesn’t look like Kirby either. ‘The Affairs Of The Man From Out Of This World’ might be Simon, too, but it could be Kirby doing comedy. Seems to be a Superman spoof. It’s followed by some covers for ‘Headline Comics’ and ‘Justice Traps The Guilty’ which are by the main men. A five-page story ‘Credit And Loss’ doesn’t look like Kirby. Some of these might be by Mort Meskin, a stalwart at the studio for many years.

‘A Boys Ranch’ cover and seventeen-page story ‘The Man Who Hated Boys’ are most definitely Kirby. Apparently ‘Boys Ranch’ was one of his favourite strips but it never really took off. Several stories of the boy ranchers follow: ‘A Very Dangerous Dude’ (9 pages), ‘Mother Delilah’ (20 pages), ‘Fight To The Finish’ (6 pages). There’s a double-page spread in colour of Clay Duncan squaring off to a dangerous bear followed by several ‘Boys Ranch’ splash pages. For years, I have been reading comments about how marvellous ‘Boys Ranch’ was Kirby’s greatest work and how it should be reprinted. Well, here is some of it at least. It’s certainly good but I don‘t think it‘s as fine as his Marvel work.

The ‘Boys Ranch’ stuff is followed by several crime short stories that don’t appear to be by Kirby. ‘Masher’ (5 pages), ‘The Beefer‘ (6 pages) ‘Tough Beat’ (6 pages) and ‘The Mountie’ (5 pages). Although not by our hero, these stories often have first-rate art, especially ‘The Beefer’ and are worth a look on their own merits. The Simon and Kirby Studio did employ talented people. Most definitely Kirby is the seven-page ‘Fighting American’ yarn ‘Duel To The Finish Line’ but page 2 appears twice and page 4 is missing. That error on my pdf reviewers copy might be corrected in the final printed book. There’s a return to the western theme with a few pages of ‘Bulls-Eye’ and then an interesting six-page short story ‘Fruit Salad’ about a flyer bedecked with medals. The theme is heroism. The art is not Kirby but it is good.

The next section is romance comics, which don’t interest me much. Stories from ‘Black Cat Mysteries’ that follow the girly stuff include ‘Take Off, Mister Zimmer’, ‘The Fireballs’ and ‘The Big Hunt’. ‘Jim Bowie Makes A Magic Knife’ is a short western interruption to the fantastic fare. The art on ‘Take Off, Mister Zimmer’ looks understated for Kirby but it’s excellent.

This impressive volume winds down with several space stories that Simon and Kirby produced in the late fifties but which Joe managed to sell a few years later. These are: ‘The Thing On Sputnik 4‘, ‘Lunar Trap‘, ‘Face On Mars‘, ‘Island In The Sky‘, ‘Saucer Man’, ‘Space Garbage’, ‘Garden Of Eden’, ‘The Great Moon Mystery’, and ‘Lunar Goliaths’. They are all five pages long and the last two feature the 3 Rocketeers. Really great vintage Kirby art and some of it looks to be inked by Wally Wood. For me, this is the satisfying climax of the book. I have seen these stories coloured in another collection but the quality of the art really shows on this black and white version.

After ‘The Old Hulk’ and ‘When Time Ran Out’ – not Kirby – the last bit features ‘The Fly’, who may or may not have inspired Spider-Man in the minds of the many who have laid claim to the invention of that hero since he made it big. It’s all nonsense. Spider-Man didn’t succeed because of his powers but because young readers in the sixties could identify with Peter Parker, who was invented by Stan Lee. Stan may not deserve as much credit as he gets for the Marvel Universe but he‘s entitled to that bit. ‘Fly’ stories are interspersed with some yarns about the Shield, a flag bedecked all-American hero and there’s an Afterword by Jim Simon, son of Joe, to finish.

This magnificent tome is nearly 400 pages and contains a lot of high-quality art. Big hardcover books are not cheap nowadays but this is certainly value for money and, if you shop around, you can get a good price. For the dedicated fan of Simon, Kirby, et al, it’s definitely worth it.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better - William H. Patterson Jr. Here, at last, is the long-awaited second volume of the authorised biography of Robert A. Heinlein. ‘Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, Volume 1: 1907-1948: Learning Curve’ told the story of his boyhood, his time in the navy and the beginnings of his writing career. ‘Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, Volume 2: 1948-1988: The Man Who Learned Better’ starts in 1948, by which time he was selling short stories to high paying magazines like the ‘Saturday Evening Post’ and had an arrangement with the publisher Scribner to write one juvenile novel a year, timed for the Christmas trade. Soon, he was working on the screenplay for ‘Destination Moon, the film version of ‘Rocketship Galileo’ and also got a job as a technical advisor on the production.

‘Volume 1’ also covered his personal life: the first brief marriage, the second longer one to Leslyn and the advent of Virginia, who became his third wife. Ginny moved in with Robert and Leslyn under their open marriage arrangement and ‘when the Snow Maiden got her skate in the door, things were different’ according to one correspondent. ‘Leslyn slept in the studio whilst Bob and the femme fatale cavorted in the master bedroom.’ Later, Ginny casually mentioned to Bob’s old friend, Cal Lanning, that they had lived together before they were married. Heinlein was furious. He was always very keen on keeping his private life private.

As well as being a private man, Heinlein was also rather madly patriotic and could not abide with anyone speaking against his country, even natives. He told Asimov off for complaining about the food when they worked in the Navy shipyards and, much later, he fell out badly with Arthur C. Clark when that worthy opined that the so-called ‘Star Wars’ missile defence system might not be a good idea. When I read ‘Grumbles From The Grave’, the posthumous collection of Heinlein’s grumpy letters, I had the impression that he had cut off all contact with John W. Campbell, Jr., following criticisms of the navy by Campbell during World War II. In fact, contact with the editor of ‘Astounding Science Fiction’ continued, usually in letters about L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics system, something Heinlein wisely avoided. No one was messing with his brain. He needed it. However, he certainly counted Hubbard as a good friend in 1948 because he loaned him $50 at a time when the Heinleins were pretty hard up themselves.

Many examples of his generosity are cited in the book. He gave money to Theodore Sturgeon when he was broke and also handed him a few plot ideas. He was generous to Sturgeon’s widow when she was in financial difficulties. He bought an electric typewriter for Philip K. Dick and loaned him money. He quietly supported the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) through hard times, even though a few of the other authors were highly critical of his political views. He really didn’t seem to care about money for its own sake. As soon as it was earned, he and Ginny would go off and spend it, usually on travelling around the world if they weren’t building a house. Later, a lot of it went on medical expenses.

The above examples of how nice Heinlein was highlighted the main enigma about him. He didn’t practice what he preached. The latter books seem to advocate selfishness, greed, looking after number one, etc and to sneer at altruism as pure foolishness. Lazarus Long regards lesser mortals – nearly everyone – as stupid and deserving of their Darwinian fate: poverty, famine or death. But Robert A. Heinlein wasn’t Lazarus Long or Jubal Harshaw or even Valentine Michael Smith. He spent a lot of time and money on recruiting blood donors. He went out and campaigned for political causes he believed in, though they were usually right wing. As mentioned above, he was generous with his money. In real life, he was more like the teenage idealist in a Heinlein juvenile than he was like the sour old heroes of the later novels. That is to his credit.

Heinlein always wanted his works to speak for him and avoided as much as possible any delving into his private life. That was quite interesting in ‘Volume 1’: political campaigns, marriage and breaking into the Science Fiction field and rising to the top. In ‘Volume 2’, the life is really a bit boring. Many squabbles with Shasta Publishing and Hollywood finance men over his share of the loot for the products. There’s a lot about house-building and trouble with contractors. There are family visits, family squabbles and loads of world travel. ‘Volume 1’ concentrated more on Science Fiction writing as he was learning his trade and to an extent on the Science Fiction fraternity of the time. As he became popular in the slicks and book publishing, Heinlein largely left hard-core SF fandom behind. Forrest Ackerman played a large part in this by being a pain in the neck, acting as ‘agent’ for Heinlein properties when he had no right to do so, this despite repeated attempts to make him stop. By this stage, Lurton Blassingame was the agent for virtually everything and was doing a very good job of making his client richer, obtaining foreign sales for the Scribner’s juveniles and getting good rates for serialisations of them in ‘Boy’s Life’ magazine. These had to be cut considerably and slightly amended to make the instalments more fitting but getting paid twice for the same novel was a good gimmick. The adult novels were usually serialised in the top SF magazines of the day so they also paid off twice.

Heinlein’s fame comes from his work as a Science Fiction writer. This biography reveals that he didn’t spend a whole lot of time writing. The very successful run of ‘juveniles’ for Scribner, one a year, were usually knocked out in a month. For example, he started writing ‘Star Beast’ on August 26th 1953 and had it finished by September 26th. The adult books didn’t take much longer. He wrote ‘The Puppet Masters’ in about five weeks beginning October 1, 1950. ‘Glory Road’ took three weeks. However, the time spent bashing out the first draft isn’t the whole story. Heinlein kept a large file of index cards on which he constantly made notes when he had an idea. Furthermore, he seems to have spent almost as much time cutting the first draft for publication as he did writing it. Certainly, this was the case with ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’. He also spent a lot of time and emotional energy arguing with Scribner’s editor Alice Dalgiesh about her ‘censorship’ of his work, though it seems to me that she knew the restrictions of the time and her cuts were designed to get the book safely past spinster librarians and other guardians of public morals in fifties America.

Of course, the time taken to write a work is no reflection of quality, for by now he had become a master of his art. All of Heinlein’s juveniles are intelligent, exciting adventure stories, easy to read and still popular today. The literati may criticise the lack of similes, metaphors and deep Freudian meaning but that stuff isn’t necessary to the average reader. The adult books of the fifties still had to be mostly about plot and characters. By 1960, Heinlein was fairly secure financially and ventured to include a bit more lecturing in ‘Starship Troopers’. That won a Hugo and his course was set. Thereafter, the books were more about his views than about plots and character. There were honourable exceptions, notably ‘The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’ but, in general, the adult novels from ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ onwards are the thoughts of Chairman Heinlein.

It should be noted that as Heinlein is an intelligent, witty writer and the books are very charming and readable. I like them all, even though I don‘t agree with his politics. It’s worth pointing out, though, that his reputation was mostly built on the fifties work and I believe that is what will stand the test of time. ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ remains a classic and marks his zenith, the equivalent of ‘Sergeant Pepper’ for The Beatles. After the fact, people may argue about its worth but no one doubts its importance. The comparison is apt, too, because, like that popular beat combo, Heinlein was at the top of the field and had sufficient clout with the men in suits to experiment. They could be sure that any Heinlein book would sell. It was also like ‘Lord Of The Rings’, very much a part of sixties pop culture.

There is a theory, backed up by information here, that with the later works, especially the very latest, he was not interested in melodrama and the usual stuff of adventure but more in ideas and social satire. That being so, criticism of ‘I Will Fear No Evil’ or ‘The Cat Who Walks Through Walls’ for not being like ‘Starman Jones’ is futile. They weren’t meant to be. Heinlein knew what he was doing and if some people in the so-called SF community didn’t like it, he didn’t give a damn.

The main thing lacking in this authorised biography is any definite opinion by the author about his subject. The general tone is reverent, which is okay, but many biographies are extended essays which put forward a particular point of view. Sometimes the biographer may not like his subject. That’s okay, too. Patterson has done wonderful research as evidenced by the extensive notes accompanying each chapter but doesn’t have a conclusion or any analysis of what Heinlein was about. The two books might be called ‘What Heinlein Did’ and ‘What Heinlein Did Next’. On the other hand, there are plenty of opinions about Heinlein and his work out there and the facts assembled here are useful in their own right. ‘Volume 2’ contains some interesting stuff but, probably because the life of a struggling artist is more precarious than that of a successful rich one, the first book was better.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/