OtherRealms 21 — Chuq Von Rospach - Birds - Landscapes

OtherRealms — Issue 21, Summer 1988

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 1)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 1

Table of Contents

Part 1
Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach

Part 2
The Agony Column
Rick Kleffel

Part 3
An Interview with Chairman Bruce
Bruce Sterling
Interviewed by Alan Wexelblat

Part 4
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint

Part 5
Adulthood Rites
Neal Wilgus

Behind Closed Doors at Resurrection, Inc.
Kevin J. Anderson

Part 6
Something Old,
Something New,
Something Borrowed,
Something Blue
Alan Wexelblat

Part 7
Words of Wizdom
Chuq Von Rospach

Part 8
No Prisoners!
Laurie Sefton

Part 9
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

Part 10
Appreciations: Clifford Simak
Robert A. Heinlein

Part 11
Letters To OtherRealms

Part 12
Hugos and the Other Forms Award

Book Ratings

The Masthead

Subscription Info

Editor's Notebook

Chuq Von Rospach

It had to happen. As I'm writing this, it is three days beyond when OtherRealms is supposed to be mailed. With any luck, I can be at the printer in a week, and in the mail the first week of July.

This issue is bringing home a lot of things I've basically avoided until now with OtherRealms. I've done the zine on a rather tight schedule, surrounded by other tight schedules. As long as everything went to plan, it all worked out in the end.

When it all falls apart, it really falls apart.

June was going to be a hassle going in, with a major writing commitment on the Macintosh side as well as OtherRealms all coming due about the same time. Then I got word that Clifford Simak died, and material and schedules need to be juggled to make sure we said goodbye to him properly.

Then I got the phone call telling me about Heinlein, and I sat down and cried for a while. I'm sitting here at the computer, working on the rest of the issue, my Heinlein material still unedited, because I find I can't face looking at it. I can't face looking at it, having to admit to myself that he's really dead.

I'll have to, if I ever want this issue printed. But, damn it, I'm going to miss Heinlein.

If it was just juggling of schedules, I would have been okay. But I woke up one morning with a sore leg, and ended up that night in the emergency ward. It was "only" a deep muscle spasm, but it earned me a week off work and either flat on my back or lurching around on crutches. It's been almost two weeks now, and I'm still limping. I'm only at about half- speed, both at work and writing -- I simply can't sit that long without getting uncomfortable. This really impacted getting OtherRealms out.

New Schedules

It's obvious now that I'm over-committed, and have been surviving mainly due to the whims of God (I can see Her now, sitting up there chuqling, saying "hee-hee. Let's let him take on one more project and THEN zap him!" -- God is not mean, but She does have a strange sense of humor....). That, and some recent problems and discussions on USENET, have made me sit down and try to rethink priorities and time commitments.

I'm frankly somewhat burnt out. Not on any one project or on OtherRealms, but on things in general. My schedule since the first of the year has been such that I've been unable to do something as simple as take a night off for a movie -- six months of non-stop deadline. When the leg business came up and forced me to miss a couple, it made me realize just how cramped the schedule was.

So I'm going to try to slow down a bit, and set things up so I can simply sit and stare at the walls once in a while. I shouldn't have to choose between mowing the lawn and writing my editorial; it's a question of who is in control, and right now, it's my schedule.

How will this affect OtherRealms? Not very much. I'm shifting my publication date from the 15th of the month to the 30th. Article and lettercol deadlines will be the 15th of the prior month, instead of the first. This gives me six weeks to tie everything together, instead of two to four. I've been publishing OtherRealms on a six week schedule, which will become an eight week schedule -- which should give me a better shot at catching some of those nasty typos that have been creeping in during the deadline crunch.

Another thing I'm doing is shifting to offset, and letting a real printer do the work of printing and collating for me. This is more expensive, but worth it for a number of reasons. It free's me from late night Xeroxing and collating, which is the major reason, but it should also improve the reproduction quality, especially of the art work -- I've never been happy with the way OtherRealms looks, especially the blacks in the art pieces I publish.

This should help. Expensive, but worth it. I hope you folks agree.

On the electronic side, I've been looking very closely at my options. The quality of life on USENET continues to degrade, to the point where it is almost impossible to carry on a reasonable conversation without the idiots coming in and stomping all over it.

OtherRealms is immune to it to a good degree, being moderated, but it makes it harder for me to justify putting lots of time into the network. A major scheduling problem for me, also, is putting together the electronic edition, which has normally been distributed at the same time as the electronic version. To do this has required a number of marathon editing sessions over a period of a week. The result is a high number of typos and an exhausted editor. Not a good combination.

The electronic edition takes a fair amount of work, since it requires me to completely reformat the thing and plug in all the titles, copyright marks, and other small pieces of text, as well as chopping it up into distributable pieces. I seriously considered dropping it, but I don't want to disenfranchise a large and appreciative audience.

Instead, I'm putting Electronic OtherRealms on a separate schedule. Once I get the printed version out, I'll put together the Electronic one. This looks like it will be a two week delay, although I don't know for sure yet. This means that the printed version would be mailed in the last week of June, and the Electronic released in mid to late July. Folks who can't wait can subscribe to the printed version of course. Hopefully this will make life a little saner around here, and I can enjoy OtherRealms more.

In summary, here are the new dates and schedules. These will get merged into the masthead next issue.

Publication date: the 30th of March, June, September and December.

All material and letters due: 15th of month previous to publication month.

Electronic edition released: 15th of month after publication (tentative).

This should make OtherRealms more of a hobby and less of an obsession, and allow me to enjoy some of the other things I like to do once in a while, without markedly affecting the zine. Once I clear out some of my other, non-SF commitments, it'll be even better.

New Rates

Effective this issue, there's a new cover price and new subscription rates. OtherRealms now costs $2.85, with a one year (four issue) subscription running $11.00.

Those numbers would have taken me to break-even with the new postal rates. With the switch to offset, I'm over the edge again, but I expect to be using a third class postal permit starting next issue (that was one of the projects that got lost in the one-legged tango this month) which should put it back on par.

The way I figure break-even is somewhat different than most magazines, by the way. My subscription prices are based on the cost of a single copy of OtherRealms, not on the cost of the printing and mailing divided by subscriptions. If you subscribe, you are paying for your copy, not your copy and a percentage of the complimentary copies. All comps come out of my pocket, which is how I think it should be.

The problem is that postage is insane and printing a magazine with a large number of pages and a small press-run is labor intensive. I won't see any economy of scale with printing at smaller than 1000 copy runs, which I don't expect to see any time soon.

Right now, I'm discussing foreign checks with my bank, so I can't offer either Canadian overseas subscriptions unless they are funded in dollars American. If you're interested, write to me about it. And for clubs, bookstores, or other places interested in multiple copy subscriptions, I'm setting up a special rate for bulk shipments to a single address. Bookstore sales, by the way, are fully returnable.

If you're a net reader, and have considered converting to the printed version, now is a good time to do it. I'm going to offer a one-time conversion subscription of five issues instead of the normal four. To qualify, send the check and a note with where you read OtherRealms and your E-mail account name. If I don't recognize the source, I may get back with you to verify it. If nothing else, this may help me find some of the distribution points I don't know about.

This issue

A lot of stuff has been shifted around this month. Because of the Heinlein and Simak appreciations, both the Pico Reviews and the Stuff Received are taking well earned vacations. They'll both be back next issue, and all the reviews pending will be held for then.

I've also had to cut a couple of articles originally scheduled: a bibliography of Arthurian works and M. Elayn Harvey's article on her first novel. Both should make it in next issue as well. There are also a couple of stand-alone reviews for next issue -- which means that next issue is already rather full, even before I go to press. I always need some more stand-alone reviews from folks, but any feature material is going to be shoved back a couple of issues before I can run it.

Horrors!

I've also found a Horror columnist. Rick Kleffel and the Agony Column joins OtherRealms this issue, and Rick will be dealing exclusively with the Dark Realms. I'm really happy to have him around, and once you read him, you'll understand why. I've always felt that OtherRealms should cover Horror, but never have been able, until now, to do it properly. Welcome, Rick!

The Special Brad Foster Issue

This is also the first issue featuring a given artist. All of the art (except the cover) is by Brad Foster, last year's Hugo winner for best Fan Artist and a finalist again this year. The original cover Brad did for me is on page three because of the appreciations, and his art (most of it never published before) is scattered throughout the issue. Brad was one of the earliest artists to support OtherRealms, and is one of the best Black&White technicians I've ever seen. His work deserves some appreciation, and I'm thrilled to be able to focus on him.

More Changes

This issue has a number of technical changes. The layout has been completely redesigned. The two column format is (in my opinion) more boring than the three column format I used to use, but it is also a lot easier to lay out and amazingly flexible when it comes to putting an issue together. There is a new headline face (Univers) and the whole look of the headlines has been rethought to try to simply and update the look of OtherRealms. Bookman Bold, as a friend mentioned to me, starts looking like it was set with a dirty typewriter ribbon in large sizes. The new layout uses many fewer faces and sizes, and is (I think) a lot cleaner and easier to read. If you disagree, let me know!

There will be some more layout changes next month. I'm planning on switching typefaces on the text -- something that I couldn't do this issue. The new typeface should be cleaner and easier to read. And I expect a few tweaks in the new layout, as always.

Worldcon

This is the last issue before Worldcon. Nolacon is in New Orleans this year, an Laurie and I will be there taking a well deserved vacation. If you're an OtherRealms reader and plan to be in New Orleans, track us down and introduce yourself!

The death of mimeo

It looks like it's finally happened. Reports have been circulating that the paper manufacturers are killing off the production of mimeo paper.

It is, when you think about it, the end of an era.

With the proliferation of inexpensive copiers, quick print shops, personal computers, laser writers and the relentless onslaught of Desktop Publishing, mimeo finally seems to be headed for a long deserved retirement.

This thought, of course, doesn't console those people who have relied on mimeo for their publishing. While current techniques can create much cleaner and nicer looking publications, it's at a cost. It's more expensive, for one thing, and people are going to be less forgiving of marginal layouts, material and fanzines.

There isn't a lot I can do about the cost. Xerography is more expensive, although there are things you can do to minimize expenses.

On the layout and technology sides, though, I can help. Having been playing with the new technologies for a few years (frankly, without which OtherRealms would not exist, in this or any other form) I've got an idea of the uses, abuses and pitfalls of these new toys. This is information I'm willing and happy to share.

So if you're looking at moving towards newer technologies, or want some ideas on how to make your fanzine look better, or have general computer oriented questions, drop me a line. I've gotten a lot of help from a lot of people, and I want to return the favor a little bit.

Publishing Notes

Barbara Hambly autographed at Change of Hobbit on April 16. Joe Haldeman also signed at Change of Hobbit on April 23. For information on upcoming autographing sessions, dial 213-Great-SF.

Genre related Young Adult titles from Harpers Junior Books include Road to the Stars by Robert Vardeman , Alien Child by Pamela Sargent, The Warriors of Taan by Louse Lawrence, The Dragonbards by Shirley Rousseau Murphy, The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes, The Trouble on Janus by Alfred Slote, Max and Me and the Time Machine by Gery Greer and Bob Ruddick, Mutants, an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, M.H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, The Secret of the Round Beast by John Forrester and Star Lord by Louise Lawrence.

Orson Scott Card signed at Change of Hobbit bookstore in Santa Monica, CA. on May 21. John Shirley also did a signing at Change of Hobbit on May 14th, celebrating his new book Eclipse Penumbra (Questar). Jack Vance is signing at Change of Hobbit on June 25. For future scheduled signings, call 213-GREAT-SF or watch rec.arts.sf-lovers, where I post the signings I'm sent before they actually happen.

The July lead from Baen Books include War World #1: The Burning Eye, a Shared World anthology set in the same universe as The Mote in God's Eye. Other titles for July include The Jerusalem Man by David Gemmell, The Leaves of October by Don Sakers, The Future at War #2: The Spear of Mars edited by Reginald Bretnor, Between the Strokes of Night by Charles Sheffield (reprint) and The Wooden Spaceships by Bob Shaw (Hardcover original, the sequel to The Ragged Astronauts). Baen Fantasy lead for July is The Paladin by C.J. Cherryh. Other titles include John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman and The Devil's Game by Poul Anderson (reprint).

July titles from Pocket books include Star Trek: The Next Generation #2, Ghost Ship by Diane Carey, The Troupe, a horror novel from Gordon Linzner, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Encounter at Farpoint by David Gerrold (reprint), The Star Trek Interview Book by Allan Asherman. Simon&Schuster Audio titles include The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, read by the author.

Avon titles for August include Arabesques, More Tales from the Arabian Nights, edited by Susan Shwartz, Planetfall: In search of Floyd part 1, by Arthur Byron Cover (based on the Infocom computer game), Wishbringer, by Craig Shaw Gardner (the latest in the Chronicles of Ebenezum), Anti-Grav Unlimited by Duncan Long (a first novel), Wyrldmaker by Terry Bisson and Conquest by Lynn Abbey (the sequel to Unicorn&Dragon).

Avon titles for September include The Rainbow Sword by Adrienne Matrine-Barnes; Maelstrom by Paul Preuss (Venue Prime vol 2); Unicorn & Dragon by Lynn Abbey (rack size reprint of a trade paperback); While Call them Back from Heaven by Clifford Simak. Lead title for October is Heaven Cent by Piers Anthony, the latest Xanth novel. Other October titles include Blood of the Colyn Muir by Paul Edwin Zimmer and Jon DeCles and a reprint of The Last Defender of Camelot, a collection by Roger Zelazny.

If you had mail to Science Fiction Eye returned, you weren't alone. the Post Office screwed up their P.O. Box and returned their mail throughout the month of February. Issue #3 is happily out, the magazine is alive and well, and it has a new adress. Send all mail to SF Eye, Box 43244, Washington, D.C. 20010-9244.

The nominations for the 1988 Hugo Novel category have been announced. They are: The Forge of God by Greg Bear (Tor); The Uplift War by David Brin (Phantasia/Bantam); Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card (Tor); When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger (Bantam); The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (Tor).

Pat Murphy's second novel, The Falling Woman (Tor) won the 1988 Nebula for best novel. Long-time readers of OtherRealms will remember that I've been pushing this book at you as often as possible since it was published -- and I'm exceptionally happy that in a tough category this year, it won out. Congratulations, Pat!

Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb (TSR/Windwalker books, 0-880380-455- 7, $2.95) has been awarded an Edgar as best original paperback mystery of 1987 by the Mystery Writers of America. The story is about a murder at a Science Fiction convention, and is a real hoot.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 2)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 2

The Agony Column

Rick Kleffel

Face
Cecile Pineda
Penguin Contemporary American Literature
$6.95
horror readers:***+
literary readers: *****

Stinger
Robert R. McCammon
Pocket Books Fiction $4.95
****-

The Influence
Ramsey Campbell
Macmillan Publishing, also Scream/Press
*****

The Scream
John Skipp and Craig Spector
Tor $3.95
***+

The Kill Riff
David J. Schow
$17.95 Tor, ISBN:0-312-93065-8
****-

Night Visions 4

Introduction by Clive Barker,
Stories by Dean R. Koontz, Edward Bryant,
Robert R. McCammon
Dark Harvest, $18.95
*****

Polyphemus
Michael Shea
Arkham House, $16.95, ISBN 0-87-054-155-2
*****+

Sphynx
David Lindsay, Introduction by Colin Wilson
Carroll & Graf, $18.95
****+

Unassigned Territory
Kem Nunn
Dell, $7.95, ISBN 0- 440-50009-5
*****

One of the appeals of reading horror these days is that the field is now wide open to everyone who can't fit in any other genre. Books that may not have even been published ten years ago are being given the go ahead, with glossy covers and grocery store cardboard display stands.

This process of opening up gives the horror genre the ability to encompass works of vastly different content, intent and execution. These books give a practical example of just how different two works in one genre can be -- and both still be good, reasonably well- written genre novels. It is now possible to travel from the inner mind of Face and The Influence to the Outer Limits of Stinger.

Face

In Face, by Cecile Pineda, we have an incarnation of the horror novel as haute- literature -- a book that aims for, and mostly reaches, the stratospheric heights of universal expression found in other horror works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea. As such, it won't find a huge readership, either in the horror fraternity (most of whom will consider it a bit too talky) or in the world of high-falutin' upscale Writer-Readers (most of whom will consider it a bit too macabre -- just enough so to make it unacceptable for cocktail party synopses). But for those who like to think while grinding their teeth in terror -- your ship has come in. And it's a beauty.

Helio Caras, the protagonist in Face is a dirt poor barbershop aide scraping away a meager living in the slums of Sao Paolo. Although he seems as poor as possible without being dead, in his own world, he is not yet at the bottom of the ladder. This split perception -- our view of his poverty as absolute, and his view of it as not absolute -- is at the center of the disturbing atmosphere created by the writer. She writes in short chapters (often only one to two pages), using sparse, clean prose, which gives the book a readability that is often missing in literature.

But a fall from the cliff results in a horrifying facial disfigurement, one that Helio Cara cannot afford to have surgically corrected. In swift succession he loses his job, his girl, and his shack -- and what the reader might have once thought of as worst has become considerably worse. Helio flees the city and moves back to his mother's now-abandoned house in the country. There, with a knowledge gained from barbershop wart removal, interviews with plastic surgeons and the study of library texts, he picks up needles, thread, razor blades and procaine in an attempt to rebuild his face and his identity.

The horror in this novel comes at the reader from two angles -- the poverty of the lowly in other countries, and the horror of losing your facial identity -- and it's an effective combination. The sparseness of the prose eliminates the poor starving third world overly-compassionate complex, as does the kitchen table plastic surgery. But the desperate search for employment by a man who has become a monster to his peers adds a believable tension to the surgical horror. This is the writer's first novel, and was nominated for an American Book Award. Her next novel, the blurb tells us, is set in 10th century India. You might have to go to some trouble to find this book -- but it's worth the search.

Stinger

You certainly won't have to go to much trouble to find Robert R. McCammon's new novel Stinger. You can pick it up with two quarts of milk and a box of diapers at the grocery store. If you do, fasten your seat belts, don't touch that channel, and get ready for the return of something that was invented a long time ago but is just now having a resurrection in the book world -- science fiction horror. Many of us can remember the terror and awe of those black-and-white monsters from TV's The Outer Limits. Ants with wicked human faces, stones that could talk, two-dimensional living lightning bolts -- whether or not you could imagine it, the creators of The Outer Limits would have it fall out of the sky and into somebody's back yard. But with the success of The Exorcist, Carrie and other such supernaturally-oriented novels, the monster lost a lot of ground as a central element of the horror novel.

Another contributor to the downfall of the monster in horror novels was the success (a few years later) of monsters in science fiction films -- Alien and Jaws in particular. It seemed that novels just couldn't compete with the styro-gyro creations of the new breed of makeup-mechanical artists -- there are times when one picture cannot be equaled by any number of words. Unfortunately, none of these creations possessed any more intelligence, cunning or character than Bruce the shark. And, when the strings started to show, they left most folks cold. It seemed that the days of the intelligent, tortured monsters -- Frankenstein's created soul and the elegant and evil Dracula -- were gone. Lost to the horror genre, forgotten by science fiction writers.

Good news for monster fans -- smart monsters and science fiction themes have been rediscovered by horror writers and are rearing their ugly -- but not brainless -- heads in the most recent crop of novels by todays top mainstream horror writers. First Dean Koontz gave us Watchers, with two genetic experiments -- one very good, and the other very bad -- on the prowl in Orange and Santa Barbara counties. These beings were more intelligent than the humans pursuing them, but like the human characters, they were driven by trauma, desire, love and hatred. Shortly thereafter, Stephen King introduced us to his version of B-movie monsters as raucous gangsters in The Tommyknockers. In Stinger, Robert R. McCammon delivers the all-stops-pulled-monster-invades-small-town novel -- with a vengeance. And, like Watchers and The Tommyknockers, Stinger immeasurably improves upon the sources it draws from, which are both plentiful and obvious.

In his latest novel, Mr. McCammon has taken a bit of The Hidden, a touch of The Terminator, a liberal dose of Alien, borrowed from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and combined these in his own genetic centrifuge to create a novel that is as much -- or more -- fun to read than these movies are to watch. When a UFO appears over the dying Texas mining town of Inferno, all that is found is an unbreakable round object the size of a pool ball. An eight-year old girl is the one to find this object, and before she can say "Possession!", the alien inside of the sphere has taken control of her body and placed her mind (soul, whatever) inside the sphere for safekeeping. As it happens, this alien is a "freedom fighter" (as opposed to terrorist), on the run from one bad, bad, bounty hunter -- Stinger, who arrives all too soon on the "wrong side of the tracks" in Inferno.

What ensues is gruesome, engrossing, and imaginative. The author handles the big cast of characters especially well -- his orchestration of character and action across the landscape of this town divided into Bordertown and Inferno proper is clearly and cleanly handled, and he build the suspense and horror perfectly to an appropriately large-scale climax. The science fiction elements are well thought-out, but most importantly, we are given well developed human characters, each instantly identifiable (and not overly stereotypical), and none of whom are rich and/or famous. Even better, the two monsters also have distinct characters, a rarity in SF horror. Yes, there is plenty of dripping slime, torn flesh, and alien genetic experimentation -- but there are also clear and comprehensible, if alien, motivations. They don't call him "one of the masters of modern [mainstream] horror" for nothing. Reading this book, you might not ever make it to the beach this summer. And it's cheaper than the movie tickets.

Polyphemus

But don't switch that dial -- there's even more fun in store, combined with some serious, high-quality literate writing and a top-flight publishing package that yields Polyphemus by Michael Shea from Arkham House. This collection of short stories is no less than the most amazing package to come down the pike since Scream/Press' version of Barker's Books of Blood, and it's been worth the wait. Handsomely illustrated by John Stewart, this volume is certainly a best buy for those interested in horror, science fiction or humor -- all three genres are represented here, along with heroic fantasy and urban folklore. It's enjoyable enough to be easily read, it's certainly shocking, and most importantly, it's high quality writing by a unique voice in the genre.

Michael Shea isn't a new voice -- he's been around for quite some time, and this collection will definitely pique the readers' interest, and have them hunting up all his other work, along with this reviewer. What is impressive here is the range of stories, that are all recognizably written by the same author, yet have an incredible variety of subject, tone, and genre. The title story is ecological science-fiction horror in the tradition of Solaris and Dune, but don't let these quality references fool you into thinking that the story is devoid of blood, slime, horror or action. All are abundantly present. "The Angel of Death" is the story of what happens when an alien student comes to earth to study sexuality, and of his meetings with men, women, and something that may or may not be human -- one who thinks of himself as 'The Angel of Death". Once again, humor accompanies horror, to the reader's delight. And finally, there's "The Autopsy", which showcases for the reader one of the most intelligent, insidious aliens ever to find its way to earth. There is no one (on earth) who will be able to read this story without yelling at the characters in the book, to stop, stop! Actually, the less said about the stories here the better -- this is the kind of book readers will want to savor, enjoy slowly, and reread. As soon as they've stopped shaking.

The Influence

Although Ramsey Campbell is another writer who is often tagged with the dubious honor of master of modern horror, The Influence is anything but mainstream. His writing has more in common with P.D. James and Henry James than with Stephen King and Dean Koontz; in fact, he is often referred to as "a writer's writer" because, although he receives much praise from his fellow writers (many of whom cite him as an influence), he never seems to really break into the big-big bestseller/major motion picture bracket. And it's just as well, because Ramsey Campbell uses poetic prose techniques to create a subtle horror that can be likened to authors as diverse as Flannery O'Conner and Franz Kafka -- techniques that might not transfer easily to the big sell/screen.

There are no gargantuan monsters or rich and famous runaways in The Influence, just lower-middle class English working parents and their children, under emotional and financial pressure after the death of an unlikable great-aunt. But Queenie, in her low-key fashion, soon becomes as frightening to the reader as the thought of a reptilian monster hatching in your stomach, made even more so the familiarity of the situations. For, while nobody wants an alien bursting through their chest during dinner, most of us are more scared that our friends, relatives or co-workers will do something to us that is cruel and embarrassing enough to be called monstrous. Queenie's menace is familiar enough to remind you of the mean relative you'd always disliked, but imaginatively expressed by the author, as is evidenced in this passage:

When I was a baby they gave her one of my first teeth, and do you know what she said to me when I was old enough to realize? She told me that if I ever did anything she didn't like or said anything against her she'd make me feel as if the tooth were being pulled out.

These are the kind of incidents that parents fear most, the relative whose comments, joking or otherwise, somehow affect a child into adulthood. In the wrong hands, this could seem like the cheesiest voodoo threat this side of Haiti, but in Campbell's hands, the intimations of child abuse overshadow and suggest the supernatural, rather than the other way around. And Campbell's thoughts on the supernatural are convincing and compelling:

Hermione had always thought that the idea of hell presupposed a god, but perhaps hell was yourself after death: perhaps you were judged at the moment of death by that part of yourself you couldn't lie to, the part that knew everything you'd thought and done in your life. Somewhere in everyone was their own severest critic, and perhaps dying released it from a lifetime of constraints to judge what kind of eternity was deserved.... Perhaps life after death was an endless lonely dream, and whether it lasted for the moment of death or eternity didn't matter: its kind of time would have nothing to do with life awake, even if one were to invade the other.

This is the kind of careful, philosophical thought that has characterized the great literary works of the genre -- Frankenstein, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and Ghost Story come to mind -- combined with a aching look at life on the financial edge in modern England.

But just because the book is thoughtfully written and philosophically sound, don't think it isn't also gripping and entertaining, a family mystery in the best tradition of English mystery writers. In particular, P. D. James' A Taste for Death comes to mind, for both are mysteries of what the characters will become, as well as what will become of the characters. This is a book that will satisfy those with a thirst for blood and those with a thirst for thought equally, without alienating one or the other. And, even better for those readers who double as collectors, is the news that Scream/Press is soon to publish a version of this novel set directly from the author's word processor disks, including part of a chapter that was deleted in the MacMillan edition, and an author's afterward that is not available in any other edition. This edition will be illustrated by J. K. Potter, with the photographs shot in England and Ramsey Campbell's daughter serving as the lead model. Like most Scream/Press books, this will undoubtedly be something to look forward to.

The Scream

But when people are tired of thinking and tired of bleeding, they turn on music. And, while music itself is a big moneymaker, other forms of art that deal with music and musicians often aren't. Once in a while, someone writes an Amadeus or Rocky Horror Picture Show but more often than not we're given half-baked concoctions like Rock and Roll Nightmare (don't even think about renting this video!). Rock music, in particular, has been heavily abused by writers who know nothing about 1) Music, 2) Musicians and 3) Musical Equipment. Other problems are that descriptions of music are boring, unless the writers have tied that description to something outside of the music, while descriptions of musicians who are only and exactly and just solely confined to being eccentric musicians are one dimensional characters. And novels where every major character is one- dimensional tend to be, well....flat. All of which is a way of saying that The Scream, by Skipp and Spector, is treading on dangerous territory by being, yes, yet another book about devil-worship-rock-and-roll-zombies (though you'd never guess so from the cover) -- one that, surprisingly, succeeds.

The main reason this novel is a success is that at least some of the characters are three dimensional people with lives to be lived. The women characters are particularly commendable, and one of the highlights of horror in this novel the trip they take to an abortion clinic. No, it's not Rosemia's baby, it's something that could happen to a friend of yours -- and that's why you won't forget it. Like real musicians, the people in this book have families and children and parents -- three elements often reduced to absurdity in other rock novels.

Then, of course, there are the devil worshipers, the child molesters, la, la, dee, dah -- in short, the typical middle-american picture of Lead Guitarist for Radical Rock Group, who in this case, has about 75 bodies buried in the walls of his mansion. Or the seductive, evil lead singer who (literally) devours men. Yes, within the two dimensions, they're clearly drawn, but in the end, these are the cardboard characters we've come to expect in rock horror novels, and it is unfortunate that we must find them here.

On the other hand, the authors are writing about what they know, and when they didn't know, they asked someone who did. The descriptions of the mechanics of music (the tour, the equipment, the roadies) are first rate and solidly believable. And the invention the authors propose is not only clever, but sensible. As a musician who has performed live, I'm in a good position to evaluate these aspects, and everything adds up. That alone made this book readable, where it might otherwise have been laughable.

Incorporating these elements with a Supernatural from Vietnam theme is like smoking at a gas station, but the authors bludgeon ahead, and come up with yet another surprisingly strong story line. Like the musical/technical aspects of the novel, the supernatural in The Scream is logically developed, but appropriately mysterious, and keeps the reader guessing and reading until the last line of the last page. In fact, this book is good enough to make the reader forget that "it's only rock and roll".

The Kill Riff

But, if after reading The Scream, you think it's safe to go a concert -- think again, because David J. Schow, a noted short story writer for The Twilight Zone Magazine, has just unleashed his first novel -- The Kill Riff, and, when read in the same vicinity, there's no question that The Kill Riff blows away The Scream and a good many other rock novels. In the first place, there's no supernatural element to this novel, and that in itself is a refreshing breath of clean air. There are no devil/demon worshipers of any kind to be found in this book, and even better, it largely sidesteps the censor rock issue that will soon become a trite element in music novels. What we do have is very well drawn characters, and, some of the best observations about showbiz of all types to be found in any recent novel. What is missing are major characters whose net yearly income is less than $100,000, but, if we have to have yet another novel about the rich and famous (one of whom must, of course, is an ex-Viet Nam veteran, no less!), let it be The Kill Riff.

The plot concerns Lucas Ellington's revenge for the death of his daughter in a stampede at the Civic Auditorium during a concert by rock's new bad-boy band, Whip Hand. Mr. Ellington decides that since these people are scum-of-the-earth and a convenient scapegoat, he will use his Army training to "be all he can be" -- in this case, a murderer committing the perfect crime(s). Amazingly, the reader's sympathy is with Lucas, as he tracks and kills the members of the band, saving Gabriel Stannard, the lead singer, for last. A good part of the terror in this novel comes from the realization (as demonstrated by Lucas) how easy it would be for a reasonably intelligent person to commit a number of murders for which he/she is never caught nor punished. What Lucas does not count on is the fact that Gabriel Stannard is something of a gun freak himself, surrounded by bodyguards who are less than stable. And what the reader won't realize until they start the novel is how great the characters are going to be, how funny the jokes will be or how gripping the narrative will become. All too soon (and perhaps against your better judgment), you'll find yourself clutching this book, yelling out loud to the characters in an effort to try to convince them "Don't go in there!"

And once you're caught up in the narrative, you won't be ready for some of the major twists and surprises that Mr. Schow hands to you. This is a book that will especially appeal readers of action-oriented crime novels, as well as those who are looking for horror. Because of the lack of a supernatural element, I was prepared for disappointment, but there wasn't any of that, or relaxation coming around the corner. Great characters, gripping action, good jokes and observations about music -- this novel abound in these elements, and the words Blockbuster Movie in subtitles flashing at all the right times. Next time though, let's see if we can bring things out of the financial stratosphere.

Dark Visions 4

Dark Visions 4 is the newest entry in this top-flight series from a new star in the small American publishing houses, Dark Harvest books. Despite the high, high quality of the previous issues, this is by far the best of the series. The idea of this series is to give top notch veterans and newcomers to the field of horror 30,000 words to do with what they wish. In general, the fiction published in these books is darker, more extreme and more experimental than that found in the writers more generally available releases. Last year brought us Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, which he directed as the movie Hellraiser. This year brings us three stories by Dean R. Koontz, a passel of tales by Edward Bryant and three stories by Robert R. McCammon.

Koontz's work in this collection takes elements of his bestseller style writing and combines them with elements of shock horror. The results (surprisingly enough to me) are wonderful, shocking, exciting stories that are definitely this writer's best, most uncompromising work. Two of the tales use classic SF monsters (a shape changer, a body snatcher) and rather extreme gore, but amazingly, end up being convincing tales of -- love! There's a smidgen of black humor and a truckload of dark horror, but these are stories about man's capacity to love. The shock of finding out what the subject is in these works is as great as those provided by the SF/horror elements. The final story subjects a rather unlikable atheist narrator to the horrors of extreme bad luck. The prose in this story is remarkably controlled, allowing the reader to see limitations in the narrator that he himself is unaware of. This is the kind of story that is too emotionally severe to be published as mainstream fiction, yet too muted and normal for most horror or science fiction magazines - and it finds a home in Dark Visions 4.

Edward Bryant's stories also catch the reader unawares -- but then, that's the point of horror, isn't it? They're all shorter than Koontz's, and have a wider variety -- from the humorous mystery of "Haunted" to the senseless, brief violence of "Doing Colfax", to the classic Twilight Zone twist of "Buggage". But, by using an ingenious device, just when one starts to think that their impact will be blurred by the variety and humor, Mr. Bryant manages to sneak up and bury a very surprising hatchet in our unsuspecting brains. Like Mr. Koontz, Edward Bryant bludgeons us with horror, but surprises us with the subtlety of his written art.

Robert R. McCammon has written many, many mainstream style horror novels from They Thirst (an excellent large-scale modern vampire novel) to Usher's Passing, a Gothic novel of the arms race and black magic set in the South. His writing style has always been superior to the run-of-the-mill-Graham Masterson/Whitley Streiber-let's-crank-out- another-monster-black-magic-story school of fiction, so I was a bit disappointed that he didn't offer the freshness of artistic vision offered by the other writers. But, for sheer peek- between-your-fingers terror, he certainly delivers the goods, particularly with "Best Friends", the story of some very, very bad demons that are called into our world by an emotionally disturbed teenager, with results that are appropriately disastrous and unexpected, to quote "Ready or not, here they come!"

Which, might be said about Night Visions. Next month, we can expect to see Dark Visions 5, with contributions by Stephen King, Dan Simmons and George R. R. Martin. If King doesn't pull this series into the limelight, then -- maybe my hat will eat me.

Sphynx

Horror and supernatural fiction devices -- telepathy, lycanthropy, vampirism, etc -- are often used by authors to externalize otherwise invisible internal, emotional conflicts. Unfortunately, if the emotional observations don't ring true or aren't interesting, the supernatural device rapidly becomes gratuitous, and the novel loses it appeal once the freshness of its supernatural plot device has worn thin. This is why so many once- interesting classics of the supernatural now seem rather flat. But the respected publishers at Carroll & Graf have seen to it that the works in their new series of Classic horror reprints is edited by none other than Colin Wilson, the notable author and philosopher who brought us The Mind Parasites so many years ago. If Sphynx by David Lindsay, the first volume in this series, is representative of the quality of those to come, then this line will rapidly become a must buy for all those seriously interested in entertaining, literate, supernatural fiction.

Sphynx is, in fact only borderline supernatural/science fiction; it has more in common with Evelyn Waugh than with H. P. Lovecraft. The novel tells the story of Nicholas, a young English clerk who inherits a large sum of money, and, as a result, decides to rent a room in a house in the country, where he can continue his scientific research into the recording of dreams. He has already completed the majority of the research necessary to create a camera-like device that records his dreams on chemically- coated film, and now plans to construct a production size device that records, first, five minutes, then later on, one hour of the dreams of those who are in its presence when they are dreaming. Nicholas has rather naively counted on relative peace and quiet in his newly-rented room, but he is so unworldly that he (a young single man with money) has elected to rent a room in a house where the three unmarried daughters of the landlord still reside. The social situation is complicated even more by an excitable, irresponsible two- timing metalworker Nicholas employs, who is having dating one of the daughters, a neighboring young female compose, and an experienced, worldly young widow who is also a neighbor of Nicholas' new residence.

All of these characters far outstrip Nicholas in social expertise, and his whirlwind learning experience is filtered and diffracted by the dream recorder of his invention. The author's perceptions of people are are so right-on that this novel becomes riveting, sometimes hilarious, reading, even by today's most jaded standards. Where else could one read the complaint of Lore, the composer, who laments that "Women are nine-tenths reputation and one-tenth human being"? Murder, jealousy, abuse, callous disregard for other's pride, all are stirred expertly, then reinvented in the sparse but highly imaginative dreams that Nicholas' device records. The climax is surprising, but leaves the reader with enough to feel satisfied with everything but this series -- when does the next volume come out, and who will it be -- and this author, whose works I will now have to endeavor to read.

Unassigned Territory

And finally, we come full circle, this time with a magnificent entry into science fiction, Unassigned Territory, the second novel by Kem Nunn. Tapping the Source, his first novel, showed an almost Lovecraftian sense of the pervasiveness of evil, as it followed a naive young man from the desert into the scummy beach life of Southern California, searching for his sister, who may be missing, dead or moved away, no forwarding address. Starting out in a low-key, almost absentminded fashion with a single character and a single point of view, the reader was gradually introduced to an ever-deepening chain of evil, until the novel built to a truly demonic denouement. In retrospect, it becomes clear that Tapping the Source was written more within the genre of horror than mystery, despite the fact that is was marketed as a mystery.

Unassigned Territory brings all of those Lovecraftian intimations of evil out into the harsh desert sunlight, and under the scrutiny of Obadiah Wheeler, a canny young member of a splinter fundamentalist sect called simply The Friends. It's 1970, and in order to preserve his 4D draft status, Obadiah must do at least 120 hours work per month to preserve his status as a minister. It is this that prompts him to head out into the unassigned territory of the title, accompanied by members of his congregation, to seek new converts for his religion. In the course of doing so, he stumbles across "The Thing" in Sarge Hummer's Mystery of the Mojave Desert Museum -- something that may or may not be an actual extra-terrestrial artifact, and Delandra Hummer, Sarge's daughter. In a moment of sun-drenched decision, strikingly similar to that which occurs in Camus' The Stranger, Obadiah sees his ministry going down the drain, and decides to hitch up with Delandra, stealing "The Thing" from the museum in hopes of selling it to Dr. Ceton Verity, builder of a red-white and blue Electro-Magnetron resting peacefully near the site of the disappearance of the Table Mountain Indians.

What ensues is a hilarious -- but sometimes horrifying -- update and remix of Lovecraftian cult-terror with a modern sense of paranoia. Nunn uses the time-honored technique of ridiculing the fathers of the obscure theories, thus making them even more believable once all those hard questions have been asked -- and answered. This book has some consummate moments of open-ended terror, but they are accompanied hand-in-hand by some of the funniest writing to come down the pike since Vonnegut demonstrated the use of humor in science fiction. Imagine Flannery O'Connor writing science fiction set amidst the losers and dreamers wandering around the Mojave Desert and you'll come close what the author does in this novel. But you'll never be able to pin down all the references, any more than you'll want to put down a book that makes you laugh out loud.

The characters here all extremely memorable, but the book is constructed in the opposite manner of Tapping the Source; rather than starting with one character, then spreading out, Nunn starts with several characters, then slowly draws them together towards a nexus that no-one wishes or is able to think about. Rex Hummer, Sarge's son, and Harlan Low, Obadiah's Church Elder, seem at the beginning to be minor characters, but develop into major forces by the end of the novel -- and into people you look more and more forward to hearing from. This is a novel you won't find in the SF ghetto at your bookstores, but wherever it's pigeonholed, any science fiction or horror fan looking for a good time -- can be sure to find one here.

Next Time

Coming soon are reviews of: The Blood Kiss, by Dennis Etchison (Scream/Press), Servants of Twilight by Dean R. Koontz (Dark Harvest), Toplin by Michael McDowell (Scream/Press), and Tapping the Source (Dark Harvest), featuring all new stories by Stephen King, George R. R. Martin and Dan Simmons.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 3)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 3

An Interview with Chairman Bruce

Bruce Sterling
Interviewed by Alan Wexelblat

A conversation with Bruce Sterling is a little like an intellectual roller-coaster ride. He moves from Fuller to Gibson, from politics to writing, with a mental agility that's hard to chase. This interview occurred shortly after Sterling returned from a publicity tour in Japan.

AW: How was Japan?

BS: I must have had my picture taken 1500 times. That's no exaggeration. Professional photographers would accompany every journalist and while I was there they'd set up parabolic reflectors and just shoot off two or three rolls of film. And they had these 35- millimeter Nikon things with wide-angle lenses. And they'd be sitting there and you're trying to establish some point with some guy and they're off wandering around trying to get angles and whenever you gesture or anything that's at all dramatic ... k'snee! k'snee! k'snee! Or you light a cigarette -- click-click, click, click-click-click.

AW: Other than the photographers, how was it?

BS: Well, it was a big kick. Y'know, it's a big thrill to be treated like a rock star. I had an entourage with me.... Editors and a translator and a couple of gofers. At one point an adoring journalist followed me around for about three hours, literally, watching everything I did. Unfortunately, I didn't realize he was a journalist; I thought he was some other guy. I was having a very interesting, unguarded conversation with him and it turned out he was a journalist. But it was okay. I think he was very flattered that I was so friendly and open with him.

It was a business gig. I was over there doing five and six interviews a day, a couple of video standups, and endless business lunches. A party I went to, it turned out to be this posh publisher's gig where I was guest of honor. I didn't even know.

AW: You probably showed up wearing jeans.

BS: No, no. I was smart -- I dressed just like they did. They all wear baggy black suit jackets and skinny black ties. Black pants and black shoes. Everybody in London wears black, everybody in New York wears black, everybody in Tokyo wears black. So, I just put on the local color and that was cool. Everyone was very polite. The Japanese are very gracious.

It was a promo thing. I had a few hours that I was able to do things and I went out and bought rock albums and stuff. A couple of mornings I got up early and walked around in the neighborhood.

AW: You didn't do any touristy kinds of things?

BS: No. I didn't go to any Zen temples or any of that. I went to the Budokan, but I didn't know what it was. Y'know, I went and walked around this huge building and thought, God what an interesting thing. Later I found a street sign that indicated what it was. It's this enormous domed stadium that's in this industrial Chinese style. It's an auditorium, but it's got those peaked-roof things like the Chinese do and a big gold ball on top. It's a real monstrous hybrid. I thought it was beautiful; I really feed on that kind of thing.

AW: What are their release schedules like? Do their books come out the same time they come out here?

BS: No. They've got to be translated. I don't think Islands has been translated yet. Schismatrix is in its second printing now and Mirrorshades is just out now. And I've got a new book which is going to come out over there presently that will be called Semi No Jo-o which is a Sterling short-story collection which has no English-language edition. It's just a Japanese Sterling book.

AW: I've been tracking your stuff down, but I can't find your short fiction anywhere.

BS: It's never been collected. That will soon be remedied. I've signed to do a big, extensive illustrated Arkham House edition of Sterling short stories. It's got almost every short story I've ever published. It'll be like 100,000 words.

AW: Anything new?

BS: Nothing that hasn't appeared in one place or another. But a lot of my work has appeared in markets like Interzone which has, like, 2,000 people who read it and and it's in England, so it might as well be new.

AW: Let's start with Islands. What was interesting to me was that it's written from a woman's point of view. Did you find that hard to do?

BS: It was difficult, but it's certainly not the first thing I've written from a woman's point of view. There's Spider Rose, which has a woman in it. And there are long sections of Schismatrix which are narrated from the point of view of Nora Mavrides, Lindsay's wife. If anything, I found it kind of liberating because it was easier to get to the emotional core of matters when you've got a character who's allowed to be more demonstrative than a man would be in a similar situation.

AW: We haven't gotten any farther in 30 years in men's liberation?

BS: I don't know whether that's so or not, but on a fictional level, it's easier to access that sort of thing. One of the things is that she's not a techie. That's a science-fiction writer's trick because the difficulty you face is that you've got to have people explaining machines and gadgets. Jules Verne knew this. He always has at least one average Joe where the professor can stop and say, "For, you see...," "Here's the airlock," and "This is what we call a diving suit... blah blah blah."

So Laura Webster is a public-relations person, but her husband's an architect, so we're full of little things like that which came across more naturally with [her there].

AW: You've commented that having a baby was "like growing a new leg." A baby figures very prominently in Islands. Is that a reflection of your own life, or was that planned before you had the baby?

BS: There was a baby in the book before we had our own. Certainly, having a baby allowed me to make the baby a much more fictionally-convincing thing. In the original draft the baby was sort of like a piece of wood, like a prop. Now it's much more like an infant human being actually is. Although I have to admit it's an exceptionally well- behaved baby.

But the reason there's a baby there is because this book is about the long term. When you've got a child it teaches you to think in that way.

I think that a lot of science fiction is written in a way that's sort of peculiar. Even though it's supposedly extrapolative, it's often immediately focussed. It's not until you have a baby that you feel like you're in life. Suddenly you're dealing with real consequences because they're not just yours, they're some innocent's, and you're responsible. It sort of roots you in life in a way that being alone and fancy-free doesn't.

For many years I was proud that I could fit all my possessions into a Volkswagen. I moved around and lived a student's life and everything. I always figured if things get bad, you pick up and move on. But you're dealing with real consequences when you've got kids. And this book is about consequences. So it's a necessary thing.

AW: Besides not being able to fit your life in Volkswagen, what else has the baby changed? What was a day in Bruce Sterling's life like before the baby compared with after?

BS: It's hard to separate the differences that having a baby has meant. I can't really weed those out from the natural progression of my life and my own career. I used to have a day job. I couldn't support myself as a writer. Now I'm modestly successful. I'm leading a sort of fake middle-class life here. I can't really afford it but I can sort of pretend that I can, and get away with it. I have so far.

AW: Another thing you said that's really stuck with me that I wanted to ask you about was "Just wait, man. Wait to see what's going to happen in ten years." This is in response to people who claim cyberpunk is a fad. I'm curious what sort of thought-out vision of where you and maybe the rest of the cyberpunk writers will be in ten years.

BS: I can't speak for anybody else, but I can certainly draw a line that leads from the first book I published, which was ten years ago, to the work I'm doing now, which is, I think, vastly more powerful and sophisticated.

I'm not like Jimi Hendrix here. I'm not about to choke to death on my own vomit just because I turned 34, or 28 or however the hell old he was when he died. People think we're rock stars, they really do. They get into a habit of treating us as rock stars because they figure "No one's going to be this famous very long. And the drugs are gonna get them. The drugs or the money or the women or whatever modish vice destroys you."

They don't realize that this is a long-term thing. And people, especially people who aren't real sci-fi people, don't really know what a real science fiction writer's career is like. I mean, science fiction writers -- once they get their feet firmly planted and their sucker deep in the juice -- just never go away. I mean, we've got people who are the top people in science fiction now who are septuagenarians. They're seventy years old, and still on the New York Times Best Seller list, selling more books than they ever did.

How many seventy-year-old rock stars do you know?

AW: I've found there's a vast difference between the current generation of writers and the older generation. For one thing, approachability.

BS: Approachable in what sense?

AW: It's a personality-type thing, like the rock star business. Like you're more-real people.

BS: I think that must be a generational thing. I imagine that if you were Andy Offutt's age and had seen what he's seen, you'd find his work a lot easier to grasp. Our work does appeal to certain kinds of people. It strikes them in a way that they have not been struck by science fiction before. That's why we get a lot of interest from people who are in the arts or in graphics or video or sculptors or ... not what you'd call SF fans. Because they recognize that we talk about the zeitgeist, that we talk about the late 20th century. You have to realize that a lot of people find our work very off-putting.

I consider reading Gibson to be one of the easiest things... His work seems incredibly pellucid and smooth. He literally drags you through... you sail through his work. But I know people who I think are fine, intelligent, decent upstanding salt-of-the-earth type people, who literally can't handle Gibson at all. They open it and it's like Sanskrit. They fry. They can't handle it. I can't say why that is, but it is a real phenomenon, a fact of life.

You'd like to think that you could speak of the broadest possible audience, but on the other hand it doesn't really do you any good as a writer to do damage to your own perceptions and your own message. You have to trust your instincts, really. Because if you don't you're going to end up writing stuff that seems labored and false.

AW: You write for the Muse and not to pay the bills?

BS: I think that's a false distinction that people make. Gibson doesn't write what you'd call commercial science fiction but somebody told me that Gibson is Canada's single most successful writer.

He's made far more money in the past two years than any other writer in his entire country. So, who's to say?

I have to laugh sometimes at people who think that they're going to make a lot of money writing science fiction. Like they were really clever to write science fiction and make maybe as much money as the butcher or a plumber. In most cases a lot less. But they'll still come out and say, "Boy! I made 15 grand for a book and isn't that really something? I'm going to be a leader here in the publishing schedule."

People don't realize how little 15 grand is, especially when you've got self-employment tax and stuff. For any clever person... that's starvation wages! If these guys are so smart why didn't they go to law school? It doesn't make any sense to me.

AW: Look at it from this point of view. It would be infinitely easier, in some sense, for Gibson to write another Sprawl story which was more or less the same as the ones that he's written before instead of working on this project with you. And that's what I mean by writing for the money, because in a sense it's easy. It doesn't require any further innovation or originality on his part, but it is guaranteed to sell.

BS: You're guaranteed to make some money in the short term, I suppose, but if you don't think over the long term what's the use? Think of the damage Gibson would do to his long-term earning potential if someone could say "Here he is; he's selling out. He's snoozing in an easy chair, writing Sprawl Novel 23."

That's absurd! In ten years, Gibson could be a major literary figure. He doesn't have to settle for being a hack.

AW: I could reel off a list of names....

BS: Those guys are all morons. None of them make Big Money. None of them make as much money as they could. They've settled for making a little money for a little effort. There are people in the world who get a big kick out of it. I just don't see the appeal.

Not only do I not see the appeal, but I don't even see how it makes economic sense. If you were going to be a sci-fi writer, wouldn't you rather be like Arthur Clarke, with your own high-tech research camps and movies made of your books, and your own TV series and stuff? Isn't that game worth the candle? As opposed to settling for being like somebody with Ace Books who's bringing out such-and-such number 12 that no sane person wants to read? You can write for teenagers forever and never put your brain in gear, but how much better it is to be read by cosmonauts and to give lectures to UNESCO. It seems to be where all the fun is!

If you want to talk about ambition, you need to talk about real ambition. Not this penny ante stuff. I don't see where the kick in that is. It baffles me.

AW: One of the things that struck me as connected between Islands and Schismatrix was the idea of cultural cycles. You use the word clades in Schismatrix and I looked it up in three dictionaries and could not find it. So what the heck are clades? And do you really think that culture moves in cycles?

BS: Cladistics is a study of clades and it's a taxonomical term. And clades, in Schismatrix, doesn't really have much to do with culture. It's got more to do with evolution. A clade is a branching-out of related daughter species from some earlier evolutionary ancestor. So one clade is the entirety of related species. There aren't any clades in Islands in the Net. Islands isn't about big Stapledonian things like human evolution. Islands is about politics and culture.

AW: You don't see them as parallel? In the sense that they both evolve, they're both evolutionary structures.

BS: It seems a far-fetched comparison. If you knew more about clades... Read a book by Freeman Dyson called Disturbing the Universe, which goes on and on about clades and human evolution, from which I cribbed many of the best ideas in Schismatrix, then you'd get a much better idea of what I was trying to get at there.

There's a great Whole Earth Review issue called "Signals" which talks about this at great length. The common social organization in eighties culture is the Net, rather than the neighborhood or the village. It's like the world's one electronic village, so anybody you can reach with a phone call is really a neighbor of yours. These people tend to accrete even though they're very distant geographically. Mere acreage doesn't count for that much anymore. And you see that come up again and again.

It's like there are new tribes, tribes that have electronic boundaries rather than physical ones or bloodlines. And it's technological but it's also tied in deeply to the way post-industrial society is organized. Toffler talks about it a lot -- de-massification he calls it. As opposed to industrial culture which tends to reduce everyone to a lower common denominator.

It's like one of those neural nets that organizes itself and then sort of falls into the proper configuration. You find that happening a lot in the eighties, that people fall into a configuration and then they all look around and say "Hey, we're a tribe." That's what happened to me.

In the seventies, I was part of the local tribe -- Turkey City people -- just because we all happened to be here and all became friends.

That had its day and now I'm tied in with people like Gibson, doing a book with him by modem. He lives hundreds and hundreds of miles from here; another country for Christ's sake. And yet he's one of my closest friends and closest collaborator -- the guy I have most in common with.

AW: How did you and Gibson get together?

BS: Oh, he wrote me a fan letter.

AW: Really?

BS: Yeah. It's always a good idea -- you see somebody whose work you admire, write him a fan letter. Authors love that shit. Sometimes they complain about it, but they even like the ones that are from people who are demented and write in crayon. About the only thing that writers don't like is getting letters from people who say things like "Dear Mr X. I read your novel about the purple people of Triton and I've talked to them, too." That sort of thing's bothersome.

I don't think that Robert Heinlein appreciated the fact that Charles Manson was one of his big fans, but other than that, it's a big kick. If you want to get in touch with people, you have to reach out. You run the risk of rejection, but that's part of it, right? What you have to do; nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Of course, Gibson knew Shirley. And I knew Shirley. And Shirley and I both knew Steve Brown, the current editor of Science Fiction Eye. It could have been any number of ways that I could have gotten in touch with Gibson and sooner or later I'm sure I would have. But as it happened, he just wrote me a note: "Dear Mr. Sterling. Liked your book."

AW: Which one was it?

BS: It was Involution Ocean. I didn't think of it as being a big deal at the time; I just said, "How nice. A fan letter," and wrote him back.

Then he started sending me manuscripts and stuff. And once he mentioned that he'd sold a story, I thought "Oh, boy. An ambitious would-be writer. Wonder if he's any good?" Then he actually sent me the manuscript of Burning Chrome and I read it and I immediately realized "Whoa! We've got a live one here!"

AW: So that's Gibson and Shirley and a few others that were in town. How did Bruce Sterling become Chairman Bruce? Reading through the first issue of SF Eye, it's amazing some of the things people say about you. Maddox just goes on and on during this interview with Gibson.

BS: I'm a "treacherous, crazed Rastafarian"? I "emit ectoplasm"? I can say why I became Chairman Bruce. The reason I got involved in this was that I began to take a deeper interest in the things we were doing. I wrote a fanzine -- I took that upon myself, to pay the postage for it and edit it and get it out to people -- which just served as the central info dump for the thinking and criticism we were doing. This was Cheap Truth. So I was "in command" of the roundtable discussions, that makes me the chairman, right? I mean, I was the one who decides, "now X speaks; now let's hear a bit from Y." And I would call people up and suggest things for them to write. "Look, I'm really interested in what you did here; can you try to explain that for us?" "How would you like to write some..."

If somebody called me up and said, "Boy, I just came across this nifty idea" or "...this great writer" I would urge them to do an article on it. I controlled the means of information in a little Net, so that made me the SysOp, the Chairman. Plus, I edited Mirrorshades, which anybody could have done, I suppose. It was obvious that sooner or later -- and probably sooner -- somebody was going to do it. And it was a choice between one of us doing it or leaving it to some genre guru who would deign to notice us.

I knew that it was going to be necessary to do it, so I appointed myself. It's not that anybody else was jockeying for the position. At the time, it didn't look like there was going to be any money associated with it. Mostly a lot of hassle and work. I did the hassle and work and it turned out to be a fairly successful collection.

But that's why I'm the Chairman.

AW: Listening to Maddox, the way he says Chairman it's like he means Chairman Mao. I sort of expect him to get up and start waving "Bruce's Little Red Book" or something.

BS: Well, you know Maddox. He's a funny guy; he doesn't take this very seriously. The real Chairman Mao, the Chinese now say that he was Hitler with a command of the worst aspects of Chinese feudalism. It's not like my chairmanship gives me any real power or control over what other writers do. I don't call up Maddox on the phone and say "Tom, write me X story." That's not my power. I'm not even John Campbell.

He was a guy who really did have dictatorial power and if he decided that psi powers were for real he could write a lunatic editorial about it in his magazine and six months later everybody in the field would be writing about psi powers just like they were a real thing. Or he could launch Dianetics. He could start pop religions in his magazine. That is what passes for real power in science fiction, and the stuff I've got is just a joke essentially.

AW: There seem to be two camps -- one camp says that cyberpunk is a marketing fad or marketing gimmick. If they're being negative about it, they claim it's all self-hype. The other camp seems to claim it's something of an aesthetic movement, some kind of high Art in paperback covers. It struck me that you have claimed it's both at the same time.

BS: Yeah? There's something peculiar about that? Why can't it be both at the same time? Art Nouveau was, right? Pre-Raphaelite art was. The pre-Raphaelites had an ideology and a marketing scheme: they used to sign everything "P.R.B." -- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were the first group who were really like what you'd call a quote movement unquote. It's just one of the things that's associated with movements.

Even the pre-Raphaelites, and this is back in the 1850's, had a little rag that was the center of their ideology. It was called The Germ. It had maybe thirty copies, something like that.

As far as the marketing aspect of it goes, people don't realize just how little writers have to do with the marketing of their own books. Take K. W. Jeter. He's made annoyed comments about cyberpunk in Interzone and so forth. But at the same time his own book, Glass Hammer, I remember coming out in the HEB grocery down the street here: "The Cyberpunk Masterpiece." That was the first time I'd thought things had gone too far. Not that it was Jeter, but that cyberpunk was being sold by the HEB.

People are going to call our work cyberpunk until the word ceases to sell copies! I know that Arbor House is going to call Islands in the Net cyberpunk, but I don't really know whether it is or not. Obviously it's a movement novel; it is written with an ideological foundation. I think that it's a clear progression from my other work, but it's not written with many of the tag lines that people associate with cyberpunk; it's not Chandleresque, it's not film noir. The people in it aren't criminals or lowlifes, they're sort of well- meaning middle-class liberals more than anything else. So who's to say?

I think it's a science fiction novel. I'm not going to go out of my way to say "Boy. I write this sub-genre called cyberpunk and that's just what I do, man" because it's not what I do. I write all kinds of stuff. I can't help that. About all I can do is not let it get in my face. I'm going to do what I want.

AW: What criteria do you use when you pick up a piece of science fiction to say this is more or less cyberpunk?

BS: I don't really do it much any more. I'm not really interested in the sort of stuff we were writing in '83 and '84. If I pick up a story and read it and it's got a character in it who's a hustler like Case in Neuromancer and it's got a lot of cybernetic buzzwords in it and maybe there's a character who's a mercenary who's dressed in black leather and has razors under her fingernails, then I identify that as very Mirrorshades. But I don't write that anymore and I'm not particularly interested in reading it.

I would read it with glee if it were done as well as Gibson did it, but I've never seen anyone do it as well as Gibson does it. It already looks a little dated. They don't realize that the thing about Neuromancer that made it what it was was that it really just took a big chunk out of what made 1982 1982. Neuromancer is about the world and derivative science fiction is about other kinds of science fiction. And Neuromancer's not really about science fiction; Neuromancer is about the late twentieth century and the technological milieu.

If I see something that just has key images from cyberpunk, that just plays pulp writing games with them, that's of no interest to me.

Besides, who's to say? Here's Islands, right? It's going to be marketed as a cyberpunk book. Suppose it becomes a real big book. Suppose it sells a lot. Then people are going to read this, many who've never read cyberpunk before, and they're going to think, "Oh. So this is cyberpunk. Yes, political, set in the early twenty-first century. It's about international law and certain concerns and family relationships" and all the things that Islands is about. And who's to say nay? Who's going to come and say, "Oh, no. This isn't cyberpunk?" It's got the word here on it.

I can see if something's good and something's not. That's the criterion I put on things. There are certain things that the introduction to Mirrorshades talks about which I think are principles that I think make science fiction good science fiction. It's got visionary intensity and carries extrapolation into the fabric of daily life. It's detailed and intricate. There's a list of five catchwords in there which apply to a great many science fiction books. And when I see that I think, "Wow! That's great!"

It's not the business of cyberpunks, or even myself, to go out and set boundaries; we're in the business of exploding boundaries. We're interested in InterZones, not in thermos bottles -- isolated things, ghettos. That doesn't do anything for us. That's not where the action is.

That's why I was excited to go to Japan and talk to their people. They see it as a different thing over there and, I think, a more accurate thing. In Tokyo, cyberpunk is an eighties pop culture entity. It's not something that happens within science fiction. They don't worry "Is Piers Anthony cyberpunk?" It doesn't occur to them to ask that question. They can see it happening around them because for them, Tokyo is part of the Sprawl. They recognize it immediately as something that speaks to them, that has truth in it. It deals with their milieu. It's not writing about science fiction, it's writing about what is happening there.

To me, that's the quill. That's what's worth pursuing. It doesn't do any good to write work which is more and more theoretically cyberpunk. There's nothing to be gained by that. It would be a betrayal of everything the movement represented. It would be a closing of your eyes and a stopping up of your ears and a turning inward and we just don't do that; there's just no point.

AW: There's a sort of technology transfer going on here. You see Gibson's stuff in the manuscripts he sends you and in Cheap Truth and stuff like that. But it takes two years for that thing to get published; it comes out it hardback; not a lot of people read it; it takes another year or two to come out in paperback. Finally, six years down the road it really has an impact. Your perspective is six years ahead of the reading public.

BS: Yeah, but I'm talking long term. I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow. I've been writing for ten years. It's why I say, again and again, look ten years down the road. Ten years down the road the big four, the gerontocrats of science fiction, are all going to be dead or in old age homes. It's just a fact.

Look at Locus. Look in any issue of Locus now and you'll see that the obituary section is huge. A generation is dying, and somebody's going to replace those people or science fiction is going to cease to exist as an entity, which I think would be a tragedy because it's needed now more than it every was. And where are the people to step in? I look around at my contemporaries and I know who's going to step in. Unless they're run over by trucks or something, there's nothing that can stop these people; they're the best.

AW: Beyond the obvious names, who do you think are the names that we should be watching?

BS: Well, Shepard is a very great writer. He's possessed of enormous talent. I think he'll go far if he wants to go far. I mean, he could always quit and become a Nantucket whaler. Who's to say? But guys like him just don't come along very often.

Blaylock is a writer of enormous gifts. He has the real science fiction quill, that guy. He dreams SF in his sleep. You just don't get that combination very often: someone who can really turn a phrase, who can really see, and yet whose vision is very skewed at the same time.

Science fiction writers walk a tightrope. You have to be crazed enough to have the mental horsepower to move people, but you can't be so fucked up that you're unable to write English. Every once in a while a guy comes along who's really gifted, who has a knockout punch with each fist, and I think Blaylock is there. Every book of his I've seen gets stronger.

And then there are the people in Mirrorshades. I think Greg Bear is a writer of very great ability. And he doesn't care to be called a cyberpunk, so I'm not going to call him one; I don't care. He obviously has the gift; you just see it in his work. Greg Bear doesn't write unworthy things. He works.

I think that there are many writers present in science fiction who are going to have a lot more influence than one might think. Gardner Dozois is becoming step by step a very powerful editor. He may end up being the most powerful editor the field has had since Campbell. No one's stopping in the middle to say "Oh, look at Dozois taking over the field and shaping it into his own image."

One reason for this lack of notice is that Dozois, unlike Campbell, doesn't write crazed stupid editorials about Dean drives and how black people are inferior. If you look, what's happened with Isaac Asimov's -- they gained nine Nebula nominations this year -- that's never happened before. And if you can see the people who are published in Asimov's, who are the creme de la creme, really, you can see that Dozois has got his hands on the rudder and the ailerons there. The man is setting the pace. I think he's an editor whose influence is going to be great.

I like John Kessel a lot. He doesn't write very often -- he's not prolific. I don't like all of his work by any means, but I think he's somebody who understands what's going on in science fiction. He thinks about things. He's got an influence because he runs Sycamore Hill, the writers' conference in North Carolina. As a theorist, his work goes deeper than appearances.

I expect to see -- any minute now -- the group of people who are going to remove from us the stigma of being Young Writers. The generation that was born in the 1960's is going to come along very soon. They're not very visible yet, but the cyberpunks certainly weren't visible until the eighties and we're mostly the generation born in the late forties and early fifties.

People call me a young writer, but I'm 34 years old; that's not young. Ian MacDonald is young; he's 26. I think he's a writer of great promise. It's hard to say; he's only written one novel, got one short-story collection out. But his work is very visionary and intense.

I think that careers of science fiction writers tend to follow a certain slope. A guy who's going to end up being a really powerful and influential science fiction writer usually starts out writing books which are very colorful but very disorganized. It takes quite a while to learn a sense of craft and discipline. When you're young and energetic, with your head full of visions, you have a hard time controlling it. But unless you've got that spark at the beginning, you're never really going to make anything of yourself. This is the "rough diamond" effect, right? And I see that in Ian MacDonald, so I have high hopes for him. And not least because he's British and they really need some good young writers over there.

I hope to see some good stuff out of Japan. The Japanese are now the second-largest science fiction publishers in the world. The thing that's scary is that they know everything about us. They know the most obscure pop bands in Athens, Georgia, and we know nothing about them. It's all one way, like they're behind one-way glass over there. They know things about us we don't know about ourselves, like American marketing. It's a weird thing, but maybe that will be broached; maybe we'll see some good Japanese science fiction. You can only hope.

I like Karen Joy Fowler a lot, too. And I like Gwyneth Jones. I think they could go far. I think Karen Fowler's very talented. She's very gifted; she's like the "big gun" of humanism as far as I'm concerned. She writes a kind of fiction that, in many ways is my bete noir. She does things that I ought to really loathe. I have every ideological reason to hate them and yet I really like them, and I think that's a sign of a great gift.

Who's to say what's to become of science fiction? It shows every sign of going on and on, but things could change in a hurry -- one big economic depression or a sudden breakdown in literary barriers. You sort of see more and more science fiction encroachment on the mainstream and it could happen.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 4)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 4

Scattered Gold

Charles de Lint

Installment #4:
In which we discover that
the aliens are already among us

The Sadness of Witches Janice Elliott [****] Hodder & Stoughton, 1987; 192pp; Cdn$25.95; 0-340-41657-2

Communion: A True Story
Whitley Streiber
[**+]
Avon, February 1988; 306pp; $4.95;
0-380-700388-2

Unassigned Territory
Kem Nunn
[****]
Delacorte Press, 1987; 305pp; 0-385-29536-7

Second Sight
Mary Tannen
[*****]
Knopf, 1987; 259pp; $16.95; 0-394-56204-6

Red Prophet
Orson Scott Card
[****+]
TOR, February, 1988; $17.95; 0-312-93043-7

Barking Dogs
Terence M. Green
[***+]
St. Martin's, 1988; 214pp; $15.95;
0-312-01424-4

A Fall of Princes
Judith Tarr
[***+]
TOR, April, 1988; 448pp; $18.95; 0-312-93063-1

Waiting for the Galactic Bus
Parke Godwin
[****]
Foundation, May, 1988; 229pp; $17.95; 0-385-24635-8

The Silver Glove
Suzy McKee Charnas
[***]
Bantam, March 1988; 162pp; $13.95
0-553-05470-8

Crazy Time Kate Wilhelm [***+] St. Martin's Press, March 1988; 248pp; $16.95; 0-312-01411-2

Velocities Boxed Set
edited by Andrew Joron
[****]
Ocean View Books, 1988; 290pp; $12.95
Set of five booklets/boxed; 0-938075-03-9

The Silicon Mage
Barbara Hambly
[***]
Del Rey, April 1988; 338pp; $3.95; 0-345-33763-8

The Nightingale
Kara Dalkey
[*****]
Ace, May 1988; 221pp; $16.95; 0-441-57973-6

Or maybe not. It all depends on whether or not you take Whitley Streiber's latest book as fiction or fact, but that's something you'll have to decide for yourselves.

In the meantime, there's lots to look at this time around, so without a lengthy preamble, let's get straight to the books.

The Sadness of Witches

For the reader unafraid of occasionally wandering afield from our venerable genre, who considers story, style and strength of characterization above genre labels, who is willing to follow Mystery in his or her fantasy reading rather than the simple retelling of yet one more magical quest of epic and heroic proportions, I offer the following slim volume: Janice Elliott's The Sadness of Witches.

I know little of the author beyond what the dustwrapper has to offer. What made me pick up the book from the mass of thrillers and the like with which it was surrounded on the bookstore's new releases shelf was it's intriguing title and the reproduction of William Blake's "Hecate" on the front cover. And though I judged a book by the cover, in this instance, I wasn't for a moment disappointed.

The plot is simply put. To quote the dustwrapper, Walter Waterman gives up his efforts to save the earth and settles with his wife Molly in a coast guard cottage on a Cornish cliff, high above the steep dark village of Poltreth.

Across the harbour a witch watches.

The story goes on to relate Walter's involvement with the witch, introducing other odd residents of the village and the Waterman family, and generally meanders about in a most engaging style that combines a sense of whimsical description with mysterious goings on. The interrelationship between the characters is, as it is in real life, both befogging and illuminating, the former because all people are a mixture of good and bad impulses and sometimes it's difficult to judge a person because we often don't know which impulse is in ascendance can vary, and the latter because Elliott has a true gift for getting right to the heart of her characters and revealing them to us in a few quick strokes. The brooding Cornish coast becomes a character in its own right and Elliott's handling of her fantasy element is so matter-of-fact that many readers would be hard put to realize they're reading a fantasy novel in the first place....

Ah, but that's the kick, isn't it? In our field, we say fantasy novel and it immediately conjures up Tolkienesque imagery, or Conan clones, or...but you get the idea. It makes for easier marketing and it helps the reader to know exactly what kind of a book they're getting. Oh, certainly books slip by -- as Ace did with Jonathan Carroll's Land of Laughs, say, or Doubleday with Evelyn E. Smith's The Copy Shop -- but mostly we know what we're getting and prefer it that way. I can be as guilty of that as the next person.

But sometimes...sometimes we miss out on wonders. Because we're looking for another one just like the last one we enjoyed and don't want to try something different. Because that wonder is published outside the genre and we're busily wearing our blinkers and can't see it for looking.

Elliott's novel has everything a good book should have -- engaging characters, deft style and a plot that matters (not because there are worlds to be saved or dragons to be slain, but because we care about the characters, so we care what happens to them). It's also a damn fine fantasy and I hope a few genre readers out there will give it a try.

Communion

When this book first appeared in hardcover from Macmillan last year, I wrote a brief review of it for my local newspaper that ran:

"Communion is an account of the author's own possible experiences with mysterious 'visitors' -- possibly extraterrestrials, possibly from an alternate reality. Although intriguing, and certainly related with a sense of initial skepticism upon the author's part, the exhaustive seeking after proof becomes quickly boring and the premise a bit too much to swallow.

"At the hardcover price, interested readers are better off waiting for the paperback, or following similar, if not quite so competently told, stories in the supermarket tabloids."

Well, it's now out in paperback -- arriving in my post box along with a thick sheaf of press clippings, glossy flyers and a button with a picture of the "alien" from the cover and the words "WE ARE HERE" emblazoned above its head -- and I wonder....

No. I don't believe Whitley Streiber was actually taken away by little people to some spaceship or hidden laboratory. But ever since I read the book last year, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I keep finding myself wondering: Well, what if it did happen? What if he is telling the truth?

Preposterous, yes. But that "what if" is a part of the whole speculative process that has us writing and reading sf/fantasy/horror...all those fictions that take a step beyond the here and now to explore...what if.

I've long admired Streiber's work. The Wolfen and The Hunger were easily two of the most original horror novels to come along in years -- each of them reworking tired old themes in such a way that they acquired whole new freshness. His The Night Church was a disappointment, but he more than made up for it with his subsequent books like War Day and Nature's End, realistic speculations on the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange and the dissolution of the environment, respectively.

But the Streiber of late has been giving us ever stranger material. His novelette "Pain" in Cutting Edge (Doubleday, 1986) speaks of enlightenment through torment. Catmagic, a contemporary fantasy utilizing pagan beliefs as its magical base, was written with collaborator Jonathon Barry, "a practicing witch" who turned out to be a pseudonym of Streiber's. And now Communion -- a "true story" in which Streiber expounds on how ETs or elves are messing up his life.

What are we to make of it all?

On the one hand, it's extremely easy to laugh off -- and write the kind of review I initially did for the hardcover edition. On the other hand...what if all of this really did happen to Streiber -- just as he's described it in Communion? Mightn't that explain the recent strange turns that his fiction has taken?

Not that I believe it for a moment.

But what if...?

Unassigned Territory

Like Nunn's first novel, Tapping the Source (Delacorte, 1984), Unassigned Territory has its roots in the desert. Obadiah Wheeler, a member of a fundamentalist faith the Friends, is sent into Nye County, Nevada, where there are hardly enough people, little say Friends, to form a congregation. The purpose of the trip is to bring an "assigned territory" -- an area not belonging to a particular congregation of Friends -- into the folds of the faith.

But for Wheeler the trip is more like a Biblical forty days and forty nights in the wilderness -- a test of his faith which he loses on his first day out when he meets Delandra Hummer, becomes her lover, helps her steal an artifact known as the Mystery of the Mojave from her brother's museum, and flees with her into the desert.

What follows is a novel that never clearly sits in any particular genre. There are moments of fantasy -- never quite overt, but present all the same; side trips detailing UFOlogy, H.P. Lovecraft's influences, and other strange mock-sciences and oddities; a sense of a coming of age, as well as mid-life crises; hardboiled aspects....

Pulling it all together is Nunn's prose -- by turns tough and lean, and again lyric and mysterious. His characters are fully realized from the moment they hit the page, whether it's Wheeler and Delandra, or the church elder Harlan Low who is pursuing Wheeler, Delandra's brother Rex pursuing the stolen Mystery and the rest of the cast of quirky, almost caricatured desert dwellers and sleazy cultists.

But while the novel straddles genres, the clarity of its purpose is in no way dimmed: We learn, as much as can be learned from the written page, of the Mojave desert, its mysteries and foibles, its foolishnesses and wisdoms -- all as they are embodied in that bleak landscape, yes, but more as they are reflected in the people who have chosen to live in, or pass through, the desert's boundaries.

In that sense, the title "unassigned territory" takes on more than the simple meaning it has in the Friends' fundamentalist faith, referring as well to some mysterious proving ground that lies outside the regular confines of space and time. A place that can only be entered by those willing to risk all.

In other words, Kem Nunn's second novel is well worth the time spent traveling its pages.

Second Sight

Although it's billed as her first novel, Second Sight is actually Mary Tannen's fourth book. The other three were for children and therefore, considering the short shrift that YA books usually receive, aren't to be thought of as "real" books, one can only assume. But we're not here to talk about the inequalities of literary perception, but rather to discuss Tannen's new novel.

And what a book it is.

Set in a barrio in the worn-out mill town of Wallingford, New Jersey (just twenty minutes from New York City) it follows the descendants of two families who were once the town's most important movers and shakers: the Appleyards and the Birds.

The Appleyards are represented by the last of the line, Will, who arrives ostensibly to write a history of the town for his dissertation. It's not long before he realizes that his true reason for coming is to learn the truth behind the Appleyard curse -- the men of his family are doomed to have accidents while riding horses. The curse originated in Wallingford. Will is a simple soul, an Everyman, but he's also a catalyst for much that happens in Wallingford after his arrival.

The Birds, on the other hand, are represented by any number of wonderfully quirky characters. There's Delia who tells fortunes under the name of Destiny Ortega; her son Lazaro, a tough street kid; her mother Lavinia, who lives alone in a castle-like house, tending orchids and waiting for her husband to come home after a fifteen year absence; the husband, Delia's father Nestor, a successful business who's suddenly in financial trouble; the sister Cass, who lives in California, but makes periodic visits back home, criticizing everything and everyone.

The other characters are all gems as well, particularly a film director who thinks in terms of film as he lives his life and the mysterious Senora, a kind of voodoo priestess who has magical plans for her grandson Lazaro -- yes, she's related to the Birds as well, because her son married Delia. Tannen has a gift for bringing her people to life, in quick easy strokes. And while their initial appearances might leave the reader puzzled as to their presence in the novel, by the time we get to the end of our journey, it all makes a certain sense -- not necessarily a tidy one, but sense all the same.

Tannen's prose is at once lyric and streetwise. She writes in the present tense, but rather than it being a literary affectation, it results in a completely natural sound. Her plotting grows out of the characters, rather than the straightforward unfolding of events one comes to expect in a novel, fantasy or otherwise.

As for the fantasy element, the "magic", as it were, Second Sight is one of those books in which the presence of the fantastic isn't so much on stage, as waiting in the wings, on the edges of our perception. It's not surrealism, because, in the end, it all does makes sense, but nor is it merely high fantasy transposed to a contemporary setting, antique costumes and baggage exchanged for modern gear.

Like the plot, like every part of the book, the magic is tied up in the characters. The entire novel rests on their shoulders and in doing so, Tannen has made a wise choice, for she illuminates both human and non-magical truths with her characters that ring with authenticity and enchantment.

While it's a difficult book to explain -- rather like dissecting your pet dog to find out what it is about him that you like -- Second Sight is a very easy book to recommend.

Seventh Son

Seventh Son, the first of the projected six volume "Tales of Alvin Maker" series, introduced us to the 1800's of an alternate America where magic works, mostly through the various "knacks" that people have -- second sight, dowsing, charms and hexes, etc. It used the Matter of America -- Native beliefs, folklore and magic, the Ohio frontier -- in a proper fashion, something that, at least this reader, has long been waiting for someone to do.

In Red Prophet, Alvin is now ten-years-old and leaving his home in the company of his brother Measure to become an apprentice to a blacksmith. They're captured by Indians and it looks like it's certain death for the pair of them -- but wait a minute. That part of the story doesn't start up until 120 pages into the book.

Before that we're introduced to a whole new set of characters, the most important being two Indians -- Tenskwa-Tawa, who comes to be known as the Prophet, and his brother Ta- Kumsaw. The Prophet sees the possibility of a peaceful settling of the growing unrest between whites and Native People, but Ta-Kumsaw means to unite the various Indian tribes and drive the white man from their land.

So when Alvin and his brother are captured, it's into this conflict that they become pivotal players. The plot grows more complex with the new characters: whites willing to kill their own children -- making it seem as though they were slain by Indians to escalate the coming war; north in Canada, a French commander plotting against his king; a mysterious weaver of fates, hidden in a secret valley....

What Card has done is create a fascinating alternative to what we know of America's history, peopling it with believable characters, and threading the whole together with a riveting plot. It's interesting that, again, many of the antagonists are not so much evil, as simply well-intentioned, but misguided. Like any of the conflicts in the real world -- Northern Ireland, the Middle East. etc. -- there are no easy answers. Not any more. Once, long ago, if things had been done differently, we could have avoided the present situations. But that opportunity's lost and what must be dealt with is what's at hand. Not might have beens.

The fantastical element of Red Prophet is important to the book and ably handled, but I found the characters -- their choices, mistakes, sacrifices and glories -- far more intriguing. Put the two together, and we're left with a fine second installment to this ongoing series.

Barking Dogs

Mitch Helwig is a Toronto cop in the year 1999 and he's just recently lost his partner. There are no clues as to who killed him -- it was just a matter of his being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- but Helwig refuses to let it rest at that. He embarks on a personal crusade against crime in his off-hours, no longer arresting criminals, but executing them on the spot.

Put like that, Toronto author Terence M. Green's first novel Barking Dogs sounds like any of a dozen film and book clones along the lines of Brian Garfield's Death Wish or the "Dirty Harry" movies. And perhaps that's why the artist or art director decided to model the cover character after Clint Eastwood. But there's more going on here than vigilante fantasies.

Barking Dogs is also a science fiction novel. There's not a whole lot of exotic gadgetry in the first half or so of the book, but there is the one implement that lies at the heart of it all: a Barking Dog. It's a device that allows its bearer to tell if someone's telling the truth or not -- an absolutely infallible lie detector that can be secreted on one's person without anyone being aware of its presence.

There is also some interesting characterization explored along the way: Helwig himself; his police chief who's on the verge of retirement and just wants to do something meaningful before he goes; his wife who's starting to look beyond their marriage for fulfillment. These are all handled sensitively and with great care.

Where the book falters is in its antagonists and the flashback sequences between Helwig and his partner. The Archangel, a crime lord, is simply too one-dimensional, even given the number of pages in which we see things from his viewpoint. He could have been far more intriguing, especially given the raw material with which Green is working. As for those flashback sequences, while they do show the closeness of Helwig's relationship with his partner, the bantering and bonhomie between the two goes on for far too long. It reads like padding.

Yet the book is still well worth reading. There are surprises in the plot, the prose is clean, and the other characterization -- especially that of Helwig himself, is superb.

A Fall of Princes

The fact that ninety percent of the high fantasy coming out today is of a similar tiresome sameness is so true that just talking about it makes me feel bored. Happily, there's still that ten percent of the Good Stuff to look for and, of that ten percent, a new book by Judith Tarr is something I always look forward to reading.

A Fall of Princes concludes her three-volume Avaryan Rising sequence set in the kingdoms of northern Han-Ianon and southern Han-Gilen. In The Hall of the Mountain King we were introduced to the rival princes of Han-Ianon: Moranden, who has given his allegiance to the Moon; and Mirain, raised in Han-Gilen and the son of the Son, born of an immaculate conception. The story was told from the viewpoint of Mirain's reluctant squire, Vadin, and ended with Mirain defeating Moranden and taking the throne.

But the Moon's influence is not so easily combated. In The Lady of Han-Gilen we learned that She was making a new threat against Mirain, appearing in the form of his old enemy, a Moon priestess known as the Exile. The viewpoint character in this second book was Eilian, a princess of Han-Gilen, who had promised herself to Mirain and proved to be another reluctant participant in the new struggle.

The third and concluding volume again deals with two princes: Sarevan, the son of Mirain and Eilian; and Hirel, son of the Southern Emperor with whom Sarevan's father has been at war for as long as he has held his throne, although at the time of the book's opening a ceasefire of sorts has been in effect for a number of years. The princes make fascinating foils for each other, almost like personifications of the left brain/right brain theory as they interact.

Like the first two books, the third volume can stand on its own, though naturally, when they're put together, they tell one longer story. It's a traditional high fantasy as well, with the right amounts of magic and intrigue, journeying about and wonders, told in a comfortable style that Tarr makes her own, even if her plots don't stretch too far from the genre's perimeters. Except....

Well, I don't want to give anything away, but in the midst of the war between the two empires, amongst the quests and gradual unfolding philosophy that Dark and Light need each other to survive, Tarr manages to pull off such a surprise that it sets the entire book on its ear. Wonderfully so. And no, I'm not going to tell you what it is. Go read the book.

I doubt you'll be disappointed. The clarity of Tarr's prose and the warmth with which she regards her characters -- a warmth that's easily conveyed to the reader -- makes her writing a delight to read. And while I've said it before, it bears repeating: there are few who do this kind of book better than Judith Tarr.

Waiting for the Galactic Bus

I love an author who isn't afraid to take chances, who doesn't allow him or herself to be bound to either one genre or previous successes, but rather is willing to grow with each subsequent book, to constantly explore new ground.

Parke Godwin's a good example of this kind of an author.

Right, I can hear some of you say. Wasn't he responsible for yet another Arthurian trilogy? Well, yes. But even there he took chances. Arthur as the viewpoint character. What happened to Guenevere after Arthur's death. An exploration of religion through the eyes of a saint and a lost race of people that legend names faerie.

He did all that. And then he moved on again. To the glorious success (at least in literary terms) of A Truce With Time which was as far from his previous work in terms of subject matter as Robert E. Howard was from Tolstoy. And now this.

Waiting for the Galactic Bus, simply put, is a black comedy.

Five million years ago, two aliens, stranded on our world, create the human race. Eventually, as the twentieth century draws to a close and they see yet another negative catalyst (a la Hitler, etc.) about to rise and plunge the world into a new age of darkness, they decide to do something about it. They take the parents-to-be of this anti-avatar -- one Roy Stride, a racist and fascist, and one Charity Stovall, who has a great deal of potential, only no chance to use it -- and run them through a gauntlet that would have done James Branch Cabell proud.

The simple lesson at the heart of this book is that you shouldn't yearn too strongly for something, because you just might get it and discover that it's not at all what you wanted. Each of these two major characters confronts just that situation -- in a place that bears no resemblance to Heaven or Hell, but is considered to be one or the other by many, depending on their viewpoint. What happens after that? Read the book.

Let me just say that Godwin's never been in finer form. His dialogue crackles; his humor isn't the slapstick from TV sitcoms, but a true humor based in part upon the human condition (listen if we can't laugh at ourselves....) and all the stronger, and yes, more poignant, for that; and most importantly he doesn't take any easy ways out. The outcome of the book is based upon the characters and the characters remain true to themselves throughout.

I said earlier that this book would have made Cabell proud, and I mean that, in only the best sense. Godwin remains his own writer, but he's the first to come so close to something like Cabell's Jurgen -- a writer I would have love to still be alive today and writing about contemporary situations -- yet still retain both a modern sensibility and his own voice. For that he deserves a hearty bravo.

The Silver Glove

Fourteen-year-old Valentine Marsh is back in Suzy McKee Charnas' new novel, The Silver Glove, and once again she's caught up in the mysterious magic otherworld that runs side by side with that of the more mundane New York City in which she lives.

This time an evil sorcerer is after her grandmother. He's also collecting the souls of street people with which he's going to resurrect dead warriors in a battle on a far-off world. He's even got Val's mother under his sway and all that stands against him is Val, who knows next to nothing about magic, except that it's real and it can hurt you, and her grandmother who might be suffering from Alzheimer's.

I liked the first book in this series, The Bronze King (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), and I like this one as well. Charnas' young heroine has a likable voice in her first person narrative and there are wonderful touches throughout as magic wrecks mayhem using everyday items as both talismans (the silver glove of the title) and dangers (stalking bicycles, killer kites).

It's a quick read, but a most entertaining one.

Crazy Time

When, in the opening pages of Kate Wilhelm's Crazy Time, a computer hacker playing a war game with a government computer accidentally triggers a test laser, "Corky" Corcoran is literally blown to pieces. Or rather, his physical and mental being are broken down into their smallest components and spread across the universe.

With an effort, Corky can temporarily bring himself back together again -- usually by focusing on psychologist Lauren Steele who was the last person he saw before the accident. Unfortunately his ethereal presence makes Lauren think she's losing her mind. And it makes a leftover paranoid General from the Cold War, one "Trigger Happy" Musselman, believe that the pair are actually "commies" trying to subvert America's greatness with some dirty plot that he basically makes up as he goes along. (Although, I should add, that Musselman believes in it all wholeheartedly.)

How this all works out makes for one of Kate Wilhelm's most entertaining books to date. It has the feel of Thorne Smith to it, not to mention Gary Grant comedies like Bringing up Baby, but retains a contemporary feel for all it's old-fashioned sense of fun. The point of view tends to shift around a lot -- often within a scene, which can be irritating -- but that's a small carp when one takes the whole lighthearted romp into account.

Go out and have some fun with this one.

Velocities

I met you long ago, but you wouldn't have known, for you
weren't there. Only your ghost.

The ghost that slid out of one of your books and met me in a
train station long abandoned....

As the above quote that leads into Jack Dann's "Night Meetings" can attest, speculative poetry is still alive and well -- at least it is in the pages of the occasional poetry journal, Velocities.

The magazine has had a run of only five issues -- from 1982 when the first issue appeared, to the most recent issue out this year -- but each issue has had enough good material in it to make it required reading for sf readers who want a fully-rounded view of the genre. Naturally the older issues are out of print, but Ocean View Books has now collected them together in an attractive package (that admittedly gets more professional in appearance with each subsequent issue).

What do you get? What's going on here?

Some of the names will be familiar -- Robert Frazier, Joe Haldeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Steve Resnic Tem, Suzette Haden Elgin -- others not, but there's something happening in these pages, something thought-provoking, at times irritating, at times lyrical, always fascinating -- whether it's the subtly of Dann's ghost stepping from the pages of a book, the hard science voice that can be found in Bruce Boston's "A Feast for the Vanquished" ("Warring buggers all/in the war-gone streets,/the night condenses/on their sticky gear....") or the juxtapositioning of sheer lyricism with cold facts in Gene Van Troyer's "The Whole Message" (compare lines like "the way she looked at things;/these particles of her life/are strewn/like winter stars/across the walls...." with "Holograms are in every way/like the objects they represent....").

You won't like everything you find collected in this boxed collection of Velocities , but I'd be very surprised if you didn't find enough to make you feel the money you paid for them was well-spent. If your local store doesn't carry the boxed set, write to: Ocean View Books, Box 4148, Mountain View, CA 94040 and tell them OtherRealms sent you.

The Silicon Mage

Barbara Hambly's The Silicon Mage brings back computer programmer Joanna Sheraton from the first book of the duology, The Silent Tower. This time Joanna must rescue the mage Antryg Windrose from the Silent Tower -- an impossible task -- and then with Windrose's help, try to defeat the Dark Mage Surakin who has combined his world's magic with computer technology from our world to create a computer that will feed on the life force of both worlds.

What's that? Did I hear someone say that that's pretty well the plot of the first book as well?

I'm afraid that's right. Certainly the incidents are different, but the basic thrust of the storyline, the sections with Joanna, Antryg and the warrior Caris crossing the otherworldly landscape on their impossible quest.... It's hard to deny the sameness in both volumes that's especially noticeable in the first hundred pages or so of book two.

But -- you knew there'd be a but, didn't you? -- Hambly does remain a very entertaining writer and while I wouldn't recommend you read the two books of this duology too closely together, they're still quite enjoyable. Hambly has a real gift for characterization -- especially bringing stereotypical high fantasy archetypes such as her mage Antryg vividly to quirky life -- so much so that her characters are always a treat, and her prose carries the story along in the best page-turning "what happens next" fashion.

I had fun with this, and I don't doubt you will too, but I do wish the plot had not seemed so familiar.

The Nightingale

The third book in the Ace Fairy Tales series -- an ongoing series of fantasy novels retelling classic tales that's been edited by Terri Windling -- sports a gorgeous cover by series-designer, Tom Canty. But good as that cover is, it doesn't hold a candle to what's inside the book.

I might as well admit it straight away: I'm going to be blathering about this one, just trying to find the words to describe how much I enjoyed it.

Kara Dalkey's contribution to the series is Uguisu: The Nightingale. She's taken the classic Hans Christian Anderson story and recast it so that it's set in Japan now, rather than China, and the nightingale is a young woman named Uguisu who plays the flute. But recast though the elements that make up the story have been, Dalkey hasn't changed the heart of the story, nor in fact the events or the order in which they take place. They simply have new faces to show us.

But what faces they are. Through prose that is lyric with a sense of old Japan, yet thoroughly approachable to a modern viewpoint, Dalkey has brought the courtly world of Japan's Heian period vividly to life. The intrigues are there, the courtly exchanges of poetry, the gods and goddesses. Her characters are both fairy tale archetypes and living, breathing people. And through it all, underpinning every part of the storyline at the same time as it rises effortlessly above to point the way the words must go, is that old classic fairy tale; happily unchanged, yet thoroughly transposed.

"The Nightingale" was always one of my favorite fairy tales when I was a child -- right up there with "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Seven Swans" and the "Jack" tales -- and I'll admit to having been nervous at how a retelling of it would turn out. I shouldn't have been. With the grace and clarity of a haiku, Dalkey spins the words out from her mind to book page to our minds in a manner that comes very close to matching the impact of the original story upon which her novel's based. And if you love that original story as much, you'll know that's high praise indeed.

Look, I said I was going to blather. Fair warning and all that. But I was utterly charmed by this tale and its telling, and I think you will be too.

We're out of room again. Next time we'll look at David J. Skal's Antibodies, some of John Shirley's recent work, a new novel by Eric Van Lustbader and...but, no. Let's leave a few surprises.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 5)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 5

Adulthood Rites

Octavia Butler

Warner Books, 277pp, $16.95
0-446-51422-5
Reviewed by Neal Wilgus

Ideally, each book of a trilogy or series should stand on its own with a minimal knowledge of the earlier titles necessary for understanding. In today's hectic rush to publish as much science fiction and fantasy as possible, this simple principle is pretty much ignored and it's not unusual for later volumes in a series to pick up where the last one left off with little or no explanation of what has gone before -- like a magazine serial without the synopsis. Octavia Butler's Adulthood Rites is a sequel to Dawn, the first in the Xenogenesis trilogy, and it suffers a bit from having no synopsis to clue readers in on just what the hell is going on.

Even a glossary would help, because if you don't know what a string of alien terms mean you're in trouble. From the text it's not too difficult to figure out that Oankali is the name of a race of aliens who have come to dominate the future of the human race, that ooloi are a third sex in the Oankali's complicated way of reproduction, that Chkahichdahk is the sort of mother ship orbiting Earth to which the Oankali return from time to time. But what the terms Akjai, Dinso and Toaht refer to remain hazy, although they obviously have something to do with the interbreeding of alien races which took place, no doubt, in Dawn.

those gripes aside, Adulthood Rites is often gripping reading, because the them of interbreeding -- sex with the aliens -- is what the Xenogenesis series is all about and Octavia butler has used her fertile imaginations to take us around a bend that is largely unexpected. The protagonist of the story is Akin, a construct born of a human mother and Oankali father/ooloi -- a prototype of what's to come for the human race when it has merged genetically with the Oankali for better or worse. Akin is superficially human looking for most of the book, with only his gray, tentatcle-like tongue betraying his otherness -- until, near the end, his metamorphosis changes him into something completely different.

Meanwhile, the rest of the human race is in dire straights as a result of what happened in Dawn. Apparently, the Oankali arrived just after a world war which destroyed civilization and would have wiped out the human race if the Oankali hadn't been in the nick of time -- collecting survivors of the war and putting them in deep freeze until the situation had stabilized. When the humans were awakened, they were given the choice of cooperating with the Oankali and evolving a new race of beings, or returning to a primitive Earth with a new found longevity but without the ability to reproduce.

This is the world into which Akin is born and it's not long before he's kidnapped by the Resisters, the sullen and hostile natives who are frustrated with their pointless longevity and desperate for children to give their lives meaning. Akin, outwardly human, but with that alien-betraying gray tongue and startling intelligence for a mere baby, lives for his formative years among these desperate characters and is thus deprived of the opportunity to bond with his own human/Oankali siblings who communicate on a genetic level and inch eagerly toward metamorphosis. When he's finally returned to the Oankali community of Lo, and then taken up to the living spaceship that is Chkahichdahk, Akin has become the spokesman for the Resisters and makes a case for returning fertility to the humans and establishing a new home for them on the chilly surface of a terraformed Mars.

In the final section of the book Akin returns to find that his old resister acquaintances have become even more bitter and violent, and when he attempts to sell them the idea of moving to Mars as a way out of their dilemma some of them turn upon him and his allies. At this point Akin begins his long-awaited metamorphosis from almost-human to nearly-Oankali and is totally dependent on his few human friends in the interim. There is an attack against them, an escape and a last minute cliff hanger that leaves the middle volume of this trilogy unsatisfying if you're old fashioned enough to expect the book to stand alone on it's won.

Adulthood Rites incorporates some bold and original ideas and is sure to have a powerful influence on science fiction dealing with genetics and bioengineering. Akin's unique experiences and his inevitable movement towards his own metamorphosis gives the story a drive that will keep you reading long after you might otherwise have put a book aside. Starting in the middle of the trilogy, as I did, is not recommended, but having completed Adulthood Rites I'm looking forward to reading the Dawn that came before -- and the concluding volume that is yet to come.

Behind Closed Doors at
Resurrection, Inc.

Kevin J. Anderson

It was my second sale, a 10,000-word novelette called "Deja Vu," accepted by a very- limited-circulation mimeographed magazine called Amazing Adventures. I received $3.00 and two copies of the magazine (retail value 75"). The acceptance letter read "Great story. We'd like to use it as the feature story for issue #4. Honestly, it's one of the best stories we've had to date."

"Deja Vu" was a murder mystery set in a future world where the dead are brought back to serve the living. I didn't have much of the background thought out, but I charged ahead with the story anyway, hoping that enough thrills and plot twists would keep the unsuspecting reader from figuring out that I didn't know what I was talking about. When the story was published I used my $3 payment to buy some extra copies for my friends and bought out a large portion of his limited print run) -- but that was also the start of many years of friendship with the editor, John Postovit, to whom my novel Resurrection, Inc. is dedicated in part.

Even after the story was published in Amazing Adventures, I liked it a lot, and did not want it relegated to fanzine limbo. The story and characters of "Deja Vu" had not been exorcised from my imagination, as usually happens when completing a piece. The idea kept coming back to me. Over the years I kept thinking up rationales for the things I had made up, twists and details that made the background more and more complex, so that when I decided to do an overhaul of the novelette in 1985 it came out to be an entirely different story.

"Flashback," seemed to explode as I pounded on the keyboard trying to keep up with the ideas. The plot diverged in a thousand different directions, getting longer and longer -- but knowing the perils of trying to market a novella I whipped the plot threads into shape and amputated many of them, demanding that they wait for a later version. However, I made careful notes of all the extra story ideas and I kept copies of the scenes I cut out.

When I finished the fantasy novel I was working on at the time -- the first book in a trilogy -- and sent it off to my agent, I asked him what I should do next, the second book in the trilogy or something different. I was strongly advised to do the latter.

What could be more different than a cross between hard SF, Gothic horror, and murder mystery? The only other fiction I am aware of that has the same flavor is George R.R. Martin's "Nightflyers" and "Sandkings," and Lucius Shepard's first novel, Green Eyes.

As I started going over the plot threads for Flashback (which the publisher retitled as Resurrection, Inc.), I began to work at a pace that would have made people think I was writing under deadline for a pulp magazine -- and I was loving it. On with the fantasy novel, I slogged along, writing a few chapters then taking a break to write a short story, I could not be lured away from Resurrection, Inc.

I had the same background and concept as before, only this time I took great pains to make sure that it made sense. Why would anybody want to reanimate dead bodies just to do grunt work? Why not just build machines instead? When you think about it, the human body is a very sophisticated machine, more complicated than anything we're ever likely to build. It's always struck me as unlikely that some demented electronics scientist would take the trouble to rebuild from scratch every organ, every nerve, every muscle fiber in the human body, just to make an android. That's a waste of time. After all, when a car dies, you fix or replace the engine instead of scrapping the entire machine. So I proposed a future where people took suitable dead bodies, popped a microprocessor in the brain to act as a new controller, and jump-started the human machine.

How do you go about reanimating a dead body? I definitely wanted this book to be science fiction -- with a flavor of horror, yes, but curses and spells and magic would have to sit at the back of the bus. Finding information on the subject is rather difficult -- the library seemed devoid of books describing what exactly happens to a body at death, physically and chemically. I pored through dozens of books about near-death experiences, how to cope with death, how not to commit social gaffes when at a cocktail party with terminally ill patients. In the end the Livermore Public Library turned out to be a bust. So I turned elsewhere.

I work full-time as a technical editor and writer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; with about 10,000 employees, "the Lab" is one of the largest research establishments in the country. Research topics cover the full spectrum -- from physics to chemistry, engineering, computer development, cancer and genetics research, lasers, fusion power, nuclear weapons design, and geology. My penchant for writing "sci fi" stories is known (and tolerated) at the Lab, and I have potential access to experts that cover the gamut of science.

It happened that I had recently bailed out a team from our medical department by putting together a rush presentation for them. I called up Kathleen Noonan, a Registered Nurse who has since become my "official fiction writer's medical expert," and laid on the table all the brownie points I had earned. Together, we worked out some of the details on what would be necessary to make a corpse -- quick-frozen sufficiently close to the moment of death -- suitable for reanimation.

As a given, we had to expect technology superior to what we have now, and we had to accept the existence of a microprocessor to do the things that the brain does, or at least to access the muscle controls in the brain. I was surprised to learn that a reanimated body -- a jump-started corpse -- would not decay so long as the blood, or a blood substitute, circulated and the cells could access nutrients. Kathleen gave me some sources of information on synthetic blood -- I even watched an amazing film clip of an experimental substance called Fluorinert, which is a synthetic blood oxygenator; in the clip, a hapless laboratory mouse was submerged in a tank of Fluorinert and happily spent hours walking around and doing the usual mouse-things, all the while breathing the Fluorinert. Ironically, I learned later that Fluorinert is also the coolant fluid that circulates through the Lab's CRAY-2 supercomputers. Fluorinert only re-oxygenates the blood, however, and does not do everything necessary for true synthetic blood.

In the meantime, the Resurrection, Inc. storyline had acquired another dimension as I followed through the social consequences of bringing back the dead as part of the work force. If labor unions today despise non-Union workers, what would they think about non- living workers?

I had envisioned armies of Servants marching through the doors of Resurrection, Inc., hundreds each day -- but I determined that was unrealistic with another bit of research. For every resurrected Servant, there must first be a dead body. And just how many people die each day in a large metropolitan area, such as the San Francisco Bay Area? I hadn't the slightest idea -- so I obtained copies of all the various Bay Area newspapers and started counting obituaries. Of the hundred or so deaths each day, I decided that 2/3 of them would not be suitable for resurrection -- either decay had begun to set in by the time they were quick-frozen (decay sets in within a few minutes, according to my official fiction writer's medical expert), or their deaths had been too "messy" and the body was heavily damaged, either in an accident or deteriorated from old age or from a debilitating disease. Others would disappear from different reasons, most notably stolen by the Cremators, a subversive group that takes advantage of the peoples' fear of coming back as a Servant; for a price the Cremators will do everything in their power to destroy a client's body before it can fall into the hands of Resurrection, Inc. The conservative end result was that maybe about 25 Servants would be processed each day. This rationale was all very rough, but it was, I think, valid reasoning, and better than no reason at all.

Still, over time, these hard-working and uncomplaining Servants would make their mark in the workplace. Hey, let's add some social unrest, riots in the streets, and then a stormtrooper style of policemen -- the Enforcers Guild -- to beat it down.

And religion! -- I love dealing with the machinations of a too-powerful religious organization. In keeping with my Gothic horror/SF tone, I developed the cult of neo- Satanism, primitive Satanism adapted to the needs of the modern day.

I studied comparative religions, read plenty of things about witches and witch hunts. I found, to my surprise that books about spells, black magic, Satanism, and witchcraft have no place on public library shelves -- either they are not there at all, or are promptly stolen by well-meaning but idiotic Christian Fundamentalist fanatics. So I bought resource materials instead, and tracked down and talked to a practicing Satanist who claims to have been a member of the same coven with Richard Ramirez (the LA "Night Stalker" killer), and I also spoke with another practicing Satanist who gave me a logical reason for why Satanists seem to feel it's necessary to worship the Bad Guy instead of the Good Guy. I added a dose of L. Ron Hubbard legends ("I'd like to start a religion -- that's where the real money is.") and came up with a character who ran computer models to design a new, commercially successful religion.

Now I needed only to turn characters loose in the setting. My main story, retained all the way from the "Deja Vu" novelette in 1981, concerned a murdered man, Danal, resurrected as a Servant who begins to get flashbacks of his first life and his death. I added Francois Nathans, the corporate head of Resurrection, Inc., who has also developed the cult of neo-Satanism, and has decided that with the introduction of Servants into the labor force he can reshape society. "Servants for Mankind -- freeing us from tedium to pursue our true destiny."

Then add one of the armor-clad Enforcers -- Jones -- who patrols the streets after curfew and finds Danal's body shortly after it has been sacrificed in a neo-Satanist ritual - - Jones gets himself into trouble by being too compassionate toward Servants. And a downtrodden technician in the lower levels of Resurrection, Inc. -- Rodney Quick -- who is being persecuted by his Supervisor in a deadly game; Rodney decides to search for the mysterious Cremators as his only hope. Then it starts to get complicated.

I listen to a lot of music as I work. Sometimes I go for dramatic classical stuff like Beethoven or Prokofiev if I'm trying to get a specific mood; but rock groups like Pink Floyd, Kansas, Styx, The Alan Parsons Project, and Rush have been influencing my writing for years. A large portion of Resurrection, Inc. was directly inspired by the Rush album "Grace Under Pressure" -- which is also acknowledged in the dedication. Almost every song on that album is responsible for a scene or a character in the book. I played it so many times during the course of writing the novel that I probably need to buy a new copy -- but it worked extraordinarily well to help plug my mind back into the story. Sit down, play the appropriate track and it was like reloading the entire novel into my personal RAM. In an interesting twist, creativity comes full circle: several Rush albums are dedicated to science fiction novels, which they found inspirational for their music.

For the big climax of Resurrection, Inc. I wanted to have my villain attempt to poison the neo-Satanists in a Guyana-style massacre. Cyanide is the obvious choice, of course, but it's been so overused in fiction. It was time to call my official fiction writer's medical advisor again. "What is it this time, Kevin?" Kathleen said, "I need a poison that will kill off a lot of people, really fast." "How fast, in a day or so?" "No, it has to act in a few minutes." "Water soluble?" "Yes. Cyanide is boring -- I want something else."

Kathleen sent me some books on toxicology and said she was tracking down a lead about biological poisons produced by some shellfish, which are apparently among the most toxic poisons known. A different health physicist shrugged and offered another suggestion, "Why not just use Hydrofluoric acid?" (It is the closest thing we've got to the monster blood you saw eat through a few of the Nostromo's decks in the film Alien.) "A good gulp of that and most of your body would dissolve." Effective, to be sure, but we don't want to get gross!

Then serendipity struck. The next technical paper on my stack to edit dealt with the hazards and toxicity of certain types of dyes used in lasers. One of them, Rhodamine 6-G, turns out to be a cellular poison second only to cyanide in its deadliness. It is a bright fluorescent red and even fit in with the science fictional background of the book. Bingo!

Resurrection, Inc. took me nine months to complete, send around for review and comment, and do a final polish. I remember fidgeting and wishing I would get word that my agent had been able to sell my first fantasy novel in the meantime. I'd been publishing short stories regularly for years, but still the next step up is selling a book. I knew when I'd get a novel published, though -- all I had to do was finish Resurrection, Inc. I had every confidence in it, because it was by far the best thing I had ever done. And it was different from any other book I'd read.

Resurrection, Inc. sold to the first editor who saw it: John Silbersack at New American Library. He said it was one of the best first novels he'd ever seen. "I couldn't put it down -- and I knew I was going to buy it right from the start." NAL put the book through production and is releasing it within a year, instead of the 18P24 months novels usually take.

You can find it in your local bookstore, under the "Hard SF/Gothic Horror/Murder Mystery" section. Right next to...right next to...hmmm.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 6)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 6

Something Old,
Something New,
Something Borrowed,
Something Blue

Alan Wexelblat

Islands in the Net
Bruce Sterling
Arbor House, 1988, 0-87795-952-8, 348 pp
[*****-]

Hardwired
Walter Jon Williams
TOR, 1986, 0-812-55796-4, 343 pp
[****]

Prelude to Chaos
Edward Llewellyn, copyright 1983
DAW, 1983, 0-88677-008-4, 256 pp
[****-]

Starfire
Paul Preuss
TOR, 1988, 0-312-93056-9, 306 pp
[**]

Bridge of Birds
Barry Hughart
Del Rey, 1984, 0-345-32138-3, 278 pp
[****]

The Wave and the Flame [***]
Reign of Fire
M. Bradley Kellogg with William Rossow
Signet, 1986, 0-451-14269-1 & 0-451-14526-7,
358 pp & 382 pp

Islands in the Net

In today's parlance, "on the net" is a state of being; it describes one's access to an electronic world of information. In the early twenty-first century of Islands in the Net, "on the Net" has become a fact of life -- a necessity for normal existence in the civilized world.

In this world, the power of governments is fading fast -- especially since the signing of the Vienna Convention banning nuclear weapons. Corporations are filling the power void, and Laura and David Webster are rising stars in one of these new corporations, Rizome Industries Group. Rizome is a multi-national conglomerate run as an economic democracy for its employee/stake holders. Laura and David, middle-class liberal post-yuppies, run a private resort hotel where the company's employees and guests can meet and relax. Galveston encourages their presence; since the collapse of oil, tourism has become a major economic factor.

The Websters' peaceful lives are disrupted, however, when they are asked to play hosts to a gathering of data pirates. These outlaws from Grenada, Singapore, and Luxembourg operate by raiding the Net for data which they sell or barter for a profit. They also fund a number of extralegal activities, including drug-running and research in unapproved technologies. Rizome has called the gathering in order to see if it can reach an accommodation with the pirates and, more importantly, to see if they can live with each other. Someone has been blackmailing them, and they are all mutually suspicious. Their suspicions and antipathy threaten the stability so necessary to good business and Rizome wants to keep things under control.

When someone assassinates the Grenadian's chief negotiator on the balcony of the hotel, Laura finds herself drawn into an explosive situation. In order for Rizome's hopes to succeed she must beard the lions in their dens.

I think Islands is Sterling's best book to date; I am impressed with every facet of it. The future he describes is believable and very well-drawn. Everything in this book could easily come to pass in the next fifty years. There is a wealth of interesting detail that is worked into the fabric of the story, instead of just being background.

In addition, all of the characters are three-dimensional people. From Laura Webster on down to the supporting cast, each has a life of his or her own. As a male, I naturally have an outsider's perspective, but I felt that the females in the story were particularly well portrayed, despite the difficulties this sometimes poses for a male writer.

In many ways, Islands is also Sterling's most cyberpunkish novel to date. The standard c-word themes of survival in a hostile environment, corporate power versus government power, bio-enhancement, and so on are all present. However, none of them dominates the book; they are presented in a low-key way that makes them seem very near; in Island there are things I expect to live to see. He also avoids the problem many cyberpunk authors have of making their heroes supermen and superwomen. Laura, despite her growth and evolution through the novel, remains a human woman, someone we can relate to.

The only flaw I could find was the pacing. It seemed uneven in places; things dragged when they might have moved faster, whizzed by when I wanted them to slow down. This is, however, a matter of purely personal taste; you may find the scenes are paced just right for you. In any event, I recommend this one highly, both for cyberpunk fans and non-fans.

Hardwired

There's formula cyberpunk, and then there's good formula cyberpunk. Hardwired is pure good formula cyberpunk. The difference is whether the author can made use of the formulaic elements or whether they overwhelm him and the story he's trying to tell.

Walter Jon Williams takes us far into a cyber-future: the Orbitals have used their superior position and technology to escape the rule of Earth and in the process have shattered the power structures of the planet. The war was deliberately quick and deliberately bloody; the rocks raining from space cost many lives and left the survivors' morale broken. Now the people on the planet live, if they live at all, with one goal -- to escape the rapidly-dying surface of the planet and make it into space. Meanwhile, the people in the Orbitals continue to milk the Earth for all she's got.

Against this background, Williams introduces us to his two main players: Cowboy is a panzerboy, a mercenary paid by the thirdmen to run cargoes from one Free Zone to another across hostile states in his panzer (armor in the original German, later associated with tanks, now applied to armored hovercraft). Sarah is a dirtgirl, a bodyguard/assassin for hire.

Each has a private dream: Cowboy longs to fly again in the deltas -- advanced tactical combat airplanes. The delta pilots were to have been Earth's main weapon against the Orbitals, but they were never given a chance to prove themselves. Sarah's dream is simpler -- she just wants two one-way tickets (for herself and her ungrateful, self-destructive brother) off the planet and the dead-end life she has on it.

Their stories start off separately, but Williams quickly brings them together, and the sparks really start to fly. The book is almost pure action; written in the present tense, it's quite a trip to read. The basic plot is simple -- in many ways it's similar to Damnation Alley -- but well-handled. Both main characters grow and develop, but they don't do it by quiet reflection; they do it because they must in order to survive in the maelstrom of action. The supporting characters are a little less well-developed. They are better than stereotypes, but I was disappointed that few of them managed to rise above the level at which they are introduced.

The plot moves smoothly, if a bit fast, and is never predictable, even though Williams doesn't conceal anything from the reader. When I read a book, I enjoy trying to guess what's going to happen next. Each time I thought I had Hardwired figured out, Williams surprised me. But in retrospect, what happened makes good sense. I heartily recommend this to fans of good c-word writing. For people new to the field, it's a little tougher to judge. I'd probably suggest starting with something a little less intense, then pick this one up once you're in the right mood for a good light read.

Oh, and fans of Buckaroo Bonzai can have fun picking out the references, which are liberally scattered throughout the book.

Prelude to Chaos

Many cyberpunk works have a vague or explicit post-holocaust feel to them. Somehow government has collapsed or its grip on power has been loosened, civilization has collapsed or seriously degenerated, and so on. It's easy to just hypothesize such a breakdown; it's harder to write a believable story showing how it might happen. However, Llewellyn has managed just this feat. Prelude to Chaos is a first-rate pre-apocalypse novel. Unfortunately, it's long gone from most bookstore shelves. You'll have to hunt for it in the used bookstores and half-price houses.

We start off in the not-too-distant future, in the last Federal Penitentiary in the United States. With the availability of a mind-wipe, the US Board of Psychiatric Assessors has been able to return almost all malcontents to society as new men and women. However, a special few have been able to maintain their sanity, commit crimes, and refuse voluntary mind-wipe. For them, there is one remaining escape-proof prison. One of these special cases is Gavin Knox, former Secret Service agent and presidential bodyguard.

Knox was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of one of his fellow agents who was supposed to be guarding the President. When the assassination went down, Knox was lured away from the scene. Videotape of the event has since convinced him that the it was the result of a conspiracy, headed by the Attorney General and including Knox's former coworkers who were supposed to be protecting the president. He did not have enough proof of the conspiracy to prevent himself from being sentenced; however, he is sane enough to avoid forced mindwipe and dedicated enough to maintain his self until he can escape and gather evidence of the conspiracy.

The other protagonist is Knox's fellow inmate - neurobiologist Dr. Judith Grenfell. She too has been set up. During the course of a routine lab experiment she discovered two extremely critical facts about the most popular over-the-counter drug in the world. The drug, Paxin, is sold under many names in many guises. It's basic function is to stop cell division in certain types of cells, including egg cells, so it makes an ideal birth-control pill. In addition, it does not harm crops and so can be liberally applied as an effective insecticide.

However, it has the nasty side-effect of remaining effective in the body far longer than anyone expected. Thus, the daughters of women who took the drug are born sterile; their egg cells can never divide and grow. In addition, the drug has a strong tendency to reinforce obedience behaviors, from simple ones like stopping at red lights to complex ones like paying your taxes. By the time Dr. Grenfell makes her discovery, it's practically too late. The vast majority of the world's women are already sterile. Nonetheless, she insists on publishing her findings. Considering the havoc this is going to cause, the government issues a gag order. When she hides her report in the NIH computer system instead of turning it over, the government decides she must be stopped and sets her up to take the blame for the murders of her two equally-uncooperative coworkers.

In prison, Knox and Grenfell meet and plot their escape. They both have a desperate need to get out of the pen without an enforced mind-wipe that would destroy their memories: the Attorney General is still in power, and Paxin is still being sold. Prelude to Chaos is their story.

Llewellyn's writing style is somewhat sparse. He concentrates on the people and the action, relying on the reader's imagination to fill in descriptive detail in many places. However, his characters do shine; even the minor ones are convincing. And, as I said before, the best part of this is the believability of the story. We are today subjecting ourselves to thousands of chemicals with absolutely no idea how they will affect us or our children in twenty years. Once you accept this major premise of Llewellyn's, the rest follows like falling dominoes.

This one is definitely worth the effort of a back-shelves hunt.

Starfire

Paul Preuss has set himself a tough task -- write a story about the near future of the American space program in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster and the collapse of the space program. That he nearly succeeds is a measure of his potential. Unfortunately, with this sort of near-future speculative SF, a miss is as good as a mile.

Travis Hill is a Texas cowboy-type turned space jockey. A crew-member aboard America's space station, he finds himself caught outside during a solar flare. In order to avoid a dose of radiation that would ground him forever, he goes against orders and becomes the first man to test NASA's bailout system from the station. By a miracle, he survives and becomes a national hero. However, NASA grounds him for failure to obey orders. Denied the chance to do the one thing he's ever wanted, he turns to the bottle and to the study of asteroids. When an experimental spaceship, Starfire, becomes available he pulls enough strings to get himself on board as a mission scientist and to get the starship assigned the mission of examining a newly-discovered asteroid that is falling toward the sun.

I found this book to be extremely tough reading. Travis is an eminently dislikable character; he and his family embody everything I've come to hate about Texans. The plot moves incredibly slowly after the initial chapter. There are innumerable boring subplots about people who really are of no consequence to the story. The supporting characters, particularly the rest of the crew, are reasonable people, but they die at random intervals for no apparent reason while Travis manages to survive.

Lastly, Preuss fails the suspension-of-disbelief test rather badly. Somehow the Americans have managed to get a working space station and starship while the Soviets (and, indeed, the rest of the world) are nowhere to be seen. No reason is given for this reversal of current reality.

This is a book primarily for gung-ho Campbell-style space enthusiasts. Those looking for more meat in what they read should give this one a miss.

Bridge of Birds

Once upon a time in in an ancient China that never was, there was a village called Ku- fu. And in this village lived an unusual man named Lu Yu, more commonly known as Number Ten Ox. Number Ten Ox was not unusual for who he was so much as for the adventure he had. It seems that in the Year of the Tiger 3,337 all the children of Ku Fu fell ill with a disease no one had seen before. The abbots of the monastery were unable to cure them. So Number Ten Ox was sent, with all the money the poor villagers could muster, to find a wise man who could save the children.

The man he found was called Master Li Kao, one of the greatest scholars of his age. Li Kao, however, had a slight flaw in his character. But, he was all the villagers could afford. So, he and Number Ten Ox set out in search of the Great Root of Power, which was the only possible cure for the childrens' illness. Naturally, obtaining this root was just about the most impossible thing under Heaven, which, by the way, figures more prominently in this story than you might expect.

In fairy tales of any culture there's a certain mystic quality that has to be conveyed. Barry Hughart does a wonderful job of conveying that quality in Bridge of Birds. The whole book has a sort of fantastic air that allows the reader to get lost in the story without worrying about little details like superhuman feats or magic ginseng roots or incredible coincidences. It also has a sense of wonder and respect for the story that is being told. All this makes it a pleasure to read.

I am no expert on Chinese mythology, but it appears that Hughart has done his homework well. The characters really ring true in their speech and in their actions; this greatly aids the suspension of disbelief necessary for a good fairy tale. The setting is exotic without being alien -- a real relief for those who find themselves drowning in Celtic and other western-oriented fantasy settings.

As with Prelude to Chaos, this book is likely to have disappeared from the shelves of your local chain bookstore. However, a prize like this is well worth the effort of a trip to a used bookstore or wherever. Bridge of Birds will delight youngsters as well as adults.

The Wave and the Flame
Reign of Fire

These two books comprise the two parts of Lear's Daughters. Lear's Daughters is the story of an Earth expedition -- in the unspecified far future -- to the planet Fiix, home to the race called the Sawls. Fiix is part of a solar system that is passing through the Coal Sack, a vast nebula. This passage should have rendered the planet an uninhabitable desert; instead, the Sawls survive in a narrow equatorial band. Similarly, the computer forecasts of planetary weather seem equally out of touch with reality.

The landing party want to know why, with the exception of the prospector, Dr. Emil Clausen. He simply wants to find the deposits of lithium his geological survey says should be present. Thereupon, he and his corporate employers, Conplex, will both become richer. The fact that the Sawls' lives and culture will be destroyed by this is of no consequence. Conplex is paying for this expedition and should get a return on its investment. The presence of the other scientists like Stavros Ibia, the linguist, is merely corporate courtesy. Naturally, the others do not see things this way. They would like to see the native culture preserved and studied. In theory, if they can prove that the native life is unique, galactic law will prevent Conplex's ravages. However, the wheels of justice move slowly, while the wheels of the mining machines move very fast.

The entire situation seems to hinge on the weather. The Sawls have an unusual culture; with almost no metals, they have developed an incredible talent with woods and ceramics. They seem primitive, but they keep extensive records that go back thousands of generations. They are deeply religious people, believing that there are two sister gods, Lagris and Valla Ired. These goddesses are said to contend with one another for planetary domination; their weapons are the weather. One uses fire and heat, the other uses rain, cold and snow.

The priesthood believe that if one sister ever defeats the other, the world is doomed; thus, they worship both, but pray for the underdog. Even more unusually, they do not believe that the sisters live in abstract places like heavens and hells, but rather are located in precise physical dwellings at opposite poles of the continent.

The sisters' war is often characterized by incredibly rapid changes in the weather. One such change wrecks the party's lander, stranding them on the planet with no means of escape or of contacting the mother ship. Since landing teams are supposed to be self-sufficient for months at a time, no one on the ship will be attempting a rescue. The landing team must move into the protective cave structures with the Sawls. The two cultures must mesh as best they can. Fortunately, the Sawls are a friendly, non-violent people, willing to share what they have.

There's plenty of potential story here. Kellogg and Rossow go to great lengths to set up a realistic alien culture and drop realistic humans into it. Unfortunately, the story never lives up to its promise. For one thing, it's just too long. Things drag on and on; this is a three-hundred page story, not a seven-hundred page one. In order to string things out, the humans have to be incredibly dense at times. The reader knows how things will end long before the action finally moves on.

The characters are also too simplistic. There's the good guy and there's the bad guy. The others get to choose sides, though they mostly figure out that the bad guy is a bad guy by two-thirds of the way through the second book. Not that they do the logical thing and stop him from being a bad guy, mind you. Instead, they have to depend on an unbelievable deus ex machina ending to save them from their stupidity.

It's a shame, really, because a lot of nice work went into this book. The aliens, as I mentioned, are particularly well-drawn; they are the best characters in the book. There are also a number of convincing scientific bits scattered throughout the books; I couldn't find anything wrong with any of the scientific bases on which the story is built. Unfortunately, this ends up hurting things -- it's so blindingly obvious to us what's going on that it's downright painful waiting for the characters to catch on.

The writing style is also uneven. Kellogg is all right as long as people are moving and there's action to be described. But all her characters emote in the same deep heart-rending way. After the fifth or sixth such passage, they become hard to read.

It's hard for me to give a definitive thumbs-up or thumbs-down to these books. There's a good story in them, but I don't know if you want to sift through several hundred pages of mediocre writing to find it.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

↑ Top

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 7)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 7

Words of Wizdom

Chuq Von Rospach

Darkspell
Katherine Kerr
Doubleday, 370pp, 1987, $17.95
0-385-23109-1
***+

Pitfall (Alien Speedway #2)
Thomas Wylde
Bantam, 198pp, February, 1988, $3.50
0-553-26946-1
***

The Web (Alien Speedway #3)
Thomas Wylde
Bantam, 245pp, May, 1988, $3.50
0-553-27166-1
**+

The Man-Kzin Wars
Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Dean Ing
Baen, 289pp, June, 1988, $3.95
0-671-65411-X
***

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars
Thomas M. Disch
Doubleday, 72pp, $11.95, 0-385-24162-3.
****+

Resurrection, Inc.
Kevin J. Anderson
Signet Books, July, 1988, $3.50
0-451-15409-6
***+

Silk Roads and Shadows
Susan Shwartz
Tor, March, 1988, 337pp, $3.95
0-812-55411-6
***+

When Gravity Fails
George Alec Effinger
Bantam, 276pp, $3.95, 0-553-25555-X
****+

The Forge of God
Greg Bear
Tor, 473pp, $4.50
0-812-53167-1
****+

Terry's Universe
Beth Meacham, ed.
Tor, 234pp, June, 1988
0-312-93058-5
*****

Tool of the Trade
Joe Haldeman
Avon, 248pp, June, 1988, $3.95
0-380-70438-2
****

A Brief History of Time:
From the Big Bang to Black Holes
Stephen W. Hawking
Bantam, 182pp, $19.95
0-553-05340-X.
****

The Year's Best Science Fiction
Fifth Annual Collection
Gardner Dozois, Ed.
St. Martin's Press, 678pp, June, 1988, $12.95
0-312-01854-1
****

The 1988 Annual World's Best SF
Donald. A. Wollheim, Ed.
DAW, 303pp, June, 1988, $3.50
0-88677-281-8
****

Kiteworld
Keith Roberts
Ace, 293pp, May, 1988, $3.50
0-441-44851-8
****

The Starcrossed
Ben Bova
Tor, 223pp, June, 1988, $2.95
0-812-53231-7
***+

To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Robert A. Heinlein
Ace, 434pp, June, 1988, $4.95
0-441-74860-0
*****

I'm so tired of trilogies I want to scream. I've almost stopped reading anything with "Book 93 of..." on the cover, because I know I'm going to find myself reading a 700 page novel. A three volume, one plot story with two cliffhanger endings and nine months or so between chapters. Chances are it'll have an elf or a dwarf in it somewhere, or maybe some pseudo-Celtic goulash that was researched out of some other Generic Celtic Fantasy Trilogy(GCFT).

I was talking with some folks on Delphi one night when this topic came up. I did a quick check on the number of series books in a typical Stuff Received. 30% of the books listed were in a series.

What bothers me about GCFT is that, almost invariably, there's a good story in there. But the author takes three books to tell a one book story.

How? They pad. They bring in lots of minor characters and let them disappear later -- or perhaps they remember to kill them off. They move off on tangents, they go on long, convoluted travels and quests.

Why do they write them? Because they sell. Trilogies sell better than single, standalone books. It's a chance to go back and relive a favorite universe, for one thing, and book 2 in the series will motivate someone to go out and find book 1 -- and the bookstores to order book 1 again.

It's less work for an author. It's more profitable for both the author and the publisher. The buyers seem to love it. So it's being done, more and more. All at the expense of the story.

I don't have the time to commit to 800 or 1000 pages, to spending upwards of $10.00 paperback for something that's an average story. There are too many other, better books I could be reading.

So I'm revolting. If the book says "Book" or "Volume" on the front cover, it's going to have to have something really special about it for me to pick up. Chances are, if I first see it at book two, it'll never get read. About 75% of the time, if I do read book one, I never bother with book 2, because I don't find anything interesting enough to bring me back.

I think a story should be written to a length appropriate to the story. And I've just read too many three-volume, one book stories for my taste. If you're going to write that much material, give me something worth reading.

Darkspell

Now, of course, the first thing I'm going to talk about is a book two of a GCFT. Life is like that sometime. But Darkspell, the sequel to Daggerspell by author Katherine Kerr, is a perfect counterpoint to the problems I'm talking about.

What we have here is the middle book of a Celtic oriented trilogy with Tolkien influences, elves, a couple of dwarves, magic, the long quest, the kingdom on the edge of ruin.

Once she took all the pieces, though, she tossed out the rule book and went off and built a good story. We watch the continued struggles of Nevyn as he tries to complete the tasks necessary to fulfill the geas he placed upon himself.

One fascinating shift from GCFT that Kerr has done is toss in a liberal amount of Eastern Philosophy with the addition of reincarnation. When a person dies, they return to inhabit a new body, and what happens in previous lives affects the personality and actions of the new incarnation. In Daggerspell, Nevyn caused the deaths of some close friends, and seriously damaged their Wyrd. He then was allowed immortality until he could help the friends that had died return to the proper paths.

All of this is done surrounded by the larger picture of the problems in Deverry. Major political battles for power are going on, as well as continual fighting and raiding. The forces of Darkness are also working their ways in hopes of coming in and taking over. It all ties together, but never too neatly.

When Kerr is done with the book, even with another book on the way, you're satisfied. Darkspell ends, rather than just stops waiting for the next installment. Much progress has been made, and many accomplishments and setbacks can be accounted. Darkspell, and Daggerspell, both made me look forward to the next book, rather than making me curse the author for making the next book necessary.

These things separate Kerr's work from the Generic Celtic Fantasy Trilogy label: a large enough scope to make a trilogy work; three separate, if related stories -- each standing alone; growth and transition of the characters; originality -- even while handling familiar objects and themes; and an ending instead of simply a stopping point.

Darkspell isn't quite the book Daggerspell was. Technically it is better. But there is a more of leisurely pace, a sense of waiting. The crisis is not as crucial as the first book, and the denouement hushed; this is definitely a middle book. The book is a real joy to read, as is the series as a whole, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Pitfall
The Web

What books could possibly follow a GCFT review? Obviously the ultimate in generic fiction, the Packaged Universe. A recent fad in publishing, packaged universes are an offshoot of shared world anthologies, where a book packager gets together with a big name author, does a designer universe and then packages it out to journeyman authors to do the actual writing.

There are three major Packaged Universes these days: A.C. Clarke's Venus Prime, Asimov's Robot City, and Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway. Both Venus Prime and Robot City have been getting so-so to negative reviews. Reviews of Alien Speedway have been so- so to good, so perhaps I got lucky when I picked it up, but this series is a lot of fun.

I reviewed Clypsis, by Jeffrey Carver a couple of issues back and I thought I'd hang around and see how the rest of the series turned out. One of the things I was worried about was consistency between volumes, since different authors handle different books.

Next thing I know, both book two and book three are both out. Both are by Thomas Wylde. And they're both lots of fun, especially if you like action-adventure space jockey stories.

There are a few caveats, though. If you buy the rest of the series because you liked the style of the first book, beware. Carver and Wylde are very different authors. Clypsis was really a Juvenile coming of age story. The two Wylde books are much more mature, much darker books -- Mike Murray, novice pilot, has had some of the gloss rubbed off.

Pitfall is best. There's sabotage going on, and unless Mike can track where and why, he's out of a job and being shipped home. It's an interesting mystery, and you really get a chance to learn about Clypsis and the racing life. The Web, unfortunately, gets off-track and goes looking into the history of Speedball Raybo, a racer who died 20 years earlier and has since been incarnated as an intelligent robot. The book ends up side-tracking into some gosh-wow-look-at-this-neat-thing plot twists that really weaken the series, sending it away from Murray, away from Clypsis, and away from the things that were focus points in the first two books.

These are not heavy books, with deep, philosophical thoughts. They won't win awards, and they aren't going to give you nightmares. They're fun, entertaining, escapist fare, which is exactly what they were designed to be.

The Man-Kzin Wars

Another variation of the packaged universe is The Man-Kzin Wars, created by Larry Niven with novellas by Poul Anderson and Dean Ing and Niven's original Kzin story "The Warriors."

The stories are good. But I felt, reading them, that while they aer set in Niven's Known Space, it wasn't the same. It's like looking at a print of a painting instead of the original. If the reproduction is good enough, you don't really notice it, but it still registers as a copy.

I'd rather read Niven's Known Space rather than anyone else's interpretation of it. This is a good substitute, but it just makes me want the original more.

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars

I don't know how he does it. When I first read The Brave Little Toaster, I didn't know whether to expect high camp or cloying sentimentality. What Thomas Disch did, however, was create one of the most beautiful and pure stories of friendship and love I've ever read. It was the story of a little toaster, who, along his friends and fellow appliances, set off in search of their missing master. The Incredible Voyage, with power tools instead of animals.

In the hands of most authors, a concept like this would quickly degrade to sniggering, to simpering cuteness, to drug induced-like weird fiction. Disch, however, has pulled it off twice now. The latest, The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, has our toaster teaming up with his friends and with a prototype hearing aid developed by Albert Einstein. They travel to the planet Mars to stop an impending invasion of Earth by a band of rogue appliances that want to wipe out humanity. They succeed, of course, but it isn't the simplistic victory you might expect in a "kids book."

This is definitely a Juvenile work, but it's one that is not only accessible by all readers,but older readers can better appreciate just how well crafted and complex the story is.

Resurrection, Inc.

They've finally figured a way to put the blue collar workers out of work. They're bringing back the dead to do their jobs. Why? They work cheap. The unemployed workers, as you might expect, aren't amused

That's the conflict in Kevin Anderson's first novel, Resurrection, Inc. The people at Resurrection, Inc. have found a way to bring the dead back to a form of mechanized life, allowing them to be used as slave labor. Riots randomly break out, usually surrounding one of the Servants, to be put down by the Enforcers, a private force that has taken over the duties of the police and tries to keep the peace. And a new cult, Neo-Satanism, is on the upswing, a cult that includes human sacrifice. And the Cremators, a mysterious group who's purpose is to guarantee that people who don't want to become Servants don't. They succeed more often than Resurrection, Inc. would like, but nobody can find them.

If this sounds like a horror novel, you're close. There are a number of strong horror elements in Resurrection, Inc. but this is definitely a Science Fiction novel. The dead are raised with technology, not magic, and the problems are those of a near-future dystopia.

All this is the background for the story of Danal, killed by the Neo-Satanists and raised by Resurrection, Inc. to be the Servant of the head of the Neo-Satanists. Something went wrong in the resurrection process, and Danal has access to memories of his past life -- something that normally can't happen. We follow him as he searches for his past and as he tries to understand his connections with the Neo-Satanists.

There's a lot in this book; more complications than I can even start to discuss without ruining everything. Anderson sends out the various subplots to the four winds, but keeps control of them and brings them back together for the climax quite nicely. He's got a strong sense of dialogue and character, and throws in enough detail to make the world he's writing about come to life and mean something to you.

The book isn't flawless. His science is somewhat simplistic, and his sociology is naive, which hurts the impact of the book. He bases an important part of the book on an unrealistic restriction that will be hard to swallow for many readers -- it tossed me out of the book when I ran into it. I gave him the benefit of the doubt on it and plunged back in, and I wasn't disappointed -- it's a serious flaw, but not a fatal one, and it is the only serious problem with the book.

This is a Anderson's first novel, and it's a good start by a promising writer. It will appeal to both Horror readers and Science Fiction readers (even SF readers who don't like horror) because it successfully melds the best of both genres. This is a book worth your time.

Silk Roads and Shadows

Evil is afoot in Byzantium; someone has poisoned the silk worms. If something isn't done to replace them, the empire may not survive. This sets the scene for Alexandra, of royal blood, to start the long trek across the silk roads to the east in search of silkworms for the crown. This is the setup for Susan Shwartz' latest, Silk Road and Shadows.

The trail leads from Byzantium through the lands of Tibet, leading finally, after many altercations, to China and the worms. Along the way, Alexandra is marked for travel along the Diamond Path -- the legendary trails to Shambhala. The book sidesteps into eastern mysticism and self-discovery, with the original quest, the worms, always present but somehow on hold.

Shwartz is a very good story-teller, and this is a good story. The problems with the book are related to there being so much inside the covers -- a little too much, in my eyes. She's trying to give you a realistic glimpse of three very different, complex cultures and tell a number of stories, all at the same time. She almost pulls it off -- enough so that I recommend the book without question. But I think it would have been better to narrow the scope somewhat, and perhaps split this into two different, related stories: the search for the worms and the Tibetan adventures. Both almost stand apart from each other already, and the entire book suffers somewhat because each sub-plot deserves the focus, but neither is allowed to keep it.

When Gravity Fails

I used to know what I was going to vote on for the Hugo this year (my personal favorite, Pat Murphy's The Falling Woman, didn't make the ballot, but it did win a Nebula, which is some consolation, I guess). I was voting for Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun. I read it coming back from Worldcon last year, and nothing I've seen has come close to it in style, substance, and quality since then.

I always read the other finalists, but this year it was just going to be a formality, you understand. To be fair. And then I'd vote for Wolfe.

Then I read George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, and I started to worry. It's good. It's very good.

It's not really Science Fiction, but we can give him the benefit of the doubt. What When Gravity Fails is is a murder mystery set in an Arab ghetto. The lead character is an Arab, a loner, a drug addict. All of the people around him are the Arab scum you would expect to see in an Arabian ghetto.

These really are Arab scum, not generic scum with Arab names. Everyone in the book, from the non-protagonist down, are very real, very nasty people. It's hard to find anyone you wouldn't want to take out and shoot. Finding a sympathetic character? Forget it.

The book has rather obvious cyberpunk edges. It's a near future world, with plastic money and designer drugs and computer implants in your skull. But beyond that, not much has changed. The drugs will still kill you, the prostitutes rob you, the drinks will be watered, and the flophouses dirty and stale.

Effinger builds an environment that could be any ghetto in any city in any town of the world, but he then takes it one step farther and brings it alive. These aren't just generic thugs in Anywhere, USA, but real, honest to God Arab thugs, in a squalid dump in the desert, trying to get by. The sense of detail, the structure built up and the characterizations create a vividness that goes beyond normal fiction.

I won't say much about the plot, because to talk about a mystery makes it easy to say too much, and I don't want to ruin this one for you. Under normal years, my vote for the Hugo would be simple -- I'd vote for When Gravity Fails. But....

The Forge of God

As soon as I finished When Gravity Fails, I picked up The Forge of God by Greg Bear. It's an Aliens-Are-Coming-to-Destroy-Earth novel.

Well, maybe. Perhaps the aliens are coming to help mankind. Or perhaps there are one set of aliens trying to destroy earth, and one trying to save it.

The opening of the book is one of the most pastoral, humane, and truly nice narratives on being a family that I ve ever seen. I was starting to look for Norman Rockwell's painting of it, it was so Nice and Sugary. You're not supposed to do that with openings, trailing off into pleasantries and trivialities. You're supposed to hook the reader, get them going, get them to turn that first page.

And then the phone rang, and I realized that Bear had me, hook, line, and sinker. Because he's set up the perfect family, the perfect life, the perfect universe. And that one phone call is going to bring it all to an end. In the hands of most writers, this opening would have been boring or ineffectual. Bear, however, was in complete control the whole time, and by opening with a master's gambit and pulling it off, builds in a sense of horror that makes the entire book sing.

Europa's disappeared, without a trace. Next thing you know, they've found aliens in Death Valley and Australia. Tthe two aliens are saying completely different and contradictory things. The end is coming. Or maybe salvation? Or neither -- could this be a hoax?

There are only so many ways an "end of the world" story can end. The world dies, the world lives. Or the world dies but we aren't there. Bear concentrates on the people and the world -- the society and psychology of an entire planet lurching into possible darkness. In the past, many who have done the same have prophesied madness, social collapse, bacchanalia, the worst of man's sins unleashed, almost as though they are "proving" mankind deserves to die. Bear's end is different, calm, almost melancholy. From a number of places, viewing a number of people, you see people get ready.

The Forge of God is Hard SF, but it's also a very strong book about people, attitudes, and a very positive look at humanity as a species and culture when it's somewhat in fashion to view ourselves in a negative way. And despite the fact that he really does blow up the earth in the end (which I hope isn't too much of a spoiler for folks) his tale is generally positive, with an ending that is hopeful without being sappy or contrived.

And Bear is the first author I've seen who has tackled the problem of "if there ARE other lifeforms out there, why haven't we heard them?" (also known as the SETI Lament) - - and does so logically and in a way that is so Right (by Occam's Razor) that I wonder if I ought to be worried.

And now, I find myself with an exceptionally unenviable choice. Three works, any one of which would demand a Hugo in an average year, and I have no idea how I'm going to vote. Because I'd hate to slight the other two. I'm leaning towards the Bear book because it's the most mainline Science Fiction book of the three, as well as the most original use of a standard SF theme I've run into in a long time.

If it were up to me, I'd award three Hugos -- simply because awards that use arbitrary time slots every so often run into this situation: really good books that are going to lose because they happen to run head-on into someone else's really good book. Everyone can't win, but in this race, nobody is a loser.

Terry's Universe

I'm not going to mince words. You are going to go out and buy this book. Why? For starters, this is the way many people are saying goodbye to Terry Carr, a man who was one of the top SF editors in the field. It's also a way for them to acknowledge the debt they have for the man and what he did for the field and their careers.

Not convinced? This book is also a benefit. All proceeds have been donated to Terry's widow to cover medical experiences. None of the authors are getting paid for the stories, or taking any royalties. All of the stories are new, and won't be reprinted anywhere else anytime soon.

Still not convinced? Well, this is one kick-ass anthology. There are going to be award winning stories coming from this book. Terry's Universe does not have a weak story in it, or even a merely good one.

What it does have, though, are new pieces by Robert Silverberg (my personal favorite of the anthology, "House of Bones"), Ursula K. LeGuin, a new Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story by Fritz Leiber, Kate Wilhelm, Carter Scholz, Michael Swanwick, R.A. Lafferty, Kim Stanley Robinson, Roger Zelazny, Gene Wolfe, Greg Benford (a story related to Great Sky River) and what is considered Terry Carr's best short work, "The Dance of the Changer at the End of Time."

All of these folks are power-hitters in the industry. All of these folks wrote killer stories to help remember Terry. You're going to miss some exceptional fiction if you skip this book, and you'll regret it later.

Go buy Terry's Universe. You won't regret it. In fact, do it now. I'll wait.

Tool of the Trade

Joe Haldeman writes gritty, realistic Science Fiction. His work The Forever War took a post-Vietnam look Heinlein's Starship Troopers and in many ways redefined War in Science Fiction. His newest work, Tool of the Trade, is a very near-future version action- packed spy thriller.

Nick's a mole, a Russia spy left hibernating inside the United States until they need him. But Nick has gotten used to the U.S. over the years, and isn't really sure that he wants to be activate. But now the C.I.A. is onto him, trying to force him into being a double agent.

And Nick has this Thing, this ability to make anybody do anything he wants them to, as long as he gets within hearing range. Neither the U.S. or Russia knows this exist, and the one thing Nick is sure of is that he wants to keep it that way.

Both sides figure out he's up to something, and mobilize. Nick cuts and runs, and we start a globe hopping chase as both sides stalk each other; the agencies trying to shut him down before he does anything, Nick trying to get himself out of the whole mess and reach his ultimate goal before he's stopped.

What goal? That would be telling. But if you had a Thing that made anyone, absolutely anyone, do your bidding, what would you do with it?"

I think Tool of the Trade is Haldeman's best work since The Forever War. I was up extremely late three nights running trying to finish it because it refused to let me go. Haldeman's twisting of the standard "individual fighting against the state" plot is fascinating. His protagonist isn't the clean-cut goody-goody man authors use, he's a spy, a willing killer, and yet still a person with morals. Using this to counterpoint the bureaucratic nastiness of the spy organizations simply makes the comparisons that more powerful. This one is highly recommended, but don't take it to bed with you.

A Brief History of Time:
From the Big Bang to Black Holes

If you've ever tried to understand the leading edges of physics, but been completely overwhelmed by the jargon and math, there is finally a work that is aimed at those of us without advanced degrees. Better yet, it's from the person generally acknowledged to be at the forefront of theoretical physics, Stephen Hawking. It's fascinating to watch his mind at work, as he explains, in a technical but understandable format, how ideas are developed, fleshed out, presented, and sometimes thrown away.

There's essentially no theory or math in A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes -- the only formula in the book is Einstein's E=MC^^2. Hawking here is not prove, but to explain, and he does a very fine job of it. A definite must for anyone interested in science from a layman point of view.

The Year's Best Science Fiction
Fifth Annual Collection

The 1988 Annual World's Best SF

It's June, which means it is time for the annual parade of the anthologies of the "best" things of the year. Frankly, it's hard to go wrong with these books. A lot of it depends on what you're looking for.

These two books are representative. The Year's Best SF, edited by Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine editor Gardner Dozois, attempts to collect everything good in the year. This year, he has 28 stories and about 250,000 words in a huge trade paperback. Wollheim's Annual World's Best is a much smaller, mass market paperback with nine stories. Between the two, five stories are shared, as well as six authors (Dozois and Wollheim choose different Lucius Shepard stories -- these collections somewhat arbitrarily limit themselves to a single author, probably to keep themselves from becoming the "best short fiction of Lucius Shepard of the year" anthologies).

There's enough difference between the two books that in a perfect world, readers would buy both, take the Wollheim book with them to read on the train and come home to snuggle up with Dozois before the fire.

Since this isn't a perfect world and budgets rarely stretch far enough, which book you buy should really depend on your reading habits. If you want something transportable, or are interested in the highlights of the year, pick up the Wollheim book. If you want more stories, as well as Gardner's look back at last year and a final list of honorable mentions, then pick up the bigger work, but don't expect to stick it in your jacket pocket. Neither is "best" but both are good representations of what the "best" was in 1987.

Briefly noted

Briefly noted, some books that I've mentioned before that I think deserve a quick comment. Kiteworld, by British author Keith Roberts, is now in paperback. It's published as a Science Fiction novel; I would claim it instead to be Fantasy, but it should please readers of either genre. What Roberts has done is build a world that extremely vivid and real, pushing the fantastic elements so far into the background that the book becomes, not a Science Fiction work about the world, but a mainstream work published in the world. It's fascinating, and worth an effort to find.

Ben Bova's The Starcrossed, a thinly veiled (and extremely funny) novelization of his life and times as Science Advisor on the short-lived Canadian television series The Starlost. Trying to describe this novel is impossible, you have to read it to believe it. Especially fun is trying to figure out which parts are real and which are made up, and picking out the various real people under their new, fictional names.

Finally, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, by Robert A. Heinlein. Now out in paperback from Ace, and if not his best work, very close to it. It felt to me that he was very carefully and very lovingly saying goodbye. It turns out that he was. And I feel, very strongly, that this is one of the books he will be proud to be remembered by.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 8)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 8

No Prisoners!

Laurie Sefton

Journey To Memblar
Burning Tears of Sassurum
Sharon Baker
Avon, 280pp, $3.50 each
0-380-75113-5
**+

A Fall of Princes
Judith Tarr
Tor, 401pp, $18.95
0-312-93063-1
**+

Wild Cards IV
George R.R. Martin (Ed.)
Bantam Spectra, 467pp, $4.50
0-553-27628-X
***+

Sorcery and Cecelia
Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
Ace, 197pp, $2.95
0-441-77559-4
****

Sheepfarmer's Daughter
Elizabeth Moon
Baen, 506pp, $3.95
0-671-65416-0
****+

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars
Thomas M. Disch
Doubleday, 72pp, $11.95
0-385-24162-3
****+

I'll have to admit it -- I'm a bit of an old fogey when it comes to what I like in my books. I'm generally looking for:

1. A protagonistic force
2. An antagonistic force
3. A reason for the two to meet
4. A place for them to meet

In other words; I'm looking for a good guy, a bad guy, a conflict and a venue. I'm even willing to have alterations in the above: the antagonistic force doesn't even have to be sentient. A "struggle against the elements" story is just fine by me.

But I am fussy about my protagonist. I want to have someone to root for, a protagonist that gives me a reason to have me want her succeed. I don't want a protagonist who just happens to be slightly less slimy than the "bad guys" in the story. This is one of the problems I have with cyberpunk; there really isn't anyone to root for.

Journey to Memblar
Burning Tears of Sassurum

Unfortunately, this sociological bent has invaded the fantasy market. Swap out a socio-genetic experiment gone bad with the prevalent futuristic cyberpunk locale, and you have the world that Journey to Memblar and Burning Tears of Sassurum is set on.

An experiment gone bad just begins to describe the world of Naphar. Two of the three races planted there are mutually antagonistic. Each considers the other worthy only to be slaves, and characteristically, they have set up religions supporting their beliefs. The soil is poisoned with selenium, so most of the indigenous fauna is poisonous. The inhabitants survive by ritualistically butchering their slave class. The third race, quite wisely, has chosen to remain hidden from the other two races; they are revered as demi-gods. The politics and social structure within the two overt races are as cruel as the ecology; most spend their lives scratching to survive, and hoping not to be sold into slavery. Even the ruling classes plot each other's downfall with astounding viciousness.

In this world we find Cassia, a slave to the small manikins, her young master Jarell, and a runaway slave, Tadge. Through a series of adventures, Cassia finds out her true parentage, and Tadge's evil former master is destroyed. And throughout their adventures, the three never stop bickering at each other, distrusting each other, and falling into the wrong hands because they can't get along with each other.

What is especially disturbing is that nothing changes. The two overt races still hate each other, religious and political corruption continues, and the rest of the world is still slogging it out to survive. Even Cassia, the one expected to learn and grow throughout the book, retreats into religious fundamentalism. By the end of the second book, I couldn't find a character I liked, much less a character I could root for.

A Fall of Princes

Judith Tarr's latest, A Fall of Princes, is the third book in the Avaryan Rising trilogy. I was looking forward to this book as the ending of one of the best fantasy trilogies yet. I was wrong. Two and one-half of books are wonderful; the last half of the third book unravels everything that the previous books created. Mirain, the son of the sun god, and the hero of the first two books, is unveiled as a charming psychotic. Most of the secondary characters, instead of being the supporters of Mirain, are shown to be in collusion to bring about his downfall. I felt as if I had been tricked; even though all the bad guys turned out to be bad guys, all the good guys turned out to be bad guys.

The two protagonists in the book, Sarevan and Hirel Uverias, are the sons and heirs Mirain's kingdom of Keruvarion and the Golden Empire of Asanion. Sarevan comes upon Hirel after he has been stripped and completely shaved by his jealous brothers. Sarevan brings Hirel back to health, and is repaid when Sarevan is mortally wounded; Hirel brings Sarevan back to Mirain's court.

Sarevan is an immensely likeable character. He is psychologically and physically mutilated beyond recognition by his father's enemies, who include Sarevan's grandfather. Hirel Uverias, while much more likeable by the end of the book, is still in turn victim of Mirain's enemies, and tormentor of Sarevan. At the end Mirain doesn't even gets the final dignity of dying; he enters suspended animation instead. No one wins in this book.

Wild Cards IV, Aces Abroad

Wild Cards IV, Aces Abroad, recounts the adventures of aces and jokers, victims of an extraterrestrial virus, on a fact-finding mission for the United Nations. A large portion of the book is the journal of Xavier Desmond, the so-called "mayor" of Jokertown. The journal, while also offering a differing view of the previous story, also gives insight to the plight of the joker.

While the core group, is the same; Peregrine, Dr. Tachyon, Fortunato, Puppetman and the rest; new aces and jokers are introduced for the local stories, namely in Central America and the Middle East. An interesting trend; some of the jokers and aces introduced have personality traits that are very closely aligned with their mutation. Is this some cause-and-effect relationship?

My only problem with the Wild Cards series so far is the quantity and quality of sex scenes. There are too many for the level of quality. There are not a few SF writers who have written erotica; perhaps Martin should use these writers in a future volume?

Sorcery and Cecelia

Sorcery and Cecelia is a lovely little work by Patricia Wrede and Carol Stevermer. The story is set in Regency England with a twist; this Regency England has sorcerers and wizards. Other than that, all is as Jane Austen would have described. The "season", the "bon", and the "Society", made up of nobles and landed gentry, are all there. The entwining plot of magic adds to the romp. I have to admit, I knew who was going to end up with whom 1/3 of the way through the novel, but the getting there was the fun. I'd love to see more of this.

Sheepfarmer's Daughter

This is the first of Elizabeth Moon's trilogy, The Deed of Paksenarrion. Paksenarrion, or Paks, runs away from an unwanted betrothal to join a mercenary army. She is hardened as a fighter before she goes out to battle; she survives an attempted rape andaccused of assault. The battle scenes and their aftermath are what pulls this novel beyond so many fantasy novels. People rarely die in a noble manner in this book, they either bleed to death or die from gangrene. Which, if you think about it, would be correct for a medieval milieu. Sorcerers and healing draughts are available, but they're expensive, and aren't wasted on foot soldiers.

Sheepfarmer's Daughter is an excellent beginning to the trilogy. The characters ring true, and I didn't want the story to end. I'm looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars by Thomas Disch is a delightful, insightful delicious read. Even if you haven't read The Brave Little Toaster, sneak this charmer out of the Juvenile section for your very own.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 9)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 9

Much Rejoicing
Episode 6: Sturgeon's Lawyer

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

Bio of an Ogre
Piers Anthony
Ace, $17.95
0-441-06224-5

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars
Thomas M. Disch
Doubleday, $11.95
0-385-24162-3

Camp Concentration
Thomas M. Disch
Carroll & Graf, $3.95
0-88184-386-5

Clan Ground
Clare Bell
Dell Laurel Leaf, $2.95
0-440-91287-3

High Rise
J.G. Ballard
Carroll & Graf
0-88184-400-4

Last and First Men
Olaf Stapledon
Jeremy P. Tarcher, $10.95
0-87477-471-3

The Motion of Light In Water
Samuel R. Delany
Arbor House, $18.95
0-87795-947-1

Resurrection, Inc.
Kevin J. Anderson
NAL, $3.50
0-451-15409-6

Portal
Rob Swigart
St. Martins Press, $18.95
0-312-01494-5

Seventh Son
Orson Scott Card
TOR, $3.95
0-812-53353-4

Space War Blues
Richard A. Lupoff
Dell, $1.95
0-440-16292-0

The Motion of Light in Water

All of you. Yes, you, and you, and even you in the green shirt pretending to read the new GOR book. Especially that one, in fact. Go buy Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water.

Many of us have come to greet the announcement of a new Delany with anticipation; book after book, for over two decades, has been filled with astonishing language, brilliant imagery, and shattering analogies to the real world.

But who would have expected the same of an autobiographical memoir?

Motion is the story of Delany's late youth and early manhood. He tells how he discovered, in parallel, his identity as a black man, a gay man, and a science fiction writer, in no particular order. The three chains of discovery are woven into a network of language, imagery, and insights that will keep anyone even slightly interested in any of these three elements of Delany's identity sitting up until all hours, turning pages until their fingers bleed from paper cuts and their eyes grow bleary from staring at black on white.

I know. I did.

If that isn't enough, there's the "bits." Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, W.H. Auden, Cab Calloway, and other folks with nothing at all to do with one another wander in and out of the book (and Delany's life), each a relatively minor encounter, but each of them in that brief moment illuminated from an entirely new angle. At a glance, this might look like name-dropping, but Delany's attitude toward these incidents keeps them from ever quite reaching that level.

Though it deals heavily with sexual matters and sexual politics, this isn't a "sex book" by any means. A significant part of the book deals with Delany's wanderings through the gay demimonde of early '60s New York City, a world that seems totally alien and terrifying in the age of AIDS. Delany paints a culture -- really, almost a non-culture -- of casual and purely physical encounters that from a middle class perspective may appear perverse, but he paints it as it had to be to survive at all. It appears, at least in my eyes, strangely and beautifully innocent. In that sense, this may well prove to be a seminal work indeed.

Delany-as-writer develops more slowly. He wrote a variety of things for years before he sold his first SF novel, The Jewels of Aptor. But the simple fact that Jewels was his first sale may have turned his career to SF as much as any intent on his part. The roots of Jewels, and other early novels, appear in Motion almost in passing; it is only at the end of the period the book covers that Delany seems to begin thinking of himself as "a sf writer." (This alone will probably be a shock to any number of people who think of themselves as sf writers long before their first story is completed, let alone published; to such people, the idea that one might fall, almost accidentally, into that Blessed State will be nearly unthinkable.)

Finally, we see Delany-as-black-man. As a child, he lived in Harlem. His neighbors were almost exclusively black, but he was sent to a private school where his friends and classmates were almost exclusively white. Some of Delany's most powerful social insights, in Motion and throughout his work, arise from this daily displacement between subcultures, and his attempts to see the larger whole of which they were parts.

Given his early life, Delany could easily have been a bitter man. The most astonishing thing about The Motion of Light in Water is the love with which it is written. He has nothing mean, and almost nothing angry, to say about anyone. Delany seems to have a good word for everyone; even when describing those who hurt him in some way, he spends more time speaking of their feelings than his own, and not one is painted as a villain or sadist.

I can only repeat what I said when I began this review: go out and buy this book. Don't wait for a paperback; you can't afford to wait that long.

It really is that good.

Bio of an Ogre

There's something about Piers Anthony that fills me with the urge to make invidious comparisons. It really isn't fair of me; last time, I stacked a Xanth novel up against Lucius Sheppard's incredible Life During Wartime; now I'm about compare him with Delany.

But, hell, he invites it. Anybody who writes an autobiography -- and they've been endemic in SF since Asimov's two gargantuan tomes fell into our hands in the late '70s -- is setting themselves up as a target, Delany as much as Anthony.

Anthony might well be expected to write an entertaining autobiography. I often enjoy the author notes at the ends of his novels more than I do the novels themselves (which is not a slight on the novels; the author notes have been known to be longer than many of the novels' chapters); with Bio of an Ogre, I was looking forward to an extended author note.

Nor was I disappointed. If Delany's book concentrates on three aspects of his life, Anthony's concentrates on two, and one is his writing. Bio would be a much more appropriate book than Motion to give a young person asking how you become a writer; Anthony describes many of his lessons, artistic and business, in great detail.

The other principal focus of Anthony's book might be called "How I came to be an Ogre." He calls himself this, perhaps in jest, referring to some of his more difficult-to-get-along-with personality traits.

Considering the image the fan press has given Anthony as a monster of conceit, this book comes as a surprise. He does, indeed, hold a high opinion of his own writing and his own integrity. But it may well be that within the quite legitimate definitions he uses, that opinion is justified.

I treading carefully here: I want to say that Anthony comes across as being incredibly honest and honorable. But I have to include the caveat that this is his story, told from his point of view. When he describes how he dealt honorably, and others did not, we are not given both sides of the story. (In one of the more serious cases, actually, he goes out of his way to give his opponent's side of the story: but in general, no.)

The problem is this: he feels he has the right to judge everyone else by the same standard of integrity he has, apparently, chosen for himself. His standard is such that (he says) he will take pains to avoid telling even a "white lie."

Very well, that is an honorable standard indeed, and I would never criticize him for it. But is it reasonable, is it even "fair" (whatever that means), to hold his own standards as a measurement for others? Honesty is a fine principle, but others may choose other, perhaps equally valid, principles for their lives: principles like "don't hurt others." Or other principles which don't seem so lofty, but may be legitimate in their way, like "bravery" or "success at any cost."

Because he does hold his standard as a measurement for others, Anthony feels he has been wronged, repeatedly. The fourth of the book's five parts is in large proportion a catalog of wrongs done to him by fans, publishers, critics, and even other writers (notably SFWA, Gordon Dickson, and Robert Silverberg) during the covered segment of his life.

It is here that I want to draw the aforementioned invidious comparison. Delany seems to be laying the facts before us: "This is what happened to me, and what I did, and what I felt about it." He goes out of his way to make us understand the other people in his life, as human as himself.

Anthony does not. His book seems to be "Here is what everyone has done to me, and what I have done in return, and why it screwed me up so badly." The people he comes into contact with, both friends and opponents, and even his wife, seem to exist only with respect to himself; there is no attempt to understand why they treat him the way they do.

I submit that this egocentric (and I mean this word in the most literal meaning; not that Anthony has an unduly high self-opinion, but that he views reality only with respect to himself) attitude is a large influence on Anthony's fiction. He is capable of creating fascinating and well-rounded protagonists, such as "Death" of On A Pale Horse or Hope Hubris of the Bio of a Space Tyrant series.

But his supporting characters, even in his most "serious" fiction, always seem hollow, existing only to give his protagonists something to interact with. The villains, even in his more "serious" fiction, seem uniformly villainous; they are seeking power, or wealth, or some other simple goal, with no more complex needs or feelings. They might as well be Snidely Whiplash or Boris Badinov.

I don't want to belabor the point. Let me conclude by observing that Bio is an entertaining book, detailing the life of a man I find fascinating and in many ways admirable. If you are at all fond of autobiographies, this is one of the more enjoyable products of the "SF Bio glut."

High Rise

Publishers sometimes do things that deserve special notice. Carroll & Graf have been doing something, recently, that deserves to be recognized: putting some of the best SF of the '70s back into print.

The two latest before me are J.G. Ballard's High Rise and Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration.

I've discussed Ballard before in this space. Most of his works from the '70s have an extremely unusual flavor that leads some to doubt that he was even writing SF during this period: his novels dealt with the psychosexuality of car crashes, the violence of American society, and, in High Rise, the breakdown of civilization in a modern apartment building.

The building in question is a huge towering edifice of the sort to be found in most major urban areas. People park beneath the building and ride or walk up dozens of floors to reach their homes.

The inhabitants of such a building always live in an uneasy sort of truce -- the existence and habits of each are always an inconvenience, if not an outright annoyance, to some of the others.

Ballard simply allows some of that underlying energy to run amok. It begins with small acts of violence and vandalism, and quickly escalates into a full-scale guerrilla war between the floors of the building. What makes the book work is the protagonist, who finds himself drawn into the urban barbarism, and even coming to love it.

Is such a book SF? I say yes. Ballard does with psychology and sociology what a Clement or a Forward does with physics and biology; he is the first "hard science" writer of the soft sciences.

Camp Concentration

Disch's Camp Concentration is a late-Vietnam-period nightmare.

The story is set in a turn-of-the-century Fascist America similar to the one Disch later envisioned so well in 334 and On Wings of Song, but from a very different point of view: the hero, Louis Sachetti, is a poet, a conscientious objector, and, thus, a political prisoner.

He is taken from his cell to the underground Camp Archimedes. Here political prisoners are being used in intelligence-increasing experiments, and Sachetti is told that his skills as a writer are wanted -- he will chronicle the experiences of the prisoners.

They are fearsomely intelligent -- and doomed. The agent that increases their intelligence, a mutant strain of Treponima pallidum, is also killing them.

And, of course, Sachetti is himself infected.

Disch's political satire is painful; his observation of character detail is precise. But the greatest success of Camp Concentration is in Disch's portrayal of a man gifted and cursed with a growing, superhuman intelligence. It's hard to adopt the point of view of someone much smarter than yourself; Disch pulls it off. This takes my highest recommendation -- but it's not for the easily depressed.

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars

As long as I'm on about Thomas Disch, let me mention -- briefly -- that the sequel to The Brave Little Toaster is out. It's called The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, and it's all about a fiendish plot to destroy human life, foiled by the Toaster's pluck and optimism.

I don't know how Disch pulls off stories like this, or the classic "Dangerous Flags." Nobody in his right mind would tackle them; they're so inherently "cutesy" that Beatrix Potter would die of diabetic shock.

But, somehow, Disch gets away with it. They're tight, beautifully-written stories that leave you feeling good.

Hmmm... maybe that's how he gets away with it...

Last and First Men

Another publisher that deserves our gratitude is Dover. For years, they've kept good "trade paperback" editions of classic works in print when nobody else would.

Some of the SF/fantasy writers kept available to generations of fans in this way are Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Taine, James Branch Cabell, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. All of them have otherwise been in and out of print -- in some cases, mostly out -- over the decades.

Oh, and one more: W. Olaf Stapledon.

Dover has kept his work alive through two omnibus volumes containing four books: Last and First Men paired with Star Maker, and Odd John with Sirius.

Now Stapledon seems to be coming back into fashion. A little while back, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., issued a lovely edition of Star Maker. Now they've reprinted Last and First Men.

Now, mentioning Dover first may sound like a slight to Tarcher. I don't mean it that way, honest.

But Dover has stood by Stapledon for years, and now Tarcher reissues him with a fair bit of ballyhoo (foreword and afterword to L&FM by Gregory Benford and Doris Lessing); I want to know why.

The claim of this volume is that it is the first complete edition ever published in the U.S. I haven't compared it word-for-word with the Dover edition, but in a quick skim I don't see anything I haven't seen before.

Still, it is a classic of SF, and, more, a damn fine book, presented beautifully. Stapledon was at his best here. It's a travelogue of time, detailing the "future history" of intelligence on Earth and beyond through no less than nineteen sentient species, and hinting at greater things beyond.

Pick up Last and First Men, and Star Maker, in whatever edition you can find them. More I cannot say.

Disclaimer: The next two books reviewed here were written by friends. I think I'm capable of being reasonably objective about them, but you may want to take what I say about them with a grain of salt.

Clan Ground

Clare Bell writes juvenile novels for rather advanced juveniles. Her first book, Ratha's Creature, dealt with the discovery of fire by a clan of sentient smilodons in an alternate pre-history where the smilodons were sentient. I enjoyed the book, but probably wouldn't have given the sequel a second look had I not met the author.

Which would have been my loss. Clan Ground is a damn good novel. It picks up some time after the events of Creature . The Clan, who exist by herding game animals, have established local dominance by use of fire.

They think it's alive. After all, it moves and eats and possesses some unusual power -- and dies if not fed. Many primitive humans have felt the same way. (In fact, some very civilized humans have thought of fire as a living thing; Olaf Stapledon wrote an entire novel about sentient flames. Jeremy Tarcher, are you listening?)

Certain of the Clan cats are designated as "firekeepers;" their life's work is to tend the fires that protect the Clan and the herd from marauders.

Enter, then, Shongshar, a non-Clan cat. He's the villain of the story; he comes to the Clan and begs to serve the fire. Problem is, he wants to serve it more than necessary. In fact, he goes about instituting a fire-worship religion that nearly destroys the Clan.

There's a lot more to it than that, of course; Shongshar is not an unmitigated villain; a different turn of events might have made him a fascinating hero. (I've always had a soft spot for likeable and well-defined villains. Shongshar made the book for me.) And there's a wonderful solution to the problem of manipulating fire and tools when one doesn't have hands.

Clan Ground isn't a perfect book. The genetics of feline sentience seem more than a little confused. There's a tendency to fall into the "Jean Auel" syndrome -- too much invention and discovery happening in too short a historical period. And some of the "mysteries" of the novel are just too damn obvious to hold any suspense.

But in all, I'd happily give the book to my kids to read -- when they're fifteen or so.

Resurrection, Inc.

Kevin Anderson is about to become an overnight success after years of obscure toil. His short fiction has appeared in most of the major semi-pro magazines in the horror/dark fantasy field, in Amazing and F&SF, and in last year's Best Fantasy Stories.

Now his first novel is coming out; it should hit the stands about when you read this. It's called Resurrection, Inc., and it squats firmly on the boundary between SF and horror, in a way that should appeal to some readers from each genre.

A company known as Resurrection Inc. fits dead humans with electronic devices that make them perfect slaves -- they never question, are not able to question, their owner's orders.

They've put a lot of people out of work. The workers aren't thrilled by this, and a variety of social oddities result: most notably the Neo-Satanist church, the fastest-growing religion of the century.

In this future, a man is murdered -- sacrificed by the Church of Satan. He is made into a Servant, one of the zombie slaves sold by Resurrection, Inc. But he's different. He keeps having flashes of memory from his first life...

I recommend Resurrection Inc. to you. I'd like to recommend it "highly," but I can't, quite. There are a number of irritating problems: a fascinating subplot that vanishes (by the "they all got run over by a train" method) about a third of the way through the book; a number of characters who seem to exist solely to fill their functions in the plot; and a rather cliched "the underground resistance movement strikes the Bad Guys down" ending.

Contrariwise, it's full of beautiful stuff, from the Servants themselves to the image of San Francisco Bay completely built over; and it's well-written and engaging. You care about the characters. So I can hardly pan it either.

All I can do is say, check it out for yourself. If your tastes are even vaguely like mine, you'll probably like, but not love, it. Which is, after all, more than most first novels ever deliver.

Portal

Something appeared in my mailbox a little while ago. Something called Portal, by Rob Swigart.

It's not a novel. Richard Lupoff praises it extravagantly on the back cover, but he's quick to point out that it's not a novel. And he's right, for reasons that bear some looking at.

Portal has two main plot lines. The outer "framework" is the story of an Intrepid Starship Explorer, who returns to Earth and the place is closed. Well... deserted. No signs of destruction, war, plague, or anything else greet him; there just isn't anyone around.

So the nominal "plot" of Portal is the story of this man's efforts to find out, through a still-functioning worldwide AI network, what happened to all the people.

The second plot, of course, is What Happened To All The People. This is the story of a doomed love and the extraordinary lengths a boy goes to to redeem it and meet his girl. He ultimately opens the Portal for mankind, about which I will say no more because it would spoil much of the story's ending.

Either of these would have made an exceptional novel. (So, for that matter, would the story of the AI's, abandoned and without purpose, not knowing where their masters have gone or why they have been left behind: and then this sole human appears from space...)

Unfortunately, none of these stories is told. Instead, they are mished and mashed together by the presentation of small chunks from here and from there that, hopefully, add up to the story: a technique borrowed from Dos Passos by way of John Brunner.

This technique is tremendously demanding of both reader and writer. When both put the effort into it, it can be incredibly rewarding. In this case, however, it simply isn't worth the reader's effort because Swigart does not know how to handle it.

With the "Dos Passos presentation mode," every section is in some sense a scene, and each scene must count, must have emotional impact. Many of Swigart's sections are recitations of fact, as dry as a passage from Asimov's "Encyclopedia Galactica:" fascinating ideas, but not scenes by any stretch of the imagination. After a few of these, the going bogs down; after enough, the story grinds to a halt. Nor is it at all helpful that some of the information in these sections is presented several times from different perspectives.

I suspect that some of the problem stems from Portal's unusual genesis. It has been released simultaneously as a computer game where the player takes the part of the returning astronaut, and has to interrogate the AIs to find out "what happened to the humans." If the game is designed at all well, there are numerous paths to the same ultimate end, and some vital information would have to be planted in different forms along all those paths.

Many of the expository sections of Portal-the-book seem to be dumps directly from the computer game, with no editing.

All in all, Portal is a book of fascinating ideas and characters, and several brilliant plots hidden among the clumsy exposition. Swigart shows ability to plot, and to write, throughout. One can only hope his next book is a novel. It should be pretty damn good.

Closet Classic

Sherman, set the Wayback machine for...1978. No, make that 1967. Or...?

In '67, Harlan Ellison's incredible Dangerous Visions anthology appeared, and sold so well, and was so acclaimed, that he was pressured by the publisher into doing a sequel. The sequel, you may recall, was Again, Dangerous Visions.

A,DV contained a story by Richard A. Lupoff, called "With The Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama." This was one of the two or three most dramatically experimental pieces in a huge book that was noted for experimentation, during a period noted for experimentation.

That was published in 1972, after several delays. The delays cost Lupoff dearly.

You see, Dell Books had wanted Lupoff to expand "WtBBBoLONA" into a novel. Lupoff wanted to expand "WtBBBoLONA" into a novel. Ellison wanted Lupoff to expand "WtBBBoLONA" into a novel.

But time got messed up, and by the time A,DV was published, Dell was not as interested as they had once been.

In fact, it took them until 1978 to publish the book, which had been through several metamorphoses and finally emerged under the title Space War Blues.

This is the novel, then, that a young Dan'l Danehy-Oakes set his sweating hands on in that summer of 1978 and was lost in for days. I must have read it three or four times before I could bring myself to read anything else; it impressed me that much.

What is it? It's a spacegoing Catch-22 with voodoo; it's a space opera with yuks; it's one of the funniest, saddest, baddest, and maddest books I've ever read, and easily the best (if last published) product of the late '60s/early '70s "New Wave" in science fiction. For one thing, unlike some of the books of the period, it's actually about something.

Man finally got to space, and it wasn't occupied, so he took it. Unfortunately, he took everything with him: his hatreds, his prejudices, his stupidity, and his infinite capacity for screwing things up. SWB is about a few of those screwups.

Surn (that's "southern" to y'all) whites from worlds like N'Alabama and N'Jaja (sound it out) still hate the "cruvvelin black animan nigras" who've colonized N'Haiti and N'Ghana and so forth. One of these fine surn worlds (N'Ala, that's right from the original title) wishes to teach them uppity nigras a lesson once and for all.

The black citizens of New Haiti, in the meanwhile, do not wish to be taught a lesson; they wish to be left alone by the bigots of N'Ala. Both sides have plenty of technology; what they lack is manpower. N'Haiti finds a solution that simply must be read to be believed, and the war gets very very strange indeed.

Nor should the Australian theme be ignored. If there is a lingering image anywhere in the book, it is the Yurakosi "sky hero" who sails the beautiful ships from world to world. He can walk naked to the stars where other races cannot; his unusually deep melanin protects him from the worst of the cosmic radiation, and he needs only a skintight suit to keep him from decompression and suffocation.

Dell published it once and dropped it; the "New Wave" was no longer marketing magic.

Gregg Press picked it up for one of their fine hardback reprints, but who can afford those?

So this column concludes with a call to the folks at Dell: I know it wasn't you, back then, but it was your company that sat on that book for six years, my friends, and that finally released it with nearly no publicity. I strongly urge a reissue, with the ballyhoo needed to bring it to the public's eye.

I don't speak of justice to Dick Lupoff; he has made it clear that Space War Blues is, to him, a thing of the past, and this is as it should be. But Dell Books owes a debt to the book itself, and nothing will pay that debt but that you bring it to the pubic eye. Do it.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 10)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 10

Clifford Simak -- 1904-1988
Robert A. Heinlein -- 1907-1988

Clifford Simak

On April 25, 1988, we lost Clifford Simak. He was 83, An SFWA Grand Master, winner of the Hugo, the Nebula and the International Fantasy Award. His best known works were City (1952 IF Award), The Big Front Yard (1959 Hugo), Way Station (1964 Hugo) and Grotto of the Dancing Deer (Hugo and Nebula, 1981). He is survived by a daughter, a son, and a brother.

I feel guilty about the paucity of appreciations. Simak was well liked and appreciated by many. A number of comments got lost in the mourning when Heinlein's death was announced, and I wasn't able to track them down in time for this issue. I feel sorry that a man to the field and loved by it's readers is leaving us under the shadow of another. I will carry appreciations for Simak next issue as well if they are sent to me.

Clifford, you brightened our lives and lightened our hearts. Wherever you are, our love and our respect go to you. Be happy, and know you are loved.

Robert A. Heinlein

I got the word on May 9th, the day after he died. Life hasn't been the same since. This isn't an obituary -- I've tried writing one since I heard the word, and my mind refuses to accept that he's gone.

He's not really gone, you know. Open up one of his books and he's back, staring over your shoulder, talking, teaching. He sat up with me, many nights, sharing his life, his love of people, his demands that you stand up for yourself and not wait for others to do it for you. He taught me a lot. I like to believe I got at least some of the lessons right. He was, more than any other writer, my spiritual father, although we never met.

So no obituary. Anything I do would be a pale imitation to the good-byes in Locus, and I refuse to let him die. Any time someone tells me otherwise, I'll just look at the bookcase and smile. I know better.

I'm not alone, either. Never before has a Science Fiction writer been recognized as widely as Heinlein has. Obituaries in all the newspapers; in Time, in Newsweek; in the New Republic. NBC Network; NPR. Even Herb Caen, spiritual guardian of San Francisco, said goodbye.

Not all of these were good obituaries, or accurate, but it is an indication of how important Heinlein was, not just to us, but to everyone.

Waldos. Waterbeds. Grok.

How many authors have words in the dictionary?

How many authors can look at major technological advances and say "That's mine!"

Starship Troopers. Time Enough for Love. Have Spacesuit Will Travel. I will Fear no Evil. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Friday. The Roads Must Roll. The Man Who Traveled in Elephants. To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

No, he's not dead. He's right in the other room, and down the street, and across town and in the libraries and towns and minds across the country. Open up a book, and you'll see.

Appreciations

Tom Galloway

Last July I did something stupid.

I was going back to LA from Westercon in Oakland. I would be moving to Switzerland soon, and since I'd never done it, I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway back along the coast. And this took me through Santa Cruz.

I knew about the Heinlein collection at UCSC, so I called and set up an appointment to look at it. For someone like me, for whom Robert Heinlein is one my two favorite authors, it's interesting. I got to read a couple of stories that hadn't been reprinted in any of his collections. Some unreprinted magazine articles. Some correspondence about stories and articles. Earlier drafts, with marked in changes. Fascinating stuff.

But that wasn't the stupid thing. That was the smart thing I did that day.

Now, I have to give you some background about myself. I know several authors at both the friend and acquaintance level, mostly from having worked conventions. I've met a number of other people who are celebrities, or major authorities, in a limited field, such as chess or Artificial Intelligence or other interests of mine. I was a member of a committee at Yale that selected and contacted prospective speakers for one of the residential colleges. So I know how to behave and act around such. I know that you don't just pop up on someone's doorstep and go, "Gosh, Mr. Einstein, I really love your work". If everyone did that, such people'd never have time to do what they did to make people want to pop up on their doorstep.

Right now, you're thinking that the something stupid I did was to pop up on Mr. Heinlein's doorstep. Wrong. This something wasn't that stupid.

Close though. Y'see, for several years before that, I had in my possession the Heinleins' phone number. I'm not going to say how I got it. But I had this number, and I hadn't used it for the several years that I'd had it.

Until that day last July. I'd just seen the collection. I was in the same town. I was moving to Europe for an indefinite period, but at least a year. And we all know that his health'd not been the best for a number of years. And it all came together and I did the stupid thing.

I pulled over at a phone booth.

I even made a rationalization. I was going to offer to arrange for me to pay for a dinner for him and Mrs. Heinlein at a restaurant of their choice, as a token of my thanks for many hours of enjoyment and education.

I dialed the phone.

To my surprise, a male voice answered. For some reason, I'd expected Mrs. Heinlein to answer, probably because I once read somewhere that she handled his correspondence. I managed to recover slightly, and got out an explanation of who I was, and why I was calling. Compounding my stupidity, I managed to make it sound like I was trying to invite myself to dinner with them.

That got straightened out, and he declined my offer as they were in the midst of preparing to move to a condo. Other than that, I won't go into the details of the maybe two minute conversation, except to say that at the end I thanked him for the many hours of enjoyment and education.

Mr. Heinlein was very polite throughout the conversation, which I knew was an imposition. It was dumb. It was stupid. I still have problems believing I did it.

And even now, now that I know that I'll not have a chance, however remote, to somehow manage to encounter him in a way that would not be an imposition, I don't know how I feel about it. On the one hand, I'm very glad that I did have a moment of personal contact with him. On the other, I know that it was a stupid thing, and a very bad way of supposedly trying to express my appreciation to him.

But, y'know, in a way I'm doing the same dumb thing right here. I'm trying to express my appreciation of what his work meant to me and did for me, and here I am just writing about two minutes of "personal" contact which if anything were against the sort of thing I thought I'd learned from his work.

I guess the point is, it meant enough to me that I did something that normally I'd never do. The something was dumb. It was stupid. But the work affected me that much.

Shit.

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

The litany of the dead goes on, and on, and on; but somehow these two hurt more than most. Somehow these two touch us right where we live.

Both of them were getting on; both of them were had been ill, were living on overtime. We should have seen it coming -- and I guess, in a way, we did. In a way. But we never really expect it until it happens. Do we?

I never met Clifford Simak. I met Robert Heinlein only once, and that at a time when he was very ill -- shortly before his bypass operation. But both Heinlein and Simak have enriched my life, and many others -- probably yours, if you're reading this -- with their quintessentially American dreams of the future.

Heinlein was the town-bred American, beating the drum and selling war bonds. If he hadn't so much style, he would have been just a Babbit, waving his flag and mouthing his cliches; but he was never cliche. Think of every way you could to say something, and Heinlein would still surprise you.

Simak, now, was the American outback woodsman. He told stories of a quiet future where folks is still folks and everybody is basically good, if you only understood 'em; and he filled this future with magic, so nothing in the here-and-now ever looked quite the same after you read a Simak book.

It was Heinlein's stories, more than anyone else's, who taught us that it was possible to think and reason in an SF story. It was Simak's that taught us that you could write SF with genuine feelings. They were, respectively, the mind and the heart of science fiction, and it's fitting that they should be taken from us so close together. No less sad for that.

A few months ago, I reviewed Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset for this 'zine. I wrote (among other things):

This may well be his last book; if so, he's built himself a monument worthy of his life and work.

I stand by that.

Simak didn't need a monumental last book; each of his works was a quiet, tastefully-placed stone or flower in a rock garden nobody else could tend, and that stands for him as no towering headstone could.

In the last few years, it's been fashionable among young turks to call Heinlein a fascist, Simak a sentimentalist; to say that both had outlived their talent. I don't think so. Listen to me, young turks: years will pass, and City and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Way Stations and Double Star and They Walked Like Men and Time Enough For Love and A Choice of Gods and To Sail Beyond the Sunset will still be here long after all you young turks, and me, and Chuq, and the cyberpunq posers have all been swept away to wherever they sweep trash like us.

And the answer will be unspoken, unheard, but true and passionate: their talents outlived them. Not the other way around.

Sail on, Robert, into an unimaginable sunset.

And, Clifford, may your enchanted journey never end.

Kenn Barry

I never met Robert Heinlein. I wish I had. Saw him once, at a con, but not being one of those people who feel that hero-worship is a good excuse for bothering your hero, I didn't introduce myself.

But at least I had the pleasure of knowing him in the same way that the rest of his legions of fans did. I found his books in my local library when I was 12, one fine summer. Some things, some experiences, so rivet a person that they can never be forgotten (nor, sadly, recaptured). Such was that summer, for me. The Rolling Stones; The Star Beast; Tunnel In The Sky; Time For The Stars; Red Planet. When I couldn't find any more on the "books for young people" shelf, I made my first foray into the grownup's side of the library, and read until there was no more to read. When the Heinlein ran out, I moved on to Clarke, Asimov, the rest of the crew, and they were fine, but it wasn't really the same.

How can one put it into words? How can that feeling of the mind coming alive be communicated? If I say it was like the first time I heard "Rite of Spring", sitting in my room, in the dark, but not really even knowing where I was, will it mean anything to anyone but me?

Heinlein has put the stars in our eyes, and his starry-eyed readers will put the stars in our reach. Listen to the people who made Apollo, who made the Saturn V. What did they read as youngsters? Over and over, the same names are heard: Verne, Wells, Heinlein. Somewhere out there are thousands of brothers and sisters I've never met, dreamers and believers, who as children went through those books at lightspeed, and knew it could be real, if we chose to make it so. Heinlein showed us. He made that dream of the future a living reality, showed us that it was only our bodies chained by gravity, not our minds. He took us to space, and we won't ever come home again, not really.

The 12th summer passes; a year goes by. Puberty arrives, and with it the mailer from the SF Book Club: new Heinlein novel! Stranger In A Strange Land. Yet more horizons become visible. Question authority. Think new thoughts. Never be afraid to doubt that which makes no sense, no matter how many times They tell you you're silly or stubborn, a troublemaker. Have faith in yourself.

I can't summarize a man's life work in one essay. So many threads, so many lessons. I was never close to my real father, but Heinlein made up much of the lack. He was not the only place I found lessons about duty, and courage, and responsibility, but he more than anyone else made these things real for me. Protect the weak; value honesty for its own sake; take responsibility for your own actions. I haven't always lived up to this model, of course, but at least I have the ideals; Heinlein gave them to me.

Many more summers have come and gone for me since those first, electric discoveries of new dimensions of my own humanity. Since then have come the muddy, equivocal lessons of age, including the lesson that even Heinlein can try, but fail, to distill wisdom into words. And now there's that final lesson that we are only clay, and cannot tarry forever, no matter how much we wish it were otherwise. Heinlein wished harder than anyone, but he, too, now sails beyond the sunset. If there were one thing I could tell him, I know what it would be: that those stories he was always so modest about, those words strung together to entertain, to "buy groceries", have given him the immortality that he sought. As long as human children look up and wonder, his books will be there to inspire them.

Goodbye, Mr. Heinlein. You are loved, and missed. And if there is another shore upon the other side, maybe I'll one day get to thank you personally, and laugh along with you at the wonderful joke we play on ourselves called Life.

Joel Davis

I can remember reading Simak's books when I was, or, 10 or 11 years old. I can even remember the smell and feel of that old, tiny library branch, where I found those books. I don't even have to close my eyes to see exactly which shelf they were on. I've read Way Station so many times I can't count 'em. And City -- it blew me away. And my personal Simak favorite was and still is Time is the Simplest Thing. It was the first SF novel that this Catholic kid ever read that had a Catholic priest in it. When I saw that, I remember thinking: Wow--this stuff is really real. This guy writes about people like me! And, of course, the story is so wonderful, gentle, the great Simak touch. I just checked my own bookshelves. Yeah, still got a copy of it. Crest Book, Fawcett World Library, paperback. 50 cents. Mmmmm. Love that smell of old paperbacks. Copyright 1981 Doubleday edition. Don't know about this one, since it doesn't have an imprint date. But it's old, and it's real, and it is taking me home again to dusty roads in rural Ventura County, California, 1961. 13 years old. I remember. Thanks, Clif. God bless ya!

Fred Bals

I woke up sometime very late on Sunday night, May 8th. I jumped awake out of a nightmare, reaching for my wife, knowing something had happened. That happens to me frequently. I'm not a very good sleeper. So even though there's a terrible temptation to point at the coincidence and make more of it, I don't want to. I can wonder though how many others who hold a similar love for science fiction may have been suddenly jarred out of sleep that Sunday night and thought to themselves, "something has happened." The name Robert A. Heinlein is -- by any measurement -- synonymous with the phrase science fiction. Ask people with a passing knowledge of science fiction about writers, and they are as likely to name Heinlein as Asimov or Clarke. Within fandom itself, Heinlein is often referred to simply by his initials -- RAH -- in a shorthand sort of familiarity usually reserved only for Presidents of the United States. In fact, that type of shorthand can be used only when you know your listeners are as familiar with the subject as you are. It's shared knowledge on almost a racial memory level. Say JFK to the average North American and you know you're going to generate a certain set of associations. Say RAH to the average science fiction reader and you will get some sort of response. Heinlein so profoundly affected science fiction that it's difficult to imagine what the field would have been like without him. There is not a contemporary writer working in science fiction who has not been influenced by Heinlein's writing. That statement bears repeating -- there is not one writer in the field who has not, in one way or another, had to deal and come to terms with Heinlein's monolithic presence -- whether to ultimately embrace him or to rebel against him. His influence is simply too pervasive to ignore. Write a time-travel story, and lurking somewhere in the back of your mind -- as you know it will with your readers -- is "By His Bootstraps." Generation starships? "Universe." Self-aware computers? "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Swords and sorcery? "Glory Road." Combat science fiction? "Starship Troopers." Try to create a strong-willed, opinionated character, and you're guaranteed that he or she will be compared to Heinlein's generic "competent man." The list goes on and on. Only Hammett and Chandler in the mystery genre, Hemingway in the mainstream, and Heinlein in science fiction have had such a tremendous an impact on other writers -- and their field itself -- as they have had upon their readers. The man has died. But the writer achieved immortality long ago.

The Robert A. Heinlein Space Station A Proposal

Raymond E. Feist

I like the sound of that. Heinlein Station. Yes. I do like the sound of that. As a child I loved adventure and reveled in the works of Scott, Sabatinni, and Dumas. Tales of daring- do and romance were my escape. My alien planes were upon the shores of France as D'Artagnan sought a boat for passage to England, or the windswept highlands of Scotland where Alan Breck helped young David Balfour reclaim his due.

Then I discovered science fiction. And then I discovered Robert Heinlein. Robert A. Heinlein was a giant, a man of letters as important to his time and place as were Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas to theirs. For in my life I have seen the idea of adventure turn from being one of the King's Musketeers to being a Starship Trooper. For has their been one of us, who as a child found a book by Robert A. Heinlein that didn't have his or her imagination fired, who didn't suddenly become seized with the desire to go Out There? There have been and are other writers who have the same effect, but Robert had that effect on more people than any other writer I know of. Ask those around you which books got to "hooked" on Science Fiction, and there well always be a Heinlein title among them. It may have been Tunnel in the Sky, or Rocketship Gallelio or The Door Into Summer, but there's a Heinlein title in there. For when I was a child, first learning that there were places I'd never seen, landscapes of awesome design, people with impossible creatures, with odd and alien sounding names, Robert A. Heinlein was often my guide.

And that is why I like the idea of the Robert A. Heinlein Space Station. Without leaving this Earth, he was my guide Out There. Without leaving this Earth, he said it was all right for us to dream. Without leaving this Earth, he took us to places of wonder beyond imagining and made them real. He turned my mind toward Space, toward the idea of going Out There. And in doing this for two generations of Americans--no two generations of human beings regardless of nation--with others to come, he becomes more important that Scott or Dumas, for while they entertained and excited us, as Heinlein did, it was Robert A. Heinlein who turned our vision heavenward. It was he, most of all, who said, now that you've read about going Out There, go Out There! That's why I like the idea of Robert A. Heinlein Space Station.

Heinlein Station. Can you think of a better place for us to begin out voyages Out There?

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 11)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 11

Letters to OtherRealms

An Open Letter to Greg Bear
M. Elayn Harvey

Hi, it's me, Elayn (the silent one, end chair, hard/soft SF panel, Norwescon 10?). I'm writing because I've finally put together something to say, an idea the panel grabbed at but, I think, was never able to pull out of its lair.

We were debating the validity of the terms hard and Soft science fiction because of the false, unflattering division it creates, where none should exist, and we were trying to define these terms. You were all for throwing out the terms and I agreed. Did you see me silently nodding my head down there? Still, I came away feeling we hadn't gotten through to the audience. I felt some were still divided in the Serious Science versus Not-So-Serious- Science camps without understanding that we were saying "There's no such thing as non- serious science." you and Dr. John Cramer tried valiantly.

Near as I can remember, it was defined that "Hard" SF is a term we gave to a book within which technological problems are solved by the characters, and "Soft" SF is a book within which the character's personal problems are solved despite, due to, amid a technological theme. With more succinct terms, we could say it's a matter of technology- problem books versus people-problem books.

Then the idea that "Technology problems" are to be taken more seriously or given more importance than "People problems" gets unmasked as the ridiculous chimera it really is.

But our attempt to side-step the terms didn't heal the issue. We are still plagued by the notion that some sciences are more valid than others. I sympathized with the biologist in the audience who complained about the "slight" the terms hard and soft were giving her field. I don't know who created these camps, but it amounts to a form of bigotry, and we who call ourselves SF writers, who care about the integrity of science, should do something.

If I may offer an observation that helped me understand why this division exists? I believe it was John who said something about nuclear fission being sexy. It brought a laugh, but I don't think people realized how really close he hit on the crux of the whole debate -- I didn't, until I'd thought about it for a while.

Science is being done by humans, and what's the most powerful drive in the human race? Right, sex. So, naturally, anything that demonstrates power gets the same attention and respect. The more power -- the more respect; it's natural, but unfortunate. We're confining our respect (adorations?) to the "hard" sciences of dominations, which includes the ability to destroy a rival.

On the obverse, a science that demonstrates less power gets less respect, hence the term, "soft". Our own psyche is the source of the idea that hard science is superior. let's substitute different words and watch the leopard change his spots again: Dangerous sciences versus Safe sciences.

That puts things in better balance, but again, we're human; the former gets respect because, like sex, it's a matter of our survival as a species. And again we're placing greater reverence on that which can destroy us, but that's fear masquerading as scientific respect.

I don't think the biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists or psychologists have any reason to feel inferior. Maybe somewhere down the road we writers can point this out. I think you made a start, Greg, with Blood Music -- you made us respect biology. But you had to demonstrate its power, make it dangerous to get our attention. See what I mean?

Okay then, lets do this for every branch of science, and in that way, get everyone in the same camp. After all, any technology problem is a people problem.

Gee, aren't you glad I didn't think of all this during the panel? We might have been there two hours....

[To a good degree I agree with you, but there's an aspect I think you missed. One factor that differentiates the "Hard" and "Soft" sciences is familiarity. The sciences that define "Hard" sciences -- physics, math, astronomy, etc. -- have been traditional fodder of SF. People are familiar with them, they have been the main focus of Science Fiction since the Golden Age. The "Soft" sciences are newer to the field and therefore not as familiar to the reader.

Because of this, the reader isn't as demanding about the science, and the writer isn't as careful in the research. This has been made painfully obvious to me since I met Laurie, who has degrees in both biology and psychology. Having a resource like that handy has made me very aware of the shortcomings of much science fiction, whether it be Hard or Soft. Sometimes it's fairly intricate. Sometime's its as basic as having a red-headed olive skin child born of two fair-skinned, blond parents (a quick hint in genetics: if this happens in your book, you better have a milkman handy....). "Hard" SF writers regularly get hate mail because they misplace a decimal point in their orbit -- and just as happily create hair and eye colors at random in a limited gene pool because it creates a nice effect for a given character.

Laurie's going to be looking at these issues in more details in the coming months, trying to create an awareness that these details matter just as much as orbital speeds, star temperature and planet atmospheres. Frankly, if you're going to pride yourself on getting the details right, you better get all your details right.

What this really comes down to is ghettoizing (or bigotry, although that's a word with emotional constraints I prefer to avoid). The mainstream ghettos SF because they don't understand it. The "Hard" SF folks ghetto "Soft" sciences for the same reason. Anything they don't understand is, by definition, inferior. ]

Fred Bals (bals%nutmeg.DEC@decwrl.dec.com)

The issue looks good and strong. I especially liked Resnick's Behind the Scenes article, and I look forward to reading his book after the interesting description of how it was created. I think the Behind the Scenes idea has a lot of potential and look forward to seeing more of them.

I was also very impressed with the artwork this issue, and think it's probably the strongest use of art I've yet seen in any issue of OtherRealms.

I also liked the parallel reviews (First Flight, Mercedes Nights, Metrophage, and Marlborough Street come to mind). I think having reviews of a book from two or more perspectives really helps a reader decide whether the book is something s/he should be looking for. To give a specific example, looking at Danny Low's and my own reviews of Mercedes Nights I found that what I didn't like -- the parallel storylines -- is exactly what Danny did.

Taltos
Denise Draper (denise@cwi.nl)

Hi, I'm an avid reader of the electronic version of OtherRealms, and I think you deserve congratulations for the work your doing. I read it mostly to get recommendation for books, particularly for books from authors that I've never read.

But anyway, I'm writing to add something to your review of Taltos. Many people have observed the difference in feel of the series, with Taltos at the light end, and Teckla at the heavy end, but I have yet to see anyone mention what is (or may be) behind it.

If you compare the books by feel and simultaneously by timeline, you will notice something. Vlad starts of (in Taltos) as a hard-and-nasty punk who is making something of himself, and who doesn't have much on his mind other than his own survival, which is rather precarious. As we follow him, in time, through the series, he changes. First, we see that there are things that occur to him, but he doesn't want to think about. Later, when "mature personal relationships" become a part of his life, he does more thinking. As of Teckla, he still doesn't want to talk to us about it, though -- what we get is indirect, our own observation of his obvious pain. What will happen in the future, we have to wait to see.

I am really impressed with Brust for doing this. Personal growth is a common enough theme in novels, but I think it is unusual for the author to deal with it in this way -- with a first person narrative, where the entire style of the book must change as the character changes. And moreover, when seen in this light, the early novels (in time) are actually just as full of "deep meanings" as the rest, because without them the contrast to Teckla (and presumably to later books) wouldn't be there.

I just had to say this, because to me it is the most important facet of the entire series, and I haven't seen anyone else mention it. On the other hand, I could be entirely wrong; maybe Brust just felt like writing a "light" novel with Taltos...

Artificial Kid
Andy Dwell (andy@ecrcvax.UUCP)

I wanted to make a short comment on Alan's review of the Artificial Kid in the last issue of OtherRealms I received. I often don't feel strongly enough about these things to bother writing, but it just so happens that I had read the book for the first time the day before I read the review; I was astonished by the difference in our perceptions.

It's true that the book is highly stylized, but there is a fairly good reason, it's meant to be funny. It's not another Hitchhikers Guide, but the jokes occur fairly regularly, and were enough to make me laugh out loud once or twice (the concept of 'posthumous assassination' which is what happened to Moses Moses, for example).

[Alan Responds: I didn't make myself very clear in the
comparison of ARTIFICIAL KID and Greek tragedy. What I meant
was that he used some of the techniques of Greek tragedy
(e.g. having action happen 'offstage' & someone comes
'onstage' to talk about it). I agree that there's a fair bit
of humor in the book.]

Ace Specials
Kevin Anderson

In Dan'l's last "Much Rejoicing" review of Metrophage, you stated (implied?) that this was the last of the Ace Specials. Not so, my friend -- there are at least two more forthcoming, and I think there are three. Black Snow Days by Claudia O'Keefe, is the only New Ace Special written by a woman -- Terry Carr bought the book from her chapters and outline. Then there's the last Ace Special, bought by Damon Knight after Terry Carr's death. Black Snow Days won't be out until a year from this fall.

Chuq, I suppose I like your "standard" rating system, but it seems to mean vastly different things to different reviewers -- just look at the ratings given by Alan, say, compared to those given by Charles de Lint. The two people obviously have different standards, and it's hard to compare. Unfortunately, it's easy to point out this problem and next to impossible to solve it.

Your editorial on reviewers in OtherRealms was excellent. I'd also add my two cents' worth that reviewers are never "right" or "wrong" -- they are just critiquing a book against their own set of preferences or distastes. The reviewers who panned Moby Dick weren't necessarily wrong, they were people who didn't like the book. Readers need to get it through their heads that reviews aren't the Last Word -- just find a reviewer whose tastes seem to parallel your own, and then listen to his or her recommendations. I generally agree with Roger Ebert and generally disagree with Gene Siskel on movies -- that doesn't mean Siskel is wrong, it just means that Ebert and I like the same sort of stuff.

[I think Dan'l meant to say that Metrophage was the last
special that Carr edited.

And yes, the ratings tend to be somewhat arbitrary. So it goes. There isn't a whole lot I can do about it without scrapping the standard completely, which I think makes it worse. Compare, for instance, my numbers with Dave Shea, who's about a full point under what I think it ought to be compared to what his reviews say. Or my reviews in the last couple of issues and a year ago, since I've tried to be a little tougher and more consistent.

But getting people to try to think their way into a standard is better than each reviewer having their own different standard. And the reviewers have the option of not giving a rating at all (as Dan'l's chosen to do) when they don't feel the standards work for them.]

The Princess Bride
Janice Eisen

I must make a comment about Alan's review of The Princess Bride. I'd never argue about his opinion of it, but he's missed a very important point about the book. It isn't abridged from anything; there is no S. Morgenstern. Goldman wrote the whole thing. He doesn't make this hard to figure out: Morgenstern is described as a Florinese writer, and there isn't and never was a country named Florin. Once you understand this, you'll realize that the "interruptions" are in fact an integral part of the book, that Goldman is weaving the fairy tale and the life of the narrator together to illuminate his themes. I'm not saying you have to like this technique, but you should try to understand what the author was doing.

Having just read The Kindly Ones, I was fascinated by Melissa Scott's article. I'd definitely like to see this feature continue.

I haven't read any of the Alien Speedway books, but I did read William Wu's Robot City book and concluded that the series was a colossal waste of time and talent. Not to mention the fact that all these books "franchised" series are marketed in a very misleading fashion: the actual author's name appears on the cover only in very small print, and not at all on the spine, leading the potential purchaser to believe that the book was actually written by the Big Name who sold his universe. I'm quite annoyed by the existence of these series. For God's sake, it's not as if Asimov et al are short on money.

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

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Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 12)

Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 12

Hugos & Other Forms

[This is a bit of a change in the LetterCol. I was unhappy with the definition of the Other Forms Hugo category, and wrote a quick essay about it on USENET to generate a discussion and (hopefully) find ways to improve the category and clean up some problems I see with some of the other Hugo Awards. An edited (greatly shortened, for space) transcript of the discussions follow, with my suggestions for changes and improvements to the Hugos at the end.

I don't believe my suggestions are perfect. Far from it. Complex situations don't boil down to simplistic answers. I make this material available here, not as the final resolution, but as another step in discussing the situation and finding ways to improve it.

-- chuq]

For those that don't know, the Nolacon people decided to create a special category to handle material that wasn't able to be cleanly dealt with in the existing Hugo categories. The result was the "Other Forms" award.

The definition of "Other Forms" is any Science Fiction or Fantasy related item that doesn't fit into any other category. The specific things they're trying to deal with are books like the Hugo winning Science Made Stupid which won a Hugo as an art book in the non-fiction category; Dark Knight which lost as an art book in the non-fiction category and the likelihood of both Watchmen (another graphic novel) and Harlan Ellison's I, Robot script both needing a home in the upcoming Hugo elections.

Unfortunately, I think the Nolacon people blew it. The wording is poor and ambiguous. Worse, "Other Forms" has the potential for of abuse. It's going to be a lightly nominated category -- I expect that we'll see a large number of votes for I, Robot, Watchmen and then there will be three things that happen to have gotten more votes than all the other things.

What kind of random things qualify? I nominated two entries in "Other Forms" -- A.J. Budrys for his book review column in F&SF and Thomas Easton for his book review column in Analog. Both write genre related columns, and the columns don't qualify for any other category. After mailing off my ballot, though, I started thinking about the implications of "Other Forms". It's such a wide open category that it cries for abuse.

Like Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine? You can nominate Dozois for Best Professional Editor, but not the magazine. So nominate it for "Other Forms" as best genre fiction magazine. How about nominating Clarion as the best genre related writing conference? Or Writer's of the Future for best writing contest? They all qualify based on the wording of the award.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

One discussion I'd like to start up is what to do with the Hugo's that might improve this situation. Should Graphic Novels be specifically added to the Best Novel category, irregardless of words? Should they have their own category? Nothing at all?

Are there any other categories that need adjusting?

Tom Galloway
(galloway%elma.epfl.ch@CLSEPF51.Bitnet)

Should Graphic Novels be specifically added to the Best Novel category, irregardless of words? Should they have their own category? Nothing at all?

Heck, this opens up almost as large a can of worms as the Other Forms category. Namely, how do you define a graphic novel? The first pass would probably be something like "A work of fiction in which the narrative is substantially conveyed by either illustrations or a combination of narrative and illustrations such that removal of the illustrations would substantially effect the narrative itself" The somewhat convoluted wording is necessary to rule out the novel which merely has text illustrated.

But the big question is how one further defines this. Should there be a difference between the Far Side and Bloom County comic strips and an issue of, say, X-Men? What about something like Cerebus, which has been announced to be a 300 issue "novel", but which is made up of a number of self-contained stories which are further divided into individual issues. Like other serialized works, is it not eligible until the year in which issue 300 is printed is considered? Or are the trade paperback partial compilations eligible for the year they're published? Are individual issues eligible?

Is the Worldcon ready yet for a graphic story Hugo? To be honest, it's only in the last few years that there's been material out that I'd consider worth giving a Hugo for the most part. Does this track record justify making this a permanent category yet?There is certain to be argument against this based on awarding comic books rather than "real" fiction. Comic book fandom has pretty much split off from sf fandom in the last 20 or so years. It's unclear whether the idea of a graphic story Hugo is politically feasible.

Delete the Best Semi-Pro magazine category

To be honest, while I don't have a copy of the regulations under which a semi-pro magazine is defined, I suspect that the only reason Locus is in this category is due to its circulation being just under the 10,000 which SFWA (yes, I know SFWA has nothing to do with Hugos) defines as a pro fiction magazine. It's clear to me that Locus is a professional magazine with no semi- about it; the thing provides the sole or vast majority of livelihood for several people. It pays contributors. To me, that means it's a fully pro magazine, not a semi-pro. There were good reasons for breaking the semi-pro out from fan, but I don't think either Locus or SF Chronicle belong here.

I decided to get really strange on the Other Forms nomination. I ended up nominating Budrys and Harlan's columns in F&SF, the Hour 25 SF radio show in LA, Harlan's other unpublished script [Flintlock], and something I wish I'd thought of several weeks ago, SF- Lovers.

Wilson Heydt (whh@pbhya.PacBell.COM)

"Other Forms" also includes filk, and as Chuq noted, the rules are fuzzy in the extreme. The folks at Off Centaur have compiled a partial list of eligible filk for this year. There are some of us that are nominating "Dawson's Christian" (by Duane Elms) for the "Other Forms" Hugo.

Jim Freund (jfreund@dasys1.UUCP)

First of all, I firmly believe that a form of the Other Form category should most definitely exist. My personal love has always been for sf&f audio drama and well-done dramatic readings. I remember the Hugo nominations for two Firesign Theatre LP's coming in last place each time. And we all know how much Harlan would love one for spoken word. The late Mike Hodel should have enjoyed some recognition for his fine sf radio program on KPFK (Hour 25). (Modesty forbids my mentioning my weekly 2 hour sf radio program on WBAI for over 17 years, Hour of the Wolf)I have produced radio dramas over the years that I might have liked to have considered, and at WBAI alone, other sf radio drama producers over the years worthy of consideration have included Samuel R. Delany, John Lithgow, Baird Searles, and more. Moving outside the US we must take note of the BBC, with such productions as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Nicol Williamson's reading of The Hobbit, etc.

Not one of the above can even begin to compete in popularity (the Hugo is a popularity poll) with even a Grade-Z movie or an episode of V in the Special Dramatic Presentation category. Yet to make a specific Aural Hugo would be sill. So I welcome the premise of this new award.

Yet I recognize the validity of your argument. I find the Hugo voting to be too dispersed in taste for serious nominations (due to the vague wording) to come forth. I think SFWA could handle such a category better...

o Best Professional Artist. Shift this from a nomination of an artist to nominations of specific works. This would reduce the tendency of a well-known artist get votes on name value even in a year when their output is small or not up to snuff.

This seems it could become a double-edged sword. I feel that the Hugo's cite name value popularity so much above all else that they often have not familiarized themselves with a given category. I fear that the people who would vote (and nominate) conscientiously on such an award would be few and far between. A good but not stand-out piece of artwork might win partly on the basis of the work it is depicting. On the other hand, your plan might encourage publishers to use better cover art as an incentive to featuring a potential winner.

In fact, all of these specific proposals are close calls, worthy of debate and much fannish quibbling.

Mark Waks (justin@inmet.UUCP)

Wow. What a can of worms. I've been sitting here for about five minutes, thinking about this, and I can already see some of the problems that are going to be encountered if Graphic Novels (GNs) are given their own award.

First, there's the old "what do you call Science Fiction" problem. Do superheros qualify? I mean, I do think that Watchmen is pretty decent SF, but how much of the rest is? The big problem, I guess, with giving GNs their own category in the Hugos is that they would then get an award every year. This is purely subjective, but I have no faith in the ability of the comic book industry to put out even one Hugo-level GN each year. Just because we've done it for the past two years means nothing. I wouldn't want this to degenerate into a simple "best comic" award; I hold the Hugos to a higher standard than that.

On the other hand, there really should be some way for a really exceptional GN to be nominated, regardless of length.

What if Watchmen had never been collected? For example, I would consider Moonshadow to be high enough quality. If the category were created, it would need to be broad enough that a run of a comic could be included. Otherwise, we're shorting a part of the comic industry.

As far as voting for particular works of an artist, rather than the artists themselves: Hear, hear! I think that this is a marvelous idea, and likely to result in far more considered voting. I would seriously suggest this to the Hugo committee.

Kathryn L.Smith (kathy@XN.LL.MIT.EDU)

You're probably right about there not being a Hugo-quality GN every year, but "No Award" appears on the ballot every year too. If you don't think any of the nominees are of that quality, you can always vote that as your first choice. And yes, there have been several cases of a given category not being awarded every year. The question is basically how much faith do you have in the voting members of the WorldCon.

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes (djo@pbhyc.PacBell.COM)

Do we need two media awards? Best movie and best other media? Is there enough material out there to justify it?

The real problem is that in any given year, there may be a radio show, or a TV show (should TV shows be counted in with movies under "Drama"? How about stage plays? Slide shows (remember "The Capture")?

Perhaps "Other Forms" should be used as a Nominating category -- and then categories set up based on what gets nominated in a given year. If two or three art books get nominated, set up an "art book" category for that year. Two or three graphic novels, set up a "graphic novel" category.

You'd have to have some threshold -- say, some minimum number of nominations -- for something to make the ballot. For example, suppose Watchmen and Elektra each got 150 nominations this year, and Hairballs got forty. Then I'd say that there should only be two graphic novels on the ballot.

Setting the threshold could be a problem, of course; and what do you do when only one item in a given category makes the threshold? Put it and "No Award" on the ballot together, or just award a de facto Hugo?

Best Professional Artist

I've thought for a long time that people should vote for individual works instead of the Artist's output over a year. I suspect that (for example) Kelly Freas might not have won quite so many Hugos under that rule -- does anybody really go back and look at what this year's Freas, Whelan, Sweet, etc. covers were, or do they vote for their general impression of an artist accumulated over years?

Kevin Anderson (kanders@ncis.llnl.gov)

Every year I contemplate writing a letter to Charlie Brown, beseeching him to drop his name from the list. Come on, guys -- Locus is in a class by itself and will always win, unless SF Chronicle converts people. But even still, people will perceive it as a two-man race. And that's not true at all.

I'm a small press advocate, and I don't agree with Chuq that there are no other alternatives. If Locus and SF Chronicle withdrew from the running, then maybe people could pay attention to marvelous efforts like Weirdbook, Whispers, Shayol, or Eric Vinicoff's Rigel. And ain't it too bad that Fantasy Book didn't win any best semi-pro magazine awards when it was around? Space & Time isn't quite in the same league, but it has been published continuously for 20 years and it's quite well done. These things are not fanzines, and they should be recognized for what they are -- one of my complaints about Locus is that they usually make snide comments about small press magazines because they seem to think that a publication produced by one person out of his or her own savings account should be comparable in quality to Omni.

Michael C. Berch (mcb@ati.tis.llnl.gov)

Somehow the idea of Locus "stepping aside" to let others cop the Semi-Pro Hugo leaves sort of a bad taste in my mouth; the idea of a award where everybody's not competing equally lessens the meaning of the award, like playing a kid at chess and letting him win.

The trick here is to avoid loss of face, and it can be done by realigning the categories into something where Locus no longer gets a lock on a category, but can still compete if it chooses. Something like:

The editor awards have always puzzled me, as in trying to find a way to vote for both a favorite book editor (Terry Carr, sigh) and a favorite magazine editor (depends what mood I was in). Don't quite know what to do about that.

Jim Brunet (jimb@ism780c.isc.com)

Anyway, as to Other Forms. After mulling it over, I don't think that Watchmen or any other graphic novel should be nominated in the novel category, regardless of word count. The forms are completely different, fish and fowl, maybe even fish and conifer. I agree that there needs to be a niche for things as diverse as Watchmen, Science Made Stupid, etc. However, I'm also uneasy as to where it will end. Best SF poem? Best SF make-up job? Best SF album? Very little in jest.

On the other hand, I vigorously approve of your suggestion for best SF art, instead of artist. I don't know SF art that well, but when I did nominate and vote on such, I made an effort to look at magazine covers, book covers, etc., from the previous year in order to vote on that year's work instead of general reputation. Even then, I had the feeling that I was in the distinct minority.

Brandon Allbery (allbery@ncoast.UUCP)

I thought about Chuq's posting and then combined it with various other ideas. I think I've an idea.The basic idea would be to keep Other Forms in a modified form. It is obvious, from the existence of Watchmen/Dark Knight, that new forms of fiction can spring up and that existing forms which are not normally Hugo-quality may be used in Hugo-quality ways. Thus, "Other Forms" can potentially be useful in insuring that deserving works not fitting into other categories earn their just rewards.

Also rather obvious, however, is that an anarchic category just won't do. As Chuq said, there are altogether too many possibilities for abuse of the category.

My suggestion for the "Other Forms" category is that it be a two-step category. The first step is to select categories; last year and this year, for example, "Best Graphic Novel" would be a good category. This would be voted on the same way that specific works/authors/artists, etc. are voted on for the Hugo ballot.

Voting on categories would be done fairly early in the Hugo nomination process. This would be so the winning categories could be selected and made public in time for works to be nominated for these categories at the same time as other works are nominated into "standard" categories. From that point, works in "Special Forms" categories may be handled in the same way as for normal categories.

This would deal with the changing SF scene with minimal effect on the existing Hugo nomination process; it is flexible while it helps to insure that oddball write-in nominees do not swamp the nominations or final balloting.

[And finally, my thoughts on what should be done with the Hugo. First, I'd like to see Other Forms converted to a new type of award, an advisory Hugo. Voters would nominate Other Forms Hugos in the first round, as they currently do. Instead of a final ballot, however, the committee would use the nominations to choose whether there is enough interest to warrant a special Hugo. They could, based on the number of nominations made, award zero or more special Hugos in a given year.

To qualify for a special Hugo, certain restrictions need to be made to minimize special interest groups and people with strange senses of humors. First, it has to be genre related. It has to be originally published (or otherwise made public) in the appropriate year for qualification. And there has to be a significant interest in the item in the nominations -- for instance, at least 50% of the ballots that nominate Other Forms nominate the work.

If the committee feels a work is inappropriate, it can be disqualified, at the risk of enduring all the screams and yells of those that disagree.

This isn't perfect. But I think it keeps the intent of Other Forms while keeping it under control, and trying to guarantee it only is awarded in years when there is a deserving candidate. I don't believe there is enough quality material to guarantee that Other Forms would be awarded every year without cheapening it, and that is one reason why I don't want it to be a normal, nomination/vote award.

There are three other areas I'd like to see the Hugo's changed or realigned. First, change "Best Artist" to "Best Artwork" -- a piece of art qualifying if first displayed or published in the nominating year. This does mean that it's possible that Michael Whelan will take all five slots, but if he does, he'd deserve it -- and it strongly removes the name recognition factor from nominating process.

The second change would be modification of the "Best Professional Editor" category into two categories: "Best Magazine Editor" and "Best Publishing House" -- the latter instead of "Best Book Editor" because it is very difficult to see who edits which books. Book editing is much more a team effort, and it makes sense to honor the house and the team rather than single out an individual.

Finally, the magazine categories need realignment. The primary problem is not the "Annual Locus Award" in the semi-pro category, but that the categories attempt to define contenders by both size and intent. It's almost impossible for a casual reader to understand intent -- OtherRealms, for example, was nominated in both Semi-Pro and Fanzine categories. I would convert the categories into the following three awards:

o Best Professional Magazine: for magazines with readership over 7,500.

o Best Small Press Magazine: for magazines with readership between 1,000 and 7,499.

o Best Amateur Magazine: for magazines and fanzines under 1,000.

Magazines of similar size should have, in general, similar resources and generally the same quality level. By decoupling the size of the magazine (the primary limitation on quality, material, etc) from the question of what the magazine does (is it a hobby, a semi- hobby, or are they serious?) you make it easier for a good magazine to compete against it's peers.

My big complaint with the current system is that the question of intent skews the voting to heavily. The semi-pro category tries to define what the magazine is -- a definition that is aimed specifically at Locus, but which blurs in too many cases (including today's Locus, and fanzines with delusions of grandeur such as OtherRealms).

The numbers I've chosen are somewhat arbitrary. They were chosen to make sure Locus and SF Chron compete as Professional Magazines, which was done to open up the small press category to the many under-appreciated mid-sized magazines in the field. The Amateur cut-off could just as easily be 750, or maybe as small as 500 (although that would convert Lan's Lantern, and almost convert File 770, both of which are definitely fanzines). Somewhere between 500 and 1000 the cost of Xerox or Mimeo starts to outstrip the cost of offset printing, and that's generally the place where I define the difference between an amateur press and a small press.

As I've said, these are my best guesses on how to "fix" things. they aren't perfect. Locus can compete fairly as a professional magazine, but I don't believe that SF Chron can, which means that Andy Porter would have to get used to losing in another category. OtherRealms would end up in the Small Press category instead of the Amateur category, which I think would make it harder for me to compete and win against the likes of Grue or Fantasy Book. But these publications are all, in many ways, special cases. I think for the magazine field the categories would be more representative and fair.

And I'm always interested in more ideas and suggestions on this stuff. One of the things you realize, getting into this, is that there are no easy answers. -- chuq]

Book ratings
in OtherRealms

All books are rated with the
following guidelines. Most books
should fall into the range [***-] to
[**+]. Ratings are modified with - or +
to show a half step, with [***-]
subjectively better than [**+].

[*****] Ones of the best books of the year
[****] An above average book
[***] A good book. Recommended
[**] Flawed, but has its moments
[*] Not Recommended
[] To Be Avoided

Subscriptions

An individual copy of OtherRealms costs $2.85. A one year (4 issue) subscription is available for $11. Please note the new rates, courtesy of our Postal Service. Contributors of published material -- artwork, articles, letters or whatever -- will also receive copies of the issue they are published in.

Complimentary subscriptions to members of the publishing industry are available. OtherRealms is available on a returnable basis to specialty shops and bookstores. Please contact me for details.

OtherRealms is also available for arranged trades with your fanzine or at the whim of the editor. It is also available at Future Fantasy Books, Palo Alto CA.

Is this your last issue?

The number on your mailing list is the issue your OtherRealms subscription dies. Negative numbers indicate complimentary subscriptions. If it is zero, this is a one-time mailing, so if you want to see it again, you should Do Something about it.

Electronic OtherRealms

An electronic, text-only version of OtherRealms is available on many different computer networks and bulletin boards.

On the Internet, BITnet, CSNet and UUCP networks, send E-mail to chuq@sun.COM for information. On USENET, it is distributed in the newsgroup rec.mag.otherrealms. It is also available on the Delphi timesharing service.

Those funny runes

The E-mail addresses attached to some contributor names are like Postal Addresses, only translated into computerese. Computers can use them to find other computers and actually deliver messages to people. Most of the time, anyway. If you don't understand them, don't worry -- neither do many computers.

Submissions

OtherRealms publishes articles about book length Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. The primary focus is reviews of books, especially newer and lesser known authors. Other material about books and the people that write them are welcome, including interviews, bibliographies and biographies.

Authors are invited to write articles for the Behind the Scene series. These allow you to go into the background and research that went into a book -- the things that make the book special and interesting that don't necessarily show up in the finished product.

Please query on all non-review material, due to the limited space I have for these items. OtherRealms does not publishe poetry, fiction or anything about media, fannish or short-fiction works.

Submissions can be made on either Macintosh or MS-DOS disk, via E-mail on the networks listed above, or the old-fashioned ink-on-paper format.

On the Mac, I can read MacWrite, Word or Fullwrite format files. On MS-DOS, please try to submit an ascii readable file. If you aren't sure about any of this, contact me first.

Please include envelope and return postage if you want to see your submission again. Anything submitted without return postage will be discarded.

OtherRealms does not prohibit multiple submissions, but please note them as such. I take first serial rights unless other arrangements are made. On artwork, I take non- exclusive one time rights.

Art

I'm always looking for good genre related artwork, from small clip-art pieces to covers. Originals will be returned after use. I can now handle electronically generated art in EPS format as well.

Publishing news

OtherRealms is interested in publishing news about the happenings in the field -- contracts, promotions, deals, sales, market needs. If something has happened you want the world to know about, I want to know.

The details

OtherRealms is published on a Macintosh and a LaserWriter Plus. Software used to generate it include Microsoft Word, FullWrite Professional, SuperPaint, Aldus Freehand, Ready, Set Go! 4.0 and a host of others.

The body typeface is Palatino. The Headlines use Univers in various weights and sizes. The cover logo uses Canaith, heavily modified in Aldus Freehand.

OtherRealms
Science Fiction and Fantasy
In Review

Editor

Chuq Von Rospach

Science Editor

Laurie Sefton

Contributing Editors

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Charles de Lint
Rick Kleffel
Alan Wexelblat

OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988

One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.

No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published
in March, June, September and
December by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560

USENET: chuq@sun.com
Delphi: CHUQ
CIS: 73317, 635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

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OtherRealms — Issue 21, Summer 1988

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 1)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 2)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 3)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 4)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 5)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 6)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 7)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 8)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 9)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 10)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 11)

Issue 21, Summer 1988 (part 12)

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