OtherRealms — Issue 29, Winter 1991
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 1)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 1 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Table of Contents:
Part 1
Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach
Part 2
I'm Not a Nice Girl
Laurie Sefton
Behind the Scenes: A Chronicle of Deverry
Katherine Kerr
Part 3
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Part 4
Interview with an Anarchist: Lewis Shiner
Alan Wexelblat
Part 5
Past Imagining
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Fantasy in the Mainstream: The Novels of Olaf Stapledon
Chuck Koelbel
Walter Jon Williams: Bibliography
Walter Jon Williams
Part 6
From Beyond the Edge: Reviews (part 1 of 2)
Part 7
From Beyond the Edge: Reviews (part 2 of 2)
Part 8
Flights of Fantasy
Reviews by Laurie Sefton
P.J. Plauger
Mitch Wagner
Part 9
Words of Wizdom
Reviews by Chuq Von Rospach
Part 10
Your Turn: Letters from our readers
The Masthead: subscription, copyright and administrative trivia
Editor's Notebook
Coments and Ramblings from Chuq Von Rospach
My new job
No, I haven't left Apple -- I'm not sure they could kick me out if they wanted to. But since we last talked, some things have changed. I'm now one of the three book reviewers for the new Amazing Science Fiction. I've committed to reviewing four books a month, twelve times a year for the duration.
I'm both thrilled and cautious about this. Thrilled to actually be paid for reading and reviewing books; cautious because this is the sort of thing you just can't slip a couple of weeks if life gets too busy -- unlike OtherRealms. You notice that OtherRealms, which was scheduled for January, is late. Part of the lateness was caused by my new position, since I needed to get up to speed and start reading. One habit I had with OtherRealms was that when schedules got tight, I'd simply stop reading for a while, and then perhaps catch up on ten or 15 books in a couple of weeks before writing my Words of Wizdom column. that works when you're quarterly, but now I have to read six or seven books a month to make sure I fill the column, and perhaps build up a backlog of reviews so I'm not always on the edge.
This is naturally going to affect OtherRealms. It already is. What it's ultimately going to do to OtherRealms I don't know yet. I still think three issues a year is reasonable, but I'm also a hopeless optimist. Between work, the Amazing column, my real writing, Laurie's going back to school (which doesn't affect me directly [except I've been warned I WILL be cooking dinner on a regular basis], but she has put a lot of time and energy both into OtherRealms and into doing things that allow me to spend time on this beast that otherwise would have gone to boring projects like vacuuming) and the further resurgence of some of my non-fannish interests, I have to realize that there's a finite amount of time and an infinite number of projects. OR is still an important part of my life -- but I also have to realize that it's not the only thing I'm responsible for any more and plan accordingly.
This is not, definitely not, the sounding of OR's death knell. The electronic issue goes away next issue, but I'm not foreshadowing the death of the rest. Just a warning that schedules are going to be 'flexible.' My apologies in advance for this to all my readers. Things that I get paid for take priority on my time over things that don't. That is a necessary fact of life.
Going to work for Amazing has other implications. Reviews that I'm paid for won't be published here in OtherRealms, so my Wizdom column is going to shrink. I'm going to have to depend more on other people to keep the focus on books. My writing in here has been shifting to a more personal focus over the last few issues as it is, and this is going to accelerate it. For those that don't like that, well, sorry. You CAN read Amazing SF and get my reviews, as well as those by John Bunnell and John Betancourt. So far, (one and a half columns into this new relationship) we seem to be a pretty good team -- we're trying to avoid duplicating reviews, and so far, our tastes all differ enough that there's been no real fighting over who gets what title, which is good.
It feels damn good, by the way, to get paid for reviewing -- even though it's hard work. After 29 issues of OtherRealms, six years of pushing myself out into the world on my own, it's nice to know someone else thinks enough of me to publish this stuff for me. The money's nice, too -- not exactly Spider Robinson's "Cheese sandwiches and exposure" from his reviewing days (it's more like tunafish, and the exposure IS nice....).
Now, if I can just get some of my fiction sold.
And some new toys
I mentioned my resurgent hobbies above. A couple of things have been taking more of my time and energy. One is the garden. Earlier this month I planted three trees and five rose bushes, which means that about 80% of the back yard has now been rehabilitated and the major foliage planted. When we moved in two years ago, we moved into a house that had (literally) not been maintained for ten years -- what hadn't died was overgrown and needed to either be cut way back or (mostly) simply pulled out. Digging in the dirt is a great way for me to get away from computers for a while (I spend all day with them -- there are times when coming home and 'relaxing' with computers is not what I want to do), plus I enjoy watching an entire living space slowly reshape itself. A couple of weeks later, the roses have budded out, the trees are getting ready, last year's raspberries are starting to leaf and there's unripe fruit on the strawberries. Laurie has tomatoes under the lights in the garage and this weekend I should be installing a new low-flow sprinkler system in the raised beds (we HAVE been busy out there). If things work out, we should be able to spend much of the summer enjoying the back yard instead of weeding it. One hopes.
Since last issue, I've picked up a couple of new techie-toys, too. Last issue I talked about a new Shortwave radio, which I've since bought -- a Kenwood R5000. Most nights when I'm working I tune in the BBC World Service, since I get much better news from them than I get from American media. One of the neat features of the R5000 is an RS232 port, so I'm working on a Hypercard stack that will control the radio and let me handle most of the frequency and control stuff from the computer. Why? Well, it's fun and it's nice to be programming again.
Another toy, this time for the computer, is a Syquest 45 megabyte removable drive. For about $1.50 a megabyte, I now have a potentially unlimited amount of disk space simply by swapping out cartridges. I was chronically tight on room on my regular hard disk until I got it, but now I've got a lot of flexibility. One of the things I've done is load the text of all issues of OtherRealms onto a cartridge, and then I've used a tool called "On Location" to index it. On Location allows me to type in strings and find out exactly where those strings are in any of the indexed files, so I can look up anything in previous issues quickly and without any real delay or hassle. I'd originally planned on building a Hypercard stack to do this, but with On Location, I don't need to.
Isn't technology wonderful? What's scary: When I was starting out in the computer industry, the "home computer" state of the art was the IMSAI 8080 (mine had 8K of RAM, 5K of ROM and a cassette interface). My work computer was a studly PDP11-34 running RSTS, and state of the art in disk storage was a CDC drive the size of a small washing machine that stored an entire 80 megabytes of data. Now, 15 years later, my "obsolete" Mac II (which now has eight megabytes of RAM and 128K of ROM) has more power than that PDP11 did, and I own a disk that, for a total price of $600 (drive and two cartridges) stores as much as that old CDC drive did, is faster and is about the size of a Stephen King book in hardcover. Where are we going to be in another 15 years? When you stop and think about how far computers have come, the mind simply refuses to accept the significance of the changes.
One hint on where we're going: Go systems, who just gave the world a first look at their new pen-based computer operating system. It looks awesome and may well be as important a paradigm shift as the Macintosh was (even if you hate the Macintosh, you have to admit that with OS/2, X windows, SunView, Microsoft windows and all of the other Graphical Interfaces, the Mac really made a fundamental change in the way we do computers. Xerox pioneered it, the Mac made it practical and now everyone else is copying it. That's how technology moves forward).
War
We're at war. This shouldn't come as a great surprise to you. If it is, you haven't been paying attention. It was no surprise to me, either -- but I have to admit that even though I thought I was more or less prepared for the inevitability, when it happened I was still shaken. I watched CNN and ABC like everyone else; for a few days very little got accomplished. It's funny how inconsequential a fanzine deadline can seem when planes are flying over the deserts shooting at each other.
I have many mixed feelings about this. I'm heartened that all this very expensive high tech stuff is working as well as it seems to be -- and bothered that we find ourselves in a position to put it through the ultimate field test. I'm very encouraged that so far public support stays high, and very discouraged that Saddam Hussein seems much crazier than anyone gave him credit for and really IS willing to let us pound his entire country into sand and turn himself into a martyr rather than admit he's being overwhelmed.
Let us all hope he suffers an accident before major ground fighting casualties begin. Even dead and as a martyr, he will be a force to reckon with in the Middle East, but as long as he lives, the fighting will continue.
Scary fact for those people who think America is picking on a tiny country: according to the experts, Iraq has the fourth largest armed forces in the world (the first three being us, USSR and People's Republic of China, not necessarily in that order). At least, they did when this all started, there was a report on the BBC World Service tonight that the British experts no longer believe this to be true, not that you can get decent military casualty information out of either Iraq or the Pentagon.
Speaking of which, since last we spoke I went out and bought a Kenwood R5000 receiver, also known as a Shortwave Radio (although it really does much more than the 'shortwave' frequencies). I've been having lots of fun with it, and one of my current projects is to write a Hypercard stack that'll control the thing through its RS232 interface (a radio with a serial port? What will they think of next). I have a number of the basic support functions working, but there are only so many hours in the day....
Anyway, I find I spend much of my time listening to the BBC, which I bring up here to ask whether anyone else has noticed exactly how piss-poor American journalism of the war has been. Once the initial shock of the invasion wore off, I pretty much switched the TV back off -- not because I wanted to avoid the war, but because I'm getting much better information on the shortwave. The quality of reporting on the American media frankly sucks.
There has been a lot of criticism thrown at the Pentagon because they've been heavily stonewalling the media. A lot of that stonewalling is true -- try to get any reasonable information on casualties, machinery losses, collateral damage or any information of great substance. On the other hand, we are at war, and this is the first war where Pentagon briefings are being beamed behind enemy lines in real time, thanks to communication satellites. The Pentagon has a job to do. That job is NOT keep the media happy, but to get the fighting over with a minimum of allied casualties. Giving Iraq information that can help them fill in the holes in their own intelligence only makes it worse for us, so I can't blame the Pentagon for turning a deaf ear on some topics. I've also been VERY bothered by the frankly poor quality of the questioning. These are supposed to be professional, trained journalists, and yet (as Jim Eason of KGO radio likes to say) the primary questions seem to be of the form "When will the ground war start?" or "How long is this war going to last?" -- worse, a reporter will ask a question and the briefers will say something like "That's an operational (i.e. militarily sensitive) detail and we won't comment" -- and not only does the reporter get snotty because the Pentagon doesn't want to blab secrets to the entire world, the next couple of reporters think that maybe if they slightly rephrase the question, these highly trained Pentagon folks might slip up and tell them something.
I haven't really thought much of American mass-media (especially on television) for a long time, but I did better journalistic work for my high school newspaper. It's bush league -- and a number of journalists have taken blatantly adversarial positions against the Pentagon -- which, of course, means the Pentagon is even LESS likely to talk to them. And then they get miffed when the Pentagon won't discuss things with them. Bad journalism made worse by a bad attitude. Thank you, I'll stick with the BBC. The BBC (and to a good degree the British military and media) seem to have a much better attitude about this. I get information about the war from them that shows up on American television a few days later (presumably after THEY've heard it on the BBC). One of the regular programs on the BBC is their daily book reading. Currently, they're reading the Hobbit every night, but right after the troops went to Saudi Arabia, the BBC scheduled "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller. These broadcasts, of course, go to the troops. Coincidence? You won't find that kind of humor in American television. It's too subtle.
Let us hope, by the time you read this, that it's all in the past and the rebuilding has begun. Let us hope that sanity reigns and the chemical and biological weapons Hussein have stay unused. Let us hope Hussein doesn't rape and burn Kuwait beyond recovery (if the reported and documented atrocities have any basis in fact, he's doing things even the Nazi's would have flinched at -- whether it be large-scale rape and pillage of Kuwaiti cities or pulling all of the infants out of the incubators of a hospital ward and tossing them on the floor to die so they can carry the hospital gear back to Iraq for the soldiers). Tonight (which is February 12), the BBC is reporting that there are at least 50 oil fields in Kuwait burning, covering much of the country in smoke -- and last week, Hussein was threatening to burn Kuwait to the ground rather than give it up.
Which reminds me of something. Earlier this week, Jim Eason on KGO radio (talk/news here in the Bay Area) had someone call up and take the allies to task for allowing Hussein to cause that major oil slick from the Kuwaiti tanker port. We knew it was going to happen, he said, and we should have stopped it. Eason responded quite simply: "What should we have done?"
"We knew it was going to happen. We should have done something."
How's that for thinking? If you're going to criticize, at least pretend to come up with alternatives. If the war is so terrible, what are the alternatives to fixing the situation? If we should have stopped Iraq from trashing the ocean, how should we have done it? We weren't exactly invited guests at that oil terminal when they opened the drainspouts.
Don't just complain. Don't just criticize. Criticize constructively. It's easy to say "you're wrong" -- but it's really tough to say "Here's a better way". Sometimes, it just doesn't exist.
It should be obvious I support the way -- not because I like it, but because I see it as a necessary evil, a lesser evil than leaving Saddam Hussein and his terrorism, his regional bullying, his nuclear and chemical and biological weapons -- and his crazy bugfuck attitude. He is, bar none, the most dangerous man to come to power since Hitler, and as long as he is in power the entire world is in significant risk. The war is a nasty thing -- but to not deal with this man, I feel strongly that we would simply have to deal with him later from a great disadvantage. He sees no problem in killing thousands of innocents in Kuwait -- he sees nothing in throwing tens of thousands of his own supporters to their death -- for little more than the protection of his macho sense of power. This war is meaningless. Any sane person would have run like hell when the first bombs came calling. That Saddam Hussein not only continues to fight, but continues to try to escalate the war and scream his rhetoric only proves the man is not sane and that his power must be terminated. I haven't even mentioned his random attacks of terrorism at Israel with his SCUD missiles (all the while calling the U.S. for 'war crimes' for attacking citizens of Iraq. We ARE at war with Iraq -- what's his excuse with Israel?).
Saddam must go if we have any hope for long term peace in that region. War is Hell, literally, but sometimes necessary. The difference between me and a peace-activist is that I see war as a terrible alternative and a peace activist sees war as the worst possible alternative. Having seen the results of Nazi Germany against its neighbors, I don't think we can sit idly by this time. Go study the attack against Poland and Czechoslovakia; go study the Holocaust -- then try to imagine a scenario where the U.S. doesn't play isolationist until long after Hitler had a major power base through the bowels of Europe. Answer: if the U.S. had gotten involved in WWII early, there's a good chance, a very good chance that Hitler would have been stopped, Europe would not have been ripped to pieces and the Holocaust would not have happened. Sometimes you have to stand up and stop the tyrants. Waiting until the Holocausts have happened to stop them doesn't make the dead people feel better.
I know some of you out there disagree with me on this. That's your right as an American (on the other hand, if you lived in Iraq and publicly disagreed with Saddam Hussein, you'd be dead. Isn't it nice to live in a country that tolerates dissent?) I certainly don't mind people disagreeing. I only get upset when people disagree unthinkingly. You can't understand a situation from the evening news or what you read in the first two paragraphs of the newspaper (which is all the vast majority of newspaper readers read; isn't THAT depressing) or from some catchy but meaningless protest slogans. Go study the situation -- read up on Hussein's history (did you know he came to power as an official state torturer?) and what he's done to Kuwait. Go study the first few years of WWII and Hitler's decimation of the Poles. If you still can't support war, bless you -- at least you thought.
The only thing an unthinking patriot and an unthinking anti-patriot have is that they're both blind to reality. "Real" patriots think America does nothing wrong and we should always be loved and obeyed blindly (forgetting that dissent is a primary aspect of the freedoms we fought to gain in our independence from England); "Real" anti-patriots think America never does anything right and if they're involved, they must be the bad guys. I have no sympathy for either the "Love it or leave it" crowd or the "America is scum" crowd. I make up my mind on a case by case basis -- and that's all I ask of others. Unfortunately, I find that most folks prefer falling behind easy platitudes. That way they don't have to think for themselves.
I don't care if you're for or against the war, as long as you look the situation over, study the facts and decide for yourself. Think about it.
Think.
"Blind" Hubble
Remember how the major media "proved" to us how worthless and screwed up the Hubble was? It was fun to bash NASA about the screwups. Good, easy press. Bad news sells newspapers and toilet paper, after all.
Well, it didn't take long for the scientists to figure out it wasn't all that bad. The Hubble wasn't blind, just nearsighted. That, of course, was on page 17, not page 1.
And now this -- in the 1-Feb-91 issue of Science -- the tuning and calibration is done on the Hubble and the actual research is starting, and the Hubble is "only" 10 times clearer than anything we can get from the ground. "Only" 10 times better.
Now, it should be much better than that. I'm not downplaying the screwups that caused us to ship Mister Magoo up to sky. But think about it. The media made a hey-day on how this was a billion dollar piece of useless junk. Now that it's turning out (already!) data that's revolutionizing astronomy, where do you think the media is? Have you seen any "well, maybe it's not as bad as we thought" pieces on page one of your local newspaper? Or were they buried behind the commodity prices?
Environmental Pop Quiz
Quick pop quiz. What's less harmful to the environment: a paper coffee cup or a foam coffee cup?
All of you who said paper cups -- guess what? It looks like you're wrong. Martin Hocking from the University of British Columbia (again in the 1-Feb-91 Science, if you want the full details) has done a study of the total environmental impact of your average, everyday "green" paper cup and compared it to the nasty, environmentally ugly foam cup. The results are fairly stunning -- the polyfoam cup is not only less expensive to produce, but it creates many fewer pollutants in the process and uses fewer resources. It is also, on the recovery end, much cleaner to deal with.
For instance, in raw materials, a paper cup requires 33 grams of wood pulp. Surprisingly, it ALSO requires 4.1 grams of petroleum products (primarily fuels used for energy in the creation process, and that specifically excludes the plastic or wax coating -- just the paper) and 1.8 grams of others chemicals (including sodium sulfate, sodium hydroxide, chlorine, sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide). The polyfoam cup uses 3.2g of petroleum products and 0.05 grams of other chemicals per cup. The weight of the paper cup is 10.1 grams, the foam cup 1.5 grams.
Surprise #1: you use MORE hydrocarbons to create a paper cup than you do to create a hydrocarbon-based foam cup. Plus you have to add in the paper, plus a fair number of fairly noxious (and ecologically nasty) chemicals during the paper pulping and pressing and bleaching processes.
Surprise #2: energy usage. Total energy usage to create paper cups is about 9000-12000 kilogram of steam and 980 KilowattHours per metric ton, vs. about 5000 kilogram of steam and 120-180 KwH for polyfoam. Also note how many fewer cups you get per metric ton -- it takes about 6 metric tons of paper to match one metric ton of polyfoam. You're using a LOT more energy to make "green" paper cups.
How about pollutants? For every metric ton of paper, we're creating 50-190 cubic meters of contaminated effluent that's being dumped into our lakes and rivers. These include sulfuric acid, chlorine and significant amounts of biological material that, when released into from the plant, will break down and use significant amounts of the free oxygen in the water, possibly choking out the wildlife and plants. On the other hand, polyfoam causes under 2 cubic meters of water effluent with essentially no chemical or organic content.
Surprise #3: paper processing is a highly polluting process that causes significant damage to the local water system unless very carefully monitored and unless expensive pollution controls exist (and even then there are still hassles). Just ask anyone who lives downstream of a paper plant how "green" they are.
But the big problem with polyfoam is that it releases lots of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, right? That's why everyone screams? (that and the use of hydrocarbons).
Surprise #4: A metric ton of polyfoam will cause the release of 35-50 Kilograms of Pentane, which has replaced CFCs as the chemical of choice in the manufacturing process. Pentane has been shown to increase ozone, both in low and high atmosphere studies. On the other hand, Pentane also has a maximum life of about seven years, after which it's broken down and gone. So paper cups help prevent global warming, then, right?
Well....
Instead of Pentane, creation of a metric ton of paper causes 5 to 15 kilograms of particulates to be released in the air (i.e. smog). Also measurable amounts of Chlorine, Chlorine dioxide, sulfides and sulfur dioxide. So during the creation process, polyfoam is somewhat more polluting, but is dispersing stuff that is fairly short-lived and relatively benign (unlike the older CFCs, and definitely unlike things like Chlorine). But we aren't done yet.
What about when we're done: those foam cups will live forever, clogging our landfill, right?
Surprise #5: polyfoam is highly recyclable. In fact, McDonalds had invested three years in building a system that would take the majority of the polyfoam in its containers and recycle it -- they were about to put the program in place when some "green" activists started a major publicity campaign against them that forced them to trash all of that work, all of their polyfoam and switch over to "green" paper products. It would have been a model program in the effective re-use of previously disposable material. Instead, they were threatened with a smear campaign and forced to switch to "green" paper products, the production of which is a highly polluting process.
But you can recycle paper, right? Well, some paper. Coffee cups aren't recyclable, because they're put together with a type of glue that can't be removed during the repulping process. Same with all the food service papers that use wax or plastic coatings to protect the food. Newsprint is recyclable, but we don't wrap food in newspaper in the U.S.
Surprise #6: instead of building recycling programs for polyfoam, we're chopping down trees, using up as much hydrocarbon as they would for foam, create more (and nastier) pollutants, all so we can haul the paper off to the landfill.
Where it sits.
Surprise #7: they've been digging up landfills and trying to figure out what goes on inside them. Guess what? They're finding out that "biodegradable" paper, when placed in a landfill, generally sits there, essentially inert. Just like polyfoam. They've dug up forty and fifty year old newspapers -- that were still easily readable. Large chunks of landfills just sit there and never do anything. Just as if they were full of plastic or polyfoam. The parts that DO degrade generate methane and carbon dioxide. Guess what? Methane and Carbon Dioxide are greenhouse gasses, and Methane is essentially equivalent to Pentane as far as greenhouse response is concerned. Worse, you only have to degrade 2% of the paper to generate as much methane as the equivalent amount Pentane released in polyfoam creation. So you better hope that 98% of that paper doesn't degrade, or it's going to do worse things than the polyfoam did in the first place. We won't even mention the runoff from the landfill contaminating the water table (which won't happen with polyfoam, since it doesn't degrade and cause noxious runoff).
And if you burn that paper? You get lots of carbon dioxide, particulates and other random chemicals.
Look, everyone "knows" that paper is better for the environment. Everyone "knows" that petrochemicals pollute. Everyone knows that to be socially conscious you have to use "green" recyclable products and convince others to do the same.
The problem is, what everyone "knows" isn't always right. Drilling for oil is a relatively benign operation -- until it leaks. Clearcutting trees is always disastrous for the local environment and butt-ugly to boot. A "green" product like paper sounds great -- trees are a renewable resource, right? But when you look at the total cost -- collection of raw materials, processing, use and disposal, some fascinating realities pop in. What we all know ain't always so.
The McDonalds program could have been the first step in a nationwide move by Corporate America to move towards intelligent disposal of their discards. Instead, they were coerced by the "environmentalists" to drop all that and move to a product that is significantly more damaging to the environment and uses much more energy and resource in the creation -- and is just as difficult, if not more difficult, to dispose of. All in the name of "saving our environment". Isn't this stupid?
The point of this diatribe is this: being careful in the treatment of this planet is crucial to our long-term survival. But it's just as critical that we deal in facts and we do what science has shown is necessary. The state of the environmental movement these days is that a relatively small pressure group comes up with an emotionally powerful position and coerces people into conforming or facing what can be a terrible PR disaster for a company. I mean, we all "know" that paper is better than plastic, right? Except the science is clearly showing that's not true.
I wonder what else we "know" about the environment, what policies we're putting in place, that are making it worse because people are moving through emotion or political expediency and not the facts?
Think about it. What do you know is right? And why? Has it really been proved? Or are we working with Old Wives Tales again?
Price Increase update
Last issue I announced an upcoming price increase in OtherRealms subscriptions. Because of all sorts of things, I still haven't decided what to do, so this is on hold. Even though postage has gone up, until I finalize this, I'm not changing anything, so the old rates will continue to apply indefinitely.
Dial 1-800-HI-PIERS
Are you a Piers Anthony fan? If so, you probably should know about Valet Publishing, a new organization set up by Anthony specifically to sell and market his books. They're putting out a newsletter all about him that is available on a quarterly basis for only $7.50. He's also set up the Xanth Trading Post so you can mail order your favorite Piers Anthony stuff.
You can get more information by calling 1-800-HI-PIERS.
I take this as an indication of just how popular Anthony has gotten with his fans. We've had all sorts of stars and superstars in the SF field over the years, but as far as I know, this is the first author with his very own 800 number. Obviously, someone likes his stuff (but I wonder why....)
Next Issue
Is issue 30, which I think will be something special. At the very least, different. More than that I'm not going to say. My hopeful schedule is early April, but since I'm writing this in mid-February, I wouldn't hold my breath. Please remember that issue 30 is the final issue that will be distributed on-line -- and people who want to get back issues on-line should note that I'll be removing the archives on apple.com (anonymous ftp, directory pub/otherrealms) about a month after issue 30 ships.
See you next issue!
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 2)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 2 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
I'm Not A Nice Girl
Commentary by Laurie Sefton
Well, it's been about four months, so it's time to sharpen the claws and have another go at it.
Lots of responses to my original editorial, and a few requests for reprints. Typical net.jackal response, but we expected that, didn't we? The biggest surprise was the gender roles discussion; apparently there are more people than I thought who have slugged it out with society's expectation of what they should do with their lives. To those who have been there and responded in kind -- thanks. And to those who wrote and said "I wish I could do something like that.", well, there isn't a magic cookie, piece of armor, or fairy dust that will get you on your way. You just have to hunker down and decide that it's your turn to have a life, and if people aren't going to let you, you'll have to teach them otherwise. Yes, you'll lose some battles, and yes, your scars will itch for years, but it's a lot better than wishing and wondering what might have been.
Speaking of battles: I was listening to the local news/talk station on January 16th, when they broke in to announce that Baghdad was under attack. Life has definitely not been the same since. I suspect that most of my friends and acquaintances didn't get much sleep for the first few days. We all appeared to be glued to the television (CNN and ABC being my choices) at home, and to the radio at work, (although some intrepid souls brought the televisions they bought right after the 89 earthquake in to monitor the television reports) and didn't bother to get much rest in between. We're 11 hours behind Iraq time out here on the west coast, so when it was 8 AM here, it was 7PM in the middle east, and just gearing up for another bombing run. By the time we left work for the day, it was time to check out the news briefing from the Pentagon, the analysis of what had happened the "day before", and speculations on what was going to happen "today". I had put up my long-wire for my shortwave at work a few days previous to the start of the war (let's face it -- this is not a police action), and was monitoring the BBC and KOL Israel during my working day Anything to get some new or different information.
Information -- that certainly is the crux of the matter, isn't it? I was rather shocked and amazed at the total lack of knowledge about middle eastern affairs. Most people were operating on what I call the "first paragraph" syndrome -- which meant that they were reading the first paragraph of whatever news story interested them, and took that information for their total knowledge-base. Very few realized that they middle east didn't come all nicely and neatly carved, and that Saddam Hussein's claims that Kuwait was unjustly ripped out from under Iraq, when it "had always belonged to Iraq" were playing off of the lack of knowledge of the history of the region. Ever hear of the Ottoman empire? The parcelling out of the middle east occurred mainly because the Ottoman Turks backed the wrong side in World War I. That's what Lawrence of Arabia was all about. So, if you're going to discuss middle eastern situations properly, get thee down to the library, and read some books on the topic. [Looks like you will have to go to a library, as most bookstores are woefully deficient on middle eastern history. And we're not talking about the franchises here; one well known local book store has western European history, American history, and "Middle Eastern studies". That means that someone is telling middle eastern history to you, but is injecting their own thoughts on the matter. It's the effective difference between history and political science. Lucky for me, someone at Stanford is teaching "The history of the Middle East" this quarter, and I was able to pick up the texts.] Middle Eastern history, if it's covered at all in world history (otherwise known as "Let's do the ancient Greeks, the ancient romans, skip to medieval England, and then pick up on the rest of Europe as the various countries explore the western hemisphere"), tends to stall out just about the time that the Roman Empire fell. That's a pretty sad state of affairs.
As long as we're discussing the sad state of affairs in US education, it's a good time to relate what happened in my class last semester. The class was made up of about 1/2 political science graduate students, 1/3 engineering economics grad students and the other 1/6 from various engineering disciplines. The course grade was determined by two papers written during the semester, a 3-5 introduction paper, and a 15 page position defense paper. Sounds simple, right? Just pick out a topic from the course syllabus (the course was titled "The Role of Technology in National Security"), state a position, and defend that position. This was much harder for most of the students than anyone thought. My topic for the semester was "The theory and implementation of a national computer security governmental policy", and I wrote up my little 3-5 page intro, with the thesis that while the government had all sorts of good ideas what computer security policy was, they sure didn't know how to implement it. The class after I turned it in, the class received a handout from the grading TA and course professor, saying that there was a problem with the papers being turned in so far, and that they just seemed to be a regurgitation of research material. After about a week of worry, I received my paper back -- with the only "A" given in the course. The TA noted that I had the only paper turned in which gave a thesis at all, much less defended it. I expanded on that thesis for the final paper, and received an "A" on that, too. Bragging aside, I have to wonder about students who should be some of the best in the country, as Stanford graduate school isn't that easy to get into, and why they are stymied at the idea of presenting original thought. Is it that the undergraduate institutions prefer to get papers without original thought, as they may be easier to grade? Are students who have no original thoughts easier to herd through college? And exactly what do the universities expect to turn out, if original thought is selected against? Who do they expect to lead, if they weed out the leaders? I have to wonder.
A side note: One of the lectures was the standard "How are we going to compete with Japan" monologue, given by local multi-millionaire Silicon Valley CEO and former congressional representative Ed Zschau. He ranted a bit on where our future chemists and biologists were going to come from, as no one was piquing their interest in high school or college. When Q&A time came at the end of the lecture, I asked him, given that I used to be a chemist, and that I have a biology degree, and that I am now in the computer industry because: 1.) It pays about 4X better than the bio/chem industries do; and 2.) I'm not going to die an early horrible death from working with a Macintosh -- the mean age of death for a chemist is in her mid to late 50s; how I could, in good faith, tell future scientists that they ought to go into the biological or chemical sciences for a living.
He was stunned, and stuttered out that he hadn't had any idea the conditions were that bad, and then to recover, noted that I seemed to have done pretty well, given my background. I have done well in spite of my education and training, not because of it. I didn't appreciate being thought of as a Reaganomics poster child.
Yet another class department: I've just finished with the Apple University course "Survival Skills for Managers", and since I'm still here, so I must have passed. I was hoping for a course that discussed how to track down the HR rep, which forms need to be filled out, and when, and how to work that excuse for a Hypercard stack that I'm supposed to use for reviews. Well, we had two HR people at class, and since one of them was the manager of my HR representatives, he received some "constructive input" on his charges.
Other than that, it was a pleasant way to spend three days -- I didn't have to think much (all those grad classes in industrial/organizational psych pay off), and it gave me the opportunity to see how managers at other parts of Apple handled their work. And you get to do lots of psycho-whatsit fun stuff, like:
1. I took a very short personality inventory and found out that I am a "driven analytical" (those of you who know me can now say -- "no shit"). Personality inventories are almost as much fun as getting your colors done, and are allegedly useful, to boot.
2. We played "guess the compensation package". Some people still don't realize that under-paying an employee is a false economy. In one of the case studies, some of the colder managers stated that an employee who moves from a "non-exempt" (hourly) to an exempt position shouldn't expect a raise (in this case we were arguing about 2,000-3,000/year), as they are now in a state of employment that offers "more chances for advancement". I called on one of the HR representatives and asked exactly how much it cost to hire an average employee at a Silicon Valley company, and more importantly, how much it cost to replace them. The cost surprised the managers; it costs about $46,000 to hire and approximately $100,000 to replace (factoring in lost time, advertisement costs, time spent interviewing, etc) an employee. Makes $3,000 look rather small, doesn't it?
3. We played motivational psychology games. Those of you who had children in the 1970s may remember Dr Haim Ginott. Ginott's main principle was to never put blame on the child, but to give reactions to the child's behavior. This is where we heard such great statements as: "Timmy, I become very upset when I find dead and dismembered bodies in the basement.", with the hopes that little Timmy will decide that maybe serial murders upset mommy, and that he shouldn't do that anymore. Well, this has crossed over into the workplace, so now we have the manager saying to the employee: "I become very upset when deadlines are missed, and it impacts the rest of the group, too." Notice the amalgamation of guilt -- not only is the manager upset, but so is the rest of the group. Also notice the clever use of impact as a verb. The trouble with this approach is that as soon as a child figures out how how to talk, he has usually figured out the fire art of indirection. If you can't expect a two year old to put up with this, why should you expect your employees to?
All in all, it was a nice vacation from the desk, and at least I now know to expect from some of the other managers. I hope I also know how to counteract it.
So, what have we learned in the last few months? That information is important, but so is the ability to use it wisely. Think about it.
Behind the Scenes: A Chronicle of Deverry
Katherine Kerr
Copyright 1991 by Katherine Kerr
Anyone who has read my fantasy series, Daggerspell, Darkspell, The Bristling Wood, and The Dragon Revenant, knows that the history of the kingdom of Deverry is as important to the over-all story as the personal dramas of the characters are. In the new set of books I'm currently working on, the Westlands series, this same history plays a part as well. Yet, thanks to the needs of good narrative, I can't always make the historical happenings as clear in the text as I would like. What you have here is a quick outline of Deverry history, complete with king lists and dates, to make it easier to follow the historical sequence of events in the books themselves.
First of all, many readers and reviewers have assumed that the series is set in some sort of alternate Britain or that the people of Deverry came originally from Britain. In fact, they emigrated from northern Gaul, as a couple of obscure clues in the text tell the compulsively careful reader who also knows an awful lot about Celtic history. Since only a few of you fall into that category, allow me to explain further. For one thing, the great heroes often mentioned, Vercingetorix and Vindex, are real, historical Gauls. For another, those "vergobretes" who become in Deverry "gwerbrets" are mentioned in Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars as magistrates among the Gauls, though, he says, the Britons have no such kind of leaders, relying instead upon "kings." The Gaulish king, it seems, was more what we'd term a "warleader," the "cadvridoc" of Deverry, than the ruler of an organized state. Even in Britain, however, the Celts elected their kings more often than they accepted them by inheritance, a Celtic political tradition that lies behind the instability of the Deverry kingship.
The language of Deverry also derives from that of Gaul, but Gaulish was not, as far as scholars can tell anyway, very much different from the Old Brittonic that evolved into the language we know today as Welsh. Thus the language of Deverry looks and sounds much like Welsh, but anyone who knows this modern language will see immediately that it differs in many respects. Now, not a lot of Gaulish survives. The Gauls had never been big on writing things down, and, when the "cursed Rhwmanes" conquered the place and imposed Latin as the official language, the native speech and oral literature died out. What does survive are personal and place names -- the very thing a fantasy author needs! As for the Deverrian forms of these names, remember that not only do all languages change over time, but each family of languages changes according to its own rules. In our own family, IndoEuropean, which includes among others the Romance, Germanic, Persian, Hindi, and Slavic groups as well as the Celtic languages, these changes have been studied and codified by linguists. For instance, any "g" sound caught between two vowels tends to first soften, then drop away; "-nt" or "-nd" at the end of a syllable changes to a simple "n," and so on. What I have done, then, is taken old Gaulish names and subjected them to these rules of change to produce the Deverrian names you find in the books. That some of them have ended up sounding like actual Welsh names goes to show just how much alike Old British and Gaulish were.
To return to our history, the people of Bel, that is, the Gaulish tribes who chose the god Belinos to be their special patron deity from all the wide and rather randomly-organized Celtic pantheon of gods, lived in a vaguely defined area of Gaul known as Devetia Riga. While the precise location has been lost, we do know that it was somewhere on the Atlantic coast, and more north than south. The Devetii, as they would have been known to the Romans, first came in contact with the classical Mediterranean cultures around 200 BC or so when Greek traders came their way, bringing wine, the art of writing, and other such luxuries. Civilization had little effect on them, however, until they were conquered by Julius Caesar round about 55 BC just as so many other Gaulish tribes were. Although the great hero Vercingetorix made a gallant last stand at Alesia, in the end Roman organization and Roman stubbornness wore him down the way they wore down the heroes of so many other peoples of the ancient world. With a great deal of grumbling, the people of Bel accepted to some extent the Roman yoke. They learned some Latin, adopted a few Roman customs, and studied Roman herbal medicine. They also sent a few of their wise men to Rome as ambassadors, where, as so many other Gaulish ambassadors did, they met Cicero before his untimely end and purchased, upon the ex-consul's recommendation, learned books to bring back to the tribe. Yet unlike so many other Gauls, the people of Bel always remembered their days of freedom. When in AD 69 Julius Vindex, a Gaul who had risen high in the Roman government, led his rebellion against the corrupt emperor Nero, the men of Devetia were among the first to support him. When his rebellion failed, they would have followed him into an honorable suicide, too, if it weren't for the counsel of that rather mysterious figure, Cadwallon the Druid [1]. It was Cadwallon who, along with the cadvridoc, Bran, led the Devetians on the Great Migration which ultimately, and by means that could only have been magical, took them to the shores of the continent that would eventually be home to the new kingdom, Devetia Riga reborn, though over the years its name wore down to Deverry.
A Brief Chronology
An Extract from an essay by Durryc of Cerrmor
The years 1-254 are known to modern historians as the Dynasty of the White Mare. Although King Bran himself died soon after the founding of the Holy City of Dun Deverry, his direct descendants ruled the infant kingdom as the small colonies around Dun Deverry spread up and down the Belaver. Cerrmor was founded in 25, Lughcarn in 106, as exploratory parties searched desperately for a good source of iron. One was finally found in the mountains of the north, at the source of the river then named the Caminos Isarnos, the "iron road", which became the most important waterway in the kingdom. (Eventually, of course, this name evolved into the Camyn Yraen of today.)
The period of the First Interregnum, lasting until 297, was touched off by the death of Bran's last lineal descendant. Every powerful clan in the country joined the fighting to see who would control the kingship; eventually the Striking Wyvern clan won. In disgust, the Dragon and the Hippogriff clans migrated to the south-west to found their own kingdom in the formerly elven province of Elditina. In 301, after much searching for omens, Cynaeval of the Hippogriff clan founded a royal city called Abernaudd while in 302, Cadvaenan of the Dragon, Cynaeval's foster-brother, founded Aberwyn as a princely hold, the second city in the new kingdom.
In Deverry itself, the years 298-402 saw peace and prosperity. Expansion continued rapidly. Colonists founded villages and opened up new farmland in Cantrae and Gwaentaer proper while old villages grew into cities and towns in Deverry itself. By the 380's the population spread reached the Eldidd border from the east while of course, the population of Eldidd reached it from the west. Bitter fighting over the defining of that border and the subsequent Deverry defeat brought down Wyvern rule when the great clans rebelled against a king they considered weak.
The years 403-600 were known as the Age of the Warring Clans. To some scholars, this was the Second Interregnum rather than a true civil war, because there was always a titular king in Dun Deverry. The Great Clans, however, did pretty much as they pleased in defiance of what central government there was. Thanks to the amount of empty land available, the constant fighting -- mostly a matter of blood feuds, a common and well-loved pastime brought over from the Homeland -- could rage without tearing the society apart, as those who preferred peace simply moved away from disputed territory. In this period Gwaentaer was heavily colonized; the population built along the iron routes down from Cerrgonney; there was even limited settlement in the Auddglyn.
In the Early 400's, over in Eldidd, the first contact with the elves occured, who withdrew to the west rather than fight over territory that they had barely settled. Bad feeling between the two races remained, however, which would explode into war in later years[2]. In 558 came an event with much more immediate consequences when a group of Deverry merchants, bound for Eldidd, were blown off-course and carried to the far islands of Bardek. There they discovered a Roman-style civilization, founded by mysterious and magically transported refugees from Mauretania. For the first time in Deverry history, a true middle class emerged, based on the newly-important merchants and traders.
In 602, after many years of fighting, Adoryc I founded the dynasty of the Blue Wyvern[3], the first effectual dynasty in some two hundred years. His power was based on a coalition of the rising new merchant class, the priests of Bel and Wmm, and the lesser clans. Concessions to his allies included royal support of the new Bardek trade and a royal ban against the head-hunting tht provided so much fuel for the fires of the blood-feuding. He also divided the estates of some the conquered Great Clans to reward the lesser, among them the Falcons, Boars, and Wolves[4]. By 655, the new religious ban had taken effect, and ritual headhunting had become a crime rather than an obligation.
In general, the years 610-644 were a time of prosperity, relative peace, and growing trade with Bardek. The kingdom of Eldidd, meanwhile, continued to spread east rather than north, and border clashes became common again along the Giryspel range. From 665-76 the First Eldidd war dragged on rather than raged, resulting in a boundary compromise that pleased no one. In 72028, the Second Eldidd War began when Liddmaryc of Eldidd laid claim to Cenerrpaen, the triangle of coastal plain by the Girysbel. Eldidd won and forced a humiliating treaty, one provision of which was the betrothal of Covramur of Deverry's infant daughter to Liddmaryc's grandson, Waryn. This marriage gave Eldidd a distant claim to the Deverry throne.
Then, in 750, Covramur died without a son, ushering in the Time of Troubles[5], the long civil war that nearly destroyed our entire culture. Covramur left three daughters, and their husbands all laid claim to the throne in the names of their sons, as ancient Celtic law allowed them to do. There were three claimants, one in Cerrmor, one in Cantrae, and one in Eldidd. While Cerrmor and Cantrae fought over the Holy City, Eldidd waged a war of attrition on the western border until in 773, the capture of Mael, Prince Aberwyn, produced a twenty-year truce between Cerrmor and Eldidd. Eldidd was forced to make peace by default with the Cantrae faction as well in 793, when the province of Pyrdon rebelled from Eldidd and declared itself a kingdom[6]. The wars dragged on for years of raiding, feints, but no decisive victories for any one side.
In the late 840's, however, a new claimant, Maryn, appeared from the obscurity of the kingdom of Pyrdon. In the midst of hysterical talk of omens and magic[7], the war-weary common people embraced him as the one true king, and many an exhausted noble lord joined his cause in the hope of peace as well. In 854, after a long but final war, Maryn took the Holy City and was acknowledged there as the one true king of a united Deverry. In Eldidd, however, the pretender refused to acknowledge Maryn and make peace, forcing the new king to conquer the kingdom and reduce it to the status of a province[8]. At this point Casyl, king of Pyrdon and Maryn's father, abdicated in favor of his son, thus bringing Pyrdon into the new kingdom as well.
Even though the king died fairly young, in 862 to be exact, he set his new kingdom upon a sound course. In general, the next hundred-odd years were a time of reconstruction and peace throughout the kingdom. Population began to rebuild after the long bleeding of the wars, in Eldidd as well as Deverry. In a dark note for the future, however, the remnant of the losing Cantrae faction fled north to settle Cerrgonney province and found a loose coaliton of independent lordships, who then proceeded to squabble over who among them would be gwerbret. With the treasury exhausted from the civil wars, the kings were forced to ignore this constant warfare, except for punishing the occasional raid down into Gwaentaer. (The name Cerrgonney is an interesting hybrid of Deverrian and Dwarven, by the way, meaning Gonn's Fortress, Gonn being a legendary demigod of the dwarven race.)[9]
The early years of the tenth century were marked by two short wars. In 918, there was an abortive rebellion in Eldidd, crushed by Aeryc the First with the aid of the loyal Pertyc Maelwaedd, Lord Cannobaen, who was rewarded with the gwerbretrhyn of Aberwyn.l! In 921, war flared in Cerrgonney when the newlydetermined gwerbrets attempted to impose their own taxes on the towns along the Camyn Yraen. When these towns appealed to the king, Aeryc marched north and defeated, at least temporarily, the rebel lords. The year 936 saw a rather more important development, when the king and the royal council reviewed all trade treaties with Bardek and transferred them into the direct control of the king. The council also assimilated all preexisting trade pacts between Eldidd and Bardek into the Deverry model. The revenue brought into the royal coffers by this step was enormous, making the king and his city completely independent, for the first time, of the shifting good will and treacherous loyalty of the great clans.
The years 962-84 tested the new central power with a round of wars in Cerrgonney. In 962, King Maryn II, infuriated by the continuing efforts of the northern gwerbrets to control the iron trade to their own advantage, declared the rank of gwerbret abolished in Cerrgonney. His son, Casyl II, finally brought this matter to a sucessful conclusion after twenty-two years of mountain warfare. Hitheron, all Cerrgonney lords would swear direct loyalty to the king[11].
Thus we bring our brief chronology up to the eleventh century. All through this hundred-year period, peace reigned, secured by the continuing expansion and stabilization of royal power. The Gold Wyvern dynasty, as this set of kings is known to later history, laid the foundations of our modern nation-state and its parlimentary democracy. Perhaps the most notable event of this period was, in 1039, the founding of the province of Cwm Pecl. The king, with a fine historical touch, awarded this new gwerbretrhyn to the Stallion clan[12], the descendants of the onetime kings of Pyrdon who had done so much to ensure peace for the growing kingdom....
Deverry King Lists
(Dates are of reign, not life.)
Blue Wyvern
Adoryc I 602-621
Adoryc II 621-56
Adoryc III 656-69
Gwaddoryc 669-692
Paryc I 692-724
Adoryc IV 724-33
Covramur 733-50
The Time of Troubles:
Claimants to the Deverry Throne
Cerrmor Cantrae Eldidd Glyn I 751-97 Slwmar I 751-79 Aenecyr 751-815 Camlann 797-822 Dribyn I 779-93 Talyn 815-19 Caturyc 822-36 Alyn 793-818 Ogretoryc 819-38 Glyn II 834-43 Slwmar II 818-34 Cadlew 832-54 Maryn I 843-62 Dribyn II 834-47 Aenecyr II 854-55 The Red Wyvern The Gold Wybern Maryn I 843-62 Lallyn I 1011-39 Casyl I 862-93 Cynan 1039-57 Gwardyn I 893-913 Lallyn II 1057-92 Aeryc 913-49 Gwindyc 1092-1107 Maryn II 949-66 Casyl II 966-8 Gwardyn II 987-1011
Footnotes
[1] These events may someday be covered, if I live so long, in the last, as yet untitled, volume of this Celtically convoluted series.
[2] In the 720's, to be exact, an incident that plays a part in A Time of Exile, first volume of the Westlands series (coming in 1991.)
[3] Nevyn's father was Adoryc II. See Daggerspell for more details.
[4] These are, of course, the three clans who are so important in the first three books and who appear in scattered references throughout the entire series.
[5] Events from the Time of Troubles are detailed in Darkspell, The Bristling Wood, A Time of Omens (forthcoming in 1992), and are touched upon in A Time of Exile. Eventually I will devote an entire book, tentatively called The Red Wyvern, to finishing up this on-going story of the original Silver Daggers, but it's more than a bit premature to tell you when.
[6] The events surrounding Prince Mael are central to Darkspell.
[7] For the true story, see in particular The Bristling Wood and A Time of Omens.
[8] There is more information on this in A Time of Exile.
[9] The relationship of the Mountain People to human beings in the North will get some play in A TIME OF WAR, the third book of the Westlands series.
[10] Detailed in A Time of Exile.
[11] A circumstance of crucial importance in The Bristling Wood.
[12] Which includes Rhodry's cousin Blaen, so important in Darkspell.
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 3)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 3 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint
Copyright 1991 by Charles de Lint
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Ray Bradbury
Knopf, July 1990; 285pp; $18.95
Unlike many authors who have been writing for as long as he has, Ray Bradbury has only published twenty-five books. But also unlike many other authors, those twenty-five books are true jewels.
Whether he turns his keyboard to science fiction such as his The Martian Chronicles or Fahrenheit 451, fantasy like The October Country or Something Wicked This Way Comes, or mysteries such as the recent Death Is a Lonely Business or the book in hand, what stands out in Bradbury's work is both the sheer quality of his prose and his affection for his characters.
The latest book takes the narrator of Death Is a Lonely Business and places him on a 1950's movie studio lot as the scriptwriter for a horror film. Together with a boyhood friend, he sets out to create the perfect movie monster, only to find that the lot itself and the graveyard that lies beside it, are already haunted by a monstrous Beast.
But this isn't a horror novel. Rather, it's a love letter to the movie business as it existed in the 50s, encompassing both the positive and negative aspects of it. With Bradbury as the author, though, it's all viewed through a soft-focus lens. There are the genuine aspects of a whodunit, as well as the elements of a thriller, yet in the end one leaves the book with a strong sense of the times and the warm memory of the very real characters with whom Bradbury peoples his fiction.
Make Way for Dragons!
Thoraninn Gunnarsson
Ace, August 1990; 215pp; $3.95; 0-441-51527-1
From another world to ours, come two battling dragons -- one huge and evil, the kind one associates with Wagner's Ring Cycle; the other small and good. The battle ends in a draw and both creatures go off to recuperate for the next round. The evil dragon heads off into the wilderness; the good one -- whose name is Dalvenjah -- makes her way to the nearest city where she hopes to hook up with a local sorcerer.
What she ends up with is a cello-player named Allan Breivik who, while he has a certain amount of inborn magical talent, has no training.
What follows is an enjoyable romp as Dalvenjah and her dragonet Vajerral (who snuck in through the rift between the worlds behind her) adjust to living in California and prepare for the next battle with the evil dragon.
Gunnarsson has a nice light touch with his prose and he's mostly on target with his story. Where it falls apart is when he brings in the FBI. They're fairly innocuous at the beginning of the story but when they reappear towards the end, they don't act like real police officers at all and deliver lines along the lines of "Even so, I would not have her sacrifice herself."
Still, if you can ignore that aspect and you aren't looking for anything beyond a light entertainment, I don't doubt that you'll have some fun with this novel.
Alien Sex
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Dutton, May 1990; 251pp; $18.95; 0-525-24863-3
This anthology, following on the heels of Datlow's extremely successful Blood Is Not Enough, repeats the set-up of the earlier book. Once again it's a mix of reprints and original stories; once again she presents a series of highly innovative glimpses into all the varied possibilities inherent, but so often not found, in a theme anthology. It's to her credit that both books can be read straight through without a sense of sameness. Yes, each story relates to the theme, but from that point on, all bets are off.
Alien Sex runs the gamut from Larry Niven's hilarious essay on Superman's sexual limitations, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" to the seriousness sf speculation of "Husbands" by Lisa Tuttle. Along the way we catch glimpses of bestiality (handled very tastefully) in Leigh Kennedy's "Her Furry Face", a dark poem by Michaela Roessner, Philip Jose Farmer offering a William Burroughs-esque version of the Tarzan myth, Pat Murphy's fascinating exploration of evolution in "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates", and a handful of other wonderful stories.
One of my favorites was Lewis Shiner's updating of the Lilith myth in "Scales" -- not so much for the story itself, which is good, but for the deceptively simple and moving prose in which he tells it. I liked his narrative style so much that I pulled his recent novel Slam from the middle of the "to be read" stack and started in on it as soon as I finished the last story of the book in hand.
I don't know what subject Datlow will turn her sly attention to for her next anthology, but you can bet I'll be lined up at the bookstore waiting to get my copy of it as soon as it's available. The one short story that she edits for OMNI every month just isn't enough.
Slam
Lewis Shiner
Doubleday, July 1990; $18.95; 0-385-26683-9
As mentioned above, Lewis Shiner has a deceptively simple prose style -- trust me on this, it's not easy to write this clearly and concisely and still keep a sense of heart in one's work.
Slam is a mainstream novel with prose just as invigoratingly spare as that of "Scales". It's told from the viewpoint of a thirty-nine-year-old man who's just served six months in a federal penitentiary for tax evasion and is now out on parole. He gets a job as caretaker in an old oceanside house, looking after some twenty-plus cats, and soon is involved with as eccentric a cast of characters as one could hope for: his lawyer friend Fred, who's always telling lawyer jokes; his fundamentalist parole officer, Mrs. Cook; the pastor of a local UFO church; a pair of deaf and blind treasure hunters (one's blind, the other's deaf); Terrell, an escaped convict with whom he shared a cell; the local widow, Mary Nixon; and a group of anarchistic skateboarders.
Over the passage of his first week of relative freedom, Dave runs the gamut of emotions, from falling in love with one of the skateboarders who's young enough to be his daughter, to his convict buddy Terrell running dope out of the house Dave's looking after. Complicating matters is the fact that Dave just can't deal with authority and his parole officer is putting the pressure on him.
How Dave deals with it all makes for an entertaining, at times humorous, and always thoughtful story. The final resolution's a bit idealistically pat, perhaps, but within the context of a piece of fiction, it does work.
Slam, for all its realism, isn't realistic fiction. Many of the characters say or do things one wouldn't normally associate with the sort of person they are. But what underlies the surface story is an exploration of anarchy -- how to be truly free in a world that has no patience for those who stray from the norm -- and whether it's the skateboarders, Terrell or Dave himself discussing it, the resulting thoughts on the subject give depth to a story that's not only entertaining, but provocative.
The Real Story Stephen R. Donaldson Bantam Spectra, January 1991; 210pp; $19.95; 0-553-07173-4
After nine highly successful fantasy books, and three mysteries under the pen name "Reed Stephens", the best-selling living fantasy author Stephen R. Donaldson has made a career change with his new novel, The Real Story.
It's not simply that its subject matter is pure science fiction, nor even that it's a particularly short book from an author whose novels usually sprawl out some five-hundred pages per book. The writing itself has changed to suit the tone Donaldson wished to set with this breakaway from the past.
The Real Story is part of a five-volume series, the opening salvo in The Gap into Conflict, but introductory to a longer work as it is, it still stands admirably on its own.
The time is the far future. Humanity is out among the stars, mining asteroids for the ore that humanity has always needed to fuel its expansions and progresses. On the edge of known space, among the asteroids of Delta Sector, Donaldson explores a Byzantine relationship between a woman named Morn Hyland and two ore pirates, Angus Thermopyle, as despicable a character as one is likely to meet in fiction, and his rival Nick Succorso, who remains somewhat of a cipher even when the book is done.
Central to the story is the captor/victim relationship between Thermopyle and Hyland. Thermopyle is a social misfit, amoral, a misogynist when he thinks of women at all. When he captures Hyland after her ship has gone down on an asteroid, he becomes determined to break down her will; to make her his, body and soul. Her body becomes his through a futuristic device known as a zone implant which allows him to control her every movement, but her spirit remains unbroken until hope for succor arises in the presence of Succorso.
Thermopyle is such an unsettling character, and his degradation of Hyland so disturbing, that Donaldson has been forced to change his prose style to tell their story -- not just because science fiction requires a different style than fantasy, but because normal methods of narrative are simply too immediate for this intense a storyline.
Gone is the rich tapestry of Donaldson's fantasy prose. In its place he employs a style that is almost that of an essay or a biography -- a spare, journalistic approach that effectively removes his readers one step further from the action at hand, without noticeably lessening the intensity of what they are being shown.
What remains, however, is Donaldson's sensitivity towards the imperiled and his insight into the workings of a disturbed mind. There is a world of difference between Angus Thermopyle and Thomas Covenant, the principle character from Donaldson's most famous fantasy series, but there are similarities as well. Both characters are difficult to like and to understand, and both must have been difficult for the author to use.
But then, as has been so capably shown in his previous works, Donaldson's trademark is his ability to step beyond the ordinary, to create not only new worlds that are fully-realized within the pages of his novels, but characters that few other writers would even consider making protagonists.
The Real Story is certainly a change of pace: short and to the point, yet for those who have followed its author's career, it might well seem inevitable that he would move on to the complexities that are also found at the heart of this most recent work.
Black Cocktail
Jonathan Carroll
Century/Legend, 1990; 76pp; L4.50; 0-7126-2164-4
Weird Tales edited by John Betancourt, George H. Scithers & Darrell Schweitzer Terminus Publishing, Winter 1990-91; 146pp; $4.95 Magazine; no ISSN
Jonathan Carroll is a long-time favorite author of mine, but he also continually frustrates me. In his novels, short stories and this novella, he reveals a prose style that literally sings with clarity, odd turns of phrase, resonance, insight -- in other words, all the Good Stuff. Unfortunately, his last few novels and this piece in hand, often leave me disappointed at the end. Not because his prose loses its strength, but rather that his stories seem to run out of steam about three quarters of the way through.
Novels such A Child Across the Sky merely left me somewhat confused at the end. But this one....
It's starts, as most of Carroll's work does, with such promise: Ingram York, trying to recover from his lover's death, meets Michael Billa who seems to be the prefect friend: witty, a great conversationalist, the kind of person who just makes you feel good. Imagine York's dismay when, sometime later, he meets Clinton Deix, who claims that all of Billa's stories are lies and can prove that he and Billa were schoolmates, even though Billa is in his late thirties, while Deix is only fifteen.
This is the sort of thing at which Carroll excels: tantalizing puzzles, characters that come alive as soon as they step on the page, mystery. But unlike some of those novels that left me confused at the end, this time around I understood all too well. The puzzle would have been better left unexplained. I won't tell you why, since I don;t want to spoil things for you in case you feel differently; I'll just tell you that it all seemed rather hokey.
Still, there's lots of nice touches such as York being Maris' brother -- remember her from Bones of the Moon? -- sweet asides, snippets of pearly wisdom, a sense of wonder. I used to have the same trouble with the endings to Clifford Simak's later books, but I still read them because the ideas, everything I like about Simak's prose and characters were too good to miss.
So I guess I'll keep reading Carroll, marveling and being frustrated, for as long as he writes.
Much better than Black Cocktail is the latest issue of Weird Tales which features four stories -- a form in which Carroll excels -- and a kind of interview. I say "kind of", since Carroll's responses to obvious questions are all present; the magazine just didn't print the questions. Still, it's easy to figure out what's going on.
The stories aren't exactly all new, either. "The Panic Hand" appeared in a recent Interzone and "Tired Angel" showed up in Fear. There's no mention of their previous appearances, but since both of those are UK newsstand magazines, you'll likely not have seen either of them, which would be a shame if Weird Tales hadn't reprinted them here, because they're among Carroll's best work.
The other two pieces, "My Zoondel" and "Postgraduate", while not as strong, are still fine, weird stories, and of course, Weird Tales publishes features, columns and a number of stories by other authors as well. The Dean Koontz interview is interesting, taking a different line of attack than most recent ones have, Nina Kiriki Hoffman is in fine form with her "Exact Change", and the whole package sports a wonderful cover by Thomas Kidd.
Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Copyright 1991 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Episode 14: The Return of the Invidious Comparison. But Without Piers Anthony.
I don't know what, if anything, they thought of it as song. But that, as Santine Once said to me, is what you can never know and I can never tell you.
-- Samuel R. Delany, Stars in my Pockets Like Grains of Sand.
Sometimes books leap out and demand to be compared with one another. Or, at least, lumped together. I present for your delectation two pair of such, a book that needs no companionship, and a couple of quickies.
The Night Mayor
Kim Newman
Caroll and Graf, $17.95;
0-88184-642-2
Sparrowhawk
Thomas A. Easton
Ace, $3.95; 0-441-77778-3
The Night Mayor is by turns scary, funny, silly, and gripping. Kim Newman gives us the entertainment medium of the future, Dreaming, a sort of movie set in cyberspace so that you can enter and experience the characters' full range of senses.
A Dream is also the perfect escape haven for a convicted criminal, Truro Daine, a supernasty who gives new meaning to the name "mass murderer." Daine has escaped into a Dream of his own making, a cine-noir Night City from which he can't be pulled by force because of namby-pamby rules about the death penalty. Instead, a pair of professional Dreamers must enter his Dream and eject him from within.
As the novel opens, one of the Dreamers, a schlockmeister named Tunney, is already in Daine's Dream. His personality has been subsumed into his best-known creation, a Bogartesque private dick named Richie Quick. We follow him through a series of cliched hard-boiled movie scenes (including an uproarious visit to Chinatown), with guest stars galore, while, in alternating scenes, the other Dreamer, artiste Susan Bishopric, is brought to his aid.
After Bishopric enters Daine's dream, the plot begins to permute and mutate in delightfully unexpected ways, including a brief interlude from a Japanese monster movie, before justice is done and Daine faces a worse punishment than he has escaped.
Newman's future is marvelously detailed, but not very convincing. It's the sort you go along with for the romp, like one of Douglas Adams' confections. Also, the Dream gets sufficiently weird at times that it's not entirely clear what is going on or why. And Daine never shows himself to be as evil as his carefully-detailed reputation. These are not mere quibbles, quite, but the ambition of The Night Mayor is such that these flaws are easily forgiven.
Sparrowhawk, by comparison, is less daring plot-wise; it's essentially a near-future police procedural. Tom Easton's daring is in his milieu, a future in which biotechnology has advanced immensely: people drive immense Tortoises and Roachsters (made from lobsters and, yes, cockroaches) to work in the morning and live in giant, hollowed-out gourds. We who have seen his "biofuture" stories in F&SF, not to mention Gardner Dozois' Best of the Year anthology, have waited for his first novel with some anticipation.
Emily Gilman is a gengineer developing the Bioblimp, a huge hydrogen-self-inflating jellyfish with marsupial pouches, and tentacles toughened to serve as cargo handlers: a moving van. Her future is bright. But someone's out to kill Emily, and doesn't much care who else gets killed along the way.
Detective Bernie Fischer comes in on the case. He follows clues and leads in impeccable police-procedural tradition. The case is solved and wrapped up neatly. It's a good mystery novel.
Unfortunately, it's a lousy SF novel. The plot is insanely pedestrian for such a wild milieu; as far as Easton shows us, people and culture are essentially unchanged by 100 years of advances in biotechnology. The first scene in the novel is an airline terrorist attack, which is immediately blamed on -- you guessed it -- Palestinians.
Emily is the mother in a nuclear family, faithful to her husband; she has a brief fling with Bernie that only serves to strengthen that devotion, and to convince Bernie to marry the fellow cop he's been dallying with since before the novel opened. We -- at least those of us who read mystery novels -- have seen this bit in too many police procedural novels to see it carried forward into the next century with anything but boredom and frustration.
To sum up, Sparrowhawk is an almost completely successful novel, but successful only because it attempts very little. The Night Mayor is less successful than Sparrowhawk, but because it attempts so much, its failures are more interesting than the other's success.
Oddly enough, there is a related comparison to be made between the next pair of books...
Winterlong
Elizabeth Hand
Bantam Spectra, $4.95; 0-553-28772-9
Mad Roy's Light
Paula King
Baen Books, $3.50; 0-671-72015-5
The common theme here: transcendence.
Elizabeth Hand's Winterlong is damned difficult to describe. It's set after I don't know how many "Ascendences," which are fought with "Rains of Roses" (tailored viruses) and may or may not be a new name for world wars.
The viewpoint characters are definitely underclass and not really clear on world politics. Which is fine; we learn enough to understand what happens to the characters as the novel progresses.
Our viewpoints are a boy and girl who eventually turn out to be twins separated, not at birth, but very young. They were the property of a house of religious prostitution, the Miramar, one of several such in the City of Trees. These houses worship a goddess, the Magdalene, and a god, the Gaping One, the latter being a death-god who they'd rather worship from a distance. He is supposed to bring the Final Ascension when he returns.
The girl, Wendy Wanders, was sold by the Miramar because she was autistic and so useless as a prostitute. The upperclass used her in experiments, which partially cured her and gave her an artificially augmented empathy. She enters the dreams of others, a talent which her owners use as a therapeutic tool. But Wendy's clients have developed a nasty habit of committing suicide.
The boy, Raphael, remained with Miramar and grew up a pampered prostitute. He leaves the house to live with his current client, a museum curator with sadistic tastes, in the hope of gaining knowledge; he is not entirely successful. Raphael accidentally kills a curator and has to flee for his life. On the way, he contacts a group of corpse-eaters called the lazars.
Wendy is driven from her home outside the City of Trees in a Rain of Roses; Raphael, the same night, is captured in a raid on one of the Houses. They begin a complex dance which leads to their coming together and the transcendent return of the Gaping One and the Magdalene. The path is very bloody.
That is not merely an oversimplification of what happens in Winterlong: it is a terrible distortion. To be frank, the book is too dense to be tractable to summary. Looking over what I've written, I see I've failed entirely to mention Dr. Silverthorn (who becomes a walking skeleton before dying), Miss Scarlet (a talking chimp and the greatest actor of the age, who is obsessed with the Disney film Pinocchio), and a host of wonderful things.
I have also failed to mention that Winterlong, because it's so dense, is very rough going in spots; in particular, in the first two chapters (the point of view alternates chapter-wise between Wendy and Raphael) it's difficult as hell to get your bearings. And the only reason this is so is because of an apparent reluctance on Hand's part to compromise with point-of-view or to introduce explanations of what her point-of-view characters already know, descriptions of what they're already intimately familiar with. This is laudable artistically, and disastrous commercially. I don't see Winterlong attracting a mass audience, which is a shame, because it's one of the most ambitious novels since The Book of the New Sun (which it resembles in several ways) or Neuromancer (which it also resembles in others).
Now, Mad Roy's Light doesn't seem like the sort of book that will end up with a transcendent vision. At first glance, and even at second, Paula King has produced a plot from Andre Norton and A.E. Van Vogt born out of a milieu of C.J. Cherryh: which are, in fact, not at all bad antecedents, as antecedents go.
Jennan Bartlett is a Cherryhish character, one of the first humans inducted into a trading Guild led by the alien Daruma, isolated from her own kind and loving the alien.
Another group of humans steals a McGuffin -- a widget, a religious statuette called a Madringal -- from a planet named Shann, whose natives are all schizophrenics. Bartlett gets involved in some trade and political machinations which endanger her life roughly once on each planet she visits, confronts her own need for human (sexual) companionship, faces off mysterious, powerful aliens from outside Guild space. A nice, neat, generic SF adventure novel sort of plot, all in all...
...except that the McGuffin holds the key to why the Shenda are all crazy. We are privy to this knowledge from a brief prologue, set fifteen thousand years earlier, in which a godlike being called Madringa appears from a Shenda warp drive, cries "I AM THE LIGHT," and destroys Shann's moon. The Mandringal McGuffin is, of course, the very warp drive part which can resummon Mandringa, and does to various extents as the novel progresses. The ending shows us some of Mandringa's activities, but in fact still damn little of what it is; King attempts to portray transcendence through silence, and fails.
In fact, neither Hand nor King succeeds brilliantly in portraying the transcendent. As Wittgenstein observed, "What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence." But because Hand's characters, her world, her very language are so rich, while King's are ultimately so familiar, her failure is the more interesting.
Which brings us, at last, to the only completely successful first novel I've read lately.
Imagining Argentina
Lawrence Thornton
Bantam, $8.95; 0-553-34579-6
Rarely does a book make me weep. Almost never does a book make me weep in public. But on the bus going home one recent evening, reading the climax of Imagining Argentina, I could not restrain myself.
It's the story of Carlos Rueda and his family, told by his friend Martin Benn. Benn is a journalist who works with Rueda's wife, Cecelia, in Buenos Aires during the '70s. Cecelia writes a series of articles about the "disappeareds" that culminates in her own disappearance.
Rueda, and his daughter Teresa, are shattered. He tries in a number of ways to cope, to compensate, to convince himself she'll be back; his grieving is very real to the reader.
And then, one day, he starts telling stories about the disappeared. He tells a mother that her child will be returned to her under such-and-such circumstances: the child is. He tells of the death of another, the continuing imprisonment of a third; and it becomes clear that he is telling the truth, that somehow his stories tell what has happened, and what will happen, to his listeners' loved ones.
Even the news of their deaths, even the news of their rapes and tortures and deaths, comforts, because it ends the uncertainty. Too, Rueda gains strength from those he helps. And we see, not only the evil of the junta -- something we have all seen so many times we no longer need to be convinced -- but, more importantly, the sheer unimaginative banality of their evil. Rueda grows strong enough that he can confront the man behind the disappearances, General Guzman: and does so, and comes out of the office unhurt.
But he can not tell the one story he needs to hear, the story of Cecelia. His life goes from bad to worse; his daughter is taken, and when her story is told, it's one of torture and rape and death.
Rueda carries on. He knows that he must, that they took his daughter because they dared not take him. His is a private war, but a war in which he holds the only weapons that matter -- spirit and imagination.
Eventually, as the history books say, the Generals fall. I won't reveal what part Rueda plays in this, or how he finds the end of Cecelia's story, but I will tell you to go out and read Imagining Argentina if you have to knock over a bank to get the money for it. It's about love, about fear, about the survival of the human spirit, and about the reason we all started reading this stuff anyway: imagination and the power of stories.
Quick Takes -- all good reads:
Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt (Ace, $3.95; 0-441-22332-X). A pleasant but dull Englishman accidentally gets hold of the Nibelung's Ring and Tarnhelm. Silly and literate.
Stars in my Pockets like Grains of Sane by Samuel R. Delany; Emergence by David R. Palmer; Little, Big by John Crowley (Bantam Spectra Signature Special Editions, $4.95 each). Three of the most important works in the SF/F field in the last ten years, all reissued with nice covers and new introductions or afterwords by the author. If there's any of these you don't have, you're in for a treat.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Workman, $18.95, 0-89480-8530-2) A grumpy angel and a pleasant demon try to stave off the Apocalypse. Problem is, they've misplaced the Anti-Christ. Sort of like Douglas Adams, only intelligent.
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 4)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 4 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Interview with an Anarchist: Lewis Shiner
Interviewed at Armadillocon 11 by Alan Wexelblat
Copyright 1991 by Alan Wexelblat and Lewis Shiner
Lew Shiner: I was born in 1950 in Eugene Oregon. My father was in the National Park Service for most of my childhood and we moved once a year whether we needed to or not. He would be transferred to another town or, if we were in a town for more than a year, we'd move to the other side of town. Just, I guess, to keep in practice or to get to a better house or a better neighborhood.
So even if I was in the same town for more than a year, I'd still end up losing all my friends. This turns out to be a completely paradigmatic background for a science fiction writer. You end up being jolted into new environments so often that the only continuity in your life becomes books. These are the things that can move with you.
Just about every writer I know -- and fans too for that matter -- tended to have a book in their back pocket. You'd go out to a restaurant with your parents and you'd have a book and you'd whip it out while you're waiting for the waiter to bring the food. My parents were always taking books away from me to make me stop doing this.
Alan Wexelblat: It's true; I've done similar things. When I started out it was comic books.
LS: God, yes! My parents were hell on me for comic books. This is one of the great ironies: when I was twelve or eleven one of my favorite comic books was Rip Hunter, Time Master. I just loved it. My father read one of those. Here's Rip Hunter going into what's supposed to be ancient Greece only there's aliens and all this stuff. My father said, "God, this is shit! I forbid you to read this ever again." Now here I am at age 38 writing Rip Hunter, Time Master for DC Comics. I thought that was a real triumph.
AW: Some people who work in comics say they take twice as long because they feel they're talking to a younger audience and they want to be extremely careful what they say. Do you feel that you write differently because you have a different perception of the audience there?
LS: I may clean up the language a little bit. The Time Masters book is for general audiences so that's extremely cleaned up. Otherwise, no. I try to write the dialogue in the natural style that I would otherwise do. I've made a real effort in all my comics work to keep it very visual, very cinematic to where it's pictures and dialogue. Very few captions, if any at all. Just make the stories do the work, because that's what comics is all about.
You want to be specific in what you tell the artist to do, so you're not being lazy. But on the other hand, you want to let comics play to their strength.
AW: How about potentially touchy subjects, like sex?
LS: I'm all over it, in the comics as well. There's a sexual element in the Time Masters thing where one character, Bonnie Baxter, who was a very sisterly figure in the old comics, is having an affair with a college professor when she's called in to join the team. Rip and Jeff, who are the two main guys, both get very involved with her. She and Rip are necking, but Jeff is the one who gets into bed with her.
This is a general audiences book, but we can show Jeff getting out of bed afterwards. The sexual relationship is pretty explicit. I think it's important; it's not something I ignore in comics any more than I would in the rest of my work.
A different series I have in development right now is going to be for mature audiences. There will probably be full frontal nudity in it; we use lots of language. There's some fairly explicit sexual stuff. My protagonist has a sexual problem: he's a voyeur. This series is about the sort of indirection that occurs when people are observing the world through their computers, through film, with everything sort of second-generation. For the main character to be a voyeur is very appropriate thematically, and I'm going to play it up.
In the second issue, he gets burned out on the project he's working on and goes down to a topless joint, which you don't see that much in comics. My character's there because he likes it.
I think I'm fortunate my family settled down about the time I was discovering sex. We spent six months in Africa when I was around puberty, which is a dislocating, horrible thing to have happen. After that we kind of settled down. I was in Dallas for all of high school, then went away to Vanderbilt for a couple years of college. Dropped out, tried to make it as a rock star, failed miserably.
I went back to Dallas, finished college, got a BA at SMU, graduated in 1973. I went back to SMU simply because my father was teaching there and I could get free tuition.
I lived in Dallas for another 15 years, in a succession of small apartments, doing the usual succession writer-odd-jobs: clerking in a record store, construction, architectural drafting, was a freelance quasi-commercial artist for a while -- as much a commercial artist as somebody can be who can't draw. I did a lot of lettering and technical drawing, the same trick Doug Potter had used with much greater skill in Houston. You get associated with a print shop and they need somebody to do some basically simple line art but not something they can handle themselves. That gave me a certain amount of business so I hung on to that.
There was a period where I did actually support myself with rock and roll. I was in a house band at a really awful club called "Boogers." I never had the phone number, and I'd always have to call and find out when we were playing. I'd have to call Information and ask for "the phone number for Boogers" because it wasn't in the book. There'd be this long pause while the operator tried to decide if I was pulling her chain. Is this some kid who's just called the drug store looking for Prince Albert in a can who's now calling the operator looking for boogers? That was a little humiliating.
About 1976, I got into computers. There was a writers' group up there and one of the other members was working for a small computer company. He needed somebody to be his assistant techwriter. He figured he'd rather have somebody who could lie convincingly than somebody who knew about computers. He figured he could teach me about computers and lying was a natural gift that he'd rather find to start with.
He brought me in and I quickly displaced him. I decided this could be key to my writing career: if I could learn to program then I could call my own shots. It would be a good thing to do part time; I could work at home, if I could swing it. I wrangled my way into writing the language manual and used that as a lever to learn the language and then started programming.
The company managed to alienate every single programmer they had and we all quit within four or five months. I went off with one batch of them and worked for them part time on and off right up until this year. They're real good friends of mine and have been very supportive. The little short collection I have coming out from Pulphouse is dedicated to them.
Seventy-nine was the year I took the plunge and tried writing full time. I'd tried before a few times, but by then I'd sold a few short stories. First sale was in 1976; I sold a short to Galileo. Almost immediately sold another story to a magazine called Mystery Monthly, but they managed to fold the month before my story was to come out. Third sale, much later, was to Shayol, Pat Cadigan and Arnie Fenner's magazine. That also took a couple of years to come out.
So the writing career was really slow and I felt I had to make some kind of commitment. I was working fewer and fewer hours during the day; I wrote a novel at night, two pages per day, struggling along.
Finally, in 1979, when my love life was horrible, my job life wasn't cutting it, I decided it was time to make a big change. I quit everything, sold my car, packed all my valuables into a storage building, sent my chapters and outline of this novel off to Joe Lansdale's literary agent, and took off to Mexico.
Joe and I had done a collaboration and that was in the mail when I left. I spent two and a half months down there doing a lot of the research that I ended up using for Deserted Cities. I came to a crossroads in Mexico: I'd been down there about two months and I had to decide if I was going to go home or go to Cuernavaca and just drink myself into some sort of obscurity. Maybe spend the rest of the money I'd saved up from my years of work and become a professional alcoholic.
Right when I was having to make this decision, I called home to talk to my mother. She'd gotten two letters: one from Lansdale that we'd sold the short story and the other from Joe's agent who was excited about the novel and wanted me to finish it. So I packed my shit, came home, took a few things out of storage, and moved down to Austin. I wanted to be in a real writers' community and I knew most of the people down here from various conventions.
I got an apartment, rewrote the suspense novel, never sold it. Wrote another suspense novel, never sold that, though I sold a few more short stories.
I came to another point where I had to re-commit to the writing. I was splitting my energy between a rock band and the writing. I felt I would do better at either one if I committed myself fully. This occurred about the same time that I married Edie. It seemed a more appropriate behavior for a married man to be a writer than going off with the band to Detroit for the summer. In '81 that didn't seem like a real good idea; they were still killing each other over the ruins of the auto industry.
I settled into the writing life. Got a PC so I could program at home rather than having to go up to Dallas constantly. That was when I wrote Frontera and my career pretty much took off from that point. Life just basically got more settled and that's the situation I'm in now.
This year, finally, between the comic book work I've started doing and various other writing projects -- Wildcards and so forth -- it's gotten to the point where I was just not able to do enough programming. There was enough money, I thought, that I could get by without it. That's gone down to a purely consulting gig. They've hired a new programmer; I go up once in a while to try and straighten him out. The rest of the time is spent writing.
AW: What are the new things on your plate now?
LS: The comic book stuff consists of a number of projects. There's one in development that I hope will turn into an ongoing monthly series. That's the one I mentioned earlier involving computers and so forth; it's a non-superhero comic. I think it's fairly revolutionary for a mainstream comic book. I'm also doing a slot in an anthology project for DC. I've got other stuff that's merely in the talk-about stage that will probably eventually happen. I've got a new novel that I'm beginning to think about; I'm in the research phase on that.
I'm back writing in Wildcards again. Numbering the books has gotten so complicated because of Book 6 being split into two parts and Wildcards novels now appearing that we've begun to talk of things in terms of thematic trilogies. The upcoming trilogy, after we finish off the Hartman trilogy, is going to be the Jumpers trilogy. I'll have stories in at least the first two of those three books.
Following that will be the Cardshark trilogy. I've had a fairly big hand in plotting the whole direction of that three-book unit, so I'll be working on that. I'm doing the Wildcards comics for Epic which will be a four-issue Prestige-format series which may be coming out as soon as next summer. I'm head writer on that, writing a frame sequence myself and collaborating with the other writers on the origin stories that will be sprinkled through it. The frame sequence is all new material and will require loyal Wildcard readers to go out and purchase this as well as the books. That's happening right now; as soon as the convention's over I'll go back to working on that script.
AW: Your works are scattered all over style/genre/media boundaries. Do you like working over this broad a spectrum?
LS: From where I sit, I see many more similarities than differences. To me, the stories are much too similar. Frontera and Deserted Cities in particular have a similar sort of structure. Each moves toward a central location, each has four viewpoint characters, and an outside military arriving near the end of each book. None of this was intentional, of course. I woke up after Deserted Cities was out and realized how much I had recapitulated myself. The fact that they're in different genres, one sort of c-punk and the other magic realist, seems very superficial to me. These kind of distinctions don't have much to do with characterization, structure, theme, and so forth. I think there's a very strong thematic connection in all my work.
In fact, I was at a cyberpunk conference in Leeds this summer and one of the participants gave a paper on my stuff. It was not a terribly theoretical paper; his point was that all my books involve anarchy to one degree or another. The anarchist is perceived as a positive force to reawaken a stagnant society. He found this in a great number of my works. I'll buy into that, particularly since the novel I'd already finished -- Slam, which he hadn't seen -- is a blatant novel about anarchy. Genre distinctions or the presence or absence of certain tropes in a work is a very minor detail compared to the other stuff.
AW: Tell me a bit more about this new book.
LS: The protagonist of Slam is modeled in some ways on Howard Waldrop in that he's a guy who lives outside of the system. But he's never hurt anybody. He's kind, he's gentle, he is -- if anything -- too passive at the beginning of the book. And yet, society has branded him an enemy because he worked in a used record store, took his payment in cash and didn't report it to the IRS. Howard Waldrop, of course, does not do this; Howard doesn't have a job. If Howard had a job like this, he might be tempted.
Anyway, the IRS busted my protagonist and insisted that he get a job so they can garnishee his wages for back taxes. He refused to get a job and was therefore jailed for not having a job. Thus, he has become an enemy of society. The book chronicles his progress from a totally unfree condition, when he's in prison, to a condition of complete freedom by the end. But that necessitates a more drastic route than I myself have taken. It involves him getting a false ID, going underground, that kind of stuff. Steps which I hope I won't have to take. I think, in the circumstances, his position is completely justified and I support it even if I haven't done it myself. I like to think of myself as an anarchist.
AW: But you do pay your taxes?
LS: I do pay my taxes, and I don't even cheat. However, I would be happier about paying my taxes if there was a checklist on the back of the form 1040 which would allow me to decide how my money was to be spent.
AW: You're well known not just for your leftist views but also for your very strong ecological orientation. Is that something that came out of your father's work, or is that a later thing?
LS: That was probably a later thing. Who knows why that happens to somebody? The amazing thing to me is that everybody doesn't feel that way. It seems obvious that if you're sensitive to what's going on around you, it's hard to avoid those kind of feelings.
AW: So here you are in a creative field, and 'influence' is sort of a bizarre word to apply to it, but it's there. People read what you write and they discuss it and they get ideas from it. Do you deliberately put forth the ideas you want?
LS: Absolutely. Some of this has to be due to my age. People who were born in 1950, who came of age during the 60s, tend to be more radical on these issues. There's the horrifying thought that I've seen in several magazines that we may be merely an anomaly. That this little bump in the graph of population -- the baby boom -- may be the only people to whom these things are important. I certainly hope not. But I think the whole 60s thing that I went through, being fairly radical, disposed me to my present stance.
It also disposed me to believe that every act in some sense is a political act. Every work of art has a political subtext, consciously or unconsciously. And if you consciously try to avoid politics in your work that's just another kind of politics; therefore, your duty is to try and control the political content of your work and try to use it in the best cause you can.
Frontera is an anti-war book. It basically says that it's the duty of everyone to stop and say: "you may not manipulate me and you may not co-opt me into your war machine." Deserted Cities is basically the same thing. You have individuals walking into a battlefield and trying to take peoples' guns away from them. There's a lot of ideology tossed around. One of the characters in Deserted Cities is having an argument with a rebel who says, "without guns ideas have no force." To which my viewpoint character replies, "with guns all ideas are the same."
That kind of stuff is very important to me. That may be the main thing that gets me excited about sitting down to write. That and the stories themselves and the characters.
This has led to my editing an anthology for Bantam that will be out probably in the fall of '90 called When the Music's Over. Pat Cadigan's in it, along with many others. It's all original material. I required every story in the book to offer a non-violent solution to whatever problem was presented. This is one aspect of it; the other is that half the money the book makes -- what would have been my share -- goes to Greenpeace. I thought that was really putting my money where my mouth was. I felt I was in a 'put up or shut up' situation. Thus the title.
My agent is donating half of her money from it to Greenpeace. One of the contributors is donating all his income from the book to PETA. It's a sort of attention- and money-generator for those kinds of causes. Fortunately, no one came along and said they wanted to donate their money to a cause that I had political problems with, like United Skinheads Foundation or something. That would have really put me in a spot. But I think that was taken care of by the people I chose to put in the book. I don't think there's anyone in there that isn't of a sympathetic nature. No one who is truly capable of writing the sort of story I wanted is capable of giving their money to the skinheads.
AW: This may be something of a sensitive subject, since you've edited this anthology, but there was just a "Feminism in SF" panel here and one of the things that came up as a comment by one of the panelists was the idea that often editors will get an anthology together and only then discover that there are no women contributors. Then they'll quickly go out and try to find a couple of female names.
LS: Well, I started off concerned that I wanted a lot of women involved with the book simply because I think there are in contemporary society different perspectives. It's society-driven in that there just are some perspectives no men have. And different approaches to problems. I wanted to get as many viewpoints on things as I possibly could; unfortunately, I didn't get as many as I wanted.
I've got some very close friends, who are women writers, who I went to right away: Pat Murphy, Lisa Tuttle, and several others who I really wanted a story from. Pat Murphy had written one of the paradigm stories that I told people to go read if they wanted a model before they wrote something for the anthology: "Art in the War Zone." But Pat simply couldn't do it. Lisa simply didn't have time; she was overbooked.
And stories flooded in from white, Anglo-Saxon males. God, what are you going to do? You get brilliant story after brilliant story by white guys. I resisted it; I fought it. In one case I had to reject a guy because he was white. A good friend, he'd written a great story, but I had to say: "Sorry. Got no more room for you." I know reverse discrimination is unconstitutional, but they were willing to put up with it. They saw my point. I was also very concerned with trying to get some stories by foreign authors, which proved to be an unbelievable hassle.
I did get some women writers: Nancy Kress, Pat Cadigan, Marian Henley. I discovered a new writer named Sherry Coldsmith, bought her first story. Those are all the women writers I got, but it wasn't from lack of effort.
I think if I were to say I was a feminist it would have kind of a bogus sound to it. It would be like trying to claim something I'm not really entitled to. But I think to say that I'm a pro-feminist is fair. I'm certainly very concerned with the issue and it hasn't been addressed very well in any of my fiction. But that's coming up; in the new book I'm consciously trying to work with some of that. I think it's desperately important and I care very much about it.
Let me end things by saying this: Whether I'm working in comics or prose or Wildcards or anything else, the thing that's really motivating me is the desires I have for the particular story I want to tell. Early on, I tried to adapt myself to the medium and wrote to what I perceived the market to be. It just didn't work; I wasn't very good at it. What success I've had has been from my writing from the heart to the best of my ability, so that's what I do.
AW: I think you do very well and I look forward to seeing how the new projects turn out.
LS: Thanks.
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 5)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 5 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Past Imagining
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Reprinted from "Rayguns, Elves and Skin-Tight Suits" Copyright 1985 by Krause Publications and Lawrence Watt-Evans Used by permission of the author
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." So said St. Paul (I Corinthians 13:11). You've all probably heard that quoted before, in all manner of applications. Paul was talking about "charity," according to the King James Bible, a mistranslation of the Latin caritas, meaning "caring". He was explaining how a man without it is nothing but a child.
A good many people, however, seem to live by those words without their context. They shun anything that's "childish" and deride those who do not. Anything not fraught with social significance is "kid stuff" and obviously worthless.
Or for some it's not social significance that matters, but intellectual content; a work that can be appreciated without careful study is "Mickey Mouse" and "infantile".
Some have no set criteria, but simply divide the world's pleasures into "grown-up" and "kid stuff" on an empirical basis -- beer is grown up, dolls are kid stuff.
This is built into our society; from a very early age we learn to give up things we've "outgrown". At any elementary school you can hear kids saying, "Aw, that's baby stuff," about games they enjoyed a month before.
Among comic book collectors, virtually everyone over the age of sixteen has encountered derision because of his/her collecting. "You read funny books? Hey, what's Bugs Bunny doing these days? Gonna be Spider-Man when you grow up?"
However, take a look; are the people saying this so very mature? If they say comics are stupid, what are they reading? Most of the time they aren't reading anything; they're watching "The Dukes of Hazzard" on TV.
Gosh, how mature. "Dukes" happens to be a big hit with the four-year-olds I know. TV, however, has not been labelled kid stuff, while comic books have, even though a good many TV shows require considerably less intelligence and sophistication than most comics. A great many other things have been labelled kid stuff. Amusement parks, for example; nowadays about the only time you'll see anyone over the age of thirty in an amusement park he/she is there as an escort for his/her kids. Most of you probably assume that that's always been the way of the world.
Not so. When amusement parks were first really popular, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the clientele was almost entirely adults. Go look at any of the old photos of the crowds on Coney Island or at any of the old trolley parks from before the First World War -- do you see any kids?
Now find a photo of Coney Island or Disneyland from any time after World War II -- kids everywhere.
Bicycles -- look at bicycles. When they became popular, late in the nineteenth century, they were ridden primarily by adults. Cycling was rather adventurous (and if you've ever ridden those poorly-balanced antiques you'll know why), something that dashing young men and women did. Then look at any picture from 1950 through 1970 with bicycles in it, and the odds are that kids are riding them. Nowadays they're becoming acceptable for adults again, thanks to the energy crises of the seventies, the revival of serious bicycle racing, and the advanced technology that's spun off from racing and made top-of-the-line bikes too expensive for kids, but in the fifties they were strictly kid stuff, and an adult on a bicycle was something that elicited laughter.
Trading cards -- ignoring the current collectibility of baseball cards and all the other variations, who buys trading cards these days? Kids, of course. However, were they originally intended for kids? Does the fact that baseball cards originally came in cigarette packages answer that for you?
Cartoons -- nowadays anything animated is assumed to be for kids, which must frustrate Ralph Bakshi no end; it's a major reason that films like his "American Pop," or "Heavy Metal," bombed at the box office. More than a decade after "Fritz the Cat" got an X rating, most Americans equate animation with kid stuff, but fifty years ago Disney's Mickey Mouse (before he was watered down) was popular with all ages, and Betty Boop was racy enough that she had censorship problems.
Of course, nowadays having something labelled as "suitable for all ages" is the kiss of death, because that will be interpreted as meaning "kid stuff". This is stupid, as it's perfectly possible to produce something that really does appeal to all ages. Look at "Raiders of the Lost Ark", for example.
Science fiction and fantasy are thought of as kid stuff by a lot of people; when I tell people what I do for a living, one of the questions I've learned to expect is, "What age group do you write for, kids or teenagers?"
Basically, anything that's primarily for fun is considered kid stuff, except for sex, drugs, liquor, and TV. I've spoken with people who consider all fiction, or even all books, to be kid stuff! (Remember, I've lived in rural Kentucky; there are still people around who don't hold with book learning.)
I don't think that this is what St. Paul had in mind when he spoke of "childish things".
(Of course, right there I'm sure I'm in disagreement with any number of hardcore fundamentalists who see Dungeons & Dragons as a Satanic ritual and comic books as kiddie porn.)
Why on Earth should fun be just for kids? Well, hey, I wouldn't ask the question if I didn't have an answer. It's a pet theory of mine. I have a lot of pet theories- -I breed them.
First, let's take a look at what's considered kid stuff, and when it became kid stuff.
Comic books are considered kid stuff, and except for special cases, such as soldiers who couldn't get anything better and collectors, they've apparently been considered kid stuff all along. Certainly Dr. Fredric Wertham thought of them as being aimed exclusively at children as far back as 1947, and the comic- book letter columns I've seen back to 1950 all assume a juvenile readership. The contents of comics from the thirties seems geared toward kids. Scribbly stories featuring the Red Tornado, "Comics" McCormick, and Supersnipe all treat comics as kid stuff. So let's say that they were probably kid stuff in 1933, and definitely by 1945.
Amusement parks -- in the twenties they were still frequented largely by adults, going by contemporary literature and old photos, though kids were present in large numbers, as they had not been at the turn of the century. However, by the fifties amusement parks were strictly kid stuff. I don't have much evidence either way from the thirties or forties, though there are plenty of references to soldiers taking dates to amusement parks during World War II. Let's say the transition period was sometime between 1930 and 1950.
Bicycles -- well, they were supplanted as serious transportation in this country by the automobile, more specifically by the Model T, but you'll find ads showing young women out for a Sunday jaunt on bicycle up through the 1920s. By 1955 bicycle ads -- or any other ads -- only showed kids.
Trading cards -- well, they were pretty silly to begin with, and appear to have been strictly kid stuff by about 1925, if not sooner. I admit to not being up on the field.
Animated films -- animators have never given up aiming at an adult audience, at least in increasingly-rare theatrical releases, but I know that by 1960, when I started paying attention, adults did not watch cartoons.
TV, which is usually just as juvenile as comic books or animated films, came along in 1949 -- that is, that's when it began to catch on with the public, since it was around for a few years before that. The great boom in TV began in 1949 and gradually slowed down in the early sixties, and it's never been considered strictly kid stuff -- except on Saturday mornings.
So where does that leave us? Well, most of the transitions from adult-oriented to kids-only seem to have happened between 1930 and 1945. What happened over those fifteen years?
Hey, if you don't know, you shouldn't be reading this; we aim at an audience that knows at least the basics. The thirties were the worst economic depression in modern history, and the early forties were World War II. Rough times. The Depression put incredible numbers of people out of work, and even those who were still working were often living in an atmosphere of constant worry and tension for fear they would be the next to go. Money was tight -- prices dropped steeply, hard as that may be to believe for those of us who have only lived during the past forty years of non-stop inflation. And until Roosevelt took office in 1933, there were no government handouts of the sort we have today -- no unemployment benefits, no social security, no welfare payments. If you were retired on a pension and the company went bust, as many did, you had no income at all. It was entirely possible to starve to death.
This was not exactly conducive to fun. The birth-rate dropped sharply, and business at various entertainments did as well. Amusement parks that had thrived all through the twenties went bankrupt. Movie attendance leveled off (scholars disagree on whether it actually dropped or not), and patrons were lured in with gimmicks such as free dishes -- people who speak of the thirties as the Golden Age of Hollywood are not talking about box office receipts; film quality went up in order to compete for the no-longer-growing market. Radio was very big -- it was free, once you'd bought the set.
Survival was a struggle, and when you're struggling to survive, you don't go out and spend your money at Electric Park or at the Bijou. You don't buy yourself a comic book -- if you've just got to spend your dime on something to read you get a pulp, which will last you a lot longer.
However, kids were still kids, no matter what the economy did. A great many parents had the attitude that their lives might be miserable, but their kids would enjoy life. Just because Daddy's out of work, why should Junior be miserable?
Take the kid to Coney Island for the day -- you can't afford to play the games or ride the rides yourself, but you can enjoy it vicariously by watching the kids. Buy the kid a comic book -- it'll keep him out of the way while Mother takes in washing, a dime well spent. (Actually, some older people I've spoken to swear up and down that new comics cost a nickel during the Depression, not a dime; either all their memories are wrong, or I've fallen into the Twilight Zone, or they were sold at discount in some places.)
World War II had something of the same effect; men were in the army, women in the defense plants, but kids were still at home or on the streets, and comics or trading cards or whatever kept them busy. There seems to have been a great acceptance of the idea that the world was in really lousy shape, but could be improved so that the next generation would be able to enjoy themselves. When I was growing up, along with all the other Baby Boom kids, I remember hearing people of my parents' generation talk about how we youngsters didn't appreciate what they had done for us, how they had struggled through the Depression and fought the Nazis so that we could have TV and washing machines and comic books.
I had assumed at the time that this was just something every generation had to put up with -- you can find complaints about the younger generation back to the first century BC, at the very least -- but now I'm not so sure. I think perhaps the generation that came of age during the Depression and the war had this attitude far more strongly than most. I can't imagine anyone born in 1960 telling his kids how he had to struggle to survive. The Depression generation really did have more worries and less time for fun than others -- and for that reason came to think of fun as being something one outgrew.
There are things that one outgrows, certainly -- but fun needn't be one of them. Just because children enjoy something doesn't mean adults can't enjoy it as well. There's a growing realization of this, I think; that's why we're seeing more respect given to the work of Carl Barks and John Stanley, why George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg are zillionaires. The people who still sneer at it all as "kid stuff" are the ones who can't free themselves of their earlier training, or are unsure of their own maturity and therefore exaggerate it (like the swaggering macho males who flaunt their manhood because they aren't really confident of their masculinity). As the Depression generation ages and fades in importance, I expect "kid stuff" to become ever more socially acceptable.
So the next time someone sneers at you for reading funny books or science fiction, just comfort yourself with the thought that you're part of the wave of the future, free of the dead hand of the past, and with that charity St. Paul recommended, forgive the poor outdated slob.
Fantasy in the Mainstream: The Novels of Olaf Stapledon
Chuck Koelbel
Copyright 1991 by Chuck Koelbel
In the past I've talked about authors who are well-known for their mainstream fiction, but have also written some speculative fiction. This time I'll be talking about another type of author: a man who is best known for his SF, but is underappreciated by fantasy and science fiction fans. That man is the late Olaf Stapledon, a British writer who wrote his most interesting works between 1930 and 1950. Despite writing some of the most visionary work of that time, Stapledon is seldom read today. His works continue to affect SF and mainstream literature, however; such diverse writers as Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, Gregory Benford, and Doris Lessing have noted him as an influence. Hopefully his influence will continue to grow. Jeremy Tarcher is currently reissuing his works as trade paperbacks, with new introductions and afterwards by prominent writers.
One of Stapledon's hallmarks is the vast scope of his novels. Modern writers are generally considered to be working on a large canvas if their work covers centuries and hundreds of worlds. Herbert's Dune series takes place over several thousand years, while Wolfe's Book of the New Sun takes place millions of years in the future (although the main action lasts "only" a few decades). In contrast, Stapledon's Last and First Men tells the story of humanity's evolution from the present until the solar system is destroyed, roughly 2,000,000,000 years in the future. I know of no other authors who have attempted a work of that magnitude, let alone produced a moving work from it.
The framing story of Last and First Men is one of the last humans telling the history of the species to an ordinary man, circa 1931 (when the book was first published). This is possible because the Last Men have discovered the secrets of time and can project their consciousness back to any period they desire. He gives the entire history of Man, starting with a series of nationalistic wars following the War to End All Wars. These wars result in a world dominated by America and China, and eventually by a world state based on America alone. But this system falls into decadence and finally collapses in an orgy of self-destruction. All of civilization is effectively destroyed, and the remnants of humanity are forced back to the stone age. But finally, after a hundred thousand years, man regains a measure of civilization, centered this time in South America. And Man destroys it again, a mere fifteen thousand years later, in a horrific nuclear disaster. This time Man does not rise for ten million years. By then, he has physically evolved to a new form, although he is still recognizable as human. This new species is called the Second Men. The same pattern repeats throughout the book. On exponentially increasing time scales, new races of Man rise, reach new heights of civilization, and eventually fall. In all there are eighteen species called Man, all of which trace their lineage back to the First Men (i.e. present-day humanity). The Last Men live on Neptune, forced there by an unfriendly sun making the inner planets uninhabitable. Through it all, Man strives to understand the universe and his place in it, and to perfect himself.
Rating Last and First Men is not easy. For breadth of scale, it certainly rates [*****]. For scientific and historical accuracy, it probably rates [-]. Of course, it is hard to blame Stapledon for not predicting the next 50 years of world history correctly, or for not foreseeing the actual form of nuclear power. There are few individuals, so characterization is basically non-existent. Despite this, there are stereotypes of many groups (Americans, Chinese, and Jews, for starters) that may be offensive to some readers. This is mainly a problem in the first few chapters, before First Man has evolved into Second Man. In fairness to Stapledon, part of what he was trying to do was to show the Man's progression over time; in doing this, it is natural for the first generations to look crude. Still, for believable characters give this book a []. Likewise, there is little direct action. The story reads like a history book, with events described from a distance. What action there is, however, is fascinating. For pure plot, the book rates about [***]. Stapledon's writing style is deliberately like a textbook, setting out the facts of humanity's future. It is also somewhat dated; in that way, it reminds me of Wells. While this style fits the subject matter, it isn't terribly interesting to the casual reader. For prose style, rate the book [*]. Where the novel really comes into its own is in the realm of ideas. Stapledon is using this book to dramatize his philosophy of existence. Things like the perfectibility of humanity and constantly striving for higher goals are recurring motifs that are nicely illuminated by the plot. In short, Last and First Men has a great vision. As food for thought, I give it a [*****]. Overall, then, I rate the book at [****].
Stapledon's philosophy gets even greater scope in Star Maker, an indirect sequel to Last and First Men. Here, the framing story is an ordinary man who has what might be called an out-of-body experience. One night he is gazing at the stars when suddenly he is mentally soaring through interstellar space. After some time he enters the body of an alien on another planet, and begins exploring that world. Eventually, he and the host alien mentally leave that planet and travel even further through the cosmos. They can also travel in time using the same mechanism. Over time they meet other explorers and witness the evolution of the cosmos. The fate of the Last Men is glimpsed, hardly significant in the great scheme of the universe. Other species evolve to dominate the stars; it should come as no surprise that eventually they also fall into decline. Cultures come to dominate the cosmos in a sort of galactic-scale survival of the fittest. At the same time, nebulas, stars, and galaxies evolve according to the laws of astrophysics. All this happens on a time scale of roughly 500,000,000,000 terrestrial years, after which our cosmos has completely dissolved. There is also a glimpse of the Star Maker, the creator of our universe, involved in his (its?) own cycle.
The ratings for Star Maker are much like those for Last and First Men. The action of Star Maker is generally more direct, since the story is one man's recollections. At some points, however, the narrator starts losing words to express his experiences, and must fall back on indirect descriptions. The prose is much less stilted, since the narrator is an ordinary man rather than a superhuman from the far future. For modern readers, this is somewhat counteracted by the book's age; patterns of speech have changed since 1937, when it was written. Stapledon also showed more imagination in the alien races in this book than in the human races in its predecessor; probably this was intentional, to emphasize the continuity of humanity in Last and First Men. The science is, if anything, less convincing in Star Maker, however, and the descriptions of the aliens, while imaginative, are somehow less involving than the history of humanity in the first book. Overall, I would rate Star Maker as [****].
There is also another sequel to Last and First Men entitled Last Men in London. Unfortunately, that book is out of print and I haven't been able to track down a copy for review. Anybody knowing where I can find a copy, please let me know.
By and large, Last and First Men and Star Maker showed evolution from the viewpoint of its end product, a race of fittest survivors. Stapledon also wrote two books looking at individual leaps in evolution. The first of these, Odd John, tells the life story of a Nietzschean superman trying to survive in the world of inferior men. John is the mutant son of an ordinary doctor and his dull-seeming wife. John's mental abilities are awesome, including extremely fast learning, astounding insight into difficult topics, and telepathy. His physical appearance, however, is frail and in some respects inhuman. The novel traces his life from being a child prodigy through his search for others of his kind to his death. Throughout, John must fight the conventional world to achieve his goals. Those goals pointedly do not include world domination. John has little use for ordinary homo sapiens; he simply wants to prepare a place for his own race, homo superior. Eventually, he gathers a colony of fellow mutants around him on an island in the Pacific. The world at large, of course, misunderstands the colony and moves to destroy it. In short, Odd John is the prototypical story of a superman battling the world's prejudices. Stapledon does a good job of characterization in this novel, suggesting John's abilities quite convincingly. The narrator, a friend of John's father who falls under John's influence, suggests the enigma of John by alternately admiring and being disgusted by John's actions. This ambivalent reaction distinguishes Odd John from many other oppressed superman novels, which tend to have unbelievably good or bad characters.
Overall, I rate Odd John as a [****-]. The basic plot, while probably fresh when the book was written, has been overused by generations of writers since Stapledon. (I'm getting tired of big, bad governments automatically mounting military expeditions against peaceful, remote colonies. Why don't any generals ever say, "Look, we've got better things to do with our battleships"?) The science is again speculative at best, although everything hangs together pretty well if you allow for a little mysticism. I also wasn't terribly convinced by the young John's actions, although I suppose I shouldn't expect normal human child development in homo superior. Balancing these weaknesses, Stapledon obviously thought out the ramifications of a superhuman better than many other authors who have tackled the subject. The relatively balanced view of superior beings is a nice antidote to the usual power fantasies in the genre.
The other portrait of a superior individual is Sirius. The title character is an dog, deliberately raised to supercanine levels by controlled breeding, genetic manipulation, and training. Sirius has the intelligence of a normal (probably above-average) human, and the physique of a German Shepard. This combination makes him much prized, first as a sheep dog and later as a research subject and researcher at the university. Because he can't be satisfied as an ordinary dog and won't be accepted as an equal by humans, Sirius must struggle his entire life to find his identity. Even when he finds a workable self-image, the people in the local town cannot accept him and his "sister" (the daughter of the scientist who created him). Again, Stapledon provides good characterizations. Sirius in particular is well-imagined, with both canine and human aspects to his character. The atmosphere of distrust near the end of the book is also quite believable. I rate this book a [****+].
In summary, I recommend Olaf Stapledon to anybody interested in speculative fiction. No other author has approached the scope of Last and First Men and Star Maker. These books should be required reading for anyone thinking about large-scale evolution, either biological or astrophysical. Odd John vividly describes the struggles of a superior being to escape his inferiors. Sirius is a tragedy of a being with no place to call home. I won't say these books are the most exciting adventures on the market, but they are among the most thought-provoking stories in SF.
A Bibliography of Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams
Copyright 1991 by Walter Jon Williams
Historical Novel
(written as "Jon Williams")
The Privateer, Dell, 1981
The Yankee, Dell, 1981
The Raider, Dell, 1981
The Macedonian, Dell, 1984
Cat Island, Dell, 1984
SF Novels
Ambassador of Progress, Tor, 1984
Knight Moves, Tor, 1985.
Hardwired, Tor, 1986
Voice of the Whirlwind, Tor, May 1987.
The Crown Jewels, Tor, Sep 1987
House of Shards, Tor, Nov 1988.
Angel Station, Tor, July 1989.
Elegy for Angels and Dogs, Tor Double, (w/ Roger Zelazny's The
Graveyard Heart,), Aug 1990. (An abridged version was
published in Asimov's, May 1990.)
Days of Atonement, Tor hardback, Feb 1991.
Collection
Facets, Tor hardback, Mar 1990. (Contains Surfacing, Video Star, No
Spot Of Ground, Flatline, Side Effects, Witness, Wolf Time, The
Bob Dylan Solution, Dinosaurs, and an introduction by Roger Zelazny)
Stories
"Side Effects," F&SF, June 1985. Reprinted in Year's Best SF, 3rd
Annual Collection, 1986.
"Sarah Runs the Weasel," Omni, serialized (!) March-April 1086.
"Panzerboy," Asimov's, April 1986.
"Video Star," Asimov's, July 1986. Reprinted in Year's Best SF, 4th
Annual Collection, 1987.
"Wolf Time," Asimov's, January 1987.
"Witness," Wild Cards, Bantam, 1987.
"Unto the Sixth Generation," Aces High, Bamtam 1987.
"Dinosaurs," Asimov's, June 1987. Reprinted in Year's Best SF, 5th
Annual Collection, 1988, and the Wollheim Best of the Year for 1988.
"Ligdan and the Young Pretender," Guns of Darkness, ed. J.E.
Pournelle, Tor 1987.
"Surfacing," Asimov's, April 1988. Reprinted in Year's Best SF, 6th
Annual Collection, 1989.
"Consequences," Call to Battle, ed. Jerry Pournelle, Tor 1988. Written
for, and also available in Liavek: Festival Week, ed. Shetterly &
Bull, Ace, May 1990.
"Flatline," Asimov's, Aug 1988. Reprinted in Year's Best SF, 6th
Annual Collection, 1989.
"The Bob Dylan Solution," Aboriginal SF, Sept-Oct 1989.
"Mortality," Wild Cards: Down and Dirty, Bantam, Dec 1988.
"Solip:System," (special edition hardback novelette), Axolotl Press,
Oct 1989. Reprinted in Asimov's, Aug 1990.
Wild Cards: Aces in the Hole, (collaborative mosaic novel w/ Martin,
Snodgrass, etc.), Bantam, Feb 1990.
"No Spot of Ground," Asimov's, Nov 1989, also in What Might Have Been
Vol 2, Benford & Greenberg, Bantam, 1990.
Game Titles
Privateers and Gentlemen (age of sail RPG), Fantasy Games, 1981.
Pride and Prejudice, Baen Software, 1986.
Hardwired (SF RPG), R. Talsorian Games, 1989.
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 6)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 6 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
From Beyond the Edge
Reviews by our readers
Another Day, Another Dungeon
Greg Costikyan
Tor $4.95 339 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
First, this is NOT an AD&D novel even though the story universe bears a remarkable resemblance to a typical AD&D gaming universe.
Timaeus D'Asperge is a newly graduated fire mage. He is also a noble which severely limits the professions he can engage in honorably. Fortunately, adventuring is one such profession and there just happens to be a "dungeon" conveniently nearby. He hires the adventuring outfitters of Pratchitt (Does this name sound familiar or not?) & Stollitt to facilitate his first adventure. Pratchitt & Stollitt are really a pair of thieves for whom, outfitting adventurers is more of a front than a real avocation. They know only a little more about outfitting an adventuring party than Timaeus.
They undertake the commission anyway and put together a most eccentric group of adventurers. There is Father Thwaite who is a very good healer when he is sober which is rarely. There is Kraki, the fearless and brainless barbarian. Only Garni the dwarf is competent but he firmly believes in bringing everything including the kitchen sink on an adventure.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part is about the party's adventures in the "dungeon" and the fabulous treasure they find, a life size magical statue. The second half is about what happens when they bring the statue back. Everyone knows there is much mana in the statue but no one knows exactly what type of magical power is in the statue. Nevertheless every magician and political power group in Durfalus wants that statue and will do anything to get it. In a world where magic works, "anything" is really something.
The story is written as a droll British parlor comedy. It succeeds quite nicely. There is the right amount of wacky but dignified humor. Despite the AD&D flavor, this book in no way resembles the typical AD&D adventure book. It is a good solid tongue-in-cheek adventure story. It also has a shameless "to be continued" ending. However the break happens at a natural breakpoint in the story. [***]
The Barsoom Project
Larry Niven & Steven Barnes
Ace, $4.50, 340pp, 0-441-16712-8
Reviewed by Steven Sawicki
There must have been a subconscious reason this book sat around for so long before I picked it up to read. I mean, I loved Dream Park, generally like everything Niven and Barns have done -- individually and as a team, and have a particular like for "game" based novels. So what's the problem?
Well, first I was a bit put off by a 4 page cast of characters and glossary list. Niven has done this before and it hasn't bothered me, but for some reason I interpreted this as an indication that the characters were so interchangeable I'd need the list to get through the book. And I was right.
Niven and Barnes seemed to have taken the best qualities of Dream Park and intentionally ignored them. There's a large cast of characters who for the most part are interchangeable, there's two interweaving plot lines that tend to weaken each other rather than strengthen, there's a certain lack of tension throughout the entire novel and the amazing constructs of Dream Park seem somehow now mundane.
Let me give you one example. The action of the plot takes place during one of the games -- a Fatripper Special -- a game modified for the education of substance abusers. So, in a sense, you have a cast of characters who, by nature, are seriously flawed. Imagine what could have been done with this. Instead Niven and Barnes utilize their characters as if they were ordinary people -- no, not ordinary, extra-ordinary -- given the things they do during the game. Consistently, I had to keep wondering when these people's problems would rise to hinder their goals. The problems never did. Perhaps in Dream Park, problems are always minor and need not really be addressed.
To say I'm disappointed with this would be putting it too mildly. It's tedious, boring in spots, lacking logical followthrough and generally a waste of time. [+]
Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three Edited by Don Sakers BAEN Books, 0-671-69864-8, $3.95, 312pp. Reviewed by Mary Anne Espenshade
This is the best anthology I've read in a long time, not a failure in the bunch, with lots of first time writers as well as familiar names. Filking is one of my favorite parts of fandom. I don't compose but I sing along whenever possible and I have a collection of both purchased and recorded-myself-at-filksings tapes. There are filks on everything from Asimov to Zelazny, from Beauty and the Beast to Star Wars, but this must be the first time a book has been written because of a filk. Leslie Fish's "Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three" is available on several tapes. It is funny and different and inspired this whole collection of short stories, some of which closely follow the details of the song, others using it only to set the scene. This includes everything from stories that exist only to set up a pun punch line to hard SF murder mystery. A number of the authors are filkers themselves. Only one story makes the ghost a horror figure (I won't spoil it by telling you which one). Usually she is the catalyst making the story happen but sometimes she just dances by in the background. The stories were very well selected, no two are the least bit similar though they all had the same song for a starting point. [****+]
The Colors of Space Marion Zimmer Bradley Donning/Starblaze, 0-89865-191-3, 1963, $8.95, 171pp. Reviewed by Mary Anne Espenshade
I bought this reprint of an old MZB story because I'm always on the lookout for MZB I've missed and because the illustrator, Lee Moyer, is someone I'm acquainted with through fandom. It is a good, juvenile story, if you can get past some of the very dated feel. The Lhari control all interstellar space travel, with a monopoly on the only working warp drive. Humans can't use it directly, they must be kept in suspended animation during warp travel or die. Bart Steele is half human and half Mentorian, his Mentorian mother was a mathematician on a Lhari ship. Since the Mentorians are the only race able to work directly with the Lhari, humans resent them for it. The title refers to the main difference between the species in this book - the Lhari don't seen any colors in the spectral range that humans do. The Mentorians can see human colors and into the Lhari range. Bart sets out to find the "eighth" color -- the secret to warp power - -and faces dangerous adventures aboard a Lhari ship to find it. He learns the Lhari aren't as superior or as different as they have lead humans to believe. [***]
Dimensions: A Casebook Of Alien Contact Jacques Vallee Contemporary Books, 1988, $17.95, 304 pp, 0-8092-4586-8 Review by David M. Shea
Debunking UFOlogy is entirely analogous to debating theology, a harmless intellectual game of no lasting value. This point is clearly made in the Foreword, wherein Whitley [Communion] Streiber calmly asserts as fact that the UFO question is both "the deepest mystery that mankind has ever encountered", and "certainly a real phenomenon". Better you should read Streiber, a mere priest of the cult who assumes you will believe in UFO's on faith because he says so. Vallee debases what appear to be legitimate academic credentials by hiding his New Age mumbo-jumbo under a patina of pseudo-science. Vallee states, apparently sensibly, "I am not prepared to abandon the rational approach ... for conclusions based on faith [or] intuition." Cut to the chase, however, and you find that he reserves the right to define "rational" according to his own whim. This includes the assumption that there may be "variants of current physics ... in which psychic phenomena could be the rule rather than the exception". This brings Vallee to the pat conclusion that UFO's "cannot be understood apart from their psychic and symbolic reality". Sure thing, Jack. Pardon me while I go light a candle at the Shrine of Shirley MacLaine.
Expanded Universe
Robert Heinlein
ACE, 0-441-21891-1, $4.95, 582pp.
Reviewed by Mary Anne Espenshade
Expanded Universe is a large collection of stories and articles from the '40's and '50's through 1980. Most of the fiction is in the oldest section, some familiar, some less so - I'm not a Heinlein expert. The second half is nonfiction, predictions and political diatribe. Future predictions made in 1950 are updated twice, once for the 1966 collection and again in 1980. Heinlein sounded surprised in the 1966 revisions that World War III hadn't happened yet and almost disappointed in 1980 that we still hadn't been invaded by Russia, as he was so sure it was going to happen. I only wish he had lived through 1989, since his political predictions get farther off base all the time. His economic predictions, however, are spot on (and that was by 1980, before the Reagan deficit years), as are his dismal statements about education in the US. Lest this sound like a political review - all the predictions are stated in SF terms, sometimes as near future fiction, others as "life in the year 2000" type articles. There is a wonderful article from 1979 testimony to a House committee on NASA spinoffs - if only it could be required reading in Congress now. My favorite fiction piece was "Over the Rainbow ...". I had read it before but I still love the punch lines. It is the story of a vice president, added to the ticket only to get votes from certain special interest groups, that unexpectedly (to those who engineered the election anyway) becomes a great president. From the fiction I also especially liked "Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon", one of his Boy Scout juveniles, and "They do it with Mirrors - an Edison Hill Crime Case", a pulp mystery from 1945 that was too risque to print as written at that time (after reading it I still haven't a clue as to why, but times have changed a lot since then). [****]
Expecting Someone Taller
Tom Holt
Ace $3.95 231 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
Malcom Fisher is your basic henpecked English male. One night he runs over a badger who turns out to be the giant Ingolf who is the keeper of the Ring of the Nibelungs and the Tarnhelm. As Ingolf's Bane, Malcom gets the ring and helm which makes him the ruler of the world. There are a few problems though. Wotan, Alberich and others want the ring too. That was why Ingolf was running around as a badger. It was a disguise.
As you might expect, the story is basically a very humorous re-telling of the ring cycle. There is a Gotterdammerung but the ending is happy as expected. The humor is typical droll English humor. Nothing unpleasant ever happens. The suspense is in what Holt will turn up with the turn of the pages. There are the usual cliches but also some original surprises. In all, this is a pleasant read. [***]
Fire on the Border
Kevin O'Donnell, Jr.
ROC $4.50 368 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
The alien Wayholders have attacked the Terran Association but their purpose is not conquest but training. The Wayholders are fighting a battle of survival against another alien race. They have found that experienced soldiers have a better chance of success against these aliens. The relatively defenseless Terran frontier worlds provide the Wayholders with the right combination of resistance and ease of conquest for the final training of their troops.
The leaders of the Association have been intimated by threats of full scale conquest into allowing the Wayholders free reign to attack the frontier worlds. This capitulation is kept secret but the reality of the nonexistent defense of the frontier eventually leaks out and a small rebel defense force forms.
This is an ambitious work. It is a military hard SF story that tries to be more humanistic than most stories of this type. There are enough detailed battle descriptions to satisfy any armchair general. The attempt to be more humanistic is not quite as successful. The story viewpoint bounces between the characters of Darcy Lee on the rebel side and Kajiwara Hiroshi on the Association side. However instead of concentrating on these two, O'Donnell tries to include too many other characters. The result is too many spear carriers who are too prominent in the story but who also suffer from the lack of characterization typical of spear carriers.
Hiroshi is also an unsympathetic character. He is someone who lets his principles do his thinking for him. He is caught in a situation where there is a conflict of principles and takes the easy way out of continuing to follow orders. His clone Daitaku is a much more sympathetic person for being able to apply common sense thinking in the same conflict of principles.
The most successful aspect of the story is the portrayal of the downside of longevity. There are many people today who feel that a practical form of immortality is just around the corner and they proselytize about the benefits of such a achievement. O'Donnell shows the more likely result of such an achievement.
This book is a well done military SF that also tries and partially succeeds to be more than that. It presents some very good extrapolations of the consequences of technology on society which is an old hard SF tradition. The books tries for good characterization and partially succeeds. In all, this is a book that even those who do not like military SF will enjoy. [***]
The Girl, The Gold Watch,And Everything
John D MacDonald
1962 Fawcett $2.25 207 pp 0-449-14296-5
Reviewed by David M. Shea
The girl was Bonny Lee: beautiful, nineteen, and in her own ingenuous description, "cheap, ignorant, and fun-loving". Kirby woke up one night and found her in his bed. The gold watch was Kirby's only legacy from his eccentric millionaire uncle. When he turned the silver hand, time stopped. Everything was seductive Charla, suave Joseph, the lawyers, the business men, the Internal Revenue Service, and everyone else who wanted a piece of the $27 million dollars they assumed Kirby had embezzled. Would Kirby stand up like a man, or would he be a ninny all his life?
The author was best known for an endless string of gumshoe mysteries. MacDonald went against form with this amusing book, of which SF people seem mostly ignorant, though it was made into a TV-movie. Comprised of equal parts SF, mystery, comedy, erotic fantasy, and pop psychology, TGTGWAE is a hoot, fast-paced and funny all the way. Sure it's mindless drivel, but it's good mindless drivel. What more do you want? [****]
Hawk and Fisher
Simon Green
Ace Books $3.95 213 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
This is basically a whodunit with a very superficial fantasy coating. Hawk and Fisher are Guardsmen for the city of Haven. They are assigned to guard councilman Blackstone during a party. Naturally, Blackstone is killed and the two must solve the mystery before dawn. This book almost totally lacks any originality or imagination. The style is straight modern police thriller and is an anachronism in the fantasy setting. Haven is a clone of the Thieves World Sanctuary down to the similarity in names. An unastute reader can solve the mystery well before the two characters mainly because Hawk and Fisher commit a very obvious blunder. Without this blunder the story would have ended half way through the book. The only thing that saves this book from total failure is the method by which Blackstone is murdered. That is original and imaginative and fits completely in the fantasy setting. One wonders if the method came first and the story was then built around the method. However this one piece of inspiration is not enough to recommend the book. [*]
The Heralds of Valdemar Mercedes Lackey
Arrows of the Queen DAW, 0-88677-311-3, 1987, $3.50, 320pp.
Arrow's Flight DAW, 0-88677-222-2, 1987, $3.50, 318pp.
Arrow's Fall
DAW, 0-88677-255-9, 1988, $3.50, 320pp.
Reviewed by Mary Anne Espenshade
The first trilogy set in Valdemar, exploring the training of a Herald. The Heralds of Valdemar are much more that the traditional post of announcing guests to the Queen. They travel the country as impartial arbiters in all judicial matters and disputes. Talia, of the Holderfolk near the southern border of Valdemar is chosen by the Companion Rolan to be the Queen's Own Herald. The first book describes her training at the Herald's Collegium and the internal strife in the government surrounding her selection. The second volume follows Talia on her field apprenticeship with Kris and learning to control her Gift. The third book brings the political problems to a head with Lord Orthallen's plot with Ancar of Karse to invade Valdemar. The descriptions of the society are fascinating, this is not the typical uniform fantasy world. [****+]
In Between Dragons
Michael Kandel
Bantam $3.95 181 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
Sherman Potts is your typical nerdy SF reader. He fantasizes a lot. The difference is Sherm's fantasies come right off the pages of books in a magical library. Unfortunately, because Sherm's fantasies are real, they have a way of getting totally out of hand and they threaten to destroy the magic library and Sherm's real life.
The resolution is not as well done as the story but the ending is acceptable. Sherm's fantasies are exactly that of an adolescent boy in the troves of puberty. The book is filled with ironic humor. Sherm knows that many of his problems will resolve itself when he grows up but that does not help him cope with them any better. This is the voice of the author speaking and Kandel injects many such instances of humor throughout the book. In all, this is an accurate book and maybe not to the taste of many people for that reason. [***]
The Last Herald-Mage Mercedes Lackey
Magic's Pawn DAW, 0-88677-352-0, 1989, $3.95, 350pp.
Magic's Promise DAW, 0-88677-401-2, 1989, $4.50, 320pp.
Magic's Price
DAW, 0-88677-426-8, 1990, $4.50, 352pp.
Reviewed by Mary Anne Espenshade
Lackey's second Valdemar trilogy is actually set much earlier than the first. Talia is reading about the adventures of the Last Herald-Mage when she is first introduced in Arrows of the Queen, so the reader knows going into this what the ending will be, at least according to the legends within Valdemar. It's a good thing Lackey is a fast writer because I could not put these books down once I had started them. [*****]
Mad Roy's Light
Paula King
Baen $3.50 275 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
Jennan Bartlett is one of the few humans allowed into the Daruma Guild that controls space trade in most of known space. Bartlett considers herself more Daruman than human but finds herself in a situation where her basic human values conflict with basic Daruman values. Bartlett finds herself given what seems to be an impossible mission involving a trade agreement between three races, one of them human. As it turns out, there is a fourth race involved and this one is not bound by the niceties of interstellar etiquette as it has evolved in known space. Paula King acknowledges C. J. Cherryh and Andre Norton for their inspiration and it shows. The feel of the story is very much a blend of the style of the two authors. The male characters are not as incompetent as those in a typical Cherryh story. Bartlett is a bit more competent than a typical Norton heroine. The story is more the hard SF of Cherryh than the soft fantasy of Norton. If you like either Norton or Cherryh, you will most likely enjoy this book. [***]
Mighty Good Road
Melissa Scott
Baen 1990 306 pp $3.95 US 0-671-69873-7
Reviewed by David M. Shea
Freelance salvage specialist Gwynne Heikki accepts a contract to return to the planet where she spent her childhood in search of a missing cargo blimp. Little does she know that the very people hiring her are the ones who have the vested interest in making certain the real truth never comes out.
I have enjoyed previous works by this Campbell Award-winning writer. This book contains a readable story, but the first half is told at glacial pace -- it takes 131 pages to get the actual salvage operation under way. Eventually the story speeds up (to a slow walk), but mostly it consists of people standing around talking, lots of cyberjargon, and reams of irrelevant physical description. I know that Ms. Scott is capable of better than this. [**]
Never Deal With a Dragon
Robert N. Charrette
ROC Books $4.50 377 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
First, let me say that this is an excellent book. Hopefully that will keeping you reading pass the next few sentences. This book is set in the Shadowrun game universe. Shadowrun is what you get when you combine AD&D with cyberpunk; Uzi toting elves who can jack into the Net and cast Feeblemind spells on AI's. Seriously, the Shadowrun universe is well constructed and makes more sense than most despite the premise of magic working along side of science.
The book is written as a novel and not a game session transcript. There are several coverging story lines told from different points of view. The main story is about Sam Vernor's rite of passage. He is a salaryman for the Renraku megacorporation. During the course of the story, he realizes that Renraku is not the benevolent company he has believed it to be. His escape from Renraku is abetted unwittingly by a rival megacorporation seeking to steal Renraku secrets.
Vernor is driven by self preservation and a need to discovered what happened to his sister to involve himself in this corporate war. The story ends with Vernor thwarting the plot despite the double and triple crossing that happens. At the end, Vernor has matured into someone who can stand on his own with a little help from his friends. Neither Vernor or any of the characters in the story are supermen who succeed solely on their abilities. Everyone who survives does so with the help of friends. This emphasis on friendship is rather refreshing in an action story. All too often action stories revolve around a superman and everyone else serves only to show off the superiority of the hero through their incompetence or hero worship. This book succeed on its own merits. You can read and enjoy this book totally independent of any knowledge of the Shadowrun gaming system. [***]
Othersyde J. Michael Straczynski E.P.Dutton; 0-525-24873-0: 294 pages; June 1990: $18.95 Reviewed by Richard Weilgosh
Have you ever wished harm to come to someone? Combine this idea with two lonely teenagers and their desperate wanting to belong and you have the makings of a horrific story.
Chris Martino and his mother have recently moved to California from the East following his parents separation. Roger Obst or 'Horseface' to his classmates is a fat, abused and lonely boy who is looking for friendship from anyone. Naturally these two become friends, and together they suffer beatings at the hands of the high school jock. 'They use invisible ink to write messages back and forth, but one day the message received is not the one sent. Instead it's a message from the Othersyde. As instructed. Chris and Roger buy telegraph keys in order to better communicate with the Othersyde. However Roger is the only one to use the key and the Othersyde offers to help him get revenge on those who have hurt him. Will he do it? If he does. at what cost to himself and to his only friend? The climax of the Othersyde is quite exceptional. This is a fast-paced. gritty novel of supernatural horror with the gore kept to a minimum. Othersyde has a well executed plot combined with very believable empathic characters. He tells this thoroughly enjoyable tale with style and flair and it should appeal to a wide audience.
Polar City Blues
Katherine Kerr
Bantam $4.50 262 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
This book is very unlike the fantasy books that Kerr wrote previously. It has a certain gritty texture that suits the story very well. However there is a sense of romanticism in this story that precludes it being a 'book noir'. The story is about a major interstellar crisis that threatens to destroy Polar City. Bobbie Lacey comes closest to being the main character in what is basically an ensemble cast of characters.
The story starts off with the murder of an Interstellar Confederation diplomat. The murder eventually proves to be an assassin for the rival Coreward Alliance. Chief of Police Al Bates has to solve the mystery without creating an interstellar incident that will precipitate an attack on Polar City. Lacey is drawn into the mystery as she is the one person that various less than honest citizens will approach with information.
This is not a "solve it before the author reveals it" type mystery. It is more of a "see how the characters figure it out" type of story. Kerr succeeds quite well. Nobody acts stupid. The various characters fumble their way to the solution like intelligent people. The only weak point is the ending. Kerr puts the main characters in a position where they cannot escape death and literally has someone comes out of left field to rescue them. There is some forewarning of the rescue but it comes too close to the end. This is a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent story. [****]
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 7)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 7 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
From Beyond the Edge (Part 2 of 2)
Queen of Angels
Greg Bear
Warner, 0-446-51400-4, 1990.
Reviewed by Paul S. R. Chisholm.
Emanuel Goldsmith, one of the "untherapied" (who needed no help meeting official standards of mental health) and one of the greatest poets of the year 2047, appears to have committed a horrific multiple murder. But this the story of the three people who try to understand what he's done. Mary Choy, a genetically "transformed" cop, tries to bring him to justice. A friend of Goldsmith's, Richard Fettle, tries to come to terms with the murder, and with his own inability to write. Martin Burke, whose therapy techniques have remade the world, searches for answers in ``the Country of the Mind.'' At the same time, a nearly-sentient robot probe called AXIS is just entering the Proxima Centari system . . . and other dangerous territory.
This is a nearly incomprehensible book of a nearly incomprehensible society. It's not just the funny punctuation; Bear really has drawn a radically different world. If he's been somewhat timid in his applications of nanotechnology (except for a certain hairbrush handle) and artificial intelligence, it's because he couldn't push the reader much farther. The theme, not the plot, ultimately draws the various threads together. A tough read, but probably worth it in the end.
Rimrunners
C.J. Cherryh
Questar $4.95 US 280 pp 0-445-20979-8
Reviewed by David M. Shea
Bet Yeager was Earth Company, one of Mazian's people, until the war stranded her in Alliance space. Now she is starving on Thule Station, trying to get back on a ship, any ship. The one she gets is Loki, a "spook", half-merchanter, quasi-military, operating under doubtful Alliance authority. All Bet Yeager wants is a safe place to hide and an honest job to do; but there is something very wrong aboard Loki, and she may be the only one who can fix it.
This book presupposes that you have read Downbelow Station for the macro-politics of the situation. Rimrunners operates on a smaller scale, with a single viewpoint character, and a basic theme of the micro-politics of survival, very like Merchanter's Luck. That this is one of the smaller pieces out of which the author is assembling the sweeping history of Union/Alliance space, does not detract from its validity or its readability. One of the top-rated authors in SF shows again how she got to the top. [****]
The Rowan
Anne McCaffrey
Ace, 0-99-13570-7; 335pp, $19.95
Reviewed by Richard Weilgosh
Until The Rowan, The last McCaffrey novels that I enjoyed were Crystal Singer and Killishandra. It was worth the long wait.
A three year old child is the only survivor of a mud slide that destroyed her family's colony. The Rowan, as she is called, is found to possess considerable telepathic and kinetic abilities so she is raised to become a 'Prime Talent' for the Federal Telepath & Teleport network. The job of the FT&T is the development of telepaths or 'Prime Talents' who are then responsible for the movement of commerce, communications, and personnel between the Earth and the star colonies on which these 'Primes' serve. The first half of the book deals with The Rowan's training and her maturing as a person along with the relationships she'll need in her job. It also deals with the training of her staff and the setting up of her own Tower on Callisto. The rest of the story concerns The Rowan's involvement in a war and the attack on the planet Deneb by a race of strange beetle-like creatures. This is where she meets her love and future husband, Jeff Raven and they with the other 'Prime Talents' hope to defeat the aliens. The outcome is predictable but satisfying and most fitting.
This is a relaxing. highly entertaining and imaginative novel and a most welcome break from the glut of blood and gore books so prevalent these days. As all of McCaffery's heroines are, The Rowan is the strong central figure who is extremely competent, sympathetic and determined in what she wants and does. McCaffrey also presents us with a new set of delightful and likable secondary characters especially the teacher, Siglen. It's a pleasure to read such a smoothly written novel.
I believe that The Rowan is partly based on a short story from her earlier collection Get off the Unicorn. This is one of her best novels to date. McCaffrey is the author of the famous 'Dragonrider' books.
Sparrowhawk
Thomas A. Easton
Ace, October 1990, $3.95
Reviewed By Michael A. Stackpole
Sparrowhawk is an excellent example of the things most writers who aspire to produce science fiction should bear in mind. They can be enumerated as follows:
1) Some worlds, while they function for short stories, cannot bear the scrutiny or prolonged contact with the mind of an intelligent reader that a novel engenders.
2) Writing humor is very difficult.
3) Copy-editors DO have value.
4) Research is the foundation upon which good fiction in built.
In this novel Easton presents us with world in which animals are genetically altered by gengineers to all but replace machines. Roachsters, for example, are computer controlled genimals -- vehicles grown from lobster stock and outfitted with cockpits, bumpers and license plates for use on grassy highways. Sparrows have been grown up to serve as jet-assisted passenger planes (and all giant birds are referred to, in the text, as planes) and policemen fly gengineered Hawks in pursuit of criminals.
While this world works fine in a short story setting, like Easton's "When Life Hands You A Lemming..." (Analog, May 1989), it breaks down quickly when a reader is given time to question the internal contradictions the author uses to hold the world together. No reason is given for exactly WHY the shift from normal machines to genimals is made -- though the author notes the genimal revolution is paralleling that of the internal combustion engine (though that analogy is unsupportable in my opinion). If it is a question of ecology, it strikes me that with the level of technology he suggests for his gengineers, they could easily have created a creature that converted carbon monoxide into oil -- perhaps even creating it in cans in a process similar to that used by his hanky-bushes to produce tissues.
As is shown in the book, there are serious down sides to using genimals to replace machines. A berserk Mack truck is brought down by .357 Magnum bullets, which is to be expected. Living creatures DIE from little things like that. While an A-10 Thunderbolt tank-killer plane can survive and fly with over 40% of it being shot away, a living creature could not do the same. Furthermore, a car will run at 60 mph for as long as it has fuel, while a living creature will tire.
Easton notes that no slave race has been created through gengineering because humane groups would not permit such a thing happening. Later in the book, however, we are presented with a "genetic sculpture" that is living and "part cat!" This whole idea calls for a reexamination of how "humane groups" would look at gigantic lobsters and Tortises roaming the country at the bidding of their masters, and I do not feel such animals rights groups would find these creatures something they would let exist without protest.
The rest of the book is filled with similar contradictions in logic. A genetic engineer, Emily, laments the fact that she takes the family's only transport into work, so her househusband has to walk to the local market to get food. One wonders why a computer "autopilot" could not allow the Tortise to return home. At another point she explains that sizing a creature is easy. At the same time her husband laments the need to muck out the garage because their Tortise does not produce enough manure to support a "litterbug." Well, if sizing is easy, clearly there would be a market for "dustbuster" forms of the manure-eating creatures.
Easton's "Lemming" story is clearly satire. It has been suggested that this book, too, is satire but I remain unconvinced of that. The book seems from the outset to adopt a very serious tone. True, the house-husband goes through PMS-type tirades and mopes around the house like a stereotypical wife of the 1950s, but I took that as an inept attempt to show the downside of gender equality. If this is meant to be humor, I missed the jokes entirely -- perhaps a genetically engineered bookworm that could produce a laugh track could have been bound into the spine.
The copy editing of the book, over which Easton has no real control, allowed gems like the following to get into print: "The bicycle, when the streets were smooth, as they were by spells, and the litterbugs had been doing their duty, as they generally had, came as close, he was sure, as he would get today. [to feeling the same freedom he felt in soaring on a Hawk]" (p. 36). It also let this one slip through "His loyalty was so obviously just that, no more, unreal, a lie for whatever in-built reasons, that, for a moment of irrationality, she wanted to strangle the little bastard." (p. 80). And, lastly, this: "He even told himself that if he ever chose to marry, another cop, one much like Connie, Connie herself, would be ideal, for she would understand the life, and the risks." (p. 104).
There are other examples of weird prose and points where non-sequiters roll through the text. (At one point Emily demands to know what happened to pictures on a desk when she is in a room we have been told, time and again, that only the house's owner -- not her -- has ever been in.) Editors generally catch those things and ask for fixes. Somehow, though, some of them slipped through in this book. Perhaps they can be fixed in subsequent editions.
Research is always important with science fiction novels because they often concern themselves with extrapolation of known fact or current theories. Mr. Easton has indeed made himself knowledgeable on the science of genetic engineering and I, at least, was not able to catch him in any glaring errors there. His grasp of current technology in other areas, however, is lacking and makes his future a mix of 90s biotechnology and 50s electronics.
For example, in Neoform, employees must sign in and out when they enter or leave the building. We are told they used to use a magnetic-card system, but people, to avoid the bottleneck at the front desk, gave their cards to others to check them out at lunch. For that reason the company went to a system where employees use a light-pen to sign in and out. A computer compares their signature to one it has stored in memory to determine if the person is legitimate or not. Of course, as any of us can attest when trying to sign a scad of traveller's cheques, signatures vary. Moreover, signatures can be forged with practice. On the whole a retinal-pattern identification system would be more exact and less time consuming.
The genimals, we learn, are going berserk and attempting to kill Emily because of special chips being implanted in their motherboard. This has resulted in a jet-liner Sparrow landing on a highway and slaughtering hundreds of folks, including most of its passengers and all of its crew in hopes of killing Emily on a return trip from the airport. When the chip is identified by the police and a second is found on the board of a bulldog/Mack truck, our cop hero, Bernie, notes "Same part number.... It's a PROM, all right. And the serial numbers are even sequential."
I am unsure which is worse: knowing the terrorists have enough of these chips to go into mass production, or trying to plumb the depths of stupidity that would prompt them to put serial numbers on the chips. I suspect, after having read the book to the end, the terrorists have done this to provide the police with some vague chance of stopping them. They have taken pity on the cops because the science of detection in this world is such that even Doctor Watson could have solved the mystery on his own.
This book as been called a "twisty police-procedural mystery." This book is to police-procedurals what "Gilligan's Island" is to "Robinson Crusoe." The forensics team, at the site of a murder, does not go through the trash and bag evidence -- that is left to Bernie, who goes back well AFTER the whole place has been cleaned up, but the trash has not, somehow, been emptied. The detective, Bernie, has a picture of a single bloodstained footprint on the carpet and laments the fact that it is the only clue to the murderer. This in light of the fact that even today the police can detect (through the use of chemicals and ultraviolet light) traces of blood after repeated washings of carpets and clothes. Hair and fiber samples, which a criminal can only avoid leaving behind if he wears an environment suit, are likewise revealing to cops today but remain unmentioned here.
Police behavior is vasty different in the future. After shooting the Mack truck and killing it, Bernie leaves the scene to his fellow cops, gets a drink with Emily, then takes her to a motel room and boffs her. Instead of getting called on the carpet for that by his boss, he's allowed to keep the Mack's collar ornament (a chrome 18-wheeler) as a memento. Bernie promptly washes it off and gives it to Emily to give to her 4 year old son, right before she and Bernie have another bout of sex! Even more strange, Bernie does not pursue a fleeing mass-murder suspect, but instead says, "Don't bother [chasing him]...we'll get him later anyway."
In a review it was suggested that one cares about the characters. I feel this is true, because they are clearly incapable of caring for themselves. All of the genimal assassins have been created to kill Emily so someone can take credit for a genimal she created, though the patent is already being processed in and is obtained in her name during the course of the book. The Sparrow/jet that lands on the highway is there specifically to get her, when it would have been so much more simple to just bring down the Sparrow she'd flown home from Washington by having it collide with the terrorist controlled Sparrow- assassin.
The murder/rape that points out the wonders of forensic science in 2044, metastasizes into a series of same by the end of the book. All of them are committed, says Bernie, because "All fanatics are nuts, and too many of them are nuts about blood." Once again, a little research, this time into the psychology of serial killers, would have made the book so much more believable.
The characters have more than one dimension, but only in the way that a sheet of paper can be said to have depth. At their best they are stereotypes and at their worst, which is most of them, they are reduced to racial/political/religious stereotypes. As Easton notes in describing the home of a character of Indian descent (though US born of parents from South Africa), "The [odor of] curry, like sin, was something that followed the children of Mother India wherever they might wander, unto the seventh generation." Easton is blessed, in my opinion, that Indians have more of a sense of humor than, say, Moslem fundamentalists.
Writing, and especially writing novels, requires skill. While not as important as the training a surgeon gets to perform brain surgery, a writer has to develop in order to create pleasant, readable work. Novelist-dabblers, fortunately, can retire after one unsatisfactory effort and no one will be the worse for it -- as would not be the case of a patient in the care of a surgery- dabbler.
Luckily, because the human psyche has a great penchant for hysterical amnesia, this book is forgettable. This is one you can pass by unless you're looking for a book that you can toss down and say, "I can do better than this" tp start your literary career. You'd not be setting your sights very high, however you'd have no place to go but up.
Surfing Samurai Robots
Mel Gilden
Lynx Books, 1-55802-001-2, 1988, $3.95, 246pp.
Reviewed by Mary Anne Espenshade
As SF this probably only rates **, with one off-beat alien and a near- future California where robots are available as servants, tour guides and even to do your surfing for you. As a pulp mystery parody it gets [****]. Zoot's planet, T'toom, gets radio transmissions from Earth (they panicked at the original War of the Worlds broadcast too). He decides to visit the place because he wants to be just like Philip Marlowe, but he ends up in Malibu, among the surfers, eating yoyogurt and watching tv until a motorcycle gang challenges them to win the Surf-O-Rama. Zoot must become a private eye for real to learn who destroyed all the surfbots and why Heavenly Daise, genetic research scientist and daughter of the owner of Surfing Samauri Robots, has disappeared. This is a FUN book. [***]
Till the End of Time
Allen Appel
Doubleday, $19.95, 405 pp.
Reviewed by Gregory Benford
To reach back and change the past -- surely one of the most enduring and endearing impulses of the modern mind. Science fiction has attacked this great thought-experiment with myriad purposes and results. Here Allen Appel follows on his successful novels Twice Upon a Time and Time After Time, which deal with historian Alex Balfour's lurches from era to era in pursuit of moral meaning and simple survival. It's an engaging read, zesty and vivid, a lively page-turner.
Yet not without moral purpose, as far too many popular novels are -- and seemingly these days, must be. Appel is after larger game than the reader's attention span.
His hero swings back and forth between our complex era and the seemingly simple moral landscape of World War II. Alex moves through time without scientific prop or artifice, as in the earlier books. The contrast between our cynical and expedient time and the clear demands of the greatest of all wars is striking.
Today we fear nuclear war somewhat, but find our greatest enigmas in environmental and other issues. Appel's hero can concentrate on making the opening of the nuclear age less bloody, elevating matters to a lofty plane. This is the opinion of Einstein, when confronted with the time traveller. That his suggestion would be turned into a weapon used against civilians horrifies the aging physicist. He urges Alex to make Roosevelt set down guidelines for use of the bomb, well before 1945.
Should Alex try to change history? "And yet, didn't he have to make the attempt, even though the outcome was doubtful? That part of Einstein's philosophy had to be correct; a moral man must attempt moral change."
Even though Alex gets an interview with FDR, the wily politician derails his course into a fact-finding mission to the South Pacific. This allows us into the real world of the Big War, with some splendid action writing. We get the full tour, with well-considered meetings -- JFK as uncertain skipper of PT-109, 'Wild Bill" Donovan as manipulator supreme. FDR stays in touch with messages relayed through notables, particularly a wanton Betty Grable, who supplies some welcome steam.
Appel neatly contrasts the certainties of that time with our own mitigated present. His lady love, mired in the journalism of 1990, pursues a parallel plot involving Japanese germ warfare. Her Washington, contrasting vividly with FDR's, is convincing: "Molly examined the heavy, greasy food and understood why most of Washington's government workers seemed to harbor an air of gloom and defeat."
But the miasma of our age is strangely neutral, as though the issues of that distant war were mere movie material: "The Germans have been able to accept the enormity of their crimes, to dwell on them at a national level, but the Japanese will admit very little. And the Holocaust, as terrible as it was, is over. Germ warfare continues, or at least the development side does." Indeed, Iraq's use of mustard gas reminds us that there is still no true international moral consensus.
This novel seems at first to be a simple action gambol, but it raises issues seldom treated in our press. The Japanese did carry out terrible experiments on captives. They did allow to die or outright kill half their prisoners of war, while the Germans lost a few percent. Yet the power of the Nazi imagery is such that we ascribe the blackest role to the Germans, and forget the Japanese. We wring our hands over our use of the atom bomb, though in fact our fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo killed more. Further, the Japanese understood this long ago. They had an atomic bomb project. "They would in fact hide the possibility that they had ever even attempted such a thing, just as they hid the fact that Hirohito was an active participant in Japan's war plans."
True enough, and the novel capitalizes on this, framing its conclusion at Hiroshima, where the author places the Japanese A-bomb project. This serves some dramatic purpose (though in fact the work was in Tokyo), which however fails to render the climax as powerful as the earlier material. The central problem of time-travel narratives is whether a better outcome results. Appel finesses this card by finally making his hero unable to affect crucial events, by pure authorial fiat.
We lose, then, the telling crunch. Alex wanders off to care for an infant saved from Hiroshima's blast. This reader wonders what it's all been about.
Should the US have foresworn the bomb, despite the deaths? Or was that clear demonstration of their power a crucial object lesson? What would Einstein have said, if he had seen how it has all turned out (so far). These are interesting questions, but alas, the novel, for all its fun, averts them to its loss.
(reprinted by permission of the author from the Washington Post. Copyright 1990 by Gregory Benford).
The Vang: The Battlemaster
Christopher Rowley
Ballantine $4.95 313 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
Rowley has unquestionably matured into a very good writer. This book is very good. The basic story is the same as The Vang: The Military Form. However the details are significantly different. Again, a hibernating Vang is found. A Battlemaster as the title states. However this time humanity knows from the previous Vang revival that the Vang exists and what they can do. The ITAA has definite procedures for handling a new Vang revival. The problem comes from the location of the revival, Wexel. Imagine Lebanon ruled by the Mafia and you get some idea of what it is like on Wexel.
The ruling ITAA is not popular and the native lords are very uncooperative. In addition, all the fighting and killing that normally happens on Wexel disguises the activity of the Battlemaster. The Battlemaster is also much more intelligent than the Military Form. As a result, it does not blindly try to conquer the planet but evaluates the situation and makes plans accordingly.
Everyone in the book acts sensibly or as sensibly as they can. Some of the characters are rather stupid. It is normal for them to act stupidly. The intelligent characters act intelligently. They do not accomplish as much as they should because the obstacles they face are tremendous. There are no artificial hindrances typical of poor writing.
This book has it all, good story, good characterization and lots of action. [***]
The Vor Game
Lois McMaster Bujold
Baen $4.50 345 pg.
Reviewed by Danny Low
While this is the latest Miles Vokosigan book, it is one of the earliest in story chronology. Miles has graduated from the Military Academy and gets his first assignment in the most remote and inhospitable base in the entire Barrayaran military. This portion of the book is actually a novelette that is grafted onto the front of the novel. The results of this little side adventure are important later in the novel so it is not totally out of place in the book.
The real story starts when Miles gets orders to spy out the growing military buildup in some neighboring systems. He runs into his old command, the Dendarii Mercenaries, who have undergone a small coup de main by Miles' old nemesis, Admiral Oser. This is only the beginning of Miles' problems. His cover is blown from day one. The Barrayaran Emperor decides to play pauper prince without the pauper and Miles finds him about to be sold into indentured servitude. Of course all this happens just after Miles thoroughly ticks off his field commander and is under orders to return immediately to Barrayar.
The basic structure of the story is that of a mystery. The mystery being why the sudden military buildup in the neighboring system. The rescue of the Emperor is basically a red herring although it provides some amusing events. The solution to the mystery is not very hard but is also not obvious. The astute reader should be able to figure it out about the same time as Miles if not before. While some background briefings are found in the book, most people find will the book slightly baffling if they have not read the previously published Miles Vorkosigan books. Specifically, The Warrior's Apprentice should be read before this book. In summary, an excellent addition to the Miles Vorkosigan saga. [***]
Vows and Honour Mercedes Lackey
The Oathbound DAW, 0-88677-285-0, 1988, $3.50, 302pp.
The Oathbreakers
DAW, 0-88677-319-9, 1989, $3.95, 318pp.
Reviewed by Mary Anne Espenshade
Two collections of the adventures of the swordswoman Tarma and the sorceress Kethry. I originally read some of these stories in the fantasy fiction magazine Fantasy Book, others appear in the Marion Zimmer Bradley-edited anthology series Sword and Sorceress. The Oathbound is almost entirely a collection of previously printed stories, reset as a novel. The Oathbreaker is much more one story. It also includes a feature of Lackey's books that I especially like - an appendix of song lyrics. Tarma and Kethry are followed by a minstral who wants to benefit from their fame by writing songs of their adventures, but they never have adventures in quite the heroic way he wants, so his songs "improve" on the events (and endlessly annoy the two they supposedly describe). [****]
West Of January
Dave Duncan
Del Rey 1989 $3.95 US, 343 pp 345-35836-8
Reviewed by David M. Shea
Knobil didn't set out to save the world from the slowly advancing sun; it just happened. He was born among the herdfolk, but fled after the death of his "father". Then he came among the seafolk. Then he was captured and enslaved in "heaven". Then ... Well, you get the picture. It's a "journey of wonders" novel; it also involves a highly improbable number of sexual encounters.
Nothing kills a story faster for me than an obnoxious social structure. This book features several such, each seemingly more offensive and sexist than the last. The author quickly forfeited whatever good will I began with, and in the absence of some redeeming virtue, never got it back. I just didn't like this. [*]
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 8)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 8 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Flights of Fantasy
Reviews by Laurie Sefton
This column we begin with an economics lesson. We're going to discuss the concept of marginal utility. Those of you who suffered through Econ 101 may have sudden stirrings at the back or your brain (or the pit of your stomach, depending on how you did) concerning marginal utility, marginal cost, and how the two help to set the price of an item. Marginal utility is the "good" that a consumer gets out of one more unit of a particular item. So, the marginal utility of the third hot fudge sundae ought to be quite a bit less than the first. And being a rational consumer, you won't pay more for the 3rd hot fudge sundae -- in fact, you would be willing to pay quite a bit less. Now, take this concept and stretch it a little to book buying. Are you, as a rational consumer, willing to pay a larger amount for the nth in a series of books, because you feel that you'll get that extra cost's "good" out of the book?
The publishers are betting that you (or that enough of you) will. Switching to hardcover in the middle of a series appears to be the latest fashion. The publishers hope that you're hooked on a series or an author to the point that you won't mind paying $20.00 instead of $5.00. The question is: Is a book that is good enough to buy at $5.00, still good enough to buy at $20.00?
Stronghold
Melanie Rawn
DAW, 1991, 0-99677-440-3, 487 pp, $21.95
Melanie Rawn's Stronghold is definitely worth your extra money. Stronghold is the first book in the Dragon Star trilogy, which follows from the Dragon Price trilogy. I find it interesting that while it is advertised as such, the Dragon Prince trilogy really didn't come to a conclusion at the end of Sunrunner's Fire, considering we left with Andry, the Lord of Goddess Keep, hunting down and killing diarmadh'im (the sorcerous race who are able to use starlight to power their spells), and realizing that the crown prince Pol is of that race.
However, Andry has much more to worry about. The kingdoms are being attacked by raiders, who appear to be interested only in destruction. Andry and Pol are set against each other while both attempt to fight off the raiders. Each refuses the help or the abilities of the other, and with each attempt to breach the chasm between the two, each becomes more disdainful and mistrusting of the other. Kingdoms are lost and many are slaughtered because of the pride of two men. If you remember the review of Dragon Prince, I mentioned that one of the refreshing aspects was that no one misunderstood each other because of stupidity that most children would have noticed. The misunderstandings, hurt, and suspicion between Pol and Andry are due to flaws in both their characters. Neither of them recognize it yet, but they're reflections in a mirror. How far down the path of destruction their shared flaw will lead them and their kingdoms remains to be seen. Stronghold is the story of a deadly dance between two very powerful men. [****+]
By The Sword
Mercedes Lackey
DAW, 1991, 0-88677-463-2 492pp, $4.95
By the Sword is one in a series that I worry about making the transition. Mercedes Lackey pulls together the Vow and Honor diptych with the Heralds of Valdemar trilogy. The uniting character is Kerowyn, the granddaughter of sorcerous Kethryn, who suddenly finds herself the owner of Need, which both requires her to fight for a woman in distress, and forbids her to harm a woman. Kerowyn is trained by Tarma and sent out on her way as a mercenary, but not before she she crosses paths with Prince Darenthallis, the third son of the king of Rethwellen. Kerowyn then spends the next several years rising through the ranks as a mercenary, leading to her captaincy of her own company.
The Heralds appear when Valdemar, threatened by outside forces, who are using both mages and ensorcerlled fighters, entreats the King of Rethwellen for aid. Kerowyn forces the issue, by bringing up a age-old promise by the Rethwellen to Valdemar. Kerowyn finds herself fighting for Valdemar, and torn between her duties as a mercenary captain and her feelings for a Herald, still burning from her past.
By the Sword is unevenly paced, with a lot of detail up front, and increasingly lighter detail until the deus ex machina end of the novel. It seemed as if this was two books, and Lackey was forced to tie them together, and the second book lost. The mercenary scenes were also lighter than needed; By the Sword suffers in this respect by comparison to Elizabeth Moon's Paksennarion's Deed trilogy. Too much is tied up too well and too neatly at the end of this novel to push a reader towards buying a hardback to get the next stories. [****-]
The Dagger and the Cross Judith Tarr Doubleday/Foundation, 1991, 0-385-41182-0, 474 pp, $10.95 (Trade), $21.95 (Hardcover)
The Dagger and the Cross is the sequel to Alamut, Judith Tarr's story of love, hate, alienation and desire, set during the 11th century Crusades. At the end of Alamut, Aidan, Christian knight and Prince of Rhiyana, and Morgiana, assassin and Muslim had found their peace together. Now they waited for Gwydion, King of Rhiyana and Aidan's twin, to come with a Papal dispensation to allow them to be wed. But once again, petty jealousies and the fear and hatred of the "elvenkind" come into play. An important document is stolen, and Aidan and Morgiana are cast against each other, just as the armies of Saladin and the Christian crusaders are thrown into conflict.
Once again, Tarr works at multiple levels within the story. There is the animosity between Christian and Muslim, human and "elf", and the interfamilial warring that erupts when jealousies over past love; such as between Morgiana and Joanna, or perceived preference and maternal love; between Aimery, Joanna son by her husband Ranulf, and Ysabel, Joanna's daughter by Aidan and inheritor of Aidan's magic. One point that I found exceptionally interesting was King Gwydion's reaction to his niece Elen's taking of a Muslim lover. After all the talk and action of need for acceptance that kept being expressed by the Rhiyanan's Gwydion's anger at Elen's choice came as a bit of surprise. It seemed as if the "elves" needed to If practice a bit of what they preached. There almost seemed to be a duality of freedom -- the "elves" were free to pick their lovers, as they weren't free to do much else, while the humans were expected to act within the constraints of their own society. Either that, or Gwydion was showing more than a little chauvinism; while his brother was free to choose a Muslim assassin as a lover and wife, his niece would not have that choice available to her. A small, but interesting point, which lends itself to the complexity of the story.
If you haven't read Alamut or The Dagger and the Cross yet, go to the bookstore now. You won't find this level of writing often. [****+]
Raising the Stones Sheri S. Tepper, Doubleday/Foundation, September 1990, 453 pp $19.95, 0-385-41510-9
Reading Raising the Stones is damn close to a transcendental experience. After I finished it, I was overwhelmed by the story and it's implications. Raising the Stones points out the pain and suffering that religion can cause, how evil can be done in the name of a religious deity, but also how religious worship or a deity can be incorporated into a harmonious life -- even if it is the deity who makes the life harmonious. While Tepper once again makes the comparison between a good and kind matriarchal society and a harsh and evil patriarchal society, the lines are not as broadly drawn as before. For example, the High Baidee have taken their entire religious instruction from their "Prophetess", who gave out such advice as "don't be sexist pigs", and twisted it around into a number of dietary laws. While the High Baidee are almost comical in their misinterpretation of what would be considered fairly useful advice, the people of Voorstod have taken the worst of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and bent it to their ways. The colony of Voorstod exists because their ancestors were driven from Earth for being so warlike and despicable. On Voorstod, they continue to plot and plan the overthrow of the known worlds for the glory of their one god, and by that, to bring about the end of the universe. At the same time, Hobbs Land, a agricultural colony, is quietly being populated by "gods", or more closely, the reconstructed personalities of the recently dead held in a gestalt with what appears to be an intelligent fungus. The "gods' make their worshippers happy, productive, and fill them with a sense of ease. At the same time, they make little or no demands on the moral or ethical structure already in place. It is inevitable that these two systems come into violent contact.
Beyond the immediate story, Raising the Stones is a question about the place of religion in society. Does society need a person, place or thing to venerate, and will that religion always become the reason behind actions that people refuse to take responsibility for? Tepper always provides questions to ponder. [*****]
Lammas Night
Katherine Kurtz
Ballantine, 1983, 0-345-29516-1, 438 pp , $4.95
Lammas Night is a re-issue of a 1983 book by Katherine Kurtz, but I suspect that it was originally issued somewhere in the 3-digit range, given how many people I know who have looked for it, and how few people actually read it back in 1983. Lammas Night is not in the Deryni universe -- it's set in Britain in 1940. A witches's coven is attempt to stop the psychic, as well as physical attacks by Nazi Germany. This isn't just any coven however, the witches are also working in the highest echelons of the British military and intelligence. Their plan? To "protect" the British Isles by forming a grand coven of every witch and magic worker in Britain, and projecting a psychic shield around the island. This has been done before, but only at the cost of either a willing royal sacrifice or a willing substitute
Into this walks Prince William, the "extra prince" of the Royal family. You won't find a Price William among the sons of King George V in this world. However, in Lammas Night, Prince William is both the twin brother of Prince John (who did exist, and died at the age of 13), and a representation of what happens with "extra" royals -- Prince William feels useless, more of a public relations dummy than a human being. The Prince finds himself drawn into the covens' workings, and heads towards a fate which eerily parallels that of Prince George, Duke of Kent in real life. Lammas Night is a entertaining mixture of magic and intrigue. [****]
Deryni Magic, A Grimoire Katherine Kurtz Del Rey, January 1991, 0-345-36117-2, 371 pp, $5.95
Kurtz has also recently come out with Deryni Magic, A Grimoire. While this is set in her Deryni Universe, it is not fiction per se. It's actually a source book for the background and implementation of Deryni magic. There are parts of the book which are copied out of previous Deryni books (and in one case, at least twice), and parts which appear to either be drafts or short stories never before seen. The book does give the Deryni fan a concrete and consistent base for how the Deryni universe operates. [****]
Sunder, Eclipse & Seed
Elyse Guttenberg
ROC, December 1990, 0-451-45046-9, 351 pp$4.95
Sunder, Eclipse and Seed made the review list this time for a couple of reasons, one good, and one bad. First it has one of the more interesting female triumvirates of goddesses I have seen in a time. They're definitely based on the maiden, mother, crone archetypes, but are twisted to match the almost fatalistic attitude of the people who worship them. The role of religion in this world seems to be more of "what can we get out of you" rather than "what can we do for you". It appears the the latter was twisted into the former along the way. Calyx, the protagonist, finds herself able to have lucid dreams, but because she is the daughter of the local liege lord, she isn't able to go off for proper training, Even when she is trained in secret by one of the monks, she isn't taken seriously more because it would break up the monks' social structure and societal power than any rational reason the monks might have. In Calyx's world, those who have the power would rather stand by and let their world collapse around them than engage in any creative thought. Calyx has to fight both on a physical and a psychic level to save her world.
One thing about the book, though -- nowhere does it say that it is the first part of a trilogy until you get to the author's biography at the end. I'm not quite sure what was the rationale for this from the publisher -- whether the reader wouldn't care, or that they were afraid it wouldn't be bought. As it is, I'll now check the cover, cover page and the end page of the book before I start it. I think the publishers lose on this fight. [***+]
P.J. Plauger
Mitch Wagner
Originally published in UNIX Today!
Republished with permission of the author.
From the elegant title to the low-key opening paragraph to memorable closing, "Child of All Ages" is a perfect little gem of a story in 19 pages.
It was one of the first and last fiction efforts of P.J. Plauger, who -- in the words of the more melodramatic species of pulp fiction-led a double life. And Plauger's other life was taking up too much time for him to continue with fiction long after the 1975 publication of "Child of All Ages."
Plauger is a Unix programmer, who marketed the first Unix workalike, Idris, through his Westford, Mass., company, Whitesmiths, before Unix itself was available for mass consumption. He made the first commercial C and FORTRAN compilers, and has co-authored several seminal textbooks, including a C manual and The Elements of Programming Style.
But fiction is his best love, and, with the sale of Whitesmiths about 18 months ago, he is looking forward to returning to it.
"It was simply a matter that the world of business sucked me in," said Plauger, 46, in a telephone interview from his Massachusetts home. "It was too demanding and it took up too much of my life."
During the early '70s, he published half a dozen short stories in Analog. He won the John W. Campbell award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the Year. "Child of All Ages" was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
"I'll be honest with you," said Plauger. "Had 'Child of All Ages' won either a Nebula or a Hugo, I'd probably be a science fiction writer already, today. I couldn't stand losing."
His fiction work was done while he was an employee of AT&T Bell Labs. He worked on a remote terminal at his home, hooked up to a Digital Equipment PDP 11-20 and later a PDP 11-45, running Unix. He worked in the ed text editor, using the nroff formatter for printouts.
Unknown to him, the work made him a minor celebrity among the Unix pioneers at Bell Labs. "On my last day, in 1975, I found a strange little gift. [Unix co-inventor] Dennis Ritchie had done a three-page critique of my novel, and left it for me in E-mail. I used it, too," said Plauger. "Turns out that people at Bell Labs had been going through my directory all along, looking to see what I'd been writing lately."
Noted critic Norman Spinrad, who publishes a column in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, said he remembers Plauger as showing signs of being a very talented newcomer.
"I remember that one story, the 'Child of All Ages,' " said Spinrad. "That thing stood out. It was elegantly written. It was an emotional story, not the kind of thing I would associate with [hard-core] science fiction.
"It seemed like one of those stories that" -- he paused for wording. "It was one of those stories by a newcomer that seems to have been written by a guy who's been around for years.
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 9)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 9 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Words of Wizdom
Reviews by Chuq Von Rospach
Since last issue I've read a fair amount of stuff, much of it unusual or weird. If you're looking for trends in all of this, good luck -- but please don't tell me if you find one. I'm not sure I want to know.
First, a quick discussion not of a book, but of a publisher. I've lauded (and occasionally ranted) about Pulphouse publishing before, and I'm sure I'm going to do it in the future. But when I pulled the books in my "to be reviewed" pile together, I realized that there were five separate books from Pulphouse in there. Pulphouse is a limited-edition small press, not a major publisher. Unlike many small presses, they turn out work of a consistent high-quality, both in content and craftsmanship. They do so at a reasonable price and (even more surprisingly) while keeping to a schedule. They are making a success (critical and financial) of it in a field littered with good intentions. They're doing this while publishing a lot of what I think is the leading edge of the field today.
Their flagship is Pulphouse, a quarterly 'magazine' of short fiction. These are really hardcover books of about 250 pages each with specific flavors of fiction. Issue 8 (Summer 1990) was Science Fiction, while Issue 9 (Fall 1990) was Dark Fantasy. They also cover Horror, Speculative Fiction and Fantasy. It's limited to 1,250 copies per issue, so this isn't something that's going to show up in Crown Books any time soon. On the other hand, if you're not reading this book, you're missing the place where the authors of the field are showing off their most interesting works -- these are not only good, but they're the experimental, innovative or simply different pieces of fiction that can't find a home in larger, more conservative and mainstream magazines. They feature people like Charles de Lint, Jane Yolen, Michael Bishop, John Brunner, Lisa Goldstein, S.P. Somtow, Joe Lansdale -- you're going to find the people you want to read, doing the stuff they want to write.
There's a downside to this. Issue 12 is the last issue of Pulphouse -- but only because after that they plan on publishing a regular fiction magazine. On a weekly basis (these folks are not only horribly prolific, but they somehow pull it off AND can walk around conventions without looking completely exhausted. Sometimes I hate them. Mostly I look forward to whatever they publish). The magazine will be edited by Dean Wesley Smith, who is the publisher of the hardbacks (and co-founder of Pulphouse). The current editor of Pulphouse is Kris Kathryn Rusch, who has just been hired to become the new editor for Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine to replace the retiring Ed Ferman (see? I told you you were missing something. It'll be fascinating to see what Kris does with a real budget).
If all they did was Pulphouse, they could be proud of the results. But they do a lot more. They've taken over Axolotl press, which puts out limited edition novellas by major writers, including Westlin' Wind by de Lint, Bully! by Mike Resnick, Solip:System by Walter Jon Williams and more. Many people feel that the novella length (25,000-40,000 words) is the optimum length for SF. It's long enough to build detail, but not long enough to get flabby. When you read some of these works, you'll see why. Another series of theirs is the Authors Choice Monthly, collections of short stories chosen by an author for this collection. Collections have already been published for authors as varied as George Alec Effinger, Lisa Goldstein, Karen Joy Fowler and Spider Robinson, with Michael Bishop, Kate Wilhelm, Damon Knight, Mike Resnick and others scheduled for the next year. It's a good place to read hard-to-find works by favorite authors. They're also doing a series of special projects, including MONAD, a new series of magazine/books of SF criticism edited by Damon Knight (the first issue just came out and it's fascinating stuff), a new edition of the Science Fiction Writers of America Handbook (stuffed full of useful information for the writer or the hopeful writer) and Ellison Under Glass, a three volume set of new works by and about Harlan Ellison.
They're busy folks, and most important, everything they publish is worth reading. If you're interested in reading where the field is going before it gets there, the Pulphouse people should be on your shelf. Do yourself a favor and write them (Pulphouse Publishing, Box 1227, Eugene, Oregon, 97440) and ask for a catalog. You're sure to find stuff in there that you'll want -- and enjoy.
Since I'm now writing book reviews for Amazing Science Fiction (see my editorial for more details) not everything I read or review will make it into this column. This does not imply, however, that what's left over is either bad or forgettable. The schedules for Amazing (and limitations I have on number of books and the timeliness of reviews) means that even if I wanted to, not everything will fit over there.
One such book is Alan Rodger's book Fire (Bantam, September 1990, 505pp, $4.95, 0-553-28777-X). This is Rodger's second novel, and it's a dilly. Fire is not Science Fiction -- it's Horror, but it's got a strong SFnal background. The end of the world is coming -- sped along by a President who believes he was brought to power to spawn Armageddon and a scientist who invents a bug designed to rebuild the body of extinct animals for which enough DNA can be found to make the decoding possible. This (unfortunately) works far too well and when it accidentally gets free, it not only starts reconstructing all sorts of interesting DNA, it takes it one step further -- it brings it back to life. The dead start rising from the graves. Fire starts out very strongly rooted into the realm of the possible (it's easy to mistake it for SF, in fact) and slowly makes the transition towards the ultimate conflagration -- taking the user on a ride from hard-core genetic manipulation to the Final Battle between Good and Evil (who wins? I won't tell).
If this book was straight SF I might quibble with some of the technical details. but within the context of the book any problems I might raise really don't matter and don't impact either the book or the reader's enjoyment of it. Things a hard SF writer might get jumped on for aren't as important in Horror, and what is important is that Rodger's has written a very good, tightly written and horrific book -- one that will not only please Horror readers, but which will be accessible to the readers of SF that don't normally wander far from their favorite genre. A trip to the side shelf is definitely in order here. [****].
Another Horror book you probably want to track down is Razored Saddles, the ultimate "Cowpunk" anthology edited by Robert McCammon (Avon, October 1990, 285pp, $3.95, 0-380-71168-0). What's cowpunk? Take a Western, mix in some Horror and then twist things around a bit. Cowpunk ranges from McCammon's own "Black Boots", told from the point of view of a gunslinger who's primary enemy won't stay dead -- much to the dismay of those around him to "Gold" by Lewis Shiner, which was the search for Lafitte's gold in a Galveston of yesterday, to "Stampede" by Melissa Mia Hall, a story of a modern-day rodeo using large, genetically engineered rattlesnakes.
It's the sort of book that pretty much defies description. I think it's also the sort of book that you'd tire of quickly if you were reading it regulary -- but this collection is a fascinating set of weirdness and horror with a Western motif (and not a little SF and Fantasy tossed in for leavening) and it set just fine with me, pardner. [****]
The latest Miles Vorkosigan book is out, and The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen, September, 1990, 345pp, $4.50, 0-671-72014-7) doesn't disappoint. Vorkosigan is a dwarf who maintains a double life, simultaneously being the heir to the crown and (in his secret disguise) the head of a major mercenary space fleet -- without anyone noticing. This may sound silly, but Bujold pulls it off and has written a series of enjoyable and interesting stories about Miles and his development. This one takes Miles through an early part of his training and his first post after graduation from the Academy -- official weatherman in an arctic outpost in the middle of nowhere. As unsensational and boring a post as any military person could hope for, right?
If you think so, you don't know Miles.
There isn't a lot to say about this series I haven't already said. Bujold is one of the best of the younger writers in the field and her books have yet to disappoint -- and Miles Vorkosigan is one of the more interesting semi-comic characters to show up in the last ten years. Bujold never takes him too seriously and you know he's going to come out on top in the end, but she always leaves you wondering exactly how she's going to pull his fanny out of the fire without faking it. And, somehow, she always does. [****]
After a long delay, Michael Moorcock has returned to one of his classic venues and written a new novel about Elric of Melnibone, his albino prince. I must admit I'd never read the Elric books, so The Fortress of the Pearl (Ace, December 1990, 212pp, $4.50, 0-441-24866-7) is my first exposure. I have a mixed history with Moorcock -- his Behold the Man is one of my favorite works in the field, yet I found both Gloriana and his Dancers at the End of Time series completely unreadable. So it was with both interest and trepidation that I wandered into this book -- to be swept away into one of the most interesting and distinctive worlds I've read for a while. Elric is a Hero, and The Fortress of the Pearl is Heroic Fantasy, written in a style that makes most of the other Heroic works like Howard's Conan seem like pale parodies. If someone ever wants a my definition of heroic fantasy, I'll give them this book (as well as Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser works).
I really can't recommend this highly enough. [****+]
In case you're beginning to think I liked everything I read, let me tell you a bit about C.S. Friedman's The Madness Season (DAW, October, 1990, 495pp, 0-88677-444-6). I loved her first book, In Conquest Born and was really looking forward to this one. Although you won't see it mentioned anywhere on the book, this is a vampire novel, and perhaps even a horror novel (although is Fire is a horror novel with delusions of SF, this is an SF book with delusions of horror) but the lead character is a vampire, survivor of five centuries on an earth under conquest by an alien species. His immortality is found out, and he's sent off-planet to be studied further, and because he's a threat to the Tyr.
What happens to a vampire that not only leaves its native soil, but leaves its solar system? Well, frankly, I don't know, because I gave up before I found out. Friedman has put together a number of really interesting items -- she's got some unusual biological ideas on vampirism, some really interesting aliens in the Tyr and their friends, a premise with great potential and an interesting lead character. At about page 60, I put the book down, frustrated because while things were happening, nothing really seemed to be going on -- whatever action there was seemed to be so remote from anything resembling a primary plotline that I felt we were just running in place. I do so like Friedman's work that I opened it up and tried again -- and when I hit page 150, I gave up for good.
You may well pick up this book and really enjoy it -- my problems with The Madness Season are definitely in the "your mileage may vary" areas. There's a lot of interesting stuff in here, but none of it really seems to matter. There's a very fine line between a leisurely, complex tapestry of a story and a plot that's been tranquilized. I really wanted to enjoy it, but this book kept dancing just out of reach, dropping hints here and pieces there, but never letting me get my fangs into it until I decided it simply wasn't worth the effort. [*]
Last issue I ripped apart The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger as being a cute idea sloppily implemented. The second book in the series has been published now, and Robin Bailey's The Lost City of Zork is definitely better. Better, however is about the only word that comes to mind. In this book, Caspar Wartsworth, would-be adventurer and barbarian, goes adventuring, more or less to free Quendor from the rule of King Duncanthrax.
Bailey is a good writer, but funny writing is hard to do and this book, while it has its moments, just isn't consistently humorous. Jokes drop to the ground with a dull thud too often for my tastes -- this book just doesn't compare to the works of Craig Shaw Gardner, Esther Friesner or Terry Pratchett. The thing that bothered me more is the tenuous link to the Zork game itself. While the first book in the series at least tried to follow the story of the computer game, here Bailey has written a straight adventure story and tossed in a few names and places. A few swipes with the global change of of word processor and it's no longer a Zork book.
This is not a bad book, but it's not a particularly great or notable one, either. It might be an enjoyable evening's escape (it was for me) but I found myself thinking that the time could have been better spent elsewhere. Zork fans (like me) are also likely to be disappointed. [**]
Another book you probably want to miss is The Red Tape War by Jack Chalker, Mike Resnick and George Alec Effinger (Tor, April 1991, 288pp, $17.95, 0-312-85151-0). With powerful talent like this, you'd think something interesting would pop out of the word processor, but this book is one of those things that authors love to play with but which rarely get published -- it's a "screw you" book. The idea is to get a bunch of authors together, and they write chapters in series, with each author leaving the poor sap starting the next chapter by leaving them in as impossible a situation as you can so you can watch them squirm while they write an even more implausible escape. It's a lot of fun to write this stuff, but I think they're very tedious to read (I keep hearing chortling snickers of authors from underneath the pages) because the "screw you" aspects and the necessary deus ex machina recoveries tend to both screw up continuity and stretch the reader's disbelief beyond the breaking point.
This book is no exception. It was a lot more fun to envision these three plotting to screw each other over than it was to actually read the results. Even so, I probably could have tolerated it until the book started speaking to me -- seriously. Chapter 3 starts out with the book filling in some of the detail and explaining the situation. I wasn't a fan of people dropping the fourth wall when Groucho started talking to the audience in his films, and I'm not a fan of it now. This kind of device rips me out of whatever environment the book has built to date and reminds me that, damn it, it's only a book. By the time the book was done nattering at me, I simply didn't care. I tried again, but whatever disbelief I had was gone for good.
You might find the jokes in the book funnier than I did, but even so they're weak giggles at best. Even if you don't mind authors popping out on stage and explaining the jokes, this is the kind of work that's a lot more fun to write than it is to read. Either skip it completely or save your cash and wait for the paperback. All three of these authors are capable of much better. Watching them pimp each other over is not my idea of fun. []
Finally a couple of oldies -- one definitely qualifies as a closet classic, but the other....
I finally was able (through a friend) to track down a copy of Ted Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood. The copy I borrowed (I can't find my own copy, after months of searching) is a 1961 edition (ISBN 0-345-25712-X-150), and I'd been told by a number of people that it was one of the best things Sturgeon had ever written. They're right. Some of your Blood is one of the best books I've ever read, period. It is also long out of print and likely to stay so. Why? Because it's really not SF, and Sturgeon is an SF writer, so this book is hard to pigeonhole. It's also a very disturbing, emotionally draining book that will leave you simultaneously fascinated and revulsed. The story is fairly simple -- George Smith is a patient in a military hospital, sent there as a psycho for hitting an officer. The military bureaucracy wants the situation resolved and George on the street before he figures out they're liable for a lawsuit over this, but the doctor in charge is sure something isn't kosher and won't let go. The novel is structured as a series of letters, notes by the doctor interspersed with journal entries from Smith -- very similar in structure to Flowers for Algernon, but designed to push very different buttons in the reader's emotional structure. There is something very wrong with smith, and it's the reader's growing realization that the doctor is very right without really being able to put a finger on why that gives this book it's power.
I'll be very honest. This book gave me nightmares, which simply doesn't happen much any more (not since I went through puberty, at least). By the time I finished it, I felt very disturbed and drained for days. This book touched me at a level that most fiction can't even see today -- but I doubt I'll ever want to re-read it, either. Being affected doesn't necessarily mean I enjoyed the trip. This is a very important book -- but I'm not sure whether it's commercially viable these days, or whether a lot of people could cope with reading something this powerful today, having been brought up on safe, commercial fiction. It is, however, an important part of science fiction, since Sturgeon is a key (but under-appreciated) part of our past. If you can find a copy of this book, you ought to give it a chance -- but don't be surprised if you run screaming out into the night. Such stuff as this is nightmares made of. [*****]
Not quite so intense and a little easier to find is a very early book by one of my favorite writers, Mike Resnick. Redbeard (Magnum books, 1969) is one of his early works, and mention of it is usually guaranteed to drive Mike screaming out into the night. It is, in his eyes, one of those early works best forgotten, the kind of thing that you wish was under a pen-name. Now, Redbead is no Ivory or Paradise, but I also don't think it's nearly as bad as Mike remembers it. What it is is a rip-roaring action-adventure that lands somewhere between an homage to and a pastiche of Conan the Barbarian. It's after the war, and the mutants in the tunnels are fighting it out with the normals up on the surface. Leading the troops for the mutants is Red Will Donahoe, aka Redbeard, a non-mutant barbarian who seems to be half Conan and half Groo. A rather deadly combination for enemies and friends alike.
Redbeard isn't an award quality book, but even in his (relative) youth Resnick could write good, engaging and enjoyable prose. If this book is a bit high-strung and enthusiastic, it's still better than some of the stuff being put out today by people with lower standards of quality. [**]
This is another book that's going to be somewhat hard to find, so I'll tell you what I'll do. I just happen to have two copies of it in my collection, so I'm going to put one of them up for auction. I will accept bids until June 1, 1991, with the book going to the highest bidder (send no money now, just the bid. We'll make final arrangements later). All monies will be donated to TAFF (the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund), and if I keep Mike from killing me over this, I might even be able to get it autographed. If you want a copy of Redbeard, by Michael Resnick, mail a bid to me C/O OtherRealms and we'll see what happens.
------ End ------
Issue 29, Winter 1991 (part 10)
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 10 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Your Turn
Letters from our readers
Richard Lupoff
On page 39 of OtherRealms #28, I notice a review by Mr. Michael Orr, of a novel called CIRCUMSOLAR! The review credits me with the authorship of this novel.
Alas! Such is not the case. I never wrote any such book. As far as I know, no such book exists. I suspect that Mr. Orr is playing some sort of joke on me, perhaps behind your back, or perhaps with your cooperation. Or maybe the book does exist and I just haven't seen it around, and somebody is using my name without my permission and putting it on books I didn't write.
Or maybe I had amnesia and wrote the book and forgot all about it. I mean, the possibilities keep multiplying, don't they?
Maybe there's another planet just like ours, and another Richard A. Lupoff lives there and writes science fiction novels, and somehow one of this other Lupoff's manuscripts made its way to our Earth and got published.
Man, this is getting scary!
I wish you (or better yet, Mr. Orr would look into this and let me know what's going on. If somebody else is writing books under my name -- and, if Mr. Orr's judgement is to be trusted, really lousy books at that! -- at the very least, I want my piece of the royalties.
If Mr. Orr can produce a copy of "my" book CIRCUMSOLAR!, I'd be very eager to see it, and even more grateful to have a copy of my own to add to my brag shelf.
[[This is the kind of situation that I'm always worried about with a publication like OtherRealms -- reviews of nonexistent books, hack jobs by people with an axe to grind, puff pieces by personal friends -- are all ways that the openness of OtherRealms to outside writers can be abused. When it happens innocents are hurt. My apologies to Dick for letting this one slip through -- chuq]]
M.J. B.
I wanted to write you a note to tell you how much I enjoy OtherRealms. I especially enjoyed your discussion of Westercon. At one time I got involved in 'organized fandom' but even then it was a pretty wild group of people. Nice folks, sure, but for every nice person there were two more whom you looked at and muttered "Jeezus......" I figured I was just too basically 'straight' for that crowd. We're talking about 15 years ago, here, and boy does that make me feel old. The last Con I went to, on the first night someone dismantled ALL the furniture in his/her room and placed the pieces in the elevators. At about that point I decided I'd had about enough. (So did the hotel, BTW).
Anyhow, it sounds like Cons haven't gotten much better, which is a real shame. I am a long-time SF fan, who has the misfortune to be married to a 'non-reader'...oh, I don't mean he can't read, just that he won't read (unless you count the racing form). I surely do miss discussing good books with other fans who can talk dragons or robots or whatever and not go glassy-eyed in three nanoseconds. Reading OtherRealms is a breath of fresh air for me....
So, thanks, Chuq, for the fresh air you've sent my way for the past five years (that's how long I've had net access).
PS. One thing I do miss about the cons, though...the zines. I just loved the fan writing, mimeographed or Xerocopied, damn near illegible and usually not very good but every once in a while....ooooh....buried treasure. I wish there were somewhere I could send away for more of those zines....without having to go to Con and risk life and limb among the strange flora and fauna.
(and a second letter to Laurie)
I just finished reading your "Not a Nice Girl" article in OtherRealms, and I really want to say how much I admire you.
I, too, am not a nice girl, but I imagine I've been so for longer than you have. When I graduated from high school in 1967, nice girls got married and had babies and spent their lives caring for husband and children and not doing much else. Worst case, they got secretarial positions until they found the right man, which wasn't expected to take more than a year or two. College? For a girl? Not in my Italian family....
So when I expressed an interest in computers (a relatively new field at the time), folks looked at me as if I'd suddenly sprouted a second head. I spent three years in a clerical position here at Xerox, telling everyone I wanted to learn to program, and being told not to get such ideas into my pretty little head. As you said, girls didn't do computers...or anything else, either...
Then, in about 1970, Xerox got into trouble over some government contracts. Basically, the government decided that there were not enough minorities in the 'professional positions' here, and if the situation wasn't rectified immediately, Uncle would take his business elsewhere. So, the Xoo held what many of us senior women now refer to as 'Hire a Woman Month'. Suddenly I found myself officially being called a programmer. Of course, such niceties as 'training' weren't given a lot of thought....after all they just needed token minorities...nobody actually expected us to be capable of doing the job.
So, I learned to program in the school of 'hard knocks'. Now, 20 years later, I'm a senior consultant here at Xerox, and people come to me for help. Pretty funny, huh?
But the funniest thing is that, even today, most men deal with us senior professional women by the simple expedient of convincing themselves that we're really just funny-looking men....girls don't do computers, right? I do computers. So I must not be a girl. Just a man with breasts.
Feh, indeed. Some things never change.
But, in reading your article, I just have to admire your courage soooo much. You've done so many different things. I fought tooth-and-nail for the chance to do just ONE thing, the one thing I wanted more than any other, programming professionally.
At one time, about 15 years ago, I got involved briefly in organized fandom. I wrote some stories and poems, and some of them were published in fanzines. But the one incident which sticks in my mind the most concerns a particular story I wrote, a humorous story (or at least it was intended to be humorous) set in a computer room, in which the constant stream of obscenities that programmers tend to bestow on the equipment resulted in a sentient computer with an...uh... interesting vocabulary.
When I submitted it to the fanzine I'd been working on, the (female) editor sent it back with a note suggesting I submit it to one of the 'boy's" fanzines.
Because everyone knows that girls don't do computers.
Joel M Snyder
Undoubtedly you'll get several dozen letters, but I thought I would write moments after reading your note. If only for the cathartic effect.
Yes, you're right, you're right, you're right. USENET is full of idiots, and the very structure of the system is such that such idiots are encouraged -- the electronic personalities of people too afraid to speak their mind in person explode with the anger and hatred that they've bottled up inside. And the network is anonymous, and safe, and comforting, and provides a world apart from the one which frightens them so.
And I understand your desire to GET OUT. We all have this feeling when the assholes and idiots of the world just gang up on us. "I'm working my butt off, and all you can do is complain..."
And there is no "but." The basic reaction is, "yes, they're jerks, but..." There is no but. They're jerks. Takes the fun out of it. So get out. And don't even feel guilty.
I've been posting EOR on our local bulletin board for about five years (since 1986, I'm pretty darn sure, if not before), and you have a set of loyal readers here at Arizona -- presumably some of them will get in touch with you for paper copies.
Anyway. Thanks for the effort, and for making at least SOME electronic mail interesting.
Gordon E. Banks
Do you have any suggestions for what could be done to make the net more civil? Some of Maddox's latest spew has been particularly offensive and profane, although he is smart enough that on balance I learn something by reading his posts. Should there be a board of censorship to which complaints can be made and warnings issued?
I too have had some flames (mainly from sci.med postings) and even a phone call from someone who threatened to sue me. But I haven't gotten anything like the abuse that you have. Perhaps something about fandom is malignant. I too read the Ellison piece and was very sympathetic to it. The hostile reaction to it on the net is revealing. Why is it that when someone puts their work before the public, some people think there is now some obligation to them?
You clearly have good reason for quitting, and I won't urge you to reconsider, for it is clearly dangerous to your mental health to continue, and I don't see any practical way of getting the abusers to lay off.
[[The primary problem of USENET (and to a lesser degree, FIDONET) is that there is no central authority and no enforcement power. If someone wants to be an idiot, they can be an idiot, and unless they happen to be on a machine who's administrator cares enough to make them cut it out, you can't touch them. USENET revels in it's anarchy, but it also wallows in it. On balance, I find the anarchistic freedoms allowed by the net overshadowed by the segment of the net-users who refuse to accept that with freedom comes the responsibility to not abuse those freedoms. Anarchy works only when everyone involved is either mature enough to deal with the situation rationally or is stuck somewhere that they can't cause problems. As long as people are not accountable for the actions, USENET will continue to attract those people for whom creating controversy and being obnoxious are great fun. That's one reason why I'm now home based on GEnie. It's not perfect over there, but it has one thing that USENET doesn't: a person paid to make sure that the people who get out of line either settle down or get out. (there are negatives to THAT as well; just look at the fun on PRODIGY -- but there are tradeoffs on everything in the real world). -- chuq]]
Mike O'Brien
Just been reading the latest OR. Easy to see why you'd leave USENET. Hope GEnie's more congenial, if more commercial. I'm getting back into ham radio after 20 years out of it, and there seem to be the same sorts of BD cases there - difference is, after they piss enough people off, the FCC fines 'em $1,000 and yanks their licenses. Though I heard that one such fellow was back on the air within the week, using some foreign callsign from a boat out past the 3-mile limit.
I think the shitheads aren't just on USENET. They're everywhere. "Genuine" celebrities seem to have the same sorts of troubles you've got. You hear a lot of stuff like that if you live in LA - you're from down here, right?
You expressed interest in going to Yellowstone next summer. I'm writing primarily to heartily endorse that. It's one of the few things I enjoyed as a kid that still measured up when I went back as an adult. I just spent 10 days in the Old Faithful Inn with my fiance, geyser-gazing. We hiked out into the never-never, we sat around on the boardwalk in the Upper Geyser Basin within eyeshot of our room, we gazed and we gazed - and we never got tired of it.
Some folks see one geyser and that's it. Other's become addicted. We're now members of GOSA - the Geyser Observation and Study Association.
Of all the books on geysers, the best, hands down, is "The Geysers of Yellowstone" by T. Scott Bryan. If it spits water and it's in Yellowstone, it's in this book. You can buy it in the park or order in advance from The Yellowstone Association.
Lodgings -- I'm tired of camping out. The cabins are OK but pretty run-down, really. They were never built that well to begin with. To my mind, the finest accommodations in the park, hands down, are the rooms in the Old Faithful Inn. They cost $32 a night, bathroom down the hall. The place is 100 years old and the largest free-standing log structure in the world, and it looks out over the Upper Geyser Basin (NOT Old Faithful - that's off to the side. You see it in front of you as you pull up to the front of the hotel.). The lobby is five stories tall. The food is superb. Reservations required, naturally, but you only need reserve a few months in advance, NOT years in advance as I'd been expecting!
Go enjoy yourself. Chat up the ranger force. Hike out to Artemisia Geyser. See Lone Star Geyser, and from there, take a (cautious!) walk along the banks of the Firehole River, to see geysers and hot springs nobody ever sees. Find a geyser gazer and find out the indicators for Fan & Mortar Geyser, such as it has. Best show in the park. Right on the boardwalk. Nobody knows about it.
Make it your own. There are thermal shows to be seen here that you'll tell your grandchildren about, and most people miss them. Don't.
John Lorentz
I enjoyed your review of Westercon, Portland and the Pacific North-west in general. Being co-chair (and running Registration) for an event that takes three years to plan does not allow the opportunity for an objective look at that event. (For that matter, it doesn't allow time to see any of the convention.) I'm glad you liked the convention and Portland. Come back anytime. (We do run this smaller -- 1,100 person -- event each November called "OryCon".) I also congratulate you for finding Alexi's and (especially) for finding Jarra's. They're two of my favorites (out of dozens -- we eat well in Portland).
However (there has to be a "however", doesn't there), I do have a couple of comments. Firstly, the Art Show. It may be possible that some of the artists didn't participate due to our liability policy. (We stated that, although the Art Show was locked at night, and although we posted a paid guard at the Riverview Room -- the Art Show site -- we were not responsible for damage or theft of artwork.) If so, they didn't tell us. The Art Show was nominally sold out. Then some people informed us that they couldn't make it because of: (a) other commitments, or (b) they'd already sold the pieces they'd planned on sending us [or (c) the art work showed up the day after the convention -- this did happen]. No one said they wouldn't display art at our show because of our policies. Now, Ctein (who writes for the ASFA newsletter) may know -- or believe -- differently. But, if it's true, it's news to us.
Our policy is a fairly standard one, and it's how we've run OryCon for years -- and we usually sell out that show also. To cover the artists' pieces, we'd have to make a substantial change in our insurance policy. (For that matter, we might not even be able to get the appropriate policy. Very few companies will insure non-profit groups.) The cost for that policy would have to come from somewhere -- I suspect the artists. It would probably triple their fees. Is it worth it? (Especially since there were no losses?)
Secondly, the discussion on alcohol. (By the way, I appreciate it that you liked our no-weapons policy. We're happy with it -- for much of the same reasons you stated.) I like having beer available at parties. I don't got to parties to get drunk and rowdy. I go to parties to nurse a bottle for a while, and have interesting conversations with fellow con-goers. Non-alcoholic parties always seem very dry (no pun intended) and usually dull. There are ways to avoid problems with alcohol. But I didn't agree with many of yours. "No gate crashers" doesn't work, and is not valid, for open (not convention-sponsored) parties. We (the convention) have no right to tell people what they can/can't do in their own rooms, as long as it's legal and not causing problems outside that room. While most of the rooms in our hotels were rented by Westercon attendees, a few weren't. We certainly couldn't tell them what they couldn't do. And, if I'm at a con in another city, and I want to invite some friends to a party in the hotel room I'm renting, I'd be very pissed if the convention told me I couldn't.
"You get carded at Registration and get your badge marked." Have you ever run Reg? It gets very busy (especially at a larger convention). It isn't possible to spend the time checking age id, and stamping badges * WHICH THEN CAN BE PASSED ON TO UNDER-AGE FRIENDS!* (Unless we weld them to people.) A far better alternative is what we do at our conventions (OryCon and this last Westercon). People (EVERYONE -- NO MATTER WHAT THEIR APPARENT AGE) have their id checked at Hospitality, and get their hands stamped. (Hands aren't -- usually -- interchangeable.) If they wash their hand, then they go back to Hospitality to have their id re-checked. (Since Hospitality was open 21 hours a day, this was fairly convenient.)
Yes, we want to avoid problems. But there are friendly ways of accomplishing this.
It's quite possible that the strawberries that you got at Pike's Place weren't as good as Californian berries. Unfortunately, you were here a month too late for the peak of the Oregon (Willamette Valley) strawberry season. They're the best I've ever tasted. (By the way, it's "marionberries", not "marian berries". They're named after Marion County, Oregon [where they were developed], not the [soon to be ex-mayor of Washington, DC.)
Anyway, come back again. There is lots to see here in the North-west. And definitely go the Vancouver Westercon in 1991. It's one of the prettiest cities I've ever seen. (And if you think that Portland has a good selection of restaurants...)
Other stuff: If someone wants to locate of copy of "Dragonhiker's Guide..." (Langford's book), they might try Wrigley-Cross Books, 8001A SE Powell, Portland OR 97206 (503-775-4943). That's where I got my copy, though whenever Paul (Wrigley) gets a new shipment in, they go real fast.
Teddy Harvia
Your mom is not the only one who doesn't recognize all the creatures in SF art.
I sometimes get lost scanning OtherRealms. Headers across the tops of the pages would better orient me.
What perpetuates the sexism Laurie Sefton decries is that men and women are different. One is not inferior to the other; they are just different. In the minds of some, anyone different from themselves is inferior. It is fear as much as attitude. Fear is often irrational and hard to overcome . . . with acts or words.
Andy Porter
Thanks for the new issue, just received. Remember what Ray Milland said in The Man with the X-Ray Eyes: "If thy fanzine offends thee, Pluck It Out!"
Or something like that...
Funny, after having a computer since early in ' 84, I've never gotten involved with BBses. Possibly because I've never figured out how to use a modem (with my IBM clone that is: the Mac is so much easier to use, so much clearer that I'm sure it's a matter of a few minutes to learn).
Anyway, I don't have the time...
The article by Lawrence Watt-Evans was fascinating in that here's someone who has no experience with, no background in SF fandom, explaining things about it (many of which are wrong: for instance, that "nor is there the network of dealers in new and used books") and then why comics fandom (which he obviously doesn't know arose from SF fandom) is on the whole more interesting.
(In the newest issue of Extrapolation, there's a survey of articles about A Canticle for Leibowitz which mentions that no fanzines were surveyed, unless the articles were reprinted from previous academic sources.) Am I not suffering fools tonight? Am I getting old and tired? Is my Mac incredibly easy to use, and fun too? You bet your ass...
There are a lot of assholes out there. The question is, when do their idiocies cancel out the good stuff that makes us want to keep publishing?
Cathy Howard
Susan Shwartz had one heck of a nice vacation. So did you and Laurie (shame on you for not getting a redwood burl mug. Maybe next time).
I don't know if Laurie was seriously asking about what passes for an English requirement at colleges these days, but I'll tell you anyway. I'm going for a 4-year accounting degree and my English requirement is English 101 and 102. Both of these concentrated primarily on writing papers and studying literature. I can't say I particularly feel like I learned much in either class except how to write papers the way a college teacher wants them written.
Harry Warner, Jr.
I owe you locs on several recent issues of OtherRealms. During the past summer I've been sick and distracted by various obligations.
Your editorial on Earth Day is in line with my own thinking on a related matter, the dispute over one proposed logging operation that would threaten one species of owl. Like you, I feel that the salvation of the environment is too big a task and too important to justify limited programs, no matter how well-intended. The energy that goes into Earth Day or that fight over one forest area should be directed instead to the international problem. Saving one patch of woods and one species of owl and devoting one day a year to demonstrating will have an insignificant effect on the real problem, the need for a carefully planned, combined program by all the major nations to control acid rain, the greenhouse effect and other forms of pollution.
As you might suspect, I was overjoyed to find you defending the value of ink on paper for editing purposes. I've spent the past week ransacking this house in a vain attempt to find the manuscript of my second fanhistory book. The only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that it wouldn't be any use looking for it if it existed only in electronic form: too many changes in computers to make playback very probably from the time I wrote the book to today.
[[There was an interesting report from the Federal government recently. It turns out that a good part of the scientific data and government records that have been stored over the years is now unreadable -- because they're written on magnetic tapes that the government can no longer read. This is especially true with the data collected by NASA from space research (NASA literally generates millions of reels of magtape a year, much of which is never looked at ever again due to lack of time, money or access). They're starting to look at the issue, but it's not going to be an easy one to solve. -- chuq]]
Alexis A. Gilliland
Thank you for #28 with the lovely Hanke-Woods cover. Three things in this issue merit comment. The first is Susan Shwartz's vacation piece, a lovely combination of travelog and con report. Susan sees the world very much the way Dolly did in her younger days, evoking in my wife a desire to travel tempered only a little by reality. The second is Laurie's far too brief note of response to a raspberry on her bulletin board. She is an interesting person, responding with considerable dignity to what seems to me a wholly unnecessary aggravation.
Which leads me to your own editorial, and maybe not be accident. First of all, the rules of electronic intercourse seem to be cutting edge modern, not necessarily a good thing. In the stodgy old medium of fanzines, the general rule is that unsigned material is not published, while libel, gross stupidity, and slander are (in theory) edited out. A second consideration is that the audience you are talking to is much smaller. With a modem and a bulletin board, however, you can have a real-time conversation with real people as the wide world hangs out on your computer monitor.
Your violent reaction to meeting one of these phantoms in the flesh suggests that maybe this isn't such an unalloyed blessing after all. Clearly the effort of suppressing the rage felt at a steady drip, drip, drip of insult, provocation and petty injury exacted a physical toll over time.
I never got a modem or involved myself with the wonderful world of USENET, and not I have an excuse for what was really inertia, sloth and technophobia.
We Also Heard from: Mahan Stephen, John Fiala, Sheryl Birkhead, Barb Jernigan, Ann Feeney, Jon Bonnell, Thomas Lindgren, Jordan B Pollack, Ken Hancock, ange, Susan Joyce Gross, kathyj, Larry Strollo, Joseph J. Ford, Rodney Hoffman, Anne Louise Gockel, Susan Shwartz, Kitt Kerr, Christopher Cambler, David Elliot, Chuck Koelbel, Mark Brader, Mark Axelrod, Janet Huss, Mark Anbinder, Diane Mitchell, Wes Miller, Todd Ellner, Bob Weber, Andrew Dwelly, Janet Fields, Jerry Kaufman, Peggy Ranson, A.C. Clarke, Victor Popov (Bulgaria), Kenneth Kousen, Misty Lackey and Larry Dixon, Tom Easton and Roger Weddall.
The Masthead
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OtherRealms Science Fiction and Fantasy in Review
Issue 29, Winter, 1991
Editors Chuq Von Rospach Laurie Sefton
Contributing Editors Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Charles de Lint Dean R. Lambe Lawrence Watt-Evans
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach All rights reserved.
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OtherRealms is published three or four times a year. Next deadline: July 15, 1991.
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