Tag: Book (Fiction)

“Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories #9 (1947)” ed Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg

This series of anthologies was published in the 1980s and was a retrospective of the best stories from years gone by as picked out by Isaac Asimov & Martin Greenberg (I possibly unfairly have the impression that Greenberg probably did most of the legwork, then Asimov made final decisions & wrote quirky little intros – no evidence for that tho). I picked up volumes 9 and 10 second hand at some point after I’d bought the “Before the Golden Age” anthologies (my first post about those books) – I don’t know if they were even published in the UK as what I have are US editions. I used to look for others of the series in secondhand bookshops but I’ve never seen any of them (and probably now wouldn’t bother buying them).

This volume covers 1947, and there’s a little introduction that reminds us of what was going on in that year in “the world outside reality” – i.e. what most of us call the real world – and “the real world” – i.e. the world of SFF publishing. I think when I first read these two I found that switch of “real” designation amusing, but I find it rather twee now.

One thing that struck me while reading these stories this time round was that they feel closer in style to more modern fiction than the anthologies I just read. For instance, gone are the “lone gentleman inventor and his machine” type stories (a la H. G. Wells’ “Time Machine”) that were still popular in the 1930s. Even when the subject of the story is an invention it still seems to take place in the world rather than off in some secluded mansion somewhere. Of course one thing that’s happened in the decade since the end of the 30s is the Second World War, and that does have an impact on the subject matter of these stories – one of the intros notes that of the 14 stories in the anthology 4 of them deal with nuclear warfare & its effects. I remembered this as a higher proportion of the book, I think partly because two of the stories that have stayed with me the most are of that type.

“Little Lost Robot” Isaac Asimov

This story is one that I know inside out, as well as being here it’s in a collection of Asimov’s robot short stories that my mother owns that I read over & over as a teenager. Basic plot is that someone tells one of his robots to “get lost” in strong terms, and it does so – it goes & hides in amongst identical looking robots. For plot reasons it’s necessary to find that specific one, and Susan Calvin (robot psychologist) does so via logic. To be honest I’ve never been that fond of the story – it’s about the logic puzzle of the idea rather than the characters or even the plot. But when I was reading it this time, I had a bit of an epiphany. It’s a bit of a “well, duh” moment, but still a genuine paradigm shift for me. Look at these bits of dialogue, one of the engineers talking to one of the robots as part of the set up of the logic puzzle solution:

“Sit down, boy.”
[…]
“Mm-m. Well, boy, gamma rays will kill you instantly.”
[…]
“The only thing I can advise, boy, is that if you detect […]”

The humans call all the robots “boy” and do so frequently, and I’d pretty much not noticed. It stuck out this time, tho, coz I’ve learnt since I last read the story that that would be the way a slave-owner would address their male slaves in the US. Which made it ping into focus that the robots are explicitly replacement slaves, written by someone whose country had fought a civil war over slavery about 80 years earlier. Which, well, duh. But I’d never parsed it like that before – I read the robots as servants, which has different connotations. And now I’m wondering if I’d see different things in the later robot novels (which I always preferred to the short stories). I’m thinking of the ones with R. Daneel Olivaw – who is indistinguishable from a human, but still treated like a robot (coz he is). Is there stuff in those books that went over my head because I wasn’t coming at them from the perspective of robots=slaves? (I don’t own those books, maybe I’ll borrow them from my parents when I next visit.)

“Tomorrow’s Children” Poul Anderson

Story of the aftermath of a nuclear war, and the efforts of what little is left of the US government to find out just how bad it is. Short answer – very bad. It’s a well-written & depressing little story although these days the science feels off (the sorts of “mutants” that are being born since the bombs, for instance, don’t feel right).

“Child’s Play” William Tenn (the pseudonym of Philip Klass)

A parcel containing a child’s christmas present from 2153 is mis-delivered to a struggling lawyer in the 1940s. It’s the futuristic equivalent of a chemistry set – a biology set that lets you build living organisms & do things like twin a person. The protagonist is fascinated & tries things out. The ethical implications aren’t dodged by the story and the ending makes that clear, but you’re firmly in the protagonist’s head and he has no qualms (and squashes any that start to raise their heads). The protagonist is also very sexist, but I’m not sure if the story is or not – I read it as disapproving of the way he sees the woman who’s in the story. I did enjoy this, and I vaguely remembered it once I started, but it’s not really a story I expect to stay with me.

“Time and Time Again” H. Beam Piper

Man dying in explosion in 1975 (in a war) wakes up inside his 13 year old body in 1945. Figures out how to prove to his father this is true & plans to avert the war. This is a kinda neat story, but it feels like it’s all premise & no pay off – like this is chapter one of a longer story. Very boys own club too – I don’t think there’s a single woman with a speaking part.

“Tiny and the Monster” Theodore Sturgeon

The title of this is rather well done – Tiny is a dog, a Great Dane (and thus not tiny), and the monster is only revealed later in the story but it’s not a monster either. Tiny shows an unexpected interest in the work of Alistair Forsythe, a young woman who is a gifted metallurgist (mostly a theoretician, but practical ability too). The story is primarily told from her perspective, and tells us how she (and her mother & Alec who was Tiny’s original owner) figure out what Tiny (and the monster) want and how to give it to them. The romance sub-plot wouldn’t be out of place in a Nora Roberts novel, which means it’s still sexist as hell but at least they’re both people with actual personalities and they have chemistry between them. (Faint praise I guess, but this story does contain the line “a woman is only forty percent a woman until someone loves her, and only eighty percent until she has children”. Yes this is in a character’s mouth, not the narrator’s but it sums up the all pervading sentiment around that subplot.) They’re even presented as complementary & equal in the work that’s done in the story – he’s mostly the brawn & she’s mostly the brains but not only are both important for the solution but also she’s stated to be cleverer than him. I rather enjoyed this one despite eye-rolling at the sexism – it’s quite charming.

“E for Effort” T. L. Sherred

A man invents a time viewer that can look at (but not hear or feel or affect) anything anywhere in the past. Together with the narrator they make a series of films of things like the life of Alexander the Great, but historical drama isn’t the endgame they have in mind. Unfortunately, things don’t work out as well as they hope (I don’t really want to spoil the end of this one) – hence “E for Effort”. It’s a well thought out story – the difficulties of making money out of the device, of getting their films released, are all thought through as are the various ramifications of the device. I enjoyed it.

“Letter to Ellen” Chan Davis

How would you feel if you discovered you were artificial? Two young men working in a big bio-engineering company putting together organisms discover the truth about themselves. The science just feels wrong all over, which detracts from the story a lot for me. They’re basically building an organism from bits like you’d build a house – like there’s a lab doing “the ultramicrosurgery of putting the nuclear wall together around the chromatin and embedding the result in a cell”. And I suppose you could do that to make an organism if you knew everything about every cell in it (I’m thinking with a 3D printer, perhaps?) but the direction real biotech has gone in is growing things & cloning organisms using a cell of an existing organism (which is persuaded to behave like a fertilised egg & put into a womb to develop). So it felt too bizarre for the emotional impact to really come through.

“The Figure” Edward Grendon (the pseudonym of Lawrence L. LeShan)

This is more of a vignette than a story, and on the surface it’s the closest to the “man invents machine” plot in this anthology. But underneath it’s about the world, and it’s one of the nuclear war influenced stories. It’s one of the stories from this anthology that I always remember – it’s chilling, depressing and understated. I think I’d pick it as the best one in the book. I don’t want to say any more, because I think that would spoil the initial impact if you ever have a chance to read it.

“With Folded Hands …” Jack Williamson

This story is in conversation with Asimov’s robot stories, and given my revelation about robots=slaves in “Little Lost Robot” I wasn’t surprised that the robots (“humanoids”) in this story were black in colour. Of course they are, robots=slaves & in the US slavery=black. The point in this story is to explore what it would be like if robots took the first law of robotics (the Prime Directive here) to extremes: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”. For instance these humanoids won’t let a person in the kitchen – knives are sharp you might cut yourself, the oven is hot you might burn yourself. They also do all the work, leaving humanity a purposeless coddled species. Disturbing in implication but not particularly plausible I thought, I don’t think I believed either the setup or the ramifications.

“The Fires Within” Arthur C. Clarke

What if there were a non-human civilisation living 15 miles down in the depths of the earth. A vignette really, told mostly as a letter describing the discovery. With a somewhat predictable twist at the end (not helped by being the second story in the collection to use a similar twist). Felt a bit pedestrian to me.

“Zero Hour” Ray Bradbury

The new game craze for pre-pubescent children is “Invasion” and somehow they’re all playing it across the world at once. 7 year old Mink even says things to her mother like “Mom, I’m sure you won’t be hurt much, really!” or talks about fifth columns, but the adults all ignore it as just yet another incomprehensible kid craze, whatever will they think of next. As the reader you know exactly where it’s going from early on, but Bradbury still manages to make it compelling.

“Hobbyist” Eric Frank Russell

A probeship, manned by a single man & his pet parrot (to talk to, to keep from going nuts with the solitude), crash lands on an unknown planet. In the process of exploring to try & find fuel to get back off again the protagonist finds something that might be our creator. I liked this, particularly the exploration bits & the relationship between the man & his parrot. Tho I did find the creator thing a bit twee.

“Exit the Professor” Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym for Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore)

Described in the anthology as a “whacky story” and that’s what it is. A professor comes to a remote rural town to investigate the reports of a family with strange powers. We see the story through the eyes of one of the Hogben family, as they avoid being taken off to be “studied” or put in the circus, or otherwise treated as freaks. A sample:

[…] that time, it all started because Rafe Haley come peeking and prying at the shed winder, trying to get a look at Little Sam. Then Rafe went round saying Little Sam had three haids or something.
Can’t believe a word them Haley boys say. Three haids! It ain’t natcheral, is it? Anyhow, Little Sam’s only got two haids, and never had no more since the day he was born.

It’s a fun story that kinda fits into the “there’s supermen among us” sub-genre.

“Thunder and Roses” Theodore Sturgeon

Post-nuclear war story set in an army base that’s got some of the remaining living people as they basically wait to die. This is the other nuclear war story that stuck in my head – it’s actually the story that I think of first when I think of this book. Depressing, with maybe a note of hope at the end if you squint at it (and very much the counter-example to anyone who thinks SFF is escapism, this is so not ignoring the reality and implications of the time it was written in). I hesitate to say it’s a favourite of mine, because it’s not precisely enjoyable to read – but reading it as a teenager in the 80s it felt as relevant as it must’ve done in 1947.

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“In Great Waters” Kit Whitfield; “The Iron King” Maurice Druon

Two books in one post, because I don’t think I’ve got much to say about either of these. I read most of both while we were up visiting J’s parents last weekend, tho I started “In Great Waters” before.

“In Great Waters” Kit Whitfield

This book took a while to get going for me, then I found the end disappointing and too neatly tied up for my tastes. In this alternate history merpeople are real and the kings & queens of Europe are descended from a hybrid, who took control of Venice back in the day. Every non-landlocked country wants a hybrid ruler because then they can get their coastal merpeople to stop invasions from other countries. The merpeople (who are never referred to as that, they are deepsmen) aren’t quite intelligent although they have language and are almost “human”. Because the royal families all descend from one woman, and so have been interbreeding for several generations they have all sorts of health issues. But “bastards” i.e. non-royal-family hybrids are strictly forbidden & burnt to death if found.

The story is seen from two points of view – Henry, a bastard brought up by deepsmen for the first few years of his life before being cast out, and Anne, youngest daughter of the current English royal family which is in the midst of a succession crisis. I think one of my problems with getting properly sucked into the book is that Henry is pretty alien in perspective (good in theory, but didn’t help me get immersed) and Anne spends most of the book being a passive observer (not even always seeing enough to be sure what’s going on). So the story seemed to happen off the page for the first two thirds of the book, then suddenly our two characters are the centre of it all and everything gets resolved. And I think the implications are that we all live happily ever after, except for those who don’t. And I just don’t buy that.

I did like the pseudo-Tudor court with its paranoid politics. I also liked the way Henry goes through culture shock when he gets kicked out of his deepsman life into a landsman life – and never quite gets over his upbringing even if he gets socialised to some degree. It felt real and made for an interesting character. Just it was hard to sympathise with him and made the first few chapters which are solely his point of view more difficult to get invested in. Whereas Anne was sympathetic (and again felt real) but given it’s a plot point that she projected an image of being a bit “simple” in public there’s a lot of watching things happen around her.

“The Iron King” Maurice Druon

Got this out of the library due to a review which mentioned that George R. R. Martin has said that Druon’s books were an influence on A Song of Ice & Fire. Druon is a French author, who published the seven books of his Accursed Kings series in the 1950s in French (the translation I read was done by Humphrey Hare and I’m not sure if that was a new one for this edition or is the one done in the 50s).

The Iron King tells a fictionalised version of the last year or so of the reign of Philip the Fair, Philip IV of France. To give some context, for those like me who are shaky on French history, his daughter Isabella married Edward II of England. Their son was Edward III of England (and he’s the one that kicks off the Hundred Years War (post)). The bulk of the plot revolves around the final events of the prosecution & persecution of the Templars, and Isabella’s campaign to expose her brothers’ wives infidelity. I think it keeps fairly close to the actual events of history where they’re known (and it has footnotes telling you more details sometimes!).

I liked reading it, but it did feel rather old-fashioned. Not sure if I’ll seek out the others in the series or not. I might prefer to read an actual history book about these people instead.

“Wool” Hugh Howey

This book pushes so many of my buttons (in a good way) – it’s post-apocalypse, it’s not a generation ship* but in many ways it’s the same as a generation ship. And it’s got that thing that hooks me into Sherri S. Tepper’s books (but without the Moral) – there’s something rotten deep in the centre of the society and half the fun is figuring it out as the characters do. (Not quite as straightforward as it being a dystopia, something about the way the rottenness is set-up/revealed.)

*J points out that he didn’t know what I meant by generation ship, so perhaps I should explain 🙂 I mean a spaceship travelling to another star at below light-speed, and all the people in it are awake, so over the time of the journey there are several generations and gradually the society stops believing in anything other than the ship. Normally in these sorts of stories there’s also some disaster (contrived or natural) that means records are lost.

The whole world that the protagonists know consists of an underground bunker, which has just one set of observation screens on the top floor out of the hundred or so floors. Society has stratified – engineers are in the lower levels and keep the place running but aren’t really appreciated for it. IT are important, and it’s not quite clear why to start with, and they’ve got a whole floor/suite of floors to themselves. The middling floors have the middling people. And up the top are people like the mayor, the sheriff and other officials. And the viewing screens, showing the dead dead world outside.

Resources are limited as you’d expect in that sort of scenario – they might as well be in a spaceship. If you want to have children you & your spouse need to win the lottery after someone dies. And expressing any interest in the outside world is firmly squashed – if you dare say it out loud then you are sentenced to “cleaning”. Out you go in a suit to clean the cameras for the view screens, and die in the toxic atmosphere when the suit inevitably gives way. Everyone who’s sentenced says they won’t clean, and then they do … and the first part of the book ends with an explanation of that, from the point of view of the man doing the cleaning. But there’s something rotten in the centre of this society and we haven’t found it yet, just the first hints.

Not going to spoil the book, that would be a shame. But it does make it a bit hard to talk about 🙂

I liked the way the various characters felt nuanced and real. The character I was least keen on was the chap who seemed to be there just to be the love interest, but thinking about it a bit more he’s actually also doing something useful in the book in terms of showing us what’s going on. So not just the love interest. And the antagonist isn’t a moustache-twirling villain, you can see he’s the hero of his own story even if what he does is repugnant. You can even sympathise with the aims of some of the rottenness – this is a resource limited pressure-cooker environment and wide-spread disorder could be completely fatal. But the methods are not something I can sympathise with even as I can see that it’s being done out of a sense that this is the best way to do it.

There’s an excerpt for the next book in the series (trilogy?) at the end, and it looks like it’ll go back to the beginning and tell us how the world got to the state it’s in in this book. There’s still something rotten at the centre, and we haven’t got there yet. I’ve got that reserved from the library now. (Thinking about buying these, but I think I want to know if the next book is as good first.)

“Control Point” Myke Cole

I’m torn about how to sum up my feelings about this book – is it flawed and doesn’t work for me? Or is it ambitious but doesn’t work for me? This post will have spoilers because I don’t think I can discuss it without.

The basic premise of the book is that some event has happened in the relatively recent past of the story and now people are developing magic powers – they manifest in some particular power (controlling fire, say, or opening gates) and it can happen to anyone at any time. And the US (the world?) has reacted by categorising them, prohibiting some sorts, and (I think) conscripting them all into the army. Oh and by invading another dimension, with its own indigenous population that are called “goblins” by the humans.

The excerpt I read set me up for a story that I ultimately didn’t get. This is actually the same sort of problem as I had with the film Avatar, and is definitely on me and not on the book (or film, in the case of Avatar). The opening scenes of Control Point read like the protagonist, Oscar Britton, was going to be part of a majority of “good guys” in the military working against loose cannons like Harlequin. The opening scenes of the sequel, Fortress Frontier, read the same way with a new view point character – and I read that excerpt before this book turned up in the library. So I thought what would happen was Britton would manifest, then would go on the run (I read a review, so I knew that was on the cards) but then return to the military and work within the system to both do the necessary job and to help change things so kids weren’t being killed by a military supposed to protect them. And that’s not what I got at all. Part of my lack of enjoyment of the book is that I thought it was going in one direction, and then it wasn’t.

So that’s some of the “didn’t work for me” part of my opinion. If that had been all – if the story was just a different sort of story to my expectation – I might’ve still enjoyed it overall. I liked Avatar, after all, even if I’d still like to see the film I thought I was getting! 🙂

But I also didn’t like where this story went. The whole of the military and by implication the government that are in charge of them seemed to me to be deeply immoral, and it felt like it a caricature written by someone philosophically opposed to the military (which doesn’t appear to be the case from reading Cole’s bio on his website). For instance – they’re invading this new dimension that the world has access to since the event that caused magic to happen. Not for a reason that’s ever mentioned, and in the story it’s a covert invasion and the population at large (even a lot of the military) don’t even know there’s a dimension there to invade. It’s never shown as a reaction to a threat, it’s just “ooh it’s there, let’s conquer it”. They’re brutalising and killing the indigenous population in a way that makes one think of the way the white settlers and the young US dealt with the Native American population. And that parallel is emphasised by a group of antagonists in our dimension who are Native American terrorists using the new magic to try & secede violently from the US.

Everyone who manifests is conscripted into the military, initial training involves brainwashing as well as teaching them control. And either the brainwashing takes and they “voluntarily” join the military proper or it doesn’t take and they hang about being trainees until it does (or forever). Even if you manifest in a non-prohibited school of magic you’re not allowed to be a civilian once you’ve learnt control – nope, you need to “volunteer” or stay to rot. If it’s a prohibited school of magic and/or you go on the run when you manifest coz you don’t fancy vanishing into the military then as far as the outside world is concerned you either die or are locked up forever – but the reality is that you “join the military as a contractor” with the threat of actual death always hanging over you and none of the rights of a real soldier. Britton has a bomb inside his chest, coz that’s the sort of brutal thing this army does when they don’t think the brainwashing will take.

It is more than probable that this is intended as a dystopic view of a potential future – a “what if” about how a totalitarian leaning US government would react to people gaining superpowers. An extrapolation from the sort of regime that runs Guantanamo Bay. But to me it felt shallowly caricatured rather than interestingly dystopic.

And then we have Britton who goes through the entire story fucking things up via not thinking more than one step ahead in his “good intentions”. Again, I suspect this is deliberate – and this is the bit that makes me tip my opinion towards “ambitious but doesn’t work for me”. It’s a working out of the proverb that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Britton tries to save the kids at the start, but his actions actually cause more people to get hurt. Britton goes on the run, but he can’t control his powers & people die because of it. In trying to protect himself & get the bomb removed from his chest Britton gets people killed, rather than try the option that might have a higher risk for him but a lower risk for everyone else (this one in particular is signposted as a bad idea so strongly that I really can’t imagine why Britton ever thought it was a good idea). And that’s just a few examples – the whole book is full of them.

As I was reading it, I was thinking it’s a flawed story of an evil army doing evil things because it’s evil, with a hero who we are told is smart but who can’t seem to ever engage his brain before acting. But after finishing, and thinking about what to put in this post I started to think it’s an ambitious story about what would happen if the military machine that runs Guantanamo Bay & Abu Ghraib had to deal with American citizens manifesting dangerous superpowers, and how even the best of intentions don’t matter when you don’t think about the consequences of your actions. But nonetheless, it didn’t work for me – on the whole I’m more optimistic about human nature (perhaps that’s naivety, I have a feeling that’s what Cole would say). And I prefer reading stories that share some of that optimism, or at least have a protagonist that I like rather than want to shake and tell him to “think first, damnit!”.

“Before the Golden Age 3” ed. Isaac Asimov

The third and final volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiographical anthology of short stories from the 1930s covers 1935-1938. And as with the other volumes it’s a bit hit & miss. Some of the misses have aged poorly, some I suspect I’d never’ve enjoyed even if I were a young lad in the 1930s.

I’ve been re-reading this with an eye to diversity – partly, I confess, because it’s easier to see here than it is in fiction from my own era. The original impetus is that there’s a fair amount of conversation around SFF fandom in the last few years about this sort of issue – like this post in Elizabeth Bear’s livejournal which addresses the idea that somehow if you have a protagonist or primary character who isn’t able-bodied/white/Western/straight/cis-male then you need to justify it otherwise you’re just “being PC”. Rather than, you know, writing a story about a person who’s as much of a person as any other person. And as I say, it’s easier in general to pay attention to in these stories because I’m not steeped in the culture of the 1930s like I am in my own (and the only difference between me & the “default” is that I’m female so it’s easy to have a blind spot). Sort of practising the thought patterns for future use.

So I’d been looking for women or lack thereof in these stories. And the racism jumped out at me, and would’ve done if I was looking or not – that’s something where we’ve really come a long way since the 30s. But I haven’t really mentioned the other sorts of categories where people get elided into non-existence or caricatured. People with disabilities & transpeople are mostly Sir Not Appearing in this Universe – although there’s some pretty poor portrayals of mental illness (like the madman in “Minus Planet”). And really I’m not sure I can say much more than that about it.

Sexuality is an odd one though – in the vast majority of these stories it doesn’t feel like any of the people have any sort of sexuality, they’re not even asexual it just isn’t a thing. Even some of the ones with “romance subplots” (like the dreadful Meek stories in volume 1), you aren’t left with an impression that these people fancy each other, or even like each other. It feels like the author is aware that people get married, but has no idea why. A large part of that is style, of course, and differences in the culture of what’s appropriate to talk about. But some of the stories do manage to build that feeling even without anything explicit – taking an example from this volume “Proxima Centauri” has a love match that feels like a(n overwrought, fairly chaste) love match. And then there’s the ones like “Minus Planet” where to my modern eyes the two male protagonists read as gay (in a chaste & understated way). Particularly in comparison to “Proxima Centauri”. In both cases the main character goes off on a mission/trip that may well end in death, and in each case the “love interest” goes with him. The woman because she can’t live without him, the man because he can’t let him go alone. And I’m left wondering if that’s a modern reading pushed back inappropriately, or if it was a deliberate but subtle hint that would’ve been picked up by someone of the time. I’m not sure where, if anywhere, I’m going with this but it’s something that struck me.

A note on the notes that follow – I read this on the plane to & from Berlin, and only took notes on the way out so the second half are written after a few weeks gap.

1935

“The Parasite Planet” Stanley G. Weinbaum

Tale of derring do on the frontier – this frontier being Venus. Strength of the story is the exotic, alien & deadly wildlife. Weakness of the story is the romance plot, although if the last paragraph about how they would get married immediately wasn’t there then it’d be a little less out of nowhere.

“Proxima Centauri” Murray Leinster

Ship travels to other star to colonise. Might not be a generation ship as it was only 7 years, but that’s the feel. Tedium leads to social breakdown, leads to segregation between officers & crew – this sets up the “love triangle” as the daughter of the commander is in love with a crew member but the second in command would like to marry her. Main plot is more interesting – the planet is inhabited by intelligent carnivorous plants who value animal flesh more than we value gold. Death & Doom follow (though our plucky heroes win the day, kinda).

“The Accursed Galaxy” Edmond Hamilton

Meteor lands, turns out to be a strange polyhedron. Reporter who finds it calls in a scientist who opens it under instruction from the being within, who tells its story before being freed. And reveals the “awful truth” about our galaxy. Neat but implausible explanation for the expanding universe. Back to “women what are they?” tho, but at least that means no 1930s romance subplot.

1936

“He Who Shrank” Henry Hasse

Lab assistant to a mad scientist is injected with a potion that makes him perpetually shrink (and includes all sorts of things that keep him alive too). The atoms of each universe are the solar systems of the next. This is one of the stories that stuck in my mind over the years since I last read this – it holds up, I think.

“The Human Pets of Mars” Leslie Frances Stone

UFO lands, aliens have a look around, take a motley crew of humans back as pets. Eventually our plucky hero organises an escape. Too many of the secondary characters felt like types to me – the pompous privileged politician, the older organising matron, the shiftless black workman, the half-crazed black spiritual woman, the sweet girl child etc etc. The protagonist and the other primary characters aren’t much better, to be honest. I think this falls into the “neat idea, shame about the execution” category.

“The Brain Stealers of Mars” John W. Campbell, Jr

This reminded me a lot of Ray Bradbury and of Philip K. Dick. Claustrophobic paranoid story about chameleon type aliens living amongst the Martians. The (human) protagonists land, and discover these creatures who start mimicking them – 20 of each man, how do you tell which one was the real one? The solutions felt a little too neat (and the story feels like it worked, rather than being ambiguous), but this is Campbell and as I recall he liked the human protagonists of stories he bought as an editor to win. (And now I’m trying to remember where I’ve picked up my ideas about Campbell’s preferred tropes – maybe I’ll find a book on my shelves during my re-read that tells me.)

“Devolution” Edmond Hamilton

Pessimistic little story about the “true origins” of the human race. This seems to be a Hamilton theme, and he does do them well. Completely preposterous, mind you.

“Big Game” Isaac Asimov

Short-short by the man himself, as of age 21 – written in 1941 and unpublished before this anthology. It’s the “true story about what killed the dinosaurs”, and is as pessimistic as Hamilton (by whom it was inspired).

1937

“Other Eyes Watching” John W. Campbell Jr.

Non-fiction article about Jupiter. I confess to skimming this, and I think I’ve done so every single time I read this anthology. It’s in the purplest of purple prose, and I just can’t be bothered to pick the facts out of the flowers. It starts:

All space was flamed with an intolerable incandescence; for two thousand million miles, titanic streamers of flame shot out, wove and twined, streamers that flared dull-red and cooling where they stretched to breaking, then great clots that swirled in blue-white heat of new creation. Dimming slowly in the distance, the Wrecker was vanishing, the vagrant star that had lashed worlds out of the Sun as it swept by.

It makes my over-use of commas and run-on sentences look tame … Apparently it, and others like it, inspired Asimov to further being interested in science, tho.

“Minus Planet” John D. Clark

Antimatter planet approaches the Earth and will hit & cause catastrophe, but our plucky heroes spot it in time and save the day. Despite the best efforts of a random madman who’d like to stop them. Suffers terribly from “women, what are they??”. Not that memorable to be honest, I preferred “Born of the Sun” in the last volume (which was more science fantasy/horror than this, but at least it had a fun catastrophe).

“Past, Present and Future” Nat Schachner

Man of ancient Greece who winds up in the future Inca lands uses the “secrets of the Egyptians” to enter suspended animation looking for a better future. He’s joined (accidentally) by a (white) man of the 1930s. They wake up in the far future in an enclosed habitat because “the rest of the world is destroyed” – it’s a dystopia reminiscent of Huxley’s “Brave New World” with its castes of people for particular societal functions. Our heroes are better because they’re not stratified like this, they’re more human. And along with a throwback from the upper echelons of the future society they escape to explore the outside world. Interesting premise, but it feels like the story stops before it starts.

1938

“The Men and the Mirror” Ross Rocklynne

It’s a shame this is the story that ends the anthology, because I’ve never liked it. Two men, one a policeman chasing the other an outlaw. They are perfect gentlemen, being gentlemanly. And they discover an impossible physics problem in outer space, having gotten into a pickle they get out of it again by co-operating and using their superior intelligence. They are gentlemanly gentlemen once more. I tend to forget the plot between readings, because the soulless physics problem is actually marginally more interesting despite my general lack of interest in physics.

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“Before the Golden Age 2” ed. Isaac Asimov

This is the middle volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiographical look at the science fiction stories from the 1930s that influenced him. No absolute shockers here and I enjoyed reading all of the stories – they still suffer from the various -isms of the time but the sins are more of omission than commission which is a step in the right direction. I think my favourite would be “Sidewise in Time”.

1933

“The Man Who Awoke” Laurence Manning

Man invents a method of hibernation and goes to sleep so he can wake up 3000 years in the future & see the wondrous progress. It turns out not to be as simple as that – there’s been progress, but there’s also been a bewildering (to our protagonist) shift in attitudes to consumption. The biology of hibernation is very 1930s, but the future society which now lives in forests using mostly renewable resources, and carefully manages itself not to use up its resources feels a lot more of modern concept. As Asimov says in his afterword this wasn’t yet a fashionable thing to worry about. It’s still a very 1930s story tho, not only in narrative style but also – women, what are they? On the plus side the inhabitants of the future are brown-skinned yet have both good people and bad people and are treated just like people by the narrative.

“Tumithak in Shawm” Charles R. Tanner

Sequel to “Tumithak of the Corridors” which is in the first volume of this anthology. Tumithak now leads an army from his corridors to do battle with the alien shelk – through various twists & turns of the plot they join forces with another subterranean band of people (under Tumithak’s leadership, of course) and win the first real battles against the shelk! I particularly liked the way that Tumithak & co react believably to being out on the surface for the first time (and being the first generation to see the sun in 2000 years), and the way that they aren’t just obviously victorious from the beginning – we know the end because of the framing story of how Tumithak is a legendary hero, but there’s still tension and still mistakes and bad decisions. In looking to see if Tanner wrote any more I’ve discovered that all his published stories are freely available (on what looks like a legitimate website) so at some point I should read a few of the others.

1934

“Colossus” Donald Wandrei

Man travels & grows to burst through to a bigger universe where our whole universe is one of the atoms. This suffers somewhat from poor science even for the time (although as handwaves go, breaking the speed of light by drawing on “intra-spatial emanations and radiations” is right up there with reversing the polarity of the whatever). I think I might’ve preferred this story if it had explored the vaguely dystopian future-on-the-brink-of-war more, rather than had our hero go off on his journey. And if the girl had lived – she had an actual personality, a shame to have her killed off halfway through to make our hero sad & lonely as he travelled. It was nice that the aliens in the larger world actually seemed fairly alien in some of their attitudes & appealing to (effectively) their humanity didn’t work.

“Born of the Sun” Jack Williamson

What if the planets weren’t balls of rock or gas? What if they were actually eggs? A mix of horror (I want to say “Lovecraftian horror” but I haven’t actually read any Lovecraft) and science fiction – our hero learns the Awful Truth just in time and builds himself a spaceship. Reminded me a bit of a (science fiction) book I read several years ago based on Velikovsky‘s ideas, but only in that it takes “completely nutty science fantasy idea” and runs with it in a science fiction type of way. However, I didn’t like the romance subplot here – particularly not the patronising way the protagonist thinks of his fiancée, and could’ve done without the racist elements too (lots of exoticising stuff about the Oriental mind, and evil Chinese antagonists). And to modern eyes the ending looks less hopeful than I think was intended.

“Sidewise in Time” Murray Leinster

Some cosmic event happens & the world becomes a tapestry of scrambled pieces of different alternate histories for a time, before mostly descrambling itself – many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suddenly made real. One man (Professor Minott) has figured out from the initial harbingers of the event that triggers it what’s about to happen and we get his story as he tries to lead a party of undergraduates to a land where he can rule the world, interspersed with vignettes of other events across the world. It’s also a take on a wish-fulfillment story for Minott, only his wishes don’t end up fulfilled – he’s just a maths lecturer at a tiny university, and he sees his chance to gain power & get the girl of his dreams, but in the end he’s not the swashbuckling hero he thinks he will be. In the hands of Meek (who wrote the dreadfully racist stories in the previous volume) this would’ve turned into White Man Reigns Supreme, but this story is much more nuanced and good – White Man gets his comeuppance and isn’t as clever or superior as he thinks he is. My favourites of the vignettes were where the nasty, mean-minded & abusive farmer gets eaten by a dinosaur & we’re very much expected to cheer as his wife realises that she might have gone mad (she’s not) but she’s free. And the Roman army (from a land where the Romans lasted into the 20th Century & conquered the Americas) descend upon a car and kill it because they think it’s a weapon, efficiently brutal. Oh, and a sad one where three diplodocuses (or some dinosaur of that general sort) get killed when they’ve wandered into a town – they’re just confused, poor things, they didn’t even mean to destroy anything 🙁

This made me think of Fred Hoyle’s “October the First is Too Late”, except there the scrambled Earth is in different time periods rather than different alternate universes. It’s been probably 20 years or more since I last read that book – it’s one that my parents own – and I can’t remember much about it except for the premise and the fact I liked it. Even the title and author took a bit of creative googling to figure out. Now I just need to remember by the next time I’m in Oxford that I want to re-read it! 🙂

“Old Faithful” Raymond Z. Gallun

Intelligent life on Mars communicating with Earth people. Told mostly from the perspective of the Martian – who is convincingly alien. He thinks differently, perceives differently, has a different sort of society, looks different, tolerates different atmospheric conditions. But despite all these differences the alien is a sympathetic character. And after 9 years of communication the understanding on both sides is still pretty fuzzy, it’s built up from the beginnings of the basics of arithmetic but they still don’t truely understand each other. Which is refreshing after all these stories where the aliens or whatever are human-ish and understanding is perfect after some minor stumbles.

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“Book of Shadows” Paula Brackston

Another book I got out of the library after reading an excerpt on tor.com. Well, I read an excerpt of the sequel and remembered I’d been intrigued by the first one when I’d read that excerpt, and finally found out it had a different title in the UK.

The story is the story of Elizabeth Anne Hawksmith, born in the early 17th Century and still living in 2007 – told partly through her journal, and partly via three long flashbacks to significant events in her long life. She’s a witch – a real one, with real ability to do magic – who has lived her long life in fear of being found by the man (Gideon) who trained her. The magic system is the sort of traditional witchcraft from both 17th century & modern ideas of witchcraft – herbwives, healing, pacts with devilish beings, black witches & white ones, fires on Beltane, the Summerlands etc. That sounds dismissive, but actually I think it’s one of the strengths of the book – it’s not explained in detail, it just is and its recognisability makes it feel more real than some meticulously detailed explanation would.

In 2007 Elizabeth has just moved to a new home, and starts befriending a local teenager almost despite herself. She tells this teenager (Tegan) some of the story of her life – including how she came to be a witch in plague-stricken, witch-fearing 1627. The next interlude is Gideon catching up with her in 1888, and then we have the last time she loved someone (in the midst of the First World War). She’s hoping, initially, that she’s finally free of Gideon – but you can sense the inevitable results of letting her guard down right from the start of the book. However that doesn’t make it predictable – I didn’t guess what the ending was going to be until it happened, but once it did it felt right and a better end than the predictable thing I thought was coming.

It was a book I enjoyed reading, and I always wanted to know what happened next. But that’s not to say it’s without its flaws. In retrospect it feels like a lot happened off-screen that was actually rather important to the story – and then suddenly it’s revealed in the last few pages, and in some ways undermines the characterisation of Elizabeth that we’ve had up to that point. Also – Tegan was mostly a cipher, which didn’t help overcome the constant reminders of Doctor Who from her name (although the character was more Ace than Tegan in so far as she was developed). And Gideon felt a bit cartoonishly bad.

As far as I can tell this is Brackston’s first book (her webpage only mentions this (calling it “The Witch’s Daughter”, which is the title in the US) and the next one, “The Winter Witch”) – I’m not blown away by it, but I shall keep an eye out for more from her in future.

“Ran Away” Barbara Hambly

A couple of months ago in a thread about book recommendations on Realms Beyond kjn said he thought Barbara Hambly hadn’t really found her voice until “Bride of the Rat God” and then the historical mysteries she wrote after that (by which I think he meant the Benjamin January books). Which I thought was interesting, because I’ve read several of Hambly’s books (including “Bride of the Rat God”) and enjoy them a lot but I haven’t actually read any of the Benjamin January series or indeed anything more recent than “Bride of the Rat God”. The ones I’ve read are mostly portal fantasies, published in the 80s & 90s. So when I saw “Ran Away” turned face out at the library and noticed the cover said it was “The new Benjamin January novel” I picked it up to read.

Benjamin January is a free black man, the son of slaves, who lives in New Orleans. This book is mostly set in 1837 (with an extensive flashback to Paris in 1827). He’s trained as a surgeon, but makes his living as a musician because in that time & place white people don’t like black people being medics. I assume the earlier books give some indication of how come he has the medical training and the rest of his good education in the first place – it’s not the subject of this book. There’s a few things like that which reminded me I was reading the most recent book in an established series, but in general it stands alone well.

The story opens with January being told by his mother that “the Turk” has murdered his two concubines that morning in a jealous rage – it’s the gossip of the town, with lurid details & everyone knows it must be true that a heathen like that would do such a thing. January insists that it can’t be true, he knows the man and knows he’s not like that. And then we’re off into a flashback to 1827 when January lived in Paris with his first wife, a North African ex-Muslim woman. Because of his medical training his wife enlists his help on behalf of one of the concubines of the Turk, who it turns out has been poisoned by one of the Turk’s other wives. When she then vanishes January is the person the senior wife of the harem comes to to help find her and make sure she’s safe. A bit hard to write that plot-starting summary because I don’t want to give away too much of how it works out. But suffice to say that this flashback (which is the first half of the book) demonstrates that indeed the Turk is not the sort of man to murder the concubines. The second half of the book returns to 1837, and January’s efforts to find out who did murder the dead girls and why. The two mystery plotlines are well done, I didn’t find the answers to them obvious at the beginning but when the story got there they felt right. They also linked together well, with things from the first half showing up in the second half (and something that had niggled at me as being unresolved in the first bit was in fact a minor plot point later 🙂 ).

When I think of Hambly’s books I think of well-drawn, solid feeling characters who are often square pegs in round holes and intricate societies where there are hierarchies & manners that keep people reminded of their place and role. (I’m not sure I phrased that well, hopefully I’ve got the idea across). This book is no exception to that – and in some ways is more unsettling because this is an actual society from history and people like January or any of the other main characters will’ve actually existed.

One of the themes of this book seems to be how all the different sub-cultures of “society” are actually much the same under the skin, and how petty all their reasons to feel superior to each other are. Like how much the high-society girls looking for husbands at the Paris balls are the same as the coloured demi-mondaine of New Orleans being presented to society to meet white “protectors”. And how the concubines of the Turk aren’t worlds away from these black mistresses of those white men, despite the latter despising the lives of the former. Or there’s the slave woman who is very clearly sniffy about January’s social status because he’s a darker black than her but he’s a free man and she can be (and has been) bought and sold with no respect for any of her wishes. And the French of New Orleans don’t mix with the Americans, the old aristocracy of France are “above” the “new people” who gained status with Napolean or in the Revolution. Having just read some 1930s stories I was particularly struck by how this is a book with many racist, classist and sexist characters, but it manages not to be a racist, classist or sexist story. People are people, good or bad or indifferent because of who they are personally not because of some stereotype.

I’m not sure I’d say that this is better than the earlier Hambly I’ve read (tho it’s been a while since I read the others), but I would definitely say it’s as good. She’s one of my favourite authors, and clearly I now need to buy everything else she ever wrote – I have about a dozen books already, but there seem to be at least as many others I’ve not yet bought, including the Benjamin January series 🙂

“Before the Golden Age 1” ed. Isaac Asimov

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is a phrase that commonly has two definitions – the first of these is the era when Campbell was editing Astounding Stories and the writers included people like Isaac Asimov. The other definition is that the golden age of science fiction is 12. That the stories that you read around that sort of age when you’re just discovering your own tastes in fiction are the ones that stick with you through your life. This anthology is a selection of stories that Isaac Asimov remembers reading in the 1930s – in his own personal golden age – that had an influence on his writing and thus on “The Golden Age”.

As an aside, I’m not sure I quite agree with either definition – both that those 1940s stories of The Golden Age aren’t (in large part because of my own age) going to be the best thing ever for me. And also that I think I’m still discovering new books & stories I think are as good or better than the things I read in my teens.

But still, as a conceit for an anthology it’s a good one, and as well as reprinting the stories Asimov writes about his own life. He comes across as very full of himself, but also aware of that and poking fun at his own ego. I suspect if I’d ever met him I’d’ve found him irritatingly smug, but the tone works OK in an autobiography.

This volume covers the years 1931 & 1932, when Asimov is 11 & 12. I bought it sometime in the mid-80s, about ten years after it was published. Its been years since I last read it, and mostly what I remembered was that the stories seemed dated, a few were still quite good but most were pretty “meh” to my more modern eyes. That’s a fairly accurate summary – with the addition that some are downright bad to my more grown-up modern eyes. The science tends to be wrong (either because we now know more, or because the author didn’t know what was known then), they tend to be full of info-dumps and “As you know, Bob” conversations. Some of them work despite this.

And they all have what one might euphemistically call “the attitudes of their time”. The sexism tends to be in the absence of women, and in the lack of personality for the women in those few stories with any female characters – the sort of thing you can excuse for any one story as being that the author just happened to choose a male protagonist. But when you look at the collection as a whole there’s a pattern – nobody thought a woman to be interesting enough to be the protagonist or even a primary character (with the exception of the alien in the Williamson story at the end). The racism is … mostly of the same sort. I wrote the little notes on the stories before I wrote this intro & you’ll spot the bit where I’m suddenly taken aback. There are three stories in the middle that are appallingly explicitly racist, two of them (a duology by Meek) to a degree where if you took the racism out there’d be no story left. I skim read the second of those, and wouldn’t’ve even done that if I hadn’t been going to write about the book.

I’ll be keeping the book, but boxed up – primarily for the autobiography and for the nostalgia.

1931

“The Man Who Evolved” Edmond Hamilton

Story about the future evolution of humanity, a morality tale of the “meddle not with things you do not understand” type. Also felt like the H. G. Wells story “The Time Machine”, in that it was a scientist building a contraption to find out how the human race developed & demonstrating it to his friends. The science is dreadful (evolution Does. Not. Work. Like. That. and I suspect even a biologist in the 1930s would wince at it) but the story is still compelling.

“The Jameson Satellite” Neil R. Jones

Another “what will it be like in the far future” tale. In this one a man works out how to perfectly preserve his body after he dies, by shooting it into space in a rocket to orbit the Earth. Much much later he’s discovered by aliens, who are metal men (Zoromes from the planet Zor, I kid you not) who were once biological but have transplanted their brains into metal bodies and now live forever. The science is equally as wince-making as the last one but I have a higher tolerance for bad orbital mechanics etc than I do for bad biology 😉 The “radium repulsion rays” to prevent meteors hitting the rocket were a bit much tho … It was still a fun story to read, I keep wanting to use the word “charming”.

“Submicroscopic”, “Awlo of Ulm” Capt. S. P. Meek

Woah, these two were very much a “product of their time” to an extent that they didn’t have anything to recommend them today. Man builds machine to shrink himself, finds submicroscopic land inhabited by beautiful white people who are being attacked by brutish black savages who want to eat them. The sequel introduces scientifically advanced cruel yellow people with slanty eyes who’d like to enslave them. The hero wins the day because he’s the WASPiest WASP that ever WASPed, and also has guns but if he hadn’t he’d still’ve won. Asimov notes in his afterword that he was uncomfortable with the “touches of racism” he noticed in his re-read, but I’d say that “touches” is inadequate to even begin to describe the level of racism. Oh, and sexist too – these are the first stories in the book to have a woman mentioned at all, but she’s not a person she’s a plot coupon. Save the princess, marry the princess, save the princess (again), duel someone to the death for the princess, duel someone (else) to the death for the princess, reflect on how you didn’t kill them brutally enough because of what they threatened to do to the princess… So I think that’s actually a step back from the woman-free state.

“Tetrahedra of Space” P. Schulyer Miller

A story in the tradition of Wells’ “War of the Worlds” – aliens land, some plucky earth men persuade them to move on when something common on Earth turns out to be poison to them. Astonishingly purple prose, which made me giggle out loud at times because it was so overwrought. Here’s a sample:

It was beyond all reason — all possibility! And yet — it was! Now I could see them clearly, rank on rank of them in orderly file, some hundred of them, strewn in great concentric rings about the softly glowing spheres — harsh as the black rock itself, hard, and glittering, and angular — a man’s height and more from summit to base — great, glittering tetrahedra — tetrahedra of terror!

Unfortunately, also a very racist story 🙁 I kept trying to give it a pass coz I was enjoying the main plot, but it kept getting worse – there’s a nasty subplot to do with a South American native/Portuguese “breed” on the “wrong side” (i.e. his mother was white). However, in contrast to Meek’s stories I feel that it could be edited to remove the racist attitudes & the racist subplot and at the end you’d have a story where the essential plot was the same, just stripped of the 1930’s unpleasantness. (The science would still mark it out as from that time period, mind you …).

“The World of the Red Sun” Clifford D. Simak

Time travel in the style of H. G. Wells – with a well thought out machine that has believable flaws. Plucky 20th Century men save the world of the far future! Given how thought through the time machine was it was startling that the men of the far future still spoke English. An enjoyable story.

1932

“Tumithak of the Corridors” Charles R. Tanner

Far future Earth, long post-invasion by Venusians & the start of the story of how people won back their planet. The framing story is that this is a reconstruction of “how it must’ve been” told from even further in the future. This is one of the stories that had stuck in my mind from reading this book when I was a teenager and I think I like it just as much as an adult – caveats about 1930s story telling styles still apply, tho, and I can’t exactly call it non-sexist or non-racist. It does actually have a couple of women with speaking parts who have about as much personality as the male secondary characters – but that means pretty much none. No overt racism & even an explicit statement that people come in many sorts, good & bad, regardless of nation or era – but everyone’s white except the savages who live in the dark (who are slate-coloured) which is somewhat problematic. Well thought through consequences of the living arrangements of the people, tho the science/arts divide made me roll my eyes a little. My favourite of this volume.

“The Moon Era” Jack Williamson

Another man in a machine goes on an adventure story – this time the machine is invented by an old wealthy childless man who summons his never met before impoverished nephew and announces that if he takes the trip in the machine he will inherit the fortune. The trip is supposed to be to the Moon & back, and indeed he goes to the Moon but the time he arrives is not the time he left the Earth. The alien he meets is female – has to be for the plot to work, but she’s no plot coupon she has a personality of her own. A melancholy story, which I liked although I didn’t quite buy the ending.

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“The Desert of Souls” Howard Andrew Jones

I read an excerpt from the sequel to “The Desert of Souls” on tor.com & was intrigued enough to reserve this one at the library. And then a bit startled when it came in coz it had been long enough that I forgot I’d reserved it 🙂

It’s set primarily in the Baghdad of the 8th Century, during the time of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, and our protagonists are part of the household of Jaffar, son of the Vizier. Jafar & Haroun are historical figures (as are some of the others), and they are also protagonists in some of the stories in the Arabian Nights. This story is a kind of modern story of that type, with ancient magic & djinn. There’s also some of the feel of Sherlock Holmes & Watson to the main two characters.

Everything is told to us by Captain Asim, the man in charge of Jaffar’s household guards. He organises a diversion for Jaffar after his pet bird has died – they go out into the market place in disguise, accompanied by the scholar Dabir. While Jaffar enjoys pretending to be a common person they go and have their fortunes told, and shortly afterwards a man being chased through the streets trying to reach Jaffar dies in front of them carrying an elaborate door pull. The two main plot lines of the book are thus launched – Dabir are tasked to find out what is so important about the door pull, and Asim is to guard him particularly when this requires travelling to a far away ruined city. Jaffar is also keen to separate Dabir from his erstwhile pupil, Jaffar’s niece Sabirah, out of fear that they have fallen in love – said fear being encouraged by the prophecy of the fortune teller. Sabirah is destined for an arranged marriage with someone politically suitable, and far above the station of a scholar/tutor no matter how learned he is.

One thing I really liked about this book is how rooted in the real world it is – even the bits that are fantastical. There’s a tale within the tale about a previous adventure of Jaffar, Asim & Dabir and described as an incidental detail in the ancient ruins they visit is what is what seems quite clearly an ancient Assyrian relief of a king in a chariot. The afterword at the end says that Haroun & Jaffar are real, but I was quite pleased I’d figured that out already & I’d looked them up (and the answer to what Jaffar’s prophecy means was mentioned in wikipedia too!). Also helping it to feel real was that the characters don’t feel like 21st Century Westerners dumped in an exotic setting.