Tag: Books to read

A REVISIT: HOT MOON: an interview with Astrophysicist & Author Alan Smale (Part 2)

A year ago, one of Arc Manor’s featured novels was released:
Hot Moon: Apollo Rising, Book I.

In celebration of this hot novel’s one-year anniversary, we’re revisiting an interview with the author Alan Smale by Isaac E. Payne.

This is part 2 of that interview, if you missed part 1, find it HERE.

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ABOUT HOT MOON – FROM THE PUBLISHER:

“A nail-biting thriller.” −Publishers Weekly

“I loved it. Great ‘hard’ science fiction with convincing space battles. “−Larry Niven

From the Sidewise Award-winning author of the acclaimed Clash of Eagles trilogy comes an alternate 1979 where the US and the Soviets have permanent Moon bases, orbiting space stations, and crewed spy satellites supported by frequent rocket launches.

Apollo 32, commanded by career astronaut Vivian Carter, docks at NASA’s Columbia space station en route to its main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station. In an unplanned and desperate move, Vivian spacewalks through hard vacuum back to her Lunar Module and crew and escapes right before the station falls into Soviet hands

Their original mission scrubbed, Vivian and her crew are redirected to land at Hadley Base, a NASA scientific outpost with a crew of eighteen. But soon Hadley, too, will come under Soviet attack, forcing its unarmed astronauts to daring acts of ingenuity and improvisation.

With multiple viewpoints, shifting from American to Soviet perspective, from occupied space station to American Moon base under siege, to a covert and blistering US Air Force military response, Hot Moon tells the gripping story of a war in space that very nearly might have been.

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We’re back with the second part of our interview with Alan Smale! His new book, Hot Moon, is rooted in an alternate 1979, where Soviet spacecraft meet NASA ships in space.

In this part, we continue our conversation about Hot Moon, as well as Smale’s future plans and writing process.

IP: What was it about the Apollo program specifically that sparked the idea for Hot Moon?

AS: One of the great things about the Apollo program was its ambitiousness. We went from zero-to-sixty in space very quickly, with the Mercury and Gemini programs leading up to it. All of which had the obvious aim of sending Americans to the Moon and back again.

And that goal caused a huge amount of technological innovation in a very short time. There were a lot of risks involved and a lot of hairy moments, especially with Apollo 13. There was a great deal of improvisation and ingenuity, on top of those aspects which were extremely well-planned. So I think it’s very fertile ground for fiction.

The Moon landings themselves were incredibly impactful, and it was just great fun to see people bouncing around on the Moon’s surface. In Hot Moon, I tried to bring out that excitement. I mean, the book is a thriller, but I think I managed to get quite a bit of the thrill over the space program in there as well.

Plus, there’s the conflict aspect of the story. In Hot Moon, we see the first space battle, between the Apollo spacecraft, the combined Command and Lunar Module, and the classic Soyuz Soviet craft. These spacecraft were frankly very clunky technologies, and I think those scenes are unlike anything people have seen in fiction before, or at least I haven’t read anything like it. Writing it was great fun, and it was exciting to extrapolate and think about how the technology could have been improved in the late 1970s and early 1980s, if the two superpower space programs had continued on with the same frenetic pace.

So I had a blast writing it and it’s getting good reactions from readers so far. I’m very happy with it.

IP: Had your timeline been a reality, and the US had continued at the same pace, what would your prediction for 2079 be, in terms of space exploration?

AS: When I was a kid, I was convinced that my future lay in space, that by the time I was the age I am now, I’d be living and working in space. In the 1960s, there was no particular reason for me to think that wouldn’t happen. People were talking about going to Mars by 2000, and if we’d kept up the investment in space and everything had gone well, we could possibly have done that.

Of course, there would have been factors that slowed down progress. There would have been a lot of the same societal pressures that happened in our existing timeline. Some people would have been concerned about the cost, and the value of going off-world. 

But if we’d managed to keep up the momentum, I certainly think that we could have visited Mars, and had human flybys of Venus, among other things, in my lifetime.

2079? Whether we could have set up permanent colonies in space by that time, I’m not really sure. I guess if we’d pushed really hard, we might’ve gotten to it in one hundred years, but it’s very hard to extrapolate that far. There are so many factors that go into making space colonies or visiting Mars a reality. The politics, in particular, are challenging. Incoming administrations like to shape the space program in their own way and set new priorities. In our own history, the flow of money to NASA was a constant issue all the way through that period, and remains so today.

IP: Do you think privatized space operations like SpaceX or Blue Origin are improving our chances of getting to Mars and exploring farther?

AS: I think the energy that has come into the human space flight arena from the private sector is generally a good thing. There are obviously some personalities involved that can be a bit problematic, but I think in terms of increasing the pace of exploration, and pushing the envelope, the private space companies are a welcome addition to what NASA is doing.

And, to be honest, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the first human to land on Mars got there as a result of a private space flight rather than a NASA mission.

IP: Is there any level of collaboration between NASA and these other privatized space programs?

AS: Oh yes, there certainly is. A lot of the flights to the ISS, the International Space Station, are being conducted by the private sector. There’s actually quite close collaboration between many of the private companies and NASA.

IP: Interesting! Jumping back to Hot Moon for a second, can you tell me a little more about the Apollo Rising series? Can we expect to see another 15 books or will it be a trilogy?

AS:  I think it’s very unlikely that it will turn into 15 books. I don’t have the energy for that! I put quite a lot of effort into writing Hot Moon.

I originally conceived Hot Moon as a standalone, and that’s how I was marketing it and trying to sell it. My agent was considering it that way when she was sending it out to publishers, too.

But then, once CAEZIK bought Hot Moon, we got a lot of positive reactions and a number of nice blurbs from really high-powered authors. My publisher, Shahid Mahmud, had a lot of faith in the book, and so we started talking about a sequel. I admit, I didn’t immediately jump at the idea. I wanted to go back and think it through.

I took a couple of months to think about where the story would go. Surprisingly, I discovered in reading back through my notes that there were actually quite a few ideas that I hadn’t made the most of. Not loose ends, as such – Hot Moon is still complete in itself, and still reads well as a standalone. But there were characters that hadn’t really come to the foreground in the first book, people who could make a big mark in the second. The ideas started flowing, and I began to see all kinds of opportunities to continue the story, and came up with what I think is a very satisfying plot.

Just like Hot Moon, the second book – Radiant Sky – will stand up on its own, with its own story arc. We have the same lead character–my astronaut, Vivian Carter–and many of the other people from Hot Moon will be returning. There will also be a number of new characters, and the story will go in directions that I don’t think most readers will be expecting.

Whether there’ll be further books beyond Radiant Sky, I don’t know. I’m only contracted for the first two books, so we’ll have to wait and see. If they’re successful, if they find their audience, I’d hope there’s a good chance of a third book. I doubt that I’d want to go beyond three …  but then again, in the beginning I thought Hot Moon would be a standalone. So I guess anything could happen. It’s kind of an evolving process, I’d say.

IP: Have you started writing the second book?

AS: Yes, I have. When I pitched it to CAEZIK I sent a very detailed outline – probably a lot more detailed than they were expecting. They’d asked for something relatively short, but what I sent was eighteen pages of fairly dense prose. In addition to describing the plot in detail, I really wanted to work through the politics in the background, and the new technology as well. I guess I was proving to myself as well as to my publisher and editor that I really had the goods to do this.

I think I must be one of the few authors who pitches books with a technical appendix!

As far as the writing goes, I have about 50,000 words of Radiant Sky written now, but they’re very, very rough draft words.

I still need to do quite a bit more editing on them before I can really show them to anybody, but I’m working through various scenes, fleshing out my ideas, and making sure everything hangs together. I’ve made decent progress, but I have a lot more work to do.

IP: In addition to the Hot Moon sequel, what other projects do you have in the works?

AS: I do have a number of new ideas rattling around, and I still have some activity going on with my first trilogy, Clash of Eagles, which came out from Del Rey. Those books are set in a completely different world, in which the Roman Empire survives into the 13th century in its classical form and is now moving into North America.

The Clash trilogy was published between 2015 and 2017, and even though the series is finished, there’s still quite a bit of interest in them. I still get interviews with people wanting to talk about those books. I might go back to that world in the future for some shorter fiction, and I still think about that a lot.

But I do like dotting around history and exploring various times and places. I have several pieces of short fiction fermenting in my mind, and when I get time I’ll start on those.

Also, Rick Wilber and I collaborated on a long novella, or maybe a short novel, called “The Wandering Warriors” which was originally published in Asimov’s, and then came out as a book from WordFire Press in 2020. Rick and I are very keen on this world that we made. It’s a time travel story that combines his passion for baseball and my interest in ancient Romans. So we’ve actually written a story about Roman baseball, and it was quite successful. And he and I are working together again, throwing ideas back and forth about how we might write a sequel to that. It’s a really open-ended concept that we could continue to have a lot of fun with.

So I have various projects going on in the background and a lot of ideas percolating, but promoting Hot Moon and writing Radiant Sky are really my main focuses right now.

IP: So this is kind of a different question. How do you manage keeping a balance between writing fiction and writing professionally for your job? Can you describe what that process looks like?

AS: Yes, certainly. If there are days when I’ve done a lot of technical writing for work, like writing a paper or a report, I would say it’s very difficult to write creatively after that.

But there are other days where I spend a lot of time in meetings, reading up on something, or talking to people. On those days I can really focus on writing in the evenings. For obvious reasons, I do most of my writing on evenings and weekends. I have a lot of very busy weekends where I’m trying to get down to as many words as possible and also do all the day-to-day life stuff that I have to do.

So, I’m not sure I have a process as such, but I do have to manage my time very carefully. And yes, it is sometimes hard to get my brain to do all the things I need it to do!

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A big thanks goes out to Alan for having this chat! If you like the sounds of Hot Moon, it was released on July 26th, 2022, and is available on ebook, in paper, and as an audiobook.
Find all versions HERE.

To learn more about Alan’s writing, check out his website!

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A REVISIT: HOT MOON: an interview with Astrophysicist & Author Alan Smale (Part I)

A year ago, one of Arc Manor’s featured novels was released:
Hot Moon: Apollo Rising, Book I.

In celebration of this hot novel’s one-year anniversary, we’re revisiting an interview with the author Alan Smale by Isaac E. Payne.

~~~

ABOUT HOT MOON – FROM THE PUBLISHER:

“A nail-biting thriller.” −Publishers Weekly

“I loved it. Great ‘hard’ science fiction with convincing space battles. “−Larry Niven

From the Sidewise Award-winning author of the acclaimed Clash of Eagles trilogy comes an alternate 1979 where the US and the Soviets have permanent Moon bases, orbiting space stations, and crewed spy satellites supported by frequent rocket launches.

Apollo 32, commanded by career astronaut Vivian Carter, docks at NASA’s Columbia space station en route to its main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station. In an unplanned and desperate move, Vivian spacewalks through hard vacuum back to her Lunar Module and crew and escapes right before the station falls into Soviet hands

Their original mission scrubbed, Vivian and her crew are redirected to land at Hadley Base, a NASA scientific outpost with a crew of eighteen. But soon Hadley, too, will come under Soviet attack, forcing its unarmed astronauts to daring acts of ingenuity and improvisation.

With multiple viewpoints, shifting from American to Soviet perspective, from occupied space station to American Moon base under siege, to a covert and blistering US Air Force military response, Hot Moon tells the gripping story of a war in space that very nearly might have been.

~~~

We hope you enjoy learning about this author and his novel, and if we’ve piqued your interest, stop by the shop and pick up your own copy HERE. It’s a lot of fun!

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It’s not often that you see a hard science fiction novel crafted with such care and meticulous research as Hot Moon by Alan Smale.

Astrophysicist by day, award-winning author by night, Alan Smale’s newest book is about an alternate 1979 where the Soviets are bent on wresting the Moon from NASA’s hands. This sci fi novel features accurate details of orbital mechanics, daring feats of ingenuity, and a thrilling battle in space.

We sat down with Alan to discuss how he started writing, the inspiration for Hot Moon, and his future plans.

Isaac Payne: So Alan, I know that not only are you an award-winning author, you’re also an astrophysicist for NASA. Tell me, how did you decide to get into astrophysics?

Alan Smale: Sure. It really started when I was a kid. I was always interested in astronomy, and fascinated by the Apollo program as well. I used to go out in the backyard with my dad when I was young and look at the Moon and planets, the stars and galaxies. I stayed interested in astronomy for all of my formative years.

And then later on, I went to college to study physics at the University of Oxford, they had optional astrophysics courses in the first and third year, and so I took those and enjoyed them thoroughly.

After my bachelors degree, I was accepted for a doctoral program. It’s actually called DPhil in Oxford, Doctor of Philosophy, rather than a PhD, but it’s the same thing. I did optical and x-ray astronomy research there for three years or so while earning my doctorate. After that I did a post-doc at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, part of University College London.

When my first post-doc ended, I moved to the States to take up a job at NASA, at the Goddard Space Flight Center. I’ve been with NASA ever since.

IP: What kind of research do you do at NASA?

AS: I study low mass x-ray binaries, which are binary star systems that are quite tightly bound, and one of those stars is a compact object, either a black hole or a neutron star. These are extremely dense objects. Material from the more normal companion star spirals into that compact object, and that’s where the x-rays come from. If we study those sources by looking at both the x-rays and the optical emission, we can learn a lot about them.

IP: So obviously you’ve been pretty ingrained with science and astronomy since you were young. Were you an avid science fiction reader, too?

AS: Oh, yeah, I cut my teeth on all of the old classics. When I was growing up, I read a lot of Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Larry Niven. All of this stuff was really prevalent in the atmosphere around me at the time.

I’ve been interested in science fiction all my life, as well as science and astronomy. In fact, all the sci-fi I read probably played a big role in my interest in the sciences. The space program, astrophysics, and science fiction have always coupled together quite tightly, for me.

IP: And when did you start writing science fiction? Did you start pretty early on with that as well?

AS: I started writing science fiction in a very juvenile kind of way. When I was a kid I used to write what now would be called Star Trek fan fiction. But I really started writing seriously for publication when I turned 30. I was already living in the States and working at the Goddard Space Flight Center by then. I’d finished my academic studies, and I was no longer a student at that point, so I had a little more free time. Then, pretty soon after that, I started having stories accepted.

IP: What was the name of your first publication?

AS: It was a short story called “The Breath of Princes” and it appeared in the A Wizard’s Dozen anthology from Harcourt Brace, edited by Michael Stearns.

It was actually a fantasy story, which is kind of funny looking back on it now. In fact, my first two or three published stories were fantasy, but over the past fifteen years, most of my writing has been alternate history or hard science fiction.

IP: What about the genre of historical fiction do you find fascinating?

AS: I’ve always been a history buff. Growing up in England, there was a lot of history around. My family used to go to Hadrian’s Wall for vacations, and to Bath, so I got to explore a lot of Roman ruins and remains there.

I’m not actually sure what the precipitating event was that made me focus on historical writing, but one thing about it is that it’s very different from my day job. I feel as though I’m using very different mental muscles when I’m writing history-based speculative fiction than when I’m doing academic research.

My most recent book, Hot Moon, is very technical, hard science fiction, but until I got to that book, most of my fiction writing was in a different head-space from the day-job work I was doing. Doing scientific research is very different from writing about history, so it was a complete break for my brain, the two sides didn’t bleed into each other.

It feels very refreshing, somehow, when I’m working hard at both science and writing. A change is as good as a rest!

Anyway: I’d always been fascinated by history, and by some of the older alternate history tales. Books like Lest Darkness Fall by Sprague de Camp, and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.

The past is a very fertile playground for fiction. And one of the things I like about alternate history is that it kind of holds up a mirror to the real history; I get the resonances of what really happened, underlying the tale that I’m telling, and they both reinforce each other and play off each other.

If you know the real historical events, then you’ll know that the events in a given story are different because of a different result in a war, or an election, and perhaps different people are in the foreground. And by doing that, it kind of makes you think about how history is made. Who the important people are. How history really works.

I just found myself gravitating more and more to that kind of writing over the last 10 or 15 years. Over that period, a lot of my reading has been historical non-fiction, and most of my writing output has been historically based.

IP: You mentioned that Hot Moon is hard science fiction, as well as being an alternate history. Can readers expect for Hot Moon to stay within the bounds of 1979 astrophysics, or does the book move into science fiction with more advanced technologies?

AS: I definitely stay within those bounds. There’s nothing in Hot Moon that wouldn’t have been possible with the technology that they had back then. I spent a lot of time researching the Apollo program, which was a real labor of love because as I mentioned before, I was really into it when I was a kid.

I spent a lot of time getting into the nuts and bolts of the technology, really getting deep into figuring out what was possible and what wasn’t. I obey the laws of physics throughout the book, which is actually a pain because orbital mechanics are quite complicated and it really constrains what my characters can do! They need large amounts of fuel for relatively small orbit changes, for example, and things like that.

So in the first book, there is nothing that wasn’t possible with the technology of the time. The Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft, the Lunar Rovers, and other hardware in the book either existed in the 1970s, or could have been in existence in that timeframe if the US and Soviet space programs had continued. There would have been no technical showstoppers with implementing any of the vehicles, machinery, or bases in Hot Moon.

In the second book we’ll certainly see more of the speculative technology that was suggested at the time. These are ideas that people had done a bit of experimentation with, some prototyping and technical development, but which never came to fruition. There were a lot of bright ideas around then, but a lot of those programs ended up being canceled, or not coming to fruition for other reasons.

So, overall, I’ve tried really hard to keep the science very close to reality. There’s a key political difference in how we get to the world of Hot Moon in 1979. And one of those differences is that the US involvement in Vietnam is much more limited, and of a shorter duration.

As a result, the US has quite a lot more money. In reality, the US couldn’t possibly have pursued the war in Vietnam and the Space Race simultaneously without making huge concessions elsewhere. So, a different Vietnam War, and a rather different Cold War, are central to the Hot Moon universe.

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Make sure to check out the second part of our conversation with Alan Smale, right here on the Signals from the Edge blog next week!

In the meantime, check out another one of our interviews: CAT RAMBO & JENNIFER BROZEK

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GALAXY’S EDGE REVIEW ROUNDUP: MAY 2023

Richard Chwedyk sold his first story in 1990, won a Nebula in 2002, and has been active in the field for the past thirty-two years.

GOING OUT IN STYLE

Well, the curtain is coming down, the swan is waiting in the wings, the song is sounding. One phase in the history of GALAXY’S EDGE is coming to a close. It’s time for me to pack up my bindle and find a new train to hop.

Funny thing: I feel like I never really hopped this train in the first place. I’ve been running behind it, or alongside it at best, for most of the journey. Which is not to say that it hasn’t been informative, educational, and even fun.

I was also fortunate enough to acquire this gig at a time when the field, and the publishing world in general, was undergoing fundamental changes.

Or does it always feel that way?

Perhaps, but for some reason this feels different. “Professional” publishing, for the most part, seems to have become more “corporate” than ever, trying harder than ever to manufacture saleable product, which seems, from a corporate perspective, to necessitate more sharply defining categories and genres. Conversely, our authors are producing work that, where it doesn’t defy the old categories, confounds them. Smaller presses and independents are making their own rules, and it’s always been from them that the innovations have come.

At one level, it’s a fascinating time to be reviewing books. Which makes it a little sad to find myself turning in my last column.

And yet, the less time I spend putting together columns, the more time I have to read.

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Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions
edited by A. R. Capetta and
Wade Roush
MITeen Press
October 2022

Why hasn’t someone thought of this before?

Perhaps they have, and I was just not on the mailing list.

While many of us (looking at the mirror now) have lamented the perceived lack of interest in short science fiction by younger readers, and have also noted that much science fiction in the YA market are variations on dystopic themes or heroic fantasy gussied up with zap guns and warp-drive starships, MITeen Press, through the editorial auspices of A. R. Capetta and Wade Roush, have done something about it with this fine collection of ten stories. The hardcover edition premiered last autumn, so I’m late in including it here, but the trade paperback will be coming out next fall, so I’m not exceedingly remiss (this time).

The goals of this anthology seem to be threefold: 1.) familiarize YA readers with the joys of short science fiction; 2.) with the emphasis on science; and 3.) to do so with as much innovation in style and approach as the authors can provide. One of the stories is written as a sequence of text messages. Another is a graphic story. The others, written in more familiar prose styles, are not slouching in exploring the boundaries of narrative form.

Every story here is of a quality that, if it doesn’t command your attention, is worthy of your committed perusal. That being said, the ones I enjoyed most were “The Weight of a Name” by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, Capetta’s own “Extremophiles,” Elizabeth Bear’s “Twin Strangers” and “Melanitis” by Junauda Petrus-Nasah. The graphic story, “The Memory of Soil” by Wendy Xu, is also great in its literal approach to its title. Perhaps because it resonates with the attitude to nature I encountered in Nancy Marie Brown’s book, of which more later.

Would that more of our “big,” i.e. “professional,” publishers would think along these lines. Science fiction in many respects has always been at its strongest in its shortest form. And the move to more digital publishing extinguishes many of the arguments against short fiction getting low sales. This may be a good time to re-emphasize the joys and importance of short fiction to a new generation. In fact, there may never be a better time than now.

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Victory City
by Salman Rushdie
Random House
February 2023

Let me say this at the outset: this is a fantasy novel.

The reason I’m saying that is, apparently, critics and Rushdie fans either can’t say the word, or can’t find the word—fantasy.

There, I’ve said it again.

When a goddess speaks through the mouth of a little girl who is her namesake, it’s fantasy.

When that namesake has a lifespan of 247 years, it’s fantasy.

When an entire city is grown from a bag of magic seeds, it’s fantasy.

When your protagonist can change humans into other animals, it’s fantasy.

And Rushdie, no matter what else he is or what else he does, is a fantasy writer.

Rushdie is a great storyteller, and he first embraced storytelling at a time when the literary currents in which he chose to swim were churning in the opposite direction.

Much of this story is based upon folklore and history—like much fantasy. And, like much contemporary fantasy, he uses folklore and history to explore contemporary themes. It’s not so much that he is doing anything different as he is doing some things better.

The tale of Pampa Kampana, and her founding of the city of Bisnaga, a sort of feminist utopia, and the tale itself—and how the tale is told—is very much at the heart of the novel. The prose is presented as a translation from Sanskrit, and as a reflection of that language, so that its cadences and vocabulary seem of another time as much as its content may reflect ours.

In a way, it is South Asian Tolkien.

Did I say that?

I did. And I mean it.

If you’ve never read Rushdie before, read this one. Just … read it. Forget about the Booker Prizes. Forget about the controversies. Hard as it may be, even try to forget about the fatwa and the more recent horrendous physical attack that nearly took his life. Leave that aside, and just enter the reality, the fabric, of this novel, and allow it to perform its enchantments.

If you’re any reader of fantasy, you’ll find yourself in familiar territory.

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Wraithbound
by Tim Akers
Baen
April 2023

You can check with my editor: I turned this column in very, very late.

I have an excuse. I’ve been waiting for a copy of Wraithbound to arrive. And I’m pleased to say it was worth the wait.

The premise is simple. Young Rae Kelthannis, the son of a “stormbinder” who is stitched to an elemental wind spirit and can command those forces of nature, wants to follow in his father’s footsteps. Hastily, and against his father’s wishes, he attempts the procedure—and botches it. Instead of stitching himself to an air elemental, he is bound to a demonic wraith. The world in which father and son live is already dipping into chaos, and the mayhem picks up from there.

I’ve only recently become familiar with Tim Akers’s work, and I’m highly impressed with the economic precision of his prose and his real gift for keeping the action moving throughout his novels. In Wraithbound I believe he gets even better. My perception may be a bit blurred because for once I’m actually starting with the first book in a fantasy series, but his storytelling skills are impressive. And on a thematic level, this novel demonstrates the kind of clarity and maturity I wish were more evident in other volumes of this sort. I’m anticipating the release of the next volume in this series, especially since this time I won’t have to read it on deadline.

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Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth
by Nancy Marie Brown
Pegasus Books
October 2022

I’ve never reviewed a nonfiction book here, at least not that I recall, but this humble meditation that brings together Iceland, its folklore, climate change, particle physics and … J. R. R. Tolkien(!) is very much worth your attention, no matter where your interests lie.

I’ve said, I think, in these very pages (if not, I’m saying it now) that fantasy, like science fiction, is not so much a literary category as it is a way of looking at the world (and Damon Knight said something like it before, so there!). In that way, we might find Tolkien the most important of the topics included in this book. Brown quotes from his seminal essay, “On Fairy-stories” extensively. I’ve always read the essay as a kind of manifesto, not for fantasy itself but for a way of looking at fantasy, and the insights it can provide for how we perceive the world around us. The sentiment is echoed in another book from which Brown quotes, about James M. Barrie. Neuroscientist Rosalind Ridley, in Peter Pan and the Mind of J. M. Barrie, points out that fairies, like paper currency, are things that exist and have value only if everyone agrees they do. There are differences between solid objects and socially constructed ones.

Ridley writes: “There are also occasions when art tells us something that science only recognizes at a later time.”

That’s not news to us. But Brown puts this together with Icelandic beliefs in “hidden folk,” like elves and gnomes and such, and how they are held even by hard-edged rationalistic scientists and intellectuals, and how these beliefs inform their attitude towards the environment. Desolate stretches of the countryside, with nothing visible but ice and stone, are seen as having something akin to a sentience, if not a consciousness. They are “alive.” We might regard our environment differently if we considered it as connected to ourselves, through the hidden folk, and in turn we connected to it. We might make different choices before digging up rocks to build a highway or an oil well.

And the means by which we can see the world this way is through the fantasy of “fairy-stories”—in the widest sense of this term.

I’m presenting this thesis in only the most elementary fashion. The detail to which Brown gives her thoughts are wonderfully lucid and thought-provoking. In a way, it’s what we in the field have always understood, but greatly appreciate its being articulated so beautifully in this book, so that others might see what we’re talking about.

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Observer
by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress
The Story Plant
January 2023

And speaking of consciousness …

Robert Lanza is a brilliant scientist and remarkable thinker, but perhaps the smartest decision he ever made was to collaborate with Nancy Kress when he decided to present some of his farthest-out concepts in novel form. Great scientists do not have an outstanding record in the novel-writing sweepstakes. Kress not only is as fine a professional novelist as is working today, but she has explored some similar themes as Lanza presents here with her own work, most notably genetics and the uploading of consciousness—whatever that is.

Tolkien once said in an interview that at the heart of all great literature is the inevitability of death. What’s at the heart of this novel is to find a way of overriding that certainty. Dr. Caroline Soames-Watkins, whose brilliant career has been derailed by a twitterstorm, is hired by her great-uncle, a Nobel laureate, to work on that very project, with himself as the subject.

The question of surviving natural death often boils down to the question of what actually survives. If you download the memories of a dead person, are you saying a person consists of memories and nothing more? If you can succeed in transferring a neuro-system into some other entity or host, does that mean all that matters is the neuro-system? What is the nature of consciousness, and how much of it is dependent upon the biosystem that houses it? What is the nature of personhood?

Questions like these can be perplexing enough to make a reader want to swear off consciousness forever. And yet Lanza explores them thoroughly in ways that don’t make you think you’ve accidentally dropped LSD. Kress has created characters and settings to house these big ideas in ways that feel perfectly natural and emphasize the tensions and attractions which weave these characters together. This is supposed to be a “novel of ideas,” and yet it doesn’t feel like one, or not “merely” like one. It is a human (even all-too-human) story with all the depth and breadth one looks for in any good novel, and does so with an enviable simplicity of language and structure.

If anything underscores the mysterious complexity of consciousness (and its scary doppelganger, the unconscious), it’s a novel, or any work of art, really.

Which makes, I guess, Observer, the novel itself, its own best argument. And a most convincing one at that.

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High Noon on Proxima B
edited by David Boop
Baen Books
February 2023

Yes, yes, I know. I reviewed David Boop’s previous anthology on this theme, Gunfight on Europa Station, not very long ago. This time, though, I think he’s outdone himself in attracting some fine science fiction with western themes. And I’ll emphasize science fiction, because very often with “genre-bending” stories, the SF gets a little lost. As Boop makes clear in his Foreword, the authors have done their painstaking homework. And the results are evident.

Especially notable are stories by the always-reliable Brenda Cooper and Walter John Williams, not to mention Ken Scholes and Susan R. Matthews. Thea Hutcheson’s “Five Mules for Madame Calypso” took me by surprise; I thought stories about bordello ships were abandoned after Mike Resnick stopped writing them a few decades ago. “Justice and Prosperity” by Milton J. Davis is, frankly, a brilliant evocation of African American themes brought into a new perspective. The story from which the anthology takes its title, “High Noon on Proxima Centauri b,” by Cliff Winning, moves its action swiftly and effectively while juggling seemingly impossible loads of astronomical information with grace.

It’s all fine work.

Often, when editors return to themes like this for a follow-up collection, the results are not unlike “sequel syndrome” with popular films. In this case, Boop gets better, or his authors do. Personally, I wouldn’t tempt the fates with another in this series, but if Boop proves more intrepid than I, and rides the bronco one more time, I’ll be more than willing to slap a twenty-dollar gold piece down on the bar and say, “Hit me again.”

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Fort Privilege
by Kit Reed
Doubleday Books
April 1985

Let us now praise Kit Reed.

I first encountered her work in the pages of F&SF. She wrote the kind of short fiction that I considered “experimental” at the time. Kind of a cosmopolitan Carol Emshwiller, with a touch of Margaret St. Clair and even a little Robert Sheckley. Innovative, sophisticated, witty. I still like her short fiction best, but fans also highly value some of her novels, especially Little Sisters of the Apocalypse.

Her novel, Fort Privilege, has always intrigued me. Critics in the field at the time seemed to pay little attention to it, though it displayed the kind of maturity and stylistic skill they called for. It was like a dish they ordered from the kitchen, then sent back without comment.

Which isn’t an inappropriate metaphor, since the novel is about a contingent of New York City’s super-wealthy, luxuriously ensconced in the fortress-like Parkhurst apartments (modeled on the famous Dakota) on Central Park West while the metropolis becomes an enormous reenactment of Escape from New York. Most of the city’s elite have retreated and, in the world of this novel, there isn’t much between the super-rich and the super-angry “rabble.” Led by the current owner, the Parkhurst residents intend to have at least one more defiant fling—not just interested in fiddling while Rome burns, but adding an entire symphony orchestra doing back flips on roller skates.

I think the novel was not accepted at the time because it didn’t engage in the usual class-struggle stereotypes. The wealthy Parkhurst residents, though far from admirable, are not execrable caricatures of all we hate about the super-rich. The mobs outside, justifiably raging against the inequities and filled with criminal intent, are barely depicted at all. Every critic seemed to have a predetermined notion of how this story should be told, and no regard for the story Reed was telling them. She had a distinct take on the growing disparity between the wealthy and everyone else. It wasn’t that different from the social justice issues the critics were looking for. In fact, in some ways she had taken those issues for granted to focus on other aspects of human behavior under such severe divisions.

Those aspects? Hard to summarize, if I really have a handle on what they are, but they seem to be expressed or alluded to in this passage early on in the novel, from the point of view of Bart, our closest protagonist and one of those not quite “to the manor born”:

 … What if things were as bad as everybody said? The Parkhurst was impregnable. The worse things were outside, the harder you danced. There was a kind of bizarre recklessness about this that pulled him along. They danced before the Battle of Waterloo, he thought; the night before the Sepoy uprising at, he thought it was one of the stations north of Delhi, there was one hell of an officers’ ball. Better have fun tonight; no telling what you would be called upon to do the next day.

We don’t need to see the rioters in Central Park to understand a common thread may run between “them that got” and “them that don’t.” To do so might spawn moral questions that are, in this novel, beside the point. And in these times, when the divisions between the “gots” and the “don’ts” have grown further than could have been imagined in 1985 (at least by many of us), it may be worthwhile to rediscover, or reexplore, this novel by an author of speculative fiction who never went for easy answers.

For which we should be ever grateful to her, and always remember her.

Copyright © 2023 by Richard Chwedyk.

~~~

Find the entire last issue at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine — where you can read for free until June 30, 2023.

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A REVISIT: The Reinvented Anthologies: a conversation with Cat Rambo & Jennifer Brozek (Part I)

Only a year ago, Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek were hard at work on The Reinvented Heart. Now, with the release of their second anthology The Reinvented Detective (and it is SO good, ya’ll!) looming on the horizon, we thought we’d take a little trip back in time and revisit an awesome interview from Isaac E. Payne and the editors of the Reinvented series.

Enjoy …

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SFF legends Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek have been hard at work on The Reinvented Heart, an anthology about sci-fi relationships.

We met up with them to discuss the new anthology—available in ebook and hardcover.

Here’s what they had to say:

Isaac Payne: So I only have a couple of questions, and then we can open it up to a conversation afterwards. I guess starting out I want to ask about the The Reinvented Heart anthology. It’s been making some waves out there on the SFF frequencies, and I’m just curious about how you decided to break up the Anthology into three distinct sections. I’m familiar with only a few other anthos that do this, so what was the inspiration behind that idea?

Cat Rambo: I actually talked to Jane Yolan in an interview I did with her about that. You may have noticed the three sections are each prefaced by Jane. And in fact, she read them all on the interview, which was really cute.

Basically, we approached Jane and asked if she’d write something for us, and she said, how about poems? My response was, “sure, you’re Jane Yolan!” and I want something from you.

So, she sent in three poems and I said to Jen, you know, poetry is cheap, right? We’re paying by the line, and it’s not like a 5,000-word story.

We ended up organizing the book according to the three poems, breaking it into three sections—Hearts, Hands, and Mind.

And then as part of The Reinvented Detective, which is the anthology that’s coming out next year, we asked Jane to write us three poems again, this time about themes around detectives.

But the funny thing is that I just did this interview with Jane and she hadn’t known what we’d done with her poems until she got the PDF, and she was just delighted! No one had ever done anything like that with her poems before.

IP: That’s cool! You mentioned The Reinvented Detective which is coming up here next year. Is there anything that you’re going to change about this anthology based on what you learned from The Reinvented Heart?

Jennifer Brozek: Well, since we’re just now going through the hold stories and the on-spec stories, I think it might be a little bit too soon to answer that.

But based on the stories we’re getting, we might spread out the anthology to make it about more than just crime and justice.

We might organize it based on groups of stories, like Art Nouveau or the Old Classic. We got a lot of Poirot and Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as some pastiches.

I’m thinking that when we see all the stories, we’re going to end up breaking them out into groups rather than themes, but that may change.

We haven’t seen all the stories yet!

IP: Just out of curiosity, how many submissions did you receive for The Reinvented Heart? I edited the Triangulation: Extinction anthology and I’m always curious about the numbers for other anthologies.

CR: I want to say around 230?

JB: No, it was closer to 260, and that’s just slush. We had the on-spec stories too, so in total it’s more like 300.

IP: Gotcha, that’s pretty good, all things considered!

JB: Yeah. The Reinvented Heart is my 21st anthology, and The Reinvented Detective is my 22nd.

When I did 99 Tiny Terrors, I got 600 submissions in a month! Or when I do a closed anthology, like The Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods, I cherry-pick every author.

So, the number of submissions really depends on how much it pays and how many people feel they have a chance to get into the anthology. For 99 Tiny Terrors, a lot of new people were willing to send in their stories because it’s flash.

CR: Yeah, flash is fun. Fun and fast.

JB: But when I was working with Apex Magazine as a slush reader, I’d have to read five stories a day just to keep up!

IP: Yeah, for Triangulation: Extinction I think we had around 600 different submissions. That was over the span of four months, but when the submission window closed, I was still doing a lot of reading!

CR: Yeah. Well, I read completely differently than Jenn.

Jenn is very kind of slow and steady, reading five stories a day. Whereas what I will do is take a weekend to—and excuse my language—just f***ing slam through, sometimes at the rate of a hundred or so stories a day.

And I’m reading fast—fast and furious. But I’m making authors really have to prove themselves to me in the first half page or so.

IP: I guess it’s kind of hard as a writer when you don’t know whether or not you’ll be going through that gauntlet.

JB: When I teach and talk about being an editor, I tell everybody to write your stories like you’re going to be read by a slush reader who’s having a terrible day and all they have to do is get through your story so they can go home.

All your story has to do is turn a slush reader’s terrible day into something magical.

CR: Ah, that’s a nice one, that’s good. You know, one of the talking points of the book is that despite having set the word count at 5,000, there’s a novelette in there! I had solicited Justina Robeson for a story, and she kept mailing back saying that it was getting longer and longer.

And finally, we said, sure, send it in. And both Jenn and I read it and knew we had to put it in the anthology because it was so good!

IP: That’s great, it’s always nice to be surprised like that. So, what’s up next for The Reinvented series? After The Reinvented Detective, of course.

CR: We’re still arguing about that, haha. But we’re absolutely going to continue the series; we’d like to do one a year. I really want to do The Reinvented Coin, so my feeling is that if I’m patient and give Jenn her way for the next few, I’ll get to do that one.

JB: I like that one, but I’m interested in doing The Reinvented Fable. Like if you do a version of Little Red Riding Hood, but in the future, in space. We can do a contrast between old and new fables.

But I do like the idea of The Reinvented Coin, or Cat came up with a good one, The Reinvented Alice.

CR: Yeah, The Reinvented Alice or The Reinvented Oz.

JB: It’s Oz but all science fiction, where you pick a pastiche based on the original series.

IP: I do like those ideas. What does The Reinvented Coin entail?

CR: Economics, trade, bartering. 

JB: Anything that fits under that broad category, really. You could be selling memories of loved ones, for example.

CR: But only one story about NFTs, tops.

IP: Have you read the book This Eden by Ed O’Loughlin? It’s like a science fiction noir, espionage story, but at the end the main villain is a cryptocurrency.

CR: Oh, I love that, I’ll have to find that book!

IP: That’s just what The Reinvented Coin reminded me of haha. So, here I have a few questions that get into the SFF conversation as a whole …

#

Join us next week for the second part of this interview with Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek, where they talk about the SFF community as a whole, and the changes coming down the line for the genre.

And keep an eye out for the upcoming announcement of The Reinvented Detective release!

~~~

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GALAXY’S EDGE REVIEW ROUNDUP: MARCH 2023

Richard Chwedyk sold his first story in 1990, won a Nebula in 2002, and has been active in the field for the past thirty-two years.

MOVING OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE

The other day I was writing up a lecture for an asynchronous class on science fiction writing I’m supposed to be putting together. I brought up the subject of how there’s a wide variety of reading in the field these days, some but not all of it divided along generational lines. Mostly, though, it’s a matter that readers often find one kind of SF that appeals to them, but don’t venture much further from that little corner of work they like. So I recommended to aspiring writers to read as much SF as they can manage, and to read as much outside of their “comfort zone.” See what the folks on the other end of the field are doing. Good or bad, you’ll learn something you can apply to your own writing.

Good advice, I thought. And like much of the good advice I hand out, I wasn’t following it.

Teacher, teach thyself first.

So, most of the entries in this column will be of books and authors who aren’t my “go to” choices.

And what I found was that I can be right even when I don’t know what I’m talking about.

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The Genesis of Misery
by Neon Yang
Tor
September 2022

This may sound like a negative review, but it’s not. Yang does a lot of things that get on my nerves. They use the sort of present tense narration that’s become quite fashionable, but they handle it effectively and consistently. The dialog is also fashionably snarky and always looking to make little zingers that will end up in someone’s next news feed.

I let those little irritations go because at the heart of this novel is an interesting theme. A kind of “Joan of Arc” situation with their Misery Nomaki protagonist, but not in any traditional, or even nontraditional, way I’ve seen before.

The neat thing about it was that it erased the usual sense of inevitability that accompanies such a classic mythos and its variations. It kept me reading with great anticipation of where Yang would take the story.

Way out of my comfort zone, but I’m glad I read it. I suspect I’ll be reading more books written in this kind of voice. If it’s where we’re going, I don’t want to be left behind.

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Leech
by Hiron Ennes
Tordotcom
September 2022

Reading about parasites and viruses and weird microbial entities is something of a horror story all in its own way. It can be appalling, disgusting and, ultimately, compelling. What is that phrase again from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? “The fascination of the abomination.”

Pair this with a gothic setting and a cast of characters from a surrealist Bruno Schulz novel, and you might have something like Hiron Ennes’s Leech. It’s not the sort of novel I would usually choose to read—not in my “comfort zone,” surely—but I’m grateful I did. It adds whole new meanings, in fact, to “comfort zone,” and then smashes them to pieces and buries them in quicklime in the deepest cellar of an ancient fortress.

It begins with our narrator/protagonist, enroute to the Château de Verdira, home of the Interprovincial Medical Institute, in the far north of an unnamed country. The doctor of the chateau’s baron has died, and the narrator is to become his replacement. The last leg of the journey is on a worn-out sled:

The ride is unpleasant, but it is not long. In a few minutes an orchard of smokestacks appears beyond the treetop, ringed by the slanted tin roofs of miners’ homes. The pines part, ushering us down a corridor of crooked stone buildings braced with ice. We wind through the snowy streets, past half-buried warehouses, past belching chimneys and pumping turbines that denied sleep even in the dead of winter, and up the slope of a looming hillside. At its crest, we cough to a halt before a wrought-iron gate. Two men emerge from a crumbling guards’ hut, one wielding a shovel and the other a rifle. They exchange a few words, then force the gate open on hinges rigid with cold. The taller one waves us in, gun dangling from his shoulder like a broken limb, and we sputter onto the unkempt, frozen grounds … 

The institute is allegedly devoted to training doctors and guarding humanity from a bevy of microbial threats that have already jeopardized their existence on this world. Unfortunately, one of the many bodies the institute has kept for many purposes—research and otherwise—has disappeared. Our narrator has to discover what has happened to the body. And that’s for starters.

There is much of Mary Shelley here, not only Frankenstein but The Last Man. Along with the surreal influences added to a landscape designed by Mervyn Peake, I’m reminded a lot of the Brontës. It reminds me of a time when I had my advanced science fiction writing students read Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” (a story partly inspired by her reading about botflies before taking a trip to Peru). One of my students described it as a love story, in fact, as a version of Jane Eyre. And, by golly, my student was right. Similarly, Leech is a novel gazing down from the precipice of Romanticism, the great carpet of the world below looking distant and tiny—but familiar—as if fixed to a microscope’s slide.

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Haunted by the Past
by Simon R. Green
Baen
December 2022

In my junior high days, not only did I have a weakness for books about the occult and psychic investigators (or whoever passed as them then), but I enjoyed tales about detectives like Algernon Blackwood’s Dr. John Silence and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin. When I hit full adolescence, I wrote my own parodies of a hard-boiled psychic private eye named Ed Migraine. By the time Anita Blake and Dirk Gently came by, I had moved on to what I thought were greater things. Harry Dresden may have hung out in Chicago, his books felt like someone trying to swat flies with a Howitzer. Not my thing.

Recently, though, I’ve been feeling nostalgic for Ed Migraine, so I picked up the latest in Simon R. Green’s Ishmael Jones series. Jones and his companion, Penny Belcourt, seemed more my speed than Harry Dresden.

This latest adventure has them at Glenbury Hall, where an associate of theirs has disappeared. It’s supposed to be the most haunted place in England, reminding me of the historic Borley Rectory. It’s loaded with strange, creepy, scary stuff, which suits me fine. Ishmael and Penny are experienced enough with this stuff to keep their wits and wittiness about them.

Nevertheless, things get stranger and stranger until they seem to be on the verge of a very science-fictional spatial-temporal paradox.

Or at least so it seems.

For me, as a reader, it feels like the farther you travel, the closer you get to home.

In books like this, the “detective” part has to be as strong, if not stronger, than the “occult” part. It works for me in Haunted by the Past. Readers more familiar with this subgenre may not be as impressed, but Green’s prose is efficient without being utilitarian. And it’s of a good length (283 pages) to keep things moving and engaging.

I’m not quite ready to leap back into occult mystery stories, but I’m sorely tempted to pick up some more books in this series and perhaps reacquaint myself with what intrigued me about ghosts, poltergeists and suchlike in the first place.

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The Scarab Mission
by James L. Cambias
Baen
January 2023

In all honesty, James L. Cambias is definitely not outside my comfort zone, though I must confess that I was about to throw in the towel on any more novels about scavenger ships. Every other SF novel with a spacefaring setting published today has to have a crew of scavengers, it seems.

The last novel of his I read, Arkad’s World, really impressed me, and I’ve always enjoyed his short fiction. So, even though this is the second book in a series, and it contains a derelict colony, which is another thing I’ve seen quite enough of recently, I thought I’d give it a try.

The plot is a suitably tangled web, in a good way, and the concept of the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium is quite engaging, but what took my attention especially were the characters. Solana Sina, the scarab (Cambias loses no time in explaining what a scarab is) who can’t bear to look at human faces; Atmin, a raven; Utsuro, a cyborg; and … a dinosaur!

I am always a sucker for a good dinosaur:

Pera was big—probably two hundred kilos—but she looked lean and swift rather than bulky. The word predatory came to mind. Her long tail coiled securely around the post of the seat she was sitting on, with her massive legs tucked in on either side. She wore a simple dark skinsuit with lots of pockets, and had gloves on her feet with openings for her huge hooked claws—which were coated in blue enamel. Her skin was dark gold and the crest of feathers on her head was brilliant blue, matching her eyes. More blue feathers ran along the other edge of each bare forearm.

The ship they’re on, Yanai, is also a character.The most intriguing character for me makes a late appearance: an AI spider named Daslakh. Apparently, Daslakh’s role in the preceding novel, The Godel Operation, was much greater, so I’ll have to go back and check that one out. Daslakh is wise, sneaky and enigmatic, and great fun to read about.

Of course there’s intrigue, pirates, human (and non-human) trafficking, plenty of suspense and all sorts of things to keep the story moving. It’s not just great fun but thoughtful fun. And it all comes in at lean, mean and super-clean 266 pages. I’m sold. Cambias can write about wriggling space jelly, I’d venture, and it would still be in my comfort zone.

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Chicks in Tank Tops
edited by Jason Cordova
Baen
January 2023

It wasn’t too many years ago when it seemed that every new release in the SF book section featured an attractive female in an impractically skimpy, skin-tight outfit brandishing a weapon at least twice her size. What made me most uncomfortable about the covers wasn’t so much the imagery and symbolism (a topic for a much longer essay), but that the imagery and symbolism had become so pervasive. The sameness of it all almost (but not quite) made me yearn for the old days of gothic romances, when rack after rack was filled with book covers featuring wispy women in negligees looking over their shoulders with fearful expressions while in the background loomed old scary mansions, or even castles, with a light in a single window.

We returned to one of the great unwritten rules of publishing: when something hits it big, keep copying it and copying it until you can barely give the books away (reminding me of even older days when a detergent company, I kid you not, put a Harlequin Romance in every box they sold). Repetition is the sincerest form of desperation.

It was about 1995 that Baen published the first Chicks in Chainmail anthology, edited by the irrepressible Esther M. Friesner. It was a takeoff on the sword and sorcery books, the covers of which featured attractive females in impractically skimpy outfits, brandishing swords at least twice their size. Some great new ideas go back a long way.

Back then, I didn’t board the Chicks in Chainmail bus, or the bus didn’t stop for me. I may have appreciated the self-parody of a form which in some respects had already become parodic, but at the time I was striving for a more “serious” side to SFF and didn’t have the patience for amusing takes on women in sword and sorcery.

In other words, I was being a snob.

A number of follow-up anthologies came out until about 2004, with a return volume, Chicks and Balances, in 2015. After that, I thought the coast was clear.

I was wrong.

Chicks in Tank Tops hopes (or threatens) to do with women in military SF what Chicks in Chainmail did for women in sword and sorcery. In the ensuing years I have lost at least some of my snobbiness, as well as more willing to search for good short fiction wherever I can find it. My timing, for once, is spot on.

The stories included herein are quite smart and sophisticated. The entry by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller dually reminded me of how long it’s been since I’ve read anything by them and how good they can be. There are works here by the always reliable Jody Lynn Nye, David Drake (two stories!) and Esther M. Friesner herself. What impressed me as much if not more were the stories by authors with whom I’m less familiar, like A. C. Haskins, Joelle Presby, G. Scott Huggins and Marisa Wolf. Regular readers of military SF may be more familiar with these names, but I’m a stranger in town.

The overall quality of the work here is impressive. It may not make me a fan of military SF, no matter who or what is on the cover, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for these authors’ works from here on.

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Walk to the End of the World
by Suzy McKee Charnas
Ballantine
February 1974

Let us now praise Suzy McKee Charnas.

The sad news is that she recently passed away, in fact just as I was readying to complete this column. I might have waited for a later column, but I didn’t want to allow this opportunity to pass. One never knows these days who we might lose in the coming months. I also wanted to note this novel in contrast to Chicks in Tank Tops. It helps underscore the distance we’ve come in the portrayal of women in American science fiction.

Charnas’s effect on feminist science fiction has been, in my opinion, overlooked for quite a while. It can be argued, and quite successfully, that her second novel, Motherlines, was more influential in feminist SF circles, but looking back on these novels, and the “Holdfast Chronicles” in its entirety, without Walk to the End of the World, there would be no Motherlines, or The Furies, or The Conqueror’s Child.

I mean that in more than a chronological sense. Motherlines is one of those novels that describe how an alternative society can be formed. Walk to the End of the World describes why it’s formed, and does so with sincere urgency.

Walk takes us to a postapocalyptic world where women are subjugated in the most horrific ways. Her depiction of this world is uncompromising, unsparing. Contemporary readers will need a multitude of trigger warnings.

Holdfast is a brutal, unforgiving world, ruled by some of the most misogynistic, sadistic males you’ll find in all of literature. We learn more about this world than we’d care to, but we need to. It’s not necessarily supposed to be a reflection of “our” world, but it depicts what our world can feel like if you occupy the bottom rungs, and what it can become if we’re not careful. Our central protagonist, Alldera, takes a long time coming to the foreground, but when she and her few allies do, she provides the ray of hope we’ve been looking for. Not a bright hope, but enough.

That’s the point.

The pace is akin to a slow, relentless drumbeat. She refuses to spare the reader’s sensitivities. It’s a first novel and has those flaws of many first novels, especially her reliance on many lengthy expositional passages. Charnas pulls it off because she’s writing with her nerves and her heart.

That’s what keeps it compelling. Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin, working at the same time, are intellectual and clever and stylistically brilliant. Charnas is like pure id. Her primal voice and unflinching eye are what still speak to us after a half century and will keep speaking to us for many years to come.

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Redspace Rising
by Brian Trent
Flame Tree Press
September 2022

Definitely in my comfort zone and very much worth reading. Just when you thought tales taking place within our solar system have pretty much exhausted the technological possibilities, someone like Brian Trent comes along and reimagines everything.

The suspense and action here come from notion that war criminals from a recent interplanetary melee have escaped arrest by housing themselves in genetically 3-D printed versions of other humans. Hal Clement and Philip K. Dick can both eat their hearts out. This is the second book in a series but it took me no longer than the first chapter to get up to speed. Trent is an experienced prose juggler and gives this whole tale a marvelous sense of urgency.

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The Best of Edward M. Lerner
by Edward M. Lerner
ReAnimus Press
May 2022

Allow me to squeeze one more in. I’ve had to cut it for the last two columns. Lerner is one of the wittiest and most thoughtful of recent Analog regulars, and this collection provides a fine overview of his output. My one added observation is that the title is somewhat premature. “Best of” collections are supposed to be a sort of authoritative summary of authors who are wrapping up, unofficially, their authorial careers (relax, James Van Pelt, I don’t mean you, either). Not only do I think Lerner has a few more good novellas in him, this volume also misses a couple that to my mind should rate inclusion. For the time being, though, this will do nicely.

Copyright © 2023 by Richard Chwedyk.

~~~

Find the entire article at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine — where you can read for free until April 30, 2023.

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SIX MUST-READ SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS BY WOMEN AUTHORS

We wrap up our celebration in March of Women’s History Month with six “must-read” Science Fiction novels by a group of women authors that make us want to stand up and clap and stories that promise to break your heart a little, right before they show you there is hope for us and our future …

Thank you.

Dept. of Speculation meets Black Mirror in this lyrical, speculative debut about a queer mother raising her daughter in an unjust surveillance state …

In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement: rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime—and a warning to those they encounter. Within the Department, corruption and prejudice run rampant, giving rise to an underclass of so-called Shadesters who are disenfranchised, publicly shamed, and deprived of civil rights protections.

Kris is a Shadester and a new mother to a baby born with a second shadow of her own. Grieving the loss of her wife and thoroughly unprepared for the reality of raising a child alone, Kris teeters on the edge of collapse, fumbling in a daze of alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. Yet as the kid grows, Kris finds her footing, raising a child whose irrepressible spark cannot be dampened by the harsh realities of the world. She can’t forget her wife, but with time, she can make a new life for herself and the kid, supported by a community of fellow misfits who defy the Department to lift one another up in solidarity and hope.

With a first-person register reminiscent of the fierce self-disclosure of Sheila Heti and the poetic precision of Ocean Vuong, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a bold debut novel that examines the long shadow of grief, the hard work of parenting, and the power of queer resistance.

A stunning science fiction debut, The Space Between Worlds is both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging …

‘My mother used to say I was born reaching, which is true. She also used to say it would get me killed, which it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway.’

Born in the dirt of the wasteland, Cara has fought her entire life just to survive. Now she has done the impossible, and landed herself a comfortable life on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, she’s on a sure path to citizenship and security – on this world, at least.

Of the 380 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but 8.

Cara’s parallel selves are exceptionally good at dying – from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun – which makes Cara wary, and valuable. Because while multiverse travel is possible, no one can visit a world in which their counterpart is still alive. And no one has fewer counterparts than Cara.

But then one of her eight doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined – and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her earth, but the entire multiverse.

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space …

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. 

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. 

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his mysterious employers have inadvertently discovered time travel—and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes …

Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family.
 
So begins Jinwoo Chong’s dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic ’80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse.
 
Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers’s delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future …

~~~

Winner of the Hugo Award!

It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.

One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered.

But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.

They’re going to need to ask it a lot.

Becky Chambers’s new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?

A science fiction epic for our times and a love letter to our future, The Terraformers will take you on a journey spanning thousands of years and exploring the triumphs, strife, and hope that find us wherever we make our home …

Destry’s life is dedicated to terraforming Sask-E. As part of the Environmental Rescue Team, she cares for the planet and its burgeoning eco-systems as her parents and their parents did before her.

But the bright, clean future they’re building comes under threat when Destry discovers a city full of people that shouldn’t exist, hidden inside a massive volcano.

As she uncovers more about their past, Destry begins to question the mission she’s devoted her life to, and must make a choice that will reverberate through Sask-E’s future for generations to come.

~~~

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GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE: ISSUE 61, MARCH 2023—HIGHLIGHTS

Over at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, the Penultimate Issue #61 has been released this month. Here are some highlights:

Continue reading “GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE: ISSUE 61, MARCH 2023—HIGHLIGHTS” →

HOLIDAY READS: 5 SPECULATIVE BOOKS TO KICK OFF THE SEASON

Tis the Season here at Signals From the Edge, and since it’s the start of December (and several holiday celebrations), we figured what better to go with those twinkling lights than a few books full of wonder and speculation. So grab a gingerbread cookie or two, toss some marshmallows in your hot cocoa, wrap yourself up in your favorite blanket, and prepare to dive in …

Continue reading “HOLIDAY READS: 5 SPECULATIVE BOOKS TO KICK OFF THE SEASON” →

GALAXY’S EDGE REVIEW ROUNDUP: NOVEMBER 2022

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
by Richard Chwedyk

Richard Chwedyk sold his first story in 1990, won a Nebula in 2002, and has been active in the field for the past thirty-two years.

In previous columns, I’ve said a lot already about my love for short fiction. I don’t need to repeat myself, but I will (as Joseph Epstein wrote, “A teacher is someone who can never say anything once.”), though in keeping with the subject, I’ll be brief.

Short fiction represents the heartbeat of these forms we love, science fiction and fantasy. It’s not tied down to narrative and stylistic structures publishers believe are compulsory for “saleable” prose. Any subject, any style can be explored with the single proviso that it be interesting.

Even the novels discussed here demonstrate the craft and vision received by working in short forms. Big things may not always come in small packages, but the odds are pretty good that size doesn’t always matter.

~~~

The Year’s Best Fantasy, Volume One
edited by Paula Guran
Pyr
August 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64506-048-2

This volume represents something that we’ve needed for a long time. It was 2009 when the last David G. Hartwell/Kathryn Cramer-edited Year’s Best Fantasy volume came out, and Pyr should be applauded not merely for putting out this volume, but for choosing Paula Guran as its editor. She has wide-ranging tastes and a keen eye for significant work in a field that has grown so large so swiftly. And she has done so in a perfectly manageable format. The book comes in at a comparatively slim 439 pages. Like the Hartwell/Cramer anthologies, it provides a comprehensible overview without overwhelming the reader.

~~~

The Best of James Van Pelt
by James Van Pelt
Fairwood Press
August 2022
ISBN: 978-1-933846-21-7

If you’re a constant reader of magazines, as I am, print or online, James Van Pelt is one of those names you encounter with frequency, and in a good way, because no matter what else may be in that issue’s contents you are assured of at least one good story, well told.
For that very reason we tend to take him for granted. And we shouldn’t.

~~~

Wergen: The Alien Love War
by Mercurio D. Rivera
NewCon Press
November 2021
ISBN: 978-1-914953-01-9

As well as Rivera knows his Wergens, he knows his humans even better. That doesn’t sound like high praise, but it is. Many SF writers who work out alien cultures down to minutiae often have a blind spot for human complexity. Or perhaps they have transferred that complexity into their aliens. Rivera conveys our complex and often contradictory nature with honesty and integrity. This is what science fiction can do at its best, and what Rivera does on every page of this extraordinary volume.

~~~

Forkpoints
by Sheila Finch
Aqueduct Press
June 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61976-218-3

Sheila Finch’s short fiction has always been literate and fascinating. She finds new ways of looking at old SF concepts where she doesn’t invent a few concepts of her own. One of the things I have most appreciated about her Xenolinguistics stories is she makes the struggle to communicate, and to comprehend what’s communicated, into captivating SF.

~~~

1812: The Rivers of War
by Eric Flint
Baen
August 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9197-9

This book arrived a few weeks before I heard of the sad passing of its author. I usually don’t review works by Eric Flint because—what’s there to say? He was fine author of consistent quality. Probably one of the two or three authors most responsible for the popularity of alternative history fiction. If you like that kind of work, you knew of him already. He never let his readers down.

~~~

A City in the North
by Marta Randall
Warner Books
May 1976
ISBN: 978-044694062-3

Let us now praise Marta Randall.
The 1970s by any estimation was a tumultuous era, and preconceptions at every level were being challenged. The setting and characters of A City in the North may not resemble any aspect of that era, but they echo it. The implicit questioning of established norms haunts every page. Nothing here is entirely as it seems.

~~~

The Jigsaw Assasin
by Catherine Asaro
July 2022
Baen
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9196-2

I shouldn’t have to mention a new Catherina Asaro novel because Catherine Asaro fans know where to find her books and know how to get them. But I hadn’t read a Major Bhaajan novel in some time, and I’ve grown fond of her tough, no-nonsense P.I., and all the gritty nuances of Undercity, though the story here is set in Selei City. A series of murders, assassination attempts, plots and foreboding intrigues that could be red herrings or the key to the whole McGonigle—you’ve got it all here. Science fiction or hard-boiled noir decked out in space opera greasepaint? Hey, a physicist can’t help being a physicist, even when she’s writing highly suspenseful SF thrillers.

~~~

Hot Moon
by Alan Smale
Caezik
July 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64710-050-6

I recognized Smale from his shorter fiction (and of that, his early fantasy stories), so I thought I’d dip into it to see what he was doing. The dip kept me reading through the night, to the last page.
This is a highly inventive, brilliantly conceived alternative history where the Apollo program wasn’t shelved after 1972. The U.S. has space stations and bases on the Moon’s surface, and the Soviet Union is still around, making trouble as the story begins in 1979. Smale, whose “day job” is a NASA astronomer, has worked out all the details and hardware with mind-boggling plausibility. All his characters act, feel, and sound real. First-rate hard SF.

~~~

The Serpent
by David Drake
Baen
July 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9198-6

You might not think a melding of Arthurian legend and science fiction could be successfully executed, but this is David Drake, and he pulls it off splendidly (with a little help from Orlando Furioso). He keeps things moving and does so with an economy of language that is in itself a kind of magic, bringing it all in at 246 pages. He’s done it before but, arguably, not as well.

Copyright © 2022 by Richard Chwedyk.

~~~

Find the entire article at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine — where you can read for free until Dec 31st, 2022.

AND

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