In the fall of 2010, I had the privilege of attending a conference where I got to meet Brian Stableford for the first time. Always an admirer of his fiction, I was thrilled to have a chance to talk with him and learn of his current projects. His main efforts these days, he revealed, would lie in translating forgotten vintage French fantasy and science fiction, much of which had never previously had English-language editions. At one dinner outing, Brian further confirmed his love for Gallic culture. The conversation had turned to the fancy of what era one would visit, if given a single trip in a time machine. Brian looked wistful, then declared, ” Fin de siècle Paris!”

True to his passions, Brian has poured out a steady stream of such volumes, all published by Black Coat Press. If you visit their web page and search their catalogue under Brian’s name, you’ll see nearly 100 titles, exclusive of his own writings. These constitute an invaluable resource for SF scholarship, as attested to by John Clute, who has found Brian’s informative forewords, afterwords and annotations, full of original research, invaluable for adding data to the SF Encyclopedia. But moreover, these forgotten fictions represent sheer good fun for readers, who get old-school adventures and a window onto a vanished period of history.

Today we’ll look at the two newest offerings, which are the first volumes in a series titled “The Dominion of the World.” The run will culminate with The Psychic Spies and The Victims Victorious.

Originally published in 1899, The Plutocratic Plot opens with brio and pulp vigor. US billionaire and uber-capitalist William Boltyn, stymied in his plans to get favorable trading legislation through Congress, and also failing to militarize the nation for a conquest of Old World countries, decides to form his own private army. He solicits monetary contributions from a cabal of fellow magnates, and signs on the famed genius inventor Hattison of Zingo Park (read, Edison of Menlo Park) to whip up some superweapons. All gung-ho, Hattison builds an instant city in the Rocky Mountains (foreshadowing the Manhattan Project of the 1940s), and puts his infernal thinking cap on. The only oddball element in the cabal is a cantankerous old fellow named Madge, who insists that spiritualism and the occult can contribute meaningfully to the scheme. Shades of Hellboy and the BPRD!

Humor is provided by Boltyn’s Falstaffian servant Tom Punch. For a love interest, we get Aurora Boltyn, the billionaire’s scientifically inclined, ledger-minded daughter. Hattison the elder attempts to arrange a marriage between Aurora and his techno-nerd son Ned. But Ned balks, and is sent to Europe on a spying mission. But what develops? Europe seduces Ned, and he falls in love with beautiful and soulful Lucienne Golbert, daughter of another scientist. They marry, and the first book ends—but with the American terror campaign still looming.

Le Rouge and Guitton are shamelessly propagandistic about “the Transatlantic Peril,” their counterpoint to the anti-Asian “Yellow Peril” that occupied so many pulp pages in the USA. Americans are a cruel, charmless, rapacious breed, their country a cultural wasteland. “Like all American cities, New York has no history. It has scarcely existed for a century.” To the contrary, “In being so prodigal with space and light, large squares and promenades, the Parisians had made their city the most cheerful and joyful place, where one could live life to the full.” But guess what, the Brits are dissed as well, so there’s not even any Euro-solidarity expressed!

Spain comes in for a similar tongue-lashing at the start of the second book, The Transatlantic Threat,

when Ned and Lucienne go there for their honeymoon. After this bit of romance, Le Rouge and Guitton introduce new complications. Monsieur Golbert and his scientific partner, Olivier Coronal (who also loved Lucienne but nobly stepped aside) want to build an undersea railway across the Atlantic, to show the humane ambitions of real science, as opposed to the brutal aims of the Americans. It’s naked rails, by the way, and a wheeled submarine, not a tunnel or tube. They secure funding from a rich French banker. But when the Americans hear of the plan, they not only blow up the rails, nearly killing Ned, Olivier and M. Golbert, but also bankrupt the banker!

Our tale shifts focus to Olivier and his comical servant Léon. In America now to distance himself from Lucienne, Olivier falls in love with none other than Aurora Boltyn! And she returns the sentiment. But Olivier is still determined to thwart her father, and so he goes undercover at the secret research city, there discovering—well, let’s just say that modern SF readers will probably think of the recent mockumentary project titled Boilerplate.

One has to admire the authors’ unrelenting castigation of America. “The engineer Hattison promised us marvels that will realize our common dream, the crushing of Europe. That will mean, for Americans and me in particular, industrial supremacy over the entire world. We shall have abolished, once and for all, the useless rubbish that the old European civilization drags in its wake.” For 21st-century readers of any nationality, the theme has a delicious, delirious through-the-looking-glass quality that is truly counterfactual now, after the alliances of two world wars and so much history. Still the critique remains stimulating.

And when the authors launch into a resounding paean to the utopian potential of science in chapter IX, we see that despite their tendentious plotting, their hearts were in the right place, allied with the Gernsbackian visionaries who would soon follow in their pioneering footsteps.

What do you get when you combine hyper­smart teenagers trying to crack the uncrackable Voynich manuscript, letters from the infamous alchemist and conjurer Edward Kelley’s daughter, a mysterious secret society or two, and chase scenes set in a pitch-perfect modern Prague? Funny you should ask. Robin Wasserman’s sinister, twisty new literary thriller The Book of Blood and Shadow is such a perfect specimen that it’s hard to believe it didn’t exist until now. Published as YA and sure to appeal to many teens, this sophisticated, exquisitely crafted book should also find a ready cross-over audience of adult readers. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Protagonist and narrator Nora draws the reader in immediately: ‘‘I should probably start with the blood.’’ But she doesn’t, explaining that starting there – on the night of another major character’s murder – would be starting in the middle, robbing the story of its necessary context, however painful providing that context is. By using this approach, Wasserman lets the reader know immediately that the stakes here are huge – life and death – and that our narrator is incredibly intelligent and analytical, both extremely important in the scheme of this novel. As Nora goes on, she tells us it all began with the book. A scholarship student at a private school in her senior year, Nora is a gifted translator of Latin and has been convinced by her best friend Chris to sign on for a project at his college. He and his roommate Max are working with a professor known as ‘‘The Hoff,’’ who is obsessed with solving the mystery of the Voynich manuscript – a real-world work believed to date to the 15th century and written in a strange, unknown language. The world’s best translators and cipher-breakers have tried and failed to decode its secrets. Nora, meanwhile, is assigned to translate the letters of Edward Kelley’s daughter, Elizabeth Weston, a task perceived as less important. Nora identifies many parallels between her own life and Weston’s, beginning to feel close to her through what Chris’s girlfriend and Nora’s friend Adriane – who isn’t part of the project – refer to as ‘‘the dead-girl letters,’’ disappointed that they never seem to include anything interesting, like sexual exploits.

Finally, Nora makes a discovery in the letters that might point the way not just to translating the Voynich manuscript but to a machine constructed by Kelley called the Lumen Dei that would link humanity to God. Nora also starts dating Max, a brief burst of happiness before things begin to unravel. The office experiences a break-in, then the Hoff has a stroke, and, finally, Chris ends up dead. Max disappears under suspicion of being the murderer, and Nora is grieving and more or less alone – except someone may be following her. Chris’s cousin Eli shows up, and eventually she, Adriane, and Eli end up looking for Max in a Prague haunted by old magic. Nora’s connection to Elizabeth Weston may be the key to a dangerous, centuries-old mystery… or the mystery itself may be lunacy, and the friends may have been targeted by devoted lunatics.

As we get to know Nora and her friends, Wasserman builds their relationships and personalities so that the reader feels as close to Nora – to all of them, really – as Nora does to Elizabeth. Nora proves an engaging, sympathetic character, all the more so because of her dry wit and perfectly aimed observations. I suspect her intelligence will summon some of the usual complaints that surface when YA characters show a certain kind of maturity or smarts or even just a big vocabulary. Those complaints would be even more off-base than usual here, willfully ignoring that these are very specific characters in a very specific story. Add to that the fact that Nora has lost her older brother, Andy, in a car accident, a loss that colors the way she experiences everything, and I believed in the character completely.

Many, many books have been touted as the next The Da Vinci Code, almost all of them terrible. What those comparisons usually seem to mean, in my experience, is that the books in question are working with some of the same elements – elements which are deeply enjoyable when done well, and which are, unfortunately, rarely done well. Centuries-old societies lurking in the shadows, hidden messages encoded or buried or perhaps lost and recovered, and always, always high stakes intrigue and a race against the clock – these are a few of my favorite things. While comparisons of The Book of Blood and Shadow to The Da Vinci Code and (more aptly) Donna Tartt’s The Secret History are inevitable, the invoking of those other books shortchanges this one. Wasserman has delivered a remarkably involving page turner that has important things to say about the mysteries of the universe and the destructive force of belief. It may be in conversation with those books and others, but it’s also completely, satisfyingly itself.

A pair of digests, one a double.

Analog, July/August 2012

Plenty of good reads in this double issue with double novellas, definitely the best issue of the year so far.

“Nightfall on the Peak of Eternal Light” by Richard A Lovett & William Gleason

Drew Zeigler – not his real name — has come to the moon to start a new life under a witness protection program after betraying his mob family. But his handlers, who disapprove of his choice, have only given him enough money to reach his destination, not to live there. And Loonies don’t tolerate freeloaders. Thus the problem he knows about is gainful employment, which he finds at a solar generating station on the peak, the only place on the moon in almost continual sunlight. But the problem he doesn’t know about is the hitman on his tail.

“Eventually, I knew I’d start helping make the money more directly. In my family, it’s what you do. So when the Feds got a handle on a couple of killings . . . that was my second way out. And this time I made it stick.”

There’s a good tense action thriller here as the hitman tracks Drew and the cops track the hitman, all played out under believable lunar conditions, with a really neat trick at the end. A fun read once it gets going, but I only wish the authors hadn’t spent so much time, particularly at the beginning, with the personal backgrounds of Drew and the Raz the cop – repeating the details of the college track career of one and the failed marriage of the other, far too often for reader interest. Because I don’t think readers really care all that much, despite the authors’ effort, about these characters finding familial fulfillment. We want more of the well-done lunar chase and the [neat trick] stuff.

“Conquest of the Air” by Rob Chilson

First contact. Among the People of Ocean-the-World, there have always been those who dreamed of swimming the air. But reports of bright air bubbles rising above a remote bay have given urgency to the quest – and funding. Shellshaper the Bright Dreamer is going to see his dreams come true.

Bright and Airswimmer supervised a joyful procession of Association members in moving their headquarters from their gloomy deep building to a spacious hangar at the port. The younger members flashed through their new quarters and rammed each other’s sides, glorying in the acceptance as much as in the space and light.

But the expedition turns military when surveillance concludes that the airbubbles appear to be air boats created by landwalkers – intelligent landwalkers – with an advanced technology. It’s possible that the Bright Adventure‘s voyage might end up killing the dream of airswimming instead of fulfilling it.

In the alternating narrative, we have Chanarong Chalmers as the supervisor of mining operations in the heavy-metals-rich Bonanza system, pressured by the corporate heads of JohnCo to produce on an impossible schedule. Now the discovery of the fishfolk means the entire mining expedition is illegal. A treaty is imperative, as soon as possible. But of course nothing is so simple.

A well-worked-out contact story. The “fishfolk” technology is imaginative and ingenious, and, happily, the characters aren’t the usual stock heroes and villains that populate so many oversimplified tales of this sort. The outcome is by no means predictable.

–RECOMMENDED

“Sam Below Par” by Ben Bova

A Sam Gunn story. Chou is a golf course designer who got on the wrong side of his politically powerful mother-in-law.

My parents disowned me. My contracts for new golf courses disappeared. I was alone, friendless, on my way to jail, when Sam whisked me to the Moon.

There to design a golf course so Sam can sponsor a tournament for the biggest stars in the game, then cheat by using an advanced model of spacesuit.

Shopworn formula, lame plot, creaking humor. Should have been put out to pasture sometime around 1958.

“The Mutant Stag at Horn Creek” by Sarah K Castle

Before radioactivity closed the Grand Canyon, back when Sue was a young ranger, she saw a freak of nature at Horn Creek, a stag with a weird, contorted rack and – Sue wasn’t quite sure she hadn’t imagined it – fangs. Now nearing retirement, she gets to take one last patrol, and she knows whom she wants to take it with, her niece Katy, whom she hopes will take her place. But Katy hasn’t come to see her aunt, she’s come on a quest for “killer content” to post online.

I hoped we would talk, maybe straighten out the morning’s misunderstandings, but I couldn’t bring myself to start the conversation. I sure as hell kept my eyes open. I didn’t expect to see the old stag himself, but I was alert for clues as to what had changed down here that might’ve made him what he’d been.

What I like is the setting, written with close authority, and the notion of species adaptation to changing conditions – albeit over-accelerated, even with the presence of radiation. The characters are well-drawn, particularly Katy, who gave me a strong urge to throw her down the canyon.

“To Save Man” by H G Stratmann

The title evokes the Damon Knight classic and represents about the same state of SFnal advancement. The benevolent Zyrans approach humanity to save it from themselves, but encounter human paranoia. Fifty years ago, it might have seemed advanced and daring, but now the references to anal probes and boobs are only lame.

“The Song of Uullioll” by Gray Rinehart

Uullioll has an uncommon love for the sun, although his companions in the pod deplore his obsession.

“It brightens all, no matter where we are in our migrations. It brightens above the icy cold where we eat, where the big crabs crawl on the hard below. And it brightens above the warm stills where the girls become mothers. I like the bright hot. It floats above the dry-clear we breathe; how can you not like it?”

“I think the bright hot has already burned your brain, Uullioll.”

Interesting juxtaposition of this one with the Chilson novella, both featuring aquatic beings who crave to reach the land, comparing the terms they use for common phenomena. But Uullioll definitely appears to be a cetacean, and cetaceans don’t spawn like fish. An irritating error in an otherwise likeable simple tale.

“The North Revena Ladies Literary Society” by Catherine Shaffer

After leaving the CIA to have kids, Beth is stir-crazy enough to join the local ladies book club. She doesn’t expect a drive-by shooting linked to a secretive terrorist organization that she recognizes from an operation years ago.

Beth leaned on the bumper of a police cruiser, looking cool but trying to get her legs
to stop shaking. “Automatic rifle,” she said, “an AK-47, by the sound.”

“Right,” said the officer. “Your name?”

“Beth Pratchett.”

“Address?”

“606 Westbrooke Avenue,” she said.

“Occupation?”

“Housewife.”

A whole lot of action thriller and SFnal conspiracy packed surprisingly into a short piece. Nicely sketched characterization, with a slyly humorous tone.

–RECOMMENDED

“Red Rover, Red Rover” by Howard V Hendrix

Dogs, sentient and speaking. The narrator is a rich old man, and Cogzie is his indulgence. As is moving to Mars, where the enhancers he puts in the dog food gives Cogzie vivid, lucid dreams of dying: “I had been cursed to nine lives’ worth of bad luck, by a black cat avatar of the ancient Egyptian cat-goddess Bastid—according to my dream, anyway.” And the recurring phrase: “Fortunately, the only casualty was a dog.”

A strange tale that, unfortunately, takes too long to settle into its voice, beginning with hokey bad jokes. But there is a haunting quality to the dreams, and the effect they have on both man and dog.

“Zeitgeist, Inc” by Carl Frederick

Conradin is having vague second thoughts about the venture capitalists,

wondering if it had been the right thing to do, taking the VC money—and along with it, a company president of their choosing—Helen Lee . . . who had just called him dear. He smiled thinking about it, but then frowned. He, who had founded the company, had been relegated to CTO, Chief Technical Officer.

Conradin seems to be more than a bit thick. Or is it differently-brained. He should definitely listen more to his dog.

Another contrast, between this talking-dog story and the Hendrix. That one is poignant, this, humorous. But it’s not a very funny humor, because Conradin’s mental density just isn’t funny, while not realistic enough to be poignant.

Asimov’s, July 2012

Twice as many hits as misses this time.

“Old Paint” by Megan Lindholm

Hit. Times are hard when Sadie is young, and her mother has to struggle to get by and raise her and her brother Ben. Among the things they don’t have is a car, until her mother’s grandfather dies and leaves him his old reproduction woodie. Suddenly the kids see a new side of their mother and realize that she once had a grandfather who loved her and programmed the car to recognize her.

I was still surprised when she slid in behind the wheel and put the key in a slot-thing and turned it. The vehicle had an anti-theft box on the steering column. She hesitated, and then put her forefinger on the sensor. “Hello, Suzanne,” the car said in a rich, brown voice. “How are you today?”

“Just fine,” she said quietly. “Just fine.”

A heartwarming story about family. Sadie, the narrator, is mostly an observer of the evolving relationship between Suzanne and rebellious Ben, and between Suzanne and Old Paint, as surrogate for her grandfather. It’s the story of children who learn their parent is human, and once was young. (As I read this story, the state of Nevada had just licensed driverless cars.)

“Alive and Well, a Long Way from Anywhere” by Allen M Steele

Miss. Part of the author’s Near Space series. Paul Lauderdale is the media rep and spokesman for Jerry Stone, a reclusive Howard Hughes-like space entrepreneur who has taken up residence alone on a remote asteroid. “Let’s just say that I’m sick of people and I want to get away for a while. I’m rich enough that I can do whatever I want, and that’s what I want to do.” And that’s it. He does. And why anyone is supposed to care, I can’t say. Stone is not an interesting character because the author excludes the information about him that might be of interest. Lauderdale isn’t. And the narrative relies excessively on the recitation of details from the other works in the series that will be redundant to those familiar with it and boring to those who aren’t.

“The Girl in the Park” by Robert Reed

Hit. The narrator’s elderly father, suffering from short-term memory loss, repeatedly relates a recurring dream from his days as a young father when he saw a young girl in the park, dressed like a hooker and obviously headed for trouble. He remembers wanting to stop her, but failing; regret has always haunted him. He keeps asking his son if he can find out what ever happened to the girl.

This is a story about guilt – the old man’s lingering guilt and his son’s, as well as the guilt of everyone who let the world go to hell – and attempting to expiate it. Despite the horrors it uncovers, the story is ultimately hopeful. Maybe people can learn better. In the meantime, however, families still have to deal with the burden of failing minds, which Reed portrays with painful immediacy.

“I didn’t sleep last night.”

I wait.

“Did you hear me?”

“You dreamed about that girl in the park again.”

He looks at me. “Have I told you about her?”

“Once or twice.”

“Kill Switch” by Benjamin Crowell

Hit. A genemod world where Jo is a jazz sax player modded for music, who meets a girl who has a lot in common with him, including a glitch in their mods that brings the music on too strong; they share the same drug to dampen it. Pretty soon they’re thinking about a baby, but the mods they want for the baby are expensive, so they accept a deal to move to North Dakota and augment its failing population. North Dakota turns out to be a different kind of place.

The rows [of crops] swept past, always converging to a vanishing point somewhere near the rising sun. Diagonals flickered in and out of the geometry, sliding over each other. Jo had a wistful feeling that if he hadn’t been back on full meds, his brain could have made the flickers into a beautiful rhythm, like the sound from a distant orchestra of guiros and washboards.

Not really about sex-flipping or gene modification, but a story about a relationship beginning to fray as both partners realize their incompatibility in a new environment. Jo really comes alive as a character, a person beginning to discover his real self and finding he’s a better person than he supposed.

–RECOMMENDED

“Zip” by Steven Utley

Miss. More time traveling scientists from this author, but in this instance Something Goes Wrong, they know not what. It doesn’t seem that they can go home again so they argue about what they should do.

Do we just hang in space, until everything in the universe contracts into the infinitesimal point of beginning? Do we go into that point ourselves, and come back out, or go on through, or what?

Really unoriginal premise and a bunch of guys arguing unoriginally about cosmology and time while admitting they don’t really know what’s going on.

“Bird Walks in New England” by Michael Blumlein

Hit. The story of a marriage. There is a single, possibly ambiguous, SFnal element, but the main thing is the wife’s voice – an eccentric one that expresses its joys and pains in metaphorical terms.

An eagle mates for life, and I believe that I was born an eagle. But I was taught and raised to be a rail. A yellow rail, a shy, retiring and secretive bird of reeds and deep grasses. When I came out of my shell, I was reborn an eagle, and an eagle is faithful to her companion. An eagle loves her mate, but she lives to spread her wings and fly.

The oddness of the narrative voice is a bit much in the opening paragraphs, but the story is a heartfelt one, ringing true.

“Long Night on Redrock” by Felicity Shoulders

Peder and Lise are vigilant against strangers coming around near harvest time to steal their crop. A suspicious-looking outworlder has been hanging around, but while they’re guarding the field, he abducts their kids. Worse, he takes them into a prohibited zone where hallucinations and ghosts come out of the ground. Lise and Peder are ex-military; they have a lot of ghosts. But that can’t stop them from going after their kids.

Peder clawed emergency water and food packs out of the closet upstairs; then a low, squat shelter that would withstand a few more notches of sandstorm than most, some thin blankets. He could just see Lise, half-hidden by the doorway, performing the swift, efficient series of movements he had imagined her rehearsing, in their first years home, every time a tile fell or a lost critter hit the window, every time her body tensed in the shelter of his long arms: two steps to the wall, one long swipe to uncover the safe, press-two-three-thumb, 2-4-7 code, the door wide, the rifle out. One for him too.

As an action story, it works pretty well, but I find the premise of the haunted sector less than convincing, and the moral is moralish. Neither a real hit or a miss, but somewhere in between. Although it’s listed in the ToC as a short story, it seems to be the longest piece in the issue.

Karl Edward Wagner was among the most talented writers of the generation that helped to put horror on the popular fiction map in the 1970s and ’80s. For this comprehensive two-volume retrospective of his short horror fiction, editor Stephen Jones gathers the full contents of Wagner’s collections In a Lonely Place (1983) and Why Not You and I? (1987), plus most of the contents of Exorcisms and Ecstasies, a compilation of Wagner’s previously uncollected short fiction that Jones assembled in 1995. The books also include several colleague tributes to Wagner, who died in 1994 at the age of 49, among them ‘‘The Truth Insofar as I Know It’’, David Drake’s illuminating and very sad eulogy to his friend and business partner.

The contents of the two volumes – 35 stories – span 20 years and are arranged largely in chronological order of their publication. Where the Summer Ends collects nine long stories, most of which not only represent Wagner’s best work but also some of the most distinguished horror fiction written in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Wagner was already recognized as a sword-and-sorcery wunderkind for his Howardesque tales of the warrior Kane when he published the book’s lead-off story, ‘‘In the Pines’’, in a 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The tale is a retelling of sorts of Oliver Onions’ classic ghost story ‘‘The Beckoning Fair One’’ (which Wagner references in his story) and it shows how well Wagner understood the mechanics of the horror tale. Onions’ story tells of an author who rents a house and who crumbles psychologically under the influence of a former female tenant whose ghostly presence has imbued the place. In Wagner’s story, a husband who moves temporarily with his wife to a remote cabin in Tennessee to recuperate emotionally following the death of their young child falls under the spell of a ghostly woman who disappeared from the premises half a century before. Atmospheric and laden with portents and foreshadowings, the story builds to a powerful climax in the final paragraphs. It’s the first of several of Wagner’s tales to feature a femme fatale as an embodiment of supernatural horror.

‘‘In the Pines’’ is a good example of how Wagner could take themes from classic horror fiction and refurbish them effectively in stories that spoke to the fears and concerns of modern readers. He was remarkably well read in the horror genre, and his fiction is rich with references and homages to his predecessors and their work. ‘‘Sticks’’ is a tribute to the artist Lee Brown Coye, and by extension the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, whose Arkham House collections Coye designed dustjackets for. About the time that he wrote the story, Wagner had commissioned Coye to create the artwork for Worse Things Waiting, a collection of Manly Wade Wellman’s fiction that came out under the short-lived Carcosa specialty press imprint that Wagner had started up with David Drake and James Gray Groce. In Coye’s eerie primitive stick and twig designs, Wagner found the perfect inspiration for a story that nodded to the Cthulhu Mythos without overtly evoking it. Another writer whose work Wagner admired is Robert W. Chambers, author of the landmark weird fiction collection The King in Yellow (1895). The influence of that book and its surreal, nightmare-ridden approach to horror is evident in ‘‘The River of Night’s Dreaming’’, Wagner’s unsettling blend of supernatural and psychological horror.

The variety of Wagner’s early fiction is impressive. ‘‘The Fourth Seal’’, a wonderfully paranoid speculation about what the medical profession is really trying to achieve through disease management, doubtless grew out of Wagner’s training as a psychiatrist (he practiced very briefly). ‘‘Where the Summer Ends’’, written for Kirby McCauley’s (then) state-of-the art horror anthology Dark Forces (1980), is a great monster story in which the monsters are never seen, but very effectively suggested. ‘‘.220 Swift’’ is a modern version of the Greek myth of Persephone, laced with elements from the work of Arthur Machen and Robert E. Howard.

‘‘Neither Brute Nor Human’’, the next-to-last story in the first volume, marks a turning point in Wagner’s fiction. A mildly cranky jab at the genrification of the horror market, about two writers who discover they are being vampirized – literally, as well as creatively – by fans, it introduces a theme that recurs in a number of stories from the next ten years of Wagner’s output: the artist undone by forces hostile to his creativity – very often his own personal demons. This is the subject of ‘‘The Last Wolf’’, ‘‘Silted In’’, ‘‘Lost Exits’’, ‘‘The Slug’’, and several other stories found in Walk on the Wild Side, which collects mostly the shorter works Wagner produced in his last decade. The impact of these stories is notably less than those in the first volume, in part because their shorter length makes them more dependent on twist endings and narrative gimmicks to achieve the horrors that Wagner was able to evoke through the mood-building and careful orchestration of creepy events in his longer work. To be sure, there are some very good stories in volume two – among them ‘‘Into Whose Hands’’, which ingeniously turns on its head the notion of the physician who would play God, and ‘‘More Sinned Against’’, a black magic revenge tale with a nasty surprise worthy of a Robert Bloch story – but many of these tales, however competently told, read as though they could have been written by any number of writers other than Wagner. The eroticism Wagner deployed to great effect in ‘‘The River of Night’s Dreaming’’ curdles into crude exhibitionism in ‘‘The Kind Men Like’’ and ‘‘A Walk on the Wild Side’’. And the exuberance of storytelling for storytelling’s sake that buoys up Wagner’s earlier work is replaced by a bitterness that makes several of the stories seem spiteful.

It’s not fair to psychoanalyze any author’s writing as cryptobiograpy, but it’s almost impossible not to do this after reading Drake’s concluding ‘‘The Truth Insofar As I Know It’’, which poignantly details Wagner’s heady days as a writer full of youthful promise and his abrupt slide into the alcoholism that ultimately killed him. The evidence is easily found in his stories, and it virtually screams out at the reader in this passage from ‘‘Did They Get You to Trade’’, Wagner’s self-conscious portrait of a gracelessly aging punk rocker who knows that he’s outlived his time: ‘‘Each one of us has only so much – so much of his best – that he can give. You’re like a punch-drunk boxer hoping for the bell before you land hard on your arse. It’s over for you. No matter how much you want it. No matter how much you try.’’ That’s not a particularly horrific piece of writing, as the best tales in these volumes demonstrate, but it’s an insight into how some of the worst horrors they conjure may have been inspired by the tragic turn of their author’s life.

Gary Westfahl’s illuminating and entertaining new study of a certain subset of SF films could not have been released at a more useful or propitious or significant instant in history. With the space program of the USA at a watershed moment of retrenchment and reassessment (hopefully segueing into a renaissance) and the space programs of other nations ramping up, not to mention the debut of exciting private ventures such as the Planetary Resources asteroid-mining scheme, Westfahl’s deeply considered, deeply researched survey of cinematic depictions of our species in space, using the talismanic icon of the spacesuit, crystallizes just how far our attitudes toward space exploration have come in the past century, and how far they have to go, and in which direction. This book easily might assume a larger cultural stance than merely straddling the entertainment fields of movies and books.

As the subtitle to this volume indicates, Westfahl will venture back almost to the dawn of cinema to examine the presence of spacegear in films as the defining touchstone of a certain sensibility and focus. But before then, in an amusingly named preface, “Pre-Flight Briefing,” he outlines with great clarity the reasons why he feels the spacesuit is the defining motif of a certain serious-minded speculative vision. His insights, I find, represent a very clever and striking perception and distinction not previously noted or vocalized by critics within the field. Westfahl convinces the reader at once that his theme is valid. He narrows his remit to certain films, dismissing others—”pseudo-spacesuit films”—with good logic. And he outlines the periods of study.

The next chapter, titled “First Flights,” finds only three worthy entries from the first half of the twentieth century. Himmelskibet, Frau im Mond, and Kosmicheskiy Reys. Inclusion of this last-named film, the rarest, illustrates Westfahl’s dedication and reach, as he winkles out relevant material in the most hidden niches.

At once, the reader feels in good hands with Westfahl for a couple of reasons. His plot descriptions of each film are entertaining, succinct and vivid, giving the reader a good grasp of perhaps unseen or unfamiliar material. Moreover, Westfahl exhibits a dry humor, a droll scholarship which seems like the writings from some more sober-minded big brother to Bill Warren, famous for his gonzo guide to SF of the Fifties, Keep Watching the Skies!. And Westfahl does not focus narrowly on just the films as standalone artifacts, but rather embeds them in the culture and history of their times, often giving great anecdotes relating to creators and their creations.

The following chapter, “The True Frontier,” is in a certain sense the core of the book, since it describes the subject matter at its initial peak of crystallization, when films such as Heinlein’s Destination Moon broke virgin territory in realism and scope. Westfahl widens his remit to television shows here, devoting, for instance, a comprehensive section to the sixteen broadcast hours of Men into Space. Then, we see, much as the SF digest magazine market collapsed around the same period, so does the market and audience for such films.

So, where next? To “Wild Adventures,” Westfahl’s examination of “melodramatic” spacesuit films that nonetheless contain tidbits of wonderfulness. This chapter and the next one—”Ships of Fools,” which looks at comedic SF—are typical of Westfahl’s ability to sort gems from dross, and his willingness to open-mindedly consider everything, no matter if it’s as silly as Don Knotts’s The Reluctant Astronaut. Wrapping up his detour from the pure quill with “Space Frights,” those films with a horror focus, Westfahl summarizes his distinctions with this keen assertion: “Thus, melodramatic and humorous spacesuit films encourage people to travel into space because it is comfortingly familiar, whereas horrific spacesuit films urge people to shun space because it is disturbingly unfamiliar. They all prod people to embrace what they know and avoid what they do not know—space itself, accurately portrayed only in genuine spacesuit films.”

Breaking out non-Anglo-American films into their own chapter, “Parallel Flight Paths,” Westfahl offers what will certainly be lots of fascinating information unknown to even dedicated fans. Not in that exact category, but still vastly interesting, is his take on the famous Toho Studio films such as The Mysterians.

At last in “From Reel to Reel: The Rebirth and Death of the Films,” we hit the mature period that culminates in 2001: A Space Odyssey, “the crowning achievement in the tradition of spacesuit films,” says Westfahl. By this time, the reader is fully primed for Westfahl’s masterly analysis of the Kubrick-Clarke opus. Then comes a brief coda concerning everything since—”Return to Earth: Films After 1969″—where Westfahl makes a valid case for the vanishment of the hardcore spacesuit film.

Any lover of SF in either its print or film forms is going to find this valuable survey hard to put down for sheer readability, and will come away immensely enlightened about patterns and themes that were heretofore invisible, though they were right before our eyes.

The usual monthly ezines, plus a couple of less usual ones. The web is making it possible for individuals to create and publish their own personal visions for a magazine, and the quality is often as high as readers can find in more traditionally professional zines.

Clarkesworld, May 2012

A dystopian issue.

“Prayer” by Robert Reed

Climate change has produced global crises, and the US now occupies Canada in the name of its AI Almighty.

I would even go so far as to propose that the distant generals were aware of their limitations yet sent the troops across the lake regardless, full of religion and love for each other and the fervent conviction that the United States was the empire that the world had always deserved.

Of course there is an insurgency, and Ophelia is part of it. Her nom de guerre is Ridiculous; her sentient second-hand railgun is Prophet. But who is on what side, and who is using whom?

A cynical and scary story, primarily because we can see it all coming into being now as powerful interests pursue their own ends while the cries of the masses go unheeded. The narrative alternates among points of view, suggesting an answer to the question: how many sides are there?

–RECOMMENDED

“Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop” by Suzanne Church

It’s obvious that Alex is a loser, but a question whether this is owing more to his own character or the milieu in which he lives, with much of the population hooked on nanites that deliver a powerful group high based on synchronized music.

The beats were building again. This time, with a third-beat thump, like reggae on heroin. I could feel the intensity from my fingertips to my teeth to my dick. Even if I couldn’t hear more than the background beats, I anticipated the drop. Rain opened her mouth again, raised both her hands in the air with everyone else, like a crowd of locusts all swarming together.

Clubbing the night away, Alex pursues the ultimate high while careful not to violate the terms of his probation for the accidental death of a girlfriend while under the influence.

This is Cautionary Tale that reminds me of the experiments in which rats self-stim their pleasure centers to the point of starvation. It’s clear that Alex hasn’t learned his lesson, but the author’s graft of the Jessica story onto Alex’s club night seems forced.

“All the Things the Moon Is Not” by Alexander Lumans

It seems that the moon is covered with a hallucinogenic yellow mold, and the US has sent up a crew of four astronauts to harvest it. There is also a Russian mold bootlegger up there, and Murphy is obsessed with the chess games they play together – Tchaikovsky always wins. Everyone is crazy with the mold. Weird things happen, which may or may not have actually happened.

An absurdist piece, which seems to have as its point that a small isolated group of people on hallucinogenic substances will do crazy things. But the overall scenario is absurd – megafauna suddenly appear and rampage on Earth – with no point that I can discern.

Apex Magazine, May 2012

The editorial suggests that the issue’s theme is things falling apart, which is certainly true of the Swirsky story.

“Decomposition” by Rachel Swirsky

Revenge falls apart. Vare strikes back at his enemy by killing his two young daughters, but the corpses intrigue him and he takes them home to play with.

Ayl went onto a threadbare daybed. Delira lay across the thinning velvet of a loveseat, still-growing mahogany curls draping over the arm.

The housekeeper spoke hesitantly. “Should I fix them a room…?”

Macabre fantasy, in which Vare is seen to be as much under his own spell as his victims. The narrative voice, tinted with dark humor, makes it a treat for readers.

“Tomorrow’s Dictator” by Rahul Kanakia

Sasha is the dictator of Walden Three, an adjustment cult where she brainwashes the residents – including her husband – into giving over their will to her. But the job is stressful and she needs to find a successor.

Sasha needed this to work. She couldn’t bear to ride home with George babbling away. She couldn’t bear another year of staring down the sheep at the general assembly. She needed someone else. She needed a partner.

A story about control, and getting what you wish for. If the characters had any depth, it would be a tragedy.

GigaNotoSaurus, May 2012

“Tilia Songbird” by Francesca Forrest

Anj is the Cinnabar Empire’s governor of the Cloud Mountains, a backwater where careers go to die. One day a strange girl enters her office, sings a song, then leaves with a feather from one of her bluetails.

“I wanted you to know me,” the girl said, tracing the door jamb with the feather. “Now you know who I am.” Then she was gone.

The locals revere Tilia and her songs and her chaste kisses, believing that she confers blessings from the spirits. But among Tilia’s home tribe, rumors of her kisses have given rise to a different interpretation, and now they have sent an envoy to demand her return. More, they offer in exchange an alliance that could be to the great advantage to the Empire – and thus to Anj. Anj doesn’t believe in spirits, but she senses that Tilia indeed has the power to confer blessings.

The story belongs to Anj, both a capable imperial governor and a virtuous individual – not always an easy combination to carry off. But the scenario makes it pretty easy for her – a bit too easy; things work out very conveniently well. Quibble: Kehan is portrayed as a prosperous landowner, with others working for him. Why, then, is he fixing Anj’s leaky roof?

Redstone SF, May 2012

I take issue with the romance of space colonization.

“Imagine Cows on Mars” by M Bennardo

Well, at the moment, it’s yaks. Terraformers are working on Mars, but settlers aren’t supposed to be there yet. They come anyway, sooners, though most die in the attempt. Earth, we gather, is the greater evil, even with the fungal disease that afflicts the settlers.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible, with an effort, to read something like this without a moral dimension, an account of pioneers in an alien landscape. But that would be perverse, particularly in this publication. It seems pretty clear that we’re supposed to admire these intrepid pioneers, but I don’t find their enterprise admirable at all. The sooners are not only free riders, they’re thieves; they appropriate for their own use goods, such as the yaks, that they don’t own. The terraformers have to divert resources to ensure their safety. I find it particularly offensive when the narrator tries to guilt-blackmail a terraformer into bringing scarce drugs for a sick child, taking a position of moral superiority that he’s not entitled to.

“I want you to owe me,” I said. “If you don’t bring back the rings or the medicine, you’ll be stealing from me. One way or the other, you’ll at least have to come back and face me again.”

But because it’s the golden calf of space colonization, we’re supposed to applaud, even when one of the settlers says, “But when we’re finished with Mars, it’ll be another Earth.” Poor Mars. Imagine diary factories and shit lagoons.

“Into Place” by Alter S Reiss

LaMarr constructs mind traps, and he’s probably the best there is. The trap attracts the target mind and holds it in a catatonic state – the better the trap, the longer it works. He used to work for the government, now he works for a company of dubious ethics. His current job is a wife involved in a custody dispute; the client is her husband. But LaMarr doesn’t have any misgivings about his work.

“When you’re in a trap, there’s no pain, there’s no worry beyond the context of the trap. Everything is solvable, everything is manageable. You can leave whenever you want, Dan. If Anne Marion wanted to leave the trap that I’ve built for her, she could do it now, this very instant. She’s won’t. She’s in the trap because it’s better than being outside the trap.”

LaMarr may not have misgivings, but LaMarr isn’t exactly normal. He doesn’t seem to consider that life is bypassing the lives in his traps, or that others may be suffering her loss even if the target is not. The mind trap seems to be a lot like an addictive euphoric drug, and I think LaMarr, absolving himself from responsibility, gravely overstates the degree of the target’s free will. It’s an interesting moral situation.

Mirror Dance, Spring 2012

An online fantasy quarterly that seems to be a personal project of the editor, Megan Arkenberg. She expresses a preference for “beautiful but readable prose” and “LGBTQA characters”, which is reflected in the contents. There are four original prose short stories as well as some poetry. The Pre-Raphaelite art is striking, but that’s not my department.

“The Love Mod” by Anna Sykora

Mod is for model, a synthetic [organic] human designed for a specific purpose. André was designed for love by Simone de la Tour, who was so pleased with her creation that she intended to marry him until André jumped out of the carriage and fled.

He imagined serving the aging Simone’s sexual pleasures till she died. He imagined getting decommissioned then–his memories pillaged, his life force drained, his perfect body stuffed down a recycling unit…

Now on his own in Paris, he is penniless and helpless, so naturally falls into the hands of the unscrupulous.

Another variation on the love-robot meme, but this one turns out to be lightly cynical humor. More interesting, though, is the setting, a Parisian cross between the fin de siècle and a fantasy future, where carriages are pulled by designer-color horses and whores are paid in Euros. There are several sly references that add interest, such as André’s rescuer Klaus Klinski. Altogether a nice mannered entertainment that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

“Fog” by Carol H March

The fog is emotional, not meteorological. A couple’s relationship begins to fail.

One day everything was fine; the next a logjam of words smothered in the interest of peace had formed an impenetrable dam in my throat. When I tried to clear it, I saw the cloudiness in the space between us. Clear edges had blurred.

While the 2nd-person narrative is nominally addressed to the lover, it is in essence just the narrator’s own voice. The metaphor is effective, but there is no actual fantastic content.

“The Players” by Caroline Spencer

John finds himself awake in an attic room full of sleepers, and he leaves to explore the house where, he believes, he is held captive. Corridors and doors lead on to others, including a hallway full of portraits.

The rectangular canvasses were mounted in a variety of elaborate frames and had been arranged to cover the walls with only the smallest gap between each one. John noticed with a strange chill that every single portrait showed a person sleeping.

Finally he meets a man who tells him that the house is the setting of a game, and none of the players can see each other – except that John can see the other man.

The author mentions that many of her stories have their origin in dreams, and this one definitely has that quality. Dreamlike, it makes no literal sense, although the reader has the feeling there is sense to be made of it, if only it would be revealed. Mysteriously intriguing.

–RECOMMENDED

“The Ale Wife” by Christopher Owen

Soldier Tom Bobbin visits a tavern and falls in love with the ale wife. His feelings are not reciprocated. He persists.

“Lorena my sweet. Perhaps we are going about this all wrong. I must prove my worthiness to you. Offer me a challenge. I will do anything for you, anything. I can climb high mountains and swim broad lakes and rivers. I’ll fight any man. I’ll fight a bear. A brace of bears!”

A foolish protagonist makes for a less interesting story. The narrative is flawed with anachronisms. We appear to be in the “old days”, so Tom ought to know that “wife” means simply “woman.”

Bourbon Penn #4, April 2012

Another e-quarterly, this one quite different from the above, as the illustrations illustrate. The defining term is “odd”. This issue seems to be subtitled: Nervous Breakdown [Don't Apologize for Acting Out of Line]. As usual with these ezines, the stories tend to be short. There are six of them, some nice little bits of absurdity.

“Pearls” by Priya Sharma

The narrator is a painter with slithery hair, whereby we know her identity. It’s not easy being a gorgon. Stalkers tend to seek her out. It was better before, in the world she was born to.

A twist turns this one into a love story. The author takes liberties with the myths, but what else are myths for?

“The Mall” by Hannah Lackoff

A plastic setting where an older form of existence sometimes unwelcomely intrudes, like the fairy-things who steal babies out of their strollers. The center of the mall and the story is the fountain where a plastic boy holds a plastic fish that spurts water.

The boys’ hands are green, but it’s not the green of pleasant mosses and coppery rust; it’s the green of Hot Topic nail polish and wayward highlighters, of sale stickers and plastic house plants. He is fake, and he can’t help it. He doesn’t know any better.

A series of vignettes from the points of view of various mall visitors. Oddly, the story celebrates the plastickness of the mall, appreciated by its denizens who find refuge and satisfaction there.

“A Blade of Love” by Nathaniel Tower

Allan Thermoose’s wife is in love with a blade of grass. It’s the 375th blade, directly even with the crack in the third slab of sidewalk east of the mailbox.

We note from the first sentence that we’re in absurdityland. This is a nice example of the species. Another husband would probably pour Round-Up over his gramineous rival, but the real oddness is Allan’s complaisance.

“The Langsammachen Pitch” by Martin Zeigler

Baseball. The Gazelles are in a slump, so the owner brings in a special attraction, Professor of Physics Horst Langsammachen.

The sports lead in last week’s Sentinel certainly helped. “If you must witness one miracle this year,” it proclaimed, “then see the unbeatable, unbattable, unbelievable pitch of this Einstein of the Diamond, this Newton of the Hill, this Euclid of the shortest distance between the mound and home plate.”

A nice Tall Tale in the baseball subgenre. Readers familiar with German will guess the nature of the Professor’s special pitch.

“After the Bees” by Carson Becker

When Sara took up with Heidi as her lover, she didn’t know that Heidi had bees living in her hair. Sara assumes she is allergic. But the bees aren’t the real problem in their relationship.

Sara wanted to know when she would see Heidi again. Heidi wanted Sara to stop asking and enjoy the fucking moment. Sara should learn to relax. Heidi obviously thought fairies came at night to carry used teabags from sink to trash.

The liberation of Sara is delightfully odd.

“Mereá” by Nancy Hightower

Gil’s wife walked off and disappeared one night when they were camping in the desert. The guides tell him he must go to the underground city Mereá, who might let him find her again. Mereá is a place of remembering and forgetting.

Legend has it that some nights there are twenty steps leading down into the heart of Mereá; other nights there are thirty. Or one hundred. There are some who descend forever, another warned him.

A surreal journey into the dark heart of memory and self-awareness.

–RECOMMENDED

Both: Our only disagreement is just how much we love this film: Howard thinks The Avengers is the best Marvel superhero film ever made, while Lawrence thinks it’s the best live-action superhero film ever made. (The Incredibles is still the reigning champion as best superhero film period.)

Howard Waldrop: When I saw Thor, I thought, “The Marvel franchise is in trouble, they think they can roll out any superhero crap and we’ll buy it.” I thought it boded ill, especially for The Avengers, the build-up to which has been going on for a couple of years now. I missed Captain America because I didn’t want to be truly disappointed again (and the trailer was no help).

Imagine my true surprise when The Avengers turns out to be the best Marvel movie so far. It has good direction (movie makers: note) and it has a script (especially: note).

A peek at the very Marvel Comic Book Plot: “The Tesseract,” a power source/Stargate type device from several predecessor movies, falls into the hands of Loki (fronting for a bunch of Fin Fang Foom-era Marvel aliens, who have promised Loki he can have the place after they settle Earth’s hash).

The lineup is essentially the late 1960s one—Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, and, used well for the first time in movies, The Hulk. Hawkeye is there, too, but due to plot exigencies spends two-thirds of the movie as a tool of the baddies. There’s Nick Fury, head of S.H.I.E.L.D. who looked like a white Sgt. Rock in the comics but who now looks like Samuel L. Jackson with an eye patch.

Lawrence Person: Samuel L. Jackson acts just like he has in every other film of the last 15 years that wasn’t directed by Quentin Tarantino or (ugh) George Lucas. And he’s fine, and even a bit more throttled back, but it’s not among his best work, as Fury is essentially a straight man. (Though not only could they do worse, they actually have done worse.)

HW: S.H.I.E.L.D gets the Avengers together. Much is made of Cap as an anachronism (he spent the latter part of the twentieth century frozen in an iceberg). He recognizes exactly one cultural reference during the movie’s running time.

LP: There are some wonderful moments that come from Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) being a total Captain America fanboy. He even shyly, apologetically asks Cap to sign some trading cards. (“Originals. Most of them are near mint.”)

HW: Bruce Banner is laying low as a doctor in India; he’s a real-live person in this movie (the first of the right uses of The Hulk). Iron Man is his usual ego-pit genius; Thor does less preening than in his eponymous outing, and threatens to become a decent character.

LP: Beyond Fury, Joss Whedon (as both director and writer) makes superb use of his characters. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark is still the cocky, arrogant supergenius you can’t help loving from the first two Iron Man films. Thor is even more not-too-bright than he was in his title film. (Loki: “Are you ever going to not fall for that?”)

There’s a fight between Iron Man, Thor and Captain America that’s completely illogical from a mission standpoint, but absolutely logical from a psychological standpoint, with three very different Alpha males compelled to assert their dominance. (Later on they add a fourth, Bruce Banner, who has to stay a self-imposed Beta male in order not to turn into a Gamma male.)

The film even manages to make Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner, the lead in The Hurt Locker) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) work like important members of the team, despite the sub-super nature of their abilities. I didn’t think an arrow expert would even be as intimidating as an army sniper with a Barrett .50, but I must admit that shooting a data device into a slot from 200 feet away to launch a computer virus is a pretty neat trick.

Whedon, who seems to have a knack for getting excellent performances from his female leads, gets good work from Johansson, an actress more frequently deployed for eye candy than thespian range. Though he also uses the eye candy to fine advantage here (both aesthetically and plot-wise), and she does look really good in those full-body leathers…

Tom Hiddleston has even more fun with Loki than he did in Thor, a flaunting, strutting trickster god prone to showboating, monologuing and nemesis.

The secondary characters are also well-served. Agent Coulson gets his turn in the spotlight (“Oh, that’s what that does.”). Gwyneth Paltrow still has such wonderful chemistry with Downey that you wonder why come clever studio doesn’t pair them up in a straight romantic comedy. (Maybe because straight romantic comedies that make a billion dollars (as The Avengers will, and deserves to) is a set of exactly one.) And one familiar beloved character dies a tragic, noble death.

HW: Another hangover from the ‘60s – S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying aircraft carrier (modeled on Jim Steranko’s drawings) is much more believable, for some reason, than Angelina Jolie’s was in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

LP: Well, giant turbo fans are presumably more powerful than giant propellers…

I actually found myself buying the superscience (giant airborne aircraft carrier, various Stark suit improvements), sciencemagic (the Blue Scepter of Plot Contrivance), and supersciencesupermagic (the Platonic Solid of Unlimited Blue Energy) in this film more than in previous Marvel films. Maybe it was because Marvel had already established the extremities of those limits in previous films, and nothing leapt out at me as being flat out impossible like the particle-beam-bending prism in the second Iron Man movie. Or maybe it’s just because I can’t whip out the lift equations to debunk the flying aircraft carrier (I was told there would be no math).

In short, there was nothing here more implausible than anything we’ve yet seen in the Marvel cinematic universe, and if you can’t buy Norse gods, a billionaire supergenius flying a self-designed battlesuits, and a giant green rage monster all together in the same pot, well, why would you watch this in the first place?

HW: I missed Ant-Man from the 60s lineup, but knew why they didn’t use him. I wanted them to use his sidekick The Wasp: nothing gets your mind off Galactic Domination like a wasp flying up your nose.

The aliens’ ships, when they come, look like crosses between metal Euryptids and Chinese New Year street dragons; they don’t make a lot of sense but are pretty AND sinister and Blow Up Real Good.

LP: I suppose I could complain that the aliens’ attack strategy is pretty stupid, but is there ever a movie where that isn’t the case?

HW: Joss Whedon’s co-screenplay and direction keeps calling attention to the humor inherent in the material. Tony Stark looks around at the hundreds of monitor screens in the carrier, puts one hand over his eye, imitating Jackson’s eye patch, and asks, “How does Fury see half this stuff?” Later, after the big battle is over, one of the technicians goes back to playing Angry Birds on his government-issue computer.

LP: There are dozens of clever moments that humorously undercut a character with an understated aside or gesture; tiny, perfect human touches needed to ground a film filled with so many superhumans. (The absence of same is one of the many things that made the Asgard sections of Thor feel so dull.) They’re one reason why this two hour and twenty-two minute movie never feels too long. Another is the two main set-piece action sequences (one set on the carrier, with Loki locked (they think) inside, the other the alien attack climax), which are pretty impeccably staged.

HW: Stay for the credit cookie: Not a word is said, but it’s the perfect coda for a movie that’s saved the Earth.

LP: Actually, two credit cookies: One after the main credits, and another after the full ones. Both are worth watching (and you have time to make a pit stop and get back between the two).

HW: The biggest audience reaction in the film is to something The Hulk (no longer that nice Dr. Banner) does. You’ve waited a long time for it, and you cheer out of its sheer appropriateness. It’s truly liberating.

No matter how much it’s hyped, no matter how much money this one makes, it’s worth your patronage. We can only hope there are more movies this good to go to in the coming years.

Here’s the latest F&SF, plus some more obscure publications, including a debut.

F&SF, May/June 2012

The best issue of the year, so far.

“Maze of Shadows” by Fred Chappell

Another tale of Falco the shadow thief. Master Astolfo has accepted the commission of a nobleman to guard his house with shadows in order to protect a mysterious treasure within. Falco and his fellow-apprentice Mutano have duly constructed a shadow maze, but a blind man sent to test it easily finds his way through. The chateau [pun, there?] also houses the cat that has Mutano’s voice, while he can only converse in cat – a situation that Mutano wants to remedy.

Sunbolt appeared from behind an arcade column directly across. He ambled slowly toward us, pausing now and again to display an attitude of nonchalance by sitting and washing his paws and ears and underbelly. This cat carried himself with a posture that proclaimed he knew his worth and held it considerable. If he were a man, he might play the role of a youngish sea captain with a ready and playful sword.

There’s a thing about series: if built around an ingenious and fascinating notion, such a premise can carry the first story a long way. But in the subsequent installments, we expect and require rather more. There is plenty of more in this one. The shadow trade figures prominently, the details sufficient and comprehensible for the purpose of the story without a lot of unnecessary backgrounding. The mannered narrative voice of Falco is engaging. There is also a neatly complex plot full of interwoven mysteries to keep readers involved. And some extraordinary cats.

–RECOMMENDED

“Liberty’s Daughter” by Naomi Kritzer

A libertarian dystopia, in which independent states have been established on man-made islands, subject only to their own rules. The population is mostly either citizens who have bought a share in the steading, or bonded workers. Teenager Beck Garrison was born on the steading and has a part-time as a Finder.

. . . let’s say you need something really specific, like a size six black bathing suit. There’s only a few stores and they might not have one in stock. But there’s probably someone on the seastead who’s got one, who’ll sell it for the right price, or trade it for the right thing. And that’s my job: finding that stuff, and then getting them what they want in exchange.

A bonded worker has the size eight sparkly sandals she needs, and in exchange she agrees to find what happened to the worker’s sister, who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. This detective work, of course, leads Beck into trouble.

An interesting setting, which the author neither excuses nor demonizes. Beck makes for a resourceful young detective, which we can imagine to be her future profession. But there’s a lot we aren’t told, particularly concerning her father, who is somebody but we don’t know who. When he discovers what Beck has been up to – and he is quite well-informed – he tells her, “. . . you’ve demonstrated that you are stubborn, disobedient, and disrespectful.” Which he clearly sees as assets to be employed, rather than character flaws. But readers will know that Beck might have her own ideas. An appealing heroine.

“Asylum” by Albert E Cowdrey

This issue’s Cowdrey is a ghost story set in New Orleans, the author’s specialty. Willy is a loser who has always been obsessed with the afterlife. He figures, reasonably, that ghosts will have the answers he’s been looking for. So when he inherits a nice competence and foolishly imagines himself rich*, he finds a decrepit mansion that used to be an insane asylum, now haunted by the shades of its departed inmates.

“I think these folks spent the happiest part of their lives here in the nuthouse, where they were safe and taken care of and nobody told them they were out of their minds. An asylum originally meant a refuge, and that’s what it was for them. The masked ball was the high point, so year after year they come back to this room on this night, because this is where the ball was held.”

Willy has a great time at the ghost ball, so he moves in.

The story isn’t very original**, and neither scary nor crazy fun, as many of these tend to be, but rather wistful, its humor subdued.

* Willy is better off than the author thinks he is, though, as an inheritance in the US is not taxable to the beneficiary as income, but to the estate. That’s a pretty big oops.

** Aspects of the scenario greatly resemble that of the author’s “Greed”, from the previous issue of this zine.

“Taking the Low Road” by Pat MacEwen

Jeanne wants to leave behind her twin sister and their life as celebrities so strongly that she signs up to transit to a new colony via wormhole – not the safest choice.

The worm didn’t notice, of course. We were bits of debris, like the mineral content in some kind of quantum mechanical vitamin pill. What it needed the most, it got from ingesting the black hole, or rather the white hole it became in other nearby universes.

But Jeanne is dismayed to discover that Jeannette has followed her.

What’s interesting here is the wormhole travel, which is literally through the body of the hyperspace worm that literalizes the concept. The risks – typically 15% of travelers lost on a crossing – are so great that I can’t really credit people using this method of transit for routine travel. But the author describes them vividly. It’s annoying when the annoying sister shows up in the story, as a distraction from the wormy marvels.

“The Children’s Crusade” by Michael Alexander

A colonized world where humanity has devolved, becoming afflicted by illness and religion. Because the native foods are slowly toxic to humans, they have also developed a tradition of cannibalism; malefactors and suspicious strangers go into the pot, and “sharing the flesh” is as literal as it is sacramental. Because they have also developed a measure of telepathy, William sees something promising in the outwardly unprepossessing stranger who arrives in his town.

Peter leaned his head back, letting the rain settle on his face, then pulled the skinbag slung from his shoulder around to the front and put the spout to his lips, drinking deeply. He capped it, belched, wiped his mouth, leaned to one side, and farted; all in all, a class act. I kept an eye on him as I whittled, figuring anything that ugly was a potential threat.

Peter turns out to be much more than he seems, which is probably protective coloration.

While the scenario is not at all original [I'm having to say that a lot], the well-developed characters carry the story, and the messianic tone of the opening turns out to be quite fitting. It’s odd that we see no women or girls here, although they seem to exist. It’s an interesting question whether the cannibalism contributes to the declining birth rate or helps the population by supplying necessary nutrients, but the author is wisely more concerned with his story than such speculation.

“Necrosis” by Dale Bailey

Set in the days when gentlemen of leisure congregated in their clubs. The members begin to notice that one of their number has developed a disagreeable odor.

Westfall claimed it had started in the late fall. He’d run into Condon Christmas shopping — we usually trade small gifts among ourselves — and had detected a faint unpleasant smell around the man. But the rest of us disagreed: the scent could have been nothing but some poorly chosen cologne, and besides, in the thronged department store in late November, the smell, which even Westfall admitted was subtle and brief, might have belonged to someone else altogether, brushing past in the crowded aisle where they stood conversing.

A weird tale in the classic mode, with a mannered narrative and atmosphere suitable to the previous century. The mystery is at first a subtle matter, but the author briefly opens a door into horror at the end, then closes it on the readers, who are left to wonder and dread – along with a certain amount to frustration, not knowing what has actually happened.

“Typhoid Jack” by Andy Stewart

An android twist on the police state, the germ police are in charge, and privacy is almost nonexistent. This is where the narrator comes in.

People need to piss away a day now and then. Need an excuse to be lazy, or to give it less than the 120 percent. People need a day off work. That’s a harder thing to come by since the Farmers started running things. A new level of productivity was required of society when they came on board. Most of the time that’s a good thing. Not all the time, though.

So Jack is a germ peddler, and it pays the big bucks. But there’s something suspicious about his latest client, and the enforcers know it.

The scenario is improbable in this moral tale about individual freedom/responsibility and the public good.

“City League” by Matthew Corradi

A world in which memories are routinely bought and sold, which has generated a big business in verifying them. The narrator, a memory verifier, is also a baseball fan, with a large collection of classic baseball mems. So he’s bothered when a mem that he’s checking out conflicts with his own memory of the details of a historic perfect game that he actually attended as a kid. Or so he remembers.

That baseball mem, however, and the perfect game, and “Two-Ply” Frye, they all bothered me on the ride home down the C-rail to my little apartment in Allen Park, and they bothered me late into the night as I ate my frozen pizza and followed the Tigers on my wall beam.

This one begins as if it will be concerned with the corruptibility of information in the digital age. But it soon takes a turn towards the personal, a devastatingly emotional story of a father and son.

“Grand Tour” by Chris Willrich

Now that she is eighteen, I-Chen is about to embark on her Grand Tour, and she doesn’t wanna.

Dad tried to lay a comforting hand on her aching head, exactly as if she were twelve years old and this was her Bat Mitzvah, not her Grand Tour. She ignored him, stalked aboard the flyer, and threw her backpack as far from the cockpit as she could get. The backpack beeped it was fine. That made her want to throw it again. Wordlessly, Dad sat at the controls. She wanted him to come back here so she could yell at him to leave her alone.

Pretty standard kid stuff. It doesn’t make much sense to me that an entire extended family will interrupt their lives and careers and take off to vacation in the stars for a dozen years objective, every time one of their kids hits age eighteen – just to give her some space to grow up. It should be the kids going.

Tor.com, April 2012

One short story amidst the tie-ins.

“On 20468 Petercook” by Andy Duncan

A very silly spacewalk. George and Stanley have a boring job, tending the solar sail on the surface of “minor planet 20468″. They have little to do but play video games and natter interminably, employing locutions like “old tosh” that are already archaic today. Even on the rare occasion that they have a task to perform, they aren’t very good at it.

“From my vantage point, there seems to be a red light on your screen, appearing and disappearing with some rapidity. Were I asked to describe it, I might be so bold as to say it is flashing.”

The title, of course, reveals the story’s inspiration, as well as the illustration. I can’t help also suspecting that Stanley is named for one of an even older pair of comics.

Fireside Magazine, Spring 2012

Debut issue. The zine’s slogan is “Many genres. No limits. Just good stories.” Laudable ambitions, which the Liu and Buckell stories fulfill fairly well. The stories tend to be quite short.

“To the Moon” by Ken Liu

Not space travel. Wenchao leaves China with his young daughter in hopes of a better life in the US, if he can qualify for asylum. He’s assigned to a young attorney struggling with her growing disillusion with the system. She tells him that she wants to hear his story and wants it to be the truth, but what she really wants is for it to conform to the rules. At the same time, Wenchao is telling his daughter another version of the story, how he climbed the pagoda tree with her until they reached the moon.

The Moon seemed close from the ground but it kept on receding as we progressed up the tree. We had to climb through clouds, through flocks of wild starlings and sparrows, through wind and rain that threatened to tear us from the tree, until finally, we were at the very tip of the tallest swaying branch, and then, just as the Moon passed right overhead, I reached up and hoisted us onto it.

A thought-provoking look at the different ways a story can tell the truth. The fantastic element is only metaphorical.

“Emerald Lakes” by Chuck Wendig

A series story. Atlanta Burns is locked up in the psych ward after she shot her stepfather’s balls off, with some justification. Survival in the psych ward takes strategic originality.

Perhaps this might be more meaningful to those already familiar with the character. No genre content.

“Temperance” by Christie Yant

Finding himself by mistake in the town of Temperance, ruled by the militant foes of alcohol, alcoholic Anthony sees a ghostly vision that thrusts him into a tragic future. We only get a fragment of the story, however.

“Press Enter to Execute” by Tobias S Buckell

When the internet goes bad. Or rather, worse. Mayhew is a paid killer, hired to kill spammers, whereby he is known as “the spam assassin.” He’s a big net star.

The support for my missions was always put together by crowds of unconnected people who would never realize they were helping participate in a crime. In the old days they would be “accessories” in one way or another.

Then things go wrong, and he finally learns who has hired him. Maybe.

A particularly clever, entertaining idea of the “If This Goes On” sort. I only wish the ending weren’t one of the “how is he telling this story?” sort.

Bull Spec #7, Spring 2012

I thought at first glance that the current issue of this small press slickzine was a more substantial one, with six original stories. However, these are all quite short pieces, often to their disadvantage – sketchy, vignettes more than fully-realized stories. The nonfiction is given a lot more space.

“The Gearaffe Who Didn’t Tick” by D K Thompson

In the ruins of a world that might once have been colonized by humans, robotic automatons scavenge a ruined spaceship for oil. Timid young Annabelle is afraid of the darkness inside the ship; there are voices in the darkness, although none of the other gearaffes seem to hear them. The coalyote, however, suggests that perhaps the darkness is just as afraid of her.

A children’s story, charming and imaginative, although it might take a special child to appreciate some of the wordplay. We never learn how the automatons can be said to be born, or why Annabelle is different, but these details seem inconsequential.

“Complications of the Flesh” by Jason Erik Lundberg

Drug dealing in Southeast Asia. The nameless narrator is in trouble, drug dealing in Southeast Asia, screwing his partner’s girlfriend. At least, that is one scene, but it alternates with another in which he is imprisoned with a violent woman who may also be the girlfriend – this all may be a drug-induced hallucination. Except that it’s really something else.

I ask if you know who I am.

“Yes. I have always known.”

Who am I?

“It is unimportant in this place.”

The reader is left to figure all this out, which is not so difficult in itself, but quite without context in reality, whatever that may be.

“Inseparables’ War” by Stephanie Ricker

Twin brothers share a telepathic bond, which proves the salvation of Bobby when he is drafted into the Vietnam War. Quite sketchy.

“Fish Eyes” by Natania Barron

In a village of fishermen, the nets are put away in autumn and not brought out again until spring [this is two seasons, not one, as the text states]. Brodd’s father has told him this again and again, but now his father is away at war, and armed raids have left them with nothing to eat. In desperation, Brod takes a fish to feed his family and learns why he is not supposed to be there. He learns more than the reader does, however. The piece is horror, the story of crossing the boundary of the forbidden. Often in such tales, it is the very inexplicability of the secret that constitutes the horror, but in this case, the weirdness is such that the effect is diminished. We don’t know enough, and it’s unsatisfying.

“Friday Nite at the A&W” by J P Trostle

Essentially, the Jetsons.

“When Dreams Wake” by Jason K Chapman

Sarah has been brought to an alien place to nurse a sick and possibly dying alien who speaks in enigmas and riddles. Gradually she learns something of the nature of reality in this place, which is the dream that the alien dreams.

A fine story, with well-done imagery:

Yesterday was as sharp as honed steel, as were the days before that, but her memories of life before coming to care for him were puffs of smoke silhouetted against a blazing sunrise.

–RECOMMENDED

When I was but a lad, the Science Fiction Book Club held out as enticement to join (cost: one thin dime, to be mailed physically via USPS) the two-volume anthology edited by Anthony Boucher and titled A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. When I received this induction premium, my head practically exploded. The set contained four complete novels, and a wealth of shorter fiction. Holding those books, I felt a palpable sense of the living, ongoing history of the field, and a vision of the riches the genre contained. I marveled that any editor could assemble between two covers (okay, four covers) such a generous treasure trove for my enjoyment. Needless to say, I hardly waited ten minutes after receipt before diving into them, and they fulfilled all the advertised delights.

I get the same feeling these days whenever I receive a book from Haffner Press (or from NESFA Press, or Subterranean Press, or a few other worthy independent publishers). The giant, career-spanning compilations these fine presses produce offer a similar thrill of enormous literary riches. But additionally, they also carry a weight of nostalgia and time-binding and laudable archival rescue work that the Boucher volumes did not. Boucher’s Treasury appeared in 1959. The oldest story in it hailed from 1938. But most of the pieces were from the forties and fifties. And many of the stories—the novels especially—could easily be found in other editions. So great as the Treasury was, it spanned only twenty years of the field (admittedly, a field that was barely just a tad over thirty years old in 1959).

Today, we are (almost) fifty-five years deeper into the production of SF. Boucher is nearly twice as far from us as he was from Gernsback. The Boucher books felt to me then almost like a state-of-the-art snapshot. But the strata from which these new books mine their treasures are much deeper and stranger and uncommon for the 21st-century sensibility. In fact, in many cases, these newly collected stories will be getting their first airing in several decades. This phenomenon imparts to these collections a sense of time-travel artifacts, antiquities rescued from the dustheap of history. It’s a feeling I welcome, but I know that others, perhaps especially younger readers, might feel such assemblages are fusty relics.

One final thing that distinguishes Haffner (and NESFA and Subterranean) collections from the Boucher landmark is the altered state of book publishing. The Boucher project was just another line-item in the boring, stable world of Doubleday. Whereas in this uncertain age of the digitization and evaporation of paper books, a book from Haffner, lovingly and luxuriously crafted and thoughtfully designed, carries a weight of defiance, of proud traditional assertiveness and rootedness, even of countercultural nose-thumbing.

Taking all that into account, I believe that any reader with a more than passing interest in what SF is and means and can accomplish—and who wants to enjoy some Haggard-level storytelling—owes it to himself or herself to check out these books. Specifically, today, this latest Kuttner offering.

Haffner previously gave us Terror in the House and Detour to Otherness by Kuttner, the latter with his wife, C. L. Moore. Terror contained facile, repetitive stories that packed a simple, effective punch, then evanesced. Useful as an insight into the development of a talent. Detour, however, offered lasting works of pure genius. The tales in Thunder fall between those poles. They show a solo Kuttner spinning off ideas like a Catherine Wheel throws sparks. He takes the seminal tropes of the field (in stories from 1937 to 1950), juggles them with skill and zest, rearranging them in infinite patterns that are plainly all cousins, and crams more action into his allotted pages than any “decompressed-mode” modern author ever could. These stories remind me of those hour-long B movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, films that swept viewers up instantly and carried them to the exciting climax with no time to stop and ponder any gaps in logic or continuity.

The first story, “Raider of the Spaceways,” delivers satisfying pirate-themed derring-do on Venus, complete with weird lifeforms. But the second entry, “Avengers of Space,” ramps up the stakes considerably. Invaders from another dimension steal Earth and the Moon entire, and it’s up to a few off-planet refugees to save all of humanity. Ultimately, the rescue comes down to one man, our hero, Terry Shawn. Stop to consider for a minute what the reality of such a situation would feel like: the entire fate of the species resting on your shoulders. It’s nigh-inconceivable, but Kuttner manages to realistically convey some of the suspenseful existential angst anyhow.

Like Boucher offering four novels, editor Stephen Haffner includes one or two short novels here. “The Time Trap” plays masterfully with that great “power chord” notion employed by van Vogt and others of castaways from various eras all ending up in the same locale and period, there to fight it out for supremacy. “Crypt-City of the Deathless One” (Kuttner’s titles are always pulp-strength, although subtle ones such as “What Hath Me?” and “Carry Me Home” show up toward the end) takes place on dangerous unexplored Ganymede, where adventurers seek an alien power source. Kuttner excels at vivid, economical descriptions that embed the reader instantly into any venue: “Jupiter is a ball of luminous clouded marble in the sky of Ganymede. Its light is a queer, pale glow that lacks the warm brilliance of sunlight. When the titanic planet lifts over the horizon, gravity seems to shift, and the ground feels unstable beneath your feet.”

So many of these stories take place in that familiar, now-vanished, genre-consensus background of a colonized Solar System with each world boasting its archetypical cultures and environments. This assumption leaves Kuttner free to plot without doing worldbuilding every time. Another notable feature of these tales is that of the loner, the ethically compromised anti-hero. Kuttner favored these guys, giving a lie to the legend that all the stories of this era centered on stalwart Dudley Do-Rights. And Kuttner’s memorable women were often of the Veronica Lake or Rita Hayworth persuasion: tough gals who could be merciless when necessary. But these stories are not unrelievedly grim, since some of Kuttner’s trademark zaniness pops up now and then: “There’s something [in the water] that increases the surface tension tremendously….The fish have to climb rocks to dive back in.”

Dying young at age 42, Kuttner still turned out a body of unparalleled work. His fiction shaped the SF of his day, and continues to exert a subliminal influence today. And his legacy has never shown brighter nor more enjoyably than in these Haffner Press tributes.

At its heart, A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarök is a story about stories. Here Byatt explores why we tell them and how some grow to become myths. The book’s slightness does nothing to indicate the weight of the ideas enclosed within.

On its surface, this is a story about a character referred to only as ‘‘the thin girl,’’ who was evac­uated from a ‘‘steel city’’ to the English country­side during World War II. She spends the time reading and rereading both Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Promise and Wagner’s Asgard and the Gods. In the former, she recognizes the clear message but can’t connect with it during this bleak time. In the latter, she connects to the chaos and, per­haps, the moral ambiguity of the tales as well as the thought that the world as it was known could be devoured by wolves.

The thin child’s foremost concern isn’t her own survival but that of her father, who has been at the front for a number of years. She knows, deep in her heart, that he won’t come back, because that’s how most stories go. Fathers and heroes frequently fail to return. The thin child seems to take comfort in this.

While Byatt explores the experience of being a kid during a war (or, really, any equally trau­matic event), she also retells the story of the Ring Cycle, deftly interweaving the two. Neither story would have much impact if forced to stand alone. Together, however, they echo and howl.

Byatt’s simple prose is nothing that a ten-year old couldn’t easily read, further proving that complexity isn’t always equivalent to power. There are moments where she condenses com­plicated emotions into something crystalline: ‘‘What was fearsome, the thin child understood, was to have helpless parents.’’ And in context, that sentence knocks the wind out of you.

Underneath all of that, however, is Byatt her­self deconstructing and testing what it is that makes a story work, as well as what elevates a story into a myth. Thoughts about both get dropped into the larger stories, commenting upon both the action and the ideas. ‘‘The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them.’’

Ragnarök is one of those books that you could read every couple of years and find something new each time, no matter how well you know the story of Loki and his mates, or the Blitz.