George Mann

The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories

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And we’re back to matters weird and Lovecraftian with the late Sam Gafford’s one and, unfortunately, only collection.

Low Res Scan: The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories, Sam Gafford, 2017.

Cover by Jared Boggess

It’s a Low Res Scan because I’ve already reviewed three of this book’s stories, “Passing Spirits”, “Weltschmerz” and “The Land of Lonesomeness”.

There’s a lot of Lovecraftian fiction here, mostly using the Cthulhu Mythos paraphernalia of gods, places, and blasphemous books. Not all of it falls in that category though.

Sweetening the deal for your purchase of this book, even if you’ve encountered Gafford’s fiction before, several stories are original to this collection.

One is “The Adventure of the Prometheus Calculation”. As you would expect from the title, it involves Sherlock Holmes. Well, a Sherlock Holmes with a Babbage Engine for a brain and the world’s only “living, functional robot”. It proceeds roughly along the lines of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes tale “The Final Problem”, but Mycroft Holmes and Professor Moriarty have different roles. There are also elements of Frankenstein in the story. Ultimately, though, it’s nothing special as either a Holmes story or steampunk.

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The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 3

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The outside project has been sent off to an editor, so the new reviews should be more frequent. There’s certainly a backlog of titles I’ve read.

For now, though, you get another retro review.

This one is from May 6, 2010.

Review: The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 3, ed. George Mann, 2009.Solaris Book of New Science Fiction

The third and final in this artistically, if perhaps not commercially, successful series doesn’t disappoint. There are no truly bad stories, just a few that didn’t do much for me. Most I found good and one truly memorable. Mann lives up to his writ of widely varied stories that diverge from near future dystopianism.

Curiously, many of the stories seem twinned, thematically or in images or feel, with other stories. The “gothic suspense” of John Meaney’s “Necroflux Day” with its story of family secrets in a world where fuel and information are stored in bones is also conveyed, better, in the gothic “A Soul Stitched in Iron” by Tim Akers. The latter story has an aristocrat, fallen on hard times, tracking down a putative murderer that’s upsetting a crime lord’s plans. That murderer happens to be an old friend of the protagonist, and the killer’s motives involve subterranean secrets that underlie the status of a noveau riche clan. Meaney’s story didn’t do much for me. Akers interests me enough to that I’m going to seek out his Heart of Veridon set in the same city.

Alastair Reynolds’ “The Fixation” and Paul Cornell’s “One of Our Bastards Is Missing” are both, loosely defined, alternate history. Reynolds’ story has a scientist restoring the Mechanism, very much like our Antikythera Mechanism – an ancient clockwork computer. In her world, while the Romans found no practical use for the Mechanism, the Persians did and founded the predominant power of the world. However, other universes are also interested in their versions of the Mechanism and prepared to vampirically leach its information structure from other universes to facilitate a complete restoration. The central idea is interesting, but the alternate history speculation is at a bare minimum. Not even really alternate history but an annoying, distracting mélange of medieval European, Renaissance, and 19th century politics, Cornell’s story features personal teleportation, so called “Impossible Grace”, that binds the solar system together and greatly complicates the balance of power in the royal houses of Europe. For me, its plot of political intrigue was ruined by the story’s capricious use of history. Stephen Baxter’s “Artifacts” is Baxter in his deep cosmological mode. Its scientist hero, provoked by the religious ideas of his father and early death of his wife, ponders why our brane (if I understand the concept correctly, a cluster of universes) has time flowing in one direction and the consequence of death. His discovery oddly echoes the theme of Reynolds’ story, but I also liked the story’s near future Britain noticeably not affected by any Singularity and poor enough to have to recycle computers for rare metals. Continue reading →

The Affinity Bridge

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Predictably, another series I haven’t gotten around to completing.

A retro review from June 16, 2009. I’m not working on other things — ’cause I’m holding an icebag on my face following some pre-Halloween surgery (with Dr. Frankenstein-like stitches).

Review: The Affinity Bridge, George Mann, 2009.Affinity Bridge

The first in a promised series of Newbury and Hobbes investigation, this is an enjoyable steampunk mystery.

For those unfamiliar with steampunk, don’t think an alternate history. Think an alternate aesthetic centering around Victorian electric and steam technology taken to levels not seen in our world (and usually impossible to have ever been seen in our world).

While Newbury is a student of the occult, this book is more about the sort of odd, baroque technologies you want in steampunk — airships, brass automatons, bizarre medical devices, and nifty weapons – rather than magic. While I might have wanted a bit more description of the fog-shrouded London of November 1901 where Victoria still reigns, Mann still does a good job building the atmosphere with descriptions – especially in the action packed final third of the book.

Newbury and Hobbes are well done, believable characters. Mann doesn’t make Veronica Hobbes a warrior babe. While a romance may be brewing between the two, Mann makes it seem credible and not a hackneyed mystery cliché. Continue reading →

The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2

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You get this retro review, from April 9, 2009, for the usual reasons: I’m off working on new material.

Review: The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2, ed. George Mann, 2008.Solaris Book 2

George Mann’s Solaris anthology series is one of several recent attempts to revive market for original, unthemed anthologies. I don’t know about the quality of the other series or even the first volume of this one, but, based on this installment, I hope Mann’s series continues. None of the stories are bad or boring. All, with one possible exception, are truly science fiction, and three stories are noteworthy.

Extrapolate the instant feedback of popularity polls, add “sensate matter” which can be reprogrammed to assume any configuration, and you have the sport of “competitive urban planning” which is the subject of Paul Di Filippo’s humorous “iCity“. The hero of Kay Kenyon’s “The Space Crawl Blues” is facing, like many a science fiction protagonist before him, technological obsolescence. Personal teleportation is on the brink of rendering starship pilots like him unnecessary. Teleportation converts the body to mere information, but whom do you trust to edit that information and based on what criteria?

Chris Roberson’s “Line of Dichotomy” is part of his alternate history imagining the past and present dominated by the empires of Mexica and the Middle Kingdom. Here their struggle comes to Fire Star, our Mars. It’s a classic story of a group desperately fleeing pursuit across hostile terrain. The unresolved ending tries too hard for something else, but, apart from that, the story was enjoyable. Robert Reed’s “Fifty Dinosaurs” really only has three dinosaurs, some giant microbes, and one human. Their response to their peculiar origin has a charming, surreal quality to it.

Many of these stories mix humor and action. More on the humor side are two installments in Neal Asher’s Mason’s Rats series. Here the English farmer and the intelligent, tool-using rats on his farm have to battle pushy salesmen and bureaucrats in “Mason’s Rats: Black Rat” and “Mason’s Rats: Autotractor“. The “Evil Robot Monkey” of Mary Robinette Kowal resents his freak status as neither monkey nor human and just wants to be left to his pottery. Martial arts, a giant mech fighting machine, a classic western plot, and a wry take on fathers, sons, and their expectations of each other make up Dominic Green’s “Shining Armor“. I’m not a fan of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius series, but I did like the latest installment, “Modem Times“. Maybe it caught me in the right mood or maybe I’ve just read enough to know what to expect – and what I’m not going to get – from this incarnation of the Eternal Champion. If you like the Cornelius series, you’ll probably enjoy Jerry’s quest for the lost spirit of the 60s even more than I did.

Slick and pleasant enough and not overstaying their welcome – but not sticking in the mind either – are Brenda Cooper’s “Blood Bonds” about twins, one still living a normal life in the flesh and the other paralyzed and only living in a virtual reality, getting embroiled in a rebellion of artificial intelligences. Eric Brown’s “Sunworld” is a rather standard tale of a young man in a medieval-like setting, complete with a theocracy, being initiated in a startling truth. The nature of that truth is somewhat interesting but not really that exceptional.

Karl Schroeder’s “Book, Theatre, and Wheel” is the one oddity of the book. Arguably, it’s not even science fiction. Set in Italy shortly after the Black Death, its hero, accompanying a member of the Inquisition, investigates a merchant woman with uncanny business success and some possibly subversive social ideas. The story revolves around a real idea, Cicero’s Theatre of the Memory, though Schroeder, I think, extrapolates an improbable degree of efficacy for it. Still there is a science fictional air about the story, indeed it rather reminded me of some Robert Anton Wilson, with talk of using Cicero’s memory training to reinvent ourselves and civilization.

Peter Watts’ “The Eye of God” is one of the anthology’s highlights. Set in a near future of ever more sophisticated brain scanning and hacking via electromagnetic radiation, it’s narrator, on the way to the funeral of a possibly pedophilic priest, contemplates the dark desires of his own mind – and how they will soon be revealed to all.

The other exceptional stories of the book, David Louis Edelman’s “Mathralon” and David Abnett’s “Point of No Contact“, both take two old science fiction cliches and use them to clever effect in stories that break rules of fiction. The first has something to say about economic forces becoming as mysterious and inhuman as natural forces with its account of the trade activity around the fictional element mathralon. Abnett’s tale is about the startling insignificance of alien contact.

 

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