Paul Di Filippo

Fabulous Harbors

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The Moorcock series continues with what is sort of the middle book, even though it’s a collection, of the trilogy, the so-called Second Ether Trilogy, that started with Blood.

Raw Feed (1998): Fabulous Harbors, ed. Michael Moorcock, 1995.Fabulous Harbors

“Introduction” — Mock introduction to the collection. Moorcock claims these stories were related to him by Edwin Begg and that these stories tell of a “slightly better world”. On the other hand, Moorcock, in a serious vein, says our “visions reveal our motives and identities.”

“The Retirement of Jack Karaquazian” — Fragment mentioning, in the title, a character from Moorcock’s Blood. I still don’t really understand Moorcock’s multiverse, but I like it. Many characters with the same name or similar names pop up. They seem to be manifestations of the same personality across the multiverse or, sometimes, the same character. Of course, the balance between Law and Chaos – not to be confused with good and evil, is of paramount importance. I’m not sure how the Holy Grail and the Bek’s, particularly Rose von Bek, figure in all this. The multiverse also seems to operate on many different scales of time and space. This story mentions the “Masked Buckaroo” which Moorcock has written of elsewhere as well as his creator.

“The White Pirate” — An entertaining, playful fantasy that does a twist on the Wandering Jew tale. Moorcock gives us the Wandering Gentile, unjustly cursed by Christ and an immortal wanderer about the Earth, a miserable man with a tinge of Hitler about Him. (His name is Manfred von Bek and, at one point, he says “Mein Kampf! Mein Kampf!”). Only finding the Wandering Jew can remove the curse. Finally, after a 2,000 year search, he finds him – and he’s infuriated. The Wandering Jew, sensibly, has made the best of his lot (as he remarks being cursed with immortal life’s not a bad thing). He leads a rich, rewarding life of study, surrounded by riches and adoring families and friends. The Wandering Gentile can’t accept he’s wasted so much of his life on despair and bitterness, and he strikes off again. Moorcock even works in a bit of an attack on the idea of political ideologies. Continue reading →

Stealing Other People’s Homework: The Return (Reprint) of the Lost Race Novel

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A lost race novel by Nero Wolfe’s Rex Stout?

A Hollow Earth invaded by a Brit and a Yank?

Another lost race novel by H. Rider Haggard.

Paul Di Filippo looks at some recent lost novel reprints

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What Might Have Been, Vol. 2

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The Raw Feed series on this classic alternate history anthology series continues.

Raw Feed (1991): What Might Have Been, Volume 2: Alternate Heroes, eds. Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg, 1990.Alternate Heroes

“A Sleep and a Forgetting”, Robert Silverberg — Anothery story by the very prolific Silverberg using his historical knowledge. Here Genghis Khan was captured as a young man by Byzantine traders and Christianized. Our staid linguist protagonist Joe decides to have some fun and launches on an historical power trip. Using relay satellites within Mercury’s orbit which send messages back in time, he inspires Khan to become a Christian conqueror against the approaching Moslems. The consequences are left to the reader’s imagination making this a peculiarly underdeveloped alternate history. Still, it was interesting.

“The Old Man and C”, Shelia Finch — An alternate history which presupposes Albert Einstein took up the violin instead of physics. (The title is a nice pun on the musical note (and the variable c in E=mc2.) Despite his success, he has the nagging impression (reinforced by the constant references to light in the story and Einstein’s fascination with it) that his life took a wrong turn, that he was destined for bigger things. At his life’s end, as atom bombs enter his world, as his physicist son tells him of the new theory of relativity, his mind wanders and he clearly grasps, intuitively, the new physics. A grim, depressing, poignant story that reminds us of the “dark waters of the soul” where sharks swim to steal our dreams and destiny.

“The Last Article”, Harry Turtledove — An elegant, simple story that makes a profound political point. Nazis invade India; Gandhi tries his passive resistance routine on them; he and his followers are shot. As Field Marshal Walther Model tells Gandhi, before the latter is executed, passive resistance only works in a regime ruled by conscience, capable of shame. A certain type of morality must be present, a certain concern for the oppressed must exist before passive resistance can work. In short, only societies that are already somewhat good can be reformed this way. The truly bad aren’t impressed. Continue reading →

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 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.

 

More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.

Outposts of Beyond

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Outposts of Beyond

So, I was walking around the dealer’s room at Minicon 50, and I came across a publisher I had never heard before: Alban Lake Publishing.

They had a variety of things on hand including an unusually large amount of speculative poetry in both collections and magazines which caught my eye though they only thing in that line I bought was Suzette Hadin Elgin’s The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook.

I did recognize the names of several people in their publications: Lee Clark Zumpe, Laura Givens (though more as an artist than writer), and Bryan Thao Worra through his work at Innsmouth Free Press.

Since I appreciate writing decent stuff is hard work and it’s hard to get it noticed after you write it, I’m a tiny bit susceptible to purchases that are motivated a bit by charity as well as self-interest (or instruction with the Elgin).

So, after chatting with the magazine’s editor Tyree Campbell,  I picked up a copy of Outposts of Beyond, October 2014.

Now I not going to extend the reviewing madness into magazines. However, given that this magazine isn’t well publicized — I don’t recall seeing mentions of it in Locus or Locus Online, I decided to give my impressions.

I am not going to review every story. There are six of them as well as three poems and two reviews. Part of that is because most of them, after reading them a bit longer than a month ago, have left my brain entirely. In fact, any significant memory of them left my brain after only a week.

These are mediocre stories. I mean mediocre in the classic sense — nothing special, nothing memorable, middling. They all have the necessary parts of stories: characters, conflict, resolution. It’s just they just made almost no impression on me.

The sole exception was Pedro Iniguez’s “Road to the Sun”.  Continue reading →

Romance on Four Worlds

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There are few books I am super eager to read. I’ve got a zillion reading projects going on and pick the next book more on plans and associations than moods.

However, when I saw that Tom Purdom’s collection of future Casanova tales had been collected, I was … pleased. And it got moved up pretty quickly on the reading stack … though I didn’t beat Paul Di Filippo’s review out. But then he’s a professional reviewer, and I’m an amateur (in, perhaps you will conclude, every sense.)

It’s a decent review with a good description of the four stories’ background and plot, I’ll cover some of that, but, in my afterthoughts, I’ll concentrate more on critiques and comparing the book to other Purdom stories.

First, though, as per the usual drill, is the quick, short, off the cuff (meaning without consulting my betters like Di Filippo) first thoughts on the work followed by more details and spoilers.

Review: Romance on Four Worlds: A Casanova Quartet, Tom Purdom, 2015.

A literary sonata.Romance on Four Worlds

The themes: the rapturous duets of lovers, the pursuit of love, and the technological discordances that threaten both.

From the forests of a Mercury habitat to the Kuiper Belt, Joseph Louis Baske devotes his life, like his 18th idol Giacomo Casanova, to the pursuit of women. Not merely the physically beautiful, but the competent, the intelligent, the graceful for beauty has many manifestations. The thrill of Joe’s consummation may last only 45 minutes … or years, but a fleeting emotion of such power is still a real emotion.

His secret, he tells one of the many men who asks about it, is not the sex he offers. It is the talk, the companionship, his concentration and fascination, treating his lovers as real women with “desires and needs of their own”. Continue reading →