Review of Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

It was a brisk autumn afternoon in the grungy backstreets of Johannesburg.  Moving in fits and starts, a draft manuscript of Charles Stross’ latest Laundry Files novel danced along the pavement, buffeted by the wind.  The margins full of notes, he was undecided how heavy to lay on the tech and magic. Should I go all out, from www brain implants to wizards, or keep things relaxed, just a little social media and a touch of voodoo?  At the same time and place, Philip Pullman, pique on his tongue and time to kill, was looking for a place to relax into a pint or two.  But just as he spied a promising pub, the draft manuscript whipped up and slapped him in the face.  Peeling the papers away and holding them at arm’s length, he entered and sat down, ordered a glass of bitter, and took a look at what fate had sent his way.  Immediately intrigued, he didn’t notice when the beer arrived.  So absorbed, in fact, he began scribbling his own notes—character needs animal familiar,a strong, toothy one—but which? Crocodile? Alligator?... And this one? Mongoose?  Sloth?  Pullman so deep in concentration, it took the man sitting at a nearby table several tries to get his attention.  “Hi, my name is Bill Gibson.  Looks like you’ve got some run ons, hanging clauses, and more than a few over-indulgent metaphors there.  Let me see if I can’t help you tighten up that story a little—give it an edge you can cut with, you know?” The rest, as they say, is Lauren Beukes’ 2010 Zoo City.

The above introduction would seem to render Zoo City imitative rather than original. That was only half the intention.  By setting her story in a fully realized, near-future version of Johannesburg, giving her main characters singular voices, and having her own thematic aims, Beukes transforms the tropes and styles of Stross, Pullman, and Gibson into a combination of her own making.  The influences are readily apparent, but the creation is of its own design—at least mostly. 

Review of The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford

Looking back through history, some of mankind’s most intriguing pseudosciences are those that draw connections between appearance and value.  Judging the human book by its cover, phrenology and physiognomy purport to be able to measure morals through the dimensions and attributes of body.  Somehow maintaining plausibility for centuries, it wasn’t truly until the turn of the 20th that the practices were quelled from the public eye.  But what a tool of power it would have been.  A malleable concept if ever there were, a king or high-minded official might condemn a person based solely on the dimensions of a nose—even if their own physical characteristics fit that of a murderer or rapist.  Taking the idea and putting it to use in fiction, Jeffrey Ford’s 1997 The Physiognomy (re-released by Open Road Media in 2015) is the redemption of one such high-minded official.  His story defining the word ‘malleable,’ it’s about as swimmingly macabre as dark fantasy gets.

Cley is a physiognomist living in the Well-Built City.  A despicable, bilious, narcissistic criminal of an official, he is the right-hand man of the city’s even more despicable ruler, the sorcerous Drachton Below.  Falling out of favor at the outset, however, Cley is sent on a punitive assignment to a small mining town in the distant, dirty reaches of the realm to weed out the thief of a strange white fruit.  With miners petrifying in the blue dust they collect each day, demons in the nearby forest, a beautiful young woman with greater physiognomy talent than he, and a strange thing calling itself the Traveler haunting his dreams (or his reality), Cley’s time in the town of Anamasobia spins his already bizarre world to the surreal. Catching the thief is only a doorway to stranger things.

Review of The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

Ken Liu’s first published story appeared in 2002, and over the next eight years only five additional stories appeared.  A fire lit beneath him after, however, since 2010 Liu has been a machine.  An astonishing eighty pieces of fiction published in the five intervening years, the only thing more amazing is that none of these works was a novel.  But finally in 2015 Liu has emerged in long form.  A major switch in terms of style, The Grace of Kings, book one in the Dandelion Dynasty series (trilogy?), is perhaps the least and most expected story that could have emerged.

A sense of humanism grounding the storm of short fiction Liu has produced to date, The Grace of Kings is likewise rooted in history, society, culture, and the interaction among them.  Looking at cycles of power, the effects of war on a large, multi-ethnic archipelago, and the choices the people at the top face as time moves forever forward, the novel is, however, a significantly more in depth examination of these ideas than anything Liu has produced to date—a 650 page examination, in fact.

Review of The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock

(Cue eager 1950s’ advertizing voice.)  Looking for something new?  Tired of that steady diet of popular fantasy with the same dichotomies, the same sense of style, the same touch points?  Need something fresh, something outside the mainstream of genre?  A plot that goes none knows where?  Characters so obtuse they’re normal?  Imagination of the most esoteric?  If this is you my friend, then look no further than the incomparable Mr. James P. Blaylock!  Fabulist extraordinaire, he mixes a drop of the supernatural into the mundane affairs of Joe Average to create a concoction most quirky—and pleasing for it!  Run, run, run to your corner bookshop and pick a book today!

After such a review introduction, I should pause to note the above tone is all in good fun, but the message is real; Blaylock is the scribe for the reader looking for something outside the fantasy norm.  His oeuvre unique across the spectrum of speculative fiction, one may choose almost anywhere (save the middle of series, or course) and walk away satisfied.  Take for example his delightful 1988 The Last Coin—as consistent, individual, and delightful as the day it was published.

Review of The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction ed. by Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois is well known for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies.  Roughly five-hundred stories having accumulated in the series as of 2005, at that time St. Martin’s Griffin asked Dozois to up the ante: to choose the best of the best.  Producing two volumes, the first being The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction, the second The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels.  (For the record, like the yearly anthologies, the best-of-the-best anthologies were also ice aged: The Mammoth Book of The Best of The Best New SF and The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels, respectively.)

Dozois consciously trying to avoid stories that had been re-printed innumerable times in other anthologies while maintaining a consistently high level of quality, the anthology he compiled covers all the names of the field one would expect, while not always the stories. What Dozois continues to do is spread interest within the sub-genres and micro-genres science fiction has to offer, resulting in a solid collection of short stories, from the genre’s mainstream to a handful somewhat beyond (but not too far).  (See the bottom of this review for a complete list of the thirty-nine stories Dozois selected.)  The following review covers some but not all of the stories, thirty-nine indeed mammoth.

Review of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 9 ed. by Jonathan Strahan

Numbers sometimes speak louder than words, so rather than open my review of editor Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 9 (2015, Solaris) with some trite intro, here is the statistical breakdown:

Percentage of stories by authors making at least their second appearance in Strahan’s ‘best of’ series: 75% (highest of all volumes to date)

Percentage of stories by authors making at least their third appearance: 64%

Percentage of stories by authors making at least their fourth appearance: 39%

Percentage of stories by authors making at least their fifth appearance: 18%

Percentage of stories by authors making their seventh appearance: 4% (one story, in fact: Kelly Link has appeared in seven of the nine volumes)*

I don’t mind repeat inclusions.  It’s perfectly plausible that a given writer has written several high quality stories over the past decade.  The question in my mind, however, is: does such a list truly represent the current state of short speculative fiction?  Has the editor really gone out to pound the pavement, gotten to know the back genre corners and haunts of underground authors who are writing quality fiction but not yet in the spotlight, and compiled a list of the best of 2014 regardless of author?  Or has he just gone with old faithful?  I know Strahan is working within limitations most readers may not be aware of—legal clauses, reprint restrictions, author rights, sales expectations, etc.  Nevertheless, given such a high volume of repeat inclusions, I lean toward the idea these are favorite authors, and therefore not wholly representative of 2014 in short speculative fiction.

Review of The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

Oh cosmic evil, wherefore art thou?  Ahh, a deep pit in the fields of rural Ireland, just where I thought.  At least, this is the dish William Hope Hodgson would serve.  His 1908 The House on the Borderland is the story of an Irish recluse’s encounter with inexplicable forces of the malign in the fields outside his home.  Even stranger is that the evil bears the head of a pig.  (I would have thought goat given all the pagan stereotypes, red eyes, horns, etc., but, what do I know of cosmic evil…)

The House on the Borderland opens with two fishermen going to the countryside for a little sport.  Encountering a strange house at the edge of a small gorge, rifling through the interior they discover a manuscript, and over a meal begin reading it.  The framing device effective, the tale the manuscript tells is one that requires that extra bit of narrative distance to work properly.  An unnamed narrator, living in the countryside with only his sister and dog, experiences the most bizarre happenstance one day.  Seemingly swept out of the Earthly dimension, he arrives in a massive field, and in the center sits a house—a house that bears strong resemblance to his own, yet made of jade and much bigger.  An evil swine entity making its presence felt more than seen in the ether surrounding the house, the narrator’s return home sees several of the swine beasts trying to break into his house.  Though defending himself with a shotgun, his inter-dimensional experiences are only just beginning.  Looking out his window one evening, time begins to shift from fast, to faster, to dying Earth.  And that is only one stop of the cosmic clock.

Review of Soldier of Arete by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of the Mist is the intriguing story of a mercenary soldier living in ancient Greece befuddled by anterograde amnesia.  Each night’s sleep wiping his memory of everything but his youth and instinct, each morning brings a new beginning.  And the perpetual fresh start was evident in the relative lightness of the book’s tone.  Meeting gods, being everyday in a new place, and forever meeting fresh faces (even though he may have already met them), Latro remained optimistic throughout that despite his memory problem he would find his way home.  At the conclusion of Mist he experienced a wake up call, of a sort, however.  Segueing into the next novel, Soldier of Arete (1989) digs itself deeper into Latro’s mind as he attempts to come to terms with the realities of length: the road home, and how he will handle his memory issues if there is no cure.

The scene at the end of Soldier of the Mist a major event in Latro’s life, the opening of Soldier of Arete nevertheless finds the slave-soldier in the same company. Watched over by the faithful child Io and befriended by the trustworthy Seven Lions, he and the army he is owned by continue to make their way across the seas of ancient Greece to worthy destinations.  Witness to a brutal execution at the story’s start, a figurative execution closes the novel, leaving Latro to have acquired a great deal in the middle.  Spending time amongst the Amazons, gleaning memory and scroll trying to uncover plots against his life, pawn to others when his memory fails, and always unaware who is and isn’t a god, his adventures are no less intriguing than Mist.

Review of The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology ed. by Gordon van Gelder & Edward L. Ferman

Every five or ten years, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine is poring over its backlog and publishing a fresh ‘best of’.  The first several editions edited by Edward L. Ferman, in the late 90s the magazine underwent transition, and Gordon van Gelder was added to editing duties.  But 1999’s Fiftieth Anniversary edition is different in more than just terms of editor.  The backlog search limited to the decade, The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary anthology features only stories published in the 90s.  Moreover, where the later anthologies (the 60th Anniversary and the Very Best of Vol. 2), contain stories by authors the majority of readers are familiar with, the fiftieth goes a more esoteric route.  Sharon Farber, Bruce Holland Rogers, Ray Vukcevich, Esther M. Friesner, Dale Bailey, and Michael Blumlein are generally authors known only to those deeply involved in speculative fiction.  The quality of their stories, however, is another matter.  Popularity not always equalling excellence, the lesser known names add an air of originality for unfamiliar readers, making the anthology an unexpected but no less enjoyable selection of stories from the Magazine.

Kicking things off is Elizabeth Hand’s touching novella “Last Summer at Mars Hill”.  About two teens dealing with their parent’s health problems during a summer holiday in Maine, it is paranormal fantasy (the fantasy sparing in its use) which touches upon terminal illness in poignant fashion.  “Maneki Neko” by Bruce Sterling is a one-off about the Asian cat sitting at the cash register of businesses worldwide.  Tsuyoshi, a video renovator, thinks nothing of passing along snippets of interesting old video onto the web when asked.  Helping his wife deliver a maneki neko one day, all hell breaks loose after following one instruction on his smartphone.  Sterling’s satirical take on modern life does explain how all of the cats ended up scattered around the world, but goes little further.   “No Planets Strike” by Gene Wolfe is a tale that, when divided into its component parts (alien planet, Shakespeare, talking barnyard animals, bad fairies, and Christian mythology), simply should not work.  Wolfe turning it all into a delight, the story becomes one of the most unique in the anthology.  “Sins of the Mothers” by Sharon N. Farber is a story that brings adoption and gene technology into sharp focus.  The story of an adopted man who finds his birth mother later in life, his reasons for seeking her out are not precisely altruistic.

Review of Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Folk music in the US is viewed as an innocent, pastoral indulgence with roots in rural life.  Its lilt between twittering energy and melancholy not for everyone, there was, however, a time when it reached the heights of popularity—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Simon & Garfunkel, Carly Simon, and others big names of the 60s and 70s counter-culture movement.  In England, however, folk music has added dimensions.  Celtic history forever lingering in the background, the music can likewise have pagan undertones—the spirits of forest and meadow tucked into the melodies and lyrics.  Bringing together a folk band and the counter-culture movement in England in the early 70s, Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall (2015, Open Road Media) is not only a beautifully written piece of nostalgia, but also a story about the essences of an age past that still haunt the bucolic reaches of England’s countryside.

Flower power with dark undercurrents, Wylding Hall is written in documentary format.  Akin to VH1’s Storyteller series, the novel steadily rotates through the recollections of the members of Windhollow Faire and the making of their smash hit album Wylding Hall.  Some just teenagers when they joined the band, one magical summer in the deep countryside of England at a worn down manor changes their lives forever.  Freedom, music, poetry, and a little hashish in the air, the light and joy of creation is offset by the shadows of Wylding Hall.  Amidst the fun, unexplainable events offset what could be the greatest summer of their lives.

Review of Sleeps with Angels by Dave Hutchinson

One of life’s little pleasures, it’s always nice to encounter a writer for the first time and discover a keen sense of style.  Mollifying whatever the actual content may be, it leaves a good first impression that goes a long way toward organizing a second encounter.  A magical ace seemingly forever up its precisely starched sleeve, Dave Hutchinson’s 2015 collection Sleeps with Angels (2015, NewCon Press) left such an impression on me.  I’m off to find his novel Europe in Autumn.

Containing six solid stories, one of which is never before published, Sleeps With Angels is, above all, very well written.  Each story carefully crafted, the prose is polished to high shine.  Like Ted Chiang, Hutchison is apparently one of those writers with a day job to pay the bills (he’s averaging about one story per year over the past couple of decades), allowing him to take his time, making sure the dross is pared away and what remains, on point.  “The Fortunate Isle”, the story leading off the collection, is a mini-police procedural that opens at the scene of a murder and quickly has the reader begging for more given the defined manner of presentation.  An elderly man shot through the head sitting in his own armchair, the woman in the house says its her husband before being whisked away to the hospital with her own emergency.  When an old Irish mafia feud turns out to be the cause, nobody is surprised.  It’s when somebody tries to steal the body, however, that the police are taken aback. 

Review of Guards ! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Many science fiction and fantasy writers pass away each year, but few cause me personal pause.  Hearing yesterday of the passing of Terry Pratchett, however, a heaviness hung on my heart - exacerbated by his final, fitting tweet "AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER."  The following review was queued but not scheduled to be posted for a few weeks.  As small a memento as it is, I've bumped it up in honor of truly one of the greatest figures the speculative fiction field has ever known, and ever will.  Much more to his stories than brilliant humor, the world would truly be a better place if everybody went out and read a Pratchett novel.  Thanks for the stories, Terry.

For those who missed it, the duology which opened Discworld, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic respectively, was a shot across the bow of epic fantasy.  Pratchett undermining familiar elements and having a laugh at its stereotypes, the two novels, however, proved not enough.  The 8th Disc novel Guards! Guards!, on top of introducing the City Watch sub-series and a couple of characters who would go on to achieve Hall of Disc status (Commander Vimes and Corporal Carrot), continues to dig at epic fantasy’s tropes, dismantling them in humor with every spadeful.  The farmboy slays a dragon to become king the stereotype targeted, the roast succeeds behind all of the humor Pratchett is known for.  Whether or not it works as a thematic whole, well…

The Supreme Grand Master of the appropriately named Unique and Supreme Lodge of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night has an idea: to overthrown the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork and install a puppet ruler, himself Geppetto.  The details: find a long lost heir to the throne, find him a dragon to slay, and install him as king.  Using the magic he has acquired in a book stolen from the Unseen University library, the Supreme Grand Master sets about his nefarious scheme.  Meanwhile, Carrot Ironfounderson is being sent into the world of men by his dwarf parents.  Given the massive sword he was found abandoned with as a baby and a letter of recommendation to the City Watch, he leaves the mines for a new life—all 6’-6” of him. And he certainly finds a new life in Ankh-Morpork.  With the drunk Commander Vimes at the helm, the group stumble and bumble over one clue at a time trying to find a stolen book before the chaos of a dragon descends on the city. 

Review of The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett

Lightning-cracked time portals.  Secret tombs. Slave ship mutiny. Snake men.  Buried alive.  Parlays with kings.  These are just some of the adventurous elements of Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon.  (Though initially published as Sea Kings of Mars, it quickly changed names, and in reprintings since has consistently been known as The Sword of Rhiannon.)  Written in 1953, it was one of the last threads of the pulp era yet benefits from increased expectations regarding prose and characterization.  It never, however, fails as an adventure.

Matt Carse, Earthman and grave looter on Mars, meets with the opportunity of lifetime one evening walking the streets of Jekkara.  Shown the mystical sword of the mighty and long dead sorceror Rhiannon, its gleaming jewel only set his mind moving in other directions: where there is such a beautiful sword, there must also be treasure of greater magnitude.  Taken to the tomb, its there his greed gets the better of him.  Examining a particularly strange artifact, the rug is pulled from under his feet and, like Alice, through the rabbit hole Carse goes.  With only Rhiannon’s sword in hand, he arrives at a Mars millions of years in the past and into the middle of one of the biggest plots the planet has ever known. Carse’s problem is, his actions are what unleash the plot and send the world of the Sea Kings into turmoil.

Review of Saint Rebor by Adam Roberts

Liberace revived, a neural net guillotine, robot brain builders, designer illnesses (like perfume!), endorphin drought, lunar Kafka—Adam Roberts is one of the most dynamic figures in science fiction at the moment, and his 2015 collection Saint Rebor (NewCon Press), which this list of ideas is a partial representation of, proves precisely why. 

Containing eleven stories (and one poem), three of which have never before been published, Saint Rebor is a brisk, vibrant collection that highlights the elasticity of Roberts’ imagination. “Gerusalemme Liberace” is the story of that flamboyant pianist, brought  back to life and parading the streets of the ancient city.  Preaching universal love in an awkward manner, Islamic and American governments join forces to put an end to the ‘threat’ in witty, relevant fashion.  Wikipedia defines ‘anhedonia’ as “the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable”.  After aliens arrive in the solar system, humanity experience the phenomenon in the story of the same name.  Begging aliens for the secret to interstellar travel, what are they willing to pay?

Review of Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said something to the effect “nothing offends a woman’s vanity like a woman’s vanity.”  Though probably not the least politically correct statement of the era, such thoughts nevertheless did little to complexify opinion of women.  Scheming, jealous shrews who think only in terms of their own conceit the resulting image, adding the supernatural only darkens lines and casts longer shadows.  Women’s magic near automatically represented by ugly witches or aged, plotting spinsters, it’s as if we’ve come to accept the combination of spells and femininity as being nothing short of a malicious search for renewed beauty and youth, and revenge on those who have it.  Capitalizing on the idea in what is certainly dated fashion is Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943).  Penned in fine prose and plotted to a perfect T, the novel is a horror of both the literary and gendered variety.

Raymond Saylor is an ambitious sociology professor working at prestigious Hempnell University.  Life in an easy groove, his academic papers are accepted to positive criticism, his domestic life is at ease, his peers and students respect him, and he is in a leading position for the faculty chair that will soon be vacated.  But at the outset of Conjure Wife, Saylor discovers something when snooping through his wife Tansy’s dresser that changes everything: she has been practicing voodoo for years without his knowledge.  Tufts of feather tucked away here, magic charms hidden there, vials of graveyard dirt pushed to the backs of drawers, shiny buttons attached to clothes—all around their home she unearths the evidence as Saylor confronts her.  Despite Tansy’s protests that her magic has been protecting him from the feints and jabs of others at the university all along, the implements are burned, leaving Saylor ill at ease.  But a phone call jerks him from his reflection.  The professor’s heart set ticking, a student on the other end of the line is raving and crazed with the idea he has been wrongfully failed.  But the infuriated young man is only the beginning.  Issues with the dean’s wife revealed during a game of bridge, a love-smitten student harassing him, a seemingly mobile piece of building ornamentation, strange noises in the wind—Saylor’s world begins to crumble, professionally, academically, and domestically, around him.  But Saylor has not discovered all of Tansy’s secrets.

Review of Eric by Terry Pratchett

Before the Discworld had Tiffany Aching, there was Eric Thursley.  An ambitious teenage boy, he wants his cake and to eat it, too.  Eric (1991), the ninth Discworld novel, sees the teen on a journey that parodies the Faust legend in a manner only Terry Pratchett can.  Rincewind bumbling along in tow, Eric achieves a higher plane of understanding in most unlikely fashion—all no thanks to the ill-starred wizard’s mix of luck.

A thirteen year-old amateur demonologist, Eric summons the unwitting Rincewind into a hex circle in his bedroom one evening and demands the cowardly wizard supply his three innermost desires: the most beautiful woman, to rule the world, and to live forever.  The boy’s parrot confusing matters, suddenly the three (the dirty-mouthed bird, included) find themselves in the jungles of the Tezumen Empire.  Exploring what is a thin disguise for Aztec culture, they learn many things while put in some tricky situations, but not before the Luggage with legs makes its appearance—and not a minute too late.  Their Faustian journey only beginning, the pair proceed to embark on a jaunt through time and space that traverses the most disparate of lands, hell just the last stop on the line. 

Review of Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer’s 2001collection City of Saints and Madmen was a tour de force.  Putting Ambergris on the map, it presented vignettes from multiple perspectives of a fantastical city: scattered amidst historical monologues and art house pieces, interviews with crazed writers and fictional glossaries are stories of the strange and Weird.  Shifting gears, VanderMeer followed up the collection with Shriek in 2006.  Approaching the fungal metropolis from a personal point of view, the character studies of a socialite and her historian brother anchor what is by comparison a more subdued but no less creative text.  But even after the second book, questions remained—what about the Gray Caps, the underground, what ever became of Duncan Shriek, what of Ambergris’ true history, among others.  Thus for the third Ambergris book, VanderMeer did what any writer would do who wants to get under the skin of their own creation: he wrote a detective novel in an attempt to uncover its mysteries.  Putting an exclamation point on the Ambergris series, Finch is that novel.

Though the perspectives vary significantly throughout City of Saints and Madmen, there is a classical feel to the collection, a sense that the stories are written in modes more akin to yesteryear than modern times.  Shriek saw the clock roll ahead; Ambergris was still not the modern metropolis one thinks of New York currently as, for example, but instead a previous iteration, perhaps mid 20th century.  The clock spinning further ahead in Finch, the setting is contemporized.  While far from obvious, the fungal city nevertheless has a turn of the 21st century feel to it.  The surface details as wonderfully Weird as VanderMeer’s imagination has proven itself to be, rather the shift is seen in the function of the elements deployed.  And none moreso than the state of socio-politics.

Review of Twenty Trillion Leagues under the Sea by Adam Roberts

I imagine it’s something of a minor surprise to readers of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea to finish the book without ever having dipped a mile or two beneath the surface.  At least it was to me.  (It’s worth noting, however, the adventures of Captain Nemo and Aronmax onboard the mighty Nautilus are more than enough to make the reader lose sight of the fact ‘across’ is the more suitable adjective.) Apparently more inspired than surprised, in 2014 Adam Roberts dipped into the lexical impasse by penning a waterverse adventure in honor of Verne that holds true to its verbiage.  Oh, and he added a few zeroes to the depth meter—Twenty Trillion Leagues under the Sea (2014 Gollancz UK, 2015 St. Martin’s Press US) where the needle ultimately rests.

But in what spirit these leagues are traversed is what gives Twenty Trillion Leagues under the Sea its character.   Largely eschewing the hard sf mode of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and utilizing the underworld adventure mode of Journey to the Center of the Earth, the combination results in an underwater fantasy that pays homage to both Verne novels while telling its own vintage-esque tale of imaginative fancy.  Thus, hard sf purists will undoubtedly call out Roberts for his less than rigorous application of scientific knowledge when Verne went so far to make his Leagues as realistic as possible.  But they would be missing the point.  Twenty Trillion Leagues is as much homage to the original novel as it is Verne’s oeuvre and the era’s overall storytelling.

Review of Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett

As NASA’s Curiosity rover trundles about the surface of Mars today, another page turns on the glories of pulp science fiction.  Leigh Brackett’s vision of a land populated with humans and aliens, ancient cities and creatures, long-buried secrets and mysterious deserts fades a shade closer to pale as one desolate desert image after another is beamed back to Earth.  But there was a day when her works shone with the hope and possibility of life on the planets beyond Earth. Gollancz bringing together the best of these stories in one collection, Fantasy Masterwork’s Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories is the imaginatively nostalgic look back to a time when the solar system held more possibilities.

The collection contains five novelettes, five novellas, one short story, and one novel.  Though organized chronologically by publishing date, little actually links the stories.  A few are set on Venus and a handful feature the character Eric John Stark, but the majority are the plights and travails, adventures and journeys of various men and women across the ancient Martian landscape.  All manner of the vividly fantastic and anachronistically technical emerging in their tales, the collection is by default science fantasy, but certainly the motifs and mindset of pulp fantasy fill the book’s cup.

Review of "A Year in the Linear City" by Paul Di Filippo

Of the striking elements of Philip Jose Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the greatest may be the setting.  Humanity confined to an infinite strip of land bounded by mountains on one side and a river on the other, they can go as long and as far as they want in either direction and never find a barrier.  Individual groups and societies lining the river, raw human nature pervades the story.  But what if they achieved civilization?  What if the strip became a single line of city buildings stretching from horizon to horizon?  Such is one premise of Paul Di Filippo’s delightful 2002 “A Year in the Linear City”.   It is, however, not the most striking element.

The novella opens on a roaring 50s’ quote from John Clellon Holmes.  Expressing a freedom, a joie de vie, an uninhibited exuberance in which new cultural niches were continually opening up, what follows is the dynamic story of Diego Patchen.  Part of a new wave of writers producing what is being called Cosmogonic Fiction (CF!), he’s had recent success with stories published in the increasingly popular Mirror Worlds magazine.  Writing not yet as profitable as he would have it, he and a disreputable yet amiable friend, Zohar Kush, occasionally participate in the illegal activity of scale-hunting (stealing scales from the massive reptile that resides in the under levels of the city) to make ends meet.  Though having a girlfriend of the voluptuous, kind variety, not all is sanguine in Patchen’s world.  His father a bilious man who lies abed day after day lamenting the death of his wife, Patchen likewise faces editorial censure and peer ridicule for his production of “counterfactual tales”.  But when a cultural embassy is planned, of which Patchen is on the list of delegates, things take a turn Uptown.