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 Stars Seem So Far Away by Margret Helgadottir

I am far from the most knowledgeable person on the subject, but in my web wandering and scattered reading it has certainly come to my attention that post-apocalyptic YA fiction is ‘a thing’ (or at least recently was ‘a thing’).  A sub-genre niche publishers and authors have rushed to capitalize on, the number of titles in the sphere has risen sharply.  But as with all such rushes, one must pick and choose carefully; quality requires weeding from quantity.

Margret Helgadottir The Stars Seem So Far Away (2015, Fox Spirit Books) is post-apocalyptic YA fiction.  Part of the third-wave of such texts, it wears its taxonomy on its sleeve.   But the devil is in the details. 

The Stars Seem So Far Away is ostensibly a collection.  But it quickly becomes apparent that the stories function more like point-of-view chapters, creating a cycle that rolls toward an all-inclusive conclusion.  A handful of teens anchoring this overarching story, Aida, Bjorn, Simik, Nora, Zaki, and a couple of others start at different points in a Europe torn apart by catastrophe and plague, but eventually wind up together in the same plight.  Foregoing the sensationalist details that many other post-ap YA novels seem to focus on (looking at you, Bacigalupi), Helgadottir keeps the spotlight on the young people, their interrelationships and emotional stances, and their reactions to the events they experience traversing the scarred landscape, trying to stay alive and find a better life.

Review of "Journals of the Plague Years" by Norman Spinrad

Deft prose, in-your-face ideas, cut to the punch mentality—Norman Spinrad is one of the more contentious voices in the field, if not one of the most welcome for it.  The poet Alicia Ostriker calling all good art a dance with the devil, Spinrad knows how to tango, challenging the reader with the forthrightness of his conceptions.  Exemplifying these attributes to a socially relevant T is his 1988 novella “Journals of the Plague Years”.  Tackling HIV/AIDS concerns arising at the time, the story cuts to the bone of social, political, and commercial involvement with the disease. 

“Journals” and “Years” plural (as opposed to the singularity of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year), the novella is divided between four perspectives: a soldier, a researcher, a senator, and a teenage girl.  Not rotated strictly on waltz rhythm, Spinrad leapfrogs amongst them in developing the overarching story.  HIV exploding in the US population through rampant sexual activity, massive quarantine zones and health cards are implemented by the paranoid Christian senator Walter T. Bigelow in an attempt to keep the virus under control.  His program an initial success, the spread of the disease falters, giving Richard Bruno a chance, deep in his laboratory, to effect a cure.  A cure he does find, but soon enough the virus mutates, and he’s back at square one.  The disease continuing to creep through the population, Linda Lewin learns, at the tender young age of sixteen, that she’s Got It.  Her parents aghast, she runs away to find a new life in the San Francisco quarantine zone and there do what she can before her time is over. But all hell breaks loose when the concerns of Bruno’s laboratory and the interests of the population at large come to loggerheads.  Infected soldier John Davis conscripted in his dying days to perform one last mission, the fate of HIV in the US hangs in the balance.

Review of Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is one of genre’s more divisive offerings.  Loved or hated, it tells of an alien arriving with a message of universal love and the religious, political, and social reaction as a commune of belief is created around it.  Heinlein painting the scene in black and white, his ideas are presented via contemptuous satire, rendering the novel largely a soapbox—the reason behind said reader discord.

Enter Nnedi Okorafor’s 2014 Lagoon.  About aliens who arrive in Nigeria bearing a message of love, likewise all manner of chaos is unleashed as they spread knowledge of their mission.  Lagoon is significantly different from Heinlein in tone and attitude, however.  Rather than bludgeoning the reader with jaded cynicism, Okorafor presents the social and political issues Nigeria is dealing with in candid fashion while integrating the alien viewpoint, arriving at something greener, something more holistic than just the disparaging dichotomy of Heinlein.  Her commentary may sometimes be (indirectly) cutting, but Lagoon remains a warm, parental novel—the strong hand of love—that is more constructive than destructive.  Not just Heinlein’s stick, Okorafor also offers the carrot. 

Review of Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson

The European Union very well may be the most interesting social experiment ever attempted by mankind.  Taking almost a billion people with differing culture, language and belief, not to mention centuries of unending feuds and wars, and unifying them under a single government is an act unprecedented in world history.  In many Europeans’ eyes, however, it’s just that: an experiment, nothing certain about future coherence.  A thought experiment which sees “Europe calving into icebergs”, Dave Hutchinson’s 2014 novel Europe in Autumn (2014) locates an atypical espionage thriller on the continent post-EU.

From Scottish independence to Silesia’s secession from Poland, Europe in Autumn is set in a Europe recognizable culturally yet fragmented politically.  Rudi is an Estonian chef working in Cracow, who finds himself faced with an interesting and profitable proposition after his restaurant absorbs an evening’s destruction from a group of drunk Hungarian mafia.  His Estonian passport giving him access to polities in Europe where Poles are not allowed, he completes a simple mission into Germany and returns safe and sound.  That step his first into the world of cross-border information trafficking, it isn’t long before the information begins tracking him too, fully exposing just how intricate and complex the relationship between government and the individual truly is across the freshly shattered European continent.

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 Engineering Infinity ed. by Jonathan Strahan

According to Jonathan Strahan’s introduction, Engineering Infinity (2010) is intended to be a survey of the state of hard sf short fiction at the beginning of the 21st century. Specific writers targeted, indeed if one looks at the table of contents there are several (white males) known for their realistic extrapolation on theory.  Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Gregory Benford are four easily recognizable names in the sub-genre.  But there are a number of stories in the collection which must really suck their bellies in to fit through the doors of hard sf.  John C. Wright, Gwyneth Jones, Charles Stross, and David Moles are not authors that immediately pop into mind when the term is bandied about, and the stories they provided for the anthology are dubiously hard sf, at best.  But throwing taxonomy to the winds (where it probably belongs), Engineering Infinity remains a solid collection of stories.  No single story outshining the others or existing entirely in nothingness, it is also a highly consistent selection.

The two stories falling furthest on the hard sf side of the line are by the Canadians, Peter Watts and Karl Schroeder. “Malak”, Watts’ addition, is freighted.  Examining the morals of drone technology in warfare, he shifts the Middle East conflict a few years into the future where flying weapons possess semi-AI minds and are able to make some decisions in combat.  The remaining decisions, well, they are unfortunately still left to humans.  “Laika’s Ghost” is also a political/military influenced story, but this time in near-future Kazakhstan where an agent has been sent to investigate the bomb making capabilities—bombs worse than nuclear—of the post-Soviet culture still existing in the backlands.  Stuck traveling with a paranoid American looking for asylum from what he saw on Mars, the investigation unearths a lot more than just bombs.  Highly, highly reminiscent of a Bruce Sterling story, “Laika’s Ghost” is interesting for not being a Cold Ware redux, rather a look ahead at what the state of world agriculture, politics, space travel, and, unfortunately, weaponry, may be like in the former Soviet states.

Review of City by Clifford Simak

Clifford Simak’s work puts such a debate into my mind: where to draw the line between good intentions and overly-simplistic outlay?  If writers were judged on the sentiment of their work and its relationship to humanity’s future, Simak would rank among the most concerned.  Much of his fiction, for example his major novel Way Station, caution us against short-sighted views and champion a mindset which has nature and universal respect at its core.  What greater vision could a reader ask for?  But there is also much of his fiction caught up in unsophisticated ideas that scan at a quick glance, but upon any deeper examination, crumble into plainness, mindlessness, even cheesiness.  City (1952), perhaps Simak’s most famous work, only heightens the debate.

Extrapolating upon the direction Simak perceived society and technology to be moving post-WWII in the US, City is a series of eight stories (nine, depending on the version) presenting a chronological sequence of views of said extrapolation.  Positing humanity incapable of getting out of its own way, he portrays a future wherein dogs, after a jump in sentience, rise to the peak of civilization—not through the deft use of cunning or brute force, rather by stepping into a vacancy afforded by humanity’s mismanagement of its own affairs.   Self-interest and poor decisions deflating civilization, in an ironic utopia it’s canines who bring peace to Earth.

Review of Cosmonaut Keep by Ken Macleod

Ken Macleod’s The Star Fraction, despite the throwback genre name, was a politically variegated take on near-future science fiction with a view to the solar system and humanity’s evolution at large.  The three books in the Fall Revolution series which followed, linked fractally at best, expanded the novel’s ideas into the far-future—wormholes, A.I., post-humans, colonies on other planets, and ultimately into a The City and the Stars statement.  Located more toward the sophisticated end of the science fiction spectrum, they are something unique for their detailed politics and technical and social concepts which accompany.  Not trusting their audience, when Tor rolled out the series in the US they chose the most accessible, identifiable work among the four books as the first offering.  Thus, when completing the Fall Revolution series and looking for a new direction, Macleod opted to take the same route as American publishers.

Cosmonaut Keep (2000), opening volume in the three-book Engines of Light series, continues to mix politics into its storyline and work with near-future to far-future settings, but does so with a retro-sf sensibility.  One storyline cyberpunk-ish in its initial outlay but developing into a classic conspiracy theory on a space station, the second is even more recognizable for its love triangle, aliens, and setting on a world far, far away but with corporations, castles, aristocrats, etc.  Macleod lowering the denominator from the Fall Revolution series, the result is a novel (and series) of broader aim and appeal that jettisons sophistication in favor of accessibility: Cosmonaut Keep, and the Engines of Light trilogy, is space opera—Ken Macleod space opera, but space opera.

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 "Mortimer Gray's History of Death" by Brian Stableford

A wise man once said that nothing is certain in life but death and taxes.  Science fiction creating scenarios which put an end to the certainty of the former (more often than the latter, it seems), extended life and immortality are commonly used tropes of science fiction.  But they are less commonly examined tropes of science fiction.  More often a means of disguising the immense lengths of time necessary to travel across space or a splash of virtual life eye-candy to alter perspective on existence, there are a limited number of genre works that peer deeper into the mortality of death in the immortal future.

With such an introduction and such a title, one might expect Brian Stableford’s 1995 “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death” to be a morbid discourse on murder, funeral rites, war, suicide, entombment, etc., moving forever downward into the gloomy depths of despair.  Such is not the case.  Stableford’s tone may be consistently staid, yet the tale eases forward with subtle dynamism; Gray’s History is as much a survey of the man’s research as it is his personal life and thoughts regarding mortality in the context of biotechnical advance.  It thus instead makes for a beautifully nuanced sociological discourse.

Review of Pelquin's Comet by Ian Whates

One of the significant differences between science fiction and realist fiction is the sense that the possibilities of sf are so much grander.  Genre writers taking advantage of the four dimensions as a playground for fiction in a variety of ways, from the temporal extents of Olaf Stapledon’s works to the microworlds of Madeline D’Engle, no sub-genre, however, may utilize the possibilities more than space opera.  Arguably the core of science fiction, it’s been in existence almost since the beginning, and there are no signs of its disappearance anytime soon.  Carrying the torch in the 21 st century is Ian Whates’ Pelquin’s Comet (2015, NewCon Press).

Knowing that a major stash of alien artifacts lies unclaimed, Pelquin, Captain of the freebooter Pelquin’s Comet, heads to the major financial center of New Sparta to find a sponsor in order to make a run at the loot.  An Elder artifact in hand, he succeeds in convincing one of the credit officers to extend a line of cash his way, but not without a compromise.  Forced to take on a representative of the bank (the mysterious alien toting Drake), Pelquin reluctantly agrees to the terms and sets his small crew to gearing up the ship for the trip.  Exiting New Sparta, however, a surprise attack occurs.  With projectiles flying the Comet gets off the ground, but not without its chief mechanic Monkey getting badly injured.  And he’s needed.  The jump into RzSpace going smoothly, once inside the other dimension, however, a problem occurs with the motors, an emergency landing needed.  Babylon the closest planet, it’s there the Comet heads and the Captain’s plans for an easy loot grab really start to spiral out of control.

Review of Sirius by Olaf Stapledon

Brian Aldiss designates Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) the first science fiction novel.  The story of human creating human and the discordant relationship that results, H.G. Wells took its inspiration and wrote the The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).  A similar premise (human attempting to endow animal with human intelligence and appearance), Wells nevertheless took time to examine the animal side in balance with the human.  The third link in this chain of humanity’s god quest (unnatural means of endowing sentience in living flesh) came after a much shorter interval: Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius (1944).

But Sirius is also part of the natural evolution of the writer’s own oeuvre. Like Last and First Men’s follow up Last Men in London, Stapledon saw fit to rework the ideas of his novel Odd John, publishing Sirius nine years after.  Continuing with the theme of super-intelligence, Stapledon threw the gauntlet down to himself by shifting premise from super-human intelligence to super-dog intelligence, aka human intelligence.  While superficially seeming a cheesy idea, Stapledon unpacks the idea with his trademark attention to detail.  Few science fiction writers these days who look into every nook and cranny of the wild ideas their brains conjure, Stapledon opens the concept of Sirius from nothing, scrutinizes it closely, develops every inch within natural frames, then closes it in literary fashion.

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 A Tale of Two Clocks by James Schmitz

After finishing a book that has no obvious flaws I feel guilty writing something of a negative review.  Viable critiques generally focusing on the concrete, more objective aspects of writing, James H. Schmitz’s 1962 A Tale of Two Clocks (also known as Legacy) has no glaring surface flaws.  The prose, while not attempting anything lush or attractive, nevertheless moves forward one step at a time and is technically correct. The structure, while perhaps a tad padded, nevertheless suits the story desired to be told.  The characters are rather flat, but they were never intended to win the Booker or Pulitzer, rather fill a space opera.  The setting, while not rich, occupies the backdrop.  And while developed at a slow pace, some sense of mystery and adventure is built.  In short, A Tale of Two Clocks does the the things it should relatively right.  Why then do I feel so underwhelmed?  I think it has to do with a more subjective aspect of writing: tone.

Seemingly unaware of mood, and thus unable to fully generate plot momentum, the tone of A Tale of Two Clocks is like that party guest who asks the socially appropriate questions, responds in uncontroversial fashion, and leaves at 9:30 when things are just starting to pick up.  This is strange as the main character Trigger, top graduate student researching mysterious alien plasmoid objects and a crack shot with her pistols, is most everything heroines of yesteryear genre are not, and would seem to be an inviting center point for a fun space opera… 

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 Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction

From cyberpunk’s focus on near-future political and technological concerns to the explosion of singularity/post-human texts which followed a decade or two later, science fiction has moved from one end of the temporal spectrum to the other.  Cyberpunk generally more tactile, concrete, and relevant, post-humanism, by default, spends more of its time swimming in the waters of fantasy.  Though Charles Stross is best known for conveying just how wacky the far-future can be, there are other writers who capture the incredible possibilities of super-futures in intensely aesthetic fashion.  Hannu Rajaniemi is one, and his most recent collection Collected Fiction (2015, Tachyon) is one of the imaginative reasons why.  Whether or not Rajaniemi’s short fiction as a whole was ready to be collected, however, remains another question.

Rajaniemi has one minor collection under his belt (Words of Birth and Death, three stories), which essentially makes Collected Fiction his first.  Bringing together nearly all the short fiction he has published to date, it confirms the title while adding three pieces not previously published.  Totaling nineteen stories, none stretch into novella length; all are bite-sized vignettes of radically technical futures with a dash of mythic/pagan-ized fantasy.

“Deus Ex Homine” (translated to ‘god from man’) sets the post-human tone for Collected Fiction. 

“As gods go, I wasn’t one of the holier-than-thou, dying-for-your-sins variety. I was a full-blown transhuman deity with a liquid metal body, an external brain, clouds of self-replicating utility fog to do my bidding and a recursively self-improving AI slaved to my volition. I could do anything I wanted. I wasn’t Jesus, I was Superman: an evil Bizarro Superman.”(1)

Also Rajaniemi’s first published story, it tells of a man and woman separated by a godplague—an intrusion of post-humanism that destroyed the man’s corporeal humanity (he requires a head implant to tell him others’ emotional projections) and subsequently the relationship.  The emotions are a bit forced, but informs the reader of the type of story to come.  Following this story is perhaps Rajaniemi’s most celebrated short to date: “The Server and the Dragon.”  A far-far-far future story of abstract dimension worthy of Iain Banks’ Excession, it’s about a world seeding by an AI computer that possesses significantly more mythic ambiance than hard sf.  Mother Goose on post-human steroids, “Tyche and the Ants” is about a young girl cavorting on a fairy tale lunar landscape.  But it isn’t before running into the Jade Rabbit, Moon Girl, Hugbear, and the Brain AI that she meets the miscreant little “ants”.  This is the first ever post-human bedtime story for children I have ever read, and perhaps the best of this collection.

Review of The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison

    “I am slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat.  There aren’t many like me in the universe.  I can change personalities in a flash, rob any bank in any solar system no matter if the guards are human or robot, con a space captain out of his ship, start a war or stop one, whichever pays the most.  So when the cops finally caught up with me, naturally there is only one thing they could do: they made me a cop.”

A bit of fun, Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat (1960) is space adventure in crime.  Jim diGriz the gentleman thief, he breaks in, gets out, gets the dough, but never kills, and ultimately is in the gig for the adrenaline.  Ordinary life too heavy, he prefers disguises and cigars, whiskey and the excitement of dabbling in crime—and the reader had better appreciate such suaveness if they too hope to enjoy the novel.

Caught in a bank robbery gone wrong, diGriz finally meets his match at the opening of The Stainless Steel Rat.  Easier to fight than join, he becomes a member of the Special Core which brought him in.  His first days on the job fruitful, he uncovers a major plot to construct a battleship that would threaten League interests in the galaxy.  Sent to the scene to use his talents as a con man and bring in the perpetrators, confronting the criminals everything goes as planned until… the tables are turned.  Nonplussed, the Rat spends the rest of the tale getting even—at least so he thinks.

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 Dark Star by Oliver Langmead

There are many modes and styles of storytelling.  Classic, minimalist, expository, stream of consciousness, mosaic, meta-fiction—and on and on go the ways in which an author can transpose their imaginings into fiction.  But poetry?  Have you ever read science fiction in metered form?

      Time to waste, so I escape the city

  At one of those seedy establishments

  They call ‘Glow Shows’ because they fill the girls

  So full of Pro’ it nearly burns their veins.

      Prometheus, resident wonder-drug;

  Pro’, Promo’, ’Theus, liquid-fucking-light;

  Prohibited by city law and shot

  By yours truly, Virgil Yorke, hero cop (1)

So run the first lines of Oliver Langmead’s Dark Star (2015, Unsung Stories).  And what follows is a story that lives up to every ounce of vividness contained in those few words—a proper story, just in measured form.

The effect replete, when Detective Yorke is called to the late night scene of a murder, the emptiness between the lines makes what imagery that is in the lines—the corpse’s neon veins—twice as powerful.  The city of Vox perpetually dark, the young woman’s body glows in the back alley, begging Yorke—and the reader—to learn what has transpired.  But just as his investigation begins, an even bigger crime calls Yorke away.  Vox dependent on the power generated by three dying stars, one has been stolen.  So, into the cold, dark night Yorke goes, battling his own addictions every step of the way, the metered verse stripping his story down to its evocative essentials.