SF is as SF does

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

I use the term "SF" in the title rather than "SciFi" because Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie includes three categories: science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy.

The opening novelette and title story, "Lake of Souls" sits on the boundary between science fiction and fantasy, as does Ms Leckie. The story is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, of a crablike creature without a name, who embarks on a quest to find the fabled Lake of Souls, where it may obtain a soul and a name. Until obtaining soul and name, these creatures are called by the generic term Spawn.  This Spawn's quest differs from the usual process, where marks that appear on a being's head upon one's final molt can be read as a name. I don't use "he" or "she" for Spawn because the author studiously avoids genderizing it. The science fiction element enters with a human on the planet, the last survivor of a mass murder on his survey ship. He is on a quest of his own, to find the murderer and the communication device he brought to the planet with him. He and his shipmates had been calling Spawn's fellows "lobster dogs", and having met Spawn, he realizes that these beings are sentient, which he must communicate with "home base", and with others because of the political implications of his discovery. I'll leave it at that; I am perilously close to spoiling too much. I should mention in passing that the author is very skilled at imagining and portraying sundry sorts of non-Earthly beings.

Consider a feudal society, right here on Earth. The lords and ladies lived in splendor in their castles and manor houses, cared for by servants and surrounded by serfs who lived in penury and often misery. Aristocrats lived much longer than serfs, and soldiers typically had notoriously short lives because of the aristocratic hobby of warfare. Move that scenario to a planet on which the aristocrats are called the Justified, and live unlimited lives, though they can die, but never of "natural causes". Everyone else, the short-lived, serve the Justified. I should also mention that they are lionlike, and the Justified become many times stronger than the short-lived. This scenario plays out in "The Justified". An episode in mid-story indicates that short-lived can be promoted to Justified. This has implications for a future situation, back here on Earth again, if aging is defeated but that indefinite life extension is too costly for most to afford. In this and in nearly all of Ms Leckie's stories females are dominant.

These stories are from the first third of the book, where we find all the stories one could term "science fiction". The other two sections are taken from the author's world-building series, termed Imperial Reach and The Raven Tower. Both are based on pantheism: people interact with gods of many "sizes", some that are like feudal lords over a domain, and others that have more narrow realms of influence. Like the Justified discussed above, these gods aren't necessarily eternal, but how a god is done away with isn't made clear. They gain strength from being prayed to and sacrificed to, and the most common sacrifice is an ounce or so of one's own blood, spilled on a makeshift altar.

From all of this I conclude that the author is fascinated (obsessed?) with feudalism, with highly structured societies, and with extreme feminism. Also that she would like to be a god. Then again, who wouldn't?

Some stories actually go somewhere

 kw: story reviews, collections, short stories, poems, sketches

The latter 3/5 of 2023 Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and a ton of others, did only a little to improve my opinion of the volume. I didn't read past the first page of about a third of the 38 remaining pieces. Of those I read, there were only a few more pointless stream-of-consciousness pieces, a smattering of tolerable items, and then there was actually a poem that I liked, in spite of its being "free verse" (which means "not verse"), and three more items that made me react, "I'm glad I read that".

The first of these is "If Your Dreams Don't Scare You" by Joni Tevis, published in the Georgia Review. The theme is hazing in the context of a marching band. I was in a high school marching band for 3 years, and I'm glad there wasn't a hazing tradition at my school. The skills we had to learn, and the sarcastic comments from one of the band directors, were bad enough. About a third of the story reviews hazing mishaps around the country that made national news (or should have)…like deaths.

The second is "Half Spent" by Alice McDermott, from Sewanee Review. The story gradually reveals hidden depths in a widow who'd been thought a "silly goose" (my term, not the author's). Her passing showed she had a much greater connection to her community than her late, somewhat-lamented husband.

The third, which made me weep, is "Too Attached" by Whitney Lee, from The Threepenny Review. A doctor attends a woman with a dying pre-born baby, which finally miscarries. Later the woman tries again, and delivers safely, attended by the same doctor. The doctor muses over being too attached to this couple, that such attachments might cause her to leave the profession. This is a real risk. During her last year my mother was attended by a lovely nurse; she became so attached that, as Mom failed, the nurse had a nervous breakdown and had to turn over the caring duties to another nurse. But she managed to be there when Mom died.

The poem I liked is "Screensaver" by Robert Cording, from The Common. An elegy to a youngster who died, it proves that stream-of-consciousness has a proper use. Very touching.

That's a poor harvest of goodness from 66 pieces. The volume as a whole gets this from me:

Is literature becoming irrelevant?

 kw: book reviews, collections, short stories, poems, sketches

I am a little less than halfway through reading Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses (2023), edited by Bill Henderson and others.

The series used a few logos in early years, and then settled on this one, presented in various background hues ranging from yellow through earth tones to red.

When I encountered the 2014 edition I liked it rather well and posted a positive review. I was still positive a couple of years later. This time, not so much (so far). Of the 28 pieces I have read (or passed over) so far, only one made me react, "I'm glad I read this": "Dear Friends" by Mary Rueful, originally published in Sewanee Review. I call it an annotated list of friends, a series of vignettes that explore numerous dimensions of friendship.

I almost rejected the entire volume based on the first half-dozen lines of text in the first piece, which I decline to name. Sadly, I read too fast to have stopped earlier, because it almost immediately takes the reader into a realm no person of conscience willingly visits, with an image that is hard to forget. It is a sad fact of the human condition that a vicious, corrupted mind such as the author's can even exist.

A goodly number of the pieces are "poems". So far, what I have seen (and skimmed through) have neither rhyme nor rhythm. They consist of slightly evocative prose broken into lines. If the language were more poetic I might call such a piece a poem, but they are junk.

Many of the pieces are aimless stream-of-consciousness bits of one or a few pages, that start and end nowhere, with nothing learned along the way.

One imaginative piece, "Mantis" by Gina Chung, tells of love almost found and then lost, in the character were a praying mantis, who is accustomed to devouring suitors during copulation. The "one that got away" is her only regret. It's a useful allegory of a certain kind of relationship…

A number of pieces portray gay men or women, closeted or out. "The Kiss" by Kate Osana Simonian treats of a relationship between two lesbians who attend a religious school; one is fully out, the other so closeted that her orientation is unknown, even to her best friend. A drama production enwraps their drama. The writing is overdone, with attempts to build tension in a Hitchcockian way that is more annoying than useful.

"Back" by Banzelman Guret is moderately dystopian science fiction, exploring an extreme development of gig work while the protagonist is dealing with his father's OCD and institutionalization.

These few out of 28? If these are "the best", literature is coming on hard times. Maybe in the next few days I'll find another story or two that make me glad I found them.

A roughly mixed SF collection

kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, collections

My "when I can't read anything else" book this past few weeks has been The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack, an e-book I got for a promotional price of 99¢…and that's about what it is worth. It contains a few classics such as "Out of All Them Bright Stars" by Nancy Kress, "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke, and "The Syndic" by C.M. Kornbluth, and a couple of the lesser-known stories by writers such as Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury. Most of the other stories are by authors I had never heard of, and I find that is for good reason. They were definitely bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Usually when I skip the bulk of a story it is because it is vulgar, but in this volume I skipped out of several stories simply because they were either based on bad ideas or too badly written to make them worth ingesting; sometimes both.

Let this be my shortest review so far. I hope this volume represents the nadir of the MEGAPACK® series.

Robot anarchy

kw: book reviews, science fiction, robots, collections, short stories

In my away-from-other-books times I read The Robot MEGAPACK, which consists of 19 stories. Their publication dates range from 1934 to 1962, clustered a bit in the mid-1950's. Ordinarily I might comment on their length. I think at least one is a novelette, but a quirk of production meant I could only guess. The "pagination" is by section rather than by virtual page (2-3 screens), so for the entire set of stories the page indicator was stuck at "7 of 7". There is another indication that this volume was slapped together a bit too hurriedly. There are typos of the kind that nearly always indicate the text was scanned without adequate proofreading. Things like "dear" for "clear" and a few non-letter characters. Some of these could be handled if the text analysis software had an attached dictionary; some need a human proofreader.

No stories by Isaac Asimov appear. Indeed, these stories show no indication that their authors cared for the Three Laws of Robotics, which were hinted at in "Robbie" in 1940, and formalized in the stories that make up I, Robot (1950). Rather, most of these robots are potentially harmful, and many of them are quite harmful, even deadly. A prime example of the latter would be the "tickler", initially a PDA-like device in "The Creature from Cleveland Depths" (1962) by Fritz Leiber. The device begins as a reminder-and-pager, is soon developed into a smart phone-like device, but then becomes a manipulator of moods (businesses and governments pre-load it with "stimulating, wholesome" stuff that it whispers to you subliminally). As predicted by a co-protagonist, the ticklers are eventually produced with enough brains to become sentient, and even apparently telepathic. The human bodies they control are now enslaved. The denouement is amusing, in a nice twist on the dark direction the story seemed to be following.

In "The Mad Robot" (1944) by William P. McGivern, it is one of the scientists who is insane, not the robots. Robots have been coupled to slivers of brain tissue to improve their cognitive abilities. There is a back door to their programming interface, used by the evil genius to commit occasional mayhem, for reasons he loquaciously describes in a climactic scene. This is the story that I was referring to in my riff on getting to Jupiter in a week. Although the action takes place on Jupiter (how, I don't know, since it lacks a surface, and gravity's force at the top of the visible clouds is about 2.5 G's), it could really have been located anywhere.

Nearly all the robots in these stories are humanoid (as they usually are in nearly all SciFi about robots). However, the needs of industry have mandated that actual robotic equipment is much less general-purpose. Welding robots can't walk around; shelf-loading-and-unloading robots are more like smart forklifts (centrally controlled, though, not autonomous). I'll riff elsewhere why we don't need a "Rosie" like the one in the cartoon show "the Jetsons", so much as a number of more specialized devices.

For me this was pure escapism. I know too much about AI, about actual robots in use, and about the Uncanny Valley that it is better not to approach. But I could suspend all that to enjoy the novel ideas these writers presented. I'm all about ideas.

A third MEGAPACK

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories, space opera, space aliens

My original purchase from the MEGAPACK® series included three e-books. I already finished and reviewed two of them. This is the third. Like other early volumes in the series, it is titled The 13th Science Fiction Megapack. Later collections of classics have a theme or author as a focus. This volume contains 26 stories, eleven published in 1963, and the rest scattered from 1930 to 2010. All were new to me.

A goodly proportion of the stories experiment with taking the alien's eye view. Two of these, sitting back-to-back, are "The God-Plllnk" by Jerome Bixby and "A Guest of Ganymede" by C.C. MacApp, both published in 1963. In both stories, the invaders from Earth are either consumed or subsumed. Sobering.

Others take a recent discovery or trend then present and extend it. One of these, "Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin Station", by Mary A. Turzillo, published in 2009, riffs on the effects of infection by Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that afflicts cats and eventually nearly everyone who owns a cat. With just a little studied exaggeration, and imputing to Toxoplasma characteristics of a few other parasites, including the one that turns rats from cat-fearing to cat-seeking, we find an entertaining tale of psychology and motivation. The cats and their "guests" take over Mars.

From time to time writers tackle the possible interactions between archaic humans and Neanderthals, some 30,000 years ago or more. "The Day is Done" by Lester del Rey, published in 1939 is one of the earliest and best. (My second-favorite, "The Ugly Little Boy" by Isaac Asimov, is from 1958). del Rey's very moving story is set as the last of the Neanderthals are vanishing.

One of the stories of 1963, "The Girl in His Mind" by Robert F. Young, is based on a sort of dream "technology" that seems to foreshadow a dreamland called "the Commons" in stories by Matthew Hughes (see this review from 2006). In both 1963 and 2006, the writers take lucid dreaming a few quantum leaps beyond anything actual lucid dreamers (such as myself) experience. Lucid dreaming as we know it permits the dreamer to have some control over the story line and content of a dream. In my case, most frequently, I "stick a toe" into a dream that presents itself, and if I don't like where it may go, I open my eyes briefly and banish it. Once a dream starts up that I am more happy with, I let myself fall the rest of the way to sleep. Often, but not always, I know I am in a dream and I direct it more to my liking. Other times, I have "ordinary" dreams, that just happen with me as more of an observer than a participant. Any of this is a far cry from the long quests described by authors Young and Hughes.

I think I enjoy classic science fiction so much more than most "modern" writing because the authors aren't grinding an axe, at least not in the overt way that is nearly universal today, which is why I read so little modern science fiction. Writers of the world: present your views and your reasoning; do not attempt to impose them or shame your readers – I am shameless anyway, and I'll shame you right back!

Favorites of a Grand Master

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, collections

If you know who Ben Bova is, no introduction is needed. If not, I cannot presume to provide one that is adequate. Once called "the last of the great pulp fiction writers," he shaped science fiction as a genre beginning late in the "Golden Era", around 1960, and continuing until his death in 2020. His last book (of 120), published in 2020, is Ben Bova: My Favorites.

Fourteen short stories, fourteen quite diverse topics. Lengths range from 8 to 42 pages. A couple are space opera, with spaceships that fit in the same conceptual space as automobiles; they just need to get you somewhere. A few are alternative history, including the only story with aliens, "The Great Moon Hoax, or, a Princess of Mars," in which not only do Martians help NASA fake the surveillance of Mars and Venus, but also to confine Moon landings to places that won't expose them…and, just by the way, a couple of other big things are faked also, but I don't have the heart to do that level of spoiler.

One touching story is titled "Muzhestvo". We learn at the end what the word means, and why it is important. This didn't have to be a science fiction story, but in that setting it is fitting.

However, without pointing fingers, even though Bova has now passed away, a few stories are definitely not among my favorites. They are just crass; he had an axe to grind, and no writer is helped by grinding his axe in public.

That's enough from me. Whether you'd agree with which stories I might like or not like, this book is definitely worth reading.

Cyril may have died too young

kw: book reviews, science fiction, megapack series, anthologies, short stories, collections

Cyril M Kornbluth didn't have a middle name, but his friends have written that his use of "M" was a tribute to his wife Mary. This wasn't his only quirk, but this piece isn't mainly about him but about what he wrote. He died at the age of 34, of a heart attack, after shoveling snow and then running to catch a train. During the nineteen years during which published stories and novels, his writing was characterized by sideways thinking that still stands out. He published nearly ninety stories, nine novels, and seven works of non-fiction.

The e-book The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack: Featuring the Classic Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth contains 18 of his stories, a sci-fi novella The Syndic, and a non-science fiction novella The Naked Storm. I did not read The Naked Storm, the longest piece in the collection at 179 "pages". From the outset it began to go in a disturbing direction, so I skipped it. The total volume contains 868 "pages", about twenty of which are devoted to advertising for the Megapack series, so there was plenty of other material for me to enjoy. Note: On my phone, with the type size I like to use, a "page" includes between two and four screens, because page counts shown in a footer are based on whatever publication the series publishers scanned, whether a paperback or an octavo volume.

In the 1950's, just before I began reading a lot of science fiction, Galaxy was one of numerous "pulp" magazines full of space opera, which has a special place in my heart. Kornbluth was a mainstay of the genre, and in this issue he wrote as Cyril Judd, one of his many pen names.

I encountered a few old friends in this Megapack, including "The Marching Morons", based on the observation that people with more education and intelligence tend to have fewer children. In 1951, when Earth's population was about 2.6 billion, Kornbluth imagined a "far future" era with twice that population, most of whom would be idiots; he surmised an average IQ of about 45. The teeming billions are cared for by a small, decreasing number of intelligent folk, who seek ways to remedy the situation. It is still worth reading, even though population zoomed past 5.2 billion in 1990, and is presently pushing 7.7 billion. Average IQ also hasn't dropped precipitously, but CQ ("caring quotient", as in "Why should I care?") is much lower in the present generation, at least in affluent societies. I wonder what Kornbluth might write about that?

I had also read "The Syndic" long, long ago, so long that it was almost a new book to me. It contains a powerful idea, stated by the rather philosophical F.W. Taylor, Godfather of The Syndic and uncle of the protagonist:

"A strange thing—people always think that each exchange of power is the last that will ever take place."

A story left nearly finished when Kornbluth died, tidied up and finished by Frederick Pohl and published in June 1958, is "Shark Ship". It posits a different "solution" to the dilemma of a planet over-filled with people: convoys of ships that sail the seas, forever excluded from land-based society, catching and living upon plankton. The rigid society that must result is too fragile to survive when one ship loses its net, unless the unfortunate ship and the thousands aboard it are shunned and left to die of starvation. The story ends shortly after the ship diverts to approach land, to see if there is a new way of life possible there; the land is nearly abandoned, and there is hope. This has the flavor of a good beginning to a novel, but the author didn't live to develop it. The rather neat wrap-up is apparently Pohl's work. 

This and other stories indicate that Kornbluth had a rather pessimistic view of the coming decades and centuries. Did he die too young? Were he living he'd be 97. Even had he lived "three score and ten", it would have been until 1993, and a very different sort of science fiction was in vogue then. Maybe he'd have reveled in it, and become as productive as Asimov. Or, maybe it is best that he went when he did, a man already a little out of his element.

Enjoying space rovers

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories, space opera

In addition to the books on paper that I usually read, I keep a few e-books in my phone's library (Google Play Books). That gives me something to read when I am not at home or when it is inconvenient to carry a book. I recently encountered the Megapack series, a collection of more than 300 compilations in numerous genres, including many classic science fiction collections. I took advantage of a promotion to get a few books for a dollar or two each.

The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction Megapack contains 23 stories by Silverberg, mostly from the 1950's plus a few from the 1980's, in 460 pages. Page 460 is a gigantic "page" (30 screens) of Megapack advertising.

I recognized a few of the stories, but most were new to me. This is mainly because most of them predated the time I began reading science fiction in 1967. Silverberg wrote more novels and fewer short stories after about 1960, and gave much time in the 1970's and onward to editing anthologies.

Reading these stories brought me back to why I love science fiction, particularly prior to the 1990's. Space Opera is my hometown. A spaceship, to Silverberg and his ilk, was a special kind of automobile, one that could cross a galaxy the way we might cross a continent in a multi-day road trip. Little attention was given to how a rocket might cross light-years and light-decades in a matter of hours or days. Sometimes one finds mention of "subspace" or "hyperspace", but usually there is nothing about that. These "space cars" run on some kind of super-gasoline. There is even mention of an "auxiliary fuel tank" in at least one story. It reminded me of the special lever in my 1962 VW Bug, that connected a one-gallon reserve tank, so I could go 20 miles or so to find a gas station when the main tank emptied.

The focus of these stories was not really technology of space flight, but the relationships between the humans in the stories and between them and sundry alien species. This is similar to the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, with numerous aliens of many types (but most of them are "humanoid", making it easier on the actors).

The dictum of John Campbell was, "Pose a problem, and then solve it." Silverberg's earliest stories included an opponent, either someone who was the problem, or one who wanted to prevent the solving of the stated problem. Later stories are more sophisticated, but the problem always gets solved. In a few cases, a protagonist may lose his life in so doing, but most stories have a "happy ending".

I will limn just one story: "Valley Beyond Time" (12/1957) puts a few humans and a few aliens, a total of nine persons, in a magical valley, where they are thrall to a "watcher". They grow younger while there. Without giving too much away, this pre-echoes the episodes of Star Trek that feature the omnipotent alien Q.

Space opera may be out of date, but I for one revel in the clever solutions its heroes produced. Science fiction is about exploration of ideas, more than any other genre. That keeps me going.

Literature's mainstream – muddier than usual

 kw: book reviews, fiction, short stories, collections

The themes of the stories in The Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Curtis Sittenfeld, seem to be two: Dystopia and Slice-of-Life Emptiness. Frequently a story encompasses both. Is this a reflection of the way society is viewed through the mainstream media, mainstream entertainment, and mainstream politics (not those of the recent President, but of his opponents)? Pessimism rules the party called Democratic, and it rules American culture.

One story in this volume that bucks the trend is "The Apartment" by T.C. Boyle. It is a slightly fictionalized account of the life of Jeanne Louise Calment, from the time a lawyer proposed a "reverse mortgage" on her apartment, when she was 90, until she outlived him about thirty years later; she lived to age 122. There is another fictionalized life story, "Liberté" by Scott Nadelson. It isn't nearly so pleasing; the author gets more into motives and musings he could not have known.

Far too many of the stories relate someone going nowhere fast, or almost nowhere, and usually working their way down the ladder of success, if they were anywhere on it to begin with.

As usual in such a collection, the writing skill of the authors is excellent. However, it seems they have little to work with. In a very different genre, I read a story long ago of two people sent to contact an alien race, learn their language, and attempt to set up friendly relations. One is a skilled linguist, and goes after the language at a great rate, but at the end of the story is more of a prisoner, like a talented zoo animal. The other, who learns few words, does what he can to improve the skills and livelihood of the people around him, and becomes their trusted friend (this mirrors one of the side plots of The Ugly American by Burdick and Lederer, without the heavy political overtones). At the end, when the fellow who succeeded in gaining the trust of the aliens is asked about the difference, he says, "You have to have something to say."

This generation of writers doesn't have much to say, but they can say it very, very well.

Science Fiction on the rise

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, short stories

Considering quantity alone, the increasing number of "Best Of" collections indicates that science fiction is getting more popular. I care most about the quality, from two angles. Firstly, when I finish a story, am I glad I read it? Secondly, the quality of the writing, as writing (analogous to the art critic who said, "I can't paint, but I can recognize good painting.") In both ways, it seems the field is improving.

A comparatively new series is represented by The Best Science Fiction of the Year, edited by Neil Clarke. The 2020 volume is the fifth of the series. One could say that my familiarity with no more than a handful of the authors is another indication that the genre is doing well. The new writers, many of them young, have new ideas aplenty. I was happy to see a lot more stories with believable space aliens and fewer of the navel-gazing, introspective sort that was popular for far too long. I did notice that a significant majority (16 of 28 stories) had a dystopian or post-apocalyptic milieu. I think the younger generation or two are being handed a lot of bad news, so that informs their interest; fortunately, they are coming up with very creative means of coping.

I took brief notes on all the stories, but I think I'll focus on just a few:

• The Little Shepherdess by Gwyneth Jones – A novel take on harvesting seabed nodules. The "industrial solution" is to use big trawls to scrape up everything. A creature is found that gathers the nodules into little piles, for her own purposes. The "bottom up" solution is to have many low-impact harvesters gather the piles; a robbed pile prompts the "shepherdess" to rebuild the pile. Ms Jones has been around a while, and has good ideas well presented.
• The River of Blood and Wine by Kali Wallace – Colonizing a planet is like colonizing a continent. If there are inhabitants, tragedy ensues. In this story, the colonizers pull back before genocide results, not without protest, because, of course, whatever choice is made, someone's ox is gored. This author's deft touch keeps a strong subject from getting either explosive or syrupy. The author is new to me, as are both of those who follow.
• On the Shores of Ligeia by Carolyn Ives Gilman – Citizen science comes to the rescue when a remotely-operated "rover" on Titan gets stuck. I find the idea resembles the one in "Little Shepherdess", in that a lot of little things do a better job than one big thing.
• Give the Family my Love by A.T. Greenblatt – Here I wrote one line: "Apotheosis of a bookworm". I really identify with someone who, like Jorge Luis Borges, thinks that heaven must resemble a library, and a near-infinite library certainly resembles heaven.

Some short stories are exploratory, a way of answering, "If such-and-so were different…" One of the stories (Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds, another familiar name), gradually sneaks up on the reader with the idea, "What if all the insects died?" Another (The Work of Wolves by Tegan Moore) posits animal helpers with EI, Enhanced Intelligence. If the enhancements are partly external, how small can such a critter be?

Only Old Media by Annalee Newitz opened on such a gross note that I skipped to the next story after the first paragraph. I knew I wouldn't finish it thinking, "I'm glad I read that."

The volume is a good use of nearly 600 pages.

Roots of Western Culture

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, collections, medieval literature, translations

Pity poor Peter Abelard! The primary logician of his day, famous as a theologian and philosopher, he is hardly known today, nine centuries later. That in itself is no surprise, but among those who might have heard his name, it was in combination: "Heloise and Abelard". The love letters between him and his paramour are more famous than any of his "professional" writings. Much more.

One of Heloise's letters has been collected, in translation from old French, in the omnibus volume The Portable Medieval Reader, and reads in part:

Heaven knows! in all my love it was you, and you only I sought for. I looked for no dowry, no alliances of marriage. I was even insensible to my own pleasures; nor had I a will to gratify. All was absorbed in you.

Pretty steamy stuff for the early 1100's. The full letter is five pages of small type. It is followed by a seven-page semi-biography of Abelard written by Peter the Venerable, the abbot at Cluny where Abelard was cared for in his declining years. Twelve pages out of 687 may seem a small enough amount to devote to one philosopher, but in this Penguin volume, edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (both editors translated some of the items) and published in 1949 (I have the 1981 paperback reprint), there is a lot of ground to cover: representative writings from 1050-1500 AD. The editors selected 150 items to survey the 450 years so allocated. All the items are, of course, European.

I decided from the outset to at least categorize the articles. Rather than struggle with an HTML table, here are the results from a spreadsheet:

As you might expect, in the interlocking cultures dominated by the Holy Roman Empire, the largest single category is Religion and Theology. Religion of the Middle Ages is quite foreign to the modern mind, even among Roman Catholics, who are its direct descendants. For the hierarchy of the Church, it was intensely political. The political order of the Roman Church today pales by comparison. For the laity, it was a strange combination of nanny-state and not-so-benign neglect, in which failure to attend Confession and Mass was a punishable offense.

But to me the historical documents hold the most interest, and I suppose I could have made History a secondary category for them all. I was so taken with excerpts from the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor that I wrote of it separately. Education beyond learning to read and add was a serious matter in the 1100's.

Poetry also occupied the literate people of the time, but I confess that none of the translations in this volume do much justice to the originals. It's hard to take a tightly-crafted poem and translate it well; one must sacrifice either the sense or the rhythm and rhyme.

It is no surprise that only three articles explicitly describe science. Prior to Roger Bacon in the 1200's, science cannot be fairly said to exist. It took nearly 400 more years for Galileo to come along and make science a discipline of disciplines. Of course, Tycho, Kepler and Copernicus were scientists, but "science" wasn't a "thing" yet.

Rather than drag on and on, I'll leave it to you, should the matter interest you, to locate a copy of this volume, no doubt quite as bedraggled as mine is; or perhaps someone else has produced a newer volume of equal value and scope. This book given to me by a friend, and sat by my bedside for three years while I went through the articles, one every few days. It isn't something one can settle into an armchair and read for hours. Having finished reading it, I find it worth keeping on hand for reference.

The increasing field of good short SF

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, short stories

For a longish generation that I call the "trash years," a great deal of science fiction/speculative fiction/semi-hard fantasy was published by authors who were feeling their oats after the restrictions against overt sexual content were lifted in the wake of what we now quaintly call the sexual revolution. A wet dream fantasy in a sci-fi setting is still a wet dream fantasy.

Now writers who were mostly born after The Pill hit the market, and after Gender was uprooted from biological sex, are filling the market with books and short stories based on good ideas, well presented…and I mean "good" in both a conceptual sense and an ethical sense. Being an old-fashioned, conservative, spiritually active fuddy-duddy, I keep my distance from roughly half the social trends out there, but I am also aware that, in the context of the various subcultures that now make up Western society and American society in particular, most characters in these stories are presented as "doing good" (or trying to) according to the environment in which they find themselves.

Thus, the new collection The New Voices of Science Fiction, edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman, gathers twenty stories of Novelette length and shorter by writers that may not be household names yet, but most of them have the potential. Seventeen of the stories were new to me; three are also found in other collections I read in recent months. I do have a quibble with the word "The" in the title. Too exclusive. These are "Some" of a large number of new voices, and as a series title (which I suspect is where this is heading), I'd like it better if "The" were removed.

I'll limn a few stories that I find worth special mention. "Openness" by Alexander Weinstein explores the results of over-sharing, aided by technology that permits near-telepathic contact. It is probably where some folks would like FaceBook/Instagram et al to take us. The concept of "bubbles" of privacy has been around for a long time. In an office, awaiting an appointment, if you sit far from the receptionist, you'll be ignored. Sit closer than about ten feet, and the receptionist will almost certainly talk to you, or ask if there's anything you need. That's one bubble. Then the arm's length bubble is for close friends and intimates only, at least for most of us. Various cultures have these bubbles, usually just the two, but the sizes can differ, as can what is permitted and what is discouraged within each. This is reflected in the "layers" of sharing that the technology of "Openness" assumes. We don't need technology to realize that most relationships need boundaries, and "TMI" can drive people away. The story's technology just facilitates it happening even faster.

I noted in the author description that Nino Cipri uses "they" pronouns and has a gender description rather longer than average. While I don't care for such things, I read their story "The Shape of My Name," kind of like trying Brussels Sprouts for the first time (Hey, I can't stand how Sprouts smell, so why should I expect them to taste good?). Stripped of the time travel elements, which are interesting in themselves, it is a story of a young female-born coming out as a male, and having access to future medical tech that makes a complete bodily conversion possible. The crux of the story is the series of reactions of the protagonist's mother, who finally self-exiles to a future year beyond which the family time machine cannot reach. So this is also a tale of abandonment, a very real fear of many young people today, as they explore levels and directions within themselves that are either meaningless or repugnant to the prior generation. Author Cipri is a good enough writer to elicit my sympathy for the protagonist, for which I appreciate them.

"The Secret Life of Bots" by Suzanne Palmer is a triumph-of-the-unexpected tale. The "bots" are not traditional robots by any means. They are mostly about the size of June beetles, and are probably modeled on them. But a few kajillion of them, the maintenance crew of a starship, pull a very big chestnut out of the fire on behalf of the hapless humans who don't realize that yon "bug/bot" has at least as good a brain, and that instantaneous communications can overcome a heck of an obstacle. Think of a crowd of cooperating Neanderthals taking on a Woolly Mammoth, raised to the nth power.

I could mention a couple of other treatments of time travel, but instead I'll touch on the last story, "A Study in Oils" by Kelly Robson. A conscience-wracked athlete/artist is in hiding after semi-accidentally killing an opposing teammate, in a sport that one must sign a big-time disclaimer and waiver just to play. Sort of like 1930's-era boxing was, but this is moon hockey, and it's easy to think of the implications of a sometimes deadly sport moved into 1/6th-G! The fellow paints to work through his anguish, which actually helps his legal case. To say more would be too much of a spoiler.

These and other "new voices" are sure to strengthen the whole SF field in years to come.

A dud, and then some fun escape lit

kw: book reviews, fiction, crime fiction, science fiction, collections, short stories

The books now on my reading table are nearly all short story collections. I began to read one, then set it aside in favor of another, and didn't return to it.

Firstly, I picked up Exit Wounds, edited by Paul B. Kane and Marie O'Regan, a collection of murder mysteries, as the title clearly indicates. Alongside it I set Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow, edited by Kirsten Berg, Torie Bosch, Joey Eschrich, Ed Finn, Andrés Martines, and Juliet Ulman; a collection of stories from the Future Tense column sponsored by Slate and others. I don't care for a steady diet of crime stories, so I decided to intersperse them.

At the first sitting I read four stories in Exit Wounds. "The Bully", by Jeffrey Deaver takes a turn midway that makes you realize you are inside the mind of a serial killer. However, it is rather cerebral and pensive. The next three were also told from the killer's point of view, and each was progressively darker. Then, in Future Tense, I read first "Mother of Invention" by Nnedi Okorafor; a smart house with the directive, "Protect the occupant" does just that, to the detriment of the house's designer, but to the benefit of the occupant, his spurned lover. I didn't care for "No Me Dejes" by Mark Oshiro, though the technology of memory capture from a dying person for retention by a chosen descendant is intriguing. I had read "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis" by Annalee Newitz, and re-read it with much enjoyment.

At that point, a day or so later, I decided to skim and skip in Exit Wounds to confirm a suspicion I had. While not all the stories are first-person-killer, nothing matches "The Bully" in quality. I decided, "enough is enough" and set it aside.

With the exception of "Domestic Violence" by Madeline Ashby, which I'd also read before and don't care for, the rest of the stories are full of interesting ideas. "Safe Surrender" by Meg Elison adds a dimension to the longing many adopted children have to know their natural origins, and "Overvalued" by Mark Stasenko explores ramifications of putting a monetary value on—and a futures market for—prodigies and other brilliant people.

I grew up on SciFi in the Campbell mold: "Pose a problem, then solve it." In more modern fiction, whether specific problems are solved, or even solvable, takes a back seat to the growth (or not) of those involved. Not all of the stories even end with an ending, seeming to be instead ending at a beginning. I am coming to realize that life is like that. What's the good of finishing a great task if you're left with no more than endless resting on your laurels? And life itself is a project without a definite ending, usually. Though it does end, all to often it ends ambiguously. Stories that reflect that may be less satisfying, but can be more gratifying.

Showcasing the perceived outsiders

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, collections, short stories

The title of New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl, is actually modest. When I saw the title, I figured the writers would be predominantly African-American, with a smattering of Latinos, but I found they also included several sorts of Asians and a Native American or two.

Reading the stories was a heady experience, like attending a tasting with unfamiliar wines and liqueurs. I read most of the stories, but not all. From the opening I could tell that some worlds were much too occult or horrifying. I nearly skipped "Burn the Ships" by Alberto Yañez, but found it to be a magical fantasy Holocaust, with a different outcome.

Similarly, "Kelsey and the Burdened Breath" by Darcie Little Badger borders on occult horror, telling the tale of "shimmers", a different word for ghosts, that are either vampires or cannibals in their own sort of afterlife. In the story's milieu, they are visible if one knows how to look. The evil ones become "burdened" and cannot rise into the sky, as is usual. But it is really a story about Kelsey's growth.

I delighted in the premise of "The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations" by Minsoo Kang. The title tells a story in itself. Would that producing lying translations could actually avert war!

The breadth of vision is sufficient that most folks will find at least a few stories to savor, no matter what their ethnicity.

Finding Nebula

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

My long-term favorite collection of science fiction short stories (with a novella or novelette thrown in) is the Nebula Awards series. This year the new volume with last year's stories is Nebula Awards Showcase 2019, edited by Silvia Morena-Garcia.

The science fiction field has finally emerged from the gutter; starting nearly 50 years ago, writers were released from a tacit and mostly self-imposed censorship regarding sexual subjects. Many of them went wild. Even Isaac Asimov, who had utterly eschewed any sexual content, began writing bad sex scenes into the last few of his Robot and Foundation stories and books.

I avoid reading erotic writing for the same reason I don't go to strip shows: I care about my marriage vows, and I prefer not to gaze or dwell upon who/what I cannot possess. In our mid-seventies, I still think my wife is an unsurpassed beauty; I need no other.

That said: while the writers of this volume of Nebula don't hide sex, it plays about the same part in the stories that any of us might allow it to play in our public lives. Occasional mention, but not the focus. I think the past two generations of readers are finally tired of camera-in-the-bedroom writing. Besides, folks who want those kinds of thrills have about a billion free porn videos available.

I greatly enjoyed most of the stories. There were three that I began, and within a page my spirit protested, so I went on to the next story. Not because of eroticism, but either outright fantasy (which I don't like to read) or a world I preferred not to enter. So I'll mention just a few that I fancied:

• Weaponized Math, by Jonathan P. Brazee – Sniper war setting. A number-wizard turned sniper saves the day.
• All Systems Red, by Martha Wells – The cyborg calls himself Murderbot. The cloned brain and other organic components of this bodyguard of sorts (on a very interesting distant planet) clearly came from a barely functional introvert. Someone after my own heart.
• Wind Will Rove, by Sarah Pinsker – Generation ship setting. They've lost much of their cultural past due to hacking (I keep telling folks, microfilm is the only secure backup for stuff you really want to keep!). Music, and a particular tune with a mixed provenance, help the protagonist stay sane, connecting her to both past and future.
• Carnival Nine, by Caroline M. Yoachim – Wind-up clockwork people. They live around 1,000 days. I hope the days are long; that's only two years and nine months on Earth. Life with a disabled child is tough, no matter what kind of critter you are.

I hope that's enough to whet your appetite.

A collection that suits me better

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies

I wonder, is it that Neil Clarke thinks more like I do, or that the editors of the last SF collection I reviewed think so very differently from me? I remarked at the end of that review that the "quality of the editor" matters much, but I ought to have used a word different from "quality". I'll ruminate on that…

Neil Clarke's fourth collection of The Best Science Fiction of the Year (the year 2018) does indeed include a much greater proportion of stories that greatly appeal to me, compared to several of the past year's "Best of" volumes. There are actually a number of excellent writers who have returned to the Dictum of Campbell, "Pose a problem, then solve it." That would include "Okay, Glory" by Elizabeth Bear and "Umberlight" by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Other stories raise the "alien viewpoint" subgenre to new levels, most notably "When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller and "Theories of Flight" by Linda Nagata. I was quite taken with the love story within "Traces of Us" by Vanessa Fogg, with the overt theme of recorded intelligences, and how complete their experience might be.

I always recognize in Ken Liu's writing a political undercurrent, seeing that I number among my close friends a number of both Taiwan-born and China-born immigrants; that means I get Sino-centric news through channels that most in this country have no access to. In "Byzantine Empathy", though, I find a superb gut-level presentation of the unbridgeable gap between the "caring professional" and the empathy-driven amateur; the latter typically do all the heavy lifting that the former later take advantage of to advance their organizations. The use of VR technology to emotionally move (even propel) an audience will no doubt move off these pages into stark reality in the very near future.

This collection restores my optimism that writers are still having good new ideas, and some of those ideas may well move into mainstream thought. Reading this volume was a refreshing way to close out 2019.

What is best - depends on the editor

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

Looking for some lighter reading I picked up The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019, edited by Carmen Maria Machado and the series editor John Joseph Adams. If there is a theme for this volume, I'd guess it is "Pouring out their pain." Even in the fantasy stories, all but a few of the twenty offerings, there are few positive endings.

Most of the authors are members of groups that are currently or formerly marginalized (and, I must say, members of most "formerly" marginalized groups still think they are marginalized, big time, whether they are or not). I'd say that gives the bunch of them the right to complain. It is interesting how some of them sought to couch their complaint. Most notably, Brenda Peynado in "The Kite Maker" places us inside the head of a human who is sympathetic to space alien refugees; they are not invaders, but fleeing a destroyed planet. The aliens resemble dragonflies, very fragile, and even though living in refugee camps—thinly disguised versions of the internment camps of the 1940's—and quite inoffensive, they are thoroughly hated by a great many. The trouble is, the story goes nowhere. The POV protagonist loses his business, but nothing is improved.

The most poignant is "On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog" by Adam R. Shannon: meditations and ruminations while a beloved dog is being put to sleep. As touched as I was, I couldn't help noticing that the three-injection cocktail described is the one used for capital penalties by lethal injection, that is, "putting to sleep" for humans. Animals are typically euthanized by slow injection of a large overdose of an opioid or anaesthetic. It would actually be more humane to euthanize humans the same way.

I got no more than a page into some of the stories; I quickly discerned that they were going somewhere I didn't want to go. The rest left little impression. And that got me thinking. Who decides what is "the Best" for one of these compendia? The editor(s) of course. Thus the quality of the editor determines the quality of the volume. There are several other "the Best" collections being published on a more-or-less regular basis which I esteem more highly than this one.

No kidding, it really is the very best of the best

kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, collections, anthologies

I noticed that I haven't posted anything for nearly two weeks. I have't been idle. The book I just finished has 686 pages of first-rate science fiction stories. Even being engrossed, day after day, it took that long to finish them all.

The book is The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. I believe it set a record for me: of 38 stories, I liked 29 well enough to record the authors' names on my "lookup list" for getting books. That exceeds 70%, totally violating Sturgeon's Dictum, "90% of everything is junk". But then, not only was Gardner Dozois a great editor, whose tastes largely coincide with mine, but he was a great re-editor. The book is the last of three; there's no way to get all of the "very best" into one book, even one pushing 700 pages. There won't be a fourth, since he passed away in May, 2018.

I considered delving into a handful of the stories, but the breadth of ideas is just too great. I'll just have to keep this volume on hand for selective re-reading later on. Just this: nearly every story takes a viewpoint from the side or behind a familiar trope, or introduces something from far outside anywhere SciFi has taken me before.

This short story collection took me by surprise

kw: book reviews, fiction, short stories, collections

The local library finally wised up and began putting the collections of short stories in its New Books section all in one place. Their Dewey Decimal code is SS, after all. So this and the prior two books were easier to find, and allowed me to indulge my enjoyment of short stories, which I usually prefer to novels. The recent trends in science fiction novels are not to my liking.

The collection is The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction, edited by Larry Dark. I pay so little attention to mainstream fiction that I didn't know about the Story Prize until now. It is given to award books containing exceptional writing in short format. In the Introduction the editor waxes eloquent about the difficulty of the short format, and of how gratified he is to find many authors who still publish books full of short stories, even though "the money is in novels." After fifteen years of conferring the award, Mr. Dark gathered for this volume the best story of each year (minus one).

When I have dipped my toe into the mainstream I have usually come away dissatisfied. Many times I have stopped rather early on in an apparently aimless book or story, skipping to the ending "to see if it goes anywhere". If it does not, that's that, I am done with it. Sadly, this is more and more true of speculative fiction, particularly longer works of science fiction or fantasy (yes, I also enjoy well-written fantasy, but my standard is high, and no more than a few books per decade pass muster).

Most of the stories in The Story Prize were top-notch, to my way of thinking, so I can mention only a few. One, the longest in the volume (76 pp), is actually science fiction: "The Memory Wall", a novelette by Anthony Doerr; a way of recovering the experiences of memories has been developed, but it only helps dementia patients a little, and there is a dark side to the existence of memories outside the brain that made them. Another, "Saleema" by Daniyal Mueenudin, shows the nearly-universal experience of poor women world-wide, who have no currency but their own bodies, and does so without making the reader feel slimed. And finally, the last story, which initially seems to be going nowhere, about a man keeping a private epiphany a secret for decades; when in old age he heals an old rift with a neighbor, but also begins to harbor doubts and tells his wife, she is unsurprised, saying in effect, "Why not?"

Though a few stories were indeed "flyover country" to me, most were worth reading, and quite enjoyable. Even a couple that made me squirm (e.g. "Saleema") were stories I am glad I read.