Science fiction writer William Tenn, who was in private life Phil Klass, died yesterday of congestive heart failure. He was eighty-nine. He leaves his wife Fruma and daughter Adina, and much of science fiction fandom will also miss him.
He wrote one novel, Of Men and Monsters, and many wry and wonderful short stories, collected by NESFA as Immodest Proposals and Here Comes Civilization. He was Worldcon Guest of Honor in 2004. His stories were satire, and they were real science fiction. "The Liberation of Earth" in The Best Penguin SF was one of the first science fiction stories I ever read, and it blew me away. His stories generally worked by taking some science fiction ideas that nobody else would have thought of putting together, twisting them up with his typical wry humour, and hooking you into them with his way with words. They read aloud wonderfully—I’ll always remember hearing him read “On Venus, Do We Have a Rabbi” at the 2001 Worldcon.
At that same convention I was on a panel on his work, with Connie Willis and Robert Silverberg, and Phil sitting in the front row nodding soberly from time to time. He had an absolute straight face, in life as in his stories. After the panel when Robert Silverberg went up to him, he said how much he’d loved Dying Inside, and I got to see one of my science fiction writer heroes admiring another—and a great writer being taken aback by praise. A second later he was saying how we’d talked about stories he’d forgotten writing—but there was a twinkle in his eye. And that was Phil, generous, funny, and straight faced. Another time at a Boskone I introduced my son to him. Sasha was twelve or thirteen at the time and he’d recently loved Of Men and Monsters. “This is one of the new generation of your fans,” I said, and Sasha and Phil both synchronously rolled their eyes at the impossibility of mothers. He does have a new generation of fans, though. The last time I heard one of his stories read aloud was at a party here, when a fan in her twenties read “The Party of the Two Parts”, the amoeba sex story.
We’ll miss Phil Klass. William Tenn’s work will live on.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
The Guns of the South (1992) was the first, or anyway the first I encountered, of the new kind of time-travel alternate histories, the kind where a group of people from the future, with their technology, turn up in a particular point in the past and change it. There were plenty of stories about organized groups of time travellers trying not to disturb the past, and also plenty about one person, without more than he could carry, changing things, starting from De Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall (1939) but what made The Guns of the South innovative was doing it with a whole group of people and their stuff. It was followed with Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time (the island of Nantucket in the bronze age) and Flint’s 1632 (a US steel town transported to Europe of 1632) and at this point it’s pretty much a whole subgenre.
What makes the book so great is that it’s told entirely from the points of view of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and Nate Caudwell, a sergeant in the Confederate army. The reader immediately recognises what an AK47 is, and knows where the white supremacists have come from to help the South, but the way Lee and Caudwell learn about them and their intentions, and the way the tide of history is turned, makes for a compelling story. Only about a third of the book is about the way the AK47s help the South win the Civil War; the rest is about what happens afterward, and the uneasy relationship with the men from the future.
There are four good places to start reading Anthony Price’s Audley series. They are with the first written volume, The Labyrinth Makers (1970) a thriller about British intelligence and the KGB struggling over the lost gold of Troy. Or you could start with the first chronologically, The Hour of the Donkey (1980), which is a war story about the events leading up to Dunkirk. Or you could start with Soldier No More (1981), which is about a double-agent sent on a recruitment mission in 1956, and the Late Roman Empire. Or you could start with Other Paths to Glory (1974) which is another recruitment mission and the Great War. There are nineteen books in the series, but none of the others strikes me as a good way in. I started with Soldier No More when I was in university, when one of my tutors mentioned that it was a thriller featuring Galla Placida.
These books are not science fiction or fantasy, except for Tomorrow’s Ghost (1979), which is arguably fantasy. It’s from the point of view of a female agent who at least believes that the folk tale she has told will lead to somebody’s death—and it does, too. Fantasy. Which makes the whole series fantasy, in a way.
They all feature or at least mention David Audley and some kind of intelligence work, they happen in the same conceptual universe, they are told from an incredible range of points of view, and they almost all feature some historical mystery in addition to the contemporary one. They have an over-arching plot arc that was cut short by the Cold War ending unexpectedly before he was done with it, so the series isn’t finished and probably never will be. They are the books from outside of SF that I re-read most often.
My problem with this book is how much I like the first trilogy, and how much The Other Wind needs to undermine them to make its point. Probably if I had read all these books in the same week, whether in 1974 or in 2002, I wouldn’t have this particular problem. This problem comes from reading the first books over and over between 1974 and 2002 and seeing my own things in the margins, so that when Le Guin gives me different margins I turn into the Winds from Ventus and disbelieve. This is only my second reading of this book, which I read immediately it was published and haven’t picked up since. I cannot like it.
Tales from Earthsea (2001) is a collection of stories set in Earthsea, written between Tehanu (1990) and The Other Wind (2002), and clearly meant as a bridge between those two novels. Le Guin says in the introduction that “a great deal about Earthsea, about wizards, about Roke Island, about dragons had begun to puzzle me”. These stories are uncertain, questioning, puzzled stories, as different from the certainty of the first Earthsea trilogy as you could find. Le Guin is questioning the things she took for granted, and finding tentative answers, answers that go against the grain of story. This was a brave thing to do, but not always a successful one. These stories are beautifully written and contain flashes of wonder, but I neither really like them nor really believe in them. The first three books are rock solid and makes a world that feels like a real place. These stories are set somewhere wavering. Even as I get caught up in them I am thrown out of them.
Seventeen years after The Farthest Shore (1973) came Tehanu (1990). In that time an awful lot happened. One of those things was second wave feminism, and Le Guin, always a feminist, always ahead in thinking about gender issues, looked back at Earthsea and feminist criticism of Earthsea, and saw that she had done a lot of things without thinking because of the way the weight of story pulled her. I’m pretty sure that she wrote Tehanu to try to address some of this directly, not to revise but to revision Earthsea, to give women a voice. If the first trilogy are, as Le Guin said, male and female coming of age and death, this is being a woman. (Calimac suggests The Farthest Shore is the book of the old man, and Tehanu is the book of the old woman, but I don’t think so. Ged is 50 in The Farthest Shore and Tenar is in her early forties here, and not even at menopause.)
Another thing that changed between 1973 and 1990 was the existence of genre fantasy. In 1973 there was really nothing but The Lord of the Rings and the scattered predecessors Lin Carter published as the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Genre fantasy was created by people reading and reacting to Tolkien. Lester Del Rey published The Sword of Shannara (1977) as “look, we have more of this stuff”. By 1990 there was a lot of it. Le Guin had written the earlier Earthsea books for children, giving them young protagonists as viewpoints. Now she didn’t need to, there were adult readers who would buy fantasy. She could write an adult fantasy novel, and she did.
The Farthest Shore is the third in the Earthsea series, set years after the other books, when Sparrowhawk has become Archmage, head of the magic school on Roke.
In the Court of the Fountain the sun shone through young leaves of ash and elm, and water leapt and fell through shadow and clear light. About that roofless court stood four high walls of stone. Behind those were rooms and courts, passages, corridors, towers, and at last the heavy outmost walls of the Great House of Roke, which would stand any assault of war or earthquake or the sea itself, being built not only of stone but of incontestable magic. For Roke is the isle of the wise where the art magic is taught, and the Great House is the school and central place of wizardry; and the central place of the house is that small court far within the walls where the fountain plays and the trees stand in rain or sun or starlight.
Arren comes to Roke to report trouble, and finds the archmage, and more trouble than he thought, and a hard road to follow.
Le Guin has said of the first three Earthsea books (in The Languages of the Night) that they concern male coming of age, female coming of age, and death. Presumably it was the realisation that most lives contain other things in between that prompted her to write the later books. The Tombs of Atuan has long been a favourite of mine but reading it this time I kept contrasting the male and female coming of age in the two books.
The Tombs of Atuan is about a girl who is the reincarnated One Priestess of the Nameless Powers. She lives on the Kargish island of Atuan in the Place of the Tombs, and is mistress of the Undertomb and the Labyrinth. She dances the dances of the dark of the moon before the empty throne, and she negotiates a difficult path with the other priestesses, who are adult, and adept with the ways of power. It is a world of women and girls and eunuchs and dark magic, set in a desert. A great deal of the book is set underground, and the map at the front is of the Labyrinth. It couldn’t be more different from the sea and islands of A Wizard of Earthsea.
A Wizard of Earthsea is one of the most beautifully written books in the English language. It’s also one of the very few fantasy novels that succeeds in feeling like a legend. It was published in 1968, when I was three, and I read it in 1974 when I was nine, and again every year or so since. It isn’t a book I get tired of. Looking at it now, it’s a fantasy novel, looking at it then it was a children’s book. It promised me magic and sea and islands—I fell in love with it before I’d read a word of it, because I fell in love with the map. I could draw the map from memory, and the reason for this isn’t because it’s an especially good map but because Le Guin is so wonderful with names—Selidor, Iffish, Havnor, Osskil, Gont, Pendor and the Ninety Isles.
My problem with re-reading it now is that I loved it before I understood it, and that can come between me and seeing it clearly. There’s also Le Guin’s own criticism of her Earthsea and the revisioning in the later books. It isn’t possible to read “as weak as women’s magic” and “as wicked as women’s magic” and not take notice of them.
This is a very unusual book whether you look at it as a fantasy novel or as a children’s book. It’s unusually dark, and while it’s certainly a coming of age story, it’s about coming to know yourself and the darkness in you. There’s adventure, and danger, and joy, and dragons circling on the wind above little islands in a wrinkled sea, there’s magic of illusion and naming and changing shapes, but what it’s really about is the sin of pride. There’s a lot here for a child who wants the story of a boy who can turn into a hawk, but it’s altogether more serious than that. It’s on a very small scale for a fantasy, too, the danger is a personal and individual one, not a threat to the world.
When I first read Tea With the Black Dragon I had never tasted Oolong tea. Now I have a special pot for it.
Tea With the Black Dragon is an odd but charming book. It’s the kind of book that when someone mentions it, you smile. It’s unusual in a number of ways. It’s set at a very precise moment of the early eighties, which can be deduced from the very specific technology—but it’s a fantasy. It has an action-adventure plot with kidnapping, embezzlement and early eighties computer fraud—but that’s secondary to what it’s about. (If ever a book had plot to stop everything happening at once, this would be it.) One of the major characters is a fifty year old divorced single mother who may be a boddhisvata. Another is a Chinese dragon. The whole book is infused with Chinese mythology and CPM era computers. It’s very short, barely a couple of hours’ read, which was unusual even when books used to be shorter.
As a follow-up to my recent post on SF reading protocols, I thought it would be interesting to ask what books people have used to successfully turn other people on to SF?
(Here as before “SF” means the broad genre of “science fiction and fantasy”.)
My aunt is an interesting case. When I was a teenager she bounced off book after book and author after author that I was loving. She couldn’t read The Door Into Summer! (It had a cat in it. She loves cats!) She couldn’t read The Lord of the Rings! When she couldn’t read The Left Hand of Darkness I gave up. When I started again, twenty years later when we’d both grown up more and she’d read some of my books (out of literal nepotism), I succeeded in getting her to read Robin McKinley’s Beauty, Sharon Shinn’s Summers at Castle Auburn, and Susan Palwick’s The Necessary Beggar.
So, I asked for recommendations for neglected books and authors and had an overwhelming response. I’m going to make the results into a useful reading list, in alphabetical order, with links, and usefully divided. The world is a very big place with a lot of stuff in it, and a lot of books are published and pretty much vanish. They say word-of-mouth is the best way to find books, and these are all books with someone to advocate for them. Sometimes I was astonished to find something was out of print, other times delighted to see that it was. (Murray Leinster is in print! Katherine Maclean is!) Other times I was surprised to find an author I’d never even vaguely heard of who published several books. I read a lot, and I’ve spent a lot of time online and in conventions hanging out talking about books. If I’ve never heard of Wilhelmina Baird or Wilmar Shiras, it’s not the same as your great-aunt never having heard of Neal Stephenson. Nobody can read everything, and nobody wants to, but I’m surprised there are so many I haven’t even considered. And then there are the authors I can’t believe anyone thinks are obscure.
You wouldn’t think I’d like Lisa Tuttle’s The Mysteries. It’s a contemporary-set fantasy novel, using Celtic mythology, written by an American and set in Britain. Any of those things would put me off, but in fact The Mysteries is brilliant and gets away with all of it. I read it because I’ve been reading Tuttle for years and even when I do not enjoy her books I always think she’s amazing. She’s written books I’ll probably never read again because they’re too disturbing, but I’ll buy anything she writes as soon as I can, even in genres I don’t like.
The Mysteries gets away with so much because Tuttle has a deep understanding of Celtic mythology and not a typically shallow one, because while she’s American she’s been living in Britain for decades, and because even so she knows enough to make her first person narrator an Anglicized American. This is a book that only Tuttle could have written—and it’s surprising how rare it is to say that, to read something that could only have been written by that writer. A lot of books are fun but they could have been written by anyone.
The book begins with a dictionary definition of “mystery” in all its senses, and then immediately plunges into the world of mysterious disappearances. Ian Kennedy is a private detective who tries to find missing people. A lot of people have gone missing in his life, and we slowly learn what happens when he finds them. There are four stories of disappearances connected to Ian, in addition to the accounts of historical mysterious disappearances that the book is dotted with. There’s his father, Jim, his girlfriend, Jenny, his first case, Amy, and his current case, Peri. Two of them were perfectly ordinary disappearances, people who wanted to vanish and did. Two of them went into the Otherworld. The book circles on itself; reading it is following several stories at once, and if there’s a central meaning to “mystery,” it’s close to “Eleusinian”.
By some measurements, Peter Dickinson’s King and Joker was one of the first adult SF novels I ever read. By others, you could say it was one of the first adult mysteries, though I found it on the SF shelf. It’s probably not something anyone else would see as a great influential work, but it’s hardly possible to find anything that’s influenced me more. It’s a mystery set in an alternate history. It’s not a story about the alternate history, though the background is well worked out and the revelations are well fitted in to the story. I’m reluctant to say it isn’t SF, because the experience of reading first King and Joker and then The Dispossessed on the same afternoon is what made me fall in love with the possibilities and scope of a brave new genre that had such wonders in it.
I’d actually read several SF books before—Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time, and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, Clarke’s Time and the Stars, The Penguin Best SF collection, others. But I’d never made the connection that these all fitted into one category—I’d read some science fiction, but without being aware of it. Awareness of the genre came from King and Joker, The Dispossessed and the fact they both came from the shelves in the adult library marked “Science Fiction”.
[Read more: alternate history, personal history no spoilers]
Steven Brust is the author of 18 books set in Dragaera and several other standalone volumes. I recently re-read all 18 Dragaera books: 12 Vlad books, 5 Paarfi books and Brokedown Palace, culminating with the new one, Iorich, and wrote about them here. I then interviewed Steven Brust in email about writing the series.
Jo: Do you see the Vlad books as episodes or as part of an ongoing narrative—what’s the shape of it going to look like when it’s a whole thing?
SKZB: Wait...that doesn’t feel like an either/or question. So I guess the answer is both. It wasn’t until I was working on Tacky that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series. At that time “fantasy series” had a sort of nasty odor, so I started thinking of what I could do so it wouldn’t smell so bad. I came up with several answers, many of which contradicted each other. For example, I wanted each story to stand on its own, and I also wanted each one to fit in as part of a larger whole. I wanted to never tell a story I didn’t feel like telling, and I wanted to make sure I told the whole saga. I wanted to use them as vehicles to challenge myself, and I wanted to use them to relax and have fun after doing something difficult. I wanted the whole series to feel like it was part of a larger plan, and I wanted to feel free to go off in unexpected directions if and when they occurred to me. So what we have, so far, is the result of a morass of contradictory intentions. Maybe it’s dialectical.
The Philip K. Dick Award is for science fiction published as a paperback original, as most of Dick’s own work was in his lifetime. It’s an interesting award, precisely because of this. It tends to catch books that are good but haven’t had a lot of attention—so many paperbacks are reprints that paperback originals often don’t get reviewed, and don’t have much advertising budget from the publisher. The Dick list is one to watch to find new writers and books that may have slipped beneath the radar, interesting oddities, and small press releases from major writers. The purpose of awards is not to make writers feel good, although they do that, but to draw good books to the awareness of readers.
The Dick is a juried award, which means that the jury read through a whole pile of paperback originals and agreed on the best—they do this so you don’t have to. The shortlist is more interesting to me than the winner—it’s very hard to agree on what is “the best”, and then it’s just one book, but a list of half a dozen excellent books gives a good range. These cover the whole spectrum of science fiction, and just science fiction, not any shade of fantasy. I haven’t read any of them, but I commend them all to your attention.
This year’s nominees are:
Bitter Angels by C. L. Anderson (Ballantine Books/Spectra)
The Prisoner by Carlos J. Cortes (Ballantine Books/Spectra)
The Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia (Harper)
The Devil’s Alphabet by Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald (Pyr)
Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore (Aqueduct Press)
Prophets by S. Andrew Swann (DAW Books)
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Genres are usually defined by their tropes—mysteries have murders and clues, romances have two people finding each other, etc. Science fiction doesn’t work well when you define it like that, because it’s not about robots and rocketships. Samuel Delany suggested that rather than try to define science fiction it’s more interesting to describe it, and of describing it more interesting to draw a broad circle around what everyone agrees is SF than to quibble about the edge conditions. (Though arguing over the borders of science fiction and fantasy is a neverending and fun exercise.) He then went on to say that one of the ways of approaching SF is to look at the way people read it—that those of us who read it have built up a set of skills for reading SF which let us enjoy it, where people who don’t have this approach to reading are left confused.
If you’re reading this, the odds are overwhelming that you have that SF reading skillset.
(As I’m using it here, “science fiction” means “science fiction” and “SF” means “the broad genre of science fiction and fantasy.”)
We’ve all probably had the experience of reading a great SF novel and lending it to a friend—a literate friend who adores A.S. Byatt and E.M. Forster. Sometimes our friend will turn their nose up at the cover, and we’ll say no, really, this is good, you’ll like it. Sometimes our friend does like it, but often we’ll find our friend returning the book with a puzzled grimace, having tried to read it but “just not been able to get into it.” That friend has approached science fiction without the necessary toolkit and has bounced off. It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s not that they can’t read sentences. It’s just that part of the fun of science fiction happens in your head, and their head isn’t having fun, it’s finding it hard work to keep up.
Kage Baker is very ill, and would like cards, emails, prayers, and good thoughts.
Email to: materkb [at] gmail [dot] com—it’ll be printed out and read to her.
Cards to: Kage Baker 331 Stimson, Apt. B, Pismo Beach CA 93449.
Kage is the author of the brilliant Company series about time travel, history and the effects the past and present have on each other—they start with In the Garden of Iden. Ellen Kushner said about them this morning for people starting them now: “how I envy you not having to wait a year or two or seven to find out how it all comes out!” She also wrote the unusual fantasies The Anvil of the World and The House of the Stag and YA The Hotel Under the Sand, as well as some of the best short stories in the genre in the last ten years. Full bibliography here.
I’ve never met her. I always felt she was someone who might do something amazing at any moment, and even if I didn’t enjoy a particular novel or story I could admire it, and admire her range and originality and ambition. Her career was full of award nominations and it’s painful to see it cut short this way.
They’re saying it’s time to say goodbye and it’ll be a miracle if she lasts another six months—so if you’ve enjoyed her books and stories, send a card or an email, and if you haven’t been lucky enough to discover her thus far, this is a great time to buy one of her books and send a message that way.
James Nicoll asked an interesting question on his livejournal yesterday—he wanted people to name talented but unjustly obscure authors. He’s had some wonderful answers, and I wanted, with James’s permission, to ask the same question here.
It’s easy to moan about bestsellers you don’t like, but who are the authors that should be getting the sales and the attention and yet remain obscure?
Cosmonaut Keep is the first book in the Engines of Light series, but it stands alone very well and would be a good introduction to Macleod for someone who hasn’t run into him before. It’s a double stranded book, one strand set among hackers in near-future Edinburgh and orbit, the other half set halfway around the galaxy on the planet of Mingalay, which boasts five intelligent species, all of which evolved on Earth, living together and trading in reasonable harmony between the stars. Both Matt, in the near future, and Gregor, in the far away one, are reasonable everymen, but they’re not just there to carry the reader on a trip through the universe. Before the book’s over we’ve had first contact, alien intervention, intrigue, philosophy, guilt about the dinosaur-killer, star travel, true love, and octopodia as a key insight. Both stories build to their climaxes and dovetail, solving many mysteries and leaving others open for the other two books in the series.
And then there’s Cosmonaut Keep itself:
He and Margaret stepped out on the ground floor [...] and made their way around several zig-zag turns of defensive corridor. Antique spacesuits stood in artfully placed ambuscade niches.
The corridor opened into the castle’s main hall, a cavernous space hung with retrofitted electric lights, its fifteen meter high walls covered with carpets and tapestries and portraits of the Cosmonaut Families, heads and hides of dinosaurs, and decoratively arranged displays of the light artillery with which these giant quarry had been sportingly slain.
[Read more: no real plot spoilers but it’s hard to avoid them when talking about both halves]
Gadgets and/or Words That Are Fun to Say by Caragh O’Brien
Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie by Mitch Wagner
Moffat’s Women #3 - Sally by Teresa Jusino
