Locus, June 2014

by Locus Publications

  And there are plenty of such delights in the book, including M. John Harrison’s lovely Autotelia story ‘‘Cave and Julia’’, a kind of masterclass on how to use setting to illuminate character, or Geoff Ryman’s clever ‘‘Rosary and Goldenstar’’, which somehow combines Shakespeare with two of his own characters, the alchemist John Dee, and the astronomer Tycho Brahe, with unexpected results. Two of the strongest fantasy stories are Sofia Samatar’s ‘‘Selkie Stories are for Losers’’, which brings the selkie legend into a contemporary family saga by means of a terrific narrative voice, and K.J. Parker’s ‘‘The Sun and I’’, with its sharp commentary on belief, framed in a tale of an invented sun-god religion that gets out of hand.

  On the more purely SF side, it’s interesting to note the continuing emergence of a kind of neurological SF, not only in Naam’s ‘‘Water’’ but in Ian R. McLeod’s sensitive ‘‘Entangled’’, in which a woman suffering brain damage finds herself excluded from a world in which nearly everyone else has joined into a kind of consciousness singularity, or even to some degree James Patrick Kelly’s equally moving ‘‘The Promise of Space’’, about a wife’s effort to come to terms with her neurologically damaged Marsnaut husband. Kelly, along with McDonald, Egan, Ryman, Harrison, and Robert Reed (whose ‘‘Mystic Falls’’ departs from familiar territory with his tale of a personified information virus), may be one of the more familiar longstanding SF names in the book, but it’s also rewarding to see Karin Tidbeck bring her strange kind of magic to an extrasolar planetary setting in ‘‘Sing’’ and Caitlín R. Kiernan continuing her return to science fiction in ‘‘The Road of Needles’’ – although, as Strahan notes, her ‘‘Black Helicopters’’, one of the outstanding novellas of the year, was too long for inclusion. Both the Kiernan and the Tidbeck stories, along with others by Yoon Ha Lee, An Owomoyela, Priya Sharma, and others, demonstrate an ongoing creative dialogue between SF and other modes of fantastika, from fairy tales to magic to myth. That dialogue is what perhaps most clearly emerges from the anthology as a whole, and validates Strahan’s implicit argument that the fantastic genres can inform one another in productive ways, just as the variety of settings and authors represent another kind of dialogue. I’ve not seen the other year’s bests at this point, but so far Strahan’s selection constitutes the most interesting conversation about the fantastic I’ve seen this year.

  •

  Mostly on the basis of his earlier novels, James Morrow has probably gotten himself compared to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. more than any other living SF writer, despite the fact that Morrow’s rationalist humanism finally ends up at odds with Vonnegut’s sometimes glib black humor. But both authors can be wickedly funny satirists, and both have occasionally made aspects of SF pop culture targets of their satire – Vonnegut most notably with his Kilgore Trout and Morrow most recently with his farcical short novel Shambling Toward Hiroshima (reviewed here in February 2009), which took on Hollywood monster movies, oddly repurposing Godzilla as an American secret weapon during WWII. That novel turned on a singular deception – an actor in a monster suit trying to convince the Japanese high command that the threat was real – and The Madonna and the Starship turns on a similar deception, in this case trying to convince threatening aliens that a fake TV show is real.

  Moving the setting to the freewheeling early days of network TV, The Madonna and the Starship is even more deliberately over-the-top than Shambling Toward Hiroshima. The narrator, Kurt Jastrow, is a pulp SF writer whose steady income comes from a live TV show called Brock Barton and his Rocket Rangers, each episode of which is followed by Jastrow himself appearing as a kind of Mr. Wizard figure conducting science experiments vaguely related to the show. Suddenly a pair of cartoonish lobster-like aliens, dressed in trenchcoats and slouch hats, appear to present ‘‘Uncle Wonder’’ with an intergalactic prize for championing rationality, but at the same time they are distressed by what they view as a profoundly irrational Sunday morning religious program written by Jastrow’s girlfriend Connie. In an effort to cleanse the galaxy of superstitious thought, the aliens plan to commandeer millions of TV sets, turning them into death rays that will zap all the viewers of the religious program. It’s up to Kurt and Connie to save these viewers by hatching a scheme to convince the aliens that the program is in fact profanely sacrilegious, coming up with a script that, among other things, has Jesus presenting the Eucharist as a commercial plug for Sugar Corn Pops and Ovaltine.

  The story has the tone of a manic tall tale and is often just as hilarious, but it also includes some sly and knowledgeable references to early 1950s TV and SF culture. Kurt’s pulp magazine editor, for example, is an agoraphobe named Silver, clearly intended to call to mind Galaxy’s actual agoraphobe editor Horace Gold. And even the rationalist fundamentalism of the ‘‘logical positivist’’ alien lobsters comes in for some barbs, as Kurt at one point hopes to convince the aliens that their hyper-rationalist intolerance is really no more than a disguised narcissistic nihilism. Ideas like that might echo Morrow’s more serious novels like The Last Witchfinder, but for the most part the novel’s freewheeling tone echoes not so much earlier Morrow, or even Vonnegut, but the work of another SF writer actually working during this era – Frederic Brown, whose Martians, Go Home, with its heckling, sarcastic alien invaders and parody of SF writers, came to mind more than once.

  •

  Despite his regular appearances in F&SF, Bradley Denton has maintained a surprisingly low profile for an author whose career stretches back three decades. This is partly due to his sparse output – a handful of novels and not that many more stories – and partly to the fact that his output has ranged from SF to horror to mysteries; he’s been nominated for Edgars and Stokers as well as Hugos and Nebulas, and has won World Fantasy, Sturgeon, and Campbell Awards. His new collection Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas consists of three long stories, but provides an excellent overview of his versatility and eclecticism. The title story, ‘‘Sergeant Chip’’, is likely the most familiar, having won the Sturgeon and been included in three year’s best anthologies in 2005. It’s also the only example of Denton’s SF in the collection, the other two being essentially mysteries with supernatural elements. Despite its rather cute title and the novelty of having a smart dog as narrator – complete with a dog’s presumed preoccupations with loyalty and duty – ‘‘Sergeant Chip’’ turns out to be a much more tough-minded story than one would expect, with its SF elements fully worked out, including a future war setting that at times recalls Joe Haldeman or Lucius Shepard. Sergeant Chip himself is an enhanced, combat-trained Labradoodle whose near-telepathic link with his handler Captain Dial also suggests the dog-human interface of Simak’s classic ‘‘Desertion’’ (come to think of it, there are a lot of superintelligent SF dogs, going all the way back to Stapledon’s Sirius. Quick, someone write a dissertation!) Denton gamely takes on the challenge of adopting a narrative voice simple enough to be credible as a representation of a dog’s thinking, and the relative innocence of this voice lends considerable power to the narrative as the corrupt nature of the war gradually becomes evident, and the appalling reason for Captain Dial’s eventual death is revealed. It’s a masterfully controlled performance that doesn’t quite sacrifice the Rin-Tin-Tin aspects, but rather uses them to frame a sharp political commentary.

  The second novella, ‘‘Blackburn and the Blade’’, is a spinoff of Denton’s 1993 novel Blackburn, about an empathetic serial killer (more than a decade before Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter showed up). It’s probably the most complexly plotted tale here, but also the most conventional, as Blackburn, en route to Chicago to practice his trade, finds himself embroiled in a creepy murder case in the Quad Cities area of Illinois and Iowa, a setting that Denton takes full advantage of. Although we’re reminded a little more often than necessary of Blackburn’s offhanded sizing up of almost everyone he meets as a potential victim, the well-drawn cast of local characters lends the story a convincing authenticity, and made me curious about the novel
itself.

  The most significant achievement here, though, is the Edgar-nominated ‘‘The Adakian Eagle’’, whose title, we quickly learn, is a sly allusion to The Maltese Falcon. Its central figure is a middle-aged, already somewhat dissolute Dashiell Hammett, his last novel already ten years behind him, serving in the Army in the Aleutian Islands during WWII. (This much is actually true, and the military newspaper Hammett edited was called The Adakian, after the island of Adak where he was stationed.) The narrator is a private who has discovered the crucified and disemboweled remains of a huge bald eagle on a nearby mountain slope, and enlists Hammett to help him investigate (the Army was aware not only of Hammett’s reputation, but of his experience as a Pinkerton agent as well). This in turn leads to their involvement with a local Aleut, an overambitious lieutenant colonel, and the bit of native Aleutian folklore that provides the story’s only real fantasy element, a kind of dream-vision of past and future that both Hammett and the narrator experience after being served spiked coffee by their Unangan friend. The mystery does get solved, but that brief vision of the future lends a haunting and tragic resonance to the story, and Denton’s skill with evoking setting, in this case a cold and rainy volcanic isle plagued by vicious williwaw winds, is at its very best here.

  •

  [William H. Patterson, Jr. unfortunately passed away shortly after the following review was received, and before seeing the release of the second volume of his Robert A. Heinlein biography, his life’s work. For an obituary on Patterson, see page 71. –Locus]

  It’s tempting to claim that, a quarter century after his death, Heinlein remains one of the most dominating and divisive figures in SF; his books remain in print, he’s the focus of continued academic scrutiny, and he’s one of the few names who seem de rigueur in college courses about SF. No one would question his historical influence, or his importance in developing the techniques for limning immersive, lived-in futures that are now standard in SF writing. And he certainly retains followers, from those who nostalgically remember discovering SF through the famous juveniles to that smaller group who treasures the philosophical contentiousness and baggy structure of his later novels. But there are also a number of younger writers entering the field who have little familiarity with or interest in Heinlein, and who quite reasonably bridle at the get-off-my-lawn complaints from older readers that you can’t write this if you haven’t read that. Being one of those older readers who grew up with Heinlein, I found myself fascinated by much of the sometimes numbing detail in the second volume of William H. Patterson’s biography Robert A. Heinlein (I’m omitting the complexly punctuated string of subtitles here), but I can’t help but wonder what these newer readers and writers would make of it.

  Like Patterson’s first volume, this one is a monument to both assiduously detailed research and hagiographic testimony. But while the first volume, essentially a coming-of-age tale, addressed the fascinating question of how a kid from Missouri who had never planned to be a writer ended up dominating the SF of the 1940s, the second volume has no such built-in narrative arc: beginning in 1948, it’s an account of how an already successful writer became still more successful, flirting with Hollywood, moving out of the juvenile market, becoming an unwitting and unwilling guru of the counterculture with Stranger in a Strange Land, and eventually becoming one of the first SF writers to consistently land on national bestseller lists. Patterson traces all this in rigorous chronological order, but offers surprisingly little perspective on the novels themselves: we get barely a page on Time Enough for Love, for example, but nearly an entire chapter on an article on rare blood types Heinlein wrote for an encyclopedia yearbook. On the other hand, descriptions of the various medical maladies suffered by Robert and his wife Virginia go on and on, as do minutely detailed accounts of foreign rights sales and point-by-point itineraries of just about every trip they took. These passages, which take up considerable space, remind me of nothing so much as Asimov’s resolutely factual and opaquely unintrospective autobiographies.

  If Patterson does introduce a level of dramatic tension, it’s essentially that of a hero myth, complete with clearly defined villains. The heroes are of course Heinlein and Virginia, who gave him his ‘‘‘finish’ as a professional writer… almost always she would be able to come up with an idea he could use.’’ If we check the voluminous notes (of which there are nearly 200 pages!), we find that, perhaps not surprisingly, the only source cited in this paragraph is Virginia Heinlein. The villains are a more interesting lot: the fan Forrest Ackerman, who kept trying to sell Heinlein stories he didn’t have the rights for (‘‘I wouldn’t let Ackerman negotiate on my behalf for a latch key to Hell’’), the shady Shasta publisher Erle Korshak (‘‘an unbearable jerk’’), the fan and writer Alexei Panshin (author of the first critical study of Heinlein), and most of all Heinlein’s first wife Leslyn, who repeatedly wrote what Patterson calls ‘‘poison-pen letters,’’ some of which were so ‘‘over-the-top nuts that anyone who looked at them would conclude she was insane.’’ While Patterson prudently refrains from quoting those letters, the implication that Leslyn might have been mentally disturbed renders his one-dimensional portrayal of her as a shrewish alcoholic madwoman more than a little uncomfortable.

  Later, the villains come to include almost any reviewer or academic w ho criticized Heinlein’s work; of a review of Starship Troopers he writes, ‘‘It is hard to believe that anyone who actually read the book could take this review in any way seriously,’’ while almost none of the contributors to a fanzine discussion of the book ‘‘seemed to be able to read even the clear language of the book.’’ In a collection of academic essays, most contributors were ‘‘either ignoring or misconstruing the clear language of the texts.’’ On the other hand, we’re told that I Will Fear No Evil ‘‘got glowing reviews in specialty publications for Women’s Lib,’’ but none of those reviews are actually cited. Of H. Bruce Franklin, who wrote a book on Heinlein, Patterson tells us he had been ‘‘dismissed from a tenured position at Stanford several years earlier because of his Maoist political activity,’’ which is only one of a number of factual problems that pop up when Patterson moves outside of his carefully documented Heinlein research to a broader context. He tells us that Alger Hiss was ‘‘convicted of spying for Stalin’’ (he wasn’t), that Alan Shepard was ‘‘the first American to orbit the Earth’’ in 1961 (his flight was suborbital), and that Everett’s many worlds hypothesis was simply old ideas from Ouspensky and J.W. Dunne ‘‘cloaked in the lingo of quantum mechanics.’’ On more than one occasion, Patterson takes pains to explain how the American left – fairly significant in his chapters on the 1960s – had long since abandoned the ideals of Enlightenment liberalism and Jeffersonian democracy, leaving them in the hands of libertarians.

  In the end, Patterson’s subtitle for both volumes – In Dialogue with His Century – turns out to be exactly appropriate, and lends this massive biography considerable value as a resource for those interested in a detailed portrait of how an unusual and unusually powerful writer negotiated a very public career that stretched from the Depression through three major wars, the rise of the counterculture (and its eventual assimilation), and well into the 1980s. It’s likely the most we will ever learn about Heinlein (and probably in finer detail than most readers would sit still for), and despite its adulatory tone it reveals a great deal more about Heinlein’s real attitudes than his own rather disappointingly bland Grumbles from the Grave. For a reader wanting perspective on understanding why Heinlein is so widely regarded as the quintessential American SF writer, though, the old boy still remains an enigma.

  •

  For those readers, fortunately, a much less heralded – and far more concise – introduction to Heinlein’s fiction is available in Thomas D. Clareson & Joe Sanders’s The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction. Clareson, who died in 1993, was a pioneer in the academic study of SF, involved in the founding of the first MLA seminar on SF, the journal Extrapolat
ion, and the Science Fiction Research Association. At the time of his death, he’d been working on a Heinlein study for Starmont House, a small press known for its short monographs (seldom more than 40,000 words) on SF and fantasy writers. That likely helps explain the conciseness of the present volume, which is mostly the work of Sanders, whose balanced and critically astute approach grapples fairly both with the earlier classic works and the later more problematical novels, which he admits sometimes felt to him ‘‘like touring a second-rate nursing home.’’ That’s the sort of ouch-comment that might lead you to question the critic’s perspective, but Sanders explains that one of his students, Stacie Hanes, convinced him that the later novels, far from failed efforts to recapture earlier glories, were more experimental and deliberate than he had initially suspected. Though Sanders is not as uncritical as Patterson – whose biography he apparently did not have access to in finishing the manuscript – his approach to these late novels aligns with Patterson’s claims that Heinlein was indeed seeking to break new ground in terms of narrative techniques and what we would now call postmodern sensibilities, even if he was not always successful