Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 309 - 2014-05 - vol 25 no 09 (epub)
Author: Unknown
Date: 2014-05-26 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Burrowing Wombat Press

The New York Review of Science Fiction

Contents

- Amy J. Ransom: The New French SF: The Imaginary Worlds of Jean-Claude Dunyach

- Barbara Bengels: Writing Outside the Box: Advice from Science Fiction Writers about Nurturing Gifted Children—and Their Writing

- Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Remembering Jody Scott

- Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas by Bradley Denton, reviewed by Don Webb

- Mark von Schlegell: The Great Jack Vance

- Joe Sanders: The Emperor of I Scream: Torture, Revenge, Justice, and Hope in Iain M. Banks’s Surface Detail

- Brendan Byrne: William Gibson and The Anxiety of E-Mail

- In the Company of Thieves by Kage Baker, reviewed by Michael Levy

- Photos

- Editorial: Shameless Self-Promotion

Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors. Alex Donald, Webmaster; Jen Gunnels, Theatre Editor; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor. Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.
Staff: Ann Crimmins, Sophie Logan; Heather Masri, Lisa Padol, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Jason Strawsburg, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.
Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

Published monthly by Burrowing Wombat Press, 206 Valentine Street, Yonkers NY 10704-1814

Send all editorial inquiries and submissions to <dgh@tor.com> and <kjm@panix.com>. Individual issues and subscriptions are available worldwide in various electronic forms at Weightless Books <weightlessbooks.com> and other fine establishments.Paper copies of all issues are available individually or in bulk. Details are available at our web site. New York Review of Science Fiction Home Page: www.nyrsf.com. Also at: facebook.com/NYRSF; @nyrsf on Twitter.
Copyright © 2014 Burrowing Wombat Press.

The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings

Grand Central Neighborhood Social Services
120 East 32nd Street

Special Event May 30!
Skyboat Media
Stefan Rudnicki
Gabrielle de Cuir
Curated by Amy Goldschlager

Then, back in the regular venue:
SoHo Gallery for Digital Art
138 Sullivan Street,
just south of Houston

June 3, 2014
Tom Doyle
Gregory Frost

Watch this space for more details, or check out
<www.hourwolf.com/nyrsf/>

Admission is a $5 donation. Doors open at 6:30, readings begin promptly at 7! All readings subject to change without notice.

To join the Readings mailing list please send a note to
<NYRSF_Readings@hourwolf.com>

Amy J. Ransom
The New French SF: The Imaginary Worlds of Jean-Claude Dunyach

As Art Evans proposes in “Good News from France,” a recent review essay of three new studies of sf from France written by French scholars, it appears that the traditionalist French academic establishment has begun to acknowledge the legitimacy of French science fiction as a national genre worthy of comment. Until very recently, in spite of Jules Verne’s frequently acknowledged paternity of the genre, even ardent historians of French sf tied its history, including its production in France, to its developments in the Anglo-American world, insisting that sf began in 1926 with Gernsback’s invention of the term (Vas-Deyres 22–23). Natacha Vas-Deyres in an extensive, rigorous study, Ces Français qui ont écrit demain: Utopie, anticipation et science-fiction au XXe siècle (The Frenchmen Who Wrote Tomorrow: Utopia, Anticipation, and Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century; 2013), begs to differ, tracing the roots of French sf back to the merveilleux scientifique (scientific marvelous) of Verne and Maurice Renard. Vas-Deyres also makes a compelling case for the significance of contemporary French writers of sf such as Serge Lehman, [Yal] Ayerdhal, Serge Brussolo, Philippe Curval, Pierre Perot, Laurent Genefort, and others. Unfortunately, very few of these writers have been translated into English; once again, the image of French sf—particularly its image in the Anglo-American sf mainstream—remains trapped in the past.

Back in the 1960s, DAW Books experimented in publishing translations of what were then contemporary French sf writers such as Gerard Klein, and in the 1990s, Bantam Spectra took a chance on French-born Canadian sf writer, Élisabeth Vonarburg. More recently, thanks to the efforts of Wesleyan University Press with its Early Classics of Science Fiction Series and Black Coat Press in Encino, California, an increasing number of proto-science-fictional and “classic” (read public domain) sf texts are being translated from French into English. But in terms of writers active today, such translations remain few and far between. Grand Junction (2009), Cosmos Incorporated (2008), and Babylon Babies (2005) by Maurice G. Dantec (b. 1959) have been published in English by Del Rey books, the last as a movie tie-in with Babylon A.D. (2008), directed by French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz and starring Vin Diesel. But Dantec remains among the select few along with Jean-Claude Dunyach (b. 1957).

Considered by Élisabeth Vonarburg to be among the best French sf writers currently active, Dunyach tops her list because of both the literary quality of his work and the scope of his imagination. His stories have appeared in magazines like Interzone, the Australian Altair, and the Canadian On-Spec, as well as in US anthologies like Full Spectrum and David Hartwell’s Year’s Best. Most recently, his story, “God, Seen from the Inside” (translated by Sheryl Curtis), appeared in the January 2014 issue of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine. Moreover, Black Coat press has published two collections of his work: The Night Orchid: Conan Doyle in Toulouse (2004) and The Thieves of Silence (2009). Much of our access to the work of Jean-Claude Dunyach in English is due to a core group of devoted translators led by Canadians Jean-Louis Trudel and Sheryl Curtis; the latter are responsible for twenty-three of the twenty-nine stories collected there. In the paragraphs that follow, I will survey the imaginary worlds of J-C Dunyach, first the short fiction available in English, but then I will also reveal a glimpse of his novels, still only available in French.

Dunyach is among the few French sf writers of hard sf, and his cyberpunk fiction has earned him comparisons with William Gibson; the rigor of his science can be linked to his educational and professional background. Holding a PhD in mathematics and supercomputing, Dunyach has worked for the French aeronautic corporation Airbus for decades. Although he is only a part-time writer, his production is significant in both its quality and its quantity: since the mid-1980s, he has published seven novels and nearly sixty short stories. In 2000, the Nantes-based publisher, L’Atalante, began reprinting Dunyach’s earlier tales alongside previously unpublished texts in what is now a seven-volume collection of his “nouvelles,” a sign of his status in a developing canon of contemporary French sf writers. His stories and novels have won him most of France’s genre prizes at least once, beginning with the Grand Prix de la Science-Fiction in 1984, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 1997, and both the Rosny-Aîné and the Ozone Prizes twice each during the 1990s. His short story, “Unraveling the Thread,” translated by Ann Cale and Sheryl Curtis, also won the British magazine Interzone’s Best Story of the Year award in 1999.

The Short Stories

Dunyach’s versatility shines through in the two Black Coat Press collections, The Night Orchid and The Thieves of Silence. Although a certain amount of his lyricism is unavoidably lost in the translation, the breadth of his range is not. From the hard cyberpunk of “Shark,” a work that Natacha Vas-Deyres describes as a rigorously constructed metaphor for the cyberworld (444–45), to the gruesome horror stories, “Time of the Worm” and “Spun Sugar,” and the whimsical fairy story, “A Wish for the Fay,” the French writer works effectively in all of sf’s sub- and peripheral genres. Dunyach’s sf ranges from his recent, environmentally engaged, near-future extrapolations like the as yet untranslated “Aime ton ennemi” (“Love your enemy”) in Les Harmoniques célestes (L’Atalante, 2011) to the far-future, deep space opera found in his magnum opus, the novel Étoiles mourantes co-authored with Yal Ayerdhal. Before I turn to that work, I would like to survey the range of what is available in English.

The brilliantly engaging title story of Dunyach’s first Black Coat publication, “The Night Orchid (Conan Doyle in Toulouse),” translated by Jean-Louis Trudel in 2000, is set in Dunyach’s home town in 1890. Professor Frédéric Picard requests the assistance of his friend A. C. Doyle—since their “mutual friend” Holmes was busy with another matter—in solving a colleague’s strange murder. Also on the case is Doyle’s other great hero, Professor Challenger, a young scientist whose features rather resemble those of a Mousterian caveman on display in Picard’s museum. That the culprit turns out to be a pterodactyl that has survived in an isolated cave in the south of France adds to the story’s charm and whimsy.

Dunyach also writes serious sf, including a number of colonization stories earlier in his career; one of his first publications, “The Sand Swimmers” (1983; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis), seems typically French in its marriage of far-future space travel with references to two nineteenth-century French poets, Baudelaire and Rimbaud: both the poets and Dunyach’s science-fiction characters envision the voyage as a form of escape from the mundane here and now. A project for colonization of a desert planet has all but failed until the remaining survivors, the only three children—now adolescents—to be born on the planet, learn to adapt to their new home world by developing the practice of sand swimming, hence the story’s title. Its assertion that “[t]hose who survive will be transformed” (256) engages an aspect of sf from settler-colony nations like Canada, where national identities are constructed by the appropriation of characteristics from the new territory. A somewhat similar treatment of the space colonization theme and how it impacts relations between generations occurs in “Station of the Lamb” (1995; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis), in which a nameless single father brings his early adolescent daughter to visit a crucial monument to those who gave their lives so subsequent colonists could survive. The title refers both to the founding family, the Lambinis, and the sacrifice of a lamb, the youngest child who died with its mother as the family used their own frozen bodies to fill an anomalous gap that occurred in a space station linkage.

Extraterrestrial life forms and the problem of the Other appear in stories like “Footprints in the Snow” (1997; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis) in which Lovecraftian, shapeshifting aliens stranded on Earth meet each year in the Andes to mate, a sterile release since Earth’s polluted atmosphere will eventually kill them all before a rescue ship can arrive. This story interestingly reverses both the alien invasion parabola—since conquest is impossible for the small group of survivors—and the Lost in Space parabola, which usually features humans stranded off-world. “All the Roads to Heaven” (1999; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis) offers a more sinister alien invasion in which volunteers like the protagonist, Wander, hike into the remote areas where extraterrestrial cocoons drop each year. If a human witnesses their opening, the species doesn’t attack but instead offers an ecstatic experience that leaves the human in a raptured but catatonic state.

Memory, its loss and recovery, represents a central theme in Dunyach’s work as seen in the early story “In Medicis Gardens” (1986; in Night Orchid, trans. Dominique Bennett). As the title suggests, the narrative is set in Italy, in a completely flooded Venice of the distant future, a metaphor, perhaps, for the lost memory of the protagonist and his former lover. Like others in need of cash or wanting to forget the pain of the past, she has sold her memories. Hoping to respark the old flame, the protagonist begins to visit her daily until the frustration of repeatedly renewing the forgotten acquaintance forces him to take a drastic measure: to sell his own memories. Of course, the mechanism fails since after the procedure he does not recognize her at all. Such ironies recur throughout Dunyach’s oeuvre. He develops the theme of recurrent amnesia more fully in the untranslated novel Étoiles mortes (Dead Stars; 2000), and memory, as it is obviously connected to personal identity, appears again in “The Parliament of Birds” (1996; in Night Orchid, trans. Jean-Louis Trudel).

Linked to memory is the theme of time, another of his preoccupations, as seen in the titles of “Time, As It Evaporates” (1986; in Night Orchid, trans. Jean-Louis Trudel) and “Time for Worms” (1998; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis). One of his first stories to be published, “Scenes at the Exhibit” (1983; in Night Orchid, trans. Jean-Louis Trudel) combines the problem of time with a thematic concern which, to my mind, sets this French writer’s work apart from Anglo-American strains of sf: the preoccupation with art. Like Élisabeth Vonarburg, Dunyach has written several stories which feature artist protagonists, societies in which the practice of art is the organizing principle, and extrapolations of future types of art, as do his major novels in the AnimauxVilles (AnimalCities) series. “Scenes at the Exhibit” poses as an excerpt of a gallery catalogue describing “time slices.” Using a technique that is not fully explained, artists access the “Multiverse” and use surgical precision to excise slivers of time precisely at very violent moments in history such as John Lennon’s assassination or “The Sarajevo Incident.” This story also demonstrates Dunyach’s interest in the human body as art, which appears as well in “Come into My Parlor” (1985; in Thieves of Silence, trans. Dominique Bennett) in which a predatory duelist living in a decadent, domed space colony transforms his victims into works of art for his vast gallery. In “The Dead Eye of the Camera” (1986; in Thieves of Silence, trans. Jean-Louis Trudel), the first-person narrator has developed the art of screaming within the context of a society in which the entire city appears to have become a gallery in which buskers constantly circulate practicing innovative art forms. The title refers to their goal: for their performance to be broadcast and watched by others. Published in the mid-1980s, the story anticipates both reality television and YouTube, it would seem. The title story of Dunyach’s second collection for Black Coat, “Thieves of Silence” (1990; trans. Ann Cale), also centers on the career of two psychic artists who combine their respective talents to create a stage show.

The Novels

Dunyach’s preoccupation with these themes also appears in his AnimauxVilles novels; it is unfortunate that these have not yet been translated because they are particularly deserving of a wider readership. As Élisabeth Vonarburg explains in her two-part review published in Solaris, Dunyach’s publisher, Paris’s well-known genre press Fleuve Noir, published his second novel, Étoiles mortes (Dead Stars) in two volumes, Nivôse (1991) and Aigues-Marine (1991), following them up with a collection of stories, Voleurs de Silence (1992), presented as a third-volume epilogue. This fictional universe features a sentient biological species that lives both independently in space and anchored to planets in symbiosis with the human populations that inhabit them. Now available in a single e-volume, Étoiles mortes follows its protagonist, Closter (whom we believe is a clone), his cat Ombre, and a woman, Marika. Again drawing on the problems of authenticity and identity, it is not Marika herself but her astral projection whose adventures we follow in Dead Stars as this odd trio jumps from city to city to search for her flesh-and-blood body and to escape a man pursuing Closter/Monteori for reasons that are not quite clear.

Étoiles mortes is deeply intellectually engaged with questions of identity as humanity’s elite has developed the technology to create “copies” of individuals and the capacity to remove a consciousness from its corresponding body. Vonarburg argues that this solo novel reveals Dunyach’s talent and lyricism as a writer:

It’s not just the novel’s plot that thrilled me, as complex, logical, and well-oiled as it is. Rather, it’s Dunyach’s tone, voice, and music, which is finally complete [in comparison with his stories and earlier novels]. Here, we have it all, the dynamism, discrete ferocity, what I would call Dunyach’s Karateka side.... (Rev. of Nivôse, 57; my translation)

Vonarburg’s reference to the 1980s video game influenced by Japanese martial arts is not gratuitous here, either, as games—from hopscotch to Go (the universe is referred to as the “Ban,” the board on which this Japanese game is played)—represent a central motif in many of Dunyach’s works, suggesting that game theory would offer a fruitful theoretical approach to his writing. At times this novel felt a bit long to me, perhaps suggesting that the short story form is Dunyach’s strength, but it introduces the fascinating concept of biological, sentient cities—the AnimauxVilles—one of which is described as follows:

Noone had thick skin. The thousands of years passed in deep space, from one side to the other of the stellar mass known as the Milky Way, had toughened her epidermis. The light ochre of her youth had turned brown, then dark gray. She had lost all feeling in several areas of her carapace centuries before and others were soon to follow. Plaques of hardened cartilage speckled her surface, surrounded by waves of dried flesh which also seemed as heavy as beached whales. Her belfry was a blade of bone, her streets deep valleys that the light of the stars never penetrated. She nonetheless preserved in the core of her depths a zone of tender flesh with visible capillaries.

These cities can jump through space via a pattern of nodes that transect the universe, thus instituting an instantaneous form of transportation, which they share with certain humans.

The AnimauxVilles recur in Étoiles mourantes (Dying Stars; 1999), Dunyach’s collaboration with another icon of contemporary French sf, Yal Ayerdhal (b. 1959; he publishes using only his surname), a work which could be an internationally significant work of sf and which deserves a much wider readership to assess its merits. As its title suggests, the book climaxes with the supernova of a pair of twin stars, which allows one strain of humanity, the Mechanists, to end the AnimalCities’ monopoly on instantaneous teleportation through space. While it has become a commonplace to describe French sf as “soft,” concerned more with the extrapolation of social and psychological developments, this cannot be said of Dunyach and Ayerdhal’s collaboration. In addition to expressing metaphorical concerns about the ability of a divided human community to bridge differences that have developed over time through an isolation forced on them by the AnimalCities generations ago in order to end millennia of conflict, Étoiles mourantes is deeply engaged in the description of extrapolated science and technology and current and speculative cosmology and astronomy.

Roughly the first half of the novel, divided into four sections, sets the scene and establishes what is at stake as each section describes a different strain of humanity in the far future. “Le Mécanisme,” the Mechanism, details a warrior society modeled in part upon Shogun-era Japan and on the Aztec Empire. Enfranchised males—with names like Hualpa, Chetelpec, Iztoatl, and Xuyinco—exist in a hierarchical, military order with three castes of females, including a geisha caste, fully subordinate to them; this dominance is maintained in part by the physically and mentally enhanced, permanent, sentient Armor in which warriors are encased. Rivalries between branches of the political and military-industrial complexes lead them to assert their hegemony over all the branches of humanity and even space itself. They believe they can do so because of a new ship they have created:

The Zero Plus returned from its first trial run, a round-trip of a billion kilometres at a speed so close to that of light that at least twelve of its engineers began dreaming of defying Einsteinian physics, a trajectory barely interrupted by two immersions in the Ban. It hadn’t exchanged, it had transduced, as only the AnimalCities knew how to do, by sliding into a link that connected two very close knots. The knots were really close, barely a half-parsec apart, and the vessel had consumed its entire load of fuel in that trip. (n.p.; all translations my own, from the Kindle French edition of Étoiles mourantes)

With it, they hope to break the AnimalCities’ monopoly on jumping through space.

The mechanisms of this dystopian society are described through the perspective of Tecamac, a young hero who wears the next generation of Armor, which—unbeknownst to his superiors—has been sabotaged by the more utopian society of the Organics. The authors’ description of the developing relationship between Tecamec and his Armor offers a prime example of the intensity and rigor of this novel:

[He had to] learn to command the most formidable machine in all of the Mechanists’ creation, a recalcitrant machine which pardoned nothing and which, for its part, must learn to use the human system that pretended to pilot it just to stay functional. Then, one morning, the thirtieth, he had to learn to communicate with the machine because the machine tried to communicate, to transcribe through intellection this personality that it had gorged upon since Tecamac had locked on the Armor. First, this consisted only of sensations, but not those that the machine transmitted to the adolescent’s senses allowing him to understand the milieu in which he circulated during his training. These new sensations resembled spectacular demonstrations as if the Armor ran its fingers across the keyboard of a new piano. Then, the machine tested different configurations, linking sensations to emotions, then refined the emotions to the point which it could find the exact nuances in the only palette it could access, spurred on by Tecamac’s personality. Finally, it assumed the form of an external consciousness and spoke [to the youth].

The spartan Mechanists, whose entire bodies, including face and genitals, are permanently covered with a reactive metal alloy called carbex, are disgusted by the biologically intense Organics but need their superior nanotechnology to develop tecamec, the prototype whose human wearer adopts its name. The Organics have also developed a form of symbiosis that problematizes notions of monadic identity through genetics and biochemistry; not only do they exercise control over their own physical self, revealed through the use of palliative metamorphosis, they also experience a certain loss of control on a regular basis. Once they reach puberty, all Organics experience the generation of symbiotic growths, which if not removed and given away can consume and take over the human personality. Having raised the excretion of goiters and tumors into an art form, the novel’s third part, dedicated to the description of this society, is thus called “Artefactions.” Highly social and cultivated but also described as vain, precious, and decadent, the illusion of utopia in this official anarchy is undermined by the revelation of a secret, governing junta and the participation of the novel’s young heroine, Érythrée, in a revolutionary movement.

The novel’s second part describes “La Fédération Originelle,” governed by a dictator who has extended his reign beyond the parameters of a normal life and refuses to accept the natural course of life after death in this society: the transfer of the personality into a cyborg “Personae.” Janos Koriana, whose official title is Charon (after the boatman of the Styx), rules with totalitarian power over the twenty-eight-world federation organized around Old Earth, the least genetically or technologically altered branch of humanity. The authors seem the least interested in describing Old Earth, focusing only on its leader and one other essential figure, the Passeur des Morts (the Passer of the Dead), Gadjio, who assists the process of transfer from a biological body into a technological one, which the authors explain as follows:

Death, as Gadjio often repeated to his rich clients, was the fate that the universe reserved to everything, including itself. Survival, in any form, was intelligence’s response to entropy. Many men found it easier to leave knowing that they had left behind them a simplified, immutable, immortal, and garrulous copy of themselves. Thus, the personae were born. At first they were nothing more than an artificial intelligence linked to an animated hologram, enriched by a carefully selected collection of memories of the deceased and a sort of primary personality form based on his or her principal character traits. Then the technology improved. Memory crystals of gallium arsenide allowed for the storage of the equivalent of two centuries of life in an urn measuring fifty square centimeters, leaving just enough space for the ashes and bone fragments.

The Charon’s unnatural obsession with life has led him to negotiate for a suit of Armor from the Mechanists; unfortunately, his plans go awry when a conflict with the Passeur leads to the division of the armor and its partial fusion with each of the old men.

Finally, the fourth branch of humanity, the “Connectées” (the Connected Ones) described in the chapters of “Symbiases,” reflects characteristics of all of these other groups. While the Mechanists represent one type of a cyborg identity with the biological human covered by the technological Armor, the Connected represent the development of the inverse of a cyberpunk society. Rather than lose their physical bodies through their connection and then insertion into a virtual world, the Connected use a caudal appendage, referred to as a Flagella, to jack in to a network that links their entire society. Their need for vast quantities of new information and for a sense of connectedness to a hive mind has become so acute that it is physical: this section’s heroine, Nadiane, suffers a horrible withdrawal when she is sent alone into space, and her ship’s AI also proves incapable of surviving on its own without the constant input and approval of others. The last described—apart from the AnimalCities themselves—this society seems like the one that the authors would most like to be a part of. While it is clearly flawed, it seems the most utopian.

These focal individuals—Tecamac, Gadjio, Érythrée, and Nadiane—will meet in deep space at the site of the supernova for a reunion of humanity engineered by the AnimauxVilles referred to as the Retrouvailles (“Rediscoveries”). Their arrival involves both instantaneous transportation by individual AnimauxVilles and two highly advanced space vessels, the Mechanists’ Zero Plus and the Connecteds’ Nexarche. However, the most scientifically “hard” passages—also arguably the novel’s most poetic ones—involve the extended description of the supernova itself.

The binary system was in the process of devouring itself. At its origin, KDT 1822+17 consisted of two neighboring red giants, but the primary star had been transformed into a Wolf-Rayet star in the final phase of its combustion. All that was left was a dense core fed by matter stolen from its massive sister star, which spilled over its Roche’s lobe. The result was an immense accretion disk whose center was occupied by the compact primary star, surrounded by wreaths of incandescent gasses. On the other side, in relation to the Zero Plus, the hot stain engendered by the impact of the disk with the gaseous current torn from the secondary star shone like the interior of an alchemist’s crucible.

While I enjoyed a number of Dunyach’s short stories and found Étoiles mortes a relatively compelling read, the collaboration with Ayerdhal for Étoiles mourantes allows his talent to reach another level. Its richly developed characters, particularly the female ones, and its scientific and imaginative rigor exceed that of his other works. In particular, I found some of Dunyach’s early work guilty of precisely the sins that Anglo-American critics have used to attack (and then ignore) non-English-language sf. Besides the technical problem of translations (their paucity and sometimes their poor quality), the largest obstacle for international sf to gain a wider readership in the English-speaking world remains a perception that “foreign” sf is a pale imitation of the “real” thing. A corollary notion argues that, as imitation, non-Anglo-American sf is always already doomed to being behind the curve in the genre’s developments. Sadly, this sometimes appears the case with French sf from the 1950s through the 1980s, as Bradford Lyau’s study of The Anticipation Novelists of 1950s French Science Fiction (2011) reveals. While Dunyach’s work largely exceeds in quality your “average French sf” writing of an earlier generation, his early novel, Roll Over Amundson, particularly fell into this trap. Published in 1993, it appears more appropriate to 1973 with its puerile rock star protagonist and objectification of female characters. Perhaps, though, this might be the result of the successful writer dusting off that old first novel manuscript written during his teenage years.

Étoiles mourantes, in contrast, does not disappoint, holding its own with contemporary novels like M. John Harrison’s Light (2002). But until it becomes available in English, I encourage readers to discover the relatively uncharted territory (for English speakers that is) of contemporary French sf, beginning with the many stories of Jean-Claude Dunyach now available.

Amy Ransom lives in Alma, Michigan.

Works Cited

- Evans, Arthur B. “Good News from France.” Science Fiction Studies 121 (2013).

- Lyau, Bradford. The Anticipation Novelists of 1950s French Science Fiction: Stepchildren of Voltaire. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2011.

- Vas-Deyres, Natacha. Ces Français qui ont écrit demain: Utopie, anticipation, et science-fiction au XXe siècle. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013.

- Vonarburg, Élisabeth. Conversation with the author. September 23, 2013.

- —. “Review of Nivôse et Aigue-Marine (Étoiles mortes I et II) by Jean-Claude Dunyach.” Solaris 99 (1992).

- —. “Review of Les Voleurs de Silence by Jean-Claude Dunyach.” Solaris 102 (1992).

Barbara Bengels
Writing Outside the Box: Advice from Science Fiction Writers about Nurturing Gifted Children—and Their Writing

There’s a classic New Yorker cartoon showing a rather austere businessman admonishing his cat, “Never, ever, think outside the box.” This may be fine advice for cat owners (if such “ownership” is possible) but it certainly doesn’t—or shouldn’t—apply to parents of children, especially that challenging breed categorized as gifted, the ones most likely to always be thinking outside the box. It’s not my intention to define giftedness—but as the mother of three girls who were always intensely interested in diverse, sometimes bizarre, subjects (and right now I’m thinking of my daughter Jessica’s third grade obsession with slugs), I learned in various PTA gifted committees that a parent frequently is the first person to identify a child’s giftedness due to their unusual and excited way of observing the world around them. (As James Gunn was quick to point out, though, when his son sat in a chair and pretended he was the Lincoln Memorial after seeing its picture, he assumed that his first child’s behavior was the norm.)

So what, I wondered, would it have been like to be a parent of one of the science fiction writers whose work I’ve been enjoying for the past fifty years? After a particularly animated session at the Intensive English Institute for the Teaching of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, I surveyed about seventy sf writers about their childhood memories; over fifty responded, and many also spoke about the advice they would give to parents of children who are unusually curious or divergent thinkers. This included general pointers, suggestions on how to encourage their interest in writing, and finally some really thought-provoking advice on parenting bright children.

Unlike a more conventional audience, science fiction writers never questioned the value of reading science fiction and even pointed out its virtues for children. For example, John Kessel felt that “SF is good for provoking thought about big questions.” Expanding on that idea, Eileen Gunn said,

Certainly one could make a case that science fiction is even more important for the child who is not exceptionally gifted, as it could spark an imagination that might otherwise remain unawakened. For gifted children, a key benefit of science fiction may be that it often deals with exceptionally gifted characters who are deeply involved in and curious about the world around them. It provides role models, and it tells stories in which these children can see themselves.

Perhaps the most obvious suggestions for nurturing bright children were voiced by Jim Gunn: “I suspect that reading and talking to them (and we certainly talked to them a lot) are the best methods ... helping them make the most of their gifts.” (I am reminded of a neighbor who asked me why I was talking to my infant daughter when she couldn’t possibly understand me yet. It never crossed my mind not to talk to her!) Ann Zeddies and Esther Friesner stressed making sure that children enjoyed reading and being read to, though Zeddies warned that you should only “read things ... you like yourself so they won’t hear deadly tones of boredom in your voice.” Friesner felt even comic books made for fine reading and warmly remembered her dad taking her on “expeditions to the comic book store.” John Kessel also encouraged reading whatever one’s children read.

Talk to them about it, and find out what their dreams and opinions are... If something troubling to you or them comes up, challenge them. (For instance, I think that one of the most popular sf books among young readers, Ender’s Game, is a work promoting and exhibiting psychological damage <www4.nesu.edu tenshi/killer__000.htm>, but I was happy to have my daughter read it so we could talk about it afterward.)

Esther Friesner said her parents encouraged her “reading from a very early age ... by reading to me and telling me stories. When I clamored for more and more stories, I was urged to learn how to read so I could have all I wanted.”

Spider Robinson also felt particularly adamant about parents’ responsibility in fostering reading as a crucial part of a child’s education:

It will do no good merely to sing the praises of literacy to our children.... We must be more devious than that: we must con our children into reading. I can offer two stratagems in this regard. The first was devised by my mother and used upon me; the second my wife Jeanne and I developed and field-tested on our daughter, who is now 32.

My mother’s scheme was, I think, superior to my own, in that it required diabolical cleverness and fundamental dishonesty.... She would begin reading me a comic book—then, just as we had reached the point where the Lone Ranger was hanging by his fingertips from the cliff, buffalo stampede approaching, angry native peoples below ... Mom would suddenly remember that she had to go sew the dishes, or vacuum the cat, or whatever—and leave me alone with the comic book. I had to know how the story came out. There were pictures to assist me. Most of the words were ones I had just heard read aloud; I could go back and refer to them, again with visual aids. By the age of six, thanks to my mother’s policy of well-timed neglect, I had taught myself to read sufficiently well that on my birthday she presented me with a library card and sent me to the library with instructions to bring home a book....

From the day our daughter was old enough to have a defined “bedtime,” we made it our firm policy that bedtime was bedtime, no excuses or exceptions ... unless she were reading, in which case she could stay up as late as she pleased. The most precious gift any child can attain is a few minutes’ awareness past bedtime. She went for the bait like a hungry trout....

There was one “battle” where several authors recommended parents should surrender: the censorship of their children’s reading materials. Eileen Gunn pointed out that children “benefit from having parents who take an interest in what they read, [but] who allow them reasonable privacy and appropriate freedom to choose their reading material....” Anne McCaffrey expanded on that issue: “To gifted kids who love reading, let them at it ... and do not try to limit their selections. I went through a whole period of Westerns, but since I lived on the East Coast, it was a glimpse of another style of living. One never knows when something one reads will give you a clue or an idea....” Connie Willis agreed: “Point your kids at the library and let them discover it on their own. Don’t worry about them reading good books—I read astounding amounts of junk ... but they didn’t do me any harm, and kids who love reading eventually gravitate all on their own to good books. Besides, how do you know what’s a good book? Or what kind your kid will like best?” Gene Wolfe quoted Samuel Johnson’s statement about what a boy should read: “Any books he will read, sir! Let him read what he likes, and he will find better books for himself by and by.” And, Wolfe continued, that certainly goes for girls too.

But books weren’t the only equipment the writers recommended to encourage and inspire children’s creativity. Eileen Gunn felt very strongly that all children need a “supply of art and writing material, and easy access to information: books, magazines, television, and the Internet,” according to Gunn. Ann Zeddies along the same line said:

Give them a rich compost of information, all kinds of information. You never know what they will pick up and find useful.... Smart kids tend to get stuck inside their heads because they can manipulate symbols far sooner than they can develop their physical ability to manipulate objects.... Provide ... all the paper they can use, and plenty of pencils, pens, paint and art supplies of all kinds. Give them music. They’ll be more grounded and less frustrated if they can find avenues to express themselves physically. Learning to play a musical instrument, to swim, ride, bike, hike, climb, pitch tents, start campfires, use tools, play a sport, can all be good if you can find a venue that isn’t intimidating....

Michael Bishop raised the stakes when he urged parents to
help [the children] cultivate a sense of awe in the face of this immensely mysterious universe by looking at the night sky, taking hikes or walks in rural areas or wilderness places, and visiting museums, cultural sites, and natural wonders. And don’t try to direct your child to activities or careers that satisfy your private ambitions rather than the child’s. (Share your ambitions but don’t push them.) In short, let the child’s mind grow and the child’s interests happen.

The fine line between encouraging children and pushing them came up time after time in the authors’ letters—and certainly not all of them were in agreement. Most writers concurred with Jack Dann to “give [children] positive reinforcement and allow them to follow their dreams ... to follow their bliss, to quote Joseph Campbell.” Paolo Bacigalupi added that he wasn’t “really sure that gifted children need much ... except that they be supported and not have their souls crushed.” George Zebrowski agreed, saying, “I advise parents ... to tread softly on dreams ... [but] raise the level of encouragement along with growing evidence of ability.... Ironically, I wonder if early help or hindrance makes any difference.... I once complained that the help I got from my parents was a prison.” Harry Harrison came out in favor of “benevolent indifference.” Pam Sargent recommended “leaving the kid alone for periods of time, allowing him or her moments to read, reflect, draw, chuck baseballs or footballs, [hang] around with friends, or just lie daydreaming.... in this culture of hovering parents and heavily scheduled children, [free] time seems an increasingly rare gift.”

Connie Willis was also deeply concerned about parents overloading their children:

[In] some ways I think the lack of encouragement at home may [be] a good thing. I know the accepted wisdom is that the way to make your kids into readers (and writers) is to surround them and immerse them in books, make sure that they see you reading, discuss books, read what they’ve written, and encourage them at every turn, but I’m not so sure.

I come into contact all the time with parents who are simply smothering their kids with encouragement—they want me to recommend books for their kids to read, to critique what they’ve written, to help them get published at the tender age of twelve, or ten, or six, and I can’t help feeling their kids are going to wind up fleeing all things bookish.

I’m not suggesting parents snatch books out of their kids’ hands and lock them in the attic.... All I’m saying is that sometimes a little healthy neglect can be a good thing.... I think sometimes I became a reader and a writer because I was the only one who liked it. It was mine and no one else’s—a childhood secret hideaway, an adolescent rebellion....

Another concern was voiced by Anne McCaffrey about a particular helicopter parent who was hovering over her daughter too much. “I had a parent write me ... as I was her daughter’s favorite author. She wanted me to write to the girl and tell her to conform in her high school. She was definitely a non-joiner and miserable. I would not tell the child to conform to social peerage. One doesn’t learn to think, conforming. Since she read sf I sent them a long list of good writing in the field, each with something to say and a new society or world to examine.”

Writers were also interested in how parents might encourage their children’s writing ability. Some, like George Zebrowski, weren’t sure how much to “push”: “Early development may be crucial in the arts. I liken it to piano practice, and every year lost sets you back.... Parents should try to neither help nor [be] a hindrance, if only to measure the dedication of their young.” Michael Flynn warned,

Parents—don’t overdo things. Even helpful criticism if overdone can be a killer. But so can ... gushing enthusiasm. The kids usually know when they’ve written crap. But you can usually find something: a novel idea, a gem of a sentence, an interesting character. But at [a young age] ... it is a story that matters, not the craft of writing. Get them to tell you a story. Don’t try to tell them what the story should be. Ask interested questions like, “Why did [this character] do that?” Then get out of their way again.

Anne McCaffrey concurred: “... my first advice to would-be writers ... read and tell a story. So many kids just gussy a story up with similes and metaphor that do not, in fact, enhance what they’re trying to relate.” James Patrick Kelly emphasized how important it is to take their work seriously by
engaging with it and testing its boundaries. If a kid is writing about his house of the future and claims that he has a water slide in his bedroom, then I get to ask how much money he makes and what he does for a living to be able to afford such a luxury and how big his house is and where exactly he lives that can accommodate such a structure. It is coming up with answers to those questions that the beginnings of a science-fictional worldbuilding can be found. Most kids have extravagant imaginations, and I try to help them live up to the scope of their thinking.

Another point he emphasized was the need for rewriting.

Whenever I go into a school for a writing residency, I encourage the students to write multiple drafts, revising their stories to answer the questions that I and their fellow students ask. Whenever possible I try to get them to finalize their work for publication, even if publication is only a stapled collection of student work. I still have some stuff from when I was a kid. Sometimes a physical artifact can act as a kind of talisman for future accomplishment.

Connie Willis addressed another aspect of this subject: actual publication. While several authors had parents who sent off their early works to publishers on their behalf (either openly or surreptitiously), Willis was certain that this is a bad idea:

DO NOT try to talk your kids into sending their stories out for publication—or worst of all, send them out to editors for them.... If they’re going to be writers, they’ll do it on their own. In secret. Possibly even in the dead of night, without telling anyone.... Writing is like deciding to become a nun. It’s a holy vocation, and you have to come to it on your own. NOBODY can do it for you.

Frederik Pohl told a striking story which should serve as both advice and a warning to all parents of kids who show writing talent and interests:

When I was editing Galaxy, I got a letter and manuscript from a woman who was bursting with pride over the manuscript, which her son had turned in for a composition requirement. His teacher was greatly impressed by it. So was she. I, not so much. As I wrote to her, it was a pretty good story and had been ever since Ray Bradbury published it under the title “The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse” ten or twenty years earlier.

I urged her to explain to her son the wrongness of plagiarism. As to punishment, I suggested only that he be required to tell his teacher what he had done.... a little healthy skepticism is the advice I would give to any ... parent in the same circumstance.

(A recent New Yorker cartoon shows two Elizabethan parents and their child sitting in the headmaster’s office, saying, “In fact, the work’s so good that we question whether it’s Will’s own.”)

Perhaps the most heretical point made by any of the sf writers was a very basic question Ann Zeddies posed:

[Does] any sane parent actually want a science fiction writer for a child? All those “why nots” and “what ifs” and “why the hells”—all those constant aggravating questions—requests for Halloween costumes the likes of which have never been seen on a suburban street. Wouldn’t most families prefer a docile conformist who would dress as a ghost or hobo, collect the candy, then collect a college degree, job, house, spouse, and a couple of grandchildren? Isn’t security what we’d like for our children? Why turn them into internal exiles on their own planet, galactic expatriates who can never go home because home hasn’t happened yet in this continuum? If they must be writers, then for heaven’s sake, make them writers of chick lit or sensational memoirs or naval thrillers, or something with a snowball’s chance of actually providing a living in today’s publishing climate! You should be asking ... for hot tips on how parents can make sure their children don’t turn out like us!

Finally, several of the authors had valid concerns, suggestions, and admonitions about dealing with gifted children. Jerry Pournelle and Nalo Hopkinson were both troubled by the educational system. Pournelle pointed out that the “brightest kids are not a problem what with the Internet. It is the IQ 110–120 who are wasted. No child left behind: none get ahead.” Nalo Hopkinson vociferously criticized social inequities built into the system:

[Much] of the time, the main difference between a “gifted” child and a “problem” one is privilege. A well-off white boy who has poor social skills and a short attention span but who knows everything there is to know about every type of plane ever built might be called a geek, but he might also get access to books and get streamed into the “gifted” classes. A poor black boy who has poor social skills and a short attention span might never get access to the information he can feed his brain. He might get streamed into the “slow” classes, might get viewed as stupid and dangerous, and ultimately might end up in jail. And us girl geeks of whatever cultural persuasion are just changeling children who mostly never manage to perform femininity in acceptably normative ways. It is still much less acceptable for girls to be misfits than for boys to be.

Jack Williamson felt that “if a child has the science fiction gift, he’ll be fascinated at a first exposure” and he went on to challenge parents to make sure the child has “a good general education, especially in science.” Geoffrey A. Landis felt it very important that parents encourage their curious children to “go deeply into whatever pursuit fascinates them,” and Barry Longyear emphasized instilling the value of hard work. “I am neither gifted nor brilliant—I worked hard. Very hard, to achieve what I have.” (Several authors addressed the question of whether sf writers are generally gifted themselves. Nalo Hopkinson mentioned in her letter to me that “I’m completely certain that science fiction and fantasy writers are not amongst some kind of intellectual elite, and I don’t want to be positioned that way. We can be just as ignorant as anyone else, and often are.”)

For more pragmatic advice, Gene Wolfe and David Marusek both noted the value of taking interested children to sf conventions. “Let him talk to a few writers. Let him meet the science Guest of Honor,” suggested Wolfe. Marusek felt it very worthwhile to introduce the children “to their idols. Science fiction is a homey community.” Taking them to a con “when their favorite writers are attending ... brings the whole idea of writing down to the human scale.”

However, Ann Zeddies stressed that parents are and should be the primary role models for their children:

Whatever you wish they would become, do your best to be that yourself. If you want them to be kind, brave, honest, then be kind to them. Be courageous in your own life. Tell them the truth.... The only way to create goodness is to model it. We model ourselves on what we see. That’s why stories are so important, because we become what we imagine and act out. So try to show your children what you want instead of lecturing them. Work with them instead of giving them orders. We model ourselves on what we love, and your children will do their best to love you, no matter how big a jerk you may be. So try not to be a jerk....

Don’t try to mislead them or withhold information from them. It’s not a good thing to do to any child, but particularly damaging to a very intelligent child who will soon guess what you’re doing and will see it as an affront to their intelligence. The more intelligent the child, the more they depend on good information for security, and the more frightening it will be if they suspect that their world is built on false premises.

Jack Dann added that parents “want security and a cleared pathway for our children, and the arts are notoriously insecure.” Regarding older children he said, “have the courage to allow your children to live dangerously. After all, it’s their lives. I broke my father’s heart when I dropped out of law school after selling a story to Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. But I’ve never regretted it.” Again, Ann Zeddies had sage advice: “very intelligent children ... tend to be perfectionists—if you want them to be kind to themselves, to be forgiving, to have the courage to risk mistakes, and to be able to comfort themselves when things go wrong, model that for them too. Be kind to yourself. Accept yourself. Be brave enough to take chances and make mistakes, and find a way to comfort yourself if things don’t always go as you hoped. This is something I’m still learning rather late in life, but not too late to make a difference to my children.”

The reality that Zeddies says she—and parents of all children—must confront is that “there is no completely reliable algorithm for raising a child ... whatever B.F. Skinner may think. They’re all mutants, not clones—so far at least.” However, she’s content to also proffer the fantasy she has for her children, one which we may all share:

The child of fortune hears a distant calling in the wind. They must go on a long journey, to the end of the known world. They must climb the glass mountain, dare the dragon, enter the forbidden city of the warrior monks, bridle the winged steed. They run out the door without so much as a pocket handkerchief. All we can do is run after them, hand them clean socks and a packet of sandwiches, kiss them goodbye. Tell them we’ll love them always. Hope they’ll find their way....

My hope for them, my story about them, has never been that they would become “normal.” In my story, somewhere along the way, things change! Something happens! Something wonderful!

Barbara Bengels lives in Garden City, New York.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Remembering Jody Scott

I saw a note about author Jody Scott (1923–2007) that amounted to “almost no one knew her” and “there is no information available about her.” And unjustly, I guess that’s true. So I’m going to correct the record a little bit, hoping not to hurt anyone’s feelings if I’m as honest as possible, relying on imperfect memory for the more amusingly sordid details.

She was a good friend to me, and I speak from great affection for Jody. Some of this I repeat as she told it to me so it’s only as true as she was having it be and as I remember it, which is two steps from true, but it’s the best I can do.

I think Jody was largely honest but sometimes a little deluded. She was a brilliant social critic and told me very boldly (this is not literally her rant but it captures the tone), “Everyone in the world is stupid and wrong about everything. If they would listen to me, the world would be perfect. I have the answers. I could turn this world into an ideal paradise instantly if they’d listen, but their stupidity extends too far; they don’t realize their savior lives among them.”

I told her, “I agree with you that the whole world is stupid, but you’ve only got it half right. You are no exception. We are all of us stupid, you, me, the whole world. No exceptions.”

But she was persistent and serious. The world was fucked up, but she wasn’t. She was the greatest genius who ever lived, unrecognized by all. Oh, and I wasn’t half stupid, but still, only she, the great and powerless Jody, was wisdom incarnate.

When I first met her, she was a butch babe. An old time dyke who looked great in a tux. Always the gentleman. She was sensitive and naive, traits she would vigorously deny without getting mad about it. She knew everything about everyone she met even if she didn’t know a thing. And if someone told her a sob story, she’d get all angry on their behalf, never imagining they were deluded even then.

Once a falling-down drunk waylaid us in the street and gave his sob story about how he was formerly the lead guitarist in Jerry Lee Lewis’s band and by his own testimony one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived. But for this and that reason he was blackballed from the business, none of it his fault. Jody gave him twenty bucks so he could stay blotto, then the rest of the night kvetched about how genius was always pushed out in favor of mediocrity, a great guitarist like that and look where they put him. I told her, “That guy was full of shit.” Couldn’t convince her.

Her desire to believe everyone’s a fool, yet this drunk was a victim of his own greatness as he’d framed it, fit, and it had to be true. Well, I fear that was her world view about herself; though she was no drunk, she was that sort of unrewarded genius. And I’ve no doubt at all Jody was a genius. A warped genius but a genius. And she was nobody’s savior, even if they HAD listened!

So, well, why should you care who Jody was? Barry N. Malzberg called her “the best unknown sf writer.” She wrote two stunningly fine novels—Passing for Human (1977) and I, Vampire (1984), ahead of their time for lesbian fantasy/sf and ahead of the genre in literary merit. She also co-wrote with George Thurston Leite, under the pseudonym Thurston Scott, a gay mystery novel set amidst Oakland’s Latino gang culture, praised by Anthony Boucher, Cure it with Honey (1951; in paperback as I’ll Get Mine, 1958). There were a few short stories as well, not many, including “Shirley Is No Longer With Us” which she wrote for my small magazine, Windhaven, in 1978, and a novelette, “Origin of Species,” in Fantastic Science Fiction, February 1966. If all her short stories were gathered together, they’d be a very small book.

During her “beard” marriage/association with George Leite, they ran a Berkeley bookshop and coffeehouse called daliel’s (always affectedly lowercase), a gathering place for the likes of Philip Lamantia, Kenneth Rexroth, Anais Nin, Darius Milhaud, Harry Partch, Jean Varda, and Henry Miller. Beats, surrealists, poets, and queers. Jody was rarely willing to speak of those days, but sometimes I wheedled it out of her.

She and George edited a literary magazine called Circle. Jody was the real editor, but George was the outgoing social butterfly who took most of the credit while Jody worked her ass off keeping the coffeehouse and magazine afloat and functional. George’s personality was expansive and eccentric, a would-be mystic whose hero was Madame Blavatsky, button-holing anyone who was easily impressed and imposing his opinions on all things without caring about the opinions of others.

George had a whole mythology about himself as the new Abraham Lincoln at the forefront of the struggle for racial equality. Just another guy full of shit, I strongly suspect his glamour captivated Jody and for a brief while she thought there were two geniuses upon the Earth, but she never admitted that to me. It seemed to me another part of her was still angry that all those transiently important artists and authors never realized the woman stuck washing the dishes and organizing the bookshelves was the actual genius while they were kowtowing to a fool and fraud. But I could get little out of her about it; she hated to speak of George either positively or negatively.

As the finances of the coffeehouse fell behind, and as George played from within his closet without helping her one bit, she wanted out of their business arrangement and certainly did not require a beard as much as he seemed to.

Soon she was on her own, making a good living directing porno movies for a lowlife she met through George. When that guy got in trouble with the law, owing Jody money, he gave her his entire company, contacts, and equipment and skipped town. So now she produced, wrote, and directed dirty movies for the lowest of X-rated theaters, which were numerous in the ’60s and ’70s.

It was profitable, except it meant being buddy-buddy with the Mafia to get distribution, and it meant getting harassed by the Feds. You could do time in those days for doing what she was doing. One day the Feds descended upon her crappy little film studio and confiscated all her equipment. Although they never charged her with a thing, it wasn’t like she could just ask them to give her stuff back. So she just went on to new things.

She made a lot of money for a while selling encyclopedias door to door. Would I kid you? She was the only woman doing it, and she was the only member of the sales force who seriously sold much. She was the sort, as they say, who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

As soon as she had a saved a small bundle of funds, she switched to real estate scams. She bought desert property in Eastern Washington, divided it up, then would take “marks” on fabulously choreographed journeys and show them the exact little square of nothing they were buying. Though there was no water, no electricity, barely even a road, she made it sound like the only safe investment anyone could have, land, eternal land, and you could sell it dear in few years, or you could build your dream home on it when you retired.

The deals she offered sounded fabulous, and she sold this worthless land with great ease. For a not too dreadful down payment and small monthly payment for a decade, you’d be a landowner. After a few months or years, the buyers would realize they bought something worthless, stop paying, so she’d regain the property to sell again.

Now it was a while before I realized this was at least halfway if not entirely a scam. Once when I had an advance for a book in hand, I tried to get her to sell me a piece of property. She absolutely refused. I was startled, since she was forever selling people land they could almost afford. Why not me? Later, I slapped my forehead and realized she just wasn’t the sort to rip off the people she cared about. She was a flimflam artist, not a sociopath.

I forget when or where we met. Probably just knew her from here and there, and we slowly began hanging out more and more. She lived in a house in Shoreline, Washington, and was breaking up with a woman she’d lived with for some years—a really great woman, I should add, an artist. The breakup was a tragic loss for Jody. But she immediately went “on the make,” and because we were friends, she tried everything to get me to move in with her.

I lived with and loved greatly an alcoholic whom Jody felt justified in trying to “steal” me from. Sheri came home once and found us getting nasty on the sofa and nearly beat the shit out of Jody, who was more careful thereafter and afraid of Sheri, a vet of the Viet Nam era. I hugely enjoyed hanging out with Jody, but her always wanting to seduce me was a nuisance. It was at the same time good for my not totally strong ego, so I was at fault for not being discouraging enough. But when at last she met Mary and they fell in love, it was a relief to me, as Jody became more purely a friend and not a horndog friend, a comforting soul to be around.

Mary was a minor. But fortunately (for Jody) Mary’s mom, about Jody’s age, all too eagerly said, “You want her, you can have her.” They lived together in the messy Shoreline house for many years, not always an even-keel relationship but largely a good one. Her ex (who’d been selling handcrafted Victorian style toys in the Seattle Farmer’s Market) had in the meantime gone blind and opened a music box store downstairs in the Farmer’s Market. A great shop it was, too.

I was at the time involved with the Expository Lump, an sf/f writer’s group, mostly members of Science Fiction Writers of America. It followed Milford rules, which were too narrow for art; we critiqued one another’s manuscripts in progress. Sometimes it all got too predictable, though, and now and then new blood was needed. For the first time, I was to suggest a new member.

Jody showed up with a short story, copies for everyone, which we critiqued. First one, then the next reader ripped the story asunder on the basis of the “rules.” I was dumbfounded. These were working writers who knew what the market demanded, and their advice and opinions were perfectly respectable. But Jody’s story was absolutely amazing and would need comparison to Virginia Woolf had Woolf written science fiction. Everyone in that room expected E. E. Doc Smith or at best Robert A. Heinlein, and they didn’t even comprehend something transcendent.

It came around to me last. I was almost hyperventilating I was so shocked. I said, “I can’t believe none of you recognize the brilliance of this story! If your opinions reflect what the market demands, and Jody can’t sell this, then I’m going to scrape up the money and publish it myself, as this is one of the coolest stories I’ve ever read!”

Now I was and am glad to be the only one, now and then, who recognizes brilliance. It confirms my sentiment that the world is ruled by banality and that people crushed by these rules can’t even see what’s destroying them. But from the members’ point of view, they were right, absolutely right; the story was unsalvageably shitty, and I was just blindly sticking up for a friend.

So Jody finally told us, told them, “It was a test to see how dumb this dumb critique circle could be! The story might not be publishable, but I’ve already sold it. It’s the first chapter of Passing for Human, slated for publication by DAW Books.”

Now they were even angrier. The Lump did not exist to give pointless advice on stories already sold but for revisions and improvements or for honing one’s skills. Yes, they were tricked, and the trickster was evil for tricking them.

Later, I was contacted by a couple members of the group who gave me alpha-behavior talking-tos for bringing a rabble-rouser into their nice, calm, literary gathering. I was told never to bring Jody again; she was not welcome, and I had better tell her so. I said, “I don’t think I’ll need to tell her.” From her point of view, there was no reason to suffer the same fools more than once.

So yeah, she was the best author in that room, bar none, not the most successful, best paid, or best known, but the best. She knew it. I half suspect they realized it, however belatedly. But she didn’t have a method of making friendships out of these realities. She had a way of making people really peevish with her “I’m God, you’re not” attitude and behavior. I found her charming as hell and one of the most rewarding friends I ever had, but then, I really didn’t mind that she thought she was god. She always let me tell her, “You’re not god,” and never got mad at me for that, so why should I be mad that she thought I was wrong?

Between the first and second sf/f novels she wrote for DAW, she felt obliged to peddle her wares and involved herself in various aspects of fandom, including NorWesCon. Nowadays NorWesCon is for geeks and dweebs of the barely literate sort, but in those days out of a membership of one or two thousand, three or four hundred would be working writers, and it attracted editors from the East Coast. It was a great convention in its heyday.

Jody attempted to go into Sales Mode and unload a few ice cubes on this warehouse full of Eskimoes. But she wasn’t pumping out the stuff; there wasn’t much to sell, so she fell back to that other position, having the kind of “fun” that made people hate her forever. Oh, not everyone, fortunately. She did a reading event that was packed standing room only, and how many writers with one book from DAW can do that? The fans were impressionable and lined up for her self-important pronouncements and either believed her (she was always at least half right) or, like me, thought it was all oddly sweet and very entertaining.

One of her promo bits was a flyer that offered cover-blurb style quotes about how great a writer is Jody Scott, praise credited to Shakespeare, Poe, Hemingway. One living writer was quoted—a living writer who was a member of the Expository Lump and who did not have loving feelings toward Jody and who took very, very seriously any cover blurb provided.

That author said (paraphrasing from memory): “I’m going to sue Jody! I never said that about her book, and it is harmful to my reputation to have such opinions put in my mouth!” I talked her down. “No one thinks you and Shakespeare praised her book. It was a joke.” Jody wasn’t finished, though. She buttonholed this author on the false premise of apologizing and instead said, “I know you’re in the closet. Just come out, and you won’t be such a miserable soul. I’ll introduce you to some gals.”

Now this author so far as I know is not gay, and if she was, I can’t imagine she’d be in the closet about it. But as her ears turned bright red and the hate grew deeper, I knew this one chance of gaining a friend of honest value was forever lost to Jody. Later I said to her, “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” But being the Perfect Creature she regarded herself as being, she couldn’t possibly be wrong. “Some day she’ll come out of the closet, and you’ll know I was right.” “I doubt it, but even pretending you were right, that was just crude, with no possible benefit to you, her, or anyone.”

Had something like that happened to Jody, though, she wouldn’t have minded a bit. She hated nobody. She was angry at the world and humanity collectively, but she didn’t dislike people individually and seemed puzzled anyone could dislike her as an individual.

In time, because Jody had become, with Mary, more recluse than not, she’d lost whatever social niceties she once had. And as years passed, it seemed to me, she became increasingly withdrawn from a world that wouldn’t understand her, so why try?

I was enough like her that I was going through the same withdrawals from community, too, not excluding Jody, so eventually I never saw her any more. Wanted to. Just lost the energy to be social. Have never regained it. I’m practically an agoraphobe now. I don’t think Jody was that bad, but maybe she was. Maybe she had a busy social life I knew nothing about. I can only comment on what I saw. And I saw someone less and less inclined to leave the house unless it was time to sell some more worthless property, since even finding it easy enough to sell her novels, that wasn’t going to pay the bills.

Certainly there was more I didn’t know of Jody’s life than I knew. Mine is a narrow portrait. She rarely spoke of her son, Tom, for example, and when she did mention him, it was always in a vague but positive context. And yet, he only came to see her once in twenty years. I don’t know that they were estranged, but they sure as hell weren’t close.

In her will, she left him an antique rifle and the artwork of his late father, O. T. Wood. She left the rest of her estate, notably the Shoreline house, to Mary, who had by the end been her partner for 30 years. And then her son did show up with attorneys to contest the will. There was no such thing as gay marriage back then, and Tom hoped the court would declare their lifelong relationship invalid on the face of it, that Mary’s relationship to Jody constituted “moral turpitude” and “undue influence,” and therefore everything should be given to him.

I bet that kind of shit worked in a lot of places, perhaps still works in some places. Didn’t work for Tom, who even had to pay Mary’s court costs for his trouble. Which induced him to file yet another claim—that the court was gay friendly and had treated him as “a gay basher”; that he was a victim of “reverse discrimination”; and that the proof of his assertion was that his entire attempt to gain the property was called “a frivolous waste of time” by a Superior Court commissioner.

Fact is, Jody didn’t have much beyond the house, and that had a reverse mortgage on it, so what really was Tom after? Some kind of revenge? He certainly didn’t care about Jody’s legacy. When the case was done, I read the court documents. And I was struck by the lack of any reference to her literary effects.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson lives in Bremerton, Washington.

Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas by Bradley Denton
reviewed by Don Webb

Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2014; $40.00 hc; 292 pages

Writers are not competitive. If we were competitive, I’d keep a list of who were better writers than me in Austin. Of course I’d check off Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, who both left town—and with a sigh remove Neal Barrett when he joined the Hereafter Gang. But I would never do that. I just worry about South Austin—and that leads to the problem of Bradley Denton. You see, he’s oddly talented—so I was pretty stoked when I got his latest collection to review.

It had a talking dog story, a tribute story drawn from his best-known novel, and a novella from a themed collection with a dead writer in it. Three marks of a loser. I was stoked. It simply couldn’t be good.

Then I read it. Damn it, it’s good.

The first novella, “Sergeant Chip” (2005), isn’t a talking dog story; no, it’s a goddamn telepathic dog story. The modified dog is in the Army, and it’s engaging in a revolt against moral-less authority and Army stupidity. The theme of decency versus abuse is Denton’s mainstay, and in an era of writing without a moral compass, he stands out like the Pole Star. The dog is not a human in fur; he thinks like a dog. He both understands and fails to understand the humans who train him as a dog would—he has the loyalty-to-the-pack morality of a dog. And in time of warfare this makes him the most moral being around. The narration does not spare blood nor hide the horror of war, yet certainly it does not glorify these things. After his master dies and Chip becomes the Alpha male, I found myself rooting for him every step of the way. His heart is clearly better than those in charge, and so likewise is his mind. The science fictional trope that allows him to communicate to some humans is presented in a believable way and has its roots in current research. The ending is left open, and as always with Denton the prose is crisp—somewhere between Stephen King (on his good days) and Mark Twain.

The second novella, “Blackburn and the Blade” (2006), features the return appearance of Jimmy Blackburn, the perfect killer-with-a-code eponym of Denton’s 1993 novel Blackburn. The state of Texas put Jimmy to death a few years ago. Jimmy is perfectly appealing: he kills those people who (as we say in Texas) need killin’. You know them—the folks in line at the “Ten Items or Less” checkout line with their goddamn fourteen items. Denton has told us that Jimmy killed 17 people—but he left out some details, leaving room to go back for more. Jimmy gets a worthy opponent this time: Joe Lansdale’s “God of the Razor.” Jimmy has to make things right against a smarter, socially protected, crueler opponent. In other words, Denton once again pits evil against evil. He doesn’t let Jimmy’s self-righteous anger be seen as good—but it does appeal to the dark side of the good reader. If you’ve ever looked askance at the aforementioned fourteen-item shopper, you will eat up this masterful exercise in narrative voice as though it were pecan pralines.

The third novella—to use an over-used reviewer’s phrase—is what you buy the book for. “The Adakian Eagle” (2011) is a story of murder and shamanism in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. A scheming lieutenant colonel sets up a young Army boxer on a murder charge. The young boxer meets an older corporal with the initials D. H., who wrote some book about a bird. In this contrafactual tale, which we used to call “alternative history” until Michael Chabon won the awards that Howard Waldrop should have—never mind; Howard’s face is on a stamp in another dimension and besides he lives in North Austin and doesn’t screw up my schemes.... As I was about to say: In this contrafactual tale the reader gets a literary hard-on when he recognizes the real historical figure being used. Yet Denton violates this structure by telling us that it’s Dashiell Hammett in his introduction. In a really good contrafactual, the story is so compelling that the added history is a cherry on the banana split of plot, characterization, and imagery. A friend of Howard Waldrop’s for some decades, Denton has learned from the best.

One of the important characters here is Unangan, not the generic movie Eskimo, and Denton does a great job of getting the anthropology right. Three of the characters in the story take the traditional Amanita muscaria and rotten fish soup, which can reveal the whole life-streams of the celebrants. The narrative for 95% of the piece is pure Hammett, and deft handling of the multiple timeline mosaic takes Hammett’s The Glass Key up a few notches.

The story can be read on many levels—a good account of the Aleutian campaign in WWII (with its use of native Aleuts), a great mystery and revenge story (like the other novellas in this book), and finally a philosophical response of Western thought to shamanism that is neither Orientalist nor whitewashed. But the best part? You get to see the older Corporal Hammett scare the bejesus out of the lieutenant colonel. Like Jimmy Blackburn and Sergeant Chip, he is a badass who excels at taking bad guys with a cool mixture of word and deed.

Denton learned his craft from James Gunn at the University of Kansas. He’s the real deal, trained in the sciences (BA in astronomy) and humanities (MA in English literature). Denton has been a permanent fixture of the Austin scene since 1988, a man of unfailingly good temper and a thoughtful friend to the writing and fan communities.

This collection may be the best introduction so far to Denton’s moral themes, speculative fiction finesse, and lively plotting. It’s hard to believe that this book was not created as a whole; without his introductions, I would have believed this to be a single work of great artistic harmony.

Don Webb lives in Austin, Texas.

Mark von Schlegell
The Great Jack Vance

“Mrs. Jack Vance”—she is pure and related to divinity.... she is informing, correcting me, speaking words of wisdom.... Behind her have I seen the Godhead, which is the ultimate archetype (the Wise Old Man once more).... She instructs me with the Logos, the word, wisdom itself.…

—Philip K. Dick, Exegesis (204)

Though he seems to any rational glance to be without end, John Holbrook “Jack” Vance, like the ever expanding Universe that created him, does have a beginning; it occurs in Northern California in the summer of 1916.

Ninety-three years later, the author of more than sixty genre novels and near countless shorter fictions chose to present 2009’s surprising nonfiction memoir, This Is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This Is “I”) as a work of regional California history. The book immediately locates Vance’s special feel for weird literature in his early experience of the Northern Californian post–Gold Rush boom economy. Abandoned by a deadbeat dad, raised by a spirited single mother (now daughter of a suddenly rich father), Vance saw the Sacramento River delta as a Utopian paradise—and worlds away from the violence slaughtering a generation of Europe raised on Edwardian romanticism. Gentility was very much a role in what was now an almost baroque American West, and though wealth came to his family when he was a baby, it did not outlast his youth. As the title of his autobiography neatly signals, Jack Vance would maintain the paradox of Edwardian elitism and Western populism until he died. High-low California and the vain splendor of the rich forever haunt his writings—many of which, interestingly enough, would be composed as far away from post-war USA as it would be possible to get. (The West of Ireland, Italy, Kashmir, Tahiti—much of the autobiography describes places the Vances lived as they wrote the books that paid for their travels and freedom.)

Nature was bountiful and relatively gentle; he developed a life-long love of the sea and sailing. But it was clear from the first that the prize gems were books of a certain kind. They were like pieces of nature themselves, these new scientificfantasies by likes of L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Dunsany, and Jeffrey Farnol, books written for clever boys (Vance This Is Me 213). His eyes soon suffered—they kept him out of the Navy during the Second World War.

The literature that transformed Vance from reader into writer extended into the California still growing up around him from magazine racks, at this time nodes of the global, modern, popular culture. Vance saw nascent science fiction and fantasy as tied explicitly to the idea of the expanding present exploited by jazz:

About three miles west of us was the town of Oakley. In the drugstore was a magazine rack, and there I came upon the Amazing Stories quarterly, edited by Hugo Gernsback, and also the Amazing Stories monthly. I subsequently discovered Weird Tales and subscribed to it. It was a banner day of the month when I ran down to the mailbox in front of Iron House School to find it there.... (This Is Me 17)

Hugo Gernsback had developed Amazing out of the popular fictions he’d been placing in the back-pages of radio buff and engineering periodicals. Vance was an engineering student, primed to respond to stories celebrating the common sense of the scientific method. Gernsback himself would soon coin the term “science fiction,” branding that genre with which Jack Vance, “Genre-Artist” extraordinaire, would always be rather awkwardly associated (cf. Rotella, “The Genre Artist”).

If 2004’s Lurulu, his last novel, still stands as perhaps the finest science fiction of the twenty-first century, it is via fantasy through Dungeons & Dragons into gaming and through his fan, George R. R. Martin, into TV that his writing can be seen as actively engaged with the present mainstream.

Vance never was comfortable with what was known as science fiction. He tended to dismiss it rather rudely from his consideration. It is telling that in the autobiography he moves immediately from Amazing Stories to Weird Tales. Certainly Weird Tales was a more literary affair than the early Amazing. In its 1930s golden age, Weird Tales boasted writing of more extravagance and eccentricity than any other American periodical. With a mature H. P. Lovecraft directly involved in its creation and flavor, with Margaret Brundage’s famous and scandalously fashionable covers, the magazine laced the drugstore mainstream with surrealism (still being invented), sex, and science fiction. Vance was hardly an admirer of HPL himself, saying “Lovecraft couldn’t write himself out of a wet paper sack” (Platt 163). Weird Tales’s most provocative covers served the works of the young and brilliant C. L. Moore. Jack Vance spoke rarely about his favorite writers of science fiction and fantasy, but when he did, he always mentioned her.

Catherine L. Moore (1911–1987) was only five years Vance’s senior. Well into her career, Moore married the science fiction regular Henry Kuttner, and together under a variety of names they wrote a great deal of sf and not so much fantasy. She got to an early, brilliant start in Weird Tales, authoring two series that would be of particular influence on writers to come. Moore’s “Jirel of Joiry” stories updated Robert E. Howard even as he was publishing the extraordinary Conan stories in the very same issues. Moore’s transformation of male tropes occurred on the page; esthetic disruption was a matter of form. Moore clearly is a source of the enlightened feminism whose POV-shock frequently interrupts Vance’s ostensibly male focus, distinguishing it immediately from most U.S. science fiction of the golden age. Moore’s recurring male hero, Northwest Smith, hitching about various settlements of the solar system under the most dubious circumstances, showed Vance that ordinary pulp stories of revenge, desire, crime, and punishment could be set offworld, set against the most fantastic and tantalizing circumstances:

Who has been influential upon my development as a writer? Who indeed? I don’t know. To name some names, I admire C. L. Moore from the old Weird Tales magazine. As a boy I was quite affected by the prose of Clark Ashton Smith. (This Is Me 213)

The Poe-like nineteenth-century flaneur imprinted itself on Weird Tales through figures like Clark Aston Smith. His type can be found in the countless avant-garde impresarios who do not quite replace villains in Jack Vance narratives. Drug addict, poet, surrealist sculptor, devoted fan of Baudelaire, Smith imagined bizarrely detailed landscapes in the most extravagant terms. Vance’s famous style is always both a quiet celebration and blatant satire of the lengths Smith was willing to go:

It was noon of a vernal day when I came forth from that interminable cactus-forest in which the Inquisitors of Ong had left me, and saw at my feet the gray beginnings of Yondo. I repeat, it was noon of a vernal day.... (Smith, “The Abominations of Yondo”)

Vance would refine and clarify Smith’s excesses, discovering an always delightful style able to deliver sentences like “Titus Pompo, I will warn you once and once only. You are talking dangerous nonsense,” with the archest possible seriousness (Ariminta Station 276). Though a Clark Ashton Smith sentence can take over a page—
but in that fantastic wood I had found no token or memory of a spring; and the swollen, fulvous, dying and half-rotten growths through which I had pushed my way were like no other cacti, but bore shapes of abomination scarcely to be described... (Smith, “The Abominations of Yondo”)

—his Lovecraftian and overwrought prose can’t deliver the sort of fully conceived world C. L. Moore was able to detail, complete with fascinatingly developed fauna, flora, and cultural systems.

Previously having published jazz reviews, Vance sold his first story, the novelette “The World-Thinker,” to Canada’s Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1945. (They published it under the title “The World-Builder.”) Written while he was serving out the end of the War on board a Merchant Marine vessel, the story features Kenna Parker, an “enigmatic,” elusive heroine (first arrested for assault with a deadly weapon and now on the run with a set of deadly equations) and still sparkles:

It hardly seemed the face of an incorrigible criminal. A reckless glint in the blue eyes, a whimsical tilt to the eyebrows, a set to the lips—otherwise it was the face of a very pretty girl.... (“The World-Thinker” 36)

The hero Lanarck will get those equations but not quite the girl—though he goes so far as to occupy her mind. In fact, the hard-to-get attractive/elusive female will occasion all sorts of journeys throughout Vance’s “Gaean Reach”—that galaxy explicitly honoring a goddess. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s, when Vance’s overseas success was now taking care of financial problems at home, that female protagonists and antagonists take the reins of Lyonesse with spectacular results.

In crime, he tried earlier. Vance wrote the fascinating locked-room mystery, A Room To Die In (1965), as his second under the Ellery Queen moniker, starring charming young Ann Nelson, a schoolteacher-heiress who decides to turn detective instead of up dead. Two more crime novels of the ’80s, The View from Chickweed’s Window and The Dark Ocean, also featured strong female protagonists.

Back in 1945, the not-quite-villainous “world-thinker” with his black “tremendous dome-like bulk” of a body specifically resembles the cover image for Moore’s first and most famous Jirel story, “Black God’s Kiss,” of 1934. His power is a totally augmented imagination. Its power is both imaginary and real by definition:

In front of Lanarck’s eyes, space quivered and wrenched. A dark aperture appeared in midair. Lanarck, looking through, saw hanging apparently but a yard before his eyes a lambent sphere—a miniature world. As he watched, it expanded.... (“The World-Thinker” 40)

Describing the experience of reading a science fiction story would become the story itself.

Soon enough, the name Jack Vance was thought to be another Kuttner pseudonym (Clute 1266). In reality the name soon described a woman as well as a man. Fellow student Norma Genevieve Ingold (1927–2008) would take on the name Vance when they married in ’47; a lifelong partnership was begun:

Norma was strongly supportive of my writing from the start, and we began to work together as a team. I cannot emphasize enough how hard Norma worked over the course of my career, certainly as hard as I have, if not more. (This Is Me 94–95)

We know she was responsible for the manuscripts moving from pen to typewriter and from proofs to print. Was Norma one reason for the numerous fascinating women who wend their way through the many worlds of Jack Vance?

The young Vance listed “hot jazz” and “feminine psychology” as central interests alongside “Oriental languages” and physical sciences in his author’s note to “The World-Builder” in Thrilling Wonder Stories. U.S. science fiction was a boy’s club at least through most of the ’60s. A long-time, perhaps perpetual, place on the science fiction midlist may be best explained by the fact Vance seems to have received his most definite fan letters from female readers:

Dear Mr. Vance,

This is a fan letter—an unmitigated fan letter. I have read all your books and stories with the greatest pleasure, and then after a while re-read them with greater pleasure. There are some lovely imaginations at work in S.F. now, but the work itself is so often botched or stretched or compromised; yours never; you are competent, an artist. Write more books, write more books.

Yours gratefully,

Ursula K. Le Guin 27 April 1967

In the Jack Vance Collection at Gotlieb Library Collection in Boston, an assortment selected and sent by Vance himself in the late 1980s, Le Guin’s letter is indeed the only unmitigated fan letter the author seems to have received at all up to that date. In the Gotlieb Collection is a manila envelope with this handwritten note on it:

Dear the Gottlieb

Herewith a collection of ancient correspondence, rejection slips, etc. a compendium of a thousand little tragedies and small triumphs that made me feel rather sad going through them.

Along with editors constantly bickering and projecting negativity, the other fan letters ask Vance not to write a certain way or to return to old characters. In their context we see what a glorious exception Le Guin provides. Quite simply a masterpiece of the fan letter genre, it is even written in that semicolonial “Vancian” style one takes one when determined to speak with a clarity that is not itself without a certain luxury or wryness. In two well-executed sentences, Le Guin offers a clear critical reading of Vance as the quintessential writer, no more no less—celebrating the victory of craft and practice over a romantic valorization of authorship and therefore the need for no further criticism.

In the Gotlieb archives, as I’ve suggested, Ursula Le Guin is the only reader to suggest Vance’s work is “never ... botched or stretched or compromised.” Whatever the reason, in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s the writer-editor gate-keepers of U.S. science fiction (John W. Campbell and Frederik Pohl stand out as closer to enemies than editors) were forever accepting Vance while pushing him away at the same time. The re-titling, reediting, the forcing of rewrites is accompanied by steady disagreement in all matters. Vance’s immediate success in the mystery world, the quiet masterpiece The Fox Valley Murders (1966), came with absolutely no generic interference and feedback.

It didn’t seem to help that Vance secured the services of Scott Meredith, a first-rate agent. “Our slick writers include P.G. Wodehouse, B. Traven,” Meredith told him. “And of course we do not ignore our pulp authors in favor of the slick writers. Ten percent of a bunch of eighty dollar checks soon adds up to just as much as ten percent of a several hundred dollar check…” (“Letter” 2 June 1950). In his first letter Meredith made it quite clear how many books Vance would be expected to write. Vance accepted, and though he experimented in genre, he never experimented in “class.” Apparently content to survive with the chance of sudden possible windfalls from TV and elsewhere on the horizon, as the quintessential mid-lister he never showed an inclination to reach across the aisle into so-called serious literature.

As late as 1995, Clute and Nichols’s influential Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was scolding Vance for his reliance on “pulp conventions” (1264). But throughout his career, the pulps themselves found the author often perplexing and overly literary. At least until the 1970s, editors would be asking Vance to bring back Magnus Ridolph, the deliciously pulpy antihero of his early 1950s C. L. Moore imitations. Vance’s most original developments of the science fiction field celebrated today, the fantasy/sf hybrids of the “Dying Earth” genre (first written in the ’50s and returned to with stunning effect throughout his career) and the Planetary Romance style novel first clearly demonstrated in 1965’s Big Planet, and its sequel, Showboat World (1975), were only seen as problematic by his editors. (By this point, Vance was either provoking editorial interference or entirely unconcerned. Showboat World was originally entitled Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River, Lune XXIII, Big Planet.)

“I am not paranoid, I hope;” Vance wrote to Scott Meredith on August 6, 1966, “no persecution complex or anything like that, but it’s almost as if [Campbell] were griped at me personally.” Even when the powerful Campbell published Vance in Astounding Science Fiction, he expressed long and wordy reservations about the work. Yet Vance’s writing was good enough to survive the hostility. Campbell issued Vance’s “The Potters of Firsk,” a tale of art turned to (literally) crackpot religion, alongside the first appearance of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics in the May 1950 Astounding. In his 1951 novel, The Brains of Earth, Vance did indeed anger Campbell for satirizing the young religion of Scientology. (Scott Meredith said in a letter on May 4, 1951, that “It had been shown to Campbell, but he felt that Dianetics was not fiction, and shouldn’t be used in fiction.”) Accepting his situation, suffering the whims of whatever lowbrow organization he was working with at the time, in the ’60s Vance issued a number of increasingly impressive novels out of stories, returning to The Dying Earth for the first time with Cugel the Clever (1966; published as The Eyes of the Overworld). He also continued to experiment in exquisitely (if sometimes ridiculously) executed mysteries and crime novels of the English model, usually under the name John Holcomb Vance, “outraged at the entire range of the science-fiction market” (“Letter,” August 6, 1966).

In 1964 when Pyramid Books offered him a contract for an original novel with the humiliating title they supplied, Space Opera, Vance responded with characteristic punctilio by actually addressing the future of high opera in galactic space. An homage to Wodehouse, the novel is a clearly intended send-up of high-art pretension. When society scion Dame Isabel (our young hero’s rich Aunt) hears a report of the supposedly exhilarating “9th Company,” perhaps the only alien music group in the galaxy, she decides to affirm Earth’s primacy by financing the best high opera company she can put together and bringing it on a tour of alien worlds. But none of her Phoebus Company productions, from Wagner to Verdi, makes the slightest impression on any of the perplexed races she encounters; in fact, each show on the tour bombs more dangerously than the last. Meanwhile, the kitchen staff’s jug band is a runaway success.

Faced with the failure of eighteenth- and nineteen-century opera to impress any alien mind, Dame Isabel is a good enough businesswoman as to abandon the tour and return everyone to Earth but not before taking the whole Phoebus Company to see an actual performance of the 9th Company, whose competency and power she has always doubted. Vance’s conception of the alien art form surprises the reader, just as much as Dame Isabel, by its splendor and power. But the art he describes is quite simply his own:

Dame Isabel swung about and found the sky to be dancing with colored shapes. They mingled and separated, merged inward and outward and settled to the meadow which became a place of luminous magic, and the whole Phoebus Company came forth in awe to watch the magnificences now displayed to them. Cities like flower gardens appeared one after the other, as if in compendium: each different, each a development of the last, each with its own delights and prideful vistas, each receding and growing remote. A miscellany of new images appeared in the foreground: regattas of boats with enormous patterned sails, each of which might have been alive and sentient: a jeweled moth. Exalted figures marched in a stately pavane; there were tourneys of love and beauty, gusts and whispers of many musics. Now came a series of pageants, performances by troupes like the 9th Company, and Dame Isabel thought to recognize the 9th Company itself. Suddenly there was silence, so intense as to be an ecstatic sensation in itself. Down from the sky floated a battered spaceship....

At this point ghostly symbols and characters suggest only their own inadequacy clearly.

There followed other spectacles and vistas, and these seemed far away and long past, like memories half-forgotten. A parade of dead heroes came by, turning to search the faces of those who watched, as if asking for knowledge which had been denied them. All seemed to ask the same question and then they were gone from view. Cities were built and listlessly abandoned: all goals had been achieved, all excellences attained. Nothing remained but idleness, casual amusement....

Previewing Lyonesse, prophesying a move toward what only the twenty-first century will begin to understand as the pointless wealth of The Dying Earth—there comes the climactic pièce de résistance:

Finally in gigantic enlargement appeared the Tough Luck Jug Band, with its music of boldness and assertion, enthusiasm conquering surfeit. For a brief space the world was renewed and wonderful things seemed possible. Then the meadow was as before, the sky was blank; the Phoebus Company stood alone beside the ship.

The last Beckettian image rather vehemently asserts the scope and limits of the minimalist writing-as-writing esthetics of the Jack Vance space opera.

Back on Earth, his books were being read by a generation believing itself ready to transform the world. For Vance the question was scriptory. In the ’60s, despite the state of the market, despite immediate success in crime fiction, Jack Vance preferred to write science fiction, to do exactly no more and no less than what he outlined in Space Opera. It is telling that he reveals his ’60s work as an alien performance, for the joys on every page one finds in Vance are the results of the fisher/miner of languages and narrative forms, no more and no less. Vance’s world view is the rational world view of total empiricism, like David Hume; custom and superstition explain all that can be explained, and self-interest is the law of the human land, even out beyond the Gaean Reach itself.

But within the confines of the musical moment—between the covers of the book—everything again is possible or seems that way. Indeed, on the silence left at the end of a Jack Vance performance, writers like Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, and J.G. Ballard would help transform the possibilities of high literature from below. As if in inverse proportion to Vance’s self-removal not only from high literary culture but from science fiction as well, perhaps more interestingly than any other writer of the paperback revolution—a misguided sort of claim, no doubt, but supportable—Vance’s was breeding activist fans. His would-be disciple, Frank Herbert, was so stung by Jack’s disdain for his desert planet idea that he turned his full attention to the project that would be called Dune to prove him wrong (Vance “Interview” 2010).

Vancians are the sorts of fans who will go so far as to remake the world so it contains the idol’s image.

The Vance fan, confronted by a literary establishment that erases its hero, creates its own literary magazines to discuss Vance with other fans. Through Gary Gygax, Vance’s influence would transform the shape of gaming into the twenty-first century. In Gygax’s 2001 essay, “Jack Vance and the D&D Game,” the author seems almost at pains to stress there were parts of the game not under Vance’s direct influence:

Need I say that I am not merely a Jack Vance fan, but that he is in my opinion the very best of all the authors of imaginative fiction? Well I am and he is! ... Just what portions of these works, the subsequent AD&D game, stemmed from inspiration related to the writing of Jack Vance? Several elements, the unquestioned foremost being the magic system used in these games. To my way of thinking, the concept of a spell itself being magical, that its written form carried energy, seemed a perfect way to balance the mage against other types of characters in the game. The memorization of the spell required time and concentration so as to impart not merely the written content but also its magical energies. When subsequently cast—by speaking or some other means—the words or gestures, or whatever triggered the magical force of the spell, leaving a blank place in the brain where the previously memorized spell had been held. Because I explained this often, attributing its inspiration to Jack Vance, the D&D magic system of memorized then forgotten spells was dubbed by gamers “the Vancian magic system....”

Of the other portions of the A/D&D game stemming from the writing of Jack Vance, the next most important one is the thief-class character....

D&D’s risky acceptance of evil in its character generation (the “alignment” system that helped fuel the 1970s and ’80s urban legends and extravagant claims about devil worship) and its insistent sense of humor are also easily traceable to that “realm of cynical wonders” The Dying Earth (1950) (cf. Rotella).

But calling attention to the relation of magic to writing in Vance, Gygax can help us see behind the mask Vance so consistently dons of the unimpressed craftsperson, unconcerned with high art and its pretensions, to see that his life’s work does stand as an affirmation of writing as magic. In some ways it brought itself more and more to life, peculiarly and easily dovetailing with the cultural scene determined by the Internet despite Vance’s general uninterest in technology. In the ’90s fans used the ’Net, on a global scale to establish a complete, hardcover, 45-volume archival edition of the whole Vance corpus, re-proofed and edited according to authorial intention.

With original intensity and vision, the Vancians have therefore secured the survival of their idol’s literary principle beyond the paperback revolution into the still unknown future books must brave. Its web site explains,

The Vance Integral Edition project began in 1999. Over 300 volunteers, world-wide, worked via the Internet, for 6 years, to create a definitive and complete edition of Vance’s work in 44 volumes. A supplemental 45th volume, with the 3 Ellery Queen novels, was also published. Approximately 600 book sets were printed for VIE subscribers. Several dozen sets were donated to libraries... The V.I.E. project was unprecedented in the history of literature: never have readers paid comparable homage to a writer, and never has a writer received such a treatment over the Internet.

The model of Shakespeare, whose own works were similarly preserved and celebrated by his friends and colleagues, certainly comes to mind. Like Shakespeare, Vance wrote for money. Like Shakespeare, his female characters outshine those of his contemporaries. Frederick Jameson in his acclaimed Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, makes Philip K. Dick his science fiction Shakespeare. With Dick the most literary sf allowed, criticism by writers in the self-promoting Hard SF, New Wave, or Cyberpunk eras for the most part leaves Vance unmentioned; Samuel R. Delany and Thomas Disch do without; and Brian Aldiss is explicitly hostile. Yet Vance’s work, still insistently pulp, still appealing to the general reader of imaginative literature, has not dated like the work of these younger writers with literary pretension already so often has.

Like any craft, writing is mastered by practice and patience, and if one has any “knack” for it at all, that very knack—paradoxically—can explicate everything under the sun but itself. (This Is Me 6)

In This is Me!, Vance admits a “knack,” a built-in, unexplainable facility for writing. This is unable to describe itself? Is it really? What reads rhetorically like a confession of weakness can also be read as a bold claim of extraordinary powers that can explicate anything under any sun. In Vance this power seems, in fact, to depend upon its refusal to consider itself.

When asked to prepare a General Preface and a series of brief introductions for each of the tales in 1976’s rather-late-in-coming Pocket Books Best of Jack Vance volume, he gave a general preface less than a page long, making clear only that this selection of his “best” work was not his own. The remaining notes are fascinating nuggets of critical kryptonite. Before “Ullward’s Retreat” we read:

To extol one’s own work is sheer recklessness; on the other hand unabashed candor is refreshing and perhaps a virtue; therefore I will venture one or two comments in regards to “Ullward’s Retreat.”

I consider the story well-constructed from a technical standpoint, and I feel that in spite of its overt frivolity, the story makes a number of profound statements upon the human condition. There are no villains in this piece, and no heroes; we are confronted only with human captiousness and human vanity. (Best of Jack Vance 29)

Charles Platt said of this,

The “captiousness” in the case of the Preface, is Vance’s own (the quietly extravagant word signifying the particular artificially created quality the OED calls “Apt to catch or take one in; fitted to ensnare or perplex in argument; designed to entrap or entangle by subtlety; fallacious, sophistical”). The reader who goes forward and reads this oddly conventional tale (by no means a best) for any particularly profound glimpses of the human condition will be left with something different altogether: “a history of the future human race” that depends on the shallowest of issues and behaviors. (161)

“Now what about lunch? Genuine algae!” Ullward’s retreat is not a military maneuver in any great war but simply a Californian architecture built up to view the future. “A rustic lodge commanded the view, the door being the opening into Ullward’s living room.” Vance’s works are far more autobiographical and self-descriptive than we like to believe. The architecture becomes eerily familiar as it reappears in the many manses of fictions to come. In the opening of his 1966 masterpiece, The Eyes of the Overworld (aka Cugel the Clever), Vance seems to explicitly reference his own eccentric, self-built home in the Oakland Hills:

On the heights above the river Xzan, at the site of certain ancient ruins, Ioucounu the Laughing Magician had built a manse to his private taste: an eccentric structure of steep gables, balconies, sky-walks, cupolas, together with three spiral green glass towers through which the red sunlight shone in twisted glints and peculiar colors. (3)

And so quite clearly every reader of Jack Vance (who wrote by hand with multicolor pens) recognizes the homemade getaway is not for Rhialto the Marvelous, not for Shimrod or Murgen or the many other players-with-fire—it is the manse of the laughing wizard-author himself with its written spells collected and preserved all around, tricks of other mages stolen and jarred, curses still outstanding. As Vance identifies with the Magus, the fan identifies with Cugel, the not so clever everyman Ioucounu torments.

“I felt myself seized by a writer’s style in a way I had never experienced before,” writes Carlo Rotella of his first experience with Cugel. Rotella, an academic and nonscience fiction specialist, wrote 2009’s New York Times portrait of a then still-living Jack Vance, “The Genre Artist.”

By virtue of their hostility to and virtual destruction of what might be called the romantic author, Vance’s works confront the authentic reader with his own imagination-as-imagination: that lazy, workaholic faculty entirely dependent on nature, depths, chance, custom, and language. Brian Aldiss found Vance “a gaudily painted coelacanth, washed up on sf’s shore” (314). There is indeed something ancient in Vance, a literature that is only language, as full of marvels as the any animal of evolution, but as with today’s charming coelacanths (not at all the living fossils Aldiss believes them to be) it is caught and not found washed up. Though his stories will occupy the Bronze Age past in the Lyonesse trilogy of the 1980s, they will take place on the “the Elder Isles,” a repressed Atlantis between England and France, now indeed sunken beneath the sea:

The Elder Isles had known the coming and coming of many peoples: Pharesmians, blue-eyed Evadnioi, Pelasgians with their maenad priestesses, Danaans, Lydians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks, Celts from Gaul, Ska from Norway by way of Ireland, Romans, Celts from Ireland and a few Sea Goths. The wash of so many peoples had left behind a complex detritus: ruined strongholds, graves and tombs; steles carved with cryptic glyphs; songs, dances, turns of speech, fragments of dialect, place-names; ceremonies of purport now forgotten, but with lingering flavor.... (Madouc 2)

Imaginative literature of the Weird Fiction tradition distils the lingering flavors of these old worlds and peoples still present in a living language where the old magic can become cryptically new. In 1964’s The Houses of Iszm Vance can be found satirizing Jane Austen by what appears to be a nonsense game:

It was assumed as a matter of course that visitors came to Iszm with a single purpose: to steal a female house. (5)

Such wordplay opens the remarkable story of one peculiar Gaean world that moves through a cascade of science-fictional ideas, including a growable, gendered, and sentient posteconomic architecture, total surveillance via brain scan, multiculturism, and more. Unlike science fiction that focuses on one idea as its own brand, one central mood or concept, a Vance narrative moves relentlessly left-to-right, according to the play and change of a single line of music: illustrating nothing in the singular except that usual captiousness of language that will prove to be the tone of any human world with limited exploitable resources. Like the author, his all-too-human heroes and villains alike will prefer to show themselves only in extravagant and perfect disguise.

By the mid-’60s, Jack and Norma Vance were working wonders with words-as-words. The quality of the Vance style became so extraordinary as to stand out not only in popular fiction (where only Chandler seems comparable) but in English language literature of the post-war period in general. Few writers have been able to craft such a comprehensive, recognizable, resilient, and far-ranging, esthetically pleasing style.

It is regrettable that recent attempts at approaching twentieth century science fiction as a phenomenon serious enough to study prove themselves so provincial by leaving Jack Vance unconsidered. But one has to smile at recent defenders of the “mainstream novel” like the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik when he protests the inclusion of Philip K. Dick in the canonical Library of America over issues of “bad writing”:

The trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut—or, for that matter, Chesterton or Tolkien—as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a hack’s habits, too, and he never really got over them.... That’s probably why Dick’s reputation as a serious writer, like Poe’s, has always been higher in France, where the sentences aren’t read as they were written.

“Pretty bad writer?” It’s doubtful Dick would have stooped to such a condescending “plebian” tone when addressing his own “fun-seeking” audience. Jack Vance forever proves the “bad sentences explain popularity in France” meme of reactionary canon making poseurs for the lie it really is. With less-than-zero publicity, Vance remains in print in a rather large fashion overseas—despite his most famous feature being his sentences. Philip K. Dick’s supposed “bad writing” is a fiction; indeed against Vance’s Chandler-like mastery of style, Dick was a sort of Hammett, able to fashion a clear prose that could handle ideas other writers still do not know how to approach with grace, humor, novelty, and many other novelistic qualities missing from mainstream novels back when they were relevant at all. Dick’s current success is driven by his writing, not by publicity departments. (Though even sf writer friends like Poul Anderson and Frank Herbert suffered Vance’s scorn, in a radio interview on the show “Hour 25” on 12 November, 1976, Jack and Norma reveal more than a passing regard for Philip Dick—an extreme rarity.) I believe the proletarian and antiaristocratic ideology of the pulp midlist tradition as fully explored by Vance and others explains both Dick’s liquid clarity and his refusal of any high style at all. This success does not distinguish him from Vance, however, who, despite a vivid style, needs no current “relevance,” no movies to work his magic in, nor any light of promised illumination to shine his way. In fact, the style is disguise; Vance prefers the dark.

Mark von Schlegell lives in Los Angeles and Cologne. This essay was adapted from the lecture “Beyond the Paperback Revolution: Jack Vance” first given in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair at Staedelschule Frankfurt, 14 October, 2011.

Works Cited

- Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree. London: Atheneum: 1973.

- Clute, John, and Peter Nichols, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Second edition. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995.

- Dick, Philip K. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, eds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

- Gopnik Adam. “Blows Against the Empire: The Return of Philip K. Dick.” The New Yorker. 20 August, 2007. <www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/20/070820crbo_books_gopnik>. Accessed 11 April 2014.

- Gygax, Gary. “Jack Vance & The D & D Game.” The Excellent Prismatic Spray #2 (2001). <www.dyingearth.com/files/GARY GYGAX JACK VANCE.pdf>.

- Hoder, Mike. “Hour 25: 1976 Jack Vance radio interview.” KPFK Radio, 12 November, 1976. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqK9sTE83V0> et seq. Accessed 11 April 2014.

- Le Guin, Ursula K. “Letter to Jack Vance, 27 April 1967.” The Jack Vance Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

- Meredith, Scott. “Letter to Jack Vance, 2 June, 1950.” The Jack Vance Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

- ——. “Letter to Jack Vance, 4 May, 1951.” The Jack Vance Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

- Platt, Charles. “Interview with Jack Vance.” Dream Makers Volume II: The Uncommon Men & Women Who Write Science Fiction: Interviews. New York: Berkley Books, 1983.

- Rotella, Carlo. “The Genre Artist.” The New York Times, 15 July 2009. <www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19Vance-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0> Accessed 11 April 2014.

- Smith, Clark Ashton. “The Abominations of Yondo.” Overland Monthly, Vol 84, No. 4. (California: April, 1926). <www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/2/the-abominations-of-yondo> Accessed 11 April 2014.

- The Vance Integral Edition. <www.integralarchive.org/base3.htm>. Accessed 11 April 2014.

- Vance, Jack. Araminta Station. New York: Tor Books, 1988.

- ——. The Best of Jack Vance. New York: Pocket Books, 1976.

- ——. The Eyes of the Overworld (aka Cugel the Clever). New York: Ace Books, 1966.

- ——. The Houses of Iszm. New York: Ace Books, 1964.

- ——. “Interview.” Star Ship Sofa, June 8, 2010. <www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2010/06/08/aural-delights-no-140-kim-stanley-robinson-plus-jack-vance-interview-2/>

- ——. “Letter to Scott Meredith, 6 August, 1966.” The Jack Vance Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

- ——. Madouc (Lyonesse III). London, Grafton Books, 1989.

- ——. Space Opera. London: Gollancz. 1965.

- ——. This Is Me, Jack Vance! (Or More Properly, This Is “I”). Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2009.

- ——. “The World-Thinker.” Thrilling Wonder Stories. Toronto: March 1945.

Joe Sanders
The Emperor of I Scream: Torture, Revenge, Justice, and Hope in Iain M. Banks’s Surface Detail

More than material comforts, political systems offer their members protection—from outsiders and from themselves. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, for example, when members of the People’s Front of Judea are nerving themselves to strike a blow against the tyranny of the Roman Empire, their leader, Reg, rhetorically asks what the Romans have ever given them only to have one member reply “the aqueduct,” another suggest “sanitation,” and so on through “roads,” “irrigation,” “medicine,” “education,” “wine”—leading up to one final exchange: “And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.” “Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.” Whether it’s the Roman Empire, the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, or the Thousand Year Reich, such organizations promise their members safety through violence: Law and Order. People are perversely attracted to seeing themselves as both potential victims and victimizers; they actually believe they need to be defended against themselves. When the members of the People’s Front mention how difficult it is to provide safety “in a place like this,” they really mean “dealing with people like us.” Just so, in Iain M. Banks’s 2010 novel, Surface Detail, an elderly legislator defends the establishment of virtual Hells where the souls of sinners can be punished forever, by bellowing that “We need the Hells! We’re fallen, evil creatures!” (445).

Surface Detail is one of Banks’s novels set in the interstellar Culture, which is the very opposite of an “empire.” Instead, the Culture is a vast, anarchic cluster of biologic and mechanical individuals drawn together by shared curiosity about exploration and evolution. The Culture has no central, decision-making authority; rather, its consciousness accumulates in conversations between countless mortals and the AI Minds of gigantic Ships with their arrays of avatars and drones that can take almost any physical form. The Culture tries hard not to interfere with how other civilizations express their values, though in this novel it clearly is on the side of those trying to expose and destroy the virtual Hells. This position requires a difficult balancing act, for while the Culture prefers not to limit individuals’ choices, it also realizes the dangerous attraction of “safety” achieved by repressive codes that give the right to inflict pain on transgressors. The attraction is especially great when one doesn’t have to confront the painful results. One purpose of literature, however, is to encourage empathetic recognition. Surface Detail’s description of the suffering going on in the Hells is so brilliantly, viciously appalling that it should encourage people to reject a social system based on bribery and torture. The question then becomes what alternative the Culture could offer that might both restrain and satisfy humans. In his novels, especially in Surface Detail, Banks sets out to show a believable substitute for “justice” that actually is merely revenge expressed through pain.

The novel’s opening focuses on Ledeje Y’Breq, a young woman whose suffering seems to deserve exactly that kind of justice—i.e., revenge administered with as much pain as possible. Because he scammed Led’s father in a business deal, Joiler Veppers acquired legal ownership of her, meaning that he could rape her at will and punish her as he pleased when she tried to escape. During her last attempt to flee, while struggling with him, she tries to sink her teeth into his throat but instead bites off and swallows the tip of his nose, whereupon he stabs her to death. Nothing in the rest of the novel counters readers’ first impression that Veppers is a vicious sociopath who deserves the most severe punishment. Therefore, we are pleased when Led finds herself alive again—her personality and memories (i.e., her soul) downloaded into a physical body thanks to the neural network that was secretly given to her by the avatar of an eccentric Culture spaceship. We also sympathize with her seething determination to return home so that she can slaughter her murderer.

Her mission of revenge involves a frustratingly long journey. The Culture disapproves of cold-blooded killing, even as punishment for murder, and it officiously tries to assign a slap-drone to Led that would interfere with Veppers’s painful execution. Nevertheless, Led somehow manages to make the trip aboard the Special Circumstances warship Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, on what readers eventually learn is the ship’s own quest to help locate and destroy the virtual Hells. She travels in the company of the ship’s avatar, Demeisen. The avatar at first coolly rejects her request for transportation, saying of her story, “‘All very melodramatic. Your feud may inspire a not terribly good screen presentation at some point in the future, hopefully distant. I look forward to missing it’” (206). Although Demeisen relents and interacts with Led in what seems to be friendly dialogue during the voyage to track down Veppers, his presence continues to remind her of a larger perspective in which her painful grievances are insignificant. Getting ready for combat with a fleet of enemy ships, for example, Demesien smilingly rejects her offer to help.

“My dear girl, in Culture history alone it has been about nine thousand years since a human, marvelous though they are in many other ways, could do anything useful in a serious, big-guns space battle other than admire the pretty explosions ... or in some cases contribute to them.”

“Contribute?”

“Chemicals; colors. You know.” (424)

Observing the avatar’s apparent glee at annihilating the attacking ships, Led asks whether there were people on board; the answer is yes, though Demeisen points out that they chose to put themselves in harm’s way, “if I may just leap in front of any nascent and entirely vicarious moral qualms you may be about to suffer from, tiny human” (509). She waits awhile then, as he appears to gloat, “sighing happily and seemingly either ignoring or having forgotten about her,” until she quietly asks to be taken to her home planet now, whereupon he replies: “‘Of course,’ Demeisen said, turning to her with a neutral expression. ‘There’s that man you want to kill, isn’t there?’” (509).

Demeisen does not voice approval of any possible evolution in Led’s attitude toward slaughtering one’s enemies. He seems to dismiss her moral qualms and to restate her purpose with a neutral attitude. He is equally nonjudgmental when she finally expresses her own, new uncertainty about killing Veppers as painfully as possible. Though she admits that she has “fantasized about it a hundred times,” she says that “‘if I can do it, if I do do it, then on one level I’m no better than him, and he’ll have won by making me behave like he does’” (531).

Despite this increased uncertainty about her own motives, however, Led still realizes that killing Veppers will not only satisfy her but also keep him from raping and murdering more people. In any event, momentum still is carrying her toward completing her revenge while disguised by a new tattoo, a gift from the avatar that has insinuated itself onto her body. But Demeisen spoils her attempt to sneak up on her intended victim. Instead, he introduces the two: “‘Doll, this is your rapist and murderer. Veppers, you ghastly cunt, this is Lededje Y’breq, back from the dead’” (567–8). Her physical attack thwarted, Ledeje is distraught by this apparent betrayal when Veppers walks away unharmed, but Demeisen comes very close to lecturing her directly: “Snap out of it babe. It’s not about your little revenge trip; we’re getting Hells destroyed. For free! Not even on your conscience! Seriously: who do you really think matters most, here? You, or a trillion people suffering? Fucking get grown-up about it, won’t you?” (575).

As a matter of fact, Veppers does not escape justice, and Led is responsible for his death. Before we see how that thread of the plot is tied up, however, we need to consider what and how she might be learning while she is being given a chance to grow up.

The first time Led meets the avatar of the ship, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, it is occupying the body of a young man who had won a “competition to replace a ship’s avatar” (207) for a brief time. Demeisen has been damaging the host body in minor ways; also, since the fellow “is quite defiantly heterosexual with a fear of bodily violation that borders on outright homophobia” (207), the avatar is arranging a homosexual tryst while he brusquely dismisses Led. This cruel behavior could be seen as teaching “the poor fool” (207) a lesson. In fact, when Demeisen releases his control, the young man is aghast because his body has been repaired and he has no recollection of all the time when he was being hurt and violated: “‘But I wanted memories! Something to remember!’” (233). Wiping the slate clean could be seen as another way of teaching the young would-be voyeur a lesson, except that he disappears from the novel, so readers never see whether he learned anything from his experience or from the gap in his memories of experience. He might have learned that he is responsible for choosing his own experiences and for reflecting on them later. Or he might not. The avatar, representing the values of the Culture, leaves the matter entirely up to him.

For that matter, the comfortable cliché that someone “needs to be taught a lesson” contains a negative judgment that usually goes along with approving harsh administration of the lesson. Since readers are encouraged to identify with Led and to accept the righteousness of her quest for revenge, Surface Detail does not set her up as a poor fool who needs/deserves to be taught a lesson. But the book does show her and other characters being exposed to experience from which they might be able to learn lessons.

One lesson that Led learns is to look more dispassionately at herself as she compares her behavior to Veppers’s. In the Life of Brian scene referred to earlier, the People’s Front of Judea is planning to kidnap Pontius Pilate’s wife and send severed pieces of her back on the hour, every hour, until Pilate agrees “to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman Imperialist State” within two days. Reg points out that the Romans “bear full responsibility when we chop her up, and that we will not submit to blackmail!” Monty Python’s satirically exaggerated characters represent us normal folk who cannot recognize how self-contradictory our beliefs and plans are. But art can help members of an audience see themselves more clearly. In much the same way, in Surface Detail, Banks shows the confrontation between a university professor and an elderly legislator. The professor has let his soul briefly be inserted into one of the virtual Hells so he later could describe them to an appalled public; the legislator believes that the Hells are necessary and will do anything to protect their existence, as he blurts,

You live on your fucking campuses with your heads in the fucking clouds and think everything’s as nice as it is there and everybody is as civilized and reasonable and polite and noble and intellectual and cooperative as they are there and you think that’s the way it is everywhere and how everybody is! You’ve no fucking idea what would happen if we didn’t have the threat of Hell to hold people back! (445–6)

Inwardly, the professor reflects that the speaker evidently has not attended many faculty meetings. He replies that the other is “‘typical of those with ethical myopia, who feel only for those nearest them. You would save a friend or loved one and feel a glow of self-satisfaction at the act, no matter to what torment that same act condemned countless others’” (446). In other words, both the gloating creation of the Hells and the verbal frenzy with which they are defended demonstrate the degenerate cruelty that results from a lack of fundamental interest in, let alone understanding of, other individuals. Such people, as Led observes, tend to become like the awful people they condemn.

Not that some people don’t deserve condemnation—Veppers, for example. He values other people only as they can be exploited, and he cleverly manipulates his society’s moral restraints. He conceals his murder of Led, for example, not because he is afraid of a legal penalty but because it would reflect badly on his image of perfect self-control. In fact, Veppers turns out to be the landlord of 70 percent of the virtual Hells, since they are hidden in storage units in the substrata surrounding his country estate. Throughout the novel he has been plotting to invite an attack from an outside force that would destroy the increasingly inconvenient Hells while leaving him with even more power. In short, he is intelligent, uncontrollable, unredeemable, and dangerous. For the sake of preventative maintenance—and justice—he should die.

And so he does, though not as Led has fantasized killing him. After her aborted assault, Veppers races to his estate to salvage some valuable possessions before everything is destroyed, warning his employees only then since some casualties are necessary to add verisimilitude to his pretense of innocent suffering. Led pursues him and they grapple—until he is immobilized by the slap-drone (disguised as her new tattoo) that Led had unknowingly transferred to his body when she struggled briefly with him after Demeisen foiled her plan. Now he is at her mercy. This is the moment when Ledeje could make Veppers’s death as agonizing and protracted as she wishes. Demeisen tells her so, mentioning only in passing that “‘Conscience can be a terrible thing.... So I hear’” (615). Instead of living out her fantasies of revenge, she says “Quickly,”

“What?” the avatar said.

“Quickly,” she said. “Don’t draw it out. Just—”

The avatar gazed into Veppers’s eyes and nodded down at the girl. “See?” he said. “Good kid, really.” (616)

Veppers does die painfully, so Led’s vengeance is accomplished. However, that does not provide the easily satisfying catharsis that readers have been encouraged to expect. The novel began with Led suffering extreme physical violence, so naturally readers expect retribution in the same terms. We aren’t exactly shortchanged, but we are encouraged to see Veppers’s execution as something that should be just finished quickly, not savored. Led has learned that the worst part of an execution is its effect on the executioner. Demeisen knows as much—at least in theory; however, he endorses her decision after the fact, only after she has figured it out for herself.

That’s how the Culture operates. Other organizations demand that their members fear and hate the worst in themselves; the Culture invites people to discover the best in themselves. That’s how Banks operates too. Typically, his fiction sets up reader expectations that dreadfulness will be resoundingly destroyed then actually reaches a more moderate, believable yet somehow anticlimactic conclusion. This disconnect between what readers expect and what we get encourages us to reexamine our extreme and self-contradictory attitudes toward what we hate.

Banks has been doing this for quite some time. The Wasp Factory (1984), his first published novel, features a narrator who has murdered two cousins and a younger brother, remarking now that “It was just a stage I was going through” (42). Observing how he has gone on to torture animals and insects, readers are repelled, but we have read enough fiction to know what to expect. Surely the narrator deserves to be severely punished! Obviously, his brother, Eric, making his way home after escaping from a mental hospital, will be the righteous agent of vengeance! Then, instead of teaching the narrator the lesson that readers are waiting for, the plot makes a daring, dizzying turn that does not excuse the narrator’s behavior but does force readers to see her differently. Instead of being able to say “good riddance,” readers must remain in the narrator’s disturbing company. This left some early readers not only uncomfortable but outraged. Rob Latham’s Dictionary of Literary Biography essay on Banks quotes reviews that called the novel an “‘elaboration of cruel fantasy’” and “‘the literary equivalent of the nastiest brand of juvenile delinquency’” (66). Evidently some critics do believe that we need the threat of punishment of keep us in line. As a philosophical interrogator smugly remarks in Banks’s later novel, Transition (2009), for example, “Fear of being tortured can be a highly effective technique for maintaining law and order in a society and I believe that we would be in dereliction of our duty if we did not do our bit” (80).

The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), the latest and sadly last Culture novel, continues Banks’s exploration of these concerns and his determination to move readers past our easy expectations of “justice” and “punishment.” As one entire civilization prepares to leave this level of existence and enter the Sublime, the Culture investigates the possibility that the decision may be based on lies. Readers learn that, indeed, the information is false, and we follow the unscrupulous actions of the man who is maintaining the falsehood to enshrine his own glory. And so we expect the deception to be exposed, the rush to the Sublime to be halted, and the villain punished. Again, however, that doesn’t happen. The Culture realizes that entering the Sublime may or may not be desirable but concludes that it doesn’t have the right to interfere with the choice, however misinformed it was. So the villain is allowed to enter the Sublime along with the other members of his civilization, fully aware of his own moral corruption but publically unshamed.

Left behind, however, is Vvr Cossont, the Culture’s chief investigator, who for better or worse is now free to try anything she can imagine without her people’s support but also without the accompanying obligations. Just so, the narrator of The Wasp Factory is left facing an uncertain but less constricted future. And Ledeje Y’breq will get to choose her amusements for herself. All these characters have endured a discomforting moral surprise and survived. So have the readers. Like the characters, we have learned to live with the result. We are left with something potentially “better” than we thought we wanted. The novels’ conclusions are less extravagantly satisfying than we expected, as the people involved have wound up more personally restrained but perhaps less constrained by patterns of anticipation. All of us have learned that patterns are as much barriers as they are guides. That means we should be able to abandon torture, reexamine our need for revenge, and try to determine the purpose and limits of real justice.

If we can believe that individuals can change, we may be able to accept Banks’s assertion that, after the destruction of the virtual Hells that Veppers was storing, the civilizations that still operate Hells realize that their behavior is somehow improper, so that the remaining Hells are shut down. Although this realization appears to be spontaneous, it makes the Culture “very happy” (623). The kind of freedom from systemic dread/hate that the Culture provides doesn’t always and inevitably lead to healthy personal liberation; it’s impossible to imagine Led and Veppers in a group sitting around a campfire, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” But the Culture still provides the most likely place for humans to discover their least vicious, most generous tendencies. Readers should share the Culture’s happiness—and wonder why their own lives are less bright.

In one of Banks’s non-sf novels, The Steep Approach to Garbodale (2007), troubled young Alban McGill realizes that he can’t achieve his immature, romantic dream but still reaches some balanced happiness by realizing that “[s]ome hopes and ambitions were manifest only as a direction, not a destination. Maybe the trick was to realize you were involved in a process, not aiming at a completely achievable end result, and accept that, but travel hopefully anyway” (365). People in Banks’s Culture are free to come to the same conclusion. Their actual physical makeup doesn’t matter. Vvr Cossont has four arms, Led and Veppers are potbellied and hunchbacked, and the professor and legislator in Surface Detail are quadrupeds with prehensile trunks. That doesn’t matter; they all are capable of love, hate, and nasty faculty meetings, which means they are essentially human. And Banks insists that humans can sometimes, despite great difficulty and uncertain prospects, learn to change their behavior.

Readers are left, in short, with hope, an invitation to travel hopefully forward.

Anyone who expects more reassurance than that from a science fiction novel has been reading too much science fiction.

Joe Sanders lives in Mentor, Ohio.

Works Cited

- Banks, Iain. The Steep Approach to Garbodale. London: Abacus, 2008.

- ——. Transition. New York: Orbit, 1998.

- ——. The Wasp Factory (1984). New York: Scribner, 1998.

- Banks, Iain M. The Hydrogen Sonata. London: Orbit, 2012.

- ——. Surface Detail. New York: Orbit, 2010.

- Latham, Rob. “Iain Banks.” In British Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers Since 1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 261. Detroit: Thompson/Gale. 2002.

- Python, Monty. The Life of Brian. Handmade Films, 1979. Quoted from <montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Life_of_Brian/10.htm>, accessed 30 April 2014.

Brendan Byrne
William Gibson and The Anxiety of E-Mail

Cayce Pollard, the protagonist of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) as well as the closest thing the post-9/11 creative class has to a Holden Caulfield, is a regular at a small online forum called Fetish:Footage:Forum (F:F:F), “one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar cafe that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.” This, despite the fact that she finds the experience “like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counter-purposes, deter her.” Though over a decade old, these two lines go further toward evoking the experience of contemporary mediated communication than the howling majority of the fiction of the last decade, despite the disparity in tech.

Though Cayce is obsessive in her attention to the anonymous footage which is the impetus for F:F:F’s existence, the only place where the online and offline overlap at the beginning of the novel is her psyche. Employed by a weaponized boutique marketing agency, Cayce seeks the maker of the footage in the real world. As Cayce shifts geographies, interacts in real life with other members of F:F:F, and the mainstream begins to appropriate their shared obsession, the novel describes “the universe of F:F:F ... [m]anifesting physically in the world”.

The footage, and its maker, are another expression of the quintessential Gibson sought-object around which all of his plots circle. This is an anti-MacGuffin, which is the opposite of Adorno’s “something unique that no-one wants to buy”, yet fulfills the same function, being so impossibly new that it, too, “represents, even against [its] will, freedom from exchange.” As Veronica Hollinger observed in “Stories about the Future,” “The ‘typical’ Gibson novel introduces the possibility of profound change ... transformation implied in some radical technological event—and then breaks off as if unable to envisage what comes next ...” (461). In Pattern Recognition, the seeking of this sought-object overlays the real world with the digital. As smartphones were not readily available until 2007 with the launch of the first iPhone (though having a prehistory going back to the 1970s), this is terraforming via eruption: seduction, both physical and corporate, and acts of violence escalating from the defacing of Cayce’s prized vintage jacket, to an attempted mugging, then further.

Lacking smartphone or tablet to access F:F:F, Cayce’s access of the forum is presented as immersive, yet her relationship with e-mail mirrors our own multiplicity of new media. Short, private bursts from fellow denizens of F:F:F are returned almost immediately (and when not, this is commented on). Long missives from a friend on an expedition read like something out of a nineteenth century novel. Relative lack of access to the Internet drives said friend to write so as to convey experience rather than to transmit actionable-information or seek emotional support; a reply is almost unnecessary. Then there is the e-mail from Cayce’s mother titled “HELLO???” which she does not read, despite being “a mouse-click away from opening” it. Gibson doesn’t linger on the episode but allows Cayce’s emotional triaging to color the proceedings. A similarly unconscious Cayce e-mail response, an immediate reply to a business partner, signals a romantic interest she is trying to keep from herself. One of the more trenchant observations on the form comes via a memory of her absent father: “The restraint of pen and tongue that Win always advised is difficult to maintain in a medium that involves neither.”

As if fulfilling this warning, it is the act of composing an e-mail that hich shows Cayce most nakedly. Having acquired what might be the footage maker’s e-mail, Cayce has looked up “the person responsible (whatever that might mean) for the domain” and gotten a street address in Cyprus. Beyond this, the recipient is anonymous, yet Cayce almost immediately addresses a topic she has otherwise avoided, writing, “My father disappeared on September 11, 2001, in New York, but we haven’t been able to prove he was killed in the attack.... I can’t tell you why, but [the footage] became very important to me.” The connection between her father’s absence and her obsession with the footage has never been made more explicit. Gibson underscores this with, “All through that winter ... she’d gone to F:F:F—to give herself to the dream.”

Before signing off with the confused old media/new media combination of “Sincerely yours,/ Cayce Pollard” and “(CayceP)”, Cayce ends with a series of questions:

What I want to ask you is
Who are you?
Where are you?
Are you dreaming?

Cayce has preemptively answered her own questions by opening with, “My name is Cayce Pollard. I’m sitting on the grass in a park in London.” and later implying that she might agree with fellow footage-head Parkaboy’s assertion that the maker is “[d]reaming for us.”

Then a final question:

Are you there? The way I’m here?

This question cuts across the histories of metaphysics and media and is defiantly unanswerable. Cayce would previously end the letters her therapist had her write with questions. Though her therapist “had thought the letters Cayce most needed to write wouldn’t end in question marks,” this final question seems to access a submerged part of Cayce, the part which is drawn to the footage beyond sheerly a reaction to trauma.

Cayce types in the address “as though she would actually send it.... And of course she doesn’t. And watches as it sends.” Controlled briefly by a “[c]onvergence of something ... in some part of herself she can’t access,” Cayce has performed an action which, because of the medium, is impossible to reverse.

Then:

Automatically, she checks for mail.

Timing out, empty.

A woman jogs past, crunching gravel, breathing like a piston.

The ubiquitous reflexive, anxious check of e-mail creates disappointment, and so Cayce is released back into the world of physicality: the motion of the jogger, the distinct sounds she generates. The real world is still there, empty, waiting to be filled.

Brendan Byrne lives in Queens, New York.

Works Cited

- Hollinger, Veronica. “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Nov. 2006).

In the Company of Thieves by Kage Baker
reviewed by Michael Levy

San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2013; $15.95 tpb; 336 pages

When Kage Baker died from uterine cancer at the age of 57 on January 31, 2010, she left behind a large number of heartbroken fans along with a legacy of some twenty novels and novellas, two published short story collections, and a number of unfinished pieces which are now being completed by her sister and life-long (though never bylined) collaborator, Kathleen Bartholomew. Baker’s third collection, In the Company of Thieves, brings together one short story, two novelettes, and three novellas (perhaps her favorite length), including the Nebula Award–winning “The Women of Nell Gwynne’s,” which is also the inspiration for the book’s beautiful Tom Canty cover.

The first piece in the collection, the oddly named short story “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park,” made its initial, posthumous appearance in 2012. It’s part of Baker’s long-running Company series about immortal cyborgs, some of them thousands of years old, who work for Dr. Zeus, a far-future company that preserves valuable works of art and other rare items in order to save them from destruction and also sell them for a tidy profit in the future. The story is narrated by Ezra, who, as a child in mid-nineteenth century San Francisco, underwent the cyborg process with unfortunate results. Although now immortal, he has an affliction very much like autism, which makes it almost impossible for him to interact with other people. Since he can’t do the work cyborgs normally do, Dr. Zeus’s operatives consider putting him in “storage” but instead set him up as a sort of biological camera, recording the gradual changes in the city’s architecture and landscape as the decades pass. Ezra is particularly drawn to the beautiful (and quite real, though now largely destroyed) Sutro Park, which was created by Adolph Sutro, an eccentric nineteenth-century philanthropist and mayor. While still alive, Sutro opened the park to the public so everyone could enjoy the elaborately designed flower beds (which look like tapestries or carpets) as well as the statuary and other landscaping. Ezra is also attracted to a mortal woman who seems obsessed by the park and paints her repeatedly over the course of her lifetime. She is politically involved in preserving the park and for her actions eventually gains a reputation as a crank with San Francisco’s city planners. Although he never speaks to the woman (he isn’t capable of that), Ezra records her entire life in the park and, eventually, when she dies there of cancer, creates a sort of virtual reality memorial to her in which she, or at least Ezra’s version of her, is able to live forever in a sort of highlights version of the gardens. This is a beautifully written tale, Baker at her most literary.

The second story, the relatively minor novelette, “The Unfortunate Gytt,” from 2005 is one of only two non-Company pieces in the book, and is set in the steampunk alternate nineteenth-century England of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, a much smaller-scale secret operation than Dr. Zeus, but one that, in Baker’s hands, finds plenty of room for both adventure and zany technology. It is told from the viewpoint of a supercilious metallurgist, Mr. Marsh, who is inducted into the group in an elaborate and rather melodramatic secret ceremony that borders, as Baker’s stories occasionally do, on parody. March, who doesn’t see the humor at all, then discovers that the members of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society are in deadly earnest. Their purpose is to work together outside the restraints imposed by law and business concerns, to create new and valuable technology, and then to channel that technology and historical events in general in ways that are in fact good for both England and the world. This is far from a new idea, of course; many writers, most notably James Blaylock, have done similar things, but Baker nonetheless brings her mildly steampunk world to vibrant life. Although Marsh is the viewpoint character, the actual hero of the story is Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, a super-competent but gentlemanly secret agent, and much of the story takes place in and around Rosslyn Chapel, that mysterious and absolutely wonderful church on the outskirts of Edinburgh which has been connected to the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, and a zillion conspiracy theories even before its appearance in The Da Vinci Code.

Next comes Baker’s 2009 classic, “The Women of Nell Gwynne’s.” The tale, set in England in 1844, centers on an educated and intelligent woman known only as Lady Beatrice, who, on her own and without prospects, finds herself recruited to become an upscale whore at the eponymous brothel located on Birdcage Walk in Westminster, just off of St. James Park. Nell Gwynne’s is a very ritzy and very confidential place with only the most skilled and beautiful prostitutes, many of whom seem to specialize in various forms of BDSM, and its primary clientele are Members of Parliament, upper-level government officials, and the like. Unbeknownst to most of that clientele, however, the women of Nell Gwynne’s, led by their intrepid, ostensibly blind proprietress, Mrs. Corvey, secretly work for the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, using their access to important men when they are most off guard to wheedle out state secrets and take daguerreotypes of anyone the Society feels may eventually need blackmailing—always for the greater good of the Empire, of course. Examples of the Society’s technological prowess were on display in “The Unfortunate Gytt” but particularly notable in “Nell Gwynne’s” are Mrs. Corvey’s mechanical eyes, a Society product built from tiny lenses, wires, and gears, which have not only given her back her sight but also allow her to see in the dark and at a great distance.

The first part of the novella concerns Lady Beatrice’s getting to know the other prostitutes at Nell Gwyne’s while proving herself to be both a talented whore and a resourceful spy. Eventually she, Mrs. Corvey, and three sisters, the Misses Devere, are sent by the Society to be the primary entertainment at the ancestral country estate of the rather decadent Lord Basmond, who is about to sell a secret invention (an antigravity machine, as it turns out) to the highest international bidder. The women must stop the sale, recover the invention, and look into the whereabouts of the Society’s own secret agent, who has gone missing on the estate and is presumed dead or captured. It is also assumed that Lady Beatrice and the others will screw, fellate, dominate, or murder the Lord and as many of his guests as is necessary to succeed in their mission. There’s obviously a lot of sex in the story, but it isn’t all that specific, and the women’s rather off-handed, ho-hum attitude towards that part of their jobs intentionally robs it of any real erotic excitement. Indeed, the entire story is told in a delicately arch manner that subtly makes fun of all of the male characters, even the members of the Society itself. I’m not entirely sure how this story would have been received if it had been written by a male writer, but in Baker’s hands it is a resounding success.

Returning to the world of the Company, although neither it nor Dr. Zeus are ever mentioned, is the long novella, “Mother Aegypt,” from 2004. The story is set somewhere in Eastern Europe (north of the Danube, we’re told) in a time that is obviously premodern (if there are more specific temporal cues, I’ve missed them). The narrator, Golescu, is a mountebank, womanizer, and compulsive liar. Although something of a fool and an egotist, he’s obviously well educated. He claims to be of noble upbringing though there’s no way to know whether or not his story is true since he lies about everything. Golescu is quick to use others without conscience and may well be a sociopath. As the story opens, he’s on the run from people he’s presumably conned. Looking ridiculous as he wheezes down the road in a big-breasted, female clown suit for reasons never entirely explained, he takes cover in one of a pair of wagons, each painted “black as the robe of scythe-bearing Death” (129), which bear “in curious antiquated letters” the words “Mother Aegypt.” The inhabitants of the two wagons, we discover, are Emil, an intensely photophobic autist, and the eponymous Mother Aegypt, who travel the European countryside seemingly at random, gathering various examples of material culture, works of art, old swords, canes, and so forth for reasons that Golescu never figures out, while also eking out a living as, in his professional opinion, a not particularly successful or crowd-pleasing fortuneteller. Mother Aegypt, who has the body of a young and attractive woman but a face that seems at once ancient and timeless, is intensely secretive and seems to be, although the conman is too self-centered to notice, deeply depressed.

Only gradually will the reader realize that Mother Aegypt is in fact one of the Company’s immortal cyborgs (though, again, the story gives no specific references to the series). Although she agrees to let Golescu travel with her to look after Emil, she periodically leaves them, disappearing with all of the artifacts she’s collected, presumably to cache them somewhere safe to be rediscovered in the far future for the Company’s profit. While caring for Emil, who may also be a failed Immortal like Ezra in “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park,” Golescu discovers that the autist can perform a variety of savant tasks such as instantly knowing how many peas are in a jar, and he soon begins to exploit Emil’s talents in a series of cons. He also discovers, however, that Emil has other, even more unbelievable abilities. For example, when Golescu brews up a vat of fake medicine designed to make chickens’ eggs look richer (it’s just yellow dye), Emil adds a few chemicals of his own and suddenly we’re in Food of the Gods territory with giant poultry marauding across the countryside. Emil also mentions his periodic concocting of the Black Cup, which Golescue assumes, wrongly, is the source of Mother Aegypt’s immortality. Eventually, the conman convinces himself that he’s in love with the woman and that she secretly returns his favor. A spectacular climax occurs after Golescu convinces the immortal woman to eat a box of fancy chocolates. As fans of the Company series might guess, this turns out to be a very bad idea. Although the story is at times rather dark, it is perhaps no surprise to discover, as Kathleen Bartholomew in her story notes says, “Kage laughed out loud the whole time she was writing” “Mother Aegypt.”

The last two pieces in the book are Company tales set in Hollywood, where Baker grew up and about which she wrote a number of stories and novels set over a period of several centuries. The novella “Rude Mechanicals,” first published in 2007, centers on two of her reappearing cyborg characters, the somewhat OCD worrywart, Lewis, and his devil-may-care, action-oriented friend Joseph, both of whom are thousands of years old. It’s 1934, and Lewis has been assigned to preserve the promptbooks and production notes of the great European stage director, Max Reinhardt, who has come to America to escape the Nazis and direct an extravagant live version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the outdoor Hollywood Bowl. The 1935 film version of Reinhardt’s production starred James Cagney, a badly miscast Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown, and Victory Jory, though only Rooney and de Havilland took part in the original Hollywood Bowl version. Joseph is involved in his own project tracing the whereabouts of a gigantic lost diamond, and he wants Lewis to get him a job on the set of the production because he believes that the gem is secretly buried near the Bowl. There’s some wonderful stuff here about Hollywood in the 1930s and about Reinhardt and his work—the great director is treated with complete respect—but mostly this is Baker’s sf version of a madcap 1930s comedy with real but minor actors of the period behaving badly while Lewis and Joseph go to extraordinary and sometimes hilarious lengths to catch up with the diamond. This MacGuffin, in turn, keeps getting handed off in a wild series of exchanges by people who have no idea what they’ve gotten hold of. Essentially “Rude Mechanicals” is a lightweight piece of froth, but as science fiction froth goes, it’s very well done. Only Connie Willis does this kind of thing as well as Baker does.

The final tale, the novelette, “Hollywood Ikons,” appears here for the first time, the second posthumous collaboration between Baker and Bartholomew to see print. As such, it holds up quite well. Narrated by the always ebullient Joseph and set in 1943, it concerns his adventures at a time when his cover job involved working as a studio detective assigned to keep the oft philandering Spencer Tracy out of trouble (Tracy’s lover, Ingrid Bergman, can’t stand Joseph, he tells us). Other than Tracy’s sex life, Joseph’s biggest problem appears to be the ever-fussy Lewis, who insists on moving in with him because Lewis’s apartment has a plague of rats and the landlord is being slow to deal with it. This, of course, gives us a bit of an Odd Couple vibe right off the bat. However, we quickly synch into what might be a reference to Monty Python’s “Killer Joke” skit when Joseph is assigned to hunt down a set of killer religious icons from ancient Constantinople, paintings done in such way that they are (for scientific reasons, of course!) deadly to any mortal who looks at them. Somehow these death-dealing religious artifacts have ended up in Hollywood, and our intrepid Joseph must hunt them down with the help of Lewis and one Slick Mick, an immortal gone bad who has become a hopelessly addle-brained chocolate addict (see “Mother Aegypt”). Then they must deal with their orders from Dr. Zeus to, rather unbelievably, send the icons on to the Nazis. Moral issues are invoked. Are the cyborgs merely tools of their far-future masters or do they have free will? Can they keep Hitler from getting the deadly art works? And how does all of this tie in with the rats in Lewis’s apartment?

Many of Baker’s key preoccupations are on display in this enjoyable collection: the detailed evocation of the past, particularly though not exclusively the California past, through diamond-sharp references to real but eccentric places and people; the odd but invariably effective mixture of serious, sometimes very dark action with humor that can veer between screwball comedy and outright parody; secret societies and the secret histories they engender; the question of what immortals might actually be like and how they might deal or fail to deal with all of the time on their hands. Combine these themes and others with sharp writing, well-developed characters, and a particularly strong sense of who should narrate or focalize each tale, and what we end up with is excellence. Wrap it up in another beautiful Tachyon Publications package, and what’s not to like? This book will make long-time fans very happy and, as is Bartholomew’s stated intent, should attract new readers to Kage Baker’s work as well.

Michael Levy is currently confined to a wheelchair after a close encounter of a surgical kind. Needless to say, he’s really grouchy and very much appreciated having this book to review.

Photos

NYRSF at Play: Bernadette L. Bosky and Arthur D. Hlavaty at the court of Peter Straub, ICFA 35 (March 2014).

The dashing Steve Erikson and the dramatic Jen Gunnels, to the nines. ICFA 35 (March 2014).

Editorial
Shameless Self-Promotion

I’m writing this in mid-May, with fairly high confidence that you will have it in your hot electronic hands well before the end of the month. Huzzah for being on schedule! I expect the June issue will also be on time. July might slip because of convention season (see below), but not, I hope, by much, and then August and beyond should all be well under control.

I talk a lot about hitting and missing our schedule, because that’s one of the things David Hartwell drummed into me: once a monthly magazine starts getting cavalier about its deadlines, it stops being monthly, then stops being bi-monthly, then stops being quarterly, then stops being. Our schedule is a promise not just for this month, but for all months to come.

Our Back Pages

Periodically I like to remind people that (pretty much) our entire run is still available. We have paper copies of the first 24 years of NYRSF available at a new bargain price: $3/issue for any issue of your choice; if you order more than 5 issues, the price drops to $2 each, and 100 or more paper issues of your choice are only $1 each! You can also get our grab bags, sets of 40 unique, random, irreplaceable issues for $20, 60 issues for $30, or 80 for $40. E-mail nyrsf.payments@gmail.com for more information. Take a look at our index <bit.ly/NYRSFIndex> and I’m sure you find something that piques your interest.

More recent back issues—volume 24 and up, from September 2011 onward—are also available through Weightless Books for a mere $2.99 each in the standard array of formats—epub and Mobi for e-readers, PDF for large-screen readers or for printing out. You can find those at <bit.ly/NYRSFIssues>, and they’re included in the Index as well.

And for those who want shiny printed copies, all of volume 24 and up are available as print-on-demand double issues from Lulu.com at <bit.ly/NYRSFLulu>.

Lights of Other Browsers

Another point that I don’t hit nearly often enough is that www.NYRSF.com is once again a going concern. Every issue, we post 3 or 4 articles from the issue on the site, with comments enabled (with screening and moderation), along with a full table of contents and this very selfsame editorial. Go check it out!

I also mention this periodically: The best ways to keep up with us online are through the NYRSF Facebook page (facebook.com/NYRSF) and the NYRSF Twitter feed, @nyrsf. In addition to new issue announcements and updates to the web site, we post/tweet things that we think are cool. And you like cool things or you wouldn’t be reading this.

Can’t Forget the Motor City

For me, the highlight of July is definitely going to be DetCon 1, the 2014 NASFiC (North American Science Fiction and Fantasy and All That Cool Stuff Convention), at which my wife, our husband, and I will be the joint Fan Guests of Honor. You can read more about us here <detcon1.org/coming/guests-of-honor/#BoskyHlavatyMaroney>, but basically we’re a group of fannish writerly types who have somehow managed to make an odd-numbered marriage for the past 22 years. Arthur and Bernadette are fascinating people, and I can talk for a long time about stuff and things, so you should come and see us and all the other wonderful members of the convention. The other Guest of Honor are Steven Barnes, John Picacio, Helen Greiner, Bill Sutton, Brenda Sutton, Nnedi Okorafor, and Jon Davis, so it will be splendid. Detroit, July 17–20. See you there!

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors

Table of Contents

- The New York Review of Science Fiction

- Contents

- Amy J. Ransom: The New French SF: The Imaginary Worlds of Jean-Claude Dunyach

- Barbara Bengels: Writing Outside the Box: Advice from Science Fiction Writers about Nurturing Gifted Children—and Their Writing

- Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Remembering Jody Scott

- Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas by Bradley Denton, reviewed by Don Webb

- Mark von Schlegell: The Great Jack Vance

- Joe Sanders: The Emperor of I Scream: Torture, Revenge, Justice, and Hope in Iain M. Banks’s Surface Detail

- Brendan Byrne: William Gibson and The Anxiety of E-Mail

- In the Company of Thieves by Kage Baker, reviewed by Michael Levy

- Photos

- Editorial: Shameless Self-Promotion