Not too long ago I bought a book bundle offer at an online auction to help Vera Nazarian, and received a generous stack of classic (and not so classic) science fiction from the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s. Some I’d read before, some I hadn’t, and some, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if I read when I was a kid or not. Here's my thoughts on some of them.


Worlds of the Imperium, Keith Laumer.

A fast-paced parallel universe caper, in which the protagonist is kidnapped from an Earth that appears to be our own by agents from a universe where science has found a way to navigate the various world-lines in order to assassinate a dangerous warlord from yet another world-line. It’s a fairly straight forward spy caper, and a very quick read. Like so many genre novels of the era, the only woman character is a “love interest” for the hero – she’s portrayed as intelligent, brave and beautiful, but does little of substance beyond serving as a compensatory “reward” for the hero, torn from his own world to save another.


Phase IV, Barry N Malzberg.

An alien influence provokes accelerated evolution among a colony of ants somewhere in Arizona. Soon the ants are on the move, destroying homes in a “planned community” being built in the region. The area is evacuated, scientists arrive to investigate.

Much of the novel is a science fictional reworking of Carl Stephenson's famous short story "Leiningen versus the Ants" – only the ants have developed a form of intelligence and the ability to adapt rapidly to threats, and they have a purpose, not just a blind instinct to follow. And that changes the ending completely.


Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein juveniles. It’s a classic reversal of fortune story, complete with an ironic justice payoff – the victim of interstellar slave traders turns out to be one person most suited to track interstellar slavery to its very roots and eradicate it.

There is some wonderful worldbuilding in the section that’s set among the Free Traders, to say nothing of a consciousness of power relations between the sexes that to some extent belies the accusations of sexism that are frequently levelled against Heinlein. In Free Trader society, the conscious separation of a person’s roles within the Family and the Ship produces a culture in which each person’s abilities are acknowledged and used – meaning that men and women work together at the jobs they do best – but at the same time, everyone follows strict gender roles as members of the Ship’s Family – roles that are obviously constructed as a response to the social needs of a people divided into small clans that must practice exogamy to avoid the risks of inbreeding.

My main quibble with the book is that it ends far too quickly – just as the protagonist Thorby has just begun the task that all of his history has prepared him for.


Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein

The first Heinlein juvenile, this reads more like a “boy’s own” adventure than just happens to involve rockets than a science fiction novel. The plot is simple – a group of boy scientists find a mentor, decide to build a rocket that will take them to the moon, and in the process, foil the evil intentions of Nazi space pirates (this are not nearly as cool as it sounds).

What bothers me is the basic set-up of the story. From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK. This rather spoiled my appreciation of what is a slender and formulaic tale to begin with.

However, one nice touch is the inclusion of a Jewish boy as one of the junior scientists, and he turns out to be the one most suited to be the co-pilot (creepy scientist is of course Captain and pilot), which gives him at times some opportunities to be heroic.


Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein

I liked this when I first read it, and I still like it. Sure, it’s basically a very thin adventure fantasy/RPG/arcade game plot, namely, the Quest for the McGuffin. Hero and party overcome obstacles of increasing difficulty on the path to the McGuffin, overcome the Big Boss who guards the McGuffin, take the McGuffin back to its proper place, then hero marries princess.

And it features three of Heinlein’s favourite characters: the super competent, super beautiful woman; the curmudgeonly old geezer who’s been there and back and knows it all; and the straight-as-an-arrow young man who is about to learn what the world is really all about.

But as one of Heinlein’s rare forays into fantasy, it’s interesting, and it does answer the one question that not too many writers of standard adventure fantasy ever get around to answering – what happens after the plough-boy cum hero settles down with the princess? And at least the princess in this case isn’t just the bait, er, reward for the successful hero, she’s part and parcel of the mission, from planning to execution and she decides whether she’s also part of the hero’s reward.

In that sense, it’s a lot better than a fair number of others of its ilk.


Earth Unaware, Mack Reynolds

If ever a cover was not just totally disconnected from the actual contents, setting and plot of a book, but wrong in every respect, it would have to be the cover of Belmont Books’ May 1968 edition of Mack Reynolds’ Earth Unaware (originally titled Of Godlike Power).

The cover features a muscled, nearly nude barbarian warrior with flowing blond locks and a fluffy loincloth. Clinging to his arm is a red-haired woman with ample breasts, hips and thighs, wearing something dark and vaguely furry that covers her torso and nothing else. They seem to be standing in a cloud of low-lying yellow fog against a dark, featureless background. At their feet is something vaguely mechanical, somewhat suggestive of an abandoned futuristic oversized grenade launcher. It’s all done in an impressionistic, soft focus, pseudo-Franzetta style.

The book itself is a modern speculative fantasy set in a North America not too far advance from the date of writing, in which increasing capacity for the mass production of consumer goods has led to the (once expected and highly anticipated) leisure society, where material abundance and technological advances have resulted in increasingly shorter work-weeks and a massive demand for popular entertainment. The protagonist is Ed Wonder, the host of a radio show that features interviews with people who claim to be reincarnations of Alexander the Great, or to have been taught a new philosophy of life by aliens from Jupiter.

Then Ed and his friends, socialite Helen Fontaine and newspaper columnist Buzz De Kemp find the real deal among all the stories of somewhat questionable veracity – a travelling preacher who advocates an end to consumerism and profligate wasting of natural resources, calling for a return to a simpler way of life, who has the power to change the world with the over-heated Biblical style curses he utters in the heat of anger or passion for his view of how people should live.

The first major manifestation of this comes when Ed and Helen visit one of the preacher’s tent-revival-like meetings. Helen interrupts his sermon on the wastefulness of modern society, provoking his anger – which results in a curse on the vanity of women. Ed and Helen leave the meeting, but before the evening is out, Helen finds herself driven to wash off her makeup and comb out her high-society hairstyle. The next morning, Ed (and the world) discovers that women everywhere are avoiding cosmetics and anything else that might enhance their appearance, choosing functional clothing and wearing their hair au naturel. And only Ed and Helen can even being to figure out why.

So, no, no barbarians, blond or babe-like, but an interesting satire-cum-thought experiment. I’d read some of Reynolds’ other books when I was younger, and I found this as enjoyable in its own way as my memories of his other books.

The Black Flame
Rifkind’s Challenge

Some months ago, I re-read Daughter of the Bright Moon, the first of two books written in the late 1970s by Lynn Abbey, about Rifkind, a priestess/healer/warrior of the nomadic Asheera, and enjoyed it just as much as I had 30-odd years ago.

So naturally I had to re-read the second book, The Black Flame, and of course I had to follow that with Rifkind’s Challenge, the recently published third volume of the tale of Goddess-touched healer and warrior, which takes up the story some 15 years after the end of the second volume.

The Black Flame is a rousing sword and sorcery adventure and a doomed romance, one that takes the hero Rifkind through some profound emotional changes. At the end of the novel, she returns to her homeland, gives up her warrior ways, and accepts a role among her people as a healer.

Rifkind’s Challenge finds her once more prepared to leave her people, summoned by dreams of old companions from the adventures of her younger days. Abbey has matured as a writer, and her central character has matured as well, making this third adventure even better than the first two.

And the ending seems to contain a set-up for yet another adventure for Rifkind, so I’ll be keeping my eyes open to see if Abbey does have more plans for this character.

I've been reading science fiction (and what was, in my youth, its upstart cousin, fantasy) for going on half a century now - the first book I can remember buying off the grocery store paperback carousel was James Schmitz's Agent of Vega (The PermaBooks 1962 edition - I can still see the cover in my mind), and odds are that was not the first science fiction book I'd read.

In that time, I've built and sold or given away at least a dozen complete libraries of SFF titles - my life was for many years an unsettled one. But now that I've become a home owner, and have many walls that can be lined with books, it's my ambition to recreate all the libraries I've owned - or at least, all the best parts of them.

So I've given my partner a long list of SFF books I want to own once more, and every once in a while he finds himself in a used bookstore and buys several of the titles off that list.

AS it happens, there's been some of these re-acquired books hanging around in the to-be-read pile, and this past week I decided it was time to read them all.


Double Star, Robert Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein novels - probably because of the combination of the craft of acting displayed by the main character and the plot focusing on political intrigue. To me, there's still something profoundly engaging - and yet, upon re-reading, profoundly disturbing - about this portrayal of how one person comes to surrender not only his future, but his identity, for a cause. It's an interesting mediation on the idea of personal sacrifice for the common good and the processes that lead one to commit to such sacrifices.

We see Lorenzo as a tragic hero, because Heinlein presents the cause he comes to champion as a just one. But one must also look at the process Lorenzo undergoes here - a traumatic separation from everyday life, enforced isolation from everything familiar, deep immersion in a specific political viewpoint, being surrounded with people who strongly espouse this viewpoint and stress the importance of the task he has been recruited for in such a problematical way... it's the same set of techniques used in cults, in military basic training camps, in fundamentalist madrasas, in all sorts of places where one breaks down personal identity and replaces it with devotion to a cause or an organisation.

And in the end, Lorenzo has vanished and the person he has become doesn't even think all that highly of who he once was, satisfied that the ends have more than justified the means.


Beyond This Horizon, Robert Heinlein

One of Heinlein's quirkiest and least focused novels, I've always thought. We have some of the classic and contradictory elements of a Heinlein future - societies where the libertarian idea of arming everyone and allowing private duels to settle personal conflicts co-exists with the profound degree of social control necessary for the acceptance of a world-wide genetic breeding program. We have an attempted revolution by Luddite-inspired neo-facists (complete with plans to eliminate the inferior races - in this case, people who have not been part of the government breeding program), a love story between a man who doesn't want to further his carefully designed genetic heritage and the woman chosen by the agents of the state as his ideal genetic counterpart, numerous paeans to rationality and the wonders of science, a quest for the truth behind paranormal ideas such as reincarnation and telepathy, and a seemingly socialist political and economic system in which a well-run centralised state produces higher and higher citizen living allowances and excess production that can be used for just about any hair-brained scheme that comes to mind, as long as it can be argued to be in the interests of science, the people, or something else noble and iconic.

It's fun to re-read, but I still have no clue, after all these years, of what Heinlein might have been trying to say on this novel. Maybe that no one ideology has a hard-and-fast hold on utopian ideas, or that no matter how utopic a civilisation my seem, there will always be people who aren't content - some who will want to destroy, and some who will want to grow in new directions? Who knows. And Heinlein isn't around to tell us.


A Case of Conscience, James Blish

Another classic that leaves me with unanswered questions, even after re-reading it again after so many years. The novel is in two parts. In the first part, a team of scientists from Earth evaluate Lithia, a newly discovered planet which is home to a technological but pre-space flight alien civilisation to determine what kind of relationship should exist between it and Earth. One of the scientists, a physicist, wants to turn the planet into a physics weapons lab because of its wealth of fissionable materials. Two others want to open it up for mutual trade. And the fourth, a Jesuit priest and biologist, has decided that it is a Satanic trap for the human conscience, a planet where all adults of the dominant species behave in the most moral of fashions even though they have no religion, no god, no revelation, no experience of sin and grace.

In the second part, the scientists return to Earth, carrying with the a gift - the carefully stored embryo of one of the Lithians. The alien grows rapidly to adulthood and, cut off from his culture, deliberately becomes a focal point for the frustrations and discontents of a vast underclass of human beings, sparking riots and threatening to create fractures in human society. Eventually he is taken prisoner and sent on his way back to Lithia. Meanwhile, the priest has come under severe criticism within the church because in his assessment of Lithia, he has fallen into the heresy of manicheanism, in granting Satan the ability to create of his own accord - an ability that must be reserved for God. However, the Pope himself suggests a way out - Satan can create illusion, which, once exorcised, will vanish. At the same time, the physicist has been given the go-ahead to create his weapons research lab on Lithia.

The climax leaves the reader with no resolution to this case of conscience. Through the offices of a convenient advance in technology, a group of scientists - including the conscience-tormented priest, watch Lithia in real time as they wait for the physicist to begin a dangerous experiment that one of the scientists on Earth has predicted will destroy the planet. As he watches, the priest decides that he must try to carry out the Pope's recommendation and begins his exorcism. The experiment, as feared, fails with devastating consequences.

Has God chosen to destroy Satan's illusion via the material tool of a scientific experiment gone awry? Or has the theological issue been a red herring all along, and the real sin here the way that a arrogant physicist has been given the opportunity to destroy an entire planet of sentient beings? Blish clearly wanted his readers to think about the interrelationships of science and religion, and the effect they have on society, for themselves.


Slan, A. E. Van Vogt

One of the classic stories about the emergence of a super race, their persecution by "ordinary" humans, and their struggle for survival and plans for and/or success in achieving benign control over all of humanity, mutant and otherwise, for the greater good of all. Scratch the surface and it's a particularly ugly justification for a fascist utopia, but at the same time, it's such a deep-seated nerdly wish fulfilment fantasy that, as a nerd myself, I can't help identifying with the orphaned slan Jommy Cross and his search for the secret slan organisation that, he believes, must exist, so that he can give them the benefit of his father's scientific discoveries in their goal of preparing to take over the world.

Fantasy is, after all, one of the places where we can imagine the things we would never want to really do.


Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Ah yes. The classic anti-censorship novel, which interpretation Bradbury recently repudiated, insisting that it's all about how bad television is for you. Well, I won't deny that there's a profound critique of the ways in which North American society has, for quite some time now, been creating dumber and dumber forms of public entertainment (it's fascinating to compare the "families" the Montag's wife is so enthralled by with the most recent forms of entertainment to hit the public airwaves, the participatory reality show where viewers can influence what happens on the show), and the effects that this may be having on society.

But if censorship is control of what people are allowed to see, then this is clearly about censorship, and what happens to people in censored societies when they realise what is being kept from them.


October Country, Ray Bradbury

In re-reading this collection of short stories, I was reminded both of how good a writer of the short form Bradbury is, and of how truly grotesque and disturbing his vision could be. There is a great deal of death and decay in these stories - suitable for the season where the weather turns cold and living things die and many cultures have their festivals of the dead. Bradbury was a master of may genres, from science fiction to horror, and this is certainly a collection of some of his finest examples of the latter.

Last night we watched the new adaptation of C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian. We were disappointed. There was so much that didn't seem right at all that I had to get the original novel from the shelf and re-read it right away, muttering to myself all along "Why did they move this around?", "Why did they cut this out?" and most importantly, "Why did they put in this freaking raid on the castle sequence that isn't in the original and doesn't make sense in the freaking movie?" It was just all wrong.

On the other hand, the book, Prince Caspian, by C. S. Lewis, was as charming as I remember it from previous multiple readings. The plot makes sense and the story unfolds without needless repetitions. (Aslan is not a Tame Lion, and I hardly think he'd bother telling Lucy in the same way twice that things that things don't happen in the same way twice - a rather amusing bit of irony that can happen all to easily when you hack up parts of a perfectly good plot and mix them in some kind of stew with your own longing for bigger and longer swords.) And the Bacchae fit right in, as Lewis knew full well, understanding that Christianity like many other religions is both Apollonian and Dionysian in nature.

About the only thing the movie did better than the book was having Susan in the middle of the melee doing double duty with short-sword and bow and giving Legolas a run for his princely money and perfectly coiffed hair, rather than just shooting lady-like arrows from afar while the boys grunt and sweat and bleed. (I always thought Lewis gave Susan a raw deal, but there are something that must be understood in the context of the time and culture, even if one must disagree with them.)

I can't remember when I first read Anya Seton's Katherine - a wonderfully rich and detailed historical novel about John of Gaunt's mistress, later wife, Katherine de Roet Swynford. It's been called Seton's masterpiece, and I dare say that's true (though I personally have a soft spot for Green Mansions, the first book of Seton's that I remember reading). It was in my early teens I think, for I was already well acquainted with the works of Katherine Swynford's brother-in-law, Geoffry Chaucer, when I read it, and my fascination with Chaucer began somewhere around the seventh Grade in school. I must admit, I first picked it up because of the Chaucer connection, but I read it avidly, cover to cover, because of the spell that Seton's portrait of Katherine cast over me.

As in Alison Weir's biographical sketches of the wives of Henry VIII (who was, of course, descended from Katherine through the "Beaufort bastards," the four children she bore to John, Duke of Lancaster), this is a picture of a woman who was, as much as was possible, a strong woman in her own right, limited in scope by the times she lived in, but enduring and achieving much within the sphere allowed her.

Recently, I've been going back and re-reading some of the historical novels that profoundly moved me when I was younger, and this was certainly one of them. I'm very happy to have read it again.

The Armageddon Rag, George R. R. Martin

I loved this book when I first read it. It was the mid-80s, and it was time for a long hard look at the 60s – the music, the dreams, the energy, the dark side, the enormous potential for change, for hope, for new ideas, but also for blind obedience and destruction. It was all there, balanced on the edge of a vibrating metal guitar string, and Martin brought it back in a book that defied genre and made it all so real you could hear the music and smell the sweat and the weed and feel the vibe in your blood and the rhythm in your bones. And it made you want it all again, and wonder where it all went, and then realise that you can’t bring back the dead and still keep moving forward, but you can keep the dream alive and growing and changing as long as you set the energy free.

Then earlier this year, Jo Walton gave the book a retrospective review over at tor.com and I knew it was time to read it again.

And it was everything I’d remembered.

Daughter of the Bright Moon, Lynn Abbey

I have long had fond memories of Abbey's two books about Rifkind, priestess and warrior, sole survivor of her tribe, a wanderer in strange lands. And now that Abbey has written a third book about Rifkind's adventures (Rifkind's Challenge,, it only seemed right to hunt down copies of the original books and re-read them before picking up the new one.

Re-reading this was a pleasure, and it brought back those pre-Xena, pre-kickass urban fantasy chick days when it wasn't all that easy to find a good story about a strong woman who takes on the worst evil you can find and survives. Plus, it's a good story, with some nice characterisation and some real humour in and among the swords and the magic.

So, one of my favourite authors from my youth is John Wyndham, and I have been trying to re-acquire and, of course, re-read, his novels. Well, Penguin Books seems to have decided to help me out with that, as they have recently re-released a number of Wyndham's classics, and so I've been adding to my collection of Wyndham.

The Chrysalids

A post-apocalyptic dystopia, set hundreds, perhaps thousands of years after a Tribulation, most likely a nuclear world war from the description of the ruined places of the earth and the key plot point of on-going outbreaks of hereditary defects among plans, animals and humans. The novel's strong point is the description of a society that polices its racial purity with extreme and religious vigour, destroying and evidence of genetic deviation among plant and animal life, and exiling (after forced sterilisation) any humans who show signs of being Other than what is prescribed as human.

The story focuses on a group of young people. outwardly completely human, who have developed - and learned to hide - telepathic abilities, and what happens to them once they are no longer able to keep their suspicious gifts a secret. The conclusion is (almost literally) a bit of a deus ex machina, and wraps everything up all too quickly without examining any of the potential problems it poses - but the close look at a society obsessed with keeping itself pure of all taint of the Other - and how those in power use the obsession to their own ends - is worth the read. Also fun is the counterpoint provided by the world-travelling sailor-uncle of the narrator, who has seen through much of the hypocrisy, deception and fear rampant in his own society and the others he has known in his travels.

Trouble with Lichen

Despite the light and breezy tone of this novel, which is often considered one of Wyndham's lesser works, it's actually an interesting novel with a profoundly feminist perspective for something written by a man in 1960.

Diana Brackley is a chemist, at her first job following graduation, when she discovers that her boss, a man she has somewhat of a hero-worshipping infatuation with, is concealing a scientific discovery. Shocked by this, she secretly repeats his discovery, realises that he has found an compund that can significantly increase life span, and decides to do something about it on her own since it seems that he won't.

Her decisions are rooted in the awareness that for women (in this pre-Pill era), life seems require a forced choice between career and motherhood - but that if only women had more time, they could do both, if they wanted too.

There's some wonderful social satire from a feminist point of view in this novel, and it's a quick and pleasant read. At times, Wyndham drops the ball in his understanding of the feminist perspective, but considering the time in which he wrote, I'm certainly not going to rag him for it (sexist metaphors intentional). There are lots of men today who couldn't see some of this as clearly as he did then.

Northwest of Earth
Jirel of Joiry

Catherine Lucille Moore, better known as C.L. Moore, was one of the few women regularly writing and getting published in the science fiction and fantasy genres during the great era of pulp fiction during the 30s and 40s. She wrote extensively, sometimes in collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner – their joint stories were often published under a pseudonyms, most notably Lawrence O’Donnell and Lewis Padgett .

In her solo writing, she created two of the greatest characters (in my not-so-humble opinion, of course) to grace the pages of the science fiction and fantasy pulps – Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry.

Northwest Smith is the quintessential mercenary, adventurer and rogue – willing to take on any job if the price is right, outside the law but grounded in his own sense of honour, smart, bold and not easily taken in, but with a certain weakness for women in distress, particularly if they are beautiful and exotic – and Northwest Smith’s worlds, where humans are newcomers, barely children among the ancient and often decadent alien races that have gone before, some of those women can be very exotic indeed.

But Northwest Smith, memorable creation that he is, was not all that different from the heroes of a good many pulp stories. To my mind, CL Moore’s best creation is the tough-as-nails, brawling warleader who makes no allowances for her gender, the unmatched warrior Jirel of Joiry. As tall and strong and as skilled with a sword as any man, Jirel was one of my earliest heroes – proud, fierce, competent, fully in command of the men who fight and if necessary die for her. Jirel was the kind of woman that no one else was writing, or would write again until a good 40 years later.

The Jirel of Joiry stories – most of them, anyway – have been available in a single volume for many years now, going in and out of print under a variety of titles, but never vanishing completely. The Northwest Smith stories have just been recently released after a hiatus of more than 50 years in a single volume containing a forward by C. J. Cherryh and a previously uncollected story, “Quest of the Starstone,” co-authored by Moore and Kuttner in which Moore’s two finest characters meet and fight side by side.

Naturally, I snapped up the new release of Northwest of Earth, and was most happy to spend several hours lost in the lush writing and fantastic tales of ancient and unknowable evils; this of course was more than enough of an excuse to pull my worn copy of Jirel of Joiry off the shelf and indulge myself further. They just don’t write like that any more – which is probably a good thing, because there is a thin line between gloriously extravagant and overblown when it comes to this style of prose. But Moore was one of the masters, and it’s good to have stories like “Shambleau” and “Black God’s Kiss” close at hand.

The Martian Chronicles
Something Wicked This Way Comes

I've been re-reading a lot of Ray Bradbury's work recently - mostly his collections of short stories, which are without question among the finest examples of the craft of the short form.

The Martian Chronicles, like several other of Bradbury's collections, seems to tell a story - overtly, about the human attempts to colonise Mars - but each story in and of itself speaks to elements of the human condition, from hope and joy to hate, suppression and fear. Re-reading the stories in this volume was like a master class in the art of distilling human existence in all its rich variety into a few pages full of words and images.

I was not as pleasantly occupied by my reading of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I don't remember reading this novel before, and I doubt that I will return to it as I have to his short stories or his classic novel Fahrenheit 451. Something Wicked This Way Comes feels like a potentially great short story drawn out to lengths that the material simply doesn't sustain. And in the drawing out, it accentuates one of the great flaws on Bradbury's work - the idea that only boys and men can have wonderful adventures and fight the great struggles against the dark. In most of his short stories, this unfortunate tendency is clear, but not generally expounded upon. Something Wicked This Way Comes is too full of observations about the nature of boys and men when confronted with the felicities and adversities of life, without any corresponding observations on what sorts of exciting and important things girls and women can do.

Ah, but those splendid short stories - that's what's worth remembering.

Antagonist, Gordon R. Dickson & David W. Wixon
The Chantry Guild, Gordon R. Dixon

Once upon a time, George R. Dickson wrote a short novel called Dorsai! (there's also a revised version called The Genetic General). The overall future he created for that novel, and the specific culture of Dorsai, captivated a lot of people, so he wrote more Dorsai novels. Then, because all the cool kids like Heinlein and Asimov were doing it, he decided to made his Dorsai novels the cornerstone of a projected, multi-volume series that traced the past and future development of the human race while at the same time expounding upon a pet theory of the forces behind human history and the evolution of civilization.

I loved the Dorsai novels when I was young, and I enjoyed many of the ones that followed, even though they got kind of weird - the main protagonist of one of the novels (Donal Graeme) goes off into deep space as an old man and reappears decades later as an infant drifting in space (Hal Mayne), while having also sent his consciousness back into time to become someone else (Paul Formain) who takes some crucial actions that make the existence of his present and future selves possible...

Anyway, Dickson's main sequence of novels - the ones involving Graeme and the other Dorsai, Formain, and finally Hal Mayne (who ends up being Dickson's version of a Kwisatz Haderach who can be in all places and times) - reaches a climax of sorts in the novel The Chantry Guild which was published in 1988. Hal Mayne and the people of Earth are under blockade and the bad guys are just about to take over the whole known universe, when Mayne reaches a profound philosophical breakthrough which is presumably going to save the day in stunning fashion. It was a great climax, but I wanted to see more - what happens after Mayne reaches his his apotheosis, how does he fix what his major opponent has done to the settled worlds beyond Earth, and what does that do for humanity?

Instead of doing what I'd hoped he would do, and continue this future history post-apotheosis, Dickson became fascinated with a character he had developed for the Hal Mayne novels, Bleys Ahrens, the antithesis to Mayne's thesis, whose own plans for domination of known space are continually thwarted by Mayne, yet whose opposition is the force that drives Mayne to reach the synthesis of becoming the first fully evolved human being. So Dickson wrote a series of novels that began with Ahrens' childhood and told the whole story from the other side. I kept reading, even though the books about Ahrens became increasingly annoying - Dickson's style deteriorated, and while sometimes telling the same story from two different perspectives can be very powerful, it helps if you can identify with all of the POV characters, and Ahrens simply isn't the sort of character you really want to identify with. Think John Galt with an interplanetary military organization and a desire to rule the universe.

Antagonist was apparently written from detailed notes left by Dickson after his death. I'd kind of hoped that it would take the story not just up to, but past, the events at the end of The Chantry Guild, but no such luck. The novel ends with Ahrens' attempt to take control of Earth, after subordinating all of the outer settled worlds - the last major confrontation they have before Mayne's timely transcendence of time and space. Nothing new, not much of interest, and Dixon, alas, is not nearly the writer that Dickson was in his prime.

So when I'd finished Antagonist, I decided to re-read The Chantry Guild, because that's where the series really ends, not with any of these Bleys Ahrens novels, and that's all there is - unless there are more notes left in the Dickson estate, and someone else with more skill on tap to turn them into the final Childe Cycle book I always hoped that Dickson would write.

In these times, when there's a new urban fantasy or supernatural romance on the shelves almost every day, and there is a recognisable format that so many of these books have adopted, it's fun to go back and re-read some of the earliest works of the genre.

Tea with the Black Dragon, by R. A. MacAvoy was written in 1983, when very little fantasy was being written that took place in contemporary times and real places. It is, like many modern urban fantasies, both a mystery adventure and a romance, but part of its charm is that the main characters are a middle-aged woman having communication problems with her daughter, and a centuries-old dragon in the form of a man who has grown tired waiting for the "master" that he was once told he was destined to meet.

It's a wonderful, charming, magical book, and it was a pleasure to read it once again.

Yeah, I’ve been reading anthologies again. Here are thumbnail comments on the most recent ones.


Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, ed. Lynne Jamneck

This was a real delight. Jamneck has put together a very satisfying volume of stories, all of which in some way look at possible futures – some welcoming, some terrifying – in which the question of desire and erotic love between women is a major element. There wasn’t a single story in the volume that I didn’t enjoy, although as always there were some that spoke to me more powerfully than others. My favourites: Nicola Griffith’s “Touching Fire” (also collected in With her Body, published by Aqueduct Press), Gwyneth Jones’ “The Voyage Out,” Kristyn Dunnion’s “They Came From Next Door,” Lyda Morehouse’s “Ishtartu,” Tracy Shellito’s “Mind Games,” Melissa Scott’s “The Rocky Side of the Sky,” Elspeth Potter’s “Silver Skin” and Sharon Wachsler’s “Sideways.”


The Future is Queer, eds. Richard LaBonté and Lawrence Schimel

This anthology, which also looks at queer futures, is not quite as solid a collection of stories as the volume edited by Jamneck. For me, the stand-out pieces were L. Timmel Duchamp’s “Obscure Relations,” a look at issues of power, identity, incest and narcissism via the practice of cloning, and Rachel Pollack’s “The Beatrix Gates,” a story of healing and love and transformations; I also enjoyed Joy Park’s “Instincts,” Candas Jane Dorsey’s “… the darkest evening of the year…” and Hiromi Goto’s “The Sleep Clinic for Troubled Souls.”


The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3, eds. Karen Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffry Smith

You know in advance that when you read a selection of winning and short-listed pieces for the James tiptree Award, you are going to be reading pure gold. And all I can say about this third volume is: What a feast! Gems from some of my favourite writers - Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Glass Bottle Trick,” Ursula LeGuin’s "Mountain Ways," Eleanor Arnason’s “Knapsack Poems,” Vonda McIntyre’s “Little Faces,” Tiptree’s own “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” a critical piece by Dorothy Allison, “The Future of Female: Octavia Butler's Mother Lode,” and an essay by L. Timmel Duchamp, “Letter to Alice Sheldon,” which discusses the perceptions held of “women authors” as compared to “authors in general. Also, the first chapter of Geoff Ryman’s Air, which I have not yet read but am not quite strongly minded to, and interesting stories by Ted Chaig, Aimee Bender and Margo Lanagan, and “shame,”an essay by Pam Noles on how Tvland treated LeGuin’s classic A Wizard of Earthsea - must reading for those who don’t already know why LeGuin (rightly so, IMO) disowned this presentation of her own work.


In the Shadow of Evil, eds. Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers

Imagine that the battle between Good and Evil is over, and Evil won. The forces of Good are out-manned, out-gunned, out-classed. Now, what kind of fantasy story would you write? That’s the question that editors Greenberg and Helfers set to the writers represented in this anthology. The answers, from such writers as Tanya Huff, Michelle West, Fiona Patton, Mickey Zucker Reichert, Julie E. Czerneda and Jane Lindskold, are in many cases both inspirational and heart-breaking.


Sword and Sorceress II, ed. Marion Zimmer Bradley

This was a re-read that I recently re-acquired because I was trying to collect all of the Dossouye stories written by Charles R. Saunders. But in going back almost to the beginning of what was a truly ground-breaking series of anthologies that helped to establish a wide and eager audience for fantasy in which women do the adventuring, took the risks and won the glory – or at least managed to do what they needed to do – I was also gifted with the pleasure of reading again so many earlier stories from writers, like Saunders, who have contributed so much to science fiction and fantasy: Vera Nazarian, Diana Paxson, Rachel Pollack, Phyllis Ann Karr, C. J. Cherryh, Charles de Lint, Jennifer Roberson, Deborah Wheeler (now writing as Deborah J. Ross). A great trip down memory lane, with some great female protagonists for company.

Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey

Daughter of Time is a fascinating blend of genres, a historical whodunnit - a bored police inspector, injured on his most recent case, and confined to a hospital bed, decides to tackle one of the great mysteries in English history: who killed - or caused to be killed - the princes in the Tower?

For those who have forgotten, or never knew, the story, the princes were the two sons of King Edward IV, last seen alive in the Tower of London in the summer of 1483, shortly after their uncle, Richard III, became king. The accession of the oldest prince, who would have been Edward V, may have been put off because of some doubt as to whether the marriage of Edward IV and their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, was legitimate, as Edward was rumoured to have been contracted to marry another woman, Eleanor Butler, at the time of his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. It's possible that, in light of this possible bastardy, and the availability of an experienced adult heir in Richard, that Richard was seen as the better choice at the time by all. Many historians have argued, however, that Richard had the princes killed to strengthen his hold on the throne.

However, by fall of 1485, Henry Tudor had invaded England and defeated Richard III in battle at Bosworth Field and claimed the throne of England by right of his descent from Edward III's son John of Gaunt and his mistress (later wife) Katherine Swynford and by right of his betrothal to Elizabeth of York - the older sister of the princes in the tower. If the princes were still alive at that time, by ensuring that Elizabeth was seen as legitimate, Henry also legitimated the two survivors of the Wars of the Roses with better claims to the throne than his - so, if they were alive, he had a powerful motive to have them killed as well.

James Tyrell, an English knight who served both Richard III and Henry VII, confessed to the murder of the princes under torture in 1501 after being arrested for treason in another matter altogether.

There is no consensus among historians as to who killed the princes - and some believe that they were not, in fact, killed at all, but either died of natural causes or were secretly removed from the Tower and sent somewhere far away.

In Daughter of Time, Tey argues persuasively - through the medium of Inspector Alan Grant and his examination of contemporary accounts and historical analyses from the perspective of an experienced homicide detective - that the evidence against Henry Tudor is much stronger than the evidence against Richard III. Whether you accept Tey's arguments or not, the novel is compelling reading both for those how enjoy historical accounts and those who enjoy a good mystery.

The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury

One of several re-reading projects I've been meaning to get around to is the short fiction of Ray Bradbury. This is the first collection I've gone back to, and after two, maybe even three decades since my last reading, it's amazing how many of these stories are ones I remember, and at the same time, ones that I get thrills and chills about all over again as if I'd never read them before.

It's a powerful collection, containing such stories as: "The Veldt" (children turn on their parents using the technology of a simulated playground), "The Other Foot" (the reaction of a Martian colony of black people driven off earth to the news that most of the remaining white people on earth have died in a world war and the survivors desperately need their help), "The Rocket Man" (a child and his mother deal with the danders faced by his father's career as a 'rocket man'), and "The Exiles" (what happens to the spirits of books and their creators when all the books are destroyed?), to mention just a few of the 18 classic short stories in this collection.

Bradbury's gift was to be able to write just enough, no more and no less, that each story was complete and full to the brim - nothing wasted, nothing missing - and to tell in this way a simple story that somehow had meaning and relevance far beyond the basic plot of the tale. A master storyteller.

The Trail of Bohu, Charles R. Saunders

This was the last published volume in the magnificent fantasy series about the hero Imaro and his quest to rid the land of Nyumbani of the evil Mashataan, demons who seek to destroy him and to rule all of Nyumbani. Saunders had several more volumes planned, but the apparent lack of interest in a black fantasy hero whose quest is set in a world based on the land and cultures of Africa has now twice cut short the telling of the tale.

The Trail of Bohu is long out of print, and used copies can be pricey, but for those who did buy and enjoy Night Shade Press' recent re-release of a revised version of Imaro and The Quest for Kush, the story doesn't end in Kush, and this was the book that showed us where Imaro would have to go to complete his quest - and that told us just who Imaro was, and why this quest was his to shoulder.

Yes, I'm bitter. Just the idea of Imaro, a black hero, travelling through an African fantasy world, was exciting when Saunders' first stories were published. In the 30-odd years since, a reader still has to hunt for fantasy that's not set in a white universe. But at least I have all the Imaro that there was.

The Tale of the Five, by Diane Duane:
The Door into Fire
The Door into Shadow
The Door into Sunset

Of all of Diane Duane’s marvellous books, Door into Fire, the first volume of Duane’s Tale of the Five, is dearest to my heart. You see, back in 1979, when it was published, I was a young queer geek who had never before read anything in her genre of choice that had, not just a queer protagonist, but one who was openly in a committed, long-term (and polyamorous!) relationship with his male lover, who lived in a world where what hadn’t yet come to be called alternative sexualities here on Earth were an accepted part of life, welcomed and cherished and supported. Heterosexuality was not privileged in this world. And I was rocked to my soul with the feeling of joy and rightness Duane’s story gave me.

Oh, I’d read books that had queers in them before. They were quietly getting on with their lives in Samuel Delany’s work, and coming out, sometimes quite fiercely, in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books, and had even popped up in a few short stories here and there, by people like Sturgeon and Farmer who liked to press all sorts of buttons anyway. And outside of genre fiction, what queer girl worth her salt hadn’t real that terrifying book of Radclyffe Hall’s, or scrounged up some lesbian pulps by Ann Banion? But I’d never read a book about a place where queer people were just like everyone else, and could be themselves, and be in love, just as happily (or not, but not because of their orientation) as anyone else. They could be heroes, and their tales could end with them living happily, and in love.

And in addition to all of that, Door into Fire and its sequels are great heroic fantasy, too, with an overarching theme that they share with Duane’s remarkable Young Wizards series, a subtle and ultimately more realistic variation on the classic battle between good and evil in which love is engaged in a long defence against despair, the fear of death and the nothingness of entropy.

I’ve heard rumours from time to time that Duane has, or had, plans to write a fourth volume, which would of course be wonderful, although the Tale has reached a comfortable resting point – complete with the genre’s best wedding ever, and I mean it – at the end of the third volume, The Door into Sunset.

But whether she does or not, the three volumes that exist now were, and are, an important part of my becoming who I am, and each time I re-read them (which I do, every handful of years) I am once again caught up in the tale of the Five: Herewiss S'Hearn, heir to Brightwood and potentially, first man in centuries to wield the Blue Flame; his loved Freelorn, uncrowned king-in-exile whose quest is to remove the usurper from the throne of Darthen; Sunspark, the fire elemental who comes to love him; Segnbora, a Rodmistress in search of her own fire; and the dragon Hasai, who, with Segnbora, must defy all the traditions of his people in order to save them.

Gentle reader may recall that one of my favourite fantasy writers is Judith Tarr. Although she has written some fantasy set in original worlds, some of her best work, in my opinion, is in the vein of the historical fantasy, in which she revisits a place and time in our own very real history, and retells it as if some of the myths and legends common to that time and place were also real, and had been a part of the unfolding of history.

Earlier this year I re-read Judith Tarr’s The Hound and the Falcon trilogy, her first published fantasy:

The Isle of Glass
The Golden Horn
The Hounds of God

This series is partly the kind of historical fantasy that Tarr would later excel at, and partly an alternate historical fantasy, in which history did not happen quite as it did in this world. It’s also the first of her works that I read, and hence I remembered it with great fondness, and anticipated re-reading it. And I was not disappointed.

The Hound and the Falcon is set in an Earth where elves exist, and have for a long time had relations of state with the world of man, but are now withdrawing slowly, pushed to the edges of the known world by the advance of the Catholic Church, to which they are anathema. The time corresponds to our own 13th century: there is a Richard on the throne of Anglia, and a crusade brewing. But in this Earth, there are three kingdoms in southern Britannia – Anglia, Gwynedd, and Rhiyana, and the king of Rhiyana is of the Elfkind.

The protagonist of the series is Alf, who we see first as Brother Alfred, a devout monk who, despite having lived in the monastery of St. Ruan for 60 years, and having penned a scholarly religious work that is known throughout Europe, appears to be little more than a beautiful, almost unearthly-looking boy. Alf was a foundling, his past unknown, and he has lived his entire life sheltered by the abbots and monks of St. Ruan, never having to face the question of who – or what – he is. Then, quite suddenly, Alf is thrown into the outer world of politics – both secular and churchly – and is forced to acknowledge his true self and his people in order to survive – and discover himself, and love – in a world where religious wars are raging and the Church wants nothing more than to drive whatever it considers to be heretical and evil from the sight of man and God.

The story of Alf’s search for truth, self and love, set against a turbulent time of fear, distrust, hate and catastrophic religious war, is compelling – and its conclusion leaves the reader with both joy and sorrow.

This is among the best of Tarr's many great works of fantasy.

Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein

This was one of my favourite, if not the favourite, of the Heinlein juveniles I read when I was much younger, and upon re-reading, it still stands up in many ways. If you’re going to read Heinlein, you have to just accept the particularly American survivalist libertarian slant to so many of his books, and just relax and enjoy the story. This particular tale, about a high school survival training class’ final practical exam gone horribly wrong, appealed to me because of the strong female characters, without whom our putative hero would be long dead before the recall finally comes. Sure, all of Heinlein’s women thought having hundreds of babies was their dream goal, but they all managed to think straight, have identifiable sexual natures, haul their own weight or more, save the boys just as often as the boys saved them, and perform heroically without fainting like proper ladies or (for the most part) dying like sacrificial lambs. For books written in the 50s, that’s got to count for something.

The SERRAted Edge series, Mercedes Lackey
Born to Run, with Larry Dixon
Chrome Circle, with Larry Dixon
When the Bough Breaks, with Holly Lisle
Wheels of Fire, with Mark Shepherd

Mages, elves, race cars, dragons and abused children. Possibly one of the stranger mixes to dominate a series of novels, but Lackey makes it work, at least if you like this particular blend of high fantasy with contemporary/urban fantasy, and don’t object to Lackey’s persistent use of the plot device of the abused child, often with some kind of great destiny or special power.

I’d read and enjoyed two of these books - Born to Run and Wheels of Fire - before, and enjoyed reading the other two for the first time. The four books have interlocking characters and settings, although not all have the same protagonists. Since the release of these four novels (and others written by other authors in this shared universe), Lackey has begun a prequel series with Roberta Gellis set in Elizabethan England which tells the backstories of many of the key elven characters in the SERRAted Edge books. The discerning reader will also note references to characters from the Diana Tregarde books and other of Lackey’s urban fantasy works.

Elisabeth Vonarburg, translations by Jane Brierley:
The Silent City
The Maerlande Chronicles

I first read Elisabeth Vonarburg’s The Maerlande Chronicles (published in the US as In the Mother's Land) some years ago. It captured my imagination in a way that no other feminist exploration of a female-dominated society has. It remains my favourite example of the subgenre, more so than other, better-known feminist revisionings of society, be they utopian, dystopian, or somewhere in between.

It’s hard for me to put my finger on just why this book is so meaningful to me in the midst of such powerful works as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, to name but a few.

Part of it is the mystery, I think - the fact that Vonarburg lets us look at her future society from the inside out and leaves her vision incomplete and unfinished. Vonarburg’s Maerlande is a commonwealth of matriarchal societies at a pivotal point in their history. We know some of what has gone before, but only through the eyes of the characters - we do not know, nor will we ever learn, the uninterpreted truths. We know that changes are coming, from the discovery of new evidence about the past, from explorations planned for the future, from plans old and new only referred to and never described explicitly, but we do not know what those changes will be or how they will affect Maerlande and its people. There are characters whose functions in this change are only partially seen and understood. Vonarburg gives us an image of a future that is as open to speculation, interpretation, and conjecture as any real society is, and furthermore, one in which not only gender roles but gender itself may be less fixed and certain than we, and the women of Maerlande, believe.

Some time after my first reading of The Maerlande Chronicles, I discovered a library copy of The Silent City, which is set in the same universe as a time some centuries before. While the events of The Silent City – set during a period of worldwide social disintegration out of which the commonwealth of Maerlande will some day evolve – illuminated some of the questions, the uncertainties, the mysteries, there was still much that I didn’t have a clear interpretation of.

For some time, I thought this might be due to the fact that I read them in the “wrong” order, so this fall, after finally acquiring my own copy of The Silent City, I decided to read both volumes in order, only to find that the tantalising lack of definitive determination of objective fact remains.

The Silent City is set at the end of technological Civilisation; a plague has swept around the world, disproportionately killing men, and most of humanity is sinking into various forms of barbarism, most of which are violent and patriarchal. At the same time, the last remnants of "civilised" humanity have withdrawn into underground fortresses, from which they send out, from time to time, cyborg observers to watch the disintegration happening around them. The novel tells the story of one of the last inhabitants of the last functioning city, whose genetic experiments may ultimately bring about an unfathomable change in human existence.

The Maerlande Chronicles takes up the story several centuries later. Humanity is recovering from the devastation of the past, although some variation of the old plague remains a threat to all children and men are still in the minority. A commonwealth of matriarchal societies has come into existence, each one somewhat different in the ways it deals with issues of gender, reproduction and leadership, among other aspects of life, but all drawing much of their culture from a key religious event involving a female saviour figure and her apostles. We see the events of the novel from a number of perspectives, one of which may be informed by at least some, if not all, of the information and experience of the key protagonists of the earlier book, but the crucial mysteries of the past – the reality behind the religion of Maerlande – and the future – what will be the ultimate effect on humanity of the combination of the plague and the genetic modifications that are part of the first novel's plot – remain unanswered.

And there is something both comforting and compelling in that uncertainty, because it is so very real.

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

I’ll say it up front: this is my least favourite of Austen’s novels. I re-read it rarely, in comparison to my favourites, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. It doesn’t call out to me in the way that the others do, reminding me that it’s sitting on my shelves, waiting for me to turn my attention once more to its pages.

But, a few days ago, I was flipping channels and happened upon a film version of the book – one I hadn’t even known existed – and I decided to read it again to see if my feelings about it had changed.

They haven’t.

It’s an enjoyable read, to be sure – it’s hard to imagine not finding something to enjoy in an Austen novel – but I remain unable to connect to Catherine Morland the way I do with the women of Austen’s other novels. Part of it, I think, is that Austen has made too much of a satire of Catherine’s character for me to warm to her. Most of Austen’s other protagonists – Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot – have their weaknesses, flaws and follies, but they also have their strengths. They are strong characters with distinguishing qualities. They are individuals. Catherine Moreland has never seemed to me to emerge from the text as a person in her own right the way Austen’s other protagonists do – the circumstances she finds herself in seem to overwhelm her, and she never seems to be much more than a pretty and somewhat silly girl who loves reading Gothic novels.

All the other elements of the Austen novel are present, and indeed the social satire is stronger here than in some of the other novels, and the skewering of the conventions of the Gothic novel are fine indeed, but without a strong and central protagonist, the rest of it falls just a little flat.

Charles Saunders:
Imaro
The Quest for Kush

The vast majority of epic/heroic fantasy written in English draws on the history and cultures of Europe for its inspiration - and particularly, medieval and renaisaance Europe. There have been exceptions over the years, and it is a good thing to know that those exceptions are growing in number. There's now a fair amount of epic fantasy that draws on East Asian and South Asian cultures, and even some that draws on American, Australasian, and some other Aboriginal cultures. But there's still not a lot that draws on African cultures - except, of course, for Egyptian and some other Mideast cultures.

Which brings me to the writing of Charles R. Saunders.

Back in the late 70s and early 1980s, Charles Saunders began writing heroic fantasy with settings drwn from the rich and varied cultures of Africa. The vast majority of his characters are Africans, not white men putting, in some fashion, their stamp on an unknown land.

This material was very much in the vein of Robert E. Howard's heroic fantasy, but it was written about black heroes, situated in fantasy realms based on black tradition, culture, history and belief, and it came from the mind and heart of a black man. And you know how rare that is in the world of fantasy and science fiction.

Saunder's main heroic character was Imaro, a young man who grows up as a pariah among his own people but goes on to become a great warrior with an evident destiny. He also wrote a group of short stories about the truly remarkable Dossouye, a black woman warrior in a time when it was still rare to find a woman warrior at all in science fiction or fantasy.

Sadly, we have never been, and may never be, permitted to read the fullness of Imaro's quest, or Dossouye's story.

DAW books published the first three novels of what, according to various interviews and other sources I've read, would have been a series of five or six novels that brought Imaro through a succession of preparatory quests and tasks until he was ready to meet his ultimate destiny.

But for a number of reasons, one of which was the serious error of describing the fist book, Imaro, as a novel about the "black Tarzan" (aside from the lawsuit that prompted, how can a black man born in Africa be anything like Tarzan?), DAW ceased publishing the series after the third volume and Charles Saunders withdrew from the field of fantasy writing.

Recently, Night Shade books reissued the first two volumes, Imaro and The Quest for Kush, with the intention of publishing all three previously published books, as well as the final books of Imaro's quest that Saunders had never completed, and even (this made my heart leap when I heard it) a Dossouye book.

But that's not going to be, it seems. Once more, the market for fantasy about black heroes written by black writers has proved to be insufficient, for whatever reason. Night Shade has announced that it will not be publishing the third volume, The TRail of Bohu, nor will it be publishing any new books by Saunders.

At least I did my part. I now have on my bookshelf the freshly re-read first two volumes of Saunders' novels. It was a great joy to read them again, becasue there's something in me that does love a Golden-Age style swords against sorcery hero. But I mourn that I will likely never learn the end of Imaro's journey, and I'll likely never read anything more about Dossouye. And that's a real shame.

Although, she says in a faint and wistful voice, if you ordered Saunders' two Imaro books right now from Night Shade, and told them how sad you are that they are not going to publish any more of Saunders' books, and promised to buy anything of his they print if they'd only reconsider, well then, maybe...

I recently acquired a copy of Jeanne Cortiel’s critical analysis of Joanna’ Russ’ fiction, Demand My Writing and in preparation for reading it, I decided to go back and reread some of Russ’ books that I hadn’t read for a long time, and to read some newer works that I had never read. My partner, who believes, and not without cause, that Russ is one of the most important writers of our time and certainly one of his greatest favourites of all time, has everything she’s ever written, so this was not a difficult task to arrange.

What follows is not a series of reviews so much as some casual notes about what I though on reading/rereading these books.

On Strike Against God

This was new to me. It is not SF (any more than , say, The Women’s Room is, although the argument could certainly be made that such books are a particular form of the alien contact novel), but rather a contemporary novel, in Russ’s unmistakable style, about a woman who has begun to rebel against the stifling masculine privilege and oppressive hetero-normativity she finds around her. It contains many of the same themes as The Female Man, and that’s a good thing.

The Hidden Side of the Moon

A collection of short stories- any of them dealing with issues of personal identity and family relationships from women’s perspectives, including such masterpieces as “The Little Dirty Girl,” “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed,” “The View from this Window,” and others. Many of these stories are more properly classed as speculative or experimental fiction that science fiction, but who cares?

Extra (Ordinary) People

Five linked stories (sometimes rather loosely linked, at that), beginning with the absolutely astonishing story “Souls.” Worth reading for that alone.

The Female Man

One of the classic feminist SF texts, I’m just going to assume you have all read it, and if you haven’t, then what on earth are you doing reading this when you could be reading it instead? It loses none of its force upon re-reading. And if anyone thinks that things are so much better now than they were when Russ wrote this… no, they’re just differently framed and packaged, that’s all. You still don’t have to walk very far to find a man who can look at a room full of women and ask where all the people are.

The Adventures of Alyx

Alyx’ career was really rather interesting, when you come to think about it. Starting out as a woman adventurer in a historical/fantasy world not dissimilar to, say, the world that Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser or other heroes of that sort lived in, she ends up being kidnapped into a science fictional future to save the asses of a bunch of future humans with minimal survival skills and becomes an agent of the temporal police. I’ve got quite a soft spot in my heart for Alyx. This collection has all the Alyx stories, including the short novel/novella Picnic on Paradise.

The Zanzibar Cat

More great goodness in small packages, including the one that really did change everything, at least for women in SF communities, “When It Changed.”

In closing, may I suggest that if you haven’t done so lately, go out and read some Joanna Russ. It will do you good. Really.

King Hereafter, by Dorothy Dunnett

King Hereafter is perhaps the best historical novel I have ever read. I first read it shortly after it was first published in 1982, and was quite enraptured by it. This is the third time I've read it, and it is still just as marvelous in my eyes.

First, forget Shakespeare's Macbeth - almost all the contemporary records that exist go against just about everything in the play, except for some of the names and places. There was never a Banquo, and MacBeth reigned over a large amount of what is now Scotland for 17 years, and is recalled in some texts as being a good and generous king.

But there were two men that we have solid, but incomplete genealogies and histories for, one Thorfinn Sigurdson, the Norse Earl of Orkney and Caithness, and one MacBeth mac Findláech, Mormaer of Moray, whose lives seem in some ways to parallel, in some ways to merge, and in some ways, to diverge. MacBeth was a king of Scots, or of Alba, that's recorded fact. Thorfinn is said in some Norse records to have conquered a vast portion of Scotland, the Hebrides, and parts of Ireland in addition to holding his own lands in Orkney and Caithness, and to have become King of the Scots. They are both given genealogies that contain some of the same people, or some people who could have been the same, or which are parallel, and which link them both to the royal family of Alba and specifically King Malcolm or Máel Coluim, the man who was the grandfather of the Duncan who was king before MacBeth. Many historians think that they were either cousins or possibly half-brothers through the maternal line, both grandsons of Malcolm. Some historians have concluded that MacBeth and Thorfinn were allies who essentially ruled, with each other's assistance, the entire north of the British Isles.

Dunnett proposes a theory about the descent and identity of MacBeth - one that goes perhaps beyond what the existing (albeit inconclusive and sometimes contradictory) sources can support, but one which makes great reading. After a great deal of historical research (which shows on every page of the novel), she has, by judiciously picking and chosing among the varied genealogies given for Thorfinn, his wife Ingeborg, MacBeth, and his wife Gruoch, and by making use of the ambiguity between father and step-father, merged the two men, and their stories, into one glorious life. And it could even be true.

According to Dunnett's theories, Malcolm's daughter, the quite historical and much-married Bethoc, is the mother of Duncan by her first husband Crinan, the mother of Thorfinn/Macbeth by her second husband Sigurd of Orkney, and was after the death of Sigurd, the wife of Findláech - making him Thorfinn/MacBeth's step-father. Dunnett argues that he is known by two names in history because, as Earl of Orkney, he rules a largely pagan people and holds his title from a pagan king, and thus in his actions as Earl of Orkney, he is known as Thorfinn, while, as Mormaer of Moray, he holds his lands from A Christian king and rules a Christian people, and thus uses his baptismal name of MacBeth, or "son of life" (and that his wife, Ingeborg/Gruoch, is known by two names for the same reason).

One can question the validity of this choice of Dunnett's - and many, many historians do - but as a work of fiction, the novel is splendid reading. Her proposition that Thorfinn and MacBeth are the same man and the subsequent merging of their separate deeds is the only major departure from the accepted historical record that I'm aware of, and the image she gives us of the politics, both secular and religious, of the time - the 50-odd years preceding the Norman conquest of England in 1066, to peg the time period to a relatively well-known event in the history of Western Europe - is detailed and well-delineated.

The character of Thorfinn, called MacBeth, is mesmerising. One follows him from a young boy of five already enmeshed in dynastic politics following the death of his father Sigurd, to a middle-aged man whose body has not the strength to win one last fight against one more foe. Along the way, we meet and come to love, as he does, the other great character of the novel, Ingeborg, called Gruoch, who he marries after killing her husband - his own step-father's killer - and who survives him to become the wife of Malcolm Canmore, the man who defeats and kills Macbeth.

Put together the magnificent characters, the skilful writing, the rich detail and the daring interpretation of history, and I think it's an irresistible read.