Book Review: Thou Good and Faithful by John Brunner. (OK novella)

 

Thou Good and Faithful by John Brunner. (as John Loxsmith)

First published in the march 1953 issue of Astounding magazine.

re-published here in the Now Then! 1965 collection that I have had unopened on my bookshelf for decades. I decided to read this after reading two books about Brunner and his work – The Modern Masters of Science Fiction biography by Jad Smith and the Happening worlds of John Brunner. It was my understanding after reading this it was John Brunner’s first professional sale written when he was 16, and published in 1953 when he was 19 years old.

Brunner himself considered it his first sale, in the preface in the 1965 collection he referred to it as his first professional sale to a Science Fiction magazine. Called it his "entry into the field." That was certainly my motivation for reading it.  After reading the story I fired off a tweet referring to it as impressive as his first story sale at 16. Fellow Hoosier Science Fiction reviewer Joachim Boaz (@SFRuminations) called out my tweet pointing out that it was not his first sale and that he was 19 years old when published.

I respect Joachim and his reviews, I am glad he said something but re-reading Brunner’s preface I don’t feel bad that I didn’t have that exactly correct. Brunner clearly did not consider fanzines sales such as The Wanderers and Brainpower that were published under the name K. Houston Brunner as part of his proper works (or a major sale). More curious though was his first novel sale at 16 a CLI-FI novel written in 1951 called Galactic Storm under the name Gil Hunt. I have not read that novel, in four years Brunner would declare it a failure and would never re-edit or release it like he did many of his early novels. It is strange that Brunner seems to deny a book that addresses many of his later themes like the dangers of environmental destruction and nationalism but it is one he doesn’t think highly of. Certainly, it SHOULD be considered his first sale. Although it was this story that would really kick-start his career.

Written the same year Thou Good and Faithful is still a window into the 16-year-old Brunner even if it took three years to find a home. What a home - John W. Campbell editing Astounding one of the most popular magazines of the field and the story made the cover. Published under the name John Loxsmith the young Brunner seemed to understand that someday he might not be so proud of these early efforts. Making the cover Astounding I am surprised he didn’t use his name.

So how is the novella itself? I am going to spoil the ending, as it is a somewhat hard-to-find story and I want to discuss what this says about the seeds here of the Brunner that would evolve from this tale. Brunner stated that he was inspired by a passing remark about a robot who retired and homesteaded a planet. This was clearly Simak’s classic novel City. That novel uses a framing device of Robots and dogs telling stories about the long dying human race. The influence of Simak is clearly in a couple of aspects of the story, not the least of which is the title a direct homage to a moment where Jenkins the robot tells of early dog culture who awaited the rest of humans  to pet them “Well done, Good and Faithful Servant.”

The storytelling vibe of this novella is very Simak with a very pastoral landscape and almost fantastical living quality to the robots. That said it is very Brunner in the sense that the space travelers are looking for new homes for humans, considering the ecological devastation back home. Finding a habitable planet could make a whole career. I mean look how bleak of a picture a teenage Brunner painted in the early 50s.

“The real Earth was the place from which men would cheerfully run away to enlist as lowly troopers on a ship like this one, to be cocooned and made to hibernate while light-years ticked away, to be revived and ordered to battle stations against an enemy who might not appear, to return to mindless sleep until the time came for paying-off and discharge – most likely on some other human planet than the race’s overcrowded pock-faced homeworld.”

For a teenager now the science, social awareness, and ecological themes would be impressive as most young people are not thinking about these types of things. Besides being readable and fun the story holds up amazingly well. Keep in mind the very progressive naming of the starship captain Chang, as Brunner puts it in the text as a typical human name.  

The twist or the hook of the story is they find the world is inhabited not by life but by robots.  So the human in the story believe there is only two options – Did the Robots destroy their living creators or did the creators leave them after some natural disaster? It results in an interesting ending that also harkens back to the Simak story, the Robots can overpower the humans but make an offer. “Will you accept this planet and ourselves as a gift?”

Chang goes into the giant computer to negotiate and this is where the twist of the story expresses the theme Brunner set off trying to make. This is where the seed Brunner saw in the Simak novel blossomed into it’s own story. The machine tells Chang he never considered a third alternative for how this planet came to be.

“What third alternative?” Said Chang with the dream-like air of a man who finds himself doing the impossible.
“They gave it to us,” said the Machine.

The robots were designed to serve and look like members of their creator species who instead of expanding into space evolved into beings of pure mind leaving their creations behind who maintained the planet. The twist is that they got bored and lonely, they were excited to serve again. Then the deal was made.

I love this novella for many reasons. One that Brunner took a throw-away line in a Simak story and expanded it.  The story is clear and holds up very well seven decades after it was written. Brunner’s work would go on to become some of the smartest most politically strong and environmentally aware science fiction of the 20th century, this story written when he was 16 years old might not be the most original of his works but it shows the seeds of a master and is absolutely worth reading

Book Review: Night Terrors & Other Tales by Lisa Morton

 

Night Terrors & Other Tales by Lisa Morton

Paperback, First, 281 pages

Published September 2020 by Omnium Gatherum

Lisa Morton is an important and beloved figure in the horror community, besides being the president of the Horror Writer’s Association for many years she is one of the world’s most knowledgeable Halloween experts. A pretty cool thing to be an expert in if you ask me. Those two things already make her cool, but ad to that she has written a book about the films ace Hong Kong director Tusi Hark and is an accomplished novelist. Her novel The Castle of Los Angeles is a criminally underrated haunted theater tale. She has a couple of Bram Stoker awards, Well six but who is counting? She has written produced screenplays and works at one of the coolest used book stores in Los Angeles.

All that stuff is cool. Very cool, but for me of Lisa’s many strengths, her short stories are some of the best around. She dedicated this collection to Dennis Etchison, who she has long championed as one of her most important teachers, while her stories have their own voices the influence is undeniable.  Lisa Morton’s short stories can have a pulp flavor at times but in the right ways. More importantly, there is storytelling ease all done with strong literary flair.

I have a couple of Lisa Morton collections up on the shelf, a couple of these stories are ones I read in their various printings in anthologies and magazines. I would put Lisa in the canon of short story writers of this generation that I consider masters of the form. Alongside Brian Evenson, Cody Goodfellow, and Laird Barron, must-reads who stories I skip to read first when they are in anthologies.   These authors can spin a short finely tuned short story as tight as a guitar string. In past generations think of Shirley Jackson, CL Moore, Judith Merril, Bradbury, The Matheson (Richard and RC), and a personal favorite John Shirley. That good.

What makes a Lisa Morton story unique? Like her teacher Etchison, these stories have dark renounce, some have to curl around your heart like the tale ‘The Secret Engravings.’  There is also stories like ‘Sparks Fly Upward’ that have clarity and surface message that reminded me of Alice Sheldon (AKA James Tiptree Jr.).  We will come back to this bold middle finger of a short story in a bit.

I have my favorites. With close to twenty stories Night Terrors has a variety of stories of various styles and subgenres of horror. Monsters, The Psych Ward, Mad Science, Bad Magic, The Unnameable. From classic monsters remixed to cosmic horror that kind of previews the various tones. Two of the three Mad Science stories were favorites of mine, As an SF reader I really enjoyed Morton dipping into the very Phil Dickian space with ‘Resurrection Policy’ a story about a rich asshole who didn’t read the fine print and ends up reborn in a less than desirable body. This is a dark comedy that is perfectly executed.  

The next story after it ‘Feel the Noise’ is a pitch-black political story. As much as the story before amused me, this one is equally crushing. It uses technology to express the trauma and karma of war in a richly personal tale of horror.  And that is the thing Lisa Morton is not afraid to have an opinion and that is where her stories remind me of John Shirley’s highly political but still fantastical takes.

That brings me back to the Zombie tale ‘Sparks Fly Upward.’ This zombie story that appeared in the John Skipp edited Mondo Zombie it clearly has a pro-choice message, but even saying undervalues the message. Just know this is a really creative way to use the form to express a point.

The collection is the powerful top to bottom, with no stinkers or skippers. While Brian Evenson and Thomas Liggoti for example have respect for the literary world, and writers like Laird Barron are starting to crack respect to such snooty circles writers like Lisa Morton are right there. I would put a few of the stories up there with any powerhouse you name. Either way in question is a Lisa Morton a must-read. Yes, indeed it is.

Book Review: Ice by Anna Kavan, Kate Zambreno (Afterword), Jonathan Lethem (Foreword)

 

 Ice by Anna Kavan, Kate Zambreno (Afterword), Jonathan Lethem (Foreword)

Paperback, 50th Anniversary Edition, 193 pages

Published November 14th 2017 by Penguin Classics (first published 1967)

There are some books that are classics of the Science Fiction genre that transcend the era they were written in and feel timeless. Amazing works of fiction retain all the power they were written with even as decades passed. Often they are ones that are respected beyond the genre ghetto. For me I Am Legend, The Dispossessed come to mind. The last book like this I discovered was Canticle for Leibowitz. A book that is respected beyond the genre, but undeniably Science Fiction.  Add Ice by Anna Kavan to that shortlist. Beyond the fact that it has a penguin Classics edition, it has had many editions that have gotten forwards from Sci-fi Royalty like Brian Aldiss now Jonathan Letham who has feet in both literary worlds but capped with an excellent afterword by Kate Zambreno who is not a genre writer.

Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901, to wealthy expatriate British parents. Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson. Her life was a bit of tortured existence, suffering from Heroin addiction and being in and out of mental hospitals. I first read about her challenging life in the pages of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds.  I immediately put a hold on it at the library, which delivered this excellent 50th-anniversary edition with the very good Fore and Afterword.

For me reading Ice was like the literary equivalent of a well-structured and brutal death metal song.  The power of the prose left me feeling breathless and nodding my head constantly in approval.  I can’t speak to Kavaan/ Ferguson's other novels but it is my understanding that this is alone work of the genre, but not the lone work of genius. Being alone work of genre is another thing it has in common with Lebowitz.

The story of a weird apocalypse is at times almost surreal. A supernatural cold is slowly creeping across the landscape entombing the earth in a sheet of thick ice. We are told this story by a nameless narrator who goes on a hero’s quest across this cold and dying landscape in an attempt to save the “Glass girl” a blue-eyed super goth lilly white-skinned woman who is on the cover of this edition. His motivation is simply to save her from the fate of being enslaved by The Warden.     
The prose is wonderful. Powerful and clean, the beauty and horror are woven together like the threads in a basket, one that carries a grim world…

 “Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees around the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armor.”

There were pages and pages throughout the short but powerful novel that I stopped and read multiple times.  As our unnamed point of view character travels the world, we see more misery and destruction. There is a tight balance between story and vibe. The tone overpowers the story at times but to me that made perfect sense as mirrored the slow creep of the ice.

The novel does an excellent job of balancing the weird with the uncomfortable reality that gives the novel a feeling of creeping horror.  Dead silence, white peace.

“It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.”

Unlike any novel about the end of the world, Ice has a feeling of creeping misery and depression that would be a natural thing to feel. I have read stories that captured that feel, but it is rare to stretch that feeling over a complete novel.
 
“As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.”

At the same time, the mechanics of the adventure never fall to the wayside, and using beautiful and heartbreaking to tell action is a magic trick that Ice performs over and over…

“In the deepening dusk every horror could be expected. She was afraid to look, tried not to see the spectral shapes rising from the water, but felt them come gliding toward her and fled in panic. One overtook her, would her in soft, clammy, adhesive bands like ectoplasm.”

To say this novel is unique is a terrible understatement. The themes the novel explores are vast and deep. From isolation, disconnection with society, climate change, feminism, and fascism.  It is all tied together with some of the best and most elaborate prose. It has both moments of epic almost cosmic level terror that hit like a sledgehammer and moments of world-building that are surgical and exact.  It is the reason this review is almost more quotes than me writing about it. Nothing I can say can sell this novel better than the beautifully dark prose.

At the same time, the parallel to our world is strong, but it is the reversal that makes it haunting. Each year the forest fires rage, the heat waves kill more and the shoreline creeps up higher. Ice presents an end that is as cold has her relationship to the world and presents us with a catalog of what-ifs. Do we live with the creep or do we see through it as it spreads….

“I realized that the destruction must have been on a gigantic scale. Little could have survived. The local broadcasters were cheerfully reassuring. It was official policy, the population had to be kept calm. But these men actually seemed to believe their country was safe, no matter how far removed from the present devastation, which would spread and spread…”

Magazine review: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, #759 Jan/Feb 2022 Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

 

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, #759 Jan/Feb 2022
edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

Look I am not going to go super deep into each issue, but let me say how stoked to get these in the mail and you should too.

 My favorite novelettes were Bone Broth by Karen Heulers and Prison Colony Optimization by Auston Habershaw. So let us start with Bone Broth, the Off-beat vibe hooked from the first moment. The story had a lived-in feel. The prose was super strong and has me looking forward to her novel mentioned in the intro.  Prison Colony Optimization is a classic feeling SF tale that really made me happy, maybe that is the wrong word with such a depressing subject. This is a tale of an AI running a deep space prison. Very cool.

My two favorites of the short stories were doe_haven.vr by Cara Mast and The City and the Thing Beneath It by Innocent Ilo. The first of which was a VR story of future online addiction. A powerfully weird story.  The City and The Thing Beneath was my favorite piece, it is a Nigerian set story that has a strong geographical feel and better experienced. That is what I liked about that story is it felt like an experience.

Also of note the opening novella The Art of Victory When the Game is All the World by Eugie Foster was pretty solid and made powerful by knowing the author dies shortly before her death and was submitted after she died from Cancer. I admit I had never heard of her or her work. Now I know she has several collections one of which I am picking up. It wasn’t my favorite thing in the collection but really glad 8 years after her death it was here.

Another great job Sheree Renée Thomas!

Book Review: The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

 

The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

Paperback, 168 pages

Published September 28th 2021 by ECW Press

 

There are many reasons that this book should have been right up my alley, and I wanted to like it more than I did. I am generally positive about it and very clear that my problems with it may be personal and might not affect you as a reader. So, to open up this review I want to say you should check this book out.

Premee Mohamed is an author I have had my eye on to check out. I knew she wrote about climate themes, and as a believer in Cli-Fi, I generally want to check out all that I can. Her novel Beneath the Rising sounds great, and one that was on the radar. Judging from the length and genre I kind of assumed this was in the Tor novella series. I thought a shorter work was a better place to start.
It appears this is published by some sort of Canadian grant, makes sense it is a Canadian author with a post-climate apocalypse setting of Alberta. The setting and world-building are excellently done, within the first few pages we know society has mostly collapsed except a few domed pockets.  Our main narrative point of view is Reid who is accepted to university. It would mean leaving her family who struggles to survive.  Scouting parties for water and constant misery are a part of life and Reid doesn’t feel right about leaving her family.  The description of the environment is done with style.

“In silent agreement, we squeeze into the window to study our valley. Unlovely in the early spring, crusted with think rime of muddy snow, the river still choked with ice, a single dark thread of water at it’s center. Sleeping tangle of grey saplings, dead shrubs of sepia or amber or faded dogwood red. Brown sparrows and dust-colored pigeons. The only real color is magpipes, repeated shouts of iridescence, irritatingly clean in their black and white suits. Like photographs of actors or spies. How do they stay so clean in this crap, I always wonder.”

The story really gets interesting with the introduction of The cad. It is a fungal infection that is more than just a disease it also alters the mind.

“And people protested. They protested the bans and they protested and they protested the Cad and they mobbed anyone with tattoos of leaves or ferns or cephalopods. No one realized that the infection was cryptic, then dormat, then heritable from either parent. And so it spread, named and considered an epidemic at first- a flash in the pan, like Ebola or Zika or Covid, that would eventually burn-out – and near the end more or less endemic.”

For me, some of the moments that hit me the hardest were the ones that hit close to home. As someone who has been warning about climate change as an activist since 1994…

“It was not instantaneous, the “end of the world,” the way it is in nightmares. The sky didn’t tear open around an asteroid, the earth didn’t swallow us up. And of course the world didn’t end the same for everyone.”

These warnings in the novel made for very powerful moments.

“On a human scale it was slow enough that for a long time it didn’t even seem truly dire; on a geological scale it seemed that nothing was happening, till suddenly the feedback cycles tipped over, became too front-heavy to regulate themselves.”

All this is good stuff. Overall I enjoyed the book for the first half I was thinking very highly. In the second half, there were a couple of chapters devoted to characters hunting. The vegan, animal liberationist in me could ignore a little bit of this but I felt it went on too long and slowed the narrative down. Again this might not bother you as a reader. Also, I was curious about the university and the domes. Those places and settings we never got to explore.

Overall the best compliment I can give this short novel is that it made me more interested in the author’s other work.  Even if I didn’t love this novel, I can see lots of stuff I do like. I would also recommend it to most Sci-fi/CLI-FI readers.

Book review: The Secret Skin by Wendy N. Wagner

 

 

The Secret Skin by Wendy N. Wagner 

Paperback, 102 pages

Published October 25th 2021 by Neon Hemlock Press

I am going to take a minute at the start of this review to make a point that I have expressed a few times.  Social media is a double-edged sword. Every author knows right or wrong they have to use it to promote their work. My interest in this book is an example of social media done right.  It is subtle and to me, it is mostly being yourself.   For an example of doing it the wrong way, there are some overzealous young writers who send out friend requests, and the moment you accept they invite you to like their page, it used to be a problem that writers would post links to their books in other posts, hey if you like this blah blah.

Somewhere along the line, I followed Wendy Wagner on Twitter.  We never really chatted before, I have retweeted her a few times, I noticed the titles of her books. I made a mental note, I have to check out her work at some point. Then one day she tweeted something about this book and I went to my library website and suggested a purchase.  

A few weeks later the San Diego library had a copy and now I have read it. I am glad I did because it is a great introduction to a writer from a city of writers I love. I am surprised Wendy and I didn’t cross paths during my years in Portland, but she is coming on the podcast soon.

The Secret Skin is that perfect horror bite-size, how many times over the years have I written about the perfect length for horror being the novella. I know that is not exactly a hot take as most believe that about horror and the novella. This story is an erotic gothic haunted house tale with a cool period settting we have rarely seen – coastal Oregon. Many books in this genre are padded and get dry and boring. Not The Secret Skin which is nearly perfect in pace and tone.  You may be thinking that you are familiar with the elements for tales in this type of genre. The classical settings and familiar feelings are there for sure and the execution makes or breaks a book like this.

Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Mexican Gothic worked in part last year because of the unique setting but it would have been dead in the water without powerful execution.  Wagner is an excellent writer who tightens narrative screws into the foundation of this story with powerful sentences.  It is rare to use a single sentence to evoke major sensations but evocative prose in this book often that way.

How about this line of dialogue?

“You must really be my aunt if the house wants to kill you.”

There is little need to unpack this, but that is the gig so I am going to.  There is fear and history in this one line. June’s fear of the house, how she dreads it, and her feelings toward her Brother’s new bride. It also suggests a tension between them over the new marriage etc. So much happens in this one line of dialogue. It got my attention.

Another thing I enjoyed was Wagner’s ability to make creepy moments in single lines like this…

“That was when the house first started whispering to me, and I knew I had to leave Stormbreak as quickly as I could.”

I don’t want to give away the love story, or at least the lust story, you might be able to guess early but it doesn’t make it any less powerful. Parts of the narrative slip at times into second person and this makes for a great reveal of who June is writing to just a little past the halfway mark.
 
“Hush, house,” I whispered, and as if it had been listening for me it fell silent.”

It all comes together in a fantastic final paragraph. The Secret Skin is a prime example of a book that is not exactly my cup of tea but it is told so effectively that I don’t give a shit at all. The Secret Skin is a great horror novella and comes highly recommended. Wendy Wagner has my full attention now.

Book Review: Kiss of Life: The Untold Saga of America's Last Outlaws by Gene O'Neill, Gord Rollo

 

Kiss of Life: The Untold Saga of America's Last Outlaws by Gene O'Neill, Gord Rollo

Paperback, 261 pages

Published March 2021 by Omnium Gatherum

This is an interesting review for me to write. I am not anti-western; in fact, I like lots of westerns and I actually have a track record of enjoying Westerns written by genre writers. Perhaps my favorite examples are Richard Matheson and John Shirley, the latter of which wrote a similar historical western novel Wyatt in Witchita a few years back. That said it is not exactly my favorite genre to read.

I admit Gord Rollo is not a name I know, but Gene O’Neill is what got my attention with this book. Gene is the author of one of my all-time favorite short stories, The Burden of Indigo. His work is consistently great, and I think he is an underrated voice in dark fiction.  Since it had a horror publisher, I thought going into this that it might crossover genres like Matheson’s Shadow on the Sun. No, this is a pretty straightforward historical western novel that tells the lesser-known moments of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

I get the feeling fans of the Paul Newman/ Robert Redford movie might be more interested and while I like many movies of that era it is just one I have never seen.  This appears to be a more gritty take although there is fun to be had. The structure is back and forth from modern to classical feeling. The framing device is a modern descendent of the outlaws traveling companion Erta Place. Her name is  Jessica the idea of her telling the stories as she heard them passed down from Erta gives them a unique Point of view, very different from the classic movie.  The idea being Erta who was there till the bitter end was left out of the narrative.

Not sure the framing device will work for everyone, as there are not really stakes to the modern story elements.  I don’t know the story of how this collaboration happened and I ended up being a bit more curious about that than the notorious outlaws. I think fans of the characters and movie will not want to miss this. I admit I was hooked because of my respect for Gene O’Neill. Not sure the book would have grabbed me without that connection.

It is clearly deeply researched, it feels lived in, and I respect that as well. It is a good novel about topics and eras I don’t have much interest in. So the fact that I read the whole thing and enjoyed is a testament to the hard work. I recommend it to western fans and devotees of the movie, I am not sure there is a crossover for most genre readers that read my blog. I am always down for Gene O’Neill personally.