All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
SIDEWAYS IN CRIME edited by Lou Anders:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/10/2008]
SIDEWAYS IN CRIME edited by Lou Anders (ISBN-13 978-1-844-16566-7, ISBN-10 1-844-16566-3) is an anthology of (mostly) alternate history mystery stories. As is also true of science fiction mysteries, the biggest problem is reconciling the two, in that the alternate history means that some of what we know and take for granted in our world is not true in the story's world, and yet we are in general expected to be able to pick up clues based on something being out of place. For example, if a clue is the presence of a written note, it is important that we know whether most people can write or not.
But in addition, the author has to come up with both a reasonable alternate history *and* a reasonable mystery, and this is not easy, especially in short story form. The result is often lopsided. For example, "Sacrifice" by Mary Rosenblum has the most interesting alternate history (Aztecs not conquered by Spain). But it is hampered by too much "info-dump" about the alternate history, not to mention bad proof-reading (missing or superfluous commas in particular), and copy-editing--Rosenblum scatters Nahautl words throughout, even when an English word would be just as good, but then refers to a "turkey", surely incorrect in this world. Tobias Buckell's "The People's Machine" is also set in an Aztec-Empire- survives world--this seems to be very popular these days. But Bucknell's story has a conclusion that makes no sense. (I'm not talking about the solution to the crime, but rather to the thoughts of the protagonist at the end.)
Both Kage Baker's "Running the Snake" (Boudicca successful) and Theodore Judson's "The Sultan's Emissary" (no Crusades) show different histories of England, and both run into the same problem: too much the same or similar after centuries. In Baker's case, it's Shakespeare; in Judson's, the entire royal line. Judson also has problems with names such as Abdul Erickson representing someone from a long line of Norse Muslims--but he would be something like Abdul Jafarson then.
John Meaney's "Via Vortex" is a "Nazis won" story, but involving the use of energy vortices for teleportation in what seems like a particularly unlikely and bizarre way. There is far too much "peculiar science" to make this a believable alternate history (at least to me).
Stephen Baxter's "Fate and the Fire-Lance" is yet another of the "history repeats itself across timelines" sub-genre, this time with the son of a (Serbian) Roman Emperor being assassinated in 1914. This story is weakened by the extremely unlikely introduction of a royal tutor, first as translator and then as detective, fully accepted by the police.
Jack McDevitt's "The Adventure of the Southsea Trunk" has someone else publishing the first few Holmes stories that Doyle wrote but could not sell in that world, but the whole thing seemed like a big "so what?"
Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "G-Men" takes us to a change point, but so little forward of it that we have to do all the extrapolation. (I agree with William Mingin when he says in his review of SIDEWAYS IN CRIME in "Strange Horizons": "To my mind, the most pleasing and productive sort of alternate history story gives us a world in which there has been a significant historical disjunction some time in the fairly distant past, so that we find ourselves in a political and cultural reality much different from our own. The stories themselves tend to (but don't have to) occur some time after the hinge event, and also in the 'past,'" relative to our own time."
Jon Courtenay Grimwood's "Chicago" has cloning and memory adjustments in Capone's era without any explanation whatsoever.
Some are not even alternate histories. Pat Cadigan's "Worlds of Possibilities" is a many-worlds story with not much focus on any of them. The same is true of Chris Roberson's "Death on the Crosstime Express". S. M. Stirling's "A Murder in Eddsford" is one of his "Change" stories (the laws of physics change on March 17, 1998, and you can no longer get "a useful amount of mechanical work out of heat." This is way too off-the-wall to even be considered as fantasy, let alone a reasonable alternate history. (At least Poul Anderson's BRAIN WAVE had a reasonable answer for why everything in that story suddenly changed.)
Paul Park's "The Blood of Peter Francisco" is so dense with cultural referents that I am unable to understand it. The same may well have been true of his "Roumania" trilogy, which everyone seemed to like a lot more than I did. So I will only say that I may be tone-deaf to his appeal, and you should judge it for yourself. (In his review, William Mingin says this is an example of what the "Turkey City Lexicon calls "Card Tricks in the Dark: 'Elaborately contrived plot which arrives at (a) the punch line of a private joke no reader will get or (b) the display of some bit of learned trivia relevant only to the author. This stunt may be intensely ingenious, and very gratifying to the author, but it serves no visible fictional purpose.")
Both "Murder in Geektopia" by Paul Di Filippo and "Conspiracies: A Very Condensed 937-Page Novel" by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint are supposed to be humorous, but I found them both too much interested in constant culture references and other humorous techniques to tell an interesting alternate history story. (Which is not to say it cannot be done--just that they did not do it.)
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WAR OF THE WORLDS: GLOBAL DISPATCHES edited by Kevin J. Anderson (Bantam Spectra, ISBN 0-553-10353-9, 1996, 288pp, hardback):
This certainly seems to be the year for pastiches. First there was the anthology Resurrected Holmes (edited by Marvin Kaye), which is a series of Sherlock Holmes adventures purporting to be written by various famous authors. And now there is War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, a series of accounts of the Martian invasion first described by H. G. Wells, mostly purporting to be written by various famous authors and other personages. (A few are satisfied merely to use famous people as their main characters.) Interestingly, while there is a story in Resurrected Holmes credited to Wells, there is no story here credited to Doyle. (Then again, there have been earlier Holmes "War of the Worlds" stories, notably Manly Wade Wellman's Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds.) The only overlapping "authors" between the two volumes are Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. P. Lovecraft, which may seem odd considering that Holmes and the invasion were contemporaneous, but while the invasion stories are written by or about the participants, the Holmes stories are described as having merely been composed by their authors on the basis of notes sent to them, so the authors there tend to be from a later period.
The first story in an anthology is normally the strongest, but here I suspect that it is more that Mike Resnick is the biggest draw. "The Roosevelt Dispatches" by Resnick, while amusing enough, is hardly a strong story, centering mostly around a rather obvious (if not predictable) ending. (It also seems to assume the Martians had landed only in Cuba. I don't object to the stories contradicting each other, but they shouldn't blatantly contradict Wells.)
Kevin J. Anderson's "Canals in the Sand" has Percival Lowell trying to signal the Martians in response to what he believed were canals on the Martian surface. It is more a "pre-invasion" story, and ends just when things start to get interesting, though readers familiar with the original story should have no difficulty filling in the rest.
The main character in Walter Jon Williams's "Foreign Devils" is the Dowager Empress of China and Williams manages to give us a glimpse into a very different world than the other, more Western-centered stories. Because of this, it is one of the best stories in the anthology, with Williams adding interesting and even somewhat alien characters and outlooks to the familiar invasion story. That this happened to be a very interesting period of Chinese history helped, of course, but Williams seems to have been the only one to think of it.
Daniel Marcus's "Blue Period" centers around Picasso but seemed rather flat. Someone who knew Picasso's life and work better than I might have gotten more out of it. This is the major drawback of this book--for many of the stories, a knowledge of the main character's life and work is necessary. The result is that the market of people who will enjoy or appreciate all or even most of the stories is smaller than one might think, and considerably smaller, I fear, than the number of people who will be attracted by the theme of the anthology.
"The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James" by Robert Silverberg is perhaps the best-written piece in the book--not surprising when you consider Silverberg's talent. It is also the least original, however, in that Silverberg follows mainly to the story as told in the original, but with Wells and James as participants. (This story should possibly have been placed first to give readers a good solid background for the other stories.)
Janet Berliner's "True Tale of the Final Battle of Umslopogaas the Zulu" has both Winston Churchill and an H. Rider Haggard character in a way that is not entirely convincing or satisfying. Perhaps it's that having three foci (with Wells's Martians being the third) makes the story just too elaborate.
Howard Waldrop's "Night of the Cooters" was not, apparently, the inspiration for this book, though this 1987 tale of the Texas Rangers versus the Martians certainly predates everything else here and is in fact the only story not written specifically for this volume. (Several other stories have appeared in magazine form before the book came out, but were nonetheless written for the book.) In any case, Waldrop should get a few extra points for originality, even though that originality is not obvious here. (There have of course been other stories inspired by the Wells novel, but Waldrop's is probably the best-known.)
Doug Beeson's "Determinism and the Martian War, with Relativistic Corrections" has Albert Einstein thinking about inertial frames of reference while the Martians invade, and "Soldier of the Queen" by Barbara Hambly has Rudyard Kipling meeting the Martians in India.
George Alec Effinger's "Mars: The Home Front" takes a completely different approach than the other stories. Rather than being the story of the Martian invasion of Earth as told by yet another Earthly eyewitness, it is the story of what was happening back on Mars, as told by John Carter. Because Effinger is not describing the same events that everyone else is, this story is a welcome change from the similarity of all the others, and proves that even when given an apparently limiting set of constraints, a good writer can still break out and write something new and fresh.
"A Letter from St. Louis" by Allen Steele, featuring Joseph Pulitzer, is a return to the idea of a fairly standard retelling of the story.
Mark W. Tiedemann's "Resurrection" is primarily a letter purported to be written by Leo Tolstoy. There is more of alternate history feel to this than to most of the others (with the possible exception of the Williams), since the framing story is set in an alternate world from the one we live in.
"Paris Conquers All" by Gregory Benford and David Brin (Jules Verne) is an attempt to tie a Vernian technological solution into the story that did not work for me. "To Mars and Providence" by Don Webb is a reasonably decent attempt to combine the "Elder Gods" of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos with the Martian invasion. But while Daniel Keys Moran and Jodi Moran try to evoke Mark Twain in "Roughing It During the Martian Invasion," they don't quite succeed; you get a story with a riverboat and some snappy asides, but no real Twain spirit. (Maybe I'm just too familiar with Twain, having read just about everything of his in print, including Joan of Arc and Christian Science.)
"To See the World End" by M. Shayne Bell is purportedly by Joseph Conrad and is another story that, like Tiedemann's "Resurrection," has a much stronger alternate history feel than the rest of the stories. Most of the stories seem like stories set in the fictional world of Wells, while these two seem as though they are set in our world in the midst of a Martian invasion.
"After a Lean Winter" by Dave Wolverton is set in the far north and told from the point of view of Jack London. It seems to be a good copy of his style, but it's not a style I'm particularly taken by.
I usually like Connie Willis's work, but her pseudo-academic work, "The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective" wears out its welcome rather quickly. With forty numbered and twelve unnumbered footnotes in its eight pages, it may be more appealing to academics. I found my eyes glassing over after about three pages. The again, that may be the intent.
An afterword by Benford and Brin again in the voice of Verne concludes with a plea that we go to Mars.
To order War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches from amazon.com, click here.
THE ENEMY STARS by Poul Anderson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/06/2009]
The science fiction group chose THE ENEMY STARS by Poul Anderson (ISBN-13 978-0-671-65339-2, ISBN-10 0-671-65339-3) for this month's book. This was not so much for any great fascination with the book as with chance. People had been saying they wanted to read a Poul Anderson book, but there was no one novel that the library system had more than one or two copies of. However, when we went to a half-price sale at a local used bookstore, we found a whole *stack* of THE ENEMY STARS. What's more, we found them on the back porch, where books are normally six for a dollar. But these were half- price, so we picked up a half-dozen copies for fifty cents total, and handed them out to the group members.
And it is certainly true that if we had to pick an Anderson to read, this would not have been it, in spite of the fact that this *was* nominated for a Hugo (under the title WE HAVE FED OUR SEA). First of all, there are certainly more well-regarded books by Anderson. For example, Anderson had six other Hugo-nominated books: THE HIGH CRUSADE, TAU ZERO, THERE WILL BE TIME, THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND, FIRE TIME, and THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS. Of these, THE HIGH CRUSADE and TAU ZERO are certainly better novels. But the sad fact is that even those are not widely available.
Anyway, while the basic plot of THE ENEMY STARS--starship breaks their faster-than-light matter transmitter and has to repair it--it seems to me that it is dragged out too much. (And one could quibble about the idea that four guys could rebuild a FTL transmitter practically from scratch, but that's the Campbellian tradition.) There's a subplot of one character's family problems, and a lot of not-very-subtle chacterization, which the group seemed to agree was more to let Anderson present various philosophies rather than do character studies. On the whole, I cannot really recommend it.
To order The Enemy Stars from amazon.com, click here.
"Sam Hall" by Poul Anderson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/16/2004]
Poul Anderson's "Sam Hall" was okay but seemed like typical conservative/libertarian preaching. (I know that "conservative" and "libertarian" seem like opposites, but in many ways they are not.) It wasn't helped, of course, by Anderson's introduction (in THE BEST OF POUL ANDERSON) in which he explains how the McCarthy era wasn't really that bad and the only people complaining were very vocal in their complaints that they couldn't complain and they were probably Commie liberals anyway.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/06/2004]
Someone asked for a more exact citation of the Anderson quote, and since I had to type it in anyway, I will include it here. Anderson talks about traveling around Europe on a bicycle and then returning to the United States:
"Returning, I found the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now this wasn't quite the horror that academic folklore maintains. While no doubt a few innocent people did get harmed, the fact is that others *had* been the dangerous agents of an implacable enemy; and in any event, as a shrewd observer remarked, the period consisted mainly of intellectuals screaming from the rooftops that they were afraid to speak above a whisper. Actual suppression, when it occurred, was almost always the result of private unofficial hysteria. Still, it didn't take great imagination to see the trend continuing until we really got a dictatorship."
[Asterisks indicate italics in the original.]
(THE BEST OF POUL ANDERSON, Pocket Books, August 1976, ISBN 0-671- 83140-2, pages 79-80. The ISFDB gives the ISBN for the first printing as 0-671-80671-8; mine is the second printing and has a higher price, so apparently they changed the ISBN for that.)
"Three Hearts and Three Lions" by Poul Anderson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/02/2004]
"Three Hearts and Three Lions" by Poul Anderson is the original version of the novel of the same name. (This was expanded throughout, rather than forming intact a segment of the novel, so the only place to read this novella is in its original magazine publication. I suspect, however, that it will be voted on by a lot people who have read only the expanded version. However, my reaction applies to both.) The story of a twentieth-century man finding himself transported not only back in time, but into a magical version of our world, is a classic, and Anderson knows his stuff here. For example, you might think that the use of tobacco here was anachronistic. But I discovered that the first literary mention of tobacco was in Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queen" in the late 16th century, so I guess Anderson is allowed to include it on the basis of established usage. (And just as Sturgeon did, Anderson revisits his themes in other works as well, particularly A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST.)
TIME PATROL by Poul Anderson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/24/2004]
The book chosen for our science fiction discussion group this month was Poul Anderson's TIME PATROL. There seem to have been a variety of collections of Anderson's "Time Patrol" stories, called variously THE TIME PATROL, THE GUARDIANS OF TIME (released once with four stories and once with five, I think), TIME PATROLMEN, and ANNALS OF THE TIME PATROL. (There's also the novel THE SHIELD OF TIME.) However, we said that whatever people found, the stories to read were "Time Patrol", "Brave to Be a King", "Gibraltar Falls", "The Only Game in Town", and "Delenda Est". The premise seems classic, but may well have been invented by Anderson: a corps of "time patrolmen" makes sure that people don't tamper with history. Most of the stories involve agent Manse Everard traveling to fix history, sometimes with a brief section in the parallel timeline that would evolve if the change was allowed to remain. As an alternate history fan, I love these, though the earlier ones are somewhat dated in their attitudes. And while Anderson is not generally known for his imagery, his description from "Gibraltar Falls" is one that has stuck with me long after many other stories have passed from memory. Alas, I think these are currently out of print, though easily available used.
To order Time Patrol from amazon.com, click here.
"Un-Man" by Poul Anderson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/02/2004]
"Un-Man" by Poul Anderson seemed a fairly basic story about a secret group of a special type of human (an "un-man", which is also a pun on "U.N.-man" [as in United Nations]) whose job is to enforce world peace. I suspect even in 1953 it wasn't particularly original, but I also think I find Anderson's overtly political works much less appealing and more strident than his non-political ones. And
QUEST OF THE SNOW LEOPARD by Roy Chapman Andrews:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/19/2008]
At first glance, QUEST OF THE SNOW LEOPARD by Roy Chapman Andrews (no ISBN) seems to be a travelogue, recounting one of Andrews's expeditions to Asia for the American Museum of Natural History. But what it turns out to be is a novel. If it were written today, it would be marketed as a "young adult" novel because the main character is a seventeen-year-old boy on this expedition. (Indeed, the book is dedicated to the Boy Scouts!) Andrews claims that everything in the book really happened at one time or other, though not always to the same small set of people, and excluding the actual capture of the snow leopard(!). The capture he says *could* have happened that way, and he wanted to include it.
Actually, if it were written today, there would probably be much outrage over it, as Andrews gives instructions to his hunters that when they shoot a particular species, he wants them to get a male, a female, and a few young so they can make a nice exhibit of their stuffed skins back at the Museum. It is clear that the attitudes of 1916-1917 (when the expedition supposedly took place) or even 1955 (when the book was written) are not those of today.
To order Quest of the Snow Leopard from amazon.com, click here.
SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE GHOST OF BAKER STREET by Val Andrews:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/03/2009]
SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE GHOST OF BAKER STREET by Val Andrews (ISBN-13 978-1-84782-110-2, ISBN-10 1-84782-110-3) is a bit different. It is a novel about a screenwriter who goes to London in the early 1950s and takes certain rooms in Baker Street, only to discover that they are haunted. The ghost of Holmes seems to be visible to everyone and manages to walk around, sit on a sofa, and so on, while claiming he is unable to affect material objects. I found Holmes's inconsistent "properties" to be distracting. He can be heard, so apparently he can affect air, at least to the extent of forming waves in it. Although he can be seen with no problem, he cannot be filmed or photographed (though he *can* be tape- recorded). And I don't care how eccentric the (American) narrator considers the English to be, his explanations of why his friend "Cyril" shows up all over London in the same red dressing gown would soon start to wear thin.
This volume was also abysmally proofread. I found "effect" instead of "affect", "infer" instead of "imply", "Vivienne" instead "Vivian", and "Hercules Poirot" instead of "Hercule". There is also the problem of a story supposedly written by an American, though with British spelling throughout.
Andrews has written well over a dozen other novels for this series. From their titles, it appears that at least some of them are more traditional Holmes stories, and I will probably give some of them a try if my library has them, but if they do not, I will not be terribly disappointed.
To order Sherlock Holmes: The Ghost of Baker Street from amazon.com, click here.
FLANDERS by Patricia Anthony (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00528-3, 1998, 384pp, hardback):
In Flanders Field the poppies blow ....
To Flanders in 1916 comes Travis Lee Stanhope. He has volunteered for the British Army, looking for escape and adventure. What he finds is hell. (As a Southerner, one suspects he refused to listen to General Sherman's statement along these lines.) Kim Stanley Robinson summarized it well in "A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations": 54,000 men who died over a fifteen-year period are remembered on the Vietnam Memorial. Imagine one of those for the Triple Entente losses every six weeks of the Western front of World War I, or thirty-five Vietnam Memorials in all, lined up in a row. Along the Western front, there were 7500 casualties each day, not in battle, but from sniping; this was called "wastage." This is particularly noteworthy, because it is as a sniper that Stanhope comes to Flanders.
Stanhope is an outsider: an American in the British Army, a Southerner constantly called "Yank," a reader of the Romantic poets in a company of men more interested in more earthly delights, a man blessed (or cursed) with "second sight." As such, he finds himself attracted to other outsiders, and Anthony does a good job of showing us the many faces of the outsider.
Publishers Weekly compares this book to Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. I also saw a lot of parallels between FLanders and Stanley Kubrick's classic film Paths of Glory. There is the heartlessness of the distant commanders in their commands. There is the insular attitude, the use of the outsider as scapegoat. What there is more of in Anthony's novel is the hell of war, a hell that could not be brought to the screen in the 1950s. She lays it all out--not just the battles and sniping and "authorized" killing, but also the disease and the maggots and the hardening of men's hearts and souls.
Stanhope tries desperately to hold on to his humanity in all this, but he finds himself gradually sinking further into not just despair, but death--the death of his soul.
Although the fantasy content is on a much more restrained level that most fantasy novels, it is necessary to the story. Without it, Anthony would still have a powerful novel, but a different novel. As it stands, though, this will be on my Hugo nomination ballot next year.
To order Time Patrol from amazon.com, click here.