Three Authors and Some Extra Stuff

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– Wombat-socho

Last week I said I was going to talk about great SF writers of the 1950s, which I’ll do presently, but first a couple of items hot off the presses and onto my Kindle, so to speak. First up, Casey Neumiller sent me a review copy of Dead Man’s Fugue (for which much thanks!) which I enthusiastically recommend to those of you who like SF adventures. Set in a time after Earth has fought a colonial war against its interstellar colonies (and lost badly), it concerns one Rake Weston, ace pilot, who wakes up in an insurance facility in a new body and with all sorts of folks gunning for him. Too bad he doesn’t know the reason why – but you get to come along for the ride as he does his damnedest to find out why before he winds up dead. Again. Neumiller’s debut is a non-stop thriller, reminiscent of many of the grand masters and yet unmistakably his own; for the price, it’s a hell of a bargain. The other hot property is S.M. Stirling’s The Given Sacrifice, which wraps up the six-volume tale of Rudi Mackenzie and the Cutter War and begins another tale, that of his daughter Crown Princess Orlaith. I’ve been following the Emberverse series since Dies the Fire, so there was no way I wasn’t getting this – but unlike some of its predecessors, it felt a bit rushed. For all that, there’s some great storytelling in here – the tale of the Morrowlander Troop, and the hilarious story of the awkward discussion between Heuradys d’Ath and her mother Delia about girls are just two of the better spots – but I honestly wish it had been longer. So much the worse for me.

We had somebody complaining last week about the lack of scientifiction before Hugo Gernsback and wanting to know if we could call Verne and Shelley examples of “Bronze Age” SF. The short reply was “No”; the long reply is here.

By popular demand, we’re going to talk about Ray Bradbury, even though he didn’t consider himself an SF author and rejected the label. He did get quite a few things published outside the pulp ghetto, and most of his work is arguably fantasy of the non-elf & dwarf crap variety, Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree being perhaps the most memorable. SF readers, of course, tend to dwell on Fahrenheit 451 (one of the classic dystopias) and The Martian Chronicles, though even the latter is essentially a fantasy like all his other work.

Poul Anderson’s career actually starts in the late 1940s, with the short stories that would later be collected in Twilight World, but he’s much better known for the Dominic Flandry stories, the tales of a freebooting intelligence officer of Imperial Terra’s navy. Flandry is somewhat reminiscent of James Bond, but is much more likable than Fleming’s cold killer even if they are in a similar line of work. Captain Flandry and Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra contain the bulk of the Flandry stories, the latter including the heartbreaking short novel “A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows”. On a lighter note, Anderson collaborated with Gordy Dickson to produce the cheerfully imitative Hokas, alien teddy bears who are more than a little unclear on the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Earthman’s Burden relates the amusing struggles of Interbeing League Envoy Alexander Jones to cope with his charges. Most of Anderson’s van Rijn stories and separate novels came out in the 1960s, so we’ll leave them for that post.

This seems as good a place as any to mention H. Beam Piper, whose Terro-Human Future History can be considered a counterpoint to Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, in that Piper believed no amount of planning was going to change human nature, and the best one could do was learn from the past before it repeated itself. Most of his stories were collected in Ace editions in the 1980s which have since gone out of print, but the original stories (along with the novels Four-Day Planet, Space Viking and Uller Uprising) are included in The H. Beam Piper Megapack, which also includes his Paratime stories and “Little Fuzzy” as well as his non-SF novels Murder In The Gunroom and Rebel Raider. To get his most famous Paratime novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, though, you’ll need to shell out a couple more bucks and get The Complete Paratime.


I’ll probably look at Arthur C. Clarke. C.M. Kornbluth and more of the other authors from the 1950s next week. Your suggestions are welcome.


51 comments

  6. Well it started off a lot like Walter Jon Williams book Voice of the Whirlwind (’87). But it is starting to diverge.

  8. Piper was fairly prolific in writing before his unfortunate suicide, and it takes a fair amount of digging to find his novels. Plus, he had a number of people try to complete his sagas, in addition to Lord Kalvan ot Otherwhen. “Fuzzy Bones” and “Golden Dream” are two that I am aware of ….. and not to my liking (not the Lord Kalvan efforts, though).

    But there’s “Fuzzies And Other People”, which was apparently completed from a draft found in his effects. and published in 1984.

    I do know that a fair number of his novels have been recently reprinted (I forget which publisher), and that you can download many of his books from Project Gutenberg.

  10. Dominic Flandry is one of the best spy characters in Science Fiction. He wins, but he also looses quite a bit. I’ve enjoyed the entire Technic Civilization saga that’s been reprinted.

  11. I read the first book in Stirling’s Emberverse series, but I prefer his companion series known as the Nantucket trilogy. It’s good speculative fiction.

  14. I liked Great King’s War, but as some reviewers have remarked, the sequels that Carr did on his own tend to be darker in tone and spirit than Piper’s original. Still good brain candy, though.

  15. Pretty much everything except Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is in the megapack I linked above. A lot less effort than rooting through Project Gutenberg, and damn near as cheap.

  16. Different strokes for different folks. I like the killer dyke character in the Emberverse novels better, myself, but again, it’s a matter of taste

  18. The Emberverse series died a few books ago. They were journeying across the post-apocalyptic US, making all this build-up about how dangerous it would be once they crossed the Mississippi…

    Then there was, what, one fight and the next chapter they’re at Martha’s Vineyard.

    Wait, what?

  19. I’m about halfway done with the book, kindle says 67%, and it’s a pretty good read so far.

    Oops, I started to give a spoiler.

    It has been, as you posted, worth the money.

  20. I have a lot of the EE Smith books myself. I’d read a lot of them as a younger feller and when I saw that Amazon had a lot of them for free, I got’em quick. Not everybody’s cup of tea, but I like them.

  21. Oh, those two tales were OK, taken by themselves. Problem is, they really don’t fit into the Terro-Human Future History, as laid out by Piper. There are comments in other books/stories of Piper’s about Fuzzies that simply don’t match up with the plot in those sequels.

    Yeah, I’m a purist about such things. But I didn’t know there was a third such effort; I will check it out. As closure, if naught else.

    As for the Megapack….I appreciate the pointer. If I can get that for my iPad, I’ll buy it. I like keeping oldies like those on it, for a quick read when I have a few minutes few. I made a point of downloading all of the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs I could from Gutenberg, and yeah, it’s a pain.

  22. Both were somewhat discussed last week, but not in detail. So maybe Wombat will let us argue about The Notebook of Lazarus Long, and it’s relationship to “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” sometime.

  23. PS: Not that I should be a purist — Piper himself was not consistent in his own Terro-Human Future History, as noted by others (e.g., just what happened to the Merlin supercomputer from “The Cosmic Computer”?)

  25. You really do want to hear more about Queen Victoria’s cigar smoking, bawdy poetry writing daughter, don’t you?

  26. I think you missed a book in there somewhere. There was a lot more than “one fight”, and Nantucket != Martha’s Vineyard.

  39. This did start off very similar, but it quickly went it own way. The only “cyber” it really had was a neural jack, and that seems to be in nearly all SF now days. It does however share a lot of plot devices with several other books I’ve read. But overall it was a very enjoyable read.

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