Birthday Reviews: Cherryh, Schroeder, Wilcox, Zahn

This week’s birthday authors take us to the clouds of Jupiter, to a world six hundred years’ voyage away, and present us with two variations on Cassandra.

C. J. Cherryh (1942-09-01)

“Cassandra” (F&SF, October 1978)

Cherryh is mostly known for her novels (I’ll be reading at least my thirty-fourth of hers soon, which is now less than half the total), which include some fantasies and many set in realistic future space milieus, but she’s written several stories collected in Sunfall, Visible Light and, ultimately, in the Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh. One of her earliest, and one which made one of the biggest impacts, was this updated myth of mad Alis, who staggers through life in and out of mental hospitals seeing a double vision of her current reality of people and places and her possible future of ghosts and destruction after the War. It’s a short and seemingly simple tale but Alis’ agony (and ours) is firmly, judiciously depicted, with depth.

Karl Schroeder (1962-09-04)

“The Pools of Air” (Tesseracts 3, 1991)

A filmmaker, her on-air talent, and a tech guy are trying to save their skins after the helium-3 refining ship they are filming on crashes into something while cruising the clouds of Jupiter, destroying its front-end and cutting them off from direct access to their shuttle. The protagonist has baggage, both figurative and literal, which is not helping her or her companions. In a way, that element is the whole story so it’s hard to say it should be minimized but, in ways, a lot of hard SF [1] is damaged by writers who have drunk the kool-aid and overtly bow to what Asimov called “the tin-god of characterization” in an effort to be accepted as literature. There’s a certain kind of SF where that usually works and sometimes hard SF can be fused with it but, generally, it’s a distraction and hard SF works better on a scientific and social level than a personal one. Be that as it may, this is a concise and energetic story that takes the reader to an impressive setting.

Don Wilcox (1905-08-29/2000-03-09)

“The Voyage That Lasted Six Hundred Years” (Amazing, October, 1940)

This is an honorary happy birthday because parts of this story are painful to read but it is the first full treatment of the generation starship (a year before Heinlein) and it’s oddly clever in ways. Akin to how puns are contrived but still work, this is a pile of author fiats but is at least elaborately contrived. The first generation starship takes off from Earth with what turn out to be seventeen couples and one “Keeper of the Traditions” (our narrator) who goes into suspended animation [2] for a century at a time before coming out to see how things are going and to try to set anything wrong to right. However, he takes a couple of steps backward for every one he takes forward. The time lapse view of the society leads to a certain propulsive effect and the variety of this civilization’s discontents maintain some interest.

Timothy Zahn (1951-09-01)

“The Cassandra” (Analog, November 1983)

Going out through the in door, this Cassandra is quite different. Zahn portrays this as a generational mutation (with characteristic physical markers of white hair and green eyes) on a colony which then collapses due to group trances of apocalyptic visions and the ensuing dislocations and stress. Now a few Cassandras are back on Earth, suffering in a more isolated way and we follow the effort of one such highly educated man struggling to get and keep a job as a dishwasher. This is a story in which there is a problem to be solved (whether it is solved or not) and, despite the author’s afterword talking about how atypically tragic it is for him, there is actually a sense in which it is uplifting because it’s not an inexplicable and pointless affliction or a parable of human blindness but is a natural problem with a cause and actually has some gain come from the pain. This is yet another example of how you can give twelve authors one theme and get twelve unique stories back. If you only think of Zahn as a tie-guy or even just a novelist, check this and his other short fiction out.

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[1] I call it hard SF because it seems like it generally, despite being insufficiently concerned with Jupiter’s radiation. The trio breathe a sort of liquid air which, among other things, helps them deal with gravity and I suppose it also wouldn’t hurt regarding radiation but, so far as I recall, radiation is never mentioned.

[2] If it was ever explained why there is suspended animation tech and the mission was designed to (a) have such a tiny population and (b) not provide them all with the tech so as to avoid having to endure such a difficult and uncertain voyage, I missed it.

Seven Book Series by Living Authors

I was organizing and cleaning out bookmarks and came across “8 Books Series I Never Finished.” Despite being dismayed at the excess of series in the current market (especially debut “novels” that are already “in series”) and pining desperately for singletons, I thought I’d do a variant of that here: whether I’ve finished it or not, if the author is alive and I’ve read more than three volumes in a strict series (must have recurring characters and/or a continuing plot, not just be set in a particular universe), I’d discuss it.

In turns out that, while I read plenty of milieu books and singletons, and some duos and trios, it’s rare for me to go over three strictly related novels, usually because more volumes drive the series into the ground. With those meeting the criteria, though, I tend to “finish” them. (Though I’m unlikely to stay “finished” if more volumes do come out.)

Agent Cormac by Neal Asher (5/6 vols.)

I’ve got most, though not all, of the Polity universe books. Central to those are the five “Dragon” books featuring Agent Cormac (and there’s a prequel, which isn’t my favorite, that also features Cormac). It’s not so much Cormac that led me to read all five volumes, but the overarching story of the awakenings and incursions of bizarre things into a widescreen universe with lots of thoughtful violence. You’ve got ancient races and superscience technology and AIs and cyborg soldiers and most anything else you could ask for. While I’m willing to continue with more milieu books, I’m not clamoring specifically for more Dragon/Cormac. And, while I’ve been less high on Asher’s non-Polity stuff, I’d still like to see him keep trying to create things outside of it.

Lost Fleet 1&2/Lost Stars by Jack Campbell (15 vols. (6+5+4))

Some people misunderstand me when I say these are “popcorn” books but I mean it in a good way. They’re fairly light, yes, but tasty and easy to continue eating quickly and I like them and it’s all good. There are some tics and flaws to the writing but I like what these military space operas have to say about democracy, corporations, and infinite war. They’re very moderate, reasonable works in an age of immoderate unreason. So a bit of depth and a lot fun! I really enjoyed the first set of six which was the “anabasis” of Captain Geary’s fleet. I also really enjoyed the variant set of four “Lost Stars” books about a splinter world of the broken Syndicate trying to rebuild after the war. In terms of galacto-politics, this could almost be background story to one of the “rebuilding” phases of Asimov’s universe, such as Trantor’s rise or something (though it’s very different in most every other way). I was less thrilled with the second, five volume, set of Admiral Geary books but they still had some good aspects. While I may be wrong and it’ll be the best set yet, I have no interest in the prequel series (or prequels, generally) and, after so many volumes, have had plenty of the universe, generally.

Morgaine by C. J. Cherryh (4 vols.)
Chanur by C. J. Cherryh (5 vols.)

I have essentially all the Union/Alliance books and, indeed, essentially all Cherryh’s books up through the early 90s or so. While she has a reputation of being a series person, until the Foreigner universe, she’d really written several singletons and only written a duo here or a trilogy there and, of course, the huge sprawling, very loosely connected U/A books containing most all of them, but few extended series. The Morgaine saga began as a trilogy of science fantasy books about the galactic gate traveler, Morgaine, and her trusty “mortal” sidekick, Vanye, and only received the fourth book years later. I enjoyed the grittiness and intensity of the first three but still had lingering questions and naturally couldn’t stop there. The fourth book didn’t wrap everything up in a bow, but did resolve things sufficiently that I was finally satisfied. The Chanur saga began as a book, got a trilogy (akin to the Faded Sun’s “one big book split into three”), and then got a belated “next generation” add-on. I enjoyed the multi-species hustle and bustle with another of Cherryh’s “human fish out of water” characters and, being a sort of subset completist regarding Cherryh, I carried on with the “Legacy” volume which wasn’t bad but, unlike the fourth Morgaine book, turned out to be unnecessary.

Alex Benedict by Jack McDevitt (7 vols.)

The first of these is A Talent for War and, like most or all of McDevitt’s series, began as a singleton. It focuses on Alex Benedict as he solves an old mystery regarding humanity and the one other sentient species in the galaxy. It became a series fifteen years later and switched to being narrated by Benedict’s assistant/business partner, Chase Kolpath. These got to be a sort of cozy, comforting thing for me, despite the archaeological mysteries often resulting in clear and present dangers to the protagonists and people around them (and all too often resulted in sabotaged skimmers) but Coming Home (#7) was, on the one hand, less satisfying yet, on the other, sort of brought things back to the beginning and could be seen as wrapping things up. I don’t know if there will be another or if I’d get it. I think the series could likely use at least a rest.

Featured Futures doesn’t get a lot of comments and this is not even strictly on topic so I don’t expect any for this but they are welcome, whether about these series or any others (or even on the topic of series in general).

Top Ten Most-Read Authors

The “Top 10 Monday” at Thrice Read was on “Authors I’ve Read the Most Books From.” I don’t guess this is a “tag” and I don’t usually (ever?) play on them anyway but I got curious and ended up making the list and jotting some comments (that got increasingly out of hand the more I got excited). I don’t do the Goodreads thing so I just had to cobble the list together as best I could. The result isn’t a list of “favorite” authors but it certainly includes a lot who would be on such a list. It is also composed almost entirely of older authors with all that entails mainly because some newer authors haven’t had as much time to accumulate.

The list has eleven authors because I originally thought Spinrad and Dick were tied at #10 with eighteen but then I remembered I’d read Radio Free Albemuth but didn’t feel like deleting Spinrad because of that. Though I have another Spinrad novel and a non-fiction work in the Pile, I still have three PKD novels and a collection (it’s a big Pile), so he’d still be behind. Speaking of non-fiction, the numbers for Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov would go up if counting non-fiction.

11. Norman Spinrad (18)

Spinrad’s peak for me was from Bug Jack Barron (1969) to Child of Fortune (1985), with Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream (1972), and The Void Captain’s Tale (1983) (along with the novella Riding the Torch (1974)) being the essential long Spinrad works. The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970) is an essential collection and No Direction Home (1975) isn’t bad, either. Spinrad’s a New Wave guy and The Iron Dream savagely parodies SF&F archetypes by presenting the novel as written by Hitler and The Void Captain’s Tale is a kind of “art space opera” which is thickly stylistically experimental. So absolutely not my kinds of things but Spinrad is just amazing anyway.

10. Philip K. Dick (19)

PKD is overrated and overread (if only because he’s so highly rated and widely read) but I do love Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and Ubik (1969) and like some others. His “Collected Stories” (five volumes, of which I’ve read four) also contain a lot of great stuff. He’s a brain-bending beatnick who grapples with the nature of reality, the dehumanization of automation, and god and insanity.

09. Roger Zelazny (20)

Roger Zelazny is now probably most famous for fantasy novels and the things he ought to be famous for are pyrotechnic SF(-ish) stories. Another sort of new-wavy guy with a lush style and vivid imagination. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of his stuff but love a lot of it, too. The early novels (excluding the expanded versions of excellent novellas) are pretty good, but his collections are where it’s at. Four for Tomorrow (1967) only contains two stories not repeated in The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories (1971) and both are still essential, as are My Name Is Legion (1976) and even The Last Defender of Camelot (1980) and Unicorn Variations (1983).

08. Arthur C. Clarke (23)

Clarke is another guy I’ve gotten rid of a lot of. His very earliest novels are too much like travelogues and such of his later novels as I’ve read seem a little tired but the run of SF novels from Childhood’s End (1953) to 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) (excepting Imperial Earth (1975)) is excellent. I’ve also read and enjoyed most of his collections before replacing them with The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000) which would have to be essential even if a story or two slipped through the cracks. One of the few hard SF writers who seem to also make literary folks at least somewhat happy.

07. Robert Silverberg (24)

Robert Silverberg was a story factory in the 50s. I’ve read very little from that period but have vague but fond recollections (those are not from the 50s) of Master of Life and Death (1957). His critically esteemed period began when Frederik Pohl, who’d recently become sole editor of Galaxy and If, made him a deal in about 1963. This manifested in book form by 1967. So Silverberg also became a sort of new New Waver. Probably the most successful novel of that period was Dying Inside (1972). But again, for me, the stories were the peak and probably the essential single book would be Beyond the Safe Zone (1986), which is an omnibus of Unfamiliar Territory (1973), The Feast of St. Dionysus (1975), and Capricorn Games (1976) which, along with Born with the Dead (1974) and the stories fixed up into The World Inside (1971), collect the vast bulk of his stories from 1970 to his brief retirement period of about 1976-79. Later in 1979, he began serializing the superficially sunnier fantasy-tinged Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980) which is nevertheless SF filled with dark undercurrents. Regardless, it’s an excellent book and became the start of a series for which he may now be best known.

06. Fritz Leiber (24)

Fritz Leiber is the protean master of everything. He’s a very good SF writer in addition to being one of the very best in both fantasy and horror. I’ve never read his Burroughs pastiche, Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), and think A Specter is Haunting Texas (1968) is only okay while The Silver Eggheads (1962) is very nearly bad (and maybe a couple of his collections aren’t perfect) but you can’t go wrong with anything else. His Changewar series is one of the major time travel series in SF and his Fafhrd & Grey Mouser/Lankhmar series is a cornerstone of fantasy, while a huge number of stories and novels like Conjure Wife (1943) and Our Lady of Darkness (1977) are important to horror. I have a special fondness for a couple of relatively neglected works. One is a solipsistic mildly nightmarish tale that appears in various forms under various titles such as You’re All Alone and The Sinful Ones (c.1953, either version is good) and the other is a bit of exhilarating slapstick weirdness called The Green Millennium (1953).

05. A. E. van Vogt (25)

A. E. van Vogt. What can you say? People tend to view Campbell’s Astounding as monolithic but there was a great deal of variety throughout, manifested most obviously by the colorful overreaching towards transcendence of van Vogt amidst the cool reason of Asimov and the folksy groundedness of Heinlein. It would be easy for a critic (such as Damon Knight) to trash van Vogt but a more admirable critical task would be to analyze exactly how he managed to create such worlds that mesmerized generations of readers with such unconventional materials and methods. As Dick said,

Damon feels that it’s bad artistry when you build those funky universes where people fall through the floor. It’s like he’s viewing a story the way a building inspector would when he’s building your house. But reality really is a mess, and yet it’s exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.

Van Vogt’s career went in at least two phases. From 1939 to about 1951, he poured forth a mighty torrent of stories and novels. Then (perhaps due to his penchant for odd systems of promised empowerment) he became involved in Dianetics (not Scientology) and basically quit writing except to “fix up” a bunch of stories into sorts of novels. In book form, this covers stuff from basically 1946 to 1968. The dynamic Frederik Pohl struck once again, getting van Vogt to write new stuff from about 1963 which manifested in books from 1969 on. I’m not very familiar with the later phase but almost anything from the earlier phase is fantastic. Again, while the Weapon Shops and Null books and things like The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) are famous (and rightly so) I also feel like mentioning my appreciation for a somewhat less famous early fixup, The Mixed Men (1952, aka Mission to the Stars).

04. Poul Anderson (27)

Poul Anderson is an odd writer for me. Works such as Brain Wave (1954) and Tau Zero (1970, an all-time favorite) as well as The Enemy Stars (1958) and The High Crusade (1960) are classics and quite various in content. (He’s also very highly regarded as a fantasist and I have a couple in the Pile but haven’t read any.) He’s written innumerable stories of equally wide variety and high caliber. His Polesotechnic League/Terran Empire future history series, featuring Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, and Dominic Flandry, is very good. So I’ve read a lot of Anderson books and enjoyed a lot. But I’ve also gotten rid of several and he’s definitely a guy who wrote too much with a lot of stuff rarely less than serviceable but often not much more than that. And (kind of like the often excellent Jack Williamson) he seems to lack, for me, some sort of pizzazz or spark or whatever many of my very favorite writers have. Nevertheless, at his best he’s very good.

03. C. J. Cherryh (35, maybe 37)

C. J. Cherryh’s well known for fantasy works and has written excellent singletons of a more or less science-fictional nature such as Wave Without a Shore (1981) and has written stories (even winning her first Hugo for one) but (at least until the Foreigner series) she was best known for the series of novels set in her Union/Alliance universe and particularly those at the core of it, running from the Hugo-winning Downbelow Station (1981) to Finity’s End (1997). She can be a difficult author, writing complex, claustrophobic, tough tales and, indeed, I read a book eons ago, then another couple fewer eons ago, before she finally clicked for me while giving her yet another try (which included a re-read of Downbelow Station). Then again, some folks dive right in with no problem. Either way, she’s a superb science-fictional anthropologist with a great knack for creating aliens and putting hapless humans in their midst. Also, for such a space-oriented author who doesn’t usually focus on specific hard sciences, she nevertheless plays closer to the rules of the universe than most authors. In addition to Downbelow Station and the other core Merchanter works, some of my favorites of hers are The Faded Sun trilogy (1978-79, really one big novel published in three parts) and the Heavy Time/Hellburner duo (1991-92) except that those two really need a third book. I also especially like both the original trilogy and the belated sequel that make up her “science fantasy” Morgaine Saga. In fact, aside from shared-world stuff and post-1988 fantasies, I’ve read all her stuff until around 1992 when it gets more sporadic and the only one of those I really didn’t care for was Hestia (1979), though Brothers of Earth (1976) might be my next least favorite. Basically, it’s all good. I’m sure the Foreigner stuff is too but I read either the first volume or first trilogy in the series (which is why I’m not sure of the count for Cherryh) and I just didn’t feel like getting involved with that.

02. Robert A. Heinlein (40)

Heinlein and Asimov. Basically, if you don’t know who they are, go find out. If you don’t love one or both of them, I’m afraid we can’t be friends. (I kid. Sort of.) When I was younger, I actually liked all Heinlein but he definitely breaks into two clear phases with a fuzzy phase between. His late phase (which I mark from 1970-1988) didn’t survive either my getting older or my re-reading them or both. Friday (1982) comes closest to the early magic. The middle phase, basically from 1961-1970 is very choppy but does include a couple of Hugo winners, a late and brief addition to the Future History stories and the much-belated publication of both of the two related stories that make up Orphans of the Sky (1963). But it’s the early phase of 1939-1959 that is nearly solid gold. This period includes virtually all the Future History stories and juvenile novels as well as many other independent stories and novels. All the virtues of Heinlein and almost none of the vices are present in those masterpieces of science fiction.

01. Isaac Asimov (44)

While I’m not going to argue with anyone who prefers Heinlein, my personal favorite is Asimov. Partly, this is nostalgic and honorary in the sense that I recall reading The Foundation Trilogy (1951-53 from 40s stories) and having my brain irrevocably altered. But leaving that aside, he’s still my favorite for his clear prose, imaginative scope, embrace of logic and reason, and sense of humor.

He preferred his Robot stories and I prefer his Foundation stories but I love both and they’re both essential. His work divides into early (1939-59) and late (1982-1992) with a couple of books and several stories between and many people disregard the late period, including the Robot and Foundation sequels. Even I will admit that they aren’t as essential but at least the first of the new works, Foundation’s Edge (1982) and The Robots of Dawn (1983), while different from the earlier titles, are still very good and none are bad.

I’d also make a pitch for the often slighted trio of Empire novels (1950-52) which, after all, are important precursors (and, ultimately, connective elements) between the Robots and the Foundation. Even considered as stand-alones, they really captured my young imagination. Paradoxically, I put off reading his six Lucky Starr juveniles (1952-58) until my imagination was no longer especially young. Asimov lacks Heinlein’s easy rapport with youth so they don’t stand up to his juveniles, but they’re still pretty good. (On the other hand, I read one “Norby” book when I was young but I believe they were basically written by Janet Asimov and targeted at people much younger than I, and I have never had any interest in reading more. Also, while both Silverberg and Asimov are on this list, I didn’t care for the one book I read of the several in which Silverberg expanded Asimov stories into novels.)

More important than those (if not as essential as Robots and Foundation) are The Gods Themselves (1972) and The End of Eternity (1955), as well as the story collections which include great works like “Nightfall” and “The Last Question” (usually along with chatty, amusing, informative introductions to the volumes and stories).