Wondermakers 2 edited by Robert Hoskins

I collect anthologies. Well, I collect all sorts of SF (and non-SF) books, but with single author works, I tend to be a bit more selective, whereas for anthologies, I pick up almost anything (especially reprint anthologies) since most have at least some interesting stories in them. But sometimes, since the stories overlap to some extent with other collections, I may buy them then only get to them many years later. I probably bought Wondermakers 2 at least a dozen years ago – perhaps even 20 years ago – but just got around to reading it on the trip back from L.A.con. It’s a good anthology, with works spanning the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.

“Dominions Beyond” by Ward Moore is a wonderful alternate history of sorts. I’d previously read Moore’s great alternate history novel, Bring the Jubilee, but I’d never read any of his short fiction. In “Dominions Beyond,” a man from Victorian England is accidentally sent to Mars. He encounters Martians who are much like primitive humans. They approach him, planning to kill the stranger, but like a good Englishman, he speaks sternly to them. He knows nothing of cultural relativism and beings naming things (and the people; “Mogulum Tu,” can’t possibly be an acceptable name, so he renames a native “Tom Smith”). The natives at first avoid killing him out of curiosity, but soon begin following him as he teaches them metallurgy (he was an industrialist on earth) and other useful arts that improve their lives and dominate the planet. More than a hundred years later, the first mission to Mars (or so the earthmen think) find a British colony, toasting the queen and drinking tea, on Mars. It’s a great send-up of colonialism, and very amusing.

More downbeat is Dean Koontz’s “The Twelfth Bed.” Koontz’s had a first career as a prolific writer of mostly mid-level, minor SF before he became a bestselling author of thrillers and horror novels (and caused most of his older work to go out of print). I’ve not read much by him, and in fact have mostly avoided him, as his works seemed like the stuff I wouldn’t care much for. But “The Twelfth Bed” is a very effective story. Humans are imprisoned by androids and forced to live out their lives in a small prison. No reason is given, nor do we know much about the world in which this is occurring. Everything, in rather Kafkaesque fashion, is focused on the room in which the prisoners live. The story describes how a small group of them react, probing a bit into how people would react in such circumstances. If more of Koontz’s earlier short stories were of this quality, we lost a promising writer when he moved into the world of bestsellers.

Wondermakers 2 also features stories by the two greatest SF satirists of the mid-fifties and sixties: William Tenn and Robert Sheckley, though both are represented by good if somewhat minor stories. Tenn’s “Eastward, Ho” presents a post-apocalyptic America that has been retaken by the Indian tribes. It looks sharply at how the American settlers treated the natives by reversing the situation, to good effect. Sheckley’s “The Gun Without a Bang” is more straightforward SF. A big game hunter is pursued by alien creatures, who keep coming after him, no matter how many he kills with his new model gun. The gun disintegrates noiselessly, so the survivors never learn fear.

Ursula LeGuin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” is set in her Hainish universe. It examines what happens to a crew of a starship – one an empath – who go on a voyage of exploration. The story centers around the reactions of the crew to the empath and the empath, who feels and responds to the emotions of all those around him, to them: crammed in amidst the emotions of the others, he hates them, and, because of how he acts on this, they hate him. It looks at the true horror of what empathy could be like for an empath. His reactions are understandable; he is constantly awash in a sea of emotion, and withdrawal is his only defense in the end. But things become worse when they land on a planet where the vegetable biomass is, if not quite sentient, able to feel, to respond, and to reflect emotion back. It’s a powerful story, a good example of earlier LeGuin. There are a few flaws – she drops into too much explanation of the empath’s condition later in the story – but despite that it’s one of the best in the collection.

Isaac Asimov’s “Living Space” is good, if minor. Like many Asimov stories, if centers on an idea, not characters, and ends with a twist on that idea. Humans have discovered a way to move into alternate dimensions. They solve the population problem by offering everyone an uninhabited earth of their own; after all, if there are infinite earths, there are infinite earths that never developed life. But if there are infinite earths, there are also ones which are doing the same thing, and more. The story is interesting enough, but with little emotional impact, memorable only for its central idea.

Poul Anderson’s “The Horn of Time the Hunter” is part of his Kith future history. A starship, moving at relativistic speeds, is returning from a many thousand year journey, and stops on a once-inhabited planet. At first they find only ruins, but then find an intelligent aquatic species. It features strong characterization as well as an penetrating look at the tricky moral situation of how one deals with someone who – perhaps through misunderstanding – has just killed a close friend. It’s the typical Anderson mix of poetry, wonder, and science, and is one of the strongest stories in the book.

“The Case of the Martian Client,” by Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman, is a story about what Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger may have done during Wells’s Martian invasion. There’s really not much of a plot to it; its main power comes from the interactions of the characters, which the Wellmans handle quite well. It’s followed, though, by a rather strange afterward by Wade Wellman. It starts well enough, with him describing the genesis of the story. But it then descends into rather nutty speculation about why the UFOs are watching us (Wellman seems to be a believe that UFOs are real alien spacecraft) and what a bad idea it is to beam messages into space, where hostile or even hungry aliens might hear. Quite wacky.

The final story, Robert Silverberg’s “Caught in the Organ Draft,” covers some of the same territory as Niven’s “The Jigsaw Man.” In the future, in attempt to get more organs for those who need them, a draft is instituted. The draftees may need to donate a kidney or a lung. The story works well on several levels. The surface story works well, but there are also several other levels. The story comments on how drafts work (it was published in 1972 and thus written in the midst of the draft in the Vietnam war), including why some who don’t like the draft have mixed reactions, both to why they don’t like the draft as well as why they may give into anyway. It also explores the issue of a the young of a society giving up resources to the old as a society ages – something that resonates today as Social Security and Medicare spending is soaring. This is a strong Silverberg story, from his most productive period, and packs a strong impact.

There are several other minor stories, and all are at least enjoyable (except perhaps for the very short Zelazny story “The Monster and the Maiden,” which just had me scratching my head). It’s a collection worth looking for in the used books stores near you (or of course on the Web).

The Totally Geeky Guide to the Princess Bride by MaryAnn Johanson

MaryAnn Johnson runs one of my favorite film Web sites: The Flick Filosopher (http://www.flickfilosopher.com/). She has a very geeky, snarky, and amusing insight into films, and even when I don’t agree with her, I usually find her amusing and interesting. She’s written her first book -- The Totally Geeky Guide to the Princess Bride – which she lists as third in her “top 100” (which she emphasizes aren’t her 100 favorite films or her list of 100 best films, but instead the formative films that made her the critic she is). (If you are curious, Buckaroo Banzai and Raiders of the Lost Arc are one and two.)

The Princess Bride is not only a very good film. It’s one of those films that many watch numerous times, that has a loyal, cult following, and that is full of lines that, if quoted, can be instantly identified as being from The Princess Bride. Monty Python and the Holy Grail probably has even more lines that are quoted even more often, but I’m hard presses to think of many other films that both have so many quotable lines and are quoted so often. (Lots of people may quote “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” but how many other Gone with the Wind quotes fit so many situations so well.)

The book – it’s really a long, multi-part essay – explores why The Princess Bride resonates so well with so many people. As she says, it’s funny, swashbuckling, magic, romantic, and mysterious – but so are other movies. What is it about this movie that makes it so memorable?

One part of it is the way it very consciously plays with our expectations of stories or movies. The whole story-within-a-story format enables it to comment on what’s going on and to draw us in in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise be drawn in. As she notes, “the film celebrates storytelling by deliberately and with comic afterthought pointing out how artificial storytelling is – and yet, at the same time, it is so effective an effective example of storytelling that even constant reminders that what we are being presented is fake cannot undermine it.”

A great example of this that she cites as an example is when Princess Buttercup, trying to swim away from her captors, is pursued by the fire eels. Things look bleak and hopeless; tension builds. And then the narrator breaks in to say “She doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.” Well, of course she doesn’t. We deep down know that she couldn’t, but we fall in for the tension in films when this happens anyway, just like in Raiders of the Lost Arc we get tense and excited when Indy is trapped in the Well of Souls with the snakes, even though we know he can’t possibly be killed. The Princess Bride draws us into this type of storytelling, then reverses it to wonderful effect and humor.

MaryAnn explores this relationship between our expectations of storytelling and how The Princess Bride plays on those in some detail, exploring a number of interesting facets of this, but always staying engaging and amusing. She also looks a bit at the uses of the framing story to pull readers in, how the movie is really about “true love” (and why those among us of a somewhat cynical bent accept that in this movie when we don’t in so many other more earnest romances), and even a bit about how it relates to the theater of the absurd (though again, at a more pop-culture level, not at an academic level).

One aspect that she alludes to though doesn’t explore directly that I think is another key reason for the continued popularity of The Princess Bride is the quality of the writing, especially in terms of the sharpness of the dialog (which also ties into why it’s quoted so often). In the 1930s and 1940s, the dialog in so many movies sparkled. But these days, that’s less common, as the emphasis is more on plotting, visuals, etc. (The extreme case of this is George Lucas, who doesn’t seem to understand the value of good dialog at all, but who is masterful in terms of visuals.) It’s not universally true. We do still get some great films that are driven by wonderful writing: Shakespeare in Love is a great example here. But it’s much rarer than it used to be. But that’s another thing that makes The Princess Bride special.

At 88 pages, the book is a fast read, one that you can devour at one sitting. It’s both amusing and insightful. I’d be interested to see her look in more depth at some of the other movies in her top 100 some day, many of which also would be well served by this sort of “geeky” analysis.

Dread Empire’s Fall: Conventions of War by Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams has to be one of the most overlooked of SF’s very good writers. Throughout his career – starting with the Zelaznyesque Knight Moves, through the Hard Wired, Aristoi, Metropolitan, and others, he’s produced a series of good books, written in a number of different styles and modes. He has handled each different style well, then tried something different. But he’s only rarely been on the Hugo ballot, certainly not as often as his body of work deserves. Perhaps this is because he didn’t first firmly establish a readership by sticking to one style before moving onto another. (For all it’s supposed delights in originality, a portion of the SF readership really doesn’t always react well to authors who try something different each time.) Williams’s most recent project has been a space opera trilogy, Dread Empire’s Fall. It’s been a major contribution to the new space opera subgenre.

The first two volumes of Dread Empire’s Fall – The Praxis and The Sundering – were published several years ago. As the series starts, the empire has been ruled for centuries by the Shaa. They rule ruthlessly and impose a secular religion called the Praxis on al the races of the empire. But the Shaa are a dying race, and when the last one dies, a battle for power ensues as the insectoid Naxid try o take control. During this, the two main characters whose stories are intertwined in the final volume – Conventions of War – come to prominence. Gareth Martinez is a lord in a minor but rich family. Caroline Sula, who we find out isn’t really a peer but has taken over the life of one, is an ambitious young woman. Together, they devise battle tactics that enable elements of the fleet – bound by centuries of tradition and not open to new ways – to win major victories.

At the start of Conventions of War, Sula is on the planet Zanshaa, which is firmly under the control of the rebel Naxid government. Her story takes up about half the book (intertwined through most of the book with Martinez’s story). Essentially, in an effort to overthrow the Naxid regime, she becomes a terrorist, and soon leads an underground army in the attempt to take back the capital city. This in many ways is a disquieting part of the book. Williams shows us Sula’s point of view and makes us root for her, even though she often isn’t the most likable of people. Moreover, her tactics – which include assassination of Naxids and those who support them, blowing up hotels and administrative buildings, and so on – are particularly unnerving given the current world political situation. Because while we are made uncomfortable by Sula’s tactics, at the same time we hope she is successful. It’s made a bit easier by the fact that the Naxid are over-the-top brutal in their response, hurting their own cause. Had they not been so, it perhaps would have been even more unsettling to follow Sula. But follow her, and cheer for her, we do.

Meanwhile, Martinez, part of Chenforce (a larger squadron under Michi Chen), is using the tactics he and Sula devised to make raids into Naxid space. They are very successful, yet when they finally return to the larger fleet, they find it now controlled by Lord Tork – who believes that all fleet actions should be fought like they were hundreds of years before – in a calculated, conservative, mechanical way, where the winners are know as soon as the battle starts. He decrees that no innovations like the tactics of Martinez and Sula are to be used. Tork is a bit of an exaggeration of some real life attitudes; some admirals in the age of fighting sail likewise didn’t like innovation, though in the end, they were forced to give into it in the wake of men like Nelson better than Tork does in the wake of Chenforce’s great successes.

Conventions of War is a good conclusion to a very good series. It’s only real flaw is that it feels a bit more padded than the previous two volumes. There is a subplot in the first half of the book that’s essentially a murder mystery that Martinez must solve. It’s actually a pretty interesting mystery in its own right, but it really isn’t essential to the book and could have been cut.

Despite that though, this volume, like the previous two, is a very nice mix of space adventure, military SF (including fascinating working out of space tactics and how battles could work), political intrigue, and speculation on the ethics of warfare (what if you have to commit “piratical” or even “terrorist” acts to win a war?). The characters are interesting (and not always likeable in some ways, including our protagonists) and the background well done.

Recommended. I look forward to what Williams does next.

Three Days to Never by Tim Powers

Tim Powers is not a prolific writer; he seem to produce a new book only every few years. But what he does is of such quality that I tend to rush out and buy his new books as soon as they are released. His previous novel – Declare -- was published in 2001 – and is certainly one of the two or three best fantasy novels of the decade so far. It combined gritty, John le Carre style espionage with Powers’s usual “secret history” style of fantasy, giving a fantastic explanation to the events of the cold war, ranging from the fall of the Soviet Union to the strange career of double agent Kim Philby.

Three Days to Never explores similar territory. Israeli Massad agents and a secret organization battle one another in California, while the great grandson and great-great granddaughter of Albert Einstein are caught in the middle. Einstein, it seems, had discovered far more than relativity, though he had kept his other discoveries secret from all but a few. Only those secret groups – including government groups – that delve into the supernatural know at least some of what he had discovered, which involves time travel, ghosts, and the multi-dimensional universe. Now, the Massad is searching for Einstein’s time travel device, in order to prevent the Yom Kippur War from ever having occurred, while the occultist society that is also searching for Einstein’s legacy simply wants to gain ultimate power.

As the novel starts, Frank Marrity and his daughter Daphne hear that their grandmother has died, leaving them a strange message about burning down her shed. They find the shed still intact, though the grandmother had tried to burn it down. Inside, they find some strange objects, including what seems to be the Chinese Theatre slab where Charlie Chaplin had left his handprints, as well as more mundane things like a tape of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. The leave with the latter, but when Daphne tries to watch it, she discovers that only the first few minutes are the Pee-Wee film. Instead, she finds a strange silent film, which somehow triggers a psychic event, in which she sets fire to the VCR and her own room.

Bit by bit Powers reveals the story. The grandmother turns out to be Einstein’s daughter, and the tape and the Chaplin slab part of time travel device that Einstein had asked her to destroy. Powers, as usual, weaves together all sorts of strange details – details that on the surface shouldn’t be connected or make not sense, like Chaplin’s handprints, strange voices from TVs, gold swastikas, and the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor – into one big picture. In Powers’s hands, they all become part of a strange and complicated history.

The real heart of the story is the bond between Marrity and Daphne. They are very close, and have an easy, friendly relationship (in our reality anyway, but since the past can be changed, other realities can exist). Marrity is an English professor and Daphne the idea daughter for an English professor, one who can quote Shakespeare back to him. (This also ties to the story, since The Tempest plays a role.) The climax of the story involves Marrity’s attempts to save her from being wiped from existence (not just killed, but made never to exist) as the cabal of occultists tries to find the discovery Einstein most tried to suppress – a way to wipe someone’s entire lifeline from existence. It all makes for an existing reading experience.

This is a good – even a very good book – and if it were by almost anyone else, I’d probably have been even more enthusiastic. As it stands, it’s good mid-level Powers (which is certainly praise). It’s not as good as his very best novels. It doesn’t quite have the amazing mix of historical details and sense of wonder that Declare had (few books do), not the frenetic mix of action and strangeness found in The Anubis Gates. But it’s still highly recommended.