weird capsule reviews

nancy kress, dangerous visions, roger zelazny

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The Best of Nancy Kress (Nancy Kress, 2015)

The first story in this collection, “And Wild For to Hold,” was so good I immediately paused any further reading to go text friends about it. One said (paraphrased), “Nancy Kress is talented, but sort of evil.” Further discussion made it clear my friend was talking about the novel Beggars in Spain, and the original novella of that story is the final piece in this volume, so as I continued to read The Best of Nancy Kress I felt what I can only call a sense of Doom every moment I got closer to “Beggars in Spain.”

But to return for a moment to “And Wild For to Hold”—this story is about an organization which extracts people from the past they’ve deemed crucial pivot points in history. By removing these people, they avert war and bloodshed. These “holy hostages” include Helen of Troy, Adolph Hitler, the Tsarevich, and, now, Anne Boleyn. But Anne Boleyn is not persuaded by the argument that her disappearance from her life will avert war and suffering. She is not even persuaded by the knowledge of her own death, which is outlined for her in graphic detail, at her own request. It is her life, and she wants to live it, and she will find a way back. And because Anne Boleyn is very accomplished in manipulating scenarios in her favor, even when she doesn’t have much real power, she stands a good chance to win.

I loved this story for two reasons: first, because its depiction of Anne Boleyn is so compelling and really embraces everything that makes her difficult. Second, the society which is manipulating history helps Kress to stage of a battle of values in that way that only speculative fiction really does, in part by making both sides somewhat alien to our own perspectives. Boleyn’s insistence that she be allowed to die her own death, no matter the cost to others, is both sympathetic and a little horrifying.

The rest of the collection is—mostly—pretty good. There was one story I intensely disliked (“Margin of Error”), and a couple I wished I liked but which felt overwritten to me (“Trinity,” “Shiva in Shadow”). There was one I respected (“Laws of Survival”) because Kress kills a bunch of dogs in it, which is one of the most unpopular moves you can pull in a story, but for that reason, I also did not enjoy myself. “Beggars in Spain,” the novella, I did not end up finding evil. It is, though, maybe the most recently written piece of SFF I’ve read that really felt like a Heinlein story. But now I feel as if “is ‘Beggars in Spain’ evil or not” is a journey every reader must take alone.…

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Dangerous Visions (edited by Harlan Ellison, 1967)

To lead with what is probably the least relevant thought here: every story in Dangerous Vision comes with an introduction by Harlan Ellison and an afterword by the author. This kind of thing is very normal in science fiction and seemingly nowhere else, even though frankly I really wish it was.¹ So² I was reading all of Ellison’s introductions to these writers, which are all like so-and-so is one of the most promising / accomplished / gifted writers around; here’s his introduction to Larry Niven’s story:

It is generally agreed that, of the newer, younger writers in the speculative writing arena, one of the most promising challengers is Larry Niven. He has been writing for two years and has already found his own style, his own voice. He writes what is called “hard” science fiction—i.e., his scientific extrapolation is based solidly in what is known at the date of his writing; in a Niven story you will find no beer cans on Mars and no hidden planet circling around the other side of Sol on the same orbit as Earth. To the casual consideration, it might seem that this would limit the horizons of Niven’s work. For a lesser imagination that might be true.…

And so on and so on. Anyway, I was like… what does this remind me of? Because it really reminded me of something.

Then I realized: Substack. It reminds me of Substack.

Dangerous Visions and its companion volume (Again, Dangerous Visions, which I haven’t gotten through yet) are both attempts to codify and establish a movement. And that’s how you have to talk about yourself if you want to start a movement. Nobody else is gonna. I mean they might later, if you succeed, but to some degree you just have to have both the ego and the lack of it to commit yourself to some really embarrassing statements about how important you are. Anyway, it worked out for Ellison (kind of). (A man of many ways, as they said of Odysseus.)

Here are my classifications of the stories in Dangerous Visions.

“Very sixties” (complimentary):

“Flies,” Robert Silverberg; “The Malley System” (Miriam Allen deFord); “A Toy For Juliette” (Robert Bloch); “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” (Harlan Ellison); “The Jigsaw Man” (Larry Niven); “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” (Carol Emshwiller); “What Happened to Auguste Clarot?” (Larry Eisenberg); “Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird” (Sonya Dorman); “Auto-da-fé” (Roger Zelazny); “Aye, and Gomorrah…” (Samuel R. Delany)

“Very sixties” (derogatory):

“Riders of the Purple Wage” (Philip Jose Farmer) (sorry, Farmerheads); “Eutopia” (Poul Anderson); “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”³ (Theodore Sturgeon); “Ersatz” (Henry Slesar); “The Happy Breed” (John T. Sladek); “Encounter With A Hick” (Jonathan Brand); “The Recognition” (J.G. Ballard)

“Very sixties” (simultaneously complimentary and derogatory):

“Faith of Our Fathers” (Philip K. Dick); “Lord Randy, My Son” (Joe L. Hensley); “From the Government Printing Office” (Kris Neville); “Land of the Great Horses” (R.A. Lafferty); “Judas” (John Brunner); “Carcinoma Angels” (Norman Spinrad)

Not very sixties in either sense:

“Evensong” (Lester Del Rey), “The Day After the Martians Came” (Frederik Pohl), “The Night That All Time Broke Out,” Brian Aldiss; “The Man Who Went To The Moon—Twice” (Howard Rodman); “Gonna Roll the Bones” (Fritz Leiber); “The Doll-House” (James Cross); “Shall the Dust Praise Thee?” (Damon Knight)⁴; “Test to Destruction” (Keith Laumer)

Unclassifiable:

“Incident in Moderan” and “The Escaping” (David R. Bunch)

There are a couple different ways something can read “sixties”⁵ to me. One has to do with political preoccupations: crime, overpopulation, the idea of Bad Utopia. Another has to do with form: stories that break a straightforward beginning / middle / end to approach their subject many ways. (“Flies,” which is a spectacular story, really establishes this sense of freedom right out of the gate.) Finally, there’s experimenting with sexual taboo, which is also, to me, what tends to age the worst in these stories.⁶

To briefly brings things back to women, my Theme™️ I guess, some of the stories here made me wonder if loosening standards around depictions of sex ended up making some men regress in their writing about women, because… suddenly they didn’t have to think of things for women to do in their stories. They could literally just be there for sex purposes, and so, they were.⁷ The Farmer story is probably the most extreme example of this—at one point, out of peevishness, a guy epoxies a can of spermicide to his girlfriend’s vulva, and there is a long comic setpiece devoted to this moment, or at least it was supposed to be comic, it was definitely long—but even comparing the female lead in PKD’s story here to the female lead in The Man in the High Castle shows a real shrinking of what the character is, what she can do, and so on.

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This Immortal (Roger Zelazny, 1965)

Part of my journey through past Hugo winners. Let me say something here that has nothing to do with the book, but: the ebook of This Immortal is really terrible. Random page breaks, typos, dropped periods. It was so bad that I felt I should stop reading it and get a paper copy, except… I really liked it and I didn’t want to stop reading it. But I’m going to buy a proper copy.

“Conrad,” as he’s currently calling himself, is an immortal human being who works to preserve important Earth artifacts, and also as a tour guide for aliens from Vega. (They are called Vegans, and it took me a moment to figure that one out, I will confess.) The Earth has been devastated by nuclear war; its de facto government now exists on Earth colonies on other planets, but the people there are not interested in the old country. Instead, Earth is a curiosity to Vegans, who own resorts on the planet and like to look at its ruins. Conrad, under a different name, once led a resistance movement against the Vegans. Now he works for the government. He’s supposed to guide one particular Vegan on a tour, but it also becomes clear that some people really want this alien dead.…

What makes This Immortal so good is its tone, which manages to be elegaic and elevated and funny all at the same time. It is a story that is both about losing hope in the future and a story about rebirth. Conrad has mastered a glib, defensive humor that he uses to keep people from looking too deeply into his own past. At one point, finding himself in a hotel room where he once stayed as a past self, he discovers that it’s emblazoned with plaques commemorating his other self’s stays, including “Konstantin Karaghiosis sat in this chair.” At that moment, he thinks to himself: “I was really afraid to go into the bathroom.” When a woman asks him if he’d “fight [his] weight in anything that moves,” Conrad responds, “Not red ants or bumblebees.” He keeps this kind of patter up constantly, including (as the bathroom example shows) to himself.

But running under this humor is a deep sense of loss: of the Earth that was, of the people he once knew, of the cause he once espoused. Immortality makes all struggles seem pointless, but even a life that doesn’t end still has to be lived. No matter how many times he seems to turn away from life, Conrad always seems to end up back in the fight. The result is a really remarkable book, and one I’m glad to have read. But wow, do I need a different copy. Any errors in this post should be attributed to my terrible copy of this book. Even the parts that aren’t about this book. It infected everything with its incompetence. I am very sleepy.⁸

This Immortal tied with Dune for the best novel Hugo. Is it finally time for me to read Dune? Magic eight ball says….

incredibly, it really did say this. I didn’t just hit refresh until I got a funny result

Also, if I were twelve, I’d have had the biggest crush on Conrad. Has to be said!

1. This is an observation I have stolen from Samuel Delany (“Heinlein,” Starboard Wine):

Science fiction has developed at least one critical form all its own: the annotated anthology. Traditionally SF magazine editors prefaced each story by a punchy, two- or three-line blurb. Collecting their own tales in volume form, SF writers from Sturgeon to Le Guin have stolen the blurb’s position for brief, informative paragraphs about their tales—understandable in a writing field with no formal tradition, at least at its outset, of biography, history, or criticism. A good deal of SF history is buried in these blurbs. Perhaps the most important historical document in this form, ranking only beside Peter Nicholls and John Clute’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia, is Judith Merril’s more and more heavily annotated Best SF of the Year volumes, running from 1956 through 1967.

2. Silently edited this trainwreck sentence because I meant to before I sent it.

3. Amazing title, though.

4. Right on the border of “sixties” (derogatory) but not quite there.

5. I actually wrote “seventies” in my first draft and then was like “wait… this came out in 1967…” But then, who’s to say the seventies didn’t start in 1967.

6. In “Eutopia” the whole story builds up to the twist / punchline that the main character is gay in a way that may or may not have worked at the time… but definitely does not work now.

7. If you aren’t having sex with a woman she is usually a Bitch Wife or a Bitch Mom. However, let it be known that my boy 💕 Fritz 💕 does something interesting with the Bitch Wife.

8. Still true.