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Monday, February 10, 2025

Review: The Road to Sugar Loaf, by Eric T. Renolds

The Road to Sugar Loaf: A Suffragist's Story: Reynolds, Eric T:  9781735093833: Amazon.com: Books

Eric Reynolds, as a writer, has been published in Galaxy's Edge, Sci Phi Journal, Starship Sofa, and various anthologies. He has published Arthur C. Clarke, Lavie Tidhar, Nisi Shawl, Elizabeth Bear, K. D. Wentworth. Michael Burstein, Rudy Rucker, Stephen Baxter, Tery Bisson, G. David Nordley, Tobias Buckell, Frank Wu, Jay Lake, James Van Pelt, Eric Choi among others. But he's published anthologies of writers who are a complete unknown--at least to me.

Reynolds's writing is not far from his own personality. Simple, sweet, clear, straight forward. Here's a taste from early in the story:

During the fourth week of school, lockers and the lingering scent of freshly painted walls greeted civics teacher George Fielding as he walked the long, echoing hallway. He stopped outside Principal Holt's office when Violette emerged and handed a string-clasped envelope. He peeked inside to find Suffrage leaflets and other printed materials.

Violette looked around the hallway. "It arrived today from The Kansas Equal Suffrage Association," she whispered.

He thanked her and continued to his classroom where several students stood laughing next to the open door. They looked away when he approached. Upon entering the classroom, some students tried to suppress their snickering. Their glances toward the blackboard revealed what amused them.

George saw a caricature of himself wearing a dress while holding a sign that said, "Women Vote."

He smiled and turned to the class. "I see some of you are interested in Women's Suffrage, and I commend the artist for making more handsome than I actually am, but that dress should persuade you not to pursue a career in fashion design."

Reynolds relates the story of not just the vote in Kansas but across the fruited plains. The characters march to Washington and get thrown in jail under difficult circumstances, fueled by determination and will through protests and hunger strikes. His characters, particularly the women are strong and well drawn. The quiet scenes were some of his strongest.

More variety, particularly among the men, might have been preferable. I met men, not from that era but immediately following the one Reynolds describes, and I still recall a gentleman joking that my grandmother thought women shouldn't have the right to vote. I turned to her, but she didn't respond. There could have been a range of motivations for either party--from being totally true to totally untrue and a million subtleties between. He was clearly amused while my grandmother suppressed any response. Neither had been born during the movement, yett here it still impacted their conversation. For me, this showed more variations in character than what one might think from a casual glance.

Like a lot of other writers, writers meet writers in the course of writing. It's a small world. I edited a small journal, Mythic Circle, which required a theme of myth. He wrote a small tale set in space where myth was featured. I liked it but requested revisions. He obliged. I showed it to the lead editor and professor, Gwenyth Hood, who also liked it, and we published it. 

It may have been Eric's first publication. He may have told me that, years later, to my surprise. Possibly I am mistaken. But it was solid work if memory serves. I wouldn't have published it had I thought otherwise.

I didn't publish everyone. I had a writer of some note whose work I've praised in public. But none of the things he submitted quite fit. He was a little irked by that. I was a little surprised, too, that I hadn't, but I think if he'd have sent ten works, I'd have found one that felt right. Not unlike Picasso, he was going through a period--a style not so much to my liking.

Eric and I may have met in an online workshop, later at a convention by chance. He and his wife and kids made for an attractive family. This photo is a more recent one. He had more and darker hair back then.

Eric, later, started his own press, publishing original anthologies of speculative fiction, and in a few of these, published stories of mine, so full disclosure. 

Also full disclosure: I have a relationship with you all as well. So I try to direct the people who might be drawn to Eric's work and steer away those who would not. You have enough information to see which you are.

Eric T. Reynolds Books - BookBub

Saturday, February 8, 2025

"When I Was Miss Dow" by Sonya Dorman

 

First appeared in Frederik Pohl's Galaxy Magazine. Made the first ballot for the Nebula and nominated for the Tiptree Retrospective award. Reprinted Brian W. Aldiss, Harry Harrison, Judith Merril, Pamela Sargent, Brian Attebery, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ellen Datlow, Heather Masri,  Lisa Yaszek.

 

Summary:

Aliens, who trade with humans, can change shape and gender--a bit like squishing play dough through a plastic "factory" into whatever shape desired. Despite being initially reluctant, one of the aliens enjoys becoming Miss Dow who takes a liking to the doctor she is supposed to work for.


Discussion (spoilers):

She forms an attachment both to the doctor and to her form. It anticipates Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness by several years and one might guess it had some influence on the novel.

Ah, now this belongs in an anthology (or at least one could see why it might be included) like Norton's. It belongs in a year's best. It is the cream if not the crème de la crème. It made the first ballot, but if you see which tales beat it out for the Nebula, you'd understand. However, as a subgenre that gained importance with the Tiptree award. You can see, from the novelty of subject matter, why Aldiss and Harrison decided to bump aside the finalists to reprint this instead.

If one takes The Left Hand of Darkness to be seminal, then this is the seed that must have spawned Le Guin's work.

Thursday, February 6, 2025

"Feather Tigers" by Gene Wolfe

Bruce McAllister [Editor] – EDGE Autumn/Winter 1973 – Science Fiction - Picture 1 of 13

First appeared in Bruce McAllister's Edge. Reprinted by Terry Carr, Brian Attebery, Ursula K. Le Guin.

 

Summary:

 Quoquo, a blue alien the shape of a "child-sized" bunny, is investigating Earth after a catastrophe has wipe most life other than plants which have grown wild and thick.

Humanity has left behind intelligent machines, but Quoquo doesn't find them all that useful, saying that they lie.

Proudly, Dondiil, another blue alien, has been breeding domestic cats for 40 orbits of their home world, so that they now approximate the kind that would have existed in the area [Vietnam].


Discussion (Spoilers):

Quoquo takes a blaster into the jungle and clears a path for himself. However, Dondiil has let his genetically modified tigers to escape. Quoquo blasts them until he realizes he's been hallucinating at least some of them. Finally, at his death understanding some human concepts.

Quoquo--whose name approximates "whichever" or "whatever"--has a hard time believing human culture. He's trying to be objective but failing. His name in his own language may be an intensifier: "Quo" now with even more "quo."

Humans do things that don't make sense like having a "Paris, Texas" that has nothing to do with "Paris, France" and what the aliens think they know about the species such as cannibalism, is applied over a time and circumstance and in a way that distorts understanding. Perhaps this is why Quoquo thinks the skyacht lies to him. The history is too complex, too broad and too thick to be easily understood. 

"Feather tigers" is another of those strange humans topics where humans see something where there is nothing. Only when exposed to a similar environment is Quoquo able to understand--albeit too late.

The ship is described by some unnamed narrator as being like the phoenix, and so too is the environment returning to what it once was--even if using animals different from the ones before.

This is a solid story. But Wolfe has others, better. The more I read The Norton Book of Science Fiction, the more I sense they are the B-sides of SF: These stories deserved more attention, which is great, but the book has a grander title with a presumed grander scope. No doubt the old reviews still exist. I do know some professors of the time professed their appreciation of the book. 

I've been reading the opening essays, which are informative, and establish the parameters of selection, and perhaps this urgency to get on the right side of politics held the book back from being something closer to what the book title proclaims. There's nothing wrong with what they're wanting to do, but it requires a different title: Forgotten or Neglected Stories of an Ethically Kind SF. At least that seems to be the best title for the moment. Maybe I'll have another later.


Tuesday, February 4, 2025

"The Life of Anybody" by Robert Sheckley

https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/8/81/ITWPDO19XX.jpg

First appeared in Sheckley's collection, Is That What People Do?, reprinted by Brian Attebery, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, Robert Weinberg.

Summary:

Sometime in the near future, people will have TV cameras show up in your living room. You have to be natural or they'll cut away. Better to have bad ratings than none at all. Nobody wants people acting differently than they normally would.

Discussion (Spoilers):

The couple know they are boring, so they spice up their lives in case the cameras come calling again. 

Sheckley had already predicted reality TV before most writers, but here the speculation is that we are actually boring, which is sort of interesting. The shows people watch are more interesting than most people's lives.

However, to become interesting, people would have to fake their lives, which is what we get from most reality TV--people behaving unnaturally to create drama that might get people watching your reality show.

For so short a story, the tale accomplishes much.

I am going through the Norton anthology, story by story, to get a sense for the modus operandi. They seem to be seeking shorter works, provocative works, and possibly works that present gender in a certain manner. There is no particular gender issue at play except maybe the wife chooses not to stir up marital strife for the sake of ratings.

But Sheckley has had better stories than this, so it's odd that this one is selected. Maybe this is the academic aspect, allowing professors to select this among other TV tropes.

The other possibility is that stories were selected to make them easier for non-SF readers; however, you'd think that a course in SF would be more interested in making a splash as opposed to easing people into the waters (especially by 1960-90). When this was published in 1993, most readers would have already been exposed to far stranger SF on TV and movies.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Night-Rise by Katherine Maclean

 First appeared in Alice Laurance's Cassandra Rising. Reprinted by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery.

Summary:

A reporter takes in the story of a "Dark Christ"--a person or people who are, in this world, not necessarily anti-Christ or maybe they are. They are described more in terms of Yin-Yang--the destructive version of Christ. The reporter is witness to a murder.

Discussion (with Spoilers):

The reporter does not report the crime. Drunk, he goes down to the docks and he himself is killed by the same group.

It has long been a debate whether journalists should be involved in news or just report on it. If the journalist had reported them, perhaps he might have still been alive.

This is philosophical fiction, yes, but is this SF? It speculates on this religion, but it could as well be of our world now or in the past.

Probably the most interesting thing about the story is where it appeared. The editor opens with a small window on women in SF and probably one of the more interesting looks women in SF, looking at the male writers, too, discussing what she considered worthwhile portrayals of female characters. 

Moreover, some complained about the political nature of Le Guin's The Norton Book of Science Fiction. And we have a story that no one else noticed (which could be cool, rescuing a good story from obscurity), but it isn't really SF, which lends some credence to the complaint.

While written by a woman, however, the story is about a man. Given the above, is this meant to be a critique of men? Let's come back to this after parsing possibilities.

So we have a religion who feels free to take lives. There's no discussion of the beliefs, per se, so maybe it could be any affiliation--political, social--except they define themselves as like but opposite of Christ.

They kill a man who is interested in boys. Is this ethical? If it is, then a journalist who doesn't report this murder, shouldn't be held responsible, but yet he is killed as well. Why? Is it because he drank? Is that ethical? Are both murders justified or neither or only one? How do you as a reader feel about the murders?

Once we establish this, we might understand better how we might feel toward the murder of the journalist. Because we inhabit the journalist, my suspicion is that we are meant to find some empathy toward him. Not always, of course. And maybe not completely. 

"[The journalist] imagined he saw young, sympathetic faces around him, sympathetic but mistaken. But it was took black, he could see nothing.

"Trying to speak, felt the caress of white silk around his neck." 

The speaker gives positive attributes to the killers ("sympathetic" and caress") but also calls them "mistaken." In retrospect, he sees himself as blind (or "could see nothing.") 

Back to the topic of men and women, then, what does this suggest about male and female traits? Is this meant to suggest that men are more likely to kill and turn a blind eye?

Friday, January 31, 2025

"The Anything Box" by Zenna Henderson

 https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/d/d9/FSFOct1956.jpg

First appeared in Anthony Boucher's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, reprinted by Judith Merrill (twice), Damon Knight, Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh,  Richard Glyn Jones, A. Susan Williams, Pamela Sargent, Margaret Weis, Garyn G. Roberts, Gordon Van Gelder, Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer.


Summary: 

A teacher spies one of her students who seems to be way too preoccupied with imaginary things, pawing at and staring into something invisible at her school desk. However, when the student hands the "Anything box" to her teacher, she learns that it is, in fact, real.


Discussion:

When her father is taken to the state penitentiary, the girl becomes too involved in her box, even falling down, so the teacher takes it away, trying to convince the child that it isn't and never was real. The teacher loses track of the box for awhile. 

Meanwhile, the child becomes more lifeless. The teacher eventually gives the box back but exacts a promise from the girl that she'd never again try to go into the box.

This is a paradox. It is a story whole central speculative conceit may or may not be real--the kind of thing that SF readers are supposed to hate. We could say, on the one hand, that the box is real because the teacher experienced it; however, you could just as well say that that may just be an overzealous empathy, identifying with her students. 

The strange thing is that this is also a metaphor for SF itself--a thing of imagination whose purpose we can't really pin down but we can see that for those who love it, it has a transformative power over people's everyday lives.

The power of this paradox and metaphor can be seen in Merril's decision to have it part of a decade's representation for speculative fiction, but no one else did for another four decades. Then it returns. Perhaps it is this metaphor that editors return to this story, and/or perhaps they want to represent a popular writer of her time. How strange that a tale should both represent a thing yet also defy it?


Wednesday, January 29, 2025

"Webrider" by Jayge Carr

First appeared in Ellen Datlow's The Third Omni Book of Science Fiction, reprinted by Donald A. Wollheim, Arthur W. Saha, Pamela Sargent.  

Summary:

Twig is a webrider. She can travel over space and time. The danger is groupies--those who, like her sister, try to ride the web but cannot and die.

Discussion:

This opens with a fine energy--matching William Gibson's more frenetic prose with Samuel Delany's Aye and Gomorrah, adding a touch of Jeffery-Carver-style space travel (where travel is, at least in part, a state of mind) and something of the author's own. It's an interesting concoction. It's not a major work but thought-provoking. It takes a look at art--how hard it can be to learn on one's own, but with the proper mentor....