In which Keith reads some books 2024: Thread 2 (Jul-Dec)

It's a new thread!

Where am I at mid-year?

Forty-three books read, totaling 15,306 pages, up 55% from the first half of last year.

Making good progress on my category challenges: 12/26 on AlphaKit; 6/12 on both SFFKit and MysteryKit; 20/25 on BingoDog; and 84 stories read from my list of SF award nominees. Books are already scheduled for the rest of the year to finish the Bingo and the Kits, and I ought to be able to get the SF award list up to 150 by year's end.

I've learned that I can't overplan and categorize my reading, and abandoned some additional category challenges back in April. They left me almost no room for reading that didn't fall into some challenge or another, and that drove me nuts. I think I'm back down to the right mix of planning and freedom. There are 19 books scheduled specifically to meet my challenges for the rest of the year, which should be a bit less than half of what I'll have time to read.

Onward to more good books!

Congrats on a productive and rewarding first half of the reading year!

44: Miss May Does Not Exist, Carrie Courogen

Courogen attempts a biography of Elaine May, and the problem with the book is summed up in the title, which comes from the first comedy album released by May and Mike Nichols in the late 1950s. Her biographical statement for the album's liner notes was "Miss May does not exist." Because she has been a fiercely private woman throughout her career, rarely giving interviews or making public appearances, there really isn't much to know about May beyond the work itself. And as hard as Courogen has tried, interviewing dozens of May's friends and collaborators, she hasn't been able to get past that obstacle.

Even more than most celebrity biographies, this one is reduced to a hopscotch of "and then she wrote (directed, starred in)...". To be sure, May's career is a dazzling one: overnight stardom as part of the Nichols & May comedy team; the first woman since Ida Lupino to direct a Hollywood studio film; several years as the industry's go-to script fixer/ghostwriter; and in 2018, a Tony Award when she returned to Broadway for the first time in 60 years. She is a gifted actress and a stunning writer, and while her improvisational style and perfectionism made her less well-suited to film directing -- she usually ran well over budget and over schedule -- there is a loyal audience for her films, which have grown in reputation over the years.

Courogen does a fine job of surveying that career, but one wants a bit more personal insight from a biography than she is able to offer, and there isn't much of that here. May has chosen to stay out of the spotlight as much as possible. It becomes something of a running joke that when she reluctantly agrees to talk to the press for a piece on an upcoming play or movie, she tells the reporter "I'd prefer it if you could keep my name out of your article."

One of Courogen's recurring themes is that May has been punished more harshly by Hollywood for her failures than male writers or directors would have been. She's not entirely wrong; lord knows that a lot of male directors have been given second (and third, and fourth...) chances after a flop in a way that May didn't get after Ishtar.

But you can't blame that entirely on sexism. It's not hard to understand why studios were reluctant to work with May again after Paramount's experience making Mikey and Nicky. The movie went 30% over budget; May shot three times as much footage as was made for Gone With the Wind; and when the film still wasn't finished more than a year after her deadline, Paramount had to take May to court to get her to turn over several reels of film that she had hidden in order to keep the studio from completing the movie without her. Two things can both be true: The phrase "a difficult woman" is often used to keep women from asserting themselves in the way that men are expected to; and Elaine May was, as a director, a difficult woman.

The background sexism that pervades May's career is, sadly, carried on in Courogen's own writing. She refers to her subject as "Elaine" throughout, which I thought felt disrespectful and diminishing. It's hard to imagine that she'd have consistently referred to "Alfred" if she'd been writing a biography of Hitchcock.

I had hoped that this book would be a suitable companion for Mark Harris's superb biography of Mike Nichols, and it's not. It's a fine overview of her career, and that gives it some value. But a biography it's not, and there was no way it ever could be. The material that would have been needed to write that book, like Miss May herself, does not exist.

>3 KeithChaffee: An interesting review (and, happy new thread). It's unfortunate that the author handled the limited subject matter badly. I'd imagine this would have been better if the author had chosen to simply write a (respectful) long article instead of trying to make it into a book.

45: Steal Across the Sky, Nancy Kress

(AlphaKit: S; SFFKit: first contact)

Humanity is contacted by an alien race calling itself the Atoners, who tell us that 10,000 years ago, they kidnapped a large number of humans and resettled them on other planets. They wish to atone for the terrible thing they did to humanity in the process, something which goes beyond the mere kidnapping, and they seek humans to volunteer to be Witnesses, who will travel to those other planets to observe the cultures that have developed. That observation, the Atoners believe, will allow us to understand what they have done to us.

The Witnesses are sent to seven sets of binary planets where the Atoners settled humans. We follow Cam and Lucca, the Witnesses on one planet pair where two very different cultures have developed. They are not archaeologists or specialists of any sort -- the Atoners have specifically avoided such people in choosing Witnesses -- so they have only their own instincts to guide their interactions with the natives.

The parallel stories of those two Witnesses are entertaining, with a sharply contrasting pair of intriguing cultures to be explored. Had the novel been entirely about those explorations, it would have been sufficient. But Kress brings that piece of the story to an end more quickly than I'd expected, and when we learn what it is that the Atoners are atoning for, her exploration of the fallout from that discovery is thoughtful and provocative. (Well, the short term fallout, at any rate; the novel ends with a reminder that the long range changes are going to be really interesting. While it doesn't quite rise to a full-on "here comes the sequel" tease, a return to look at how things have changed in 20 years or so would be more than welcome.)

In terms of the SFFKit challenge for the month, this arguably is or isn't a first contact novel, depending on how you interpret the phrase. Is this our first contact with the Atoners? Not really, if they kidnapped people 10,000 years ago. But we have no historical record or memory of that contact, so it feels like a first contact. Even more intriguing: Are the Witnesses making first contact when they visit those other planets? They aren't meeting an alien species, but they're certainly making first contact with alien cultures.

Kress has been writing for more than 40 years now, and has a dozen or so major genre award nominations to her credit. She's never been a flashy or trendy author, and outside SF, she's probably best known for her regular "how to write" column for Writer's Digest. But she's a solidly reliable author, and you can count on her to provide well-considered speculation about technological/scientific change and its consequences, with a bit more attention to character and personality than is common in the genre. Steal Across the Sky is a good example of her work; it's a sturdy, well-constructed novel built around one big idea and its consequences.

>5 KeithChaffee: Ive always liked her books, and that does sound like a good one. However I am curious I can just imagine them asking for 'volunteers' who then wind up in the same place aka twilight zone. does that happen at all? regardless looks like one to read

>6 cindydavid4: No, nothing like that happens. The volunteer mission is exactly what the Atoners say it will be.

>5 KeithChaffee: For some reason, I haven't read much Nancy Kress. I should definitely add that one to the wishlist!

>8 bragan: I think one of the reasons Kress is somewhat overlooked is that her best work is short fiction. And as important as short fiction is and has been to the genre, there are a lot of people who prefer their reading at book length. Kress's novels are very good, but there are better novelists, and the consistent A-/B+ novelist doesn't get much notice in a field with so many A+ folks.

One of the most interesting developments of the e-book era, especially in SF, has been the increased publishing of novellas as stand-alone books. (*) Fiction at that length gets a lot more attention now than it did 25 years ago, and I have a hunch that over the next decade or two, as a new crop of best-selling authors grows whose best work is at novella and shorter length, we're going to see a serious revival of the SF short story as an important part of the genre I think we're already starting to see more single-author collections than we used to, and I wouldn't be surprised to see within the next five years one or two new entrants into the "year's best stories" arena, which has been steadily decaying since the death of Gardner Dozois, whose YB series was the gold standard for 35 years.

(* -- As a measure of that shift, I note that 5 of the 6 2024 Nebula Award nominees for Best Novella were first published as stand-alone books; 5 of the 6 1999 nominees were originally published in magazines. The turning point is 2017; that's the first year in which a majority of the nominees are books, and it's been that way ever since.)

>5 KeithChaffee: That book annoyed me when I read it 15 years ago - I found the first half absolutely brilliant and then it just fell apart for me.

>9 KeithChaffee: As someone who enjoys a good novella, and has more than once been frustrated by stories that feel like they should have been novella-length and were padded out to novel length in order to be more salable, more novella publishing is very appealing to me! Although the fact that often they're only available as ebooks is less so, even if it does make economic sense.

46: Fortune Favors the Dead, Stephen Spotswood

(MysteryKit: cross-genre mystery)

It's the mid-1940s, and Lillian Pentecost is the most famous female private investigator in New York. She has relatively recently hired an assistant, Willowjean "Will" Parker," as a concession to the slowly advancing state of her multiple sclerosis, which is beginning to take a physical toll. Will is a former circus worker, and the many skills she learned there prove to be useful in unexpected ways.

In this novel, they're hired by Rebecca and Randolph Collins to investigate the murder of their mother, Abigail. It's the sad capper to a rough stretch for the Collins twins; their father, Alistair, died by suicide a year earlier. The twins are accompanied by their godfather, who is the acting CEO of the Collins family steel business.

Abigail was throwing a party on the night of her murder, so the house was chock full o'suspects: the medium whose seance was the evening's main entertainment, her nerdy assistant, the professor who's writing a book on the occult, the crude and burly factory plant manager.

The mystery is reasonably entertaining, and Spotswood introduces his victims and suspects with crisp efficiency, giving them just enough rounding to be more than mere archetypes. The solution and motives feel fairly prepared, and Pentecost and Parker are a clever pair of detectives.

But:

This novel has a massive "Tiffany Problem." That's a coinage of Jo Walton, who points out that the name "Tiffany" is much older than most people think it is, but it can't be used in historical fiction, because readers will perceive it as an anachronism, even if it's historically possible. The Tiffany Problem in this novel is Lillian Pentecost's use of the honorific "Ms."

It is true that "Ms." goes back to the 17th century, when (like "Miss" and "Mrs." at the time) it was just another abbreviation for "Mistress;" none of those words originally conveyed anything about marital status. But as "Miss" and "Mrs." took on marital connotations in the 19th century, "Ms." faded into general disuse. There were occasional attempts throughout the 20th century to revive it, but they never really caught on until Gloria Steinem founded Ms. Magazine in 1972.

So is it possible that a successful single women in 1942 New York would use "Ms."? Maaaaaybe, but it's unlikely, and it would certainly be unusual enough that other characters ought to react to it with some surprise and confusion, which none of Spotswood's characters do. And even if it's historically defensible on the narrowest of grounds, it reads as thumpingly anachronistic, and I was jolted out of the narrative with every reference to "Ms. Pentecost". Other readers may not be bothered by it, but it was jarring enough to me that it will probably keep me from continuing on to the next volume in the series.

So is it possible that a successful single women in 1942 New York would use "Ms."?

Certainly not. The idea of the use of Ms in normal correspondence and conversation was not practiced in the 1940s. Although the introduction of Ms as a neutral alternative to 'Miss' or 'Mrs', and the direct equivalent of 'Mr', was proposed as early as 1901, it was not until the 1960s that its use was promoted. Its use didn’t become acceptable until the 1970s and even then it was not universally used.

It would annoy me too seeing it occur in a book set in the 1940s. It’d be jarring.

47: You Should Be So Lucky, Cat Sebastian

It's 1960, and the Robins are New York's newest baseball team. They're an expansion team, so no one expects them to do very well, and not all of the players are happy to be there. That's emphatically the case for shortstop Eddie O'Leary, whose very vocal anger and frustration at being sent to the Robins have made him the team's most unpopular player. It's not helping that after an excellent rookie season in Kansas City, he's starting his first year in New York in a major hitting slump.

Mark Bailey writes newspaper and magazine features, often profiles/takedowns of various fraudsters and scam artists. He's struggling to get his life and writing back in gear after the death of his partner, so his friend at the Chronicle offers him what should be a fairly easy job: Interview Eddie O'Leary every week, and turn those interviews into a ghostwritten "Eddie's Diary" column, ideally building to some sort of feature article for the paper's new magazine section at the end of the season.

That's the setup for romance between Mark and Eddie, in which the primary obstacle is their differing attitudes about just how closeted they want to be. Mark's not exactly wanting to burst fully into view carrying protest signs, but after seven years in a relationship that had to be kept entirely secret (his partner was a high-profile lawyer with political ambitions), he'd at least like to be able to socialize with friends in public. Eddie's in an even more visible (and even more homophobic) career, and can't risk his secret being revealed.

This is a very gentle period romance in which homophobia is talked about, but not actually seen, so much so that we almost start to wonder what everyone is so afraid of. Every straight person who learns about the relationship is instantly accepting and supportive. I'm not saying that I need someone to be physically beaten into a coma or anything, but a sense of actual stakes, some evidence that something actually was at risk would have helped.

Still, if you like your romance on the sweet and gentle side, this is very nice work. Mark and Eddie are flawed but likable characters, and the conflict between them feels realistic to the period. The supporting characters are varied and colorful; I particularly enjoyed George, the grumpy elder statesman of New York sports journalism.

I'm not likely to rush out to read the rest of Sebastian's collected works, but this was pleasant.

>5 KeithChaffee: I'm glad to be reminded of Kress. I read her Sleepless books many years ago, and I don't think I've seen any of her work since then. I'll put her on my long-term list, which means it will take a while to get back there.

48: The Husbands, Holly Gramazio

(BingoDog: recent bestseller -- was on the NYT list for a week in April)

Gramazio jumps directly into her story: Lauren has returned home from a night out with friends, and there is a man in her apartment. Once she gets over that shock, she begins to notice that the apartment has changed -- different furniture and art, and photos of herself that she doesn't recognize, including what seems to be a photo from her wedding to the strange man.

As if that's not enough, things get even stranger when the man goes into the attic. A different man comes down, and once again, Lauren's surroundings have changed. The cycle continues: Every time a husband goes into the attic, the attic sends down a new husband.

You could handle that premise in a lot of ways. It could veer into horror; you could emphasize the comic fantasy, and send Lauren on a quest to find the wizard who can stop this; it could become a Serious Literary Novel, exploring questions of identity and the importance of permanent relationships.

Gramazio puts a mostly rom-com spin on things, which is not to say that this is a rom-com (there's no one guy to focus on, no gradually developing story of true love, no happily ever after). But it's mostly got that light, breezy tone, in which the author is taking us for a cheerful romp. Things get a bit more serious in the final chapters, to an extent that I don't think Gramazio quite pulls off, but this is mostly a fizzy comedy, and a darned good one at that.

Every time you think the story is falling into a rut -- "OK, how many more husbands are we going to test and reject?" -- Gramazio finds an unexpected variation on the magic attic that deepens and enriches the story. And by the end, it actually does become an exploration of identity and permanence, a reminder that you don't have to write a Serious Literary Novel to examine serious ideas. Thoughtful and fun aren't mutually exclusive.

>16 KeithChaffee: I am looking forward to reading this!

>14 KeithChaffee: I've read another Cat Sebastian book and I agree with your assessment: pleasant, but nothing very special.

49: Ingathering: The Complete People Stories, Zenna Henderson

(AlphaKit: I, Z)

Henderson was active in SF for about 30 years, beginning in the early 1950s. The People stories make up about half of her work, and most of them were collected in two books, published in 1961 and 1967, each with new bridging material to link the stories into something halfway between a story collection and a novel. The stories and bridging material from those books are gathered here, along with a few stories originally published after the 1967 collection.

The People are from another planet, but they are physically indistinguishable from Earth humans; the two groups can even interbreed. When their homeworld ("The Home") is destroyed, they are forced to flee, and some of them crash land on Earth. We follow one group, living in a remote Arizona canyon. They have been somewhat scattered, and the "ingathering" of the book's title is the process by which those in the canyon gradually find and collect the other People living in the area. The stories are set between the very end of the 19th century, when the People arrive, and the 1970s.

The central conflict of the series is rooted in the special abilities of the People, telepathy and flight among them. They quickly realize that most Earth humans, or "Outsiders," will not understand these abilities, and that they must keep them hidden. Henderson's earliest stories, those in the 1961 collection, generally present this theme via stories about children and their teachers.

I discovered Henderson when I found her books in my public library. I must have been 10 or 11 when I stumbled across the first People collection. Here was a whole book of stories about kids learning that they have to keep their differences -- significant, but ultimately harmless -- hidden from the world for fear of violent reaction. You can only imagine how strongly those stories resonated with a small town gay kid just starting to understand his sexuality.

Does Henderson hold up 50 years later? Well, somewhat. Her prose is graceful and easy to read, and the best of her stories land with emotional power. In "Pottage," the Canyon dwellers discover another small village of People who have responded very differently to the fear of being discovered. "Captivity," Henderson's only award-nominated story, focuses on one isolated member of the People whose artistic abilities give him the strength to cope with being stranded outside his community.

But at book length, especially gathering more than two normal books' worth into one volume, the sameness of her themes does become more obvious than it would be if you were reading a new story every year or two as it hit the magazines. And the later stories, which are more likely to be written from the perspective of Earth humans who stumble across the People, rather than of the People themselves, don't work as well. "Katie-Mary's Trip" is the low point; it's Henderson's attempt to write a hippie character, and as so many writers did in the late 60s and early 70s, she embarrasses herself in attempting to adopt the tone and voice of a character she clearly doesn't understand.

If you like the rural themes of Clifford Simak, you're going to love Henderson, who is so bucolic as to make Simak look like Public Enemy. Her stories are also strongly infused with her characters' spirituality, an odd mix of the beliefs they've brought from the Home and Earthly Christianity, that doesn't quite ring true. Their adoption of Christian ideas seems to happen very quickly, and I wondered when they had time to discover, read, and convert to Biblical beliefs; surely their early decades on a new world would have been devoted mostly to figuring out how to survive and how not to be seen.

(The fact that the native beliefs of the People are already so close to Christianity in many ways, along with their biological closeness to Earth humans, made me wonder if somewhere in Henderson's backstory was an early connection between the two. Perhaps the People are human; I was amused imagining the possible overlap between Henderson and the Nancy Kress novel I read a few weeks ago.)

I can understand how and why Henderson has largely been forgotten, but I think this volume's attempt to revive her work was justified. Is that just me remembering her powerfully those stories hit me when I found them at exactly the right moment? Perhaps. But I am happy to know that the same press has also issued a complete collection of her non-People stories, and I look forward to reading that one, too.

I love Zenna Henderson's books - I have this, and a couple collections of her stories (mostly non-People ones). I didn't know there was a complete collection of her others, I'll have to get it and see if there's any I don't already have. I do reread them, not regularly but occasionally - usually something will trigger me to remember a particular story (eggs in the Depression. Water in the desert. Rural schoolteacher...vignettes she turned into full stories) and I'll end up reading the whole book because her voice is so lovely.

>20 jjmcgaffey: Believing is the complete non-People collection. Like Ingathering, it does include a few stories that were published in magazines after her paperback collections were published, so you probably will find something you don't already have.

>1 KeithChaffee: ve learned that I can't overplan and categorize my reading, and abandoned some additional category challenges back in April

I did the same when we started 3rd quarter i was driving myself crazy and decided to back off of some challenges. Really helps when you are wanting to read non challenge books just released. Made my life a little less hectic, and I find I am able to complete the challenge books that are left

btw I love how much you talk about these older authors that I never heard of. keeping track of names and will try to read some of their work

50: From These Ashes, Fredric Brown

This is my second book in a row from NESFA Press, so a few quick words on them. NESFA is the New England Science Fiction Association, and they publish reference books on SF and books in honor of the guests at their annual convention. But their primary work is as a sort of archivist of the genre, publishing collections by authors of earlier eras who they feel deserve to stay in print. They might be authors who have gone somewhat out of style in the modern era, like Zenna Henderson or Chad Oliver; they might be complete collections too large for the mainstream presses to tackle, like the 6-volume set of Roger Zelazny's short fiction they've just published. They do valuable work, and every genre should be lucky enough to have one or two specialty presses that care about the history of that genre.

This book collects the complete short fiction of Fredric Brown, originally published between 1941 and 1965, arranged in chronological order. Brown was a midwesterner, never much involved in the SF author/fan culture that sprang up on both coasts in the genre's early years. While it's not unusual to find SF or mystery writers who've dabbled in the other genre, Brown is one of the few to be a genuinely significant figure in both.

Within SF, Brown is better known for his short fiction than for his novels, and I do mean short. He specialized, especially in the latter half of his career, in short-shorts, stories of one or two pages. From 1954 to 1963, this collection includes 62 stories, totaling 130 pages.

At that length, he's not writing stories so much as jokes, single ideas that build to a clever twist or punch line. And Brown's final twists could be clever indeed. "Millennium" is one of my favorite "deal with the devil" stories; "Rebound" is a precisely structured miniature that puts all the punch in the next-to-last word; "Hobbyist," really more of a crime story than SF, builds quickly to a delightful just-desserts ending.

Of his longer stories, the best known these days is probably "Arena," which was the inspiration for a Star Trek episode. (Well, sort of. Trek writer Gene Coon came up with the story, having apparently forgotten the Brown story he'd read earlier. Coon's version wasn't exactly like Brown's, but the basic concept is identical. The Trek lawyers caught the similarity, contacted Brown, paid him for the rights, and gave him screen credit.)

Had I been in charge of this book, I might have chosen not to arrange the stories chronologically. Putting all of the short-shorts at the end might leave the reader with the final impression that Brown was merely clever, skilled with a quick punchline or sharp pun. But he's more than that (though that's not nothing). His prose is crisp and graceful, even after eighty years; he carries his ideas to their logical conclusions in creative ways; and he finds unexpected resolutions to his stories. The ending to "Etaoin Shrdlu," for instance, is not only an unexpected victory over the story's menace, but shows an unusually cosmopolitan worldview for 1942.

When you collect the complete works of any artist, there's bound to be a bit of slush in the pile. But Brown is never so bad as to be unreadable. At worst, his stories are a bit unoriginal, and even that is probably exaggerated for the modern reader, who's read a half-century or more more of variations on the same familiar tropes.

>50 cindydavid4: Nice to know that this book is available. I'm a fan of Fredric Brown's short stories.

51: The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older

(AlphaKit: M)

A mystery/SF hybrid that falls flat in both genres.

Humanity has been forced to abandon Earth, and on a gas giant planet that is one of many new homeworlds, a man disappears from a small settlement that isn't much more than a railway station and a bar.

Inspector Mossa is assigned to the case, and she reluctantly turns for help to her college girlfriend. Pleiti is now a Scholar at the university where the missing man worked, and Mossa needs her knowledge of the university's people and politics to solve the case.

For the mystery fan, too many of the things we'd need to know to have a fair shot at solving the case are withheld from us until the moment that Mossa identifies them as the solution. The way in which the vanished man has disappeared, for instance, is something that we had no idea was even possible until Mossa declares that this must be how he left.

On the SF front, I wasn't convinced that so much of a new world's energy would be devoted to the dream of repairing the dead Earth and making it habitable again; there would be too much work to do (especially on a planet so hostile to human life as this one is) simply to survive on the new world to waste energy on the dead past.

And the personal story between the two, in which Mossa and Pleiti are reminded that they once loved each other and consider giving their relationship another shot, wasn't very believable, either. Both are such annoying people, self-absorbed and emotionally remote, that the failure of their relationship was one of the few credible things in the book, and both seem too smart to believe that those problems could be overcome in a second go-round.

I'm baffled by the praise for this one, which was a nominee for the Hugo, Nebula, and Ignyte awards (*). A second book in the series has been published, and unless it also lands on the awards lists, I won't be picking it up.

(* -- The Ignyte Awards were created in 2020 to honor the best speculative fiction by BIPOC authors.)

I found it not bad, though yes, I was surprised it made the Hugo lists. I didn't know there was a sequel and will be looking for it, though. I _hated_ Malka Older's first book - it was extremely well-written and a painfully likely sequence of events about elections and voting, at the time of the 2020 election. Not the fault of the book, exactly, just...bad (or very good) timing. This one was weird and interesting, though yes poorly seeded. I found the relationship more boring than anything else (they kept stopping in their investigations to think about what the other wanted from their new renewed relationship...). As I think about it, it wasn't very good - but I did enjoy while reading (it's a neat setting) and will read again.

To your point about the division of effort - consider the group(s) they were dealing with. I suspect the vast majority of the population is far less interested in the question of recreating Earth, but since they were working with/among the university, the "zoo", and the rocket port...

52: A Comedy of Murders, George Herman

(AlphaKit: M/G; MysteryKit: amateur sleuths; BingoDog: paper-based object (a notebook) in the story)

The first of six novels, published between 1994 and 2012, in which our detectives are Leonardo da Vinci and his apprentice, a dwarf named Niccolo. ("Dwarf" is not the word we'd probably use today, but it's the word used in this book.)

It's 1498, and Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan is under a great deal of pressure. The French are preparing to invade; the Venetians see that as an opportunity to get a piece of Milan for themselves; the Pope isn't happy with him; and his usual banks are threatening to call in his debts.

As if that weren't enough, a shadowy figure known as the Griffin is running a ring of assasins within his court, and the Duke himself is clearly their ultimate target. Niccolo thwarts the first attempt on the Duke's life during a hunting excursion, and is rewarded by being brought to Milan as a servant to one of the ladies of the court. He eventually becomes a friend and unofficial apprentice to Leonardo, who is holed up in "the madman's tower" doing all sorts of strange experiments and research.

It's a crowded court, and Herman asks us to keep track of a dozen of the duke's advisors, several ladies of the court, assorted servants, six different cardinals, and an eight-member troupe of actors who are visiting Milan. And there are a lot of murders to be solved; by the time the book has ended, more than ten corpses have made their way to Leonardo's tower. (He's been given special dispensation by the Church to dissect the bodies, something not generally allowed in this era.) The methods of killing are unorthodox -- poisoned with an overdose of aphrodisiac, torn to death by falcons, crushed to death by a chapel crucifix that's been rigged to fall.

The absurd methods and numbers of murders are meant to be, as the title suggests, comic. The jacket copy describes the book as "the wittiest historical mystery since The Name of the Rose." It has, I grant you, been many years since I read the Eco novel, but I'm not sure "witty" is the word that comes to mind when I think of it, and it doesn't quite apply here, either.

Wit requires a light touch, and Herman's prose is too stately and formal for wit. A typical paragraph:

In an elaborate bedchamber in Paris, the tall and sinewy Louis de Valois, formerly Duc d'Orleans and now newly crowned king of France, sprawled in the red velvet chair near the bed of his cousin's old advisor, the exiled Prince of Salerno, Antonello di Sanseverino. The septuagenarian moaned and made suffocating, guttural sounds which segued into deep, soul-racking coughs that shook the old man's body. The young king halfheartedly listened to the crescendo, pulled a grape from its stem, imagined it to be the left eye of Ludovico the Moor, and chewed it with enthusiasm.

Comedy in general, and wit in particular, needs speed, and Herman's style requires the reader to slow down to absorb all of the details. You're less likely to laugh when you've spent five minutes making your way through "there's a joke coming...I'm setting up a joke...oh, this is a funny one...you're going to laugh...are you ready?....here it comes.." before the joke actually arrives.

And it's a shame that the prose and the attempted style are so at odds, because there is much to praise here. The necessary Italian history is laid into the narrative smoothly, with relatively few awkward infodump passages. While I could have done with half as many randy cardinals and a few less servants cluttering up the narrative, Herman keeps his enormous cast of characters clear without too many "which one was he again?" moments. And Leonardo and Niccolo are an intelligent, thoughtful pair of sleuths, mostly solving the crimes from a distance though skillful observation and understanding of the people involved. But that weighty, leaden prose is too big an obstacle for the book to overcome, and I won't be continuing on with this series.

I am in the middle of an oddly specific reading slump, in that I can't seem to connect to anything non-fiction. I've picked up three different NF books in the last two weeks, all on topics that should hold my interest and all reasonably well written, and I just bounced off all of them. No problem at all with fiction. Very strange.

I wonder if we use different reading skills or different parts of our brains when reading fiction vs nonfiction? I would say that fiction is easier, but that's not always the case. I hope you find your nonfiction mojo again soon. In the meantime, enjoy your fiction!

really good question. It makes sense that would be true;fiction is about stories, non is about reality, in science, history, biography etc or was anyway But this might be all mute now that we have nonfiction novels and the like. bet theres been some research on that. stay tuned

53: The Four Profound Weaves, R. B. Lemberg

Imagine being a visitor from an alien world reading the story of Snow White. You'd be able to understand the plot in its most basic terms, but you'd miss a lot of what's going on because you don't know the cultural, social, and historical connotations and implications of the elements of the story -- witches, stepmothers, apples. Those things carry symbolic and emotional resonance that you can't understand if you're not part of that culture.

When an author writes a story set in an alien culture, they risk putting the reader in that position; the closer their story comes to feeling like fairy tale or myth, the greater the risk. If the culture has been well thought out, then the elements of the story will have weight and significance that are implicitly understood by the characters of the story, who have grown up learning them. The author's challenge, and it's a difficult one, is to help the reader to the necessary understanding of those cultural assumptions. And that, I fear, is where Lemberg falls short.

The story itself is fairy simple: Two elders from different cities make a journey. The woman seeks her long-lost aunt, in the hopes of finally learning the magical weaving her aunt had promised to teach her. The man is worried about returning to his home city, where he is an outcast.

But -- and here's where we start getting into cultural resonances that aren't entirely clear -- both of these people are "changers," meaning that they have changed their gender. I wouldn't use the word "trans" to describe them, because that would carry social and cultural implications in our world that don't seem to apply in the same way in Lemberg's universe.

Changing seems to have very different ramifications even within the two cities these characters come from. It's an unusual, but generally accepted, thing in hers; it is so taboo in his that it has led to his self-imposed exile.

And from there, the novella is a festival of ideas and concepts that clearly have deep meaning to these characters -- sand and weaving and birds and bones -- but that meaning was never made clear to me.

Most of Lemberg's writing has been set in this "Birdverse," and I imagine that if I had read more of their work, more of the puzzle pieces would fall into place. But unless a book is explicitly part of a larger work -- volume three of a trilogy, for instance -- the author is not entitled to the assumption that we've read their other work, and the book has to be able to stand on its own.

And on its own, this book left me floundering, knowing that there were levels here I wasn't getting, and frustrated that the author wasn't doing enough to help me understand them.

The nonfiction slump has been broken; happily making my way through a book about television history.

54: The Platinum Age of Television, David Bianculli

For almost forty years, Bianculli has been the television critic for NPR's Fresh Air. In this book, he attempts to trace the history of television, genre by genre, exploring how we got from the so-called "golden age" of the 1950s to today's "quality TV" era, which he calls the platinum age.

Each of his eighteen chapters summarizes the history and development of one TV genre -- crime, workplace sitcoms, spies -- going into more depth on five key shows in that evolution. The landmarks in the spies chapter, for instance, are The Avengers, Mission: Impossible, Alias, Homeland, and The Americans.

Throughout, Bianculli points out important relationships -- writer X got his start on show Y before becoming a star on show Z -- and unexpected connections. I never knew that the creators of Scooby-Doo drew inspiration for their four main characters from 60s sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, but I'll never again be able to not see them that way.

Scattered between the chapters are about two dozen interviews/profiles of individual TV creators, each one placed after the chapter to which they made the biggest contribution. While it is true that television history (like most history) has, until recently, been overwhelmingly dominated by white men, I still think Bianculli could have more of an effort to diversify his subjects, which include only three women (Carol Burnett, Amy Schumer, and Michelle King in a joint interview with her husband Robert) and one person of color (Larry Wilmore). The interviews also get a bit repetitive. The careers of Bianculli's subjects overlap, and he's not averse to using the same anecdote in multiple chapters (Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, for instance).

The book was published in 2016, and even in those few years, there are things that would Bianculli would probably update for a new edition. There would not be glowing profiles of Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K., for one thing. (The Cosby Show is included as a touchstone show in the family sitcom chapter, as it should be, and Bianculli does an excellent job of explaining both why the show mattered and why revisiting the show is always going to be uncomfortable.)

An updated book would have to include a chapter on reality TV, a glaring omission in the book even in 2016; I would also have liked chapters on game shows and news programming. To his credit, Bianculli acknowledges in his conclusion that even a book of nearly 600 pages couldn't get to everything, and lists several other genres he had to skip over.

And one can argue with the selected highlight shows; that's half the fun of a book like this. Surely the crime chapter should have highlighted something earlier than Hill Street Blues (Dragnet? The Untouchables?), and by no stretch of the imagination does the six-season Downton Abbey belong in the miniseries chapter.

But these are the quibbles of a mildly obsessive TV fan. On the whole, this is a delightful overview of television history, and Bianculli does a fine job of tracking the trends and shifts that got us from Bullwinkle to South Park, from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Girls.

55: Jackalope Wives and Other Stories, T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher is a pseudonym used by Ursula Vernon, who also writes and publishes under that name. Some of the stories in this collection were originally published as by Ursula Vernon. When she writes for children, she uses the Vernon name (but she also publishes YA/adult fiction under that name); beyond that, I don't see any clear distinction between when she uses the two names.

Let's start, as I am prone to do, with the two award-winning stories, "Jackalope Wives" (Nebula short story winner, 2015) and "The Tomato Thief" (Hugo novelette winner, 2017). They share a central character, Grandma Harken, an old woman living in the desert southwest. She is a woman with unusual powers, though it's never precisely clear where they might come from. She's a witch, perhaps, or a minor god; if she's not a god herself, she's at least on speaking terms with some of the local gods.

Both stories find Grandma Harken coming to the aid of enchanted people who now live on the border of human and animal. Of the two, I prefer "Jackalope Wives;" "The Tomato Thief," while an entertaining story, meanders a little too much for my taste.

Witchcraft and enchanted creatures are common themes throughout this collection, which places Kingfisher solidly in the fairy tale tradition. She's writing variations on the classics -- "The Dryad's Shoe" is a witty take on Cinderella, "Let Pass the Horses Black" riffs on Tam Lin -- and putting a fairy tale spin on stories that might not seem to be part of that world -- "Origin Story" is a delightfully creepy variation on Frankenstein.

Best in show honors, though, go to the spectacular comedy of "That Time with Bob and the Unicorn," in which the narrator gets tangled up in a local man's quest to find a unicorn. This is surely the only story I'll ever read that includes the phrase "narwhal turds," and when the narrator starts going on about "the genetics of inbred hillbilly water unicorns," I was giggling with delight.

That story highlights one of Kingfisher's strengths, narrative voice. Her stories vary wildly in tone, but each has a voice that is precisely tailored, internally consistent, and a joy to read. There are several more Kingfisher/Vernon stories on the Great Checklist of award nominees, and I look forward to them with great anticipation.

56: Bed-Knob and Broomstick, Mary Norton

Norton was an author of children's books, probably best remembered in the US for The Borrowers, a series of books about tiny people living in our walls who survive on our crumbs and cast-offs. But she first came to attention with these two long stories. Ever since the 1971 Disney film adaptation pluralized the title, new editions usually carry the title Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Carey, Charles, and Paul are sent away from London to spend the summer in the country with their aunt, because their single mother has to be at work during the day and cannot take care of them (*). They meet their aunt's neighbor, the mildly formidable Eglantine Price, and learn that she is studying to be a witch. She enchants the bed-knob of Paul's bed, turning the bed into a flying machine that will take the children wherever they wish to go.

(* - The first of these stories was published in 1944, and while it's never made explicit, English children of that era would probably have assumed that the absent father had been killed in the war. And sending children to the countryside, whatever the reason, would surely bring back memories of the Blitz. So there is a dark undercurrent to the situation that is largely lost, or at least much less immediate, to modern readers.)

In "The Magic Bed-Knob" (a Retro Hugo Award nominee), the children go to London, hoping to visit their mother but winding up in prison for a night, then travel with Miss Price to a tropical island. In "Bonfires and Broomsticks," they travel through time to 1666, arriving just before the Great Fire, and bring a new friend back to the present with them.

These stories are very English in a way that some Americans -- me among them, I must admit -- will find terribly precious and twee. And some of the social and cultural stereotypes of the era are hard to take; in particular, must there be cannibals on the tropical island? It is some small consolation that they aren't explicitly described as black, but the actual description isn't much better:

The man who had caught her looked exactly like any cannibal she had ever imagined -- the lips, the hair, and the nose with a bone stuck through it.

On the plus side, the children are endearing, Miss Price's amibivalence about her study of witchcraft is unexpected in this type of story, and Norton does create a sense of thrilling adventure for her young readers. Still, with so many excellent, less problematic children's books to choose from, I don't think we need to feel any guilt about letting Bed-Knob and Broomstick fade gently into obscurity.

A bit of between-book SF award reading: "There Shall Be Darkness," a 1943 Retro Hugo nominee by C. L. Moore. Moore was one of the first successful women in SF, rising to prominence in the 1930s. After her marriage to Henry Kuttner in 1940, much of her writing was in collaboration with him, often under one of several pseudonyms. After Kuttner's death in 1958, Moore gave up fiction writing; she spent a few years working in television, but had given up writing entirely by the mid-1960s.

This story is a political soap opera of sorts, set on Venus as the Terrestrial Patrol prepares to leave the planet after 300 years of occupation. Our protagonist is Quanna, whose loyalties are torn between her brother, a would-be warlord who hopes to fill the power vacuum after the Patrol leaves, and her lover, the commander of the departing Patrol.

This is very definitely of its era in style; it's pulp through and through. But Moore's prose is more graceful than many of her contemporaries, her characters (Quanna in particular) given relatively complex personalities and motivations for the period, and Quanna's ties to the two men are skillfully used to generate suspense about her ultimate plan.

The anthology in which I found the story is worth a mention. It's a 1951 collection called Journey to Infinity, edited by Martin Greenberg (*), whose foreword explains that this is a new concept in SF collections. (Dude. It's 1951. The SF anthology itself is still a pretty novel idea. How much innovating do you need to do already?) The stories have been chosen and sequenced in a way that they collectively tell a single story, that of the rise and fall of humanity as a galactic power. Sadly, the copy I was able to get from my library is not in great shape after 70+ years; the pages are yellowed and on the verge of falling out of the binding. I was hesitant to spend any more time reading it than it took to get through the award-nominated story for which I borrowed the book, so I can't speak to how successful Greenberg's concept was, but it's an interesting idea.

(*NOT the Martin H. Greenberg who edited more than 1000 SF anthologies from the 1970s to the 2010s. Martin no-H Greenberg was reportedly a jerk, difficult to work with, and notorious for not paying his authors. Martin H. Greenberg was, by all accounts, a delightful man who knew and was adored by everyone in the field.)

57: The Alchemy of Stars, Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen, editors
58: The Alchemy of Stars II, Sandra J. Lindow, editor

The Science Fiction Poetry Association was founded in 1978, and began giving its Rhysling Awards for speculative poetry in the same year. These two volumes collect the Rhysling winners from 1978 through 2018.

Two Rhyslings are given each year, for long and short poems, with long being anything of 50 lines or more (500 words or more for prose poems). In 2006, a "Dwarf Star" award was created for poems of 10 lines/50 words or less; it is not technically a Rhysling, but the Dwarf winners are also included here. The shortest of the Dwarfs is only six words long, an untitled poem by LeRoy Gorman:

aster than the speed of lightf

I am not an expert on poetry, so I can't speak with any authority about whether this is good poetry. But I found about the same percentage of poems that I enjoyed as I would expect from the average poetry collection, and found seven or eight that I liked enough to type them into my growing file of favorite poems. (I posted one short poem that I liked from each volume -- "egg horror poem" by Laurel Winter and "Advice to a Six-Year-Old" by Mary Soon Lee -- in the Club Read "Poetry II" topic.)

Not surprisingly, a greater percentage of these poems than usual are narrative, and the first volume includes the only poem ever to be nominated as a short story by one of the major SF awards. "the button, and what you know" by W. Gregory Stewart was a Nebula nominee for Best Short Story in 1992, and it's a charming blend of the cryptic and the comic.

Not everyone's into genre fiction, and poetry has even fewer readers, so obviously these are books aimed at a very specific audience. But if you're interested in this particular intersection, these books are worth a look.

>35 KeithChaffee: Huh. I thought I had read all of T Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon's short story collections. I know I've read The Tomato Thief but several of the others you describe don't ring a bell, including the unicorn story...so clearly I have some reading/rereading to do! Yes, her stuff is wonderful. She both writes excellent "childrens" stories (do look at A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, with a young teen or pre-teen protagonist and a _great_ story), and has gotten me to read and enjoy horror (those are Kingfisher books - The Twisted Ones, The Hollow Places, A House With Good Bones...)

>38 jjmcgaffey: "Bird Bones" and "Let Pass the Horses Black" are the two stories identified as original to this collection; everything else is a reprint, mostly from various magazines, some of them quite small.

Yes, but I thought I had this collection! I don't, so clearly I need to get this. It's so hard to find short stories...unless they're Hugo-nominated, I _love_ the Hugo packet. It's so useful.

59: Stories 3: Time, Robert J. Sawyer

Sawyer is among Canada's most prominent English-language SF authors, a 13-time winner of the Aurora, Canada's major SF award; he's also received both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. His short fiction has been gathered in three volumes with the themes of earth, space, and time.

The highlight of the "time" volume is "Identity Theft," a clever SF mystery in which the only private eye on Mars must find a man who's disappeared. Disappearing isn't easy on Mars, where's there's only one city, and the dome that houses it is only about three kilometers across. (With some editing, this story was later transformed into the first several chapters of Sawyer's novel Red Planet Blues.)

A follow-up short story about the same detective, "Biding Time," has a lovely just-desserts ending. Two of the better stories take us back to prehistory: "Just Like Old Times" centers on the punishment of a serial killer, and "Peking Man" finds a new take on one of the genre's most freqently revisited characters (to be more specific would give away too much).

The short-short "If I'm Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage" builds quickly to a sharp punchline; "Iterations" is a dark, brooding story of parallel universes and parallel selves. If there's a clunker here, perhaps it's "On the Surface," a riff on H. G. Wells and The Time Machine that doesn't add much to the original.

Sawyer's one of my favorites. His ideas are imaginative, and he thoroughly thinks through their implications. You might think of him as a modern Isaac Asimov, or a less smart-alecky John Scalzi. He's more of a traditionalist than an innovator, but even when his themes are familiar -- parallel universes, time travel, time dilation in space travel -- he finds new variations and unexplored corners of those themes.

60: Death of an Old Sinner, Dorothy Salisbury Davis

(MysteryKit: upstairs/downstairs)

Between 1949 and 2002, Davis published about 20 each of mystery novels and short stories. She served as President of the Mystery Writers of America in the mid-1950s, and was named an MWA Grand Master 30 years later. She served on the steering committee that formed the Sisters in Crime organization in 1986, and her grande dame status gave that group more legitimacy in the eyes of many.

Most of her books were stand-alones, but this 1957 novel is the first of three featuring the housekeeper Mrs. Annie Norris. Mrs. Norris is about sixty and has worked for the Jarvis family for more than forty years. As we open, the family consists of retired Major General Ransom Jarvis, ten years older than Mrs. Norris, and his unmarried son, James, who is preparing to run for governor.

The General is supposed to be writing his memoirs, but doesn't have much enthusiasm for the project; he's more intrigued by the idea of faking a salacious, scandal-filled diary for his great-uncle, a former US president, which he thinks will be more lucrative than his own life story. (Davis never specifically identifies the uncle/president, but since we've had only one bachelor president, it's not hard to figure out that the General is related to James Buchanan.)

Could that fake diary have anything to do with the sudden death of the General in a Manhattan hotel room? James is on the case, with the assistance of a former colleague from the New York District Attorney's office, and more help than he might have expected from Mrs. Norris.

I like Mrs. Norris, who is not all the cuddly ball of warmth we often get from crime-solving housekeepers. She's a cranky, judgmental woman, utterly devoted to "Master Jamie," but not terribly fond of the General, who she sees as a womanizing and financially irresponsible scoundrel. (She's not wrong.)

And Davis's prose is often delightful. I loved this bit, from our introduction to Mrs. Norris:

She had come over from Scotland at twenty, Mrs. Norris had, already a childless widow, and the truth was that over the years, adding a bit now and then to her husband's stature from what she took off that of other men, she probably loved him better now than ever she did in their brief marriage.

That's a sharp, precise bit of description that tells us a lot about her crabbed view of the world.

If there had been even one other character in the book who was as interesting, or as vividly drawn, I might be able to offer at least a mild recommendation for the novel. But alas, the supporting characters -- the women in particular -- blur together rather badly, and the plot is convoluted and hard to follow, entanging the General's mistress with New York gangsters and somehow dragging Mrs. Norris's brother-in-law into the mix.

A few nice details here, but they're not enough to inspire me to explore Davis any further.

>41 KeithChaffee: Im interested in his work. is there a reading order, or just jump in?

>43 cindydavid4: Pretty much just jump in. There are some trilogies among Sawyer's work, but most of his novels are stand-alone. Flashforward is probably his best known novel, if only because of the (mediocre) 2009 ABC TV series adaptation. There's Red Planet Blues if you're into SF/private eye hybrids; Illegal Alien is a good SF/courtroom drama. Triggers mixes SF and political thriller; Quantum Night begins with the development of a perfect test to identify psychopaths. Any of those would make a good entry point, I think.

61: xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, Kate Bernheimer, ed.

(SFFKit: gods/mythology; AlphaKit: X)

I am normally a great fan of reimagined versions of the classics, but this collection of fifty stories inspired by myth did not click for me, and by the second half of the book, I was mostly browsing and skimming, hoping to find at least a few stories that would hold my attention.

I think the main problem is that the stories have been too contemporized, to the point of removing the gods from them entirely. The stakes are dramatically lowered if there's no element of god vs. human in these stories; reducing the story of Demeter and Persephone to a story about the awkwardness of shared custody diminishes the story.

The book is dominated by Greek myth, but there are stories built around Chinese, Indian, Norse, Inuit, and Mexican myths; it warmed my atheist heart to see that one story's mythological referent in the table of contents was "God and Satan."

The book sequences the stories in alphabetical order by their mythological source, so we progress from "Anthropogenesis and Norse Creation Myth" to "Zeus and Europa." That leads to a few stretches of redundancy; hitting all of the Daedalus stories in a clump feels more repetitious than it would if they'd been scattered throughout.

There were a few stories that clicked for me, though not necessarily because of their mythological resonance; they were just nicely written stories. Kit Reed's "Sissy" suggests that for some men, finding a way to connect to their father is the metaphorical rock they must forever push up the hill. Willy Vlautin's "Kid Collins" is the best of the book's several takes on Persephone; ditto for Anthony Marra's "The Last Flight of Daedalus" and that character.

Aimee Bender's "Devourings" is a Cronos variation that finds a way to keep something of the god/human dynamic; Maile Chapman's "Friend Robin" puts the Irish Brownies in modern context; Elanor Dymott's "Henry and Booboo" makes the story of Candaules and Gyges (which I hadn't previously known) even creepier than the original.

Best in show honors go to Edward Carey, whose signature style of gently disquieting strangeness is well suited to the story of Baucis and Philemon, which he reimagines in "Sawdust."

This is a collection of fine authors, and I don't think anything here is badly written. But most of the stories have, in their reinterpretation, removed themselves so far from the original myth that they simply read as contemporary literary fiction, which is a genre that just doesn't interest me much. Your mileage is likely to vary.

62: The Endless Vessel, Charles Soule

(AlphaKit: V/C)

Soule is doing a lot here, juggling ambitious plotlines and big ideas.

In the very near future, the world is suffering a pandemic. The Grey is a deep depression. Most of its victims fall into a state of apathy and inactivity; a smaller number become suicidal.

A relative handful are afflicted with the Joy variant, and become enthusiastic activists for the destruction of society as we know it. The world is ending, they argue, and we need to take whatever pleasure we can from the present moment without being distracted by the relics of the past. They go so far as to commit acts of terrorism to destroy those relics -- museums, music studios, theaters -- hoping to force people to accept that humanity as we had known it is no more.

Against that backdrop, Lily Barnes is working to create a carbon scrubber that will clean the atmosphere and help to end the climate crisis. Her boss shows her a prototype scrubber he's been given, which is so far advanced that she can't begin to understand how it works. Deep within its wiring, she finds a distinctive pattern of twists and coils that she recognizes as a signature of her father, who has been dead for fifteen years.

And in the late eighteenth century, Molly Calder converts her textile mill into an institute for researchers in a variety of unusual, often disreputable fields, hoping to find some way to bring her late husband back to her.

As each of these threads plays out, Soule crams so much into the novel that ideas will go flying by that you'd like to see given more attention, fleeting thoughts that deserve their own stories and novels. The place where all of his plotlines finally come together, for instance, is called The Haunted Forest, and it's a remarkable creation, a place with implications that are joyful and creepy and awe-inspiring.

I was not entirely convinced by the ending, which solves too many enormous problems with facile "love one another" platitudes. But the journey to that ending is an entertaining one. The story moves briskly along; the main characters are well drawn and the supporting players are colorfully sketched; and if some of Soule's ideas skip by too quickly, at least they are interesting ideas that leave you with something to think about as they whoosh past. The greatest sin of the novel is that it is overly ambitious, and when most things work as well as they do here, that's a sin I'm willing to forgive.

63: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi

(SFFKit: gods/mythology; BingoDog: written in another cultural tradition)

Shigidi is one of the minor Yoruba deities, a short, ugly god of nightmares who specializes in playing on people's fears and scaring them to death as they sleep. He works for the Orisha Spirit Company -- Talabi here conceives of the various deities as part of a corporate bureaucracy -- and doesn't enjoy his work very much.

Things change when he meets the gorgeous succubus Nneoma, who convinces Shigidi to leave Orisha, go independent, and team up with her on various demonic enterprises; in exchange, she'll transform him into a tall, powerful hunk and teach him to use all of the power he never knew he had.

But the elder gods at Orisha aren't done with Shigidi, and they rope him and Nneoma into doing One Last Job -- a heist in which they must recover a stolen artifact from the British Museum.

That's a marvelous premise, but I'm afraid it doesn't live up to its potential. The novel bounces around in time with every chapter. It gets hard to keep track of where/when we are, and Talabi often steps on his own big moments by revealing their eventual outcomes before actually showing us the events.

And the climactic gods-vs-gods battle has the same problem that has led to growing exhaustion with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero stories. When the characters are this powerful, their fights aren't all that interesting. Bash bash rip off an arm smash crush stab the giant beat hit thrash. Yawn. The characters are so powerful, so close to omnipotence, that it's hard for me as a mere mortal to feel like there are any real stakes. Even when Talabi finds a way to put one of his gods at risk of something like death, it never feels like an actual threat; we know there's going to be some godly loophole of salvation.

As lively and colorful as Talabi's god characters are, I wanted a bigger touch of humanity. There's only one significant human among the supporting players (their identity is one of the book's more unexpected revelations), and even they have already cheated death at least once.

I liked the energy Talabi brings to the story, his characters are vivid, and some of the set pieces are filled with great energy. I will certainly be interested to see what he might do in a second novel (and there are already two collections of short stories that might be worth a look). But this one didn't quite work for me.

64: The Compleat Werewolf and Other Tales, Anthony Boucher

Boucher (rhymes with "voucher") is another of those pulp-era authors who was equally proficient in SF and in mystery; he was also an important critic in both genres. When writing and reviewing mystery, he used the pseudonym "H. H. Holmes," though his mystery novels these days are usually published under the Boucher name.

He was also an important editor in SF. He co-founded and was the first editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and is still one of the genre's major magazines.

This collection was published in 1969, shortly after his death, and gathers the best of his SF stories from the early 1940s. I had picked up the book mostly to read the two award-nominated stories, but I enjoyed them so much that I wound up reading the whole book.

Boucher's writing is recognizably 40s SF (it's hard not to notice the almost complete absence of female characters in these stories), but it's a notch higher in literary style than most of his contemporaries -- more graceful prose, a bit more character development, fewer overwrought adjectives and exclamation points.

The stories for which I picked up the book both hold up well after roughly 80 years. "Q.U.R." is a tale of an inventor who has to fight entrenched business interests after finding a solution to a crisis in the robot industry; "We Print the Truth" centers on a newspaper editor who finds himself with unusual power and responsibility after being granted a wish. (It makes an interesting companion to Fredric Brown's "Etaoin Shrdlu," which I mentioned a few posts back. There was something in the air in this era about enchanted printing presses.)

But I liked some of the other stories even more. Several of the stories lean slightly into horror, and Boucher finds just my level of eerie and creepy without getting too gross. "Mr. Lepescu" starts with a familiar theme -- a child convinced that his imaginary playmate is real -- and gives it a sharp final twist; "The Ghost of Me" is a witty piece that combines ghost story with a touch of time travel gone wrong.

Solid, well-crafted stuff, and still thoroughly readable and enjoyable today.

>62 KeithChaffee: That sounds... flawed, but really, really interesting. I might have to add that to the wishlist. (A thought reinforced by reading the only LT review of it on the book page so far, even though it's two stars: "One of the promotional blurbs compares this work with 'Midnight Library.' Not even remotely close." As someone who disliked The Midnight Library, I will take that as encouragement!)

>49 bragan: ha! really, thats damning with faint praise

>49 bragan: Haven't gotten to The Midnight Library (though I very much enjoyed Matt Haig's first few novels), so I can't speak to that specific comparison. My general impression of the two authors, though, is that Haig approaches things with a light sense of humor, a touch of whimsy, that Soule doesn't have. Soule is less interested in his characters as people than Haig is; Soule focuses more tightly on plot and story.

Another author knocked off of the SF awards list with the two Retro Hugo nominees by Hal Clement, member of the SF Hall of Fame and recipient of the Grand Master Award from the SFF Writers of America.

Clement is the grandfather of "hard" science fiction, which places the emphasis on the science, and insists that it must be as accurately depicted as possible. Any extrapolations or imagined technology of the future must be at least conceivably possible given the current state of the field. In his novels, he often challenged himself to write plausible stories about extreme conditions; his novel Mission of Gravity, for instance, imagines what type of life might evolve on a planet with extremely high gravity.

The challenge in writing hard SF is that a clumsy author can wind up writing science lectures that never quite cohere into stories. (A recent example would be Andy Weir's The Martian; yes, I know this is a minority view of a popular book.) Clement never quite falls into that trap, but he comes awfully close sometimes.

The two stories under consideration, for instance, are both essentially science puzzles: How does our hero survive or rescue himself under a specific set of difficult conditions? In "Uncommon Sense" (the 1946 short story award winner), the protagonist is a spaceship captain who has been locked out of his ship by a rebellious crew; the planet is dangerously hot during the day and he has no weapons. He has to find a way to regain control of his ship.

"Attitude" (a 1944 novella nominee) focuses on a spaceship crew that has been taken prisoner by aliens with whom they cannot communicate. The crew must collaborate with a second group of aliens who have also been taken prisoner to find a way to send a message to their potential rescuers.

In both cases, the challenge is an interesting one, and it's fun to watch the characters puzzle their way to a clever solution. But there is a chilly distance to the whole thing; there's not much room for emotion or anything but the dryest and coolest sense of humor.

I admire the rigor with which Clement poses his science problems, and the cleverness of both his solutions and his presentation of those solutions in a way that will be understandable to the non-scientist reader. But I do find myself wanting some character development, a sense of actual people in his stories that would make them more than just a series of clever logic puzzles.

The genre wouldn't be what it is without the influence of Hal Clement, but I can't imagine myself eagerly picking up any more of his work.

Huh. My image of Clement is "that guy who writes really good aliens". I love his Ice Planet and the Needle and Eye of the Needle series (well, every time I finish the latter two I grumble about things that didn't make sense, but while I'm reading I love it). Ice Planet is a lot of fun - written from the POV of an alien investigating this really cold planet, where _water_ can sometimes be a _solid_, and the very strange inhabitants thereof.

Some of his have been interesting but not absorbing, as you say somewhat distant - the heavy planet series, for one. But the three above I love and reread regularly.

Maybe he’s better at novel length, with more time to really dig into and play with his ideas.

Could be. I'm not sure I've ever read any of his shorts.

65: Lost: Back to the Island, Emily St. James & Noel Murray

A "complete critical companion" to Lost, which premiered 20 years ago this week and spent six seasons telling the story of a group of plane crash survivors and the mysterious island where they found themselves.

We get short essays of 2-3 page on each episode (each essay signed by one of the two authors), with longer pieces on forty "pivotal" episodes. Those are not necessarily, they stress, the forty best episodes, but the episodes that will alllow them to talk about the major themes and ideas of the show.

Scattered throughout are supplemental essays on other aspects of the Lost experience -- Lost merchandising, the obsession among some fans with figuring out the answers to the show's mysteries, the show's handling of its non-white characters.

Both St. James and Murray wrote regular reviews of Lost for at least some part of its run, so they've thought a lot about the show. Their commentaries are critical but fair, neither overlooking the show's legitimate flaws nor scolding it for the "failures" that existed mostly in the mind of its most obsessed fans. The controversial finale is the only episode to get a jointly-written commentary from both authors, and they (correctly) defend it against its detractors.

This would be most useful as a companion to a rewatch (or a first watch, if you've never seen it), and if I ever find the time for that project, I will certainly be happy to have a copy on hand.

>56 KeithChaffee: Interesting, and hard to believe that it's been twenty years. I was a devoted watcher, and one of those who found the ending bizarre. I'm not sure I'm up for a rewatch, but it was definitely part of my life for a while.

66: Drive-Thru Dreams, Adam Chandler

Breezy, chatty history of fast food and its impact in the US. Not a lot to say about this one, though there's an occasional interesting observation. Chandler notes, for instance, that when White Castle arrived in the 1920s, it didn't only create the fast food industryt, it played a major role in rehabilitating the hamburger so that it could become an American staple. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had been published about fifteen years earlier, and ground meat was still widely viewed with suspicion; White Castle's emphasis on sanitation -- the diner could see the gleaming kitchen and cooktop, and the "White" wasn't an accidental choice -- helped restore faith that burgers could be safe to eat.

>51 KeithChaffee: I liked Haig's Dead Fathers Club, which is the only other thing of his that I've read, but The Midnight Library reads a little too much like a motivational poster in novel form for me.

I also realized, when I went to add The Endless Vessel to the wishlist, that I had read something of Soule's before: The Oracle Year. Which I do remember enjoying.

>56 KeithChaffee: No, it cannot possibly be 20 years since Lost premiered. I refuse to believe it! (Also, I agree, the finale didn't really deserve the negative reaction it got from so many people, although I do kind of understand it.)

67: Dogland, Tommy Tomlinson

Tomlinson follows one dog, a Samoyed named Striker, through the last day of the Westminster Dog Show, where he is among the top contenders to be named Best in Show. From that narrative spine, Tomlinson's digressions include the history of dog shows and the nature of the dog/human relationship. The book was prompted, he says, by the question that came to mind while watching the Westminster show a few years earlier: Are these dogs happy?

Striker is not, at least in theory, being directly judged against the other dogs at Westminster. Instead, each dog is being judged against its own breed standard, a lengthy document describing the ideal dog of that breed. The winning dog should be the one that comes closest to its own breed standard. As Tomlinson explains it, "It's as if humans decided that George Clooney was the consummate man, and we measured all other men by which ones were the Clooneyest."

This is a charming book, filled with interesting bits of history and anecdotes. If you've ever wondered, for instance, why poodles are so often the victims of canine topiary, Tomlinson has the answer:

Poodles, of course, are not born with preposterous haircuts. Those haircuts once had a practical purpose. In Germany, where poodles were created, the dogs were bred by hunters to fetch ducks. They were designed to have thick curls to insulate them from cold water. But they wound up with such dense fur that it was hard for them to swim. So their owners shaved the poodles except for the spots that most needed to stay warm -- chest, head, feet. As they came out of the fields and into homes, that fur proved perfect for sculpting. Groomers kept shaving parts of the poodle but went wild with what was left. The poor poodle ended up as a hybrid from hell: duck-hunter chic.

Thankfully, Tomlinson does not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing the dogs he writes about, as too many books about animals do. It is, in fact, one of his themes that we do not know, and likely never will know, what our dogs are actually thinking. Do they love us as much as we think they do, or is that just learned behavior that they know will get them food and shelter? Do they have any memories of their lives with us?

Tomlinson's an easy writer to read. His prose is graceful, and his humor is occasionally pointed without ever being mere snark. This is a delightful book.

>60 KeithChaffee: "Duck hunter chic," I love it. I might get this book for my mother. She loves watching the Westminster Dog Show. Then, of course, I can borrow it. ;-)

>61 labfs39: Always a good reason to give a book!

It's my 2nd Thingaversary today!

>63 KeithChaffee: Happy Thingaversary! The rule is that you now should buy two books to celebrate your two years here (this tradition only becomes onerous once you have to buy ten or more books to celebrate).

>63 KeithChaffee: Happy Thingaversary! You'll have to let us know if you decide to celebrate with a couple of book purchases. It will be my 17th Thingaversary in March. Not sure I'll be able to meet the expectation this year!

I bought the three volumes in the Dangerous Visions SF anthology series, the third of which has just been published more than 50 years after its predecessors. Getting to the third volume was a long and convoluted journey, and I wanted to re-read the first two volumes (it's been at least twenty years since I last looked at them) before diving into the third. Don't know how quickly I'll get to them, but they're on the Kindle waiting for me.

68: Hollywood Pride, Alonso Duralde

(AlphaKit: D)

The subtitle calls this "a celebration of LGBTQ+ representation and preseverance in film." It's a survey of the major films and personalities who make up LGBT history in (mostly) American cinema.

The book is organized chronologically, with chapters divided roughly by decade. Each chapter is divided into two main sections, "The Films" and "Icons," giving capsule summaries of the movies or biographies of the people. Those sections are followed by "other films of note" and "other icons of note" listings, which run rapid-fire through supplemental choices, summarizing movies in a sentence and careers in a couple of key credits. There are occasional sidebars, mini-essays of a page or two on major themes of a particular decade.

The individual entries are brief, with most lasting only four or five paragraphs. Duralde does a superb job of cramming a lot of information into limited space, but the prose never feels rushed or overly info-dump-y. He doesn't limit herself to positive depictions of the community (the first half of the book would pretty much vanish if he did), and is careful to place each entry in its historical context. The "icons" section of the 1930s chapter, for instance, ends with a section on "the sissies," a group of character actors famous for playing effeminate gay-coded men -- Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn, Eric Blore -- and Duralde notes that even today, those portrayals remain controversial within the community.

As the title suggests, the focus is mostly on American film, though there are a few entries on particularly important movies and people from international cinema.

Turner Classic Movies, working with Running Press, has been publishing a series of glossy coffee-table/reference books for some years now; this is the third in a series of books on historic representation of minority communities, following Donald Bogle's Hollywood Black and Luis I. Reyes's Viva Hollywood. Duralde's book is an excellent overview, and it leaves me eager to read the Bogle and Reyes books.

>60 KeithChaffee: Poor Striker - they didn't even put a Samoyed on the cover. Sounds like an interesting book, however.

>68 SassyLassy: Do you happen to know what kind of dog IS on the cover? Odd-looking thing, and there was no note about the cover photo in the book.

>69 KeithChaffee: An Afghan hound?

Looks right to me. A beautiful, majestically silly-looking dog.

Yep. I lived in Afghanistan, and learned about the origin of the hounds - there is a breed there that are famously intelligent, used to herd animals over vast regions (desert - you have to keep moving to get them enough food and water). But every once in a while these short-haired dogs would throw a sport, with long hair - which nearly always went along with being immensely stupid. The herders had no use for these long-haired idiots, so they brushed them up pretty and gave them as gifts to the King (Shah)...who also had no use for them and gave them away as diplomatic gifts. So outside Afghanistan, the "Afghan hound" is always descended from the long-haired idiots. I don't know if they sometimes throw short-haired and/or intelligent pups...but all the Afghan hounds I've ever dealt with were serious dim bulbs.

>72 jjmcgaffey: You’re right. I had a friend in Melbourne who kept the long-haired variety. They were really stupid but beautiful.

I never saw any in Afghanistan when I was there during a small window of peace. I was only there for a few months. Its currency I remember was called Afghan too. It was the only country I’ve been to where the black-market exchange rate was more expensive than the US dollar.

I liked it there. It was so peaceful and easy for western women compared to some Muslim counties further to the west. It is I think, the only country in the area that had never been successfully colonized by a foreign power.

Yup. We went from there to Iran, and wow was that a cultural change. We (my sisters, my mother and I) used to ride bikes in Kabul...not so much in Tabriz.

The smart hounds are too valuable to be pets in the cities - they're out working in the rural areas. We had one, but I think she was a crossbreed.

I find it deeply amusing (except when it's annoying) - the currency is afghanis (one afghani, two afghanis - usually referred to as afs). When we were there, we were always correcting visitors who called the Afghans Afghanis. Now, kids (and by now, adults) who were born outside Afghanistan call themselves Afghanis...argh! I don't correct them, it's their life, but argh.

>74 jjmcgaffey: Yes I remember that change to Tabriz.

We have a long railway line in Australia called The Ghan (1,986 mile trip) , named after the Afghan cameleers who came to Australia to provide transport in the Red Centre. It would be a great train ride. I’ve been to the Northern Territory. Pre-Ghan, and I traveled by bus to Melbourne. Long hot dry ride back then.

My parents took a trip through Australia, including on The Ghan (in and out, not all the way, if I recall correctly). I wasn't with them, unfortunately - I'd love to visit Australia someday.

>69 KeithChaffee: Definitely an Afghan, a gorgeous looking creature and sleek, but not one I'd care to have. One of their characteristics is an odd loping movement.

>72 jjmcgaffey: Interesting.

69: A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine

(SFFKit: women authors; AlphaKit: D)

Sequel to A Memory Called Empire, which I read earlier this year. As always with sequels, it's challenging to talk about this one without doing at least a little spoiling of the earlier book, but I'll do my best to keep it to a minimum.

Lsel is a small space station sitting at the edge of the Teixcalaanli Empire, and tenuously clinging to its independence from that empire. Mahit Dzmare, recently appointed Lsel's ambassador to Teixcalaan, has returned home where she is trying to catch her breath and figure out her next step after the events of the first book.

She quicly finds herself tangled in Lsel's own political struggles, a pawn being tossed about by several members of the station's ruling council. So when Teixcalaan calls on her -- she is still officially the ambassador, after all -- for assistance in making first contact with an alien race that is on the brink of war with the empire, she jumps at the chance to get away from Lsel.

Meanwhile, we're also following events on the Teixcalaanli home world, where the Emperor and her ministers are in conflict about how to play the potential war to their own advantage. Most entertaining of these characters is Eight Antidote, eleven-year-old clone of an earlier emperor, who is being trained to take over the throne himself one day, and who has his own thoughts about wartime ethics.

This is much more a traditional space opera than the first book was, with invading aliens, first contact, xenolinguistics, and a fleet commander worried about mutinous underlings. In terms of basic plot, you could have read something like this in 1953. But that book would have been 140 pages long instead of 500; it would have had fewer, thinner characters and subplots; and those characters would probably all have been male. The aliens would have been reduced to bug-eyed monsters, and the author wouldn't have even attempted (as Martine does, mostly successfully) to give us a glimpse into their way of thinking.

Very fine stuff, as was its predecessor. Both novels won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and while I haven't read all of the other nominees from those years, these are both entirely deserving of honor at that level.

Between books, another pair of Fritz Leiber's SF-award-nominated Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, several of which I read earlier this year. "Thieves' House" is a nice rescue/heist story in which the Mouser must save Fafhrd, who is being held prisoner in the very well defended headquarters of the thieves' guild; "The Sunken Land" is a short mood piece with minimal story about a visit to this universe's equivalent of Atlantis. Still a lot of Leiber left on the master list of award nominees, but only one more from this series, and I expect that it will get about the same response that these (and the earlier batch) did -- not really my cuppa, but awfully well done examples of their kind.

70: Fast Company, Marco Page

(MysteryKit: not too scary)

Earlier this year, I read They Died in Vain, a collection of short essays on favorite overlooked mystery novels; this is one of the books included there. It's a 1938 novel set in New York's community of rare-book dealers.

Joel Glass is one of those dealers, and he has a small sideline as a sort of detective, helping insurance companies to track down books that have fraudulently been reported as stolen. When one particularly unscrupulous dealer is murdered, Joel's detective work takes a darker turn.

"Darker" is relative, of course, and Page's tone is relatively light and breezy. You might be reminded of the Thin Man movies. Like Nick and Nora Charles, Joel and Garda Glass do a lot of bantering while chugging smart cocktails.

In fact, Page was one of the writers on two of the Thin Man sequels, under his real name, Harry Kunitz. He also wrote the screenplays for the film version of Fast Company and its two sequels (not based on novels). Oddly enough, Joel and Garda were played by a different pair of actors in each of the three movies.

With novels of this era, modern readers are likely to worry about social attitudes and language, which are mostly OK. There are two or three ethnic slurs that wouldn't be acceptable today (including one use of the n-word). The female characters aren't merely decorative; they have intelligence and agency, and Garda has a few crucial moments in the solving of the mystery. And while a large number of the book dealers have Jewish-sounding names, that feels more like an accurate reflection of the business than like ethnic stereotyping, and there is never a suggestion that any character's villainy is connected to their ethnicity or religion.

The cast of characters is large -- half a dozen book dealers, the dead man's secretary, an insurance investigator, police officers and lawyers -- but Page does a good job of giving each of them just enough distinctive personality that I never struggled to keep them all straight. The pace is brisk -- the book is just over 200 pages -- and the screwball-ish moments work better than such things usually do in print.

I enjoyed the book, and it's a shame that it's fallen so far into obscurity. Neither of my large urban libraries had a copy, and it's no longer in print; I was able to find a reasonably priced copy on the used book market.

That copy is in pretty good shape, but just battered enough and obscure enough that I don't think there'd be much point to dropping it off at the local Little Free Libraries. If anyone here is interested, I'd be happy to send my copy to a new home; just drop me a message. (US only, please)

>78 KeithChaffee: Great review, and I'm really looking forward to this. I'm halfway through a A Memory Called Empire at the moment.

>81 KeithChaffee: This sounds fun, can't say I've heard of the author or book before.

71: Hi Honey, I'm Homo!, Matt Baume

Baume looks at the changing role and place of the LGBTQ community as reflected in American sitcoms. A dozen chapters, each focused on one TV show, provide snapshots of how things are changing from Bewitched in the mid-1960s, which could address the community only subtextually, to Modern Family 40 years later, which got more objections about the fact that its gay couple never kissed than it did about their presence.

Most of Baume's featured shows are obvious choices -- Soap, The Golden Girls, Will and Grace -- but a couple are somewhat out of left field. Alice and Dinosaurs seem to have been chosen for a single episode, and in the case of Dinosaurs, an episode that Baume describes as so muddled in its allegory that it's hard to say with any certainty that it's about gayness at all.

This would have made a top-notch New Yorker article, but at 250 pages, it's bloated far beyond any length that can be justified by its minimal new information or insight.

72: What Goes With What, Julia Turshen

Turshen divides this cookbook into six broad sections -- salad & sandwich, vegetables, and so on -- with each of those divided into a few subsections. Each of those twenty subsections offers five recipes, and an accompanying chart meant to show the home cook how they can build new recipes from these basic principles.

The "salad dressing" chart, for instance, tells you that the basic recipe is 1 part acid, 2-3 parts fat, and some sort of seasoning. If those components are red wine vinegar, olive, oil, and oregano/garlic, you've got the recipe for Pizzeria Vinaigrette. Change it to kimchi juice, mayo, and a combo of soy sauce and fish sauce, and you've made Kimchi Dressing.

These charts aren't quite as helpful to the average home cook as Turshen wants them to be; the salad dressing chart is one of the few that provides any sort of proportion information. And if I want to make meatballs, for instance, knowing that the basic formula is meat + binding + seasoning isn't all that helpful if I don't know how much binding and seasoning goes with my pound of ground beef, or how that might vary depending on the specfic binding and seasoning I'm using.

So whatever value this book has to offer will be in its 100 recipes, not in its charts and basic principles. Fortunately, those recipes are pretty good. They assume a broader pantry than the one I grew up with, but these days, ingredients like fish sauce, kimchi, and sesame oil aren't that hard to find in the supermarket, even in small towns. The recipes aren't terribly difficult or time-consuming, and Turshen isn't afraid to get her hands dirty in the cooking process; if your hands are the best mixing tool for a particular recipe, she's not going to tell you to struggle through mixing with a wooden spoon.

There are recipes here that I will probably try -- turkey meatballs with gochujang glaze, gingery peach and blueberry cobbler -- and were I not such a picky eater, there would be even more. I don't think this is a brilliant, must-have cookbook, but it's not a bad one. Maybe not an essential purchase, but worth checking out from your local library.

73: Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 5 (1943), Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg, eds.

A significant upgrade from the 1942 volume in this series, but one that raises an interesting question about the nature of retroactive award-giving.

I've talked in at least one of my threads about the Retro Hugo awards, but a quick summary: The first World Science Fiction Convention was held in 1939, but the first Hugo Awards weren't awarded until 1953. Beginning in 1996, WorldCons that took place 50, 75, or 100 years after one of the non-Hugo WorldCon years were given the option to award Retro Hugos for that missing year. The stories published in 1943, which would have been Hugo recipients in 1944, were Retro-ed in 2019.

A 75-year gap means that most of the voters weren't actually around to have read the stories of 1943 when they were published, and they would have found it difficult to read most of what came out that year. Virtually all of it would have been published in the pulps of the era, and good luck finding a copy of the May 1943 Super Science Stories after all these years. The SF anthology wouldn't be a thing for another decade, so you'd have to rely on "best of" single-author collections or reprint anthologies from later decades, and you'd have to wade through a lot of them in search of the 1943 stories.

Or you could just turn to this book, which was published in 1981 and was still pretty easy to find in 2019; it's one-stop shopping for the best stories of that year, or at least for one pair of editors' opinion of the best. So is it a surprise that of the 12 stories in this book, 8 were among the nominees in the three short fiction categories? It certainly seems possible that a lot of voters in 2019 used this book as a recommendation guide when filling out their ballots. It will be interesting to see if that pattern continues in the few Retro Hugo years still to come in this series.

But on to the book at hand! 1943 was, at least in the view of Asimov & Greenberg, the year of married authors C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. Each was a fine writer on their own, and much of their work after their 1940 marriage was done in collaboration, even when it was published under one of their own names. They also used several pseudonyms, and SF scholars have done a fair amount of detective work trying to figure out who wrote which of the stories published under all of their assorted names.

There are five Moore/Kuttner stories in this volume. "Doorway Into Time" is credited to Moore, and is probably a solo story; it's a so-so adventure tale about a scientist and his girlfriend who are drawn into a portal by an alien hunter in search of prey. "Clash by Night," credited to Lawrence O'Donnell, is of disputed authorship, with some sources claiming it's a Kuttner solo effort and others saying it's a collaboration; it's a fine bit of military SF set among the underwater domes of Venus.

Three stories are credited to Lewis Padgett. "The Proud Robot" is most likely a Kuttner story; it's from a series of comic stories about an inventor who can only do his best work when drunk, then can't remember how his inventions work when he sobers up. "The Iron Standard," a collaboration, finds a group of Earth astronauts stranded on Venus, struggling to get food in a harshly regimented economic system that seems to have no room for them. And "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," a joint effort that is by far the best story in this volume, is about kids in the 1940s suburbs whose minds are rewired by a batch of toys accidentally sent back in time.

Also interesting: Eric Frank Russell's "Symbiotica," a tale of peril in an alien ecosystem that drags on a bit too long, but is filled with novel ideas for the time; Leigh Brackett's "The Halfling," a romantic mystery set among a group of interstellar carnies; Edmond Hamilton's "Exile," a short story that does a nice job of building mood and tension before ending in a crisp punchline; and a pair of stories that I'd already come across elsewhere this year, Anthony Boucher's "Q.U.R." and Fredric Brown's "Daymare."

A couple of the stories haven't held up as well. P. Schuyler Miller's "The Cave" is a bore, and we are still slogging through the inexplicable popularity of the insufferable A. E. van Vogt.

74: 84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff

(BingoDog: set in multiple countries)

An epistolary memoir, taking the form of twenty years of letters, from 1949 to 1969, between New Yorker Hanff and London bookseller Frank Doel, of the Marks & Co. antiquarian bookstore.

This is a small book -- less than 100 pages, many of them less than half full, and even that largely taken up with letterhead, salutations, and closings -- and it has the reputation of being a charming, heartwarming valentine to friendship.

I don't get it.

Hanff is the epitome of the Ugly American, a brash, pushy, intrusive woman with absolutely no sense of (or interest in) where to draw appropriate boundaries in a commercial relationship. She scolds Doel and his colleages when she thinks they haven't acted quickly enough to find the specific rare books she's looking for; she babbles on at length about her personal life; she winds up attempting to befriend not only Doel and his co-workers, but his wife, daughters, and next door neighbor. And her awfulness is clear from her second letter, in which she scolds a London bookstore for billing in British currency instead of "translating" into dollars.

To give credit where credit is due, she is also kind and generous, often sending holiday parcels of food that's difficult for Londoners to get during post-war rationing.

But if I had been Frank Doel, after reading the first two or three letters from Hanff, I would have written back that Marks & Co. unfortunately did not usually offer the sort of books that she was interested in, and referred her to whichever London bookseller was at the top of my enemies list.

>86 KeithChaffee: Oh I loved this book when it came out and on my first trip to London cruised Charing Cross Rd to browse the bookstores. Then just last year I chose to reread it for some theme or another.....and OMG I couldnt believe this was the same woman. I was shocked how much I missed, and yeah, to whoever was at the top of his enemies list. indeed

>87 cindydavid4: I too loved this book when it was out. I found it gently and charming - a story of a friendship. I went to Charing Cross quite often and didn’t ever find the bookshop of the book.
BTW it was made into quite a charming movie with Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft

I’ll have to read it again in these changed times.

>88 kjuliff: I knew about the movie, though I haven't seen it. Bancroft and Hopkins strike me as lovely casting for the two leads.

>89 KeithChaffee: They are. Perfect. It’s on Prime, Apple TV and other platforms.

>89 KeithChaffee: the movie is really quite delightful, and the author doesnt seem to be quite as rude as she was in the book. could be wrong, it been a while

75: Foundation, Isaac Asimov

A classic early example of a "fix-up," the gathering together of a group of stories with a little tinkering to shape them into something more novel-ish. In this case, four previously published stories have been gathered (and given new names), along with a new introductory story; whatever tinkering has been done, this feels more like a collection of separate stories than it does like a single narrative.

It's typical of early 40s SF. Ideas are more important than characters, who serve primarily as mouthpieces for those ideas; "the future" is depicted mostly through giving characters names that sound like rejected pharmaceutical products ("Ask your doctor if Hari Seldon is right for you!").

Hari Seldon is the dominant figure in this book, though he doesn't actually appear in most of the stories. He is the great genius of Asimov's imagined science, psychohistory, which posits that while the actions of individuals are unpredictable, the actions of societies can be predicted with (astonishingly precise) accuracy. What he does after he forecasts the coming downfall of the great galactic Empire sets in motion the events of these stories, which take place over the course of roughly a century, with a different set of characters featured in each chapter.

Alas, I fear that "stories" is a generous description for what's in this book. These are primarily exchanges of political and philosophical speeches, dressed up in the guise of stories. But the costume is a little too thin, and the alternating "here's how I will destroy you" and "but you have not foreseen my brilliant strategy" monologues get tired very quickly.

The Foundation series was enormously popular in its day, and Asimov returned to it late in his career as part of an attempt (rather misguided, if you ask me) to tie all of his novels into one grand future history. And the third season of Apple TV's adaptation is due sometime next year. All four of the previously published stories gathered here were eventually nominated for Retro Hugos as the best of their year, as were stories gathered for the second volume in the series (so I'll eventually be reading that one, too).

But as a reading experience 80 years after their original publication, they really don't hold up very well.

>92 KeithChaffee: What a pity. Foundation was my introduction to SF. I was completely enthralled. I’m glad I never tried to read it again. Surely it was an experience not to be repeated.

>93 kjuliff: I think it may be a case of the old fandom adage that "the golden age of SF is 13."

76: The Big Bite, Charles Williams

(MysteryKit: noir; BingoDog: "big" or "little" in title -- and that finishes my BingoDog card!)

John Harlan looks OK. You'd never guess that a drunk driver had run him off the road a year ago. But he's lost just enough off his speed and timing to end his professional football career, and he's not sure what comes next. Still, Mr. Cannon, the other driver in the accident, wound up dead, so Harlan figures he got the better end of the deal.

Opportunity knocks in the form of the insurance investigator who worked his case, who pops up to tell Harlan that he doesn't think that accident was accidental at all, and he really doesn't think that Cannon's death was accidental. He needs Harlan's help to prove that Cannon was murdered by Mrs. Cannon and her lover, with an eye toward blackmailing them to keep their crime a secret.

This is noir, and all of the obligatory elements are in place. Harlan is both tough and clever, albeit a bit less so (on both counts) than he might believe; Mrs. Cannon is a knockout who can give him a run for his money in both of those departments; and Harlan's beautifully conceived blackmail scheme will run perfectly right up to the moment when it suddenly doesn't.

The prose is hard-boiled to the core. Here's Harlan, on the end of his football career:

When you're a half stride slow in the National Football League you're an old lady trying to walk up Niagara Falls with a crutch; they run down your throat faster than you can spit out your teeth. The old man gave me every chance in the world, and even tried me out in a defensive spot before he let me go, but it was no use. I couldn't pivot and swing fast enough to go with the play even when I saw it coming, and they ran through me like B-girls through a sailor's bankroll.

The characters are vivid; the story zips along with a brisk, chilly inevitability; the twists and turns -- especially the very last one -- are gloriously nasty; and everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

As for the obligatory old book language warning: This is a 1956 novel, and while some of the language is now archaic ("colored"), it was the proper and polite language to use at the time, and it is never used in a disrespectful or derogatory way.

This was my introduction to Charles Williams, who was quite successful in the 1950s and 1960s. These days, he seems to be mostly a critic's darling, the sort who pops up on lists of underrated crime writers. I would be more than happy to read more of his work if it's as good as this.

77: The "I Don't Want to Cook" Book, Alyssa Brantley

Two cookbooks in fairly rapid succession; a bit unusual for me.

This one is at precisely my level of difficulty. It's a notch above some of the "cooking for dummies/college students" books that think of "two slices of break, 1 tbsp jelly, 1 tbsp peanut butter" as a recipe. But it doesn't ask me to buy seven new ingredients or to spend three hours prepping to make dinner, and it's perfectly OK with the idea that I'm more likely to buy a jar of marinara sauce than to make my own from scratch.

What we have here are 100 one-dish recipes, all designed to be quick to cook, divided into chapters by the type of dish used. You've got the expected -- skillet, casserole, baking sheet -- but there are also chapters devoted to the grill, the wok, and the Instant Pot. Each recipe includes time estimates (which I assume should probably be increased by at least 50%, which is true for all cookbooks), divided into prep time, active cook time, and hands-off cook time (those minutes when you can just leave the dish on the stove or in the oven).

Everything is quick and easy, nothing is remotely gourmet. I bookmarked half-a-dozen recipes to add to my "I should try that sometime" folder, and the most unusual ingredients required are tahini and za'atar, which you might not find in every kitchen these days, but can probably find in most supermarkets.

Not for the haute cuisine crowd, but I found it useful.

78: A Lot Like Christmas, Connie Willis

(AlphaKit: L/W)

A Lot Like Christmas is an updated and expanded version of Connie Willis's Miracle, a collection of her Christmas-themed fantasy and SF stories. None of the stories are original to this collection, though five of them are new additions since the 2000 publication of Miracle. (The title Miracle brings up way too many touchstones for me to find the right one.)

The stories are all delightful, but you do notice some similarities when you read them all in one batch. Willis is fond in her holiday stories of throwing together a pair of co-workers or acquaintances who realize, after a lot of zippy screwball-esque banter, that they are meant to be together. (The words, "Why, Miss Jones, you're beautiful!" don't actually appear anywhere, but they might as well.)

Nearly half of these stories are of that type, but the story details are different enough to keep you going despite the repetition. "Newsletter" mixes Christmas with Invasion of the Body Snatchers; "deck.halls@boughs/holly" imagines the future of party planning; "Now Showing" turns a trip to the multiplex into a spy caper. Best of this bunch, and for me the best story in the book, is "All Seated on the Ground," a story about choral singing and xenolinguistics.

Willis's stories borrow elements from Sherlock Holmes ("Cat's Paw"), The Twilight Zone ("In Coppelius's Toyshop"), and All About Eve ("All About Emily"). We're warned that a white Christmas isn't always all it's cracked up to be ("Just Like the Ones We Used To Know") and paid a visit from a very un-Dickensian Spirit of Christmas Present ("Miracle").

On my SF-awards nominated quest, "Miracle," "All Seated on the Ground," and "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know" were all Hugo nominees; "Just Like' was also nominated for the Nebula.

These are lovely bagatelles, and only the Grinchiest reader could fail to be amused.

>97 KeithChaffee: I love Connie Willis but had never heard of her Christmas collection. Good to know.

79: Time and Again, Jack Finney

(SFFKit: recommended to you by a person, not an algorithm)

The recommendation that qualifies this book for this month's SFFKit came in the form of a SantaThing gift. I got this book last year from LT'er TanyaJ, who I don't believe I've ever overlapped with anywhere in LT Talk. It was a thoughtful and smartly chosen gift, fitting in perfectly with my SantaThing blurb -- a classic time travel novel that I somehow had never read, and I am very happy to have finally gotten around to it, even though I didn't enjoy the book as much as I might have hoped.

Let's start with the book's strengths, which are impressive. Finney has come up with an unusual time travel mechanism, a form of self-hypnosis which relies on emotional and psychological training rather than a time machine or other mechanical device. The opening chapters, in which our protagonist, advertising artist Silas Morley, is recruited by and trained for the top-secret government project, are clever and entertaining. And the book's coda, in which Si is presented with a difficult decision (and makes the right one, if you ask me), is very nicely done.

Finney makes smart use of a now-obscure event from 1882 New York as the dramatic climax of the novel, and works his characters into that event in a way that provides a plausible and dramatically satisfying explanation for how it came to happen in the first place. He has thoroughly researched that moment, as he has everything about that place and era.

And here we start to slip into the things I didn't enjoy so much, because every single bit of Finney's research has been loaded into this book, which runs a bit under 500 pages. There are long -- very long -- sequences spent with Si walking the streets, marveling at which buildings he recognizes (or doesn't) from his home year of 1970. We spend entire chapters wandering through New York department stores, or riding the streetcar, or taking photographs and sketching (and all of Si's photos and sketches are included within the book); even the big climactic sequence, as exciting as parts of it are, goes on twice as long as it needs to. If you're reading the book as a historical document, all of that stuff might be fascinating, but it doesn't do anything for the story.

The female characters, both Si's 1970 girlfriend and his 1882 romantic interest, rarely rise above being damsels in distress. Not surprising for a book from that era, I suppose, but somehow more annoying than usual; all that time spent on the precise details of everyone's wardrobe, and no room for a few sentences to give the women some actual personality?

And most disappointing, the McGuffin -- the historical mystery that Si is attempting to solve in 1882 -- isn't very interesting. It's a mundane tale of corruption and blackmail, of personal interest to Si and his 1970 girlfriend, but of minimal historical relevance. And both the blackmailer and the blackmailee are cardboard villains, so cartoonishly evil as to make Snidely Whiplash seem Shakespearean.

(It occurs to me that readers younger than I -- and these days, that's most of them -- may not remember Snidely Whiplash. He was a villain in the Rocky & Bullwinkle show, the nemesis of the noble Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right. These segments were parodies of silent film melodramas. Snidely wore black suits and a top hat, twirled his mustache, was obsessed with tying heroine Nell Fenwick to the railroad tracks, and said things like "Curses! Foiled again!")

As I said, I'm happy to have read Time and Again; it was a notable gap in my reading, and I can see how influential it's been on later work in the time travel subgenre. But for me, at least, the 50+ years since it was written have not been kind to the book, and I won't be moving on to Finney's sequel. (From Time to Time, published in 1995, finds Si traveling to 1912, where he winds up on the Titanic as part of an attempt to prevent World War I.)

>99 KeithChaffee: I loved that book in the 70s and probably read it more than twice. as an adult reading it id probably agree with the McGuffin but for me it worked.(and perhaps it was because I did remembr Snydly Whiplash)

I did read the sequel and liked it but dont have much memory of it so that says something

I've tried, and bounced off that book a couple times. I never got far enough in to figure out what the problem with it (for me) was. And maybe I'll just leave it that way.

Speaking of book-bouncing, I've been in a slump this week. I've picked up several books on subjects that ought to have held my interest and just haven't been able to connect to anything. I thought I was in a nonfiction mood, but maybe not, so I'm going to try and break out by veering back into fiction and reading the new best-of anthology from Harlan Ellison.

Still making my way through the Harlan Ellison anthology, and while reading the Wikipedia entry on Ellison, stumbled across this historical tidbit, which I will be thinking about for the rest of the day. Ellison makes a brief appearance in Gay Talese's celebrated 1966 Esquire profile of Frank Sinatra: "...the crooner took exception to Ellison's boots during a billiards game Ellison was playing with Omar Sharif, Leo Durocher and Peter Falk."

80: Greatest Hits, Harlan Ellison

Since Ellison's death in 2018, there has been a real effort by J. Michael Straczynski, his friend and literary executor, to put his work back into public consciousness. This new "best of" collection is part of that campaign.

Within genre fiction of all types, he's long been recognized as a major figure. He's received the lifetime achievement awards of the Horror Writers of America and the World Fantasy Award, been named a Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and the Science Fiction Writers of America, and been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He has received at least two each of the major genre awards -- Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, Edgar, World Fantasy.

And he's one of a handful of people who can be said to have significantly changed his field. Ellison was one of the drivers of the "new wave" movement that hit science fiction in the mid-1960s, a shift away from adventure stories and spaceships toward literary experimentation and explorations of the psyche. There was an emphasis on confronting contemporary social issues (there are a lot of really bad allegories about racism from that era) and shattering old taboos. The titles of Ellison's major early works scream new wave: "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World," "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."

His concern for social issues wasn't limited to his fiction. Ellison marched with King, campaigned for the ERA and against the Vietnam War, and mentored a lot of women and POC writers, most notably Octavia Butler.

He was also, as he was delighted to acknowledge, one of the most abrasive, contentious, difficult people you might ever meet, and that also comes through in his writing. His stories dealing with racism, in their worst moments, come close to indulging in rather than confronting the problem. This collection comes with an introductory note about the "outdated cultural representations and language" in some of the stories, and the story "Mephisto in Onyx" gets its own supplementary note.

But holy shit, could he write! His prose sparkles and dazzles and thrills; his ideas are large and daring. He is occasionally so far out on a limb of stylistic experimentation that you have to slow down to figure out what the heck he's doing; "The Deathbird" is a re-examination of the Garden of Eden story told in short fragments that include a multiple choice exam, a set of book-club-style discussion questions, and a short essay about Ellison's pet dog.

I would single out as favorites from this collection "Jeffty Is Five," which starts out as an exercise in Bradbury-esque nostalgia before curdling into a heartbreaking ending; the aforementioned "Mephisto in Onyx," a duel of wits between a mind-reader and a serial killer; "I'm Looking for Kadak," a comic bagatelle about Jewish Venusians desperately trying to find a tenth to make a minyan; and "Paladin of the Lost Hour," about the relationship between a Vietnam veteran and the old man he rescues from a mugging. (And I now need to find the adaptation from the 1980s Twilight Zone revival, starring Danny Kaye at the end of his career and Glynn Turman at the beginning of his.)

Ellison is one of the major writers of the late 20th century, and I wouldn't restrict that claim to genre fiction writers. He deserves to be thought of alongside the finest writers of "literary fiction," which let us never forget, is just as much a genre as SF, mystery, and horror. Greatest Hits is a fine collection of his best work, and it scratches the surface so faintly that you could easily assemble a Volume Two with no significant decline in quality.

81: Arsenic and Adobo, Mia P. Manansala

(MysteryKit: culinary mysteries)

We start with a familiar trope, albeit one that feels more like rom-com than murder mystery: A young woman comes home from the big city to help save the family business. That's Lila Macapagal, and the business is the Filipino restaurant run by her aunt and grandmother. But when the caustic local food critic, who happens to be Lila's ex-boyfriend, drops dead while eating at the restaurant, Lila is the primary suspect in his murder.

There are other suspects, to be sure, most of them the owners of other local restaurants that Derek had written horrible things about. And there's a large supporting cast of friends and allies for Lila to draw on as she attempts to solve the case -- her aunt and grandmother, of course; her "aunties" April, Mae, and June, a trio of gossips Lila calls the Calendar Crew; a best friend whose brother is both Lila's lawyer and her potential romantic interest; a local dentist (and second possible boyfriend) whose brother is the officer investigating the murder.

This is a solid culinary cozy, and if the murderer is a little too easy to spot -- I had it figured out fairly early, for heaven's sake, and I never know whodunit -- the characters and the storytelling are strong enough to make up for that. And for those who like their culinary mysteries with recipes, there are four at the end of the book; I'm intrigued by the Filipino-spiced banana bread, made with lots of cinnamon and ginger, and a touch of cayenne.

Manansala's adding quickly to her series; this came out in 2021, and the fifth in the series was published last month. I would be happy to pick up the next volume.

A small rant, though, on a tangential matter that didn't seem to belong in the review proper:

Lila comes home from Chicago to Shady Palms, which she repeatedly describes as a "small town." OK, fine, it's not Chicago, but it's a large enough place to support not only her family's Filipino restaurant, but also successful Chinese, Mexican, southern BBQ, and Polish restaurants. (And those are just the ones that actually figure into the storytelling; the implication is that this is just a small piece of the Shady Palms dining scene.)

Now, I know small towns. I grew up in a small town, a place where the 700 residents were greatly outnumbered by the cows. And any place large enough to sustain that many restaurants is most emphatically NOT a small town. It's a small city, maybe. Perhaps one would be frustrated by the lack of a world-class orchestra or a great art museum. But having grown up in a place where the nearest McDonald's was 45 minutes away and seen as a peak of local cuisine, do not grumble to me about your "small town" when you're living in a perfectly nice suburb.

>106 KeithChaffee: I can relate, Keith. We had one diner in our town when I was growing up, and we now have two restaurants plus a seasonal "snack shack".

>106 KeithChaffee: >107 labfs39: I know some towns in Australia where it feels like there are more coffee shops and restaurants (we don’t have diners) and cafes than there are residential blocks.

>104 KeithChaffee: Ellison sounds fun

>106 KeithChaffee: sometimes fiction make it’s own rules for convenience or impact. Interview with a Vampire insisted the vampires kill a couple people a day in 19th-century New Orleans. Every day. Like 700 or more people a year. Per vampire. I mean, it’s a vampire book, but still…

>106 KeithChaffee: Good point about the small "towns". I agree (and often think this when I read books that are (supposedly) set in a small town!) I grew up in a town of about 1300; I believe it's closer to 1100 now, but the population is aging. Also a farming community.

>107 labfs39: We had a few (3 or 4, if you include the bar and that number changed slightly over time) small restaurants, only one "ethnic" one, though: the Chinese food (really, Western Chinese, though) place. I had to laugh at your "snack shack" reference, because we had an independent little fast food place that was actually called the Snack Shack! (I miss the Snack Shack! LOL!) It's not even there when I go home, anymore. It was there for a very long time, though.

Yeah, I think mostly when I was growing up (in the 80s), it was one restaurant (North American/diner type), the Chinese food place, the Snack Shack, and the bar.

82: The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean

(SFFKit: bookish fantasy)

Scattered around the world are small, isolated communities of book eaters, who take nourishment from books instead of food. They also absorb the information of every book they eat, with nearly perfect recall.

In Britain, the book eaters are the Six Families, each living in a large family manor. With so small a community, marriages are carefully planned and arranged to maintain genetic diversity as much as possible; in order to keep the women docile and obedient about these arranged marriages, girls are raised on a limited diet of fairy tales and damsels in distress.

From childhood, Devon has been sneaking into her uncle's library and eating books she shouldn't, which has made her an unusually rebellious young woman, unwilling to follow the usual protocols and abandon her children when she is moved into a new marriage/breeding opportunity. When her son, Cai, is born with a rare mutation that makes him a potential danger to other book eaters, she is determined to rescue him from the restrictions of life among the other "dragons" and give them both an independent life away from the Families.

Very entertaining blend of fantasy (*) and thriller. The world of the book eaters has been smartly thought out, with interesting details that never feel like mere "oh, wouldn't this complicate things nicely!" contrivances. Devon and Cai are well rounded characters, and the supporting players are crisply and quickly drawn, given enough depth to feel like more than pieces to be moved around the gameboard.

(* -- One could quibble about whether the book eaters are fantasy creatures or SF creatures. The Families' own understanding of how they came to be on earth is that they were placed here by aliens, which I suppose would technically make this SF, but there's a lot of ambiguity about that explanation. It falls somewhere in the realm of myth or legend for the Families, who are for reasons that Dean explains not given to keeping accurate historical records. Whatever genre you choose to slot the book into, the story works.)

There is perhaps one "but you didn't know that I was really working for..." reversal too many in the final chapters, but aside from that, the thrills work, the villains are thoroughly hissable, and Dean does a fine job of building suspense.

I went into this book with modest expectations. I'm not a big fantasy reader, and what I knew of the premise sounded like something that could easily get too twee for my tastes. So this was a delightful surprise, and I look forward to seeing what Dean does next.

83: The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Ursula K. Le Guin

(AlphaKit: K/Q)

I can't think of an author whose stories generate such sharply contrasting reactions in me as Le Guin. Her stories either click solidly or leave me entirely cold. This volume collects 17 stories from her first (roughly) decade of work, originally published between 1962 and 1974, and it contains some of both.

Let's start with the high points. "Nine Lives" and "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" are, as Le Guin notes in her introductions to the stories, as close as she comes to traditional SF adventure stories; each is the story of a small spaceship crew finding something unexpected on a distant planet. But even as she nears the traditional, Le Guin's angle of approach is distinctive; she's less interested in space battles and aliens than she is in psychology and the internal lives/conflicts of her characters.

And the story that is (of what I've read) by far my favorite of her work, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," is by some definitions barely even a story. There's no plot to speak of; you can't really summarize the piece without simply reiterating it in full. There's only one distinct character, and that character is more a symbol than a person. It's a piece about mood-setting and effect, more of a philosophical hypothetical than anything. In fact, in this volume, it carries the subtitle "Variations on a theme by William James," which I don't remember seeing when I've come across the story before. And yet, for all the "barely a story"-ness of it, it is an unforgettable piece of writing that shifts the way you see the world.

But when Le Guin doesn't click for me, which is most of the time, getting through her stories is like an uphill slog through molasses. There's a chilly intellectual detachment that puts me off, and let's face it, "chilly intellectual detachment" is pretty much my brand, so if it's too much for ME? (And yes, ChillIntDet is a large part of "Omelas;" if I could explain why it works so perfectly there and falls so flat everywhere else, they'd be paying me the big bucks to write literary criticism.)

She leans, I think, too heavily to the literary end of the spectrum to hold much interest for me. Is there a contradiction between that and my recent gushing over the literary innovations of Harlan Ellison? Perhaps, but I think the difference is that in Ellison, the style enhances and is subordinate to the stories, which are strong enough to stand up to the stylistic hyperactivity; in Le Guin, the stories are more fragile to begin with, and they disappear behind the wall of ice surrounding them.

Your mileage, of course, may vary, and Le Guin is a revered figure, one of the few SF authors to get her own volumes in the Library of America series. There are another 20-ish Le Guin stories waiting for me on my slow survey of award-nominated short SF, but I will take them one by one, as they pop up in various "year's best" volumes. Pushing my way through another volume of nothing but Le Guin stories would be more effort than I could take.

Reading that makes me wish I had already read Le Guin so i could grasp better what you mean. Very interesting review and thought-provoking review. I think psychological focused writing is going to naturally be hit or miss in general with any writer and any reader.

84: Your Caption Has Been Selected, Lawrence Wood

For about 25 years, The New Yorker has held a cartoon caption contest in each issue. A cartoon by one of the magazine's many cartoonists is presented without a caption; readers are invited to submit their best caption; the staff chooses three finalists; and the readers vote for the winner. Lawrence Wood is the reigning king of the contest, having won it three times and been chosen as a finalist twelve additional times. This book is both a history of the contest and a guide to writing winning captions.

The problem is that it does neither of those things at anything beyond the most superficial level. I've already told you about 80% of what there is to know about the contest itself, and Wood's advice on how to win is mostly fairly obvious.

He reminds us, for instance, to pay attention to which character in the cartoon is speaking, and to write a caption that would be coming from that character's point of view. Good advice, yes, but I don't know that I needed an expert to tell me that.

There are several dozen cartoons from the contest scattered throughout the book, and they are the most interesting thing in it. But even there, the book manages to disappoint. I read the book on my Kindle, and the e-book version ignores basic e-book technology. Each cartoon should be, as illustrations often are, expandable to full screen. These are not, and I was left squinting at the tiny captions and minute details of each little drawing.

As is often the case with nonfiction books, there simply isn't enough material here to justify an entire book. Might have made a great New Yorker article, though.

85: Eight Faces at Three, Craig Rice

1939 novel, the first of about a dozen featuring crime-solving attorney John J. Malone.

Our victim is Alexandria Inglehart, the distinctly unlikeable maiden aunt of twins Holly and Glen, who even in adulthood live in fear of Aunt Alex. It's Holly who enters Aunt Alex's room early one morning to find that her aunt has been stabbed to death with her own letter opener, and it's Holly who becomes the principal suspect.

She certainly has motive; she's just married a man of whom Aunt Alex doesn't approve (he is -- shudder -- a musician), and Aunt Alex was scheduled to meet with her attorney later that day to change her will.

The musician's manager, Jake Justus, is the one who brings Malone into the case, saying that John could get her "out of trouble if she'd committed a mass murder in an orphanage with seventeen policemen for witnesses." Holly's friend, Helene, a glamorous socialite, completes the trio of crime-solvers who will become the central characters of Rice's series.

This book was published only a few years after Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man and its film adaptation, and the influence is obvious. The screwball banter threatens to overwhelm the story; everyone's so busy tossing off bits of witty repartee that you almost forget there's a murder to be solved.

And the booze. My lord, so much booze. Jake, Helene, and John all seem to live in terror of ever completely sobering up; there are lots of "jokes" about how terrifying Helene's driving is when she's had a few; and there's barely a scene in the novel that doesn't find everyone tossing down another drink. I find that level of "hooray for alcoholism!" distasteful -- it's why I never could get into the Thin Man movies -- so I'm unlikely to return for more of Rice's series.

If you're less bothered by that aspect of things, though, what Rice does, she does well. Her principal characters are otherwise likeable, and her supporting characters given enough depth to be more than merely functional. The jokes are mostly funny (though old fashioned, to be sure), the circumstances of Aunt Alex's murder are distinctive and interesting, and the solution is clever and plays fair with the reader.

As I make my way through the history of award-nominated short SF, I have found that most of these stories are fairly easy to get hold of. They've been published in one of the several "year's best" series that have existed over the years (and I own complete sets of all of the American YB series), or in various collections and anthologies. But about 20% of them have never been reprinted anywhere since their original magazine publication. I think of them as the sad orphans of my project, and every now and then, I go shopping on the used-book market for back issues of SF magazines to pick up those stories, because yes, I am that neurotic and completist about my impractical projects.

I've been making my first serious dive into the orphans this week, and I am learning that award nominations notwithstanding, their orphan status isn't usually all that surprising. I mean, none of them have been bad stories. They're all competently written, with ideas that were probably more surprising or clever when they first appeared. But as time has passed, and their ideas have become commonplace, it's become clear that there wasn't much to them beyond their then-surprising ideas.

The best stories of the past are more than a mildly clever idea or an unexpected twist ending; they have something thoughtful to say about their ideas, or an interesting literary style. The modern reader can still be thrilled by them. That's not the case for these orphans, which evoke mild smiles, gentle chuckles, perhaps a tough of nostalgia, but don't reach the heights of surprise and discovery of the great stories.

For the record, this week's batch of orphans were:

"Space to Swing a Cat," Stanley Mullen
"They've Been Working On...," Anton Lee Baker
"Once a Cop," Rick Raphael
"Maiden Voyage," J. W. Schutz
"Idiot's Mate," Robert Taylor
"The Mischief Maker," Robert Olin
"The Earth Merchants," Norman Kagan

These were originally published between 1958 and 1968. By chance, one non-orphan story happened to share space in one of these old magazines, so I also read Roger Zelazny's "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth," the 1966 Nebula-winning novelette. Zelazny's never quite been my thing, but this wasn't bad; it's the tale of a fishing expedition on Venus, with a few early New Wave stylistic touches and a nice balance between thrilling adventure story and interest in its characters' psyches.

Will I keep diving into the old magazines for the orphans? Well, of course I will -- neurotically completist, remember? -- but I'll do so with tempered expectations.

I admire you your completist journey My problem is that there is so much out there to read that I know Ill never finish, so I keep my reading towards the easily available, till some one turns me on to some gem or another.

What a project. I hope you find them all, and stumble across a lost gem.

>117 KeithChaffee: archive.org has quite a lot of scans for the older magazines - i.e. the Astounding Science Fiction, June 1958 is here: https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v61n04_1958-06_dtsg0318 for the Stanley Mullen story. May not get you all but should get you at least some of the orphans (as much as I like the real magazines, some of them get crazy prices and they had never really been printed on paper which was expected to last that long).

>120 AnnieMod: Thanks! That will be helpful

Having survived an unusually hectic day of airline travel, I'm now in northern Vermont, where I'll be spending Christmas with my sister and her family. It snowed all the way back from the airport, a trip of more than two hours, because things really are that remote and far apart in Vermont. My nephew is asking me to be the guest on an episode of his podcast, which I didn't even know was a thing he did, so I have no idea what I might be in for, but I gather it's kind of bro-y, and I suspect that his usual listeners will find me a rather boring old guy. Time to listen to a couple of episodes, I guess. Oh, and so this isn't completely off topic, I'm hoping to get some good books for Christmas.

>122 KeithChaffee: Welcome back to snowy New England.

86: 21st-Century Science Fiction, David G. Hartwell and Patrick Neilsen Hayden, eds.

An anthology of stories by "some of the best science fiction writers that came to prominence since the twentieth century changed into the twenty-first," edited by two of the field's best editors.

There are 34 stories here, by an impressive roster of the new century's finest writers -- Vandana Singh, Paolo Bacigalupi, Rachel Swirsky, John Scalzi, Genevieve Valentine, Daryl Gregory among them.

For my money, it is a collection of consistently very good stories that rarely reaches greatness, a solid gathering of B+/A- stories. The best of the bunch include three stories that deal in various ways with parent/child relationships -- Gregory's "Second Person, Present Tense," Peter Watts's "The Island," and Madeline Ashby's "The Education of Junior Number 12 -- and Scalzi's "The Tale of the Wicked," in which tropes of first contact and intelligent spaceships collide in amusing ways.

The SF community in general was more impressed than I by these stories, nominating eleven of them for major awards, with three winners ("The Island," David D. Levine's "Tk'tk'tk," and Elizabeth Bear's "Tideline"). But there are very few outright clunkers here, and the average quality is higher than in most anthologies. Perhaps not the ideal book for the SF novice, but genre fans should appreciate it.