Gardner Dozois, July 23rd,1947 – May 27th, 2018

  Upon learning that Gardner Dozois had passed away yesterday I wanted to remember his work.

While he had many roles, author, editor, and anthologist, during his career in science fiction it is probably for his work as the editor of The Year's Best Science Fiction series that I best remember him. Every year the one book I was guaranteed to buy was the latest volume in the series. Every year I depended on Gardner to introduce me to not just the best stories but often the best new authors (at least to me). 

   

It is in these volumes, I met Robert Reed's Great Ship, Eleanor Arnason's Holmes Sherlock and the rest of the Hwarhath, and authors like Ken Liu, Vandana Singh, Aliette de Bodard, Lavie Tidhar, Yoon Ha Lee, and Greg Egan among many others. I also found stories that stuck with me like "Mammoths to the Great Plains" by Elanor Arnason or "The Waiting Stars" by Aliette de Bodard. But his greatest gift and one of my favourite stories of all time, all the more unexpected because it wasn't even science fiction (was it? ) , was "The Night We Buried Road Dog" by Jack Cady. It appeared in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection, not I suspect because it was one of the year's best science fiction stories, but because Dozois wanted it there so we could all enjoy it, and I thank him for that.

Here is the tribute at Tor.com

https://www.tor.com/2018/05/28/gardner-dozois-in-remembrance/

and from Boing Boing

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/28/i-owed-him.html

and from Michael Swanwick

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.ca/2018/05/the-gardner-dozois-you-didnt-know-you.html

and from Alastair Reynolds

https://approachingpavonis.blogspot.com/

and from Alec Nevala-Lee

https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2018/05/28/the-constant-gardner/

And now I just noticed some great stuff in volume 13.

Cover Credits

8 th Michael Whelan
31st Jim Burns
30th  Michael Whelan
11th Kim Poor, design Nathaniel Estes
13th Bob Eagleton, design Todd Radom

Grayson & Grayson London, Bleiler, Dikty, Conklin, van Vogt and more

Grayson & Grayson appears to have been a UK publisher 

that reprinted science fiction published in the US for 

the UK  market from 1951 to 1957. (I looked at their 

listings in ISFDB). I became interested in them when I saw  

this cover illustration, 

I knew it had to be an illustration

for one of my favourite works of sociological SF, 

"And Then There Were None" by Eric Frank Russell.  

Published in 1953, the anthology was edited by

Bleiler and Dikty, the cover is signed by illustrator 

Mudge Marriott who does a number of covers for this

publisher. Additional contents include, "The Hunting 

Season "by Frank M. Robinson, "Flight to Forever" by Poul ,

Anderson and "Izzard and the Membrane" by Walter M. 

Miller, jr. 

The Miller story is a really interesting computer AI 

story that I will discuss in more detail another day,

 but it originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction,

in May 1951 and the US and UK editions of this "best of

anthology" and then does not seem to have been reprinted

again which I think was very unfortunate.

By now it should be clear that I love this type of bright, 

garish 1950's illustration with alien landscapes and big rockets

so I really liked Mudge's work. I also like small or lesser known 

presses so I began looking for more books by Grayson & Grayson 

and Mudge Marriott.

Score, while A.E. van Vogt has suffered a lot of criticism 

from some, he was as popular as Heinlein in his heyday 

before his unfortunate foray into Dianetics. He was Canadian,

 "eh" and he produced Slan, The Voyage of the Space Beagle,

The Weapons Shops of Isher, and Null-A series among

other novels and short stories, love them or hate them

people read, discussed, debated them and generally had 

a good time reading his work.

My buddy Doug would want me to point out the Coeurl should 

be red again I say it is a trick of the lighting. 

This edition was published in 1951, cover uncredited.

A 1952 reprint of a Conklin anthology, with a snazzy radio 

antenna, power station, secret headquarters or whatever?

Again by E. B. Mudge Marriott 

link to contents http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?26477

  

And another "Best of" anthology this time from 1952 with another 

cool rocket, the name Mudge Marriott appears on the cover.

link to contents http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?35913

As I  noted earlier, my wife and I are taking a trip to the London 

in the fall and hopefully I can find acquire more Grayson titles,

this time without the hefty shipping charges.

  

Michael Dirda reviews Scientific Romance: An International Anthology of Pioneering Science Fiction & Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction

Some time ago I encountered the essays of Michael Dirda a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World. As someone who is surrounded by more books than I can read in my remaining years, and who purchases even more each month, I was delighted to read the essays of someone who admits he shares much the same hobby/failing/obsession/etc. A critic who still haunts library book sales and used book stores and discusses not just Spinoza, Dickens and Welty but also Dick, Lovecraft, Vance and Doyle. Who in his book Browsing: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books notes that he acquired a number of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction form the 1960's at a library book sale and then discusses the contents noting for example that Carol Emshwiller is one of the greatest living writers of fantasy and science fiction.

So when I noticed that he had just reviewed two anthologies

Stableford's Scientific Romance: An International Anthology of Pioneering Science Fiction, January 2017 and Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction, by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp 

I thought I would pass along the link.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/michael-dirda-on-the-evolution-of-science-fiction/2017/02/28/79427c0a-fab2-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?utm_term=.ec9a5b56de8f

Bud Webster (1952-2016)

 This summer I was at the cabin which meant I did not post as much as I had planned. It also meant that I did not order lots of books from ABE because I did not have room to bring them back what with our tools, my wife's telescope and 3 dogs. There was also the possibility of a postal strike which curbed my enthusiasm. So I did something almost as fun, agonized endlessly about my first order. When these obstacles were out of the way, I was interested in four volumes of Ballantine's six volume series by William Tenn, published in 1968.

For lovely photos of all six volumes see the great SF blog unsubscrbedblog.

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/a-william-tenn-reader/

Another potential purchase was the first five volumes of the Alpha anthologies edited by Silverberg, Bud Webster has been my go to authority on anthologies since I first stumbled across his essays on the web (link below) so I did some googling. 

It was then I learned that Bud had passed away in Feb. 2016. Bud was not much older than I am and one thing that had attracted me to his essays on anthologies and important
SF authors was that many were books and writers important to me in my youth. The portrait he painted of himself as a bookish boy disinterested in sports who saw the library as a safe and welcoming place and SF as it's greatest attraction was also familiar to me.

I have have read, bought and accumulated SF most of my life, but my focus has changed over the years. I collected small press but they got expensive, pulps largely for the covers but I have run out of room to display them and I will not buy them to keep them in boxes. A number of the blogs I currently follow focus on 1960's and 1970's SF and I have been using them to point me to authors and works I have missed.

However my first love was always the Sf short story, thanks Ray, so Bud was a revelation. All the information I could possibly want on anthology series in one place. I started with
the bricks (heavy books) as he described them Adventures in Time and Space by by Healy & McComas and many of Groff Conklin's including the enormous hardcovers The Best of Science
Fiction, The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Treasury of Science Fiction, Omnibus of Science Fiction. while I my wife and I had some anthologies especially Wollheim' Best of anthologies, many edited by Bleiler, Dikty, Merril, Pohl, Silverberg, Knight, Carr, Aldiss Harrison, Carnell etc. have followed. To avoid wallowing in nostalgia I have collected current best of series by editors like Gardner Dozois and the late David Hartwell as well.

I did buy the Alpha as for the Tenn's, well lets ask Bud.

"Not that it matters, really, since I was an ardent fan of William Tenn from whenever I first ran across him. I recall clearly the plans I had for my weekly pay when I was sixteen and delivering papers in the hills around Roanoke. I had a long list of albums (Mothers of Invention, Electric Prunes, Yardbirds and other soft-rock hits) and books I wanted to buy, and among them was the lovely little matched six-volume set of William Tenn stories that Ballantine brought out in 1968. I had to get them one at a time, as they came out, but I was proud of that little row of books and I showed them off to my other sf-reading friends."

from Past Masters, In a Klass By Himself (or, Tops On a Scale of One to Tenn)

by Bud Webster

Thanks Bud

More information and links on Bud Webster follow and you will read more about Bud's influence and the anthologies he lead me to in future posts.

"Bud Webster lived surrounded by more than 10,000 books, from ratty, dog-eared paperbacks to rare, signed first editions. There were books in every room except the smallest ones, and occasionally (like Scrooge McDuck) he liked to gather them all in a pile in the middle of the floor, toss them up in the air, and let them come down and hit him on the head. A columnist for the SFWA Bulletin and frequent contributor to the "Curiosities" page of F&SF, he was the author of 41 Above the Rest: An Index and Checklist for the Anthologies of Groff Conklin, the definitive bio-bibliography on the subject, as well as The Joy of Booking: Webster's Guide to Buying and Selling Used SF and Fantasy Books. He also wrote fiction, but not nearly often enough to suit Mary, his Significant Other. He lived in Richmond, Virginia, with the long-suffering Mary and three damn cats."

Sadly Bud died in February 2016 - he will be sorely missed but his memory will live on in the columns below and his writings elsewhere

from http://www.philsp.com/articles/webster_index.html

This links also provides links to pdf's of many of his columns.

For more information on Bud Webster the following link is also useful.

http://file770.com/?p=27560

Interzone; The 4th Anthology

Interzone; The 4th Anthology, ed. John Clute, David Pringle and Simon Ounsley, New English Library, 1990, cover uncredited, but this must be the House of Usher see below.

A few weeks ago I wanted to read something by Eric Brown. Wikipedia told me his story  "The Time-Lapsed Man won the Interzone readers' poll for the most admired story of 1988", and the ISFDB database led me to this anthology on my shelf. Since I can never read just one, I read a couple of other stories in this volume.

"The Time-Lapsed Man" by Eric Brown. Thorn is an Engineman, who while encased in a tank uses his mind to push his ship between the stars. During the last three months spent in the tank Thorn has been in a timeless  state of "flux" he has " been one with the vastness of the nada-continuum." Now Thorn has returned to Earth and will live an empty unfulfilled existence for the next three months until his next shift, in a passage reminiscent of Randolph Carter, in Lovecraft's Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, we learn that  "Until then his conscious life would comprise a series of unfulfilled events; a succession of set pieces featuring an actor those thoughts were elsewhere. Occasionally he would be allowed intimations of rapture in his dreams, only  to have them snatched away upon awaking." p44. But as his current shift ends Thorn realizes that he cannot hear, and that if this continues, his very career as an Engineman will be jeopardized. Eventually in desperation Thorn contacts his doctor, and ex-lover Caroline Da Silva in an attempt to diagnose the source of his increasingly bizarre symptoms.  This story interested me on many levels. While our current knowledge of an astronaut's duties shows them to be a  fairly straight forward series of technical tasks similar to those of any operator of a fairly complex piece of equipment, Thorn's duties seem more reminiscent of the odd, highly romanticized experiences of pilots in the fantastic stories of Cordwainer Smith  "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Lady that Sailed the Soul",  The Game of Rat and Dragon or "Think Blue, Count Two". But Thorn is not a Smith character, he is more like the detached, disaffected protagonists of one of J.G Ballard stories, largely divorced from any reality but that manufactured by the demands of his own, largely interior mental landscape. Brown propels the reader through his story quickly with details of the relationship between Thorn and Da Silva juxtaposed skilfully with the increasingly isolating symptoms of Thorn's illness. The ending offers an interesting twist on our expectations concerning Thorn's eventual fate and makes for a very satisfying conclusion to a well structured story.

Tommy Atkins by Barrington J. Bayley; I have been quite impressed with the stories by Bayley that I have read and I have been picking up any of his novels I see. Bayley's stories often place his protagonists in strange surreal landscapes or situations resulting in bafflement or confusion for the main character with an equally inconclusive or ambiguous ending for the reader. This latest story, is powerful and thought provoking and it certainly did not disappoint. 

Harry in an engineer managing a munitions factory in a setting similar to Britain during WWI. Harry is a solitary figure, the only family member mentioned is his brother Terence missing in action at the front. Harry himself had volunteered during the early days of the war but been turned down for medical reasons. Now his job is considered a reserve occupation and he wears a War Work Badge to indicate his status. Despite this, Harry undergoes a lot of snubs including receiving a white feather denoting cowardice as a apparently healthy man amid a population where even the women and old men show signs of disfigurement and amputation. It is this world of air raids, rationing and unrelenting war propaganda that Harry has known since he was 14 and the war is now in it's 25th year with no signs of ending. Bayley tells us that Harry himself is now facing a nightmarish choice. It is at this juncture that Harry receives a pamphlet with the words "ENDING THE WAR An Explanation of the Tommy Atkins Movement." Wikipedia tells us that Tommy Atkins is a slang term for a common soldier in the British Army especially prevalent in WWI. Bayley's Tommy Atkins Movement is a peace initiative launched by common soldiers from both sides to end a war they feel has been prolonged because of excessive national pride and unwillingness by senior leadership to compromise or appear weak. The facts around the causes of the WWI are quite complex but it appears clear from my reading is that most countries felt it would be over in a few months. It was also a war that was greeted at least initially with a great deal of patriotic fervour by a number of the participants. Instead the war dragged on for years across muddy blood-soaked battlefields with vast numbers of dead and wounded and an entire generation decimated. Bayley extrapolates an even more horrific scenario, what if the war had continued, what if patriotism was taken to an unthinkably extreme and egregious level. What kind of choices would someone like Harry face? 

The Growth of the House of Usher by Brian Stableford; Of Poes's Fall of the House of Usher, Lovecraft in his Supernatural Horror in Literature p. 45 says; "Usher, whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history–a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment." In "The Growth of the House of Usher", Rowland Usher describes his house to our unnamed narrator, as follows "My house simulates, by necessity, a more primitive kind of organism: a lowly scavenger which draws its energy from the organic detritus of the silt out of which it is constructed. It is no more sophisticated than many sedentary creatures which live in shallow seas, filtering food from the murky waters which overflow them. Its closest analogies, if you wish to think in such terms, are coral polyps, barnacles and tubeworms. Nevertheless, however primitive it is, it lives and it grows. 
Usher a recluse has summoned his college friend because he fears he will soon succumb to the same genetic malady that killed his father and his sister. Both men studied civil engineering using Gantz bacteria to convert formally unusable land including deserts and mountains into entire cities and Usher has chosen our narrator to execute his will which leaves the fruits of his research to mankind in general for the benefit of future generations. For this reason he wishes to introduce his friend and executor to  the nature of his experimental work and familiarize him with his greatest achievement, the House of Usher itself. Often when an author reworks part of a classic theme, be it by Doyle, Poe or Lovecraft the end result is a poorly executed pastiche that adds nothing to the original. Stableford is far too accomplished a writer for that. In the third paragraph Stableford has the narrator himself state of Usher's house, "Exactly to what extent he had been inspired by the coincidence of nomenclature that linked him with the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe I do not know, but there is surely some sense in which one of the true architects of that remarkable tower was a long-dead nineteenth-century fantasist, even though the other was a twenty-second century civil engineer." Like any good magician, Stableford clearly shows us there is nothing hiding up his sleeve before mysteriously producing his coins and flowers. And produce them he does, he merges the gothic style of Poe's original tale with the revelationary disclosures of the solitary scientist beloved of pulp fiction to tell a story in which nothing really comes a great surprise but whose elements add up to a very satisfying and original narrative. In the end, this story holds out the hope that this version of the House of Usher, can become a symbol of achievement rather than horror, or at least a weird (in the Weird Tales sense) and enjoyable addition to fantastic architecture. 

New Arrivals

Saturday I was able to stop by one of the Fair's 

Fair bookstores in Calgary. The number of used books  

stores here have really declined over the years, but 

this small family run chain combines a number of 

locations with excellent service. It is so nice 

 to buy in person to avoid shipping costs, to actually 

handle the books and run into items on the shelf you 

did not know you needed until you have them 

in your hand

My haul included a number of anthologies, one, 

a nice copy of Conklin's Great Science Fiction by Scientists.

 Anthologies have always been of interest but since reading

 Bud Webster's articles on collecting anthologies,

 see them in the links under Handy Resources on the right

 or buy his book Anthopology 101, they have become 

something of an obsession.

I also got a copy of the Dick novel with a cover 

I really wanted, a fairly risqué cover for Thomas 

Burnett Swann an author I normally associate with  

minotaurs and fauns, and intriguing novels by Mark S. 

Geston and Michael G Coney which fell into the category of 

impulse buys.

And who can resist a horror anthology with a beautiful 

Richard Powers cover. The authors have a nice SF feel 

including Matheson, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, Kutter and 

Robert Moore Williams. An exceptional trip.