Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  The Touch

  A Step Beyond

  Hopscotch

  The Verificationist

  It's Been a Good Life

  The Lost

  Atom

  Black Projects, White Knights

  Coldheart Canyon

  The Fifth Victim

  A Matter of Profit

  Thief of Souls

  Lazy Bones

  Sarah's Landing 1

  Pretty Dead

  From the Dust Returned

  Let's All Kill Constance

  Boost

  Expatria

  Keepers of the Peace

  Collecting Candace

  The Curse of Chalion

  Saturday Morning Fever

  Voice of the Violin

  The Wooden Sea

  Nemesis

  Tempter

  Into the Web

  Peril

  Fault Lines

  The Feminists

  Kunma

  Terror Tales of the City: Prince of the Perverse

  Fountain Society

  Prey

  Nalda Said

  The Compleat Enchanter: Fantasy Masterworks 10

  Singularity

  The Mind Box

  The Dead Wives Society

  Regina's Song

  The Shroud of the Thwacker

  Children of the Star

  Enchantress from the Stars

  Time Traveling with Science and the Saints

  Artifacts

  Fever 42

  Through the Wormhole

  Pigtopia

  Galactic Rapture

  The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

  Daughters of a Coral Dawn

  Reunion

  Last Harbor

  Fitcher's Brides

  Alone

  The Killing Hour

  The Survivors' Club

  Science Good, Bad and Bogus

  Death in Dublin

  Vaporetto 13

  Motion to Kill

  The Tarzan Chronicles

  The Anniversary

  Lost Stories: 21 Long-Lost Stories from the Bestselling Creator of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man

  A Caress of Twilight

  A Time Gone By

  Empty Cities of the Full Moon

  A Season for the Dead

  Lucifer's Shadow

  Supping with Panthers

  Sense of Evil

  The Program

  Timeshift

  The Murder Room

  Deadly Visions

  Speak Now

  Dark Terrors 4

  The Tooth Fairy

  The Anatomy Lesson

  Edward Maret

  Surgical Risk

  Right to Life: A Novella and Two Stories

  Bag of Bones

  The Knotted Cord

  The Moth Diaries

  The Buzzing

  From the Corner of His Eye

  Fury

  Impact Parameter, and Other Quantum Realities

  Dead Man Riding: A Nell Bray Mystery

  i-o

  Fantastic Tales

  Silence and Shadows

  Fat Ollie's Book

  Rules of the Hunt

  Deepsix

  Guilty Until Proven Guilty

  Northern Gothic

  Windhaven

  Come Fygures, Come Shadowes

  Noir: Three Novels of Suspense

  Picoverse

  Bronwyn Book One: Palaces & Prisons

  Remnant Population

  The Speed of Dark

  The Dreamthief's Daughter

  Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist

  Suicide Casanova

  The Integral Trees

  Flying Cups & Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction & Fantasy

  Phoenix Fire

  The Burden of Indigo

  Decadence

  Thief of Time

  Song of the Bones

  The Extremes

  The Prestige

  Dirty Boots

  Resurrection Men

  Hell on Earth

  Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies

  Scorched Earth

  Any Time At All

  Salt

  The Years of Rice and Salt

  The First Cut

  The Vampire's Violin

  Home Front

  Next of Kin

  Ship of Fools

  Drive

  Quietus

  Louisiana Breakdown

  The Grail Conspiracy

  The Longest Way Home

  Way Station

  Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

  Cavalcade

  What Rough Beast

  Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire

  Has Science Found God?

  Return to Isis

  The Legend of Rah and the Muggles

  Blade of Tyshalle

  Selected Stories

  The Companions

  Singer from the Sea

  Terror Firma

  Games Dead People Play, and Other Stories

  The Book of Revelation

  The Assassins of Tamurin

  Big Planet

  Bloodlines

  Golem

  The Reunion

  Journeys into Limbo

  The Psychotronic Video Guide

  The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction

  God Save the Mark

  Love Spell

  The Rift

  Passage

  The Haunted Air: A Repairman Jack Novel

  Hosts: A Repairman Jack Novel

  The World and Other Places

  Going, Going, Gone

  The Otherhood

  Magic Time

  TWO GROUP REVIEWSCruci-Fiction

  Across the Sea of Genre

  Warm Words & Otherwise

  A Blizzard of Book Reviews

  John Grant

  Cover art by Ron Tiner

  Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

  A bumper collection – over 150,000 words! – of book reviews, many of full essay length, by the two-time Hugo winning and World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Fantasyand author, among much fiction, of such recent nonfiction works as Corrupted Science and Denying Science.

  Scholarly, iconoclastic, witty, passionate, opinionated, hilarious, scathing and downright irritating by turn, these critical pieces are sure to appeal to anyone who loves fantasy, science fiction, mystery fiction, crime fiction and many points in between ... and who also enjoys a rousing argument.

  Published by infinity plus at Smashwords

  www.infinityplus.co.uk/books

  Follow @ipebooks on Twitter

  © John Grant 2011

  Cover © Ron Tiner

  ISBN: 9781465982278

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  The moral right of John Grant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted b
y him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  Introduction

  Why would anyone want to read a collection of book reviews?

  It's a very good question, and one to which I'm not certain I have any coherent answer. The fact of the matter, though, is that book reviews have a power to fascinate us. Some friends in London have a bathroom shelved with old copies of Foundation and other literary magazines, and I'm far from the only guest of theirs to find myself spending far longer closeted than I'd originally intended. And one of the great joys of browsing through old magazines like the Edinburgh Review is discovering reviews of books you never knew existed by authors who've often been long ignored.

  All right, then: an ancillary question. Why would anyone want to read a collection of my book reviews?

  Let me get back to you on this.

  ~

  The vast majority of the reviews in this book were produced in the early and middle years of the 21st century's first decade for two online venues, the website infinity plus, edited by Keith Brooke, and the genre-fiction webzine Crescent Blues, edited by Jean Marie Ward. Reviews for the former could be of any length I chose, and so some of the ones you'll find here are fairly long – up to several thousand words. Reviews for Crescent Blues, by contrast, were limited to 500 words (although I did, as you'll see, occasionally succeed in persuading Jean Marie to relax the rules a little). In the case of some of the other reviews here the wordcounts imposed by editors were even tighter and the dicta even stricter.

  I discovered there were different skill sets (to use that ghastly but useful modern term) involved in writing essay-style reviews than in producing the shorter style; in the former I could bring in lots more information from outwith the scope of the book under consideration, and also I could opt far more for analysis and, to back up my contentions, citations of specific pieces of text or summaries of various plot points. Yet I soon found, too, that I could, as it were, sneak bits of analysis into the shorter-style reviews as well. My technique became to write the Crescent Blues (and similarly constrained) reviews to a length somewhat greater than would ever see print, then cut the text down savagely. Of course, I now wish I'd kept my original drafts ...

  A few other magazines are represented here by a small number of reviews, sometimes just one: SFX, Foundation, Extrapolation and most especially the horror magazine Samhain, edited by John Gullidge. There are also a handful of reviews where, embarrassingly, I can no longer remember who they were written for. Google helped me in a couple of instances, but not for that final hard core. I can only assume they appeared in print magazines, and that my file copies of the relevant issues have long vanished into the quicksand of time. One culprit in this latter context may be my tumultuous move from one continent to another in 1999, during which a lot of stuff was discarded.

  In pulling together this collection I obviously did a fair amount of basic copyediting and proofreading. (I was chagrined to find how many typos and general screw-ups there were in what I'd assumed to be pristine text! My apologies to all my original editors for the work I made for them.) I've excised some of my more irritating outbursts of adolescent snottiness and – although you may find this hard to believe as you read – plenty of incidences of ghastly, self-important pomposity. I've tidied up various instances of repetitive ideas and phraseology; for example, when reviews appeared separately it didn't much matter if I quite often said a book was "well worth your while", but when reading the text all together I found the repeated phrase rebarbative. I've added a few footnotes, clearly labelled, where it has seemed to me that an extra comment from the perspective of 2011 is called for. And I've on occasion found myself trying my damnedest to remember the first thing about books that in my reviews I described as "unforgettable".

  Most of the books discussed are fiction, split about half and half (although I haven't counted) between fantasy/science fiction and mystery/crime. There are also a few nonfiction books represented here, many of them from the publisher Prometheus. At the moment I'm going through the copyeditor's corrections for my own first book for Prometheus, Denying Science. It's a small world, or something. What worries me is that I see I've quite often been a bit scathing about the standards of proofreading and so forth in the Prometheus books I've reviewed. Fingers crossed none of their staffers ever ventures here ...

  During the surprisingly long editorial process involved in preparing this text it was borne in on me more and more what a huge debt of gratitude I owe to the authors of all the books reviewed here, even the ones where my comments have been less than complimentary. Writing about those books has shaped the person I am today, and the way that I look at the world.

  —John Grant, Hewitt, June 20 2011

  The Touch

  created by Steven-Elliot Altman, edited by Patrick Merla

  ibooks, 347 pages, paperback, 2000

  A Write Aid project to benefit the charities HEAL and F.A.C.T.

  Imagine the problem facing the potential reviewer of a charity anthology – the authors have contributed for free, and so it must have been especially difficult for the editor to turn any offering down. Of course, one wants the venture to succeed: the charity, and the people dependent upon it, need as much support as they can get. At the same time, the reader – the person who may go out and spend $14.00 on the book – must not be misled as to its quality. The dilemma can best be expressed in the following terms: "What the hell do I do if the book's no good?"

  Luckily, this is not a worry that affects The Touch. Of the 23 stories here, only two are weak (and those by two of the most famous authors to contribute); perhaps two more are so-so, but all the rest vary between good and excellent, with the average probably being somewhere around the "extremely good" mark and one story in particular being a gem.

  So, the mechanics:

  This is a theme anthology, the theme being that, sometime in the near future or even the near past, a new epidemic has inflicted humanity. The form this epidemic takes is that those infected by the disease, should they touch a non-infected human being, will deprive that human of one or more senses. In most of these stories the sense concerned is a fairly obvious one: sight, hearing, sexual desire, speech. In some it is more subtle than that. A few of the most effective stories concern such subtleties: in one the sense involved is the ability to order one's experiences, in another it is the ability to hear music in one's head, and in a third it is the ability to recognize faces. At the same time there are a couple of exceptional stories that use the more obvious senses as their underpinnings. What all of these outstanding tales share is a focus on the human aspects of either (a) being deprived of a sense or (b) being one of the witting or unwitting infecters, a "Depriver".

  The arrangement of the stories accords approximately to a chronology of the spread of the Depriver disease, with the earliest stories happening a little before 2001 and the later ones being set well into the future. The stories do not actually pull together to form a coherent pseudo-history, but this does not matter. What is important is that the idea itself has sparked off such a plethora of good stories. A measure of the general quality is that, after reading a bunch of these stories, you have to remind yourself to remember that touching another human being in real life is actually (probably) safe enough.

  What, then, are the best stories of a very good bunch?

  Karl Schroeder's "After the War", set in the former Yugoslavia during the civil war there that the West largely just watched, is a study of victims, both those who have suffered directly from the massacres and those who have been sufficiently brutalized by the political and racist climate to perpetrate those massacres. It is a moving tale, reminding us that we condemn others at our own peril.

  In a way Harry Turtledove's "The Lieutenant" does the same, although here the viewpoint is different. Whereas Schroeder's story looks from the inside at the very human tendency to condemn – seeing it as rooted in the predilection to
victimize – Turtledove's story regards these twin motivations from the outside, seeing both as based in self-interest. "The Lieutenant" loses power as a result, but is nevertheless a fine tale; in other company it might be outstanding.

  Diane Dekelb-Rittenhouse's "Gifted" truly is outstanding. It centres on a precociously young musician who falls for an older (not much) patroness of the arts who is a Depriver. The touch of her hands is enough to induce deafness in others. The musician himself has already been deprived of his talent in a more mundane fashion: a child prodigy not just as a player but as a composer, he has been robbed of his ability to compose through the insensitivity of his overweening father, who through relentlessly pressing him to attain ever more has succeeded in making him attain less. The result of all this is a superbly human story which will bring close to tears anyone who loves music.

  Bob Mahnken's "Shared Losses" is another fine story. Its focus is bigotry, personified by the elderly narrator, who, although female, exemplifies the male backwoods American (alas, still extant) whose solution to anything untoward is to shoot it. The story harks back to an earlier era of sf – it could well have been written by Clifford Simak had Simak's times been a bit more liberated – but loses nothing thereby. What Mahnken impressively succeeds in doing, even as one weeps for the victims of the bigotry, is make one sympathetic towards the bigot herself; no mean feat. And yet, of course, until bigotry is understood it will never disappear – a point that is perhaps one of the main subtexts of this book.

  Then there's Sean Stewart's "Don't Touch Me". Like Mahnken's, this tale eschews any consideration of the more obscure senses the Deprivers might inadvertently steal; here the focus is on love stolen by the conditions the disease imposes. Several of the stories in this anthology concern the insuperable obstacle that the inability to touch places upon the course of love (generally on the obstacle it presents to sex), but this one triumphs through its attention to character: its narrator is a recently dumped adolescent male; the object of his rebound attraction is a girl who would be fascinating at any other time but is doubly so right now. The integrity of the telling makes this another powerful tale.

  But the gem of the entire anthology is Dean Whitlock's ambitious and unbelievably well achieved "Waiting for the Girl from California". This is a story so good, and so beautifully written, that it sings from the pages. It is so poignant in both its concept and its telling that it makes one ache ... and if I told you a single thing more about it I'd spoil it for you. If this tale goes unrecognized by some award or another then the whole awards system must come under scrutiny. If you bother to read not one other story in the anthology, your fourteen bucks will have been well spent. This is what fiction – and most especially speculative fiction – is all about. It is a long time since this reviewer has been so affected by a story, all the more remarkable since this one is a mere sixteen pages long.