High Stakes - George R. R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass

High Stakes is the 23rd book in the shared world series Wild Cards, and the final book in what has become known as the Mean Streets Triad. The triad started with Fort Freak (2011), which combines a police procedural with comic book heroes inspired characters. This final volume is quite a different beast though. It takes us far from the streets of Joker Town in New York and pits an unlikely bunch of heroes against a malevolent foe capable of destroying the world. It is pure Wild Cards alright, but probably not the ending of this story arc people were expecting.

Detective Franny Black manages to crack the case of the disappearing Jokers. He tracks them down to a casino in the city of Talas, Kazakhstan, where Jokers are forced to fight to the death in an arena. Franny's intrusion puts a stop to that but it soon turns out the casino hides a much greater threat. The jokers do not just serve as a sick kind of entertainment. The deaths of the Jokers slakes the thirst for blood and suffering of a creature waiting to unleash its terrible power upon the world. Franny may have solved a crime and destroyed the world in one move.

The Wild Cards series swing back and forth between short story collection and traditional novel. High Stakes is what Martin calls a full mosaic. It was written by six authors: Melinda M. Snodgrass, John Jos. Miller, David Anthony Durham, Caroline Spector, Stephen Leigh, and Ian Tregillis, all of whom have contributed to the series before. Where, in the previous two novels in the triad, the authors all had clearly defined sections, this book is edited in a different way. You can still recognize the various contributions by the point of view, but they are worked into seven long sections with contributions by all the authors instead of individual chapters. The editing is decent, some minor continuity errors but nothing that really bothered me. There must have been quite a bit of rewriting involved. The copy-editor could have done another pass though. If I spot typos there's a lot of them.

I suspect that quite a lot of people will not particularly like this novel. It breaks from the police procedural and launches into full-blown Lovecraftian horror. The horrific element of the novel is, as one would expect from a comic book inspired series, very much over the top. The authors don't shy away from describing events in gory detail. I felt the copious descriptions of the nightmarish scenes in Talas padded the novel quite a bit. I suppose with six authors you need to give them some space to do their thing but this book definitely could have been shorter. If this gory kind of monster horror is your thing, then you will want to read this book. It is such a break with the two books that have gone before, and the reader has to have read Lowball (2014) to make sense of this one, that for many readers it will be a disappointment.

Here and there, a fine bit of characterization can be found in the novel. When the horror does not rely on monsters, it is actually truly horrific. The influence of the creature the Aces are fighting makes the darkest thoughts, hidden in the deepest recesses of their mind, surface. The shift between the face they normally show the world and the murderous monsters they can turn into is often rapid and very disturbing. Especially Molly, who swings between the lonely and selfish kleptomaniac she has shown herself to be and the murderous fury she can turn into several times in the book, is a good example of this. A lifetime of therapy probably won't be enough to deal with that kind of trauma.

While the novel is well padded and over the top, the authors do manage to keep it compulsively readable. The reader will want to know how they manage to defeat the monster lurking under Talas. To do that, the authors reach back to a character that has not appeared in the Triad before. For readers who have not read the other novels in the series, it may feel like a deus ex machina ending. I guess one of the advantages of having so much material to draw on, is always being able to drag in an Ace with useful powers.

High Stakes left me with pretty much the same feeling as Suicide Kings (2009), the final novel in the Committee Triad. The triad starts out interesting but then doesn't live up to the promise. This book was very readable, fun even at some level, but it was not a good book. High Stakes manages to make the triad feel unbalanced by so completely changing the nature of the story. It makes the book feel like a story attached to the previous two books at a later time rather than a continuous narrative. I guess there is a trade off between leaving the authors space to be creative and agreeing in advance on a story arc. Martin has sold three more Wild Cards books to Tor. I hope they manage handle to this obvious limitation of their modus operandi better in those novels.

Book Details
Title: High Stakes
Editor: George R.R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass
Publisher: Tor
Pages: 555
Year: 2016
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3562-3
First published: 2016

Lightspeed Short Fiction

A few weeks ago I received the anthology Lightspeed Year One, edited by John Joseph Adams, as a reward for supporting one of their Kickstarter projects. It is a volume that collects the stories published in 2010, the first year of the magazine's existence. The magazine is still around but this is the only anthology to be published in what was intended to be an annual anthology. The book itself is a 575 page monster, containing 48 pieces of short fiction. It's a mix of reprints and originals. I have read quite a few in other publications already so I don't intend to read the whole thing any time soon. I have been reading a few stories new to me over the past couple of weeks though. Those I am going to review this week.

" . . . For a Single Yesterday" - George R. R. Martin

Last year I wrote a twenty-five thousand word piece on George R. R. Martin's massive collection Dreamsongs (in Dutch). Between that collection and various other collections and anthologies I must have read most of Martin's short stories by now. This one has escaped me until so far however. It was originally published in a 1975 anthology and has only appeared in long out of print Marin collections until Lightspeed dug it up. It is fairly typical 1970s Martin stuff really so I'm not surprised it didn't attract much attention. He has written better stories in that period.

The plot deals with the aftermath of a nuclear war. Central government has collapsed and groups of people are trying to form something resembling a stable society again. The main character is a semi-official leader in one such community. Tension in the group rises with a new arrival. He is a military man and his ideas and background clash with the liberal attitude of the community up to that point.

Martin, who had been a few years out of college when he wrote this, is clearly influenced by the early 1970s counter culture. Drug use is accepted, music plays a very important part in the story. Martin would reach back to that music in his novel The Armageddon Rag later. The drug is the most science fictional element of the story. It allows the user to relive the past more vividly than ordinary memory allows. A serious temptation for those who have lost loved ones. But would it not be better to use the drug to regain lost knowledge?

The characterization is the strongest element of this story. Although it is a fairly short piece he manages to develop three characters enough to make the drama that unfolds work. As a science fiction story it is a bit thin. As usual Martin is interested in his characters, all the other elements are in service of that.

The story can be read for free here.

Amaryllis - Carrie Vaughn

This story is a Lightspeed original. It was also the first one to be nominated for the Hugo Awards in 2011. The award would eventually go to Mary Robinette Kowal's story For Want of a Nail. The story also has a post-apocalyptic feel to it, but more in line with 21st century science fiction, the collapse is an ecological crisis rather than a nuclear one. It's been reprinted a number of times in various best of and post-apocalyptic anthologies.

The main character is the captain of a fishing boat, run by a small group of people she considers family. Their catch is very strictly regulated to prevent overfishing and having children requires permission to prevent unsustainable population growth. She gets into trouble when one of the officials fixes his scales to repeatedly put her over the limit.

I'm not entirely sure why this story has gotten as much attention as it has. The background is good, although regulating catch is much harder than the story makes it out to be  - ask anyone fishing in the North Sea these days - but the plot is just weak. The main character struggles with the selfishness of her mother, who conceived her without permission and ruined her family in the process. She doesn't really dare take action. 

The resolution of the conflict relies on one of her crew members doing the obvious. The motivation of this character to do so is not entirely clear, one could say she just can't stand the unfairness of it, but the cynic would say it is because she really wants to have a baby. All of this is followed by a happy ending. I liked Vaughn's vision of the future but the story itself is just mediocre and the main character passive. Not the best story in this batch for sure.

The story can be read for free here.

More Than the Sum of His Parts - Joe Haldeman

This one is another reprint. The story originally appeared in Playboy in May 1985. It was nominated for a Nebula Award. I have never read anything by Haldeman before, but from what I have read a lot of his fiction is influenced by his experiences during the Vietnam War. This influence is not all that obvious in this particular story however. At least not to me. Maybe someone who has read more of his work will see it differently.

The story is set in a far future when humanity has colonized the moon. The main character is very seriously burnt in an industrial accident. His skills are valuable however, so much so that his employer decides to pay for very far reaching treatment. He is in effect turned into a cyborg.

This story is very creepy. You can tell right away the character is completely unhinged. He talks about his accident and the changes made to his body in a mechanical way. There doesn't appear to be any feeling left in him. Apparently tossing some artificial limbs and organs together with bits and pieces of organic matter does not make a human. The question the reader is left with is whether or not the main character was a psychopath to begin with and the accident made it more prominent, or if it was the alterations to his body that turned him into one. Probably the strongest story in the batch.

The story can be read for free here.

Hwang's Billion Brilliant Daughters - Alice Sola Kim

I know absolutely nothing about Alice Sola Kim other than that she has about half a dozen short stories to her name. This one is a Lightspeed original and deals with time travel. Each time the main character wakes anything from a few days to many decades have passed. The only consistent factor in his life is the fact that he keeps running into his descendants in the female line.

This is a story that is more about style and form than about plot. The main character remains distant to the reader, in fact he becomes even more so the further he travels into the future. The author jumps back and forth in time to show us the motivation of the main character to start his time travels, giving us very brief glimpses of what a particular future would be like. They are shown to the reader in very brief paragraphs that seem to contain enough hints for an entire story.

The non-chronological, stop-start style of the writing may not appeal to all readers but personally I thought it is a beautiful bit of writing. It is one of those stories that would never work in the novel format. Probably the most love-it-or-hate-it story of the bunch but it fell the right way for me.

The story can be read for free here.

Four stories of the first year of Lightspeed. As I mentioned in the introduction, there are plenty more in the anthology. I may come back to it later in the year.

Fevre Dream - George R.R. Martin

Fevre Dream (1982) is Martin's third novel. It follows his début Dying of the Light (1977) and his fixup collaboration with Lisa Tuttle Windhaven (1981). All three are decidedly different beasts. Dying of the Light is a science fiction set in Martin's never officially named Thousand Worlds setting. Windhaven is nominally science fiction as well but much more to the fantasy side of the genre. Fevre Dream is a historical horror novel. For his fourth novel, The Armageddon Rag (1983), he would shoot off in another direction again. A choice that ended up almost wrecking his career as a novelist. Fevre Dream however, was a commercial and critical success. Written in a time when horror was on a high, it earned Martin Locus and World Fantasy Award nominations in 1983.

The Mississippi river system: 1857. Abner Marsh is a riverboat captain down on his luck. Where he once owned a profitable business, owning several steamboats, disaster has struck and he is down to one, severely outdated boat. His luck seems to be changing when he is approached by the peculiar but obviously wealthy Joshua York. Together they build the finest steamboat on the river, and Abner is dead set on proving it is the fastest as well. His partner has some strange conditions for bankrolling the new boat however. Conditions that seem to make little sense to Abner and get in the way of him running his company. Soon York's nocturnal habits and unexplained trips arouse suspicion. Joshua York is clearly not what he pretends to be.

There are a few things that usually don't attract me in fantasy and science fiction, and Martin has written all of them at some point in his career. Time travel (Under Siege, Unsound Variations), comic book style narratives (Wild Cards) and vampire stories tend to make me hesitate to pick up a book. Fevre Dream is a vampire novel. This type of novel has undergone quite a change in the years since Martin wrote this book. Martin wrote vampires in the tradition of Bram Stoker. Dangerous, powerful, charismatic, evil and very hard to kill. Powerful individuals they may be, the modern world is catching up to them. Their aversion to sunlight makes them vulnerable, and places to hide and feed on the population unnoticed are harder to find. The American frontier is still a wild place however, and a group of vampires is making use of that. What they do is horrific and Martin doesn't spare us the horrific details.

There is a bit of a contradiction in Martin's treatment of the vampire mythos. The human characters in the book seem to be aware of Stoker's ideas on what vampires are some forty years before Dracula was published. Joshua even mentions Vlad Țepeș to Abner and some of the characteristics and weaknesses of his race as described by Stoker  in one of their conversations. It's a peculiar lapse in what otherwise appears to be a well researched novel.

Most of the novel is set on the Mississippi river in 1857. Martin has done his research on the history of transport on the river and describes the atmosphere in the towns along the Mississippi very well. It is a highly dynamic place, still wild enough to be considered the frontier, but a place where the impact of modern technology and industrialization are beginning to be felt. Along the river the conflict that will explode into the American civil war is already brewing. Martin doesn't shy away from showing the appalling racism that was part of every day life along the river and still echoes through American society. Slavery and the practice of hunting escaped slaves feature in the novel and it contains a lot of language nobody in their right mind would consider using today. Martin uses this part of history as more than a backdrop. Historical developments shape the story and the main character. Martin has a knack for researching a period and then using it to create a great story. Which makes it all the more of a shame he never finished Black and White and Red All Over.

Martin's preference for morally ambiguous characters is well known and it shows up in this novel as well. Particularly over the issue of slavery. Although Abner, being from a northern state, doesn't own slaves himself, he doesn't really object to the practice either. He hires a mate who can keep 'the darkies' in line and doesn't seem to think they are good for anything but the hardest, lowest paid jobs. Not until his clash with the group of vampires, who see humans as cattle, sometimes useful but mostly food, does he begin to appreciate the injustice of their position. His attitude towards Native Americans, only very briefly discussed in the novel, is similarly racist and ignorant. Martin uses it to develop his character to an extent but you have to be able to stomach a whole lot of racism to appreciate this story.

The dynamic between two other main characters, Joshua and his nemesis Damon is another expression of Martin's preference for complex characters. Damon is what you'd expect of a vampire. Joshua on the other hand isn't. In his struggle with Damon he develops into a tragic character. Perhaps his pointless battering against Damon's power is a bit too dramatic for some but it does suit the southern gothic atmosphere of the book very well. He is pulled between two ways of life and even though we see the effect of that exclusively through Abner's eyes, it comes across very well.

A while back I reread Martin's career spanning collection Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective. In the 1970s Martin produced a couple of stories that were inspired by poems. And Seven Times Never Kill Man (1975) takes the title from a poem by Kipling, in A Song for Lya (1974) a poem by Matthew Arnold is referenced. Joshua York, it would seem, is a fan of British  poetry as well. He references Percy Bysshe Shelley (in particular Ozymandias) and in more detail Lord Byron. Abner is not impressed by York's 'gimp Britisher' but later on in the book it grows on him. Martin must have had an inspirational English teacher to let it influence his work to such an extent. I don't think I've seen any traces of it in his post-Hollywood material though.

Martin may be a fine writer but he didn't convince me to try more vampire novels with Fevre Dream. In the end it is his handling of the characters and the historical backdrop that carry the novel for me. The vampire story itself is rather predictable for a novel published before the Urban Fantasy boom and the introduction of glittering vampires. It's entertaining but of the novels Martin produced in his pre-Hollywood period, this is not the one that stands out. Ironically perhaps, I vastly prefer The Armageddon Rag, the novel that almost wrecked Martin's career. Not everybody will agree with me though. If you like your vampires without glitter, in the hands of an author who can tell a good story, Fevre Dream is worth a try.

Book Details
Title: Fevre Dream
Author: G.R.R. Martin
Publisher: Gollancz
Pages: 350
Year: 2001
Language: English
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 1-85798-331-9
First published: 1982

Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective - George R.R. Martin (part 3)

The continuation of my review on George R.R. Martin's massive collection Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective. You can read the first part here and the second part here.

The Siren of Hollywood

Tuf Voyaging was a success and Martin even sold a second book that, as you will already have guessed, never got written. Tuf didn't bring in enough to get Martin back on his feet financially and so he moved on to other projects. The Armageddon Rag, while derailing his career as a novelist, did provide him with an opportunity in Hollywood. He sold the film rights of the novel and got to know people working in television. Soon, Martin was writing scripts for the second incarnation of the horror show Twilight Zone. That show got canceled rather quickly and Martin moved on to writing for a new series called Beauty and the Beast, starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman. It ran for three seasons and Martin wrote a total of fourteen episodes. After the series got canceled, he tried to pitch a number of projects. One even got to the stage where a pilot was shot but eventually none of them ever made it to the small screen.

Martin worked in Hollywood for ten years and to cover this period he includes two of his scripts. These texts are mostly dialogue with brief descriptions of actions and location in between. They also include information on camera angles, closeups, fadeouts and the like, making for a very unusual reading for someone who is used to novels and short stories. The first, The Road Less Traveled,  is a Twilight Zone episode. This one did make it to the small screen but was so horribly mutilated in the cutting room that Martin intensely disliked the episode that was eventually broadcast. He includes the full script as he had intended it to be shot. 

The story is about a man who dodged the draft in the late 1960s and relocated to Canada. He later returns and settles into a career as a teacher when he is suddenly confronted with a version of himself that did go to Vietnam. It probably works better on television than on paper. Shoot it properly and it can be a very suspenseful story. If you read the script you really need to try and put it on a screen in your head to make it work.

The second script included in this section is called Doorways. It is the pilot for a series Martin had hoped to make for ABC. The concept of the show was based on two travelers journeying between alternate versions of earth. The script Martin included is a bit different from the one that was eventually shot. In the second half of the pilot, the characters move to a different world and where Martin had imagined a post-apocalyptic world in the original script, they later changed it to a world without oil. If you look really hard you can still find that pilot. It was released on VHS in 1993. Despite it being quite a good pilot, the show was never made. To add insult to injury, 1995 saw the premiere of a new show on Fox called Sliders, with pretty much the same concept. It is one of many what might have beens in this collection.

Whatever caused ABC to cancel the show, it most likely wasn't the writing. The pilot is quite fun to watch and this alternative script would have worked well too in my opinion. I have no doubt that this series would have done well. Doorways is not the only project Martin tried to develop after Beauty and the Beast was canceled. The collection Quartet: Tales From the Crossroads contains another script for a pilot that was never produced and Martin tried to rework several of his short stories for television as well. In the end it all came to nothing. Maybe his disappointing experiences in Hollywood made him hold out on selling the rights for A Song of Ice and Fire for so long.

Doing the Wild Card Shuffle

Martin didn't completely stop producing works in print during his years in Hollywood. He wrote several short stories in this period, but his most important side project was undoubtedly Wild Cards. Wild Cards is a shard world in which an alien virus hit New York City in 1946. Of those infected, 90% died a gruesome death, 9% was mutilated in unimaginable ways and the remaining 1% developed superpowers. The series is clearly inspired by superhero comics, allowing Martin to return to his earliest love. Most of the books in the series are what Martin calls mosaic novels, with six to eight people doing the writing and Martin editing the whole thing into one story. The first volume of the series appeared in 1987 and by the time Dreamsongs was published, sixteen Wild Cards volumes had been released with a seventeenth on the way. Right now there are twenty-two volumes available with a twenty-third expected in the not too distant future.

Martin includes two of his own contributions to the series in this collection. The first  is Shell Games (1987) from the first book in the series. In that volume, the writers cover the years between the release of the virus and the 1980s, making it more of a short story collection than a mosaic novel. As such Shell Games can be read as a standalone easily. It introduces one of Martin's own characters, the Great and Powerful Turtle. When we meet him he is a boy with impressive telekinetic gifts but no idea of how to use them. His childhood friend helps him figure it out however. The story shows us the dark side of New York and some of the more brutal effects of the virus. It is a pretty dark story as many of the other Wild Cards stories would be.

The second piece is called From the Journal of Xavier Desmond and is taken from the fourth book in the series, Aces Abroad (1988). An expanded edition has recently been reissued by Tor but it is still on my to read list. In Aces Abroad Martin provides the parts of the story that ties the other contributions together. As the title suggests it is entirely written in the form of diary entries and not quite as readable without context as Shell Games. Desmond refers to a lot of affairs the reader of Dreamsongs doesn't get to see as well as things from the previous three volumes. It gives the reader some insight into the process of editing one of these volumes, but for the reader who isn't familiar with the series the storyline of Desmond himself (he is dying and making his peace with the world and the fact that the virus affected his life to a large degree) is a bit thin.

The Heart in Conflict

The final section of Dreamsongs contains a number of stories from the mid 1980s onwards. It is a mix, stories Martin felt were important but couldn't really be placed in any of the other sections. To find something that unifies them, he refers to William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Prize winners banquet in 1950 in which he said that "the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing". Martin agrees with that. He doesn't want to be limited by genre conventions or the genre/literature divide. What interests him is the motivation of his characters and that is what has made A Song of Ice and Fire such a resounding success. This section contains six stories, generally longer pieces, and takes up almost 300 pages in my edition of Dreamsongs.

It opens with Under Siege (1985), which is the rewritten version of The Fortress we encountered in the first section. In this story a desperate group of time traveling nuclear war survivors try to stop the Soviet Union from forming and the siege of Sveaborg might just be the turning point in history they are looking for. I'm not too fond of time travel stories, I just can't wrap my head around the logic most of them employ, but I must admit this one is pretty good. Very little is left from the original historical piece but there is enough for people familiar with this bit of history to sink their teeth in.

The Sikin Trade (1988) is probably the longest piece in the entire collection. It is a horror novella that Martin had tried to develop for television at one point. I have a feeling it might make a better movie than a series though. The story is set in a decaying industrial town that is shaken by the brutal murder of a young woman in a wheelchair. Memories of a series of murders twenty years back begin to stir. Questions about those killings remained unanswered at the time. Now PI Randi Wade is looking into the matter on behalf of her friend Willie who knew the victim. During the investigation she finds out things about the city she has lived in her entire life that shock her to the core.

This novella is one of the strongest pieces in the collection. It is a classic horror story of the type monsters-are-among-us. It is sometimes quite bloody but Martin mostly focuses on what these events do with his two main characters. They are good examples of the flawed heroes Martin likes to write about. It's very well paced and has a great climax. As horror stories go, I don't think you can improve much on Martin's execution in The Skin Game. Someone really should make it into a movie.

Next up is Unsound Variations (1982). A story inspired by chess. Martin clearly uses his experience in organizing tournaments in this story. It is about a man invited to visit one of his old teammates who has become fabulously wealthy after they last saw each other in college. They don't particularly like each other. Rich he may be, but he wasted the opportunity to win against one of the best university chess teams in the nation by giving away a match he had already practically won. It's a strange story that combines chess with time travel. The supposed won position becomes an obsession for the characters and while I don't know that much about chess, just the very basics really, Martin manges to describe it in a way that drags you along with the characters desperately trying to find a solution to the problem.

The Glass Flower (1986) is Martin's final story in the Thousand Worlds universe. Of course he didn't actually say he wouldn't write any more but it doesn't look likely he will return to it any time soon. In the early 1990s he did try his hand at a Thousand Worlds novel but ended up writing A Game of Thrones instead. Maybe he should return to it because I can't say I particularly like this story. It doesn't really seem like a fitting conclusion to a series that produced so much interesting work.

The story is nominally a science fiction story but takes such surreal turns that for a lot of readers it will stretch the limits of what they consider SF. It deals with immortallity and one of the legends of Matin's future history finally makes an appearance in person. Kleronomas, who by the time the story opens has already lived many centuries, shows up on the doorstep of Cyrain, who deals in eternal life on an out of the way planet on the edge of human explored space. He is not looking for eternal life however, that is something he already possesses, he is looking for death. Both of the main characters in the story strike me as incredibly jaded. It doesn't make for pleasant reading. It's also a fairly slow moving piece. With eternity at your disposal I guess there is no need to hurry. Definitely not my favourite story in the collection.

More than a thousand pages in Martin treats us to a little bit of Westeros. The Hedge Knight is one of the prequel novellas about Dunk and Egg. It is set some ninety years before the main series and besides a few references to both Dunk and Egg in the main novels, the novellas are very much their own story. You can read them independently. They share the background of Westeros and the brutality of life in that world with the main series though. These novellas are quite good reads. It is interesting to see the kingdom under the Targaryens and in these stories we get to see society from one who starts pretty much at the bottom. As prequels go, it is quite successful. Martin has written three of these novellas at this point and wants to write more. They have been postponed while he works on the main series though. Yet another project that I would not mind seeing Martin return to.

The final story in the collection is another horror tale. Portraits of his Children (1987) is about a writer so caught up in his writing and fictional characters that he alienates the people around him. The last one to leave is his daughter. Alone in his house and unable to continue his writing, he broods about his family, his writing and the arguments. Then, a package arrives from his daughter. It contains a surprisingly accurate picture of one of the characters from his books. For the main characters of the story, the line between fiction, fiction based on real people and events and real life is blurred. They all seem to put it somewhere else and it is the root of many of their arguments. His wife and daughter frequently see  his writing as wish fulfillment or an expression of his dissatisfaction about life with them. All three of them get very bitter about it. It's a disturbing story, and probably even more so to writers. How transparant is your writing to people who know you well?

And with that we reach the end of over 1100 pages of Martin's short fiction. While I did not like every piece in the collection, I do think it succeeds in giving an overview of Martin's career up to that point. The essays Martin includes make for very interesting reading and the majority of the material included ranges from very good to outstanding. In a time when everything Martin wrote is overshadowed by A Song of Ice and Fire, and lately even more by Game of Thrones, it is good to be reminded that he is much more versatile than that. Do not let the collection's impressive size discourage you. Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective  is well worth reading. After finishing this reread I came away with the feeling I should have done it sooner.

Book Details
Title: Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective
Author: George R.R. Martin
Publisher: Gollancz
Pages: 1185
Year: 2007
Language: English
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-575-08148-2
First published: 2003

Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective - George R.R. Martin (part 2)

The continuation of my review on George R.R. Martin's massive collection Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective. You can read the first part here.

The Heirs of Turtle Castle

Martin has a lot of fans who see him primarily as a fantasy writer. He also has fans who know him as a science fiction writer. Some of those were mightily upset when Martin started A Song of Ice and Fire, even accusing him of changing sides. A slightly ridiculous accusation in the face of Martin's diverse output in the 1970s and 1980s. His works often straddle genres and he has written stories that could be considered historical fiction, horror, fantasy and science fiction. In this section Martin reaches back to his early fantasies. They are quite different from his sprawling novels, but fantasy nonetheless. 

The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr (1976) is what Martin considers to be his first pure fantasy sale. I must admit, I don't like it much. It is another story dealing with loneliness. Laren Dorr is punished by the Seven (presumably some kind of gods) to spend eternity on a planet of which he is the only inhabitant. Until Sharra, the girl who travels between worlds, arrives looking for her lost love. It is another story that was supposed to be the first in a series which would have had Sharra visit countless worlds. He never got around to writing them though. Often when I come across one of Martin's unfinished projects I wonder what the whole thing would have been like. With this story, being limited to one is fine with me. There is something melancholic about the story but Martin has done that better in other pieces.

I have already reviewed the children's version of The Ice Dragon (1980) on this blog. Martin edited the story a bit and released it for young readers in 2006. Dreamsongs contains the adult original of The Ice Dragon. Both versions are very good, but I think I like the adult version slightly better. It is written from the point of view of a little girl and there is a lot of adult stuff between the lines that the reader is meant to catch even if the main character doesn't. It works fine as a children's book but even with the light trimming Martin had to do to tone down the references to war and violence, something is lost. The story is unfortunately burdened with the debate about whether or not it is set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. After rereading it, I remain of the opinion that if you want to shoehorn it in, you probably can, but that it most certainly wasn't conceived that way.

The third story in this section is In the Lost Lands (1982), the first and only story in the series on Grey Alys. This story is a dark fairy tale in essence. Be careful what you wish for is clearly the morale of In the Lost Lands. I like Alys a lot better than Sharra. She is a powerful character involved in some very shady business. Martin is simply better at writing morally ambiguous characters. Sharra is too much of a romantic heroine for my taste. Martin has sold the movie rights of both In the Lost Lands and The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr (as well as Bitterblooms from the previous section) recently so we may well see either or both on the big screen soon.

Hybrids and Horrors

In this section Martin presents six stories with a clear horror element. Half of them are not uncut horror though, but mixtures of horror and science fiction. A combination that has produced some of Martin's best work. I'm not entirely convinced by Martin's more pure horror tales though. While they are generally creepy, they seem to lack the imagination Martin is able to put into his fantasy and science fiction.

The section opens with Meathouse Man (1976). It is a story in a series that made it to three and deals with a man who is a professional corpse handler. The corpses have had their brains replaced by a device that links them to the handler. A good handler can control as many as eight at a time. They are used for hard, dirty or dangerous work. Targer is quite good at his job but his life is all work. He wants more out of it. He is looking for love. It will not surprise the readers that he is disappointed repeatedly. Meathouse Man is horrific in the fact that the corpses are seen as things to use and abuse as the handlers see fit. This includes using them for sex and the scene in which Targer explores this part of his talent is absolutely revolting. He strikes me as a character who, being surrounded by corpses most of the time, has trouble understanding his own humanity and that of others. No good can come of it of course.

Remembering Melody (1981)  is an uncut horror story about a group of people who become good friends in college. They promise to support each other should one of them ever need help. Three of the four make a life for themselves after college but the fourth ends up in a life of addiction, bad boyfriends and failed careers. She calls on the others repeatedly until they have had enough and refuse to help her. I guess you could say this story is about the consequences of broken promises. It is a decent story but I could see the clou coming a mile off when I first read it. Not my favourite in this collection.

The next story is Sandkings (1979) and of all Martin's short pieces, this is probably the most successful. It won him a Nebula and a Hugo and made him more money than most of his novels until he started writing A Song of Ice and Fire. It is a science fiction/horror hybrid set in the Thousand Worlds universe. There is an adaptation for television, a comic version and it has been reprinted more times than I care to count. If you know anything of Martin other than A Song of Ice and Fire, this is likely to be it. Despite it being one of Martin's most successful works, it is another one of those one story series. One of the many opportunities in Dreamsongs to think about what might have been had Martin followed up on this story.

The story deals with a cruel man with too much money and a habit of showing off expensive and preferably dangerous pets to his friends. When he returns from his latest and unexpectedly long business trip most of his pets have died. He sets out to find something new and ends up buying Sandkings. Cruel man that he is, he raises cruel pets and that gets him in serious trouble. The Sandkings are fascinating creatures. Figuring out their lifecycle and habits is what the story revolves around. They turn into scary creatures, partly because Martin keeps it unclear what makes them tick until the very last moment. It is one of the highlights in the collection.

Nightflyers (1980) is a horror story in space. It is also set in Martin's Thousand Worlds and was made into a craptastic movie in 1987. I've seen it so you don't have to. Don't. Read the story instead. There are two versions of this story. Martin has opted to put the longest of the two in this collection. He feels the shorter version is too constrained by its length. He may well be right there. Another author might have made this into a full novel. It would certainly have been possible.

Nightflyers is about a poorly funded expedition to find the mysterious Volcryn. Beings who have been spotted for thousands of years, traveling from the centre of the galaxy to the rim. The expedition's leader has trouble finding a ship that will stop in interstellar space and so he turns to the Nightflyer. The captain of the ship is decidedly peculiar. He will only show himself as a hologram. There is always something claustrophobic about a spaceship where all is not well and Martin uses that to the full extent in this story. The ship is the only thing that keeps them alive in the hostile environment of deep space. Where do you turn if it is also trying to kill you? It is a solid story. I have no idea how the makers of that movie managed to screw up so badly. Maybe someone should have another go at it.

The Monkey Treatment (1983) is another of the stories in this section I don't particularly like. It is a play on words mostly. The main character has a monkey on his back. Literally. The story about a man who likes to eat and is seriously overweight because of it. He feels bad about his weight and even blames his lack of success with women on his posture. Desperate to lose weight he opts for radical treatment. We see the entire story from the point of view of the main character. He clearly doesn't like being overweight and associates his size with being ugly, gross and repulsive. He does so in no uncertain terms. It is probably not a pleasant read for people who are not happy with their posture. There is nothing to balance the main character's opinion on these matters either, since he provides the only point of view in the story. I like the concept of the story but I don't particularly like the execution.

The final story in this section is The Pear-Shaped Man (1987), which is without a doubt the most creepy tale in the bunch. A young woman moves into a new apartment building. In the basement lives a peculiar man everybody knows as  the Pear-Shaped Man. He seems harmless but the main character slowly becomes obsessed with him and is convinced he means to do her harm. Martin manages to make the man creepy without him actually doing much of anything early on in the story. The unease the main character feels does grow into full blown horror later on though. I feel Martin slips a bit at the end of the story. The climax is very surreal and doesn't really seem to fit whit the rest of the story. Still a supremely creepy bit of writing though. Of his uncut horror stories, this one is probably the best.

A Taste of Tuf

Where 1971 was a big year in Martin's life, 1979 and 1985 prove to be equally important to his career. Martin produced a steady stream of short fiction throughout the 1970s. His first collection appears in 1976, followed by a second in 1977. that year will also see the release of his first novel Dying of the Light. He is selling reasonably well but still has to keep a day job to get by. He organizes chess tournaments to supplement his income and 1976 till 1978 he teaches English and Journalism at Clarke College in Dubugue, Iowa and becomes their writer in residence in 1978-1979. When his first wife graduates Martin decides to take the plunge. They decide to move to New Mexico where Martin will devote himself to writing full time. His marriage does not survive the relocation but Martin is more productive in these years than in any previous period in his career.

His second novel Windhaven, a fixup written in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle appears in 1981, followed by the historical horror novel Fevre Dream in 1982. For his fourth novel he gets his biggest advance yet and Martin uses it to finance a bigger house. While the critics love The Armageddon Rag (1983), the novel doesn't sell at all. It is a novel that is hard to place in a genre, and completely different from what Martin has written before. Personally I think it is very good but it must have been a pain to market. In 1985 it becomes clear that his agent is unable to get anyone to make a bid on Martin's fifth novel, which by that point is partially finished. Martin is in serious trouble now. He abandons what should have been his fifth novel and looks for other sources of income. Tuf Voyaging is one of the projects he takes on in this period. Part of the unfinished novel was later published in the collection Quartet: Tales From the Crossroads (2001).

In 1986 Baen publishes Tuf Voyaging. It is sometimes called a novel but in my mind it is a short story collection. Stories about Tuf, an eccentric trader and ecological engineer traveling Martin's Thousand Worlds universe, fixing all matter of ecological problems, appeared between 1976 and 1985. I reviewed the collection earlier this year so I'm not going to go into too much detail about it. Martin has selected two of the stories from that collection. Of the first one, A Beast for Norn (1976) is the oldest of the lot and was rewritten before the publication of Tuf Voyaging. In Dreamsongs Martin includes the original version. It is a bit shorter than the one in Tuf Voyaging, with a more abrupt ending. The version that ended up in the Tuf collection is definitely more polished and more in line with the other stories. It is interesting to see the changes Martin made to the story and how the character of Tuf developed but of course you do need access to both versions to appreciate that.

The devastation Tuf causes in this story also shows that Martin's expertise on the subject of ecology is limited. The casual way in which species get released into an environment they did not evolve in borders on the criminal but Tuf seems to think the ecosystem will find a new balance. Whether that new balance is capable of supporting human life is anyone's guess. The second story is Guardians (1981) which is chronologically set before A Beast for Norn. Interestingly enough, Tuf is a lot more concerned in this story about the effects of meddling in an ecosystem he doesn't fully understand. Fortunately he solves the puzzle before species go extinct.

End of part two. Come back on Sunday for the final part of this review.

Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective - George R.R. Martin (part 1)

Riding on the first wave of success for his massive series A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin and Subterranean  published this equally massive tome with an overview of his career up to that point in 2003. It has since been reprinted by Gollancz and Bantam under various tittles, sometimes in one volume, sometimes in two or three. I own the Gollancz edition from 2007. One of the one volume ones. It weighs in at 1185 pages and contains an introduction by Gardner Dozois, nine essays, thirty-four pieces of short fiction and a bibliography. It is, in other words, quite an exhaustive read. I've been going over it in the past few months for a Dutch language project over at Hebban. That project involves ten articles and will probably total something close to twenty-thousand words. It's a bit much to do the whole thing over again in English (it would have to be substantially rewritten for a different audience) so I figured I'd try for a more conventional review for Random Comments. With so much material to cover it turned out to be a bit on the long side so I am splitting it in three parts. The second part is scheduled for Wednesday, and the final installment will be posted next Sunday.

Dreamsongs is divided into nine sections. They are roughly chronological and sometimes thematically ordered and each cover a stage in the career of Martin. He starts in his youth and goes all the way on to The Hedge Knight (1998), which is the newest piece covered in the collection. Each of the sections is preceded by an essay by Martin in which he discusses his inspirations. They also contain quite a bit of biographical detail. Martin has selected stories that he thinks represents a certain part of his work best, and although there are a few award winning stories in this collection, it is certainly no best of George R.R. Martin. At least, that is not what he aims for.

A Four-Color Fanboy
 
This section of the collection deals with Martin's youth and very early writings. Martin calls them his apprentice works. He discusses what first set him on the path to becoming a writer and strangely enough, it is not science fiction. In his early years Martin read a lot of comics. He made up his own stories too and even sold them to his classmates. Later he did of course move on to science fiction and fantasy, but the foundation is still comics. Martin was a real fanboy and wrote for several of the amateur fan magazines of the 1960s. It explains something about Wild Cards I guess. Martin includes three pieces of his early writing in the collection. None of them sold, but The Fortress did get reworked in a story Marin would write in the 1980s.

Only Kids are Afraid of the Dark (1967) is essentially a comic in written form. The prose is absolutely terrible and the story a cliché superhero plot. Martin's imagination does shine through but at this point he clearly has a lot to learn about writing. Martin takes creative writing classes in college and the other two stories in this section are a result of that. The first is The Fortress (1968), which he wrote for a class in Scandinavian history. It describes the events at the siege of the fortress Sveaborg in 1808. The reasons for its surrender still puzzles historians. It is straight historical fiction. Martin does not include any speculative elements and follows history as it is known. I'm still not impressed by the prose in this story, but it has improved a lot compared to his written comics so I guess the classes are paying off.

The third story is not a particularly fine piece either. And Death His Legacy (1968) is a rather blunt political statement. Given the time Martin went to college (late sixties, early seventies) I guess the content is not even that radical, but reading it today, it mostly strikes me as immature. These stories are Martin spreading his wings, writing to learn for the more professional pieces that will follow. He is taking a chance by publishing them in this volume. They are not that interesting to read as stories, but do give a clear insight into Martin's development as a writer. As such I can appreciate them, but I am not surprised that he didn't sell any of them.

The Filthy Pro

The second section of Dreamsongs deals with Martin's early sales. He sold his first story, The Hero, to Galaxy in 1971, while still in college. After that first sale, Martin starts to publish regularly in the major magazines. The other stories in this section are from the summer that he graduated. Martin holds a Master's degree in journalism but couldn't find a job in that profession. The summer of 1971 was one of the few moments in the 1970s when he actually had plenty of time to write. It resulted in a number of stories that would help Martin establish a career in science fiction.

The Hero is the first story set in Martin's future history that doesn't have an official name. Most people refer to it as the Thousand Worlds however. The Hero is another, albeit slightly less blunt political statement. It deals with a soldier from a high gravity planet. He possesses augmentation of his already impressive physical strength, making him a formidable warrior. He feels he's getting old though, and wants to retire  before the enemy gets him. His superiors are not sure that is a good idea. Martin, who faced the draft and a likely tour in Vietnam at the time, filed for conscientious-objector status and sent this story along with his application. Given the distrust it displays of those in command of the army, I am not at all surprised it was granted. Martin spent his alternative service with VISTA between 1972 and 1974.

The Exit to San Breta (1972) is a futuristic ghost story. Martin himself insists it is fantasy and not science fiction. The story is a bit dated by now. Martin predicts the flying car sometime in the 1990s, which makes regular cars obsolete in the twenty-first century. The highways are abandoned and only traveled by those with an interest in the classics. The main character is driving his classic Edsel down a lonely stretch of highway when he is involved in a car crash. There is more to the accident than meets the eye. The story may be very dated, the one thing Martin got right in it is the status of the Edsel as a classic. It was a dismal commercial failure when it was put on the market by Ford but now an Edsel in good condition is quite valuable.

The Second Kind of Loneliness (1972) is where Martin really hits his stride. It is the first story in what was meant to be a series. Martin has written a lot of first stories but not many seconds and even fewer thirds. It is written in the form of diary entries and deals with, as the title suggests, loneliness. A theme that Martin would revisit frequently throughout the 1970s. Although Martin puts his main character in the most lonely place imaginable, a space station on the edge of the solar system, the loneliness that the main character is concerned with is the kind of someone who is awkward in the company of others. It's a very tragic story and in my opinion the best in this section.

The readers at the time probably didn't agree with me though because Martin got his first Hugo and Nebula nomination for another Thousand Worlds story. With Morning Comes Mistfall (1973) is a mood piece really. Not much to the plot but the central question. Do we really need to know it all or are some things better left a mystery? Martin clearly believes we need a bit of mystery in our lives. Martin didn't win, the Hugo went to Ursula K. Le Guin that year and the Nebula to James Tiptree, Jr. He  had settled into his writing career though, and more awards nominations would follow.

The Light of Distant Stars

The next three sections all cover work from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. Martin attempts to present them as science fiction, fantasy and horror respectively although he admits he often blends genres. The Light of Distant Stars is the section dealing with science fiction and contains six stories, all set in his Thousand Worlds setting. It opens strongly, with one of Martin's most famous stories. A Song of Lya (1974) would get him a Hugo, Locus and Nebula Award nomination. He won the Hugo but lost the other two to Robert Silverberg. It is a heartbreaking tale and one of many in Dreamsongs that deals with broken hearts and unanswered love. These stories are in part a reflection of Martin's own love life at the time. He ceases to write them in the early 1980s, when Parris McBride moves in with him. He would marry her in 2011. Martin builds a good science fiction story out of it, but essentially it is about lovers drifting apart. I can definitely see why it is one of the most popular stories Martin ever produced.

In This Tower of Ashes (1975) we meet another character with a broken heart. He has distanced himself from everybody and broods out in the wilderness. It is not nearly as strong as A Song for Lya. The main character is being childish and petty. He keeps seeing himself as a victim and that makes him uninteresting for the readers. Not the strongest story in this section.

And Seven Times Never Kill Man (1975) is much better. It was inspired by a bit of poetry from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling in which a wolf teaches its pups the law of the jungle. Martin shows in this story what happens if you do kill man and as you can probably imagine, it isn't pretty. Interestingly enough, pacifism plays an important role in the plot. Given Martin's political leanings and his stance on the Vietnam War, perhaps it isn't surprising but I don't know many writers who would deal with the type of conflict described in the story in such a way. Another interesting element is religious madness as a theme. Something that will show up in Martin's later work as well. Maybe not quite as much personal drama as in some of Martin's other stories but in And Seven Times Never Kill Man we do get to see Martin at his best.

Martin got into editing in the 1970s as well. One of his projects was a series based on Campbell Award nominated writers called New Voices in Science Fiction. He would edit six of them although the final one never got published. The publisher Bluejay went bankrupt before it could be published. For the first edition he got to buy one of his own stories (Martin was nominated for the Campbell Award for best new writer in 1973) and that story is The Stone City (1977). The main character is a galactic traveler who gets stuck on the planet Greyrest. Apart from huge fields of ruins from an extinct civilization, there doesn't appear to be much of anything on the planet. It's a haunting tale where the main character eventually looses himself chasing his dream to see the galaxy. The main character is a bit like Martin himself in this period. Hopping from world to world, sampling each but never committing to one. It would be a while yet before Martin could make himself abandon that approach.

In Bitterblooms (1977) we see another character trapped in a fantasy. This story contains a bit of Arthurian mythology and plenty of references to the planet Avalon, a name that shows up in many Thousand Wolds stories. It is tempting to live in a fantasy, but real life and responsibilities are calling. It is indeed a bitter story about choices and their consequences. The experience changes the main character in ways that make it hard for her to really fit in her old life. It's another very good story in what is a very strong section of Dreamsongs.

The final story in this section, The Way of Cross and Dragon, takes us to a planet where Judas Iskariot has been pronounced a saint. One of the distant successors of the Catholic Church is not amused and sends in an inquisitor. Another story dealing with religion. It is very cynical really. The story is not so much about faith as about doubt, and of that there is plenty. The characters have a hard time admitting it though. It probably won't be a favourite with deeply religious people but I thought it another strong piece.

End of part one, come back on Wednesday for more.

Tuf Voyaging - George R.R. Martin

Early in his career George R.R. Martin was not particularly good at finishing series. A lot of his 1970s stories leave openings for sequels that never got written. Tuf is a bit of an exception in that respect. Martin wrote enough of them to fill a book. In a way, we have to commercial failure of The Armageddon Rag (1983) to thank for it. Martin couldn't get his fifth novel sold and abandoned it eventually. He had a contract for a Tuf collection though, and he needed money quite badly at the time. The result is this book. Not that it is a complete of course. Martin had ideas for more stories, after the publication of this collection in 1986 there was even talk of a full novel. None of that ever happened. Martin left for Hollywood and got into A Song of Ice and Fire later. It looks unlikely that more Tuf stories will appear. Not any time soon anyway. A shame really, rereading this collection left me with the feeling Martin was not yet done with this character.

Tuf Voyaging is sometimes mentioned to be a novel, sometimes a fixup and sometimes a collection. I think it is the last. In fact, if you approach this work as a novel, you'll be disappointed. Martin wrote them as short stories and although there is a bit of development in Tuf's character, there isn't much of an overarching storyline. The oldest story of the bunch, A Beast for Norn  appeared in 1976 but Martin rewrote it quite a bit for this collection. The original version can be found in the massive collection Dreamsongs and was first published in an Orbit anthology called Andromeda I. All others Tuf stories ended up with Analog between 1978 and 1985. That last year was particularly productive for Tuf, with no less than four stories appearing. Martin also added a brief prologue to the collection to gather everything together.

The collection  presents the stories chronologically and starts with The Plague Star (1985). It tells the tale of Tuf taking a group of adventurer out to a derelict spaceship that the party's leader thinks is a huge, ancient seedship from the a huge war fought more than a thousand years ago. The builders had very advanced knowledge of genetics and ecology, making the ship, if intact, very valuable. In this story we meet a Tuf that is almost comic. He's calm and very much in control of the situation even when it appears he's not. He's also verbose, eccentric and seems a little naive. He seems blissfully unaware of the backstabbing that is about to break out yet somehow seems to come out on top.Tuf has reinvented himself as ecological engineer. He now wields the power to shape or destroy entire planets. He has, in other worlds, become a god.

There is a lot of religious symbolism in these stories. Lots of biblical references are sprinkled throughout the text. Martin uses the miracle of loaves and fishes, the ten plagues brought down on Egypt and the manna that feeds the Jews in the Sinai in Exodus all find their way into the stories. At one point Tuf even pretends to be Yahweh to bring a wayward religious leader to heel.  Absolute power and the use of it is an important theme in these stories. Tuf uses his power as he sees fit and seems to have inhibitions about ending ways of life forever, wiping out whole ecosystems or waging biological wars. Tuf feels entitled to make these decisions without consultation. He goes from unassuming to almost tyrannical over the course of the collection. If Martin does write a sequel, it would be interesting to see what Tuf would do if he screws up.

Having taking control of the Ark, as the spaceship is called, Tuf proceeds to the planet of S'uthlam where he hopes to get the damage to his ship accumulated over a millennium fixed. As the name suggests, the planet is in a permanent state of Malthusian crisis. The majority of the population beliefs it is their holy duty to procreate and does so at an alarming rate. Tuf himself, when he finally finds out the size of the population of the planet, responds with a typical understatement.

"Since you solicit my opinion, Portmaster, I shall venture to say  that while the world above us seems formidably large, I cannot but wonder if it is indeed large enough. Without intending any censure of your mores, culture, and civilization, the thought does occur to me that a population of thirty-nine billion persons might be considered, on the whole, to be a trifle excessive."
Tuf talking to portmaster Tolly Mune in Loaves and Fishes.

Mune, interestingly as much opposed to the enormous growth the the population of the planet, is one of the few characters in the story who seriously tries to make Tuf see the problematic way in which he uses the Ark and makes his decisions. Mune and her troubled planet appear in three stories in this collection, making it the spine of Tuf's adventures. Loaves and Fishes, Second Helpings and Manna from the Heavens were all first published in 1985 and contain most of Tuf's development as a character.

Tuf's adventures on S'uthlam can also be seen as commentary on the overpopulation that is one of the main driving forces in environmental degradation all over the planet. One of the strategies Tuf (himself a vegetarian) proposes is the replace all sorts of inefficient foodstuffs (read meat) by much higher yielding, if not always tasteful, alternatives. Tuf realizes that in the face of exponential population growth, this is just a stopgap measure however and that the real solution much be found in birth control. That is one theme where I think the collection could have used a bit more depth. The ethical dilemma is outlined but never really discussed or shown in much detail.

In between de stories dealing with S'uthlam, Tuf visits several other planet. In Guardians (1981) he brokers a piece between humans and an, until Tuf's intervention unrecognized, sentient species. In A Beast for Norn (1976) he end animal fighting in a roundabout way and in Call Him Moses (1978), he stops a fanatical religious leader with a few biological tricks up his sleeve. It's in these stories that you can tell Martin's knowledge of ecology is basic. In the stories dealing with S'uthlam, he needs to employ the entire ecosystem for food production, basically redesigning it completely. In the other stories, he just meddles and the consequences of this could be dramatic.

Tuf tends to introduces species to fix certain biological problems. If experience on Earth is any guide, this almost always backfires in some way. Think of rabbits overrunning Australia, the unbelievable damage rats can do on islands where they are introduced, the devastation caused by the Nile Perch in Lake Victoria, the list of examples in endless an costly in both ecological and economical sense. In A Beast for Norn, in which Martin introduces two dozen alien species to a planet, when confronted with the fact that he ruined the planet's ecosystem and crashed it's economy he remarks:

"Unlikely," said Tuf. "My experience is these matters suggests that Lyronica may indeed suffer a certain interlude of ecological instability and hardship, yet it will be of limited duration and ultimately I have no doubt that a new ecosystem will emerge. It appears unlikely that this successor ecology will offer niches for large predators, alas, but I am optimistic that the quality of Lyronican life will be otherwise unimpaired.
Tuf speaking to one of his customers in A Beast for Norn.

Now that would be a remarkable feat of ecological engineering. Doing away with an entire trophic level of an ecology doesn't strike me as a good way to keep the productivity and complexity of an ecosystem in tact.

Ecology is still a subject a lot of science fiction steers clear of. Martin gives it a try in this collection but on the whole it is closer to a satirical work than a scientifically accurate one. That being said, I did enjoy reading this collection again. The humour is part of it, but I also simply enjoyed the writing. Despite writing them out of chronological order, Martin manages to get a development in the character from a humble and eccentric trader in The Plague Star to a near megomaniac Manna from the Heavens. I've seen many review stating there is no character development in Tuf. I respectfully disagree with that. It is more subtle than in some of his stories, but it is most certainly there. One other thing I appreciate about Tuf Voyaging is that it underlines that Martin is just as comfortably writhing short stories as he is writing huge fantasy novels. Martin is a versatile writer, capable of writing more then fantasy novels alone. As much as I like A Song of Ice and Fire, I still think Martin's best work is in his short fiction and Tuf is one example of that. Don't approach it as a novel and don't expect epic fantasy and you might just end up liking what Martin has done here.

Book Details
Title: Tuf Voyaging
Author: George R.R. Martin
Publisher: Meisha Merlin
Pages: 440
Year: 2003
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 1-59222-004-5
First published: 1986

Lowball - George R.R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass

Lowball is the twenty-second installment in the series of Wild Cards mosaic novels. It was announced quite a while ago but for some reason there are more than three years between the release of Fort Freak, to which Lowball is a sequel, and this novel. I wonder what caused the delay. Might have something to do with Martin's availability as editor of the series though. For the first time Melinda M. Snodgrass is on the cover as editor. She has been assisting Martin in that job for quite a while next to her writing contributions. Maybe  Martin decided to spend a little less time on this project in the face of the overwhelming success of A Song of Ice and Fire. I also wonder if there is going to be a third novel about the officers of the 5th precinct, because this one does leave a few storylines dangling. There is a title floating around, High Stakes, but I haven't come across a publication date yet. Only thing I can find about it is an announcement from 2012 on Martin's blog.

New York's 5th precinct, better known as Fort Freak, lies in the heart of Jokertown. It is by any means the most unusual post a police officer could get assigned to. A mixture of people unaffected by the Wild Cards virus and those whom the virus did transform try to keep order in a place that is the home of a great many colourful characters, misfits, criminals and strangely deformed people. New talents show up frequently, making police work extremely challenging. Unorthodox methods to keep everybody in line are common in this precinct. Lately, a great many Jokers, generally people who won't be missed have started disappearing. Nobody is greatly concerned, but Father Squid, the local priest, keeps digging into the matter and, reluctantly, so do the officers at Fort Freak. The case turns out to be much more complicated than the captain expected when he assigned it to his newly promoted detective Francis Black.

As always, the novel is written by a number of different authors, all writing from the point of view of one character. This volume contains contributions by Michael Cassutt, David Anthony Durham, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David D. Levine, Walter Jon Williams, Carrie Vaughn and Ian Tregillis. All of them have previous experience in this shared universe. There doesn't seem to be an obvious frame story this time, several of the sections are split into at least half a dozen pieces. I guess it must have been a pain to edit this one and make everything fit. Then again, that probably goes for all of these novels.

The story can be read independently of everything that has gone before but obviously you get more out of it if you have read more Wild Cards novels, Fort Freak in particular. There are a bunch of references to Fort Freak but nothing that is absolutely necessary to understand the plot. Links to the story of the Committee Triad and a few characters introduced in those books show up as well but again nothing essential. I haven't really found that many links with the older Wild Cards novels I've been reading recently. The authors are really writing for a new generation here.

Martin and Snodgrass have done a fairly good job on the editing. While the point of view changes frequently, the flow of the story feels mostly natural and it builds up to a good climax. Oddly enough it is the contributions that aren't split in many pieces that feel a bit out of place. In particular Ian Tregillis' story No Parking and Carrie Vaughn's piece Once More, for Old Times' Sake feel like they don't fit in with the rest. That is a real shame, I quite liked Tregillis' piece in particular. Both of them are well written but their parts in moving the plot forward don't really feel like they need a separate point of view, or as many pages as the novel dedicates to these storylines. I'm also still not very fond of Mary Anne Mohanraj's Detective Michael Stevens. His character, despite being unaffected by the virus, has to be the most unbelievable in the whole series.

I have a feeling more than a few readers will think the actual plot of the novel feels a bit like a bad movie plot. Something with Jean Claude van Damme in it maybe. It is certainly a bit over the top and not the height of originality. Normally I would probably dislike it but in this case I have to admit it does fit with the comic book background that is the inspiration for this series. The books are all a bit over the top, featuring many characters with superpowers. The perverse purpose to which they are turned in this novel is something that fits the overall setting. David Anthony Durham even turns his story line (Those About to Die) featuring the Infamous Black Tongue into a surprisingly relevant piece as his character, a young black man, struggles to find his place in Jokertown society and stay away from the violence that ruins so many lives in his community.

Lowball is a solid entry into the Wild Cards series. I think it more or less delivers what established readers have come to expect from the series. Like pretty much all of the previous books in this series I've read, it doesn't entirely escape the problems that arise when so many writers work on a single project. The fact that it isn't the work of one author keeps showing and that doesn't always do the novel good. That being said, I thought Lowball was quite an entertaining read, with occasional flashes of very good writing. If you can forgive it the B-movie plot I think you could do worse than pick this one up. It left me hoping Martin and Tor aren't going to make us wait another three years for the next volume.

Book Details
Title: Lowball
Editor: George R.R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass
Publisher: Tor
Pages: 361
Year: 2014
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3195-3
First published: 2014

Jokers Wild - George R.R. Martin

Jokers Wild is the third volume in the long-running Wild Cards series. The twenty-second volume titled Lowball will be released by Tor sometime this summer. To coincide with the release of new Wild Cards books, Tor is reissuing the first three novels in the series as well. These novels are written by a writer's collective in a style that they refer to as mosaic. Most of the novels are written by a group of writers, and Martin (increasingly assisted by Melinda M. Snodgrass) edits them into one story. The series has gone though several changes in publisher but, partially carried by the success of Martin himself in recent years, seems to be going strong at the moment. I have only read the first two volumes, The Committee triad and the most recently published novel Fort Freak but I do intend to read them all eventually. This third volume was first published in 1987 and features contributions by Leanne C. Harper, Lewis Shiner, John J. Miller, Edward Bryant, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Walton Simons and George R.R. Martin himself.

Jokers Wild takes place on Wild Cards day 1986, the 40th anniversary of the release of the virus. The day has become something of an odd combination of remembrance and celebrating in recent years, and New York is flooded by tourists coming to witness the celebrations. Not everybody is in a mood to party however. Jack Robicheaux is looking for his teenage niece who ran away from home. Elsewhere Jennifer Maloy, accomplished burglar, unwittingly steals a very valuable little book, greatly upsetting the mobster it belongs to. To make an already chaotic day even more troubling, the Astronomer is out for revenge after his recent defeat at the hands of a group of Aces. Wild Cards day is never a quiet day in New York but this year it will be one to remember.

The entire story is set in one 24 hour period, a way of storytelling that is almost always all or nothing with me. The pace with which events unfold is so rapid that it can easily go at the expense of character development or coherency of the plot. Of course Wild Cards is inspired by comic books, larger than life archetypes, overdrawn emotions and clear good and evil contrast is to be expected to an extend. Jokers Wild manages to pull it off in my opinion but not without leaning heavily on the previous volume Aces High. It is most definitely not a good entry point into the series. The first three volumes, all published in 1987, were most likely planned in one go. It will be interesting to see how much the next couple of books rely on what has gone before.

Each of the authors has a central character with Martin, who writes the point of view of the owner of the the Aces High restaurant Hiram Worchester, tying them all together. Although the missing girl and the stolen book subplots intersect with the Astronomer story line in several places, it is the Astronomer who is central to the novel. Despite his defeat in the previous book, he is still very powerful and out for revenge. It's in this character that the comic book nature of the Wild Cards series shows most clearly. Where most of the characters have at least some redeeming characteristics, the Astronomer is all evil. His aim is to take out the group of Aces that defeated him before Wild Cards day is over and it doesn't take long for the message to get across.

All of the other Wild Cards novels I've read up to this point, deal with discrimination at some level. There is an interesting parallel with the treatment of AIDS patients in the 1980s, when fear of what was back then still a death sentence, resulted in many patients ending up completely isolated. In Jack's storyline it is even briefly touched upon. In this novel the victims of the Wild Cards virus let off some steam. They take over the city. Most of the action takes place among the victims of the virus so the discrimination is not quite as obvious in this novel. There is an undertone of Wild Cards days slowly turning into a freak show however. As with everything to do with the virus the celebration has a distinct dark side to it.

I must admit I'm quite impressed with the way in which the authors have managed to create a credible alternative history of New York, created a number of new landmarks in the city and give the city an impression of the colourful and tragic part of town where the Jokers band together. It's vibrant in a way but also a place where criminal activity comes to the surface and desperation is always present. In terms of setting I think they've done a wonderful job. The Wild Cards world holds infinite possibilities for more stories and the authors don't seem to be shy about using it for a bit of social commentary.

That being said, the novel does show some of the shortcomings of a work with so many authors. In depth characterization is mostly absent and here and there, fault lines in the style of writing are noticeable. Martin has done a wonderful job in editing it so the very compressed time line of the novel makes sense however. It must have been particularly challenging to get everything to fit in just a twenty-four hour time span. It's not the most challenging reading material but it is fast and fun and hard to put down once you've started. I don't think it is quite as good as either Aces High or Fort Freak but a decent entry in the series nonetheless. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing Tor reissue some more of the older Wild Cards books.

Book Details
Title: Jokers Wild
Author: George R.R. Martin
Publisher: Tor
Pages: 384
Year: 2014
Language: English
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2617-1
First published: 1987

Hunter's Run - George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham

A book with three authors, I can't think of many of those. The only one that comes to mind is Black Trilium by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May and Andre Norton, which is less that successful to put it mildly. That book was more or less commissioned. Hunter's Run has a completely different history. That alone makes is a much more interesting book. I read it the first time in Januari 2008, not long after it had been published. Back then I thought it was pretty seamlessly written for a book with three authors. Of course I hadn't read anything by Dozois and Daniel back then. That has since been remedied and I still think it is a very well edited book. Whether you will like it depends on your expectations I guess.

Mankind has made it to the stars only to find out they were beaten to it by more advanced species. None of them managed to overcome the limitations imposed by the speed of light however. That hasn't stopped these species from colonizing other planets. Humans, whit their capacity to bend ecosystems to their needs (or destroy them, depending on where you are standing) are very useful to these species indeed. They get sent out to newly discovered worlds to settle them. One such place is São Paulo, a planet in the early stages of settlement. The kind of frontier mentality that rules the planet suits our violent and anti social main character Ramon Espejo just fine. After he kills someone in a bar brawl, he decides to make himself scarce for a bit and go out prospecting. During that trip, he finds out the planet is not quite as empty has the settlers believe.

Hunter's Run has one of the most unlikely histories I've ever come across in a novel. Gardner Dozois started writing it in 1976 with the intention of writing a short story. He got stuck at one point and put it away for a bit before handing it over to George R.R. Martin to have a go at it. Martin did, but like Dozois, got stuck somewhere along to the way. He handed it back to Dozois in 1982 with the intention of alternating it between them until it was done. This never happened and in the end the two of them decided to bring in a third author, a young writer by the name of Daniel Abraham. Finishing it under the editorship of both Dozois and Martin, who by that time had big reputations in the field, must have been quite an experience for Abraham. He finished the story eventually and it was published as a novella called Shadow Twin in 2004. The three of them saw the potential for a novel in the story however and again it was substantially rewritten and expanded, resulting in the release of Hunter's Run in 2007.

Did all of that work result in a good book? Well that depends on how you look at it. It was published during the long wait for A Dance with Dragons (which wasn't even halfway by then) looking for something else by Martin to read. His influence in the novel can be felt of course, but it reaches back to the period in his career when a lot of his output consisted of short science fiction stories. Martin didn't publish his first novel, The Dying of the Light, until 1979 after all. Hunter's Run is many things but it is nothing like A Game of Thrones. People going into this novel with the expectation of getting something like that will be very disappointed. This should be obvious just from the cover text but there are an amazing number of reviews out on the web complaining about it.

There is something very unusual about the setting of this novel. Back in 1976, science fiction was the domain of white men. Dozois decided to take the rather bold step of coming up with a story with mostly characters Latin American descent. John W. Campbell would have been turning in his grave. It might have been pretty revolutionary if it had actually been published back then. These days, science fiction is thankfully a bit more varied. I understand that the novel fits into the same universe Dozois uses in his 1978 novel Strangers. I own an e-book version of that novel but I haven't read it yet. I might have to do something about that. Dozois' universe is only superficially explored in this novel I would say there is more to tell about it.

It is hard to tell who is responsible for what in this novel but if I had to have a guess, I think the character of Ramon is mostly shaped by Abraham. He is from another generation of writers approaching science fiction concepts in a different way. Ramon is something of an anit-hero. He is violent, anti-social, prone to drinking too much and involved in a very dysfunctional relationship with a woman called Elana. Sex, booze and violence are the crutches he uses to get by in a society he despises. The only time when Ramon is somewhat at ease is when he is alone prospecting. The authors use a science fiction plot device to force Ramon to look at himself and ask himself what is means to be human and how he can become a better man. The answers Ramon comes up with are surprising. It's the psychological struggle Ramon is facing that is the core of the novel. I think Martin and Dozois could have done a lot worse that bring Abraham on board for this.

If you go into this novel leaving Martin's success in the last fifteen years behind, I think Hunter's Run is a very enjoyable novel. Despite being a smooth read in terms of prose, personally I still can't see the cracks in the writing after this second read, there is something of a split in the novel. The early stages and the final section of the novel, set in the major city of the colony, read like a more traditional story, whereas the section set in the unexplored wilderness of the planet are more of a psychological drama. Not all readers will appreciates both parts of the story. Personally I don't think it is brilliant but I do think it is a very interesting work. The history, the impact each writer had on the novel and the phase of their careers they were in at the time make the story that about the novel just as interesting as the one in it. I don't think I've read a lot of books for which that is true. Still, Hunter's Run will not be what each of these three authors will be remembered for. They all have written better stuff. As such, I do consider it a minor work in the bibliographies of Martin, Dozois and Abraham.

Book Details
Title: Hunter's Run
Author: George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Pages: 394
Year: 2007
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-00-726021-8
First published: 2007