Author Archives: Keith West

Piracy on the High Skies

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Cosmic Corsairs
Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio, eds.
Baen
Trade Paper $16.00
Ebook $8.99

When Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio said, “Cosmic Corsairs”, I said, “I’m there.”

Aside from the fact that space pirates are among my favorite things to read about, the anthologies these two gentlemen have put together in the past have been well-worth the investment, which meant I bought this book as soon as I could get my grubby little hands on it and started it immediately.

I am a satisfied customer.  Continue reading →

Simak’s Birthday Nonpost

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Today, August 3, is Clifford D. Simak’s birthday. Simak (1904-1988) is a favorite in these here parts. It’s been a long day, It’s late, and I’m tired. I’ll raise a glass in his memory shortly, but I’m not going to do a full post tonight. The computer keeps freezing up for a few seconds at a time, and I don’t have the patience to reboot it.

I’ve got a post in mind and will get it up in a few days.

 

C. M. Kornbluth Educates Tigress McCardle

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Cyril Kornbluth (1923-1958) was born on this date, July 23. He died of a heart attack. Had he lived, he probably would have become the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Kornbluth was extremely cynical, something that was quite obvious from his work. But he also had a great sense of humor. An excellent example is the story I read in honor of his birth, “The Education of Tigress McCardle”. It was first published in the July 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction Magazine. I have no idea why it wasn’t included in The Best of C. M. Kornbluth. It is one of his best.

There are several things going on in this story. Some rube who talks like a hick has been elected president, and the Constitution has been changed to make him king. Meanwhile, a Chinese merchant on the West Coast has decided it’s time to revive the Yellow Peril and reinvents himself as the new Fu Manchu. He manages to get a parental licensing measure implemented and makes the king think it’s his idea.

This is all backstory. Continue reading →

Thoughts on Robert Sheckley

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Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) was born on this date, July 16. Sheckley worked at all lengths, but he is probably best remembered for his short stories.  They tended to be witty and satirical.

I’m not going to review a story because I’ve spent most of the day getting an online exam ready and trying to calm some nervous students. Not that I blame them. Summer classes move fast, this course is challenging in a normal semester, and the online format isn’t helping. I haven’t had time to read one.

In spite of that, I want to make note of the occasion. Sheckley was an important writer who deserves to be remembered.

I was fortunate enough to meet him the year he died. He was a guest at ConDFW in February of that year. This was only a few weeks before he traveled to the Ukraine and fell ill. After returning home, he died in December.

I remember sitting around a table in a small conference room where he read one of his stories. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen of us in the room. I was rather surprised there weren’t more people there. He’d recently had a story published in an anthology, which he was gracious enough to sign for me along with a couple of collections I had brought with me.

The Ebb and Flow of Empire” The Van Rijn Method Part 1

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I’ve been rereading Poul Anderson’s future history, beginning at the beginning. This series is sometimes call the Technic Future history. The name comes from the Polesotechnic League, which is the first interstellar government, although it’s more of a league of intergalactic traders and merchants. Baen has collected all the stories in order of internal chronology.  The first volume is called The Van Rijn Method.

This series has to main subseries. The first concerns the trader Nicholas Van Rijn (rhymes with “line”) and his protege David Falkayn. The second subseries deals with Dominic Flandry, who is an agent trying to stave off the fall of the Galactic Empire, even though he knows it will be ultimately futile. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, Heinlein

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Robert A. Heinlein

Today, July 7, is the birthday of Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988). It’s become fashionable to slam him now that he isn’t around to defend himself. It seems the words of Marc Antony still are true “The evil men do live after them; the good is oft interred with their bones” (Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 2, lines 3-4).

Granted there are some Heinlein works I have no intention of rereading or even reading in the first place, but there is no denying he cast a long shadow over the genre. When you still have detractors over thirty years after your death, you have had an impact. Continue reading →

“The Bee’s Kiss” by Charles Sheffield

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Charles Sheffield

Charles Sheffield (1935-2002) was born on this date, June 25. It has been nearly two decades since his death. Sadly his work has fallen into obscurity. And that’s a shame because he was one of the best writers of hard science fiction in that closing years of the Twentieth Century. Hard sf, or scientifically rigorous science fiction as I think it should be called, has a reputation in some circles as having cardboard characters and being long on description. In fairness, there is some truth to this, especially in some of the older sf.

That some people tar all of this subgenre with that brush is unfortunate. There are a number of writers who observe scientific rigor in their works while creating living, breathing characters. Charles Sheffield was one. His characters were fully functioning human beings, not caricatures from central casting.  An example is the scientific horror story “The Bee’s Kiss”. Continue reading →

The Ebb and Flow of Empire

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Over on Adventures Fantastic, I’ve been reviewing the nominees for the Retro Hugos. Isaac Asimov has two stories from his Foundation series on the ballot, one a novelette, and the other a short story. I haven’t read the original Foundation series since I was in high school. These two stories are the last two in Foundation. So I read the whole book.  The last story in the book, “The Merchant Princes”, which was published under the title of “The Big and the Little” before the story that precedes it in the book. There’s a passage in the story where the central character travels outside the Foundation’s sphere of influence and talks to an old man. The old man tells him what’s happened in the Empire, which the Foundation has lost contact with, over the last few decades.

In addition to increasing my interest in history, that made me want to read something with an epic scale.  I immediately thought of Poul Anderson’s Technic future history, particularly the Dominic Flandry subseries. Which made me want to reread H. Beam Piper, Dune, and  and to read the rest of Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series.  (If you haven’t read Ruocchio, you’re missing out. I’ve only read the first book, but I’ll be buying all the others.) Continue reading →

Keith Laumer Sends a Message

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There are some writers who are superstars and whose names and works live long after they have entered the long night. There are others who do consistently good work, have their cadres of fans, and are forgotten within a few years or decades of their passing.

Keith Laumer

One such author was Keith Laumer (1925-1993), who was born on this day, June 9. Laumer died nearly three decades ago. In the early 2000’s Baen published a number of omnibuses of his work. Since then, he’s fallen into neglect.

Laumer is best remembered for his tales of the diplomat Retief or perhaps the Bolo series of intelligent tanks. But he wrote a number of other things, all of them enjoyable. He could do action and adventure, space opera, and time travel. He knew how to tell an entertaining story, and he could hide a moral lesson in it without detracting from the entertainment or beating you over the head with his message. Continue reading →

Lester del Rey and Hitler

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Today, June 2, is the birthday of Lester del Rey. Yes, the Del Rey imprint at Ballatine was named after him and his wife, Judy-Lynn, who were editors there for many years. Lester was the primarily the fantasy editor and Judy-Lynn the science fiction editor, if memory serves.

But Lester also wrote science fiction, and quite a bit of it before he took up the editing chores at the imprint named after him. I looked at one of his fantasies here.

For this post, I want to look at what I think is one of his best stories, and certainly one of my favorites. “My Name is Legion” is a time travel story, and while what’s going on is lost on the villain (Hitler, although he isn’t called by that name), the perceptive reader will understand the punishment he gives himself. Continue reading →