May 10, today as I’m writing this, is the birthday of George Alec Effinger (1947-2002). George was a regular at Armadillcon for a number of years back in the nineties. He was very easy to approach and talk to.

He has faded into obscurity these days. He wrote a handful of stand-alone novels, but one (Nightmare Blue) in collaboration with Gardner Dozois and one (The Red Tape War) in collaboration with Mike Resnick and Jack Chalker.

He was working a cyberpunk series featuring a character named Maurid Audran, who lived in an Arab ghetto called the Budayeen. He didn’t live to finish the series, but the three novels (start with When Gravity Fails) and the collection from Golden Gryphon press are worth seeking out.

But I want to highlight a series of short stories and novelettes Effinger wrote through the eighties and nineties. They were collected in Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson in 1993. another three stories were written later and not included in this volume. These were a series of tongue-in-cheek tales that palyed with the tropes of classic pulp adventure.

The setup is this. Maureen starts out as a Valley Girl. The stories are narrated by her friend Bitsy. She finds herself in a number of worlds. You can see the cover of the February 1986 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction above. You can tell from the cartoonish elements of the illustration that these stories weren’t intended to be taken seriously. They were just for fun.

And they were a lot of fun. The characters age. Maureen starts out as a teenager, but she is a married adult in the later stories. At least that’s how I remember them. I read them the Science Fiction Book Club edition of the collection.

One of the things that stood out to me was the voice of the stories. It changed as Bitsy (who tried not to go by that name as she got older) aged and matured. If you can find a copy of any of the stories, or the collection, give them a read. Effinger had a lot of fun with these stories, and you could tell he respected the source material.