Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Star Virus by Barrington J. Bayley

The Book of the Week is The Star Virus by Barrington J. Bayley, in honor of Mr. Bayley, who passed away last week at the age of 71.

Barrington Bayley was a British writer, part of the "New Wave" who wrote regularly for New Worlds magazine in the 1960's and 70's. His output tapered off after the mid-1980's, but he continued to publish occasionally into the 21st Century. Bayley was a very talented writer and his work, while never terribly successful commercially, was influential on many of his better known contemporaries such as J.G. Ballard, M. John Harrison and Michael Moorcock, who called Bayley "the most interesting SF writer of his generation."

Published in 1970, The Star Virus was the first of Barrington Bayley's sixteen novels. It is a space opera featuring a rather cynical and impulsive starship captain. The Book of the Week is the paperback original, published as half of an Ace Double, with cover by famed artist Kelly Freas. The other half of this Ace Double is Mask of Chaos by John Jakes, who wrote quite a lot of pulpish science fiction and fantasy (notably the Brak the Barbarian sequence) before finding much greater success with historical novels like The Bastard and North and South.

Next week's Book of the Week will be my favorite Barrington Bayley novel.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Gambler by Paolo Bacigalupi

My story recommendation for this week is "The Gambler," a novelette by Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo is the first author to garner two of my weekly story recommendations, which is fitting, since in my view no one today is writing better short fiction. (I suspect the two novels he has been working on are great as well, but he hasn't shared them yet.)

You can find "The Gambler" in Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders (cover art by John Picacio). Just out from Pyr Books, Fast Forward 2 contains fourteen tales by some of the leading names in science fiction today, including Ian McDonald, Cory Doctorow, Mike Resnick, and Nancy Kress. As I wrote in my review of Fast Forward 1, the resurgence of the unthemed original anthology series is very encouraging for the SF/F field, in light of the major magazines' declining circulations. In addition to the Fast Forward series, there is strong work in the Eclipse anthologies edited by Jonathan Strahan and in the ongoing The Solaris Book(s) of New Science Fiction edited by George Mann. But Fast Forward is the best of the lot, in no small part because it has Paolo Bacigalupi.

Paolo's work is often praised for taking an unblinking look at important social and political issues. This is true, but it understates what he achieves in his fiction. First and foremost, Paolo writes beautifully crafted stories. He gets you to care about his characters and what happens to them. That is why his stories' messages are effective.

"The Gambler" is set in a near-future newsroom, when reporting is dominated by the ever-present need to draw net traffic, depicted in a great graphic representation called the "maelstrom." Our main character Ong, a political refugee from Laos, wants to investigate serious issues, but there is little room for such stories alongside the latest celebrity sex scandal. This is meaningful social commentary cleverly presented, but what makes the story work is that Bacigalupi gets you into Ong's skin early on:

Sometimes, when I wake in the night to the swish and honk of Los Angeles traffic, the confusing polyglot of dozens of countries and cultures all pressed together, in the American melting pot, I stand at my window and look down a boulevard full of red lights, where it is not safe to walk alone at night, and yet everyone obeys the traffic signals. I look down on the brash and noisy Americans in their many hues, and remember my parents: my father who cared too much to let me live under the self-declared monarchy, and my mother who would not let me die as a consequence. I lean against the window and cry with relief and loss.

Every week I go to temple and pray for them, light incense and make a triple bow to Buddha, Damma, and Sangha, and pray that they may have a good rebirth, and then I step into the light and noise and vibrancy of America.

It is not Ong's parents who need a good rebirth. Soon Ong will receive a huge career break. Whether he can take advantage of it makes for a terrific story, because you care about his fate.

All of which is not meant to minimize the importance of the issues Bacigalupi addresses in his fiction. Indeed, one reading of "The Gambler" is that Ong is a stand-in for Paolo himself, who no doubt has also been told that "no one wants to read about how the world's going to shit." Paolo writes about the world going to shit, but believe me, you want to read it.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Nerves by Lester del Rey

The Book of the Week is the 1956 paperback original edition of Nerves by Lester del Rey, with cover by legendary artist Richard Powers (with a less surreal illustration than most of his).

Nerves is a great example of a prophetic science fiction story. It concerns an accident at a nuclear power plant, similar to the Chernobyl disaster. The book describes the awful effects of radiation sickness in detail, and raises the concern that a nuclear accident might contaminate a large swath of the countryside. That would be impressive enough for a 1956 book, but the magazine version of the story first appeared in 1942. Lester del Rey was writing a cautionary story about the dangers of a nuclear power plant accident many years before the first commercial nuclear power plant was built.

The Book of the Week was published by Ballantine Books, one of the major science fiction publishers of the time. In 1977, the Ballantine SF/F line was renamed "Del Rey Books," in honor of Lester del Rey and his wife Judy-Lynn, who had become the lead editors at Ballantine. The Del Rey imprint remains one of the major SF/F publishers to this day. Next week, however, we will return to the much smaller Regency Books, with my favorite from that odd publisher's list.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Luckiest Street in Georgia by Vylar Kaftan

My story recommendation for this week is "The Luckiest Street in Georgia" by Vylar Kaftan, from the October 2008 issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine.

Miss Minette is 83. She sits in her rocking chair and watches her street. She sees everything happening on her street, and many things that have not yet occurred but will. And nothing bad happens to her neighbors when she is watching. Except perhaps for Tom across the way, the one person on the street Minette cannot change.

"The Luckiest Street in Georgia" is a short and simple story, yet thought-provoking with an emotionally satisfying resolution. Miss Minette is a well-drawn elderly protagonist, something of a rarity in science fiction and fantasy.

Vylar Kaftan is a new writer to watch. She has published some two dozen pieces of short fiction in the last five years, in small but high-quality venues such as Clarkesworld, Helix, Lone Star Stories, Paper Cities, and Sybil's Garage. (I won't mention that she was a tocmate of mine in the Glorifying Terrorism anthology, because pimping my one published story again would be pathetic.) "The Luckiest Street in Georgia" is Kaftan's first appearance in any of the genre's major print magazines, but surely not her last.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Eleventh Commandment by Lester del Rey

The Book of the Week is The Eleventh Commandment by Lester del Rey, a 1962 paperback original, cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.

This is from the Regency Books line, which we were discussing three months ago before being interrupted by the death of Thomas M. Disch and by the Hugo Awards. Regency deliberately sought out books with controversial topics and The Eleventh Commandment is no exception, heavy on the sex and religious satire. This was rather different from del Rey's usual fare, space opera and young adult adventures.

In two weeks we will finally get to my favorite Regency Book, but first, next week you will see why Lester del Rey is on the list of science fiction authors who had a remarkably prescient vision of an event decades in the future.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente

My story recommendation for this week is "Palimpsest" by Catherynne M. Valente, a short story from Paper Cities, an anthology of urban fantasy edited by Ekaterina Sedia (cover illustration by Aaron Acevedo).

"Palimpsest" explores the bizarre eponymous city, which seems to be Valente's answer to China Miéville's New Crobuzon. The story is absorbing from the opening paragraph, when four newcomers to the city meet at a fortune-teller's shop:

Four strangers sit in the red chairs, strip off their socks, plunge their feet into the ink-baths, and hold hands under an amphibian stare. This is the first act of anyone entering Palimpsest: Orlande will take your coats, sit you down, and make you family. She will fold you four together like quartos. She will draw you each a card -- look, for you it is the Broken Ship reversed, which signifies perversion, a long journey without enlightenment, gout -- and tie your hands together with red yarn. Wherever you go in Palimpsest, you are bound to these strangers who happened onto Orlande's salon just when you did, and you will go nowhere, eat no capon or dormouse, drink no oversweet port that they do not also taste, and they will visit no whore that you do not also feel beneath you, and until that ink washes from your feet -- which, given that Orlande is a creature of the marsh and no stranger to mud, will be some time -- you cannot breathe but that they breathe also.

As this excerpt suggests, Valente writes remarkably rich, lush prose. (The same is no doubt true of her poetry, which I have not read.) Usually I avoid authors with such an ornate style, because I find it annoying if not done just right. Thankfully, Catherynne Valente does it just right. She immerses you in her story without letting it become oppressive. Her two-volume fantasy The Orphan's Tales was a World Fantasy Award nominee and won the Tiptree Award and Mythopoiec Award, and there is every indication Valente is just getting started.

"Palimpsest" gives us a preview of Valente's forthcoming novel of the same title, scheduled for release in February 2009. I can't wait.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi

My story recommendation for this week is "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi, a novelette from the September 2008 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I already praised "Pump Six" in my review of Pump Six and Other Stories, but F&SF reprinting the story gives me an excuse to talk about it again, and this story deserves all the exposure it can get.

"Pump Six" is set in a near-future New York City in obvious decline. Infrastructure is falling apart, sterility is a rampant problem, and many of the children who are born turn out to be bizarre mutations. Yet New Yorkers seem absurdly unconcerned about all this. The main character is trying to keep the city's sewage plant operating, but he can't even convince his coworkers that wearing a smiley-face sticker does not protect them from the effects of polluted water. Bacigalupi eventually gives us a science fictional explanation for why people are behaving so stupidly. "Pump Six" is by far Bacigalupi's funniest story to date, but it is also just as effective a cautionary SF tale as most of his work.

Paolo Bacigalupi has only published eleven stories, but they are as strong a body of work as anyone in the field has produced in the last decade. (His twelfth story, "The Gambler," to appear in the forthcoming collection Fast Forward 2 edited by Lou Anders, is also excellent.) His stories are always beautifully written and usually address issues important to our collective future. Bacigalupi has been nominated for the Hugo Award three times, and I suggest "Pump Six" merits a fourth nomination.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card

The Book of the Week is The Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card, cover art by Carl Lundgren. This is copy #159 out of the 475-copy special limited first edition with slipcase, published by Phantasia Press in 1989. The Folk of the Fringe is a collection of beautifully written short stories all set in near-future Utah, where Americans attempt to rebuild after the collapse of civilization due to biological war and global climate change. (Ironically, Card is today an outspoken global warming skeptic.)

This slipcovered limited edition was issued simultaneously with a much less expensive trade hardcover edition. The bookseller from whom I acquired the Book of the Week apparently did not realize that he had the far more valuable limited edition, perhaps because the signed limitation page is inserted at the back of this book instead of in the front. And so I got to add to my collection a book I had coveted but for which I hadn't been prepared to cough up full price. Of course, the bookseller gets the last laugh. The bread and butter of the used book trade is taking advantage of us poor suckers who hang out at bookshops hoping to find a rare first edition, but buying out the rest of the booksellers' stock while we look.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

The Book of the Week is PS Publishing's limited edition of The Colorado Kid by Stephen King. This is my coolest acquisition from the dealer room of the recent World Science Fiction Convention here in Denver. It is the first hardcover edition of The Colorado Kid, preceded by the paperback original from Hard Case Crime. I also have the paperback, but this numbered (mine is copy #5), slipcovered, limited edition is much the preferred edition, in no small part because it is signed by Stephen King as well as by the artist Glenn Chadbourne and by Charles Ardai, who wrote the introduction.

A slipcover is always a dead giveaway that a publisher is trying to get you to pay too much for a book. This time I was willing to do it, because my collection has been missing anything signed by Stephen King. The nice thing about a signed limited edition like this is you know the signature is authentic. Because he is so popular and because he does not do many public appearances, Stephen King is one of the few living authors whose signature is valuable enough for unscrupulous folks to bother forging.

Stephen King wrote The Colorado Kid for the Hard Case Crimes set of cheap, lurid, pulp-style mysteries. Charles Ardai, one of the creators of Hard Case, wrote to Stephen King's agent asking if King would write an introduction to Hard Case's first book. Ardai's introduction to the Book of the Week describes how he nearly suffered a heart attack when the agent called to say that Stephen King would rather write one of the books himself. The novel King wrote, The Colorado Kid, is not really lurid or pulpish, but nevertheless fits nicely into the series because it is in part an extended meditation on what is appealing to us about mysteries. Incidentally, The Colorado Kid has almost nothing to do with Colorado; it all takes place on a small island off the coast of Maine. Next week's BOTW will be a slipcovered limited edition I recently acquired on the cheap.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Daughter of Bótù by Eugie Foster

My story recommendation for this week is "Daughter of Bótù" by Eugie Foster, from the August 2008 issue of Realms of Fantasy (story illustration by Jada Fitch).

"Daughter of Bótù" is a fairy tale with an Eastern flavor. It is the tale of An-ying, a rabbit transformed into a young woman, who quickly falls in love with a prince. The premise may sound routine but it soon turns into something memorable, thanks to Eugie Foster's gorgeous prose and to the twists the story takes as the love between An-ying and her prince becomes rather complicated.

In the past five years, Eugie Foster has published an impressive volume of interesting short fiction, commonly with an Asian setting and feel. Her collection Returning My Sister's Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice is due out early in 2009 and is one to watch for.

The August 2008 issue of Realms of Fantasy has an impressive list of contributors, including Liz Williams, James Van Pelt, Carrie Vaughn, and Jim C. Hines, but even among such strong company, I found "Daughter of Bótù" the clear standout.