Locus, July 2014
Page 22
MEDIA-RELATED
1) William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back, Ian Doescher (Quirk)
2) Darth Vader and Son, Jeffrey Brown (Chronicle)
3) Vader’s Little Princess, Jeffrey Brown (Chronicle)
4) William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, Ian Doescher (Quirk)
5) Godzilla, Greg Cox (Titan)
GAMING-RELATED
1) World of Warcraft: War Crimes, Christie Golden (Gallery)
2) Warhammer 40K: Scars, Chris Wraight (Black Library US)
3) Forgotten Realms: The Companions, R.A. Salvatore (Wizards of the Coast)
4) Forgotten Realms: Companions Codex I: Night of the Hunter, R.A. Salvatore (Wizards of the Coast)
5) Warhammer 40K: The Greater Good, Sandy Mitchell (Black Library US)
audible.com (audio)
SCIENCE FICTION
1) The Martian, Andy Weir (Podium)
2) The Lost Fleet: Steadfast, Jack Campbell (Audible)
3) Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes (Recorded Books)
4) The Currents of Space, Isaac Asimov (AudioGO)
5) The Didymus Contingency, Jeremy Robinson (Breakneck Media)
6) Deadly Shores, Taylor Anderson (Tantor)
7) Dust World, B.V. Larson (Audible)
8) The Kraken Project, Douglas Preston (Macmillan Audio)
9) Dune, Frank Herbert (Macmillan Audio)
10) 11-22-63, Stephen King (Simon & Schuster Audio)
11) The Stand, Stephen King (Random House Audio)
12) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (Random House Audio)
13) The Atlantis Gene, A.G. Riddle (Audible)
14) The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, Jack Campbell (Audible)
15) Ender’s Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition, Orson Scott Card (Macmillan Audio)
16) Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (Random House Audio)
17) Influx, Daniel Suarez (Penguin Audio)
18) Reamde, Neal Stephenson (Brilliance Audio)
19) Ender’s Game Alive: The Full Cast Audioplay, Orson Scott Card (Audible)
20) Eon, Greg Bear (Audible)
FANTASY
1) Skin Game, Jim Butcher (Penguin Audio)
2) A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
3) A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
4) A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
5) A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
6) A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
7) Sixth Grave on the Edge, Darynda Jones (Macmillan Audio)
8) Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson (Macmillan Audio)
9) My Life as a White Trash Zombie, Diana Rowland (Audible)
10) Outlander, Diana Gabaldon (Recorded Books)
11) Storm Front, Jim Butcher (Buzzy Multimedia)
12) Dead but Not Forgotten: Stories from the World of Sookie Stackhouse, Charlaine Harris & Toni L.P. Kelner, eds.(Audible)
13) The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson (Macmillan Audio)
14) World of Warcraft: War Crimes, Christie Golden (Simon & Schuster Audio)
15) Blood Wager, Connie Suttle (self-published)
16) The Line, J. D. Horn (Brilliance Audio)
17) Fool Moon, Jim Butcher (Buzzy Multimedia)
18) The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (Recorded Books)
19) Grave Peril, Jim Butcher (Buzzy Multimedia)
20) The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, Mark Hodder (Audible)
Return to In This Issue listing.
NEW AND NOTABLE
John Joseph Adams, ed., Dead Man’s Hand (Titan US 5/14) The Wild West gets weird in this anthology of 23 weird Western stories by some of the biggest guns in the field, including Joe R. Lansdale, Seanan McGuire, Charles Yu, Hugh Howey, Orson Scott Card, and Tad Williams.
Greg Bear & Gardner Dozois, eds., Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson’s Worlds (Subterranean 4/14) The many worlds of Anderson’s fiction provide plenty of inspiration for this tribute anthology of 13 original stories by noted authors including Nancy Kress, C.J. Cherryh, Stephen Baxter, Terry Brooks, Robert Silverberg, and David Brin, along with appreciations by the authors and some of Anderson’s family and friends.
Kristen Britain, Mirror Sight (DAW 5/14) The Green Rider series takes a surprising and entertaining Steampunk turn in this largely standalone fifth novel in the series, which finds Rider Karigan G’ladheon transported 200 years ahead into a grim future.
Hayley Campbell, The Art of Neil Gaiman (Harper Design 5/14) Gaiman’s many creative interests are examined in this intriguing mix of biography and art, extensively illustrated with photos, illustrations for Gaiman’s work, plus his own drawings and doodles, reproductions of working notes, scripts for comics, and more. A fascinating look at the artistic processes of one of the field’s most popular authors.
C. Robert Cargill, Queen of the Dark Things (Harper Voyager US 5/14) Mortal wizard Colby Stevens, still reeling from events in Dreams and Shadows, finds old enemies – one a former friend – turning up in Austin, Texas. Dealing with them dredges up old memories of how he became a wizard, a revealing look at this fascinating character and his complex alternate world.
Paul Cornell, The Severed Streets (Tor 5/14) Police investigators continue to learn how to deal with the world they see with their new second sight – and justify their team’s existence in a time of budget cuts – by looking into murders inspired by Jack the Ripper in this gritty, dark urban fantasy novel, sequel to London Falling.
Ellen Datlow, ed., The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Six (Night Shade 6/14) The lastest year’s best anthology from one of the most respected editors in the field, this offers 24 horror stories from 2013 with a summation of the year by Datlow. Authors include Laird Barron, Neil Gaiman, Linda Nagata, Kim Newman, and Conrad Williams.
Rich Horton, ed., Space Opera (Prime Books 5/14) Locus’s own Rich Horton selects 22 space opera stories from the last 14 years by an impressive roster of authors including Gwyneth Jones, Greg Egan, Naomi Novik, Jay Lake, and Alastair Reynolds, ‘‘This is a big, meaty book that delivers a lot of good core SF, some of it space opera as good as anybody has ever written it, and well worth the money.’’ [Gardner Dozois]
Kij Johnson, ed., Nebula Awards Showcase 2014 (Pyr 5/14) This year’s Nebula Award winners and selected finalists are showcased in this 48th volume in the annual anthology series, with six stories, two novel excerpts, award-winning poems, and essays on Grand Master Gene Wolfe.
New and Notable continues after ad.
Michael Kelly, ed., Shadows & Tall Trees 2014 (Undertow Publications 5/14) The literary journal of weird and strange tales becomes an annual anthology with this first volume, which presents 16 original stories by authors including Robert Shearman, Kaaron Warren, F. Brett Cox, and Conrad Williams.
James Morrow, The Madonna and the Starship (Tachyon 6/14) This delightfully over-the-top novella mixes satire, SF, and religion in a tale of the host of a 1950s TV science show for kids, visited by admiring, lobster-like aliens who decide to eliminate all viewers of a popular religious program.
William H. Patterson, Jr., Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2: 1948-1988: The Man Who Learned Better (Tor 6/14) The second volume in Patterson’s biography of Heinlein, following the Locus Award-winning and critically acclaimed Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1: 1907-1948: Learning Curve. ‘‘Even though this last half of Heinlein’s life is seen from a more partisan viewpoint… it is possible to read through that skewing to get a sense of a complex, contradictory personality… it will certainly remain part of the discussion about its subject’s place in SF and those parts of American culture that the genre has touched.’’ [Russell Letson]
Jonathan Strahan, ed., Reach for Infinity (Solaris 5/14) Strahan’s latest original anthology presents 14 SF stories of striving for the next step, whatever it may be, by a stellar crew of authors
including Greg Egan, Ellen Klages, Adam Roberts, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Kathleen Ann Goonan. ‘‘So far Strahan’s selection constitutes the most interesting conversation about the fantastic I’ve seen this year.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]
Jeff VanderMeer, Authority (FSG Originals 5/14) The weirdness escalates in this second book in VanderMeer’s acclaimed Southern Reach trilogy about a mysteriously isolated swampland and scientific attempts to explore it. ‘‘Whether a tale that began with free-fall will lead to fantasy, hardcore science fiction, or Someplace Entirely Different, Jeff VanderMeer will continue to probe the nature of existence and the human soul.’’ [Faren Miller]
Jo Walton, My Real Children (Tor 5/14) An old woman remembers having lived two alternate lives through some highly divergent history in this unusual SF novel. ‘‘Walton’s undeniable skills in both character development and social extrapolation result in a novel which at its best is an epic of regret and redemption, and a wise meditation on what our lives mean, and what they might have meant.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]
Return to In This Issue listing.
TERRY BISSON: THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
July 16, 2031. Indigent chipped. Los Angeles homeless fitted with intradermal GPS to expedite monitoring by social workers. A low-intensity shock discourages clients from leaving their service area.
July 26, 2044. Poltroon’s revenge. Afternoon talk show host Calvin Mays killed in black powder ten-pacer by insulted Indiana governor Dermont Hood. First televised duel since Affairs of Honor declared ‘‘Free Speech’’ by Supreme Court in 2039.
July 12, 2076. Two riders approaching. Alice Fedler’s bestselling novelization of Bob Dylan’s ‘‘All Along the Watchtower’’ wins coveted PEN/Prosation prize. First win by female author since Kate Proon’s 266-page Dover Beach in 2061.
July 3, 2105. Cerulean survival. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) removed from Endangered List as EA (Extinction Alert) confirms 74 percent born dark blue with flippers. Swift adaptation to loss of sea ice prompts new research into evolutionary triggers.
–Terry Bisson
Return to In This Issue listing.
DANIEL KEYES (1927-2014)
Author DANIEL KEYES, 86, died June 15, 2014. Keyes is best known for his Hugo Award winning classic SF story ‘‘Flowers for Algernon’’ (F&SF, 1959), the Nebula Award winning and bestselling 1966 novel expansion, and the film version Charly (1968).
Daniel Keyes (1997)
Keyes was born August 9, 1927 in New York, and served in the US Maritime Service from 1945-47. He attended Brooklyn College, where he earned a BA in Psychology in 1950 and a MA in English and American Literature in 1961. He worked variously as an editor, comics writer, fashion photographer, and teacher before joining the faculty of Ohio University in 1966, where he taught as a professor of English and creative writing, becoming professor emeritus in 2000. He married Aurea Georgina Vaquez in 1952, who predeceased him in 2013; they had two daughters.
Keyes began working in SF as an associate editor at Marvel Science Fiction in 1951, and his first published SF story was ‘‘Precedent’’ there in 1952. Other novels include The Touch (1968; as The Contaminated Man, 1977), The Fifth Sally (1980), and The Asylum Prophecies (2009). He had other books published in Japan, including novel Until Death Do Us Part: The Sleeping Princess (1998), and wrote true crime volumes including Edgar Award winner The Minds of Billy Milligan (1982), sequel The Milligan Wars: A True-Story Sequel (1994 in Japan, forthcoming in the US), and Unveiling Claudia: A True Story of Serial Murder (1986). His memoir Algernon, Charlie and I: A Writer’s Journey (2000) discusses the experience of writing the story and its impact on his life. Keyes was honored as a SFWA Author Emeritus in 2000.
Keyes lived in south Florida, and is survived by his daughters.
THE FLOWER BEING by Gary K. Wolfe
The first time I met Daniel Keyes, he was trying to register for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Ft. Lauderdale in 1998. Even though he was an invited author, something had slipped through the cracks on his registration, and the young person manning the desk didn’t seem to recognize the name Daniel Keyes. That was the only time during that long weekend that someone failed to recognize the name, or to be awed by it. Keyes hadn’t been seen much in science fiction circles for a few years (though he did attend Florida mystery writers’ conferences), let alone in the kind of semi-academic, semi-professional settings such as ICFA. So only a few of the writers and academics there had actually met him.
Standing: Joan Gordon, Judith Clute, Brian Aldiss, Veronica Hollinger, Charles N. Brown, Joe & Gay Haldeman, Stephen R. Donaldson, Dede Weil, Gary K. Wolfe, John Clute, David G. Hartwell. Kneeling: Rusty Hevelin, Daniel Keyes. (1997)
There’s a kind of guilty pleasure in being able to introduce a famous person to unsuspecting admirers, and I got to do a lot of that during that weekend. One very accomplished writer, an ICFA regular, literally fell backwards into his chair by the pool bar. ‘‘’Flowers for Algernon,’’’ he said in a kind of daze. ‘‘That is the perfect narrative arc.’’
Anyway, I helped Dan straighten out his registration, and as we were chatting I mentioned that my wife and I had been married a few months earlier and were doing another wedding for our ICFA friends, mostly at the insistence of Charles Brown, late of this magazine. We already had a lot of enthusiastic participants – Charles conducting the ceremony, Russell Letson and Joe Haldeman providing music, Rusty Hevelin as ring-bearer. But Dan, who I had known for maybe an hour and a half at this point, wanted in on the action, too. My wife said about the only role we hadn’t filled was flower girl, and Dan jumped at it. ‘‘Only it’s flower being,’’ he said. ‘‘Everyone already associates me with flowers anyway’’.
Daniel & Aurea Keyes (2000)
And so we did, and still do. Unlike some writers whose reputations are so clearly linked to a single story from relatively early in their career, Dan didn’t seem to mind much that his other work was less well-known, or known mostly outside the science fiction field. He was, for some reason, immensely successful in Japan, which is still the only place his Collected Stories has been published, and his nonfiction study of multiple personality disorder and the criminal justice system The Minds of Billy Milligan was an Edgar nominee and a winner of Germany’s Kurd Lasswitz prize. But he was always unashamedly proud of ‘‘Flowers for Algernon’’, and even wrote a fascinating ‘‘autobiography of a story’’ with Algernon, Charlie, and I in 2000, including a detailed account of the origins of the story, his later battles with Hollywood figures over rights, and even the short-lived Broadway musical version. It’s not surprising that when Keyes received the SFWA’s redoubtable ‘‘Author Emeritus’’ award at that year’s Nebula banquet, he made a point of reminding everyone that he wasn’t emeritus at all, but that he’d just moved away from SF.
The memoir also makes clear that Keyes was more closely involved in the science fiction world of the early 1950s than many readers suspect, befriending Lester Del Rey and Morton and Philip Klass (William Tenn) before his career even got started, later being accepted as a kind of junior member of the Hydra Club, and presenting ‘‘Flowers’’ at a Milford workshop attended by Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, James Blish, Avram Davidson, Ted Cogswell, and Gordon R. Dickson. It was Del Rey, in fact, who got the young and still-unpublished Keyes the interview that led to his position at Stadium Publications as associate editor for a line of nine pulps, including Marvel Science Fiction, a defunct late 1930s magazine that Stadium had revived in 1950. Keyes also edited a comic book line, apparently working under Stan Lee.
Daniel Keyes (1960s)
So ‘‘Algernon’’ wasn’t as anomalous as it may have seemed when it came in third in the SWFA polling for Robert Silverberg’s landmark 1970 anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Just about every other story in that volume was the work of writers with long, legendary reputations – Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon, et
c. – but even the least prolific of these writers, Stanley Weinbaum, who died prematurely at 33, published something like three times as many SF stories as Keyes.
But then, few stories have had a life like ‘‘Flowers for Algernon’’ – a TV drama, then as Keyes’ novel of the same title, then as a feature film (winning an Oscar for Cliff Robertson), a play (mostly for school and amateur groups, but with separate adaptations in France, Australia, Poland, and Japan), a radio drama, a Broadway musical, two audio books, another TV movie with Matthew Modine (quite a bit closer to the original story), and another TV movie, in France in 2006. It’s one of a handful of SF stories that seems to have been read by practically everyone, sometimes as a school assignment, sometimes through its stunningly long list of anthologizations – and sometimes, as generations of my own students can attest – with no clue that it’s an SF story at all, simply because they felt it to be too emotionally charged and genuinely heartbreaking to just be SF.
None of Keyes’s other SF stories come close to ‘‘Flowers for Algernon’’, of course, but his nonfiction studies of mental illness The Minds of Billy Milligan and Unveiling Claudia demonstrate some of the same narrative drive and explore some of the same neurological and psychological issues that SF has only begun to embrace meaningfully in the last few decades. In that sense at least ‘‘Flowers for Algernon’’ begins to seem years ahead of its time.
Keyes strews flowers at Gary K. Wolfe & Dede Weil’s wedding celebration, with Joe Haldeman, Dede, Brian Aldiss, and others in background (1997)
But what I remember most about Dan is the startled delight of almost everyone who met him for the first time that March in Ft. Lauderdale, and at the subsequent ICFA conferences over the next few years. I don’t know what anyone expected the author of ‘‘Flowers for Algernon’’ to be like, but it probably wasn’t a short New Yorker in wildly colored vests, a manic sense of humor, and the rapid-fire delivery of a Henny Youngman. And, of course, with the tragic sense of the life of the damaged people he wrote about, including that student in his remedial high school English class who pleaded with Keyes more than 60 years ago, ‘‘I want to be smart.’’