Jules Jones

I wandered into Alex Woolfson's sf webcomic site Yaoi 911 while he was still posting Artifice, and was hooked. The ad I clicked said "smart guy-on-guy sci-fi", and that's exactly what I got.

Artifice, now complete, is a solid story about an android soldier who didn't obey orders, and is now being interrogated by the company's top robopsychologist to find out why. There follows a battle of wits as Doctor Maven tries to uncover why Deacon, last survivor of an assassination squad, not only failed to kill the last survivor of the colony his unit was sent to dispose of, but attacked the retrieval team sent in to fetch him. Excellent writing by Woolfson teamed with nice art by Winona Nelson, and it skilfully blends a thoughtful look at the use and abuse of androids with a delightful gay romance.

The Young Protectors, currently in progress, is a superheroes comic. Although some of the superheroes we run into aren't so heroic... In the prologue, young superhero Kyle has just finished a quick visit to a place he doesn't really want to be found by the rest of the team, when he encounters supervillain The Annihilator. The Annihilator's price for not telling the world that he just saw Kyle go into a gay bar for the first time is... a kiss. :-) Kyle goes back to ordinary after-class superheroing in the first chapter, but life rapidly gets more complicated for him. At forty-something pages in, there's a lot of intriguing backstory and long-term plot being hinted at, and I can't wait to see what happens next. Also, some acidly entertaining commentary about the amount of collateral damage around superheroes. Woolfson's excellent script is pencilled by Adam DeKraker and coloured by Veronica Gandini. I have no idea where Woolfson's planning to take this, but if you like your superhero comics with some May/December superhero/supervillain in the mix, take a look at this.

There are more pieces available to mailing list subscribers, but these are the ones which are currently available without registering.

Book 12)

This was the out-of-copyright short story, downloaded from Feedbooks, rather than the fix-up novel with the same title. It's set in the Lensman universe (although it's not part of the main sequence of stories), and has the classic pulp feel to it. If you don't like that style, you'll hate the story, but if you do, it's a fun short read.

LibraryThing entry

UK edition of a selection of Blish's short stories and novellas. This has somewhat different contents to the US edition under the same collection name.

Common Time
Short about a test pilot flight of a faster than light ship (using the Haertel overdrive, a common strand in Blish's work). The two previous test flights left successfully but never came back, so this one is under total computer control and Garrard's primary job is to stay alive long enough to report back. The opening sequence is a vivid description of the effect of drive on time perception, with the perceived time rate decoupled from the physical time rate. This section is very hard sf in tone. It then goes into a passage that feels very New Wave to me, even though the story predates the New Wave movement. The juxtaposition is rather disconcerting. I've always loved the opening sequence, but I seem to be getting old and cranky as regards the middle section.

A Work of Art
One of my favourite pieces by Blish. Richard Strauss finds himself alive again in 2161, the product of a mind sculptor. As is quickly explained to him, his personality and talent has been recreated in the body of a musically talentless volunteer. Strauss welcomes the chance to write new music, and adapts well if crankily to the changes in society over 200 years, but is not impressed by modern music. He gradually comes to realise what the true artform of this era is. A moving exploration of identity and personality.

To Pay the Piper
The survivors of an apocalyptic war have been living in deep bunkers for years. The war goes on, but one side develops a method to re-educate the population so they can survive on the plague-ridden surface. The hard part -- it's a slow process that for practical reasons is to be restricted to the troops who will be sent to do final battle, but the civilian population want *out*. A politician exploits popular sentiment to lean on the scientists to give him priority...

Nor Iron Bars
Set in the same sequence as Common Time, but somewhat further on in the development of the Haertel overdrive. Space colonisation has begun, but the Haertel overdrive is not yet fit for shipping large numbers of humans. This is an experimental flight of another ftl drive -- and it too has strange effects, this time a disconnect between spatial dimensions. But this ship has passengers, giving the captain an added incentive to find a solution before the various side-effects kill people. Notable for showing an inter-racial couple in a story written in the 1950s.

Beep
Short story later expanded into a short novel, The Quincunx of Time. There's a spreading interstellar culture, and the intelligence service is using the top-secret Dirac transmitter, a communication device that offers instantaneous transmission over unlimited distances. Any message sent on a Dirac device can be picked up by any other Dirac, anywhere. Blish explores the practical and philosophical implications of the technology. I like this a lot, but a lot of people don't.

Beanstalk
Novella about a group of genetically engineered humans, and the problems they face in being accepted by standard issue humans. The group are tetraploids, with features common in polyploid life-forms -- longevity, large size and low fertility. It's an interesting way of looking at racial and cultural discrimination, as the group are of the same genetic stock and culture as the host culture, but are clearly differentiated by their much greater height, and have created their own sexual mores to deal with the twin problems of low fertility and the skewed gender ratio that has resulted from prospective parents being far more willing to use the treatment on male embryos than female. But it somehow falls a bit flat for me.

Overall, the collection's worth reading, but some stories are definitely more interesting than others.

Anthology of sf crime short stories from the prolific book packager Martin H Greenberg. I normally like the anthologies Greenberg puts together, in both sf and mystery, but I've got a bad case of "it's not you, it's me" with this one. I can see why other people might like it, but it doesn't quite work for me, and I think it's because I'm not quite keyed in to the relevant genre conventions. Half way through, and I still haven't encountered a story I'd regret not having read, and have read one or two that left me feeling I'd just wasted a small piece of my life -- even though I know and like the work of several of the authors (and indeed, bought the anthology specifically because it included a short by one of my favourite authors). I've finally learnt that I don't have to finish a book just because I've started it, so I'm bailing at this point -- but even so, I think this one could work for a reader with slightly different tastes to me.

LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Amazon US

Snagged from the Broad Universe mailing list -- Anne Wilkes is putting together a database of places to request reviews of your sf:

http://wilkes.zftp.com/ReviewPlaces.html