Book Review: A Dream of Kinship

Book Review: 'A Dream of Kinship' by Richard Cowper

3 / 5 Stars

'A Dream of Kinship' (240 pp.) was published by Pocket Books / Timescape in August, 1981. The cover artist is uncredited.

This is the second book in the so-called 'White Bird of Kinship' trilogy. The initial volume in the trilogy is 'The Road to Corlay' (1978) and the final volume, 'A Tapestry of Time', was published in 1982.

My review of 'The Road to Corlay' is available here.

'Richard Cowper' was the pen name of the UK writer John Middleton Murry, Jr. (1926 - 2002).

'Dream' opens in 3019 AD, just after the events of 'The Road to Corlay'. The Kinship, a sort of post-Christian sect heavily imbued with humanism, is under persecution by the Catholic Church and its head inquisitor, the malevolent Lord Constant. Across the archipelagos that constitute the former British Isles and northern France, the agents of Lord Constant maneuver to detect and extirpate the followers of the White Bird (the talisman of the Kinsman, and a sort of New Age analogue to the Holy Spirit).

Corlay, a city in Brittany, is under secular protection and seemingly safe from the actions of the Church. However, in the opening chapters of 'Dream' we are introduced to the Magpie, an enigmatic soldier of fortune and convert to the Kinship. The Magpie has come to Corlay filled with a sense of unease, and anxious to see to the welfare of Jane, the young widow of Thomas of Norwich, an early acolyte of the faith and the man who best knew the boy Tom of Cartmel, the John-the-Baptist analogue introduced in 'Corlay'.

Jane and her circle are reluctant to believe that the Church would dare strike at them in the safety of Corlay. But as the Magpie is about to discover, it is not just the survival of the Kinship that is a stake, but the survival of the boy, Tom, that Jane soon is to birth. For Tom is to be no ordinary child, but one gifted with strange powers, powers for good, but also for ill. And the Lord Constant fears for the change that will overtake his world if Tom is allowed to live...... 

I gave 'The Road to Corlay' a three-star Rating and I am content with bestowing the same Rating for 'A Dream of Kinship'. 

The opening chapters of 'Dream' are the best, being well-crafted in terms of building suspense and pathos unfolding amid the wintry hills and desolate fields of Brittany. 

The remaining two-thirds of the novel are considerably less dramatic, as they constitute a  bildungsroman centered on the youth and maturation of Jane's son Tom, and his talent for piping songs that bring a sense of the otherworldy to his listeners. Interspersed with the adventures of Tom are incidents dealing with the at-times lethal geopolitics of the Kingdoms making up what used to be the British Isles. 

Curiously, in 'Dream', author Cowper abandons the science fiction sub-plot present in 'Corlay'. I found this improved the novel, allowing Cowper to focus more fully on his pastoral, post-apocalyptic civilization, which he depicts with considerable affection. 

Summing up, those who read 'The Road to Corlay' will want to pursue this second volume in the trilogy. It's a fantasy novel with a skillful prose style on the part of author Cowper. However, 'A Dream of Kinship' does have a deliberate, character-centered pacing, and those accustomed to the broader and more exciting scale of 'epic' fantasy storytelling may find 'Dream' to be lacking in this regard.

Book Review: The Faded Sun: Kesrith

Book Review: 'The Faded Sun: Kesrith' by C. J. Cherry

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Faded Sun: Kesrith’ (252 pp.) is DAW Book No. UE1600 and was published in August 1978. The cover illustration is by Dino D’Achille. It’s the first book in the so-called ‘mri’ trilogy, with the other volumes ‘The Faded Sun: Shon'jir’ (1978) and ‘The Faded Sun: Kutath’ (1979).

Some 20 years ago I started to read ‘Kesrith’, got about half-way through it, and was so bored, I gave up on the book. In the spirit of completion, I recently decided to attempt ‘Kesrith’ again, and this time I persevered all the way to the end…………

Following the publication of ‘Dune’ in 1965, detailed depictions of alien societies, psychologies, and social mores became a major theme in sci-fi. An unwritten rule became commonplace, that exposition on aliens be rendered in stilted, formalistic prose. Nouns associated with alien societies were capitalized, aliens rarely used contractions in their speech, and all manner or esoteric and arcane mannerisms by aliens were used to propel narratives about perplexed Terrans, or outsiders, struggling to comprehend these mysterious entities. The apogee of this stylistic attitude came with Donald Kingsbury’s 1982 novel ‘Courtship Rite’.

Author Carolyn Janice Cherry (b. 1942) took these conventions to heart. Many of her sci-fi novels deal with humans / Terrans who through misadventure find themselves submerged in alien societies. Often, if they are to survive, these Terrans must overcome hostility or indifference from their hosts. 

‘Kesrith’ plainly is modeled on ‘Dune’, and while this is not a bad thing, the fact is that the book is too slowly paced, and too dependent on characterization and world-building, to be effective.

The eponymous planet is a Dune-style desert world, an armpit of the galaxy. Some Fremen-like, Vaguely Arab, Vaguely Muslim tribesmen, known as the mri, eke out a squalid existence as mercenaries to a more sophisticated, but risk-averse race of aliens known as the regul.

 

The war between the regul – waged through their mri intermediaries – and humans has gone badly for the regul, and as ‘Kesrith’ opens, the regul are in the process of abandoning their operations on Kesrith and turning the planet over to the Federation. The mri are less than pleased with the thought of being deserted by their hereditary allies, and the enclave on Kesrith is beset with considerable angst. 

Things don’t improve when a duo of Terrans, the taciturn diplomat George Stavros and his aide-de-camp Sten Duncan, arrive on Kesrith as barely-tolerated guests of the regul. As the narrative progresses, there are fractious interactions between the regul, mri, and humans, interactions that have ominous implications for the frail reality of the truce between regul and humans. Will the mri survive the conflicts roiling Kesrith, or find their race exterminated ? 

From its opening page, ‘Kesrith’ smothers the reader with alien-culture motifs. There is a barrage of invented words, some with apostrophes to lend them a Vaguely Arabic flavor. The dialogue is reliant on an enigmatic diction, leaving the reader with the unenviable job of trying to parse the meanings behind what is being said. Making things worse, it’s not just the mri culture that gets this treatment, but the regul do as well. 

I could tolerate the verbiage if the lead characters have some redeeming qualities, but sadly, in ‘Kesrith’, they don’t. The mir characters Niun and Melein, and the Terran protagonist Sten Duncan, are very dumb, and I found myself indifferent to their fates. Indeed, I found the novel’s most interesting characters to be the bearlike 'dus', indigenous mammals who have something of a Companion Animal relationship with the prickly, peevish mri.

Nothing of consequence happens until Chapter Sixteen (page 172), two-thirds of the way through the book. Thus, the reader must invest quite a bit of his or her time before things even start to get interesting.

I finished 'The Faded Sun: Kesrith' with no burning desire to advance to the next volume in the trilogy. I'd be interested to hear if any PorPor followers believe that ‘The Faded Sun: Shon'jir’ is an improvement. Or is it just more of the same...........?!

At Cupboard Maker Books

At Cupboard Maker Books
Enola, PA

Cupboard Maker Books is a used bookstore located in Enola, Pennsylvania, a town on the western shore of the Susquehanna River, across the river from Harrisburg. It's at 157 North Enola Rd, also known as Route 15, which in turn is directly accessible from exit 65 on Interstate 81. Cupboard Maker Books is not hard to miss: it has a uniquely colorful storefront (above).

It's across the street from a train yard (below).

On the day in early March that I visited, they were having a 33% off promotion for science fiction and fantasy titles.

It's a pretty big place, lots of aisles, lots of books, both hardcover and paperback.

The section devoted to sci-fi is extensive, both for hardbound and paperback books. They also have a dedicated section for horror fiction, something of a rarity in used bookstores.

There are at least two cats on the premises, although one was apparently in quarantine........?!

Most paperbacks are $3 each. I came away with a good selection of regular Old School potboilers (two with an emphasis on teen pregnancies ?!), and a couple of vintage science fiction titles:

When you're done at Cupboard Maker and you are wanting a bite to eat, I recommend Al's of Hampden, a brewpub that serves good pizza, sandwiches, salads, and appetizers. They have a large selection of craft beers of tap, too. At 2240 Millennium Way in Enola, in back of the Weiss market, they are a short drive from exit 61 off of Interstate 81.

Book Review: Interzone: The 1st Anthology

Book Review: 'Interzone: The 1st Anthology' 

edited by John Clute, Colin Greenland, and David Pringle

3 / 5 Stars

'Interzone: The 1st Anthology' (202 pp.), was published by Everyman Paperbacks (UK) in 1985. The uninspired cover art was done by Robert Mason. The anthology was edited by John Clute, Colin Greenland, and David Pringle. It compiles a number of novelettes and short stories that saw print in the UK magazine Interzone during the interval from 1982 to 1985. 

[ Interzone still is going strong today, 40 years after it started.]

I cheerfully admit that I picked up this anthology with low expectations, as my other foray into mid-80s UK sci-fi, the collection 'Other Edens', was a disappointing assembly of outdated, warmed-over New Wave stories.

My capsule summaries of the contents:

Happy Day !, by Geoff Ryman, is a novelette that appeared for the first time in this anthology. It's set in a near-future USA, where women have taken control, and macho men are systematically being exterminated, since, as one observer remarks, 'men are violent'. The 'Boys' are a detachment of gay men who agree to assist with the extermination process, in exchange for being allowed to live. 

Rich, the first-person narrator, decides to extend fellowship in the Boys to an alienated wanderer named Royce; this has consequences for the future of the group. This novelette tries very hard to be transgressive, calling to mind Harlan Ellison stories from the 1970s and 1980s. The homosexual cohort described in 'Happy Day' are not pleasant people, and their portrayal likely would be considered politically incorrect (even offensive) by modern standards. 

The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe, by Angela Carter: a 'fabulation' that deals with the relationship between the writer and his mother, amid the poverty, disease, and premature death commonplace in 19th century America. It's fully as dreary as it sounds. 

The Flash! Kid, by Scott Bradfield: a snotnosed delinquent named Rudy McDermott discovers something alien and unknowable inside a termite nest, and the World is never the same. This story tries to emulate the comedic sci-fi of Robert Sheckley and Ron Goulart, and if you like that kind of stuff, then you might like 'The Flash! Kid'. I didn't.

After-Images, by Malcolm Edwards: when World War Three arrives, by some freakish phenomenon of physics, a small English town survives immolation. Or has it ? A great story, and one of my 'Top 21' horror stories. Unfortunately author Edwards, a playwright, did not produce any more short fiction in his career, preferring instead to work as an editor and critic.

Kitemaster, by Keith Roberts: in a vaguely post-apocalyptic UK, soldiers of the Church keep watch for incursions of 'demons' from the Badlands. This story later would be part of Roberts' 1985 fix-up novel 'Kiteworld'.

The Monroe Doctrine, by Neil Ferguson: it's an alternate 1968, and when the Russians invade Czechoslovakia, U.S. President Marilyn Monroe decides to meet face-to-face with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to advance the cause of World Peace. This story tries so hard to be cute n' sassy. It was author Ferguson's first published story.

Angel Baby, by Rachel Pollack: a teenaged girl is molested by an angel.....?! A provocative premise, but the story fails to capitalize on it. Most of 'Angel Baby' is devoted to documenting, via lengthy internal monologues, the angst of our stricken teen.

On the Deck of the Flying Bomb, by David Redd: the protagonist is a crewmember on the Mother of all Cruise Missiles. He is unhappy about the one-way nature of its mission. This is a figuration that is more of a fragment than a completed short story.

Cyberpunk maestro John Shirley provides 'What Cindy Saw', a variation on the theme of 'is someone crazy, or just gifted with the ability to see the underlying reality of the world' ? An early entry from Shirley, this story has a kind of crazed energy that makes it readable, if a little contrived.

The Object of the Attack, by J. G. Ballard: Dr. Richard Greville, psychiatrist, has a patient with severe antisocial tendencies. But perhaps that is a good thing ? One of Ballard's more accessible short stories, although its premise owes something to Stephen King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone.

Something Coming Through, by Cherry Wilder: in a near-future Arab city known as Deskar, Wheeler, an American, tries to save his relatives from execution for the crime of possessing  alcohol (Deskar has a quasi-Muslim sensibility). Can a local herb salve his misery ?

Dreamers, by Kim Newman: in the future, you can live vicariously by downloading and experiencing other people's dreams. John Yeovil has gotten rich off of specializing in porno dreams, and a new dream, featuring JFK and Marilyn Monroe, could make him very wealthy indeed.........this story has some interesting proto-cyberpunk concepts, but its overly wordy, and poorly organized, narrative ultimately fails to impress. 

Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report,  by Michael Blumlein: in the future, body parts can be used to improve the lives of impoverished Third World Peoples. But there's a catch............this story is disturbing and treads into splatterpunk territory (author Blumlein's 1990 anthology of horror stories, The Brains of Rats, got a rave review from the Too Much Horror Fiction blog).

Summing up, the entries by Ryman, Edwards, Roberts, and Blumlein lend sufficient value to earn 'Interzone: The 1st Anthology' a three-star Rating. If it helps, I'd say it's a bit superior to the equivalent mid-80s 'Annual World's Best SF' sci-fi anthologies published by DAW Books, but inferior to the 1986 cyberpunk collection 'Mirrorshades'.

Two sci-fi stories from Playboy, 1972

 Two sci-fi stories from Playboy, 1972

I'm not a big fan of comedic sci-fi stories, but the February, 1972 issue of Playboy magazine has two pretty good ones, including one by R. A. Lafferty, an author who usually does not impress me.

While Hugh Hefner liked sci-fi and routinely published the genre in Playboy, it was somewhat unusual to have two sci-fi tales in a given issue. As it happens, Hefner's judgment on these two entries was sound. They have the right length and tenor for the magazine as it was in the early 1970s: still genteel, but also cognizant that upstarts like Penthouse were changing the nature of the content in the men's magazine genre.

Perhaps because it was published in Playboy, Lafferty's story lacks the abstruse, self-consciously arty tenor of much of his fiction from the New Wave era. 'Rangle Dang Kaloof' is a short story about a man tormented by an imp. It works because it has the straightforward sensibility of a Roald Dahl tale.

The second entry, by Robert F. Young, takes as its title a phonetic play on the Mexican Mayan ruin Chichen Itza. 'Chicken Itza' is about the planet Sirius V, where a Federation initiative to 'civilize' the native Siw people has been implemented. A no-nonsense auditor named Firby is dispatched to Sirius V to review progress. Firby is astonished to find that the planet is a model of efficiency and modernization. Nothing seems to be amiss. How exactly did this happen...........?!

This is the first story I have read by Robert Young (1915 - 1986). It's a well-written story, and in my opinion superior to Lafferty's. 

According to his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Young was quite successful in publishing short stories in both genre and mainstream magazines and digests during the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. He also published four novels, 'Starfinder' (1980), 'The Last Yggdrasill' (1982),  'Eridahn' (1983), and 'The Vizier's Second Daughter' (1985). I well may investigate some of these.

Zippy's Day

Zippy's Day
by Bill Griffith

This brilliant little five-page comic, drawn in 1977 and featured in Zippy Stories (Last Gasp, 1986), features meticulous shading and cross-hatching by artist Griffith. 

Although word-less, it ably presents themes of humor, affection, a shade of pathos, and (in the darker scenes) even a bit of disquiet. In its draftsmanship and plotting, it is markedly superior to most of the indie comics being published nowadays.

Karl Edward Wagner's 'Sticks' audio drama

Karl Edward Wagner's 'Sticks' audio drama (?!)

Well, this is weird..........kind of an exemplar of how the internet can lead you down the rabbit hole.

I was idly putzing through Discogs, looking for affordable LPs that feature cover artwork by the rather obscure New York City psychedelic artist Brad Johannsen (of 'Occupied Spaces' fame).

I discovered a CD that had been made in 1998, with cover art by Johannsen (who apparently died in 2011).

The CD is an 'audio drama' of the classic, 1974 Karl Edward Wagner short story 'Sticks' ?!

Wagner died in October of 1994, so he plainly would not have been in a position to lend official approval or endorsement (?) of this effort, which apparently was helmed by a musician and DJ named Tom Lopez (aka 'Meatball' Fulton), who composed the other, non-Sticks tracks on the CD. 

According to his Wikipedia entry, Lopez, born in 1935, is head of the ZBS ('Zero Bull Shit') Foundation, and in the past, interacted with various counterculture luminaries such as Abbie Hoffman, Yoko Ono, and Captain Beefheart. There are a plentiful array of Lopez's audio dramas available at amazon, under the name Meatball Fulton.

amazon has a copy of the 'Sticks' CD available, but the asking price is $103, which is way out of my budget. The CD isn't uploaded to YouTube so I don't know how good it is. Maybe someone in possession of a copy will Comment about it...............?!

Book Review: Rough Trade

Celebrating Black History Month 2023

Book Review: 'Rough Trade' by Cole Riley

2 / 5 Stars

“That’s youth talking.” Benny Seven snatched the pipe from the woman. “Well, I’ll say this. Enjoy your youth now, girlie. It goes so fast. Soon there’ll come a time when you see a few wrinkles in your face and the gray hairs'll start creeping in. Your market value goes down if you know what I mean. Old age eases up on you little by little. Yes, sir, the clock is always running.”

Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we celebrate Black History Month by reading and reviewing nonfiction and fiction books that illuminate the black experience. We try to focus on books that are less well-known, and have lapsed into undeserved obscurity.

For Black History Month 2023, we're reviewing 'Rough Trade' (192 pp.), a 1987 mass-market paperback published by the pioneering black fiction publisher Holloway House. The cover artist is uncredited.

‘Rough Trade’ (320 pp.) in set in New York City in the late 1980s. As the novel opens, we are introduced to Velma and Claudia, two of the foxiest young chicks in East Harlem. 

Both women are enjoying the allure of the Street Life, but in the opening pages of ‘Rough Trade’, a meetup with a hustler leads to a confrontation with a group of ruthless thugs. Only an act of suicidal courage on Claudia’s part persuades the thugs to let Velma go free. 

Traumatized psychologically and physically by her treatment at the hands of the thugs and the death of her best friend, Velma finds herself drifting from place to place, and man to man, in a desperate search for well-being. The lure of drugs, with which she can self-medicate, leads Velma even further into decline. Even the well-meaning interventions of her sister Vandella, and her boyfriend Nick, fail to deter Velma from her wayward path.  

Just as Velma’s life reaches its lowest ebb, a troubling rumor comes to her ear, a rumor circulating around Harlem that a woman resembling the deceased Claudia is alive and well in the baddest part of town. 

Velma must make a deal with the odious pimp Benny Seven to learn the whereabouts of the Claudia lookalike………..Benny of course wants something in return, and he has tastes that shock even the street-hardened Velma. But as Velma will learn, nothing in her life has prepared her for the revelations that come with her search for Claudia…………

According to the Simon and Schuster ‘Author’ directory, ‘Cole Riley’ is the pseudonym used by:

‘……an innovative voice in urban literature, produced several early street classics: ‘Hot Snake Nights’, ‘Rough Trade’, ‘The Devil To Pay’, ‘The Killing Kind’, ‘Dark Blood Moon’, and more……. He lives and writes in New York City.’

‘Rough Trade’ isn’t a successful novel. It's an uneven, at times awkward, mix of hardcore ghetto mayhem with considerable exposition on personality crises and conflicts. 

While the opening and closing chapters are suitably harrowing, even displaying a Splatterpunk sensibility, the bulk of the narrative relies on melodrama, with Velma having emotionally laden conversations with her sister, with her boyfriend Nick, her mother, and her psychiatrist. Indeed, at times, ‘Rough Trade’ comes across as a ‘ghetto’ analogue to Judith Rossner’s 1983 psychiatric drama ‘August’.

Having to wade through so much angst, it was gratifying to arrive at the novel’s denouement and find it devoid of contrivance, but the final chapter comes across as a little too pat to be effective.

Summing up, if you are a devotee of the Holloway House catalog (entries in which are increasingly rarer, and more expensive, to acquire) and what could be called proto- Urban Fiction, then picking up a copy of 'Rough Trade' may be worth your while if you can find the book for a reasonable price.

Book Review: Fires of Azeroth

Book Review: 'Fires of Azeroth' by C. J. Cherryh

3 / 5 Stars

'Fires of Azeroth' (236 pp.) is DAW Book No. 341, and was published in June, 1979. It features cover art by Michael Whelan. 

This is the final volume in the so-called ‘Morgaine’ trilogy from C. J. Cherryh. The first volume in the trilogy is ‘Gate of Ivrel’ (1976), and the second, ‘Well of Shiuan’ (1978). 

These three volumes are available in the Nelson Doubleday / Science Fiction Book Club omnibus 'The Book of Morgaine' (1979) and the DAW omnibus ‘The Morgaine Saga’ (2001).

As 'Fires' opens, our heroes Morgaine, and her long-suffering man-at-arms Vanye, have traveled through yet another star gate, this time, from the wretched world of Shiuan to the idyllic forested world of Azeroth.  

Of course, the series' villain Roh, along with one hundred thousand Shiuan soldiers intent on committing violence and mayhem, also passed through the gate before Morgaine could deactivate it. Thus Morgaine and Vanye have but little time to admire the bucolic landscape of Azeroth; they must find the country's rulers, a race of elvish people known as the arrhendim, and convince them to mobilize against the menace of the horde. Only the defeat of the horde will allow Morgaine to access, and close down, the master star gate on Azeroth. 

But the leaders of the arrhendim have known nothing but peace for well over a thousand years, and they are mistrustful when a female version of Elric of Melnibone appears before them, warning of the destruction of Azeroth unless fell magic, long since abandoned, is revived and used as a weapon.

Even as Morgaine and Vanye embark on their desperate quest to deter the Shiuan invaders long enough to mount a defense, the cause may be lost........for Roh knows as much, if not more, than Morgaine about the powers of the gate. And Roh has no scruples about using any and all means necessary to fulfill his sordid ambitions...........

I gave 'Fires' a three-star rating. The initial third of the novel, much like 'Well of Shuian', suffers from indolent pacing, as the author focuses rather laboriously on world-building and documenting the interactions between Morgaine, Vanye, and various new supporting characters. A plot device used throughout the trilogy, in which a dim-witted Vanye is captured by adversaires and must rely on guile and stratagems (related using long-winded dialogue passages) to gain freedom, evoked some exasperation in me. Indeed, much of the book revolves around verbal fencing matches, in which the participants vie to use the most elliptical and oblique verbiage available to them.

The final chapters of the novel, which finally advance the confrontation with the Shiuan horde and the desperate struggle to gain the master gate on Azeroth, bring some much-needed momentum back to the narrative and with it, justification for the reader's patience. I won't give out any spoilers, save to say that the ending of 'Fires' signals that Cherryh had ambitions - which were realized with her 1988 book 'Exile's Gate' - to write at least one more entry in the 'Morgaine' saga.

Summing up, those with a willingness to read a deliberately paced science fantasy, where character interactions are given primacy over plot development, may find 'Fires of Azeroth' rewarding and by extension, the 'Morgaine' trilogy.

International Dateline from National Lampoon

International Dateline
from National Lampoon, March 1976

Well, it's Valentine's Day, and thus, a good a time as any for some snide humor about looking for love. This is the 'International Dateline' column from the March, 1976 issue of National Lampoon. 

The Editorial page doesn't provide attribution for the column, so I don't know who wrote it, but whoever did, intended to offend.......