Electronic OtherRealms #18 Fall, 1987 Part 1 Table of Contents Part 1 Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach Historical Realism Harry Turtledove Part 2 Two Books on Robert Bloch Jerry Boyajian Double Nocturne Danny Low The Uplift War Fred Bals Part 3 An Interview with Mike Resnick Part 4 Scattered Gold Charles de Lint Stuff Received Part 5 Rebellion, Counter-Revolution, Blemishes and Potential Jim Brunet Part 6 Words of Wizdom Chuq Von Rospach Part 7 Loose Ends Alan Wexelblat Publishing Notes Part 8 Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Part 9 Letters to OtherRealms Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach Conspiracy As I write this, I've finally recovered from jet lag having returned from two weeks in England playing tourist and attending Conspiracy. Since OtherRealms is a reviewzine I'm going to limit my personal comments here (and point you instead at Hard Hat Fanzine #1, which should be in the envelope as a special added bonus this month) but I did want to thank all of the OtherRealms readers (from seven countries, by my count) who took the time to track me down and say hi. The feedback I got on the magazine was both enlightening and encouraging, and it was nice to finally put some faces to names I've only known via mail and computers. So, for all the friends I met for the first time (and also to those I got to see again) thanks for sharing part of your vacation with me, and I hope this was just a beginning. Partings I read with some regret, but to be honest, not much surprise, the termination of Fantasy Review as of issue #103. I recommended Fantasy Review as a source in my Reviewing the Reviewers article in OtherRealms #9, but since that time the magazine, with a new publisher, has shown a continuing drop in the quality of its material. In issue #102, there was an irresponsible article attacking Orson Scott Card that had me wondering whether to renew my subscription --Jit now looks like this might have been a last ditch effort to generate some controversy in the hopes that people would buy the issue. I'm sorry to see Fantasy Review go, although the Card article left a bad taste in my mouth that tarnishes all of the good things that editor Robert Collins and the magazine did -- nevertheless, Collins should realize that he did some very good things with FR, and did them amazingly well considering the financial and other problems that seemed endemic to the publication. Heinlein's Women Is Robert Heinlein sexist? And why is everyone interested? I bring this up because I have had three people query me in the last two months about writing articles on this exact topic. My answer to all three was the same: It's none of our business. The question ought to be "Are Heinlein's works Sexist?" This may seem like a trivial difference to you, but it is critical to understand if you plan on writing for OtherRealms. One of the most common mistakes critics make is to believe that the author and the work are the same thing, and that you can do a study of the author's books and use them as a basis to judge the author. This may be true of some authors and some books, but as a general case I believe it to be false. The purpose of a review is to review the book, not call the authors beliefs into question, nor is it to abuse the author, make fun of the author, or to espouse the reviewers political beliefs. The idea is to help the reader of the review decide if they want to read a book. Many reviews (although, hopefully, none in OtherRealms) have hidden agendas -- the reviewer is more interested in getting their viewpoint aired than they are in discussing the work -- if you disagree with that statement, read the review section in any major newspaper or the New York Review of Books and see how many of the reviews actually have much to do with the work in question. In the latter, having the first mention of the work on the second page of a review is common -- an act I find completely unjustifiable. So if you want to write an article that proves that Heinlein's works are sexist, be my guest. But leave Mr. Heinlein out of it. (For the record, when given that option, all three authors declined). If you have to bring the person into it, there is a flaw in your article. [And as an aside, I don't believe that Heinlein's works are sexist. He does write about women from another, more traditional generation, but that should not be mistaken with sexism. And I feel that Sailing on the Sunset, reviewed in this issue, has one of the most positive and effective female characters ever written by a male author. But if you still disagree, and want to prove it, I want to see it -- but leave the people out of it]. Contributor Notes Congratulations are in order for Contributing Editor Jim Brunet. His latest story, Symphony in Ursa Major, can be found in the July/August issue of Aboriginal SF. Also, congratulations are in order to Stephen Fox for his nomination and Brad Foster for his long deserved award for Best Fan Artist in the Hugo's this year. Foster continues to show up in the pro and semi- professional markets as well -- the latest being the cover of the August Science Fiction Chronicle. I'd like to welcome a new artist to the OtherRealms family, with a twist. Alf Yngve sent me some fascinating material all the way from Sweden, along with a couple of Swedish fanzines. In his letter, he mentioned that the fans in Sweden are rather few, so I thought I'd drop him a plug and mention that if you're interested in sharing SF with folks with different perspectives, consider becoming a penpal of someone like Alf. If you want to drop him a note, write him at Alf Yngve, Kullasgatan 20A, 463 00 Lilla Edet, Sweden. You'll be seeing more of his art over the next few issues (and hopefully more international art as OtherRealms penetrates the continental boundaries further). Finally, I'm very proud to announce the addition of a new name in the OtherRealms masthead. Charles de Lint, an author (his latest being The Jack of Kinrowan: A Novel of Urban Fairie from Armadillo/Ace) and former reviewer for Fantasy Review has joined OtherRealms as a Contributing Editor. His column debuts this month, and I think you'll agree with me that he is a strong addition to OtherRealms and a voice that deserves to be heard. Please join me in welcoming him aboard! This Issue This is the first quarterly issue of OtherRealms, but it isn't the final form that the zine will take. I tried to put it together on a six week schedule in time for Worldcon, and almost made it. From the looks of it, I'm going to be right around 48 pages in eight weeks, which isn't bad and gets the magazine in your hands the end of September, a nice tradeoff between wishes and reality. OtherRealms will probably continue to be about 48 pages for the next few issues, since that is about the limit that I can handle financially. I'm working on the budgets and getting quotes to see if I can afford to take OtherRealms offset, so it can be saddle stitches and to improve the reproduction of the art; if it works out OtherRealms may be offset next issue, or perhaps the one after. The limiting factor for magazine size right now is financial -- I have enough good material to double the number of pages and still give me a good start on the next issue, but I simply can't afford to use it all. My hope is that the paid subscription base will continue to grow -- as my subscription base goes up, my per copy costs go down and I can add pages without changing the subscription costs. I've made a number of layout changes in my continuing attempt to figure out how to design a magazine and make it look good. I'm still playing around with the way the title section of an article looks -- trying to make sure it stands out without overwhelming the page and get the information out in a clear way. A couple of people mentioned (justifiably so, in retrospect) that it was difficult to tell who was actually writing the reviews, since that information was sometimes on the second or third page of the article. This new layout should take care of that. Corrections I accidently misspelled Ardath Mayhar's name as Ardath Mayhay in the Stuff Received section last issue. Her book is out from Space And Time, and is titled The Wall. Sorry for any confusion. Apologies It looks like my comments on Ace and Dave Smed's last issue were not researched as carefully as they should have been. The time between The Sorcery Within and The Talisman of Alemar is a very long one as series go, but it isn't as long as I first reported it, and there are contributing factors on all sides that explain the publication delay. I made some comments about Berkley that weren't true and weren't fair, and I want to apologize to everyone involved for not being as careful in my reporting as I should have been. And to everyone, especially Brad Foster, for the reproduction problems of the art in issue #17. I'm still not sure what went wrong, but last issue simply didn't reproduce well, and a lot of the wonderful detail in the cover got lost. The work I've done with book covers isn't up to what I'd hoped, either, so I'm going to hold off on printing any more until I can get the quality up. It makes no sense to take a nice cover and reproduce it in a terrible way, so until I can do the art justice, I won't. Future Issues Next issue will feature the first article in the Behind the Scenes series, by author and Campbell award winner Melissa Scott. Melissa takes us behinds the scenes of her new book The Kindly Ones (A Baen Books paperback). There will also be an interview on Jack Chalker as well as a bibliography, an article on Brian Aldiss (who just won the Hugo for his reference book The Trillion Year Spree) and all the normal stuff. Laurie is also working on an article about post-apocalyptic agriculture and how our current dependency on technology in the fields will affect us. You will probably be surprised and perhaps frightened by what she's found. The Pico review section (missing this month due to space problems) will return. Future issues will feature interviews with Gardner Dozois of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and the new Isaac Asimov Presents imprint of first novels and author Joel Rosenberg. They will have lots of material that hasn't been written yet, too, so get busy! Deadline for the winter issue (which is pretty full already, from the looks of it) is November 15, and should be on your porch for Christmas. Finally, the long delayed OtherRealms index to reviews may finally see the light of day. At least, I hope so ("This time for sure!") See you then! ("I take a size seven and a half...") Historical Realism Or Oh My God, Not Another Movement Harry Turtledove Copyright 1987 by Harry Turtledove [Harry Turtledove's latest novel, An Emperor for the Legion, is available from Del Rey Books] Cyberpunk, or The Movement, or whatever the folks who write it and like it want to call it, has been getting a lot of ink lately. No wonder: it's the Miami Vice of SF. It's fast paced, it's exciting, and it has a lot of flash, all of which draw attention to it. It's not what I want to talk about. Much more quietly, a fair number of people have started turning out a kind of Science Fiction and Fantasy that used to be rather rare: historical realism is probably as good a name for it as any. For whatever it's worth, I'm one of those people. If cyberpunk is Miami Vice, what we do is more like I, Claudius -- work for the mind as well as the glands. Now that I've named historical realism, I suppose I ought to define it. One way to do that is to say that it's the place where the techniques of good SF and Fantasy meet those of historical fiction: where the research that goes into the background of the world presented, whether it's a Fantasy world, an alternate history, or the "real" world with odd types of characters running around loose, gives that world a depth and authenticity it couldn't get any other way -- a sense that there's more going on in that world than you or the characters actually see, that pieces of the world don't disappear when you or the characters aren't looking directly at them. Another, probably better, way is to point at some examples. Here are three: L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, and H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. Of the writers whose careers began before 1950, de Camp, Anderson and Piper most clearly exemplify historical realism at its best; indeed, along with their SF and Fantasy, both de Camp and Anderson have published historical fiction. de Camp's historical novels, in particular, rank with those of Mary Renoult as the best and most painless way to get a feel for the history of classical Greece. Newer authors whose work fits the mold of historical realism include Katherine Kurtz, Barbara Hambly, Judith Tarr, the team of Roland Green and John F. Carr, Susan Shwartz, and myself. Some of us write only Fantasy, some only SF (John Carr says he can't write Fantasy because he doesn't believe in it), and some, like Susan Shwartz and I, do both. One thing most of us have in common is graduate work in medieval history or literature -- Jthere may be more people doing historical realism these days because there are fewer academic jobs around. Or maybe, as Judith Tarr has remarked, it's just that writing fiction is more fun than academic prose. God knows that's true! Katherine Kurtz was in the UCLA Graduate Program in History when I was an undergrad there, back in the late sixties. Even then she was publishing her Deryni tales, and she has for the most part stuck to the Deryni universe ever since. Her stories draw heavily on her knowledge of English medieval history, church history and canon law; her people are very much part of her quasi-medieval world in their attitudes, not, as is all too often true, misplaced twentieth-century types who somehow happen to be toting swords instead of AK-47s. Barbara Hambly would have been perfectly at home in the pages of the old Unknown. If ever there was Fantasy with rivets, she writes it: the magic in her stories is as rational and self-consistent as an inherently chaotic business like magic could be. She also has a master's degree in medieval history from UC Riverside, and it shows, for her backgrounds are as meticulous as her magic. She is also honest enough not to leave out the dirt, sweat, and pain that are inevitable parts of any pre-technological society. Add to all that a smooth style and a gift for sharply defined, quirky characters and it's no wonder that she's established a large and loyal audience. Judith Tarr's trilogy, The Isle of Glass, The Golden Horn, and The Hounds of God explores the boundary between the medieval world and Faerie. In that way, the books remind me of a Christianized version of Anderson's The Broken Sword. But Tarr's work is very much her own. The research she's done for her own studies (she's finishing up a Ph.D at Yale) gives her world -- well, it's actually ours, but with some very strange things going on --Ja you-are-there verisimilitude it couldn't get any other way. Her people have a gentle strength to them that's most appealing. Writing pastiche is hard work. I know, I've done it. Writing well is tough enough by itself; writing well and trying to sound like someone else at the same time is at least four times as hard. In Great Kings' War, their continuation to Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, Roland Green and John F. Carr sound so much like H. Beam Piper that they make what's left of my hair stand on end. Only Piper, I would have thought, could have described an ineffectual king as not even reigning over his country, just drizzling on it a bit. But that's Green and Carr, both of whom have also published on their own. They're currently working on the next book of the adventures of Calvin Morrison, AKA Lord Kalvan. Look for it. Susan Schwartz has a doctorate in medieval literature from Harvard. She describes herself as a renegade academic. She has an upcoming Fantasy trilogy set in a universe where Antony and Cleopatra beat Augustus at Actium instead of the other way around; the first volume, Byzantium's Crown, will be out this spring. She has also appeared often in Analog; she's in the process of turning two powerful stories there, "Heritage of Flight" and "Survivor Guilt," into a novel. Along with that, she has edited several Fantasy anthologies, including Moonsinger's Friends, a collection to Andre Norton: the Festschrift for a distinguished elder professor is an academic tradition of long standing. Shwartz and Judith Tarr are also two of the founders of the cyberprep movement, perhaps out of an atavistic fondness for pink and green. Oh, well, nobody's perfect. Finally, me. I flunked out of Caltech after my freshman year, and ended up with a Ph.D in Byzantine history from UCLA. Among other things, I've written Byzantine-flavored SF (my Basil Argyros stories, set in a universe where Muhammad converted to Christianity and the Empire stayed strong) and Fantasy (my Tetralogy, whose first volume, The Misplaced Legion and the just released An Emperor for the Legion, drops three cohorts of Caesar's legionaries into a Fantasy world based on eleventh-century Byzantium). I've also done a series of stories, most of them in Analog, set in a world where the Americas were populated, not by Indians, but by Homo Erectus -- the land bridges worked out a little differently than they did here. That series was harder for me to put together; I had to work hard both on anthropology and on real American history from colonial days to close to the Civil War, to see parallels and divergences in my alternate universe, and also to make what I was doing seem authentic. I doubt historical realism is the wave of the future for SF and Fantasy, as some have claimed the cyberpunks will be. Frankly, I doubt any one movement will swallow the whole genre. I certainly hope not. Diversity is one of the things that makes SF and Fantasy as enjoyable as they are. But to my admittedly biased point of view, the possibilities in twisted history, when it's twisted by people who know what they're doing, are among the most exciting and thought-provoking the field has to offer. OtherRealms #18 Fall, 1987 Copyright 1987 by Chuq Von Rospach. All Rights Reserved. One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors. OtherRealms may be reproduced in its entirety only for non-commercial purposes. No article may be reprinted without the express permission of the author.