Aventine

by Lee Killough

A resort for the superrich and the supersophisticated on a bucolic planet at the crossroads of the civilized galaxy; where lifestyle and living quarters are limited only by imagination; where furniture changes shape and color to match the owner's mood; where the statuary moves and the stones sing; where split personalities live without pressure to become normal...

Where beautiful women and twisted artists can get away with murder.

Contents:
1 • The Siren Garden • (1974)
22 • Tropic of Eden • (1977)
42 • A House Divided • (1978)
66 • Broken Stairways, Walls of Time • (1979)
83 • Shadow Dance • (1982)
117 • Ménage Outré • (1981)
136 • Bête et Noir • (1980)

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories

171 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 1981

About the author

Lee Killough has been storytelling since the age of four or five, when she began making up her own bedtime stories. So when she discovered science fiction and mysteries about age eleven, she began writing her own science fiction and mysteries. Because her great fear was running out of these by reading everything her small hometown library had. It took her late husband Pat Killough, though, years later, to convince her to try selling her work. Her first published stories were science fiction and her short story, "Symphony For a Lost Traveler", earned a Hugo Award nomination in 1985.

She used to joke that she wrote SF because she dealt with non-humans every day...spending twenty-seven years as chief technologist in the Radiology Department at Kansas State University's Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital before retiring to write full-time.

Because she loves both SF and mysteries and hated choose between the two genres, her work combines them. Except for one fantasy, The Leopard’s Daughter, most of her novels are mysteries with SF or fantasy elements...with a preference for supernatural detectives: vampire, werewolves, even a ghost. She has set her procedurals in the future, on alien words, and in the country of dark fantasy. Her best known detective is vampire cop Garreth Mikaelian, of Blood Hunt, Bloodlinks, and Blood Games. Five of her novels and a novella are now available as e-books and she is editing more to turn into e-books.

Lee makes her home in Manhattan, Kansas, with her book-dealer husband Denny Riordan, a spunky terrier mix, and a house crammed with books.

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Killough's homage to JG Ballard's great "Vermilion Sands" stories, and hers range from good to excellent. I read them as palate cleansers between books, which worked well. Good stuff, and good SF. My old PB was picked up at a used bookshop long, long ago, and sat unread for years.

The standout story is "Bete et Noir", the last one. This is a story of a future theatre verité production, with well-drawn characters and settings. I can't say much more without spoiling it, but it would be worth picking up the collection just for this novelette. 4.5 stars.

Aventine itself is a future resort town that started as an artist colony. It blends elements of Taos, Santa Fe and Aspen -- all within a days drive of the author's Kansas home. The settings hold up well, 35 or 40 years on, with fewer incongruities than most old SF. Recommended.
Here's a nice essay-homage, by a wannabe writer who likes her stuff a lot: https://vardomskaya.com/non-fiction/l...
Recommended reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kil...
Huh. A retired veterinary radiographer! Who knew?
"The Monitor, the Miners, and the Shree" (1980) rings a vague bell. Pretty sure I read it, back in the day.
"A Voice Out of Ramah " (1979), her first. "A beautiful and forceful Terran female landed and began asking questions...." Heh. Cover is familiar, but I don't think I've actually read it. TBR, maybe?

[Alex Sarll]

Back in those decadent days when we could wander without a care, and I'd buy books with nary a thought, I'd sometimes pick up an old SF paperback almost at random, attracted by the cover or – as here – the title, knowing little about the premise and less about the author. Hell, it wasn't until I was halfway through that I glanced at the author bio and discovered Killough was a she-Lee. From the blurb, I was expecting a languid, faintly sinister story of somewhere the rich and strange go to escape the dreary chains of convention – a science-fictional Valmouth or South Wind. The introduction suggested Vermillion Sands was more of a model, which is not a Ballard I've read, but after this – and knowing some of his other work – I can definitely picture it. The other thing I hadn't realised was that it wasn't a novel at all, but a collection of short stories in a shared setting. This is a form at which SF and its kin have long done well – a legacy of magazine roots – but what works well serialised doesn't always play so well collected. At its peak you get something like Simak's City, where each story builds on its predecessor, advancing an overall bigger story while also working in its own terms. Elsewhere, though, you can end up with something like, well, Aventine, where a series of variations on a theme might have worked read over the course of years, but even with gaps between, are less satisfactory as a book. And the degree of similarity is high. The first two tales each have a narrator who works in a niche and invented artistic field, with a colleague who is more artistic*. The narrator falls for a client who has a powerful male figure in her life and who is not nearly the ingenue she seems. The third story rings the changes in so far as the protagonist is an estate agent and the rival player is the woman's split personality instead of another man, but only that far. Thereafter, we do get a little more variation – and there's a particular timeliness to Broken Stairways, Walls Of Time, with its recluse who can still see people by telepresence; I expect we'll be getting a lot of that even if we're ever officially allowed to resume life again. It has more of that Ballardian sense of dislocation to it, maybe sadder for the prose being (for better and worse) much less mannered than his. It may also have helped that by then I was aware of the writer's gender, so was finding the recurrent male gaze more interesting and less exasperating – and indeed, the cover story turns out to be all about a literal female gaze. The last story, perhaps my favourite, was the only one with a female narrator - but also the only one mostly to take place outside Aventine proper, and - though this seems likely coincidence - based around an image, of red sand showing through white like blood, which would recur in the only decent installment of the last Star Wars trilogy. On the whole, though, while any one of these stories would be an interesting glimpse of the near future* as seen from the recent-ish past, one is all you really need.

*In one or both senses of the word – compared to the fluidity I was expecting, Aventine is a surprisingly heteronormative refuge for the rich and peculiar.
**Nearer, too, than I'd initially thought – after three stories mentioning stargates, I was surprised to learn that this is a world where someone can at least have worked with Paul McCartney.

[Glyn Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Vermillion sands shorts by J. G. Ballad are such an influence on the imagination of those who read them that others create balladian landscapes of there own. These are arguably the greatest non Ballad sands inspired story's there are. 5stars.

[Hal Bodner · Rating 5 out of 5]

AVENTINE is probably the quintessential short story collection about creativity. Entwined within these amazing stories which focus on the artistic processes of creating sculpture, dance, symphonies and even plastic surgery, are some riveting tales of murder, mystery and intrigue.

I first read this fascinating collection of short stories, set on a planet which is half artists' colony and half celebrity get-away, almost thirty years ago. I make it a point to re-read it every few years and it never fails to withstand the test of time and to hold up to the original reading. Each story highlights a different artistic craft: acting, choreography, holographic symphonies, some of them familiar to the reader and others completely out of the author's imagination.

What makes this collection work so well, however, is Killough's ability to take what is basically a science fiction construct, mix it with a healthy dose of mystery/thriller, and tie it all together in one believable whole by her incredibly adept use of character. The reader not only gets to know these people, s/he feels for them -- and therein lies the success of this collection.

But what makes AVENTINE worth re-reading periodically isn't just the cleverness of the theme, the strength of the writing -- which is excellent, or even the wonderful variety of characters. Killough has the ability to write truly moving tragedy -- and there is an abundance of it in AVENTINE. Each story is very much like it's own opera. If I have any criticism to levy at this collection it is that, like opera, none of the stories end well for the characters in them. But that's okay as there is a richness to each tale that, in some ineffable way, makes every story seem like something far more epic than its short length would seem to indicate.

If you are a fan of science fiction, if you enjoy art of any kind, if you are partial to mysteries or thrillers, or if you just like a good read, hunt down a copy of this book, settle into a chair under a good light, and prepare to experience something truly special that, if you are like me, will stay with you for a very long time.

[SciFiOne · Rating 3 out of 5]

1984 grade C-

Short stories