Canavan’s Comments (group member since May 15, 2018)

Canavan’s comments from the Spells, Space & Screams: Collections & Anthologies in Fantasy, Science Fiction, & Horror group.

J. said: Seldon calculating future trends seems to be at about the same level of suspension of disbelief as Muad'Dib's prescience.

I guess I would disagree, J., although I freely admit that in my view these are concepts that perhaps differ in degree and not in kind. When science fiction writers employ as plot devices concepts like prescience (as Frank Herbert did in his Dune books) or personal teleportation (i.e., “jaunting”, as Alfred Bester called it in The Stars My Destination ), they may as well be talking about magic. The chance that such abilities are ever going to manifest in human beings is virtually zero. On the other hand, however vanishingly remote the possibility, the capability to more or less accurately predict large-scale behavior of social groups over time remains at least theoretically possible.

All that aside, I have no doubt that I’ll be giving this forthcoming series a chance.

Lena said: This is not one of the classics I enjoyed. Psychohistory and the thousand year plan felt ridiculous.

I greatly enjoyed these stories when I read them as a kid. They had a lot to do with forming my youthful love of sci-fi. While I agree that Asimov’s made-up science of psychohistory seems improbable, the nerd in me still appreciated the audacity that went into its formulation. As for the forthcoming film, I have my doubts. In talking about his own work, Asimov always stressed that his stuff was less action-oriented and more about ideas. That kind of material is harder to translate to the screen and I worry that attempts to “jazz it up” aren’t going to help.

“On the Road to New Egypt”, Jeffrey Ford

(view spoiler)[When I was a kid of about 8 or 9 I decided that I was going to read through the King James version of the Bible. I stalled out, if I recall correctly, somewhere in the New Testament. I found the experience at different points boring, fascinating, puzzling, and terrifying. I remember finding the Book of Job in particular quite disturbing — the manner in which God seems to be depicted as a callous gambler with a person’s life as the stake. Ford’s story strikes me as his rather demented version of this allegory, with Christ and Devil portrayed as a couple of frat boys on a road trip. In a 2002 interview with Nick Gevers, Ford admitted that the story embodied his personal “conception of the major players in the game of good and evil. Surprisingly enough, they’re a lot like a couple of guys I know.” Ultimately, I find the story interesting, even if it doesn’t completely work for me and I remain unclear on some of the details of what Ford is trying to say. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½

Ronald wondered: Is that the same author [i.e., Kelley Armstrong] who wrote "Dead Ringer" for the X Files anthology?

Yes, it is.

“The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”, Neil Gaiman

(view spoiler)[Gaiman’s novelette is a rather biting commentary on Hollywood’s crass commercialism. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the story is semi-autobiographical, incorporating Gaiman’s experiences in Tinseltown during a failed attempt to develop a Sandman film. I get the impression that neither Fiona nor Lena are big fans of Gaiman, but I tend to like his work. When he’s on his game I find his writing to be clever, perceptive, and often poignant. I found that to be true of this story. I like the metaphors he employs here, particularly the central one in which goldfish tell us something about the film industry’s lack of institutional memory. Even though I really enjoyed this story, I must admit that it’s inclusion in this anthology is puzzling. I personally wouldn’t describe it as fantasy, urban or otherwise. (It is not until the story’s closing moments that we first encounter what I would describe as just the faintest whiff of the supernatural.) I would probably characterize this effort as being satire and/or absurdist; in that respect it reminded me a bit of Barton Fink. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭✭

“Make a Joyful Noise”, Charles de Lint

This story of crow people, ghosts, and fraught human relationships belongs to the author’s Newford cycle, of which I have read my fair share. I know readers who find de Lint’s work too saccharine for their tastes — that they are the literary equivalent of Hallmark holiday movies. Maybe I just have a high tolerance for that kind of stuff, but I generally enjoy his shorter works, this one being no exception. Perhaps it’s fair to say that even if de Lint’s stories show a strong tendency to adopt an optimistic view of human behavior, they also often leaven that sweetness with occasional dollops of ambiguity and darkness.

✭✭✭½

“A Bird That Whistles”, Emma Bull

I don’t recall whether it was mentioned in the intro, but there seems to be a connection, sometimes an overt one, between music (often folk music) and some forms of fantasy. Both Emma Bull and Charles de Lint are folk musicians as well as writers of fantasy and both music and musicians feature in their tales. In every such story I’ve ever read (including this one) music is imbued with an almost ethereal, spiritual quality. (view spoiler)[Anyway, the present story deals with a kind of love triangle involving two musicians, one mortal and the other elvish, and a waitress. The complexity of the emotions involved as the story progresses places this one at least a cut above most of the others of this ilk that I’ve read. (hide spoiler)]

A couple of personal asides. I met the author once at a book signing in Minneapolis back in the 90s. She seemed like a nice person. Unfortunately, I never got to hear her band, Cats Laughing. The story also mentions the folk singer Betsy Kaske. I did hear Kaske play back in the 80s in Milwaukee. I was sad to learn that she passed away about a month ago.

✭✭✭½

I’m starting this month’s selection nearly a week late, after struggling (as per usual) to finish last month’s. I read through Peter S. Beagle’s introduction and Charles de Lint’s essay, “A Personal Journey into Mythic Fiction”. Broadly speaking both are concerned with genre taxonomy. I’ll keep my thoughts brief, since I kinda blathered on about this general topic when the group was discussing steampunk. I find discussions of genre categorization occasionally diverting, but my overall feeling is that they aren’t particularly meaningful or useful and say more about the proponents of this or that classification scheme than they do about any real underlying literary distinctions.

✭✭½

A few brief thoughts about this month’s selection. This is the second anthology I’ve read offered by the British Library and edited by Mike Ashley. I don’t regret having read either of them, but I have to admit that I found the story selections in each a bit underwhelming. By concentrating in large measure on unearthing lesser-known tales for his anthologies, Ashley pretty much guarantees that they aren’t all going to be undiscovered classics; I can accept that, but it would nice to find at least a few gems. And for my money Ashley allows the inclusion of too many real clinkers. I suspect that the problem is that what Ashley is trying to do is kinda hard. I can’t think of many anthologists who have successfully pulled it off. Maybe Hugh Lamb, Richard Dalby, and Jack Adrian.

Thanks as per usual for all of the perceptive comments about the stories.

Overall rating: ✭✭½

“No Ships Pass”, Lady Eleanor Smith

As Mike Ashley noted in the intro to this anthology, he attempted when putting it together to focus on lesser known stories. “No Ships Pass” is an exception to this rule; it’s been anthologized a number of times since its initial appearance in The Story-teller. (I’m pretty sure I first encountered it in The Third Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories , edited by Robert Aickman.) (view spoiler)[Short and sweet review: It’s basically a maritime version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. And it’s the best story in the collection. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭✭

“The Soul-Saver”, Morgan Burke

Burke’s story has a pulpier feel to it compared to most of the entries to this point. I thought in reading it that it would have been at home in one of the early horror pulps such as Weird Tales. (view spoiler)[The premise, involving the migration of human souls into mice, while never really explained in detail, is still suitably creepy. I was a bit underwhelmed by the climax, but perhaps that’s because over the course of my life I have co-habited with mice in a number of older houses and that familiarity makes it difficult for me envision them as devourers of human flesh. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭

“The High Seas”, Elinor Mordaunt

(view spoiler)[Throughout this anthology, I’ve noticed that Mike Ashley displays a tendency to pair up similarly-themed stories. Hence, Mordaunt’s story, like the preceding one, “Devereux’s Last Smoke”, is concerned with sexual rivalry. Mordaunt’s take on this theme is, however, rather unsatisfying. For one thing, all three members of the triangle come off as deeply flawed and unsympathetic. That might be okay if their character deficits (or the manner in which they manifested) were somehow interesting. Instead, my primary reactions to the story and its characters were annoyance and distaste.

There is a supernatural element to story, but it’s kind of tossed out near the end in such a slapdash fashion that it has almost no impact on the reader. Similarly, the story’s conclusion regarding the eventual fate of Bran and Ivy seems oddly arbitrary. If Mordaunt was trying to make some larger point about human affairs in penning this story, I’m afraid that it pretty much eluded me. (hide spoiler)]

✭½

“The Black Bell Buoy”, Rupert Chesterton

This turns out to be another entry that had me on the fence. It is by no means a badly written story, but it’s mining familiar waters — (view spoiler)[we have the rather shopworn device in which two men compete for the favor of a woman; one of the two men (usually, as this case, the bad ’un) does in the other, who subsequently returns to wreak his vengeance. Perhaps it’s because one of my favorite ghost stories (F. Marion Crawford’s “Man Overboard!”) employs this same trope to far better effect that I find myself somewhat underwhelmed by Chesterton’s tale. I think the point where Chesterton more or less loses me for good comes at the climax, where Pettitt rather over-dramatically declares himself a murderer and goes down with his ship. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½

“Devereux’s Last Smoke”, Izola Forrester

I’m a little bit on the fence about this particular story. I think it’s better written than many of the others we’ve seen up to this point (although some of the period slang went over my head). (view spoiler)[I thought the ending was fairly well handled, although Barnaby’s decision to relate his tale in front of Crane struck me as incredibly callous, making me wonder whether he had some unstated motivation for doing so. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

Welcome, Sami!

“The Ship That Died”, John Gilbert

This is a rather odd little tale. (view spoiler)[As pointed out by Mike Ashley, this story, like its predecessor, “The Murdered Ship”, is interested in the notion that ships that have died may return as “ghosts”. As others have already noted, what makes Gilbert’s contribution so frustrating is his refusal to explain or even hint at what is causing the story’s events. Why, for example, is the ship disintegrating at such an alarming rate? Why does the phantom vessel seemingly attempt to ram those she encounters? (hide spoiler)]

✭½

“The Murdered Ships”, James Francis Dwyer

(view spoiler)[More U-boat shenanigans of a sort. In Dwyer’s supernatural worldview, baddies are haunted, not by the souls of people they have killed, but rather by the souls of the ships they have “murdered” (hence the story title). It’s a mildly interesting idea, but the author doesn’t fashion from it a particularly spooky tale. Things perk up a bit in the final few paragraphs, but that climax comes and departs so quickly, that it’s not really enough to redeem a story that in the final analysis is merely passable. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭

I’ve been distracted recently by other reading projects, but I’m returning to our group read and will attempt to finish it off this week.

“From the Depths”, F. Britten Austin

Austin’s contribution is by no means terrible, but quite frankly I expected more from a title story. What make it all the more disappointing and frustrating is the fact that the set-up is quite promising. (view spoiler)[Written on the heels of World War I, Austin capitalizes on Germany’s controversial use of unrestricted submarine warfare (as opposed to attacks per prize rules). I thought the idea of communication with the dead via Morse code was a potentially interesting variant on the more typical seance. But this penultimate scene is handled rather clumsily by the author. And the characters themselves are rather cartoonishly rendered (especially Horst). A thumbs up for this effort, but just barely. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭

Lena said: Another Walberg action movie coming to Prime

At the risk of pre-judging, that looks bad. And the fact that Antoine Fuqua is directing doesn’t fill me with confidence.

“The Mystery of the Water-Logged Ship”, William Hope Hodgson

Given William Hope Hodgson’s oeuvre, the inclusion of one of his stories is probably a sine qua non for an anthology on classic nautical horror, such as the present one by editor Mike Ashley. Sadly, the present story is not one Hodgson’s better ones. It’s presence here illustrates the problem of anthologizing lesser-known tales at the expense of more famous ones. Any of the Hodgson stories cited by Ashley in his intro (e.g., “The Voice in the Night”) would have been a better choice than “Water-Logged Ship”.

I really like the set-up for this tale. (view spoiler)[The steam-yacht White Hart, crossing the Atlantic, encounters a derelict ship and mysterious stuff happens as they attempt to tow it. Then Hodgson completely spoils his nice atmospheric story by explaining away the mystery as being the work of seafaring marauders who apparently attended the Rube Goldberg school of piracy. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½