I would think any fan or scholar of the ‘classic’ era of spaceflight, the space race, and humankind’s first steps away from sessility knows how many ifs and maybes there are in the stories and histories we tell. What if the rocket had not exploded, what if Russia, or the US, would have decided on different missions, different risks, different strategic, tactical, political approaches?
Ian Sales, a British author and editor, has written a series of stories based on some of these premises - four of them are collected in the Apollo Quartet, the first of which, ‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’ won a BSFA award. All of them are departures, at some point, from the US timeline as we know it, all of them deeply researched, extensively documented (you do NOT skip footnotes in an Ian Sales book!), and presented in line with the documentation style we know from the era. Truly grand stuff for any fan of space flight.
The collection at hand, Dreams of the Space Age - again in the format of a small and beautifully presented hardback, is the fanciful child of these stories. Here we have a bit less rigour, a tad more fiction, but all stories are well researched, are deeply rooted in human space flight history as we know it, and depart from it somewhere. All stories, save the final one, were previously published; and all are introduced by a relevant picture from classic space flight history. The book starts with an Introduction by Dave Hutchinson, and finishes with a short biography of Ian Sales, but none of the usual lists of NASA acronyms, mission timelines, sources, or website references we are used to from the Apollo Quartet.
Here's one I missed at the time - my loss, of course, and all the more my enjoyment and amazement of reading this now. Should, for whatever reason, you be in the same boat, then let me strongly suggest you spend half an hour reading Ted Chiang's novelette Hell Is The Absence of God.
Yes, the title is in itself a Christian quote I reckon, and the story setting/world builds from some parts of current Christian world-view/mythology (and I leave it to the reader to decide how far this is actually Christian, or if the story really constitutes a criticism of said religion). This is a world where the existence of God, of Heaven and Hell, and of Angels is evident, visible, tangible, and thus a major fact of life. Angels visit/pass through the world as a side effect of whatever business they are on, and effect miracle healings, life changing events, but also death and destruction.
There are two groups of people - those who are devout, and will thus go to heaven (and upon death it is observable which direction the soul takes!), and those who are no and go to hell, which is characterised by the absence of God. And, like any such system with decision points, influences, and partly deterministic outcomes there are people gaming the system...
In my opinion not about religion (never mind a specific one per se) but about the nature of belief, devotion, and what it does to a society. Also, in my opinion, a grand piece of writing and well deserving the Hugo and Nebula Awards it won!
Paul Cornell is a British writer, and a man of many talents - he’s written novels, short fiction, comics, non-fiction, TV tie-ins, Screenplays… He’s been nominated for Hugo Awards in 3 different categories, and he has won a BSFA and an Eagle Award. A Better Way To Die is the first collection of his short stories, published by NewCon Press. The stories in this book were all previously published in a variety of places between 2005 and 2014, and it’s the first time that all 4 Jonathan Hamilton stories can be found in one place, which is reason alone for owning this book!
But let’s take it one step at a time; below is a run-through of the various stories in the collection, and my thoughts on them. But before I start with this let me say that, if you own/have read all of them already then this is obviously not for you, but for the rest of us this is a strong recommendation to buy and read this book.
So, without further ado - the book starts out with an introduction by John Scalzi, pointing out that Cornell is one of the nicest people on the planet, a great writer, and a must-read. After that we start with Paul’s stories - most of them have a short prescript by the author discussing some key points, inspirations, or importance to himself of what’s to come; I found this to add rather a lot to some of them.
Ian Sales is a UK author, editor (both for books and websites), and publisher; who grew up in the Middle East before returning to the UK to enthral us with his tales of spaceflight as we know it (and then some more) that he could not do himself. His motto/tagline, on his own blog, is “It doesn't have to be right... it just has to sound plausible”, which very nicely sums up his writing, especially the Apollo Quartet, of which All That Outer Space Allows is the 4th and final instalment. Unless you count Dreams of the Space Age as the 5th one, of course... but not everybody is of the Douglas Adams school of counting series.
The books and stories in the Apollo Quartet are only loosely connected, but all are based on and extrapolated from the US space program during the space race. All of them have some point of departure, where they branch off from spaceflight history as we know it, or where they continue where our history left off. All That Outer Space Allows is a bit of a departure from this format of the previous 3 books – not only is it one step removed from actual spaceflight activity and told through the viewpoint of an observer, but it also does not contain the trappings in the form of acronym lists, mission listings etc – kept in Apollo project font and forma – which gave the earlier books their own, slightly grubby retro-feeling. Instead the story is interspersed with faux NASA and other contemporary (-looking) lists, announcements, and press clippings which underpin the events in the story. One real fun piece was a faux SF Encyclopedia article, putting the story itself into a larger framework of Ginny's life, by outlining the larger cornerstones in her past and future.
Instead of projected spaceflight history we get what I felt was Ian's most 'fiction' story in the quartet. Not because the other stories aren't fiction (they are – all of them start at a point in spaceflight history and extrapolate from there in a direction our history did not take), but because here the initial premise is fictionalised, too – I guess writing about an actual astronaut and his wife in the way this is written would have been ever so slightly iffy...
Let me give you a story of ascendance. Or, rather, a story of repeatedly failed ascendance, following an Imugi (Korean Lesser Dragon, some kind of giant serpent) in its repeatedly thwarted attempts to become a Dragon and enter the gates of heaven. It's a story of persistence, of human love, and of the coming together of two very different world views; and it's great.
Zen Cho is a Malayan author living in the UK - her website is linked below, and I would suggest you check it (and her other work) out.
If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again was was published by Barnes&Noble
The cover design on the right is by Shirley Jackson
Let’s talk about Fredric Brown for a minute, just in case you have not heard of him before. Yes, it might have happened, even if he is, in my eyes, one of the great classic SF writers. Or maybe because of it - he might simply have been before your time, just as he was before mine. And I don’t know if/as/when I might have come across his oeuvre if I had not been given a copy of the marvellous short story collection Honeymoon in Hell to read. He was a master of the short story, frequently holding up a mirror to humanity through his fantastic settings, and just as frequently leading his readers down the garden path, reversing everything with the final paragraph (or even sentence at times) and sending them back to the beginning, to re-read the story with the correct mind set this time. He wrote Science Fiction, Mysteries, Farces, Detective stories, and, as a pulp writer frequently paid by volume and frequency, at a fantastic rate, which means that a full bibliography of novels, collections, never mind short publications is longer than mine and your arm together! And, just to go back to this, if you really have not heard of him before, then you really should have a look, now you know of him!
Most of his output is in print, or has a tendency to be re-printed occasionally, the edition of the book at hand comes from Blackmask, who, as far as I can establish, are a Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing Press, and most likely POD (nothing wrong with that for such a large back-catalogue!)
The Screaming Mimi is a detective novel, following the investigative reporter Bill Sweeney, working for the Blade, as he follows the trail of The Ripper in a classic Chicago setting, and crosses path (and frequently more) with a number of classic characters whilst doing so - starting with the exceedingly good-looking (he’s seen her naked, accidentally) dancer Yolanda Lang, her agent/manager JJ ‘Doc’ Greene, her huge dog Satan (also part of her dance act. Don’t ask.), or a bum called God. The ripper in question has slashed and killed 3 girls, all good-looking and blonde, and has only been deterred from doing the same to Yolanda by Satan.
