No, I don’t doubt NASA and the Space program.  This isn’t the “Space Doubt Library”, like I said before. I think perhaps someone is spacing out the title of my column if that seems to be the title.  Indeed, we are positive about space here—I and my readers are put into outer space by all the good science fiction we’re reading.

     And now, to show how far out the column is, we shall have another look at the apocalyptic writing of this century.  I have some books that are so far out, they’re not only out of sight, but gone.  Gone into space, perhaps.  But you will see pictures of the covers of these books accompanying my column, and this is to prove that I actually have the books that I’m reviewing.

     I’ve had pictures of book covers here before, but this was to prove that the works I was reviewing actually existed.  Now that we have that established, yes, I do have copies of them myself.  Onward to the books.

     Dan Brown excited a whole lot of public interest with THE DA VINCI CODE and made numerous best-seller lists, and it finally became a TV series and a documentary that were trumped on the big push of the Scifi Channel, one show about the book and the other the book itself.  You remember that the book had the precept that Jesus Christ had Mary Magdelene for his wife, a lady that would perhaps have been his apostle if any of the apostles had been female.  As for disciple, there was no such thing as a female disciple, the thing had a male gender.  At any rate, I would call that book apocalyptic, due to its subject matter tending so close to the apocalypse where there was what may be considered its source—who preceded John of Revelations in perceiving the apocalypse?  No one.  No one in written text, anyway.

     So Dan Brown picked up this apocalyptic notion at the other end and began to delve.  One witnesses an uprising of serious objection to both the author and his book now that much of the adulation and acclaim has started to subside.  Well, they all incur spite and malice, Dan; you should know that, and probably do, considering that the work was a study of Leonardo Da Vinci, who was mass-assailed by a populace, some of whom had in mind his nude portraiture and anatomical studies, and others his rumored graphics of advanced weaponry.  “He draws us into war,” they used to say of him.  Which gives one the notion that they were speaking English until you realize the word-play exists in Latin, although perhaps does not exist in English.

     Now on to the newer book by the same author, THE LOST SYMBOL, which is a work of quasi-fiction, like the preceding volume, set in the present age. I call this work apocalyptic also, because it portrays the apocalypse, opening with a description of a death cult in full swing, within sight of the White House. The social activity alluded to in the opening chapters resembles what was described in the news recently when a couple of people were chided for crashing a White House party. (A joke I heard recently had it that the two party crashers were Obama and his lady.) They said security wasn’t on the ball, and it isn’t on the ball in this book, and it would be difficult for it to be in the chaos that’s described.  This is just the opening for further turbulence as the reader and writer make their way into chaos piled on chaos as all the cryptologies of organized society are delved into, with the delvers becoming lost explorers.  The reader might note that the setup described in the opening is an alternate reality existing in almost paradigmatic form, and there are alternate existences all over the place as the novel proceeds into its own pandemonium.

     The book’s worth having, though not worth living in.  It’s copyrighted 2009 by its author and published by Doubleday, now a division of Random House, which at one time had only one other holding, called Modern Library.  If the book is not available at Barnes and Noble or Borders, they can order it, or it can easily be found on the net.

     FLATLAND, by Edwin A. Abbott, is available in an annotated edition published in 2002 by Perseus Publishing in hardcover and in paperback in 2008 by Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group.  I don’t know whether it can be located on the net in a procurable form, as I do not bother myself checking out commercial literary sites. Interested people may get information about its availability from Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue, South, New York, New York 10016-8810. This book hasn’t been reviewed in SF magazines very much, but it isn’t as if no sf reviewer has reviewed it; but it wasn’t very highly recommended, and was called an oddity.  However, the book has a cult which writes flatland-derived stories and some of these have been published in science fiction magazines.  The point about Flatland is that it is indeed flat, existing within a collapsed dimension and not having the structure of reality.  The possibility of escaping or emerging from it is mentioned within the text.  If the reader does not do some creative work of his own, he is left with a nirvana.  The volume is worth studying to see what the author and others have to say about all this.  It isn’t exactly nihilism, it’s where nihilism has come and gone, a sort of aftermath.

     As you can see, FLASHFORWARD has a sort of avant-garde titling, and a cover which purports a view of modern civilization. That this edition is au courant is evidenced by the blurb for the TV series on its cover, and on the rear of the dust jacket they give time and channel.  So the book itself is a sort of flash phenomenon, an avant-garde touch.  The book was published in 1999 by TOR, Tom Doherty Associates, so there was time for it to have been a hit TV series, but where or when it struck, I don’t know myself, only that it was released on abc recently and has been running on that channel.  If all this were not so I would call the advertisers prophets when they refer to it as a hit series.  It gets tiresome, every new sf event has already premiered somewhere else. Too bad if you aren’t up with it.  The only thing is, I thought I was up with it when I started tuning in the Scifi Channel.  Nope, still not up with it.  Maybe some of these have been premiered on a punk rock channel somewhere, available by satellite for people with the Dish.

     Which is in keeping with the title the book has. Sawyer scored recently with www.wake, small lettering in the title for that avant-garde effect, a book about a computer becoming sentient and its users becoming very computer-involved. Before this book he was with ROLLBACK, a book about elderly people in their own world. FLASHFORWARD is time-warping in action; who touches this book touches, not a man, but its subject matter, for the book is its subject matter, an extension of the old principle of the medium being the message, or, as it was later put with virtual, the massage, or perhaps it is an extrapolation of that principle or a development of it.  All of that’s avant-garde. Books that are items or things are in that vanguard.  Anyway, the book is time-defying as well, quite an advantage in reading and in discussing.  At the forums they’re wondering if maybe it’s flash-fiction.

     I’d go with it some more, but I don’t want to be the fiend who does spoilers.  TOR books can be found on the net.

    THE FUTURE OF FANTASY ART, edited by Aly Fell and Duddlebug, with a foreword by William Stout, is a better collection of art than one is used to, as it lacks many of the faults that fantasy art appearing in collections has had, and has acquired a sincerity and a wish to denote obscure regions, with the result that the art can be looked upon with some pleasure. The publishers are “Collins Design, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers”, locatable at www.harpercollins.com

     My printer cartridges were low when these were printed, but they are just proofs, not advertising, so I saw no need to do new ones.  Though on the art volume, the cover could have looked a lot better.

     Some of the people who write for Surprising have come up with new books, and one cannot omit them here, although their books also appear in the advertising column with information about their availability.  They are Nescher Pyscher, Gary Every and Joanne Tolson.

     Nescher Pyscher’s ITCHY WHISPERS does not seem to me to have a very promising title, but this Trafford edition is a handsome work well worth having.  The volume reminds me of some of the volumes of the works of Walt Kelly in terms of the spirit of the back cover and other aspects of the book. It’s highly individualistic in presentation and clearly set aside from the ordinary book.  The stories within are satisfying to the reader, showing an avant-garde approach to fantasy and, as it seems to me, using science and science fiction as an avant-garde view.   Buy it and you’ve got a book. As I say, information on purchasing it is available in The Traders Nook.  If you’re looking for something different in these twin milieus  of something different, here is a book for you. I predict you’ll be reading the stories, not just showing off the volume.

     Gary Every’s SHADOW OF THE OHSHAD has a title that might put you off, as it seems to invert the syllables of the first word in the second. There’s a bit of the mirror universe about it, as it seems to me; at any rate, Every’s subject matter is not life as we know it, though he is a columnist for a newspaper where he lives, from whence the writing in the book is derived.  The works are lore rather than fiction, presented from the real world point of view.  The book takes you somewhere else, from wherever you may be, and probably even has that effect on others living where the author lives, as he delves into impinging unreal worlds which are the real life of other cultures but which are more into the, as it were, unreal worlds of the superstitious perspective.  But is this unreal?  They do impinge on our own ways of life.  Again, it’s a book worth having, not just worth reading.

     Joanne Tolson’s poems are always worth a read, as you have seen here if you read the poetry in Surprising, and her chapbook is a nice little volume to have; you’ll find it in the Traders Nook.

     I think it might be nice to look over the magazines by reviewing some of concurrent dates to the date on Surprising, even though these are outdated by their future-dating processes.  But they did represent the ending of one year and the beginning of another, just as you see at the exact time involved with Surprising…until Surprising’s currency is left behind by the passage of time and you find the door into summer by looking at the sf magazine displays.

     Having mentioned the Flatland cult in my review above, I’d point out that “Formidable Caress” in the December Analog is a story that I view as being of this type.  It takes place in a realm of time stratas called Old Earth, where in long cycles the world seems to withdraw into a neutron star and then expand again in a Big Bang.  The story has been a series there and this is its most recent episode, taking place at the time of the destruction.

     Another series story in the same issue, by H.G. Stratmann, is about some aliens with powers matching that of the creators of the Universe who have moved Mars and Venus and are terraforming them; the young lovers Martin and Katerina, from America and Russia’s cooperative space program, are there to find out what their plan is and see what they will have to say about it.  In this latest adventure they seem to have failed the test the aliens put them to, due to Katerina’s religious convictions.  “Wilderness Were Paradise Enow” is the name of the story. The serial, “To Climb A Flat Mountain”, concerns re-configurement of material realms and mutations of people, as seen by G. David Nordley, and Carl Frederick’s “The Universe Beneath Our Feet” reminds us of material reality.  The editorial concerns present-day technology.

     The January-February issue of Analog has three series stories, all of them novellas. The first is another Stratmann tale about the aliens, following the one in the last issue fast enough for the reader, and in this one, “Thus Spake the Aliens”, religion is reasserted at the end of the tale and things look better.  One is still up in the air, but perhaps there’ll be another, though there doesn’t HAVE to be. There’s no feeling of “A lone author must write another story or the human race is left in limbo,” because the author suggests that will not be so.

     The second series story is another of Richard Lovett’s Brittney and Floyd tales.  Brittney is a being who has arisen and developed sentience who is implanted in Floyd.  In earlier stories they survived (the story was about survival), then explored mines, all of it very existential with the novelty of one character’s existence being disputable, but they do dwell in a sort of termination of life’s human experiences—now in this one, they discover alien life which existed prior to the human race coming into being.  Not exactly human herself, Brittney changes to another form of existence, though not yet an independent human one.

     Then there’s one of Kristine Katheryn Rusch’s Retrieval Artist stories, similarly existentialistic but representing a rather nihilistic existentialism existing beyond the bounds of credibility.  Her stories seem to concern identity where identity is a rare thing, but not correspondingly priceless.  Other items in the issue seem to have a similar existential setting—for instance, in David L. Clements’ “A War of the Stars” a clone is persuaded to go for human identity.  And in “Simple Gifts” by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, people are shown doing nothing nowhere in a big way.

     There’s a science article in the issue that is, on the whole, a jape.

     In the December Asimov’s the editorial describes moving to a new office, where they share the building with Analog. Robert Silverberg continues describing his world-building for his novels in his column, suggesting that world-building is a very important matter for an sf novelist. A poem in the issue discusses the possibility of the world ending in 2012, nixing it.  Another poem nihilistically describes an anti-world, and a third poem describes a collision of galaxies.

     “A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime” by Benjamin Crowell is not as good a story as its title suggests it will be, in spite of being a novelette, but it parallels the spirit of the title while sticking to a businesslike milieu with an affinity for the one presented in “Simple Gifts” in Analog.  I think the text smuggles the title, as may occur when a spirit is involved.  Some of the short stories seem to concern women’s rights and the like. They tend to dud an issue that is overall an effective one.

     The January issue has a Dada-like cover that’s highly attractive and distinctive, by Jeroen Advocaat, as if we were to believe a name like that. The editorial describes troubles with the post office and some introspection about what constitutes a magazine.

     There’s a story about trying to publish an effective science fiction magazine in some parallel realm called “Wonder House”, a story by Allen M. Steele which seems more or less a hoax called “The Jekyll Island Horror”, but we learn by Googling that Jekyll Island is a real place. Carol Emshwiller does another story about a man trying to avoid civilization by disappearing into nature, growing more and more difficult to find as a refuge, called “Wilds”. “Conditional Love” by Felicity Shoulders furnishes the genetics material in the issue, and Robert Reed does another of his mundane destruction-of-things pieces, “The Good Hand.”

     The December issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction definitely features Matthew Hughes’ “Hell of a Fix”, which seems to set the pace for what might amount to a theme issue, and which is illustrated by a death’s-head cover by Kent Bash. The story makes a grand shuck out of the selling-your-soul-to-the-devil theme, but one cannot ignore the fact that such stories are written after reading it—it shows more consideration for how hell is than is generally shown in stories of the kind.  “Dragon’s Teeth” by Alex Irvine is a degenerative dragon-hunt with no nobility about it.  Tim Sullivan’s “Inside Time” has a way-station existing within a singularity and a plot similar to what horror comics used to have occurring with the three characters in the way-station.  There’s plenty of time-distortion in the story for those partial to it.

     “I Must Needs Part, the Policeman Said” by Richard Bowes has author as human sacrifice as Bowes suggests his story is true and uses himself as a main character in a near-death conspiracy based on the Phillip K. Dick school of writing, which had a lot going on around it and is mentioned in the story. 

     The short stories have a woman’s viewpoint tendency about them and include one about a woman stranded on the Moon while the world is destroying itself by Brendan DuBois, another about a woman at the terminus of her life who has lost her family and sees them now as ghosts called “Iris”—she’s about a ghost herself…and another about how crummy life on a commercialized moon is.  “Farewell Atlantis” has time travelers from Atlantis trying to have an effect in the present age and not managing it very well.  On the whole, these shorts are stunners going the limits, and that is a characteristic of the issue.

     Scott Edelson’s been gone from the staff of Scifi about a year now, but the magazine keeps on being steadily what it was; the December issue has whatever seems to be new or coming in it.

     The December Realms of Fantasy is nothing special, except that the magazine’s still there, when it looked like it might not be. The February issue has someone who looks like the Beastmaster on the cover and features a far-out new story by Harlan Ellison within, about a man who has created life without establishment help.  Ellison’s been sort of out of circ recently, but there he is back again, right in stride.

     Weird Tales publishes behind schedule instead of ahead of schedule like the sf magazines; the latest issue is the Fall issue, devoted to Poe and does the cover remind you of any actress you’re familiar with? Nick Mamatas does some work in it.  George Scithers is now listed as editor emeritus.  The magazine has taken on an avant-garde appearance, but still has plenty of tokens of the way the magazine used to be. Emblazoned on the cover is the fact that they took the 2009 Hugo Award.

     That does this reviewer’s job of covering the territory for this issue, and I hope I have pleased the reader by saying what’s what. Things have really been jumping, it seems to me, and now I’ll wait and see what the next four months will bring. So will you, I suppose.