Volume 7, Issue 2 – February, 2004

We Can Review It For You Wholesale

2003 proved to be a busy year for me. I attended several conventions and undertook a transatlantic trip to Scotland. Oh, and I forgot to mention that during the year I finished five of my own books (two of them co-authorships) and edited a bunch by other people, most notably C.S. Thompson’s astonishing novel A Season of Strange Dreams and the five volumes of the “director’s cut” reissue of Fay Sampson’s extraordinary Morgan Le Fay series. Not to mention writing a bunch of reviews for Crescent Blues, Blue Ear (no relation) and of course Infinity Plus, plus a few short stories. At the moment I’m editing/rewriting the memoirs of a rock star with one hand while ghostwriting a fantasy novel with the other.

And the dog ate my homework.

In other words, I can give plenty of excuses for why I didn’t review the following books…

Richard K. Morgan: Altered Carbon

Reviewers all over the place praised this piece of noir cyberpunk to the skies, and certainly, it’s pretty impressive. In the world of Altered Carbon, people can back themselves up in computers ready to be downloaded into a different body, rented or cloned, should something happen to the old one or simply should it prove convenient. John Varley and others explored this territory fairly thoroughly over the years, so Morgan’s debut stands or falls by its strength as a noir thriller/detection. I found it to be pretty good in this capacity, and will most certainly read its follow-up, Broken Angels (March 2004). But the book seemed somewhat overlong, and the depiction of the lesser characters proved sketchy enough that from time to time I experienced some difficulty sorting out who was who within its Byzantine plot. Recommended, but with reservations.

G.M. Ford: A Blind Eye

This new addition to the Frank Corso series opens with the intrepid Corso and his one-time lover, Meg Dougherty, on the run from the Texas law (who want to force Corso to testify). In the middle of a blizzard, Corso and Dougherty crash their car and hole up in a deserted Wisconsin farmhouse. Breaking up the floorboards of the outhouse for fuel, they discover a stack of years-old corpses. This leads them into a hunt — sometimes in cooperation with the cops, sometimes in competition with them — for a most unusual serial killer. The climax of the book occupies the whole of its second half — an impressive feat! In addition, the action takes place among the isolated Jackson White people of New York state. Highly recommended as a good page-turner.

Elizabeth Moon: Remnant Population

Elizabeth Moon’s fame rests primarily on her military SF. Consequently, I avoided her work like the plague until about a year ago, when her exquisite novel of autism, The Speed of Dark, came my way. I still cherish no desire to read her military SF, but I continue to bore people rigid ranting to them about how good The Speed of Dark is.

Remnant Population (a reissue of a 1996 novel) doesn’t quite equal The Speed of Dark, but nevertheless I enjoyed it as much as any SF I read during 2003. When the Company decides to pull out of a colony planet, they leave behind an old woman, Ofelia. Much later, the Company attempts to establish a new colony, but intelligent natives no one knew existed rout Company forces, shedding quite a lot of Company blood in the process. While Earth tries to figure out what to do, an expeditionary party of the natives finds Ofelia and establishes communication with her. This forces her into the position of mediator between the natives and Earth.

That just about summarizes the plot, actually. Nevertheless, the book proves entirely engrossing, partly because of the character of Ofelia herself, but mainly because of the aliens Moon created. Through Ofelia’s eyes they become comprehensible, but they always remain entrancingly alien. I recommended this so hard to my non-SF-reading wife that in the end, to shut me up, she read it. To the astonishment of both of us, she loved it too.

Peter Straub: lost boy lost girl

Any new Peter Straub novel qualifies as hot news for this particular reviewer, and lost boy lost girl was no exception. As always with Straub, this complicated ghost story cum serial-killer murder mystery operates on a number of levels. However, to be honest, I found it something of a let-down after The Hell Fire Club and Mr. X. The novel displays many virtues, but it suffers a little from predictability. Further, while Straub — a very literary writer — generally excels in the artistic use of words, here and there in this novel the writing descended into prissiness and, on occasion, absurdity. To cite but one example: “A minute later, he was vomiting up the breakfast he had not eaten.” Although the book remains far better than most of its kind, I consider lost boy lost girl a second-string work in the Straub canon.

Robert A. Heinlein: Have Space Suit – Will Travel

I could swear I read this decades ago, but when it arrived I realized I could remember nothing about it. So, mindful of Citizen of the Galaxy and other excellent Heinlein young adult books, I decided to read it again. For one thing, it’s short. Since the vast majority of SF novels published these days weigh enough to break the scales, this reviewer greets anything under 300 close-printed pages with cries of glee.

Young Kip Russell builds his own spacesuit and dreams of going to the moon. Space pirates abduct him and bring him there. But this proves to be only the first stage of a long voyage he’ll take to the core of the galaxy. There he’ll meet countless galactic civilizations and play an important role in a trial at the highest court of all. Nothing wrong with that, but the latter part of the book becomes impossibly turgid thanks to Heinlein’s tedious proselytizing. Heinlein lacked the artistry to carry off the sermonizing or the suspension of belief necessary to allow this reader to ignore the stark improbabilities of the plot. By book’s end I felt that one of those 600-pages-of-close-print SF doorstops might have seemed like a shorter read.

April Smith: Good Morning, Killer

Smith’s previous novel featuring Special Agent Ana Grey, North of Montana, impressed me a great deal, and I expected a great deal of this follow-up. Unfortunately, Good Morning, Killer rather disappointed me, probably because between the two novels the characterization of Grey shifted from enjoyably feisty to outright pain-in-the-ass. It’s difficult to get exercised over the difficulties of someone whom, in real life, you’d duck into doorways to avoid.

Aside from that, Smith delivers a reasonably constructed thriller. Ana must cope with an unusual serial abductor. He kidnaps jailbait girls, strips them but seemingly does not rape them before releasing them unharmed. At the same time an old, unsolved crime appears to implicate Ana’s nearest and dearest. In addition — in a related subplot — Ana’s longish-term relationship collapses around her ears, surprisingly not purely because of her bitchiness.

Scott Turow’s laudatory cover quote (“The writing has the taut, perfect tone of a well tuned string and the story goes forward with tremendous momentum from the very start, even though it is also a book that deepens with every page.”) is not completely unjustified but, paradoxically, the book remains unengaging.

Terry Pratchett: Monstrous Regiment

At his best, Terry Pratchett is one of our best current fantasy writers, and Monstrous Regiment qualifies as very near his best. The fact that it’s frequently hilariously funny is icing on the cake.

Young Polly disguises herself as a man in order to join the army and fight in defense of her country in an endless, certainly pointless war against its neighbor. Soon she discovers that more and more of her fellow grunts are, like herself, women in men’s clothing. The war slaughtered so many of the young men of both sides that not enough remain alive to sustain it. Monstrous Regiment is one of the most enjoyably effective anti-war novels since Harry Harrison’s 1965 classic Bill, the Galactic Hero (ignore the dire sequels). ‘Nuff said.

Larry Niven: The Integral Trees

Despite the title, this omnibus reissue contains both The Integral Trees (1983) and its sequel The Smoke Ring (1987). I managed somehow to miss out on both of them the first time around. Consequently, I fell on this collection with a delight tempered only by the knowledge that some of Niven’s other writing of that era and a little later did not age well. That criticism could indeed be leveled at these two novels, but so mildly as to be largely irrelevant.

Long ago, a mad computer (I simplify) marooned a bunch of humans in a bizarre habitat: the gaseous donut surrounding a neutron star. The donut affords air and energy to develop and sustain life, most notably enormously long floating trees that serve as homes for many of the more mobile life forms — newly arrived humans included. The two novels take place some generations later, after the descendants of the original strandees multiplied, diversified and established various different mini-civilizations.

Niven writes very pared down prose by today’s standards — not necessarily a bad thing. Nevertheless, Niven effectively conveys the kind of cosmic awe which has always been his main strength. However, he loses out a little on atmosphere and characterization. The two novels prove highly readable, generate appropriate gasps but in the end, a mite uninvolving.

Victor J. Stenger: Has Science Found God?

Stenger set himself a phenomenally ambitious task in this book. In order to counter claims in the popular media and elsewhere that science provides evidence for the existence of God, he surveys everything we currently know about the universe and ourselves to determine if any evidence of God exists. In addition, he examines the question of whether one could enter God into the equations of modern science without irremediably destroying the equations.

As Stenger states near the outset, believers present the rationalist with the false challenge of effecting an impossible proof — the nonexistence of something that does not exist (try proving that Martians don’t live among us). At the same time, these same believers entirely duck the issue that should, in the abstract, be far easier: a non-faith-based proof of God’s existence.

As a result, Stenger cannot present a simple, elegant five-line proof of his case. Instead, recalling the enormously lengthy iterative proofs done a few years ago by computer of Fermat’s Last Theorem, he must perform his extensive survey in countless fields of knowledge to produce a proof by statistics. In this he succeeds, and a great deal of what he tells us along the way proves fascinating. The only problem with the book is that, necessarily, it becomes thematically if not factually repetitive.

I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone seeking a primer in what we as a species currently know about “life, the universe and everything.” But the book, necessarily, proves less effective as a piece of polemic (try George A. Erickson’s Time Traveling with Science and the Saints, also from Prometheus, if you crave a good piece of blood-stirring, tub-thumping rationalist polemic). This could well be the most worthwhile book I’ve read all year. I haven’t yet reviewed it fully only because I quail at the prospect of writing a review to the standard the book merits.

Dave Duncan: West of January

Dave Duncan’s seemingly endless King’s Blades series of military fantasy novels sort of put me off reading his work. Thus I picked up this reissue of his early (1989) science fantasy with some reluctance. Indeed, had it not been such an attractive publication, I would’ve passed it by. Now I’m thoroughly glad I chose to read West of January.

Over the course of many generations of isolation, the human colonists on the planet Vernier regressed both technologically and sociologically. They exist now as a scattering of ideologically opposed cultures. Each culture, despite their many differences, acts almost as barbaric as the next. In addition, Vernier is vast and its rotation relative to its star is exceedingly slow. As a result, all the cultures must keep constantly on the move to avoid the baking heat of full noon — not to mention the chill of night.

An angel (one of the itinerant members of a slightly less barbaric culture who make minimal changes for the benefit of the species while generating bastards everywhere they go) fathered Knobil, a young herdsman. The tale of Knobil’s search for truth and a kind of cultural transcendence proves quite engrossing. It shows the heights this much maligned SF subgenre can attain. My profound personal thanks to the small Canadian press Bakka/Red Deer for bringing West of January to my attention. Try this novel and I bet you feel the same.

Sheri S. Tepper: The Companions

I confess to being an enormous fan of Tepper’s and avidly read everything she publishes, even while recognizing that her novels can be somewhat uneven. At their best they define a subgenre of SF that would best be called “science fantasy” if others hadn’t appropriated the term. Even when they fail to attain such heights, Tepper’s books almost always remain engaging and readable and always offer an interesting subtext.

The Companions ranks as one of the not-so-good ones, alas. But you won’t believe me on this until you get within about fifty pages of the end, when suddenly, a spectacularly successful novel collapses amid hurried, chaotic and just outright bad plotting.

The book depicts a ghastly phase of civilization. On earth, dreadful overpopulation creates an era of gross repression that includes a powerful move to exterminate all nonhuman animals.

Dog-loving Jewel (a typical Tepper heroine — studious and enormously attractive) relishes the opportunity to assist her linguist half-brother on the distant, undeveloped planet Moss (shades of the planet Grass, featured in some of Tepper’s best work). There they must determine, among other riddles, whether the inhabitants possess true sentience.Tepper resolves this particular mystery in masterful fashion. The answer leads to a far greater realm of discovery than anyone could possibly imagine — one in which the presence of Jewel’s dogs proves crucial. Unfortunately, faced with the task of resolving the remainder of the enormously complex scenario she created, Tepper in effect bottoms out. I exhort you to read the first 400 pages or so of The Companions. You’d be hard pressed to find a better 400 pages of SF anywhere. Then let your mind start dreaming up its own possible resolutions of the whole.

Edna Buchanan: You Only Die Twice

The diligent reader will find a few very good chapters in the multi-author disaster Naked Came the Manatee. Buchanan authored one of the best sections, which inspired me to read one of her Florida-set, Britt Montero mystery thrillers.

If you enjoy Sue Grafton, you’ll go nuts over Edna Buchanan. Montero works as a newspaper reporter who dabbles in detection rather than as a full-time private eye. But otherwise, she shares strong — and good — similarities with Kinsey Milhone.

In this installment, a recently dead corpse washes up on Miami Beach. The corpse demonstrably belongs to a woman who died a decade ago. Her convicted murderer currently awaits execution on Death Row. Montero’s solution of this enigma involves many genuine thrills for the reader.

In addition, throughout the novel, you experience the delicious feeling of a high intelligence at work. Only the pressure of other reading prevents me from rushing out and grabbing every other Buchanan book available.

Sue Grafton: Q is for Quarry

I found a thematic similarity between this novel and Edna Buchanan’s You Only Die Twice, discussed immediately above. A couple of police detective friends, forced through ill health to accept retirement, decide to set about solving a Jane Doe murder that puzzled them for 18 years. The retirees call in Kinsey Milhone to help them with the footwork.

Of course, she soon gets far more…

involved than that, playing a fully active role in the necessary delving through ancient history and long-buried secrets. At the same time she copes with the latest episode of the long-running saga of her estranged but would-be reconstituted family and the ups and downs of the romantic life of her elderly landlord and best friend Henry. And Henry’s brother and sister-in-law.

That’s where the book breaks down for me — these soap-opera elements. I frankly don’t care what happens to Henry and Co., and I can’t understand why an intelligent person like Kinsey can be so stupid and bull-headed as not to sort things out with her family. Both of these subplots bore me intensely, and they take up a depressingly large part of the book.

I consider this a colossal shame, because the actual detection part of Q is for Quarry ranks with the very best of Grafton. The plot gains an additional frisson from the fact that the crime Kinsey sets out to solve actually occurred in 1969 in Lompoc, California, near Santa Barbara. Grafton also provides a meaty afterword concerning the real case, complete with a forensic reconstruction of the Jane Doe victim. Overall, I recommend the book. I guess.

Mark Billingham: Scaredy Cat

A rather clumsily written but nevertheless absorbing serial-killer/police-procedural novel, Scaredy Cat benefits from its setting — in and around London, U.K., rather than in the U.S.A. Not one but two serial killers seem to be at work, their murders eerily paralleling each other. Detective Inspector Tom Thorne and his colleagues pursues both ardently.

The book reminded me quite a lot of the late Bartholomew Gill’s mystery series about Irish Chief Inspector Peter McGarr, but I found Billingham’s Thorne much more convincing as a character. In addition, this novel takes the reader on far more of an emotional rollercoaster than anything I ever read by Gill (which, to be fair, isn’t all that much).

The solution to the mystery proves completely satisfying; the grittiness, admirable. The book offers excellent characterization and fascinating forays into past history and aberrant psychologies. In addition, Billingham achieves something more — and something more admirable — in his portrayal of the mental disintegration of one of his primary characters. This allows the reader to forgive the slightly trite conclusion and the rather ungainly writing.

M.J. Rose: Sheet Music

I was in two minds about this book after I finished it, and I’m still in two minds about it now. This slightly erotic, increasingly romantic and certainly gothic contemporary mystery centers on U.S. journalist Justine Pagett, who fled to Paris to escape her father and sister after the death of the mother she worshipped. There she besmirched her reputation by a gross breach of journalistic ethics.

But the opportunity of a journalistic lifetime calls Justine back to the U.S. — an interview with reclusive, eccentric composer and large-scale classical-music mentor Sophie DeLyon. Powerful forces seem to want Justine to back off from the assignment. She receives threatening e-mails, and not long after her arrival at DeLyon’s rambling estate, the composer inexplicably disappears.

The solution of the mystery involves a certain amount of rather predictable sexual revelation and a high measure of improbability. I found Rose’s depiction of Justine’s struggle to come to terms with the real facts of her dead mother’s life much more impressive. I rather enjoyed this book, overall, but it didn’t engender in me any great urge to read anything else by Rose.

Gregory Frost: Fitcher’s Brides

This is a super novel, one of the Terri Windling-edited Fairy Tale series in which writers recast traditional tales. In this instance, Frost combines Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Birds to produce a fantasy that proves very much more entrancing than either.

In 1843, charismatic preacher Elias Fitcher claims the world will soon end. Everyone except those who come to dwell in his utopian community in the Finger Lakes region of New York State will be forever damned by a vengeful Lord. Among the families suckered by this nonsense are the Charters: mom, dad and their three lovely daughters (Vernelia, Amy and Kate).

Fitcher’s eye first falls on the eldest sister, and she becomes his bride. But she soon disappears. Next Amy, and finally, of course, Kate find themselves “favored.” The spunky, intelligent Kate succeeds in outwitting and defeating the vile sexual predator Fitcher where the over-sensible Vernelia and the flighty Amy failed — exactly as you’d expect from a fairy tale.

Frost defies your expectation, however, by successfully turning his fable into a very full fantasy, in two principal respects: the long denouement and the bizarre, near-macabre, supposedly utopian society itself. Jekyll’s Glen seems, as you read, to be simply a rather strange community. Well, what else might one expect from 19th century religious nuts? Very subtly Frost reveals its further strangeness. You accept a considerable amount of Jekyll’s Glen’s plausible reality before you realize just how very odd things actually are. Then you look back and discover quite how much you took at face value that you shouldn’t have.

Frost’s artistry is exemplary, and his tale-telling likewise. This dark and broody novel will hold you from beginning to end. Wow!

Martin Gardner: The No-Sided Professor, and Other Tales of Fantasy, Humor, Mystery, and Philosophy

This exceptionally worthwhile piece of publishing fills a gap in both the available science-fiction/fantasy literature and Gardneriana. At the same time the 28 short pieces here demonstrate why Gardner, so widely acclaimed for his nonfiction, garners little attention as a fiction writer.

This book inspired many flashbacks to my experience many years ago as a creative-writer tutor at weekly evening classes. These are stories which, at their finest, I would have told my students showed, well, a certain amount of promise. I find it hard to pick out any highlights when so many of the lights prove to be so low. The various squibs, like “The Virgin from Kalamazoo” (in effect extensions of his witty nonfiction science pieces), probably best represent Gardner’s gifts. If you want a fun story collection, look elsewhere. At the same time, serious students of the imaginative genres will consider this little volume a must-have.

Greg Iles: Mortal Fear

I’m not quite certain why this rather old novel (published in 1997) came to be on my to-be-reviewed pile, but I’m very glad it did. The bastardized term “techno-thriller” now means little more than “sort of near-future thriller with a lot of gizmos, usually sophisticated Stealth-type planes.” Therefore it’s a great treat to come across a novel to which the term can be excellently applied.

Iles chose the Internet — in 1997, definitely, a cutting edge, near future technology — as the framework for Mortal Fear. Harper Coles runs EROS, a high-priced, absolute-confidentiality-guaranteed cybersex forum. By the very nature of EROS, it takes Harper — and anyone else — a while to realize that someone is, one by one, gruesomely bumping off the forum’s anonymous female clients. As soon as Harper raises the alarm, he finds himself the prime suspect. Who else but EROS’s operator would know the real-life identity of his clients?

Coles’ wrangles with the feds over this mistaken suspicion provide the solitary weak point of the novel. The subplot’s plausibility does nothing to lessen its tedium. But once the hunt for the serial killer (a killer as strange as any you’ll come across in fiction) begins in earnest, you’ll find yourself feverishly turning the pages. Mortal Fear also succeeds in conveying the eroticism of the subject matter, despite the almost total lack of on-stage sex. A stunning thriller, Mortal Fear ranks as one of the very few I’m certain I’ll read again.

Stephen Kendrick: Night Watch

In 1902, a secret ecumenical meeting in London brings together leading representatives of all the world’s major faiths (including those of several Christian sects). A priest is found murdered in the church where all parties are staying. The unbroken snow around the church indicates that the murderer must be one of those inside the church.

The authorities call in Holmes and Watson. The clerics attending on the conferees include a young Father Brown. The prospect of a Holmes/Brown team-up had me salivating. The result, alas, proved to be a rather dutiful, rather tedious, double homage. The truly dedicated will almost certainly enjoy it, however.

Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio

This very virtuous piece of science fiction draws its inspiration from the cutting edge of microbiology. It won a Nebula Award and spawned a sequel (maybe more than one sequel). I found it dull and unconvincing.

Scientists Christopher Dicken and Kaye Lang pursue separate but interrelated lines of research. He seeks the truth about a mysterious disease that affects only pregnant women, bringing miscarriage. He wants to know why people created widespread conspiracies and even committed murder in an attempt to guard the secrets of this malady.

Kaye researches retroviruses, those fragments of genetic material found in our DNA, which she considers might one day spring (as it were) to life again. In the manner of countless near-future, dreadful-warning doorstops of the 1970s, Bear weaves politics and science as these two cardboard characters dig out the world-shattering truth of mystery. The science proves genuinely interesting, although far from blithely conveyed. The rest suffers from the same stodginess but lacks the interest.

Lee Child: Persuader

This blistering thriller features Child’s series character Jack Reacher, an ex-military cop who acts as a sort of vigilante-for-hire. The opening sequence of this novel ranks as the most cinematically effective I can remember reading in any thriller. After that everything else ought to be a let-down. But to Child’s credit, while it would be impossible to match this opening, the rest of the tale never disappoints.

One of the vilest criminals Reacher ever tackled proves to be still alive. Reacher spots the man by chance while waiting for the lights to change at an intersection. This man turns out to be involved in Reacher’s current case — the infiltration of an organized-crime scheme to import sophisticated weapons for sale to terrorists in the U.S. under cover of a carpet dealership. Child delivers fast-paced and savage action, and an intelligent plot. Reacher must constantly use his brains even more than his not inconsiderable brawn resulting in a first-rate, helter-skelter read.

Vera Nazarian: Lords of Rainbow

Vera Nazarian creates fantasy uniquely and absolutely her own, not just in terms of her imagination but also in terms of language and evocation. In particular, she excels in the weaving of colors (you need to read some of her work to understand this). You may later forget some of the details of a Nazarian plot — as one does with all tales — but you will almost certainly never forget the feelings you experienced while reading the story and watching the kaleidoscope of colors she presents.

So it’s almost paradoxical that she sets this, her second novel, in a world where color is notable by its absence. The quest of Lords of Rainbow — high fantasy at its highest — involves the return of color to the deprived world. To reveal any more of the plot than this would give you the false impression that the novel is just another piece of genre high fantasy. It’s not. But no mere words of mine can convey the experience of reading Lords of Rainbow. Just believe me, and read.

Steven-Elliot Altman: Deprivers

A year or two back Steve Altman edited a charity anthology called The Touch, which I very much admired. The Touch posits that there exist among us people whose touch can inadvertently or deliberately deprive us of one or more of our senses, permanently or temporarily. A bunch of authors took this idea and ran with it and created one of those rare thematic anthologies where almost all of the stories qualified as humdingers.

Now Altman returns to the fray with a novel of his own, depicting the emergence of the Deprivers from the shadows of society and their efforts to establish their civil rights. Unfortunately, I cannot extol the virtues of the novel as excitedly as I did those of the anthology.

The novel can be divided in two halves. The first consists of a long and rather good novella tracing the redemption of a Depriver who used his “gift” in order to pursue a career as a paid hitman. The second presents a more general depiction of the struggle by Deprivers worldwide to gain acceptance as equal if different members of the human species.

The novel loses conviction in its second half. I encountered similar scenarios in too many SF novels read many years ago (James Gunn’s 1962 fix-up, The Immortals, for one). I gather there may be more Deprivers novels on their way from Altman in the future, and I very much hope he makes more of his excellent premise.

Christopher Moore: Fluke, or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

There’s a very good reason why critics hail Terry Pratchett as the best comic fantasist in the world. Almost all of the others are astonishingly bad. They’re not all dire, of course — think of Tom Holt, Ron Goulart, Douglas Adams, Esther Friesner and a few others. But in the frenzy of over-publication brought about by Pratchett’s success readers endured countless truly woeful misses among the handful of hits.

Most of the second-raters failed in imagination. If the invention fires on all cylinders it barely matters should the jokes falter. So it’s a delight to discover someone new capable of conjuring the fantastication while being uproariously funny at the same time.

Don’t confuse Moore with a Pratchett clone. Nothing could be further from the truth. You’ll find his humor quite different; his fantasy, likewise. Moore qualifies as a true original voice.

The heart of this novel revolves around an outrageous conspiracy theory concerning the song of the hump-backed whale and very much more besides. By the end of this novel you’ll never be able to look a whale square in the eyes again — unless, of course, you seek urgent counseling to persuade you that there’s nothing actually wrong with finding a member of a different species overwhelmingly sexy. A thoroughly entertaining comic fantasy at every level.

John Grant

John Grant/Paul Barnett is author of over 60 books, Consultant Editor to AAPPL and US Reviews Editor of Infinity Plus. His most recent novels are The Far-Enough Window, from BeWrite, and The Dragons of Manhattan, currently being serialized in Argosy. His collaboration with artist Bob Eggleton, Dragonhenge, nominated for a 2003 Hugo Award, was followed in 2005 by The Stardragons. His most recent major nonfiction is The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective, with Elizabeth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville. His story collection Take No Prisoners was released by Willowgate Press in August 2004. He has won the Hugo (twice), World Fantasy Award, Locus Award, Chesley Award, Mythopoeic Society Award, J. Lloyd Eaton Award, and a rare British Science Fiction Association Special Award. He is married to Pamela D. Scoville, Director of the Animation Art Guild; they live in New Jersey with four cats and not enough bookshelves.