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“In Europe,” said Father, “you will build a new nation and I will grow old. The Empire will pass away, and in a thousand years your descendants will read of it in a language that does not yet exist, and they will wonder if these things really were. And even if they think the story of our age is no more real than the tales of Camelot and Troy, those in ages hence will know who among us were villains and those who were loyal to the things they held dear.”

• Title: The Martian General’s Daughter
• Author: Theodore Judson
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Year: 2008

At the end of the twenty-third century the Pan-Polarian Empire is dying. Centuries old, encompassing most of the known world, mankind’s greatest empire is grinding to a halt in the face of domestic rebellions, insane leaders, corrupt officials, and plagues — and not just plagues that kill but something worse, a metal plague that destroys technology. When the Emperor dies, civil war is inevitable, and General Peter Black on distant Mars receives word that he has been endorsed by certain factions and moneyed interests for the position. Forced to join the conflict, Black and his illegitimate daughter Justa — the narrator of The Martian General’s Daughter — manage to make it back to earth on one of the last functioning starships, already failing from exposure to the metal plague. It is the world of the twenty-third century — and of Late Antiquity at the close of the Roman Empire, for the story of The Martian General’s Daughter is in fact a parallel retelling of the collapse of Rome, with the many political, economic, and social factors inherent in that empire’s fall relived and reinvented for the strange world of Judson’s future earth under Pan-Polarian rule.

In describing The Martian General’s Daughter as a ‘parallel account’ I mean to indicate that it is indeed a different sort of thing than what is more commonly seen, namely an author drawing inspiration or plot elements from a historical period such as George R.R. Martin’s channeling of the War of the Roses or Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantastical retellings of historical events. Judson does something different and accomplishes a thing I’ve never seen before in doing so. This is not an account of the fall of Rome in disguise as something else, nor is it an adoption of the environment of Late Antiquity as a kind of varnish on a extrapolation of future events, it isn’t even, as many people may think, an allegory on American power and influence, it is instead a reinvention of the world of tomorrow that transposes the historical logic of the Roman Empire upon the future — Judson does, in fact, put the fall of Rome in our future, and we of the Late Republic can marvel at our own collapse from the safe remove of three centuries. This world is so successfully drawn because it has little in the way of a logical dependence on our own time, and that otherworldliness, combined with a flawlessly evocative rendering of a declining and decadent civilization, makes for a masterpiece of world building. And the more one knows about Rome, the more parallels one uncovers, the greater the enjoyment and the more successfully rendered this world of the twenty-third century.

But this isn’t a slavish retelling of events, nor is it a kind of fictional history book of the future. From the first the reader is plunged into a world of political maneuverings and warfare, of generals, Emperors, assassins, and politicians. Justa, our guide to all this, reports with a sharp eye and clear voice the conflict her family has been drawn into. The book begins in 2293, the year that sees the start of civil war and General Black’s return from Mars. But the bulk of the story is in the past, and each alternating chapter details Black’s perilous existence under the mad reign of Luke Anthony and his falling in and out of favor over the years of Justa’s young adulthood. Those who know Roman history (or have gleaned a bit from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator) will recognize in the characters of Luke Anthony and his wise father Mathias the Glistening the persons of Commodus and Marcus Aurelius. Parallels such as this have a way of heightening expectations and of reinforcing associations in much the same way as a Shakespearian tragedy — in which the audience is already well-aware of the plot and resolution — evokes an even higher order of tension and suspense than that derived solely from the unraveling of the unknown.

As I’ve said it’s the known quantities and parallels that elevate this book above the run-of-the-mill tale of a secondary world, and it also helps it to achieve its oddness and capacity for surprise. Luke Anthony, like Commodus, fancies himself a gladiator and likes to show off at public games — his preferred mode being that of slaughtering hundreds of exotic animals with a high-powered rifle. Like Caligula, he thinks he is alternately a god and various figures of the mythological past such as Hercules or Tom Sawyer. We get something of the shock the Roman Senator must have felt upon being confronted by Caligula’s shenanigans when Luke Anthony and his intimates appear before the court in the guise of Tom, Huck Finn, and Jim. And just as Luke Anthony appears all the more insane because he is operating within parameters we recognize, in being tied to our own world of experience, so to do Judson’s themes resonate all the more profoundly because of their links, however tenuous, to our own reality.

General Black is the last good man to serve the Pan-Polarian Empire and, like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, he does his duty no matter the consequences to himself or others. Justa’s loving portrait of him shows him for his faults but also his great strengths, Black is a moral man and a loyal one, though unimaginative, ruthless, rigid, and unworldly. The illegitimate Justa is ever at his side, a reminder to him of a weak indiscretion on his part, and of whom he is ashamed during her early life — though her loyalty and devotion to him overcome such feelings with time. This is Black’s story, and sometimes he plays the role of dynamic force and at others the Holy Fool, but it is also very much Justa’s story, as she endures the uncertainty and chaos of life underneath a mad Emperor and remains ever loyal to her declining father — just as he holds fast to his own loyalty to an Empire in collapse. Both suffer for their loyalties, and both are heroic figures in their own way.

And indeed the whole world is suffering in the late twenty-third century, as bloody rebellions abroad and corrupt machinations at home ensure the people are the ones to suffer. Garden City is the great capital of Pan-Polaria, a teeming polyglot metropolis of forty million built on the bones of Mexico City — it is Constantinople to Washington DC’s Rome (and Washington, we are told, famously burned while the Emperor Darko flew a kite in Maryland). The Empire, which extends even to the other planets of the solar system, is shrinking, and the technologies it depends upon are disintegrating in the face of the metal plague. One military campaign illustrates that decline quite simply — it begins as a mechanized assault and ends on horseback. Over the course of the book things revert inexorably to the primitive, the Emperor’s Golden Hovercraft is replaced by a chariot, computers disappear, and the space colonies are cut off completely as both ship travel and communications become impossible. All of this creates a feel of decline more palpable than that provided by straight history, and I would recommend The Martian General’s Daughter to anyone that wants to get a feel for the collapse of the Roman System — it is a case of good fiction illuminating in ways non-fiction cannot.

But the appeal of this book goes well beyond just those readers interested in Rome — it is a treasure for fans of science fiction, future worlds, and the sorts of political intrigue and military adventure characteristic of stories of Empire. It takes the premise that ‘everything old is new again’ and makes it work in a completely satisfying way, all while creating vivid characters and real drama. This strange parallel future of Judson’s isn’t about history repeating itself and it isn’t about extrapolating current trends, rather it aims at exploring the universal themes of our political species and does so in a way at once rooted in the past and in the future — and in imagination. The Martian General’s Daughter gets my highest recommendation, and gets a place on the highest shelf of my personal pantheon.

The Martian General’s Daughter at Amazon

The station, at this hour, is practically deserted. But in a moment I hear the wailing of onrushing wheels, metal on metal, and simultaneously I pick up the blasting impact of a phalanx of minds all rushing toward me at once out of the north, packed aboard the five or six cars of the oncoming train. The compressed souls of those passengers form a single inchoate mass, pressing insistently against me. They quiver like trembling jellylike bites of plankton squeezed brutally together in some oceanographer’s net, creating one complex organism in which the separate identities of all are lost. As the train glides into the station I am able to pick up isolated blurts and squeaks of discrete selfhood: a fierce jab of desire, a squawk of hatred, a pang of regret, a sudden purposeful inner mumbling, rising from the confusing totality the way odd little scraps and stabs of melody rise from the murky orchestral smear of a Mahler symphony. The power is deceptively strong in me today. . . . But I’m not deceived into thinking that the decline in my ability has been checked. . . . When one knows that something is dying inside one, one learns not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment. Today the power is strong yet tomorrow I may hear nothing but distant tantalizing murmurs.

• Title: Dying Inside
• Author: Robert Silverberg
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Year: 1972

David Selig is a freak, David Selig is a superman. He reads minds, absolutely and effortlessly and at great distance and with the kind of penetrative thoroughness that ensures he knows more about you than you do. David Selig is a wretch, David Selig is a failure. Sampling a thousand vicarious lives, he’s never learned to live his own. Ransacking minds, he’s never been alone. But as Selig creeps past forty the gift is fading, and Dying Inside is his account of the loss of this amazing and inexplicable part of himself.

Dying Inside is rightly hailed as one of Silverberg’s best novels, and it is only one of a handful of very strong offerings that comprised the second phase of Silverberg’s career, when the prolific but workmanlike writer of adventure SF suddenly switched gears to produce psychologically thoughtful New Wave specfic novels such as Thorns, Hawksbill Station, and The Book of Skulls. Dying Inside was published the same year as The Book of Skulls, and both are psychological novels that take place in the modern America of their time. Both novels are Silverberg’s closest foray into the world of contemporary literature, with Dying Inside as perhaps the more perfectly integrated hybrid of SF and literary techniques.

The novel is told in the first person by Selig, whose narrative voice bounces between the poles of cynical-yet-flippant fatalism, clinical detachment, and bleak despair. That alone is reason enough to read this novel as Silverberg crafts a completely authentic voice, the thoughts of a character at once insufferable and tragically vulnerable. Selig is a weak and frightened man, but he is a highly educated and erudite one, and the continual seasoning of his story with high culture references only reinforces how divided and powerless his character is — for all his quoting of Eliot or Shakespeare or Aldous Huxley, it is apparent that Selig himself is a man without answers. Just as his telepathic power provides his every justification and sense of self, Selig’s knowledge, and in particular his store of poetry, is often flung up as a kind of shield, as a way of expressing that which he cannot even begin to articulate. All of this serves as a distancing device, highlighting Selig’s fundamental problem — that he does not know himself, does not know what he is outside of his vanishing gift.

Which is precisely why a novel about a telepath can be an expression of normal human truths. Selig has squandered his power; as he enters middle age he is alone, barely scraping by on what he makes ghosting term papers for college students at his old alma mater. Here his telepathy is of some use, as he probes the minds of his clients to establish the best and most believable manner to counterfeit their writing. Again, this is Selig living another’s life, using both his power and his old collection of term papers to squeak by. But his power is deserting him, and some days it’s not there at all. Dying Inside address this notion of squandered potential profoundly, and does so not as a cautionary tale, but as an enlargement on the tragedy of the human condition.

Dying Inside is a slim volume, much of which is told as episodes from David Selig’s past. We glimpse his precocious yet miserable childhood, where the obvious joys of a mindreading child are coupled with the lost innocence of contact with so many tired adult minds. Selig’s adopted sister is the only link he preserves with this past, and their relationship — based on her full knowledge of what he is — is a cornerstone of the book, as they gradually learn to accept one another. Two of Selig’s important past relationships with women are shown, both sabotaged because of his gift, though each in a very different way. And Nyquist, the only other telepath Selig has ever met, looms over sections of the book like an anti-Selig — a man who uses his telepathy as a tool to get what he wants and suffers not a jot for it. All of these past episodes in Selig’s life construct a character that is knowable to the reader despite his unthinkable power, and it is apparent that Selig’s plight is not alien to our own experience.

In the end, the inevitable does occur — as was necessary from page one. Selig’s apotheosis is an especially beautiful one, as Silverberg takes the character to the lowest depths of humiliation and then truly shows the reader just what it is that Selig will be missing for, as Selig uses his power one last time to see into the mind of a man that pities and despises him with the utmost contempt, he is transported with a profound and ecstatic joy. For it’s not those surface thoughts that matter, it never was, it was the rapture of true togethernesses, of true knowing, that happened whenever David Selig linked his mind with the mind of another. Beyond the powerlessness and need to redefine himself, it’s the aloneness that Selig feared. The aloneness we all must face.

Dying Inside is a book that takes the tragic rather than the triumphant view, though it is not without a note of hope. It is also about time, about growing old with the promise of youth unfulfilled, about the weight of potential and how it alone can be enough to crush or paralyze a person. Ultimately, too, it’s about coming to terms, about accepting what cannot be changed, about living the life we have and being who we must. It is unquestionably a classic, a must-read from one of SF’s Grandmasters.

Dying Inside at Amazon

There are philosophers who argue that there is no such thing as evil qua evil; that, discounting spells (which of course relieve an individual of responsibility), when a man commits an evil deed he is a victim himself, the slave of his progeniture and nurturing. Such philosophers might profit by studying Sanctuary. [from Joe Haldeman’s Blood Brothers]

• Title: Thieves’ World
• Author: Robert Asprin, ed.
• Genre: Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery
• Year: 1979

The late Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World is the granddaddy of the shared-world anthology, and it’s success can be seen in its numerous sequels (the original series ran to twelve anthologies in ten years, plus a few spin-off novels) as well as related matter such as rpg products, in addition to, of course, the many similarly themed anthologies that came out in homage or imitation to the original. In his afterward, ‘The Making of Thieves’ World,’ Asprin describes the shared world idea as a way for many authors to write fantasy without first having to each come up with their own worlds. Imagine, Asprin says, if Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser inhabited the same world as Conan, or if Elric and Kane opposed one another at the head of rival armies. It’s a great, fun idea, and it works well, and it certainly attracted a wide panoply of science fiction and fantasy writers over the decade it ran.

Thieves’ World is the first book in the series, from which the whole derives its name. It centers on the town of Sanctuary, a rats’ nest of rogues and hotbed of skulduggery, a conquered city on the edge of empire rife with competing factions and conflicting religions. It’s a fairly standard fantasy backdrop, at least in this first installment, but it’s also a consistent and well-realized one replete with just enough world-building style details to make the place come alive without the danger of the setting taking over from the plot. Or the characters — and this last is where Thieves’ World really shines.

Each author in the anthology has created his own character, and the book contains a larger-than-life cast of scoundrels, magicians, street folk, and thieves. The ne’er-do-well minstrel Cappen Varra, the cursed magician Enas Yorl, ruthless crimelord and ex-gladiator Jubal, ageless madame Myrtis, and mysterious Lythande, his forehead marked with a glowing blue star that burns with his anger or agitation — just a few of the most prominent personalities of Sanctuary. And while a story might focus on only a few of these characters, they turn up repeatedly again and again in the background of different tales. Indeed, this is part of the fun of the shared world, as different authors handle each other’s characters a bit differently, and even whole scenes from one story may be repeated in another with a twist in perspective. A nice touch, and one that lends the stories the feeling that many lives are brushing up against one another and interconnecting in the world of Sanctuary.

As for the stories themselves, ranging from short story to novella length, some stand out more than others. John Brunner opens the anthology with Sentences of Death, a clever piece centering around apprentice translator Jarveena and her employer, an opportunistic book merchant and scribe. When a magical scroll falls into their hands they decide to profit from it as best they can, and set off a chain of events that involves a strange magician, a foiled assassination attempt, and the fulfillment of Jarveena’s lifelong thirst for revenge. In Poul Anderson’s The Gate of Flying Knives, we have a more traditional sword & sorcery tale, in which the rogue Cappen Verra must venture into another world to rescue his love — and where he discovers that a certain slight-of-hand can be worth more than any sword or spell. In Joe Haldeman’s Blood Brothers the odious One-Thumb, a man confident in his continued existence because of a magician’s curse of damnation on anyone that should ever dare to slay him, meets his comeuppance in a most unusual and ingenious way. In my favorite story of the collection, Asprin’s own The Price of Doing Business, shrewd operator Jubal discovers just how differently those who don’t share his ruthlessly practical outlook see the world, and finds himself confounded first by a child, and then by one of the Emperor’s own elite guardsmen.

Other names that the reader will recognize, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Andrew Offutt, also have strong offerings; and overall the anthology is a solid mix of stories from writers of varied sensibilities at different points of their career. But the book is cohesive, the styles complimentary, and the fun firmly at center stage. I can understand how it started something big, especially as it was released before the modern fantasy explosion, and I only wish there was a comparable series today showcasing a similar broad array of talent against a shared world backdrop. One can hope — and in the meantime there is plenty in the Thieves’ World series to satisfy the cravings of sword & sorcery fans.

Thieves’ World at Amazon 

The house stood on the hilltop, a huddled structure that had taken root and crouched close against the earth. So old that it was the color of the things around it, of grass and flowers and trees, of sky and wind and weather. A house built by men who loved it and the surrounding acres even as the dogs now loved them. Built and lived in and died in by a legendary family that had left a meteoric trail across centuries of time. Men who lent their shadows to the stories that were told around the blazing fireplace of stormy nights when the wind sucked along the eaves.

• Title: City
• Author: Clifford D. Simak
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Year: 1952 (1980)

City has the well-deserved reputation of a classic, Clifford D. Simak’s beautifully-written future history rivals anything produced in science fiction’s Golden Age in sheer scope and originality of vision. You won’t see a book like this today, a third of the size of a modern fat fantasy yet somehow managing to create a sense of vastness as the story unfolds over tens of thousands of years — proof that there is more than one way to craft an epic. City is an episodic novel built from a series of linked stories originally published separately in the forties (though the final story, ‘Epilog,’ was not written until the seventies and the book did not achieve its present shape until 1980), and each story begins with a connecting explanatory note examining the history and obscure terminology in the tale, written by a learned Dog.

That’s right, a Dog. Through hints and context clues the reader soon realizes these nine tales of a rapidly changing human society survive only as puzzling folk myths amongst a civilization that has cause to wonder if mankind ever really existed at all, or if that species is as fictional as as the other strange and un-Doggish concepts present in the stories, such as spaceflight, warfare, and cities. In fact the first story in City, from which the whole cycle takes its name, is the most problematical for the Dogs, so full of strange concepts to be almost meaningless.

To us, of course, it is just the opposite — the further into the future the stories in City stretch, the genuinely stranger they become, until they begin to resemble myths of the distant past, in fact. The first story takes place in the shell of a city in the wake of a mass migration of humanity to the countryside — a perfect storm of cheap atomic energy, private air transport, and a hydroponics revolution have dramatically altered the social fabric of mankind. Cities have become an anachronism, anyone of average means can now own a virtual mansion in the middle of a large acreage and trust to perfect communication and the family helicopter to bridge the distance to work and recreation. Written in 1946, the short story City anticipates the world of 1990 as a sort of post-singularity future — an atomic singularity as envisioned by the World War II generation.

Though this is the last time a city has any importance to the plot of the book (with a very minor exception), the first story establishes the themes of the cycle. Firstly, we are introduced to the Webster family, members of which are central to many of the stories in the book (and are arguably the most important humans ever to live — as it was a Webster that first altered Dogs and taught them speech and culture), secondly the theme of decay and decline takes center stage and never really lets go. Change is palpable in City, and always there’s a feeling like a great winding-down of days, a slow approaching doom, and the flight of man from the cities and the death of his communal instincts is essentially the first step on a long road to annihilation. But always it is social change that is the motive force; from the first story onward technology is an important tool but never the decisive force, indeed the most important of all technologies in the book is itself a kind of philosophy, a thing that alters the way humanity understands itself. This is a future history that puts the long sweep of societal change in the driver’s seat.

With each generation of Websters we are introduced to more and greater changes — and to an unexpected apocalypse of ingenious devising. Eventually, Man is reduced in importance, his successors the Dogs, the Robots, and the Mutants each pursue their own ideas of civilization. Only one figure really recalls the enormous scope of history that runs through these stories, and that is Jenkins, a robot servant of the Websters who becomes a mentor to the Dogs and teaches and instructs them. Once free completely of the influence of man, the Dogs develop their own perceptions and philosophies and create a pacifistic animal paradise, in which the animals of the earth live in harmony. When Man is reintroduced into this idyll, so too comes murder. When Jenkins is confronted with the reinvention of the bow and arrow, he muses on the nature of mankind:

It’s just a bow and arrow, but it’s not a laughing matter. It might have been at one time, but history takes the laugh out of many things. If the arrow is a joke, so is the atom bomb, so is the sweep of disease-laden dust that wipes out whole cities, so is the screaming rocket that arcs and falls ten thousand miles away and kills a million people.

Jenkins arrives at a solution, and in the end the tiny remnant of mankind have come full circle, and it is they that are the children in need of a father, rather than the Dogs. The later stories in City most contrast the world of Man and the world of the Dogs, but Simak does not necessarily take the easy road of condemnation. Mankind is violent, inherently dangerous, but it is shown that there are things he can do to survive that neither Dog nor Robot can accomplish, even in his most primitive state. What Jenkins ponders, and Simak poses, is whether or not such powers are worth the price they inevitably demand in payment. Jenkins’ answer is a firm ‘no.’

City is a haunting book, a far vision of a strange future that packs more sense of wonder than any space opera. It’s also a thoughtful book, and perhaps a pessimistic one, but one that looks at the future sweep of society in such a compellingly original way that it’s impossible to forget. Like Asimov’s Foundation, Simak plays with the building blocks of history to create a chain of interlocking narratives, each building logically from the last. But Simak’s sensibilities are perhaps closer to Le Guin’s, and his prose more akin to Bradbury’s, than to any of his contemporaries writing on the hard SF end of the spectrum. Regardless of just how you slice it, City is an indispensable classic of the genre that, though written at a time when many loudly prophesied apocalypse in a rain of atom bombs, chose to eschew the bang and embrace the whimper.

City at Amazon

The Return of the Sword just got a great review over at BlackGate.com. Black Gate reviewer Ryan Harvey goes beyond simple summarization to get at the heart of the themes and story elements of the anthology’s nineteen tales, and he does a superb job of explaining to a genre-savvy reader just why he or she might want to give The Return of the Sword a try.

Link to Ryan Harvey’s Black Gate review of The Return of the Sword

And since my recent immunization against all forms of false modesty, I don’t mind quoting what Ryan had to say about my story:

“Grand warfare is at the core of a number of the stories. Bill Ward’s “The Wyrd of War” abandons dialogue completely for a description of an enormous dark fantasy battle. It works as a prolonged prose-poem, and anyone wanting to immerse him or herself in feverish madness will get a thrill from Ward’s headlong action.”

The debut issue of Darwin’s Evolutions just went online and it’s a promising premier. It’s got a great depth to it already, with fiction, articles, and graphic content as well as interviews, reviews, and an artist spotlight. The focus is on genre fiction, but the boundaries of genre are stretched by the sheer variety of the offerings, from articles for writers to manga reviews to a profile of a free fiction site to, of course, some genre-bending speculative fiction. In his editorial, Darwin Garrison lays out his simple requirements for Evolutions‘ fiction as follows: “. . . stories should be selected by how entertaining they are, not by some obscure literary standard or politically correct issue-content benchmark.” I couldn’t agree more.

Click here for Darwin’s Evolutions #1

With great art and design, huge breadth of variety, and a fun philosophy toward content, Darwin’s Evolutions is an online magazine to keep an eye on.