FFB: The Fugitive Stars -- Daniel Ransom

Okay, I'll say right at the start that I have no idea what the title means.  Sounds good, but I don't see any connection to the story.  But, hey. I don't care.

This is one of those books that I've had for years and had been planning to read for a long time.  Somehow it got stuck back behind some other DAW books and forgotten.  When I came across it recently, I decided it was past time to read it.  

Daniel Ransom is probably best known for his horror novels written for Zebra books back in the Good Old Days, but he also wrote SF for DAW Books (I'll eventually get around to Zone Soldiers).  And you probably know already that Ransom is a pen name used by Ed Gorman.  Gorman says that this particular book could not have been written without extensive help from Larry Segriff.  

I don't know what Segriff's contributions were, but Gorman's style is almost immediately recognizable in The Fugitive Stars.  There's an underlying tone of melancholy leavened with humor that seems typical of a lot of his work to me.  Ransom says that the book owes debts to a lot of old B&W movies from directors Don Siegel, Jack Arnold, and Val Lewton.  SF fans will notice debts to writers like Robert A. Heinlein and Alfred Bester.

Michael Raines is a telepath who's losing his powers.  Once a part of an experimental government program, Raines is now on his own, lonely and getting older.  A mysterious woman leaves a package at his door, and the action begins. It doesn't let up.

It seems that some astronauts visiting a comet in the year 2011 (the book was published in 1995) have been possessed by an alien something, and now the alien something has begun taking over others.  It's up to Raines and the wife of one of the astronauts to stop it and save the world.

The things that happen are like the the things that happen in the old B&W movies, and it doesn't do to think about them too much.  Just go along for the ride and imagine the story unfolding in a theater on a Saturday afternoon in 1957.  Give it a try, and you'll see what I mean.

The Artist Who Helped Invent Space Travel

The Artist Who Helped Invent Space Travel

Hat tip to Jeff Segal.

Science Fiction for the Holidays

Not exactly a seasonal cover here, but the first issue of Infinity has a story that really bowled me over when I was a kid. It's "The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke, and it went on to become a classic in the field. If you've read much SF at all, I'm sure you've read it.

Rash -- Pete Hautman

A lot of the best writing around these days is in YA novels. If you don't believe me, read one. Try Nancy Werlin, for example, or Pete Hautman.

Bruce Taylor might not have a high opinion of Steve Stilwell's movie IQ, but surely he'd never argue with him about writers. It was Steve who told me several years ago about Hautman's first YA novel, Mr. Was, a wonderful book. And last year Hautman won the National Book Award for Godless.

Hautman's also the author of a number of fine, funny adult crime novels. I don't know how that career's been going, but I get the impression that the books haven't sold as well as they should have. Doesn't matter, I guess, in one way, since the YA career's going so well.

Rash is Hautman's latest. It's set a toward the end of this century, in the USSA (the United Safer States of America), where no one takes a risk, where anything that might endanger you or someone else has been outlawed, where you can go to prison for dropping an apricot on the ground if someone slips on it. Bo Marsten is from a family of criminals. Both his father and his brother are in the pen, and Bo seems highly likely to join them.

Sure enough, he does, and the book becomes something different from what you might have been expecting. It's sort of a cross between The Longest Yard and Holes, but it's really nothing like that. It also doesn't offer a lot of easy answers. Plus it has laughs. No wonder Hautman keeps on winning awards and piling up the readers. Check it out.