Old Tea Leaf Reviews 15: 1995 Locus Poll Best First Novel

[james_davis_nicoll]

Cut for Length

Best First Novel

1 Gun, with Occasional Music                 Jonathan Lethem

        I own this but have not read it yet.

        My impression is that Lethem has a book published every
year or two but that he has escaped the narrow boundaries of genre
fiction.


2 Queen City Jazz                            Kathleen Ann Goonan

        This is a post-apocalyptic novel where the apocalypse was
poorly designed and incredibly powerful nanotech. I seem to recall
that this was well received at the time but I thought the nanotech
was too magical.

        Goonan is still being published but I think there was a five
year stretch in the early 2000s where no new novels came out.


3 Rhinegold                                  Stephan Grundy

        I have not read this book.

        Grundy is new to me but I see he's been creating modern
adaptations of old sagas for some time. He also uses the pseudonym
Kveldulf Gundarsson  and as far as I can tell, his most recent
book was 2002's FALCON NIGHT (Co-written with Melodi Grundy).


4 Witch and Wombat                           Carolyn Cushman

        I did not read this. As far as I can tell this was her
only novel, although she is very active as a reviewer.


5 Vurt                                       Jeff Noon

        I did not read this.

        Noon had eight novels. I am unaware of any more recent than
2002 but he is said to be working on a script for a movie called
DIVINE SHADOWS.


6 Midshipman's Hope                          David Feintuch


        This is the first novel about Nick Seafort, the man who gives
seemingly cursed chronically depressed religious fanatics a bad name.
Nick always tries to live up to his duty to Earth's space navy, even
when it costs him his immortal soul. Nick has a tendency to find
solutions to problems that require him to heroically sacrifice other
people.

        Nick is also on my list of people not to go camping with
because he would eventually decide civilization could only be saved
if he fed me to a bear.

        Feintuch wrote seven Seafort novels, each more gloomy than
the last, and two fantasy novels. His final novel was published
in 2002 and he died in 2006.


7 Wizard's First Rule                        Terry Goodkind

        This is a giant fantasy written along Objectivist lines. Is
this the one with the evil chicken?

        Goodkind has produced eleven books in the Sword of Truth
series. The stand alone DEBT OF BONES is forthcoming. He appears
to be rebranding himself and recently left Tor for the sweet embrace
of a three book deal with Putnam. The first book will be a contemporary
thriller set in an American city.


8 Aurian                                     Maggie Furey

        I did not read this.

        Furey appears to have had at least ten novels. Her most
recent release came out in 2008 but I see a six year gap prior to
that.


9 Love Bite                                  Sherry Gotlieb

        I did not read this.

        I think this was her only novel.


10 The Woman Between the Worlds              F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

        I missed this. I used to follow him in ANALOG so if I had
seen it, I'd have given it a chance.

        I think that aside from a Tom Swift tie-in, this was his
only novel to date. He's reasonably prolific as a short story writer,
a reviewer and in non-fiction.


11 Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls     Jane Lindskold

        I did not read this.

        Lindskold is a prolific fantasy author whose career is ongoing.


12 Becoming Human                            Valerie J. Freireich

        I did read this although the details are hazy. Is this the
one about the neuter who escapes their oppressive native culture for
a more cosmopolitan world? I liked enough to pick up at least one
other book by her although not enough to reread it.

        As far as I know, all four of her novels came out in the 1990s.


13 Mistwalker                                Denise Lopes Heald

        I did not read this.

        I believe that this was their only novel.


14 Aggressor Six                             Wil McCarthy

        Humans are forced to adopt alien behavior in an attempt to
understand why the aliens are attacking humanity.

        McCarthy is one of the more note-worthy hard SF authors these
days. His most recent work is the interesting but flawed Queendom
of Sol series, which was concluded in 2005..


15 This Side of Judgement                    J. R. Dunn

        A time cop finds himself put in the position of protecting
the Third Reich from would-be do-gooders.

        I liked this at the time but the argument in favour of
keeping history as it is is one I think of as the vending machine
theory of ethics, where you earn the capacity to be decent once
you've fed the vending of history with enough dead Jews. I am not
myself keen on this argument and I think the fact that it took
countries like Canada and US until the 1970s to end practices like
state-sanctioned eugenic sterilization or using ethnic minorities
in medical experiments is signigicant.

        As far as I know, Dunn had three SF novels, all in the
1990s. I believe he is now some sort of right-wing pundit, if
this is the same JR Dunn:

http://www.americanthinker.com/jr_dunn/

[After thought: think about the implications of the phrase "SF author
turned right-wing pundit" before you click on that, m'kay?]


16 The Imperium Game                         K. D. Wentworth

        I did not read this.

        She appears to have been reseaonably prolific. Her website
leads me to believe that she has some books forthcoming from Baen,
although I think her most recent novel was in 2004. She appears to
be active at shorter lengths.


17 Changing Fate                             Elisabeth Waters

        I also did not read this.

        She appears to have had two novels under the Waters name
but Elisabeth Waters is a pen name and I have no idea if she's
published under other names.

        Oddly, I see at least one source that seems to imply that this cam
out in 1989. Wait, no. Wikipedia says that it won the Gryphon. That's
the award for "Best Unpublished Fantasy Manuscript by a Woman", isn't
it? I think that was Andre Norton's idea and that the award soon fell
into disuse.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Wil McCarthy is not currently writing SF because he's too busy running a start-up to develop one of the technologies from the Queendom of Sol novels. (Be afraid, be very afraid.) This info is current as of early 2007, the last time I saw him -- if his start-up goes the way 90% of such go, then I expect he'll go back to fiction, and if it goes the other way, he'll have enough money to buy Bertlesmann.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Read and liked both Gun, With Occasional Music as well as Vurt. Science fiction with literary tricks, so to speak.

[jamoche]

Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls Jane Lindskold

Read that one and thought it was startlingly original; read her next one and thought it rather mundane. I suspect there's more than a bit of Zelazny influence for the first and that without it she's fairly ordinary.

[kate_nepveu]

Midshipman's Hope

Many years ago now, zorinth asked me for a definition of "angsty", and upon hearing it, went over to the "F" shelf and pointed at this series.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

If you like Hammett combined with biotech you will like "Gun with occasional music." I do and did.

[(Anonymous)]

_Vurt_, well. The whole "blur the boundaries of reality and virtuality" thing? It's much harder to pull off convincingly than people seem to think.

I disliked _Aggressor Six_ because it falls into the category of "the whole book is an effort to Figure Out The Answer, and then the answer is either obvious, kinda dumb, or both". Also, I have trouble seeing how "we can't even talk to you until you surrender" would get fixed as an evolutionarily stable strategy.


Doug M.

This Side of Judgment

[(Anonymous)]

You're confusing this book (which seems to be some sort of near-future police procedural) with _Days of Cain_, which came out in 1997. AFAICT, Dunn had just three novels, all in the 1990s, and hasn't written any SF in this century.

Unfortunately, yes, it is the same guy. Go figure.

Dunn seemed like a decent enough writer -- he was very interested in the Nazis, but that by itself doesn't mean much, and I don't recall him showing any of the other classic indicia. _Days of Cain_ has its problems, sure, but it's an SFnal treatment of the Holocaust that isn't stupid, mawkish, cranky, or falling into any of the other obvious traps. That's no small accomplishment.

IMS the central premise of the book boiled down to something like "God help us, this is in fact one of the best of all possible worlds": there's no way to eliminate the Holocaust without making even worse stuff happen down the line. This is not a cheerful point of view but I don't find it implausible. YMMV.

Canoodling through some of the articles at that link -- sigh -- I see that one of the few things he and I agree on is that David Irving deserved everything he got. The man hates him some Nazis.

My very tentative take is that he's a military historian type of the sort you'd expect to be writing MilSF and hanging out at Baen's, but for some reason he's set his sights a little higher.

That said, there may also be a touch of the Brain Eater at work too. The articles I skimmed showed a lot of demonization of constructed Others (liberals! they come in three different flavors, and all are stupid and suck!), which definitely wasn't present in _Days of Cain_. The whole point of that book is that the protagonist is (1) totally wrong, (2) doomed to failure, and (3) sympathetic anyway.

Other-other hand, he might just be one of those creative folks who come across as much more/less thoughtful/sensitive/imaginative/nuanced in one medium than in another. (Gosh, that would be unusual.)

Anyway, he seems to have given up writing SF, so likely moot.


Doug M.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

This Side of Judgement J. R. Dunn

A time cop finds himself put in the position of protecting
the Third Reich from would-be do-gooders.

Or he would if this book was DAYS OF CAIN. I have no idea what TSoJ was about.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any of those and have only read one of J.R. Dunn's, and that was because I was typing for him in his OMNI interview. He sent me Days of Cain which, yes, prove that he's a right winger. He was a nice guy to talk to.

In Days of Cain, people who have time machines keep trying to go back to prevent Auschwitz and are stopped by the Monitors (who preserve time and history) but at the end, we find out the folks who are running the Monitors and preventing the Auschwitz changes are (rot-13'd) natryf. Erny puhepu-yvxr natryf. It was a tough read -- one of the folks trying to prevent Auschwitz goes in as a prisoner.

[khavrinen.livejournal.com]

12 Becoming Human Valerie J. Freireich

Is this the one about the neuter who escapes their oppressive native culture for a more cosmopolitan world?

I think you're confusing this with Carolyn Ives Gilman's Halfway Human, which fits your description, whereas Amazon's description of Becoming Human is rather different.



17 Changing Fate Elisabeth Waters
Oddly, I see at least one source that seems to imply that this came out in 1989.

I thought at first that this confusion might have been because it was an expansion of the short story ( "A Woman's Privilege" ) published in one of MZB's Sword and Sorceress anthologies, but on checking I see that this was volume III, from 1986. This novel seriously pissed me off because one of the themes of the short story ( which I really liked ) was "Just because we're the only two of our kind doesn't mean I have to fall in love with him; he's a jerk", and the book retconned it into "Oh yes it does mean that." I think I was permanently scarred by having Wuthering Heights thrust upon me in one of my high school English classes -- plots in which "guy acts like arrogant a$$hole = women characters absolutely swoon with love/romance" always have me throwing the book against the wall.