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

Re: This Side of Judgment

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

As I recall, DoC asks an interesting question at one point. If you justify letting the Holocaust occur because humanity becomes less beastly slightly faster because of it and you justify it by saying that at some point you will resurrect all the victims at some point in the future, how satisfying are those people going to find paradise, given the effects of having died in a camp run by Nazis?

Re: This Side of Judgment

[(Anonymous)]

"and you justify it by saying that at some point you will resurrect all the victims at some point in the future, how satisfying are those people going to find paradise, given the effects of having died in a camp run by Nazis?"

If I recall, in Mark Twain's "Captain Stormfield's Visit to heaven", plenty of people found paradise a bit of a letdown, but long-term inhabitants shrugged this off, since given eternity, they'd all get over it...

Bruce

Re: This Side of Judgment

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Right, isn't this a standard apologetic argument of Christianity? Life is short, but Eternity is forever? I haven't read the book, so maybe this is just a utilitarian argument involving strictly finite quantities . . . . "It is better for one person to be set to the Rack, than one hundred trillion trillion people suffer a mote in their eye."

Re: This Side of Judgment

[(Anonymous)]

"Right, isn't this a standard apologetic argument of Christianity? Life is short, but Eternity is forever?"

Which, on the other hand, works just fine as an argument _against_ hell, but who expects God to be logically consistent?

In any event, if they have the technology to resurrect people dead for billions of years, presumably they also have fairly good therapists...

Bruce

presumably they also have fairly good therapists

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There's a rather sad Poul Anderson about a man who wakes from cold sleep in an era where he really doesn't fit in and when the stresses of his situation drive him mad, we learn that because almost nobody in this era ever suffers from mental illness, they have completely lost the art of treating it. So they freeze him again and sent him through time in the hope that someday they will recover those skills.

Re: This Side of Judgment

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Actually it's really bad theology, becuase you're making 6 million jews who died in the holocaust into 6 million jesuses, who now apparently died for the greater good of non-jews everywhere. Which is a quite impressive heresy, even for gnostic traditions of christianity.

Then there's the whole thing with turning the holocaust from a horrible and repeatable failure of humanity, to something that happened "because" and now can never happen again, "because", and it in fact ensued that such things would never happen again.

So Rwanda didn't happen, and the Great Leap Forward, and the Starvation of the Ukraine, Pol Pot is a myth of people who just don't love the many many jesuses who died for their sins, etc...etc...

I'm also suspicious that it might imply that God didn't mind the nazi's nationalised version of catholicism all that much.