I read Robert A. Heinlein as a kid. He was overwhelmingly the most influential writer I encountered between the ages of about seven and fifteen. The first Heinlein book I came across was an old Gollancz edition of Citizen of the Galaxy at the local library. That would have been around 1971 or so. Somewhere not too long after New English Library published an edition of his fantasy novel, Glory Road, in a cheap paperback edition with a bright pink cover. I think it might have been by Bruce Pennington, who did a lot of Heinlein covers for NEL, but I’m not sure. I do remember some kind of big beast, and a scantily clad woman, both of which made a big impression on my ten-year-old self. I gulped the book down with great enthusiasm, as I did every Heinlein novel (except Farnham’s Freehold) written before I Will Fear No Evil. It had adventure, cool sounding descriptions of the lead female character and a male lead that sounded just like the kind of guy I wanted to be when I grew up (I was young, remember).

Well, I’m not seven or fifteen anymore, and it’s been close to fifteen years since I last read a Heinlein book, but he’s been on my mind of late, what with an early novel being published for the first time last year and his centenary coming up, but I had no active plans to re-read any of his work. Not until, that is, the nice folks at Tor Books sent me a galley of their new reissue of Glory Road. It arrived a couple weeks ago at the office and I looked at it, smiled, remembered enjoying it years ago, and set it to one side. And it sat there for a while, and I thought, maybe I’d check it out. Try one of the old favorites again, see what 40-year-old me thinks of it. And it was interesting.

The first thing I noticed was that Heinlein’s writing style was still very clean and readable when he wrote Glory Road. Going by the publication date of the book I’m guessing he wrote it in 1961 or 1962, and the book shows few of the excesses that came to bog down his later work. It zips along. The next thing I noticed, unsurprisingly, is that Glory Road is very much a book of its time. More than anything else, the feel of the book reminded me of the Fawcett Gold Medal ‘Travis McGee’ novels by John D. McDonald, which were full of adventure, laconic wit and all kinds of strange social mores that no longer quite translate for a modern reader. There is an almost casual sexism displayed by Oscar, the book’s lead male character, in portraying all of the women in the book, that took me aback. I also was thrown by the extent to which he objectifies, the female lead, Star, who seems to be an extraordinary woman by any standards, and yet is still mostly a sex object. There are also odd descriptions of non-Caucasian folk, people performing service type tasks and so on. Basically, attitudes that I imagine sat pretty well with middle-class America in the ’50s, leavened a little by the lechery of a man hitting his own mid-50s at the time. I was then struck by just how ‘thin’ the book felt. I don’t mean the length of the book, but just how little world building is in fact going on. Heinlein spends very little time building his world, gives it very little depth, and instead focuses on whipping us from one scenario to another before we realize just how rickety the cardboard sets are. And the story itself. Well… The book is set early in the days of the Vietnam conflict and in another dimension. The descriptions of our world seem ok, but the mechanism for moving between dimensions recalls nothing so much as the wish-fulfilment of Bur roughs’ John Carter traveling to Barsoom, and the first main battle scene is actually ridiculous.

Which quickly brings to me to one of the biggest questions when reading a book like this one: does it stand up today, or is it strictly of historical interest? Honestly, as much as I loved it when I was young, and as much as I’ve admired Heinlein all these years, it’s hard to see Glory Road as being anything other than one for the history books. The style of the novel is fine, but it’s pulls you up short again and again, and it’s just not that well done. Where a ten-year-old me didn’t question much, and just went along for the ride, 40-year-old me found himself going “but, that’s dumb” and “that doesn’t make any sense at all”. While I really believe Tor are to be applauded for republishing the novel, I think it’s not really for the modern or casual reader. And for this reader, it makes me think I’ll be more cautious about re-reading old loves. Some sleeping dogs should be let lie.

There are a couple interesting new stories online at the moment. Susanna Clarke, who is very much the flavor of the moment, has “Antickes and Frets” over at the New York Times, while Tim Pratt has “Life in Stone” on Lenox Avenue. The Clarke story is a nice, if reasonably minor piece, that gives you a pretty good taste of what her work is like but isn’t quite as strong as some of her other short fiction.

The Pratt story, on the other hand, is probably the strongest story he’s had published this year. In addition to “Life in Stone”, he’s had “In a Glass Casket” in Realms of Fantasy, “Hart and Boot” in Polyphony 4, and “Terrible Ones” in The Third Alternative. Of those, I’d say “Hart and Boot”, an interesting slightly twisted Western was the next best.

I’m not actually going to blog too much more about these stories right now because Tim, and Jay Lake, are at the center of something I’m trying to work out at the moment. I think both belong on your ‘to read’ lists, and I think both have the potential to be major writers in the field, but I think both are at real turning points.

I’ve just handed over the final ms. copies of Science Fiction: Best of 2004 and Fantasy: Best of 2004 to my co-editor for delivery. I am done till next year! Yay. Now, where is that pile of 2005 stories? I know I set it down around here somewhere.

Well, not really. But. There have been so many good short story collections this year that I thought I’d mention the ones that I thought stood out. So, what follows is a list of the Top 25 collections I saw this year (Note: This doesn’t include books that are yet to be published, and is limited to books I’ve seen). I am tempted to present the Coodies, though. An award for the best collections of the year. The categories might be Best Collection of the Year and Best Career Retrospective, but I’ll see. In the meantime, the list:

Baker, Kage, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories
Butner, Richard, Horses Blow Up Dog City & Other Stories
Charnas, Suzy McKee, Stagestruck Vampires & Other Phantasms
Cherryh, C. J., The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh
Crowley, John, Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction
Di Filippo, Paul, Neutrino Drag
Dozois, Gardner, Morning Child and Other Stories
Duchamp, L. Timmel, Love’s Body, Dancing in Time
Ford, John M., Heat of Fusion and Other Stories
Goss, Theodora, The Rose in Twelve Petals and other stories
Gunn, Eileen, Stable Strategies & Others
Jones, Diana Wynne, Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories
Lanagan, Margo, Black Juice
Lethem, Jonathan, Men and Cartoons
MacLeod, Ian R., Breathmoss and Other Exhalations
Morrow, James, The Cat’s Pajamas and Other Stories
Pratchett, Terry, Once More* With Footnotes
Roberts, Adam, Swiftly: Stories that Never Were and Might Not Be
Sargent, Pamela, Thumbprints
Shepard, Lucius, Trujillo
Silverberg, Robert, Phases of the Moon: Stories from Six Decades
VanderMeer, Jeff, Secret Life
Varley, John, The John Varley Reader
Williams, Liz, The Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories
Wolfe, Gene, Innocents Aboard

I get really fed up when a potentially great project gets stuffed up by laziness, dumbness, a shoddy approach, or dubious commercial motivation. It’s not that I’m necessarily immune to some of these things myself (I’ve certainly been lazy, dumb, and/or shoddy at times), but they just grate on my nerves. I especially hate it when a book project is announced and you go “yes!” and then it gets royally stuffed up.

There are countless examples. I remember when, way back in 1990, a major Larry Niven career retrospective was announced. Now, Niven wrote some of the most exciting hard SF short fiction of the late ’60s and early ’70s. A big collection, assembling the very best of those stories would have been a wonderful thing, the kind of book that everyone should own. But the book, N-Space, was crap. It featured essays, minor stories and (unforgivably) novel excerpts, in amongst some terrific major work. A terrible disappointment. Perhaps enough time has passed – it’s been almost 15 years now – that someone could do a major ‘Best of Larry Niven’ but I have my doubts. More recently there was The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Vinge is an interesting writer, and a single volume ‘collected stories’ wasn’t a bad idea. But, the book omits his single most famous short story, “True Names”. As it happened, another book was published at pretty much the same time that featured that story and some essays about it. But, so what! It wasn’t the collected stories, it was dumb.

I could go on and on, but what I want to do is mention a great recent book where they got it right. I remember, as though it were yesterday, being turned on to the science fiction of John Varley. I stumbled across a paperback edition on In the Hall of the Martian Kings, and was entranced. Strange, challenging, and yet reminiscent of Heinlein (who I loved above all else at the time), it seemed like the pure stuff. Real SF. And the stories kept coming, right through to the smack in the face of “Press Enter”. And then we got the collection Blue Champagne from Dark Harvest, and it stopped. From the mid-’80s through till last year, when a couple good stories were published, there was almost no Varley short fiction and not that much at novel length. A major career retrospective seemed like an obvious book to publish, at least to me, but it kept not happening until the good folk at Ace announced they would do it. And The John Varley Reader was born. Collecting 18 stories and adding a bunch of fascinating biographical material, it’s what a major retrospective should be. The best-of-the-best stories presented so modern readers can get at them, nothing less than a single volume argument as to why the writer is important and worth reading. The John Varley Reader does that, and in spades. It could have added “Blue Champagne”, but that’s a personal taste thing. This is book you need to own. Kudos to Ginjer Buchanan and every one at Ace for having the guts and the savvy to do the book right.