Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tor published a series of tête-bêche novellas, stretching to 36 books. By book #30, they’d dropped the tête-bêche format, and in fact dropped the whole double-novella thing at times, as this one is pretty much a short story followed by a short novel. Which are not at all related. And I have no idea why they were published together. Or indeed why they were published at all. ‘The Longest Journey’ originally appeared in Analog in 1960. It’s set on the moon of a gas giant, colonised by humans at some point but now they’ve regressed to a late mediaeval tech level. A Columbus-like figure sails across a vast ocean to a mythical land… and finds it is inhabited with people just like himself. They’re welcomed with open arms, trade agreements are drawn up… and then the explorer learns of a hermit and his ship that sails between the stars… This is the sort of sf story that used to appear by the hundreds back in the 1950s and 1960s. It apparently won the Hugo for best short fiction, which only goes to show the award was won by unremarkable stories even back then. ‘Slow Lightning’ is original to the double, and I’m baffled why it made it into print. It reads like half a dozen stories randomly stuck together because the author once heard the word “plot” and has a sort of vague idea what it might mean. It opens on a contemporary Earth after an alien, well, not an invasion. They came, they started trading, they pretty much overwhelmed the planet… and they turned Boston into an intergalactic port. A young orphan, whose parents died while settling an alien world, is now living with his aunt and her moody teenage son. With him he has Gray, a spatient, who is a sort of alien android thing but looks more like a six-legged rhino or something. The boy finds an alien egg in the wreck of a ferry on the bay shore. He decides to hatch it to see what comes out. Gray investigates as he’s worried what it might contain. The egg hatches, end of story. Except it isn’t. The plot now jumps back in time to the boy’s parents, to explain what they were doing and how they died, and how that ties in with the egg – which is sort of does but only peripherally. Anyway, they die, end of story. Except it isn’t. Because the story now jumps even further back in time to shortly after the aliens arrived, and describes the death of the boy’s grandparents, who were caught up in a turf war between the Boston authorities and a smuggler lord who married the boy’s grandfather’s sister. The whole thing reads like they might have been separate but linked stories, but the decision to publish them together, in reverse chronological order, was a mistake. ( )

My reactions to reading this in 1992. Spoilers follow.

“Slow Lightning”, Steven Popkes -- A story set in the shared univesre of a future, sinking Boston. The first part of this short novel was Popkes novella “The Egg” which I’d read before and liked. The rest of the story wasn’t as good though it did fill in some details of this universe. Structurally the story is very interesting. It’s three episodes (the first being “The Egg”) which could stand alone. However, the episodes are set chronologically backwards and characters from the preceding ones often show up as minor characters in the next one. In “The Egg” orphaned Ira Bloom and alien nanny Gray are the main characters. In the second story, Ira’s parents are the main characters and the tale of Gray’s discovery is told. The story ironically ends happily though the reader knows both of Ira’s parents will soon be killed in a labor dispute. The last story tells how Ira’s aunt and mother became orphans. Through this all runs the theme of duty, duty to family and friends and love. "Love of family, love of work, love of duty” says alien philosopher Gray, and in that order. The troubled relationships of “The Egg” between Ira, aunt Roni and his cousin and Gray are resolved, knitting all into a family. In the second story, Roni and Gilbert Bloom’s relationship is explored as they try to find work at Maxwell Station. The third story is the most complicated working of this story. Peter S. Croix, protagonist of the story and Ira Bloom’s grandfather, must choose between desire to save himself and his family and his loyalty to smuggle Lat Do whom the Boston authorities are going to come down hard on. Lat Do has married and cared for Croix’s maimed sister (he blames himself for the farming accident responsible). It is also in this story that a couple of other threads running through the novel are especially prominent. First is the strange stylistic device of having non-present (usually dead but not always) people hanging around the protagonist giving advice like some Roman tutelary family spirit. This device is never rationalized. In the first story, Ira’s dead parents talk to him. In the third story, Peter Croix hears the fiery voices of his ancestors involved in the 1885 Metis rebellion in Canada. They are urging him to stay and fight the Boston authorities he knows will come. Yet he’s trying to work out an reapproachment between Boston and Lat Do with the mysterious Bishop 24. The Bishop is very influential amongst Earth’s aliens. The Bishop has been manipulating affairs to support Lat Do’s high tech smuggling ring as a counterweight to the alien trading blocs. He is about to buy out so the Earth authorities won’t touch it. But the Police Commissioner acts too fast and moves against Lat Do before the deal can be finalized. Lat Do suspects betrayal by the Bishop, dies trying to kill him. Marie, Lat Do’s wife and Croix’s sister, is killed by Croix when she trys to kill the Bishop. (This is prefigured by Lat Do killing his brother who trys to rape Roni Bloom. Both acts are seen as familial duty, Chamcha as the Bishop calls it). The Bishop, Croix realizes, is too important to be killed since he is looking out for Earth’s interests. This is what the Bishop calls Rhamcha, a Holy moral sacrifice. It is because of Croix’s sacrifice that the Bishop manipulates things so Gilbert can get a job on Maxwell Station and find Gray. Bishop betrays his own people to find Gray whose family he betrayed and had destroyed. This is Chamcha. Gray does not know this and seems to hate the Bishop when they meet in “The Egg”. This convoluted tale of sacrifice and duty through three generations of humans was interesting. The central character, the enigmatic, strange centaur Bishop 24, was the best part of the story and one of the best parts of the series. However, Alexander Jablokov’s “The Place of No Shadows”, in which the Bishop isn’t present, is still my favorite installment.

“The Longest Voyage”, Poul Anderson -- The ending, where Captain Rovic decides to blow up the star ship so the inhabitants of his world will explore their planet before venturing to others, was not a surprise. Nor did it strike me particularly hard emotionally. I’m not sure Rovic’s reasoning is solid. The circumnavigation of the world was obviously based on Magellan, and Rovic was kind of a Sir Francis Drake character with bits of Scottish culture and nomenclature thrown in. Anderson once again doing a competent job of blending his knowledge of history into sf. ( )