It's a different world

 My brother, Charles Ebert, published an anthology of his short fiction titled A World Where Sandy Never Died and Other Worlds, which I finished up a few days ago (and haven't had a chance to review yet, because of my hideous work schedule this week.)

This work collects 12 stories, 11 of which were published elsewhere, and each comes with a preface talking a bit about the story. Most fall somewhere under the umbrella of "Soft Sci-Fi" or "Near Future Sci-Fi", although more than a few are under different headings.  

Honestly, I was happy a story I heard him read out loud at a convention was included here ("Hauntings"), since it's almost a play on Beetlejuice in terms of trying to get rid of a problem tenant. 

We have a much more "could be current" story in "The Ossuaries", where the connections between historical atrocities and our modern age come really into focus, as does the choice between fulfilling a dream or temporarily preventing an echo or a previous atrocity. 

I enjoyed the title story, which concerns people people slipping between universes to find albums from artists who died in our world but survived in others. While I'm not as passionate about the artists mentioned in here as the author is, I kept picturing other ways to enjoy such excursions, and wondering if one could build a much larger story on world presented here. 

For me, those 3 are the highlights of the collection. They're all good and well written, but these three are the ones that stuck with me. I believe this one is on Amazon, so if you have some extra cash, give it a whirl.

I've got that JOY JOY JOY JOY deep in my heart!

With this author, I need to preface this with the fact he's my brother. Indeed, I along with my other siblings show up on the dedication page.

In other words, anytime I review something by someone I know, I do my best to remove my connections with them when reviewing, which is a bit like Jimmy Carter removing himself from his peanut farm after becoming President.

Anyway.

So, The White Angel of Death actually refers to a character, but she doesn't show up until about the midpoint. Which does make her a better character than say, John Galt, who doesn't show up in his novel that he's the main character of until 3/4 of the way through. Mostly, we're following around Michael "Mickey" Weston, a keyboardist for several local bands (most recently, the Balding Orangutans, who fired him, but kept his riff on their national hit "Monkey With Your Love".) Mickey works as a record store and is dating a girl named Trish, who mostly seems to want to argue. We open on Mickey's mom calling him to let him know his brother is in the hospital and likely dying. Frank not only is an addict, but he is also in late stage Acquired Manic Syndrome, the current plague. AMS basically screw with serotonin transmission, making the infected very happy. Second stage screws with the actual synapse, and third stage leaves you paralyzed but orgasmic, essentially left to die of a good time. The disease follows AIDS like transmission, through blood or other bodily fluid.

Frank, the brother, ends up spitting blood on Mickey, who does have a cut on his hand, and who does indeed contract the, I assume, bacteria. (The cure bears a similar name to antibiotics, so I assume bacterial.) As such, Mickey does indeed slowly start transitioning into his life of being a "Happyhead", one nickname for folks infected. While going to get tested, (which is when we find out about government response to AMS, which basically boils down to "You get cured, and if you refuse, we will arrest you and cure you whether you like it or not", under the theory that if the disease mutates into another transmission vector, people who don't deserve it will wind up with it), we also hear about White Angel, an organization run by Jane Alison Tippet, who' initial paperwork reads as if it's your right to die happy than live depressed.

Mickey tests positive on the first round, then demands the second test for confirmation. Then he starts refusing the cure. Indeed, with the sort of help of a coworker (who had AMS and got the cure, which essentially keeps you from ever recontracting the disease), Mickey starts joyholing, which is pretty much happyheads prostituting themselves to the uninfected. $300 an encounter, and the stamina to go 3-6 times a night. Just watch out for the cops, kid.

Mickey does actually get almost caught in a sting operation, and contacts the local White Angel chapter, who provides him a motorcycle and a contact in Chicago. (We start in Columbus. Sadly, most of the landmarks mentioned in this maybe 2 decades ahead of us setting are long gone, razed and built over with utilitarian capitalist venture that the average college student can't afford but make the parents think the area is safe.)

In Chicago, an encounter with his White Angel contact and the bartender who's a CDC mole ends up with him meeting Iz, who's part of an unaffiliated Permanent Floating Rave. The PFR is in a bad neighborhood, and the happyheads are paying protection money to a local gang to leave them alone while they all joyhole (or in a few cases, provide other outlets) for money. Anyway, thing eventually go south, and Iz, who really doesn't like White Angel ends up leading the remnants back to the main house, where Jane Alison Tippet herself resides and runs classes for AMS sufferers, as well as safe houses for them. Mind you, as we sit through Ms. Tippet's class, we find out her philosophy isn't much better than the governments. It draws from the fun 19th century theory that since more people eat up more and more limited resources, the poor should suffer so that more resources become available. Indeed, she thinks of AMS as a gift from G-d, a plague that lets the infected die happy. Which translates into shoving her charges into brothels, providing all the vices they could want, and keeping the money they raise.

In the background, we have national news that we gets bits and pieces of in the context of someone riding serotonin overload really isn't paying attention to national news. This means we hear bits about the Texangelicals and their militias, who in the end help defend President Burlinson from being evicted from the White House following his impeachment.

Honestly, reading this was a bit like remembering my own brief time on antidepressants back in '01, wherein there are some seriously bad things going on, but you don't really pay attention to them because your new brain won't let you. It's very interesting, with the darkness buried under layers of sex, love, and drugs.

Ordinarily I'd post a link to the place to purchase it, but evidently the publisher is slowly going out of business, and Chuck's trying to get the rights back to publish it again. You may get lucky on Amazon, you may not.

Nasty Little Hobbitses...

Full disclosure on this one. My half-brother, Charles Ebert, recently self-published his first novel. I was lucky enough to receive a copy as a gift. How that affects this review is up to you and your own perceptions.

As for the title of this post, as Chuck notes in his acknowledgements, it's his "Lord of the Rings", which really is kind of fitting. (We'll return to this here in a bit.)

So.... The Sword of Dalmar starts off fairly cryptically with some guy waking up on an island. We then proceed to meet Buckle, who handles most of the affairs of Roduct's Delamarian estate. Roduct is a Sarondak, a race of desert people who live east of the Barrier mountain. (Delamar, of course, is the far west, abutting the sea.) Roduct is one of the few Sarondakis to throw off Soowooli, which is a form of fire magic that, near as I can infer, imprisons the soul and Will of someone in a jar, making them more or less a slave. 

The Sarondaki are ruled by the Immortal Skrike, who, prior to the events chronicled here, once ruled all the way to the sea from their desert home across the Barrier Mountains. The story goes that Dalmar (He of the eponymous sword) and his girlfriend (who was more or less a lady of a lake) went to kill Skrike, failed, but managed to inspire the three western kingdoms to drive back Skrike's forces.(the sword was forged with magic of all the elements, and therefore the only thing capable of killing an immortal)

Roduct gets a Sarondaki visitor, in the middle of a dark and stormy night. After chasing the visitor away, Roduct draws up a new will leaving his estate to Buckle. Which is all well and good, until the next morning, when the corrupt sheriff of the district comes by accusing Roduct (now conspicuously missing) of murdering his late night visitor. As such, Buckle, along with estate hand Yazzle (who fills the big and dumb role) and female warrior Zabeth (who starts off as a scullion who trained under the armsmaster of the estate) take off for the East to find Roduct.

Along the way, they pick up Bindle (another warrior, who more or less deserted his post) and the Water Witch Krinseth (who uses her magic to track Roduct.) All of which eventually leads to a split party, with the asthmatic Buckle and Yazzle stuck in Skrike's dungeon mining coal, while Bindle and Zabeth join up with Constable Kebble raiding the Sarandaki parties in the desert. Since it is a desert, Krinseth spends most of the latter half of the book in a self created cairn waiting on a rain storm in the desert.

While the book has more than a few rough patches (In particular, the 3 Western rulers are basically plot expositions with names), it's quite readable. I rather enjoyed that Zabeth didn't fall into the old fantasy trope about the warrior woman who finds a man and calms down. When she does end up taking a lover, it's on her terms and in no way diminishes her chosen profession. Asthma was a unique quirk to give the main character, although I imagine some of that had to do with the author's own issues in childhood and beyond. The lack of some of the more abused fantasy tropes (there's no guiding prophecy that everyone is fulfilling, no real non-humanoid races) helps quite a bit. That this was technically written 30+ years ago (and has probably undergone several revisions since then)  also helps avoid the plague of either gritty realism with every major character dying or the sunshine and rainbows with everyone getting a happy ending. I also like that the full story of Dalmar and his lver is never spelled out in a long block of exposition; we get it in bits and pieces and are forced to infer the truth from various perspectives.

And yes, there are quite a few Tolkien-esque moments throughout the narrative, including a bit towards the end that while not quite driving Saruman from Hobbiton, it did echo that sequence. Then again, most of the sword and sorcery fantasy genre owes a debt to tolkien, although thankfully, most of those authors don't get quite so verbose with it. (Because, seriously, the wall of text that was Ent society and the wall of boringness that was Tom Bombadil.)

Since it is self published, I don't think it's available at a normal bookstore. So, in one of those rare instances where I link something... You can buy the paperback or kindle version from Amazon.