A Green Man Review

I don’t think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It’s instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That’s why I write science fiction — even though the term ‘science fiction’ excites disdain in certain persons.

Kage Baker

I was thinking about Kage Baker, who has been  gone 15 years the end of last month, so I decided give a selection of the reviews we have done. Of course she was much more than a writer of great speculation fiction, as she was the companion to a space pirate named Harry, a baker of barm brack,  very fond of Terry Gilliam and perhaps smitten by Bruce Campbell. English cooking with slabs of meats and desserts made with lots of butter by two fat ladies on a motorcycle with a sidecar cruising the countryside? Oh yes! And finally I must mention that she had a deep love for the early years of Hollywood and the film industry in general.

Cat has a neat work for us: ‘At a mere one hundred and three pages, this is one of the best Robert Heinlein works I’ve ever read. Oops, I meant Kage Baker works. Or did I? Ok, let me reconcile the contradiction I just created (somewhat). The Empress of Mars reads like the best of Heinlein’s short fiction from the golden period of the 1940s and 1950s. It is so good that I’ve no doubt John W. Campbell would’ve published it! It would sit very nicely alongside much of his short fiction such as ‘Blowups Happen’, ‘The Long Watch’, and ‘The Green Hills of Earth’, to name but three classic Heinlein tales. It’s that well-crafted. It’s that entertaining. And it’s that rarest of short works — one that is just the right length.’

Matthew looks at a Kage Baker venture into children’s fiction: ‘In comparison to her other works,’ says he, ‘I would consider The Hotel under the Sand to be one of Kage Baker’s lesser works, but it is still highly enjoyable.’

Matthew also reviews Kage Baker’s Not Less Than Gods, her last Company novel which Kathleen, her sister, told Cat that apparently only she and Kage liked. (Cat says he liked it too.) Matthew says of this novel that ‘Ultimately, this is not going to be considered one of Kage’s strongest works. For someone who is a Company junkie, it is a nice installment, but the newcomer would not understand the novel’s position in the entire series. A lot of “inside” knowledge is required to more fully appreciate the novel.’

Gary here with some music. I jumped at the chance to review the new record by Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz; I’ve been writing up Eric’s music — solo, with band, and in various duos — for a quarter century now. ‘Circle and Square is full of gentle but sturdy songs about the human condition and the important role art of all kinds plays in the lives of us all. A good record for now.’

‘If you know the music of Värttinä you have some idea of what Tuuletar sounds like,’ I note in my review of Tuuletar’s third album Maammo. ‘All four of the women of Tuuletar — Venla Ilona Blom, Sini Koskelainen, Johanna Kyykoski and Piia Säilynoja — sing and do vocal effects and percussion, and Blom does some beatboxing as well.’

I also wrote about Tibet: The Voice Of The Tantra, a new two CD set of an old recording of the Monastery Of Gyütö’s monks. ‘The discs preserve a 1975 recording at the monastery and university of Gyütö performed by the first generation of Tibetan monks who went into exile from Lhasa to India with the current Dalai Lama. It’s an astonishing and utterly tranfixing auditory experience, of very high quality for 50-year-old field recordings.’

Lastly for me this time, I wrote an omnibus review of three new jazz releases, Martin Wind’s Stars, Dave Pietro’s The Butterfly Effect, and John McNeil & Tom Harrell’s Look To The Sky. The latter is a reissue: ‘These days I’m all about the trumpet, so I’m totally delighted by this classic reissue from SteepleChase. John McNeil and Tom Harrell are legendary horn players who rose to prominence in the New York scene of the 1970s, and this recording is the only one they made together.’

From the archives, Rebecca enjoyed the Christian Celtic folk pop of Ceili Rain’s Say ‘KAY-Lee’. ‘It is cheerful, enthusiastic, and well-crafted. Those people who are more comfortable with a bleak, cynical view of life will not like it, nor will those who are mistrustful of Christianity. However, those looking for a positive alternative will enjoy it. I think the warmth and optimism expressed here are as valid as any of the darker emotions expressed by musicians today.’

Finally, Richard was highly impressed by Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley’s Mither o’the Sea, one of the earliest recordings by the Wrigley Twins. ‘Most of the pieces played on this all-instrumental CD are composed by the sisters themselves (nearly always by Jennifer) or by other Orkney musicians, and respect local traditional forms. A couple come from mainland Scotland (not to be confused with Mainland in Orkney). To my surprise, a perusal of the booklet revealed that only the very last of the 23 tunes spread over 12 tracks is a traditional piece, a jig from Holm (a Nordic word that simply means “island”).’

I’m going to leave you with the Kage‘s reading one of her own works, that being her Empress of Mars which Cat reviewed anove. It was supposed to be included on a CD in the limited edition version of the story that was going to be published by Nightshade Books but that never happened, so she gave us permission to have it here. So find a quiet place to listen and settle in to hear a most excellent sf story told by a master storyteller!

Kathleen, her sister, notes that ‘she was an old-fashioned storyteller. She loved adding dimensions, and felt that all her stories should be either copiously illustrated or read out to an audience.’

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven

Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

We’ve given over this edition to Gary, our music editor extraordinaire, who’s telling us about the books he reviewed last year and some music from 2025 that he really liked as well. So here he is…

I didn’t review a lot of books in 2025, but those that I did review were exceptional. (I must confess I spent much of the year immersed in Henning Mankell’s series of police procedurals featuring the Swedish detective Kurt Wallander. Mankell wrote and set them in the 1990s and early 2000s, and in them he identifies a number of global societal trends that are still affecting us today. Highly recommended if you haven’t yet read them, or watched the BBC’s versions.)

First up chronologically was Simon Jimenez’s debut SF novel The Vanished Birds, which was a finalist for the Locus Award for 2020 and named one of the best books of the year by tordotcom and Kirkus Reviews, it was also selected by Jo Walton as one of the top 10 genre books of the first quarter of the 21st century (a list you should definitely check out). ‘In The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez has created memorable characters, crafted an intricate and epic plot spanning centuries and lightyears, and especially has done some extraordinary world building. It’s the kind of world — or really universe — building in which the details are slowly revealed in the reading without a lot of tedious explication. He does that by first introducing us — in a bit of literary legerdemain — to a small character on a marginal world and then gradually enlarging the field of view, giving us more characters in more complex situations in various settings across vast time and space. By the time you realize the scope of the tale, you’re definitely hooked.’

Next up was Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, which filled in the origin story behind her highly popular Lady Astronaut series. The series imagines what would have happened if the U.S. had started the space program right after WWII, before an asteroid hits the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1950s and irreparably damages Earth. ‘When we meet her, Elma York (née Wexler) and her husband Nathaniel are horny young married professionals on vacation in a secluded cabin in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. Both work for the space agency NACA, she as a computer, he (a Manhattan Project veteran) as chief engineer. … Kowal handles the story masterfully, with just enough scientific jargon and facts to keep it feeling authentic but not enough to bog it down; her dialogue is solid and contributes to the believable characters; and especially she conveys the inner reality of a woman of the pre-feminist 1950s and ’60s who believes in her own capabilities and chafes against society’s restrictions, but often doesn’t even recognize many of the assumptions she unwittingly accepts. She even handles a few mild sex scenes with grace and aplomb.’

I read Elizabeth Bear’s The Folded Sky, the third entry in her White Space series, as soon as it was published. As Elizabeth herself pointed out, this one is a family drama, first contact novel and space opera, with a mystery thrown in for good measure. The heroine Dr. Sunya Song ‘… has been assigned to travel to a red dwarf called the Baostar that is about to go supernova. It is surrounded by Koregoi tech in the form of a sentient archive that the Synarche is just learning how to communicate with, and that’s where Sunya comes in. She’s tasked with communicating with the Baostar, all the while a small fleet of ships is ferrying away as many parts of it as can be saved before the star explodes. … The attempted murders, the unstable star, the nasty pirates are all something like McGuffins that move the plot along as we root for Sunya to survive long enough to gain confidence in herself.’

To wrap this up, my final review was James S. A. Corey’s The Mercy of Gods, the first of a new series by this duo who brought us The Expanse. It’s an edge-of-seat SF thriller in which a nearly omniscient alien power subjugates a human civilization, enslaving its top scientists, engineers and leaders on the aliens’ home planet, where they compete to the death with other slaves to solve problems for their new masters. ‘As with the crew of Rocinante in The Expanse, “Corey” (a.k.a. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) has created a team of distinct individuals for the reader to identify with, each having their own strengths, weaknesses and quirks. And then put them into an unimaginably stressful situation that brings out their best and sometimes worst traits. The plot draws on elements of Holocaust narratives, prison narratives and of course the campus novel, all in the midst of a fantastically constructed space opera. It’s also influenced by a classical, or rather Biblical source that I’m embarrassed I didn’t spot: The Book of Daniel, in which the Israelites are dragged off to Babylon for a generations-long captivity. The universe of The Mercy of Gods is a one that I won’t forget, and I can’t wait for the next installment in this trilogy.’

It was also the year that I discovered a pretty good SF related podcast, The Coode Street Podcast with Jonathan Strahan & Gary K. Wolfe. The two hosts engage in interviews with noted SFF writers and also have discussions (sometimes rather too in the weeds for me) of awards, cons and other genre arcana. I’ve really just dipped my toe in so far, but I very much enjoyed discussions with Jo Walton and with Guy Gavriel Kay.

Time to clear the slate of music that I enjoyed but didn’t get around to reviewing way back in 2025. (Remember that year? What a strange one it was!) Some of these were languishing on my desktop since mid-summer, but most are from late fall and even early December. Why does so much new music come out so close to the end of the year!? Anyway, I’ve rounded up a bunch of jazz releases into a couple of omnibus reviews.

I’ll start with Julian Shore Trio’s Sub Rosa, GinmanBlachmanDahl’s Play Ballads, Convergence’s Reckless Meter, and Kalia Vandever’s Another View. A couple of piano trios, a modern jazz sextet from Colorado, and a trombone-led quartet with one of today’s top guitarists in a strong supporting role.

Sub Rosa: ‘The trio shows its chops and Shore his talent for arrangement on some well chosen covers including Duke Ellington’s “Blues In Blueprint,” a lesson in abstraction based on a simple form; a romantic trip through the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)” and a highly abstracted romp through the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein standard “All The Things You Are.” ‘

Play Ballads: The album is rife with Ellingtonia: in addition to “Satin Doll” you’ll find the Duke’s “C Jam Blues” and “Come Sunday,” his son Mercer Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Chelsea Bridge.”‘

Reckless Meter: ‘The music is modern but melodic, with a lot of swing coming out of that rhythm section and delicious harmonies from the horns. If there’s anything that sounds better to my ears than a trumpet and sax mixing unison and harmony lines, it’s when you add a trombone to the mix!’

Another View: ‘In places Vandever draws on trance-like repitition to create an aura of mania or paranoia, particularly the introductions to “Withholding” and “Unearth What You Already Knew,” and elsewhere employing a menacing style of classical-influenced composition to unsettle, especially the arco bass-trombone duet that opens “Cycle In Mourning.”

Next up are Ovella Negra’s Va de Mescles!, and Rosàlia De Souza Quarteto 55˚’s self-titled debut album of Brazilian samba, choro and more. ‘Ovella Negra is at root a piano trio, but one with a difference. Pianist Joan Frontera Luna’s vision was to create a vibrant jazz program from the popular folk music of his native Balearic Islands (off Spain’s southern Mediterranean coast, including Mallorca) and unite the music with a visual program that showcases the island’s traditional dances as well.’ … ‘De Souza, a world renowned interpreter of samba, bossa nova, and Brazilian music traditions with more than a dozen albums to her name joins with Danish pianist Peter Rosendal, Canadian bassist Graig Earle, and Danish drummer Jonas Johansen on a program of mostly originals by quartet members in various combinations, with some Brazilian classics sprinkled in.’

In music podcasts, I continued enjoying some of my old standbys: Discord & Rhyme, Slate’s Hit Parade with Chris Molanphy, and Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. And I discovered a couple of new ones that I’ve been binging. Most recently The Late Set, in which Nate Chinen and Josh Jackson conduct in-depth conversations with jazz musicians and share the occasional number from one of those artists’ live set. But my favorite of the year is A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey. These are short (approximately 30 minutes) but deep episodes, begun in September 2018, covering Hickey’s sometimes quirky but definitely authoritative opinions about the way rock music has evolved. I found out about it when someone from the old Richard Thompson List posted a link to the episode about Fairport Convention’s ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’, which is 178  on his chronological list.

The year just turned, so why not a song to see it off that celebrates that turning? It’s ‘Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)’ by Judy Collins who sang it at The Newport Folk Festival, fifty-five years ago. It was written by Pete Seeger in the late Fifties and first recorded in 1959.

The lyrics save for the title, which is repeated throughout the song, and the final two lines are the first eight verses of the third chapter of the ‘Book of Ecclesiastes’. The Byrds also recorded it and you can hear them sing it here. This version was recorded at the Boston Tea Party fifty-six years ago.