ive! From Planet Earth presents 20 stories and two poems from throughout the career of George Alec Effinger. Published from the early 1970s through the late 1990s, these previously uncollected works demonstrate the range and versatility of an extraordinarily accomplished author.
Several of the stories in Live! From Planet Earth spin classic SF themes in unexpected directions. "The Aliens, Who Knew, I Mean, Everything," a Hugo and Nebula finalist, opens the book with a humorous tale of aliens who arrive on Earth to help the human race, but, in so doing, drive their human hosts to distraction with their insistent opinions on matters both cosmic and mundane. "From Downtown at the Buzzer" combines first contact with a much rarer category, the SF sports story, as the first aliens on earth show an unexpected affinity for basketball, an affinity that forces humans to confront their own preconceptions about differences within their own species.
"Target: Berlin!" and "Everything But Honor" explore alternate history with, respectively, an absurdist take on a decades-delayed World War II and a harrowing account of a research scientist whose repeated attempts to change the past yield worlds that are different from his own but just as deeply flawed. "One" powerfully considers what it would really mean to be alone in interstellar space, while in "My Old Man" a chess-playing computer forces the narrator to confront unpleasant truths about his relationship with his father. Two of the earliest stories, the Hugo finalist "All the Last Wars at Once" (1971) and "At the Bran Foundry" (1973), comment sharply and satirically on the human potential for violence and self-destruction; in one of the latest, "Solo in the Spotlight" (1997), satire leads to a happier ending as war is averted through a judicious reading of Tarot cards by the U.S. president's daughter.
The book also contains a number of conscious homages to other authors. "Two Sadnesses" injects the innocent worlds of A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh) and Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows) with the consequences of real-world warfare and environmental degradation; "Seven Nights in Slumberland" merges the dreamscapes of Windsor McKay's "Nemo in Slumberland" and Neil Gaiman's Sandman. A significant portion of the book is devoted to seven stories and one poem, all originally published under the pseudonym of "O. Niemand," all set in and around a human colony on an asteroid, each representing the style and themes of such classic American authors as O. Henry, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor. Effinger's versatility is further on display in "Glimmer, Glimmer," a brief fantasy of revenge that originally appeared in Playboy, and "Housebound," a mainstream story about a woman's struggles with agoraphobia. The book concludes with a poem, "My First Game as an Immortal," which moves the theme of sports into the afterlife.
Brilliant humor, and more
The life and career of the late George Alec Effinger (1947-2002) was marked by critical success, commercial shortfalls, serious health problems and, all too often, staggering hardship. Remarkably, Effinger was best known as an SF humorist, and in stories such as "The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything," "Solo in the Spotlight," "From Downtown at the Buzzer" and "Target: Berlin," the author's comic gifts are prominently and effectively displayed.
However, one of the most important things this collection accomplishes is to offer a glimpse of Effinger's darker impulses. "One" and "My Old Man" are unsparing in their considerations of the human capacity for alienation and loneliness, while the satire of "All the Last Wars at Once" and "At the Bran Foundry" falls squarely in the unflinching tradition of Swift and Orwell.
Most of all, however, the stories in Live! From Planet Earth demonstrate a flawless sense of structure, theme and the resources of language that never forgets the baseline requirement of telling a good story. In a book of many strong stories, Effinger's gifts may be on display most strongly in "Two Sadnesses," a story that could have been a joke, but, in its presentation of shattered innocence through a pitch-perfect recreation of the voices of two of the most beloved of all childhood stories, is not merely effective but heartbreaking.
The SF community lost a lot when it lost George Alec Effinger, and Golden Gryphon Press has done a great service in pointing a new generation of readers toward the works of an author who richly deserves to be remembered.
