The Unfolding of the World, by Harold R. Thompson
This is a short story that felt like a small story. The basic premise, a soldier of fortune
exploring the buffer-state hinterlands, is solid. Somehow, despite the large scale of the tale,
it just felt too darn small. Exploring a
poorly mapped area at the edges of an empire, and clashing with the great
civilization beyond should evoke a much greater scale and drama than this story
manages to achieve. A one paragraph side
trek or two, or maybe a short passage stretching out the journey there or back
again, would have gone a long ways towards establishing higher stakes in the story. Had the fantasy nation been fleshed out as
well as the characters, this would have been a real gem of a story. As it is, it feels more like a lone wanderer
finding a strange small town, and escaping from it to no real purpose. Harold’s characterizations are great. His
writing is solid, and it isn’t a bad story.
It just felt small and inconsequential.
The Sands of Rubal-Khali, by Donald Uitvlugt
A woman captured by slavers who escapes into the hands of a
bounty hunter and then clashes with an ancient sorcerer in his tower fastness
hits all the right notes, but this story has the opposite problem of the
previous. There’s just too much going
on. Our heroine is on a fantasy world,
but she is a spacer from another planet, and there are references to historical
cultures as well. Throw in at least one
alien/fantasy species that isn’t given quite enough description, and you wind
up with a lot of extraneous detail that interferes with the story itself. This reads like a short story written for
people who are already familiar with the setting and its background. It feels like there’s this big, beautiful
setting out there, but we get the barest hints of it, few of which are
particularly germane to the story before us. Combine that with the constant
uncertainty of where the heroine is going and why, and you get a tale that
feels far more disjointed on first reading than it really is. While writing this review, I went back and
re-read it, and that second reading – when I knew why everyone was behaving as
they did – was an improvement.
Unfortunately, saying the story needs to be read twice to be enjoyable
just shifts the criticism to a new angle, leaving this story not quite up to
Cirsova’s typical high standards.