Tyree Campbell

‘The Fifth Di…’ is a small press magazine with three dots in the title that features a mixture of Science Fiction and fantasy short stories with a bit of poetry thrown in for good measure. It was published for many years by Nomadic Delirium Press and has now been taken over by Hiraeth Publishing.

The first story is ‘The Daughter Of Doubt’ by AD Ross. The Scorpion, master of the underworld in The Suspicious City, has a great treasure. Dee, a magician and martial artist is determined to steal it, aided by our hero Yarvil. He was almost killed by one of the Scorpions underlings when he tried to make a deal with the villain but survived and is back helping Dee. This is a complex tale of skulduggery set in a fascinating fantasy world. Very well-written with good plot twists. I really liked it.

‘Grocery Purgatory’ by Mark R Hunter is a fun tale of disappearing chicken gumbo soup in a small-town store. Galen Palmer ends up working in the shop with musclebound bully Bill Harrison and cute blonde Marissa, both from his old school. It’s like he never left. The ending satisfied while defeating expectations.

‘Fireweed’ by Debby Feo is a pleasant fable about dragons that fly between planets and even stars. There are certain ancient families and Fireweed belongs to the Solfatara line. This was a gentle coming of age story with lots of nice details, suitable for children.

Cherish Adonia is a dark tormented soul on board a 13,600-ton icebreaker beneath the Amundsen Sea in ‘The Sun Beneath The Glaciers’ by Erica Ciko Campbell. It’s set in a future where mankind has discovered immortality but has the dilemma of insufficient memory to cope. Old memories must be erased to make way for new experiences and Cherish has led a rich full life even before this adventure. The dense, dark narrative style carries you along but I wasn’t sure what to make of this one.

‘A Hero Reborn’ by David Samuels is a tale of ancient Greece with a modern, feminist twist. Twelve-year-old Delia of Atokos (buck teeth, acne) is the daughter of Telemachus and a Princess of Ithaka. She’s in Thebes on a mission to get trained in archery by Atalanta so that she can save her homeland but Atalanta has become a downtrodden housewife. An adventure tale with talking animals suitable for children that adults can enjoy too. I did.

‘The Fifth Di… March 2020’ contains a mixed bag of moderately entertaining stories. Nothing terrible and nothing that’s going to win a Hugo so about par for a small press magazine of its type. I found the bag a bit too mixed in that ‘Fireweed’ and ‘A Hero Reborn’ are fables suitable for children while ‘The Daughter Of Doubt’ and ‘The Sun Beneath The Glaciers’ are rather dark. However, it’s early days with the new publisher and maybe they’re still finding a path.

Overall, not bad and the usual kudos are due to Hiraeth and other small presses for keeping short fiction alive and encouraging new talent. There’s no eBook version and distribution is spotty but you can get it straight from the publisher in the USA. To save postage costs, I got mine from The Book Depository in England, a subsidiary of Amazon.… (mehr)

It’s the end of the world in ‘A Wolf To Guard The Door’ by Tyree Campbell. The nations of the Earth have fallen out with each other and the people have fallen out with their governments. International tensions combine with local ones. Food shortages, ethnic issues and long-held frustrations have caused riots and disorder but whether beheaded by militant Islamists or disintegrated by Korean nukes, you’re just as dead. Most electronic devices are dead, too, thanks to the electromagnetic pulse from the nukes.

A group of refugees led by a pilot get a plane out New England and head for France. His idea is that the Pyrenees might survive. The group are an assortment of characters who don’t get on well. Addison Temple is a spoilt rich man who thinks he can buy his way out of the apocalypse. Miller is a female ex-marine who’s competent with guns and violence. Jameela is a strong black character. Nollaigh is a pregnant woman who struggles to fly the plane and deliver a baby in one very exciting scene. Nouh is a quiet Muslim taxi driver keeping a low profile. Young Derek is so immersed in his video game that he barely notices the end of the world. Later, they find a wolf cub to give the book its title.

When this lot crash on a beach in France, they are saved by a chap called Blake who was heading for the Atlantic coast of to drown at his wife’s favourite spot. She’s dead and he can’t live without her. Blake sees the plane come down and by the time he’s helped save the passengers, suicide is forgotten. He has responsibilities now. With supplies short, bands of roaming outlaws are hijacking anything worthwhile and shooting the owners, so it’s a dangerous world.

Meanwhile, Italian journalist Cosimo Bruni travels west, also heading for the Pyrenees. He reported on the Basque resistance movement and made friends. En route, he falls in with a nice young lady called Palmina, whose from the former Yugoslavia, so she’s seen trouble. They get helped along by two old railwaymen still determined to do their job.

This isn’t a story about the war but rather about a few desperate people trying to survive the aftermath. Campbell sets up the plot nicely in the introductory chapters and makes you interested in the characters so you give a damn what happens. He uses the classic technique of leaving one character in peril at the end of a chapter, cutting to someone else, leaving them in peril and then cutting back to the first one. This keeps you turning the pages. The writing is straightforward. Clarity is more important than style but there are some nice observations about both individual characters and the human race. Some bitter ones, too.

There’s a lot of information subsumed in the text. I would guess that the author is familiar with the south of France though it’s possible he obtained the detailed geographical knowledge from google maps. He seems to know about guns. It was disheartening to read that old missiles can blow up in their silos, though the biter bit part of that is comforting in a way. It’s also worrying, if true, that the Russians often arm their missiles before they are launched so if theirs blow up in the silo, it’s a nuclear accident which is even worse, especially for Russians. This should put them off starting anything. The North Koreans, unfortunately, have shiny new missiles.

Campbell reminds me of Heinlein in many respects. Emotion is conveyed effectively with understatement, as in ‘Starman Jones’ where the grizzled guru turns to face certain death. Alongside great respect for competence, there’s anger at useless people who contribute nothing to society. Like Heinlein, he’s not afraid to tackle the genuine issues between different races and creeds while simultaneously showing that there is good and bad in all creeds and colours. This novel has a noble Muslim, two able black people and a rotten, rich white scoundrel. Campbell is also a true romantic when it comes to love and a genuine feminist portraying the fairer sex as strong and able. In the end, like Heinlein, he believes or at least hopes that the best of humanity will prevail over the worst and we will survive.

A good book and I enjoyed it immensely. If you like that classic four-time Hugo Award winner and Grand Master of Science Fiction Robert A. Heinlein, you’ll like this. A lot.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/… (mehr)

Yoelin Thibbony is the name of the heroine in The Butterfly and The Sea Dragon. She is trained in martial arts, thinks way ahead of her enemy, and gets the job done when it comes to rescuing anything—from items to people. Even though she had an abusive childhood, she has the right personality for the job. She’s very bright, collected, and performs well under pressure.

Yoelin receives a request from her old boss to find a woman named Menorah Dhu and bring her to Corporatia—a section of our galaxy that occupies four hundred light-years of the spiral arm, with Earth about a third of the way. The information Yoelin is given is that Menorah Dhu used to work for Corporatia as a records clerk. One day she downloaded important records onto a Palmetto (some kind of tablet) and erased them from the system. Menorah Dhu then bypassed security and left Corporatia for Havelox Rest, a planet located in a place of the galaxy that’s known as The Dragons. At first, Yoelin declines the offer; Havelox Rest is the place where she lived the traumatic years that scarred her for life. But after a tense encounter with her ex-boss, Yoelin boards her spaceship and heads for Havelox Rest to look for Menorah Dhu.

In Havelox Rest, a planet larger than Earth that consists mostly of shallow seas and small islands, Yoelin visits the tavern. There she meets an artist who is taken by her and begins to sketch her from afar. Stefan Coppenrath seems to see right through her and when he finally makes conversation with her, he tells her that he’s been looking for a new muse, someone like Yoelin, because his old muse (a girl he once met and sketched named Deirdre Hanratty) went missing many years ago. What Stephan doesn’t know is that Deidre Hanratty now goes by the name Yoelin Thibbony. And so the love story begins.

During this trip, Yoelin also meets a creepie—a giant eel-like creature that inhabits the sea. Yoelin treats the animal with kindness and respect and the two of them form an immediate bond that enables them to communicate telepathically. It also makes the creepie very protective of Yoelin, to the point that she kills in order to keep Yoelin out of danger.

Yoelin and Stephan visit the marketplace knowing that Menorah Dhu will most likely be there. When Yoelin finally finds her, the two women become the targets of a shooting spree. Yoelin rescues Menorah with Stephan’s help, and once they find a safe spot, Menorah tells Yoelin that she has never worked for Corporatia and doesn’t have any stolen files. After the unexpected shooting, Yoelin suspects that Menorah Dhu is telling the truth; even more so once she learns that Menorah is a marine biologist studying the creepies. Having learned first-hand that the creepies are able to communicate telepathically with humans, Yoelin begins to see how these sea dragons could be used for military purposes. Menorah Dhu fears for her life and asks Yoelin to help her, and Yoelin is not about to turn Menorah to Corporatia without knowing the truth.

I had not read anything by Tyree Campbell, and I’m very picky when it comes to Science Fiction novels. Mostly because I often have a hard time following the settings of Sci-fi novels. However, the descriptions are so rich that I was able to follow the storyline without questioning what the places looked like, or how societies and cultures functioned. The characters were also very appealing. Yoelin stands out as an admirable heroine without exaggerations—no damsel in distress and no anti-social punk. In this novel we see Yoelin face her demons and come out winning, which is very gratifying.

The futuristic technology is explained well and the author focused on items that were important to the story, which in turn, kept me focused on the plot.

The telepathic conversations that took place between the creepie and Yoelin were simple enough to keep my interest. In fact, all dialogue was done very realistic throughout. You could hear each character speaking differently. Menorah Dhu and Yoelin Thibbony sounded nothing alike. They had different personalities and different voices.

I enjoyed the flow of the story as well, not too fast or slow. The creepies (or sea dragons) were very interesting. I’d like to see what happens with them next, as their fate was not conclusive in the end. Since the title of the book is The Butterfly and The Sea Dragon, A Yoeling Thibbony Rescue, my guess is that this will become a series.

This was a fun and easy read. It’s one of those stories that opens your mind to new worlds while it leaves you with that warm feeling in your heart. And that’s what I loved the most about this story. It has a lot of heart and we can all relate to the characters. Even though it takes place in the future, the essence of the human species is still very much present.… (mehr)