On the evening of Tuesday, 7 January 2012, Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday (what happened to Little Nell?) and hours after the Giants’ Super Bowl victory parade, the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series presented a special US Coast Guard-themed event (Semper Paratus!—Always Ready!) featuring Lt. (S) Myke Cole and USCG veteran Robert J. Howe, plus, sailing in in their wake, civilian Saladin Ahmed.
Things got under weigh with the Series’ executive curator, Jim Freund, greeting the audience and welcoming them to its current venue, the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art on Sullivan Street in Manhattan. (The event would truly have been perfect at the Series’ previous venue, South Street Seaport.) Freund, host of WBAI’s (99.5 FM) Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy, related how he had wanted to invite Bob Howe to read, “and when we met up with Myke Cole at Readercon last year and heard of his new series,” a military fantasy, realized that “the pairing was a natural.” The third—the “pre-show” or “warm-up”—reader, Saladin Ahmed, though not in keeping with the Coast Guard theme, was a fortuitous addition. Though he had moved back to Detroit, Ahmed is in town to promote his debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon (from DAW Books), which officially came out that very day. Continuing, Freund announced that, in honor of the centennial of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (also, by the way, of Tarzan of the Apes), the next (6 March) reading will be themed “A Journey to Barsoom,” hosted by John Joseph Adams, and featuring readers Catherynne M. Valente (“a princess of Mars”) and Jonathan Maberry (“the great Jeddak”). He then introduced the evening’s lead-off reader.
Saladin Ahmed, a past finalist for the John W. Campbell Award and the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, offered a “low-key” selection from the second chapter of Throne of the Crescent Moon, a fantasy novel with a quasi-Arabian Nights setting. The main character, Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, is a monster-hunter ready to retire… which, of course, means that something happens to prevent him: an old flame’s family is murdered by ghuls (a more Arabic spelling).
Next up, Cole, an active duty officer in the USCG (his rank is at present “in a weird transition”), began by proudly describing his unique branch of the US uniformed services. In addition to its military mission (Cole has done three tours in Iraq) and maritime law enforcement role, the Coast Guard also has environmental responsibilities, and responds to disasters. (Cole was recalled to serve during the Deepwater Horizon [aka BP] oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and off southern New Jersey during Hurricane Irene.)
Cole’s military fantasy Shadow Ops series (published by Ace [Penguin]) posits what the military (a highly regulated and regimented organization, and one whose “mission is to bring order to a world gone mad”) would do if magic (which is unpredictable and dangerous) were real; it might be described as a cross between Black Hawk Down and D&D. Cole read from the first novel in the series, Control Point, in which Army Lt. Oscar Britton of the Supernatural Operations Corps, who has just discovered that he has latent (and forbidden) magical abilities (which will later make him a “selfer” fugitive), with his team, enters a parallel universe which is the source of magic and fantasy archetypes. In the exciting, fast-paced chapter presented, they encounter roc-riding goblins.
Following a short break, Freund introduced the final reader of the evening. Brooklynite Robert J. Howe is the editor, with SGDA proprietor John Ordover, of the anthology Coney Island Wonder Stories (WildsidePress) and is just completing his second year as Secretary of SFWA. Between 1976 and 1980, Howe served in the US Coast Guard aboard the Cutter Cape George, on the Aids to Navigation Team (ANT) Woods Hole, and the Cutter Gallatin. Reading from a work in progress, Masts on the Event Horizon, Howe, who was (“honorably!”) discharged from the USCG as a petty officer third class, showed “the difference between an officer [Cole] and an enlisted man.” Set aboard a merchantman whose engines have gone dead, the piece was colorful, appropriately, “salty” (just about every sentence seemed to have the adjectival “f”-word at least once and sometimes multiply), and at times amusing. (“I’m on the f__g Flying Dutchman with Rain Man.”) Accompanied by a thawed dead man (the Nazis couldn’t kill him, but “McDonald’s and RJ Reynolds” did), a crewman abandons ship for a ghost ship (the deeps are a graveyard).
Copies of Ahmed’s book (personally delivered to the reading by Peter Stampfel and Betsy Wollheim) were for sale at the back of the room.
The audience of close to 60 (it was one of the largest readings in a while) included Richard Bowes, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Laura Ann Gilman, Amy Goldschlager, Karen Heuler, Kim Kindya, Barbara Krasnoff, Danny Lieberman, Gordon Linzner, Robert Rodriquez, Wrenn Simms, Peter Stampfel, Terence Taylor, and Betsy Wollheim, plus Cole’s folks. After the traditional folding-up of chairs, the readers and members of the audience adjourned, as customary, to Milady’s, a nearby pub.
Jim Freund adds: “It may be noteworthy that at least one rep from the USCG was present—an officer outranking Myke.”