Pirate Freedom, by Gene Wolfe, $24.95. Science fiction has always been used as a gateway to adventures. Wolfe uses hints of the future and a step through time to tell a marvelous pirate story.
Chris is raised in a Cuban monastery “sometime after the fall of communism.” When he leaves the monastery, he walks into a 17th-century world of Caribbean piracy.
The only thing he can see to do is sign on as a sailor. When the English pirate Burt Bram captures the ship, he gives Chris a chance to join them. Burt likes him and wants to make him a captain. Still, Chris is put in chains and set ashore when he refuses.
Trying to survive as a hunter on a Spanish-controlled island drives Chris back to piracy. Chris proves a natural and is soon the captain of his own ship. As Capt. Chris, he is a natural leader and finds success despite numerous setbacks.
The pirate story is told by an older Chris who is a new Catholic priest in America. He’s biding his time before communism falls in Cuba and he can return to the island and find a way back into the past and the love he has left there.
Chris is a step ahead of the reader, with charming naïvete, while Wolfe is miles ahead, slyly steering the course. Adventure abounds on land and sea with a world of pirate lore from the dangers of Port Royal to how to scrape the keel of a ship.
Emshwiller: Infinity X Two, by Luis Ortiz, $39.95. The year’s best choice for a beautiful Christmas present is a thoroughly illustrated biography of the man who set the standard for science fiction art in in the 1950s.
Ed Emshwiller went to college on the GI Bill after World War II. He became a successful commercial artist with his magazine covers for “Galaxy” and “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.” He signed his paintings “Emsh” and became a major figure in the world of science fiction writers and fans.
He often used naturalistic detail, but in his heart Emsh was more adventurous. At the height of his success, he turned from commercial art to avant-garde film. He was also a master in this less-noticed and less-lucrative field.
This is a dual biography. Carol Emshwiller was a Levittown housewife who started writing as a way of fitting in with Ed’s science-fiction friends. She sold magazine stories. Like her husband, her interests went more to the avant-garde than the commercial.
Together they were the unconventional artist couple of the suburbs. According to their son Peter: “It sometimes felt a little like we Emshwillers were the Munsters or the Addams Family of our neighborhood.”
Ed died from leukemia in 1990. Carol is still very active, with the excellent novel “The Secret City” published earlier this year. She was a Guest of Honor at this year’s World Fantasy Convention.
Luis Ortiz captures multiple worlds: the ’50s suburbs, science fiction and art films. Illustrated throughout by classic Emsh pictures — often with Carol as a model — Ortiz has written a loving story of a couple successfully living for their art.
Fred Cleaver is a freelancer who writes a regular column on new science fiction.
