Seven Adventures in Time and Space. Paizo, 2011, 255 p.

These are reprints of early Silverberg stories from the 1950s which first appeared in Science Fiction Adventures. As the stories’ titles (not to mention the book’s cover illustration) suggest they are firmly in the pulp tradition and bear most of that era’s faults and suppositions. Planet Stories as a publishing venture was set up precisely in order to resurrect them.

This volume has seven of Silverberg’s stories from that time plus an introduction from the author remembering those early days of his as a writer.

Slaves of the Star Giants. Lloyd Harkins wakes up in a future where giant creatures (whose descriptions are a bit like dinosaurs) have taken over Earth and its humans have degenerated into pre-civilisation mode while giant robots plough back and forth. He has been summoned there by someone called the Watcher who primes him to enter a place called the Tunnel City and use to overthrow the aliens. This story is typical of those where humans – especially those of the twentieth century US variety, and, naturally, males – are superior creatures.

Spawn of the Deadly Sea is set on a far future Earth which was conquered by aliens known as Dhuchay’y who flooded the planet and left its human inhabitants to live on floating cities (each of which specialises in one product with which it can trade,) and then disappeared. Dovirr is a youngster in one of these cities, Vythain, who wishes, despite the chances of being killed on sight) to join the crew of Gowyn, the local Thalassarch (one of the human rulers who go around the cities collecting tribute; apparently in return for protection from pirates.) There are also undersea creatures known as Sea-Lords who will eat anything organic thrown into the water. These are descended from humans genetically altered to fight the Dhuchay’y but who were produced too late to make any difference. Dovirr vows to Gowyn to destroy the Dhuchay’y should they ever return.

The whole scenario falls completely to pieces if you give it a moment’s thought – what use would tribute in gold be to a Thalassarch who spends all his time plying the seas? – even while reading it. However, these stories were never designed to be anything but mere entertainment.

The Flame and the Hammer. The decaying Galactic Empire is threatened with revolt. Legend has it that a device known as the Hammer of Aldryne will end the Empire by killing the Emperor. Duyair, son of the High Priest on Aldryne is interrogated by the priesthood when his father is killed by Imperial torturers seeking the Hammer. He has no knowledge of its existence or whereabouts. The rebellion starts with the new High Priest Lugaur Holsp claiming to have the Hammer but he plans to collude with the Emperor to enrich himself. It falls to Duyair to thwart this.

Valley Beyond Time. A selection of humans, several men and two women, plus three aliens, find themselves in a valley from which they seem unable to escape. They have been plucked from their normal lives by a being named the Watcher presumably to see how they react and interact. The usual jealousies and conflicts arise before they begin to test the valley’s boundaries.

In Hunt the Space Witch! Barsac seeks his friend, Zigmunn, who had been left behind on the planet Glaurus when he failed to get back to his spaceship on time. He finds Zigmunn has recently fallen under the sway of the Cult of the Witch and was taken to the planet Azonda.  Barsac has to be inducted into the cult, a process involving a kind of conditioning, in order to follow him. Barsac has to overcome the conditioning to succeed.

The Silent Invaders. The people of the planet Darruu are in conflict with Medlin. In surgically enhanced disguise as a human named Harris, Aar Khiilom of Darruu has been sent to Earth to thwart the efforts of Medlin to enlist Earth as an ally. His encounter with Beth Baldwin – who turns out to be a similarly disguised Medlin spy – leads Harris to a reassessment of his loyalties.

Spacerogue. Barr Herndon is the spacerogue of the title. He has sworn revenge on Seigneur Krellig after his family had been killed during a looting raid by some of Krellig’s henchmen. Recruitment into a smuggling operation gives him the chance to achieve this.

These stories have the faults of the time they were written and the outlets to which they were sold. The protagonist is always stronger or more forceful than his opponents, there is an awful lot of casual, unthinking violence, women are generally treated as little more than sex objects, not many are given any kind of agency. The prose is barely workmanlike. They do not bear comparison with the author’s later works. This collection is only for the Silverberg completist.

I also have to say the book’s cover is execrable.

Pedant’s corner:- Harkins’ (several times; Harkins’s,) “unable to get at this throat” (at his throat,) focussed (focused,) “in an old age” (in old age; no need for the ‘an’,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, a missing start quote mark at the beginning of another, “‘but there was no organisation on Aldrynel’” (that ‘l’ ought to be an exclamation mark,) “‘the throne of his father distinguished’” (has very odd syntax,) mind-wracking (mind-racking,) “shrugged and shagged a mass as it hung before him” (not shagged I should think; snagged makes more sense,) Vellers’ (x 4, Vellers’s,) (like a faroff musical chord” (a far off musical chord,) vender (vendor,) Glaurus’ (x 2, Glaurus’s,) “as if in each of the masks a witch shined” (shone,) Harris’ (x 3, Harris’s,) “the music reached an ear-splitting crescendo” (sigh; the music crescendoed to an ear-splitting climax,) a missing close-quote mark at the end of a piece of direct speech, “the proteus’ body” (proteus’s,) Morais’ (x 2, Morais’s.) “The Lady Moaris could not have been more than twenty-three or twenty-five” (well, which is it then? If she was twenty-five she was more than twenty-three.)

Edited by Avram Davidson, British Edition, Atlas Publishing and Distribution by arrangement with Mercury Press, 112 p.

Note: the cover painting shown right is the one on my copy but the contents differ from those listed on the image which was for the US edition for April 1962. The British editions obviously did not match the US ones.

In those days the magazine had no Editorial column nor was the text of its stories – except the title page for Uncle Arly here – laid out in two columns as it would be in later years.

Isaac Asimov’s SCIENCE column was going strong. Here in Hot Stuff^a he considers the highest* temperature possible in the universe (the interior of a star about to go supernova.)

Saturn Rising by Arthur C Clarke.¹ A veteran of the first two trips to Saturn on a lecture tour is buttonholed by the hotel owner, an enthusiast for that planet, eager for commercial opportunity.

Brown Robert by Terry Carr² is both SF and a horror story. Arthur Leacock assists young Robert Ernsohn, brown Robert, to make the first trip through time. This is one of the few SF stories to deal with the fact that time travel must also involve space travel.

My Dear Emily by Joanna Russ is a vampire story set in 1880s San Francisco. As well as the Emily of the title another of its characters is named Charlotte; two names obviously chosen to invoke thoughts of the Brontë sisters. Yet the overall effect is far from that template.

The Man Without a Planet by Kate Wilhelm.³ The titular man carried on with a space voyage despite that meaning the death of his companions. The sympathies of the story’s narrator are somewhat like the protagonist of Robert Silverberg’s To See the Invisible Man.

Darfgarth by Vance Aandahl. The titular character is a wandering minstrel whose mandolin has a magical effect on the locals he stops to serenade. Until he goes too far.

Stanley Toothbrush by Carl Brandon.⁴ One morning, while shaving, viewpoint character Herbert thinks the word ‘shelf’ is ridiculous and all his shelves disappear. Later his girtlfriend teases him about a (non-existent) new boyfriend and he turns up on her doorstep. The have great problems with him – till she imagines him away.

In Uncle Arly by Ron Goulart⁵ the uncle of an ex-girlfriend has begun to haunt Tim Barnum’s television set, every Tuesday evening for half an hour. He also pops up on the radio.

Subcommittee by Zenna Henderson.⁶ Talks to end the war between humans and the alien Linjeni are going nowhere. Serena’s husband Thorn is on the talks committee. Their son Splinter finds a way through the fence between the two communities and makes friends with Doovie, a Linjeni child. The rest of the story more or less writes itself but 60 years on it is striking how the cultural assumptions of the time were entrenched even in SF: the Linjeni females in this story are as bound to their families as human women were in those days. Of course it may not have been possible to get anything else past a male editor.

*as known then.

Pedant’s corner:- ^awave length (now is one word, wavelength.) Centigrade (that unit of temperature is now designated Celsius,) “56 hydrogen nuclei … are converted into 1 helium nuclei” (the nuclei is plural, so the ‘1’ is wrong. Context and the subsequent text suggests ‘14 helium nuclei’.) Later we have 19 helium nuclei where again 14 makes more sense.
¹Ingalls’ (Ingalls’s,) “It took me awhile” (a while.) ²Mr Lewis’ assistant (x 2, Lewis’s.) ³zombi-like (zombie-like.) ⁴focussing (focusing,) “‘An what do you mean’” (And,) a miising full stop at the end of a sentence, a double quote mark at the beginning of a piece of direct speech when elsewhere there are only single ones. ⁵ “and pointing at the fat man on the set who was singing again. ‘And who’s this guy?’” (is missing a ‘said’ before ‘And who’s this guy?’) “before go to the bank” (before I go to the bank.) “Jean left them” (elsewhere she is Jeanne.) ⁶ “and felt of the knitting” (and felt the knitting.)

This week contribution to Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times started by Judith and taken up by Katrina.

This shelf is full of SF books by Robert Silverberg.

He is my second favourite SF writer. (Ursula le Guin is my favourite but due to the way my books are shelved hers are not to the fore.)

The photo is a crop of the one I featured on 16/8/20. As a result it’s a bit blurry.

There’s stuff here from Silverberg’s glory days; Thorns, Nightwings, The Man in the Maze – the one that persuaded me to persevere with SF when I was on the point of stopping reading in the genre – Tower of Glass, A Time of Changes – “My Name is Kinnall Darrival and I mean to tell you all about myself. Obscene! Obscene!” – Dying Inside. Then there’s the much later Kingdoms of the Wall (see my take on its first paragraph here.)

Looking at the photo I see the books aren’t quite shelved im my usual order system, probably due to them getting mixed up a bit in the house move – six and a half years ago now. Time flies.

This meme started with Judith at Reader in the Wilderness but has now been taken up by Katrina at Pining for the West.

This shelf is the last containing SF books I have read. These start at Connie Willis and finish with Roger Zelazny – to whom all bar Silverberg and Le Guin bow down – but also incorporating my copies of the old Spectrum SF magazine (I have six copies of issue 2 because I had a story in it – I also had one in issue 3 but only got four copies of that) and 17 issues of Galaxy Magazine. [Edited to add. I forgot my four copies of the Destinies collections are in there too.]

In there is also my John Wyndham collection.

The 20 books following I had read (from Dumbarton Library it must have been) before I bought copies to keep and have housed them separately from my other SF ever since.

Then you’ll note two copies of a book called A Son of the Rock, plus a Zelazny collaboration.

(This week’s entry for Judith’s meme at Reader in the Wilderness.)

Again these are small-size (original size) SF paperbacks. Again they are housed in the garage and again are double-parked.

It was difficult to get back far enough to fit these all into the photo.

They start at Stanisław Lem and finish at Connie Willis. There’s a whole shelf of Robert Silverberg in here. Other notables: George R R Martin, Ian McDonald, Larry Niven, Christopher Priest, Tim Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bob Shaw, Cordwainer Smith, James Tiptree Jr (aka Alice Sheldon,) Harry Turtledove and Ian Watson.

Another for Judith Reader in the Wilderness‘s meme.

This week, the remainder of my SF hardbacks. Click pictures to enlarge them.

More Ian McDonald, China Miéville, Christopher Priest, Keith Roberts, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Silverberg, a book of Art Deco posters which fits in nowhere else.

On another shelf entirely, standing next to the above. This contains books by my not so secret SF vice, Harry Turtledove, plus one Gene Wolfe, among others. Above, on its side, is a book containing illustrated Bernie Taupin lyrics for early Elton John songs:-

Large SF paperbacks this week for Judith’s meme at Reader in the Wilderness.

I keep these in an old music cupboard I inherited from my great-uncle. I’ve got so many of these they have to be double-parked, so you can’t actually see the first and third shelves shown here when the cupboard is opened. Stacking some on their sides gives me an extra 4 cm of space. Click on the photos to enlarge the pictures.

These include a J G Ballard, Iain M Banks, Chris Beckett, Eric Brown, Ursula Le Guin and Ian McDonald:-

Annoyingly, even these large paperbacks do not all come in one size. The upright ones to the right here are smaller than the previous books. More McDonald, Tim Powers, Kim Stanley Robertson, Adam Roberts, Hannu Rajaniemi, a lesser Robert Silverberg, Kurt Vonnegut:-

More Ballard, Banks, Beckett and Brown. Lavie Tidhar, Neil Williamson and another step down in size:-

John Crowley, M John Harrison, Dave Hutchinson, Stanisław Lem:-

I’ve just discovered through Ian Sales’s blog that the BBC has produced a list of “100 Books that Shaped our World.” It’s as idiosyncratic as any such list always is.

Ian has started a list of his own (with different criteria) of which you can see the first instalment via the link above. Nina Allan has also published her own list.

I doubt that I could go up to anything like 100 on the books that shaped me and my reading so I’m not even going to try except to say my love of Science Fiction was engendered by reading the SF of Captain W E Johns and Patrick Moore out of the children’s section of Dumbarton Library (in the basement, accessed via an outside door) and, once I’d graduated to the adult floor, the yellow covered Gollancz hardbacks.

Two exceptions.

I was about to give up reading SF when I read Robert Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze. It’s not his best but it’s one from the 1960s, in the “revival” stage of his career after he came back to SF and wrote stories the way they ought to be done – as distinct from the less considered works he’d written in the 1950s. It made me realise that SF could be literature.

So too, in spades, did Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

Of the BBC’s list the ones I’ve read are in bold (19.) If I’ve read one or part of a series it’s in italics (2.) Some others here are on my tbr pile.

Identity
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Days Without End – Sebastian Barry
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
Small Island – Andrea Levy
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Love, Sex & Romance
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Forever – Judy Blume
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Riders – Jilly Cooper
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Far Pavilions – M. M. Kaye
The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

Adventure
City of Bohane – Kevin Barry
Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman
Ivanhoe – Walter Scott
Mr Standfast – John Buchan
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
The Jack Aubrey Novels – Patrick O’Brian
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – J.R.R. Tolkien

Life, Death & Other Worlds
A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
Astonishing the Gods – Ben Okri
Dune – Frank Herbert
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis
The Discworld Series – Terry Pratchett
The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le Guin
The Sandman Series – Neil Gaiman
The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Politics, Power & Protest
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Noughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman
Strumpet City – James Plunkett
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
V for Vendetta – Alan Moore
Unless – Carol Shields

Class & Society
A House for Mr Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Poor Cow – Nell Dunn
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – Brian Moore
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Coming of Age
Emily of New Moon – L. M. Montgomery
Golden Child – Claire Adam
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell
Swami and Friends – R. K. Narayan
The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
The Harry Potter series – J. K. Rowling
The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ – Sue Townsend
The Twilight Saga – Stephenie Meyer

Family & Friendship
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
Ballet Shoes – Noel Streatfeild
Cloudstreet – Tim Winton
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
The Witches – Roald Dahl

Crime & Conflict
American Tabloid – James Ellroy
American War – Omar El Akkad
Ice Candy Man – Bapsi Sidhwa
Rebecca -Daphne du Maurier
Regeneration – Pat Barker
The Children of Men – P.D. James
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
The Quiet American – Graham Greene

Rule Breakers
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Bartleby, the Scrivener – Herman Melville
Habibi – Craig Thompson
How to be Both – Ali Smith
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Psmith, Journalist – P. G. Wodehouse
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – Audre Lorde

Tales of Alternate History, Del Rey, 1998, 332 p plus iv p What is Alternate History? by Shelly Shapiro.

The question in that What is Alternate History? introduction is surely superfluous to anyone with an interest in buying this book.

As someone with an interest in both history and SF I’m obviously a pushover for counterfactual histories like the ones collected here. None of the stories (which are all by men I note) here deal with the big what-ifs like different outcomes to the US Civil War or Second World War but instead examine smaller turning points with subtler ramifications. The quality of the writing is variable but all hold the attention.
Must and Shall¹ by Harry Turtledove sees Lincoln shot in a Confederate attack on Washington DC so that many years later the former Confederate States are still ruled by a much resented military occupation and aching to rebel.
An Outpost of the Empire² is one of Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna stories. Here a new Roman pro-consul comes to Venetia – once of the recently defeated Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine Greek aristocrat Eudoxia despises him yet has to be accommodating. The plot could be described as Pride and Prejudice in togas even though Silverberg undercuts it with his last sentence.
In We Could Do Worse by Gregory Benford we are under Joe McCarthy’s Presidency as Nixon had delivered the 1950 California Republican Primary delegates to Taft who in turn nominated McCarthy as Vice-President. Taft died. The story illustrates the resulting authoritarianism and bending of rules to ensure McCarthy’s re-election, all in the name of anti-Communism. Sadly this strikes all too resonant a chord now than it would when it was first published in 1989.
Mike Resnick’s Over There³ sees Teddy Roosevelt make a nuisance of himself during the Great War by reconstituting his Rough Riders and taking them over to France where Pershing is under orders to keep him well away from the front.
Ink From the New Moon by A A Attanasio is narrated by a Chinese visitor to the New World – colonised from Asia much earlier than it was by Europeans in our time – and encounters Columbus.
Southpaw by Bruce McAllister follows Fidel Castro after his acceptance of the invitation to become a professional baseball player with the New York Giants. The story concerns his glancing contact with Cuban dissidents.
Greg Costikyan’s The West is Red⁴ has an impoverished capitalist USA has voting in a Communist President to implement the more efficient economics of centralist planning. Background events in the story bear some resemblance to Boris Yeltsin’s frustration of the old guard’s coup d’état in our world.
The longest story in the book, The Forest of Time⁵ by Michael J Flynn, examines the fate of a parallel worlds Jumper who is marooned in a North America where the thirteen original colonies never united and focuses on the responses of those who encounter him.
In Aristotle and the Gun⁶ by L Sprague de Camp a time traveller goes back to try to persuade Aristotle of the benefits of the Scientific Method, with, to him, unexpected results.
How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion by Gene Wolfe is not as apocalyptic as it sounds. The Second World War is a board game and the German invasion is by the “People’s Car”, a device outperformed due to Churchill’s knowledge of the properties of transistors.

Pedant’s corner:- ¹Michaels’ (Michaels’s,) Morrie Harris’ (Morrie Harris’s,) New Orleans’ (New Orleans’s,) “gaping at naked women” (it’s usually gawping at,) Colquit Reynolds’ (Colquit Reynolds’s) ²In the introduction “Shadrack in the Furnace” (Shadrach.) ³”Bullets and cannonballs flew to the right and left” (cannonballs? In World War 1?) ⁴”would have own the Cold War” (would have won.) ⁵mowed down (mown.) “The argument in the cell reached a crescendo.” (No. It reached a climax,) Oschenfuss’ (Oschenfuss’s.) ⁶Nearchos’ (Nearchos’s,) Alexandros’ (Alexandros’s,) Zandras’ (Zandras’s,) Attalos’ (Attalos’s,) Herodotos’ (Herodotos’s.)

the greatest empire that never was.

Small Beer, 2003, 255 p. Translated from the Spanish Kalpa Imperial by Ursula K Le Guin. First published in two volumes La casa del poder (The House of Power) and El Imperio mas vasto (The Greatest Empire) by Ediciones Minotauro, Buenos Aires, 1983.

This is not really like anything I’ve ever read before, a sweeping, dazzling, accomplishment of a book, soaring yet at the same time utterly grounded, told in two parts, The House of Power and The Greatest Empire, of five and six sections respectively, a history of an empire “so long that a whole life dedicated to study and research isn’t enough to know it wholly,” a history “strewn with surprise, contradictions, abysses, deaths, resurrections,” of an empire “so vast that a man can’t cross it in his lifetime.” A chronicling of human life, then.

I doubt it has any equivalent but the nearest comparison in SF is probably Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna, mainly due to its episodic narrative, but despite its fabular nature (no empire could ever last as long, with so many ruling dynasties, as the one in this book) this is somehow less fanciful and more convincing (and I liked Roma Eterna a lot even though it was late Silverberg where he wasn’t quite as incisive as in his pomp.) Kalpa Imperial nevertheless did somehow at times remind me of translations of Chinese literature but probably only because it deals with emperors and empires and the consequent power struggles.

Despite its subtitle the book does not restrict itself to the emperors or their courts. Life in the empire is presented in an approximation of its diversity but there is no continuity between the sections, no characters carry on from one to the next or later. Instead the picture is built up from what are in effect short stories/novellas set in the same milieu. A binding link in the book, though, is that, like fairy tales, most of the sections begin with the same phrase, in this case, “The storyteller said:” but varied with one, “Yes, said the storyteller:” a, “Vast is the empire, said the storyteller:” with the last section altering the template to, “‘I’m an orphan,” The Cat had said,’”. All these help to solidify the tales, to root the book in a compelling simulation of an actual history as remembered by oral historians. But it is precisely that lack of continuity, that difference between the sections (except for the narrative tone,) that works to make the book feel like a true history.

Throughout the book there are asides on the art of story. “The reason why there are storytellers in the world is to answer those questions we all ask, and not as the teller, but as the reader,” “a storyteller is no more than a free man, and being a free man is a dangerous business,” and, pertinently to any time but certainly apposite now, “who takes any notice of the wise, these days, except storytellers, or poets?” Particularly redolent was the passage which dwelt on the phrase, “not all is said.”

There is a knowing quality to the section which riffs on The Odyssey. A legend is recited containing people named Kirdaglas, Marlenditrij, Betedeivis, Maripícfor, Briyibardó, Jedilamar, Alendelón, Orsonuéls, Clargueibl, Yeimsdín etc, with houses named saloon, rashomon, elañopasadoenmarienbad and charge of the light brigade and which also features sirens called ringostars.

Gorodischer is well-served by her translator. (Though if you’re going to be translated it must be a boon if it is done by one of the best writers around.) But the whole is a marvel of invention, a rich imagining of a world not our own but as near to it as makes no difference.

Pedant’s corner:- “time’s mirror losses all its reflects” (reflections, surely?) Ja’ladahlva (elsewhere Ja’ladahva,) a missing end quotation mark, busses (buses,) “who lived more than twenty kilos away” (kilo is used as an abbreviation for kilogram, not kilometre,) “the girl was very young girl” (a very young girl,) “in the darkness under of the walls” (either under or of, not both,) two of the women were were crawling (only one were needed.) “Five minutes later” (twice in two lines, both beginning a paragraph.) “He knew it” – death – “was waiting for him in the South too, but maybe there it wouldn’t take so long to come” (context suggests “but maybe there it would take longer to come”,) traveller’s tales (travellers’ tales?) “.. he could stay as long as he like before” (liked,) “a gesture that included that included” (one “that included” only,) a missing quote mark at a section beginning with a piece of dialogue – probably house style but it irritates me, Clargueible (previously Clargueibl,) “of the the dead emperor” (only one “the”,) “it it rose up” (only one “it”.)