Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 30, 1993 TAG: 9307300217
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV8 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The title story in her first hardback focuses on alien tourists from another star system who suddenly show up to visit various points of interest on Earth. One alien is interested in the manufacture of illegal whiskey, and settles in Franklin County, believing it to be the major industry there.
The story is full of references to this part of Virginia, from recollections of UFO reports around Wytheville to a down-home hardware store at Rocky Mount. The major characters, both women, are a Franklin County lawyer retained by the alien visitor and a chemical engineering major at Virginia Tech.
Several reviewers of science fiction say that Ore has created some of the most convincing and detailed aliens of any writer in the field.
Her first novel, "Becoming Alien" (1988), which started in Floyd County and moved into the galaxy, dealt with a human learning to work and survive in an interstellar culture made up of many alien races.
It proved so popular that it generated two sequels, "Being Alien" (1989) and "Human to Human" (1990). The second book brings the human character temporarily back to Earth, which he finds more alien than the multi-alien civilization to which he has grown accustomed.
All those books, like her latest one, have been published by TOR Books. In 1991, she came out with "The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid," featuring a character created by cloning.
Ore has proved a popular guest at science fiction conventions in Roanoke and elsewhere. She and Roger Zelazny are among the writer guests scheduled to attend a convention called Kaleidoscope in Lynchburg Sept. 24-26.
"More than any other writer I've ever seen before, Rebecca Ore is able to step outside the human perspective and reveal us to ourselves - she makes us imagine what it means not to be human, and therefore understand what it means to be human," writer and reviewer Orson Scott Card said.
Ore, who lives in Patrick County, had her first story published in the May 1986 issue of Amazing Stories. It was titled "Projectile Weapons and Wild Alien Water" and appears in the hardback collection as "Projectile Weapons."
She scored twice more in Amazing Stories, which was the first magazine devoted to science fiction stories and is still published after 67 years. Both of those stories, "The Tyrant That I Serve" (which was on the cover of the September 1986 issue) and "Ice-gouged Lakes, Glacier-bound Times" also appear in the collection.
Two other short stories and an essay give Ore's views on aliens, actual and fictional.
"Sometimes we turn ourselves into the aliens, wearing primitive clothes and wire-rimmed glasses, MBAs growing ginseng and playing dulcimers," she writes. "Technology makes the human as well as vice versa, for a woman whose odds of dying in childbirth are better than 50-50 doesn't have the same interest in independence that a woman with her own car and birth control prescription might have."
Her latest book brings together previously published work and some new material.
The title story was originally written for publication in one of TOR's "double" books, containing two short novels on flip sides. TOR stopped the doubles series before it used Ore's manuscript.
So "Alien Bootlegger" became the core story for the collection. With the rest of the stories in the book, it explores the meaning of being alien from many viewpoints. Copies are available at Waldenbooks and elsewhere for $19.95.
by CNB