Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “Sunken Gardens” by Bruce Sterling

August 17th, 2026

(Cover by Bruno. Omni, June 1984.)

Who Goes There?

Bruce Sterling was born in 1954, in Brownsville, Texas, but later moved to Austin, because that’s the thing to do if you’re at least a little eccentric. I had stated somewhere before that Sterling genre debut was the novel Involution Ocean, but actually the short story “Man-Made Self” predates it by a year. While these two works were published in the ’70s, it wasn’t until the early ’80s that Sterling started to become prominent in earnest. He didn’t write another short story for six years, but when he did, it was the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated “Swarm,” the first entry in his Shaper/Mechanist future history. “Swarm” is still probably Sterling’s most reprinted story, but more importantly, it introduced a series that can be considered akin to post-human space opera, although Sterling insists on calling the Shaper/Mechanist stories cyberpunk. These stories appeared over the next few years, each garnering awards attention and marking the end of Sterling’s apprentice phase, with the series culminating in the novel Schismatrix, considered by some to be Sterling’s best.

“Sunken Gardens” is the penultimate short story in this series leading up to Schismatrix, and appropriately it takes place late in the future history. While it works just fine on its own, it’s better appreciated within the larger context of the series. While there’s a fair amount of explaining for the first-time reader’s sake, there are nuggets of worldbuilding that are likely to fly over your head. The plot, however, is rather simple. As with other entries in the series, “Sunken Gardens” earned a major award nomination in the form of a Nebula nod, and it’s well-earned.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1984 issue of Omni. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and the Sterling collections Crystal Express and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling. You can also find it by picking up Schismatrix Plus, which contains all of the Shaper/Mechanist stories.

Enhancing Image

The Shapers and Mechanists are factions of humans that have gone in radically different directions, each with its own offshoot. Mirasol, the heroine of this story, is a Patternist, an offshoot of the Shapers. While the Shapers are people who’ve adapted to outer space and on other worlds through genetic engineering, the Patternists have engineered their brains so as to be better at (you guessed it) forming and recognizing patterns. They have a knack for invention, but this comes at a cost. Because of their “cerebral asymmetry,” the Patternists also inherited some “grave weaknesses” like “autism, fugue states, and paranoia.” Well, this is unfortunate in its phrasing. On the plus, “Sunken Gardens” is a rare SF story of its vintage to have an explicitly autistic protagonist; and while the aforementioned traits are framed as flaws, Mirasol is still made out to be a decent person. Incidentally, the Patternists and similar factions who toy with the human mind reminds me a bit of one of Philip K. Dick’s lesser novels, Clans of the Alphane Moon. What if we had a society totally populated with and run by neurodivergent people? What if a furry convention was a country, or at least a town? The Patternists and others like them live in so-called redemption camps, isolated from each other and indeed from the Regals in Terraform-Kluster (calling it T-K from now on), a society of rich assholes orbiting Mars.

Typically in stories about efforts to terraform Mars there are a couple factions, but “Sunken Gardens” puts a twist on this by making the fight between factions a sort of battle royale. The short of it is this: The Regals have chosen champions from six factions, of which the Patternists are one, and with Mirasol being their champion. This is not a kill-everyone sort of battle royale, but instead the champions are given a set time to begin terraforming pockets of a large crater, called the Ibis Crater. The winner of this competition is to go “up the Ladder” and become a Regal. The Regals themselves are backed by the Investors, “those star-traveling reptiles of enormous wealth.” We don’t see the Investors in this story, and we have only a meager idea as to what the Regals are like; but then again, what we do find out about them isn’t promising. Mind you that the Regals have spent the past century hammering Mars with huge chunks of ice, turning the planet into a kind of winter wonderland. I’m not kidding. It’s an icy shithole, and the idea now is that there must be a batter alternative. The ramifications of Mars getting iced over a long period of time (although by terraforming standards, a hundred years isn’t that long) will only be gradually revealed, but for now it’s important that Mirasol wins—if only because winning means being uplifted to become like the Regals.

Tellingly, we’re told little about what happens in the competition. We’re not told much about how Mirasol dealt with her little pocket of the crater, and we’re told very little about her rivals. I don’t think we even get any of their names. The only other named character of note is a Regal, Arkadya Sorienti, Incorporated (I’m not kidding), “a member of T-K’s ruling oligarchy.” In case it hasn’t become apparent by now, Sterling’s anti-capitalist sentiments (he’s decidedly on the left, and quite open about it) are made clear. Rather than cooperate, the factions are incentivized to work against each other in the name of prestige. “The Regals had held [these competitions] for decades as an objective test of the skills of rival factions. It helped the Regals’ divide-and-conquer policy, to set the factions against one another.” The Regals have the Investors and the so-called Lobster King on their side, while the human factions don’t even have each other for support. The situation is bleak. To make things just a shade darker, one of the six competitors never shows up to the final briefing, and their territory gets forfeited. Wisely Sterling doesn’t tell us why the sixth competitor didn’t appear. The sunken gardens of the title are the isolated patches of land each competitor has to play with—to work as a “gardener.” “Sunken Gardens” plays with the idea of terraforming on almost a micro level, which I don’t think is something I’ve seen much in SF written even after this point.

The pacing here is a bit odd. There’s a lot of backstory for something that only totals about fifteen pages—mind you that “Sunken Gardens” is about tied for the shortest of the Shaper/Mechanist stories. The plot is straightforward enough, but there isn’t actually much of it, or at least not much we’re told about. Very feasibly Sterling could’ve turned this into a novella, what with the density of the dynamics between the different factions and the Regals, but he chose not to. This also seems to be the only entry in the series where Mirasol appears, but then it also takes place late in the timeline. My big gripe, I guess, is that I wish it was longer, which is a rather positive-sounding complaint to have about something. There’s also the pleasure of Sterling’s style, which is more literate than the average bear’s, such that I’ve pulled more quotes here than usual.

There Be Spoilers Here

So, Mirasol wins the competition, but it comes at a cost—not to herself personally, but to the people who, it turns out, were already living in her sector of the crater. Something kept secret from the competitors was that there was was already a human population, small and semi-civilized but quite intelligent, lurking in the crater. And, inadvertently, Mirasol had killed them. The Regals had apparently been meaning to kill anyone on Mars who’s run the risk of becoming too technologically advanced—God forbid they discover one of the Investors’ great secrets, without their help. This sparks a crisis of conscience for Mirasol, but “her corporate ladyship” will have none of it. There’s a faint glimmer of hope at the very end, since Mirasol has earned her way up the Ladder and as such will come to have a modicum of power, but it’s hard to say if anything will come of it. Personally I could’ve done without that last-second attempt at optimism, but that is a very small quibble; otherwise this is a haunting ending.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read “Swarm” and “Sunken Gardens,” which makes me think I should probably get to it and read Schismatrix (or rather Schismatrix Plus, since that’s the edition in print nowadays and it’s the one I have) already. Partly this is because I’m sold on the Shaper/Mechanist series, but also this is a case where reading any one of these stories in isolation doesn’t give one a full impression as to the setting. Only after having gone through everything will I finally get the picture, as it were. Sterling said he intended to leave the series be after Schismatrix, a stance he makes perfectly clear in his introduction to Schismatrix Plus. This means that the centuries-spanning saga of the Shapers and Mechanists comes to about… maybe 400 pages. I sure miss when SF tended to be concisely written.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (Part 2/4)

August 13th, 2026

(Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, December 1962.)

The Story So Far

Lucas Trask is dead, in a sense. He died when trying to save Elaine Karvall, his wife-to-be, from Andray Dunnan, a mad nobleman who’s convinced Elaine wants to marry him instead of Trask. Unfortunately for everyone, Dunnan is allowed free roam despite his mental illness being well-known, for he is Duke Angus’s nephew and that gives him a lot of leeway. Nobility and title matters a lot in this far future, where despite the prevalence of spaceships and robots, humanity has slipped back into feudalism. The worst part is that this is for the Sword-Worlds, which are relatively well-off. You could do worse and journey to one of the Old Federation planets, whose peoples have slipped even further into cultural backwardness. Civilization, in the world of Space Viking, is hard to build and easy to undo. Trask himself is a baron, set to connect with the industrial might of the Karvall family through Elaine; but Dunnan kills her and hijacks the Enterprise, a prized ship, with some devoted supporters of his. Within just an hour, Trask’s whole world has fallen apart, and now the only thing he cares about is catching and killing the son of a bitch who ruined his life.

Even with the help of Otto Harkaman, a veteran Space Viking, the question of tracking down the Enterprise soon proves to be a hard one. The Space Vikings are not so much a group of people as a certain lifestyle, which many would say is odious, if also requiring of bravery. The Space Vikings are used to plundering and setting up bases on Old Federation worlds, where the people may be backwards, but where certain planets may be rich in materials needed for, say, the hyperdrive. (These forgotten planets with their “primitive” cultures generally don’t have spaceships, and even if they do they don’t have ones capable of FTL travel, hence the hyperdrive being very important.) Trask decides to become a Space Viking himself in pursuit of his goal, although he has some very harsh life lessons to learn. With a new ship, christened the Nemesis, Trask and Harkaman think they’ve found the Enterprise, but instead find the Space Scourge and the Lamia, home to fellow Space Vikings, near the planet Tanith. Some unknown calamity had mostly depopulated the planet, which makes it perfect for building a base. Task comes to the conclusion that since chasing Dunnan all over space would be impractical, it might be better to spend years building a base on Tanith and wait for the party to come to him.

Enhancing Image

To say Trask is an anti-hero would be putting it a bit mildly. Space Vikings are, by their “code,” self-serving and not heroic in any sense. Trask, being new to this whole thing, is convinced to send the Nemesis down on Khepera, a planet whose people only have semi-modern fighting equipment. Building a base means farming resources, and for a Space Viking farming resources means plundering neighboring worlds. The battle on Khepera is rather one-sided. Trask and Paytrik Morland, a fellow nobleman, land and see some of the carnage first-hand. There’s a passage that’s pretty haunting, not to mention brutal, in which we see a local man cradling a dead woman, presumably his wife, “half her head […] blown off.” What Trask does next is disturbing and telling. See here:

“Poor devil,” Morland said, and started forward.

“No.”

Trask stopped him with his left hand. With his right, he drew his pistol and shot the man dead. Morland was horrified.

“Great Satan, Lucas! Why did you do that?”

“I wish Andray Dunnan had done that for me.” He thumbed the safety on and holstered the pistol. “None of this would be happening if he had. How many more happinesses do you think we’ve smashed here today? And we don’t even have Dunnan’s excuse of madness.”

The “fighting” and subsequent sacking of this city and the following one on Khepera alone would justify a war crimes tribunal, but there doesn’t seem to be such a thing in the world of the novel. Trask and his men can take what they want with little in the way of repercussions, aside from the predictable casualties on their end. This brutality is something Trask is vividly aware of, to the point where he has latent attacks of conscience on some nights in the midst of sleep—nightmares and visions of his dead beloved staring at him in stark horror. Yet there is no stopping or averting it. Trask figures he will go to Hell when he dies, if there is such a thing; on some nights he’s convinced he’s convinced he has already died and gone there. Nowadays we would probably call Trask passively suicidal.

Of course, nowadays we would call Space Viking “grimdark.” It might be one of the earliest examples in the field. Reading it I’m reminded of Warhammer 40,000, albeit without that franchise’s fantasy elements and very dark (as you would expect) sense of humor.

Now, the business of gathering resources isn’t all bad, or at least horrific. There are, in fact, some cultures in the Old Federation where it’s possible to negotiate, and even trade, rather resorting to brute force. The most curious of these more “civilized” cultures introduced in this installment would have to be the Gilgameshers, a non-aggressive “theo-Socialistic” people who have bartering and haggling as pillars of their culture. They have spaceships, but not FTL travel. They’re also religious zealots, and look on non-believers as somewhat barbaric at best. In other words, they’re a pain to deal with, but at least they don’t pose a direct threat to Trask’s project. (I should mention here that Piper was an avowed atheist whose ambivalence towards organized religion was surprisingly overt for 1950s America. This was another thing he had in common with John W. Campbell, although, of course, they made sure not to have any badmouthing regarding Christianity in the text.) The opportunity to not wipe entire cities off the map actually means a lot in this future, where apparently nuclear weapons are sort of commonplace. Like I said, this reads as grimdark.

By the end of this installment, six years have passed since that fateful night, almost in the blink of an eye. Also by this point, Trask and his crew have killed thousands, probably well over a million people through bombings alone, never mind the boots-on-the-ground sacking of cities. This is all in the name of one day encountering a single man, who, rumor has it, has been gathering resources on his own end and staying in hiding, not wanting to meet Trask head-on. All the more reason to build up Tanith’s might. Have I mentioned this novel is bleak?

A Step Farther Out

When reading Piper, it can be tempting to read into things and find “clues” about what was apparently his deteriorating mental state. In the case of Space Viking this is all too much a temptation, since this is looking to be one of the most hopeless SF novels of its era. It may turn out to be Piper’s darkest novel, and the fact that it finished serialization less than two years before his death doesn’t help. I’m halfway through it now, and while I’m enjoying it quite a bit, it’s not an easy novel to recommend. I’m curious as to how the plot is gonna progress past this point, given the second installment’s somewhat episodic structure and constant grimness.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” by James Tiptree, Jr.

August 9th, 2026

(Cover by James Gurney. F&SF, May 1988.)

Who Goes There?

James Tiptree, Jr., real name Alice Sheldon, born Alice Hastings Bradley, is one of the darkest and most turbulent figures in American SF, as well as one of the most acclaimed. She had gained notoriety well before she was even an adult, being the heroine of a duology of travel books aimed at young readers, as written by her mother. Alice apparently didn’t appreciate this now-obscure bit of fame, although her travels in Africa as a child did inspire at least one of her classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See.” As an adult she dabbled in writing herself as early as the ’40s, but it wasn’t until 1967 that she made her SF debut, as well as introducing the Tiptree pseudonym. By the time she made her first appearance in the field she had already done a stint in the Army Air Forces, then later in the newfangled CIA, and had even earned a PhD in psychology. She had also married twice, taking up the last name of her second husband, Huntington D. Sheldon. As you can see, she was already in her fifties by the time the Tiptree persona was born; and although her career in the field only lasted twenty years, she (as Tiptree) had emerged pretty close to fully formed.

Despite winning multiple awards and much praise for her short fiction, Tiptree never appeared at conventions or gave interviews; she corresponded and formed friendships with people who had no clue what she even looked like, and indeed would not know for several more years. The truth came out in 1977, or rather some very clever fans had discerned the truth, although she kept using the Tiptree byline until the end. The conventional narrative goes that Tiptree wrote her best work right up until her true identity was revealed, but some major short fiction did get published at this point. By 1987, however, both Tiptree and her husband were very old and in frail shape. This, combined with Tiptree’s long-running battle with depression, compelled her to do something that to this day makes her a controversial subject, even among her fans. She took a gun, went to her then-bedridden husband, and shot him. She then called her attorney to confess to the killing, before finally lying in bed next to Huntington and shooting himself. The two had at some point years prior agreed to go through with a suicide pact, were they were to become too feeble in the future. The question of whether Huntington gave his wife consent on that final day is unfortunately one we’ll never get an answer to.

Tiptree had admitted as early as 1976 (her true identity still a secret) to planning to end her own life at some point, and the suicide note the authorities found at the scene had apparently been dated 1979. As with most suicides, the final decision was not a spur-of-the-moment thing, but rather something which had been contemplated months or even years in advamce. Following her death, a handful of new stories were published, as tends to be the case with authors who are as prolific as Tiptree was. “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” was published almost exactly a year after Tiptree’s death; and according to David G. Hartwell’s note in Meet Me at Infinity, it was the penultimate story she wrote to completion. Despite being one of the last she wrote, and indeed written well after what is considered Tiptree in her prime, this novella is very much classic Tiptree. It may not be as violent or transgressive as her most (in)famous stories, but thematically it falls well in line with what came before. Even as she started succumbing to her inner demons, she knew what she was doing.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1988 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was first reprinted as one half of a Tor Double, with Michael Bishop’s “And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees.” It was then reprinted in the Tiptree collection Meet Me at Infinity, which compiles previously uncollected stories and nonfiction. It’s also set to be collected in a Library of America hardcover volume of the best of Tiptree’s short fiction, although that’s not set to come out until next year.

Enhancing Image

Tom Jared is a telepathic scientist (the fact that he has psi powers is made out pretty casually) who’s come to the planet Wet in the name of making Second Contact, as a follow-up mission to the previous (and first) human visitor. Not much is known about life on this planet, which is still better than nothing. To use Jared’s own words here:

Wet has been visited only once before, by a loner named Pforzheimer, who stayed only long enough to claim a First Contact. His notes in the Ephemeris say that there are humanoid natives, confined to the one small continent, or large island, on the other side of the planet from me. Besides that, what land there is consists of zillions of small islands and islets, mostly atolls, long, looping chains of them everywhere, archipelagoes forming necklaces around friendly seas.

So, it’s almost entirely water. Yet there’s still humanoid life—in fact there seem to be at least two humanoid races, although the second one had not been made contact with before. Much like Japan, itself a cluster of islands and islets, the humanoids here live an amphibious lifestyle, holding up their end of the bargain by subsisting on fish and other sea life. Conveniently Jared’s telepathy allows him to communicate with these people, despite the fact that they shouldn’t have even a single word of common language. Even more conveniently (if ultimately played for tragedy, as Jared at the very beginning has us know), he’s been split from the rest of his landing party and thus meets an alien who also happens to be on its own. I say “its,” but the gender of the alien is soon revealed to be female, although curiously Jared admits to feeling attracted towards this humanoid whilst at the time assuming her to be a he. This bit of queerness of not really touched on again, but it’s still refreshing to have a male protagonist who seems to be bisexual. Worth mentioning here that Tiptree herself bisexual, although she identified as a lesbian who sometimes fell hard for men.

The alien’s name is Kamir, and immediately we get two things: the first is that Kamir will die, since Jared told us right at the beginning that this is her fate; and the second is that Jared and Kamir are meant to fall in love, as if the cover for this issue of F&SF doesn’t make it obvious enough. This premise is all very Tiptree, both in its pessimism (we know upfront that the two lovers will not get their happy ending) and its usage of rather old SF ideas. Even for 1988, this human-meets-alien tragic love story was not new, and indeed it made me think of Philip José Farmer’s “The Lovers,” which was published a whole 36 years earlier. Despite being published a few decades later, Tiptree’s story is not much more graphic than Farmer’s. There’s a sex scene early on, but as Jared says, “It isn’t Human, but exciting beyond words, and finally, somehow, fulfilling.” If anything Farmer’s novella is more erotically charged, and the aftermath more surprising. To spoil the ending of “The Lovers,” if you wanna cover your eyes for a second, another similarity is that Kamir is not only able to produce offspring with her human mate, but she is biologically doomed to die during or right after delivery. This is also an idea Tiptree had explored before, most famously in “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death.” But whereas in “The Lovers” the death-from-childbirth incident is a big twist, in “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” it’s established as a reality much earlier, to the point where it can’t really be considered a spoiler. We can put two or two together and assume this is how Kamir will meet her end. This is a classic doomed romance.

Of course, Kamir is not so sad about the prospect of dying, since she was expecting this—in fact, she was hoping for it. She thinks of herself as ugly by the standards of her race, namely because of her perceived weight; but with her people it’s the fact that she’s too skinny, rather than too fat, that makes her unattractive. The women are supposed to put on weight, in preparation for mating and getting pregnant, as it’ll make the whole process smoother and better ensure the survival of the babies. Given that Kamir is of about average weight and curvature for a human woman, her weight problem doesn’t trouble Jared at all—except for when it comes to the problem of getting her pregnant. Funnily enough, the possibility of contracting some horrific space disease through unprotected sex does not occur to either of them. It was a different time. Anyway, the first half of the novella deals with the meeting and then budding romance between the two—a relationship that would not have been possible had Jared not been a telepath. The fact that he breaks a few rules (something like the Prime Directive if you know your Star Trek) by falling for and then fucking Kamir is presented as a problem, but it’s unclear what the consequences for fucking a sexy alien babe with webbed feet and arms would be. Given that Jared is telling us this story after the fact, it can be assumed nothing too bad had happened; never mind that because Jared is telling us this story now (although for some reason he narrates in the present tense), there can only be so much tension. It must be said he’s luckier than most Tiptree protagonists.

There Be Spoilers Here

We come to learn more about the webbed people, who are friendly almost to the point of naivete, taking in Jared as if he were one of their own. Being Kamir’s mate certainly helps. (Something I couldn’t but wonder as I was reading this is the passage of time. How many months has Jared been on Wet? Long enough to impregnate Kamir and for her to deliver two healthy babies [there was a third fetus, but it does not survive and has to be cut out of the “womb”], but we’re not given dates or anything. I feel like restructuring the story as a series of diary entries would’ve made the passage of time clearer, and maybe also a chance for Tiptree to not write a story in the present tense for once.) However, it’s not enough to mourn the inevibility of Kamir’s death, so we also have to have an impending skirmish between the webbed people and the “goldskins,” a fellow humanoid race on Wet who are landlubbers. Since the webbed people are not used to fighting outside of hunting in the waters, the goldskins see them as easy prey; they especially, for some reason, have an appetite for the webbed people’s children. Jared is not a peacemaker at all, and he can’t even find a common ground in language between the two peoples. The worst case scenario, thus, is genocide, if for no other reason than that the webbed people have suffered too much by the climax to be interested in peace. Jared ultimately comes to be like, and indeed see himself as, a Promethean figure, introducing the webbed people to the art (and disgrace) of warfare. In wanting to survive, these people lose much of their innocence.

As is typical with Tiptree, everything is at best transient. The webbed people are basically good, but this goodness will not last. Jared and Kamir’s love is genuine, but this love won’t last either. The title itself alludes (and the story proper puts this a little too bluntly) to the rather mysterious extinction of the Neanderthals, close relatives to our direct ancestors. The Neanderthals were a burly big-headed race of humanoids who lived and died less than 50,000 years ago—not even a blip in the grand evolutionary scheme of things. Some people today, primarily those hailing from mainland Europe, have a sliver of Neanderthal DNA in their makeup. We know that some Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (our ancestors) would have mated and allowed this mixture to happen; no doubt at least some of it was through rape, but one also has to think there may have been, even in those brutal years of the last ice age, that thing we call love. Jared’s devotion to Kamir results in the survival of their offspring, even as Kamir dies, a withered husk of her former self. For Tiptree, nothing is permanent and death is everywhere; but then there are also little remnants of the dead past. There are ripples in the water. Things might start and end, but there’s always change.

A Step Farther Out

Tiptree’s view of the world, including human relationships, is akin to a black hole; yet at the same time there’s a romantic undercurrent in a lot of her fiction, including this story, written less than a year before her death. There’s a deep longing, and at the same time a profound fear of the possibile negatives of forming a connection. “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” is one of Tiptree’s most accessible stories, in that while it ends in a minor key (something we’re told will happen right at the start), there’s far less hostility towards relations between men and women than in, say, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (one of the darkest and most misanthropic SF stories ever written) or “The Women Men Don’t See.” It’s unusually tender for Tiptree, even if it borders on utter hopelessness. I’d recommend it if you’re either skeptical about Tiptree or have read all her most “classic” work but are looking to dig a little deeper.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (Part 1/4)

August 5th, 2026

(Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, November 1962.)

Who Goes There?

Henry Beam Piper is surely one of the more unusual characters to emerge on the scene right after the end of World War II, and incidentally he died right before the coming of the New Wave. He was born in 1904, but didn’t make his debut until 1947, with the story “Time and Time Again.” Over the next decade his output was sporadic, as he had a day job as railroad security; but once he was let go from that job he started writing full-time, and so his output in the past half-dozen years of his life hiked impressively. The early ’60s saw a late bloom for Piper of the sort that doesn’t come to most writers. Despite all this, there was trouble in his midst. He married late in life, and by all accounts his marriage was both short-lived and miserable. His agent also died suddenly, without having informed him of the sales of several of his works, which led him to believe his career was floundering. Being behind on payments from his writing, without a regular job at this point, and being reluctant to ask those who knew him for financial assistance, Piper decided to take one of the many guns he owned and commit suicide in November 1964. He left behind several unpublished works, including the novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and two sequels to Little Fuzzy. His career had in fact reached a high point, but he didn’t know it.

Space Viking is a standalone novel set in a larger future history, sharing the setting with Little Fuzzy and The Cosmic Computer, among others. Piper had established two expanded universes that supposedly are tied together, although I’ve yet to find clear evidence of this. One is the Federation future history, of which Space Viking is a part; the other is the Paratime Police series, which is older in origin and which contains Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. The Piper I’ve read tends to be set on Earth (most of the Piper I’ve read is from the Paratime series), but Space Viking is decidedly a space opera. Only a quarter in, but I’m rather interested.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, November 1962 to February 1963. It first appeared in book form as an Ace paperback later in 1963. Like most of Piper’s work, Space Viking is in the public domain, so you can read the serial version on Project Gutenberg. There are a few exceptions to this: some rascal (I think John F. Carr) keeps a grip on what little of Piper’s fiction that has not since fallen out of copyright.

Enhancing Image

In the distant future, humanity has conquered the stars, fallen into disrepair, and then recovered—somewhat. We are evidently on the other end of a long galactic dark age, what with the Old Federation and all that. Mankind, in its somewhat rejuvenated state, has collectively come to the conclusion (or at least the most powerful people have) that Space Feudalism™ is the way to go. Barones, dukes, and whatnot, are BACK. This is important context, since Lucas Trask is himself a baron, set to marry Elaine Karvall, the daughter of a big (like multi-planet) industrialist. Lucas thinks this is about to be the best day of his life, but he’ll be proved tragically wrong in a minute. See, since the aristocracy has made a huge comeback, you have people with titles, prestige, and positions of power they’re totally unqualified for. Andray Dunnan is one such person, being Duke Angus’s nephhew, and he’s convinced Elaine is in love with him despite the fact that they’ve barely interacted and Elaine’s betrothal to Lucas being well-known. He’s full of paranoid delusions, and yet he’s convinced that his own reality supercedes objective reality. “Yes, in his own private dream-world, a world of fantasy that had now become Andray Dunnan’s reality, in which an Elaine Karvall whom his imagination had created existed only to love him. Confronted by the real Elaine, he simply rejected the reality.” You may be wondering how such a clearly dangerous man (his condition is notorious enough that several people, including Sesal, Elaine’s dad, try steering him away) could amass a number of people who follow his orders. This is a question we’re still trying to figure out in the real world. Alex Gorram, a shipbuilder, even asks why Andray has not been put in psychiatric care, but we’re not given an answer.

Unfortunately today is the day where what’s little of Andray’s self-control snaps, and it doesn’t help that Elaine makes the mistake of trying to break through his delusions to his face. What ensues is a shootout in which Elaine gets mercifully fridged; to add insult to injury, Lucas’s attempt at saving her, but tackling and trying to cover her, may well have (through no fault of Lucas’s own) put her directly in Andray’s dodgy line of fire. Not only does Andray kill Elaine, but he and his goons steal the Enterprise (no, not that one), Otto Harkaman’s prized ship. This is a mistake one Andray’s part, considering Otto is a Space Viking, one of those nomadic roving spacemen who, like their namesake, are fond of plundering and pillaging. Space Vikings are not an ethnic or cultural group, but rather to become a Space Viking means a certain lifestyle and worldview. Anyone with the guts and metal can become a Space Viking. (I should mention here that some characters have rather unusual names, and that it’s easy to asssume that like with Piper’s other Federation stories, mankind in this future is decidedly multi-racial.) Lucas decides to take up with Otto and become a Space Viking, with a new ship of his own to match. He considers naming this new ship after Elaine, but rightly comes to conclusion that this would be a bad idea. He goes through a few names (I think Vendetta is the best one), but decides that Nemesis will be the right name for such a ship. He will, after all, be using said ship to hunt down Andray to the ends of the universe.

Something I couldn’t help but think about while reading the opening stretch of Space Viking is how in some ways it reads similarly to Dune—not Piper’s fault, or Frank Herbert’s fault, since the two were writing these novels around the same time, and indeed Dune World (the first chunk of the first novel) only appeared in Analog about a year after Piper’s novel. You have a spacefaring humanity with a weirdly retrograde form of government, although unlike the world of Dune there are robots in Space Viking. You have a young man who comes from nobility, but whose life gets turned upside down when someone close to him gets killed by a fellow noble. There young nobleman then follows a path to becoming an anti-hero, or maybe even a villain, all in the name of revenge. Eugenics (characters are being quite literal when they talk about “the best Sword-Sword genes,” although in-context that also works as metaphor) is treated as gospel. There’s generally a retrograde attitude about everything, despite the laser-guns and spaceships, what with the Sword-Worlds being named after famous swords (Excalibur, Durendal, Flamberge, etc.). There’s even a major character with a last name that sounds similar to Harkonnen. It borders on what some call Raygun Gothic, although I’m not sure how to feel about that label. Also like Dune (and I mean this as a positive), the values and tech in Space Viking combine to make a setting that doesn’t take obvious cues from any one time period or place; in that sense it’s aged better than most of its peers.

There Be Spoilers Here

The Nemesis is unable to keep up with the Enterprise, in no small part because these are sister ships, with near-identical designs, and there’s no way for one to outrun the other. Eventually it becomes a question as to where the bastard could’ve gone. Lucas and Otto decide to land on the planet Tanith, a planet that used to be “civilized” but which has since been driven back almost into the primordial soup from whence the whole world came. The buildings are still there, for the most part, but the city they come to has been largely depopulated. How did this happen? Only theories. Tanith is one of those planets in the Old Federation, so in other words the sort of planet that’s been left behind or scorned. I said before that the world of Space Viking doesn’t follow a linear progression with how people act or what tech they have access to, but in keeping with Piper’s right-wing pessimistic view of the world, civilization seems to wax and wane, like the tides. “Civilization,” as we understand it (and after all, what is civilization? and how do we know when we see it?), is surprisingly easy to undo, according to Piper. All it might take is for the wrong people to be removed from the equation, or for de-civilization via something like a plague.

To take Otto’s words:

“It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs, to keep a civilization running. Smash the installations and kill the top technicians and scientists, and the masses don’t know how to rebuild and go back to stone hatchets. Kill off enough of the masses and even if the planet and the know-how is left, there’s nobody to do the work. I’ve seen planets that decivilized both ways. Tanith, I think, is one of the latter.”

Of course, Piper does that old-timey SF thing where planets are treated like countries, countries are treated like cities, and so on. It’s an easy trap to fall into; but still, we’re not given that vivid an idea as to the scale of all this. I’ll get used to it, if only because it’s a problem one often finds with space opera so there’s not much of a point in harping on it, but you can do more with it than what Piper does here.

A Step Farther Out

Probably not the best choice for first Piper Federation story, although this is not my first rodeo with this future history—just the longest so far. Actually with Piper and the Federation universe I recommend tracking down the collection Federation, or rather the stories in that collection, since I think they’re all in the public domain. Unlike most Piper I’ve read up to this point, Space Viking stays true to its title by being both spacefaring and unsparing in its violence. Also, unusually for Piper, there doesn’t seem to be a woman in sight who lasts longer than five minutes. The Nemesis is very much a boys’ club, and landing on the semi-wild Tanith is not looking to change this. Still, I’m liking it a fair bit so far. Piper isn’t a wordsmith exactly, but he’s an earnest speculator of the sort John W. Campbell would’ve liked, and he’s a more fluid storyteller than most of the authors who appeared in Astounding/Analog at the time.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: August 2026

August 1st, 2026
(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1947.)

I was thinking of taking a break from this blog for this month, but maybe I’ll save the vacation for September. Funnily enough it was easier to come up with a review forecast, with stuff I’m interested in checking out, than it was to announce a month-long break. This is what happens when you’re a compulsive reader.

Anyway, we’re back to our usually programming, although we have a serial novel in a whopping four installments (although Space Viking is not as long as the installment number would have you think), as well as a reprinted SF-horror yarn by one of the most famous British authors of all time. Of course, with the exception of Arthur Conan Doyle, these are all authors I’ve covered before. I figured that if I’m gonna keep myself busy, even going against my own expectations, I may as well keep things “safe” for the time being. At least with Bruce Sterling this is earned, considering I was set to write about another short story of his many moons ago, only to not get around to it. Consider this a second attempt.

I’m keeping this post short and sweet. Not much to report on my end, aside from recently acquiring a second cat. (Cats are easy to adopt, like they just kinda let you pick them up, get them their shots, sign a paper, badda-bing badda-boom.) I also have maybe one too many books on my plate at the moment (incidentally none of them are genre fiction), so I hope to whittle that down, make things more manageable.

As for the stories, we have one from the 1910s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, and two from the 1980s.

For the serial:
- Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, November 1962 to February 1963. Piper was born in 1904, but didn’t start writing SF until he was in his forties, making his debut in 1947. The next decade or so was productive enough for him, including the non-SF mystery novel Murder in the Gun Room. Said novel, while not SF, does pay tribute to fandom in the years following World War II. Space Viking was one of several novels Piper had written in quick succession in the last few years of his life, along with The Cosmic Computer, Little Fuzzy (and its sequel), and Lord Kalvin of Otherwhen. Sadly, after a failed marriage and with the belief that his writing career was floundering, Piper took his own life in 1964.
For the novellas:
1. “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” by James Tiptree, Jr. From the May 1988 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Tiptree is one of the most acclaimed authors of her generation, although despite being typically considered part of the New Wave she was actually a decade or two older than most of her peers. Her life story is a dramatic one, worthy of a Hollywood biopic, and the circumstances of her death remain controversial to this day.
2. “The Araqnid Window” by Charles L. Harness. From the December 1974 issue of Amazing Stories. Harness’s career as a writer spanned six decades, although it came in fits and starts. He stepped away from writing in the ’50s to focus on his job and raising his family, only returning after a decade. “The Araqnid Window” itself is one of only two Harness stories published in the ’70s. His job as a patent attorney goes to explain his low output.
For the short stories:
1. “Sunken Gardens” by Bruce Sterling. From the June 1984 issue of Omni. Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas, but later became an Austin denizen. Unusually he made his fiction debut with a novel, Involution Ocean, published when he was very young. His first ambitious project, though, was the Shaper/Mechanist universe, comprising the novel Schismatrix and some short stories.
2. “The Horror of the Heights” by Arthur Conan Doyle. From the December 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. First published in 1913. While Doyle did not invent the detective story (he rightly credits Edgar Allan Poe with that), he did codify the genre and became quite rich and famous off of it it. Doyle also wrote in other genres, though, including horror and science fiction.
Now let’s do some reading.
Short Story Review: “The Furies” by Roger Zelazny

July 29th, 2026

(Cover by Gray Morrow. Amazing Stories, June 1965.)

Who Goes There?

Roger Zelazny was born in 1937 in Ohio, raised Catholic but later identifying as agnostic. While Zelazny would become irreligious as an adult, his interest in religion and mythology proved genuine, as this would be a key driving force behind his work, a career spanning a little over thirty years. Zelazny started writing for amateur publications when he was a teenager, but it was his professional debut in 1962, in Amazing Stories, that marked the genuine introduction of one of the major SF talents of the ’60s and ’70s. His relatively early death in 1995, from complications with colon cancer, came tragically after he had finally given up smoking. (Read any early Zelazny story and there’s a good chance the protagonist smokes cigarettes or a pipe.) His final solo novel, A Night in the Lonesome October, indicated a writer who was by no means running low on inspiration, even if said novel is preoccupied (albeit somewhat playfully) with death. While Zelazny’s books have never sold all that much, even with his Amber series, he’d prove hugely influential on the likes of George R. R. Martin, Andrzej Sapkowski, and (God help us) Neil Gaiman. His literary DNA can be found in many pockets of modern fantasy writing, although weirdly his influence is not as overt in the world of SF, despite his contributions.

A big reason for Zelazny gaining more traction with his fantasy than his SF (despite the latter winning more awards when he was alive) may be that he seemed more comfortable appearing in Fantastic than Amazing from the outset. Cele Goldsmith, editor of both magazines in the early ’60s, printed Zelazny more often in Fantastic, and indeed bought so much of his material in those first few years that he occasionally appeared under a pseudonym in the same issue as a story under his own name. “The Furies” is one of the few long Zelazny stories to appear in Amazing during this time, along with the Nebula-winning serial He Who Shapes. This is not quite major Zelazny, but it’s a curious experiment in narrative structure and what characters the reader is expected to sympathize with. It also, at least with hindsight, reads as unusual compared to other Zelazny stories from around the same time because of its lack of a typical Zelazny protagonist. To this day it remains a bit obscure, but it probably shouldn’t be.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1965 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted in the Zelazny collections Four for Tomorrow, The Illustrated Roger Zelazny, and The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.

Enhancing Image

I said that “The Furies” lacks a typical Zelazny protagonist (tortured, romantic, intellectual, sarcastic, likely a smoker), but that’s because we get three (arguably four, more on that later) for the price of one. First up is Sandor Sandor, a prodigy who despite suffering from agoraphobia and a phycail disability (he has to use prosthetics for three of his four limbs) may be the best landographer (I’ve been informed that “landography” is not a real word) in the known universe. He’s like a human GPS, in that he can calculate distances and locations on any known planet without even consulting maps by the time he’s an adult. Now, this is totally implausible, but it becomes quickly apparent that the mind powers our characters possess are not to be taken at all that literally. Benedick Benedict (I know, these names) is an empath, of sorts, who on touching people’s skin and even inanimate objects is able to gaze into thoughts and memories. Such an interaction always makes him weep—not because of emotions but more as a nervous reflex, and during these moments he can’t help but yap about what he’s seeing. With this extra-sensory ability he’s garnered a reputation as someone you’d rather not cross paths with unless you wanna use his ability for something specific. Such an ability would also pay well. Finally there’s Lynx Links, also known as “the Lynx,” now retired but formerly one of the most ruthless and successful field agents around, with dozens of humans and aliens’ heads (figuratively) mounted on his wall.

As the narrator tells us, “This is the story of how [the Lynx] came to be summoned back from Hosanna, the World of the Great and Glorious Flame of the Divine fafe, and was joined with Sandor Sandor and Benedick Benedict in the hunt for Victor Corgo, the man without a heart.” The style of the narration is sentimental, fable-like, in a way typical of early Zelazny, although said style feels even more extreme in execution here. Or maybe it’s because this is a longish novelette, although it’s not as long as the page count would make you believe. At its core it’s an adventure narrative, with maybe a moral to give at the end. The three amigos are hired to track down a once-respected Guardship captain who has since gone rogue, with the aim of taking revenge on humanity. Sounds simple, and with a rather cliched villain motivation; but this is where things get interesting. Victor Corgo is the captain of the Wallaby, once called the Happy Wallaby, but a government-backed genocide of the Drillen. an intelligent race of quadrapedal aliens whose existence proved to be inconvenient. Zelazny would take this idea of alien life as stand-ins for real-world indigenous peoples in other stories, but this might be the first time he did this theme in the context of colonialism and genocide. It’s a theme that resonates to this day, and unfortunately it’ll probably continue to resonate for the rest of my life. That Corgo has been destroying ships indiscriminately is pretty bad, no doubt, but I can think of worse reasons for doing all this.

Perspective shifts between the three heroes and Corgo, and this doesn’t always come down to a third-person narrator, as Benedict is able to read Corgo’s mind—to an extent. Ya know, Corgo had died. But then he got better. This is coming down to his real heart being replaced with a cybernetic one, which even gives him incredible healing abilities—or rather, it’s able to manage his insides better than a human heart would. Mind you that in 1965 we were still a few years off from the first artificial heart transplant. But with Corgo’s real heart in possession, Benedict is able to get glimpses into the captain’s mind, even though he might be many light-years away. This is, as you might say, kinda out there, to the point where it almost comes off as fantasy. Sandor, Benedict, and the Lynx are less people than they are representatives of certain elements, which was by no means unintended on Zelazny’s part, as the ending will have us know. Ironically the most human character here, in the Shakespearean sense, is Corgo. You may also notice, if you’re reading “The Furies,” that like a lot of early Zelazny it’s slim pickings in terms of female characters; indeed the most notable woman here is not a human at all, but the single Drillen Corgo took from the planet. Their relationship is—let’s say ambiguous. There’s a rumor that they’re in a romantic relationship (Benedict calls him a “zoophilist”), and given that the Drillen possess human-level intellect and communication it’s possible; but I don’t recall that being confirmed in-story. Well, no matter. Their relationship is shown to be a warm one.

The result is a long and yet more narratively straightforward precursor to “The Keys to December,” published just a year later but showing Zelazny making strides in maturity. Of course, the most unique thing about “The Furies” is also a bit of a structural problem, since Corgo becomes the most sympathetic and understandable character here (the “heroes” remain always somewhat at arm’s length from us), but at the same time he’s positioned as the villain. Your enjoyment of “The Furies” will depend on how you cope with this, and also the unusual style Zelazny uses. He wrote it as if it were meant for children, but it’s really not.

There Be Spoilers Here

In a way the ending is inevitable, and tragic because of its inevitability, but unfortunately it’s also corny. Truth be told, I just wish Zelazny or Goldsmith had taken an eraser to the final paragraph, since it makes the moral of the story and the nature of the three heroes too obvious. I had heard that “The Furies” was not Zelazny’s preferred title, which is not surprising (in the old days a story’s and even a novel’s title would be changed in the time between submission and publication), but even with that in mind, the ending could’ve been worded a lot better.

A Step Farther Out

We’ve reached the end of the Amazing Stories marathon for July, ending on a flawed by worthwhile Zelazny title. Zelazny was one of several notable authors whose early years Cele Goldsmith helped nurture. Incidentally the June 1965 issue was also the last credited to Goldsmith. Ziff-Davis gave up the magazine after this, and Goldsmith went with them. She got a better-paying job as editor-in-chief of Modern Bride, and rarely did she seem to look back on her short but important tenure at Amazing and Fantastic. Zelazny would also move to bigger and better things, and at an impressive speed at that. Not since Robert Heinlein a couple decades earlier had there been so meteoric a rise for a genre SF writer. He won two Nebulas the first year the awards were given, for the aforementioned He Who Shapes and “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.” He’d win a Hugo for his debut novel This Immortal, and this was all by the time he turned thirty. “The Furies” not being at the top of the early Zelazny stories isn’t really a knock against it, since it had some stiff competition.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “A Game of Unchance” by Philip K. Dick

July 25th, 2026

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Amazing Stories, July 1964.)

Who Goes There?

Philip K. Dick was born in 1928, one half of a pair of twin siblings, but his sister died in infancy while Dick survived—a loss that would crop up here and there in his work throughout his life. Dick wrote some juvenelia when he was a teenager, but he landed his first professional sale in 1951, although it would take another year for said story to appear in print. Having flunked out of college (actually he got kicked out of UC Berkeley for failing what at the time was mandatory ROTC) and no longer wanting to work at a record store, Dick decided to try writing full-time. It was grouling work, and while he wrote at a mile a minute (with the help of amphetamines), poverty would plague him for much of his adult life. He tried breaking into the mainstream with a few non-genre novels, but only one of them, the pretty solid Confessions of a Crap Artist, even saw publication in his lifetime. In spite of all this, along with the fact that he died at the age of just 53, he came to have one of the most distinctive and important ouevres of any genre SF author. For years after his death he acted as sort of a go-to example for “intellectual” stimulation in SF, with themes and such. Dick has been such a favorite with academic types for so many years that it seems like recently we’re finally able to take a step back and better appreciate his work.

Even with his faults, of which there are several (his penchant for misogyny, his at-times sloppy phrasing, that like every prolific writer he fell back on a set of themes and character types), taken into account, Dick is arguably the best American SF writer of the ’50s and ’60s. Keep in mind also that a lot of Dick’s best work lies in his short stories, which he didn’t write as frequently after the ’50s; indeed he transitioned from being one of the best short-story writers of the ’50s to one of the best novelists of the following decade. “A Game of Unchance” came out during an especially busy year for Dick, which saw the publications of The Penultimate Truth, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Simulacra, and the book version of Martian Time-Slip. This SF-horror yarn reads like a companion piece to a much earlier Dick story, “Colony,” although the situation here is different.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1964 issue of Amazing Stories. Took a surprisingly long time for “A Game of Unchance” to appear in book form, being reprinted in the 1980 Dick collection The Golden Man. Other Dick collections with this story include We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick.

Enhancing Image

At some point in the future, Mars has been colonized, or at least is in the process of being colonized. The habitable but not exactly friendly planet (the depiction of Mars here, as with Martian Time-Slip the same year, would’ve been anachronistic even for 1964) is the new home for a bunch of human settlers, whose rough-and-tumble lifestyle echoes that of the sharecroppers from earlier in the 20th century. One day an alien carnival ship lands outside of town, promising games, magic shows, freaks, and “WOMEN,” that last part practically in all caps. Falling Star Entertainment Enterprises. Bob Turk remembers what happened when a similar ship landed round the same time the previous year: the results were not good. “Last time a carnival had come to their area they had been robbed of most of their crops—accepted by the pitchmen in barter—and had wound up with nothing more than an armload of useless plaster figurines.” Well, not gonna happen this time. Fred Costner, Tony’s son, is “sort of half-witted” but who also possesses genuine psi powers, so he can act as a spy for the settlers and help them win the big prizes at the carnival. What they win, however, ends up being far more troublesome than it could’ve possibly been worth.

The most valuable prizes at the carnival seem to be a bunch of plastic figurines, like toy soldiers but bigger and more complicated-looking. The carnies are protecting these and reserving them for only the biggest winners, although why is a mystery to Fred. “He could not for the life of him fathom the carny’s reasons for protecting these; surely they were worthless.” Still, the logic goes that the tougher the challenge, the sweeter the prize. Of course, Bob and company are cheating here, what with Fred’s help, although the carnies apparently have a psi person of their own trying to rig games. The whole thing is rigged, is the point. The prize in question, a bunch of “microrobs,” are not actually micro in size at all, but they could be confused for toys. Only thing is they’re very much not toys. One of them damn near blinds Hoagland Rae, a village leader, and another one later fatally wounds a Martian gopher. These little bastards, who don’t seem to be sentient but who at the same time quickly prove to be unruly, come upon the townsfolk almost like a plague of locusts. Bob and the others, being unprepared for such a thing, have to call in military guys from the UN. (The most unrealistic part about this story, aside from Mars itself, is the notion that the UN is good for anything.) Even then, the carnies show no interest in helping with the infestation; on the contrary they’re all too happy to leave the settlers with the mess they’d made for themselves.

Given that the themes that recur in Dick’s fiction have been picked apart by people more well-read than me, one pet theme of Dick’s that flies somewhat under the radar is his ambivalence toward capitalism. Dick was not a leftist himself, although he was open about having quite a few leftist friends; but since very early in his career his writing expressed a disdain for both corporate shenanigans and government authoritarianism. There’s a memorable scene early in Ubik where Joe Chip, the protagonist, has to haggle with his robotic apartment door. There’s some not-too-subtle commentary on class hierarchy in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? “A Game of Unchance” takes a critical if also sympathetic view of the settlers by calling out their foolishness for giving up their livelihoods for some carnival games, but also pointing out that life in the colony is horribly dreary. The colonists do not see themselves as a people with values or even “culture” so much as they see themselves as a bunch of individuals trying to fight off boredom and poverty. The ship makes bank off the colonists, takes advantage of their need for entertainment, and at the same time leaves them with some killer robots. One of the UN men theorizes that they were in fact not supposed to win those microrobs, but this is never confirmed, and anyway the ending casts doubt on this theory.

There Be Spoilers Here

The central tragedy, indeed the horror, of “A Game of Unchance” is that the villagers are doomed to make the same mistakes, despite their best efforts. As such the story has a cyclical structure, with the opening and ending scenes being similar. This is rendered literally when another carnival ship arrives, although evidently not the same people as from earlier in the story. Of course there were freaks and scantily clad women, and “the games of chance had been placed—conveniently—ahead of even the girly shows and the freaks.” Maybe things will be different this time. We’re introduced to another valuable prize in the form of “homeostatic traps,” which are like automated robots made to combat pests like the microrobs—indeed they seem to have been made with the microrobs in mind. The villagers, desperate for a solution to their immediate problem, give up all they can to win these traps. Once again the carnies have a psi person on their team, but once again Fred is able to cheat into winning the most valued prize. “It was almost as if they had worked it that way on purpose.” We’re all but told in plain words that the cycle of those who con and those who get conned will continue, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow.

A Step Farther Out

“A Game of Unchance” lies on the border between major and minor Dick, as it’s a bit too long and winding for what it is, and there’s this sense that we’ve seen this premise done before—maybe even by Dick himself. For the most part, though, the execution is quite good. It’s the kind of story where thinking about it after the fact is maybe as rewarding as the experience of reading it. There’s a creeping pessimism that hangs over most of Dick’s work, but it’s especially pronounced here, with the ending line being a haunting moment. The anti-capitalist commentary here unfortunately has not aged in the 62 years since its publication. While it’s not as outright horrifying or bleak as “Colony” (without spoiling anything about that story, I seriously recommend it), it posits the sentiment that we will keep falling into the same traps in the hopes of getting out.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Down to Earth” by Harry Harrison

July 22nd, 2026

(Cover by Alex Schomburg. Amazing Stories, November 1963.)

Who Goes There?

Harry Harrison was born and raised in the US, but would spent much of his life living abroad, to the point of living long-term in both Ireland and England, and indeed he came to be associated with the UK SF scene despite being American. It also helps that he had a decades-long friendship with Brian Aldiss, one of the great British SF writers, although he didn’t quite have Aldiss’s literary ambition. Interestingly, Harrison started out as an illustrator (he would keep working on comic strips for many years) before moving into writing prose, making his genre debut in 1951. As a writer he became primarily known as a humorist, with comedic novels like The Stainless Steel Rat (plus its sequels) and Bill, the Galactic Hero being well-liked, if also not winning any awards. He did nab a Hugo nomination for his debut novel, the relatively serious Deathworld, and his 1966 novel, the very grim Make Room! Make Room!, is still in print. That his serious fiction has survived the onslaught of time better than his comedic work isn’t surprising in itself: humor generally doesn’t age as well as drama, or at least with exceptions it doesn’t resonate as much with later audiences. “Down to Earth” is one of Harrison’s comedic stories (at least I think it’s supposed to be comedic), and unfortunately it did nothing for me.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1963 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted in the Harrison collections Prime Number and Galactic Dreams.

Enhancing Image

It’s 1971, the first manned mission to the moon (funny, Harrison’s anticipation of the moon landing is behind by a couple years), and quickly things are going wrong. In fact fatally wrong. One of the two astronauts, Glazer, has fallen through a crevice and there’s seemingly no way of getting him out, the crevice only deepening into a seemingly bottomless black pit as his comrade, Gino, tries in vain to keep contact with him. Glazer ends up falling presumably to his death and we never hear from him again. I feel like I’m not spoiling anything by saying that I honestly thought Harrison would bring this opening scene back, in a Chekhov’s-gun moment, but Glazer’s fate ultimately has no bearing on the rest of the story, which is an odd choice. Instead our secondary protagonist is Colonel Coye, or simply Dan, who picks up Gino on the next orbit round the moon. What happened with Glazer is treated as a minor tragedy, but then he wouldn’t be the first casualty in the Space Race and unfortunately such casualties are to be expected. What isn’t expected, and indeed what Gino and Dan can’t possibly have expected, is what the men find when they return to Earth. Houston has gone dark—indeed the whole of America seems to have literally gone dark. No lights viewable from space. Miraculously the two land safely, without Houston’s help, but this is just the beginning.

To give the story credit, I did not think we would be landing in an alternate universe where not only has World War II dragged on far past its expiration date, but that the Nazis have gained enough headway that they’ve even done what is considered nigh impossible and successfully invaded the US. This is not exactly a “Hitler wins” timeline but rather a “Hiter is about to win” one, which of course is bad news for our astronauts. It’s pretty rare to find an alternate-history narrative in which the Nazis have landed in but have not yet conquered America, so there’s a novelty factor in that. Now, on paper this sounds compelling enough, but in practice Harrison can’t be bothered to treat his own premise seriously, and despite the story’s length (it barely counts as a novelette) he speedruns through the action like he’s anxious to get to the end. In the span of just a few pages Our Heroes™ are captured by German patrol, taken in for interrogation, and then rescued by American resistance. This all happens so quickly, and the dialogue is so no-frills and on-the-nose, that it almost reads as parody. The problem is that I’m not sure what the joke is supposed to be here; it has the quick pace of a comedy, but there’s neither setup nor punchline. None of this is helped by the characters themselves being about as thin and flimsy as cardboard, with even Gino not really having a unique personality.

Harrison’s writing is very much informed by the pre-New Wave years, but even by the standards of the ’50s, when he started writing SF, “Down to Earth” is less literate and indeed more pulpy than a lot of SF from that time. It’s very much an ideas-driven story, but Harrison consistently drops said ideas and never picks them up again. Glazer’s death doesn’t play into later events at all; it barely even goes mentioned by Gino, who saw the damn thing happen. There’s a scene early on where Dan talks about this figurine he keeps that serves as a good-luck charm, but that doesn’t go anywhere either. We have scarcely an idea as to what life in the Gulf states under Nazi occupation is like, and barely any time has passed before we’re shipped off to Denver. There’s the faint implication that the Nazis were able to land in America thanks to setting up base in Central America and having connections south of the border, but Harrison makes no observations about this, and even the cultural similarities between Jim Crow America and Nazi Germany go totally unmentioned. The whole thing fails to be serious, and at the same time Harrison has maybe one joke in mind (the ending) and everything else is fluff, which is just the sort of thing that would irk me—as if Harrison wanted to push my buttons from beyond the grave. You could treat this premise seriously and easily expand the story into a novella, but Harrison did not have the motivation for such a thing.

There Be Spoilers Here

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say the character with maybe the most dialogue in “Down to Earth” is when we meet a very old but still spritely Albert Einstein. Yes, Einstein functions here as Mr. Exposition, explaining to Gino and Dan what probably caused them to shift into an alternate timeline during their return voyage. The explanation he gives reads like New Age nonsense, or at least it would if “New Age” was a thing in 1963; as such it simply comes off as silly and pseudo-scientific. I wanna mention here also that Gino and Dan are rather passive through all this, in that they do the bare minimum to avoid getting killed and end up not even being responsible for getting themselves out of this mess. The solution ends up being simple, requiring minimal imput from Our Heroes™, although as the very end reveals to us, there is a catch to all this. There’s a sort of O. Henry-style twist that I think is meant to be taken in jest, but it’s too little and too late for a story that could’ve used a lot more humor for how unserious it is. I had become just tired of it all.

A Step Farther Out

My kneejerk reaction to “Down to Earth” was that it might be the worst story I’ve ever reviewed in the four years I’ve been running this blog. I sort of detested it. Harrison is taking the piss here, but in a way that’s somehow almost utterly devoid of humor. The actual jokes seem to have gone MIA. With that said, there’s an inherent absurdity to the premise and the snap-crack pacing such that it’s mildly entertaining to think about once you’ve already suffered through reading it. The “science” is utterly bogus, but at least Harrison is barely even pretending that one ought to take the scientific aspect seriously. It’s unfortunately just not good in any sense that matters, sorry to say. The best thing that I can say, aside from the absurdity, is that it at least goes down quickly enough.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Thirteen to Centaurus” by J. G. Ballard

July 18th, 2026

(Cover by Lloyd Birmingham. Amazing Stories, April 1962.)

Who Goes There?

James Graham Ballard was born in 1930, in Shanghai to British parents. The family took shelter but could not emmigrate when the Japanese invaded Manchuria and continued their imperial crawl along East Asia. Ballard spent a couple years of his youth in an internment camp under Japanese rule, and this experience later served as inspiration for his mainstream novels Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. Starting in the ’80s, Ballard seemed to lean less experimental and more sentimental with his fiction, which is a gear shift after he had spent the previous couple decades writing some of the most experimental and transgressive SF the field had yet seen. He plays fast and loose with genre conventions, which admittedly comes into play more in his early short stories than his novels from the same period. This all culminated in the 1970 “novel” The Atrocity Exhibition and, most infamously, his 1973 novel Crash. Being on the one hand technically pornographic (if only because of how many explicit sex scenes Ballard is able to cram into 200 pages) and thoroughly depressing, Crash was and still is one of the more challenging novels you can read that can still be considered “real literature.” Unfortunately, when Ballard arguably reached his peak as a novelist was also when he started writing fewer short stories, and he all but stopped appearing in the magazines after 1970.

Ballard appeared regularly in New Worlds in the latter half of the ’50s, but that was in the UK, where, as we all know, civilized people do not live. On the other side of the Atlantic it would take a bit longer for Ballard to make headway, and when he did it was largely thanks to the efforts of Cele Goldsmith, who in the early ’60s was editing Amazing Stories and Fantastic. Ballard was prolific enough during this period that he was appearing in magazines unique to the US and UK without really any overlap. Goldsmith, who seemed to treat Amazing and Fantastic as almost interchangeable, had Ballard stories printed in either one regardless of the given story’s SFnal qualities. With that said, it’s good that “Thirteen to Centaurus” appeared in Amazing since it’s one Ballard’s more grounded tales, while at the same time showing him as a very clever storyteller. This is a story that has a few tricks up its sleeve. Short stories tend to have One Big Twist™, but “Thirteen to Centaurus” has a couple.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1962 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted a few collections, including The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, The Voices of Time, and The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.

Enhancing Image

The Station is a revolving spaceship, a cramped space home to three families: the Peters, the Grangers, and the Bakers. Each family takes up a set of roles on the ship, with the Peters having given both the former and current captain, while the Grangers are more concerned with safety checks, security, and being generally a middleman between the Peters and the Bakers. It’s because of the Grangers that all three families are able to socialize with each other. All told, that’s thirteen people. And then there’s Dr. Francis, who does not belong to any of the families. Abel Granger, a 16-year-old boy who has shown signs of being very precocious, had a love-hate relationship with Francis. “Much as he sometimes disliked Dr. Francis for snooping around and being a know-it-all, Abel realized how dreary life in the Station would seem without him.” Abel himself had been born on the Station, and doesn’t know anything about life outside of it; he doesn’t even know (for a while, that is) that the Station is in space—that there’s an outside of the Station. Despite being equipped to support a micro-community for decades, the Station doesn’t have any windows.

There’s a reason for this.

Well, one day Francis takes Abel aside and gives him some important news: the Station is a spaceship, and that said spaceship is on its way to colonize Alpha Centauri. It’s a generation ship, as the oldest members will die off with the years and Abel himself will probably die of old age before the Station reaches its destination. The Station left Earth fifty years ago, and it’ll probably take another fifty years to reach Alpha Centauri. Abel had inferred something like this from a recurring dream he’s been having, about a disk in the sky which is actually our sun, “a deep inherited memory” despite the fact that he’d never seen it before or had even set foot on Earth. He’s also been doing some advanced math work about the nature of the Station. Now you may be thinking, this is all well and good, but we’ve been here before. Even for 1962 this is not a new premise, and indeed the first few pages trick us into thinking this will be just another generation-ship story. You may also notice, however, that the title is referring to the three families, and that those thirteen do not include Francis. This is because Francis is not actually part of the crew, and that is because the Station is not actually a spaceship. Not only that, but we’re still on Earth. We never left. This is an elaborate ruse that’s been going on for half a century.

At this point the third-person narration flips from Abel’s perspective in the first stretch to Francis’s, where it more or less remains for the rest of the story. This is not a coming-of-age narrative, contrary to what the opening would make you think. The protagonist is not Abel, but Francis, who’s been in on the scheme since the beginning. The Station is actually a slowly revolving dome, 150 feet in diameter, in a large hangar, totally sealed off from the outside world except for an “airlock” only Francis knows how to use to get in and out. Ballard pulls a pretty sick rug-pull here, although it won’t be the last time he pulls a fast one on the reader. But since we’ve established the real premise of the story, that the Station and the people in it are part of a long-term space flight experiment, I’m free to talk more about what Ballard does really well here. In a sense “Thirteen to Centaurus” is less out-there than some other early stories from Ballard that I’ve read, namely in regards to its style. Ballard is one of the most literarily minded SF writers of his generation, and he can bend your mind like a spoon when he really feels like it; but then the style he employs here is relatively straightforward. Instead what “Thirteen to Centaurus” lacks in stylistic density it makes up for in thematic density, being an earnest exploration of the messy ethics involved in what was then the Space Race.

Colonel Chalmers (what a British-sounding surname, if I may add), who’s been supervising the project, has been becoming increasingly skeptical about its long-term goals. It’s hard to blame him, since the Station has been around for fifty years with very little to show for it, with the budget having been updated only once in all that time. Then there’s the recent trouble with Abel, who might be too smart a cookie for Francis to deal with; the boy might even figure out he’s been on Earth the whole time. The whole project could blow up in everyone’s faces any day now. This is all made worse by the fact that you can’t just shut everything down and let everyone out of the Station: to shut down the project too quickly would be as disastrous as Abel finding out and telling his crewmates. Francis, almost to his despair, realizes that there’s no easy way out of this. Chalmers ends up Thibeing the voice of reason once Francis suggests marrying Abel with Zenna, the Peters’ teen daughter, in a desperate attempt to keep the boy distracted—a desperation no doubt partly driven by the sunk-cost fallacy on Francis’s part. The vibes are so bad here, never mind the legality of it.

As the colonel says:

“This project should never have been launched. You can’t manipulate people the way we’re doing—the endless hypno-drills, the forced pairing of children—look at yourself, five minutes ago you were seriously thinking of marrying two teenage children just to stop them using their minds. The whole thing degrades human dignity, all the taboos, the increasing degree of introspection—sometimes Peters and Granger don’t speak to anyone for two or three weeks—the way life in the dome has become tenable only by accepting the insane situation as the normal one. I think the reaction against the project is healthy.”

He’s right, ya know. Constructing a giant goldfish bowl (they even call it that a couple times) where a group of people will live and die, ignorant of the outside world, all to test a theoretical flight to colonize a distant planet, is morally murky at best. And yet, despite his increasingly dubious mindset with wanting to control the people in the Station, Francis does see himself as one of them. He’s the fourteenth member. He’s on both the inside and outside, and as the story progresses he comes to see himself as belonging more to the Station than Chalmers and his colleagues. As I was reading “Thirteen to Centaurus” I couldn’t help but think of Philip K. Dick, who no doubt would’ve taken the same premise and applied a pulpier hand than Ballard. In a way Ballard does Dick here better than Dick sometimes does himself, making us question the validity of the fabricated reality within the larger “real” world. How much do Francis’s years of subjective experience dealing with Abel and the others factor into his growing melancholy and derangement? The “fake” Station has become more real to him than life outside of it. Imagine living off and on in the same goldfish bowl for years and not feeling the same way.

There Be Spoilers Here

The story begins and ends with the short sentence “Abel knew,” with a different context for each time. Early on Ballard peels back a layer of reality, to show the world outside of the Station, but the ending sees him peel back yet another layer, albeit with the tables turned on Francis. The ending is where the really big twist happens, but it also forces the reader to look back on what came before and reevaluate what seemed like strange behavior coming from Abel. It’s a dramatic reveal that would raise questions about the inevitable fallout, had this been a novel, but because it’s a short story it’s a delightful O. Henry-style stinger. Ballard would later bend and stretch the conventions of the short story, such that (for instance) the vignettes that make up The Atrocity Exhibition don’t even register as short stories in the normal sense, but with “Thirteen to Centaurus” he calibrates the sense of growing unease to near-perfection.

A Step Farther Out

Damn good story, this one. It’s almost never been anthologized over the past several decades, which is a little baffling to me—not that you can’t easily find a Ballard collection that has it. “Thirteen to Centaurus” doesn’t quite anticipate the morbid and Burroughs-influenced direction Ballard would take later in the ’60s, but it shows him as an ingenious storyteller and one who’s willing to pull a fast one or two on the reader. While in terms of prose style it reads like SF from the ’50s, being perfectly fine but sort of beige on that front, it tackles questions that have to do with both existentialism and the Space Race that was then heating up. There’s an ambivalence here about sending people into space, more specifically in efforts to colonize other celestial bodies, that probably speaks more to modern readers than it would have in 1962. For my money this is one of Ballard’s best.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “A Dusk of Idols” by James Blish

July 14th, 2026

(Cover by Leo Summers. Amazing Stories, March 1961.)

Who Goes There?

James Blish is one of the most important genre SF writers of the 20th century, although it’s hard to rationalize this estimation given his work has its peaks and valleys in quality, as well as the fact that his books are sort of hard to come by nowadays. He’s one of the semi-forgotten masters of mid-20th century SF, although you might find a stray copy of A Case of Conscience or Cities in Flight in the wild, and recently Valancourt Books reprinted Black Easter and The Day After Judgment. With regards to this blog it’s really Blish’s work as one of the first SF critics that stands out, as Blish reviewed magazine SF under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr. I didn’t read Blish’s two books of criticism, The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand, until after having launched SFF Remembrance, but having read both since then I couldn’t help but feel a kinship with Blish when he’s in critic mode. He influenced another one of the field’s great critics, Joanna Russ, and indeed the two admired each other despite their differing worldviews. Blish had a conservative streak (more specifically he had a rather harsh view of women) and even jokingly called himself a fascist at one point, but at the same time he detested the Vietnam War and he was by no means a philistine. Contrasted with modern right-wingers in the field, who have a tendency towards philistinism, Blish was very well-read, and it was his fondness for “high” literature (especially the Modernists) that separated him from many of his peers, as he tried to give genre SF a “literary” bent.

Blish’s most productive period was easily the ’50s, which also saw much of his best work. Possibly due to poor health (Blish was a heavy smoker and eventually died from lung cancer, at the relatively young age of 54), he didn’t write a great deal in the last decade or so of his life. “A Dusk of Idols” can be considered on the borderline between Blish’s imperial era of the ’50s and his more sporadic output of the ’60s. It’s a story that offers quite a bit to think about, some of these thoughts having disturbing implications, but sadly it stops just short of being major Blish, largely due to the length and pacing. It strikes me as a story that Blish, for whatever reason, could not be bothered to give one more revision, and so it appeared in the cheap Amazing Stories instead of a better-paying outlet.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1961 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted in Amazing Stories: Visions of Other Worlds (ed. Martin H. Greenberg) and the Blish collections Anywhen, A Dusk of Idols and Other Stories, and Works of Art.

Enhancing Image

“A Dusk of Idols” can be considered on one level a planetary adventure, and a mostly straightforward one at that for Blish. An unnamed narrator tells us the story of a former colleague named Naysmith, and this story is framed in a way as to suggest Naysmith had since died; however, this is misleading, probably deliberately so. The protagonist, of course, is not the narrator but Naysmith, who is an unlikely candidate for a planetary adventure, on account of not just being a bourgeois surgeon but also a hypochondriac who fears getting sick constantly. “[Naysmith’s] temperament, to put it very simply, was that of a pathologically depressed man carrying a terrible load of anxiety.” Funnily enough it was this strange temperament of his that probably inspired him to become a doctor in the first place, and he proved so capable that he became a traveling doctor for rich asshole. This makes Naysmith going to Chandala all the stranger, because Chandala has a reputation for being wildly unsanitary. Said reputation proves accurate once Naysmith lands on the planet, as basic medical care and even sanitation is forbidden to most of the populace, with filth even being treated as a virtue by local religious advisors. Even the ruling class is not immune to the waves of disease, but the poor bear the brunt of it. This is on a planet where the locals average about fifteen feet in height.

Some background would be nice here, since Blish doesn’t explain the world of the story all that much. Evidently “A Dusk of Idols” is set in a future where interplanetary travel is commonplace, and also the known universe is populated with intelligent life other than human, although the people of Chandala are humanoid enough. The Heart stars are a cluster of intelligent cultures who are like the galactic version of a VIP list; if you become one of the Heart stars that presumably means you’re one of the most “civilized” in the known universe. This question of who does and does not count as civilized comes back around in the end. As is typical of SF where there are several intelligent cultures, there’s sort of a food chain to the whole thing, and surprisingly (for SF of this vintage) humanity is not at the top. Indeed Earth is not even one of the Heart stars. Humans are considered civilized, but on basically the level of small children. To make matters worse, the Heart stars don’t see the apocalyptic levels of plague and filth on Chandala as a problem worth thinking about. Clearly this calls for one anxious but currently brave doctor (Naysmith) to investigate.

It takes almost no time at all for shit to go south once Naysmith lands, as he commits a social faux pas with a religious figure, the penalty for which is apparently summary execution. The guards meant to kill him are so tall and sickly, however, that the little human manages to escape, which is a rare bit of comic relief for this story. Naysmith spends the rest of the narrative on the run, with only his space suit and a giant spear he stole (how he’s able to carry the spear is something I couldn’t help but think about) for protection. He also acquires a shell large enough to ~~surf on~~ use as a rowboat, “the greenish-brown carapace of some creature which, from its size, he first took to be the Chandalese equivalent of a huge land-turtle, but on closer examination seemed actually to have been a good deal more like a tick.” I like the imagery here, with the comparison to ticks rather than turtles; this all gives the impression of a sickly world, and one the Chandalese may have created to be that way. There’s a heavy allusion to ecological catastrophe, or ecocide, as seen in the following passage. This is after Naysmith committed the faux pas and is hiding out in the jungle:

For some reason, however, the Chandalese forest seemed peculiarly free of large animals. Occasional scamperings and brief glimpses told of creatures which might have been a little like antelope, or like rabbits, but even these were scarce; and there were no cries of predators. This might have been because Chandalese predators were voiceless, but Naysmith doubted this on grounds of simple biology; it seemed more likely that most of the more highly organized wild life of Chandala had long since been decimated by the plagues the owners of the planet cultivated as though they were ornamental gardens.

In terms of its thematic scope, “A Dusk of Idols” is pretty ambitious, encompassing sociology, ecology, and a commentary on class disparity, with the Chandalese clearly being metaphorical for certain human cultures. A lot of the time the use of humanoid aliens in SF is because the writer was being lazy, but here we’re clearly meant to think of the Chandalese as analogous to mankind. It’s not a pretty picture. A kneejack thought that both Naysmith and the reader might have is that the Chandalese are hopelessly backwards, or maybe that the Chandalese ruling class is sadistic to the point of self-sabotage; yet the big twist of the story tells us something very different about this society, and by extension about human society as we know it. Clearly Blish is hunting intellectual big game with this one, and at points he’s not very subtle about it. The magazine version has an introductory blurb about Goethe’s rendition of the Faust legend, and then there’s stuff like this little rumination from the narrator:

The Atridae, it is very clear, still mutter in their sleep not far below the surface of our waking minds, for all that we no longer allow old Freud to cram our lives back into the strait-jackets of those old religious plays. Perhaps one of the changes in us that the Heart stars await is the extirpation of these last shadows of Oedipus, Elektra, Agamemnon and all those other dark and bloody figures from the way we think.

Or maybe not. There are still some 40,000 years to go. If after that they tell us that that was one of the things they were waiting for, we probably won’t understand what they’re talking about.

Continuing the Chandalese-as-metaphor idea, one can think of Naysmith as less having gone to an alien planet and more as going to one of the so-called dark corners of our own world. There’s a bit of a tightrope to be walked here, because Blish runs the risk of saying something racially insensitive and leaving the reader with that baggage. One of the literary references Blish doesn’t make, in a surprising omission, is Heart of Darkness, although Naysmith’s journey into the dead city and the massive sewar network underneath evokes Marlow’s journey along the misty and seemingly prehistoric Congo river. Joseph Conrad, like Blish, sympathetized with the horrific conditions of the average person (although in Heart of Darkness it’s the Congo under Belgian colonial rule, whereas on Chandala the rulers seem to be home-grown) while coming decidedly from a white bourgeois perspective. When Naysmith really does use his shell as a makeshift rowboat and journeys through the sewers (his ventillated spacesuit keeps him clean, and also keeps him from vomiting his guts out at what must the worst stench known to man), it’s less a journey into the belly of the beast and more rewinding the clock into the murky past. Like Marlow Naysmith almost goes backward in time as he travels.

There Be Spoilers Here

Taking the spoiler section as an opportunity to again bring up the Goethe quote—actually not from Goethe’s Faust, like Blish indicates, but Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It’s Mephistopheles saying, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” This line comes back around once Naysmith is able to escape the Chandalese authorities and return to his ship. He makes it out alive and well, contrary to what the narrator implies at the beginning of the story; rather the narrator “loses” Naysmith in the sense that the latter quits his job as a surgeon and leaves the medical world behind. He becomes blackpilled not just on saving Chandalese but on the morality of the Heart stars. See, the Heart stars consider Chandala to be perfectly civilized, not despite but because of the systematized death by poor health and sanitation. The society’s upper crust weeds out the “weak” by deliberately making disease and illness widespread. They use public health as a weapon, even if those who survive must suffer for it. Nothing, according to the Heart stars, is wrong here. All is going according to plan. It’s one of the more disturbing endings to an SF story I’ve encountered as of late, and the flabby second half of the story doesn’t undermine it much.

A Step Farther Out

Being a novelette with relatively little dialogue, it would’ve taken a really sure hand to not make “A Dusk of Idols” not become dull or a slog after a point—a sureness that Blish unfortunately didn’t quite have in this case. The back end made my eyes glaze over momentarily, which is a shame because the journey through the sewers is by no means bad when taken in a vacuum. The ending itself is also pretty effective, and would’ve been even more so had Blish trimmed the story down by a couple thousand words. “A Dusk of Idols” was the cover story for the March 1961 issue of Amazing Stories, with the cover showing Naysmith on his shell-boat; it’s an evocative image, doing well for a cover, even if it illustrates what I think is the weaker half of the story. I would go ahead and mildly recommend this one—just be aware that I don’t think it shows Blish at his best.

See you next time.