Remembrance of Things Past and Future

Serial Review: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard (Part 2/3)

February 6th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, October 1934.)

Who Goes There?

Looking back on it, many of the most important figures in fantasy are British. J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, and of course we have William Shakespeare, whose fantastical plays (namely The Tempest) are essential to our understanding of the genre, even down to the language we use. As far as American fantasists go, though, few are more important (or more American) than Robert E. Howard, whose life was tragically short but who managed to produce a truly alarming amount of work in that short time. Across a near-endless supply of short fiction and poetry he ventured between low fantasy, horror, and the western, sometimes mixing the three to produce stories that were more invigorating than those written by his fellows. He was arguably the first literary swordsman, although he would probably prefer the position of “barbarian poet.”

Howard ran several series during his brief career, and Conan the Cimmerian was easily the most popular of the bunch, at least with hindsight; it, more than anything else, gave Howard a life after death as scord and sorcery’s key founder. While not Howard’s first sword-and-sorcery hero (or rather anti-hero), Conan was the final synthesis of Howard’s developing philosophy regarding man’s relationship with civilization.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 of The People of the Black Circle was published in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. You can also read the whole novella (the individual installments are pretty short, totaling about 30,000 words) on Project Gutenberg in a variety of formats. Because this is a Conan story, and one of the more famous ones, you won’t have a hard time finding it at all, be it online or in print.

Enhancing Image

Picking up where we left off, Conan and Yamina are on the run yet again after Conan is accused of murdering an ally of his—an act actually committed by Kemsha, the wizard who, along with his girlfriend Gitara (she has a name now), turned his back on the Black Seers of Yimsha and is now trying to take Yasmina as ransom of his own. Part 1 saw us starting out in the Hyborian equivalent of India, and now we’ve moved towards the equivalent of the Himalayan mountains. You start filling in the blanks once you realize these locales are based on real places.

The romantic/sexual tension between Conan and Yasmina continues to grow when the former proposes that the latter ought to take on the clothes of a local girl so as to disguise herself; after all, at least three parties are looking for her. Conan trades with a local girl and gives her a gold coin for her troubles, although perhaps wisely he sees her running off in the buff rather than giving her Yasmina’s clothes, since if the girl were found with those clothes she could be tortured and, worse yet, Our Heroes™ could be found out. It’s a bit of a comedic scene and it provides some relief after what amounted to a prolonged chase sequence in the first installment. It’s also here that Yasmina’s attraction to Conan is written more overtly, and it turns out such attraction may not be one-sided: when Conan gives her the new robes he beckons her to change out of his sight—an unusually chivalric and modest move for the barbarian.

A little gripe to shove in here before we get to the big action set piece of this installment. I’ve said before that Howard tends to use the same words to describe things when a perfectly fine alternative doesn’t present itself immediately, like Howard is in a mad dash to get the words out and has to go with what comes to mind first. For example, I feel like there has to be a better word to describe an attractive woman’s spine than “supple.” Actually Howard throws the word “supple” at several body parts, and it only works occasionally. This is a small price to pay for writing that is, far more often than not, narratively adept. Howard, on top of having a superhuman work ethic, also had a sixth sense for plotting, both in sustaining narrative momentum and also coming up with twists and turns that’ll hold the reader’s attention.

Speaking of which, here’s one now!

Kemsha and Gitara catch up with Conan and Yasmina, quite miraculously considering Kemsha got damn near run over by Conan’s horse at the end of the previous installment, but their reunion is short-lived when the big (i.e., the true) villains of the story make their first in-person appearance. Four of the Black Seers appear out of a dark cloud, above Our Heroes™ and well out of reach, and while we were led to believe the Black Seers meant business before, this is the first time we get to see them.

Howard doesn’t miss here:

The crimson cloud balanced like a spinning top for an instant, whirling in a dazzling sheen on its point. Then without warning it was gone, vanished as a bubble vanishes when burst. There on the ledge stood four men. It was miraculous, incredible, impossible, yet it was true. They were not ghosts or phantoms. They were four tall men, with shaven, vulture-like heads, and black robes that hid their feet. Their hands were concealed by their wide sleeves. They stood in silence, their naked heads nodding slightly in unison. They were facing Khemsa, but behind them Conan felt his own blood turning to ice in his veins. Rising, he backed stealthily away, until he felt the stallion’s shoulder trembling against his back, and the Devi crept into the shelter of his arm. There was no word spoken. Silence hung like a stifling pall.

The Seers are mainly here to get at the one who betrayed them. On the one hand, fair, but also despite being a villain we’ve come to sympathize with Kemsha. Howard has a gift for creating characters who are, if not totally rounded, at least recognizably human; while we haven’t spent that much time with Kemsha and his girl we understand their motives. Surprisingly, Gitara is not a Lady Macbeth figure who bullies Kemsha into taking power so that she can rule vicariously through him; she genuinely cares for him, and he cares for her, which is a connection that is ultimately held to be true, even if what comes next is tragic.

I hate to bring up another blocky quote like this, but I had to copy down some of the confrontation between Kemsha and the Seers as told from Yasmina’s perspective. The wizards have a bit of a Dragon Ball Z standoff, and despite facing off against four wizards more powerful than him, Kemsha is able to hold his ground. We knew he was more powerful than he appeared from he was able to do in Part 1, but this battle of wills is easily the greatest test of Kemsha’s strength, both as a wizard and as a human being. Yasmina, however, being far from a brainless damsel, figures out how Kemsha does not immediately succumb to the Seers, and how he probably is only able to do this with Gitara by his side.

The answer, simply is love.

The reason was the girl that he clutched with the strength of his despair. She was like an anchor to his staggering soul, battered by the waves of those psychic emanations. His weakness was now his strength. His love for the girl, violent and evil though it might be, was yet a tie that bound him to the rest of humanity, providing an earthly leverage for his will, a chain that his inhuman enemies could not break; at least not break through Khemsa.

Unfortunately something has to give. The Seers, similarly to Yasmina, pick up on Kemsha’s love for Gitara as his shield and proceed to use it against him. Redirecting their efforts at Gitara, she unfortunately is not able to withstand their efforts and is thus guided off the mountain’s edge, taking Kemsha with her to their apparent deaths. Again, despite being villains, their downfall is framed as tragic, and such framing works as we feel their loss. With their biggest opponent (who isn’t Conan) out of the way, the Seers snatch up Yasmina and take her to their lair, with Conan getting the fuck away just by the skin of his teeth. If you’ve read a few entries in this series before then you know Conan ain’t scared of shit, except… well, maybe these creepy bald guys. Admittedly a barbarian, while he can punch and slice his way out of most trouble, would probably get ass-blasted by some high-level wizards.

The People of the Black Circle is a later Conan story and it definitely feels like a later entry, on top of being the longest written up to that point. Conan has loved and lost before, and faced off with some pretty scummy bad guys, but the Black Seers actually make the guy retreat and think hard about how he can get his girl back. Of course it’s a hard conflict to spoil since we know in advance that Conan will come out on top somehow, but it’s more a question of how many people have to die for the bad guys to get taken down. Speaking of which, there’s a character who only appeared for a second in Part 1 who makes a big reappearance here, and his crossing paths with Conan may well lead to quite the final battle with the Seers…

There Be Spoilers Here

There is one player I’ve not mentioned till now, and that’s Kerim Shah. He was allies with Kemsha in Part 1 for like five seconds before the latter decided to go rogue, but now that Kemsha is dead (well, not quite yet) it’s up to Kerim Shah to rescuse Yasmina (and by “rescue” we mean capture her for his own ends) with or without Conan’s help. Since Our Hero™ is at his lowest point towards the end of this installment and since all his allies are now either dead or think him a traitor (his own Afghuli henchmen, having thought he killed the glorified redshit from Part 1, are now after him as well), he might do well to enter a temporary truce with Kerim Shah.

The two thus join forces.

What I find entertaining about this arrangement is that Kerim Shah makes no secret of wanting to take Yasmina as ransom; he states clearly that he and Conan have different goals in mind, and that even if they were to defeat the Seers they would still fight over Yasmina. They team up anyway. Kerim Shah might be a mercenary and a bit of a shithead, but he’s nothign compared to the creepy bald guys who spend the final scene of Part 2 subjecting Yasmina to some rather esoteric torture. Hero versus villain? Yawn. Hero teaming up with Villain B to take down Villain A? Now that’s more interesting. Of course what separates Conan from Kerim Shah is that he’s not a dog for bureaucracy and he actually seems to care for Yasmina. Again, Conan is really an anti-hero; he’s the guy we root for because the people he faces off with are always much worse than him.

Oh, and one last thing…

Gitara has fallen to her death, sadly, but for better or worse Kemsha’s death was not as swift. Conan finds Kemsha barely alive, apparently little more than a pile of broken bones, but luckily Kemsha lives long enough to give Conan his magical… girdle? Yeah, I guess you’d call it that. Conan is not a magician at all, but even a tool handed down from a skilled wizard will certainly help him in his inevitable confrontation with the Seers. Then Kemsha finally dies, sort of in a state of grace, broken but not destroyed, his humanity preserved. We actually get a spectrum of villainy with this story, from irredeemably bad (the Seers), to bad pragmatic and cool (Kerim Shah), to kinda bad but also kinda good (Kemsha). Howard has a way with bringing characters to life with relatively few words.

A Step Farther Out

Thing about Conan stories is that, like any other episodic series with a recurring protagonist, we know Conan will get out of this ordeal fine; the question is how and at what cost. Conan is wearing plot armor, but they must’ve run out of stock at the plot armor store because nobody else has it. People are dropping like FLIES! And yet the good news is that the plot is funneling into what looks to be an exciting climax. Will Yasmina make it out okay? Will Conan and Kerim Shah keep to their truce or will there be BETRAYAL? Most importantly, how the FUCK do people run around half-naked or just totally naked fine when we’re in the mountains? I’m pretty it’d be chilly at that elevation. Anyway, stay tuned.

See you next time.

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Novella Review: “Dancing on Air” by Nancy Kress

February 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Mark Harrison. Asimov’s, July 1993.)

Who Goes There?

Ncany Kress debuted nearly half a century ago (you can actually find her first short stories in Baen-era Galaxy), but despite her longevity she continues to feel like a “modern” author. She’s been a mainstay of Asimov’s Science Fiction for almost as long, being evidently one of Gardner Dozois’s favorites. She was, for a short time, married to fellow SF author Charles Sheffield. My first encounter with Kress was some years back, with her 1984 novella “Trinity,” with combines the SF premise of cloning with a believable and slightly demented human drama. Much more recently I read her Nebula-winning short story “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” which I have to admit I was less impressed with. Ah, but today’s story is a good ‘un.

What I like about Kress is that she seems fond of writing in the novella mode, which (warm take) I would say is the ideal length for SF. Not too long, but just long enough to give a few major characters their due and also give the reader a neat idea. Quite a few of Kress’s novellas have been up for awards, with her 1991 novella “Beggars in Spain” (later turned into a novel) being one of the most acclaimed SF novellas of the ’90s. “Dancing on Air” was itself up for the Hugo and Nebula, and even placed #1 in the Asimov’s Readers’ poll for Best Novella. There’s a good reason for this.

Placing Coordinates

From the July 1993 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a decent number of times. It appeared in the 1994 edition of Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction. It got a chapbook edition at one point from Tachyon Publications. Then there’s the Nancy Kress collection Beaker’s Dozen. If you’re in a collecting mood there’s The Best of Nancy Kress from Subterrainean Press, a fancy hardcover that goes for, hmm, over $60 on average used. Have fun!

Enhancing Image

We begin with a murder myster of sorts. Two ballet dancers in New York have been found dead in the past month; both cases seemed to be foul play. Aside from being dancers, both women were discovered to have been bioenhanced—their bodies modified artificially (and illegally) so as to make them sturdier and more refined performers, with the latter dancer she had apparently gotten bioenhanced shortly before her death. The head of the New York City Ballet, Anton Privitera, is staunchly anti-bioenhancement; he has a reputation to uphold, which immediately makes him a suspect. I’ll say here and now, though, that if you’re reading “Dancing on Air” with the specific expectation of it being a murder mystery, you’ll probably be disappointed. Luckily for the rest of us, Kress has different aims in mind.

The plot is split in two. First we have a first-person narrative by Susan, a reporter whose teen daughter Deborah is a hopeful in the School of American Ballet, “the juvenile province of Anton Privitera’s kingdom.” Susan is worried about Deborah for a few reasons: she’s been hanging out with Susan’s deadbeat ex-husband, and of more urgent importance, she’s been curious about bioenhancement. The other half of the story is about Caroline, one of the top dancers at the New York City Ballet, practically a living legend in her field, and already looking to be washed out at 26. Caroline, being a star in the dance world and a possible target for these recent murders, is given a bodyguard in the form of Angel, an uplifted dog. Yes, Angel can talk, and it freaks everyone out whenever he does that. Angel is of course bioenhanced, but people don’t think as much about engineering an animal like this. Bioenhancement for humans is a good deal riskier, both in the legality of it and possible unknown effects.

There were several kinds of bioenhancement. All of them were experimental, all of them were illegal in the United States, all of them were constantly in flux as new discoveries were made and rushed onto the European, South American, and Japanese markets. It was a new science, chaotic and contradictory, like physics at the start of the last century, or cancer cures at the start of this one. No bioenhancements had been developed specifically for ballet dancers, who were an insignificant portion of the population. But European dancers submitted to experimental versions, as did American dancers who could travel to Berlin or Copenhagen or Rio for the very expensive privilege of injecting their bodies with tiny, unproven biological “machines.”

Something odd about the Carolina thread is that it’s narrated from Angel’s perspective. Like with Susan it’s first-person narration, but it’s in the present tense, presumably because while he is smarter than the average dog, Angel doesn’t seem to have the concept of time nailed down. He’s also hardwired to only respond to certain commands from Caroline, which Caroline finds out much to her own dismay. Anton and his business manager John Cole, who had Angel uplifted in the first place, are a shady pair.

Anyway…

It’s the ’90s, and while “Dancing on Air” isn’t cyberpunk it does happen to cover one of the hallmarks of that movement. We’re at the point where we’re a good deal past Greg Bear’s “Blood Music” but Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age was still two years off. The technological breakthrough of the story is nanotechnology, and you know what that means…

At first glance it reads like Suspiria but with nanomachines, but while there’s a good amount of suspense for most of the story, it’s far from horror. Rather the suspense comes less from the murder mystery and more from uneasy parental relationships on both ends. Susan tries and fails to reason with Deborah, who seems too caught up in her own childish ambition to see the danger; meanwhile, as Susan investigates the dance academy, and finds out more about Caroline, things don’t look so good for that woman’s personal life. Of course what Susan doesn’t find out is then revealed to us via Angel’s narration, and it’s in these scenes where Caroline is at her most candid. There’s some dramatic irony at play, since we get to know things about each of the two leads that one does not know about the other.

This two-pronged narrative would be more difficult to pull off with a short story, and as a novel there would be the temptation to add an extra subplot, but at about 20,000 words “Dancing on Air” feels just right in terms of how it’s structured. Each thread has what the other lacks, basically. Susan’s plot reads almost like what you’d see in a film noir or police procedural, while Caroline’s plot is more akin to a character study; the scenes with Caroline and Angel are shorter and punchier than Susan’s.

Now, about those nanomachines. Bioenhancement in the story is more or less replacing one’s own cells with these tiny little weirdos. If you’ve read “Blood Music” where, SPOILERS, the scientist who experiments on himself with the nanomachines gets taken over by them, then you can sort of predict the downside of nanotechnology in this story. I won’t get into specifics right now, though, because how exactly Kress decides to show the monkey’s paw curling with the nanomachines is interesting in the context of what amounts to a family drama. Susan’s relationship with her daughter and Caroline’s with her mother are the focal points of the story, not so much the nanomachines; the science-fictional element exists in service of a human narrative that could potentially happen even without anything science-fictional.

One last thing to mention before we get to spoilers (because I don’t think this is much of a spoiler) is that Caroline’s mother, Anna, is terrible. She and Caroline don’t interact for nearly all of the latter’s plot thread, but we run into her from Susan’s perspective and she’s a nasty piece of work. While Anton comes off the most suspicious, Anna is shown to be a crass, selfish, insensitive old woman who doesn’t seem to care about her daughter’s wellbeing. You might be thinking, “Well she can’t be that bad, right?” Oh, just you wait! You’re gonna “love” what happens in the climax.

There Be Spoilers Here

I wish more stories introduced a murder mystery only to use the mystery itself as a red herring. Anton is introduced as an obvious suspect and by extension an obvious red herring, but not only is it not Anton who killed those women, it’s not anyone among the cast that we know either; it’s just some guy. It’s like Kress was misdirecting us with that thread, and I think she did that pretty well, because the mystery was interesting enough, the thread of familial turmoil is not only more interesting but also ultimately more relevant with regards to the technology Kress has given us.

Caroline may have been saved by a crazy murderer, but her dancing career is coming to an end regardless: for reasons she can’t grasp she has been underperforming horribly as of late, with critics taking note. Unbeknownst to herself (at first), Caroline is an experiment. Dancers are routinely tested for bioenhancement (bioenhancement seeming having replaced steroids for dancers and other athletic types in-story), and it’d be easy enough to do because you could compare the original cells to the nanomachines. It’s here that Kress brings in a rather scary question: What if there were no original cells to compare the nanomachines to? Adults have been known to get bioenhanced, but what about children? Or, even scarier, what about fetuses? It would be possible to experiment on fetuses meant to be aborted anyway, but what if these fetuses… weren’t?

Am I the only one who’s reminded of Greg Egan right now?

Upon attending a science conference in Paris that’s supposed to reveal some crucial info about bioenhancement, Susan finds out two things: bioenhancement is basically a death sentence, and also that there were fetuses some three decades ago who were subjected to bioenhancement in vitro, with some still walking around as adults. One of the scientists who was set to make this public announcement killed himself right before the conference, apparently out of guilt.

Caroline Olson, Deborah said, had been fired because she missed rehearsals and performances. The Times had called her last performance “a travesty.” Because her body was eating itself at a genetic level, undetectable by the City Ballet bioscans that assumed you could compare new DNA patterns to the body’s original, which no procedure completely erased. But for Caroline, the original itself had carried the hidden blueprint for destruction. For twenty-six years.

The reason why Carolina tested negative for bioenhancement is because her whole body has been replaced by nanomachines—probably before she had even left the womb. She’s kind of a cyborg if you think about it. It would also explain why her body has become conspicuously fragile as of late despite her age; the nanomachines are slowly eating her body from the inside. Caroline has an expiration date, although when that is exactly is unknown. Her mother, in wanting to create the perfect dancer that she herself could not be, used her daughter like a guinea pig and, unbeknownst to Caroline, gave her a short lifespan. Which sounds monstrous, because it is. Caroline is not happy to hear that her mother has used her like some tool her whole life, so in the climax she orders Angel to KILL THAT BITCH! YEAH! FUCKIN’ GET HER ASS! Which, look, I know it’s supposed to be tragic, but it’s pretty hard to feel sorry for Anna when Angel goes after her.

The ending is bittersweet, although it leans more on being simply a downer. Sure, the murderer had been caught and the world now knows about the risks with bioenhancement. Angel even lives at the end! Albeit minus a leg, on account of Susan’s intervention. But Caroline is institutionalized and Deborah, being too young and ambitious, throws caution to the wind and gets herself bioenhanced. It’s a dumb risk to take, but as Susan points out, in her bitterness, ballet dancers tend to wreck their bodies in pursuit of their art—only not as dramatically as this. Withered knees. Hip replacements. Arthritis. Why not bioenhancement, the new cancer of the digital age? The pain may be worth it, if it means being perfect for a few years…

A Step Farther Out

“Dancing on Air” is a two-pronged family drama, and pretty good family drama at that. The nanotechnology at the heart of the story causes issues, but ultimately the problem is a people problem. The technology is science fiction but the human anguish is not. Ultimately it’s a story about abuse; it’s about parents forcing their wills on their children, with cruel and horrible results. Susan, Caroline, and the others aren’t perfect, but they (except for Caroline’s mother) remain sympathetic because their desires are sympathetic. The narrative of parental abuse may hit home for some people, but for others (like me) it’s an effective allegory about the uneasy partnership between science and artistry. The ending is more bitter than sweet, but Kress is never less than humane with this outing.

And of course, Angel is a good boy.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: February 2023

February 1st, 2023
(Cover by Joe Tillotson. Fantastic Adventures, October 1951.)

I have to admit I take really niche pleasure in writing these forecast editorials. I suspect reviewers have a to-read list and just tackle shit when they feel like it, but I myself prefer to plan things out. Funny thing is that aside from these forecasts I don’t have a to-read list, anywhere. All this stuff is either in my noggin or it’s not shown up on my radar yet. Hell, I only started keeping a list of things I did read this year. I’m mostly a spontaneous reader, so let me have this one little bit of scheduled activity.

No gimmicks this month. Well, there is one, but you wouldn’t know it at first glance and I’m not even sure it counts. You see, I have a major soft spot for SF-horror; I love SF, and believe it or not I love horror too with almost equal passion, so what happens when you combine the two? This month’s short stories are crossbreeds of horror and science fiction, one by the most famous horror author of all time, the other by someone whose name probably doesn’t ring a bell but who really deserves more recognition.

Anyway…

No more wasting time, let’s see what’ll be on my plate!

For the serials:
1. The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard. Published in Weird Tales, September to November 1934. Started this last month and now we’re gonna finish it. It’s been a fun ride so far. Howard only wrote about Conan the Cimmerian in the last four years of his life, but like with everything else he wrote a lot of it, and this is one of the longer Conan tales. Due to the episodic nature of the series it’s not necessary to have read previous Conan stories to enjoy this one.
2. Needle by Hal Clement. Published in Astounding Science Fiction, May to June 1949. Clement had already been active for several years, but Needle was his debut novel, and it would be published in book form in 1950. Clement is one of the founding fathers of what we’d call hard SF, with Mission of Gravity especially geing a genre-defining novel, but Needle seems to not fall into that mold; rather it’s one of the earliest known attempts at mixing SF with the mystery genre.
For the novellas:
1. “Dancing on Air” by Nancy Kress. From in the July 1993 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novella (well, Best Novelette for the Hugo, I guess voters were confused). Kress is one of those authors I’ve been meaning to read more of, and I’ve been making progress… slowly. Like all great authors Kress seems very fond of the novella mode, but rather than go for one of her award-winners I’m going for a slightly deeper cut. Just slightly.
2. “Medusa Was a Lady!” by William Tenn. From the October 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures. Tenn is supposedly one of the great comedians in SF from the late ’40s to his semi-retirement from the field in the late ’60s. Unusually for Tenn, “Medusa Was a Lady!” (also reprinted as the lamer-sounding “A Lamp for Medusa”) ventures into science-fantasy territory. And look, I’m weak for a good cover, and the Joe Tillotson cover shown above convinced me.
For the short stories:
1. “Let Me Live in a House” by Chad Oliver. From the March 1954 issue of Universe Science Fiction. Oliver is one of those forgotten authors who popped up on my radar recently, with this story especially catching my interest. Oliver started young and was one of many authors who rode the wave of ’50s magazine saturation before quieting down circa 1960. While Ursula K. Le Guin is rightly praised for her anthropological SF, Oliver was a major forerunner in that vein.
2. “The Jaunt” by Stephen King. From the June 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Does King need an introduction? Not really. Anyway, an SF Discord (shoutout to Media Death Cult, by the way) I’m in has “The Jaunt” on a list of short stories the group’s covering this month, and it’s one of the few on the list I had not read before in all honesty. Rather than just read and make a few remarks on it, I do believe I’ll give it the fancy long review treatment…
So it’s a short month. Only two serials, two novellas, and two shorts. I have something special in mind for March, but for now I’ll enjoy this calm before the storm. Nothing too gimmicky this month! Just catching up with some authors I’ve been meaning to do that with, plus some horror thrown into the mix—which may or may not be foreshadowing.

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang

January 31st, 2023

(Cover by Julie Dillon. Uncanny, January-February 2015.)

Who Goes There?

We don’t know a whole lot about Hao Jingfang, although she’s prominent enough to be one of those native Chinese authors to get circulation in the Anglosphere, and even a Hugo! She’s appeared in both Invisible Planets (which is where I had first read “Folding Beijing,” although I remembered basically nothing about it prior to this reread) and Broken Stars, both edited by Ken Liu, both containing stories from native Chinese authors in translation. Her background in economics certainly gives context to today’s story, which unusually for an SF story (even a “modern” one) gives a good deal of thought to not only the practical conditions of a future civilization but also the economic reality of it. The only other Jingfang story I’ve read is “Invisible Planets,” from the aforementioned anthology of the same name. (No, I don’t remember reading that one either.)

“Folding Beijing” is a sort of reprint but not really. It was first published in the February 2014 issue of the Chinese magazine ZUI Found, but did not appear in English (translated by Ken Liu) until the January-February 2015 issue of Uncanny Magazine, and it’s this English version that won Jingfang the Hugo for Best Novelette. At 16,254 words it’s almost long enough to count as a novella, although I can believe its novelette status; despite its wordage it has plot beats that could be adequately covered in a 10,000-word story. I’m not sure if Jingfang’s style is just verbose or if it looks that way as filtered through Liu’s own poetic-leaning style.

Placing Coordinates

You can read “Folding Beijing” free online here. I really should not have to elaborate on that, but then we do have several print options. It appeared in a couple annual best-of anthologies, including Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 and Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 1. Something I’ve noticed, looking through the last few entries in his own best-of series, is that Gardner Dozois was oddly deaf to stuff coming out of Uncanny Magazine, despite that publication quickly gaining traction for its quality. Speaking of which, if you’re in a collecting mood then there’s The Best of Uncanny: you could get a hardcover for a pretty penny or as an ebook if you wanna save money, but my opinion on this deeply political matter is, what’s the point of getting an ebook copy of something that’s clearly meant to be a collector’s item? Finally, as said before, you can find it in Invisible Planets.

Not hard to find at all. What’s your excuse?

Enhancing Image

The stereotype of Asian parents being obsessed with schooling immediately rears its head, and not only that but it drives the plot. Some things just can’t be escaped. Lao Dao is a waste disposal worker in a future Beijing that looks a little… different from how it is nowadays. Just how different we’ll see later. The crux of the issue is that Lao Dao, a single parent with a shitty job, wants to send his adopted daughter Tangtang to kindergarten, which sounds easy enough to basically all of us, except that apparently in the Beijing of the story kindergarten may as well be college. Right off the bat I find this hard to believe, at least as a pale white kid from New Jersey who spent his time at kindergarten literally taking naps. There is sort of a justification for why schooling works the way it does in-story, but we’re not given that until much later and even then it’s a bit of a tough pill. The words “kindergarten” and “tuition” really should not be next to each other.

Lao Dao makes just enough to pay rent, so how he’s going to get his daughter (who, mind you, is an off-screen plot device and not a real character) may require some extra income if you know what I mean. I’m of two minds about the exposition here, because clearly Jingfang thought out the implications of her partly invented society and did what most any good science-fictionist ought to do: take things to their logical conclusion, even if it sounds extreme. The problem is that, like I said earlier, this story could’ve feasibly been a few thousand words shorter, mainly through streamlining the walls of text Jingfang throws at us. Take, for instance, this early bit where we find out just how dire the kindergarten situation is:

Lao Dao’s research on kindergarten tuition had shocked him. For schools with decent reputations, the parents had to show up with their bedrolls and line up a couple of days before registration. The two parents had to take turns so that while one held their place in the line, the other could go to the bathroom or grab a bite to eat. Even after lining up for forty–plus hours, a place wasn’t guaranteed. Those with enough money had already bought up most of the openings for their offspring, so the poorer parents had to endure the line, hoping to grab one of the few remaining spots. Mind you, this was just for decent schools. The really good schools? Forget about lining up—every opportunity was sold off to those with money. Lao Dao didn’t harbor unrealistic hopes, but Tangtang had loved music since she was an eighteen–month–old. Every time she heard music in the streets, her face lit up and she twisted her little body and waved her arms about in a dance. She looked especially cute during those moments. Lao Dao was dazzled as though surrounded by stage lights. No matter how much it cost, he vowed to send Tangtang to a kindergarten that offered music and dance lessons.

The good exposition is giving us an impression as to the class divide in this city, which as we’ll find out is even more of a gulf than we’re initially led to believe; the bad exposition is at the end, those last few sentences about the daughter which we really don’t need to know about. All that matters is that Lao Dao has someone in his life whom he loves and who he has to care for. That Lao Dao might do something illegal so as to provide for someone he cares about is understandable on its own; we don’t need bits of flavor for a character we won’t be getting attached to anyway.

Moving on, Lao Dao meets up with a knowledgable older neighbor who, reluctantly, gives him advice on how to traverse the city for a risky but lucrative gig. See, Lao Dao is in Third Space, the lowest echelon of Beijing and the rank that has quite literally the least time and space to work with. You see, Beijing is not a place that you can just make a round trip for; it’s always locked away in parts depending on which echelon of the city is allowed to use what. I’ll explain how this works in a second, but for now it’s important to know that Lao Dao has a difficult task as messenger, taking a message he had originally gotten from Second Space and taking it to First Space. Getting caught meant imprisonment, but success meant putting his daughter in school. “And the cash, the cash was very real.” Lao Dao had snuck into Second Space just to get the message, so First Space, while it would be more difficult, would be surely possible.

Now is the time for me to explain how this works. Correct if I’m wrong, because the phrasing for this little bit of exposition is confusing (I blame Ken, sorry), but Beijing operates on a 48-hour cycle. First Space gets 24 hours to do whatever it wants, then gets put into drug-induced sleep for the next 24. Second Space gets to be awake from 6am on that second day, when First Space is asleep, to 10pm. Then Third Space comes up at 10pm that second day and goes to sleep at 6am the following day, and then the cycle begins anew. 24 hours, then 16, then a measely eight for Third Space. “Five million enjoyed the use of twenty-four hours, and seventy-five million enjoyed the next twenty-four hours.” Sounds simple enough to get around; Lao Dao just has to break curfew. Well, there is one more complication, and it’s what gives the story its title.

What happens to Beijing every Change (mind the capital C) is hard to describe with words, which doesn’t stop Jingfang/Liu from trying. Imagine if a city was a piece of origami. The city is always compartmentalized; it’s impossible to see or even comprehend the city with all its parts unfolded. It’s an impressive if also nightmare work of architecture wherein the three echelons are segrigated by time and space, with First Space being allowed the most access. Not only does Lao Dao have to sneak past surveillance (which, come to think of it, would be nigh superhuman on its own) but he also has to navigate a city that has literally changed its shape around him. The scene where Beijing changes for the first time is a money shot and the most evocative part of the story; it kinda just peaks right there, which is weird because we’re only about a third into it.

Getting to Second Space would be easy enough, as was getting the message. Quin Tian is willing to pay a huge sum for a message to be sent to Yi Yan, a woman in First Space he is deeply fond of, and twice as much money if Lao Dao can get a message from Yi Yan back to him. Basically, Lao Dao has to go from Third Space, wait a whole 24 hours for First Space to go through its cycle, then meet at Second Space, then wait through Third Space’s cycle before getting to First Space. (Who’s on First Space? Sorry.) If this sounds a little convoluted, don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

There’s a weirdly specific genre of storytelling that may as well have (although it probably didn’t) originated in Italian Neo-Realist films. To indulge my film buff side and drop some of my baggage on you, “Folding Beijing” reminds me more than a little of Bicycle Thieves, which has a very similar premise and sequence of events: a put-upon father has to help his child but is forced to venture outside the law when his livelihood is threatened, with tragic results. See also the much more recent Wendy and Lucy, in which a woman (implied to be homeless) has to choose between taking care of her beloved dog on a shoestring budget and putting her in more capable (i.e., slightly less impoverish) hands. In all three stories money is the driving force of the conflict; without it there would be no plot. “The soul of man under capitalism” is fitting for all three.

Needless to say that the Beijing of the story is not the socialist paradise that certain people desperately want China in the real world to be, and which China in the real world is seemingly averse to bringing about.

There Be Spoilers Here

I’m not terribly interested in recounting events in the latter of the story, so I’ll use much of this space to go on a related tangent. “Folding Beijing” is no doubt a dystopian narrative, which makes it just one more entry in a very long (and honestly tired) line of dystopian science fiction. Dystopian SF is, to my mind, the most overexposed and overrated subgenre of SF; it really can be quite tiresome with how much it’s read in schools and how much water it holds in the popular consciousness. 1984 is a more respected (and itself overrated) work of literature than the genre it belongs to. If SF wants to be taken seriously by naysayers and academics it’s all but required to come packaged in a box which reads “DYSTOPIA” instead of “AMAZON.” The Last of Us (both the video game and the TV show) is taken seriously seemingly on the basis that it’s dystopian SF, therefore it’s serious SF. The world presented is dogshit (i.e., worse than ours), therefore we respect it.

Anyway…

Something I’ve realized is that it’s impossible to write dystopian fiction without also writing self-criticism. There’s no such thing as writing a dystopian SF where the society presented has absolutely nothing to do with the society the authors lives in, where the society presented can’t possibly be an “if this goes on” scenario. George Orwell wrote 1984 in reaction to Stalinisn, yes, but he also wrote it because he feared the UK devolving into (more) authoritarian capitalism and becoming akin to that other country he loathed very much. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in reaction to the creeping ubiquity of technology in people’s lives which (he thought) would choke off intellectualism and freedom of expression. (The prominence of television, then-newfangled tech, in the novel and how it relates to characters losing their capacity to think actively, should tell you where Bradbury is coming from.) Similarly to Fahrenheit 451, “Folding Beijing” is basically an anti-technology narrative.

Now, when we call someone a luddite, we use as shorthand for the “old man shakes fist at cloud” meme, but when I call Jingfang a luddite, I’m using it in the proper sense. There are two sides to the robot debate with regards to human employment: the first side says that automation will free people to do as they please and indulge in creative endeavors they otherwise might not have been able to; the second side raises the question of, “What would happen if you had millions of people only really fit for unskilled labor who one day found that unskilled labor taken over by automation?” Jingfang very much falls on the latter side. Beijing is a city of about 80 million people where a sizable portion of those people don’t have work to do and there’s very little room for upward mobility. A good fraction of the population works in waste disposal because that’s basically the only job they can do; meanwhile a small fraction reaps the benefits.

And even the human-driven waste disposal is in jeopardy of being replaced.

Rather than free people to live the lives they want, automation has helped create an incredibly rigid class system in which the rich use the city as a playground and dump their waste on those who (quite literally) live on the other side. And yet, while Lao Dao’s experience in First Space is traumatizing, there is a ray-of-hope ending, with him not getting thrown in jail and even bringing home some money for his daughter—albeit not the amount he had originally sought. Personally I found the ending unsatisfying, if only because by the time we get to it Jingfang has thrown so much exposition at us that the plot starts feeling like a sideshow. She does a lot telling rather than showing, whether it be someone projectile vomiting exposition at Lao Dao or the reader being subjected to chunky paragraphs of characters telling their life stories—characters who, mind you, appear once and never again. This is a short story and not a novella, sure, but it’s bloated.

A Step Farther Out

“Folding Beijing” winning the Hugo when it did must not have seemed like coincidence, given that Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem in its English translation also won the Hugo the previous year. If SF in the 2010s was defined by anything (aside from, ya know, the Sad Puppies and that whole debacle) it’s the rise of Chinese SF in the Anglosphere. I reckon “Folding Beijing” appealed to voters because it has a robust human interest plot that’s buoyed by an admittedly pretty neat idea, but the important thing is that said pretty neat idea is not just there to look cool in the reader’s mind: it illustrates the story’s central conceit effectively. That it’s also outwardly ambivalent about China’s future (i.e., that China will only become more of a hyper-capitalist shithole under the current regime) probably didn’t hurt. As for myself, I’ve seen this sort of thing done many times before, and more concisely, even if I agree with Jingfang’s conceit.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard (Part 1/3)

January 27th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, September 1934.)

Who Goes There?

Robert E. Howard is one of the most important practitioners of fantasy in the genre’s history, and this is impressive when you consider not only how young he was when he died but how much he wrote in that short time. He debuted in 1924 and wrote at a truly terrifying rate until his death by gunshot wound in 1936, with a slew of completed works and outlines in his wake. Among the authors who frequented Weird Tales in the ’20s and ’30s, Howard had to be one of the five most popular contributors to that magazine, not to mention one of the most prolific. Whether it was fantasy, horror, or the Western (though, oddly, not science fiction), Howard did it all, and with a zeal that few could match. Whereas others authors had maybe major series under their belt, Howard had several, and one of these would come to define a subgenre: Conan the Cimmerian, more popularly known as Conan the Barbarian.

Conan is the single most famous sword-and-sorcery character of all time, and he wasn’t even Howard’s first attempt at creating such a figure (see Kull the Conqueror); rather he was the final synthesis of Howard’s developing philosophy on man’s relationship with civilization. Hailing from a distant alternate past where sorcery and devilish creatures reign, Conan is both a classic anti-hero and Howard’s ideal man: a nomad, a man who doesn’t take orders, a man who can fight his way out of anything, and yet a man who is articulate and thoughtful despite his brawn. “The People of the Black Circle” was the longest Conan adventure published up to that point; the series had been going on for two years and would only last two more under Howard’s watch, ending with his suicide, until the scavengers came…

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 was published in the September 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. I do believe this is also the first story I’ve covered that’s on Project Gutenberg! That’s right, you have no excuse to not read this, unless you just don’t feel like it. And since it’s a Conan story, and one of the big ones at that, you won’t have a hard time finding it in print at all. With that said, the go-to choice would be The Bloody Crown of Conan from Random House Worlds. They put out a series of Howard collections and this is just one of several Conan collections, never mind Howard’s other work. I actually have the paperback for his horror fiction, and if that one is anything to go by these paperbacks are sturdy, thick, and heavy. Like physically heavy. Your wrists are gonna be sore after a while.

Enhancing Image

Of the Conan stories I’ve read (this is like the fourth or fifth one), this one has easily the best opening scene in my opinion. We start in the kingdom of Vendhya, the in-universe equivalent of India, where the king is on his deathbed and his sister the Devi Yasmina is by his side. However, the king is not dying via natural causes; rather he’s been cursed, by the Black Seers of Mount Yimsha, presumably the people of the black circle. The king, whose soul is bound to eternal damnation by the curse if something doesn’t kill him before it can take him, begs Yasmina to take his life and save his soul, as he’s too physically weak to do it himself. In tears, but know what she has to do, Yasmina kills her brother’s body but saves his soul.

It’s a tense and delightfully macabre opener, but more importantly it’s an effective establishing moment for Yasmina, the heroine of the story and arguably the true protagonist. This is not your typical “screaming wench” of old-timey fantasy—this is a woman who, though she may get emotional, will take action and will not take shit from anyone. Her establishing scene is so good that I can forgive the fact that Howard can’t help but mention her ~~mammaries~~ ~~mommy milkers~~ ~~titties~~ breasts a couple times. The king’s death begins the plot, the ball only really gets rolling because Yasmina vows to avenge her brother and take on the Black Seers. This will, of course, be a massive and dangerous undertaking since the Black Seers are a league of incredibly powerful wizards, capable of cutting down a man from halfway around the globe. To take down these sorcerers will require cunning, might, and the will of an unstoppable man. Hmm…

Across the series we see Conan in a variety of occupations, from mercenary to pirate to bandit and generally anything that’s not all too reputable. Here we get word of him as the leader of a band of marauders, although he remains offscreen for a bit. Yasmina speaks with Chunder Shan, the governor of one of Vendhya’s provinces, about finding a man who may be able to enact her revenge. The good news is that Conan’s men have been captured recently and are waiting for execution, which makes them ample ransom material for Conan to join Yasmina; the bad news is that this news will undoubtedly piss off Conan, and Conan is not a man to piss off. I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong for Yasmina or the governor.

A couple scenes go by and you may notice that Conan has not shown up yet. This is not unusual for series. These stories are episodic in nature, with perspective characters usually not being Conan, but rather people with their own self-contained plotlines, never to appear again by virtue of dying or by simply never running into Conan a second time. The perspective shifts around here quite a bit, impressively so considering how short this installment is (about 10,000 words, if even that, the norm for Weird Tales serials), but ultimately Yasmina is the closest we have to a lead figure and it sure as hell is her story. None of this is a problem, since Howard has an almost supernatural ability to draw the reader’s attention, even when you’re unsure if he has everything worked out in advance.

I mean really, Afghulistan is Afghanistan? Iranistan is Iran? Who writes this shit? At least Vendhya for India is slightly more clever.

Anyway, a lot of misconceptions fly around because of how Conan’s been interpreted in other media, and admittedly I still get taken back a bit when reading one of the original Howard stories. I love Arnie and all, but his version of Conan barely fucking resembles the guy except maybe physically, and only if you’re staring through an empty beer bottle. Conan has become popularly thought of as a big dumb Germanic dude who barely talks, but in the Howard stories he’s a surprisingly articulate but still strong and nimble Celt; that last part is a bit of self insert hijinks considering Howard’s own Irish background. But no, Conan is not just dumb muscle, although to call him an anti-hero almost feels like a stretch; he comes off good because the people he faces off with are orders of magnitude worse.

We actually get a physical description of Conan when he decides to cut out the middle man and pay the governor an unscheduled and rather direct visit. You can see with your mind’s eye where Frank Frazetta’s legendary paintings of the man might have come from.

The invader was a tall man, at once strong and supple. He was dressed like a hillman, but his dark features and blazing blue eyes did not match his garb. Chunder Shan had never seen a man like him; he was not an Easterner, but some barbarian from the West. But his aspect was as untamed and formidable as any of the hairy tribesmen who haunt the hills of Ghulistan.

Things quickly get more complicated. Yasmina comes in and catches Conan and the governor in a behind-locked-doors conversation, and being a perfectly reasonable man Conan snatches up Yasmina and jumps the nearest goddamn window like it’s no big deal. Ah, the tables have turned! Yasmina, having offered Conan’s men as ransom, is now ranson herself, and in the arms of a man who will not be fucked with. ~~He’s kinda cute, though.~~ To make matters stickier Yasmina’s servant (who I don’t think is named in Part 1) runs off with plans of her own, conspiring with her boy toy Khemsa (who happens to be a wizard) to turn against the Black Seers and go after Yasmina themselves. Khemsa is an interesting character, and we’ll get back to him in a minute, but to complicate things even more we have Kerim Shah, a formiddable mercenary who was formerly in league with Khemsa but, upon overhearing the lovers’ plotting, seeks to strike out on his own.

At this point we have at least three factions with their eyes on the Devi, each for their own purposes, and honestly reminds me a bit of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, though obviously this is not a comedy. It is quite a fun time, though. In record time we’re introduced to an ensemble cast, on top of the sheer badassery of Conan himself, plus an exotic location, plus a MacGuffin of sorts, plus a sizable dose of intrigue. It’s a multi-threaded chase that’s maybe a bit overstuffed, but again, it’s consistently enthralling. Howard was not a refined writer, but somehow he found the energy himself to not only write with alarming speed but to convey that speed into the writing itself; the ffect is a wee bit intoxicating.

There Be Spoilers Here

Conan sometimes gets a love interest of the week; sometimes this translates to some woman who just needs rescuing and whom Conan will abandon as soon as she’s out of danger. To her credit, Yasmina is far from a nameless damsel, partly because, while normally a woman in her position would be captured by the villain of the week, Conan is the one doing the capturing here. Despite their circumstances, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where their relationship is heading, especially once Yasmina starts putting on the tsundere “it’s not like I like you or anything” act deep into Part 1. What makes the budding relationship fun to read is that both of these characters are tops—that is to say, they’re both dominant types. Conan won’t take any of Yasmina’s shit and Yasmina conversely won’t take any of Conan’s; at most she’ll keep quiet as a pragmatic decision.

And of course Howard can’t help but describe in loving detail how physically well-toned both parties are. Look, I’m bisexual, I’ll take it.

Just as curious is the subplot with Khemsa, a wizard and underling of the Black Seers who goes rogue and who may be more powerful than he would seem. There’s a bit of Orientalism at play here, with Khemsa sometimes being referred to as “a man in a green turban”—ya know, to remind the reader that he’s From the East™. Some racism at play, no doubt, but it’s not that bad unless you’re at the age where you don’t know where babies come from yet. What makes Khemsa interesting is that he’s a villain for sure, but he’s also doing this ~~for good pussy~~ out of love, and he’s also clearly not the biggest threat, though we do get hints of how terrible his power can be. A glorified redshirt who knew Conan from a previous adventure feels the wrong end of a wizard-conjured spider. Still, he’s one player in a much grander scheme who hopes to become something much greater than just a mook; you could say he’s the rare mook who gains self-awareness and takes matters into his own hands, and damn his masters.

Unlike the other Conan stories I’ve read, this one has a distinctly “exotic” set of locales, encompassing central Asia and the Middle East. again there’s some racism at play, what with Howard repeatedly comparing Conan’s handsome (albeit deeply tanned) whiteness with the rest of the cast, which to Howard’s credit this is a mostly POC cast, including the love interest. Howard’s writing on race and gender can be messy, not helped by the tragic fact that he died so young, but unlike Lovecraft, whose depictions of non-white folks (or hell, non-WASPs) are almost always cringe-worthy and whose representation of women in his fiction is next to zero, at least Howard tries. This was 1934, and SFF writers (with a few exceptions) even two decades later struggled to write women and non-white characters as inclusively.

A Step Farther Out

There are maybe one too many plot threads going on, considering how short it is, but this is a train with no brakes on it and I just bought a ticket. Howard, even when he’s phoning it in, knows how to move a plot forward at breakneak speed and intensiity, and “The People of the Black Circle” is pretty far from him phoning it in. We get an expertly crafted opening scene and Conan’s not even in that, and while it does take a bit for him to show up, that’s by no means a bad thing as we’re given more time to know the supporting cast. The action starts right from the first page and it basically doesn’t stop, with gambit being piled on top of gambit and with characters plotting behind each other’s backs. Speaking of characters, some leading ladies in Conan stories are just there to be captured and then rescued, but Yasmina is much more thoroughly characterized than the norm, and one more example of how Howard is actually able to like, write women. Crazy to think about, I know. Howard’s ability to balance narrative momentum and characterization continues to astound me.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Cascade Point” by Timothy Zahn

January 24th, 2023

(Cover by Doug Beekman. Analog, December 1983.)

Who Goes There?

It feels weird to introduce Timothy Zahn, because he’s a somewhat famous author who’s famous for reasons that have nothing to do with this site. Zahn debuted at the tail end of the ’70s and quickly became a regular contributor to Analog Science Fiction under Stanley Schmidt’s editorship, and not surprisingly he also became a regular at Baen Books. Zahn’s fiction, from what I can tell, skews toward good old-fashioned space opera, but with more attention paid to character work than some of his fellows. What really gained Zahn recognition, though, was his attachment to the old Star Wars expanded universe, being perhaps the most prominent and most acclaimed author to write for that (now defunct) continuity. Thrawn, Zahn’s single most famous creation, is so beloved that he’s actually crawled his way into post-Disney buyout Star Wars properties. Zahn’s Star Wars cred is so prominent, in fact, that a lot of people seem unaware that he’s written things that have nothing to do with that franchise.

Not that I’m one to talk.

“Cascade Point” was the first story of Zahn’s that I’ve read, and so far it’s the only thing by Zahn that I’ve read. Don’t worry, I’ll fix that eventually. It was written during an especially prolific period for Zahn, and even nabbed him a Hugo (despite not getting a Nebula nomination) for Best Novella. Technically a reread, because I know for a fact I read it as part of The New Hugo Winners (see below), but I basically remember nothing about it from that first reading. In hindsight I think I just didn’t give it a lot of attention, which is a shame because I can see why readers at the time would’ve liked it a lot.

Placing Coordinates

The December 1983 issue of Analog is not on the Internet Archive. Not on Luminist, either. Same goes for any Analog issues after 1979. That’s right, if you want it you’ll have to buy a hard copy with dollars, pounds, shekels, and so on, which is what I did. Like I said, I try to read these stories as they had originally appeared unless it’s a reprint. What’s weird is that despite the Hugo, and despite Zahn’s status, “Cascade Point” has not been reprinted often. The New Hugo Winners, edited by Isaac Asimov and an uncredited (for some reason) Martin H. Greenberg, is easy enough to find used. That Doug Beekman cover is so good that they reused it for the first edition of Cascade Point and Other Stories, and I don’t blame them. Most interestingly (to me) it was bundled with Greg Bear’s “Hardfought” as a Tor Double, that series packaging Hugo- and Nebula-winning novellas together. Finally, if you want a reprint published in the 21st century we have The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, edited by Mike Ashley.

Enhancing Image

Pall (seems like a bastardization of “Paul,” but would be funnier and indeed is porbably pronounced like “pal”) Durriken has a fine enough job as the captain of the Aura Dancer, a space liner that’s not what you would call first-class. Durriken is not the most sociable of men, reliying most on Alana Keal, his right-hand (wo)man and the person onboard he gets along with the most. The plot involves a trip to the colony planet of Taimyr with a small number of passengers in tow, but we really get a quality-over-quantity deal here as two of the passengers, Rik Bradley and his psychiatrist Dr. Hammerfield Lanton, are a bit of an odd pair. These two, as it turns out, will cause some issues.

As you know if you’ve read enough science fiction, space travel is highly impractical at best; without faster-than-light travel or some way to cheat around spacetime it would years at bare minimum just to leave one’s solar system. Of course FTL as we understand it is impossible, something I suspect was considered true even in 1983, which of course did not stop authors from going with the “ceating around spacetime” option. Here, we have a series of warp points called cascade points, in which not only can ships basically teleport but also seem to intersect with alternate universe. Yes, this is another multiverse narrative, sort of, but the multiverse is not made as big a deal of as you would think. As far as anyone can tell a ship going through a cascade point is not liable to enter an alternate universe by accident—which is not to say it can’t happen…

Passengers and crew are supposed to take drugs that knock them out cold during a ship’s maneuvering through a cascade point, minding that these points are days apart; in other words, everyone goes unconscious except for the person piloting the ship. First-class ships like luxury liners can afford to have an autopilot installed for cascade point maneuvers, but the Aura Dancer is decidedly not first-class and so Durriken has to stick it out alone, every time, without losing his sanity. Given that it’s set far in the future, robots and computers play a shockingly small role in the literal mechanics of the setting. I’ll elaborate on this a bit later, but I’ll say for now that, looking back on it, this lack of computerization is one of those signs that this novella was not of its time, but actually before its time. It feels like a Star Trek episode, like from the ’60s, the original show—not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

So, about the cover. In case I didn’t make it clear before, I really like it. Some cover stories get covers that have little to do with the actual story, but this is not one of them. Sometimes with a cover story you can tell which scene exactly inspired the cover art, and in the case of “Cascade Point” it’s the first time we see the effects someone awake would experience when going through one of those cascade points.

Observe:

I will never understand how the first person to test the Colloton Drive ever made it past this point. The images silently surrounding me a bare arm’s length away were life-size, lifelike, and—at first glance, anyway—as solid as the panels and chairs they seemed to have displaced. It took a careful look to realize they were actually slightly transparent, like some kind of colored glass, and a little experimentation at that point would show they had less substance than air. They were nothing but ghosts, specters straight out of childhood’s scariest stories. Which merely added to the discomfort… because all of them were me.

Durriken sees alternate versions of himself when going through a cascade point, or rather the ghosts of different versions of himself since he can’t interact with them and they, conversely, are unaware of his existence. It’s a bit of a psychedelic effect, and it makes for a good illustration, but it’s not the root of the conflict; nay, the root of the conflict is people. See, Dr. Lanton is treating Bradley for neurosis, and Lanton has this brilliant idea to use the cascade points as a possible way to treat Bradley, keeping him awake through the multiverse hijinks. As you can tell, this is a horrible idea. Lanton is the closest the story has to a conventional villain, although he’s less malicious and more laughably incompetent—so ethically dubious that I honestly have to wonder if he’s based on Eugene Landy. Hmm, Lanton, Landy…

Lanton’s ideas about treatment are so obviously bad that even Durriken feels the need to point it out; but then, Lanton is a paying customer and a passenger on Durriken’s ship. The human drama comes from Lanton’s treatment methods but also some equipment he brings aboard that a) he didn’t consult any of the crew about in advance, and b) might contain materials that could interfere with the ship’s delicate maneuvering balance. For instance, if some device Lanton brought aboard just so happened contained a specific and rather rare metal that would throw the ship’s cascade point maneuvering off—well, you can guess what might happen. For now, thought, the big problem is simply dealing with the asshole and also making sure Alana, who has a history of falling in love with her “patients” (it’s a good thing she’s not a nurse), doesn’t get too attached to Bradley.

You have the relationship square of Durriken, Alana, Lanton, and Bradley; there are other characters with names, but you’re not gonna remember them. Would pose a problem if this was a novel, but being a 20,000-word novella leaves only so much room for character, and the characters Zahn does focus on are pretty fun to read about, even if some of their antics can wander beyond the realm of plausibility. I seriously doubt, for one, that Lanton would be a licensed psychiatrist who’s allowed a seemingly endless supply of drugs and gadgets; maybe it would’ve been plausible in 1983, given changing medical practice standards, but certainly not now. Alana, while she’s charismatic, is also a bit of a satellite, with her relationship with Bradley dominating her character for most of the story.

Durriken is a fun protagonist, though, which is good considering he’s also the narrator. Writing a first-person narrator is always a dangerous game, because as a reader you’re basically sitting down and having a one-way conversation with this person for however many minutes or hours. Thign is, the person spewing words at you could be a real annoying prick, but thankfully Durriken has just enough of a sense of humor without detouring into asshole territory. His objections to Lanton’s methods are super-reasonable (a little too understated, if anything) and it’s clear that he cares about his crew and his ship while also wishing he could have a better life for himself. Seeing alternate versions of himself is disorienting just visually, but it’s also unnerving for him to think about all the ways his life could’ve gone better or worse. Not too philosophical, but it’s fine character work.

There Be Spoilers Here

Early in the story we hear, rather passively, that ships have occasionally gone missing mid-voyage; no wreckage or signs of piracy or system failure, but rather ships just straight-up vanishing into thin air. The Aura Dancer is a secured vessel, but the fact that these vanishings remain unexplained doesn’t help Durriken’s conscience. He’s right to be worried, too; turns out Lanton brought aboard a gadget with a certain rare metal inside it that would mess with the ship’s cascade point maneuvering, requiring compensation, but more importantly it sends the ship more off-course than anyone could’ve expected. When we finally get to Taimyr we find… nothing. Nobody waiting for the ship. No buildings. Not even the remains of buildings. It’s as if the world had never been colonized, which gets Durriken thinking…

Basically, the Aura Dancer hopped into an alternate universe where Taimyr remains uninhabited. Thanks a lot, Lanton! Keep in mind that the situation is more complicated than I’m letting on, but that’s the gist of it. “Cascade Point” is arguably hard SF, but it’s such a loaded term that it could apply to anything that has even the most tenuous connection to real science. I’m not a scientist or someone with a background in physics (I majored in film studies) so I’m just the kind of person Zahn would cater to when he goes on about Ming metal and cascade points and other invented nonsense. My general rule is that if a story’s science can’t be easily disproved by a middle schooler then it’s fine enough for me, I usually won’t get hung up on inaccuracies, in which case “Cascade Point” passes easily.

What’s important is that with the heightened stakes, the character drama intensifies. There’s a bit of romantic tension between Durriken and Alana, on top of Alana’s deal with Bradley, but luckily Zahn keeps their relationship platonic; they’re very good friends and it’s clear that they trust each other more than anyone else on the ship. So what’s the solution? To make a long story short, going backwards. There are extra steps, but again, that’s the gist of it. Crazy. How come nobody’s done this before? Well, as far as we know anyway. The potential for ships to hop across universes is pretty vast, a vastness that’s only hinted at here. The ending is rather happy-go-lucky with Durriken saving the day and Alana giving him a figurative pat on the back, albeit Lanton gets away with his idiocy. Disappointing.

The very last scene is pretty good, though. It brings closure to Durriken’s character arc while giving us something genuinely heartwarming. Not necessary from a plot angle, but I’m glad Zahn included it.

A Step Farther Out

I chose this for review partly because it’s one of those stories where I’m pretty sure I didn’t give it the attention it needed the first time around, and partly because I thought it’d be interesting to read/review it in close proximity with “Hardfought,” since the two were reprinted together at one point. It’s curious to read these two so close together, because aside from being spacefaring hard SF by “macho” ’80s authors, they have very little in common, and their goals are also quite different. “Hardfought” is honestly one of the most impressive pieces of science fiction at any length that I’ve read in a long time—a genuine effort on Bear’s part to write from the future as opposed to simply about the future. “Cascade Point” is considerably more straightforward and less ambitious, which means it goes down easier but there’s less to think about. The cliche about the Hugo winner being the crowd-pleaser and the Nebula winner the “literary” choice is more often untrue than not, but it’s pretty accurate here.

Which is not to say “Cascade Point” isn’t an effective crowd-pleaser. It’s old-fashioned, and it arguably would’ve read as that even at the time, but Zahn knows what he’s doing. I’m a sucker for narratives set on ships, bonus points if there’s good crew dynamics, and this is a good one. It’s a classic Analog narrative in that it’s ultimately a “problem” story: there’s a scientific problem, usually an anomaly, and Our Heroes™ have to solve it. The ingenuity of man triumphs. Like I said, this feels like it could’ve been a Star Trek (specifically TOS or TNG) episode, and not a bad one. Just set your expectations for something that’s pleasing but not mindblowing.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg (Part 3/3)

January 20th, 2023

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, June 1970.)

Who Goes There?

As author, editor, and fandom personality, Robert Silverberg is indispensable. It’d be very hard to make sense of SF’s transition from the pre-New Wave ’60s to the debauchery of the New Wave without taking Silverberg’s talent and influence into account. His original anthology series New Dimensions published seminal works by the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jr., and in the late ’60s and early ’70s Silverberg wrote an almost superhuman sequence of novels that would be enough for most authors’ whole careers. He won a Nebula with A Time of Changes (which I’ll no doubt review eventually) and his 1972 novel Dying Inside is easily one of the ten best SF novels of the ’70s; the fact that it didn’t win a Hugo and/or a Nebula is scandalous. The Tower of Glass (minus the definite article in book form) is from this sequence of novels, and how does it hold up with the admittedly stiff competition upon finishing? Let’s see…

Placing Coordinates

Part 3 was published in the June 1970 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. If you want it in book form it’s not hard to fine used online at all. As for the serial, I do wanna warn you that it is unusually long compared to the previous installments; indeed it might take up damn near half the novel, which I made the mistake of trying to get through basically in one sitting. The wonky pacing might’ve skewed my opinion on the third act of this novel is all I’m saying.

Enhancing Image

The drama with Cassandra Nucleus, the android Leon spaulding had mistakingly killed at the end of the previous installment, is resolved without much fanfare: Krug signs a contract to reimburse the company that owned Cassandra, and the civil suit is dropped. Hell, Krug can afford it. For Krug, the biggest thorns in his side have seemingly been taken care of and he can return to focusing on the tower, which at this point he might care more about than his own son. Not that anyone can blame Krug, really; his son Manuel is a bit of a chump.

Something that gradually and undeniably becomes a problem with this last installment is that Silverberg a) gives into his need to be edgy a little too much, and b) feels the need to end the novel on a BANG despite so much of it being a low-key character-focused drama. I was intrigued up to this point despite there being very little in the way of action, but Silverberg is about to ramp things way up—and not necessarily for the better. His side gig as a writer of erotica also rears its ugly head with quite literally any scene involving Lilith Meson, Manuel’s android mistress and SPOILERS! part of a con to make him become a human spokesperson for android equality. Lilith and Thor Watchman have been scheming to make Manuel a player for their team, with Lilith actually having feelings for Watchman and not Manuel. Or maybe she has feelings for neither. It’s hard to figure what her deal is.

There’s a lengthy (it feels longer than it is) sequence where Lilith dresses Manuel up as an alpha android (that’s right, Manuel, presumably a white man, technically parades around in redface) and he gets a taste of what it’s like to live as an android. The experience is more than a little traumatizing. On top of the dozen other things going on in this novel, Silverberg digs deeper into the caste system among androids, between the alphas, betas, and gammas, with gammas being the least intelligent and most expendable. We travel though a gamma ghetto and it’s all rather grotesque—and yet somehow it also feels of little consequence. It’s during this sequence that Silverberg introduces yet more things, including a drug that slows down one’s sense of time and which a lot of gammas are hopelessly addicted to. Don’t think about it too hard, it doesn’t really come up again.

We get multiple sex scenes with Lilith here, which on the one hand must’ve surely struck magazine readers in 1970 as transgressive, but the problem is that they really aren’t necessary, and also, to be a little more blunt, Silverberg’s not very good at the writing porn thing. If I have to read about “breasts” (that specific word) in my SFF ever again for the next week I’m going to [YASS] myself. Silverberg is excellent at writing about the male psyche but far less convincing when trying to capture “the woman’s angle,” which is where things get ugly. Either you accept it or you don’t. Silverberg at his best is able to make you forget about his limitations and instead make you think the same things he’s thinking about, namely stuff involving identity, religion, existentialism, the works. Silverberg in erotica mode is nothing I want, though, although like I said it must’ve been more eye-catching at the time.

Anyway, as for Krug we still have at least three issues: the tower, the prospect of getting granchildren out of Manuel and Clissa, and lastly this weird little subplot that I could’ve sworn was not introduced in previous parts involving a spaceship. On top of building the tower to communicate with the mysterious alien signal coming from that distant star, Krug is also sending what almost amounts to a generation ship full of androids in that direction, although given the nature of space travel and time dilation he would not live to see the passengers arrive at their destination. The move feels like desperation on Krug’s part, but also on Silverberg’s; it’s like Silverberg added this thread at the last minute for the sake of getting the ending he wants. I’m not even sure what the androids onboard are supposed to do when they eventually get to where the signal’s coming from.

It’s not all bad. Even taking the awkward sex talk into account, anything with Thor Watchman is destined to be at least readable. His newfound religious weariness from the end of Part 2 continues to ferment, and on top of that his relationship with Lilith, which up to this point had been professional, takes a much more intimate turn. The result is a love triangle that will naturally end with one of the players getting kicked out at the end, but who and how are questions yet to be answered. You may be wondering: How does Clissa figure into this? She doesn’t, really. Oh, I’ll get to her in spoilers, but I’ll just say for now that what Silverberg does with her—a character who’s been sadly underutilized for most of the novel—is objectionable.

If I sound unusually bitter with this final installment it could be that it’s easily longer than the previous ones, and also is much busier than the others. What was merely bubbling at the surface before is now bursting and making a mess everywhere, and it’s like Silverberg realized he created about five different subplots and has to resolve all of them in a novel that, in its book form, only clocks in at about 200 pages. Something I tend to like about pre-1980 SF novels is their brevity, how even if you don’t like what you’re reading you won’t be reading it for long, but The Tower of Glass is one of those rare good novels from the period that really could’ve been improved by expansion. Even an extra 40 or 50 pages, or in other words if this was a four-part serial instead of three parts, would’ve done it favors. Silverberg fits too many concepts into too small a space, and ultimately his economy of wordage works against him.

We’ve got an almost comically tall glass tower with a tachyon beam, teleportation, ego-swapping, a caste system of androids, a family drama, a love triangle, and a Darwinian nightmare future that’s more hinted at than actually shown. YA GOT ALL THAT? Okay, time to jump to the explosive climax, which I certainly have some thoughts about.

There Be Spoilers Here

He had considered it before, but Krug finally agrees to do a shunting session with Watchman, his top android. What could go wrong? Everything. The ego-swapping reveals not only Watchman’s con with Manuel but, more importantly, Krug’s disdain for being treated as a god. Which you can’t say is unexpected. Up to this point we’ve been unsure as to how “good” a person Krug is, but the climax certainly does not help his case, which makes his fate all the more curious.

Watchman’s faith, which had been on uncertain ground before, is now shattered, and as an alpha—not just an alpha but one heading the building of the glass tower—he has authority when he announces publicly that Krug is a false god. The result is utter disaster. Androids leave their posts, go on strike, and some even kill their human overseers. A worldwide revolt of androids begins, and Krug’s empire collapses in what seems like a matter of hours. Stretching one’s suspension of disbelief a bit here, but okay. Point being, everything goes to hell. Watchman sabotages the tower and overrides its various safety measures, causing it to collapse. Manuel barely escapes an angry android mob with Clissa getting fridged in an unnervingly unceremonious fashion. Right, so about that…

The women in The Tower of Glass really draw the short stick. Lilith loses Watchman at the end, with Manuel a nervous wreck, and Clissa gets apparently raped and butchered by androids offscreen. This is not it, chief. For one, I seriously find it hard to believe that androids would go after a human woman like this, but also, given the parallels Silverberg has drawn between the fight for android equality and the real-world civil rights movement for BIPOC quaulity (which was still very much going on when the novel was being writtne, mind you), this does not look good from an allegorical standpoint. Also, it’s a waste of character. Clissa’s outspoken sympathy for androids comes to naught, something even Manuel himself points out. Why introduce a character with this viewpoint if you’re going to not only barely use her but give her so shitty an exit? Againt this is like Silverberg was running out of time on the novel.

Going back to the spaceship that was only recently introduced, Krug uses it to escape the android rebellion, but also to cut out the middle man and travel to the distant planet himself. Again I’m not sure what he hopes to accomplish when he gets there, but then it might still be preferable to staying on what is quickly becoming a hellworld. We don’t know if the androids really will take over or if the humans will be able to fight back, but it doesn’t look good. In the span of about 20 pages The Tower of Glass goes from being a domestic, if intense, drama to being a tragedy of apocalyptic proportions. On an allegorical level it mostly works (as a religious and Freudian allegory, that is) but in execution it feels weirdly rushed and tactless by Silverberg’s standards. Surely he had considered a better way to tie all these subplots together, but deadlines might’ve forced him to compromise.

A Step Farther Out

Silverberg really let me down on this one, man. With reviewing serials I’ve found that the final installment will either make or break the whole thing, the latter more often being the case, and The Tower of Glass is sadly not an exception. There are sparks of that late ’60s and early ’70s Silverberg brilliance here, but I guess the saying is true: it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Comparing it to as refined a masterpiece as Dying Inside is almost unfair, one because of that novel’s quality, but its simplicity. Both novels are short, only about 200 pages, but Dying Inside is so much more focused and yet so much more intense, never mind more elegant in its usages of the tools at its disposal. I can see how readers were impressed enough by The Tower of Glass at the time that it got a Hugo nomination, although I probably would’ve voted for Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero that year. If you want a sample of what New Wave SF was like then you could do worse than The Tower of Glass, but it’s not even Silverberg’s best novel (or even probably his third best) attempt at this particular mode of writing.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Non-Zero Probabilities” by N. K. Jemisin

January 17th, 2023

(Cover by Andreas Rocha. Clarkesworld, September 2009.)

Who Goes There?

Assuming you’re “in the know,” you already know about N. K. Jemisin, by reputation if not by having read several of her many novels. With that said, a bit of an introduction is in order, for me if no one else. Jemisin is so far the only author to have won the Hugo for Best Novel three years in a row, along with the only author to win the Hugo for Best Novel for all three entries in a trilogy. (Vernor Vinge won with three consecutive novels, but said novels were all published several years apart.) The Broken Earth trilogy, a fantasy series with a dying Earth setting, did all this, along with the third entry, The Stone Sky, winning a Nebula. While her career is still very much in progress, Jemisin stands as one of the most acclaimed SFF authors of the past decade, and has achieved that certain status that the vast majority of authors crave: to be a critical darling and a regular bestseller. “Non-Zero Probabilities,” an early short story from Jemisin, was also a Hugo and Nebula finalist.

I’m ashamed to say that prior to doing this review I’ve not read a single word of Jemisin’s fiction. Sure, I’ve checked out her blog, and I follow her on a certain social media platform that has a bird for a logo, but the thing with Jemisin (this is not a criticism, please don’t kill me) is that she sure loves her series. On top of the aforementioned Broken Earth trilogy we also have the Inheritance trilogy, which I actually saw an omnibus edition of at a Barnes & Noble the other day; the thing was fucking HUGE. Most recently we have The World We Make, which came out last year from Orbit, as the sequel to The City We Became. Jemisin has yet to write a novel that’s not part of a series or franchise, so either I wait for her to write a standalone novel or I get over my fear of commitment and give one of these a shot.

Placing Coordinates

“Non-Zero Probabilities” was first published in the September 2009 issue of Clarkesworld, and you can read it for free online here. Check out also the magazine’s podcast reading of the story here. Despite the Hugo and Nebula nominations (along with being a damn fine story), “Non-Zero Probabilities” has not been reprinted much, although you can easily find a print version of it in the Jemisin collection How Long ’til Black Future Month? Jemisin has not written a great deal of short fiction over the years, with How Long ’til Black Future Month? collecting the vast majority of it, and she has not published a short story since 2019. The good news is that several of those stories have appeared in various online magazines, which means we’ll be seeing her on this site again… eventually…

Enhancing Image

Adele (no, not that one) is your standard quirky biracial (half black, half Irish) woman, although her situation as of late has not been standard. New York has been caught in a sort of bubble where statistically unlikely things have been happening with frightening regularity—for both good and ill. One of the first things we see is a shuttle train being derailed and killing bare minimum a couple dozen people—a horrifying accident that normally would be unthinkable but which recently has been inexplicably allowed into existence. “The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time.” Incredibly unlikely yes, but not impossible. This is by no means an isolated incident; miraculous things have been happening constantly, but only in this finite space.

“It’s only New York, that’s the really crazy thing. Yonkers? Fine. Jersey? Ditto. Long Island? Well, that’s still Long Island. But past East New York everything is fine.”

At least my home state has not been affected!

New York has been transformed, sort of cut off from the rest of the world, in a way that’s not seen so much as experienced. I’m reminded very much of Bellona, that isolated wasteland (or wonderland, depending on how you look at it) of Samuel R. Delany’s mammoth novel Dhalgren. If you’re even remotely familiar with that novel and are worried that “Non-Zero Probabilities” might approach that level of opaqueness, fear not, this is basically a comedy. A rather dark comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. The fact that it’s set in New York, one of the world’s biggest punching bags, and not say, fucking Cleveland, makes the hijinks hit much harder. Granted, there’s a bit of an out-of-pocket comment made about Bangkok being “pedophile heaven,” which is a little… culturally insensitive perhaps; there’s also a joke about Chinese knockoffs, which might’ve been a fresh joke then but just feels tired now. But the insensitivity is all in good fun, and boy does this story have fun with the sheer lunacy of its premise.

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to call “Non-Zero Probabilities” fantasy or SF, given that the scientific “explanation” is only mentioned in passing and is not even confirmed to be the cause of the bubble. People who normally would not be superstitious have started taking good luck charms seriously, and conversely doing away with things meant to represent bad luck. It’s a bad time and place to be a black cat. Hundreds of thousands of people are set to gather together in Yankee Stadium and I guess push the bad vibes out of the city—although that would necessitate pushing out the good vibes as well. Sure, you could get absolutely fucked over in a convoluted series of accidents, but you could also win the lottery twice in a week. By the way, if you’re wondering if the mass prayer at Yankee Stadium will serve as the climax, just don’t think about that.

At 3,350 words this is probably the shortest story I’ve covered for the site, and it’s also a contender for the most plotless. Adele goes about her day, she meets up with a couple people she knows and they talk about the bubble that’s overtaken New York, and Adele herself does not get into any life-threatening situations. The stakes, at least from a certain angle, are low. We don’t get a plot so much as a series of happenings, which are both entertaining and logical extensions of a setting wherein the unlikely has become likely and there is no such thing as impossibility.

Question: Who would want to live in New York?

I’m not talking about the New York of the story, I’m just asking generally.

Anyway, this thing is highly readable and very short; it’s just long enough that you get a taste of what Jemisin’s doing but short enough that it doesn’t tire itself out as a comedy. It’s an episodic narrative where we get these short scenes that illustrate Adele’s character, the ways in which the city has changed, or both, often to comedic effect. The conflict does not involve Adele directly so much as a general question of science vs. superstition; on a micro level it has to do with Adele’s nominal Catholicism (ya know, the Irish in her) being challenged on two fronts, by a scientific anomaly on one and a supernatural force which may not be the Abrahamic God on the other; on a macro level it’s a question of whether “objective” reality is merely determined by numbers or if there’s an invisible hand orchestrating events.

It’s a bit of a thinker, but first and foremost it’s a slice-of-life comedy that’s constructed efficiently and written with remarkable confidence.

There Be Spoilers Here

This is a hard one to spoil, first because, like I said, it’s basically a slice-of-life narrative, but also because it doesn’t really have an “ending.” Now, not every story has to go out with a bang; it’s possible, occasionally even preferable, to leave things open, and “Non-Zero Probabilities” is one of those stories where I actually don’t mind the lack of closure. The question of whether the statistical anomalies are driven by science or superstition goes unanswered, but to answer that question, or rather to give us the answer, would probably be unsatisfying. Jemisin makes the wise choice of plopping us straight into this augmented New York for a few thousand words and then taking us out of it just as quickly, with a helpful dose of humor but also an air of mystery about what the city might become. Much like Dhalgren, like the Bellona of that novel, the mystery behind the anomaly is much more interesting than the possibility of finding a solution.

A Step Farther Out

A pretty good introduction to Jemisin’s fiction, although something tells me this is lightweight by Jemisin standards, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you want your short story of the day to be like comfort food. I also have to admit that as a fan of comedic fantasies in the Unknown tradition I’m predisposed to find the hijinks of “Non-Zero Probabilities” at least a little involving. Not all of the jokes work, but most of them do in my opinion, which is more than can be said of most comedic SFF. A lot of the humor of course has to do with Jemisin’s snappy narrator’s voice and the fact that she doesn’t waste time on flowery descriptions when she knows that’s not the kind of writing we’re here for. I can see why it’d be deemed a bit too minor to be included in best-of-the-year anthologies, but given its modest goals which it achieves with easy success, I liked it quite a bit.

See you next time.
The Observatory: Was 1953 the Best Year in SF History?

January 15th, 2023

(Childhood’s End. Cover by Richard Powers. Ballantine Books, 1953.)

Are we halfway through the first month of the year already? Aw geez, that means I gotta write something. I always have a few editorial ideas swimming around, but the question is always: When should I write these? A topic can be timeless, or it could benefit from being discussed at just the right moment. The right person in the right place can make all the difference, and the same goes for articles, even ones I’m not getting paid for. It’s January 15, 2023, which means two things: it’s a Sunday, and it’s also Robert Silverberg’s 88th birthday. Hopefully we can get a dozen more out of him.

I don’t consider myself a big Silverberg fan, at least not yet, but I do see his place as a constant in SF history as indispensable. I can’t think of anyone alive now aside from maybe Samuel R. Delany whom I would like to sit down with and interview for an hour more than Silverberg, for the simple reason that Silverberg has a nigh-endless supply of stories to tell—not stories as in fiction, mind you, but life stories, stories within SF fandom, stories about all the times he got rejected by editors and, naturally, the subsequent acceptances. This is a man who traded words with John W. Campbell, Anthony Boucher, H. L. Gold, Frederik Pohl, Ben Bova, etc., and lived to tell the tale. This man has attended every Hugo ceremony since its inception in 1953, since he was just old enough to be able to attend the Hugos, and that alone would make his memory a precious thing to back up on some hypothetical external hard drive for people’s memories, which are essentially their beings anyway.

And speaking of 1953…

I have a lot of anthologies on my shelves. I’m young and amateur, but still I think I have a good number. One of those is Silverberg’s Science Fiction: 101, which is a curious mixture of fiction anthology, writing advice, and memoir. I don’t think it’s in print anymore, sadly, but I do recommend finding a copy, as, regardless of how one may feel about Silverberg as a person, the fiction selected is of quite a high standard—some certified classics with a few deeper cuts thrown into the equation. Something I couldn’t help but notice, though, even if Silverberg didn’t bring it up himself, is that focus on ’50s SF in the anthology, and more specifically on a certain year. Of the thirteen stories included, five are from 1953, which one might think to be a little much, especially given that there are only two stories from the ’40s (C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” and Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain”). Yet 1953 is undoubtedly framed as a Big Year™ for Silverberg, which makes sense; he was just then starting to write SF in earnest, having lurked around long enough as a fan and now readying to make his mark on the field.

Science Fiction: 101 shows off short SF that meant a lot to Silverberg personally, mostly stuff published during a period in his life when he was making the jump from fan to professional. The slant towards 1953, however, only hints at just how prolific and remarkably high in quality that year was for a lot of people active in the field then. On multiple fronts, the field was rolling ahead at full speed, with the growing accessibility of paperbacks meeting halfway with a magazine market which was at the very height of a bubble—a bubble that, mind you, was about to burst, but in the moment it was at a point of critical mass, which meant a diverse market for writers who otherwise might struggle to get published in Astounding or Galaxy. In the US along there were well over a dozen SF magazines active in ’53, including Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Future Science Fiction, Science Fiction Quarterly, Worlds of If, Universe Science Fiction, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Space Science Fiction, and frankly almost too many more to count. We would not see this saturated an SF magazine market again until, well, now, but I’ll come back to that at the end.

There was something for everyone. If you wanted “literary” thinking man’s SF then Galaxy and F&SF scratched that itch tremendously; if you’re stubborn and like to read macho SF about psi powers then Astounding has your back; if you’re into planetary romance and generally adventure SF then there are a few options; if you like certain authors but wish you could buy even more of what they’re selling, then good news, those authors have probably sold to more magazines than you existed. And of course, if you’re one of those few sad fantasy readers in that weird point in time that’s post-Chronicles of Narnia but pre-Lord of the Rings then you’ll be pleased to know there’s a new fantasy magazine on the market: Beyond Fantasy Fiction, helmed by Galaxy‘s own H. L. Gold. And if that’s not enough, especially if you’re an avid book reader, the paperback market for SF is opening up big time, and that door will only open wider.

1953 was a great year to be Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and quite a few others. Dick and Sheckley had debuted the previous year, but 1953 saw these one-man writing factories pull out all the stops; you could probably make a top 10 list of your favorite Robert Sheckley stories from 1953 alone. It was also the year that Arthur C. Clarke, who had appeared from time to time in the American market previously, made his first big splash with American readers here, not just with the publication of Childhood’s End but also a slew of short stories that are still highly regarded, the most famous being “The Nine Billion Names of God.” Poul Anderson, who had been active for some years but had not made much impact, invoked F&SF‘s first serial with Three Hearts and Three Lions, forcing editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas to backpedal on their “no serials” policy.

When it came time for Hugo voters back in 2004 to partake in the Retro Hugos, all the aforementioned authors got at least one nomination, not to mention others getting in as well. I understand that the Retro Hugos are a controversial topic (Worldcon doesn’t even do them anymore, at least for now), but I find the idea admirable, and at the very least we get some deep cuts that deserve to be rediscovered on top of the usual suspects. The “1954” Retro Hugos, covering the best stuff to come out of 1953, might have, across all its fiction categories, the strongest of any Retro Hugo lineup. You’re probably thinking, “Voters are biased, they always pick either already-famous works or minor works by famous authors,” and that is basically true. For one I’m pretty sure the people who gave Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” the Retro Hugo for Best Short Story were thinking about the justly famous Twilight Zone adaptation and had not actually read Knight’s story; if they did they would deem it as minor. I’m also pretty sure Ray Bradbury was not the best fan writer of 1938, just call it a hunch.

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, October 1953.)

What makes the 1954 Retro Hugos different, however, is that the shortlists (never mind the winners) for fiction, regardless of category, are all but unimpeachable. Let’s take Best Novel as an example, because this really is a golden set of nominees. We have Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, and the winner with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. While not my personal favorite, Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most famous novels in all of SF; people continue to read it, it’s still being discussed quite actively, and it’s even taught in schools; it’s a stone-cold classic of the field and its win is deserved. With that said, you could literally pick any of these other novels and you wouldn’t really be wrong to do so. The Caves of Steel is arguably Asimov’s single best novel; Childhood’s End is a career highlight for Clarke, not to mention one of his most influential; More Than Human sees Sturgeon in rare good form as a novelist; and even the most obscure of the bunch, Mission of Gravity (Clement is one of those authors begging to be rediscovered), is a foundational example of hard SF.

All killer, no filler. You can’t say that with the Best Novel shortlist for any other Retro Hugo year, either because of nominees that are justly forgotten or because of nominees that don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. Yet the near-uniform excellence of the nominees here, as the best of 1953, tells me that it was a very good year indeed. A lot of people were active in the field at the time, but just as importantly, a lot of those people were producing damn good work that still holds up. There was filler, and there was retrograde SF that would’ve been considered old-timey in fashion even in 1953, but there was also so much treasure from so many different voices that the sheer level of quantity and quality is hard to ignore. It was even a good time to be a lady author, what with women like C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Margaret St. Clair, Andre Norton, Judith Merril, and others who have been sadly forgotten producing good work; we would not see this many women contributing to SF again until at least the ’70s.

Now, I admit, I have a ’50s bias. When I started reading short SF in earnest some years ago I mostly stuck to the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, with that middle decade especially getting attention. I have a real soft spot for SF from the ’50s, but not because it’s idyllic or puritanical or old-fashioned—it’s because the SF of that period is often not any of those things. The first serial I reviewed for my site was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, a sleazy novel about cold-blooded murder, prostitution, incest, and generally the dark side of a world where telepaths are the top 1%. A little more intense than what you’d expect for a novel published in 1952, and yet when the inaugural Hugos were held the following year Bester’s novel was honored with the first Hugo for Best Novel. Clearly writers and readers alike (at least enough of them) were daring enough in 1953 to think that a novel about the aforementioned cold-blooded murder, prostitution, incest, etc., was not only welcomed in SF spaces but could be considered a great work of literature. People seventy years ago were not as naïve as we like to pretend.

But that was, after all, seventy years ago, and of course 1953 is not the best year in SF history; there really cannot be a “best year” for a genre lauded for its capacity to change and adapt over time. The best year for SF hopefully has not happened yet. Yet certainly 1953 is emblematic of a specific point in time for the genre’s history, a time when the magazine market was booming, book publishing was on the rise, and we even get a few major “sci-fi” films that would help determine the genre’s cinematic power for the coming decade; more specifically I’m thinking of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The War of the Worlds, by no means perfect movies but ones which set a standard for the genre on the silver screen. The variety of voices writing SF in 1953 would also not be outdone for many years, and if we’re talking about short SF alone, we would not see such diversity again until the current era, what with several online magazines publishing works by people who would not have been heard even in that wonderland of ’53, whether because of their race, sexual orientation, or political leanings.

The future should always look better, and if it doesn’t then we should try to make sure that it does. There’ve been think pieces and discussions recently about the need for utopian SF, and why not? SF writers aren’t supposed to predict the future, but it’s possible to offer a blueprint for how people might be able to make a world wherein future generations will want to live. First, however, you need SF that’s thriving with quality works by quality people, and you can’t have that if the market has narrowed, where only so many outlets can only take so many voices. I shudder to think of a time when short SF has been basically locked out of discussion by virtue of so few short stories being published, which is why it’s such a good thing that the market is doing very well right now, and why such a level of diversity that we now see is to be treasured. If 1953 for SF represents anything it’s the same thing that 2023 for SF ought to represent: the promise of a good future.
Serial Review: The Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg (Part 2/3)

January 13th, 2023

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, May 1970.)

Who Goes There?

Robert Silverberg retired from writing fiction in 2015, but who can blame him? His output is so prolific and far-reaching that he wrote enough for at least three people; few things make the folks at ISFDB sweat more than organizing Silverberg’s bibliography, with his short fiction tracking quite literally in the hundreds, a good portion of it under several pseudonyms. Silverberg won a special Hugo in 1957 as a promising new writer (he began a few years earlier, but the dam only break in ’56) when he was barely out of his teens, and by the time he turned 25 he had a whole career’s worth of fiction under his belt. It was only after a short hiatus in the ’60s, though, that Silverberg started producing the work he is now most acclaimed for, including but not limited to a a rapid-fire series of novels written between 1967 and 1972, although only 1971’s A Time of Changes won a major SFF award. He won three Nebulas for his short fiction, however, including one for the mythical and emotionally stunning novella “Born with the Dead.”

The Tower of Glass (or just Tower of Glass as it’s known in book form) is one of those novels that was written at a time when Silverberg could almost do no wrong, and so far that level of quality has been met. Part 1 introduced quite a few characters and a lot of intrigue, yet it didn’t feel overstuffed; Silverberg forgoes long descriptions of places and people’s bodies in favor of getting to the meat of the matter and making it all very readable. Now, calling something “readable” feel like faint praise, because really most writing in a language you’re fluent in is “readable,” but Silverberg has a vigorousness that’s hard to match and which often makes his writing intoxicating. How well does Part 2 hold up? Stay tuned.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 was published in the May 1970 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Galaxy was in a bit of a rough state at this point, after Frederik Pohl stepped down as editor, but it was a pretty good time to be Robert Silverberg in the magazine; he had no less than four of his novels serialized in Galaxy between 1969 and 1972, and generally the serials that ran in the magazine during this period are more impressive than the short fiction. As with honestly too much of Silverberg’s output your best bet, if you want a book copy, is to look in the secondhand market, with the bright side being that used copies of Silverberg books are not hard to find.

Enhancing Image

I actually don’t have that much to say about Part 2, which with egards to any work of fiction can mean one of two things: either it’s really good in a way that is almost self-evident, not requiring a great deal of analysis, or it’s such a piece of shit that I don’t care to discuss it much. Part 2 falls into the former category, which probably wasn’t clear before. My gripes with the first installment has been all but removed, at least for now, on account of Silverberg focusing on certain characters and pushing others to the sidelines, at least for the moment.

For one, the female characters whom I felt before to be somewhat lacking in characterization play little to no part in this installment, which I guess is a fine enough solution. Lilith only appears in the final scene, and I don’t think Clissa even makes an appearance, let alone has a line of dialogue. We do get a new female character in the form of another android, Cassandra Nucleus, but she’s only in one scene, and as I’ll explain soon it seems that Silverberg thought her much more useful than alive. The result is that Part 2 is closer to being a sausage fest, which would be more of an issue if the male main characters weren’t so engrossing.

We still have our three-man band of Simeon Krug, his son Manuel, and Thor Watchman, although Watchman gets a good deal more screentime (pagetime?) than his human co-leads. It’s with Watchman that the novel zeros in on its themes, namely those of religion and racial equality; the religious understones in the first installment have now become overt, and Silverberg borders on sermonizing here, but thankfully he is quite the capable sermonizer. Ironic, I know. The glass tower that serves as the primary background for the novel has taken on a transcendent tinge, not just in its sheer size (its projected height is stupidly high), but its ambition, with astronomer Niccolo Vargas at one point calling it “the first cathedral of the galactic age.” Unbeknownst to Vargas, and even Krug, there’s an actual cathedral hidden away near the construction site—only this one is secret, and made for androids.

I said in my review of the first installment that Watchman is, if anything, overzealous in his loyalty to Krug; he sees him as a godlike figure. It’s only now, though, that we come to understand just how Watchman feels about Krug, the man, the idea of the man, as God made flesh for androids. Religious zeal, and the struggle to protect that faith, is the backbone of the conflict for Part 2, and it looks like it will boil over into the concluding installment. Very interesting. Everyone is being tried here in different ways: Krug, with his dream of making contact with an alien race; Manuel, with his conflict of interests as a very well-to-do human man who is hopelessly in love with an android; and Watchman, an android who is torn between his loyalty to his creator and his loyalty to his race.

An aside, but it took me a while to realize androids’ “last names” are often occupations. Thor Watchman, Siegfried Fileclerk, Lilith Meson (as in the particle), and Cassandra Nucleus. (Most likely androids are named either after occupations or having to do with physics. There’s another android, for instance, whose last name is Quark.) It’s as if androids are names after their capacity to do work—as if that’s the extent of their worth in the eyes of humans.

We also get a new gadget in this installment, whose application is yet to be seen, which is shunting. By some process that Silverberg doesn’t care to explain much (nor should he), shunting is basically ego-swapping, wherein two people can quite literally swap perspectives and walk around in each other’s bodies for a bit. A shunt room, where the action happens, sounds like one of those things that rich people use when they get bored, although there’s a hint it might be used to help the strained relationship between Krug and Manuel. Krug considers shunting with his son for a moment, but rejects it on the grounds that it would feel wrong, and in fairness to him the Freudian implications of such a device would be nigh-endless. Lucky for the both of them (or maybe not), there’s a much bigger problem that will soon arise and give Krug, at best, a major headache.

You see, the aforementioned android cathedral was built in secret, and not even Krug knows that his own androids worship him. The result of android religion being made public could be disastrous; therefore, presumably any measure necessary must be taken to avoid this becoming known to the human public. When Leon Spaulding, Krug’s private secretary and local test tube baby, comes close to finding out about the secret cathedral, the androids mislead him by saying Krug is in danger, which Spaulding naturally reacts to. What happens next is something that neither side could’ve predicted, and which will cause a great deal of pain for both of them.

There Be Spoilers Here

Krug gets confronted by two members of the AEP—the Android Equality Party. We have Siegfried Fileclerk and Cassandra Nucleus, the latter of whom will be dead in just a minute. I do have a question first, though: If androids are property then how do they hold political positions? Obviously their potential for upward movement would be limited, but it seems like if an android is able to be some congressman’s secretary then the likelihood of politicians becoming sympathetic to android rights would be very high. Actually there’s the unspoken question of how slave labor have become normalized once again in Western society, but given the awful things that have happened in recent years maybe it’s not that far-fetched. What’s important is that Krug is not happy to see these people; he even takes some issue with them calling themselves “synthetic persons.”

There’s some debate as to what exactly Krug thinks of androids (it doesn’t look good, mind you), but tragedy strikes before we can get a clear answer on that. Spaulding, under the impression that the androids are assassins, kills Cassandra Nucleus with a “needler” (yes, I’m thinking of the Halo games, although apparently a needler is not an uncommon name for a weapon in old-timey SF) while she’s only a foot or two away from Krug. The action is a real security hazard, but the real cause for drama is that Cassandra and Siegfried are not assassins, not to mention they’re property, which means Cassandra is damaged property. The court case with the company that owns Cassandra will no doubt empty Krug’s wallet a touch. The fallout among the androids proves more painful, though.

The highlight of Part 2 has to be the lengthy political discussion Watchman has with Siegfried after Cassandra’s death. Silverberg wrote this novel in the wake of Martin Luther King’s death and there’s this sense that he’s responding to what was then the unwinding of the civil rights movement, although curiously his characters do not mention said movement; they do bring up the American Civil War, and even the treatment of first-generation Christians in ancient Rome. Watchman is a pseudo-Christian who thinks his faith in Krug, his ability to withstand punishment, will help lead to android equality (how much Watchman actually believes in android equality is left ambiguous) while Siegfried is more proactive. It’s a political debate, but it’s also a religious one, which leaves Watchman with some questions about Krug’s character, along with his own faith.

His faith had not wavered before Fileclerk’s brusque pragmatic arguments but for a few moments, while they were thrusting and parrying beside the body of Cassandra Nucleus, Watchman had felt the touch of despair’s wings brushing his cheeks. Fileclerk had struck at a vulnerable place: Krug’s attitude toward the slaying of the alpha. Krug had seemed so unmoved by it! True, he had looked annoyed—but was it merely the expense, the nuisance of a suit, that bothered him? Watchman had riposted with the proper metaphysical statements, yet he was disturbed. Why had Krug not seemed lessened by the killing? Where was the sense of grace? Where was the hope of redemption? Where was the mercy of the Maker?

The installment ends with Manuel and his buddies getting word that an android had been killed by accident, with Krug involved. How could this escalate? We’ll just have to wait and see.

A Step Farther Out

The plot thickens.

My enjoyment of this novel goes up with each chapter; it gets better as it goes along. I’ve adapted myself to reading novels in serial format, more or less, but even by my standards this was a breeze. I got through about fifty magazine pages (or 75 book pages, to make a guess) in two sittings, and I got through most of it in the second sitting. Silverberg can write. He’s not exactly a poet, but he has the superhuman ability to get you wrapped up in his world when he’s on the ball, and The Tower of Glass (unless it fumbles in the third installment) is definitely Silverberg on the ball. He does the Philip K. Dick thing where he jumps around between different characters’ perspectives and puts us inside their heads so that we empathize if not necessarily sympathize with them, no matter how detestable their actions might be. Could he fuck it up at the end? Maybe. But I don’t think he will.

See you next time.