Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Serial Review: The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (Part 1/3)

November 5th, 2026

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, October 1953.)

Who Goes There?

The birthdate of Isaac Asimov is given as January 2, 1920, but this is almost certainly not the day he was born on—for one because his parents didn’t keep a record of his birth date, but also Asimov was born in Russia at a time when a different calender was in use; by his own admission he could’ve been born as early as October 1919. For the sake of his schooling in the US, however (Asimov moved with his family to the US when he was a toddler), his parents gave his birthdate as January 2, 1920, and it stuck. Then again, being slightly of indeterminate age would become a fitting trait for Asimov, as he excelled in schooling to the point where he graduated high school at just 15. No doubt Asimov was a prodigy, and while he eventually went to college to study chemistry, his “true” calling (or anyway what he would become most famous for) was in writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Asimov sold his first story while still a teenager, and his single most famous short story, “Nightfall,” was published when he was only 21. Arguably most of Asimov’s important fiction, at least at short lengths, was published by the time he turned thirty, namely the stories that would make up I, Robot and the Foundation trilogy. The ’40s and ’50s were an incredible time for Asimov creatively, resulting in some masterful turns like today’s serial, such that if somehow a meteorite were to wipe him from the face of the earth in 1960, his status as one of the greats would still be cemented.

At least posthumously Asimov is most known for his fiction, but when he was alive he gained more public notice (and I’m sure made more money) as a pop scientist who wrote books and articles for laymen. Before Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson (but not Carl Sagan), there was Dr. Isaac Asimov. It probably helped that Asimov was a very good public speaker, despite having social anxiety as a child and young man, who gave some pretty electrifying interviews. Another thing that “helped” was the fact that Asimov wrote very little SF in the ’60s, to the point where Harlan Ellison failed to coax him into writing a story for Dangerous Visions; but then Ellison’s efforts were not entirely in vain, as Asimov ended up writing two introductory essays for that landmark anthology. When Asimov finally wrote The Gods Themselves, his first SF novel in over a decade, reviews were ecstatic and he was awarded both the Hugo and Nebula that year—maybe as consolation awards, more than anything. Again Asimov’s SFnal output became sporadic for some years, until the ’80s, and not necessarily because of renewed creative energy. In December 1983, Asimov went through a triple bypass surgery, during which he received (unbeknownst to the doctors, of course) an HIV-positive blood transfusion. HIV/AIDS would not be made public for two more years, and the details of Asimov’s condition were only publicized after his death. The last decade of his life saw Asimov write prolifically for the first time since the ’50s, in part due to mounting medical bills, Despite his health failing, Asimov kept it up until the bitter end.

Going back to the prime of both Asimov’s life and career, The Caves of Steel is technically part of a series, taking place in the same universe as I, Robot and following the same (and famous) laws of robotics. (Yes, I know Asimov eventually conjoined the robot and Foundation universes, but I’m just gonna ignore that part.) Unlike I, Robot, which is really a collection of previously published stories with some interludes to connect everything, Asimov wrote The Caves of Steel as a novel from the beginning. This is a personal favorite of mine, at least going off of memory, which admittedly has been looking fuzzy as of late. Obviously a refresh is in order. But so far this novel is everything I remember it being, and then some.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1953. It appeared in book form as a Doubleday hardcover just a few months after the serial ended. I feel like I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but The Caves of Steel has consistently stayed in print.

Enhancing Image

Elijah Baley is a detective, rated C-5, with a wife and a teen son and maybe not enough money in the bank. Julius Enderby is Police Commissioner and also an old college friend of Baley’s, which is something of a double-edged sword, because Enderby has just given Baley the unenviable of solving a murder—only it’s not just any normal kind of murder. The victim is Dr. Sarton, a sociologist and, much more importantly, a Spacer. See, there are no aliens in this universe (not literally universe, but you know what I mean), so instead there are Spacers: humans who left Earth centuries ago to colonize other worlds. Spacers and Earthmen are separated by centuries of cultural differences, not to mention living situations. Spacetown is on the outskirts of New York, home to Spacers staying on Earth, and since Spacetown falls under New York jurisdiction, it’s up to New York police to solve this murder. For better or worse, Baley will not be solving this mystery alone, as the local authorities of Spacetown have assigned a partner, regardless of whether Enderby agreed with this or not. The partner in question is one of Asimov’s most vivid characters, named R. Daneel Olivaw—a humanoid robot. Baley is irate about this, but Enderby promises him a promotion all the way up to C-7, which he could really use.

If you know anything about The Caves of Steel then you know about the basic premise of a human detective and his robot buddy, and with good reason. Asimov had really struck gold with this idea, which would only mean so much if the execution was lackluster; but this novel sees Asimov in top form, with Baley and R. Daneel as two of his finest creations. The thing to keep in mind with Asimov is that his robots are almost always his most sympathetic characters, and there’s something to be said especially in the context of The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, where the understanding that robots are a marginalized group is made more or less explicit. Baley himself is also maybe part of a minority group, but we’ll get to that in a minute or two. This is all taking place in the context of a setting where anti-robot sentiment is commonplace, and not totally irrational. Maybe the single biggest social issue of the day is the place of robots in society—more specifically a society where people are packed like sardines. Small-c cities are a thing of the past, having long been replaced by big-C Cities, which are more or less fully autonomous self-enclosed urban units of truly massive size and population density. “To be sure, something had existed in the same geographic area before then that had been called New York City. That primitive gathering of population had existed for three thousand years, not three hundred, but it hadn’t been a City.” People living in Cities rarely ever see daylight, and in fact are unaccustomed to natural air.

While we’re here, it’s time to get my few quibbles out of the way before I go back to fawning over what this novel does very well. One point of criticism I can see being leveled at this novel is the emphasis on worldbuilding, at least early on, as opposed to the puzzle-solving we typically see in detective novels. Granted that these are a really fast sixty magazine pages (the pacing here is impeccable), a couple things become apparent, the first being that Baley is not a very good detective, and the second being that Asimov himself doesn’t seem terribly interested in the murder he had made up being solved. Even when I was a dumb teenager who had very little experience with detective stories, I got the itchy feeling that Asimov wasn’t terribly invested in the whole “mystery” aspect of his mystery novel. I also remember the final reveal being sort of underwhelming, but we’ll get to that much later, in a couple installments. Then there’s maybe the biggest sticking point for modern readers, if not for readers in 1953, which is the fact that despite taking place something like 3,000 years in the future, social norms and white-people slang have seemingly been frozen in time like flies in amber. Asimov constructs a compelling and plausible future society based around claustrophilia (as opposed to claustrophobia), but he didn’t predict that maybe smoking cigarettes and pipes in public might not be as socially accepted in this future as in 1953.

(Less a legitimate criticism, but even when I had first read this novel all those years ago I was taken aback by how Bentley, Baley’s son, talks like he belongs in a ’50s sitcom. Bentley’s dialogue struck me as unbearably goofy at the time, being [in my view at the time] the novel’s one real blemish; but I’ve seen seen and read enough media made in the ’50s that I have to think some white people really did talk like this.)

Reading The Caves of Steel as a fully “mature” adult humanoid has led me to appreciates things about this novel I hadn’t paid much mind before; in the case of the first installment, the biggest example of this is a scene going into the background of Baley and Jessie’s marriage. Jessie is one of Asimov’s more well-rounded female characters (admittedly the bar is low), even if her role in the story revolves around her relationship with Baley. Typically the heroes of detective stories are bachelors/bachelorettes, or in the case of Columbo married to a wife we never see, but Asimov takes a surprising amount of time establishing the fact that Baley is a family man with responsibilities. Like I said before, Baley’s name is Elijah, and meanwhile Jessie’s real first name is Jezebel, although she never goes by that. It’s unclear what religion Baley and his wife are supposed to follow, or if they’re even necessarily religious; it could be that like Asimov, who was raised Jewish but came to identify as an atheist, they approach the Bible firstly as literature. There’s a lengthy flashback scene where the two have a sort of argument over interpreting the Biblical Jezebel. It’s probable, but unconfirmed (at least going off of memory), that Baley is culturally if not religiously Jewish. The Spacers, we’re told, know about as much about the Bible as your cat would know about not scratching up your damn furniture, which is a curious cultural development. We’re to take that the Spacers, including R. Daneel, are atheistic. Such thoughts didn’t occur to me all those years ago.

Back to R. Daneel, the prime cause of conflict in the first installment is Baley’s discomfort with working with a robot who not only appears perfectly human from the outside but who also seems to be everything Baley isn’t; that is to say, whereas Baley is a mere man and not “the plainclothesman of popular myth,” R. Daneel “was that very myth embodied.” R. Daneel, being a Spacer-designed robot who appears to be sentient up to a point, is miles ahead of the robots on Earth, who from what we see are nakedly robotic and overly friendly. Baley, if anything, is overly hostile. R. Daneel, on the other hand, is stoic and not given to the flights of fancy that come to humans, and what’s more, he’s disguised as a human in New York; it’s important that nobody find out his true nature. Keeping R. Daneel’s role in the mystery-solving under wraps is another point of conflict that I’m sure (if memory serves me right) Asimov will keep running with. Of course, one thing R. Daneel literally can’t do that humans can is kill a human being, either through action or inaction. If you’ve read I, Robot, however, you already know there are loopholes in the laws of robotics and that things can (and in some cases already have) go amiss.

There Be Spoilers Here

Stay tuned.

A Step Farther Out

There’s a lot to be said about this novel, most of which will have to be saved for future installments. By this point Asimov had perfected the beige style of prose he’d become famous for, relying less on an “iceberg” theory of meaning and more wanting to convey large-scale ideas with very straightforward language. The style he uses for The Caves of Steel is actually not quite as minimal as what he used for, say, Foundation and its sequels, and unlike Foundation it’s easy enough to imagine The Caves of Steel being translated faithfully to a visual medium. We haven’t, nor might we ever get a movie based on this novel, but its influence on later SF in film and TV, from Blade Runner to The Big O, is pretty tangible. When reading serial installments I do typically have lock in and spend a lot of time reading, trying to pay attention, but I blazed through this first installment like it wasn’t a chore at all. I have a very good feeling about this rereading.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: November 2026

November 1st, 2026
(Cover by Gary Freeman, Asimov’s, April 1992.)

My return to writing reviews here was a bit rocky; of the eight stories I had set out to review for October, I only ended up writing about five of them. This has to be the worst average for me so far, but then I do call these monthly posts forecasts, and forecasts can be off the mark sometimes. As such, partly because of lagging behind and partly because this is still very much the season for spooky shit, we still have a couple horror stories to look forward to before the year is out. In practicve this is primarily an SF review blog, since historically that’s been the genre most represented in American and British genre magazines since the 1920s, but if SF is my “favorite genre” then horror is a pretty close second; it’s just that aside from Weird Tales in its prime (and of course its rivals like Strange Tales and Unknown, short-lived as they were), there’s never been that much of a magazine market for short horror fiction. Same goes for fantasy, to a lesser extent, for reasons that are frankly hard to make sense of neatly.

Something else had been bugging me for a long time, which was the question of when and how I would finally write about Isaac Asimov’s fiction. See, Asimov is a tough nut to crack these days, in part because of how divisive he is as a person (his famously massive ego and his now-infamous penchant for sexually harassing women at conventions), but also his legacy as a writer is up for debate. This might not be the case anymore, but there have been a few generations of SF fan who got into reading science fiction in earnest because of Asimov’s work, and this was also the case with myself. I had read several Asimov novels in high school and college, and even afterward I sometimes plundered the depths of his short fiction. He’s certainly the most famous member of the Futurians, to the point where I often don’t even see the fact that he was a Futurian mentioned when discussing his life story. The profound importance of Foundation and his robot series alone would guarantee Asimov’s place in the SF pantheon, but such importance also has its price. Obviously I’m not gonna excuse the man’s at-times awful behavior, but unlike, say, Robert Heinlein’s, whose novels (especially the later ones) have aged very poorly in places, I think a young reader can still easily get into Asimov’s work and find it enjoyable.

When I thought about what Asimov to tackle at long last, I came to the conclusion that it had to be a) something I’ve read before, albeit many moons ago at this point, and b) one of my absolute favorites of his. The answer, of course, was The Caves of Steel, which might be my single favorite Asimov novel (the Foundation trilogy works best as a whole, rather than as three separate novels, and I also don’t count I, Robot as a novel), but which I have not read since I was all of 18 or 19. Asimov had set out to write an SF-detective novel that would be both compelling and convincing as a detective story in an SFnal setting. This was a novelty at the time, you understand, when, going off of editors’ and authors’ opinions, there seemed to be the common sentiment that SF and detective/mystery fiction were like oil and water. Asimov set out to prove said sentiment wrong, and he was so good at it that he managed to pull it off at least twice (I’ll eventually cover The Naked Sun, The Caves of Steel‘s loosely connected sequel). This will be a trip down memory lane for me, but also a good read.

Now…

We have one story from the 1920s, one from the 1950s, one from the 1970s, one from the 1980s, and one from the 1990s. The oldest of these turned literally a century old this year.

Now, for the serial:
- The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1953. Asimov is one of the most important figures in 20th century SF, if also one of the more divisive, for the quality and sheer quantity of his work but also his public persona. Certainly Asimov’s famously beige style of prose is a love-or-hate-it deal, and Asimov himself has justifiably come under scrutiny in recent years for his—let’s say dubious relations with women, both fans and fellow authors. I don’t read much Asimov these days myself, but he was a formative writer for me in high school and college, and heck, it’s been about a decade since I had read The Caves of Steel. This is the first of two novels to feature the adventures of human detective Elijah Baley and his robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw.
For the novellas:
1. “Sanctuary” by Alan Dean Foster. From the November 1988 issue of Amazing Stories. Originally published under the pseudonym of James Lawson. People who have the misfortune of being Star Wars fans should know that Foster actually wrote A New Hope‘s novelization, albeit with George Lucas credited instead. He’s also made good money on writing many other tie-in novels, almost too many to count. On top of being mostly known as an author of tie-ins, however, Foster has written a good deal of original work over the years.
2. “Protection” by Maureen F. McHugh. From the April 1992 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. McHugh’s level of acclaim is inversely proportional to how much she’s actually written. She’s written only four novels, the most recent of which, Nekropolis, was published way back in 2001, and which is an expansion of an earlier short story. Yet her debut novel, China Mountain Zhang, is regarded by critics as one of the best debut SF novels of the ’90s. “Protection” itself, published the same year, was nominated for multiple awards.
For the short stories:
1. “The Night Wire” by H. F. Arnold. From the September 1926 issue of Weird Tales. This is a case of a story utterly dwarfing its creator, as “The Night Wire” has been reprinted many times over the past century, yet Arnold himself remains a totally obscure figure. We know his name was Henry Ferris Arnold and that he was born in 1902, and we can also infer he worked in news coverage.
2. “The Barrow Troll” by David Drake. From the December 1975 issue of Whispers. Drake died a few years ago, leaving behind a long and surprisingly diverse body of work. He became most known as a pioneer of military SF, first with the story cycle Hammer’s Slammers and its sequels, but he also wrote more than his fair share of horror and dark fantasy, of which this is an example.
Come along and read with me.
Short Story Review: “Remembering Melody” by George R. R. Martin

October 31st, 2026

(Cover by Jim Warren. Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1981.)

Who Goes There?

Happy Halloween, everyone.

How would we remember George R. R. Martin if, God forbid, an anvil had fallen on his head in 1983? Those in SF fandom would know him as one of the most distinguished post-New Wave voices, having made his break in the early ’70s with some very moody and atmospheric science fiction, with the occasional fantasy story thrown in there. He was a runner-up for the inaugural John W. Campbell Award (now the Astounding Award) for Best New Writer. He was, at least up to that point, the youngest ever to win a Hugo in any of the fiction categories, for his 1974 novella “A Song for Lya.” Said novella is just one entry in what came to be a rather loose future history known as the Thousand Worlds, which also includes The Dying of the Light, Martin’s debut novel. His second novel, if you wanna count it, was Windhaven, which he co-wrote with Lisa Tuttle over a number of years, although it’s almost more of a story cycle than a novel. Martin’s single most famous story, and one set in the Thousand Worlds, would have to be “Sandkings,” a Hugo-winning SF-horror (with some dark comedy) tale that’s been reprinted many times by now.

Of course, one thing Martin would not have been was a fundamental game-changer in the world of fantasy, both in literature and TV. A lot of people are unaware that Martin had already been a published (and acclaimed, though not exactly famous) author for 25 years when A Game of Thrones was published in 1996. In fairness, A Game of Thrones arguably marked the point when Martin broke through as a novelist, since up until then his novels were sporadic in quantity and frankly not quite on par with his short fiction in quality. His 1982 horror novel, Fevre Dream, is evocative and thrilling at times but suffers from a case of bloat, being over 400 pages and having at least three different places where it could’ve ended. Martin’s said, I think in both interviews and print, that he considers himself instinctively a horror writer, and indeed his horror short stories (he never could return to horror at novel length after Fevre Dream) are some of his best. “Remembering Melody” is not exactly major Martin, but it’s still thrilling, eerie, and very well-paced, so I consider it a good read.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. It’s since been reprinted in Great Stories from Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine (ed. T. E. D. Klein), Fears (ed. Charles L. Grant), A Century of Fantasy 1980-1989: The Greatest Stories of the Decade (ed. Robert Silverberg), and the Martin collections Songs the Dead Men Sing and the first volume of Dreamsongs. (There’s also GRRM: A RRetrospective, but this was split into the two-volume collection Dreamsongs.)

Enhancing Image

“Remembering Melody” is notable for a couple reasons: it’s the first GRRM story to have gotten a movie/TV adaptation (if you don’t remember the anthology series The Hitchhiker, don’t worry, I had no clue about it prior to yesterday), and also it was Martin’s first attempt at writing a horror story set in what was then the present day. While working on what eventually became Windhaven in 1979, Martin was apparently inspired by Tuttle’s success with writing “realistic” horror stories. Martin had written some horror by this point, most famously “Sandkings,” but these were all horror mixed with SF or fantasy, whereas “Remembering Melody” is pretty grounded for about 80% of the word count. Some months ago I reviewed “The Pear-Shaped Man,” a later story that more thoroughly explores the horrors that can lie waiting amidst everyday life, but how successful is tonight’s story by comparison? Well, it’s shorter, so there’s that.

Now with the plot, we have Ted, a thirty-something lawyer who’s made a good life for himself, if also a somewhat lonely one. The story starts with Ted getting a surprise knock at his door while in the midst of shaving, cutting himself, which is maybe a bad omen. Melody has arrived unexpectedly, and you could say she’s an old friend, although she and Ted haven’t spoken in a few years. When a friend (or former friend) you haven’t talked with or seen in a hot minute suddenly shows up at your door one day, you know implicitly that said friend will ask you for something; nobody wants to reconnect after years of no contact just because they miss the other person that much. It doesn’t help either that Melody looks like shit, and this is barely an exaggeration. Martin is not the most subtle of writers (especially when it comes to dialogue, must be said), but he’s able to tell us a character’s whole backstory just from how he describes them. The first time we see Melody is disconcerting. Get a load of this:

The last time Ted had seen [Melody], three years before, she’d looked terrible. Now she looked worse. Her clothes—shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt—were wrinkled and dirty, and emphasized how gaunt she’d become. Her ribs showed through plainly; her legs were pipestems. Her long stringy blond hair hadn’t been washed recently, and her face was red and puffy, as if she’d been crying.

She seems like someone half-dead already, but also she seems like she had come out of a time warp. Keep in mind that “Remembering Melody” takes place circa 1980, and this is an important marker because we find out Ted, Melody, and a couple of their mutual friends used to be hippies in college, back in 1970, so a decade earlier. As Ted tells Jill, a friend of his at the law firm, “Everything was weird. […] They were good times, too. Special times. Sometimes I’m sorry they had to end.” The four friends shared a house in their early twenties and had the kind of friendship that lay awkwardly between friends-with-benefits and what we would now call a polycule. (It’s a shame the term “polyamory” would not be coined for another couple decades.) We’re not told specifically why the friend group drifted apart and that era of optimism ended, but if you were reading this issue of TZM in 1981 then you already knew, and even today it’s no secret how the hippie dream eroded. Of course, it’s a bit of a complicated story as to how everything turned sour, but at least in the case of Ted and his friends the drifting-apart was amicable. Everyone went on to have bright futures with good jobs—except for Melody.

Of the four, Melody was the most idealistic, even majoring in art—a move that was probably considered laughably naive at the time, but would be considered even more so (to the point of stupidity) today. Naturally she’s also the one who took “the real world” by far the hardest, although from what we can tell about Melody we maybe shouldn’t feel too bad for her. Much of the horror (at least for me) of “Remembering Melody” doesn’t come from anything supernatural but rather from the very real (to the point where it’s probably happened to you at least once already) scenario of being friends with someone who just takes and takes and rarely if ever gives back. It’s a sort of abusive relationship, made worse here because apparently Melody has gone down the drug-addiction pipeline. So she’s unhealthily skinny, into cocaine, a divorcee (we’re told she married this one guy literally a week after meeting him, I guess out of desperation), and she also seems to be homeless. In other words, it’s hard to imagine her living situation as becoming worse. What’s Ted to do about this?

According to his introduction in Dreamsongs, Martin tried selling “Remembering Melody” to some “slick” publications before submitting it to Twilight Zone Magazine, and it definitely reads as a horror story that’s supposed to have a certain “literary” value, such that it might appear in an outlet that doesn’t primarily print horror fiction. You’d be forgiven for getting through most of the story and thinking there might not be a supernatural element at play after all, even if hindsight tells us it would be reprinted in a few fantasy-themed anthologies. Martin holds his cards close to his chest on this one, so that for better or worse you spend much of the time wondering when the other shoe will drop. Something to keep in mind here is that there are only a few characters in “Remembering Melody” to begin with, but Melody doesn’t interact with anyone aside from Ted, and indeed this is the first time Jill even hears about such a person existing; just something to put a pin in for when we get to the ending.

There Be Spoilers Here

Are you ready? We get two twists for the price of one: the first is that Melody has killed herself, after threatening to do so during an argument with Ted, and the second (bigger) twist is that Melody’s been dead this whole time. Unbeknownst to him, Ted got visited by a ghost at the beginning of the story, and unfortunately said ghost is out for a bit of revenge—not just on
Ted but on their mutual friends. Now, taken literally, I’m not sure how to feel about this reveal, since you can’t really blame Ted for being frustrated with someone who is both a hot mess and a layabout, and his fate as someone who will end up either committing suicide or in a mental institution seems disproportionate. Taken symbolically, though, it does make some sense, if we’re to take Melody as something akin to the vengeful spirit of the failed hippie movement. Melody retained her idealism, but at the expense of real-world concerns like… food, and shelter. She died destitute, a suicide, having been abandoned by her college friends, who themselves had abandoned said idealism and become (ugh) capitalists; so it’s easy to imagine a vengeful ghost coming in for some payback.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve been out of sorts this months, getting back into writing while also having weirdly little time to watch spooky movies as befitting the season. Halloween is by leaps and bounds my favorite holiday, so I wanted to make it count, and yet for some reason I couldn’t. I even had a small case of writer’s block when reviewing the GRRM story, despite it feeling like an easy job and having more or less gathered my thoughts on it right after finishing it. I simply struggled to put the words on the screen. I do recommend “Remembering Melody,” by the way, especially as an introduction to Martin’s horror writing if by chance you haven’t read “Sandkings” before. “Sandkings” and “The Pear-Shaped Man” are more thrilling and entertaining, and in the case of the latter a bit deeper, but for one’s first attempt at a “contemporary” ghost story this is a pretty good one. I think that George R. R. Martin fellow just might have a bright future ahead of him.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Old Darkness” by Pamela Sargent

October 25th, 2026

(Cover by Andrew Probert. F&SF, July 1983.)

Who Goes There?

I unintentionally took a mini-vacation from writing this month, hence why it’s been a week since my last post, and also why I ended up skipping over a couple stories I had set out to cover. The first reason is that I was feeling a strange lack of inspiration and went through a little bout of writer’s block. The second reason has more grounds in objective reality: As you probably know already, AI (not generative AI, but AI that’s nowadays commonly used in coding) detected a long-standing and long-hidden bug in PHP that would allow any amateur hacker to break into the majority of the world’s websites, including the really big ones. Numerous sites worked behind the scenes over the next 24 hours or more to fix the issue, because it’s actually a really big issue, and some sites went down entirely (albeit temporarily) because of this. As far as sites I use regularly goes, ISFDB might’ve been hit the hardest, as it was straight-up out of commission for about three days. Now, I use ISFDB to track down sources for stories, dates, credited artists, and so on; without it, running this blog would become nigh impossible. So I spent a few days twiddling my thumbs, waiting for ISFDB to go back up, and in the meantime I figured I should put Thomas Ligotti and Lucius Shepard aside for a moment and improvide a bit.

Let’s talk about Pamela Sargent, then. Sargent was born in 1948, in Ithaca, New York (I almost went to college in Ithaca, little fun fact), and as far as I can tell she’s lived more or less her whole life in New York (albeit not NYC). She made her debut in 1970 with “Landed Minority” in the pages of F&SF, although this story has never been reprinted. She’s written quite a few novels since the ’70s, including a few Star Trek novels, but fans of genre history would most know her for her trilogy of landmark anthologies published in the ’70s, the first being Women of Wonder. This won’t come as a shocker or anything, but Sargent came of age when second-wave feminism sprouted up in the ’60s. The long history of women in genre SF is a thorny one, although there had in fact been women writing SF under their own names since the days when Hugo Gernsback ran Amazing Stories. At the same time, while there were women writing in the field since the beginning, their stories were rarely collected or anthologized up until the ’70s. Sargent’s work, as both an author and editor, can thus be thought of as indicative of a major turning point in the field’s history. This is all kind of a funny lead-up, truth be told, because “The Old Darkness” is not SF, nor does it (at least explicitly) tackle feminist issues; instead we have supernatural horror of the allegorical variety, albeit with a female lead.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1983 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan) and the Sargent collection The Best of Pamela Sargent.

Enhancing Image

It starts like an ordinary blackout, with severe weather cutting off power in the neighborhood one evening. Nina is in the middle of cooking dinner while her husband Andrew is watching a baseball game, when suddenly their evening plans get thrown out the window. Now all is dark, and worse yet the storm outside is too harsh to go driving in. At least Nina can finish dinner with the help of candlelight, but there’s still the question of what to do until the power comes back on. Nina is in a poor mood, but little does she know things are only about to get worse. Before we get into the interpersonal-drama side of things, let’s consider an early passage that hammers home what might be the story’s key theme so pointedly that it honestly might be a red herring—at least I hope:

[Nina’s] grandparents, believers in progress, had always told her things were better now. Human minds had been darker when people couldn’t read late at night, their prejudices greater when they had lacked television’s images of other places, their work harder without the appliances many took for granted. Nina was not so sure; technical civilization had isolated people from the basics of life, and had fooled them into believing that they controlled the world.

As you can tell from the title and the premise, “The Old Darkness” is about mankind’s primordial fear of the dark; it’s possibly the oldest kind of fear one can develop. Both little kids and adults are uneased, albeit to different degrees, by an unlit room or corridor. It could be that darkness per se doesn’t scare us so much as the obscurity that comes with darkness. A blackout can (and occasionally does) happen in your neighborhood and everything electric in the house you’ve been living in for the past ten years suddenly adds up to zero. If night comes, which in my experience happens often when it comes to power outages, you might set out candles you had bought months ago for such an occasion; but even with these dim pockets of light, you might not always be sure of where you are or where everything else is. Your sense of placement becomes foggy. If you’re unlucky, a power outage can last a few days instead of just a few hours.

For better or worse, Nina and Andrew are not alone in all this, as Rosalie, a close neighbor of theirs, knocks on their door and is invited in. Rosalie, unlike Nina, is a divorcee; and while she typically is on good terms with her ex-husband, it takes her all of two minutes to start complaining about him. It also takes as much (or as little) time for Andrew to start insulting Rosalie’s taste in music. The blackout seems to have everyone on edge, although in Rosalie’s case it could’ve also been because she overheard the O’Haras, her downstairs, get into a heated argument before she went over to Nina’s place. I think it’s worth mentioning here that these people all live in the same apartment complex, in what is only called “the valley,” location unknown. Soon we have three more guests with the Levitases: Jill, Tony, and their little daughter Melanie. Now it’s like a fucking party in here, but as they say, familiarity breeds contempt.

“The Old Darkness” is a short story, not quite a novelette, that can be split into two halves, the first in Nina’s apartment and the second when they go outside. It’s hard to discuss the back half without getting into spoilers anyway, but I do prefer the first half’s claustrophobia and sense of inner turmoil. You could also say the scenario depicted here is “realistic,” but I’d say that actually Sargent may have taken inspiration from stage dramas with the story’s first half. We’re stuck in one rather cramped location, with characters coming and going from “off-stage,” and to add to it, there’s this theatricality with the dialogue, a “heightened” sense of drama. People don’t really talk like this in real life, although they do talk like this on the stage and on film. If you’ve seen or read one too many domestic dramas then “The Old Darkness” might strike you as a little too familiar. At the same time, the melodramatic dialogue works in this context, since we’re stuck in Nina’s shoes and she has to deal with a somewhat irate husband and even more irate neighbors. At one point the third-person narrator rather bluntly tells us, “Nina felt trapped,” and it’s easy to sympathize with her.

Even early on there are some potential supernatural moments, albeit these same moments could be chocked up to coincidence or people’s tightened nerves affecting their perceptions. One throwaway bit of dialogue I didn’t pay any mind on my initial reading is when Nina, in attempting to entertain Rosalie, brings up “a legend that the first people who settled in this valley disappeared—just vanished into the woods.” Not very subtle foreshadowing here. Of course, Nina has been living in the valley her whole life, except for when she went to college. This is an important detail, because while she may not be as outwardly miserable as the divorced Rosalie or the bitterly married Jill and Tony, Nina has the air of someone who’s been living in her hometown for too long, like a bird that’s come to resent its cage. Like I said before, familiarity breeds contempt, and now there are six unhappy people stuck in a one-bedroom apartment. So far this could all be adapted into a one-act play, and even with what happens in the back end of the story it’s easy to imagine a stage version.

There Be Spoilers Here

The last third of the story sees Nina and Andrew leave their neighbors behind and the “stage” expand considerably. By the time we leave the apartment it’s become apparent that all hell has broken loose in the streets, with the couple’s car breaking down and the threat of getting trampled or beaten being more immediate than whatever supernatural force has caused the neighborhood to not only be without electricity but all but cut off from the rest of the world. In a way I expected it, but I don’t find this “explosive” climax to be as compelling in execution as it might’ve seemed to Sargent when writing it. Maybe it’s also the fact that while I dislike crowds, I dislike the prospect of being trapped in cramped spaces with moody people even more. The bulk of “The Old Darkness” could honestly be read as a precursor to the sort of claustrophobic horror we’d see more often post-COVID, but the climax unfortunately breaks the spell.

A Step Farther Out

“The Old Darkness” dares ask the question: Are straight people okay? The answer is: Obviously not. It’s an allegorical horror story about becoming disillusioned with one’s living situation, or in the case of Nina, being stuck married to a guy who’s sort of obnoxious and in an apartment complex with people you may or may not get along with. There’s a satirical element at play here, although I wouldn’t call it humorous. The decision to make the encroaching darkness itself so poorly defined is one that’ll inevitably turn off some readers, and even on my end I have to admit that my interest waned once the supernatural presence became more overt. What Sargent does really well here is less invoking a fear of the dark and more a fear of people. The biggest threat, ultimately, is an unruly crowd. Do I recommend it? Sort of. You could say tentatively.

See you next time.
Short Story: “Family” by Joyce Carol Oates

October 18th, 2026

(Cover by Tony Craddock. Omni, December 1989.)

Who Goes There?

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938, in upstate New York, and lived her early years among farmers and the land, in contrast with fellow New York authors born within just a few years of her like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. This rural background partly informs today’s story, but more on that in a bit. For a long time I thought her debut novel was A Garden of Earthly Delights, but actually it was With Shuddering Fall a few years earlier. Oates started writing when she was very young, writing quite a few short stories when she was in high school and with With Shuddering Fall published when she was 26. Soon she became one of the most acclaimed fiction writers of her generation, winning the National Book Award for her 1969 novel them and garnering multiple Pulitzer Prize nominations over the years. She has kept on writing (and, more recently, tweeting) at almost a breakneck pace for the past sixty years, and it looks like she’ll only stop once she shuffled off this mortal coil; if anything her productivity has only gone up with age, as she’s published at least one novel every year since 2000.

Despite her reputation and literary credentials, a good portion of Oates’s fiction is horror, even resulting in her winning several Stokers across a few categories. Her 1995 short novel Zombie is not about the walking dead, like how you would assume, but about a Dahmer-like serial killer. Much of Oates’s horror fiction is of the non-SFF variety, with her fascination with murderers and shady figures by the side of the road going at least as far back as her 1966 story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Today’s story, “Family,” can be considered an example of weird science fiction, in that it puts us in the near future, in a rural community that’s surviving in the wake of some unspecified calamity, and with more disasters to come. It’s not quite post-apocalyptic, but rather like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead it sees human society in the midst of collapse.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1989 issue of Omni. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), Masters of Darkness III (ed. Desnis Etchison), American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now (ed. Peter Straub), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Oates collection Extenuating Circumstances: Stories of Crime and Suspense.

Enhancing Image

In a way, “Family” can be read as a fable, helped by the nameless narrator and the vagueness of the setting, both where (it’s simply called “the Valley”) and when (“neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall”). The narrator, like Ishmael, has little to no bearing on the action of the plot, so for the most part I’ll stop mentioning them from here on out. They live in a family with a few brothers and sisters, and two parents, simply called Mother and Father. The family is relatively well-off since Father had sold most of the acres of land he had inherited, at a time when such land still had value. Unfortunately, the parents’ marriage deteriorates and Father moves out, never to be seen or (strangely) even really thought about again. By this point the family had fallen on hard times, with some of the livestock being killed by rabid dogs and Father having to let go of most of the servants. Obviously there would have to be a new man of the house, so to speak. It takes Mother no time at all to take in a new man, as well as his children from his previous marriage. New Father’s physical description is, let’s say a bit disconcerting, with “an unusually large head the cranium particularly developed, and small shrewd quick-darting eyes beneath brows of bone.” Then there’s New Father’s mouth, which gets described thusly:

The man’s jaws were strangely elongated, the lower jaw at least an inch longer than the upper, so that a wet malevolent ridge of teeth was revealed; as so often happened in those days, a single thought passed like lightning among us children, from one to the other to the other, each of us smiling guiltily as it struck us: Crocodile!

When starting “Family,” you might be duped into thinking it’s taking place in the present day and without anything SFnal at the outset, but soon it becomes apparent the family are living at some point in the future, where the country (presumably the US) has fallen into conditions similar to the Great Depression, only now martial law has also been declared. There was also some unspecified disaster in the past that’s resulted in mutations, which is what’s clearly happened with New Father and at least one other character, whom we’ll get to in a moment. There’s talk of water being contaminated and people living in compounds rather than on the land, with the family eventually being confined to one of these compounds. “All schools, public and private, had been shut down indefinitely.” For only being maybe 7,500 words in length, “Family” is dense with allusions, details, and worldbuilding of a sort that’s unusually subtle for SF; but then Oates might’ve written it primarily as pastoral horror, which is how people seem to take it, given where it’s been reprinted. Even so, it is undoubtedly near-future SF that reads as uncannily believably and thoughtful, with conditions worsening for the family over time as it looks like the government is becoming increasingly desperate. We’re never told exactly why things have gotten so rotten, which is probably for the better; it’s not like, after decades of post-nuclear SF, we need to know the specifics here.

The real conflict comes into play when Cory, an older sister, gives birth without anyone knowing who the father is, with even Cory not knowing how this all happened. Realistically it’s all but guaranteed that Cory had been raped while she was unconscious, and that the most likely culprit is New Father, given the baby’s strange characteristics. Of course, Mother interrogates every man and boy in the compound, including relatives, about whether they spawned the “bastard child,” and if New Father really was the one responsible then we never find out. We’re not even sure what the baby’s sex is. Oates (or rather the narrator) describes the baby as less like a small human being and more like a strange animal, if also a “defenseless living thing,” and it is indeed quite strange, with a “small pursed mouth set like a manta ray’s in its shallow face.” The baby feeds on Cory so fiercely that her breasts ooze blood and pus and it’s only thanks to the family getting a new cow that the baby can be fed safely. Now, it could be because I have an aversion to human babies, but the baby in “Family” is basically everything I would thereotically hate about raising a child, including the outlandish off-chance that said child would be a mutant would shark teeth and a fish-like mouth. You can’t blame Mother all that much when she tries prying the baby from Cory’s hands with the probable intention of killing it. Unfortunately for everyone, Mother does not.

There Be Spoilers Here

Cory dies one night, her body found the next morning with her chest all but eaten through. The narrator and others thought it must’ve been hungry rats that had gotten in, somehow missing the baby in the same room but going for Cory while she lay in her bed. Of course, we know better. Looking back through this story, the foreshadowing of the baby’s insatiable appetite is not all that subtle, although one is not prone to think of it in the moment. At the same time, the baby isn’t evil, for “evil” would require some knowledge of the moral spectrum, of which the baby (or indeed any baby) simply can’t have. No, rather the truth is that the baby was born with a weird mutation, for which it obviously had no say in, and it can’t help but be a cannibal; heck, it would latch onto anything it could get its lips on. After Cory’s death, and eventually after Mother’s (her death, on the other hand, being unknown, or at least the narrator is unable to recall how it happened), there’s a New Mother in the house and it becomes apparent that something must be done about Cory’s baby. By this point, said baby weighs a massive thirty pounds, yet is still unable to talk or walk.

Everyone silently is aware the danger the baby presents (even Lona, another sister who took Cory’s baby in, has to watch her ankles around it), yet there’s also the implicit responsibility the family has to protect one of its own. It’s a curious dillemma, since the baby is murderous, not to mention mutated to such an extent that it barely even resembles a human child, and yet it can’t be reasonably held accountable for its actions. New Mother makes the cold if understandable decision to take a few of the kids and enter Lona’s place in the dead of night, lure out the baby with treats, and put it in a barrel full of hungry rats. This is an oddly roundabout way of doing things, but then maybe none of those involved want the baby’s blood on their hands. It’s a disturbing sequence, not least because the baby’s death is necessary; in a better world it would surely be possible to put the poor thing in special care where it can be raised and maybe even eventually learn to not munch on its fellow man. It’s too bad that the world of “Family” is decidedly unfit for the likes of such mutations—indeed it’s becoming increasingly hard to live for even “normal” human beings. And then, what is “normal”? The ending, which is ostensibly happy but which has an underlying cynicism similar to the ending of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, implies that normalcy is not objective but rather a matter of circumstance.

A Step Farther Out

From what I can tell, “Family” is an outlier among Oates’s horror fiction, which might explain why it’s only appeared once and in an obscure collection. Most of Oates’s horror is non-supernatural, or at least the supernatural element is only implied, but “Family” is unusual in that it shows Oates dabbling in speculative fiction. It’s a shame she’s not done it more often, given how much she’s written, because she’s surprisingly adept at the whole thing. “Family” is effective as both science fiction and horror, although I’ve only seen people acknowledge its virtues as pertaining to the latter genre. Sure, there are a few scenes and short passages where I could almost feel my skin crawl, but there’s more to it than that. Right here is a somewhat hidden gem one ought not to miss.

See you next time.
The Observatory: We Don’t Know How to Talk About Digger

October 15th, 2026

(Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, in front of an audience of irate Europeans.)

Given the kind of movie Digger is, it would be impossible to discuss it in any kind of depth without going into spoilers. I seriously suggest you see this movie in theaters while you still can before reading the rest of this editorial. Just a fair warning.

Yesterday, October 14th, was apparently the last day my local Regal was showing Digger, the latest movie directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, his first since Bardo in 2022 and his first Hollywood production since The Revenant in 2015. The production budget for Digger is estimated to be between $125 million and $180 million, at least part of which can be attributed to its all-star cast: Tom Cruise, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, and others. I brought up the date at the beginning of this paragraph because Digger only entered theaters on October 2nd. That’s right, Regal kept this movie in its theaters for not even two full weeks. It looks like AMC will keep Digger for another week, but probably no more than that. Between its production and marketing budgets, the film would have to make at least $300 million just to break even for Warner Bros., although Paramount (it’s a long story that I don’t feel like getting into) is looking to inherit WB’s money troubles anyway. All told, the worldwide gross for Digger will ultimately amount to… maybe $50 million. The result is unquestionably the box office disaster of 2026, and that’s not including the sharply divided critical reception.

Digger is one of my favorite movies to come out this year, even if I was all but predisoposed to love it, given I have a Letterboxd account and a blog. Some 528,000 people have logged this movie on Letterboxd, with a pretty respectable rating of 3.9 (out of 5), while on IMDB it has a no less respectable rating of 7.5 (out of 10), albeit with only about 35,000 IMDB users having logged it. We can infer a few things from these figures, maybe the first being that IMDB is no longer the major online hub for moviegoer input that it was way back in the early 2010s. Letterboxd has long since overtaken IMDB as the site of choice for cinephiles, especially people my age and younger. Another thing (and this is really funny) is that of the 528,000 Letterboxd users who’ve seen Digger, seemingly very few of these people have seen it in any given theater. My own theater at my local Regal was completely empty (barring myself) when I saw the movie, and from what I can tell this is a common experience. You would think, going off of social media buzz and word of mouth, that more people are seeing Digger; yet the theaters continue to be deserted. Even some celebrities (Anne Hathaway, Hideo Kojima, Neil Young [of all people], among others) going to bat for Digger has had no tangible effect.

In a way, the game was rigged from the start. The trailers for Digger drew mixed reactions, even if some were excited at the prospect of Tom Cruise starring in an auteur-driven production for the first time in many years. The big problem with these trailers, aside from their content, is that they ended being a pack of lies. The movie Digger is marketed as is not the movie Digger actually is, and this has been a headache for both the marketing team and those who review movies for cash. Now, let’s assume for a moment that film critics count as people. As of right now, Digger has a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 53%, with an average rating of 6.10 (out of 10). Even some of the reviews tagged as “fresh” read as ambivalent, and curiously both Jacobin and National Review gave it negative reviews. The problem every one of these critics has had to reckon with is the fact that the logline (basically the elevator pitch) we got for Digger (going by its marketing) is a ruse, and as such it’s impossible to review the damn movie without at least giving away the first major plot twist. Most Hollywood movies don’t dare anything this audacious in the first place, but while such a rug-pull would be enough for most, such is merely the beginning with Digger.

The first half-hour or so of the movie, in which we’re tricked into thinking Digger will be something “normal,” more or less goes like this: Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise under to a good deal of makeup, such that there are later points in the film where he becomes unrecognizable) is an aging oil tycoon who seems to have emerged straight out of the plains of Texas circa 1950. Backed by the US government, even being good friends with President Compson (John Goodman), Rockwell’s company has taken to drilling for oil in Greenland. Unfortunately a crack about five feet in length forms in the ice at one of these oil rigs, methane bursting forth from underneath, and before you know it that crack’s become a lot bigger than “just” five feet. Soon we’re dealing with a runaway ice shelf, split off from Greenland and heading towards Europe, with the slim possibility of it turning into the Atlantic and melting. Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed, who, and I mean this as a point of praise, looks and acts like he had wandered off the set of a Wes Anderson movie by mistake), the local climate expert, gives a detailed prediction of what would happen if the ice shelf were to hit the mainland. The prognosis is bleak.

Going off of the movie’s first act, you’d be forgiven for thinking this will be an obvious if also quirky satire of “the system’s” failure to combat man-made climate change; certainly there are valid holes poked in the fabric of American society. Maybe the funniest and most on-point bit of satire comes from Goodman’s Compson, an elderly and increasingly feeble man suffering from “cancer of the asshole,” who’s due for surgery in the midst of the ice shelf crisis. Compson’s condition deteriorates over the course of the film, at times becoming delirious and ultimately being wheelchair-bound and hooked up to oxygen. Despite Compson’s obvious impairment, nobody suggests invoking the 25th amendment. This might hit a little too close to home for some people. Also unsurprising is the fact that Compson and at least some of the people in his cabinet are Christmongers, and that their appealing to the Bible is shown to be at least somewhat performative. Again, intentionally or not (Iñárritu has said the germ for Digger came about way back in 2015), the satire here threatens to come too close to real-world politics. There’s also the question of whether such a movie can sustain itself for the whole two-hour runtime.

Well, there’s good news and bad news—the latter specifically for film critics who have to talk/write about this movie. A mishap with a fake tree reveals that everything we’ve been watching up to this point is actually a performance—a high-budget stage production of Fossil Fools. We’ve been watching Digger the movie, but also a rehearsal of Fossil Fools the play. Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, but he also plays Curtis Markson playing Digger Rockwell. Digger’s exaggerated mannerisms and attire are part of the play’s satirical bent. Of course, an observant viewer will notice certain oddities about the “film” right from the opening shots. We’re introduced to Digger with his bedroom curtain rising up the same as a stage curtain, and the exterior backgrounds look like obvious matte paintings. Most of the film’s first half-hour takes place in one location, with actors going in and out of doors like the sides of a stage. Digger’s beloved cat looks like an obvious animatronic, and indeed it is an animatronic. Mind you that I went into Digger with this first major twist spoiled for me in advance, but somehow this knowledge didn’t make the first act any less enjoyable, nor did I feel any less gleeful with that fake tree fell over. Picking up on the movie’s willful artificiality is part of the fun.

Evidently the rug-pull has not worked its magic on everybody, not least because, on top of being a black comedy like the marketing indicated, Digger is also science fiction; it might also be the most compelling piece of climate fiction, regardless of medium, to come out in recent years. What seems at first to be a cross between Don’t Look Up (apparently Netflix turned down Iñárritu’s offer to work with them like with Bardo because they found Digger too similar in its premise to Adam McKay’s 2021 movie) and Asteroid City (speaking of Wes Anderson) is actually one of the most intellectually and emotionally bewildering mainstream movies to come out in a very long time. I say “mainstream,” just because of the cast and studio backing, but Digger might be even more primed for cult-classic status than the equally bewildering The End of Oak Street from just a couple months ago. (Oh yeah, I also wrote about The End of Oak Street.) A key difference, however, between these movies is that The End of Oak Street should’ve been easy to sell to the average moviegoer, whereas Digger‘s premise is too layered and high-concept to do justice in a two-minute trailer, never mind that its metafictional aspect is supposed to be kept a secret.

A lot of negative reviews decried Digger as being pretentious, relentlessly bleak, accusatory, unfunny, unfocused, and what have you. Whether the movie is “unfunny” really comes down to the viewer’s own sense of humor and one’s ability to take the film on its own terms. Now, accusatory? I’m not so sure. The now-famous ten-minute monologue (all captured in a single take) Digger goes on in front of the European parliament, in which he both admits to his company’s recklessness and accuses his audience (but not the audience watching the play, I think is the important distinction here) of being equally complicit in the global climate’s decline, gets often removed from context or taken at face value—sometimes by people who have not even seen the movie. Make no mistake, this extended monologue is an impressive turn from Cruise, being the film’s centerpiece and the single strongest argument for his earning a Best Actor nomination come awards season; but what’s even more impressive, from the perspective of having seen the rest of the movie, is how Iñárritu and his co-writers are able to contend with the long history of climate fiction, turning these worn-down conventions on their heads through a combination of execution (consider the sheer grayness of the audience’s outfits in contrast with what Digger is wearing) and context. It’s a movie less about how we should save the Amazon and numerous endangered species and more how we are already living in a world where said species will likely have gone extinct just a decade hence.

Digger is not a revolutionary film because of how self-reflexive it is; hell, it’s not even the first “self-aware” sci-fi Hollywood production to come out this decade (see the aforementioned Asteroid City). It’s not an “important” movie. There’s no call to action, and it’s unlikely any one of the few people who’ve seen it in theaters will become a climate activist or eco-terrorist. But that’s also a point (not the point, since like with virtually all great works of art it has multiple facets) the film is making. Art is not proactive, it is reactive. There has never been, at least to my knowledge, a single case of a work of art invoking revolutionary change; even the closest to an example I can think of, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, failed in its mission statement to help make democratic socialism a viable political movement in the US. Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary (in terms of their filmmaking) movies about the success of Soviet socialism were indeed made years after the revolution ended. Fossil Fools, the play within the movie, is a scathing indictment of those in power some thirty years prior who had the chance to avoid disaster and refused; but this play, too, ultimately functions as no more than catharsis and entertainment. The moment “to do something” has already passed. Digger‘s ending, the specifics of which I dare not give away here, is a slyly metafictional statement about our relationship with art and the world we have already inherited.

I’ve seen some uncharitable takes claiming Digger is “anti-art,” which is an absurd notion. If nothing else, this film is a hell of a theatrical experience where everyone involved clearly gave it their all. Iñárritu will continue to make movies, although whether he’s able to stay in Hollywood after Digger‘s historic bombing is a different question. I can’t help but think of that famous line from Joan Didion’s The White Album: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Art is not activism, and believing in it hard enough will not save the world; yet at the same time we do need it. We need art like how we need food, water, and shelter. Once I got around to seeing Digger, after reading about a lot of critics’ misgivings with it, I was surprised by (among other things) its lack of bleakness regarding the necessity of art. “Movies will not save us.” So? Neither will clean drinking water and a balanced meal; yet we still need those things. Digger is not the best movie to come out this year (I have a few gripes with it myself), nor is it the “most important,” if only because such a label implies a capacity for real-world utility art simply doesn’t have; but it’s that rare work of challenging and forward-thinking speculative fiction that somehow infiltrated the mainstream.
Short Story Review: “Greenface” by James H. Schmitz

October 12th, 2026

(Cover artist not credited. Unknown, August 1943.)

Who Goes There?

James H. Schmitz was born in 1911, in Germany, although both of his parents were American. Schmitz grew up fluent in both English and German, and until 1938 he’d spend most of his life in the country of his birth. (Yes, the good news is that Schmitz and his family moved to the US right before things got really bad in Europe.) Around this time, Schmitz tried his luck at writing fiction, namely “literary” fiction involving man’s relationship with animals—only none of these stories sold. His first sale was today’s story, “Greenface,” for the fantasy-horror magazine Unknown. This would end up being Schmitz’s only published story for six years, and there are actually a few reasons for this. The first is Unknown‘s early demise (“Greenface” appeared in the penultimate issue), and the second is that America entered the war and Schmitz got drafted into the Air Force. Once he was out of the military, another issue sprung up, namely that Schmitz was not instinctively an SF writer—at least at first. He wanted to sell to Astounding but didn’t know how to go about it, in the sense that it took some time for him to find his voice as a writer. Finally, in 1949, Schmitz reappeared on the scene with “Agent of Vega” and “The Witches of Karres,” the latter of which he eventually turned into a novel.

Schmitz came to writing SF a bit late, as “Greenface” stood as a false start, but this first story has a few of what would become hallmarks for Schmitz, not the least of them being a fascination with the natural world and how mankind might succeed or fail in co-existing with it. “Ecology” is a word that comes up a lot with Schmitz, to the point where one of his best stories is even titled “Balanced Ecology.” I have to assume “Greenface” appeared in Unknown instead of Astounding because it’s chiefly a horror narrative, although we do get an SFnal rationalization for the titular monster. This is a good one, albeit a bit longer than it should be.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1943 issue of Unknown. It would not be reprinted at all until The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (ed. Ray Bradbury) in 1956. Other reprints include Unknown: Tales from Beyond (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Stanley Schmidt), Things Hunting Men (ed. David Drake), The Baen Big Book of Monsters (ed. Hank Davis) and the Schmitz collection A Pride of Monsters.

Enhancing Image

Hogan Masters is a down-on-his-luck boss and owner of Masters Fishing Camp (what a fucking narcissist), who currently is having issues with three things: getting the camp started, his uneasy relationship with his fiancée, and also his drinking problem. Hogan’s alcoholism figures more into the plot than I initually expected, to the point where I wonder if maybe there’s something Schmitz is trying to say about alcoholism by way of allegory, given what’s about to happen to poor Hogan. But it’s probably nothing. In picking up a dying garter snake, which seems to have been struck down by something, Hogan quickly finds what will eventually become his nemesis: Greenface. Of course, Greenface is not the thing’s name, that’s simply what Hogan’s christens it with on finding it. For better or worse, Hogan is a bit tipsy when this happens, because Greenface is a very weird-looking creature, being “a shiny, dark-green lump, the size and shape of a goose egg standing on end among the weeds.” If Hogan were sober during all this he would most likely have browned his pants. Of course, right now Greenface is harmless—at least to humans. But just what Greenface is is a question that’ll only be answered a good while later, though. For the time being, Hogan has bigger fish to fry, including Julia Allison, his fiancée.

“Greenface” has basically the plot of a monster movie, of the sort that would only start to proliferate about a decade after this story’s publication. In that sense it’s ahead of its time. There’s a cornball aspect that escalates alongside the conflict, to the point where it all but overtakes the ending; but we’ll get to that at a later point. “Greenface” has some pacing issues, but I like how we spend little time in establishing the setting (think Camp Crystal Lake) and our hapless protagonist before being introduced to the real star of the show. Indeed Greenface itself (we’re not sure of its gender) is a neat creation, being a carnivorous vegetable that’s also mobile, and which for some reason has the approximation of a human face, albeit without eyes or a mouth. And yet somehow, despite the lack of said mouth, it smiles. To make matters worse, Greenface seems to be growing, and it comes to a point where Hogan is no longer the only one aware of its existence. Like I said, “Greenface” is considerably more horror-tinged than the kind of SF Schmitz would become known for. It helps that this is an unusually violent story, even for Unknown; the scene of Hogan holding the now-dead snake and unwittingly crushing its skull is a bit of a stomach-churner. Oh, and that’s not even getting into what Greenface does to some poor dog.

It’s appropriate that with Schmitz’s first published story we also get the first of his many monsters, and Greenface doesn’t disappoint. While the arc of its development from a little golf ball on stalks to a thirty-foot-high roaming carnivore, along with the interior artwork depicting its almost humanlike face, would make one think of it as like a giant monster in an old-school creature feature, Schmitz goes a long way to make Greenface sound plausible. We’re never told where it came from (it’s implied to have come from a tropical climate), but the idea seems to be that Greenface is like a member of an invasive species—possibly the only member of its kind. Hogan’s increasing obsession with the creature (incidentally his obsession grows in proportion with Greenface’s size) involves studying the thing’s habits and what makes it tick. As is typical of plant life, Greenface relies on photosynthesis (on top of its diet of small animals) for nourishment; in broad daylight it’s mobile, but on a pitch-black night or in a sunless enclosure it becomes more or less stationary. It’s also resilient, evidently, limping away harmed but alive even after Hogan entraps it and pumps it “with enough shot to lay out a township.” Then there’s the most curious implication: the idea that Greenface, on top of having a face which uncannily resembles a man’s, has almost humanlike intelligence. Ultimately it’s both flora and fauna, with a size and appetite becoming too big to be sustainable.

Less interesting is the human angle, which is robust but nothing to write home about. Julia spends much of the story offscreen, although she works as a precursor to the type of no-nonsense proactive woman Schmitz would come to write on a regular basis. I do like the irony of Hogan, who at the start is said to be a bit of an alcoholic, drinking less as he becomes more fixated on catching or killing Greenface. He becomes paranoid to the point where Julia accuses him of taking up the bottle again late in the story, yet by that point he couldn’t be more sober if he tried. Tangential, but I’m not sure how old Hogan and Julia are supposed to be. They’re set to be married, like a young couple, and Julia’s young enough to still be taking orders from her petit bourgeois dad, but Hogan has the stance and weary worldview (and drinking problem) of a middle-aged man.

There Be Spoilers Here

The last act of “Greenface” plays out like the big showdown the human heroes have with the giant monster in a creature feature, complete with Hogan’s lodge burning down as a set piece. I’m conflicted on this ending, because on the one hand the final exchange between Hogan and Julia is cheesy—as in, just a little too gosh-wow for my taste. On the other hand, I was surprised that Greenface’s death is framed as tragic—the tragedy ultimately being that Greenface had invaded an ecosystem unsuited for its survival. It would have died of cold, once winter came, and Julia even points out that by the time of their final encounter, Greenface had some red spots on its massive body, indicating the onset of disease. It was already dying. And yet the burning lodge with Greenface inside it is described as a “funeral pyre […] worthy of a titan.” There’s something magnificent, if also horrifying about Greenface, such that despite having it as the villain of the story, Schmitz wants us to know he also respects his creation in a way. We’ll see this theme of environmentalism (a curious theme indeed, considering Schmitz regularly appeared in the famously reactionary Astounding/Analog) pop up again in greater detail in Schmitz’s future work.

A Step Farther Out

This is a good place to start with Schmitz, which is fitting given it was also his debut, even if he didn’t start running SF in earnest until years later. Apparently when James Blish reviewed “Greenface” as part of a later collection he dismissed it as a pulpy knockoff of Algernon Blackwood’s rural horror, which I think is an unfair comparison—never mind that Schmitz did see Blackwood as one of his chief influences. Blackwood was easily the more elegant storyteller, but something he didn’t do that Schmitz does is place the monster in the larger context of an ecosystem with its checks and balances. This, more than anything, is what makes “Greenface” science fiction, despite it appearing in a fantasy magazine.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “In the Arcade” by Lisa Tuttle

October 8th, 2026

(Cover by Steve Fabian. Amazing Stories, May 1978.)

Who Goes There?

Lisa Tuttle was born in 1952, in Texas, although she’s spent most of her adult life at this point in the UK. She wrote her first professional story, “Stranger in the House,” when she was all of 19, and to this day is one of the youngest to win what is now called the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (for some reason not counted as a Hugo, even though it’s given out at Worldcon each year and there’s a list of runners-up). Tuttle’s first love, and indeed the genre she writes most prolifically in, was horror, although her first story of at least novella-length was the SFnal and not very scary “The Storms of Windhaven,” in collaboration with George R. R. Martin. Eventually this collaboration resulted in what could be considered Tuttle’s debut novel, Windhaven, although it’s not indicative of the kind of fiction Tuttle normally writes. For a more telling sample of Tuttle’s style I’d have to recommend the short stories collected in A Nest of Nightmares. “In the Arcade” is not in said collection, maybe because Tuttle considered it too slight (and in fairness, it is slight), but also it’s less straight horror and more SF with a strong horror tinge. It’s a curious little cyberpunk-adjacent piece that unfortunately is too brief and underwritten for me to give full marks.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1978 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted only a few times, in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII (ed. Gerald W. Page), Horrorstory: Volume Three (ed. Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner), and the Tuttle collection Stranger in the House: The Collected Short Supernatural Fiction, Volume One.

Enhancing Image

Before I go into the story proper, I think it’s important to mention that “In the Arcade” features a heavy use of racial slurs, and sadly I can’t go into plot details without repeating some of these slurs. The story itself is not racist at all, but rather racism as a theme figures majorly into it. We’re all adults here, but I thought a disclaimer would be useful.

Anyway, like with a lot of stories, “In the Arcade” starts with someone waking up. Eula Mae wakes up in the middle of the night, suddenly and covered in sweat. Everyone else is still asleep, and more disconcertingly, nobody else seems capable of awaking. Her husband lies next to her, as if dead, although it’d be more accurate to say like an inanimate doll. And there’s something else: outside her bedroom window, Eula sees what should be the familiar moon and night sky, but this is not the case either. “The moon had always been there, she’d looked at it almost every night of her life. And now she looked up and saw not the familiar moon at all but a simulacrum, a falsehood, a stage moon: a light.” Ditto for the clouds, which are described as being like drapes. It’s like the outside of the apartment is a studio lot. After failing to wake the neighbors, Eula decides it’s time to head outside into the street in the dead of light. There’s really nothing left here for her to do. Hell, whatever’s wrong seems to be affecting everyone except for her, she who had been (un)lucky enough to wake.

Obviously we have ourselves an artificial world, or at least an artificial environment. This was not a new idea, even in 1978; and although it’s tempting to think of the premise reminiscent of Philip K. Dick (which, to be fair, it very much is), Dick was not the only author playing with these ideas before Tuttle came along. Unlike Dick, who had a misogynistic streak, Tuttle sought fit to give us a heroine, and one who’s at least middle-aged at that. Also, whereas Dick had an economy of words but no delicate ear for the language, Tuttle’s prose is somehow equally spare but more subtle. I didn’t even catch a tiny passage about a “familiar imprint of the six-pointed star” on Eula’s forehead the first time around. The foreshadows the ending in a sense, but it also tells us something about Eula’s character, namely that she’s supposed to be Jewish, what with the star of David literally marked on her forehead; the fact that it’s imprinted, rather than tatooed, is another telling detail. Another neat little bit of foreshadowing is how Eula is able to break down the door to her sister’s apartment by herself, “although she did
not think of herself as physically strong.” On its own it’s unlikely but still possible for a woman of Eula’s age and shape to do such a thing, but by this point we know something is up.

From here on the details get rather fuzzy. To use some video game terminology, Eula goes out of bounds, clipping through a wall and entering a large, clean, well-lit hall, completely unlike anything she’d seen before. Looking backwards, she finds the city she was living in was called Niggertown (yeah), and we know this because not only is there is a sign for it, but there’s even an accompanying booth, of the sort one would find at a local fair. It’s here that the vibes go from bad to worse, and I do mean that as a compliment. You can practically feel the utter lack of sunlight reading this story, which is just the kind of sensation Tuttle was looking to evoke. The builders of this place were not progressive-minded optimists, but rather of a very different sort. The description of the Niggertown booth itself is kind of a harrowing read, but I don’t think it’s necessary to quote the whole thing here. We get a sensationalist advertisement for an imaginary past, in which seemingly every negative stereotype about black Americans is depicted with reckless abandon. But of course, the people who line up for such an attraction are not to be offended by such brazen racism anyway; clearly there’s a supply and demand here.

There Be Spoilers Here

The implication (and indeed is implied but not shown with “In the Arcade”) that this all takes place in a future where Nazi Germany won World War II. There’ve been so many “Hitler wins” stories over the decades that it takes a little finessing to make such a scenario interesting again, but Tuttle does a fine job here. The two men Eula meets by accident are described as “fine, blond, strong, Aryan types,” which is maybe a bit on-the-nose. Otherwise, however, how these men act could pin them as American just as easily as from Nazi Germany, and maybe that’s the point. One of the men is even wearing a Nazi uniform, yet he doesn’t “sound” German. Hitler himself may or may not be alive still, as we merely get mentions of “the Old Man,” who insists on there being real people in these attractions, even with the increasing use of androids. I like to think it’s some other Nazi higher-up, since I can’t imagine Hitler having lived nearly long enough to see the artificial cities created here, even if the Nazis had won the war. Just a nitpick on my part. Oh, and if you were expecting some great conclusion to this story, you’re shit out of luck, because it sort of just ends. The two men catch Eula unconscious and presumably send her back to Niggertown, and that’s the end of it. I have to think Tuttle had something bigger in mind with this premise than what we got, but I’m not sure. There’s a discerning observation Tuttle makes here about nostalgia having a fascist quality to it (there are few things right-wingers love to do than idolize the past, especially a past that didn’t actually happen), but as it stands “In the Arcade” is less a short story and more like a recounted dream.

A Step Farther Out

Published in 1978, the same year as Joan D. Vinge’s “Fireship,” “In the Arcade” anticipates some tropes that would become well-worn in cyberpunk, which mind you would not even have a name for several more years. Sure, we don’t have computers with this story unless you count the androids, but the sunless past-obsessed setting would become a familiar hunting ground for the likes of William Gibson and Pat Cadigan down the road. Now, since Tuttle is not an SF writer by nature, her rendering of the “arcade” reads less like speculation and more like a bad dream. It’s also such a short story that there’s not much time to become attached to Eula or her situation. One more revision might’ve unlocked its full potential, but I still recommend it for those interested in cyberpunk.

See you all next time.
Short Story Review: “The Opener of the Way” by Robert Bloch

October 4th, 2026

(Cover by J. Allen St. John. Weird Tales, October 1936.)

Who Goes There?

Robert Bloch is one of those rare prodigies in prose writing, having solder his first story when he was all of 15 or 16. He was born in 1917 in Chicago, although he eventually moved to LA where he became a prolific TV writer. Bloch was the youngest member of the so-called Lovecraft Circle, which saw such luminaries as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, and others. He corresponded furvently with H. P. Lovecraft in the last few years of the latter’s life, with Lovecraft giving the very young Bloch feedback on his stories. The two even wrote stories for each other, each fictionalizing the other, with Bloch writing “The Shambler from the Stars” and Lovecraft responding with “The Haunter of the Dark.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Bloch was one of the first to expand on the then-unnamed Cthulhu Mythos, and this interest in the Mythos would show in Bloch’s fiction up until at least the 1970s. The irony is that while a lot of folks may recognize Bloch’s name, far fewer would be aware of his many contributions to cosmic horror as we now understand the term. This is not even getting into Bloch’s interviews, lectures, etc., in which he shows himself to be a pretty shrewd student of genre history.

“The Opener of the Way” is a pretty early Bloch story, although considered major enough that it served as the title story of his first collection. Bloch was only 19 when this story was published, but by this point he had already appeared in Weird Tales about half a dozen times, and indeed would continue to appear regularly in that magazine until its demise (well, first demise) in 1953. This story follows a genre trend that had been going on since at least the late 19th century, namely the Orientalist fascination with the ancient Egyptian pantheon (especially Anubis, but we’ll get to him) and The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It wasn’t even Bloch’s first story that he wrote on Egypt, but it works as a notable stepping stone for a very young and eager writer who was learning the ropes quickly.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1936 issue of Weird Tales. It’s been reprinted in The Macabre Reader (ed. Donald Wollheim), The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology (ed. Boris Karloff [yes, that one]), and the Bloch collections The Opener of the Way and The Early Fears.

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Curious choice Bloch makes right off the bat is to start “The Opener of the Way” near the climax of events, before rewinding the tape. Sir Ronald Barton and his adult son Peter have combed the deserts of Egypt with the hopes of uncovering a tomb dedicated to the god Anubis—a tomb which has not had a single human foot set in it for 3,000 years. Anubis, as you probably know already, is the god responsible for gatekeeping the afterlife, with the body of a man but the head of a jackal. The two men find the 12-foot-tall statue at the end of a passage, and we get this bit of description: “The arms of the statue were held forth in an attitude of warning, as if endeavoring to repel the passage of outsiders. This was peculiar, for to all intents and purposes the guardian figure had nothing behind it but a narrow niche in the wall.” There is nothing physically behind the statue, or so it seems; yet according to Ronald, this statue is supposed to be hiding Anubis’s original form, not the form of a jackal-man but as something even older, and perhaps more sinister. Of course, it’s only a statue—dead as the dodo. At the same time, though, the Egyptian laborers who did the grunt work of uncovering the tomb seem ill at ease about it. But Egypt has been a Muslim country for centuries, and the old gods are not coming back. Peter himself increasingly worries about his dad’s sanity, and with good reason.

We’re not told exactly how old Ronald is, but given his white hair and wrinkly skin he’s at least in his sixties, and he’s been working in Egypt as an archaeologist for the past twenty years. He’s also, maybe, just a little insane, although he was surely a normal man at some point in the past. Bloch notes that Ronald being a little haggard, mentally, would not be unusual for someone in his profession, as there is something hostile in the environment that, given enough time, might push any (white) man over the edge. Bloch doesn’t make a big deal of this, probably because he didn’t think that deeply of the racial dynamics inherent in his story, but Ronald and his son are white Englishmen in a land whose culture goes back to the time of the pharaohs. Despite the setting, the Egyptians themselves barely play a role at all, being only called “the natives,” and without there being any named Egyptian characters. This whole thing got started because Ronald took it upon himself to steal an ancient parchment, tucked alongside the mummy of a disgraced priest. In a juicy little detail, the priest’s body had long since had its limbs and even its eyes removed, yet the parchment remained. The priest had a curse put upon this tomb dedicated to Anubis, and if one wants to see what’s “beyond” the statue and live then there are several steps that must be taken. Now, because this is a Bloch story, you probably have an idea as to how things for the two men will turn out.

“The Opener of the Way” does not count as part of the Cthulhu Mythos, but it does have a strong tinge of cosmic horror, not to mention the occult. The basic idea here is that the image of Anubis we know is merely a front, or rather a form made to be presentable to human eyes, as the true form of Anubis may well drive one to insanity. Indeed, the true form of Anubis may even be pre-human. “The enchanter who had written [the parchment] alluded to gods far older than those he worshipped. There was mention of the ‘Demon Messenger’ and the ‘Black Temple,’ coupled with the secret myth and legend-cycles of pre-Adamite days.” This is exactly the sort of passage one would find in, say, Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone,” which is a Mythos story. That throwaway phrase of “pre-Adamite days” implies some kind of pre-human era. Well, there were giants in the earth in those days. The implicit belief among so many followers of the Abrahamic religions is that essentially God did not exist prior to the advent of mankind; or, if you wanna think of it another way, God for some reason spent some time twiddling his big thumbs waiting for mankind to arrive. Yet keeping with the tradition of cosmic horror, humans are puny compared to the power of the old gods. Anubis as a jackal-man may just be an invention, made up by humans, as a way to placate followers, for the truth (an unspeakably old truth) would be too much for them.

I mentioned before that according to Dashiell Hammett, an effective weird tale should make the reader feel that the impossible might just be possible after all, but very much undesirable, regardless of whether the reader went in already believing in the story’s notions. Nobody alive today believes in the ancient Egyption pantheon, but an effective story about said pantheon should temporarily make a believer out of the reader. “The Opener of the Way” does this quite well, in no small part because of how it uses Peter as an audience surrogate. Peter is a young man, probably in his twenties, and he starts out as totally dismissive of his dad’s belief in the old manuscript. If we remap event into a linear order, we can see Peter gradually become convinced that there’s something wrong with the tomb, the inner passageway with the Anubis status, and last but not least Ronald’s eroding mental state. The manuscript with its telling of the curse is clearly having some kind of effect on the old man, if not necessarily a supernatural one—although let’s face it, we know something spooky is up.

There Be Spoilers Here

There’s an important step to surviving the curse that unfortunately Ronald doesn’t take heed of, and that is the rule that nonbelievers will die, their souls sucked out of their bodies and merged with Anubis. Ronald gives the excuse that surely this is not meant to be taken literally and is simply meant to ward off would-be looters; but he ends up being tragically mistaken. Both father and son end up dead, the former having murdered the latter against his will. To add a little salt on the wound, when the Egyptian labors journey down 700 feet below the desert’s surface to find the slain explorers, they simply leave the bodies there to rot, writing them off as suicides. Nobody will ever know the discovery Sir Robert had come so close to making—unless, of course, some perhaps similarly ill-fated explorer discovers the bodies years or decades hence. The manuscript the long-dead priest had written will still be there. Looters might eventually come for the very clothes on the dead men’s backs, but not the manuscript.

A Step Farther Out

Pretty enjoyable, if also derivative. Bloch was a skilled writer from the outset, but like every young writer he did what was most logical: he mimicked his favorite authors. This is not a negative criticism, by the way; rather it’s a perfectly natural step a writer takes when in the process of finding their own voice. The first stretch of Bloch’s career is very much downstream from Lovecraft, but there’s a humor (especially a love of puns) and wilful irony in Bloch’s work that Lovecraft would’ve never entertained. But “The Opener of the Way” is uncharacteristically serious for Bloch, which would be a problem if it wasn’t handled deftly. I could take a fine-tooth comb and nitpick about some turns of phrase, showing a lack of refinement in Bloch’s style at this early junction; but just imagine trying to write anything remotely this good when you were 18. Yeah, I thought so. It’s spooky, it’s well-paced, the decision to tell events out of order was a neat move, and the ending has an air of grim tragedy that’s honestly stuck with me.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: October 2026

October 1st, 2026
(Cover by Ron Walotsky. F&SF, October 1984.)

95 years ago, there was the publication of a horror anthology. The book was titled Creeps by Night, and the editor was none other than Dashiell Hammett. Now, Hammet was not a horror writer; rather he was arguably the finest crime writer of his generation, and maybe even when compared to the generation that followed. Hammett did, however, have an eye for good fiction, and moreover he respected what was then the burdgeoning pulp market, seeing as how his short stories and even a couple of his novels (most famously The Maltese Falcon) first saw print in those same pulp magazines. By and large the stories chosen for Creeps by Night were recent, published between 1910 and 1930, and by and large these stories were originally published in the pulps. Hammett is less concerned with the exact literary merit of the stories and more with their effectiveness as weird fiction. As he says so well in the introduction:

The effectiveness of [weird fiction] depends on the reader’s believing that certain things cannot happen and on the writer’s making him feel—if not actually believe—that they can but should not happen. If the reader does not feel that these things have happened, or does not care whether they have happened, then the author has been, in the first case, unconvincing, and in the second, uninteresting, literary faults by no means confined to our present field, and so of no especial interest to us here.

The “present field” in question is horror, and more specifically short horror as appearing in often cheap periodicals. Hammett, himself an accomplished author, recognized that there was a truckload of garbage when it comes to these periodicals, but he also recognized the merits of what was at the time a not very respected field of writing. The pulp horror story, or the weird tale in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, was not like the more mannered and openly appreciated supernatural horror by the likes of M. R. James, Henry James, Arthur Machen, etc. Weird Tales and its rivals patronized a small but passionate group of writers and readers, who in turn huddled around lurid and often violent weird stories like moths around a lantern. In a way this new breed of horror story took after the precedent set by the Jameses and their ilk, but they also pointed the way for a new and uniquely American kind of horror.

Creeps by Night was published right in the middle of that boom of pulp horror, and in the 95 years since there has been, if anything, more freedom afforded to writers who would prefer to specialize in the short story over the novel, even if the novel utterly dwarfs the short story in popularity. Short-form horror literature has also become a lot more sophisticated on average since the 1930s. For all the changes that have happened, though, the central conceit of the weird tale has remained steadfast, namely that a good weird tale ought to make the reader feel that something can but should not happen. There is also the emphasis on how the reader feels rather than thinks, which may be the key difference between weird fiction and, say, dystopian SF—not that the two are mutually exclusive. Whereas dystopian SF is meant to light a flame under one’s intellect, horror leans more towards the irrational. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in ghosts (as I don’t—at least not literal ones), a good ghost story should make you feel, if only temporarily, that such things can be. That’s the magic of it.

Obviously since October is here, we have all weird and strange stories for this month’s review forecast, spanning nearly a century in content but hopefully showing something of a continuity in the short-form horror tradition. Of course, it helps that I always get into this exact mood when October comes around, even though autumn seems to start a bit later with each passing year as the climate becomes more erratic.

Well, it can’t be helped.

We have one story from the 1930s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1970s, three from the 1980s, one from the 1990s, and one from the 2020s. I didn’t go in intending for there to be a focus on horror from the ’80s, it sort of just turned out that way.

Now, for the stories in question:
1. “The Opener of the Way” by Robert Bloch. From the October 1936 issue of Weird Tales. Bloch was born in 1917, and would’ve been all of 18 when he wrote this story—yet by this point he was already an established author in the pages of Weird Tales. He evntually became famous for writing Psycho, but he started out as one of Lovecraft’s many correspondents and imitators.
2. “In the Arcade” by Lisa Tuttle. From the May 1978 issue of Amazing Stories. Like Bloch, Tuttle was something of a prodigy, writing her first professional story when she was in her teens. She collaborated with George R. R. Martin on the SF novel Windhaven, but Tuttle’s true calling always seemed to be horror. While she’s written several novels, she’s far more prolific with short stories.
3. “Greenface” by James H. Schmitz. From the August 1943 issue of Unknown. Schmitz would forge a respectible career as an SF writer about a decade down the line, with maybe the most notable recurring feature of his stories being his sympathy for his female characters. “Greenface” is an unusual debut for him, being horror and printed in Unknown, and being his only story for six years.
4. “The Medusa” by Thomas Ligotti. From the Winter 1991 issue of Fantasy Tales. While he has not written a great deal over the past four decades or so, even seemingly having gone into hibernation as of late, Ligotti stands as one of the undisputed living masters of horror. He takes some cues from Lovecraft, no doubt, but the cadance of Ligotti’s prose style is very much his own.
5. “Family” by Joyce Carol Oates. From the December 1989 issue of Omni. Over her very long career, Oates has won multiple literary awards and is typically considered a literary author (and tweeter), but her fascination with horror goes back to pretty much the beginning. Most of Oates’s horror output has been through short stories and collections, and even then she’s been startlingly prolific.
6. “The Night of White Bhairab” by Lucius Shepard. From the October 1984 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Shepard only started writing as an adult when he was pushing forty, so in that way he was a late bloomer; but when he did debut in 1983, he emerged in the field more or less fully formed. A lot of Shepard’s work blurs genre lines, and this is probably no exception.
7. “She Sheds Her Skin” by Raven Jakubowski. From the November 2023 issue of Nightmare Magazine. “A tailor by trade and writer by vocation,” Jakubowski is an NYC denizen who technically made her debut back in 2014, but she only started writing consistently again (after a false start) around 2021. According to an interveiew, “She Sheds Her Skin” was inspired by COVID lockdowns.
8. “Remembering Melody” by George R. R. Martin. From the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Martin is one of our most famous living writers, although he’s far more known for his fantasy than his SF and horror. Despite this, Martin has remarked on more than one occasion that he considers himself instinctively a horror writer more than anything, and honestly it shows.
Now let’s get in the mood and read some spooky stories.