Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “The Undersea Tube” by L. Taylor Hansen

March 14th, 2026

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Amazing Stories, November 1929.)

Who Goes There?

We don’t know that much about Lucile Taylor Hansen. I’m not even sure if we have a photo of her. The funny thing is that when she had a story published in Wonder Stories a sketch of a made-up man was used to conceal her gender, and even the introductory blurb for “The Undersea Tube” seems determined to not refer to gender at all. This might’ve been an idea of the editors, or it could’ve been Hansen’s. It was not unusual in the pulp days for educated women to initialize their first names for publication so as to keep a degree of separation between their writing careers and their day jobs. Hansen herself was well versed in anthropology and geology, doing graduate work at UCLA, and with most of her published work being science articles and books rather than SF. With regards to Amazing Stories she actually contributed far more articles than stories, and over a much longer period of time. But, as so often happens with lady SF writers from this era, she sort of just vanished from the face of the earth one day. Why she insisted on hiding her gender and her first name even into the 1940s, by which time it had become pretty normal to see women use their full names in the genre magazines, nobody can really say.

This is all more intriguing than the story I’m about to write about, which is a robust but underdeveloped bit of 1920s super-science. By this point in the history of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback had relinquished control and indeed took little time in founding a new SF magazine, Science Wonder Stories. T. O’Conor Sloane, formerly the managing editor, then descended to become editor of Amazing Stories. Maybe this was due to old age (Sloane honestly might be the oldest editor of a genre magazine in history, being in his eighties when he finally stepped down in 1937), but Sloane was not as forward-thinking as Gernsback; and while Gernsback had the issue of not paying his authors, Sloane was incredibly slow with accepting/rejecting manuscripts, even losing them on occasion. Unfortunately for both Sloane and the magazine, Amazing Stories was about to get some serious competition in the forms of Astounding Stories and Gernsback’s Wonder Stories. It doesn’t help that some writers and artists, like Frank R. Paul, stayed loyal to Gernsback and jumped ship.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1929 issue of Amazing Stories. It wouldn’t be reprinted until it appeared in Amazing Stories…. again, this time in the May 1961 issue. It has also appeared in The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1929 Anthology (ed. Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stein). It’s in the public domain, and is on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Hansen goes out of her way to explain the logistics behind the Undersea Tube, to the point where the worldbuilding takes up about a third of what is already a short story. This is both a good and bad thing. Bob, the narrator, tells us right away that the Undersea Tube, much like Jurassic Park, ended up a disaster and with a body count. Bob is, in fact, the sole survivor of the disaster. (To get a spoiler out of the way, how he managed to survive the wreck and no one else is never explained.) There are actually a few questions Hansen raises and then deliberately leaves unanswered. What we get is very much speculative fiction, in that there’s earnest speculation about the viability of undersea subways, with a strong mystery element, plus maybe just a hint of fantasy. But we’ll get to that last part in a minute. Bob took the Undersea Tube, namely the tube going between Liverpool and New York City, the most ambitious feat of human engineering in history thus far. There are a few other tubes in operations, namely one going between France and England and another between Canada (Montreal [not fucking Toronto?]) and the US (Chicago), but the Undersea Tube is transatlantic, going across (or rather under) a whole ocean.

Would it be practical to construct a subway that goes across the Atlantic, buried under the ocean floor, as an alternative to commercial airplanes? I’m pretty sure no. Of course, flying across the Atlantic was itself a dangerous prospect in 1929, and some aviators gave their lives to prove this. But Hansen puts in the effort to make the Undersea Tube sound plausible. We even get a few drawings (I assume courtesy of Hansen) showing the tube’s makeup in blueprint form. This is the sort of effort one can easily admire. As for the story, Bob talks with Dutch, a former college roommate (not sure how old they’re supposed to be, but given how long the Undersea Tube must’ve taken to build and a couple jokes the two make, I have to think they’re at least middle-aged) about the Tube. Bob wants to take the Tube from the US to Europe, having some business on the other side and having never taken the Tube before, but Dutch is worried. Ditch is convinced the Tube will succumb to a disaster in the near future—not because of a fault with the Tube itself, but because of the earth around the Tube. To make a long explanation very short, Dutch suspects an earthquake fault is the reason a certain crack, which had formed a while ago, has only gotten wider. There’s a specific spot in the solid rock that’s bound to break open.

This is all told in a matter-of-fact way, as if a journalist were writing a report—appropriate, considering the story we’re reading is a report Bob wrote for “the International Committee for the Investigation of Disasters,” after having survived the incident with the Tube. It’s not sensationalist, at least for the most part, in contrast with a lot of SF of this vintage. Bob and Dutch are one step above total cardboard, but they also aren’t charicatures the likes of which I’ve often found from this era. Dutch was one of the engineers who helped build the Tube in the first place, but since then he’s become disillusioned with his creation. He ultimately decides to ride the Tube on the same voyage as Bob, and as you can guess, he doesn’t make it. His decision to ride to Tube, despite warning Bob, implies he has a death wish, being at least passively suicidal. Melancholy very rarely appears in SF from this era, so that in itself is also a rarity. Finally, the decision to tell us how the story ends right at the beginning while also leaving out an important plot detail, only hinting at it at the outset, is a bit of sophisticated storytelling that makes me think Hansen had a good idea of what she was doing. We’re given a few crumbs of info at the beginning, but not the context until later. I consider “The Undersea Tube” to be lopsided in its pacing and altogether too short, but for its faults it’s by no means half-assed or unoriginal.

There Be Spoilers Here

Early on we’re told about a very strange event that happened in the midst of the Tube’s construction. The diggers had unearthed a cavern, itself seemingly a tomb for a jeweled casket, in which lied a beautiful dead woman. She had been dead for years, maybe centuries, but still appeared young and fresh, as if sleeping—until the casket was opened. The air did not agree with the corpse. But who thise woman could’ve possibly been or where she came from remained forever a mystery. We do get something like an answer when Bob becomes a passenger on the Tube and becomes unexpected bunkmates with an old man who is never identified and whose body is never found among the wreckage afterward. Mund you that the part of the story involving Bob in the Tube is shockingly brief, being little more than a footnote in the wake of what was a ton of lore and super-science. I was really surprised when I came to the end of the story and found that it had, well, ended, as soon as it did. The discovery of an undersea city, perhaps Atlantis, is made ambiguous since Bob is the only one alive to have seen it, and even then he doubts himself. It could be that people who look just like us lived in this decadent and apparently now abandoned city, which if you ask me threatens to venture straight into the realm of fantasy. To think there was a time where people, even educated people, took the idea of Atlantis or Mu seriously. This is a thread Hansen leaves hanging, an unanswered question that could be taken as a positive or a negative.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve been doing a marathon of short stories printed in Amazing Stories in the 1920s and ’30s this month, and so far “The Undersea Tube” might be the one most worth recommending, if not “objectively” the best. It’s genuinely SFnal while also being more than a little different from so many other stories published in the same magazine at around the same time. There’s a tangible sense of mystery and wonder Hansen works to invoke. She was doing something inventive here, so I can understand that even with so few stories under her belt (she wrote less than ten), she still became a subject of interest for fans at the time. At the same time it says something that despite her lack of “literary” prowess she was probably one of the best SF writers to come out of that particular generation.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson

March 11th, 2026

(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, December 1928.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve covered Jack Williamson here a number of times before, in part because he was so prolific and also because his early writing is indicative of the spirit of ’30s and ’40s SF. He made his debut in 1928, with a guest editorial and then a short story, “The Metal Man.” He was only twenty years old at the time, but had taken an interest in writing SF in the mode of A. Merritt as a teenager and was quick to learn the ropes of pulp writing. Williamson would end up having the longest career of any SF writer, at 78 years, having only stopped with his death in 2006. The fact that he appeared in Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and lived through nearly eighty years of the field’s history is really an incredible thing. His Hugo-winning memoir, Wonder’s Child, is a candid record about his childhood, moving from place to place along the southern border of the US (he was actually born in Arizona before it became a state), along with some angst regarding romance and trying to lose his virginity as a young man. He was also candid about his limitations as a writer, namely that no matter how much he worked his craft, he could never develop the refined style needed for more “sophisticated” SF. He simply didn’t have a delicate ear for writing prose.

Said limitations didn’t stop him from staying in the game for decades, pretty much without any kind of hiatus, although his most productive period was in the first dozen or so years of his career. He became the second author to be made an SFWA Grand Master, after Robert Heinlein, and on top of the Hugo he won for Wonder’s Child he won another Hugo as well as a Nebula for his novella “The Ultimate Earth.” Not bad, given he was in his nineties. As for “The Metal Man,” which kicked off this long and acclaimed career, it’s… not very good. Which I guess is understandable, the man was barely out of his teens and this was his first professional sale, in a market that was itself rather new and untested. I can also readily believe Williamson was thinking of Merritt with this, since I’ve read enough Merritt to figure that; but while Merritt impressed a baby-faced Williamson in the 1920s, Merritt now reads as pretty clunky and whimsical.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted more times than should be considered reasonable for a story of middling quality, but I guess it does have some historical significance. “The Metal Man” has appeared in Avon Fantasy Reader #8 (ed. Donald Wollheim), The Best of Amazing (ed. Joseph Ross), The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg), The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (ed. Tom Shippey), and the Williamson collections The Best of Jack Williamson, The Early Jack Williamson, and The Metal Man and Others.

Enhancing Image

The narrator tells us of a lifelike and life-size statue of a man at the Tyburn College Museum, which despite being in a state of neglect is an object whose very unusual and tragic origin is a sort of open secret. The statue is all that remains of Thomas Kelvin, a widely respected geologist who became obscenely rich off of prospecting for radium, only to have met a slow and yet early demise. He had apparently become sick “of a strange disorder that defied the world’s specialists, and that he was pouring out his millions in the establishment of scholarships and endowments as if he expected to die soon.” Which he did. The man’s body has been encased in metal, and looking at him he seemed to have been in good health, except for a “peculiar mark upon the chest,” a “six-sided blot, of a deep crimson hue, with the surface oddly granular and strange wavering lines radiating from it—lines of a lighter shade of red.” There are disagreements as to how Dr. Kelvin met his fate and became a museum piece, but the narrator claims to have obtained the manuscript of Kelvin’s account of those fatal prospecting days, as his body was shipped in from France. The rest of the story is that manuscript, told straight from the horse’s mouth.

A year prior, Kelvin had hoped to find radium deposits in El Rio de la Sangre, “the River of Blood,” which sure sounds inviting. Now, you may be wondering why the hell a geologist would hope to find radium of all things, since nowadays we know radium to be pretty dangerous and to have only a niche use. You know how in the early 20th century cocaine was used and advertised as a medicinal drug? Similar lines. The effects of radiation on the human body had not yet been studied, a gap in knowledge I suppose Williamson uses to his advantage. Hugo Gernsback’s introductory blurb for “The Metal Man” says the story has “a surprising amount of true science.” No fucking clue what he could possibly mean by this. I guess it’s a surprising amount of true science in that there’s virtually none to be found here. Speaking of things that strain one’s suspension of disbelief, Kelvin is both a wealthy scientist and an aviator, even purchasing a private “monoplane” he pilots himself. He does a scouting run along the river and finds a huge crater, at first appearing to be a lake but actually being a pit of heavy green gas. (Something I couldn’t help but notice is Williamson relying on colors a lot, especially the primary ones, a habit that seems to crop up in his early fiction a fair amount.) Well, in Kelvin goes.

I would like to mention that the pacing of this story is very strange. Kelvin says he only has so much time to write about his adventures, and overall the manuscript is short enough, but it’s also needlessly verbose. This kind of purple (sorry about the color thing) prose is uncharacteristic of Williamson, and it’s no wonder that he would soon abandon it. Merritt wrote in such a style to achieve a certain effect, not unlike Lovecraft (who was, after all, a close contemporary), although it must be said that Merritt was not as deliberate with his word choices. Williamson, having been so young and with not much of a background in literature at this point (he would earn a BA and MA in English much later in his life), didn’t seem to consider both the readability and plausibility of the framed narrative as much as he should’ve. And of course, Kelvin’s need to attribute a color to every goddamn thing is never given any in-story justification.

There Be Spoilers Here

One of the strangest things to happen is Kelvin coming upon an eagle, which had once been living, but having since turned to metal, apparently covered in the same “bluish radiance” as Kelvin and his plane. He then finds other birds, also cast in metal, having fallen victim to the deadly magic of this area by the so-called River of Blood. There’s even a “pterosant,” which is to say an ancient flying reptile. “Its wing spread was fully fifteen feet—it would be a treasure in any museum.” It’s clear that whatever killed these flying creatures will at some point come to collect on Kelvin, but he’s able to delay the inevitable by trying out some awful tasting purple berries. The juice of the berries tastes like ass, but has the helpful ability of counteracting one’s transformation into metal. The solution, unfortunately for Kelvin, is temporary, and the problem is permanent. He’s able to escape this dark little corner of the globe, and to write about it, but he’s a dead man walking.

A Step Farther Out

I’m sort of taken aback by how many times this story has been reprinted and how many editors consider it to be essential Williamson. Is it because it’s his debut? There are major authors with innocuous or even bad debut stories that understandably get thrown in the dust bin of history. Williamson himself thought well enough of it that he went to the trouble of revising it for one of his collections some forty years after the fact. It could be the nominally SF story that’s really an adventure narrative in an exotic location had an appeal for those of Williamson’s generation, and even a generation after that, that’s lost on me now. You can certainly do worse as a twenty-year-old just learning to write sellable pulp, but Gernsback glazing it and history being kind to it is baffling to me.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Fate of the Poseidonia” by Clare Winger Harris

March 7th, 2026

(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, June 1927.)

Who Goes There?

I was supposed to write about a Clare Winger Harris story months ago, in fact her debut, “A Runaway World.” The problem was that not only did I not like the story, I wasn’t even sure what to write about it. Mind you that this was not my first run-in with Harris, having also read “The Miracle of the Lily,” which is considerably better. Harris has a curious life story behind her, so it’s a shame that to this day much of her life remains a mystery to us. She was born in 1891 in Freeport, Illinois. Her father was himself a published author, while her maternal grandfather was the wealthiest man in Freeport. She eventually married Frank Clyde Harris, who was an architect, engineer, and associate professor. So, Harris grew up with some educated and financially well-off people, which was not a given at the tail end of the 19th century. She also seemed to have caught the writing bug from her old man, since by the time she made her SF debut in 1926 she had already written a novel (her only novel, in fact), titled Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece, a work of historical fiction. For reasons we’re not sure about, Harris then pivoted to writing SF.

As far as the historians has so far been able to tell, Harris was the first woman to have her work published in the SF magazines under her own name and without her first name initialed to hide her gender. In his introductory blurb for “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” Hugo Gernsback writes that “as a rule, women do not make good scientifiction writers,” (uh oh) “because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited.” Not sure what he means by “general tendencies,” but as far as education goes he was unfortunately correct for the time. After all, women in the US were only granted the right to vote in 1920, just seven years earliear, and options for higher education were still pretty limited. Harris was a member of that very first generation of educated women (who would’ve been white and coming from at least middle-class backgrounds) to write for the genre magazines. “The Fate of Poseidonia” is just as good and probably better than a lot of the SF written by men at the time, although I’m still not sure if I would call it a “good” story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. It was reprinted only once in Harris’s lifetime, in the collection Away from the Here and Now, and it would stay that way for a few more decades. Since the turn of the millennium, however, it has gotten a new lease on life, being reprinted several times since 2000, in The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy (ed. Garyn G. Roberts), Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (ed. Justine Larbalestier), The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1927 Anthology (ed. Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stein), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Harris collection The Artificial Man and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

When I wrote my review forecast earlier this month I said “The Fate of the Poseidonia” featured a heroine, which turned out to be incorrect. Either the folks at the SF Encyclopedia stretched things beyond the breaking point, or had confused it with a different Harris story. Our “hero” is very much a man, although George Gregory is not a hero in any meaningful sense. At the outset of the story he’s a young man with a girlfriend, named Margaret, but aside from her and Professor Stearns he doesn’t have any real friends, living in a hotel room and ignoring his neighbors. He also finds his relationship with Margaret has become increasingly strained, or rather distant, which is a sign that a breakup is imminent. What ultimately happens is worse than “just” a breakup, though. Gregory discovers a rival for Margaret’s affection, in the form of Martell, a strange man of about the same age but with a “swarthy, coppery hue” to his skin, “not unlike that of an American Indian.” So, he’s red, and for an amazing reason. Martell is not, as Gregory, Native American, but… let’s be honest and say he is clearly a Martian. The two even meet at a lecture Professors Stearns is giving about canals and potential life on Mars, said lecture proving very relevant.

The twist that Martell is a Martian on Earth is so obvious (at least to a modern reader) that even someone suffering from tunnel vision will catch it early. That Gregory quickly becomes convinced something is off about Martell proves to be a correct hunch, but the lengths Gregory goes to try to get dirt on his romantic rival strain the reader’s sympathy for him. Not only is he an anti-hero, if anything, but he also gets cucked, with Margaret deciding to dump him and go out with Martell instead. To make matters worse, the world’s sea levels have gone down seemingly overnight, leaving unnumerable fish dying on shrunken shores and a fraction’s of the world’s water having mysteriously vanished. The Pegasus, a “transatlantic passenger-plane,” has also gone missing, presumably along with the ocean water. No one knows how this happened, but Gregory has a feeling Martell has something to do with it. (I mean, he’s right.) You may be thinking, where’s the Poseidonia that the story’s title alludes to? We’ll get to that later. Truth be told, the title is sort of a misnomer, since for most of the story the mystery is centered on the fate of the Pegasus. I may have given Martell being a Martian early, but there are plot points that are less obvious.

(By the way, this might just an error typically found in old magazines, and I don’t have any other version of this story on hand, but the chronology of events is confusing. We’re told that the inciting incident happened in the winter of 1894-95, when Gregory and Margaret would be somewhere in their twenties. But the lowering of the ocean levels and the disappearance of the Pegasis are said to happen in 1945, fifty years later. But fifty years have certainly not passed since the story’s beginning. Hell, not even a full year it seems like. Most likely the year we’re given at the beginning is supposed to be 1944-5, but I can’t be sure right now.)

As you can tell from the premise, speculation about life on Mars was a lot more optimistic in 1927 than just a few decades later. First there was speculation about life on Earth’s moon, and then on Mars. There was the frequen that somewhere in our solar system, preferably closer rather than farther away from Earth, there might be intelligent life that can become friends with mankind. We hoped we might not be alone in the known universe. Well, 99 years later and we’re still alone. As for Martell, this might be the first time Martians are written as having skin tone akin to the indigenous peoples of North America. As far as classic alien skin tones go there’s basically little green men and the grays, meanwhile the Martians of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds stay hidden inside their giant metal tripods. But Martians being red-skinned or thereabouts would become the norm for depicting humanoid Martians until at least the ’60s. Of course, by the ’60s we knew there was no such intelligent life on Mars. Harris was forward-thinking in this regard. She also anticipated the proliferation of commercial air flight with a reasonable time frame, although it would take a decade or two longer in real life for airplanes to become commercially the norm than in-story. The 1945 of the story is obviously different from the 1945 we really got, but it’s by no means far-fetched.

Well, except for the Martian business.

Another thing Harris anticipates is a TV set small enough to fit in the comfort of one’s own home. A big plot point is Gregory spying on Martell’s abode and sneaking in when the Martian is out. Aside from this being illegal at the very least, Gregory does discover some decidedly not-human tech, namely a TV-radio combo he dubs the “devil-machine.” Evidently this is how Martell is able to communicate with other Martians. More strangely, Gregory is able to look into far-off places with this machine, convincing him there is some coordinated plot and that Martell and his men are indeed not of Earth. Nah, really? Made even more obvious when Gregory sees one of these Martians with his arms bared, and for some reason they have little sets of feathers. Why would a humanoid need feathers? Never gets explained. Made more inexplicable because aside from the skin tone and texture, and the feathers, these aliens totally pass for human. We unfortunately do not get truly alien aliens in this story.

There Be Spoilers Here

The one thing that really surprised me about “The Fate of the Poseidonia” is that it has a downer ending. The bad guys win. Well, it might be unfair to call the Martians bad, since they have a legitimate reason for taking some of Earth’s water: Mars does have canals, but unfortunately life on the red planet threatens to be snuffed out because of a water crisis. There were some casualties in taking the two planes, but you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. The ending is absolutely a downer for Gregory, though. He’s been locked up in a mental institution, with no one except Professor Stearns believing him. Margaret has gone off to Mars with Martell, and was in fact the sole survivor of the Poseidonia. She expresses her regret in trusting Martell, in the brief time she has to talk with Gregory, but the signal’s cut and it’s assumed the two will never see each other again. This story does not have a heroine, as the SF Encyclopedia claims, but it does have maybe the most impotent male “hero” of any Gernsback-era SF story. Maybe a male writer would’ve given Gregory some kind of out, but Harris gives her shitty protagonist the worst outcome. This is an admirable and morbid curveball, for a story that’s otherwise predictable.

A Step Farther Out

Did I like “The Fate of the Poseidonia”? Not really. Harris’s style is pretty creaky, and the small type for the magazine version made the physical act of reading rather hard on the eyes. 99 years of science fiction have also rendered the plot, about Martians in disguise plotting to steal resources from Earth, feel all too familiar—for the most part. I will say, Harris making her male lead a petty and insecure cuckold who ultimately isn’t rewarded at all for his actions seems like a deliberate choice. It’s a deeply unflattering depiction of fragile masculinity that would speak to a modern reader far more than the writing on a technical level. With that in mind, it has aged relatively well for a Gernsback-era story.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Thing from—’Outside’” by George Allan England

March 3rd, 2026

(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, April 1926.)

Who Goes There?

When Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories in 1926, the inaugural issue’s contents would be very important. It was, after all, a newfangled magazine with a novel premise, that being the exclusive focus on science fiction, a term that hadn’t even been coined yet. In his editorial for this issue, Gernsback mentions H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe as the leading forerunners of what he calls “scientifiction.” These were and still are important names in the history of the field, so Gernsback had made a wise choice by not only mentioning them, but printing fiction by all three in the first issue. A name he doesn’t bring up alongside those three, but who does appear here, is George Allan England. Contrary to what his last name would make you think, England was an American. He had a pretty active life, being a prolific writer, adventurer, and failed politician, having unsuccessfully ran for governor of Maine as a socialist. Incidentally he was close contemporaries with fellow adventurer, pulpster, and socialist Jack London. But whereas London because rich and famous from his writing, England never reached that level of mainstream success, and nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who has heard of him.

While England was more a novelist than a short-story writer, he did write a few shorts which have been reprinted more than once, “The Thing from—’Outside’” (sometimes reprinted without the em dash and inverted commas) being maybe the most popular. It was first published in 1923, when England was already in the third act of his career, in Science and Invention, of whom one of the editors was (you guessed it) Gernsback. Apparently he thought it was so nice he printed it twice. It counts as science fiction, I guess, but it’s much more a work of cosmic horror, so that honestly it could’ve just as well have appeared in Weird Tales.

Placing Coordinates

First published in Science and Invention in 1923, then in the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories. It has since been reprinted in Strange Ports of Call (ed. August Derleth), the January 1965 issue of Magazine of Horror, Friendly Aliens: Thirteen Stories of the Fantastic Set in Canada by Foreign Authors (ed. John Robert Colombo), Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman), More Voices from the Radium Age (ed. Joshua Glenn), and a few others. Because it’s been in the public domain for a minute, you can find it on Wikisource of all things.

Enhancing Image

Five Americans have gone canoeing in the Canadian wilderness, a trip which has already gone south by the time the story starts, on account of their indigenous guides having abandoned them. Apparently something had spooked them. This is a racist trope I notice pop up in old pulp adventure writing: the native guide leaving the (white) explorers to their fate or dying unexpectedly. As for the Americans, we have Professor Thorburn and his wife; Vivian, Mrs. Thorburn’s younger sister; Jandron, a geologist; and Marr, a journalist. (Bit of a digression here, but how much younger is Vivian supposed to be than her sister? Professor Thorburn is said to be deep in his fifties, and presumably his wife isn’t too much younger than that, but Vivian’s young enough [and attractive enough] to be called a “girl” more than once.) It’s easy to think at first that the professor is the protagonist, but actually it’s Jandron—an observation easy enough to make with hindsight. Not everyone will make it out alive, and nobody (except for Jandron) knows what they’re doing. Things are already looking rough, even without a cosmic entity taking, since they’re already miles away from civilization and this was in the days before cell phones. This is all before the coming of the ice—and while this is Canada, winter isn’t due yet.

We know about burns, from intense heat, but we also know similar damage can be done with intense cold, hence things like frostbite. Jandron, being a very smart person, finds a ring of ice burned into a rock, which (he tells the others) will be there forever. He’s seen something like this before, and for better or worse, he’s also into Charles Fort. For some context, Charles Fort was a journalist who, late in his life, gained unexpected prominence with a few books that are comprised of unusual and dubious “data.” In other words, useless but curious information, a lot (if not all) of it not based in fact. In other words, he spread misinformation for the fun of it, and also to make a point. He didn’t actually believe, for instance, that mankind is secretly the property is an unimaginably advanced lifeform. He inspired a couple generations of SF writers and readers. One of his books, Lo!, was even serialized in Astounding. It’s unclear how much these people took Fort’s throwaway ideas seriously, or if England believed any of it himself, but Jandron seems to be a true believer.

As Jandron explains later in the story:

“[Fort] claims this earth was once a No-Man’s land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for possession. And he says that now everybody’s warned off, except the Owners. I happen to remember a few sentences of his: ‘In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted here, sailed, flown, motored, walked here; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They have been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.’”

Bro would be a crazy person in the real world, but luckily for him (or maybe not) his hypothesis that the Thing stalking him and his friends is an invisible being that exists Outside (with a capital O) the universe is correct. Or at the very least it’s never proven incorrect. “The Thing from—’Outside’” is one of the earliest (it might be the very first) works of fiction to deal with Charles Fort’s writing, even mentioning it directly. In a way it reads like a contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft’s work, albeit pulpier, although I’m not sure if England was aware of Lovecraft at this time. He was most certainly aware of Algernon Blackwood at least, and indeed England’s story reads less like Lovecraft and more like a scientific counterpart to Blackwood’s “The Willows,” which itself has a similar premise but takes a mystical approach. “The Willows” is one of the most reprinted and respected weird horror tales of all time, despite the fact that it’s about fifty pages long and not much actually happens in it. “The Thing from—’Outside’” is more eventful; indeed it’s indicative of England’s trade as someone who wrote for the non-genre pulp magazines. There’s action, but also a lack of elegance.

(Modern readers should also take note that while England was a leftist, he was also a white man born in 1877, so his views on women and non-white folks can chafe, even in this story. Of course, being bigoted and also a socialist is something that can be applied to quite a few white leftists in both the 1920s and the 2020s.)

This is not to say “The Thing from—’Outside’” isn’t worth reading; on the contrary, it’s a good deal of fine. There are moments of genuine creepiness sprinkled into what is really a great-outdoors adventure story with some rather high stakes. The wilderness becomes colder and more inhospitable with every passing hour, so that one night the bonfire they’ve set up goes out suddenly, even with the plenty of wood to spare, as if a giant pair of wetted fingers had pinched out the flame. They also notice that less wildlife has been showing up, even down to the bugs, so that the forest becomes lifeless except for the trees, which themselves are losing their leaves. This change in climate is both unnatural and concerning. Even the river Our Heroes™ have been canoeing along has grown ice at the bottom. “It” is like an invisible cat and the humans are a bunch of field mice, although they make the comparison of being like ants more often. There’s a sense of both patience and sadism to the invisible horror, giving it the semblence of a personality despite being totally unseen and unheard. Some spooky shit is definitely going on, and one by one the party of five dwindles.

There Be Spoilers Here

By the time we get to the climax, the professor and his wife have both died. This is unfortunate. Even more unfortunate is that Jandron now has to deal with a stir-crazy Marr, and Vivian, who isn’t in much better shape. What happens to Marr, thanks to “It,” is maybe the creepiest part of the whole story. While he had blocked himself off from the others the Thing from Outside the universe had contorted and deformed his body and mind, so that he became “something like a man,” a “queer, broken, bent over thing; a thing crippled, shrunken and flabby, that whined.” Ultimately he dies before Jandron and Vivian are rescued, which is maybe a good thing for him. The others narrowly survive, and for Vivian the whole episode has been blacked out of her mind. Eventually they get married (right, there’s a romance angle here that I don’t care for), but Vivian “could never understand in the least why, her husband, not very long after marriage, asked her not to wear a wedding-ring or any ring whatever.” Granted, Lovecraft protagonists tend to get off with worse, so this is bittersweet instead of a downer. But while Vivian remains mercifully ignorant of those days in the wilderness, we’re told Jandron will always be so haunted.

A Step Farther Out

It’s not as good as “The Willows,” but then what is? England wasn’t typically a horror writer, but rather an adventure writer who just so happened to write a decent amount of SF—again, a term that did not exist in the 1910s and for much of the ’20s. He also, for reasons I’m unsure about, took a detour into cosmic horror, and did a fine job at it. England would appear in SF magazines from this point on, mostly after his death, and entirely (unless I’m missing something) through reprints. I’ve not read a whole lot of pre-Campbell magazine SF, but I’ve read enough to know you can do worse (so much worse) than “The Thing from—’Outside.’” You can also do much worse if you’re interested in some classic cosmic horror that’s contemporaneous with Lovecraft, but quite different in style.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: March 2026

March 1st, 2026
(Cover by Leo Morey. Amazing Stories, Jaanuary 1934.)

In March 1926, there was a new fiction magazine on newsstands. This in itself was an unexceptional event; after all, there were already quite a few fiction magazines on the market, “the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on.” But this was Amazing Stories, a magazine whose mission statement was to publish a genre of fiction which prior to this didn’t even have a name: science fiction. Sorry, “scientifiction.” The publisher was Experimental Publishing Company, which had already run SF-adjacent magazines, namely Science and Invention and Radio News, and the editor was Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback was born and raised in Luxemburg, but moved to the US as a young man, where he made a name for himself as an inventor, as well as taking major part in the aforementioned magazines. He was also a lousy fiction writer, and even worse when it came to having business sense. What he lacked in those areas, though, he certainly at least tried to compensate with a restless imagination. He was a pioneer in the truest sense, with both the good and bad that come with being on the razor’s edge of innovation. Gernsback ran SF before, but he wanted a whole magazine dedicated to “scientific fiction,” and as he explains in the inaugural editorial: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” The standard for science fiction had been set.

There was science fiction prior to Amazing Stories, of course, and a lot of it. Gernsback himself considered the first real master of SF to be Edgar Allan Poe, who despite being known for his horror also wrote quite a few SF stories—the two not being mutually exclusive. (Nowadays people, including those like Brian Aldiss who very much know their stuff, tend to say SF really started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.) Other practitioners of proto-SF include Jack London, William Hope Hodgson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and others. Indeed, it’s this wealth of SF published prior to 1926 that would make up the bulk of the material in Amazing Stories for the first few years of its existence. Gernsback especially resorted to reprints of stories and novels by H. G. Wells, who was still alive and well at this point. The business relationship between Gernsback and Wells eventually soured, and unfortunately this was a common occurrence with authors hoping to be published in Amazing Stories. The big problem was that Gernsback seemed to have the money-handling abilities of a gerbil or guinea pig, neglecting to pay his writers for absurdly long periods, even having to be threatened legally to pay up. The money problem got so bad that it’s suspected by some historians that Gernsback declared bankruptcy because he found it preferrable to paying up on his debts. There was an infamous case where H. P. Lovecraft only appeared in Amazing Stories once, with “The Colour Out of Space” (one of his best), on account of Gernsback’s reluctance to pay him, with Lovecraft calling him “Hugo the rat.”

Despite the financial strain, and with Gernsback losing his own magazine only three years after launching it, Amazing Stories somehow persevered. Things looked even rougher when T. O’Conor Sloane, who was managing editor under Gernsback, got kicked upstairs to become editor. Sloane was already in his seventies when he took over, so he was goddamn unspeakably old from the outset. He eventually died in 1940, at the impressive age of 88. If Amazing Stories was shaky in quality under Gernsback, with the original fiction often failing to stand toe-to-toe with the reprints, then the Sloane era made it thoroughly play second-fiddle to newfangled SF magazines, including Astounding Stories and Gernsback’s own Wonder Stories. Within just five years or so the first SF magazine got relegated to publishing second-rate fiction with second-rate paychecks for its writers. E. E. Smith, who had first made his mark in Amazing Stories, eventually jumped ship in favor of Astounding. You also like authors like Jack Williamson, who stayed loyal to Gernsback despite everything. That Amazing Stories made it to the end of the ’30s, and survived well beyond that, is really incredible. It subsisted largely on an audience comprised of young readers and scientist/inventor types. These are very different demographics in some ways, mind you. It continued, under Sloane, as the magazine where science and adventure would (ideally, if not so much in practice) be perfectly balanced.

It wasn’t all bad. In scouting for this month’s selection of short stories to review, I thought the pickings would be slim, but there was still a decent amount of fiction printed in the first ten years or so of this magazine’s life that at least looked intriguing. For instance, how many women would you say wrote for Amazing Stories in those early years? More than you’d think. Gernsback had his shortcomings, but he didn’t seem to have a misogynistic streak worth mentioning, and on occasion he published stories that would be considered positively feminist for the time. So, we have nine stories, the biggest batch of fiction I’ve had to tackle in a bit, all from the 1920s and ’30s. I’m sure some of it will not be very good, and it’s worth mentioning that when reading SF of such vintage it’s important to put yourself in a certain mindset. Still, I think I chose well.

For the short stories:
1. “The Thing from—’Outside’” by George Allan England. From the April 1926 issue. First published in 1923. Makes sense that we’re starting with a reprint, given the heavy usage of them in early issues. Also, it originally appeared in the Gernsback-edited magazine Science and Invention. England was a prolific pulp adventure writer, real-life adventurer, and failed socialist politician.
2. “The Fate of the Poseidonia” by Clare Winger Harris. From the June 1927 issue. Harris was, as far as we can tell, the first woman to write for the genre magazines under her own name. She made her debut in Weird Tales in 1926, but more than half of her work went to Amazing Stories. I had meant to review her debut story some months ago, but I struggled to write anything constructive about it.
3. “The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson. From the December 1928 issue. Williamson might have the single longest career in genre fiction, although Michael Moorcock is getting close. He made his debut in 1928, with this very story, and only stopped with his death in 2006. He always remained pulpy in style to an extent, but he managed to stay relevant for an impressive span of time.
4. “The Undersea Tube” by L. Taylor Hansen. From the November 1929 issue. Lucile Taylor Hansen was a trained anthropologist whose writing was mostly nonfiction books and articles. She concealed her first name and gender when writing SF early on, likely to separate this side gig (she didn’t write much SF) from her life in academia. She contributed some science articles to Amazing much later.
5. “The Gostak and the Doshes” by Miles J. Breuer. From the March 1930 issue. Breuer was the son of Czech immigrants, and even wrote for Czech-American publications in Czech rather than English. He was a trained medical doctor, and he spent most of his adult life in Nebraska, working alongside his dad at first. As you can guess, he didn’t write that much SF, on account of his day job.
6. “Omega” by Amelia Reynolds Long. From the July 1932 issue. Long seemed to have lived her whole life in Pennsylvania, although she would’ve lived on the other end of the state from me. She cut her teeth on writing SF, seemingly using the field as a training ground, but she later moved to detective fiction and poetry. She worked at the William Penn Memorial Museum for 15 years.
7. “The Lost Language” by David H. Keller. From the January 1934 issue. Of the pre-Campbell SF writers, Keller might be one of the most respected. Like Breuer, he was a trained physician, complete with an MD, and like Breuer he served in the Medical Corps in World War I. He was one of the first American doctors to deal with PTSD in soldiers, which apparently influenced his fiction.
8. “The Human Pets of Mars” by Leslie F. Stone. From the October 1936 issue. Stone was another pioneer in the field, in that like Harris she published under her real name, although many assumed it was a pseudonym. Her work is shockingly feminist and anti-capitalist for the time. She stopped writing by 1940, having become disillusioned with both the field and the world at large.
9. “Shifting Seas” by Stanley G. Weinbaum. From the April 1937 issue. For about a year and a half, Weinbaum was arguably the hottest new writer in SF. His untimely death from cancer in December 1935, about 18 months after his debut, means we’ll never know how he might’ve matured as a writer. Ironically he never appeared in Amazing during his life, opting instead for its competitors.
Hopefully you’ll read along with me.
Serial Review: Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (Part 4/4)

March 1st, 2026

(Cover by Gray Morrow. If, July 1966.)

The Story So Far

Roan’s time aboard the Warlock ends in disaster, although in fairness it wasn’t his fault. With Henry Dread, on the surface a pirate captain and in actuality an officer in the fledgling Imperial Terran Navy, now dead (by Roan’s hands) and the Warlock having gotten its ass blasted by a Niss ship’s automatic defense system, the survivors are left with Roan as their new leader. He’s not much of a “leading” type. The good news is that while the Niss ships are still about, lingering in the blackness of space, the Niss themselves seem to have gone out to lunch—via the grim reaper. The ship that destroyed the Warlock turned out to be a ghost ship: everybody, both the Niss crew and Terran captives, has long since died. Roan and his crew decide to take a diversion to Tambool, the planet where Roan was born and raised, to gather some info about Our Anti-Hero’s past. Some gaps remain in his backstory, though, and the quest to ITN HQ continues, with Roan impersonating a lieutenant who had died on the Niss ship. This move sounds smart in the short term, but will prove a problem for later.

With some deception and threats, Roan and three of his best men are taken to ITN HQ, a palace that had originally be constructed for some member of the ruling class, now the home of Terran military ghouls and their cronies. And also their slaves. Slavery is not unusual in parts of the galaxy, with some alien cultures treating it less as a means of cheap labor and more a give-and-take practice. Roan himself grew up with an alien slave who lost to Roan’s parents in battle, and thus became a sort of member of their family as dictated by his race’s customs. Commodore Quex and his buddies of the ITN are a lot less caring with their slaves, however, murdering them on sight if they become even so much as a slight inconvenience. Terrans, even though none of them be “purely” human, clearly look down on Gooks and especially Geeks as akin to dogs and horses. Maybe even less. So it’s hard to feel bad when, in the midst of a tense and violent dinner part, Roan kills Quex, even if he does give him an “honorable” death. With this violence, it looks like Roan’s time in the ITN will be short.

Enhancing Image

We finally get answers to the two biggest questions that have been haunting this novel, namely what the Niss have been doing this whole time and what has become of Earth, Roan’s ancestral homeworld. The answers are both interconnected and anticlimactic, maybe by design. It’s true that the Niss formed a blockade around Earth and supplanted the Terrans as the top dog in known space, but that was literally thousands of years ago. We have never seen a Niss prior to this final installment, and when we do finally meet one he is weak and at death’s door, with everyone else already dead. Having replaced humanity as rulers of the galaxy, the Niss apparently diluded themselves over time, to the point of a slow extinction; nowadays they’re treated as a myth, something to be talked about rather than seen. With the highest goals of galactic conquest achieved eons ago, the Niss, having found no greater cause in life, opted for a slow death. Humanity still exists on Earth, it turns out, maybe being better off than their former conquerors; but this too, came with its own price. As with the ITN ghouls, the people on Earth have at least partly fallen to decadence, with there being an “Upper” and “Lower” society. They also have their own form of slavery, keeping mutated “dogs” (which really are more like large and intelligent monkeys, or very hairy humans) as their servants. Like real-world dogs, these “dogs” are loyal to their masters; they enjoy being slaves. This is a fact that disturbs Roan, since, to paraphrase him, at least slaves in alien cultures knew enough to loathe their positions in life. This all feels very wrong.

The final quarter of Earthblood, in which Roan and two of his men (Poion having died in the interim) are on Earth, could’ve justified being a novel on its own, and maybe it should’ve been a novel. Something I’ve mentioned before in passing but which needs reiterating here is that Earthblood is fast as fuck; it’s one of the most lightning-quick SF novels I’ve read in a while, which is sometimes to its detriment. The pacing becomes almost manic at times, with how much Laumer and Brown try to fit in here. The Terran culture Roan comes quickly to hate is layered, in some ways disturbing, and yet we’re not given that much time with it. There are a few new characters introduced in this last stretch of the book, maybe the most memorable of them being Daryl, who serves as Roan’s (and by extension the reader’s) guide to how things work. Daryl is old enough to have birthed a daughter who herself at least appears to be an adult, and yet he’s youthful and rather feminine in appearance. He’s also, not very subtly, a queer man almost of the drag show variety. I’m not sure if Daryl’s effeminate nature and attempts to flirt with Roan are indicative of the authors’ homophobia, because truth be told he’s no worse than some of the human characters we’d met before, but it’s certainly hard to ignore. Speaking of ambiguous queerness, we also have Sostelle, the “dog” who accompanies Roan for much of his stay, who despite having a feminine-sounding name is supposedly male, and who also comes to have a submissive relationship with him. These are things the novel never elaborates on, because it’s already so fast and so much is happening that for better or worse we can’t dwell on them.

The good news is that the Niss blockade is no longer an issue for Earth interacting with the rest of known space, but the people on Earth aren’t even aware the blockade had ended a long time ago, due to humanity having become degraded and small-minded. Typically in an old-timey SF novel with this kind of plot, Roan would support the rebuilding of the Terran empire, but not only has he since given up on that, having hared his short time spent with the ITN, but he loves the rather large number of intelligent alien races in the galaxy too much to let mankind put the lot into servitude. He’s still a tough and murderous son of a bitch, but he does in fact have some morals, which Daryl and those like him run afoul of. There’s an unnerving scene in which a dancer named Desiranne, who reminds Roan of Stellaraire, tries to commit ritual suicide as the grand finale of her performance for him—an act she had been trained and even raised to carry out. She almost succeeds. Roan’s one-man rebellion against decadent Earth society is totally justified, if we’re being honest, and it feels earned because the whole novel had been building to this moment. The Terra Roan hoped to find wasn’t there after all; instead, it’s something he and the others will have to build themselves. You could say a kind of cultural revolution is needed, to break down the old way of living and create something new.

A Step Farther Out

I decided to read a couple contemporary reviews of Earthblood, including Algis Budrys’s review in Galaxy, who makes the connection that Laumer and Brown had probably taken inspiration from Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. More specifically the brutality and paranoia of Earthblood remind me of Hubbard’s short novel To the Stars, one of the most brutal (and xenophobic—it is Hubbard, after all) SF stories I’ve ever read. I do mean that as a compliment, by the way. What Earthblood lacks in elegance, having a rather shoddy structure that makes it seem like Laumer and Brown wrote it with serialization in mind, it makes up for in a kind of “wow” factor. Like damn, I did not think an SF novel from the ’60s could be this grimy. At the same time it has more of a humanist angle than Heinlein or Hubbard, or at least it’s not as racist or sexist as it could’ve been. I recommend it as a rough but entertaining one-off, the kind of adventure novel that was soon to become outdated thanks to the New Wave. It is, as Baird Searles says in his review of the novel for Asimov’s, a relic from “the tail end of this jolly era” that included such pulpy SF.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (Part 3/4)

February 25th, 2026

(Cover by McKenna. If, June 1966.)

The Story So Far

Life in the circus has not been very kind to Roan, but at least he has Stellaraire, his woman, and Iron Robert, a hulking Geek who is his loyal friend. Unfortunately he loses Stellaraire when the circus ship, having been mistaken for a war vessel, is attacked by pirates, with an emergency maneuver killing almost everyone aboard. Roan and Iron Robert survive to be greeted by Henry Dread and his band of merry men, although it turns out Henry is part of a fledgling Imperial Terran Navy. Earth may be blocked off from the rest of the galaxy, thanks to the Niss, but there are still humans sprinkled throughout known space. Granted, it’s rare for them to be purely human, but they appear to be human enough. Roan spends the next five years of his life aboard Henry’s ship, that being the Warlock. Henry comes to treat Roan almost like a son, but their relationship is troubled by Henry’s racism toward Geeks (non-humanoid aliens), with Iron Robert being kept locked in a cell all this time. There’s some internal conflict with what Roan wants, between sympathizing with Henry’s hopes of rebuilding the Terran empire and discovering his own origins. Where exactly did Roan come from? Who were his genetic parents? How did a precious embryo like him end up on a backwater planet like Tambool?

Unfortunately Roan’s time on the Warlock comes to about as dramatic an end as possible. They spot a Niss ship one day, and rather than retreating, being certainly outgunned, Henry thinks it’d be a great idea to go charging in head-first. The failed attack results in the Warlock getting blown to bits and Roan losing Henry and Iron Robert, the former by way of killing him (in what ends up being a totally futile action) and the latter because Iron Robert is literally too big to fit in the escape pod with the crew. With Henry having made Roan the new leader and not being so sour about the whole getting-shot-in-the-chest thing, Our Anti-Hero™ has a crew, but not a proper ship. He’s also low on friends at the moment.

Enhancing Image

The encounter with the Niss ship turns out to be an anticlimax in a way, but an interesting one, since the Niss ship is, in fact, a ghost ship (in the novel it’s written as one word). Everyone aboard, both the crew and the Terrans they were keeping as prisoners, has been dead, seemingly for a very long time. Roan and his men are able to sneak aboard, as the ship’s automatic defenses, still alert after all these years, didn’t pick up the escape pod. While the loss of the Warlock and Henry Dread are to be lamented, Roan has already started formulating a new plan. He acquires the ID of a long-dead Terran captain named Endor, and thinks it might be to his advantage if he impersonated someone who knew this captain—maybe a lieutenant. Lieutenant Roan it is. After all, it would be awkward if he made contact with the ITN after having killed one of their own. Surely this will not come back to bite him later in this installment. But for now, things are going swimmingly, all things considered. We’re more than halfway into the novel and we have yet to encounter a living Niss, that’s fine. Roan’s less concerned about the Niss and more about how he, as an embryo, made his way to the black market on Tambool, the planet of his upbringing.

When we return to Tambool we find that Roan’s adoptive mom is dead. Oh nooooo. Specifically, and this is one of the more disturbing parts of what is already a pretty grim novel, she had sold her body to be experimented on, as like a cadaver, so that she would leave Roan with a small inheritance if/when he returned home. Through some interrogation (by that I mean threatening at gunpoint) Roan is given some info, namely that he came originally from Alpha Centauri (I don’t know if you know this, but Alpha Centauri is big) and that he was the only embryo of his batch to make it to the black market intact. It’s not much to go on, but it’s something. By this point, Roan has taken a few of the best of his crew and come down like a landing party in Star Trek, leaving one of them to defend for himself once they leave (or rather escape) the black market. Roan’s best and brightest are Askor, Poion, and Sidis, although I’m gonna be honest with you, with the exception of Poion I can’t tell these fuckers apart. Poion at least has the ability to read people’s emotions on a telepathic level, so in that way (speaking of Star Trek) he’s like the Deanna Troi of the group. Also like Troi, Poion is not very useful, and likes to state the obvious.

Under the guise of being an ITN man, Roan and his three most trusted men are taken in by the fledgling navy and given what is arguably the most memorable sequence in the novel (at least up to this point), in the form of a luxurious dinner party. I’ve mentioned before that each installment has had a villain, or at least an antagonistic figure in the case of Henry Dread. For the third installment we have Commodore Quex, technically a Gook but who claims to be at least partly human. Slavery is treated as the norm by certain cultures in this novel, but the men of the ITN take things a step further by really treating their slaves as property, maiming and killing them for any reason they feel like. ITN HQ is described as a place of decadence that’s slowly rotting away. Get this:

The Headquarters of the ITN was a craggy many-towered palace built ages before by a long-dead prince of a vanished dynasty. It loomed like a colossus over the tumbled mud houses of the village. A vast green window like a cyclopean eye cast back brilliant viridian reflections as Roan and his crew marched in under the crumbling walls along a wide marble walkway, went up wide steps flanked by immaculate conical trees of dark green set among plants with tiny violet blossoms.

Roan may be very much an anti-hero, having no qualms with killing and stealing to get what he wants, but it turns out there are people who are even worse than him. He also comes from a working-class background, and spent his whole life up to now surrounded by Gooks and Geeks. The almost comical levels of racism shown by Henry Dread and later Quex and his goons alienate Roan from the ITN cause, because it’s become obvious by now that the ITN is a human supremacist organization. At one point Quex has an alien slave girl casually murdered at the dinner party for the “crime” of appearing to have annoyed Roan. So it’s hard to feel bad when Roan quite deliberately puts a bullet through Quex’s heart.

A Step Farther Out

We are slowly creeping toward the climax of this novel, which I only get a faint impression of because of how it’s structured. While these scenes and chapters sort of fall into place so as to fit in magazine installments, it’s also a quasi-episodic quest narrative whose effectiveness I’m unsure about. There is no B plot or divergence from the quest so much as Roan and his crew hopping from place to place. I will say, as a positive point, that Earthblood‘s open violence and sexuality is not something I would’ve expected from a pre-New Wave novel published in a magazine. This is a dark read, and not what I would recommend if you’re into high adventure that’s more fun-loving; but at the same time, it is worth recommending as a Heinlein pastiche that’s both less creepy and more from a humanist angle than what Heinlein (especially in the ’60s) was capable of writing.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Daughter” by Philip José Farmer

February 20th, 2026

(Cover by Jack Coggins. Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1954.)

Who Goes There?

As far as the gap between the ’50s SF boom and the New Wave era of the late ’60s and early ’70s is concerned, Philip José Farmer can be considered a missing link. Stylistically, at least early in his career, he was inconspicuous compared to many of his peers; but rather it was his willingness to explore sexuality in SF writing for magazines which was only rivaled at the time by Theodore Sturgeon. And whereas Sturgeon was a small-r romantic by nature (nothing graphic happens in his queer story “The World Well Lost”), Farmer’s treatment of sex was, from the outset, more blunt and candid. His debut story, “The Lovers,” was rejected by Astounding and Galaxy, before finding a home in Startling Stories. No doubt the first few years of Farmer’s career would’ve been rockier had he not found an ally in Samuel Mines, who edited Startling Stories and its sister magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. The effort paid off, since it won Farmer a Hugo for Most Promising New Writer, but his troubles with getting published were only just beginning. A mixture of censorship and plain ol’ bad luck made it so that Farmer’s debut novel (but not the first novel he wrote) wasn’t published until 1957. Despite all this, and despite not writing in earnest until he was in his thirties, Farmer went on to enjoy a very long and prolific career.

When I reviewed “Mother” I was hoping to get to its sequel in maybe a year’s time, in keeping with how long it took for “Daughter” to appear in print, but real life and other things got in the way. It’s a sequel, in that it takes place on the same world and follows the same alien race as its predecessor, but it’s not strictly necessary to have read “Mother” first. I liked “Mother” quite a bit, which was a pleasant surprise at the time because my experiences with Farmer have been very mixed, and I’m happy to report “Daughter” is about as good, if also quite different in some ways.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Winter 1954 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It was reprinted in the Farmer collection Strange Relations, which also has “Mother.” The weird part is that there’s an omnibus volume also titled Strange Relations, which contains the titular collection as well as The Lovers (the novel version) and the novel Flesh. These are all thematically related, but they don’t take place in the same continuity.

Enhancing Image

As I said, we return to the setting of “Mother,” but not, it seems, the same set of characters. You may remember (or like me you had to reread the story or my review to refresh your memory) there was Eddie, the mama’s boy and would-be planetary colonist who becomes the mate, or “mobile,” of a Mother he names Polyphema. We meet neither of these characters again and we’re not sure what becomes of them. It’s not even clear if “Daughter” actually takes place before or after “Mother.” Instead we’re introduced to Hardhead, a Mother herself and our narrator. That’s right, the protagonist is not a human at all, but an alien—not even a humanoid alien at all, but something very much its own beast. There is a human in the story, simply called Father, whose real name we never learn and who seems to not be Eddie. From what we learn of him, Father, unlike Eddie, is an emotionally stable man who also knows a thing or two about science and medicine. He’s also indirectly responsible for much the plot and the resolution, but he’s inactive, on account of being inside Mother’s womb most of the time. He can communicate with the Mothers and “virgins” (those who have not reached maturity) with a radio, however.

Let’s take a step back and explain some details about the Mothers, since while “Daughter” does have some exposition, and you can gather some things via context clues, Farmer assumes you’ve read “Mother.” The Mothers are large tentacled omnivores that, when mature, become immobile and use protective shells for defense. They’re a single-sex race; every Mother is a female. They reproduce by taking a mobile, which really can be an organism of any sex, but which the Mothers perceive as always male, and basically use the mobile as an assistant in spawning larvae before eventually devouring it. So, they reproduce asexually, but a Mother can’t reproduce on her own. A Mother eats things with an iris that works almost like an octopus’s beak. They’re able to communicate with each other through radio waves, which is how Eddie and later Father are able to talk with them. At the same time it’s unusual for a mobile to be “semantic,” i.e., for it to talk with its mate. The mobiles are, as you can guess, typically not keen on the whole making-larvae thing, but Father continues to live inside Mother because he’s able to consent. They are, or at least were, proper mates.

Hardhead recalls that when Father wanted to speak with his daughters without Mother catching on he would use “Orsemay,” which is clearly Morse code. A question that only occurred to me after I’d finished the story was how Father’s radio is able to work for so long. Is it battery-operated or hand-cranked? This is not a question Hardhead would be able to answer, and it’s not exactly relevant to the story, but it makes you think. Also, while we have to assume Father is indeed a man, it’s worth remembering that the Mothers do not perceive mobiles as anything other than male; to say a Mother has a female mobile would invoke a paradox, which is actually a key plot point in “Mother.” Nothing so dark as the conclusion of that story happens in “Daughter,” which itself is if anything a more conventional adventure narrative—once you remove the fact that Our Heroine™ (it was rather uncommon for the protagonist of an SF tale to be female at the time) is like a giant hermit crab with tentacles. Think of it: Hardhead is a woman (sort of), and also an alien of such a sort that one would have to be pretty determined to see her as a sex object.

The idea here is that “Daughter” is a coming-of-age story, in which Hardhead recounts she and her sisters moving out, so to speak, which is to say Mother ejects them from her womb after some delay. It’s time for the adolescent Mothers to build up strength, gather nutrients, and survive so they can fulfill their biological role. The good news is that these adolescents, who are squishy like slugs (Father even calls his daughters “Sluggos”), can move around easily enough—the bad news being that they’re prey. While the Mothers are too big and armored to have natural predators, young ones fresh out of the womb are vulnerable to what is called the olfway, a cross between a wolf (as you can guess by the name) and a spider. Quite vicious, persistent, and cunning. Hardhead and her sisters can construct shells out of minerals, with Glasshead making a shell of glass and Woodenhead a shell of cellulose. What follows is a kind of a cat-and-mouse hunt between the olfway and the sisters, with Hardhead’s sisters unfortunately falling victim to the beast. If you’re reading “Daughter” you may have, at this point, come to think of a certain story about three pigs and a wolf. This is deliberate, although not exactly spelled out, but while making the connection early means you can anticipate the ending, that’s not a bad thing.

There Be Spoilers Here

A curious ability the olfway has is that it can synthesize chemicals so as to break through shells of certain elements. It does this by breaking off a bit of a virgin’s shell and taking it back to its hidey-hole, where it can work for a combination that lets it break through the material. The lesson of “Daughter,” if there is one, is that slow and steady wins the race, or that patience is a virtue. Hardhead’s sisters scramble for hill spots where they can fortify, but they choose poor materials for their shells and pay for it. In working to counter the olfway’s special ability, Hardhead has to suffer in the short term, but this suffering pays off in the long run. She’s able to counter the olfway and even (barely) devours it. This all works out like a fairy tale, which makes sense in more ways than once, given that Hardhead is relating this story to an audience, and also the fact that Father had taught her about the story of the wolf and the three pigs. It’s a scientific fairy tale, which in keeping with the tradition is a bit dark and has a moral. It’s also, like a lot of classic fairy tales, aimed at kids but is not childish at all.

A Step Farther Out

“Daughter” is shorter than “Mother,” and is also easier to predict, especially if you catch what Farmer is doing before the climax. It’s still very good, and even unconventional by the standards of ’50s SF. If “Mother” was Farmer attempting to shock and disturb the reader with a very unusual human-alien relationship, not to mention an unusual alien race, then “Daughter” is proof of how you can take that setting and craft a satisfying adventure story out of it. Not sure why it’s never been anthologized in English, or indeed why it’s only ever seemingly appeared in Strange Relations and nowhere else. You don’t need to have read “Mother” to understand it, although that story does do more to flesh out the setting.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (Part 2/4)

February 17th, 2026

(Cover by George Schelling. If, May 1966.)

The Story So Far

Roan is a pure Terran, originally meant to be the surrogate child of royalty, but instead sold to a husband and wife who sell their passports so that they can raise the boy. Roan’s parents are a mutated human and a humanoid alien, and they’re loving and caring despite the poverty they have to endure. From a very young age, Roan knows he’s unique in this part of the galaxy, for pure humans are hard to come by. The Terran empire once ruled the galaxy, but the empire has since been broken up by a fierce and intelligent race called the Niss, with Niss ships supposedly (we never see them) blockading Earth from the rest of known space. Since childhood it’s been Roan’s dream to find his ancestral home world, as well as meet a fellow pure Terran. Humans, on the occasions that he meets them, are mutated, like his father, as well as the lovely circus dancer Stellaraire. As a teen Roan is forced into joining Gom Bulj’s Extravaganzoo, a flying circus, with “Gooks” and “Geeks” as performers. With his agility, Roan is made to be a high-wire performer, but his time at the circus is made much worse by his antagonistic relationship with Ithc, a strong and fearsome alien who serves as the arch villain of the first installment. Roan eventually kills Ithc, and even gets away with it, but this then begs the question of how he’s supposed to get out of the circus. His only friends here are Stella and the hulking tough-skinned alien Iron Robert. Roan is strong and clever, but also stubborn.

Enhancing Image

A couple things I should talk about before we get into the actual plot of this installment. First, you may have noticed that for reasons beyond human comprehension, Laumer and Brown thought it would be great to use a real-life racial slur to mean something totally different in this novel. Mutated humans and some humanoid races are called Gooks, which is not what that word means in our world. This is a slur that’s typically associated with the Vietnam War, but its usage goes at least as far back as World War II, and has historically been used to dehumanized those who at least appear to be East Asian. Laumer especially (given his military background) would’ve been familiar with the word, which makes you wonder why they use it here, albeit in a different context. It’s something none of the characters comment on, which in a way is understandable since at some point (or so it’s theorized) mankind had crossbred to the point of ethnic boundaries becoming quite blurry. Roan himself is not explicitly said to be white, from my recollection, although illustrations give him Caucasian features, not to mention the look of a stereotypical pulp hero.

On a more innocuous note, I got curious and decided to look into the book version, which aside from cleaning up the many typos of the magazine version seems to feature the same text. The one major difference is scene and chapter breaks, in that there are fewer scene breaks and more chapter breaks in the book version. It’s easy to take for granted, when reading old stuff as it appeared in magazines, that some formatting and finessing with the text is necessary to make it fit a certain number of lines and a certain number of pages. This is doubly the case for serials, where ideally each installment (except for the last) should end on a cliffhanger. The second installment of Earthblood just kind of stops, and indeed for the book version this ending happens in the middle of a fucking chapter! This is something the vast majority of people wouldn’t consider.

Now…

Just when it looks like things are about to get boring, the circus ship is attacked BY PIRATES! In an emergency maneuver, the ship goes into overdrive and takes on three G’s, which is about enough to crush your average person to death. So goes Gom Bulj and everyone else aboard, except for Roan, who by sheer force of will is able to survive and turn off the heavy gravity, and Iron Robert, who is Iron Robert. (Something this book wants to make very clear is that Roan is special.) Even Stellaraire is not spared; on the contrary she gets fridged, having gotten trapped under debris and burned to death. Mind you that up to this point there have been only two notable women in the novel: Stellaraire and Roan’s mum. The mother is alive, but it’s possible we never see her again. The misogyny could certainly be worse, but I have to wonder what Brown was thinking during the weeks she must’ve spent working on this novel.

Roan and his buddy get captured, with Iron Robert ultimately getting locked in a cell. This is maybe better than the big boy getting executed, because the ship’s captain, Henry Dread, really doesn’t like Geeks. Or Gooks, really, but he’s more racist against non-humanoid aliens. Henry does, however, take a liking to Roan, and soon enough Roan becomes a new member of the crew. For the next five years (we only know this because the book tells us directly), Roan does piracy stuff, IN SPAAAAAAAACE. The captain is a human supremacist, so it’s unsurprising when we learn he hopes to rebuild Earth’s space navy. He’s also, like Roan, a pure Terran. Supposedly. The two form a bond over their shared lineage and similar temperaments, but the friendship is a troubled one. Iron Robert is the only friend Roan has, and Henry wants the alien locked up. There’s also the problem of how to save Earth and rebuild a space navy when there are the Niss to consider. Nobody knows what they look like—not even Henry, who’s been prepping to do battle with them. Most of this installment follow the growing friendship between Roan and Henry. The passage of time gets a little strange; there are a few time jumps, which the narrator tells us directly, otherwise we wouldn’t figure Roan is on this ship for five years.

Eventually we get to easily the most frustrating part of the novel thus far, in what I would call a ten-car pileup of stupidity. They come across a Niss ship, and rather than retreat (on account of being outmanned and outgunned), Henry thinks it would be a great idea to attack the ship now. He can’t even be bothered to be reasonable about it. This turns out to be a huge mistake. As the pirate ship gets blown to kingdom come, and with everyone escaping to a single cramped pod, Roan has to make to tough choice to leave Iron Robert behind, on account of him being literally too big to fit in the pod. Or at least Roan would make that choice, if he wasn’t stubborn to the point of lunacy about it, even shooting and killing Henry. Killing the captain ends up being a pointless gesture as well, because they end up having to leave Iron Robert behind anyway. They call it the most unnecessary killing in all of old-timey science fiction. That Roan becomes the de facto head of the crew and sees no repercussions for his mistake is incredible.

A Step Farther Out

Racism and sexism in Earthblood fall under the category of “It can definitely be worse.” I know this because I’ve read enough SF from this period. Robert Silverberg alone probably provided enough miosgyny in the back half of the ’60s to power the Hoover Dam, like a hamster on a wheel powering your desktop computer. It’s not even nearly as problematic as Robert Heinlein was during this period, although I’m not sure if that’s because of Brown’s input or if Laumer really isn’t that bad on his own. On top of aging fairly well, this is just as fairly an entertaining novel thus far. The plot sort of meanders, and I’m starting to get tired of how everything in the universe seems to revolve around Roan (or maybe it’s that Roan is not that interesting a protagonist), but you can do a lot worse.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Intruders from the Stars” by Ross Rocklynne

February 13th, 2026

(Cover by Robert Fuqua. Amazing Stories, January 1944.)

Who Goes There?

Of the writers to get their start before John W. Campbell took over Astounding in late 1937, Ross Rocklynne was one of the few who adjusted well to the new regime. It could be because he and Campbell were close contemporaries, as well as Rocklynne being an early practitioner of what we now call “hard” SF. He made his debut in 1935 and had become an established writer by the time he attended the first ever Worldcon in 1939. He never gained the popularity of other contemporaries like Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, or even Campbell under his Don A. Stuart pseudonym, perhaps because he only ever wrote two novels, neither of which has ever appeared in book form. Rocklynne went MIA for much of the ’50s and ’60s; the SF Encyclopedia entry on him says this was because of Dianetics (a sadly common occurrence with SF authors at the time), but it doesn’t mention he also stepped away from writing because of chronic pain in his face and jaw. When he returned to writing in the late ’60s his work was surprisingly well-received, and he even appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions with a new story, alongside the New Wave writers.

“Intruders from the Stars” marked a rare Rocklynne appearance in Amazing Stories, since he was much more in favor of Astounding. I only heard about it because it had gotten a Retro Hugo nomination for Best Novella. The pickings must’ve been slim, because unfortunately it’s not very good. In fairness, 1944 is typically considered a lull year for the field, largely on account of the war. If authors didn’t enlist or weren’t drafted, some (like Asimov and Heinlein) worked busy jobs as civilians in support of the war effort. It wasn’t all bad: it was during those few years when Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, often writing together, emerged as an intimidatingly strong creative duo. Clifford Simak also began the series of stories that would later form his “novel” City. Still, there were fewer authors active between 1943 and 1945 than usual.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1944 issue of Amazing Stories. It remained stranded for three decades before being reprinted in the November 1973 issue of Science Fiction Adventures Classics.

Enhancing Image

It’s the last battle between an empire on its last legs and a more democratic faction. The empress of this civilization, a beautiful woman named Bess-Istra, faces death in battle, retreat from the planet, or a compromise with the leader of the enemy faction, a prime minister who wants Bess-Istra as his wife. Bess-Istra isn’t keen on this. For reasons that are never given, except maybe the implication that she’s really just that attractive, Bess-Istra passively draws in nearly every male character who crosses her path. Every man seems to feel intense love or hatred for her—sometimes both at the same time. Take Bandro, Bess-Istra’s right-hand man, who is loyal to her at the beginning, only for her to beat him and chew him out for suggesting she take the compromise, “his love for this girl at that moment turning into hate.” Said hate will fester over the course of the story, but we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Then there’s the totally amoral scientist Sah-Hallo, who stays loyal to Bess-Istra, if only because he seems to be the only man around to not feel strongly about her, being rather preoccupied with his “toys.” The fallen empress and her thousand trops hop in their massive cylindrical escape ship and mark coordinates for a neighboring planet fit for colonization. Or maybe not. Given how small Bess-Istra’s army really is and the fact that they don’t know much of anything about who may be living on said planet, there’s a very real chance whoever’s there might see them coming. Which is what happens. The folks on this other planet, who seem pretty advanced, nudge the ship off course so it misses the planet, instead heading for a planet you and I would be familiar with.

We then jump forward in both time and space to Earth, specifically Mozambique in 1944. We have our token American character in the form of Bill van Astor-Smythe (what a name), a war correspondent who for some reason has been hanging out in the jungle. These Japanese have invaded the island of Madagascar and look to make headway in Mozambique, which is… also very strange. Okay, time to take a step back. “Intruders from the Stars” explicitly takes place in 1944, but it’s not our 1944. This issue of Amazing Stories would’ve appeared on newsstands in December 1943. Rocklynne could’ve written this story as far back as late 1942, when the frontlines of World War II in both theaters looked quite different. There was still fighting in North Africa, Mussolini was still in full control in Italy, and the tide had just turned in favor of the Americans in the Pacific. It’s possible Rocklynne wrote this story during the Guadalcanal campaign. It still doesn’t excuse some conspicuous inaccuracies, like the fact that Bill and other characters act as if Midway hadn’t happened. The Japanese are a lot better fortified in-story than they were in real life, especially by the time of the story’s publication. The European theater is also described repeatedly as being bad for the Allies, which simply wasn’t the case, even by the middle of 1943. You have to wonder how people in those days got their news, or rather when they got their news. Obviously you’d read newspapers, listen to the radio, watch newsreels at the movie theater, but information could be wrong or misleading, not to mention there was a time delay. The unfortunate thing is that “Intruders from the Stars” would’ve read as dated on the very day it appeared on newsstands.

In case you haven’t guessed, this is very much a wartime story, and in part it functions as wartime propaganda, complete with racism against the Japanese and the liberal usage of a certain slur. There’s racism elsewhere, like referring to Chinese laborers as “coolies,” a slur so outdated that your grandpa might not even know what it means. To an extent at least, the racism is a byproduct of the circumstances in which Rocklynne wrote his story. Looking at World War II propaganda, namely anti-Japanese propaganda, between movies, cartoons, comic strips, etc., we see that things could be a lot worse than in Rocklynne’s story. The Japanese empire is antagonistic force, but the much bigger problem is Bess-Istra’s ship, which has crash-landed in the jungle. Bill meets a young missionary named John (or Johnny, as Bill keeps calling him) Stevens and his assistant Thomas Reynolds. The three men find that the locals have been drawn to the empress and begun treating her as an idol, which is bad for Stevens’s business. Bess-Istra and her cronies have been in cold sleep, possibly for centuries, but now awaken to a world which is decidedly not the one they were aiming for. Well, ya know, when you’re given lemons you should try making some lemonade. It’s convenient that not only is Earth totally habitable for Bess-Istra and her kind, and not only are these aliens totally humanoid in appearance, and not only are they able to understand human language thanks to a fancy alien doohickey, but also they’re able to catch up quickly on what’s been going on in the world. This is all rather hard to stomach and unscientific by Rocklynne’s standards—not that he was the strictest of writers.

Both Bill and Stevens are immensely attracted to Bess-Istra, much to Stevens’s angst, on account of his religious duties. Sex, or rather sexual attraction, plays a big role here, such that Bess-Istra’s obvious plan to become ruler of Earth wouldn’t get far without it. For his part, Bill is no fool, and from the day they meet he knows Bess-Istra and her gang are up to no good. The problem is twofold: a) he finds himself drawn to her, almost against his will, and b) he thinks, or tries to convince himself, that maybe there’s the chance the empress really does mean well when she says she can end this war with minimal casualties. It’s a very tempting proposal, and it turns out that what the aliens lack in numbers they more than make up for in equipment. Bess-Istra also seems to be taking an interest in Christianity (it’s vahue as to what sect, but I have to assume Catholicism), listening patiently while Stevens yaps at her about it. The Christian God is quite different from the goddess on Bess-Istra’s world, who demanded blood sacrifices. Having lived some of her life as a slave, Bess-Istra knows a thing or two about pain and torture. What ensues is—honestly sort of hard to describe. The aliens incapacitate Japanese and German soldiers, with the Allies and resistance (it’s nice, at least, that we get mentions of Chinese and other non-white resistance forces) groups making major headway almost literally overnight. Hitler (for some reason his first name is spelled “Adolph” in-story) and other Axis higher-ups are captured with ease.

Before you know it the war has ended, which is good for humanity, but then the question is… What next? It’s obvious what Bess-Istra wants, but the real question is whether anything can be done about it. How can Bill, who has (against his better judgment) befriended the empress in a sense, hope to save the world from her clutches?

There Be Spoilers Here

The answer is a mix of religion and some tough love—by that, I mean what is admittedly a well-earned slap, coming from Bill. I will say that while the love triangle angle is unearned, it’s interesting that not only does Bess-Istra’s interest in Christianity turn out to be genuine, but this happens because she falls in love with Stevens. Not that they can even get their relationship started, for a few reasons. In a bit of a twist it isn’t Bess-Istra who is ultimately the villain, but her spurned right-hand man Bandro. Whereas the plan to capture the Axis leaders and hold them on trial for war crimes was genuine, Bandro has a much more violent idea, killing soldiers and civilians indiscriminately. Berlin and Tokyo are utterly destroyed, which disturbs Stevens and even Bess-Istra; and yet, in the story’s most baffling moment, Bill begs to differ. He says:

The people of Japan and Germany are hopelessly warped. The Japanese believe themselves to be the divine flower of the world, and worship their emperor as a god in his own right. They believe it is a privilege for ‘inferior’ races to be ruled by them. The same goes for the Germans. They literally believe themselves to be the chosen people. That belief has been drilled into them for long, long years.

Nothing, only death, can completely erase the utter cruelty that has been bred into the very minds of those people! The utter conceit and treachery. The utter inhumanness.

Up to this point, Bill’s been a pragmatist and not one given to combat, which makes his sudden genocidal lunacy all the more head-turning. No doubt this was a sentiment some people really had, not helped by the death camps discovered at the war’s end (Rocklynne and others would not have known the full extent of Nazi and Japanese crimes at this point), but it makes little sense to come from this character. The good news is that Bess-Istra has by this point turned a new leaf and tells Bill to shut the fuck up. Ultimately the story rejects the notion of so-called collective punishment, even against the omnicidal horror of Germany under Nazism. Ultimately everything works, except for Stevens, who dies heroically. The implication is that with Stevens dead Bill might be able to make moves on the (former) empress, but we never get a clear answer as to how Bess-Istra feels about the Yankee journalist. As soon as the action ends, the story’s over.

A Step Farther Out

This is, if anything, indicative of both wartime SF and adventure SF of the sort that didn’t appear often in Astounding. There were other outlets for such pulp, including Planet Stories and Startling Stories, and even then Amazing Stories played second fiddle to those at the time. The magazine’s readership was waning, and this was a time when there were also paper shortages. It’s impressive, really, that Amazing Stories survived the war. “Intruders from the Stars” is not something I can honestly recommend, but it does serve as a kind of time capsule for a particular brand of SF writing that died off when the war ended. Rocklynne was a consummate professional, and while he wrote better than this, he also wrote worse.

See you next time.