The Story So Far

Sam Reed is ugly both physically and as a person. He’s a remorseless thug and grifter who makes money in the underworld of Delaware Keep, but he’s also rough-skinned and bald as an egg. It wasn’t always supposed to be like this, though. When he was born, Sam Reed was actually Sam Harker, of the Immortal (long-lived) Harker family, perhaps the single most powerful family in the Keeps. Unfortunately his mother died in childbirth and the father, his mental state in a downward spiral, decided to take revenge on Sam by giving him up as well as having him modified to make him appear like a “short-termer.” Sam grew up unaware of his lineage, and also the fact that he would live for centuries—assuming someone doesn’t kill him first. The possibility of getting murdered is quite real, considering Sam already had enemies to begin with, but also he gets into dealing with the Harkers and more specifically Zachariah, the patriarch of the family and Sam’s grandfather, unbeknownst to either of them at first. A love triangle of sorts develops between Sam and Kedre Walton, Zachariah’s mistress, which naturally irks the old man. Still, Zachariah finds Sam useful and hires him to assasinate Robin Hale, a fellow Immortal and a former Free Companion who’s looking to revive efforts to colonize the hostile islands of Venus. Sam goes along with this at first, but quickly realizes he’s as likely to get killed himself after killing Hale. Thus the two men, when they meet, decide to come up with a scheme behind the Harkers’ backs, and within this scheme Sam forms a plan to fuck over Hale for the sake of a ton of money.

Just when it seems like Sam has pulled off a successful grift, he gets blasted with dream-dust by Rosale, a popular dancer who’s been looking to double cross Sam this whole time. Our Anti-Hero™ finds himself coming out of this drug-induced stupor—a whole forty goddamn years later. All this without having aged at all, which means he must be an Immortal. That’s like the only explanation, right? Really he should’ve died, but Kedre, apparently out of genuine fondness for him, had him drugged, walking the streets as an addict for decades, until one day he snapped out of it. Despite having no prospects and no money, and even his own name being cursed after the grift he pulled on the colony, Sam manages to get back on his feet and even strike a new deal with Hale—as Joel Reed, Sam’s long-lost son. The landside colony did happen, but it’s been lacking in manpower and resources for years, as the Immortals have made sure it won’t prosper. Sam sees a new grift on the horizon, but also a chance to get revenge on Zachariah and the others. In a big fat lie that he’s sure will be found out, in time, Sam claims to have found a way to immortality landside.

Enhancing Image

A character I did not mention before and probably should have, although she only appears in a couple scenes throughout the novel and not at all in the final installment, is Sari Walton. Sari is Kedre’s granddaughter, and bears enough of a resemblance to her that when they first meet early in the novel Sam actually confuses her for Kedre. She’s also, by extension of being both Walton and Harker, Sam’s cousin(?), although neither picks up on this family connection. She’s less a character and more an example of the Immortals’ sleazy decadence, being a hedonist and a barely functioning drug addict. Similarly Sam can’t even take revenge on his father, Blaze, who has long since lost his mind and been confined to a padded cell, a development that would’ve happened even if Sam had never started on his warpath against Zachariah. Of course, Blaze being institutionalized is bad PR for the Immortals, who while being a bunch of idlers and schemers take pride in their ability to govern over the proletariat. On the one hand I take issue with how with maybe the exception of Kedre, every female character in this novel serves a plot function as a warning sign with legs for Sam, but characters of either gender come off pretty badly. This is a Kuttner-driven story, and Kuttner had a rather dim view of humanity. Sadly even Kedre takes a backseat in the final installment, really just being there as someone for Zachariah to explain his plans to.

Much of the final installment takes place landside, in which, over the span of quite a few years, the new wave of colonists set up on several islands. We get very little description as to what life is like landside, but the idea is that it’s rough, made more so because now there is a ticking-clock element. Sam and Hale both know that the lie about immortality is just that, and that at some point the young settlers will notice that they’re not quite as young as they were, say, five years ago. At some point they will come for Sam’s head. Sam, on his part, had given the settlers some bogus explanation, something about radiation that only works on the very young, which now sounds even more ridiculous than was intended in 1947. Somehow the ploy works, despite an underground group of dissenters threatening to overthrow Sam. The Logician, who you may have forgotten about, has even decided to join in on the fun, although eavesdropping on the dissenters gets him into quite a bit of trouble, and only his connection with Hale saves him. The Logician (he has a name, but that’s not very important) is the unlikeliest character in the whole novel, both for the power he possesses and how he has a tendency to show up in just the right place at just the right time. Indeed without the Logician the ending would not have happened, but I’m getting ahead of myself slightly. This is a curious subplot, if only it didn’t suffer from the same problem as the rest of the novel, which is that it feels underdeveloped to the point of malnourishment. I’m not sure how much time Kuttner and Moore spent on writing Fury, but even by the standards of ’40s SF it strikes me as rushed and stripped-back to a fault.

Speaking of which, there is one new character of note introduced, although I’m barely exaggerating when I say she exists as plot device. See, we’re told over and over that the Immortals are fond of playing the long game, partly because of their extremely long lifespans but also implicitly because they’re lazy. Zachariah comes up with an assassination plan for Sam that would take a couple decades at least to come to fruition, but… I was going to say it’s all but foolproof, but it’s so strange. The Harkers, through the power of eugenics, are able to breed selecively a girl whom Sam would unconsciously trust, which is important for a man who is (rightfully) paranoid about everyone around him. The girl in question, Signa, eventually gets hired as Sam’s secretary when she comes of age, but little does Sam know that this is like The Manchurian Candidate and that Signa has been brainwashed to kill him upon a specific unconscious trigger. This is pseudo-science of the highest order, and it’s one of those things that makes me wonder if Fury had been written specifically with John W. Campbell’s tastes in mind. Certainly it feels more made-to-order than “Clash by Night,” which at least has a touch of the personal. Fury leans much harder on what you might generously call oudated psychology, to its detriment, and while the scene where Signa nearly kills Sam is a tense one, this is all such a last-minute development that the impact is minimal. Sam spends several years with Signa as a secretary, but we get very little impression of what they’re working relationship is like, only that they’re not romantically or sexually involved. I guess that’s all well and good, considering Sam is over a century old by this point and old enough to be Signa’s great-great-grandfather.

On the one hand Fury is about man quite literally crawling out of the swampy waters of Venus onto dry land, as a sort of retelling of man’s evolution, both as a descendant of amphibians and as homo sapiens evolved from hunter-gatherers to “civilized” people. Taken less as allegory and more as political commentary, it becomes more ominous. After the failed attempt on Sam’s life he’s essentially put into cold sleep by the Logician, after it’s become apparent that the colony might succeed without him, and just as apparent that if Sam continues in his position he’ll emerge as a Mussolini-esque figure. Democracy was already a fugazi landside, and it’s implied that the Immortals, who by this point had been forced out of the Keeps, will govern alonside Hale. This probably won’t be much of an improvement, if we’re being honest. If we’re to take the Logician at his word then we’re supposed to believe that there are times and places where strongmen like Sam are necessary for the betterment of humanity. The novel doesn’t challenge this notion at all. Sam may have been raised to be a criminal, but his Harker genes made sure he be destined for greatness—even if it comes at a rather high price. Intentionally or not, Fury is one of the more overtly fascistic works I’ve read from Astounding‘s so-called golden age, which sounds disconcerting (because it is).

A Step Farther Out

This is the longest Kuttner-Moore story I’ve read, as while the two wrote a mindboggling amount of fiction they wrote relatively few novels, and I have to admit it’s not one of my favorites. The virtues that mark the best of Kuttner and Moore’s (alone or together) short fiction is here, sort of, but these good qualities are held back by strange pacing and characters who are not totally worth caring about. This is not to say I wish the characters were lovable little woobies, as Sam being an asshole is indeed critical to the plot happening in the first place, but it can be hard to stay invested when, for instance, conversations between Sam and Zachariah are basically like Zoom calls between you and that coworker you hate. It’s also a disappointing follow-up to “Clash by Night,” which with a much smaller cast and in less than half the word count managed to evoke a vaster and more lively world. The problem ultimately is that while Moore did write parts of Fury, her contributions as a stylist and a sort of humanist (although like Kuttner she was a pessimist) are sorely missed.

See you next time.