(Cover artist uncredited. Startling Stories, May 1950.)
Who Goes There?
Everyone who makes it big has had to start somewhere, and the same can be said for John D. MacDonald, who became famous for his crime novels, be it standalones like Cape Fear (originally titled The Executioners) or his long-running Travis McGee series, about a detective who lives on a house boat. But before all those novels, MacDonald wrote a fair amount of SF in the late ’40s and early ’50s—a past he did not seem to be ashamed of, considering he also authorized a collection of his short SF in the ’70s, well after he had made it as a crime writer. Wine of the Dreamers would be either MacDonald’s first or second novel, and it’s certainly the first of a few SF novels he wrote. Why he started out with SF before soon moving to crime is unclear, but I would have to guess it has something to do with the bubble that was the market for SF in the few years right before and after 1950. If you’re a young writer looking to cut your teeth, like MacDonald was at the time, you could do much worse than writing SF, even at short lengths, since there was no shortage of outlets that took short SF. Aside from maybe catching a short story or two of his in passing this is the first thing by MacDonald I’ve read, which is not a typical starting point.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. I got a PDF of the book version, and skimming through some sections quickly reveals that the magazine and book versions are rather different, with the former being abridged, although ISFDB and the SF Encyclopedia make no mention of this difference. Aside from an ebook edition the book version has not seen print in a couple decades.
Enhancing Image
I don’t have that much to say about Wine of the Dreamers, so I’ll put down my thoughts in note form and see where that takes us. My thoughts were a bit scattered as I was reading it and unfortunately, now that I’ve technically finished reading it and the dust has settled, I’m still struggling to process fully what MacDonald did here.
The premise is simple enough, although it’s given a smokescreen of complexity by virtue of there being two sets of protagonists for the price of one. Firstly we have Dr. Bard Lane and the psychologist Sharan Inly on Earth, in a quasi-dystopian near future where the space race (which mind you we were only starting to see the first glimmers of in 1950) is still a matter of national concern. Sensational news media dominates print and radio, with horrors like murder, theft, and scandal seemingly around every corner. Gambling has also become more of a concern, which is prescient on MacDonald’s part considering we in the year 2025 have a huge gambling problem—albeit more in the form of sports betting and video game micro-transactions than casinos. Divorce is also on the rise, because of course it is.
MacDonald has things to say about what were then society’s ills, or rather middle-class white America’s ills, without actually taking much of a political position. Like I couldn’t tell you if he was a Republican or Democrat at the time, although given this was before the late ’60s switching of the parties it wouldn’t have been much help anyway. In fairness to him, America really was in a liminal point in its cultural development: World War II had recently ended, leaving the US and Russia as the only really functioning international powers as far as Europe was concerned. The Allies had partitioned Germany, and even split Berlin in two, which itself turned out to be a humanitarian crisis. When MacDonald wrote Wine of the Dreamers circa 1949 it also would’ve been before the Korean War. TV was also only just starting to become commercially viable. If the scenes set on Earth do a good job at anything it’s capturing the uncertainty and paranoia of the immediate post-war years, without much room for so-called prosperity. It’s an America not too unlike ours.
The secondary plot follows the titular dreamers, or the Watchers as they’re called, a small and closed-off society of humanity in the stars that can barely be considered a society, being on its last legs and so decadent. Raul Kinson and his sister Leesa are young and rebellious members of a culture that has long since given up on progress and excellence, with the Watchers spending much of their time in dream machines, where they imagine themselves as other intelligent beings on other planets—one of these planets being Earth. Of course, the problem is that the “dreams” the Watchers have are not dreams at all, but rather the Watchers telepathically take over the minds of unwilling and unsuspecting hosts, only the Watchers don’t know this. The novel’s central dilemma is what might happen to such a society if it became aware of the evils it casually indulges. Philip K. Dick could’ve done a mean job with such a premise, but MacDonald is a very different writer from Dick and so isn’t as interested in the philosophical or religious implications of the dream machines. MacDonald illustrates the loneliness and creepiness of the Watchers’ society well, but he doesn’t go far enough for my liking.
So, the big thing that dates this novel, aside from it being very post-WWII, is the fixation with mental illness, or more specifically a neurotypical person’s conception of mental illness. This is gonna sound like it was done in bad taste, but the idea (I’m not kidding) is that the reason there have been so many freak incidents throughout modern history, with people seemingly going postal at random or being “possessed by devils,” is because of the Watchers abusing their powers and having way too much fun with the bodies they possess. Obviously we know this to not be true, and MacDonald would’ve known as well, but that didn’t stop him from coming up with a nonsense SFnal explanation for severe mental illness that shifts the blame away from capitalist society’s consistent demonizing of those with mental illness and puts it on a made-up outside force. As someone with a history of depression, this is hard for me to take. In the years immediately following the end of WWII there was evidently a resurgence of interest in psychology in middle-class America, and how people with mental aberrations might be treated. Wine of the Dreamers sees MacDonald hopping on that bandwagon.
Of the two plots, which get more or less the same amount of attention, the one focusing on the Watchers is easily superior. This might be because I’m indifferent to the Earth plot involving a rocket launch that goes horribly wrong (because I’ve become increasingly indifferent to space flight and the prospect of colonizing other worlds), but I’m more interested in fictionalized societies that say something about our own, by way of allegory. From what little MacDonald had to say about this novel we know he intended it to have symbolic meaning. The Watchers are humans who have been away from Earth for thousands of years, and the culture they’ve built up has been mostly forgotten and degraded to the point where they’re basically a dying race. As MacDonald says, “when original purposes are forgotten, the uses of ritual can be destructive.” The dream machines were not meant for sadistic fun, but as a teaching mechanism for the isolated Watchers. It’s a shame then that at least in the magazine version we only get the bare-bones version of this conflict. I will say, at least as an advertisement for the book version (although that didn’t come out until a year later), the magazine version of Wine of the Dreamers does its job.
There Be Spoilers Here
Of course all’s well that ends well, although it was indeed the ending of the magazine version that made me raise an eyebrow and wonder if there was more to the story. Turns out I was right. There’s a kind of romantic square going on between our four main characters, with Raul and Leesa taking over Lane and Inly’s bodies respectively, with Raul falling for Inly and Leesa falling for Lane. This hint of romance is only that: a hint. (By the way, something we learn about the dream machines is that the “dreamer” can only occupy the mind of a host who’s of the same sex, which makes you wonder what would happen if a cisgender Watcher took over a trans person’s body. Just food for thought.) In the magazine version we’re told, as really an afterthought of an epilogue, that Our Heroes™ will be having a double wedding, which is incredible considering they haven’t known each other that long. Skimming through the book version this epilogue at least feels less thrown-together, since it gets a whole chapter to itself as opposed to a couple paragraphs. Either way the ending is weak, smacking of either MacDonald not knowing how else to end his story or of editorial interference that would not have been unusual for the time.
A Step Farther Out
It’s competent, although somehow I felt like I was only getting part of the picture with it. It could be that the book version, being longer, is the better experience, but that’s a question to ask the three living people who have read the book version of Wine of the Dreamers. What’s funny is that looking up reviews on Goodreads, at least one major review implied to have read the magazine version, which is considerably shorter. Had I known about the difference in advance I might not have chosen this novel for review. I’m not sure if MacDonald had written the magazine version first and then expanded it or what have you, since despite being a popular writer in mystery/crime circles we actually don’t have much in terms of interviews and essays from MacDonald; he was not that much of a public figure. At some point I’ll tackle his short SF, which might be more indicative of his talent. If you’re gonna read Wine of the Dreamers then I suggest seeking out the book version, although it’s very out of print.
This is it, the last post of the year, and also the last entry in my year-long tribute to that classiest of genre magazines: F&SF. I felt it only fitting to tackle a work by someone who was a long-time contributor to F&SF, and also from what I can tell this might be the only “complete novel” ever published in the magazine, all the others being serials. Algis Budrys enjoyed a long and productive life, and even got his start in the field early, being barely out of his teens when his first story was published in 1952. He was born in 1931 to Lithuanian parents, in what was then East Prussia, which later became German and then Russian territory. The family moved to the US when Budrys was five years old, and he spent some of his childhood in New Jersey (my home state), which no doubt played a part in the setting of today’s story. English was presumably his second language, which didn’t stop him from picking up the pen at a very young age and proving himself, over the course of just a few years, to be one of the finest wordsmiths in ’50s SF (for however much that’s worth). By the time he turned thirty he had already written such acclaimed novels as Who? and Rogue Moon, which, while flawed, are some of the most philosophically demanding reads of the pre-New Wave era, gaining him a reputation as a writer’s writer.
By past the early ’60s, Budrys’s output went down considerably, to the point where after that decade he would write only two novels: Michaelmas in 1977 and Hard Landing in 1992. While he wrote little short fiction, he kept busy and stayed a presence in the field in other ways, namely as critic and editor. He at first did the review collumn for Galaxy, before moving to F&SF, where he would stay for about 15 years. Also, around the same time Hard Landing was published, he staerted editing the ambitious semi-pro magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction. More controversially he was also a judge for the Scientology-backed Writers of the Future contest, and a long-time editor of the annual anthologies that organization put togehter, although Brudrys was not himself a Scientologist. Hard Landing was not the last work of fiction of his published in his lifetime, but it feels like a farewell to something, on top of being Budrys’s most formally complex novel, even if at about 45,000 words it barely counts as a novel.
Placing Coordinates
While its publication date is sometimes given as 1993, Hard Landing was first published in the October-November 1992 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Unless Kristine Kathryn Rusch was lying or mistaken, this version is “the entire text” of the novel. The only way you can get it in-print is from Gollancz, either as an ebook or as part of a paperback omnibus with The Iron Thorn and Michaelmas.
Enhancing Image
We open with a document delving into the accidental death of a mysterious man, one by the name of Nelville Sealman, who got electrocuted at a railway station. To make a long story short, Sealman is one step short of being a John Doe, as his documentation turns out to be forged: he seemed to have borrowed the name of another Nelville Sealman, who had died in infancy in 1932, and he has no friends or next of kin. Nobody came to identify him. Authorities would only have the foggiest notion of who he was based on what he had on his person, which is not much. Doing some basic math tells us the story, at least at the time of Sealman’s death, is set in 1975. Of course, Sealman is not really Sealman, nor is he even a human being, but a humanoid alien named Selmon, who had crash-landed on Earth, in New Jersey, in the late 1940s, along with four others of his kind, although one of them had died from his injuries shortly after the landing. The deceased’s alien idenity is only made clear once an autopsy is performed and the National Registry of Pathological Anomalies (NRPA) enters the picture. Think The X-Files, which is funny because Hard Landing‘s magazine publication preceded that show’s premiere by mere months. Speaking of funny things, there’s a local pathologist named Albert Camus, which must be awkward for him since I assume the famous French writer was still a thing in this novel’s universe. (How come you never meet anyone named Abe Lincoln?) There’s also a certain Dr. William Henshaw, who appears to be a minor character at first but who will figure majorly into the plot.
The plot, such as it is, is not really the novel’s focus, for there isn’t much of a linear beat-by-beat plot but rather a Cerberus or hydra of plot threads, which happen in tandem with each other and which all sprout from the same seed. The “hard landing” of the novel’s title would have far-reaching ramifications, not least for the four (then three) survivors, especially Arvan (human name Jack Mullica) and Ravashan, with the third, Eikmo, mostly staying off-screen to do whatever business he does. Budrys ignores Eikmo, or rather refrains from giving us his perspective, for pretty much the entire novel; but this turns out to be quite deliberate rather than an oversight. As for Mullica (I’m calling him that for the rest of the review) and Ravashan, they serve as dual protagonists, being the two perspectives we shift to the most frequently. I say “the two perspectives” because despite this novel’s brevity, there’s a surprising number of those, including a fictionalized version of Brudrys himself. The, I guess you could say “gimmick” with Hard Landing is that it’s framed as a mix of fiction and non-fiction, between first-person accounts, documents, and interview recordings. It’s also not always clear who the POV character is, such that much of one’s effort when reading this novel goes into putting the pieces together—and of course these narrators are not always reliable. On paper there’s little (aside from some salty language) that would not be able to see print in, say, the years when Budrys was in his prime as a fiction writer (the ’50s and pre-New Wave ’60s), but the way in which Budrys goes about telling his story is decidedly postmodern.
Mullica and Selmon meet in 1975, in which the latter really does die in a railway accident. The rest of the novel mostly recounts how we got to this point, with the two main perspectives because Mullica’s and Ravashan. We find out early on that Mullica, despite being an alien, had gotten married a while back—he and Eikmo both, “Eikmo and his fish-store lady,” although Selmon and Ravashan remain bachelors. Mullica and Ravashan are like the plot threads of this novel in that despite starting at the same place (the crashed ship), they go in very different directions. One thing that stands out obviously with Hard Landing, and which people (on the rare occasion that anyone talks about this novel, for despite getting a Locus poll spot and Nebula nomination it’s quite obscure) are a little too quick to point out, is that it’s a dramatization of the immigrant experience—specifically the white European immigrant experience in the first half of the 20th century. Mullica and company are of course not of white European ancestry, but they pass for white, and Margery (Mullica’s wife) even mistakes him for a Soviet defector when they first meet. That Mullica and the others have rather unusual “equipment” on the inside (which does become plot-relevant) is beside the point. If readers nowadays seem indifferent to Hard Landing, or those few who read it in the first place, it’s because of two things: that Budrys’s use of multiple narrators is a smokescreen for what is really a simple and ultimately old-fashioned narrative (even in 1992 the idea of aliens landing and mixing in with everyday humans was not new), and I would also say the more unfair sentiment that the narrative of the continental European immigrant in America is no longer relevant.
There’s much debate as to how autobiographical a work of fiction can be. The idea that the author or creator puts at least a bit of themself into their work is in itself a relatively new one, in terms of understanding art, so it stands to reason that, for instance, when we read Hamlet or Macbeth we’re peeking into the mind of an Englishman who’s now been dead for over 400 years. But then there are authors who unabashedly project themselves onto their work, sometimes brazenly, to such an extent that the work really does become semi-autobiographical. Philip Roth basically made a career out of blurring the line between his real life and the lives of his main characters; there’s even a fictionalized version of himself in a few of his novels, most famously The Plot Against America. Even in the realm of genre SF there was a precedent for fiction-as-autobiography when Budrys wrote his final novel, namely with the case of Philip K. Dick. I decided to find out for myself, and Budrys had indeed reviewed Dick’s famously (or infamously) loopy novel-tract hybrid VALIS, for F&SF, although I was disappoint to find that he had very little to say about the novel as a reflection of what was clearly Dick’s mental illness and his attempt to cope with his condition. Maybe it was something one could not say in a book review that presumably thousands of people would read, including possibly Dick himself. But, whether he was genuine about it or not, Budrys’s assumption that VALIS was an attempt on Dick’s part to form a new Gnostic Christian sect was a tragic misreading of that book. Similarly it would be a tragic mistake to overlook that with his final novel, Budrys, as the son of immigrants, was writing about what it was like to be assimilated into American culture.
Mullica strives and eventually succeeds at basically living a normal life, albeit with a brush or two with low-level crime thanks to Margery’s brother (there’s the implication he runs drugs or dirty money, but not much comes with it, maybe intentionally on Budrys’s part), while Ravashan’s path is a lot more… let’s say ambitious. He gets involved with the US military and even starts to work for an unnamed and amoral congressman he calls “Yankee,” and he even founds NRPA. Yes, the department that investigates alien sightings and other anomalous activities was started by an alien. It’s called irony. Ravashan also believes he won’t be able to consult a physician for his problem, on account of keeping his alien nature a secret, so he gets the bright idea to see a veterinarian instead—who happens to be Henshaw. One of my quibbles with this novel is that its brevity and economy of words work as much against it as for it, particularly with character relationships. There’s quite a bit you could do with Ravashan and Henshaw’s interactions, but Budrys doesn’t do as much as he could’ve. Think about it: Ravashan, who by the back end of the novel has become unspeakably powerful, albeit preferring to work behind the scenes, is able to hide the fact that he is not technically a white man—that is to say he’s able to pass as a white man. But Henshaw is black. I bring this up now because Budrys brings it up. Henshaw is a well-educated black man, and is indeed the only POC in a cast of lily-white folks. On paper he’s potentially the most interesting character in the novel, but, perhaps because he feared he would screw things up, Budrys makes only step above minimal use of him. This is especially a shame because it turns out that Henshaw is one of the narrators, although this is not revealed until late. Hard Landing suffers, if anything, by being too short.
There Be Spoilers Here
It’s implied that Ravashan has contracted AIDS, at a time when the Reagan administration had not yet made it publicly known, which is how he goes out. In the strangest and maybe most provocative scene in the novel Ravashan pulls an As I Lay Dying and tells us the scene of his own death, and Henshaw subsequently burning his body so as not to leave evidence of an alien having lived on Earth. How this could be relayed to us is mysterious at first, but later we find that Henshaw has tried to write a novel based on his experiences with Ravashan and NRPA, although he’s not able to finish it. Murrica, depending on how you look at it, is not as lucky. Remember Eikmo? He’s back. He apparently got news of Selmon’s death and assumed the worst, because he tracks down Mullica to his home and thinks he had killed their mutual friend. After an altercation, both are dead, Mullica killed by Eikmo and Eikmo in turn killed by an enraged Margery. And then there were none. The scene plays like a fucking tragic play, although the exact facts of the exchange are called into question. The reality is that there is no objective viewpoint, and at the very end of the novel Budrys perhaps overplays his hand by his fictionalized self saying: “In fact, I could have made up the whole thing, couldn’t I?” Either he has a moment of doubt about whether his readers got the message or he’s mocking the obviousness of the narrator (or narrators) being unreliable. The latter is more likely, but either way I’m not a fan of the very end of this novel.
A Step Farther Out
That’s it, my last review of the year. I’ve come to realize that my ability to deliver reviews on time has been slipping as of late; partly this is because when I write, I write a lot, which takes time. I’m also quite lazy. I had finished reading Hard Landing almost a week ago but did not start working on my review until yesterday. I do, however, have a fun announcement to make in my forecast post tomorrow. Stay tuned.
(Cover by Lawrence. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, March 1944.)
Who Goes There?
One of the most beloved Christian apologists of his era, G. K. Chesterton came to prominence in the Edwardian era as a kind of jack of all trades when it came to writing, being a prolific essayist, poet, and short story writer. His Father Brown mysteries were pretty popular during Chesterton’s life and remain very much in print. (Curiously Chesterton came up with his Catholic priest detective character long before he himself converted to Catholicism.) His religious treatises Heretics and Orthodoxy were partly responses to avowed atheists of the era, such as George Bernard Shaw (Chesterton and Shaw were good friends, for the record), and partly to help those who considered themselves defenders of the faith in what was becoming a more secular England. You don’t have to be Catholic, or even Christian (as indeed I’m not), to enjoy Chesterton’s writing, since he tended to be very funny, and had kind of an Oscar Wilde-esque penchant for zingers. He’s a much finer prose stylist than H. G. Wells, his close contemporary, friend, and in some ways his foil. He also wrote his fair share of fantasy, including what is perhaps his single most famous work, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, one of the great novels of the 20th century.
Of course, how The Man Who Was Thursday counts as fantasy can be a point of contention with people, to the point where folks in the Famous Fantastic Mysteries letters column were wondering if it might even qualify as fantastic enough—although they enjoyed the novel as a whole. 1908 would be a bit of an annus mirabilis for Chesterton, as it saw the publications of both The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy, and despite being on its face an espionage novel (an early example of that genre) The Man Who Was Thursday might be as concerned with Christianity as Chesterton’s religious tracts. This is a reread for me, although I have to admit I mostly just stuck to the complete text rather than its FFM publication. I said in an earlier post that the novel’s FFM printing seems to be unabridged, but doing a side-by-side comparison between the Project Gutenberg text and FFM version for random passages show that the novel has been subtly abridged, from about 57,000 words to maybe 55,000—a difference the casual reader might not notice. Chapters and scenes remain intact, but sentences and even parts of sentences are occasionally tossed out the window, I have to assume for length but also for little flourishes that the editor (Mary Gnaedinger) might’ve considered a little too verbose.
Placing Coordinates
First published in 1908 and reprinted in the March 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which for some reason is not on Internet Archive. It is on Luminist at least, so there’s that. I will say, however, that aside from the novelty of Lawrence’s interiors (which are quite good) and a slightly altered text, I would simply read it on Project Gutenberg, it being in the public domain and all. Paperback copies are also not hard to find in the wild, this being a fairly well-known classic novel.
Enhancing Image
The Man Who Was Thursday is a masterpiece, and when it comes to novels as fine and yet weird as this one the question we have to ask ourselves is not “How did he do it?” but rather “How did he get away with it?” How did Chesterton get away with writing this? It’s what we would now call trippy, there’s certainly a hallucinatory effect that intensifies as the novel progresses; but it’s also a deeply Christian and at the same time political novel. Not only is anarchism mentioned but it’s the political ideology that takes center stage, at a time when anarchism in the US and England was gaining some very bad mainstream press, most infamously (at least for Americans) with Leon Czolgosz assassinating William McKinley in 1901. This novel was written in the 1900s, and presumably is set in that decade, what with there being “motor-cars” that predate the Ford Model T. So Chesterton introduces us to Saffron Park, a London suburb. These are not, however, the fog- and mud-covered streets of London as described at the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House; instead it’s a whimsical and implicitly fantastic introduction that hints at the madness to come. We’re introduced to Gabriel Syme, not as you would normally describe the protagonist in a narrative, but like the subjective viewpoint in a lucid dream—an angle Chesterton is going for quite deliberately. Between the novel’s subtitle and this opening passage about the people of Saffron Park it’s clear, at least with hindsight, that Chesterton is setting us up for something, only we’re not given to thinking anything is amiss at first. Not even Syme suspects what he’s in for, poor bastard. I could quote the whole passage, but I won’t.
We meet Syme and his friend/rival Lucian Gregory, who considers himself not only an earnest poet but a genuien anarchist—possibly the realest. Syme claims Gregory is full of shit, and so Gregory takes him on a journey to prove that he is, indeed, the realest. Gregory is quite the character, and I’m gonna frontload this review with discussion of him since once we get through the first few chapters we won’t see him again until the very end of the novel. It isn’t apparent at first, but Gregory will serve a major symbolic purpose, on top of being reponsible for kicking off the plot, being a tenacious red-haired man, someone who considers himself both a genuine creator (a poet, or an artist) and a genuine destroyer (anarchist) “a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.” He is contrasted with his sister Rosamond, who similarly has fiery red hair but whose demeanor is much kinder; she’s a minor character, and like Gregory she’s gonna be absent for most of the novel, but we’ll eventually get back to her. Indeed we have no choice but to remember Rosamond, as she will be the only female character of any importance. I said this is a great novel, I didn’t say it would be all that egalitarian. As for Syme and Gregory, whom Chesterton calls at one point “these two fantastics” (these are not realistic characters, or even actors on a stage, but water-colored figures in a fairy tale), the two take a trip to what turns out to be the entrance to a secret lair, with a password and everything. The password in question is “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,” which is funny considering Gregory and other anarchists would have to recite the name of a notorious conservative politician of the time.
Political humor. Tehe.
Before we continue with the plot, I wanna stop for a moment to illustrate how the FFM printing occasionally removes sentences or sentence fragments, seemingly to achieve a punchier effect in places where Chesterton is being verbose, such that these passages would be considered the least necessary. Readers wouldn’t have missed out on much, but what they did miss would’ve often been little juicy nuggets of prose. Take this passage for example, in which Syme and Gregory are traversing the secret passage which leads to the Council’s hideout. I’ve bracketed the section which the FFM printing excludes:
They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs[, and the very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.]
Sure, we don’t need to know that last fragment, as it doesn’t further the plot or action, but it sounds better than simply “They were bombs.” Anyway, Gregory is convinced he’s gonna be the new Thursday in the Council of the Days, a league of European anarchists, the best and most fiendish the movement has to offer. Each member of the Council takes on an alias after a day of the week, and the previous Thursday died recently. There’s gonna be a vote tonight. Syme and Gregory have each sworn a secret to each other, which each party is to keep to himself—a tragic development for Gregory, given Syme’s secret is that he’s actually an undercover cop. Gregory just led a cop into a den of anarchists. What a dumbass. But all is not lost, as Syme is not only here by himself, unable to call for backup, but he’s also sworn that he’d keep the hideout a secret. Since these men are English, their word turns out to be good enough. The Man Who Was Thursday is a uniquely British novel in several ways, not the least of them being that if this were an American story Syme wouldn’t give a fuck about keeping a secret with a man who evidently sees him as an adversary once he reveals his true identity. To make matters worse, while Gregory is poised to become the new Thursday, Syme comes in with an improvised speech that blows Gregory’s out of the water, and the despite the fact that surely nobody at the meeting would have seen Syme before he wins the vote and becomes the new Thursday. More or less on a whim, it sseems. Gregory is not happy about this, and it’s hard to blame him considering once Syme becomes Thursday Gregory will vanish from the narrative until the end.
Syme is the main character, so let’s talk about him. Syme is not your conventional hero, or even much of a heroic figure. I’m not just saying this because he’s a cop. Having descended from a line of eccentrics, Syme has become neurotic about his family of nonconformists and has gone in the total opposite direction—of being in favor of order to the point of lunacy. We’re treated to what I remember as being the only conventional flashback in the whole novel, in which we’re given Syme’s backstory, how he had a chance meeting with an unusually philosophically-minded policeman, and of his encounter with a mysterious man in “the dark room,” evidently not seeing the man’s face but being given the lofty job of policeman. His job thus was to go undercover and infiltrate the Council of the Days, to put a stop to the anarchist movement in England from the inside. This is a bit of an unusual scene since it breaks away from what is otherwise is a more or less linear narrative, but we do get an explanation for Syme’s strange obsession with the anarchists, not to mention we get some really good lines from the cop he talks to. A little quibble I have with this book, which I think comes close to perfect on the whole, is that the pacing does go kind of sideways. The first two chapters are a perfect setup-payoff affair, totally engrossing and with a promising of escalating tension, only for the narrative to jump backwards abruptly momentarily. I also have to admit that once Gregory leaves the novel and we’re introduced to the Council that the plot sort of funnels, or rather that there’s a snowball effect in which you have a straight shot to the climax over the course of about a hundred pages. Most of this novel can feel like one long chase sequence.
So we meet the Council, who will accompany Syme as main characters for the rest of the novel, although some members get more attention than others. It’s a bit of an ensemble effort, and Chesterton doesn’t give himself too much wordage. With how many ideas it throws at the reader The Man Who Was Thursday could’ve easily been double its length if published today, but Chesterton, being accustomed to short-length works like poems and essays, wasn’t much of a novelist, or rather he didn’t have the prolonged stamina expected of the writer who thinks themself a novelist first. Instead he hits the reader with a shotgun blast of symbols and characters. None of the members of the Council is very developed, individually, but they prove to be greater than the sum of their parts. There is, of course, Sunday, the head of the Council, an almost impossibly large man with a face that could take up the whole sky—a character not too dissimilar from Chesterton, for his physical largness but also his charima. There’s Monday, only otherwise known as the Secretary, who acts as Sunday’s right-hand man and most devoted follower, and who delivers one of the novel’s most memorable lines: “A man’s brain is a bomb.” There’s Gogol as Tuesday, a cartoonish Pole among mostly Englishmen—although it turns out that “Gogol” is, in fact, a Cockney policeman in disguise. There’s the Marquis de St. Eustache as Wednesday, a noble Frenchman who acts as if he jumped out of one of Alexandre Dumas’s novels. There’s my personal favorite, Professor de Worms as Friday, who’s so old and dicrepit that Syme wonders how he even made it to the Council meeting. Finally there’s Dr. Bull as Saturday, a young and mischievous yet enigmatic fellow whose “smoked spectacles” hide his eyes. These are basically cartoon characters, but whereas that would be considered shallow writing in realistic fiction, Chesterton uses the men’s broad-strokes characterizations for humor, as well as symbolic purposes.
Sunday outs Gogol as an undercover cop at the meeting, although despite Gogol being a cop Sunday doesn’t have him killed or anything; in what I have to admit is a confusing turn of events Sunday just… lets Gogol go free? The poor Cockney has a fall down the stairs by accident, but he’s fine, and we even see him much later in the novel safe and sound. But since Gogol is the first Council member to be outed as a cop he also gets the least time to shine; it’s a good thing, then, that his one scene where he’s the focus is pretty funny. I’m sorry, did I say “first” Council member to be outed as a cop? Well that’s because Syme and Gogol aren’t the only cops in the Council. It’s hard to say what counts as spoilers for this novel, since I’ve seen people argue that even the ending doesn’t really count as a spoiler, seeing as how the subtitle anticipates. It’s also easy to see, on a second reading, how Chesterton sets up his novel as a work of fantasy (albeit surreal rather than “high” or “low” fantasy) from the very beginning. Certainly the series of events here soon proves to be improbable, if not outright fantastic. What are the odds of there being multiple policement undercover in the Council of Days, and that these cops would be unaware of each other’s missions? Syme didn’t know who Gogol really was, and after some investigating he comes to find he didn’t know who Professor de Worms was either—not a horribly old nihilist but a relatively young actor who took on the role of a real man he once met named Professor de Worms. Wilks, the cop who has been impersonating de Worms, uses makeup and body language for the sake of a performance. Like Syme, Wilks is a man of order who has such a disdain for disorder (or, as he says, nihilism) that he comes out looking half insane for it. Chesterton seems to be saying that police and anarchist, both driven in their ideals to the point of mania, are two sides of the same coin. It goes to explain why Syme and Gregory are opposites, yet they have an affinity for each other that will come back into play at the very end.
Before we get waist-deep in the plot, or rather the prolonged chase sequence as I had mentioned, let’s talk a bit more about Chesterton’s faith and politics, and how they figure into what is a deeply religious and political novel. Chesterton is now known as a Catholic apologist, although he didn’t convert to Roman Catholicism until fairly late in life, a good 14 years after The Man Who Was Thursday was published; he was, however, already a devout Anglican who had written essays and books aimed at Christian readers, regardless of denomination. One reason I suspect this novel works with readers who may or may not share Chesterton’s faith is that while the dialogue and even character functions are laced rather strongly with Biblical meaning (Rosamond is a walking symbol of Christian grace), it’s not a work that gets stuck in the quagmire of church minutia. Just as an example, you have to admit that if you’re a secular (or even non-Catholic) fan of Gene Wolfe that his work can occasionally be stifling with its uniquely Catholic symbolism. Or to use another example, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a very good novel, but its dead give-aways as a pre-Vatican II novel meant it became dated just a few years after publications. The Man Who Was Thursday has no such issues, and while Chesterton’s both-sidesing of police and anarchists can come off a bit centrist in a way, the notion that police are not embodiments of good necessarily (Syme notes at one point, with dismay, that one of the police’s functions is to terrorize London’s working class) can actually be taken as a progressive stance. Granted, Chesterton’s framing of anarchism is unflattering (especially given Gregory’s symbolic purpose, which we’ll get to), but it could be a lot worse for 1908.
There Be Spoilers Here
Three, then four, and so on, Syme discovering that each man in the Council is an undercover cop, such that ultimately everyone in the Council (even the Secretary) who isn’t Sunday is secretly a cop—yet none of these knew any of the others were police. Each man admits to having been recruited into the service by a man in a dark room, a man none of them can identify. Each man has taken on a disguise, and each encounter has that disguise peeled back to reveal a man of nobility—if also eccentricity. Professor de Worms is shown to be a stage actor underneath his old-man makeup, the Marquis is shown to not be quite as statuesque a man as thought since much of his bulk turns out to be padding, Dr. Bull’s eerie spectacles come off to reveal a youthful innocence, and so on. Each man is not quite what he appears to be, which is fitting considering the climax of the novel takes place at a masquerade, whose unlikelihood by this point goes unopposed given how the action has escalated into unlikelier and unlikelier territory. I called much of this novel a chase sequence, but it could also be likened to tumbling down a rabbit hole. The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland comparison is apt, and it’s one Chesterton all but explicitly makes.
I said I would refrain from quoting whole passages, indeed a hard task with such a quotable novel, but I’ll make an exception with perhaps the finest of Sunday’s monologues—or at least I feel justified in quoting most of it here. It’s a badass and memorable passage, not least because of its surrealism. Up to this point Sunday has come off as a larger-than-life figure, but as the novel approaches its final stretch it’s become clear that Sunday is no ordinary man—indeed that he might not be strictly human. What is Sunday, then? A common interpretation is that Sunday is God, although it must be said that if he’s meant to be God then he is not the merciful father figure of the gospels, but the somewhat conniving God who makes a bet with Satan over whether Job will give up his faith. Sunday is not an anarchist, but then he’s also not a cop; rather he seems to be playing both sides against each other, order against disorder, to see who will come out on top. In this light it’s hard to call him a villain, but then he’s certainly not heroic. Maybe he’s beyond human conception of good and evil?
Anyway, here it is:
“You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”
Right before taking off in a hot air balloon (yes, there’s a chase involving a hot air balloon) Sunday finishes with perhaps the biggest revelation in the novel other than the ending: “I am the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen.” After the chase with the hot air balloon, plus another chase involving Sunday on an escaped elephant, the men of the Council finally meet their tormenter face-to-face at a masquerade, one in which each of the men has been given a suit whose design corresponds with a day of the creation in Genesis. (These colorful outfits are lovingly depicted on the FFM cover, by the way, with Syme and company on a chess board, with massive hands [presumably Sunday’s] manipulating them.) Then there’s Sunday, and most surprisingly (for Syme anyway) there’s Gregory, who reappears quite literally in these last few pages. If Monday through Saturday are days of the creation and Sunday is God, then Gregory, the one genuine anarchist, is shown to be analogous to Satan. (Remember the red hair?) The very fabric of reality seems to be tearing itself apart at this point, the action becoming so heightened that the novel threatens to break through some kind of wall, from the unlikely into the impossible.
Then Syme wakes up.
The subtitle, A Nightmare, turns out to be quite literal. Of course, if this novel is supposed to be a nightmare then it’s a weirdly funny one—not horror but surreal and maybe discomforting comedy. The “it was all a dream” ending tends to be disparaged, and for good reason, a major exception being the ending of this novel, which is perhaps the most befuddling part of the whole thing. Something I wanna point out is that to my recollection The Man Who Was Thursday has only one scene break, which happens at the very end, as Syme suddenly wakes up and finds that he’s been walking and in the middle of a conversation with Gregory—only this doesn’t seem to be the Gregory of the dream. The meaning behind this one scene break, which divides the nightmare from reality, is lost in the FFM printing, wherein for some reason the editors thought it necessary to provide more conventional scene breaks. This ending is very strange, not least because of how brief it is (only half a magazine page) and how there isn’t any dialogue here. It’s ambiguous how different Syme and Gregory are from their dream counterparts, but at the very least they’re good friends in the real world. We had been reading a fantasy novel this whole time, but we didn’t know it, and neither did Our Hero™. Despite the experience of having had such a vivid dream, and somehow in the middle of a conversation, Syme feels awoken in more ways than one, as if suddenly made aware of the performance of a miracle, or as if “in possession of some impossible good news.” Even if the whole adventure with the Council of Days didn’t happen in the real world, the Christian significance of it left its mark on Syme. We even meet Rosamond again, for the first time in over a hundred pages, that symbol of grace with the “gold-red” hair (compared with Gregory’s flaming redness) who, naturally, we see tending a garden—her little Eden.
A Step Farther Out
You could go on for a while about this novel, as despite its brevity Chesterton is playing with a few layers, not to mention that’s simply a very entertaining (and increasingly fucking wild) ride from start to finish. The Man Who Was Thursday is at once a spy novel involving a council of anarchists and also an Alice in Wonderland-esque journey backwards to the beginnings of Judeo-Christian theology. It works because even if you disagree with Chesterton’s religious views (as indeed I disagree), not to mention his not-totally-flattering depiction of anarchism, it still has the capacity to entertain and provoke thought. I’ve read it twice now and I can say it’s easily the best novel I’ve covered on this site, and was probably the best novel ever printed in Famous Fantastic Mysteries. It’s fairly accessible for an Edwardian novel, but it’s also very unusual in that it’s not a realistic novel at all. Reading The Man Who Was Thursday is like getting drunk and then taking an edible, and then an hour later some dude walks in and starts reading Bible passages aloud at you after the edible’s taken effect.
(Cover by Earle Bergey. Space Stories, December 1952.)
Who Goes There?
Jack Vance is one of the most influential 20th century SFF writers, and also not read nearly as much as you’d think. If the Goodreads numbers are to be believed. Vance debuted in 1945 but did not have his first major work published until 1950, with the novel (or collection of linked stories) The Dying Earth, one of the most important works of fantasy of all time. I do very much recommend The Dying Earth: it’s very short, and yet is packed with what would become Vance’s trademark baroque prose, his sarcastic sense of humor, and his seemingly limitless invention. Vance wrote the stories that make up The Dying Earth in the mid-’40s, but could not get them published for some time, and indeed these stories read like nothing else in American fantasy at the time—not even Vance’s SF from the same period. You may read, for instance, Big Planet and not suspect that the same guy wrote bejeweled far-future fantasy, if going off the prose style (or rather the lack of it) and nothing else. I had covered Big Planet last May, as a much-needed reread, but for this May I reached for one of Vance’s lesser known novels, one which is sort of a B-side to Big Planet.
Big Planet and Planet of the Damned were published mere months apart, and it’s likely they were also written in close succession. Unfortunately, as I had just implied, while Big Planet is the hit single, a real breakthrough for Vance as a world-builder, Planet of the Damned is the lower-effort B-side that smells of “second verse, same as the first.” But it’s not entirely lesser than its big (haha) brother, for there are a couple things Planet of the Damned at least tries to do better. Unfortunately this is not quite enough. Vance can either be pretty interesting or pretty dull (and honestly you have no way of knowing in advance), and this is a case of the latter.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the December 1952 issue of Space Stories, which is on the Archive. The publication of this novel is rather convoluted. The first book version is actually an abridgment, I assume so it could share one half of an Ace Double with Big Planet (that version of Big Planet was also shortened from the magazine version), and it was retitled Slaves of the Klau. We would eventually get a complete reprint of the magazine version, but it still kept the latter title. To make matters more confusing, Vance would revise it and retitle it again, this time as Gold and Iron, which is the version now in print. Have you lost track of it yet?
Enhancing Image
Humanity has come into contact with the Lekthwans, who have taken to sort of colonizing Earth benevolently, with the tradeoff being that humanity has gotten access to advanced Lekthwan technology. The Lekthwans themselves are basically humans but with golden skin, and by Earth standards are said to be conventionally attractive; it’s more their way of thinking that makes them alien, rather than their looks. The Lekthwans are sort of like proto-Vulcans, in that they see humans are lesser humanoids, given to irrationality and emotions and all those pesky things. At the very least the Lekthwans still have a sense of opulence, and they have their own conception of fun—which can’t be said for the other dominant humanoid race in the galaxy, the Klau. “The Klau are completely practical. Everything is planned for exact use, whether it makes people happy or not. There is no gaiety on the Klau worlds,” so a Lekthwan in the beginning tells us. Roy Barch is a grizzled tough guy working for Lekthwans on Earth who also happens to pine for his alien boss’s daughter, Komeitk Lelianr, who seems to take an interest in the human but who also makes it clear that said interest is not romantic. The opening section of the novel almost reads like a romance drama, and indeed bizarrely the novel could be considered a love story.
Barch and “Ellen” (the human name he gives Komeitk Lelianr) are the obligatory man-woman couple at the novel’s center, which on its own would’ve been pretty standard for early ’50s SF, but to Vance’s credit he does add a twist or two that doesn’t strictly have to do with the fact that Barch has a boner for a gold-skinned space babe. Vance is not known for his female characters, but while I’m on the side of listing positives, Ellen has to be one of Vance’s more clearly defined and assertive women, even if it shouldn’t come as a surprise how she’ll ultimately feel about Barch. Ellen is aloof and condescending in the manner typical of her race, but unlike a lot of ’50s SF women she isn’t given to screaming or shrewish rantings, nor is she a pulpy action heroine in the making; rather, uncharacteristically for the time, she comes off as the Eeyore to Barch’s Winnie the Pooh. (That’s a weird comparison, but I hope you get my meaning here.) She’s cold, even fatalistic—not because she’s cowardly but because she thinks that’s just the way the world works. When Barch takes Ellen on a “date” she more or less berates him for thinking of her as something to be gained, as opposed to someone he might share his life with. “You may feel passion, but you feel no love,” she says. And initially she might be right on that. Their relationship is one that evolves organically—or at least more so than most attempts at romance from this period of genre SF.
When the Klau raid Earth, killing most of the people around Our Heroes™ and taking the two as slaves to the labor planet Magarak, Ellen basically accepts it as her lot in life. The Klau hate the Lekthwans with a passion, but in their haste they seemed to confuse Ellen for a human, hence (probably) why she was taken prisoner. So Barch has to be the assertive one. Let’s talk about Roy Barch, or rather let’s not, since there isn’t much that can be said about him that doesn’t have to do with his relationship with Ellen or indeed his tenuous relationships with other aliens on Magarak. Barch is… more conventionally written, although that’s in the context of genre SF at the time; compared to some other Vance protagonists he’s rather unconventional. Vance’s heroes (or more often anti-heroes) tend to use their wit to get out of sticky situations, lacking the means to intimidate physically, whereas while Barch is by no means stupid, he’s certainly the brawn of the pair. He has suddenly found himself in a hostile environment, having escaped from a prison ship and taken refuge, along with Ellen, in a cave called Big Hole where other refugees hide out; and unlike someone like Cugel the Clever, Barch will have to twist some arms. And he has to deal with difference races with different cultural attitudes. “Thirteen different races, thirty-one different brains; thirteen basic mental patterns, thirty-one sub-varieties. An idea which aroused one would leave another indifferent.” Much of the novel will be concerned with this division.
I brought it up before, but unfortunately I’ll have to bring it up again since the two novels were written and published so close together, and are both planetary adventures; but Planet of the Damned sadly lacks what made Big Planet captivating, even given that novel’s flaws. In the slightly earlier novel we’re introduced to a planet with an eccentric gravitational pull, size, and geological makeup, and so we’re introduced to some eccentric locations, wildlife, and human societies. The locale is the point of the damn thing, never mind that the plot is just a string of events with a dwindling party of stock characters. Magarak is nowhere near as interesting as Big Planet, in part because Vance spends far less time describing it, which makes me wonder where much of the wordage for either novel goes. If Big Planet is maybe 60,000 words then Planet of the Damned is maybe 50,000 words or just under that. (I’m referring again to the magazine versions.) The shorter novel feels longer somehow. It took me a few days to get through Big Planet while I’d say it took me about a week to read Planet of the Damned, and I suspect it was more of a slog because there was less to chew on. Similarly to Big Planet, Planet of the Damned has a random-events plot in which there is not subplot to speak of and in which the end goal is pretty simple: get the hell back to Earth. I’ve noticed that Vance tends to structure his novels episodically, with a single overarching plot or a series of plots rather than the traditional plot-plus-subplots method.
Again, all the aliens are some flavor of humanoid, and there isn’t much in the way of encountering non-humanoid life. We get that Magarak is a shithole but we aren’t given much insight into its ecosystem or how humanoids have adapted to it. Now, you may recall there are side characters in Big Planet, some of whom are fairly memorable; the same can’t be said of the side characters in this novel. Vance implies depth and diversity with the ensemble, but we get next to no time with these characters as individuals. Clef presents himself as the closest the novel has to a flesh-and-blood antagonist, but he gets killed off rather early on. Consider that the motley crew of Big Hole at one point gets boiled down to a list:
There were the three Splangs, Tick, Chevrr, Chevrr’s small dark woman; there was Kerbol and his dour gray mate; Flatface and his two quarreling bald half-breeds; the Calbyssinians, whose sex still remained mysterious; Pedratz, taffy-colored and smelling like a bull; Sl, the double-goer; Lkandeli Szet, the musician; the six silent Modoks; five Byathids; Moses, the dwarf; the handsome youth Moranko; the cat-like Griffits, who had silently asserted rights to the first two of Clef’s women; there was [Roy Barch] and Komeitk Lelianr.
But to bring the positive vibes back, there is at least the hinting of diversity, which is something Vance can be quite good at. Vance himself was a conservative, a fact which can rear its head in his fiction at times, but he was open to depicting people and societies with values very different from his and with a minimum of judgment—or at least a minimum of sarcasm. Vance can be dryly funny, and while there are a few jokes I noticed here it’s still less humorous than more characteristic Vance material. Vance’s trademark ornate language is also absent here, as also happened with Big Planet, replaced with a much more unassuming and unadorned prose style that could be charitably called “standard ’50s SF prose.” Vance had already written The Dying Earth at this point, so it’d be inaccurate to call the blandness of style here the result of a young writer finding his voice; rather it seems like Vance is trying to pass off as a robust but disposable pulp writer.
There Be Spoilers Here
Big Planet takes place a few weeks if I remember right, whereas the plot of Planet of the Damned unravels over the course of months—and then years. The good news is that Barch and his comrades are able to construct a ship out of basically scrap metal that can get some of them off the planet, but the bad news is that at some point (I’m not sure when this would’ve happened) Barch and Ellen had sex and now she’s pregnant with his child. Apparently humans and Lekthwans are genetically similar enough that they can crossbreed; this is a bit of hand-waving, but at least it’s explained in-story as something that can happen. (At one point early on Ellen becomes a willing concubine for Clef, and it’s implied they also have sex, but due to Clef being Klau the child be his—so we’re told.) I wanna take a moment to applaud Vance for going just slightly past what would’ve been the norm with this, since it would’ve been uncommon for human characters to actually have sexual relations with aliens at this point in SF writing. There would’ve been a fair bit of titillation, but it was mostly a “look, but don’t touch” deal. This revelation pushes a wedge between Barch and Ellen and by the climax they have parted ways, and when Barch leaves the planet he doesn’t know where his not-quite-girlfriend is. Had the story ended at this point, with the slaves successfully rebelling against the Klau on Magarak, it would’ve been a perfectly bittersweet ending.
When Barch eventually returns to Earth he finds that he has become a sort of John Brown figure, a symbol of rebellion against the Klau; in that way he has become something of a celebrity. Unfortunately it’s also time now to reunite with Ellen, whom he has not seen in five years—and by extension his son, whom he has never seen before. “The child was a boy, and his skin was a pale clear gold. Komeitk Lelianr was quieter, thoughtful, though she looked a little older.” Barch and Ellen weren’t really a couple up to this point; there was always something in the way, either Ellen’s reluctance to treat Barch as an equal or simply bad circumstances. I would consider Planet of the Damned rather bland and depressingly average overall, but I do really like this ending. There’s this inversion where the main couple partake in what we think of as intimacy, but it’s only long after that initial encounter that they start to care enough about each other that they’re willing to take a big risk by raising their child together. It’s an interesting inversion of the traditional romance arc and it’s a good deal more mature than what most of the rest of the novel would lead you to believe. I would describe the ending as consciously optimistic, and that while he does phone it in for chunks of the novel, Vance does something kind of exceptional in the last handful of pages. I wonder if he had thought of the ending first and tried coming up with a serviceable plot that would get him from point A to point B.
A Step Farther Out
There’s some debate as to what counts as Vance’s first novel, since The Dying Earth is more of a short story collection, and The Five Gold Bands is more of a novella by modern standards (though for the sake of this site I’m counting it as a “complete novel”). Big Planet would then be Vance’s first “true” novel, in which case Planet of the Damned would be the sophomore slump. If you were a genre reader in the ’50s you could be reading much worse, but also there’s not much one can get from Planet of the Damned past a space adventure which even at the time must’ve seemed surface-level. It doesn’t show Vance as the unique voice that he was, nor does it build on the intricacies of Big Planet. A minor shame.
L. Sprague de Camp made his debut in 1937, and would remain more or less active until his death in 2000, although he would lean much more towards fantasy than SF after 1960. De Camp technically debuted before John W. Campbell’s takeover of Astounding, but he quickly became one of Campbell’s court jesters, his humor being just innuendo-laden enough but more often relying on deadpan and slapstick delivery. But it was with Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy sister magazine, that we saw much of de Camp’s best early work, both solo and in collaboration with Fletchet Pratt. It’s not surprising that in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp a solid portion of the stories included are from Unknown, despite that magazine only lasting a few years. De Camp would go on hiatus during America’s involvement in World War II, and he would not return to writing in earnest until around 1950. He’s probably most known today for his helping in raising awareness of Robert E. Howard’s work, if also his meddling in said work. The two would’ve been close contemporaries, had Howard lived.
Lest Darkness Fall was de Camp’s first solo novel (he had already written None But Lucifer with H. L. Gold), and it’s often considered his best. It was published in Unknown as a solid 50,000-word novel, which is why I’m confused by Wikipedia calling it the “short story version.” De Camp must’ve expanded it for book publication in 1941, but not by much, and he revised it for a 1949 reprint. This is often considered an SF novel, which makes its inclusion in Unknown a bit strange, but I do have a couple theories as to why it’s here: the first is the setting, which is pre-medieval and thus almost reads like low fantasy; the second is that Unknown had a policy of sometimes printing whole novels while Astounding did not, and Campbell maybe couldn’t fit Lest Darkness Fall in as a serial in the latter, for indeed it would’ve been too long to run in one piece.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the December 1939 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. You can also read the 1949 revision here. Lest Darkness Fall ran as a five-part serial in Galaxy’s Edge, presumably based on the 1949 version. It’s also been bundled in a Gollancz SF Gateway Omnibus with Rogue Queen and The Tritonian Ring. It’s also been bundled with a couple sequels by other hands as Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories. In other words, this is not exactly a hard novel to find, and because it’s short by modern standards it’s often been packaged with other things.
Enhancing Image
I have some notes:
De Camp does not waste time here, at least with getting us to 6th century Rome. Martin Padway is an archeologist and a bit of a workaholic who’s currently staying in 1930s Rome. (We get a mention of the country being run by Mussolini’s fascists, but Padway doesn’t seem to feel anything strongly about fascism, and anyway it’s not dwelt on.) Padway is also a divorcee; his wife left him because after “one taste of living in a tent and watching her husband mutter over the inscriptions on potsherds” she realized being an archeologist’s wife was not in the cards for her. This is about all we learn about Padway before a bolt of lightning sends him back to 535 CE. We’re not given even the ghost of an explanation for how a lightning strike could do this and it’s obvious that de Camp is not interested in the how of getting his hapless anti-hero to where he wants him to be.
The line of plausibility is a fine one to walk, and I would say de Camp succeeds so long as one does not go deliberately looking for holes. Of course some convenience is at play. It’s convenient that Padway is an archeologist and, by extension, a kind of historian, not to mention he seems to have read Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. De Camp himself admits in the introduction he took some inspiration from Robert Graves’s historical novels (incidentally I just finished I, Claudius), although Padway himself doesn’t mention Graves. This is a curious comparison, because the idea of making history entertaining was still a new concept then—not history as told in Hollywood productions but well-researched, fact-based history. With that said, while you do get some context within the novel, de Camp makes assumptions about the reader’s knowledge that probably aren’t valid anymore.
There is one thing that strains one’s suspension of disbelief, which is the language barrier. Italians in 535 CE spoke Latin, and Padway just so happens to know elementary-level Latin despite being a Congregationalist and not a Catholic; to de Camp’s credit he does acknowledge that language, even one as antiquated as Latin, changes over time, and so Padway talks with a heavy accent which other characters are quick to point out. Cleverly Padway adopts the more Latin-sounding name “Martinus Paduei” to fit in with the locals. Not sure why Padway wasn’t written as a Catholic (one who is estranged from his wife), since in the pre-Vatican II days it would’ve been perfectly sensible for a Catholic to know his Latin. Then again, Padway is mostly apolitical and unconcerned with religious matters, which is true of a lot of Protestants. De Camp is playfully ribbing some people here, but he’s not trying to make any kind of serious statement; this is, ultimately, an unserious novel.
So, the context: Rome in 535 CE is long past the days of Augustus, to put it lightly. The Italians have accepted Christianity for a couple centuries now, no longer looking to feed infidels to the lions, but the Roman Empire is now fractured. The western Italian-Gothic coalition is about to enter war with the Eastern Roman Empire, and the ensuing war will help bring about the Middle Ages, shrouding Europe “in darkness, from a scientific and technological aspect, for nearly a thousand years.” Padway knows that life in Rome is on the downslide and about to get much worse, but the people around him are blissfully ignorant of this. Surprisingly the idea of somehow returning to his own time doesn’t much occur to him; rather he quickly becomes concerned with surviving in a Rome that is about to get totally butt-fucked by war, and he also wonders if history can be changed enough to create an alternate future.
If you read anything about Lest Darkness Fall in advance then you know it’s alternate history novel, and indeed it doesn’t take long for Padway to introduce some changes that will have long-term consequences—some of which will not be to his advantage. Inventing the printing press and starting one’s own newspaper (freedom of the press and all that) in what amounts to a police state can land one in jail, as it turns out. Padway starts out “small,” teaching a local banker double-entry accounting, inventing the printing press, eventually starting the world’s firs telegraph line—you know how it is. Like I said, convenience plays a not-inconsiderable part here, although Padway is not a demigod; he can’t do everything himself. He gets arrested enough times that it becomes a sort of running gag. I would still argue Padway is too much of what Heinlein would call “the competent man,” and I have to wonder what would’ve happened if someone less skilled had been thrown back to Rome right before the Middle Ages; admittedly they would probably last all of three days.
As with Graves’s historical novels, de Camp throws some real-life figures into the mix, although due to the relative obscurity of the time period there’s nobody the reader is likely to recognize right away. I hope you know who Justinian is. And let’s not forget Thiudahad, king of the Italians and Goths who eventually succumbs to what is probably dementia or some other neurological disease; he’s pretty funny. The funniest might be Mathasuentha, princess and wife to whomever would succeed Thiudahad once he becomes unfit for the throne—and, much to Padway’s horror, a bloodthirsty opportunist. Padway considers romancing Mathasuentha until she reveals herself to be a bit of what we would call a yandere. “You wouldn’t exactly describe her as a ‘sweet’ girl,” the narrator tells us. Better to marry her off to Urias, who after all is a war hero and who can probably deal with her shenanigans. Padway himself remains a bachelor to the end, at least in the magazine version.
How good you think Lest Darkness Fall is will depend on how funny you think it is, because it is very much a novel filled with what we humans would call “jokes.” De Camp isn’t always funny, and I think his cynical brand of conservatism (almost like a distant precursor to South Park-type humor) holds him back from being a more serious writer, but when he’s on the ball he can elicit some chuckles. The novel becomes less funny as it pivots more towards alternate history warfare (this is when Padway gains enough clout to basically do Thiudahad’s job for him), but we’re assured that despite what the title suggests, nothing too dark will happen. This is largely because even as Padway’s situation becomes more serious, both Padway and the third-person narrator remain as deadpan as ever. At one point Padway ponders the evils of slavery and how he should probably do something about it, but it reads like someone writing down stuff they ought to buy as the grocery store. Like I said, not a very serious novel.
I can see why de Camp would add a few thousand words onto the novel for book publication, but if anything he should’ve expanded it even further. Lest Darkness Fall, for how much ground it’s covering, is too short; the magazine version is about 50,000 words long and it could easily be twice that length. I know this is weird coming from me, as someone who tends to like short novels, but consider that I, Claudius is 450 pages long and still omly makes up the first half of a larger narrative. There are characters who brim with personality but barely get any screentime because this novel is a train and the train will not stop. SFF novels prior to the ‘60s often didn’t go past 300 pages, and this is sometimes a bad thing because some narratives need more space to reach their full potential. Lest Darkness Fall feels like the abridged version of a complete novel which sadly does not exist.
There Be Spoilers Here
Darkness does not fall.
A Step Farther Out
The “modern man sent to the distant past” plot type has been done many times since Lest Darkness Fall, and needless to say some authors have built on the foundation de Camp laid down. There’s a lot of room for navel-gazing with this premise and de Camp keeps that to a minimum, for better or worse. If this novel succeeds (and it is a succeess for what it is), it’s because de Camp’s fascination with the foibles of ancient history is infectious, helped by the fact that this is a perfectly balanced, well-oiled machine of a novel. We’re given just enough context in what was then the modern day before being hit with the time-travel lightning. Padway is a bit of a scoundrel, but he’s not unlikable enough to make us always following him a chore; to make him a total asshole would’ve been fatal for the novel. There’s some commentary on the gap in values between Italy circa 535 CE and 20th century America, but not enough to give one the impression that de Camp is trying to make one of those pesky political statements. If this sounds like a cynical assessment of the novel, that’s because it’s a cynical novel.
What made Lest Darkness Fall inspirational for a couple generations of SFF writers is that it’s history made entertaining; one might even call it an early example of “edutainment” in genre literature. Admittely you may wanna do some extra reading on the twilight years of the Roman Empire, since de Camp assumes you’re a well-educated person who already know enough going in; this might’ve been true in 1939, but needless to say our priorities with history have changed drastically since then. It’s a genuinely funny novel, if also slight in terms of emotional and thematic content. Had I read this, say, five to ten years earlier, I probably would’ve loved it; but I also think it has since been outshined by its own progeny.
(Cover by Walter Popp. Startling Stories, September 1952.)
Who Goes There?
It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a “complete” novel here, and unlike last time this one is actually complete. Today’s novel, Big Planet, is a rare case where the magazine version of the novel serves as the basis for the definitive text, as opposed to the first book publication. I’m not even sure what Jack Vance’s first novel would be. Wikipedia says Vance’s juvenile novel Vandals of the Void was his first, but this was published after the magazine versions of Big Planet, Slaves of the Klau (magazine version titled Planet of the Damned) and The Five Gold Bands; and then there’s The Dying Earth, which may or may not count as a novel (I personally don’t count it). Thing is, Vance wrote a lot, especially from the ’50s through the ’70s. If you read enough Vance you pick up on certain pet themes of his and certain quirks (we might say limitations) which can grate on one’s sensibilities. I like Vance because he’s convenient to mine for review material.
But Vance is arguably the most important American SFF writer of the 20th century that the fewest people have read; his most famous work, The Dying Earth, has fewer than 10,000 ratings on Goodreads as of this writing. To put this in perspective, The Shadow of the Torturer, the first part of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (ya know, that science-fantasy series nerds will tell you is criminally overlooked) has more than double the ratings. Wolfe fans ought to read Vance at some point, since the former clearly owes a debt to the latter; but this also applies to fans of tabletop RPGs, whose mechanics (particularly those of Dungeons & Dragons) take after Vance’s depiction of magic in the Dying Earth series. Especially for his fantasy, Vance has left a distinct mark on genre fiction in the latter half of the 20th century, although not many people are aware it’s his mark.
Big Planet is science fiction from start to end, though, and unlike The Dying Earth it did not inspire a future trend; rather, what makes Big Planet unique for its time is its dedication to mixing planetary adventure with scientific plausibility, with a strong dash of anthropology. This is a novel where the setting is the main character—that while we find out little to nothing about the human characters propelling the action, we do get many passages in which Vance fleshes out the many locales and societies on Big Planet (for that’s the planet’s name). Because this is a fairly episodic novel, without any real subplots, I won’t be doing a point-by-point rundown but instead will focus on the novel’s ambitions and flaws as an experiment—for it’s certainly an interesting novel, though not a perfect one.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1952 issue of Startling Stories, which is on the Archive. Whereas Startling Stories tended to publish borderline novellas and abridged or easly versions of full novels, Big Planet appears complete here at about 60,000 words, and for a quarter-century (according to Wikipedia) this would be the best version of the novel you could find. The first several paperback editions, including the Avon edition in 1957, were abridged in some way, so keep that in mind if you’re into collecting vintage editions. Nowaodays, though, you can find a complete and in-print version of Big Planet easily, with the Spatterlight Press paperback being your best bet. The Spatterlight Presss edition also comes with an enlightening introduction by Michael Moorcock as he admires both Vance and Big Planet while recognizing the novel’s unusual place in Vance’s oeuvre.
Enhancing Image
We start with a ship that’s heading for Big Planet, a ship containing a commission team from Earth who are supposed to get info on a certain rascal named Charley Lysidder and bring him to justice. Why? Because Lysidder is becoming the biggest warlord on Big Planet, which is a high benchmark because Big Planet is filled with warlords and slave traders. The commission team is headed by Glystra, who will be our protagonist (he doesn’t seem like it in the first couple pages, but watch out), followed by Cloyville, Bishop, Pianza, and some redshirts. We spend about a minute on the ship before everything goes to hell; there’s a spy aboard. The skipper and first mate get their throats cut and the ship crash lands on Big Planet, 40,000 miles from Earth Enclave, basically an embassy and the only safe space for Earthmen. “To land anywhere on Big Planet except Earth Enclave meant tragedy, debacle, cataclysm.” Never mind literally halfway around the world. It turns out that Big Planet bears its name for a good reason.
We get casualties before we’ve even landed on the planet and there are more once we do, including the ship’s stewards and a nun who did not have any lines up to this point and whose body is not even recovered. (Be sure to put a pin in that last part.) It’s bad enough that Glystra and the survivors landed on the other side of the planet, but also they have no means of getting to Earth Enclave in a timely fashion; a trip, assuming they make it, will take weeks. The reason for this is that not only is there no electricity for Big Planet tech, there’s very little metal—to such an extent that metal is measured by the ounce. Big Planet has a wide diameter (yeah, duh), but it manages to have about the same gravity as Earth by virtue of being very poor in metals. Indeed the locals who discover the crashed ship waste no time in tearing it apart for scraps as the materials alone would make them rich.
There are no spaceships or cars on Big Planet—also no birds, for some reason. You’ll have to hoof it, or find a wagon or some alternate means of transport that doesn’t require metal or electricity. This is all pretty near, by the way. Vance goes out of his way to explain why Big Planet is an Earth-like setting, complete with gravity that doesn’t crush the human characters, by explaining that in some ways it is like Earth—only it lacks metals. The energy weapons Glystra and others carry are valuable because they’re powerful and accurate (there’s something called an ion-shine, which I don’t even know what the fuck that’s supposed to look like so I just think of it as a raygun), but they can also be traded for precious resources and information if need be simply becausse of the rarity of the materials. Importing metal to Big Planet is illegal (or rather the Earth federation has enforced a metal embargo on Big Planet) probably so as to not upset the balance—hence one of the reasons why Glystra wants to take Lysidder to Earth authorities.
There’s one other thing: the people on Big Planet don’t fuck around. Glystra and his team will come across bandits, cannibals, despots, and if they’re really unlucky, Republicans. For both better and worse, Big Planet is a sandbox wherein damn near anything is possible so long as you don’t need 20th century technology (or shit, even 19th century technology) to achieve your goals. Any pre-industrial system of government would be possible here. We don’t read about socialist collective farms, but it’s not hard to imagine those existing—successfully—on Big Planet. The whole thing has a whiff of pastoralism about it, not so much in the Clifford D. Simak tradition but in how Vance seems to think that people, if left to their own devices, will gravitate towards feudalism or agrarianism. If you read enough Vance you’ll get the impression that he a) hates cities, and b) is consistently wary about organized religion, which is curious for classic SF.
Oh, one more thing…
The team gets a recruit in the form of Nancy, a Big Planet native who apparently has nothing better to do with her time than accompany a bunch of soldiers and bureaucrats on what amounts to a suicide mission. Nancy is not this woman’s proper name but for the sake of my sanity, and because every other character calls her Nancy henceforth, I’m calling her that. She’s the token woman of the group, which sounds… a bit dubious. I guess it’s better than nothing, but don’t go to Nancy looking for a layered character with a rich interior life, because she will only disappoint you. Then again, Glystra is the most developed character here and that’s by virtue of being the guy who gets to call the shots; if he was in the position of say, Corbus (the ship’s chief engineer, now Glystra’s right-hand man) or Bishop then we would find out basically nothing about him.
Nancy joining the team is inexplicable, and even Glystra can’t help but notice this—though it doesn’t occur to him that Nancy knows something he doesn’t. It could also be that Nancy is attractive and Glystra is too busy getting bricked up in the middle of the mission to think about how this may not be a random encounter for long. Get this:
Something was out of place. Would a girl choose such a precarious life from pure wanderlust? Of course. Big Planet was not Earth; human psychology was unpredictable. And yet—he searched her face, was it a personal matter? Infatuation? She colored.
Is he projecting? Is he dense? Maybe.
Going back through my notes, it’s striking me how many characters show up and how many of them I’ve already forgotten about. There are episodes early in the novel that aren’t exactly Shakespearean; this could be explained by the team being a little overcrowded at first, although it does get whittled down as the novel progresses. Who the hell is Darrot? I don’t remember anything him except that he was on the ship, and then he gets killed off unceremoniously, “his dead face turned up.” There are run-ins with bandits and a very odd scheme involving river monsters that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around, only being able to surmise that it involves locals being tricked into thinking that these beasts are carnivorous. We meet so many people in the first half of the novel that it almost becomes like a joke. “If [Glystra] set about righting the wrongs of everyone they met, they would never arrive at Earth Enclave.” I guess this is a price one has to pay with an episodic structure, because it’s like we’re on a riverboat at a theme park and we’re watching all the sights on the river’s edges but we’re not allowed to wallow in them.
Something I noticed about Big Planet that makes it stick out from most Vance I’ve read is that it lacks the affected language of Vance’s Dying Earth stories—indeed, much of his work in the ’60s onward. This is not merely the result of Big Planet being an early work, because The Dying Earth precedes it and that “””novel””” has some of the most purple prose you’ll find in American fantasy fiction. No, it’s more, I suspect, that Big Planet was written with magazine publication in mind; and yes this was still early in Vance’s career, before he had garnered a reputation as one of genre fiction’s most baroque practitioners. Vance’s tendency to adorn his prose with fancy vocabulary and have his characters in a rather mannered fashion, lacking verisimilitude, can turn some readers off, so those same people might find the straightforward (to the point of curtness at times) language of Big Planet to be refreshing; personally I don’t like or dislike it.
It’s here that we reach the cutoff point, though, because about halfway through the novel we get to the best part and Vance’s purest bit of invention for the novel. We’ve come across a few villages and groups of scoundrels up to this point, but we have not encountered a city—which is where Kirstendale comes in, for the precious few chapters we spend there.
There Be Spoilers Here
The team comes across a trolley service that makes travel a bit less painful, though it’s still no match for cars back on Earth. It’s here that we enter the most memorable location in the novel: the decadent city of Kirstendale. The midpoint and indeed much of the back end of the novel is concerned with Kirstendale, either as a setting or as a carrot on a string for Our Heroes™ since it represents the height of culture and luxury on Big Planet—which naturally means it has a few caveats. Compared to what has been dealt with up to now, though, Kirstendale is a paradise. “It was the largest and most elaborate settlement the Earthmen had seen on Big Planet, but it was never a city which might have existed on Earth.” It’s no wonder that Cloyville decides to stay behind in Kirstendale once the team gets moving again.
The class system in Kirstendale is pretty weird; it’s hard to describe. Not only is metal a precious material here (as expected), but the city and its environs are barren as far as animals fit to be eaten goes. Meat is a luxury that has to be imported, and in a pre-industrial world, without planes or even steamships, you can guess how expensive bringing in meat would be. As such Kirsters (as they’re called) are generally vegetarian, although it’s implied that they will resort to eating bugs if they see it fit. Prestigue in the city is also pretty much entirely performative, in that it’s not your family line or even how much money you have that detemines your status as much as how you carry yourself, such that someone can act as both master and servant in the span of a single day depending on what clothes they’re wearing. As far as I can tell Vance was a conservative, but his playing with class barriers—poking fun at the tenuousness of class division—must’ve tickled Moorcock’s pickle. This is the most entertaining and inventive section of the novel.
If you read enough of this novel you may be wondering where that bastard Lysidder is. Like where he at? The fuck? The man does not even appear, let alone have a line of dialogue, until the final stretch the novel. Glystra meeting Lysidder face to face is one of those moments, like Charles Marlowe meeting Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, where the man has been shrowded in so much mystery as to become a mythological figure. This is made more stark by the fact that once we do get to Lysidder, Corbus and Nancy are the only fellow travelers in the party left—and Nancy turns out to have been working for Lysidder the whole time. Wow, the woman who’s been acting a little suspicious for dozens of pages is the spy! Indeed she was disguised as a nun at the beginning of the book, hence her secrecy and the fact that we never saw the body; she had faked her death, only to take on the role of a simple Big Planet girl once the team sets out.
Glystra takes it easy on Nancy because she’s a woman her partnership with Lysidder is framed as abusive… or so she says. Glystra and Corbus come up with a different plan for Lysidder and his henchmen, which on a reread surprised me more than it must’ve initially. Having hijacked Lysidder’s “air-car,” Glystra decides to drop the scoundrel off in the middle of nowhere, far out enough where going back to his hideout would probably be suicide—but technically it would be possible to survive in this new environment. “If you stay here, you’ll probably have to work for a living—the worst punishment I could devise,” Glystra tells Lysidder half-jokingly, and that’s the last we see of the novel’s villain. It’s not all a loss for Lysidder, though; if his final argument with Glystra is to make the case that forcing Big Planet under Earth rule would be a mistake then the villain wins, because Glystra and Corbus end up not going to Earth Enclave after all.
Precious commissions to Earth Enclave are said to have never returned, mostly probably because they meet a grisly end, but there’s the implication that those who survive don’t come back because they find Big Planet to be a sort of Eden—a garden untarnished by industrialism and imperialism. With the resources they already have, Glystra and Corbus would be rich enough to become landowners, maybe even return to Kirstendale and catch up with Cloyville, and ultimately they decide that’s better than to have Big Planet become yet another satellite for Earth. Sure, conditions are rough, and even at its most decadent it’s not a place for the weak, but Vance seems to be telling us that maybe it really is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. A bit of an unconventional happy ending, but I like it.
A Step Farther Out
So there you have it. In some ways Big Planet is a simple novel; it reads almost like an escort mission in a video game, which if you play your fair share of games doesn’t sound like a good time. True enough it does threaten to get monotonous at times, partly because of the characters being little more rounded than cardboard and coming and going through the narrative as they please, but it also shows Vance refining his craft as a novelist. Its best parts, which could almost work as short stories in themselves, read like episodes in a larger narrative, though this is not a fix-up like The Eyes of the Overworld, the first real novel in the Dying Earth series. In hindsight the episodes blur together with the exception of the first stretch, the episode in Kirstendale, and the finale, which admittedly is a pretty good finale by Vance standards. This is an early work that shows Vance trying to write a conventional adventure SF novel of the period and failing to the degree, which makes it more memorable than some of its peers.
Given the intricacies of what we do see of Big Planet, this is the kind of setting that could serve as venue for a trilogy of novels, each one over 500 pages long; but because Vance came from a generation of SFF writers who believed in not wasting the reader’s time, we’re left with two slim novels. We did eventually get an indirect followup with Showboat World in 1975, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t share anything with its predecessor other than the planet itself—which is just as well. Vance loves exploring settings, but for better or worse he’s not much of a plotter, which would explain why I struggled to recall what happened in Big Planet prior to this reread. No doubt I’ll forget again, but I’ll remember Kirstendale.
(Cover by Robert Gibson Jones. Fantastic Adventures, July 1950.)
Who Goes There?
This is it. The last Fritz Leiber review I’ll be writing for a long while. I’m about tuckered out at this point, but thankfully we’re ending this month on somewhat of a high note. I like Leiber quite a bit, and his range is impressive, but even with that said, this is not the sort of thing I’d normally do with an author. I’m not even sure I’ll do it again, ever, but it’s been a neat experiment! Most importantly, going through so many of his works in such a span of time has made me appreciate Leiber’s versatility more, the things that make him tick, as well as become more aware of his few limitations. That Leiber continued to produce great work for so long, despite some obstacles, is a testament to his skill and especially his creative restlessness. Despite debuting in 1939, alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, Leiber did three decades later what those peers of his could not: remain contemporary. His longevity and his versatility across several genres are remarkable, and much of his material still reads as perfectly modern.
You’re All Alone was part of a big revival for Leiber, having reinvigorated himself around 1950 after half a decade of low productivity and struggling to publish what little he wrote. Despite being published around the same time as SF classics like “Coming Attraction” and “A Pail of Air,” though, You’re All Alone‘s origins go back much farther, with themes and a tone that fall much more in line with Leiber’s horror fiction from the early ’40s. ISFDB provides an unusually lengthy note on the short novel’s gestation, but beware that this is a secondary source and the couple of typos left in tell me it’s not as thoroughly edited an entry as it should be. Basically, Leiber started working on You’re All Alone in 1943, right after finishing Conjure Wife and Gather, Darkness!, with the intention of submitting it to Unknown. Unfortunately, Unknown kicked the bucket midway through the year and Leiber was left without a suitable market for his fantasy-horror tale. It wasn’t until Fantastic Adventures, under the new editorship of Howard Brown (who also took over Amazing Stories), became a more prominent fantasy outlet in 1950 that Leiber’s novel would see publication.
Now, there are two versions of this novel: there’s the shorter magazine version under the title of You’re All Alone, and then there’s the longer book version titled The Sinful Ones (what a trashy, inferior title). The latter was initially published in 1953 with changes were made without Leiber’s consent, and it was “spiced up” considering books had looser censorship standards than the magazines. This strikes me as funny because the magazine version is already lurid enough, for reasons I’ll get into, and that while I haven’t read The Sinful Ones yet I feel like teetering more on the eroticism would simply be too much. Clocking in at 40,000 words (according to the contents page, and I can believe that estimate), You’re All Alone is too long to be considered a typical SFF novella (normally we’d be talking 20,000 to 30,000 words), and thus I’m reviewing it as a “complete novel,” even though it’s technically an abridged text.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures, which is on the Archive. Pretty striking cover, huh? It does a good job of letting you in on this being a little horrifying, a little paranoid, but also, judging from the woman’s torn clothing, a little sexually charged as well. Oh, there’s a dog in the novel, and it’s big and ruthless enough to rip out a man’s throat, but it’s not nearly that big. Unusually for a complete novel, You’re All Alone saw magazine publication more than once, appearing again in the November 1966 issue of Fantastic, which you can also find here. It’s been reprinted in both its magazine form and as The Sinful Ones, which can get confusing; there’s a paperback of The Sinful Ones from Wildside Press, and there’s a combo paperback with You’re All Alone and C. G. Gilford’s The Liquid Man, also a Fantastic Adventures complete novel. Your best bet is to just bite the bullet and read it online, since neither version has been published often, and unfortunately even the shorter version is too long to be anthologized.
Enhancing Image
Carr Mackay is just your average thirty-something in a lot of ways. He’s got a nice job at a Chicago employment office, he’s attractive enough but not model material, he has a sexy if also demanding girlfriend, and he doesn’t have any major hangups to speak of. Unfortunately for Carr, whose life prior to the story’s beginning seemed to be simple, he’s about to get a real kick in the pants in the form of a girl (said to be college age, don’t think about it too hard) who will both make and break his world. What follows is a trip into a nightmare world, a novel-length chase sequence, and perhaps most perplexing of all, a bit of a love story.
We meet Jane, who comes in presumably for job opportunities but who, judging from her nervous demeanor, is here for something else. She notices something off about Carr, but she won’t say what it is, at least not in public. Carr himself notices that a tall blonde woman is spying on both of them, or at least that’s what it looks like. Jane tells Carr to act like everything’s normal, but she’s not doing a good job at such an act and all of this is confusing for Carr, who is now finding out that there’s somsrthing “different” with him, something which separates him from everyone else. When Jane leaves, the tall blonde, apropos of nothing, slaps her, but Jane does not react; she doesn’t so much as flinch, just ignoring the slap and walking out. Do the two know each other? How come nobody in the office reacted to this? The opening scene is uncanny, and it’s also from this early point that Leiber injects a bit of social commentary into the equation.
No one said anything, no one did anything, no one even looked up, at least not obviously, though everyone in the office must have heard the slap if they hadn’t seen it. But with the universal middle-class reluctance, Carr thought, to recognize that nasty things happened in the worlds they pretended not to notice.
You’re All Alone is a Chicago narrative through and through, and it’s pretty far from a flattering depiction of the city. Of course, this could be just about any city. For such an urbanite, Leiber consistently made out cityscapes to be nightmarish, oppressive, artless, unappealing, specifically in his horror fiction. While it was published years afterward, You’re All Alone has more in common with his early stories “Smoke Ghost” and “The Hound” (see my review of the latter here) than with other works of his published during that time. There is no science-fictional basis for what happens to Carr; he, the average guy, is plopped by the hand of God from “our” world into something else entirely, as if someone had flipped a switch in the universe. One second his girlfriend Marcia and his coworker Tom act like their usual selves and the next they start acting strange, like they too had been suddenly put into a different universe, only they act unaware of it.
One moment everything’s normal, the next it’s all backwards. That’s what falling in love is like, you know, only here it’s a bit more foreboding. Who can he trust? He supposes it would have to be Jane, but she hesitates to explain herself, only to say that she and Carr ought to trust each other, that the people Carr knows are not entirely who they seem to be, and that the tall blonde is someone to be avoided at all costs. This would be sort of a demented meet cute if not for the fact that Carr is already taken, though he won’t be like that for long. First Tom introduces him to someone who does not exist (possiblly Jane is supposed to be in that place, but Tom is talking to thin air), and later when Carr meets up with Marcia she talks to him, but not quite. Again Marcia is talking to thin air, but it’s like she’s talking to a Carr who is not where she thinks he is, like Carr has gone invisible and there’s another alternate version of him that’s supposed to be in his place.
What the hell’s going on here? Carr has his theories, as to why people he knows are suddenly ignoring him or acting like he’s somewhere he’s not, as to why Jane has singled him out. And surprisingly, in the midst of his theorizing, he more or less figures out what the deal is, although it’s hard to explain, all the more so because there’s no why given. Basically, Tom and Marcia and the others are not the people who are acting weird, but in fact it’s Carr and Jane (along with the tall blonde) who are acting out of order. The tall blonde is named Hackman, and she’s part of a trio of people who, like Carr and Jane, have stepped out of the “normal” world and entered a level of existence where normal people can’t touch them.
The “normal” world of You’re All Alone is predetermined, with everything on a set path, with an unwritten script that everyone is supposed to follow. The people of this world may look alive, but they’re basically robots (not literally but metaphorically) who exist to serve what is predetermined. There are, however, exceptions… people who have broken from the script, who have become truly alive in the sense that they’re able to think and make decisions that go against the greater reality. The weird part is that the robots don’t react to when the “free” people break from the script; they just keep going like nothing has changed, reacting to the ghosts of the people they assume to be following along. The result is that the “free” people are free to do whatever they want, albeit they have to contend with other people who have gone off-script, some of which I’ll get into in the spoilers section.
(Interior illustration by Henry Sharp.)
The question is, how do you inject physical conflict into a story where the leads are unable to be hurt by 99.9% of people in the world? Well, suppose you had a secret, and a possibly dangerous one at that; then suppose there was a small group of people that knew this secret of yours, and conversely you would know their secret. You would become secret sharers, which means you could form a bond over your shared knowledge, or…
Carr and Janes are faced with danger from more than one direction. On the one end you have the trio of Hackman, Wilson, and Dris, plus their dog (yes, the dog on the cover and in the interior art, although it’s nowhere near that size) and on the other they face an even more mysterious threat: a gang of four men in black hats, who seem to scare the aforementioned trio just as much as our leads. Then there’s a wild card in the form of Jane’s ally, or at least the closest she has to one, a fellow “free” person whose name we never learn, only described as a small man with glasses. How trustworthy is he? How do we deal with these villains? Stay tuned.
There Be Spoilers Here
This is a novel full of thrills, not just of the horror variety but also incorporating some thrills of the romantic/sexual kind. Not a surprising development, but as Carr and Jane try to evade the fiends which haunt the city streets, they also grow closer together, and the result is kind of a love story. Romance is not something often practice in old-timey SFF, and even more rarely does it work; while I wouldn’t put the romance between Carr and Jane on a Shakespearean pedestal, it’s a more earnest effort than what most authors of the time would’ve given us. The problem with writing romance in the world of old-timey SFF is that presumably there would have to be some chemistry between a male lead and a female lead, and the latter specifically is an issue because most authors were not keen on writing a female lead as more than just a satellite love interest.
Jane is not as thoroughly characterized as some later Leiber leading ladies (try saying that three times fast), but she’s certainly not a trophy with legs existing only as a reward for Carr. Unlike the average leading lady in SFF from this time, Jane also has some real baggage; her home life sucks (she has basically none to speak of, on account of going off-script), she constantly lives in fear, and she has some major trust issues—with Carr as well as the small man with the glasses. Unlike most other examples from this period, Jane is not a perfect do-gooder or a total shrew but a believably flawed person, and ultimately Carr accepts her anyway, which I think is pretty sweet. Really ahead of his time, that Leiber.
Speaking of being out of the norm, there’s this common assumption that American life in the ’50s (You’re All Alone was written in the ’40s, but you’ll get what I mean) was puritanical, basically devoid of depictions and discussions of sex outside of the bedroom. You didn’t read about it, and you didn’t watch it, and you certainly didn’t talk about it. I’m thinking of Pleasantville, which is a good movie, but it’s also often misunderstood to be a parody of ’50s American suburban life when it’s actually parodying ’50s American suburban life as depicted in ’50s American television. The truth is that people seventy years ago were about as horny then as they are now—which is to say they were pretty fucking horny, it’s just that they didn’t have as many outlets for expression. A good deal of pulp fiction illustrations from this period shows scantily clad or tastefully nude women, either in a state of distress or of joy.
Why do you think the book version of this novel is called The Sinful Ones? To make it sound more lurid for the book market, sure, but it’s also not entirely inaccurate. Carr, Jane, the small man with the glasses, and others of their kind are indeed the sinful ones, the ones who have broken from societal norms on account of breaking of the big machine, and well, if you had the ability to get away with, say, being a peeping tom without consequence, you may very well do that. A “free” person in the world of the novel wouldn’t use that ability to rob a bank or get away with murder (although the latter, as we see, is certainly an option), but rather for something even pettier: to get their rocks off. Sexuality defines so many of the motivations and actions among the characters that the novel would cease to function without it; even the “wholesome” romance between Carr and Jane is tinged strongly with sexual tension.
In one of the most memorable scenes in the novel, Carr and Jane are out on one of their “dates” and they stop at a club, except they don’t take part in Chicago’s night life so much as have their fun apart from it. At one point Jane does a strip tease for Carr where everyone can see them, except nobody notices past maybe a split-second of disruption, like a glitch in the Matrix. It’s provocative, but it also captures intimacy between lovers in a public space that I’ve rarely seen in fiction. It’s like you’re both caught in a bubble and suddenly you turn into a couple of exhibitionists. Why should you care if people watch? There really is nobody else.
Jane looked at Carr and let her slip drop. Tears stung Carr’s eyes. Her breasts seemed far more beautiful than flesh should be.
And then there was, not a reaction on the part of the crowd, but the ghost of one. A momentary silence fell on Goldie’s Casablanca. Even the fat man’s glib phrases slackened and faded, like a phonograph record running down. His pudgy hands hung between chords. While the frozen gestures and expressions of the people at the tables all hinted at words halted on the brink of utterance. And it seemed to Carr, as he stared at Jane, that heads and eyes turned toward the platform, but only sluggishly and with difficulty, as if, dead, they felt a faint, fleeting ripple of life.
And although his mind was hazy with liquor, Carr knew that Jane was showing herself to him alone, that the robot audience were like cattle who turn to look toward a sound, experience some brief sluggish glow of consciousness, and go back to their mindless cud-chewing.
The eventual two-way confrontation with Hackman, Wilson, and Dris (and let’s not forget the dog!) and the gang of four (who are implied, going by their names, to be mafia members) is also inevitable; thus I don’t feel the need to dig deep into that. I was expecting thrills and chills with You’re All Alone, a robust and fast-moving plot with Leiber’s reliable level of prose, but what I was not expecting was sheer grime and sleaziness of the setting to not only be as present as it was but also to inform the plot to such an extent. Sex and violence are like border towns in neighboring countries, techically separated but only a stone’s throw apart. Leiber knew all about sex, violence, and alienation, and he respected the audience enough to let them in on this dark knowledge. For “pulp trash” in 1950 to do this? It’s likelier than you think. In hindsight the version of You’re All Alone that we now have would probably not have gotten printed in Unknown, a magazine which for all its virtues was a “classier” and more chaste establishment.
The ending is hopeful, if also too abrupt for my tastes, yet there’s still this sense of danger lurking around every corner, as if the dog that had been stalking Carr and Jane for much the novel was only a taste of future terrors. The total lack of an epilogue (the novel ends at exactly the same time the action ends) hints at a lack of real closure. Our leads can escape normal everyday life, but they can’t escape the shadows of the city, nor can they even hope to return to normality. It’s the story of star-crossed lovers who find, for both better and worse, that they are not alone.
A Step Farther Out
Leiber wasn’t much of a novelist, despite the two Hugo wins (plus a Retro Hugo) in that category, but unlike Destiny Times Three, which was short and felt like it could’ve been longer, You’re All Alone is short and yet feels like it wouldn’t really benefit from expansion. The cast is small, the plot is simple when you get down to it, yet this baby is dripping with atmosphere; the Chicago skyline is oppressive, the alleys and clubs no refuge from the lurking terror of suffocation. I’m not surprised Leiber had started working on it in the early ’40s, since it has more in common with his horror fiction and even the moodier Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories from that period. Leiber started out as a fantasist, but he was especially a practitioner of horror—a student of Lovecraft who quickly outpaced his teacher. You’re All Alone, published during Leiber’s return as a masterful science-fictionist, feels like the climax of his horror phase, being his last major venture in the genre for at least a decade. It might be the strongest argument for Leiber as the most important innovator in urban fantasy (and horror) in the days before Neil Gaiman, which may sound like a niche compliment, but it really isn’t.
Well, that’s it! I might do something like this again late next year, but this has been exhausting, if somewhat enlightening. Leiber is one of the few old-timey SFF authors who can be read voraciously in a variety of modes, and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that such a marathon is unwise for even an author as varied as him. I’ll be posting this on the last day of 2022, and if you’re reading this in the future (which yeah, 99% likelihood you will be) you’ll have at least something of an idea as to how 2023 is going. Is it better? did things somehow get worse? Regardless, I’m looking forward to getting back on a regular schedule with a roundtable of authors, jumping across decades and discovering (and rediscovering) several quite different voices. Much as I like to pay tribute to an author I respect very much, the thrill of discovery is so much greater…
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 