Category: Novella Reviews

Novella Review: “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis

December 17th, 2023

(Cover by Michael Carroll. Asimov’s, December 2007.)

Who Goes There?

It’s the holidays, Santa Claus is coming to town, Christmas cheer, all that. But before I pay that jolly son of a bitch a visit I’ve got some work to do, which in this case is to write about a seasonally appropriate story from perhaps the jolliest author currently working in the biz. Connie Willis made her debut back in the ’70s (which is wild, because I suspect people think of her as one of the fresh new talents of the ’80s), and has since collected Hugo awards like they’re Infinity stones. She currently holds the record for most Hugo wins for Best Novella (with “All Seated on the Ground” being the fourth and most recent), and I do love me ssome novellas. Willis has basically two modes: serious and comical. With serious Willis you get Doomsday Book and “The Last of the Winnebagos”; with comical Willis you get “Even the Queen” and today’s story, which is a Christmas comedy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December (appropriate) 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was published pretty much simultaneously with a chapbook release from Subterranean Press, although given the nature of magazine publication the version in Asimov’s would’ve been available first. Despite the Hugo win it has never been anthologized. It was collected in The Best of Connie Willis and later A Lot Like Christmas, which as you can guess collects Willis’s Christmas stories.

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In first contact stories the aliens might land in Washington, DC, or in some crop field in the Midwest; in this case they landed in Denver. The good news is that the Altairi are not hostile, but the bad news is they’re not talkative either, opting, in fact, to not say anything at all. A few meeting-the-aliens commissions are formed but fall through, which is where Meg, our narrator and protagonist, comes in. Meg is a small-time journalist who caught the government’s attention by having writing about aliens before, which doesn’t mean as much as they think it does, as she admits, “I’d also written columns on tourists, driving-with-cellphones, the traffic on I-70, the difficulty of finding any nice men to date, and my Aunt Judith.” That last part will figure majorly into the plot. Also on the commission are Dr. Morthman, “who as far as I could see, wasn’t an expert in anything,” and Reverend Thresher, your stereotypical Evangelical priest who (I don’t think I’m spoiling here) will be the story’s closest thing to a villain.

The Altairi aren’t communicative, but at least they don’t resist being driven around Colorado, to see some of humanity’s cultural touchstones—including the shopping mall. It’s the holidays, and it’s been long enough since the aliens came down that people in the mall don’t instantly swarm them. We’re talking about a group of six Altairi, none of whom say anything, the only method of communication they’re keen on being a constant and dismaying glare that, incidentally, is a look that reminds Meg of her aunt. The Altairi can be pushed around and herded, but they can’t be told to do anything, which is what makes what happens next pretty unusual. For reasons not known at first, since nobody had been observing them closely, the Altairi sit down in the middle of the mall; they had never been seen to sit down before, in the weeks they’ve been watched. There are shoppers, there’s Muzak on the intercom, and a group of carolers led by one Calvin Ledbetter. This is where we’re introduced to the central conflict of the story, or rather than central question: What made the Altairi sit down?

The question of what made the Altairi sit down all in unison is not as easy to answer as it may seem at firt, although (not to toot my own horn) I basically guessed the answer well in advance. “All Seated on the Ground” is a “problem” story in the classic Analog sense, which makes me think that, if not for the fact that I don’t think Willis ever sold to Analog (I could be wrong), this story could’ve fit better there than in Asimov’s. Not really a criticism, but I wanted to get out of the way just how dated this story is—not in its message or politics, but in how you could guess, without looking at the issue date, when it was published just from the cultural references. We get references to Paris Hilton, Men in Black II (not even the first movie), and this unbearably pungent stench of Bush-era humor. Comedy during the Bush years was like gazing into the abyss. Thresher himself is a caricature of a conservative clergyman, not that those people aren’t already deeply unserious. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek. I know Willis herself is a practicing Christian who really gets into the spirit of the holidays, so of course the commentary on religious intolerance is more playful ribbing than anything. Don’t expect any serious points from this if what I’m saying.

This is a story about Christmas, and more specifically about Christmas music; it’s about caroling and the classics. Again, not really a criticism, but it’s telling by what’s cited that there haven’t been any songs added to the Christmas music “canon” since this story was published—so 16 years now. I think the most recent song cited here is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which itself is older than me. But this is a story that has a lot of fun picking apart the lyrics of old Christmas songs, seeing what makes them tick, and seeing what makes the Altairi sit down in universion; hell, if that’s even the only command they’re susceptible to via lyrics. Of course it can’t just be the lyrics, as Meg says; it could be “the voices singing them,” “the particular configuration of notes,” “the rhythm,” and/or “the frequencies of the notes.” It’s a problem or puzzle, depending on your viewpoint. Running parallel to the question of what the Altairi respond to is the budding romance between Meg and Calvin, which I’m not getting into other than a) to acknowledge it exists, and b) to point out that people in the cartoon world of the story seem very nosy about other people’s relationship status, because Our Heroes™ get asked repeatedly.

How much you enjoy “All Seated on the Ground” will depend on two things: on how much you care for Christmastime festivities (I don’t much), and on whether or not you find Willis’s humor to be more hit than miss. After having read some of Willis’s comedic fiction (To Say Nothing of the Dog, “Time Out,” “Blued Moon,” “Even the Queen,” and now this) I’ve come to find, via scientific analysis, that I don’t find her that funny. This is not a slight against Willis as a person, obviously; humor is maybe the only thing that rivals sexual attraction in terms of sheer subjectivity. I can hardly rationalize a joke I like or dislike any more than I can rationalize my immense attraction to Legoshi from Beastars. What’s more damning in the case of “All Seated on the Ground” is that while Willis does explore (as a good SF writer should) the implications of the question she poses, said question is not fit to sustain a work of novella length, for my money. I don’t expect there to be three subplots tag-teaming for wordage here, as a novella is short enough that you can have one plotline through the whole thing, but the plot here—really a driving question—could be more succinct about finding its answer. It could also be that this story is a bit constipated because Willis thought it necessary to add some third-act tension on top of the driving question, which is how we get such an overlong and misshapen thing.

There Be Spoilers Here

Thresher, who through misunderstanding and his own idiocy thinks the Altairi have become born-again Christians, goes on a broadcasted crusade that gets a whole lot of unwanted attention. It’s this idiocy that seems to prompt the Altairi to leave Earth (it’s later said that they were unsure if humans were sentient, in what must’ve been a lame joke even in 2007), only narrowly stopped because Meg and Calvin are able to solve the puzzle in time. This is done because, of all things, Meg is able to remember why her grumpy aunt always gave her the same look the Altairi had been giving for months on end. (I wanna point out that about nine months pass over the course of the story, but despite telling us this Willis does not show it in the writing itself, such that the time frame feels a lot more compressed than it is. Meg and Calvin’s relationship forms over the course of months, but you would think they fell for each other almost overnight without compressed the chain of events feels.) To give Willis some credit she does do a good job of making us wanna put a muzzle on Thresher, although it’s more that we’re supposed to think him a fool than to actually hate him; making him too despicable would not be very Christmas-y I suppose. I hate this man, but then I also think homophobes can eat shit.

Predicably we get a happy ending.

I wanna talk about something being “dated” some more. I’ve been thinking that the criterion for what makes a work of SF “modern” has become increasingly fuzzy, as if we’re approaching a singularity. Consider that a random genre SF story published in 1965 probably could not have gotten published in 1945 without substantial tinkering, namely changing the prose style and subject matter. Even a deliberately retrograde piece like Roger Zelazny’s “The Door of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” probably could not have seen print in 1945 without basically removing all the Zelazny-isms—in other words the thing which makes that story special. Conversely, it’s comparatively hard to find a genre SF story published in 2007 that, with few to no changes, could not have been printed in 1987. Change the pop culture references and a few technology points, like mentions of cell phones that can record video, and you could’ve printed “All Seated on the Ground” in 1987; incidentially this was another hyper-conservative era in American history. 2007 was not that long ago, and yet when reading Willis’s story I felt like I had traveled back considerably farther in time. I’ve actually read all the fiction Hugo winners from that year and while I was not keen on Chabon’s novel, the Willis piece impresses me less.

A Step Farther Out

Despite being a 23,000-word story I couldn’t find too much to say about this one. I think one sign of a great novella is that you get a great deal to chew on in a small amount of wordage, and by that metric “All Seated on the Ground” is definitely not one of the greats. Mind you, its slightness is by design, but I also think it was totally possible for Willis to cut it down to a long novelette. I’m also not exactly a fan of her sense of humor. It’s entertaining in fits and starts, but a joke was just as likely to make me cringe as make me chuckle; there’s a real doozy of a joke towards the end that made me wanna throw my virtual copy of the magazine at a wall. This is one of those cases where the stereotype that Hugo voters are frivolous applies, because I’m not surprised it was popular with readers, but also not surprised it didn’t get a Nebula nod, nor surprised that it’s never been anthologized.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Pursuit” by Lester del Rey

December 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Paul Orban. Space SF, May 1952.)

Who Goes There?

Lester del Rey was one of several young writers who came about in the late ’30s, just in time for John W. Campbell to take over Astounding Science Fiction and reshape it to his liking. Along with Theodore Sturgeon, del Rey was a sentimentalist who right away made a reputation for “human” stories, some of which, like “The Faithful,” “Helen O’Loy,” and “The Day Is Done,” were very popular at the time. Del Rey started out as sort of a humanist, but, maybe because he got more accustomed to the cutthroat and low-paying nature of the industry, both the man himself and his fiction became a lot more bitter with time. Eventually he would marry Judy-Lynn del Rey, who proved to be one of the most talented editors of her time, sadly gone too soon. The del Reys’ most lasting impact might be in their founding of Del Rey Books, which persists to this day.

In the early ’50s, apparently to capitalize on a boom in the market, del Rey got to edit several new SFF magazines—all of them unfortunately short-lived. One of these is Space Science Fiction, and to inaugurate this new magazine del Rey decided to employ his favorite writer: himself. “Pursuit” is considerably more hard-boiled than early del Rey, and it’s a curious choice for introducing the magazine even if it’s far from the best.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then collected in Gods and Golems alongside other novellas and long novelettes. If you’re curious you can read it for free on Project Gutenberg, and actually running the Gutenberg text through a word processor convinced me it’s of novella length—about 18,000 words. ISFDB incorrectly lists it as a novelette.

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Wilbur Hawkes is an assistant math professor and recent divorcee, which normally would make him the protagonist of a Saul Bellow novel if not for the fact that he can’t remember anything from the past seven months. He wakes up one day and finds he’s taken up smoking, a habit he did not have before, and that through circumstantial evidence he finds there’s a seven-month gap in his memory. He remembers granting his ex-wife a divorce and getting a letter from a certain Dr. Meinzer, but after that it’s a blank. Quickly things go amiss when he finds he’s being watched by somebody, who probably knows more than he does, probably G-men who look to take him in for some purpose. Or it could be one big misunderstanding. Much of the ensuing plot is Hawkes a) recovering what had happened during those seven months, and b) trying to evade men who perhaps wanna do him harm. Weird things start happening. A subway entrance collapses. A cat, miraculously and horrifying, gets turned inside out. Something either supernatural or super-scientific is going on, Hawkes is gonna find out.

I don’t have a lot to say with this one, for a couple reasons. It’s a short novella, true, and fast-paced, but it’s also a victim of its own sense of economy. Del Rey runs into a major storytelling problem here, which is the “and then” school of plotting. Much of “Pursuit” can be summed up as “And then Hawkes went to this place, and then this happened, and then this happened” a few times over until we slow down a bit. There is no B-plot so it’s a straight line from Hawkes’s apartment to when he meets Ellen, at which point the chase slows down and we’re allowed some backstory, if not enough to stop the chase from continuing. Ellen is a childhood friend of Hawkes’s, although the two have not met in many years—at least from Hawkes’s perspective. Ellen, for her part, knows a lot more than she lets on at first. The two clearly have chemistry and they hit it off in what would normally be hasty circumstances, but these would not be so hasty for Ellen. I have issues with the characters, or rather the lack of characters, but to give del Rey some credit his inserting of a romance plot could be less convincing.

“Pursuit” is not very good, but it does have a few points of interest. For one there’s a barely offscreen sex scene between people who are not married that I was surprised to read; must’ve been rather titillating for what would’ve been a puritanical SF readership. Indeed there’s a level of violence and sexuality prevalent here that would’ve kept this story out of the pages of Astounding, not to mention a persistent (if also rudimentary at best) harking to Freudian psychology. The unconscious keeps being called “unconsciousness,” and it’s a good thing del Rey’s been dead for thirty years or else I would kill him over that. The central conflict of “Pursuit” is between Hawkes’s conscious and unconscious mind, but the way it’s phrased makes it sounds like he’s fighting between being awake and being asleep. Anyway, it’s too racy for Astounding but also too unrefined for Galaxy, which I suppose means it’s a good thing the magazine market was oversaturated in the early ’50s. Del Rey seemed to be playing with the boundary between SF and detective fiction here, something he would apparently try again in Police Your Planet.

There Be Spoilers Here

The big twist of “Pursuit” is one I saw coming a mile away, which is that Hawkes had, prior to the story’s beginning, agreed to an experiment with psi powers and in the process became a kind of superman; all of the crazy shit that happens in the story is his own doing, or rather the doing of his unconscious mind. Hawkes is so powerful in fact that the men pursuing him are no serious threat to him, and even when he tries to kill himself (for what he thinks is the good of everyone) he physically can’t. It’s at the point where Hawkes realizes he’s stuck with his psi powers and that the cat’s out of the bag, so to speak, that del Rey makes it clear he’s not really talking about psi powers—he’s talking about nuclear weapons. I wonder if readers were already sick of nuclear allegories by 1952. Also, del Rey runs into the problem of how one would inject a story with conflict if it’s about a superman; there are several ways one can tackle this issue. A. E. van Vogt basically made a career out of justifying plots around characters who are nigh invincible, most famously in Slan where the solution was to make the superman a child in a world where there are adults, both normal and super, who wanna eat him for lunch. In the case of “Pursuit” del Rey “solves” the issue by giving his superman a case of amnesia. Success…?

A Step Farther Out

I was unsure at first if I would have a review out on time today, partly because of outside circumstances but also I have to admit I was dragging my feet on this one. Sure, it’s short and it goes by quickly, but I found so little to chew on. Those who read “Pursuit” might be reminded of early van Vogt, or even Philip K. Dick’s “Paycheck,” but this story is not up to the standard of either good van Vogt or good Dick for a multitude of reasons, not the least of these being its lack of human character. It’s almost a pure action narrative wherein the stakes turn out to be miniscule, even if del Rey tries to make a point at the end. That “Pursuit” probably wouldn’t have gotten published in a magazine del Rey wasn’t editing goes to show that as a writer your worst choice for an editor is yourself.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Clash by Night” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

November 17th, 2023

(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, March 1943.)

Who Goes There?

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore each started out as talented writers by themselves, both of them first appearing in Weird Tales and indeed they began as writers of weird fiction. Kuttner was younger, less refined, more cheeky, but also more productive; he employed so many pseudonyms that even Jack Vance was suspected of being a Kuttner pseudonym early in his career. Moore was never that prolific on her own, but what fiction she put out really caught people’s attention, with its poetry, its tonal intensity, and its psychological depth. During World War II, after the two had gotten married, John W. Campbell needed a few authors to fill the pages of Astounding and Unknown while a good portion of his stable went off to support the war effort, and Kuttner and Moore were up to the challenge. From 1942 to 1946, a truly absurd amount of work from the two, both separately and in collaboration, appeared across several magazines, but most notably in Astounding. Naturally, because they wrote more than their own names could carry, they employed new pseudonyms.

“Clash by Night” is one of many stories the two wrote in a white heat, during those war years, this one being first published under Lawrence O’Donnell, which is typically considered a Moore-leaning name. It’s appropriate because “Clash by Night” is a somber, lyrical, rather ponderous novella that stands as a very early example of military SF but which does not fall into what would later be a lot of tropes of the subgenre. It’s imperfect, but it’s conceptually lively and prescient in its own way. Initially a standalone, it would be set in the same universe as the novel Fury, which returns to the misty underwater world of the Keeps—dome-covered colonies on a swampy Venus (not anachronistic in 1943) in the distant future.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (ed. John W. Campbell), The Great SF Stories Volume 5, 1943 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and, as always, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. It speaks to both the quality and quantity of their output in the ’40s that the Asimov/Greenberg volume contains FIVE stories by Kuttner and/or Moore. I would say that’s a bit much, but they had enough firepower for five writers.

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The average writer would’ve plopped us right into the action, which would’ve been serviceable enough, certainly nothing inherently wrong with that, but Kuttner and Moore are very much above average. We’re instead given a fictional introduction, as if it were a foreword to a history on the Keeps, with the narrator even telling us that the protagonist, Brian Scott, may not have even existed, so long ago were the exploits of the Free Companies. I know I’m just throwing these names at you, so let me give you some context. The Keeps are underwater city-states—dome structures that are kept away from the cloudy and toxic surface of the planet Venus. As was typical of the time, Venus is not only habitable but teeming with life, being home to volcanic islands and swampy forests, not to mention a vast undersea world. The Keeps, like in feudal Japan, or China prior to the unification, are perpetually at war with each other—not for ideological reasons but for resources. “It is fairly well known that only one factor saved the Keeps from annihilating one another—the gentlemen’s agreement that left war to the warriors, and allowed the undersea cities to develop their science and social cultures.” Rather than fight each other with their own armies, the Keeps hire the Free Companies, which are mercenary groups—bands of outsiders who are not native to Venus and who have no patriotic bone to pick.

The story is set in the far future, but is framed as being told from an even more distant future point; Brian Scott, had he been alive in the first place, would’ve been dead for centuries by the time of the introduction. Indeed we’re told upfront that the Free Companies have been defunct for ages, and this fatalism will permeate the rest of the narrative; we’re also about to find out, however, that this foregone conclusion for the mercenaries is not necessarily a bad thing. A little word of warning first: I’m always a little weirded out when a character in a story has my name. I think that applies to a lot of people. It doesn’t help that Scott is also my dad’s name, so it’s like Our Hero™ here is some amalgamation. To make matters worse, Scott (the character) has a similar disposition to me, as we’ll see: he’s not fond of thinking, and yet he can’t help it, just as he’s not fond of talking and yet when he gets going he waxes philosophical. Even when we first meet him it’s clear that blue (depression, yet also eroticism) is his color. He’s a captain of the Doonemen, one of the Free Companies, and he’s enjoying some off-time when he’s called in by his superior, Cine Rhys, to serve as mentor for a young patriot of Montana Keep (all the Keeps, at least the ones we see, are named after American states), Norman Kane.

The novella is frontloaded with exposition, which normally would be a problem, but I would argue this opening stretch is the best part, since the plot itself is—let’s not say threadbare, but the backstory is more intriguing than the story proper. I can see why Kuttner and Moore would later return to this setting; there’s a lot of room for elaboration. The good news of this future is that humans have colonized Venus and Mars; the bad news is that Earth has apparently been turned into a hollow shell of a planet, following nuclear catastrophe on a planet-wide scale, referred to here rather uncannily as “the Holocaust.” (It had been known internationally since the ’30s that the Nazis were violently persecuting Jews and other minority groups deemed as undesirable, but it would not be until a few years after “Clash by Night” was written that we would know the sheer lengths to which the Nazis would go to eradicate these groups. Allied forces had not yet discovered the death camps.) As a sign of collective guilt, the Keep-dwellers keep signs reminding them of the destroyed home of their ancestors, and the one taboo never to be broken among Free Companions is the use of nuclear weapons. You might’ve also guessed this was written following the dropping of the atomic bomb, but it’s one of those preemptive tales of nuclear fear.

One more thing to establish here, because it plays into Scott’s ensuing relationship with Norman’s sister Ilene and it’s also rather curious to note from a modern perspective. The Free Companions are, not strictly speaking, monogamous; for them it’s customary to have to something of an open marriage, here called a “free-marriage,” in which the partners, since they’re separated for long stretches due to the Free Companions’ travels, are not prohibited from having squeezes on the side. Unusual to read about this not only from a story published in 1943 but one published in Astounding, a publication that was famously puritanical. The love triangle between Scott, his wife Jeana, and Ilene is erotically charged. Ilene herself is an interesting character in concept who sadly goes underutilized, as she considers herself a hedonist—someone who devotes her life to seeking pleasure. Norman and Ilene seem to be opposites but they also might be two sides of the same coin, since Norman wants to join the Doonemen for reasons that appear to be frivolous while Ilene is, by her own admission, given to frivolous ventures all the time. They both contrast with Scott, who is self-serious but also at this point becoming sick of his job as a gun for hire.

Now, I should probably bring up here that the story quotes Rudyard Kipling a couple times—it might be the first American genre SF story to quote Kipling, although I could be wrong about that. It’s a move that anticipates Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson doing the same some years later; what’s different is that unlike Kipling, Heinlein, and Anderson, Kuttner and Moore as far as I can tell were not warmongers. Indeed the quotes do not refer to the virtuousness of battle but to the passing of an age, which makes sense because Kipling lamented the decline of the British empire following World War I and “Clash by Night” is about the twilight hours of the age of the Free Companies. We know in advance these mercenaries won’t be around much longer and Scott himself is keenly aware that the Keeps, once they get over their petty squabbles and unify, will not longer need people like him. War, in the story, is framed as a necessary evil—a stepping stone for a civilization that will at some point no longer need it. Even the phrase “clash by night” refers to the futility and blindness of battle—the fog of war. Thus the upcoming battle between the Free Companions of Montana Keep and Virginia Keep looks to be one last job for Scott.

There Be Spoilers Here

”Clash by Night” runs into a bit of a problem with the plotting, because at some point, naturally, we have to put the moody writing aside and get to the military action. A question you may have asked by now is, “How do the Free Companies fight each other if it’s impractical to fight on land?” By sea, of course! Battleships, submarines, and “flitterboats” which are smaller vessels. An engine failure on one such flitterboat sends Scott and Norman on a detour, and for a stretch the story it becomes something that wouldn’t be out of place in Planet Stories; it also becomes less interesting, in my opinion. I’ve said this before, but sometimes my bias against action writing rears its head. The back end of “Clash by Night” is a planetary adventure followed by a naval battle, and neither gripped me all that much. I get the impression that someone out there, who’s more into pulpy adventure writing, would like the back half more than I did. I just feel like it’s a 20,000-word novella that could’ve been cut down to a novelette. I heard from someone that this is essentially a Moore story, and I have to sort of disagree because I can see Kuttner’s knack for action prose here.

A Step Farther Out

I liked it, I just wish I had more to say. I had been hyping up this particular story in my head for a few months now; it had been on my radar for review for that long. I wouldn’t call the payoff underwhelming, because this would’ve been pretty memorable especially if you were reading it in 1943 and not used to SF about soldiers. It would’ve been written in 1942, so after the Pearl Harbor attack, and following that there were plenty of pro-war stories about (explicitly or subliminally) about letting the Germans or Japanese have it. This is a different type of war narrative and I’m not sure what Kuttner and Moore were responding to here exactly. I would recommend it, but if you’ve never read Kuttner and Moore together than I first recommend checking out “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” “The Twonky,” “Vintage Season,” and for a more overlooked gem, “A Wild Surmise.” I just hope I can get out of this funk I’ve been in so that I can enjoy writing more.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “A Man of the People” by Ursula K. Le Guin

November 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Mark Harrison. Asimov’s, April 1995.)

Who Goes There?

Ursula K. Le Guin made her genre debut in 1962, and for the next 55 years would stand as one of SFF’s most universally beloved writers. By 1970 she had started the two series that would cement her legacy: the Earthsea series and the Hainish cycle. The latter, when taken collectively, might be Le Guin’s crowning achievement, giving us such memorable novels as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, as well as some of her best short fiction, including “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow.” Le Guin put the series on hold in the latter half of the ’70s, and generally the ’80s saw her write only sporadically; but then in the ’90s she made a grand return, not just to the Hainish cycle but to Earthsea as well. “A Man of the People” is part of a quartet (or quintet, as I’ll explain in a moment) of stories set in the Hainish universe, and more specifically around two planets.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Has never been anthologized. It was then reprinted in the collection Four Ways to Forgiveness, which also includes the previously reviewed “Forgiveness Day,” although “A Man of the People” is not a direct sequel to that story. The Library of America, apparently with Le Guin’s approval, would expand the collection to make it Five Ways to Forgiveness, as part of the two-volume Hainish cycle box set. The expanded collection includes the novella “Old Music and the Slave Women,” which was published several years after the other stories.

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The protagonist has a name that’s too long, so from now on let’s call him Havzhiva. Havzhiva grew up on Hain, in a town on a quasi-island called Stse, which is sort of isolated from the rest of the world both geographically and culturally. The local customs are a bit odd. One’s “father” is actually one’s uncle, while the biological father has nothing to do with the child’s upbringing by default, and in Havzhiva’s case his mother is also often absent, “always fasting or dancing or traveling.” Sexuality plays a big part in Stse life and people are put through a sort of rite of passage at a young age, with pairings between teenagers being the norm. Havzhiva’s first love interest is Iyan Iyan, a childhood friend, although their relationship doesn’t last too long. Growing up, it’s pretty clear that Havzhiva is a restless youth, one of those characters who can’t wait to come of age.

Coming-of-age narratives like this tend to have a scene early on where the protagonist’s eyes, through some chance encounter, are suddenly opened to the wonders (and perils) of the larger world. In this case the key that unlocks Havzhiva’s ambition is a female historian who comes to Stse on business, who informs Our Hero™ that there is even such a thing as a historian—indeed that there is such a thing as history. While the customs of Stse may be the be-all-end-all for the people who live there, these customs have no meaning for the larger world. As the historian says, “There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.” It’s here that Havzhiva realizes that everywhere you look there’s history, and for Le Guin, history is both past and present; or to quote William Faulkner, “The past is never dead.” All this inspired Havzhiva to leave his hometown—to leave behind his mother, his friends, Iyan Iyan, all of it.

Havzhiva flies off to the planet Ve to study, to follow the historian’s footsteps, which ends up being another eye-opening experience. It doesn’t take long for him for take on another partner, this time Tiu, who is kind and in many ways a good partner; they have a mutual understanding. This doesn’t last either. Last time it was because Havzhiva moved out of town, but this time it’s because Tiu wants to go to Earth, or Terra as they call it. Time dilation dictates that by the time Tiu gets to Earth Havzhiva (and indeed everyone she knew then) will have turned to dust. Something I like about this story, which covers a couple decades in someone’s life, is that relationships come and go, sort of fading in and out of focus, like how relationships in real life tend to be. You might be friends, or even lovers with someone, only for you to drift apart, sometimes not talking for years, sometimes never saying another word to each other. More than in most other short works I’ve read of hers, Le Guin focuses on the relationships between people here, making up for the lack of an urgent plot.

Something I’ve noticed about Le Guin in the ’90s is that she’s sort of like how Henry James was in the 1900s. Both writers, having long since proved their mastery of conventional narrative forms, reach a stage where they become less concerned with plot and with being “concise” in favor of exploring vast thematic and psychological landscapes through language; they also both took on a penchant for complicated sentence structures and paragraphs that take up entire pages. Read one of the stories in Five Ways to Forgiveness and then go back to The Left Hand of Darkness or The Word for World Is Forest. A few things have changed, in how Le Guin tackles storytelling, but also with what concerns her. Le Guin, in ’60s and ’70s, wasn’t what you’d call a Feminist™ writer in the sense that her stories were not, with a few exceptions, chiefly concerned with women’s liberation; rather she put forth a utopian anarchist egalitarianism that some deemed inadequate. “A Man of the People,” by contrast, is overtly a feminist narrative.

Having a man as the protagonist for such a narrative is a bit odd, but it does complement the other two novellas that were published in Asimov’s and which make up the collection, given the dual male and female protagonists of “Forgiveness Day” and the apparent female protagonist of “A Woman’s Liberation.” It’s also worth mentioning that while he is undoubtedly the hero, Havzhiva’s life, with only one or two exceptions, is shaped by the women he knows, from his mother to his partners to the historian who inspired him in the first place to, finally, Yeron, a nurse on the planet Yeowe, which itself had recently gone through a slave revolt. Right, some backstory is in order. The stories in Five Ways to Forgiveness focus on the planets Werel and Yeowe, the former having until recently owned the latter as a slave planet. There’s a lot to touch on, but to avoid repeating myself I suggest reading my review of “Forgiveness Day” to get more filled in on the details.

Speaking of which, if you’ve read “Forgiveness Day” then you may notice a recurring character in Old Music, the enigmatic Hainish man who acts as Havzhiva’s contact once the latter becomes an envoy. For a second it looks like we might get a repeat of that story, what with the protagonist also being an envoy (although in “Forgiveness Day” it was on Werel), but Le Guin takes Havzhiva’s story in a different direction. The action of the slave revolt was kept offscreen in that story and is kept equally so here, this time because Havzhiva space-jumps past it. “At the time he left Ve, Werel’s colony planet Yeowe had been a slave world, a huge work camp. By the time he arrived on Werel, the War of Liberation was over, Yeowe had declared its independence, and the institution of slavery on Werel itself was beginning to disintegrate.” Now, when he takes a flight to Yeowe, a planet where the war has been fought and won, Havzhiva will surely get a warm welcome as a peaceful employee of the Ekumen from the recently freed natives, right?

Wrong.

There Be Spoilers Here

So how does an envoy meet a nurse? By getting knifed in the gut by some xenophobic cretin and left to bleed out, of course. It tooks all of two minutes upon landin on Yeowe for Havzhiva to be subjected to an assassination attempt, which is the closest this story has to a high-tension; otherwise it’s mostly people talking. It’s how we’re introduced to Yeon, a nurse but formerly a doctor who laments living as a second-class citizen, despite having been freed from slavery. The brutal reality Havzhiva discovers on the planet is that even thought the men are free, the women are still treated as little more than animals. There’s a rather lengthy reason given for this (Le Guin the social anthropologist coming out), involving the history of the culture and how, due to the slave colony being male-exclusive at first, there’s a deep-rooted patriarchy that has to be overcome.

Latter day Le Guin knows how to deliver real walls of text while often making such a style work, and my favorite instance of this in “A Man of the People” comes when Yeon throws a behemoth of a monologue at Our Hero™, basically telling him what work is to be done. It’s thought-provoking, in no small part because of how it ties into what must’ve been an increasing concern for Le Guin, which is the autonomy of women in society and how even rebels can be slaves to misogyny. This isn’t even the whole paragraph, by the way, just the dialogue:

“I am your nurse, Mr. Envoy, but also a messenger. When I heard you’d been hurt, forgive me, but I said, ‘Praise the Lord Kamye and the Lady of Mercy!’ Because I had not known how to bring my message to you, and now I knew how. […] I ran this hospital for fifteen years. During the war. I can still pull a few strings here. […] I’m a messenger to the Ekumen, […] from the women. Women here. Women all over Yeowe. We want to make an alliance with you… I know, the government already did that. Yeowe is a member of the Ekumen of the Worlds. We know that. But what does it mean? To us? It means nothing. Do you know what women are, here, in this world? They are nothing. They are not part of the government. Women made the Liberation. They worked and they died for it just like the men. But they weren’t generals, they aren’t chiefs. They are nobody. In the villages they are less than nobody, they are work animals, breeding stock. Here it’s some better. But not good. I was trained in the Medical School at Besso. I am a doctor, not a nurse. Under the Bosses, I ran this hospital. Now a man runs it. Our men are the owners now. And we’re what we always were. Property. I don’t think that’s what we fought the long war for. Do you, Mr. Envoy? I think what we have is a new liberation to make. We have to finish the job.”

Back to Le Guin’s beliefs, because having at least a cursory knowledge of them is important to understand her work and how it retains its cohesion across half a century. Le Guin is a lot of things. She’s an anthropologist, a feminist, a humanist, a compulsive storyteller, and a utopian anarcho-pacifist. Her anti-capitalist sentiments are more pronounced at some times than others, but with the Five Ways to Forgiveness stories these sentiments are at the forefront, alongside feminism. But let’s not forget that pacifist aspect. Violence, in a Le Guin story, is always something to be avoided. Arguably the only irredeemable character in a Le Guin story, Don Davidson in The Word for World Is Forest, is a man who subsists on seemingly nothing but violence and conquest. Thus, while the work of a revolution has been done, there’s another—much quieter—revolution that’s to take place. This second revolution will not involve guerilla warfare but the changing of men’s minds, a project that will of course take many years.

And that’s where Havzhiva comes in.

Having accepted the people of Yeowe, even with their faults, Havzhiva becomes a hero by understanding the people he wants to help without condescending to them. Although he may be revolted by the rabid misogyny of those in charge, he doesn’t write them off as lost causes. As we meet a middle-aged Havzhiva and an elderly Yeon at the end of the story, we’re reminded that Yeowe, culturally, remains a work in progress—but there’s hope. For Le Guin there’s almost always hope, but even more so than usual this story presents a ray of hope for the future.

A Step Farther Out

I liked “A Man of the People” as I was reading it, which didn’t take long since it’s a short novella (only about 18,500 words), but reflecting on it for a day has made me like it considerably more. Whereas “Forgiveness Day” struck me as being a bit at odds with itself, a bit undisciplined for a novella, “A Man of the People” reads more like a compressed novel, with only the most important scenes kept in. Structurally I think this is a tighter venture, no doubt partly benefitting from having one protagonist instead of two, and ultimately I found there was more to chew on. Of the three novellas that originally made up Four Ways to Forgiveness, “A Man of the People” got the least amount of awards attention and got reprinted the fewest times—which isn’t saying much, as these are all acclaimed stories. But I dare say this one might be a touch underrated.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Green Days in Brunei” by Bruce Sterling

September 24th, 2023

(Cover by J. K. Potter. Asimov’s, October 1985.)

Who Goes There?

When you think of cyberpunk the first author to come to mind is almost certainly William Gibson, who didn’t invent the subgenre but very much codified it with Neuromancer; after that it becomes a bit of a free-for-all. Cyberpunk goes back to the ’70s, before Gibson started writing in earnest, and you can even see inklings of it in the late ’60s, perhaps most profoundly in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which both have cyberpunk-y elements. But as far as the heyday of cyberpunk goes the author maybe most cited who is not Gibson would be Bruce Sterling—despite the fact that much of what Sterling has written has not been cyberpunk. It could be that Sterling is not as popular as he should be because he’s such a versatile writer, covering seemingly every subgenre under the sun and even ssometimess venturing into fantasy, all while retaining a certain attitude you’d expect from someone who grew up in Austin. He’s a bit of a punk like that.

1985 was a pretty good year for Sterling that also showed off his range, with the vicious short story “Dinner in Audoghast” (alternate history), probably his most popular novel with Schismatrix (space opera), and today’s story, which is………. arguably cyberpunk. “Green Days in Brunei” has a few hallmarks of the subgenre but would nowadays be more likely classified as solarpunk than straight cyberpunk. The “green” of the title refers to money but also green energy. I’ve been on a streak with the past few novellas I’ve covered (not counting serials) and the streak continues here, as this story is pretty cool. It has naught but the skeleton of a plot but it’s a story that much more hinges on characters and speculations about the future.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. I actually have a physical copy of this issue, but it’s easier to copy lines of text off a PDF. I ended up with six pages of “notes” for the damn thing, because Sterling packs a lot into this novella. It was then reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection, which unlike a few of the other early volumes you can find for reasonable pricess online. (Don’t try to collect the first volume unless you have money to burn.) It was later reprinted in the Sterling collections Crystal Express and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.

Enhancing Image

Turner Choi is a Chinese-Canadian twenty-something working officially as an engineer in what is set to be a robot shipyard in Brunei, a very small country on the island of Borneo; unofficially he’s also a computer hacker, although given the limited means he’s not able to do anything fancy. The shipyard in question is supposed to become fully automated, bringing industry back to Brunei with minimal human labor. Brunei is smaller than a lot of American cities, with Brunei Town itself housing only a hundred thousand people, with basically nothing to indicate it as standing in the 21st century. “No cars. No airport. No television.” It’s circa 2020 and a second oil crisis in the ’90s sucked out what little industry the country had before. Now it’s kept afloat with a very small pocket of money—an aristocracy that can almost fit on the head of a pin.

Said aristocracy, however, made a deal with Kyocera, a Japanese corporation (it’s not the ’80s if the Japanese aren’t depicted as economic juggernauts), and that’s where Turner comes in. It’s Turner’s first big job and it might be the toughest he’ll ever deal with, as he and his crew are basically expected to turn shit into sugar. The robot factory for the shipyard is condemned and has been untouched for two decades. This would not be such a problem if not for Brunei’s lacking in metals, never mind that Turner has to do some hacking on the sly to access what we might now call the internet—although here it’s basically just email and chat rooms. His Bruneian contact is also someone not easy to get along with—that being Jimmy Brooke, a former British rockstar, a “deaf, white-haired eccentric,” who came to Brunei years ago and never left. Brooke is curious, as for one he’s the only white character of importance in the narrative, but we’ll elaborate on him later.

There are only a few main characters, the last of these being Seria, a young woman who piggybacks off Brooke’s antics and who is, as it turns out, the sultan’s (rebellious) daughter. Turner hits on Seria one night and it does not occur to him fast enough that getting in with a literal princess might not be the best idea. In terms of personality Seria might be the best character, despite only existing in relation to the men in her life, including Turner, Brooke, her brother (who is mostly offscreen), and her rich dad (who is kept entirely offscreen). Turner and Seria hit it off despite the former looking a little ridiculous with his lumberjack jacket and knee-high boots that his mom bought for him. If not for his Chinese heritage, Turner would look like the typical white Canadian, perpetually gloomy from having lived in Vancouver—which hey, at least it’s not Toronto. In fairness to Turner, his personal life before coming to Brunei was a bit of a mess.

Where to start?

The shadow hanging over Turner throughout the story, aside from the stress of satisfying his employer, is the fact that he and his brother Georgie are kin to a real bastard: Grandpa Choi, now elderly but who back in the ’70s gained infamy as a corrupt cop in Hong Kong. The combined financial success and public scandal of Grandpa Choi seemed to have disastrous results for Turner’s dad, who sank into alcoholism and met an untimely death prior to the story’s beginning. We also find out that Turner’s old college girlfriend (having been separated for a few years now) is a barely functioning drug addict, and the one time we get an interaction between them is pretty uncomfortable. Turner is a classic rebellious hero, especially in the context of cyberpunk, being a romantic who is also trying to escape his past. The little computer shenanigans we see are framed romantically, both in how Turner’s l33t haxing powers are romanticized and how the romance between Turner and Seria is intensified through online messaging.

Something that caught my eye was how Sterling seemed to understand, even in this early period, how online messaging affects relationships differently from in-person talking, be they romantic or otherwise. When communicating via text you open a door to your inner consciousness that would normally be closed when talking with your mouth. Get a load of this passage describing the escalation of Turner’s relationship with Seria and how their texting only heightens their sense of intimacy:

Turner realized now that no woman had ever known and understood him as Seria did, for the simple reason that he had never had to talk to one so much. If things had gone as they were meant to in the West, he thought, they would have chased their attraction into bed and killed it there. Their two worlds would have collided bruisingly, and they would have smiled over the orange juice next morning and mumbled tactful goodbyes.

I need to read up more on what would’ve been computer culture when it was in its infancy. Sterling is known for his fiction, but he has also written extensively on the history of computing and the hacker subculture that spawned from it. 1985 sounds almost impossibly old for discussing such a topic, but remember that Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroess of the Computer Revolution was published in 1984 and Sterling certainly would have known about it. One of the few quibbles I have with “Green Days in Brunei” is that it falls for what was then the common trap of framing hackers as heroic, noble figures—a pill that would be harder to swallow nowadays. While Turner is written as flawed, with his pride certainly getting in the way, Sterling doesn’t question the nobility of his illicit hacking in contrast with the shadowy bureaucracy of the Bruneian government. That Turner’s antics ultimately do much good might stretch the modern reader’s suspension of disbelief, but then its optimism is overall well-founded.

Turner has fallen in love, which dramatic purposes usually is something that results in disaster—or at the very least conflict. Which it does, as it should. It started as a job he would do before returning to Canada, but now he has a reason to stay in Brunei; mind you, it won’t be the only reason. Sterling makes the most of tropes that nowadays might read as predictable, even going to some lengths to justify the contrivances in the plot. Turner and Seria meeting is highly unlikely, sure, but given the small population it’s not as unlikely as if they were to meet in New York. Even the laughably outdated technology is justified by the fact that Brunei is a backwater, both from lack of industry and deliberate political choices. The Green Party (no, not that one), while kneecapped by the aristocracy, has worked to turn the country into almost one big greenhouse.

Turner, Seria, Brooke, and later Dr. Moratuwa (more on him in a minute) fit into archetypes that will be familiar to cyberpunk fans, but who are elevated above their archetypes through some pretty sharp dialogue. Would “Green Days in Brunei” have benefited from being written by a Chinese or Malaysian author? Maybe. The problem is that Sterling manages to be (somehow) both idiosyncratic and a bit of a chameleon. You can discern a Sterling story by how it’s written, but his willingness to tackle different zones of interest with ease makes it so that while you can try to emulate Sterling’s style, you would be hard-pressed to actually pull it off. I would would say the novella shows its age, given how easy it is to indulge in exoticism with former colonies (this is, after all, a post-colonial narrative), Sterling manages to be sensitive and forward-looking enough that it doesn’t read as exploitative; rather it reads as coming from someone early enough in their career that they’ve honed their skills and have not yet turned reactionary.

There Be Spoilers Here

Despite his appearance and rock-and-roll lifestyle, Brooke knows more about the workings of Brunei than he lets on—even saving Turning when the latter stumbles upon a political prison. It’s here that we meet Dr. Moratuwa, a decrepit former activist who still has some fighting spirit in him; being a devout Buddhist probably helps. It’s also here that we find out the true purpose of the robot shipyard, which is to construct primitive but robust rowboats that can cross the seas without need for electricity. In a way, although Turner’s employer isn’t aware of it, the purpose of the robot shipyard is to bring back the age of sailing—using modern technology to produce ships that are made of simple materials and which anyone with at least one arm can work. And the plan will work, so long as Turner does his job.

But then a wrench gets thrown into the whole thing: Grandpa Choi is on his deathbed. Not that Turner and Georgie have any love for the old man, and indeed in the one scene where Grandpa Choi talks she shows himself to be a real asshole, but it’s during this argument between Turner and his elder that Grandpa Choi, in a moment of devilish joy, reveals that Turner is set to inherit the old man’s considerable (and blood-drenched) fortune. Our romantic leads have now both come to a crossroads, wherein Turner wants to abandon his inheritance and Seria wants to give up her title. The rich suffering a case of conscience and giving up their wealth for the good of the world is a major point here, even given metaphysical significance when Moratuwa says, “Buddha was a prince also, but he left his palace when the world called out.” If only the rich in the real world were capable of feeling remorse or empathy. It thematically ties things together, but our leads’ decision to abandon their wealth in favor of the Green movement is probably not a conclusion a more jaded writer would read—which doesn’t stop the ending from feeling genuinely triumphant.

Sterling makes a few points by way of characters clearly speaking for him, and if I were to go over then one by one we would be here all day. This is a tightly packed narrative that feasibly could’ve been expanded into a novel (add a couple subplots and you’re set), but I much prefer single-minded works like this that are easier to reread. No doubt I’ll only enjoy it more when I eventually get around to it a second time.

A Step Farther Out

I’m not sure if the ending rings as true now as it did back then; at the same time, with the growing prominence of hopeful SF (specifically narratives which speculate on alternatives to capitalism in the future), said optimism may be prescient. I don’t know if the Sterling of today would’ve written this story, because it strikes me as being written by someone who wasn’t much older than the main characters, and who hadn’t yet been broken down by the harsh reality of genre publishing—never mind that it was written before the horrific consequences of the Reagan years fully sank in. “Green Days in Brunei” reads more like a reaction to the oil crisis of the ’70s than the austerity politics of the ’80s, but its attempt to reconcile modern technology with green energy is admirable. It helps that this is about as sincere as Sterling gets, rivaling only that great “romantic gesture” of his, “Dori Bangs,” which might still be my favorite.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Earth Quarter” by Damon Knight

September 10th, 2023

(Cover by Anton Kurka. If, January 1955.)

Who Goes There?

While he didn’t write bestsellers, Damon Knight had a pretty substantial impact on the direction American SF would take in the ‘60s, as author, critic, and especially editor. He started out as a critic in the ‘40s—one of the first serious book reviewers in the field—before trying his luck at short fiction. After all, a critic who can practice the art he criticizes has more legitimacy—at least to cranky writers who can’t take criticism. But Knight was pretty good at the short story thing, and nowadays that might be what he’s most known for, although his Orbit series of original anthologies was seminal in promoting the New Wave.

In the ‘40s and start of thr ‘50s Knight wrote some memorable shorts that very much operated in the O. Henry mode (see “To Serve Man”), but as the ‘50s progressed he grew more ambitious. “The Earth Quarter” struck me as maybe being a more substantial effort from Knight—an assumption that proved correct. This is one of the best SF novellas from the ‘50s that I’ve read, not just from the ingenuity of its plot but its depth of character and subtlety of implication. Knight gets a remarkable amount of work done in just under 20,000 words while also giving us one of the few truly anti-Campbellian narratives at a time when readers still treated John W. Campbell like he worked miracles. It’s a subversive and nasty little piece of work, but it reflects a humanism that was not too common in magazine SF then.

Despite its outstanding quality “The Earth Quarter” is a fairly obscure novella, which is why I was stunned to find that I’m not even the first person this month to have reviewed it. James Wallace Harris covered “The Earth Quarter” exactly a week ago for his site, in succinct and enlightening fashion. With that said, he did call it an immensely cynical work and I don’t think “cynical” is the right word here. I do think Knight wants to believe in the good of humanity, but, at least in this story, humanity’s optics are quite bad. It’s a story about the futility of racial supremacy—explicitly human supremacy and, more implicitly, white supremacy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1955 issue of If, which is on the Archive. Knight later expanded “The Earth Quarter” into a longer novella, “The Sun Saboteurs,” and you’re more likely to find that longer version in book form—made more confusing because that longer version would also be printed under the original (and better) title. Good news is that if you wanna read the original you can do it free and easy on Project Gutenberg, since apparently Knight cared little enough for the original version to let it fall out of copyright. “The Earth Quarter” being in the public domain actually gives me a fun idea, as I will eventually explain.

Enhancing Image

First a word about the circumstances under which this review is being written. It’s Saturday the 9th as I’m writing this and my laptop is still at the repair shop; therefore I’ve had to work on this site via suboptimal means. Unfortunately I don’t have the leisure to write to my heart’s content here, which is a shame because a lot can be said about “The Earth Quarter” and I’ll have to keep things concise—by my standards. I know that won’t mean much if you know me.

Anyway…

Good news: Mankind has not only voyaged out to the stars but come into contact with multiple intelligent alien races. Bad news: Earth itself is now little more than a dustbowl, with those left on the planet living almost like cavemen. Those who journeyed out to space aren’t doing a whole lot better, with little pockets of humanity scattered across planets owned by more advanced alien races and relegated to ghettos. Man has come to find that he is, in fact, at the bottom of the galactic food chain, more being allowed to live on other planets than to own that right.

This brings us to one of these ghettos, the Earth Quarter, “sixteen square blocks, about the size of those of an Earth city, two thousand three hundred human beings of three races, four religions, eighteen nationalities,” under the supervision of the Niori, a docile and bug-like race who nonetheless hold a metaphorical sword over the human refugees. We only see the Niori once and they’re not directly involved in the plot really, but Knight uses them as an example of how alien life can be akin to angels in relation to humanity. This is a story about humans, but I don’t think the point would quite get across if aliens were kept totally offscreen.

We’re introduced to Laszlo Cudyk, a local trader, thoroughly middle-aged and not one to take action himself; actually he’s almost as passive a protagonist as you can get, which normally would be a negative except that Cudyk’s passiveness is very much part of his character—his internal conflict. Cudyk claims to be neutral in a deeply political situation, between those who want to continue living in the Quarter, those who want to return to Earth, and those who want war with the Galactics, but he is ultimately a man at war with himself.

As for taking sides, we have two passionate and charismatic figures, both of whom have radical visions but with very different goals. On one side we have Harkway, who wants to gather people together and rebuild a fragment of civilization on Earth, “a liberal fanatic” as Cudyk calls him—I have to suspect with a bit of irony. In the opposite corner we have “Captain” Rack, a military veteran who clings to his rank despite Earth’s Space Navy having been defunct for two decades. Rack is the story’s villain, and he and his devoted underlings wanna rebuild Earth’s capacity for war—in this case war with the aliens. Not just galactic war but, Rack hopes, extermination of what he repeatedly calls “vermin.”

Let’s stop and think about how we actually don’t have a lot of great villains in old-timey SF. Sure, you have the Mule in Foundation and Empire and Baron Harkonnen in Dune, and if you want a more recent example we have Tomas Nau in A Deepness in the Sky; but pre-2000 SF doesn’t offer much in the way of great individual baddies. SF is more keen on abstractions and systemic terrors, such as tyrannical governments (consider that Big Brother is an iconic idea, but not an actual character), than flesh-and-blood people as antagonists. Had “The Earth Quarter” been a novel I think people would recall Rack as one of the great SF villains, because he such a delicious piece of shit.

Rack is a Jack London-esque figure in that he is charismatic, courageous, larger-than-life, a stone-cold adventurer—and also a violent racist. (London himself thought it a swell idea if whites could exterminate the Chinese and take their land.) Had Rack been in a story written for Astounding he would very likely be the protagonist, but here Knight shows us what a mad bastard like Rack would sound like from an outsider’s perspective. And yet, as Cudyk notes, Rack is technically not without redeeming qualities, for while he is several things, he is certainly not a coward. What makes him an effective villain is that while he is delusional and a genocidal maniac, he can also convince people to do his bidding—even murder those he deems his enemies.

Not that Knight was opposed to submitting to Astounding, as he did just that several times, but it’s clear that it was far from his go-to outlet and that this likely had to do with his ideological opposition to Campbell, who by the ‘50s had only become more of a reactionary. Astounding sort of leaned conservative really since its inception, but that conservatism became more pronounced when left-leaning alternatives (namely Galaxy and F&SF) entered the field, so that with exceptions it gained a reputation as a right-wing stronghold. “The Earth Quarter” reads like a reaction to a specific brand of SF that appealed to Campbell, that being SF which was overtly pro-human and/or pro-military. This reads as obvious now, but it must’ve been doubly so for those in the know at the time. The meaning behind Rack’s characterization is hard to misconstrue.

So the inciting incident of “The Earth Quarter” is Harkway making a speech about his vision for the future at what amounts to a town hall meeting, with Rack and his goons waiting in the wings. Cudyk and Seu, the “mayor” of the Quarter, try to keep Harkway from putting himself at risk, but it’s implied that Harkway has a death wish—that he wants to become a martyr for his cause. He almost gets what he wants, but one of Rack’s goons, in a moment of conflicting loyalties, spares him—if only tenporarily. Hours letter, Cudyk finds Harkway, slain, his face literally in the gutter. Denied a public death, Harkway’s absence allows Rack to make his move.

Before I get to spoilers I do have a few more notes to make, including a couple negative criticisms. Just some quibbles. At one point early on Knight describes one of the Chinese characters in racist language, which is a little puzzling since Knight was not a racist and he would’ve been well aware of how East-Asians have historically been denigrated as akin to rats, never mind that it slightly muddies the story’s anti-racism message. There are also no active female characters, with the single woman of any plot relevance, Kathy Burgess, only getting a line or two in and more acting as symbolism than as a character. This is a far-future tale, but gender relations are still very much of the ‘50s and the men are the people who get to do things.

On a more positive note, while descriptions of the Quarter are sparse, Knight crams in a few telling details, such as signs being in both English and Mandarin since the first humans to live in the Quarter were Chinese. While the main characters are mostly white, Knight makes it clear that this is a multi-ethnic community where people are stuck in the same boat. You could expand this short novella into something longer, as Knight would do eventually, but aside from fleshing out side characters I don’t think expansion would improve it much. This is a tightly packed narrative that knows its limitations and works almost like a stage play, which got me thinking…

Harris said that “The Earth Quarter” could work as an old-school film noir, and on a moderate budget since we stay in more or less the same location the whole time and there’s very little action. I agree, but I would go one step farther and say “The Earth Quarter” could be very feasibly adapted for the stage, to such an extent the novella as-is almost reads like a play written in prose already. Aside from Cudyk’s internal monologuing (which admittedly does add a lot to the narrative, but that can be worked around) you would lose nothing substantial by setting the action on a stage.

There Be Spoilers Here

I’m not a fan of the title “The Sun Saboteurs,” for one because it gives the vague impression that this is an action narrative, which it’s not; but it also hints at a plot development that becomes the story’s crisis point. Rack, having gathered enough followers and off-world connections via the black market, hopes to sneak off-planet and lead a fleet of human ships on what would surely amount to a suicide run. That Rack wants ti do battle with the Galactics is not even the worst part—it’s the fact that he has a nuclear weapon, a “hydrogen-lithium” bomb that, if thrown into a sun, would spark a chain reaction and kill a whole solar system.

The sun-bombing plot is the closest the novella gets to pulpy, and yeah, it’s a bit silly, but as a takedown of Campbellian militarism it makes sense. There’s realistically no way that Rack can restore humanity’s supposed former glory by doing this, but that’s not gonna stop him from taking down billions of intelligent beings with him. Luckily the plot is foiled as not only is the human fleet outgunned, but the Galactics have deployed nonlethal means which the humans could not have anticipated. We’re told all this after the fact, in a rather lengthy expository monologue from Rack. It’s clumsy, but if taken as part of a dramatic play it makes more sense to have us told about this far-off action than to be shown it.

The defeated and battered Rack will not stay down for long, though, and in a last ditch effort he tries recruiting men in the Quarter. The men have none of it. Rack almost gets away, but in a moment of stark conscience Cudyk finally makes a firm decisions and throws himself in Rack’s way, preventing his escape from the mob—and guaranteeing a violent death.

Upon regaining consciousness, Cudyk gets updated by Seu on the mob quite literally tearing Rack apart, and it’s implied that despite his civil demeanor Seu was one of those who played a direct part in Rack’s lynching. “There was a thin film of blood on the skin, and a dark line of it around each finger-nail.” Now isn’t that a lovely little nugget of show-don’t-tell? But the victory is a Pyrrhic one, as the Niori are evidently disgusted by the lynching and order the Quarter shut down, putting the humans on ships back to their ruined home world.

The ending is pretty bittersweet. Cudyk considers the irony of how, had he not been struck by conscience and stuck to his vow of neutrality, Rack would’ve very likely been taken in by the Galactics and the Quarter would’ve been allowed to persist. But then maybe this was a necessary push, for while life was possible in the Quarter, change was not. Life on Earth will be hell, but then maybe… Harkway will get what he wanted. Of course that’s an optimistic reading of the ending; it’s possible Knight intended the lights going out in the Quarter to represent a spiritual defeat for humanity.

But one can hope.

A Step Farther Out

A claim has often been made, even by people who know better, that SF was lacking in social awareness prior to a certain point in history (when that point would be is anyone’s guess), and this is obviously hyperbolic. Sure, SF—especially magazine SF—was not constantly turning out think pieces about racism and labor rights in the ‘50s, but the lack of social commentary only hits one’s nostrils if one takes everything literally; on an allegorical level there was quite a bit of social commentary going on, with a lot of left-liberal authors making their points under thin veils of symbolism and implication. With that in mind, “The Earth Quarter” succeeds as a gripping narrative, but it’s also a success as social commentary.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Beyond Bedlam” by Wyman Guin

August 31st, 2023

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, August 1951.)

Who Goes There?

Well, we’ve been bamboozled again. I was gonna write a review of A. Merritt’s 1932 novel The Dwellers in the Mirage, but I basically fizzled out halfway through reading that novel; not that it was a bad read, it was more that somehow the timing did not seem right. I was struggling with Jack Williamson’s The Reign of Wizardry at the same time, a novel whose opening stretch is rather tough going, and reading both at the same time with a deadline in mind wearied me. Whereas the Williamson serial did pick up steam in its second half, giving me the energy to persist, I kept putting Merritt’s novel off and on, until I realized I probably wouldn’t have it finished in time. I’ll cover Merritt someday (considering his influence on other writers and how nearly everything he wrote appeared in the magazines), but I found out first-hand that sadly today will not be that day. Thus a shorter alternative was needed.

One thing I said in my review forecast was that only the novellas covered this month would be science fiction, and that remains true because we’re talking about a novella today that is very much science fiction. “Beyond Bedlam” had been in the back of my mind for a minute, because it apparently encapsulates what made the early years of Galaxy so unique and so ahead of the competition. Truth be told I thought “Wyman Guin” was a pseudonym at first, because it sounds like one. Guin did debut in the field under a pseudonym, but then started using his real name; maybe he was hesitant to do that as he already had a respectable day job. Anyway, he didn’t write much, but it was enough to earn him the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. “Beyond Bedlam” marked Guin’s first story under his own name and it remains his most well known.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been anthologized a few times, as well as collected in Beyond Bedlam, which has all of Guin’s short fiction; sadly these are all out of print, although the latter has an e-book edition. Good news is that you don’t even have to pay to read it in an unambiguously legitimate fashion, as it fell out of copyright and is available on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

(Before we get into the thick of it, be aware that “Beyond Bedlam” discusses mental illness at length in terms that are outdated; not that the language Guin uses is insensitive, but rather that our understanding of mental illness has, like everything else about ourselves, advanced massively since 1950. For the sake of staying consistent with the story, and for my own sanity, I’ll be referring to the condition described in-story as schizophrenia, even though it’s actually recognized as a different condition today.)

Sharpen your pencils, because class is in session.

It’s the 29th century, and things are… a little different. Sure, we have some future tech that one would expect in old-timey science fiction about “the future,” but the technology is not the focus of the story. No, the people have changed far more radically than the tech. We start out in a classroom, with Mary Walden, who is not the protagonist but who will eventually figure profoundly into the central conflict. Thing is, Mary is only half a person—or rather she’s a whole person, but only gets to use the body she’s in half the time. She shares her body with a filthy brat named Susan Shorrs, whom Mary knows nothing about other than she leaves the body shared with Mary in rough shape whenever the “shift” happens. The problem is that Mary is a schizophrenic, which is actually not a problem because so is everybody else. Schizophrenia, a mental illness that was very much frowned upon by “the ancient Moderns” (i.e., us), became more acceptable in the 20th century once psychiatric drugs started developing and became more accessible, not only treating schizophrenics but ushering them into normal society. “The drugs worked so well that the ancients had to let millions of schizophrenic people out from behind the bars of ‘crazy’ houses. That was the Great Emancipation of the 1990s.” After several generations schizophrenics were so entrenched in normal society that they actually started to outbreed non-schizophrenics, and because the Medicorps (mind the “the”) developed a monopoly on psychiatric drugs, and because said drugs became so accessible, schizophrenics soon had to take their drugs as mandated by law. Cut to 900 years later and you have a society (at least in the US, as we learn shockingly little about life outside of it) where everybody (with exceptions, who are themselves now pariahs) is a functioning schizophrenic. The “normal” person is now a body housing two totally separated and autonomous personalities, each in effect a whole person.

I mentioned earlier that Guin had a respectable day job that did not incentivize him to write fiction prolifically; more specifically he was a pharmacologist and advertising executive, so you bet he knew a thing or two about the latest in psychiatric medicine. The strange result is that the premise of “Beyond Bedlam” is patently ridiculous and whose foundations are a little shaky if you go asking too many questions, but for what the story asks of itself it is remarkably internally consistent. Basically, it works off assumptions made in 1950 (so when Guin wrote the story) about how people suffering from mental illnesses like schizophrenia seem to be growing in relation to the general populace. We know of course that as psychiatry has advanced by leaps and bounds that people with mental illness do not necessarily take up a greater percentage of the population, but that doctors have been able to diagnose people with greater understanding, never mind empathy. It’s a fallacy, but it’s necessary in presenting a distant future society wherein the “lunatics” have literally taken over the asylum.

(I could go on for a long fucking while about how this story’s setup clearly anticipates some of Philip K. Dick’s works regarding mental illness [Clans of the Alphane Moon, Martian Time-Slip, and A Scanner Darkly especially], but I won’t, becaue believe it or not I do value your time. I would just be shocked if Dick didn’t read “Beyond Bedlam” when it was first published as it very much reads as proto-Dickian, and also it’s great.)

So how does this work? You have, say, 10,000 bodies in a town but effectively 20,000 people running it. We’re told that historically there have been bodies with three or even four personalities, but while the word “eugenics” isn’t used, it’s made clear that these abnormal schizophrenics have been weeded out, or at best incentivized to not reproduce. A society wherein you have two personalities for every body would present enough of a problem, so it only stands to reason that more would be worse. People are forced into five-day shifts wherein each personality takes over for that duration, followed by a day of rest, between a “hyperalter” and “hypoalter.” The hyperalter is the so-called dominant personality that can, if they really want, interfere with the hypoalter’s consciousness, even invading their dreams. As such, on top of the drugs taken for compartmentalizing personalities, people are also required to take a “sleeping compound” that’ll prevent hypoalters from dreaming and thus risk invasion from their hyperalters.

The system in place to keep people’s lives in order is regimented and also imperfect, which is where the plot comes in; but we’re not quite there yet. “Aren’t you gonna get the plot already?” Soon. The thing about “Beyond Bedlam” is that the plot itself is straightforward, at least when put up against worldbuilding this dense. It’s like when people talk about Stand on Zanzibar but rarely discuss its main storyline; it’s because we all know the real meat of both of these works is in the background, and I do think “Beyond Bedlam” approaches that level of density. H. L. Gold’s editorial for this issue of Galaxy focuses pretty much entirely on “Beyond Bedlam” and how Guin went about writing it, and with good reason. Not only is this a first-rate story, but it probably could not have materialized in the way it did without the intense back-and-forth between Gold and Guin in refining it. Gold is unclear if Guin always intended this to be a novella, but he says that, with his help, Guin revised and rewrote “Beyond Bedlam” a couple times each, going through 80,000 words of drafts. The effort was worth it; this is a three-dimensional depiction of possible life in the future.

Now for the plot…

Mary is the “assigned” child (as people are not raised by their birth parents) of Bill and Helen Walden, who seem to lead a decent middle-class life, except for a couple things. For one, Bill and Helen’s alters, Conrad and Clara Manz, are also married to each other, which it turns out is very much out of the norm. “Such rare marriages in which the same bodies lived together on both halves of a shift were something to snicker about.” Conrad, being the hypoalter, knows that Bill has been “cheating” by messing with Conrad’s shifts for a few hours, but what Conrad does not know is that Bill has been having an affair with Clara, whom as you know is Helen’s hypoalter. Now, monogamy is not taken too seriously in this future society; people have affairs pretty casually, and the Waldens and Manzs are chill about messing around behind each other’s backs. The problem is that Bill is not only messing with a hypoalter (hypers and hypos are kept strictly apart, and never the twain shall meet) but his own alter’s spouse.

What starts as Bill and Clara worming their way around regulations to have their meet-and-fuck sessions soon snowballs into Bill jeopardizing both his own “life” and Conrad’s, both physically and by tempting the wrath of the Medicorps. This is all made worse by Mary becoming depressed and fed up with being neglected by her parents, causing her to break a different taboo by tracking down Conrad and Clara. Having the story start with Mary is sort of misleading since she only appears sporadically, but the classroom setting at the beginning gives us a healthy dose of exposition while also establishing how people in this future might want to break out of their regimented relationships with their alters. Since this is a strictly drug-induced culture, it’s also emotionally stifled, with the positives being that war is apparently a thing of the past (again, at least for the US) and crime seems to have gone down massively. The result is a more peaceful but also less free society where even one’s emotional spectrum is narrowed.

There Be Spoilers Here

The outcome is not surprising. Bill gets caught and put on trial by the Medicorps for a gross breach of conduct, with a guilty verdict resulting in either hospitalization for life or “mnemonic erasure,” i.e., death of the personality. If you’ve read a few dystopian narratives in your time then you’ve been here before, and you also know that Bill has to lose—to play the role of Winston Smith and John Savage. Yet even during what would normally be a been-here-done-that sequence in a dystopian narrative (the third-act breakdown of the rebellious hero), Guin once again shows off the wonderful density of the world he’s made. Mnemonic erasure will affect Conrad’s life almost as profoundly as Bill’s, as, being a single persona in a body, Conrad can’t just go around like one of the ancient Moderns. He still has his five-day shift, but during what would be Bill’s shift he gets put in deep freeze, so as to not interfere with the world of his late hyperalter. (Again, never the twain shall meet.) While Conrad is sort of pleased to see his alter put to death, since Bill’s been a huge recurring pain to him, there’s a cost to all this. With Bill gone, Conrad will now be sort of an outcast, and he will not be any freer than he was before.

So it goes.

A Step Farther Out

I have a two-part argument about SF and novellas. The first part is that SF is imaginative literature, in that it’s a literature chiefly concerned with ideas; the second is that the novella is the ideal mode for a literature of ideas, and by extension ideal for SF. “Beyond Bedlam” has enough meat on its bones to justify a novel, but it gets its point across in 21,000 words. It’s a densely packed depiction of a future society that, while absurd if considered too closely, does what it ought to do, in that it makes the reader think about how this society may be a distant descendent of ours. Guin does what most SF writers don’t in that he envisions a future that is mostly unrecognizable and yet just recognizable enough that we have context. The result is a nuanced dystopian narrative that does not provide easy answers, nor even an easily discernable perspective. If Orwell clearly sides with the individual in 1984, Guin seems unsure about the seesaw balance between individual freedom and public safety. It’s a haunting and mind-bending story, being one of the finest miniature gems of ’50s science fiction.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Singleton” by Greg Egan

August 17th, 2023

(Cover by Jason Hurst. Interzone, February 2002.)

Who Goes There?

He made his debut in the ’80s, but Greg Egan is one of the quintessential voices of ’90s SF—a bridge connecting cyberpunk and transhumanist SF, sometimes wandering well outside the boundaries of either. Egan’s fiction is notorious for its incorporating of biology, computer science, quantum physics, and what have you. Egan started out as a programmer and his work often reads like the product of someone from that profession who also happens to read a lot of detective fiction. The typical Egan narrator, including the one for today’s story, is a rather melancholy white man who struggles with emotional honesty, and as such, depending on your frame of reference, it’s easier to understand Egan’s stories as detective narratives with cybernetics involved, rather than hard science fiction.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 2002 issue of Interzone, which is on the Archive. If you have qualms with reading a scan of a 21-year-old back issue of a magazine that you would have to buy used anyway, rest assured you can read this story perfectly legit on Greg Egan’s site, found here. You can also find “Singleton” in The Best of Greg Egan.

Enhancing Image

We start in the now-ancient year of 2003, with Ben, the narrator, a snot-nosed college geek, being witness to what is likely a gang-related beatdown in an alley, with a ton of other people watching. A kitchen hand is getting his ass beat by two guys who don’t seem to be carrying guns but do seem to mean to kill this man with their bare hands. Nobody intends to interrupt the killing. “Keeping your distance from something like that was just common sense.” Something, however, snaps in Ben—maybe a jolt of guilt. He steps in and gets beat for his troubles, but the kitchen hand comes out the situation alive and Ben gets to feel like not just another bystander. Now, for most people an act of heroism like this would be a shining moment in their lives, maybe a fond memory, but the prossibility of not helping the kitchen hand will haunt Ben for the rest of his years.

The details of this first section are the foggiest in the story. We never learn exactly why those goons wanted to beat this man to a pulp, nor do we even learn the man’s name. We’ll never get the full context for some things—even the most important days of our lives. This haziness makes sense when you consider Ben is narrating this many years down the road, reflecting on when he was a teenager and the world seemed a fundamentally different place. Not unlike Marcel Proust in his search for lost time, there details of the past that time has simply devoured.

Ben, while still an undergrad, kicks it off with Francine, who will turn out to be his college sweetheart and life partner. The incident with the kitchen hand had, in the short term, given Ben a confidence that normally would be absent in young scientists, and he’s well aware that it was that incident which probably motivated him to pursue Francine. “There was no denying that if I’d walked away from the alley, and the kitchen hand had died, I would have felt like shit for a long time afterwards. I would not have felt entitled to much out of my own life.” But why shouldn’t they get together? They’re both scientists, albeit in different fields of study. Much of their relationshio will be long-distance due to work, but that will not be unusual in the coming years (as indeed it’s not out of the ordinary now); it may even strengthen their bond, that distance. “Singleton” is, among other things, a love story, and the romance is believable because there’s so little of it.

(A note here: There are several time-skips throughout the novella. We start in 2003 but creep across decades, well into even our own future. “Singleton” was published in early 2002 but it would’ve been written probably a whole year prior, which means Egan did not, for instance, take 9/11 and the War on Terror into account. This is like publishing an SF story in 1946 that was written, evidently, pre-Hiroshima.)

Some years go by and unfortunately the two hit a major speed bump in their relationship when Francine suffers a miscarriage that’s painful both physically and psychologically, possibly caused by Ben handling radioactive dust in a previous job but never confirmed. Regardless the two are not confident about the prospect of producing a child, and while adoption is on the table, their relationship is in enough of a rough patch that they don’t agree right away on the proper course of action. Not to say the romance aspect of “Singleton” is great, because that’s not its main purpose, but I do like how Egan shows the often banal (from the outside, anyway) downside of relationships. Ben and Francine love each other, but there are real-life issues standing in the way of an Eden-like existence, which of course also applies to a lot of real-life couples. Never mind that the idea of becoming a parent, as to be expected, fills Ben with an anxiety that’s both terrible and exhilarating. “I wasn’t ready,” he admits at one point, but for better or worse he would have to wait some more to become a parent after all.

Before we get into the actual science-fictional aspect of “Singleton,” I wanna take a moment to talk about how short fiction may be structured so as to resemble a novel; this is not exclusive to novellas as I’ve also seen it done with shorter works. The time skips and the conservation of detail (achieved via first-person narration, which you may notice is easier to do in that mode than in the third person) give the impression of a story being longer than it is, since it covers enough time and events to fit into a novel. We cover a lot of ground here in the development of Ben and Francine’s relationship, but there’s still plenty of room for Egan to explain, in language that is mostly beyond my dumb-dumb brain, quantum mechanics, the Many Worlds Interpretation, and how they relate to the major action of the narrative—which, to boil it down, is the raising of an AI.

Putting it as basically as I can, Ben builds a device, the Qusp, “the quantum singleton processor,” which basically acts as a funnel for a quantum computer. What separates a quantum computer from a normal or “classical” computer, you may ask? As a layman my explanation would be that while a classical computer can make decisions with incredible speed, it can only make one decision at a time, in other words being a linear thought processor. A classical computer, no matter how intelligent, even if it were sentient as with a true AI, would only be able to comprehend one decision at a time. A quantum computer, meanwhile, is able to see, with the naked eye so to speak, dozens or even hundreds of possible decisions simultaneously. Imagine you’re in a maze and you’re wondering which way to go; if you were a classical computer you would consider each direction one at a time, but as a quantum computer you would have all these decisions superimposed on top of each other, like cutting into a cake and seeing all the layers on the inside. I’ll let Egan explain more in his own words:

The Qusp would employ all the techniques designed to shield the latest generation of quantum computers from entanglement with their environment, but it would use them to a very different end. A quantum computer was shielded so it could perform a multitude of parallel calculations, without each one spawning a separate history of its own, in which only one answer was accessible. The Qusp would perform just a single calculation at a time, but on its way to the unique result it would be able to pass safely through superpositions that included any number of alternatives, without those alternatives being made real. Cut off from the outside world during each computational step, it would keep its temporary quantum ambivalence as private and inconsequential as a daydream, never being forced to act out every possibility it dared to entertain.

As such, a quantum computer that passes the Turing test could, with the Qusp installed, consider decisions simultaneously whilst being able to come to a single result and without being overwhelmed with information. Or so that’s the idea. The Many Worlds Interpretation is of course tied to quantum mechanics, wherein basically (I’m saying that word a lot, I know, but bear with me) every decision has its own branch, resulting in what would probably be billions (or functionally an infinite amount) of alternate universes—many of them very similar, but some very different. Ben and Francine eventually agree to try again at having a child—only this time they won’t make or adopt, but build a child. The result will be a quantum computer with the Qusp as its anchor, wrapped in a plastic human body. A ghost in a shell. Such a child would be tapped into many worlds, being able to consider decisions at a speed and complexity incomprehensible to humans.

What could possibly go wrong?

There Be Spoilers Here

In some robot/AI narratives the intelligence in question would turn out to be malicious, or perhaps too smart to relate to its human creators. Thanks to the Qusp, however, the resulting child, Helen, is not much more intelligent than a smartypants like Ben or Francine. There are certain things that are uncanny about her, such as the variety of plastic shells she can inhabit, but she is by no means an evil AI run amok. It does turn out, though, that of course there would be several issues that are not Helen’s fault. Our Heroes™ have functionally created a synthetic person or android, although it’s made clear that Helen only has her human body for the sake of her “parents.” The introduction of true AI in human form naturally causes a major stir throughout the world, with cultists both pro- and anti-AI popping out of the woodwork to make our characters’ lives worse.

(Another note: I appreciate that the future world Egan conjures is still very much recognizable as our own, albeit with a couple changes. We don’t get rayguns and flying cars, but we do get to see how an invention—in this case adais, or “Autonomously Developing Artificial Intelligences”—would interact with the known world. Aside from the whole pre-9/11 thing this is a plausible depiction of the near future.)

The back end of “Singleton” is concerned with raising Helen and how such a “unique” child poses a problem for Our Heroes™, who after all are doing this more so out of personal trauma than a need to do good. Ben eventually admits that he took on this extended project because he had become consumed by the implications of the Many Worlds Interpretation, with it all going back to that fateful day in the alley when he was but a teenager. The results are somewhat tragic, with Ben’s relationships with Helen and Francine eroding over time, but there is a ray-of-hope ending that hints at something which may bring an understanding between human and AI. If you’ve read enough Egan then you know that he’s in sympathy with transhumanism—more specifically the notion that consciousness can be totally divorced from organic biology. While there are several questions raied about Helen’s inner workings and how she may survive in the human world, what’s not questioned is that she is a thinking creature who deserves to be treated as such, and indeed the story ends with Helen caught in an act of contemplation. For better or worse, the machine is alive.

A Step Farther Out

“Singleton” is a curious novella (or, as I said before, a compressed novel) that would probably hit stronger on a reread—preferably after I’ve done more research on computing. I’ve read several Egan short stories throughout this year in preparation for reviewing a longer work of his, and yet—maybe it’s because I had read short stories from early in his career—”Singleton” is still a more demanding read than I had expected. I recommend it, because I’ve sat on it for a couple days now and it’s left an impression on me that’s hard to articulate (usually a good sign for a work of art), but it’s not what I would recommend for someone just starting to get into Egan; either shorter works or his most famous novels (so I’m told) would do the trick.

My Egan journey has been progressing at a pace where I’ll be getting to his novels, particularly Permutation City and Diaspora, soon enough. I hear the former is the best thing since sliced bread.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Immigrant” by Clifford D. Simak

August 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, March 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Clifford Simak is one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years, in that he’s exactly the kind of author I like to show off to people who think so-called Golden Age SF is just this or that. Simak debuted in 1931, which would make him a bit of an oldster by the time John W. Campbell took over Astounding in late 1937; but whereas some authors merely adapted to the new standard and were lucky to do that, Simak actually got better as time went on. He wrote most of the stories that would comprise City in the ’40s, with 1944 alone seeing four of them in print. These were some of the best and most emotionally fulfilling short stories of the era, even surpassing most literary fiction of the time in my opinion. The ’50s then saw a period of immense productivity for Simak, mostly in the pages of Galaxy, where he played well with authors two decades his junior.

“Immigrant” was one of the few major Simak stories in the ’50s to be published in Astounding, and without giving the game away at the start, I can see why it was published there and not in Galaxy. This is a bit of an unusual Simak story in that it takes place entirely away from Earth, as instead we find ourselves on an alien planet with a race of powerful and condescending aliens. It’s also rather foreboding—for the most part.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was most recently reprinted in The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories, which seems to only have an ebook edition. Sigh. You gotta go back to the ’90s for a paperback reprint. The most relevant for me has to be Galactic Empires Volume One (ed. Brian Aldiss), which is not an anthology you’d expect to see a Simak story in.

Enhancing Image

Going into this I thought it would be a coming-of-age narrative featuring a juvenile protagonist; well, it is a coming-of-age narrative in a sense, but there are a few twists. Our Hero™ is Selden Bishop, a 29-year-old genius who, through rigorous testing and passing a certain exam, gained the privilege of traveling to Kimon, apparently the most prosperous and alluring planet in the known galaxy. In this distant future, humanity knows it’s far from the only sentient race in the galaxy, and yet Kimon stands out among its neighbors as being where you wanna go if you wanna make it big; only thing is that a tiny fraction of humans (such that they can only be an extreme minority on Kimon) are allowed to enter.

Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, the country at the rainbow’s foot. There were few who did not dream of going there, and there were many who aspired, but those who were chosen were a very small percentage of those who tried to make the grade and failed.

The other thing is that those who are lucky enough to land on Kimon have been awfully cryptic in their letters to Earth for decades. It’s a shame Simak did not anticipate social media, as it would then be much harder to keep the exact relationship between humans and Kimonians a secret. Anyway, Bishop is here because he earned it, but also to do a sort of job for Morley, his Earth contact, which is to figure out what is actually happening on Kimon and what the humans are supposed to be doing there. No, despite the Kimonians being humanoid and very handsome (akin to tall bronze statues), there’s no implication of cross-breeding between humans and Kimonians; this is still a John W. Campbell magazine, after all. What Bishop discovered will be much more aligned with Campbell’s interests, but that’s for later. Much of the first half of “Immigrant” involves Bishop figuring out the basics and how to get a job, since he still needs one of those.

Like other immigrants from Earth, Bishop is sent to stay at a hotel that’s almost quite literally in the middle of nowhere, with “nothing, absolutely nothing, but rolling countryside” outside the hotel. There are no roads on Kimone, nor do there seem to be cities. While Simak does pander to Campbell somewhat in this story, the pastoralism of Kimon is surely Simak’s treat to himself. Actually the decadent ruralism of the Kimonians reminds me of what became of future humanity in Campbell’s own “Forgetfulness,” wherein mankind, in developing psi powers, forgets how to use technology as said technology becomes no longer needed. The Kimonians themselves are natural psi users, being able to communicate with each other across distances without tech via telepathy and teleportation; naturally, and more creepily, they can also read human minds.

As for the Kimonians themselves, they’re kinda… well, they’re like Vulcans: they’re a bunch of assholes. Not in an actively malicious way, but more in that they clearly think of humans as “cute.” Bishop can’t have a real conversation with them. The good news is that while the number of humans on Kimon is incredibly small, the humans have been clustered together such that it doesn’t take long for Bishop to make at least one new friend, namely Maxine, who to her credit does not exist to be Bishop’s love interest. Maxine has been here for a while now and not only understands the Kimonians to a better degree, but is capable of doing a couple things that normal humans ought not to be able to do. Unfortunately Maxine is also a pessimist who assumes the Kimonians just wanna play an epic prank of their human visitors—not that the Kimonians try hard to disprove this.

To make it in this new world, as surely the Irish and Italians had to in 19th century America, Bishop will have to know a whole new rulebook. “You have to adapt,” he thinks at one point. “You’d have to adapt and play the Kimon game, for they were the ones who would set the rules.” Whatever that game is. Eventually he sucks up his pride and goes to ask for a job, which true enough will have a very healthy paycheck by human standards, though it’s far from glamorous. Occupation? Babysitter.

What I like about “Immigrant” is that it’s too packed to work as a short story but too slight to be stretched to a 50,000-word novel; it’s a fine example of what can be done with the novella mode—specifically the short novella where we’re looking at 17,500 to 25,000 words. I suspect Simak wrote this for Astounding because of the paycheck, but also because Astounding usually ran a novella in each issue, with the only rival to both have such a policy and offer such a healthy paycheck being Galaxy. Still, this is not what I would call “major” Simak. It took me four days to read “Immigrant,” partly due to work but also I was not exactly glued to my screen. It’s hard to call boring, but it also meanders enough that I was not sure, while reading, about the point Simak was trying to make until the end. For those of you who are wary of Simak because of his sentimentality, though, you may be pleasantly surprised at how not sentimental “Immigrant” is.

There Be Spoilers Here

The “babysitting” job turns out to be a lot more taxing than Bishop assumed. For one, the Kimonian children he looks after seem totally capable of taking care of themselves, but worse is that they don’t seem to even acknowledge him as an adult figure; indeed, to the Kimonian children, Bishop is, at best, like a fellow child. When being introduced to the children they give him human names—for the sake of his convenience. “They are approximations,” says one. “They are as close […] as he can pronounce them,” says another. These are Kimonian names which Bishop is not equipped to understand; like with most everything else on the planet it’s a door he’s not allowed to open—at least not yet. Sure, the pay is extravagant, but Bishop finds “babysitting” these kids to be profoundly demeaning.

At first Bishop gets the idea that humans are allowed on Kimon to serve as pets, or at best as playmates for their children, since clearly a Kimonian child is treated as a more advanced being than an adult human with a college education. Most authors writing for most other outlets probably would’ve gone with the “humans are pets” option, predictable as that may sound now, but Simak is not like most authors; he believes, usually, that it’s possible for humans and other sentient races to treat each other with respect. I’m convinced at some point that Simak may have envisioned a downer ending wherein Bishop realizes that he and his fellow humans are mere playthings for the Kimonians—except for the fact that the Kimonians are natural psi users. Now, why would a story published in Astounding depict a “superior” alien race with psi powers while humans come off as a bunch of weaklings? Surely there’s a catch to this—and there is!

While overall I enjoy the previous Simak story I’ve covered, “The Big Front Yard,” (review here) more, I do think the solution to “Immigrant” is more justified, even if it still plays to Campbell’s interest. Simak may well have thought of the ending well in advance of writing the rest of the story; it doesn’t read like a last-minute addition. While I did not know how this story would end, I really should’ve made an educated guess from before the story even officially starts, as there’s a major clue. The opening blurb (probably written by Campbell) is clever in that while with hindsight it’s easy to see as spoiling the whole trajectory of the plot, there’s not enough context given to make a certain guess at the start.

After many years of work, the child graduates from grammar school—and is a freshman, in high school. After more years of work—he gets to be a freshman again. And if he is very, very wise, he might even get to be a
kindergarten student again…

Bishop thinks back on a few things, such as Maxine’s ability to teleport (a rudimentary ability by her estimate) and other strange things that have happened, and realizes something: these psi powers can be learned. Over time, and with the right mindset, humans can evolve to read minds, move objects, and yes, teleport to other places, just as the Kimonians do. “But before you could even start to absorb the culture, before you could start to learn, before you ever went to school, you’d have to admit that you didn’t know.” In order to learn these abilities (in which it would take years to do so), Bishop has to, in a way, become a child again. This 29-year-old man with a high IQ has to start his life over, with a new mindset, with the expectation that he’ll have to think as the Kimonians think if he wants to get to their level. But it can be done. The very last line of the story confirms Bishop’s theory: that the humans bright enough to go to Kimon are going back to school—this time to learn psi powers.

A Step Farther Out

I’m not quite sure how to feel about “Immigrant.” This is a story that ultimately plays to Campbell’s obsessions, namely his thing for psi powers and humanity evolving to a higher state of consciousness. I don’t think Simak’s view of humanity is so optimistic as depicted here and in “The Big Front Yard,” although he certainly wasn’t a misanthrope. On the other hand, much as I wanna think Simak may have had a different ending in mind in the event he could’ve sold it to Galaxy, I do think the ending was as intended from the start. It’s a bit of an eerie story, not horror but a little uneasy with how Kimon is depicted, until its swings upward at the end, like someone waving a flag in triumph. I may question the sincerity of it, but as is typical with Simak I respect the swerving-away from what might’ve been a horrific conclusion and instead choosing an ending that bodes well for everyone involved. Simak probably doesn’t believe humans can evolve into telepathic superbeings in a matter of months, but he may well believe that with some hard work and humility, mankind can redeem itself.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Oceans Are Wide” by Frank M. Robinson

June 24th, 2023

(Cover by Robert Gibson Jones. Science Stories, April 1954.)

Who Goes There?

It’s become unofficially a mission of mine to cover every recipient (all are, as of right now, eligible for review) of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for this site. The idea behind the Redicovery Award is that it’s given (nearly always posthumously) to genre authors who have, for one reason or another, been left behind by fandom’s (admittedly fickle) collective memory. Time is ruthless to pretty much all of us. A few authors who were active half a century ago still get talked about in fandom discussions, but most do not. The Rediscovery Award is for those who deserve to be, well, rediscovered. Frank M. Robinson received the Rediscovery Award in 2018, and while I had not read even a word of his prior to this review, his life and varied career are well worth considering. You see, Robinson was one of the first queer authors of magazine SFF, at least in the US.

Like a lot of genre writers round his age, Robinson got his start in the field during the height of the magazine boom in the first of the ’50s; he debuted in 1951. In the case of Robinson this period seemed to serve as a training ground, where he would work his craft at short lengths before (much later, mind you) writing novels in the “technothriller” mode. In between these points in his career as a genre writer he got involved rather profoundly in the blooming gay rights movement in the ’70s, to the point where he was associated with Harvey Milk. The book of his that most interests me has to be Robinson’s memoir, Not So Good a Gay Man, published a few years after his death. Despite not putting himself out there as a public figure he clearly worked to better the lives of his brethren, and for his efforts he was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2009.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1954 issue of Science Stories, which is on the Archive. Not to be confused with Science Fiction Stories. I also wish more magazines from the time had rough word counts in the table of contents. The most recent printing was in 1995. The two most recent anthologies this was in were edited by the same people; okay, but it’s three people. We have Starships and The Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s, both edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. A fresh reprinting may be in order.

Enhancing Image

Some stories would have the fact that we’re on a generation ship be the twist, but here that’s the name of the game. We’re onboard the Astra, in a search of a habitable planet after a few centuries of being stuck in a huge tin can. We meet Matty, who at the story’s beginning is a whimsical ten-year-old who hangs out by his lonesome and listens to his “sound box” for fun; too bad for Matty that he happens to be the protagonist of this story. Matty’s father is the Director, the leader (perhaps in name only) of the ship, and the Director is on his death bed. Because the Director’s position is inherited, like that of a monarch, Matty is next in line despite being a scrawny kid. Even more unfortunately it takes all of five minutes for Matt’s immediate family, including his uncle Seth, aunt Reba, and cousin Jeremiah, to start plotting his demise once his old man kicks the bucket.

Matty’s nurse recues him while there’s a manhunt going on and points him in the direction of the Predict, a mysterious but supposedly powerful figure who lurks in the forward section of the ship, an “immortal man whom nobody had seen—the stories went—for the last twenty-five years.” Matt will need to survive, and also need to be trained, and the Predict can provide this—at a bit of a price, it will turn out. The opening section of “The Oceans Are Wide” is paced a bit oddly, as I expected there to be more time spent in finding the Predict, but Matty finds his whereabouts so easily that I started to wonder why this mysteriouss man didn’t get more visitors. Oh well. The Predict is the man Matty is looking for, and more. With characters in this story I’ll normally only refer to them by their first names, but in the case of the Predict I’ll make an exception, as his name is Joseph Smith. Hmmm. Be sure to put a pin in this one.

Try not to take this out of context, but Joseph Smith is a bit of an ASSHOLE. Normally in these situations where there’s a wise mentor and a child protagonist the mentor, while sometimes harsh, has the child’s best interests in mind. Not Joseph Smith. “The Oceans Are Wide” is a coming-of-age narrative on its face, but as we’ll see it entails what amounts to the destruction of the individual’s happiness in the name of the greater good. Matty may be safe from his murderous family, but over the years he’ll learn to become a real bastard of a political maneuverer. Something else that’s curious is that much of the narrative sees Matty going under a different identity, being taken in by a foster family and spending the rest of his youth as a supposed nobody, with Matty the Director-to-be being presumed MIA by everyone else. The rightful heir to the throne evades said throne for his safety, only to return when the time is right—except…

I’ve heard elsewhere that Matty, despite rather tenuously having a female love interest (it goes nowhere, don’t think about it) here, is coded as a queer youth who has to hide his true identity for the sake of survivor; but of course it’s not just that. Robinson takes what must’ve been even at the time the standard procedure for politics in generation ship narratives (namely that these stories tend to endorse, actively or unwittingly, authoritarian models of government) and not only paints it a darker shade of grey but also uses the ensuing personal tragedy as a metaphor for growing up as a gay man in a time and place where being that was immensely dangerous. We queer people find that we have to, at some point, betray our own values and even our own sense of self for the sake of survival. Matty has to sacrifice pretty much any chance at personal happiness so that he could take to the throne in the future, which would be bad enough except Joseph Smith is not ambiguous about what kind of leader he wants Matty to be. Smith opposes democracy on the Astra, preferring a more… hands-on leader.

Of course Smith is the one really running the show here; like his father before him Matty will serve as little more than a puppet for the Predict, although according to Smith his late father was a shitty puppet who would not follow orders. Smith is, in most ways, a scoundrel. “Matty realized with sudden insight that he hated the Predict. He hated the remorseless logic, the constant denial of self for ship.” It’s not totally clear if we’re supposed to think of Joseph Smith as a heroic figure or a villain who happens to have a decent goal in mind, but Matty’s occasional thoughts on the man and Matty’s position as a queer surrogate suggest that at best Smith is to be understood as an anti-hero. If this was a Robert Heinlein or Poul Anderson story Smith would probably be rewritten to be more snarky, more outwardly “intelligent,” and framed more as a fine fellow—only that Robinson has other plans in mind. Indeed we get a quote from Machiavelli at one point, which suggests that Joseph Smith’s vision of leadership on the Astra is tyrannical. The creepy part is that Smith believes, all but explicitly, that tyranny is necessary in order to preserve “civilization,” for the greater good.

In fairness to Smith, life on the Astra was already a struggle. The population is strictly regulated, with families being allowed children only if there’s room available and with everyone being forcebly euthanized when they reach the age of sixty (I assume in Earth years). Introducing democracy, even if Smith supported the idea, would probably take generations, as there’s a violently reactionary monarchal system in place, hence the Game of Thrones antics at the beginning. The Astra used to be one of several generation ships coming out of a ruined Earth, but for several reasons the other ships were destroyed or were lost. Smith knows all this due to his incredibly advanced age, despite looking like a thirty-year-old man, a question that will not get answered till much later. While he’s a shady figure, to say the least, it’s not hard to understand why Smith would be preoccupied with saving the Astra, even if it meant breaking a few eggs. Speaking of which…

There Be Spoilers Here

When Matty finally becomes Director, with Seth relinquishing the position on the basis of age, he introduces some radical changes to the ship as it heads to what looks to be a habitable planet. The maximum age of sixty is removed, with the logic being that the shipmates-turned-colonists will need elders to help form civilization on the ground. Sound enough. Despite all the shit he’s gone through and the authoritarian politics Joseph Smith crammed into his head, Matty still shows a capacity for mercy. When they get to this first planet they find it’s… actually pretty welcoming to humans. Not only is there life on the planet but there’s plenty of food and, as far as the colonists can tell, no animals that would prevent a serious threat. Matty has a schedule set for the colonists, since there’s work to be done—only nobody wants to work. Nobody has to work here. “But they didn’t get back to the schedule that week. Nor that month. In six weeks, the schedule was forgotten.” If this was a Ray Bradbury story there might be some secret mischievous alien race at work, but the catch with this planet is that there is no catch.

Joseph Smith suggests to Matty that the planet is no good for colonizing—not for a sensible reason, like how suddenly introducing a thousand alien lifeforms to a lush and defenseless ecosystem would likely destroy it, but because the lack of incentive to work would result in the colonists devolving to savagery. Smith’s argument is simple, if draconian: that a struggle for survivle is necessary to maintain civilization. If the colonists don’t work then they’ll turn into pastoral commies or something. I know a few people who would have a word to say about what Smith posits here, but in the context of a queer allegory this is a very curious point. This become even more curious when we think about the gay rights movement as a movement of people and how it could be connected with other historical movements, such as (here it comes) the early days of Mormonism—although Smith strikes me more as a Brigham Young figure than the real Joseph Smith. Still, Robinson makes his point; he alludes rather heavily to the story being about the survival of a social movement and, more cleverly, how the individual can suffer when trying to support said movement.

Make no mistake, Matty is a tragic figure. As a child he’s stuck with having to choose between death and tyranny, and of course without being able to understand the implications of his future he picks the latter. From the time he chooses to be taken under Smith’s wing to the story’s climax he does not have, as far as we can tell, a single day of happiness; there may be fleeting moments, but no more. Even when nobody can hurt him anymore (so it seems) and he has accomplished his goal of saving as many people on the ship as possible, there’s a darkness that shrouds him. At the end, having served his purpose and after being ostracized by the colonists (with his consent, it turns out), Smith leaves the position of Predict to Matty. The colonists, Smith supposes, will no longer need a dictator with an iron fist but instead a philosopher-king. Smith gives Matty the equipment he uses to maintain his unnatural longevity: the equipment in question is a mysterious drug, complete with a needle. The story ends on a bleak note as Matty takes the drug and “pushe[s] the plunger home.” That the Predict is implied to be a drug addict is only the tip of the iceberg.

A Step Farther Out

The biggest problem I have with “The Oceans Are Wide” is its length, as I think it would’ve been stronger as either a novelette or a full novel; certainly there’s enough material here to supply a story that’s double the length. It also pains me to say this, as I’ve said before that I think science fiction often works best in the novella mode. Robinson probably wrote at the length he did (some 27,500 words) because he was still a fairly new writer and/or because he wrote with magazine publication in mind. “The Oceans Are Wide” is a thematically juicy affair that shows a somewhat rough but very promising talent, especially given that Robinson was one of the very few queer writers working in the field at the time. I have to say I was also impressed that I found this novella a bit disturbing, namely for its implications as an allegory, given its vintage. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s very much a work of old-timey SF that’s worth being brought back into print. I’ll be keeping an eye on Robinson from hereon.

See you next time.