Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

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Category: Serial Reviews

Serial Review: A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg (Part 1/3)

August 7th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, March 1971.)

Who Goes There?

Robert Silverberg celebrated his 90th birthday this past January, making him one of the last living authors to have been active at least adjacent with the New Wave in the late ’60s. Not only that, but Silverberg had made his writing debut a whole decade earlier, and if you look through certain magazine issues in the early ’50s you might find a teenaged Silverberg in the letters section. He has his faults, but there are few people who’ve been more dedicated to the field for as long a span of time. Even as he announced his retirement from writing fiction about a decade ago, Silverberg still gets involved with fandom events and even writes editorials for Asimov’s Science Fiction to this day. The late ’60s and early ’70s are when SF historians consider Silverberg to have reached his artistic stride, which if I’m being honest is a claim I’ve found to be a little overexaggerated. Certainly the quantity of Silverberg’s output at this point can’t be denied, but the quality of his work from this period is a good deal more hit-or-miss than I’ve been led to believe. A Time of Changes was the only Silverberg novel from this period to win a major SF award; it won the Nebula, beating out Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Is that victory deserved? Hmmm.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, March to May-June 1971. It was released in June of that year by Doubleday. I’m not sure if it’s in print in the US at this moment, but there’s an ebook edition from Open Road Media and a paperback from Gollancz.

Enhancing Image

Generations ago the planet Borthan was discovered by spacefaring humanity and thus colonized, although it’s a hostile environment with harsh weather and, like Earth, a great deal of water on its surface. The settlers, who were basically like Vikings, eventually forgot their history, the result being that human culture on Borthan has devolved into a kind of medieval futurism. You’ve got lords and barons and the like, complete with a peasant class, but more importantly this is a society that is so rooted in selflessness that it’s taboo even to use first-person singular pronouns in conversation. Everyone is supposed to look out for everyone else, to the detriment of the individual. This is important context to get out of the way first, because otherwise you might think the setting is more or less your typical Tolkien-esque fantasy realm. There are bits of modern tech, such as automobiles, but technology plays little role in the story. A Time of Changes is ostensibly SF, but it’s actually closer to being science-fantasy along the lines of The Book of the New Sun, to the point where I wonder if Gene Wolfe had taken some inspiration from Silverberg’s novel. To put it another way, it’s the kind of setting Jack Vance was fond of inventing, in which you have what is basically a medieval fantasy world but with an SFnal twist.

Of course, another thing A Time of Changes has with Wolfe’s series is the characterization of its narrator, the anti-hero Kinnall Darival, as what we’re reading turns out to be Kinnall’s memoir—or maybe it’d be more accurate to call it a bit of confessional writing. In a few reviews I’ve written before I’ve taken issue with what are depressingly common fallacies when it comes to writing first-person narration, which is why I’ve not been a fan of it myself on the occasion I’ve been able to write fiction. There are too many questions that can be potentially raised when dealing with a first-person narrator, of the sort that would distract from the reading experience; but thankfully Silverberg gives us a pretty clear reason up front as to why he wrote the novel in this way. Not only is Kinnall writing a tell-all account of his apparent rise to becoming a rebellious figure, but he writes in first-person specifically as a middle finger to his society’s aversion to the concept of selfhood. Kinnall is kind of a selfish asshole with some psychosexual hang-ups, but at least he doesn’t try to make excuses for some questionable past behavior. I mean a big part of Kinnall’s personal trauma is the fact that he clearly wanted to have a romantic/sexual relationship with Halum, his bondsister, only that Halum died years ago, tragically young.

Right, so the people of this world do not have familial relations in the traditional sense. You don’t have a pair of loving parents to whom you’re related to blood, and you also potentially two sets of siblings: blood-related siblings and bondsiblings. Everyone has bondbrothers and bondsisters, who are basically step-siblings. So Kinnall has some pseudo-incestuous feelings for Halum, and even if she were still alive this is something he’s unlikely to confess to her. There’s also Noim, Kinnall’s bondbrother, who proves useful in getting him out of the country when the political climate becomes risky. To make a long story short, Kinnall is son to the prime septarch of Salla, one of Borthan’s provinces. (I just realized it’s called a “septarch” because there are other monarchic figures who share rule of the province.) The problem is that Kinnall has a blood brother, Stirron, who becomes septarch instead of Kinnall. Mind you that the brothers are very young when this all happens, as the septarch dies unexpectedly during a hunting expedition. Now, if you know anything about the history of monarchy as form of government then you know it can be perilous to be king/queen/whatever and have siblings waiting in the wings; or, just as perilously, you might be the sibling in question. It becomes clear that Stirron is overburdened with being prime septarch (which is to say the one the other septarchs have to get approval from) of Salla, and yet Kinnall resents the structure of this society too much to become a leader of it.

The result is a picaresque, of sorts. Kinnall gets the hell out of Dodge and becomes a day laborer in another land, for a time, before becoming a sailor by the end of this installment. Something odd about A Time of Changes is that while its plot trajectory is broadly in chronological order, Kinnall can’t help but allude to future events and characters that haven’t come along yet, such as Schweiz, an Earthman whom Kinnall befriends, and whom we hear about way before we actually meet him. We hear about Kinnall being introduced to a mind-altering “potion” that Schweiz gives him way before this event happens in-story. Characters are mentioned as having died while they’re still alive in Kinnall’s recollection of them. As such, I can already tell that this is a hard novel to spoil. The unusual structure and diction can be explained by the fact that Kinnall’s never written a book before, let alone a first-person narrative, and so he’s still new to this whole confession-writing ordeal. Still, it’s awkward, not helped by Kinnall himself being a thorny character in the way that Silverberg’s protagonists tend to be. I’m gonna be brutally honest and say that maybe with a few exceptions Silverberg’s protagonists all more or less act and think the same way, which is to say they’re dreary and neurotic heterosexuals with both high sex drives and psychosexual angst. They’re also very male. Granted that the objectifying of women here is not as bad as in some of Silverberg’s other novels, one still finds a few cases of “she breasted boobily.”

There Be Spoilers Here

I dunno.

A Step Farther Out

As has happened to me almost every time when reading a Silverberg novel from this era, my feelings are mixed. It took me two days to read this installment when really it should’ve only taken one, and part of my slowness is that there are sequences I find way more engaging than others; or, to put it another way, there are sequences where Silverberg strains my patience. At least far it’s doing better than, say, Up the Line, or Across a Billion Years, which are novels that make bad impressions early on and do little to nothing to fix things. Some of Silverberg’s bad habits (namely his tendency to sexualize every female character he introduces) are on display, but as of yet there’s nothing too egregious. I think the more pressing issue is that despite being one-third into the novel now, I feel as if the plot has only barely just started kicking into gear. The pacing is “deliberate,” which is to say it’s slow, and given this is a short novel it’s a slowness that Silverberg really can’t afford. But he’s gonna make us wait.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny (Part 3/3)

June 17th, 2025

(Cover by Andrei Sokolov. Analog, August 1975.)

The Story So Far

Fred Cassidy has been going to college for the past 13 years and has not gotten a degree yet, because he doesn’t want one. He’s been exploiting a loophole in his uncle’s will, which says that he’s to mooch off an allowance until he gets his degree. Well. Aside from his latest academic adviser pushing him out the door, he has a much bigger problem on his hands, which is that a precious alien artifact called the star-stone has gone missing, and Fred’s the only person who can get it back. Why? Because Fred and his former roommate, Hal, had a replica of the stone, which through a convoluted series of events involving Paul Byler, Fred’s former geology professor, had gotten swapped out with the real thing. Multiple parties want the stone, including a much-angered Paul, a couple of hired goons, and some interplanetary alien cops. Mind you that these aliens are not all of the same race, but rather are members of a coalition of intelligent races that came into contact with humanity and made a deal with us. As part of a non-aggression deal the alien coalition had given the UN a couple artifact, including the stone, while the UN handed over the genuine Mona Lisa and the British Crown Jewels. Of course, since the stone’s gone missing, said non-aggression deal threatens to go down the shitter. Fred finds allies in two alien cops named Ragma and Charv, whom we first meet disguised as mammals out of the Australian outback. There’s another still-friendly but less useful alien in disguise named Sibla, who tries probing Fred’s mind but has a hard time doing so, on account of Fred being drunk. Getting plastered is useful for when you’re up against possibly nefarious telepaths.

Another ally of Fred’s is a mysterious voice that communicates with him inside his head, but only when he’s drunk; on the one hand this might be an elaborate hallucination, but also the presence is coming from somewhere. The presence advises Fred to get a hold of the Rhennius machine, which is the other artifact the alien coalition had given to humanity. Activating the Rhennius machine has something to do with the presence and may be a clue to getting the star-stone. Fred runs into Merimee, an eccentric scientist (like Paul) who’s also an old buddy of Fred’s uncle’s. Turns out the Rhennius machine reverses one’s perceptions, including sight and even taste. Signs appear to be written backward (a neat little typographical trick on Zelazny’s part) and what tasted good before now tastes bad (and vice versa). In what now must seem like a permanent stupor, ironically relieved by drinking copious amounts of alcohol, Fred crashes at Hal’s place after the latter confesses to having a spat with his wife Mary. The problem, the two lads find out, is that Mary has been kidnapped by the aforementioned hired goons. The second installment with a threeway confrontation between Fred/Hal, the goons, and Paul, who has shown up with an agenda of his own. Mary, for someone who probably has little to no idea what’s going on, is taking this all rather well. Meanwhile, Fred takes a bullet to the chest for his troubles, so how he survives this is a good question.

Enhancing Image

When I finished this novel I thought of it as being Zelazny’s beer-and-wine novel, because of how much drinking there is; but at the same time it should be mentioned that there’s ultimately as much casual smoking here as in other ’60s and ’70s Zelazny works. (He eventually quit smoking, but up until the ’80s Zelazny seemed to share the popular French view on smoking.) Doorways in the Sand is less intellectual than some earlier Zelazny novels, and indeed comes off as less sober, not helped by us being stuck in Fred’s shoes the whole time—yes, even during the recap sections. This is the kind of book you would read to see the New Wave’s influence on SF writing in a less demanding and less serious mode. The irony is that because it’s less serious than, say, the average Robert Silverberg novel from around the same time, this novel has aged better than most of its peers. The comedy is of an old-school slapstick sort, including the occasional pun; and while there’s a bit of language, there isn’t much of it, not to mention that there’s also very little in the way of sex stuff, which otherwise reared its head a little too often in novels from the ’70s. Even for 1975 the conceit of the plot is rather old-fashioned, but it’s heightened by Zelazny’s sense of humor and his playing with typography and perspective. Also helping is Fred being one of Zelazny’s more charming protagonists, admittedly having to compete with some of the more insufferable and egotistical protagonists in New Wave-era SF. Fred is a lazy bum who wants to mooch off his uncle’s allowance forever, but at the same time he likes to have fun and he’s not in favor of rubbing his education in people’s faces.

Now as to how Fred survived the end of the last installment, the explanation is basically this: his heart wasn’t in the right place. He was shot in what would have been his heart, but it had accidentally missed. What’s no less miraculous is that not only does Fred survive but he seems to have acquired Wolverine healing powers, since the gaping wound in his chest has healed itself in beyond record time. This has to do with the Rhennius machine, but it also has to do with the stone and where it is. The big twist of the novel is twofold: that the stone is actually sentient, and that it’s been lurking inside Fred during the events of the novel as a symbiote. The star-stone, also called Speicus, is like an organic computer that processes information, hence its ability to communicate with Fred. As to how Fred got the stone inside him in the first place, it has to do with a party and—you guessed it—a little too much drinking. Fred’s only able to recall this happening at all while under a mix of interrogation and the star-stone being “turned on,” (in context it’s one of Zelazny’s classic puns) because he was almost dead drunk at the time. The stone is a benign parasite whose livelihood depends on its host also being alive, hence its working to protect Fred. Bit of a deus ex machina for how Fred is able to survive everything that’s happened to him, but I would mind if it more if it was a more serious story, but thankfully Doorways in the Sand is not a very serious novel. We’re talking about a novel where a guy with a fetish for climbing heights (I’m not kidding) has been getting by as a college undergrad for 13 years because his uncle’s in cold sleep—that is, until said uncle returns from his nap in this installment.

This is a novel about finding an important dingus, but it’s also a novel about education. Doorways in the Sand is not a bildungsroman, namely because Fred is an adult (he’s about thirty years old), but this is still ultimately about a man’s education. Fred is so determined to be a student forever that he almost quite literally has to have his degree (it’s actually a PhD and not a bachelor’s degree, the college finding a loophole to give him a degree without having him properly graduate) and a job handed to him. If this novel is about anything (granted that it certainly is not About Something™, in that it does not ask serious questions or make observations about the human condition), it’s about knocking down the wall between what we think of as “education,” which is really an institution separated from the outside world, and of course said outside world. Fred has to gain some real-world experience in an unusually hard way, which involved nearly getting killed a few times (as I said in a previous installment review, Fred fulfills one of the classic detective tropes by getting the shit beaten out of him), but ultimately this trial-by-combat worked out for him. He has a PhD and a job with the UN, and as he says close to the novel’s end, “The fool delivered the final blow.” Fittingly for a comic novel, the “fool” comes out on top. On a totally surface level, like how one might enjoy gourmet chocolate (just watch those calories), this is one of Zelazny’s most satisfying novels.

A Step Farther Out

In his review of Doorways in the Sand, Spider Robinson expressed mild disappointment with what was then Zelazny’s latest novel while also acknowledging that it was quite good—had nearly anyone else’s name been attached to it. After Zelazny’s run of winning awards and critical appraisal left and right in the ’60s, the ’70s were shakier ground for him, partly because of his Amber series, but also, following the burning-out of the New Wave movement in the early ’70s, Zelazny’s SF no longer seemed so impressive. It’s a shame, because when taken as the somewhat unserious novel that it is, Doorways in the Sand is quite fun. Zelazny himself was fond of it, and if you’re looking for a zany and fast-moving SF-detective novel then it’s easy to see his fondness for it.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny (Part 2/3)

June 6th, 2025

(Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, July 1975.)

The Story So Far

Fred Cassidy is an upright college undergrad—in fact he would be near the top of his class and due to graduate with honors, if not for the fact that he’s been an undergrad for 13 years. Uncle Albert, that is Fred’s uncle, has been in cold-sleep for years, and in his will (since Fred’s uncle is neither alive nor dead) he stipulates that Fred be given an allowance until his gets a degree. Fred was all too eager to exploit this. Fred’s newest academic adviser is just as eager to see Fred off, and it looks like the chips are down for Our Anti-Hero™. Not helping matters is that Fred’s former roommate, Hal, moved out to head off with Mary, his newfangled wife. Paul Byler, Fred’s former geology professor and a bit of a mad scientist, shows up at Fred’s dorm looking for the star-stone, an alien artefact that a coalition of intelligent alien races had given to the UN as a gift, or rather as part of an exchange. Fred and Hal had a replica of the star-stone in their dorm, but it seems that the real one, which the UN was supposed to have locked up tight, has gone missing. Fred earns the ire of Paul and later of a couple goons who are also after the star-stone. The ramifications of the dingus going missing turn out to be wide-reaching, since it doesn’t take long for a couple alien agents, named Ragma and Charv, to get on his case about it. Fred is the only person who might know where the stone has gone, the problem being he doesn’t know where it would be consciously; if anything it’s buried in his subconscious. The only ally, aside from Hal, that he’s gotten up to this point is a strange faceless and nameless presence that enters his mind during moments when he gets drunk. To be fair, he does get drunk quite often.

Enhancing Image

I should’ve mentioned Fred’s nameless and faceless friend from the first installment earlier, but somehow it had slipped my mind. Not sure how that happened, considering Zelazny plays with formatting when Fred and this ally of his have their conversation, presented like a teletype sheet. Since these conversations happen inside Fred’s mind, it makes sense for Zelazny to forego tagging dialogue in the conventional way. It’s fun! And it makes the book go by just a bit quicker, which is an achievement considering how fast-paced it already is. There’s no real B-plot, everything is from Fred’s POV, and characters will show maybe once or twice and then never again. The incident with the aforementioned alien agents (disguised as a kangaroo and a wombat, it sort of makes sense in context) gets swiped aside almost like it never happened, but this is not unusual for detective fiction, which Doorways in the Sand very much takes after. There’s a similar incident this installment with a telepathic alien named Sibla who’s disguised as a donkey, and who tries to help Fred—keyword being “tries.” By his own admission Sibla is not an agent in the field by training, but a cost accountant who was brought in at the last minute because the guy who was supposed to be here had called in sick. Cue the studio audience laugh track. Your enjoyment of this novel will partly depend on if you vibe with Zelazny’s sense of humor, which thankfully I do or else I wouldn’t be here.

Just when you think the stakes can’t get higher, the goons from the first installment have gone and kidnapped Mary, Hal’s wife. Hal and Mary had a spat earlier, so that at the end of the last installment Fred and Hal were hanging out at the latter’s place, getting drunk as two heterosexual buddies do. Hal checked Mary’s mom’s place, where she said she was going until their spat tided over, only to find out Mary had never reached her mom’s house. (In older Zelazny stories his characters have a nasty habit of smoking like chimneys, which isn’t the case with Doorways in the Sand, but they do drink a lot. This turns out to be useful for escaping detection from telepathic beings, since getting inebriated enough makes one’s mind harder to read.) Given that she’s being held at gunpoint and that both she and her husband are likely to be killed, Mary takes this all rather well—actually better than Hal does. For his part, Hal is kind of a dipshit: the only reason he even let Mary get kidnapped is that he was too petty to call her up shortly after they had their fight to say he was sorry. I say that these characters are entertaining and even relatable to an extent, but that’s not to say they’re boy scouts, or even all that smart. By the end of this installment Fred is seemingly no closer to getting the stone than he was at the beginning, not to mention he comes out of it with a bullet to the chest which I’m not sure how he’s supposed to survive. But of course he has to survive, because he’s been telling this story to us the whole time. The installment thus ends on just the right note, posing the question of how Fred is supposed to get out his latest nasty situation, and that’s how one structures a serial.

By the way, I wanted to bring up at some point that this has to be the first time I’ve seen the recap section for a serial installment come in the first person, from Fred’s POV. This is a nice touch, and it’s obvious that Zelazny wrote these recap passages (I assume that’s standard practice anyway, but you can tell Zelazny had written these recaps specifically with Fred’s voice in mind), which does make me lament that they’re probably not in the book version. It makes sense they wouldn’t be included, but this is also like the one time reading the serial version where I feel like something valuable (aside from illustrations) gets lost in translation.

A Step Farther Out

This was the shortest installment, to the point where I was a bit surprised when it ended, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Zelazny wrote this novel in a short span of time and by the seat of his pants, which on the one hand is apparent, but also I suspect the process by which Doorways in the Sand was written also gave it a manic energy that’s sorely lacking in a lot of other SF novels, even from the time. It’s not ponderous or all that deep, but it doesn’t take itself that seriously either. It’s like a couple of Reese’s peanut butter cups: it’s not nutritious, and you won’t feel any smarter after you’re done with it, but it makes you feel good inside.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny (Part 1/3)

May 29th, 2025

(Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, June 1975.)

Who Goes There?

His star power isn’t what it used to be, although a TV adaptation of the Amber series might rectify this (because greedy executives are still looking for the next Games of Thrones), but back in the ’60s and ’70s Roger Zelazny was one of the big names in SFF. Like Ursula K. Le Guin and Fritz Leiber he was a big deal in both science fiction and fantasy, with his debut novel This Immortal (also titled …And Call Me Conrad) tying with Dune for the Hugo that year. This Immortal is ostensibly science fiction, but borrows heavily from Greek mythology so as to give it the impression of fantasy. This is a tactic Zelazny would use elsewhere, including Lord of Light (another Hugo win) and Creatures of Light and Darkness. Zelazny did not think himself part of the New Wave, but did run with those people often enough that he not only appeared in Dangerous Visions but Creatures of Light and Darkness only saw publication when it did at Samuel R. Delany’s recommendation. (In a kind of hat-tipping gesture Delany would later name one of the sections in his massive novel Dhalgren after Zelazny’s novel.) Zelazny’s career can be basically broken into three stages: the ’60s, the ’70s, and the ’80s. He died in 1995, at the relatively young age of 58. In the ’70s Zelazny focused on his Amber series, but he still had enough time to write several standalone novels, with Doorways in the Sand being one of them. I didn’t even know this novel had gotten a Hugo nomination, probably because The Forever War won that year and nothing else stood a chance.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, June to August 1975. It was published in book form the following year by Harper & Row. Until a few years ago it wasn’t in print for a while, but it got new paperback and hardcover editions from a small press that seems to be dedicated to bringing Zelazny’s works back into print. This is a noble gesture, considering that until recently the only way you could get in-print copies of the Amber novels was as one huge unwieldy omnibus volume.

Enhancing Image

Fred Cassidy is charming, intelligent, and also quite lazy: in other words he’s the typical Zelazny protagonist. Fred has done very well as an undergrad, on paper—the problem being that he’s been an undergrad for 13 years. It has something to do with the will his uncle left, which stipulates that Fred’s to be given an allowance until he finishes his undergrad studies, a fact which Fred was all too happy to exploit. Of course, his uncle hasn’t died yet—merely gone into a cold-sleep chamber, which he might not even awake from. The legal situation with the will is rather shaky. Dennis Wexroth, Fred’s academic adviser, is very displeased about the fact that Fred’s been coasting on his semi-dead uncle’s inheritance, not to mention that Fred’s been using programs that should be left open for “real” undergrads—people about a decade younger than him. To make matters even worse, Fred’s looking for a new roommate, on account of Hal Sidmore, his latest one, leaving to get married, like a responsible adult. (Well, it was considered responsible at the time; nowadays it’s almost unthinkable to get married right out of college.) But wait, there’s more! In their dorm Fred and Hal had a replica of the star-stone, an alien artifact that had been given to mankind as part of a trade deal several years ago. The star-stone will be the McGuffin of this novel, and the reason for that is that the real star-stone seems to have gone missing, posing a big problem for mankind.

When I started reading Zelazny I was an undergrad myself, and I was mostly clueless as to what his influences could’ve been. Nowadays I’m a lot more “cultured” than I was back then, so it now strikes me as obvious that Zelazny must’ve read his fair share of detective fiction—not that of the Arthur Conan Doyle sort, but rather Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. We’re talking literary noir. Someone (I think it was John W. Campbell) said that SF and detective fiction simply don’t mix, which of course didn’t stop him from serializing The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov’s classic SF-detective novel. The typical Zelazny protagonist is very much like a hardboiled detective, complete with grimy first-person narration, and Fred is no exception. He even gets the classic detective protagonist treatment: getting the shit beaten out of him. First it’s Paul Byler, who used to be Fred’s geology professor and who comes off as a bit of a mad scientist. Paul beats Fred almost to a pulp and threatens him, thinking he had taken a replica of the star-stone that Paul had kept in his lab. It turns out, however, that Paul’s replica and the one Fred and Hal kept in their dorm are different. Later a couple of goons also beat up Fred, this time over the real star-stone. Via a convoluted fashion it seems that the real star-stone, which the UN was supposed to keep safely locked away, has gone missing. (The UN, as per usual, is unable to accomplish basic tasks.) Had Fred graduated from college years ago like he was supposed to, none of this would be his problem.

Apparently Zelazny had written Doorways in the Sand in a quick burst of energy with little if any revising, which would explain the breakneck pacing, but also the lack of descriptions for places and how people look. If you pointed a gun at my head and asked me what Fred or Hal or Paul looked like, you would have blood on your hands. Anything (barring the snarky aside, which is a Zelazny special anyway) that doesn’t tie into the central mystery did not make it paper, which results in a taut and easy-to-read novel. The book version’s only about 180 pages, which was considered a novel back then but which nowadays is reserved for overpriced Tor Dot Com chapbooks. For better or worse I also get the impression that Zelazny wrote this by the seat of his pants, since he basically strings Fred along for one punishment or strange event after another; one minute we’re in his dorm and the next we’re in the Australian outback. How did we get here? I forget. Speaking of Chandler, Zelazny must’ve taken cues from his method of writing a novel for Doorways in the Sand, which is to say: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come through the door.” (I’m actually paraphrasing Chandler, not quoting.) Fred, who’s kind of a deadbeat and also irresponsible, would come off as more insufferable elsewhere, but in this novel almost everyone around him is worse. Even Hal is only marginally more functional, given that he has a bad habit of drinking and gambling, and also his newfangled marriage has already hit a rough spot. These people are either dysfunctional or villainous, but that’s the fun of it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The most memorable part of the first installment is the back end, when Fred is on the brink of death and also somehow in the Aussie desert, with a talking wombat and kangaroo for friends. Of course the wombat and kangaroo are aliens in disguise, named Ragma and Charv respectively, although that doesn’t make their first meeting any less strange. Ragma and Charv are alien cops who take Fred off-world for a time in the hopes that he can lead them to the star-stone, but of course he doesn’t know where it is. Zelazny is a fan of talking animals, or at least aliens who take on the form of talking animals. It’s funny, so you can understand why he does it. Once Fred’s back on Earth he chills at Hal’s place (Hal is drunk, naturally), and from there we get a classic detective-fiction cliffhanger. This novel is unusual in how it depicts aliens in that first contact had already been made years ago, but mankind and the coalition of aliens (it’s like the Covenant from Halo, minus the violent religious zealotry) are not exactly on friendly terms with each other. There’s a complicated agreement between the governments that could go south at pretty much any moment. It’s like the Cold War, which was still going in the ’70s but thankfully was not at a tipping point. We’ll see if this turns into a full-on Cold War allegory or if I’m just overthinking things, considering Zelazny doesn’t tend to “get political.”

A Step Farther Out

Doorways in the Sand placed second on the Hugo ballot, but there must’ve been a disparity in votes between it and The Forever War given that the latter is still famous whilst the only people I’ve seen talk about Zelazny’s novel are boomers who will soon shuffle off this mortal coil. It’s a shame, because assuming the quality doesn’t dip this will be the best serial I’ve read in a hot minute. Zelazny himself considered this novel one of his favorites, and I’m starting to understand why. There’s a joyful and kind of zany energy to it, being probably the least serious Zelazny novel I’ve read. You’d have to be a stick in the mud to not have fun here.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 3/3)

May 23rd, 2025

(Cover by Brian Boyle. Galaxy, December 1973.)

The Story So Far

John Devlin used to be a doctor on Earth, but now he’s a passenger aboard a ship in search of a planet fit for human colonization; the voyage is expected to take centuries, probably a thousand years or so. The people aboard this ship spend 99% of their time in cold sleep, experiencing surprisingly vivid dreams that leave them feeling both disturbed and weary when they awake. The ship’s computer handles almost everything, but occasionally it awakes a passenger to do some exercise, recall their dreams, and also handle ship malfunctions if needed. There’s a scare towards the end of the first installment in which some intelligent aliens try to destroy the ship, but Devlin, on being awakened, is able to take control and outmaneuver the aliens, whom we’ll not see again—for now. There’s another malfunction in which one of the other passengers, in trying to see her boyfriend who’s also onboard, doesn’t get back into her chamber correctly and so dies slowly, although thankfully she’s unaware of what’s happening to her. This sad scene shows us Devlin’s past as a medical professional and that he knows a bit more than he lets on, although not enough to know exactly why these vivid dreams are happening. Through lengthy flashbacks we’re introduced to Patricia Morley, who’s a fellow passenger and also Devlin’s love interest. We’re also introduced to Brother Howard, a religious fanatic who only appears in flashbacks but who ends up being kind of a mouthpiece for White’s opinions on human nature, not to mention he has quite a bit to do with Devlin and Patricia’s voyage.

The Earth that Devlin and Patricia came from has gone to shit, which is to say it’s only marginally worse than Earth as it is now. The question driving the whole novel comes down to this: “Is humanity worth saving?” Both Devlin and White have a tug-of-war between genuine pessimism and hope that humanity might be able to move on from its dark past. Over the course of the novel Devlin has dreams of being people and even non-humans from the past, from a sauropod in the Jurassic to a medieval warrior king, to memories of his own life. Every dream somehow involves violence and death, sometimes simply due to circumstance, sometimes because of human malice. To paraphrase Marx, history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Brother Howard was once an astronaut of sorts, and in flashbacks he tries to prepare Devlin and Patricia for the horrors that await them. One can easily go insane in space. A fellow passenger had at some point gamed the system so that he could walk about outside of his chamber, only to commit suicide, with his eyes taped open.

Enhancing Image

I was worried White would fumble the last installment, or make it so that the more tedious moments of previous installments would be in vain, but thankfully he sticks the landing. I’m not sure how White went about writing The Dream Millennium; it’s possible that aside from a basic outline he wrote by the seat of his pants, which would’ve been far from unusual at the time. I suspect, although I have nothing to back this up with, that White had a beginning and ending in mind, but improvised with the middle portion, hence why there are some stretches here that come off as flabby and perhaps unnecessary. The medieval sequence, which takes up a chunk of the second installment, has some thematic significance, but is too drawn out and without anything to make us invested in the action. There’s a sequence early in the last installment where Devlin dreams that he’s a pilot whose airplane has been taken over by a team of hijackers that’s both more involving, more memorable, and also having more directly to do with the novel’s ideas about humanity’s capacity for violence. White’s fascination with violence, or rather his profound distaste for it, comes up again and again, both in his work generally and also in The Dream Millennium where Devlin and Patricia are constantly haunted by it.

The ship had been future-proofed up to a point, but after centuries (quite literally a millennium by the end of the novel) the cracks in the armor are beginning to show, so to speak. Devlin at one point finds, to a mix of horror and wonderment, just how old and dilapidated the ship has become, despite only maybe a few weeks of subjective time passing for him. In old-timey SF space technology will be new and shiny seemingly forever, but this is not the case in White’s fiction. Also, a few of the human crew have died already and a malfunction with the others’ chambers leaves only Devlin and Patricia awake at the end, in charge of a bunch of people stuck in deep sleep who will no longer be able to sit back while centuries pass by around them. They have to find a habitable planet real soon, more out of necessity than anything; it’s either that or death for all of them. You may also recall that at the end of the first installment Devlin narrowly avoids trouble with some intelligent aliens, who are rather quickly forgotten about; the good news is that this scene was not for nothing after all, since this same alien race, several centuries later in their time, figure back into the plot. It’s a bit of a deus ex machina, with how both the humans and aliens get a happy ending, but White makes it work by virtue of having used time dilation to his advantage. Indeed the ending reminded me a bit of A. E. van Vogt’s “Far Centaurus,” which uses time dilation for similar effect.

Even the flashbacks featuring Brother Howard, which probably take as much time on the page as the A-plot aboard the ship, if not more, lead to a pretty satisfying conclusion. Brother Howard used to be insane (as opposed to how he is now, which is just a bit cooky), on account of PTSD from being an astronaut, but through years of therapy he was able to return somewhat to normalcy. (In the days before manned spaceflight, and even during the height of the Space Race, there was a lot of speculation that astronauts would experience PTSD [although it wasn’t called that at the time] much like how soldiers did. The image of the astronaut-as-soldier was a powerful one, although it’s gone out of fashion in recent decades.) Brother Howard has been testing Devlin and Patricia so that he might recruit them for this extraordinary space voyage—a trip that would take more mental fortitude than most things; of course he finds Devlin and Patricia fit for the job. I’m not sure if it was necessary for Devlin and Patricia to be a romantic item, since the latter basically exists so that Devlin has a flesh-and-blood person to talk to on the ship, but it’s not like she’s a one-dimensional character. Aside from his aversion to violence it seems like White also avoids really bad misogynistic tendencies that some of his contemporaries were guilty of (looking at you, Silverberg). Overall this is a read that I would describe as refreshing, if also B-tier in quality.

A Step Farther Out

I think The Dream Millennium would’ve worked better as a novella, but given that I had read it sporadically over the span of a couple weeks, with digital scans of the magazine issues, it’s possible I won’t feel the same if I had a physical copy of the book version in my hands. White is kind of a unique and yet obscure talent in the context of when he wrote, especially in the ’50s through the ’70s, when casual violence still permeated genre SF and there was much undue optimism about mankind conquering the stars. White’s pacificism speaks to the latest generation of SF writers, even if his style is still on the workmanlike side.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 2/3)

May 15th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, November 1973.)

The Story So Far

John Devlin is one passenger out of many aboard a spaceship, which at the beginning of the novel is already nearly a century into its voyage in search of a planet suitable for human colonization. The trip is expected to take several centuries, possibly even a millennium or more of objective time; as such, the human crew spend about 99% of their time in cold sleep, only to be woken up periodically to be tested by the ship’s computer, or to take care of some malfunction that the computer can’t handle itself. During these periods of cold sleep, in which almost no time at all passes for Devlin while decades slip by outside, he has some pretty vivid dreams, including dreams of deep-sea prehistoric life, being a sauropod in the Jurassic era, and flashbacks to his own life before he got recruited for the voyage. During one of these times where he gets woken up to handle a malfunction, a fellow passenger named Yvonne Caldwell, barely old enough to even be on the ship, is dying in her chamber, having not gotten into its properly before cold sleep took over. Caldwell wanted to see her boyfriend, who’s also on the ship somewhere, and for better or worse she’s unaware that she’s dying pretty horribly. Devlin does his best to comfort her in her last moments before she passes, and this is our first big hint that Devlin was a doctor before he left that life behind and became a passenger here.

We get a rather extensive flashback to Devlin’s life on Earth not too long ago, and apparently life on Earth has gone to shit (well, it’s only marginally worse than what we’re dealing with now). Someone I did not bring up in my review of the first installment, because her subplot did not reel me in enough at the time, was Patricia Morley, whom Devlin got to know in this flashback and who actually is also a passenger on the spaceship. Despite being standoffish in personality and also having a bit of a fucked-up face (from self-harm), Morley is Devlin’s assigned love interest for the novel. She ends up being a more significant character than she appears at first, not least because by the end of the second installment she and Devlin have both gone basically rogue on the ship. There’s also the enigmatic Brother Howard, who only appears in flashbacks and who is ostensibly of a religious order, but he seems to know more than he lets on and there’s a good reason for this. It’s also during these sequences that White’s own background as an aspiring doctor who lived in Ireland during one of the most violent periods in the country’s history is brought to the forefront.

Enhancing Image

I think my big problem with The Dream Millennium is that it’s basically two storylines, each rich enough for maybe a novella but not enough to carry a full novel on its own, that are connected enough, but then there are also scenes that have, at least on a surface level, fuck-all to do with either of the main storylines. Here, in the second installment, there’s a whole sequence (it might’ve gotten two chapters, I forget) in which Devlin dreams of being a warrior prince in medieval times who wins against a neighboring kingdom, only to have a horrible marriage in the aftermath. There’s a marked difference between Devlin’s dreams of what seem to be past lives and his dream-memories of his own life, since the former are given very little context or background. The first few dreams, involving prehistoric life, are fine as written, but unless White has something up his sleeve, the medieval sequence could’ve been cut out without diminishing the two main storylines. It’s frustrating, because this is already not a long novel (paperback editions run a bit over 200 pages), but I feel like there’s some filler here. Indeed, while reading this installment, my heart sank as I went through the medieval section, fearing that it would take up the majority of the installment and that almost nothing would actually get done. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, but it’s a black mark on the reading experience, because even if it ends up being significant later, that doesn’t change that while I was reading it I barely understood what was happening and I found it hard to care about what I was able to understand. That sequence is mostly action, and it must be said that action is not White’s strong suit.

Thankfully this installment does eventually pick up. (This is one of those things where I have to wonder if I’d be as harsh on the novel’s weaker moments if I was reading it, ya know, as a novel and not as a serial. Like remember those aliens that showed up at the end of the last installment? Yeah, they left the story about as quickly as they entered. Weird.) We get yet another lengthy flashback to just before Devlin and Morley are recruited for the voyage, but while there’s much less violence than before, the connection these scenes have with Devlin’s current predicament on the ship is much more apparent. The mystery of who the fuck Brother Howard really is is given some much needed clarity, and the budding relationship between Devlin and Morley is developed enough to justify their teaming-up in the current events. Probably the most haunting scene of this installment is during one of Devlin’s waking periods, when he finds a dead passenger named Thomas Purdy, who apparently had tricked the ship’s computer into thinking he was still in his chamber so he could commit suicide outside of it—his eyes taped open so that he could not sleep. It’s become clear by this point that there’s a huge difference between cold sleep and normal sleep, although Devlin and Morley are still trying figure out how the ship’s systems induce those frighteningly vivid cold-sleep dreams. Devlin and Morley feel weirdly fatigued, both mentally and physically, from these cold-sleep dreams, despite their bodies resting for incredibly long periods of time—or at least time outside of cold sleep. For them, subjectively, only a few days have passed, even though it’s been centuries of objective time. This boils down to the question of whether the ship itself is a simulation, and where the dividing line between dreams and reality is.

I wonder if White maybe took some notes from Philip K. Dick, particularly A Maze of Death, which, without giving away that novel’s big twist, feels thematically akin to The Dream Millennium. White and Dick are both pessimistic about the human condition, although otherwise they don’t have much in common, with White’s sensibilities being decidedly more old-school while Dick was adjacent to the New Wave. But still, while The Dream Millennium could’ve been written a decade earlier, there’s a bleakness here (not to mention a lack of problematic elements) that make it feel more modern than some other SF of the time. You’d think it’d be easy for an SF novel from 1973 to not feel horribly dated, but you’d be surprised—or maybe not, depending on your experience.

A Step Farther Out

I’m gonna hold off final judgment until I’ve actually finished the novel, but so far The Dream Millennium has been a mixed bag. Structurally it’s rather nonlinear, but it also feels like a few disparate story ideas tossed together so that White could get a full novel out of it. Other than A Maze of Death it also reminds me of Piers Anthony’s Macroscope, which it must be said is an unusually good novel by Anthony’s standards. White’s a better writer than Anthony, but even for how short it is The Dream Millennium feels a bit cobbled-together. I’m gonna see (and hope) that White manages to stick the landing with the last installment.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Red Nails by Robert E. Howard (Part 3/3)

April 28th, 2025

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

The Story So Far

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a warrior-pirate who was aboard ship not too long ago, but jumped in order to escape an unwanted marriage proposal. She then joined an army of mercenaries, but left that as well, after killing one of the officers. She’s now a fugitive, but she’s not alone, for Conan was in the same army and also deserted, with the intent of following Valeria’s trail. Conan doesn’t wanna kill Valeria, indeed having killed the brother of the officer she had killed off-screen, but rather is curious about her—in more ways than one. Aside from being warriors, one thing Conan and Valeria have in common is that they’re very bad at taking orders. They’re having a “fun” time bickering when a dragon in the forest they’re hiding out in kills their horses, and looks to have them for lunch next. Using a spear and some poison fruit, Conan’s able to incapacitate (although probably not kill) the dragon, and the two make a run for it on foot. On the plains by the forest there’s a domed city, called Xuchotl, which once had an indigenous population but which is not thinly populated by two clans, who years ago had moved in and slaughtered the original residents. Yes, that is technically genocide. We’re told that the indigenous people of the city were no better than those who killed them, and in some ways might’ve been worse. Now it’s a war between the last members of the Tecuhltli and Xotalancas, clans named after their founders. No children have been born in these clans in quite a few years, and it seems each is a mini-civilization on its last legs.

With the help of a Tecuhltli named Techotl, Our Heroes™ get introduced to the Tecuhltli higher-ups, namely their “king” Olmec and his partner Tascela (in the previous installment I said they were married, but their relationship is actually more ambiguous than that), the latter appearing youthful and yet, it turns out, being centuries old. Olmec sort of hires Conan and Valeria in the hopes that they’ll help vanquish the remaining Xotalancas. (The red nails of the title refer to red nails that are stuck into a column in Olmec’s chamber, each representing a vanquished enemy.) This arrangement goes sideways, though, when later that day one of Tascela’s servants tries to put Valeria into a deep sleep with the help of a black lotus. Valeria doesn’t appreciate this very much, so she tortures the servant until she confesses what Tascela’s plan is, although she escapes into the catacombs, never to be seen again but likely to be killed off-screen by something. It’s at this point that Valeria hears swords clashing at the gates, which probably means the Xotalancas have chosen now to make their final assault.

Enhancing Image

A battle goes down, with the Tecuhltli being victorious, of course. They’ve killed the last of the Xotalancas, which ordinarily would mean everyone gets to live happily ever after, but as you know, Tascela has other plans. Olmec also has plans of his own, and ultimately the two rulers fight for a bit over who gets a piece of Valeria’s ass. Olmec wants to rape Valeria while Tascela somehow has even worse plans in mind. Of course, while Olmec is a burley bearded guy who can break someone’s spine in half, Tascela is a sorceress who many years ago had put a spell on Olmec so that he would be unable to lay much more than a finger on her. Is this the only Howard-written Conan story with both a heroine and a villainess? Unfortunately, by this point Valeria has become little more than the obligatory damsel who needs rescuing, although while she’s physically helpless she does have quite the mouth on her. We hear about some “profanities” coming from her and it’s easy to imagine her dropping several F bombs if not for censorship. I sort of get the criticism of Valeria not being enough of a badass heroine, but at the same time I do think she works as a kind of foil to Conan. I think it’s also worth mentioning that it’s easy to believe Howard had based Valeria on Novalyne Price, his girlfriend at the time, namely through her assertive attitude and penchant for cursing, as was apparently Novalyne’s habit when she wasn’t on the job. Clearly by the last couple years of his life Howard was moving in a direction that, while not exactly feminist, was more sympathetic to women as people. Remember that this is a guy who really could not imagine living in a world without his mother in it.

As if to compensate for the slow middle section of the novella, the back end of Red Nails is nonstop violence and conspicuously erotic imagery (I don’t mean that last part in a bad way). Howard said in at least one letter that he thought of Red Nails as his sexiest Conan story, and between the two BDSM-coded torture scenes it’s easy to believe him. Yes, a second BDSM-coded torture scene has hit the towers! This time it’s Valeria who’s on the slab, with the dark-skinned Tascela towering over her, in an image that provided the cover for the first installment. (I should probably have mentioned by now that Tascela is coded as being equivalent to ancient Egyptian royalty, going by how Howard describes her clothing and especially with how she’s illustrated in the version of Red Nails printed in The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume II.) Conan kills Olmec and comes in for the rescue, but it looks like Our Heroes™ are outnumbered when the thing from the catacombs emerges as a deus ex machina, in the form of Tolkemec, who had been banished there many years prior. Conan kills Tolkemec while Valeria takes the chance to stab Tascela in the back, who despite being able to replenish her youth and make people follow her every order is apparently made of tissue paper if someone manages to catch her off-guard. “I had to do that much, for my own self-respect!” says Valeria, as almost a meta statement on how given her damsel status for much of the story she had to take down someone. Why not her evil counterpart, then? It makes enough sense. It also acts as a bit of a twist on its own, if also as an anticlimax, since Tascela shows herself to not be much of a fight after all, at least physically.

As I was reading Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard (a good one-volume biography, if also unfortunately sloppy in the proofreading department), and Finn makes a point that I’m sure is not new but which I thought useful for my own read of Red Nails: he considers Red Nails to be a thematic counterpart to Howard’s earlier Beyond the Black River, which might still be my favorite Conan story. Granted that Beyond the Black River benefits from a tighter narrative focus and the damsel being a man instead of a beautiful woman for Conan to make out with, the two novellas do each show one side of the same coin, with Beyond the Black River showing barbarism creeping up on civilization while Red Nails shows what Howard saw as the inherent evil of civilization. A more conventionally racist (mind you that Howard did have racist tendencies) narrative would’ve painted the original inhabitants of Xuchotl as backward “savages,” but from what we’re told about them they were actually quite an advanced and “civilized” people—at least on paper. But they were also decadent, and their collective villainy made way for the settlers that came in and slaughtered them. Now that the clans have been wiped out as well, Conan sees the city being truly bereft of human life now as no great loss. “It’s well the breed exterminated itself,” he says, which could be referring to the original inhabitants, the clans (who after had spawned from one people), or both. For both Conan and Howard, civilization is only temporary, and at some point will meet its end. This is the view of a philosophical pessimist, which one could argue is the most essential foundation for dark fantasy.

A Step Farther Out

I have to admit that when I finished Red Nails I felt a bittersweetness, because it was the last Conan story Howard wrote; even had he lived longer it’s unlikely he would’ve written more Conan, as he made it clear in letters at the time that he was getting tired of the character, and moreover he was getting tired of writing fantasy in general. That one can think this while only pushing thirty is something many of us would now think of as absurd, but Howard really meant it. About a year after he finished Red Nails he got in his car, took out a revolver, put it to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger. It’s ironic that he had basically intended this as the final Conan story, since it ends on a relatively upbeat note (I mean hey, all the bad people are dead) and implies more adventures between Conan and Valeria—only we never got to see those. Eventually I’ll cover more Howard, specifically work of his that isn’t Conan, assuming I don’t follow my leader.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Red Nails by Robert E. Howard (Part 2/3)

April 22nd, 2025

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, Aug-Sept 1936.)

The Story So Far

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a pirate-turned-mercenary who abandoned her ship to avoid an unwanted marriage proposal, only then to also desert the band of mercenaries she had joined, after killing one of the officers. She’s currently a fugitive, but she’s not alone, for it turns out Conan, who was in the same army as Valeria, also deserted and followed her trail—partly out of curiosity but also because he makes no secret of having the hots for the female warrior. (You gotta give Conan credit: the man is upfront about what he wants.) Valeria is not so smitten with the legendary Cimmerian. At the same time the two are probably better off together than each going their separate ways, for the moment. Their bickering is interrupted when a dragon of the forest they’ve taken refuge in devours their horses off-screen, with Our Heroes™ looking to be another meal. The dragon is not the fire-breathing dragon of medieval folklore, nor the slim serpent with wings of ancient China, but a dinosaur-like beast whose belly drags on the ground and who’s got more teeth than a dentist could possibly hope to count. With the help of a makeshift spear and the juice of a poison fruit, Conan incapacitates the dragon and Our Heroes™ flee the forest, into a wide plain and then into a massive interior city. Xuchotl is an ancient city that’s partly underground and totally encased by a dome, and at first it looks to be abandoned. When Conan splits from Valeria to do some investigating, the latter stumbles onto a couple of the city’s inhabitants and gets herself into a battle she really did not anticipate. The first installment ends with Valeria and Techotl, a member of the Tecuhltli, fending off some ravenous dogs. This first installment actually ends in the middle of the second chapter; I’m not sure if this is a criticism, I just wanted to point that out. The question then is: Where could Conan be?

Enhancing Image

Of course this had to be unintended, but I find it interesting that the first installment started and ended without Conan, only for the second installment (which is actually just the second chapter continued) to reintroduce him as fast as possible. Also, aside from the action scene at the beginning, this middle chunk of Red Nails will be much more focused on building character and the world of Xuchotl. There’s a lot less fighting and a lot more dialogue. This is not really a bad thing, since Xuchotl is one of the more imaginatively realized settings for a Conan story. Right after Howard wrote Red Nails, about a year before its publication, he admitted in letters that it would not only be his last Conan story but also probably the last fantasy story he ever wrote—mind you he was only 29 when he said this. The notion that someone so young could feel that they’ve said all they could say about a character, never mind a whole genre, might strike us as crazy, but I do believe that even had Howard lived to a nice old age it’s unlikely he at the very least would’ve written more Conan stories. Red Nails was the grand finale of the series, even if it doesn’t exactly feel like one; but also Howard really pulled out all the stops with the action, worldbuilding, and character moments. It’s also, it must be said, possibly the sexiest of the Conan stories, but that’s for me to give the details of in just a moment. For now we must be content with being introduced to the rest of the Tecuhltli, who stand opposed to the clan on the other end of the city, the Xotalancas. Turns out the city had already been built and had its own indigenous population when the founders of these clans had arrived. Given that said indigenous population is not longer here, you can guess what happened, although curiously the original people of Xuchotl are also said to have been brutal and decadent in their own right.

Thus Conan and Valeria find themselves caught in the middle of a war between dying clans (there are no children among the Tecuhltli and presumably the same goes for the enemy) that has been going on for fifty years, so that basically nobody alive now was around to witness how it had all started. When we meet the rulers of the Tecuhltli, Olmec and his wife Tascela, we get the feeling that something is very off, not least because Tascela looks to be young and beautiful but is, in fact, at least in her seventies, given that she was an adult when the war started and indeed the big reason for why it had started in the first place. How she has retained her youth is a mystery—for now. During Olmec’s big exposition dump about the history of the clans, Tascela also seems weirdly focused on Valeria, as if transfixed by her beauty. (It’s worth mentioning that while homosexuality was sometimes mentioned in mainstream fiction of the time, it was sort of taboo in the genre magazines, so that even the implication of it here is Howard teasing the reader.) Now, my dumb ass thought going in that the story’s title referred to red fingernails, but actually it’s referring to red nails impaled in the Tecuhltlis’ headquarters, each representing a slain enemy. Granted, the red nails could also refer, if only metaphorically, to Valeria, who after all is of the Red Brotherhood. For better or worse Conan is rendered the secondary protagonist while Valeria is the real hero(ine) of Red Nails; and in case there was any doubt of this she once again takes hold of the narrative in the fourth chapter, which is where the second installment ends and which is short but pretty memorable. Red Nails could be considered a logical successor as well as a companion piece to Beyond the Black River, which in some ways it’s very different from but also in other ways similar. We go from the frontier to what is basically a buried city, and the POV character who follows Conan is female instead of male, but their premises are similar enough.

Now, let’s talk about the torture scene, although it’s actually not the torture scene that provided the cover for the previous issue of Weird Tales. After their meeting with Olmec and Tascela, Conan and Valeria once again part ways for the moment, with the latter going to take a nice post-battle nap. She wakes suddenly, however, to find that Yasala, Tascela’s servant girl, had tried to pull a Bill Cosby on her with the help of a black lotus, a blossom “whose scent brings deep sleep.” Valeria is very cross about this, especially because Yasala refuses to explain herself. Valeria then does what any normal person would do and decides to strip Yasala naked and tie her down, for the purposes of strangely erotic torture with a lash. Now, as somebody who is not particularly into BDSM (although I’m not opposed to it), I have to admit that what follows is pretty hot, to the point where I would be surprised how it made its way into Weird Tales in the ’30s if not for the fact that paying kink lip service was actually far from uncommon for the magazine at this time. (There are, in fact, multiple Robert E. Howard stories that made the cover for this very reason, courtesy of Margaret Brundage.) Indeed, I can imagine that reading Weird Tales in the early-to-mid-’30s (the magazine cleaned up its act towards the end of the decade, at least when it came to the covers) and being introduced to BDSM this way. Shit must’ve blown some minds. Anyway, Valeria gives Yasala a good thrashing until the latter finally gives in, saying the Bill Cosby routine was part of Tascela’s scheme. Once Valeria unstraps her she throws some wine in Valeria’s face for her troubles and runs off the catacombs, where it’s implied she meets her death off-screen. Meanwhile Valeria hears the clashing of swords in another direction, implying that the Xotalancas are at the gates.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for the delay, but I hope the wait was worth it. Red Nails is shaping up to be yet another top-tier Conan story, but we still have a good chunk of it to go. I’ve read enough Conan at this point, a lot of it outside the confines of this site, to separate the mediocre (because there are a few Conan stories where Howard was clearly phoning it in) from the good stuff. It helps a lot that Valeria herself is a very fun character, who in some alternate timeline probably could’ve gotten her own spinoff series. I’ve read into the possible inspirations behind Valeria, with the most likely contenders being C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, whose first couple stories Howard had very likely read by the time he wrote Red Nails; and then there’s Novalyne Price, Howard’s girlfriend at the time. The details of Howard and Price’s relationship are unspeakably depressing, so I won’t go into it, but it seems he had based Valeria’s tenacity on Price. (I’ve been reading Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, and there’s a good chance I’ll be done with it by the time I finish reviewing Red Nails.) My point is that I was looking for a palate cleanser after the dismaying experience that was reading the first installment of E. E. Smith’s Triplanetary, and I’m happy to say Red Nails is meeting my expectations.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Red Nails by Robert E. Howard (Part 1/3)

April 15th, 2025

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1936.)

Who Goes There?

E. E. Smith has I guess the distinction of having the first serial I started to review but simply could not finish. I’m already a couple days behind in my schedule as it is. It would’ve been one thing if I did not enjoy reading Triplanetary (which is certainly the case, mind you), but Smith was also maybe a victim of bad timing. We are cursed to live in interesting times. Both in my personal life and in the outside world there have been some, let’s say disturbances. My question then is, if I’m not gonna continue my review of Triplanetary, what could I use as a substitute for the rest of the month? There were many options; as you probably know, a lot of novels and novellas were serialized in three installments. But for me the answer was obvious: I’d be returning to Robert E. Howard.

Despite the fact that he committed suicide when he was only thirty, Robert E. Howard can lay claim to being the most influential American fantasy writer of all time, not to mention being arguably the greatest of the pulp writers who never broke into mainstream or “slick” fiction. He began writing with the hopes of being published when he was 15, although he wouldn’t actually make his first fiction sale until he was 17 or 18; little did he know, when he started writing at 15, that his life was already halfway over. But once Howard started getting published, he never stopped—not even when he died. Almost too many short stories and poems to count were published, either complete or as fragments, in the decades following Howard’s death in 1936. He wrote nonstop for about a dozen years, and for practically every pulp and genre market, except, weirdly enough, science fiction, which he didn’t seem to have much if any interest in. He wrote fantasy, horror, Westerns, historical adventures, and even sports stories (Howard was especially fond of boxing). He also ran several different series focusing on a colorful roster of courageous and quite masculine heroes, from Solomon Kane and the sailor Steve Costigan to, of course, Conan the Barbarian. Conan is one of the most iconic characters in fiction, and he was also Howard’s final fantasy hero, being a culmination of themes and tropes Howard had developed. Red Nails was the last Conan story Howard had completed; the first installment would’ve been on newsstands around the time of Howard’s death. I had been meaning to get to this one for a while.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Weird Tales, July to October (the August and September issues were combined) 1936. Since this is Conan it’s been reprinted quite a few times, including 13 Short Fantasy Novels (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh) and too many Howard collections to count. It’s also on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a pirate-turned-mercenary who’s currently a fugitive, having killed an officer in Zarallo’s Free Companions, an army of mercenaries and, ironically from what we hear about it, not free at all. Another member of that army was Conan, and like Valeria he too deserted, albeit for different reasons. Since this is the third Conan story I’ve reviewed, I think acknowledging formula is in order. Howard wrote a lot, and like anyone who writes enough for long enough he fell back on formula and certain turns of phrase, and even how he would structure his plots. With the Conan series the idea is that the “real” protagonist is not Conan, but some third party who has their own adventure, including their own personal stakes, and who sees Conan’s exploits from the outside. There are some exceptions, but most of the Conan stories do not start with Conan as the focus characters. Valeria herself is by no means the only female main character in a Conan story, but she’s certainly a contender for the feistiest, alongside Bêlit from “Queen of the Black Coast.” But whereas readers might recall Conan’s relationship with Bêlit being genuinely romantic (if also ill-fated), his interest in Valeria is more purely carnal. Indeed Conan and Valeria’s relationship is about as explicitly sexual as one could’ve gotten in ’30s pulp magazines without the characters having actual sex (at least not yet). Valeria compares Conan to a stallion and at one point Conan threatens to spank Valeria in a way that is clearly more meant to be taken as kinky teasing rather than punishment.

Of course, Valeria is a tsundere who is not so taken with Conan’s teasing and raw machismo, although there’s the sense that she can’t help but admire him as a fellow warrior. I’ve read up a bit on Red Nails and one criticism I’ve seen repeated is that for someone who is described as a bad bitch, and who takes a lot of pride in her supposed abilities as a fighter, Valeria is not as strong as she appears. This may prove more valid than it seems to me initially, but I like the idea of a pirate lady who is perhaps a little out of her depth when fighting on land—you could say like a fish out of water. She also clearly resents being on the receiving end of misogyny and mockery from her male colleagues, saying, “Why won’t men let me live a man’s life?” at one point. (Obviously such a sentiment reads different nowadays, what with our understanding of genderqueerness, although Valeria is at the very least gender-nonconforming.) Due to the episodic nature of the Conan series it can be hard to lay out some internal chronology, but I’m pretty sure Red Nails takes place after “Queen of the Black Coast” since Conan has already lived as a pirate by the time of the former, although he makes no mention of Bêlit. I like how these two are former pirates who’ve come to land under different circumstances, with Conan’s last ship getting sunk in battle and Valeria quite literally jumping ship to avoid an unwanted marriage proposal. Also it’s worth mentioning that despite being written after some of the darkest entries in the series (“Queen of the Black Coast” and Beyond the Black River especially), Red Nails starts off considerably lighter in tone, insofar as it reads like a more typical pulp adventure.

But of course, there’s trouble afoot. As Conan and Valeria leave their horses and really get down to bickering with each other, they realize too late that they really should’ve kept a better eye on those horses. A dragon ate them both, somehow, making such short work of the animals that their bones made a distinctive crunching sound. Our Heroes™ have come face-to-face with a dragon, a beast about as large as an elephant with “huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified,” a head larger than a crocodile’s, a belly that drags on the ground, “absurdly short legs,” and a long and flexible tail. It’s basically a walking tank with a trash compactor for a mouth. Much of the first installment of Red Nails has to do with getting around this dragon, which was not quite what I was expecting, since what I had heard most about this novella was the main setting—but we’ll get to that in a moment. It looks like Our Heroes™ are cooked, but Conan comes up with an ingenious tactic that might (just maybe) kill the dragon. He makes a spear and covers the tip with the juice of a poisonous fruit, then aiming for a spot on the dragon that isn’t totally covered with scaly armor. It works, or at least it works well enough, with Conan and Valeria running off, leaving the poisoned dragon to die a slow death—maybe. I have a feeling this will not be the last we see of it. Finally we come upon a city on the plain, although it’s no ordinary city but one that seems at least partly underground, being totally kept indoors as if under a dome. Being on the run, and with no other signs of civilization in sight, Conan and Valeria enter the interior and probably abandoned city. It took long enough, but in the back end of this installment we do finally enter Xuchotl.

There Be Spoilers Here

This first installment starts and ends with Valeria by herself, since she and Conan are separated for a time once they’ve entered the city. Conan goes off to investigate by himself and leaves Valeria by herself, which turns out to have been a bad move. Valeria finds herself caught in the midst of a battle between two clans that lurk in the city, those of Tecuhltli and those of Xotalanc, having been rescued by a scarred man named Techotl, who comes from the former clan. The builders of the city seem to have died or fled, but they’ve left a great deal in their wake. People reading Red Nails expecting Conan to have more time on the page than he does will be surprised and probably disappointed. The idea, I suppose, is that Conan is simply too powerful a character to be consistently in the midst of the action, so Howard came up with reasons for his to be somewhere else. (Tolkien had a habit of doing this with Gandalf, as another example.) Conversely, if Valeria was out of her depth before then she’s almost useless by the end of this installment. So there’s that.

A Step Farther Out

Ah, it feels good to be back. It’s been over a year since I last got to write about Conan, and Howard’s fiction generally. I’m sure someone out there will blame more for pussying out with Triplanetary, but life is short and I will not, at least for the moment, waste it on trudging through terrible writing. It’s not even like I get paid for any of this. It could also be that I returned to Howard because I’m turning thirty in eight months and I can’t say I’m happy about that. It got me thinking about Howard again, for his life story is surely one of the most tragic in the history of genre writing; but, on the plus side, while he never married or had children, anyone who loves fantasy of the blood-and-thunder variety has a least a bit of Robert E. Howard in their heritage. It’s like how some white Europeans have, to this day, a sliver of neanderthal in their DNA. A relic from an ancient time. Modern fantasy writing, it seems to me, plays things too safe and sanitary, so that we could really use a darker, bloodier, sexier fantasy—albeit not that much of it. You don’t wanna have too much of a good thing, after all.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Triplanetary by E. E. Smith (Part 1/4)

April 8th, 2025

(Cover by Leo Morey. Amazing Stories, January 1934.)

Who Goes There?

There were once people who loved reading E. E. Smith, but they’re all dead now. Even at the time of his own death in 1965, Edward E. Smith was something of a dinosaur, albeit one treated with reverence within SF fandom, even if he remained totally unknown outside of it. Smith, as you might know, was perhaps the chief innovator of space opera; when his debut novel, The Skylark of Space, was serialized in 1928, there was nothing else quite like it on the market. The closest for comparison would have been Edmond Hamilton’s Interstellar Patrol series, but there was nothing on the scale of what Smith was doing. Unfortunately, to cop a line from Alexei and Cory Panshin’s review of The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, time has long since swallowed up what were once Smith’s virtues—an assessment that I think befits Smith a lot more than Weinbaum, for the record. You can still read and enjoy Weinbaum just fine, assuming you’re not of the sort that requires your SF to be dead serious; but with Smith, even if one were to keep an open mind, it can be a real challenge. Smith just wasn’t a good writer, sad to say, really in any sense of the word, except he did have a sixth sense for scale and action, mostly in the depths of space. Even Hamilton, Smith’s closest contemporary, holds up better to modern scrutiny, especially since he did end up evolving with the times, whereas Smith did not. Thus we have someone whose work strikes even the most retro-friendly of modern SF readers as a museum piece.

Why did I pick Triplanetary as my first Smith to cover here, then? The novelty of it was tempting. You see, along with the Skylark series there was the even grander Lensman series, which occupied Smith for much of the ’30s and ’40s. Smith didn’t see any of his novels get published in book form, however, until after the end of World War II, by which point some of these novels had not seen the light of day since they ran as serials more than a decade earlier. When Smith took hold of Triplanetary for book publication he revised and expanded it so as to make it almost unrecognizable from its serial version, to the point that whereas the serial version of Triplanetary is a standalone novel, the book version was retrofitted to be a prequel entry in the Lensman series. The book version is also about 1.5x the length of the serial version. The two are so different that they have separate ISFDB pages. Like I said, it’s the novelty of the thing.

Placing Coordinates

Triplanetary was serialized in Amazing Stories, January to April 1934. Smith had apparently hoped to sell it to Astounding, but that magazine went through a change in both editor and publisher, not to mention it’d gone on hiatus for about six months. The serial version of Triplanetary would remain stranded there for more than seventy years, until it was transcribed for Project Gutenberg in 2007. A few small publishers have since made this version of the novel available in book form, making sure to differentiate it from its book counterpart.

Enhancing Image

The space liner Hyperion is going on its merry way—or maybe not so merry, as the crew is aware that two ships from the Triplanetary League have gone missing in this part of space recently. Not destroyed, but simply vanished without a trace. (The Triplanetary League is a coalition of Earth, Mars, and Venus, from that distant time when Venus was thought to be hostile to human life, sure, but theoretically livable.) Conway Costigan is First Officer of the Hyperion, but also a member of the Triplanetary Secret Service, so he’s like if Spock and Jason Bourne were the same guy. Unfortunately, a pirate must’ve snuck aboard ship and taken on a disguise, as there’s an outbreak of Vee-Two gas, which incapacitates the crew. Costigan only has enough time to save himself and a single passenger, Clio Marsden, getting them into a lifeboat and reviving her. Costigan explains to Clio that Vee-Two is strictly forbidden, something she apparently already knows. (There’s quite a bit of dialogue wherein characters explain things to each other that they already know.) “The penalty for using it or having it is death on sight. Gangsters and pirates use it, since they have nothing to lose, being on the death list already,” says Costigan. Looking into Smith’s works, the death penalty was something he was just really keen on, to the point where he seemed to support its use even for drug dealers—a view that I wanna say has not aged well, but it looks like modern American conservatives are about as enthusiastic about capital punishment. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Costigan heads back into the bowels of the Hyperion to track down the pirate, with a gas mask, space armor, and a nifty weapon on a tripod that’s so powerful that it not only jibs the pirate but turns him into a cloud of mist. This scene, the strongest in the installment, understandably provides the image for Leo Morey’s cover for the issue.

You can accuse Triplanetary of a lot of things, but it is certainly not slow in its pacing, unless you’re talking about the book version. I’ve gathered that the biggest change Smith made was that he wrote six chapters of backstory to pad out the beginning of the book version, working mainly to wedge Triplanetary into the Lensman continuity. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to survive a single chapter of lore written by E. E. Smith, let alone six. The serial version, for all the bad writing on display, wastes the reader’s time as little as possible. In the course of three chapters we’re introduced to the hero, the (probable) love interest, the villain, and what’s at stake. Speaking of which, when it looks like the Hyperion’s troubles are over, the crew is taken hostage by a ship that appears to be invisible, with Costigan, Clio, and Captain Bradley meeting face to face with the owner of an artificial “planetoid” (listen, it’s not the Death Star, got it?), named Roger. Yes, Roger. That’s his name! We know this is about as old-school a space opera as you can get because tractor beams are mentioned. Roger is a mad scientist, although he considers himself not to be mad but perfectly calm and collected; indeed he doesn’t do a Bond villain laugh or anything like that, but rather is calculated in his malice. Even his threat to rape Clio (I suspect it’s implied rather than explicit because of censorship) is stated in so many words, rather than bluntly put. Much of Roger’s workforce is also robotic, rather than flesh-and-blood people, despite what the pirate in the first chapter would make us believe. Thankfully Costigan, being a badass secret agent, has a plan for getting at least himself and the others out of prison. They escape, thanks to some tech that somehow Roger’s goons were unable to detect, but their victory is short-lived as there turns out to be yet another villain, apparently alien, even bigger of a threat than the mad scientist.

Oh, it’s bad.

Putting his ridiculously bland name aside, Roger’s actually not a bad villain. Smith doesn’t bother much with describing his characters physically, but he does give Roger special treatment:

Not only was [Roger] dressed entirely in gray, but his heavy hair was gray, his eyes were gray, and even his tanned skin seemed to give the impression of grayness in disguise. His overwhelming personality radiated an aura of grayness—not the gentle gray of the dove, but the resistless, driving gray of the super-dreadnaught; the hard, inflexible, brittle gray of the fracture of high-carbon steel.

Mind you that this all happens, with Costigan and company getting attacked by pirates and then introduced to Roger, in the first chapter. If the book version of Triplanetary suffers from being too slow, as in frontloaded with exposition, then the serial version might have the opposite problem. And yet, despite having breakneck pacing, Smith still finds room to insert dialogue that is, let’s say redundant. For example Roger spends rather too much time saying, indirectly, that he plans to make a sex toy out of Clio, if only because she’s apparently too slow on the uptake to get his point. A common criticism I’ve seen when reading about Smith is that his characters don’t talk like real people, or even people you’d read about in SF published a decade later, but almost like old-school comic book characters. It’s writing in the old pulp tradition, although even within that context I’d still say Smith is more stilted than, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who for all his faults went out of his way to not irritate the reader unless one thought about his racism or dodgy science too deeply. Three chapters in and we have one character who feels like he has real presence, except Roger turns out to not even be the greater-scope villain, if the third chapter’s anything to go by.

There Be Spoilers Here

My eyes started glazing over towards the end, although I’m not sure how much of that was the quality of the novel and how much was the awful mood I’ve been in lately. I’ll let you know.

A Step Farther Out

On the one hand I believe that once I start writing about a serial then I really ought to finish it, as I probably will in this case. I’ll be honest with you, though, it’s been rough going already and we’re only a quarter into it. Maybe I just like Smith as a writer; something about him, aside from his obvious faults, bugs me. I tend to be generous with old-timey SF, even of the pre-Campbell sort, but this might be the threshold for me. But, it’s also possible that this is as bad as it gets.

See you next time.