(Cover by Richard Powers. Beyond Fantasy Fiction, September 1953.)
Who Goes There?
I’ve read a handful of short stories by Margaret St. Clair at this point, which I understand is not much, but every one of these has something memorable about it. St. Clair got started in the late ’40s and for little over a decade was one of the most prolific female writers in the field—until, so it seems, market forces changed. Although she lived a long life, St. Clair wrote little fiction after 1960, focusing more on novels (and not being a prolific novelist at that) while the intervals between short stories stretched into years. It’s a shame, because her formal talent with the short form is almost unmatched among ’50s SFF writers. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” caught my attention just from its title, but its inclusion in Beyond Fantasy Fiction (H. L. Gold’s short-lived fantasy sister magazine to Galaxy) gave me even more hope. Also, as is typical with St. Clair, this is indeed short and… bitter, actually. I struggled to come up with a review for a bit.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction, which is on the Archive. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” has only been reprinted in English twice, in the St. Clair collection Change the Sky and Other Stories, and in the chunky anthology Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer). Both are very much out of print.
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We start with an opening paragraph that I swear has a couple words missing due to a printing error (oh yes, the Gold magazines having shitty copy-editing, home sweet home), but once we get past that we’re introduced to Paul, a street bum, and a mysterious woman who clearly has a supernatural aura about her. It takes Paul a surprisingly short time to come to grips with the fact that the woman is the titular goddess—and that she’s a goddess who’s practically on her deathbed. Even so, a dying goddess has an unworldly beauty, and Paul, like any reasonable hetero man, offers to be her servant. If written today this would be the beginning of a beautiful BDSM relationship, but this is the ’50s so no dice. You think I’m joking, but their relationship quickly takes on a master/pet dynamic.
It’s not clearly immediately that Paul is a bum, but we soon discover the extent of his poverty, in that, being jobless, he get his blood drawn (apparently too often for the local nurse’s liking) for a quick buck. Not only is he single, but he doesn’t rwally have any friends aside from presumably his fellow street bums. The goddess does something unusual in that she asks Paul about his day, about his latest romantic outings, as if such information helps her—although the implication is that it does. The two do not form a romantic bond exactly, but it’s sort of like romance by proxy—except something even weirder happens. To satisfy his goddess’s wants, Paul walks around outside doing nothing in particular, only thinking up stories to tell that would satisfy her. At first I thought this was selfish on Paul’s part, but something to keep in mind that the dude is dead broke; he does not have the money to be asking girls out and eating at restaurants, although the goddess doesn’t seem to understand this.
With what I just said you may be expecting a “liar revealed” plot twist to occur, or for the goddess to call out Paul’s dishonesty; but no, she accepts every word he says without question… maybe because she can’t afford to take them for what they are. It’s depressing, and yet Paul is basically framed as doing right by indulging the goddess’s wants in her last days. If you’ve had elderly members of your family go into hospice or retirement homes, and they might not be all there mentally anymore, you or an older family member might make some shit up when talking to their elders so as to make them feel better, and the elders don’t question it. I remember when my paternal grandma was in retirement care and up to the end we acted like my other grandma (my mom’s mom) was still alive, though she had died a couple years prior. The two were friends, of course. What the old lady didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Shit, that does sound bad.
I was expecting some commentary on how the Abrahamic religions have driven the old pagan faiths into exile, like in American Gods, and because the goddess is clearly of pre-Christian vintage, but it ended up being a steady downward spiral about a stranger trying to help a fellow stranger whose condition is terminal. The fantasy element reads as allegorical here, as the goddess comes of as an old but still beautiful woman whom Paul loves but is unable to satisfy directly, both becaue of a physical gap and because Paul lives in such abject poverty that he has to steal when he can. This is like if a character in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row were to, without even thinking twice about it, fall into an urban fantasy tale, although unlike Steinbeck St. Clair doesn’t seem interested in commenting on poverty so much as using a character’s class for the sake of the allegory.
There Be Spoilers Here
The ending is inevitable, and the “twist” is not much less inevitable. Personally I wouldn’t have saved the revelation that the goddess is Aphrodite until the end, because a) it reads as predictable, b) it’s given to us via the omniscient third-person narrator and not either of the characters, and c) the fact that this is the Greek goddess of love doesn’t matter as much as you would think. Sure, it relates to how the goddess wants to hear about Paul’s fabricated love life, but having the deity who’s dying for lack of followers be a love god strikes me as a bit on-the-nose. Does that make it any less depressing when Aphrodite finally goes and leaves Paul alone, destitute, and now an alcoholic? I have to say no.
A Step Farther Out
I feel a little bad about this one. I had read the story (very easily in one sitting) a couple days ago and then proceeded to not put any words to paper about it until the last minute. A minor case of writer’s block. It’s not that this is a bad story; quite the contrary, I was thinking about the implications of the ending long after reading it. Just that with St. Clair’s writing I feel like the quality of it speaks for itself, in a way that’s unencumbered with fancy language. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” is not even the most downbeat St. Clair story I’ve read, but it has an atmosphere that could easily give one the blues. It’s only ten pages long, but it’s not what I would recommend as a casual read. St. Clair can be merciless.
One of the things that made The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction unique in its early years was its mysterious ability to attract authors who normally wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the genre magazines. In the ’50s, if you were a “serious” short story writer (and wanted the big bucks), you would aim for The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and even Playboy. Still, you had famous mainstream authors like Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson appearing in F&SF without issue. Ann Warren Griffith is another one of these mainstream authors, although she is leagues more obscure (at least now) than Bradbury and Jackson. According to Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas’s intro for “Captive Audience,” Griffith was “an actress, a librarian, a shipfitter, a pilot in the WASPS, a Red Cross ‘overseas-type girl,’ an ‘editorial assistant-type girl’ on trade magazines and, of course, a writer.” Griffith was apparently busy in several outlets, but she only wrote two SFF stories, both of them for F&SF.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1953 issue of F&SF, which is on the Archive. To my surprise “Captive Audience” has been reprinted a few times over the decades, including The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Third Series (ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas), reprinting what the editors felt were the best F&SF stories from 1953. There’s also Tomorrow, Inc.: Science Fiction About Big Business (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander), which sounds like catnip for those who want SF that satirizes American capitalism. For something that’s more recent and in print we look toward Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), edited by… somebody. I wish I knew who this person was.
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This is gonna be half a review and half an essay on the nature of dystopian science fiction, because frankly I don’t have a lot to say about “Captive Audience” but I do have a fair bit more to say about how it figures into the hitory of dystopian SF. The subgenre goes back a long way—back to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and even further back to E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Jack London’s The Iron Heel, although the first of these is often cited as the prototypical dystopian SF work. Regardless, these are stories about Bad Futures™, wherein the author makes an “If this goes on—” kind of statement, in some way criticizing some aspect of what was then their current society. Dystopia is typically defined by taking a current issue and taking it to a logical extreme. For example, Ray Bradbury reacted to what he saw as TV enabling anti-intellectualism with book burnings in Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley reacted to the rampant hedonism of the 1920s by turning it into a cult of pleasure in Brave New World.
In the case of “Captive Audience” the explosive rise in consumer culture in the years following World War II is taken to an admittedly cartoonish extreme by having advertisements that talk to you constantly. It’s the near-future—so near that it more reads like a slightly altered version of the ’50s—and we’re met with Fred and Mavis, a happy well-to-do couple who in most ways embody the “ideal” affluent American family. Fred is the Assistant Vice President of Sales at MV, short for Master Ventriloquism; like most vapid shitheads he’s into marketing. Fred and Mavis make for almost a perfect couple, except Fred has to deal with a certain in-law. “Fred honestly didn’t know if he would have gone ahead and married Mavis if he’d known about her grandmother.” Grandmother has been in jail for the crime of wearing earplugs, after the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional since they obstruct advertising—the freedom of marketing being held higher than freedom of the individual.
I wanna say the Supreme Court would never make so assbackwards a decision, but the past few years have shown us that this is actually the most believable part of the story.
In the America of “Captive Audience,” advertising is not only virtually omnipresent, but quite vocal; even cereal boxes will sing jingles at you, which makes me wonder how these things are profitable, given the tech involved. Going back to Brave New World, advertising has so thoroughly infiltrated the human psyche that people will regurgitate jingles at each other—that they will even think about jingles and slogans as if they’re Bible passages. Both Huxley and Griffith satirize the mindless pleasure-seeking that would’ve been spreading during what were, incidentally, years of huge economic growth in the US especially. Fred and Mavis are total converts of this new pleasure-at-all-costs mindset and are thus totally devoid of humanity; these are not sympathetic characters, although it’d be hard to call them monstrous. The funniest scene hass to be where Mavis has a splitting headache and decides she needs an aspirin, only she can’t pick between the three bottles she has based on their advertising—so she takes one of each. Robert Sheckley would’ve been proud to write this bit.
As for Grandmother, she fits into this weird archetype of the one character in a dystopian narrative who remembers the beforetimes. She is apparently the only person Fred knows who rejects the ad overload of the modern age, and when she gets out of prison her rebellious attitude is liable to ruin Fred’s reputation as an upstanding citizen. Aside from the inherent joke of an old lady being a remorseless “criminal,” I do have to wonder how much time has passed since American society metamorphized into this soulless hellscape that knows not love nor individuality; given the ’50s-isms it’s probable that Griffith didn’t mean the action to take place more than a couple decades into what was then the future. Endless jingles and Muzak pollute the ears of the populace, although strangely I don’t remember television getting more than maybe a few words of attention.
As with a lot of dystopian narratives, the characters are really not the highlight of the story. Grandmother is endearing, but she’s not the protagonist, being little more than a side character who appears so as to act as a reader surrogate; otherwise we would not be able to latch onto goddamn anybody. The closest we have to a real protagonist, the character who’s faced with a problem upon which the story hinges and whose actions matter the most, is Fred, whom as I’ve said is a shell of a man. Remember how John Savage, the “hero” of Brave New World, doesn’t even appear until halfway through the novel? Anyway, while there are a few good jokes here, and while Griffith’s observations are sadly on-point, I didn’t find myself thinking about this one much as I was reading it. “Captive Audience” is socially relevant now, especially since people have become more overtly anti-advertisement and anti-capitalist (again) in recent years. It’s pessimistic in that it assumes the average American is, or will become, incredibly stupid and short-sighted, but it’s sure not boring!
There Be Spoilers Here
Rather than try to change the world or even change her relatives’ minds, Grandmother finds she’s quickly gotten sick of the outside world and opts to return to prison. Again, it’s a little funny, this old lady who’s probably buddies with actual criminals. But the implication is that prison is partly where non-conformists go, those who commit the crime of standing “in the way of progress,” as Fred puts it, although what he means by progress is unclear. The story would be perfectly satisfactory if it were to stop there, but then Fred gets the “bright” idea that Grandmother is a non-conformist because being in prison has not allowed her to adapt to the brave new world. Prisoners aren’t consumers because they’re basically slaves so there’s the question of what to do about this “problem.” Indeed, what to do…
There are several flavors of dystopian ending: there’s the protagonist-gets-their-shit-kicked-in ending, the ray-of-hope ending, the Bolivian army ending, and so on. While Grandmother does not meet a destructive end like John Savage or Winston Smith, it’s implied that she and her kind will at some point be forced to join the crowd—that the skyscraper-high iron of capitalism, a la FLCL, will smooth out the wrinkles, as it were. I say this is a comedy, but it’s a bit of a dark one.
A Step Farther Out
I chuckled a couple times. “Captive Audience” has a grim ending but it’s more or less a comedy, and unfortunately an all-too-believable one. Still I find the problem here to be the same I have when reading Robert Sheckley stories, in that there’s a point being made and I can’t tell if there’s anything beneath that one meaning we’re supposed to take from it. It’s a ten-page story that was clearly meant to be taken a certain way so I can’t fault it much, but it’s just that I tend to like stories that make me think and feel more. The characters being totally superficial was no doubt intentional, but part of me wonders if this would’ve caught my eye more as a satire if it had more of a touch of humanity to it. But hey, it’s funny!
Philip K. Dick started out as a talented and prolific short story writer, honestly one of the field’s best given how old he was and the competition. Dick sold his first story in 1951 but would not get published until the following year (and with a different story), being broke, in his early twenties, having gotten kicked out of UC Berkley, and now getting the bright idea to try writing full-time. By the time of his death in 1982 he had written something like forty novels and 120 short stories, with about a quarter of those being published in 1953 alone. Dick wrote at a mile a minute, which means some of what he wrote was competent but only done to pay the bills. “Paycheck,” today’s story and one that quite shamefully I had never read until yesterday, is a case of Dick boiling the pot, as it were. Despite its banal title, this really is one of Dick’s best short stories. Not waiting to give my opinion on this; it’s just a lot of fun.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination, which is on the Archive. What’s shocking to me is that “Paycheck” has never been anthologized in English, and also that despite being printed in a long-defunked second-rate magazine it’s not in the public domain; if you wanna read it you’ll have to read a magazine scan or find a Dick collection that has it. The good news is that there are many Dick collections and “Paycheck” is likely to be in any one of them, most notably Ballantine’s The Best of Philip K. Dick and The Philip K. Dick Reader.
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Jennings is your typical working man, now finishing his two-year contract as a mechanic at Rethrick Construction—only he can’t remember what had happened during those two years. Not a minute of it. Nothing about his job, not even what he did outside of his job in all that time. Turns out Jennings got his memory wiped by the company, standard procedure, nothing to see here. This is troubling in itself, but things only get weirder once Jennings receives his pay, which is supposed to be an envelope with 50,000 credits. (I assume this is supposed to equate to a lot for two years’ labor in 1953 money.) Another weird thing, and just as concerning: the money isn’t there. Apparently Jennings, after starting his contract, chose an alternative over the conventional payment, and rather conveniently Jennings doesn’t remember doing that either. Hmmm.
Inside the envelope are seven items which normally would have little to no value: “A code key. A ticket stub. A parcel receipt. A length of fine wire. Half a poker chip, broken across. A green strip of cloth. A bus token.” Why would Jennings, in the past, have picked these specific things over 50,000 credits that he really could’ve needed? This baffles Jennings post-memory wipe, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He gets caught up on how things have changed in the two years since the start of his contract. The US has become a bit more authoritarian, with the Security Police patrolling city streets and keeping a close eye on the populace. This is also a future where I guess commercial flight never took off and instead we have “inter-city rockets,” which is one of those funny things that shows Dick had several talents but predicting future tech is not one of them.
At least Kelly, the company secretary, is nice.
Jennings leaves his job with his trinkets and hardly a minute passes before he gets picked up by SP goons, who are very curious about what he did for Rethrick Construction. Not being much of a fighter, Jennings would tell the cops what he knows—if only he knew anything. The memory wipe seems to have been a security measure for Rethrick, with even its employees being shut off from secret doings. It’s unclear what the SP are gonna do with Jennings, since they can’t get much info out of him, but the outcome will probably be grim; therefore escape sounds like a good idea. Jennings reaches into his pocket and pulls out the wire—of just the right length and material to pick locks and hightail it out of the SP building. But to go where? The SP probably know where he lives. If he’s to survive he’ll have to become a fugitive, or return to Rethrick.
Ah, but that bus ticket…
Bus to where? Does it matter? Possibly. Two of the items have been used and so far they’ve been shockingly useful. Jennings in the past must’ve requested these items for a specific reason, except that Jennings in the present can only guess as to their purpose. Surely it can’t be a coincidence. Something I wanna point out is that “Paycheck” reads like a compressed novel; it’s 13,000 words, a hearty novelette, but there’s enough suspense here to fuel a whole novel, only Dick comes from a generation of SFF writers that doesn’t believe in wasting the reader’s time. The only reason it took me two days to get through it is because I’ve been working since Thursday, so my time has been limited. If I had a whole day to myself I would’ve blazed through “Paycheck” in one sitting. In less than ten pages we’re introduced to a flamboyant future America, a likeable protagonist who’s not movie star material but still talented, and a plot that, once it kicks into motion, never ceases to intrigue me. And we’re just getting started.
Jennings realizes that the only real choice he has is to return to Rethrick Construction—only he doesn’t even remember where his own workplace was; he had been taken to a separate building, far away from the actual plant, to receive his payment. At the very least if he can find where the plant is he might be able to get hired again and hide from the SP, as while the SP can do many things they cannot interfere with business unless there’s an exception. This is an action narrative, but there are still a few nuggets of commentary from Dick, including a rather incisive moment where Jennings ponders that in the modern world it’s no longer the separation between church and state that divides man, but the separation between state and business. “It was the Government against the corporation, rather than the State against the Church. The new Notre Dame of the world. Where the law could not follow.” This rings true especially in the present day, but keep in mind that in the years following World War II Dick and his contemporaries would’ve seen an intense expansion of commercialism in American life. Capitalism had started to hit the fast-forward button.
Of course, as far as both Jennings and Dick are concerned the government is a bigger threat to human freedom than some company, even if said company memory-wipes its employees so that they don’t snitch to the competition or some third party. The memory-wiping thing would probably be used for more foreboding ends if used in a modern narrative, but here it’s little more than a pretext for Jennings to have a conversation with his past self. I won’t say there’s time travel here, but without getting too much into spoilers just yet there is a reason why Jennings is able to use the items he gave himself just when and where he needs them. Clearly these items were obtained in the past, but there’s no way Jennings could have discerned their usefulness without clairvoyance—or a time machine. This raises another question: What the hell could Rethrick be building, especially since they’re so keen on secrecy? The plot only thickens more when Jennings catches up with Kelly, who may or may not be just a secretary.
One more thing before we barrel into the back end of the story. “Paycheck” was published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination, but it was probably written a full year earlier, during the height of McCarthyism. Some editors in the field were squeamish about publishing material that criticized McCarthy and other anti-communism fanatics, but some stories slipped through the cracks. Jennings and Kelly have a bit of an argument where Kelly says that anyone who’s against the SP must be on the side of good, to which Jennings says, “Really? I’ve heard that kind of logic before. Any one fighting communism was automatically good, a few decades ago.” Dick was not a leftist, but he did have several leftist friends; in some ways he was a fellow traveler, although he did have hangups like his misogyny and anti-abortion stance. “Paycheck” does not indulge in misogyny like some other Dick narratives: Jennings is a bachelor, so minus the shrewish wife (or ex-wife) often found in Dick’s works, and Kelly, while not a three-dimensional character, is by no means a pushover.
There Be Spoilers Here
Using the parcel receipt to find the town where the plant is probably near and the green strip of cloth to disguise himself as a plant worker (well, he was a plant worker, after all, if only in the past tense), Jennings is able to retrace his steps and infiltrate the Rethrick plant, which of course is set in the middle of fucking nowhere—like a nuclear testing site. The narrative, which had hints of espionage up to this point, becomes practically a spy thriller once Jennings gets inside the plant with hopes of acquiring photos of schematics and blueprints. He has a theory about what’s being built here, but he needs to know—which might well spell his doom. Admittedly, and I have say unexpectedly, this section of the story is the least engrossing if I had to pick a weak spot, if only because this section reads like something out of a rather non-SF spy thriller and we already have a lot of those. Dick probably could’ve made more money writing spy thrillers, but he was too creative and thoughtful to be tied down like that.
This may be obvious to some, but Rethrick has in fact been working on a “time scoop,” or a time viewer as I’m gonna call it—a machine that can see into the future. “Like Berkowsky’s theoretical model—only this was real.” There are some questions that might arise when reading “Paycheck” if you stop and think, but the big one, how Jennings was able to predict his own future predicament, gets thoroughly answered. You may also be thinking, “If Rethrick has a time viewer then how come they haven’t been able to track Jennings’s movements?” Also answered: the time viewer had been sabotaged—by Jennings. The mad bastard snuck peeks at the machine and then fiddled with it such that even the company’s other top mechanics have so far been unable to get it working right again. His past self apparently had everything thought out; even the poker chip, broken in half, saves Jennings’s skin as he pretends to be a gambler who’s simply lost his way after curfew. Even the big twist, that Kelly is actually the daughter of Rethrick himself and that she planned to betray Jennings this whole time, gets accounted for. Is there anything this man cannot do…?
Turns out Rethrick is a family-owned business, with the ending implying that Jennings and Kelly will marry and that by extension Jennings will eventually take over the company. Kelly, despite being more loyal to her father than to Jennings, is implied to have had a fondness for Jennings when he worked at the plant; and even if that were not the case, I would be so impressed by Jennings’s gambit that I might just marry him anyway. Dick stories often have endings that are bleak, darkly comical, confusing, or all three at once, but “Paycheck” might have the most triumphant ending of any Dick story. I would gripe about the happy ending, as I did when I read Eye in the Sky and found that novel’s ending unconvincing, but here the victory had been alluded to almost from the beginning; indeed Jennings coming out on top is the point of the story. Dick wanted to write a story about how a man can save his own life, and even change it for the better, using everyday items that would seemingly be of no consequence; that he also wrote a great action narrative is the big cherry on top.
A Step Farther Out
Not sure if this is a hot take, but I think “Paycheck” deserved a Retro Hugo nomination more than “Second Variety.” In terms of Dick-penned action, “Paycheck” is a blockbuster only seriously topped by the second half of Ubik. Even when he’s unsure as to where a plot is going, Dick is supernaturally adept at pushing the reader from one set-piece to another with such swiftness that we can often forgive the inconsistencies—only “Paycheck” has to be one of the most tightly knit of Dick’s short stories. In a way it’s a power fantasy par excellence, pitting an unassuming but quick-witted man against a system that struggles to keep up with his maneuvers; in another way it has commentary that foreshadows Dick’s novels while also just so happening to feature a level of badassery that’ll have you cheering. Can’t wait to see how the Ben Affleck movie fucks it all up.
A favorite returns. I reviewed a bunch of Fritz Leiber works last December in time for his birthday, which was a decision I both do and do not regret. It’s demanding to binge an author’s stuff like I did, but the good thing about Leiber is that he’s versatile enough that you can hop around his career and find him in different modes: Fritz Leiber the science-fictionist, Fritz Leiber the adventure fantasist, Fritz Leiber the master of urban horror, etc. He made his genre debut in 1939 and for the next half-century would prove to be one of the most reliable writers of his generation, rivaled (in my opinion) only by Theodore Sturgeon and Clifford D. Simak; and of the three, Leiber is the one I enjoy most for the sheer beauty of his prose. Sturgeon can be overwrought, but Leiber has a hard time writing a bad sentence just ignore The Wanderer, all while showing humor and social awareness. Nowadays Leiber does not get as much credit as he deserves, with his fantasy series starring Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (incidentally the stars of his debut story) being almost as integral to the formation of American fantasy as Conan—yet so few people bring up these two lovable rogues now.
The early ’50s were an amazing time for science fiction, but not so much for fantasy. There were several attempts to start up hot new fantasy magazines and none of them worked out, folding within a couple years at the most. It’s telling that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction started out as just The Magazine of Fantasy, but then changed its title after one issue. “The Seven Black Priests” would be the last Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story for four years, and most curiously it saw print in Other Worlds, which was very much an SF magazine. Leiber struggled to get the series published for much of its existence, given that it was a) adventure fantasy, b) rather low fantasy (in that magic doesn’t play much of a part in the world), and c) heavily reliant on short fiction, what with fantasy readers having an irrational fondness for novels that are bloated and meandering.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1953 issue of Other Worlds. “The Seven Black Priests” has never really been anthologized, but it has been collected a couple times and because it’s a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story it’s been available more or less consistently for the past half-century. The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser volume it’s included in, Swords Against Death, is still in print and is available in ebook and paperback from Open Road Media (if you hate yourself and don’t wanna buy an older edition).
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We start with Our Heroes™ licking their wounds from having lost the loot of a previous adventure; because I haven’t read every Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story I can’t tell if said adventure is from another story or if it’s just something Leiber made up. Anyway, Leiber assumes, given the episodic nature of the series, that we might not’ve run into the best buddies from Lankhmar before, so we’re reintroduced to Fafhrd and the Mouser, the Mouser “clad all in close garments of gray, even to the hood which shadowed his swart features but could not conceal their pug-nosed impudence,” and Fafhrd, “a huge man with wrists thick as a hero’s ankles, yet lithe withal.” Fafhrd is a barbarian, a red-headed giant from a perpetually cold climate, while the Mouser is the short but quick thief. While they fit into RPG character classes, these are individuals who are difficult to confuse with other fantasy characters, especially from that period.
Speaking of cold, the two rogues are now in the Cold Waste, a wintery landscape that’s about as far from Lankhmar and civilization generally as one can get—only, despite appearances, Our Heroes™ are not alone. Within a couple pages we’ve gotten our first action scene, which indeed gets an interior illustration (courtesy of Michael Becker), as the Mouser faces off with a scrawny but feisty man, who goes toe to toe with the well-armed Mouser with just a knife and loincloth. The man is charcoal-black, although the boys suspect at first he might’ve gotten that complexion from the intense coldness of the area. Our Heroes™ send this knive-wielding lunatic tumbling to his death, but there’s an odd glow at the bottom of that dark pit that makes them uneasy; the man might not be dead after all. The boys continue on their way, not wanting to pay the incident too much mind, but “at least one other eye had seen the pulsing glow—an eye as large as a squid’s and bright as the Dog Star.” We may have to worry about more than just the black priests of the story’s title!
The Cold Waste is mostly snow and frozen vegetation, but there’s also a volcano that provides a bit of heat, along with a green hill by the volcano that houses what the black priests are obsessed over. The boys find, on that green hill, a strange idol with words in an ancient and mostly unknown language, along with (most relevant to our treasure hunters) an eye-like gem that is sometimes described as a diamond but which can’t really be one; it would, however, go for a fair price on the market. This whole thing gives off Indiana Jones vibes and personally I would not touch the damn thing, but given that Our Heroes™ are dead broke, the gem will have to do—even minding the priests who are eager to retrieve it. A couple things to note: there’s a long and not-talked-about-enough marriage between colonialism and treasure-hunting, which if you’re a buzzkill who can’t enjoy well-made entertainment would make characters like Indiana Jones and Nathan Drake less sympathatic. Fafhrd and the Mouser steal something which is not theirs, and it doesn’t help that the priests are from Klesh, a jungle-filled country that’s implied to be African-equivalent.
Leiber narrowly avoids turning the adventure into something that might be deemed too problematic, but I’ll say for now that at least the priests are not described in demeaning language that would normally be reserved for stereotyped black characters; they are, however, the butt of a couple jokes about clerics, which is more understandable. I’m not sure if Leiber was an atheist (he probably was), but there’s some playful ribbing of organized religion here that serves as both entertainment and which illustrates Our Heroes™ as anti-establishment. One of my favorite recurring elements of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories (and this applies to Conan as well) is that hierarchical figures are always viewed as, at best, aloof and untrustworthy. Fafhrd and the Mouser are always looking out for themselves and each other, and maybe their girlfriends if they happen to have those, but they don’t serve any particular authority figure.
For shits and giggles, here’s my favorite exchange:
“The seven black priests— ” Fafhrd muttered.
“The six,” the Mouser corrected. “We killed one of them last night.”
“Well, the six then,” Fafhrd conceded. “They seem angry with us.”
“As why shouldn’t they be?” the Mouser demanded. “We stole their idol’s only eye. Such an act annoys priests tremendously.”
It’s a funny.
“The Seven Black Priests” is the shortest Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story I’ve covered for this site thus far, and it’s both the simplest and most abstract. There aren’t any named characters aside from the boys, and indeed the only actors are the boys and the priests—plus a third party I’ve alluded to but whom I will not get deep into until the next section. The Cold Waste is a bit of a unique location because of the juxtaposition of the snowy landscape with the volcano, but the closest we get to shelter are caves. The plot is also pretty simple, with it being a protracted fight over a gem which itself may or may not have plans of its own. Normally I have a hard time following action in writing, but of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I’ve covered I actually think this one is the easiest to get invested in if you’re not familiar with the series already; it’s a novelette, so it’s not exactly short, but it’s straightforward and because it has a small cast it shows Our Heroes™ doing what they do best without need for prior knowledge.
There Be Spoilers Here
Fafhrd was the one to take the gem, and since then he’s been acting a little weird at night; as if possessed he talks in a way that’s totally out of character for him, which should send the Mouser warning signs but because this story has to go on a bit longer the Mouser decides to not do anything about it for the time being. Given the known presence of supernatural objects in the world of the series I would’ve just assumed the gem that’s supposed to represent some ancient and evil god is haunted as shit, but that’s just me. One by one the priests get killed off, yet that doesn’t remove the problem of what to do with the gem, which as the story progresses compels Fafhrd to do things that strike the Mouser as unusual. It’s implied from the hieroglyphs on the idol that the priests have journeyed to the Cold Waste to pay respects to their god and prevent it from causing unspeakable mayhem, which if you put it that way makes the boys sound like the real villains, although a) the priests attacked first, and b) the boys could not have known initially what powers the gem had. Sometimes treasure is just treasure.
By the climax of the story it’s become clear that the gem plans to use Fafhrd as its puppet and kill the Mouser to complete its ritual, for “it needs the blood of heroes before it can shape itself into the form of man.” The Mouser is ultimately left with a choice: kill Fafhrd and take the gem for himself, or spare Fafhrd but destroy the gem. It’s a pretty easy choice on paper, actually. What makes Fafhrd and the Mouser heroic is not the fact that they do sometimes save people’s skins, but it’s that their love for each other always pulls them through in the end. Aside from its anti-authority stance, I find myself going back to the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories because they present a harsh low fantasy world where friendship redeems. You could even say that, for Our Heroes™, friendship is magic. Leiber rejects the toxic notion that men, in order to prove their “manliness,” must be ruthless and self-serving, instead giving us two undoubtedly masculine men who nevertheless unabashedly love each other. The Mouser destroys the gem and thus kills the mad god who had haunted the Cold Waste for centuries, but more importantly he does it for the sake of his best friend. Unlike most fantasy, male friendship is shown to be a magical power, even for two rogues who are no more wizardly than you and me.
A Step Farther Out
It’s a fun time! Yeah, I don’t have too much to add. This is the shortest and simplest Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story covered thus far and it certainly feels like that. “The Seven Black Priests” must’ve seemed like an odd choice for Other Worlds readers, but it must’ve also been like a puddle in a desert for those who liked heroic fantasy and, in the early ’50s, were getting precious little of it. While it’s not as ambitious as some of the other Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I’ve read, or even reviewed, Leiber rarely disappoints with this series and he’s a wordsmith the likes of which we rarely see in old-school genre fiction. It’s guys being dudes in an exotic locale and there’s nothing wrong with that.
(Cover by Jack Coggins. Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1953.)
Who Goes There?
I don’t know what to make of Philip José Farmer, but in my defense his peculiar place in SF history is partly what has secured his legacy. It’d be easy to say Farmer is a New Wave author, but he’s a whole generation older than the New Wavers and indeed his roots are distinctly pre-New Wave, despite getting started late as a writer. Farmer was already in his thirties when his debut story “The Lovers” was published in the August 1952 issue of Startling Stories, and apparently readers went nuts over it. There was nothing in terms of content (although not style) that quite matched “The Lovers,” as it was rejected by both Astounding and Galaxy for its graphic (for the time) depiction of romance between a human man and an alien woman who appears human enough. Samuel Mines, editor of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, knew he had found a special talent, and Farmer’s first few stories (mostly in Mines’s magazines) led him to winning the Hugo (although nowadays it would be the Astounding Award) for Best New Author. In hindsight this can read as a bit odd, considering Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley debuted the same year as Farmer, but the old saying that sex sells was and continues to be true.
The author spotlight for today’s story, “Mother,” labels it as Farmer’s second story, although this would not have been true unless it was the second story Farmer had sold—which is quite possible. Mines singles out “Mother” as being even more transgressive than “The Lovers,” and despite the latter being more famous I think Mines is right; not only does it go into more devious territory than “The Lovers,” it’s also the better story! This is a well-structured and more engrossing tale of first contact, and I’m about to explain why it works in conjunction with Farmer’s Oedipal hijinks.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. I had first heard about “Mother” through its inclusion in the collection Strange Relations, not to be confused with the omnibus of the same title that also includes The Lovers (the novel version) and Flesh. I’ve read The Lovers and Flesh but not any of the stories in Strange Relations, which seem thematically related. Because “Mother” is a very good story it has been reprinted quite a few times elsewhere, most notably in the Farmer tribute collections The Best of Philip José Farmer and The Philip José Farmer Centennial Collection. If you like chunky anthologies there’s also The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell).
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Paula Fetts and her son Eddie start out as the only survivors of a crash, and things only get worse from there. Paula is a scientist while Eddie, who must be at least in his twenties despite early descriptions of him (more on this later), is a famous opera singer. As with any mother-son relationship where the former pampers the latter, the son is a little maladjusted. Had Eddie lived in pre-Freudian times he could’ve lived the rest of his life as a shameless mama’s boy, but this is modernity and Farmer knows that such juicy material should not be passed up. Eddie is a bit of a hot mess, but Paula, wanting to stay close to her boy, pulls some strings so that her son can accompany her on this latest expedition to a charted but uncolonized planet, on the basis that Eddie’s expertise in opera could be used to study the form on human colonies. “That the yacht was not visiting any colonized globes seemed to have been missed by the bureaus concerned.” There are sprinkles of humor throughout the story and they’re surprisingly effective. For example, the sheer morbidity of Eddie not liking to clean up the gibbed remains of the crew (quite literally bones and tissue from the impact) because he doesn’t like the sight of blood.
Eddie is, at least symbolically, a child in a man’s body.
The expedition ends before it can even start, with Paula and Eddie being left stranded on the alien planet and with only some portable tech and rations to keep them going. While we’re still at this very early part in the story, before we get to the aliens themselves, I wanna talk about Paula and how interesting she is in terms of her function in the narrative. It was rare for a woman to be the protagonist of an SF story at the time, especially in the adventure mode as with “Mother,” and true enough Paula ends up not filling the protagonist role; she’s undoubtedly smart and competent, but we’re only gonna be in her shoes for a minute before the narrative’s perspective changes profoundly and Paula is, quite intentionally, pushed off-stage. It’s also this opening section that the story is at its most conventional before it goes off the rails (in a good way), with Our Heroes™ using radio to try to find some beacon on the planet; but it’s not too long before they unwittingly get themselves ensnared by the story’s real star.
Eddie and Paula get separated, with the POV now suddenly changing to Eddie’s, with the man-child being trapped in what resembles a huge egg turned on its side, the interior of which feels “soft and yielding—something fleshlike and womanly—almost breastlike in texture and smoothness and warmth, and its hint of gentle curving.” Farmer does not beat around the bush much here. (Also, take a shot every time Farmer uses the word “flesh” and its variants.) At first unsure of his surroundings, Eddie comes to find that he’s inside a very large and very motherly alien, itself unable to move but having tentacles so as to have a good reach both inside and outside. These aliens, which resemble boulders on the outside, hence Our Heroes™ not being aware of their nature at first, are in fact highly intelligent and communicative creatures, with the Mother (with a capital M) Eddie’s inside of even being able to talk to him via Eddie’s radio tech. The Mothers talk in a certain frequency, like they’re FM radio sets, which will prove to bode both good and ill for the humans.
The Mothers are the things on which the story hinges, so let’s talk about them. Often writers struggle (or simply don’t try at all) to create aliens that are not just humanoids with blue skin and funny ears, even though, in terms of probability, we’re far more likely to encounter alien life that’s akin to either starfish or an amoeba. Farmer seemed aware of this from the beginning, as the tragedy of “The Lovers” relies on the alien woman appearing to be more humanoid than she really is; but “Mother” goes a step farther by speculating on how a human might mate with an alien that, while sentient, does not look or behave like a human at all. The Mothers are a single-sex race in that all of the Mothers are female; there are no males of the species—not even disposable things that exist as sperm banks. How do the Mothers reproduce, then? Well, these aliens catch males of other species, only they’re not thought of as males, but as “mobiles.” A mobile, to a Mother, is a male, who will spend time in the egg chamber before getting devoured and released into the environment where the cycle will begin anew. “Mobiles were male. Eddie had been mobile. He was, therefore, a male.” This would intrigue if I found it in a story published in the current year, but for something published seventy years ago it’s kind of astonishing.
Okay, so Eddie and Paula will at some point get eaten by their Mothers, but think also about how I said that the Mothers aren’t exactly discerning about what is male and female. Paula is being kept in a fellow Mother and is apparently acting as that Mother’s mate, but while this can be construed as lesbianism on the Mother’s part, the Mother does not register Paula as being female. It’s almost like gender lines are blurry or something. That Farmer was messing around with this in 1953 should earn him a medal (it did get him a Hugo), but that he did so while showing that in only a matter of months he had matured as a storyteller gets him my respect. “Mother” is a novelette, nearly twenty magazine pages, but it feels shorter somehow, even though there’s little action once Eddie gets trapped inside the Mother. The degree to which Farmer explores the alien mindset of the Mothers while also injecting this with humor is admirable.
There Be Spoilers Here
Eddie has spent enough time in the Mother by now that he’s almost become accustomed to it; he has even given his Mother a name, Polyphema, as a sort of mythology gag. Eddie and Polyphema are able to understand each other somewhat, but there were still the problems of a) contacting Paula, and b) escaping. The first gets solved when Eddie’s able to negotiate with Polyphema and talk with Paula from across the aisle, so to speak. While the humans will eventually be eaten as Nature demands, being “semantic” mobiles (in that they’re able to talk with their Mothers) gives their respective Mothers significant prestige among their peers. (Again, while the Mothers are unable to move, they can communicate across considerable distances, and are thus quite talkative, even catty at times.) Paula has a plan to get out of her own Mother (she has no qualms about killing an intelligent alien being that is simply acting according to its nature) soon enough, but Eddie still has to figure a way to get away from Polyphema.
Unfortunately for everyone a bit of miscommunication comes in to deprive of us a happy (i.e., boring) ending. Without thinking Eddie tells Polyphema that Paula, the mobile in the neighboring Mother, is his mother. The mobile is herself female, which strikes Polyphema as a paradox. “Her world was split into two: mobile and her kind, the immoble. Mobile meant food and mating. Mobile meant—male. The Mothers were—female.” When Paula does come Eddie’s way, Polyphema takes her and devours her almost instantly, in which has to be the story’s most shocking moment—even if I anticipated something like this happening. What shocked me even more was the very dark joke to follow Paula’s death, which actually had me cackling a bit. I’m not gonna say it here because it would feel ruined without the proper buildup, but when you see you might feel compelled to do a double take. Farmer can be a real comedian when he feels like it.
Having lost his real mother, and without any chance of escape, let alone finding civilization again, something strange happens to Eddie: he starts to regress, not just mentally but even physically. The longer Eddie stays with the Sluggos (i.e., the pups, who will one day become Mothers themselves) in Polyphema’s sack the more alien he becomes.
He was, in a sense, their father. Indeed, as they grew to hog-size, it was hard for their female parent to distinguish him from her young. As he seldom walked any more, and was often to be found on hands and knees in their midst, she could not scan him too well. Moreover, something in the heavywet air or in the diet had caused every hair on his body to drop off. He grew very fat. Generally speaking, he was one with the pale, soft, round, and bald offspring. A family likeness.
At the beginning of the story a nearby clock goes backwards in time when the ship crashes—doesn’t stop, but goes back. Farmer brings back this little nugget of symbolism at the end when Eddie, having seemingly met the end of his tether, goes back in time in nearly every way possible—back, even, to being like an infant in his mother’s womb. I knew in advance that “Mother” would end with the human protagonist inside an alien womb, in a Freudian returning-to-the-womb bit, but having actually read it now, the context makes the ending much more effective; it even becomes eerie, although given the alternatives the ending could be worse for Eddie. While having lost his real mother, Eddie is able to leave behind the psychic trauma of human adulthood and will probably now spend the rest of his days in the care of an alien surrogate—one who also happens to be the mother of his children. And they say old SF is unsophisticated.
A Step Farther Out
“Mother” feels like a breath of fresh air especially after the last Farmer story I had read, which was “Don’t Wash the Carats,” a New Wave-era story from one of those goddamn Orbit volumes that I found nigh unreadable hippie garbage. I’m not against hippie-dippy literature and I’m not even against Farmer when he does it necessarily, being one of the few people in the world who likes “Riders of the Purple Wage,” but I just like my literature to read like it was deliberately constructed. Not only is “Mother” deliberately constructed but it shows that Farmer was on to some weird shit at a time when most genre authors were playing by the old rules. Its style is pulpy, yes, but it’s clearly written in the adventure mode so as to more effectively subvert expectations we have about old-school first contact narratives. Tts subject matter also points toward a grand liberalization of the field that had neither a name nor a shape yet… but it was on its way.
(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Weird Tales, March 1953.)
Who Goes There?
When it comes to authors I’ve never read before I always feel a bit nervous when writing this section, because I have to give some context for an artist whose work I have next to no context for. This was not even gonna be my first Mary Elizabeth Counselman story, as I had planned at some point to cover her back in March as part of my Weird Tales tribute, but plans change and now I can’t even remember who I replaced her with. It’s a shame, because while she doesn’t get brought up as nearly as often as H. P. Lovecraft or even C. L. Moore, Counselman was clearly loyal to Weird Tales in its first incarnation, continuing to get published in it up to the bitter end. Doubly a shame because the first Counselman story I ended up reading, todays’ pick, is rather dull, and I don’t have much to say about it—although there are a few points of interest I’ll be sure to write about here. What the hell, I’m not getting paid to do any of this, and this work will not redeem me, nor will it probably turn me into a more understanding person.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. I was surprised to find “Night Court” has been reprinted several times, most notably in Witches’ Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women (ed. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini) and Great American Ghost Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Frank D. McSherry, and Charles G. Waugh). It’s definitely a ghost story, but I wouldn’t call it great.
Enhancing Image
We follow Bob: Korean War veteran, 22-year-old husband-to-be, mostly upstanding citizen, and a bit of an asshole. Bob has the very bad habit of reckless driving—not road rage exactly, but an immense carelessness that, we’re told, has gotten him into big trouble a couple times already. If not for a certain family connection in the local legal system Bob would probably be seeing jail time, but thanks to a powerful uncle he just once again got no more than a slap on the wrist for running over an elderly black man (these are not the words used in-story, mind you). Unluckily for Bob, but perhaps for future potentials victims of his behavior on the road, Bob is about to take a detour against his will… into the Twilight Zone.
Jokes aside, this does read like it could be adapted (and perhaps elevated) into a classic Twilight Zone episode, although more because of its structure and moralism than the quality of the thing. Bob is a one-note character, a good-for-nothing who exists in the context of the story to be taught a lesson, but even so there are a couple things about him that struck me. For one, I’ve read a good deal of ’50s SFF at this point, and shockingly little of what I’ve read directly mentions the Korean War; indeed the only SFF author I can think of off the top of my head who’s a Korean War veteran would be Jerry Pournelle. Mind you that the cease fire would not be declared until several months after “Night Court” was published, so this was very much an ongoing conflict when Counselman wrote it. Also, making the villain protagonist of your story a military veteran pre-Vietnam is certainly a choice. Bob talks about how he’s supposedly a hero for “killing fourteen North Koreans” but is labeled a hazard for accidentally killing a couple people on the road. He may have PTSD, but this is sadly not elaborated upon.
After seemingly having run over a little girl whilst rushing to meet up with his fiancée, Bob gets pulled over by a highway patrolman—only this is not a normal man, going by appearances, his thick goggles obscuring his eyes but also giving him an almost skeletal look. “Bob squirmed under the scrutiny of eyes hidden behind the green glass; saw the lips move… and noticed, for the first time, how queerly the traffic officer held his head.” The officer’s neck is craned as if it had been broken or mangled, yet surely the officer still lives. Things only get weirder (although not that weird) when the officer, ignoring the girl under Bob’s car, takes Bob in to be judged at the night court—which is like normal court but sPoOoOoKy. We have, by this point, pretty thoroughly left the confines of everyday reality, hence the Twilight Zone comparison, although once I realized what kind of story this was I have to admit my mind sort of went on autopilot from hereon out.
I knew nothing about “Night Court” going into it other than that it would be a tale of the supernatural, entailing some kind of judgment, and these were not incorrect assumptions! Unfortunately what I got was also a PSA on how you should watch where you’re going on the road, and it’s like… I get it, this was back before we even had seat belt laws; cars were little more than metal death traps. At the same time, I’m legally blind, so I don’t have a driver’s license, let alone a car myself. You may recall in high school how you were taught about the perils of drunk driving and texting on your phone while driving, that sort of thing. As someone who is faaaaaaaar more likely to be the victim of a hit-and-run than a perpetrator, I feel qualified to say that while this is an important lesson to learn when you’re young in the real world, it does not make for compelling storytelling. We learn that the people overseeing Bob’s trial in the night court are all victims of auto accidents, including the old man he had recently killed, and I get that this makes sense—I just don’t find it that interesting or worthy of study.
In 1953 this was probably seen as more necessary to get across in writing, but after decades of TV PSAs I think we’ve moved well past the point where a story like “Night Court” feels worthy of note.
There Be Spoilers Here
I will say, though, that the twist was not one I was expecting. You would expect the girl Bob had run over to appear at the night court as his most recent victim, but actually the girl does not exist—yet. The judge says that the girl will be born years from now, and if Bob doesn’t change his ways then he will kill this girl somewhere down the line. This gets a single golf clap from me. Less interesting is that said girl is implied to be Bob’s future daughter at the very end, which I don’t think is a necessary touch. I was expecting the story to end in a more predictable but tragically ironic way, like Bob promising to better himself only to get killed in an accident by another reckless driver, but the ending we got was anti-climatic by comparison; not as predictable, true, but it also left me feeling a little empty. Maybe Counselman had become weary of conventional twist endings? I would’ve gone for something more gruesome is what I’m saying.
A Step Farther Out
Not that all ghost stories have to be scary, but when I’m reading one I expect to feel something in connection with the supernatural; not always fear, but often an uncertainty, a sense of mystery at the unexplainable. The Turn of the Screw is not what I would call scary, but it is effective and memorable as a psychological study and as an extended metaphor—a metaphor for what we’re not so sure about. For “Night Court” I felt either detached or a little annoyed at the preachiness of it, which strikes me as old-timey even for 1953. It’s not scary or eerie, certainly, but it also reads like Counselman is wagging her finger at the reader and expecting us to take an important life lesson away from it. I usually don’t like moralism in my fiction (which is funny, given I’m a big Twilight Zone fan), but I’m willing to forgive that if the message is given a humane (not to say delicate) touch—only “Night Court” is not in touch with what I would call the pains of the human condition.
The years immediately following World War II saw a profound uptick in humor in science fiction—at least that which was published in the magazines. Almost overnight we went from hard-nosed narratives about scientists solving puzzles to inept military men and Joe the plumber getting more than what they bargained for with whatever the problem of the week was. We saw some very fine court jesters come to prominence in the post-war period, including C. M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, and of course, Robert Sheckley. While he hit the ground running in 1952, submitting to every outlet under the sun, Sheckley quickly became Galaxy‘s comedian of choice, especially during the H. L. Gold years. The two were a perfect match for each other, what with Gold’s desire for more urbane SF and Sheckley being perhaps the most aggressively urbane writer in the field then.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the February 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. As is typical of early Galaxy, this isssue is stacked, with “A Saucer of Loneliness” by Theodore Sturgeon, “Four in One” by Damon Knight, and the last installment of Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak (I’ll review this last one eventually) being other notable picks. “Watchbird” was soon included in Sheckley’s first collection, Untouched by Human Hands, and nowadays you can find it in the collection Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, which has a fancy NYRB edition. Most importantly, for those of you who are too lazy and/or don’t have the cash to spare, “Watchbird” fell out of copyrgith at some point and is available to read perfectly legit on Project Gutenberg, found here.
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We’re gonna keep this relatively short and snappy, aight?
The central question that kicks off the story is that of murder. Police may be able to catch a suspect in a murder, but they can’t prevent a murder. Solution? Create a machine that can detect acts of aggression from a distance and intercept before a murder can be committed. Gelsen, the closest we have to a protagonist, is a government contractor who helps in the production of “watchbirds,” which are small flying machines that, while not self-aware, are programmed to comprehend a definition of “murder” and to act according to that definition. Of course this is a government initiative, since while the people in the story are not too bright, they’re at least smart enough to know that such a contraption should not be left in the hands of the “free” market. “Like the telephone service, it was in the public’s best interests. You couldn’t have competition in watchbird service.” Thus the US is essentially split into provinces for watchbird manufacturers, all being connected to the federal government but each having a sphere of control.
We’re gonna be following a lot of characters, most of whom are nameless, but Gelsen is the closest to realizing he’s in a Robert Sheckley story; he has a bad feeling that the watchbirds will do more than what was intended, although tragically he’s unable to articulate how this would happen. As I said, the watchbirds are robots, and not terribly intelligent at that; they are, however, able to learn—but not in the way that humans learn things. Because watchbirds are able to communicate with each other over long distances, without input from any human central control, what one watchbird learns will quickly get to others. What happens, then, when a watchbird expands the definition of murder? They all expand the definition of murder—into a shape that the human creators did not anticipate. This is what we might call a comedy of errors, and as is typical with Sheckley, “Watchbird” is very much a comedy, albeit with a lot of death and destruction.
If you’ve read enough Sheckley (and you don’t have to read too much to get the point) then you know he’s a big fan of the “science gone amok” type of narrative, wherein human inventors, apparently lacking common sense, fail to consider the ramifications of their new creation. The purpose of a watchbird is to stun what it perceives as an aggressor before the aggressor can commit murder—but what constitutes aggression? Just as importantly, the watchbird is supposed to help potential human victims, but this turns out to be too narrow a definition for the dumb robots. Watchbirds, while being designed to prevent murder, are also not opposed to killing people by way of omission; they do not consider, for one, that stunning an elderly person or someone with a weak heart might kill them. At first this goes unnoticed. The watchbirds seem to be doing their job, which mind you does not include other types of crime. “Of course, there were still robberies. Petty thievery flourished, and embezzlement, larceny, forgery and a hundred other crimes.” But the murder rate’s gone down! For now…
Gelsen is the closest we have to a protagonist, true, but he doesn’t do much—not that he can do much. The meat of “Watchbird” is the several micro-plots wherein random people are thwarted or ruined by watchbird intereference, including a hitman who’s killed without his would-be victim even being aware of it, a doctor who is forced to watch his patient die because a watchbird mistakes the doctor’s operating for aggression, and other one-off plots that function to show the watchbirds’ evolution—or rather their increased mangling of their prime directive. It’s all morbid and chuckle-worthy, but what’s important in a storytelling context is that Sheckley does not waste time at all here; his prose is on the extreme beige side, with people and places getting basically no description at all. The result is that this is a dialogue-heavy story where the action is conveyed in short bursts. A. E. van Vogt had in mind that a scene should be around 800 words and contain a plot complication; for Sheckley the wordage seems to be boiled down to 300 words a scene. The action escalates quickly, from normalcy to the watchbirds killing almost as many people as they’re saving.
This turns out to be only the beginning.
There Be Spoilers Here
Soon the watchbirds stop trying to prevent the “murder” of just humans. First living animals, then later electrical items like cars and radios—and the watchbirds themselves. The watchbirds come close to achieving sentience but don’t quite get there, which almost feels like a subversion of the classic “robot magically becomes self-aware” trope. These robots fail to understand, for one, that cars are not killed when they’re turned off—that cars are not, in fact, living things. As I said, watchbirds do not comprehend killing via omission (as opposed to commission), thus they don’t realize that by preventing farmers from harvesting crops they’re forcing millions of people to starve. Things escalate to the point where the US’s ecosystem falls into dire jeopardy, with watchbirds preventing predators from killing prey and hunters from killing the hunted. Even killing plant life for the sake of agriculture becomes murder in the eyes of the watchbirds. “No one had told the watchbirds that all life depends on carefully balanced murders.” Again the watchbirds eventually take themselves to be living things, but they lack the intelligence to go against their programming—they can only expand the parameters of their programming and then act on it.
Now, I’m not sure what Sheckley believes in. A gripe I have with the guy is that while he’s a good satirist, it’s hard to get a read on what he’s advocating and even what he’s really against, to the point where it can read as nihilism. I can assume that Sheckley is against the death penalty, but I don’t know that, nor can I really gauge that from reading this story. The watchbirds at first stop a guy from being fried in the electric chair (cool) but later prevent a doctor from saving a patient’s life (not so cool). Aside from a general message about hubris and failing to take into account the consequences of invention I’m not sure if a deeper reading is possible. It doesn’t help that I more or less anticipated the ending, which actually reminded me of an even earlier Sheckley story, “The Leech,” wherein (SPOILERS) the human protagonists find a short-term solution to the problem—only for it to be implied that said solution will cause an even bigger problem in the long run. Sheckley wrote a lot, so naturally he’d resort to a formula.
A Step Farther Out
It’s easy to stereotype early Galaxy as being full of witty satires on post-war American life, and admittedly Sheckley’s work doesn’t help with that; but if you can get past the fact that the humor is of its time, “Watchbird” is a pretty entertaining yarn. Despite being one of Sheckley’s longer early stories, it feels shorter than it is, with the rapid scene changes and punchy paragraphs constantly pushing the reader along until we’ve reached the foreboding climax. The joke does not overstay its welcome. It also helps that we avoid some of Sheckley’s nastier habits, such as his playful misogyny. “Watchbird” is a good introduction to Sheckley’s style but also the kind of SF humor that Gold wanted when Galaxy was at its peak.
(Cover artist uncredited. Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1963.)
Who Goes There?
John Brunner is kind of a puzzle box to me: he wrote a whole lot of garbage that was clearly written to pay the bills, and yet there’s a fraction of his output that people I know will swear by as being works of genius. Was Brunner a genius? Maybe. He actually reminds me a bit of Philip K. Dick, whom I do consider a genius, albeit a deeply troubled one. Both men entered the field around the same time and took to writing genre fiction as a full-time thing, which was certainly not the norm in the ’50s, the result being that much of what these men wrote was middling at best. Of course, Brunner was a teenager when he first got published, and his work (what I’ve read, anyway) reads like that of a man who was a decade older than he really was. Today’s story, “The Totally Rich,” is a more mature and downbeat affair than I was expecting—given Brunner would’ve only been 27 when he wrote it. This was not long before he would start work on arguably his magnum opus, Stand on Zanzibar, but even after the Hugo win for that novel his works did not sell. Brunner’s career reads in part like a bad joke.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1963 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which is on the Archive. “The Totally Rich” has been collected a few times, most notably in The Best of John Brunner where it serves as the opening salvo (just mind the hideous cover). There’s also the early Brunner collection Out of My Mind, which can be found used and if you’re not up for that there’s an ebook edition—bearing in mind it’s Open Road Media (ugh).
Enhancing Image
The narrator is Derek Cooper, an inventor who normally would be the type to slave away at his work in some basement whilst surviving a shitty day job, but who had the good luck to help a very wealthy (unbeknownst to Derek at the time) man named Roger Gurney. In olden times a landowner would hire an artist for a certain project and act as their patron, providing them food and shelter and whatnot so the work could get done; so the same applies here, although the “shelter” Derek gets turns out to be a lot weirder. Derek moves to the South American fishing village of Santadora—only Santadora is not a real village, without real villagers and real fishermen. Even Derek’s colleagues during his time working on his latest invention turn out to be actors. The woman who’s been overseeing Derek’s project, Naomi, is herself an enigma; even her real name is unknown.
We’re just getting started, by the way.
I had never seen [Naomi] wearing anything but black, and tonight it was a black blouse of handspun raw silk and tight black pants tapering down to black espadrilles. Her hair, corn-pale, her eyes, sapphire-blue, her skin, luminous under a glowing tan, had always been so perfect they seemed unreal. I had never touched her before.
Derek’s project of the last year, so called the Cooper Effect, is only peanuts compared to what Naomi has in mind (she’s the one really running the show, no Roger), which turns out to be nothing less than the resurrection of a human being. Naomi is unspeakably rich; money is not an issue for her. We find that Naomi was, prior to this all this, in love with some man whose name we never learn (she only refers to him as him), who had unfortunately died prior to the story’s beginning. Being rich can get you virtually everything in the world, but it can’t bring back the dead—or can it? It’s hard to describe, but the idea is that Derek must construct, using materials Naomi has given him, a homunculus or robot reproduction of the lost lover. I think that’s the idea, anyway. Truth be told, the parameters of Derek’s new invention in progress are unclear (we’re not given a clear idea, for one, of what is and is not possible until towards the end, and even then…), but then this also seems to be part of the point: Naomi remains, to some degree, unknowable.
When I picked up “The Totally Rich” I thought it would be a more blatant satire of the wealthy, something akin to Roger Zelazny’s “The Graveyard Heart,” but Brunner has something more nuanced in mind. Derek, who is not a rich man himself but who had been basically living in luxury for a year up the time the story starts, is the modern equivalent of one of those painters and sculptors from the Renaissance who would accept patronage. We’re in the future, but it’s not clear how far in the future, the result being that it’s hard to point out something that now reads as dated. Certainly the unlimited credit cards Naomi offers Derek as compensation for his services still sound appetizing to pretty much all of us. Santadora, the propped-up fake village, is itself far from a “futuristic” location, which helps the story fulfill a sense of timelessness. I suspect Brunner intended this effect.
As we know, rich people are capable of some truly outlandish things. “Yes, Santadora had been created in order to permit me to work under ideal conditions,” Derek admits. And the unlimited credit cards. And even the fact that somehow there aren’t any mosquitos in this tropical climate. Naomi is capable of anything—except for one thing, and no, it’s not even being able to bring back the dead. There is something off about Naomi; she’s the mystery that keeps the whole plot going. No Naomi, no story. In a way this could be read as a romance, since while Naomi is trying to resurrect her lover, Derek senses his feelings for this mysterious woman grow—into what? Not love in the traditional sense, although given that these two have been basically working side by side for the past year it’s not like they’ve never talked about. It’s like Derek, who at heart is still the kid who fiddles with a Rubik’s cube, is drawn to Naomi because he doesn’t understand her.
This could easily devolve into cringe-worthy wish-fulfillment if Derek’s narration wasn’t so grounded in—not an average person’s view, but someone who knows what it’s like to create things for money. The artist as a plaything for the rich and idle. Brunner himself so desperately wanted to make a good living off of his writing, if not necessarily to become rich, though one has to think (I say this now, I’ve yet to read Jad Smith’s monograph on Brunner) he wanted to become one of idle class and not one of those who had to scrape by on pumping out mediocre fiction. Maybe he even wanted to be in Derek’s position and have some rich fuck bankroll his passion projects. Derek is a scientist, true, but his role here is much more easily understood as an artist whose patron is also his muse. The climax of the story, and the tragic epiphany contained therein, would not be if Derek was simply repulsed by the almost unbelievable scope of Naomi’s wealth.
There Be Spoilers Here
Something that does not occur to Derek until it’s too late is that there’s a reason why the passage of time in Santadora has seemingly frozen still; why nobody wears a watch and why there are no clocks around. Well, except for the one. Our Heroes™ find, sort of tucked away as if someone had hidden it and then fogot to retrieve it, “a tall old grandfather, bigger than me, its pendulum glinting on every ponderous swing.” It’s a normal grandfather clock, yet this sends Naomi almost into a frenzy, and Derek has to move the damn thing itself and dispose of it however he can. Time, for Naomi, is the enemy. After this event, Derek and Naomi hit the climax of their relationship, going to bed together (a bit of an unnecessary scene), only for Derek to find Naomi missing the next morning. Finally, coming in like a dark cloud or a raven, Roger shows up (he’d been offscreen up to this point) to give Derek the worst news he’ll hear for a long time.
Naomi drowned herself. “She couldn’t swim,” Roger adds. “Of course.” The prospect of wsiting years to see her lover resurrected proved to be too much. The worst part is that it needn’t be that way: Derek had figured out (too late) how he could finish his project in a relatively short span of time. But even then, that might not’ve been enough. Naomi had no time left—or rather she thought she didn’t have time left. She was getting older, though she put so much money and resources into keeping her looks. Some people die for love, but many more die from lack of it. Money can’t buy love, and it can’t buy time either. The rich, who in most ways are masters of the world, live as enigmas, unknowable even to each other. With Naomi dead, Derek’s work is over; he can’t even bring himself to accept those credit cards. There’s disgust (it’s clear that Brunner detests the rich, though this clashes with his desire to become one of them), but there’s also a great deal of pity for this class of people that has all but isolated itself from the human race. I did not think Brunner could do tragedy, but there it is.
A Step Farther Out
I had to reread some passages a couple times to get what was happening, but this is very much a story worth rereading. Brunner demonstrates a subtlety here that I did not previously know, even given the more experimental parts of Stand on Zanzibar. Yet “The Totally Rich” almost reads as allegorical, given its tight focus and leaning toward symbolism—a fact which, aside from a sly remark or two from Derek, passes us by without humor. Despite being very much science fiction the “science” aspect plays such a tangential role that I’m not even sure what the science here is; for one I still can’t recall what the Cooper Effect is supposed to be. This could’ve worked as fantasy, with Derek’s knack for invention replaced with wizardry. But the point I wanna make here is that while I can’t say for certain when Brunner “came of age,” given how vast his oeuvre is, I feel like “The Totally Rich” could serve as a benchmark for “mature” Brunner.
This introductory section is gonna be a bit long, bear with me. If you’re one of the three people who follows my Things Beyond posts then you would’ve figured I was to review the first installment of John Brunner’s novel The Stone That Never Came Down today, and you’ll also notice that this is very much not that review. Plans change. I did try reading that novel, but truth be told I bounced off of it so hard before getting even halfway through the installment, not to mention I was running out of time (my schedule has been merciless as of late), that I decided to just drop the damn thing. I found the stuff I had read to be both irritating and nonsensical, not helped by the fact that I had just come off of rereading Stand on Zanzibar. For a bit I thought maybe I was just Brunner’d out for the moment, but I think it’s more that going from good Brunner to bad Brunner caused whiplash; so then I was left with a hole in my review schedule that needed filling.
I also considered covering short stories by a different author, but I wanted to be fair to Brunner, so instead I figured that instead of forcing myself to cover a lesser Brunner novel we would get two Brunner short stories that will hopefully show him in a better light; helps that I’ve also been meaning to read some of his short fiction. As such I issued an executive order and today we’ll be talking about a very early but very interesting Brunner story with “Fair,” while the second installment of The Stone That Never Came Down will be replaced with another Brunner short story that’s been on my radar, “The Totally Rich.” As someone who, in recent years, has taken more to short stories and novellas than novels, I consider this move a net positive! Other than that everything else should proceed as normal; just ignore what I’m gonna be saying in July’s Things Beyond post.
The question remains, though: Who is John Galt Brunner? Depending on who you ask he’s one of the largely unsung geniuses of old-timey SF, and at the same time one of the largest providers of third-rate crap. He wrote a lot of novels that are now forgotten and/or loathed, but he also wrote a handful of novels that are said to be some of the best of their era, the most famous of these being the Hugo-winning Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner started writing as a teenager and would not stop until his death, but his career trajectory was a bit tragic; he did not get along with fellow British writers, being more accustomed to the American SF market and even being confused for an American at times. (I recently talked with an actual SF scholar, and it was not until the middle of our discussion that they realized Brunner was an Englishman.) Brunner was all of 21 when “Fair” was published—the scary part being that he was already five years into his writing career, his first work being published when he was 16.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1956 issue of New Worlds, which is on the Archive. You may notice it was initially published under the pseudonym Keith Woodcott, but this was a very poorly kept secret. “Fair” has only been collected three times in English, and has not seen print since the ’80s. It was first collected in the Brunner collection No Future in It, then much later in the Ballantine collection The Best of John Brunner. I personally don’t consider The Best of John Brunner to be part of the Ballantine “Best of…” author series from the ’70s, given it was published much later and does not follow the design pattern of that series; this is one way of saying the cover for it is so bad that I consider it to be non-canon.
Enhancing Image
We start sort of in media res, and Brunner crammed a lot into these dozen pages. We follow Alec Jevons, “ex-test pilot, ex-serviceman, ex-child and ex-husband, ex-this and that, ex-practically everything.” Jevons is deep in middle age, probably in his fifties, and he’s certainly too old to be going to the Fair, a massive playground of the future; but he’s not here for the entertainment. Truth be told, it’s not clear why he’s here, even to himself. He came here knowing that not only is this a Fair but the first Fair constructed—even now the biggest and best of its kind. I would go into great detail as to what the Fair is like, but I’ll say that if you’ve played Final Fantasy VII and remember the Gold Saucer, it’s like that: a highly advanced pleasure park that hosts a variety of attractions, ideally for young people to get lost in, hence the Gold Saucer’s reputation as a time sink in that game.
There’s this cloud of fear hanging over Jevons as he enters the Fair, even though he must know he’s not in any immediate danger; rather the fear comes from the prospect of being outed as an old geezer and picked on by the youths. Context: this is obviously set in the future but not too far in the future, as the Cold War is still going on and there’s a strong whiff of post-war British slang among the nameless youths. Brunner, at this point, was far closer in age to the youngsters than to Jevons, and for most of the story you wouldn’t guess this was the case from how those youngsters are framed as devious and unknowable—and doomed. There doesn’t seem to be a war going on, but there’s the sense that there was a war not too long ago and, more importantly, that war could come again any day now. “A million people a night in this fair alone,” we’re told, a million people a night hiding “from the uncomfortable reality of silence and thought, from the danger of tomorrow, from the waiting death poised above them in the sky…”
Something to keep in mind is that Brunner came from a generation of Britons who were too young to see combat in World War II but old enough to remember Nazi bombers over British skies. While the future of “Fair” is too distant to be set shortly after World War II specifically, it still evokes a post-war England which saw a rise in juvenile deliquency and the shadow of a generation of dead and traumatized British men. When the Cold War began in the years immediately following World War II, you’d have children and teens who grew up in an environment where the possibility of sudden nuclear devastation was very real and very known. Jevons himself served his country but was dismissed due to his Russian heritage, something that he was apparently bullied for in his own youth. While Jevons fears the youngsters at the Fair he also pities them, with the insecure boys and their girlfriends, “tarts before they were twenty, but lost and empty and without a future since they were ten.” At one point Jevons gets hit on by a girl who is probably a third his age and it (rightly) unnerves him.
Let’s talk about style for a moment, because frankly it’s not something I dwell on in these reviews and I think this is a good example of style contributing positively to the substance of the writing. Brunner could’ve easily deployed a “function only” style that got the job done but didn’t stray far from beige, but he must’ve been listening to some records at the time becaue there’s a punchiness and a musicality with how he interweaves the third-person narration with Jevons’s internal monologue, such that it’s not always clear who is saying what. The result is that there’s a bit of confusion, yes, but also a sense of intimacy with how thought and action bleed into each other. Check out this early passage, wherein Jevons ponders his age and his generation’s role in the creation of the Fairs; see how we get two channels, first- and third-person voices, sharing the same space:
The Fair had been less elaborate in his young days. Watch it, Jevons! You’re starting to admit your age. (And why not? Because if you remember that you’ve been around that long, you admit that you were responsible—this was your doing, this mechanical time-destroying hurly-burly, this feverish seeking after temporary nirvana. This was your fault!).
Like I said, Brunner’s writing here is busy, even high-octane, but this was clearly a deliberate choice on his part.
It’s hard to figure out what Brunner likes, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what he doesn’t like. For instance, he clearly despises anything that serves to numb human consciousness, and he also hates the silly business that is capitalism; not to say that Brunner was what we would call a progressive figure, given his standoffish relationship with women, but at least he tried. When I went into this I expected the Fair to be a nightmarish setting, and for most of the story my expectations were supported. The escalator system that gets more intense as you venture closer to the center of the Fair evokes a highway system from hell, and the security guards, dressed like court jesters and called “Uncles,” are not the kind you’d wanna run into if you’re scared of clowns. Yet Brunner does something in the climax that, while I don’t think it was perfectly executed, made me second-guess the story’s intentions. There’s not a lot to spoil since this is a story heavy on mood (with jazzy parenthetical asides that would not look out of place in a much later Brunner tale) and world-building rather than plot, but let’s get to it.
There Be Spoilers Here
The twist is video games. Well, it’s not just that.
Given this was written in 1955, Brunner would’ve had no conception of video games; the phrase would not’ve been part of his vocabulary. Even so, the climax of the story, in which Jevons partakes in several “totsensid” sessions, perfectly reads a highly advanced virtual reality program. “Total sensory identification was what they called it.” Total sensory identification. Identification with what or with whom? With people who are not what you’d call the average Briton, it turns out. First a pilot, which aligns with Jevons’s own experiences enough, but then he becomes one half of a newly married African couple, then later—and this really hits him—one half of a Russian couple. There’s some wish-fulfillment at play, as a sort of necessary evil, but you have these white British youths being thrown into the shoes of non-British non-white people, as a sort of empathy exercise.
The Fair is not just there to entertain, or even to push people’s senses to their limits—it’s there also to try to save the current generation of young people. A switch gets flipped in Jevons’s mind and he has the epiphany that these people are being subliminally trained, in what we would now call VR, to empathize with humans from other countries and cultures. I know people meme about Brunner for his capacity to “predict the future” (a stupid sentiment, to be sure), but I’m still taken aback that in 1955 (when he would’ve written “Fair”) he envisioned the potential of video games as a force for good in people’s lives. The thing is, games (video and otherwise) are always to some degree interactive, which is what makes them different from other mediums. We’re not given much insight into how interactive the totsensid is, but from what we’re told it’s like having your consciousness transferred to another body. Even the purposely unpleasant simulations, like being a Malay diver who’s dying of illness, have their value in how they bend one’s consciousness. “It was not pleasant, but it was real.” It’s enough to convince Jevons to start working at the Fair himself, in what has to be one of the few happy endings for a Brunner story.
I can’t say I’m entirely convinced of the ending’s sincerity, but it did take the story in a direction I very much did not expect. Brunner goes to such lengths to frame the Fair as a hellish place, only to subvert this at the end, that maybe it would’ve come as too much of a shock no matter how delivered. What’s important is that it gave me something to think about. I also feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, but Brunner not only anticipated cyberpunk by a quarter-century but also subverted one of the pet tropes of that subgenre, namely the notion that intimacy with technology via virtual reality or cybernetics would dehumanize people. Samuel R. Delany posited something not too dissimilar in his novel Nova, wherein most people are able to plug in directly to machinery via implants, with the result being that these people are actually more content with their labor than us due to being physically connected with their work. Technology, created with compassion in mind, could save the world. That Brunner put thought into this when he would’ve been barely out of his teens is impressive.
A Step Farther Out
Brunner surprised me with this one, even having heard good things about it in advance. I would’ve expected something more amateurish, given his age, but he already had a good amount of experience under his belt and there’s a spry youthfulness to the style that almost feels like it could fit in with New Wave writings of a decade later. “Fair” is, however, distinctly a Cold War-era story, written at a time when both sides were doing hydrogen bomb tests and when Germany and Berlin had been recently divided. I don’t think this story would’ve made quite as much sense had it indeed been published a decade later, and I’m also not sure if an older (and presumably more jaded) Brunner would’ve believed enough in the happy ending to go with it. “Fair” is a near-masterpiece in miniature that sees one of SF’s mavericks at a very early stage, just experienced enough to know about sentence construction and young enough to throw caution to the wind. This may be setting too high a bar, but it does give me hope for future Brunner readings.
Two stories in (today’s pick being the second) and I’m pretty sure I’m a Pauline Ashwell convert. Ashwell debuted in 1958 with two SF stories, one under her own name and the other under the Paul Ash pseudonym (I’m not sure if anyone was bamboozled by this), getting two Hugo nominations the following year—the first for her emaculate novella “Unwillingly to School” and the second for Best New Author (went to No Award, although Brian Aldiss came close). She was one of the first female authors to get Hugo-nominated in any of the fiction categories, but despite this and the quality of her work she remains depressingly obscure; it probably doesn’t help that she wrote exclusively for Astounding and later Analog. Many of Ashwell’s short stories (admittedly there aren’t too many of them) have never been reprinted, and according to a certain insider friend of mine her estate has been basically impossible to get in touch with. Surely an Ashwell rediscovery would be possible if it was easier to reprint her work.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is not on the Archive but which can be found on Luminist. It was soon reprinted in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1967 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald Wolheim), and later anthologized in the dinosaur-themed collections Behold the Mighty Dinosaur (ed. David Jablonski) and The Science Fictional Dinosaur (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Robert Silverberg, and Charles G. Waugh). This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but these are all out of print. The messed up part is that “The Wings of a Bat” might be Ashwell’s most reprinted story, given that the competition is not stiff.
Enhancing Image
We’re down for our second dinosaur story this month, although it’d be more accurate to call it dinosaur-adjacent since pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. I was surprised to find that at no point (to my recollection) does the narrator of the story call the Pteranodon at its center a dinosaur, since that would’ve been (and still is) a common mistake to make. Consider, for one, how a dromaeosaur (or raptor) has more in common with a chicken than a pterosaur, the latter being a flying reptile and an evolutionary dead end. We don’t actually see any dinosaurs in the story itself, although they do get mentioned, making this a tenuous piece of dinosaur media. We get a couple mentions of certain prehistoric animals too, but thankfully Ashwell does not go deep into details, lest the story age woefully.
Where are we? More importantly, when are we? It’s the Cretaceous, and we follow a team of colonists in a mining camp—not mining the land but the waters of the island. The narrator (whose name I don’t think we get) is on paper a doctor assigned to the camp but who in practice spends much more of his time working on the camp’s newspaper—with a readership of less than thirty people. Doc (as I’ll call him from now on) is, like everyone else on the island, very short (the tallest person is 5’7″, as company-mandated), and does not have a soft spot for local wildlife. The location? Lake Possible, a sort of Loch Ness where prehistoric life really had taken over, although curiously, like I said, we do not encounter any dinosaurs directly.
Indeed, unlike most dinosaur media involving humans, the campers are not so concerned with being hunted by predators, but instead focus on their work and try to get along with each other. Conflict in introduced when Henry, a very young co-worker of Doc’s, brings in a wounded baby pterosaur, much to Doc’s distress; for one he’s a people doctor and not a veterinarian, but he also holds a grudge against pterosaurs. “I maintain that my attitude was not unreasonable, or even unkind. I knew no more about the treatment of sick pterodactyls than Henry did—if anything, less.” Had Doc been a veterinarian he might’ve written the pterosaur off as a losst cause, but with a combination of hope and ignorance he takes the fledgling in, first getting her (for it’s identifiably a her I suppose) to eat—not very successfully. This is where the pterosaurs-are-just-scaly-birds things comes into play, with truth be told is the only thing that struck me as overtly anachronistic; mind you, I say this ias an enthusiastic layman and not an expert.
We know now that pterosaurs and birds, while they were contemporaneous and to some degree related to dinosaurs (the birds being directly related to theropods), did not have a lot in common. Fiona, as the baby Pteranodon comes to be called, proves to be resourceful, but the thrust of the narrative is essentially one where a human nurses a baby bird back to health; in reality a baby Pteranodon would’ve probably been even more independent, being able to fly and fend for itself at a very young age. As it is much of the story is concerned with Doc and company working out a way to feed Fiona and later getting her to use her wings. There’s a certain saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and that’s basically true with raising Fiona, which turns out to be a multi-person endeavor. Still, Doc got the ball rolling.
You may wonder why, feeling as I did, I allowed myself to get stuck with the brute. The explanation, though complicated, can be given in one word: Morale. It’s a tricky thing in any community. When twenty-nine people make up the total population of the world and will for the next nine years, it’s the most important thing of all.
Of course the unspoken other reason for Doc agreeing to take care of Fiona is that he’s becoming slowly fond of her, but thankfully the narration does not push this to the forefront. I know that I’m describing “The Wings of a Bat” in such a way that one could think of it as a sappy yarn about some grumpy guy who learns that children are cool and yadda yadda, but trust me, this could be so much sappier. It works, I think, primarily because Doc, for all his capacity to do good, is not a sentimental person; like a lot of real doctors he cares about the lives of others but is not what we’d call an empath. Leonard McCoy he is not quite. Despite the lack of sentimentalism, the momentum of the narration is impressive, with Ashwell taking a bit after fellow British author Eric Frank Russell in that she conveys an energy that could be mistaken for American brashness.
“The Wings of a Bat” is billed as a novelette, but it reads as shorter because Ashwell deals out information at an almost perfect pace—I say “almost” because she does faulter slightly in the last quarter or so, when she apparently felt obligated to inject some “action” into the narrative. This is a story that starts stronger than it ends, but it maintains a youthful lust for the wonders of life that border on cinematic. Not that this would ever happen, but I can imagine a live-action movie adaptation (maybe a short film) that uses mainly puppetry and animatronics to bring Fiona to life—or, as an alternative, motion capture wherein a person, mimicking what might’ve been a pterosaur’s movements on land, is CG’d over. Even something on this humble a scale can charge the imagination in such a way.
There Be Spoilers Here
Unfortunately and without warning, Fiona does leave the nest, so to speak. More importantly, there comes the possibility of a storm—even a hurricane—that could put the whole mining expedition in jeopardy. The camp’s meteorologist falls ill, and somebody has to head out and get her weather readings for her. (We can send people back a hundred million years but evidently our weather machinery can only be so advanced.) Why Doc of all people has to be the one do this is a little arbitrary, but then without it we wouldn’t have an “explosive” climax—although we didn’t need one, this being my only real issue with the story. During his expedition Doc comes across a rather nosey Pteranodon, which of course is supposed to be Fiona but which Doc is unsure about. “This creature was about twice as large as she’d been when I loosed her. Would Fiona be full grown now? I hadn’t the slightest idea.” Oh I think you do, Doc! Henry supposes that Fiona, now grown up, either thinks herself as like a human or thinks of her human foster family as like pterosaurs. Ultimately Doc accepts the reunion.
The ending is a bittersweet one. We never see Fiona again, and her fate is left uncertain; but the camp is left mostly intact and Doc himself was apparently shielded by the now-grown Pteranodon during the storm. The newspaper Doc runs changes its name to include pterosaur-watching. Well that’s sweet. It took me two and a half days to read this one, which normally sounds bad, but in the case of “The Wings of a Bat” my schedule was cluttered and the time I had to read the story I wanted to savor. The last quarter of it is the weakest part (though the ending itself is nice), but it’s still well-paced enough that I didn’t feel my time was being wasted. What I liked so much about “Unwillingly to School,” namely its punchiness and eagerness to suck the reader into a place and particular character’s mindset (never mind that said character has a disability and she does not constantly hate herself for it), is shown here as well. Doc himself is implied to live with dwarfism, and he very much strikes me as (in the hypothetical movie adaptation) being played by Peter Dinklage. By story’s end I feel like I got live on Lake Possible and its environs, despite sparce descriptions of the wildlife and most of the campers being unnamed. Ashwell has the magic touch.
A Step Farther Out
Did not age as much as I had expected; granted, this is partly due to the aforementioned lack of details given about life in the Cretaceous. Ashwell’s style is also about as spritely and youthful as I had expected, despite her being deep in her thirties at this point and writing for the most conservative magazine in the field. I think people act disappointed with Analog in the last years of John W. Campbell’s editorship because he was still capable of backing strong material, and “The Wings of a Bat” is one example. I can see how one’s interest would wane a bit in the last section, once the “action” kicks in and the doctor’s relationship with the other campers and Fiona takes sort of a back seat, but it’s still short enough that my attention span was not tested. This is, despite the prospect of a cute baby pterodactyl, not the excercise in sentimentality I might’ve assumed. Hell, I can see this working as a movie. Just remember that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs!
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 