Category: Short Story Reviews

Short Story Review: “Arcturus Times Three” by Jack Sharkey

July 8th, 2025

(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Galaxy, October 1961.)

Who Goes There?

In the history of genre SF there are many ships that pass in the night, never to be seen or heard from again, one of these being Jack Sharkey. Sharkey had made his debut at the tail end of the ’50s and wrote a pretty considerable amount of short fiction over the next half-dozen years. For reasons I’m not sure about, because we don’t know much about Sharkey, he more or less disappeared from the field after 1965. As far as I can make out writing SF was just a temporary side gig for him, which is strange since he was most active at a time when the US magazine market was at low tide, with the bubble having burst in the back end of the ’50s. Even the SF Encyclopedia doesn’t have much to say about him. Nearly every genre outlet at the time bought his stuff, though, which means he must’ve made some impression. He also had a series of short stories that caught my attention, about a “space zoologist” named Jerry Norcriss, at a time when zoology and generally the study of animal life were still rather novel in modern SF. “Arcturus Times Three” is the first entry in this series.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in Uncollected Stars (ed. Piers Anthony, Martin H. Greenberg, Barry N. Malzberg, and Charles G. Waugh). The copyright ran out, so it’s on Project Gutenberg. Surprisingly there was never a book collecting all of the Jerry Norcriss stories.

Enhancing Image

By the year 2097, man has voyaged to the stars, going where no one has gone before, to seek out new life and new civilizations, yadda yadda. However, making first contact in-person with intelligent life has proven to be a hefty gamble, perhaps heavy enough that a scientific alternative was called for; that alternative is the Space Zoologist, making capital-C Contact with alien life via telepathic mind-link, in which the zoologist will spend forty minutes at minimum inside the mind of an alien creature, walking (or slithering, or swimming) around in that creature’s shoes, sharing their brain, with the creature and zoologist’s personalities having a tug-of-war over the body. The catch, of course, is that if the creature were to die in those forty minutes, the zoologist dies with them, their body being a mindless husk. Why is this so? Well, the real reason is that otherwise there would be no potential bodily harm for the zoologist and thus your story would become boring rather quickly. Meet Jerry Norcriss, thirty-year-old Space Zoologist as well as space lieutenant, IN SPAAAAAACE. The mission is to survey some local wildlife on Arcturus Three, although the exact reason for this is not given until the end, so best not to think about it. The point is to stick Jerry’s mind in the heads of three random lifeforms, which he will not know anything about in advance and who are very likely to die within those forty minutes. Sounds simple enough, right?

I have a few issues. One has to think the mortality rate for Space Zoologist must be ridiculous, to the point where it might be more costly than to have a survey team come down and bring the party to the aliens. It also doesn’t occur to any of these people that sending robots would be preferable; surely it was not a novel idea, in 1961, to use robotic probes instead of humans to explore hostile environments. But then we wouldn’t have a story. At the same time, wouldn’t it make sense for the space crew to figure out some way to, I dunno, figure out what kind of lifeform Jerry would be sharing a head with in advance. It’s a shame, because the idea is a neat one, which borders on transhumanism. As the narrator tells us, “A man who has been an animal has infinitely more knowledge of that animal than a man who has merely dissected one.” Jerry’s interest in alien biology goes to a point where he doesn’t relate much to his fellow humans, and what little we find out about his character in this story (I assume we learn more in future entries, but not that much given the episodic nature of the whole thing) is just about enough to make us relate to him. I mean fuck, I don’t like hanging out with people that much either. With that said, this is not a cerebral or personal story, but an old-fashioned scientific adventure of the sort that would become increasingly rare as the ’60s progressed—or so retrospective views on the genre’s history would have it seem. Evidently there was still a sizable audience for this sort of thing.

As for the animals that Jerry takes control of, there’s a bit of variety between the three of them (get it, because it’s like a pun with the title, Arcturus Three and there being three animals…), with the first being this weird centipede creature that’s connected to another animals via its tongue; then there’s the most compelling sequence, where Jerry’s in the body of a “lion-thing,” somewhere between a lion and a bear, with its cub. The lion-thing’s instinctive behavior turns out to be as much that of a lemming’s as a lion’s, including a tendency to eat things that are very not good for it. Not that Jerry would know until he finds his tummy hurts real bad, on account of not being able to survey the territory beforehand. LIKE THEY SHOULD’VE FUCKING DONE. The only reason he gets out of it in one piece is having to do with time dilation, or rather Sharkey has his thumb on the scales so as to make sure his hero gets out okay. (In fairness, time would work differently on another planet. You say forty minutes, but how much is forty minutes on a planet that has a different gravity and rotation from Earth’s?) It’s all in good fun. We even get some fully intelligent aliens thrown into the mix, although their role is tertiary enough that one is quick to forget about them. This is a story where the journey matters much more than the destination, although I’m not sure if the journey was worth it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The most interesting part of this whole thing for me was the ending, which, after some rather lightweight planetary adventuring, reckons with a serious problem—that being the problem of colonization and the ensuing (and inevitable) ecological damage. On top of his awkwardness around people, Jerry feels more than a hint of shame about contributing to what will be a protracted and brutal colonization effort, in which the aforementioned animals will be displaced or killed outright, yet he also feels powerless to do anything about what is ultimately a systemic issue. He loves his job, and yet he doesn’t like what it costs for life in the universe. As the narrator says, clearly reflecting Jerry’s (and probably Sharkey’s) feelings, “People always were puzzled about how a Space Zoologist could stand being a creature other than a human being. And Space Zoologists always were puzzled about how a human being could stand being part of that conquering race called man.” I wish the rest of the story had something like this degree of seriousness, but it’s too little and a bit too late.

A Step Farther Out

I sat around for a couple days trying to organize my thoughts on this, which when such a thing happens is either from too much or too little material; in the case of “Arcturus Times Three” it’s the latter. Sharkey’s a competent storyteller with a clear interest in a certain science, but given how long this story is (it’s a solid novelette), it’s not quite enough meat on its bones. The alien creatures Sharkey describes are neat enough, but I got this consistent and burdensome feeling of wanting more, on top of the fact that I was much slower about reading this than I should’ve been. If I’m taking several breaks during your story that I should’ve been able to read in an hour or so, then something is definitely missing.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “When I Was Miss Dow” by Sonya Dorman

June 21st, 2025

(Cover by Gray Morrow. Galaxy, June 1966.)

Who Goes There?

Despite living to quite an old age, Sonya Dorman only wrote a couple dozen SF stories, probably because she was more a poet than a writer of short fiction. She appeared in the pre-New Wave ’60s when she was pushing forty, so for those of you who are unsure about trying your luck as a writer at such-and-such an age, don’t be. She was one of the few women to appear in Dangerous Visions, with the story “Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird,” although by far her most reprinted story is “When I Was Miss Dow.” Now, I have read “When I Was Miss Dow” before, and I know I have because it’s in one of the below-mentioned anthologies I’ve read from cover to cover; but if you pointed a gun to my head and told me to recap the plot of this story prior to rereading it, you would have blood on your hands. I was originally gonna review a different Dorman story, “Journey,” but upon reading it one-and-a-half times I found a problem: I had basically nothing to say about it. On the other hand, a reread of “When I Was Miss Dow” was certainly in order, and given that a decent amount has been written about it already, I figured I should throw my hat into the ring. Why not.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1966 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It has been reprinted in Nebula Award Stories Number Two (ed. Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison), SF 12 (ed. Judith Merril), Women of Wonder (ed. Pamela Sargent), The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (ed. Brian Attebery and Ursula K. Le Guin), and The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, From Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin (ed. Lisa Yaszek).

Enhancing Image

When I read “Journey” I found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place for a couple days because, frankly, I didn’t know what I could say about it that would justify a whole review around it. Thankfully “When I Was Miss Dow” does not have this issue, being a brief but compact and multifaceted short story that has a few layers to it; that it came pretty close to getting a Nebula nomination is understandable, and actually given that only three stories made the cut that year (not sure why there were so few nominees), some extra space certainly could’ve been made for it. What is the plot, then? Humans have come to some remote planet to form a colony, encountering a sentient race that already lives there—the problem being that said race is a bunch of blobs, single-sexed (apparently all male), and also single-lobed, which is a strange detail. The narrator, who does not have a name, is a young scholar among his people who is given an assignment by his Uncle (with a capital U) and the “Warden of Mines and Seeds” to go undercover as a human woman by the name of Martha Dow. These blobs are not only quite intelligent but also Protean, able to morph into just about any shape one can imagine, which includes mimicking not only the look but even the internal organs of a human being. As Martha Dow the narrator is to work as an assistant to Dr. Arnold Proctor, a gruff middle-aged man and the human colony’s lead biologist. This is the narrator’s first time mimicking a human, which means first time mimicking the human brain’s two lobes. I’m sure that nothing dramatic will happen here.

For being present in only one short story which itself only runs about a dozen pages, the aliens in “When I Was Miss Dow” are lovingly realized. There are few cases, even during the New Wave ’60s, of alien races which are about as intelligent as humans and yet decidedly not humanoid, yet Dorman’s aliens are of a rare sort. Within those dozen pages we’re enlightened as to where they live, how they live, how they reproduce (or rather, how they do not), what social relations they have, what they do for leisure, and of course, how they think. The narrator, who henceforth I’ll refer to as Dow, is used to taking on the likenesses of others, but there’s something very different about this assignment, as it takes little time for the narrator and Dow’s personalities to start merging. This is obviously a story about gender and identity, which for SF in 1966 is actually a novelty; not that it was the first to ever explore these issues from an implicitly feminist perspective, but that its observations on gender and its relationship with one’s self-perception still read as true to the human condition. A lot of stories from the era, and indeed for a while after, that explore gender do so in ways that now read as dated, be it in ways that are misogynistic and/or transphobic. “When I Was Miss Dow” basically doesn’t have this issue. The narrator’s identity crisis is implied to sprout from mimicking Martha Dow’s second lobe, in which the two personalities have a silent tug-of-war match, but other than that the crisis comes down to psychology rather than biology. The biological essentialism that much old-school genderqueer fiction runs into is more or less absent here, as this is ultimately a character study about a “he” who finds that he may not be strictly a “he” after all, but perhaps genderfluid. By using a Protean alien as her case study, Dorman seems to be arguing that gender itself is Protean, in that it is not necessarily fixed in place.

Let’s talk about sexual orientation. Since the aliens seem to reproduce asexually, they aren’t heterosexual or homosexual (or even bisexual) by default, but instead their orientation seems to be influenced by the biological makeup of the beings they mimic. (This is mostly just speculation on my part, so don’t take my word for it.) Dow makes no mention of finding anyone of any sexuality attractive beforehand, but once they meet Dr. Proctor they become smitten with him rather quickly—an attraction that Dr. Proctor is about as quick to reciprocate. Dow, outside of the Martha Dow personality, is male, yet takes on the form of a human woman. Does Dow-the-alien, who is male, find Proctor attractive, or is that more the work of Dow-the-human? It would be hard to argue that this is not in some way a queer romance, although Proctor is blissfully unaware that the woman he’s become smitten with is actually a slimy alien in disguise. Dow themself is unsure about which side of their brain has more power, yet funnily enough they do not question if their attraction to Proctor would be considered gay or straight, or even if it’s taboo somehow. The real problem is that Dow doesn’t know how much control they have over themself, even down to their own thoughts. “I’m suffering from eclipses: one goes dark, the other lights up, that one goes dark, the other goes nova.” I should probably also mention that the prose here is stylish without becoming overbearing, such that it makes sense that Dow normally works as a scholar. There’s a sense of controlled expertise with the English language, which also makes sense since, as you may recall, Dorman seemed to think of herself as more of a poet. There’s a poet’s sensibility about “When I Was Miss Dow” that, unusually for the New Wave era, is balanced by a genuinely compelling narrative.

I do have a couple quibbles, because there is no such thing as a perfect story. (Just to prove my point, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is pretty close to a perfect short story, although I always felt like that last scene at the very end was unnecessary.) For one, it’s awfully convenient that the planet the humans have landed on is pretty Earth-like, and also that the aliens have no issue learning human language. There’s an indigenous animal called a koota that may as well be somewhere between a dog and a horse; we’re only given scant descriptions of it, and I must confess I didn’t find the relationship Dow has with their aging koota to be that compelling. Dorman is of course drawing a parallel between the old koota’s fixed biology and Dow’s ability to shapeshift, along with the fact that Proctor himself is visibly aging; it’s not a subtle parallel, in a story that otherwise thrives on subtlety. I’m also not sure about Proctor having a relationship with Dow, since despite Dow called him a man of “perfect integrity” I’m pretty sure it would be considered sexual harassment (or at least morally dubious) for someone in Proctor’s position to have a romantic/sexual relationship with his assistant. The Warden gives Dow shit over the relationship, but more because of the lack of professionalism on Dow’s part than anything. I gotta tell ya, work culture has changed over the past sixty years.

There Be Spoilers Here

As Dow and Proctor’s relationship progresses, and as the latter teaches the former more about how to live as a human (although he isn’t aware of this), Dow becomes more detached from their original personality. The Martha Dow personality has taken such a strong hold that the narrator feels they might not ever be able to go back. They have long since taken to called Proctor “Arnie” rather than his last or even his first name. They like things as they are a little too much. “If I’m damaged or dead, you’ll put me into the cell banks, and you’ll be amazed, astonished, terrified, to discover that I come out complete, all Martha. I can’t be changed.” Of course, everything has to come to an end. Proctor dies one night, apparently from a heart attack. Natural causes. These things happen. Dow’s way of life is over. She tried bargaining for Proctor to be somehow resurrected with the aliens’ pattern-making chambers, but it’s not possible, and anyway even if it was the higher-ups wouldn’t approve of it. The Warden, who was due for “conjunction” (the aliens’ cycle of death and rebirth) anyway, “dies” and comes out a nephew. At the end, after everything that could be done had been, the narrator reflects that every lifeform, from the humans to the kootas to their own race, has such a cycle of death and rebirth. The narrator lets go of the Dow personality and reverts to their original state, but it’s ambiguous if they’ve totally shaken off what had been, if only temporarily, part of themself. As they say, “I’m becoming somber, and a brilliant student.” What they feel at the end could be considered gender dysphoria, with the reverting to their original state as being analogous to detransitioning. The sad part is that if we are really meant to take the narrator letting go of the Martha identity as detransitioning, then it was clearly a choice not made of their own volition; if they could they would probably stay in that form forever. Martha Dow was a part of them, but they couldn’t keep her.

A Step Farther Out

I didn’t like “Journey” very much partly because I felt like it didn’t give me much to chew on, but also I don’t think it worked as science fiction. Good SF, or at least what Theodore Sturgeon considered good SF (and Sturgeon, like Dorman, had a poet’s gentleness), should present an SFnal problem with a human solution. “Journey” could just as easily have been written as a Western (although the market for literary Westerns basically did not exist in the ’70s), but “When I Was Miss Dow” cannot work as anything other than science fiction. It has some big ideas but is also prone to introspection. It’s, simply put, one of the best SF short stories of the ’60s, and unlike some other favorites of mine from that era I don’t feel the need to put a “this is a bit problematic or outdated” asterisk next to it. I don’t know why it just went in one ear and out the other for me the first time I read it, that was my bad. Please check this one out.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Breakfast at Twilight” by Philip K. Dick

June 3rd, 2025

(Cover by Clarence Doore. Amazing Stories, July 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Philip K. Dick is one of the most important SF authors to ever live, and this is despite dying at 53 with a string of failed marriages and financial hardship left behind him. He was the first genre SF writer to get a Library of America volume, preserving some of his novels with fancy hardcover editions. The Philip K. Dick Award, given annually to the best SF novel first published in paperback, is still going to this day. Stanislaw Lem considered Dick to be the only American SF writer at the time (we’re talking the ’60s and ’70s) worth taking seriously. Whereas most authors would see their reputations taken a dent or two in light of certain transgressions, with Dick his mental illness and bad habits (namely his misogynistic streak and toxic behavior with friends, especially later in his life) are part of the “charm” for Dick fans. Indeed the fact that Dick was a hot mess is the name of the game. But before he became one of the most acclaimed novelists in the field he was one of the most acclaimed (and prolific) short story writers. 121 short stories and novellas, about half of which were written over the span of just a few years. “Breakfast at Twilight” is a Cold War parable, and one of the most solid (he wrote several) that Dick wrote.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1954 issue of Amazing Stories. It was then reprinted in the November 1966 issue of Fantastic. For anthology appearances we have Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wild Years 1946-1955 (ed. Martin H. Greenberg). As for Dick collections there are almost too many to count, but the big one is Second Variety, also titled We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and Other Classic Stories, which is the second in the book series collecting Dick’s short fiction.

Enhancing Image

The McLeans are a normal family who live just outside the city. Tim is an accountant, his wife Mary keeps house, and then there are their three kids, those being their son Earl, along with two daughters whose names are not important enough. One fine morning they’re having breakfast and the kids head off to school, only to discover there’s no school to go to—indeed there doesn’t seem to be anyone around for miles. The sky has also gone dark and the air is thick with a mix of fog and ash. Looks like the McLeans aren’t going anywhere after all, and this ends up being doubly the case when a group of soldiers come knocking at their door. The soldiers, unsure of how a house has remained in this landscape intact, accuse the McLeans of being “geeps” in disguise at first, which is to say Soviet infantry. The Cold War has apparently gone hot, with the Soviets having effectively invaded the US via a mix of “geeps” and “roms,” the latter being “robot operated missiles,” what basically amount to armed drones. The captain of the troops considers burning the whole place down with the McLeans inside, given that they don’t have their papers or their masks; but at the same time the whole situation is so inexplicable that the captain decides to call in a “polic” (a political commissioner) to investigate. The McLeans find that their house has somehow been launched seven years into the future, to the year 1980, three years after the Cold War escalated.

(By the way, the introductory blurb in the story’s original appearance is inaccurate, as it says “a hundred years” into the future. This is way off, which makes me think Dick didn’t write it.)

“Breakfast at Twilight” is a nicely self-contained little piece that honestly reads like it could’ve worked just as well for radio or a half-episode TV episode; that it has apparently never been adapted to another medium is a little perplexing. We get one location plus a small group of characters: the McLeans, the soldiers, and then Douglas the political commissioner. Very Twilight Zone vibes with this one, although it was published five years before that series. Dick’s beige prose style works in his favor, as we waste no time in establishing the premise and what’s at stake, and while most of the dialogue is expositional, it’s a lot to digest in only about a dozen pages. Given that Dick wrote quite a few stories about how the Cold War might escalate, he was kind of a pro at this sort of thing; but whereas “Second Variety” and “The Defenders” are from military points of voice, and “The Minority Report” uses policing as an allegory for the Cold War, “Breakfast at Twilight” is more about how civilians might cope with an American that has been all but torn asunder by bombs and boots on the ground. The future that the McLeans see is not that far from where they once were, and understandably they’re horrified not only by the physical destruction of the environment, but the US sliding into fascism in the name of combatting Soviet communism. Dick’s politics were honestly all over the place, but one thing he remained consistent on was being against McCarthyism and general alarmism when it came to the Soviets. The US of the near-future is not only in shambles but has devolved into a fiercely anti-intellectual and utilitarian culture, in which even certain books have been burned publicly (Douglas suggests Tim ditch the Dostoevsky in his library).

The creepiest part is that we have no clue who is even winning in this war, with the implication that whoever comes out on top will have experienced a pyrrhic victory. Earl, who’s depicted as being the most pro-war of the family (that the rash and naive son would be the most enthusiastic is, of course, a dig at ’50s jingoism), asks the soldiers more than once who is winning in this war, and nobody answers him. It’s a big thing that goes unsaid, and while Dick is not the most subtle of writers, he’s capable of some really insightful moments that cut with a trained surgeon’s precision. Now, we get an explanation for how the McLeans’ house got sent forward (or is it backward?) in time, having to do with radio and nuclear radiation, but it’s a nonsensical “sci-fi” thing that’s only there because it has to be. Dick was not a “hard” SF writer in that he was not concerned with the mechanics, or rather he saw the semblance of mechanics as a means to an end. I would take more issue with the SFnal conceit here being more or less arbitrary if the results weren’t worth it. The dilemma the McLeans then face is whether to go with the soldiers and basically become slave labor for a fascist shithole, but at leasr being safe in the short term, or remaining in the house in the slim hope that it might shuffle back to its original point in time before the Soviets are due to bomb the joint tonight. So you’ve got a bad situation vs. possibly an even worse situation, but the McLeans decide to stay.

There Be Spoilers Here

Tim gathers the family in the basement and the family makes it out by the skin of their teeth, with the house being sent back in time spontaneously just like they’d hoped. This in itself is predictable, because like, either their plan was gonna work or it wasn’t. What happens once Tim and his family emerge from the wreckage of their home (everything above the basement had gotten blasted to shit), is however quite different, and also haunting. See, the problem is that while the family narrowly avoided getting bombed, the war that they suddenly found themselves in is still happening in the future; not only that, but the war has already started. It began years ago, only soon it’s gonna go hot. The war is already happening. We then get a kind of internal monologue from Tim, who may as well be Dick’s mouthpiece in this instance, and it’s a good one:

It’s war. Total war. And not just war for me. For my family. For just my house.

It’s for your house, too. Your house and my house and all the houses. Here and in the next block, in the next town, the next state and country and continent. The whole world, like this. Shambles and ruins. Fog and dank weeds growing in the rusting slag. War for all of us. For everybody crowding down into the basement, white-faced, frightened, somehow sensing something terrible.

It’s an ending that’s not as much of a downer as what happens in “Second Variety,” but it’s no less fatalistic. Imagine living in 2018 and suddenly getting sent to 2025, and having to catch up on… more than a few things. Then you’re sent back to 2018. What would you do? Can you do anything to ease the sense of oncoming horror? On paper it’s a standard ending for this type of story, but it’s elevated by Dick’s unique intensity of paranoia, which captures the borderline apocalyptic feeling people were experiencing in the ’50s and at other points.

A Step Farther Out

Dick wrote quite a few short stories that are gimmicky and/or forgettable, but “Breakfast at Twilight” is not one of those. This is a taut and serious-minded story about a future that was quite possible at the time, and even if the Cold War never escalated to a certain point like Dick feared, it’s a paranoia that speaks to any age in which the government and ruling class could screw everyone over at any moment. We are unfortunately being forced to live in “interesting times.” This is also an effective companion piece to “Second Variety,” arguably more so than with “The Defenders,” which Dick had more explicitly written in tandem with that story. Dick’s stories (same goes for his novels) tend to riff on the same basic ideas over and over, so that they can often be compared with each other.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler

May 26th, 2025

(Cover by Graves Gladney. Unknown, November 1939.)

Who Goes There?

Crime fiction was and still is a genre kept in its own ghetto, like SF and fantasy, but as with those other genres it sometimes has broken into the literary mainstream. One of the big success stories of classic crime fiction is Raymond Chandler, who aside from writing some poetry had not tried his hand at writing professionally at all until he was in his forties. (This is a lesson in how if you’re such-and-such an age and wondering if it’s too late to try your hand at writing, don’t worry.) He was born in Chicago but came to be deeply affiliated with LA, which is no surprise given that that nearly all his novels take place in LA and its surroundings. He also spent some of his formative years in England, getting an education there, hence his US-UK dual citizenship. In fact Chandler’s knowledge of England plays into today’s story, which is not a detective story (although there is a detective in it), nor is it set in the US at all, but instead Victorian-era London. “The Bronze Door” is the only Chandler story to be published first in an SFF magazine, and it saw print the same year as The Big Sleep, his debut novel. Chandler had turned fifty by this point. He ended up writing only seven novels plus a rather modest supply of short fiction (he mostly stopped with the latter by around 1940), but it was enough.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1939 issue of Unknown. It has the rare of actually appearing in a genre magazine twice, being reprinted in the October 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can also find it in the Chandler volume Collected Stories.

Enhancing Image

James Sutton-Cornish is fat and middle-aged, and also given to day drinking, which angers his wife to the point where she can’t take it anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Sutton-Cornish have been living in the estate of the former’s ancestors, which really is the only thing that belongs to him; everything else belongs to the wife, including Teddy, their dog. “The rest was hers. Even the clothes he wore, the money in his bank account. But the house was still his—at least in name.” With their divorce underway, James heads out and goes into a bit of a stupor, and catches a cab—that being a horse-and-buggy, not a car. This strikes him as odd, but not that odd. “The Bronze Door” is presumably set in what was then the present day (the 1930s), and at one point James refers to “the war,” probably meaning World War I. But the cab seems to go back in time, at least to the Edwardian era, so that as James makes his way to Soho he also travels to an older, darker, grimier London. He doesn’t like this very much. He ends up at an auction house, and this is where he comes across the door of the title, which is a pretty weird contraption. It’s a metal door that can be placed anywhere and which opens one way, to—somewhere. Possibly nowhere. The theory we get from James is that the bronze door comes from the Golden Age of Islam, in which a sultan or whoever would use it as a method of hiding inconvenient concubines. (It’s Chandler, so of course sex comes up, but it’s also Unknown so it’s very tame.) James takes the door back home with him. Hilarity ensues.

Not that James was a good person to begin with (actually he and Mrs. Sutton-Cornish were arguably made for each other in that they’re both kinda evil), but “The Bronze Door” sees Our Anti-Hero™ slip into outright villainy by the simple abuse of a magical power. We see what the door does by some criminal who’s on the run going through it and simply vanishing into thin air, and it doesn’t take long for James to get a few ideas as to how the door might be applied to his benefit. Like getting rid of a bitchy ex-wife. There’s a tinge of misogyny here, as well as a homophobic remark that Chandler throws out there out of nowhere. At his home, James has portraits of now-gone family members, with the one sticking out being a general who was apparently an evil piece of shit, and also “fruity-looking” in the attire he wore for his portrait. Of course we’re supposed to infer that this general was depraved and debauched in some way, although in ways that Chandler is not really able to describe; for better or worse the general’s crimes are left up to the imagination. Given that Chandler’s writing can be pretty hardboiled and graphic for the time, I have to wonder if “The Bronze Door” was written as this tame or if it got put through the washer by John W. Campbell and his secretary. In the introduction for the F&SF reprint, the editors say that Chandler had actually written a lot of fantasy fiction over the years, but without the intent of seeing it published. The implication is that there’s this treasure trove of such fiction written by Chandler, but given that Chandler died in 1959 and that literally none of this alleged fiction has turned up, I have to wonder if they were misled, or if perhaps Chandler’s estate had his unpublished work locked away indefinitely. Needless to say this is not as hardboiled as Chandler’s usual stuff, and also given that he turned mostly to writing novels after this point it’s easy to see how he only had one other fantasy story published.

I mentioned earlier that while it’s not really a detective story, “The Bronze Door” does have a detective, in the form of Detective-sergeant Lloyd, who starts out as being on the trail of the criminal James has sent through the door, and who later sniffs around once one too many people in the area go missing without a trace. Lloyd is probably the closest we get in Chandler’s work to his take on Sherlock Holmes, although Lloyd is less a Sherlock parody and more your typical image of a late 19th or early 20th century British detective. (I should also probably mention again that the time period for “The Bronze Door” is rather vague, since it’s implied to take place in what was then the modern day, but there are also hints of a pre-WWI Britain. Chandler doesn’t explain it really, and this might be my biggest quibble with the story.) Generally Chandler could’ve done to explain more of the setting, or rather given us a more vivid picture, but what he does give us is splendid in the moment. Nobody does the simile quite like Chandler. There are descriptions of things here that I’d never even thought of before, let alone seen in writing. Philip Marlowe, the jaded protagonist of all of Chandler’s novels, has a way with words that tells us he’s more cultured than he appears, being a chronically drunk private detective, and Chandler does what he can to translate this prose-poetry to a very different setting with a very different kind of protagonist. If this were a more typical Chandler story then Lloyd would be the viewpoint character, since he’s the closest we get to a hero in this ordeal, but instead for the most part we’re stuck in the shoes of the no-good upper-class bum that is James.

There Be Spoilers Here

After James has gitten rid of the wife, and also her dog, one gets the sense that the walls are closing in on him. He’s “won” in the short term, but now he’s lonelier than ever, firing the few people working at his estate and spending the rest of the story as a cranky loner, sinking deeper into what is clearly insanity. There’s a hint of the gothic about “The Bronze Door,” with both the architecture of James’s estate and the implication that he’s falling prey to a strain of insanity that runs in his family. It’s somewhere between “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Rats in the Walls,” although it’s not quite a horror story. Naturally murder (in effect if not the exact result) will out, and eventually Lloyd tracks down James. The two have a bit of a fight, although it doesn’t last long, which makes since given we’re told Lloyd is a lot more physically fit than the decrepit James. The ending as a whole is not surprising, but a neat touch is that Lloyd gets some PTSD from James disappearing into the bronze door, it being a supernatural event that he can never bring himself to explain. It’s something that would freak out anyone outside of The X-Files, even someone as experienced as Lloyd. But hey, he gets a promotion and becomes an inspector by the end, so it’s not all bad. The fact that we never see what becomes of people who go through the bronze door makes it just a bit creepier. I should mention that Chandler, aside from being a raging alcoholic, seemed to have episodes of depression, most severely after his wife died, wherein he actually attempted suicide, so his fiction would be pessimistic.

A Step Farther Out

As you can see, “The Bronze Door” is a little detour in Chandler’s oeuvre, being a fantastic mystery, but not a mystery of the sort that Chandler was used to writing. Then there’s the setting, of which we never see the like again before or after with Chandler. It’s predictable, but also a solid story that’s elevated by Chandler being frankly a better prose stylist than most of the people contributing to Unknown. When you read Chandler you read for the flavor of the words more so than the plot. Not sure how Campbell managed to procure a story from someone who apparently had no experience with fantasy, but it’s a charming and somewhat eerie diversion that sees a master outside of his realm of expertise.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou

May 12th, 2025

(Cover by Zara Alfonso. Uncanny, May-June 2024.)

Who Goes There?

As you probably don’t know, I’m voting in this year’s Hugos, which makes it the second consecutive time I’ve done this. I’ll be brutally honest and say I get the supporting membership for all the free goodies it comes with more so than to take part in the grueling and overcrowded popularity contest that is the Hugos. One major plus, aside from the free stuff and indeed the thing that comes with all that free stuff, is that I’m finally given an excuse to dip my toes in more recent SFF. See, an unspoken rule of my site is that a story has to be at least one year (twelve months) old for me to consider it, since when it comes to literature I prefer to let the art marinate in the broth of time first before getting a taste of it. It’s a weird bias of mine that goes back to when I first started reading casually as a youngling, I can’t really explain it. Eugenia Triantafyllou’s “Loneliness Universe” is a Hugo finalist this year for Best Novelette, and it had already gotten a Nebula nomination. I’d been meaning to read some Triantafyllou for a minute, but have not been able to. I don’t really have an excuse. Triantafyllou is one of the most acclaimed short story writers in the field right now (she has not written a novel, at least as of yet), and like many other authors currently working she’s the sort of talent who probably had a tough go at it a few decades ago. The internet and especially online magazines have made it easier for people from outside the Anglosphere (Triantafyllou is from Greece, as she’ll have you know) to get their foot in the door, and this is very much a good thing. Despite being born and raised in Greece, Triantafyllou has pulled a Joseph Conrad and writes her fiction in English.

Now, I did not know, when I posted my review forecast on the first day of this month, that ON THE SAME DAY James Wallace Harris would post his review of this same story, so that “Loneliness Universe” is getting covered at least twice in the span of two weeks. I can say what drew me to this story, but I can’t say what would draw other people. It’s not perfect (I spotted a malapropism, and also a factual inaccuracy that distracted me), but its basic conceit is compelling enough that I’ve been stuck thinking about it for the past couple days. It’s also only nominally SFnal, really using an SFnal premise as a diving board for allegory rather than investigating a scientific phenomenon. It’s SF of such a mushy softness that it almost feels like fantasy, but this is a human narrative about a uniquely human state of mind that is sadly becoming all more commonplace. Fair warning: I’ll be talking about my autism, bouts of depression, and suicidal ideation with this one, since it’s that kind of story. It’s less that “Loneliness Universe” is exceptionally dark or bleak and more that Triantafyllou does a good job of pinpointing something I’ve been feeling for years now.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May-June issue of Uncanny Magazine, so it’s just old enough for me to have considered for review. So far it has not been reprinted anywhere, but I’m sure that’ll change soon.

Enhancing Image

We start at the ending, with an email Nefeli sends to her old friend Cara, after the two tried but failed to meet in person, after years of silence between them. Nefeli’s wondering, after the fact, if their attempt at reconnecting would’ve worked out if not for the universe quite literally preventing them from occupying the same space. “But we’ll never know. Because despite what the scientists may say, I believe I broke the universe by coming to find you.” That last part’s probably not true, but Nefeli was patient zero for what turned out to be a world-spanning phenomenon. We’re given a general idea as to how things turned out, but Triantafyllou only gives us the details piece by piece. Some stories are a whodunnit, some are a howdidit, but “Loneliness Universe” is very much a howdidwegethere. In that sense it’s a hard story to spoil since we’re told upfront that shit’s not gonna work out—the question then being how they don’t work out. There is, of course, a big difference between having a very good meal set at your table and seeing the chef and his assistants work on said meal. The process is at least as important as the result. Indeed the process of making art (which includes cooking) is the art. So how did we get here?

Reconnecting with old friends after months or years of nothing is usually awkward, because (often correctly) there’s the sense that the part wanting to reconnect also wants something in return. What is there to say after the relationship had seemingly fizzled and reached its natural conclusion. Usually people just drift apart, or maybe it was an argument that did it. Nefeli and Cara are two old friends in Greece who had drifted apart, under, it must be said, less than ideal circumstances; but now Nefeli sees a chance to rekindle their friendship. The internet was in its toddler stage before (“the pre-internet days were rough”), but since the proliferation of social media the two have reconnected in their twenties (I feel old since they’re a few years younger than me), agreeing to meet up at a spot. What could go wrong? Quite a few things, although what goes wrong is something neither of them could’ve possibly predicted. Each thinks the other has stood her up, but no, they’re at the same place—just not the same version of that place. Like layers of film overlapping when one’s in the editing room. Nefeli and Cara are sitting on the same bench, at the same time, but they’re not occupying the same space. This is a problem. Soon enough it also applies to Nefeli’s brother, Antonis, whom she’s living with. Speaking of which, this story takes place over the course of a few months in 2015, and we know this because the emails Nefeli sends are dated; but otherwise you wouldn’t know it takes place in 2015, not helped by Antonis at one point mentioning he had a PS5, which wouldn’t come out for five more years. I have to assume this was a flub on Triantafyllou’s part.

(Remember 2015? A lot has happened since then. We didn’t worry about wearing masks in public. House of Cards was the biggest show on Netflix. Louis C.K. was a respected comedian. Vine was a thing. Elon Musk was just another “eccentric” rich asshole. The apparatus of neo-liberal capitalist “democracy” in the US was on shaky ground but didn’t look like it would crumble and give way to a kind of blue-collar trade-union-endorsed fascism propped up by technocracy.)

I’m actually not sure what the purpose of making “Loneliness Universe” a sort of period piece was; it could be that setting it in the present would’ve dated it much more severely, especially given that things (by that I mean mostly bad things) seem to be happening at a much faster pace now. Time itself seems to be moving differently. The internet has been changing our perception of time for about the past three decades, only doing more so with Web 3.0 and the more drastic splintering of the web. We know this because possibly the biggest precursor to “Loneliness Universe,” although not necessarily an influence (I don’t know if Triantafyllou has seen it), is the 2001 Japanese horror movie Pulse. Without giving away the third act of that movie, the premise is basically that ghosts are making their way into the world of the living through the internet, which sounds silly on paper, but in execution ends up being quite haunting. The world becomes more devoid of human life, being replaced by these static-filled entities that wander about the landscape, forever separated from every other one of their kind. The ghosts are not happy to be here, nor are they even really malevolent, but they’re isolated. To somewhat paraphrase a line from that movie, “Death is eternal loneliness.” Nefeli is first separated from her old friend, then her brother, then her parents, then everyone close to her in her life—except through the internet. Emails, text messages, an online game called TinyCastle they play together. But she’s unable to interact with these people in-person, and this is only the beginning.

However, being an undiagnosed (it’s hard to blame me, given current circumstances in the US, for not getting diagnosed as an adult) autistic person, I’ve been living with a more mild version of Nefeli’s situation for pretty much my whole life. Indeed, anyone who’s autistic and/or clinically depressed (and I’m both of those) can tell you that they already live day to day with this weird sense of disconnection from other people—a disconnection that’s easier to cope with over text and other online activities, but which becomes unbearable in-person. It must be tempting, if you’re a neurotypical, to see the dysfunction autistics experience as a result of the internet, or some other stupid reason (it’s painfully clear to me that a lot of neurotypicals see autism as some disease that must be cured, or prevented by way of eugenics), but really there’ve been autistic people for centuries. Really the paradox of the internet (that it allows people from different countries and even continents to connect with each other, while also balkanizing the same people into little niche groups and interests) has been fostering a dissonance in the minds of neurotypicals which people with autism have had to deal with since at least the time of Shakespeare. Yeah, you people get mad at us if our tone is even a bit “off” in public spaces, and then you wonder why we retreat into online chat rooms and game lobbies for acceptance. It’s not much of a mystery, ya know. I think what gives “Loneliness Universe” its power, despite my gripes with it, is that it allegorizes something that most people would otherwise have only the faintest idea of, that being the growing entropy someone like me senses every day—the theoretically infinite drifting-apart of time and space.

There Be Spoilers Here

“The scientists” (it’s pretty vague as to what this phenomenon is, not like it needed to be specific) are theorizing that the universe is operating in a wax-wane cycle, so that hopefully, before too long, people will start living on the same dimensional level again. Assuming it happens in the first place. For all Nefeli knows the universe will just get more and more spaced out, until everyone is like the ghosts in Pulse, forever separated from everyone else. We don’t know if things get better; the story ends on a rather open note. But then of course we had already seen the ending. What had started with Nefeli is now happening with everyone else. It doesn’t really make sense if you try to look at it scientifically, but it does make sense on an emotional level, because some of us are already living through this. When I said “Loneliness Universe” is only nominally SF, that’s what I mean; it’s only SF by virtue of not being a “realistic” story and at the same time it’s not a straightforward ghost story, although it kinda is one. It’s a techno-ghost story in which the ghosts are still alive, in that they are the living dead, and so are we by extension. We’re the living dead.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry that this has been bleak. Actually I’m not sorry. I would’ve written my review yesterday, but I was busy “crashing out,” as the current lingo has it. I laid in my bed for nearly an hour resisting the urge to head to the kitchen, take out one of my knives, and harm myself. I felt completely alone in the world, and it was not the first nor will it be the last time I get this feeling. I really hate it here. For what it’s worth, I do recommend “Loneliness Universe,” but it’s a lot. It’s supposed to be a lot. Sometimes we need art that makes us feel like shit.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 1/3)

May 9th, 2025

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

Who Goes There?

In the ’50s and for much of the ’60s the US and UK scenes of science fiction were kept somewhat apart, albeit with some cross-pollination with their authors. Some UK authors appeared in US magazines and vice versa, and one of these authors from the UK to find moderate success in the US was James White. White was one of the few Irish SF writers active at the time, and that perspective ended up being rather novel, even if White himself was only a B-tier writer all said and done. Whereas the standard view at the time was that war was either basically good or bad but “necessary,” White was not so convinced of the virtues of lawful violence. Having been born and raised in Belfast and living through horrific violence between Catholics and Protestants would probably have that effect on a lot of people, but for White especially it had an apparent influence on his writing. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that White’s fiction tends to be more far more about saving lives than ending them. Interest in medicine (White wanted to become a doctor, but this career path was not to be) also plays a big role, most prominently with his Sector General series, maybe not the first but certainly the popularizer of the space hospital in SF. The Dream Millennium is not about a hospital, at least in an official capacity, although it does have elements of a space hospital.

Placing Coordinates

The Dream Millennium was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. It got a paperback release from Ballantine the following year, seemingly without any significant changes. Unfortunately it’s been out of print since the ’80s.

Enhancing Image

John Devlin is a passenger aboard a ship that’s on its way to a neighboring star system, in search of a planet suitable for human life. The ship is run by computers and the trip can and probably will take centuries. A lot of authors, especially back then, would find some way to cheat and have their faster-than-light travel, but James White was not one of them. The human crew are kept in cold sleep for the vast majority of the trip, being periodically awakened for brief periods to, as the computer says in all caps, “SPEAK, EXERCISE, REMEMBER.” Devlin and the others have one hour during to stretch their legs, basically, although it’s worth noting these passengers are not awakened at the same time. For all intents and purposes Devlin is alone on the ship, with only the computer for company. The “REMEMBER” part of the instructions has to do with remembering dreams, which itself is like a cognition test. The idea is that since the passengers will be in cold sleep for decades at a time, they’ll be dreaming a lot, and when they wake up for their periodic examinations their ability to recall dreams will be taken as a sign. Now, when you sleep normally, specifically during REM sleep, your dreams can at times seem vivid and at the same time feel like they last only a few minutes, while you’re in the midst of REM sleep for at least a few hours. Time works very differently in dreams. It’s not hard to figure out what the novel’s title is supposed to mean.

Devlin is, let’s say an anti-hero. We’re not sure, at first, what his deal is, but he gives the impression of having a dark and troubled past; he’s also not an astronaut or anyone really interested in space, for that matter, but someone who had a different kind of job back on Earth. Apparently there have been efforts to colonize other worlds because Earth itself is in a sorry state. Even calling it colonization is a bit misleading since that implies a more ambitious effort, like the sort of thing technocrats are obsessed with (ya know, the glory of mankind and all that), but this expedition is being done out of necessity. White is a lot of things, but he’s not much of a romantic. Most of the time there’s no life on the ship to speak of, and when there is it’s regimented and short-lived. The best thing that can be said is at least the ship’s computer really does seem to have the passengers’ best interests in mind. But still, the living situation is bleak. Part 1 of this novel is largely concerned with the first few dream cycles Devlin has that he has to recall, which on the one hand will probably turn out to have symbolic and even plot relevance, but also since these are dreams (or in one case, flashbacks) there’s no sense of urgency, nor is there much actual forward momentum with the plot for the time being. Your enjoyment of this novel will hinge partly on how much you get out of New Wave-influenced surreal imagery, mixed with more pessimism with regards to the human condition than the average. This is not to say White is a misanthrope, but… you’ll see.

The Dream Millennium has to do with the evolution of man, not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey, although it goes about things very differently from that novel/movie. Both are big in scale despite being set primarily on a cramped spaceship, but The Dream Millennium deals with events out of events, not to mention its timespan is much bigger. The first dream cycle Devlin has sees him as a trilobite in an unspeakably prehistoric period, and the second dream cycle sees him as a brontosaurus (big sauropod) during the Jurassic era. These are out-of-body experiences that don’t further the plot much, but they do provide stimulating experiences for Devlin that at the same time tell us a bit about his character. (I think White was also looking for an excuse to include dinosaurs in his space adventure novel, but that’s fine.) Despite being dreams and therefore harmless by nature, Devlin is not free from experiencing death and disease in these dream realms; it’s also ambiguous if these are just dreams or if they’re actually visions of past lives. A couple later events imply they might’ve been actual lived experiences. The most memorable scene in this first installment is right after Devlin’s second dream cycle, when there’s been a malfunction with one of the other sleep chambers a young woman’s lying in her chamber, dying horribly and not even sure what’s happening to her. Devlin tries comforting her and lies doing so (when someone’s on their deathbed you kinda have to lie to them at least a little bit to make them feel better), but the woman makes the odd confession of having had a dream that she was a dinosaur, similar to Devlin’s. This is despite the woman admitting to not having read up on prehistoric life like the computer told her to. She says she misses her boyfriend, and then she dies. It’s a surprisingly grim scene, but it’s also a tone-setter for the rest of the installment, which delves into matters of human misery.

It’s here about halfway through the first installment that we find out Devlin used to be a doctor on Earth, although it seems he’s no longer in that profession. You can take the man out of the profession but not the profession out of the man, though, because even if he’s not officially the ship’s doctor he still has the attitude of being one. It’s almost like White wanted to become a doctor, and that much of his SF reads like it could be made into a hospital drama with some tinkering. Despite working with similar material to 2001, The Dream Millennium operates on a very different worldview, so that you can tell James White and Arthur C. Clarke are very different people. In a way The Dream Millennium so far feels like an anti-2001, in that it focuses on the cramped and unromantic side of space travel, not to mention its view on the possibility of mankind ascending to gods of the universe is—let’s say more skeptical. There’s also much more of a focus on Devlin’s inner life, or what was called “inner space” at the time, that being juxtaposed with the virtual endlessness of outer space.

There Be Spoilers Here

We then get a lengthy series of flashbacks to a bit earlier in Devlin’s life, when he was a doctor, which oscillates between being genuinely harrowing and a bit too disjointed for my liking. The most memorable and harrowing (this is a rather dark book, it must be said) scene comes when Devlin’s trying to treat a dying boy who’s been brought in with a gunshot wound in his chest—a stray bullet, caught from a totally unrelated quarrel. What do you mean White lived through the Troubles? From what we see of Earth in this lengthy section, it’s a shithole, although it’s not much worse than life as we now know it—maybe a little more dystopian. I mean you can’t get much more dystopian than now, right? Another memorable scene is where Devlin, who describes himself as agnostic, gets into a kind of theological/existential argument with one Brother Howard, whom I’m sure we’ll meet again at some point. In the world of The Dream Millennium the question is not whether humanity can become masters of the universe but whether humanity can even save itself from decay and finally extinction. Have I mentioned that this is bleak? And then BAM, aliens are invading. Devlin’s not sure at first if this is really happening or if it’s some kind of trick, but no, highly advanced aliens are looking to overtake the ship. Now doesn’t this feel random? I wonder how Devlin’s gonna get himself out of this jam.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry this got delayed. I don’t really have an excuse, other than that I’ve just been struggling to write anything. Doing most everything has felt like a chore as of late, including reading stuff for my blog and other places. Then there’s the recent business with Worldcon (which YET AGAIN is getting steeped in controversy) and the fact that I’m voting this year (again), so that’s even more reading material. I’m enjoying The Dream Millennium enough so far that I hope I can get the review for the next installment out in a more timely fashion, but I can’t guarantee it.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs

April 10th, 2025

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

Who Goes There?

Overall we know about as much about Sylvia Jacobs as we know about Jesus of Nazareth. I can’t find any pictures of her, or find out when she was born or when she died; but then we at least have writings from her, so there’s that. I was pointed towards a useful piece by Rich Horton which covers what little we know about Jacobs’s life and what little fiction and non-fiction she had published in the genre magazines. She had studied oceanography, and was married to a professional deep-sea diver. She apparently had done some research for Robert Heinlein (regarding the ocean, of course) for a juvenile novel he had planned but sadly never got to write. She was a California denizen for at least some of her adult life. She wrote about half a dozen SF stories, mostly in the early ’50s, which is unsurprising given that was when the magazine market saw an immense bubble; and, just as unsurprisingly, she mostly went dormant after 1960. This is the basic narrative of a lot of lady SF writers from that period, although by no means all of them. Horton describes “The Pilot and the Bushman” as like a prototype for the light satire Christopher Anvil later wrote nonstop, although I don’t think he gives Jacobs’s story quite enough credit—not to say it’s a hidden gem, really, but there’s a fair bit going on here.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is my third time plundering this issue for gold, and it’s quite possible I will have covered all of this issue’s fiction contents eventually. The copyright must’ve run out at some point, because “The Pilot and the Bushman,” along with a couple other Jacobs stories, is on Project Gutenberg. It’s also been reprinted in Women Wrote the Future: Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy (ed. J. LaRue). Other than that it’s not seen print at all.

Enhancing Image

The first and easily longest scene is a Socratic dialogue between two men, although despite both appearing to be human one of them is, in fact, an alien. The Ambassador from Outer Space (we never get his actual name) is having a behind-closed-doors meeting with Jerry Jergins, a marketing man and predictably a bit of a scoundrel. The two are in the situation because the Ambassador had made what was called a “boner” in the old days, by that I mean he had made a slip at the UN Assembly by saying the aliens have what they call a Matter Repositor. The problem is that the Matter Repositor can replicate anything, and I do mean anything, which is no real issue for a society that does not run on industrial capitalism. (The Ambassador is quick to point out that the aliens’ economic model is NOT some brand of socialism, IT’S NOT SOCIALISM, GUYS.) The Matter Repositor may as well be magic, but the point is that mankind is too “primitive” to have it. The problem is that once you inform someone of something’s existence and then tell them they can’t have that thing, then that someone is no less incentivized to take the whatever-it-is. God told Adam and Eve to not eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, but that did nothing to stop Eve from having a bite. If you tell your kid they can’t have more cookies from the cookie jar than they ought to, what do you think they’re gonna do at some point? The aliens, as you can tell by the comparisons I’ve made, see themselves as being in a parental or patronizing position with regards to the humans. Jerry isn’t happy about the Ambassador’s smarmy attitude, but if he has a plan (and he does), he’s not upfront about what he has in mind.

This is a story about two races from radically different cultures, with one actually immersing itself in the other’s culture for the first time. “The Pilot and the Bushman” is, on its surface, about the immediate aftermath of mankind making first contact with a fellow intelligent race, but it takes no more than a single brain cell to figure out Jacobs is comparing her SFnal situation with the real-life occurrences of one human culture making first contact with another human culture, with one side being far more advanced on a technological level than the other. I have to italicize that one part because, of course, the Spaniards and later the English who set foot in North America were no more inherently intelligent or morally upright than the indigenous peoples of the land. There were things the indigenous peoples were not and could not be prepared for, namely diseases they had no prior contact with or knowledge of, and thus you had whole populations introduced to diseases they had no immunity against. Similarly the Ambassador fears that introducing mankind to the Matter Repositor would have apocalyptic consequences, since virtually every country on Earth has (whether lefties wanna admit it or not) a capitalist economy based on scarcity. The people of the Ambassador’s home world have been born and raised into a post-scarcity environment, which understandably has created a radically different mindset from what humans are acquainted with. The aliens are not necessarily superior but are certainly very different—the huge gap in cultures being the races being the problem.

As the Ambassador says:

To a Micronesian bushman, the pilot who can be trusted with the power and speed of a B-29 seems a veritable god. But the pilot is only an ordinary Joe, very likely no more intelligent than the bushman—he just had a different background. Fighting each other for necessities and luxuries, the process that you people call business competition, has so long been needless to our people that they would no more think of competitive gain than you would do an Indian harvest dance before you signed a contract. They aren’t necessarily more intelligent or more virtuous than your people—they just have a different background.

Of course, the aliens are the pilot and the humans are the bushman. It’s not exactly a hard comparison to make. What’s strange, reading it now, is that Jacobs goes about it with the mindset that the aliens really do mean well despite their smug attitude around humans, or at the very least that they aren’t looking to divide and conquer Earth as hot new real estate, like with their real-life counterparts. It’s a commentary on colonialism and the relationships invasive cultures have historically had with indigenous peoples, but it lacks serious bite because it does not interrogate the myriad ways in which a colonizing force can subjugate a colonized people’s development. The biggest complaint I have with this story, other than it being overly chatty (there is nonstop talking for over half of it, which can dull one’s attention span), is that Jacobs does not treat her own subject matter with enough seriousness. Horton compares it to Christopher Anvil, but I also thought of a less funny and less vicious Robert Sheckley—granted that Jacobs’s story was published about a year before Sheckley made his debut. My point is that it’s easy to overlook the territory “The Pilot and the Bushman” covers because the story itself doesn’t pay said territory that much mind. It’s a social satire, of the sort that appeared quite often in Galaxy, especially in its early years, and for that it’s an adequate example.

But it could’ve been better.

There Be Spoilers Here

Conditions improve, thankfully, when we finally see an end to the dialogue and some action can kick in, although it’s not much. The back end of this story has enough of a sense of humor and also a viciousness that the first half or so was rather lacking; like I would’ve appreciated it if Jacobs had not spent so much time setting things up. The gist is that Jerry agrees to coordinate a huge propaganda campaign to disincentivize people from looking into the Matter Repositor, while at the same time playing up humanity’s quickly growing reputation as “savage” compared to the aliens. The plan works—in fact it works better than the Ambassador would’ve wanted, although Jerry is perfectly happy with the results. Earth becomes a tourist destination for the aliens, who are so unaccustomed to things to like drinking, whoring, theft, and other vices that they see it all as an alluring novelty. They think stealing some doodad from a convenience store and spending a night in jail is fun. They’re totally unprepared for the eccentricates of human culture and are thus unequipped to resist it. This is clearly a satire of how people in the Anglosphere see certain “backwards” countries as lovely tourist spots. Even circa 1950 this would’ve been very the case with how Americans treated Hawaii, which was a US territory but a state yet. The othering of indigenous people and East-Asians in Hawaii has been a thing for decades now, but ya know, nobody likes a tourist.

A Step Farther Out

I have to assume, given how little she wrote, that Jacobs saw writing SF as like a hobby more than anything. In the early ’50s it was possibly to write SF for a living, so long as you wrote at a mile a minute and knew how to sell a story to the right editor. Maybe Jacobs was into it but not that into it; she did, after all, have a respectable day job. “The Pilot and the Bushman” was her second published story, and I’d be interested in reading the rest of her SF, although I don’t expect to find a hidden master of the form. Jacobs’s career as an SF writer is like a ship that passed in the night.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Man in the Mailbag” by Gordon R. Dickson

March 31st, 2025

(Cover by Wallace Wood. Galaxy, April 1959.)

Who Goes There?

Who was the first author to win two Hugos for fiction in the same year? George R. R. Martin. Which is wild to think about, because this was in 1980, and nobody outside SF fandom knew who Martin was at this point; nobody knew he would eventually become one of the most famous authors in living memory, and also that he would have possibly the most famous (or infamous) case of writer’s block for all the world to see. So who was the second person to win two Hugos for fiction in the same year? Believe it or not, it happened only one year after GRRM pulled this amazing feat, although nowadays far fewer people know who Gordon R. Dickson is. Dickson was born and raised in Canada (Alberta), but his family moved to the US when he was a teen and he stayed there for the rest of his life. I like Dickson in a similar way to how I like Clifford Simak, which is to say I see their works often as like comfort food. The same can be said for Poul Anderson. Incidentally Dickson and Anderson were besties, to the point where they had a long-running series, about the teddy bear alien race called the Hoka, that they wrote together. Dickson was less of a jingoist than Anderson; actually I’m not even sure if Dickson was of the pro-war sort, since reading some of his Dorsai series and other stories, including today’s story, he didn’t seem keen on warfare. I said at the beginning of the month that “The Man in the Mailbag” was a standalone, but this turned out to be a bit inaccurate, since it’s actually the first entry in a short series involving the Dilbians, a race of aliens that are sort of a cross between gorillas and bears. “The Man in the Mailbag” was much expanded into the short novel Spacial Delivery, which I haven’t read, although I did read Spacepaw, its sequel.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It could be because Dickson cannibalized it for a novel, but “The Man in the Mailbag” has only been reprinted three times: in The Good Old Stuff and by extension The Good Stuff (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Dickson collection Steel Brother. These are all out of print.

Enhancing Image

John Tardy (yes, that’s his name) has been tasked with rescuing Ty Lamore, a human sociologist who’s been studying the Dilbians on their home planet and who has apparently been kidnapped by the Streamside Terror, one of said Dilbians. Humans on Dilbia have their own name, but also a Dilbian name, or rather a name the Dilbians give them: Lamore’s is Greasy Face. Tardy will get one of his own, but we’ll get to that in a bit. The Dilbians themselves are a curious race, in their customs but also how they look, being eight-to-ten-foot-all giants covered in fur, being, as I said, somewhere between a gorilla and a bear, albeit one that walks totally upright. There seems to be some disagreement with illustrators as to how gorilla- or bear-like the Dilbians are, since here Wallace Wood’s interiors paint them as akin to Bigfoot, whereas various book covers for Spacial Delivery and Spacepaw (and the omnibus collection The Right to Arm Bears) depict them as anywhere from uncannily human-like gorillas to just grizzly bears that always walk on their hind legs. The introduction for “The Man in the Mailbag” in Steel Brother says that the Dilbians were inspired by Dickson’s non-violent encounter with a bear while growing up in Alberta. Also, The Right to Arm Bears depicts the Dilbians as, well, carrying guns, but having read my fair share of this series by now I can say the Dilbians are not keen on using guns; if they resort to violence, which they do on occasion, they much prefer hand-to-hand—or rather paw-to-paw.

So, despite its length the plot is pretty straightforward, although how Tardy meets with the Terror (he’s usually just called that rather than by his full name) is a different question. Tardy, despite being an Olympian (“decathlon winner in the Olympics four years back”), is still a tiny human in a world whose dominant race is a bunch of hairy giants. The solution is for a friendly Dilbian, named the Hill Bluffer, whom we do meet again in Spacepaw, to carry Tardy in a mailbag, which is apparently big enough to carry an adult human—mind you it’s a Dilbian mailbag, and the Hill Bluffer himself is big enough that he’s able to carry Tardy with ease. Tardy has a wrist-phone (it’s basically a cell phone, although one then has to wonder how he gets cell service on a planet that’s almost entirely rural) that keeps him in touch with Joshua Guy, the human ambassador at HQ. The idea is that Tardy will rescue Lamore without having a physical confrontation with the Terror—for one because such a confrontation would almost surely result in Our Hero™ getting beaten to a pulp. Something I’ve noticed about Dickson is that for someone who gets labeled as vaguely conservative his work often comes off as anti-war, and even sympathetic to pacifism up to a point. In the stories featuring Dilbia, one of the recurring elements is the notion that it’s best for everybody to avoid violence. It’s also best to avoid making rash decisions, since the biggest points of conflict in this story are when characters made decisions that fall outside of “the plan.” There’s a female Dilbian named Boy-Is-She-Built (call me immature, but I think this name is funny) who ends up stealing Tardy’s wrist-phone, which cuts him off from HQ about halfway through the story.

(Interior art by Wallace Wood.)

The plot itself is rather minimal, I suspect so that Dickson gives himself a lot more space for worldbuilding. The Dilbians are about on par with humans and in some ways objectively superior (for one they’re physically stronger than humans on average), but they’re also a culture that’s rooted in honor and one’s own reputation, hence one’s name being assigned by an outside consensus rather than choosing your own name. There’s a Dilbian named Two Answers because he’s known for tending to come up with two answers to a problem. Joshua Guy, the ambassador, got the Dilbian name of Little Bite because of an embarrassing incident involving—well, you can guess. The Dilbians think of humans as cute, in a condescending way, calling them “Shorties,” which can rub the humans the wrong way, but mind you that the humans are here on the Dilbians’ home world and the Dilbians did not invite them. The series, while not all that serious (my big issue with “The Man in the Mailbag” [and by extension Spacial Delivery] and Spacespaw when taken together is that they’re similarly plotted), does deal with a few serious topics, namely colonialism and the clashing of cultures. When I started this story I thought maybe it would’ve fit better in Astounding than Galaxy, given its rather lighthearted and adventure-minded tone; but then it occurred to me that given how Dickson insists humans (white people) ought to treat the Dilbians’ (indigenous people’s) customs with respect, such a notion would’ve probably rubbed John W. Campbell the wrong way. The gender politics are not quite as forward-looking, as the only notable female characters, Ty Lamore and Boy-Is-She-Built, are mostly kept offscreen and are given to flights of fancy when in on the action; but still, they’re shown to be about as capable as their male counterparts.

On the one hand, even for 1959 this feels a bit old-fashioned in the sense that it harks back to an earlier era of planetary adventure SF, which only sometimes appeared in Galaxy under H. L. Gold’s editorship; but also Dickson is a decidedly more humane storyteller than some of his peers, including Poul Anderson and even Hal Clement, which from a modern perspective makes him seem like a breath of fresh air even if he’s not exactly an S-tier writer. I’ve been thinking about the good-but-not-great writer in SF a fair bit, recently, of the likes of Dickson and Simak; maybe I should write an editorial on the subject…

There Be Spoilers Here

Once Tardy finally does meet with the Terror, a court session happens, of a sort, since there’s a bit of a convoluted case of the Terror having stolen one of the “Shorties” but also Tardy having to fight for his right to rescue Lamore. If the humans had only their way then they could’ve left by this point, leaving the Terror with nothing, but that might’ve caused bigger problems by virtue of tarnishing the Terror’s reputation. A Dilbian’s honor is their livelihood. The humans, being outsiders, will have to play by the Dilbians’ rules. Tardy will have to earn his Dilbian name of Half Pint. One of the elders, named One Man, gives a short monologue near the end that proves pertinent to the situation, but it could also apply to any scenario involving a colonizing force and an indigenous population:

You just don’t come in and sit down at a man’s table and expect him to take your word for it that you’re one of the family. As I said to you once before,
who asked you Shorties to come here, anyway, in the first place? And what made you think we had to like you? What if, when you were a lad, some new kid moved into your village? He was half your size, but he had a whole lot of shiny new playthings you didn’t have, and he came up and tapped you on the shoulder and said, ‘C’mon, from now on we’ll play my sort of game!’ How’d you think you’d have felt?”

Of course, Tardy wins his fight with the Terror, through some ingenious means, and despite ostensibly being a battle to the death both men come out of it alive. The truth is that they weren’t supposed to kill each other anyway, as the mission to rescue Lamore was a big test to see if there was a human on the planet who could stand toe-to-toe with the Dilbians. There were a few hiccups, such as Tardy losing his wrist-phone, but he was not supposed to be in that much danger. See? Everybody gets a happy ending. With hindsight it’s easy to see Dickson’s view of colonial relations as being too optimistic, if anything, but he was looking in the right direction, which is more than can be said of a lot of old-timey SF.

A Step Farther Out

I was getting a bit of déjà vu reading “The Man in the Mailbag” since Spacepaw more or less follows the same plot trajectory, which I understand is not this story’s fault, although it is Dickson’s fault for reusing it. He had bills to pay, ya know. I would probably like Spacial Delivery more than its sequel, although I do have to wonder how, even given how short Spacial Delivery is, you’re supposed to make a novel out of a short story that already feels reasonably self-contained. Ah well, this has been a fun crash course in fiction from the pages of ’50s Galaxy; and incidentally the last stop on our tour foreshadows the more adventure-oriented turn the magazine would take once Frederik Pohl becomes its new editor. As to what that’s gonna look like exactly, I’ll find out in July.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Nightmare with Zeppelins” by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

March 28th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, December 1958.)

Who Goes There?

As we near this marathon of stories from the first decade of Galaxy, I feel it’s now best to bring up Frederik Pohl, who in just a couple years would take over H. L. Gold’s position as editor in all but name before officially taking the magazine. Pohl is one of the most curious figures from old-timey SF, although he was one of the longest lived, having died in 2013. He worked in practically every stage of development in the world of SF writing, from author to editor to literary agent. I seriously recommend tracking down a copy of Pohl’s The Way the Future Was, which might be the single best memoir about the world of genre SF from the ’40s to the ’60s, from the perspective of someone who had lived through it. He officially became editor of Galaxy and If in 1961/1962 and would win the latter magazine three consecutive Hugos. He’s also pretty good as a writer, especially at short lengths, although his Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel Gateway is also one of the very best SF novels of the ’70s. He was a key member of the Futurians, a mostly left-leaning New York fan group that came about in the late ’30s, and which would serve as an entry point for some of the finest creative minds in the field, including C. M. Kornbluth, who himself was only a teenager when the group started.

Kornbluth was very young when he started writing professionally, but he needed that head start since he would also die tragically young, from a weak heart at the age of only 34. In fact today’s story, “Nightmare with Zeppelins,” would have been one of the last stories Kornbluth completed before his death in March 1958. The conventional narrative is that in the ’50s Kornbluth was the better writer at short lengths, while both authors at this point had their blind spots when writing novels. Pohl and Kornbluth were at their best together when writing novels, though, since they were able to make up for each other’s weaknesses; sadly they wrote only a few short stories together, not counting posthumous efforts wherein Pohl would work off a fragment or outline from the departed Kornbluth. One of these posthumous efforts, 1972’s “The Meeting,” won Kornbluth a Hugo more than a dozen years after his death, so that’s nice.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Fifth Galaxy Reader (ed. H. L. Gold) and the Pohl-Kornbluth collections The Wonder Effect and Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth.

Enhancing Image

Harry Lewes is a very old gentleman living in London during World War I, apparently having connections with H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, the implication being that like those men, Lewes is or at least was a Fabian—that is to say basically a democratic socialist of the British sort. As far as I can make out, Lewes is a character of Pohl and Kornbluth’s invention, although I do have to wonder if they took inspiration from a certain historical figure. Anyway, Lewes is writing his autobiography, or rather an essay in place of a proper book, to recount something quite traumatic that had happened to him back in 1864, and which makes him worry about the German zeppelins looming overhead and a possibly more destructive war in the future. As a very young man Lewes had taken up an assignment from one Carlotta Cox (who also seems to be fictitious), a do-gooder who wanted Lewes to voyage out to “darkest Africa” and study some of the local peoples, in the name of combatting racism against black Africans. Her intentions are good. It doesn’t help either that, as Lewes notes, the American Civil War was happening at this time, which make no mistake was ultimately about the spreading of chattel slavery to the western territories. (People who say the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery and systemic persecution of black people are at best tragically misinformed.) However, once Lewes gets to the continent he nearly dies and is only saved by Herr Faesch, a “hardy Swiss” with his legion of native workers. While Lewes had by this point nearly died from illness, it wasn’t that near-death experience that haunts him to this day, as we discover in this taut little narrative.

(By the way, I do not suggest looking up this story on ISFDB, since whoever wrote the synopsis thought it was a good idea to give away the entire plot. Since it clocks in at under ten pages, however, and since its ending plays such a crucial role in understanding what Pohl and Kornbluth were going for, it’s hard to discuss without spoiling.)

When it comes to collab stories I often wonder about the process behind it, especially who was the main creative force behind it. Is this more of a Pohl story or a Kornbluth story? Both authors were, at this point, writing some of the most pessimistic genre SF the field has ever seen, and indeed one of the darkest SF stories from this period is Pohl’s own “The Census Takers” (review here). There is, however, a deep-running sense of dramatic irony here that feels very Kornbluth, albeit mixed with a prose style that mimics English writing from the Edwardian and late Victorian eras. “Nightmare with Zeppelins” on the one hand harks back to Wells in his prime (Wells being an important figure in-story, especially thematically, although he never actually appears to take part in the action), but it also is clearly written from a time Wells did not live to see, which was the Cold War at its height. That this is a Cold War-era story is a fact the authors can hardly be bothered to keep on the subtextual level; it becomes pretty obvious that while Lewes himself doesn’t name it, he is clearly looking into the future and seeing a world forever changed by the atomic bomb. Speaking of late Victorian and Edwardian shenanigans, an obvious point of reference for this story is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, what with Herr Faesch being a Kurtz-like figure (albeit more benevolent than Kurtz) with his loyal band of black workers, the physically feeble but still dominant white figure who looms over a colonized Africa. But whereas Charles Marlow, the “hero” of Conrad’s novella, intentionally made his way along the Congo river to meet Kurtz, Lewes runs into Herr Faesch quite by accident. That Herr Faesch is less hateful and consumed by colonizer derangement syndrome than Kurtz, however, does not mean he hasn’t gone mad.

Herr Faesch runs a mine in this little corner of the continent, although it isn’t gold he’s mining but nuggets of Uranium-235, the properties of which he does not and sadly cannot understand fully. U-235, as you know, is the element crucial to the making of the nuclear fission bomb, which would be used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; there’s a whole lot more to it, but that is really the gist of it. Early in the story Lewes talks about what Wells called a “radium bomb,” or a continuously exploding bomb; and it’s no coincidence that Wells around this time would’ve written The World Set Free, an otherwise obscure late novel of his that has gained some notoriety for anticipating something like nuclear weapons—in 1914. Mind you that despite being very much on the left, Wells, like most British intellectuals at the time, supported the UK’s participation in World War I. He reasoning seemed to be that with the right innovations in firepower, war as was understood would be rendered obsolete, feeding into the notion that World War I was “the war to end all wars.” There may be some grim irony in the fact that Wells lived long enough to witness the dropping of the atomic bomb, an event which struck him with profound horror, along with the realization that mankind is more likely to drive itself to extinction with such weaponry than it is to achieve world peace with said weaponry. It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get the feeling that Pohl and Kornbluth were hugely pessimistic about the use of nuclear weapons, in that they probably felt the US’s use of atomic bombs against Japan was morally reprehensible.

What’s impressive about “Nightmare with Zeppelins” is that it connects the dots between three very different periods of American-European history, positing that the so-called scramble for Africa in the latter half of the 19th century, the UK’s needless participating in World War I, and the years immediately following the end of World War II share a kinship that paints humanity in a dark light. It draws a direct line from European countries’ colonizing of Africa to the US committing some of the most heinous war crimes of the 20th century against Japanese civilians. The dramatic irony gets to be rather on-the-nose, in that it becomes impossible to ignore what Lewes himself is incapable of noticing, but the point that Pohl and Kornbluth wanted to make still gets across. This is a finely tuned little nugget of pessimistic Cold War-era SF.

There Be Spoilers Here

While he’s recovering in one of the tents, in what turns out to be a safe distance from the mine, Lewes gets the feeling that something horrible is about to happen, although he can’t put his finger on it. Then, one day, the mine explodes, with Herr Faesch and some of his workers inside it, the explosion forming a little mushroom cloud that can be seen from Lewes’s tent, himself only escaping injury because he happened to be covered against the blast at the time. Looking back on this, Lewes is both right and tragically wrong about the future of warfare, hoping in vane that the cursed nuggets of U-235 may never be used to build a new weapon, and that airships in the sky may never be used to drop such a weapon on people’s heads. It leans a bit too much into dramatic irony, but still the final passage is haunting, so I’ll quote it here, as Lewes writes in his essay:

One thing is sure: Count Zeppelin has made it impossible for Herr Faesch’s metal ever to be used for war. Fighting on the ground itself was terrible enough; this new dimension of warfare will end it. Imagine sending dirigibles across the skies to sow such horrors! Imagine what monstrous brains might plan such an assault! Merciful heaven. They wouldn’t dare.

If only he could know how wrong he is.

A Step Farther Out

I’d been curious about reading “Nightmare with Zeppelins” for a few years now, just going by its title, although thankfully I did not look up a synopsis before reading it. I really like Pohl and Kornbluth as writers individually, but together they pulled a Voltron and became one of the most socially keen-eyed SF writers of the ’50s. One has to wonder what might more they could’ve done had Kornbluth not died so young, since Pohl’s digging up his departed friend’s notes really doesn’t do the duo justice. It’s not a masterpiece exactly, but I do recommend it.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Prime Difference” by Alan E. Nourse

March 24th, 2025

(Cover by Kirberger. Galaxy, June 1957.)

Who Goes There?

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Alan E. Nourse prior to today’s story, which isn’t surprising since his work seems to have fallen massively out of print, to the point where a decent portion of it has also fallen out of copyright. Nourse was one of many SF writers who came about in the early ’50s, some very young people (well, mostly men) who took advantage of the ballooning magazine market. It also helped that for some reason there were a lot of very talented writers, including Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, and Algis Budrys, who were too young to have seen action in World War II but who had entered the field at almost the exact same time. By far the most productive period for Nourse was in the ’50s; once the balloon popped he mostly stopped writing SF, presumably to focus on his respectable day job as a physician. “Prime Difference” is very Galaxy and very 1950s, for both good and ill; it’s not exactly a forgotten gem, although it apparently warranted enough attention to get an X Minus One adaptation. It is on the one hand a deeply of-its-time story when it comes to its gender politics, but also those same gender politics are the point of the whole thing, rather than merely a byproduct of when Nourse wrote it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1957 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It remained stuck there for six decades before someone transcribed it for Project Gutenberg. I guess the copyright ran out.

Enhancing Image

George and Marge’s marriage is on the skids, but then it’s been that way for almost eight years now. It’s painfully obvious, at least to George, that it would be best for the best of them if they got a divorce, “but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act,” it wouldn’t be financially a good idea. I knew, from the first goddamn sentence, that this was gonna be one of those stories. Reading ’50s SF, there are some things you have to keep in mind if you wanna adapt to the somewhat different literary environment. Misogyny is rampant, although not the same sort of misogyny one would find in New Wave SF a decade later, which was more sexually explicit and in some ways somehow more revolting (to my sensibilities, anyway) than what you’d find in the average ’50s SF story. Marriage sucks, right? If you’re a white middle-class fellow in 1957 then marriage might be your top concern, along with tax season. It was the age of John Cheever, John Updike, and John O’Hara. A lot of Johns. It was the age we started to get the signature Ingmar Bergman drama. Marriage between dreary heterosexuals was the order of the day. What’s strange about the future as depicted in “Prime Difference” is not only that it’s completely the opposite of how gender relations in the ’60s would turn out, but also that it would perceptive in a totally different and unexpected way. See, George says that “the women” getting into politics made it harder for divorce proceedings, which… if anything is the opposite of what women in politics would want. Unless they’re conservative women. Of course this was before the birth control pill and second-wave feminism, and apparently Nourse did not suspect such a thing was gonna happen in just a few years; but at the same time he posited that white conservative women with money would pose a bigger problem than “the feminists.” This is a pretty thorny story, because George is a thorny and rather unlikable character, but it also argues in favor of no-fault divorce.

Then there are the Primes, which are lifelike robots, basically perfect replicas of their human counterparts—and illegal. It makes sense that robots that can pose as normal humans would be outlawed, given the possible repercussions, although how technicians in the black market are able to afford the resources, let alone build these things, is left up in the air. George is desperate to take a siesta from his wife and he finally gets to the point where he orders a Prime—specifically a Super Deluxe model, which is I guess more lifelike than the standard. Looking at George Prime, George can’t even tell the two of them apart. “The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.” Put a pin in that. Now, I must confess that I found a stretch of “Prime Difference” to be a bit of a chore, in no small part because of how Nourse decided to tell it. George is the protagonist by virtue of being the perspectice character, “Prime Difference” being written in the first person. The problem is that George is a gaping asshole. He is! And not in an endearing or even often an entertaining way. This may well be the point (it probably is), but then why force us to tumble around inside this man’s head? It would’ve been more bearable, and its ending (which I do like) would’ve had more impact, had Nourse written “Prime Difference” in the third person. We also would’ve been able to understand Marge more, who as of now is given minimal personality. The idea is that George Prime will at times serve in the real George’s place for when the latter wants to ~~go around fucking other women~~ take a break from Marge, and Marge will not know the difference. The “problem” is that George Prime is so good at being the real thing that he’s actually superior to the real George in every way. You’ve seen this sort of plot trajectory with stories about androids before.

There Be Spoilers Here

That George Prime has been loving up on Marge, to the real George’s growing concern, is unsurprising; what’s more surprising is that Marge has had her own plan this whole time, albeit off the page. The ending implies that in a sense George and Marge were made for each other, in that they’re both conniving neurotics, but we only see one side of the story. “That Marge always had been a sly one,” George thinks once he realizes what she’s done, having run off with George Prime and replaced herself with Marge Prime, but we never get to see how that even could’ve happened. Of course George is only able to tell it’s a Prime by feeling for the little dent on Marge Prime’s head; that he figures it out pretty much immediately is a consolation. This is one of two possible endings I had anticipated, the other being that Marge finds out about the Prime and proceeds to kick George out of the house. But this way, everyone more or less gets what they want. Their marriage is “saved.” Mind you that Nourse was married for a few years at this point, although being in what I have to assume is a happy marriage doesn’t stop one from being a pessimist about the institution.

A Step Farther Out

Would I recommend it? Not really. It’s a frustrating read, even when compared to other stories about robotics from the period. Nourse wrote so much during the ’50s, though, that it’s quite possible that I caught him on an off day, or that readers thought well of “Prime Difference” at the time but time has not been kind to it.

See you next time.