Category: Short Story Reviews

Short Story Review: “The Transcendent Tigers” by R. A. Lafferty

September 3rd, 2024

(Cover by McKenna. Worlds of Tomorrow, February 1964.)

Who Goes There?

From about 1960 to the mid-’80s, R. A. Lafferty stood out as one of the true mavericks of the field, having a style that would be nigh-impossible to emulate. He has a reputation as something of a writer’s writer, not helped by many vocal Lafferty fans being writers themselves. It’s not that Lafferty was a poet (although he did have a capacity for poetry, unlike most SFF writers) or a mean wordsmith, but that nobody else wrote quite like him at the time. He got lumped in with the New Wavers, even appearing in Dangerous Visions, which in hindsight was a bit odd, given a) he was a good generation older than the New Wavers, and b) he was an outspoken conservative in what was considered a generally left-leaning movement. I don’t consider myself a Lafferty fan, because I tend to find his quirkiness and old-school Catholicism a bit stifling. It came as a bit of a shock to me, then, that I quite liked today’s story, which is an early and somewhat obscure Lafferty tale. “The Transcendent Tigers” predates the New Wave by a couple years, but it’s one of those stories that anticipates the movement. It’s also a darkly funny and pessimistic story, even for Lafferty.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1964 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which is on Internet Archive. It was reprinted in Young Demons (ed. Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia) and the Lafferty collections Strange Doings and The Man with the Speckled Eyes. It also appeared on Sci Fiction, which you can read free of charge with the power of the Wayback machine. Surprised this one hasn’t been reprinted more often.

Enhancing Image

Carnadine is a little girl who gets four presents for her birthday: a white rubber ball that’s hollow inside, a green plastic frog, a red cap, and a wire puzzle. “She immediately tore the plastic frog apart, considering it a child’s toy. So much for that.” As for the other gifts, however, she makes good use of them—indeed better use than her parents had expected. When she wears the red cap she can turn the rubber ball inside out without tearing it and is able to solve the wire puzzle—the problem being that both of these things should be physically impossible. While most of the gifts are from her parents and friends of the family, nobody knows who got Carnadine the red cap, which should tell you immediately that something malicious is brewing. Carnadine is only nominally the protagonist of the story: for one she’s a sociopath (as is typical of young children), but also much of the story doesn’t focus on her. Lafferty breaks a few rules when it comes to writing short stories, just on a regular basis, but here he does it especially effectively. The third-person narrator strays from Carnadine’s story to give us a kind of bird’s-eye view of strange things happening around the world, including speculation on a new “Power” that could make or break humanity. Lafferty gives this otherwise absurd narrative a sense of genuine speculation by interspersing Carnadine’s story with passages from fictional academic journals and news sources, almost like what John Brunner would do in Stand on Zanzibar, only on a micro scale. We do eventually get an explanation for the red cap, but by then it’ll be too late—for the characters.

Meanwhile, Carnadine has taken to “sharing the wealth” a bit and has decided to found a club, the Bengal Tigers, a club so exclusive that at first she’s the only member. “It had only one full member, herself, and three contingent or defective members, her little brother Eustace, Fatty Frost, and Peewee Horn. Children all three of them, the oldest not within three months of her age.” Nobody knows about the Bengal Tigers, but pretty soon people are gonna feel the effects of the kids sharing their red cap. This strange red cap apparently grants one ESP, along with heightened intelligence, which in the case of Carnadine turns her from someone who was already a brat into a super-brat. Even in 1964 “The Transcendent Tigers” would’ve been another in a long line of stories about kids with ESP, although typically these kids would discover a sense of heroism along with their psychic powers. Carnadine does not. On paper this is a very dark story, but it’s lightened by Lafferty’s sense of humor and especially how quippy the narrator is. Humor usually benefits from brevity, so it helps that Lafferty packs a fair amount into a short space it’s still that: a short space. Scenes go by quickly, we jump back and forth between Carnadine and the aforementioned bird’s-eye view, and while in the past I’ve found Lafferty’s prose a bit too labyrinthine that’s not an issue here, his style here being much punchier and to the point than what I would say is the norm for him. Despite “The Transcendent Tigers” only being ten pages long I chuckled several times during it, which I have to admit is unusual in my experiences with Lafferty; but also that goes to show its effectiveness as a comedy, albeit a pretty morbid one. By the end you’ll wish Carnadine would fall off a cliff.

This is also an example of liking a work of art while at the same time disagreeing with the artist’s politics as expressed in their art, something I wish more people were capable of doing! I said before that Lafferty was an old-fashioned Catholic, even for the time, and while Christianity never comes up in the story I do think Lafferty is making an argument that falls in line with his conservatism. I have a bit of a hypothesis about what separates right-wing Christianity from left-wing Christianity, and it has to do with who can be saved: right-wing Christians believe that maybe individuals can see the gates of Heaven, but not groups, whereas left-wing Christians believe humanity as a cluster of groups deserves to be saved. It basically has to do with optimism vs. pessimism, and I do think Lafferty was a pessimist—only that his sense of humor tended to soften what I think was a pretty dim view of humanity. Throughout “The Transcendent Tigers” there’s speculation from intellectuals about an as-yet-undiscovered power which could blow even nuclear power out of the water, sheerly from its capacity to allow man to change his very environment without the use of industry. A single man could literally move mountains with this hypothetical power, and these intellectuals wonder if humanity would be ready for such a thing, should it come along. Lafferty argues we’re not, and that if we were to encounter such a power we either wouldn’t know what to do with it or use it for bad ends as soon as possible. The Bengal Tigers have such a power, and it doesn’t take them long to start using it for very bad ends.

There Be Spoilers Here

On a planet “very far out,” a race of energy beings (Is it just me or was this beyond-matter kind of alien race really popular around the time of the original Star Trek series?) discusses having found a valid candidate on Earth for a way to manifest immense power in the form of a red cap. One of the aliens says he managed to find only one candidate on the whole planet, one who had perfect assurance, “one impervious to doubt of any kind and totally impervious to self-doubt.” That person was Carnadine. As the other alien in the conversation point out, however, the candidate didn’t need only perfect assurance, but other qualities, although we’re not really told what those other qualities are. Carnadine is perfectly self-assured because there’s nothing more egotistical than a child, but she also totally lacks empathy and self-restraint, which are important qualities if one wants to be a functional human being in our society! Or at least those should be important qualities; turns out the most financially success tend to lack empathy at the very least. So the test with the red cap looks to be a loss on Earth, but as one of the aliens points out, worst case scenario humanity destroys itself and the virus of the red cap will have quarantined itself.

And it does.

In the course of ten pages we go from a young girl getting a strange gift to her literally destroying cities with said gift. The body count is immeasurable. To say a lot of people get killed would be an understatement. Carnadine and the other members of the “club” use a map of the US to stick needles on cities, like voodoo on a mass scale, New Orleans, Baltimore, San Antonio (“There were some of us who liked that place and wished that it could have been spared.”), and so on down the line. The situation escalates so much in such a short space that it becomes funny in a fucked-up way, having just the right cadence for a dark joke. Had Lafferty written this as a serious story (although I do think he’s trying to make a serious point with it, which is not the same thing) it would surely be one of the bleakest SF short stories of the ’60s. But thankfully it’s not serious.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for another short review (by my standards), but then this is a concise story, and a very nicely constructed one at that. Lafferty has surprised me a couple times and this is one of them. When to authors I’m not personally fond of I’m always (maybe not “always,” I do have limits, but you know what I mean) up for giving them another chance. I mean for fuck’s sake I’ve read more than one Piers Anthony novel and I’m looking to read another one soon. Lafferty is a much better writer than Anthony, even if he can be too much for me, so we’ll be seeing him here again eventually—so in like, a year, maybe two years depending.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “There Used to Be Olive Trees” by Rich Larson

August 27th, 2024

(Cover by Charles Vess. F&SF, Jan-Feb 2017.)

Who Goes There?

Rich Larson is probably the youngest author I’ve covered on this site; he’s only a few years older than me, but he’s been mighty busy for the past decade and change, mostly in the realm of short fiction. His debut back in the early 2010s coincided with the proliferation of online magazines, in a boom for the market not seen since the ’50s. (Ironically today’s story appeared in one of the old guard.) While he has not yet garnered a Hugo or Nebula nomination it’s only a matter of time before his work is given major awards recognition, as he has made first in the Asimov’s readers’ poll multiple times and has been featured in multiple best-of-the-year anthologies. His 2015 story “Ice” was adapted into a Love, Death + Robots episode, and his most recent novel, Ymir, came out in 2022. By Larson’s own admission much of his fiction can be considered a continuation of cyberpunk, with some transhumanist elements. “There Used to Be Olive Trees” is a coming-of-age narrative set in the far future, on an Earth that seems to be recovering from a worldwide catastrophe; and while it isn’t cyberpunk exactly it does have one or two elements of that subgenre.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January-February 2017 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is not available online. If you want a copy you’ll have to hunt for a used copy or take your chances with F&SF‘s website. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (ed. Steve Berman).

Enhancing Image

Valentin is 16 years old and is one of the lucky few in “the Town” to have been fitted with an implant, or “godchip,” on his forehead, which should allow him to make contact with the Town’s “machine god.” The problem is that for those with implants there’s a test, or “prueba,” a kind of rite of passage one’s expected to pass with the first or second try; for Valentin he’s on his fourth attempt, which is unheard of. For reasons totally beyond him he’s been unable to talk with the Town’s god, and so he’s been sent out into the wilderness again, with just some provisions and most usefully his “nanoshadow,” a skin suit that will help him with the harsh climate. This sounds like a lot of setup for a story that will ultimately involve only two characters, more or less, plus a character (Javier, Valentin’s overseer) who is mentioned but remains offscreen, and it does seem a bit frontloaded! This is a solid novelette and it feels both simple and a little overly complicated, since once we meet the second main character the narrative turns into a Jack London-esque surviving-in-the-wilderness tale with technology playing a peripheral role. Soon after leaving the Town, Valentin meets a “wilder,” one of those people who lives outside what remains of civilization, a fellow teen boy named Pepe. The two don’t get along at first, which is understandable since Valentin’s implant and equipment make him a juicy target for wilders more vicious than Pepe.

Minding that Larson would’ve only been 23 or 24 when he wrote this, it’s a fine job that has enough meat on its bones to imply a larger world. I said Larson is a cyberpunk fan, and there are a few cues taken from that subgenre here, despite it falling much more into post-apocalyptic SF. The nanoshadow, which Valentin is unable to use for most of the story, would very much fit in with a cyberpunk narrative—the big difference being that the dystopian cityscape that would normally be host to cyberpunk is mostly no more. The Spain of the story has long since been ruined, and even in the wilderness there isn’t a lot that could sustain human life. Understandably, for someone who has spent his whole life in what amounts to a bubble, Valentin takes a fascination to Pepe, and this fascination might well be reciprocated. I’m not counting it as a spoiler, because something doesn’t sit right with me when it comes to treating characters’ sexualities as plot revelations, so I’ll say here that the reluctant friendship formed between Valentin and Pepe burns slowly into something romantic—or maybe just sexual. It’s hard to say. Our insights into Valentin’s mind tell us he finds Pepe very much attractive, but it’s never elaborated on if this has to do with Pepe’s looks or if it’s merely the fact that he’s interacting with someone around his own age who doesn’t see him as just a “prophet” in training. The queerness is shown but not discussed at all, and I’m not sure how to feel about this. Maybe taboos regarding homosexuality have become a non-issue now that the world has basically ended. Values change with time and circumstances. It’s not a bad depiction of queerness, but I wish there was more to it.

The plot borders on nonexistent, but we do have goals for both of the main characters which happen to intertwine. Valentin has to go to what is called the autofab, to speak with the god of the Town, and Pepe also wants to go to the autofab—only not for the same reason. At some point in the past humanity invented truly sentient AI, and these AI personalities may have become too powerful, to the point where they can interfere with the material world with a mere thought—or, in the case of Valentin and other prophets, with a bit of coaxing. Knowledge of how these AIs came about seems relegated to the Town and other strongholds of civilization, although interestingly I don’t recall us getting an explanation of how Earth came to be ruined and if the AIs had something to do with it. This story was written a few years before “AI” (machine learning) became a hot-button issue, so I have to wonder if Larson would’ve gone about the AI things if he had written this more recently. It makes sense that a humanity that’s mostly been thrown back to barbarism would see AIs as gods, but as with the relationship between Valentin and Pepe this idea feels underdeveloped. I’ve read that when it comes to first drafts Larson likes to write the whole thing in one long sitting, which admittedly is how I tend to go about my own writing (he who casts the first stone yadda yadda), but “There Used to Be Olive Trees” reads like it could’ve been polished more.

There Be Spoilers Here

When we do finally meet the “god” in the autofab, it comes off as sort of an anti-climax. The world opens up at the end a bit, but aside from Valentin’s own personal uncertainty as a prophet the story doesn’t end so much as it comes to a sudden halt. His relationship with Pepe goes unresolved, and the phrasing at the very end implies the possibility of a sequel, although as far as I can tell Larson never wrote one.

A Step Farther Out

“There Used to Be Olive Trees” is a robust and somewhat queer story that doesn’t have any glaring problems, but conversely it’s the kind of story I would consider unexceptional. It doesn’t help that while the title implies climate catastrophe and it’s something that clearly lingers in the background of the narrative, climate change is not really a topic that comes up for the characters, nor does the desolation of the setting seem to have much weight on their minds. Similarly the relationship between Valentin and Pepe is allowed to develop, but only up to a point, and I do have to wonder if the story’s queerness, or rather it’s playing with gender, could’ve been much expanded on, for the characters’ sakes but also to tie their budding relationship more into the plot. It’s a functional story that ultimately falls short an inch or two of its potential.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer

August 24th, 2024

(Cover by Paul Lewin. Uncanny, Nov-Dec 2023.)

Who Goes There?

Naomi Kritzer debuted at the tail end of the ’90s, and for a while seemed to fly under the radar; but in the 2010s her career saw a rise to prominence the likes of which is unusual for someone who had been in the game for a hot minute. She won a Hugo for her 2015 story “Cat Pictures Please,” one of the defining SF short stories of the 2010s in my opinion, and in the past decade she’s enriched the field with a keen understanding of human communities, sociology, and psychology. Her fiction can often read as only nominally SF in the sense that the world depicted is mostly the one we now recognize, only then changed by a single but major factor; conversely you could argue the grounded nature of much of her fiction, the plausibly speculative nature of it, would make it very definitively SFnal. “The Year Without Sunshine,” which won the Nebula for Best Novelette earlier this year and more recently the Hugo for the same category, is an example of such SF, to the point where the SFnal element of the story is not immediately apparent. This is a dark but also quite hopeful depiction of a future which is not far off at all—not tomorrow, but maybe next year.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November-December 2023 issue of Uncanny Magazine, which you can read here. Since it’s such a recent story it has not been reprinted anywhere so far.

Enhancing Image

The problem firstly is that the sun seems to have been blocked out by a perpetual cloud; how far-reaching this environmental change is and what even caused it remain unclear. The secondary problem is that power’s gone out—not for a few hours or days but for weeks at a time. We’ve all gone through power outages, but most of us don’t know what it’s like to be without electricity and internet for long enough that more “primitive” methods of communication and sustaining power become necessary in a life-or-death sense. Alexis, the narrator, is not in any immediate danger, although getting in touch with her neighbors makes her realize that one or two people in her neighborhood need electricity to survive. One older couple, Clifford and Susan, live with the latter hooked up to oxygen, Susan suffering from emphysema. Clifford had bought a small generator for Susan’s oxygen concentrator, but once that generator runs out of fuel Susan’s probably not gonna live much longer. Thus the plot hinges on Alexis and other neighbors coming together to find some way for Susan to stay on oxygen, in a society without power, connection to the outside world, and even with the government rationing medicine such that anything deemed less than absolutely essential becomes a rarity. This is a simple plot, if you think about it, but Kritzer makes it work.

The very beginning of the story almost reads like a red herring, with the action taking place in Minneapolis, in circumstances that almost (but not quite) read like what people in that city had to go through back in 2020, between COVID lockdown and the George Floyd protests. Indeed I’m convinced Kritzer could not have written “The Year Without Sunshine” any earlier than the end of 2020, and in that sense this is a story that very much feels of its time—up to a point. Of course it turns out the pickle Alexis and company find themselves in is a bit more severe and all-encompassing than a virus; incidentally COVID is alluded to at the beginning, but I don’t recall it being mentioned by name. After the power and internet go out for long enough one of Alexis’s neighbors, Tanesha, sets up a “WHATSUP” booth, where people can leave notes for each other, but also trade items and services, “coffee for condoms, cat food for diapers, a bike repair for a plumbing repair.” Because it turns out everyone has something of value to someone else, and everyone has at least one skill that would make them valuable to a community. Ostensibly this is a story about climate disaster, but it gradually reveals itself to be about building community; to some extent it reminds me of Stephen King’s The Mist, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Kritzer has a lot more faith in organizing and direct action than King does. Should note that “The Year Without Sunshine” might be the most overtly left-leaning story I’ve covered here in a minute, which isn’t to say it’s preachy, but it does help if your politics are in the same general area as Kritzer’s. Good thing, I suppose, that her politics are similar to mine, at least if her fiction is anything to go on.

“The Year Without Sunshine” could’ve easily been thinly disguised theory-as-narrative, but Kritzer trusts us to understand what she’s going for with how her characters interact with each other and how they try to make things work in a world that seems on the verge of ending. Granted that Alexis has an “eat the rich” shirt (which, in a humorous moment, she reflects that she shouldn’t be wearing casually in a city where there are trigger-happy right-wingers), it’s not hard to figure out that Our Heroine™ is somewhere on the left; but she spends very little time theorizing and much more on trying to find a practical solution to a practical problem. We see how society has broken down somewhat after the sun and internet have gone out, and how the implicit divide between the city proper and the suburbs have become more stark. I say this as someone who’s spent pretty much his whole life in the suburbs, so I can be self-deprecating about it, but let’s say suburbanites don’t come off well in this story. There’s a haunting scene where Alexis and company venture out to the edge of the suburbs, in search of resources, and they don’t like what they find:

The roads were quiet—mostly bikes and walkers, a few city buses. Everyone, including us, had parked cars sideways to block the streets leading into their neighborhoods, then left them there, then had the gasoline salvaged or looted out of them so the cars definitely weren’t going anywhere. Traffic on the roads picked up when we got to the edge of the suburbs, even though all the gas stations were still closed. Also, in addition to the car barricades, we saw something hanging from the streetlight that for a second I thought was a body. It wasn’t a body: it was a mannequin, though, so it was definitely supposed to look like a body. It had a sign around its plastic neck saying LOOTER.

Quite a few people are willing to band together, even just to help one of their own—but evidently not everyone. “The Year Without Sunshine” doesn’t have a “villain,” properly speaking, but the good guys find themselves stuck between two antagonistic forces, first the government and then those in the community who see themselves as better than their neighbors—the social Darwinists who think property matters more than human life. We all know those people. I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but I think it’s funny that such an overtly left-libertarian story would win a Hugo at a Worldcon held in Scotland. The government’s presence dissolves over the course of the story to the point where there doesn’t seem to be any law enforcement or oversight at the end, or at least such presence becomes more peripheral as the community becomes more of a proper commune—and pretty much all this happens in the service of helping one person with a severe disability. It’s also worth mentioning that while Susan’s disability serves as the crux of the conflict, she’s still very much allowed to exist as her own person, as opposed to a woe-is-me signal for the able-bodied characters—something which still happens too often in fiction. In a commune (and a commune should be the desired final outcome for leftists, mind you, with the state having dissolved or gone into exile), the more capable should look after the less capable, but even the less capable have ways of contributing.

There are debates, of course. People have started using bikes way more often, and you can even generate enough power for a small generator if you have enough people biking, like hamsters on wheels, but how would you convince people to do such a thing without pay? As Alexis finds out, it’s actually not that hard to convince several people to take shifts for such a thing if it means helping someone else materially. She thought some form of payment would be necessary (in a world where paper money was not basically worthless), “but it turned out to be exactly like ripping up yards to plant potatoes, people were willing to just do it.” A tougher question was how the commune would protect their resources, because nothing is free and resources have become more finite than before. Should they use lethal force to protect resources? Should the commune form its own militia? As nice as pacifism is as an ideal it’s not very practical, sad to say. Something has to give. I’m not totally convinced the commune in this story is realistically able to find a quasi-pacifist solution like it does here (basically using non-aggression as a foundation and refraining from using guns as a first resort), but it does feed into the story’s overall optimism about people working together, even in a borderline apocalyptic scenario. Science fiction historically has sorely been lacking in humanism, but that’s really a topic for another time, the point being that Kritzer’s brand of libertarianism or anarchism very much goes against the norm in American SF.

There Be Spoilers Here

I don’t wanna spoil this one much, as it’s so recent, but I will say that while the conflict does eventually escalate it doesn’t go in quite the direction you might assume. Safe to say Kritzer’s view of humanity is more optimistic than average, and also despite what the grimness of the story’s title would imply. Read it for yourself and see!

A Step Farther Out

I don’t like to review stories I deem too new; an unofficial rule here is I would prefer to wait at least a year after a story’s publication. “The Year Without Sunshine” is not quite a year old yet, so I’m making an exception with this. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t like to give in to recency bias, not to mention that with recent works by authors who are very much alive and active there’s an implicit urge to coddle the work in question, especially if you’re getting paid for your review. Well nobody’s fucking paying me. When I was catching up on stuff for this year’s Hugos, which I was voting for, I have to admit I wasn’t impressed with what would be Kritzer’s other Hugo-winning story this year, “Better Living Through Algorithms.” I thought it was fine, but nothing special. “The Year Without Sunshine” does, however, go to much farther lengths, being more thought-provoking but also tapping more into Kritzer’s trademark humanism. It barely counts as SF, depending on how you look at it, but for how it sums up what the 2020s have been like so far I think it’s essential reading.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Dusty Zebra” by Clifford D. Simak

August 20th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, September 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Clifford Simak had already been around for two decades when Galaxy premiered with the October 1950 issue, and this brave new magazine seemed to give the veteran writer’s career a second wind—or at the very least coincided with it. The ’50s would be a golden age for Simak (like with a lot of fellow genre writers), with the early ’50s alone seeing four novels from him (as opposed to just one in the previous twenty years combined), including his masterpiece City. Simak wrote a truly enormous amount of short fiction this decade, on top of the novels, and his outlet of choice was Galaxy. The reasons as to why Simak preferred Galaxy over the competition aren’t totally clear; it could be (I think I recall this) that he came to find John W. Campbell’s meddling to be too exhausting, although he still occasionally contributed to Astounding/Analog in the ’50s and ’60s. Simak has been sort of pigeonholed as a vaguely conservative writer, mostly due to his focusing on rural settings and peoples (that he’s a pastoralist can’t be denied), but a deeper reading of his fiction and reading the tragically few interviews we have with him show him to be a more complicated person. (We’re talking about someone who claimed to reread The Grapes of Wrath every year.) “Dusty Zebra” sounds at first like it might be a straightforward bartering-saves-the-day narrative, similar to Simak’s own “The Big Front Yard” (reviewed here), but it’s more of a humorous cautionary tale.

Also, I’m sorry that this is being posted later in the day than what would be ideal. My daily life has not been great.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has been reprinted in Alpha 9 (ed. Robert Silverberg) and the Simak collections The Worlds of Clifford Simak and Dusty Zebra and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

Joe is a business-minded family man, whose son Bill happens to be even more business-minded (ripping off other schoolkids by trading junk for things with actual value), and one day while looking for stamps in his work desk he finds out something very odd: there’s a tiny dot on the desk, and if an object passes through it it goes—somewhere. Seemingly vanishes into thin air. And yet something takes its place. Joe puts random crap on the dot and gets back neat little gadgets, like a pen that also transforms into a fishing rod, and especially there’s the dust-collector, a kind of vacuum that sucks up dust and makes it disappear. Where does the dust go? Not sure. Joe encourages Bill’s schoolyard trading, so it makes sense that he would be interested in what turns out to be an trans-dimensional portal, the only problem then being that while Joe has business sense he doesn’t have technical sense; so in comes Lewis, the next door neighbor, who can explain the gadgetry and mechanics of the strange little dot. (Something you may notice about Simak is that a lot of the time his protagonists are not scientists at all, but they happen to be friends with someone who is scientifically minded and who can explain the SFnal elements of the story.) Before long Joe and Lewis form a business partnership around the trading, complete with a deliberately convoluted contract, and of course Joe tries to lessen Lewis’s share at every opportunity. Simak protagonists are often well-meaning, but they can also at times fall on the anti-hero end of the spectrum, which Joe very much is; not that he’s evil or anything, but he’s a capitalist at heart, maybe a little less human than the average Simak protagonist.

The recurring trade-off throughout the stories is that for some reason the person (called “the Trader”) on the other side of the portal really likes these cheap zebra bracelets that Joe happened to have, and in return for this seemingly useless trinket the humans get a dust-collector in return. The humans find that they can trade in the useless garbage for some pretty useful items, which can then be turned for a profit. We never do learn where the dot came from, who’s responsible for it, or even what the Trader looks like. This is all rather inexplicable, although there’s just enough scientific mumbo jumbo thrown in to keep this away from being fantasy. A lot of Simak’s stories can be thought of less as hard-nosed SF and more like machine fables, in which technology figures into the setting and moral of the story, but the actual plausibility of the tech is a distant second. The dot-as-portal is ridiculous, and also this seems like a very easy way to send over a deadly weapon, or an object that could carry diseases. If we’re to take the Trader as an alien, though, it makes sense that such a figure would be more or less benign in Simak’s book. I often think of Simak as an anti-Lovecraft figure, in that when Simak characters encounter the unknown it’s very rare for the unknown to pose a serious threat. Simak’s aliens, including the Trader, are often curious creatures who can be reasoned with on some level, such as, for instance, bartering being the common ground between humanity and the aliens in “The Big Front Yard.” I assumed “Dusty Zebra” would be a similarly straightforward first-contact story in which bartering is shown as a force for good; and while the bartering itself turns out to be fine, the get-rich-quick scheme Joe and Lewis concoct will have consequences neither of them would’ve wanted or expected.

So about the zebra bracelets. How do the humans and the Trader, well, trade? How do they understand each other? Short answer is, they don’t—at least not beyond a picture book language that even a toddler can understand; but this rudimentary language turns out to be just enough. Joe and company get the bright idea to use one of Bill’s picture books (one showing items as standing in for letters of the alphabet, so A is for apple, etc.) to show the Trader what they have for inventory, and the Trader sends the book back with the desired item marked. One problem: they forgot (or didn’t notice) that the item on the Z page is a zebra—and the Trader wants one of those. Now you may be thinking, that’s a whole-ass animal. Where you would even get one for sale? But as Joe says, after taking some “advice” from Bill, “[The Trader] doesn’t know a zebra is an animal, or, if he does, how big it is!” This is of course an example of ripping someone in a deal off, but as Joe rationalizes, if the Trader can’t tell the difference then what harm is being done? “If the Trader had any qualms about what was happening, he gave no sign of it. He seemed perfectly happy to send us dust collectors so long as we sent him zebras.” This is a partnership that seems to be working, for now. A certain question does linger, though: Where does all the dust that the dust-collectors pick up go? Conceivably it has to go somewhere, and the Trader doesn’t seem to be getting the dust back…

There Be Spoilers Here

Our Anti-Heroes™ have been making a killing on the gadgets, only the problem is that they can’t figure out how to reverse engineer them so as to manufacture them themselves. To really make a killing on the dust-collectors you would need at least a few thousand, but how would you get them? The Trader apparently wants more zebra bracelet charms in exchange for the dust-collectors, and those charms have since been discontinued. In what is admittedly a far-fetched turn of events Joe (this is after making a great deal of money) is able to make a deal with the charm manufacturer, and soon enough the house gets filled with literally thousands of the damn things. The good news is that they get more dust-collectors! In fact too many of them. So, there seems to be a third party in this, or so Joe suspects: clearly the dust must be going somewhere, and in the last stretch of the story it all comes back—pounds of the stuff across multiple households. Joe’s house alone gets filled with dust that seems to have come from another dimension, but maybe not the Trader’s. Then the dot vanishes. We never do find out why the Trader cuts off communication or what he could be doing with all those zebra charms. Maybe he (or they) realized he had gotten ripped off and decided some payback was needed. Or maybe there’s another dimension all the dust goes to and they didn’t like that very much. Point being that a combination of lawsuits and being unable to replicate the gadgets brings Joe and company pretty much back to square one by the end. I like how there’s some mystery retained with the Trader by the end, so that not only did the humans pay for their profit-seeking but that they’re also left wondering what could be going on in those other dimensions.

A Step Farther Out

In a way this is minor Simak, in that it doesn’t take itself very seriously. It’s also not very SFnal, indeed bordering on fantasy—possibly even cosmic horror. Or rather cosmic humor. It’s a story about some entertaining if also unlikable people who think they can get something with minimal effort and reap the benefits. Had this been a Henry Kuttner or C. M. Kornbluth story the ending would’ve been much more unforgiving towards the humans, but ultimately it was written to be in good fun. Simak is not dead-serious that often, but just because he tends to be on the lighthearted (or at least forgiving) side doesn’t mean he can’t make a solid point. I actually think we still don’t give him enough credit.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” by Octavia E. Butler

August 13th, 2024

(Cover by Stanislaw Fernandes. Omni, May 1987.)

Who Goes There?

Some authors are reborn posthumoussly, in that their reputations get a shot of adrenaline following their deaths, but Octavia E. Butler’s story is a bit more complicated than that since she was already a respected writer—at least within the field. Butler was one of literally a handful of black American writers to be writing SF in the ’70s and ’80s, and as Butler hersself admitted the barrier to entry was so high for those of her race that the few black writers to “make it” in the field at the time sort of had to be very talented. Butler is most known for her novels, which she actually wrote more of than short stories (she also loved sequels, which is unfortunate since she didn’t live to write some of them), although this didn’t stop her from winning back-to-back Hugos for her short fiction. It was in the years following her death, though, that Butler has become reevaluated as one of the very best writers in modern SF, to the point where she recently got a Library of America volume. (Basically if you get an LOA volume you are, at the very least, canonical so far as stuffy academics are concerned.) In fairness, while it’s easy to see Butler’s recent ascension to mainstream literary godhood as (like with Ursula K. Le Guin, sad to say) a bit overblown, she was quite a good writer. Case in point, today’s story, which after the Ballard story I reviewed a few days ago stands in the running as one of the bleakest SF stories of all time. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” is brutal.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1987 issue of Omni. Honestly this is the worst way you can read this story, because Omni is physically quite hard to read. It was then reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Omni Visions One (ed. Ellen Datlow), The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (ed. Richard Glyn Jones and A. Susan Williams), Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (ed. Sheree Renée Thomas), and of course it’s in Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

This story is nominally SF, and I say that because it’s only SF on account of the disease at the heart of it being of Butler’s own creation. In the near-future, an experimental drug called Hedeonco, “the magic bullet, the cure for a large percentage of the world’s cancer and a number of serious viral diseases,” has a horrific side effect called Duryea-Gode disease, which is hereditary and degenerative. People with DGD rarely make it past the age of forty. Lynn, the protagonist, has DGD on account of having inherited it from both of her parents; and things only get worse when her father brutally kills her mother in a murder-suicide. People with DGD are defined by a physical and mental decline, but also the preculiar symptom of having a inclination for self-mutilation. In the afterword to this story (which you can find in Bloodchild and Other Stories, not the Omni printing), Butler says she was interested in the idea of a disease which makes you feel like a stranger in your own body, or a disease which makes you feel like your body is a prison. She lists a few real-life diseases as inspiration for DGD, including Huntington’s disease, although curiously she does not mention HIV or AIDS. Maybe it goes without saying, considering Butler would’ve written this story in the wake of the public announcement of HIV/AIDS, after the Reagan administration had deliberately kept it secret for four years. (Reminder that being pro-Reagan makes you at least passively supportive of homophobic policies.) AIDS and queerness don’t come up in Butler’s story, but it’s hard to not read into the subtext of how DGD people are treated, even being made to wear emblems that designate them as having DGD (for social but also medical reasons), like they’re lepers.

Lynn is of college age and knows she has maybe twenty more years before she probably kills herself in a gory fashion, which doesn’t mean she can’t contribute meaningfully to the world. After the deaths of her parents she gets sent to Dilg, an institute run by and for DGDs, a hospital and research institute rolled into one. There she meets Alan Chi, whom she takes a liking to, being someone who also inherited DGD from both his parents. “I thought Chi was a Chinese name, and I wondered. But he told me his father was Nigerian and that in Ibo the word meant a kind of guardian angel or personal God.” Symbolism much? Jokes aside, Lynn and Alan do find comfort in each other, having been excluded from normal society and being left with a disease that predestines them for short and very painful lives. The people at Dilg range from fully functioning researchers, or “elder” DGDs who have managed (so far) to retain their mental faculties, to patients who have quite literally gouged their own eyes out, as happens to be the case with Alan’s mother. One of the elders Lynn and Alan meet is Beatrice, a woman Lynn suspects is about sixty, which (we’re told) is very old indeed for someone with DGD, yet Beatrice seems like a normal person. There’s a reason for this, we’ll get to that in spoilers. It’s actually hard to sum up the plot since there isn’t much of one, despite this being a novelette; normally this would be a negative criticism, but while she doesn’t stuff her story with events, Butler more than makes up for it with character insight and a creepy fullness in how the world of the story is described. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” is about disease and mental illness, but it’s also about control. There’s a tug-of-war going on between DGDs and the outside world, but also within the community DGDs have made for themselves. This is a truly speculative narrative about a made-up but perfectly plausible disease and its consequences.

Science fiction, I do think more than other genre, can be defined by it capacity to ask questions and pose hypotheticals. If we’re to judge the quality of SF by the questions it asks then “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” would be an all-timer, because Butler asks some genuinely disturbing questions and refuses to give easy answers. I said this is a story about disease, mental illness, and control, but it’s also about free will. The term “free will” is kinda loaded, because we know our capacity for “free will” is constrained by several factors, not the least of them being our own physiology. Butler basically asks, “Is the body really a prison? Is our capacity to act and even think determined by what our bodies will allow us?” Will DGD prevent Lynn and Alan from leading happy and fulfilling lives? Probably. God knows Lynn saw some people very close to her, including her own parents, have their lives completely derailed by a disease which they really had no say in. Some of the brightest minds in human history were ruined by disease or mental illness. Butler herself suffered from depression and high blood pressure, the latter contributing to what was probably a stroke that killed her when she was only 58. Have I mentioned this is an extremely depressing story? It’s concerned with agency, control, mortality, and how people with certain ailments are excluded from larger society; again it’s hard to not think of how people with AIDS were treated like lepers, not to mention all the misinformation floating about, once the AIDS epidemic became public knowledge. People who are not perfectly able-bodied are deemed “less useful” in the capitalist meat-grinder, and in such a society DGDs really only have each other to turn to. Like recognizes like. It’s like how, in my case, I gravitate towards other people with mood disorders, namely depression, bipolar, and borderline personality disorder. We’re social animals, and if we’re excluded somehow from “the norm” then we look for communities.

Again Butler asks, “Are we slaves to our own bodies?” Mind you that this is not a transhumanist story, but it does seem to plant the seeds for what would later become transhumanist SF (not to mention genderqueer SF, which is certainly related if not the same thing). If the body is a prison then we have an obligation to break out of it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The reason why Beatrice has so far retained her appearance of normalcy and how she’s able to “control” other DGDs at Dilg has to do with pheromones. I mentioned that DGD is hereditary, but it also has to do with which parent passed down the disease and the sex of the offspring. Beatrice, like Lynn and Alan, is the offspring of two parents who also had DGD, but Lynn in particular shares Beatrice’s “gift” for controlling other DGDs. As Beatrice explains “the scent,” which she and Lynn have:

“Men who inherit the disease from their fathers have no trace of the scent. They also tend to have an easier time with the disease. But they’re useless to use as staff here. Men who inherit from their mothers have as much of the scent as men get. They can be useful here because the DGDs can at least be made to notice them. The same for women who inherit from their mothers but not their fathers. It’s only when two irresponsible DGDs get together and produce girl children like me or Lynn that you get someone who can really do some good in a place like this.”

So Lynn and Alan are in a bit of a catch-22: if they end up getting married and have kids, they’re incentivized to produce a girl, who would be able to contribute to Dilg and help with the little DGD community; but also it would be irresponsible to produce more DGDs since there’s no cure for the dissease and knowingly passing DGD on to one’s offspring is condemning them to a painful and probably short life. Dilg is meant to serve DGDs, but it’s also run by DGDs, which means the institute requires fresh supplies of capable DGDs to run it. Dilg would not exist without DGD, both because of the disease’s very existence, but also the people who live with it. Beatrice is an exceptionally well-trained DGD who uses her “scent” to work with less lucid DGDs, like Alan’s mother, but she’s also the exception that proves the rule. It’s unclear, at the end, if Lynn will follow in Beatrice’s footsteps or if she will try to live as close to a normal life as she can. This is a case where I think an open ending is ultimately for the best.

A Step Farther Out

Excellent. Of course Omni has this reputation for publishing very high-quality fiction, despite printing so little of it (it took me ten month to cover another story from Omni because frankly there are relatively few stories from its pages that I have no read before), and I think said reputation is more or less justified. This also marked Butler’s only appearance in Omni, and she really made the most of it. Check out “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” if you don’t mind a discomforting read.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Voices of Time” by J. G. Ballard

August 10th, 2024

(Cover by Jarr. New Worlds, October 1960.)

Who Goes There?

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, to British parents, and his experiences in a Japanese POW camp during World War II would much later be dramatized in Empire of the Sun. Before Empire of the Sun brought Ballard mainstream attention, though, he was a controversial figure, and before that one of the architects of the New Wave. He debuted in 1956, simultaneously in New Worlds and Science Fantasy, and while he wouldn’t be published in the American magazines for several more years, his early work quickly got reprinted in American reprint anthologies. The closest American equivalent to Ballard I can think of at the time might’ve been C. M. Kornbluth, who sadly was unlikely to have heard of Ballard before his death. Ballard later became a kind of writer’s writer, the kind of genre writer who gained acceptance with the literary crowd with provocative but only borderline SFnal novels like Crash and High-Rise. He was one of the field’s great misanthropes. “The Voices of Time” was published right before Ballard’s thirtieth birthday, being very much a story that anticipated the New Wave—not the sex and violence of the New Wave, but rather the attempts at literary intricacy, the psychology of the New Wave. This is a deceptively complex story with a black hole for a heart.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1960 issue of New Worlds. It has been reprinted in Spectrum III (ed. Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest), One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (ed. Damon Knight), Alpha Two (ed. Robert Silverberg), Modern Science Fiction (ed. Norman Spinrad), The Great SF Stories #22 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and of course in The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.

Enhancing Image

Robert Powers used to be a neurologist at “the Clinic,” but has since resigned on account of falling victim to a “narcoma syndrome” which has, over the past five years, sent thousands of people into comas from which there doesn’t seem to be hope for recovery. The Clinic itself has practically been overrun with hundreds of sleeping beauties, and as Powers sleeps more and more each day on average (something like eleven or twelve hours), he knows the time will come when he becomes one of the comatose. Subjectively he may as well have a terminal condition. Anderson, former colleague at the Clinic and now Powers’s own doctor, takes pity on him but notices there’s also a serene quality about Powers, as if he has become “like a Conrad beachcomber more or less reconciled to his own weaknesses.” Of course this is a reference to Joseph Conrad’s seafaring stories, like Lord Jim and Almayer’s Folly, and like the protagonists of those novels Powers is a doomed man—although unlike his predecessors he pretty well knows it. He might be following the footsteps of Whitby, a biologist at the Clinic who recently committed suicide, leaving his lab unattended and after having carved an elaborate symbol at the bottom of a drained swimming pool near the lab. There’s also Kaldren, a patient at the Clinic whom Powers had experimented on such that he has the opposite problem of everyone else: he never sleeps. And there’s Kaldren’s girlfriend, who he calls Coma (I have to think that’s not her real name), “the girl from Mars,” who befriends Powers.

“The Voices of Time” has been reprinted many times and seems to be one of those stories that exists as fodder for classroom discussions (assuming the teacher/professor is based enough to be teaching classic SF), partly I think because of its symbolic density. There are a lot of symbols shoved in here, some obvious, some not as obvious. “Coma” is obviously meant to be ironic, as she’s one of the few people at the Clinic who’s still awake; but then you have Kaldren, which sounds like cauldron—like a witch’s cauldron. Kaldren is perhaps the most aloof character in this small ensemble, as he’s kind of a mischievous figure, passively tormenting Powers, the Dr. Frankenstein who had messed with his brain. Kaldren passes the time by doing several things, one of them being that he likes to draw a series of numbers, apparently taken from a recording of a lost moon expedition, the last digits revealing the long series of numbers to be a countdown. According to Kaldren’s study of the recording, “by the time this series reaches zero the universe will have just ended.” (By the way, the Mercury Seven, the moon expedition which had apparently encountered alien life on the moon and went missing thereafter, is named after a real group of astronauts, called the Mercury Seven, which would’ve been announced probably a few months before Ballard wrote this story. One of the Mercury Seven, Gus Grissom, would later die in the Apollo 1 disaster.) We never do find out what happened to Mercury Seven, or where the aliens went, but we get the impression that whatever message they had for us was not a good one. Kaldren plays with the recording to kill time, while Powers does the same by venturing into his dead colleague’s lab and seeing what he had been working on—which may turn out to be a mistake, given the irradiated horrors awaiting him.

“The Voices of Time” has multiple moving parts, but if I had to boil it down to one word it has to be “entropy.” Entropy is a pretty hard word to define, and as a layman I’m not really qualified to get knee-deep in it, but in the context of Ballard’s story it has to do with the winding-down of the universe—not an explosion or even a crunch, but a very slow lapsing into eternal slumber. The universe is slowing down into lethargy, and this extends to not just humanity but all life on Earth. Whitby had experimented on animal and plant life with X-rays, irradiating these forms and awaking what he called a pair of “silent genes,” whose effects would be unpredictable but very interesting. The life forms Powers encounters in the lab, from a hyper-intelligent chimp who nonetheless has to wear a special helmet to avoid migraines, to an overgrown frog with a leaden shell which “vaguely resembled an armadillo’s.” In a more conventional SF story of the time these creatures would have at least been blessed with powers and a certain resiliency, but alas they are in pain, and dying. Whitby’s experiments with radiation had apparently fostered a little circus of freaks, the animals’ painful existence making them nightmarish but also pitiable. The “silent genes” unlocked previously untapped potential, sure, but this turned out to not be for the better. Whitby himself seemed aware of his mistake, and while we’re not told why he committed suicide, it’s not hard to guess, going off recorded convos between him and Powers.

“It’s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downwards to the common biological grave. It’s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it’s the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time. Believe me, I pity them, as I pity myself.”

I shouldn’t have to tell you that this story is hard to read, partly because of the ideas Ballard plays with, but it’s also insanely depressing. I had read “The Voices of Time” a few days ago but waited to write about it, so I could take more notes but also it’s such a miserable fucking time. This is not unusual for Ballard, although even the dark humor that would define his most (in)famous work is mostly absent here. This is a story about life in the universe becoming old and tired, but it’s also a curious subversion of what would’ve been, even in 1960, a very old topic: the forced evolution of life via radiation. On paper “The Voices of Time” would have been nothing out of the ordinary for 1940, or even 1930. The notion that humans could become “enhanced” via radiation goes back to the time of Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved,” in 1931, and goes back even further. Ballard would’ve been keenly aware of his genre’s history in the 20th century; despite being claimed by the literary crowd as one of their own he really was a student of genre SF. The thing is that Ballard, even at this early stage, was a much more sophisticated writer than Hamilton, or basically anyone who wrote genre fiction in the ’30s and ’40s. He hunted intellectual big game with extreme prejudice, and I have to admit there are passages in “The Voices of Time,” such as the above quote from Whitby, that are quite haunting—for their implications but also the beauty of their language. This is the kind of story I ideally should’ve read more than once before reviewing it.

There Be Spoilers Here

Powers spends much of the story retracing Whitby’s steps with his experiments, as something to do while he still has the capacity to stay awake; but he has also taken on an even weirder project: recreating the “mandala” at the bottom of that drained swimming pool on a larger scale, by using an abandoned airfield. (It’s unclear where this story takes place, but given the largely desert landscape it could be California or Nevada. It certainly doesn’t sound like anywhere in England that I can think of.) Something that has only just occurred to me, and it embarrasses me a bit to say this, is that while we’re given an SFnal explanation for Powers’s decline, it’s pretty obvious to me now that he suffers from clinical depression. Lethargy is a common symptom of depression, and while Powers never brings up suicide with regards to himself, it’s apparent from the beginning that he has resigned himself to what would be, at least from his perspective, the end of his life. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that at the end of the story, after having replicated Whitby’s mandala, Powers takes his own life in a rather unique fashion—by using Whitby’s experimental radiation on himself. To cop the final words from Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Powers “did, indeed, follow his leader.” One can only hope he felt as little pain as possible. It’s a fittingly bleak ending to one of SF’s bleakest stories, and a taste of the more explicit dystopias Ballard would become known for.

A Step Farther Out

I enjoyed thinking about this story more than actually reading it, although a big reason for that is the fact that I’m a dumbass and that I had to reread certain passages to get even a clue of what Ballard was doing. I always take notes when reading stuff for this site, but “The Voices of Time” is more demanding than most of what I’ve covered on here; indeed it demands that one take notes and try to think about it. It borders on “pretentious,” but it’s also easy to see how this would’ve been mind-bending for genre readers in 1960. At first you think you’re getting a standard “mad scientist” narrative, possibly even a throwback, but Ballard is five steps ahead of you and so delivers something that doesn’t quite read like anything else from the time—at least not in the genre magazines.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Retrograde Summer” by John Varley

August 6th, 2024

(Cover by David Hardy. F&SF, February 1975.)

Who Goes There?

When it comes to SF in the ’70s, you kinda have to talk about John Varley unless you’re one of those people who only reads novels. Varley made his debut in the August 1974 issues of F&SF and Vertex simultaneously, so this actually marks the 50th anniversary of his debut. (Those issues would’ve been on newsstands in July, but let me have this one.) So Varley pretty quickly made a name for himself as one of the most exciting new writers in the field, and for those first few years it was just with short stories. More specifically his stories about what he would call the Eight Worlds did and honestly still do read as fresh, if also products of their time to an extent. Varley would win three Hugos and two Nebulas, but none of these were for his Eight Worlds stories and indeed none of those stories won any awards, to my recollection. Not sure why. Even The Ophiuchi Hotline, Varley’s debut novel (he had apparently written one before but couldn’t get it published because it sucked), which is a pretty gnarly read and which serves as a sort of climax to those original Eight Worlds stories, only got a Locus poll spot. “Retrograde Summer” was Varley’s third published story and the second to take place in the Eight Worlds continuity; it also nabbed him his first Nebula nomination. Compared to some later entries in this series it’s on the tame side, but you can imagine reading “Retrograde Summer” in 1975 and finding it a mind-bending experience.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #5 (ed. Terry Carr), Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Varley collections The Persistence of Vision and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories. Not to flex or anything, but that latter Varley collection was a limited edition, all copies signed, and I happen to have one. Was not exactly cheap. What’s neat about The John Varley Reader and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories is that there’s zero overlap between them. “Retrograde Summer” is also one of the few stories published in F&SF to appear there twice, as it was reprinted in the June-July 2009 issue.

Enhancing Image

Perhaps it’s fitting that the first Varley story I cover here is set on the first planet in our solar system: Mercury.

Timothy is a 17-year-old aspiring pilot on Mercury, living with his mom Dorothy, has a special visitor coming in from Earth’s moon: Jubilant, his sister, whom he has never met before. Jubilant is older “by three E-years,” making her the big sister, and the two don’t exactly get along at first sight. This is all a bit of an odd experience since Timothy isn’t sure how Jubilant is his sister, and as we learn about family arrangements for this future humanity it’s hard to blame his confusion. The awkwardness isn’t helped by Jubilant’s total unfamiliarity with life on Mercury, and like other “loonies” she has to adjust to the gravitational pull of even this small planet. (“I’d hate to be a loonie; just about anywhere they go, they’re too heavy.) Mercury has not been terraformed; instead humans have adapted themselves to the planet’s incredibly harsh climate, shielding themselves from the sun through various means while also having skin-tight suits (or null-suits as they’re called in the Eight Worlds) that are basically full-body condoms. Something clever and revolutionary Varley did at the time was that he posited humans would be able to conquer the solar system, not through terraforming that would take literal centuries but by changing themselves in order to live in environments not suited for organic life, via technology, genetic tampering, or a combo of those things. It’s not totally plausible, but it’s a twist on space colonization that I’ve seen surprisingly few authors go for post-Varley, and honestly it reads as borderline transhumanist.

Some more context, because the thing with the Eight Worlds stories is that there isn’t a single one which gives us all the details as to how this future humanity works, which might be why none of these stories won awards despite being very fun and interesting. They’re greater than the sum of their parts is what I’m saying. For instance, we’re not told in this story why people aren’t living on Earth anymore; it’s because mankind basically got kicked off Earth by an alien race so much more powerful that it wasn’t even a contest. The bad news is that millions of people died in the ensuing exile, but the good news is that mankind got to inherit the rest of the solar system, including Earth’s moon. Call it a mixed bag. This is a future where cloning is not uncommon, where people can achieve nigh-immortality via memory uploading, where you can get three arms or a fully functioning tail, and where changing one’s sex is seen as perhaps a minor surgical procedure. Timothy himself lived most of his life so far as a woman, only “Changing” a couple years ago, and Dorothy points out that Jubilant looks very much like how Timothy did when he was a she. Right, so I should probably also mention that Varley’s idea of sex and gender, while very permissive for the ’70s, also now seems a bit… backwards. Not “backwards” as in morally dubious (although there is a bit of that), but more that Varley seemed to think of the relationship between sex and gender as reversed from how it actually works. Characters in the Eight Worlds change their gender when they change their sex, as opposed to aligning their sexual characteristics to fit more with their gender, which after all is self-perception. Let’s say there’s a lot to unpack here from a genderqueer perspective.

As for actual quibbles I have with the story, I have a couple, although nothing major. For one I find Varley’s fondness for first-person narration to not always work, depending on the story’s tone and the likability of the narrator. Timothy is a perfectly fine character who works as someone who stands on the shadow-line between childhood and adulthood, but there is a small problem in him being the narrator since we already know in advance that he’ll come out of this problem fine; because “Retrograde Summer” is at least ostensibly an adventure narrative, a tale of survival in which siblings take the situation as their cue to bond. It doesn’t help either that it’s quite hard for people in the Eight Worlds to die permanently, thanks to the aforementioned cloning and memory banks. Thus other means of generating tension are required, and in the case of this story there’s already enough tension between the family members, since Timothy gets the strong impression that Dorothy is keeping secrets from him as to his exact relationship with his sister. It’s hard to blame him, considering Timothy and Jubilant turn out to be a bit more related than the former had previously thought. Before I get to that, I do wanna mention that I like how Varley is able to info-dump on us as to how society on Mercury works whilst making it quite entertaining. Timothy and his mom live on a hilltop, which has a symbolic function but which also serves a practical function given the planet’s tendency for earthquakes. “If you live at the top of a rise, you have a better chance of being near the top of the rubble when it slides down. Besides, my mother and I both liked the view.” It’s like living in California.

Basically this is a story about entering adulthood, which is perhaps predictable, but it’s vividly drawn, helped maybe by the fact that Varley was a burned-out former hippie (or fellow traveler to hippies) who would’ve only been 26 when he wrote this. Timothy is a bit precocious, but he’s convincing as a teen character I think because Varley is writing about a time in one’s life that wouldn’t have been too far away in the rearview mirror for him. There’s an energy and sheer youthfulness to Varley’s early fiction that he wasn’t able to recapture as he got older, but here it’s in a pretty raw state. This is a bit of a double-edged sword, though, since while Varley had a knack for writing child and teen characters, there were also—let’s say problematic things in those early stories that would rub one’s modern sensibilities the wrong way. Starting in the New Wave years more or less there began this troubling tendency in genre SF where relations between grown-ass adults and minors were written about in a way that would (or at least should) give the average person goosebumps, and Varley had to be one of the worst offenders of this back in the ’70s—a discomforting notion that blemished some of what would otherwise be his strongest fiction. “Retrograde Summer” doesn’t have such nonsense, thankfully, although this is still a future society where legally emancipated minors are not too uncommon. Jubilant herself had “divorced her mother when she was ten E-years old,” which as Timothy notes is still a peculiarity, although Jubilant had emancipated herself from her mother on the moon on the basis of “religious insanity.”

If this sounds like a lot, we’re only just getting started.

There Be Spoilers Here

So what counts as religious insanity in the context of the Eight Worlds? As Jubilant tells us, after she and Timothy inevitably get trapped in an earthquake, Dorothy used to be “genotypically” a man… and also their dad. The thing about families in Eight Worlds societies is that they don’t exist anymore, or at least the nuclear family model is considered taboo. It’s one child per parent, and the idea is that each parent would raise their child more or less by themself. You might have a mother, but you wouldn’t have a “father.” That Dorothy used to be a man but also used to be the “father” in a couple that practiced the fringe religious belief of raising children together as a couple (gasp) comes as a shock to Timothy. Oh, and there’s another thing: Timothy is a clone. Jubilant was born first, and in fact Timothy was a clone grown from Jubilant while the latter was still a toddler; so the reason the two look so similar when both are women is that they’re genetically the same person. After finding this out Timothy says it’s a shame the two can’t have sex together while trapped under the rubble, and I can’t tell if this is meant to be a joke on either of their parts. After finding out they’re not siblings (at least not in the traditional sense) there’s some romantic/sexual tension, but it goes unresolved. Does fucking your clone count as incest? Mind you that Varley would write clones boinking each other in some later Eight Worlds stories with the appropriate amount of gusto. Incest enjoyers will get a bit of a kick out of the sexual tension here. Anyway, Timothy and Jubilant are old enough and close enough in age that it wouldn’t really be a problem, at least compared to some of the more questionable relationships in Varley’s fiction (Heinlein has a lot to answer for).

I will say I was surprised to find this classified as a novelette, as I’m sure it barely counts; it’s actually shorter than I was expecting. Our Heroes™ spend the back end of the story doing very little, out of necessity given they’re trying to conserve oxygen; but basically once Timothy starts coming to terms with his status as Jubilant’s clone they’re rescued, just like that. It’s bad storytelling when the conflict is resolved passively, such as here, but it’s the kind of mistake that’s easy to forgive or gloss over given how engrossing Varley’s writing is, even when he’s doing exposition. It’s just that the ending comes too quickly and easily, and there are a couple loose ends, such as how their relationship might develop after this point. Are they into each other or not? It’s unclear. It’s also unclear how this bomb of a revelation will change Timothy’s perception of his mother, but I get we don’t necessarily need to know that. This is a coming-of-age narrative, more about Timothy crossing the shadow-line from childhood to young adulthood than even the real danger of the earthquake. If you read enough of these Eight Worlds stories you realize that main characters are rarely in tangible danger, so instead Varley works to build character and the world around the characters. Unlike (if I’m being brutally honest) a lot of modern short SF, however, which too often strikes me as just moody and no-fun-allowed, Varley’s early writing was fun. I was disappointed by the suddenness of this story’s ending because I wanted more of it, which as I’ve said elsewhere is usually the best complaint one can have about a work of art.

A Step Farther Out

It’s good, even if it ends abruptly. I’ve also read enough of Varley’s short fiction at this point, pretty much all of which came after “Retrograde Summer,” that this didn’t exactly hold any surprises for me. That’s not even a question of the story showing its age, because if this is your first Varley story and you’re reading it in [THE CURRENT YEAR] then you might still find it a little spicy. If anything it’s an indicator of, let’s say more eccentric stories in the Eight Worlds series, that were to come later.

See you next time.
Short Story: “The Movie People” by Robert Bloch

July 31st, 2024

(Cover by Ron Walotsky. F&SF, October 1969.)

Who Goes There?

We’ve reached the end of the month, as well as the end of my marathon covering F&SF as it was in the ’60s, which as it turns out was a pretty weird time for the magazine! In that ten-year period F&SF went through four editors, and you can tell different hands were at the wheel at different points, because for better or worse this was a transitory period. Robert Bloch himself comes off as a rather transitory writer, in that he always seemed to be going for some new angle, never staying in the same place for long. Bloch has one of the more unusual career trajectories of any genre writer, and you can also partly blame him for our modern obsession with true crime. In the ’30s Bloch became (if I remember right) the youngest member of the Lovecraft circle, even corresponding with Lovecraft himself, despite Bloch being a snotty teenager at the time. While he would drift away from Lovecraftian horror, Bloch remained mostly a horror writer, although interestingly today’s story is not horror at all. Of course you know him for Psycho, and he was also a prolific screenwriter for film and TV, namely a few classic Star Trek episodes. I’ve read enough of Bloch at this point to know he loved the movies, to the point where he might’ve been as inspired by horror in cinema as horror in literature; but again, “The Movie People” is quite different. Bloch was born in Chicago but would eventually settle in Los Angeles, and today’s story is a bittersweet ode to his adopted city.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in New Worlds of Fantasy #2 (ed. Terry Carr), Hollywood Unreel: Fantasies About Hollywood and the Movies (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh), Silver Scream (ed. David J. Schow), plus the Bloch collections The Best of Robert Bloch and The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume 3.

Enhancing Image

This story could be considered, to some extent, autobiographical. It’s circa 1970 and the narrator may as well be a stand-in for Bloch, living in LA and friends with a guy, Jimmy Rogers, who’s about a generation older than him. Jimmy is an old man now, but back in the 1920s he had started making cash as a regular extra in silent movie productions, along with his girlfriend at the time, June Logan. The narrator, in no small part to console his friend in his old age, goes with Jimmy to The Silent Movie, “the only place in town where you can still go and see The Mark of Zorro. There’s always a Chaplin comedy, and usually Laurel and Hardy, along with a serial starring Pearl White, Elmo Lincoln, or Houdini.” It’s what it says on the tin, playing silent movies at a time when silent movies would’ve been relegated to TV airings, on the occasion they were played at all. While he would’ve still been a kid when silent movies got usurped by sound productions, Bloch apparently held them in high regard, with the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera specifically being a gateway drug for his getting into horror. We’re clearly supposed to sympathize with Jimmy, since his original job had been taken over and his industry changed forever—never mind the fact that June has been dead for four decades now.

One of the first things I thought while reading “The Movie People” was that in 1969 this nostalgic treatment of Hollywood in the years before the invention of synchronized sound would not have been as old hat then as now, although there was still precedent for it at the time. (I’m ashamed to say I still have not seen Singin’ in the Rain.) Your knowledge of film history may or may not improve the experience, since Bloch assumes you have at least a cursory knowledge of Hollywood during the silent era, but then if you’re familiar with the historical material you can already predict the arc of the narrative and the sentimentality behind it. We learn about Jimmy and June’s relationship, which was kind of a Star Is Born scenario in which Jimmy couldn’t rise above being an extra and June was clearly on her way up the ladder—and no doubt would’ve continued her way up, had she not died in a freak accident. It was 1930 and June was on the set for an early sound production. The crew was experimenting with a traveling boom mic, what has long since become the standard for film productions, only it was newfangled then. “Somehow, during a take, it broke loose and the boom crashed, crushing June Logan’s skull.” It’s a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for the changing of the guard sound film brought about, ruining careers and hitting immigrants in the industry the hardest. Read some film history and filmmakers and historians will always treat The Jazz Singer as if it were one of the horsemen of the apocalypse (it’s also kind of a shitty movie). The late ’20s in Hollywood (other film industries lagged behind in adopting sound) marked the end of an era.

Bloch is a lot of things, but he’s not subtle. The man himself seemed aware of this, as he all but says in his lecture “Imagination and Modern Science Fiction,” for my money one of Bloch’s very best pieces of writing. It’s savage, insightful, and very funny, although while he did write some SF, Bloch was never much of an SF writer. “The Movie People” is not really horror either, being that rare example of a ghost story which does not try to evoke dread or terror, but instead melancholy. The thing is that The Silent Movie seems to be haunted—maybe. It’s unclear where the supernatural is coming from, but the short of it is that Jimmy has started to notice June has been appearing on the margins of old silent movies, including ones she would not have taken part in; for example he sees her in The Birth of a Nation, which came out nearly a decade before June’s first film role. (I could go on a whole tirade about how The Birth of a Nation went from being a deeply controversial but massively successful movie at the time of its release, to sort of just being accepted as part of the American film canon, to now being treated like that one aunt or uncle who thinks Trump actually won the 2020 election. But I won’t.) Despite not having seen her alive in forty years Jimmy can still pick her out from a crowd, and is convinced there must be some ghostly hijinks going on with these films such that he can see dead people in the roles of extras. Of course the narrator doesn’t believe this, but he wants to be there for his friend—perhaps even more so now, since he’s convinced Jimmy is seeing things in his old age.

There Be Spoilers Here

On the set of his latest “role,” Jimmy gets a mysterious letter which then falls into the narrator’s hands, and it’s a surprisingly long letter especially when you consider it was somehow written by a dead person. *It could be a hoax of course, but this is a ghost story and we have to take everything at face value, never mind that Jimmy’s suspicions about the ghosts in the silent movies are proven true at the very end.) It’s a letter from June, telling her long-lost boyfriend that he can join her and others as an extra from beyond the grave. There are rules to be followed and some advice given (humorously she tells him to stay away from “the slapstick comedies”), but Jimmy is given the chance to be with June again. Naturally he takes it. The ending is bittersweet, because on the one hand Jimmy dies on-set, but it’s not tragic or brutal death at all; indeed he looks “very much as though he were smiling in his sleep” when they find him. One thing that confuses me, and this is something I’ve started to notice more when giving fiction the deep-read treatment, is that the narrator acts like Jimmy was being delusional as he is recounting his story, despite already knowing that Jimmy’s speculation about The Silent Movie being haunted has merit. Why would a narrator act like they don’t know certain information when they already know that info? It’s a common fallacy with writing first-person narrators. Anyway, that final scene where the narrator goes to The Silent Movie and sees Jimmy and June waving at him in one of Intolerance‘s famous crowd scenes is sweet. (I’ve yet to see Intolerance either, it’s a glaring blind spot for me.)

A Step Farther Out

I’m quite biased about the history behind this story, being an actual film major who’s seen a decent amount of 1920s cinema at this point, but I came away from “The Movie People” with mixed feelings. The thing is that Bloch is an ironist at heart; he’s kind of a bastard. His fiction usually falls on a spectrum between horror and comedy, with his most effective work being either darkly humorous or horrific with a touch of playful irony. “The Movie People” basically falls outside of this spectrum altogether as it’s a story more or less without irony; it’s totally sincere. I’m not sure if this is Bloch’s wheelhouse. It’s a cute diversion that tries to tug at the reader’s heartstrings a bit, but I would’ve preferred this material be put in the hands of a writer more delicate than Bloch. But that’s just me.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “They Are Not Robbed” by Richard McKenna

July 27th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, January 1968.)

Who Goes There?

Richard McKenna was kind of an outsider, although this would only become apparent with hindsight. He had a long career in the navy before deciding to take up writing as his new profession, debuting in 1958 with the nominally fantastical (it’s not SF) “Casey Agonistes,” which drew on his military experience, but more importantly introduced a whimsical and rather offbeat voice to the field. Unfortunately he would only live to see six of his short stories published in his lifetime, dying unexpectedly in November 1964 at only 51 years old. He seemed to dedicate most of his writing energy to what would be his first and only novel, The Sand Pebbles, a historical novel which hinted at McKenna’s success as a mainstream writer; and indeed he lived to see it become a bestseller, although he sadly did not live long enough to see it get turned into a major motion picture starring Steve McQueen. Even had McKenna lived longer, writing SF was probably always gonna stay a side hustle for him at the most; and yet it’s hard to not think of what more he could’ve done had he been given more time. “They Are Not Robbed” is one of a half-dozen or so stories found in McKenna’s trunk after his death, and I have to assume he had finished it despite being it a bit overlong and overstuffed. It’s not perfect, but it has some standout qualities that indicate a possibly great talent gone too soon.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has only been reprinted in English once, in Uncollected Stars (ed. Piers Anthony, Martin H. Greenberg, Barry N. Malzberg, and Charles G. Waugh).

Enhancing Image

It’s circa 1980 and Earth has been invaded—sort of. The aliens are called Star Birds, for lack of a better name, since they don’t communicate verbally and they can be barely even perceived with the human eye. Rather than try to talk with humans directly the Star Birds have opted to hire “Agents,” who tend to be young women without friends or parents, these Agents being trained to understand the aliens. The thing is that these Agents, along with a small number of other people, have what is called Tau energy, which makes them kin to the aliens. Of course the problem is that people with this energy, the “Tau people,” are quickly treated as outcasts by the rest of the populace—not entirely for bad reasons, as Tau energy has reality-warping properties that could make it a real danger in the wrong hands. There’s no cultural exchange between the humans and aliens, although the aliens have left a kind of “gift” in several locations around the world, called “Purchasing Offices” which “bought raw neural energy or else recorded dynamic patterns of neural energy.” What the aliens gain by basically having people’s brains scanned is a mystery. A very old Aldous Huxley is the one famous person cited who volunteered one of these Purchasing Offices, and he did get paid for it, although the aliens seem to pay people who go to the Purchasing Offices different amounts arbitrarily.

I feel like I’m frontloading exposition here, but so does McKenna. It’s only fair. By the way, McKenna must’ve written this story prior to November 1963, as Huxley would die that month—incidentally on the same day as John F. Kennedy and C. S. Lewis. The implication is that McKenna had the story finished well before his death but was unable to sell it, I suspect for a few reasons. One is that “They Are Not Robbed” would’ve been a bit risqué for early ’60s SF, what with unambiguous references to sex and a touch of nudity, although by 1968 such softcore material was no longer so unusual in most markets. I also have to admit this is a very odd story, in a way that seemed to anticipate the New Wave, such that I have to wonder how McKenna would’ve done had he lived even five more years. The protagonist is also a fair bit different from what would’ve been the norm in the early ’60s, with Christopher Lane being a workingman and a bit of a slacker, who as of late has found himself in a weird quasi-polyamorous relationship with a vapid girl named Alma, who also seems to be in a relationship with a guy named Buckley. “Both Alma and Buckley worked in Sales at Acme. Once she had been Buckley’s girl, now she was somehow Lane’s, at least on Thursdays.” They’re not in a serious relationship, and while Alma’s not a bad person or anything she’s more there to kill time. Worth mentioning that despite taking place in the ’80s this story very much feels entrenched in Greenwich Village culture of the early ’60s, such that it must’ve almost felt like a time capsule even when it was published.

Even the coming of the Star Birds doesn’t shake up Lane’s life—at least not directly. But he gets to know one of their Agents, Martha, in a relationship that will come to dominate the story. This is a bit perplexing since Martha herself isn’t much of a character, which is at least partly by design given her position as an Agent. There’s clearly supposed to be a contrast between Alma’s hollow materialism and Martha’s mysticism, although I have to say neither woman is given that much development. Lane himself is not the most charismatic of leads either, so it’s a good thing the story isn’t really about him—it’s about the bigger picture. We’re given some insight into how Tau people are treated after the aliens have landed, which is to say very badly; it’s actually disturbing how quickly the general populace almost become a bunch of bloodthirsty mobs, with the lynch noose becoming a common symbol among anti-Tau people, like the cross for Christians. (Another telltale sign this was written in the early ’60s is that while not explicitly mentioned, McKenna seemed to have written this with the civil rights movement lurking in the background, never exactly rearing its head but I’m pretty sure informing the text.) Society is slowly becoming divided, or rather humanity is slowly being split in two, between the Tau minority and non-Tau majority, and Lane associating with the former could present some real dangers. Not overnight, but gradually Lane’s world is being turned upside down for the sake of a mysterious woman he has fallen head over heels for, and things only get weirder when the Tau energy reveals that the world we see is not strictly the only one that exists, for there is another.

I’ve been struggling to write about “They Are Not Robbed” for the past couple days, and I think the big reason for that is that I don’t entirely understand this story; it’s rather hard to describe. It’s a first contact narrative, but it then turns into something else, and the closest point of comparison I can think of off the top of my head would be McKenna’s own “The Secret Place,” which is also a bizarre love story I’ve never been entirely able to wrap my head around. Despite his short work being at least nominally SF McKenna strikes me as more of a fantasist, in that he doesn’t seem terribly interested in the why of the SFnal elements of his fiction. The Tau energy at the heart of “They Are Not Robbed” is hard to explain because McKenna doesn’t go to great lengths at all to explain how it works. The result is a story that’s surreal, and effective insofar as it’s trying to evoke a sense of mystery and mysticism, but it’s also confusing. It reads as more or less finished, but could’ve benefited from one more round of revision, namely to tighten up the length (it must be a solid 12,000 words and could’ve been shorter) and make the narrative more focused. The budding romance between Lane and Martha is fine, but it takes an odd turn when we’re introduced to two new ideas, neither of which is much elaborated on: the existence of “time-lands” for Tau people, which exist in a separate but parallel space with Earth of the present moment; and then there are the “doublegangers,” or the doubles of the Tau people who must never cross paths with their originals or else something bad would happen.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s good news that as a new Tau person Lane has been introduced to the time-lands, because the Purchasing Offices have gradually been vanishing around the world; apparently the Star Birds are removing these stations and will soon be on their way. There will come a point, soon, when there will be no way to traverse between the worlds, at least from Earth’s side. This is the point where the story ultimately reveals what it’s about, which is to say the evolution of the human race. A select number of humans have been chosen as successors to the Star Birds, or another way to interpret it is that the Star Birds are in fact the descendants of humans from a far-off future who have traveled back in time to kickstart their own creation. It’s not totally clear at the end which is supposed to be the case, but either seems possible. Hell, just about anything seems possible. With the doublegangers left on Earth it will be like the Tau people had never left, only their doublegangers are “normal.” Eventually society will return to what it once was. As the scientist who led the study of Tau energy says, “You will leave them your simulacrum, and it will be just what they have wished you to be. They lose only what they hate. They are not robbed.” “They” of course being non-Tau people. The twist being that the Star Birds fostered a small race of superhumans would have been fine on paper circa 1963, but just five years later would’ve been old hat—again, on paper. The execution is what makes this a curious story, even if I find the execution to be unpolished.

A Step Farther Out

Would I suggest this as an introduction to McKenna’s SF? No. Then again if you know of McKenna at all then there’s a good chance you’ve already read “The Secret Place” at the least, which “They Are Not Robbed” feels like a more SFnal counterpart to—not saying “continuation” because I’m not sure which story McKenna would’ve written first. But as a curiosity I would recommend it, as it’s indeed quite strange and does serve as a snapshot of a specific cultural moment in American history, which would’ve already been in the rearview mirror by the time it was published. More than anything I lament McKenna not living longer to hone his craft, and maybe to have taken part in the New Wave, a movement that might’ve suited him. But as things are the New Wave saw only the ghost of the man. One of those missed opportunities in SF history.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Balgrummo’s Hell” by Russell Kirk

July 24th, 2024

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. F&SF, July 1967.)

Who Goes There?

In his lifetime Russell Kirk was known firstly as a conservative political theorist, at a time when American conservatism was still capable of producing intellectuals. His 1953 non-fiction book The Conservative Mind was a seminal political text in its day, although, having been written and published when the Old Right still held sway in government, it now has been seemingly forgotten in a post-Reagan/post-Trump landscape. Kirk was good friends with T. S. Eliot, a fellow conservative and one of the leading members of the Modernist movement; and this may have influenced Kirk to try his hand at literature that would very much stand on its own merits, regardless of the reader’s political biases. Nearly all the fiction Kirk wrote would be supernatural horror, as like M. R. James he seemed uninterested in writing fiction of any other kind, and he would even win the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction for his story “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.” Kirk also appeared semi-regularly in F&SF, and indeed it’s very likely he would’ve never appeared in the genre magazines if not for F&SF‘s mix of classiness and friendliness towards short horror fiction. “Balgrummo’s Hell” is a (relatively) modern take on what would’ve already been a very old tradition in 1967: the Gothic supernatural tale.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Seventeenth Series (ed. Edward L. Ferman), The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan), and the Kirk collections The Princess of All Lands and Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, the latter seemingly collecting all of Kirk’s ghost stories.

Enhancing Image

Rafe Hogan is a thief, and a pretty good one at that. His latest location for a heist is a secluded mansion in Scotland: Balgrummo Lodging. It’s not exactly a solo job, as his sort-of-girlfriend Nan had gotten hired as a nurse for the mansion and has given Hogan some valuable information as to the treasures lurking inside—namely that the mansion is home to a lot of paintings that would go for a pretty penny on the market, if anyone were to sell them. God knows there’s very little else of value inside, as Alec Fillan Inchburn, the tenth and last baron (he never had children) of Balgrummo Lodging, has sold off everything else of real value for the sake of paying off debts. Alec is extremely old, having not ventured outside his mansion in half a century, having committed an unnamed crime in the years right before World War I and having since been put under a kind of unofficial house arrest. Alec’s only associates now are his niece Euphemia “Effie” Inchburn, T. M. Gillespie, “chairman of the trustees of Lord Balgrummo’s Trust,” and a lone bodyguard at the mansion, Jock Jamieson. There are also nurses who have passed through, to aid the elderly Lord Balgrummo, but Hogan can’t figure for the life of him how these women would’ve lasted more than a week at a time. There aren’t even any guard dogs on the premises. “‘The brutes don’t live long at the Lodging,’ Gillespie had muttered in an obscure aside.” Overall it sounds like this heist shouldn’t be too taxing.

The heist itself only takes up a fraction of the story, most of the wordage being spent on the setup for the heist and the backstory for the mansion, the latter especially contributing to a sense of impending doom—yet we’re kept in the dark as to what kind of doom awaits us. Overall it’s a nonlinear structure, and I’m not totally sure it works out. As far as the action goes it borders on being a one-man show, as once Hogan gets past Jamieson he wanders through the mansion by his lonesome, at night. Kirk might’ve been aware that the actual plot he had conceived would not be able to sustain a short novelette, so he jumps back and forth in time, or rather has Hogan think back on conversations he’d had with Gillespie and Effie, both of whom are fluent in Expositionese. Normally I would fault the exposition-heavy dialogue more, but since the purpose of sucking up to Alec’s associates is to gather info, it makes sense Hogan would be recalling backstory, of which there is a lot. If I had to call “Balgrummo’s Hell” a single word it would be “atmospheric,” which is often used as very polite shorthand for when nothing happens in a story, but at least the vibes are right. It doesn’t help that Hogan is not by any stretch a “hero,” although in his defense he could be more of an outright villain: for example he contemplates murdering Lord Balgrummo while the old man seems to be comatose, but dismisses such a thought as unnecessary cruelty. He’s not exactly a likable protagonist, though, and knowing how Kirk’s worldview operates it becomes too easy to figure out that Our Anti-Hero™ is practically begging to get his just desserts. How he gets his comeuppance is a different story.

“Balgrummo’s Hell” is basically a story about two men who are damned—only one of them doesn’t know it. Something is not right about Balgrummo Lodging, but we’re not told exactly what had happened to make it fall into such decrepitude. There’s a haunting early passage where Hogan is doing location scouting in the neighborhood the mansion is found on, in which the rot of the place seems to have spread like a virus, the rot creeping like a darkness on what is already decaying Scottish urbane landscape. Kirk is a good writer, even if after having read a few of his short stories I don’t consider him that good a storyteller.

Observe:

Beyond the linoleum-factory, he had come upon a remarkably high old stone dyke, unpleasant shards of broken glass set thick in cement all along its top. Behind the wall he had made out the limbs and trunks of limes and beeches, a forest amidst suburbia. Abruptly, a formal ancient pend or vaulted gateway had loomed up. On either side, a seventeenth-century stone beast-effigy kept guard, life-size almost: a lion and a griffin, but so hacked and battered by young vandals as to be almost unrecognizable. The griffin’s whole head was lacking.

I have qualms with the payoff for the mystery, which I’ll get to, but you have to admit Kirk sets things up beautifully. We’re given a location that’s in the midst of crumbling, yet like a dying animal it has become vicious in its own way. Balgrummo Lodging is practically a living thing in itself. We know going in that this is supernatural horror, but the actual supernatural element is alluded to rather than show for almost the entire story, and for me that’s where the sense of dread really comes from. For most of the story nothing strictly supernatural happens, but we know something is wrong. This sense of dread only becomes heightened once Hogan meets Lord Balgrummo face to face, or rather comes upon Lord Balgrummo’s near-lifeless body in his study, the old man having deteriorated physically to the point where he seems unaware of what’s happening around him. One has to wonder how he’s still alive after all this. “But was this penny-dreadful monster of fifty years ago, with his white beard now making him sham-venerable in this four-poster, still among the living?” Yet Alec may well be kept alive by a torment which for him is the never-ending present—a kind of hell that, in line with Kirk’s traditional Catholic conception of punishment, is not a recollection of a horrible past but rather an obliteration of both past and future, so that the present never stops. The explanation for Alec’s condition, courtesy of a flashback with Gillespie, borders on sermonizing, which at this point I’ve come to expect. You can blame it on me being an agnostic, but Kirk’s skill for me is often held back by his sermonizing.

There Be Spoilers Here

Hogan has gone into Lord Balgrummo’s chamber to take a key which only Lord Balgrummo has, which turns out to be a mistake. It’s at this point that we’re told what the supernatural element is, and it ends up being an odd reveal because Hogan had already learned this information before entering the mansion—it’s just that the reader is only learning about it in the climax of the story. I blame myself for not guessing early on, because it’s not a hard twist to figure out; if anything, aside from his tendency to sermonize, Kirk’s biggest flaw as a writer is that he’s not very original when it comes to incorporating horror elements. The reveal that Alec had gotten involved in some horrible pagan ritual may have been a decent twist in 1887, but not so in 1967; nowadays it comes off as tired, but also a little culturally insensitive. So Effie tells us in a flashback:

“[Alec] was out in Nigeria before people called it Nigeria, you know, and in Guinea, and all up and down that coast. He began collecting materials for a monograph on African magic—raising the dead, and summoning devils, and more. Presently he was dabbling in the spells, not merely collecting them—so my father told me, forty years ago. After Uncle Alec came home, he didn’t stop dabbling.”

Lord Balgrummo fucked around and found out, and so for decades now has spent his life in perpetual torment, a torture which will continue until his body expires—and possibly may even continue after his physical death. Whether or not Hogan gets off better is up for debate. The story ends more or less how you think it will, although given the suddenness of the reveal it feels more like a stop than a proper ending. Like I said, Kirk is much better at setting up the mystery than giving us an answer for it, which come to think of it is not unusual for mysteries. I was intrigued for most of the story, but at the end I felt weirdly empty from it.

A Step Farther Out

Gothic narratives always interest me, even if the narrative turns out to be totally derivative and not worth my time. “Balgrummo’s Hell” is worth your time, depending on your appetite for an old-fashioned haunted house story with a religious moral at its center. Kirk clearly held the Gothic tradition in reverence, and line-for-line he’s a more elegant writer than most genre writers in the ’60s—whether he’s able to sustain that elegance for a whole story is yet for me to see. Maybe it has to do with my being allergic to being moralized at. Maybe I’m just not Catholic enough.

See you next time.