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Short Story Review: “The Thing from—’Outside’” by George Allan England
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, April 1926.) Who Goes There?
When Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories in 1926, the inaugural issue’s contents would be very important. It was, after all, a newfangled magazine with a novel premise, that being the exclusive focus on science fiction, a term that hadn’t even been coined yet. In his editorial for this issue, Gernsback mentions H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe as the leading forerunners of what he calls “scientifiction.” These were and still are important names in the history of the field, so Gernsback had made a wise choice by not only mentioning them, but printing fiction by all three in the first issue. A name he doesn’t bring up alongside those three, but who does appear here, is George Allan England. Contrary to what his last name would make you think, England was an American. He had a pretty active life, being a prolific writer, adventurer, and failed politician, having unsuccessfully ran for governor of Maine as a socialist. Incidentally he was close contemporaries with fellow adventurer, pulpster, and socialist Jack London. But whereas London because rich and famous from his writing, England never reached that level of mainstream success, and nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who has heard of him.
While England was more a novelist than a short-story writer, he did write a few shorts which have been reprinted more than once, “The Thing from—’Outside’” (sometimes reprinted without the em dash and inverted commas) being maybe the most popular. It was first published in 1923, when England was already in the third act of his career, in Science and Invention, of whom one of the editors was (you guessed it) Gernsback. Apparently he thought it was so nice he printed it twice. It counts as science fiction, I guess, but it’s much more a work of cosmic horror, so that honestly it could’ve just as well have appeared in Weird Tales.
Placing Coordinates
First published in Science and Invention in 1923, then in the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories. It has since been reprinted in Strange Ports of Call (ed. August Derleth), the January 1965 issue of Magazine of Horror, Friendly Aliens: Thirteen Stories of the Fantastic Set in Canada by Foreign Authors (ed. John Robert Colombo), Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman), More Voices from the Radium Age (ed. Joshua Glenn), and a few others. Because it’s been in the public domain for a minute, you can find it on Wikisource of all things.
Enhancing Image
Five Americans have gone canoeing in the Canadian wilderness, a trip which has already gone south by the time the story starts, on account of their indigenous guides having abandoned them. Apparently something had spooked them. This is a racist trope I notice pop up in old pulp adventure writing: the native guide leaving the (white) explorers to their fate or dying unexpectedly. As for the Americans, we have Professor Thorburn and his wife; Vivian, Mrs. Thorburn’s younger sister; Jandron, a geologist; and Marr, a journalist. (Bit of a digression here, but how much younger is Vivian supposed to be than her sister? Professor Thorburn is said to be deep in his fifties, and presumably his wife isn’t too much younger than that, but Vivian’s young enough [and attractive enough] to be called a “girl” more than once.) It’s easy to think at first that the professor is the protagonist, but actually it’s Jandron—an observation easy enough to make with hindsight. Not everyone will make it out alive, and nobody (except for Jandron) knows what they’re doing. Things are already looking rough, even without a cosmic entity taking, since they’re already miles away from civilization and this was in the days before cell phones. This is all before the coming of the ice—and while this is Canada, winter isn’t due yet.
We know about burns, from intense heat, but we also know similar damage can be done with intense cold, hence things like frostbite. Jandron, being a very smart person, finds a ring of ice burned into a rock, which (he tells the others) will be there forever. He’s seen something like this before, and for better or worse, he’s also into Charles Fort. For some context, Charles Fort was a journalist who, late in his life, gained unexpected prominence with a few books that are comprised of unusual and dubious “data.” In other words, useless but curious information, a lot (if not all) of it not based in fact. In other words, he spread misinformation for the fun of it, and also to make a point. He didn’t actually believe, for instance, that mankind is secretly the property is an unimaginably advanced lifeform. He inspired a couple generations of SF writers and readers. One of his books, Lo!, was even serialized in Astounding. It’s unclear how much these people took Fort’s throwaway ideas seriously, or if England believed any of it himself, but Jandron seems to be a true believer.
As Jandron explains later in the story:
“[Fort] claims this earth was once a No-Man’s land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for possession. And he says that now everybody’s warned off, except the Owners. I happen to remember a few sentences of his: ‘In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted here, sailed, flown, motored, walked here; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They have been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.’”
Bro would be a crazy person in the real world, but luckily for him (or maybe not) his hypothesis that the Thing stalking him and his friends is an invisible being that exists Outside (with a capital O) the universe is correct. Or at the very least it’s never proven incorrect. “The Thing from—’Outside’” is one of the earliest (it might be the very first) works of fiction to deal with Charles Fort’s writing, even mentioning it directly. In a way it reads like a contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft’s work, albeit pulpier, although I’m not sure if England was aware of Lovecraft at this time. He was most certainly aware of Algernon Blackwood at least, and indeed England’s story reads less like Lovecraft and more like a scientific counterpart to Blackwood’s “The Willows,” which itself has a similar premise but takes a mystical approach. “The Willows” is one of the most reprinted and respected weird horror tales of all time, despite the fact that it’s about fifty pages long and not much actually happens in it. “The Thing from—’Outside’” is more eventful; indeed it’s indicative of England’s trade as someone who wrote for the non-genre pulp magazines. There’s action, but also a lack of elegance.
(Modern readers should also take note that while England was a leftist, he was also a white man born in 1877, so his views on women and non-white folks can chafe, even in this story. Of course, being bigoted and also a socialist is something that can be applied to quite a few white leftists in both the 1920s and the 2020s.)
This is not to say “The Thing from—’Outside’” isn’t worth reading; on the contrary, it’s a good deal of fine. There are moments of genuine creepiness sprinkled into what is really a great-outdoors adventure story with some rather high stakes. The wilderness becomes colder and more inhospitable with every passing hour, so that one night the bonfire they’ve set up goes out suddenly, even with the plenty of wood to spare, as if a giant pair of wetted fingers had pinched out the flame. They also notice that less wildlife has been showing up, even down to the bugs, so that the forest becomes lifeless except for the trees, which themselves are losing their leaves. This change in climate is both unnatural and concerning. Even the river Our Heroes™ have been canoeing along has grown ice at the bottom. “It” is like an invisible cat and the humans are a bunch of field mice, although they make the comparison of being like ants more often. There’s a sense of both patience and sadism to the invisible horror, giving it the semblence of a personality despite being totally unseen and unheard. Some spooky shit is definitely going on, and one by one the party of five dwindles.
There Be Spoilers Here
By the time we get to the climax, the professor and his wife have both died. This is unfortunate. Even more unfortunate is that Jandron now has to deal with a stir-crazy Marr, and Vivian, who isn’t in much better shape. What happens to Marr, thanks to “It,” is maybe the creepiest part of the whole story. While he had blocked himself off from the others the Thing from Outside the universe had contorted and deformed his body and mind, so that he became “something like a man,” a “queer, broken, bent over thing; a thing crippled, shrunken and flabby, that whined.” Ultimately he dies before Jandron and Vivian are rescued, which is maybe a good thing for him. The others narrowly survive, and for Vivian the whole episode has been blacked out of her mind. Eventually they get married (right, there’s a romance angle here that I don’t care for), but Vivian “could never understand in the least why, her husband, not very long after marriage, asked her not to wear a wedding-ring or any ring whatever.” Granted, Lovecraft protagonists tend to get off with worse, so this is bittersweet instead of a downer. But while Vivian remains mercifully ignorant of those days in the wilderness, we’re told Jandron will always be so haunted.
A Step Farther Out
It’s not as good as “The Willows,” but then what is? England wasn’t typically a horror writer, but rather an adventure writer who just so happened to write a decent amount of SF—again, a term that did not exist in the 1910s and for much of the ’20s. He also, for reasons I’m unsure about, took a detour into cosmic horror, and did a fine job at it. England would appear in SF magazines from this point on, mostly after his death, and entirely (unless I’m missing something) through reprints. I’ve not read a whole lot of pre-Campbell magazine SF, but I’ve read enough to know you can do worse (so much worse) than “The Thing from—’Outside.’” You can also do much worse if you’re interested in some classic cosmic horror that’s contemporaneous with Lovecraft, but quite different in style.
See you next time.
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Things Beyond: March 2026
(Cover by Leo Morey. Amazing Stories, Jaanuary 1934.) In March 1926, there was a new fiction magazine on newsstands. This in itself was an unexceptional event; after all, there were already quite a few fiction magazines on the market, “the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on.” But this was Amazing Stories, a magazine whose mission statement was to publish a genre of fiction which prior to this didn’t even have a name: science fiction. Sorry, “scientifiction.” The publisher was Experimental Publishing Company, which had already run SF-adjacent magazines, namely Science and Invention and Radio News, and the editor was Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback was born and raised in Luxemburg, but moved to the US as a young man, where he made a name for himself as an inventor, as well as taking major part in the aforementioned magazines. He was also a lousy fiction writer, and even worse when it came to having business sense. What he lacked in those areas, though, he certainly at least tried to compensate with a restless imagination. He was a pioneer in the truest sense, with both the good and bad that come with being on the razor’s edge of innovation. Gernsback ran SF before, but he wanted a whole magazine dedicated to “scientific fiction,” and as he explains in the inaugural editorial: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” The standard for science fiction had been set.
There was science fiction prior to Amazing Stories, of course, and a lot of it. Gernsback himself considered the first real master of SF to be Edgar Allan Poe, who despite being known for his horror also wrote quite a few SF stories—the two not being mutually exclusive. (Nowadays people, including those like Brian Aldiss who very much know their stuff, tend to say SF really started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.) Other practitioners of proto-SF include Jack London, William Hope Hodgson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and others. Indeed, it’s this wealth of SF published prior to 1926 that would make up the bulk of the material in Amazing Stories for the first few years of its existence. Gernsback especially resorted to reprints of stories and novels by H. G. Wells, who was still alive and well at this point. The business relationship between Gernsback and Wells eventually soured, and unfortunately this was a common occurrence with authors hoping to be published in Amazing Stories. The big problem was that Gernsback seemed to have the money-handling abilities of a gerbil or guinea pig, neglecting to pay his writers for absurdly long periods, even having to be threatened legally to pay up. The money problem got so bad that it’s suspected by some historians that Gernsback declared bankruptcy because he found it preferrable to paying up on his debts. There was an infamous case where H. P. Lovecraft only appeared in Amazing Stories once, with “The Colour Out of Space” (one of his best), on account of Gernsback’s reluctance to pay him, with Lovecraft calling him “Hugo the rat.”
Despite the financial strain, and with Gernsback losing his own magazine only three years after launching it, Amazing Stories somehow persevered. Things looked even rougher when T. O’Conor Sloane, who was managing editor under Gernsback, got kicked upstairs to become editor. Sloane was already in his seventies when he took over, so he was goddamn unspeakably old from the outset. He eventually died in 1940, at the impressive age of 88. If Amazing Stories was shaky in quality under Gernsback, with the original fiction often failing to stand toe-to-toe with the reprints, then the Sloane era made it thoroughly play second-fiddle to newfangled SF magazines, including Astounding Stories and Gernsback’s own Wonder Stories. Within just five years or so the first SF magazine got relegated to publishing second-rate fiction with second-rate paychecks for its writers. E. E. Smith, who had first made his mark in Amazing Stories, eventually jumped ship in favor of Astounding. You also like authors like Jack Williamson, who stayed loyal to Gernsback despite everything. That Amazing Stories made it to the end of the ’30s, and survived well beyond that, is really incredible. It subsisted largely on an audience comprised of young readers and scientist/inventor types. These are very different demographics in some ways, mind you. It continued, under Sloane, as the magazine where science and adventure would (ideally, if not so much in practice) be perfectly balanced.
It wasn’t all bad. In scouting for this month’s selection of short stories to review, I thought the pickings would be slim, but there was still a decent amount of fiction printed in the first ten years or so of this magazine’s life that at least looked intriguing. For instance, how many women would you say wrote for Amazing Stories in those early years? More than you’d think. Gernsback had his shortcomings, but he didn’t seem to have a misogynistic streak worth mentioning, and on occasion he published stories that would be considered positively feminist for the time. So, we have nine stories, the biggest batch of fiction I’ve had to tackle in a bit, all from the 1920s and ’30s. I’m sure some of it will not be very good, and it’s worth mentioning that when reading SF of such vintage it’s important to put yourself in a certain mindset. Still, I think I chose well.
For the short stories:
- “The Thing from—’Outside’” by George Allan England. From the April 1926 issue. First published in 1923. Makes sense that we’re starting with a reprint, given the heavy usage of them in early issues. Also, it originally appeared in the Gernsback-edited magazine Science and Invention. England was a prolific pulp adventure writer, real-life adventurer, and failed socialist politician.
- “The Fate of the Poseidonia” by Clare Winger Harris. From the June 1927 issue. Harris was, as far as we can tell, the first woman to write for the genre magazines under her own name. She made her debut in Weird Tales in 1926, but more than half of her work went to Amazing Stories. I had meant to review her debut story some months ago, but I struggled to write anything constructive about it.
- “The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson. From the December 1928 issue. Williamson might have the single longest career in genre fiction, although Michael Moorcock is getting close. He made his debut in 1928, with this very story, and only stopped with his death in 2006. He always remained pulpy in style to an extent, but he managed to stay relevant for an impressive span of time.
- “The Undersea Tube” by L. Taylor Hansen. From the November 1929 issue. Lucile Taylor Hansen was a trained anthropologist whose writing was mostly nonfiction books and articles. She concealed her first name and gender when writing SF early on, likely to separate this side gig (she didn’t write much SF) from her life in academia. She contributed some science articles to Amazing much later.
- “The Gostak and the Doshes” by Miles J. Breuer. From the March 1930 issue. Breuer was the son of Czech immigrants, and even wrote for Czech-American publications in Czech rather than English. He was a trained medical doctor, and he spent most of his adult life in Nebraska, working alongside his dad at first. As you can guess, he didn’t write that much SF, on account of his day job.
- “Omega” by Amelia Reynolds Long. From the July 1932 issue. Long seemed to have lived her whole life in Pennsylvania, although she would’ve lived on the other end of the state from me. She cut her teeth on writing SF, seemingly using the field as a training ground, but she later moved to detective fiction and poetry. She worked at the William Penn Memorial Museum for 15 years.
- “The Lost Language” by David H. Keller. From the January 1934 issue. Of the pre-Campbell SF writers, Keller might be one of the most respected. Like Breuer, he was a trained physician, complete with an MD, and like Breuer he served in the Medical Corps in World War I. He was one of the first American doctors to deal with PTSD in soldiers, which apparently influenced his fiction.
- “The Human Pets of Mars” by Leslie F. Stone. From the October 1936 issue. Stone was another pioneer in the field, in that like Harris she published under her real name, although many assumed it was a pseudonym. Her work is shockingly feminist and anti-capitalist for the time. She stopped writing by 1940, having become disillusioned with both the field and the world at large.
- “Shifting Seas” by Stanley G. Weinbaum. From the April 1937 issue. For about a year and a half, Weinbaum was arguably the hottest new writer in SF. His untimely death from cancer in December 1935, about 18 months after his debut, means we’ll never know how he might’ve matured as a writer. Ironically he never appeared in Amazing during his life, opting instead for its competitors.
Hopefully you’ll read along with me.
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Serial Review: Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (Part 4/4)
(Cover by Gray Morrow. If, July 1966.) The Story So Far
Roan’s time aboard the Warlock ends in disaster, although in fairness it wasn’t his fault. With Henry Dread, on the surface a pirate captain and in actuality an officer in the fledgling Imperial Terran Navy, now dead (by Roan’s hands) and the Warlock having gotten its ass blasted by a Niss ship’s automatic defense system, the survivors are left with Roan as their new leader. He’s not much of a “leading” type. The good news is that while the Niss ships are still about, lingering in the blackness of space, the Niss themselves seem to have gone out to lunch—via the grim reaper. The ship that destroyed the Warlock turned out to be a ghost ship: everybody, both the Niss crew and Terran captives, has long since died. Roan and his crew decide to take a diversion to Tambool, the planet where Roan was born and raised, to gather some info about Our Anti-Hero’s past. Some gaps remain in his backstory, though, and the quest to ITN HQ continues, with Roan impersonating a lieutenant who had died on the Niss ship. This move sounds smart in the short term, but will prove a problem for later.
With some deception and threats, Roan and three of his best men are taken to ITN HQ, a palace that had originally be constructed for some member of the ruling class, now the home of Terran military ghouls and their cronies. And also their slaves. Slavery is not unusual in parts of the galaxy, with some alien cultures treating it less as a means of cheap labor and more a give-and-take practice. Roan himself grew up with an alien slave who lost to Roan’s parents in battle, and thus became a sort of member of their family as dictated by his race’s customs. Commodore Quex and his buddies of the ITN are a lot less caring with their slaves, however, murdering them on sight if they become even so much as a slight inconvenience. Terrans, even though none of them be “purely” human, clearly look down on Gooks and especially Geeks as akin to dogs and horses. Maybe even less. So it’s hard to feel bad when, in the midst of a tense and violent dinner part, Roan kills Quex, even if he does give him an “honorable” death. With this violence, it looks like Roan’s time in the ITN will be short.
Enhancing Image
We finally get answers to the two biggest questions that have been haunting this novel, namely what the Niss have been doing this whole time and what has become of Earth, Roan’s ancestral homeworld. The answers are both interconnected and anticlimactic, maybe by design. It’s true that the Niss formed a blockade around Earth and supplanted the Terrans as the top dog in known space, but that was literally thousands of years ago. We have never seen a Niss prior to this final installment, and when we do finally meet one he is weak and at death’s door, with everyone else already dead. Having replaced humanity as rulers of the galaxy, the Niss apparently diluded themselves over time, to the point of a slow extinction; nowadays they’re treated as a myth, something to be talked about rather than seen. With the highest goals of galactic conquest achieved eons ago, the Niss, having found no greater cause in life, opted for a slow death. Humanity still exists on Earth, it turns out, maybe being better off than their former conquerors; but this too, came with its own price. As with the ITN ghouls, the people on Earth have at least partly fallen to decadence, with there being an “Upper” and “Lower” society. They also have their own form of slavery, keeping mutated “dogs” (which really are more like large and intelligent monkeys, or very hairy humans) as their servants. Like real-world dogs, these “dogs” are loyal to their masters; they enjoy being slaves. This is a fact that disturbs Roan, since, to paraphrase him, at least slaves in alien cultures knew enough to loathe their positions in life. This all feels very wrong.
The final quarter of Earthblood, in which Roan and two of his men (Poion having died in the interim) are on Earth, could’ve justified being a novel on its own, and maybe it should’ve been a novel. Something I’ve mentioned before in passing but which needs reiterating here is that Earthblood is fast as fuck; it’s one of the most lightning-quick SF novels I’ve read in a while, which is sometimes to its detriment. The pacing becomes almost manic at times, with how much Laumer and Brown try to fit in here. The Terran culture Roan comes quickly to hate is layered, in some ways disturbing, and yet we’re not given that much time with it. There are a few new characters introduced in this last stretch of the book, maybe the most memorable of them being Daryl, who serves as Roan’s (and by extension the reader’s) guide to how things work. Daryl is old enough to have birthed a daughter who herself at least appears to be an adult, and yet he’s youthful and rather feminine in appearance. He’s also, not very subtly, a queer man almost of the drag show variety. I’m not sure if Daryl’s effeminate nature and attempts to flirt with Roan are indicative of the authors’ homophobia, because truth be told he’s no worse than some of the human characters we’d met before, but it’s certainly hard to ignore. Speaking of ambiguous queerness, we also have Sostelle, the “dog” who accompanies Roan for much of his stay, who despite having a feminine-sounding name is supposedly male, and who also comes to have a submissive relationship with him. These are things the novel never elaborates on, because it’s already so fast and so much is happening that for better or worse we can’t dwell on them.
The good news is that the Niss blockade is no longer an issue for Earth interacting with the rest of known space, but the people on Earth aren’t even aware the blockade had ended a long time ago, due to humanity having become degraded and small-minded. Typically in an old-timey SF novel with this kind of plot, Roan would support the rebuilding of the Terran empire, but not only has he since given up on that, having hared his short time spent with the ITN, but he loves the rather large number of intelligent alien races in the galaxy too much to let mankind put the lot into servitude. He’s still a tough and murderous son of a bitch, but he does in fact have some morals, which Daryl and those like him run afoul of. There’s an unnerving scene in which a dancer named Desiranne, who reminds Roan of Stellaraire, tries to commit ritual suicide as the grand finale of her performance for him—an act she had been trained and even raised to carry out. She almost succeeds. Roan’s one-man rebellion against decadent Earth society is totally justified, if we’re being honest, and it feels earned because the whole novel had been building to this moment. The Terra Roan hoped to find wasn’t there after all; instead, it’s something he and the others will have to build themselves. You could say a kind of cultural revolution is needed, to break down the old way of living and create something new.
A Step Farther Out
I decided to read a couple contemporary reviews of Earthblood, including Algis Budrys’s review in Galaxy, who makes the connection that Laumer and Brown had probably taken inspiration from Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. More specifically the brutality and paranoia of Earthblood remind me of Hubbard’s short novel To the Stars, one of the most brutal (and xenophobic—it is Hubbard, after all) SF stories I’ve ever read. I do mean that as a compliment, by the way. What Earthblood lacks in elegance, having a rather shoddy structure that makes it seem like Laumer and Brown wrote it with serialization in mind, it makes up for in a kind of “wow” factor. Like damn, I did not think an SF novel from the ’60s could be this grimy. At the same time it has more of a humanist angle than Heinlein or Hubbard, or at least it’s not as racist or sexist as it could’ve been. I recommend it as a rough but entertaining one-off, the kind of adventure novel that was soon to become outdated thanks to the New Wave. It is, as Baird Searles says in his review of the novel for Asimov’s, a relic from “the tail end of this jolly era” that included such pulpy SF.
See you next time.
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Serial Review: Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (Part 3/4)
(Cover by McKenna. If, June 1966.) The Story So Far
Life in the circus has not been very kind to Roan, but at least he has Stellaraire, his woman, and Iron Robert, a hulking Geek who is his loyal friend. Unfortunately he loses Stellaraire when the circus ship, having been mistaken for a war vessel, is attacked by pirates, with an emergency maneuver killing almost everyone aboard. Roan and Iron Robert survive to be greeted by Henry Dread and his band of merry men, although it turns out Henry is part of a fledgling Imperial Terran Navy. Earth may be blocked off from the rest of the galaxy, thanks to the Niss, but there are still humans sprinkled throughout known space. Granted, it’s rare for them to be purely human, but they appear to be human enough. Roan spends the next five years of his life aboard Henry’s ship, that being the Warlock. Henry comes to treat Roan almost like a son, but their relationship is troubled by Henry’s racism toward Geeks (non-humanoid aliens), with Iron Robert being kept locked in a cell all this time. There’s some internal conflict with what Roan wants, between sympathizing with Henry’s hopes of rebuilding the Terran empire and discovering his own origins. Where exactly did Roan come from? Who were his genetic parents? How did a precious embryo like him end up on a backwater planet like Tambool?
Unfortunately Roan’s time on the Warlock comes to about as dramatic an end as possible. They spot a Niss ship one day, and rather than retreating, being certainly outgunned, Henry thinks it’d be a great idea to go charging in head-first. The failed attack results in the Warlock getting blown to bits and Roan losing Henry and Iron Robert, the former by way of killing him (in what ends up being a totally futile action) and the latter because Iron Robert is literally too big to fit in the escape pod with the crew. With Henry having made Roan the new leader and not being so sour about the whole getting-shot-in-the-chest thing, Our Anti-Hero™ has a crew, but not a proper ship. He’s also low on friends at the moment.
Enhancing Image
The encounter with the Niss ship turns out to be an anticlimax in a way, but an interesting one, since the Niss ship is, in fact, a ghost ship (in the novel it’s written as one word). Everyone aboard, both the crew and the Terrans they were keeping as prisoners, has been dead, seemingly for a very long time. Roan and his men are able to sneak aboard, as the ship’s automatic defenses, still alert after all these years, didn’t pick up the escape pod. While the loss of the Warlock and Henry Dread are to be lamented, Roan has already started formulating a new plan. He acquires the ID of a long-dead Terran captain named Endor, and thinks it might be to his advantage if he impersonated someone who knew this captain—maybe a lieutenant. Lieutenant Roan it is. After all, it would be awkward if he made contact with the ITN after having killed one of their own. Surely this will not come back to bite him later in this installment. But for now, things are going swimmingly, all things considered. We’re more than halfway into the novel and we have yet to encounter a living Niss, that’s fine. Roan’s less concerned about the Niss and more about how he, as an embryo, made his way to the black market on Tambool, the planet of his upbringing.
When we return to Tambool we find that Roan’s adoptive mom is dead. Oh nooooo. Specifically, and this is one of the more disturbing parts of what is already a pretty grim novel, she had sold her body to be experimented on, as like a cadaver, so that she would leave Roan with a small inheritance if/when he returned home. Through some interrogation (by that I mean threatening at gunpoint) Roan is given some info, namely that he came originally from Alpha Centauri (I don’t know if you know this, but Alpha Centauri is big) and that he was the only embryo of his batch to make it to the black market intact. It’s not much to go on, but it’s something. By this point, Roan has taken a few of the best of his crew and come down like a landing party in Star Trek, leaving one of them to defend for himself once they leave (or rather escape) the black market. Roan’s best and brightest are Askor, Poion, and Sidis, although I’m gonna be honest with you, with the exception of Poion I can’t tell these fuckers apart. Poion at least has the ability to read people’s emotions on a telepathic level, so in that way (speaking of Star Trek) he’s like the Deanna Troi of the group. Also like Troi, Poion is not very useful, and likes to state the obvious.
Under the guise of being an ITN man, Roan and his three most trusted men are taken in by the fledgling navy and given what is arguably the most memorable sequence in the novel (at least up to this point), in the form of a luxurious dinner party. I’ve mentioned before that each installment has had a villain, or at least an antagonistic figure in the case of Henry Dread. For the third installment we have Commodore Quex, technically a Gook but who claims to be at least partly human. Slavery is treated as the norm by certain cultures in this novel, but the men of the ITN take things a step further by really treating their slaves as property, maiming and killing them for any reason they feel like. ITN HQ is described as a place of decadence that’s slowly rotting away. Get this:
The Headquarters of the ITN was a craggy many-towered palace built ages before by a long-dead prince of a vanished dynasty. It loomed like a colossus over the tumbled mud houses of the village. A vast green window like a cyclopean eye cast back brilliant viridian reflections as Roan and his crew marched in under the crumbling walls along a wide marble walkway, went up wide steps flanked by immaculate conical trees of dark green set among plants with tiny violet blossoms.
Roan may be very much an anti-hero, having no qualms with killing and stealing to get what he wants, but it turns out there are people who are even worse than him. He also comes from a working-class background, and spent his whole life up to now surrounded by Gooks and Geeks. The almost comical levels of racism shown by Henry Dread and later Quex and his goons alienate Roan from the ITN cause, because it’s become obvious by now that the ITN is a human supremacist organization. At one point Quex has an alien slave girl casually murdered at the dinner party for the “crime” of appearing to have annoyed Roan. So it’s hard to feel bad when Roan quite deliberately puts a bullet through Quex’s heart.
A Step Farther Out
We are slowly creeping toward the climax of this novel, which I only get a faint impression of because of how it’s structured. While these scenes and chapters sort of fall into place so as to fit in magazine installments, it’s also a quasi-episodic quest narrative whose effectiveness I’m unsure about. There is no B plot or divergence from the quest so much as Roan and his crew hopping from place to place. I will say, as a positive point, that Earthblood‘s open violence and sexuality is not something I would’ve expected from a pre-New Wave novel published in a magazine. This is a dark read, and not what I would recommend if you’re into high adventure that’s more fun-loving; but at the same time, it is worth recommending as a Heinlein pastiche that’s both less creepy and more from a humanist angle than what Heinlein (especially in the ’60s) was capable of writing.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Daughter” by Philip José Farmer
(Cover by Jack Coggins. Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1954.) Who Goes There?
As far as the gap between the ’50s SF boom and the New Wave era of the late ’60s and early ’70s is concerned, Philip José Farmer can be considered a missing link. Stylistically, at least early in his career, he was inconspicuous compared to many of his peers; but rather it was his willingness to explore sexuality in SF writing for magazines which was only rivaled at the time by Theodore Sturgeon. And whereas Sturgeon was a small-r romantic by nature (nothing graphic happens in his queer story “The World Well Lost”), Farmer’s treatment of sex was, from the outset, more blunt and candid. His debut story, “The Lovers,” was rejected by Astounding and Galaxy, before finding a home in Startling Stories. No doubt the first few years of Farmer’s career would’ve been rockier had he not found an ally in Samuel Mines, who edited Startling Stories and its sister magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. The effort paid off, since it won Farmer a Hugo for Most Promising New Writer, but his troubles with getting published were only just beginning. A mixture of censorship and plain ol’ bad luck made it so that Farmer’s debut novel (but not the first novel he wrote) wasn’t published until 1957. Despite all this, and despite not writing in earnest until he was in his thirties, Farmer went on to enjoy a very long and prolific career.
When I reviewed “Mother” I was hoping to get to its sequel in maybe a year’s time, in keeping with how long it took for “Daughter” to appear in print, but real life and other things got in the way. It’s a sequel, in that it takes place on the same world and follows the same alien race as its predecessor, but it’s not strictly necessary to have read “Mother” first. I liked “Mother” quite a bit, which was a pleasant surprise at the time because my experiences with Farmer have been very mixed, and I’m happy to report “Daughter” is about as good, if also quite different in some ways.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the Winter 1954 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It was reprinted in the Farmer collection Strange Relations, which also has “Mother.” The weird part is that there’s an omnibus volume also titled Strange Relations, which contains the titular collection as well as The Lovers (the novel version) and the novel Flesh. These are all thematically related, but they don’t take place in the same continuity.
Enhancing Image
As I said, we return to the setting of “Mother,” but not, it seems, the same set of characters. You may remember (or like me you had to reread the story or my review to refresh your memory) there was Eddie, the mama’s boy and would-be planetary colonist who becomes the mate, or “mobile,” of a Mother he names Polyphema. We meet neither of these characters again and we’re not sure what becomes of them. It’s not even clear if “Daughter” actually takes place before or after “Mother.” Instead we’re introduced to Hardhead, a Mother herself and our narrator. That’s right, the protagonist is not a human at all, but an alien—not even a humanoid alien at all, but something very much its own beast. There is a human in the story, simply called Father, whose real name we never learn and who seems to not be Eddie. From what we learn of him, Father, unlike Eddie, is an emotionally stable man who also knows a thing or two about science and medicine. He’s also indirectly responsible for much the plot and the resolution, but he’s inactive, on account of being inside Mother’s womb most of the time. He can communicate with the Mothers and “virgins” (those who have not reached maturity) with a radio, however.
Let’s take a step back and explain some details about the Mothers, since while “Daughter” does have some exposition, and you can gather some things via context clues, Farmer assumes you’ve read “Mother.” The Mothers are large tentacled omnivores that, when mature, become immobile and use protective shells for defense. They’re a single-sex race; every Mother is a female. They reproduce by taking a mobile, which really can be an organism of any sex, but which the Mothers perceive as always male, and basically use the mobile as an assistant in spawning larvae before eventually devouring it. So, they reproduce asexually, but a Mother can’t reproduce on her own. A Mother eats things with an iris that works almost like an octopus’s beak. They’re able to communicate with each other through radio waves, which is how Eddie and later Father are able to talk with them. At the same time it’s unusual for a mobile to be “semantic,” i.e., for it to talk with its mate. The mobiles are, as you can guess, typically not keen on the whole making-larvae thing, but Father continues to live inside Mother because he’s able to consent. They are, or at least were, proper mates.
Hardhead recalls that when Father wanted to speak with his daughters without Mother catching on he would use “Orsemay,” which is clearly Morse code. A question that only occurred to me after I’d finished the story was how Father’s radio is able to work for so long. Is it battery-operated or hand-cranked? This is not a question Hardhead would be able to answer, and it’s not exactly relevant to the story, but it makes you think. Also, while we have to assume Father is indeed a man, it’s worth remembering that the Mothers do not perceive mobiles as anything other than male; to say a Mother has a female mobile would invoke a paradox, which is actually a key plot point in “Mother.” Nothing so dark as the conclusion of that story happens in “Daughter,” which itself is if anything a more conventional adventure narrative—once you remove the fact that Our Heroine™ (it was rather uncommon for the protagonist of an SF tale to be female at the time) is like a giant hermit crab with tentacles. Think of it: Hardhead is a woman (sort of), and also an alien of such a sort that one would have to be pretty determined to see her as a sex object.
The idea here is that “Daughter” is a coming-of-age story, in which Hardhead recounts she and her sisters moving out, so to speak, which is to say Mother ejects them from her womb after some delay. It’s time for the adolescent Mothers to build up strength, gather nutrients, and survive so they can fulfill their biological role. The good news is that these adolescents, who are squishy like slugs (Father even calls his daughters “Sluggos”), can move around easily enough—the bad news being that they’re prey. While the Mothers are too big and armored to have natural predators, young ones fresh out of the womb are vulnerable to what is called the olfway, a cross between a wolf (as you can guess by the name) and a spider. Quite vicious, persistent, and cunning. Hardhead and her sisters can construct shells out of minerals, with Glasshead making a shell of glass and Woodenhead a shell of cellulose. What follows is a kind of a cat-and-mouse hunt between the olfway and the sisters, with Hardhead’s sisters unfortunately falling victim to the beast. If you’re reading “Daughter” you may have, at this point, come to think of a certain story about three pigs and a wolf. This is deliberate, although not exactly spelled out, but while making the connection early means you can anticipate the ending, that’s not a bad thing.
There Be Spoilers Here
A curious ability the olfway has is that it can synthesize chemicals so as to break through shells of certain elements. It does this by breaking off a bit of a virgin’s shell and taking it back to its hidey-hole, where it can work for a combination that lets it break through the material. The lesson of “Daughter,” if there is one, is that slow and steady wins the race, or that patience is a virtue. Hardhead’s sisters scramble for hill spots where they can fortify, but they choose poor materials for their shells and pay for it. In working to counter the olfway’s special ability, Hardhead has to suffer in the short term, but this suffering pays off in the long run. She’s able to counter the olfway and even (barely) devours it. This all works out like a fairy tale, which makes sense in more ways than once, given that Hardhead is relating this story to an audience, and also the fact that Father had taught her about the story of the wolf and the three pigs. It’s a scientific fairy tale, which in keeping with the tradition is a bit dark and has a moral. It’s also, like a lot of classic fairy tales, aimed at kids but is not childish at all.
A Step Farther Out
“Daughter” is shorter than “Mother,” and is also easier to predict, especially if you catch what Farmer is doing before the climax. It’s still very good, and even unconventional by the standards of ’50s SF. If “Mother” was Farmer attempting to shock and disturb the reader with a very unusual human-alien relationship, not to mention an unusual alien race, then “Daughter” is proof of how you can take that setting and craft a satisfying adventure story out of it. Not sure why it’s never been anthologized in English, or indeed why it’s only ever seemingly appeared in Strange Relations and nowhere else. You don’t need to have read “Mother” to understand it, although that story does do more to flesh out the setting.
See you next time.
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Serial Review: Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (Part 2/4)
(Cover by George Schelling. If, May 1966.) The Story So Far
Roan is a pure Terran, originally meant to be the surrogate child of royalty, but instead sold to a husband and wife who sell their passports so that they can raise the boy. Roan’s parents are a mutated human and a humanoid alien, and they’re loving and caring despite the poverty they have to endure. From a very young age, Roan knows he’s unique in this part of the galaxy, for pure humans are hard to come by. The Terran empire once ruled the galaxy, but the empire has since been broken up by a fierce and intelligent race called the Niss, with Niss ships supposedly (we never see them) blockading Earth from the rest of known space. Since childhood it’s been Roan’s dream to find his ancestral home world, as well as meet a fellow pure Terran. Humans, on the occasions that he meets them, are mutated, like his father, as well as the lovely circus dancer Stellaraire. As a teen Roan is forced into joining Gom Bulj’s Extravaganzoo, a flying circus, with “Gooks” and “Geeks” as performers. With his agility, Roan is made to be a high-wire performer, but his time at the circus is made much worse by his antagonistic relationship with Ithc, a strong and fearsome alien who serves as the arch villain of the first installment. Roan eventually kills Ithc, and even gets away with it, but this then begs the question of how he’s supposed to get out of the circus. His only friends here are Stella and the hulking tough-skinned alien Iron Robert. Roan is strong and clever, but also stubborn.
Enhancing Image
A couple things I should talk about before we get into the actual plot of this installment. First, you may have noticed that for reasons beyond human comprehension, Laumer and Brown thought it would be great to use a real-life racial slur to mean something totally different in this novel. Mutated humans and some humanoid races are called Gooks, which is not what that word means in our world. This is a slur that’s typically associated with the Vietnam War, but its usage goes at least as far back as World War II, and has historically been used to dehumanized those who at least appear to be East Asian. Laumer especially (given his military background) would’ve been familiar with the word, which makes you wonder why they use it here, albeit in a different context. It’s something none of the characters comment on, which in a way is understandable since at some point (or so it’s theorized) mankind had crossbred to the point of ethnic boundaries becoming quite blurry. Roan himself is not explicitly said to be white, from my recollection, although illustrations give him Caucasian features, not to mention the look of a stereotypical pulp hero.
On a more innocuous note, I got curious and decided to look into the book version, which aside from cleaning up the many typos of the magazine version seems to feature the same text. The one major difference is scene and chapter breaks, in that there are fewer scene breaks and more chapter breaks in the book version. It’s easy to take for granted, when reading old stuff as it appeared in magazines, that some formatting and finessing with the text is necessary to make it fit a certain number of lines and a certain number of pages. This is doubly the case for serials, where ideally each installment (except for the last) should end on a cliffhanger. The second installment of Earthblood just kind of stops, and indeed for the book version this ending happens in the middle of a fucking chapter! This is something the vast majority of people wouldn’t consider.
Now…
Just when it looks like things are about to get boring, the circus ship is attacked BY PIRATES! In an emergency maneuver, the ship goes into overdrive and takes on three G’s, which is about enough to crush your average person to death. So goes Gom Bulj and everyone else aboard, except for Roan, who by sheer force of will is able to survive and turn off the heavy gravity, and Iron Robert, who is Iron Robert. (Something this book wants to make very clear is that Roan is special.) Even Stellaraire is not spared; on the contrary she gets fridged, having gotten trapped under debris and burned to death. Mind you that up to this point there have been only two notable women in the novel: Stellaraire and Roan’s mum. The mother is alive, but it’s possible we never see her again. The misogyny could certainly be worse, but I have to wonder what Brown was thinking during the weeks she must’ve spent working on this novel.
Roan and his buddy get captured, with Iron Robert ultimately getting locked in a cell. This is maybe better than the big boy getting executed, because the ship’s captain, Henry Dread, really doesn’t like Geeks. Or Gooks, really, but he’s more racist against non-humanoid aliens. Henry does, however, take a liking to Roan, and soon enough Roan becomes a new member of the crew. For the next five years (we only know this because the book tells us directly), Roan does piracy stuff, IN SPAAAAAAAACE. The captain is a human supremacist, so it’s unsurprising when we learn he hopes to rebuild Earth’s space navy. He’s also, like Roan, a pure Terran. Supposedly. The two form a bond over their shared lineage and similar temperaments, but the friendship is a troubled one. Iron Robert is the only friend Roan has, and Henry wants the alien locked up. There’s also the problem of how to save Earth and rebuild a space navy when there are the Niss to consider. Nobody knows what they look like—not even Henry, who’s been prepping to do battle with them. Most of this installment follow the growing friendship between Roan and Henry. The passage of time gets a little strange; there are a few time jumps, which the narrator tells us directly, otherwise we wouldn’t figure Roan is on this ship for five years.
Eventually we get to easily the most frustrating part of the novel thus far, in what I would call a ten-car pileup of stupidity. They come across a Niss ship, and rather than retreat (on account of being outmanned and outgunned), Henry thinks it would be a great idea to attack the ship now. He can’t even be bothered to be reasonable about it. This turns out to be a huge mistake. As the pirate ship gets blown to kingdom come, and with everyone escaping to a single cramped pod, Roan has to make to tough choice to leave Iron Robert behind, on account of him being literally too big to fit in the pod. Or at least Roan would make that choice, if he wasn’t stubborn to the point of lunacy about it, even shooting and killing Henry. Killing the captain ends up being a pointless gesture as well, because they end up having to leave Iron Robert behind anyway. They call it the most unnecessary killing in all of old-timey science fiction. That Roan becomes the de facto head of the crew and sees no repercussions for his mistake is incredible.
A Step Farther Out
Racism and sexism in Earthblood fall under the category of “It can definitely be worse.” I know this because I’ve read enough SF from this period. Robert Silverberg alone probably provided enough miosgyny in the back half of the ’60s to power the Hoover Dam, like a hamster on a wheel powering your desktop computer. It’s not even nearly as problematic as Robert Heinlein was during this period, although I’m not sure if that’s because of Brown’s input or if Laumer really isn’t that bad on his own. On top of aging fairly well, this is just as fairly an entertaining novel thus far. The plot sort of meanders, and I’m starting to get tired of how everything in the universe seems to revolve around Roan (or maybe it’s that Roan is not that interesting a protagonist), but you can do a lot worse.
See you next time.
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Novella Review: “Intruders from the Stars” by Ross Rocklynne
(Cover by Robert Fuqua. Amazing Stories, January 1944.) Who Goes There?
Of the writers to get their start before John W. Campbell took over Astounding in late 1937, Ross Rocklynne was one of the few who adjusted well to the new regime. It could be because he and Campbell were close contemporaries, as well as Rocklynne being an early practitioner of what we now call “hard” SF. He made his debut in 1935 and had become an established writer by the time he attended the first ever Worldcon in 1939. He never gained the popularity of other contemporaries like Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, or even Campbell under his Don A. Stuart pseudonym, perhaps because he only ever wrote two novels, neither of which has ever appeared in book form. Rocklynne went MIA for much of the ’50s and ’60s; the SF Encyclopedia entry on him says this was because of Dianetics (a sadly common occurrence with SF authors at the time), but it doesn’t mention he also stepped away from writing because of chronic pain in his face and jaw. When he returned to writing in the late ’60s his work was surprisingly well-received, and he even appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions with a new story, alongside the New Wave writers.
“Intruders from the Stars” marked a rare Rocklynne appearance in Amazing Stories, since he was much more in favor of Astounding. I only heard about it because it had gotten a Retro Hugo nomination for Best Novella. The pickings must’ve been slim, because unfortunately it’s not very good. In fairness, 1944 is typically considered a lull year for the field, largely on account of the war. If authors didn’t enlist or weren’t drafted, some (like Asimov and Heinlein) worked busy jobs as civilians in support of the war effort. It wasn’t all bad: it was during those few years when Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, often writing together, emerged as an intimidatingly strong creative duo. Clifford Simak also began the series of stories that would later form his “novel” City. Still, there were fewer authors active between 1943 and 1945 than usual.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1944 issue of Amazing Stories. It remained stranded for three decades before being reprinted in the November 1973 issue of Science Fiction Adventures Classics.
Enhancing Image
It’s the last battle between an empire on its last legs and a more democratic faction. The empress of this civilization, a beautiful woman named Bess-Istra, faces death in battle, retreat from the planet, or a compromise with the leader of the enemy faction, a prime minister who wants Bess-Istra as his wife. Bess-Istra isn’t keen on this. For reasons that are never given, except maybe the implication that she’s really just that attractive, Bess-Istra passively draws in nearly every male character who crosses her path. Every man seems to feel intense love or hatred for her—sometimes both at the same time. Take Bandro, Bess-Istra’s right-hand man, who is loyal to her at the beginning, only for her to beat him and chew him out for suggesting she take the compromise, “his love for this girl at that moment turning into hate.” Said hate will fester over the course of the story, but we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Then there’s the totally amoral scientist Sah-Hallo, who stays loyal to Bess-Istra, if only because he seems to be the only man around to not feel strongly about her, being rather preoccupied with his “toys.” The fallen empress and her thousand trops hop in their massive cylindrical escape ship and mark coordinates for a neighboring planet fit for colonization. Or maybe not. Given how small Bess-Istra’s army really is and the fact that they don’t know much of anything about who may be living on said planet, there’s a very real chance whoever’s there might see them coming. Which is what happens. The folks on this other planet, who seem pretty advanced, nudge the ship off course so it misses the planet, instead heading for a planet you and I would be familiar with.
We then jump forward in both time and space to Earth, specifically Mozambique in 1944. We have our token American character in the form of Bill van Astor-Smythe (what a name), a war correspondent who for some reason has been hanging out in the jungle. These Japanese have invaded the island of Madagascar and look to make headway in Mozambique, which is… also very strange. Okay, time to take a step back. “Intruders from the Stars” explicitly takes place in 1944, but it’s not our 1944. This issue of Amazing Stories would’ve appeared on newsstands in December 1943. Rocklynne could’ve written this story as far back as late 1942, when the frontlines of World War II in both theaters looked quite different. There was still fighting in North Africa, Mussolini was still in full control in Italy, and the tide had just turned in favor of the Americans in the Pacific. It’s possible Rocklynne wrote this story during the Guadalcanal campaign. It still doesn’t excuse some conspicuous inaccuracies, like the fact that Bill and other characters act as if Midway hadn’t happened. The Japanese are a lot better fortified in-story than they were in real life, especially by the time of the story’s publication. The European theater is also described repeatedly as being bad for the Allies, which simply wasn’t the case, even by the middle of 1943. You have to wonder how people in those days got their news, or rather when they got their news. Obviously you’d read newspapers, listen to the radio, watch newsreels at the movie theater, but information could be wrong or misleading, not to mention there was a time delay. The unfortunate thing is that “Intruders from the Stars” would’ve read as dated on the very day it appeared on newsstands.
In case you haven’t guessed, this is very much a wartime story, and in part it functions as wartime propaganda, complete with racism against the Japanese and the liberal usage of a certain slur. There’s racism elsewhere, like referring to Chinese laborers as “coolies,” a slur so outdated that your grandpa might not even know what it means. To an extent at least, the racism is a byproduct of the circumstances in which Rocklynne wrote his story. Looking at World War II propaganda, namely anti-Japanese propaganda, between movies, cartoons, comic strips, etc., we see that things could be a lot worse than in Rocklynne’s story. The Japanese empire is antagonistic force, but the much bigger problem is Bess-Istra’s ship, which has crash-landed in the jungle. Bill meets a young missionary named John (or Johnny, as Bill keeps calling him) Stevens and his assistant Thomas Reynolds. The three men find that the locals have been drawn to the empress and begun treating her as an idol, which is bad for Stevens’s business. Bess-Istra and her cronies have been in cold sleep, possibly for centuries, but now awaken to a world which is decidedly not the one they were aiming for. Well, ya know, when you’re given lemons you should try making some lemonade. It’s convenient that not only is Earth totally habitable for Bess-Istra and her kind, and not only are these aliens totally humanoid in appearance, and not only are they able to understand human language thanks to a fancy alien doohickey, but also they’re able to catch up quickly on what’s been going on in the world. This is all rather hard to stomach and unscientific by Rocklynne’s standards—not that he was the strictest of writers.
Both Bill and Stevens are immensely attracted to Bess-Istra, much to Stevens’s angst, on account of his religious duties. Sex, or rather sexual attraction, plays a big role here, such that Bess-Istra’s obvious plan to become ruler of Earth wouldn’t get far without it. For his part, Bill is no fool, and from the day they meet he knows Bess-Istra and her gang are up to no good. The problem is twofold: a) he finds himself drawn to her, almost against his will, and b) he thinks, or tries to convince himself, that maybe there’s the chance the empress really does mean well when she says she can end this war with minimal casualties. It’s a very tempting proposal, and it turns out that what the aliens lack in numbers they more than make up for in equipment. Bess-Istra also seems to be taking an interest in Christianity (it’s vahue as to what sect, but I have to assume Catholicism), listening patiently while Stevens yaps at her about it. The Christian God is quite different from the goddess on Bess-Istra’s world, who demanded blood sacrifices. Having lived some of her life as a slave, Bess-Istra knows a thing or two about pain and torture. What ensues is—honestly sort of hard to describe. The aliens incapacitate Japanese and German soldiers, with the Allies and resistance (it’s nice, at least, that we get mentions of Chinese and other non-white resistance forces) groups making major headway almost literally overnight. Hitler (for some reason his first name is spelled “Adolph” in-story) and other Axis higher-ups are captured with ease.
Before you know it the war has ended, which is good for humanity, but then the question is… What next? It’s obvious what Bess-Istra wants, but the real question is whether anything can be done about it. How can Bill, who has (against his better judgment) befriended the empress in a sense, hope to save the world from her clutches?
There Be Spoilers Here
The answer is a mix of religion and some tough love—by that, I mean what is admittedly a well-earned slap, coming from Bill. I will say that while the love triangle angle is unearned, it’s interesting that not only does Bess-Istra’s interest in Christianity turn out to be genuine, but this happens because she falls in love with Stevens. Not that they can even get their relationship started, for a few reasons. In a bit of a twist it isn’t Bess-Istra who is ultimately the villain, but her spurned right-hand man Bandro. Whereas the plan to capture the Axis leaders and hold them on trial for war crimes was genuine, Bandro has a much more violent idea, killing soldiers and civilians indiscriminately. Berlin and Tokyo are utterly destroyed, which disturbs Stevens and even Bess-Istra; and yet, in the story’s most baffling moment, Bill begs to differ. He says:
The people of Japan and Germany are hopelessly warped. The Japanese believe themselves to be the divine flower of the world, and worship their emperor as a god in his own right. They believe it is a privilege for ‘inferior’ races to be ruled by them. The same goes for the Germans. They literally believe themselves to be the chosen people. That belief has been drilled into them for long, long years.
Nothing, only death, can completely erase the utter cruelty that has been bred into the very minds of those people! The utter conceit and treachery. The utter inhumanness.
Up to this point, Bill’s been a pragmatist and not one given to combat, which makes his sudden genocidal lunacy all the more head-turning. No doubt this was a sentiment some people really had, not helped by the death camps discovered at the war’s end (Rocklynne and others would not have known the full extent of Nazi and Japanese crimes at this point), but it makes little sense to come from this character. The good news is that Bess-Istra has by this point turned a new leaf and tells Bill to shut the fuck up. Ultimately the story rejects the notion of so-called collective punishment, even against the omnicidal horror of Germany under Nazism. Ultimately everything works, except for Stevens, who dies heroically. The implication is that with Stevens dead Bill might be able to make moves on the (former) empress, but we never get a clear answer as to how Bess-Istra feels about the Yankee journalist. As soon as the action ends, the story’s over.
A Step Farther Out
This is, if anything, indicative of both wartime SF and adventure SF of the sort that didn’t appear often in Astounding. There were other outlets for such pulp, including Planet Stories and Startling Stories, and even then Amazing Stories played second fiddle to those at the time. The magazine’s readership was waning, and this was a time when there were also paper shortages. It’s impressive, really, that Amazing Stories survived the war. “Intruders from the Stars” is not something I can honestly recommend, but it does serve as a kind of time capsule for a particular brand of SF writing that died off when the war ended. Rocklynne was a consummate professional, and while he wrote better than this, he also wrote worse.
See you next time.
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Serial Review: Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (Part 1/4)
(Cover by Gray Morrow. If, April 1966.) Who Goes There?
Now it’s time for an unusual team-up, between two writers who wrote for the same magazines and at the same time, but who otherwise seemed to have little in common. Laumer was from New York (although not NYC} and had a respectable military career, which he retired from to focus on writing. He bought a tiny island in Florida where he could do his work in peace. He made his SF debut in 1959 and spent the next decade or so growing a following with a mix of standalones and a couple series, most famously the episodic Retief series. Laumer was a pioneer of military SF, although that label wouldn’t become “a thing” until later. Unfortunately, Laumer suffered a stroke in 1971, at just 46, which left him unable to write for a time; and when he did return to writing, his work was not of the quality or consistency of his pre-stroke output. It’s hard to blame him for this: such a calamity would’ve ended a lot of authors’ careers. Laumer died in 1993, at a reasonably old age, but it’s his work in the ’60s that’s most remembered, though he’s somewhat obscure now.
Rosel George Brown was from New Orleans, and as far as I can tell she mostly stayed in Louisiana for the rest of her life. She had earned a Master’s in Greek, and did work as a teacher while being married to a college professor, so it’s fair to say she was a highly learned woman. She, like Laumer, made her SF debut in 1959, although she wrote only a few novels and not that many short stories. She may have done more, had she not died from lymphoma at the tragically young age of 41, just one year after Earthblood was published. Despite the small output, Brown was one of the best writers to come about during those awkward years between the end of the ’50s SF boom and the New Wave era.
Placing Coordinates
Serialized in If, April to July 1966. It was published in hardcover by Doubleday later that year. It’s been reprinted on occasion, but the best way to find it now would be the Baen omnibus Earthblood and Other Stories, which comes bundled with stories by Laumer and Brown each writing solo. Why they felt the need to bundle it I’m not sure, given it’s a longish novel by the standards of ’60s SF.
Enhancing Image
Earthblood reads in part like one of Robert Heinlein’s adventure-oriented ’50s novels, with the beginning seeming to pay homage to the memorable start of Citizen of the Galaxy. Raff and his wife Bella are looking to buy a human child, or rather a human embryo. Pure Terran. Raff is a mutant while Bella is a humanoid alien. This is a future in which there was once a human galactic empire, but the empire has long since crumbled, leaving little in the way of pureblood humans. However, mankind was prolific, and there being quite a few humanoid alien races, there are many mixed-race humanoids to be found. But like I said, pure Terrans without mutations are rare, so such an embryo would be expensive. Raff and Bella end up having to sell their passports to afford an embryo that was originally meant for “the Shah,” which makes me think this is a timeline where the Iranian revolution never happened. Now both poor and stranded on some backwater planet, the couple at least have their human boy to raise, although even then their troubles aren’t over. They’re attacked one day by a small gang of Yill, a race with a penchant for viciousness. Raff is wounded in the encounter to the point of being crippled, but since the couple technically win, by Yill custom they take in a survivor as a servant.
The embryo becomes a baby and the baby become a boy, named Roan, who in his childhood lives apart from mankind. He has his parents, the servant I mentioned, and some birdlike intelligent aliens called the gracyl. His first friend is a gracyl named Clanth, although sadly this friendship will not last too long. The gracyl are prone to cowardness, which is understandable given they’re physically weak and rather small in size. It’s clear (at least from the authors’ point of view) that Roan is meant for bigger and better things. A big part of Roan’s character arc, indeed what gets him started on his quest from a young age, is the notion that humans are in some way inherently superior to other intelligent races—that once upon a time, humanity ruled the whole known galaxy. Roan is a descendant, in biology if not exact bloodline, of rulers. (The sentiment of human supremacy is not helped in its unsavory implications by Roan being vaguely white, even being drawn as your typical square-jawed hero in the interiors.) The conflict is that he grows up in a world (or worlds) where friends are few and most people are either looking to take advantage of him or kill him outright. This is made apparent early on when he survives an attack by a predatory race called the Veed, which leaves several gracyl dead, including Clanth. It’ll be a hot minute before Roan befriends another living soul. His life, from then until the time he reaches adulthood, is an unhappy one.
Implicit racism aside, a quibble I have with this first installment is that we don’t get to spend much time with any one of the races, and there are a handful introduced here. The no-nonsense pacing is for the most part a positive, but it does leave characters who are not Roan on the side of underdeveloped. Granted, we’re only a quarter into the novel. It does seem like we gloss over the time between Roan as a young boy and when he decides to join the circus—and by “decide,” I mean he’s forced into it. He’s captured by a bipedal lobster-like alien named Ithc, but wounds one of Ithc’s hands (or claws) in the process. Gom Bulj, the owner of the “Extravaganzoo,” is mad at Roan for injuring one of his performers, but he makes a deal with Roan that the young man can’t refuse. Pure Terrans are a novelty, and years of living on a rough-and-tumble planet made Roan physically strong and agile. He’ll make a good high-wire performer—or else. Ithc is the villain of this first installment, being Roan’s nemesis, and as you can see with the front cover, their fight is one worth illustrating. Despite being a young adult, Roan has the vocabulary and stubbornness of a five-year-old, which seems to come from the lack of a proper education. He’s immature for his age, which doesn’t stop him from being both a capable fighter and clever in his own way. It also doesn’t stop him from getting a girlfriend, although it’s unclear how romantic their relationship is.
Up to this point Roan made it clear he wanted a romantic companion of his own, but he specifically wanted a human woman, or at least a humanoid alien who appears human enough. Maybe he is a bit of a racist. In Roan’s defense, the circumstances of his upbringing make it so that he has only an idea of what a human woman is like. In the first installment of Earthblood there’s the implicit question of nature versus nurture. The idea is that Roan’s “pure” genetics destine him for greatness, assuming he doesn’t get killed first, but his upbringing in a tough environment by a mixed-race couple who gave up their wealth to raise him means he has something of the scoundrel in him. He’s basically Tarzan IN SPAAAAAAACE, or to make another comparison, he’s like Superman. He was meant to be heir to royalty but ended up in the hands of loving but impoverished parents. Enter Stellaraire, a dancer and fellow “freak” at the circus, who appears human enough to Roan’s liking. Having never been involved with a woman like this before, Roan is curious rather than violently misogynistic like how you might expect—a curiosity Stella is happy to indulge. Something unusual for magazine SF of the time, at least in the US (New Worlds was spicing things up in the UK), is the unequivocal sexual component of Roan and Stella’s bond. One of the first things they do together is Stella teaching Roan how to bathe like a civilized person, involving the shedding of clothes.
There Be Spoilers
Roan discovers before he’s even taken on as a member of the crew that the Extravaganzoo is about as cutthroat as life on the outside, not least because he has to play nice with Ithc. Understandably the two hate each other. The only friends Roan is able to make are Stella and a gentle giant by the name of Iron Robert (well, he came up with the “Iron” part). Shit finally comes to a head when Roan finds Ithc torturing Stella after a show, the torture itself a kind of exhibition, and decides to take matters into his own hands—quite literally. The climax of the first installment is the bloodiest part, with Roan beating Ithc to a pulp, breaking his limbs and choking him before putting the asshole out of his misery. Roan can avoid the short-term consequences of killing a fellow performer, on account of the spectators promising to not rat out on him, but this still raises the question as to how he’s supposed to survive here, and if there’s even a way out. Presumably there is, because I can’t imagine the rest of the novel taking place at the circus. Roan is meant for bigger and better things than this.
A Step Farther Out
It’s problematic and a bit sleazy, but I’m also interested in where Earthblood goes from here. Of course, the mild sleaziness is a breath of fresh air for pre-New Wave SF. There’s sexuality, a good deal of violence, and even some mild swearing (wow). The Heinlein influence is apparent, but then Heinlein had just stopped writing novels of this sort. Also, I think it’s worth mentioning, and it’s probably because of Brown’s contributions (I’m unsure of Laumer’s skill with writing women), but this is not nearly as creepy or misogynistic as Heinlein in writing-for-adults mode. There are other issues, namely regarding race, but I’m willing to see the novel’s treatment of race (or speciesism, rather) unfold over the coming installments.
See you next time.
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Things Beyond: February 2026
(Cover by Robert Fuqua. Amazing Stories, January 1944.) What a year, huh? And we just started.
Since a lot of us are snowed in, or at least dealing with some pesky snow and ice (and ICE) in the midst of our everyday activities, we may as well pass the time by cozying up with some good reading. Or maybe not so good. Truth be told, I’m not so sure about the quality of what I’ll be tackling this month, with maybe one exception, the short story. Why yes, it’s been a while (a couple years) since I reviewed and quite enjoyed Philip José Farmer’s story “Mother,” which you may remember as being strange and pretty risqué for early 1950s SF. Farmer did write a sequel, “Daughter,” which from what I’ve heard is just as good if not better. As for choosing the obligatory item from Amazing Stories, to celebrate that magazine’s centennial, I decided to pick something from the rather neglected and maligned ’40s period. At the same time, Ross Rocklynne is not just some hack writer, so we’ll see. It had also been, for my money, too long since I’d scavenged the pages of If, namely for a serialized novel or novella, of which many were published in that magazine. For February it’s all sci-fi and all retro.
Now, there is an announcement I’d been wanting to make here, and maybe should have with last month’s review forecast, but now is as good a time. I recently launched a sister blog on Substack, Sketches from a Reader’s Album, which is not focused on genre fiction at all (although genre fiction will inevitably figure into it on occasion), but is like SFF Remembrance a review blog with the occasional editorial. At least that’s the idea. There I’ll be writing about literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, namely books that have won the National Book Award. (The National Book Award is sort of like to the Pulitzer Prize what the Nebula is to the Hugo, if you care for that sort of thing.) With both sites you can expect only so many posts a month, but they’ll be lengthy and hopefully entertaining.
As far as time frames go, we have one story from the 1940s, one from the 1950s, and one from the 1960s. Because I’ll be covering stories published in Amazing Stories in the 1920s and ’30s, we unfortunately will not be getting to more recent stuff until April at the earliest.
For the serial:
- Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown. Serialized in If, April to July 1966. Such a collaboration sounds out of the blue, and honestly I’m not even sure how or why Laumer and Brown came together to work on a novel. But it’s not totally unexpected. Laumer and Brown made their debuts at almost the exact same time, at the tail end of the ’50s, and both were prolific during the pre-New Wave years. They were also very close in age. Sadly Brown died at just 41 years old in 1967, one year after Earthblood was published, while Laumer suffered a stroke in 1971 which left him unable to write for a time. I know little about Earthblood aside from it being an adventure novel, of the sort that was common in If in the ’60s.
For the novella:
- “Intruders from the Stars” by Ross Rocklynne. From the January 1944 issue of Amazing Stories. Retro Hugo finalist for Best Novella. Rocklynne is one of those unexpected survivors from the pre-Campbell years, having made his debut in 1935 when he was just 22, and continuing up to the early ’50s before going on hiatus. (Like too many SF writers of his generation he became interested in Dianetics.) He eventually made a comeback in the late ’60s, and even appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions. Despite the Retro Hugo nomination, “Intruders from the Stars” has almost never been reprinted.
For the short story:
- “Daughter” by Philip José Farmer. From the Winter 1954 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The SF market in the early ’50s was such that you could get your story published even if it was more daring than average, provided you accepted selling to one of the second-rate magazines. By 1954, Farmer had already become notorious for his novella “The Lovers,” about a sexually explicit (for the time) romance between an Earthman and an alien woman who is more bug-like than she appears. Early Farmer is pulpy in style, but he can be rather big and provocative with his ideas.
Hopefully you’ll read along with me.
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Serial Review: The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells (Part 3/3)
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, February 1927.) The Story So Far
Bedford and Cavor are a failed businessman and an eccentric scientist respectively, who strike up an unlikely friendship and business partnership. Cavor, being the inventor, perfects a metal of his own design which he christens Cavorite, while Bedford orchestrates the construction (not the invention, of course) of a giant metal sphere which takes advantage of this anti-gravity metal called Cavorite. To test the viability of this new metal, after an accident gets nearly the both of them killed, Cavor and Bedford agree (reluctantly on Bedford’s part) to take this big metal ball to the moon. They pack some provisions, although strangely (from a modern standpoint) it doesn’t occur to them to build pressure suits for a world which very well might not even have an atmosphere. But of course, in the year 1899, it was speculated that the moon might not only have an atmosphere, but be home to life of its own. And so it does here.
Of course, nearly everything that could go wrong does, short of the two men dying straightaway. They lose track of the sphere, finding that it had been stolen or sunken into the landscape. They eventually battle hunger and thirst, although due to the lower gravity it takes longer for their bodily functions to call upon them. The biggest issue becomes the moon’s indigenous intelligent race, a bunch of “ant-men,” some of whom are man-sized, and somewhat humanoid, but otherwise have nothing in common with the men. These aliens, which Cavor comes to call Selenites, live in a complex network of underground caverns, and since the plant life on the moon isn’t useful for crafting wood-based equipment, Selenite civilization is metal-based, the moon apparently being rich in metals. At the end of the second installment Bedford and Cavor decide to split up in search of the sphere, leaving a handkerchief as a landmark.
Enhancing Image
The plan doesn’t go well at all, although the bright side is that Bedford finds the sphere and is able to leave the moon, albeit without Cavor. Unfortunately the two will never see each other again, although this is not the last time they hear from each other. In what I can only think of as a major contrivance, Bedford lands in the UK, in the seaside town of Littlestone, which is quite lucky for him. He loses the sphere again, for the last time it seems, but he’s able to make some money off of publishing the story of his and Cavort’s journey to the moon. (Funnily enough Bedford’s story appears in The Strand Magazine, which is also where The First Men in the Moon first appeared in the UK.) Normally this would be where the story (as in this novel) ends, but eventually a scientist by the name of Julius Wendigee, a Dutchman living in Britain, “who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars,” picks up coded messages from the moon. Bedford gets in on this, having hitherto assumed Cavor was dead, seeing that his former buddy is not only alive but in contact with the Selenites. This is good news!
The back end of the novel is a series of transcripts of Cavor explaining Selenite culture and biology, among other things. Bedford effectively disappears as a character while Cavor takes control, relating his story to us like the unnamed protagonist does in The Time Machine. I must admit that these last few chapters are my favorite part of the book, which is a shame considering that, by Bedford’s own admission, the story had already come to an end in one sense, but also it feels like too little and too late. We learn important details about life for the Selenites that we really should’ve been given insight to earlier in the book, since up this point they came off as generic hostile aliens. The novel is at its best when it stops being an adventure narrative and instead swerves into territory Wells is better with, namely speculation on the future of human civilization. Cavor is led into an impossibly grand hall and introduced to the ruler of the Selenites, the Grand Lunar, an immobile mass of flesh whose brain is literally several yards across. (Intelligence among the Selenites is determined by the size of their heads, at the cost of body strength and mobility. This is something that became a cliche in pulp-era SF, but it was not so in Wells’s time.) It’s here that we finally get what the point of the book seems to be—a point that Wells had rather neglected to explore up till now.
There’s a big case of culture clash between the humans (or at least humanity as told by Cavor) and Selenites, indeed every facet of culture there is. The Selenites, in keeping with their insectoid appearance, are a race of specialized workers with a single absolute ruler, although the Grand Lunar represents supreme intelligence rather than supreme fertility like a queen bee. There’s no war here, nor does there seem to be poverty. Despite their reliance on metal, the Selenites are pre-industrials. The evil and filth of Victorian England has not reached them. Unfortunately, in trying to describe life on Earth, Cavor can’t help but yap about the nastier parts of human nature and act as if these are just things one ought to expect, namely the human tendency to wage war. This understandably concerns the Selenites, and Cavor’s fate is left ambiguous, although it doesn’t look good for him. Regardless, we never hear from Cavor again. There’s an anti-war slant crammed into the climax of the novel, which I can’t help but take as hypocritical on Wells’s part, considering he would later support British involvement in World War I. (Wells was, among other things, a hypocrite: he was a womanizer, even fathering a child out of wedlock, while at the same time being prudish about sex in literature, like the good Victorian gentleman he was.) The climax is good on its own, but if only the rest of the novel had properly built up to it.
A Step Farther Out
When C. S. Lewis wrote Out of the Silent Planet he intended it as a not-very-subtle rebuke of Wells’s writing, and The First Men in the Moon in particular. For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of either novel. I don’t think The First Men in the Moon plays to Wells’s strengths, for the most part. It’s a weirdly structured thing that feels lopsided and at times bloated, despite coming to only about 200 pages in paperback. It’s a simple idea that could’ve worked better had it been the length of The Time Machine, or even The Invisible Man. Wells, who was never one to hide his beliefs, is less didactic here than in those other novels, but I wish he maybe didn’t bury the lede with what he wanted to say. The First Men in the Moon is actually less didactic than Lewis’s novel, but that’s not really a positive for the former. Maybe I would like it more had I read it as a book, in a short burst of time, rather than stretch it out over a few weeks, but I’m not sure.
See you next time.
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Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 