Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Celebrating the genre magazines, one story at a time…

  • Short Story Review: “Getting Regular” by David R. Bunch

    (Cover by Leo Summers. Amazing Stories, August 1960.)

    Who Goes There?

    David R. Bunch was born in 1925 and made his genre debut in 1957, although he didn’t start writing full-time until much later. He tried for a PhD in English Literature but ultimately didn’t get it. Unlike the vast majority of genre writers, who may write a poem here and there for funzies, Bunch really was a poet; but unfortunately, poetry didn’t and indeed does not sell, so when it came to writing he tried (on top of poetry) the next best thing. See, Bunch never wrote a novel, which goes some ways to explain why he’s always been an obscure figure, but he wrote something like 200 short stories over a span of four decades. Mind you that while 200 is a big number, no matter how you look at it, Bunch specialized in the short-story story; it’s hard to find a Bunch story that goes over ten pages in length. When he appeared in the landmark anthology Dangerous Visions he was the only author to come in with two stories, one of which takes place in the setting that would come to define his fiction output: Moderan. Moderan, the book, is a collection of linked stories set in a futuristic hellscape in which the vast majority of people have given up their fleshy bodies in favor of mostly robotic exoskeletons. Humanity has conquered death, aging and disease are apparently things of the past—but at what cost? That is the question.

    “Getting Regular” is one of the longer Moderan stories (not saying much, I know), and unlike some of the other stories in the collection, which can be thought of as vignettes or prose poems, it has a character who goes through something like an arc. This is an early entry in the series, and the fact that it was published in 1960 is a little astounding; but then Cele Goldsmith, who edited both Amazing Stories and Fantastic at the time, seemed fond of Bunch’s work and gave him leeway that other editors at the time might not have. It’s also worth mentioning that the Moderan stories were printed in both Amazing and Fantastic during Goldsmith’s tenure, as if both magazines were interchangeable for this setting. It could also be that there’s something fantastic about Moderan that

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the August 1960 issue of Amazing Stories. It has only ever been reprinted in Moderan. Surprisingly Moderan is in print, after decades of not being available, thanks to NYRB Classics. It’s one of the relatively few SF books to get an NYRB edition.

    Enhancing Image

    A peculiarity about the Moderan stories that makes them easy to pick up but hard to digest individually is that there’s not much context given per story, and also Bunch having the understandable tendency to repeat himself with regards to crumbs of backstory the reader is allowed to have. As I also said before, some of these (I decided to dig into Moderan a bit before writing all this, hence the slight delay) are less stories in the traditional sense and more like prose poems. Bunch has a touch of the poet about him, and he also has a poet’s mindset for providing detail in places we don’t consider typical when dealing with short stories. Moderan is like a bag of M&Ms, in that each M&M is virtually identical to every other M&M, aside from coloring; and yet it’s impossible to have just one M&M. The idea is that Moderan is greater than the sum of its parts.

    As for the plot of “Getting Regular,” there isn’t much of one, but the dense backstory for the setting makes the plot seem thicker than it is. We have an unnamed narrator, the commander of Stronghold 10, who from what I can tell is a recurring figure in Moderan and basically our eyes and ears for understanding the weird mechanics of this world. Despite being the leader of a whole fortress, the commander is himself a hulking and cumbersome mass of metal who can barely move around on his own, lying on a “bed of levers.” As he tells us, “I must look more like a suit of old armor once would have looked if it had in the ancient days rolled in some thick-sliced bacon and then gone to bed on a bridge truss.” The commander, like everyone else, has had his organic body gradually “replaced” with metal, with only a few “flesh-strips” left of his old body. The image we’re given right away is a grotesque one, sort of proto-Cronenberg. Everything comes to us as deeply inhuman and unnatural. Even the flowers, with their “spring-metal stems,” are merely simulacra. Even the birds that pirch in the (obviously metal) trees are themselves made of tin. We infer that everything in Moderan is made of either metal or plastic, mankind’s embrace of artifice having spread like a virus across the face of the planet.

    Since the cyborgs that now make up mankind can’t expect to die natural deaths, a chief way of passing the time is apparently for Strongholds to play war with each other—I say “play” because it may as well be a game to them. Actually it might be the only game for them. We even get weapons with quirky names like Honest Jakes, Wreck-Wrecks, etc. If I was your average SF reader back in 1960, I would probably struggle to grasp what this is all about. At the same time, these Moderan stories that appeared in the early ’60s would’ve fit right in with the New Wave crowd had they come out just a few years later, which makes sense. The sheer weirdness of it, not to mention Bunch’s melodramatic stylization (a lot of instances of the commander explaining at the reader! sometimes IN ALL CAPS!), will inevitably be off-putting to some, but I kinda like it.

    As for the commander there’s the issue of the fact that Stronghold 10 has been underperforming as of late, or rather that things have been “irregular” around here. He has to answer to the higher-ups in the Needle Tower, “so tall and high-spired that the pennon pole pierces the vapor shield,” and he has to “get regular” or else lose his status, by way of losing a flesh-strip. Flesh-strips, at least among the leaders of Strongholds, are treated like tokens, although they’re quite precious. This all sounds rather morbid and a little gross, but that’s how it is. We’re told that the reason for the commander’s irregularity has to do with a girlfriend, or maybe an ex-girlfriend, who left him one day as what might’ve been the result of a technical error. The girlfriend (also unnamed—nobody seems to have a name in Moderan) was so thoroughly “replaced” that she didn’t even have a flesh-strip. She was, for all intents and purposes, a robot, and yet the commander loved her. But then what is the difference between someone who is 95% metal and someone who is 100% metal? It’s the Ship-of-Theseus problem, obviously, but there’s real wonder as to where humanity ends and machine begins. For being 95% metal, the commander is still human enough, evidently having an interior life, hopes, fears, dreams, all that good stuff.

    Now you may be thinking, this sounds a bit like cyberpunk. It’s true, despite the earliest Moderan stories predating the cyberpunk movement by a couple decades (ironically Bunch gave up on the series around the time William Gibson and the Vinges made their first moves), it’s easy to think of the setting as an outlandish precursor to what we would see in, say, the Sprawl stories leading up to Neuromancer. Another point of comparison, which is more immediate (at least to me), is J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. We have here another book that’s a collection of linked stories and vignettes, with a recurring setting and central character, in which the author makes a grim if also satirical point about machismo and mankind’s seeming need to go to war with itself. It’s also decidedly New Wave in style and temperament, and both books contain stories which had appeared earlier in magazines. I will say, from what I’ve read of Bunch he doesn’t strike me as being as much the misanthrop as Ballard.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    Now, keeping in mind that we know the commander of Stronghold 10 will keep his rank and manage to convince the ghoul in the Needle Tower that he can “get regular” (a foregone conclusion if you’re reading Moderan, but not if you were reading “Getting Regular” in 1960), the back end of the story is less tense and more a telling depiction of a nightmare from which there is no waking. Even with the commander’s power we’re reminded that said power doesn’t mean a whole lot—for one because there’s always a bigger fish, but also Moderan is such a bleak setting that we’re left unsure if it really is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.

    A Step Farther Out

    I had more to say about this one than I expected, but then I did end up reading a few more Moderan stories after “Getting Regular,” to get a better idea of what Bunch is going for. Each story in Moderan is dense enough that rereading is not only rewarding, but maybe necessary. How much you enjoy it will also depend on how much you like Bunch’s style, which I happen to like a fair bit. I should read the whole book at some point, but it feels like one of those story collections (and Joanna Russ agrees with me on this, in her review) where you should refrain from binging. You should take your time and let the weirdness marinate.

    See you next time.

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  • Short Story Review: “First Love” by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

    (Cover by Albert Nuetzell. Amazing Stories, September 1959.)

    Who Goes There?

    Lloyd Biggle, Jr. was born in 1923, and was of that generation of American men to see action in World War II, serving in the army. He suffered a leg wound during the war that would leave him disabled for the rest of his life. He studied musicology at the University of Michigan, even earning a PhD there, and his studying of music figures into some of his SF. Compared to some other authors of his generation he came to writing SF relatively late, his debut story not appearing until 1955, and he didn’t start writing full-time until 1963; but then again, for others writing genre fiction always remains a side hustle. Aside from being active as a professional writer for a few decades (his output slowed down after the ’70s), Biggle also contributed significantly to fandom, even founding the Science Fiction Oral Association, an organization dedicated to preserving audio recordings of speeches and interviews of professionals in the field. Those of us who like to dig deep into the history of genre SF, however much of it we’re able to know, can thank Biggle’s efforts in a major way.

    I’ve only read a few of Biggle’s stories in passing over the years, and none of his novels yet, but “First Love” is a surprisingly good coming-of-age story whose obscurity is hard to justify. Surely it’s not the first “modern” SF story to deal with mermaids, and the revelation in the story’s climax is not strictly a unique observation on Biggle’s part. What makes it work is the execution, such that it doesn’t even really read as pulpy, despite being printed in the ’50s and in a magazine that didn’t pay very well. On the contrary, Biggle’s handling of youth, love, loneliness, and sexual awakening (along with sexual trauma) now reads as quite modern.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the September 1959 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted in Encounters (Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh) and the Biggle collection A Galaxy of Strangers.

    Enhancing Image

    Firstly I recommend tracking down a reprint of this story, since the magazine version has an introductory blurb that not only gives away a big twist, but it also comes off as misleading.

    Walter Rogers is a 16-year-old farm boy whose family make much of their income by leasing land to the Zenglers. The Zenglers, incidentally, live by a quarry with a lot of water in it, about fifty feet deep, so that it’s like a pond. To becomes relevant to Walter when one night a huge explosion goes off near the Rogers property, cause unknown, but blowing out all the windows in the house. Aside from Walter’s hand getting cut, nobody’s hurt. The explosion, however, came from the direction of the quarry. Now, Walter’s naturally an adventurous boy, taken to swimming and fishing; but he also has an artistic side, in that more specifically he likes to paint. After the explosion, which got a headline in the local newspaper but nothing else worth mentioning, Walter journeys to the quarry with the idea of going for a little swim. He strips down to his birthday suit, and it’s during this awkward moment that he’s met with the strangest of surprises: there’s a girl in the pond. Not a dead girl, thankfully, but also evidently not human, although she does seem to be humanoid. She’s also naked, like Walter, but unlike him she’s perfectly suited to the water, being a mermaid of sorts. Walter, who at this point in his life hasn’t yet gone out with any girls, sees a beautiful girl (never mind that she’s an alien) up close and is star-struck, his mind gravitating toward her “small breasts” and “shapely legs” as she floats beneath the surface. This is a lot to take in, but Walter is a quick thinker, and it takes him practically no time to figure the girl needs his help.

    The sexuality of all this is more blunt than one would expect, given the vintage. This is not merely for titilating the reader, either, but also serves a major purpose for Walter’s character; indeed the Meet Cute™ happening when both parties are nude and in vulnerable position, with the girl even being submerged in a body of water (think bodily fluids), sets the tone for the rest of the story. “First Love” is about a peculiar moment in a boy’s life, during that period when he has started thinking about girls in “that” way but before he has really become a man. Any honest depiction of a person’s life during adolescence should, metaphorically at the very least, involve sex in some way, and Biggle is more honest about this than many other writers appearing in the genre magazines at the time. Walter’s pressing need to help the girl, first in feeding her (finding her fish to eat, which he infers is a safe bet), is driven partly by lust. There’s also the mad frenzy that happens, the way one’s brain becomes all foggy, when in love for the first time. For better or worse, you never forget your first love, whether its reciprocated or not. Now you may be thinking, this all sounds a bit like the movie Splash (if you don’t remember that movie—don’t worry, you’re not missing out on that much), or maybe it sounds like a gender-flipped take on The Shape of Water, which I’m sure more people in [current year] know about. Guy meets monster girl. Guy falls in love with monster girl. Nowadays it feels to me like we don’t get enough of that dynamic; more often it’s a human girl and a monster guy, which can get boring.

    Being an aspiring monster-fucker aside, Walter becomes more outgoing in his efforts to help the mermaid, not least getting the help of a neighbor, Old Ed, to net up loads of fish for her.

    Walt swore him to eternal secrecy, and confided that he wanted to try to stock the quarry. Old Ed allowed that he didn’t think it would work, that the fish would lack their natural food and the water might be queer for them. But then—there might be some way to feed them, and if Walt wanted to try, why, he enjoyed catching fish, and he’d never rightly caught all he wanted to catch because he hated to waste them. Walt saved out enough fish for the Rogers’ table and triumphantly dumped the rest into the quarry with the shadowy face watching silently from the depths.

    I like the last part of that passage especially. For much of the story Biggle is deliberately murky about describing the girl, since the girl keeps herself underwater and partly out of Walter’s view. We only get bits and pieces of her at a time, and in the water where she’s at home she’s as angelic as a swan. It’s the idealized image you tend to have of someone when you fall head over heels for them, although here that idealization is rendered in a literal fashion. Normally the Zenglers wanting to dynamite the quarry would mean nothing, and indeed it wouldn’t to most people, but Walter steps in like this is a matter of life and death for him. He’s pushing himself to the limit for a girl who doesn’t even understand his language and who probably won’t even be able to communicate with him.

    Ahh, the follies of young love.

    There’s another character, Roy Zengler, around Walter’s age, who acts as a foil to him, being a very extroverted and rascally fellow who apparently changes girlfriends like how you’d change a pair of socks. He’s also framed as being totally selfish, wanting to dynamite the quarry for the fun of it, whereas Walter really does have the mermaid’s wellbeing in mind. It’s also Roy’s threatening to blow up the quarry and unwittingly kill the mermaid (it’s not like he’d believe Walter if told about it) that pushes Walter to do something drastic and decidedly illegal. No, I’m not talking about murder, but he’ll do something reckless to save the girl.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    There’s a whacky scheme to steal a truck with a tanker attached and to carry the girl off to the nearest lake—some fifty miles one way. Mind you that Walter is barely even old enough to know how to drive a car. This scheme shockingly works out, even if Walter nearly gets both him and the girl killed thanks to a state trooper seeing him trespass. While he’s able to get the girl to the lake, though, the girl is not all that thankful for his efforts; and even worse, for the first and only time we get to see what she looks like when out of the water. It’s not a pretty sight. Actually it’s the most haunting passage in the whole story, undermined a good deal because this very scene is given away in the introductory blurb:

    Her face was a gruesome, rubbery mask, her eyes large and sunken. She had no nose. Needlelike fangs protruded from her gaping, gasping mouth. Her hair, her lovely, flowing hair, was short tufts of fur that covered her back from the crown of her head to the base of her spine. The glimmering dark green fabric that she wore was her flesh, spongy and slimy to the touch.

    The experience is horrifying, even if nobody physically got hurt. The justaposition between how the girl looks underwater and how she looks and acts on land is an effective one. And, of course, Walter doesn’t get the girl and will probably never see her again, even if he does save her life. It’s a moment he might never forget, and even if he does on a conscious level it’s liable to haunt his dreams in the future.

    A Step Farther Out

    In a way “First Love” comes off as like a Clifford Simak story if Simak wasn’t so averse to describing human sexuality. We have a rather bittersweet coming-of-age narrative in a rustic setting, during summer when school is out, with a yearning for that period in one’s past when there was an inherent degree of personal freedom. The world seemed so much larger then. Sadly such freedom is wasted on the young. This story appeared in the September issue of Amazing, which means it would’ve been on newsstands in August, when school would’ve still been out—a bit of serendipity, given the story’s tone and subject matter. It’s a good summer read. Not sure why practically nobody has picked this one up.

    See you next time.

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  • Short Story Review: “Are You Listening?” by Harlan Ellison

    (Cover by Ed Valigursky. Amazing Stories, December 1958.)

    Who Goes There?

    Over the half-century and change that he was active, writing whatever the hell he wanted, Harlan Ellison made some friends, many admirers, and about as many enemies. In his lifetime he was one of the more controversial genre writers in the business, not least because of his toxic personality and at times really petty grievances. He was, for better or worse, about as dramatic as his fiction, which is saying something. Ellison was born in 1934 and started writing professionally when he was barely out of his times, just in time to see the magazine boom-and-bust of the ’50s, although it wasn’t until the ’60s that he really started catching people’s attentions. 1967 in particular can be considered an annus mirabilis for Ellison, as it saw the publications of his Hugo-winning story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and the landmark anthology Dangerous Visions, as well as the airing of the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which Ellison wrote the initial draft for (it’s a long story). Had Ellison tragically died in 1970, his legacy as an important figure would’ve remained secure, but he continued to write great fiction for several more decades.

    In 1958 Ellison was another young writer looking to make some money by selling to as many outlets as he could. He wrote prolifically in the latter half of the ’50s, but little of this material would eventually make it into the big Ellison volumes like The Essential Ellison and Greatest Hits, with “Are You Listening?” being one of those forgotten early stories. Unfortunately there’s a reason for this. “Are You Listening?” isn’t terrible, but it’s rather forgettable, with the saving grace being that it shows an early attempt at handling a certain theme that would become a recurring one for Ellison, namely the issue of conformity in society.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the December 1958 issue of Amazing Stories. It was reprinted in the Ellison collections Ellison Wonderland and The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

    Enhancing Image

    Albert Winsocki has a problem: he seems to have phased out of existence. To be clear, Albert is alive and in the world, walking among the living, but the living don’t acknowledge him at all. Even Alma, his wife, simply started acting like he’s disappeared one day, despite the fact that he’s in the kitchen with her and trying to have a conversation. When people say they feel like they don’t exist anymore it’s just a figure of speech, but with Albert it’s quite literal. It isn’t even that Albert has become a ghost, with people and things phasing through him. Oh no, he can touch people, and even punch a guy in the nose, but he gets away with it because not only does the guy not notice getting punched, he doesn’t even feel the very real nosebleed. Suddenly it’s like no matter what Albert says or does matters. In a way this is all karmic. For the past couple decades of his life Albert’s been an unexceptional husband and an unexceptional worker, and now he’s paying for it. He’s worked at the same jewelry store for years, but his own boss doesn’t acknowledge him when he appears.

    At least he’s honest. As Albert tell us:

    I had been quiet all my life; I had married quietly and lived quietly and now, I had not even the one single pleasure of dying with a bang. Even that had been taken from me. I had just sort of snuffed out like a candle. How or why or when was no matter. I had been robbed of that one noise I had thought was mine, inevitable as taxes. But even that had been deprived me. I was a shadow… a ghost in a real world. And for the first time in my life, all the bottled-up frustrations I had never known were banked inside me, burst forth. I was shocked through and down with horror, but instead of crying, I did not cry.

    In a metaphorical sense, if not literal, Albert’s malady is not unique to him. From the introductory blurb to the story itself it’s clear that this is about alienation and conformity in an urban post-war society. In the 1950s this was such a common theme, from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that it sort of became a cliche with ’50s American art, especially that which was made by educated men. Ellison was a child during World War II and just a bit too young to have been sent to Korea (although he did serve in the army later, during peacetime), but he came of age during an era when the US was emerging as one of two superpowers in the world. Yet a sense of ennui hung over Ellison and others of his generation like a cloud. Assuming “Are You Listening?” takes place in the late ’50s, Albert would actually be of the so-called Greatest Generation, but despite his age this is a story that comes off as having been written by a considerably younger person. There’s an overflowing of angst that typically belongs to the young, but also its roughness (Albert is not a very compelling narrator, which you could argue makes sense, but still) betrays the hand of someone who was doing apprentice work at this point.

    Not a criticism of the story itself exactly, but I’m not sure why this was printed in Amazing Stories instead of Fantastic. I say this because while Ellison is known primarily for writing science fiction (although he rejected the label), he also wrote his fair share of fantasy and horror—indeed he sometimes wrote stories that can’t be easily categorized. “Are You Listening?” doesn’t have anything SFnal about it, as Albert problem just sort of happens to him one day and we never get a rationalization for it (I feel like I’m not spoiling anything by giving that away). The story is clearly meant to be a supernatural fable, albeit one where the “ghost” is technically still alive. This sounds more interesting on paper than in execution, sad to say; but on the bright side, at least it’s short. It also feels like a test run for “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” with the overall message being that you should do whatever in your power to avoid being put in a metaphorical box. History loathes a conformist.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    Ehhhh…

    A Step Farther Out

    I’m not sure why this was printed in Amazing when it would’ve been a better fit for Fantastic. This was the first issue with Cele Goldsmith as editor, although she would’ve been sifting through stories Paul W. Fairman, the previous editor, had bought. This was also one of many stories Ellison would’ve been pumping out at the time, few of which would ever be reprinted more than once or twice. It’s possible there was too much material backlogged for Fantastic, which had more generous criteria for what could be published anyway. Then again, while it’s serviceable, I would not have bought “Are You Listening?” if I had a choice. I can’t recommend it unless you plan to dive into Ellison’s very early fiction.

    See you next time.

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  • Things Beyond: July 2026

    (Cover by Lloyd Birmingham. Amazing Stories, April 1962.)

    It’s been some months since I did my last marathon of short stories from Amazing Stories, and in the magazine’s own timeline it’s been a couple decades. Not that nothing good was being printed in the ’40s and ’50s, but I only have three months to do this thing and this is a magazine with a really long and messy history.

    Last time we saw pretty much the end of T. O’Conor Sloane’s tenure, by which point Amazing Stories wasn’t doing so well, either in sales or the quality of the fiction. There was then a change in publishers and Sloane stepped down, the old man (he was born in 1851) dying in 1940. The next editor was the much younger and more eccentric Raymond A. Palmer, who would do stuff with the magazine that was for both good and ill. Palmer was only 27, and came to the editorship from the perspective of a fan, at a time when the first Worldcon hadn’t even happened yet. Palmer ran Amazing Stories for the next decade and obviously bought some good fiction, but his biggest contribution was the long-running series of hoax stories written by Richard S. Shaver. The so-called Shaver mystery amassed a cult following, but it did little to improve the magazine’s sales overall, and indeed damaged its reputation at a time when it was already treated as thoroughly second-rate. Something had to be done.

    When Palmer left to persue other ventures in the field (notably he edited Other Worlds, which printed some pretty good material on a modest budget), Howard Browne, who hitherto worked as managing editor, took over. Up to this point Amazing Stories had languished as a pulp-format magazine, and as the new decade arrived it became clear that the digest format was the way of the future for genre magazines that wanted to be more respectible. So, Browne had it changed to digest, and for a brief time in the early ’50s Amazing Stories was looking good for a second-rate magazine. Notably Browne bought the first story by Walter M. Miller, and we also saw stories from the likes of Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, and even Robert Heinlein. This rise in quality coincided with the debut of a new sister magazine, Fantastic, which Browne also edited. It could be because Browne was reported to dislike SF as a genre, or maybe it’s because fantasy is in some ways less restrictive than SF, but from the beginning it seemed like Fantastic was the favored sibling.

    Both magazines had their peaks and valleys, though, especially as money ran tight and Brown eventually stepped down to go back to focus on crime fiction. In the latter half of the ’50s both magazines had resorted to reprints and relying on a deceptively small group of workhorse authors who often got published under pseudonyms. It was not unusual to find, say, two or even three stories by Robert Silverberg under a variety of names in a single issue. Shit was getting ridiculous. Paul W. Fairman acted as caretaker editor for a couple years, but clearly a fresh and ingenious face was needed if the two magazines were to survive.

    Cele Goldsmith was only 25 when she took over Amazing Stories, but she had already acted as managing editor under Fairman and so had a good idea as to what the job would entail. Even so, the arrangement ended up being a bit unorthodox, and both magazines went through some big changes. The custom for editors was to write an editorial (as you do) for each issue, but Goldsmith didn’t write editorials; instead that duty went to Norman M. Lobsenz, who also wrote the story blurbs. ISFDB lists only a few times during her six-year tenure where Goldsmith wrote an editorial. This is the reason why we have little insight into what her opinions on anything were, and when she wrote a brief essay that appeared in the March 1983 issue of Amazing Stories, reminiscing about her editorship, she had long since moved on from the field. But she did not forget her roots. To use Goldsmith’s own words from that very essay:

    I’m often asked if I miss science fiction. Of course I do. And what I miss most is the contact with the many writers who became my friends. I confess to feeling a bit smug in the private knowledge that much of their success occurred because I was, at one time, their only reader and their most important audience.

    Said writers who either submitted early stories or straight up made their debuts in Goldsmith’s magazines included Roger Zelazny, Ben Bova, Piers Anthony, Thomas M. Disch, David R. Bunch, Phyllis Gotlieb, and of course, Ursula K. Le Guin, who would become perhaps the most universally acclaimed American genre author of the 20th century. Fritz Leiber, who had taken a few years off from writing, returned with a vengeance at the tail end of the ’50s, and the magazines he appeared in most were easily Goldsmith’s, especially Fantastic. J. G. Ballard was well-established in the British magazines, but Goldsmith offered him his first consistent market in the US. In the awkward years between the ’50s boom-and-bust and the New Wave of the late ’60s, Goldsmith paved the way for authors who would fully bloom in the latter period. During the six years of Goldsmith’s editorship, Amazing Stories got nominated for the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine five times, with 1960 marking the first time it was ever nominated. Fantastic also got nominated multiple times.

    Now, as for what I’ll be covering this month, I’ll acknowledge the elephant in the room: it’s all dudes. With the major exception of Le Guin, there was surprisingly not a noticeable uptick in lady authors appearing Amazing, despite a lady editor being in charge. This is by no means indicative of some bias on Goldsmith’s part or unique to her, as much of the ’60s saw an unfortunate drought in women writing for the genre magazines, even when compared the previous decade. Still, I wanted to cover as much ground as I could while also picking stories that look interesting. We’re starting with an early Harlan Ellison story from the December 1958 issue, the first issue credited to Goldsmith as editor, and ending with a Zelazny story from the June 1965 issue, Goldsmith’s last. Ziff-Davis, Amazing‘s long-time publisher, gave up it and Fantastic after the June 1965, and Goldsmith went with Ziff-Davis in the divorce. Both magazines became cheap reprint papers for a few years after, but they eventually recovered.

    With all that said, it’s time to get to the fiction.

    For the short stories:

    1. “Are You Listening?” by Harlan Ellison. From the December 1958 issue. You know him, you love him (or maybe not), but it can’t be denied that Harlan Ellison continues to be a north star by which SF writers guide themselves, even nearly a decade after his death. Eventually he would become famous and an award-winner, but in 1958 Ellison was just another struggling young writer.
    2. “First Love” by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. From the September 1959 issue. One of those authors to have fought in WWII, Biggle began writing SF about a decade after the war ended. He studied musicology and even got a PhD out of it, but it’s his SF and involvement in fandom (he founded the Science Fiction Oral History Association) that would occupy much of his time until his death in 2002.
    3. “Getting Regular” by David R. Bunch. From the August 1960 issue. Like Harlan Ellison, Bunch anticipated the New Wave by about a decade, making his genre debut in 1957. Bunch specialized in the short-short story, each tending to clock in at only half a dozen pages. His penchant for both quirkiness and brevity goes to explain why he’s the only author to appear twice in Dangerous Visions.
    4. “A Dusk of Idols” by James Blish. From the March 1961 issue. Blish was one of the first notable critics of genre SF, at least in the US, and his reviews of fiction specifically as printed in the magazines make his critical work a distant precursor to this very site. He was also pretty good when it came to writing fiction, especially in the ’50s, which saw him win a Hugo for A Case of Conscience.
    5. “Thirteen to Centaurus” by J. G. Ballard. From the April 1962 issue. By the early ’60s Ballard was already well-established in the UK, but Goldsmith was an early champion of his work in the US, with him appearing regularly in both Amazing Stories and Fantastic during Goldsmith’s tenure. Ballard is most famous (or infamous) for his novels, including Crash and Empire of the Sun.
    6. “Down to Earth” by Harry Harrison. From the November 1963 issue. Harrison started out as an illustrator, but he made his debut as a writer in 1951 and kept at it for decades. He also later became a prolific anthology editor. Given that much of Harrison’s fiction is known for being lightweight, it might come as jarring that his most famous novel is the bleak Make Room! Make Room!
    7. “A Game of Unchance” by Philip K. Dick. From the July 1964 issue. To this day Dick is one of my favorite authors, even when taking his faults into account. Dick emerged at one of the best (sometimes funny, other times scary) short-story writers of the ’50s, inside or outside of the field. But ya know, novels make more money. As such we didn’t see as much short fiction from Dick in the ’60s.
    8. “The Furies” by Roger Zelazny. From the June 1965 issue. I had to pick at least one major discovery Goldsmith had made, and it was a hard choice since, truth be told, the material in Fantastic during this time was stronger overall than what Amazing Stories offered. Zelazny appeared more often in Fantastic, which makes sense, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good fit for Amazing Stories.

    Let’s do some reading, shall we?

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  • Short Story Review: “Stay Off the Moon!” by Raymond F. Jones

    (Cover by Alex Schomburg. Amazing Stories, December 1962.)

    Who Goes There?

    Raymond F. Jones was born in 1915 and spent much of his life in Utah. He seemed to be the first practicing Mormon (Zenna Henderson grew up Mormon but later strayed from the Church) to have written genre SF, so in that sense he was patient zero for what has since become a somewhat common trend in the field. (Indeed there has spawned a whole industry of young Mormon genre writers who learn their craft at BYU and other Christmonger factories.) Jones made his debut in 1941 and from the beginning had a pretty steady relationship with Astounding, although at his most prolific he appeared in other magazines as well. His debut novel, Renaissance, is one of the longer and larger-in-scale novels to emerge from SF magazines in the ’40s, but it’s his 1952 novel This Island Earth which might ring a bell for some people—if only because of the film adaptation being associated with Mystery Science Theater 3000. His 1945 novelette “Correspondence Course” eventually earned a Retro Hugo nomination, deservedly as it’s one of the finer stories to be printed in Astounding during its prime and still reads fairly well.

    “Stay Off the Moon!” is an outlier for Jones in a few ways, not the least being that it arrives late in his career. Jones died in 1994, but he only wrote sporadically after the ’50s. Secondly, it was published in Amazing Stories, which was not one of Jones’s regular haunts. Finally, and most strikingly, this is very much an SF-horror hybrid that could’ve reasonably appeared in Weird Tales, had that magazine not closed its doors a decade earlier. Its odd blend of speculative fiction and cosmic horror might explain why it’s basically never been reprinted, despite being considered major enough at the time to be made the cover story. I think it works rather well myself, in spite of the outlandish premise, so that it reads better in execution than it sounds on paper, if that makes any sense. (It’s worth mentioning here that Jones took an interest in Dianetics in the ’50s, something that happened depressingly often with SF writers at the time.)

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the December 1962 issue of Amazing Stories. It has never been collected or anthologized, and is neglected enough that Jones let it fall out of copyright. As such you can read it on Project Gutenberg. I can think of worse stories that have been reprinted.

    Enhancing Image

    It’s difficult to talk about this story without bringing up The Big Twist™, but I’m gonna try for as long as I can.

    At some unspecified point in the near future, the space program has gone far enough the NASA is now sending a remote-controlled “mobile laboratory,” called the Prospector, to the moon via Saturn rocket. The Prospector’s job is to collect samples on the moon’s surface, and the controller and by extention Mission Control are able to see in fine detail what’s going on out there. This is all in preparation for a manned mission to the moon. Jim Cochran is a technician whose interest in the moon borders on mania, although he also had some skin in the game since Allan, his brother-in-law, is one of those astronauts set to make the voyage and those legendary first steps. Even as the moon floats within mankind’s grasp, however, there’s still a tangable sense of mystery about it that Jim is unable to shake off, maybe because for centuries the moon has been almost more an object of mythology and folklore than a real celestial body that exists in the universe. There’s something romantic about the moon, but also something a bit eerie. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was much SF and even earnest speculation written about the possibility of life on the moon.

    Both the best and worst thing that could happen is if there is absolutely nothing on the moon—just rocks and dust. A profound and insatiable emptiness. This doesn’t sit well with Jim—the likely possibility that the Prospector will find nothing of interest.

    The baying of dogs on a wintery, moonlit night.

    The madness called lunacy.

    Seeds must be planted just so, in relation to the moon, or the crop will fail.

    Men had always felt strange things about the moon. Would a Saturn missile and a mechanical monster in its nose be able to destroy all that?

    There’s a gear shift that happens midway through the story, but Jones foreshadows the shift well in advance. He invokes werewolves, lunacy, and even calls the Prospector “a mechanical monster.” The vibes are sort of bad from the outset, but it’s hard to articulate why they’re bad, which in my book makes for effective horror. Things get considerably creepier once Jim starts analyzing material collected by the Prospector and finds that there’s something peculiar about the moondust, down to even the atomic level. Now, we know that the moon is an offshoot of Earth, having been formed at the time of Earth’s creation and becoming caught in Earth’s orbit. The moon is made of the same basic ingredients as Earth—or at least this should be the case. But Jim finds, to his horror, that is it not. Not only did the moon not come from Earth’s leftovers, but the moon seems to have originated from somewhere outside the known universe. It is a foreign body that has attached itself to Earth, having come a long way from outside out solar system. The short-term problem is that the very moondust that covers the surface might be lethal to humans, even through spacesuits, but there’s a deeper problem that only gradually rears its head.

    There’s something off about the moon, but there’s also a far less esoteric kind of horror here: bureaucracy. What began as Cochran’s Theory soon became a paper which Jim sent to a respected astronomy publication, and thereafter all hell broke loose. NASA and the ghouls in DC are less concerned about the safety of the astronauts and more at the prospect of all this money and manpower having gone to waste. There’s the sunk-cost fallacy to consider: the Americans are too deep into investing in landing men on the moon to back out at this point. Too much has already gone into the space program. It’s too late to back out now, although Jim does have some allies, including Allan and his friend Sam. But it’s not enough.

    Scientific judgement was being held in abeyance until actual moon samples were available on earth. For the present, at least one of Jim’s predictions had come true. The hypothesis was becoming known as Cochran’s Theory. That it was also called Cochran’s Idiocy by a few didn’t matter.

    We haven’t even gotten to the big reveal yet, but this is still on its own a compelling depiction of how the space race in the ’60s could’ve gone very differently, and indeed much worse, than it did in real life. A lot of classic horror is essnetially conservative in temperament, if not necessarily in politics (although a disproportionate number of the great horror authors over the past couple centuries have been some flavor of right-wing), and “Stay Off the Moon!” continues this streak by saying that maybe it’d be best for all of us if we stopped being obseesed with going to space and landing on the damn moon. As someone who has become increasingly ambivalent about space travel over the years (but for woke reasons), I have to say I get behind this sentiment. It is, to take the title from one of M. R. James’s most beloved stories, a warning to the curious.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    The Prospector continues its probing and digs deeper, until one day it doesn’t, on account of having been swallowed up by a fissure in the ground that wasn’t there before. Not only have they lost the Prospector, “a billion-dollar experiment” gone up in smoke, and not only does Jim loses his job, but he has made a discovery that will change everything: the moon is alive. There are live hydrocarbons beneath the surface, and something has been lurking inside the moon for God knows how long. Now, in the decades since this story it’s become not uncommon to find horror related to possible life on the moon, or even the moon itself being a living (and also nefarious) thing as seen here, to the point where the premise has sort of become creepypasta material. Jones handles said material with delicacy, though, so that while the actual science is pretty dubious, the reveal of the moon’s true nature is done in very good taste. It helps that while we’re told that whatever cosmic entity lurking in the moon is evil, it’s also more or less unseen. There’s also the added layer of dread from the fact that Jim’s report on the moon terror gets suppressed and he winds up out of a job. There is literally nothing he can do to help people—not even his brother-in-law. Allan loses his life during the Appollo mission, although (and I think this is a pretty wise choice on Jones’s part), we’re not told how he dies.

    There would be astronaut deaths with the Apollo missions, namely the Apollo 1 disaster that happened some five years after “Stay Off the Moon!” was published, so there’s an added sense of eeriness here that Jones obviously could not have intended. The tragedy with the moon landing here does nothing to halt the space program, as also happened in real life. We will set foot on the moon—whether it wants us to or not. The ending is bleak as shit, which goes to explain why maybe this did not appear in Analog despite that being Jones’s most frequent outlet.

    A Step Farther Out

    This is a weird one, and I don’t just mean in the sense that it borders on counting as weird fiction. Rarely do I see a short story shift gears as dramatically as “Stay Off the Moon!” does, which alone would make it at least a curiosity; but at the same time it expresses an ambivalence towards NASA and the space race that was rare at the time, and which would only gradually pick up steam as it became more appearent that something really “useful” would come out of it. That the twist is a hard one to stomach, and of course one which does not align with our scientific understanding of Earth’s moon at all, is something that some readers will be unable to get past. I thought it was more effective than it had any right to be, though, to the point where I found the ending genuinely unnerving.

    This story is a bit of a hidden gem.

    See you next time.

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  • Novella Review: “Witch of the Demon Seas” by Poul Anderson

    (Cover by Allen Anderson. Planet Stories, January 1951.)

    Who Goes There?

    During his lifetime, Poul Anderson was one of the most prolific and respected genre SF writers, winning seven Hugos for short fiction (a number I think only met by Harlan Ellison’s wins) and three Nebulas. He was a made a Worldcon Guest of Honor at a rather young age, although by that point he had already been active for little over a decade. Anderson was born in 1926 to Danish immigrants, and he and his family even lived in Denmark for a short time when he was very young—his Danish heritage being something that comes up rather often in his fiction. Vikings and generally people roaming the seas pop here and there, such as in the Hugo-winning story “The Longest Voyage,” and even in “Witch of the Demon Seas,” which is much earlier and less refined, there’s this sense that Anderson saw the sailor’s life as something to admire. The ship as a microcosm for human society would be used more famously in his novel Tau Zero, with the depths of space as a stand-in for the ocean. This is one of several recurring themes with Anderson, who over the course of half a century wrote too many novels and short stories to count across several series, not to mention all the standalone titles. He studied physics at the University of Minnesota, but took up writing full-time as soon as he graduated.

    I was supposed to review a different Anderson novella, “A Tragedy of Errors,” months ago, but I never got around to it, and indeed I still haven’t read that story. I should, at some point. The thing with Anderson is that he wrote so much, the vast majority of which was published in the genre magazines, that he’s a good go-to author for when I’m feeling low on inspiration with review material. Anderson wrote so much, in fact, that a lot of his work has not been reprinted that frequently, if at all. In the case of today’s story its obscurity can be explained by its length, the fact that it was originally published under a pseudonym (there’s an Anderson story under his own name in this same issue, the more often reprinted “Tiger by the Tail”), and also it being on the weak side by Anderson standards.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories. It has since been reprinted in Swords Against Tomorrow (ed. Robert Hoskins) and the Anderson collection Swordsmen from the Stars. It has fallen out of copyright, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

    Enhancing Image

    There’s a procession going on in Achaera, showing off the captured pirate king Corun and his band of men. Corun of Conahur used to be a legitimate warrior, and a widely respected man, who turned pirate and roamed the seas. As the sorcerer Shorzon puts it, the man may be executed, but he deserves to be put “in a decent tomb.” Shorzon’s granddaughter, the young witch Chryseis, seems to agree with the old man, and even appears to be taken with Corun upon simply seeing him. The whole public affair is theatre, of course: Corun is to be locked away in a cell, apart from his men, and executed in due time. Of course, this is before Shorzon has anything to say on the matter, in which case the sorcerer has an offer to make with Corun. The idea is simple, that Corun is to accompany Shorzon and Chryseis with a small army to the Demon Sea, an infamous territory home to the Xanthi, an intelligent race of reptile-like humanoids who take to water like swans, and who are infamous for their capacity to overwhelm the forces of men. Corun was called upon not just because he’s supposed to be one of the finest warriors in the land, but because he’s one of the few people to have actually voyaged to the Demon Sea and lived to tell the tale.

    So Corun has two options, either certain death at the hands of the law, or probable death at the hands of the Xanthi. The correct choice is obvious. “In any case—to live! To die, if he must, under the sky!” It also helps that he has immediately fallen for Chryseis’s beauty and elusive charm, which I’m sure will not come back to bite him.

    Now you may be thinking, “Witches? Sorcery? I thought this was science fiction.” Well, it’s nominally science fiction. “Witch of the Demon Seas” is a planetary romance with a rather heavy emphasis on the fantasy half of the science-fantasy equation; there’s an SFnal twist late in the story, but for the most part the only thing that would identify it as SF is the fact that the action is set on a planet that is decidedly not Earth, and at the same time is not one of those secondary worlds a lot of fantasy works use. This is an alien planet, home to a wide breadth of alien life, including Chryseis’s pet “erinye,” a stranged winged beast. First and foremost it’s a maritime adventure set on the high seas, with the final destination being a black castle on an otherwise desolate island. In a way it’s all more reminiscent of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad than even Leigh Brackett’s planetary adventures, from which Anderson clearly took some inspiration. Brackett and Planet Stories had almost become synonymous with each other through the ’40s and ’50s, but while Brackett was prolific, she could not be there to provide a novella or novelette for every issue; hence there were other wirters, including Anderson very early in his career, who wrote what you might call Brackett Lite. Anderson is competent at providing such material for the magazine, but this is clearly not what he would ultimately excel at.

    On the voyage, aboard the Briseia, we meet Captain Imazu, maybe the most sympathetic figure in the whole story, and certainly the one who seems most aware of what kind of story he’s in. He can see right through Shorzon’s scheme and knows intuitively that Chryseis figures into it somehow, but Corun is too horny star-struck to listen to reason. (By the way, you may notice that Corun has a similar name and even backstory to a certain Celtic warrior we all know.) The sequence when we’re on the Briseia, which includes a thrilling action scene when some of the Xanthi try boarding the ship by force, is also my favorite. What can I say, it takes advantage of my weakness for maritime stuff. (Also, as a final aside, I couldn’t help but notice Anderson using “larboard” to refer to “port,” as in the port side of the ship, using what was even in 1950 a very outdated nautical term. He obviously would’ve been aware that port had long since replaced larboard in the seaman’s lexicon, so I wonder why he did this.) There’s also the burgeoning romance between Corun and Chryseis, which is about as arbitrary as it is fast-moving (they’re implied to have sex after about maybe a few days of knowing each other), so I’m not too thrilled about that part. Mind you that we eventually get a plot-relevant explanation for why Corun falls head over heels for this girl he just met, but that doesn’t mean I like it.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    Sorcery is, psi powers?? No way.

    A Step Farther Out

    Was sort of dragging my heels to write about this one, although real-life circumstances also contributed to the delay. Anderson is a curious writer in that for how much he wrote over the decades, rarely does one catch an Anderson story that’s outright bad. Weak Anderson is still often better than what a lot of his contemporaries were doing, even those who arguably had higher highs in their output. “Witch of the Demon Seas” sees Anderson near the end of his apprentice phase, a period that undeniably came to end by the time he was writing the magazine version of Three Hearts and Three Lions and the serial version of Brain Wave a few years later. But aside from the fixation on piracy (a profession Anderson seemed to have some sympathy for even later in his career, see The Star Fox) and the nomadic anti-hero, this is a story one can skip when studying Anderson.

    See you next time.

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  • Serial Review: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson (Part 3/3)

    (Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, July 1959.)

    The Story So Far

    Donal Graeme has begun to make a name for himself rather quickly after graduating from the academy, even with a few obstacles in the way. Chief among these is Prince William of Ceta, one of the most powerful individuals in the known universe—a real feat, given that there’s something like over a dozen human-colonized worlds across multiple solar systems. William keeps Anea under his thumb, in a contract the latter cannot destroy without risk of being put to death. One-on-one contracts like this are not unusual; actually they’re pretty common, especially in Donal’s line of work. Donal is of the Dorsai, a society of people born and raised to become professional soldiers, indeed the finest soldiers and military strategists money can buy. The Dorsai fight not for patriotism or some other abstract thing, but simply because it is their trade and how they make a living. Soldiers are their chief export. Nearly every planet (except for something like Dunnin’s World, which is still in the early stages of being settled) has some specialized trade that it exchanges with other worlds in the form of specialized workers. Anea herself is young, but she’s been raised to become the Select of Kultis, Kultis being one of the Exotics, a group of planets whose cultures excel in genetic engineering. As to what a “Select” is or its importance, we’re only told in the final installment, which seems a bit late to me.

    Beyond the episodic narrative of Donal hopping from job to job, including narrowly surviving a spaceship disaster and hiring a psychopath (by his own admission) named Tage Lee in one of those private contracts, the rivalry between Donal and Williams is far-off but inevitable. There’s also been some bad news in the family. Kensie, Donal’s uncle, has died, and Ian, Kensie’s brother, has become emotionally compromised, distraught over his brother’s sudden death. Ian may be depressed, even suicidal, but he’s still a Dorsai, and Dorsai don’t leave each other behind. Donal, despite being much young, has already risen above his uncle in the ranks and so decides to take him in, putting him in a position where he can do minimal harm. Speaking of family, it’s been a long time since Donal has been able to get in touch with his brother Mor, surely this will not come into play regarding the novel’s climax. We’ve followed the ups and downs of Donal’s career for the past two installments, but now it’s time for the novel to have a point become more focused in its plotting, maybe even more action-packed. Dickson has gotten away with mostly withholding thrills from the reader, in no small part because the minimal amount of violence makes sense for Donal’s character, but now shit is getting serious.

    Enhancing Image

    Before getting into the final plot revelations, I would like go into the treatment of Ian as character, since it falls on the side of prescient. Ian, Donal’s uncle, is a side character who unfortunaely doesn’t get much of a chance to speak for himself, but what’s telling is how Donal treats his uncle’s mental illness, in that he takes said mental illness seriously. Granted, the scientific explanation we get for Ian’s condition reads as bogus, i.e., Ian and Kensie were a gestalt wherein one cannot function at full capacity without the other. It’s the “modern” equivalent of the long-standing superstitious belief that twin siblings share a single soul, which is fine for Edgar Allan Poe but not as fine for science fiction. Still, Donal cares for his uncle and doesn’t hold his mental illness against as some kind of moreal failing. This is unusually humanistic for something printed in Astounding, and it’s not even that unusual in the context of the novel, but rather feeds into the overarching theme Dickson’s playing with here.

    As for the plot, it’s become clear by now that William will either find some way to put Donal under his thumb or have him assassinated. William is a shithead, but he understands Donal is too smart and too talented to have as an enemy, and at the same time too dangerous. By this point some five years have elapsed since the last time they met, and by extension the last time Donal and Anea saw each other. They’re in their twenties now, and not exactly kids anymore. There’s some romantic tension that has gone unresolved, not helped by the fact that Anea has spent years resenting Donal and misunderstanding his intentions. It would be a stretch to say Dorsai! has a villain in the mustache-twirling sense; it’d be more accurate to say there are a few characters who give Donal an especially hard time, with William being like the final boss of a video game. William, when we finally do sit down with him and figure out what he wants with the colonized worlds, comes off as more melancholy than anything. Of course, he’s about to become even more like that once Donal sends his ships and does what is considered by everyone to be impossible: he conquers a civilized world. With the help of Ian, Lee, and friends, he captures Ceta.

    The victory is not all sweet, however. The final confrontation between Donal and the defeated William is a strange one, not least because we’re sudduenly introduced to what seems to be a psi power Donal has with basically no explanation, albeit it’s something the novel has alluded to before (if only vaguely). Dickson’s priorities with explaining the mechanics of his future worlds are slightly skewed, in that we’re subjected to paragraph upon paragraph of exposition about different cultures, but not so much about how genetics factor into people’s lives and individual psychologies. Hell, sex is basically not discussed at all, which might be a result of this being printed in Astounding, Dickson’s own prudishness, or both. This aversion to sex becomes most conspicuous when we’re given the explanation at the tail end of the novel that (and I’m not kidding) Anea is genetically predisposed to fall in love with the most powerful man in the known universe, which would be either Donal or William. Yeah, I can’t defend that. For how much more reactionary Starship Troopers is on the whole it is, strangely enough, more forward-thinking than Dorsai! when it comes to gender relations. On the other hand I have to give Dorsai! credit for its emphasis on compassion and aversion to bloodlust typical of military SF.

    A Step Farther Out

    What an oddly paced book, and with a mish-mash of different viewpoints. This is somewhat early Dickson, but you can see clearly what would make him different from even close contemporaries of his like Poul Anderson. No doubt the eugenics and (only vaguely explained) psi powers appealed to John W. Campbell, but while Dorsai! is in some ways a prototypical military SF novels, it’s far less hawkish and, conversely, more compassionate than what the subgenre would become known for. There’s a lot of tell-don’t-show here, and Dickson is not that elegant a stylist, no matter how many times he pays homage to Rudyard Kipling; but then, sometimes (indeed, often this is the case with old-timey SF) the style is not the thing, but the substance. I’d hate to think of reading the first book version, which was an abridgment and the only way to read Dorsai! for some 15 years, since even the magazine version strikes me as a bit too short.

    See you next time.

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  • Short Story Review: “The Halfling” by Leigh Brackett

    (Cover by Milton Luros. Astonishing Stories, February 1943.)

    Who Goes There?

    Leigh Brackett was born in 1915, in LA, the city where she seemed to feel at home for the rest of her life and whose ethos she captured far better than pretty much any SF writer of her generation. She made her genre debut in 1940, in Astounding, but soon moved to other magazines despite them paying less by the word; evidently there was conflict between the kind of SF John W. Campbell wanted for his magazine and the kind Brackett was really interested in writing. Much of Brackett’s short SF could be considered science-fantasy in the Edgar Rice Burroughs tradition, although I think it’s fair to say Brackett soon came to be a finer and more compelling writer than her main inspiration. I say “main” inspiration, because it becomes apparent that Brackett had also taken a sharp interest in the crime fiction Raymond Chandler early on, which may have influenced her to write her first non-SF novel, No Good from a Corpse, published in 1944. Brackett’s interest in crime fiction, as well as her skill with writing it, goes to explain how she landed a job as co-writer of the screenplay for The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks’s film adaptation of Chandler’s famous novel. (Incidentally, a fellow writer on the script was William Faulkner—yes, that William Faulkner.) Writing for film and TV in Hollywood probably paid better than selling to pulpy magazines, but still, Brackett wrote SF consistently through the ’40s and most of the ’50s, until the market virtually imploded.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the February 1943 issue of Astonishing Stories. It has since been reprinted in Shot in the Dark (ed. Judith Merril), The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 5, 1943 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and the Brackett collections The Halfling and Other Stories and Martian Quest: The Early Brackett.

    Enhancing Image

    Jade Greene is the middle-aged owner of a carnival, specializing in performers from other worlds—not humans, but real aliens. We’re on Earth, specifically in California (Brackett’s homeland), but evidently we’re far enough into the future that not only have we made first contact with alien life, but the aliens have even decided to bring their parties to us. Of course, this being Brackett, our solar system seems to be densely populated with alien life, from Mars and Venus and even the moons of other planets. They all live on Earth just fine, despite the differences in gravity and air content. “The Halfling” leans more SFnal than the planetary romances Brackett would become known for, but it plays things a bit loose even by the standards of ’40s SF. Then again, instead of playing into the fantasy half that tends to comprise the planetary romance, Brackett’s decided to take cues from the burgeoning world of American crime fiction, in the mode of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Specifically this is a story told in the first person, and it’s hard to ignore Brackett’s implementation of a certain voice when writing Jade’s viewpoint.

    Take this early passage where Jade meets Laura Darrow (she’s actually just called “the girl” for a while) for example:

    It’s hard to describe a girl like that. You can say she’s five-three and beautiful, but you can’t pass on the odd little tilt of her eyes and the way her mouth looks, or the something that just comes out of her like light out of a lamp, and hooks into you so you know you’ll never be rid of it, not if you live to be a thousand.

    Said passage actually does a fair bit of work, since we can infer right away that a) Jade is smitten with this girl, and b) there’s something different about her, although Jade can’t put his finger on it in the moment. (I say “in the moment,” but Jade is telling all this in the past tense, so presumably he knows how his own story ends, yet he acts ignorant of future events.) We can also infer, by way of a sixth sense known as being the reader of a story, that this Laura will somehow be involved in a conflict which looms on the horizon. Things are about to go wrong.

    There are a few other notable members of the carnival, including Sindi, a Martian woman who has been Jade’s exotic dancer of choice, and who Laura wants to replace; and then there’s Laska, a “cat-man” from Callisto who’s another one of Jade’s most prized performers. Important thing about Laska and other members of his race are that they should not be given caffeine under any circumstances, since it’s like a hard drug to them and a cup of strong coffee can drive one into a berserk rage. (We’re told about this early on, conveniently, so that it can come into play later.) As for Sindi, it’s a simple case of jealousy: Laura has a certain knack for dancing that Sindi doesn’t, so that soon the two become rivals. There is also the implication that Sindi might have feelings for Jade, but if so, Jade doesn’t reciprocate them, with him instead being intensely smitten with Laura, despite the fact that, by his own admission, he’s old enough to be her dad. I’ve read enough Brackett at this point that I have to raise an eyebrow at how often she writes romances between young girls and considerably older men. It’s worth mentioning that Brackett married Edmond Hamilton, who was 11 years her senior, although Brackett was about thirty at the time.

    It could, of course, be that the censorship typical of genre magazines of the era mandated restraint when it came to matters of sex, but it seems to me that Jade’s infatuation with Laura come less from love and more from lust, what with the many ways he describes her and with Laura herself being sort of a femme fatale figure. We figure that her story about being born between two planets and thus having a sticky situation with immigration law can’t be entirely true, or at least that there’s a crucial component she’s omitting. This is all fine, but predictable. Just as predictable is when one night there’s a murder at the carnival, and Sindi is the victim, just barely alive still when Jade finds her—her throat slashed, as if with giant cat claws. It’s so obvious that Laura is in some way responsible for this that I’m not even counting her playing the femme fatale role as a spoiler. Arguably the real twist comes later anyway, although that is also not too surprising. While I wasn’t terribly invested in Jade and Laura’s relationship and the growing mystery, I did find myself impressed by Brackett’s ability to evoke that hazy LA cityscape narration that would come to define the classic film noir. You can see what Howard Hawks saw when he read Brackett’s first crime novel, and indeed, more so than with other stories of hers that I’ve read, that lingo bleeds into “The Halfling” while feeling natural.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    Everything goes to hell so quickly that it becomes almost parodic, but it’s still gruesome enough that you sort of have to admire it. There’s a brutality here that will come to figure in a lot of Brackett’s work, a penchant for the hardboiled. The big twist, which you can anticipate if you have more than two brain cells to rub together, is that while Laura appears human, this is all a disguise. The girl Jade has fallen head over heels over is quite literally an illegal alien (bad joke, I know), and also she has an appetite for killing. Indeed she says she’s open to killing everyone in the carnival—everyone except for Jade, whom she’s taken a genuine liking to, although God knows why. This all ends about as well as you’d expect.

    Isn’t Jade kind of an odd name for a dude? At most it’s androgynous, which might be a bit of a joke on Brackett’s part, since Leigh is also an androgynous name and there’s a decidedly masculine bent to Brackett’s style, never mind that her protagonists tend to be men.

    A Step Farther Out

    Despite the Retro Hugo nomination, “The Halfling” has not been as reprinted as some of Brackett’s other early short stories, I suspect in large part because it’s set on Earth and there’s not much in the way of swashbuckling action. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, in that Brackett doesn’t do a very good job of setting up her mystery (or mysteries), but it does at least point the way towards two distinct modes Brackett would become quite good in, namely the detective story and the “mature” SF she would be writing about a decade hence. This is a story I would recommend for those looking to take a deep dive into ’40s SF that goes way outside the rather strict boundaries set by Astounding.

    See you next time.

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  • The Observatory: The Among Us Show Is (Somehow) One of the Best Sci-Fi Series in Recent Years

    (Among Us, 2026. Introduction for the first episode.)

    Rule #213: Reassure crew with the phrase, “No Biggie.”

    Rule #214: Aliens are real and they like to kill.

    It’s hard to know where to start with this one, in part because the show’s very existence is so unexpected. This is despite the fact that an Among Us animated series, based on the video game of the same name, had been announced way back in 2023, and in fact had been finished for nearly two years before being dropped unceremoniously on Paramount+ just earlier this month. In a way the delay is fitting: the game came out in 2018, but didn’t see a serious boost in traffic until 2020. (I wonder what happened that year.) It’s fair to say the folks at Innersloth, a small-time developer, didn’t expect their little multiplayer-focused game to become a cultural phenomenon, with celebrities and even at least one US congressperson streaming their sessions, not to mention at least one notable film appearance. (Remember Glass Onion, that first sequel to Knives Out? I thought it was pretty good.) The game became obscenely popular, so maybe some kind of movie or TV adaptation was almost an inevitability. Even so, it sounds at first like a bad joke, because how much can you do with a game without any discernable plot or characters, and whose reputation in the years since its catapulting to fame has become decidedly a mixed bag? I think I’ve seen more Among Us memes than actual footage of the game in recent years, and I myself haven’t played it in a hot minute. Being color-blind and having only so many friends who would be down to play this particular game with me is an easy recipe for such a situation. It is what it is.

    The premise of the game is simple and thus easy to learn but hard to master. You’re on a spaceship as some thing that’s like a cross between a bean and a trash can, as a part of a crew. Most of the crew are who they claim to be, but there’s at least one among you who is an alien in disguise. Your objectives differ depending on whether you’re a genuine crewmate or an impostor. The only way to get rid of an impostor is to call for a vote, and there is of course a chance of ejecting an innocent crewmate into the vacuum of space. There are bells and whistles we could get into, but that’s the gist of it. Every session naturally involves trust, cooperation, and most of all, paranoia. Everyone aboard looks the damn same except for color and attire, being, as Orange in the show puts it, “equally mediocre formless non-sexual beings who are very, very ugly.” There’s a bit of “lore,” but there’s no plot or concrete cast of characters—only what the players are able to invent for each session. (There’s the apparently story-driven Among Us: On Guard, but that game’s not out yet.) The game has a kind of old-school simplicity that would make it accessible to people across multiple age groups, which goes some way to explain its mainstream success. This simplicity also makes Among Us arguably ideal for fandom input, including art, music, fanfiction, and even fan-made animation. Oh, and the memes.

    And then there’s the animated series, created by Owen Dennis and backed by a small army of writers, including at least one veteran (Alex Horab) from Infinity Train, Dennis’s previous show. Speaking of people who also worked on Infinity Train, Ashley Johnson, who played the lead in that show, has returned as Purple, the closest the Among Us show has to a protagonist. Aside from Johnson we have a surprisingly solid cast of veteran actors and comedians along for the ride, including Debra Wilson, Elijah Wood, Phil LaMarr, Wayne Knight, Yvette Nicole Brown, “special guest star” Patton Oswalt, and others I’ll be sure to mention. While I said Purple is effectively the series protagonist, this is very much an ensemble effort, although due to Among Us being a murder mystery and with a growing body count as the show progresses, some characters inevitably get less time to shine than others. Who lives and who dies, and in what order? That would be telling. Now, it would be very hard to discuss this show and sing some praises for it without giving away any plot turns, so I’ll only be talking explicitly about what happens in the first three episodes. I think that’s a good compromise. Hell, you can watch the first episode for free on YouTube right this second, which I obviously recommend—BUT ONLY AFTER HAVING READ THE REST OF MY REVIEW, PLEASE.

    As for the plot, we have two newcomers, Green (Wood) and White (Oswalt), aboard the Skeld, on route to deliver a shipment of Ore Plus to the planet Industria. MIRA, the corporation that owns the Skeld, makes bank by mining Ore Plus from asteroids and selling this spiffy new substance as as a precious and efficient fuel source. It’s a long trip, with a rather colorful (and dysfunctional) crew, so that there’s drama even before the first body hits the floor. We have Red (Randall Park), the captain of the ship and a certified company bootlicker who seems to have gotten his job by kissing the right asses. There’s the aforementioned Purple as security officer, although as they’re quick to point out, MIRA gave the Skeld very little to work with in terms of preventing crewmates from dying horribly. (The cameras around the ship do not record, and also they shoot in black-and-white, which is a big problem when crewmates are identified mostly by their body colors.) There’s Blue (Dan Stevens), the ship’s doctor, who is adored (and sexualized) by literally everyone. There’s Lime (Knight), the terminally paranoid engineer, who claims to also be “an ordained minister.” We have Yellow (Wilson) and Brown (LaMarr), the ship’s cooks, a couple of besties and blue-collar socialists. We have Black (Liv Hewson) and Cyan (Kimiko Glenn), a geologist and a gemologist respectively. Finally there’s Orange (Brown, as in Yvette Nicole Brown, not Brown the character), an HR person from MIRA who’s supposed to give Green and White a tour of the ship. It takes one episode for everything to go wrong.

    An accident involving an asteroid (by that I mean an accident Red caused by giving White control of the ship for a few minutes, on account of White being here because they won some contest [and on account of Red being very bad at their job]) throws everything into jeopardy. But don’t worry, with some teamwork and a whole crateful of rubber balls, the day is saved! Until later, when White comes into the cafeteria with a serious illness known as having their head sliced cleanly from the rest of their body. (Farewell, Patton Oswalt.) It’s a bloody mess, and more importantly, there’s presumably a killer on the loose. Red is not convinced of this at first, or at least they act like they’re not convinced of a killer being on the loose. Sure thing, buddy. We know, of course, that someone among the crew is an impostor—possibly even (wait for it) an alien impostor.

    The game is afoot, as it were. The problem is that there’s no Sherlock Holmes figure on the case, or even a Sam Spade. Purple works in security, but they’re stuck with crummy equipment and only got the job in the first place because Red, who used to be friends with Purple (why they had a falling out would be going a little too into spoiler territory), vouched for them. Red themself can barely be trusted with commanding a ship, let alone solving a murder on said ship. A great deal of the conflict, then, comes from interpersonal drama rather than direct threats from the alien, although the alien shows itself to be both cunning and vicious. Despite being rated TV-PG on Paramount+, there’s a lot of gore to be found in Among Us, to the degree that it honestly makes the video game (which has its own share of blood and bone) look tame by comparison. Surely it would be unthinkable to rate this show as something ostensibly for kids if the bean creatures being gutted and decapitated were humans instead. There’s also some mild swearing, and there’s a scene that happens in the fifth episode that I would struggle to describe, even if I wasn’t giving away a major spoiler with it. The point is that while the animation is clean and cutesy (courtesy of Titmouse), and the tone mostly comedic, this is still a genuine murder mystery with high stakes. The Among Us show is like a stew with Alien, The Thing, Knives Out, and Looney Tunes cartoons as some but not all of the ingredients.

    A major positive that comes from telling a mystery story, which is to say a tale of detection and deduction, is that it’s possible to make the viewer feel as if they’re collaborating with the author by deducing from facts alongside the characters, such that one can correctly figure out the killer before the characters draw the same conclusions. Granted that the viewer has a bird’s-eye view of the story, and thus is able to make connections that none of the characters would be able to make individually, much of the fun in going through a detective story is the sense of interactivity, even if it’s ersatz-interactivity like in the case of a movie or novel. In Among Us the video game, the player really does get to play detective—unless the player is the one who’s supposed to evade detection, obviously. The problem that looms over every instance of a video game getting adapted to a non-interactive medium, namely the loss of that interactivity, is softened a good deal in the case of Among Us, since the show invites the viewer to look for clues, and like every good detective story the clues are hiding in plain sight, only waiting for an especially discerning viewer to gather them. Said clues become more apparent on rewatching, but the subtleness which with Dennis and company do their foreshadowing gives the show a good deal of rewatch value anyway. There are also red herrings, false leads, sabotaged equipment, cases of the alien taunting the crew, crewmates pointing fingers at each other. Ya know, the good stuff. It’s also pretty funny.

    I said that the tone is mostly comedic, which is to say that some of these characters are meant to be taken more as caricatures rather than as people with unique interior lives. White is the most obvious caricature of the lot, being a clueless and unrepentent capitalist (“What’s a capitalist?” asks Green at one point, to which White responds happily, “ME!”), so of course he’s the first to get the ax. There are members of the cast who are given more room for interiority, though, and there’s even a moment or two of pathos that comes from a character who otherwise seems to be there just to fill out the roster—yet these moments do not totally come out of nowhere. At the same time the show takes a rapid-fire approach to humor that’s not gonna win everyone over, in the sense that it takes a quality-over-quantity philosophy with its jokes. This is understandable, given that each episode only runs about 13 minutes on average and Among Us has to function as both a comedy and a murder mystery. The quality of the average joke is pretty good, though, and while I didn’t find myself laughing constantly (although there are certain bits I keep going back to), even the worst jokes are inoffensive. It helps, too, that while there are a few references sprinkled in there, including one to Henry Stickmin of all things, many of the jokes come from how quippy and at times absurd the dialogue can get, along with line delivery. Even with a cast like this you’d think at least some of the actors would phone it in, but this is not the case. My favorite here might be Wayne Knight as Lime, who has so much goddamn fun with his role.

    Finally, and this is something I’ve alluded to before, but this show is pretty woke. There’s a strong anti-capitalist sentiment among both the characters and the larger themes of the story, given that MIRA is indirectly responsible for every bad thing that happens, whether it be the lack of decent security equipment, putting someone as unqualified as Red in the captain’s chair, or making Green do grunt work as an unpaid intern and sending them into what turns out to be a bloodbath. There aren’t any escape pods or even a proper airlock system—just a trash disposal unit. Yellow is absolutely right when they say Green is being exploited for their labor, being both non-union and only compensated with “experience” on their resume. Also, you may have noticed that I keep using “they” and “them” to refer to all the characters, and this is accurate: every character aboard the Skeld is non-binary, or maybe genderless, with everyone using they/them. (Incidentally Liv Hewson, Black’s VA, really is non-binary, so that’s nice.) Everyone also seems to be bisexual without much of a preference when it comes to gendered appearances, with a running gag being that everyone finds Blue attractive. Then there’s the Scene™ I mentioned before but could not (and indeed cannot) describe, but believe me when I say it’s something.

    What we have with Among Us the show is sort of a miracle. It’s easily one of the best video game adaptations in the business, and unlike, say, The Last of Us (season 1, anyway, I’ve heard mixed things about season 2), which captures the story and characters of the source material well but not really how it feels to play The Last of Us, if I’m making any sense to you. With Among Us, on the other hand, it does feel like a particularly intense session of the game, albeit with a team of professional writers and voice-actors instead of your friends. We probably won’t get a second season, nor does the show call for one; there are possible scenarios for a follow-up, sure, but the story told in the show is so tightly wound and self-contained that it seems as if Dennis and company worked on it with the mindset that they would never get to do another show quite like it again. It’s short as is, which is maybe my one lingering gripe, in that all told it runs just over two hours, so that at times it does come off as the tream trying to cram a lot into a small space. But what we did get serves as a new gold standard for translating the excitement and interactivity that comes with gaming into another medium.

    And remember, FUCK PARAMOUNT.

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  • Serial Review: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson (Part 2/3)

    (Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, June 1959.)

    The Story So Far

    In the 25th century, mankind has not only voyaged beyond our solar system but long since colonized a multitude of planets. Aside from Earth, Mars, and Venus (that last one being famous for its technological advancements, which is ironic considering we know Venus to be an uninhabitable gaseous shithole), there are others such as the predominantly Catholic St. Marie, the twin planets Harmony and Association, the backwater Dunnin’s World, and the planet where Donal Graeme hails from, the Dorsai (for some reason it’s the Dorsai), another backwater whose chief export is its fighting men and women. See, the planets trade amongst each other mainly in people with certain skills, and these people are trained for said skills partly through positive eugenics, such that someone can be made to be the best, say, carpenter, or diplomat, quite literally from birth. The Dorsai (the people) have honed themselves over generations to be the best fighters and military strategists money can buy. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that, since rather than go fight battles on other worlds with some nonsensical patriotic notion in mind, the Dorsai join other worlds’ armies and even command said armies primarily for money. Donal happens to be a bright young commander even by the standards of a culture renowned for its cunning, but this doesn’t mean everyone (with the exception of Hendrick Galt, a marshal and a fellow Dorsai) trusts him by default.

    Quite the contrary…

    Not long after graduating from the academy and looking for his first assignment, Donal gets involved with Anea Marlivana, a Select of Kultis specially bred for the job, who wants him to destroy a contract she had made with Prince William, one of the most powerful men in the known universe. Not only would it be nigh-impossible to destroy the contract physically, but doing so would mean the death penalty. Clearly Anea must be off her rocker to jeopardize both her own life and Donal’s. Or is she? What’s going on with William and why would the girl, who is not much older than Donal, want to get out of her contract with him? Hugh Killien, a commandant who ends up serving under Donal, has eyes on Anea while also secretly being a way for William to watch over Donal. Well, this is inconvenient. In the heat of battle (or maybe not so hot, as there’s very little action described), in the back end of the first installment, Donal has Hugh executed on somewhat trumped-up charges—or rather, the charge on paper is legitimate, but the real reason Donal has Hugh killed off is to spite William and keep Anea safe. He finds himself unable to explain his rationale for this after the fact, though, with Anea assuming Donal got rid of Hugh out of jealousy. It’ll be a long time before they see each other again. In the meantime, Donal has a reputation to build and money to make.

    Enhancing Image

    Let’s talk about Donal as a person, because I’m not sure how much of his characterization was what Dickson had intended or if maybe Dickson had calibrated his protagonist to be agreeable to the prudish John W. Campbell. Sex, needless to say, is off the table, although the fact that Donal brings up attraction to women (or more accurately, his conspicuous lack of attraction) is worth discussing. First we have his romantic tension with Anea, which at least for the time being goes nowhere. Later he sparks a friendship with Elvine Rhy, Galt’s niece, but Elvine takes such a fierce liking to Donal while Donal feels not even the slightest attraction toward her, despite her being a conventionally attractive woman—a conspicuous absence that troubles him. Granted, Dickson also writes Elvine as shrewish and possessive, so it’s not hard to blame Donal for wanting to go to space rather than deal with more of her. The misogyny in this novel is mild, but almost pervasive. Back to Donal himself, his interactions with other characters, namely his tendency to be blunt and to take things literally, on top of the aforementioned awkwardness regarding romance, point to him being on the autism spectrum, although I seriously doubt Dickson had thought of this. Public understanding of autism has changed so radically in just the past few decades, never mind a novel from 1959, and unfortunately we still have a long way to go. Still, Dickson may have inadvertently written a sympathetic autistic protagonist for what is one of the first military SF novels.

    We’ve come to expect certain things from military SF, a subgenre that’s been a codified thing for about half a century now, and because Dorsai! is such an early example there was not yet a formula for Dickson to abide. People going in expecting action will probably come out disappointed; if anything Donal’s great gift is his ability to win battles without even really starting them. The climax of the second installment sees Donal gain control of Zombri, an otherwise barren moon which happens to be strategically important for Harmony and Association. He does this by deceiving the enemy commander, whom we’re told is a skilled and respectable man but who has a gambling problem, with his fleet of ships, and the two agree to peace. Virtually no casualties, and Donal’s bosses get an outpost on Zombri. This is part of a recurring theme with Dickson, as someone who’s read a decent amount of his work, which is that the best kind of victory is that which involves the fewest losses on either side. I’m not saying Dickson was a pacifist, because I’m pretty sure he wasn’t; but I do think, in connection with him serving his adopted country in WWII, that Dickson had a better idea as to the loss of human life in times of war than most SF writers of his generation, who stayed civilians during the war. Donal’s superior, a religious zealot who was looking to escalate things to the point of genocidal lunacy, doesn’t take kindly to Donal’s quasi-pacifistic method of capturing Zombri. Donal is too smart, and too good with a gun, to not have seen this coming. The good news is that there’s always another contract to be made.

    A Step Farther Out

    The end of the second installment is a thrilling and fitting closer, although I have to wonder how the last third of the novel is supposed to pan out. It seems like Dickson was so preoccupied with introducing the reader to a vast future setting, which indeed he’ll spend the next few decades of his life fleshing out, that he did not take much time to formulate a plot. Everything is anchored by Donal, who’s a curious choice for a protagonist, if only Dickson can refrain from playing the whole “superman” thing straight as an arrow. Miraculously Donal has won every combat scenario thrown at him so far, even with some obstacles in the way, but his interpersonal troubles will or at least should provide some genuine conflict for the rest of the novel. The problem is that a lot of stuff here just happens. There’s almost a randomness to it. This is yet another similarity Dorsai! has with Starship Troopers, which was published just a few months later, in that both novels have episodic plot structures that could benefit from some subtle trimming. Of course, this is all one big coincidence. I’m enjoying Dorsai!, but while it’s more agreeable than Heinlein’s novel, the controversial (some would say fascistic) parts of Starship Troopers are also very memorable.

    See you next time.

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