Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Celebrating the genre magazines, one story at a time…

  • Short Story Review: “It Takes a Thief” by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

    (Cover by Ralph Joiner. If, May 1952.)

    Who Goes There?

    It’s been a long-term goal of mine to review every single one of Walter M. Miller’s short stories and novellas, since all of them were published in the magazines—yes, even the stories that would make up A Canticle for Leibowitz. While he is known now for pretty much just that novel (it is, after all, the only novel he managed to finish in his lifetime), Miller wrote short fiction fairly prolifically, from his debut in 1951 until he began work on the Leibowitz stories. Those first few years, incidentally when the genre magazine market was seeing a huge bubble, were especially productive for him. Miller served as a bomber crewman during World War II, an experience that seemed to give him profound mental health issues as well as compell him to convert to Catholicism, and indeed he falls into one of my favorite kinds of writer: the depressed Catholic. Despite being active in the field for only about a decade, before going into a hybernation from which he would never truly emerge, Miller was honored with two Hugos. He killed himself in 1996, after the death of his wife and having apparently given up on the Church. He left the long-anticipated follow-up to A Canticle for Leibowitz, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, to be finished by Terry Bisson, whom Miller had personally chosen and provided with notes. “It Takes a Thief” is the earliest and easily the weakest of the Miller stories I’ve covered, but it’s still a fine read and has several points of interest.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the May 1952 issue of If. It has, so far as I can tell, never been anthologized in English, but it’s been included in seemingly every Miller collection over the years, including The View from the Stars and Dark Benediction. Miller let some of his stories fall out of copyright, including this one, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

    Enhancing Image

    Asir is having a bad day, namely that he’s been crucified, spikes through his wrists like Christ, as punishment for being a thief—not a thief of material things, but of specific, secret phrases. “A ritual-thief caused havoc in the community. The owner of a holy phrase, not knowing that it had been stolen, tried to spend it—and eventually counter-claims would come to light, and a general accounting had to be called.” This is not Earth in distant past, and Asir is not the thief who hung dying next to Christ as written in the Gospels, but on Mars, in the future. Humanity has colonized Mars, but seemingly in the process lost its way. Time has been flung backwards as with a slingshot. The crucifixion is not the punishment either, but merely the prelude to the real punishment, either something relatively minor (losing a finger) or death, Asir not knowing which. His “accomplice” (it’s actually ambiguous what their relationship is supposed to be), Mara, is supposed to have gotten word back to him as to his punishment, but it seems she may have betrayed him. This turns out to not be quite the case, but Asir is still very cross with her when he’s finally let down from the crucifix and his arms bandaged. Mara had slept around a bit in order to lighten Asir’s punishment, although the elders say it’s due to his very young age: the punishment is banishment from the village. Asir is to venture out to hills, which doesn’t bother him much given that he was born there. But he has other plans.

    “It Takes a Thief” is basically an adventure narrative who conclusion is obvious—maybe not as obvious in 1952, but who’s to say? It has some of the trademarks of a “gritty” ’50s SF adventure, including commentary on the prospect of nuclear destruction, and a hard-as-nails anti-hero who, if we’re being honest, is kind of a shithead. Asir is not secretly a nice person under his grizzled exterior; indeed the only thing that makes him better than the village elders is that he cares about helping humanity at large, even if on a micro level he’s a mean son of a bitch. Why someone who was raised “by a renegade” of a father, in the hills, apart from what civilization is left on Mars, would care so much about restoring humanity to its former glory, is unclear. It’s also unclear why Asir and Mara are together, since the former goes so far as to even threaten to kill the latter. (Asir is clearly an abusive partner, but never sees repercussions for his behavior, nor does Mara seem to mind much ultimately that Asir had threatened her life.) If this story has an Achilles’s heel, it’s the general unlikability of the few characters who take center stage. For what it’s worth, Asir’s slut-shaming of Mara is kept to a minimum, and the latter’s sleeping around is framed as a pragmatic move that “had to be done.” (I’m reminded of Miller’s oddly sympathetic treatment of sex workers in “The Lineman.”) The idea could be that Mars society has devolved into a dog-eat-dog world, such that even the most well-meaning of people have a dark side to them, but there’s also not enough psychology present for me to relate to these people.

    Despite its ruggedness and pulpy style, though, this is still at its core a Walter M. Miller story, which means it’s about life and death, and especially man’s capacity to destroy or redeem itself. Indeed the quest Asir and Mara go on to enter the vaults, a forbidden place outside the village, guarded by a mysterious creature named… Big Joe (well that’s a bit silly). The quest to rekindle humanity’s thirst for knowledge and technology strikes me as a half-formed, more juvenile version of what Miller would explore in A Canticle for Leibowitz. I’m pretty sure that “It Takes a Thief” is by no means the only protoype in Miller’s oeuvre, of course, as from what I’ve read his short fiction writing progressed such that he was setting himself up for his big novel. I liked “The Darfsteller” and “The Lineman,” and really liked the much-overlooked “Wolf Pack.” “It Takes a Thief” is not as good as the aforementioned stories, due in part to its roughness of style and characters, its brevity, and the feeling that Miller was still working well within the constraints of pulp SF writing. At the same time it’s easy to see by the time we get to the back end of the story that while he was still quite young (about my age, which does give me a pinch of existential anxiety) and early in his writing career, Miller was on his way to becoming one of the most morally serious SF writers of his generation.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    A theme that clearly haunted Miller on a personal level, and which would inform a great deal of SF in the ’50s, is the problem of nuclear annihilation. This is especially pertinent for an at-the-time devout Christian like Miller, as it poses a troubling question: If Christ had suffered and died so that humanity may be saved, then why do we now have the ability to destroy ourselves with the push of a button? As Mara quips, once she and Asir have gotten past Big Joe via an elaborate floor puzzle, “The ancients weren’t so great.” They venture into the depths of the vaults and see, on a wall, an engraving of our solar system—only here they see something they do not recognize: a planet between Venus and Mars. Earth. Many years ago man had destroyed Earth and it became an asteroid belt between its neighboring planets. This is the most effective moment in the story, and it’s genuinely haunting, the kind of punch to the gut that Miller can be really good at. It may be obvious, the revelation that Earth got blown to bits, but it’s an image that feeds into the tug-of-war between Miller’s anxiety and depression over humanity’s future—or possible lack of it.

    A Step Farther Out

    I have to admit I picked this one because it was free to read online, and also I was intrigued by the premise, though it ended up not being as good as I had hoped. Do I regret this? Of course not, I was gonna review this story at some point, as like I said I hope to review all of Miller’s short fiction. This will probably take… a couple decades. Assuming this site still exists in twenty years, or if I still will. The future is foggy, and caked in mud. I personally don’t think I’ll be able to review them all.

    See you next time.

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  • Short Story Review: “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” by Rudyard Kipling

    (Cover by Virgil Finlay. Magazine of Horror, July 1968.)

    Who Goes There?

    It’s not every day you get to talk about a Nobel winner for your genre fiction review blog, but here we are. Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865, right at the end of the year, to British parents in India. Kipling was one of the few real prodigies in prose writing; while it’s not too surprising he started writing poetry from a very young age (although he didn’t consider himself much of a poet), he also showed himself pretty much off the bat as a consummate writer of short stories. That he also got a job as a journalist while still a teenager goes to explain his professionalism, but also his (at least when he was young) unadorned style, such that his straightforwardness partly inspired the title of his first big story collection, Plain Tales from the Hills. He would later write The Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and other collections of stories. His 1901 novel Kim was one of the first modern espionage novels, sort of, although it’s much more than just an exotic spy thriller. To this day he’s the youngest to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, being just 41 at the time, an age that would be unthinkable for an author nowadays; but like I said, Kipling started early and he ended up writing a lot.

    Kipling also wrote a good deal of genre fiction, pretty much of every stripe, including what we now call science fiction. Like seemingly every British writer of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, though, he really had a soft spot for the supernatural horror story—granted that his supernatural stories weren’t always horror. But Kipling came from a generation of Britons who apparently loved telling and writing ghost stories, partly to make a bit of extra money but also for some gather-around-the-fire entertainment. “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” was published on the eve of Kipling’s twentieth birthday; yet despite being a teenager when he wrote it, and despite a bit of roughness, it shows a very promising young writer who has already nailed down the basics to an eerie extent.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in 1885, it first appeared in book form in The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Tales in 1888, the same year as Plain Tales from the Hills. On top of the July 1968 issue of Magazine of Horror you can find it in H. P. Lovecraft Selects: Classic Horror Stories (ed. Stefan Dziemianowicz), The Big Book of Ghost Stories (ed. Otto Penzler), and The Body-Snatcher and Other Classic Ghost Stories (ed. Michael Kelahan). By all rights I should recommend the meaty tome Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy, but having gotten a copy for myself, I have to say the proofreading is abysmal, to the point where there seems to be a typo every other page. Fine. You can read “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” on Project Gutenberg.

    Enhancing Image

    This story technically has two narrators, the first being unnamed and presumably a fictionalized version of Kipling himself. The first narrator serves as a walking framing device, telling of the unfortunate demise of his friend Jack Pansay, who supposedly died of some wasting disease, but who according to his own written testimony (he wrote of his experiences in the last few months of his life), the cause is something quite different. Writing with “a sick man’s command of language,” the now-deceased Pansay tells us, in his own words, of the horror that befell him. A few things to say first, not the least being that even with this short opening section, which gives context to the switching of narrators, Kipling’s ear for dialogue is on-point. We only see him a few times, but the quack doctor Heatherlegh is memorable both for his quirkiness and his seeming incompetence, or rather cluelessness as to what could be ailing Pansay. Pansay himself is indicative of the kind of anti-hero Kipling was fond of writing for his early set-in-India horror yarns: the haughty Englishman who learns a harsh lesson. Some of Kipling’s characters live to put what they learned into practice, but Pansay is not one of them. (Of course, since we already know what has become of the main character, this is a rather hard story to spoil.)

    A few years ago, Pansay had an affair with a married woman, one Agnes Wessington, fellow Briton traveling in India, and the two worked out well—for a while. But Pansay grew tired of her, which was not in itself unusual, as he confesses to us he tires of his partners sooner or later, the only problem being Mrs. Wessington did not feel the same way. “Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them; seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington was the hundredth.” Since it is surprisingly hard to ghost someone in the 1880s, Pansay struggles to get her off his back before making clear that he is no longer interested in the relationship. Mrs. Wessington doesn’t take the rejection well, although rather than plot revenge or running back to her husband, she simply… withers. Eventually she dies of a wasting disease, similarly to how Pansay goes, but it’s clear that what really killed her was a broken heart. Pansay feels a pang of remorse about this, mixed with a hateful resentment towards the poor woman, even after she has died—but he’ll learn the error of his ways soon enough. When Mrs. Wessington dies it had been a couple years since Pansay dumped her, and since then he’d moved on to another woman, Kitty Mannering. There’s no going back.

    Mind you that despite being a ghost story, and despite the setup leading us to expect a certain chain of revenge, this is not a revenge narrative; rather it’s a narrative about guilt and misogyny. Pansay, in trying to rid himself of Mrs. Wessington, comes to loathe her but also pity her, these two very different emotions clashing, and so he mistreats her even as he tries to cement the bad news in her mind. “I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate—the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed.” I was taken back by this a bit, because truth be told, as someone who considers themself a Kipling fan, issues of feminism and womanhood are not his strong suit—at least early on. He would later write some pretty memorable and well-rounded heroines in stories like “Mary Postgate” and “The Gardener,” but a childish sort of misogyny runs through some of his early fiction. Indeed woman-forsaking bachelorhood is treated as something to be aspired to (and conversely, something to be mourned when it is lost) in one of my favorite Kipling stories, “‘The Finest Stories in the World.’” Kipling, like pretty much every great writer, is someone with a few internal contradictions: he was a proud Englishman, but ended up marrying an American woman; he was a lifelong imperialist, with the belief that the British empire really had Indians’ best interests at heart, yet some of his writings come off as deeply ambivalent about government. To paraphrase George Orwell (who, like me, was a socialist and thus not a fan of Kipling’s politics), Kipling’s brand of conservatism doesn’t really exist in the US, UK, and Canada.

    Of course, Kipling’s brand of misogyny is in itself sort of alien in today’s Anglosphere, in that he was not actively a woman-hater who believed women were basically property with legs; rather he believed in a softer kind of misogyny that modern-day liberals would probably find agreeable, in that he believed women and men are different on some fundamental level (a level that transphobes have a hard time defining, despite their “best” efforts), with women being fragile in some immaterial way. Granted that this is all told from Pansay’s POV, but Mrs. Wessington and Kitty are both depicted as overly emotional and temperamental, being more beholden to the id than the superego, whereas Pansay’s problem (aside from the titular ghostly ‘rickshaw that haunts him) is that he’s torn apart by having too active a conscience. Another way of looking at it is that Pansay didn’t have enough of a conscience before Mrs. Wessington’s death, but the haunting presence of her ‘rickshaw (a two-wheeled carriage, for those who forgot), with its spectral bearers (or “jhampanies” as they’re called), drives him to realize that he had indirectly killed someone who had meant him no harm. That the story is a bit overlong in getting to this point says that Kipling had not yet gotten down the flow of narrative pacing (a gift he would use with extreme prejudice in just a few years), but he’s getting there. “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” is not a scary story, nor does it try that hard to be scary in the first place, but it’s compelling and psychologically thorny.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    Something I was thinking about while reading “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” was a fallacy in first-person narrative writing that even hardened professionals make, which is that the narrator, telling a story in the past tense and thus something that has already happened, makes remarks on their story as if they were currently experiencing it, without time to think retrospectively on the events. At least here, though, Kipling averts the fallacy by having there be a time skip in Pansay’s writing; he has, after all, spent a fair amount of time writing about the thing which is now killing him. As the end looks to be nigh, Pansay comes to grips with the notion of dying, and also that he was in a way responsible for Mrs. Wessington’s death, his only concern being what will happen to him after he dies, since he is convinced that there is such a thing as a life after this one—a kind of afterlife which doesn’t look inviting, if it’s true. His final comment, and by extension the story’s final paragraph, is a haunting one, so I’ll just repeat it here: “In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is ever now upon me.”

    A Step Farther Out

    I was indulging myself a bit with this one, as an aforesaid Kipling fan, although I had not read “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” before and there was a very real chance it would disappoint. (Truth be told, I’m not the biggest fan of Kim or the first Jungle Book.) But Kipling, even baby-faced Kipling, often delivers the goods, as he does here.

    See you next time.

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  • Novella Review: “Code Three” by Rick Raphael

    (Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, February 1963.)

    Who Goes There?

    We don’t know much about Rick Raphael. He was born in 1919 and died in 1994, just short of his 75th birthday. I can only find a few photos of him online (he had some gnarly facial hair). I don’t know what his day job was, but he clearly didn’t write for a living, given how small his output was. He wrote almost entirely for Astounding/Analog, which is normally a bad sign, although from what I can tell Raphael was a better writer, and perhaps more left-leaning, than the average Campbell regular. He’s one of the more recent winners of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, and fitting for that “award” his work must have sold little enough that he let some of it fall out of copyright, including today’s story. “Code Three” would earn a Hugo nomination, placing second and only losing to Poul Anderson’s “No Truce with Kings.” Its sequel, “Once a Cop,” also got a Hugo nomination. Both would be combined (with some material added maybe, I’m not sure) into the fix-up novel Code Three. “Code Three” is a flawed but pretty curious piece of work, in the world it builds but also the ways it does (and does not) question the role of policing—both policing as we now understand it and how it might change in a future where vehicles are hulking beasts that travel cross-country at hundreds of miles an hour.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the February 1963 issue of Analog Science Fiction. Probably due to it being incorporated into a fix-up, despite the Hugo nomination, “Code Three” would not be reprinted on its own for nearly thirty years, reappearing in The Mammoth Book of New World Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1960s (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), then in The World Turned Upside Down (ed. Jim Baen, David Drake, and Eric Flint). It fell out of copyright a hot minute ago, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg without hassle.

    Enhancing Image

    In the future, the high-speed roadways that began with Germany’s autobahns have not only been made mainstream across North America but taken to their logical extreme. The sheer dimensions of these roadways, called “thruways,” along with the vehicles on them, combined with speeds often well over a hundred miles an hour, mean that at least partly out of physical necessity there’s some freedom of movement with where one can go. The so-called Continental Thruway system “spanned North America from coast to coast and crisscrossed north and south under the Three Nation Road Compact from the southern tip of Mexico into Canada and Alaska.” So long as you were on the mainland you could drive basically anywhere in North America with relative ease. However, the complexity and scale of this network also mean that the highway patrolman of today would be totally unequipped to handle it; so a new kind of road cop came along. It’s also how we’re introduced to our three leads: senior officer Ben Martin, junior officer (from Ontario, but don’t hold that against him) Clay Ferguson, and Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot. They’re stationed in Car 56, nicknamed “Beulah,” and this is their story.

    Due to the nature of the plot, or rather the lack of it, I feel compelled to give my thoughts mostly in list form:

    1. “Code Three” starts off rough, largely because of the dialogue, which can range from decent to unbearably corny. Undoubtedly this story’s weak point, if I had to give one. The exchanges between the leads in the opening stretch, before they start their “shift” (a patrol that lasts several days before they head back for resupply), are quite unfunny, possibly intentionally so. Small talk among coworkers does tend toward either the banal or the stuff of gossip, so I can’t say it’s unrealistic—more that, if this story has a smoking gun for having been written in the pre-New Wave years, it’s how characters talk.
    2. Speaking of which, I’m sure Raphael stopped this little series after the second entry (or the fix-up novel if you wanna count that) because he got tired of it, but also it could be that say, 1965 or 1966, was the last time you could write something like “Code Three” without it having to compete with newer, fresher, gnarlier SF that would be written in the latter half of the ’60s. Mind you that when this issue of Analog hit newsstands in January 1963, John F. Kennedy was still very much alive, the Beatles would not land in America for another year, and the Hays Code still had a stranglehold on American filmmaking, albeit its grip was loosening. This was still culturally the ’50s, if not technically, hence people tending to ignore the early ’60s.
    3. Raphael’s speculation on the future of roadways would turn out to be completely wrong, of course. Whereas in this story people demanded “faster and more powerful vehicles,” that apparently would be nuclear-powered (as if), real-world car production would gear towards safer and more efficient vehicles. Of course, when Raphael wrote “Code Three” it was the norm to treat cars implicitly as death traps on wheels, and indeed in-story they’re even more dangerous. The first dramatic incident is a hit-and-run that results in a car pileup and three deaths. These cars are not only massive (probably the size of schoolbuses, if not even larger), but they can also go up in flames. The “ambulance” unit is so large as to function as a mobile hospital, complete with a surgery room, and Car 56 is big and well-equipped enough that Our Heroes™ can live in it more or less comfortably for days at a time.
    4. While the speculation is very much off, that doesn’t matter much considering science fiction isn’t about predicting the future but rather commenting on the present. We can learn a good deal about what relationships people had with the cars, or rather about the average driver’s mindset, as it was in 1963. It also helps that the technology Raphael plays with is fucking cool, if also laughably impractical. How would you even know where you’re going at 400 miles an hour? How many fatalities happen in a single day?
    5. I said before that “Code Three” doesn’t really have a plot, which is to say its structure is episodic rather than having conventional plot beats. This is actually works in the story’s favor, as it allows Raphael to focus on building the main characters and the world around them, although I can see how this might pose a problem in a novel. See, with amorphous plots it’s fine for a short story or novella, or even a really long novel, but for a short novel the reader may need something more linear. But here I think it works well. I was expecting more of a straight action narrative, but I was pleasantly surprised.
    6. Speaking of pleasant surprises, I knew in advance that one of the trio was a woman, but I didn’t know Kelly is also biracial, being Irish but also American indigenous. Martin and Clay, in typical cop behavior, make racist jokes about Kelly’s heritage (both her Native American half and also somehow her Irish half); but aside from her being written as more outwardly emotional than the boys she is not really made out to be a typical pre-New Wave woman. She’s proactive, is upfront about what she wants, and is shown to be a totally capable medical officer. She’s sort of like a McCoy figure, although this was a few years before the original Star Trek series premiered.
    7. I should probably bring up now that, yes, this is copaganda, albeit of a very soft sort. Any narrative that involves policing will have to make some kind of statement on the profession, for, against, or maybe a bit of both. “Code Three,” unsurprisingly, is pro-cop, although more of the “necessary evil” variety rather than outright bootlicking. Car 56’s job does not involve racial profiling or harassing the poor, which should tell us this takes place in a fantasy world where police do not do those things regularly. Aside from the aforementioned racist jokes at Kelly’s expensive, Martin and Clay basically mean well, even if the latter is a bit of a himbo, on top of being Canadian. Their job is to make sure the roads are safe for drivers, and to rescue as many people in the event of an accident as possible. Raphael argues that we need highway patrolmen because the roads and the vehicles on them are too dangerous—and of course there’s the occasional bad actor, such as the men behind the hit-and-run near the beginning.
    8. Hardcore propaganda goes on about crime, often of the violent sort, with some ethnic groups used as scapegoats; but in the case of “Code Three” the big fear is that an accident may happen on the road, as opposed to something deliberate. Someone I know called this story “blue-collar,” which I find a bit dubious since I don’t consider police to be workers—or at least they’re workers in a class of their own, separated from the proletariat and peasantry. It certainly gives the impression of being blue-collar in the sense that it really is just a boots-on-the-ground slice-of-life narrative. We sit through a few days in the lives of these three officers, which are sometimes dramatic but also sometimes very calm and personal. I do think the fact that we’re stuck in or around Car 56 the whole time juxtaposes nicely with the large scope of the outside world. It’s easy to see how Raphael could get a novel out of this, but also a shame he didn’t do more with it.
    9. I have no doubt that Raphael took some inspiration from Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll,” and there’s a good chance he had even read it when it was first published in Astounding.
    10. The number three comes up quite a few times and I’m not sure what Raphael means by this. There are three officers in Car 56, there are three fatalities near the beginning, there’s the Three Nation Road Compact, and then there’s code three itself.

    It’s cool, right? At least on paper.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    There’s some romantic/sexual tension between Kelly and both of the lads, at different point, but there’s the implication that Martin in particular might return her feelings. This in itself is curious, especially for Analog in the ’60s, since Martin is presumably white and Kelly is a biracial woman who apparently does not pass as white. Will this tension amount to anything in the sequel? Probably not. Martin also gets injured in the climax, but he’ll be fine, don’t worry about him. Nothing fundamentally changes by the end and that’s certainly part of the slice-of-life deal.

    A Step Farther Out

    Someone could make a cool movie out of “Code Three,” without having even to pay the Raphael estate, assuming they only adapt the titular novella and not the full novel. Despite the aimlessness of the plot there’s also a cinematic quality about it that no doubt would have appealed to readers at the time, and while it does show its age in a few areas it’s also a genuinely forward-looking story—at least up to a point. The future Raphael conjures has practically nothing to do with our present, but that doesn’t matter much because history is not a strictly linear progression. We may not necessarily have cooler technology or more progressive values fifty years from now, and indeed industrial capitalism will probably still be suffocating us in 2074. It’s funny, because at one point Martin calls Kelly Pocahontas as part of his racist joke routine, and boy, it’s nice to live in a reality where a man with significant power can’t simply call a woman who may or may not have American indigenous heritage Pocahontas as a take-that and a get away with it. It would be especially a shame if a racist misogynist were to ascend to the highest position in our government and not only get elected, but elected a second time. The good news is that the average American voter is too morally responsible to let such a thing happen.

    See you next time.

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  • Things Beyond: December 2024

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

    Been a while, hasn’t it? By that I mean, little over a week. For some bloggers this is not unusual, to go a week or even a couple weeks without posting; but for me it’s different, as I like to think one of the things that makes this blog different is its regularity. I would post something every three or four days, or even sometimes twice in as many days, and in hindsight I’m not sure how I did that for two years while only occasionally slipping by, say, posting something a day later than I had intended. The idea was that like a magazine having a monthly or bimonthly release schedule, my posts would come out at regular intervals. As you know, I’ve spent this year covering a lot of stories from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Unfortunately there’s been a bitter irony to my decision to go on a mini-hiatus, as F&SF has also been falling behind with its scheduling. Years ago they went from monthly to bimonthly, and this year those at the top announced the magazine would now be quarterly, with the big 75th anniversary issue presumably hitting newsstands in December. This is bad news no matter how you look at it. F&SF seems to be run by maybe five people plus a small army of hamsters on wheels, and they’ve fallen so far behind on publishing and even accepting stories that authors have had to retract their stories months after submitting and with no feedback. This has been a bittersweet year for F&SF.

    It’s also been bittersweet for me, although more recently leaning toward the sweet. I’ve been through a few turbulent relationships this year, but I also started going to therapy, got a prescription for antidepressants and a hormone blocker, plus I recently got to spend time with one of my partners. I got my annual raise at my job, although it wasn’t worth much. I moved into my first apartment, living partly off of savings. It’s funny, I probably have more time (and certainly space) to myself than I ever had since college, yet I’ve found it harder to write for this damn thing. Call it a soft case of writer’s block. I talked with my therapist about this last week and she suggested that maybe it’s because I wrote for SFF Remembrance partly to get away from living under the same roof as my parents—mentally if not physically. That’s not to say my home life was objectively miserable before, but one can only be so happy living in a cage, even if it’s well-ornamented. I’m now freer than I’ve ever been—which means I also don’t have as much motivation to write now. It doesn’t come as naturally to me as it did before. There was some kind of tradeoff I was not told about in advance. I could be happier and be less productive, or more miserable but more productive—or at least that’s how I interpret it. And then there’s the fucking election. On a macro scale things are looking bad for a lot of us, on the horizon, but for me personally life has been kind to me as of late.

    But, sooner or later, the show must continue.

    I said months ago that for the “normal” months I’d be covering two stories from F&SF, a novella and short story, or two of either; but I neglected to mention full novels. In fairness, this is a truly exceptional scenario, as Algis Budrys’s Hard Landing might be the only instance of a novel being printed wholesale in a single issue of F&SF. I could be wrong. I’m making a bit of an exception by covering it, plus two short stories from that magazine. Why not? This is the last chance I’ve given myself to do such a thing, at least for a while. This will also be the last time I’m not covering serials, as I’ll be bringing that department back in January, with a bang. The world may go to shit, but we’ll have fun. And before you ask, the three stories I neglected to cover last month will get their due—eventually.

    For the novellas:

    1. “Code Three” by Rick Raphael. From the February 1963 issue of Analog Science Fiction. Raphael would write a small number of short stories and novellas over the next decade, but despite living to a reasonably old age (he died just short of his 75th birthday), he wrote very little fiction overall. His work is in such disarray that some of it has fallen out of copyright, including “Code Three,” which would make up the first part of the fix-up novel of the same name. So of course he “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.
    2. “Recovering Apollo 8” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. From the February 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Short Form Alternate History and placed first in the Asimov’s readers’ poll for Best Novella. For this final month of paying tribute to F&SF I figured I should cover another author who was at one point one of its editors. Rusch took over in 1991 and for the next six years gave F&SF a darker, one might say more gothic bent, and it helps that she was also the magazine’s first female editor.

    For the short stories:

    1. “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” by Rudyard Kipling. From the July 1968 issue of Magazine of Horror. First published in 1885. The first and possibly only time we’ll be covering a Nobel winner on this site, Kipling wrote a good deal of SF, fantasy, and horror, on top of more realistic fiction and poetry. He wrote “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” when he was 19, but he was already showing signs of greatness.
    2. “The Christmas Witch” by M. Rickert. From the December 2006 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Mary Rickert is a Wisconsin native who made her debut in 1999, in F&SF, and from then on it would remain her most frequent outlet. She doesn’t seem to have written much if any SF, preferring fantasy and horror. I needed at least one Christmas-themed story, so…
    3. “It Takes a Thief” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. From the May 1952 issue of If. Before the phenomenon that is A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller wrote prolifically at short lengths, with 1952 being an especially productive year for him. I find myself gradually becoming a Miller fan, helped by his writing candidly about religion, existential crises, and mental illness—things he experienced first-hand.
    4. “A Runaway World” by Clare Winger Harris. From the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Harris was supposedly the first woman to write genre SF under her own name, and by the time she entered the field she had written her first and only novel, Persephone of Eleusis. Like too many old-timey female SFF writers she wrote a streak of short stories over the course of a decade, then stopped.
    5. “Skulking Permit” by Robert Sheckley. From the December 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Like Algis Budrys, and indeed Walter M. Miller, Sheckley debuted in the early ’50s and probably could not have found enough markets for his kind of fiction (often urbane satire) any earlier than that. But he contributed prolifically to Galaxy, and the two were practically made for each other.
    6. “Strata” by Edward Bryant. From the August 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Bryant was one of the curious new talents of the post-New Wave era, having debuted in 1970, and wrote almost entirely short fiction. “Strata” is one of several stories inspired by Bryant’s childhood in Wyoming, and I have to admit I also picked it for the reason that it involves dinosaurs.

    For the complete novel:

    1. Hard Landing by Algis Budrys. From the October-November 1992 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. While Kristine Kathryn Rusch was at one point F&SF‘s editor, Budrys was a regular columnist for the magazine for about 15 years, until he stepped down from that position, incidentally around the same time Isaac Asimov stopped writing F&SF‘s science articles (on account of dying). But Budrys, who had made his debut in the early ’50s, was very much alive still, and while he no longer did book reviews for F&SF, the early ’90s were a busy time for him, as he hosted the annual (and controversial, because of the Scientology connection) Writers of the Future contest, began editing the semi-pro magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, and wrote Hard Landing, which would be his final novel.

    Once more into the breach before the year ends, eh?

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  • Novella Review: “Last Summer at Mars Hill” by Elizabeth Hand

    (Cover by Phoebe Gloeckner. F&SF, August 1994.)

    Who Goes There?

    (It seems that my review schedule for the rest of November will be a big case of “when it’s done.” I’ve had my best friend and one of my partners come visit me, both from out of state, for a few days each. Turns out it’s very hard to get work done when you’re with someone you love.)

    Elizabeth Hand was born in 1957 in New York, and has been active in the field since the ’80s. She’s been a regular contributor to F&SF as fiction author and reviewer for the past 35 years. Her most recent novel, A Haunting on the Hill, is a sequel to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—only not quite. “Last Summer at Mars Hill” may give the impression, going by its title, that it’s planetary SF, but it’s really a different kind of story altogether, being arguably fantasy and set on a then-present-day Earth. According to the introductory blurb in F&SF, Hand wrote this story as a change of pace, “a heartwarmer written to keep her good karma.” The tactic worked, as it would win the Nebula and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. I don’t like it quite as much as other people did, at least at the time, but while it’s a bit overly sentimental for my taste it’s also a curious time capsule of semi-rural American life in the decade following HIV/AIDS being made public knowledge, one in which Hand plays fast and loose with genre boundaries. This was a story I had been meaning to knock off my list for a while. and I can’t say I was too disappointed.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Nebula Awards 31 (ed. Pamela Sargent), The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Gordon Van Gelder), and the Hand collections Last Summer at Mars Hill and The Best of Elizabeth Hand.

    Enhancing Image

    Moony and her boyfriend Jason are high school sweethearts who have returned to Mars Hill, a spiritualist commune founded in 1883 in Maine (that state where seemingly a lot of weird supernatural shit is prone to happen), and where both their parents live. Moony only has her mom while Jason has his dad, the latter having in the past come out as gay and who’s been living with HIV. “Two years before Jason’s father had tested HIV positive. Martin’s lover, John, had died that spring.” Ariel, Moony’s mom, is also revealed to have stage-four breast cancer, and she had not only hesitated to tell her daughter about this but had delayed in getting it treated, such that now the case looks to be terminal. So both their parents are dying. Mars Hill itself is all but the corpse of a once-thriving community; there are only two year-round residents in the commune, one being the enigmatic Mrs. Grose, a very old woman who was also a medium back in her youth, being one of the many “casualties” from Harry Houdini’s search for a genuine medium. Of course, Moony realizes that, the story taking place in the ’90s, “If it really had happened, it would make Mrs. Grose about ninety or a hundred years old. And she didn’t look a day over sixty.” And then there’s the mystery of “Them,” or the Light Children, mythical beings who lurk in Mars Hill’s environs and who were the reason the place was settled all those decades ago, though they’re more talked about than seen.

    “Last Summer at Mars Hill” has a double meaning in its title, one in referring to something that happened in the past, as in last summer, and also perhaps Moony’s last summer visiting Mars Hill, the place of her upbringing and the double-edged sword that has clearly influenced her life up to this point, for good and ill. “Moony” is a nickname Jason calls her, and her “regular” name is Maggie, although her actual birth name is the rather embarrassing hippy-dippy Shadowmoon Starlight Rising. Naturally she doesn’t like to be known by that name. Moony descends from a line of proto-hippies, but she now lives in the era of flannel, of grunge music and professional skateboarding (a character wears a Pearl Jam shirt at one point), and she wants to live something close to a normal life. This is a story partly about time, but it’s also very of its time, both regarding the time it’s set in and the implicit attitude of how Hand tells her story. From what I can tell Hand is a straight woman, which seems to have influenced how she wrote Moony and Jason, who are both presumably straight, although Jason’s dad is openly gay. HIV/AIDS very much casts a shadow over the story, so it makes sense that there would be at least one explicitly queer character; but at the same time I couldn’t shake the feeling that Hand was writing about what was then a devastating epidemic from an outsider’s perspective, albeit sympathetically. Of course, there are far worse positions to take than being a cishet ally, especially since Hand wrote this story in the early ’90s. There were quite a few SF stories inspired by the AIDS epidemic in the late ’80s into the ’90s, mostly by authors who were not directly impacted by said epidemic. (Nancy Kress’s “Inertia” is a very good example of this, both as a story and as a commentary on the public reaction to AIDS and those hurt most by it.)

    I suppose a quibble I have here is that while Moony’s POV is by no means invalid, I would rather read from the viewpoint of Jason, or especially Martin, since he’s a queer character who is dealing directly with impending doom. You could say it would make more sense to tell this story from Ariel’s POV since this story is more concerned with her terminal illness, but the basis of the conflict is that we’re not sure why Ariel did what she did—why she didn’t tell Moony sooner or why she waited this long to seek treatment. The history of Mars Hill is itself another point of conflict as much of it remains mysterious for Moony, a 16-year-old who has memories of the place but who clearly feels disconnected from the adults who stay there, not to mention her boyfriend feels the same way. There’s definitely a generation gap at work—in fact more than one, between Moony and Ariel, the latter being in her forties; and then there’s Mrs. Grose, who may be in her sixties or may be close to a hundred. To a degree I understand why Hand wrote from the perspectives she did, since the focus characters are all women (Moony, Ariel, and Mrs. Grose), while Jason and Martin, while important, are also men and thus relegated to supporting roles. This is a story about dealing with grief and impending loos, but it’s also a story about women of very different ages, in a place that seems to be out of step with the times. You may of course be wondering if “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is SF or fantasy, which is the story’s mystery on a metafictional level and which Hand deliberately refrains from answering clearly.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    The passage of time is sort of ambiguous, but Moony and Ariel have been at Mars Hill long enough that eventually the latter does get miraculously get a visit from the Light Children. Moony, not knowing what the hell the Light Children are capable of, is understandably spooked when Ariel leaves a note one day, fearing her mother might commit suicide or get into trouble; but instead she finds that her mother’s been healed. Her cancer is in recession, despite that being a medical impossibility. And if Martin still has HIV then it seems to be asymptomatic. Indeed a miracle has happened, which worried me because it made me think we might get a happy ending that would have been unearned. Thankfully Hand goes for something more bittersweet. We also are stuck with an unanswered question: Just what are the Light Children? It’s a question Hand leans into, maybe a bit too much, as if to tease us about what genre the story we’re reading belongs to; but then again it’s a question that doesn’t really need an answer.

    So says Mrs. Grose:

    “Well, many things, of course, we have thought They were many things, and They might be any of these or all of them or — well, none, I suppose. Fairies, or little angels of Jesus, or tree spirits — that is what a dear friend of mine believed. And some sailors thought They were will-o-the-wisps, and let’s see, Miriam Hopewell, whom you don’t remember but was another very dear friend of mine, God rest her soul, Miriam thought They came from flying saucers.”

    For my money, “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is fantasy. There’s no SFnal explanation given for the Light Children being able to heal Ariel and Martin, so their healing powers may as well be magic. This does raise the question of why Mars Hill was called that in the first place, since the founders (this is the last quarter of the 19th century, mind you) could not have known where the Light Children came from, nor did they probably think much about life on other planets. The War of the Worlds was still more than a decade off. Still, not every question needs an answer.

    A Step Farther Out

    I do sort of recommend “Last Summer at Mars Hill,” but also reading it thirty years after publication I felt like I was gazing into a time capsule, and not entirely in a good way. The fight for queer liberation has both come a long way and not progressed nearly enough since 1994, in no small part because there are still plenty of people who believe the AIDS epidemic was basically queer people’s fault, and these same people have had their abhorrent views vindicated by those in power repeatedly. This is a story that evidently spoke to vaguely left-leaning readers when it was published, but I’m honestly not sure if it would be as warmly received now.

    See you next time.

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  • Short Story Review: “Nomansland” by Brian W. Aldiss

    (Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, April 1961.)

    Who Goes There?

    Brian Aldiss started out in the pages of New Worlds and Science Fantasy, those two foremost genre magazines in the UK in the ’50s, but by the end of that decade he had gained a foothold in the US, particularly finding an American home in F&SF. Given his fast-and-loose approach to genre, this makes sense. Aldiss was one of those authors who anticipated the New Wave, to the point of becoming one of its big players. (Mind you that most of the important authors involved with the New Wave, that quintessential ’60s SF movement, had debuted a decade earlier.) He had already gotten a Hugo nomination for Best New Writer (it was a Hugo at the time, don’t ask) when he wrote the stories that would comprise the fix-up novel Hothouse, one of these stories appearing every other month or so in F&SF, the resulting series winning the Hugo for Best Short Fiction—the only time in the history of the Hugos this has happened, and admittedly with good reason. I reviewed “Hothouse” a few months back with the intention of continuing the series, and so here we are with “Nomansland,” a direct sequel.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has never been reprinted on its own, although of course you can find it as part of Hothouse.

    Enhancing Image

    You may recall the adults from the first story went to the moon via a network of traverser webs, grew wings, and have since ventured back to Earth to bring the children of their kind with them to the moon. Lily-yo and the others go unmentioned in “Nomansland,” as instead we’re left to focus on the young folks they had left behind, including Gren, who has emerged as the true protagonist—a position he will apparently hold for the rest of the “series.” Toy is the new matriarch of the little tribe, with the only two males of breeding age being Gren and Veggy. (The two males are probably only barely in their early teens, as the humans of this far future consider “coming of age” to be when you’re physically matured enough to be able to reproduce.) There’s obviously a rivalry going on between the males, not least because Gren is older and wiser while Veggy spends pretty much the whole story being a little dumbass. (I said, in my review of “Hothouse,” that the human characters might have personalities, but I didn’t say they would be likable personalities.) Anyway, Aldiss is still much more interested in the world of the story rather than the people in it, the few humans left feelings small both physically (they’re shorter than modern-day humans, and also have green skin) and in terms of their importance to the narrative. I get the impression that had there been no humans at all that Aldiss would find some way to make the Hothouse stories about something else.

    The only one sympathetic to Gren’s plight is Poyly, who will eventually figure rather importantly into the plot (and presumably the next story in the series), but not for now. What’s important is that with “Nomansland” we’re given a couple new creatures to play with, and also a new location in the form of nomansland itself, basically the coastline of this world, the area where the single impossibly massive banyan that serves as the foundation for the world’s vegetation meets its match, the sea. It’s a case of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object, and it’s also that line where the fight for survival is at its fiercest. Aldiss could’ve written a mean script for a nature documentary if he was interested, if the Hothouse stories are any indication. There’s a cold detachment in how he describes the actions of the humans and their surroundings, but this is also mixed with a poetic sensibility that probably meant F&SF was the only appropriate outlet for this kind of story in the early ’60s. There’s a juxtaposition between Aldiss’s refusal to give the humans a Shakespearean inner life and his loving odes to the strange yet natural world he has created. It’s science-fantasy in the sense that while the basis of this world is implausible (there is, after all, a half of the world where it’s always day and the other night), Aldiss tries to give science-fictional explanations within those parameters. My favorite example of this is “Nomansland” has to be the “sand octopus,” a large tentacled beast which lurks near the coast and catches whatever on the beach it can grab, since crabs have long since gone extinct. Seemingly everything in this world is big—except for the humans.

    Since “Nomansland” is a sequel to “Hothouse,” and since both stories were clearly planned as part of a series, there’s not too much I can say about one that doesn’t also apply to the other. If “Hothouse” establishes the cutthroat nature of the world then “Nomansland” expands the boundaries a bit, quite literally as Gren is spirited away by a suckerbird (which is not an actual bird) and narrowly survives, only to land at nomansland, and here the story takes on an unexpected gothic flavor. You see, real-world termites were famous for being ingenious and productive architects; so it only makes sense that the termights, their vastly larger descendants, would produce architecture of an appropriate scale—in this case a bug-made castle that Gren takes refuge in, even meeting a cat (or the descendant of cats) along the way, showing that humans are not the last vertebrate life on the planet—although this may not be true for much longer. Up this point the narrative has been geared towards action and observation, with basically no character insight allowed, which is probably intentional given what’s about to happen. If the characters seem unintelligent it’s because they simply haven’t been granted it—ingenuity, maybe, but not introspection.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    Gren reunites with the rest of the tribe, which turns out to not be so happy a reunion as Toy and Veggy think Gren is unfit to be the alpha male, and a close encounter with a sand octopus results in the young member of the tribe getting killed in a rather violent fashion. (There’s a girl named Fay and another named May; I think the latter gets killed. I’m not sure why Aldiss gave two characters such similar names. Maybe a way to signal their status as redshirts?) There’s a vote among the tribe and Gren is driven to exile, presumably to meet a gruesome death, and soon. But as luck would have it he comes into contact with morel, a sentient fungus that, when attached to one’s head, can not only communicate with the host telepathically but has access to something like an ancestral memory in the host’s brain. The result is that, all of a sudden, Gren is granted a level of intelligence (here conflated with knowledge) he did not have access to before, and he even convinced Poyly to share the “gift” with him. The ending of “Nomansland” is pretty unsubtly an homage to Adam and Eve getting kicked out of Eden, although here it’s framed as ultimately for the best. Gren and Poyly give up their “souls” (their wooden dolls, you may recall) and leave nomansland together in search of a brighter future. Well, not if Aldiss has anything to say about it. We’ll see in “Undergrowth,” the next story, soon enough.

    A Step Farther Out

    Give me a few more months and we’ll see a continuation of this series—I mean the reviews, not the stories. I have to admit as I acclimate myself more with the world of Hothouse, I start to “get” what Aldiss is doing more. The ambition of this project is perhaps better appreciates as a series of related stories than as a novel.

    See you next time.

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  • Short Story Review: “The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell

    (Cover by Richard Schmand. Startling Mystery Stories, Summer 1969)

    Who Goes There?

    Sorry that this is a day late. I hope this sort of thing doesn’t become regular, but for what it’s worth my review was not delayed because of bad news; on the contrary, things are looking up for me personally, even if it looks like we’re all going to Hell in a handbasket.

    Ramsey Campbell was only 23 when “The Scar” was published, but he had already been a published writer for five years at that point. He had been discovered by August Derleth, in what was probably Derleth’s biggest discovery in his later years, and his debut would be a collection released through Arkham House, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants. That Campbell was barely even old enough to vote did little to stop him from entering the fast track to becoming one of horror literature’s more respected authors. Campbell would eventually turn to novels, in prolific fashion, but for the first decade of his career he stuck exclusively to short stories, which especially in the ’60s (there were few markets for horror literature at the time) was not exactly a recipe for mainstream success. As early as his first collection Campbell showed himself to be a devotee of weird fiction and cosmic horror, and he would even an original story published in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I was surprised, then, to find that while “The Scar” very much deals with the uncanny, it’s much more about psychology than cosmic expanse—about inner space as opposed to outer.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Mystery Stories. It has actually been reprinted a decent number of times, including The Year’s Best Horror Stories, No. 1 (ed. Richard Davis), Lost Souls: A Collection of English Ghost Stories (ed. Jack Sullivan), and the Campbell collections Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell and Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991.

    Enhancing Image

    Fair warning that this story, while good, is very British.

    Things should be going smoothly at the Rossiter house, and yet there’s some tension behind closed doors. Lindsay Rice and his brother-in-law Jack Rossiter are very different men with different temperaments, and who evidently deal with different financial circumstances. Lindsay (from what I can tell) is an office drone while Jack runs a jewelry store, which he takes a lot of pride in. Lindsay isn’t exactly poor, but he clearly is envious of his sister Harriet having married someone petit bourgeois like Jack, that the two own a house with two fine kids while Lindsay hovers around them like a fly on shit, quietly ashamed of his own meager living situation. “But he never had the courage to invite them to his flat; […] he knew it wasn’t good enough for them.” One night Lindsay tries striking up conversation with Jack, and it goes pretty much disastrously, with Lindsay mentioning, among other thingss, that he had recently encountered a dead ringer for Jack while on the bus, the only big difference being that this doppelganger had a scar running from his left temple to his jaw. Of course the thing with doppelgangers is that if you see your own then you will die soon, but as Jack points out, since Lindsay had sseen Jack’s doppelganger then he should be fine. If it’s an attempt at a joke it doesn’t go over well. Lindsay also brings up the jewelry store possibly getting robbed, this being another attempt at humor, and Jack takes it even worse. The two are not getting along, sadly.

    (One quibble I have with this story that bothers me and probably no one else is that the characters all call each other by their first names, naturally, but the third-person narrator consistently calls Lindsay by his last name. He’s the only character who gets this treatment, I have to assume because Harriet and Jack have the same last name. I understand English naming conventions can be weird and I’ve been guilty of being inconsistent with calling characters by their first or last name during a review.)

    “The Scar” is, among other things, about self-fulfilling prophecies and time folding in on itself. Things that are talked about happen at a later time. The real world seems to be out for lunch as time goes out of order. I said before that this is a story about inner space, in that while the narrator is third-person it’s also anchored to Lindsay’s POV, with us being given a line to his thoughts. To paraphrase and heavily summarize Lovecraft’s take on what makes weird fiction the thing that it is, as opposed to just general horror or dark fantasy, is that weird fiction should involve the otherworldly creeping into normal human existence. This would be a grounded domestic drama if not for the fact that Jack, on route to the pub he and Lindsay frequent, gets assaulted by a man whose face resembles a “black egg” and who cuts up Jack’s face with the edge of a tin can—from his left temple to his jaw. Of course the faceless attacker is Jack’s double, although he doesn’t conider this, and Lindsay doesn’t say anything about having seen this man before—the fact that this man has the same scar he would give Jack. The snake is eating its own tail, somehow. The why of the attack is never given. Jack starts off as a bitter and rather conceited man, whose new injury only makes him more hostile to everyone. Harriet is worried, but doesn’t know what to do. This is a John Cheever-style family-threatening-to-implode narrative, except that the catalyst is someone who should not reasonably exist. If this is a ghost story then the ghost in question merely gives the human characters a little push, on their way to some kind of oblivion.

    The thing about horror stories is that there tends to be a dissonance between what the reader/viewer expects and what the characters expect. This is more apparent in bad works of horror, or horror where the characters seem to have taken several hit points to their intelligence. But then if you’re a normal person then you probably don’t believe in, say, ghosts, or doppelgangers who signal one’s impending doom. Most characters in horror stories aren’t aware that they’re in a horror story, although Lindsay borders on such a realization, the tragic part being that he is unable to express this. He doesn’t have the words for what he and Jack are experiencing. “Something was going to happen; he sensed it looming. If he could only warn them, prevent it—but prevent what?” We’re told early on that one of Lindsay’s character flaws is his struggle to communicate with others, despite being a grown-ass man; given also his tendency to go non-verbal it’s not unreasonable to assume he’s what we’d now call autistic. “The Scar” is horror, being an entry in a long history of stories about doppelgangers; but it can also be understood as domestic tragedy. Lindsay and Jack are both undone by their personal shortcomings, combined with an unspoken but clearly thought-about class conflict, between Lindsay’s timidness and Jack’s bourgeois vanity. The result is an eerie but also class-conscious ghost story.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    If there’s any part of this that feels like it was written by a very young writer (albeit someone who was on his way up), it’s the climax. Not that it’s bad, just that it’s predictable and it sort of takes the easy way out, which is a quibble I often have when reading horror: the author doesn’t quite stick the landing for my taste. In kind of a side note, Lindsay seeing a naked man painted entirely in red reminded me of the climax to Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, which Campbell probably had seen at this point, although it’s probably also a coincidence.

    A Step Farther Out

    It’s been a few days since I read this one, and I have to admit the more I’ve thought about it the more I like it. It’s a textbook example of a weird tale in which the mundane urban way of life meets the uncanny, and is then totally turned inside out by this sudden lack of normalcy. It may have found a better market had it been written a decade earlier, or even a few years later, but the ’60s was sadly the nadir for modern horror publishing. In fairness, while he did run cheap magazines, Robert W. Lowndes (the editor of Startling Mystery Stories, and also Magazine of Horror) did have an eye for talent; there’s a reason Stephen King thanks him in his introduction to Night Shift, Lowndes having bought King’s first two stories. Campbell would go on to bigger and better things, but while he had made his debut five years earlier, “The Scar” feels like a big bang moment for his career.

    See you next time.

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  • The Observatory: This Is Not a Review

    (Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, September 1941.)

    I was supposed to write my review of “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth for today, but I could not find it in myself to do so. For one I have to admit I’ve been feeling horribly drained from the business of moving into my apartment, which I still haven’t totally finished with yet. I’ve barely slept for the past few weeks, hence the lack of a mid-month editorial post in October. Anyway, this isn’t a review. If you want my opinion on the story, it’s middling. Derleth was a pretty good editor but a second-rate writer, from the weird fiction of his that I’ve read, and “Beyond the Threshold” explicitly tips its hat to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos (a name Lovecraft himself did not use) without doing anything meaningfully extra. It has a bit of that rural Wisconsin atmosphere, but mostly does away with it in favor of a typical old-dark-house-has-dark-secrets narrative. If you want a take that’s a bit more in-depth you’ll have to wait a couple weeks, as I am really doing a proper (albeit short) review of this story for Galactic Journey, as part of the chunky anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I’ll be reviewing more than half the stories in that book, so keep an eye out for that. Hopefully I will have also regained my writing energy by then.

    Unfortunately I’m not here to talk about fiction, really. In the morning, today, November 6th, Americans woke up to find that the improbable (not the impossible, because I think we all understood the chance of this happening was very real) had happened. Now, I don’t make my politics a secret on here; after all it’s my blog and nobody else’s. Over the past couple years my views have shifted farther left: back in August 2022, when I posted my first review here, I think I considered myself a fellow traveler, but now I would say I’m a libertarian socialist. I used to be a libertarian of the American sort (we all make mistakes, huh), but now I’m a libertarian in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde. I’m ambivalent about the state’s capacity to help marginalized groups and I’m even more ambivalent about marginalized people’s rights being secured through electoral means. Yesterday we had the chance to prove that we are above electing the king of the yuppies (that he’s also very likely a rapist is pretty significant, but which mainstream news media has treated as almost incidental) back into office, but we failed. The Democratic establishment failed its voter base and its voter base in turn failed the most vulnerable people in this country. Indeed it’s a collective failure of liberalism in the US that we have not seen since—well, the 2016 election. We’ve been told (accurately) that Trumpism is an American blue-collar sort of fascism, yet if this is true then liberalism has failed to stop fascism—again.

    To be clear, and I shouldn’t have to say this given what I had just said but I’ll do it anyway, I don’t like Kamala Harris, as both a politician and person. I think she’s a weasel, a centrist with a few progressive sympathies but ultimately someone who tried really hard to cater to “moderate” conservatives, a plan which literally did not work. It was a huge gamble, because calling Dick Cheney brat (how do I even explain to people of the future what “being brat” means) alienated a lot of left-liberal people, understandably. Who the actual fuck voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but then Harris in 2024? Who of that demographic was persuaded? Cuddling up with neo-conservatives while also ignoring (at best it was ignoring) the concerns of Palestinian-Americans and Arab-Americans at large was not a good move! I know, this may seem like a controversial opinion, but as someone who basically was radicalized by Israel’s siege of Gaza, I think the Biden (later Harris) campaign leaving Arab-Americans in the dust was very bad. Islamophobia has been a major problem in this country since at least 9/11, and it has not really gotten better. Sure, we have a few Muslim members of congress, but look at how the Biden administration has defended them against harassment, or rather how the Biden administration has not: it’s disgraceful. I say this as someone who, back when I was a right-libertarian and edgy atheist (I’m much softer on religion nowadays), also had Islamophobic tendencies; so I know very well what it looks like. Large swaths of the population see Muslims as subhuman, and unfortunately those people will be totally without shame about it.

    We have failed queer people (so that includes me), we have failed people with disabilities (also includes me), we have failed the working class, we have failed black Americans, we have failed Muslim Americans, we have failed the women of this country, and of course we have failed ourselves. What do we do with this information? How does it relate to this blog, which is after all a genre fiction review fan site? Because I’m not here to write political tracts, I’m generally someone who reads for the pleasure of it. As a leftist I still enjoy right-leaning writers like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and so on. I don’t believe in abstaining from reading fiction by authors with very different political views, or at least I try to hold myself to that belief; obviously there’s a limit for everything. But, I’m queer, and my partners are all queer, and so are quite a few of my friends. I had to talk one of my partners through a panic attack over the phone last night. We live in a country that basically wants us dead, because most of the American population is homophobic and/or transphobic. This has been the case since forever, but it’s impossible to ignore now, with social media and the little slivers of mainstream visibility queer people get. It’s not even about resisting the incoming Trump administration, it’s simply about coping, and finding ways to support marginalized people, even if these are small things like donating to someone’s GoFundMe. God knows I’ve been supporting some of the fellow queer people in my life for a minute now. I’ve said before that I use this blog as a coping mechanism, because I have a history of depression and anxiety, and that hasn’t changed.

    Here’s the thing, and this happened after Trump won in 2016 as well: the people who voted him in, who are really fucking stoked about him winning, are not gonna be any happier in the long run. If anything, with the exception of the rich (because the rich will evade basically any kind of retribution, even climate disaster [for now]), these Trumpists are gonna be made more miserable, if for no other reason than that Trump is such a toxic personality that mere exposure to him and his fucking yapping for long enough will do something horrid to one’s psyche, even if that person is pro-Trump. I’ve seen it happen first-hand, it’s a very creepy phenomenon, but Trumpists also don’t wanna admit that their own guy, whom they treat like a demi-god, makes them feel miserable. And we’re not even getting into his “economic plan” to combat inflation, because assuming that actually happens we’re all gonna be feeling that a year from now. In a way I’m morbidly curious about the future, with how bleak and yet how cloudy it is. I talk about the past all the time here because the past is never dead, and like a shambling corpse that has risen from the grave it terrorizes us despite not having a pulse. If the past is a zombie then the future is a horror that has not yet been birthed, and I’m not sure which is worse. The only thing I can say is that I hope to stay alive, despite my own thoughts of suicide.

    I’ll be seeing you again, soon.

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  • Novella Review: “Attitude” by Hal Clement

    (Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, September 1943.)

    Who Goes There?

    To get the elephant in the room out of the way, sorry this is a day late, but I’ve been in the process of moving shit into my apartment and may have bit off more than I could chew with this one.

    As for Hal Clement, the quasi-pseudonym of Harry Clement Stubbs, we’re talking about one of the codifiers of what we call “hard SF,” which is kind of a vague term, less a subgenre and more a way of understanding SF. If SF is the genre of ideas then Clement was one of its most loyal practitioners, and for six decades at that. He made his debut in 1942 with “Proof,” a story he wrote when he was but a sniveling teenager; but even at that early stage Clement’s work didn’t read quite like anyone else’s. Not to say he was a poet, at a time when genre SF writing could be pulpy or beige, because he really wasn’t; if anything his style is even more stripped back than what was then the standard. Rather what makes Clement different is that, for better or worse, his stories read like lectures—not in the sense that he’s wagging his finger at the reader, but more that his stories seek to instruct, while also being entertaining. You could call it edutainment. Despite being one of John W. Campbell’s discoveries, Clement’s work reads as more Gernsbackian than Campbellian, for reasons I’ll get into. “Attitude” is a very early Clement story, and yet, while it has a couple big issues, it also shows a barely-out-of-his-teens Clement doing what he does best.

    Placing Coordinates

    First published in the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It’s only been reprinted twice, in Travelers of Space (ed. Martin Greenberg) and the Clement collection Music of Many Spheres. I guess Clement or his estate let it fall out of copyright, because it’s on Project Gutenberg.

    Enhancing Image

    Dr. Little wakes up in an empty chamber that’s six-sided, “like the cells in a bee-hive,” with no memory of how he got here, only figuring the ship he was on, the Gomeisa, must’ve been attacked. He spends a few days by himself in this chamber, staving off hunger and boredom (how he goes to the bathroom is never answered), only subsisting on a tube that feeds him lime juice. Why lime juice? Question to be answered later. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Little, along with the rest of the Gomeisa‘s crew, is being held captive by aliens. The alien ship had been on route to presumably their home world, with the human ship in tow, and before too long Little is reunited with the rest of the crew, nearly forty men all told. (Of course the ship’s crew is unisex, you’d have a hard time finding a spaceship crew in ’40s SF that wasn’t a sausage party.) Turns out they’re not the only ones being held captive, as there are also some Vegans (as opposed to vegans), sentient and rather furry aliens who are on friendly terms with the humans. It’s also a good thing the Vegans are here, too, as they’re able to communicate with the “pentapods” (as the humans take to calling them) up to a point. An unnamed Vegan acts as interpreter for Little and company.

    It takes a minute just for us to meet up with the rest of the crew, which was an early indicator of my main issue with “Attitude,” which is to say its length borders on terminal. At 23,000 words it’s a decent-sized novellas, and honestly you could cut this down, say, a 15,000-word novelette without losing the meat of the story. There’s a lot of sitting around and chatting, with characters explaining things to each other (in fairness these are things that should be explained), to a point where it becomes a bit grating. Clement was not a “good” writer in the sense that we nowadays think of as good writing, at least for SF. Dialogue is not his strong suit, so it’s worrying that so much of “Attitude” is talking. This becomes a little ironic considering the pentapods (called that because they have five appendages and resemble starfish) never talk, and indeed the fact that they don’t or can’t talk to the humans is the main driving force behind the plot. If the humans were able to communicate with the pentapods then this would be a much shorter story, although curiously it would be no less violent. The pentapods had apparently taken the humans captive without physically harming any of them, doing this by restraining each man with their appendages. (The pentapods don’t seem to have heads or mouths, which makes one wonder how they eat, or indeed how they know what’s going on. Clement will explain their sensory capabilities to an extent, but some of it remains a mystery.) Little himself finds he had gotten both unlucky and lucky when the ship got taken over, as he should’ve died from sudden decompression, only being saved by a strange gas that puts one in suspended animation.

    This will become important later.

    Because “Attitude” is a Clement story, the characters (both human and alien) are basically reasonable beings, not prone to act on impulse. Clement’s fiction takes place in some weird alternate universe where people act in favor of their best interests. The downside of this is that because characters tend to not act irrationally, that greatly narrows the range with how you can write character interactions. For example, the Vegan interpreter is basically human, just with a different coat of paint, because the Vegans, while they are able to communicate with the pentapods, don’t seem to have anything culturally or linguistically unique about them. A Vegan thinks just like a person, which in Clement’s world is someone who thinks of everything as problems to be solved. This is like how in Mission of Gravity, the Mesklinites are like huge bugs, but otherwise they think and act like people. Then there are the humans themselves, who differentiate from each other very little. With the exception of the Dennis brothers we don’t even get first names for these people, which admittedly is not something we needed anyway. What’s more bothersome is just the fact that Little (who gets basically no backstory to speak of) spends a lot of time yapping with his fellow crewmen, especially after an escape attempt sends them to a partly underground fort, and a good deal of it could’ve been cut.

    As for the positive side, those who assume ’40s SF to be all hard-nosed gun-toting tough guys will be pleased by the lack of machismo in Clement’s writing. Little and company are prisoners on this alien planet, but otherwise things are pretty chill; the pentapods don’t seem to have any intention of harming them, only trying to foil escape through non-lethal means, and the prisoners similarly are not too keen on resorting to violence. It’s telling that when the Gomeisa‘s captain talks about his men trying to defend their ship with brute force their “plan” did not work at all. This is a recurring thing with Clement’s fiction, that solutions are best sought through non-violent means, which is a bit strange considering Clement himself was by no means a pacifist: he was a bomber crewman during World War II and seemed to think back on his wartime service fondly, and he would later support the Vietnam War. But maybe it’s less about pacifism and more about non-aggression; this is, after all, about solving a problem, or a puzzle. If Campbellian SF can be loosely defined as problem-solving SF, then Clement fits the bill; but he’s also very much a continuation of Gernsbackian SF in that he’s trying to teach the reader something, sticking as close to the sciences as he understood—taking a few liberties into account, of course. Makes sense, considering he would later have a day job as a teacher.

    There Be Spoilers Here

    The Vegans have since figured out that the pentapods don’t have a verbal language, and as such they have an intricate sign language that would render something like radio useless—but television very useful. Mind you that TV really was a newfangled technology in the early ’40s, to the point where it would not have been commercially viable yet. Little suspects these aliens captured the humans and Vegans for the sake of studying their technology, to see if anything might be useful. The aliens ultimately are neither good nor evil, but simply different, and maybe more than a little curious. Of course, “gassing” the aliens (the aforementioned gas that does no physical harm) in the climax must’ve had a different ring to it in the wake of the Holocaust—ironic for a story in which nobody dies.

    A Step Farther Out

    I may have been in the wrong headspace to read this one, between the business of moving and now being on antidepressants, but while I found it intriguing in parts I also found it to be a bit of a slog overall. It’s overlong considering the conclusion Clement reaches, but I also have to admit I’m impressed that for how early it is in his career it seems like his “voice” was already more or less fully formed at this point. Given how young he was it’s surprising he already had the basics down, both in writing fiction generally and finding his own authorial voice.

    See you next time.

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  • Things Beyond: November 2024

    (Cover by Hisaki Yasuda. Asimov’s, May 1987.)

    How are you doing?

    I wish I could say the past month has been better for me, but it has not. A big thing is happening in my life, in that today is actually the move-in date for my first apartment. Wow, imagine, at 28, my first apartment. Been taking care of the practical side of things, with assistance: furniture, stuff for the kitchen and bathroom, and of course signing up with utilities. This has been a long time coming, and truth be told I’ve become immensely tired of living with my parents. And yet I’m not happy. Moving into my own place might prove only marginally better than my previous living situation. I don’t make enough to pay for rent so I’ll be bleeding my savings for the following months. The only reason my application even got accepted is my credit score is good. I’ll be living by myself in this one-bedroom apartment. It’ll be very lonely here, as none of my partners live close enough to move in with me, and anyway, with one exception we don’t know each other that well yet. Surely the lack of my parents breathing down my neck will do me some good, but this will be a solitary existence.

    Honestly I’ve been tired all the time as of late. My work schedule as of right now is erratic and I find myself going to sleep at six in the morning and waking up after noon. As you may know I have anxiety and depression, and while the former has not been as bad lately, the latter has been worse, or rather more persistent. I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of my job. I’m tired of my imperfect body, and the fact that I can barely sleep. I’m tired of being tired. The US election is in less than a week and honestly I’m sick of this fucking immoral country, and its authorities who have been spending the past couple centuries murdering socialists, queer people, ethnic minority groups, etc. We’re only a quarter into the 21st century but already I feel like almost everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong. And will get worse. I’m normally a pessimist, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see conditions improving much.

    So, go backward or forward, but don’t stay here. I hate it here. I do this blog for fun, and according to stats have written 186,000 words (or about equivalent to Great Expectations in word count) this year alone; but I also do it as a coping mechanism. I don’t do it for readers, or money, because not enough people read this blog or even know about it, despite my spreading word on a few social media platforms. Maybe when I hit 200 subscribers I’ll start a Patreon. Just know I’ve been going at this for two years now because it gives me some degree of emotional security. If not for all these words I would surely have given up a minute ago.

    Now, what do we have for reviewing? We have two stories from the ’40s, three from the ’60s, one from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the 2010s.

    For the novellas:

    1. “Attitude” by Hal Clement. From the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. Feels like it’s been a while since we last talked about Clement, who was one of the first hard SF authors as we now think of the term. Not only was Clement a pioneer, he had a pretty long life and career, remaining active into the beginning of the 21st century. His prose is workmanlike and his human characters tend to be little more than abstractions, but his lectures-as-stories can be enthralling.
    2. “Last Summer at Mars Hill” by Elizabeth Hand. From the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novella. Over the past four decades Hand has taken a kind of jack-of-all-trades approach to writing, tackling SF, fantasy, and horror seemingly with equal relish, with even the occasional movie novelization to her credit. (She wrote the novelization of the infamous 2003 Catwoman movie.) “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is one of her most decorated stories.

    For the short stories:

    1. “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth. From the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales. Derleth was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft and could be argued as the person most responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s legacy, as he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939 firstly to reprint his mentor’s fiction. He also wrote quite a bit of fiction in his own right.
    2. “The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell. From the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Suspense Stories. One of August Derleth’s biggest discoveries as editor was Ramsey Campbell, whose work Derleth had discovered when he was but a teenager. Campbell’s first collection was published when he was only 18, so that he got his start in weird fiction very early. He would later become a prolific horror novelist.
    3. “Nomansland” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss debuted in the 1950s and would remain active pretty much until his death, which was not too long ago. He would win a Short Fiction Hugo for Hothouse, which is sort of a novel but also a collection of linked stories. We already covered the first story, and now we’re on the second.
    4. “Flowers of Edo” by Bruce Sterling. From the May 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Sterling debuted in 1977 when he was barely out of his teens, but he would become one of the defining SF writers of the ’80s. While typically labeled as cyberpunk, Sterling has a surprising versatility, with even early novels like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net being very different from each other.
    5. “Soft Clocks” by Yoshio Aramaki. From the January-February 1989 issue of Interzone. First published in 1968. Translated by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner. Seeing as how the Sterling story takes from Japanese culture, I thought it only right (and perhaps a neat gimmick) to follow up with a story from a Japanese writer. Yoshio Aramaki has been active since the ’60s as an author and critic.
    6. “Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.

    Won’t you read with me?

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